This Mechanic Created A New Way To Design Magic: The Gathering Cards 

Ascend is the mechanic to bring up for a way to make a threshold mechanic that doesn’t undo itself when you lose the requirement. They’ve only done it once and it’s a little clunky, but it’s definitely something that’d help with the complexity with resources that constantly change.

I will forever refer to Richard Garfield as Richy G, PhD from now on.

The 'crossing the threshold once' thing happened with City's Blessing. I thought that was a fun mechanic! Good video. The reference to 'Deep' from LoR made me miss that game, too.

The average person can hold roughly 6 items in their working memory at a time. I think that's important to remember when designing a mechanic. How much do you need to know to make the mechanic work. Knowing if threshold is active is a simple binary, 1 item. If it wasn't a set number, it becomes 1 item per card.

Cephalid Coliseum, Barbarian Ring and the rest of the cycle also needed the color gating as to not allow you to activate an effect without having the requisite color in your deck. Without it you could get the activation of Cephalid Coliseum with no other blue sources/cards in your deck, which wouldn’t be a huge issue, as it is not worth playing for just that, but it would still be an issue of color pie bleeding.

Shelldock Isle has “deck-threshold” that was and still can be a pain to “crunch” 😂 Also, Ascend is an example of a barometer that once you’ve achieved once, you have it forever.

I would argue that Threshold is not, in fact, Kicker. Kicker is, "This card does something, but if you spend more, it does something else (usually as well, sometimes as a replacement)." Threshold is, "This card does something, but if a certain state exists, it does something else (usually as well, sometimes as a replacement)." Threshold doesn't spend an extra resource, it's not a decision you make as you cast the spell like Kicker is; it's a state based change to what the spell (or creature) does/can do.

About players laying out their graveyards even when their deck doesn’t have any graveyard interaction: it helps you keep track of how many copies of your cards you’ve already used. For example, if you’re in a situation where you need a removal spell, and you’ve already used some number of them, checking your graveyard can be a way to remind yourself how many you still have in the deck that you could draw to. But picking up your graveyard to look through it could potentially be a tell and give away information to your opponent, whereas if your graveyard is fanned out, you can glance at it more easily and subtly. That’s the thinking anyway. I think in practice it doesn’t really have a measurable impact, but it also doesn’t hurt anything, so 🤷‍♀️

"Threshold with different activation values" is essentially Descend, which coincidentally came out in the same block as Discover.

Shadowverse makes use of a lot of those barometers. The class I like playing as is Portalcraft and it makes use the resonance mechanic, where it is active if you have an even number of cards left in your deck. Then there is lots of cards that let you draw a card or create a copy of your card and add it to the deck in order to allow you to sequence cards to create strategic depth.

Crunchy is just.. obtuse in my dictionary. Obtuse mechanics that make you think a bit more or think about more things is *crunchy*. It probably does come from crunching as mentioned, but it even feels applicable to like.. walking on egg shells. You misstep and you crunch on something. You miss count and suddenly things are weird

Barometer mechanics are a good example of digital creeping into design space, if the value is tracked in the client/app, then you can make threshold have ten cards that start with different letters in your graveyard. If you’re only designing for paper, you can’t go too far off the deep end

'Cross it once' was "The City's Blessing"

Threshold as a mechanic is a part of progressing the game as a whole. Each time you do something in MTG you set some kind of counter. Each starting point of them you can count as "threshold 1" then each effect checking the game state for something is essentially looking for some kind threshold. :) Setting this numer high enough to make it difficult to achieve is the reason to give player an award. After all it's just another knob to give to developers by designers.

You make a good point. When you have multiple cards with a constant effect that track the same board state, having their checks be the same is important for playability. If threshold was different numbers across multiple cards, the information input, and analysis, would increase exponentially with each variation. Crunching comes from number crunching but also as a direct contrast to "fluff". The opposite of fluffy (cotton candy) is crunchy (potato chips).

