Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1093: Fixed Mechanics

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Sometimes we make a mechanic and realize later that we could have done it better. This podcast talks about how we make new mechanics that are fixed versions of older ones.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is a topic I got from my blog. I'm going to talk about fixed cards. And what I mean by that is sometimes we'll make a mechanic and we'll later realize that we could have done it better. That we could have done it differently. that we could have done it better, that we could have done it differently. And so we make a new mechanic with a new name that is similar to the old mechanic, but slightly different in some way. That's what I'm talking about today.

Now, before I get into that, I should stress that oftentimes we will change how mechanics work. Sometimes, for example, we will change them, but we won't change the name. We'll just retroactively change them. A classic example would be Echo. Echo first appeared in Urza Saga. When you play an Echo creature, on the second turn it was in play, you had to cast it again. You had to pay what's called the Echo cost, which was equal to the mana cost. When we brought Echo back in Time Spiral block, we changed it so the cost you had to pay was written out. In original, like in Urza Saga,

it was always tied to the mana cost of the card. So when we brought it back, we just eroded the old cards to have the mana cost as the Echo cost. So, I mean, the cards essentially played exactly how they did before. It more expanded how we could use in the future. It didn't really change how any of the old cards worked. Other examples, Convoke or Hideaway. You know, we've definitely taken things where we want to change them a little bit, but we feel it's not so much that we need to change the name.

And then there's stuff like companion, I guess, which we realized we had done something wrong, and right in the moment, we sort of eroded it to fix it because it was broken. That's an abnormality. We don't do that kind of thing very often. Companion might be the only time that I can think of us having done that. But today, I'm talking about how we start with a named named mechanic and we change it to a different name that works differently. That's what I'm talking about today. I want to talk about fixed mechanics. But we do with mechanics that we bring back, we will slightly tweak how they work as long as we think that tweak is subtle enough. Okay, so as I explain fixed cards, I'm also going to explain some of the reasons we do it.

So reason number one is we want to expand how the mechanic works. So the classic example of this, in fact, I made a giant list of all the fixed mechanics, and this is the one that I think is the earliest one. So in Alpha, there was an aura, a creature enchantment, named Fear. And you enchant your creature, and then that enchanted creature could only be blocked by black or artifact creatures. The flavor is that it's scary, and it's so scary that only artifact creatures that are emotionless or black creatures that are used to scary things can deal with it. We even, at one point, turned it into a mechanic, an evergreen mechanic called Fear.

And mostly it was just on black creatures because it was weird to be on another color and can't be black by black. And we had done a few riffs on it, but we didn't call that fear. Eventually we realized that we needed it to just be a little more expansive. One of the things we learned is the evergreen keywords have to carry a little more weight. And so we don't like them being in just one color. So we started expanding where they are. Fear was hard to expand to other colors. So what we decided to do was we changed fear to intimidate. Intimidate fixed two problems. One of which is intimidate, the way intimidate works is, I can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and creatures that share my color.

So if you put intimidate on a black creature, it acts exactly like fear. But if you put it on other, I mean, it works exactly like fear, assuming that color doesn't change, that creature doesn't change color. If the creature changes color, it's not exactly fear. So if you have a black creature, it acts like fear until you add a color to the creature or change the color of the creature. Then intimidate will work differently than fear. And the reason we did that basically is we wanted to expand it.

We wanted to put it in red. I think we wanted a little bit in green. We just wanted to have more space for the mechanic. And that's sometimes why we fix mechanics. It's just like, oh, the first time we made it a little more restrictive than we meant. And fear is a good

example where it was kind of inertia. It's not like anyone sat down to make fear as much as like Richard had made a one-off card and then we sort of just, it sort of slowly grew into something bigger. Interestingly, Intimidate would eventually leave the game to be replaced by Menace. Now, I don't consider Menace a fix of Intimidate. It's a different mechanic. It is a similar evasion mechanic, so it fills a similar void for us, primary black, secondary red, but it's not fixed in the sense that menace and intimidator is different things.

