Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1160: Hand Matters

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the various ways we can make the hand matter mechanically.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. You all know what that means or maybe you don't. It's time for another drive from work Okay, so normally I drive to work. That's why the episode is called that podcast is called drive to work, but So it's Tuesday today. So yesterday I tried a new podcast topic, which I'll talk about in a minute I didn't like it. So I did it this morning. I still didn't like it, but tomorrow I leave to go to Comic-Con in San Diego So it's my last chance. I'm doing this on my way home because When I work through something if I take too long off of it, I'll forget it again

So anyway my topic today was a topic for my blog Someone wanted to know about the hand as it relates to magic and mechanics. How do we make the hand mechanically relevant? So that is my topic today. So anyway, I thought I would begin by talking a little bit about why is there a hand in magic? Why does magic even have a hand? So I have talked with Richard about this. So first and foremost, the answer is it's a card game. Card games mostly have a hand. Richard, stay true to it being a card game.

But I guess the larger question, why do cards have a hand? Why is that a thing? Well, it does a couple things. One is it allows you to regulate how often you get cards, because drawing a card every turn is important, and it gives you a place to sort of hold those cards. There's a whole mana system, right? There's a means by which you get to sort of play the card. So they have to sit somewhere, so the hand allows you to be able to do that. Another real important reason that most card games have a hand is hidden information. That most games have an element of hidden information. An

open information game would be like chess where everything's there. There's nothing you don't know. But most games have some amount of hidden information where you just don't know everything. And a hand does a good job where like I know things that you don't know and that I can make decisions based on my information that I have that you don't and vice versa. The other thing about an open system information game is there's a lot of pressure to take everything in. Like if I make a mistake in chess I could see everything there's nothing I didn't know but when you have some hidden

information there's a little bit like well I don't know what it is I mean good players can try to extrapolate from how the person plays but it's something that you don't have to worry about in a a lot of ways, games are more fun with a certain amount of hidden information. You don't want everything public. And as you will see today, that is important. The hidden information is relevant when we're talking about making hands matter.

Okay, so how exactly does the hand, oh, one more thing. When Richard made the hand, he did add one rule, hand size. So the idea is when the game begins, you draw seven cards and then you have a hand size of seven. And what that means is at the end of any turn, of your turns, if you have more than seven cards, eight or more, you must discard down to seven cards. Now that is one of the rules that we have talked about. One of the things we do from time Now that is one of the rules that we have talked about. One of the things we do from time to time is we look at rules and say do we need that rule? Is that rule important? And we did discuss maybe getting rid of the

rule. It turns out that the rule does matter. There are certain decks that actively sort of fill up the hand so they can discard cards and we decided it wasn't, it was somewhat of a clean rule so we decided not to get rid of it. But anyway the idea of hand size we'll talk about that that is something that would be relevant when caring about the hand. Okay so let's get in how do you care about the hand? First and foremost I mean obviously the hand has a game function I'm not talking about that what I'm talking about is we're making cards or mechanics that care about the hand. How do they do that? Okay, first and foremost, we can talk about cards entering the hand. How do

cards enter the hand? Well, there's a couple different ways. Basically, cards can come back from any zone. Cards coming from a library is usually a draw, although sometimes you can look at cards from your library and put them back. Cards can come from the battlefield, we'll talk about that in a second with bounce. Cards can come from the graveyard. You can raise debt or you can regrowth, return stuff from the graveyard. Cards can even come back from exile. Usually they come back because you have exiled from their hand and then you get them back. Normally when we exile something we don't let cards bring them back,

but we do let cards, if a card exiles itself, you can bring it back sometimes. Also in theory, cards can go from the stack to your hand. Sometimes someone can be comfortable returning to your hand. The stack is minimal, but the other three, there's a decent amount of things that can happen there. So let's talk about how we can care. So first off, you can care about cards entering your hand. So things can trigger. Draw triggers are a very common trigger.

