Back Draft — Wayfarer Upgrading!
When you get done finding your way through the challenges before you, you may feel it — you’ve gotten stronger! What’s next, you say? How does upgrading work with your decks and your Spark Emblem? What do Tiers mean?
IN THE BEGINNING
When we started with Wayfarer, we wanted to give the distinct feel that you were growing in power, in one of two ways. The first was easy — we constructed the Spark Emblems that would give you power as you grew between each Tier of our Episodes. Tiers are how strong you know your abilities are, and how strong each Episode is. We could release a future storyline that has, say, only one of each Tier 1 to Tier 5 Episodes, but then two more Tier 5 Episodes after that as a conclusion or a denouement. Our structure allows us a lot of freedom, and we aim to use it.
After we came up with the flexibility of Episodes and the Scenes inside Wayfarer allowing us to tell the stories we wanted, we knew we had to give the players a way to combat those tougher challenges. Thus, draft-based progression was born.
EASY PICKINGS
Draft-based progression was the perfect concept: how could we tie into the format a miniature version of what players do already at the limited tables? This would rope in the fans of other formats, because they enjoy the deckbuilding drafting provides.
So how does draft-based progression work? Firstly, you take 20 cards out of your deck after you see what’s in your pack. How you generate that pack as the scrivener is up to you. Typically, what I do with my playgroup is create a list of suggestions from EDHREC based on their commander, and then randomly pick cards from that list. 15 selections later, I can hand that list off to my wayfarer friend. Next, they select only TEN of those cards from the pack list I gave them, then either add those cards to their deck if they own them, or be allowed to proxy them. We’re a casual format, after all. Do whatever works for you!
I understand this might be a bit more steps to take, but as the scrivener, it’s your role to do the most work putting together the game for your wayfarers. You’re doing the storytelling, after all! Some other options include: sharing cards between your friends, buying a random Magic: the Gathering pack and using that, or more. The choice is yours!
Later on down the road, we plan to provide a website that will auto-generate suggestions in pack format that you can easily look at in-between games.
After you get your 10 cards, you put them back into your smaller, new, upgraded Commander deck (with your shiny new Tier 2 Spark Emblem!) and you’re now ready for Tier 2. This continues for Tier 3, Tier 4, and Tier 5. After each, you’ll have from the beginning, a 100-card deck, a 90-card deck for Tier 2, an 80-card deck for Tier 3, a 70-card deck for Tier 4, and a fully streamlined, max level 60-card deck at Tier 5.
And that’s it! It’s a simple path you take to upgrade and make your deck smaller, but by reducing all the chaff from a preconstructed deck, or upgrading your deck in the path you chose if you play with homebrew, your deck becomes stronger, faster, harder, smarter.
Just pray the scrivener lets you feel that way.
Join me next article, where I’ll be talking about best scrivener practices. It’ll be a guide to help you be a game master if you’ve never roleplayed before!
— Ashodin (aka Thirteen, RiptideProLab)
