It’s a GenCon tradition in our group that we play a pretty half-baked, ill-prepared roleplaying game. This was the origin of such classic adventures as “Journey Through The Mud Mines” and “Take a Train to Go Turn Off a Radio.” This past GenCon was no exception, but we used a different system that I wanted to share.

Inspired by Rob Donoghue’s Blades of Fate writeup, I hacked together a mashup of Dungeon World and Fate Accelerated. This is mostly Rob’s writeup with a few tweaks. Here’s how it works.

This probably won’t make any sense if you’re not already familiar with Fate Accelerated. If you aren’t, good news – it’s a great $5 RPG that you should check out.

Goals

I love the core conceit of Dungeon World - failure is frequent and interesting. However, I wanted to graft that onto Fate’s narratively impactful aspects and a system that didn’t assume any particular setting. Dungeon World’s magic is in how well it evokes classic fantasy roleplaying. By contrast, we knew nothing about our setting until we sat down to talk about our characters and start playing.

Dice Rolling

I used the following ladder and corresponding numbers of dice:

• Terrible - 2df, take worst
• Poor - 1df
• Okay - 2df
• Great - 3df
• Superb - 4df

This is slightly condensed from Rob’s version. Just like he’s struggled with articulating the difference between “Average” and “Mediocre,” I struggle with the difference between “Mediocre” and “Fair.” Thus, one tighter scale.

When you roll, you toss the corresponding number of Fudge dice and take the best result. That’s why the scale is so abbreviated - there’s no point when you are higher than Superb or worse than Terrible since the result is a foregone conclusion.

Die results are basically Dungeon World’s Defy Danger (that is, what Rob outlined in his article too).

• + - Success. You succeed
• (blank) - The GM offers a worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice
• – - You fail. Things are about to get interesting.

Approaches & Characters

I kept the six Approaches from Fate Accelerated as-is. The players were mostly new roleplayers and the six Approaches are a fantastic way to help new players not worry too much about the rules and instead narrate their intents.

With a condensed ladder I had to rethink what skills characters get at what levels. I kept the same rough distribution of skills from Fate Accelerated but mapped them to this adjusted ladder (1 at Great, 3 at Okay, 2 at Poor).

Aspects & Fate Points

In this world, invoking an aspect moves you one step up or down the scale as desired. For positive invokes, this is relatively easy since you can add another die to the roll before or after without too much difficulty. However, this means that negative invokes only happen pre-roll. I like to run Fate with mostly pre-roll invokes anyway, but this runs against Fate orthodoxy.

Characters started with two fate points apiece. Since we were a pretty sizeable group, that was a plenty sizeable pool.

Everything Else

Otherwise it was mostly rules-as-written Fate Accelerated. We ditched stunts entirely but I’ve done that in basic FAE before without incident. We experimented briefly with stealing Dungeon World’s “only players roll” ethos but abandoned that midway through when we found the challenge lacking.

For dice rolls, we didn’t use the explicit system that Rob grafted in from Blades in the Dark. The spirit of those was still intact and is a useful way to counteract one of Fate Accelerated’s biggest problems, letting players lean too hard on a single approach. For example, we tried to make it clear that a Forceful solution was not going to be equally effective in all situations or equally safe either.

Thoughts

This played out pretty close to how I hoped, so I’m pretty happy with this hack. For players this was a incredibly fast system to learn. Spending aspect points just adds dice to a pool, and more dice is obviously better. Taking away the option to add +2, reroll, etc from FAE really helped.¹

GMing this system is also a breeze - everything has the same fixed difficulty and if you don’t like that, you spend some fate points to make it harder for narratively interesting reasons. This was an end run around one of my only problems with Dungeon World’s fixed difficulties - new characters are too challenged by everything, experienced characters breeze through everything.

That said, I need to spend some time playing with AnyDice probabilities before I return this to the table. It was a little too easy most of the time - I saw fewer failures and blanks than I wanted to. Classic Dungeon World leans hard on the middle “7 to 9” results to generate narrative and we felt the absence of those complications in our game. It was mostly a story of things going to plan with the exception of our terribly unlucky warrior princess.

I may also take a look at adding some simple stunts back if I can figure out a way to do it that doesn’t require players to spend a bunch of time brainstorming how they mechanically work. That’s always been my challenge with stunts in Fate but that’s a topic for another time.

