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Mechanic Monday: Out of Mana, Full of Tokens

Time for another Out of Mana! How many of these am I going to do? Let’s see if I can get to ten or twelve of these and then evaluate.  That’s a ways off either way so I’d better get writing.

As I don’t believe the pandemic will end anytime soon, I expect the only gaming I’ll do this year (for the first half at the very least) will be remote/digital, I’m looking forward to when MTG: Arena hits iOS, and may even dip my toe sooner using my laptop.  As long as I strictly limit my budget, I think it’d be another fun way to get some social gaming into my diet - between Terraforming Mars and Star Wars: Squadrons, I’ve spent a grand whopping total of $50 on at least 50 hours of human-to-human social time gaming, and I’ve actually really enjoyed it.  I’ve grown even weirder in isolation, and my speech patterns especially veer wildly between halting and Podcast Played At 1.5x Speed, my sentences twisting and splitting and tangling unresolved.  A little extra human contact, attached to an exercise for my brain, would be quite welcome.

Anyways, who knows when I’ll actually get to try that (hopefully it lines up with the release of Strixhaven, the set I’m most intrigued by), but let’s get to the actual Mechanic, shall we?

Token Energy

In GREEM, you generate Tokens every turn, which are currency for playing cards, the strength and health of a played card, or form the basis of an Underling.  Cards may generate their own Tokens, move Tokens, imbue single- or multi-Token Underlings (or other played cards) with special abilities, or perform special effects by spending Tokens on that card.  Underlings may attack opposing Underlings, cards, or the opposing player; in an attack, the party with fewer Tokens loses all of its Tokens (which usually results in its removal) and the same amount of Tokens is removed from the other party (which may or may not result in its removal).

So this is inspired by less of a formal MTG ability and more the general concept of counters and tokens, which I have always liked; there’s so much flavour and evocation to most cards, but then there’s this other side of it that has these abstracted markers, for creatures, enhancements to those creatures.  Notably, MTG clearly states that counters are not tokens and vice versa, but what this blog presupposes is: what if they were? And also what if we blended that with one of my all-time favourite alternatives to Mana, the Energy from Magi-Nation: Duel (RIP you glorious mess).  Y’all know me, much as I like the storytelling I do in games, I also love abstracting away things and letting players view things as pure numbers and puzzles.  So blobs of mana attacking each other is pleasing to me.  I also think that there could be other types of Token, bestowed by cards; First Strike as a red Token that can be added to an Underling stack of base Tokens, but also there are cards with abilities that require specifically red Tokens, etc.  I think I’ve written before about One Currency For Everything but this is a new extreme of it.  And I love it!

Alright, I’m writing this for next week as I’m actually going to go write a TTRPG Tuesday now.  Til next time!

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