Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1081: Copying

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

In this podcast, I talk about one of my favorite effects in Magic: copying.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is one of my favorite topics. One of my effects that I enjoy most in all of magic. Copying. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of copying and then talk about sort of the, how we divide it up in the color pie. It is a fun effect that is very popular. Okay, so at the very beginning, we go back to the very beginning, to Alpha. So in Alpha, Richard Garfield made four cards that copied something.

So let's start with Clone. So Clone, I think it was an uncommon creature. It cost three and a blue. When it entered the battlefield, you chose a creature. It costs three and a blue. When it entered the battlefield, you chose a creature. Any creature on the battlefield, yours, somebody else's, doesn't matter. And then the clone became a copy of it.

So the idea of a shapeshifter or something that copies the form of other things is pretty established in fantasy. So much so that Richard put it in the very first set. But clone wasn't the only creature that copied things. At Rare, he also had Vesuvian Doppelganger, which costs three blue blue,

and it was like a clone, meaning that... Actually, so I think the way that Vesuvian Doppelganger works is at the start of each turn, you get to choose a creature, and then it stays blue and it retains the text that lets it change. But each turn you get to turn into something different. So clone is like I pick it,

that's what it is. For the rest of the time the clone is that thing. The Suvendoppelganger can change each turn. I'm not sure why it stays blue. Maybe Richard thought that was a fun, like, you know, you can tell that it's not quite the thing it's supposed to be. Where a clone would copy everything about it. Like, once you put a clone on the battlefield,

as far as the game's concerned, it's to copy the thing that you're copying. The only difference is, if you put it into another zone, it reverts to being a clone. That's the only thing that differentiates it from the thing it's copying. There also was copy Artifact, which costs one and a

blue, and it let you it was an artifact that could copy any artifact. So that, I mean, from the very, very early days, you know, Richard sort of said, hey, copying is something you could do. You could copy creatures. You could copy artifacts. And there were a lot of powerful artifacts

in the game. So Copy so copy artifact actually saw some play and then the fourth copy effect was not in blue the first three were in blue was fork so fork costs red red it's an instant well originally I think it would interrupt but nowadays it's an instant and it copied any spell

any instant or sorcery so alpha did a pretty good job. I mean, Richard sort of said, here's a fun thing. You can copy things. You can copy creatures. You can copy artifacts. You can copy instants and sorceries. Interestingly,

both copy land and copy enchantment would come later. Neither of those were in Alpha, but those were both... I remember when I made Tempest, one of the cards I put in Tempest... I think it was in Tempest. Let me just copy. Well, one of the sets I did. I'm not sure whether it's Tempest or not. I finally made Copy Enchantment because I'm like, how have we not made Copy Enchantment? And I made Copy Enchantment.

But basically, I think what happened was it came out early in the game, and it was pretty popular. Now, the thing to remember in early Magic is a couple things. One is that early Magic, nowadays, when a set comes out, you have a lot of people very experienced in Magic who spent many years on Magic, and even on brand new cards, that you can get a much more

expert opinion on how good an effect is this. Early Magic, like, everybody was a new player. You know, everybody, so there's certain traits we notice in new players, certain things that they like. And so early Magic was interesting in that what players got attracted to, I mean, some of it was power, but more of it was this was just a really cool effect. And Clone and Doppelganger were very popular in the early days. It just was a neat effect. And Blue, for those that might not know their history of Magic the Gathering, was a little overpowered in the early days of Magic. We talk about the Power Nine, which is the five moxes, black lotus, and then three

blue cards. Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and Time Twister. Now, Time Twister, while powerful, if not nearly powerful, is either Ancestral Recall or Time Walk. Ancestral Recall lets you draw three cards with one mana. Time Walk lets you take an extra turn for two mana.

Anyway, early magic, it was very common for people to play mono blue. There were a few artifacts, like Neverall's Disc. Blue didn't have a lot of answers to permanence, but Neverall's Disc did. And so one of the most powerful early strategies was a mono blue strategy. And not all those decks, but some of those decks would run like Doppelganger. A few might have even run clone, although Doppelganger was the stronger card, I believe.

The fact that you could adapt to it and change over time. Anyway, the funniest, my personal story, just to share my little, is I opened Clone pretty early. Maybe even on the first day I ever bought anything. I bought a starter and I think three boosters. And I don't know if I got a clone in that, but very soon after I got more boosters and I think I got a clone. So I saw a clone relatively early and I was fascinated by clone.