You guys have the most epic T-shirts

My first precon 60-card deck was the BG Morbid deck from Innistrad, so I have alays been very aware of graveyard stuff like getting something in or out, tracknig numbers of things, etc. I think I would have enjoyed playing stuff with Threshold as I like filling the graveyard and making use of those numbers. I wasn't playing Magic during the Shadows Over Innistrad block, so I missed out on Madness and Delirium there.

I’m surprised that delirium wasn’t mentioned

I suspect part of the reason that cephalid coliseum has a mana cost is so that it can be a "blue" card. If it didn't have a mana cost, you could throw it into any deck as a "colourless" land with a threshold ability. Man-lands etc also have mana costs which mean you have to make the colours the land actually makes (afaik without exception?)

I play an online CCG called Shadowverse, and for quite a while now, there's a good chance that more than 50% of meta decks revolve around a "barometer" of sorts. I thought it was pretty interesting to see how a game can use "barometers" differently. For instance, take the aggro archetype of Rally Sword. Rally(X) is a mechanic that gives you a bonus effect when you have summoned X followers (the equivalent of creatures). Most of the time, however, the thresholds you have to reach are multiples of 5. There's one main exception which is Rally 7. So I can know what my opponent is capable to doing, just by knowing his Rally count. Most other "barometers" aren't keyworded but instead written out in full, and typically has a "small" goal that makes you stronger, and a "big" goal that enables the cards you build the deck around. Shadowverse has a history bar to allow you to recall previous plays, but it also allows you to look at various important stats in case you forget, such as a player's Rally count. It also does highlight cards if you have achieved a condition that the card requires (like reaching Rally 15) to make it more obvious. Since the board size for Shadowverse is 5, this is pretty abusable in combination with barometers that need you to summon cards, provided the decks that use them aren't aggressive (though even if they are, like the aforementioned Rally Sword, it can definitely still be exploited). The Chess Rune archetype wants to get eight 1/1 tokens named Magic Pawn killed. It is virtually impossible for them to win before hitting this mark. In Shadowverse, the attacker can choose followers as the target for an attack, so you can always kill off your Pawns by ramming them into enemies. So the strategy for the opponent is to just tank the 5 damage from the 1/1 tokens for one, sometimes even 2 turns if you are able to advance your gameplan without playing follower.. Or, if your opponent is at 7 out of 8 pawns, you can leave just one pawn alive (remember, the barometer is counting dead pawns) and not give them any followers to trade into (most damage effects in Shadowverse can only target enemies and not allies). Meanwhile, the Chess Rune player is gonna try to not just have five 1/1s on board, or after a new set introduced a board buff, to buff their entire board as a punish. Or there was an option to play a spell that destroys allied followers for a benefit, but Chess Rune didn't really utilize what was intended to be the benefit very well, but it's still an option because the self-destruction is the benefit. If I say out of context that a deck that wants to summon 8 tokens ASAP, sometimes spends a card and mana to destroy its own board, that would sound insane. There's another deck called Evolve Blood, which aims to evolve their followers 5 times in the match (evolving is a mechanic that you can typically only do starting on the 2nd player's 4th turn, and only once per turn, but this deck has a ton of auto-evolve cards). Their combo relies on a card that, if you've evolved 5 times, it evolves all cards with a certain subtype on your board, and allows all your evolved followers to hit face. This pairs together with a card that summons itself from your deck at the start of the turn if you've hit 5 evolves. These two cards alone bring your opponent from 20 to 7, so it's typically an OTK. But it's a very fragile OTK. Virtually any attempt at stopping the OTK will work unless you have spare mana to cast more spells. So, even if you can OTK on Turn 5, you might want to wait another turn to have more mana up to nullify any attempts your opponent makes at stopping the OTK. Some decks run two of the self-summoning follower, some run three; those that run two are more interesting. It's decently likely to draw one of them. If you do, you only have one left in deck, so the moment you decide to hit 5 evolves, you have basically hard committed into going into the combo next turn. If your opponent manages to put up an adequate defense to stop the OTK, you typically lose there and then. What's worse is that this deck's best removal and healing and defensive tools all evolve themselves or require you to reach 5 evolves; and if your opponent is setting up defensive options ahead of time, well, you can only shut them down by playing these auto-evolving cards. Whilst hitting the 5 evolve mark makes your deck stronger, and allows you to unleash an OTK the next turn, it's also a commitment that you can't back out of that could backfire and destroy your only win condition.

