Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1018: Unreleased Mechanics

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

In this podcast, I talk through numerous mechanics that we've designed but never published.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so from time to time I get suggestions on my blog for topics. And so today is one of those topics. So somebody said they would like to hear about unreleased mechanics. So today I'm just going to talk through a bunch of different mechanics we've never made and in some cases some of the ones we haven't made went on to influence ones we did make although none of the ones I'm talking about today we've done exactly what was originally done but so one of the things let me first explain this

we come up with mechanics all the time. And that not all mechanics make it into the set. That part of the nature of design is we try things. And the reason that a mechanic might not make it, some of the time it's like, oh, there's not quite a good way to do it, or we haven't figured out how to do it, or, you know, maybe it's broken. Other times it's just a matter of well it didn't quite fit what this set was doing um the classic example of that

is energy so originally in um original mirrored in block i made energy as part of the theme of you know artifacts and that they had this energy source. What we, what ended up happening was I did too much in the design. It got a little bit overstuffed. Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time said, okay, we need to, you know, you have too much here. And the easiest thing to take out that didn't like impact other things around it, which is another, by the way, good sign of, or another good reason that mechanics get taken out is that they're not as synergistic with other things in the set.

But anyway, Bill asked that I take something out. I chose to take out energy. It turned into just counters. But I saved it. And I was like, oh, if there's a place I can use it, I will use it. And then many years later, come Kaladesh, I'm like, oh, here's a good place to use it. And we used it in Kaladesh. But that is a lot of what I'm talking about today.

I mean, as I talk about mechanics, I will talk about their feasibility or where I think we could use them and such. In some cases, where we did use them or where we used elements of them. Okay. So to start with, I'm going to go back to my very first set that I led the design for, which was Tempest. So this is back. Tempest released in 98, I believe, meaning I was working on it in, you know, 96, 97. Okay.

So here are some mechanics early, early on that we tried that didn't end up happening. So first up, one of the mechanics that I was really excited by was the idea of draw triggers. And what that means is they were cards that when you drew them, they did something. Now, maybe it could be a card that had an okay ability, but you got this free positive ability when you drew it. Or maybe it's a card that doesn't affect that is a little cheaper than it should be, but there's a negative thing when you draw it. Imagine, for example, that there are cards that says lose two life when you draw it, but maybe it gives you a spell that's a little better than normal because

you're essentially paying life. But you're paying for life right then. And the idea of it was, I like the idea that there are cards that sort of generate an effect that you, it just happened when you drew them. Now, the problem with that was how to make that happen. Let's say, for example, I have a card that says I lose two life when I draw the card. How exactly does my opponent know that I drew that card? Like, I could, let's say, for example, I'm playing and I'm at two life and I draw that card. Well, you know, maybe I want to, you know, I mean, if I'm being honest, obviously I tell my opponent, oh, I lost. But let's say I

was being a little less than honest. How do I know my opponent, like, if my opponent, oop, I lost. But let's say I was being a little less than honest. How do I know my opponent, like if my opponent, if they, for example, if they just never show it to me, you know, there's no obligation at the end of the game to show your hand. So if my opponent was at two life and drew the card that made them lose two life when they drew it and they were being less than honest, how do I know that? You know, so one of the things about when you're making cards about mechanics is that you need to have your opponent have some ability to make sure you're doing correctly. That we don't want to have effects where your opponent like could just cheat and you'd have no way of knowing, right? That we want to make sure that there's some openness to what's going on. Now, some of the time, something like morph, you know, where there's a

face down thing, we can say, okay, well, at the end of the game, you have to reveal that. So if you were doing something you shouldn't have done, it gets revealed, right? Sometimes if there's hidden information, we can make sure that if your opponent knows there's hidden information, that we can make sure your opponent can check it, even if not at the moment, at least before the game ends. But with cards in your hand that your opponent doesn't see, there was no checks and balance to that. Now, at the time, we got pretty creative.

The idea that we floated around for a while was what if we changed the back of the card? What if cards with draw triggers had a completely different back? Now, back in 98, sleeves just, like, when Magic first came out, carved sleeves weren't a thing. And even then, even when sleeves existed for a little while, they were clear. Opaque sleeves took even longer to show up. So when we first proposed this, there might have been clear sleeves, but there weren't opaque sleeves yet.

