Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1094: Returning Mechanics

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

How do we decide when to bring mechanics back? This podcast talks all about it.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, guys. Today is all about returning mechanics. So I'm going to talk about the history of returning mechanics and then try to do a somewhat exhaustive look at return mechanics. I'm sure, let me start by saying, I'm going to be throwing a lot at you today. I'm sure I missed a few. So bear with me. I'm sure people will let me know what I missed. Anyway, okay, so we go back to Alpha. Richard Garfield makes Alpha.

Alpha has some mechanics in it. Mostly what we now would think of as evergreen keywords. Flying, first strike, trample, and such. And it's not until the first large set. So Magic comes out as Alpha. There's a Ravie Knight small set, Antiquity small set. The first big set is Legends.

And Legends doesn't really introduce new mechanics, but it introduces new tools. It has gold cards for the first time. It has legendary permanents for the first time. So it introduces new concepts and what I would think of as new tools, but not really new mechanics.

It's not really until Ice Age, which is the next big set, that there start to be some actual, like, new mechanics introduced. For example, cumulative upkeep was introduced. That's where you have to pay a cost, and then every turn the cost increments, and so it gets harder and harder to pay the upkeep costs.

Now, in the early days, when you introduced something new to Magic, one of two things would happen. Either it just became what we call evergreen, it just became something that any set could use, or it was gone. In the early days, mechanics were thought to be kind of disposable, and that, you know, once you used it, if it didn't become evergreen, you know, it sort of got tossed aside.

For example, like Cube of Upkeep for Little Wild's evergreen. Oh, I guess technically, technically, Legends did have a mechanic. It had a mechanic called Rampage that said when you are blocked for every creature beyond the first, you get plus one, plus one. I think it was Rampage N, I guess. Anyway, Rampage was in Legends.

So I guess Legends technically did introduce a mechanic, which became evergreen for a little bit of a while then kind of dissipated. So the next big set was Mirage. And with Mirage, a little more the idea is, okay, we're going to start making blocks. The blocks are going to introduce mechanics. And the idea at the time is there would be two mechanics. Mirage introduced flanking and phasing.

And that was the name mechanics for the block. Back in the day, the block was large set, small set, small set. So you had Mirage, you had Visions, you had Weatherlight. Weatherlight had a little theme to it of Graveyard, but as far as named mechanics, those were the two mechanics. And for a while, every block would have two mechanics. Tempest had Shadow and Buyback. And Urza Saga had Cycling and Echo.

That was just sort of the way it was. And then Mercadie Mass did this odd thing where it didn't have named mechanics. It had new mechanics. It had the Rebels and Mercenaries. It had mechanics, but they weren't named. And the audience really responded like, I like such and such mechanics. Where are my new mechanics? The fact that they weren't named was problematic. So it sort of said to us, okay, we have to be louder in what we're doing. But anyway, so in the early days,

we made mechanic. If it didn't become evergreen tossed it aside it was just not something now things were allowed to become evergreen there were a few things became evergreen but in general you would make a mechanic and like okay we've used that mechanic which brings us to onslaught so onslaught is um four or five years after mirage mir Mirage, Tempest, Urza Saga, Mercadian Masks, Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught. So in Onslaught, Mike Elliott had done the initial design and he had

two mechanics. Neither mechanic actually ended up in the set. But Bill Rose was the head designer at the time, my role now. And Bill said to me, he wanted me to sort of take a pass at it. He thought we could he thought it could be better than it was. And so, among other things,

I ended up, there was a typo theme that was in the set but it was very, very light. I made the suggestion to way rank it up, make it way higher. The rules team had this idea for this new mechanic called Morph that I was excited by, that R&D was initially a little skeptical of, but I playtested it with them and got them on board.

And then my third suggestion for what the set needed was I thought that cycling would work really well. But I got a lot of resistance because I'm like, well, we've done cycling. We did that. Cycling was done. We have done cycling. Why don't you make a new mechanic? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Cycling is a good mechanic. Cycling was originally created by Richard Garfield, interestingly, during Tempest design. Tempest had too much in it. So cycling got pushed back to the next year's Ursa Saga. But mostly what I was saying is, look, we haven't used up all the space of cycling.

You know, why are we throwing it away? There's a perfectly good mechanic. Why are we throwing it away? The way I ended up convincing them is I made, what was it called, Lightning Rift and Astro Slide. I made two cards that triggered off you cycling cards. So I introduced something new.

I said, okay, I'll bring it back, but here's a new thing. Before, you didn't necessarily need to play cycling cards together. But I'm like, oh, what if I make a few cards that, like, wow, they're triggered by cycling. So all of a sudden you might have a cycling deck where you want to play a lot of cycling cards together. They thought that was introducing something new, and they said, okay, okay, we'll let you bring back cycling because you're introducing something new. Okay, cut ahead a few more years, so after Onslaught was Mirrodin. Mirrodin, by the way, is an example of things that go evergreen. Mirrodin had equipment for the first time,

and they kind of instantly became evergreen. After Mirrodin was Champs of the Kamigawa. After Champs of the Kamigawa was Ravnica. So after Ravnica was Time Spiral. So in Time Spiral, we did this nostalgia thing where we really leaned into nostalgia in a big... The two main themes of the block were nostalgia and time. So, for example, Time Spiral was an old set.