I was, maybe this starts my love of copying things. I just, you know, my little Johnny brain. One of the neat things about clone effects is they're very flexible, right? That they change every time you use them. And so a lot of effects

in Magic, hey, they do the thing they do, and every time you play they do that thing. But Clone has this open-endedness. Now, given the more constructed the deck, and the more consistent, the more often maybe Clone's cloning the same thing. But, in the early days, I really appreciated that the Clone, like,

the way I tended to build decks, because I was a Johnny deck builder, is I would build weird, quirky decks, and then the clone just gave me so many options of weird things to do. You know, back in the day when I was deck building, I wasn't building necessarily singleton decks, but I was having a lot of variety in my decks and putting a lot of one-ofs

that did weird things in. And, for those that don't know, the way I first got involved with Wizards of the Coast was I did a puzzle column called Magic of the Puzzling, which I did a whole podcast on. I wrote it for the Duelist magazine, which I also did a podcast on. Anyway, I loved stuff like Clone for that. Clone made great puzzle cards because part of what made a good puzzle is you want to

hide a little bit what the solution is. So you want to give the player a lot of options. And one of the neat things about making a puzzle is you can make weird things true, so a lot of times the thing you clone would not be obvious at first what you would clone. Anyway, out of the gate, in alpha, I was hooked. And now I was eye-hooked.

I think magic was hooked. The clone and doppelganger and Fork, and to some extent, Copy Artifact, were just popular cards. People really liked them. They were a lot of fun. Okay, so what happens is Arabian Nights and Antiquities

don't even have anything in them that copies. There's no copy effects in them. It's not until Legends, and then Legends has Chain Lightning, which technically is a copy effect in the sense that it's basically a lightning bolt, but your opponent can copy the lightning bolt.

And every time you copy it, then your opponent can copy it again. And so you sort of go back and forth on how many times you want to be casting the spell. Somebody has to give up. But the next thing that really was what I was on, a true copying spell, was not until the Dark, Dance of Mini. So Dance of Mini was the first copy effect

that made a token. That the Dance of Mini copied, I think it copied a creature, but it made a token out of it. And that expanded the technology, saying, oh, well, you know, before in alpha, whenever you copied something, the card that was the copy effect became that thing.

The clone or doppelganger became the creature. Copy artifact became the artifact. I guess fork didn't become the spell, but spells already are sort of on the stack. And anyway, or at a time they weren't on the stack but you know what I'm saying. Anyway, it was around that point of Dance of Many that the rules people realized

that there was some messiness. Like early magic rules were kind of hobbled together. I used to joke it was like with spit and duct tape. And they realized at one point they were trying to clean things up I assume around 6th edition that 6th edition rules didn't really handle

copying well. So for example when we would try to do shapeshifter for example there's a card Unstable Shapeshifter that I did in Tempest. And that was me kind of using other abilities.

Like, I was sort of saying, if this is, like, I think that's the first card that looks at stuff in your graveyard. Is that right? No, no, no. Oh, I know what it is. It's the card that,

it's the copy of whatever the last creature played was. So we're definitely messing around in space, but as we try to mess around in that space, the rules people come to us and say, you know what, let's just stop this. Let's just stop doing copy effects. It's a problem.

And so for a while, there was sort of a moratorium on copy effects. We weren't supposed to do them. And in fact, the story that comes out of this is in Urza's Saga, I think we had gotten a new rule. I don't even remember who the rules manager was. But every time we got a new rules manager, I would go to them and say,

hey, let's figure out copying spells. Copying is so much fun. Let's figure out copying spells. And they would spend some time on it. And then they go, eh, too hard. And they would give up time on it. And then they'd go, eh, too hard. And they would give up. But I think when Urza Saga came out, we had a new rules person. And once again, I apologize.

I don't remember exactly who it was. In the early days of Magic, we had a lot of rules managers in the early days. There was Tom Wiley, Beth Morrison, Paul Barclay. Anyway, there's a bunch. So one of these people said, I said to them, we were making Urza Saga. I'm like, could we bring clone back? And they said, yeah, I think we can. So we made a clone in Urza Saga.

And for the art of the clone, we went back to original clone. And it shows two creatures looking at each other, and they're identical, right? The idea of the clone is copy this. So we did the same kind of thing. There's this creature, and then the only difference is one of them had a little tail to tell that it was the shapeshifter. We get the art in. Everything's ready to go, and shortly before we're supposed to finish the file, the rules manager comes back and he goes, I haven't cracked it. I haven't solved it. We're going to keep working on it. I haven't solved it, but we can't do

it in Ursa Saga. But we already had the art within, so we ended up saying, okay, well, it's a shapeshifter. The art shows it's a shapeshifter. So we said, well, what if we just give it a lot of activated abilities so that you had a lot of flexibility to make it different things? So we gave it, you know if we just give it a lot of activated abilities so that you had a lot of flexibility to make it different things? So we gave it, you know, you could activate it to make it plus one, minus one, or activate it to make it minus one, plus one, or you get granted flying, or an early version of hexproof, or you can untap it. And that ended up becoming Morphling, which was a very powerful card. Now, eventually what happened was they did figure out how to do copying.

I mean, I think mostly what happened was it generally was a positive thing. Players, like I say, in the early days, clone and doppelganger were super popular. And there just was this desire to, there was a desire to to try to figure things out and make the clone stuff work. Eventually what happened was... So let me talk a little bit about how the color pie works. The goal of the color pie is we want differentiation between the colors. Magic is more fun if every color can't do every effect. And then you want colors

to have strengths and weaknesses. And more so than anything else, you want to kind of spread out who's doing what. So early on, it was clear that copying was fun. So once we kind of got the go-ahead to make more copy effects,

in the early days, we weren't supposed to do a lot of it. But eventually it's like, okay, you can make copy effects. So the first thing we realized is it was such a fun effect that we probably want to slice it up a little bit. Blue being king of copying made perfect sense. Blue is about trickery and reactive magic. There's a lot of things that blue does. You know, blue's

sneaky. But red is also sort of sneaky and into trickery. So we liked the idea that red it felt like if there's a secondary color for copying, it should be red. Now, blue and red are the spell-centered colors.

At one point, there's a big debate whether the effect of fork was supposed to be red or blue. We've made it in both colors. And the idea is kind of like if I make a fireball or something, or I make a spell and I copy my spell to make it more powerful so that I'm copying my own spells and making it bigger. That felt a little bit more blue, where if you're copying a spell and I copy it, so you want to destroy my creature, so I copy it to destroy your creature.

That felt a little bit more red. We liked that red was creating unpredictable outcomes and sort of that sense of chaos to it. So what we ended up deciding was, okay, blue will be king of copying, but we're going to make red, we gave red instant copying. And what I mean by that is temporary copying, maybe is a better term for it. So the idea is if you copy something in blue, most of the time you've copied it, right? I copy it for the rest of the game, my thing is a copy, like a clone. Maybe we have doppelgangers where you can change what it is,

but the idea is mostly when I'm cloning in blue, when I'm copying, especially permanents, hey, I'm permanently copying and I don't have that. The idea we played around in red is, well, maybe red's the one that is, because it's all about surprise and doing things you don't have that. The idea we played around in red is, well, maybe red's the one that is, because it's all about surprise and doing things you don't expect, that we would give red the temporary stuff. So that might mean target creature becomes a copy until end of turn.

Make a token, usually with haste, and then sacrifice it at end of turn. You know, red's still got to do spells, because spells are sort of here and gone. You know, I zap you in the moment. But the idea is red is a little more about I'm using the copy effect as a surprise element to do something at one moment in time.

I'm trying to surprise you and do something. Now, one of the things you'll see as I walk through the colors, because copying is fun and we think the players generally like it, it's one of the mechanics that we stretch a little bit more than others. So one of the rules is, like red, for example, we don't normally let red do long-term copying, but we make a few exceptions. For example, if I was going to turn you into a dragon, that's pretty red. And red already has access to copying. So we do let red do

a little bit of permanent copying if it's like really in red's wheelhouse of what it's making. You know, turning a dragon would be the perfect example. Okay, so basically... Oh, the other thing in blue is... Blue tends to do a little bit of transformational stuff. But what we've done is red is more likely it's temporary and I copy something. Where blue is, it's temporary, but I tell you what it is. I'm turning you into a 1-1 with no abilities until end of turn. Or I'm turning

my creature into a 4-4 flying creature until end of turn. That blue when it makes transformational things tends to lock it in. Meaning that blue is not a surprise. You know what you're getting. Where red is a little more like, what is this? What's going on, where red is a little more of like, what is this?