So the idea that you couldn't see the back with sleeves wasn't a thing yet. Obviously, with opaque sleeves, a different back doesn't matter. But the other problem we had with a different back is, let's say I'm shuffling. Well, I now know what cards are in what subset, and that can influence my shuffling. So we decided changing the back really isn't a great idea. And we didn't really have a good way to do it. I mean, if this was a video game, or 100% game, you know, if it's only, if the game only existed on digital, it would work because the, the, you know, the computer could check

to make, you know, the computer would know when you drew the card and you can make sure you lost the life. Um, so I don't know whether or not like something like that would ever work, you know, um, in online only, but it, it just wasn't something that made work. Now, many years later, in Avacyn Restored, Brian Tinsman came up with the same basic idea and ended up making miracles. Now, miracles have a couple things. One is that miracles are only upside for you,

meaning it was very hard when it's downside for you because you're just not incentivized to show that. But upside for you, the idea was, well, when I draw it, I have this opportunity. I think the way miracles worked, if you showed it, you got to cast it cheaper. So it was sort of like, well, the turn you draw it, you have this bonus, but you have to reveal it when you draw it to show that you've just drawn it. And even then, Miracle caused some issues in that it's kind of awkward. A lot of people don't think about it. They just put the card right to their hand, and Miracle's like, wait, you have to make sure that you see what the card is before it goes in your hand. And so Miracle's had some issues.

And once again, Miracles aren't exactly draw triggers, but they are the closest that I think we could get given the technology or given tabletop that we were able to do. Okay, another mechanic that we tried. So we tried this mechanic in... I'm starting with a bunch of Tempest ones. So we tried this other mechanic where the idea of the mechanic was that you could choose to start with a card in your hand

and draw one less card at the beginning of the game. And the idea was that these cards were a bit weaker. They weren't as strong as a normal card, but you had abilities to control that you drew it. So the idea is, imagine a naturalize, but instead of it costing two mana like it normally does, it costs three mana or four mana.

And the idea is, the bonus is, you could choose to start, let's say I'm going into a certain situation like, wow, I really want to make sure I have that. I could choose to put it in my hand and maybe it costs four mana, maybe it costs twice as much as normal but i have the ability to control that i could have it that was the idea behind the mechanic um the problem with this mechanic um

i did uh i did mention this in an article um is it took away the randomness like one of the things that's really important to magic is that i don't control the order that I get things. That I can build my deck and I can put component pieces in my deck, but the fact that each game plays out differently because I don't know what I'm getting. And the problem with these cards is they sort of took away the randomness. And that it was sort of like, oh, I'm playing, my opponent has this, like, you know, naturalize is the answer to my opponent's thing, so as long as I have my deck, you know, it just neutralizes strategies. It just takes away a lot of the fun. A lot of the neat thing about Magic is that games play out differently.

And if I can choose to start with the same cards, the games are going to play out a lot more similar. And so what we found there was, it just inherently took away something that was a core part of the fun of the game, which is the randomness. And I know, I know, I think in a vacuum, people like to think of randomness as not being good for a game, because you don't have control of it. And then, you know, randomness does have some impact on skill and stuff, but randomness is actually fun.

And one of the neat things about Magic is the fact that I have a 60-card deck, but every time I play it, it plays out differently, is an important part of what makes Magic a fun game. The idea that every single game it plays out exactly the same is not particularly fun. And there even have been mechanics in Magic that are a little too consistent in the way they play out that haven't been fun. And there even have been mechanics in Magic that are a little too consistent in the way they play out that haven't been fun. And so this is one of those mechanics that we tried and realized we were... Magic is a game about breaking its own rules. So sometimes you do things that break something that you haven't broken before. You know, we made double-faced cards, but there was a pack where we made pitch

cards where you could cast cards if you were tapped out and that what we found is you have to make sure that the thing you're overriding the thing that you're sort of the rule that you're breaking understand the point of that rule why does that rule exist

why is it a rent why don't you just choose one of the exercises you go on as a Magic game designer is, what would the game be like if you didn't shuffle your library? What if before each game, you just 100% ordered your library in whatever order you wanted, and that is how you played? Now, it might be interesting as a thought exercise. Oh, I'm playing in a tournament, and I get to present the order of my deck.

