Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1203: Planeshift

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of Planeshift, a set from the Invasion block.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so one of my goals with this podcast is to have a podcast talking about each and every magic expansion. And I've done a lot of it. But someone my blog recently pointed out that I while I talked about invasion, I had Bill Rose on who was the lead designer invasion and he and I talked about it a while ago

But I've not talked about plane shift or apocalypse which are the two other sets So today I'm going to talk about plane shift and in a future podcast. I will talk about apocalypse So today is the plane ship. So in order to explain Plane Shift, let me do a little bit of setting up Invasion. Cause there's a lot of what Invasion one that informs what Plane Shift became. Okay, so before I was head designer, Bill Rose was head designer.

And Invasion was around where he started. He did a little work before that, but I think the thing of Invasion block is the first block that like he really put his thumbprint as head designer. And Invasion introduces a brand new concept. What I referred to as the third stage of magic design, which is the idea of blocks having themes. And Bill's idea for his first theme that he wanted to do was multicolor.

Multicolor existed ever since the third expansion, Legends. And for a while it showed up in dribs and drabs. And then Bill decided to be cool if we sort of didn't do it for a little while and then blew it out. It had a whole block about it. And that's what invasion was. Now I think when we began invasion, there was some idea, we weren't quite sure what

to do because there are obviously 10, 2 color pairs. Now I do need to point out back in the day before Ravnica really, we did not treat the color pairs equally. The ally color pairs were treated much nicer than the enemy color pairs in two major ways. One is it just showed up more. We just did a lot more with ally colors. So there were a lot more ally color cards than enemy color cards just in sheer number.

And then we tended to treat ally color cards than enemy color cards just in sheer number. And then we tended to treat ally color nicer, like you got more for being an ally. We kind of punished you a little bit for being an enemy. Like not the original dual end. When Richard made them alpha, they all worked the same. But after alpha, a lot of the dual end cycles we did, we'd make the enemy dual end cycle not quite as good as the ally dual cycle. And just as overall in quantity and quality, for a long time, we did not treat enemy like ally.

It wasn't really until Ravnica that we changed that. So when we originally thought about doing enemy color stuff, I think the original plan was we'd have it, it just be in small doses. And then both Henry Stern and I independently both went to Bill and pitched the idea of what if we saved the enemy stuff. And so the idea was, and I'm not really talking apocalypse today, but that ended up being an apocalypse. So we'll talk more about the enemy stuff when we got to apocalypse So invasion was very much about ally and I mean completely ally so invasion was ally Planeshift which so back in the day for those people that might not be familiar with how blocks worked

In the fall, I'm using northern hemisphere Seasons here in the fall in September or October, we'd have a large set. Then in the winter, January, February, we'd have a small set. And then in the spring, April, May, we'd have a second small set. And so for example, Plane Shift is 143 cards. 55 commons, 44 uncommons, 44 rares. And that was the size of a small set back in the day. So we'd have a large set, small set, small set. And the way it worked is you would draft the large set, large, large, large, all by itself.

Then when the small set came out, you would draft two packs of large set and one pack of the small set. And when the second small set came out, you'd pack one pack of large set, one pack of the first small set, one pack of the small set and when the second small set came out you'd pack one pack of a large set, one pack of the small first small set, one pack of the second small set. That's how we would draft at the time. And Invasion introduced it kind of normally back in the day we would do two mechanics. The way blocks used to work is each block would have two mechanics usually named on the case

of Invasion not named or one of them wasn't named. And the idea was that you would introduce it in the first block and then the second and third block would adapt it and mess around with it and see what they could do with it. We would eventually get to the point where we started having more named mechanics per set but that didn't really, didn't quite happen yet. Interestingly, the block before invasion which were Mercadian Masks was a really big, we basically made a set in which we didn't name the mechanics. One was Spell Shapers, there was a creature type. Actually, it's actually all of them. Rebels and Mercenaries and Spell Shapers

were all things that were associated with a creature type but weren't named. Nowadays we would make ability awards. But anyway, they weren't named and we got a lot of feedback from people that they wish we had made new mechanics. That because we didn't name them, people didn't see them. But Invasion was right on the heels of Mercating Mass.

