Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1116: Top 20 Mechanics, Part 1

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Recently at MagicCon: Chicago, I did a talk called "The 20 Best Mechanics of All Time," which you can watch here. This podcast covers part one of that talk.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so at Chicago, Magic Con Chicago, I did a talk called the 20 greatest mechanics of all time, where I talked about my pick from the top 20 mechanics. So I was planning to turn this into, I'm assuming it'll be two podcasts, but we'll see. So I was planning to turn this into, I'm assuming it'll be two podcasts, but we'll see. And the actual speech I gave is online on YouTube. You can watch it. So I'm going to, whenever I do the same content in a different format, I try to, I'll throw some other stuff in.

So it'll be a little bit different than the actual talk I gave. But I'm going to go through my top 20 and talk about sort of why and how I picked them and what I care about them and why these are the top mechanics. Okay, so real quickly, let me start by saying I set some parameters for me when I decided to do the talk. Parameter number one is I decided no evergreen mechanics. I did make a top 20 evergreen mechanic list. I'll probably do a podcast on that at some point. But there were just too many things that would be there and it just didn't seem like the best route of this was just a, here's a top 20 mechanics

and half of them are evergreen mechanics. Didn't seem like. So I discounted evergreen mechanics. I didn't do anything that I think of as being tools so that means no mana symbols, no card frames, no templating mana symbols would be like hybrid mana or Phyrexian mana frames would be stuff like adventures or split cards or things in which there's a completely different frame to make it work and templating might be like what we call anchor words things in which there's a completely different frame to make it work.

And templating might be like what we call anchor words, or like choose dragons or cons. Those all have mechanical elements to them, but I was trying to just pick straight, simple, fits on a normal card. Although I guess a few of these, I don't know. I say that now and then my very first one actually kind of uses a different frame, but anyway. And then I also said, no, I'm not doing card types, super types, sub types, not snow, not battles, not sagas. not snow, not battles, not sagas.

Mostly what I was sticking to was just named mechanics, named keywords or ability words. We often, there are mechanics we do that we don't name. I'm not doing mechanics that don't have a name to them. So these are named keyword and ability word mechanics. That was what I was choosing from. The other thing about this list is... This list... I'm the head designer.

So I'm looking at this from a head designer perspective. What mechanics make for good magic? What mechanics have been a lot of interesting design spaces? What are the mechanics that really push us toward doing good things? What just makes good magic play? I care a little bit about design. I care a little bit about flavor, you know, enjoyability. Like, I want to make sure that these are things

that just the audience embraces and has fun with. And as I go through these, the other thing is I tend to prioritize whatever was the mechanic that pushed in a certain area the earliest. The good example is Fertel is a very good mechanic. But a lot of the fun of Fertel is playing into the face-down space. Well, as you'll see, there's a mechanic that sort of pioneered the face-down space. So when I'm listing mechanics, I give priority to the ones that sort of did it first. Because other things follow. One of the things that I got comments online is most of the mechanics I picked are

relatively older mechanics. And the reason for that is I picked the earliest evolution of something. Now, the one exception is if we did something and it didn't work and we later revamped it and it did work, I included where it worked. I didn't include the earlier version that didn't work. It's kind of the first successful use of something, not the first use of something. There are some examples in the talk where like, hey, we tried something, it failed, but we found a better way to do it and then it succeeded. Okay, so let's start with the top 20 mechanics of all time.

Oh, the other thing I stressed in the talk was, this is my opinion. This is my opinion the day I gave the speech. Maybe if I did it a month from now, I'd rearrange them or add, maybe one would drop out and one would be added. You know, this is a very subjective topic. And the idea I did it is more just to get people to talk.

I'm doing this podcast to get people to talk. This is not to say, I'm not trying to say that, you know, number one is clearly better than number two. Like, okay, I just had to put them in order and I prioritize how I prioritize. Okay, number 20. Meld. Or I break my own card frame rule. Anyway, just realized that. Okay, so the story begins back in Unglued.

Unglued was the very first unset. So one of the things I was trying to do when I did Unglued was I really liked the idea of pushing boundaries, of doing things that normal magic we couldn't do. So I went to a lot of different teams to say, hey, what are weird and quirky things I could do? We don't do, but I could do. So one of the teams I talked to was the printing team, the people responsible for making the sheets.

And one of the things they said to me is, you know, if you put two cards together on the sheet, you can have art crossover between them. For example, there's a card where free-for-all, where there's a leprechaun getting punched, and he's flying out of the frame, and then he lands in another frame, which is next to it,

which is what's it called? It's the white alt-win one, where I'm rubber, you're glue. And so I don't know if you ever noticed that there's like a leprechaun flying into I'm rubber, you're glue. And so I don't know if you ever noticed that there's like a leprechaun flying into I'm rubber, you're glue. He's being punched out of the free-for-all picture.

So we try to find different ways, like what does it matter that the cards be printed together? And one idea that really fascinated me was the idea of making a giant magic card. What if there was a magic card that was so big, so big, that it

couldn't fit on one card? And I decided to make a $99.99 creature. Originally it was $100.00 and it didn't fit into the power toughness box. I mean, we could have redone the power toughness box,

but, I don't know, Bill was like, you know, we don't need to break into three digits just yet. You know, 99.99 is impressive enough, so we did that. And so the way it works, for those who've never seen BFM, Big Furry Monster, costs 15 black mana, and if you had both sides, the left side and the right side, in your hand, you can cast it. And then when it enters the battlefield,

it becomes one singular giant creature. And one card is the left side of the card, and one card is the right side of the card. Anyway, it was... We did God Book study. We did market research on Unglued, and it was the number one and number two card. For some reason,

the left card slightly eked out the right card. I'm not sure. But I guess one person said, I like the left card, not the right card or something. I have no idea. Why have a left card beat the right card? But anyway, they were the most popular thing in the set. So I was in very true. Now, interestingly, me trying to recreate what that was in Unglue 2, which never got

printed, led to me making, for example, the split cards. But anyway, so we made them. It was popular. And Ken Nagel just really loved BFM. So he was figuring out a way to get BFM. Like, how do we do

BFM in a normal magic set? And so the first thing he tried was in New Phyrexia, Ken led New Phyrexia, the design, vision design, or design at the time. And he came up with an idea that he called Link. And the way Link's work was that there were two creatures, linked work was that there were two creatures and I think the way they worked was

let's say I'm a 2-2 with Vigilance and then I have a 3-3 with Trample. They put them on the battlefield, they sort of lock together and they become a 5-5 with Trample and Vigilance. And I think at the time, it's funny, in the talk

I talked about left and right. I actually think the way the link worked was it wasn't defined by left and right now that I think at the time, it's funny, in the talk, I talked about left and right. I actually think the way the link worked was it wasn't defined by left and right now that I think of it. I just think any two link creatures could link together. I did mess slightly with this. There's a card called Snot in Unhinged where whenever you play a snot, you attach it to previous snots, and then its power toughness is X squared, whatever X is the number of cards. So it's a 1-1, and then a 4-4, and then a 9-9,

and then a 16-16. Anyway, the idea of Link was that you take smaller cards and build a bigger card. It caused rules issues. It was complex, and it ended up... We actually removed that mechanic and Aaron Forsythe in his place did Phyrexian Mana.

So Phyrexian Mana was a replacement for Link. I mean, not that they had the same thing, just that one thing had to leave so Aaron had to add something. And Phyrexian Mana was what Aaron added. Obviously, Phyrexian Mana has its own issues. But the idea that Ken would eventually come to in Eldritch Moon was, what if we use transform technology?

I'll get to transform later on. But transform sort of said, hey, I have a front card and a back card. And what if the back card, what if I could essentially do BFM, but the idea is each of the cards has a front side that I can cast like normal. And only when both the front sides are either on the battlefield or some of them needs one on the battlefield and one can be in the graveyard, I think.

But the idea is that I get these two ones where I need them to get them, and then they transform and turn into a giant melded creature. Now, the other thing we figured out when we actually... I think when I made BFM, no one was really, like... My idea was left and right just because it seemed like... I don't know. The visual seemed fun.

