Top 8 Magic Mechanics that Wizards Should Bring Back

What makes a good mechanic? For any game, including Magic, a good mechanic is one that either encourages players to engage in fun play patterns or mitigates un-fun play patterns. The best mechanics, in addition to this, are easily “grokable;” the can be understood after reading once.

Grokability does not necessarily make a mechanic good, but it makes a good mechanic better. Take hexproof, for example; the mechanic is incredibly easy to understand, and was actually changed from the less grokable shroud, which everyone played as hexproof. But its grokability does not make it any less miserable to play with or against. Recently, on cards such as Dragonlord Ojutai, Nullhide Ferox, and Sphinx of New Prahv, we’ve seen Wizards shift to limited hexproof variants, which are superior to the pure hexproof on Carnage Tyrant and Sphinx of the Final Word.

But why is hexproof bad? While fun is certainly subjective, Magic is at its best when players are able to take game actions they enjoy, and that means interacting with their opponents. Usually, mechanics that limit interaction make the game less fun. I say usually because every once in a while, a card like Lich’s Mastery comes along, which leads to a fun, bizarre play pattern and wouldn’t work if Vivien Reid could just snipe it away.

Now let’s look at the mechanics which do the opposite; they encourage interaction or other positive play patterns and they mitigate some of the feel-bad elements of the game.

8. Morph

Morph is an exciting mechanic in Limited because it leads to unusual gameplay involving bluffing and surprise. But one of its big strengths in Limited is the ability to convert unplayable 6-drops when you’re mana-screwed into 3-mana 2/2’s. And hey, if you ever get out of your mana-screw and your Morph is still around, you get to flip it face up, presumably getting some benefit.

One of the trends in this article is that good mechanics can act as mana sinks, a way to spend your mana in the late game when you’re down on cards and have maybe drawn a few more lands than you would’ve liked. Morph is a good mechanic because it simultaneously acts both as flood and screw insurance. Mitigating the feel-bad parts of the game both early and late make it a nice smoothing mechanic in Limited.

7. Awaken

I know, I know: “Awaken is just Kicker!” Wizards has acknowledged that Kicker was probably too broad a mechanic, and they will be exploring specific subsets of it and calling them new mechanics, and I think that’s great.

Awaken is another great example of a mana sink. Take Scatter to the Winds as an example. In the early game, it’s a Cancel. But in the late game, if you need a blocker or a finisher, Scatter can create a 3/3 out of one of your many, many lands. I’ll always remember fondly the match where my opponent was at 5 life, but I only had two Shambling Vents to deal 4. However, it was so late in the game, I had lots and lots of mana. I cast Crux of Fate, held priority, countered the Crux with Scatter, Awakening a Shambling Vent, then animating it to deal 5 lethal points.

Awaken is a fun cross between a modal spell and a mana sink, it allows for fun plays, and has great interaction with creature-lands.

 6. Flashback

Flashback is card advantage, and who doesn’t love card advantage? However, flashback also provides another role. It mitigates flooding out in the late game if you have mana sinks that you can take advantage of, and spells that you get to cast again in your graveyard certainly count!

Flashback is also fun because it generates an additional axis along which players can interact. If Flashback spells are good enough, players might start considering playing cards that hate on the graveyard. Additionally, Wizards typically prints cards that care about casting spells from the graveyard alongside Flashback, which allows players to go for a more synergistic angle of attack.

 5. Landfall

Landfall is a mechanic that does a wonderful thing; in the lategame, when you’re typically praying to topdeck better spells than your opponent, it makes you happy to draw a land or a spell. With landfall, there are no bad topdecks, substantially mitigating feel-bad mana flood.

But landfall does so much more than that. It rewards you for doing something you should be doing anyways; it takes a mundane part of the game that players don’t generally need to think very much about, and turns it into a part of the strategy. Holding lands, when to play lands, and cracking fetchlands all suddenly take on much greater significance. Wizards can also have a huge variety of payoffs for the mechanic as well; aggro decks can play cards like Steppe Lynx and Plated Geopede, combo decks can play Bloodghast and Lotus Cobra, burn decks get Searing Blaze, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Landfall is a mechanic that can be easily tailored to a large variety of strategies, and mitigates one of the worst elements of the game, making it a real winner every time it returns.

