Pattern Recognition #268 - A Token of my Appreciation

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

26 January 2023

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

Sorry, I know I implied things last week, but they didn't come to fruition this week, so you're getting a slightly different subject. A while ago, I talked about Counters and Counters, and spread out that joke over two articles. But the thing about Counters - as in modifiers to permanents is that they tend to be vertical in nature. Counters used in the context, and not as a Counterspell add to ability or scale of a pre-existing card. The best way to look at this is to look at the case of +1/+1 counters for creatures, and Loyalty counters for Planeswalkers. In these cases, the more you have, the better and more powerful the respective cards are, but outside of loyalty limits for Planeswalkers, having more or less doesn't functionally change the function of the card. Just the scale at what it works at.

But this article isn't about going vertical. It's about going horizontal.

Tokens are something that I think are a unique mechanic to Magic. A Token is a virtual permanent, a placeholder for a definition of a permanent that doesn't have an actual card on the battlefield. And Tokens have existed all the way from Alpha, so they have been baked into the game from the get-go, and that has affected the whole of the game since then.

OK, so I need to be a bit more accurate here. Let's go back to the first major card that made Tokens, and see what is has to say about them;

Yes, that's the Limited Edition Alpha printing. You may pick your jaw up off the floor now for all the things that are assumes in the modern rules and needed to be spelled out here. A Token is a physical presence on the board that is not one of the cards in your deck. It is not a modifier to another card, but a distinct and separate existence that has its own permanence. It has its own definitions, such as type and subtype (if relevant), rules text and power/toughness (again, if relevant). You can have Tokens that are Creatures, Artifacts, Enchantments, Lands and even Planeswalkers. You can't have Token Instants or Sorceries though, as while you can copy them or have copies on the stack, as they resolve, they go to the graveyard, where they cease to exist.

So yeah, there are a few rules about Tokens I should cover as well. First, Tokens are not cards in your deck. They are created by sources external to them (though tokens can create other tokens, a token cannot create itself), and can only exist on the battlefield. Tokens cannot exist in the hand, the library, the graveyard or in Exile - something that has caused problems as until a couple years ago, flickering tokens was the same as destroying them - a token in exile ceased to exist, so there was nothing to return to the battlefield from Exile. It's one of the reasons that Phasing has seen a comeback as it allows Tokens to 'leave' the Battlefield without actually changing zones, so they stay and can come back when the effect ends.

A Token in existence is treated in all ways as a card of the type it is portraying, with the exception of having a qualifier of being a Token. The quality of being a token or not is something that a lot of cards and effects check for, and for this example, I will look at Farid, Enterprising Salvager.

Farid is a fairly recent card that cares about Tokens both as they are and as they are not. His first, static, ability cares when a non-token artifact foes to the Graveyard. Now, by the rules, a token can go to the graveyard - it's what makes Marionette Master so deadly in a Treasure deck - but it ceases to exist when it changes zones. So first, Farid needs something actually concrete, metaphorically speaking, to enter the graveyard in order for him to create the token that is the scrap that they got from the artifact going away.

Second, Farid's activated ability doesn't actually care about the token-ness of the artifact being sacrificed. Just that an artifact is being sacrificed, and wouldn't you know it, that Scrap token is just sitting right there, ripe for the saccing. It just works!

In addition, some cards see token-ness as a positive, such as with Hour of Reckoning, a card that I can tell you from experience is very fun to run. If I swing into Cat Tokens with my Slow Grow deck, you can be sure this card is going in as mass removal, leaving my army of kitties behind to start beating people up. I like this plan!

But where am I going with all this? Well, as I said earlier, Tokens as Magic expresses them, are something unique to Magic as far as I can tell - and if I am wrong, please say so in the comments below! Unlike every other game I can think of, tokens in Magic break parity. Now this is a fairly advanced concept to stick with me here. The phrase I'm borrowing here - Parity isn't really what I want to get across, but the core word is correct. In science, Parity is a descriptor of symmetry, where positive and negative have the same values, save for their negativity or not.

In the way that I am describing, Parity represents an equivalency in terms of cards used and the resulting permanents on the board. You cast a creature, like Serra Angel, you get that creature. You cast an Enchantment, well, there it is. You play a land, or an artifact, or a Planeswalker, and the pairity of card in hand or wherever it came from is the same as the card on the battlefield. Many recursion spells (though not all), also operate on a 1:1 ratio. One card in, one card out.

Tokens, with only a few exceptions, don't do this. You always effectively gain more than what you put into it whenever you have a token maker in play or being cast. Goblin Wizardry is a fun little card that I think deserves more love, and all it does is make two 1/1 Goblin Tokens with Prowess (you know, from last week?). But if all I did was start listing cards that made tokens, I would be here all day. And cards that make Tokens don't have to be Instants or Sorceries, they can be two-for-ones in terms of creatures on board when measured against the cards used. Resolute Reinforcements is a Standard legal card seeing a lot of use in and Soldiers, and it makes a token in addition to itself when it enters the battlefield. Two for One in a more positive manner, rather than the 2F1 problem of Auras.