So we brought back a bunch of old mechanics. And Planar Chaos was a what-if present set, alternate reality. So what if we took mechanics and we brought them back and put them in different colors? Or, like, we changed fading to vanishing? What if we sort of and we brought them back and put them in different colors or we changed fading to vanishing? What if we sort of tweaked things? And then for Future Sight, we did a lot of what we call mix and match, where we took two mechanics

you know from the past that played well together and put them on the same card. So during basically the course of Time Spar Block, we reprinted... I didn't write it all down, but we reprinted 20 mechanics. Basically, every mechanic we thought

had any value whatsoever got reprinted. Almost every mechanic at some point that we thought was a good mechanic got reprinted. The vast, vast majority of them. Okay, so be aware, the set before Time Spiral, Ravnica Block, was kind of my first full block as head designer. So we went through, we did Ravnica the set before Time Spiral, Ravnica block, was kind of my first full block as head designer.

So we went through, we did Ravnica, we did Time Spiral. And Time Spiral definitely was interesting, seeing us really use these old mechanics in a way. So the next set after Time Spiral was Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. The set after that was Shards of Alara. So in Shards of Alara, Bill Rose... Let's see. Oh, the one thing I should mention, we mentioned Shadowmore.

Shadowmore reused Hybrid. I would argue Hybrid's more of a tool than it is a mechanic. But we took something that was splashy and done in small amounts earlier in Ravnica and then blew it out and, like, half the set was Hybrid and really did something different in Shadowmoor. So in Shards of Alara, Bill was interested again in using cycling.

He had my blessing. This time there was no problems. I think having seen Time Spiral, having seen Onslaught, like the idea of bringing back a mechanic, people were slowly warming up to that. And I think it was now accepted as a thing to do.

We had liked cycling. Cycling was the first thing to be brought back. Cycling showed up again in Time Spiral, and again showed up in Shards of Alara. Cycling, just very useful. In Conflux, there was Domain. And so the idea I started getting in my head

was, not only should return mechanics be something we could do, I'm like, you know, it should be a resource we think about, we consciously think about. And so one of the things I said is, okay, I think when we're putting sets together, we should actively try to bring back mechanics. Not that we have to. It's not a requirement. But, look, there's a lot of good mechanics that we understand their designs because we've worked with them. They have a lot of design space left. Like, we, you know, I really, one of my big tenants was, sort of my early reign of a head designer, was

hey, these are good. Like, we had this great resource of mechanics. We should be bringing them back. And as you will see, I started saying, hey, I want every design team to think about what could they bring back. It wasn't a requirement. You didn't have to bring something back. But I really wanted teams to feel like,

ideally, it would be great if you did. You know, the default should be there's at least one returning mechanic. Once again, default, not required. Okay, so the next set was Zendikar. This was the set that I led. And we brought back Kicker. The idea essentially was you had a lot of lands into play. The set was all about getting lands.

So we did a lot to get you a lot of lands. And that meant you had a lot of mana. So what do you do with that mana? Well, we had a perfectly good mechanic from Invasion Block. And so we brought Kicker back. Then, by the way, we were reinventing. The previous year had been Magic 2010. We'd reinvented the idea of a core set,

including having new cards in it. So Magic 2011 was the first core set to bring back a mechanic. So it brought back Scry. Now Scry would later go on to be Evergreen. It wasn't Evergreen yet. Oh, I also should mention, as I'm going through this list

that I'm going to go through, a couple caveats. I'm only talking about Premiere sets. I'm not really getting into supplemental sets. And a lot of things become evergreen, or there's a lot of things that sort of end up becoming deciduous. I'll try to talk about them when we hit them. But there's a lot here, and like I said, I'm sure I'm missing a few things.

I'm trying to be as thorough as I can. Okay, next up was Scars of Mirrodin. Scars of Mirrodin, first of all, it was our first non-dominarian return where we were coming back to a place. We decided on our returns, we liked having some mechanic overlap. That mechanic ended up being imprint, which we just used a little bit. The problem is equipment, which had been key to Mirrodin, had become evergreen. And the other mechanics from the imprint ended up being... We wanted something

that could represent Mirrodin on the Mirrodin side, so Entwined was from Mirrodin, but didn't feel artifact-y in a way that we wanted. And Infinity... I did try to bring Infinity for Artifacts back in Scars of Mirrodin, and it ended up becoming Metalcraft. People were a little too afraid of actual Infinity for Artifacts back in Scars of Mirrodin, and it ended up becoming Metalcraft. People were a little too afraid of actual Affinity

for Artifacts. But we did wreck it in print, and we had introduced in future site some mechanics. We sort of brought back Poisonous. We changed it to the name Toxic. Tweaked it slightly so it didn't trigger, but mostly we brought back Poisonous. We changed it to the name Toxic. Tweaked it slightly so it didn't trigger.

But mostly we brought back Poisonous. Also, in the new... We did something interesting with Infect. Where we took a mechanic we'd had before, Wither, which had shown up in Shadowmoor Block, and brought it back, but added more to it and made it a new mechanic, which was Infect. Okay.

Magic 2012, which is the next core set, brought back Bloodthirst. That had been a Gruul mechanic in Ravnica. Had been a... Oh, yeah, in Ravnica. Next, in Innistrad, we brought back Flashback. I had originally made Flashback in Odyssey. It was a graveyard mechanic.

We were doing a set that wanted a graveyard theme. Flashback is an awesome, awesome mechanic. So we brought Flashback back. Then in Magic 2013, we brought back Exalted. And in Magic 2014, we brought back Slivers. Okay, after Innistrad was returned to Ravnica block, we decided that we didn't want one guild to have a return mechanic and the other ones have new mechanics. We would change our mind the next time

we would visit Ravnica. But at that point, we decided not to give all the guilds new mechanics. Okay, next up, Magic 2014 had Slivers, which isn't technically a mechanic, but we brought something back each core set. Okay, which then gets

us to Khans of Tarkir. So Khans of Tarkir brought back the Morph mechanic that we had originally done in Onslaught. And also, it brought back Delve. Delve was another future shifting mechanic. I'm not sure brought back is necessarily the right word

for future shifting mechanic, since I think there were three Delve cards in Future Sight, so brought back with a little aftric that sort of finally used it. Okay, so after Khans of Tarkir and Dragons of Tarkir,

we brought back Rebound, which had originally been in Rise of the Eldrazi. Then in battle for Zendikar, it was our return to Zendikar, so we brought back Landfall. One of the things we realized was that there are certain mechanics that are kind of iconic to a place.

