Hello and welcome to the Blog Showdown!

This is where one of eight pilot blogs will be posted and the one that has the best engagement after three weeks from their posting will become the new permanent Monday blog!

Today we are going to be debuting Mechanics Shop, the blog where I talk about a Magic mechanic, talk about its strengths and weaknesses, and mention any potential improvements!

Today’s mechanic will be…Sweep!

Origin and Function

So the mechanic made its debut in Saviors of Kamigawa in 2005, the last set of Kamigawa block and while Kamigawa is looked at fondly nowadays, at the time the block was not looked at in the best light.

The block also came between the hyper powerful Mirrodin block and the soon to be fan favorite Ravnica block, and while Kamigawa had plenty of strong cards, there was also some not so great card mechanics, Sweep being one of them.

Sweep is an ability word that has you return any number of a basic land type to your hand and get an effect based on the number of that basic land type you return to your hand.

Saviors of Kamigawa had a subtheme of cards caring about the number of cards in your hand, which this mechanic helps facilitate because it gives you more cards in your hand.

In theory the idea that you return some number of your lands to your hand in order to get a stronger effect seems like a solid way to help you swing ahead of the game, even potentially winning you the game if you happen to play your cards right and you make use of the cards that care about the number of cards in your hand.

However, there are problems that come to mind immediately.

The Problems

The biggest issue that Sweep requires you to set you back in tempo quite a bit in order to get any major benefit from the card.

There are only four cards that have Sweep, Plow Through Reito which for two mana gives one creature +1/+1 until end of turn for each Plains you return, Barrel Down Sokenzan which for three mana deals damage to a target creature equal to twice the number of Mountains you return, Sink into Takenuma which for four mana has target player discard a card for each Swamp you return, and Charge Across the Araba which for five mana gives all your creatures +1/+1 until end of turn for each Plains you return.

The effects that these cards grant are ok, but in order to get the most out of using these cards was to return a good number of lands you control back to your hand, which can set you back significantly.

If you return only one land from any of these effects, you are essentially losing a land drop for a bad effect but if you return a good number of lands back to your hand then if you don’t win the game you set yourself so far behind that you can’t catch back up to stabalize.

It also doesn’t help that among the cards that have Sweep, only two of them can potentially win you the game since they can help you get more damage through, with Barrel Down Sokenzan having had the potential to be a solid to broken burn spell if you could target player and Sink into Takenuma being an ok discard spell if you bounce at least three or more lands and otherwise it’s just a card that loses more than you would want.

There is also the downside that the cards that you bounce need to have one particular basic land type, meaning that the cards with Sweep get worse in multicolor decks. Sure there are some lands that have the basic land types that add multiples of a color, but that becomes harder and harder to make consistent the more colors you decide to play.

If your deck is one color, can manage to deal with the tempo loss of returning lands to your hand, and can find a way to win the game from that tempo loss, then Sweep cards are still just ok and not too crazy.

So how do we fix it?

Repairing Sweep

So the first thing we need is to understand what Sweep is attempting to accomplish.

Return some number of cards you control to your hand in order to have some sort of scalable effect, with the more you return the better the effect that you have. Balancing this sort of effect is very tricky, especially with burn effects, since if you have it deal damage from returning anything to your hand then all you need is an infinite token outlet to automatically win you the game, unless it is at an obscene mana cost where it isn’t worth to play.

There needs to be a balance to how much mana you spend and how many things you return, while also not setting you so far behind that you just lose or having you return a bunch of fodder to be broken.

I would want to keep the spirit of the mechanic up and have it still be an ability word and keeping in flavor with Kamigawa, we can call this new mechanic Harmony.

The way it would be templated would be “Harmony – Return any number of permanents you control up to the mana value of this spell to their owner’s hand. {Effect}”

So my thinking on this is that you can tune the spell to however strong you want it to be based on the mana value which means it has an upper bound in how strong that ability is. You would also still be able to gain some sort of effect if you return one or two things for some of the higher cost spells while also not having it busted if you return a lot of things to your hand.

Again, having an upper bound is good for balance, while you can still gain value from bouncing things to your hand for enters effects or even leaves the battlefield effects like the Frogs from Bloomburrow caring about things leaving the battlefield.

I originally was going to put nontoken permanents, but then I realized that since there was an upper bound that even returning fodder isn’t too strong.

The most difficult part is getting a powerful effect onto the card because of the fact that since it is an ability word there needs to be a good bit of text saying what needs to be done and then the effect.

Making a couple of test cards does make space a little tight, and even Sweep has the issue of not being able to have too much text by nature of Sweep being an ability word.

I still think that Harmony as an ability word can be open for some interesting potential, and with a bit of cleaning up it can make for a decent mechanic, in my opinion.

Thank you for reading, see you next week with a new blog for the Blog Showdown! If you want to see more of this sort of blog, engage with it and we’ll see how it compares with the others!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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