Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1210: Rarity Changes

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

In this podcast, I walk through the various reasons why we reprint cards at a different rarity.

I'm pulling away from the curb because the drum was on off at school. We all know what that means It's time for their drive to work Okay, so today's topic came from a suggestion on blue sky For those who do not know I'm now in blue sky Twitter is Blue sky is like Twitter of the past which is very nice So if you've never been on Blue Sky, or if you are on Blue Sky, I'm there, maro254.

Okay, so let's talk about rarity swaps. So in order to understand rarity swaps, let's first talk a little bit about rarity. What is rarity? Why do we do rarity? So when magic began, there were three rarities, common, uncommon, and rare, and then eventually we added a fourth rarity, which is mythic rare. And we're going to get real technical.

There are a few other rarities. There's land rarities and token rarities, and there are a few other things that exist. But mostly for purposes of today's conversation, there's four rarities, common, uncommon, rare, and myth. The core idea of rarities is when Richard built magic, one of the Viginious ideas he used, one of the golden trifecta, is the idea of taking trading cards

and making a game out of them. So trading cards pre-existed, magic obviously, trading cards started as a means as a collectible. The idea was you would have sports like baseball or movies or singers, you know, something that you wanted to collect, something that you cared about. And then there were different cards that represented those different things. And the idea is that when you buy a pack, you don't know what you're getting. The randomization was a big part of it. That part of what you want is you want to buy new packs to see what you get.

Richard realized that the randomness of packs of trading cards was something that you could build a game around. There was something cool. What if there was a game where we gave you component pieces and you put the pieces together? But when you bought packs you would get random cards So he was borrowing off the idea of trading cards and trading cards inherently built into them have rarities mostly in trading cards the rarity is about sort of

You want levels of collectability. Here are cards that everybody gets, here are cards that not everybody gets, here's cards that few people get, here's really special cards that is very exciting when you open them. That part of any sort of collecting is you want sort of have a range

of things that are easy to hard. And that from a pure collecting standpoint, you know, you wanna make collecting a challenge. If it was an even rarity, if everything was exactly the same, it would be very easy to collect the things you want to collect. And part of the fun of trading cards in general is the idea of there's things that you get a chase after. There's exciting things to open. There's things you open that other people didn't open and such like that, that allows for stuff like trading and a lot of different things.

Richard realized though that rarities do an important function in the game. So the biggest thing, so let me get into a concept that's very important. I use this term all the time. Let me go a little deeper into it. What we call as fan, which is short for AsFanned. And what it really means is how often does something show up? When I say AsFan and put a number next to it, AsFan of 1, AsFan of 1.3, AsFan of 2, what that means is if you open

a random booster pack of this set, on average, how many of a particular theme or something will you get? For example, if we're talking about creatures, oh, what is the Asphan of creatures? Well, the Asphan of creatures usually, so let's say in a play booster, which has 14 cards, is seven, maybe 7.2, 7.3. It's a little bit over half. So that means that if you open a random booster about 7, you know, 7 to 8 of the cards you open will be creatures because on average and once again the idea of Aspen is if you opened up a lot of cards and then you average them, what would the average be?

Any one individual pack could deviate a little bit from the Aspen. The Aspen isn't about one single pack, but more about the average over time. Now, we occasionally do things where like we make dedicated slots, like oh, like Dominaria, every pack had a legend in it. We can do some things that lock some amount of Asfan in so when you guarantee a slot well that's a guarantee Asfan of 1.0. If you don't do that meaning so there's a difference between Asfan of 1.0 meaning sometimes you get two and sometimes you get zero and a locked Asfan. Anyway there's a lot of plays we can play around with it

And there's different ways we can guarantee things and such. Anyway, the reason Aspen is important and the reason it plays into rarity is One of the challenges of making magic is we don't control what you open the whole randomization means like if you buy a Normal game you buy a monopoly or Scrabble or something, you get the same piece that everybody else gets. You know, if I open up my Monopoly, like, oh, well, I'm going to get the board and the play money and the, you know, the properties and the community chess cards. What I get and what you get are the exact same thing.