And sometimes it's not every draw, it's the second draw. It can be some limitation of draw. But the idea is I can care about cards entering my hand. That's from the library. I can care about cards entering from the battlefield.'s from the library. I can care about cards entering from the battlefield. We don't trigger about that quite as often, although we do use bouncing as an effect, which I'll get to. And then, in theory, you can care of cards entering your hand

from exile, from the graveyard. We occasionally care about cards... We more care about cards leaving the graveyard than entering your hand from the graveyard, but that is something we can care about. Exile a little less just because we don't return a lot of things from exile to your hand. Another way that you can care about cards entering your hand, there's actually a whole mechanic that does that. It was called Miracle. It was in Abeson Restored. The idea was, so back in Tempest my very first design we spent a bunch of time trying to figure out if we could make

draw triggers and what that means is imagine having a card let's say it's a card that does damage to your to any target maybe four damage but when you draw it it does two damage to you. Some of the triggers could be positive, some could be negative, but the idea is imagine cards with the mere act of drawing them triggered. Well, we had a problem when we tried to do this, and the problem was, well, how do you know? If I have a negative trigger, let's say I have the thing that does four damage to me, and I don't want to take two damage, I can just not tell you that's what I drew, how would

you know it's what I drew? So the idea we played around with a little while is that we change the back of the cards. Note this is the early days of Magic. Card sleeves were kind of a thing, although not very popular at the time, but opaque sleeves hadn't happened yet. So the idea was I would have my deck, I would draw, you would, my opponent and I would both see that I have the top card that was not a normal Magic back. It was one of these special backs. And so we knew, OK, that means you have to reveal the card when you draw it. That ended up being a little too much.

We didn't do it. We ended up replacing the void we took out with buyback. I mean, a different mechanic, but that's what ended up going there. Anyway, from time to time, people would come up with the idea of draw triggers. It was something that I used to say, it would entertain me that we'd get new designers who were like, how about draw triggers?

Finally though, Bryantonsmen in, let me take a sip of water here, I have to take a, Bryantonsmen in Avacyn Restored figured out a way to do it. So the way that miracle works is the turn you draw a miracle card you may cast it for its miracle cost which is cheaper than its normal cost. Now, it's a little weird because normally when you draw a card from your library you don't it's not important that it's clear that you've drawn it from your library so it requires people kind of drawing cards a little bit differently and also people like let's say for example I don't have miracle cards in my deck but I might make what want you to think I'm miracle cards in my deck so I still have to draw as if I have them in my deck just to make you think that maybe I have them in my deck.

And anyway it was a little bit messy and effective kind of how you drew. It was exciting there was a famous pro-tour moment with Brian Kibler Anyway, that was miracles. Okay, so we can care about cards entering your your hand I Will get to bounce in a second But there's not a lot of cards that care about bounce things bouncing but bouncing is relevant to caring about your hand So we'll get there Next up you can care about cards leaving your hand.

There's a bunch of ways to do that. The biggest way is casting. You can care about when you cast a spell. In fact, if you go back to Alpha, Alpha had a couple different cards that cared about casting. There were the Lucky Charms, which are artifacts that cared about when you cast a certain color spell,

they gave you life. And there was a card named Vesuvan Enchantress, not Vesuvan, Vendurin. Vendurin Enchantress that cared about when you played enchantments, it drew you a card when you played an enchantment. So the idea early on is, hey, I can do things and I can have things that care about me playing cards from my hand, casting cards or playing cards. We then in Zendikar, original Zendikar, we did landfall. It cared a whole mechanic that cared about you playing land We did constellation that cares about you playing enchantments We did alliance that cares about you playing creatures or cares about creatures entering battlefield from your hand

