Responding to Rosewater Making Magic

I've been looking for a recurring theme to inspire a weekly post.I think I have finally stumbled across something that may work. I would like to introduce a new series I call

"Responding to Rosewater Making Magic". 

My plan is simple, every week we get a new article from Mark Rosewater over on the mothership. I read it regularly and usually the article is pretty interesting. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree, sometimes I learn something, sometimes I gain a new perspective. So without further ado, let's go!

What's the topic for our first ever post? It's Monstrosity Week so we are treated to Building a Better Monster. In the first part of the article Mark rolls out a set of characteristics that are essential for a traditional monster.

• Threatening
• Large
• Lethal
• Hard to Kill
• A Gimmick

For each of these guys he discusses different tools the magic designers have to represent those attributes. Let's focus on one of them in particular, "Hard to Kill".

A monster's offense is important, but so too is its defense. Another key quality to monsters is that they simply don't make it easy for the hero to defeat them. They're threatening, they're large, they're lethal, but they're also very, very tough. The hero never takes down the monster with a single blow. No, the fight is a long and prolonged one because the monster is hard to kill.

Mechanically, this can be done several ways. The simplest is, of course, a high toughness. Sometimes it's through a defensive ability like regeneration. Sometimes a monster grows as the fight progresses. Sometimes you can kill the monster but it comes back. (Undying from Dark Ascension did this trope particularly well.) Another popular trick in this category is resistance to magic, whether by hexproof or protection or by an activated ability that makes dealing damage harder than normal.

The key is that a monster usually takes a number of resources to take down.

Disclaimer: I am a limited player (ctrl+f "nuts & bolts" to get Maro's take on me) and that when I'm talking about game play I'm talk about limited. 

I really appreciate the way monsters influence game play. I now find myself blocking and double or triple blocking quite often. That is something that I never did a few years ago. We always used to say "who blocks?". The monsters by and large are pretty big as laid about above. However that's not the only reason why I'm doing all this blocking.

I think Maro was trying to focus just on the monster cards themselves and not really discuss the design of the set as a whole but I think there was a lot of meat there. Let's dig in.

You see for the monsters to be hard to kill the set needed to leave out a few things which we have come to expect from every set. Chief among them being cheap unconditional removal like Pacifism.

If you take a look through the set you will notice that there is very little in the set in the way of cheap removal and Wrath effects. In order for the design to meet the goal of hard to kill monsters the set had to compensate. The presence of the monsters warps the format (which is not necessarily a bad thing). 

However we have other tools to handle them. I mentioned blocking. One option is to just deploy my own big dude, but another is to build up my little guys. In a world where removal is rare we can afford to suit up our weaker creatures and turn them into something formidable. I don't know about you, but I love that. And so do new players. Young players are all about dropping some sweet enchantments on their guys. With Theros we have a set where their instinct also aligns with a winning strategy! And that is great for everyone.


I wish I had more time to elaborate but that's all for now. Next week it looks like we are going to take a turn down memory lane.