Great Designer Search 2 - Essay 03: Integrating Design With Creative

What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?

Kamigawa block did a great job of integrating design and creative. The set is about The Spirit War between Spirits and Humans (and the various other races in relation to that conflict) with a Japanese fantasy flavor. This works out great in the cards and the mechanics of Spiritcraft, Soulshift, and Splice Into Arcane. Bushido and Ninjitsu were also flavorful mechanics for Samurai and Ninjas and all the Legendary Creatures expand the flavor with their own tales.

The main problem with all of these is how little value they had outside of the block format (limited or constructed). There was a seriously lack of interblock synergy between Kamigawa and the adjacent blocks (Mirridion and Ravnica). Splice Into Arcane is completely meaningless outside Kamigawa since there are no Arcane spells except in that block.

I feel the solution comes from Lorwyn: Tribal. Kamigawa already had a Tribal subtheme. Tribal fixes all the parasitic and isolated flaw of Arcane by allowing it to tie into every set with Spirits. Instead of casting an Arcane spell you are casting a Tribal Sorcery/Instant – Spirit. Soulshift becomes really interesting when you can be returning non-creature spells. Splice Onto A Spirit means your creatures can be packing an extra punch and makes the ability more exciting to newer players. It also means Splice spells are relevant with all the Spirit creatures in Ravnica. Spiritcraft gets the slightly simpler wording of “when you cast a Spirit spell”. This also makes it crystal clear that Arcane spells are Spirit magic, something I can tell you as a casual player at the time was not immediately obvious.