And so when we went back, Landfall was so sort of interconnected with, so much interconnected with Zendikar that we felt we needed to bring it back. Okay, next is Shadows over Innistrad. Shadows over Innistrad, we brought back transforming double-faced cards. Those have been introduced in original Innistrad. They had been something that had been really exciting, and I think, once again, the dark transformation felt very core to what Innistrad was. So TDFCs came back. We also did something interesting in Shadows of Innistrad. We brought back a mechanic that I thought we would never bring back. We had brought it back so Madness had showed up in Odyssey Block, in Torment. And then we brought it back in Time Spiral in a little bit. And I really, on my Storm Scale, I think I graded it an 8 or a 9.

I think it was an 8. I really didn't think it was coming back. And then just, we were making a set literally about madness, about the theme of madness. And like, well, it's called madness. And, you know, we had, it just worked with our other mechanics. So we did bring it back. Showing, by the way, the lesson here is any mechanic can come back. Even mechanics that might be problematic or hard to build around or hard to balance.

Hey, in the right set, with the right environment, you know, anything is fair game. Okay, which brings us up to Amonkhet. I don't think Kaladesh brought anything back. It introduced a bunch of new things. And once again, there are things

like in Future Sight, we had introduced for the first time a colored artifact. And that showed up in Shards of Alara and then showed up in Theros and then showed up in Kaladesh. So there's small things like that. That's not a named mechanic as such. Anyway, Amiket brought back cycling for the fourth or fifth time. And one of the things that we started to realize is there were certain mechanics that were just, just useful mechanics that just, hey, in a second, use it. It made sense.

We could use it there. Um, next in Ixalan, we brought back Raid. So Raid had been in, um, Khans of Tarkir as a, as a guild. Oh, the interesting thing about Khans of Tarkir is one of the mechanics of Khans of Tarkir was prowess. And that almost instantaneously became evergreen. It's since moved back to deciduous rather than evergreen, but that came from Khans. Raid also came from Khans, and we liked Raid.

The other thing that Ixalan did is, I think Ixalan was the first non-industrial world to use transforming double-faced cards. I think we started realizing that it was just a more general tool. And this is kind of true, like I said, I talk about hybrid. Like hybrid came back in Shadowmoor and then it just became a deciduous tool that we use all the time. The same, I think, for double-faced cards. I mean, we would definitely experiment and try new things but the idea

of a transforming double-faced card was just something that it's just like many sets can access it now and so it's something that we use and it's something that gets used in lots of different places okay next up was Dominaria so Dominaria brought back Kicker so one of the interesting things about Dominaria was Dominaria. So Dominaria brought back Kicker. So one of the interesting

things about Dominaria was Dominaria was a return set. And in some ways, our first sort of official return, I mean, we've gone back to Dominaria many times in the first 10 years of Magic. But this is the first time in sort of the modern era of how we did sets and thought of sets, that we were coming back and wanted to think of it as a return. So we really wanted to bring back a mechanic that had premiered in Dominaria. And it turns out that a lot of early mechanics, like a lot of our strong mechanics

that we want to bring back, there's only a handful from the early days. The three biggies, the trifecta, if you will, is cycling, kicker, and flashback. And Shadows over Innistrad, oh, I didn't mention Shadows over Innistrad had brought back

oh, did it bring back flashback? That's a good question. I'm not sure it did bring flashback. We were looking at what to bring back in Dominaria. Something had used flashback because we couldn't use it in Dominaria. Something had used Flashback because we couldn't use it in Dominaria. And we had just used Kicker. I'm sorry, we had just used Cycling.

So we decided to use Kicker because we wanted Flashback and Cycling in other places. And so we brought back Kicker. In the core set, once again, you started seeing more use of Transforming Double-Faced cards. I actually had skipped over Magic Origins,

had done the Planeswalkers that were sort of legendary creatures and then turned into Planeswalkers. And that had been super popular. And so that was definitely something that we... Like I said, I think transforming double-faced cards kind of transcended.

Also, in Dominaria, while Kicker was its repeating mechanic, Saigas were introduced in Dominaria, and Saigas would be something kind of similarly where it was a tool that we liked that ended up becoming deciduous. Okay. Sorry. I'm trying to... I'm in traffic here and... Safety first. I'm trying to cut over in my traffic. So give me one second. Safety first. Okay. I'm now in the lane I need to be. Okay. Where was I? I was in Dominaria.

Chorus set 2019 introduced TDFCs. It had a Bolas theme and Bolas. There was one transforming card, but it was Bolas. It was pretty cool. Okay. It gets us to Guilds of Ravnica. So last time I said the second visit to Ravnica, we made the conscious decision to not do any repeat guild mechanics. We, at the time, were like, well, let's give everybody something new.

