Welcome back to UB Slay the Spire! We’ve reached the final playable character, though I’m also planning to complete the wedges with a Corrupt Heart card representing the game’s greatest villain. This week did bring us a great video from Mark Rosewater himself on the best mechanics of all time, but I’m planning to save my response to that for a week I can design 20 cards (or at least 10 a week for two weeks) and this week I am sick and still working on the Uthe Subsector post, so I’ll keep plugging away at this project for now.
The Watcher was released after the game was already mature, and it shows. She is highly complex, with the ability to easily go infinite, generate temporary cards, and generally do a lot of math. Her central mechanic is stances, which are mutually exclusive states with various special effects. The calm stance is similar to no stance, but when you enter another stance from calm, you get two extra energy, making it the core of Watcher’s infinite combos, since a one-cost calm entry and one-cost calm exit are energy-neutral and can be made draw-neutral in a small number of ways. The wrath stance is an automatic damage doubler–for you and your opponent. (For MTG players wondering if this is as broken as it sounds, or if this is a Pot of Greed situation, doubling your damage is as good as it sounds, and doubling your opponent’s damage is even less of a worry than it would be in MTG, since winning before they can attack is a distinct possibility.) The third stance is rare and difficult to enter, but pays huge dividends: if you can accumulate 10 mantra, you enter divinity, get three extra energy, and deal triple damage until the end of your turn without a downside. Outside of stances, the Watcher can also generate temporary cards to attack, defend, draw cards, and store energy, retain cards in her hand between turns (in Slay the Spire, your hand is discarded at the end of turn and you draw a new hand every turn), and scry, which, confusingly, works like the mechanic named surveil in MTG.
The core of the Watcher, though, and the way we’ll determine her color identity, is her stances. Wrath, with its iconic damage doubling effect, is clearly red. Calm, which patiently stocks up resources for the future and is associated with defensive play, scry decks, and retain decks that center around hand management, feels very blue. The neutral stance, evenly balanced between the others, is white, and the flavor of divinity in Magic is white as well. What hammers this home is that the White-Blue-Red combination in MTG is associated with the Jeskai Way, who like the Watcher are warrior monks who use both passion and logic to further their martial might.
It only makes sense for a character whose central mechanic is going back and forth between stances to be a transforming dual faced card, but that restricts us to mainly depicting the central two stances. I’d like to work in a mechanic representing divinity as well. Perhaps divinity will be an effect you can achieve by stacking ten “mantra counters” on the Watcher.
Let’s start with the calm side. This should be a fairly passive, Blue-White, design. I’m inclined to have this be the side which can accumulate mantra counters as well. I like the idea that it takes five turns normally, but as little as three turns if you sacrifice something else to focus on becoming divine. The five turn baseline is based on the card Devotion. That means two mantra counters each turn. If each turn, you can do something to earn more mantra counters, that means we are looking at a potential three or four mantra counters per turn. (Letting the Watcher trigger divinity every other turn without building around proliferate would mean the ability would have to be seriously nerfed.) Three counters per turn reduces the minimum turns to four, but four counters per turn would mean it was consistently three if you built around divinity. That seems fair for a difficult goal with a big reward, and requires you to play somewhat defensively with your Watcher if you’re building around that. But what should the cost be? I like the idea that you tap down the Watcher during your upkeep, meaning you can’t attack or block with it that turn cycle. It will mean that you can’t benefit from triple damage by attacking with it, but the calm side will likely have low power anyway. Entering wrath should be fairly easy–I like doing it as an attack trigger that adds two red mana for the rest of your turn. Simple, direct, and adds weight to the choice during your upkeep because you can’t transform the Watcher if you tap her down.
For the wrath side, the rules text is simple. Sources you control deal double damage. Sources that deal damage to a permanent you control, or to you, deal double damage. But how to go back to calm? One of the biggest pitfalls for Watcher is getting stuck in wrath. To emulate that, let’s make you spend a whole turn cycle without dealing damage. We have the space to let the player deal damage during blocking, which seems fair enough. That way, entering wrath always exposes you to at least one round of double damage attacks from your opponents–the ones who survive your attack step, that is.
In terms of stats, I like the idea that the calm and wrath sides have opposite stats. 4/1 and 1/4 feel correct, meaning that three hits from the wrath side, or two hits from wrath and one from calm during divinity, will net a commander damage kill. In order to give the player time to reach divinity, I think the casting cost should be 4 mana, meaning that divinity will come into play around turn 7-9 if you curve into it and it isn’t removed. That means the damage doubling can’t happen until turn 5, which is a little late considering something like Solphim, Mayhem Dominus comes down on turn 4 and has no downside, so let’s at least let the player cast both sides so that the fun can start on turn 4. I like using hybrid here to keep the mana cost semi-hard–you must have four colored pips, but you can cast each side with its own colors or contribute the third.
(As an aside, you could theoretically reach divinity on turn three by starting the game with Gemstone Caverns (exiling a card), playing Jeweled Lotus and an untapped land on turn one to cast The Watcher, playing a third untapped land on turn two and casting Sol Ring in order to cast two from among Contentious Plan, Experimental Augury, Ripples of Potential, Serum Snare, and Unbounded Potential before your next upkeep, at which point you would have at most three cards in hand to benefit from your tripled damage. If you do this, you have just had the luckiest cEDH game of your life, and you’ve also spent something like $160 on just these cards named here.)
The card images here are from the game itself, the cards Vigilance and Eruption. (Sorry about the quick edit job on the Eruption art.) Flavor text is from the Sensory Stone event. That’s all, so I’ll see you all next week when I wrap this series up with the Corrupt Heart!