Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1208: History of Creature Types

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

In this podcast, I walk through Magic's history to talk about how the use of creature types has changed over time.

I am 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 from time to time, I like to do what I call history podcasts, where I take an aspect of the game and sort of walk through its evolution over time. So today I'm going to talk all about the evolution of the creature type. Okay, so our story begins all the way back in alpha. So when Richard Garfield made the game,

he liked the idea that the creature types, that part of the flavor of the game would be different creatures were different kinds of things. That this could be an elf or a goblin or a merfolk and the way he did that was he listed creature types so to be clear there are card types in the game card types are like creature or sorcery or land and there are super types and there are subtypes a super type would be like basic or snow or legendary. A subtype, each car type, the one exception is Sorcerers and Instants share subtypes. Each car type has its own subtypes.

And the subtype for creatures is creature types. Now, the way that creatures were done in alpha, Now, the way that creatures were done in Alpha, it didn't say creature on it, it actually said summon on it. So let's say the creature was a goblin. It wouldn't say creature hyphen goblin, which is how we say it now, it said summon goblin. And so the idea was, I mean the flavor was there, and in Alpha there were three cards, Goblin King, Lord of Atlantis, and Zombie Master that specifically mechanically referenced creature types. The idea of granting them and giving them some bonus, some boost.

And so the idea, I mean Richard understood from the very beginning that one of the reasons you want to have the subtypes for creatures, the creature types, was not only did it give some flavor, and mostly it was flavor, but it had the ability to have a mechanical hook to it. That if I label all my goblins, oh, I can make a card that gives plus one plus one to goblins. And so out of the gate, I mean Richard realized that potential existed out of the gate. In general, anything on the card that you list and identify the card meant that other cards could care about that thing. And so the idea of card types and super types and subtypes, all that came around building the structure that allowed you,

the game, a lot of the game designers to sort of make people care about that. But I will say in alpha, mostly creature types was a thing of flavor. Now there are a couple rules sort of that got set up in alpha. And once again, I think a lot of the way it works is it's not that Richard set up to make a rule per se. He just did things and then we extrapolated from that and sort of made rules. So in Alpha, most creatures have a single creature type. There wasn't, we'll get, at some point we expand what creature types do, but in the

beginning, mostly you had one creature type There are exceptions in alpha like bird of paradise is summon mana birds. So there are When I say rules alpha didn't have a hard and fast rules. There were a few exceptions, but in general Most cards most creatures had a single creature type and a decision that Richard made in alpha was, if it was special about you, was you were of a different species. If you were a goblin or an elf or a merfolk, that got written on the card. But if you were just a boring human, and what was interesting about you is you did something, you were a wizard. You were a cleric. That would get rid on the card. You were a soldier. That would get ridden on the card. And so the idea was you would have one

creature type and it either defined your species if you were special enough or if mostly if you were human it just defined what you did. Also I want to point out that artifacts in Alpha, there were artifact creatures, there were four natural artifact creatures, and there was Jade Statues that could turn into a creature. None of those had creature types. At the time, the way artifacts worked, there were four different types of artifacts.

There was like mono and poly and continuous, but one of them, they could be an artifact creature. Artifact creatures in the very beginning did not have creature types. So interestingly, the only four cards in alpha that were creatures that said the word creature on their type line was the artifact creatures. Because all the other creatures said summon something. The artifact creatures didn't say summon because they didn't have a creature type.

They just said artifact creature. A little piece of trivia for you. Okay. Um, so alpha and the other thing is I think Richard, where he found place to make sense. Oh, it's a goblin. Oh, it's a merfolk. Um, when he wasn't sure what it was, uh, a lot of times he just would repeat the name. You're like, oh, it's this, okay. I like fungus or is a fungus or, you know, he just would repeat the name if he didn't know. So here are the informal rules that sort of got set up. Like one of the things that the way magic worked

in the early days is Richard would do something. And then R and D after the fact looking at it, we're sort of make rules based on what Richard had did. For example, in alpha, there's a card called Terror. Terror destroys a non-black, non-artifact creature. And the reason for that was flavor. It's like, oh, I'm scaring you to death. You're not scared to death.