But the reality is it just leads to total degenerate. There's some degenerate combination you can do that is just the thing to do and then every game plays out identically the same. One of the important things to magic is that I have to make do with what I have. I talk a lot about in games that the reason people play games is to challenge themselves mentally. That you need to have obstacles. You need to have things your way. Things can't always go your way. That what makes a game fun is not that everything

plays perfectly for you, but that you have to adapt to what you have. And while it's fun, every once in a while to just draw the perfect hand, it actually wouldn't be fun if it always was the perfect hand. If every time you played, you just drew exactly what you needed. A lot of the fun of magic comes from figuring out how to adapt to what you have. Using what you have to win, rather than using what you want to win or need to win. Figuring out how to win with what you got. So that mechanic sort of got killed just because it fundamentally undid a core principle.

And that, by the way, is something where you have to really think about why you're doing it and what's fun about it. You know, a lot of these mechanics, when we don't do them, some of them, they don't fit the set. Some of them, you know, fundamentally what you're doing is and what's fun about it. A lot of these mechanics, when we don't do them, some is they don't fit the set. Some is fundamentally what you're doing is something you shouldn't be doing. Okay, next up, another Tempest mechanic. My favorite story of this is, this is one of those mechanics that doesn't seem so bad, and then you play it in you play it in

in playtest and you're like, oh, what were we doing? So we had this mechanic I'm trying to remember how it worked. The idea was that you had an effect and you could discard more cards to change the effect.

And so the idea was that every extra card I did scaled the ability. And so the card we were playing with is, I think it drained two from the opponent. But for every card I wanted to discard, it would do the effect again. And I remember I was playing, I think, Mike Elliott. And on turn one, he played this card and discarded his hand and drained me for like 14 or something.

And it was one of those things, the idea being that, oh, well, I'm giving up a card, so it's okay that I'm giving up the card that I could duplicate something. And what it turned out was a card is worth a resource, but it wasn't worth, you know, it just, the scale didn't make sense. It's one of those examples where we tried something and it seemed like, it seemed like it would work. And then as soon as you played it, you're like, oh, this is heavily unbalanced. Now, given this was early magic, this was way back when, maybe nowadays we would look at a mechanic like this and instantly know that it wasn't,

it didn't quite work. It is interesting. One of the things that we've learned over the years is the idea of what the cost of a card is. So you have to pay mana for a card. Obviously, I think people understand that every mana value means something. But the other thing we don't talk as much about

is that a card itself means something. That having a card has some value to it. That's why we can make zero-cost cards, for example, right? If a card didn't have value, how could we make you not pay any mana and still have it cost something? And the value is the card in your hand. You draw a card a turn,

that the card itself has some value to it. And I think this is just a good example of us undervaluing what the cost of a card was. Thinking like, oh, a card's not much. And it turns out that it actually has more cost to that. Actually, ironically, in this case, we were over-costing the card. We thought the discarding card was a bigger drawback than it was. Sorry, I was thinking backwards. But anyway, it's a good example of we tried something.

Like, playtesting is very important. A lot of mechanics we will playtest. And, like, sometimes it only takes one or two playtests to go, oh, this is broken or this is not fun. Okay, another. Here's another mechanic. And this is a good example of a mechanic that was a cool idea that we later borrowed from a bunch of other things. So they were called structures. So this was a Richard Garfield invention. So we were an original Ravnica and what structures were was a new car type. And the way structures,

they represented buildings, and the way it worked was you played them, you spent mana and you played them, and they had a toughness. And the idea was that they usually had a static ability or a triggered ability or maybe an activated ability, but the way that your opponent got rid of them was they dealt damage to it. So when you attacked, instead of attacking the player, you could attack the structures. I think the way the structures worked originally is they just had a locked amount of damage

and you had to do that damage in one blow to get rid of it. Meaning it was a little bit more like a creature. So the idea is, let's say I had something that said, all my creatures get plus one, plus one. Maybe it's, you know, I don't know, it's a little bit more like a creature. So the idea is, let's say I had something that said, all my creatures get plus one, plus one. Maybe it's, you know, I don't know, it's a castle or something. And then it had a toughness of three. So in order for you to get rid of the effect that's giving all my creatures plus one, plus one,

you have to attack it and do three damage to it. Now, the way structured work was, you know, if you attack my structures, I could block with my creatures. Much like if you attack me, I could block with my creatures. Now, so the reason we didn't do structures in Ravnica was there was a lot going on. It was a guild set. We had five guilds. We had five mechanics. There just was a lot going on. And the structures, which I think Richard made to sort of play up the city aspect of the set,

while it was a very cool mechanic, it's just that it wasn't space. It didn't fit. But I liked structures. Once again, a lot of times when we don't do something, it's not even like we don't like it. Like, I'm giving you examples where we play just things that are not fun.

