After a full year of playtesting in 2024, it’s time to revisit this set’s unique mechanics to see what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to change.

Concentration (Aura keyword)

If enchanted creature is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability, sacrifice this enchantment.

Concentration had a wobbly year. Overall, it’s been a bit too finicky to feel like a cohesive mechanic, but a few cards proved individually strong enough to see play. This almost certainly contributed to the general weakness of Blue/White decks, which want to stack enchantment synergies, and Blue/Red decks centered on spellslinging Wizards. Blue saw a number of reworks in general in 2024 to tighten up its synergies, and Concentration feels like the last piece of the puzzle that still doesn’t quite fit.

What Worked

Ironically, the most played Concentration auras were all off-color, which made Blue feel even weaker by comparison!

Crown of Madness is an evil twist on the Concentration formula, and one of the few that want to enchant an opponent’s creature instead of your own. You can read more about the design of this card here, but in short, it almost always disrupts the board and forces at least two discards, making it potentially devastating in drafts. Even then, it often felt very feast-or-famine, serving as a pop quiz for an opponent’s ability to break concentration on their own creature. This is trivial in decks with Equipment or Inspiration to target their creature, but those without an immediate answer often got steamrolled.

Unbreakable Bolt is a deceptively effective burn spell that managed to close out several games during playtests. While it takes a few turns to really crank up the heat, there were times it went unanswered and dealt 10+ direct damage, making it a pet card for a few of the regular testers. Extremely punishing to players who don’t pack enough removal in their decks.

Finally, Press On made its way into a decent number of green decks as a pseudo-Explore. It occasionally got stuck in hand when players couldn’t stick a creature on the board to enchant, but this never felt like an unfair drawback.

What Didn’t Work

A handful of awkward or unintuitive interactions made Concentration feel a bit too convoluted, restrictive, and generally unpleasant to some playtesters.

Too Wordy – “Is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability” turned out to be trickier than expected for some players to mentally track, leading to confusion and missed triggers. While intended as a nod to both its namesake in D&D, which has characters roll to maintain their concentration spells upon taking damage, as well as to class MtG cards like Phantasmal Image which vanish as soon as they’re targeted. In particular, it was easy to lose track of creatures being targeted by abilities, especially in less obvious cases like attempting to equip onto that creature.

Anti-Synergies – Players were often disappointed to learn how many “hidden” restrictions were baked into the mechanic. In addition to equip effects, a player could accidentally break their own Concentration aura by targeting their creature with Inspiration tokens or even other Concentration auras! While originally intended as clever ways to interact and free your own creatures from a Sirensong or Crown of Madness, the takeaway was usually that the entire mechanic didn’t play well with the rest of the set. This understandably pushed players even further away from these cards in drafts.

The Ward Conundrum – Several of the Wizards in blue were designed specifically to be good enchant targets, with Ward making them more difficult for an opponent to target. However, I realized that it didn’t actually work! Because of the way Ward is worded, a creature is still “targeted” even if the Ward cost is not played and the spell or ability gets countered. This meant Concentration could still be broken just as easily, and even led to some awkward rewording on some cards. For most of 2024, Mage Armor read “Spells that target enchanted creature cost one more to cast” since the whole point of the card was to protect a creature. Even this felt pretty bad, since it didn’t account for being targeted by abilities at all… What started off as a simple, flavorful idea quickly unraveled into a tangle of disappointing edge cases!

What Needs to Change

Even after concerted efforts to buff Blue as a whole, Concentration spells continue to go largely untouched. Rather than continue to spin on their individual effects, it’s time to rework the rules text of the mechanic itself:

If enchanted creature is dealt damage, sacrifice this enchantment. If a creature has two or more Auras with Concentration attached to it, all of them except the last one attached are put into their owners’ graveyards.

This version of the mechanic aims to solve a few things:

• Concentration is no longer broken when targeted. This brings it more in-line with D&D’s version, gives players less to keep track of, and allows Concentration to work with other mechanics like Equipment, Inspiration, and Ward.
• The additional clause still limits creatures to having a single Concentration Aura on them at a time. While the MtG legalese makes this seem more complicated than it is, I expect it to be more intuitive in practice… can’t concentrate on two things at once!
• Since the second clause gives priority to the last Aura attached, this means players can now fight over a creature’s concentration – Playing a Crown of Madness to remove an opponent’s Mage Armor, or vice versa. It’s important that the “villainous” Auras in the set still feel like they have available counterplay now that it’s no longer as trivial as equipping or inspiring the creature.

This change will require a few specific Auras to get revisions of their own, but it should allow these cards to see play in a much wider variety of strategies and lead to fewer “feels-bad” moments. Time and playtests will tell if this turns out to be the case.