Black creatures are pretty used to scary things. And artifact creatures don't have emotions per se, so how afraid can they be? So he made a card that had some flavor to it, but for a while, black cards didn't kill artifacts or creatures. And then even when we let it start killing artifact creatures, but even once we let it start killing artifact creatures, we left the non-black on for quite a while. And eventually we came to the realization that, you know, black should be able to kill black,

what did black kill? Black will kill anything. And we realized that some of the carryover with time, like, oh, we don't need that. So the rules originally, as we interpreted them, I guess, was all creatures had a creature type, except artifact creatures, and creatures had one creature type. The one other thing that Richard did in Alpha was one of the creature types had rules baggage. None of the others did, only one did. Little terrific question, what creature type in Alpha had rules baggage? And the answer is wall. Walls had rules baggage.

And a wall inherently meant it can't attack. We would later make Defender, I'll get there when we do that, but originally the idea was a wall, just being a wall meant you can't attack. It didn't have to, I mean, maybe it said reminder text or something, but just being a wall, the nature of making something a wall kept it from attacking. And

so there, that was the only creature type as of alpha that, um, had any rules baggage of any kind. Okay. So we get to Arabian Nights, which is the first expansion, uh, and Richard, Richard made Arabian Nights. And once again, Richard was trying to capture the book of Thousand and One Arabian Nights and like all the different Persian tales. And if we needed to make a new creature type, he did. I think Arabian Nights really set out this idea of, hey, creature types are this flavor element.

If we need them, use them. And I think it wasn't early on while Richard understood the idea that a creature type could be used mechanically I don't think Richard Richard always thinking about any sort of conservation or anything or any sort of collection of creature types like one of the things about early magic is early magic and this was once again, no one could predict what magic became. No one could predict 30 plus years later we're still making thousands of cards every year. So early on the idea that creature types, like we wanted to consolidate creature types,

that didn't happen yet. That wasn't the thing. That everything was kind of labeled by itself. A good example of that was early on, we just listed individual birds. Oh, you're a Falcon? Oh, okay, you're a Falcon. You're an Eagle?

Okay, you're an Eagle. And at some point we're like, you know, it would be fun to have some cards that care about the birds But if the birds are all over the map It's hard to do that. Well, what if instead of individually listing birds, we just said bird What if all what if instead of Falcons it was birds instead of eagle? It was bird What if everything that reference it just said birds? And then now I could have somebody that could command all the different birds.

And so that idea, the idea of consolidation would come later. The idea that, oh, I mean, even like I said, typal themes existed in alpha. Richard clearly understood the idea that the game could do that. But we hadn't got to the point like it's not till we start making a lot of different magic sets that we start seeing the need to sort of have themes to the sets like strong mechanical themes. Although the very next expansion

Antiquities does I mean Arabian Nights had a theme of sort of a top-down theme antiquities had a theme so like I think with time you start as we start making expansions even from the very beginning you see the need for themes and that need for flavor themes also pull through the mechanics okay then we get to legends so legends was the third expansion the first large expansion So legends was the third expansion the first large expansion But legends introduces a new creature type that has rules baggage Legend so the interesting thing is it introduced legendary as a super type But the super type only appeared on non creatures on lands and such in fact I think in legends is only was on lands and on creatures. We would later make legendary artifacts and champion stuff, but legends didn't do that.

Okay, so for creatures, it was summon legend. Remember the time you only got one creature type. So all the legendary creatures were summon legend and legend meant something. So what legend has meant changed over time. When it first came out, it restricted the card in your deck. Meaning if you were a legendary creature or a legend, you can only have one copy of that in your deck. With time, we started saying, well, you can have more copies in your deck, but only one

out at a time. And eventually we said, well, each player can only have only one out at a time. And we started defining that having a second one makes one of them have to go away. All this sort of came with time. The other thing to be aware of is because we only had one creature type, if we wanted to have a second creature type,

the technology we had at the time was what was called counts as. So let's say you had a legendary creature, but that legendary creature was a vampire. Let's say he was in the Wezolite saga. We only said creature type legend or summon legend. So what did we do? Well, the answer was we said counts as, counts as a vampire.

