Vandalia: Haunted Hollers

"Discovered deep underground, a magical ore known as ember has irrevocably changed life on Vandalia in many ways. While most use it as fuel to heat homes and power stoves, it also has the unique ability to give life, or 'innervate.' Sometime after the Company began full-scale mining of embershards, strange creatures began showing up in the deep forests. Disruptions underground led to traces of ember seeping into the groundwater causing strange effects in wild animals, from growing to enormous sizes to mutating into horrific beasts."

Embershard tokens are a major part of the Red/Black (Miners) archetype, with many cards in each benefitting from both creating and sacrificing them. Some colorless spells also create them to represent how pervasive embershards have become in typical Vandalian society.

Embershards were one of the first bits of worldbuilding we came up with as a fantasy stand-in for the coal mines Appalachia was built on. We knew from the start the world of Vandalia would need a powerful resource in the vein of Aether or Halo, so we started with what coal does on a conceptual level: provide energy. It helped keep people alive through warmth and cooking, and later brought machines to life via the steam engine. Ember does the same, just in a more literal magical sense.

"Innervation is the magical power to grant life found in ember. It can bring an inanimate object to life, make a living being more powerful, or even revive the dead with the right skill. This power is so unique it has even attracted the attention of other beings from beyond the stars. None are quite sure of the Visitors' intentions, but they have somehow managed to refine the shards' inherint magic into a more focused process."

Apart from being the main purpose of embershard tokens, Innervation is a major part of the Green/Blue (Aliens) archetype, with cards that either innervate on their own or by "absorbing" the power of other creatures. Other cards benefit creatures with counters or give payoffs for you or your opponents innervating by any means.

Originally the ability didn't have a name and was mechanically bound to embershards in the style of Food tokens. We soon realized it would open more design space and be a lot cleaner gameplay wise to make it a keyword action. This allowed us to make cards for other factions evoke the same flavor as embershards, as well as reactive abilites that trigger when a player Innervates.

"Embershine sits at the crossroads of magic potion, addictive stimulant, and high proof liquor. Often shortened to just Shine, this powerful drink is distilled from embershards deep in the backwoods in the dead of night and transported on souped-up cars (that often run on Shine themselves). The distillation process greatly magnifies the ember's performance-enhancing abilities for living creatures, at the cost of its longevity and animating properties. It also makes the Shine addictive and highly illegal in all Syndicate-controlled territories, thus the Bootleggers' need for stealth and cunning."

Along with vehicles, Shine tokens are central to the Blue/Black (Bootleggers) archetype. Some cards give payoffs to creating or using Shine tokens, and the Shine's buff synergizes well with vehicles and the creatures that crew them.

A core element of Appalachian history that continues to this day is the creation and distribution of moonshine. Not only the was the drink itself influencial, but bootleggers' modified vehicles directly led to the modern sport of stock car racing. We knew we had to portray that in some way while tying it in with the other fantasy elements of the plane. Some cards even pay direct homage to famous historic shiners!

Another, more unfortunate element of our culture is the pervasive effects of opioids and other hard drugs; the most common response when asking others for ideas was "you've gotta include meth!" Of course that would be crass to reference directly, so we tweaked embershine slightly to have a more narcotic edge.

"Some say it's the powerful family ties we have with our kin, others that it's from being buried close to ember deposits. Whatever the reason, spirits in Vandalia have much stronger influence over the living, to the point some can fully possess the bodies of living humans and elves. The Wayfarer University takes full advantage of this, summoning and willingly becoming possessed by the souls of the past for knowledge and guidance. This quickly made them enemies of the Martial Brotherhood, who find the act unnatural and blasphemous, and the rivalry of the two schools continues to this day."

Possession is the core of the White/Blue (Spirits) archetype, with most cards with the ability being one or both colors. There are also a few demons with Possession in black for flavor. Rules-wise, Possession functions much like Mutate with a few key differences:

1. The possessing creature is always put on top,
2. it can only target Humans and Elves, and
3. it allows you to target and take control of your opponents' creatures.

Aside from this, any other rules interactions will be the same as those for Mutate.

The idea for Possession arose when designing Wind Dancer, Soul of Depravity. We wanted a way to convey the descent into cannibalistic madness of the original wendigo myth without just making it another creature, so instead the Wind Dancer spirit has to possess an existing creature and cannot be cast on its own.

"What is and isn't a 'critter' is somewhat open to interpretation and can't be too well defined. Mostly it's any wild animal that can fit in a milk crate but is bigger than a mouse, and isn't a bird, lizard, or fish. Usually good eatin' too."

"Critter" is a batching term in the style of Outlaw. Critters are permanents with the creature type Possum, Rabbit, Raccoon, Squirrel, or Weasel. Cards that care about or classify as critters are in all colors but primarily in green.

For all its faults, I personally really like Outlaws of Thunder Junction's introduction of the Outlaw grouping. Until there are more official batching terms like it, we created Critters to fill a similar niche of applying to related creature types. While there are many existing creature types that could be considered "critters," we went with five both to copy Outlaw and so we could have one type more fitting to each color.