Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1237: Top 20 Worst Mechanics, Part 1

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

This podcast is part one of three on my series about the 20 worst mechanics of all time, based on my talk at last year's MagicCon: Las Vegas.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work Okay, so today and some number of future podcasts. I will be talking about a speech I gave at Magic Con Las Vegas in 2024 it was the 20 worst mechanics of all time In Chicago, I had done the 20 best mechanics of all time and I made a podcast series of podcasts on that talk so today I would be today and I don't know whether it'll be two or three we'll see how it goes so I'm gonna talk about the 20 worst mechanics of all time I did do a podcast really early on on the 20 worst mechanics of all time and I'm sure there's some overlap but I did a lot of

prep for the speech so this should be a bit different also that one was a long time ago Okay number 20 stickers from Unfinity so the interesting thing about stickers is I actually don't think the actual mechanic of the stickers meaning I have a means to Place things on my card that weren't there before. There are four types of stickers. There were name stickers, there were art stickers, there was ability stickers, and there was

power toughness stickers. I think ability stickers and power toughness stickers are, I mean, we do auras, we do equipment. I mean, they very auras, we do equipment. I mean, they very much fall in that category. I actually think they're quite fun. One of the neat things about doing stickers is we have a lot of variety. So there's a lot of different things that could happen. You know, I had an ungame where I got, I think, I think I got poisoned. I'm not sure whether I poisoned

somebody else or I got poisoned out. But the point is, in a set in which none of the cards have the ability to give you poison, I won a game with poison because of one of the stickers, which is kind of cool. I think in retrospect, the name stickers probably caused more confusion than they were worth. The art stickers, I think they're just fun. I think if I had to... Well, so here's the issue on stickers. Why are stickers bad in the game? I don't think they were unfun. I think if I had to... well, so here's the issue on stickers. Why are stickers a bad mechanic? I don't think they were unfun. I think they were... the actual mechanics of them were cool. The biggest flaw, the biggest problem, was what we call a logistics problem, which was the sticker. So one of the goals when we make, so when we do stickers,

we don't normally do stickers. It's not something Magic does. Now Wizards has done stickers in other products. I think some Dungeon Dragons products had stickers in them. So we had printed stickers before. But one of the guidelines that's really important was that I wanted them to go on your card and come off and go on another card. And so the number one priority

is we didn't want to harm your card. We didn't want you to feel like, oh, I put stickers on my card and now off and go on another card. And so the number one priority is we didn't wanna harm your card. We didn't want you to feel like, oh, I put stickers on my card and now I somehow ruined my card. So there's a thing in glue about how sticky the glue is that's called tackiness. Tacky, like how tacky is the glue? And so we only had the opportunity to do one test.

And really the highest priority of that test was making sure it didn't harm the card, which it didn't. But it turns out that the thing that we, that it ended up not being right for from a end goal is that it didn't do a, like, you would stick it on a card. Okay, it'd be fine. It would come off, wouldn't harm the card. It would go on a second card,

but not quite as firm as the first card. And usually by the third or fourth, it just wasn't sticking anymore. And it also doesn't stick easily back on the sheet that you pulled it off from. So people would lose their stickers or they would put it on the card and then it would fall off. And that one of the things of a logistics is,

even if a mechanic in a vacuum, like I think if we made stickers on Magic on Magic Arena or something right where there's no logistical issues at all. It just does it for you They never fall off you can put them back I think that it's a fun mechanic like the strength the reason that's on this list is not that at its core I don't think it's a fun mechanic I do think it's a fun mechanic but the at you do have to use the mechanic and one of the important things

about mechanics is it's not just in its optimized form is it fun, in its practical form is it fun. Is it fun to actually use it as you have to use it. And the nature of the way something like stickers work is we don't playtest. I mean we did playtest stickers in the sense that we went and got stickers. We did play test with actual stickers, but it didn't match the tackiness of the stickers that came out of the, and we were playing with play test cards. So when we use those stickers, we throw, you know, we, we get rid of the play test cards when we're done. Um,

and so the idea that we weren't worried about, did the sticker come off? It didn't matter. So we did test with stickers. And so we understand the visceralness of the stickers. We understand, like, there's a lot of elements of stickers that we did understand because we play tested the best we can. But one of the natures of, if you're doing something that kind of, it's not really there

till the finished product, it's really hard to test. Now in retrospect, could we have tested it more? I do wish the one test we had, we had done more long-term playing with it. But the scary thing there is, let's say something went wrong and we didn't like that test, I could make maybe one correction. I don't even know if we could change it again.

