神河当時 - デザイナーズ・コンボ

Welcome to Combo Week! This week we’ll be exploring one of the cooler aspects of the trading card game – the chemical reaction when two or more cards come together to create something greater than the sums of their parts. And since this is the design column, it makes perfect sense for me to talk about the design of famous combos. There’s just one teensy problem. We don’t design combos.

The game of Magic has millions, perhaps billions, maybe even trillions, possibly quadrillions, who are we kidding – some number so large than it would mentally cripple any human who could truly comprehend it – of combos. (Be aware that the quality level varies greatly – there are scores of combos of the Great Defender / Creature Bond / Fissure quality.) How can R&D not have designed any?

Matchmaking

The answer to this question rests in how design works. You see, when creating a card, we don’t design it to interact with any one other card. Rather, we design it to interact with many other cards. Magic is a modular game. This means that it’s crucial that as many cards combine as possible. Let me use Legos as a metaphor. Legos wouldn’t be the defining brand it is right now if each piece only fit one or two other pieces. What makes Legos Legos is that each piece fits with every other piece. It is the ultimate modular play system. Magic works much the same way. The game would quickly become boring if each card only worked with a small handful of other cards. Thus, it is up to the designers to make cards as open-ended as possible.

This means that it’s inefficient to design cards to specifically work with other cards. Rather, we try to create effects that we know interact with key elements of the game, things that will apply to multiple other cards. That said, we do create linear cards (for more on this terminology, see “Come Together”) that push you towards a particular type of card. Goblin King, for instance, does encourage you to combine the card with goblins.

But this is Combo Week, so explaining why we don’t specifically design combos isn’t going to cut it. Instead I’ve decided to let you in on a deep dark secret. We do in fact design combos. But not as often as many of you think. The combos I’m talking about are a series of cards, what I call sets, that are clearly designed to be played together. And not in a larger group sense like slivers or shrines. I’m talking about a group of cards that, by design, require you to play all of them to get the desired effect. So without further ado, here are the R&D designed combos:

（中略）

Peer Through Depths / Reach Through Mists / Sift Through Sands / The Unspeakable (Champions of Kamigawa)

And we end with Champions of Kamigawa. The designers of Champions (Brian Tinsman, Brady Dommermuth, Mike Elliott and Bill Rose) were once again inspired by Spirit of the Night, but this time they decided to change the trigger condition to get the “big guy” (and also change the color). Instead of needing three creatures, they thought, what if you needed to cast three spells?

引用元
COMBO PLATTER Posted in Making Magic on September 27, 2004
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/combo-platter-2004-09-27

この週のテーマである、コンボについてマローが書いた記事です。

ただし、ここでは一般的な意味でのコンボはなく、直接名前を指定したカードとのコンボです。デザイナーズ・コンボと呼ばれることもあります。

この手のカードで一番有名なのは、ウルザランドでしょう。各種フォーマットで、ウルザトロンデッキを成立させています。

『神河物語』では、《深遠の覗き見》《霧中の到達》《砂のふるい分け》から、《語られざるもの、忌話図》が呼び出せるコンボが紹介されています。

こうしたデザイナーズ・コンボは、不特定のカードとの想定外の相互作用が起きにくい分、パワーバランスは抑えやすいのではないでしょうか。一番強いウルザトロンでさえ、禁止にはなっていません。

もっとも、それ以外があまり活躍できていないので、抑え過ぎているのかもしれませんが……。