Yeah, sometimes we kill mechanics because we don't like them, or they don't work, or they're not balanceable. Other times we kill mechanics because we don't like them or they don't work or they're not balanceable. Other times we kill mechanics just because it doesn't fit where it's going. Ravnica had a lot going on. We had five guilds, or sorry, four guilds. This is original Ravnica. And there just wasn't

space for it. But anyway, flash forward to Future Sight and we were trying to make Planeswalkers work. And so one of the things that I liked a lot from Richard's idea was that the way you could address this thing was by attacking it. And I thought that was really cool. Now what happened with Planeswalkers is because loyalty became a thing,

because we needed a system to which to sort of gate abilities, we ended up making loyalty as a resource. Once we did that, then it made sense to tie the damage to loyalty loss. Rather than, like Richard's original version of structures, you had to do all the damage at once. But as we were designing Planeswalkers, because loyalty became the resource of it, removing that much loyalty made a lot more sense. So we shifted it.

But it's a good example where structures were this fun thing that we managed to find another place to make use of it. And then, interestingly, so real quickly, a good example of the snowball effect. So we were making planeswalkers. We ended up borrowing this element from structures that we didn't use. But then the earliest version of planeswalkers had this sort of robotic quality to them where turn one, do this. Turn two, do this. Turn three, do this. And then turn four, you go back to one. So the idea is every turn it did something that looped around. The problem was that sometimes it would make the planeswalkers just do dumb things.

The classic example was Garak. I think turn one, he made a wolf. In turn two, he doubled your number of wolves. In turn three, he gave like plus three, plus three and trampled all your wolves. Well, the problem was turn one, I play a wolf. My opponent bullsits or something. Turn two, double all wolves. Well, I don't have any wolves, so it doesn't do anything. Turn three, all your wolves. Well, the problem was, turn one, I play a wolf. My opponent bulls it or something. Turn two, double all wolves. Well, I don't have any wolves, so it doesn't do anything.

Turn three, all your wolves get plus three plus three. Well, I don't have any wolves, it doesn't do anything. It just, it made the Planeswalker feel kind of like you wanted them to have a little more agency, and it just made them play stupid some of the times. So we ended up changing it to the current system. But the idea of the system where turn one something happens, turn two something happens, turn three something happens, was actually cool. Mechanically

we liked it. It just didn't fit planeswalkers. It felt wrong for planeswalkers. But years later, when we were making sagas, we're like, oh, we want to tell a story. Well, a story has a beginning, a middle, and end. So the idea of this is what happens. If my opponent interacts with that and things go wrong, it's like, well, that's the story. You know, it didn't, somehow with Planeswalkers, when things went wrong, it felt like Planeswalkers felt like they just weren't intelligent. Where stories are like, okay, that's the story. And so we were like, Richard made structures. We didn't use them, but we borrowed some of it for Planeswalkers. Planeswalkers didn't use other stuff that we didn't use, we borrowed it for Saiga.

So there's a lot of offshooting. A lot of times when we make things that don't end up working, you know, we find homes for it later on. Another classic example of that would be the layaway mechanic. So layaway, so we made a mechanic, there was a game we made. Richard designed it. I was on his team. Called Star Wars, the trading card game. So we got the Star Wars license for a while.

And so Richard made this game. It's a really fun game. Richard, the thought behind it was he made a game that was a card game that functioned a lot like a miniatures game. So you had three different zones. You had ground and... I said you had personal and ground and space. Because usually in Star Wars battles, there's three different zones you're fighting in. And the idea is you had to win...

I think you had to win in two. I'm trying to remember exactly how the game played. Anyway, one of the ways is you got energy, or whatever the resource was, you got the resource to build things. But some things were bigger than the amount of resources you had. So in the game of Star Wars, you could put things, I don't think we called it layaway,

but you could put things in a place where you could pay them off over time. And we liked how it played in Star Wars. It was actually a very fun part of Star Wars. So we made the layaway mechanic. So the way the layaway mechanic worked is you would put a card face down in exile, and you could pay one mana to put a counter on it face down. And you could do this as many times as you wanted. Then, when it was time to cast the card, it was one cheaper, one generic mana cheaper for every counter on it. So the idea with

layaway is usually there was some colored cost in it. So normally when you cast this spell, you had to do something. But let's say, for example, it was, you know, an 8-8 creature for seven and a green, right? So 8- eight trample, let's say. So you could, over time, pay everything but the green, and so, you know, over time you could pay off the seven and then when it's time, you could then cast it. And the idea being that you often have extra mana laying around, and so that mana can go to waste. So what if instead of that mana going to waste, it can help you pay off larger things later?

