Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1097: The Waiting Game

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Sometimes it can take a while to get a particular idea to print. This podcast shares some stories of things that took a while to get out to the public.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is an interesting topic. So, I recently celebrated my 28th anniversary of working at Wizards. October 30th is my anniversary. So, one of the things I've realized, having worked at Wizards for a long time, one of the things I've realized, having worked at Wizards for a long time, is one of the sort of the natures of doing magic design is you come up with good ideas. Not every good idea happens right away. That just because you have a good idea doesn't mean that it necessarily fits on what you're working on.

And that one of the keys to good design that I talk all the time about is you want to make sure that you are maximizing what you're doing in this set. If a particular card or mechanic doesn't advance the rest of the set, then it doesn't belong in that set. And that when you first start working on magic, there's a desire just to get every cool idea you have in right away. It's just like, I have this great idea, I want to get it printed, let's get it printed. But as you work more on the game, you sort of mature a little bit as a designer, you come to realize that you have to serve the design. Meaning that even if an idea is very good in a vacuum,

that it might not be the best idea for the set you're doing. But, as I like to say, magic is a hungry monster. We make a lot of magic sets and a lot of magic cards. If you have a good idea, it will find a home. But it doesn't always find a home very quickly. And so I want to share some stories today about ideas that I had and just show about how, you know, things happen at a different, um, rate. That things don't always happen at the rate you want them to happen at.

Okay, so for starting, I'm going to talk about some cards to start with. Um, so for example, um, we're going to start with a card, what is it, Heartbeat of Spring. So Heartbeat of Spring, so when Alpha came out, there was a card called Mana Flare. That was an enchantment that whenever you tap a mana, it produces an extra mana of whatever it can produce. Mana Flare was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed, I made a lot of decks with Mana Flare back in the day. But I realized that, you know, red really isn't the color that's supposed to be doing Mana Flare. It really should be green.

Ironically, as time goes on, we've been a little bit looser with red producing mana. But normally the rule is that red's more one-shot mana and green is more permanent mana. Especially, I mean, this story takes place when I first got to Wizards back in 1995. And so, literally, I believe it was Alliances where I first pitched, we should do a green Manaflare. And the idea was, I love Manaflare, Manaflare's are great. You know, the color that really should have it is green. We should make a green Maniflair. And the idea was, I love Maniflair. Maniflairs are great. You know, the color that really should have it is green. We should make a green one.

And so I pitched it for alliances. Didn't get in alliances. I was on the Mirage development team. I pitched it in Mirage. Didn't get in Mirage. Pitched it on Vision. So in the early days, for those that are unaware, I was hired as a developer, not as a designer originally.

And there were only, first there were four of us, and then there were five of us. So it was me, Bill Rose, William Jockish, and Mike Elliott, and then later Henry Stern and Joya. So there was a point in time that we were Magic R&D. There were other people that were there. Richard Garfield was in the building. Scafali is Jim Lynn. But none of them, we were the only full-time people working on Magic. Richard at the time was designing other games,

making other stuff. And so they had hired us specifically to work on Magic. Everybody worked on Magic a little bit. But we were the full-time people working on Magic. What that meant, by the way, is I was on every development team. So I had lots of opportunity to recommend the Green Maniflair.

And I did it all during the Mirage block. Tempest was the first set I led the design. It was in my handoff file from Tempest. Urza Saga block. You know, it definitely was one of those things where I kept pitching it. And we didn't end up making it until Champions of Kamigawa. So it's like over five years later. And the reason is, it's not that anyone disliked it.

It was not when I pitched it that anyone said, no, we shouldn't make that or no players wouldn't like it. It was just a matter of, hey, there's other priorities that go on in a set. There's other things that you need to do, and that there's certain slots, and it just would sort of fight for space, and it would fight for space for something that was more crucial in the set. You know what I'm saying? It's sort of like, well, yeah, it could go here,

but this other thing has to go here, and it would lose out. A similar story, also with a green card, is a card you guys know as Ambassador Oak. Showed up in Morning Tide. So it was a 3-3 creature that enters with a 1-1 token. I called

it Moose and Squirrel was my original name for it. And the idea of an enter the battlefield effect producing a token now is pretty commonplace. But at the time I was pitching it, we hadn't done it. When I first pitched it, we had not done that yet. And it was another example where it was a fun mechanic.

