Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1199: Two-in-Ones, Part 1

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

This last fall, I wrote a two-part article about what I call "two-in-one cards," or "two-in-ones" for short. These are designs where more than one spell is represented on a single card. My dividing line is that each spell has its own name. There are a bunch of different ways we've made two-in-ones. This podcast talks all about their history. This is part one of two.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means It's time brother drive to work Okay, so today's podcast is based on an article I did Talking about the history of the two in one. So I guess I should start by saying what is the two in one? So the idea of a two-in-one is a card in which there are two cards on one card. Maybe two cards on the same face, maybe one on one face, one on the other face. But the idea is there's two distinct cards. And the way I'm defining that is that each card has its own name and maybe has its own

art. They don't always have their own art, but the idea in that the card represents sort of two unique cards. And that they have their own name and often their cost and they're just two distinct things. And we've done that a bunch of different times, and so I'm just sort of talking about the evolution of this and sort of big picture. Why do we make them them what are we doing? Okay, so the story starts in alpha Richard is making something called the boons Nicknamed the boons. So the idea was

It was a cycle of instance that all cost a single colored mana and then gave you three of something The blue one drew you three cards the black one gave you three of something. The blue one drew you three cards. The black one gave you three black mana. The red one did three damage to any target. And the green one was plus three plus three to target creature. The white one was a little trickier. There just wasn't, there wasn't a white option that was quite as good as the other ones.

Obviously people who know of the boons know that they're not really equal. The blue one is way more powerful than the others. But anyway, he ended up making a card called Healing Sav. So the interesting thing about Healing Sav is that either gained you three life or it prevented three damage. Meaning he gave you two options. Now the technology didn't exist at the time but would later

be what we call modes. So modes usually says choose one and then it has bullet points and from those you get to choose some number of them. Modes can tell you how many you choose and how many modes there are and such. But that was the earliest case and obviously we're talking alpha, where one card did two different things. Now it wasn't quite a two in one yet. They shared the same costs. They didn't have different names.

I'm only pointing out that from the very beginning, you could see the idea that one card could do multiple things. So anyway, we then get to unglued, which is a couple years later. And in unglued, one of the things, so unglued was the first unset. And the idea was, let's make a set that doesn't have a normal border, it had a silver border, and that we can do things we can't normally do. And the idea at the time was, it would be non-tournament legal, which kind of meant it was more stuff

that was more casual friendly. Now I did do stuff that the rules didn't allow. I mean, I really sort of broke all the boundaries I could. I talked about multiplayer play, I made tokens for the first time. I just was trying a lot of different things But one of the things I did was I went and talked to the graphic design slash printing teams And I said to them what can't like not I know we do what we do, but what can we do?

and one of the things they explained to me is The way we make magic cards we print them on a sheet and then we chop them up. But the sheet we print is like 11 by 11 usually. There's other variants. But anyway, what they said is, hey, you can have things bleed between cards as long as they're next to each other on the sheet. And from that, I got the idea of doing a card called BFM. So BFM, a big furry monster, was a card so big, 99.99, that it had to go on two cards. It had a left side and a right side.

In order to play BFM, you had to draw the left side and draw the right side, and then it was like 15 black man. It was very expensive. But the idea was, hey, if you you could do it if you could pull it off Here's this giant reward a 99 99 creature So it was the number one rated up. I'll say card the cards. I guess there's two of them in unglued So I was making unglued to the next year So unglued to unglued came out did really well out of the gate. We had never

done a supplemental set before, we overprinted it. So, I started making Unglue 2, but then they realized they had made too much. And basically, in order to make money selling magic sets, you have to both sell what you make and not make too much. And so, we made too much. So, anyway, UngLEW 2, after I made it, got put on hay, so it didn't come out. But anyway, in UNGLEW 2, I was playing around. So BFM, like, okay, BFM is popular. So if people like a card so big

that it has to go in two cards, what about a card so little that two cards fit on one card? And I made basically what I called the split cards. So the idea was I wanted the the graphic I was going for was that this one card held two little mini cards on it and the dimensions worked pretty well they've returned it sideways the dimensions were pretty close to having two little cards and the idea there's because they're two little cards, I went the full distance. They each had a name, they each had art, they each had a mana cost. And because I wanted them to really be different, I didn't like, I wasn't trying to make a mode where they

had the same cost. So what I did is I made five cycle of five split cards. Each one had two cards in a different color, ally colored so there was a white and blue there was a blue and black a black and red or red and green and green and white anyway I made them I got the art I mean they were all done and then the product got canceled I mean got put on Hades but Hades it never ended so it got canceled but in my heart of heart I really believed in the split cards. I thought the split cards were really clever. So a bunch of years later I'm working on Invasion. So Bill Rose was the lead designer on Invasion. It was

