Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1181: Backwards Compatibility

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

When we design new Magic cards and mechanics, we have to be conscious of how those cards will play with the cards and mechanics that already exist. In this podcast, I talk about what we do to make sure they play well together.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. Well, do we? It's time for drive from work So again, I have a podcast tomorrow I'm going on vacation and so this is my last chance to get a podcast I've been working on on backward compatibility So I thought I would try one last chance of it. I think I can do a slightly better version Okay, so what is backward compatibility? Let's start there. So Magic has lots of cards because we've been making this game for 31 years. So backward compatibility talks about making when you make something how much does it interact with stuff we've already made before. So I'm going to be, in order to get into this topic,

I needed to go through some vocabulary and talk through some concepts. And then I will leap into the core of backward compatibility. Okay, so first I need to explain, there's a spectrum of, from the Magic Cards we made. On one end is what we call modular, and the other end is what we call linear

so the idea of a modular card is it's You can take one a modular card and put it anywhere. It's a card that just works in a vacuum the more modular the more it works in a vacuum classic examples might be a kicker or Flashback or Cycling like if there's just a good card with one of those abilities, you can just put it in your deck and you can play it. You don't need any other cards. The other end of the spectrum is linear. Linear means it begets you do something. A classic example of that would be Goblin King. Goblin King says all your goblins get plus one plus

one. Well that is telling you play a lot of goblins. This card is better the more goblins you play. So the idea of the spectrum is how much is this card telling you what to play with it. The more linear it is the more it tells you, the more modular it is the less it tells you. Now there's another thing that we what we call parasitic. What parasitic means is that the things you need for this card, and usually it's when you're talking about a linear card, because linear cards need things, only shows up in the set that it appears in. So for example, Splice onto Arcane from Champions of Kamigawa is a very linear mechanic, right?

In order to play, the way it works is, I can play the cards that have Splice into Arcane, I can play normally, they're on Instance and Sorceries, but I can attach the ability to an Arcane spell, an Arcane is a subtype that only goes to Instance and Sorceries, meaning I can pay mana to sort of play it an extra time. I can make it a rider on an existing spell, but I can only splice onto an arcane spell. Well, Champion of Kamigawa was where arcane spells premiered, so if you wanted to use this mechanic, literally you could only use this mechanic. I mean, you could have four copies of the same card, all the cards that had spliced onto arcane were arcane, you could splice one copy onto

another copy, so maybe it's not 100% linear linear but it's very very linear that in order play and it's parasitic because it's linear but the things you need to play it with are only in the set that it came out now um linear things are sorry parasitic things don't need to stay parasitic if you make more of them. A classic example would be slivers. When we made slivers in original temp- or in Tempest, in Tempest, um, slivers make other slivers better. So if I'm playing a muscle sliver that makes all my slivers have plus one plus one, I want to play other slivers. So it's very linear. And at the time, the only slivers that existed were in the set. So it started as a very very parasitic linear and parasitic mechanic. But when we got to onslaught or legions

technically we made more slivers. And then in time-spiral we made more slivers. And then in a core set we made more slivers. So and then in Modern Horizons 1 we made more slivers. So we've had sets where we've made slivers. The more of them we make, it's still linear but the less parasitic it gets because parasitic is about where you can get things from and the idea of parasitic is it's not parasitic is kind of opposite of backward compatible. You cannot use it with old cards. You can only use it with new things and so the idea of being backward compatible is you want to make things that are not parasitic, that

are flexible and usable. Okay, so let's sort of dive into why does this all matter? And the reason I'm using linear and modular is just so I can explain some concepts here. Okay, so I am making a magic set. When we make a magic set, we we've done market research on this, what exactly do players want out of the magic set, you know, when we ask them what they want? So the top two things that they say they want, one is they want new things.

They want things they don't have. They want new, ooh, show me new stuff, and new mechanics and new things. They want new things. Second is they want cards they can play. They want cards that go, ooh, I like that card, and it fits into things that they can play. They want to play the cards.