You know, most games when you and I open the same game, you know, we each go to the store and buy Monopoly and we open it up. You and I are mostly getting the same thing, the same pieces, the same components. But if I go to the store and I buy magic and you buy magic, even if we buy the same amount of packs, I bought 10 packs, you bought 10 packs. We might have some overlap, some things we open, the other one would open, but they're not completely the same. That's one of the dynamics. So one of the dynamics so

one of the challenges of designing for a trading card game is you don't have a guarantee of what people have you don't know exactly what they're getting so a lot of the work we do is an as fan is saying oh well we want to make sure that you have certain things. And so if something's important, we need to do it in a high enough as fan that on average most people will open it. And also in something like limited where you're playing with more than one pack, you're playing with usually six packs, the more you open up, the more the as fan averages out to be correct, matching the as fan. The variance is lower the more packs you open. Okay, so let's dive lower the more packs you open.

Okay, so let's dive into the topic of the day. So we make cards. We might print cards at common and uncommon, at rare and mythic rare. And then later on we might reprint those cards, meaning we print them again. But when we reprint them, they might not be the same rarity. Why?

Why is that the case? Okay, well today I have 10 different reasons why that would be the case. These aren't in any particular order other than the order I wrote them down. So, okay, first is we are fallible as human beings. Sometimes we make a card and we just don't really understand the rarity

supposed to be. A classic example is Counterspell. So in Alpha, Richard made Counterspell and made it an uncommon. I'm not sure why he made it uncommon. It felt a little splashy. I don't know. But what he soon realized was it was a pretty core concept of what Blue wanted to be doing and it was about as simple as it gets. Yeah, we can do more complicated counter spells, but it's the simplest counter spell. So one of the things that rarity, we definitely do with rarity is complexity and we'll get more into that.

But the idea, so the first and foremost, why might we change rarity? Because we believe the rarity we put in the first case was just not the right rarity. So sometimes we change rarity because we print something and we're like, you know, yeah, we got that wrong. We printed uncommon, it should be common. We printed a common, it should be uncommon. You know, the sometimes the reason we change rarity is it's because if we're like, oh, a lot of times you'll do something

and you go, if I had to do that again, well, reprints are a chance to do it again. So sometimes we're doing the reprint, we're like, oh, yeah, I don't think we did that right the first time. Let's put it somewhere else. Okay, number two. Sometimes when we first introduce something,

let me talk a little bit about splash. So there is splash and there is function. Splash means, hey, it's exciting, usually because it's novel. Sometimes maybe it's a bigger version that you're used to. Maybe it just does something that we've never done before. But there's something very exciting about novelty. People like novelty.

So as a general rule, I mean, one of the things about selling any trading card game, and I'll get more into this in a later one, is you want people to be excited to open the packs. So one of the things that we tend to do is the first time we do an effect, when the effect is at its splashiest, we often will do the effect in a way that makes it, that highlights its splashiness. There are a number of different ways to do that, but one of the easiest ways to do that is just put it at a higher rarity.

Like one of the things about rares and mythic rares is we want people to be excited by them, right? These are the exciting things in the booster pack. They're not the workhorses. They're the exciting things. And so we will put novelty at higher rarities generally just because it's exciting, you know, the first time we ever do something.

So my example for this one is a car called Flicker. So the origin of Flicker is we were making a mechanical phasing in Mirage. And I was really interesting in how to interact with phasing, how to do different things with phasing. And I came up with the idea of what if you do things that phase themselves out? And the reason you would do that usually is like to protect it. You know, oh, I have a creature.

But if you try to kill it, all I can phase it out and I can save it. But one of the things that always bugged me about phasing is when you phase something out and it comes back into play, it doesn't trigger enter the battlefield effects. And I always thought it could be cool if it did. So when I was making Earth's Destiny,'s a set that I designed by myself, I came up with a new ability that I call Flicker. In fact, the card that does it, it's called Flicker. Originally, by the way, I made a vertical cycle. We ended up just being one. But we ended up making one

card with it, which is a rare card. And Flicker is like, okay, remove something and bring it back. And at the time, we had never done that effect. It was a really novel effect. It was really cool. But one of the things we figured out with time is it's a pretty simple effect and it's really useful. Flicker effects are quite fun. You can re-trigger, enter the battlefield effects. You could start something over.

