We've all heard the lullaby Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It's madly famous. Today I noticed that the melody used in the piece is actually used in The Alphabet Song. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ or whatever it's called. If you listen to Baa Baa Black Sheep you are also able to notice that the tune is quite close to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
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This particular melody? Musically, it's simple, memorable, and easy for children and adults to sing and play because of its short range (6 notes, less than an octave). It's rhythmically repetitive and pretty much as simple as you can get: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8) x6 which makes it very easy to put words to, and very easy to remember. Also more subjectively, it's a lovely little melody, it's not surprising it's stuck around.
The question as to why twinkle twinkle is such a memorable and well loved melody is despite its simplicity is difficult to answer without either being too technical or too hand-wavy, but suffice to say that it packs a lot of content into it short and sweet package. It's conversational, it sort of raises a question and answers it. It has a sort of tension and release, with the middle section being reassuringly answered by the same melodic phrase that came at the beginning. The harmonic structure is perfectly resolved: I'd be hard pressed to think of a more "complete" sounding short melody.
I think it's just one of those melodies like "oh when the saints" "amazing grace" "O tannenbaum/Oh Christmas Tree/The red flag etc." - which knows exactly what it is, doesn't have any unnecessary frills: every note is pretty much there for a purpose, and it makes them pretty timeless. "Amazing Grace" and "Oh when the saints" function very differently harmonically to "Twinkle Twinkle", but the point I just made applies to them both. But if it was easy to exactly quantify what makes these melodies so timeless, then we'd all be writing them. There's an element of tradition of course, but there's more to it than that. I'm sure people have written long books about it.
Some of this is certainly a feedback loop: it's popular to use this melody because it's popular to use this melody. Once you start using a melody for multiple songs, it becomes more likely that that melody will be used for the next song!
It's Constellation Week here on DailyMTG.com, so we're going to be spending the week talking about the new ability word from Journey into Nyx. I haven't done a mailbag article in a little while, so I decided that I would dedicate this article to answering your questions about constellation.
I should note, by the way, that I now use Twitter whenever I'm trying to generate mailbag content. It's the fastest way to get questions and the 140-character limit does a great job of keeping the questions concise. If you like having your questions answered here on "Making Magic," I urge you to follow me on Twitter (@maro254).
For starters, I should point out that constellation is technically not a keyword mechanic but an ability word. Ability words, unlike keywords, are not necessary. If you removed it from the card, the card mechanically works just fine. The ability word is a tool to group together like-minded cards so players better understand that they all work the same. It also gives them a name, to allow people to talk about the mechanic. A shared vocabulary is very important. Finally, it allows us to focus on it as a feature when we preview the new set.
Because something has to be held back. This is part of the third-set problem that I often talk about. By the time you get to the third set, the playerbase has a little fatigue for the world and you need to do something to shake up the environment. The easiest way to do this is to find something that (a) the players are eager for so they are excited when they finally get it, and (b) plays well with what has come earlier in the block without actually being there. Enchantment-matters fits this bill on both accounts. It's something we knew players really wanted, and because the set was already full of enchantments, especially enchantment creatures, we knew that it would be playable with the whole block, even though constellation only appears in the final set.
The name is somewhat limiting. On the flipside, it's not the kind of mechanic with a giant amount of depth, due to the limitations of the type of effects you can put on it. If we brought it back on a world other than Theros, we would have to talk about renaming it.
Cards that care about enchantments is the main reason. Constellation is a subset of that group, but Magic has many other cards in its past that care about enchantments. Also, after the artifact lands of Mirrodin block, you can say, "Once burned, twice shy."
We put a bunch of enchantments in it. No, we didn't feel we had to do much with the core set, as Theros block was providing lots and lots of enchantments, including enchantment creatures, that make enchantment-matters work differently from past incarnations.
