The Making of a Dynasty, Part 2

Last week, I started talking about the design story of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, introduced you to the Exploratory and Vision Design teams, and showed off two cool preview cards. Today, I’m going to tell the rest of the design story, have Dave Humpherys introduce his Set Design team, and show off another cool preview card.

As is the tradition, I like to have the lead of the team introduce the members of their team. I’ll be doing the introduction of Dave, and the rest of the bios are written by him.

If we wanted this to be a return to Kamigawa, we needed to explore what mechanical call backs we could do. The big challenge is that the original Champions of Kamigawa block was a disappointment mechanically, so there wasn’t a lot to salvage. Here’s what we had to work with:

Bushido (When this creature blocks or becomes blocked, it gets +1/+1 until end of turn.)

As mechanics from the block go, bushido is one of the better ones in that it’s simple and plays well. Its biggest problem is that it just isn’t something we wanted to put on a lot of creatures. Also, its thematic tie to Samurai added some complications. In the end, we decided we could write it out on a card or two, but we didn’t want to bring back the whole keyword.

Flip cards (Cards with two states that can flip from one state to the other.)

The biggest strike against flip cards is that we’ve figured out how to do them better with transforming double-faced cards (TDFCs). Flip cards were both considered aesthetically unpleasing and caused confusion about which version they were, especially when tapped, both problems solved by TDFCs. As you will see below, we did find a way to bring transformation to Kamigawa.

Soulshift (When this creature dies, you may return target Spirit card with mana value N or less from your graveyard to your hand.)

Champions of Kamigawa block was about a war between Humans and Spirits, so it made a lot of sense to have a Spirit tribal mechanic to represent one side of the conflict. While Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty would have some Spirits, we didn’t really want a tribal Spirit mechanic.

Spiritcraft (Whenever you cast a Spirit or Arcane spell)

Spiritcraft was the other Spirit tribal mechanic, although unnamed. Its reference to Arcane, something not in the set (more on this in a second), further made this a bad fit for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.

Splice onto Arcane (As you cast an Arcane spell, you may reveal this card from your hand and pay its splice cost. If you do, add this card’s effects to that spell.)

I’ve talked in articles about how I wish this had been splice on instant or sorcery to make it less parasitic. We experimented with splice onto instants or sorceries as the Izzet mechanic in Guilds of Ravnica, but we weren’t that happy with how it played, so that soured its return here.

Arcane (An instant and sorcery subtype)

One of the rules in design is that we don’t use subtypes on anything other than creatures if it’s not mechanically relevant in the set. That meant we wouldn’t use Arcane unless there was a mechanical reason for it. Obviously, we didn’t use splice, but we did talk about finding a different reason to use it, but nothing ended up in the file that made sense being Arcane.

Ninjutsu ({MANA COST}, Return an unblocked attacker you control to hand: Put this card onto the battlefield from your hand tapped and attacking.)

Ninjutsu is the most popular mechanic from the Champions of Kamigawa block and the only one to have been used in a non-Kamigawa set. Interestingly, the original plan was for it not to appear in the set but for us to make a Ninja Commander deck that had a bunch of new ninjutsu cards. The idea was that it allowed us to make some other cool top-down Ninja cards that weren’t always about being sneaky when attacking. During set design, Dave decided to pull it back into the set because everyone expected it to be there.

[CREATURE TYPE] Offering (You may cast this card any time you could cast an instant by sacrificing a [CREATURE TYPE] and paying the difference in mana costs between this and the sacrificed [CREATURE TYPE]. Mana cost includes color.)

This mechanic was only on a rare cycle in Betrayers of Kamigawa. It was tribal and a bit tricky to design.

Channel ([MANA COST], Discard this card: [EFFECT])

I feel the same way about channel that I do about kicker. The mechanic is a little too broad. It probably would have been better not to make something so general and instead make a lot of smaller mechanics in those mechanics’ outline. That said, channel is a perfectly fine mechanic that plays well.

Epic (For the rest of the game, you can’t cast spells. At the beginning of each of your upkeeps, copy this spell except for its epic ability.)

Brian Tinsman designed epic in his quest to make something that felt like a legendary spell. It was a rare cycle in Saviors of Kamigawa, and it wasn’t received well. “For the rest of the game, you can’t play spells” proved to be a bit too much of a downside for most players.

Sweep (Return any number of [BASIC LAND TYPE] you control to their owner’s hand.)

This was a weird ability word linking together four cards that all bounced numerous lands as an additional cost. It was done as part of the Saviors of Kamigawa wisdom theme (more on this below). This mechanic often shows up on worst mechanics of all-time Top 10 lists.

