Making a Magic Set: ENEMY ARCHETYPES
Written By: Jay Edwards
To recap from our last article, here is where we ended up for archetypes in the allied colour pairs:
Now that we’re looking at the enemy colour pairs, we’re going to have to rearrange the circles a bit.
Like before, let’s start at the top with the red-white pair. This is usually the colour pairing for tokens and going wide. This, however, overlaps a little too much with green-white, so I want to distinguish it a little bit. I could go into the tried-and-boring Equipment subtheme but I’d rather be a little different, so we’ll swerve slightly into Auras. White is going to get “aura bonuses” for cards that give bonuses for having auras and red will get “aura buffs” for the auras that themselves give buffs to the enchanted creatures.
Red-blue is possibly the most pigeon-holed colour pair when it comes to archetypes. The vast majority of the time, it’s spellsinger or artifacts. I want to avoid making a storm-style deck and I don’t foresee myself going super-hard into artifact synergies with this set, so I think for now, we’re going to go with a counterburn strategy - a control style that can chip away at the opponent with burn spells. Blue already has “card draw” so we’ll give it the other staple of blue - “counters”. Red is going to get “impulse draws” which is something that red can do to help this playstyle by digging for a final burn spell with a little risk.
Our blue-green combination is really leaning towards one specific style of play - growth. Evasive creatures and stompy creatures want two things: protection and +1/+1 counters. Blue will get the “protection” scope to cover all the ways it can give hexproof, phase things out, or otherwise protect creatures and green will get “+1/+1 counters” so it can buff creatures further.
Black-green is possibly my favourite colour pair. I love the way that the two “opposing” colours work so well together naturally and I am already seeing how our existing choices lead into what I want to do - death. I want the pair to work on the life-death axis, with black getting “sacrifice” as a subtheme to represent getting value out of sacrificing permanents and green getting a “mulch” subtheme to demonstrate using the graveyard as a resource.
White-black is our last colour pair to tackle. People often default to thinking this is just an aristocrats playstyle (sacrificing small creatures to benefit big ones) but life change is a strategy that I find really interesting. Black will get “life lost” as a focus, giving things out if you’ve lost life this turn and white will get “life gained” to focus on the opposite.
With that, we’ve completed our sketch of our colours and their archetypes! Finally, we can look at adapting creatures and characters from Legend of Dragoon into actual cards. In the next article, we’ll look at the main cast and how they are going to be turned into cards.
