Well friends, it’s been a fun week. Getting to talk about two my favorite subjects was certainly a treat. I hope the readers had a good time as well. Today is the drafting finale, and the format of choice when you’ve got 7 buddies, a quality printer, and lots of time on your hands.
Of course I speak only of the BOO (Build Our Own) draft. Using the incredible MtG Editor software, you and your friends create 45 cards, and then draft them. Unlike Wizards’s needing to attend to the Constructed and Limited formats, you only need to concern yourself with draft interactions while designing your 45. That’s not to say mistakes don’t happen, which is why we recommend showing your cards to a friend before submitting them for the final print.
Speaking of Wizards:
Q: Why is Mark Rosewater so short?
A: Because he’s concentrated evil!
Here’s a letter I received from Mark after the first BOO Draft article:
Dear Mr. Wheel (bastard!-NW),
It was with great amusement that my colleagues and I read your StarCity article “BOO: A scarily bad set!” We at Wizards of the Coast Build-Our-Own sets as well, but we call it Magic: The Gathering. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s what really smart people create when that’s their job. Sure, we could produce rockets or youth elixir, but we’ve chosen to make games. You’re welcome. You and your group have made a valiant effort at comedy, but we do that here too. And again, better. Please, for your self-esteem and our splitting sides, hang up your keyboards and Google pens. The adults will take care of everything.
However, I must thank you for brightening our day by showing us how great we are at our jobs. Best of luck in your future endeavors. Yes, we would like fries with that.
Sincerely,
Mark Rosewater
I mean come on! A little over the top, don’t you think Mark? And yet… perhaps he had a point. Oh I know, don’t blame the victim, but it’s possible that the previous version had a few clunkers in it. That’s ok, we’re all neophytes.
I showed the letter to the group. It definitely caused a stir.
“Alright”, said Group. “We’ll just show “the man” how do make a really kick ass BOO set.” And so we did.
Everyone in the group really did a fantastic job this time around. Due to holidays and whatnot, we had a little less time to craft our final versions, yet things came together incredibly well. More humor, new mechanics, a new color…
Oh that Brett Allen. A prized BOO drafter, always being innovative. Last time he simply made 4-way cards. This time around, just another color.
Q: What should the 6th color look like?
A: Well see for yourself. Apparently after the Brothers War and before the Ice Age there was this kind of nuclear wasteland, which actually makes an orangey radioactive color. The land that taps for radioactive, incidentally, is called a “glowland”. [Not gonna lie… I might be asking Brett to have my babies soon. – Knut, hoping they glow]
Freaky eh? Brett also had the cute idea to give his creatures an ability “loosely” based off of a previously printed card. For another example, check out Wisebear, which has the ability The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale. Guess what that does.
The other mechanic Brett created was an effect that came into play while it was actually being drafted. This one was inspired by forum poster Norytt from BOO1. Here’s an example of this fascinating mechanic in card form:
As for me, I just wanted to make stronger and/or more complicated cards. I was also really interested in creating some mechanics, which is quite a bit harder than simply making cards. Right off the bat I struck gold with one that barely changed at all from its inception. Behold Concurrence.
What does concurrence mean? Whenever a card is played (from either player) that shares a color and converted mana cost of the concurrence card, you can play the concurrence cost to play the card right then for free. For an example with the above, you could play Black Knight, and if Shadow Shot was in your hand, you could also pay 2 life to play it immediately. Other concurrence costs included sacrificing a land or returning a creature to your hand.
I really liked how the cards played out, although the actual concurrence costs were not paid too often. Too many things had to go right. I drafted Shadow Shot once and set up a move to use the ACC. Just wanting to try it out ended up making a far worse turn. It was still worth it!
The other mechanic was a little more difficult to template. I wanted one called Dispute. The permanent would be undercosted, but an opponent could create a life bidding war to get rid of it. This one eluded me for a long time because I kept wanting to have the dispute happen at any time. That just meant that the player with the dispute card would keep paying 1 life or 2 life to win the dispute, but have to do it infinite times.