me and Mike Elliott and the set had a multicolor theme. So I'm like, okay, like these cards, you can't play, I mean, you can play them, I guess, in a monocolor deck if you're willing to just play one of the two abilities, but where they shine is in a multicolor deck where I can play both abilities. Invasion had a ally-colored theme. So I went to Bill and I said, Bill,

and we had mocked up what they looked like because we were making them. So I went to Bill and I said, Bill, and we had mocked up what they looked like because we were making them. So I showed them the finished product. And I had art, and these cars were very close to being printed. So I had a pretty finished version of it, with names and art and everything. And Bill liked it.

Bill said, that's pretty clever. Mike Elliott, on the other hand, did not like it. He hated it. He really, he tried to convince us not to do it. Now, I should stress at the time, we had never made a magic card outside of unglued that didn't look like a magic card. But in unglued, I messed around, I turned things sideways.

I had a card, two cards. I mean, I did a lot of things where I was messing around with what a magic card could be. And Mike felt, and this is often the case that we just had gone to a place We shouldn't magic cards look a certain way and this wasn't a magic card I argued it was a magic card just a little teeny tiny magic card But anyway, so Mike made a hard hard press not to do it But Bill liked it. I liked it we were two-thirds of the

team Bill put in the file then it came to the rest of it so it turns out I think Richard Garfield who at the time had nothing to do with magic did look at them and did like them he was one person that said he thought they were very cool that was it me, Bill were it. The rest of R&D didn't wanna do them. The brand team at the time, which wasn't part of R&D didn't wanna do them. I remember the very first meeting we had, the very first development meeting,

Henry Stern was the lead developer of the set. He's like, could we just kill these right now? And I had to say, hey, Henry, before we kill them, let's play with them. And I explained to them, I go, there's lots of ways we can lay this out. out yes the way I laid them out is what I think is the most dramatic but you know it could have a normal cost and a secondary cost there's other ways to do it let's play with them first let's just see if they're

fine and they were fun because casting two things is fun you know having a choice is fine Bill likewise convinced Bran not to kill them and anyway we little by little got people to play with them. And as people played with them, it slowly won them over. And then when it came time to lay them out, it just, we did look at other options. We actually looked at a bunch of options, but nothing was either as endearing as the split card layout, nor as intuitive as the split card layout. Having two little mini cards, people got it. They knew what to do with it.

Anyway, it came out split cards were a giant hit. The players weren't like one of the things is when you are the people whose job it is to figure out what the game is supposed to be, you're like, oh, the game is this or isn't that when you're a player, hey, the game is what it is. If we make split cards, well, then now the game has split cards. And as you will see, most the history of the two-in-ones is there's some skepticism, but we make them and players go, okay sounds fun, great. Okay, so we made split cards, we entered into the idea of two-in-ones. And okay, so there were like, split cards would come back from time to time.

We did them in Ravnica when we needed the third set of Ravnica. We're trying to find a way to sneak in some of the first seven guilds because the third set was just the third guild. Planar Chaos did a cycle of monocolor red split cards. Um, we eventually did split cards with something we call Fuse and Dragon's Maze, where you could play both sides. Um, but anyway, split cards became something people liked them, they became a resource, we used them. Okay. Um, the next sort of innovation on them... Oh, before I get to the next innovation, so in Odyssey,

which came out after Split Cards, Richard Garfield had invented a mechanic called Threshold, and the idea of Threshold was that it showed dual states, that things could be in a one state and then at some point in time all the things with this mechanic would change, that there would be a uniform change, not just a single card change, but a whole bunch of cards. Richard ended up choosing the graveyard. He liked the idea that graveyard started empty. So it's not a resource you began the game with,

like life or something. But it is something that naturally, by the natural evolution of the game, would fill up over time. Creatures would die, spells would get cast. Eventually your graveyard would fill up. And you had some control over your graveyard. You could discard cards and you could mill yourself. You could do things. And so it ended up being pretty dynamic. But

there, there was a card on it called Crowson Beast. The idea of Crowson Beast was it was a little white one, one squirrel. I mean that white screen, a little one one squirrel that through like canthorpe turned into a giant beast. And on the card, it starts as a one one. It says, it says like squirrel beast on its, um, uh, creature type line. But, um, we only could show one picture because, you know, most cards have one picture, so we showed the beast cause the beast is more exciting than the squirrel. And just the idea that, Oh, the reason it's a one-one

is it's a squirrel that turns into a giant beast. People didn't really get that. It only had one name, which is corrosion beast. It only had one art which showed corrosion beast. And yeah, there's a little time reminder. I mean, yeah, it starts as a one-one. Yeah, it says squirrel on that creature type line, but people weren't really getting that

And so that's one of the things we talked about is that When you only show one element like if a card represents two states, but you creatively only show one state It's just hard to get the two states. It's tricky to do So and Richard and I had been talking about that, and we sort of went back and forth, and like, what's the solution to that problem? So meanwhile, a couple years later, we're making Champions of Kamigawa, and we're in development.

