[MtG] The Altruist Mechanic & The Flavour of Reyne's Themes [Part I]

Skip to the bottom for the first Altruist card!


Reyne. The first of the Reyne block (codenamed "Ready, Aim, Fire") and what a start. 40 cards in, and my aim has fully been flavour and mechanics within Common.

Today is a flavour guide on Reyne, some tips on how to worldbuild, and showcasing the last keyword of Reyne: Altruist.

So, how do you convey the flavour of a plane? In my case, Reyne aims to flawlessly converge various typical fantasy tropes, and generally mix them up into something new. Amongst the towering buildings of Harleia, you have the rather unusual kallin roaming about for no reason. Merfolk quietly living in their communities by the coast, with the forests of Venlan housing many elves nearby. Spirits crusading through every corner of Reyne, and the black creatures having the most mysterious existence with no large home on Reyne to call their own for Black, yet still having a decidedly strong fix on flavour in the block too. Each colour, fighting with massively independent identities, often clashing, yet I'm trying to merge them? I'm obviously stupid.


The beginnings of Reyne were founded on Harleia, its capital. I started the plane as a great fantasy-rich imperial plane with cities and nations and things like that. It sounded too much like Bant and Ravnica, so I changed everything up a bit later with Merfolk and Elves and Spirits.

But Harleia, as a city, still stays. The flavour of Harleia takes up probably the largest sector in Reyne. Harleia calls for community, order, diversity and grandeur. The city is represented by all five colours: blue is often found in the human wizards of Harleia, helping in libraries and whatnot; red in soldiers, Harleia's army and the city's strong imperialistic and military influences; green firmly rooted in many Humans; as is White, which the primary colour in Harleia. Black leads a more vague existence here, but when it does, it's Spirits, rogues, shades, and other things in the undercities of Harleia.

Flavour & Mechanics

Harleia, with such diversity, needed a cohesive identity. I knew the city would be characterised with a few common factors:

• Common Keywords
  
• Community (and Untapping)
  
• Growth

Why these three things? Well:

Firstly, common keywords. In a capital, you just recognise things. How about pushing simple things like Vigilance, Flying, Haste, Lifelink etc. Little foundations of Magic: The Gathering pushing the big picture forwards.

Community. A city could not survive without its community. Which is why many creatures help others. Regenerate is not uncommon as a mechanic here, and neither is gaining life. Most importantly is untapping. It's helping your community thrive by keeping everyone active. Sacrificing yourself for others. Interaction is a massive point in Harleian cards.

Growth shows the gradual expansion of the city. +1/+1 counters are a recurring theme throughout many colours in the Reyne set, and White and Green show this profoundly. White's theme, because of Harleia, of +1/+1 counters is restricted to small increments like one or two +1/+1 counters, showing the small efforts of the city and the ebb and flow of daily life. Normal citizens just helping others.

All of this pretty bread-and-butter foundation stuff is really common in Magic. That's what makes Harleia what it is. A thriving metropolis, simply thriving off normal life.


Venlan is the other major location on Reyne. A region dominated with forests, rivers and coastal paradise, Venlan is home to a great majority of elves and beasts. Wild and mystic in contrast to Harleia, yet just as majestic, Venlan shows what looks like a less restrained parallel of the vast metropolis on the other side of the plane. The area is dominated by blue and green creatures and magics, and their greatly nature-based, evolutionary, lush aspects are fully welcomed. The show-off race of Green, Elves, are present throughout Venlan (and Harleia actually, to a lesser extent) and show many key features of our pointy-eared friends. They embrace Green to the full, using lands to their advantage and having fun tracking and hunting. Some also delve into Blue, and take on all of the classic aspects of Green-Blue, making a new feel of the very traditional fantasy elf. There's a lot packed into Venlan, but that just makes making the region more cohesive all the more important.

Flavour & Mechanics

• Mystery
  
• Growth

Mystery is a major thing in Venlan. Hexproof, drawing cards, knowledge. All very Blue and Green things. It keeps things within colour pie, and recognisable. Everything seems traditionally Green-Blue: curious, different and changing. It makes the combination very fun to play with.