When we actually went to make them in sort of a more normal set, they figured out that the dimensions actually work better if you do top and bottom rather than side by side. That if you do top and bottom, you get a card that's much closer to the actual dimensions of a magic card.

Anyway, so the reason I chose MELD, the reason that MELD is on this list, is it is just exciting. It is a compelling thing, right? It is something like, I talked about in my talk about how you want to have splash. You want to be able to do things where people look at it and they go, I can't believe you did that. It's important. Not everything needs to be novel.

I think that it's fine to have a lot of mechanics that just play well. Not everything has to be like, oh my goodness. But you want some, you want some, oh my goodness, you want some, I can't believe you did that. And MELD really has that quality to it where people are sort of like, like the first time you ever see it, it's just something like, I didn't know you could do that. And people get very tickled by it. And there's a lot of talk. When I made this list, I shared it around the office and got feedback. And there are people that are like, oh, I don't know, meld's in the top 20. But sometimes I put things there just so I wanted to point something important about design. And the idea of doing things that are out of the box and

just make people sit up and take notice is important. Not all mechanics have to be that, but some mechanics should be that. Okay, so meld is my number 20. Number 19, ninjutsu. Okay, so this goes back to betrayers of Kamigawa. So when we were making champions of Kamigawa, one of the things that I actually took over, I became head designer in the middle of Champions Block. Now, it's possible that this was me as a developer on Champions and not as head designer,

now that I think of the timetable of this. I think Betrayals was mostly done when technically I took over. Anyway, the idea was I was becoming much more conscious of the idea that we need to plan our blocks. We don't want to just like make something and then make more. That was a lot of our early strategies

in making blocks were make something, make some mechanics, do more of that, you know. And it was definitely, it wasn't really well planned out. And we got ourselves in corners all the time and, you know, there was a lot of second and third set designs that sort of struggled. So one of the things that I thought was important, and once again, I think this is

more me on the development team than me as head designer, because I don't think I was head designer just yet. I thought we should save something for Betrayers of Kamigawa. Like, what is a really cool, okay, we're doing top-down Japanese. What is something people would expect that we could hold off on so that there's something we, you know. So in Champions of Kamigawa, we had samurai and dragons and demons and kami, which are like the spirits,

and moon folk and all sorts of, like, races that were core to Japanese mythology. The rat folk. And so the idea of what we came up with was, what if we held back on the ninjas? What if the ninjas, like we felt ninjas could be something that's exciting. Like, you know, oh, betrayers, has the ninjas. And so we wanted to give the ninjas their own mechanic. And part of it was trying to figure out,

I was sort of tasked with, okay, what could be a good ninja mechanic? And the idea that I, I mean, I thought about a lot of things. I mean, ninjas are many things. And one of the things that I was very enamored by was the idea of another thing we want in game design, surprise. So a lot of times, by the way, when you're playing a game of Magic, there's a lot of stuff that's known things. There's a lot of, okay, I got to do this, do that,

and there's a lot of things you do where you sort of just plan out your future turns. And it is good that you want people on their feet. You want people every once in a while to go, oh, something might happen here. Now, part of that I'll get into later is having a hand that's secret that your opponent doesn't know is very important. I will get to that a little more later.

But I just liked the idea that ninjas would be, were you least suspect to them? Like, ha-ha, it's a ninja. but I just liked the idea that ninjas would be, were you least suspect to them? Like, ha ha, it's a ninja. And so I was very fascinated by the idea that if ninjas had access to magic, they would probably use this magic to hide themselves, right? That, now there was a funny thing at the time when ninjas who came out,

there's someone who used to do a comic that like, it's an elephant, and no, he pulls off his hat, it's a ninja in an elephant suit. The flavor I had always been going for was that you were using magic to disguise yourself as something else. It's not that you were wearing an elephant suit. It's that I had magic that camouflaged me and made me seem like an elephant. And then when they come hit you, you're like, oh no, no, it's a ninja, not an elephant. I thought that dynamic was really neat. I really enjoyed it. And it made for some fun gameplay where I was attacking and you never quite knew. Like, okay, is that an elephant or a bear or whatever? Or is it a ninja?