So, Champions is interesting where, I was one of those rare sets, I wasn't on the design team, but I was on the development team. Brian Tinsman led the design team. Bill Rose had come up with the idea of, let's make a set, like sort of a top-down set where, let's design the world first,

and then design mechanics second. And one of the lessons we learned from that is that flavor is a lot more flexible than mechanics, and so it ended up being a little bit ham-fisted, just because once creative was locked, it was was hard mechanically it was hard to adapt to that but anyway one of the ideas that we came up with was something that Richard and I had bandied about in trying to solve the threshold thing was flip cards so flip cards you played one side one side had a cost and then you could

activate it and then you turned the card 180 degrees and the other side had its own name and its own text box and the art half the art was you could see one direction half the art you can see the other direction so they were there's only on one art box but kind of there's a left side and the right side and the left side on your orientation the left side would show you the picture that was your card. And the idea was that it was two cards in one and it fixed kind of the problem we saw with threshold which was it identified the two well here's this thing we'll name it we'll show you a piece of art okay it becomes this thing we'll name it we'll show a piece of art.

Split cards obviously had two cards in one, but they weren't permanent. They were instance and source. And so Flipkards was our first stab at trying to solve a permanent that changed states. Now, people were interested in Flipkards and they were definitely fans of Flipkards. Flipkards had a couple problems.

The biggest one was a functionality problem, which was if I turn my card sideways, how do you know which side? If it's face up, then okay, the face up side. But when I turned it sideways, some people tapped to the right, some tapped to the left. The game doesn't dictate which way it is. So if you see a tapped flip card, you honestly don't know which one it is. I mean, maybe you remember me flipping it, but without having some memory of what happened, you don't know you can't just look at the battlefield and tell what's going on

The other thing was aesthetically it just was a little bit muddled It didn't look that pretty the art the fact that half was one half the art was upside down It is it is didn't quite have the appeal Now once again, we were trying to solve something and so it did a job of solving it but one of the things in general about two-in-one cards is aesthetics are important and a lot of what we learned is where we really have it where we succeed most is where the aesthetics really line up. Split cards did a good job get it they're two mini cards you

can cast one of the mini cards people sort of got that. Flip cards did a good job. Get it? They're two mini cards. You can cast one of the mini cards. People sort of got that. Flip cards were a little bit trickier. Okay, but then we get to Innistrad. So in Innistrad, we're trying to solve the werewolf problem, which is we want to make werewolves. So we realized early on in Innistrad, we're doing gothic horror.

We want to do monsters. We had done vampires. We've done zombies. We've done spirits. We've done spirits We really hadn't done many werewolves. I think there were two before in a strad two or three But they were nothing special. I think maybe there were three there was nothing special. They were pretty lackluster But the thing I said I said, okay, let's really if we can deliver on werewolves I know we can do this at and I said here's what I want. I want

Two states. I want I want two states I want to have a human state I want to have a werewolf state because the nature of a werewolf they go back and forth between human and werewolves that's what werewolves are all about so Tom Lappilli who was on the team said well in dual masters which is a card game we make for Japan. We have double-faced cards. We have cards that they don't start in your deck in Duel Masters, they start in the uber-dimensional zone, but through cards that are in your deck you can bring them from the uber-dimensional zone onto the battlefield, and then there are ways by

which you can you can turn them from one side to the other. And so we tried it. Now I'll admit I was pretty skeptical when we first tried it, just because it was a big leap, but I'm like, okay, we should try it. And it turned out to be amazing. Now the original plan we had for Magic was that there would be a one-sided card you would put in your deck. When you cast it, you went and got the double- double face version which kind of kind of would act like a token and then you would put that on the battlefield and it would go back and

forth. It turns out that in order that we wanted them to show up together in the booster pack. We have a lot of printers some of them couldn't do it. The ones that could do it couldn't promise they could do it 100% of the time. So we ended up doing some research. We found out that like 95% of constructed players play with opaque sleeves, play with sleeves, most of which are opaque sleeves. So we just made them double faced. Then we came up with the checklist thing. We're like, okay, if you can't, if you don't have opaque sleeves, here's a card that you can check what it is, put it in and the checklist card will kind of act as the one-sided, one-faced version that you can't, if you don't have opaque sleeves, here's a card that you can check what it is, put it in, and the checklist card will kind of act as the one side and one faced version that you could put in your deck if you don't have sleeves.

