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Excellent article, thanks!

Last week I made a post that was perhaps a shade unfairly critical of current multiplayer design. R&D are doing a good job, by and large, of providing the tools we want. The cards I see as problems (the huge, splashy effects that dominate games with no additional work and requiring no particular building-around to operate) are generally high-profile and noticeable, and that overshadows a lot of the things we are getting.

Now, that's not to say that everything else is great; we get some hits and some misses. Innistrad's graveyard theme was always going to provide some solid cards, and provided a good number of really interesting build-around-me cards across rarities. Dark Ascension, though, was outstandingly weak, with barely anything worth mentioning. But Avacyn Restored is alright (a few quality cards, although none of the mechanics or themes really shine), so it's a good showing overall.

So, what do we want? Well I can't speak for the rest of them, but a lot that I like is actually on the increase, so I'll highlight the good work:

1) Graveyard disruption tied to useful effects. While I wouldn't like to see this pushed any further than it has been with Scavenging Ooze and Cemetery Reaper , I'm glad that graveyard removal is something we don't have to be forced to remove. I don't want some super-efficient hoser that fits snugly into every deck, but I'm happy to see that graveyard-based decks are more and more likely to find their strategy facing disruption in the way a deck based around keeping permanents in play does. I don't want a strong and interesting strategy hosed, but it's nice for there to be more interaction.

2) The same, for lands. We're not seeing so much of that, and of course land destruction isn't something we want in every deck. But it'd be nice if the player with Cabal Coffers had to expect to protect them. I think the answer is the type of versatile-but-weak spells mentioned in the article. I usually think of Wrecking Ball , but they're typically of the Green 'destroy a noncreature permanent' type now. I like these because they're generally focused on one of the more usual threats, but owners of troublesome lands don't get a free reign.

3) More ways of extracting value from small spells. This is a difficult one. I like little effects like Cloudshift and Lightning Bolt , and I always think it's a shame they're not worth a deck slot. There are cards that can be used to build with them, but I wish they could work without being paired with something as obvious as Isochron Scpeter . The Restoration Angel technique of attaching it to a creature is a tolerable middle ground, but a bit predictable. I guess printing these effects with a fairly-narrow repetition clause in the vein of Thunderblade Charge is as good as solution as is really going to work, and that's fine. And we're getting a few more ways of bringing noncreatures back from the graveyard, so that's a positive step. Of course it's necessary to avoid too much of a good thing; if something is pushed too hard, the challenge goes. Which, I suppose, leads to:

4) Broader focus in set themes. Or, really, less parasitism. It's especially noticeable with tribal blocks, of course, but I personally don't much enjoy building decks within a single set. I like cards that have a lot of potential interactions, which I can combine with many different things. I'm a sucker for recursion and ETB effects, because there's a whole bunch of things one can do with something like Deadeye Navigator . For me, versatility is the game, and often a set's 'on-theme' cards will be so tightly tied to their purpose that they can't really do anything outside their prescribed deck. I especially liked the GUB self-milling draft deck from Innistrad. I don't doubt it was as carefully-designed as any other draft archetype, but I love the nonobviousness and complexity and hate to see sets full of 'play this with X'. Even when X is something with a lot of history like Humans, it feels like low-hanging fruit. Innistrad was a good set, combining the narrow tribal themes which are apparently popular with non-me people with a more broadly applicable graveyard theme. There was a good deal of stuff on both sides of the fence, and that's what I'd like to see continuing.

The main thing I tend to feel is missing from multiplayer development is recognition of cards which harm these sorts of games. You mention the possibility of types of card which you should do less often, but some cards like Beacon of Immortality , Sway of the Stars , Shared Fate , Mist of Stagnation , Eye of the Storm , Iona, Shield of Emeria , Karn Liberated , Primal Surge etc. do harm even if printed only once, because that's the number of printings it takes for someone to decide it's OK to play them and then accidentally wreck a game.

In competitive formats the natural tendency is to balance a card by adding mana if its effect is too good. But in casual multiplayer games, "too good" isn't really an issue. The problem is "too boring", which is something no amount of extra mana can fix.

Note also that house rules banning particular cards are no use. Fine for your cozy little playing group with half a dozen good friends, but for those of us who play on MtGO it's not a solution.

Jun 1, 2012 -- 2:55AM, alextfish wrote:

Shared Fate and Eye of the Storm turn a game on its head, sure, but there's a place for those effects; they don't "wreck" it. I enjoyed playing multiplayed against my friend's Shared Fate deck.

Well... good!

My experience of Shared Fate has been - like many of the other cards in the list - that it can cause incredibly long games in which one or more players are largely locked out from doing anything relevant.

Jun 1, 2012 -- 2:55AM, alextfish wrote:

Primal Surge also doesn't look like a "wreck the game" card. It will often be "I win now", sure, but you get that for 10 mana; you get it for 8, in fact, on Insurrection .

That's exactly the distinction I'm trying to make: Insurrection can insta-kill one player, but that's fine because it leaves you down a card in general. Primal Surge insta-kills the entire table. All the plays made before it resolves become completely irrelevant. Obviously different players will feel differently, but for me that's a wrecked game.

Jun 1, 2012 -- 2:55AM, alextfish wrote:

(You say "harm even if printed only once", but there is a natural trend to play with the more recent cards; Mist of Stagnation isn't even Modern-legal.)

Yes, to be fair I agree that Mist is no longer relevant. My list was off the top of my head and that was one of the cards which first caused me to notice this problem many years ago.

Few groups play casual multiplayer in an environment as small as Standard, though. As such a lot of harm can be caused even by as little as one card every two years.

Great to see a multiplayer-centric article!
What would I like to see in my beloved format?
As stated in the article, multiplayer games have a natural tendency to sink back into "sit-around-and-wait-for-someone-to-blink" territory. So seeing multiplayer-centred cards that work against this would be fantastic, especially cards that reward people for swinging.
To this end, Druids' Repository is a card that intrigues me - it rewards swinging, and ramps your mana to boot. Printing more cards like this would greatly advantage the "go-hard-or-go-home" style of multiplayer game that I'd love to see played more routinely (and I suspect so would most of the other guys in my playgroup).