And the ninjas could do nasty things if they got through. So it made you be more cautious and block or maybe you wouldn't. Now, my one regret in ninjutsu, why it's number 19 and not a little bit lower, is it so monopolized ninjas. Like, every time we tried to do a set with ninjas, we're like, okay, yeah, yeah, ninjutsu is a fun way to show off ninjas, but there are other fun aspects of ninjas. Ninjas, you know, sneakiness isn't the only quality of ninjas.

And I keep, like when I handed off Neon Dynasty, I did not put ninjutsu in it. The plan was we were going to do a ninja commander deck. That might have some new ninjutsu cards in it. But we were, you know, just because I wanted to do some new and different things with ninjas. But in set design, it got put back in because everybody expects it. And so it's one of those things sometimes there's pluses and minuses with making tight creative connections. The pluses is

it feels really good. Ninjas being sneaky and popping up, the flavor that's really good but the idea that people are so associated with ninjas and ninjutsu that means it becomes harder to just make ninjas that aren't ninjutsu is definitely an issue. Okay, that is that aren't ninjutsu is definitely an issue.

Okay, that is number 19, ninjutsu. Number 18, cascade. Oh, real quickly, for those who don't know what ninjutsu is, I should also explain. Ninjutsu is a mechanic where if I attack and have an unblocked attacking creature, I can pay the ninjutsu cost and basically swap it so my ninja's attacking rather than the creature. The creature comes back to my hand and it turns out it's the ninja attacking you.

Most ninjas have some sort of combat ability or a saboteur ability that do something when they hit you. Sometimes they're just big, so I trade a small creature for a bigger creature. But the idea is I surprise you and that surprise means something in combat. Okay.

Next up, 18, Cascade. So Cascade came from the set Alara Reborn. Back in the day, we used to do what we called gimmick sets. And what a gimmick set is, all the cards in the set are blank. Legion did, they're all creatures. Alara Reborn did. They're all creatures.

Alara Reborn was, they're all gold. It's a set where literally every card in the set is gold. Now, in retrospect, what we've discovered on the gimmick-type designs is they're really, really hard to do, and it just doesn't move the needle that much. Like, having a set with a lot of gold cards in it makes people just as excited with all gold cards. Like, there's just not a lot of advantage of the everything.

And the everything makes it so much harder to do. It really causes a lot of complications. So we're like, you know what? If we just want to have a heavy gold set, have a heavy gold set. The difference between all gold or a lot of gold, the audience doesn't really care. And so trying to make things too hard for ourselves.

Anyway, while making the set, they were looking for a Timmy slash Tammy mechanic. Something that's visually exciting. Something that made you sit up and go, wow, this is quite amazing. And so basically what they did was they came up. So if you want to surprise somebody, we're talking about randomness, right?

I want to do something, I mean, not all surprise has to be randomness. Obviously, Jiu-Jitsu is a surprise that isn't random, but you want a little bit of thrill, and so the difference here is if I play Jiu-Jitsu, I, the person playing it, I know what's going to happen. Maybe my opponent is surprised, but

I'm not surprised. And so in my talk, I call this thrill. That sometimes you as the player, especially if you're Tammy, who enjoys the emotional rollercoaster ride that is playing Magic, sometimes you want to do something like, well, I want to be surprised. Not because my opponent does something I don't know, but I do something where I'm not quite sure what's going to happen. There's something really exciting about that. Now, the challenge with randomness is that

if you, like, randomness makes games fun. This is a little secret sauce behind the scenes, little game designer info. Randomization, variance, makes games fun. The appearance of variance, of randomization, ups games fun. The appearance of variance of randomization upsets some players. Meaning you don't want to feel like, oh, I'm playing the skill testing game and then I lost because I didn't win the coin flip.

And we do a lot of magic with competitive formats and we don't want people feeling like their skill doesn't matter, right? And so the idea of how do we make something dynamic and exciting that plays into a sense of thrill without it just feeling like, oh, what does it matter? Why am I even strategizing at all?