Now, there was a lot of resistance internal. There were people that really, really, really felt we should not make double-faced cards. That magic having a back was a thing that magic should not break. Again, we made them anyway. I was pretty passionate about the idea. And they came to this huge fanfare. Not that there weren't people that didn't like them. There are logistics that come with them. You know, I have to either use double, I have to either use checklist cards or put them in my thing and then I got to turn them over and when they're in my hand, I don't have all the information about the backside. There were a lot of, a lot came with trading,

transforming double-faced cards, but they were exciting. And they did something that Flipkart did not do, which is they gave, they gave each, each element of the card got its own face. I got name, I got art, I got, but I got the full card size. I wasn't crammed, I wasn't fitting two pieces of art in one. I just got, it looked like a normal MagiCard.

And when I turned it over, it also looked like a normal MagiCard. And what we realized was we could tell stories. Like one of the challenges, whenever you're doing a piece of art and the card has two states, you can't show both states. You can show state one, you can show state two, you can show it transforming into state two. But you have to pick something. You can't, you can't show both. But all of a sudden, transforming double-faced cards said you could.

You want to show the human and then show the werewolf you can and that allowed us creatively To tell some stories and make cards that did things we didn't normally get to do There will end like there are a lot of one thing is about um industry, original industry is we ended up using the double-faced cards not just on the werewolf so the werewolves all were double-faced cards but on Multiple things what we call dark transformation. It's a little girl, it becomes a demon. There's a scientist that turns into a fly. Mr. Hyde, or Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde. You could see a lot, there's a lot of tropes in horror

of dark transformation. And so, and one of the themes that ran through all of Innistrad was the idea of that the monsters were once human. That was a pretty big thing. So anyway, those came out to much fanfare. Innistrad was the idea of that the monsters were once human. That was a pretty big thing. So anyway, those came out to much fanfare. Then when they came back on our second return to Innistrad, we, not in the first step, in the second step, Eldritch Moon, Ken Nagel

had been trying to figure out how to solve the problem. He wanted to do BFM in normal magic. Remember BFM, there was a left side, there was a right side. It made a giant card that was two cards big. And he was trying to figure out how to do that. In New Phyrexia he messed around with something called Link, where there was like a left side and a right side and any left side could join any right side. And anyway, he tried a bunch of different things, but it was not until he saw double face cards.

And I don't think he, I think he figured this out like after we had, we were done like, like he figured out after we were done, um, was that you could use double face technology to do the BFM thing. And the way you did it was you would put it on the back of the card. So the idea is instead of having two cards in your hand that you have to cast and then they come together, you would have two cards that enter on the battlefield and if they're both on the battlefield together, or could be like one on battlefield one in graveyard, you have some

options, but the idea was they would transform, they would flip over and then you make a giant card. Ends up by the way that going, making the giant card so that you went sideways had better dimensions than I had done. What I had done in BFM, the left side and the right side, was kind of clever and it gave each, it made it easier in your hand to understand

this is the left side, this is the right side. If it was top and bottom, maybe that would have been a little bit trickier. But in Meld's we ended up doing top and bottom and just looked better but anyway and the thing that we had learned about the double face cards is there are just a lot of there's a lot of innovations there's a lot of things that double face cards to do and as you as I get further along it's interesting here I'm I'm into my story, but I don't think I'm getting done in 10 minutes. Well, let me finish talking about meld. So we tried to do a bunch of things with

the meld. We really tried to... I think it was Ken's idea to have more melds, but it turns out that melds is just very complicated. And they ended up just doing a vertical cycle. There was one at common, one at rare, one at mythic rare. And they were very exciting in the world. The story of Eldritch Moon was Emrakul had been lured to Innistrad and was mutating things. And so, you know, two angels are merging into one angel. We can do a cool card like that. And there just were fun stories that we could do where the meld made a lot of flavor sense. And once again came

out to great fanfare. Players really liked the meld. The one big complaint was you didn't get a meld a lot. The two comments every once in a while, I mean the problem for meld in limited is you have to first get both cards, which is not easy to do. A little easier in draft than it is in sealed. Then you have to draw both cards and play them and have them stay out at the same time. That is just not easy to meld into something. In constructed, you can have four of each. It's a little bit easier to pull off in constructed. It's a lot harder and limited. The interesting thing, by the way, is one of the things with meld is we've been fascinated by the idea of other ways to do meld. In unstable, I made a thing called host and augment, In unstable I made a thing called host and augment

