Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1130: A/B Mechanics

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

A/B mechanics are mechanics that require a separate subset of cards to work (such as madness requiring cards that make you discard). In this episode, I talk about how we design A/B mechanics, the challenges of making them, and the history of some famous A/B mechanics.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today's drive is going to be about AB mechanics. I will start by explaining what AB mechanics are. Then I will talk about how we design for them and the challenges of AB mechanics. Okay, so let me start by defining what is an AB mechanic? In order to be an AB mechanic, you need to have two things. First off, A is usually the mechanic or the thing that's self-referential. A is I care about something and in order to play I need this thing. A needs something. B is the thing that A needs.

Usually B is something that exists. That isn't... usually B isn't reliant on A. The one probably counterexample to that is meld, where I... the left side and the right side, and the left side needs the right side, and the right side and the left side needs the right side and the right side needs the left side. But that's a little a normal. Normally in an AB mechanic, let me give you some examples of AB mechanics. Madness.

So madness is a mechanic that says, if I am discarded, you may pay this usually cheaper cost to play me. Well, madness spells require discard. If there's no discard, madness doesn't mean anything. So the A here is madness and the B is discard splice into our cane. Um, the idea is these cards, you can spend the splice mechanic to put the effect onto an arcane spell that is on the stack.

So in order to use splice into arcane, you need arcane spells. So A is splice, B is arcane, arcane spells. Um, proliferate. Proliferate says when I cast this, for every counter on a player and or permanent, I can choose to add another one of that counter. But, proliferate doesn't mean anything if there aren't counters. So A is proliferate, B is counters.

Then you have populate. Populate is sort of a tweak on proliferate. It was the Selesny mechanic in Return to Ravnica. What populate means is when I populate, it's a keyword action, I copy a token. I make a copy of a token. But in order for that to be true, I need creature tokens. If I don't have creature tokens,

populate doesn't do anything. A is populate, B is creature tokens. I mentioned meld. Meld is quirky in that A and you need a specific A and a specific B. So that's the most interconnected where A needs B and B needs A. Affinity. So let's say affinity for artifacts. Okay, well in order for affinity for artifacts to mean anything, you have to have artifacts. A is affinity for artifacts, B is artifacts.

Then you get into the whole realm of landfall, alliance, constellation, magecraft. Those are all mechanics that care about a certain card type. So landfall is A, land is B. Alliance is A, creatures are B. Magecraft is A, instance and sorcerers are B. Constellation is A, and shamans are B. You get a stuff like host augment, where augment only works on hosts. So hosts are creatures that have an enter the battlefield effect. And then augment can go on hosts, literally goes to the left of them, and it changes whatever the trigger is, like what's the condition by which the effect happens. And so the trigger changes hosts into a different creature, keeps elements of the original hosts. But in that case, augment is A, host is B. Another common A-B mechanic is not named are

typal effects. Oh, I care about goblins, I care about merfolk. I care about zombies in each of those cases I Care about goblins. Well a is the card, you know, the typal card that cares about goblins and B are goblins Okay, so that so let's get a little bit into A and B, because the really understanding of A-B mechanics is understanding the asks of A and the asks of B. When you get into A,

there's a couple of questions you have to ask. Question number one, how reliant is A on B? My example here is, host augment is one end of the spectrum. An augment card literally cannot be played if there's not a host. So if you draw an augment card, but haven't drawn a host dead, I mean, it's a creature card,

you can discard it or whatever, but as far as playing it, I cannot play the augment card until I've drawn a host. It is 100% dead without the B. In contrast, something like Madness, I can't use the Madness mechanic if I don't have the discard, but the card still has a mana cost. Let's say I draw my Madness spell,

but I never draw a discard spell. It's not completely dead in my hand. I can still play it. And so one of the great questions is, right, how reliant is A on B? That's one of the questions. Another big question that you ask about A is, when do I care? When does A care about B? And there's two big categories. It could care about it in your hand or it can care about it on the battlefield. There's a few other things, there are a few that might care about graveyard or whatever,

