Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1174: The Un- Line

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about what divides normal Eternal-legal Magic mechanics from silver-bordered and acorn mechanics.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I brought my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today I'm gonna talk about the online What I mean by that is There is normal magic design and there is silver border acorn madness. That is undesigned So I'm going to talk about what undesigned is I'm going to talk about sort of over border, acorn madness that is undesigned. So I'm gonna talk about what undesign is. I'm gonna talk about sort of what separates

undesigned from normal. And so I'm just gonna walk through like, so let me give some history and then I will dive into this topic. So in 1998, we created a set called Unglued. So the way Unglued came about was, Joel Mick and Bill Rose came up with an idea for a set that was not tournament legal.

So understand at the time, this is back in 98 or 96 or 97 when we first started designing it, there are basically play fell into two categories. There was casual play, you played at home. There was tournament play, you played in a game, you know, in a game store or something and it was sanctioned. And the idea was that there's a lot of things that go on and there's a lot of non-sanctioned

play. And there's some fun designs that just are problematic in tournaments, but that we can make it in, but we can make cards, that there's fun designs there. And I took it, they gave it to me. I ended up adding, I added a humor element to it. And I was very much inspired by, when I was a kid, I used to be an amateur magician.

And there was a company that made card tricks. And one of the things they made is they made a deck that just had weird cards in it. Three and a half of clubs, a black queen of hearts. It would just had weird, there were lots of weird cards. And it didn't tell you what to do with them. It's just kind of here's a bunch of fun, weird things. What can you do with that? And I, I really approach unglued in the sense of, I just want to make things that will be cool

that at the time didn't exist. That is where full art lands came from. That is where token cards came from. We just did a lot of different things. And so anyway, that was 1998. Then in 2004, six years later, we made Unhinged. So that was the second onset. Oh, so the first onset was called unglued. We were going to make a second onset called unglued two that was supposed to come out a year or two later, got put in a hay, we never made it. Some of those cards did get put into Unhinged, not all of them. Then 13 years later, took a while for the third one, in 2017 was Unstable. That was the third onset. Then like 220-ish we made a box called Unsanctioned that was mostly reprint of old Uncards, but

there were a handful, I'm trying to remember how many, 10 to 16. There were a bunch of new cards, not a lot, but there's some new cards that we made for that product. And then in 2022, we put out Unfinity, which was the fourth sort of booster pack unset, not coming unsanctioned as its own separate thing. Okay, so I've had it designed five different times for unsets, and so today is sort of like what makes something an uncard a

Couple things I need that sort of Clarifies it the first off the line the unline moves for example in Unglued for the first time I made cards that rolled dice Before that we had some coin flipping cards like Arabian Nights had coin flipping But for the first time ever you were rolling a six sided die and the idea is that

the reason that we Didn't want to put that in normal tournament play or in tournament play if you will Was there's a high variance in die rolling for example. There's a card called Elvish impersonator and the idea is you roll two dice two six-sided dice the first one is his power The second one is his topness. I thought I think it cost three in the green So the idea is it could be as small as a 1-1 It can be as big as a 1-1, it could be as big as a 6-6, but it could be a 6-1 or a 1-6 or a 3-3 or they can at large end. In tournaments, the idea

that whether or not this card is really good or not was fate, was not a good idea for tournaments. Not that it was a bad idea for casual fun play, high variance is actually fun, high variance isn't great for tournament settings. So we chose not to put die rolling. So ungluted die rolling, unhinged to not, but unstable did, unsanctioned did, and then while in the middle we're doing infinity, we make Dungeon Dragons, the first Dungeon Dragons set, Adventures in the um, dungeon dragons. Um, the, the first dungeon dragon set, uh, dentures and forgotten realm.

