Pattern Recognition #173 - Who Knows What Evil Lurks

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

29 October 2020

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Hello everyone! This is Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series as written by myself, berryjon. I am something of an Old Fogey who has been around the block quite a few times where Magic is concerned, as as such, I use this series to talk about the various aspects of this game, be it deck design, card construction, mechanics chat, in-universe characters and history. Or whatever happens to cross my mind this week. Please, feel free to dissent in the comments below the article, add suggestions or just plain correct me! I am something of a Smart Ass, so I can take it.

Today's subject is not a Hedgehog, nor one of the inspirations for Batman, but rather as a result of me getting feedback on a cEDH deck I'm iterating and developing and one of the people offering feedback was saying that a certain card was very good, but not in theme with the deck. So I told him to shill it anyway, and he pointed me at a certain card that gave me cause to write an article about it because it's really that good.

Which card?

Shadow Rift

So, let's talk Shadow, shall we?

Shadow was a mechanic created for Tempest - the set, not the block, and was the convergence of two independently designed mechanics from Mike Elliot and Richard Garfield, Ph.D.. Elliot was imagining a mechanic to better represent an 'alternate plane of combat' for creatures, where like could only affect like in the battlefield, and Richard Garfield, Ph.D. who was looking at a mechanic that would act as a sort of 'super'-Flying, or alternative to Flying that would act as an evasion ability for attacking creatures.

Where these two mechanics met was on a mechanic that had the working title of [i]Astral[/i], but working through the development of the mechanic, the name changed several times before settling on [i]Shadow[/i]. This came with the understanding that there might be potential confusion with the pre-existing card Nether Shadow, and that wasn't a colour normally associated with shadows in particular.

Shadow is a mechanic that appears on , and cards, with a single instance of a creature. These correspond to the Soltari, Thalakos and Dauthi creature types respectively. Creatures with Shadow may only block or be blocked by a creature that also has the Shadow Keyword.

It's a very simple mechanic, and while that scores points on my end for simplicity's sake, what is does is actually make things harder and more complicated on the battlefield. As a form of alternate-evasion, Shadow does its job well, but it also does its job too well, if you catch my meaning.

Shadow as a mechanic, is very binary in nature. You can either block it or you can't. But compared to Flying, the mechanic most closely associated with it (Horsemanship doesn't count, that's Portal Three Kingdoms, and the set was designed to work only within itself), Flying could be blocked by other fliers, and had a dedicated counter-keyword as well in Reach.

Yes, I know Reach wasn't Keyworded until Time Spiral, but the counter was written into the cards already. was given Wall of Diffusion and got Heartwood Dryad as defensive counters, but one card in each colour wasn't enough.

What this did was make more aggressive decks more focused, making them glass cannons in that they could attack with near impunity, but had to find alternatives to defend themselves with.

I don't think I'm getting my point clearly across here, but there was a definitive line between Shadow and non-Shadow in terms of creatures, and I think that Wizards erred on the side of caution when they put the power and toughness on these cards, as they, with a couple of exceptions, really only had a power of 2 or 1 with equivalent toughness.

Shadow creatures were ... bad, and because two of the three colurs that had them weren't traditional aggro colours, they didn't have the wherewithal to properly support their equivalent to the White Weeny Deck archetype. A deck that ran four Soltari Champion and four Soltari Trooper could easily run rampant over an unprepared enemy, but the problem was that if you were prepared for defending yourself from Shadow creatures, you were running Shadow yourself, and thus couldn't defend yourself from non-Shadow creatures and it just went in circles and on the whole, no one liked it!

Yes, there were outliers. I still have a few Shadow creatures in reserve when I want to be meant, or for Soltari Visionary for the unblockable 2 damage and the free Demystify.

But Shadow was bad, and it should have stayed as a one-off mechanic that was tried, experimented with and failed.

But nooooooooo

Time Spiral couldn't leave well enough alone. It just couldn't let a mechanic from a set that took place on Rath stay in the graveyard. No, it had to include everything, so it included Shadow as a subtheme in the block. Spirit en-Dal was part of a meta-cycle of cards that incorporated two mechanics that would not have appeared together as they were not in the same block (along with Bogardan Lancer, Kavu Primarch and Gathan Raiders). There was also Temporal Isolation, a flavourful method of really isolating a creature and making it a good blocker, but not much else. And there was also Shadow Sliver, because that's what Slivers needed obviously.

But even I have to admit when something good came out of this, and that is Looter il-Kor. This card actually saw serious competitive play in various formats as it was a cheap creature that was effectively unblockable, and more importantly, allowed its controller to Loot their way through their deck a little bit faster.

Let's step back from the mechanics for a moment and examine the flavour of the mechanic of Shadow.

In Tempest, Shadow was a thing. It was... just there, unexplained, and unexplainable, something that the Soltari and others used to help evade Volrath and the Rathi Phyrexians.

Come Invasion though, and more importantly, the aftereffects seen in Time Spiral, we finally got a proper definition of what the state of 'Shadow' was. You see, it was explained then that when the Rathi overlay happened during the Invasion, the motion of Rath from its own dimensional space into Dominari wasn't perfect. There were currents, eddies, and more importantly, pockets that happened where Rath and Dominaria didn't fit together.

These extra-spacial pockets, such as the one that formed around the City of Traitors under the Stronghold, were trapped in a shadow existence between real and unreal, being able to partly affect and be affected by the real world.

These unfortunate groups, mostly natives of Rath (for a given definition of native), now survive on Dominaria, appearing even in the lore for Dominaria itself, though naturally they didn't see any cards as it was a mechanic no one wanted to see again.

That's really it. I mean, it was a small mechanic that didn't make much of an impact except to kill off the idea of alternate evasion mechanics, leaving us with Flying, and cards that are strictly or conditionally unblockable, such as Tidal Kraken or the various Landwalks (which is a thing I should talk about), or Bouncing Beebles or Tome Anima. Making one-off mechanics to do this is a tool that Wizards tried out, and found wanting, so it will never be seen again.

It's the lack of interactivity that killed it, words of Mark Rosewater, and honestly, this is a conclusion that I can totally agree with. It has even bounced between 7 and 9 on the Storm scale, showing how much effort it would take to get it reprinted.

But hey, we got Phasing in a Standard set, so anything is possible, right?

I apologize for the short article, but honestly, I didn't find the subject too interesting and what I wanted to cover, I covered over a short period of time.

Join me next time when I... you know what, let's talk about the one Planeswalker that blew Urza completely out of the water, but kept getting shafted by Wizards.

You know who I'm talking about, don't you?

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!