Which was Kind of use mill technology, but a front face mill technology not back face and the idea being I play the host first and then when I play the Augment I put it on top of the host card So it kind of turned into a larger card a little more connected to the BFM in that it's wider rather than tall. But the idea was I added to the first card to make a combination of the two cards. I didn't actually in my article, I didn't do host and augment. Maybe I should have in retrospect. The cards do have two different names and then come together to make one card Although the one card is a combination of their names like when you make meld It's just a unique different card. You're making a brand new card that didn't exist and that's the new card or hosted augment

They were designed so that when you made the melded version They had a new name in the sense of the combination of the two names so the interesting thing about about host and augment was that it tried to do something that we hadn't been able to do with meld, right? That you could have a left side and a right side. And the way it works is any host creature can combine with any attack. You know, any attach can go on any host. And there's a whole bunch of hosts and a whole bunch of attacks.

So there's a lot of mix and matching and opportunities. And whereas Mel didn't really work in limited, Host and Augment did work in limited because Host A stood by themselves, the host had entered the battlefield effect. So you could just play a host. And then Augment just turned your host into better things. The idea is when you covered it up, you would keep the trigger condition, I'm sorry, you would keep the effect, but change the trigger condition.

The card you put on will go to the left side, and then it would add a new name, you would change the name, and the idea is it would make a combination thing that was the two. We have messed with in normal magic, trying to make melds that have a left side and a right side. There are two giant obstacles. Obstacle number one is the creative

obstacle which is hosted augment looks goofy but it was a set that was all about being goofy and so that was okay. The idea that the left side was one creature and the right side was that. We came up with a pretty clever solution within Unglued where there's a little bar that they are, and the bar would always line up. So that's how we made sure that the two things would link together artistically because there's a little bar that they had a link to, the little metal thing. And the idea was when you put them together, kind of the left side came out of the bar and the right side came out of the bar. So they always looked like they belonged together together even though they were weird and quirky. Trying to solve for a more realistic looking thing that is half and half is very challenging

and it's proven to be something we've really struggled with and have trouble with. For the Brothers War we did try left and right augment and the reason we did it we really like it's experiments and it captures the innovation of Urza and Mishra doing all their experiments the problem is it it ended up it just the flavor didn't really match Urza it's not it was kind of interesting something that wasn't quite how it played out. So we decided not to do it there We have looked at in other places. I do think there will come a time and place where we find a place to do left and right meld I mean, we still haven't solved the creative element. It's all the creative element

Mechanically, there's some challenge to making it work And we found some solutions Like I said part of what it wants to be is that the left side and the right side come together To make something that is unique that is neither the left side or the right side And as I said host augment did accomplish this so we've done it once it it did it in a way that normal magic Doesn't quite work that way But it's not that far away. Horse argument is really not that far away of some, I mean, barring the silliness of the creative, it's not that far away mechanically from what we could do.

So I do think meld is something we will see more of. And like I said, we've learned the players like meld you've seen us do obviously in brother so we ended up doing meld and we did Urza and me strength stuff that was very fun so anyway guys I figured out early on this article was a two-part article and this podcast is going to have to be a two-part podcast I realized partway through that I have enough information that I can't possibly do it in one podcast so we're gonna wrap up right here so just to recap, at this point, so I also want to mention here, not a lot. I am more than halfway through chronology

magic. I am all the way up to Eldritch moon. I don't know if the top of my head when Eldridge moon is, but it is more than halfway through magic's life. So Split Cards did not happen until Invasion, which was 2000. It took seven years to get to Split Cards. Flip Cards were another four years later, and so that is 11 years into Magic. And then another seven years before Double Face Cards, so that is 18 years into Magic before

double face cards. And I'm talking about meld which is the return. So what's it another four years or so? So yeah so we are two-thirds the way into Magic's existence and we have definitely dipped our toe here. We've made flip cards, we made flip cards, we made double face cards, we've made double face cards. But what you'll see in the next thing is, we really start picking up the pace. The idea of two in ones, as we get, as magic moves around and we're looking more for innovation

as it evolves, we start doing more stuff. And so next time, I will talk about that. But anyway guys, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means that 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 all next time. Bye bye.