Return to the Wild
4/13/07
Discuss in the Conquest thread!
Welcome to the last feature article of the Conquest preview. I hope you got a good taste of the set before it’s officially released. The topic of this last article will be Green – the creature color…? Really what I hope to explain is how the exploration of lands and green led to a heavier creature focus than I had originally intended. And the ramifications on the rest of the set.
Green was actually one of the last colors I designed when making Conquest, and I think one of the reasons was because I felt it would come the most naturally. Lands have been coupled with green since the first Ley Druid in Alpha. And the design space has been pretty heavily mined already. But I felt there was still a lot that could be done and set off exploring the other color/type combos first. When I came back to green I had a bit of a problem. Every other color had the makings of very strong deck archetypes available to them and I was worried that by being the land color, green would just become a secondary color to a lot of decks and not really have anything of its own to contribute. It would speed up mana bases or smooth out other color combos. At the time we had just come out of the Ravnica block where this exact thing had happened. So what I did was downplay green mana tutoring ability, and focused the cards on Forests and green mana. In this way, the Conquest land deck would be green and not some other combination of colors, splashing green.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Keying a lot of cards to the Forest type was an easy cheat to accomplish this design goal, but also very intuitive and elegant at the same time. If a spell animated a land, but could only animate Forests, then you double the number of Forests needed (one to pay the mana cost and one to be the target of animation.) This allows for more powerful effects to exist even with Unexplored Wilderness in the set. Take Herd magic over here for example. It looks a lot like a 2/2 for G, but it’s really not. Not until the mid to late game (and at mid to late game I am comfortable letting green get cheap big creatures with haste.) I was able to find a way around giving green weenies, while at the same time making a strong land animator. It is a design I’m very happy with.
Speaking of Unexplored Wilderness, it’s a much better card than most people initially think, because you could very easily play with 20 of them in a deck and get around their tapped drawback. I wanted to force players to run less in their decks and really have to agonize over how many to keep in an opening hand. The use of Green mana in the costs of many spells in Conquest take this into consideration. Playing a spell that costs 1GGG or 2GGGG is actually a lot easier if you’ve managed to play even one regular forest. Plus, playing the set’s only (monocolor) land tutor requires a heavy green focus.
Wizards of the Coast has spent a lot of design tutoring for lands and putting them into play, but not so much with tutors that still leave you having to play the land. I searched far and wide through the entire card database for a reason that X was too cheap a cost for this effect, but it’s balanced. It’s appropriately costed too. And in a deck that only runs Unexplored Wildernesses it’s a waste of a card. On the other hand, and deck that runs mostly Forests will be able to tutor a greater number of lands, including Unexplored Wildernesses.
So a focus on Green mana and Forests as a type was set to be my methodology, but what would the deck do? Ultimately a player will have a bunch of lands in play and in their hand, how now would that player win? In thinking about this, I came the stunning realization that green would play a big creature and trample on through for the win. But I couldn’t do that, not with black being the creature color. What I decided was that green would do a very green thing and animate those creatures and attack with them. So while there are some beefy creatures in green, its most often used tool for victory is going to be swinging with its creature lands.
So I made a lot of effects that make lands into creatures; some permanently, and some only for a turn. And not just its own lands. In the same way that red destroys its opponents artifacts for effects (See Overloader from the 4/11/7 Feature Article) green would also be able to turn the other guys lands into creatures. Often this will be used as a long way around for land destruction, but it is completely viable as a green ability and I wasn’t afraid to use it. So expect a Provoke effect in the set as well.
Lands don’t really work with wake and you’ll find that green is completely lacking of that mechanic. But I still was interested in exploring subtypes in green, especially since I had made Forests so important. So the last card I’m revealing today is a rare that demonstrates the new choices Conquest Green presents. If Nut Brain had been made in any other set it most likely would have said, “Whenever Nut Brain or a Forest comes into play, put a 1/1 green Squirrel creature token into play.” But I wanted to explore the full power of other land types, like the Conquest Strongholds, and nodes or the Wastelands Deserts. Unlike other hermits of the past, Nut Brain doesn’t give its squirrels a power/toughness bonus, but it probably will make a lot more of them.
One final point before I go. The decision to make green land-paired but still using creatures as a win condition led me to widen the themes in other colors too. So black has a subtle artifact effect, as does white. And a secondary type was in the underbelly of the other colors in the set, including even Blue. I’m not sure if this secondary theme showed up in force in the set, but it did let me free up the set a bit and make strong permanents in colors that might not have got them before.
I hope you had a good time reading all the Feature articles and Bonus articles over the last two weeks. This weekend I will be holding a release event and early next week I will be putting up the visual spoiler, text spoiler, flavor text spoiler and FAQ. See you then, and as always, please Discuss in the Conquest thread!