I mean, we could see it again and see what happened, but I don't think we have another opportunity to change it. Like we have one testing opportunity. I can make a change based on that testing opportunity. And then that's what we live with. And so that's also kind of scary. I can test it and go, oh, this isn't right. But then I can just go, well, here's what we're aiming for.

And then I don't even get to test that next one because we only get one test. So anyway, it's one of the challenges of working. Like one of the things that unsets like to do is break boundaries and do things we've never done before. Well, one of the nature of doing that is that you run into problems like this where there's things that you can't quite test. The one other thing with stickers is I think we probably were a little too complicated

with them. Like I said, I probably wouldn't do name stickers if I had to do them again. And if I had to do them again, I mean, I would even entertain the idea of something like punch out rather than stickers meaning there's no Illusion that is sticking to your card and maybe maybe I don't know anyway that This is not the stickers podcast so let's move on that was number 20 number 19 mega morph from dragons of Tarkir So mega morph is another example where the actual mechanic, not a bad mechanic, I think it played well, I think it was fun, I think that, I believe

it got played in high-level play, like it showed up in tournaments. Okay, what's the problem with it? Well the interesting thing about this one is a perception issue. So Megamorph for a while was the lowest rated mechanic We had ever done at the time the set came out players rated it lower than anything else And I mean there are some bad mechanics magic has made its share of bad mechanics This was the absolute lowest rated thing. So why is that? Why like I'm saying? I think it's a fun mechanic Why was it so low rated and the answer is? expectation so when we made the Khans of

Tarkir block, one of the things that was a big deal was the structure of the block. The story we were telling was we visited Tarkir, home of Sarkin, the lover of dragons. But his blood dragons had been killed off and the Khans ruled Tarkir. So Sarkin went back in time and it turns out by saving Ugin in a fight he had against Bolas, by saving Ugin, there's a whole result of things and ends up saving the dragons. So we come back, there's an alternate timeline and now the dragons reign supreme. So the idea was there was three sets. The first set was a large set. The second set, first set was cons of Tarqir. Second set was fate of Reforge.

Third set was dragons of Tarqir. The idea is you draft cons by itself, cons, cons, cons. Then when fate comes out, you do like cons, I don't know if it's cons, fate, fate or cons, cons, fate, but you draft both of them. Then when dragons comes out, you like dragons dragons fate meaning the small sick and stratch with both large sets but the two large sets don't get drafted together that's why we did the whole storyline the idea is you you draft timelines oh well I'm drafting fates and cons that's the first timeline

when the timeline gets changed the past is still the past, but now there's a new timeline. So you draft Fates with Dragon's Tark here. Hold on, let me take a drink. Anyway, so the idea that we had was what if we had a mechanic that reflected that? What if we showed you that mechanic in the first set, we showed a proto version in the second set, and we showed an alternate reality version in the third set. So the first set was Morph. We brought Morph back. The second set was Manifest. Oh, now you can take cards off the top of your library and make them into the like, you know, Manifest isn't exactly Morph, but it's similar. You get things face down, they can turn turn faced up it plays nicely with morph cards and it allows any creature you turn face down

kind of act like a morph creature that you can turn to face up although you can actually get other things that aren't creatures face down obviously so it's not it's not exactly morph but it feels like a proto morph then we tried a lot of different things for alternate reality morph. The one that I personally like the most we called smorph and the way it worked is instead of paying two you paid four, that's right, instead of paying three you paid four and then instead of getting a face down two two you got a face down two two with a plus 1 plus 1 counter so essentially if you cast it that way you got a 3-3 creature for 4 mana and if you turn it face up if you

un-morphed it you now got a creature that was plus 1 plus 1 from where it was before. I liked Smorph a lot I did not lead Mark Gottlieb led Dragon Tarkir design. I was on the team. I really liked Smurf. The problem with Smurf was it didn't play nicely with Morph from the other sets. Because if you play a Morph card, you know that that's a Morph card. If I play a manifest card, maybe it's a Morph card,

I don't know. If I play a Smurf card, what's got a counter on it? You know it's a Smurf card, it's not a Morph card. So there's no, one of the things that's nice is could the different cards interact with each other now as it turns out they never played each other and limited they never coexisted and limited and it just ended up not really being a constructive mechanic at all so I think we sort of gave up something for something that didn't matter that much anyway what

Megamorph ended up being was we took Smorph and then we kept everything but the four for three, three. So it's still a three for a two, two. But if you un-Morphed it with Megamorph, you got a counter. So it did have that quality of, if you go through the morph, it's bigger than if you just cast it hard, cold cast it.