but mostly it cares about hand or battlefield. And here's how that works. For example, madness says, hey, if you discard me from your hand, you can cast me for lower costs. Well, in that case, A needs to be in your hand. And so you need to get the discard spell in your hand along with A in order for it to mean something. Now in contrast, something like Constellation, if I draw my Constellation card but I don't

draw any enchantments, why don't you just play the Constellation card? Constellations usually are on the board. Usually what they say, it's a trigger. So like, well, whenever you play an enchantment, but I got to be on the battlefield first to care. So sometimes, some A's are dependent upon like the more they're reliant on your hand, the more they care about getting B earlier, the more they are on the battlefield, the more like you can draw into B. You don't have to have B right away. Another big thing that we care about with A is sort of what we call threshold one versus scaling, which is when I care about B, how much do I care about B?

Threshold one means I just need one. All I need to do is I have one. Scaling means I get stronger the more there are. I use typo for this example. I could have a card that says, if I have a goblin, this creature gains flying or gains trample, gains some ability. Well, if I have one goblin or two goblins, it doesn't matter.

Having one goblin gives this creature everything it's going to have. Now, if I say I get plus one plus one for each goblin you have, or I grant all goblins plus one plus one, both of those say, well, to maximize this, you want a lot of goblins. And that's a big question of how much does A want? How much does the mechanic of A push you toward having different things? And the reason all this matters is, the reason I'm going through A and B is understanding the needs of your A and the needs of your B dictate how you build your set. Okay, so let's talk about the needs of B. B usually is self-reliant and what I mean

by that... Oh, sorry, sorry. The one thing I didn't get into with A. Well, actually, I'll talk about this in B. So B talks about I am something that exists. And so the question on B is how much does B naturally exist? And I will use the landfall style category for this one. So landfall says when a land enters the battlefield, it is very hard to play a game of magic. I mean, there are dredge decks, but most magic decks by definition of how the game works

need land. So I can probably throw one landfall card into a set because what A is asking of B is a very, very low ask. I need you to have land. You're going to have lands. Alliance asks for creatures, not quite as low as landfall, but pretty low, especially like limit or something, which is much more dependent on creatures. And constructed sometimes, there are creature list acts. So Alliance is asking something, but it's a much lower ask. Higher than landfall. And then you get into stuff like Magecraft

is asking for instance in sorceries, or Constellations asking for enchantments. That's a much bigger ask. And a lot of times when you're caring about the state of things the less natural B is the more structural that becomes meaning I'm not just gonna put magecraft in the set that doesn't care about instance and sorceries. It won't work I'm not gonna put a constellation sets that doesn't care about enchantments. It won't work

I can put landfall in landfall can go just about anywhere because the natural state of lands is so high. Another way to think of this is think of us doing typal themes, right? A lot of whether or not something is gonna be challenging is, okay, I care about goblins. Well, how many goblins are on the set? There's lots of goblins.

Okay, that's less of an issue. But maybe I care about goats or something, how many goblins are on the set? There's lots of goblins. Okay, that's less of an issue But maybe I care about goats or something and like how many goats in the set? Well, if there's not enough then now we put stuff in sets that are meant for limited and we put stuff that are set for Constructed so I as I'm talking through today. I will talk about both of those Okay, so we have an a we've defined an a and we understand the nature of A, how reliant is it on B, is it threshold one versus scaling, when does it care in hand or battlefield, like all those things have to come up. You have to think about those things. And then you're looking at B and you're thinking about how natural B exists. Okay, so the first thing we do when we have an AD mechanic

is we have to ask ourselves about Asfan. And what that means is in order for A and B to work together, how much A do you need and at what rarity? How much B do you need and at what rarity? So let me start with the most stark example, which is host and augment, which was unstable. start with the most stark example, which is host and augment, which was an unstable, um, because host is on creatures and very self reliable, meaning I don't host can exist by themselves most of the time, these can exist by themselves, not always met well, meld sort of exists by themselves. But, um, usually, the reason that B can exist in more number is that if you draw B without A, there isn't a problem for you.

