Trivial Pursuit: All Innistrad

Battle

n. During vision design, this mechanical component was just on lands.

During March of the Machine vision design, we knew we wanted a bunch of cards that represented the various planes in the war, and we were open to the idea of a new card type, but the version we latched onto was a design with double-faced lands. The front side acted like a normal land, tapping for mana (with most entering the battlefield tapped). It then had an activated ability to transform it and "planeswalk" to the plane. The front side was flavored as a portal to the particular plane.

The backside had a new land subtype: Plane. Yes, we knew the card type plane had already existed in Planechase, but that was an issue we planned to work out later. Planes tapped for the same color mana as the front side and had a static ability flavorfully tied to the plane. Each Plane also had an activated ability that let you planeswalk to that Plane. Then, each ability had a triggered ability that triggered whenever the Plane transformed or you planeswalked.

Here's an example:

Portal to Amonkhet
Land — Desert
CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add B.
2B, T: Exile CARDNAME and return it to the battlefield transformed. Then planeswalk to CARDNAME. It loses non-mana abilities once it has no loyalty. Activate only as a sorcery.
/////
Amonkhet, the Plane
Land — Desert Plane
T: Add B.
Whenever a creature you control becomes blocked, defending player loses 1 life.
4B, T: Planeswalk to CARDNAME.
Whenever you planeswalk here, create a 2/2 white Zombie creature token.
Loyalty 2

This design had numerous problems, so Set Design came up with a whole new take, the Siege battles seen in the set.

Blood tokens

l. The first version of this mechanic put +1/+1 counters on creatures.

The very first thing we tried with Blood was having the token put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. Our idea was that fresh blood would rejuvenate a vampire. It ended up having a number of problems, including play-balance issues. The two biggest issues, though, were that it duplicated the effect we wanted to use by having the Vampires drink blood, giving them a temporary boost. It also made Vampires play too similarly to Werewolves, as Werewolves were more about growing your smaller creatures into big creatures. We tried numerous other effects but ended up with rummaging (discarding and drawing).

Coven

u. This mechanic started as a kicker variant where you tapped creatures as a cost.

The earliest version of this mechanic went on spells and had you tap creatures to enhance that spell. That ended up being more of a cost than we liked, so we tried a version where you simply had to control three or more creatures. That proved to be too easy, so we looked for restrictions. We tried requiring the creatures to share a subtype, mana value, or power. We flipped that last one on its ear, and the final version of coven requires three different powers among your creatures.

Delirium

q. This mechanic's original name was changed for insensitivity concerns.

Delirium's original name was insanity. We didn't want to make light of mental health issues, so we changed it.

Disturb

r. The initial version of this mechanic, as designed by Vision Design, ended up appearing in the next set, with a tweaked simpler version appearing first.

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt's Vision Design team originally put Auras on the back of disturb cards. This is the version seen in Innistrad: Crimson Vow. The Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Set Design team felt there should be a simpler version, one where the front was a living creature and the back was a Spirit. So, they designed those and gave the Aura version to the Innistrad: Crimson Vow Set Design team. In exchange, they got the decayed mechanic that had been created by the Innistrad: Crimson Vow Vision Design team.

Emerge

s. The first appearance of this mechanic only appeared on colorless cards.

Emerge first appeared in Eldritch Moon. In the story, Emrakul was mutating creatures into Eldrazi, and we wanted to find a way to capture this mechanically. The sacrificing of a creature to play the card captured the feel of the sacrificed creature turning into the Eldrazi. Because the cards with emerge represented the end state, all cards with the mechanic were colorless Eldrazi.

Eminence

a. This mechanic only appears on five cards.

Eminence first appear on the face commanders from Commander 2017. It allows the cards to have an effect while in the command zone and on the battlefield. One more eminence card was made, Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir from March of the Machine Commander.

Escalate

e. This mechanic has never appeared on a blue card.

Escalate premiered in Eldritch Moon. The set didn't print escalate in a cycle, instead simply printing the individual card designs that played best. As such, escalate ended up on three white cards, three red cards, two black cards, one green card, and zero blue cards.

It is a bit odd that blue, the color most tied to instants and sorceries, doesn't't have any cards using the mechanic that only appears on instants and sorceries.

Exploit

m. This mechanic's first appearance was as a faction mechanic, and its second major appearance was in an Innistrad set.

Exploit premiered as the faction mechanic of the blue-black Clan Silumgar in Dragons of Tarkir. It then had a cameo, on one card in Modern Horizons. Its next major appearance was as part of the blue-black Zombies mechanics in Innistrad: Crimson Vow. Since then, it has appeared in Modern Horizons 2, the Fallout Commander decks, the Jurassic World™ Collection, and Modern Horizons 3.

