Pattern Recognition #260 - Walls

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

27 October 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

And welcome back! It's not fun at work, so I have no idea if I'm going to finish out my pre-Christmas break in any reasonable frame of time, but I'm going to give it a go. Which means that this week is going down right now! And I'm going to be redoing one of my previous articles from Feb of last year, where-in I talked about Walls. In retrospect, I didn't do a good job of that article, which is a sad fact of life when you've been doing this sort of thing for as long as I have. So this is my chance to make things right. Or at least better.

Let's talk Walls. This mostly-expired Creature type was last seen in .... Oh. Wow, this is egg on my face already. Academy Wall from Dominaria United. So it's not ignored, just very rare. Anyway, Walls were originally introduced in the very first set - Limited Edition Alpha, and there were a rather large selection of them from that time, from Wall of Swords to Wall of Stone. All colours got them, even the colourless artifact Living Wall got into the action as well.

Walls were uniformly high-toughness, low-power creatures, and while you had some creatures that had a certain closeness to their power and toughness - such as with the 3/5 Wall of Swords, for the most part, toughness won out at the end of the day. This was a deliberate design choice for most of the existence of Walls as they were envisioned as a form of defensive structure protecting their summoner from being attacked and damaged. But in order to do that, Walls had something unique attached to them.

Until the release of Champions of Kamigawa in the fall of 2004, Walls were the only creature type that had inherent rules to them. This was after Legendary had finally been moved from Creature type to card Super-type, thankfully. No, up until that point, the creature type of Wall had, as rules text attached to the creature type, that a Wall could not Attack.

This was hard-coded into the rules, something that was unique at the time, and thankfully still is. Unique, not part of the rules. Walls could not attack. That was it. And because of this, a few cards had to be written around this restriction. Animate Wall for example, is an aura that explicitly allowed the Wall to attack as though it were not a Wall. Rolling Stones, printed in 8th Edition, should gather no moss, as the Walls would get up and run over to the nearest magazine vendor. In addition, cards like Artificial Evolution had to be written to avoid Walls (and Legends) because of this very restriction.

But with 01 October 2004, and the release of Champions, This intrinsic rule set was finally laid to rest for good, to the relief of everyone who ever played the game before now, and had to memorize this one exception to the general rules. What we got at the time was the newly minted evergreen mechanic of Defender. Much like how Vigilance codified the pre-existing ability of the same name, Defender replaced the rules text on all precious Walls. As we said at the time "All Walls have Defender. Not all Defenders are Walls."

This was paired with the post 8th Edition decision to severely curtain or even eliminate this Creature Type. Effectively, Wizards was trying to excise a problematic card subtype, and do it in such a way that they kept the internal mechanic in place.

In addition, the also resolved the proto-Changeling problem of Mistform Ultimus, which could be any Creature type - except Wall. Now, it can be a Wall, and can attack because it doesn't have Defender. A simple change to simply and streamline the game, something that worked elegantly and honestly, whoever came up with this solution deserves a pat on the back for a job well done, even if they've frakked up in other ways before and after.

Now, some of you may have seen a contradiction in my testimony so far, even if you're not completely ignorant of the larger game at hand. I mentioned that post-8th Edition looked to remove this creature type from the game, and yet we had a Wall in Dominaria United! What gives?

Well, the answer to that is the players themselves. You see, Wizards rightly saw Walls en-mass as problematic, where players would sit behind their cheap defensive creatures that couldn't attack and didn't need to, turning the 'disadvantage' of being a Wall/having Defender into the advantage of being cheaper than a regular creature with the same power and toughness, like the near perfect example of Kami of Old Stone against Wall of Ice. The ability to not-interact with the opponent was seen as an issue, and one that should be resolved. They also saw the Creative problem of summoning a Wall, and it not really doing anything, just being able to block one creature at a time, even though they are supposed to be massive things.

The players argued that, yes, these are legitimate concerns, but they are not unsolvable. Walls do not need to be everywhere at once, that is for sure. Once in a while keeps the majority of the problems with static board-states away by simply not giving players the opportunity to invoke it. In addition, more cards were printed that allowed creatures with Defender to attack - often substituting their Toughness for Power such as with Arcades, the Strategist or High Alert or more recently - Walking Bulwark. No longer is Wall/Defender a strictly binary choice when it comes to putting it into your deck, you now have far more options to use them.

Another way to resolve their passiveness is to give them interesting and viable abilities. Suspicious Bookcase makes an attacking creature unblockable, while Crashing Drawbridge gives another creature Haste. Jeskai Barricade is an excellent protective spell for your creatures, and keeps one in play for combat. Tree of Redemption and Tree of Perdition play games with a player's life total, Drift of Phantasms lets you search your library with a MV of and so on. But because these Walls have Defender, which reduces the cost of the card in general, which means that you can get these sorts of abilities out just that much sooner. There were advantages, however small, to doing this sort of thing.

In addition, there was a move away from having Walls be portrayed as these massive, land-spanning edifices. It made no sense for a Wall of Stone to only be able to block a single creature. Yes, I know Wall of Glare can block multiple, but that's unique, not typical. In instead, Walls were re-conceived as more localized defenses, smaller things. Like the aforementioned Suspicious Bookcase isn't a wall that stretches around a city, but more of a think you hide behind, much like the the ones that Teyo, the Shieldmage creates. This neatly solved the problem of inflated toughness at the same time, allowing Walls and Defenders to be 'popped' so to speak by relatively light amounts of damage without losing their basic utility.

With these counter-arguments in mind, Wizards dipped their toes back into having Walls with Zendikar and M10 with these lessons in mind, and the response was actually pretty positive. They were smaller, more versatile and not just huge a huge chunk of numbers to go through. The change to include Defender from years previous paid dividends as no longer did they have to worry about rules for Walls, and the inclusion of that mechanic on other creatures since then had primed their playerbase to accept it.

And it worked! As long as they stayed an occasional thing, or are part of a theme for the set, such as with Dominaria United, then Walls and creatures with Defender proved they had a place in Magic's gaming. They just had to be treated like any other tribe, one that needed support and focus, rather than just existing and sitting there like a big, dumb object. Success!

Thanks for reading. Please join me next week when I talk about something else. What, I'm not quite sure yet, so feel free to comment in the comments below.

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!