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Field Report
Field Report
Written by LeetWizard
MSE's Field Test 4 concluded this month. For those not in the know, it's a project run by Pipsqueak from time to time where users submit mostly-completed sets to be playtested with each other. It's been pretty successful—almost all of the sixteen sets submitted this season have had substantial improvements made to them. If you're interested in getting a set into Revolution or other custom formats, or simply like brewing, I'd check it out.
Pipsqueak has made a few fantastic articles on custommagiccodex.wordpress.com detailing some things she's seen and learned from the experience. Having played a bunch of this season myself, I have a few insights that I'd like to share.
Versatility is King
Since there were sixteen sets, they were split into two pools for deck construction. This helped prevent players from getting overwhelmed and let some weaker sets shine more, but it led to some funny things happening from time to time. Funny things such as four different mechanics that let you cast spells from outside the game being in one pool.
Transcend from Espithel's Akellan Transcendence lets you, once per game, upgrade a Dragon into an Aeonite from your sideboard. Acclimate from Cajun's Chikyu: Chaos Rains lets you grab Weathers—monocolour enchantments that also destroy weathers of a different color. Fusion from TVP's Legend of Blue Eyes lets you cast a Fusion from your sideboard by paying its cost, discarding a card, and sacrificing a creature that shares a type with it. Silverparabellum's Onigaiko: Future Past brings back the Lesson and Learn mechanics from Strixhaven.
Of these mechanics, Acclimate and Learn were definitely the most powerful—and they were the most versatile. Any Acclimator could grab any weather, which could range from a cheap bounce spell to a big, bombastic win condition.
Meanwhile, Learn found its way onto a lot of already-powerful Magic cards. The strongest example was Lapse of Reality,a 3-mana counterspell that learned. This proved to be far too powerful with the Lessons printed— among others, you had a situational boardwipe, removal spells, and Void Assault.
Void Assault managed to sidestep the normal drawbacks of costing WUBRG by existing in your sideboard until needed. If you didn't have the required mana, you had a handful of other useful lessons in the sideboard. If you had WUBRG mana, you could kill a creature, draw two cards, and make your opponent discard a card—4 for 1 from a card you didn't even need to draw!
Akellan Transcendence and Legend of Blue Eyes, meanwhile, only had a handful of their outside-the-game cards labeled as problematic. The only Aeonites below 6 mana had 1MMM transcend costs and were noncreatures. Fusing cards is expensive— sacrificing a creature and discarding a card—and also keyed off of creature types. Giant Mech-Soldier is a big colorless creature that gains life and has ward, but you need to be playing Robots or Knights in order to use it.
Akella and LOB had strict requirements for how to get their outside-the-game cards into play, and what you could grab with them was constrained. Meanwhile, Lessons and Weathers had very lax requirements and offered a much broader variety of effects and mana values. The lesson I took away from this is that it's easy for 'outside the game' mechanics to be too powerful as a result of their cards being too versatile. Consider how difficult it is to grab a card, and what sorts of effects there are. Players will be able to grab the best one for their current situation. If there are too many perfect answers or too many cards that can win the game on their own, that's going to lead to problems.
Postmortem: Void Assault has been deleted and lessons/learners have been rebalanced. The people of Onigaiko can rest easy knowing that I have repelled the Void Assault.
Inputs and Outputs
Aekyu Never Sleeps is a set designed by 7nix. One of the mechanical themes of the set is Wayward, which rewards you for casting spells from outside your hand. The set has a number of ways to do this, such as Tales, which are spells you can cast once while the permanent with the Tale was on the battlefield.
The most creative use of Tales I saw was the cycle of 10 Stations, which add colorless mana, but have one mana Tales that turn them into proper fixing lands. Uh oh!
The Station lands are genuinely a very cool concept and a clever use of Tales. The problem is that they were the most efficient way of enabling Wayward in the set. Your deck needed to run lands anyway, and Stations could either act as taplands or be Wastes for a time. They took what was meant to be a hoop to jump through and turned it into a core feature of your manabase, easily letting you pump out several wayward triggers like Pipsqueak's Emotions like a Rain Cloud in one turn without spending cards. A monoblue deck could run something like 8 to 16 on-colour Station lands and still have a comfortable curve.
The lesson here is pretty simple—Magic players tend to gravitate towards the most efficient options above all others. Look at what's in your set and in the sets for your target format. If there's a good way to enable your mechanic for one mana, then players are going to enable it for one mana. In that case, your mechanic should be balanced around being enabled for cheap. Problems will arise when what you intended doesn't match with what players do.
Postmortem: Station lands now have a single hybrid mana pip in their Tale cost.
Broken on Impact
When your cards collide with another designer's cards, some things are going to break. This is an inevitability and it's one you should anticipate. You can scarcely count for every interaction with your own cards—predicting what other people will do is good practice, but there are some things you cannot always account for.
