Mechanic: Vitrify (Green/White)

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Following my prior attempt to design this mechanic and the worldbuilding that inspired me to continue, Vitrify is a keyword action that animates lands as 1/1 creatures. These creatures are of the "Ashborn" type, which are animate porcelain beings made with the bones of a dead god. As a word, "vitrify" means "to make glassy," and represents the difference between porcelain and other ceramic types.

The rules text for Vitrify is:

• "Vitrify" means "Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 Ashborn creature with haste and 'When this creature dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner’s control.' It’s still a land."

Below the fold, let's break down that ability piece by piece.

Design Breakdown

Put a +1/+1 counter on target noncreature land you control. It becomes a 0/0 Ashborn creature [...]

There's a couple key design moves here. First, I'm incorporating a takeaway from Mark Rosewater's "storm scale" mechanic postmortem for the Awaken mechanic: players have trouble remembering which lands are animated, but counters help with that. So we know we need a counter of some sort, and I've chosen to go with +1/+1 because it's very familiar and interacts with a lot of other cards and mechanics. If we end up with a +1/+1 counter theme in an adjacent color pair, this will help Vitrify cards do double duty.

The other thing happening here is to restricting Vitrify targets to noncreature lands, i.e. lands that haven't been Vitrified already. This is a divergence from Awaken, forcing players to go wide rather than build up a single land with repeated Vitrify triggers. This might not survive playtesting, but it's a gesture to the "army" feel that's important in green/white.

[...] with haste [...]

This is taken from Awaken also, mostly to make for smoother play experiences. Once a land is animated, it can't tap for mana if it has summoning sickness. There's the possibility that a player animates the land they played this turn and then gets screwed for that mana. Haste sidesteps the issue, while also providing some overlap with an aggro/speed-matters theme in red/white (more on that in a later post).

[...] and 'When this creature dies, return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner’s control.' [...]

This is similar to one of the rejected mechanics from my last post, but here granted as an ability rather than a counter with special rules. Having things hit the graveyard is nice, both in supporting a planned green/black theme and in terms of fully resetting the permanent (clearing counters, auras, etc). I was originally worried about how this would interact with sacrifice effects, but on reflection de-animating a land is probably pretty close in value to losing a 1/1 token, which is often the going rate for limited sac effects. It does put some design pressure to avoid powerful self-sacrifice abilities on lands, though.

The other notable design impact of granting the ability this way is that players have to remember to do it. This set won't be played on Arena or MTGO where granted abilities can be rendered on the card. However, if we make sure that all land animation in the set uses Vitrify (or at least grants the return-to-battlefield ability), then players should have an easier time remembering that animated lands always come back. And since losing a land is a big deal most of the time, players should be incentivized to keep track of their triggers.

[...] It’s still a land.

Personally, I prefer "in addition to its other types" earlier in the rules text, but this is both more concise and in plainer language. A lot of official land animation reminder text uses this sentence, so I've followed suit.

And that's Vitrify! The first complex custom mechanic I've designed for this project. I think it'll take some work to tune the power level appropriately, and I expect some iteration in the rules text and the way other cards interact with the mechanic. But for now, I'm pleased to have a design that feels both workable and fresh!