Last week, I started showing off the "Rugby" Vision Design Handoff Document, written by Vision Design Lead Doug Beyer. It was long enough that I'll be continuing the story today and next week. 

As with all my vision design handoff articles, most of what I'm showing you is the actual document. My notes, giving explanation and context, are in the boxes below the text. 

Fellowship 

"Rugby" learns a lot from Magic's past typal sets. Similar to Lorwyn, "Rugby" encourages players to combine multiple creature types in the same Limited deck. Lorwyn's answer to this mix-and-match problem was changelings. "Rugby's" main answer is fellowship. 

Fellowship is an ability that lets a player add a creature type to an invisible list that lasts till the end of the game. From then on, creatures with typal effects can affect any of the creatures that are in that fellowship list, not just their own creature type. 

Before we dive into this new mechanic, let me spend a little bit of time explaining the problems we were trying to solve. Onslaught was the first set to have a major typal theme.  Most of the creature types were kept to one color, but a few showed up in two. Limited decks had typal themes, but it was tricky to play just one color.

Lorwyn corrected the color issue, making all relevant creature types appear in at least two colors. It also went way up on the as-fan of typal cards. The result was a linear draft environment. Once you picked your creature type, it defined what colors you were playing. We introduced changeling, which did some work in helping with this problem, but not enough to stop the "on rails" draft issues.

Innistrad would have a lighter typal theme with Humans and various monster creature types. The various creature types were connected more through a similar gameplay strategy than with typal cards, although those did exist at a low volume. There were some high-rarity typal cards to allow players to build typal decks in Constructed. 

Ixalan was the next set with a major typal theme. We opted to not use changeling and didn't have the four relevant creature types appear together on cards. There were other factors at play, but Ixalan as a whole was poorly received mechanically. 

The initial goal of Bloomburrow was to have a typal theme closer to Lorwyn and Ixalan than Innistrad, but ideally without the issues of those blocks. With that said, let's look at the mechanic.

Some straightforward fellowship examples:

Valiant Mouse (common)
1W
Creature — Mouse Soldier
Mouse fellowship (The Mouse creature type joins your fellowship.)
Attacking fellowship creatures get +1/+0.
2/1

Otter Battlemage (common)
3R
Creature — Otter Wizard
Otter fellowship (The Otter creature type joins your fellowship.)
Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, fellowship creatures you control get +1/+1 until end of turn.
3/3

Rabbit Farmer (uncommon)
2G
Creature — Rabbit Ranger
Rabbit fellowship (The Rabbit creature type joins your fellowship.)
Whenever CARDNAME or another fellowship creature enters the battlefield under your control, create a Food token.
2/2

Instead of having individual cards care about individual creature types, fellowship adds a specific creature type to a master list, what we called the fellowship. This means that Valiant Mouse, in a vacuum, functions very similarly to a card with the text "Attacking Mouse creatures get +1/+0." The important difference is when you play Otter Battlemage, now Valiant Mouse and Otter Battlemage pump Mice and Otters.

Once a creature is on the fellowship list, it stays there for the rest of the game, so getting rid of Valiant Mouse doesn't stop Otter Battlemage from pumping Mice. Most of the cards had a fellowship to one of the ten animals from the archetypes

The importance of fellowship – Fellowship is the backbone of the set and the glue that holds Limited together. "Rugby" doesn't let you just throw together all your Squirrels and call it a deck. Since there are ten main types and several other animal types in the set, there's not a high enough as-fan of any given animal type to allow you to build around a single animal type. Fellowship is the tool that lets the set have a lot of types while still gluing together Limited decks in a fun way. It also allows players to cleverly blend different species and gain benefits of different animals.

Magic design has a lot of math in it. The ten two-color archetypes require ten animals. The number you need to allow a drafter to draft just one creature type exceeded the space we had within the set. For example, if you want to play a draft deck of just Bats, you need to draft around sixteen Bats. To guarantee that you could do that, you just needed a higher as-fan of Bats. This meant your Bat deck would have some non-Bats in it. Fellowship tries to address this problem. Fellowship also had a cool side effect of allowing fellowship decks to occur, where you cared more about drafting cards with fellowship than any particular animal creature type.

Ways to use fellowship – Design-wise, fellowship is very flexible—you can use it just like any creature type–matters abilities. 

For example: 

  • Fellowship creatures you control have [ability]. 
  • Target fellowship creature you control gains [benefit] until end of turn. 
  • Whenever a fellowship creature enters the battlefield under your control, [trigger]. 
  • Whenever a fellowship creature you control attacks, [trigger]. 
  • Whenever a fellowship creature card is put into your graveyard from anywhere, [trigger]. 
  • Tap another untapped fellowship creature you control: [effect]. 
  • As long as you control three or more fellowship creatures, [effect]. 
  • Discard a fellowship creature card: [effect]. 

