WotC released some really interesting articles yesterday that contain a lot of insightful information regarding Ixalan. Here are some of the facts so far:
Vehicles will make a return in Ixalan. This means Saheeli might stick around and her build-around Vehicles must not be as parasitic in the long run. Remains to be seen if they are here to stay for good.
Vraska will appear as a planeswalker - see Vraska’s Contempt as a revealed card. It’s a question if this will happen in Ixalan or the upcoming set, and if she will be BG (hopefully yes!)
Jace will once again be featured as a monocolored-blue planeswalker.
Double-faced cards return. Remains to be seen whether in MTGPQ they will be implemented differently, depending on how many of them will be non-creatures. Only one revealed so far.
Haven’t seen a triple-colored card in a while, so I am really excited to see two mythics of this nature revealed already. Remains to be seen whether they will be translated as such in MTGPQ - might be dangerous due to color pie breaks which are already a problem with cards such as Reason//Believe allowing green to have access to direct card draw, Anguished Unmaking allowing black to destroy supports, and Farm//Market giving blue the opportunity to exile attacking creatures…
Some really interesting mechanics.
– Enraged seems like an obvious “trigger on taking damage” creature effect
– Raid makes a return and Explore is a new keyword.
Gold tokens return as Treasure tokens and have quite a theme around it - hopefully they are the block’s supports in MTGPQ too. This makes the loss of Kaladesh servos less painful for planeswalkers relying on supports (such as Tezz2).
There is a bit of a tribal theme - Dinosaurs, Pirates, Vampires and Merfolk. Since there are only four of them it’s hard to tell the colors they will settle in. So far we have
– Red: Dinosaurs and Pirates
– Green: Dinosaurs and Merfolk
– Blue: Merfolk and Pirates
– Black: Pirates and Vampires
– White: Dinosaurs and Vampires
It would be interesting to have two shards (Naya and Grixis) and two pair-colors (Orzhov and Simic) as the color split of the tribes.
In a different article, MaRo admitted upon the parasitic nature present significantly in Kaladesh. Hopefully this is also something MTGPQ can also learn from in the future.
I’m curious what they’re going to do with raid as it’s a mechanic that rewards you for attacking, but in Puzzle Quest, attacks happen at the end of turn now matter what.
"There are a lot of different ways to look at a set. One way is to examine how much the set allowed you to enhance decks you already had rather than force you to build new ones. Kaladesh does poorly in this category. R&D has a term, “parasitic,” which describes a mechanic that requires you to play with more cards from the same set because the thing it wants isn’t anywhere but that one set.
"A classic example of a parasitic mechanic is energy. Energy wants you to have other cards that both gain you energy and allow you to spend it, neither of which exists outside of Kaladesh block. We tried to build energy cards that could stand on their own, but no matter what we did, they always got better if you played them with other energy cards.
“We had hoped Vehicles could be something players splashed into other decks, but the best way to use them ended up being a deck that supported Vehicles along with a lot of Vehicles. This theme wove its way through the entire design. Yeah, the cards could be played with other cards, but not nearly as efficiently as with the cards from Kaladesh. I believe this parasitism is the biggest strike against the block.”
Direct quote from the Mark Rosewater article discussing Kaladesh and it’s shortcomings.
I thought about that, maybe they make it “if you control another un-disabled creature” (since I’d assume many of them are ETB effects) which would simulate the second-main phase style of play this requires. Or they just cut out raid all together (I think they did this in Innistrad with an ability that didn’t translate well)
It has it’s place. Personally I’d like more interesting game modes and more different “match requirements”, not less, not the same ones over and over all the time.
I actually like Enraged mode. It helps speed up the events so as not to be a chore; especially when taking refreshes into account. It also encourages strategy when building for such events, knowing how long it takes to set up a particular combo and when to activate it for the most effect when Enraged kicks in.
Thats a highly positive expectation…if we are lucky the set will be delayed for 1 or 2 months, and then if its still not out… we start worrying for the future of the game
I have to wonder if the new team will push booster crafting further back to help get the new card set out faster. That worked great last time it was done didn’t it.