Here's an example from Akellan Transcendence and Denny's Anglodoor Awakened:
These cards existed together in the first playtesting week. They were independently powerful, but busted together. Split Ego could turn one of your nonland permanents into multiple token 3/2s, and Undying Hope populated whenever you attacked with a token. If you cast Split Ego on Undying Hope for X = 3 and had a token creature already lying around, you could spit 24 power onto the board as early as turn 5.
When situations like this happen, you have to ask yourself what the problem is. Is it too powerful and in need of a nerf? Did you not intend your card to do that? Or is the other card an outlier doing something weird? I cannot tell you what the answer is, but there's a few things you can do to find a solution. Consider what sorts of effects might break your card and how common they are. See what you can change about your card to keep its core ideas intact while patching holes. Is it just too good in multiples? You can always look at canon cards to see what sorts of costs and restrictions they have.
In this particular case, Denny elected to hit Undying Hope hard—now it costs three, and cannot target cards named Undying Hope. This is good change, and limits how it can cause future problems. I can assume that the play pattern of copying itself wasn't intended. Instead, I assume the focus was on copying your prayers, and then eventually your angels.
Meanwhile, Espithel boosted Split Ego's cost to XUUU and limited its targets to creatures, artifacts, and enchantments. This is a nerf, but it wouldn't have stopped this interaction. The change to its targets was entirely to prevent it from being able to hit Planeswalkers—a card type that gets a little weird when you put its abilities onto a creature. The play pattern of Split Ego alongside effects like Undying Hope was intentional, but it was just too efficient, and so the cost was raised.
The lesson here is that when your cards break, you need to figure out what the right way to fix them is. It might be putting on a restriction, or raising the mana cost. In dire situations you might even need to cut the card entirely. Sometimes, it might not even be your fault that your card's broken. If you design a set around the idea of artifact lands not existing and someone else submits a set with artifact lands, that's going to be a problem. If you design a set around the idea of artifact lands not existing and you submit it to a format that already has artifact lands, however, then it is your fault that it's broken. You knew what the format has—you should have designed around it, even playtested with it in mind. Talk to format experts or curators and ask if they think it would be okay, or what might be needed to make it okay. Use the community resources at your disposal to avoid these pitfalls. And if you're really not sure if A breaks B, playtest them together.
Decay, Fun and Play
My last card I want to talk about is another Akellan Transcendence card.
Decay was nuts. Exile 20 creature cards from your graveyard to kill someone dead. Fewer if you dealt some damage early. If you had nontoken creatures in play, you could sacrifice them and then exile them, allowing you to double-dip. Combined with powerful self-mill creatures, and creatures that could reanimate Decay, and you had a very powerful combo deck on your hands.
Except... That wasn't what Espithel intended. It was showing up in a BG self-mill deck, but Decay was meant for the black/red Incarnations archetype, which sacrificed permanents for value.
People requested him to put the card on the 'Do not test' list—a list of cards that were getting changed or reworked—as it was clearly a problem. Instead he built a BR Incarnation deck with Decay and tested it himself. The card needed to change; through playtesting it in its intended shell, he was able to find a direction to change it towards.
Then he put it on the 'do not test' list, and I had to build a second deck.
The lesson I took away from this one is similar to the previous one. Players will do weird things with your cards, things that you didn't see coming. If you want your card to play and be used the way you intended, you may have to have to assert your intentions. You can make a deck and give it to someone else to playtest, or you can go into the fray and playtest it yourself. Only you know what your intentions are, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. (And Dredge cards.)
It's not that people are playtesting your card wrong, it's that there's a mismatch between what your intention is and what players actually do. The scientific method dictates that once an experiment is complete, one must analyze the data. If a card is underpowered, sometimes it's weak, but other times it means that means players haven't figured out how to best use it. Playtesters don't have time to optimize everything.
If a niche strategy is overperforming, it might be overpowered, or your playtesters might not have constructed sideboards with it in mind. A large number of playtesters didn't even bother with sideboards at all! Don't let theory overtake reality, but don't let data overtake reason. Bad luck, bad matchups, and bad deck construction can pollute data, but there's always something to glean from it, even if it isn't what the playtesters tell you.
Wrap up
Field test was a lot of fun. I have mostly been talking about the failures of cards in it and things going wrong, but that's an inevitability of playtesting. Even against overpowered stuff, I had a blast, and my contributions helped multiple people make their cool sets even better. Even if you don't have a set in it—especially if you don't have a set in it—I would encourage people to participate. One of the key ways to grow as a designer is to play Magic, and Field Test enables you to play with cards and directly talk to their designers about what choices they made and why. It's a very fun way to improve your skills and to directly help others who will, in turn, help you.
I'd encourage people to check out Pipsqueak's articles about Field Test here:
https://custommagiccodex.wordpress.com/2023/06/09/lessons-from-the-field/
https://custommagiccodex.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/nice-job-breaking-it-field-test-3-week-1/
And if you're interested in future Field Tests, a link to the MSE server can be found here:
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