Vision design handoff documents often run through how a mechanic can be used. It's not that Set Design will use them all, but it gives them possibilities.

Fellowship should matter beyond the creature it's on – When the fellowship ability is on a creature, we tried to ensure that it mattered that fellowship was there. A creature with fellowship should have an ability that affects your other fellowship creatures.

No:
Mouse fellowship
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, it gets +1/+1 until end of turn.

Yes:
Mouse fellowship
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, target fellowship creature you control gets +1/+1.

This is a common design issue. If a mechanic is going to be meaningful, the card that has it should use it in that way. We didn't want cards adding creatures to the fellowship without caring about the fellowship in some way (although, as you will see, there were exceptions to that rule).

Fellowship on spells – We also put fellowship a few places other than creatures. Some low-rarity spells have a fellowship rider.

Gnaw at the Mind (common)
2B
Sorcery
Target opponent discards two cards. Then if you control a Rat or if Rats are in your fellowship, that player loses 2 life.

We like to demonstrate a mechanic's flexibility through various card types. Like the creatures, we still wanted the spells that added creatures to the fellowship to mechanically care about the fellowship.

Fellowship on lands – To keep fellowship as-fan high enough, one useful tool was putting fellowship on lands. These common Dwelling lands really helped keep gameplay smooth and consistent. 

Raccoon Dwelling (common)
Land
CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add R or G.
T: The Raccoon type joins your fellowship.

We started with these common dual lands adding a type to your fellowship as it enters the battlefield (on ETB), but we found that made fellowship a little too easy to achieve. Some found it odd that these have a tap ability that does nothing after you activate it once, so we talked about other designs. Maybe these should sacrifice themselves like a Flood Plain and add the type to your fellowship as part of that effect, so it's less weird that you have this extraneous tap ability after Raccoons are already in your fellowship.

We always try to consider whether dual lands can play into the theme of the set. Fellowship was core to the design, so we tried fellowship dual lands. There was an earlier version that just added the creature type to the fellowship as an ETB effect, but it was considered too powerful, so we changed it to a tap ability, meaning you had to take a turn off from the mana to do it. As you can see above, we still consider this design too strong. The reason for listing it here was to inspire ideas from the Set Design team. Maybe there was a riff on this design that would work.

Choose your own fellowship – We have a few effects in the file that let you choose an animal type and add it to your fellowship. We like a bit of this going on, even at lower rarities, so that occasionally you can get clever and name Snake, Hedgehog, or some other animal type beyond the main ten.

Fellowship Stone (common)
3
Artifact
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, the animal type of your choice joins your fellowship.
T: Add one mana of any color.

Animal Unity (rare)
1W
Enchantment
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, choose an animal type and add it to your fellowship.
Fellowship creatures you control get +1/+1.

Choosing your fellowship accomplished two important things. One, it made the card better suited for Constructed and allowed for backwards compatibility. Two, we wanted cameo creatures in the set, so it was cool if occasionally they could join your fellowship.

Only animal types matter in "Rugby" – Note that "Rugby" only uses fellowship for animal types. "Rugby" does not focus on fellowship for class types or non-animal species types for thematic reasons, although that would work in the rules. Nothing in the file lets you choose anything but an animal. We think in Limited you shouldn't finagle a way to name Warrior or whatever and stray from the animal theme.

We do think fellowship has potential to be a tool for typal gameplay in other settings, though. You could imagine Elf fellowship, Warrior fellowship, or Robot fellowship in future sets, which could then combine with Mouse or Lizard fellowship from this set.

Whenever we went with choose your own creature type, we always restricted you to animals, partly for flavor, but mostly to keep you from choosing classes like Wizard or Warrior, as we wanted the gameplay to focus on the animals. The Vision Design team was very excited about fellowship, and we liked the idea that later sets would make ways for other creature types to join your fellowship. That seemed like a fun theme for larger formats, kind of like how amass lets you build an Army out of multiple creature types if you use cards from different sets.

As with any mechanic, there are a lot of technical rules to figure out. Vision Design doesn't often resolve them, but we tend to take a stance on what played best in our testing.

Future-proofing fellowship – We think fellowship might have potential to be a tool for typal sets going forward. So whatever template and usage fellowship gets in the set, it should probably anticipate working with sets that might use it differently than "Rugby" does. For example:

No:
Fellowship animals you control have menace.
(Won't work with "Robot fellowship" or whatever else.)

Yes:
Fellowship creatures you control have menace.
(Works fine with "Robot fellowship," "Elf fellowship," or whatever we dream up in the future.)

