Making a Magic Set: Mechanical Choices
Written By: Jay Edwards
Before delving into choosing characters, assigning colours, or even picking draft archetypes, I have to figure out what mechanics I want to include in the set. Mechanics don't necessarily give a set its overall feel but they can help in guiding its creation. Mirrodin wasn't made by having Affinity, but it wouldn't have made as big an impact if the set wasn't artifact-focused. With that in mind, I want to be selective about the mechanics that I pick for this set and make sure they help to elevate the style of Legend of Dragoon.
LoD is a typical JRPG; turn-based, random overworld encounters, and leveling up a party of characters. Obviously the first place I looked at for inspiration was the recent Final Fantasy set to see how it handled this kind of thing, but outside of the Job Select mechanic, nothing was too far off of a normal set. Tiered is a neat take on Escalate or Kicked, but there's nothing really like that in LoD. That then begs the question - what makes LoD different from other JRPGs?
Something that's unique about the game that I absolutely love is the Addition system. Rather than combat being a simple menu selection, combat in Legend of Dragoon is a much more active affair. When a character attacks, the player has to time a series of button presses to do a combo, called an Addition (don't ask, I have no idea why). As characters level up, they unlock new Additions that are longer and more complicated. If the player is able to complete them correctly, you do maximum damage and earn more SP (I’ll touch on that in a bit). Alongside this, throwable magic items require players to mash the X button in order to increase the damage output of that item. I could choose Multikicker for this, but I don't think that's fully in the spirit of the game’s mechanic. Instead, I’m going to choose a favourite mechanic of mine that hasn't gotten a lot of love - Escalate.
I really feel that Escalate fits the flavour that I want to replicate the gameplay of LoD. If you only need to have the base mode of the spell, you don't need to put extra effort in, just like hitting 1 button in the combo. If you want the full effect though, you're going to have to spend resources and get all the buttons in the combo. Spells with Escalate also have a definite endpoint as opposed to something with Multikicker - Additions have a maximum number of hits and it would be a pretty big flavour fail if the spells that represent those actions could be infinite.
The other big mechanical uniqueness of Legend of Dragoon is the Dragoon transformations. The main characters of the game all have special gems that allow them to transform mid-battle into more powerful versions of themselves for a limited time. They utilize Spirit Points (SP) that I mentioned earlier to do this and that SP can only be gained in normal combat, so there's a natural cooldown period to prevent spamming. I can think of two different ways to go about this. First is to do a Magic: Origins type thing where the creatures need to have something happen and then they flip. Decent, but the change is permanent, so doesn't work amazing for flavour. Another option is to duplicate the March of the Machines Praetors and have a saga on the back that flips back to the creature. Good, but also not a creature on both sides. Thankfully, Final Fantasy actually helps me out here thanks to their introduction of saga creatures, so the Dragoons in this set with flip in saga creatures, this saving the flavour of it being a short-duration effect.
With those two options selected, I think that I’m pretty happy with my mechanical choices. Evergreen mechanics will be able to come in and add some pizzazz to other cards but Escalate and Saga Creatures will be able to cover most situations quite easily. Trying to add anything more would just feel like I’m trying to force the issue and that would make the process a lot less fun for me. Join me next time for dividing up colours and creatures!
