Pattern Recognition #388 - A touch of Class

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

30 October 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Derived from Level Up, which was in of itself a subject I intended to cover last week, the Enchantment subtype of Class represented a branch of the self-improving card type that we've seen show up in other ways since then. And they didn't exist when I last covered this subject, so lets get to it shall we?

Introduced in Dungeons and Dragons, the Class subtype of Enchantment answered the question about how to represent the iconic player-classes of the role-playing game in Magic? Before this point, Magic had utilized a Race Job system for their creature types. You could be a Human Wizard or a Kor Monk or an Angel Artificer, but that didn't really convey to the player what it meant to be that class.

The solution to this turned out to be giving the Player themselves a class, rather than trying to shoehorn in the abilities of a Class onto creature cards. Sure, you may have been able to replicate the effect with Level Up or a Pseudo-Leveler on a creature, but that takes up a lot of space on the card.

So Wizards, with the idea of the player having the Class, moved to look at how to do it. They had struck a goldmine with Sagas in the past, so invoking that with this new cad subtype should work out. And having vertical orientation for the card made it easier to align the text and give it some semblance of space to work with. Mirroring the previous Sagas so that the image was on the left, and the text on the right helped keep the two cards different from each other at a glance.

All Classes have five inherent abilities. The first three are associated with the Level of the card, and by default, all Classes enter the battlefield at Level 1. There is no marker for it, no token. It cannot be changed outside of the use of one of the other two abilities on the card. At Sorcery Speed, if a Class is Level 1, you may activate the card's Level 2 ability to move it to Level 2, enabling any associated text. Then, for the last ability, if the card is Level 2, you may pay the cost at Sorcery Speed to move the card to Level 3 and enable that line of text. Each ability of a previous level is still active unless otherwise specified.

In their introduction, there were twelve Class cards, representing the twelve Core Classes of DnD 5th Edition - the then current set of rules for 2021. The intent was that each of these twelve cards would reflect both a player class in the table top RPG as well as a class on one of Magic's Creatures. However, there were a couple cases where this didn't quite work out and I'll point them out in a moment. These were Barbarian Class, Bard Class (introducing Bard as a creature type - WHY DO WE HAVE PERFORMER NOW?!?!), Cleric Class, Druid Class, Fighter Class (representing Warrior and to a lesser extent, Soldier from Magic), Monk Class, Paladin Class (taking the place of Knight),Ranger Class, Rouge Class, Sorcerer Class (representing the Shaman creature type for Magic), Warlock Class and Wizard Class.

Response was very positive across the board. These classes worked hard to distill the flavor and essence of their respective creature type and because DnD is under the same umbrella as Magic - the same company owns both - it was easy enough for the set's developers to work with the people in charge of the RPG to ensure they could get what worked out for everyone involved.

For standard at the time, I ran an Aristocrats deck that made good use of Cleric Class, and I remember seeing most of them in the format on Arena at the time. They may not have been a massive hit, but they were well respected by the playerbase and aside from people not quite getting how the Level mechanic worked, they did their job and they did it well. Enough so that there was reason to bring them back at some point in the future. We got a tease of this with the second DnD Set, Baldur's Gate, as Artificer Class appeared in the attached Commander Products. This was another class upgraded to Core Class in Dungeons and Dragons in the interim, and so it got a card to represent it.

Surprisingly though, the real second wave of Classes came from Bloomburrow. This set included a series of cards that unlike the previous set, had the word 'Talent' in the name to distinguish it from the previous. Part of the reason for this is that in the stories and fables that Bloomburrow drew upon, people were talked about as having a skill or talent for something. They would have an Artist's Talen or a Hunter's Talent, and this re-framing of the card type by changing a name worked out just as well because you could now imply that it was something your creatures could do well, not just you. Innkeeper's Talent is an amazing example of this given just getting to Level 2 can ruin a whole lot of plans for a whole lot of people. And I've built decks that really get a lot of use out of Caretaker's Talent.

These cards worked out well as the lessons learned from the Classes were carried forward and without the restrictions placed on them by the necessities of the work of an outside franchise. The Talents were a bit more internally synergistic and more focused than the Classes, thought this isn't to say that spreading out your abilities isn't wrong either, such as with [[Paladin Class], whose second two abilities don't really mesh with the first while still providing innate value on its own.

What these cards bring to the table is a very open-ended design. Now, I say that, but Mark Rosewater has consistently put them as a 4 on the Storm Scale, which implies some degree of mechanical issues that make them less likely to be printed in a Standard Set. Which is actually quite understandable. They take up the same 'vertical design' that Sagas do, and those are much more popular for players and developers. In addition, because of their nature, they depend on being in a setting where what one does becomes important. Which involves a theme to the setting. Honestly, I could almost see it at Strixhaven to represent going to Class (heh), or New Capenna or Ravnica where your Guild or jobsite is relevant to your lifestyle.

There is also the issue that the amount of space and required card text means that you can't put a lot of words onto the card. Adventures can better get away with it because they only have two sides, Sagas can space things out a bit and stack activations to get more value out of the same space.

In a way, Classes were hamstrung by locking themselves to their three-tier methodology. Four levels would be crowded, and two levels may not be enough to get proper use out of them the way they are built. For better and for worse, three levels, two activations is the best balance. And that is a limitation that breeds creativity, but also stifles it. Sagas breaking out of their three activations was a watershed for their development. Classes.... will be more difficult.

But before I close out, I want to point out that there is something else that is new - this year new! - that draws some small inspiration from Classes. Cards that can be improved over time and stay improved. Not really Leveling up, but not-not Leveling either. Although to be fair, it does have more in common with the Pseudo-Levellers from last week.

Planets and Spacecraft

These cards can be activated at Sorcery Speed, gaining Charge Counters to build toward leveling up. Some of these cards have multiple various levels to them and they are activated in order as you commit more resources to them. Like Classes. Unlike Classes though, Charge Counters are something you can more directly interact with and manipulate as one of the Commander precons for Edge worked with in its design.

That reminds me, I gotta check to see if we're doing Slow Grow this year or not.

But back to the subject at hand!

Classes are good. They're not perfect, but the idea of a single target that you can invest resources in to make better over time isn't a bad one at all. Yes, there's the long-recognized problem where removal can easily cost less than what you're putting into your Class or Spaceship or whatever. But that's a risk you're going to have to take with these sorts of cards. It's not just them, it's a universal calculation of risk and reward.

And enchantments are harder to remove than pretty much everything else these days. So the risk goes down, and the reward can stay up.

I like them, and look forward to them in the future. What do you all think? Yeah! No? Meh? Comment below!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!