Intrigue

Food Sucks And You Should Never Use It (But Here's What To Do If You Do)

Written by Mattelonian

Okay, listen. I know where you’re at: for whatever reason, your set has an element related to eating. Maybe it’s an art set with chefs, maybe you’re returning to Eldraine, maybe your setting just really has a focus on cuisine in a way that makes you feel obligated to include it.

This article is secretly about lifegain archetypes in limited as a whole. I’m going to break down the reasons why Food tokens are somewhat difficultly designed and how that ties into the difficulties with making compelling lifegain archetypes, and then I’m going to give you some tips and examples for how to subvert a lot of the issues with using them. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that there’s no situations appropriate for the Food tokens created in Throne of Eldraine, nor that you should never use them. That said…

Food Sucks And You Should Never Use It

(But Here's What To Do If You Do)

1: The Token

The first thing we need to do is have a look at a Food token, and then have a look around at other predefined tokens to see what sets food apart from the rest.

Here’s the single fundamental problem with food compared to other tokens: Other tokens progress the game state; they move the game closer towards an ending. Creating creatures, dealing damage to opponents, setting yourself up to cast more powerful spells: these progress the board state. More and/or better cards = more stuff to do things with, more mana = more stuff to play things with. The ultimate problem is that food doesn’t do this at all on its own. This is something that a lot of newer designers tend to miss when designing food cards. They look at treasure or clue generators, and simply convert them to food generation in a way that doesn’t work, because they aren’t comparable.

Printing a 1 mana 1/2 that makes a Food token is a bad idea. Food doesn’t do enough on its own to warrant the inclusion, and its nature as a piece that doesn’t inherently progress your game state means you’ve kinda just played a 1 mana 1/2 with no effect until the very very late game. To prevent this, you need to stick food onto bodies that can do things on their own already: a 2 mana 2/2 or 3/1 are much more reasonable bodies to bring a Food token to tag along with them, as their more proactive/threatening bodies means they can make up for the fact that the food isn’t, by itself, doing anything to worry your opponent.

2: The Dangers of Gaining Life

Limited games need to end. This sounds like an uncontroversial statement, but it’s something easily forgotten, and is going to be a guiding star for the duration of this article.

Magic: the Gathering is what’s known as a defenders-favored game. You can very broadly figure this out from the fact that the defender is the person who gets to assign blockers. Compare this to a game like Hearthstone, where the attacker has all the agency in a turn; or Yu-Gi-Oh!, where the attacker gets to decide who their monster attacks. Without getting into the weeds (that’s for a future article in 2035), this means that Magic is a game where it’s really easy for both players to spin their wheels, not wanting to attack into their opponent since their roughly equivalent board states mean whoever moves first is going to get their attack eaten via unfavourable blocks and die on the crackback.

Gaining life causes the game to go on longer. This seems like a very 5head statement, but it’s even worse than you’d initially think: if you have a lethal swing, you don’t have to stress and wait for a situation where the crackback won’t kill you. That means having higher life totals in the late game, once people have more stacked board states, becomes a compounding issue. Even if we want players to be gaining life, we need to be very careful about how much, how often, and when they’re doing it.

3: Lifegain as an Archetype Sucks (to get right)

This may come as a shock, but Food tokens actually feed really easily into lifegain in limited. Wild, I know. The solution to this, as you can see in recent WotC lifegain archetype design, is to reduce the numbers of the life granted by cards in the archetype. If it’s repeated, go for 1 life. If it’s instance based, go for 2 life. Remember: this is a density issue, so if you’re not intending a lifegain archetype feel free to have a large green beater that enters and gains you 3-5 life, as long as you don’t anticipate anybody playing 6 of them in a game.