I forget the set we made Layaway for originally. I think what happened was I made it because I liked how the mechanic played in the Star Wars trading card game, and I thought it would be a neat thing for magic. So we didn't end up finding a home for it, but it was one of those mechanics

that I really liked, and maybe one day we'll find a home for it. But I know when we were working on Kaldheim, the idea, we were playing in the sense of what was an omen, and we ended up with the foretell mechanic, where you play a card face down, and then you can play it from exile. I think you pay two to foretell it, and then you can play it from exile. I think you pay two to Fortel it and then you can pay, there's a cheaper Fortel cost. Now that's not exactly layaway.

It has some elements of layaway. And when we were first talking about doing Fortel, I did walk us through layaway. I said, well, here's how we did this the last time. And it turns out that Fortel has some different needs. And so it didn't quite play out the way layaway played out. But it did borrow from layaway and definitely was kind of a spiritual successor to layaway. Will we ever make layaway? I don't know. Like, a lot of today's is me talking about things we've tried.

Some things, like energy, we try and we're like, wow, that's really good. I'd like to find a home for it. And layaway kind of falls in that camp. Like, if I ever find the right place for layaway, layaway, I think, could be a fun mechanic. There's a lot of dynamics to it, and it requires, you know, there's some busyness, and you have to remember. And now, the one nice thing about layaway versus suspend, The problem with suspend was I had to do something, and then I had to remember to do it every turn. I had to remember to, you know, tick down on the suspend counters. Layaway is sort of like do whatever you want.

It's up to you. If you don't remember to do it, you didn't do it. So layaway doesn't quite have the suspend problems. But it does have a bunch of managing things and such. So anyway, layaway is definitely something we thought about. Okay. Another mechanic that we tried was called forbidden. So forbidden was a mechanic that we originally tried. Where was it? Avacyn restored. So the idea of the forbidden mechanic was that the forbidden cards don't start, can't start, in your library.

Normally, they were better than normal for a spell. For example, I think one of our forbidden cards was a forbidden version of Ancestral Recall. Spend one blue mana, draw three cards. Way too good. We don't make Ancestral Recall anymore. That's significantly too good. But the idea, the Forbidden worked was you had cards that when you cast them allowed you to shuffle Forbidden cards into your library. Now what ended up happening was a couple things. One was

there was a lot of what we call inconsequence where okay, I finally get a card that lets me shuffle this thing in my library. Oh yay, I have my Ancestral Recall or whatever. I shuffle it into my library. And then a lot of the time I don't even draw it, right? And so it didn't sort of happen enough. And then there's just general balance issues of, you know, you're jumping through a hoop to get something more powerful,

but how powerful can we make it? And in the end, it just just it wasn't quite exciting enough and it had enough logistical issues and play design issues that we ended up not doing it um now we definitely i for example um lesson learned from kaladesh uh now lesson learned does things a little bit different than we did with Forbidden. One is the spells in Forbidden can go in your deck. If you want to play them, you can. They are kind of the opposite of, like, the idea of Forbidden is these cards are so good that they would be problematic in your deck.

Where Lesson Learned is more like, well, you can play these in your deck, but they're not great. The rate is not great. So the reason you're excited is other cards let me sort of draw them for free, essentially. Right? If I play a learn card, it's like, oh, I get whatever the value is of the learn card, and on top of that I get a card, and I have the flexibility to get the card that I want. So lesson learned, and even then, interestingly, lesson learned was originally in Kaladesh,

we did a mechanic, what do we call it? Like invention, I think they call it inventions. The way it worked was there were cards, it was like lesson learned, except the subset, instead of being instants and sorceries, were artifacts. And the idea was, it's sort of like, oh, I can fashion whatever tool I need to help me. And they represented small artifacts that were useful, but a little more narrow. So the idea was, in the moment, I can go get whatever artifact helps me in what's going on right now. It was, once again, a good example of a mechanic we made that didn't work out.