They both have to do with blocking, but they're fundamentally different things. Okay, the second reason that we will change a mechanic, fix a mechanic, if you will, is because the player base doesn't play it correctly. And I have two examples of this. So first is fading. So fading was a mechanic that showed up in Nemesis. The way fading works is

it's fading with a number. Let's say it's fading three. That means when it enters the battlefield, it has three fading counters. And so turn one, I play it. It gets three counters on it. Turn two, I have to remove one of the fading counters at the beginning of the turn. I do that. The creature now can attack that turn because it came in the previous turn. So I attack for the first time. On the third turn, I remove the second counter. It attacks for the third time. I say for the second time. On the third turn, I remove the second counter. It attacks for the third time. I say for the second time. On the fourth turn, I remove the last counter.

But the way fading works is you only sacrifice the creature if you can't remove a counter. So on the fourth turn, you remove the third counter. It still can attack that turn. Then on the fifth turn, you go to remove a counter. It doesn't have any counters. It goes away. Our thought process at the time, the reason we did it that way was we liked that when you saw fading three, it said, hey,

you can use this creature three times. You can attack with it three times. And we thought that was the most important sort of criteria to have a sense of how long to have the creature out. But what we found is, elsewhere in Magic, we do other cards that have counters. A classic example would be the Clackor creatures. There, elsewhere in Magic, we do other cards that have counters.

Class example, the Clackor creatures. There was one in Alpha and more after that. Zero, zero creatures that you put plus one, plus one counters on them. And when you attack or block, they remove the counters. And the idea is, when I get to zero, I will have no toughness and I go away. So, you know, a zero, zero creature that has plus one, plus one counters on it, when you remove the last counter, the creature dies when the last counter gets removed. And what we found is intuitively that's how people felt it should work. People were constantly misplaying it. Now, fading was very popular. It was a powerful

mechanic. I should say, I'm not popular is the correct popular. It was a powerful mechanic. I should say, I'm not popular is the correct term. It's a downside mechanic. But people liked the mechanic in the sense that it played well and it was powerful. Okay, so along comes time spiral block. And time spiral block had a time theme. So the first set represented the past. The second set represented the present, although an alternate reality present. And the third set represented the future. So one of the things I thought would be cool

is I wanted to bring back a mechanic for each set that embodied past, present, and future. So for the past, I brought back Flashback. Literally, it's a mechanic whose name is Thinking Back to the past, and you're casting spells at your graveyard that you've previously cast. For future, I did scry. It wasn't evergreen yet. Scry is to look into the future to see, you know, what are you going to draw? Now, for the present, it was a little trickier. I ended up liking the idea of vanishing

in the sense that vanishing is very about being in the present. It's not going to be around for long, so enjoy it now. You're in the present. The problem, though, was as I said, everybody was playing, not everybody, but a lot of players played Fading Wrong. It did not

intuitively match how they think it was supposed to work. So, I said, well, this is the alternate reality set. What better to bring back a mechanic but to slightly change it? So we turned it into vanishing. Vanishing had two main changes. One is that it dies when you remove the counter. And essentially, if you add a number to vanishing, meaning what would be fading three, if you make it vanishing four, it works exactly the same as fading three.

The creature will have the same number of turns in turn. Now, the number matches how many turns it's on the battlefield, not how many turns it can attack. So you play it, it's on the battlefield. You have three turns removing counters where it stays on the battlefield. So you have three attacks. Then on the fifth turn, when you remove the fourth counter, it would go away. The second change on Vanishing is, I think Fading used Fading counters.

Vanishing changed it to Time counters. There was a Time theme in the block, in Time Spiral block. And there were cards that interacted with Time counters. There was a time theme in the block, in Time Spiral block, and there were cards that interacted with time counters. So it just made the mechanic a little more interactive, allowed a little more interaction with the rest of the block. Another example of a fix that came from intuition problems was Shroud into Hexproof. was Shroud into Hexproof. So Shroud was a mechanic that we introduced in Future Sight, the third set in the Time Shroud block.

