This one is causing something of a uproar over on MaRo's Tumblr. Some people are just weirdly ticked off because this is an artifact.

I don't really care that this is an artifact but I feel like for years Maro has talked about trying to keep artifacts and enchantments different and now he is acting like that was never something he tried to do. I haven't bothered to read all of it maybe there was more explanation when people started asking and I missed it.

I don't think he's acting like anything. He even wrote today about how with Mirrodin, he tried to fight for stronger lines between artifact and enchantment but was voted down. As the need for non-colorless artifacts has become clear, he and WotC have shifted their thinking about mechanical differences.

Yeah, here's a good summary on reddit of MaRo's tumblr comments regarding this.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Personally, I'm fine with the distinction just being flavor. The colored artifact frame does a lot to help you remember that it's an artifact and not an enchantment.

There's nothing wrong with having some colored artifacts once in a while.

Incidentally, that's me.

lol, well thanks for the summary!

I'm not a fan of glass casket and witching well in the slightest, I'm not particularly convinced that flavor should be a relevant factor on whenever red or black gets to destroy a permanent or is powerless to stop it. Plus I feel that "I want to run shatter because I need to destroy equips, vehicles, artifact creatures, colorless silver bullets coming from the sideboard or permanents with a strong tap ability" is more logical than "I want to run shatter to blow up things equipments, vehicles and random stuff that they wanted to have artifact flavor or they wanted to be weak to shatter and not mire in misery for play design concerns."

Even if they want an artifact matter block, it would be more memorable if the artifacts behaved differently from enchantments, imho.

(Ps. I'd also have loved if bolas citadel was an artifact enchantment, but whatever.)

Tldr: I dislike that flavor derermines if a color is weak or no to a card.

"need for noncolorless artifacts"

lol

Up until now-ish good artifacts came in pretty much two types:
- High mana-cost forgettable jank that is only good if you can cheat it into play or is otherwise bulk-rare fodder.
- Low cost "pushed" artifacts that end up causing balance issues as every deck that can play them, does.

There was a need.

I feel that this particular card is the biggest offender that we've seen to date. That being said, there may be standard environment considerations at play here too. Since Theros is the next set, they may be leaning more into colored artifacts, so the (assumed) enchantment synergies in Theros will be balanced.

yeah, I think this is where I'm at too. like, having one type or the other has clear mechanical implications, so it'd be nice if some thought was put into mechanical identity. it doesn't have to be the activated/static divide, I agree that that's too restrictive. honestly, it doesn't even have to be the colored/colorless divide either. but every other pair of types in the game has something that distinguishes them mechanically: sometimes those differences are huge, like between creatures and lands. sometimes they're small, like instants and sorceries. but artifacts and enchantments have literally no inherent differences within the rules of the game, so if you're going to bother having both of them (and getting rid of one at this point would be deeply implausible) there really should, at the very least, be some sort of mechanical design principles to distinguish one from the other.

nah man

I don't think there was a need for colored artifacts becoming an "all the time" thing rather than a "weird and special" occurrence and I'm kind of sad these floodgates have been opened. There needs to be some difference between an artifact that doesn't happen to tap itself and an enchantment, there really does. FFS bring back static artifacts turning off when tapped at this rate. It wouldn't help Glass Casket not be a bleed, but it would be better than just going with "artifacts can be colored by default now."

So far the artifacts we've seen that don't tap or equip are white/blue which has an "artifacts and enchantments matter" theme, they can be animated by Animating Faerie. Arguably they could have just made Animating Faerie work on non-aura enchantments in addition to artifacts.

Apparently, there IS something wrong with COLORLESS artifacts once in a while. We learned that in Urza's, relearned it with Mirrodin, and&D finally took the hint after Aetherworks Marvel.

Hehe Glass Casket. You can call it Glassket

Only really had the time to post about this now and gotta say I don't really buy Maro's argument for it and at the same time I sort of do.

Basically, the issue is that card types have always been seen as kinda "metaphysical" to the game. Card types are "important", constitutionally important to the structure of how the game plays, differently from, say, supertypes or creature types which are generally very minor markers whose purpose is, most of the time, to serve as markers for in-game card effects. Each card type basically does a thing that no other type does; lands are played directly from hand to the board for no mana, creatures attack and block, artifacts and enchantments don't, instant and sorceries are one-shot effects, planeswalkers can be attacked.