This is more of a creative question than a design one. The mechanic is tied to the gods, which are tied to Nyx, which is tied to the stars. (You'll notice that all the creatures tied to Nyx have a starfield incorporated into them, as does the enchantment creature frame.) To the best of my knowledge, that's how we got to the name. I do like that constellation implies an interconnectivity between multiple stars.
The only real change was the decision to only put it on enchantments. Originally that wasn't the case but we found if too many cards with constellation weren't enchantments you had this weird problem where if you put a lot of constellation cards in your deck, you had no room for the enchantments. I will point out, that development prefers when we do things that way because it allows them to push the mechanic a lot more because players can't just fill up their deck with cards of the mechanic.
In design, we put the ability into all five colors but focused it a little more in white and black, as those were the colors that had the higher focus on bestow in Theros. That seems to have lessened a bit during development.
When Mercadian Masques came out, the set had new mechanics (Rebels and Mercenaries, Spellshapers, pitch cards, etc.) but nothing that was named in any way. The response we got was people asking why we had chosen not to put any new mechanics in the set. That made us realize that many players need help in seeing what's new. Since then, we have been much more willing to use ability words to help label mechanics we wanted players to notice.
Constellation is an ability word. All ability words officially don't anything, ruleswise. You could remove any ability word and the card would be just fine. As I said above, the reason for the ability word is not to make the card work, but to allow ease of recognition. Also, when a lot of cards that work the same all have the same word, it helps players more quickly recognize what the card does. "Oh, it works like those other cards. Got it."
The Theros block has numerous enchantment creature tokens as well as ways to get enchantments onto the battlefield in ways other than casting them. "Enters the battlefield" allows us to make those also count.
One of my jobs as head designer is gauging the design space of each of our new mechanics. How much space does it have and what future does it hold? Constellation is one of those mechanics that is much shallower than it looks. It requires effects that can happen multiple times, which is pretty limiting. I'm not going to say there isn't more design space than what Journey into Nyx used, but there's not a huge amount.
Sometimes, when you create one mechanic, it begets others. Landfall was definitely one of those times. Once we realized what we could do with landfall, it made us start to examine mechanics that cared about other card types and subtypes entering the battlefield.
The Zendikar block had a different structure. The third set in the block was Rise of the Eldrazi and it was a large set with a mechanical reboot. Theros block, on the other hand, was a traditional three-set large/small/small block. Journey into Nyx did not have the luxury of a fresh start, so we had to hold something back to allow ourselves to add a twist to the environment. Holding back enchantment-matters meant that the early sets in the block could mix and match the enchantment and nonenchantment components. Then, by adding the enchantment-matters theme in the third set, all of a sudden, we would be opening up an entire new style of deck to be drafted. Without making enchantments matter earlier in the block, there was no prior impetus to collect enchantments in a single deck in Limited. So why is it different than Zendikar? Because of the block structure and how we were using the mechanic in question in that structure.
I believe it would be much worse if the mechanics checked how many enchantments you controlled on the battlefield because, in that scenario, your enchantments aren't sitting with the rest of your cards and can be easy to forget. Constellation and bestow both require you to focus on them as they are being cast, which makes it a little harder to forget.
It's what we tend to do as a default. One of the main goals of mechanics is to reinforce the feel the set is trying to create. When the set has factions of any kind, the momentum is to give each faction a keyword, to have the design reinforce the structure. A war is essentially a two-faction design, so yes, barring reasons not to do it, we tend to give each side in a war its own mechanic.
Constellation was a bottoms-up designed mechanic (meaning, it started from a place of mechanics rather than flavor). We knew from the start that it was going to be tied to the Gods, flavorfully, but the crux of the design was a desire to make players care more about enchantments enabling enchantment-heavy decks.
Bestow did a much better job of addressing the deficiency of Auras. Constellation helps some, but the fact that it triggers on enchantments entering the battlefield means that players can still hose constellation triggers (the non-bestow ones) by removing the creature being targeted with the Aura.
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