And anyway, we wanted it to be a morph variant and so we gave it a name that had morph in it. So Megamorph is a silly name, I will acknowledge that right now. And I think the problem was it just wasn't different enough. Like the reason I like Smorph so much is having a four mana 3-3 is such a different world than a 3-mana 2-2 that it really just you have to rethink everything. It just changes how you think about Morph. Mega Morph not really. It played mostly the same as Morph. Yes there was an advantage of going through Morph rather than Hardcasting and so maybe a little bit of time where you normally would Hardcast

it you'll you'll go through the Mega Morph but it it didn't really change things enough and so the problem was a combination of the name being a little silly and the, it just not delivering. Like I think Manifest did such a good job of delivering on Protomorph, that alternate reality morph, it just was a let down. So once again, it's not that it was a bad mechanic,

it's not that it didn't play well, it just, we labeled it and tried to say, oh, this is the alternate reality morph and it just didn't seem like, it wasn't different enough. And I think the expectation was the problem. Not that the mechanic was bad. It just, A, didn't feel enough like morph to get a new name.

And B, you know, Manifest had been such a different take on morph, they really expected us to be more bold. And in retrospect, I wish we had done Smorph. Not called Smorph, but. Okay, number 18. Companion from Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths. So the idea, one of the things we were trying to do on Ikoria was it was a monster theme set,

and we wanted to play around with a lot of the monster tropes. Well, one of the monster tropes is what they call bonding, which is the idea that there's a monster but I, a human usually, have an affinity with a monster. I connect with a monster. And so the monster, well the monster might be a monster to everybody else, to me they're like a factor, they relate to me. And we were trying to capture that sense of you connecting with a creature

So we came up with a can of called companion. I believe the mechanic had come up we had done a What's it called We had done a hackathon. That's what's called. We had done a hackathon We were looking at future potential future mechanics for magic And one of the teams came up with the companion ID. And the idea is it's an extra card, but in order to have this extra card, you have to have your deck meet a certain requirement.

And yes, for those asking, I mean, definitely, I think looking at companion and how the, not companion, looking at commander and how commander, the commander really influences what the deck can be. It adds a color identity and you know, it's whatever it's doing because it's the thing you know you're going to get you, your deck is sort of warped around it. And we like that idea of could we bring that to limited?

Could we bring that to constructed? The problem with companion is a process problem. So when we made I coria, I led the vision design, I handed over both mutate and companions. Those are both very complex mechanics. Both of them. So one of the things is when we when design vision design gives mechanics to set design, vision design is pushing boundaries, right? We're trying to do new things and like, the role of vision design really is to see what can we do that we haven't done before? You know, what, I mean, some of it is,

it's not always reinventing the wheel. Sometimes like, oh, there's a perfect, we kind of already exist, let's bring that back. But it's trying, I mean, we are definitely the group that more pushes boundaries. But one of the lessons is that you only get to do really one, what I'll call boundary pushing mechanic per set, because the people downstream of us,

set design, play design, they have to make it and it's a lot of work to make something brand new that we've never done before. If you're making something, a riff of something we've done, hey, we've done before, we've experienced with it, we know what to do, that's a lot easier for us to do. But when I do something in space we've just never done before, and both mutate and hey, we've done before, we've experienced with it, we know what to do, that's a lot easier for us to do. But when I do something in space we've just never done before,

and both mutate and companion were in space we've just never done before. Each one of those is a very complex mechanic. And we handed off, I think the problem on the set was we gave them sort of, you know, expression as I, your eyes are bigger, what is it, your stomach's bigger, no, your eyes are bigger. Your was it your stomach's bigger? No, your eyes are bigger than your mind. Your stomach.