Growth is a common theme with Harleia. I knew I wanted this from the conceiving of Venlan. But the important thing was to differentiate, so the regions were visible from surface flavour all the way to mechanics. The most noticeable thing about Venlan compared to Harleia is that Green is much more dominant. Green is the home of Giant Growth-esque cards. So what a better way than to tie cards in the sets with the theme of +1/+1 counters, and at the same time add an identity to two colours. Killing two birds with one stone. Yay! So Green ended up with larger boosts than White, and often in the form of more explosive cards.

More on Growth leads me to the first custom mechanic of Reyne: Myriad. Myriad is basically the first half of Doubling Season as a keyword. It's such a flavoursome mechanic, in my opinion. It represents the ability to accept more from the community, and grow as an individual. It ties in with this grand majesty of both Harleia and Venlan. I did want to keep Myriad outside of White for the majority (for reasons I'll probably say sometime later). For that reason, Myriad is a /nearly/ all Green mechanic. I'm not afraid to splash it in other colours though rarely.

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So this is all somehow connected to the other custom mechanic: Altruist.

So, I wanted to connect up a few things in the set with a mechanic.

So far, I had:

• Spirits and Channel
  
• Tapping and Untapping
  
• The Mob Mentality, Working as a Community, Strength in Numbers
  
• Growth and +1/+1 counters

I knew growth was more than well represented as a theme, so I had no need for another boosting mechanic. What I did have was a good base of tapping, Channel and what felt like a need for a mechanic that worked better with more things on the battlefield.

So, this is what I came up with:

Altruist (You may add this card to your hand from your graveyard by tapping a number of permanents equal to this card's converted mana cost. Altruist only as a sorcery.)

So, at first sight, I'm actually reminded of mechanics like Convoke, Buyback, Flashback and other recycling keywords/ability words. Its familiarity is a big bonus here.

Secondly is the great evocation of community. Altruist, literally I'm gonna nickname it 'the kindness mechanic', is a representation of a community working together to get something back. It's the more moral, less power-based version of Flashback. It's very passive, and purposely so. Cards with Altruist will usually be White, as White is the colour of kindness and rationality, but will also be present in Green as a great way to give the two major colours of Reyne an extra mechanic, but not overwhelmingly showy.

Also, of course, is the fact that it taps. This is very helpful to convey Blue's theme of tapping things, and more importantly, White's ability to untap things and help out with help and relief.

What else? There's the helpful advantage that Channel gains from it. Being able to Channel several times is a great bonus. It won't appear much in Reyne, but I promise it'll be on a really epic Mythic Rare card!

Here's the first official card with Altruist on it.

Mourn the Innocent
Instant
Altruist (You may add this card to your hand from your graveyard by tapping a number of permanents equal to this card's converted mana cost. Altruist only as a sorcery.)
Target player skips his or her next combat phase unless he or she taps two permanents he or she controls.

Altruist is a very nice mechanic, but it will be broke if you don't do it like Cascade did (very expensive cards for smaller effects). Otherwise, it'll be too easy to get lots of pluses, since you can tap lands, planeswalkers (which don't care if they're tapped or not), and enchantments. Convoke was a similar mechanic but it could only tap creatures, so it was balanced in that sense.

The first card you made IS a card without such a powerful effect, and it gives the opponent an option too. So it is pretty fine IMO.

That's definitely one of the things I need to look out for while using the mechanic.

The formula's pretty much:

If you want to give an effect Altruist, add a certain amount of mana to it in addition to what its normal balanced mana cost would be:

1-3 CMC cards: +1/+2 mana
4-5 CMC cards: +2/+3 mana
6+ CMC cards: +3 and above mana

Giant Growth with Altruist would probably be 3 CMC, so you'd have to tap 3 permanents to recycle it.

You Should Also Giving it a Specific Timing coz you can always get a bunch of pluses from tapping out all your permanents during your opponent's End Phase...and that's a pretty bad idea.

I'll errata as 'Altruist only as a sorcery."