So the challenge of making new mechanics is you wanna make things that, A, are new and exciting and different, but B, are something that people can play with. Now, modular mechanics are easy. If you can just take one of this card and throw it in a deck, well, take one and throw it in a deck. So modular are kind of self-correct, not mechanics are easy. If you can just take one of this card and throw it in a deck, well, take one and throw it in a deck. So modular are kind of self-correct, not a big problem.

Linear is a little more complicated, right? Because if I make a parasitic mechanic, that has a problem. So let me explain that problem. Okay, so once upon a time, the main format we designed for, at least constructed format, was standard. At the time, standard was two years worth of cards. Currently, standard is now three years worth of cards. And standard is a 60-card, four-of format.

What that means is you need 60 cards, and you can have up to four copies of every non-land, basic land. Because that is the case, if you wanna have a deck that's really in theme, meaning let's say for example, you want half of all your non-lands to be in your theme. So let's say you're having a new mechanic or whatever. Okay, I want half of my non-lands.

How many cards is that? Well, in 60 card four of it's like 7.5. So you need seven or eight cards. Okay, now let's contrast that against Commander. Commander is a 100 card Singleton format. So let's say you want to have half of all your 9 lands, that's about 30 cards. So the difference between 30 cards and 7 and a half cards is it's 4 times as many cards. And remember, when I say 30 cards, that means 30 cards in your colors that make sense to play in your deck.

So not just 30 cards in a booth in the set, but 30 cards that are relevant for what you need. So that's a lot more like 50, 60 cards, a lot of cards. And the reality is we can make enough cards in a normal You know normal premier set that you can play a 60 card for of with that theme We can do that. We can make enough cards that you can play that theme it is I won't say impossible, but very very very very hard to do so with commander. We just don't make enough cards This is the volume that you would need we don't make. So the challenge is we need to make new

exciting things and one of the formats we have to care about because it's a the most played tabletop format is Commander. How do we do that? That's that is the core of what we're talking about today. How do we make backward compatible? In an internal world, how do we make backward compatible stuff? There's a bunch of ways to do it, so I'm going to walk through some of the ways to do it, and then talk about some of the larger meta issues with it.

OK, number one way you could do it is you can go and find a theme that we've not we've not cared about but that exists in magic. And normally what we can do, I mean when I say find a theme, just find, pick a word. What's the word on a magic card that we can care about? My example for this would be Lizards from Bloomberg, Lizards Typal. I don't believe before Bloomberg there was a card that specifically cared about lizards, mechanically, but there are a lot of lizards, especially now that we made Viacino Lizards. There are a lot of lizards, so if you want to go make a lizard themed deck, you can. Like for

example, I'll use Bloomberg as my example, we're making Bloomberg. We want to make animals that you can go build decks out of. People want to do that. But one of the things we have to be conscious of is like raccoons. I believe before Bloomberg there three raccoons I believe one of which is silver border. Same with otters. There's just not a lot of otters. There's not a lot of rabbits.. There's not a lot of Mice. You know, that there are definitely creature types that if you wanted to make a commander deck of that creature type, we're just not giving you enough cards in Bloom Burrow, plus the cards that exist to do that. But there are other things like birds, like rats, like squirrels, where we have made more

cars, like lizards, where we have made more cars, and so there is a possibility that you can do it. I'm not saying necessarily it's the greatest deck in the world, but at least you actually can build it. Also there are stuff like changelings, there are some filler that you can use, and hey, maybe you can even make an Otter deck with change Then but that's not really an Otter deck I mean, it's a little cheaty like if you only have you know, you need enough otters to feel like an otter deck

But the nice thing about it is changelings do let you take some of the newer themes in these Maybe be able to do it But that's the point is the the backward compatibility is I need to make sure that when I make something that you can have access to the rest of Magic to fill that out. And like I said, I'm not particularly worried about the modular stuff because, hey, I can go play one of that. It's the linear stuff that we have to concern ourselves with. And when you make a Magic set, you want a fair share of modular and linear things. Yes, you want some modular

things. You want some things that, hey, this is just generally useful. But players also like having directive themes. That's very important. One of the reasons typal is so popular is, hey, I get it. I want lizards. I can go search a database for lizards and find a lizard card. That you want to have themes that someone can say, I want lizards. I can go search a database for lizards and find all the lizard cards. That you want to have themes that someone could say, I want to build that deck. And using a simple database, you can find cards that go in that deck.

