According to Magic the Gathering‘s principal game designer Gavin Verhey, ‘hone’ counters – a new form of lasting buff for equipment that will debut in the Hobbit set – aren’t going to be limited to Middle Earth. According to Verhey, “it’s something new that debuts there, but it’s not a Hobbit specific mechanic… you will see it more in the future”; and the tokens came about while trying to fix a long-standing problem with red decks.
Wizards of the Coast revealed hone counters in a blog post on Saturday, July 18. They’re very simple: for each hone counter on an equipment, the equipped creature get +1/+0. The first hone equipment to be revealed was Bilbo’s sword Sting, which can flash into play and enters with a hone counter on it for every creature your opponents control.
On the same day that hone was revealed, Wargamer staff writer Matt Bassil was asking questions and taking notes at the ‘There and Back Again’ panel about the design of the Hobbit MTG set at MagicCon Amsterdam. That’s where Verhey went into detail about the simple but potentially potent new mechanic – and revealed that it’s going to hang around.
“We have a lot of internal hackathons, where we try and come up with new ideas and new products”, Verhey begins, and “more recently, we’ve run some mechanical hackathons”. The goal of these is to “try and solve a problem that a color has, or come up with new mechanics”. “A few years back, were were doing some explorations around the color red”.
As Verhey says, “red is notoriously bad at building up over time”, and the theme of the hackathon was to find in-flavor ways for the color to succeed in slower games. So it was that “one of the possible outcomes was this hone counter mechanic, because red loves equipment, and you could hone up its equipment and make them better over time in a very red way”.
“We’ll see how it plays and how people receive it to determine how much more we want to do in the future”, Verhey says. He’s confident it will be an unobtrusive mechanic: “equipment, Umizawa’s Jitte aside, very seldom hold counters”, so hone counters won’t get mistaken for other kinds too regularly.
The Hobbit set is the next up on the MTG release schedule, arriving on August 14. Excited? Already planning upgrades for that Commander deck you built based on the Lord of the Rings set? Trepidatious about what this return to Middle Earth might do to Standard? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
