I've recently been cooking up a Rowan, Scion of War deck and one of the things that struck me while I was thinking about the way I wanted to win with the deck is how perfect Crackle with Power is as a wincon for her and the way that perfectly integrates her function in gameplay with her character and motivation in the Wilds of Eldraine story.
For a primer, here are the cards that I'm talking about:
Rowan, Scion of War taps to reduce the cost of all red or black spells you cast by X, where X is the amount of life you've lost this turn.
Crackle with Power is an X spell that deals five times X damage to each of up to X targets.
The synergy is obvious. Most of the time, a Crackle with Power that is sufficiently charged can instantly win you the game, and, provided you lose enough life to make it worth your while, Rowan can give the spell the power it needs.
Will and Rowan's conflict in Wilds of Eldraine come down to their views on power: both its meaning and the justification of its use. Will's power, at least in Rowan's perspective, is almost entirely ephemeral. He holds the crown — the position of High King — but to Rowan, this power isn't anything real. He hopes to be the figurehead: a king in name who brings together the divided world in a time of strife.
(Quotes below from Wilds of Eldraine Chapter 1 by K. Arsenault Rivera)
"The Realm needs a High King; I did what I had to do... We have to be careful about the impression we're making. People want to be united, and I want to unite them."
Rowan doesn't think he can do it. Rowan believes that the only form of power that people will respect is action; she sees Will's focus on unity as inaction.
"Let them be afraid. I doubt any of them will be raiding the countryside any time soon with the beating we gave them. I'd rather have a thousand brigands living in fear of me than a dozen farmers living in fear of brigands...
"Our parents wouldn't ignore a curse that's spreading through the kingdom. Or is 'unity' going to solve the Wicked Slumber, too? And before you forget, our parents earned their titles. You just decided to call yourself High King because you thought it suited you."
She knows she has power — real power — and is frustrated that Will won't let her use it to address the problems at hand.
Rowan's intentions are good — or at least they adhere to a morality. She wants to prevent people, especially Will, from suffering, wants to end the Wicked Slumber, wants Eldraine to be at peace, but doesn't think that any of this can happen if she is unable to utilize her full power. She feels the incessant need to take action, to demonstrate power, to invoke fear and hurt to attain the good that she seeks.
Crackle with Power demonstrates the pinnacle of this philosophy in Rowan's experience. It represents an action she took on impulse, pushing herself through fear and pain, yet still fueled by her own righteousness.
(Quotes below from Strixhaven Chapter 5 by Adana Washington)
Rowan felt a cold anger rising from somewhere inside her—rage, overwhelming the fear and the pain. She couldn't win, but she could hurt the one who did this...
The Snarl hung in the air, still brilliant, even in crimson. Still rippling with power.
Rowan took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reached out.
And when she reached into The Snarl, took its power with the goal of bringing punishment upon those that would cause her and her brother harm, it was incredible.
She felt the power rushing through her, power like she had never dreamed. It felt, in that moment, that she could do anything; mountains would crumble before her, cities burn, oceans boil.
She hardly noticed as her feet left the ground, wind swirling as if the air itself feared her. And it should, thought Rowan. Everything should.
This moment may not be the beginning of this pattern of thought for Rowan but it is a very pronounced one. She seized power when it was available, and took action when it was most needed, and the result was that she got exactly what she wanted. It's no wonder that after that she would hope to do it again.
And so Rowan leaves Will behind to go on her own journey: an angry, impulsive journey that sees her tempted to become the thing she swore she would destroy, only for the hope that she could once again use her power. For the greater good. At any cos.
Crackle with Power sees Rowan acting impulsively, with cruelty, with anger, to do something that she feels is right. In its mechanics, Rowan, Scion of War sees this moment and says "this is what I need to do, and I will pay anything to make sure I can do it."
MtG Ludonarrative, Part 6: Artifacts and Enchantments
If Pokémon can hold swords in their mouth, so too can my ornithopter hold a giant hammer.
Artifacts in MtG encompass a wide range of objects, thematically ranging from equipment like powerful and unique legendary weapons, to buildings like citadels and ironworks, to vehicles, to all manner of trinkets and baubles, gems, wands, rings, cauldrons, and many more.
Regarding equipment of the more mundane nature like a vanilla sword or shield, I wonder though, why you the player/planeswalker should need to provide those when just about all summoned creatures come with the gear they need. Another quirk that comes to mind would be equipping weapons to things that logically lack ability to wield them, like a certain hammer with a certain flying trinket.
The idea of equipment being dropped upon the creature dying makes sense, though needing mana once again to equip is harder to explain lorewise. Perhaps having creatures tap to “pick up the equipment” and equip would be interesting. As well maybe there is design space to be explored with creatures dying to leave behind their gear as equipment tokens that can be picked up later.