If you draw a host, okay, it's a creature with an entrance to the battlefield effect. Great, those exist in magic all the time. Having a lot of hosts causes you no problems. It is possible to have an A where the B can cause you problems. Maybe we're doing something typal where the world doesn't really support B in a way that's going to show up in enough number. But most of the time the idea is how much does B have to exist. Now in the

case of Host and Augment, because Augment is so reliant on host, it's unplayable and host is so generally useful that we needed to go very high in host. So I believe in unstable, we had two cycles at common and I think white and green, which were the host augment colors for the draft archetype, I think might've had one more of each. Meaning that we have a lot of, our Asfan of host creatures is pretty high.

We put like, the more cards that come in, the higher your Asfan. So we had, I think 12 cards in common. Now, unstable wasn't exactly a normal, like it's slightly smaller than a large set. In a normal large set that has, well, back in they had 100 cards, now they have 80 in Playbooster world.

Nonetheless, 12 cards is over 10%. And these days a bit over 10%. Meaning, we talk about Asfand. So normally in a booster pack, I'm using the numbers for when Unstable was a set. Play boosters have changed the numbers, but I just wanna talk about what it meant in Unstable. So it's a little complicated in the sense that

we've changed the numbers with play boosters. So pardon me for a second. When Unstable got made, it was a 15 card booster pack, one card was mythic or rare, three cards were uncommon, one was a land card, and then 10 cards were common. So as long as I get above 10%, that means my ASFAN is one, which means every single booster I open on average has a host creature in it. And in fact, I believe our as fan, I know, because we also had, um,

host creatures and uncommon and we had some at rare. I believe, um, our host was, I think it was like 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, somewhere on there. It was every, I mean, every pack on average had more than one or had at least one and more than half had more than one. Trying to get host up. We really want host to show up. And then with augment, what we did is I think we had two common augment, one in white and one in green.

And then all the augments other than in the two colors that are the draft archetype showed up at uncommon or higher. And there is less overall augment creatures than there are host creatures. There are more host creatures than augment creatures. Now there's a bunch of factors going into there. For example, the augment creatures had to hold the triggers, the conditions by which you trigger. There's less of those than effects you could generate.

So there's a bunch of reasons, but purely from an Asfan standpoint, I needed hosts to show up more often in the greater number so that and once again the way you raise Asfan is have more cards and at lower rarities than you raise the Asfan. Okay now that's an example where B is plentiful or B can be plentiful and A is 100% reliant on B. plentiful or B can be plentiful and A is 100% reliant on B. Now let's take a different example. I will use madness. So madness says, hey, I'm better if you have to discard me, but you can play me. I have a mana cost. If I don't happen to draw the card, I'm not forever dead in your hand. I'm not as efficient, you know, and obviously, you want the discard cards to happen.

It is an AB mechanic. But it is a little, you know, if you don't quite draw into your discard cards, it's not quite as catastrophic as with augment where nothing you can do with them. In that case, by the way, how heavy your B is, your Aspen and B, is a lot to do on how naturally it occurring and how often it is required for A.

Now, the one thing about Aspen for B, let's get into this, is the more naturally it occurs in the set, the easier it is to be at a higher rate. The more unnatural it is, the more naturally it occurs in the set, the easier it is to be at a higher rate. The more unnatural it is, the more you need to warp your set to get the numbers up. Let me start with Constellation. So Constellation says, I need enchantments.

Now, and I'm gonna talk about limited for a second. Constructed, limited is a little easier to explain. So I'm gonna start with limited. Constructed has some overlap, although constructed different in some ways. In limited, the default, when you draft a deck or play a sealed deck, the default limited deck is 17 lands, it's a 40 card deck, 17 lands, 16 creatures, seven spells.

