Battles - the new card type

 

The first new card type has arrived since the introduction of planeswalkers around 16 years ago, and really only the second ever new card type proper given than "tribal" shouldn't really count and is more of a subtype. Initially I was excited. I have been really impressed with vehicles, class, and saga cards which are sub-types rather than full card types but do function a lot like a new thing in the game. I have also been a fan of planeswalkers and what they have brought to the table. Even adventures tend to play reasonably well despite many being somewhat pushed for power. All in all Wizards tend to do a great job with bringing in these new and functionally unique new types. With something as significant as a type proper I was expecting big things. I liked the idea of inverted planewalkers that give something to attack rather than something to defend. I like the idea of battles giving effective larger life totals to players and making combat more dynamic and involved. I was ready to jump on board but then I started to consider the cards themselves and how they are playing and I started to about turn my opinion. They seem very win more and that is a problem. 

A planeswalker is typically a bad investment on the turn you make it, breaks even the next turn, and stats to slowly pull ahead from the third turn. If you are ahead when you deploy them you can usually endure the tempo setback and stabilize with your walker alive to steadily take over the game. Battles, or at least the "siege" subtype of battles that we have so far seen, give all or nothing. They can give it all the turn you make them or never flip and give just the front end. This means they are not only win more cards but also polar in performance and swingy in game play. They can be a planeswalker that activates and then goes ultimate on the same turn, that should seal a lot of games. I can see a number of decks being built so that they can safely and reliably setup to deploy and instantly complete certain battles. Obviously they further promote the advantages of going first. The game is already a little more tempo focused than seems optimal and so this is a shift in the wrong direction. I think, on the play, curve into a battle then either complete there and then or on the following attack has the potential to become a common and tedious game play pattern. This will of course be most offensive with the battles that provide reasonable assistance in this tempo assault.      

My main take away is that these could have just been put onto the existing enchantment type and simply been a subtype like saga and class cards. The type here seems more flavour driven that mechanically driven and that seems very much like the wrong way round to be doing stuff. I actively encourage the exploration of new ideas, even ones like this that have intrinsic flaws such as having a win more play pattern. Planeswalkers are great but to this day they have made red less accessible in cube to new players as no-one has a clue what burn can and cannot be aimed at planeswalkers. Battles looks like it will add another layer of that again. Yes, this would likely have been the case if these were an enchantment sub-type but we could have far more easily moved on with our lives. These make you take notice. It will be hard to unring this bell and it seems like a bell that has been rung to generate buzz rather than to improve upon the game.  

What I will say is that this looks like an outstanding multiplayer mechanic and should not only play well in EDH but also add a really juicy dimension to the game. I am more than happy for them to be putting EDH design focused cards into the standard sets but mechanics is pushing it a bit far. And card types! Well, that is surely a long way too far. These battles feel like they should be enchantments with a keyword and a substype. They should then probably have been more care to put the more egregious looking designs for 1v1 play only in commander product. 

Which sort of leads to the next point. Fundamentally these cards are all over the place. Given the flip condition is combat/damage based, both the front end and back end scale wildly with those things and often in all the wrong directions. Removal is way better on a front end as it lets you attack into them more freely. Dorks on the back end are less exciting as they expose you to mass removal more etc. Most of the backsides are dorks and mostly they will be obtained through combat and so by and large these are over extension traps. 

Costing will also have a massive impact. The pricier ones might well come to late to be relevant. By turn five what aggro deck who has gotten someone to 10 or less is going to start attacking a battle? Certainly it is an interesting choice to add but I suspect too often the battle will be ignored. Magic just walks a very fine line these days with a small and fragile 20 life points and an utterly savage degree of power on threats. Once a cube game goes one persons favour and any stalemate breaks down the game is almost always over there and then or the following turn. These issues can of course be addressed with design at least which makes it a lot less of a problem than the inherent win-more nature of battles which is harder to design out of cards. I raise the point as I fully expect them to fail with the balance side of things. There is always a Smuggler's Copter, Jitte or Skullclamp lurking with these new types! It is hard to design, test, and understand the implications of such new things and so I fully expect this to be a shitshow with some grossly overpowered battles alongside a bunch that never see any play. 

To me the best battles look like the cheap low impact ones as there is much less room between the value of flipping and not flipping. On a big powerful battle you can typically just get a cheaper version of the front half. This means you need reasonable expectation to be flipping it to justify playing it over the cheaper front half only version. I don't think you can ever have a reasonable expectation to flip and so you have to be relatively happy with the deal you are getting on the front half of your battle. It won't be a great deal ever but on the occasions you do efficiently flip it you will have a whole lot of bang for your buck. I guess the point I am making is you are playing a bit of a lottery, the win is big regardless of your battle should you flip it and so you are much wiser to play the cheaper and more cost efficient on the front side battles as that has a much nicer looking matrix. Low cost for no return or occasional big win when compared to high cost for no return or occasional big return is an easy choice! 

The colours may also have some differences in regards how they play. White might get into flickering the battles which is pretty hard to interact with. Red might find it is into burning down battles. There are a number you can flip with a Fireblast in a sneaky surprise way and that could be cute, cool, or really oppressive! Black also has the likes of Vampire Hexmage just in case we needed some combo abuses. So far the battles all have the "siege" subtype implying we might get other kinds of battle in the future. Interesting if so but not taking away from the face that all those we have seen so far have the issues that I have highlighted. 

So, my conclusion is still going to be pretty sat on the fence. Without actually playing with the things it is hard to judge. I am certainly very suspicious, these seem dodgy in loads of way, big and small. I am also however of course excited to play with these new things. If I am right and once the excitement has worn off then we can start to be properly critical. Certainly as a curator of cubes I can easily ignore these should I wish and so really even if they are an absolute shocker I have no real right complaining about them at all!