Pattern Recognition #335 - Going Down in Numbers

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

15 August 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!

And welcome back everyone! Today's subject comes to you from my lovely efforts to find something to talk about and the 'Random Card' button on Scryfall. So let me show you what got my interest this week:

This bulk common from Shadowmoor is nothing spectacular at all, that's for sure. In fact, about the only thing interesting about it is the Hybrid mana cost of . But that's not what I want to talk about. Rather, I want to talk about the -1/-1 Counter and its history. Because it has a surprising amount of history, that's for sure!

The -1/-1 counter was first introduced in Arabian Nights on the card Unstable Mutation. There was a discussion that came in the comments last week about Pongify and the nature of instant based vs Enchantment based removal and creature modification. This card, I think, does what you were all discussing right. You may think that giving the target a base +3/+3 might be a bad choice for this colour, but when you realize that this benefit is slowly worn away over time due to the accumulating -1/-1 counters, it slides back to where it was, then grows worse. It's a neat way to interpret constant change over time, and I know I had fun with this card in ages past.

From there, we got Thelon's Chant and Tourach's Chant, a colour-pair of cards that do the same thing and hate each other from the old days of yore. -1/-1 Counters became a very constant, but equally minor thing in the following sets until Mercadian Masques with the printing of Quagemire Lamprey. One or two cards per set with a focus on or as its primary, but also in and .

After Masques, the counter was retired from normal gameplay for a while. It wasn't a big thing, so its loss wasn't really felt. A larger focus was placed on the more positive +1/+1 counter, which is a different subject, and one I don't mind as a concept at all. But it wasn't forgotten as Torment gave us a Shambling Swarm after a period of three years. It wasn't that impressive of a card, as it was conditional removal in that you could use the temporary counters to finish off a creature that would have otherwise survived combat or something similar.

No, -1/-1 Counters really hit their stride and became a thing with the sets of Shadowmoor and Eventide. This back half of the Lorwyn Block focused a large part on the ideas of "Fairy Tales At Night" and as part of it, the notion of things being ground down over time, leaving behind ruin was partly reflected in two mechanics as well as having a larger non-mechanical presence in the set.

Persist is a mechanic that allows a creature to come back from the graveyard to play with a -1/-1 counter on it as long as it didn't already have such a counter on it when it died. It was and still is a very elegant solution to allow a creature to return to the battlefield once but not infinitely repeating. Kitchen Finks and Murderous Redcap both became very effective combo-pieces because of this ability.

And if you could remove the -1/-1 counter because you had Heartmender, well, you could do it all over again!

Sadly, Persist wasn't the end of it in that block, and we got Ken Nagle's proto-Infect mechanic. We got Wither.

Wither is a mechanic that turns combat damage applied to a creature by a creature with the ability into -1/-1 counters, effectively ensuring that the damage remained over turns rather than going away at the end like regular damage. It was a great way to represent the decay of the dark Lorwyn, and it was focused mostly in with cards like Corossive Mentor, but also went into with Tower Above. It did touch and also appeared on non-creatures with a couple of options like Puncture Blast. Stigma Lasher was the first card I remember seeing that also shut down lifegain in the process.

However, these two sets and these mechanics revealed something about the counters in the wider playerbase that didn't quite appear in Wizard's internal playtesting. Or given who was involved, did, but it was seen as a good thing.

-1/-1 counters, en masse, are a feel-bad mechanic. Players watching their numbers go down isn't all that fun. And while, yes, losing is part of the game and that can and will involve that happening, the existence and persistence of -1/-1 counters over time is a stark reminder of the current degraded board state. It's not fun, and as feedback developed, the reductive aspect to these counters meant that there would only be so many of them before creatures started dying and taking the counters with them. Unlike +1/+1 counters, which can go as high as you want them to. Numbers Go Up is more fun and exciting than Numbers Go Down.

Sadly someone didn't get the memo, and after Eventide and Shadowmoor delivered their verdict, Wizards tried again, but even harder in the Scars of Mirrodin block with Infect.

Infect is, was and always will be a shit mechanic, and if you play it, you should feel bad. Except you're playing Infect, therefore you don't have feelings in the first place to regret your decision.

Moving on!

Amonkhet and Hour of Devestation brought back -1/-1 counters after a long absence from the game. However, unlike previous iterations of this counter, which saw it being used as a punisher effect on the opponent, these two sets started with the notion that it was a drawback on your own creatures.

Channeler Initiate is a great example of this as a 3/4 for is a little too much even with current powercreep, the fact that it comes in with 3 -1/-1 counters to make it an effective 0/1 puts it at a much more manageable point on the power/toughness/mana value curve. In addition, the use of the counters acts as a resource limiter on the number of times you can tap it for mana. But once you have, well, a 3/4 in the mid to late game may be nothing worth writing home about, but it can slip through the cracks when there are larger threats out there.

Consuming Fervor was the colour-shifted Unstable Mutation and I love it for it.

These sets did allow for putting these counters onto creatures your opponents control, such as with Festering Mummy or Ruthless Sniper, but these two cards showcase that there was a tight control placed on how many -1/-1 counters could get out onto the board at a time. They weren't going to proliferate as badly as they did in other sets.

I've been meaning to build a Hapatra, Vizir of Poisons Commander deck at some point, but I never seem to find the time or effort for it. I've seen it roll, but maybe I should give it another crack after the local Pauper Commander event in a couple weeks. I'll have words to say about that in a later post.

Since then, -1/-1 counters have shown up rarely, but still once or twice a year. Modern Horizons and Commander sets tend to get them as they are the ones that can handle the inclusion of this counter-type and relevant mechanics.

This doesn't stop such things from showing up as a mechanical Cameo. Massacre Girl, Known Killer from Murders at Karlov Manor is an example of this sort of one-off instance of an effect that isn't there to break the game, but to give it a little dash of flavor.

Wizards has not admitted to any plans to bring back -1/-1 counters in any major factor in the future. Their interactions with +1/+1 counters as well as trying to put both into the same set would only lead to mutual destruction. But +1/+1 is far more popular and far easier to develop around, making it far better to incorporate into a set than this counter.

I don't blame them at all.

I do like how they were treated in Amonkhet. As a limited resource that as you cast off, you lost some things but gained in strength. Almost classical Phyrexia in a way. You know, the good Phyrexia, not the abomination we had to deal with a few years ago. If Wizards was able to tweak the balance dial from where it was at Amonkhet and Hour to something a bit more elegant and self-contained - a resource, not a punishment - then I would definitely be willing to give it a chance again.

As long as we don't get Devoted Druid all over again. That's bad.

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet!

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