In General: Manifest Destiny

Hello and welcome back to In General. Every Sunday here on The General Zone, I get to talk about anything and everything relating to Magic the Gathering. This week we are taking an in-depth look at the new Manifest mechanic and what it means for both designers and players. By now everyone has had a chance to read our set review articles and play with the cards a bit, so I want to discuss the limited environment of Fate Reforged.

The Morph Format

For those of you who played Time Spiral limited, you know that Morph can be tough to play against. Also, you have no idea how easy you had it. Does anybody out there remember Onslaught block?! Jeez.

When Morph first debuted we had no standard by which to evaluate it. At first we didn't know all the morphs, and there were quite a few whammies that you needed to watch out for. Have you ever run into a Zombie Cutthroat and then felt really bad about yourself? This card was in Cubes for a long time because it it was so hard to play around....but we learned, didn't we?

The level of Instant-speed interaction in the average game of Magic has gone up significantly over the years. On board tricks use to be less common and easier to play around...until Morph happened. You used to be able to pick up a card and read it to find out what it did. Morph FORCED you to remember every detail of every Creature that it was printed on. That lead to many frustrated new players who couldn't compete with players who were more acquainted with the format.

Morphs in Khans of Tarkir

It is much easier to predict what your opponent's Morphs are in Khans than it was in Time Spiral. The penalty for guessing wrong is still high, but most people are playing rigidly defined color combinations, which helps you narrow down the possibilities.

This restriction makes designing Morph cards much simpler. This gave the designers a little more freedom to experiment with different types of Creatures. There are Morphs that you can flip up for no mana, but if you examine them more closely you will find that they aren't likely to just eat an attacking Creature. At best, they will trade. This helps reduce the mental tax on players. You don't need to be able to determine precisely what their face down Creature is... as long as it won't affect the board much if it were turned face up.

Imagine this hypothetical Morph card:

This illustrates my point perfectly. When it is face down, you are still unsure what to do about it because you don't know what it is, but when it is turned face up...nothing changes. Any play you made by just assuming it was a colorless 2/2 is still valid because it IS, IN FACT, a colorless 2/2 when turned up.

Morphs in Fate Reforged

In Khans limited, the Morph varied greatly in size, shape, and color. You could be running into a woolly mammoth for crying out loud.

By contrast, In Fate Reforged literally anything could be hiding under that Morph bug...right? Well no. If you take a look through the cards in the set, the majority can't ever be flipped up at all, so they are just always the 2/2, but let's focus specifically on the Creatures.

Scrolling through Gatherer you will find that most of the Creatures in the set will trade for a 2/2. That didn't happen by mistake. We have a 4/1, 3/2's, a 4/2, several 2/1's, a 5/2 Defender...coincidence? Nope.

What does it all mean Basil?

From a design standpoint, Morph is complex and rewards more knowledgeable players. Manifest, raises that bar even higher, perhaps too high for normal humans to consistently achieve. Manifest has the effect of increasing variance within the game because it is so difficult to manage all of the necessary information. Sometimes a less skilled player will defeat a more skilled player by flipping a big Manifest threat. This empowers newer players to stay in games that they would otherwise lose.

The bottom line for me is that playing against a Manifested card is always going to be complex and stressful, which I love, but is also just plain fun. You are never really going to know what is under there. You can play the numbers, play a guessing game, or you can just play like you have nothing to lose.

That is a feeling that I haven't gotten from Magic in a long time.

-GG