Now, there are people that want more complicated things. We make those as well. But the challenge today is how to do backward compatibility in a way that allows you to do new things. I mean, be aware, we also want to bring back things and do themes again and bring back mechanics. So part of making themes could just be taking themes that there already are enough cards and bringing them back. A related thing we can do is, remember I talked about the slivers, so I'll talk about a related

thing, energy. So when energy first came out, it came out in Kaladesh and then Aether Revolve, there just wasn't enough energy to really build, I mean, you can build it as a component of your commander deck. You can have a little package of energy, but it's hard to make an energy, a devoted energy deck. There's weren't enough cards that were energy. But we did fallout and the science deck used energy and then we used we made modern horizons 3 and it had a whole energy archetype In fact multiple archetypes to make use of energy

So all of a sudden one of the things we can do is we can go and find themes That there they didn't meet the threshold and make enough so they meet the threshold So that's something for example we do in like modern horizon sets where okay let's find decks of people kind of like and you know but that has it isn't quite all the way there. Now part of it might be in modern it needs more power or commander just needs more cards and so we can make that. So we can sort of find themes that exist but don't exist in high end of volume and we can do them. Another So we can sort of find themes that exist but don't exist in high end of volume and we can do them. Another thing we can do is we can take something that exists in Magic

but we can find a new way to use it. So a classic example of that would be landfall. So landfall is from original Zendikar. The idea of landfall is whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, it triggers, right? Well, you're already playing land. Land was what, you know, it's backward compatible. Land exists. There's lots of lands in Magic. But it made you care. Normally, the way you normally play is unless I'm trying to bluff, you know, maybe it's the last card in my hand. Sometimes you hold land to make people think it's more. But normally, barring that, hey, if I can play a land, I'll play a land.

I'll build up my land so that I can catch larger things that the game goes on. But all of a sudden, Zendikar came out with landfall and like, oh, well, maybe even though I can play a land, strategically it's not the right thing to play a land. Or late on in the game sometimes when play a land. Or, you know, late on in the game sometimes when you want to draw something, normally you want to draw not a land. Drawing a land late in the game is a bad thing. But in Zen no Karn, it could be a good thing. So it, one of the things that it does is you can make a mechanic that changes how you, it can take a core part of the game, something the game already has and makes,

but just makes you think about it differently. It says, oh, lands matter, but all of a sudden, lands entering the battlefield matter. That's just a little bit different than things before. And so it makes you have to rethink how that works. OK, next, sort of related to that, is we can make something that takes a component that exists in Magic, maybe not something as simple as a card type, but you can take something that exists in Magic and care about it in a way you've not cared about before.

My example here will be committing a crime from Outlaws of Thunder Junction. So the idea of targeting your opponent with spells and abilities is something Magic does, has done. Terror wasn't alpha, like you could target your opponent from the very beginning of the game, but once again, there wasn't something that cared about it. So even though you could do it, there wasn't something that said, hey, play a lot of these together. But all of a sudden we make cards that care about committing a crime, and it encourages

you to start to want to play these cards, and maybe play more of these cards, to play them together. And that's another way we can take a theme and sort of push toward background compatibility, is sort of find a new design space that cares about things that we haven't cared about before. And you can see, by the way, there's a lot of connective tissue here, what I'm talking about. We can take a mechanic that exists but doesn't have enough to it.

We can take a mechanic and use it in a slightly different way. We can take a mechanic. A lot of what we're doing is finding ways to make something new out of something old. Another way to do that is mixing and matching. So for example, we were making Kamigawa in the End Dynasty And we wanted to care about ninjas. The problem was there's just not a lot of ninjas

Ninjas showed up for the first time in Kamigawa block, the champions of Kamigawa block And then they showed up a little bit of some supplementary stuff, a few core sets But there just weren't a lot of ninjas. So if we knew we did ninja typo, there just isn't a lot of ninjas. So we said is there something similar to ninjas? We said yes, robes. Ninjas are kind of like robes. So what if we care about ninjas and robes and likewise care about samurai and warriors?

That we can sometimes take something that there's not enough of, link it to something there's more of, and we can make it work. A similar related thing is batching. So in Dominaria, we were doing a historical theme. We wanted to care about history. And so because of sets around it, we couldn't do the graveyard. So we came up with a list of things we thought kind of represented history Artifacts which are objects of the past Legendary creatures some of them are old enough because it's fantasy that they are they are themselves are from the past Some of them might be you know people who are connected to people from the past and then we had sagas which are stories of the past And the idea

is, Batching said, okay, I want to care about history. Well, I wanted to find these things, two of which, artifacts and legendary things, go back to, you know, I mean, artifacts go back to alpha, legends, legendary creatures and stuff, go back to legends. Those are both in the first year of magic. Now, sagas we're new so we can mix and match old and new But the idea is batching sort of says, okay I'm gonna take things you care about maybe some old maybe some new but I'm gonna mix and match them in a way that makes You care about them differently having ninja with rogues made decks you hadn't made before And so a lot of ways that we can make new things is by combining old things in ways. We haven't combined them before that we can make new things is by combining old things in ways we haven't combined them before.

And like I said, the loading fruit is like lizards where we haven't done it at all, but then even once we've done lizards, we could combine them into something larger. And that's the different layers that you can do something you haven't done or there's not enough volume and make enough volume. You can do something you haven't done. You can take something you have done and mix it with something you haven't done. There's a lot of layers of how you can do it. Another thing that we do, I'll use devotion for my example. So we made a mechanic called, what was it called, Chroma. It first showed up kind of unnamed in FutureSight. And then a year later, it even tied.

And the way Chroma worked was that it looked at colored mana symbols in mana cost it could be in your hand it could be in the battlefield in a graveyard it just looked all sorts of different places and it had a very generic name to do so but through a common I mean it we did not make it we did not make it something you could build around we did not give it a good flavor and we did not make that many good could build around. We did not give it a good flavor. And we did not make that many good cards with it. So Chroma ended up being a dud.

People didn't really like it. But we're working on Theros. We're trying to figure out how to show the influence of the gods. And we're like, you know what? We really had high hopes for Chroma. What if we figure out what we went wrong? And we said, OK.

The biggest problem with Chroma was two big problems. One was it was very undirected. I had cards in my hand, in my graveyard, in battlefields. It just didn't have a cohesive theme. Like if it only looks at one place, then all your cards work together, right? The thing that makes one card work makes another card work. So we said, okay, we're just gonna make it on the battlefield. The second thing is chroma, literally the Latin word for color. It's very generic, not exciting, not flavorful. Devotion, on the other hand, is, oh, it represents a devotion to a god or another generic, other kinds of devotion, but that's very flavorful

so We took a mechanic that was kind of disparate made it more connected more linear more directive and said, okay now I want to play all these cards in the same deck together and they will play well together. Oh, I have you know, I Have a devotion to green. Okay, play lots of green things with lots of green symbols. And I can play a green deck and play creatures that have green, green, green, green in the mana cost and, you know, get a lot of green. So that's another way is we can sort of take something we've done before and sort of fix it.

And a lot of these things, you'll notice, like a lot of this is just how do we take things. Sometimes it's not enough volume. Sometimes is we didn't do it correctly. Sometimes is, you know, we want to combine it with something else. But that is something we have to think about. I mean, the real, the key here to doing this is understanding that part of living in the eternal world we live in now is like one of the exciting things about magic is that there's a great history. Like if you want to go play chess and chess is a very old game chess there are what six pieces

six unique pieces that's it. I mean you have multiples of some of them but there's six unique pieces magic has over 27, six unique pieces that's it I mean you have multiples of some of them but there's six unique pieces magic has over 27,000 unique pieces that is kind of I mean it can be intimidating I guess but it also is kind of what makes magic magic right that you can you have such options and so we really when making and it's not that we can't make new things I mean I'm all for I mean so another thing to get into this is part of making a part of being backward compatible isn't just looking to the past part of it also is looking toward the future so for example when we make new creature types we think about how

how it would work are there places we can do it? Like we, when we make mechanics, we think about what we call future-proofing. Like how, how are we doing something now that will be fruitful later? So the metaphor I would use for this one is the lumberjacks, when they cut down trees, one of the things they do is not just cut down the trees, they plant new trees, right? That they're cutting down the lumber, but they're also thinking about the trees, they plant new trees, right? That they're cutting down the lumber but they're also thinking about the future. And the idea is, hey, if we just chop all the trees and don't replace them, there won't be trees. We need to have more trees.

And so part of making magic is really thinking about, it's thinking forward. And we do that in a lot of different ways. You know, some of them are creative in story, but a lot of them are mechanic. A lot of them are, hey, what can we do? Sometimes it's a matter of making a mechanic and not doing everything a mechanic can do, because like, oh, someday we can bring it back and do that new thing with it. For example, when we made transforming double face cards, we understood modal double face cards. A day after making transforming double face cards,

we made modal double face cards. When you're experimenting with double face cards and what they can do, it's pretty obvious. We've made split cards. It's just evolution of split cards. So we came up with it. We took a while to make that. When we made Planeswalkers, we understood that they could have static abilities. We purposely kept ourselves making static abilities for a while so that we could mine other aspects. So part of it is thinking where we can go and sometimes that's holding off. Sometimes that, hey, one day, for example, I will give something I've been up to. This is my own personal thing.

I'm a huge fan of robots. I like robots in pop culture. And we've been doing a lot of human versus beyond sets. So one of my things that I really early on said is, hey, if it's a robot, let's call it a robot. Let's make robot a creature type. And then let's use robot everywhere. And yes, there's a lot of variations on robots,

androids and all sorts of things. But I'm like, let's just call them all robots. So every time we made it, you know, we made transformers like, let's make them robots. They're robots in disguise, let's make them robots. And you know, as we're finding opportunities to do them, I'm like, let's make this a robot. So that someday, and I don't know when,

but someday I'll be able to work on a set and go, ooh, I can make robot type all because I've made enough robots that people can go make a robot deck. There's a lot of fun robots out there that you have to sort of plan ahead and that a lot of backward compatibility is forward planning to sort of get us there. And that is something that we're very conscious of. Like one of, I mean I've talked about this many times, but one of my role of head designers is I have to think about the future. You know, we have to keep making magic cards. In order to keep making magic cards, we have to plant

the trees. We can't just cut down the trees, we have to plant the trees. And so we do that. And there's a lot of like thinking about things and making decisions and a lot of care goes when we make something to think about what it will mean long term. And for example sometimes when we do something we think about oh are there hooks or you know you want to sort of think where things can lead and a big part of my job is potential is understanding what potential things have what what things can be, what things can become. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about that and I'm not alone, the rest of R&D does as well. And the

reason for that is so when I'm sitting here making a brand new set and I need to be backward compatible that you know I've done something to help me. I will say Magic is a very complex game. There are a lot of moving pieces. Like one of my fears if you go back you know when I first started working on Magic I actually honestly I was like oh one day I was gonna run out of stuff you know I mean there's yeah it's a game and there's cool things but aren't we good at some point run out. Now what I've discovered now doing this for almost 30 years is there's not endless simple space the thing that's most dangerous to

run out of is nice simple clean space that there's not endless amounts of and so we have to be careful with that but as far as just things you can care about there are a lot of things you can care about and the cool thing about magic is we can make new things to care about and then make enough of those and then we can care about those. So, but magic does have a lot of elements to it and it's been interesting to me how often we've been on a team and like, okay, we want to care about something. And usually like, committing crimes is a good example. I didn't start by saying let's care about something we never cared about before. That's not where I started.

I started with saying, hey I want to do committing a crime. Okay, well how do we do committing a crime? What what does committing a crime mean? How do we do that? And so you know I have to sort of think about that and interestingly as we thought about that and came up with a design for it, we ended up coming up with something that already existed, right? And so it didn't come about of us trying to be backward compatible, but I recognized when we were doing it

that we had made something backward compatible, and that is super valuable. And so that is something that we are well aware of. Yeah, in general, the largest sort of, I mean, the reason this is a topic today and the reason that I'm thinking about it is that we actually had a meeting where we just got all the designers together and we were talking about just future ideas, future things. What are the things we have to worry about? One thing we want to keep our eye on is different people care about different aspects and play

design trying to balance cards and set design. Everybody has their own sort of vantage point. I had to give a little talk. The thing I talked about was how backward compatibility is a what we call a choke point meaning that Really every set wants to be backward compatible and every set wants something new and now It's not that the new thing always has to be backward compatible It's not that we can't do new things that are modular I mean, there's there there's a lot of differences, but one of the things I was talking about was, Hey, look, in the age

we're at in the eternal age with commander and all the stuff, our new sets, our premier sets have to speak to a much larger game. They have to speak to the totality of magic and that, you know, I laid out for you, like there's a bunch of ways we've come up with to do that. But the metaphor I like to use is that all of you, the Magic players, are like the Borg. It's the enemy of one of the enemies in Star Trek. And the Borg is a collective, they're super smart, and the idea is whenever you use a weapon against them, they can process and understand it and come up with a solution to it so fast that the weapon isn't useful a second time. That any weapon you use against them, you have to use a different weapon. And a lot

of designing for magic is like that. Hey, we came up with a cool thing, but that cool thing, we only get to use it so often. Like batching is a good example. Batching is awesome. And there's time and place we can use batching. But if every did batching if we were batching constantly it itself will become a problem there be memory issues just understand what's going on it wouldn't be as exciting anymore like badging is cool and we can do batching every once in a while but that's the challenge is we only you know we come up with new things and we can do them every once in a while but we have a lot of sets we're making we're constantly looking and that is part of the challenge and something that I was

talking about is you know we need the new thing but we need the new thing that's also back compatible and that is a challenge there's not endless things that do that and so we really it's something that I'm on the lookout for and like I said we've found some solutions to it and we will keep finding more but it's something that's on my mind something I'm thinking about which sort of prompted me talking about this today. I mentioned this before like I've been doing this a long time why aren't I bored yet because magic keeps evolving and changing and we have brand new problems to solve there's never a lack of problems.

I've solved a lot of magic problems and you know what? Once I solve those problems, well, new things pop up, we got to solve those. So I'm knee deep in sort of understanding backwards. I spend a lot of time thinking about backward compatibility and especially linear, linear backward compatibility, things that are linear that are backward compatible. Modular is not as much an issue but so anyway something I've been thinking about and since I've been thinking about it I let all you think about it it's because I'm doing a podcast but anyway I'm now home so we

know what that means I mean it means instead of talking magic it's time for me to be talking dinner so anyway guys it was fun talking with you and I hope you enjoyed this sort of glance into yet another thing that we have to worry about. But now that I'm home and it's time for me to eat, I'm going to bid you all adieu and I will see you next time. Bye bye.