Three ways not to animate lands

December 20, 2022 at 3:51 AM

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Today I tried to design a mechanic for green/white around turning lots of lands into creatures (semi-)permanently. It didn't really work.


The Goals

The benefit of "animating" lots of lands, from a design perspective, is to: 1. Help support a "go-wide" theme that rewards lots of creatures 2. Create interesting decision points (you can't usually use a land to cast a spell and attack with it in the same turn) 3. Overlap with a likely self-mill theme in green/black with cards that care about lands in the graveyard or help you replay them

This would also feel very new compared to other Magic designs, which often animate lands temporarily or make animate effects larger but more rare.

Attempt 1 - Wide Awaken

A previous Magic set, Battle For Zendikar, used a mechanic called Awaken that animated lands permanently. It tended to make medium or large creatures, and it was always a one-time effect for the late game, all different from my aim. But it's good precedent, so the first version of the mechanic I considered was based on Awaken:

Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 creature in addition to its other types.

This would have a keyword associated with it, and could be added as a rider on spells or as a creature ability. The issue is, if the goal of the mechanic is to do this a lot, eventually most of your lands would be creatures. That makes the green/white player really vulnerable to removal, and it basically forecloses printing board-wipe effects that destroy all creatures.

Attempt 2 - Field-Shields

Earlier this year, Magic got a new mechanic, shield counters, which serve as a reimplementation of classic rules bugbear Regenerate. If lands dying and leaving a player without mana is the big issue of Attempt 1, maybe something that leaves the land behind would solve the problem. We could introduce a new "Enki" counter to handle our animation, with the following rule:

A land with an Enki counter is a 1/1 creature in addition to its other types. If a creature with an Enki counter would be destroyed, instead remove an Enki counter and all damage from it.

It's important to remove the damage, since damage stays on permanents until end of turn, even if they stop being creatures. Removing the damage prevents the unintuitive case where re-animating the land after combat would have it immediately die from this damage.

I'm still not pleased with this result. Primarily, the need to remove damage, something players usually aren't tracking too closely after combat, adds complexity. Adding new complexity is a big ask for a new counter with special rules, at least without the authority of an official Magic release. Finally, part of the motivation for the mechanic was to see lands hit the graveyard, and this prevents that entirely.

Attempt 3 - Gravebounce

There is a modulation of Attempt 2 that would avoid some of its drawbacks. Unintuitively, "being destroyed" and "dying" are different events in Magic, with the latter involving the card actually going to the graveyard. We could modify our Enki counter rule to take advantage of this:

A land with an Enki counter is a 1/1 creature in addition to its other types. When a creature with an Enki counter dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner's control.

This sort of works. In the process of going to the graveyard the land will lose its counter naturally, so it won't be animated on return. Landfall is very unlikely to show up in the set, so the land re-entering the battlefield is not a major impact.

However, I think this design would warp sacrifice effects entirely. A land that sacrifices itself like Evolving Wilds would need to be balanced for potential infinite recursion. Creature sacrifice effects would need to be weak enough for loops of animate -> sac -> repeat to be reasonable. You could add an intervening "if it wasn't sacrificed" clause into the rules, but then the mechanic just starts to feel clunky. And since all of this is still dependent on a new counter with special rules, there's very little room for clunk.

Reflections

It's not too surprising that it's hard to make "turn all your land into creatures" viable. After all, one of the biggest downsides of animating lands is the increased vulnerability to removal or combat. Sometimes trying to design something fresh leads you to a lot of reasons it hasn't been designed yet. I still kind of like the idea thematically and mechanically, and I'll probably toy with other designs if I think of them; feel free to drop a comment if you've got a way to make it work!

#mechanics