Making a Magic Set: ALLIED ARCHETYPES
Written By: Jay Edwards
If you’re not familiar with drafting and its terminology, an “archetype” is what playstyle certain colour combinations lean towards when you’re choosing your cards. Looking at the Magic: Foundations archetype chart, that set has 10 different options to choose from. Take blue/black as an example; when drafting Magic: Foundations, blue and black cards share a number of cards that deal with your graveyard and focus on controlling the boardstate. This does not mean that you have to deal with your graveyard only if you draft those colours, but it’s where the two colours overlap. Why does this matter to us as we design the set? Because it helps figure out what each colour does on its own!
If we focus down specifically to black’s archetypes in Magic: Foundations, we can see what black’s identity within the set itself is. We already know that black does things with your graveyard alongside blue, but there are 3 other colours to match up with. When matched with red, black goes into the “Raid” archetype, which involves triggering Raid abilities by attacking over and over. White joins it in the Life Gain archetype, mostly by sapping your opponent’s life and creatures for life. Green and black is that Morbid archetype in Magic: Foundations which is similar to the Graveyard archetype that black and blue have, but this is more creature-based rather than spell-based. With all that info, we can determine that black has: disposable creatures that can swing with wild abandon and can play the long gain with board control and life gain. This is basically what we knew that black did, but this helps focus the wider scope of what black could do to a more narrow point for a single set.
Sets usually have 10 archetypes, one for each colour pair. First, we’ll look at the allied pairs (the colours that naturally compliment each other) and determine those as we can extrapolate the enemy pairs from what we determine some of what the colours do. Within those 5 pairs, each colour needs to share something with each of its allies:
Rolling a random selector, let’s begin with green-white. Immediately, I’m thinking of creatures and going wide with tokens. Tokens can be a fairly simple archetype to implement and it can easily assist either colour’s other matches. I’m going to note both colours with “tokens” since both colours have that within their wheelhouse and we can bulk them both out with future pairings.
Continuing right, we can look at white-blue. Azorius Skies is another simple archetype and a favourite of mine - it’s just flying creatures and things that give things flying. Making it solely flying though is a little boring from a design perspective, so I want to expand it a little and generalize it to making things “evasive” rather than just flying. Again, both colours can just be get “evasive creatures” as their entry since future pairs will add depth.
Blue-black are very strong control colours. Counters, discard, removal; this is where it lives. This style of play wants to extend the game as long as possible to drain their opponent’s resources. I’m going to give black “removal” and blue “card draw” since both are critical to this gameplay style.
Red-black is all about going hard and fast, without regard to oneself. Burn, one-for-one removal, and acts of desperation are hallmarks of this colour combo, leaning towards an aggressive control style. Red will get “burn” for all those direct-damage cards and black will get “life for cards” as this playstyle will willingly change one resource for another.
Now we’ve come to the last allied pair - red-green. Traditionally, this is the colour combo of aggressive stompy play patterns. Honestly, I don’t really want to mess with that, but I want to focus more on combat tricks rather than just on needing big dumb things. Green is going to add “stompy creatures” for those trampling creatures and red will get “combat tricks” to represent the one-shot power buffs.
That’s it for the allied colour pairs! In the next article, we’ll tackle the enemy colour pairs and figure out what we want each colour to be doing in this set.