The reason that got killed from Kaladesh was was we were doing energy and we were doing inventions and development came to us and said, look, these are both really complex mechanics. We can do one of them. Which one's more important? And we had really, the creative team had built the entire world flavorly around energy.

And so like, okay, energy is more important. So we took that out. But it's the kind of thing where we can look back and say, hey, there's something fun there. The other thing that happens sometimes is some of the balance problems with artifacts got a little bit easier when they were spells, when they're instant sorceries. That, you know, we had tried to do it with artifacts,

and when we tried to do instant sorceries, it, I mean, it didn't fix all the issues. There were plenty of balance issues still. It's not an easy mechanic, but it did make it a little bit easier, and doing spells ended up making it a little easier to balance. Okay, another mechanic that we tried that we didn't end up using was called Skirmish. So Skirmish was in War of the Spark. So early on, the way I like to tell the story is we were trying to capture a planeswalker war.

And early on, I focused on the war part and not the planeswalker part. Eventually, I'm like, what's more important, planeswalker or war? I'm like, planeswalker. So we ended up making the set that had, you know, 36 Planeswalkers. Earlier versions, so the way Skirmish worked was when you played Skirmish, you got a game piece that said, okay, we're going to play this game

while we play the normal game. And the idea was, when you did certain things, you got to advance you kind of think of Skirmish like you're playing a tug-of-war game, sort of. That when you did certain things, you got to advance toward your opponent. And so I think whenever you did combat damage to them, I think whenever you played a skirmish spell,

you did things that would advance you toward it. And if you ever got to one end, then you won the skirmish, and there's a reward for it. And we experimented. We didn't know whether there would be one reward or there would be multiple skirmishes and you pick the skirmish you want or whether certain cards made certain kinds of skirmishes.

We didn't get far enough to really figure that out. But the idea essentially is while you're playing this game of magic, there's this other little mini game that plays into things that you want to do, right? Like, it's encouraging you to attack and play spells. Well, you want to attack

and play spells. One of the things we have to be careful about and Planeswalkers definitely has something there we have to be is what you don't want to do is have things that say, hey, instead of playing your main game, stop playing that game, play this other game, and it just kind of delays the game. Like, we have to be very careful with planeswalkers not to do that.

We don't want it to be, oh, now the planeswalker's here. Spend three turns dealing with the planeswalker. And then just go back to what the game was. We want to make sure that whenever we're asking you to sort of play a mini game, it's in addition to what's going on in the game. And it involves the game. I mean, on sets, occasionally, do, like, a really involves the game. I mean, on sets occasionally do like a really short mini game, playing rock, paper, scissors or something.

But in general, whenever we're playing a game that's sort of going on, we wanted to interact with what's going on. We don't want it to be separate from what's going on. We want it to interact. Mostly the strike against Skirmish wasn't that it didn't play well, or wasn't that it didn't,

there wasn't interesting things that happened I think the biggest strike against it was it wasn't really satisfying what we needed like the War of the Spark like I said what made the War of the Spark so exciting was like

almost every Planeswalker you knew were all fighting together. And it was this sense of this, like, it wasn't about the battle per se. I mean, there was a battle. I mean, matches a game about conflict. But the thing that made it exciting wasn't that there was a big battle. It was the characters that were battling. it was the characters that were battling. And so what I realized was putting all my energy in the battle,

in the war, rather than the planeswalkers, wasn't playing to what the thing was about. Why was War of the Spark exciting? Because almost every planeswalker you knew were all fighting this giant war. Well, let's focus on that. That's got us on the path to making it more about, hey, how do we have more planeswalkers? Normally, I said we'll have a handful of about, hey, how do we have more planeswalkers? You know, normally I said we'll have, you know,

a handful of planeswalkers. How do we have 36? And so we figured that out. So Skirmish, like I said, it wasn't so much that we didn't like it. And I think that Skirmish kind of led to, for example, the dungeons in Forgotten Realms, the first D&D set. And I think the idea is,

imagine that we're doing something external to the game that impacts on the game. I think that Jules was on the war team and had played Skirmish. And once again, here's a good example. It's not that dungeons are Skirmish. They're not. It's a very different dynamic. Skirmish was all about a fight back and forth

between you and your opponent. And there was this sort of ongoing tension where dungeons is about I'm exploring the space and generating effects and stuff. And so it's not quite the same, but there were elements of what made Skirmish exciting that definitely was on Jules' brain when he was trying to solve the problem of what's called Dungeons and Dragons. I can, you know, clearly there can be

dragons on the battlefield, but where do the dungeons come from? And that's where the idea came from is, well, what if you venture into the dungeon? And that's where that idea came from. And that's one of the interesting things about today's podcast is that, you know, things don't really go to waste. If we come up with an idea that's a good idea, either we will find a home for it. And like I said, there's a lot of things where we do something and we don't quite know what to do with it, but eventually we figure out where to put it.