Descent from LCI was basically threshold with a variable.

Threshold happens to be one of my more favorite non-evergreen mechanics in MTG, however one thing that had always struck me as a little odd is that the threshold is always 7. This feels like something that could naturally have a number attached to increase design space, like Threshold 10 for abilities that unlock at 10 cards in grave or Threshold 5 for 5 etc. secondly 7 specifically always seemed a bit arbitrary and random. Why 7? Why not 6 or 8? That being said, you do actually have a good point in that having variable threshold numbers would give a lot more to track and make for even more needlessly complex board states. However, it still doesn't answer that curious question of why 7 exactly 🤔. Perhaps it has something to do with the maximum starting hand size being 7, or perhaps they simply just did loads and loads of play testing at numerous variables and 7 just seemed perfect. 7 also just seems like such a ubiquitous number in general, so maybe it was intuition to make it 7 due to that. Does make me curious, but love the mechanic nonetheless!

it may be worth bringing up descend as a threshold variant that was recently introduced

*Threshold? That's just kicker.*

threshold has been mentioned by wizards to be somewhat difficult to include in sets in that threshold is very specifically 1 attached to graveyard decks and two considered too easy of a condition to fulfill in terms of both deckbuilding costs and gameplay threshold is easiest of all the graveyard barometer mechanics as your deck just needs to play some sort of discard or self mill with no other costs vs delirium which prices you into playing bad cards to fulfill the 4 types descend which is permenants

I also like the use of barometers in paper as opposed to some sort of turn count system, just much easier to manage. I dont think magic has any turn based things besides turn one, or if you didnt go first stuff.

Me before video: ooh something that isn't Kicker?

resource systems are very interesting to me and i would love to hear your thoughts on how the digimon card game (the current iteration, released in 2020) approaches resources.

It occurs to me that Threshold could potentially be seen as a catch-ip mechanic, like a Blue Shell in Mario Kart. If you're doing worse than your opponent, you might be able to use the more powerful version of the card more quickly than your opponent. I don't know that it succeeds or was even intended as such due to it also being open to very high-level crunchy play, but it's an interesting way to think about the mechanic. "One and done" modes always kinda irk me. Like, I don't want to remember whether or not I have the City's Blessing or my creature is Monstrous if I no longer meet the condition at an easy visual inspection. I'd much rather these sorts of mechanic be "A player/permanent has [keyword] if [condition]" than introduce more "A player/permanent has [keyword] if [condition] at some point in the game" mechanics.

Shelldock isle is one of the few cards that cares about tracking cards in deck. Its awkward enough online, in paper its even worse. Fun card though

Not necessarily related, but Threshold-likes feel horrible with those old cards that care about the order of your graveyard, and both of those were relevant in some Pauper decks I played years ago. Having to go through the graveyard every now and then while keeping the order intact is so annoying IRL.

hi guys, we like you, no thershold, we don't need 7 cards in the graveyard

La Mort T-shirt. Nice nice.

12:32 And I was wondering why this guy looked so overly handsome today... it's like this movie trope with the wallflower girl 🤣

If I'm baked my fast math is wonky so keeping the gy displayed let's me count cards and %s faster. 😅

So Tarmogoyf is a Barometer. Or is it a Tarmometer ?

Man, metelcraft could have been a great mechanic. Too bad it was sabotaged by only ever triggering +2/+2 on colourless artifact creatures in a set that had infect and proliferate.

to bad mtg threw out good card design like this a long time ago. threshold totally sucks now.

It's not hard to keep track of graveyards. A die will do it. Layering them such that relevant cards are turned sideways in the graveyard or some other such thing helps a lot.