What's going on? That red has a little bit of that chaotic feel in the instant stuff. So instant copying, more red. Blue is king of copying. Blue can do most anything. If there's a reason to do instant, or temporary copying in blue

for some larger purpose that feels very blue, it's not that it's off limits to blue. Blue is primary in copying. But by default, that is primary in copying. But by default, that is a red thing. Okay, so let's talk about the other colors. So there's a, oh, let me walk through real quickly. One of the things that we experimented over time with copying is that there are a lot of different things you can copy. Obviously, you can take a permanent and you can copy it. And like I said, over time, we let you, I mean, we have done copy anything. I don't know if we've, well, I guess we've done

some blue cards that have copied Planeswalkers. I think we've done, anyway, we've made most of copy a permanent. You can become that permanent. Blue, also we've done... Anyway, we've made most of copy permanent. You can become that permanent. Blue, also we've messed around with copying spells, obviously. But with Intercept, it went a little bit further. What if we could copy... Enter the Battlefield effects. That was Pent Harmakon. What if we could copy, you know, activated abilities?

What if we could copy things out of the graveyard and different stuff like that? So we started finding ways to chop things up. And as we found more ways to do things, it allowed access to other colors. Okay, so probably the color that I would call tertiary in copying, although every color, technically speaking, blue is primary, red secondary, and the other three colors all are tertiary in that there's a little bit that we let them have. Let's walk through that.

Green is next. So green is the next. So green, in the early days, we used to do this effect we liked in green where you could go and get other copies of creatures that you have on the battlefield. Green has the ability to go get creatures out of a library. But the idea we liked is instead of you go getting the

creature you don't have, it lets you double down on the creature you do have. And we thought that was a cool effect in green. Then what we realized is a similar thing to go getting a creature out of your library and put it on the battlefield is just copying your own creature.

So we started letting green do a little bit of copying its own creatures. It still could also fetch stuff out of a library, but in a world like Commander with Singleton, that effect does not work in Commander, where copying your own does. Green also does a lot of token making. We've let

green do some copy token. I'll talk about white in a second, but Propagate was the Selesny mechanic in Return to Ravnica, that block. And the idea is that we let green and we let white copy tokens. And I think it just copies your, it just copies your token. So it's a subset of green in that green can copy its own things.

Now, I'll get to white in a second. One of the things that green... One of the arguments, the Council of Colors argues about copying in green all the time. There's some things that everybody's on board on. We like green self-copying when it's like self-copying itself,

like oozes and things like that, where it breaks apart, but it copies of itself. And we like some amount of copying its own things. The big thing that we've been starting moving toward is that we want it to be more about doing green things with copying and less doing blue things with copying. What we mean by that is

we like it when the point of the spell is more I'm getting big, beefy creatures unless I'm copying small utility things. Like, blue is more about the control and build-up utility. Green is more about, like, make more of your giant things. And so, as we're making green copying, A, it's limited to your own stuff, but B, we've more been looking for effects

that sort of play in the idea of, hey, it's going to help me take my board presence and magnify my board presence. I'm not stealing my opponent's creatures. I'm not copying my opponent's creatures. I'm not accessing things that I don't have access to. I'm not using it more for utility than for sort of volume and size. So we still let green do it, but green does it a lot less.

Blue does copying effects every set. Red does copying effects every year, not necessarily every set, but most sets, a lot of sets, red does it. And then green is like, hey, maybe once a year, maybe once every other year. Like, green effects are a lot less. Okay, let's get to black. So black in my mind is number four. First off, we've found some fun of copying things out of the graveyard. Ironically, we made a blue card that did that in Planar Chaos, but we were sort of, it was Planar Chaos, so we were messing around. Body Devil, I think was the name of that spell. That lets you

clone a creature out of the graveyard, which shocker, it's a lot like reanimation. That's what we were playing with in Planar Chaos. Anyway, black obviously can reanimate things, which is not technically copying, but it is very similar to copying. You know, I mean, for example, if we made a black creature that copied a creature in your graveyard, that is not that dissimilar to reanimating it.

When we do things that copy stuff out of the graveyard, sometimes we'll copy abilities or copy activated abilities or the keyword abilities or we don't copy keywords specifically but we'll we'll name the ones you can copy um so anyway black will do a little bit of that playing around with death um we also have done black is the one other color that we've done clones that can copy the opponent stuff um there's something about like the evil twin feel that has a black feel to it. I mean, the actual evil twin is blue-black. But the,

usually if we do that in black, we don't do it a lot and there's usually some other rider to it. There's some cost to it. Like a common thing is like, well, you can copy it, but you're losing life.

It's like there's a, it comes at a real cost for you to do that. But black is the one color... Well, I'm sorry. Red can copy opponent stuff temporarily. Blue can copy opponent stuff. And black is the one other stuff that can permanently copy opponent stuff. But like I said, not too often and with an additional cost. White is probably the color that does the least amount of copying. Propagate...

So the copying of tokens is the one area we've given white. We like the idea of white building its army. And so the idea of I keep getting more of little creatures is something that we like in white. So we do let it do that.

The big thing to keep in mind here is that we generally think that copying is I mean every effect is fun for somebody right? everybody loves something that everybody loves

they go ooh I love this thing that's exciting that I could do this but there are certain effects that have a more just uniform appeal. Not that everybody likes them, but, you know, it's generally more popular. And I would put copying into that larger category.

That is funny. There are certain things that I really enjoy, like copying and doubling things. And one could argue copying and doubling are kind of the same thing. But those happen to be very popular with the player. So my love of magic overlaps with a lot of people's love of magic. So we do try to find opportunities.

The idea of cloning things is a lot of fun. The big difference right now, and the reason we'll have a lot of arguments in Console Colors, is it's not that we don't like copying and have it spread out a little bit. We just want to make sure that it's carved up enough and that it's distinct enough. You know, that if you're, it's like we don't want everybody just saying, I'm going to copy my opponent's best creature. Somebody should do that.

Mainly blue. You know, black can do it in very skinny cases. But the other colors, you know, and maybe red doesn't temporarily, but we want to really make sure that we mix up and differentiate what's doing what. I'm happy to say that unlike early Magic,

where we were very cautious with our copy effects, probably because of the rules, we've definitely embraced them. Before I did this, I looked, you know, and there's like seven pages of copycards, you know. It is definitely something that Magic has leaned into. I think in Commanders especially that there's a lot of fun that goes on with copying.

So it is definitely something we've leaned into and that we enjoy. But it took a little while to get there. One of the things that, to me, when I tell these little stories about the history of magic is there are things that 30 years in that we know are just hey these are cool things that took us a little while to figure out the component pieces part of it was a rule thing but part of it just was

I don't know we have a lot more data than we did back in the day. Like, back in the day, it was a lot of sort of gut, you know what I'm saying? I mean, I would interact with the audience and stuff, but it was more anecdotal than data, that it was, I would talk to people, and I would learn things. And I had a pretty good gut for what I thought players liked. But, you know, you would get into meetings and have that argument. And nowadays, like, we can just pull up actual data. Do people like this? Well, here's the most popular cards from the last end sets.

Hey, look how many of these are, whatever effect that you're trying to talk about. hey, look how many of these are whatever effect that you're trying to talk about. So the nice thing about having the data means that we have more of a sense of what players like in a way that we can do it. And the other thing I think is there's a snowball effect where you have to sort of convince R&D that people like something. And once you get over that hump, we start making more of those things. And the more we make, the more people can interact with it. And so people liking it becomes louder. And so a lot of early magic

was trying to get that snowball rolling. And copying was one of those things that I took under my wing. So I'm quite happy with the proliferation of copy effects. I think it is a fun effect. Anyway, so just so you guys are aware, a little update on making magic into the new building. Or not making magic, drive to work in the new building.

So normally we used to be in a different part of Renton. We're still in Renton, but a different part. And when I would be in that part of Renton, it was a 30-minute drive. So when I would drive from work to Renton, assuming there was no traffic, I would get there usually between 28 and 30 minutes. That's how long it took to get there,

which was, as regular readers will know, about the exact time it took for a Drive to Work episode. Nowadays, we are about five minutes closer. So if there isn't traffic, although as you'll see from my other podcasts, so far I've had a bunch of traffic. If there isn't traffic, I actually get to work closer to 25. But one of the things I've decided is I think around 30 minutes, like at bare minimum, it should be close to 30 minutes. You know, 28, 29, I'll accept. But it should be close to 30 minutes.

So if I have traffic, a lot of times when I get to the office, I will stop. But we actually, the way it works is there are different parking levels. So parking A and B are supposed to be for the, there's a hotel across the street. So we're supposed to park at parking C and above. So the joke is don't park below C level. So anyway, I have to drive up. So today there was no traffic. I got here right on time. So I literally continue talking while I'm driving up. So I'm trying to use that extra time to get you guys to make sure I get to 30 minutes.

But anyway, guys, I'm not parked. But even if I have to talk a little bit after parking, I will do so to make sure that we get a full time. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. Copying, like I said, is a near and dear effect to me, something we keep doing. Luckily, I think I've got a lot of other people in on and well, I think R&D's realize how much the players like it.

But there's a lot of other fans of copy effects in beside me. So a lot of people make copy effects, so there's infinite copy effects these days. So anyway, that is everything I have to say about copying. So now that I'm parked, it is time for me to go to work. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed it. And I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.