I think it's what the idea that I we've been off more than we can chew that it just was too much. And I think part of companions problems was they spent so much time making mutate work, which is a very complicated mechanic that they just didn't end up having enough time for companion. And it's just clear. I mean, obviously there, it's the only mechanic we've ever eroded the entire mechanic in a functional errata sort of way. I mean, we errata mechanics like on very simple little things, but this is like, no, like it works fundamentally different. There's a cost that wasn't there before. I mean, we, we, it was

functional errata for an entire mechanic in a way we don't really do. And we only did it because we had to do it. We don't like to do it. So anyway, it's a good example where I think the... So the other problem with companion is one of the core problems of companion, I think is, it's just an extra card. Extra cards are very valuable, free extra card, you know,

and that I think there are a lot of restrictions that go into making a companion We want to make sure that the opponent can understand if your deck follows the rules that been laid out So, you know, it's easy for them to monitor whether you've done what you're supposed to do and anyway There was a lot going on. I don't think we gave I Mean I think there's a chance. I mean the other other problem we have at Companion is the design space is shallow because of restrictions like your opponent has to know what you're doing and be able to monitor it. So I'm not sure whether to go back to Companion.

It's not because I don't think play design can handle it if given enough time and enough space. It's that it's just not a super deep pool design wise anyway that is companion number 17 haunt from guild pack the second set of the original Ravnica black so haunt was the origin of mechanic white black and so the way haunt worked so here's the first problem haunt work two different ways if I cast cast a creature, well first of all, the spell. If I cast a spell, the spell went off, then instead of going to the graveyard,

I exile the haunt card, sort of, I don't know if attached is the right word, but it is connected to a creature on the battlefield that I control. Then, when that creature dies, I get the spell effect that was on the haunt card happens. So it's like I have a spell, my spell then becomes a death trigger

for a creature on the battlefield. That is if it's a spell. If it is a creature, the creature has an enter the battlefield effect, then when the creature dies, I haunt it. And then when the creature that it has haunted dies, its death trigger is the enter the battlefield effect of the haunt creature. So for first starters, haunt like the fact that there's two different kinds of haunt and they, I mean, I understand

they kind of like, the idea is a haunt card will haunt a creature and give it a death trigger and the death trigger will match kind of what happened when you cast the spell. That's the over linking thing. But there's a lot of functional differences because when I cast a haunt spell right away it gets attached to a creature. When I cast a haunt creature it's not until the creature dies that it haunts something. The other thing, so the core problem of this one is an issue we call stickiness, which is not to be confused with tackiness, which has to do with glue.

Stickiness has to do with how easy is it for players to remember what exactly it is, what it does. And the more sticky you are, like flying is super sticky. I tell you flying once, you got it, you cemented it. I got it, it's in the air, it flies by, things on the ground, can't block it. Right away it's super, super sticky because it connects to something that makes sense. I mean haunt has good core flavor ideas It's a ghost haunting a creature But its execution isn't doesn't do the best job and like for example haunt on the spell

Well, what's haunting listen the creature dies? Okay, the dead creature's haunting it, but the spell, what's haunting like this? Who is, who's doing the haunting if it's on the spell? And so the, the problem essentially is it's the kind of mechanic that I tell you what it does. And then you're playing with it a day later and you're like, I don't remember what it does. Like haunts a lot of things. When I say to people what it does, they're they're like, people have to think about it.

And the fact that it works two different ways does not help things. I do think that haunts, that the core idea of I die, and when I die, I haunt another creature and that means something, that core, that's the core that's actually pretty cool. That's the flavorful part. And I do think maybe one day,

maybe we could like, we could find a way to fix a haunt. The word is really good. That's the saddest thing when you have mechanics that's bad, but you love the word and the flavor's great. So haunts one of those things that we keep looking at that can we sort of completely recontextualize it without technically changing it, but changing the execution, not in how the mechanic works.