This ability to make your presence on the battlefield much larger than the cards you put into them is something that Magic is designed around; I would go far as to say that it is one of the unsung and hidden pillars of the game.

Of course, not all colours treat tokens as equals, which is only natural given the nature of the game and the colour pie. The Least of these is . Now, while this colour can and does make tokens arbitrarily thanks to cards like Talrand, Sky Summoner, they tend to be as a consequence of other actions, and not as the intended result.

But where really shines with its token making isn't in the making of tokens in of themselves as some predefined creature like a 1/1 or 2/2 Bird. No, makes token copies of prexisting cards as part of their slice of the pie that deals with mimicry and replications. In fact, Rite of Replication shows this off, as when you cast it, you make a single a single token that is a copy of any creature on the board. If you kick is, make 5 copies instead - watch out for the Legend Rule! Now, when you have Clone effects in the game, and again, this is something that excels at, you can sort of get away (not always) with using the card you used to make the clone as a representation of that clone, but for this sort of thing? Copying multiple times? You need tokens for that.

Next up, . Unlike the previous colour, actually has a very solid token generation scheme - as long as all you want out of it is a 2/2 Zombie. Yes, they can make other tokens, like the occasional 1/1 Bat with Flying, or various stripes of Vampires, but at the end of the day, if you're in , you'll get Zombies, either by accident or design. In this, we get cards like Doomed Dissenter, our first replacement Zombie maker, where you get a Token when a card leaves the battlefield - an excellent way to discourage removal. But we also get arbitrary token makers - that is, a card that just makes tokens, and does nothing else. doesn't really do this, so Endless Ranks of the Dead isn't something that you would find in that colour. But also likes tokens for another reason - the represent a solid, dependable, and in the end, renewable resource for sacrifice. After all, one zombie is as good as another when it comes to making it go away for your power. Something that has been a core concept of the colour since the introduction of the Thrull token from Antiquities.

Moving on though, it's really hard to say who is third, as the top three are all very close to each other, and Token generation is the point where synergize to extreme effect. In the end, I have to pick as the middle-ground, though it is only middle by definition of the Median and not the Mean. Here, much like , 's token generation is defined mostly by a single creature type, that being the 1/1 Goblin. This is perhaps the most commonly generated token in the game over the course of the history of the game, mostly because it has been a constant thing with one or two cards in each set making more Goblins. And more Goblins. And more Goblin Warrens. But will also, more rarely, crack out 4/4 Dragons with Flying. This is mostly done at the rare level or the Mythic as while doesn't get flying naturally, it does get them for Dragons, and long ago Wizards decided that there was a minimum power-and-toughness for a creature to be a Dragon and not a Drake.

After this, the difference between the top two comes down not to the tokens themselves, but to how they treat them. gets the nod for second place thanks to their wide and deep reservoir of tokens, from the Standard issue (heh) 1/1 Soldier tokens, all the way through to 2/2 Cats (with or without Lifelink) and finally to 4/4 Angels with Flying and sometime Vigilance. Though Intangible Virtue will fix that right up. is capable of making a lot of tokens when it wants to, and among them is the first real point where the colour has a built-in capacity to change what token is being made away from the default version. Divine Visitation converts any creature tokens you make into 4/4 Angels with Flying and Vigilance. Which isn't a problem at all. In addition, as I mentioned without really drawing attention it, is also the first colour to really look at boosting their Tokens as more than just an extension of other creatures, getting their own lord effects, as well as Hour of Reckoning mentioned earlier as a case where Tokens are a protected class.

But is the real winner where Tokens are concerned. From the massive number of options they can make, from 1/1 Saprolings to 3/3 Elephants to even bigger creatures, and they can make them in massive amounts. But where really shines in terms of Tokens comes from the sheen numbers they can put out. For you see, is the colour of Parallel Lives, of the extremely powerful Doubling Season, Chatterfang, Squirrel General, or Primal Vigor. When starts making tokens, it doesn't stop or slow down at all. Heck, will gladly just spit out tokens at regular, from the not-legal at all Generated Horizons, which introduced Land Tokens that would later be brought into the full game with Awaken the Woods, to Master of the Wild Hunt or the more humorous Nut Collector. Tokens just come naturally to , which should come as no surprise given everything I've just said.

In the end though, Tokens are a fundamental part of the game, something that we really can't do without at this point. The ability to get more than what you pay for something in terms of a board presence is so much of a requirement at this point, that Wizards has problems with too many of a good thing in people's decks. Just look at the sheer proliferation of Treasure tokens in the game since their introduction in Ixalan.

So, what are your thoughts on Tokens? Is there something you like about them? Hate about them? I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Join me next week when I talk about something - what, I don't know yet!

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!