So maybe something has counters to get used up. You can put them out. Maybe something got like negative one minus one counters or counters on it you don't want or ors on it you don't want. You can take them off by, anyway, there's a lot of cool things you can do. So with time we realize,

oh, this is an effect that has, it's more what we call workhorse, meaning there's some effects that are splashy. Like, oh, look at this. And there's some effects that are workhorse. And that just means they're efficient. They do what you need to do. So over time, when you first do a mechanic,

the first time it appears, you tend to lean into the splash of it. A great example of that also might be hybrid, right? First time we did hybrid, we really made it a splashy thing and leaned into it. Cause we've never seen hybrid before. But eventually hybrid really is just a workhorse mechanic. It allows us to do things.

It's a tool. So eventually we just use it where we need to use it and it's no longer a thing about rarity. So that's another reason why things might change. Rarity is early on we're trying to play up the splashiness of it, but long term we're playing up the workhorse-ness of it and the workhorse needs to be at a lower aspect so it gets to do the job is trying to do like once we understand what flickering can do and flickering is not This new novel thing. Hey, well, we want to stick it to the rarity where it does the work

It needs to do and that's a comment Okay number three From time to time or not time, different sets have different focuses and themes that part of making magic is we have to make a lot of sets. We want the sets to be exciting. And so different sets will lean in different directions and do different things. So for example, original Kaladesh,

we were doing this invention theme, right? We were making, it was an artifacts that played into invention. But one of the things we realized was, traditionally a lot of the sort of quirkier builds around artifacts tend to be rare. That's how we normally do them. But it was the theme of the set.

We really were playing into this. So we allowed ourselves to lower the rarity so that certain types of effects would show up more. Another example might be hey we're doing a graveyard set well certain effects in certain colors we don't use all that often but in the graveyard set maybe we use a little bit more because that's the theme of the set so one of the reasons we will change rarity is we're just trying to play into what the set is doing and In order to do that. We will push things we will raise the as fan of something. Oh We're doing a graveyard set. We want more things that care about the graveyard

But normally in a normal set in a default set we don't do as much stuff in the graveyard So usually the ass man is pushed up a little bit We don't do as much stuff in the graveyard. So usually the a-stand is pushed up a little bit. So the cards might show up at a slightly higher rarity. But when we're trying to make it more prevalent, when it's more the theme of what's going on, we need to lower the a-stand of some cards, or I'm sorry, we need to raise the a-stand,

but lower the rarity of some cards to do that, so that things show up more. So that's another reason that we might change cards to rarity is we're just trying to get certain effects to show up at a higher Asfan. And the other thing, we talked about Asfan, if I make something a common in a pack in 14 cards, I'm talking average here

because play boosters have things that can, every slot is not guaranteed to a rarity. When Magic first started, things were locked by slot, meaning you got, originally there were 15 card packs, and so one of them was a land, 10 of them were commons, three were uncommons, and one was a rare, which one eighth of the time was a mythic rare. Play Booster's a little more complicated than that,

but essentially, if you make something a common, commons just show up a lot more. And so right now, for example, in Playbooster's, there's 80 commons. And I'm trying to remember how many, I don't know whether it's somewhere between eight to 10 commons I think you get. And so the idea is if we put something at a common,

the chance of it showing up is just much, much higher. Its frequency rate is much, much higher. So if you're trying to get an effect to show up, every time you put it in common, the way we do the math to figure out Asband is like, what's the chance of a common showing up? Well, there's so many of them, there's so many slots, here's the math. What's the chance of an uncommon? What's the chance of a rare? What's the chance of a common showing up? Well, there's so many of them, there's so many slots, here's the math.

What's the chance of an uncommon? What's the chance of a rare? What's the chance of a mythic rare? A chance of a common is pretty high. There's a lot of slots and only so many commons. What's the chance of a mythic rare? Hey, it doesn't even show up every booster, so much, much lower. So the more we put something at a lower rarity, the higher the aspen.

So the idea here is there's a set, it has a theme. We want to raise the Asfan of the theme. Well the way to do that is to move down effects in rarity so that you raise that and that's why we would change that. Okay, another thing that we care about in limited is limited helps us determine what happens, sorry, rarity helps us determine what happens in limited. The higher the ASFAN, the more likely it's to show up, the more impact limited. The lower the ASFAN, the less likely it shows up, the less it impacts. So if we do something at a high ASFAN, oh, that's really going to impact limited because

we know it's going to show up. For example, there's a set called legions that was all creatures. Well, when the whole set is creatures, we have a lot of thinking about how limited will play that involves that pack. And so one of the things that we're always conscious of is if you want something to appear more unlimited, you will lower its rarity. If you want something to appear less than limited, you will lower its rarity. If you want something to appear less unlimited, you will raise its rarity. A very classic example, by the way, unlimited is we make a card. We really liked how that card played. I mean, you know what? That would be more fun if it showed up a little bit more

than maybe we were printed at a lower rarity or vice versa. Man, that caused problems unlimited. That really was problematic. It was a bomb It wasn't fun to open it didn't make games all that fun in limited. So we raised the rarity We put it at a higher rarity that one of the reasons that let's say we made a card It was a rare when we first saw it, but when we were printed, it's a mythic rare It's like oh, maybe that's really messing with, and we don't want to mess with limited. So in order to sort of keep it less involving limited, we can change the rarity of it.

And we'll go both ways. Maybe it's like we want to show up more, we lower the rarity. We want to show up less, we raise the rarity. Next, this idea that every card is exactly at a rarity is just not true. We do have demarcations. We do have like, there are certain effects that go at certain rarities. There's certain general rules about rarities.

I've done podcasts on rarities. In fact, I did a whole series on each of the rarities. But the, there are some things that just fall in what we call gray area meaning there's some effects that like is it common or uncommon it could be either it depends on the set that's in so sometimes there's things that are just kind of in the middle between two rarities and so it's possible that one set i mean it's just a matter of where things can fall and sometimes it's not a matter of like this conscience changing as much as hey as we're making the set we have we know we have flexibility with certain cards and there's just certain effects where we have some give where we want to put them and so sometimes things change

rarity just because they go at more than one rarity and so we use that freedom. Another thing is that one of the reasons as I talked about why trading card games exist, why there's a rarity, one of the means of rarity is as a means to sell the booster. They get people excited about the booster, right? Oh, maybe I open this thing and so you want your rares, your mythic rares to be exciting. I talked earlier about maybe we put things higher in rarity for splash value, because we think people would like it. One of the interesting things about bringing things back

though, is they are what I will call solved. Meaning when I first put something in a booster pack, you don't know, you know, a lot of the excitement is based not on the reality of what it is, but on the potential of what it could be. So a lot of times we put things that rare and mythic rare. And the idea is like not everything is going to be termed viable. We just, there's no way to do that.

There's no way to make everything such that it can be termed viable. Only only a certain percentage of cards can be termed viable. And if you up the power level one, it just knocks out another card. So a lot of us putting stuff at rare and mythic rare especially at rare is saying hey here's something that seems exciting right but when you do reprints you don't get like a card that seemed exciting it proved not to be exciting the players know that it's been solved and so you don't quite get the same kick out of certain types of cards especially cards that seem exciting but end up being weaker than they seem so when

you're reprinting things and you're trying to have exciting reprints you need to take cards you know delivered and so one of the ways to do that is sometimes to take a card that was at one rarity but really delivered and some, hey, maybe, maybe it was stronger than we meant it to be. Or maybe it just ended up being something that just, it's synergies for like, there's something that we didn't quite get about it. But the, um, so anyway, we made the card and, um, the audience really liked it and they're very excited.

We were printed. It, it'll be a driver. People will want to buy packs trying to find that card. So we will often raise the rarity of those cards because we want people to be excited and that these are cards that are proven to be a cool thing. And like I said, when we're printing cards, you, people know what the cards are. They know whether they're good or not. So you don't really get away with, Ooh, this seems like it could be exciting. They know whether they're good or not. So you don't really get away with, ooh, this seems like it could be exciting. They know whether it's exciting or not.

Okay, another thing that can happen is sometimes you are filling out your set and you fill up a rarity. And then you later realize you want a card, but you're like, I don't have space in this rarity. Oh, I have space at another rarity. And so you're like, well, either the card is one of those gray areas where it could be in more than one rarity, or sometimes it's like, well, I think for this sad, it plays into theme or whatever, whatever reason you can rationale and sort

of say, okay, I, I don't have room in its normal rarity, but I'd like to get it in the sat and you know, you have some flexibility to shift things up and down. And so sometimes things change rarely just because to fit in the SAT. Hey, that's where the slot was. Okay, next. So another big element of rarity has to do with complexity. As a general rule of thumb, we like comments to be simpler and easier and we like It's not that rares and mythic rares need to be need to be complex. There are simple effects

There still are rare effects, but we like to simplify how easy magic is to play If you guys ever heard something called New World Order The philosophy behind New World Order is the simpler common, the easier it is for the game to approach by beginners because so much of the cards they open will be commons. Commons make up at least two thirds of your cards. So for a beginner who doesn't buy a lot of cards, a lot of what they will see and represent will be the commons.

And so we try to be careful about the complexity of commons. That's the pendulum of shifts. We're currently putting a little more complexity of common than we have in the past of commons. That's a pendulum that shifts. We're currently putting a little more complexity common than we have in the past for various reasons. But so one of the reasons that cards can change rarity is it ended up being more or less complex than we thought. And so sometimes when you come back, you're like, well, we put that at a higher rate because we thought it was really complex, but it's become a regular part of magic I mean I used flickr earlier flickr is a fine effect where if you've never ever seen flickr before and you have to understand

The card leaves the you know gets exiled and then comes back from exile That means it triggers enter battlefield effects and it changes the counter like there's a little bit of Understanding of how flickr works. So the first time you ever experienced Flickr, it could be a little more complicated, but it's an effect we do all the time, right? And so sometimes like the complexity also, and it's just a matter of maybe it's something that people generally like and it's more intuitive to them.

Like a lot of times we make cards and we sort of learn, like sometimes we think things are very intuitive and they are not. People really struggle with them. They have a lot of problems. So maybe when we come back, we go, you know what? That was harder than we thought. Let's raise the rarity.

Or maybe we're like, ah, people, we thought it might be hard, but people generally get it. We can lower the rarity. So trying to adjust for the complexity is a reasonable the rarity. So trying to adjust for the complexity is the reason we'll change rarity. Okay another reason is game balance which is sometimes we make a card and we don't quite understand the impact the card has. One of the general rules is One of the general rules is you want the fun things to happen more often and you want the less fun things to happen less often.

And so sometimes there are things that are powerful and you wanna bring them back. People like the card, but the power level of the card kinda dictates the change in rarity. Partly like I said this goes beyond limit obviously the impact's limited but also we're like hey we just want like for example sometimes there's things are like you know what we'd like this to be in casual game flats. Yes this is a fun competitive thing that people

might really enjoy in more advanced play, it's a more complicated effect or something in which, maybe there's something in which, hey, if you know what you're doing and you're playing with someone who knows what they're doing, this card is kind of fairly balanced. But if you're knowledgeable and your opponent's not knowledgeable, man, you're just gonna, it really causes problems.

So we try to figure out there are play balance reasons why certain effects want to be a different rarity and what another just big one is we want the as fan of it lower that could mean limited once again when I talk about as fan as fans biggest impact is in limited and what we call casual constructed limited because you open up the cards the lower the r, the more often you get them, the higher the rarity, the less. So I talked already a lot about limited. Let me talk a little bit about casual constructed.