Because haunt will, haunt will when it dies, attach to a creature. That's the important part. So anyway, that's the problem with haunt. Next is Annihilator from Rise of the Eldrazi. So Annihilator has a number, Annihilator N, and it means when I attack, defending player must sacrifice N permanence. And while there's some creatures that annihilator one or annihilator two,

we also have some of the big old draws. Annihilator four, bigger annihilators. The problem against annihilator is, I did a podcast where I talked about what makes, how to make losing fun. And one of my, one of the important things I said, two of the things I said,

one was I said, you wanna make sure that players feel like they can win, that they see a win. And the second is, if they're gonna lose, they lose fast, right? So the idea is, you wanna always be in a state in the game where I have the potential to win.

And once it's clear that I can't win, okay, end of the game. Well, Annihilator breaks both of those things because pretty much Annihilator very quickly makes it so it's hard to come back. And it doesn't kind of subtly, so you're not even necessarily aware of it. I mean, you have to play against Annihilator a few times to really understand this, but Annihilator,

if I have Annihilator 2, odds are if I attack once with annihilator two, your chance of coming back from that is not good. And if I attack two or three times, I mean, the chance of you coming back is single percentages at best. Well, not at worst, because, but I mean, your chance of coming back is very low. And it's the kind of mechanic that just does, like I said, make a losing fun. It does not make losing fun. It wins in a way that you're not quite clear that you're losing and it takes forever for

you to actually win the game. Like it just whittles them away in a point where it makes them powerless to do things. So it doesn't let them play. That's another rule of making losing fun. You got to let them play. So it doesn't let them play. It ruins all the permanence. A lot of times you get rid of your lands first

because you wanna keep your creatures on the battlefield. But then you can't, once your lands are gone, you can't do anything. So like it's, and I learned it's funny, like of my six lessons of how to make losing fun, it breaks three of them. So it's just, it's not fun. It's not a fun mechanic.

I get it as flavorful and being all the drossy, I know why we did it, but it is just, it is just not a fun mechanic. I get it is flavorful and being on the Eldrazi I know what we did it but it is just it is just not a fun mechanic. Next Devoid speaking of the Eldrazi. So Devoid was from Battle for Zendikar. We went back to so when we left we visited Zendikar and we did it with Zendikar and WorldWake and then Rise of the Eldrazi we realized that trapped inside was the Eldrazi an escape. So when we came back to Zendikar we're like well last Rise of the Eldrazi, we realized that trapped inside was the Eldrazi and they escape. So when we came back to Zendikar, we're like, well, last we left, the Eldrazi escaped. I guess we should deal with that.

So we had a giant war between the denizens of Zendikar, the Zendikari and the Eldrazi. And we did not bring back Annihilator because we realized it wasn't fun. In fact, one of the problems we had in Battle for in battle presented car was a lot of the things we had done to define the old Drozdy were not things that we were happy with There are a lot of like like an eyeliner. So one of the things that I realized early on was I needed some Recognizable through line I needed some weight and one of the qualities that we had done At least with that the most iconic of their drives it was they were colorless. That they pre-existed color. So I'm like okay I like the idea of colorless

mattering that seems like a cool thing. The problem was I couldn't actually have that many colorless things. We learned from doing a lot of artifact sets that having too many colors things creates what we call the blob problem where any deck can play the good cards and so they play all the good cards together. So we came up with the idea of what if they had mana cost and they were colored, but I was influenced by a card we had made in Future Sight, in fact I think it's a card I made in Future Sight, where it was a red spell but it was colorless. In fact that same spell hints that for the very first time mentions Ugin.

So that spell did a lot. Anyway, so the idea was I just wanted to have colorless spells that use colored mana. And the idea originally was I'm just going to write on this is colorless. You know, the idea was I just was going to write that on the card. We didn't really have the colorless, you know, the idea was I just was gonna write that on the card We didn't really have the colors indicator yet. But anyway at some point during Set design or maybe just development at this point. I don't know what set design was the thing yet They came to the conclusion that it made more sense to keyword it and for like rules structural reasons the problem was

When you see a keyword you're like, okay. Oh, what does it do? And the answer here is it doesn't do anything just the creature is colorless. So it just felt like oh, what does it do? And the color I mean ironically being colorless in this environment actually there was positives too because we had a lot of colors matters But it does it really felt like a mechanic that didn't do anything like the colors felt so inconsequential that it didn't feel like a mechanic right and so who is got this brand new mechanic what does it do doesn't do much like it makes it colorless and so once again and this I as I one of my themes of today is with like mega morph presentation is important perception is important How people think about the mechanic is important. Naming it megamorph caused a lot of problems, you know,

and just the way we set it up for the block, like it was a perceptual issue more than anything. Not that it didn't play bad. And Devoid's a good example. I think in retrospect, if I had to Devoid it again, I would make it a supertype. So that the super, because supertypes can carry rule baggage.

