One of my favorite recent Magic designs is Currency Converter.
On paper it looks awkward. Sure, an artifact that spits out Treasures makes sense for a currency exchange. But why the creature tokens? The draw-discard minigame? The distinction between lands and nonlands? None of these mechanics exactly follow the flavor of the card.
And it has templating issues. Discarding seven cards simultaneously causes the first ability, as written, to trigger seven times; the triggers must be ordered, then resolved one by one, with players getting priority before each resolution. This can slow down a rules-conscious Commander pod, and it’s especially cumbersome for online play. With Magic’s new digital-conscious design sensibilities, I would have expected “Whenever you discard one or more cards, you may exile any number of them from your graveyard” instead.
Overall, the card looks inelegant. Not terrible, not even bad, but a little clunky.
Imagine a much smaller text box:1
T, Exile a card from your graveyard: Create a Treasure token.
Doesn’t that look better? The Convertor has been stripped to its most essential component: turning excess resources into Treasures. This nugget of flavorful resonance, of ludonarrative harmony, has been rescued from the rules text soup of the original. No longer must you read the card three times to figure out what it does. No longer must you sort through a million triggers when someone casts Wheel of Fortune. It’s simple and clean. Hire me Wizards.
In fact Currency Converter is a fantastic design, much better than my suggested revision. It oozes flavor—I’ve never worked in a currency exchange, but surely it must feel like playing with this card. At the most basic level, of course, you’re “converting” lands into Treasures and nonlands into Rogues. But it goes ways beyond that.
The process of conversion is finicky and fiddly, full of choices. Which card do you discard? Do you exile the card you just discarded? Do you make a Treasure or a Rogue this turn? Which exact card do you return to your graveyard? Do you loot instead? All these little micro-decisions add up, slowly but surely, to a long-term value engine—just like running a real financial business probably.
Even the abundance of triggers contributes. If ever there were a time for players to wade through a complex stack interaction for marginal benefit, it’s when they play a card about money changing.
You don’t always have control over which micro-decisions you’re presented with. Sometimes your opponent forces a discard. Sometimes you can’t make Treasures because you’re short on lands. To me, this feels like I’m responding to market forces outside my control.
Every time I tap the Converter to make a Treasure I hear a little ch-ching in my mind’s ear. Create enough creatures, and it feels like they’re filing out of my business. Sometimes the queue fills up quickly—multiple cards discarded—but I can only process them one at a time. Even the Converter’s power level is resonant: it’s an efficient value engine that makes the deck (economy) run more smoothly without being the main attraction.
You wouldn’t notice any of this just by reading the card. Currency Converter’s resonance is found in gameplay, not in its text box.
Oh, and the exchange’s customers are Rogues because the card is set in a world rife with organized crime. The money is probably dirty.
My first Dungeons & Dragons character was a also rogue. Most of my combat utility came from Sneak Attack…or would have, if I’d been able to parse the 5th edition rules:
Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack roll. […] You don’t need advantage on the attack roll if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn’t incapacitated, and you don’t have disadvantage on the attack roll.
Forget reading it three times; I didn’t grok Sneak Attack until I watched Critical Role. It’s even pretty simple in concept—you get bonus damage if you attack someone who’s already cornered by an ally, or if you have advantage on your attack roll—but the actual rules are annoyingly difficult for newcomers to wrap their heads around. The double negative still kills me.
I once played a game of Starfinder. My character was an operative—a rogue, basically—with the Trick Attack ability:
Just before making your attack, attempt a Bluff, Intimidate, or Stealth check (or a check associated with your specialization; see page 94) with a DC equal to 20 + your target’s CR. If you succeed at the check, you deal 1d4 additional damage and the target is flat-footed against your attack.
The flavor is the same: you fight dirty. But the mechanic is much easier to understand—just make an ability check! You can even customize the flavor of the attack based on the ability you choose; I was a Daredevil, so I could use Acrobatics as well as the normal Bluff, Intimidate, or Stealth. What flavor! What class! Why didn’t D&D do this?
Here’s how it played out in practice:
“Roll for Trick Attack. No.”
“Roll for Trick Attack. No.”
“Roll for Trick Attack. Yes, extra d4.”
“Roll for Trick Attack. No.”
“Roll for Trick Attack. Yes…”
I don’t think Sneak Attack in 5e is an amazing design, but it is better than its Starfinder counterpart. There’s a minigame involved in assessing the battlefield, looking for chance to get in that extra damage. The mechanic shines when you feel like a dishonorable fighter stalking easy prey.
And Sneak Attack, like Currency Converter, is better than it looks on paper. Of course elegance—concision, comprehensibility, aesthetic harmony—is important in game design. But it’s not terminally important. Sometimes good gameplay is worth the clunk.
With the mana cost adjusted as necessary.