It was a nice, it was a clean, simple little card. And it just kept losing out to other things. And ironically, the reason it ended up in Morning Tide, this is another interesting theme here, is a lot of times you'll be the one pushing something and you push it and you push it and you push it and then somebody else sometimes will be the one that actually gets it in.

Like, I tried to get Ambassador Oak in so many different sets. I kept trying to put it in. Likewise, it was also in Tempest. Like Heartbeat of Spring, I included it in Tempest. A handoff from Design and Development. And I think what happened was the reason it ended up in Morning Tide was it allowed us to make a card of a certain creature type that made a creature of a different creature type and Lorwyn Block had a typo

theme so it allowed one card to care about two different creature types and that was just it really makes like and that's the thing that normally happens is at some point you come along and there's a set that needs that thing or that thing is fundamental to what you're doing

you know and that that the you know And there's a set that needs that thing. Where that thing is fundamental to what you're doing. You know, and that, you know, another card, for some reason there's all green cards today. What's the card called? I call it Cone of Creatures. It made a 1-1, a 2-2, and a 3-3. And this is another example of this kind of story where, so basically it was a card that made three tokens, a 1-1, a 2-2, and a 3-3. We had made a card called Cone of Flame that did one damage to one target,

two damage to a second target, three damage to a third target. So I like the idea of Cone of... I call it Cone of Creatures. It's not what it ended up being called. It was a green card. Anyway, I tried to make it for years. I even put it in the duel list in one of my articles. I had an article about cards I tried to make it for years I even put it in the do list in one of my articles I had an article about cards I tried to make that I couldn't make so years later it comes out in the set

and I'm writing an article about it talking about I'm like oh I tried to get this to make it forever and as is normally the case I sort of got it into the psyche and somebody else made my card and I find out from Kelly Diggs, who was my editor at the time, that he had actually designed the card. He

had no idea that I had previously made it, that I was trying to get it in. He just on his own made the card. And so here I am in the article going, well, I've been trying to make this card forever and somebody, you know, I finally got somebody else to put it in. And he's like, well, I didn't even know you made it. So there's also some of that sometimes where you try to do something, especially if it's sort of more low-hanging fruit design, that somebody else might come up with the same idea and make it. So eventually, sometimes it gets made that way. Another reason sometimes that things get delayed.

I'll do a different card. It's not a green card now. Mindslaver. get delayed. I'll do a different card. It's not a green card now. Mind Slaver. So in Tempest, in the story, originally, Volrath, the bad guy, has a helm, a helm of Volrath, that allows him to take control of other people. And so I was trying to figure out sort of, there's this theory I had back in the day, I called them our key card, where it was a card that went in the set that usually was an artifact or something anybody could put in any deck, and that it just did something we'd never done before. And what happened was, there's a card in Alpha called, what is it called?

And what happened was there's a card in Alpha called, what is it called? Word of Command, where the idea is you try to cast a spell in somebody else's hand. It had a lot of problems. It had rules issues, gameplay issues, because normally when you cast it, you know, they'll just cast it before you can cast it if they can. It was a neat idea, but a hard card to execute. And so I've been trying to figure out, how do you make a card that takes over, like that casts a card off somebody else's turn?

And then I came up with the idea of, well, what if instead of stealing a card, you steal their whole turn? That for a whole turn, you decide. You get to look at their hand, and you get to decide all the actions that they take. And I thought that was a perfect fit, so we made Helm of Volrath. You take control of another player for a turn. And I thought it was the most neat, coolest thing,

and the rules manager at the time said, yeah, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how you take control of another player's turn. And so I was told I couldn't do it. So it ended up becoming something else. The set still has Helm of Ulrath, but it ended up doing something else. But flash forward a bunch of years, and I'm making Mirrodin. Mirrodin was an artifact set. So I was just looking through old artifacts that I had tried to make,

but for some reason didn't get made, just to see if, like, I really wanted some very quirky, weird artifacts, and I ran across Helm of Ulrath, or the original Helm of Ulrath, and I'm like, this is really cool. So I went to the rules manager at the time, which was a different rules manager, and they looked at the card, they go, yeah, yeah, I think I could do that, and so we made Mindslaver. So, like like Mindslaver, like I said, there's many reasons why things don't get made right away. This particular case, it was rules.

Sometimes it just, it needs the right environment. Sometimes it just needs the right amount of support. For example, there's been things that I've either tried to get in the game or get back into the game. Squirrels is a good example. So I, very pro squirrel. I was, I think in early magic, I had my hand on almost every squirrel made early magic. I had a major hand on getting it made.

Um, and then, uh, it was deemed that squirrels were too silly for magic and it got, uh, pushed back to, I did them in unsets because we were told not to do squirrels anymore by the brand team. Um, but I worked really hard to sort of, you know, uh, foster a very pro squirrel environment, uh, until the point where, uh, I think they made Modern Horizons 2 and just like made it a major theme. And it just really got, I think, little over little, R&D sort of sentiment changed. That's another thing sometimes.

So let's get into mechanics now. So for example, we'll talk about Poison. So Legends came out. I was not at Wizards yet. And it had two cards. Pit Scorpion and... What was the other one? It was an artifact and a creature. Anyway, it had two cards that produced poison counters.

And the idea is, if you gave your opponent ten poison counters, they lost the game. Neither one in Legends was particularly good. And for a while, every once in a while, we'd make a card with poison. None of which were very good. And it was really my desire to make poison a thing. Like, you can play a poison deck. And so in Tempest, it was a major theme of Tempest. In fact, Tempest's codename was Bogavati, which was like an Italian land of snakes. It was trying to reinforce that we were the poison set. And then, during the course of development, it went from having like 30 poison cards

to 20, to 10, to 5, to 1, to 0. And then R&D made the decision to stop doing poison. Now, I was a huge fan of poison. And there's a long track to trying to get poison back into the game. Originally, Unglue 2 had a poison theme, but that set

got killed. And then, during Future Sight, I convinced them to let me put a few poison cards in as the hint of the future. And then, at Scars of Mirrodin, we were doing a Phyrexian set, and I'm like, you know what really feels invasive and, you know, Phyrexian? Poison does. And we ended up making the infect mechanic, and poison came back in a big way. So much so that when the Phyrexians returned, poison came came back and Phrexia all will be one. So, um,

and that's a good example of sometimes just, you know, there is, magic is not a singular creation. One person's not making it. And so, there very much is a group thinks to, like, what is and isn't appropriate for the game. And so, there's times when I've been a little on the outs and I'm like,

okay, come on guys, and, you like, OK, come on, guys. And, you know, I had to sort of slowly warm people up to it. And part of that is just, you know, there's a change in people who are there. There's a flux. New people come. And it's just sort of championing something that you get new people on board. And so that R&D over time can slowly change its opinion because the makeup of R&D can change. One of the advantages of sticking around for a while.

Another mechanic that shows an example why things can take a while. So in original Mirrodin, I had the energy mechanic. There was a lot going on. For those who don't know the Tempest story, I handed over a file and Bill Rose who was the lead designer at the time was like Mark you have enough stuff in this set for like

five sets. In fact there were I think for something like seven years there was a card in a printed card in the file that had started in the handoff for Tempest. Anyway, there was too much going on.

Energy was one of my themes. And I ended up turning it into sort of a counter theme. But anyway, it was just too much. It didn't fit. But I liked it. I liked energy. I thought it was a cool mechanic. And so I spent many years trying to find a place for energy.

But energy is not the kind of thing, like, it's not just one card. It's a whole mechanic that requires a whole structure to support. So I knew I needed to get to a place where it could breathe and it could be the thing. Like, the set needed to be built around it. And it took a while. It wasn't, I think, I don't remember exactly, but Kaladesh is where Energy got made, and that was over a decade after Tempest.

