Pattern Recognition #275 - The Cards that Actually Broke the Game

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

23 March 2023

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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.

A while ago, I made the case that Shock Lands of Ravnica almost broke the game with how they interacted with pre-existing cards that pulled lands from the library - a state the only became exacerbated once Zendikar rolled around and people were reminded that Fetch lands existed. And yet, the very first comment on that post was from a person who was wondering why I didn't talk about the subject of today's post. To which I replied that the Shock Lands almost broke the game.

You see, there is a more serious set of cards than they; Artifact Lands actually broke the game.

Well, not by themselves, no. They were part of a larger mechanic from the Mirrodin block that I am going to be looking at today, and how it helped shape some of my personal rules about what makes a good card in Magic. Yes, I know I'm not a designer, but being on the outside, you can see things that you might not be able to when compared to the people working down there at WotC.

Now, this is not going to be some overly detailed review of how things went horribly wrong. I will be aiming to give something of a summary and a demonstration of the poor design choices that happened, and how these were responded to. Plenty has been written about what happened in the 20 years since these cards were printed, and it's telling when this mechanic is still just as popular today as it was then, including a card printed in the last year that is receiving serious discussion about being banned in Pauper because of how it works, and how it feeds into this mechanic

So let's talk about Affinity. Because it's something that's needs to be laid out before we can get into the hows and whys of the lands. Affinity is a keyword mechanic that includes a dedicated condition to the Keyword. Much like how Protection does nothing by itself, both it and Affinity need to have some qualifier to work. You see, how Affinity works is that it reduced the cost of a card being cast with it by for each card that met the Affinity condition you controlled.

This doesn't seem like a problem at first glance, and that's probably because most of you never got to live through its heyday, and some of you probably weren't even born yet when those cards were printed. Don't worry, I'll fix you right up! You have to understand that Mirrodin was a block with a heavy emphasis on Artifacts, and to a degree that makes the modern Artifact set - Kaladesh and Aether Revolt - look positively quaint in how they embraced the idea.

Now, a set that leans hard into a card type is, in of itself, not a problem. Theros and Enchantments. Legion and Creatures. War of the Spark and Planeswalkers - OK, maybe not so much that, but they get a "B" for effort. So the Artifactness of Mirrodin wasn't an issue. Well, it was, but that's something I'm going to get at in a moment.

The first problem with Artifacts, at least in the pre-Alara era, was that they were, by definition, coulourless. Always . And this was before the days of EDH, so those of you who are skipping to the end to comment about how Bosh, Iron Golem is actually can scroll right back here and keep reading! Artifacts were, by design, intended to go into any deck in order to shore up something about that deck, or to try and cover a weakness in them. Some decks even went all-in on Artifacts pre-Mirrodin and speaking from personal experience, they weren't that good, except as a gimmick.

So, when Mirrodin came around and introduced Affinity, they were attached to cards that, at least initially, counted Artifacts for their Affinity purposes. And because these were cards that had a built in cost reducer, they tended to be... a bit overpriced. Assert Authority for example, is staggeringly over-costed. A modern spell that would Counter a spell and put it into Exile would cost such as the (currently) Standard legal Dissipate. Which meant that you would need 4 Artifacts in play to bring Assert Authority down to its 'actual' casting cost. And if you tried to cast it fully? Well, you're paying out the nose for it.

But there was a slight design... let's call it a hiccup. What happens when you make a card that makes itself cheaper? What happens when you print an Artifact that also has Affinity for Artifacts? Well, if you're Wizards, you double the normal mana cost of the spell, give or take, and you call it a day. You get a card like Frogmite which has a mana value double what it would normally cost for a vanilla 2/2. You got Myr Enforcer, and then Mycosynth Golem. All of these creatures had the advantage, if you want to call it that, of enabling their own Affinity counts for future copies of the same card.

Essentially, playing artifacts allowed you to play more artifacts cheaply into a never-ending cycle of recursion that would eventually result in artifacts having a casting cost of .... . That's right, Affinity makes your stuff free! Free spells (as long as they were Artifacts)! And everyone like free, right?

No. This is the source of my personal rule number 1 when it comes to Magic card design! Let me repeat it for you all so that you may bask in my glorious intelligence! FREE SPELLS ARE BAD. Yes, I'm looking at you, Fierce Guardianship.

But this wasn't the end of it. Nor was it the beginning. I'm sure you can see the end, when you have cards like Thoughtcast, a recent reprint in a Commander precon which could easily cost a simple , when drawing two cards would normally be , such as with Divination. Cards that cost far less than they should give advantages in terms of being able to ply their resources without the same restrictions that other decks faced.

Yet, there is still the beginning. I've named them already, but here they are; Ancient Den, Seat of the Synod, Vault of Whispers, Great Furnace, Tree of Tales and...

Darksteel Citadel

Artifact Land. Two simple card types. I mean, Artifacts are the card type most represented on another type, thanks to Artifact Creatures, but this combination was new to the game. Even Enchantment Creature got a test drive in Future Sight, but this was new.

But these six cards were the core enabler to one of the worst times in Magic's history. I've just spent some time talking a bit about how Affinity fed on itself, with each card adding more and more to the pile, until cards that were overcosted become free. Well, how about you start this off with a card that you can play for free, and is an Artifact?

Add into this mix non-Affinity artifacts that were cheap because they didn't have Affinity for Artifacts, and you got yourself an extremely oppressive and utterly devastating deck that was ahead of the curve from turn 1, and could scale upwards at the game went on thanks to the use of a Modular subtheme on Arcbound Worker and Arcbound Ravager.

This deck was so efficient, so capable of out-pacing and out-valuing everything else in any format it was legal in, to the point where the card considered to be the hard-counter to Artifact decks - Energy Flux in formats where it was legal - wasn't enough.

Affinity brought about the Second Combo Winter, to use an overly dramatic turn of phrase. But as a person who was there for it, it's the truth. Affinity was so dominant that Wizard's usual methods (at the time) to try to reign in an out-of-control deck - that being taking out the finishers, didn't work - the deck persisted with barely any slowing down.

This domination caused players to leave the game, and you can tell how bad people got burned by this when they mention that they are getting back into Magic, after leaving in Mirrodin. It's because of Affinity.

It wasn't until March 2005 when an unprecedented EIGHT cards were banned from Standard just to kneecap Affinity. Skullclamp had already eaten a ban because it's Skullclamp, but when Arcbound Ravager and Disciple of the Vault got banned for being end-game cards, that wasn't enough. No, All Six Artifact Lands got Banned in Standard as well.

Eight cards, including the core lands for the block, all hit because they produced too much value for too little effort. Because Artifacts feeding into Artifacts, with redundancy and some pretty amazing end-game options turned out to be too powerful.

And still is. The legacy of Affinity is still in the game, and people at Wizards recognize that Affinity can work. It does work. Blasphemous Act has, effectively, Affinity for Creatures, and no one considers it broken. Powerful, yes, but no where near ban-worthy. The most recent set, All Will Be One, has Affinity for Equipment in it, to help refine and bolster the Rebels. Cost reduction is fine, but cost elimination is not. And there are plenty of ways to write down Affinity without using the Keyword. You'd be surprised at how often it comes up - with just a narrowly limited selection of what is counted or not.

And yet, Affinity as an archetype is still strong, even 20 years later. The five coloured Artifact Lands are still Banned in Modern, just to keep Affinity down, while Darksteel Citadel got reprinted into Standard without much worry. It also soured the reception of artifact heavy sets to the point where the next effort - Kaladesh and Aether Revolt - were a massive step down in power, and helped set a better boundary for where Artifacts could go in the future. The full adoption of coloured Artifacts really helped there.

So there you have it. The cards that broke the game. Six lands. That's all it took. Well, them an a mechanic that leeched off of them to an insane degree. Affinity is a mechanic that was surrounded by too much support, but as the years have gone by, the mechanic has been refined by what it can or cannot do, and is now a viable took in Wizard's kit for cards and sets to come. It's a friggen TWO on the Storm Scale now!

Affinity is a great success story for Wizards and Magic. It shows how a mechanic can be fixed and made into a useful part of the game. Unlike so many others, that never get a second glance because they weren't the hot newness that someone wanted to drive pack sales, or a deliberately overpowered effect that caused a backlash from the players, here we see a viable middle ground in what can and cannot be accomplished by work, effort, and a good design philosophy.

Affinity will never be a major thing again. There's too much room for error. But as something to supplement other things, to act as the occasional gimmick for a card in a set, I think it will show up again and again, to no one's trouble.

Thank you all for joining me this week, and I will be back next week with another subject, though I haven't settled on it yet. Until then, please talk about your experiences with Affinity in the comments below. Good, bad or ugly? Express yourself!

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!