This set has always felt and eventually do become like Theros Beyond Death, it felt really messy and complicated and hard to put your fingers on. Except well while people hate Theros for its Uro and Breach, people seems to actually like this Ixalan for not being as tropey as the next sets. Do I see it?
Design lore: The structure of two color pairs and two color trios were first designed to be used for Tarkir, not Ixalan. Ixalan at first was supposed to be a war between the invader and the natives using the mechanic of Mornach in 1v1. But then they realized they could add another faction, then they realized they want to use the Tarkir system so now it’s 4 factions. And that’s how we came to that original Ixalan block, the last one of its kind.
Safe to say, most people like that block more for the creative and especially the Jace + Vraska story than the actual cards themselves. They didn’t have the speed to take on the broken Energy cards of Kaladesh, and the draft format was way too on rails (cough cough Bloomburrow) to compare with Dominaria later on. Eventually, most people just came to Ixalan for the value engine dinosaurs, which honestly is my least faction out of the four. Reasons are too obvious, but here’s to me writing a dedicated hit piece on it. Yes, that probably means I find the colossal dreadmaw about as funny as a core set basic land. Finally, I have a full bonus article putting my views of this color combination into context:
A Slightly Better Written Naya Hit Piece
Also don’t forget that the large set doesn’t have draft signposts for Azorius and Golgari because those two pairs don’t fall into any of the factions. Had this set been more multicolor like to literally cut the set skeletons from Ravnica and Tarkir respectively and put in, it might have been more tolerable. But no, now it just comes off really awkwardly.
When are we finally getting the allied enchantments that turns to a land through?
Fun fact: The map frame on the back of those DFCs were supposed to be for a masterpiece set of tutor cards, whether from the whole deck or just from the top card. Ain’t no way you can really name 54 of them off the top of your head, so would that really be possible? Imagine making a sequel to that now like ZNR did Expeditions again.
Design lore: This set came about because they started with the idea of an underground world. One where you could mine up one of five different gemstones (at one stage they could work like Treasures just monocolor) to craft up different things. They even admit that they were inspired by a certain game where you mine things that children do like, yeah that’s a very complicated way of naming the game now a lot people just play for the PvP mode, lmao.
Eventually they did in fact realize that sounded insane and decide to just to crave in Ixalan for this set. So now instead of mining stuff, you just mill to descend. So instead of spending said gems to craft stuff, you just delve cards to transform DFCs. The verbs includes explore returning from original Ixalan to put on a new artifact token called a Map, original Ixalan did put a precent to making new versions of these things with Treasures after all. The noun of this set are Caves, a land type introduced in the same year as Phyrexian Spheres. Don’t think too much about how much support these things will get, it’s totally just for Limited.
Oh right I also forget the design mistake that is Discover. It’s a mistake because it only really fixes the surface of Cascade’s issues, being that 1. Cascade had to be tied to a spell being cast, now you could discover whenever 2. If you cascaded into a counterspell, suck on you, but with discover you can just draw it. Yeah, that’s all the things discover fixed.
One thing it actually regressed on is the name. You know how original Ixalan had Enrage, a keyword that actually sounded the same as another Hearthstone keyword put in a set that has Dinosaurs. Good thing they worked the same, so I can let it slide. But you know what else Hearthstone had? Something called Discover, the game will generate three random cards and you pick one to draw or something. Alchemy would eventually have a version of that, called Conjure, which is the same name as some PvZ card game’s bad try at that, where they just generate the one card so they don’t let you choose. Oh right, Discover, now MTG copy that word, but now they do this cascadey thing. These two things are so far apart it’s just dumb really.
The actual problem with Discover, as it was with Cascade, is one of: being a paper mechanic, it can only queue in what you physically let it queue in, and when you let it only queue in one thing, it will get that thing every single time.
You probably recognize this dumb combo and probably can imagine in your head how it works. If you don’t know, maybe watch these things work in Arena and put on a timer to see what is even the point.
-3 is the ability to note, then the passive ability
thank you jace
It is alleged that Cascade is supposed to add an element of randomness, chaotic, splashy fun to a game of MTG. You know, adjectives that feel a bit too associated with a certain format that now when spreads outside of that format, just causes harm. These things do just sound cynical alright.
How would I come to actually solve this problem? Well, instead of just hitting the first card and call it the one to cast, I would probably require multiple cards with different names and fit the criteria to be hit, then obviously to keep the randomness the one to be cast has to be the first one. So you know, you either just don’t care or you have backup plans or they could just design the card pools to not hit the critical mass. Sounds not too hard to do in digital, but well the problem is the real world. You might need to flip basically your whole deck, then keep the order of the legal cards nice and tidy, that sounds like a damn lot. But it would keeps something in check.
Did that sounded so dumb no wonder no one thought of it?