SP

Footnotes

1. This has an interesting unintended consequence - adding new dice to a roll isn’t guaranteed to make it better. If you failed, you have a 66% chance of improving it somehow. If you got mixed results, you have only a 33% chance of turning that into a success. It adds a little uncertainty into spending a Fate point. However, if you spend enough to go beyond Superb, you still just succeed regardless of roll. This allows players who really want to pass a particular check to creatively do so. ↩

Recently I returned from the Best Four Days in Gaming, GenCon. In between roleplaying games of demon battling, cyberhacking, and union negotiating, I managed to fit in a fair number of board games. In no particular order, here’s some micro-reviews.

Before you get too excited about the prospect of hot takes on the latest GenCon releases, you should know that these are mostly games that I happened to play for the first time at this GenCon rather than new hotness. In other words, do not set expectations to Stun.

FIVE MINUTE DUNGEON

Fast-paced cooperative game that has players leveraging five unique decks to clear a dungeon in five minutes or less. Easy to learn and fast to play, great game to kick an evening off with. A lack of depth means it is not something I’d return to over and over, but then I feel that way about most cooperative board games.

DECRYPTO

A team game of providing clues to your teammates that help them guess words without providing so much information that your rivals can also guess them. This game rewards clever left brain thinking and I quite enjoyed it. However, it only shines if you play it with the perfect group of friends - a single bad cluegiver can ruin the game. As a result, I’m more likely to stick with Codenames instead of playing this.

REEF

A mostly solitaire game of building coral reefs by trying to make patterns. I only needed to look at another player’s board twice despite a few mechanics which try to promote interaction. That leaves me with just the puzzle in front of me, but it isn’t a terribly satisfying or difficult one. As a result, Reef is a completely unobjectionable but equally unmemorable game.

SMILE

A lightweight, mostly themeless auction game for 3-5 players. Over ten rounds, you bid on cards with a color and a point value between -5 and 5. If you collect two cards of the same color, you lose both. This makes card values unpredictable for better and for worse. Not bad, but there are better auction games (see below).

DEEP SEA ADVENTURE

A fun push-your-luck game for 3-6 players about divers with a shared air supply who are diving for sunken treasure. The air runs out faster as divers carry more and more treasure, so you have to constantly watch your other players to make sure they don’t ruin your plans. Which they will anyway. A fast game you can fit in your pocket. It’s a great choice when I have too few people for Diamant or want a more thoughtful approach.

A FAKE ARTIST GOES TO NEW YORK

Fascinating game about drawing a shared picture with one catch – one person has no idea what they are drawing. Real artists try to guess who the fake is while the fake artist tries to not get caught or guess what they are drawing. It creates an interesting tension for all players since real artists can’t be too obvious in their work. This is the game that Spyfall wants to be and feels like it would be equally good for all player counts. Bonus points for being another ultra-tiny game you can put in your pocket.

THE TEA DRAGON SOCIETY CARD GAME

A fine deckbuilder about raising dragons so that others can drink magic tea that can pass along your memories (read the book - it makes more sense). This is a pleasant game with an interesting push-your-luck model of spending cards that I haven’t seen in other deckbuilders. Aside from that and the adorable art, the remainder of this game is very generic. If you’re a fan of the source material then this is a very fine licensed game, but otherwise pass on this.

LOST CITIES: RIVALS

It’s Lost Cities as an auction game. On your turn you either draw a card and add it to a shared auction pile or begin an auction for that pile. This plays like a streamlined version of classic auction game Ra with an added twist of getting new cash reserves at several checkpoints in the game. This twist makes sure that you have interesting choices even when you’re cash poor. You’ll often have to decide between triggering small auctions (hoping to win them) and forcing larger pots (hoping to get your cash back sooner). Probably not my favorite auction game ever, but almost certainly my favorite one for under $20.

FIREFLY ADVENTURES

The core idea is admirable. Firefly Adventures tries to incorporate a variety of non-combat options into a traditional combat-centric miniatures game. The rules for this are simultaneously convoluted but also too simple. Non-combat characters will spend a lot of time thinking about their character’s “mode” or the specifics of initiative order so that they can finally… open a door. More action-oriented characters have to struggle against these added mechanics as well to play a fairly traditional combat game. Even Whedon fans should avoid.

Friends know that I endlessly talk about team values. They’ve made a huge difference in my career - I still have a framed copy of Obtiva’s values next to my desk (complete with our Big Hairy Audacious Goal courtesy of Dave Hoover).

Many organizations capture their values in fancy signage and slide decks. Typically they become something of a joke, a bar bet to see if anyone can name more than 1 or 2. How do you make these values stick in a way that helps new hires understand what it means to be successful in your team though?

Your onboarding process is the ideal way to start that journey.

Values-Based Onboarding in Action

I love this description of Toyota’s onboarding from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor:

Wanting to combat Japanese cultural taboos against criticizing management, Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line.

Toyota combines two powerful learning techniques to make sure employees learn this critical value:

1. The best time to instill values in a new hire is before they built their own impression of what the company is.
2. We learn best by doing.

You can imagine an alternate universe where new Toyota hires sit through a presentation with a slick graphic encouraging them to “question everything.” I’m guessing these employees don’t need such a presentation though - they’ve already lived it.

Another example from a totally different company: one of Reverb’s biggest competitive advantages is a culture that expects everyone to care about the product deeply. To that end, they developed what they called “The Contest” - all new hires are given a budget and told to buy and resell as much inventory on the site as they possibly can. By the end of your five weeks in The Contest, you understand the product’s strengths and weaknesses firsthand. They even hand out bonuses to people who make suggestions on how to improve the product from the contest.

In both cases, employers have identified what they value most in their employees and have incorporated those values into an engaging, hands-on onboarding processes. New employees have no choice but to learn and demonstrate the company’s core values.

If your team isn’t finding a way to turn your values into action through your new hires, you’re missing a huge and early opportunity to convert good hires into good hires for your company.

Let’s say you only have 5 minutes with one of your teammates to answer the question “How satisfied is this person with their job?” What do you ask and what do you look for?

Of course many readers immediately reject the premise at this point. I know – ideally you get more than 5 minutes for these kinds of checkins because you’re proactively scheduling skiplevels and other forms of soliciting feedback. Let’s just hypothetically assume that perhaps your planning and scheduling don’t quite go to plan. I know this definitely never happens to you but it certainly happens to me on a regular basis.

So what do you do with those five minutes? What do you look for?

The Trifecta of Job Satisfaction

When I have only a few moments to check in with someone, I look for indicators of what I consider the three pillars of job satisfaction:

• Utilization
• Growth
• Impact

In a deeper conversation like a skiplevel, there are many other things I look for about their career and their relationship with their manager. When I don’t have much time though, these three qualities are often a leading indicator of all sorts of problems.

Utilization

I define utilization as “the mapping of your job to your skills and interests.” While this isn’t always the same as utilization from the business’ perspective, it’s a useful proxy to gauge how motivating an individual finds their work.

I list utilization first because the other pillars take a backseat when there are problems. If I value myself as a designer but most of what I do is backend coding, I won’t feel well-utilized regardless of how much I’m growing or making a difference.

Utilization can also swing too far in the other direction, feeling over utilized. This generally means someone has a work-life balance issue or has to juggle too many competing demands for their time at work. For most people this is just as serious a problem as under utilization.

Growth

If someone’s skills are well-utilized, the next pillar of satisfaction is growth, the rate at which they acquire more skills. This should be a key motivator for virtually all members of the team. If it isn’t, you have a deeper problem than someone’s satisfaction.

Growth is also a reasonable proxy measurement for challenge. This is particularly important for high-performers - they often report a lack of growth when they aren’t feeling appropriately challenged.

Impact

The last metric I look for is impact – whether they feel their work makes a difference. Even if you are growing and well-utilized, feeling like your work has no impact is a sure path towards burnout. The root causes of this can be everything from organizational communication problems to challenges outside of work. Finding an impact problem rarely presents an immediate solution, but it directs you where to keep digging.

Assessing impact can be particularly important for spotting burnout in newer engineering managers. These folks are often still coming to terms with the transition from maker to manager. They can feel like their new workload lacks the same visible impact as shipping code to production.

Digging into impact can also reveal problems even when someone believes their work makes a difference. Sometimes, an underperformer will still believe their work is making an outsized contribution. This is a sign that feedback mechanisms are broken - perhaps they aren’t getting enough feedback or aren’t interpreting it correctly.

Everything Else

I would hazard a completely unscientific guess that these three factors cover about 75% of the typical satisfaction problems in an engineering organization. The remaining 25% is a myriad of issues which are specific to the individual and the organization. Typically those are only uncovered by deeper conversations though.

In time you’ll find your own ways to dig into these pillars and perhaps come up with a different three. My set has evolved several times until I landed on the three here. Regardless, it’s important to have a consistent gauge for happiness and to make sure you have the opportunity to dig into each team member’s satisfaction whenever you can.

Many new managers define 1:1 meetings as something like “a regular opportunity for a manager and their direct report to check in.” That’s a fine starting point but it misses out on a significant learning opportunity for leaders of all skill levels: the peer one-on-one.

Used effectively, these conversations can be a catalyst of growth for you and your organization.

What is it and why does it matter?

Let’s start with a totally incomplete list of what an effective manager covers in a typical 1:1

• Challenges and how to get past them
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Expectation setting
• Strategic planning beyond the day-to-day
• Career growth

When you’re still a full-time maker, limiting these conversations to you and your manager is very effective. Your manager has a high degree of impact on your challenges and context on your work.

This degrades as your scope grows within your organization. Your manager’s context decreases as they delegate more and more to you. The onus for solutions falls increasingly on your shoulders just as your key ally is less able to help.

If this sounds familiar, you need a peer one-on-one. These are periodic checkins with the closest person you have to a peer. In a large organization that might be an actual organizational peer. In a smaller organizations that might be a senior engineer on another team, a manager in another department, or a management coach.

“What Do I Talk About?”

This is easily the most common question when I suggest these checkins. The answer might seem counterintuitive, but it’s the exact same list of topics I outlined for “normal” one-on-one meetings.

While your peer might not have the same context and assistance that your manager can provide, there’s a few other benefits that your manager can’t provide so easily.

The biggest is that these meetings can be a safe space for a variety of topics you may not feel comfortable bringing to even the most supportive managers. This might include getting feedback on half-baked ideas or asking “how would you solve this” questions of your peer. If you share the same manager, these peers can be an invaluable asset in helping you understand your manager and “manage up” to them.

Peer one-on-ones have also addressed one of my biggest challenges of leadership: finding safe opportunities to vent. Leadership can be a lonely and isolating job - it’s inappropriate to vent to your direct reports and it can be dangerous to vent too much to your own manager. This leads to keeping your frustrations and challenges bottled up. This allows them to build over time into major problems for you and your team. Peer one-on-ones create the space to talk about these frustrations with someone who understands (and perhaps even shares them.)

Your first one-on-one

Starting these checkins can be intimidating - you have to make yourself vulnerable to a coworker in a way which feels like asking someone out on that first date. Just like that though, the best way to ask someone is just to ask them.

Until you’ve had enough of these meetings to find your rhythm, it can feel a little awkward at first. Push through that - learning to be vulnerable as a leader is a huge skill that pays dividends over the long-term.

Just like all one-on-one meetings, the cadence and structure will vary as you find what works. Having these conversations offsite can help reinforce the idea of a safe space separate from work, but find what works for you.

An example

When I moved into director-level management at Braintree, I did so with one other person, Pedro. We started these checkins out of necessity as we each went through the journey of figuring out what our jobs actually were.

Pedro and I kept these meetings long past the point where we understood our new roles. They became opportunities to get feedback on our plans, discuss performance issues in our organization, and sanity check reactions from our teams or stakeholders. Without intending it, these meetings were catalysts for each of us.

It also had other unexpected benefits. When a crisis came up in Pedro’s organization while he was on paternity leave and his manager out, I had the context from these conversations to drop everything and cover for him for a week. This would have been a rough transition for all involved if we hadn’t been spending an hour every other week comparing notes.

These checkins aren’t just for peers in the traditional sense as well. I’m a huge fan of these 1:1’s with my product partners as well. At Reverb, these checkins helped Engineering & Product stay aligned and keep our people unified as one product delivery team.

Get started!

I hope this has convinced you to start these checkins of your own. If you have any questions or concerns about finding the right partner or starting these conversations, let me know in the comments below. If you have additional tips or insights from these checkins, I’d love to hear about that as well!

Here’s a fun fact about my career: in almost a decade of working in Ruby, I’ve never been paid to write rails new into a console.

At Groupon and Braintree I’ve helped build some of the largest and longest-lived Rails monoliths in the world. As such, I’m sometimes asked for advice on writing Rails code that lasts.

Someday I’ll write more on this subject. For now my definitive answer is my last talk at Ancient City Ruby, “Ancient Rails”

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t link to this excellent series on the topic from Braintree’s original CTO, Dan Manges, who had a major role in many of the things we got right.

In a recent coaching session, a manager said of a teammate “Why can’t they follow my example and act more like me?” It’s a natural desire but an effective manager has to recognize a hard truth: leading by example doesn’t work, at least not the way we expect. That’s not to say we shouldn’t use it, but as managers we shouldn’t expect any behavioral changes in others based solely on how we conduct ourselves.

Bummer, right? Why is that?

Not Everyone Wants to Be Like You

Leading by example leans hard on the assumption that your audience actively wants to emulate you. Even if I admire your work, there’s countless reasons why I may not want to mimick the way you work. This is true even of my direct reports who also manage - just because we have similar roles, not all of them want my job or ask themselves “what would Scott do in this situation” at every turn.

Noisy Signal

Communication and observation is hard. We’re raised on fables and parables which cut out all the extraneous information so that a lesson is made obvious. These have nothing to do with the real world though. Consider this simple story:

Taylor takes a breath before speaking in a flat voice. “Production is hard down - we haven’t had any 200-level responses in the last two minutes. I need someone to dig into our stack and see what’s wrong while someone else reaches out to Customer Service and makes sure they’re aware.”

Ask yourself this: if you want to do one thing to be more like Taylor, what behavior should you emulate?

Here’s an incomplete list of possible answers:

• staying calm in an emergency
• speaking with specifics about production incidents
• including the rest of the business when something is wrong
• delegation

If Taylor is trying to lead by example then it’s anyone’s guess what we’re supposed to pick up.

Even if you cheat and say “all of the above,” you’re still relying on others to make detailed observations of you in the middle of your interactions. On a good day I’m just about able to walk and talk at the same time, let alone get all the subtleties from the above. That’s a big ask and one that is unlikely to pay off.

No Mechanism for Feedback

Let’s say you get lucky – someone wants to emulate your behavior and even picks the right one. In the lack of explicit conversations about these behaviors, there’s no way for this individual to get feedback on how well they’re doing. The only hope is that you notice their mimicry and are able to give them further guidance. Otherwise, you are just hoping they figure it out themselves.

How to Make Leading by Example Work Anyway

Leading by example is still an effective management technique despite all these issues, particularly with other managers. To make it work, you have to employ one of the most important tools in the managerial toolkit: explicit expectations. In other words, you have to have a detailed conversation about the behavior you want someone to emulate in detail.

Using yourself as an example can be awkward the first few times you do it. You also have to be careful about how often you do this - if each 1:1 drifts into a conversation about your own behaviors and challenges, you risk becoming a narcissistic leader. When these conversations are used thoughtfully, it can be a powerful way to mentor your team and bond through shared challenges.

Going back to the earlier example, imagine if Taylor had said something like this in a 1:1 prior to that moment:

“The next time there’s a production outage, I want you to focus on making fast decisions and communicating them concisely.”

Now Taylor has framed their behavior in a whole new light. The extraneous details can be ignored and Taylor can provide quality followup feedback as someone does or does not emulate this behavior.

What do you think though? Have you found other ways to make leading by example work for you? I’d love to hear them if so.

Engineers crave explicit feedback and expectations, and yet it’s often hard to provide these when coaching on ownership and leadership. It’s frustrating for all involved - as managers, we want to provide goals but oftentimes struggle to go beyond “I want you to handle problems like I do.” To solve this, I’ve found the following tool super helpful for this - the Four Levels of Autonomy. I’ll outline them briefly and then explain how I use them.

From highest to lowest autonomy:

1. Take action and inform later.
2. Identify solutions with a recommendation for action.
3. Identify problems.
4. Wait for instructions (AKA “The Danger Zone”).

In general, I coach leaders to work at those top two tiers depending on the domain, its risks, and their expertise. In both cases, the individual is responsible for identifying opportunities, the top skill I need leaders to develop. It allows me to throw increasingly big problems at them without devoting significant time to getting into the details of their expertise.

The third tier, “Identify problems” is generally a good starting place for juniors or those learning a new role/domain. I’ll typically provide gentle coaching to get to that next step, identifying and recommending solutions, but it’s okay if that skill is still developing. Ultimately though, I want teammates to grow out of this level for two reasons. It requires an inordinate amount of time since their manager has to have most of the same context as the individual so that they can design solutions instead. It also robs the team of the creativity and insight that this person would otherwise bring by working on solutions.

The last tier, “Wait for instructions,” is a dangerous spot to be in for very long at any skill level. The challenge of waiting for instructions is that it requires another person to develop enough context and detail on their teammates’s responsibilities in order to provide detailed instructions and identify problems. It’s a colossal waste of time and is usually only acceptable at the very beginning of someone’s tenure.

Of course this framework doesn’t cover all leadership gaps and still varies on a case-by-case basis. Still it’s been a great way to take feedback like “I need you to take better ownership of problems” and distill that into specific outcomes which are or aren’t happening. If you end up using this framework, I’d love to hear how it goes.

I love, love, love the RoboRosewater Twitter account. It brought me back into Magic after a 18 year hiatus. Most of the cards are hilarious gibberish, some are playable or near-playable, and some few are both playable and novel cards. After following the RoboRosewater account for a long time, I decided to build a draft set out of the cards from or derived from RoboRosewater cards. How hard could that be?

Read on to find out.

FIRST, A GIANT DISCLAIMER

I don’t know Magic particularly well. This is my third ever Magic draft. I would rate my skill somewhere between “RTFM” and “lol.” I still get confused about simple things like when you declare blockers vs assign damage. I still say “interrupt” all the time. If you are reading this to follow in my footsteps, be warned: here be dragons, lots of derp, and a bit of hherp too.

HOW ABOUT A SECOND DISCLAIMER?

It’s misleading to call this a RoboRosewater draft due to how many changes I made. The more accurate way to describe this is a set heavily influenced by RoboRosewater. When I made changes, I kept the title of the card and tried my best to keep the spirit of the card intact. This draft set probably isn’t as wild or fun as a pure RoboRosewater draft set. If you want that, I highly recommend this instead:

Album's here: https://t.co/Msi6eqraDL and a pdf w/ correct scale: https://t.co/dZm2WF2TEB

— μ (@mu_is_a_letter) July 6, 2016

Goals

My goal in building this draft set was pretty simple. I wanted to make a set of cards that could be used in a mock draft (not a cube of singletons) under the following constraints:

• Incorporate cards from RoboRosewater, staying as faithful as possible.
• Avoid cards that completely disregard the color pie like white counterspells.
• Make sure each color is playable - has a good mix of powerful cards and generally adheres to a sane mana curve.
• Make sure each game is playable  - there shouldn’t be any cards so horribly broken that the opponent has no chance to respond before the game ends.
• Generally respects rarities - bad-to-solid cards at common, solid-to-great cards at uncommon, and good-to-bomb cards at rare.

My purpose with these constraints was to simulate a proper set, but also to allow people to unleash their inner planeswalkers. In a set with no deliberately designed archetypes or stragies, who in our group would be able to discover and exploit the most powerful synergies and decks?

Process

I ended up having to make a number of tweaks as I went through this process. The primary cause is that not all cards are created equally. RoboRosewater makes green cards almost twice as often as black cards for instance - 39 total playable green cards vs 22 black cards when I last looked. It’s a similar story for types - 117 creatures vs just 51 sorceries, instants, and enchantments.

Because I wanted this to be a draft simulation, I also had to make costing changes to smooth out the mana curve for each color. I used the draft frequencies of Shadows over Innistrad as a starting point and came up with the following rough frequencies by rarity:

• A given common should appear 2-4 times
• A given uncommon should appear twice
• A given rare should appear once
• A given mythic garbage should appear once

Furthermore I went with the following per-pack distributions:

• Common: 9.67 cards
• Uncommon: 3 cards
• Rare: 1 card
• Mythic Garbage: 0.33 cards

Wait, Mythic Garbage?

