Mechanic:"Gravefall" (Green/Black)

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I've referred to this mechanical theme a few times, so I thought I ought to just make a post about it. "Gravefall" is the unofficial name I'm using for triggered abilities of permanents with the form,

Whenever a land is put into your battlefield from anywhere, [positive effect].

The name "gravefall" is of course a reference to landfall, but for the graveyard. This type of ability has precedent among official cards, but only on a few cards scattered through Magic history. Thematically, gravefall represents the spreading swamp corrupting the western half of our region map from WWN worldbuilding.

Gravefall serves as a fairly general payoff mechanic, but needs other events to enable it. The primary enabler will be self-mill, where gravefall gives incremental value to supplement bigger plays like reanimating a big creature. But there are secondary synergies with discard effects (including loot/rummage) and Vitrify. A few sacrifice-theme cards might allow a player to sacrifice lands as a tertiary enabler (though this is obviously a narrow design space).

Having a lot of flexibility around gravefall effects also helps cards with the mechanic tie into other archetypes and do double duty. A gravefall trigger that gains life (as shown above) ties into a lifegain theme, one that adds +1/+1 counters works with a counters theme, etc.

One limitation of this mechanic is that the payoff per trigger needs to be relatively small on most cards. "Draw a card" would cause a "mill three cards" effect to draw 1-2 cards on average in limited, which is very strong in a deck dedicated to self-mill. This could mean the the design space for gravefall as written ends up being too small, but there are a couple of tools to address that:

1. Change the text to "Whenever one or more land cards..." This wouldn't effect triggers from a single land hitting the yard, but would mean that multiple lands being milled would still only trigger once.
2. Limit gravefall abilities to trigger once per turn. This could be done piecemeal per-card, and with either the as-written gravefall language or the modification above. This kind of language always feels a little clunky to me, though, and kills a value player's dreams.

The reason I've avoided either of these is that green/black is thematically invested in swarms and rolling over your opponents with inexorable value engines. The experience of "now I get to do an action a lot of times" is a big part of the joy of green/black to me, so I'm holding onto that until broader design challenges or playtesting convince me otherwise.

Short and sweet post this time, primarily just committing some thoughts on the mechanic (and showing off my shiny new card template, if I'm being honest).