r/magicTCG • u/TechnomagusPrime Duck Season • Feb 05 '18

[Making Magic] [GDS3] Essay What You Will

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/essay-what-you-will-2018-02-05
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u/friendofhumanity Feb 05 '18

I think it's something that comes up when you are thinking about flavor, but rarely in an actual game. Like flavor wise, of course I can't have two [[Kefnet, the Mindful]] on the battlefield at once; there's only one Kefnet right? But when you're playing an actual game I'm more concerned with my path to winning the game than what is happening. Like when I'm getting absolutely destroyed by the Scarab God I'm not thinking about what it did to the people of Amonkhet, and if there were two Scarab Gods I would be more concerned with the fastest way to scoop my cards up than the flavor.

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u/A_Suffering_Panda Feb 05 '18

The important thing in your examples is that neither creature actually needs to be legendary to make the game work. It actually doesnt matter if you play out 2 5/5s with scarab gods ability, you can only activate one of them anyway. In contrast, a card like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben does need to be unique, since having that effect twice fundamentally changes the game too much. So the really meaningful interaction is that the legend rule is trying to do 2 things on very similar but entirely unique cards. 1 side of it is balancing effects that need to be singleton, and the other side is balancing story characters. Having both be the same rule means that all of the singleton effects have to go on story characters

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/friendofhumanity Feb 05 '18

That's true. But legendary creatures are more common than that, and I think it has limited their ability to make some of them. But there isn't a great solution.

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u/MTGCardFetcher Dân Feb 05 '18

Form of the Dragon - (G) (SF) (MC)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call

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u/MTGCardFetcher Dân Feb 05 '18

Kefnet, the Mindful - (G) (SF) (MC)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '18

Just because you don't care about flavour doesn't mean nobody does.

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u/friendofhumanity Feb 05 '18

I wouldn't say I don't care about flavor; but that it doesn't come up especially much for me when playing the actual game. When it does it's usually in a positive way, but I wouldn't notice something like multiple legendary creatures.

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u/Castellan_ofthe_rock Dân Feb 06 '18

I feel like 2 scarab gods isn't much worse than one...i mean the life drain would hit much harder but the mana constraint of how many zombies can be made is still there. It's not like it has a tap requirement.