We, sometimes, especially creature subtypes don't tend to carry rules baggage, but supertypes can. And I think Devoid, like I think a supertype, it's the kind of thing that's perfect for supertype. It's very simple, easy to understand. And you would see them go, oh, it's a Devoid instant. What does that mean? Oh, it's colorless, even though it has color mana would see them go, oh, it's a devoid instant. What does that mean?

Oh, it's colorless, even though it has color man. I think that would have been much preferable. So anyway, I, again, it's funny. A lot of the problems today, one of the lessons, I mean, this is also the higher up in my list. As we get lower in the list, there's a lot more gameplay issues that are popping up. But it's interesting that some of the stuff higher on the list is not even that mechanic wasn't inherently fun, that there wasn't something fun about it. It was more presentation was bad or how we, like a lot of it had to do with sort of how

we did it. I mean, some of them, like for example, stickers had a logistical issue, Megamorph had a perceptual issue, companion honestly broken, we perceptual issue, Companion honestly broken we just didn't have time on it, Haunt I think we didn't we didn't do a good job of making easy to understand, Annihilator just was inherently unfun mechanic, Devoid we didn't sell it well. So you see this pattern. Okay one more I think and then we will be done for today.

Partner, so this is originally in Commander 2016. So the idea was we wanted to make more four color commanders but we didn't, it's hard to do four color design. So one of the solutions we came up with was a mechanic called Partner. And the way Partner worked is if a creature, a legendary creature had Partner then you could have two different creatures with a partner in your command zone. So it allowed you to mix and match.

And so we made a whole bunch of different commanders here. And then most of them were two color. I'm sorry, some of them were one color and some were two color. The two color were allowed so you could set them to do four color. But you can combine the two color and the one color to do three color or you can combine two one colors obviously to are two color. The two color were allowed so you could set them to do four color, but you can combine the two color and a one color to do three color or you can combine two one colors obviously to do two color. Anyway, the problem with partner is an interesting one. It's what I call a commutorex problem. Commutorex is the study of math and numbers. It's actually what Richard Garfield got his PhD in in math. And the idea is that the problem with partner is every time we make a new partner card, the partner mechanic gets

significantly stronger and it just gets keep because let's say I have one partner card and I make a second partner card. Okay, I now have one combination. A and B can go together. Now, let's say I make a third one, A, B and C. Well, now I can play A and B, I can play B and C or I can play A and C. Instead of one option, I now have three options. Let's say I make a fourth one of A, B, C and D. I now can do A, B, C, D. I can do B, C, D. I can do C, D. I have six options. So as you can see, every time you add it keeps going up. And so the problem we run into is it's a mechanic that we realized we couldn't make more of. First off, we made the mechanic and in general, what often happens sometimes you make a mechanic and

it's a little stronger than you realize that happens. It's doing new mechanics. But what we didn't quite realize is we didn't quite appreciate the combinatorics of it. This is an ongoing lesson R&Ds had over time. Choice is powerful. Giving pieces of choice is powerful. And that we often don't give enough credence to, oh, this mechanic has choice while that choice really has a power value to it. We have to appreciate that.

And so Natalie was partnered in the sense that we underestimated that. But when we would go to make a new partner card and we made a few new partner cards, it just increases the power level of all the partner cards. And so we had to go, well, we had to stop making partner cards. So it's not that we can't make a mechanic that this is it and we're done, we're never gonna make it again. We do those every once in a while. But it is definitely a mechanic that we didn't quite appreciate the nature of what happens as they you get you know as they start interacting with each other and it was a good lesson I mean, I think understanding the power of combinatorics is an important thing for us to understand

Okay guys, so I managed to get through Six one two one two three four five six. I got seven. I got through seven today, which is good So anyway, this will probably be a three-parter I think my other top 20 was a three-parter. So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed the Part one of the top 20 worst mechanics, but I am at work. So I don't know what that means This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic it's time for me to make magic I'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye