The Risks Of Hybrid Mana

My 16-year-old self, in his first year of playing Magic, was shocked that it was possible to pull a $60 card out of a booster pack. That card was a foil, original-printing Deathrite Shaman, the jewel of my friend’s collection, the “one-mana Planeswalker,” the scourge of Modern and Legacy until its execution by ban-hammer. A large part of Deathrite Shaman’s success was its hybrid mana cost, which allowed base-black decks to fix and ramp their mana with nothing but some recycling in the bin.

Hybrid mana debuted in Ravnica: City of Guilds as a way to give players either-or costing, as opposed to the both-and costing of true gold cards. Since then hybrid mana has appeared in dozens of expansions, a deciduous design tool available to any card design that needs it. With good reason, it’s also a popular mechanic among Cube designers, but its oft-praised upsides are counterbalanced by a deeply idiosyncratic card suite. Not only does the complexity hinder game-design generalizations, it obscures a predictable flaw in the hybrid mechanic’s balancing.

Of course, I’m not one to back down from a challenge, so we’ll be exploring the good, the bad, and the just-plain-weird of hybrid mana.

Mono-colored Gold Cards

Just like one hybrid pip can be paid by two colors, hybrid designs themselves tend to fall into two categories of incentive. The first category uses a high density of mana pips or situational effects to incentivize mono- and two-color decks:

Arcanist's Owl might be a strong rate for

, but the only deckbuilders able to take full advantage will beor either constituent mono-color. That’s the balancing mechanism of many hybrid cards, including variants that still require one or more regular pips, like Jund Hackblade. “Twobrid mana,” its aesthetic and rules ugliness aside, also more-or-less demands disciplined mana. Meanwhile, though cards like Collision//Colossus and Firespout are technically much more castable than the quad-pipped Arcanist's Owl, these situational effects backstop the ease of casting them. From a cube design perspective, these cards can safely be grouped with traditional gold cards and designed as such.

70% Colorless Hybrids

The second category of hybrid cards looks very different than “mono-colored golds,” with the exact opposite effect on a player’s manabase:

If Slitherhead costed

, it would be playable in one of the ten two-color guilds. Because it’s hybrid instead, and only costs one pip, Slitherhead can easily be cast by any guild that contains either color: seven guilds out of ten. That’s even more flexible than a mono-colored version, which could only go in four guilds! Most hybrid designs with one or two colored pips might as well be 70% colorless.

Similarly, Unmake may have a more stringent casting cost, but because unconditional removal doesn’t always need to be cast on Turn 3, it’s easier to fit it into other guilds. Bedeck//Bedazzle is also strong late, with a premium buyout clause if the combat trick loses relevance. Revitalizing Repast is even more heavily subsidized by a full dual land on the back face. To some extent, all these cards demand even less of the player’s manabase than mono-color cards, to say nothing of traditional gold cards.

Cube designers tend to love this feature of hybrid cards, because it increases tense cross-appeal between drafters. If I’m drafting Rakdos and my neighbor is drafting Simic, we might both be interested in Slitherhead despite having no overlapping colors, and change our draft priorities accordingly. That push-your-luck subgame helps ensure that no two drafts feel alike.

Unfortunately, because 70% colorless hybrid cards look like gold cards, they often merge novel effects. That makes hybrids often stronger than their surroundings, which in turn overrepresents them in many cubes, multiplying the risk that hybrids fail to live up to their highest potential.

Rate Arbitrage

Power outliers matter more when they have a high value over replacement.

An example: Haywire Mite might be the best Naturalize effect printed to date, but it hasn’t caused any problems in any format from Standard to Legacy. That’s because Green benefits from thirty years of Naturalize innovation, and context often favors alternatives like Force of Vigor or Foundation Breaker. However, if the printers malfunction and Naturalize gets printed at

, a very different story emerges. Even though Naturalize is nothing special in Green, this is the first of its kind in Black, allowing it destroy troublesome artifacts and enchantments with zero additional manabase cost. Instant staple. This shift of value in a new context is called arbitrage.

In recent Magic, arbitrage is best exemplified in Diplomatic Relations. Its printed version technically allows an opponent’s creature to damage itself. Now, a

-mana common Murder is nothing new to Black or White; even Blue and Red have more mana-efficient ways to deal with creatures. But because this was completely new for the color of Prey Upon, people hyped up Diplomatic Relations as a possible Pauper and even Legacy roleplayer. Wizards of the Coast quickly issued an erratum for the typo, and the card fell back into obscurity.

