If you cast this spell for its mutate cost, it becomes overlaid on target creature you own that shares a creature type or inheritable keyword with it. Mutate is the keyword we're using to let players build their own monsters. They were pretty cool though, so maybe in the future if creature keywords return.
#Ikoria quick draft guide upgrade#
That whole style of card, creatures that upgrade themselves with keywords for mana, ended up not getting made. At the time of this document, I didn't believe the cards would actually be printed with the monstrosity keyword, but we left it on so that Set Design could make the call. One, mutate changed during set design to no longer directly interact with keyword counters, and two, monstrosity ended up not being used in the set. These cards could be done without the monstrosity keyword, but the flavor seems like such a homerun for this set.Įverything above actually came to pass with two exceptions. Monstrosity – There are a number of spells that use the monstrosity ability to grant a keyword counter rather than a +1/+1 counter. If you cycle the card, you get to put a keyword counter on target creature that has the ability on the creature. Trainers – This is an uncommon cycle of humanoids (non-monsters) that put a specific keyword counter on another creature when they enter the battlefield and then have an activated ability that can affect a creature with that ability.Ĭycling – We have an uncommon creature cycle with cycling.
There is a common cycle that gives you two choices and some higher rarity cards that give you more than two choices. Versatile creatures – These are creatures that give you a choice of keyword counters when the creature enters the battlefield. Spell effects – Any place we would grant a keyword ability until end of turn we instead put a keyword counter on the creature. Keyword counters are being used in several ways: The Set Design team decided just to print nine. We did try very hard during vision design to have ten keyword counters, one that overlapped each two-color pair, but prowess not working out left a gap in blue-red. We also liked the idea that this evolution had some variance built into it. We decided we wanted to create a more fluid evolution where various creatures could evolve into others. This had a number of issues, the biggest two being difficulty in consistently making it happen and the repetition of play when you do. It can evolve into Creature B, which can then evolve into Creature C.
#Ikoria quick draft guide series#
The lowest-hanging fruit was a series of creatures that evolved from one another. We wanted some kind of monster evolution, so we examined the various ways we could handle it. If those are the only things monsters were in this set, we'd quickly paint ourselves into a corner. Monsters, normally, are big and splashy, but low in number. This requires us looking at how we usually handle it and understand what happens when we change how much of it we're doing. It's common to take a theme we normally do in small volumes and crank it up to make it the major theme. In Ikoria, this had a lot to do with how Magic has treated monsters in the past and what we had to do differently to make a monster-focused set. We made a lot of individual choices, and it's important that I walk them through what factors shaped those choices. I don't just want to tell the Set Design team what we did. This is about as in the weeds and behind the scenes as it gets. Two, a lot changed during set design, so what you're seeing is the set as it was handed off. The boxes contain commentary for added insight into what was going on during vision design and/or commentary about how things would later be adapted during set design. One, everything not in a box below is the actual document as I wrote it two years ago. I showed the Throne of Eldraine vision design document last fall ( Part 1 and Part 2), and it was received well, so I thought I'd do the same with the Ikoria (called throughout the document by its codename "Cricket"). The document lays out the vision that the Vision Design team created for the set and spells out all the mechanics and themes that they've created thus far. At the end of all vision designs, the lead vision designer creates a vision design handoff document for the Set Design team.
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