Like, I waited a while to find the right place for it. And I eventually did, and we did make it. And, you know, but a lot of the lesson of today is that, you know, we really have to be fine tuned in what we're making. And so, you know, things that are good things and things get cut from sets, not because they're bad. Um, it's just, you, we, we need so much and we need the right things.

And sometimes it just doesn't fit or the rules don't work or whatever. R&D is currently not in favor of doing it. But there are different reasons, but you want to hang in. Okay, other things that took away. Oh, here's a good example of a mechanic that didn't exactly come back, but influenced another mechanic. So we made a mechanic called Layaway. So one of the non-magic sets I worked on

is we made a Star Wars trading card game back in the day. Richard Garfield led the initial design. I was on that team. And then I was in charge of the first set. And anyway, one of the mechanics in it was that there were things that were expensive. You only got so many, sort of the mana, if you will, of Star Wars, is you got so many, I don't know what they were called, but it was like mana.

You got so many sort of units to spend on casting things. But there were some things that were more than you would get on one turn. So the idea was, in the game, you could take something and put it, I forget whether it was face up or face down, but I think it was face down. Anyway, and you could put sort of counters

on it. Like, you could spend units on it and then once you had enough units, then you would cast it. But sometimes it would take multiple turns. And that was the way in the game, if you wanted to play a giant, I mean, Star Wars has some really big giant things, you could do it over turns. So we made a magic mechanic based on a code, Layaway.

And the way Layaway worked is, you could take a card, you could put it face down, you could spend mana to put counters on it, and then you could cast it from exile. It was in exile. You could cast it from exile by paying its cost, but it was reduced by one generic mana by every counter on it.

So it allowed you to sort of pay for spells over time. It was a cool mechanic. I still like the mechanic. When we were working on Kaldheim, we were sort of messing around with it. We ended up, I mean, Fortel is not exactly Leiaway. It's different in some ways. But Leiaway sort of paved the way to Fortel. So that's another thing that happens sometimes, is you come up with a mechanic

and you come up with a means and a ways by which it sort of informs you and you end up riffing on it to make something else. So sometimes things come back exactly as you made them. Sometimes they influence and make other things. Another classic example of that would be

when we were making planeswalkers. We first started making planeswalkers in Future Sight. We weren't happy with them. They were going to be on the future shift to cheat. So we pushed them back to Lorwyn. One of the early versions of planeswalkers, on turn one, you would do something. On turn two, you would do something else. On turn three, you would do another thing. And then you would wrap back around. So it would run through them in a certain order. The problem was that it just ended up, they would do stupid things

sometimes. The classic was, the original Garruk made a beast, a 3-3 beast. On the second turn, it doubled all beasts. So for every beast token you had on the battlefield, it made another beast token.

And then on the third turn, all beasts got plus three, plus three, and trample. So the way it was supposed to work is, turn one, I make a beast. Turn two, I copy it. Now I have two beasts. Turn three, all my beasts, both my beasts get plus three, plus three, and trample.

Then the next turn, I make another beast. Now I have three beasts. Then I copy it. Now I have six beasts. Then it keeps growing. But let's say, for example, you made a beast, and on that turn, your opponent hits it with a lightning bolt. Kills it. Okay, next turn, you copy it, but you don't

have any, so nothing happens. Then the next turn, all your beasts get plus two, plus three, and trample, but you don't have any, so nothing happens. They felt like the planeswalkers didn't have agency, and that just didn't feel right. So we changed the planeswalkers over to the system you guys know now. But it wasn't that that system was a bad card idea or bad mechanic idea. It just didn't make sense for a planeswalker. So flash forward

many years later, working on Dominaria, and I'm trying to figure out how to tell stories. Like, I want a card that represents a story. How do I do that? Well, a story is a pre... Like, the very same thing that didn't make sense for a planeswalker fit perfectly for a story. Here's what happened. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. And that if something disrupted it,

it wasn't that the disruption was a problem for planeswalkers because it made them too weak or whatever. We could balance that. It was more of it just didn't, it made them feel like they were dumb. But a story is like, well, that's the story. That's what happened. And so when we were making sagas,

the starting point of sagas was let's take this initial planeswalker mechanic and figure out how to adapt it so we maximize making it a story. And so that's another thing is that when we have ideas and ideas get abandoned along the way, nothing's really forgotten. Like one of my jobs as head designer and one of the reasons I'm on all the design teams is I have this knowledge of all these things we've tried. And that pretty much in an exploratory or vision, when we try new things, not all the time,

but I would say 90% of the time, I'm like, yeah, we've tried something. Maybe we've tried exactly that. Maybe we've tried something similar to that. Or maybe we've done something that you should think about when we make the new thing. Another example, here's another example where something, so this is an interesting story

where we hinted at something, I'll tell you the story. So we're making Future Sight, and we make a card called Steam Flogger Boss, and we thought it would be funny on the future shifter sheet, because it represented things to come. What if we had vocabulary that didn't mean

anything yet, and that we didn't explain? So it was all rigor. Whenever a rigor assembles a contraption, it assembles a second contraption. What is a rigor? What is a contraption? What is assemble contraptions? None of that meant anything. And the idea was we were just sort of having fun with, hey, we're saying words that aren't real. We thought there's some sort of, it just, it was part of the fun of seeing the future is like just creating this emotional response. But then Aaron, Aaron Forsyth, my boss, who at the time had an article, owned up to the fact that we just

thought it was funny. Like it didn't, we had no idea what assemble a contraption was. It wasn't like we had planned to do it. And once we told the audience that it didn't mean anything, holy moly, the audience was like, well, now it needs to mean something. And so it was one of the things that I tried for years to assemble contraptions.

How do I assemble contraptions? What do I do? I had a mechanic I tried in Kaladesh. I think I tried a couple different places. The problem is that a lot of the things I need to make it work were... It just ended up being a little too simple. And then it wasn't until I was making a steampunk inventor's unset, unstable, that I said, well, okay, if I have unglued technology,

or un-technology, I can do whatever I need to do, and it allowed me to make contraptions. It allowed me to get an extra deck so that contraptions could be their own card type, and it allowed me the freedom to do what I wanted contraptions to be in a way that the normal sets weren't letting me. So that's another thing. Sometimes the reason it takes so long to make something is you don't have the technology to make it yet. You know, for example, we made split

cards, and when we made split cards way back in, well, split cards were originally made for Unglue 2, and then they got put into Indestrod. Not Indestrod, sorry, into Invasion. Wrong I said. And the idea of having permanent split cards

came up way back when we were making split cards, right? Like, okay, we have split cards. Well, what if one of them was a permanent? And the issue at the hand was the game just doesn't like instant sorceries on the battlefield. So the idea of one side is a creature and one side is

an instant or sorcery, the rules didn't like that. And we could make a token, so like assault and battery for example, you know, did damage as a spell or could make a token. So making a token was a lot like making a creature. We talked about what if there were two creatures?

How do you know which one's on the battlefield? And what if you marked it or something? And we talked a lot like making a creature. We talked about what if there were two creatures? And it's like, well, how do you know which one's on the battlefield? And what if you marked it or something? And we talked a lot about sort of making split permanents, but it always just wasn't, there wasn't the elegance that we needed. And then in Innishrod, we make double-faced cards. Now, Innishrod did transforming double-faced cards, but once the technology of double-faced existed, all of a sudden something that we had talked about doing

that we didn't have a solution for, we now have technology to do that. And even then, like, even though in Innistrad we came up with the idea of what we call modular double-faced cards, during the design of Innistrad, like, when we were making the one double-faced cards, we thought of the other kind of double-faced cards,

but we're like, you know what? We want to limit what we're doing here, but in the future we can do it. And it took a while. It wasn't until Zendikar Rising that we made modal double face split cards. And in fact, the classic example there was I was so excited by the idea that I pitched an entire set built around them, which was originally Strixhaven. Now, there was so much design, I ended up stretching them across the block. So there was, we did lands in Zendikar Rising. We did the gods that were gods on one side and something else on the other side, usually a permanent.

