meditation on evolution

hi welcome to a long post about how i think of evolution working in mtg. this might be really boring but since we were talking about top-down design a bit in the thread i thought it could be interesting to talk about my thought process in moving evolution as a mechanic from the pokemon video games / the pokemon tcg into mtg. the way that i considered building this mechanic is by thinking about what it should and should not be able to do until i had a good scope, and then thinking of the best way to implement it. there are a huge number of things to consider about it though, so i didn't think i could create a mechanic that would do everything i wanted. for that reason i divided my list into two: things that i absolutely want the mechanic to do, and things that would be nice for it to do or things that it shouldn't be able to do but it's not too bad if it ends up doing them anyway. another good thing about listing out optional requirements is that they can contradict each other without making the design of the mechanic impossible, and then we can go back and choose which ones we like the most to prioritize. with that in mind, here are the things that i absolutely wanted from evolution in mtg:

0) all pokemon that evolve should evolve in the same way.
   i usually don't really like introducing new keyword abilities in custom cards (i'll try to mention this if i ever be a judge of one of these) but when you've got hundreds of pokemon that all do the same thing, it really doesn't make sense to write it out every time. there's way less cards with, like, eternalize, than there are pokemon that can evolve. we should use a keyword ability here.

1) other mechanics interacting with evolution should not result in a board state that doesn't make sense narratively.
   one thing that's really cool about mtg is that you can think of what's happening to your cards as part of a story. if you turn an artifact into a creature, you have a pretty good mental image of what that looks like and it's cool to think about that creature going to fight something. most stuff (and i would argue the best stuff) in magic is like this, where you can sort of think of how it works intuitively and follow the story in your head. for this reason we need to be a little careful with how evolution works, because there's so many ways to mess with things on the stack in magic. for example, if the evolution ability was something like "sacrifice this creature: put a [whatever] creature onto the battlefield with haste" then countering the ability would cause the pokemon to just die, which doesn't make sense narratively. that effect would be better off as something like "{T}: Put a [whatever] creature onto the battlefield. If you did, sacrifice this creature." (the 'if you did' is also important here, so that you can't just tap to sac the creature (go away emrakul))

2) pikachu with different names should be able to evolve into raichu with different names, etc.
   another thing that's super nice about mtg is that all of the cards have different names (except for a few unset cards that specifically use this as a joke). if you know the name of a card you can find that card, unlike in pokemon tcg where every pikachu card is named "pikachu". i will not sacrifice this aspect of mtg for this mechanic. however, how can "fighting pikachu" evolve into both "fighting raichu" or "fast raichu" or whatever? there's a few different ways to solve this, but (even though it's a little messy) i think the easiest is to just make a new creature type for each type of pokemon, and use that as the target for evoltuion. this doesn't really work for eevee though, since they can evolve into several different types of pokemon (although why would you, eevee is perfect), so we'll have to think about this a bit more later.

3) each evolution stage should be its own card.
   it's very important to have a drawing of your creature on the card you're using. also, changing card names during gameplay is sort of confusing. because of this, just using an ability of a card to indicate that it has evolved (like level up) isn't something i want. i really like the concept of using flip cards (front and back) to show evolution, but it just doesn't work for pokemon with three stage evolutions, or for my good friend eevee, and there's probably some people who really like second stage evolution pokemon that would be really sad if they didn't exist.

that's about it for things that seem totally necessary to me. there's a longer list of things that i think would be good to include, but i don't think it's possible to hit all of these. (if i'm wrong, let me know!)

1) eevee should be able to evolve in some way that's cooler than other pokemon.
   listen,
   eevee is the perfect, platonic ideal of a great pokemon, and should never actually evolve. even the smallest child knows this kind of a thing. however, evolution is its big thing, and i respect that. my eeveelution cards will have the ability to turn back into an eevee because that's what i'm all about and you have to deal with it. i think eevee should have protean. that frog thing sucks and i don't understand it. it's like yoshi from hell. i'm sorry. (i don't play pokemon competitively.)

2) "vulpix" should not be able to evolve into "alolan ninetails", "pikachu" should not be able to evolve into "lt. surge's raichu", etc.
   i don't know if there's a good way to summarize this, but there's a few evolutions that aren't possible in the pokemon tcg because they don't really make sense narratively. it isn't too impossible to think of a narrative for this kind of evolution though... maybe lt. surge found the raichu after it was a pikachu? maybe a regular ol' vulpix found its way to alola and then evolved? (i know that's not how it works in the games, but it is how it works in real life)

3) you shouldn't be able to play evolved pokemon without the base pokemon.
   this is how it works in the pokemon tcg, so it would be nice if it worked this way in mtg, too. i think that in mtg, though, it sucks a lot more to have cards in your deck that are totally useless unless you meet the requirement of including one other creature. i thought about giving all evolutions "pokemon-this-evolves-from-cycling" but i think that would make it kind of broken in standard (i don't actually play standard, but my impression of the format is that the goal is "i want to get my combo as fast as possible", and having 12 cards in your deck that could turn into or be a charmander might make that a little /too/ easy). in commander, which i normally play, you might draw a charmeleon and then never see charmander that game at all. so i don't really think this limitation makes sense in mtg.