Uh, and they decided in that to use some 20 sided die. Now they were very restricted in what they could do because they didn't want the cards using die rolling to be tournament level cards. So they'd be very careful on what, and. Unsets can still do die rolling and have a little bit higher variance. But anyway, when the nice thing about die rolling is when introducing it to a format like eternal which is what we did with the Acorn cars and infinity,

you can have high variance and still be at a much lower pole, a much lower power level than the format is at. But in standard it's a little trickier also they were using 20 sided dice in Adventures of the Forgotten Realm 20 sided dice are obviously a higher variance than a six sided die anyway my point on die rolling is the line is not fixed that we could do something and go oh this is clearly on this side of a line and then things change.

And the other thing about the unsets in general is we tend to test out new area and push in new directions and that some of that space may be down the road. There's definitely cards in early unsets that just we could do now that wasn't a, like now isn't a problem where in the time it was pushing things a little bit. Okay, so, okay, so the first corollary there is, the line can change, so it's not like it's a,

the line itself evolves with time. And as magic does more and more design stuff and pushes in newer space, sometimes we encroach on some of that, some of the un-space, if you will. Okay, so, the other big thing to understand is that there really are two different categories, well sorry, I'll say three different categories of undesigns. Category one is it just doesn't work in the rules.

The rules can't technically handle it. The way rules work is when we make something in the rules, it has to work 100% of the rules. The rules can't technically hand out. The way rules work is when we make something in the rules, it has to work 100% of the time. And there are definitely design spaces where the player, a perfect example of this is a card called staying power from unhinged. Staying power is an enchantment that says all effects that end at end of turn last until the end of the game. So if I giant grow something with staying power out, that creatures permanently for the rest of the game a plus three plus three.

And staying part is a really good example where 99% of the time you'll get it right. Like staying power, most of the time you understand what it's doing and you can make it work right. But there are weird corner cases where it causes problems. And the way to think of it is imagine a computer is programming something. A computer has to be absolute. For the rules to work it has to be airtight. There can't be hypotheticals that don't work. But most of the time it just works the way you think it works.

Like, staying power is a good example of a car that people seem surprised we can't make in black border in normal magic and the answer is oh There's just weird technical side corner cases. It can't handle another card was a car called far out in Infinity where you got to choose as many modes as you wanted to and that's another card where most of the time it works There's a few small exceptional cards where it doesn't work. And because it doesn't work on those cards, sometimes when you make a choice, they can't all coexist. That that has to be one thing. You're choosing between choices and it's not additive.

So that causes problems. So the first category is there's things that we make that just don't work in the rules. We like to make things that make sense. It's not like I wanna make things that are, there aren't logical ways to follow what happened. And the best of this category are things where the players don't even have any confusion.

It just feels like, yeah, Magic could do this and technically it can't, but it feels that way. And there's a lot of things. And once again, sometimes we do things that I've been told we can't do and later we find out a way to do them like the idea of putting trample on a direct damage spell I mean we still technically take a trample on I think but we do something that's very similar or maybe we can't I think we did put

trample on you know some of it is just figuring out how to execute it sometimes we figure it out sometimes we can. The second category are things that work well within the rules, but tournaments kind of don't want them. The classic example there are sub games. So the first sub game was made in Arabian Nights by Richard Garfield called Shahariz Odd. You stop the game you're playing, you use your library and go play a separate game. And then the outcome of that game affects the original game.

Sub games got moved to a silver border soon as silver border got made. We have done sub cards, unglued did not have a sub game card, but unhinged, unstable and infinity all did. But that's a good example is the rules can handle. In fact, Tug of War, the green one, I think it's called Tug of the, the green, the green one, I think it's called Tuckawar, the green, uh, sub game in infinity when we were dividing things into Acorn and