So it's actually the next set, which is Odyssey, that starts doing a little more naming of things. Anyway, so Invasion had two mechanics, one named, one unnamed. The named mechanic, also created by Bill Rose, was Kicker. And so the idea of Kicker is what if spells would did more if you paid more for them? And the idea Kicker is very, very useful.

It's not a deciduous mechanic. The idea basically is one of the things that you need to do when you make a magic set is you need to get people ways to spend extra mana. You know, the nature of the mana system is early on, I'm a little starved for mana, but as the game goes on, I get more and more. And usually by the late game, I have lots of mana

and I'm starting to run out of cards. So what we wanna do is make sure that there's things to do with your mana. What we call mana gates, basically. We want something that, something that allows you to make use of your mana. I guess mana gate is not technically the right term. Mana gate is something that's, mana is what keeps you from getting access to it.

So mana gate, we just want something that you can use your mana with. And mana gates I guess are a subset of that. And so the idea is you want to make sure that something allows that. Kicker does a good job. Oh, well, if it's early in the game, I could play for its cheap cost If it's later in the game, I could play for its more expensive costs The other thing that Bill liked about kicker and reason it made sense invasion was the idea that you could do off color kicker One of the things that was important in doing a multicolor set was Yes, some of the cards were traditional gold cards,

meaning I have to spend two colors of mana to cast it. But the idea was also some of them are single color cards that to optimize the card, you need the second color. I could kick it with a second color, I could activate it with a second color, maybe there's some additional cost that requires a second color. So the idea of those cards is they're playable, especially limited, if you have one of the

colors, but they get better if you have both colors, where the gold cards, the traditional gold cards, you can't even play them unless you have both colors. Okay, the other mechanic that I introduced had a nickname, it wasn't actually a name. We now call it Domain. We now, we've given it an ability award. It didn't have one at the time. So real quick story about Domain. When Richard Garfield first made Magic, when he first was playtesting Magic,

he had a bunch of playtest groups. One of which was from the University of Pennsylvania where he was going to school. That is what we now call the East Coast Play Thefters. Scaffoli, it's Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. He also had a group he met through Bridge, now referred to as the Bridge Club. And that was Bill Rose, Charlie Cattino,

Joel Mick, Don Felice, Elliot Sie Siegel Howard Kallenberg a Lily woo and then the He also had a neighbor named Barry Reich or bit and Barry Also played that's I think Barry was the very first person to ever play test with him. I think he was his next-door neighbor anyway, when Richard realized that the game was actually going to get published, he asked the different teams to work on expansions. Now no one realized how fast Magic would need expansions because Magic did much better than

people expected. I mean, not in a bad way, just you expected the game to act like a normal game, and it was a phenomenon. So no one expects a phenomenon. So the East Coast Play Defters would start working on Ice Age, codenamed Ice Age. The Bridge Club would start working on Mirage and Visions, codenamed Menagerie. And Barry started working on a set he called Spectral Chaos. So Ice Age got turned into Ice Age, Menagerie got turned into Mirage and Visions. So when we were making Invasion, Bill, so the Invasion team was me, Bill Rose and Mike Elliott. Bill was the lead designer of that. And that's the set where we went to my dad's house.

If you've listened to my podcast on my dad, we went to my dad's house for the first week of that design. Plane Shift would be the same design team except we added in Henry Stern. No, back in the day, the Magic R&D was a lot smaller. So I believe Invasion, for example, was the first set, I think that Randy Bueller worked on, for example. Just to give a little context. Anyway, in spectral chaos, so

Invasion isn't really spectral chaos, but we did borrow a few things. The main thing we borrowed was there's a mechanic that Barry had made that we now call Domain. At the time, we just called it the Barry Mechanic. And the idea of Domain is they are spells that scale based on the number of different basic land types you have. And so really what it did, it just wanted, it was trying to encourage you to splash other colors through splashing other card types, basic land types. splashing other cart types, we have basic land types.

