Living_End Look at suspend, for example. In Time Spiral, not only are there run-of-the-mill suspend sorceries and creatures, but also targeted sorceries (which have their own unique play decisions), spells that you can’t play except via suspend, cards with abilities that are active while suspended, and even one card that costs more to suspend than to play. That’s a lot of exploration for a single mechanic, especially when you consider that we plan to use it in all three sets of the block, and that each small set needs to come up with a twist of some kind that the other sets don’t have.
Don’t worry, Planar Chaos has its twist on suspend. We figured it out; we always do. But it can be difficult to make sure the first set packs in enough goodies to make new mechanics and themes seem deep and interesting, but not so much that there’s nothing really left for the rest of the block.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom for small set design. The road goes both ways. Often in the design of the big set, so many good ideas come forth that the set can’t hold them all, and the small sets get to start off with a collection of goodies that there just wasn’t room for in the previous set.
The card I’m showing off today is part of a cycle that was just that – a leftover from the Time Spiral design that just didn’t fit in that set, yet made perfect sense in Planar Chaos. Time Spiral’s nostalgia theme generated lots and lots of awesome card ideas, and there was no way to cram them all in one set, even if the set was over 400 cards like Time Spiral was. So Planar Chaos got this little gem and its brethren:
