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Enigma, Psionic Titan

If my memory serves, the first draft of this card was designed soon after I had finished writing the story of Emperor Enigma. The idea was simply to mechanically represent this powerful tyrant who empowers and brainwashes others, but differently than Volpes. Where Volpes subverts and redirects existing personalities and loyalties, this version of Enigma isn’t shy about using his powers to more directly control his forces.

As you can see, the core design remained largely intact, but a few things made themselves apparent in play-testing that mandated a number of tweaks.

• As Wizards of the Coast has learned as well, there is a significant difference between something happening on upkeep, and that same thing happening at the beginning of your end step. Too frequently, (because my playgroup hates fun theft decks), he wouldn’t survive long enough to gain the additional loyalty, and would quickly get killed in combat. This change gives the deck a way to build up their board prior to playing him, so he can get the loyalty boost.
• Because Commander players are, in general, more likely to play defensive, tying the loyalty boost to attacking encourages players to swing and commit creatures to combat. This should discourage defensive play while flavorfully tying into the way Enigma is flavorfully conquering his opposition.
• An issue with the +1/+1 counter being applied when creatures take damage is that your opponents are likely only going to block if they can deliver lethal damage to the attacking creature before the trigger is allowed to go off. Or worse, they won’t block at all and just take the damage on the chin. There’s also the benefit, in conjunction with the above changes to the first ability, of giving the player a self-controlled way to boost Enigma’s loyalty by modifying an attacking creature.
• Unfortunately, both of those changes combined made the card way too powerful for a 3-mana card. To scale it more appropriately, an additional mana was added to the cost. Additionally, the second ability was changed from a triggered ability to a loyalty ability in order to force the player to make more interesting decisions in the middle of a match.

While my playgroup did have a problem with the -X ability, especially since it can take most tokens for 0 loyalty, and most early game plays for cheap, funnily enough the above changes also solve that problem by forcing the player (read:me) to choose between taking a creature and using one of the other abilities to build up the board and/or swing in for big damage. It’s still a nice option, but it’s an option among multiple.

Fascinating how solving one problem can often solve multiple other problems down the line.