And so, invasion had kicker and it had domain, although domain was unlisted. So, the first thing that happened, so Plane Shift, let me walk through, code name Hong Kong, I think all the invasion block code names were named after Asian cities, I believe. Our code naming system got a little more exact over the years, a little more easy to follow. So the set was the design was led by Mike Elliott. The team was the same design team as invasion, except Mike led it rather than Bill. And then William Jockeish led the development of the set.

So first and foremost, like I said, a lot of the way the small set, the first small set worked back in the day is it was just more of what the big set did. In this particular case, it was more ally color cards. I also wanna point out that the idea of the third set being different, a lot of, when I became head designer, back when Ravnica happens,

I started into doing what we call block design, where we did a little more planning out what's where, and a lot of the idea of block design came from the success of Invasion Block. Invasion had a little bit more advanced planning. We were working towards something, which was a key part of block planning Anyway, when I get to the apocalypse, I'll get more into that when I get to the apocalypse podcast. Okay, so plane shift

The the probably biggest thing that plane shift was trying to do a We were evolving the mechanics especially kicker. But B, I think that Invasion was more leaned into single color, although it encouraged you to splash more colors with stuff like Domain. Planeshift definitely dipped its toe more into three color. And in some ways, I mean, Legends, the original legend set that introduced multicolor did have three color cards in it. But I think this was the next set after that really to have some volume of three color cards where that was a theme. One of the things when we talk about draft that two color sets when they're ally want you to draft shards or arcs, meaning a color in these two allies.

The reason is, let's say we have an ally color set. If I draft white and blue, I have the ability to pick up green or I can pick up black if I want to play three color because blue black is also a strategy and green white is also a strategy. So for the first time, or not the first time Legends did it, but for the first time in a draft setting, I guess I should say, Legends wasn't really made for draft, we set up the idea of having two color drafts and three color drafts. So three color was an important part of the flavor of Plane Shift. So not only was it doing the ally colors, but also was setting up a little bit more about three color. And one of the ways we did three color is first off we had a cycle of dragons that were three color. They had

charms. We had done charms originally in Mirage. The original idea of charms was it was a spell that cost one that did very little tiny effects that were too small to put on a normal card but the idea is having the choice between the different effects allowed made it made sense. Charms are very popular so we were kind of looking for other opportunities to do charms so the cool thing about a three-color charm is you have three colors. The colors are, you know, can each do their own effect. So the charms in Plane Shift,

let's say it's a white, blue, black spell, well, it'd have a white effect, a blue effect, and a black effect. Again, they were small effects, although by the nature of a three-color card, it has to cost three mana versus one mana. So the effects got to be a little bit bigger than the original charms. So that was kind of cool. We also, not only did we have charms, the dragons had lairs

and the lairs were the earliest versions of three color lands, meaning a land that tapped for three colors. I think they came and played tap and you had a bounce. Oh, I mean, they didn't come play tap, but you had a bounce a land when you played them. So they put a land back in your hand, but they tap for one of three colors. We had had like Arabian Nights had a land that tap for all five colors that pain to you, but a city of brass but uh we hadn't

done specifically three colors so first off Plane Shift is playing a little around in three color space and this is the first color legends that had three color didn't have drafting drafting wasn't a thing um so the idea that you could draft three colors this was the first set where you could do that um and so that theme was added a little bit. The other thing, like I said, is you want to expand upon the mechanics. And so one of the things we did with Kicker is, I believe the first set, Invasion, only did Kicker as a, for mana. It had off-color Kicker because multicolor was a big part of the theme, but the idea was if you're going to kick you're only using mana. There's a cycle of spells

in this set where the kicker requires sacking a certain land type. And so you can get extra without necessarily spending more mana. We're very careful these days with sacking land as additional costs, but we did that there. The other thing we did is the idea of what if something had more than one kicker. So the interesting story here is Mike, Elliot, and I both were inspired by the same idea, which is what if I had a creature that had two different kicker costs? And both of us were inspired by not just two different kicker costs, but kicker costs not in the color of the original card, playing into kind of three color space.