So the one thing that Richard built into the game that is by definition random is the library, right? You have a group of cards that you handpick but you don't know the order you get the cards in. And that the shuffle deck is really important. It's what makes magic dynamic.

What adds a lot of the fun is, hey, I don't know, you know, every game I play, I got to deal with the cards in the order I get them. And that, you know, there's enough variance with, you know, 40 cards, 60 cards, 100 cards, pick your format, that the games don't play out the same.

You know, that I'm not, it's not just I'm playing the exact same game every time. That there's nuance. Things happen and I have to adapt. And a lot of that adaptation is where the fun comes from. Okay, so the idea they played around with is, okay, we want randomness. Can we use the beginning? Can we use the deck in some way? So what Cascade was, was Cascade said,

I have a, when you cast this creature with Cascade, just one second. Sorry. When you cast this creature with Cascade, you keep revealing cards from the top of your library until you reveal a non-land permanent, or it wasn't even non-land,

until you reveal a non-land permanent, or it wasn't even non-land, until you reveal a non-land spell with a mana value that is less than this spell. So if I play a creature that has a mana value of four, I keep flipping until I find a three mana spell and then I cast it for free. I don't pay for it. So the idea is this creature comes with a free spell attached to it. But the bigger the creature is, the bigger the spell can be. Now, the problem we ran into this mechanic is, right, the whole idea of it is we want this sense of thrill. What's going to happen? But what we found out was that if you were a spiky player, you quickly figured out, oh, well, if I limit what's in my deck that is of a certain size,

let's say, for example, I have a two-drop with Cascade or a three-drop with Cascade, and I only have one thing in my deck that's smaller than that, then it's not random. I know exactly what I'm getting. And you can build your decks in such a way that says, oh, well, every time I do this card, I get this card for free. And because of that, you can build around it,

and Cascade gets dangerous in some ways. And so Cascade is a good example of the mechanic in its purest form. Like, a lot of times, for example, when we do stuff in design or vision design, we tend to play the mechanic as we want it to be played because we're just trying, is it fun? But then what happens is it gets to set design and play design and they start saying, okay, well, we're going to make sure we win. And then sometimes to win, the things you do

with the mechanic aren't kind of the fun thing. That the right way to play it is not the fun version. And ideally, it's our job to figure that out and go, oh, this is why we did it. This is the fun part about it. Oh, they're just going to circumvent the fun part. That's not ideal. So one of the things we've

definitely done, we may discover in Lost Caverns of Ixalan, like, there's something super fun about Cascade and the things that Cascade represents when it truly is random, when I don't know what's going to happen. One of the things, for example, that we did when we rediscovered is we stopped, A, it's now a keyword action. It's not tied to the, it doesn't have to be an enter the battlefield effect. It can be, but it's not tied to that.

And it's no longer intrinsically tied to the mana value of the card that has it. Meaning, I get a card that costs three that casts something that's bigger or smaller. We have some flexibility. And part of that is that, for example, I could have a five drop that gets you a free thing that's three or less rather than four or less. Or I could have a three drop that gets you a five or less, but because itself is smaller, you'll hit other copies of it. Anyway, the reason Cascade's on my list is there's something so viscerally fun, there truly is

this sense of thrill that Cascade captured that I don't know any capture quite as well as Cascade. And Cascade really sort of hammered home the, hey, I want to do something where I, the person doing it, don't quite know what's going to happen, but fun things will happen. And there's a lot of individual card designs that play in the space.

There's sort of a red rare slot we do from time to time where like chaos will happen. What's going to happen? I don't know. Let's see. rare slot we do from time to time. We're like, chaos will happen. What's going to happen? I don't know. Let's see. And so really, Cascade was sort of the forebearer of that.