Fateful hour

f. I included this mechanic in "The 20 Worst Mechanics of All Time" panel that I did at MagicCon: Las Vegas.

Fateful Hour was number six on my list of the 20 worst mechanics of all time. Its condition (being at 5 or less life) proved to be too narrow a space to make useful designs. "The 20 Worst Mechanics of All Time" panel was held back in October at MagicCon: Las Vegas. You can see it here.

Flashback

g. I came up with this mechanic while judging a feature match at a Pro Tour.

Flashback was my pick for the best mechanic of all time during my panel at MagicCon: Chicago. You can watch that panel here. Here's its origin story for those who have never heard it:

For the first eight years of the Pro Tour's existence, I attended every event, ran the feature matches for the Swiss rounds, and oversaw the video-coverage commentary for the final day.

Sometimes games would get a bit lopsided where one player got a huge advantage over the other. When this happened, I'd imagine hypothetical abilities for the player who was behind and think of how they'd use them. One ability was the ability to cast an instant or sorcery spell from their graveyard. I liked the idea so much that during the design for Odyssey, which I led, I pitched it as a whole mechanic since the set was all about the graveyard.

The earliest version of flashback allowed you to cast it out of the graveyard using the same mana cost, but that made the spells lackluster. Instead, we chose to cost the initial spell close to normal and just have expensive flashback costs.

Madness

h. This mechanic was rated 8 on the Storm Scale but has managed to come back.

On my blog, I came up with a scale that's my guess on the likelihood of a game element returning to a premier set, with 10 being incredibly unlikely and 1 being almost certain. Here are links to my latest Storm Scale article (Part 1 and Part 2) for those who want more detail on it. The first article has links to all my other Storm Scale articles. Madness first appeared in Torment, the second set in the Odyssey block.

Madness requires a lot of restructuring from a set and isn't easy to balance, so when players asked me to put it on the scale, I gave it an 8. I was very skeptical it would ever return. But then we made Shadows over Innistrad, a set about many of the denizens of Innistrad slowly going mad. Madness was such a perfect fit for it that we chose to bring it back, much to my surprise.

Investigate

p. This mechanic was designed to give you half of a given resource.

Shadows over Innistrad was about tapping into cosmic horror. Stories in subgenre tend to begin with someone trying to solve a mystery, so we explored making a mechanic called investigate. Drawing a card by investigating felt flavorful, but we were worried it would be too much card draw in the set. This led us to ask the question: "Is there a way to draw half a card?"

After some brainstorming, we came up with the idea of creating an artifact token that let you pay mana and sacrifice it to draw a card. Because you had to spend extra mana to get the card, it felt like half a card. Investigate was so popular and worked so nicely in the design that it paved the way for us using more artifact tokens as core elements of sets, such as Treasure, Food, and Blood tokens.

Meld

j. This mechanic was inspired by the highest-rated element of Unglued.

When I started the design for Unglued, the first Un- set, I went to different parts of the company to ask about what options were available to push boundaries. One of the teams I talked to was the Production team, who oversaw the layout and printing of cards. They explained that art could cross over from one card to another if the two cards appeared next to each other on the printing sheet. This inspired me to create the following card. Or rather, cards:

B.F.M. was a creature so huge that it couldn't fit on one card. You had to have two cards put together to cast it. B.F.M. was the highest-rated "card" in Unglued.

Ken Nagle loved B.F.M. and spent years trying to find a way to bring something like it to Magic. Numerous attempts were removed from design files, but finally, Ken figured out a way to do it by making use of double-faced cards. If the front side of two different double-faced cards was normal, the back faces could be two halves of a giant card. Ken would finally make this mechanic, meld, in Eldritch Moon. There, it captured the mutations caused by Emrakul.

Miracle

k. This was the replacement for the forbidden mechanic, and both were made by Brian Tinsman.

Brian Tinsman was a fan of bold mechanics. While leading the design for Avacyn Restored, Brian came up with a mechanic he called forbidden. Forbidden cards were so powerful that you were not allowed to put them in your main deck. You had to have other cards that tutored them from outside the game. The Development team felt forbidden couldn't be properly balanced, so they asked Brian to come up with another mechanic. Inspired by the ideas of a mechanic that triggered when you drew it, something R&D has been messing around with since Tempest, Brian created miracle, which he used to fill the void left by forbidden leaving the set.

Morbid

v. This mechanic has appeared in an Un- set, multiple Universes Beyond products, a straight-to-Commander product, and a straight-to-Modern product.