So, why didn't fellowship make it to print? The short answer is that Set Design didn't feel we needed it. I think that, over time, R&D has come to realize that Innistrad was the better way to do typal themes as opposed to how Lorwyn did them. If you draft cards of a certain group, you want them to be cohesive and play together, but it's not crucial that they mechanically care about one another. Constructed will want more directional and stronger typal cards, but those can be done at higher rarities, which will impact Limited formats less.

The other main reason is that the mechanic was logistically complex. You had to mark what was in your group and then remember it, not just for yourself but each other player. As often happens in vision design, we tuned the mechanic as we played, so we were more accustomed to it. It's one of the reasons you want different eyes looking at a set. Set Design could see some of the complexity that Vision Design was blind to.

Fellowship wasn't necessary and added complication, so it was removed. That's the type of decision Set Design must make.

Offspring

Rules question: When does fellowship take effect? – We played fellowship as "turning on" when the spell is cast rather than when it resolves. That way, Rabbits would join your fellowship even if your Rabbit Farmer creature was countered. But that might not be the right solution. The exact rules template has not been figured out at this writing.

"Rugby" wants you to cast a lot of creatures and give them abilities, and it's a set that wants to be about the charm of animals. Offspring is a mechanic that does both.

Offspring is an alternate cost on creatures. If you pay the alternate cost, you get the creature and a token copy of it, except the token is 1/1.

So far, save for the two-color pairs, everything in the document was cut from the set. Now we start getting to some mechanics that stayed.

The role of offspring – Offspring came out of exploratory design as a way to represent cute young versions of an animal parent. So, it had its origins in flavor. But it played so well that it stayed in the file from the beginning. It gives the set a bit of a mana sink and creates some interesting designs.

A common practice in early exploratory design is to write down everything we can think of tied to the theme we're working with. For Bloomburrow, that was animals. High on our list was "cute baby animals." I believe the idea for offspring was influenced by the mechanic eternalize from Hour of Devastation. Eternalize itself was a tweak on the mechanic embalm from Amonkhet, which allowed you to activate a creature in your graveyard to create a white Zombie token copy of it.

Eternalize also made a token copy, but it set the power and toughness at 4/4, meaning the copy was often stronger than the original. What if we turned that on its ear? What if we made a copy that was a 1/1 instead? That captured the flavor of a young one. It was like its parent but not as strong. We tied it to a cost because we liked the parent and child entering together. The imagery we wanted was that of a parent with its child following behind it.

Offspring can appear with a simple keyword.

Offspring Squirrel (common)
1B
Creature — Squirrel
Offspring 3B
Lifelink
2/1

It can also appear with a triggered ability.

Offspring Otter (common)
3R
Creature — Otter Wizard
Offspring 5R
Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, CARDNAME deals 1 damage to each opponent.
3/3

The mechanic also works with powerful ETB effects.

Banisher Mouse (rare)
3W
Creature — Mouse Cleric
Offspring 6W
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile up to one target creature you don't control until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.
2/2

Normally in vision design handoff documents, we like to show a lot of card designs to give Set Design a sense of how the mechanic looks on cards. Here, Doug showed the depth of the mechanic, that it can be on everything from very simple commons to splashy rares.

Offspring Otter would make it to the final set as Coruscation Mage. It would change from a red four-mana 3/3 to a red two-mana 2/2, and its offspring cost would become generic. The move to generic mana was something done by Set Design to all the offspring cards.

Token expectations for offspring – Offspring creates very specific tokens, a lot like embalm did. And like embalm, we expect the set to have to print a token card for every offspring creature in the set. That creates some art budget issues and some art dependencies, but we think these tokens will be adorable and enjoyed by players.

One of the things Vision Design tries to figure out is what ramifications the designs might have on things downstream. Here, Doug is noting a possible art concern for the tokens.

Duos

Duos are creature cards with two different animal types. For example, a creature with the subtypes Mouse Raccoon would be a Duo. For flavor, they represent two different animalfolk who are friends (and we'd expect their art to show both animals cooperating somehow).

Mechanically, these Duos help raise the as-fan of the main ten creature types, ensuring that Limited players can get enough of a given animal type. We tried to give them designs that would work with the Limited archetype of both animals. 

Duos can be especially important in blue and red, as their space for creatures is very crunched. We didn't see a need for any Trios.

Cunning Duo
1U
Creature — Otter Rat
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, the next noncreature spell you cast this turn costs 1 less to cast.
1/3

One of the biggest struggles making a typal set with ten different creature types is that you run into space issues. There are only so many card slots. The Duos were something we'd considered for Lorwyn but dropped. One of the reasons I like being on Vision Design teams is because of the ability to reuse mechanics like this.

We've run out of time for today. I hope you enjoyed part two of the Bloomburrow Vision Design Handoff Document. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, fellowship, or Bloomburrow as a set. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week for part three.

Until then, may you collect your own grouping of animals.