#block design

Hitman 2 - Police Station - Blocking level Prototype

Block Design, Incidence and Concurrence Matrix

Block Designs Properties

The necessary conditions that the parameters of a BIB design must satisfy are

$bk = vr$, where $r=\frac{bk}{v}$ each treatment has $r$ replications

no treatment appears more than once in any block

all unordered pairs of treatments appear exactly in $\lambda$ blocks (equiconcurrence) where $\lambda=\frac{r(k-1)}{v-1}=\frac{bk(k-1}{v(v-1)}$ is often referred to as the…

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Part of Magic design is tweaking individual cards. Should this White combat trick grant lifelink or first strike? Should this Green creature be a 5/5 or a 6/6? Should this counterspell cost 2UU or 3UU? If you’ve ever designed your own custom cards, these are the things that dominated your thoughts.

But Magic is bigger than a collection of individual card designs. Cards exist in context, filling out a whole set of related cards. Sets exist in context, being part of a block of two (previously three) sets. But Magic is even bigger than blocks. Many people may not have noticed, but all blocks have synergy with adjacent blocks. Under the two-block paradigm and rotation cycle, all blocks will have synergies with the previous and next two blocks. Today I want to go over how and why interblock synergy is such a key part of design.

Point A to Point B

Herald of Kozilek by Johannes Voss

Before I delve into the ideas behind interblock synergy, let me take a moment to demonstrate that it exists. Explaining why it happens is easier when you have some examples to work with.

So let’s start with the Khans of Tarkir block. The block’s time in Standard was shared with the Theros block and now the Battle for Zendikar block. That means that Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged, and Dragons of Tarkir would have to contain cards and mechanics that played well with both of these adjacent blocks.

The connection between Khans block and Battle block is easiest to recognize: colorlessness. People who criticized devoid for being a parasitic mechanic only have to look back one block to see that it’s actually part of a huge theme throughout Magic’s history. After all, morph spells and face-down creatures are colorless too. Take Herald of Kozilek as an example of how this design process works. Sure, it helps out the devoid (read as: Eldrazi) spells in Battle for Zendikar, but it also lets you cast Khans-block morph spells for (2) instead of (3). Even further, colorlessness matters to the Blue/Red artifact subtheme in Magic Origins. “Colorlessness” is a theme that has stretched across six sets (including the looming Oath of the Gatewatch).

Now let’s look back. What themes from Theros block did Khans block pick up on? While it was never a top-tier deck, WU Heroic was a powerful deck that utilized both the heroic creatures from Theros and the prowess creatures from Khans. Theros’s Black/Green self-milling cards also played well with the Sultai clan’s delve mechanic. The ten-card cycle of Temples helped support Khans’s strong wedge theme (and also Return to Ravnica’s guild theme before it!)

When you examine sets a little closer, you start to recognize interweaving patterns that link set to set, block to block.

Constructing Standard

Temple of Plenty by Noah Bradley

Blocks didn’t used to have these kinds of relationships with each other. A great example of this disconnect can be seen in the days of Odyssey block and Onslaught block Standard. Onslaught block carried a tribal theme focusing on Soldiers, Wizards, Zombies, Goblins, Elves, Beasts, Birds, Clerics, Slivers, and Dragons. This fit perfectly with Odyssey block’s creative direction, which supported Birds, Cephalids, Horrors, Dwarves, Centaurs, and Insec…now wait just one moment. Those don’t line up at all. And what happened to all the graveyard-matters cards from Odyssey block? When it came to building decks from this era of Standard, you pretty much had to stick to one block or the other.

The same problem repeated itself when Mirrodin’s artifact theme supplanted the tribal theme. You were either Goblins or Affinity, and few cards met between those archetypes. Even worse, the mighty Goblin Piledriver couldn’t even help Goblins be a better deck than Affinity, which was slammed with about a billion bans in a format that almost never bans cards.

That’s a consistency problem when the new cards, and thus decks, just edge out the old ones. It also makes the format easier to solve, as each deck is generally built from a smaller pool of cards. The point of Standard including multiple blocks is to present players with a diverse card pool to build decks from, not silo incompatible mechanics block-by-block.

Really, this is just one extreme at the end of a continuum. You could also have the same decks appear in every Standard, the individual cards in each set barely affecting archetypes. Obviously, R&D tries to hit somewhere in the middle. Each block has new mechanics that will spawn new decks, but they will also help support the existing decks.

Let’s look at the current Standard and see how rotation and seeded mechanics has helped craft the environment. Before Battle for Zendikar, Abzan Midrange, Atarka Red, Red/Green Dragons, and Esper Control were some of the top decks in the format. Theros block rotating changed each of these decks in different ways. Abzan Midrange lost Elspeth, Sun’s Champion; Atarka Red lost Lightning Strike; Red/Green Dragons lost Elvish Mystic and Xenagos, the Reveler; Esper Control lost Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver. Other key cards left the format, such as Hero’s Downfall.

What happened when Battle for Zendikar was released? Some decks fell apart. Red/Green Dragons couldn’t ramp as quickly or efficiently as before. The deck basically died. Abzan lost its best late-game inevitability, and thus has shifted more towards aggro than control. Esper Control has adapted with different win conditions. Atarka Red now plays more like a combo deck. Many of these decks are still mostly intact, but play differently. This provides novelty and familiarity.

But look at Standard right now. It isn’t just made up of decks that survived rotation. Jeskai saw limited success a year ago, but new life has been breathed into it as Dark Jeskai. Eldrazi Ramp took the concept of Red/Green Dragons, turned it up to eleven, and focused its ramping on lands rather than mana dorks (largely hinging on Explosive Vegetation, a card that already existed in Standard). Gideon, Ally of Zendikar has warped White decks around him, filling the void that Elspeth left. Outside of the highest levels of tournament Magic, ingest decks and Ally decks populate FNM tables. New cards support strategies that never quite made it before while also pioneering new territory. Novelty and familiarity.

Keeping Standard fresh isn’t just about creating new decks. It’s also about reinvigorating forgotten archetypes and paying off on cues from earlier sets.

Game of Knowns

Uncovered Clues by Jaime Jones

If there’s one thing the Magic community is proud of, it’s that we’re pretty clever. One of the major ways we intellectually engage with Magic is through speculation. A meta-game develops around Magic where we’re always digging for clues and trying to figure out what’s sitting right over the horizon. This is the kind of curiosity that gave birth to Kruphix on Theros, and it lives within every one of us.

Few enjoy speculation more than Vorthoses, always looking for esoteric clues in legends past that will help them accurately predict where Magic’s story is going. But Mels have their fun too, and interblock synergy is their playground.

While even I have been speculating about Shadow over Innistrad’s story, knowing that every block shares some mechanical space with the next block provides a totally different way for players to engage the meatiness of Magic. There are mechanical clues in Battle for Zendikar that point to what kind of block Shadows over Innistrad will be. It’s impossible to discern what all of them are right now, but we’ll look back in April and realize that the signals were there the entire time.

Symbiotic Design

What we’re doing when we try to weave together mechanical threads is uncovering work that took R&D years to put together. Each block is designed to positively support mechanical themes in adjacent blocks. Some payoffs are immediate. Others won’t be revealed until a few sets later. This helps keep Standard complex enough for us clever players to enjoy by hiding complexity in plain sight. The next time you have a “Duh!” moment for not noticing a sweet card interaction from across blocks, thank R&D for laying the groundwork of your discovery.