Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic The Gathering's first sci-fi set, and it's been an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:enormous success. The Japanese Cyberpunk aesthetic is incredible, the cards are notably more powerful than other recent sets, and it's brought a lot of new mechanics we're likely to be playing with for a very long time.For a set so good, you may be surprised to hear that its development process was a bit shaky. We'd already heard about how it had to be stopped mid-way to make room for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Innistrad: Crimson Vow, but there was a lot more going on as well. ༺Here are five things you may not have known about Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
5 ♛ It Features The First Creature Typꦫe-less Creatures In Almost 30 Years
It's a common misconception among players that every single creature must have a creature type, such as Rogue, Ninja, or Elf. With Neon Dynasty, were shown that that isn't strictly true, thanks to the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:cycle 🧸o🐽f Go-Shintai Enchantment Creatures.
The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Go-Shintai is this set's Shrines cycle, a classic theme in Kamigawa sets. They were made enchantment creatures for the first time to spice things up, b🌳ut that came with a new problem: a lack of space on the typ🌞e line. Shrines, by definition, are legendary enchantments, and now they're also creatures, eating up even more space on the line. As a result, all six of the Go-Shintai are given the type line "Legendary Enchantment Creature – Shrine".
When they were announced, many players were excited with what they imagined was Shrine becoming a creature type. As shrines are based on playing as many of them as you can, becoming a creature type would allow token copies or even changelings to be excellentꦛ inclusions in a shrine deck… but sadly it wasn't meant to be.
According to the game rules, Shrine is still just anꦉ🦋 enchantment subtype, and subtypes can only belong to one kind of permanent. They may appear alongside each other on cards with more than one type, like how Gingerbrute is an Artifact Creature with the artifact type Food and the creature type Golem, but that didn't make Food a creature type.
With the confirmation that Shrine definitely isn't a creature type, the Go-Shintai became the first creature cards printed since 1994 to not have any creature type. is the only other creature not to have one, which was printed way back in The Dark. Of course, morph creatures also lack a type, but they're not printed cards you can find in booster packs, so it doesn't really count.
4 We Saw The First Attempt At Modified 🌳Last Year
One of the new mechanics of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is Modified. Any creature you control that has an equipment attached to it, aꦬ counter on it, or an aura enchantment you control 🌟enchanting it is Modified. There are lots of payoffs across Neon Dynasty for it, such as how Upriser Renagade gets +2/+0 for each other Modified creature you control.
It was a great way to represent the augmentation rife in a cyberpunk Kamigawan society, but it wasn't actually designed with Kamigawa in mind. In fact, it was originally going to appear as a mechanic almost exactly a year earlier in the Viking-themed set, Kaldheim. At the time, the mechanic was known as 'Enhanced', but was eventually pulled from design. Likely to cut down on the number of new keywords in a set that already included Boast and Foretell.
Enhanced may 🐈have had to wait a year before becoming Modified in Neon Dynasty, but there are still some traces of it found in Kaldheim. Three cards: Halvar, God of Battle; Warchanter Skald, and Koll, The Forgemaster all mention "creatures you control tha🀅t are enchanted or equipped", remnants of what was one Enhanced.
3 Double-Faced Cards Weren't In The Initial Design ༺
The last couple of years have been dominated by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:double-faced cards. Modal Double-faced Cards were a heavy theme of Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim, and Strixhaven, while in the two Innistrad sets we saw transform come back with Disturb and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Daybound/Nightbound. With such a strong trend, the inclusion of transforming cards in Neon Dynasty𒊎 didn't feel out of place, but they weren't originally intended to be double-sided at all.
The original Kamigawa sets are set 1200 years before Neon Dynasty, and so 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sagas were chosen as a great way to reference the myths and legends of the older sets in a way that players would appreciate. But, instead of just having simple Sagas, Wizards wanted to try something new and have the Sagas turn into enchꦐantment creatures that are reminiscent 💫of the legend they represent.
Two methods of doing this were trialed: the first was that it made a creature token once the Saga haꩵd finished, and the other was to have the Saga become an Enchantment Cre🔥ature without transforming. The card's frame was even going to be adjusted slightly from older Sagas to accommodate it.
However, Set Design, who takes the Vision Design team's concepts and makes them into concrete, playable cards, had another idea. Kamigawa had 'flip cards' that rotated 180 degrees to become a different card. A few years later, they were followed up with double-sided transforming cards in Innistrad, which functionally do the same thing. So why not just make the Sagaꦬs double-sided and put the creature on the opposite face? The last chapter of each Saga could read "exile this Saga, then return it to the battlefield transformed under your control", and it'd be a much cleaner way of representing what the Vision Design team wanted to do.
2 𒁏 Ninjutsu Wasn't Originally In The Main Set ဣ
It's hard to imagine Kamigawa without Ninjas. They're one of its most iconic tribes, and ninjutsu has always been a very popular mechanic. However, the original design for Neon Dynasty relegated ninjas, and specifically their ninjutsu ability, into the supplementary 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Commander products, away from the set itself.
The reason for this was that Wizards of the Coast was concerned it acti♏vely worked against the Modified theme of the set. Whenever a creature is bounced b𝓰ack to your hand, equipment is unattached, counters disappear, and any aura enchantments on it go to the graveyard. It would've been a feel-bad situation to have to ninjutsu out a heavily-modified creature and lose all your hard work.
Fortunately, there was a space for ninjas in the set. Each mechanic is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:roughly split along colour lines, with cards that care about Modified being mostly found in red and green. On tﷺhe other hand, Ninjas are a blue and black tribe, about as far away from red and ✤green as you can get on the colour pie. Once it was realised that there would be little overlap between decks that want to put Modifications onto everyone, and decks that use lots of ninjas, both were kept in the set with no problems.
1 ♛ It Almost Wasn't Kamigawa
Although Kamigawa has regularly been one of the game's most popu🎃lar candidates for a return by the community, Wizards of the Coast was very hesitant to return to it. So much so that Neon Dynasty was almost set somewhere else entirely.
The original three Kamigawa sets were an unmitigated disaster. They sold well, players hated the mechanics, and the design teams felt they missed the mark with making a Japanese-focused set that resonated. The sets remained some of the biggest failures in𒊎 Magic's history, with the only thing offsetting it slightly was how well the legends-matters theme of them fit into the growing Commander format.
And yet, players still loved Kamigawa as a setting. Japanese pop culture has grown vastly more popular in the years since, to the point where "when are we returning to Kamigawa?" was one of the most common questions asked to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:head designer Mark Rosewater.
And so, at first, the plan was for Neon Dynasty to take place in an entirely new Japanese-inspired world (similarly t🌌o how Eldraine was another attempt at the traditional fantasy world of Llorwyn). Instead of focusing too heavily on myths and legends of Japan that maybe didn't translate that well to cards, it was going to focus on Japanese pop culture tropes, like anime, mechs, ninjas and samurai. Of course, Rosewater knew that many peop𝄹le would want it to be Kamigawa, so went into vision design phase open to the idea of it maybe becoming Kamigawa later down the line.
That moment came when the set needed some conflict put into 𒆙the heart of its themes, and it was d🐠ecided that tradition versus modernity would be a great fit. There was an in for Kamigawa: while the 'modernity' side of the conflict would be all the pop culture references and mechs they had been working on, the 'tradition' side could be callbacks to older Kamigawa. And so, relatively late in the process, it was finally decided that Neon Dynasty should become Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
