Making a Magic Set: Counting Cards and Colours
Written By: Jay Edwards
In my previous experience building sets and having gone through quite a cube phase in university, I know having a skeleton of what I want card divisions to look like within the set is very important. These aren’t exactly hard limits since there could be a killer card that’s designed that only fits one colour or maybe I can’t think up one more card for a colour, but the numbers are there to guide design choices. Alongside determining roughly how many cards I want in each colour, I have to figure out how many multicolour cards and artifacts I am aiming for too.
The number of cards in a “typical” set actually have had some variance throughout the years of Magic’s life. I already know I’m not going to pull a March of the Marchine: Aftermath and call 50 cards a full set, but I also don’t want to set myself up for failure by promising the 383 cards of Ice Age. The source material also has to be considered as well, though LoD is quite a sizable property for being just one game. If I just took the creatures in the game into consideration, I’m looking at 129 separate entries in the bestiary alongside 70ish boss monsters (some are multiple parts, so they each get individual entries and I won’t make “Wendigo: Snow Cannon” and “Wendigo: Heart” separate cards). Just that alone would bring my set into the Eventide range of cards, but I think I can push it a little more than that. Some creatures likely won’t make the cut, so I’m setting myself a goal to make a set roughly the same size as Avacyn Restored - 250 cards.
Jesus, 250 sounds like a lot to develop doesn’t it? We can break this down a bit though to make things feel less… titanic. First thing we can do is figure out our colour split within the card pool. Keeping the colours roughly equal will make for a much more enjoyable draft experience and having enough multicolor options and colourless choices for anyone to grab is key here. But how many multicolour and colourless cards is “enough” versus “too many”? If we simply divide 250 by 7, one for each colour with one for colourless and one for multicolour, the total in each category is 35.7. Making the number whole, that’s 36 in each colour, 35 colourless, and 35 multicoloured cards.
The LoD universe is kind of neatly divided into colours in a sense already - each creature (bar a couple) is assigned an element that works in an opposing system of damage (they each deal double damage to their opposing element). These pairs are: Fire and Water, Wind and Earth, and Light and Darkness. There’s a 7th element as well, Lightning, but this element is unique in that it is neither weak nor strong against anything. 7 elements is a little awkward to easily slot into the different colours of Magic, so some out of the box thinking is going to be required when that comes around. For now, let’s return back to the fact that each creature only has 1 element, meaning that the concept of “dual” elements isn’t really a thing. Because of that, I want to cut back the amount of multicoloured cards a bit. If I move the slider slightly, 38 cards of each colour, 35 colourless, and 25 multicoloured cards feels better for this set.
To bring back the elemental division in the LoD game, this is purely a mechanical division and doesn’t really represent the nature or characteristics of a given creature. Yes, Water has fish and ice themed stuff, but it also holds the Mandrake monster (a giant plant) and the Trap Plant monster (a plant, but this time on the Moon). Given this, I feel pretty comfortable looking at the creatures and how they act in-game and assigning colours that way instead of putting them in categories based on their element. In-game random encounters aren’t just one element either, with Dragonflies (Thunder) able to appear alongside Rocs (Wind) or Killer Birds (Darkness), so having creatures spread out regardless of their elemental affiliation will give that same kind of flavour to drafting.
To close, I think we’re close to finishing the pre-development roadmap of this set. The last thing we need to look at is archetypes. Since I’m designing this as a whole set and it’s intended for drafting, we’re going to have to look at what the draft experience is going to look like. We’ll have to pick a few different playstyles that will be hinted at for players to aim for when they crack their packs. Once that’s done, we can finally start designing cards!