On our third trip, the decision was, you know what? If there's just a good mechanic, we should reuse the mechanic. So the one we technically reprinted was Convoke. There was a riff on Scry. There was a riff on Flashback. But Convoke was the one we

brought back literally with the same name. I did a whole podcast on fixed mechanics where we took things. So I'm, mostly today I'm talking about bringing back things where it's the exact same mechanic, not tweaking and making a new mechanic. I might mention a few in passing. But today's, so if you want to hear about all the fixed, I did a podcast on all the fixed mechanics where we took something, we fixed it, and we brought it back. So if you want to hear about all the fixed I did a podcast on all the fixed mechanics where we took something we fixed it and we brought it back so if you want to hear on those

go listen to that podcast okay next up War of the Spark so Ravaging Allegiance had all the new stuff War of the Spark

we decided to bring back Poliferate Poliferate had shown up in Scarves of Mirrodin and it was a really fun mechanic people really liked it we had this Planeswalker theme and so the idea of having Polifera

interact with loyalty counters was pretty cool. Now it made us kind of, we had to work the set around it. One of our mechanics, Amass, we made specifically so that the Amass, the army got a token, but all the counters went on the same army. So like, Polifera wasn't super, like, It was good and that made your army one bigger. We couldn't have done it if we had a mechanic like...

In original Kaladesh, we had thought of bringing back a proliferate, but we had things like Fabricate that made plus one, plus one counters. The problem with plus one, plus one counters and proliferate is, plus one, plus one counters are so good at proliferate. If you have a theme where you spread them all over the one counters and proliferate is, plus one, plus one counters are so good at proliferate, if you have a theme where you spread them all over the place and then proliferate

is just the strongest thing you can do and it really warps how proliferate works, so when we put proliferate in sets, we either don't have plus one, plus one counters, or we are more careful and just use them very judiciously as we did in War of the Spark. Okay.

After War of the Spark. Okay. After War of the Spark, we get to... So War of the Spark led into Throne of Eldraine. Throne of Eldraine had all new things. Then we had Theros Beyond Death. So Theros Beyond Death was our return to Theros. We actually repeated two mechanics.

One of the things we learned about enchantments. So we did a lot of work in exploratory design and vision design in Theros Beyond Death, saying, hey, are there new things we can do with enchantments? What else can we do with enchantments? And what we found was devotion and consolation. Well, devotion, I think, was very thematically tied to Theros. I kind of felt like if we're going to go to Theros, we want to have the gods. We're going to do the gods. We need devotion. And it felt like you couldn't really do Theros. I kind of felt like if we're going to go to Theros, we want to have the gods. If we're going to do the gods, we need

devotion. And it just felt like you couldn't really do Theros without doing devotion. Constellation, we actually looked for other replacements. We looked like, what else can you care about? How else can you care about enchantments? And what we found in the end was that Constellation was just, like, Constellation was basically landfall, but for enchantments.

We have little by little hit the card types. Most of them, at least. And anyway, we tried other things and we sort of, in the end, we said, okay, I guess Constellation's the best, and just use Constellation. And it's a good example, by the way, where one of the reasons,

one of the topics of today's thing is, look, mechanics are a tool. If we did it right the first time, there's no reason to, like, that's fine. We did them right the first time. We can just use them again. And I think the lesson here, as I'm getting on, is we clearly went from a spot in early Magic

where, like, right, they were disposable. We didn't want to reprint them, to now, like, they're very usable tools. One of the first things we do in almost any exploratory design, once we they were disposable, we didn't want to reprint them, to now, like, they're very usable tools. One of the first things we do in almost any exploratory design, once we have our theme, is, okay, what existing mechanics exist that we could use? What makes sense? Like, that's something, it's a whiteboard exercise we do in almost every exploratory design, which is, okay, here's our new theme, or we're returning to a world.

Okay, A, what do you expect? And B, what's a good fit here? And a lot of times, you know, you get something like, oh, this is ideal. Okay, next up is Ikoria. Ikoria, again, had cycling. Cycling is just so useful and so easy to use and lets you have more niche cars and bigger, expensive cars. And it just really did something

that was so clean and simple. Okay, next up is Zendikar Rising. So Zendikar Rising was our third trip to Zendikar. So we used Landfall again. We used Kicker again. One of the running jokes is Eric Lauer really, really likes Kicker. And so a lot of the sets that Eric Lauer works on, if it doesn't already have Kicker, it gets Kicker.

Kicker is super useful. The reason that Kicker and Flashback and Cycling show up a lot is they're three super, super useful mechanics. In fact, we chose to make them deciduous. I'll get to that decision in a sec. We'll get there soon. So anyway, Zendikar Rising did Landfall. It did Kicker.

I also think it's the first time we did Two-Brid Mana again. Two-Brid Mana had been introduced in Shadowmoor. It was a set all full of hybrid mana. We introduced Two-Brid Mana, which you spend a color or two generic mana. And so it wasn't on, I think it was just on one card. But it did return.

And once again, I think two-bird is more of a tool than mechanic. Okay, next up, we get to Kaldheim. So Kaldheim brought back Snow. Snow was a super type that was introduced in Cold Snap. Well, one could argue it was kind of introduced in Ice Age, although not officially as a supertype. And then it was redone as a supertype in Cold Snap. And then Modern Horizons 1,

the first Modern Horizons, made use of snow. And it was successful. And the funny thing there is the reason they used snow was there have been a lot of people asking for more snow covered basic lands and we've talked about wanting to do snow covered dual lands and was like well if we're going to do all the lands we might as well do something with them. And so we we we brought back Snow there. It went over well. Like, I didn't think we were going to bring Snow back,

but it went over well there. So when we were in call time, actually in set design, Dave Humphries was the set lead, said, you know, everyone seems to feel, like, we had talked about Snow in vision design, but Modern Horizons 1 had not come out yet. And by the time set design happened, Modern Horizons 1 had not come out yet. And by the time set design happened, Modern Horizons 1 had come out,

and it had been very popular. So we were like, okay, we're going to do snow, and we put snow in. The other thing that Call of Time did is it brought back Changeling. Changeling was a mechanic we had originally done in Lorwyn that was kind of a typal glue. Changeling means you have all the creature types.

