How does soulbond work in magic

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To clear up some confusion and make sure players understand the two new mechanics in Avacyn Restored , here are the relevant sections from the as-yet-unreleased FAQ for the set. When you reveal this card this way, you may cast it by paying [cost] rather than its mana cost. Any ability that triggers whenever you draw a card, for example, will trigger. If you don't cast the card using its miracle ability, it will remain in your hand.

If you don't want to cast it at that time or you can't cast it, perhaps because there are no legal targets available , you won't be able to cast it later for the miracle cost. Ignore any timing restrictions based on the card's type. For example, if you haven't drawn any cards yet during a turn and cast a spell that instructs you to draw three cards, you'll draw them one at a time. Only the first card drawn this way may be revealed and cast using its miracle ability.

Cards you draw for your opening hand can't be cast using miracle. The simplicity of each soulbond creature turning on and granting abilities short circuited when players had to start remembering which abilities were shared and which ones weren't. In the end, we decided that we had to suck it up that the cards didn't look powerful at first glance. All Magic sets do some of this. We figured we would write articles to help players get how soulbond worked.

We also decided that having no soulbond Angel was a price to pay to keep the mechanic as easy to grok as possible. We already knew the mechanic was a little complex and would later get more complex in development , so if giving up an Angel helped lessen this problem, it was a price we had to pay. Having finally solved how the cards were going to work or so we thought we started down the next problem to solve.

How were we going to use soulbond to help create color identity? One of the functions of mechanics in a set is to separate how the different colors play. Part of what makes Magic fun is that each color has its own philosophy and play style.

This allows players to explore, because each color will give you access to a different facet of the set. Diregraf Escort Art by Ryan Pancoast. Often, we solve this by only putting mechanics in certain colors. Sometimes, though, the flavor demands the mechanic show up in more colors, which means the definition is not limited by what color gets the mechanic but by how it's used by those colors. Here are some of the major tools design gets to use to help focus a mechanic in a certain color or colors:.

The biggest two tools to affect as-fan are number and rarity. If you want to increase as-fan, you either put more of that type of card in the set or you put more of that type of card at common. Often you do both. For soulbond, the number one color to get an increase of as-fan was green, with blue coming in second.

What this meant was that we simply had more soulbond cards in green and blue and they also appeared at a lower rarity. If you want players to connect a particular color to a particular mechanic, another way to do this is with power level. Players remember the cards they play with. If the mechanic's best cards are in a certain color, that means players will get used to seeing that color with that mechanic.

In Avacyn Restored , that meant we wanted to put the power level of soulbond with primary in green and secondary in blue.

The simplest way to do this is straight-forward: make sure some of your best cards with the mechanic are in your primary color. Another one of the tricks to help green is that we saved one of the most potent parts of soulbond solely for green—power and toughness pumping.

The reason this is so good is that most abilities don't stack. If, for example, you have a soulbond creature that grants vigilance, that creature is weaker if it pairs with another copy of itself because having vigilance twice doesn't do anything. Power and toughness pumping, on the other hand, does stack, allowing good synergy when the creature is paired with itself. The final trick to help cement a creature as the primary color is to give it things that play well with the mechanic.

Sometimes this is finding natural parts of the game that interact well. Other times, its designing cards that are made such that they would be bad normally but very good with the mechanic. This allows the player drafting a soulbond deck to get copies of these cards because nobody else wants them. Flowering Lumberknot is a good example of a card like this. So that's how we made green the soulbond color. Why did we choose green, though?

As I explained during Avacyn Restored preview weeks, everything in the set gravitated toward white. As such, the design team worked hard to steer things to other colors whenever possible. Soulbond was all about cooperation and teamwork. Two colors in Magic are about the value of the group over the individual: white and green the two enemies of black, the color of putting the needs of the individual first.

If we couldn't use white, green was the next logical choice. Another quick aside—in early playtests, every color was boosting power and toughness, but we found it was just too good in large numbers so we cut it down to just a few cards all in one color. If I'm telling the design story, it ends here. We figured out how we wanted soulbond to work. We chose the colors we wanted soulbond to lean toward. The cards were playing well and we handed over the file. Remember in this version, soulbond creatures only paired when they entered the battlefield.

So what happened? Keyword Actions. Backbone Conjure Perpetually Seek Unstoppable. Ante Divvy Rhystic. Bury Landhome Substance. List of obsolete terminology List of deprecated mechanics List of silver-bordered mechanics List of unreleased mechanics Storm Scale. Cancel Save. Universal Conquest Wiki. Triggered 1st ability Triggered 2nd ability. Innistrad: Crimson Vow Commander Decks. Soulbond You may pair this creature with another unpaired creature when either enters the battlefield.

Ability Words. See also List of obsolete terminology List of deprecated mechanics List of silver-bordered mechanics List of unreleased mechanics Storm Scale.