Eternal. Um, so, uh, Jess Dunks is the rules manager. So he was in the meeting. He's like, Hey, the rules can handle this. So we actually put it for a while. Um, we put, uh, uh, so report, I, I, sorry, made it eternal. But then at the slideshow, so many people were like, why is this eternal? It wasn't that it couldn't be eternal. It didn't felt like it was eternal. Sub games aren't great for tournaments

because they have less space. And there's just things that, there are things that don't, aren't good for tournament play. So we decided, okay, sub games exist. Yeah, the rules can handle them, but we're going to keep that an un-thing. The third category is what I'll sort of call silly things. Go get me a drink, click like a chicken, where it's, it is just stuff that pushes in other

directions and I'll get to that that whole area and then last area once again it's not that rules can't handle it although it gets a little fuzzy like what counts you doing something is a little can be a little fuzzy but it just once again it doesn't quite feel right so some of the dividing has to do with what do we want happening in tournaments we don't want people clucking in tournaments we don't want people affecting other games in terms of that. There's just things we don't want to do. Okay, so now let's start getting to the actual line. Okay, so probably the most important difference between normal magic and un-magic is the

following rule. In tournament magic, all cards that have the same name in English are identical according to the rules. So no matter what version I have, no matter what printing I have, it has to function the same in tournaments. Now we do do errata, sometimes cards change, but when that happens, all cards change. So all cards have to be the same. In unsets, the rule is, if a card asks you to care about the quality of a card, you actually have to look

at the actual card you're playing. Now, this actually, there's a lot of design space in this. And the reason for that is, there's a lot of design space in this. And the reason for that is there are a whole bunch of things that can change between printings. Meaning since tournaments have to say, hey, version, you know, card, printing A and printing B have to be identical, that between printing, things can change. So for example, cards can change rarity. We could print a card at an uncommon, but then we printed it as a common. We can reprint a card at rare, and then we printed it as an uncommon. Rarity can change, and we can go up in rarity. Rarity can change. So we can't care about

rarity because two copies of the same card could be different rarity. Likewise, we can't care about art or artists. Art and artists will change or can change between printings. We can't care about watermarks because watermarks change between printing. Like I said, we can't care about rarity. We can't care about collector number. We can't care about collector number That there we can't care about frame treatment There's there's just things that we're not allowed to care about and some of those things are quite fun You know some of those things like it's neat to care about rarity or artists like some of those are fun But it's and it's not that players get confused by them once again I can look at a card to the artists is, but the general rule that we play with

in constructed keeps us from making those cards. And there are a lot of fun cards, there are a lot of fun attributes to care about. Part of sort of being fun in the game is just finding weird and different things. And we have cared about all sorts of things. We've cared about collector number, we've cared about, we've cared about things that are weirder things,

but that's fun because we can in the unworld. The other big thing that's important to understand is a rule about how names work. So a card has a name, obviously in different languages, as a translation of that name, but one of the rules mechanically is that we can't care about the quality of a name. We can care if a card is called a specific thing.

So we can care, is this card called whatever? Does it have the following name? We can refer to names as a whole, but we can't refer to qualities of names. For example, we can't say, does this name start with a certain letter? We can't say, are there two words in this name? We can't say, is a particular word in the name. Like Ursus Hot Tub is a card in Unhinged

where you can discard a card to go get to tutor for another card that has the same word in its name. That's not viable. Double header cares about if the card has two words in its name. We have cards that care about what it starts with. All that, none of that is viable. We also, we can't care about words.

Like we can, you can talk about whether a certain function exists and that function could be tied to a word but we can't say does the following word appear we can't we can't do that I can't say go fetch a card with the word target in it that's not something that normal eternal magic can do un cards can do that the other thing is I can't refer to text specifically, meaning I can't say are there three lines of text, four lines of text, how many lines of text? Because different printing for lines of text can be different. Oh, and also I can't care about flavor text. Flavor text can vary between sets. There are some Uncarts that specifically

care about what the flavor text is, and we can't do that because of the meta rule. Other things that you're allowed to care about in un-territory, you can care about the quality of where you are playing. For example, I could care about what time of day it is. I can care about whether it's day or night. I can care about whether I can see objects in the room of where I'm playing.

The idea being that card, normal Magic cards, Eternal, Legal, Tournament cards need to function. They need to play the same every time you play them, no matter where you play them, when you play them. But Uncards can vary. That this card you play them, when you play them, but on cards can vary. That this card, you know, there's a card, there's an elf card that cares about what time of day it is. And it's more powerful, like it's more powerful at 12

than it is at one. So if you're playing late morning or late at night, it can be more powerful. But we're not allowed to do that. Cards can't change value based on external things. Another thing we can't do that. Cards can't change value based on external things. Another thing we can't do that's external is we can't care about or impact other games. There are a handful of cards we've made in Unsets where you can mess and interact with other games. Now, the

rule about interacting with other games is those games have to also be playing in ungame because we don't want you messing with game. We don't want you like someone's in the middle of a tournament and you mess with them somehow from another game. So it's limited to things that only interact with other un-games. But it is fun. There's a lot of fun interaction. I remember once I was doing spell slinging where people

can come up and play me, and there were two of us. So someone waited till both I and the person next to me and other wizard person was free. And then he and his friend played in that game. And what they did was he was playing me and his friend had cards that interact with other games that were interacting with me. So it's sort of like two different decks were fighting me.

And I did not win that game. I don't think I won that game. Oh, I take it back. I know I had arm wrestle. It's the only time there's a there's an uncut that makes you arm wrestle It's the only time I ever won an arm wrestle, but I think I lost that game overall Another thing that we can't do in normal magic is We allow you to fetch cards from outside the game

but we don't allow you to go and purchase product as we're talking about Booster Tutor. Booster Tutor is a card that first showed up in Unhinged and both Unstable and Infinity did a variant on it. There's just a lot of fun. Going to packs and opening them up is a lot of fun. Players are very fond of fun. Going to packs and opening them up is a lot of fun. Players are very fond of it. So the idea is you can go get a specific card from outside the game, but even then certain formats, I mean in tournaments you need to get it from your sideboard. I know a commander doesn't really,

there's no wishing in commander, so certain things don't work in commander. Anyway, but the idea to go get a booster is a lot of fun and people really enjoy it, but it just felt wrong. There's a ramization element that we don't like and we don't want to make people in the middle of the tournament have to like buy something. Okay, the next area that we can do in Un-Territory that we can't do in normal is people like copy effects. The game can handle certain copy effects. I can copy one card, no problem. I can copy one aspect of one card and copy one aspect of another card, no problem. But that when you start getting some of the things that we start doing, there's a card called Grisilda Monster Matcher

where you smash two cards together. Because you don't know the quality of the two cards you're smashing together. What's that? I'm gonna sneeze. Sorry. Because the nature of smashing two different things together is weird interactions can happen.

In normal magic, if I just copy one thing, okay, I can copy all that one thing. If I copy two things, but I delineate what I'm copying, I get the power from this card and the substance from that card. Because you're delineating it, you can do that. But when you start getting a little more open-ended, like copy card A and card B at the same time, you start getting into a weirdness. And so that's something where we're where we can't quite do that in normal thing Another rule that we have one of the things that unsets a lot of the undesigned is about there's some rules that we have In magic that we do not cross

One of the ones is we do not allow a player to put a card They do not own in a hidden zone, which means that if I can't put somebody else's card in my hand, I can't put somebody else's card in my library. The reason for that essentially is we don't want people mismanaging other people's cards. We don't want it. I shuffle in my library and you forget about it and then you don't take the card. So there's just rules about that. It's a rule. We don't do it. We've never broken it. But on cards like breaking rules. So

like there's a card called X in unstable, which is a spy and you can put them in your opponent's hand and then he cast spells out of your opponent's hand. There's stuff like that that you can't do. Other things that are related to that are stuff like, I can't draw off my opponent's library because I can't put their cards in my hand. But, you know, Unstable has a card that lets you do that. We have cards that let you do that. And so the idea is that particular rule, the rule that you can't touch your opponent's cards,

I mean, you can interact with them on the battlefield if you steal them and such, but I can't put them in my hand We also had a card from unglued called mirror mirror where you switch sides So I'm now playing my opponent so I'm holding their cards and playing their cards That's the kind of thing we just wouldn't do in normal magic Another thing that we really have fun with that we've done on a few cards I think the first card to do with the call yet another aether vortex was unhinged.

So yet another aether vortex, you flip the top card of your library. I think both players flip it up. And then any card that's any permanent that's on the top of the library is also on the battlefield. And so it concurrently exists on your library and in your battlefield.

We had a card in unstable that could be in your hand and on the battlefield. We've messed with them. So the idea is being in more than one zone at a time is not something the rules actually happen. It gets very wonky, very fast. There's a lot of fun interaction and yet another Aether Vortex is one of my favorite designs. It's a really fun card but it's one of those things, once again, where it makes a lot of very weird corner case things happen that the rules just can't handle. OK, next up.

Oh, an offshoot of not being able to put cards in your hand is like we have a card called Letter Bomb An offshoot of not being able to put cards in your hand is, like we have a card called a letter bomb that you shuffle into your opponent's library. So once again, the hand's a hidden zone, the library's a hidden zone. You can't put cards you don't own in the zone that you don't own, so it's a little hand in the library.

Okay, now let's get to the physical component. So there are certain cards. In normal Magic, Magic is a mental game. When you play Magic in a tournament setting, we want it to be solely a mental game. We don't want it, like I said, in Unhinged, we made a cycle of cards that you do mini games. There was a breath holding contest. There was a arm wrestling. There was a staring contest. There's rock paper scissors. So there's these little and the idea is I don't want to why did I lose my game? I couldn't hold my breath as long or we'll do things. Some cards and physical components you have to like there's definitely cards we've made

Cards of physical coordinates, you have to like, there's definitely cards we've made where you have to balance cards on your hand or your forehead. There's a card in infinity called Form of the Second, what is it called? Click on the name. It's a card that you put your library on your head or seven cards of your library on your head,

or sorry, six cards, you're the seventh card. And then you have to balance it on your head if it falls off, then you lose the effect. There's a card called Charm School, where you have to balance cards on your head. Anyway, and there's cards that restrict you, there's one where you can't use a certain hand. There's things that we can do

where we create physical implements. There's a card called Handi Dendi Clone Machine, where your hands are the tokens, the token maker. So there's a lot of physicality that there's a lot of fun. There's a lot of interaction. And one of the cool things about sort of on territory is saying, hey, you can use the magic game to do things that are kind of out of the ordinary. And that physicality is not something we want in tournaments that we we want someone to play and it's about their mind and not about can they do certain actions. And sometimes the actions can be on the silly side.

I mean, a lot of the unsets are trying to embrace kind of doing things that are out and embracing the fun of what magic can be. I think the unsets in my mind are kind of the funnest version, like magic in which you're trying to have fun and nothing else matters. It's just about having a blast and doing crazy things and it really pushes boundaries in what you can do.

And the cool thing about magic is because magic is you build your own deck, like I'll give you lots of weird and silly things you can do. You choose which of those you want to do. One of the things we did in Unglued that stopped doing after unglued was cards that make that your cards force your opponent to sort of physically do something. Nowadays we mostly put the restrictions on you. You sign up for it, it impacts you. But there are definitely some early cards where I can physically restrict my opponent. We

gotta be more careful about that. Or I make my opponent do something silly. There was a card in UNGLUE 2, it didn't get called, I'm a Little Teacup, where you force your opponent to do the I'm a Little Teacup song. And it's sort of like, oh, look, they didn't sign up for this. And so that's one of our philosophies in the UN design is, hey, it's fine to do weird and quirky things, but let's make sure the person doing the weird and quirky things signed up for the weird and quirky things. And so different philosophy now is, hey, weird things can happen, but you opt

