While Magic: The Gathering is undeniably a phenomenally successful game, said success has come despite the laundry list of mistakes it’s made over the years. Whether it’s overpowered mechanics like Affinity or Dredge, or individual broken cards like Oko, we’ve seen more than a few major slip-ups. Companion, perhaps the most notorious of these issues, came in 2020’s Ikoria. Now, despite all of its problems, Mark Rosewater has stated that a return for the MTG Companion mechanic may be on the cards.
This revelation came in a recent Blogatog post, following a bout of fresh discussion on the mechanic. While it’s really just a tease for now, it’s clear that there’s untapped potential here. That said, other recent Blogatog posts outline the problems with returning to this particular well. Concerns about power level aren’t the only issues that plague the Companion mechanic, it seems.
A Broken Legacy
For the uninitiated, Companions are legendary creatures that you can cast from outside the game, provided your deck meets a specific condition. The mechanic was a very fun idea in theory, but in practice, it was all kinds of broken. The conditions required for some of the Companions, Lurrus in particular, simply weren’t restrictive enough to balance out ‘drawing’ a free card at the start of the game. Lutri, the Spellchaser was even banned in Commander from day one, since its condition meant every Izzet deck in the format could include it consequence-free.
Companions dominated eternal formats right out of the gate. In fact, Wizards banned Lurrus and Zirda in Vintage and Legacy just a couple of months after Ikoria’s release. Realizing that this wouldn’t be enough, it actually errata’d the entire companion mechanic in June 2020. Now players would have to pay three mana to add their chosen Companion to their hand each game.
Mechanic-wide change like this was pretty much unprecedented, especially given the severity of the downgrade here. What’s even more surprising, however, is that some Companions were still too good even with this change. While Lurrus was unbanned in Vintage, it was later banned in Modern and Pioneer. Further down the line, Yorion was banned in Modern, and Jegantha was banned in Modern and Pioneer.
This brings us to today. Right now, 50% of the total Companion cards in the game are banned in one format or another. It’s hard to think of another Magic: The Gathering mechanic with a worse track record.
A Return For The MTG Companion Mechanic?
With all of that in mind, it’d be safe to assume that Wizards was one-and-done on Companion. The mechanic proved to be a nightmare balance-wise, after all. Mark Rosewater has spoken negatively many times on Blogatog about the mechanic, too. Back in March, he even wrote, “We’d have failed pretty spectacularly if we have to errata a mechanic as much as we errataed companions.”
That said, it appears that all hope is not yet lost. In a Blogatog post on Saturday, Rosewater responded to a question about the possibility of the Companion mechanic making a return to MTG.
“Cold-cryptic: Will we ever get more companions or maybe some cards that have interesting interactions with companions?
Mark Rosewater: Maybe. : )”
Via Blogatog
While this is about as vague as answers get, it is still a glimmer of hope for those who love Companion. “Maybe” might be Rosewater’s textbook non-answer that’s impossible to discern, but it’s notably not a no. Given how controversial the Companion mechanic has been for MTG, an outright “No” definitely would have been expected. That said, it’s by no means as definitive as one of Rosewater’s “if/when” answers.
With all the controversy Companion has created over the years, giving it another go does seem like courting disaster. That said, there are definitely reasons for Wizards to do so. As Rosewater noted back in June, the mechanic is surprisingly popular among players. A second batch of Companions would also be a great opportunity for Wizards to redeem the first. As he put it in December last year: “Us doing something wrong doesn’t mean we can’t do it right.”
Difficulties In Design
Of course, having the Companion mechanic return to MTG is far easier said than done. Half of the original Companions ended up banned in one format or another, after all. In some cases, this was down to power level, but usually it was just because the option to include a Companion created a “why not?” mentality among players.
The concern with Companion is that any new design could cause this problem all over again. On top of that, there’s not a ton of room for design in this area in the first place. With the Companion discussion starting up again, players like Bobbymcbobbo have been suggesting ideas for new ones on Blogatog. As Rosewater pointed out in response, however, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
“Companion restrictions need to be monitorable. That means “the deck has a Forest” does not meet the bar for a companion restriction. In other words, it’s more restrictive than you think. Also, there’s a big difference between design space and practical design space. “Doesn’t have any Forests” is monitorable, but not inherently an interesting restriction.”
Mark Rosewater, via Blogatog
This really hammers home just how challenging Companions are to design. Not only is the range of possible conditions limited, but those are limited again by the innate requirement that the cards themselves be interesting to play. Mrmoustachemm and Cold-cryptic suggested Companions that limited your land picks, but as Rosewater pointed out, that doesn’t really lead to interesting deck building.
Rosewater has said several times, including very recently, that this design space issue is the biggest problem with Companion coming back. While this doesn’t bode well for the mechanic’s return, we’ve seen Wizards take on similar challenges before. Just look at how they wrangled Affinity into shape, after all. Personally, I hope they do take another crack at it someday. Companion is incredibly interesting, and a more balanced take on it could be fantastic for the game.
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