Small Set Synergies

Written by crushcastles23

Love it or hate it, Marvel's Spider-Man has come with the smallest main set size that we've seen in a draftable product since Rivals of Ixalan in 2018. Rivals of Ixalan was built to be drafted with Ixalan, but Spider-Man is drafted by itself. This makes it the smallest solo draft set since Coldsnap back in 2006. Because of this, Spider-Man is built a lot differently from other existing Magic sets and we can learn a great deal from how it is structured.

While the card count in sets has stayed pretty consistent since Outlaws of Thunder Junction in April 2024, there has been some variance since. Edge of Eternities and Bloomburrow stray from the standard set size by only having 81 commons. Why? Because they lack a common land cycle, something most sets have these days. Sets with dual-faced cards (DFCs) generally have higher card counts because Wizards of the Coast has to print DFCs on their own sheet, something the custom Magic community is not limited by.

Spider-Man drops the number of draft archetypes in a set from 10 down to 5, the allied color pairs. This is reflected in the fact that there are no enemy color cards below rare, there's a cycle of allied hybrid cards at common and uncommon, and there're two cycles of uncommon allied gold cards. The first uncommon cycle is focused on enabling the archetypes, while the second cycle is focused on being payoffs. Additionally, there're 5 allied color lands filling out commons number 61 through 65. This is a solid base for us to build our small sets from. 

While Spider-Man keeps it simple with the allied colors, we don't have to. Adjusting the color pie from its normal WUBRG order to something different entirely can yield different combinations of focused archetypes while maintaining color balance. By simply switching blue and red, we now have red-white, black-red, blue-black, green-blue, and green-white as our five "allied" color pairs. This tactic can go farther and jumble WUBRG to BURWG to make blue-black, blue-red, red-white, green-white, and black-green our color pairs.

One of the most important parts about choosing the draft mechanics of a small set is choosing mechanics that complement each other. In Spider-Man, the white blue theme is Modified, caring about Auras, Equipment, and counters. The blue-black archetype, Villains Connive focuses on drawing cards and playing Villain creatures. The discard of Connive supports the black-red theme allowing you to cast your Mayhem cards, as well as the white-blue theme of Modified with the +1/+1 counters generated by discarding nonland cards. This means that Connive feeds three archetypes at once and every card with Connive is being fought for by anyone in blue or black, not just players in blue-black. 

On first blush, the green-white theme of Web-Slinging doesn't play well into the Modified cards in white. But Wizards of the Coast has been doing this for a long time and they saw this coming by focusing white's modify cards on enter and leave the battlefield abilities, rather than relying on other triggers like attacking. Red-green works as a big spell deck partially because there are two well-supported alternate casting cost mechanics, with Web-Slinging and Mayhem. While they are frequently disparate strategies, they can feed each other by returning a card with Mayhem to your hand, then discarding it and recasting it for cheap later. 

"Your commons define the experience, your commons define what's possible." 

—Mark Rosewater, Drive to Work 1271: Structuring Sets.

While Spider-Man teaches us about how to structure our sets, the one of the greatest recent examples of synergy between mechanics in a set takes place in Edge of Eternities. 

When you are designing your small set, one of the first things that needs to be figured out is the central mechanic of the set. This mechanic can be anything, while each following mechanic needs to build upon the core mechanic or stay in sync with it without stepping on its toes. 

In Mark Rosewater's Drive to Work Podcast 1113: Synergy, Mark talks about synergy trees. Synergy trees are a way to visualize how the set can work with itself. Let's look at one for Edge of Eternities. In Edge of Eternities, there are two primary mechanics, with Warp and Landers. Landers feed leave the battlefield triggers, landfall, ramp, and artifact counts, meaning that every archetype wants Landers. While Warp primarily works to trigger your enter or leave triggers twice instead of just once. Warp is a mechanic that can fit on any permanent spell, though it exists almost entirely in Edge of Eternities as a creature mechanic. Void exists as a glue mechanic, which bridges the gaps between the two primary mechanics of the set. Spacecraft and Station exist as a mechanic primarily outside of Warp and Landers, but Warp still allows creatures to tap to Station Spacecraft before going to exile even though they have summoning sickness.

While this synergy tree is built as a full web to describe a set, you can use a basic synergy tree to build out a single mechanic and the mechanics around it in your set. Let's look back at Connive once again to provide an example. 

With this guide, we can see how Connive can fit in with multiple possible draft archetypes built around it. Ask yourself, what other mechanical options can you build from Connive? What other keywords would fit with it?

What can we safely look past in both Spider-Man and Edge of Eternities? Their bonus sheets. Spider-Man has the Marvel Source Material Cards and Edge of Eternities has Stellar Sights. Technically these expand the pool of cards for each set, but with only 1 in 8 packs containing a bonus sheet card, an average eight person draft will only open 3 of them, making them as rare, if not more so, than opening a mythic. Because of this, they can mostly be dismissed for our purposes, though we should always remember bonus sheets are an option. A bonus sheet like the Strixhaven Mystical Archive, which was guaranteed to appear in every pack can be used to enable a more difficult mechanic, shake up draft, or give a very visible indicator of the theming. In original Dominaria, packs were guaranteed to contain a legendary creature at uncommon or higher, while today they'd probably have a full bonus slot in the pack just for a randomly chosen legendary creature.

Spider-Man has ushered in a new opportunity for the development of smaller draftable sets that focus on set-wide mechanical synergies, while Edge of Eternities shows us how synergistic sets can be. The best way to get better at Magic is playing it, and the best way to get better at making Magic is to make it. 

Recommended listening:

Drive to Work Podcast 1113: Synergy

Drive to Work Podcast 1271: Structuring Sets

Limited Resources 821 – Spider-Man Set Review: Commons and Uncommons
Limited Resources 822 – Spider Man Set Review: Rare and Mythic Rare (and Bonus Sheet)

Drive to Work Podcast (In general)