into doing them and you do the weird things. There can be freaky interactions that the opponent has to interact with, but that's different than the physical stuff. A side effect of the physical stuff is vocal things. So for example, there are cards that make you say things. Carnivorous Death Parrot, the upkeep cost is you have to say something. There's a whole mechanic named gotcha in Unhinged, which is not a great mechanic, but if you said a certain thing or performed a certain action, your opponent could call gotcha on you Once again, this is breaking sort of the rule we later got into where I don't want to keep you from doing what you want to do But anyway things that have a vocal component that is also

clearly an unterritory the final area Is sort of what I'll call trivia There's two variants of this one is like there's a card called is sort of what I'll call trivia. There's two variants of this. One is, like there's a card called Squirrel Farm and unglued where I show you a card from my hand. If you can't name the artist on the card, I get a squirrel, a squirrel token.

And the idea is, hey, how well do you know your artists? And some people really well know the artists. Some have no idea at all. Now after you show them the art, you have to reveal the artist. So if you do it a second time, at least can they remember what you showed before? I made a score on a farm deck,

and there's a lot of fun in waiting the just right amount of time to re-show them a card to go, oh, I can't remember it. But anyway, that kind of trivia where, once again, we want it, we want it to be a mental game, but not about remembering what exists. The corollary of that is a card called Richard Garfield PhD, where the idea is you can turn any card into any other card.

And that is, in my mind, a form of trivia. It's sort of like, oh, this card costs two in a red. How many cards do I know in the history of magic that cost two and a red? And that is, being how many thousands of cards there are, that is really hard to track. And so if you wanna sign up for that, once again, great, it's fun. People love mental magic and it's great that we can make cards like Richard Garfield PhD

that essentially are mental magic. But we don't wanna put that on a tournament. And so that is something else that we do. And like I said, a lot of this, I mean hopefully today is, there's a lot of fun space. There's a lot of neat cards out there. I think many people have had fun with astronaut's coupon, which forces your opponent to go get you a drink. There's cheaty face, you can cheat into play. There's all sorts of things that just really break, that like, it's a good thing that magic

is hard and fast rules. We want when you're playing a card in a tournament setting that there's a definitive way that it works, and the rules explain exactly how it works, and the judges know exactly what's going on. There's a reason that we're not doing things that take up space or take up time or you know like for example early magic in alpha there was chaos orb where you flipped the chaos orb in the air but it turned out to be a huge problem for tournament because the correct answer to dealing with a chaos orb is to spread your cards wide apart and it made it hard to play in stores anyway

so like The thing about undesigned is I think there's a lot of really fun play there might not be for everybody some people might like magic in the more confined tournament sort of setting or You know, I I understand that we push in different areas I think what I found is that different players enjoy different aspects of what's going on some players want the rules to work absolutely they don't like cards that are fuzzy in the rules some people like to be a mental game and don't like cards that get physical some people you know and some of them can get silly so like

I said there's really the whole idea Undesign is magic can be more than the constraining element of tournament magic. It can be more than that. And there's a lot of fun things. And because we have a place to do stuff like that, it's great that we can do cards that don't quite work. And so that is really, the reason I'm so fond of Undesign, A a I think it lets you do things that you don't normally

Do but be it just allows magic to be more That if you want magic to have some of these qualities to them you can the game can do that. That's something that can happen But it's an opt-in game you choose what to do And so that's great if you don't like that aspect of the game You don't have to put it in but there are people that might really enjoy it. And that I get not everybody wants to have to face a cheating face. Not everybody wants to go get a drink for their fellow player. And that's okay. So, you know, that is why it exists. But anyway, I hope this was a good insight into sort of showing the line between what is sort of traditional normal magic and what is more casual break-the-boundaries

magic that the Unsets are. Anyway guys, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means that I'm at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.