Although alliance might care about them entering from anywhere, but anyway most of the time it's from your hand So the idea of caring about you casting things is something we can care about Sometimes we also can care about. Sometimes we also can care about like, oh you've cast two spells in a turn, you know, we can care about what you're doing and how you're casting. Another thing that we can do is we can care about your hand as cards in your hand. So you can discard cards, for example. So we have a fact sometimes it's an alternate cost to casting a card fact sometimes it's an alternate cost

to casting a card. Maybe it's a cost to an activated ability. Maybe it's the result of doing something. But the idea was a discard as a cost is something that we've played around with. And the idea is in your hand that the cards have value as individual cards that can do things, but also just the card itself has value and

you can use the card as a resource. So let's say I have extra lands or things where I don't need the card, I can then spend the card as a card. And there's a bunch of different things that have cared about the card as value. There's a whole mechanic named, what was the mechanic named? It was from Torment and it cared a madness. It cared about whether you discarded a card. And so cards with madness had a madness cost and if you discarded the card you could cast the card for its madness cost which was usually cheaper. But the nice thing about it is you got to use it

for as a resource to discard and you got to cast the spell. So upside. We've done different things that have cared about discarding, but it's a neat sort of way to use your hand as an additional resource. And there's definitely cards, there's some cards that have an effect when you discard them. There are definitely a lot of effects that care the trigger off you discarding cards. That can be a common trigger. So we can trigger our cards entering your hand. We can trigger them cards leaving your hand. There's a bunch of ways to do that. The other thing that we can care about is we can care about your hand as an entity.

So for example, this story happened during Mirage. So we were doing development on Mirage, sort of what before Play Design existed, we used to have design development, now we have vision design, set design, and play design. But back in the day we had development. I was hired as a developer, so in the early days I was on all the development teams. So we made a hole in Mirage in green, and Bill said, you gonna have any ideas? And I'm like, yeah, I've designed some cards what is it is mono green how about two green green for a star star

feature whose power and toughness are equal to the number of cards in your hand build the time the way that the email system worked at the time is if you type in a certain combination of letters It would fill things in so if you put in letters that there was only one combination It would fill it in so bill being the gamer that he was figured out the least number of letters He had a right for each person to have the email system put their name in and for me It was ma first two letters of mark and ro the first two letters of rosewater So when he wrote the card down, he wrote Morrow. The creative team ended up saying, oh, that seems

like a fine name, and they kept it in. Morrow is my nickname for those that somehow don't know it, but named after that card, which is named after me. Anyway, the Morrow idea was I care about your hand not as individual things in your hand But it's just how many cards are in your hand the bigger your hand the bigger the creature and and it played nicely with Like I talked earlier about the discarding your hand, right? You have a hand size and so what you could do was you get up to seven cards draw your eighth card Attack with an 8 8 and then you and then your second main phase you could cast a spell and then get back to seven cards, draw your eighth card, attack with an 8-8, and then and then in your second main phase you could cast a spell and then get back to seven so you have to discard a card. But if you cast just one spell and turn, you

could attack every turn with an 8-8, which is pretty powerful for four mana. In fact, my very first teaser ever, which was Mirage, I said you can have a creature that can attack for eight that has the cost four mana. Anyway, that idea became something that we played around with. The idea of your hand size matter, in fact, there's a whole set of saviors of Kamigawa that had it as a major theme. I think we called it, I think we called it wisdom,

I think was an informal name. Anyway, there was like a cycle of Maros in it, there's just a bunch of cards that care. Turned out that hand size matters is not the greatest of thieves. Like it's fine maybe if one archetype cared, but the problem is in order for it to matter you need to sort of not do things and so it really slowed things down a lot and it ended up being kind of awkward in the way it works. So while there are individual archetypes that might care about your hand or care about your hand size, it is not something

we do at large anymore. Okay. Then there are cards that can care about the quality of cards in your hand. The example, like obviously when you cast it, it can care about the color. I talked about the Lucky Charms, care about what color it is but there was a cycle during Earth's destiny called what was it called the sense. So like Jasmine or sense of Jasmine you would cast it then you would reveal some number of white cards from your hand and you would gain two life for every white card you reveal. Now we had done stuff before there's a card with Gerard that counts the number of cards in your hand you gain life but this is more about I care about how many white cards are in my hand and so this had

you started you have to reveal it to show that you have it. During lore when we did a difference there were basic, not basic lands, there were non-basic lands they were dual lands and revealed a certain creature type from your hand, they would come in untapped. So we played around a little bit with caring about the quality of what cards are in your hand. The other place we've made use of it is, for example, in Scourge and in Dragons of Tarkir, we cared about dragons.

Well, one of the problems with dragons, like typo cards for dragons is they're big. You really can't get them out until later in the game. So caring about dragons being out sometimes is a little bit hard. So one of the things we started doing is caring about, oh, well, do you have it? Like, do you have a dragon on the battlefield? Or do you have a dragon in your hand? And so you can reveal that you have a dragon in your hand to care about that. It's a way to show what inexpensive cards. So one of the values there was the idea that we can mechanically not just what your hand is like in size, but the individual things in your hand. What colors you have in your hand, what card types you have in your hand.

Now we have to be careful here once again because hidden information is important. We don't want to really show your whole hand if we can help it. And so we want to be careful how often we reveal hands. Things like dragons or things where it's something that's going to happen eventually, we do want to care about that. So it is a tool we can use from time to time. Another thing that we can care about the hand, I talked about how Richard introduced the idea of hand size, right?

That you normally have a hand size of seven. So we made some cards in Urza's saga, I believe, that could change your hand size. Mostly they made them go down by some number. So the idea is now your hand size is five. So now if you have six or more cards, you have to discard. It went on creatures that it was a downside to the feature but you got a slightly bigger feature than normal we haven't done a lot with sort of hand size as far as limiting it it's not super fun so

we have to be careful now the other thing we can do is there are cards like um oh what's it called is there are cards like um oh what's it called um ivory tower where uh ivory tower rewards you for how many cards you have in your hand it gets you life and then there's uh library of alexandria from arabian knights uh ivory towers from antiquities so rabbi nights was the first ever set ticket it's second ever set um uh library of alexandria lets you a card, but only if you have seven or more cards. So there are definitely cards that care about the quantity of your hand, care about what's in your hand, care about the number of cards in your hand, care about what's in your hand. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about interacting with other zones. So let me talk a bit about Bounce.

So Bounce is the nickname for cards that put cards from the battlefield back into their owner's hand. Start in alpha there's a card called unsummon. The idea is the hand is your holding ground before you cast your spells and so what unsummon and bounce spells like it do is they return things back to the hand. The interesting thing about bounce is it's not a permanent answer it's a temporary answer. The person still has access to the card, still has access to their mana. What you're really doing is you're buying yourself tempo, right? You're buying yourself time.

And that if I bounce the creature, especially if I bounce it maybe at the end of your opponent's turn, during your whole turn they don't have it, then they got to cast it again in their turn, it spends mana, it really sort of eats up resource. But it doesn't stop the thing. And one of blue's weaknesses is blue is not good at destruction blue doesn't destroy things so we give it tools like bounce so it can interact now the reason I say this is much like I talked about discarding before and yes you can make your opponent discard you can bounce off to your opponent's hand that's more I mean that interacts with your opponent's hand

but with your hand you can use these as a cost. I've already talked about discarding as a cost. Well you can use bounce as a cost. One of the early mechanics that played around this base was, we called it gating. It was a nickname from Plane-shipped, the set after invasion, the second set of the invasion block. The idea of Plane-shipped, of gating cards were, they were multi-card cards, allied, because Plane-ship was allied, and when you played them, you got, it was a bigger creature for a smaller mana cost, but you had to then unsummon a creature of one

of the colors of the card. The card was two colors. The idea being, if you had no other creatures, well, this creature would bounce itself, because it was the colors. But normally, you would play a bigger creature and bounce something smaller. So we can use bounce as in a different cost playing cards.

