Originally this week I was planning on writing about Modern as it’s now on the ‘ol Magic Online and the Daily Events are firing at a good pace. Then last night the PAX party went down and a mechanic was spoiled which blew up the internet for a good couple of hours. This article will contain spoilers about it, though I imagine few people who read MTG sites will be able to avoid the spoilers for this set if only for rules clarifications. Fair warning to turn back now if you are one of the few who don’t want to be spoiled.

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For those who haven’t seen it, I introduce the new flip mechanic of Transform and double-sided cards.

Flip Mechanic

Read the mechanics if you haven’t and then come on back. I don’t think Magic will die or think that it’ll have a huge impact on how we play the game, neither will happen. However there seemed to be so many obvious logistical issues that this type of move was an impossibility. Once checklist cards were revealed then about half of them went away and became merely annoyances. I’m going to try not going cranky MTG player on you, because there was quite enough of that on the many forum and Facebook threads when the format was announced. However I’m hard-pressed to see a lot of upside in handling the mechanic in this fashion.

As an aside, people really like Tom LaPille as the official whipping boy of any poor decision WOTC makes from here until the end of time in the eyes of some Magic players. Congratulations Maro, no longer are you the gold standard of blame. 🙂

There are three main logistical issues that come up.

1. Open information has now been introduced to drafting.

2. Checkbox cards are essentially nice proxies as dual-sided cards cannot be played in unsleeved decks or anything except opaque sleeves.

3. There are going to be a lot of warnings / penalties / rulings handed out on these cards.

I pity any store without a real judge or a level one that isn’t actively interested in learning new things, because this is going to put a huge strain on those with less rules knowledge. People at the FNM level have plenty of questions about Core Set, let alone advanced mechanics that can alter how the game is played. The first time I have to ask someone if they know how many spells their opponent played on a turn is going to be painful.

Trying to get players to sleeve their decks in a certain kind of sleeve doesn’t sound difficult, but many MTG players have an issue with following any instructions whatsoever. Most people don’t even read the one page policy guideline for tournaments or bring materials which they need to play the game with them. Not to mention a fair number of casual players don’t want to sleeve up their decks to begin with, so unless you play with an awkward checklist card you can’t actually do that. To top it off you have to deal with cheaters who are going to be staring at their own / opponents decks in an attempt to gleam information.

So what do you gain from this? More room for text… Which probably isn’t what Magic needs more of in the first place. Show a new player [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card] and watch their minds explode at trying to process everything it does. While newer and casual players may grasp transform quickly, the actual rules mechanic behind it is going to cause problems. Still I wanted to ask the people who would be manning the prerelease lines and running these top eight drafts of limited PTQ’s what they thought of it.

Riki Hayashi and Eric Levine both had two simple words: “Don’t panic”

Level two judge Jess Dunks had an in-depth answer for me:

“I don’t think that the transform mechanic is as clunky a mechanic as we have seen in some other sets, and I don’t think it will be that hard for players to understand once they get used to it. The biggest problems I foresee are actually going to be issues at prereleases, where the players often aren’t comfortable with tournament magic, and many of them are still learning the basics of the game. I expect that these people will probably do some things wrong that we might think of as pretty silly. Many new players, however, will actually be excited enough by the thematic implications to learn how it works, much the same way that players are often pulled into magic by the fantasy basic theme.

Some problems:

Because there are no mana symbols on the transformed side, and no characteristic-defining ability that says what color they are, colorblind players may have issues with knowing for sure that the second face is the same color as the first. (there is a colored dot on the type line to indicate this, but that isn’t any help either)

Many sleeves that players use are not truly opaque. You can look at the back and tell that the Deckmaster logo and the mana symbols are there, and see the word Magic written in big blue letters. If a player’s sleeves show that you’re using double-face cards, perhaps because you didn’t open enough checklist cards to use them, they will find themselves in trouble for having marked cards.

Some players who do use the proper opaque sleeves will have a hard time remembering what the other side of this card does. Not wanting to constantly take the card out of the sleeve every time they want to read it, they will take the pre-emptive step of writing what it does down on a piece of paper beforehand. While their intent is innocent, this is a textbook example of outside assistance, since they are using notes from outside the game.

Other problems come up for constructed, like whether to use the checklist cards and keep the real cards somehow separate from your deck and from your sideboard, or to use the real cards and pull them out of the sleeve every time they transform and every time a transformed creature leaves the battlefield.

Drafting has its own issues, but at competitive events, Alexei has suggested that they just replace the double-face card with a correctly marked checklist card. “

“Penalties I expect to be giving with increased frequency due to these new types of cards (which ironically are not a new card type): Outside assistance: “I didn’t want to pull the card out of the sleeve to read it, so I wrote down what the other side said before the match!”

Marked Cards (upgraded to GL): “I didn’t notice that my sleeves were translucent!”

Fraud: “Did you just look really hard at the back of your opponent’s deck before cutting just the top card?“

Level two Tim Froehlig: “It should be fine, with the fill-in card or whatever. My concern lies with the drafting portion at competitive/pro events and the extra information, especially since these cards appear at uncommon and not just rare. I’m also concerned with casual play, but on the whole I don’t really feel like it’s that huge of an issue. People on the internet will complain either way. Players in the real world may love or hate this. “

Level two Alexei Gousev: “I really hope that at Pro events, they take out all of the flip cards pre-draft, and replace them with checklists. If they do, then emulating that at PTQ top 8s and whatnot should be doable. For Regular REL drafts… who cares. “

For Constructed I don’t see these cards as being a big deal under most circumstances. Everything needs to be sleeved and you can play the cards as-is with only the minor annoyance of actually removing the sleeve from the card when it transforms. It can be obnoxious, but it’s something that will only take a few seconds to do. If that’s too much, the checklist card is close enough to a real thing for it to be functional. In fact that’s what I originally thought would happen, that one card would transform by taking a card outside of the game state (say your command zone or treat as if you were carrying tokens) and replacing the card with it.

