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Checksthesky

Today we are going to look at the step-by-step process for the design of one of the epics of Worldbreaker, Magni, the Mountain King.

Early on in our talks in R & D about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and its impact on Year 5 of the Wow TCG, we heard that Blizzard had some plans for both Magni Bronzebeard and Cairne Bloodhoof. We knew they were both going to exit the scene, although exactly how was certainly not set in stone. So we knew we wanted to try to tell this story with their cards.

My first effort tried to tell the story of Dwarves’ legendary resolve – they became more powerful with the loss of their king. (Also, notice my sweet name.)

We played with this card for a bit (he was a 7 / 7), and decided that this sort of textbox, although flavorful and powerful, was sort of just numbers. And he never impacted the board at that cost, because players just wanted to get him in the graveyard. And we wanted it to be more Dwarfy (Dwarvish?)!

So here we have a 4 cost 4 / 4 who simulates Find Treasure. There are some nice things about this design – you can discard a second copy of Magni – but ultimately we decided the tracking on the graveyard power was too annoying.

You may notice that at this stage he is also a ‘Breaker’ ally. At one point, cards in Worldbreaker were tagged with ‘Breaker’ (a placeholder word if ever there was one) if they were either new to the expansion (race/class combo, abilities, equipment) or important characters in the story. We had cards with the (placeholder) term World on them that would look for Breaker cards on both sides of the game. The point of this was to not only teach what is new in Cataclysm, but make those cards stand out mechanically as well. Alas, it was determined that tracking the Breaker cards was too complex.

Here we have Magni using the actual keyword Find Treasure. And now he has a Year 4 keyword as well in Death Rattle. In a vacuum, Death Rattle may be the keyword that makes the most sense for what we were trying to convey with Magni (and Cairne for that matter). We just felt that it was a little too awkward to have reminder text twice on an Epic ally. We also felt like Find Treasure wasn’t impactful enough of a power. We wanted Magni to make your Dwarves better on the board, not just be a hand-smoother.

Now he is starting to look like the King you know. Except the placeholder name for Stash was Mulch at the time, and it made armor instead of a dude. The armor was definitely sweeter in a lot of ways, but was changed to an ally for power-level considerations.

Although you can’t see it here, this was the first Magni to be Magni (1) instead of Unique, which sort of pinpoints the timing of our discussion about changing that referent to mid-August. I liked the token being a Pallbearer (the Cairne token was a Tauren Mourner) because it helped tell the story.

This is almost exactly the version that went to print, with a slight change to the name (DW is our intrepid loremaster, Drew Walker).

So there you have it. Magni stayed pretty true to his original design intent and direction, got a little smaller, a little more Dwarfier and a little simpler. I hope you have fun reading about, and playing with – Magni, the Mountain King!