The Typal Paradox: A Historical Design Survey

The last few weeks I’ve been re-evaluating older Magic sets from a design perspective, starting with Shards of Alara. Today continues the retro ethos, but rather than focusing on a single set, we’ll study how a single archetype has evolved over the years: creature-type-matters decks, also known in Magic R&D parlance as “typal decks.”

Creature types are one of Magic’s most flavorful synergies, but one of its most stagnation-prone synergies in Draft.

The stagnation is caused by linear synergies that provide drafters too few incentives to compete with other drafters. Goblin King is below vanilla rate by itself, so there’s no reason to play it unless you have sufficient Goblins, and if any of those Goblins also encourage Goblins, then the Goblin incentives compound… until it’s the non-Goblins that are worthless on rate! At worst, this leads drafters to put on their Goblin-colored glasses and ignore everything else, including the decisions of other players. It’s a shame because Draft is more satisfying when players’ decisions cascade downstream; the dependence on past human action helps Magic resist trivial solution as a game of pure numbers. Draft is better when your opponent’s choices affect your own, and typal synergies have a nasty tendency to silo one drafter off from the rest.

And despite all that, Goblin King is still up there with sliced bread and the refrigeration cycle on the mountaintop of human luxuries. It’s awesome when your pathetic, unlovable dinks team up to become an unstoppable army. Moreover, though Cube has a reputation for overwhelm, optimizing a typal synergy is accessible even to completely new drafters: 1) pick the Goblins, 2) pick the payoffs, 3) profit. Decks like this offer immediate, self-explanatory appeal, and that’s worth its weight in gold. Our challenge as curators is to ensure the type-matters deck (and any other linear synergies like it!) is equally fun on the third or fourth or tenth draft. No universal design solution exists, so let’s instead survey the patterns of four historical Draft formats where creature types matter.

2003’s Legions was an all-creature set structured around types-matter. This premise is fundamentally weak – noncreature spells are cool, plus they break battlefield stalls – but nevertheless, the types-matter structure is worth evaluating for its strong symmetry:

set:LGN

Exactly two payoff types per color are each enabled by multiple colors’ worth of creature types. Beasts are in

Another typal trick that Legions uses is mixing “species payoffs” (Bird, Beast, Zombie) with “job payoffs” (Cleric, Wizard, Soldier). That allows a Bird Soldier or a Zombie Wizard to create competition between drafters, which makes it likelier that your priorities are contingent on your opponents’ decisions (or their anticipated decisions, which is arguably even more fun).

For all that, Legions doesn’t have much going on. It needs to introduce typed landcycling because there are no cheap cantrips to smooth over mana screw, and Morph’s untyped facedown critters have weird anti-synergy with all the normal type payoffs… a little bit of a mess, but the coolness of so many creature types almost makes up for it.

Lesson: Even a format composed exclusively of creatures can create Draft competition through jobs/species crossover. (Also, no need to overcommit.)

Lorwyn is Magic’s second attempt at a pure types-matter draft format. It solves most of the problems of Legions, but that solution will create new issues. Most of Lorwyn’s ten main archetypes are two-color subtypes:

set:Lorwyn

These five subtypes are classic X-matters decks — play lots of small creatures with the right type, then pump them up or use them to turn on bonuses.

The other six Lorwyn archetypes offer a more distinctive style. Giants were sparse and high-cost, so White is mostly dominated by Kithkin, which gets their own mono-color rare legend. And only 3 of 22 Kithkin were Green (including Gaddock Teeg). Elementals were similarly clustered in Red, but they appear (in conjunction with Evoke) across all 5 colors. Treefolk were base-Green but spanned White and Black.

I also like that each subtype has a mechanical identity. Faeries favor instant-speed trickery. Kithkin demonstrate strength in numbers. Treefolk exploit their high toughness. Elementals sieze the moment for temporary advantage. Not only does this express more of Magic’s color pie, but it means that an aggro deck might want proactive Elementals and Kithkin regardless of whether the subtype payoffs overlap.

So far, this means that any given White drafter (for example) may be competing with a base-Green drafter for Kithkin and a base-White Treefolk drafter for noncreatures and rate monsters. So far so good, but then, Changeling kicks down the door:

Lorwyn takes the species/job crossover of Legions to its fullest extreme by giving its Changelings creatures every subtype at once. (Yes, all of them.) A trope loosely inspired by Celtic tales of protean child-snatchers, the Changelings really make Lorwyn hum because they give every player an incentive to consider every creature-type payoff. Once you’ve picked a couple of Kithkin payoffs for your Changelings, you might consider adding some regular Kithkin, despite the fact that you started out as a Treefolk deck. It also opens up the Draft possibility of a handful of Changelings buffed to ungodly stats by a motley crew of mismatched payoffs, and that’s a cool dream and a distinct new kind of big-creature aspiration.