Each of those are fundamentally different in the way they play, and to write out what they do would increase complexity enormously. I mean, you technically could wipe out the creature card type and write Eager Cadet this way:


Card types do, then, what keywords do but raised to the eleventh power: they consolidate a lot of information into one nice, compact mental box. And, due to being the building blocks of the game, this rather complex set of information is assimilated all at once at the beginning; you don't learn Magic then you go learn card types, learning Magic is learning the card types.

That is why, I think, something being a card type is generally seen as a "big deal" (as far as the obscure theme of Magic design discussion is concerned anyway). People had issues assimilating, for example, that tribal was a card type instead of a supertype because tribal doesn't do anything of the above. It is just a marker that lets noncreature cards have creature types, but it doesn't play any different than a non-tribal card would (outside of cards that play off the marker, I mean).

This system was never perfect, of course, the main issue being instant and sorceries and artifacts and enchantments. Instant and sorceries fill the same role - one-shot effects -, but at least the timing restriction makes them play slightly different. Artifacts and enchantments are much more severe. They are basically the same card type, all distinctions between them are artificial: the colorlessness, the tapping, Auras and Equipment etc.

But those distinctions were pretty much the compromise found to force artifacts and enchanments to be distinct. They are Magic saying "yeah, they are kind of the same thing, so how do we make them not be and give each their niche?" So they made artifacts generally:


And 99% of Magic's cards, an artifact has had at least one of those traits. I think Alara had a few ones that weren't, there are Eldrazi, and Theros had enchantment creatures, but all those were exceptional due to thematic demands instead of an expression of a broad design philosophy.

And then comes Glass Casket and it has none of the above. It is basically Silkwrap, an enchantment, except it has an artifact frame. Maro says it is fine, essentially, due to:



Consider this card:


Is this card acceptable? It is basically a sorcery, except it plays off some artifact synergies and dodges some counterspells. It is flavorful -- everyone knows what Pot of Greed does. And the effect is certainly blue. But I think everyone would see this as weird almost in an Uncanny Valley way -- outside of specific themes, artifacts and enchantments aren't supposed to do one-shot effects and then be there on the board forever doing nothing. Rules-wise, they can do it, certainly; that just isn't what people expect them to do. And even considering people's expectations of artifacts have been relaxed to allow for colored ones, people still sorta expect artifacts to be at least one of the following:


Maro's arguments miss the point of why people feel weird about Glass Casket. It isn't about the presence of something, but the absence; artifacts were expected to have a few things and Glass Casket doesn't have them. If Glass Casket had ", : You gain 1 life" added, nobody would bat an eye.

But the thing is, in last analysis, does it matter? I mean, I just wrote this really long post discussing why some pieces of cardboard have "Artifact" written on them instead of "Enchantment", but what is even the point in writing this. Glass Casket is just one card, after all. And even if it weren't, so what? You'd have some slight bump in complexity, as the artifacts/enchantments split would be slightly harder to grok, but gameplay would be mostly unaffected outside of maybe making red slightly better at removing problem permanents, and black's newfound enchantment removal slightly worse. Artifacts and enchantments are basically becoming tribes of sorts. But gameplay wouldn't be changed otherwise in any substantial way. So I guess this is less about Glass Casket being good or bad and more about understanding why some people got weirded out about it. It really messes with the "mechanical aesthetic" Mel cares about.

tl,dr The whole Glass Casket mini-controversy is more of an expectations question regarding what artifacts are expected to do.

As a note, enchantments that are practically just spells have started to get more common. Dovin's Acuity could in practice just have came back from the graveyard, Liliana's Contract and Oath of Chandra has other text, but they're also completely reasonable cards to play just for the battlefield trigger, and my favorite of the bunch, Trial of Strength, is practically just a sorcery that is practically just a creature.

I'm a big fan of those cards personally though so I'm all for it.

@Mown: I'll defend Dovin's since it's a fairly easy trigger (unlike trial) and means it can be removed rather than having to deal with grave hate, but the others are pretty legit. I'm reminded of Ardent Plea by this discussion, though the Exalted is pretty alright.