And so in Lorwyn, we were trying to make cards that multiple decks would want to draft, and so we used Changeling as part of that glue. Anyway, there's a theme in Call of Time, mostly in green and blue, but there's a theme of shapeshifters on... There's ten worlds in Call of Time, and one of the worlds was the worlds of the shapeshifters. And so Changeling was the theme. There was a little bit... Early Call of Time had tried doing a more typo theme

that ended up being called Clan, that ended up being pulled out. But anyway, changing was sort of the remnant of where that theme ended up going. Okay, next. D&D Adventures in Forgotten Realms. This is another one where it's, I don't know exactly a mechanic.

We had introduced die rolling in Unglued, the unset. The second unset on Hinge didn't have die rolling, but the third one, Unstable did. For the first time ever, we brought, so this is an example of taking something that was in another space, in this case, silver-bordered space, and bringing it into black-bordered space. Now, given that's it used 20-sided dies because it was. Now, given that set used 20-sided dice because it was D&D and we used six-sided dice, although technically there was one 20-sided dice, Sword of Dungeons and Dragons in Unstable

did roll a 20-sided dice. So technically speaking, 20-sided dice had happened in an unset. Okay, next up is Innistrad Midnight Hunt. So I think what happened was, I think our second trip to Innistrad, we had not done Flashback. And so this is our third trip.

Like, oh, we got to bring Flashback back. People love Flashback. So we brought back Flashback. We also brought back Investigate, which had shown up in Shadows of Innistrad, which was our second visit. And of course, Transforming Double-Faced Cards came back.

By this point, Transforming Double-Faced Cards are just a deciduous mechanic that lots of sets are using. I'm not... Once something kind of becomes deciduous, once I sort of announce that to you, I'm not... Like, Scry at some point became evergreen. Okay, lots of things started using Scry at that point. I'm more talking about, today, about things that come back in which it is not an evergreen or a deciduous thing. Okay, next up is Kamigawa Neon Dynasty.

Crimson Vow was after Manhattan, but that didn't have anything new. Sorry, had new things, didn't have any reprint. Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, we were going back to Kamigawa after over a decade. And so one of the things we wanted to do because it was a return to a world we hadn't been in a while we wanted to do a little bit of return mechanics um the biggest problem we ran into was there are not a lot of strong mechanics in champion and champs kamagawa block it is not considered from a mechanical standpoint uh one of our high points mechanically one of our low points. And so, we ended

up bringing back two mechanics. We brought back channel, which channel is... We labeled something that we do in other places, we don't always label it, which is activated abilities from your hand. The way we executed channel in original Kamigawa Black, there was a connective tissue between what effect

the channel effect was and what the spell did. But we brought Channel back, and we brought back Ninjutsu. Ninjutsu was the ninja mechanic. Originally, by the way, we weren't going to bring Ninjutsu back. We were going to make a ninja commander deck to go along with the set, and that was going to have new Ninjutsu cards. But basically, this is, again, Dave Humphreys. There just was enough expectation from people

that Dave kept hearing that he decided to add it back in. So ninjutsu got added in. Okay, after Kamigawa Nyan Dynasty is Streets of New Kappena. So this is the point where we decide that we're going to take some mechanics that we use all the time, cycling being the poster child here, because there were

some cycling lands we wanted to do. And we're like, okay, can we do cycling lands? We have to add other cycling. In order of cycling lands, must cycling be returning? And we finally said, you know what? Cycling is just a strong mechanic. This is the sixth, seventh, eighth time it's come back. Let's just make cycling deciduous.

So we did. And so what that means is any set can now use cycling. It can use cycling in small amounts. Cycling doesn't have to be a giant thing in the set. It can be a small thing in the set. So I'm not going to talk about cycling anymore because cycling is a deciduousness. And then we also brought back Hideaway.

So Hideaway is an interesting mechanic in that it was originally in the Lorwyn block. In Lorwyn... Was it in Morningtide? It was Lorwyn for sure. Anyway, it was on only five cards, and they were trying to do something here, actually a completely different mechanic, and it was called Crimes, I think, and it just didn't pan out. It just didn't work, and so they ended up saying, well, kind of what you're doing, there's some similarity here to Hideaway. You know, we could tweak Hideaway and make Hideaway work slightly

different to get this optimization, and it wouldn't impact the old Hideaway cards too much. So they tweaked Hideaway a little bit and brought it back. So Hideaway showed up here. Okay, next was Dominar United. So Dominar United was trying to sort of make a riff off Invasion. So it brought back Domain and Kicker. This is where Kicker, I think, officially becomes Deciduous. Kicker is now in the Deciduous family. Cycling and Kicker and Flashback

have all become Deciduous. Like I said, the big trifecta, they're just so useful. We use them all the time. Oh, and the one other thing we made deciduous was landfall. So those are the mechanics that any set is allowed to use those for mechanics. There's a few other ones that were sort of we do a thing we call cameos now,

which I guess I'll get into. The idea of a cameo is that at high rarity, usually rare, mythic rare, we're allowing ourselves to bring back a mechanic that is in small number, maybe one or two cards. It's not sort of a main mechanic of the set. It's just something that flavorfully very fits. It's simple enough that we think it's not going to cause confusion.

Like, we're not doing cameos with a mutate. But the idea is we bring back something that we think is easy to understand, it's super flavorful, and it just adds a lot in a tiny, small dose. We've learned in our Commander products that sometimes bringing back a mechanic and just doing a really cool thing on one card with it is a lot of fun. And so we call those cameos. We decided that Premiere sets were dipping our toe into cameos. So that is something we were trying.

For example, and I guess it's not exactly that, but the kind of thing is, in call time, Dave had one card with poison. Not a whole bunch, it wasn't a whole mechanic, just one card that had poison. Thing the Thing Bearer It wasn't a whole mechanic. Just one card that had poison. Thing the Thing Bearer. And that, it was really a fun card people really liked it. And so, trying to sort of think of things in that regard.

Oh, by the way, just for people that are wondering, I am sitting in traffic. We've normally, in 30 minutes I get to work. That's why we're past 30 minutes. Luckily today I have plenty to talk about. So, we will continue on.

Okay. Next is the Brothers' War. So the Brothers' War was interesting. So Brothers' War was us retelling an old story. The funny thing was it was... So, if Dominaria United

was a throwback to Invasion, Brothers' War was a throwback to Antiquities. Antiquities, though, was so early, it was Magic Second Expansion set, that it didn't really have, like, mechanics. There weren't named mechanics. So we did a lot of riffing on individual cards in Brothers War,

but it was hard to bring back a mechanic from Antiquities. The one that we were able to do, though, is we did find two mechanics that we thought were splashy that really played into the themes we wanted. One was Unearth. Unearth had shown up originally in Shards of Alara. It had been

the Grixis mechanic. So, Unearth, I designed Unearth in Shards of Alara as sort of a creature version of Flashback. I made Flashback in Odyssey, I really liked Flashback, and I was trying to make a creature version of Flashback. I made Flashback in Odyssey, I really liked Flashback, and I was trying to make a creature version of Flashback.

Now that we have finality counters, there's now technology to do it that we didn't have back in the day. Back in the day we didn't unearth. The reason we didn't unearth, and this is a good example of sometimes where there's just the perfect mechanic. The story of the Brothers War, for those that might not know it, has to do with Urza and Mishra, the brothers, uncovering a lot of ancient artifacts made by the Thran, an ancient civilization that had advanced technology. And so a lot of sort of them unearthing all these old artifacts played a major role in the story.

So being able to use unearth as a bring-back mechanic, it's a good example where the word and the concept, everything about it was so flavorful. In fact, we had done, Ari, Nhi, and I had done a, originally, The Brothers War

was going to be for a supplemental product, not a premiere set. And Aaron was like, you know, maybe this could be a, I supplemental product, not a premiere set. And Aaron was like, you know, maybe this could be a, I think this could be a premiere set. What do you think, Mark? I'm like, yeah, it could be a premiere set. So he tasked me with sort of making a demo to sort of demonstrate the capabilities of, hey, what would it look like if it was a set?

And interestingly, in the demo, Ari came up with the idea of adding Unearth, which was super flavorful. And, uh, Aaron had come up with the idea of using Meld to make Urza and Mishra. Um, and so our, our initial, like, pre-exploratory design, what I call the proof of concept, uh, we made two decks that played against each other. Um, and in it was Unearthed. In it was Meld. So, I mean,

it's just funny how you make a proof of concept that, which is super, super early, the number of things that then made it into the final product were actually really interesting. So, okay. Next up, Phyrexia All Will Be Won. So, this was another return for proliferate. So, this was a return to New Phyrexia all will be one so this was another return for

proliferate, so this was a return to new Phyrexia, so as I explained when we go back to a world, one of the things we always ask ourselves is, okay we're going back to a world is there anything mechanically that's just iconic of the world? Oh, we're going to Zendikar, we gotta have

landfall, we're going to Innistrad we gotta have transforming double-faced cards you know, there's certain things that you just really thematically we're going to Zendikar, we've got to have Landfall, we're going to Innistrad, we've got to have Transforming Double-Faced Cards. You know, there's certain things that you just really thematically think of when you go back to a place. So we were going back to New Phyrexia, and on some level going back to the Phyrexians.

The Phyrexians had a couple mechanics. The three big mechanics tied to them were Poison, Proliferate, and Phyrexian Mana. Poison we did go back to. The set does mess around with Poison.

We actually took the mechanic Poisonous from the mechanic Poisonous from what is it? Teacher site. And then retweaked it and made it into toxic.

And then we brought proliferate back. But proliferate really requires a lot of structure. So what we did was we made oil counters. So the first time in Scars of Meriden proliferate interacts with minus one, minus one counters. The second time we brought it counters. So the first time, in Scars of Mirrodin,

proliferate interacts with minus one, minus one counters. The second time we brought it back, where the spark interacted with loyalty counters and a little bit plus one,

plus one counters. And this time, it interacted with oil counters. So each one made a very different environment. The other thing we did do is Phyrexian mana

tactically returned. We did some Phyrexian planeswalkers. Now we added a rider. We had to pay extra life if you use the Phyrexian mana. So like, we adapted them a little bit. But Phyrexian Planeswalkers. Now we added a rider we had to pay extra life if you use the Phyrexian Man. So we adapted them a little bit. But Phyrexian Man I also would argue Phyrexian Man is a little more tool than mechanic per se.

But we did bring it back. Okay. Which brings us to March of the Machine. So March of the Machine was interesting. So March of the Machine was the Phyrexian War. Early on we talked about it took place in everywhere, right?

It took place across the multiverse. We did discuss early on did we want to do a time spiral thing where we just blow out everything? And what we realized was modern horizons had really shown that there is a home for that. There's a place where, like,

just using all the mechanics, intermixing with high complexity, there's a home for that. And there's this type of player that really enjoy that, but the average Magic player doesn't enjoy that. That's kind of a lesson of Time Spiral. Oh, I didn't really talk about it real quickly since I have traffic.