Finally, enchantments are fairly straightforward flavour wise, as permanent magical effects of different kinds. Even after some head-scratching, nothing flavour-breaking really comes to mind.
This concludes my MtG Ludonarrative series, where I share some of my random thoughts on different aspects of the game. Thanks for reading!
MtG Ludonarrative, Part 5: Instants, Sorceries and the Stack
Theory: the Dominarian time rifts were actually made by planeswalkers casting instants backwards in time on the stack.
Instants and sorceries in Magic are probably the most direct flavour-wise, being spells the planeswalkers cast. Sorceries are more in the ritual end of the spectrum, requiring time and concentration, while instants are snappy reactive magics good for a storm of spell slinging. Where things start to get interesting is on the stack.
Say my opponent had a bird and I wanted to lightning bolt said bird. My opponent could then counter spell in response. Simple enough, he sees me casting the lightning bolt and counters my magic before it hits. So counterspells is as fast to take effect, if not faster than my bolt. Now say in response to that I cast a second bolt on the bird, and my opponent doesn’t have a response. Then things would resolve and my second bolt would go through. Functionally it would be as though it were cast after the first two spells, like a sorcery. Yet when did I cast it?
Let’s tweak the example, same bird, same first bolt, now my opponent responds with an instant that gives the bird hexproof until the end of turn. To this I once again respond with a second bolt. When the dust settles, the bird is fried. The hexproof had gotten there faster than the first bolt but not the second. Yet if we assume all bolts to travel at the same speed and the second one was cast after the first, how could that be possible? I would have had to cast the “second” bolt preemptively or backwards in time so that it would hit before the hexproof. Time paradoxes galore…
And things only get messier when you start targeting spells on the stack, essentially countering spells that have not been cast yet?!? So as a representation of reactive magic, the stack is neither really in chronological order, nor reverse chronological order, but anything beyond the first two spells becomes a tangle of temporal logic.
Then again, given that they can travel spacetime between planes, I guess planeswalkers throwing some magic through time is perhaps well within the realm of possibility. No birds were harmed in the making of this thought experiment. In the final part, I will discuss the quirks of artifacts and enchantments.
Why can I only command my army of 15 flying squirrels to defend, but not attack Emrakul?
In Magic, creature cards are spells you as a planeswalker cast to summon minion to do your bidding, from lowly soldiers to mighty dragons. Yet upon some reflection, one wonders, are you summoning THE Niv-Mizzet? THE Avacyn? THE Omnath? Or just a simulacrum? Surely even if you could command such legendary creatures, it makes little sense that you and your opponent are each allowed to have one, there can only be one REAL one after all. Adding on the fact that you can also have multiple versions of the same character, this paints a picture that the creature you are summoning is a) not likely the real named character and b) is not even necessarily a copy of the present-day version. That being said, perhaps we can suspend our disillusionment in terms of being planeswalkers controlling the creatures, and just enjoy the boardstate for the story it tells. After all, regardless of how it happens, I just want to see Avacyn and Griselbrand duke it out.
Which brings us to combat… Something I’ve always found a bit strange in Magic is how you can’t command your creatures to specifically attack your opponent’s creatures. Regardless of their intelligence or obedience, the only offensive command you can give is “attack the enemy planeswalker”. The attacker is denied the initiative and advantage is given to the defender to choose blockers that best suit them. The presence of summoning sickness also favors defensive play, in that the newly played creature can block as soon as possible, but generally cannot attack with Haste. That being said, this does serve well to prevent the starting player from getting a significant advantage of always being an attack ahead by default.
The ideas of power and toughness bring several thoughts to mind. With damage going away at the end of turn, there is a large reduction in housekeeping, yet what does this mean flavour-wise? Perhaps you are constantly pouring mana into your minions to refresh them, and only when the short-term exceeds that healing does the minion perish? As such, creatures don’t take permanent damage of any kind (save in the case of say -1/-1 counters). An interesting feature of MtG’s combat system to be sure.
Additionally, as hilariously described in Spice8Rack’s video, the scaling of power and toughness in the game provides much comedy. With the 15 flying squirrels against Emrakul being one of the most jarring examples, it is clear that there isn’t really a linear scaling. This I think, is due to a mixture of having 20 base life and the inherent inconsistency of getting enough lands to cast high-cost spells, resulting in a scale that is much condensed to fit creatures from the smallest critter to world-ending eldritch horrors.
On the whole, the combat system in Magic is well balanced and well established at this point, and any major changes aren’t likely, yet it provides many interesting thought experiments to be had regarding the gamification of creatures and combat. Coming next is Part 5: Instants, Sorceries and the Stack.
As early as Richard Garfield’s game called Five Magics, from which MtG would eventually be born, there was the idea of the colour pie. With much work later done by Mark Rosewater in defining the respective colour identities, it now serves as the base framework for the unique “Magic the Gathering” way of looking at the world. People like to categorize things, and the colour pie provides a way to classify just about anything, from objects to ideas, personalities and emotions. It draws connotations of the colours from various philosophies, such as the classical four elements, and thus provides both a flavourful identity and sense of faction in the game.
Having five groups also works well in a myriad of ways, allowing for asymmetry unlike an even number, while being more complex than say the triad of rock-paper-scissors. The combinations of pairs or trios for forming guilds, wedges or shards also works well with five basic colours in generating a Goldilocks amount of 10 for each subgrouping, unlike say if there were 4 colors, which would having only 6 pairs and 4 trios, or 6 colors, which would have 15 pairs and a whopping 20 trios.
Magic’s lands are where the planeswalkers draw their mana to cast their spells. As cards, lands can be considered as a ritual depicting the act of the planeswalker making a connection to a particular locale. The mechanical identities of various non-basic lands can also show flavorful quirks of those locations, perhaps some are particularly hard to pull mana from (ETB tapped), or others offer myriad benefits as scrying, counter-making, and more.
Mechanically, Magic’s lands were groundbreaking in having the resource system mixed into the high-variance nature of shuffling the deck. While some, myself included, tend to see the possibility of mana flood or mana screw creating non-games as a flaw in the design, the same variance undeniably allows for exciting games where a draw from the top is make-or-break.
Moreover, Magic’s five-colour mana system would not work nearly as well without the accompanying randomness of lands, where playing many different coloured spells has the inherent risk of not drawing the right colored lands. This issue has largely been made minimalized over time with the printing of numerous dual lands, such that multi-coloured decks are highly prevalent in eternal formats.
While the inherent asymmetry of the color pie at times leaves players grumbling that their favourite color is unloved by their particular format, it is without a doubt one of the main factors that make MtG unique, and I’ve yet to encounter any other game with anything quite like it. See you in Part 4, creatures and combat.
What if pre-mending planeswalkers never went away, but became the players instead?
Initially, the players in Magic were merely wizards, powerful ones without a doubt, but still reasonably commonplace in the fantasy setting. With the development of the Mending lore, planeswalkers were stripped of their immense powers and made more relatable, allowing them to be framed as the protagonists of the Magic story. The players then, became planeswalkers, mages with the ability to travel the dimensions, channeling the mana of diverse locales and casting exotic spells.
In the game, the player starts with 20 life (or more depending on the format), this is greater than the base toughness of any creature in the game (save the B.F.M.). This means that, at full health, the player can face-tank Emrakul. Adding on the idea that the player can summon any number of powerful beings to do their bidding, from elder dragons to literal gods, just how OP is the player?
Surely the player is no mere planeswalker, the toughest of which start with a measly 7 loyalty. While the in-game narrative is of fellow planeswalkers coming to the player’s aid, and leaving upon becoming injured, the player can just as quickly call them into battle again (play another copy); or even outright sacrifice and replace them via the legend rule. What about having different versions of the same planeswalker in play? Fear my army of Chandras, young and old, gathered from across time and space. To this, I have no explanation.
This all starts to paint a picture that the player is in fact, an entity with such power as to be able to bind legendary beings and even planeswalkers to their will. Thus, in a strange twist, pre-mending planewalkers seem to be an ideal role for the players to take. Look forward to Part 3 on lands and mana.
What do the library, hand and cards flavorfully represent in MtG?
In my headcanon, MtG is a duel of wizards rummaging through their bags of holding for hackysacks of spell components to chunk at each other.
Magic was originally conceived as a quick gam to play between DnD sessions, and it's interesting to see how the roleplaying game inspired the design. The premise was of wizards dueling, where the cards are their spells, the library is their spellbook - their long-term memory of spells, and the hand is their working memory of just the spells that come to mind in the heat of battle.
The Vancian magic system of spell slots carries over, represented by having only a certain number of copies of spells. The deck, being only a part of the player's total collection of cards, is perhaps just the spells prepared for the day. The initial wincons of the game also make sense here, life being self explanatory and decking representing the opponent running out of spell slots or being mindwiped through mill. The graveyard then, is not only the creatures you summoned that fell in battle, but also a repository of the spells you've already expended.
Now I'm not sure as to why a 60 card deck, 7 card hand, and 4 copy limit were chosen for Magic. Best guess it's a mixture of "it worked" and that poker cards have 4 suits. Flavorfully though, it would have been fun to have a 50 card deck, 5 card hand, and 5 copies of cards in a game of Five Magics.
In the early MtG novel, Arena, which is no longer canon, the library was portrayed as a satchel of amulets and baubles which allowed the wizard to cast spells. In the modern lore, there is less direct mention of quantized spells. Cards less often depict generic evocations or conjurations, and more specific characters and events. So what does it all mean when the player can summon Jaces and Niv-Mizzets to their aid? Stay tuned for Part 2.