There’s one other interesting thing to take note of when considering these cards, they are perfect for Magic Online. If programmed correctly it’s simple enough to mouse-over and find out all relevant information at any given time and without any of the logistics changing. It’s almost as if this mechanic was designed for that platform and not the paper product. Obviously not going to be the case, but something to take note of if the proliferation of Magic Online continues.

From a flavor standpoint the mechanic is wonderful and I don’t think anyone can realistically attack it on that front. The cards make a lot more sense than the original flip cards did and the art is wonderful, having separate pictures is a huge step up from the cramped picture that was in the center previously. It also makes the aforementioned issues with reading the cards and knowing what mode they’re in completely solved.

From a design standpoint it can be criticized and already has been. One game designer forum I visit on occasion had a thread on it and nearly every post can be summed up with, ‘Is this a joke? Why would they think this is a good idea?’ When looking at the mechanic purely from a design standpoint there are some advantages, you open up room for additional text and clear up annoyances from the Kamigawa flip cards. The reason they didn’t just bring back the flip cards is because the execution of them was… Let’s say lackluster at best. There was too much text to quickly identify what the card could do and when they became tapped it could become awkward to figure out which side was active. There were other issues but those seem to be the two most prominent ones people bring up.

Maro even tweeted this Sunday afternoon: “We did a lot of research on flip cards. They were a success on concept and a failure on execution. “

Sirlin of Play to Win fame and who designed his own card games (fun ones I might add) also made a post on his website regarding this development.

“I admire that they are trying to do something new and splashy, but this just seems so full of problems. You can’t shuffle a deck that has a card with no back, so you’ll have to either use opaque sleeves and actually take the card out of the sleeve during gameplay when you need to flip it, or you’ll have to use the “checklist” card in place of the real card when it’s in a hidden zone like your hand or deck. The checklist card looks like a joke to me, I thought it was maybe April Fools when someone linked it.

It’s also pretty problematic in draft if you open a pack and decide to take a double-sided card. Everyone can see that, and also everyone now has reason to scrutinize you as you look through your possible draft picks, just to look for this.

There’s a lot of confusing interactions too. Imagine your double-sided guy interacting with [card ixidron]this[/card], [card illusionary mask]this[/card], or [card break open]this[/card]. And in case you’re wondering how double-sided cards work when things copy them, here’s a quick explanation for you:

If a double-faced card becomes a copy of something else, the copied values will overwrite its characteristics for as long as the copy effect lasts, even if the double-faced card transforms. If a double-faced card that’s copying something else is instructed to transform, it will do so, because the physical card has two faces, but its characteristics will still be those of whatever it’s copying. This is true even if the object it’s copying is one face of a double-faced card.

I almost wonder if these cards will end up banned, all of them, for some sort of logistics reason. I think a LOT of what MTG has been doing in the last couple years is really great, so this stands out as pretty wonky. It looks like the community of MTG players–people completely used to their game constantly changing–are even saying that this is just too much.

The theme and flavor of the new set looks great, at least.”

Let’s look at the design side and tie it in with the Great Designers Search 2.

Remember fellow Channelfireball writer Johnathan Loucks? He was eliminated from the competition for having too much complexity in his designs and not fitting the ‘theme’ of his own set.

“You kept getting pulled off target by shiny mechanics that, while novel, weren’t doing what your set needed. You also are attracted to complexity in way that I hope this competition has made you more aware of. “

Now look at double-sided cards and feel free to chime in on how much sense that makes. R&D does a lot of things right, far more than they get credit for and I respect that. However when they critique other people’s designs on occasion there’s this feeling of depressing irony in that they can’t seem to learn from their own mistakes in a number of ways. What are some cardinal design rules that get harped on? Respect the color-pie and be mindful of color bleed. What did we get in New Phyrexia?

[card]Dismember[/card]

[card]Mental Misstep[/card]

We have perhaps the most egregious example of color bleed in years with [card]Dismember[/card] and it was so blatantly obvious that I’m amazed it got through. It’s even worse than what [card]Mental Misstep[/card] accomplished in its short life-span from a design and color-pie perspective. [card]Mental Misstep[/card] was another rule break in that free spells need to be treated with a huge amount of care because they’re usually terrible ideas. Misstep is already banned in Modern and people have argued that it warped Legacy to a huge degree and should be considered bannable there as well.

With that said, you did manage to generate a huge amount of buzz and I wrote this article about it (and I’m sure many others will soon enough) so mission accomplished! You definitely got people talking about the set and in a few months we’ll get to see if that buzz ends up being positive or negative. Ultimately I’m not the best person to be judging because I’m a competitive player and in the end we’ll accept whatever is thrown our way unless it completely wipes out the game mechanics and strategy we know and love. So in the end it’ll come down to the casuals who will make or break the feedback and if we see more dual-sided MTG cards in the future.

What do you think about the mechanic? Sound off in the forums, over at the official Wizards forums or even Maro himself via e-mail, twitter or smoke signal. Next week we take a look at Modern in the wake of the Pro Tour!

Josh Silvestri

Email me at joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom