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Developer: The Slivers Return

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Warning: This article will focus largely on Magic the Gathering details. So if you don’t care about the game, there might not be much useful information until the end.

During May of last year, I wrote an article discussing the controversy of the new look for Magic the Gathering’s Sliver creatures.  In the end, most of my assumptions had been true: they had a new look because they were from a different world and this distinction needed to be made because the Slivers only affected your cards as opposed to the old Slivers that affected all other Slivers, no matter who controlled them.

Well, a year has passed and the Slivers are returning for one more go in a Magic Core Set, but this time with only a land, a Mythic Rare, and a cycle of 5 uncommons.

New World Order

One of the reasons that the Slivers were changed to only affect your Slivers is because of the Wizards design philosophy known as “The New World Order”; it sets out a few design rules that the game would follow from then on and has been in effect for a while now.  The rule that affects the Slivers is essentially that a card should never have an unintended downside.  Some brief explanations:

  • A card can have a cost, but it should be fairly obvious (losing life, discarding cards, etc.)
  • A card might not be useful now, but that is because it isn’t needed yet (a card to destroy creatures is useless if there are no creatures to destroy, but it will be when one is played).
  • A card might not be useful now because the opponent has card to punish you for it (s/he has a card to destroy it or you will take damage if you play it, etc.)

In the example I used a year ago, I mentioned that Elvish Champion made all elves stronger; if he has any elves, you might lose the game by accidentally giving him/her an unknown advantage.  To prevent this, the NWO stops such cards from being made now.

Personally, I understand (as a designer) why the NWO is a good idea, but I  have nostalgia for the old slivers (if only they were an exception to the rule…) and have thought of many fun card effects that would not be allowed under it.  It is unfortunate, but necessary I suppose.

The 2015 Slivers

I am writing this article because I find myself being less forgiving about the upcoming Slivers – like the 2014 set’s Slivers, they are mostly just old Slivers converted to the NWO format.

For the introduction to these new slivers, it seemed worthwhile – you need a solid base for players to build decks with and the NWO wouldn’t allow the old versions to be reprinted.  But for this year, the set’s main game mechanic isn’t slivers – there are only 7 cards that reference Slivers in the set.  The Slivers of this set should have been designed with more interesting interactions; they are an addition to the previous year’s Slivers and should add some exciting new options for those decks, but instead they have more unimaginative abilities:

  • White gets some temporary removal with each new Sliver (exile a card until that Sliver leaves play) – the most interesting effect, but at a high cost (6 mana)
  • Blue gets some protection from enemy spells –  good, but the old Crystalline Sliver generally works better…
  • Green gets a functional update to Toxin Sliver (although color shifted from Black)
  • Black makes the enemy lose 1 life for each Sliver attacking them – new for Slivers, but not for Black
  • Red gets a functional update of Two-Headed Sliver
  • The mythic 5-color Sliver makes your Slivers indestructible – very powerful, but very bland

In Conclusion

The inclusion of Slivers is suppose to be an exciting event for Magic players, but if they keep making uninspired design choices, it isn’t going to be.  While the previous year’s cards seemed like a necessary first step in light of the New World Order, the lack of interesting abilities on these new Slivers screams out that there are out of ideas for Slivers; just more functional reprints and keywords that are too new for older Slivers.  The new Sliver land is very good for Sliver decks, but otherwise there are no new really impressive cards.

I’m Just saying, the returning mechanic for this Core Set is Convoke – are they really going to pass up the only opportunity they will likely to have to give Slivers Convoke?



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