 4. Creaturelands

You might be noticing a trend by now: mechanics that mitigate mana flood by making lands relevant in the late game are strong mechanics. Creaturelands are no different. Drawing them early allows you to hit land drops as usual, but in the late game, drawing them is equivalent to drawing a creature. Something which is a land when you want it early and a creature when you want it late is something that will be valued by any deck. While the first cycle of creaturelands were a bit too good, Wizards seemed to hit the sweet spot with the second cycle. Creature lands also allow you to disguise your instants; are you holding up a Counterspell, a removal spell, or a Celestial Colonnade activation? Creaturelands are a great part of the game, and I always look forward to their return.

 3. Raid

Raid leads to fantastic gameplay. Like Landfall, it rewards you for doing something that you would probably be doing anyways. But also like Landfall, it imbues the action with a strategic significance that you don’t usually have to think about. Because Raid bonuses are sometimes so impactful, players have to make a decision regarding whether they’re willing to make a bad attack and throw away a creature to earn the Raid reward. From the blocking player’s perspective, it also makes things interesting. Is this a bad attack to activate Raid? Is it a combat trick? Is it just a bad attack? The amount of strategic depth that Raid adds to the game by just existing is substantial, but it’s not a complex depth that newer players can’t handle. It also encourages good, fun gameplay, namely, attacking. Games in which things are happening, creatures are attacking, and resources are being exchanged are generally more fun than games where all creatures on board are 2/3’s and nobody can do anything *cough* Collected Company mirrors *cough*.

 2. Cycling

Cycling is a beautiful example of a smoothing mechanic. It lowers the variance of a deck by allowing players to search for the pieces that they want. Flooding out? Cycle your lands. Mana screwed? Cycle your spells. It allows you to do something with your mana both when it’s constrained and when you have too much. Players of all experience levels like it and it leads to more actual games of Magic played. When Amonkhet rotated and we lost our Cyclers, I heard many players lament the degree to which they noticed the difference now that they couldn’t cycle their lands in the lategame. Some players even half-seriously proposed that all lands should have Cycling 3.

Like Flashback, Cycling also tends to have support cards built around it. In fact, we even had a competitive Standard deck built around the mechanic, and it’s not often that a viable Constructed deck is constructed around a keyword. This is just additional upside built on top of all the other benefits that cycling offers.

 1. Investigate

Wizards nailed this mechanic. Delayed card advantage at a cost of 2 is the perfect rate. It’s a fantastic mana sink that allows you to use most of your mana most turns, and, while Tireless Tracker was around, players forgot what it felt like to have fewer than five cards in hand at all times. It even combines the excellent Investigate mechanic and the unnoticed Landfall. Now, to be clear, Tireless Tracker should not be a Green card and was probably a bit too powerful, but the gameplay around Investigate was great. It also incidentally has synergy with artifact-based decks.

There’s so much design space still to explore with Investigate. Reprinting the mechanic alongside something like Improvise, or leaning into sacrificing artifacts, or triggers around artifacts entering the battlefield all allow for interesting possibilities. But all of that is just frosting; fundamentally, Investigate mitigates flood and gives players plenty of cards to work. That is a good thing because when players have more cards, they have more options and more opportunities to interact, and that’s absolutely the hallmark of a good mechanic.

While these are the eight mechanics that I think are among the best for the game, everyone has a secret wishlist for returns! Which mechanics are you looking forward to Wizards bringing back?

Ryan Normandin is a grinder from Boston who has lost at the Pro Tour, in GP & SCG Top 8's, and to 7-year-olds at FNM. Despite being described as "not funny" by his best friend and "the worst Magic player ever" by Twitch chat, he cheerfully decided to blend his lack of talents together to write funny articles about Magic.