How does soulbond work

The player may also choose not to pair with another creature, and then choose to pair with another creature when that creature enters the battlefield. Usually, the creature with Soulbond as well as its pair gain abilities or advantages when paired up. There are also other cards which look for paired up creatures.

Creatures can not become members of multiple pairs. However, if two creatures with Soulbond pair up, they each provide their benefits to each other. Thematically, the mechanic has similarities with the overly complicated banding.

They remain paired for as long as you control both of them. As long as Wingcrafter is paired with another creature, both creatures have flying. MTG Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit this Page. Edit source History Talk 3. Statistics 19 cards From the glossary of the Comprehensive Rules September 24, — Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Soulbond A keyword ability that makes creatures better by pairing them together.

See rule Soulbond was supposed to represent the joining of the good guys to bring down the bad guys. Getting a bonus only for yourself flies in the face of this flavor.

It feels selfish, not selfless. Geist Trappers Art by Anthony Palumbo. Version C The Fighter —Soulbond creatures grant abilities both to themselves and to the creatures they are paired with. This version had a couple of things going for it. The flavor was great. Both creatures were better for the union. This version was pretty easy to track they kind of feel Sliver-ish and had a game play that felt very unique.

Once we crunched all of the above issues, the team realized we wanted to use version C, which, of course, led to the next issue. We thought we'd solved the problem. Soulbond was going to grant abilities to itself and the creature it paired with. What this meant, though, was the creature couldn't naturally have the ability.

For example, if a soulbond creature granted vigilance when paired, it couldn't have vigilance until it was paired. This might not sound like a big deal, but it actually caused a few problems. The first is the image problem. If soulbond creatures aren't upgraded until they're paired it meant the base version looked anemic. For example, look at Druid's Familiar.

Druid's Familiar costs. At first glance, this seems pretty bad. The second issue is what I'll call the Angel issue. It's a set rule that all Angels fly, but soulbond creatures don't gain their ability until paired. This meant an Angel with soulbond can't exist because the two rules contradict.

In a set all about Angels who supposedly are the forces bringing everyone together, the inability to have Angels with soulbond was a big deal. Angel of Jubilation Art by Terese Nielsen. We tried versions where creatures had multiple abilities but only granted one think of a Soulbond Angel that flies but grants vigilance when paired and it just didn't work. The simplicity of each soulbond creature turning on and granting abilities short circuited when players had to start remembering which abilities were shared and which ones weren't.

In the end, we decided that we had to suck it up that the cards didn't look powerful at first glance. All Magic sets do some of this. We figured we would write articles to help players get how soulbond worked. We also decided that having no soulbond Angel was a price to pay to keep the mechanic as easy to grok as possible. We already knew the mechanic was a little complex and would later get more complex in development , so if giving up an Angel helped lessen this problem, it was a price we had to pay.

Having finally solved how the cards were going to work or so we thought we started down the next problem to solve. How were we going to use soulbond to help create color identity? One of the functions of mechanics in a set is to separate how the different colors play. Part of what makes Magic fun is that each color has its own philosophy and play style. This allows players to explore, because each color will give you access to a different facet of the set.

Diregraf Escort Art by Ryan Pancoast. Often, we solve this by only putting mechanics in certain colors. Sometimes, though, the flavor demands the mechanic show up in more colors, which means the definition is not limited by what color gets the mechanic but by how it's used by those colors.

Here are some of the major tools design gets to use to help focus a mechanic in a certain color or colors:. The biggest two tools to affect as-fan are number and rarity.

If you want to increase as-fan, you either put more of that type of card in the set or you put more of that type of card at common. Often you do both. For soulbond, the number one color to get an increase of as-fan was green, with blue coming in second. What this meant was that we simply had more soulbond cards in green and blue and they also appeared at a lower rarity. If you want players to connect a particular color to a particular mechanic, another way to do this is with power level.

Players remember the cards they play with. If the mechanic's best cards are in a certain color, that means players will get used to seeing that color with that mechanic. In Avacyn Restored , that meant we wanted to put the power level of soulbond with primary in green and secondary in blue. The simplest way to do this is straight-forward: make sure some of your best cards with the mechanic are in your primary color.

Another one of the tricks to help green is that we saved one of the most potent parts of soulbond solely for green—power and toughness pumping. The reason this is so good is that most abilities don't stack.

If, for example, you have a soulbond creature that grants vigilance, that creature is weaker if it pairs with another copy of itself because having vigilance twice doesn't do anything. Power and toughness pumping, on the other hand, does stack, allowing good synergy when the creature is paired with itself. The final trick to help cement a creature as the primary color is to give it things that play well with the mechanic.

Sometimes this is finding natural parts of the game that interact well. Other times, its designing cards that are made such that they would be bad normally but very good with the mechanic. This allows the player drafting a soulbond deck to get copies of these cards because nobody else wants them.

Flowering Lumberknot is a good example of a card like this. So that's how we made green the soulbond color. Why did we choose green, though? As I explained during Avacyn Restored preview weeks, everything in the set gravitated toward white.

As such, the design team worked hard to steer things to other colors whenever possible. Soulbond was all about cooperation and teamwork. Two colors in Magic are about the value of the group over the individual: white and green the two enemies of black, the color of putting the needs of the individual first. If we couldn't use white, green was the next logical choice.

Another quick aside—in early playtests, every color was boosting power and toughness, but we found it was just too good in large numbers so we cut it down to just a few cards all in one color. If I'm telling the design story, it ends here.

We figured out how we wanted soulbond to work. We chose the colors we wanted soulbond to lean toward. The cards were playing well and we handed over the file. Remember in this version, soulbond creatures only paired when they entered the battlefield.