The upcoming Marvel Superheroes MTG set will introduce a brand new enchantment subtype. Even if you were paying close attention to the Marvel cards that have been revealed so far, you'd be forgiven for failing to notice it, though. Doom Reigns Supreme is the first plan card in Magic: the Gathering, but is it just me, or does it seem that we've seen similar cards before?
For two mana, Doom Reigns Supreme is an enchantment and a plan. When a Villain enters the battlefield under your control, your opponents each lose one life, while you gain one. Then it gains a plan counter. Once Doom Reigns Supreme has gained five plan counters, it gets sacrificed, and you can exile five cards from target opponent's library and cast up to two of them for free.
In terms of power level, there's nothing wrong with this card. It's a strong payoff for villain typal decks that steals cards from another player. It's even quite thematic, since it feels like your villains are coming together to pull off a big robbery.
The issue here is one of execution. Mechanically, this plan feels very similar to a previous subcategory of enchantments - Quests.
Quests, while not an official subtype, were a series of enchantments that first appeared in the set Zendikar in 2009. Quests gradually gain "Quest counters" whenever you fulfill a certain condition. They are then often, although not always, sacrificed once they reach a certain number of counters in order to provide a beneficial effect.
The card Quest for the Gravelord, for example, gains a Quest counter every time a creature dies. It can then be sacrificed once it reaches three quest counters in order to create a 5/5 Zombie Giant token.
While Quest for the Gravelord doesn't have a similar effect to Doom Reigns Supreme, it feels like they're drawn from a remarkably similar blueprint. If you swap out the word "plan" for the word "quest", then these two enchantment variants feel like they're drawing from essentially the same well.
Perhaps once we see more plans, they will start to set themselves apart, but for now, it feels like I'm repeating a quest that I've already completed.
Speaking of quests, if you're looking for an adventure, why don't you head over to the Wargamer Discord and see what you can discover?