Home               Orb of Insight: Relic - 6

 

 

Today’s article is all about tying loose threads together, and hoping that instead of ending up with a bunch of knots, you find a beautiful tapestry has emerged.  You see, the design for Wastelands seems a bit freer than for most sets.  There are multiple themes and sub-themes and they compliment different areas of design space. 

 

Relic, the keyword on yesterday’s preview card, is all about balancing options in a way that deals pretty heavily with tempo.  Even though the Enlightened Stonerune can draw you extra cards, (so it seems like card advantage), the real decision with this card, and most of the Relic cards, is what stage of the game you want it to be.  Are you drawing into extra answers or are you trying to pull a lockdown off?  It was tough not to discuss Relic in the article, but the flavor of the story had to take precedence.  Relic gives you options tied to the normal use of a card.  And as the Orb of insight for today reveals, Wastelands only scratches the surface of the possibilities for this keyword.  Too many sub-themes would spoil the stew, so to speak, but too few and the set is lacking in interest. 

 

          Top card matters finds a new niche in design space and that is why I chose it to be the central theme of the set.  It isn’t card advantage or tempo, per se, to know what the top card is.  It’s a kind of informational advantage.  Now, this kind of information doesn’t usually get much attention from casual players when they’re playing a game, but they tend to like the cards that reveal a player’s hand or rearrange the top of their library.  And hardcore players tend to undervalue these kinds of cards when they’re making their decks or judging the strength of individual cards, but they’re keenly aware of the importance of making their decisions in-game with as much information as possible.  I always found that a bit funny and I hope that this theme will bring the two ends together and create some middle ground.

 

          Recycling yesterday’s news is a form of card advantage.  It isn’t just card advantage, though.  It’s tied to the game state.  You have to choose your options carefully and decide if you’re you want to recur that spell in the graveyard or if you have something else to do this turn.  So this is card advantage that requires you to make decisions.

 

          The two sub themes, on first glance, seem to just be another way to fill space in a set.  But to make “top card matters” shine, I had to look at what it did for you.  The primary thing is that it gives you information about the future. And look! The two subthemes,  recycling(card advantage) and Relic(tempo), both ask you to make decisions based on the game state to use them most effectively.  My hope is that the information that “top card matters” gives you will feed the decisions you make with Relic and recycling cards.

 

          So is this article just a rehash of this week’s greatest hits?  Nope.  Today we’re tying loose threads together, and loose threads is what this set is made of.  Let me explain.  I tried to explain how the set mechanics in Wastelands all tie together even though they seem different.  Tying together different looking elements is how all of the mechanics were approached.  None of the cycles are strict cycles and none of the mechanics is a strict set of cards.  Each of the mechanics ranges over a broader area of design space than normal.  Wizards likes to keep design space tight, so they find an idea and hone in on exactly what makes that design idea new and unique.  I’ve chosen to make a set that uses a kind of “familial resemblance” to tie things together.  So the set’s mechanics should be in more places than you expect to look.  And when you think you understand the boundaries of what each mechanic means, there should be one more card that’s on the edge, like a distant relative.

 

          Here are some distant relatives:

 

 

 

Rainwake takes the top card matters and enables it to be developed further.  After all, you’ll know what’s on top of their library.  But it also feeds off of knowing what they’ve already drawn.  If you know their hand, you know which card type to pick.  Crested Sunmage wants to feed off of every reveal of your library, and asks you to play more cards that reveal. You have to take my word that these aren’t the only distant relatives.  I’d have to reveal the whole set to properly show what I’m talking about.  Most of the cards in the mechanics should look like they can be the center, with cards that they support and cards that support them.  Each card should have siblings that look a lot like them, parents that help them out, children than depend on them, and cousins that have one or two things in common.  And the cousins have even more distant cousins themselves, that have nothing in common with the first card.  But the whole thing is tied together in the familial resemblance of the set’s broad mechanics.

 

 

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