Now for a quick arbitrage quiz. Let’s roll back time to the era of the Mirrodin frame (2003-2015). What do the following five cards from the Mirrodin-frame era have in common?

• White’s cheapest creature capable of a counterspell effect
• Blue’s cheapest creature with Hexproof
• Black’s cheapest “exile target creature” removal, and only such instant
• Red’s first 2/2s for
  
  with no downside¹
• Green’s only unconditional Jackal Pup

These are far from the only instances of hybrid cards providing one of their colors a new effect or unprecedented efficiency. During this era Plumeveil was the biggest Flash creature below

, Blue’s and White’s best option to ambush attackers at a profit. Firespout is Red’s best rate on a 3-damage sweeper until Slagstorm, and still offers situational advantages. Even the humble Boros Recruit was Red’s first one-mana first-striker, and remained its only option until 2017’s Rigging Runner. (Deathrite Shaman probably also belongs on this list, for about five reasons.)

Remember, many of these cards are 70% colorless, so when arbitrage brings effects into new colors, they’ll tend to have high value-over-replacement at extremely low deckbuilding cost. This functions similarly to colorless power outliers like Dark Depths and Umezawa's Jitte, and other almost-colorless outliers like Dismember or Gitaxian Probe. (Ah, Dismember, long-time staple of Modern Mono-Blue Merfolk.)

Nor was the Mirrodin frame’s rate arbitrage a historical aberration. I chose the era because less-wordy cards are easier to compare, but at time of writing, Find//Finality is the cheapest double-Disentomb on the market, even disregarding the bonus Duneblast. Companions were busted for many reasons, but their hyper-flexible splashability was a huge contributor – Lurrus and Kaheera would not be as free in Azorius control if they required a third color. And designed-for-Standard Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior is simultaneously White’s strongest cheapest Imposing Sovereign creature of all time, as well as Blue’s only instance of that rules text.

Granted, these hybrid cards may not always define Legacy or eat an emergency Vintage ban, but all the broken precedence starts to add up to a predictable oversight in how hybrid cards are designed. The pattern of rate arbitrage exists, and our job is to apply that insight to Cube.

Easy puzzles aren’t always ideal

Remember, the core benefit of hybrid cards is that their pickability creates cross-competition in draft. It’s a meaningful upside, but if that were enough to justify a card’s inclusion in a cube, why not make every card pickable all the time? Create a mono-color cube, or a colorless cube!

Unfortunately, the idea that every card could ever be pickable for every deck is an illusion. Even in a mono-red cube, the aggro decks will never want control finishers, and the control decks will never want aggro beatsticks. The extremes of cross-competition have extremely diminishing returns; at worst they just obligate players to read more before each pick, burning precious minutes in draft and precious neurons that could be spent on playing Magic.

The strongest hybrid cards push towards this extreme. That’s because the strongest hybrid cards tend to be the 70% colorless versions, whose color-pie bends are easiest to arbitrage, making them easier high picks and easier maindeck cards. That can be a good thing, but only if you believe those decks being overrepresented is healthy!² If Spider-Woman always provides an early nudge towards proactive Azorius decks, then it’s less likely that players will play sweet combo or control decks in those colors. Pond Prophet may seem innocuous enough, but its flexibility might be preventing your pet cards and test cards from making the final cut. A cube is an equilibrium ecosystem where every “strictly-more-flexible” hybrid card takes play equity away from something else. Easy puzzles are not always the most satisfying to solve.

Our job as game designers isn’t to remove all the tension from draft and manabase construction, even if that’s how we tend to optimize as players. A designer’s job is to make the solution an interesting challenge. The longer I’ve designed cubes, the more I’ve appreciated non-hybrid implementations of almost-gold designs, like off-color Kickers and activations, or threshold-style progressive unlocks. Flexible mana-fixing like fetchlands, bouncelands, and Treasure tokens also create cross-competition. It’s possible to create flexible picks, tense drafts, and fun deckbuild puzzles without putting as much pressure on Magic’s color pie.

All that said, you’ll have to pry Deathrite Shaman from my cold, dead, hands. Since it’s gaining me two life a turn, that seems unlikely.