So the idea is I have a card of the center color, because we're talking about, so let's say we're talking white, blue, black. Blue is the center color. So my main body would be blue. And then I could have a kicker in white or a kicker in black is the idea. Mike and I had two different approaches to this. Mike's approach was the battle mages, which I'll get to in a second. And my approach, what did we call them?

The volvers, I think we called them. So I think Mike's was a little more straightforward and this was Mike said So we decided to put the volvers into apocalypse so when I get to apocalypse the podcast I'll talk about those we put the battle mages here. So the idea of the battle mages was I Have a creature so the battle mages all costs two generic mana in one colored mana And then they were two, two creatures. But you could spend one and one of the colors. So let's say this is a blue card.

I could spend, I think, I think it was like one in white or I could spend two in black. So the idea is one of the colors was two mana. One of the colors was three mana and each of the colors was three mana, and each one of them had an enter the battlefield effect. So it had a spell effect essentially that happened when the creature entered the battlefield. So the idea is for three mana, if I just had blue mana for two and a blue, I could play a two-two. But for five mana, and I had the second color, I could play a tutu that generated a smaller effect.

Or if I had six mana, I could play the larger kicker cost and have my tutu enter with a bigger effect. Or if I have eight, I could pay both kicker costs and I could have both happen. And the way we design the effects is so that the small effect and the bigger effect were synergistic with each other. So there is value to casting them together. But the idea really, and this is one of the early kicker, the whole idea of kicker was

flexibility and this is even more flexibility. Instead of having one way to get like normally with magic, you could cast the card one way, you'd one cost, but then kicker said, Oh, now you have two costs. You can cast it with kicker without kicker Well battle made just says hold on now You can cast it four different ways by itself with first kicker with second kicker with both kickers and that was it was it definitely it's sort of a fun innovation and It also played it nicely played into the three color space because if I only had two colors

I still could play the battle mage. I still could even kick the battle mage I might not be able to optimize the battle mage, but I still had you know If I was playing just the main color and one of the two ally colors Hey, I have a playable card and the cards were designed such that especially limited You could you could play and just getting one of the abilities is good enough that that's not a bad card. Okay so next up again there was more domain we messed around with domain a little bit and experimented a little bit and just tried you know I think domain here in the invasion it was just on straight up spells.

I think here we started messing around to do activations. We messed around with other ways to play with domain. The other thing we did is we did, we did have a new mechanic, just in the nature of the times we did not name the new mechanic. The new mechanic we now refer to as gating, we refer to the time as gating. The way gating worked was it was a multicolor card, usually two colors. It would enter the battlefield and then it required you to return a card of one of the colors of the card. Now given the card itself was one of the, like let's say it was a red and green card. So when it enters, you have to return a red creature or a green creature back to your hand.

Now this creature itself is a red and green creature. So you could bounce itself. And there were some of the gating creatures that had an enter the battlefield effect. So kind of like buyback, like you could play it, bounce itself back and then generate the effect but not have the creature, for example. Other things, like for example, let's say you played a cheap battle mage creature early so I just played from the two to

an attack once or twice then I could gate and then I can bounce the battle mage back to my hand so the next time I play it now I could kick it make it bigger. I think we had a couple cycles of gating I think there was an uncommon cycle I and I think there was a rare cycle. But the idea was, so that was the new mechanic. Like I said, at the time we were a little skittish on naming things. Nowadays we definitely would have given an ability word. We had what we called familiars.

So familiars, once again, playing into our three color theme, familiars were in one color, but they made the two ally colors cost one less. So let's say I'm a black card. It said your blue and red spells cost one less to cast. All the familiars had an ability in color for the basic color, for the main color and then made their own. And the nice thing about that again is you can play it in two color, you can play it

in three color. If I'm playing black, if I'm playing blue black or playing black red, okay, it helps in my other color. If I'm playing black, blue, red, all three colors, well, now helps in both my other colors. And so there's a lot of theme, a lot of the theme of Planeshift is more stuff for your ally, but starting to lean a little bit

and help you playing three color if you wanna play three color. There also were Planeswalker enchantments. The way the Planeswalker enchantments work, I should note at the time it wasn't until Time Spiral Block and the Mending that we kind of redid Planeswalkers and depowered them such that we could make Planeswalker cards. At the time, Planeswalkers were kind of like gods. We felt they were a little bit too powerful to show up on cards.