So if in the rules text it says counts as a vampire, that's like the word vampire was written on its rules text line. So that was the technology we did early on. Okay, the next probably important one is fallen empires. So fallen empires comes out in late 94. And fallen empires is the first set that says, you know, could we use typal as a theme?

Obviously individual cards cared. It wasn't that, it wasn't that typal as a, as a one of thing didn't exist, but the idea that said, oh, what if we focus, what if we build decks where the idea of the deck is you want to have the same creature all in the same deck. And yes, early magic, you can make your Murfolk deck or your Goblin deck.

But this was something where it was built into the fabric of what the set was. So for those that don't know Faun Empires, the flavor of Faun Empires was, it's on a kind of called Sarpedia. And there, for each color, there are two different factions, mostly that are using creature type to identify them, that are at war with each other.

And you know, like the thrulls were, the Order of the Ebon Hand had made the thrulls as the service race, this created race, but they turned against them and you know that so there are different fights in each of the group and so that was represented mechanically and a lot of that dedication came through the creature type as a way to sort of say hey you might want to play these together and while the idea of typal mechanics weren't inherently new, the idea of a typal theme was relatively new. And Fallen Empires really put that...now, Fallen Empires didn't go heavy on it. It was more of play these cards together and the cards all happened to be of the same creature type. And there might be a few cards that care to help reinforce that.

But the theme was more thematic and creative than it was strongly mechanical. Okay next we get to Tempest. So Tempest actually has two different mechanics in it. Slivers and Lissets. And each of those were the idea that we're going to make a brand new mechanic, we're going to tie it one to one with a creature type and then have that carry over. Slivers were particularly interesting because not only were slivers a named, I mean, sort of identified mechanic, but they also were typal by nature. So where slivers came from was when Mike Elliot, before he got hired by

Wizards, he came to work in R&D, made a set called After Ways. He made his own magic set. And when he got hired by R&D, they bought his set. And so when he was on Tempest, when we were sort of brainstorming mechanics, he gave up a lot of mechanics that he had made for his set, one of which was slivers. I think in the original, in his original after ways, there were creatures that fell from the heavens and when they fell they broke into pieces. Maybe there was one thing. But anyway, the slivers were the pieces of the creature that fell from the heavens.

And they were called slivers. And they were inspired by plague rats of all things. Mike liked how plague rats were this cool thing that you wanted to play together. Now plague rats made each other bigger, but Mike said, well, what if I do other things? What if they're granting abilities? And so the idea that they could grant flying or grant first strike or grant trample. So we ended up putting them into Tempest. Mike Ryan and I, when we made the Weatherlight Zygots, sort of reconcepted them.

In magic, they are these little creatures from a plane we do not know. Their home plane is unknown. But they were discovered by Volrath and brought to wrath. He wanted to study them. And they're a little mesomorph, they're little shape-changing creatures that share, they have a hive mind. And the idea is they have the ability to grow, to grow in shape. So let's say for example, one of the slivers saw a bird and noticed the bird could fly.

Well, by watching the bird and mimicking the bird, the sliver could grow wings because it could change its body. Now, once it grows wings, it can fly because it grew wings. And when it gets close to other slivers that share the hive mind, it's a proximity thing, they now have the information that the wing sliver has,

and now they know how to make wings so that they can fly and The idea was that as they graphed different body parts the different body parts grant them different abilities and that was the flavor we did They ended up playing a role when Gerard and the Weatherlight are coming to the stronghold to rescue Cisse and Karn and Takara, they in the death pits of wrath or the furnace of wrath, they encounter the slivers and they have to, they solve the problem of the slivers by realizing that they need to be near each other to grant the abilities. Anyway, all that is in the art of Tempest. But anyway, the idea of that, you know,

we could have whole type of mechanics, really it's something Tempest sort of, once again, it wasn't, Slivers weren't named, but they did it, but because they were all called Slivers, that's how people refer to the mechanic, it's the sliver mechanic. Okay, then we get to sixth edition.

Sixth edition is the first time. So remember on creatures that said summon creature. Well, one of the weird things is let's say I had a spell that said destroy target creature. How did I know that my goblin king was a creature? It didn't say creature on it. It said summon goblin. And so the idea was, well, look, let's clean it up. Every car type should list what it is. And so sixth edition solidified the idea that, okay, I'll say creatures will say creature on them. And then they'll have a hyphen and say it's some type. So instead of summon goblins, it's creature goblin. And the reason for that was just to make it clear about what's what. You don't have to learn that summon means creature or that, you know, something meant enchantment.

It just made it clear what things were. Also, let's see. Oh, okay. So the next we get to Urz's destiny. So remember that artifact creatures did not have a creature type. I was not a fan of that. And so I definitely was, I felt like, this is where I started entering the picture. I mean obviously I was there as of, I there for Tempest. I wasn't there for

Fun Empires. I really was a huge fan of creature types. I liked typo themes. I had made Goblin deck and I'd made a zombie deck and I'd made a merfolk deck and I really I saw the power in creature types and liked creature types and thought they were both flavorful and mechanically interesting. So it always bugged me that artifact creatures didn't have a creature type. And it took me a while in Erzut's, so Erzut's Destiny was the first set, I was the design team, so just one, a design team of one. I convinced somebody that there was a Thran Golem in it. And I think I convinced them to let me make it a Golem.

And then in the very next set, Mercadian Masks, I finally said, look, hey, all creatures should have a creature type. Why should artifact creatures not have a creature type? Like it's one of the things that define creatures. And so as of Mercadian Masks, we started giving artifact creatures creature types. Again, only one at the time, but still, you have to inch your way forward as you can. Okay, then we get to invasion.

So invasion is me starting to test the waters. I really like the idea that there could be more than one creature type. Why are we living in one creature type? We can fit more than one on the line. We should really make use of that. And so in Invasion, I made a cycle of multicolored creatures. I think they all cost one of one mana, one of a second. They were all pretty small, mostly two twos, I think.

And the idea was they were a cross section between two different popular creature types of those colors. Oh look, it's a goblin and a zombie. Oh, you know, red legs goblins, black legs zombies. Oh look, it's a goblin for the goblin deck and a zombie for the zombie deck. And it was playing into the multicoloredness. So like it's red and black.

So it's a red creature type and a black creature type Then the after invasion the next set was Odyssey. I turned out that the creative team Had left and I had done the create. I'd read names. I've written flavor text Inverse his legacy. I'd written the art descriptions. I for unglued, I had done all the creative work. So Bill came to me and said, look, I'm trying to get a new creative team. While I do that, for Odyssey, can you take care of names and flavor text and creature types?

And I said, sure. So I saw my opportunity. So a couple of things. One thing I did is I started doing more offbeat creature types just to sort of show the breadth of what we can do. So instead of green having elves that had squirrels, you know, I started sort of branching off and doing different things. Ironically, the set right after it was onslaught that kind of came back to bite me. I'll get to that in a second. But anyway, we introduced some new creature types to in two in specific that I should point out

One was the AVEN even were the bird people and the other were than then to go then to go were insect people So I said is well, what if I just to find these I'm the person making the creature types I'm just gonna find that AVENs are bird soldiers. That's what they are A few of them were bird wizard. But I just sort of built in, they're like, well, it's defined by their identity, they're soldiers. I'm gonna make them bird soldier. And the Nantuko were like clergy.

So I'm like, okay, and the Nantuko are insect druids. And I just said, that's what they are. And so every time I listed them, I just put two types on them. And meanwhile, while that was going on, I had talked a lot with the creative team and we shared a lot of desire to do more with creature types. We thought the creature types were very flavorful. I think the creative team liked them because they were so flavorful. I liked them because I saw a lot of the mechanical hooks they provided.