There's some cards that use bounce as an upkeep cost. Green for example has creatures that sometimes bounce things back to your hand. There's some stuff especially in red where creatures that have haste that you can tap with them the turn you play them but then they bounce back to your hand. There are cards that like sometimes in blue where they stay in play but when you try to attack after you attack once they bounce or if they get blocked they bounce. There can be restrictions that get them back to your hand. The idea essentially is you can use sort of bouncing as a cough. The idea of putting things back in your hand as a cough and that is something that we've definitely used numerous times.

Okay and like I said earlier there are some effects that get stuff back from the graveyard to your hand. We don't care too much about that but it's something technically we can care about. Okay the other big place that we can use with cars in your hand is the idea of things that work in your hand. And there's two categories of these. The first is the idea of sort of an alternate cost. So the earliest memory of this was back in Tempest, Richard Garfield worked on the design and he pitched the idea for an idea he called cycling.

So cycling ended up not being in Tempest. There was too many things in Tempest. We had to pull some out. So two of them, Echo and Cycling, went in the next year set, which was Urza Saga. So the idea of cycling is, there's a cost for cards in your hand, it was two in the original block that introduced it in Urza Saga. But later on we brought it back and added a number number so it doesn't always have to cost two. The idea is if this card is in your hand you can spend two mana and if you do you can discard the card and draw a new card. And the idea is Richard realized that sometimes you had dead cards in your hand and that it made you not want to play certain type of cards. Cards that were too much of a niche

or cards that were expensive. You might not play in your deck. But the idea is if I can put them in the deck and the situation doesn't come up where I can play them, or at the moment I can't play them, I always have the option of putting them back in my... I'm sorry, discarding them to draw a card. I can replace them essentially. Cycling has gone over real well. It's one of the mechanics, one of the non-evergreen mechanics we've brought back the most times, now deciduous, and we bring it back on occasion when we need it But it's a very useful mechanic We did a lot of things what we did offshoots of that. There's a card called reinforce

That was in Morning tide where you discarded the card, but instead of getting a card You got a you got plus some plus some counters card you got a you got plus on plus on counters. We had an ability for the gruel where you had creatures you could sacrifice and if you did that you could get sort of a giant growth effect plus X plus Y where XY was the power and toughness of the creature. And in Champs Ecoma we even did a mechanic called the channel where channel is there are cards that have a cost. And if you pay the cost and discard the card, it can do whatever effect you want.

We can do all sorts of different effects. So we've definitely played into the space the idea that the card has an alternate use and you can use that in your hand. And if you do that, you don't get the normal spell, but you get the alternative spell. And that has been a pretty popular series of design space for us to go. The other place we can go requires a little bit of a story. So Ron Spencer was an artist that first appeared in Alpha. He did terror, for example, in Alpha. Ron was known for doing creepy things that were kind of scary looking.

And so that became the go-to that a lot of art directors used them for. But it turns out what a lot of people didn't know was one of the other things he did as an illustrator was he did greeting cards. So he did a lot of very cute things. In fact, you ever saw, I think, it's Bear Cub from Portal he did. Very cute.

Anyway, he was assigned some card that was some evil thing that they normally gave him. And so he turned in this little Drawing of a mouse this cute little mouse and he had just done it as a joke Just playing against type and so he you know a week later He's ending the real sketch But anyway, they hung that sketch up and by the art directors and I remember seeing it. I really liked it So when I was working on unglued, I loved the idea of using that sketch

So we the art director talked to Ron and said hey, you know, here's what we're doing It's called infernal spawn of evil and we want you to draw this again So he brought he draw it back and it was this little mouse sipping cocoa and it was super cute And so I made use of him. He redid the image a little bit But it's basically the image he had done before and went on to be a very beloved image and people loved him. We did Infernal Spawn of Evil, and we did a third one that was with the grandson. Anyway, I had that card. So the card represented the Infernal Spawn of Evil, a creature so evil that it was this big giant nasty creature. But I