Default, you can change from that. But what that means is in a normal deck, if the thing you care about is not lands and not something that can go on creatures, you have a very tight window that makes sense. You have seven slots. And those seven slots usually have to be things like removal and card draw and card flow, or maybe a combat trick, but things that are going to deal with your opponent's creatures and other permanents. So if the thing you care about isn't in that group, it becomes hard to get the Aspen you

need. Now, the trick usually is if what B is caring about is something that's not naturally plentiful, it will need to go in an environment where it's unnaturally high. For example, we're making Theros. Theros has an enchantment theme. That is why something like Constellation can go in Theros. There's an enchantment theme. For example, there's other whole mechanics that revolve around enchantments. Bistot was a mechanic where they were enchantment creatures that could become auras and if they fell off

they become creatures again. You know we did things like glissids and tempests where they were creatures that turn into auras or even just like I said one of the tricks we use a lot and this is true in artifact sex and enment sets, is you can make creatures that are artifact creatures or enchantment creatures. Like for example, with infinity for artifacts, one of the ways we made that true is we just put a lot of artifact creatures in. So that way you get to count your artifacts among your creatures. If you don't count, if you can't do it among creatures or landslots, you're very restricted on the

kind of AB mechanic you can make. Usually if you want to care about it in a larger volume, then you need to find ways to get into the landslide. And you can get clever. A couple ways we do this. One way is you could produce a token. Maybe I am, you know, maybe I, or for example, let's say I care about enchantments. Wiles of Eldraine said, okay, hey, a lot of normal creatures generate an aura token. So there it goes in my creature

slot because it's a creature, but it counts as generating an enchantment. Another thing we'll do is, like for example, if you want to care about instance and sorceries, you can have token making. So it's an instance or sorcery that makes a token, but that it, so I get to put that in my land slot because it generates a token, but also comes from my instance and sorceries because it is an instance or sorcery.

Another thing we do, other than the token making like lesson learn is where I can fetch another card. Maybe I have a card that didn't start in my deck or maybe I fetch a card from my deck. Maybe I fetch a card from my graveyard that I'm it's allowing me to get a second card. Another thing we also do sometimes is cards that have extra utility in the graveyard. Like sometimes we'll use double face cards like disturb was it was a creature but died into an into a spell or into an enchantment, depending on what you're caring about. So there's there's a lot of tricks and things we can do.

But a lot of understanding B is understanding the natural state of how much, like how often is B going to show up? How easy is it to get the ASFAN to B up? And then the other thing is the harder it is to get for B, so remember I talked about two states. One was threshold one versus scaling. The lower your ASFAN, the more you have to lean toward threshold one. Threshold one just means I just need one of them.

Now there also, there's threshold one in your hand and there's threshold one on the battlefield. We've done mechanics, for example, where you have to show something from your hand or things that you just have to have them on the battlefield. You know, we do, one of the things, for example, let's say you care about something that is a little more expensive.

Like I'm doing dragon typal, right? We did dragons of Tarkir, they had dragon typal in it. The problem with dragons is they tend to be more expensive, so that's doing more of like, well, if you have a dragon on the battlefield or you have one in your hand. And sometimes we care about things on the battlefield or in your graveyard or with things, things in your graveyard or an exile. Sometimes we can expand where we're looking. But there are threshold one just means I need less in my deck. I just need to have one at the moment. I care about it. Where scaling means no, no, I need to have a lot. And that means I have to build my deck such that I'm really leaning heavily into that.

The best example of real scaling tends to be large, draftable, typal themes. Oh, I'm drafting an elf deck. Well, a lot of those decks do things like grant elves ability. That is scaling. If all your elves get plus one plus one, that's considered scaling because it's powerful if I have one elf, but it's more powerful if I have two elves, more powerful if I have three elves, the more elves you have, the better it is. And so the idea is the higher the, on the spectrum from threshold one to scaling, the more you are towards scaling,

the higher your as fan has to be. So one of the ways that we'll deal with things, let's say I have a B that's not a natural state, maybe I lean more toward threshold one effects because then the total as fan doesn't need to be as high. The other thing I was talking about earlier was hand versus battlefield. Where do I care? The more that I care that it has to be in my hand, meaning I have to draw it before I can get the effect out of it, the higher the Aspen has to be. You know, if I want to maximize my madness effect, well, I need to draw my discard so I can cast it while it's sitting in my hand. Where something like

Constellation or Magecraft that's sitting on the battlefield, well if I don't draw my Enchantment or my Insta-Sorcery right away, I still can play the creature, I can attack and block, I can do things with the creature and if I draw into it later. So that's another important thing when thinking of Avstan is thinking about the state sort of when things happen. When you, like, one of the ways we think about is, let's say I say, how many, within how many cards do I need to have this thing? Do I need it within my opening hand? Do I need it within the first three, four turns?