And the idea of Shroud is it was untargetability, meaning nobody could target it. It's something we had written out on cards before, but we decided to make it a keyword. And so what happened was we made it, and we decided to make it a keyword. And so what happened was, we made it, and we noticed something interesting in that players, like, they understood that they couldn't target their opponent's Shroud creatures, but they really

felt like they could target their own. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't tear my guy, but I can giant girth him, right? So people were playing Shroud incorrectly because it just felt like the downside, it didn't feel like it should have a downside. Why can't my creature let me target itself? I want to put auras or equipment or whatever on it, you know.

So what was happening was we decided to redo it. We just literally made a new mechanic that worked like people thought Shroud worked, which we called Hexproof. Now, note is that Hexproof itself would later be replaced by Ward. It's kind of similar to the Intimidate Menace thing.

Ward really isn't... It's not exactly Hexproof, you know what I'm saying? It is something that just makes spells more expensive to target you, usually. Makes additional cost to target. So it's not... Hexproof is you just can't target me, and ward is a variant. So ward isn't really a fixed hexproof.

But hexproof is definitely sort of a fixed shroud. Okay. The number three reason that we might change something is a play design, a balance issue. So the example of this is the mechanic that inspired this podcast, Cascade into Discover. So the idea is Cascade first showed up in Alara Reborn. And the way Cascade worked was it was an ability on permanence. When that permanent, I think it was a cast trigger? When you cast the card,

it would keep looking at the top cards of your library until it found a spell that was lower than the mana cost of the creature that had... I'm sorry, of the permanent that had Cascade. Now, Cascade was very fun and popular. The problem was it was designed in such a way that it was a little more abusable than we meant. And the reason was we made some cards that had

low costs that were three mana cards with Cascade, meaning they went and got two drops or less. It was possible for you to build your deck such that you didn't have anything that cost two or less except for the cards you specifically put in your deck such that you didn't have anything that cost two or less, except for the cards you specifically put in your deck. And the most popular ones in tournaments are cards that don't have a mana cost. So they have a tactical mana cost of zero, even though there's other ways to cast them. And anyway, so that was causing problems. And so when we brought Cascade, or we brought back Fading as Cascade, not Cascade, we brought Cascade back as Discover.

A, I mean, the name wasn't great. We fixed that. You know, sometimes, and that's another thing I didn't, like, when Intimidate, Fear became Intimidate. Fear was not a great name. It's not that you had fear. You were scary. You invoked fear. So sometimes when we change things, we fix the name.

That's another thing. Usually fixing the name is not the main reason we do it, but it is a side effect. Like Cascade did not work well in Underground World, for example. But the larger issue is we turned it from this ability, this keyword that's on the permanent to a key, I mean, it's still on the permanent, but we made it into a keyword action, which means that when something happens, it triggers. And that allowed us to do a whole bunch of things. It allowed us to disconnect the mana value from the number that you're searching for. It allowed us to put it in places where the previous cascade wouldn't work. It could be on spells.

It also allowed us to trigger multiple times, so it could be something that would happen every turn under certain conditions. It just opened us up, and the important thing is it gave us more... I mean, it allowed us more design space, so that's important, but probably the most important is it allowed us better tools and knobs to balance the card. Sometimes we make a mechanic that players like, but the mechanic has balance issues. And so sometimes we can't bring it back because of that. And so Discover was a number of things. The name didn't fit.

The functionality, we wanted a little cleaner. There also was a thing because it was a cash trigger. When you put it on enter the battlefield effects, it didn't quite go in the order people expected a little cleaner. There also was a thing because it was a cache trigger. When you put it on enter the battlefield effects, it didn't quite go in the order people expected it to go. So a lot of times when we can fix something, we got to fix, like, the nice thing about fixing something is you can fix a number of different things. It really gives you some nuance on what you're fixing

and how you're fixing it. Okay. The next reason we fix cards, and this is one, this is one, a lot of times we're fixing things because we tried something and we felt like, oh, the way it worked was slightly off. Sometimes the issue is we have a mechanic that we really feel good about and we put it out there and we don't quite get the response we want.