Wisdom (Hand size matters)

The main mechanic theme to Saviors of Kamigawa was “hand size matters.” Wisdom was the informal nickname given to it. It didn’t really tie into the Japanese flavor and wasn’t all that synergistic with the other mechanics in the block. I do think it’s a theme we might be able to use in the right set (although it has a lot of challenges), but it’s not a great fit in Kamigawa.

When the dust settled, there weren’t many viable mechanics to bring back. We ended up choosing channel and ninjutsu (and even that was originally planned for the Ninja Commander deck).

Channel was both functional and practical as it allowed us to put spells on artifacts and enchantments to helps bring up the as-fans of those two card types. As you’ll see in a second, we also created a transformational mechanic that we felt had a little of the flip card vibe to it. Instead of bringing back a lot of named mechanics, we decided to bring back a few of the high-profile cycles (Dragon Spirits and Shrines) and do a lot of one-of call backs (one of which is my preview card today; I’ll show it off soon).

I explained last week that we based the design around the conflict of modernity versus tradition, and that the modern side would focus on artifacts and the traditional side would focus on enchantments. This meant each side would have artifact creatures or enchantment creatures respectively, would make use of various cards of that card type, and would have cards that mechanically cared about that card type. To help focus on the two sides, I wanted each to have its own mechanic. The modern one should show up on artifacts, and the traditional one should show up on enchantments.

Interestingly, the modernity mechanic came about because we were trying to solve a different problem. The world really wanted a lot of Vehicles and Equipment, but we were running out of slots for them. Was there any way to put Equipment into creature slots? Well, what if they were also creatures?

Magic had done something like this all the way back in the very first set I led the design for, Tempest. It had a mechanic called Licids.

Licids were creatures that could activate to turn into creature enchantments. What if we tried the same thing but had them turn into Equipment rather than Auras? We had learned from Licids that we didn’t want the activations to be too inexpensive. We playtested it, and it worked well.

The solution for the traditional side also came from answering a different question. The traditional side was about the past and enchantments. That really sounded like a perfect home for Sagas. We had a whole block of cards and stories to reference. The big question was, did we want to do something different with these Sagas or did we simply want more straightforward “vanilla” Sagas? Again, we had a crunch in the non-creature slots, so we asked, could these be creatures? What if we made Sagas that were also creatures? That didn’t seem very enticing. You didn’t want players attacking with them while getting effects and have the creatures go away when the effects stopped.

That’s when we came up with the idea of having the final chapter create a creature token that was thematically tied to the Saga. We had the creature token be an enchantment creature to play into the enchantment synergies.

This then led to us asking, did we have to make a token? Could the Saga turn into a creature? We tried that, and it seemed fun. It also felt like it was tapping a little into the transformation that the flip cards had done in the original block. True, they had been creatures that turned into enchantments (well, at least in Saviors of Kamigawa), but the reverse didn’t feel too far off. In the handoff from vision design, we suggested a tweaked frame with a single face, but the double-faced versions were just far cooler and easier to use, so the Set Design team made that change.

My preview card today is one of these “Saga Creatures.” As with all of them in the set, we use the story of the Saga to call back to stories and characters from the original block. My preview is a call back to my favorite design from Champions of Kamigawa.

Once we had a mechanic for each side, we made one for the middle. During vision design, we called it harmony (it ended up going unnamed in the set), and it required you to have both an artifact and an enchantment. This would enable some decks that played a combination of both sides. We focused it in white and black as a draft archetype.

The final mechanic we added was something we wanted to be useful to both sides. We ended up using a mechanic we had originally designed for Kaldheim. The mechanic, modified, took advantage of the fact that both sides made use of things that went on creatures (Equipment and Auras; we would later add counters). Modified took advantage of the mechanical similarities of artifacts and enchantments which did a nice job of tying the component pieces of the set together and allowed another series of decks that could mix and match the sides. The mechanic was focused in red and green as a draft archetype.

While that’s all the mechanics, there were two more themes we added during vision design. Every set likes to have a little bit of tribal-ness to it, and Champions of Kamigawa block had taught us there were two tribes that players enjoyed building around most: Samurai and Ninjas.

The one problem was that none of the sets around Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty would have either of those two creature types, so we ended up pairing each one with a class creature type that sees more print. Samurai was paired with Warrior, and Ninja was paired with Rogue. This would allow you to build decks in both Limited and Constructed. While we let each creature type show up in more colors than in Champions of Kamigawa block, we focused each of them in the two colors they were best known for (red and white for Samurai, and blue and black for Ninjas).

That’s all the time I have for today. As you can see, there’s a lot packed into Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, so I can’t wait for all of you to get a chance to play with it. As always, I’m eager to hear your thoughts on today’s column, on any of the mechanics I discussed, or on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty itself. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week when I show you the vision design handoff document for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.

Until then, may you discover the part of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty that most speaks to you.