So we came up with a plan, a plan that we pitched during, oh, Miradim, but before we get there, sorry, I should actually run through onslaught very quickly before we get to Miradim. Okay, so onslaught comes around. The quick story of onslaught is Mike Elliott hands over design, it has like two mechanics in it. And Bill, Bill thinks it needs something. It feels like the mechanics aren't really mechanics in it. And Bill, Bill thinks it needs something. He feels like the mechanics aren't really wowing Bill. And so he has me look at it. And one of the little tiny themes that Mike had did

was he had creatures that could change their own creature type, which I was very fascinated by. But there wasn't a lot in the set that cared. Like there wasn't a lot that cared about creature types changing. And it didn't, changing your creature didn't mean as I'm like so I had long liked the idea that typo was a compelling theme and starting with invasion this is the era where we start doing blocks with themes right so

invasion had been multicolor Odyssey's been the graveyard so I'm like okay Mike really hadn't put a theme to his to the block and I Saw this little gem of an idea said, okay What if we take typo and we blow out typo? My thought process at the time was I saw how many players really enjoyed making typo decks and they sucked They were horrible. I I made a lot of typo decks and I said look if players are bending over backwards to do something that's horrible That like it's not powerful. They're not being driven by power level It's not like this is the this is the thing that wins them games

They do it because they want to do it doesn't that seem like a great theme and that's what I pitched to Bill I said Bill look here's the theme. We know people we know the casual players enjoy What have we just made the competitive players care about it You know and so I got signed off from bill and we really pushed the theme so onslaught was the first I mean fawn empires was the first set that any sort of type of component to it But I think that onslaught was the first that said look we're we're doing this as a grand unifying mechanical theme And that's when the Odyssey stuff came back to bite me. The fact that I hadn't made the red cards Goblins or the green cards Elves. So we did

a big thing and Onslaught was the first big sort of typo block. And the first set that was typo like in an aggressive mechanical way. There definitely were things in the past. I mean, slivers were mechanically identified, phone numbers had themes. I mean, there were things we had done, but this was the first all out, like this is the, it's not typo set. Um, and I remember this, it was really interesting. I also had added in morph because morph the, the, anyway, you guys have heard the more story, but I added in morph and type.

Those are two big things I added into onslaught. Um, Oh, and cycling. Um, anyway, and when we got back, I remember from the pre-release, I think Randy, who was my boss at the time, really thought like, oh, the big thing about this was going to be Morph. Morph's amazing. And people liked Morph, but the biggest takeaway was how excited people were about Typol. That Typol was a big thing. And I remember him going, oh, the big thing's Tyo. I'm like, yeah, I've been saying that. I recognize the power of typo.

So anyway, so we made Onslaught. And then during Onslaught, it's when the creative team and I were doing a lot of talking. And so Brady came to me one day and said, OK, he had a pitch. And he wanted to get me on board because he had to convince R&D, the rest of R&D, to do this. And I was the most sympathetic, obviously. He knew all the creature types.

And the idea we had at the time was called the race class system. It mimicked how D&D, so in Dungeon Dragons, when you make your character, you decide what, is it human? Is it an orc? Is it an elf? You decide what the creature is,

and you decide what your creature is. Am I a fighter? Am I a thief? Like what do I do? And so they refer to that as race class. Like what am I and what do I do? So Brady and the creative team wanted to pitch the idea of what if magic did race class? What if magic said, oh well you are something. You are a goblin. You are an elf. And you do something. And so the idea was for anything that was sort of sapient, we would start introducing two creature types. And this was introduced for Mirrodin.

So the R&D said yes to this. And so it ended up being done in Mirrodin. The other thing that in order to do this, we had to introduce human. For the very first time in Meriden. And so I remember it's funny. The thing we agreed to at the time was we decided, OK, we'll introduce human, but we won't typally care about human was the agreement everybody made.