The problem is though, a Food token gives you 3 life: That’s a surprisingly large amount of life! This immediately excludes it from our numbers noted above. Unlike access to a card via clues, the only ultimately relevant life point is the final one. What that means is that there’s not really much pressure to crack a food until you absolutely need to, which means the mana investment isn’t nearly as important (since you can crack it whenever you have free mana regardless), which shakes out to meaning that food gen frequently could just say “you gain 3 life” and be roughly equivalent. Now if you make three of them in a game, you’ve gained 9 life, your opponent has to do a whopping 50% extra work to kill you, and if they do the same thing suddenly we’ve been sitting here an hour chipping each other 2 life at a time. That’s deceptively few tokens for it to happen, and it’ll creep up on you fast. So, unfortunately we are left bearing the sins of Eldraine yet again by having to deal with food giving an unreasonable chunk of life in one go, and we can’t change anything about it.

Okay, But I Want To Use It Anyway

I see you have chosen the path of pain. I was like you once. I respect it.

I did promise you at the start that there are reasons to use Food tokens, you just have to do it very carefully. Here’s some tips and tricks I learnt from my foray into it with my own set called Merveaux. I’m going to be using Merveaux as an example of how I’ve worked around many of the problems associated with Food tokens and lifegain as a whole, and use cards as examples of that. This set has been playtested to hell and back, so I hope you can learn from my experiences making it.

The first year of playtesting was mostly fixing food.

Merveaux is a 3c wedge set with a top-down focus on art and a bottom-up focus on artifacts and enchantments. This means some kind of faction focusing on cuisine was all but assured for me, and thanks to Throne of Eldraine, we all have to suffer the existence of the Food token in its current state. It’s an expectation. Don’t worry though, here’s the secret sauce.

1: Food Mattering in Other Ways

The first thing we need to do is have a look at a Food token, and then have a look around at other predefined tokens to see what sets food apart from the rest.

This is how canon frequently does it, though I’m not actually the biggest fan of their most common approach.

Canon likes to use food as a kind of energy substitute: a resource to be expended without checking what it does. However, food differs from energy in a key way: It has an inherent outlet. That’s good! Being stuck dead with 5 energy sucks since energy needs you to draw additional cards in order for you to spend it. I’d argue, though, that food’s lack of board state progression means that being stuck with 5 Food tokens prolongs the game in a way that isn’t especially FUN. Even if those 5 tokens help you stay alive long enough to draw your win condition, remember, we want limited games to progress to that end state in a timely fashion.

(Also, for my taste, I dislike how it doesn’t actually care about what food does. It might as well be a blank artifact token for a lot of these cards. It bypasses the issue of food gaining too much life by never letting the food gain life in the first place, which kinda defeats the point to me when that’s the only thing it does.)

Here’s how I handled it in Merveaux:

Preparation is an ability word (like landfall) that cares about if you’ve gained life or created a token this turn. The trick to this is that while both halves work well enough on their own, it’s triggered twice by a single Food token: Once when it enters, and again when you sacrifice it for life. This means that Preparation can be the actual focus of the wedge, with Food tokens existing as a powerful way to double-trigger your preparation cards. What this does is it places importance on food without upping the density of the food—remember, we can only allow a very small number to appear in a game before running into that issue of the game needing to END. The presence of the food is felt by enabling multiple things to happen, but we actually don’t need that many Food tokens to get it all to happen in the first place. Which is good, because the less food we see, the better!

2: Enablers: Making Them Work For It

Proactivity is the name of the game (Other than Magic). Remember that guiding star of wanting the limited game to end? Any effect that triggers without interaction from our opponent (i.e. the chance to block with their creatures) should probably be progressing the game in other ways (i.e. by dealing damage). You desperately want to avoid a game state where your best move is to simply pass the turn repeatedly.

Tying this back to food and lifegain in general, this means you need to gate your lifegain behind rewarding the player for actually engaging with the game. You need to gate your life behind doing something. This means no upkeep or end step triggers to gain life unless it’s locked behind aggression or otherwise risking or inputting stuff. No activated abilities that let you gain life. Nothing that would let a player not engage with the meaningful parts of magic and end up further from losing the game because of it. Your two chief tools for this are simple: Instance effects (entering or dying for life), or attacking effects (whenever you attack, whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player). Our goal here is to force a player looking to play the lifegain deck to achieve that end by also, incidentally, making their opponent's life total become 0.