The inspiration for morbid involved making a mechanic where death mattered. Innistrad was trying to capture the horror genre, so we were looking for ways to increase fear through gameplay. We liked the idea that sometimes a creature would attack without a clear way to survive. In normal Magic, that's usually a sign that the attacking player has a combat trick. But in Innistrad, they might want the creature to die so they can trigger a morbid spell. This added a cool, extra layer to combat that we liked.

Prowess

i. This mechanic has been a set mechanic, an evergreen mechanic, and a deciduous mechanic.

Prowess began as a mechanic for the Jeskai Monks, the blue-red-white faction in Khans of Tarkir. This clan was smart and good at combat, so we looked for ways to combine those two elements. In the end, we chose to have creatures that got stronger whenever you played a noncreature spell. This allowed you to use instants as combat tricks.

We liked prowess so much that we immediately made it evergreen. We'd been looking for a mechanic for blue and red, so prowess seemed like a perfect fit. But as we made more sets, we found that certain set structures didn't want prowess, and we weren't always using it. For that reason, we downgraded it to deciduous, which means we use it when it makes sense.

Soulbound

o. This mechanic ranked the highest in questions received from Prerelease judges.

Avacyn Restored was a set about Avacyn being released from the Helvault and returning to restore peace to Innistrad. It was a chance for the humans to get a leg up on the monsters after two sets of being terrorized by them. We wanted a mechanic that conveyed humans working together. Banding was a mechanic from early Magic that we retired due to complexity issues, but the flavor of it was good. This led to soulbond, which allowed you to have two creatures pair up so that they could share abilities. The problem was that the mechanic wasn't the most intuitive and had a lot of added complexity and tracking issues.

We used to get information from judges about what the most common questions were at the Prerelease. Soulbond has the distinction of being the mechanic that generated the most questions during Avacyn Restored's Prerelease events. Although, I do suspect that mutate would have overtaken it if we'd been collecting data.

Splice onto Arcane

t. The earliest version of this mechanic was an ability that only worked out of the graveyard. The printed version doesn't use the graveyard.

The first version of splice worked like the printed version. It went on instants and sorceries and let you pay a cost to add a spell's effect onto another spell. However, there were two big differences. First, you used the ability from your graveyard rather than out of your hand. You would cast the spell with splice from your hand, then you could start splicing it. The other difference was that there was no limitation on what you could splice it onto. In development, we moved the splice ability to your hand and added the Arcane restriction.

Training

d. Erik Lauer made this mechanic because he thought a different mechanic "did it backwards."

Mentor was designed for the Boros Legion in Guilds of Ravnica. If a creature with mentor attacks with a creature with lesser power, it gives the smaller creature a +1/+1 counter. Erik felt we did the mechanic backwards, meaning he wanted the counter to go on the creature with the ability. So, he made a mirror of mentor, training, in Innistrad: Crimson Vow.

Transforming double-faced cards

c. This mechanic was inspired by a mechanic in another game that Wizards makes.

Innistrad's Design team was trying to capture the flavor of Werewolves when Tom LaPille suggested an idea he saw in another game Wizards makes: Duel Masters. For a couple years, Wizards sold the Pokémon Trading Card Game in the US. When Nintendo formed their own company to sell the game, we looked for another Japanese trading card game we could sell. We didn't find one, so we decided to make one of our own. Five members of R&D, myself being one of them, designed Duel Masters for the Japanese market. We expected it to last three to five years. It's now been over two decades.

Double-faced cards proved to be a great fit, not only for Innistrad but for Magic in general, and now show up in a lot of sets.

Undying

b. I came up with this mechanic by chatting with my wife Lora.

Here's the story. I was working on Dark Ascension when I got the note that the set was too focused on Humans. The monsters didn't have the level of complexity that we wanted them to have. The fun part of playing a Magic set is getting to play all the roles, and being a monster is pretty cool. We needed a fun monster mechanic. The Design team tried a bunch of things, but nothing was working.

One night, I was at home and being pretty quiet. My wife Lora could see that I was trying to solve a problem, so she asked about it. During our courtship, Lora used to play Magic with me, so she knew how to play. Here (with some dramatic license) was our conversation:

Lora: So, what's the problem?
Me: There's a horror trope I want to capture. You know how in movies the hero kills the monster and, just as they're celebrating their survival, they realize the monster isn't actually dead?
Lora: Yeah.
Me: I want to make a mechanic that does that, but I'm having trouble.
Lora: Is there an existing mechanic that has that feeling?
Me: Yes, it's called persist. When a creature dies, if it doesn't a -1/-1 counter on it, it returns to the battlefield with a -1/-1 counter.
Lora: Why don't you just use that?
Me: I can't. It uses -1/-1 counters, and the set doesn't have those.
Lora: What counters does the set have?
Me: +1/+1 counters.
Lora: Could you use them?
Me: Yes, I could! Thank you!