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Apparently R&D's definition of a threshold mechanic is so broad as to be essentially meaningless.  I maintain that the definition should apply only to mechanics with exactly two states.  I'll buy that Kird Ape qualifies but all of the subsequent examples are things that shouldn't qualify.  My definition would be that a threshold card should have a state that is an on/off switch defined by the board state - Halcyon Glaze ends itself at a predetermined time, so it is something other than threshold.  Meanwhile Warlord, Maro and Priestess are all "counting" cards; they don't need to also be lumped in under threshold.  A narrow definition is best in this case.

As usual I think Maro is vastly overstating the difficulty of tracking multiple levels of a threshold, and it irritates me to know that they straight-jacketed the design as much as they did, especially given how boring most of the metalcraft cards ended up being.  Overall I have come to regard metalcraft as a bad mechanic; it pointlessly attaches a condition to things that you want to have happen, just so they can be costed more aggressively, reading to blowout games when you're successful in meeting the condition and miserable failures when you aren't.  Dull, random, and bad.

"There is no reason to open up future design space we won't use" - tsk tsk, MaRo.  Throwing away perfectly good design space forever, just to get the game to play a little better now?  The design team for Magic 2079 will hate you for this.

Getting three artifacts out is absurdly easy if you build your deck right.  As long as the metalcraft cards aren't things like Fog and Llanowar Elves that you must have in the early game, and as long as there isn't much of Shatterstorm going around, you should have no trouble at all meeting metalcraft four games out of five.  Which only further reinforces the stupid borkenness of cards like Carapace Forger and Auriok Sunchaser.  It's not that they might hit for 3-4 on turn 3, it's that they will virtually always be that large when  you play both of them at once on turn 4 and then bash for 7.

Scars of Mirrodin is linear?  Other than infect, I wouldn't have said so.  Proliferate is vastly open-ended, equipment lets one creature play many roles, artifacts by their nature can go in any deck of any color, and metalcraft can use any artifacts.  If it's the most linear set since Lorwyn (and I'm not sure that's true, Alara was pretty linear too with its shard themes), that's only because you've done a pretty good job of avoiding excess linearity in most of the recent sets.  Zendikar's Allies and Vampires and Landfall were fairly narrow, but it felt to me like there was a fair bit of room left; ROE as well had some decent flexibility.  So overall I think you just plain told an untruth here.  Infect aside, SOM seems pretty modular.

Overall, a rather disappointing column.

And finally, next week we get some answers about that stupid test.  Were its questions fuzzily-worded on purpose to weed out all but the designers that think exactly like MaRo, or was it just written poorly?  I'm eager to know.

I thought this was a great column. "Surely," I thought, "this will demonstrate to the naysayers that they really did think hard about these types of decisions and the decisions they made were in fact correct for the overall health of the game." Apparently not.

I did think it got a little silly, how wildly threshold could vary. But you need a name for the mechanics that are similar to Threshold but aren't, and treating the whole thing as a sliding spectrum makes more sense than excluding things with only two states. (Although I can't think of any real examples of a card with more than two states)

I don't know that I'd consider Mirrodin all that linear compared to other recent sets. It's a bit more linear than Zendikar (artifacts = not as common as lands), but it's significantly less linear than Lorwyn, which was only a few years ago. 

Oct 17, 2010 -- 10:15PM, Louisschiffer wrote:

And what gain is there? terribly little, the difference between four and three artifacts isn't terribly much, and once you start going to five and six you start making cards that are just terrible in 90% of the games they appear in as sort of shattering will make sure they never activate fast enough to be above curve.

Quick example of a card that they aren't making because of this rule:

Floating Fortress
Artifact Creature - Wall, 3, 2/8
Flying, defender.
Metalcraft 6 - As long as you control six or more artifacts, Floating Fortress gets +8/+2 and loses defender.

10 power is a very important number since it ends the game in two hits (or one if you give it infect).  Therefore, simply powering this card down until it's balanced with Metalcraft 3 (which would utterly break it) makes it dramatically less viable than in its current state.  This card offers a strong possibility of an instant win when you get five other artifacts out, making it possible for you to create a lot of tension by sitting with four out and leaving your opponent to wonder, do you have two Scale of Chiss-Goria in your hand?  Does he need to Revoke Existence now, when it might leave him without a kill spell for one of your later guys?  Obviously this example is a little out-there, but I'm sure that you'd find it possible to do a lot of design work at Metalcraft 6 that just plain doesn't work at 3.

Besides if Magic 2079 really cares that much they can always go back and change it. Nothing is ever set in stone with magic. Keep things simple today and if tomorrow needs more variations they just rewrite the rule.

Resulting in old cards that don't do what they say and are hard to use around new players because of that.  This should be avoided whenever possible.  Making it "Metalcraft 3" today, even if they never printed any other metalcraft numbers ever again, would have left the door open just in case, and at absolutely no cost to the present.  The number does not make it any harder to figure out, because it's just repeating what's in the text.  And replacing "three" with two instances of "3" (so they matched, and making comprehension for non-English natives easier as a side benefit) would not take any more space on the card.

It was ALL-upside.  There is no excuse for their not doing it.  None.

Oct 17, 2010 -- 9:44PM, willpell wrote:

Not linear? Proliferate is linear! It says "play me with cards that have counters!".

That's "modular".  There are lots of cards that use counters in lots of different ways, therefore proliferate has lots of potential uses.  If Proliferate isn't modular, nothing is.

A truly modular mechanic is rebound from ROE. It makes no demands of the rest of the deck. Or clash... from Lorwyn.

Clash is linear because it demands that you engineer your deck to be as commonly able to win the clash as possible.  You need lots of high-CMC cards to win clashes frequently; you need library manipulation to win them regularly.  Not to mention the cards that triggered off clashing; those were insanely linear, on top of the linearity of needing to be able to rig the clash if it was to be winnable.

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WTH?

Oct 17, 2010 -- 11:19PM, Qmark wrote:

Oct 17, 2010 -- 11:08PM, willpell wrote:

Quick example of a card that they aren't making because of this rule:

Floating Fortress
Artifact Creature - Wall, 3, 2/8
Flying, defender.
Metalcraft 6 - As long as you control six or more artifacts, Floating Fortress gets +8/+2 and loses defender.

Watch this:

Floating Fortress
Artifact Creature - Wall, 3, 2/8
Flying, defender.
As long as you control six or more artifacts, Floating Fortress gets +8/+2 and loses defender.

So, if they printed this alone (let alone others), why should players have to talk about "all the Metalcraft cards plus Flying Fortress" when they could just talk about "all the Metalcraft cards"?  And if they wanted to exclude Flying Fortress, they could just say "all the Metalcraft 3 cards".

R&D never lets brain freeze-inducing sets out the door. (I'm sure there are those that would argue on this point.)

Really, what about Scourge ?