Do I need it before the game ends? When do I need it? The later in the game I need it, the larger my Asfan can be as far as when, you know, that's why hand versus battlefield matters. Threshold 1 versus scaling is a lot more about volume that needs to be in my deck, but that affects Asfan. Okay, another trick that we use, or a common trick that we use, is sometimes you can put A and B on the same card. I'll use populate as my example here.

Okay, so we, I was returning to Ravnica, the Celestia mechanic was populate. Populate cared about having creature enchantment, sorry, creature tokens. The problem was if I have a populate spell, but I don't have on the board a creature token. Well, no. The other thing to be aware of is usually on a card like populate, it's a rider on another spell. It's on a permanent that populate's going to enter the battlefield. It's on a spell that does something but then

is populated as a rider. So the populate cards often have some use, but you kind of don't want your thing to be dead. You want to avoid making your mechanic dead. What I mean by that is I can cast a card and just not do the populate, but then I'm not getting the breadth of what my card does and it feels bad. You know, if I have a populate card, I want to populate. Okay, so one of the tricks we did with populate is some of the time populate, the populate card will itself create a creature. So for example, maybe I make a token a 1-1 or a 2-2 and then I say populate.

So the cool thing about there is in a vacuum if this is my only populate card, well I have something to populate. I can make my 2-2 and populate it. Now I have two 2-2s, right? But if let's say I get like early in the game, I don't have any creature tokens yet. Okay, it's not useless. But later in the game, if I draw it later in the game, well, yeah, I can make my 2-2. But oh, now I have a 5-5 token play. Now my spells got better because I can populate something bigger. Now my spells got better because I can populate something bigger. But the nice thing of combining A and B where we can is it just makes things so they sort of aren't dead by themselves.

Another common trick is let's say we're doing a scaling typal effect. I have a zombie that says when I enter the battlefield my opponent shows me a card for each zombie I have and then I make them discard one of the chosen cards. Now on a creature that is a zombie that's an enter the battlefield effect on a zombie it's never that because in itself is a zombie so my scale starts at one so worst case scenario they, they discard a card, right? They choose which card to show me. There's only one card they show me. I make them discard that card. That's equivalent to my opponent discards the card.

Now, the more zombies I have, the more I get a look at, the closer it gets to coercion, where I'm picking what they're discarding. It's not them picking what they discard. But the idea is because I can put it on my creature and the creature itself can be that thing, it makes it a lot easier. Let's say I'm making a typal spell.

Let's say I'm doing the same thing, but as a spell. My target player shows me a card for every zombie they have. If I don't have a zombie out, the card is stone cold dead, right? It doesn't do anything. So there are a lot of tricks like that. Like one of the things we do a lot, we like doing typal effects

where they go on creatures of that. Okay, now here's where it gets interesting. Sometimes the combining of it itself can be problematic. My example there is constellation. So in Journey to Next, where constellation is the third set in the Theros block, we introduced Constellation. To try to make Constellation, to sort of make it work better, make it smoother, most of the Constellation went on enchantments. Now a lot of them were

enchantment creatures, but they were on enchantments. But what happened was when people build a Constellation deck, it ended up being a little too efficient. Meaning that every card, like one of the things that you have to care about in AB is how often does my V show up? Well what we did when we made constellation, we said okay well since everything that has constellation is an enchantment, when I make my deck full of Consolation, every other Consolation card cares. That caused play design problems. It did what we call snowball,

which mean it got so efficient that there wasn't the knob. Like one of the things that when we design is we like to give knobs, it's called, to play design, meaning, okay, play design needs to adjust the power level of this, how do they do that? So what we found when we returned to Theros, Theros Beyond Death was one of the best knobs we could do with Constellation Is the stronger the Constellation effect? The less often we put it on enchantment. So we make a really strong enchantment and we put it on a

