Pattern Recognition #160 - Magnify your Appetite

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

16 July 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

So, welcome back! We're about half-way through summer, and I'm starting to feel a little hungry. Who else? Well, today's I'm going to be covering one of Magic's bad mechanics, why it was bad, why it should never see the light of day again, and then one of Wizard's attempts to fix it - a far more successful version, in my opinion.

So, let's jumpt right into it, and talk Amplify.

For those of you not in the know, for which I don't blame you, Amplify was a mechanic that appeared on a total of 9 cards from Legions.

Legions was an experiment in general, and while a few good things came out of it (like more Morph options, Cycling, Slivers and Mistform Ultimus), what it was really know for was being a pure creature set. I'm not joking, aside from the reprinted basic lands from Onslaught, every card in the set, all 145 of them, were Creatures.

Just ... let that sink in for a moment. You open a draft pack, and every card is a creature. No instants. No Sorceries. No Artifacts (that also weren't creatures). No Enchantments. Creatures with static abilities became your new enchantments, creatures with 'enters the battlefield' effects were sorceries. And as Flash hadn't been keyworded yet, if you wanted instants to be played, you unmorphed a creature.

Trust me, the design of Legions deserves its own article, but not here.

No, we're here to talk about one of the Tribal synergies that this set tried to use to help the tribes in the set gel, and that is Amplify. This is a static ability that reads "Amplify N: When this creature enters the battlefield, you may reveal any number of creatures from your hand that share a creature type with this card. For each card revealed in this way, put N +1/+1 counters on this creature."

Thus, if you were to play a Feral Throwback and when it entered the battlefield, you revealed a Branchsnap Lorian, and a Brontotherium from your hand. The Feral Throwback would then enter the battlefield with 4 +1/+1 counters on it.

Amplify served to allow you to focus your tribal choice, making your creatures bigger when you play them. And it sorta worked! Amplify did what it advertised on the box, and did it well. In that regard it is a success. However, the drawbacks became more and more apparent, not only people played with the cards in the set, but as the rest of the block came out.

The first issue was in which cards got Amplify. These are the nice creatures that got this mechanic. Three Beasts, three Zombies, 2 Soldiers and a single Dragon.

These are, with the exception of the Dragon, the exemplar tribes of their colour in the block. was Goblins. These guys were meant to be anchor points around which you could build your deck, big creatures you could drop when the time came to end the game.

I can see that with Kilnmouth Dragon or Zombie Brute, but in practice, the cards didn't work out that way.

The first issue was one of the hand itself. You may have noticed that these cards are not exactly cheap. The cheapest being two of 's Zombies at a converted casting cost of , going all the way up to a CMC of . While the idea was that these creatures would be held in hand and cast later, allowing you to stockpile creatures for later Amplification.

Except, well, what sort of deck are you playing where you're holding onto cards in hand just to make a creature bigger? None of these cards are , the colour of holding up options in hand until they're needed. The first problem was one of opportunity. Namely, what are you giving up to have the opportunity to Amplify these creatures?

The other major disadvantage was one of information. You have to reveal cards form your hand to get the Amplify effect. You have to reveal cards. You give up the advantage of having unknowns in your hand in order to create an advantage now. And in Magic, this is something that people don't want to give up voluntarily. The advantage from having cards that your opponents don't know you have is something that cannot be overstated, or taken lightly.

One of the advantages from Duress, for example, isn't the discard, but in knowing what your opponent has in hand. Telepathy. Glasses of Urza. And as such, Amplify is just shooting yourself in the foot.

Amplify seemed to be more aimed at limited decks, a means to encourage tribal synergy, or at least take advantage of it. But honestly, it just fell flat on its face as it just did so little. I mean, yes, Canopy Crawler and Kilnmouth Dragon both take advantage of the number of counters on them, but those were the exceptions, not the rule.

But you want to know the one real embarrassing part to Amplify? One of the things that Wizards backtracked really hard on?

Daru Stinger

This relatively innocuous creature has Amplify 1, and can tap to do have a Ranged Strike effect on a creature. This in of itself isn't a problem, but rather look at the Creature Type.

No, not here on TappedOut. It's wrong. Go check Oracle itself.

Did you know that after this set was released, one of the Great Creature Updates happened? One of those efforts to unify flavor and mechanics?

Did you know, that for a VERY short time, Daru Stinger was Human?

I'll give you a moment to understand just how horrifying that could be in any format. Then realized that this creature is now one of a very, very few, that have a creature 'job', but not a 'species', because even Wizards realized how badly this could turn out.

So, Amplify died, an embarrassment in handling and execution. Let us not mourn its passing, for we have something better now.

Let's talk Devour.

Devour, printed in Shards of Alara, is the mechanic associated with the Shard of Jund, the colours of . Jund's flavour was that in the absence of 's patience and 's thoughtfulness, the semi-plane was one of instinct, of the natural order of the world, of Freedom.

And naturally, because people don't understand what freedom means, Jund expressed this concept with the idea of the Food Chain. No, not Food Chain, Though it would certainly fit. No, in this case, it is the weak who are devoured by the strong, andS the strong defend their prey from all other predators.

In mechanical terms, when a creature with Devour enters the battlefield, you may sacrifice any number of creatures. When you do, put N +1/+1 counters on that creature for each creature sacrificed this way, where N is the Devour number.

Yeah, I mangled the concept there, but roll with it please.

Devour is a superior mechanic in several ways, the first of which is a better and more developed understanding of how to incorporate variable 'enters the battlefield' effects with the creature's own abilities. You have Hellkite Hatchling, where simply the act of Devouring gave the creature more abilities. Or Marrow Chomper, where you gained life for each creature it devoured. Or my favourite Mycoloth, which is a powerhouse in Fungus/Saproling decks.

Second, and most importantly, Devour doesn't depend on Tribe. Yes, Voracious Dragon checks for the Goblins its devoured, while Mycoloth makes Saprolings. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. You can Devour Soldiers for Tar Fiend, or Elementals for Feaster of Fools and they don't care.

But what made Devour really important, and far more successful wasn't anything like that. No, Devour worked out because it rewarded token creatures. This may seem odd, so let me lay it out. is the king of tokens, with ] in a dead heat for second place. Who cares if you sacrifice some tokens to a Devour effect? There's more where they came from.

doesn't really care. Rather, they see their creatures as just another resource, token or not, and killing them to make something else more powerful is as natural to them as breathing.

But for ? I really think Shards of Alara was their first real foray into token generation. Yes, it was just Goblins for the most part, and yes, I know that every colour has made tokens in the past - I am not ignorant of Kher Keep and the Kobolds of Kher Keep and their like. But here, with Devour as a core mechanic, did get Dragon Fodder, Goblin Assault and Rakka Mar. Cards that were dedicated to making tokens. Tokens that would die in one way or another, so why not make sure they died for a good cause?

Devour is manifestly better than Amplify. It has a cooler name, more open-ended options, and doesn't give your opponent an advantage in using it. Heck, it even got a card printed in this year's Commander product! Ravenous Gigantotherium is a card that exists, and is intended to be used! It's not a forgotten mechanic, and it's not something that's been buried.

Devour succeeded where Amplify failed. Wizards learned their lessons, and even though the connection may be tenuous, I think that Ampify was in the back of the minds of those who developed Shards of Alara, and the Devour mechanic.

Now I'm hungry. You know, it would be hilarious if you could sacrifice Food tokens to Devour, but that would just be silly. Eating Food? That's what Goblins are for!

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!