But planeswalker enchantments were our nod. We, each one had a different planeswalker referenced on it from the invasion story. The planeswalkers play a big role in the invasion story. And the way each one worked is you activated it, you randomly looked at the top card of your library, and then the effect cared about what that card was. Oh, I think you might've randomly looked at the top card of your library, and then the Infect cared about what that card was. Oh, I think you might have randomly looked at your opponent's, not your library, I think

you randomly looked at your opponent's, top of your opponent's library. So A, it gave you a little bit of knowledge about your opponent, what they had on the library, and you would trigger off what you revealed. Oh, the other thing about Battle Mages is battle mages were part of something we don't do a lot, which was a vertical and horizontal cycle. It was a vertical cycle of horizontal cycles. What do I mean by that? So at common, we had what we call apprentices.

The idea of an apprentice was it was in a single color, so let's use red. So the idea is it's a red card and it was small. I think it was a 1-1. And the idea was it had an activation, two activations in each of its ally colors. So since we're talking red, black and tap it did something, and then green and tap it did something. So I could play this little 1-1, and I had access to two different abilities. Again, I could play it in the two-collar deck as long as they had the main color, or I could

play it in the three-collar deck. The uncommons were the battle mages that had the kicker cost, so you could kick in either direction. And then at rare, we had the mafters. The mafters were three threes That had two mana. So let's say it was red It would be black black tap or green green tap and they would it was just like the apprentices but larger spell effects So the idea is you have the apprentice cycle at common you have the battle mage cycle at uncommon You have the master cycle at rare. So it was a it was both a horizontal and a vertical cycle

We don't we don't do those a lot. The last big story I want to tell, I think hit all the main things of the set, I want to talk a little bit about a special card that appeared in it. So back in the day, and I've done podcasts on these, we ran an event originally called the Duelist Invitational, later called the Magic Invitational, that was Magic Invitational that was the all-star game for Magic. We would invite 16 players, top pros, there was a whole means by which you got invited winning pro tours and there were some fan favorites and stuff. But the way it worked is it was a round robin tournament which means it was a 15 round tournament

in which each player played each other player once. And the way it worked is there would be three different, sorry, five different formats, two of which would be limited and two of which would be constructed. In the early days, I always used to do something called duplicate sealed, where everybody got the same pool and they had to, so it was sealed, but everybody gets the same pool and they had to so it was sealed but everybody gets the same pool so you know what everybody else has so it's it's it's it's duplicate seals very skill and testa very skill intensive which is one of the things i was trying to do for the all-star game is i would throw formats at them they'd never seen before

uh and duplicate sealed while they'd seen the format before they hadn't seen the card pull before and I did all that I made up cards for the first time one year. They were all one drops I did a lot of weird one year. We took existing powerful cards and we costed them one year I took weak cards and recosted them So we did a lot of things like that One of the other formats in limited that we did a lot was called Solomon draft the way Solomon draft works I did a lot was called Solomon draft. The way Solomon draft works, I did a podcast on drafting,

or I will, and sometimes I record these, they don't always get released in the order that I record them. The idea in a Solomon draft is the first person takes, you shuffle all your cards together in a giant pile, first person takes the top eight cards off it, divides them into two piles, the second player takes one of the two piles.

Then the second player divides the first, the next eight cards into two piles. Solomon draft is very skill testing. One of the things I tried in this format is I like doing very heavy skill in tensors, because these are the best players in the world, it's the all-star game. Anyway, so this was the fourth invitational. The first invitation was in Hong Kong. The second invitation was in Rio de Janeiro. The third invitation was in Barcelona.

