Pattern Recognition #321 - Batches and Batching

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

25 April 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Ah, Batching. I'm pretty sure I've covered this before, but I think I want to cover it again with the recent release of Thunder Junction and the newest implementation of it. For the people who haven't seen this before, and may be wondering what else is out there that does something similar.

Batching isn't a mechanic, it's a concept. A piece of development slag that represents a container that several disparate or similar concepts or ideas can be placed into. It's utterly abstract, and each individual Batch needs to be named with something that can help identify it.

Batches have been Development-Facing for some time, internal to WOTC and their process of giving up a well designed game. And it has come through - though not obviously - before it was officially made player-facing in terms of informing the players what it was, how it worked, and here is a working example.

As a concept, a Batch brings in several distinct items under a single umbrella term, word or phrase in order to save space on card text. Mostly, as reminder text is still a thing and needs to be used often enough (especially on commons). But the thing about Batches is that what is brought together under that conceptual umbrella doesn't have to be the same ... let's call it a 'level' of card mechanic or type. The first openly public facing Batch, "Historic" combined the Supertype of "Legendary", the Type of "Artifact" and the Subtype "Saga" to create a unified whole. Now, it is important to state that these selections are not exclusive nor mutually required. A card needs only to fit into any of the categories of the Batch to qualify. It does not need to fit into all of them, and having a quality that isn't listed in the Batching does not disqualify it either. Got that? Good!

Anyways, while I was thinking about this subject, I was wondering if Batching had slipped through the game's design and into the player's hands before the official rollout of the concept. And while the thought of tracing it all the way back to Alpha and dividing the cards into "Permanents" and "Non-Permanents" was definitely hilarious in my mind, I decided to be a little more serious.

But before we go further, there is a type of Batching that was first used in Arabain Nights, and I will talk about King Suleiman and all that followed form that later on.

So instead, I think that Prowess was the first proper use of batching as a mechanic and keyword. For those of you relatively new to the game, Prowess is an ability found on or granted to Creatures that gives them +1/+1 until the end of the turn when that creature's controller casts a non-Creature spell. It's a backwards sort of negative-space version of Batching, and if anyone accuses me of reaching for it, I'll probably agree with them. But it gets the point across. That Batches have always been in the game, even if they aren't named, and at the same time they can throw their net as wide or as narrow as they want in order to achieve the goals that are put before them.

And that puts me into the position of looking at the first real and proper Batch.

HISTORIC

Historic was introduced in Dominaria, and combined Legendary, Artifact and Sagas into a single umbrella case. The last of these three was also introduced in that set and quickly became exceedingly popular. Historic batched together the concept of history, of the great things of the past, and those that would be great in the future when the present becomes the past. It was something just ... clicked with the players. We understood what it meant when the game talked about something that was Historic, and because all of the conditions were on the type-line for ease of reference, and with the change to the header of the card, the little visual flourish above the card name, all of these cards now had an additional visual indicator that made them stand out from the rest.

I've covered them in more detail before, so I'll just move on. The next Batch was an odd one by the later established patterns. Party, introduced in Zendikar Rising, is a batching of Warrior, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard. However, it doesn't count all creatures of those types. Rather it is a binary check for each listed creature type. If you have zero, one, more or all can have different effects, depending on the card in question. Like how Coveted Prize's cost gets reduced the more Party members you have, while Linvala, Shield of Sea Gate only does her thing if you have a full party.

Unless you have Pinkie Pie. She makes sure that everyone in your Party!

The next Batch was from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. This was "Modified", which doesn't track anything else previously tracked, like card types, but rather the state of the card. A card is considered Modified if it has an attached Aura, Equipment or has a counter on it, be it a +1/+1 counter, an Age counter from a card's Cumulative Upkeep, or even a Ghostform counter from Kaya the Inexorable. This state-based Batching allowed for interesting effects as you can modify which creatures are modified to a limited extent, such as by moving Equipment around. Or finally use Arcanum Wings to recycle an Aura for use!

Lastly, and most recent as of the time of this typing, is Outlaw. This group of five Creature types - Assassin, Mercenary, Rogue, Pirate and Warlock - represent various people that would fall under the category of 'criminal' for the purposes of the set.

Way back in University, I wrote an essay in one of my Sociology courses about the concept of the 'Outlaw' and how it worked and why with a focus on Medieval England. The use of this word in this context with those options annoys me on a "I did the WORK!" level. Especially the inclusion of Mercenary and Warlock, but I can also see why Wizards would want to make those inclusions as part of that denominator.

Anyway, Outlaws worked because they cast such a wide swath over creature types that pretty much any colour could get reliable access to them, and the benefits of having them. I haven't really rolled a deck like that yet, and while it's not on my radar at this time, I'm willing to take the words of other people in the comments below about this Batch.

Now, this isn't the end of Batching. Throne of Eldraine had a working Batch for a good chunk of development before being removed late in the process. Mystical was a proposed batch that would include Artifacts (overlapping with Historic), Enchantments of all stripes (not just Modified-by-Auras) and Faeries. You can read more about it here, in the retrospective by Mark Rosewater. In short, it was removed because its supporting aspects were being toned down and eventually it was decided that there wasn't enough support for the Batch to stay as-is. Sad, but understandible.

The next Batch I'm going to talk about isn't a real batch yet, but from what I've seen, it's one of the more requested ones especially as it's appeared on eight cards so far where each component is listed separately, but consistently. Sea Monsters is a proposed Batch that incorporates Krakens, Leviathans, Octopuses and Serpents. This encompasses one hundred and eighteen creatures (at the time of this writing). This Batch is primarily in , with supporting, then a couple each in the other three colours - the only one being Yorion, Sky Nomad, which you don't even need that color for, it's just there. I can understand the desire to create this batch as four of the cards that invoke this batch as a Commander. Runo Stormkirk whose flipside makes extra token copies if they are a Sea Monster. Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep who as a Kicker, casts Whelming Wave, Kiora, Sovereign of the Deep who turns the creature you cast into a free additional spell and lastly, Kenessos, Priest of Thassa, who cheats them into play.

Damn, I really want to get my hands on that guy now.

But that isn't the limit to Batching. You can Batch types and Keywords as well! There is a concept in Magic called Type Coupling. This is where a card groups multiple creature types into a single unified effect. Thi first appeared on King Suleiman, which grouped Djinni and Efreets together into a single effect, which was more for flavor than because the two were actually distinct in mythology by their elements. But this sort of grouping continues to this day, although sometimes this results in two types getting merged, like with Hounds and Dogs, then most recently with the very quiet announcement that Viashino were now Lizards, even though they didn't have any sort of preliminary merging, this was just ... cleaning up.

I really should do a thing about them, but that's for another time.

Anyway, Batching is fun! It works! It makes things more convenient and concise and the best part is, it isn't being overused with new Batches every set! And because it's not a mechanic, but an idea, it can be used in any set, for any format, and not be a problem at all.

I look forward to seeing the next Batch and how it gets supported. Any takers on when or what it will be? Me? I'm betting that when we get to the Space Set, we'll see a batch for Robot, Construct, and Golem. Possibly calling it Mechanical?

Who knows!

Thank you all for reading. I'll see you next week with something else. What? I'm not sure yet. But I'm always willing to lend an ear to suggestions and requests.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!