A RoboRosewater draft wouldn’t be complete without a few playable but totally useless cards. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving out good ol’ Racka Rornoshy for instance:

Since the power level of RoboRosewater seemed higher than “average” Magic, I repurposed mythic rares as mythic garbage instead.

Changes

Most changes were limited to costing, color changes, or cleaning up the text to conform to modern templating and fix minor illegalities/misunderstandings. I removed or altered mana abilities on creatures and permanents to ensure that any two-color combination was equally draftable. This meant that a creature or artifact never generates a color of mana that wasn’t required to cast it.

RoboRosewater loves to refer to tribal themes where it doesn’t generate many creatures within the tribe. I made every effort to fix those references so that no participant in the draft felt misled and every tribal power has a least a few members of that tribe in the draft.

I had to heavily edit a number of lands. RoboRosewater loves to generate lands that are pretty bonkers. For instance, here’s the original Wulder of Boon and Fire Sheap:

Neither is very compelling or sensible on their own, so I combined the spirit of Fire Sheap (land with consumable counters) and Wulder of Boon (land that can adjust p/t or generate mana) to create the final versions of those two cards that made the draft:

Finally, I made changes to extrapolate interesting keywords and effects that weren’t defined by the cards themselves. Joto of Same Uftine is a good example - Hherp is interesting enough that it should do something related to casting from hand…

After thinking a lot about what it meant to “cast a card from hand”, Joto became this:

(Joto also gained reach because green was desperately short of ways to deal with fliers)

Manduj Masthorow is another good example - what is “borest strike” exactly?

The idea for this definition didn’t even come from me but from one of the Twitter responses:

@RoboRosewater Borest Strike (this creature deals damage after creatures without borest strike)

— 马塞洛·乾酪 (@Lil_cheez) November 27, 2015

Thus, Manduj’s final form:

Enough Already, Spoil Me!

Thanks for bearing with me. I just wanted to make sure you understood the intent and constraints behind some of the cards that were changed.

All Commons, Uncommons, and Rares (imgur)

All Mythic Garbages (imgur)

What Happens Next?

We are currently playtesting this draft set. I do not recommend putting together a draft of these cards at this time. Even just the initial draft revealed a few problems - Hydrobow Sunchaser is unintentionally overpowered as it can return itself from the graveyard. On the flipside, I took the original Fortigang Tramber and made it even worse, creating the least liked card in the draft.

At Braintree we turn drafts into “draft leagues” that run over the course of a couple of weeks. When this league finishes, I’ll post…

• A revised set of cards that include balance tweaks we’ve discovered like the above.
• The two decklists of the participants in the championship match
• Exact card distributions for an eight-person mock draft of this set and a Magic Set Editor file for printing or modifying them.

Finally, let me again express my gratitude to RoboRosewater by paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes:

If anything in this set brings you joy or fun, all of the credit is due to RoboRosewater. Only the mistakes are mine.

Please feel free to ask any questions you have about this via Twitter.

Two weeks ago our dog Frodo passed away. It is a wound I still carry with me. While he will never return, by sharing his memory he is never completely gone either. These are some of my favorite Frodo moments.

Frodo loved humans intensely and indiscriminately. Sit still for a moment and Frodo was likely to plop against you with violent force. Virtually everyone loved him right back immediately. Our youngest niece particularly adored him.

Frodo dressed up as Frodo for Halloween. He was a tremendously good sport about it.

Frodo and his sister Sam were inseparable. We bought multiple dog beds - they usually went to waste as the dogs would rather be near one another whenever possible.

Seriously, they were inseparable.

This is one of their first car trips after we adopted them from Midwest Boston Terrier Rescue. It would take Sam awhile to adapt to a new home with new people, but Frodo was loving and welcoming from day one.

Anytime I was on video conference at home, as I was in this photo, Frodo was very likely just out of the camera. Apologies if you saw his ears or heard his snoring.

This is how I will always remember Frodo. For him, “come” was an easy command. “Stay” was the challenge - it meant being far from Allison and me.

I miss you so much, buddy. I am glad to have had the time together that we did. I am all the better for it.