Okay, next up. Number 17, Amass. So this goes back to War of the Spark. So Nicol Bolas was fighting most planeswalkers, and he had brought to Ravnica, he trapped them in Ravnica, and brought an army of Eternals, which is like the zombie army. And we needed to represent the zombie army. It was an important part of the story. Like, literally, this was a three-year story. The whole reason we went to Amonkhet is to learn about the zombie army and how he was making it

and we wanted to represent it now in Hour of Devastation we had tried a mechanic called Afflict that the idea originally was oh maybe this will be the mechanic that's the zombie mechanic and the plan originally when we put it in Hour of Devastation was oh we'll bring it back when they're there Afflict didn't quite go as well as we wanted. And it didn't, the other thing we wanted is,

one of the things about the zombie army was this idea that it grows, and then it's an army, it's this endless amount of numbers. Now, the low-hanging fruit for this was tokens. You make a token, and so we played around with a bunch of different things. One of our go-tos sometimes is you can't block. Because one of the problems if you make a whole bunch of tokens is it just gums up the board. Your opponent, what can they do?

It's like, okay, you attack with your big creature. I chump block my little tiny guy. And if you make them bigger, it's hard to make a lot of them. If you make them smaller, it's more advantageous to block with them than it is to attack with them. We did try a version that was kind of cool for a little while where all the zombies had to attack or block together.

So the idea is if I have four of them and you attack with a 5-5, well, I can chump it, but I have to chump it with all four of my guys. I can't chump it with one of them. So that made it a little bit harder to do. And then to be honest, there's

some promise. There might be a place somewhere we use that. We tried for a while that you couldn't enhance them or target them or, you know, like they're there but, but anyway, none of that quite worked out. So we said what we often do, and this is important, which is one of the things we're making mechanics is you have to send functionality. Okay, I need to make

something that represents a growing army, but I don't want an endless number of tokens. That just introduces all sorts of new problems. So the answer there was, okay, can we solve this problem without making a whole bunch of tokens? And then the idea came, well, what if instead of going wide, we go tall? Meaning, we don't make a lot of tokens, we make one token. And then, whenever you have to sort of make more of the zombie, it's not that you make more zombie tokens,

you make the zombie, the army token, if you will, get bigger. You start putting plus one, plus one counters on it. And the interesting thing was, so day, night, what we ended up using in Midnight Hunt, plus one plus one counters on it. And the interesting thing was, so Day-Night, what we ended up using in Midnight Hunt,

we had tried Day-Night in original Innistrad. We ended up going with Double-Faced Cards and Transform. But one of the ideas that we played around there is the idea that said,

oh, okay, well, if you don't have this, go get this. We would do it for dungeons. I mean, there's a bunch of places we ended up using this technology. We use this for War of the Sparks. So the idea is, you know, put counters on your army. Oh, you don't have an army?

Well, okay, first go get an army and then put counters on. And the idea was you never had more than one army, and your army just got bigger. Now, there were some things we had to build around, definitely am mask. You have to be careful about things like pacifism. There's some answers. And so we had to be careful when designing with a mask in it. You want to make sure that a mask isn't shut down a little too easily because it can be with certain kinds of things. It does make you have to balance your environment a little bit. But anyway, the reason a mask is on this list is it just does what we need to do functionally really well.

I mean, originally a mask was just the zombie Eternals. And then, hey, we're making Lord of the Rings. And like, we need an orc army. And like, oh, well, we kind of solved this problem. You know, and one of the things about Universes Beyond is, hey, we make new mechanics and we need new mechanics, but if we have an existing mechanic... One of the things about Universes Beyond sets in general is

the thing that sells the set is not necessarily the mechanics per se. I mean, you want mechanics to be flavorful and make sense. You want good gameplay. But the thing that really sells the set is, hey, it's Floor of the Rings or whatever the property is. And so it is fine to do novelty where it makes sense, mechanical novelty, where it reinforces and you're doing something magic can't do before.

But in general, one of our rules with Universes Beyond especially is, hey, if we've solved this problem, use the tools we've already done. We don't need... Universes Beyond less needs to reinvent the wheel than maybe Magic in Universe sets need. Because there's a little more... We put a little more novelty in some of the Magic in Universe sets.

Anyway, we have used the mass, so we've even changed it so you can amass whatever. You can amass zombies, you can amass orcs. I think there's a Modern Horizon card that amasses slivers, I believe. So anyway, there is... It is a fun tool that...