Time Spiral introduced infinite mechanics. I mean, infinite mechanics. And the feedback we got from our data was the enfranchised players adored it. They loved it. Play was up. But the non-enfranchised players, like Jess, hated it. It was too much.

They were overwhelmed. And so one of the lessons from Time Spiral is it's okay to bring things back, but you got, like... When you bring something back, you are... It's a new mechanic to a player who hasn't been playing since the last time that was there. bring things back, but you got, like, when you bring something back, you are, it's not, it's a new mechanic to a player who hasn't been playing since last time that was there. So when you bring back a mechanic, you have to

treat it like, like, in Time Spiral, we treated it as bonus. Like, we had actual mechanics. We had split second, we had suspend, we had actual mechanics. It was layered on top of our normal mechanics. And what we realized was, okay, we get to bring back mechanics, but they count as mechanics. They're not free.

You have to count them as actual mechanics with actual weight, and you have to think of it as vocabulary and stuff like that. So that was an important lesson in Time Spiral. Anyway, at Merchant of the Sheen, we said, okay, we have modern horizon sets to do that. But we did like the idea that brings something back. We're sort of, you know, this is, you're seeing all the different worlds we've ever been to. And we decided that the Phyrexians, Phyrexians ended up using some new stuff.

Transforming double-faced cards made sense, and then a bunch of newer mechanics, incubate and such. But the denizens of the world that were defending themselves, we thought it'd be cool to have one returning mechanic. And this is an interesting case where we did the whiteboard exercises,

we listed all the mechanics, we voted on them, we put them in the order we wanted to try them. Number one was Convoke. We put it in, tried it, it was so awesome, we're like, yeah, we're not going to beat this. And then didn't try to beat it. We're like, okay, this is the best we're going to do. So we should keep that. Okay. Next up is Wilds of Eldraine. Okay, so Wilds of Eldraine

is another return. We're going back to Eldraine. So we ask the question we always ask ourselves, okay, well, if you're going back, what do you want to have? And Adventures was basically the answer. There's just no way we're going to Eldraine and not do Adventures. Adventures was just so iconic. We had done Adventures again in the second D&D set. I'm not really talking about supplemental sets,

but there are returns that show up outside of Premiere sets. I'm just sort of focused on Premiere sets today just because there's so much to cover. Interestingly, food also came back. We weren't going to... Oh, I'm sorry. I think when we handed off the file, we had a little bit of food. Food had kind of become deciduous before we returned to Eldraine.

We had food in original Eldraine, and it just became something... Treasure and food were kind of our absolute slam-dunk artifact tokens, and so both treasure and food just became... I mean, technically, most of the clues

and blood are deciduous in the sense that Inset can use them. But treasure and food are close to being evergreen. Treasure is on the wisp of being evergreen. Food is pretty close. But they're definitely deciduous stuff we use all the time. Also, real quickly, Saga's by this point have just become deciduous. I don't know the point at which they became deciduous.

We had used them... I think Theros Beyond Death might have been the first time they came back after Dominaria. We talked about them being an Eldraine, original Throne of Eldraine, or... And we decided that because they were enchantments, and it was nice to make reference to the story from before, that Theros Beyond Death just needed them a little more. But when we were going back to Wilds of Eldraine, we said, you know, you know, sagas are kind of evergreen now.

Not evergreen, but deciduous now. And doing fairy tale, you know, sagas sounds cool. So anyway, just I didn't really mention, sagas had to become deciduous. Okay, the last set, at least that's out as I record this podcast, the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. So another,

this was what I call a backdrop set in the sense that the main thrust of the set is not the mechanic. Like, when you look at Throne of Eldraine, we definitely did some shifting.

A lot of the courts are downplayed a little bit. So there's an aspect that gets played out. There's more of an enchantment theme, role-play theme. So there's new stuff added, but a lot of the courts are downplayed a little bit. So there's an aspect that gets played out. There's more of an enchantment theme, role-play theme. So there's new stuff added, but a lot of the core,

the adventures, the food and stuff, it played a little more like original. Now, I guess there's gradations. On some level, Throne of Eldraine's not exactly a return. It's a little more distance. We have role, you know.

Like when we go back to a world, we do like to add something new to the world that's in theme. I feel like Lost Caverns was a little bit more of, it really was Underground World and we're doing Discover and Descend and all that stuff.

That's a little more the heart of what the set is. But, it was our first time ever going back to Ixalan after the first return. We did want to return something. So we ended up deciding to return Explore. We felt that, like, the idea of Underground, the exploration made a lot of sense in Underground,

and it made sense, like, it was a theme that carried through. It was a nice mechanic that was simple, that worked well. We also brought back Transforming Devil Face cards that become lands, which was simple, that worked well. We also brought back Transforming Double-Faced Cards that become lands, which was a Telltale sign. As I said before, Transforming Double-Faced Cards are pretty much existing here.

The other thing I'll point out, just to once again reference my other podcast, Discover is a great example of we brought back Cascade, but we changed it, we fixed it, we made it a little bit better. I have a whole podcast on all our fixing. Okay. So I actually got through that all.

Maybe it was a good thing I had extra time, because maybe I would not have got through that in 30 minutes. So my last thoughts here, I'm almost at work, so let me give you my final thoughts. I think the idea of mechanics really has shifted over time um and the way that i see it it's sort of as head designer is a lot of what we do um a lot of magic design is one of the things about iterating on the same game for 30 years is you keep inventing new things. You make new technology for your design, new tools for your design. And that part of one of the advantages of being a 30-year-old game is, hey, we've done a lot of things. We've tried a lot of things.