And then we did a variety of things in Strixhaven. But that's a good example where sometimes it takes a while to get to the technology. Like, there's a lot of reasons that you have a good idea that it doesn't get made. And, like, some of the time it's just, it can't be made. Sometimes, like, MindSlaver, we just didn't have the rules yet. You know, sometimes the reason it doesn't get made is not that it's not a good idea, it's that we just, we don't know how to do it yet. Another thing I want to talk about is, sometimes it's not even making a new thing.

It's just trying to get a change made. My classic example here was when we first introduced dogs as a creature type, we called them hound. That the creature type was hound. And my pet peeve had always been, well, a hound is a kind of dog. You know, all hounds are dogs dogs but not all dogs are hounds. So it was weird when you made a dog and called it a hound.

They're just dogs you kind of didn't feel you could make because, well, they're not technically a hound and we would make dogs that weren't really hounds and call them hounds.

It just was weird to me. So for years, I tried to get them changed to dogs. I tried to get hounds and I mean, I tried and I tried and I failed

and then eventually, somebody who had no idea that I'd been trying for years to do it, just on their own decided we should do it. Enough had changed that they were able to do it and it got changed. So I joke that it's kind of one of the ongoing things of

you try to get something changed, changed, changed and somebody else, completely unaware of all the work you went to get it done has the same idea and matters to get something changed, changed, changed, and then somebody else, completely unaware of all the work you went to get it done, has the same idea and matters to get it done. The one last example I'll give, just because there's endless examples of this. Let me talk a little bit about sets. For example, I came up with the idea of a land-based set, a set that's around land mechanics,

years and years and years before Zendikar was a thing. And in fact, I kept pitching it as an idea and it just sort of kept getting put to the bottom of the, you know, they're like, yeah, we have other ideas,

you know, lands. And eventually the way it got made was I was making a, what's called a five-year plan. Back in the day, now there's a whole team that does it I'm part of, but back in the day

I was the one that did it. I would come up with what the upcoming ideas were for the upcoming blocks, run it by my boss, who was Randy Bueller at the time, and he would sign off on it. And so I was supposed to do five years, and then one year I handed in seven years. I joked it was the seven-year, five-year plan. I joked it was the seven-year, five-year plan. And the very last item, or actually, I don't even think I turned it in as the last item, but Randy pushed it to the last item, was the land set. And so it ended up getting pushed back quite a bit.

But we eventually got there and we eventually made it. Innistrad, interestingly enough, was also something. In the original Odyssey, I had a conversation with Brady Dommermuth and we realized that horror as a genre, as a setting for magic, would make both a really good environment and a good set. And it took me a long time to get that set made. I went through a lot of rigmarole, a lot of different things. I mean, for example, I wanted to do the set and instead of doing the set, we had like a company-wide contest to come up with a world and we did. And then I think Bill was worried that it wouldn't work and he came to me and said, well, how about IndieShot? You know, so anyway, the point of today is that part of making magic is you will come up with things that matter to you, good ideas, things you're passionate about, and they won't get made.

And you could just go, well, I guess we'll never make that. Or you can dig in deep and you can say, this is a good idea. And you have to be patient. You have to find the right opportunity. Maybe it's the technology doesn't exist yet. Maybe there's not the will of R&D to do it yet. Maybe just you haven't found the right set

where it just fits in. Or maybe there's just somebody else that'll do a selling job better than you. Who knows? There's lots of reasons. But at some point, if you're patient,

you will get, there's lots of things that you will eventually get in. And I have a giant list of things right now. There are things that I've been trying to get in forever that I haven't done yet,

that I haven't given up on, that, you know, one day I'll be doing a podcast and I'll be telling the story of finally I did Thing X. In fact, there's a magic setting that I've been trying to do forever. I'm on the cusp of making it happen.

Anyway, guys, that is today's podcast. I am 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 make magic. Hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.