Magic The Gathering Arena Introduces Its Newest Digital-Only Mechanic, Intensity
Magic The Gathering Arena is currently in the middle of its spoiler season for the upcoming Alchemy and Historic tie-in for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and has revealed one of the new digital-exclusive mechanics coming to the formats.
Alchemy: Kamigawa will introduce 'Intensity', a new property inherent to cards that can be modified to scale that card up and down. So far, we've only seen it on a handful of cards such as Bellowsbreath Ogre and Runaway Growth, but it is very likely we'll be seeing more of it in upcoming releases.
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From what we've seen, Intensity appears to be a trait of the card itself, rather than the usual paper method of putting counters on things. By using the perpetual mechanic, the intensity of cards can be changed to make an effect more or less powerful; for example, Runaway Growth produces green mana equal to its intensity when it is tapped, which also perpetually increases its intensity by one. Meanwhile, Bellowsbreath Ogre deals damage equal to its intensity to any target when it attacks, and then perpetually raises it by one as well.
In the paper game, these kinds of effects would usually be done through adding counters onto things. For instance, Black Market produces black mana equal to the number of charge counters it has on it. By tracking Intensity as a property of the card itself, though, changes made with the perpetual mechanic can follow a card across all zones of the game in a way counters can't. No matter if it's in the hand, battlefield, graveyard, or exile, its Intensity will stay the same.
Alchemy and Historic are the two formats in Magic The Gathering Arena that use digitally-exclusive mechanics that, Wizards claims, couldn't
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