The idea of an army is really something that shows up a lot in stories. I believe a mass is going to be a tool that we go back to a lot and a lot. It just does something very efficiently and very well and very flavorfully in a way that leads to good gameplay, the functionality I'm talking about. Okay, number 15, Prowess. So Prowess, we go back to champions, not champions, to Khans of Tarkir.

We were trying to make the Jeskai. They were the white, blue, black. Not white, blue, black. White, blue, red faction. And the combination of they were really smart and they were really good fighters. Sort of the showling monk sort of feel.

And so we're like, okay, we want a mechanic that says, hey, play a lot of instants and sorceries, because that is what red and blue tend to do. And this seemed like, of the five factions, the one that was most spell-based. But we also wanted to be combat-relevant, right? And so the idea is, how do I turn instants and sorceries,

especially instants, into something that's combat-relevant? And the answer we came up with was prowess. So prowess says whenever you cast a non-creature spell, this creature gets plus one, plus one. And sometimes you'll have

prowess more than once. Prowess stacks, which would end up being a problem for us in a second. But anyway, we made it for the Jeskai. It went over really well,

so much so that it became evergreen almost instantaneously. I think the next corset after it had it in it, we used it right away. And the reason was that one of the challenges we have is we like to have overlaps of our colors, just so we can make hybrid spells and stuff like that. And red and blue did not have a good overlap. Red and blue is always about spells, but we need

creature keywords. What kind of creature cares about spells? And prowess exactly cared about spells. Now, you'll notice that prowess is no longer evergreen. It got turned into deciduous, which means we can use it when we need it, but it's not in every set, or not in both sets. The problem there was it acted differently than a lot of evergreen mechanics. Like I said, it's stacked, meaning if you had prowess and prowess, it acted differently. If you have flying and then flying, well, I just have flying. If you have prowess and prowess. Now, once upon a time, lifelink used to stack.

But that caused us problems. So we actually changed lifelink. So once you have lifelink, it no longer stacks. Having multiple versions of lifelink. So we had that issue. It was a triggered ability. We really didn't have other evergreen creature abilities that were triggered. And it was the kind of ability that just kind of stepped on design space. Like, we'd make sets, and I'm like,

oh, in this set, okay, we have to not make prowess because that stepping on the toes is something else we're trying to do. Having spells matter as a theme is something that pops up a lot. But, for example, Prowess was non-creatures. So let's say we have a set that cares about instants and sorceries

specifically. Well, it's weird to do Prowess because Prowess isn't instant sorceries, it's non-creatures. And then, oh, well, what if we just do non-creatures? Like, well, there's other themes in the set we don't want. Like, we just want to be instant sorceries. We're trying to push you in red and blue. And if you say artifacts or enchantments or something, it starts pushing you in other colors.

So it just got... It was in troublesome space. And so what we realized was, okay, we can't... Sometimes we can use it. There are sets we can use. It can become deciduous. But it just... It was showing up not enough that we sort of took it away from evergreen status. This is why it's on my list.

I went back and forth. This was evergreen for a while. But I finally decided, like, okay, it's not currently evergreen. I defined it as evergreen. So that, my friends, is Prowess. So I'm basically at work. It's funny. When I first started doing this, I said, oh, there's 20 things.

Okay, probably I could do 10. I thought I would do two podcasts. I go, I'll do 10 at a time. But now that I'm here and I'm over 30 minutes in and I've done one-fourth of it, what I'm realizing is I think this is fun. I think I will continue to do this. I don't know whether it'll be three or four, but I'm going to keep doing this at the rate that it makes sense to do it.

I'm adding a lot of extra detail in. So even for those of you that watch the talk, I'm obviously talking more about stuff just because I have more space. And I got a lot of podcasts to do, so whenever I have a podcast, I go, oh, this could be more podcasts. I'm like, okay, more podcasts, great. So anyway, this is part one of the 20 Greatest Mechanics of All Time. I hope you guys enjoyed listening to it.

But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. That means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.