However, when Morningtide then introduced extensive jobs-matter payoffs alongside Lorwyn’s same species-matter payoffs, it created a whole bunch of pseudo-Changelings with relevant species and jobs, doubling down on the Changeling experience. Unfortunately, when half the Goblin deck’s payoffs are actually for Rogues and Shamans, and half the enablers are actually Changelings and Elementals, then you’re simply not Goblin gaming anymore (you’re far too busy re-reading everybody’s typeline).

Changeling is a mechanics-first fix, and to that end, it succeeds in creating a dynamic draft. But, like a jigsaw puzzle made of monochrome squares, Changeling misses the point of subtype synergies. Creature types are cool partly because they characterize the vivid individuals of a fictional world. The decks they create are also cool precisely because they’re hard to do successfully! Changelings, if overindulged, makes subtype deckbuilding trivial and/or flavorless, cheapening creature subtyes into big number generators rather than ludonarrative touchstones.

Lessons: Subtype spiderwebbing can’t come at the expense of flavor and story, but changelings are a good tool for draft competition and novel interactions.

set:Innistrad

Humans and monsters, the deepest roots of horror that Innistrad harnesses. The only types with mechanical payoffs in this 2011 set are Zombies, Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, and the beleaguered Humans.

Innistrad is quite nearly a perfect set on all metrics, including its subtype execution. Its first success is Humans-matter. Surprisingly, this had never been done before in Magic, and the emotional resonance was immediate. The related “non-Human” template is also clever, creating Changeling-like gameplay moments (since all types but one fit the criterion) while strengthening ludonarrative.

The next successes are related. Five subtypes – the fewest yet in our survey – allows deep support for each type, without oversaturating. With that extra space, parallel incentives encourage subtype-agnostic deckbuilds. For example, Travel Preparations might imply a more graveyard-heavy deckbuild than Hamlet Captain. Meanwhile, our Humans may not stay that way for long: Morbid encourages us to risk our enablers in combat, while double-faced cards like Mayor of Avabruck improve on Legions’ species/job crossover (using a species/species crossover of two all-star species that tells a cool self-contained story). Repeat this exercise for all of Innistrad’s monsters, and you’ll find healthy restraint and tight aesthetics exhibited over and over.

Lesson: Lean into the ludonarrative – tell a story with your choice of creature types, then integrate the typal synergies alongside other unrelated mechanics.

set:ZNR

The newest set we’ll study today, Zendikar Rising is a types-matter set that does not insist on itself. One of Legion’s and Lorwyn’s foibles was over-saturating their subtype synergies, ignoring that sometimes players just want to draft something else. ZNR, by contrast, distills an ever-shifting balance of creature-type incentives — some decks will want to be full-on typal, and others in the same color pair will be nearly uninterested.

The first tool ZNR uses to create this interplay is the Party mechanic. A “party” is however many creatures you control among the types Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard. Though I don’t love the exclusive focus on jobs-matter (since jobs are less obvious than species at-a-glance), Party successfully taps into a dungeoneering flavor. Mechanically, Party dilutes typal’s usual doubling-down incentives with reasons to mix-and-match.

Critically, Party is opt-in and progressive — the drafter gets to choose how much they’ll care about it, and sometimes they’ll decide that two Party types is enough to make their payoffs playable. (Imagine how different you’d feel if the common removal spell was an all-or-nothing design like “if you have a full Party, destroy target creature”!) For added spice, Party interacts differently with each color pair, since the four Party types don’t favor every color equally (Blue, for example, has no Warriors, and must rely on Red or White to fill its Party). No two Party decks will look alike.

Then, for the drafters who decide they don’t care about a full Party, ZNR also supports a traditional subtype-matters deck for each Party type, and those subtypes have a parallel mechanical identity, just like Lorwyn’s best decks. Warriors care about Equipment; Clerics about lifegain; Wizards about spells; and Rogues about the graveyard. In each case, mechanical enablers that don’t overlap with the supported type (like the Ghastly Gloomhunter’s non-Cleric lifegain) create further Draft competition. This layering of archetypes means that three ZNR decks in

Lesson: Layered archetypes with progressive payoffs allow drafters to opt out of types-matter if they’d prefer.

Thanks for joining me on this deep dive into typal archetype design! May your draft formats always be dynamic, and may your Moggs always Flunk.