Like I said, energy being the biggest poster child of that. What else? Let's see. Here's a mechanic that we came up with that we haven't quite figured out what to do with, but it's something I liked. So during

Guilds of Ravnica, this was our third trip to Ravnica, and the story was that Bolas was slowly taking control of the guilds. And so half the guilds had someone under Bolas's influence running it. So he was influencing half the guilds, and half the guilds weren't. the guilds and half the guilds weren't and so there became sort of this there was a sort of a tension in the world between you know who's under uh bolus's control who's not who's a you know who's allegiant who who is um has some allegiance to bolus and who doesn't so we made a mechanic uh and the idea of the mechanic was when you played it you had to state your allegiance so either you were for bolus or against Bolas was the idea. And then all

the cards that made you choose allegiance then had an effect based on your allegiance. And usually it was a static ability. I think a few times there might have been a one shot effect. But mostly it was a static ability. So the idea is, oh, I have a creature. Does he have Death Touch or Lifelink? If he's for Bolas, he has Death Touch. If he's against Bolas, he has Lifelink. And so you have to decide, oh, so when you play your first card, it's like, oh, what do I want? Would I rather this be a Death Touch creature or a Lifelink

creature? Now, the interesting part came when you played the second one. Now, every time you played a choose allegiance card, you got to choose your allegiance. But you only had one allegiance. You could change your allegiance, like you could be against Bolas and decide to be for Bolas. But the point is, every card in play that cared about the allegiance cared about what your current allegiance was. So let's say I play my first card and I go,

okay, it's got death touch or lifelink. I'm like, you know, I'd rather have Lifelink. So I choose, I'm against Bolas, I have Lifelink. Then my next card says, oh, okay, every time you play a spell, you either gain a life or your opponent loses a life. Let's say it's a white-black spell. You know, some Orzhov thing. And so if you're for Bolas, your opponent loses a life. But if you're against bolus, you gain a life.

And I'm like, oh, well, you know what? I think I'm ahead enough on the board. I'd rather be doing damage to my opponent than gaining life. So I now change my allegiance and I'm now four bolus. But when I do that, now my creature that has, that did have I do that, now my creature that has,

that did have lifelink, now has death touch, right? Because since I'm four bolas, it changes. And so the idea with legions is you had to sort of choose and figure out in any one moment in time what to do. Now the reason we didn't do the mechanic,

once again, wasn't we didn't like the mechanic. It was that there were already, it was a guild mechanic. There were five guild mechanics in the set. We didn't want a sixth mechanic. There was a lot going on. And while it was cool and flavorful, and it definitely played in, like, the reason we came up with it is it has some neat flavor. I think had we done something a little different, if, you know, we had talked, for example, on the third trip to Ravnica of not doing guild mechanics, of doing things a little bit differently.

For example, Strixhaven was a faction set where instead of each faction having its own keyword, each faction used the same keywords, but how they used them was different. And so we had originally tried doing that in the first or the third Ravnica. Had we done something like that, then maybe allegiance would have made sense. But we opted not to do that, and so it didn't.

Now, will we use allegiance somewhere? Maybe. And once again, the flavor could be a little bit different. In that particular set, there was a flavor reason to be for or against an individual. There are other ways to flavor this mechanic. And it's something that's come up. It's something we've talked about. There are balance issues. You know, it is a tricky mechanic to balance because if you're playing multiple of them, you know, anyway, it's tricky to balance.

It's not that easy. Anyway, guys, you guys got a little bit longer podcast than I planned. I had some traffic today. Anyway, I'm curious what you guys thought of this. There are more unreleased mechanics. I just talked about some of the more famous ones today. So if you enjoyed hearing about this and want to hear more unreleased mechanics, let me know. But anyway, guys, I'm parked.

So we all know what that means. It means at the end of my drive to work, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.