And then many years later, when we're making Innistrad, I came back. At the time, everybody who had made that agreement was no longer in the building except for me and Bill. So I went to Bill and I said okay Bill I'm making a set it has a strong typo theme Innistrad, humans matter I really want like it's four monsters and the humans you know and I want the humans to matter in a way that's really important can I care about humans but you know and I said but we'd made this promise and I

go but we're the only ones left that made the promise and Bill goes what makes this that better? I go. Yes, it well he does. Let's do it. And so we started making human type all So then we get to time spiral Time spiral block at the end of it was future site future site had the future shift of cards I am in the future shift of cards, we introduced the idea of tribal that would end up in lore. Lorwin would sort of officially have it, but it got teased in future site. And the idea there was creature types are subtypes.

They can only go on creatures. What if we could put creature subtypes on other things, like instance and sorceries and enchantments and artifacts? So we made the tribal. It ended up being a supertype, not supertype, it ended up being a card type. I think in retrospect we wish we made it a supertype, but anyway, it ended up being a card type. And the idea is if you put tribal on a card, it was allowed to have a creature subtype

even if the card was not a creature. So if you made a tribal sorcery it could be a goblin or a tribal enchantment could be a merfolk. So we ended up doing that. We also during Lorewin we did the grand creature type update where we went back and we sort of with the new guidance of all the stuff we'd the changes we'd made in the race class and all that we went back and sort of cleaned everything up. There are a bunch of creature types we'd introduced since like there are cards in which in the race class and all that. We went back and sort of cleaned everything up. There were a bunch of creature types we'd introduced since like, there are cards in which,

in the name it said something and we had since introduced that creature type. We're like, oh, well let's make sure all those match up. That if we've introduced this creature type and then clearly the card implies it's that creature type that it says that. The Grand Creature type, the downside of the Grand Creature type was,

it just made a lot of cards that were printed that did something that was not printed on the card And so we do do a rat of creature types from time to time We're just more careful how often we do them are not super consistent on it and Then I'm going to end today with champions of Kamagawa Why end with champs of Kamagawa because champs of Kamagawa? Gets rid of the two creature types that have rules baggage. Legend goes to Legendary and becomes the supertype.

And wall stops carrying weight. We make the defender mechanic. And then all cards that had been walls gain the defender. And we are one-for-one whenever we make a wall I believe it has to then we don't make walls that don't defender but we can use defender on non walls and other cards could have an offender but anyway so and just be aware Mercadion masks is well into magic's life it took a while to like, you know, to stop carrying weight, rules weight on cards.

Anyway, um, obviously Onslaught really showed the love of typal. Lorwin again brought back and did more typal things. As I said, Innistrad would revisit typal at a kind of a lower, like it was a, typal was a component, but just an element of many elements not the key element We would do ixalan and we typo themes are just an ongoing theme most sets have a typo theme Maybe it's just a small archetypal thing. Maybe it's a bigger thing. Maybe it's core to a mechanic But it varies now. I mean typo themes are just run amok through what we do and creature types Like I said, I think it took a while to sort of understand that the problem now as we as we get to the present day

The problem we run into now is we sometimes run out of space on the type line Legendary is a long word. We like artifact creatures. Sometimes there's enchantment creatures and We we in fact we have gone to the opposite end of the spectrum where we like having many creature types as we can It just adds more flavor and adds more mechanical hooks. And so now sometimes like oh we can't fit all the things we want to fit on it There are some legendary enchantment creatures that had to be shrines and they couldn't be accepted creature type because it just didn't fit And we've also had stuff like remember we were making the gods from Theros So we then not that God's a bad word But like we needed it to be God because even longer it wouldn't fit because they were enchantment creatures

So anyway, it's funny how creature types really went from this Very early innocuous thing to being a pretty core part of magic. Like I said, there are very few sets we make this day that don't have a card in it that cares about a specific creature type and often a theme that cares about it. And then from time to time we do larger themes in which it's a component like Innistrad or it's the main theme like Onslaught or Lorwen or Ixalan. Anyway guys that is the histories of creature types so I hope you found that interesting the sort of evolution over time but I'm now

at work so we all know that means means at the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys all next time bye bye