And that makes us reevaluate the mechanic. So the classic example here is Chroma into Devotion. So Chroma was first dreamed up by Aaron Forsythe in Fifth Dawn Design. He made a single card and I said to him, Oh, Aaron, this isn't one card. This is a mechanic.

And so I held on to it. And then in Future Sight, we were doing the future shifted sheet where we were hinting at cards and mechanics from the future. So we decided that we named it Chroma, and we hinted at the idea that—actually, it might not have been called Chroma yet. But anyway, we hinted at this mechanic where you would count colored mana symbols. And so come Eventide, a year later, we were printed the card that showed up in Future Sight. That was the future version of the card that showed up in Shadowmoor, the preprint. And then in Eventide, we really, we went all out.

And Chroma, basically Chroma was an ability word, and it said, hey, just be aware, you're going to count colored mana symbols somewhere. It could be on the battlefield, could be in your graveyard, could be in your hand. And the response to Chroma was basically, eh. It wasn't hated. It wasn't, like, beloved or hated, as I like to say.

It just kind of didn't evoke, like, people were like, whatever. But in my heart of hearts, I had high hopes for Chroma. I was kind of sad that Chroma really just, I mean, we aim for higher than, eh. So we were working on Theros a few years down the road. And one of the things about Theros is the gods of Theros, their power comes from the belief of the people. The more the people believe in them, the more powerful they are. And we liked the idea that there was some sense of devotion.

People had devotion to them. So we wanted a devotion mechanic. And I think it was Zach Hill that recommended, well, could we use Chroma? And so the idea was a couple things. One is, here's the problems I think Chroma had. First problem was, it was a little bit vague. The name Chroma is this Latin, it's a Latin root for color.

It hinted that it had something to do with color. But it didn't really evoke anything. The fact that the mechanic looked all over the place meant that there, there, there wasn't this continuity to it and it made it hard to build a deck around it because different cars just cared about different things. Um, and the other thing I think is also, we didn't really push anything. Like none, it was just It just was a mechanic that, at the time, I guess development,

or now it would be more play design, didn't want to really push it, so they didn't. It was a mechanic that just ended up, no one played it much anywhere. It didn't even matter too much in Limited. It mattered a little bit in Limited, almost not in Constructed. So anyway, what we said is,

okay, we're going to rename it, give it a better flavor, call it Devotion. We're going to only care about it on the battlefield so that all the Devotion cards work together. And we're going to be a bit more aggressive with it. And it definitely was made

so it showed up in Limited and it even showed up in Constructed. There were Constructed Devotion decks. And the card went from being, the mechanic went from being, eh,

to being one of the most popular, if not the most popular mechanic in Theros. You know, so much so that when we came back to Theros, we were like, well, we have to do devotion. That is like the most defining mechanic from Theros. So, um,

so yeah, so sometimes we want to bring things back because we think we can do them better. Okay, my next example is one where sometimes we fix things and there's a question of did we need to fix it? Should we have fixed it? So my example here is Theros had a mechanical monstrosity. Monstrosity said, hey, pay this cost. It went on creatures. And then the creature becomes monstrous. And then you put some number of plus one, plus one counters on it,

and it gains, it can gain ability. It gets the counters, and sometimes it also gains abilities. But once you've used the monstrosity ability, that's it. You can only use it once. And that's why we use counters to sort of remind you that you've used it. So in,

was it Guilds of Ravnica? Guilds of Ravnica,s of Ravnica Ravnica allegiance we decided to put they wanted a monstrosity like mechanic on

Simic they didn't like the word monstrosity quite so much and they wanted to make one subtle functional change so the way it works in Theros

is if I use monstrous even if all the counters get removed from the creature, I can't cast Monstrous again. Or if my opponent somehow gets a possible counter on my creature, I can still cast Monstrous. Monstrous has to do with have I used it or not. Adapt is less Monstrous except it looks at the counters.