Non enchantment. Okay in order to put this in my deck, I'm watering down how many enchantments I have. That's a really interesting knob. And so it's not that no constellation effects can be on enchantments, but we wanna be careful. And that itself is a knob on the power level that we can do on those creatures. So A and B overlapping is a tool and something we can do to get the Asfan up and something

we can do to make things less dead at times, but it does create synergy and it's possible to create too much synergy. And so that's something we need to be a care of. Need to be a care of. Mostly, anyway, I'm at work so I'm just going to wrap up for today. AB mechanics are fun. The main reason they're fun is it's fun to make you care about something, right? One of the things that trading card games do really well, and Magic in particular, is hey, my deck cares about this. I'm going to fill my deck up with this. Oh, the other interesting thing,

by the way, is there's a difference between designing for AV mechanics as exists in limited. And normally, if you're a mechanic, we care about you in limited. But there are AV themes. Typal is my good example here. Sometimes we're designing for limited. When you design for limited, you have to make sure your Asfans work in limited. But sometimes we're designing an AV mechanic for constructed. For example, let's say I want to make a card that cares about a certain type. Maybe I'm not making a limited card, so I put it at rare, mythic rare. I put it at a place that hopefully you're not going to see that much of because I don't want you to get trapped, you know, and so I don't put it at common or uncommon. So it's something that shows up less often.

And then it can care about something and it depends upon your format. Am I designing something for standard? Okay, well maybe it doesn't exist in enough volume in this set, but it exists in standard. Or maybe it's made for pioneer or modern or commander. It just depends what I care about. But in construction, we can make things at higher rate. We can make sort of AB mechanics that are more looking at not the limited environment, not the set, but the format environment. And so there are AB mechanics and AB themes and stuff that sometimes we put at the top end. It really depends sort of, and there is, that's where the natural state of B isn't within

the set because that's limited. It's in within the format. And so when we talk about constructed, that's the thing we're looking at. And one of the things we do is we are aware of where we're going. We're aware of what we want to do. And so in order to make sure that we can do that, one of the things we have to do is we have to plot out sets. So the best example right now going on, which we've said we're doing is, okay, we have

Bloomberg calling up. There's a lot of animal themes. So we want to make sure that when you build a format, it helps if the format, if everything you care about is only sitting in the one set, it becomes harder to balance. And so one of the things we like to do is make sure we understand themes that are upcoming and we load the themes ahead of time.

We give you some things. So one of the things you'll be noticing is there are some animal types that are showing up in different places so that when BloomGurl comes out for like standard, yeah, there's a lot of things in BloomGurl, tools in BloomGurl, but there's other stuff that already is seeded. We call it seeding.

It's already seeded in the environment. And so when we talk about A, B for constructed, it's a lot about figuring out what you need, but thinking a little bit bigger picture and planning ahead. Or sometimes it's about looking back and saying, is the threshold there? When we were doing outlaws, so outlaw in outlaws non-rejunction,

there's an outlaw batch that cares about rogues and assassins and mercenaries and warlocks and pirates. And part of that is saying, okay, looking back, do we have enough of those? And so like when we made the batch, we're like, let's look at older formats and is there enough in each color? And you're like making sure that it hits the spread. So like when we do batches and stuff now and we're looking at backward compatibility,

part of making sure that AB things work is looking at does the format have it in that level? So AB, how you do for constructed is different than how you do it for limited. One is more bio-server, limit is more about the bio-server of stuff to set itself. In constructed it's more about making sure formats have that.

Sometimes it's front loading stuff, sometimes we see things, sometimes there's a built in naturalness to whatever it is we care about. And all that goes into figuring out the mechanics as we make them. So anyway, guys, I hope this was a fun discussion on A-B mechanics. I'm always excited when I realize there's a meaty topic that I haven't talked about because when you're a thousand plus podcast in, you're always looking for things you haven't talked about. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today, but I'm now at work. So we all know what that means.

That means instead of talking magic, it means I'm sorry, I messed up my own intro. What does it mean? It means that at the end of my drive to work, so instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.