And the fourth invitation was in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur. So Chris Pakula, who is famous magic player, sadly not in the whole fame, I think he should be in the whole fame, but he is, he had, I think three top eights to his name, almost a fourth, he just missed, just shy of a fourth top eight. He was known for a couple things. One, he was an entertainer, he was a great storyteller. I used him a whole bunch to do commentary. Brian Weisman, him, did a bunch of commentary

in the early days. He was my color commentator, he was very good. He's a great storyteller. He also was somebody that was really big. In the early days of the pro tour, we were a bit chaotic. A lot of shenanigans going on. He was really someone that pulled the players together and said, hey, if we wanna have an honest system,

we, the players, have to reinforce that, if we want to have it on a system, we, the players have to reinforce that and was a big part of that. Anyway, Chris had made some top eights, but he had never won a big tournament. And Kuala Lumpur, he makes it to the final two. So the way it works is, there's a Brown-Robin, we cut to the top two. The way the top two works is,

they play best two out of three in each of the five formats. So, but the one of the running jokes was Chris was horrible at Solomon draft. He had never won a, I don't think he'd ever won. I had done Solomon draft in a couple of different invitationals, all of which he had attended. And he had never won a single round of Solomon draft. Turns out the other person who finished in the top two beside Chris was John Finkle and John and Chris were good friends. John Finkle for those who don't know, there's a debate for who is the best Magic player of all time. John is, I believe John is the best player of

all time, but it's a fine debate. be Kai Buddha could be Paulo could be else V There are a bunch of people in contention. I Believe so. I think John has the record for the most top eight 13 I think maybe he had once since I remember anyway, he John is a very very good player and Very good at Solomon draft one of the best players ever at Solomon draft. And so when Chris made the top, the top two, he knew he was faking John really what it was. It wasn't even a win three out of five,

cause he didn't think he'd win Solomon draft. And so what it really was is he had to win three out of four formats to win. And we put the Solomon draft first, John crushed him. But then Chris went on to win. Actually, John won one, I don't remember which format, John won one other format, but it came down to one of the constructed formats in the finals, the best two out of three, and Chris actually won the tournament. It's sort of Chris's crowning glory his big giant win but for winning the Invitational you get to make a card so the card Chris turned in

I think he turned in meddling wizard I think was the name of his card or though no the meddler it was called the meddler and it was a blue creature I think it was a 2-2 blue creature that cost 2 and a blue I think and when it enters the battlefield you named a spell and then you could spend I think it was blue and sac but you spend some amount of mana and sac it to counter the name spell so we got that spell the meddler but we always we try to make it match the set we're making him in oh is in plane shift this is a ally color set so we changed it so instead of I think ally color set. So we changed it. So instead of,

I think his version had three mana. We made it two mana. So white and a blue for a two, two. And instead of naming the spells and sacrificing the counter, we said, what if you just name the spell and then now they can't play the spell? So when you cast the spell, you name a spell. And then for the longest creatures on the battlefield they can't cast the name spell any copy of the name spell and I remember I called Chris so I would work with the players to say okay here's what we're doing with the card here's our we're improving it I wanted to get Chris's approval he was very happy because he because you're willing to make that card I said yes and he goes absolutely so many mage has gone on and I wouldn't say it's the most powerful

imitational card but it's in the top echelon. It is a very good card. It saw high level tournament play. Most of the Invitational cards actually ended up in the top eight of a Pro Tour. Not all of them, but a lot of them did. Chris's definitely did. But anyway, it went on to be a special card. I know Chris bought the art or owns the art now. Anyway, and so that card is in Plane Shift. So looking back, like I said, Plane Shift was a fun set. It was very typical of a lot of the small sets of the era. It really did dip a toe into three color.

It messed around a little bit with what kicker and domain could be. It introduced gating, although unnamed. So it definitely sort of did its thing. And it really set up Apocalypse. So at some point I will do my Apocalypse podcast. But anyway guys, that is Plane Shift. I'm at work now so we all know what that means.

It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed the talk today and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.