4) if you do play an evolved pokemon while you do have the base pokemon, you should get some kind of benefit.
   my friend itsmekidney suggested that we can make up for ignoring the last point by allowing people to play evolved pokemon, but giving them a bonus if they had the pokemon that it should be evolving from. i think this makes a lot of sense and is really cool, and also is a great analog for the classic "lt. surge evolved his raichu too early" phenomenon that the anime presents. if you summon an already evolved raichu, maybe it didn't have time to learn the cool agility focused moves that pikachu learns at higher levels.

5) you shouldn't have to draw the evolved card seperately from the base evolution.
   i know that in pokemon you do have to draw both the base pokemon and the evolution card, but the pokemon tcg is also littered with trainer cards that make up for this by having you not need to do that (if you flip a coin, or something). mtg has so many other cards that it doesn't make as much sense to expect players to have a lot of cards that specifically make evolving pokemon easier (plus trainer cards in pokemon tcg effectively don't cost mana to play). (also, i play commander, and if i have to draw the evolution card that i only can have one of in my deck seperately i'm never going to be able to evolve anything). i think it makes more sense to have some kind of ability on the base pokemon card that searches for a card that can evolve from it. i thought about using a one-sided "partners with" for this, but again this doesn't work for my good pal eevee, who is the best pokemon, and who i am sort of designing this mechanic around because i can.

with all this in mind i think we have a much better idea of what the evolution mechanic should and shouldn't do. here's a rough draft that i'm thinking of:

Evolution [cost] ([cost], {T}: Search your library for a creature card with "Evolves from [this card's creature type]", reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library. You may put that card onto the battlefield with an evolution counter on it. If you do, move all evolution counters from this creature to that creature, then sacrifice this creature. Activate this ability only any time you could cast a sorcery.)

let's take a bit to break down this rough draft and refine this idea. this is a little bit wordy, and it means that all of the evolution cards need to have "Evolves from [whatever]" on them, but i think that's the best way to make eevee work, unless we introduce "eeveelution" as a creature type or something like that. it also lets us have cards that specifically say e.g. "Evolves from Alolan Ninetails", which is kind of nice, if we don't mind making "Alolan" a creature type. the evolution counters can be used to limit the number of activated abilities the evolved pokemon has. for example, you could have a Charmeleon with "{R}: ~ gets +1/+0 until end of turn. Activate this ability only if ~ has an evolution counter on it", or a Charizard with "{R}{R}{R}: ~ deals 3 damage to any target. Activate this ability only if ~ has two evolution counters on it." or similar things. i don't like the wording "from this creature to that creature", though, and you can proliferate and move these counters around which doesn't make sense narratively, but mtg doesn't have too many other options for representing card state other than counters, and lots of other cards do things that are similar, so i think it's fine. having it be sorcery-speed avoids some weird combat trick cheese, and it also lets us accomplish our optional goal #1 by letting eevee have "You may activate evolution abilities of ~ any time you could play an instant." the {T} cost mirrors pokemon tcg's restriction of only allowing a pokemon to evolve once per turn, but in true mtg style it lets you get around the limitation if you have supporting cards. a big problem with it is that you don't have to put the card from your hand onto the battlefield, so you can use the ability to just draw a bunch of good cards. that's something to revise, but overall, i'm pretty happy with this, but maybe we can clean it up a little bit.

[Quality] Evolution [cost] ([cost], {T}: You may put a creature card with "Evolves from [Quality]" onto the battlefield from your library, then shuffle. If you did, put a number of evolution counters on it equal to the number of evolution counters on this creature plus one, then sacrifice this creature. Activate this ability only any time you could cast a sorcery.)

nice, this is looking better already. i added the [quality] evolution bit so that we can have cards with "alolan vulpix evolution" if we want to really lock things down. plus "Eevee Evolution 1W" looks better than just "Evolution 1W" on a card i think. i borrowed the reminder text format of partners with ("put ... from your library") to prevent just putting stuff into your hand forever and to trim the text down a bit, but it didn't help much because i had to make the evolution counters bit even wordier to compensate. you can really see how much of the text is devoted to the counters in this draft, so i really want to do something about that. i really can't think of a good way to do it though!

i think this is what i'm going to go with. i'm pretty happy with how this ability works. i think it's pretty simple and easy to understand despite being pretty long text-wise. i ended up hitting all of my requirements, and 4/5 of my "nice to have"s. thanks to Hardcordion for this extremely good theme, to itsmekidney for pointing me in the right direction, and to my secret friends who i forced to read this whole thing before i posted it. if you have any thoughts on my process or suggestions for how this mechanic could be improved i'd love to hear them!