The Actual Problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns

Today, we get to talk about yet another problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns. If anything, it is the original problem with the card.

The one that when Oko was first revealed, everyone was buzzing about.

What is a Food token?

When I first started trying to write something about current Standard, the thing that came to mind was the idea of a forced or unforced error in design.

War of the Spark and Modern Horizons had their share of missteps, but each was a fairly resource straining and epic undertaking. They were also both working in totally new spaces. If you look at past Magic design mistakes, almost all of them are caused by trying new things and missing (Smuggler's Copter, Skullclamp, Jace, the Mind Sculptor), not being able to allocate enough resources to what is going on (True-Name Nemesis), or both (the Energy mechanic, the two sets I mentioned).

When you shoot high and strain resources in the hopes of putting out something awesome, there's an excusable level of failure. When you ban something like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, you know it's because they were shooting at making 250 cards matter and be great and one or three missed too high.

What was Throne of Eldraine's excuse?

I wrote an article titled The 10 Most Broken Cards in Throne of Eldraine last month. One of the cards I scored exceedingly high was Feasting Troll King.

I probably had some Hogaak on my mind biasing my rating upwards, but Feasting Troll King is an extremely powerful card. When first looking at the set it felt like there were a number of ways to generate Food at minimal mana or card cost. Basic cardboard economics show turning minimal investment into a 7/6 trample is good.

The follow up issue was that turning any investment into a 3/3 Elk was much less good.

When it was possible Oko, Thief of Crowns would be banned before Mythic Championship VI and SCGCon, I went back to thinking about Feasting Troll King. I looked at my decks, and remembered the experience I had playing them. Which was that Oko, Thief of Crowns was my best Food generator, and without it the easiest way to make a Feasting Troll King was tapping Castle Garenbrig to cast it.

Another common theme among Magic mistakes is a parasitic mechanic running out of control. The best recent example is Energy, though the classic is Affinity for Artifacts.

You print some cards that enable Energy. The pieces fit together and make all the other cards that do it better. Every more subtle interaction in the format now has to stack up to those obvious ones. You push the power level on some of the pieces, because if you don't you wasted a lot of cards that only work with each other.

If you don't push enough, you get Ixalan where the tribes barely made an impact. That might be an equally bad mistake on its own.

If you push too hard and don't print appropriate interaction to punish going all in on that one thing, you can easily end up in a scenario where that thing outclasses everything else.

But Energy didn't really go over the top without Rogue Refiner from Aether Revolt. And Vampires and Dinosaurs both got raised to highly competitive options with some targeted Magic 2020 buffs.

There won't be another Food card for Feasting Troll King for a long time. Maybe one can slide into Core Set 2021 if needed. There isn't a Hunt for the King or whatever a second Throne of Eldraine set would be. And if the mechanic was any more complicated than Food token, we might not see it until a Modern Horizons style set.

Throne of Eldraine is only the third true standalone set of this type in the Modern era. Dominaria was the first, and War of the Spark the second. Ravnica Allegiance and Guilds of Ravnica were set up in traditional Ravnica block fashion, where they don't expect any given mechanic to carry forward and all 10 guilds are the cohesive whole.

Dominaria and War of the Spark had linear mechanics, but they were open ended. Legendary or artifact stuff matters gets cards every set. Proliferate works with any counters.

Throne of Eldraine's first is being the first standalone set to support a parasitic mechanic.

From this idea of having one shot to make Food hit Standard play, the narrative of creating Oko, Thief of Crowns is easy. I'm not excusing missing the utterly stifling impact Oko's +1 has on deck building, but the rest falls into place,

You want Food to hit Standard. You are spending a planeswalker on it, and that planeswalker is one you are setting up as a prominent current and future antagonist. Even if Food misses, you want this card to hit. So numbers get pushed a bit to ensure it works by itself.

If you look at Simic "Food", the only real Food card is Wicked Wolf. Food as a mechanic has largely missed Constructed, we just see a lot of it from Oko and Gilded Goose. The failure case came true, and Oko "succeeded" at surviving that.

When you ban Oko, and that's a when not an if, you will see basically no Food. Even when Attune with Aether was banned, Energy showed up.

If you want another actionable, large scale design lesson from Oko, it is here.

Parasitic mechanics will be made again because they do new and interesting stuff. You have less cards to spend on them now that everything is single serving. How do you make them in a single set without having this issue again?

We have two existing models. I'm not sure either is optimal, but I present them anyways.

One came about after the Affinity fiasco. The Soulshift and Spirits mattering was a key part of Champions of Kamigawa block, and Ravnica: City of Guilds had plenty of Spirits to grow those synergies. You don't have to push and worry as hard if mechanics grow and change over time. That was repeatedly implemented block-to-block, but that now has to be woven in on a set-to-set basis. I'm unsure doing this is possible. You have general ideas of a block's mechanics early enough to seed it months or a year ahead, but not a single set. Throne of Eldraine feeds Theros Beyond Death's assumed  Devotion theme well, but War of the Spark and Magic 2020 didn't really feed Throne of Eldraine. Maybe this is another issue, since those sets and the Ravnica ones were so busy they didn't have space.

The other option is treating everything like an old small set. Mechanics become disposeable, you don't care a ton if they fail, and you don't go on Oko sized excursions pushing them. But that sucks, because everyone loved Constellation in Journey to Nyx and hated seeing nothing more of it.

Maybe standalone sets need to share mechanics. Maybe you need to break down the Core Set walls and have it serve a dual intro and supplementary purpose more. Maybe the 2 + 1 + Core model we saw in Ixalan + Dominaria or Guilds of Ravnica + War of the Spark is best since you can seed ahead of the standalone within the same year.

All I know is I really don't want to see the same thing that happened with Oko happen again.