So if I put, if I use the activated ability and put counters on it, but I then move the counter somewhere else, I can use it again. Or somehow my opponent puts a personal counter on it, I now can't use Adapt. Now Adapt is an interesting question in which we change it for some fine-tuned reasons. I mean, it's technically different. But there's an interesting question is,

is Adapt better than Monstrosity? Did we improve upon it? It made it a little bit more interactive with things that were going on. I mean, one of the reasons they did it was it was sitting in a guild set where the mechanics wanted to interact with each other. And it allowed it to have more interaction

with other mechanics around it. But, and this is my thing of, there's a cost to fixing a mechanic. There's a cost to redoing it, changing it slightly, and then giving it a new name. And Montrossi into Adapt is a good question of,

well, should we have done that? Like, was that a good call? I will put question mark. I'm not sure. I think it was a pretty subtle change. I don't know. For example, if we had a set to do again, I might just want to use monstrosity.

I think monstrosity is the better word to adapt. So it's an example where we fix something, but I'm like, did we fix it to make it better? I mean, we fixed it to make it different. And I understand why in that environment we did it. I do get why it was made. It definitely is on the borderline.

Like, when I look at this, like, if you ask me, should Chroma become devotion? A hundred percent. Should fear become intimidate? A hundred percent. Should fading become vanishing or cascade become discover?

All those I'm behind. The construction and adapt, I'm, it's not that I, it's a good example just to sort of point out that we can change things, should we? And that one's closer to the line. Maybe we should have, maybe we shouldn't have. It's closer to the line.

Other examples. So another example of us changing stuff is... So Poison was a mechanic that first showed up in Legends. It was on individual cards through Mirage Block. We then decided to get rid of it, although against my will, I like Poison. I finally managed to convince the powers that be

to bring Poison back. It would end up getting used in Scars of Mirrodin. But in Future Sight, a lot of Future Sight talk today, we teased it on three cards and we gave it a mechanic which we called Poisonous. Scars of Mirrodin ended up using a mechanic called Infect, where any damage

done by the creature to other creatures was in the form of minus one, minus one counters, and to players was in the form of poison counters. Infect had a lot of issues. It was harder to balance. It required the use of minus one minus one counters we did try it when we came back

for actually all to be one but in the end we decided we wanted to do something a little bit different we made it corrupted the environment was done differently and so originally we went back to poisonous it turns out that poisonous because it was in future site the environment was done differently. And so originally we went back to Poisonous. It turns out that Poisonous, because it was in FutureSight,

and we made a whole bunch of mechanics to sort of tease in FutureSight, but it didn't go through the rigor that a normal mechanic would go through. Normally when we make a mechanic, we spend a lot of time and energy fine-tuning it, make sure we have the exact right template. And it turned out that Poisonous wasn't quite the template we wanted. I think it was triggered. Like, it did some stuff in digital that wasn't super nice,

and it just, it was like a little bit off of what we wanted. Now, the interesting thing about Poisonous was we'd only ever made three cards. There wasn't a whole host of cards with Poisonous on it. So we decided to change it to Toxic, which, once again, is a good example where it was a small, subtle change. I think if we had made a lot of poisonous cards, maybe we would have reconsidered. But the being that there are only three of them, that it just wasn't, we hadn't committed heavily to it. I think we said, you know, let's just do what we're supposed to do.

Inertia is a powerful force. If we've done something before and there's a lot of cards that have that word on it, we will run and reconsider. We also did talk about whether or not to keep the name. As I mentioned with Convoke and Echo, we changed it. It turns out that we had one other problem with Poisonous, which is Poisonous, technically something is poisonous not because if it bites you, it would give you poison,

but because if you eat it, you would get poison. So a snake is only poisonous if eating the snake would harm you, would poison you. And so poisonous wasn't quite the right word. So that's the reason we didn't keep the word was, the word was a little off and didn't quite describe what we needed it to. And so we changed it. Now, one of the interesting things about doing the research for this podcast is I went and talked to the rest of R&D and we said, what are all the things, what are all the fixed mechanics? There are definitely some that fall

into the gray area. Like for example, there's a card called Aftermath. There's a mechanic called Aftermath that showed up in Amonkhet, where you cast, it's kind of like a split card with a restriction on it, where you cast the left side in your hand and the right side from your graveyard, kind of like flashback. We made a mechanic in Midnight Hunt, in Shroud Midnight Hunt, called Disturb. Disturb has a lot of the functionality of Aftermath,

where you cast one side from your hand and one side from the graveyard. Now, they were all permanents in... They were all permanent spells in Midnight Hunt, but the mechanic could have them be spells if you wanted. So, like, Disturb could do what Aftermath did.

Not quite a fixing Aftermath. It allowed us to expand Aftermath a little bit, but I mean, so, you know, a similar one is there's a mechanic in Tempest called Entwine where you add two abilities on a spell, and then if you pay the Entwine cost, you get to do

both of them. There's a mechanic called Fuse that kind of does Entwine, but only on split cards. So it's not really a fixed version of Entwine in that it's not like Entwine cards could be Fuse cards. It has to be a split card.

But it made use of that. Flashback, there's a mechanic in Guilds of Ravnica called Jumpstart, which is kind of Flashback, but it forces you to discard a card. I wouldn't call that a fix in that we still want to do flashback. I think we did a flashback variant there,

but it's not that we want to forever change flashbacks. I don't think of that as a fix. And then there's stuff like Regenerate. We learned when we got rid of Regenerate that getting indestructible sort of until end of turn has a lot of similar functionality not identical, there's some differences but filled the void

in a similar way in that the cards we formerly wanted to regenerate we could capture 95% of the functionality through getting indestructible until end of turn and once again it's not exactly fixed, it's not exactly regenerate functionality through getting instructable to end of turn. And once again, it's not exactly fixed.

It's not exactly to generate. But it is similar in regard. Now, the interesting thing about that one is we didn't make a brand new mechanic. We made use of the existing mechanic to fill the void. So anyway, but that part of the thing today is just sort of pointing out that there's some fuzzy area in this.

OK, now one final thing. So upcoming, I will just say in 2024, we have another mechanic. So there's another mechanic that players liked that we wanted to tweak slightly. We felt that, you know, time had gone by since we originally had done it, and we felt like, that we thought the mechanic would be better slightly different. And so there is another fixed mechanic coming your way in the set in 2024. So a little tease of things to come, but I think you guys will like it. Anyway, so that, really the point of today's podcast is talking about how, look, we are far from perfect. We do a lot of things. We try things.

We learn from them. You know, one of the things about making magic is it's an iterative process. And we're constantly learning. We're constantly improving our sort of design techniques. And so we will look back sometimes at things we did before and say, you know what? With 2020 in hindsight, we could have done that better. So some of the times we do do it better. And that is, you know, it's yet another thing that we do. So just another sort of...

The reason I thought it would be a fun topic for today was that... The reason this topic came up is... There are definitely a bunch of people who are like, why couldn't you just do Cascade? Why couldn't it be Cascade? And the answer was, there was a lot of things about Cascade that were problematic. That it had play balance issues.

We didn't have the knobs to design it the way we wanted to. The name also was problematic in this particular case. There are a bunch of reasons why it was a better thing. And the other thing, by the way, is we don't fix things that we don't think there's potential for. If we don't think we'll ever do it again, why bother fixing it? Usually we fix things because we think there's a future. Now, some of those things that intimidate might not end up having as much

a future as we expect, but that's why we do it. Why do we make Cascade and Discover? Because people like Cascade, and we'd like to be able to do that mechanic, but Cascade had a lot of issues, and so we were fixing it, and that is why. Once again, our goal in fixing a mechanic is to try

to make the mechanic better to make better gameplay I don't mean more powerful necessarily Cascade in some ways is more powerful than Discover only because it's more abusable but yes, I mean you're raging about how easy it can go into decks competitive decks

but we have to be careful things being broken or being used in ways we don't intend sometimes causes us problems not always, but often causes us problems. Not always, but often causes us problems. But anyway, guys, that is my talk today about fixed mechanics.

I hope you enjoyed it, but I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's 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 today's podcast, and I'll see you next time.