wanted to be able to do something with it before you drew it and it was an unset So I said well What if you showed it to your opponent and you could pay mana you pay mana to show it to your opponent? And if you did it was so scary they lost life You had to say it's coming because you had to taunt them So you say it's coming you showed them and then it was so scary they lost life so flash forward to dissension which was the third set in the original Ravnica block, and one of the guilds is Azorius, which is white blue. So, okay, we wanted to do something for Azorius, and we were thinking about it, and I remembered

the card, Infernal Swarm of Evil, from Unglued, and I said, well, what if we did things you could activate in your hand? And we made a mechanic called Forecast. The way Forecast worked is it had an activated ability you could activate it in your hand if you did you would reveal it to your opponent to show that you had that card in your hand and then you would do that ability and the way it would work was the ability would be a small ability but it would have synergy with the card when you cast the card for example there was one card where you could cast and make a little

1-1 flying token creature token and then if you cast the card. For example, there was one card where you could cast and make a little 1-1 flying token, creature token. And then if you cast the card, it got star star equal to the number of flying creatures. So the idea is the more you use the card ahead of time, the more you were setting up the ultimate card. The idea was the forecast was a small ability that you could do over turns and then that eventually when you had the mana you one cast the big ability that could take advantage of that and it played into a lot of the feel of Azorius they were slow and you know more a more controlling deck so it made a lot of sense so anyway that opened up the door to the idea that we could have cards that you could activate in your hand once again it is something we're careful with.

We don't do a lot of it. Forecast sort of taught us like, the thing about activating your hand was it doesn't leave your hand, right? So it means you get to do it again and again. So there's repetition of play issues we want to be careful with. So it is something that we can do,

but it is not something that we do a lot. It is something that we're very cautious with in general, because we want to make sure, once again, when messing with your hand, we want to make sure we're not upsetting sort of the general flow of the game. Okay, my friends, that's... Let's see if I named them all. I think I did. I'm a little listening. I make sure that I talked about all the different ways we can care about your hand. So let me talk a little bit, I'm almost almost home here. So one of the things to keep in mind is that the hand is an interesting zone. There's

cool stuff that can happen there. Obviously it plays an integral part in the game normally, but it is something that we like to play with. It is something that we've made mechanics to go there. We have themes that go there, we've even tried to do larger themes. We want to be careful how big a theme, just because there's a lot of, in order for the game to play well, we have to manage the hand, especially the information, and so it is something we can go to, it's something we've been careful not to go to too much, or especially not to lean into things that discourage you from doing things. The most common way we interact with the that discourage you from doing things. The most common way we interact with the hand is sometimes we'll have milling themes. Oh, well, sorry, milling is not the hand, but we'll have like discard themes.

We'll have graveyard themes in which we like to discard. So I guess I combine things. When we have graveyard themes, we like having discard and sometimes having milling as ways to fill up your graveyard and so sometimes discard is a component piece. Maybe we have madness or something that cares about you discarding, maybe we have a graveyard theme that cares about discarding. A lot of times if we have a theme whether it's a typal theme or a card type theme or a color theme we will care about things either entering or leaving your hand especially like casting the cards so that we can care about that. Sometimes if we depending on what it is, we can care about things in your hand a little

bit like there's definitely spaces we can play, but we just got to be careful because like I said, it is not it is not as deep as battlefield as graveyard. There's places to play and things we can do. But it is one of the things that we just have to be very careful with. And so I like the hand as a mechanical resource. I think there's neat things you can do with it. I think there's a lot of ways we've used it that have been fun. There definitely been some things we've had to be careful of. If you're not careful with your hand, you can make things where the game states are not fun.

So it is definitely something that requires a little extra use. But anyway, mostly my goal today was to talk about how, hey, the hands made a lot of fun. There's a lot of neat things we can do with it. And it was fun to walk you through all of them today. So I am now at my home. So we all know what that means.

Or do we know what that means? It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of making talking magic, I'm not going to be making magic, I'm going to be making dinner instead because I'm home. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. But as I am home, that means this is the end of my drive to work or drive from work. So I will see you all next time. Hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast.

Bye bye.