We've experimented. Hey, we've failed a lot of things. We've experimented. Hey, we've failed a lot of times. You know, we've put a lot of toil and sweat into figuring out what makes good magic. So why, why wouldn't we use that? Why wouldn't we take that stuff and put it in the

sets we're making? You know, why wouldn't we, like, if we've, like, one of the things that's really interesting is when we do exploratory design, part of the question we ask ourselves is, okay, how do we do this theme? And then one of the questions is, like, have we done this theme? Can we do this theme? Is there something that we've done before

that would really make this theme shine? And sometimes it's a practical thing. Hey, there's just a lot of mana here. Kicker would be good. Or we really want a lot of large things, but we don want a lot of large things, but we don't want that to cause trouble, so it's like cycling would work here.

And sometimes it's like, oh, it's about the Brothers' War, and they literally unearthed artifacts from the past. That's what they did. Ooh, what if we use unearthed artifacts? That's the kind of thing where having the repertoire we have, having the giant toolbox that we have really is a huge huge advantage um one of the things i say all the time that in some level we are you know constantly making a new game the magic is many games all in one

and part of what allows us to do that is the shared rule set, right? Hey, I'm going to teach you a new game, but, well, it kind of works like a game you already know. In fact, most of it works like the game you already know, but I can add in new things, and I have the ability to take old things that, if you've been playing, you might already know. And that's part of the, like, the other interesting thing that, about bringing things back that I didn't get into, but I have time, so I will get into it real quickly, is one of the worries, the reason that mechanics were thought of as being disposable was kind of we had done them, and then what excitement was there? We've done this already. You would just look at it and go, oh, yeah, that's that mechanic. I've seen that already.

already. But when we brought cycling back, which was our first mechanic we brought back that wasn't evergreen, what we found was cycling had shown up for the first time in Urza's saga, then we didn't do it for a while. Onslaught is five some years later, right? And so when we brought it back in Onslaught, people were excited to see it. They're like, oh, yay, cycling's back. And so this idea that excited to see it. They're like, oh yay, cycling's back. And so this idea that like somehow people knowing it was this drawback, that like people like, where's the new stuff, that there really was this excitement. That one of the cool things about having a game with history, we have mechanics with history, and that it's really fun sometimes to pull something from the past. Like it's really neat when we're doing exploratory design and we realize there's mechanics we haven't brought back in years,

maybe decades, that is perfect for the set. And that's really fun to be able to do that. And so I think the idea that returning mechanics are some drawback that you have to deal with, 180, right? They're a very valuable tool, and they're something that unto themselves can bring excitement. That sometimes bringing back a

mechanic can be something that itself is one of the, what we call the key selling points of the set. Oh, you love this? Well, guess what? This is coming back. Like, I remember when we were doing Cons of Tarkir, we had done Morph originally in Onslaught and

there were some in Time Spiral Block because there was everything in Time Spiral Block, but we really hadn't done anything since then. When it came back in Constant Tarkir it was a big selling point. People were excited people liked Morph. So I think our attitude on what mechanics are and how to use them really has changed

over time and like i said one of my my big things as head designer one of the big pushes that i made was hey stop seeing this as a drawback or as a like this is a huge advantage we have most games do not have the advantage of 30 years of mechanics to pull from we do do. And that, you know, especially as my job as head designer is to looking out for design space, like, hey, we don't need a, a set only needs to do so much new design. We have lots of sets to make new things for.

You know what? We should use our mechanics where they make sense and that part of, you know, preserving new design space is being very thoughtful of how to use old design space. The other thing that's really interesting about bringing mechanics back is a lot of mechanics,

I mean, there are mechanics that had as much space as we used them. Cypher is a good example where there wasn't a lot of space left on Cypher. It's hard to bring Cypher. I mean, we did Cypher in blue and black, so we could bring Cypher back in other colors. But the point was, we really used up the space of what it was. That's not

true of cycling. That's not true of flashback. There's a lot of mechanics that have a huge amount of design space, and so one of the cool things when you bring it back, you can explore more design space. You can do other things. And so what that's made us do is when we use the mechanic for the first time, I mean, we don't have blocks anymore. This is part of it.

But it used to be, we would try to get every, like, we would do a new mechanic and we would do every riff of the mechanic we could think of because we were trying to make use of the mechanic, right? We only had it for this one year. Let's use it up. You know, don't leave any part of the buffalo behind. But now that we realize that it's a resource, that we can bring it back, that's completely

changed our thought. The thought now is, hey, only use as much as you need to use. Now, if you need more, use more. We're not saying you can't use as much as you need, but my point is, hey, if you don't need it, we can bring it back. And so it is really the complete mind change of sort of how we think about returning mechanics

has changed how we design mechanics in the first place, that we really think about not what can this mechanic do what does it need to do and one of the things that happens all the time now is i will see things and say hey i like that i don't know if we need to do that here you know that's a neat idea but that really is expanding in a whole new space you know what when we bring we bring it back, we can do that. Let's not do that here. And so it is funny that, you know, when I go back to my early days in R&D, that there's this attitude

of like, use it up! You know, because we're never seeing this again. Now to the point of okay, be cautious. You know, we want to make sure we mine all the good parts of this mechanic. But anyway, guys, so that is my thoughts today. So you got extra traffic today, so I hope you enjoyed the prolonged,

the nice, now that I'm back actually driving, you guys get actual traffic podcasts. When I'm home, I mean, if I'm having a really good interview sometimes, I will let it run a little bit long. But other than that, I really try to stop very close to 30 minutes just because I think 30 minutes is ideal for this podcast. But one of the cool things of actually driving is you actually get me driving to work. So today I had a lot of traffic.

I'm late for a meeting. I have a council of colors meeting that I'm two minutes late for. And so anyway, guys, now that I'm literally, I'm in the garage and I'm about to park, we all know what that means, that this is my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.