![]() ![]() ![]() Over 70% of respondents have made the Magic road trip, which is even more than I would have guessed. Last Week's Poll Road trip time: How many times have you piled multiple people into a car to go play Magic? As you spend more time playing Shadowmoor, you'll be able to see even more interconnections. I avoided listing every single connection in order to keep the web from getting too visually tangled. In addition, many individual cards can link two bubbles, like the way that Leech Bonder links with -1/-1 Counter Manipulation. There are many other connections I could also have listed, like linking Unblockables to Hybrid, since all unblockables are hybrid cards. It's a pretty far advancement from Mirage's completely unrelated phasing and flanking. That's how the entire set of Shadowmoor intertwines together like a giant, flexible level 2 Menger sponge. The answer was taking an element that exists in the background of every Magic card, and bringing it thundering to the foreground: "color matters" was the first major theme of Shadowmoor. What theme could be a mirror image to "creature type matters," and also be compatible with the cards in Lorwyn / Morningtide? Likewise, he wanted the major theme of Shadowmoor block to be backwards-compatible with the cards in Lorwyn block. Since we knew Shadowmoor was the mirror image of Lorwyn, Mark had long pondered what mechanics could be the mirror image of Lorwyn's "creature type matters."Īs Mark has written in recent articles, it was important that the Lorwyn theme would be supported throughout the neighboring Shadowmoor block as well, meaning that Shadowmoor block had to include all the same creature types as Lorwyn. The creative team designed the worlds of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor at the same time as mirror images of each other: one light and cheerful, the other dark and evil. Today I'm going to show you how Shadowmoor's mechanics interconnect by leading you on a visual journey through Shadowmoor's mechanical web. For almost every mechanic, if someone asks "Hey, why is this here?" there are very specific reasons for how that mechanic fits into the rest of the set. This methodology opens up deck building and game play dramatically, since any particular card interacts with multiple elements of the set, instead of just one little section. As the set design evolves, these connections form a great web. These subtle connections ensure that every card fits into the set in multiple ways, through multiple pathways and connections. One of the advances of modern-day Magic design is that the design and development teams work hard to make all of a set's parts interconnect and work together. ![]() And Tempest brings in shadow and buyback, which again have nothing to do with each other. Mirage features phasing and flanking, which have nothing to do with each other. Ice Age introduced cumulative upkeep, snow lands, and cantrips, none of which have anything to do with each other. ![]() In fact, they often had nothing to do with each other. The original spell will be unaffected.In the early days of Magic design, the mechanics in a Magic set weren't always selected because they worked well together.
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