Pattern Recognition #100 - Alpha Boons

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

14 February 2019

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.net's longest running article series about the bric and brac of Magic: The Gathering, card design, game history and theory as well as being my own personal soap box for when I want to go on and on about things that interest me. Who am I? Well, I am berryjon, self professed Old Fogey and yes, I've been playing this game for longer than some of you have been alive. I've earned that title.

So, what to do for the big 1-0-0? I mean, it's a huge mark in the history of anything, and I wanted to celebrate appropriately.

Now, we shall go back to the beginning, and talk about the Alpha Boons again!

What? I need a pattern too, one to recognize in order to make the name of my series relevant, don't I?

Well, let's start from the top then, for those who have forgotten what I'm talking about in the over-a-year since I last talked about them.

Back in the beginning of the game, when Richard Garfield, Ph.D. was first making cards, it seemed that he figured that with each of the five colours, there needed to be something that could be recognizably the same between all of them, yet each holding their own distinctions to help show what each color was capable of.

His decision here has proven to be so effective that it has become baked into the core design of the game, something that players can and WILL spot when it appears that it hasn't happened, and they will clamor for the fix to arrive sooner, rather than later.

This is the idea of the Horizontal Cycle.

While I have talked about the Great Cycles in the past, the 7 year turnover in most players' commitment to the game (oh man, that was two years ago? Really?), I didn't really touch on Cycles within the cards themselves, and this seems like a good place to talk about them. You see, there are two ways for cards to refer to each other in a set, without naming cards directly. And I can tell you from personal experience, that near-complete lack of directly naming other cards in Magic is a blessing.

Anyway, there are two ways to do this, through the Vertical or the Horizontal.

Now, Vertical Cycles are easy to understand and implement. They are a set of cards that appear at Common, Uncommon and Rare in a set that share a color, but they escalate in capacity as the rarity goes up. There are a couple examples I want to show you just to get you to understand this idea. The first comes to us from the Starter 1999 decks, and were reprinted as a complete thing in 7th Edition.

Lone Wolf, Pride of Lions, and Thorn Elemental. Now, that last one got shifted to Uncommon in Dominaria, so that may be where you recognize it from. But anyway, these three cards represent an escalation in from smaller creatures to larger, with a commensurate increase in the mana costs, but they all share the same basic ability.

Another example is one that didn't occur at all rarities is the comparison between Baneslayer Angel and Serra Angel, both of which were printed in M10. In this case, the former card has larger stats, and three more abilities while costing the same as the lower-powered Angel.

Now, on the other hand, a Horizontal Cycle is a set of cards in the same set that have similar abilities, occuring at (most of the time) the same rarity, and costing the same. My personal favourites here are the Circles of Protection, where can selectively prevent damage from a source of a single color. This is a cycle because each version of the cards in the cycle reacts to a single color, not to all colours at once.

On the other hand, horizontal cycles are not limited to just appearing in a single colour. In fact, it is that has the most of them, simply because of its love for the Protection mechanic in the early years of the game. But true Horizontal Cycles are best exemplified when they cross color borders. Want an example of a great cycle that everyone loves, and crosses colors?

Everything from Hallowed Fountain to Stomping Ground, that grand cycle of Shock Lands that are colorless lands, but affect each pair of colours in turn!

And as I mentioned earlier, the players will notice when a Horizontal cycle is incomplete. I mean, just look at the Bicycle Lands from Amonkhet! Irrigated Farmland, Fetid Pools, Canyon Slough, Sheltered Thicket, and Scattered Groves. Where's the Enemy Colored versions, Wizards?!?!

So, this leads me back to where I started. In more ways than one, I might add. The Alpha Boons. This horizontal cycle of cards came about as a way for each player to see at a glance that this was the sort of thing each color was good at - even if it took a moment to think about it rather than being blatantly obvious.

Healing Salve for , Ancestral Recall for , Dark Ritual for , Lightning Bolt for , and Giant Growth for .

These five cards represent, at the time, the best of each color, and while they have had their ups and downs, they can still be seen as benchmarks in Magic's design and history. Of course, that isn't to say that they are in any way equal to each other. Three of these cards can act as a sort of counterbalance (but not Counterbalance) to each other, while the other two are no longer viable for a variety of reasons.

Let's go through these cards in color order.

Healing Salve is the weakest of the Alpha Boons. Gaining three life isn't a big thing in the course of the game, as Life gain in of itself does little, rather than simply delaying the inevitable of losing. Preventing three damage on the other hand, is of more use as it can save a creature from dying, which is something that tends to excel at. Though for the same cost, you could also have cast Righteousness on your blocking creature, making it far larger and far more likely to kill the attacker.

Now, Wizards knows this, and they've experimented with cards like Healing Hands, which increases the life gain effect and adds a cantrip to the mix, only to replace that with Revitalize, a strictly better version of the older card Reviving Dose. On the flip side of Healing Grace, we get fewer options for Wizards to examine, as Festival of the Guildpact feels like a worse version of Stream of Life with an added card draw due to its more reactive than pro-active. And Withstand is a Reviving Dose, except, once again, reactive rather than preventative. And can work on Planeswalkers or Creatures.

Now I have a vision of being able to give "Life" or Loyalty to a 'Walker they control, and I can just hear everyone at Wizards crying out in terror at the thought from a thousand kilometers away.

Let's not go there. That way lies Madness.