So casual constructed is there are a bunch of people who don't buy a lot of magic cards. They're casual players. Now, they're casual players who buy a lot of cards, but there's a large, large group of players and it's probably the biggest group of magic players who are like, hey, I like Magic, it's not my main game, I do other things, I buy a little bit every time it comes out. I don't own a lot of cards and I play what I like to call cards I own. Kitchen table Magic. I make decks out of what I got and what I got is what I got and I don't have a very

advanced deck because I don't have a lot of cards. And in a lot of ways, casual play, the very bottom end casual play, is not that different from limited as far as the power level and the nature of it. So if we want things and keep them out of casual play, just like we want to keep them out of limited, that's an awesome thing we have to be careful of.

So if there's an effect that we know just gonna Stymie less enfranchised players. Well, that's don't put it in common and maybe the first time we did it We did put it in common and didn't understand that so next time we go. Okay, let's get that out of common So sometimes we do things and as we understand the effects of them We change the rarity as to stop that effect in the future. The final thing, this is my number 10, sometimes there are external things that impact rarity changes. My example for this will be play boosters.

When we made play boosters, we had to change the makeup of our rarities. So before play boosters and draft boosters, we had 101 commons, we had 80 uncommons, it's like 53 rares and 15 to 20 mythical rares. When we went to play booster, we had to change, so let me talk about common and uncommon, which is what matters here we went from 101 commons and 80 uncommons to 80 commons and 100 hundred uncommons So that changes the very nature meaning that the commons are going to show up a little more than they used to the uncommons are going to show up

Sorry The commons were at a slightly lower as than which is why we lowered them. That's why it went to 80 from 100. So we want to come to show up at a rate very similar to what they showed up before in order to do that because in play boosters there's one less card plus you have more opportunity to get higher rarity cards. So commons were showing up a little less.

That's why we lowered the number of commons. So and this general rule we wanted commons to show up about the same amount But the effect of doing that meant that common cards um By lowering the number of them so we match how often they show up Just meant the common cards that do show up show it a slightly higher um rate than they normally do because Just meant the common cards that do show up show it a slightly higher rate than they normally do because They're just less commons and there's less slots for commons, but there's less commons

anyway, the net and the flip of that is Uncommon showed up a little more than they used to so we raised the number of them So they showed up at an equal rate. But what that meant was certain uncommon effects showed up differently and certain common effects anyway long and short of this is what I'm trying to explain is there are certain effects that we didn't want showing up quite as often as they now showed up in play boosters on commons the classic example there will be threading effects the threading is I steal your creature for the turn, usually in red. Threading effects we decided, you know what, those would be better. Like we had to choose sort of where to put them. We're like, you know what,

we think we like it better at the rate they show up at on common. So we had to move some stuff around. And so the idea there is the reason we're changing rarities is there's other things impacting the general feel of what's going on and that rarities are not locked in stone over time as we change how we make magic, as we change how we create our boosters, how we, how, you know, like what goes in rarities and what rarities are changes over time. And so sometimes the reason we change rarities of cars is the nature of how rarity works has changed. And so there are external things.

So anyway, to recap, so I'm at work, so let me quickly recap. So there are a lot of reasons we will change why a rarity between the original printing and future printings. Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe we start using the effect more and less of a novelty and more of a workhorse thing. Maybe the theme of the set wants something at a higher or lower as than. Maybe we're trying to adjust it for limited so we want more or less. Maybe it's in between two rarities and we have some flexibility and a different set just chooses differently.

Maybe it's a driver to get people to want to buy the booster. So we push it up in rarity. Or sometimes also maybe we want more people to expose to it, we can push it down in rarity. There's not space in this original rarity. And sometimes when we map things out, things don't end up fitting where they did before. Maybe it's more complex or less complex. And we feel that shift in rarity

better reflects the complexity. Maybe something has play balance issues and we didn't, where we put it before we decided we'd like it better somewhere else. Or maybe there's a larger element like play boosters or something that's impacting them that's affecting them. So anyway that is the many reasons why rarities can change between printings. So I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast but I'm at work so we all know what that means. I mean this is the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.