Finally, a brainstorm. Make the dispute an upkeep trigger. In retrospect it seems pretty obvious, but I was really pleased when it came together. The other important part was that you bid in actual life payments, not just numbers that only become relevant once a high bid is reached. That means you’re guaranteed to lose one life during your upkeep, but if your opponent wants to fight, they’ll have to lose at least two, and so on. The best of the bunch seemed to be Jeweled Cheetah, a 3/3 Red haster for three.
For some reason, my inspirations kept coming really late at night. My two favorite cards were both made at 3AM or later, and both were quite popular. Green Wrath of God? Why not:
Number one is a little farther down.
Really, everyone made exciting, strong, innovative cards. I think everyone was really impressed with each other, which was great. You would hear “Hey Ricky, your Control Magic is really annoying. But it’s fair!”
Q: People, when designing cards, like to:
a: build weak little numbers
b: create cards of fair and balanced power, or
c: make spells and creatures (and lands!) of insane, overwhelming fun/severity?
The answer is definitely c, because people just don’t like to make garbage. The fun part is getting other people to think its garbage. Black is a great color to BOO draft because everyone makes 1-2 good Black kill spells. That’s the easy stuff. What about a card like Brian Wong’s:
Probably not playable, which is fine. However, the really exciting thing about BOO is that people make these cards that unintentionally work really well with other peoples’, purely by accident. Dan Diamant created
Mindcrime
UU
As an additional cost to play Mindcrime, remove half your library from the game.
Draw 10 cards.
Now besides that card being really cool, we all launched into a discussion about whether Mindcrime and Battle of Superficiality were a playable combo together. It’s not like they were snatched up quickly. In fact it’s almost a guarantee if you wanted them both you could get them. Ultimately we decided it wasn’t worth it, but your mileage may vary.
Ricky and Brett unintentionally created a Radioactive/Blue combination that made every creature infinite/infinite. There are lots of others.
Yet though we had great gains, things were not perfect. Eric Reasoner made Replicate, which was bizarrely parallel in both name and execution to the new mechanic in Guildpact. I don’t think Guildpact will have the rather broken:
U1
Draw a card
Replicate – Pay 2 life.
The idea was fun and did lead to some interesting interactions, especially with cards that had actual replicate costs. Eric other mechanic was Launch and was, if possible, even more absurd. Launch was a built in Channel effect, where you could pay life to reduce the generic mana cost of a card. I’m not going to give an example cause they’re all sick. I think the only way launch could work is if it was on a card of all colored mana. One of them was a 3/4 with Spirit Link! Turn 2!
Matt Ruhlen still won the award for craziest overpowered set. There’s no blame here, one of our guys cancelled at the last second and Matt graciously volunteered to make 45 cards (with art!) in five days. Thank you Matt!
This did cause a few missteps. Matt went a little crazy in the bomb department, both literally and metaphorically. Matt submitted a card we vetoed quite quickly, but it did spark the discussion whether it was actually better than Jitte:
Blue-Tongue Kavu
UR3
Flying
When Blue-Tongue Kavu comes into play, it deals 3 damage to target creature.
Discard a card: Return Blue-Tongue Kavu to its owner’s hand.
Yowza. It got curtailed big time in development and still ended up being very strong.
Christian Robertsen won the highest honors this time, the award for the most giggle-worthy cards. Please check out Baby Seal and Essence of Chaos for an honest to goodness lol. My personal favorite was:
Tht (sp) cracks me up every time. Christian also had the popular elephants and penguins mechanic, a big hit from the previous BOO.
BOO 2 was a definite hit. We now have all the cards from BOO1 and BOO2 together. After BOO3, we’ll have ourselves a little block party. If you and your group are hitting a PT or GP sometime soon, why not put together a BOO draft of your own? Whip it out and I promise a crowd of gawkers will come flocking over, wanting to read new spells and see mechanics never seen before. You may just start a little tradition.
Yo Mark, looks like you were wrong after all. Don’t worry about it man:
For all the BOO2 cards in pdf format, check out here.
The BOO1 cards can be seen here.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to help out this week! Have a great year all.