Wizards has also tried to improve this card by splicing in other colors. Perhaps the most interesting is the combination with , Lightning Helix. This pure combination of and was in of itself an extraordinarily powerful card, one that has been a staple of many a decks ever since its printing in the first Ravnica block. However, as a great many Boros players would tell you, myself included, the life gain / side of that card is incidental. It's the Red that really carries that card.

But even that wasn't enough, and in Dominaria, Wizards decided that perhaps the solution wasn't to make the card an either/or choice. Why not make it an and instead? Healing Grace removes the "or" from Healing Salve, making it a manifestly better card as it can counter up to six damage from a single target against a player for the cost of .

Moving on, we go from the worst to the best. Let me be clear here, Ancestral Recall fully deserves its place in the Power Nine, that selection of cards that are so horribly overpowered that they are Banned in (almost) everything! Hell, the only card that does the same thing at the same speed is Jace's Ingenuity, which costs a colossal more to do it at the same speed, while the Sorcery speed equivalent, Concentrate, only costs in total.

I could go on and on and ON about how ridiculously good even drawing a single card at instant speed can be, starting with the awesome Opt, but I think that the fact that any card that even remotely reaches the capacity as this card winds up with the ban-hammer smashed into it - the latest being Treasure Cruise - should tell you more than me spending 1000 words on it.

Now, that isn't to say that drawing cards is bad. It isn't. It's just the cost and benefit involved with this instance that is just so far off the power curve of the game that there really isn't much that can be said about it.

So lets move on to something I can talk about!

Dark Ritual isn't actually obvious about what it is on the surface. Given that took over mana acceleration on permanents, and has taken over temporary acceleration, why did get this here and now?

Well, it's not obvious. But it is simple. You see, is the color of sacrifice, and with Dark Ritual, you are sacrificing your future for your now. Don't quite get it? Well, you're giving up a card in hand for a temporary boost in mana - a Simian Spirit Guide writ large, if you will. When that card could be a land instead, which instead would provide a more smooth and permanent boost to your mana production, or something that could stick around or have a more direct affect on the board state.

It's a bit abstract, but this is what Dark Ritual and it latter ilk do, they give up tomorrow for today.

Of course, this isn't something that Black can just do nowadays. It's lost that touch, and Suicide Black is no longer a real thing in the modern era of Magic for the most part. You can't just go around blowing yourself up anymore just for some small advantage. That's what Dark Ritual does, just not as obviously as, say, Char.

Of course, all the things you could do on turn 1 with in that day and age? Hypnotic Specter doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the horror that could be done with that much of a head start. only wishes it could be this good.

Yet, oddly enough, of all the Alpha Boons, this one keeps coming back in preconstructed decks as its ability to affect how the deck operates can be accounted for and planned with and around. I looked at this card's Gatherer page, and it has received 23 different printings, only 11 of which were in regular sets!

It's in that odd niche of being good at what it does, but it can't be allowed out of its box without some very strict supervision from the adults in the room.

Moving on to , we get perhaps the most recognizable of the lot, Lightning Bolt. This card has defined damage dealing in the game to the point that when it was reprinted in M10 and M11, the flavor text explicitly called out the joy of those old players who suddenly got it again.

Dealing this much damage in a single instant, to a single target has actually affected the game's creature and later Planeswalker design even though it hasn't been a regular showing in a long time, despite such recent worthy successors like Skewer the Critics and Wizard's Lightning. Have you ever wondered why some creatures just have 4 or more toughness with no discernible reason? Nyx-Fleece Ram isn't as bit as it is because it's supposed to be some perfect blocker - though it is good at that too. Or better yet, Yoked Ox?

It's because of Lightning Bolt. Wizards keeps in mind that anything with a toughness of 3 or less can die at any time when a single instance of mana is in play. So creatures are designed with a Toughness of four or more to compensate. It's just that endemic to the game now!

And this card it at the top of what the Alpha Boons represent and could still be printed in a regular set. Not that it is likely, mind you. But still possible. 1 mana for 3 unconditional damage is a bit much, and here is a thing upon which Wizards and I can agree upon.

Lastly, we come to . If there was a perfectly designed card in the game, this would be it. Giant Growth is the beautiful combination of Lighting Bolt and Healing Salve, focused on a creature. While Wizards has tried to replace it with Titanic Growth, but it's just not the same. Giant Growth is simple, easy to understand, elegant in its design, and perhaps most brilliantly, it can fit into any set at any time, be in flavour for anything, and not affect set balance.

I'm serious here. Giant Growth, like adding "Scry 1" to a card, doesn't affect a set's balance, internal or external at all! All you're doing is making a creature bigger, and that is a self-correcting issue in addition to creatures being able to naturally take each other out in combat and the effect isn't permanent either. Oh, and just because the creature is bigger doesn't mean it still can't die to non-damage based effects either.

Giant Growth works, and it's the best of the bunch.

So, here I am, at the end. Again.

The Alpha Boons represented a Horizontal Cycle where each instant speed card (I know, Interrupts and Mana Sources) gave you three of something for 1 mana. That is the nature of this cycle, and is the standard by which, for better or for worse, all other such cycles are measured.

Without Cycles, the game would be harder to design, as without some measure of common ground, nothing could ever build up into each individual slice of the Color Pie, nor could any of these colors find some measure of cooperation with anyone else.

Cycles are the wheel on which Magic turns, and without them, we would have no game. No way to balance anything against anything else. They are a hidden strength to the game, and there can be no understating this.

And with these five, it all began.

Join me next week when I continue to flail about trying to gain traction with a deck that doesn't work in the local Slow Grow League!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!