Hang on a second, what about these guys? What about lifelink?

3: Payoffs: Make Them Work For It (Redux)

Okay, so we’ve gated our lifegain behind action… most of the time. What do we do if we want to include a couple lifelink cards? Well, for that we look to the other side of the equation: Our payoffs. What your payoffs reward is the gameplay they will encourage, so we want our payoffs to reward you having gotten your life through fair and justified means (attacking your opponent, playing cards) rather than underhanded and stall-y ways (blocking - ew!).

The simplest way to do this is just to lock your lifegain triggers to only caring about your turn.

(So less like Pridemate and more like Purifier or Scrivener.)

You can do this by putting it behind end step triggers, specifying your turn, locking it behind attack triggers (be careful of lifelink!), etc. Forcing them to engage with the effect on their turn too also allows us to neatly sidestep the possibility of a Food token providing an on-board trick, at least from a defensive side. I included Pridemate for another specific reason: I’m using it as an example of the type of trigger to avoid, but I need to emphasise that I’m being overzealous to instill solid general design principles. Pridemate, in practice, ends up as a scaling threat which can help break stalls by itself. That said, nothing’s stopping you just sitting on it until the end of time either, which can be an easy trap to fall into. Design intelligently and make sure your enablers are sufficiently aggressive and you can get away with shortcuts that lead to cleaner design. Just make sure you know what you’re doing first!

Corollary: Breaking the Rules

Here’s two iterations of a common from Merveaux. The left, the original older design. The right, the current design in the set. You may notice that I’ve foregone my own advice here somewhat: The left clearly encourages aggression by forcing you to attack, but the newer one theoretically allows you to just sit back and durdle until you have a huge lizard. What’s the deal?

Well, to work with lifelink, the old version of Cookie Snatcher needed to have slightly scuffed wording; scuffed enough to warrant custom reminder text (ew) on a common (double ew). However, since I’ve heavily curated the ways you can trigger preparation in the environment, you actually can’t trigger a Cookie Snatcher in the draft environment in a way that doesn’t involve interacting, despite its deceptive appearance at first.

Would all this planning fall apart if, say, somebody cheated and smuggled an Inventor’s Fair into the draft? Absolutely it would! Environments are allowed to be warped around themselves. The only issue becomes when you expose warped cards into a standard environment. Thankfully, standard (and other 1v1 constructed formats) have a lot more tools to deal naturally with pesky lifegain decks. Although all the cards get a power bump by access to styles of lifegain they wouldn’t otherwise, this actually just means their power scales neatly to be on-par with the rest of the format they’ve been introduced into. This is a principle you can use a lot: By making cards that rely on a density of certain effects, you can allow those cards to scale in power directly in proportion to their access to those effects, which tends to correlate directly to the power level of the format! For example, prowess effects scale with how many cantrips are available in a format.

Conclusion

All bits aside, food is a lot harder to use than it seems, and it’s a lot harder to use well than even other seemingly equivalent tokens. If you do use it (or otherwise work on a pure lifegain archetype), keep the following tips in mind:

Try to make Food tokens sparse but still feel relevant.
Don’t allow your enablers or payoffs to work if a player is stalling the game out. A long, slow game is a boring game, and a boring game is a poorly-designed game.
Don’t allow repeated generation of food below rare.
Put food generation onto creatures that are statted to allow them to be active combat participants.
Try to make your payoffs engage with the conceit of food, rather than using it as a raw resource.
Consider changing “Sacrifice a Food:” to “Sacrifice a token:” or “Sacrifice an artifact:” even, to broaden the use case of the abilities.
Don’t let people gain life without engaging with their opponent by attacking or expending cards.
Keep the numbers small if you can: 1 life repeatedly, 2 life in bursts (if possible)

Next time: "Make Them Attack Each Other Please, For Fuck’s Sake," a look into the wider design ethos behind durdling in limited environments, and why all your upkeep triggers should be attack triggers.

Credits:

Written by Mattelonian.

Thanks to Zangy, Myrryth, Janahwhamme, and FLAREdirector for helping with edit passes!

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