Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1248: Futureproofing

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

In this podcast, I talk about a concept called futureproofing where we design mechanics to better enable us to use them in the future.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time brother, drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is future-proofing. What is future-proofing? Why do we do it? How do we do it? You will learn all that before I'm done talking today. Okay, so first let me explain what future-proofing is, and then I'm gonna go back and give a little history and then walk through how and when and why we future-proof Okay, so what future-proofing it means is when we make a mechanic how Much do we think about future uses of the mechanic?

And the idea is if we think the mechanic is going to come back And we think we might want to expand on the mechanic or shift the mechanic, we want to think about are we leaving ourselves open-ended enough that we can do that? Now, there is pros and cons. You know, the, well, you know, why don't we just future-proof everything?

And the answer is that you lose out on some flavor and some specificity and or you could make things wordier. Like there's a reason to not necessarily future proof everything. And then once again, if we're going to make a mechanic and we're never going to bring the mechanic back, we don't think the mechanic is returning. There's really no reason to future proof it. You know, you're just making extra, you're adding extra words or doing extra things that aren't going to matter. But if you are going to bring it back and you don't future proof it, you might make it harder to use later.

And so there's a lot of give and take on it. So okay, so I understand the concept of future proofing. I want to start by going back in time. As I've brought up many times on this podcast, this October is my 30th anniversary working at Wizards And so I've been doing a lot of thinking back a lot of to the early days So when I first got at Wizards in 1995 magic was very young magic came out in the summer of 1993 So it was just to turn two years old when I got there and the thing to remember and I've talked about this, but the thing to remember is early

magic when Richard made magic, he was not making the phenomenon that magic became because nobody, nobody can predict that. Right. He was making a game he thought would sell at game stores and it was successful. Hey, maybe they'd make some expansions. But the idea of so successful that you're making Six to eight expansions every year for decades You know that that is not like that the amount of expansions that have been made

There's no way in the world Richard was making he could have he could even imagine that that is beyond the wildest dreams And this is not remotely striking against Richard. You just don't make something assume it's going to revolutionize the game industry. When you make a game, you don't assume that's going to be true. And so early Magic very much had a different attitude to current Magic. For example, Richard wasn't nearly as tight on a lot of the component pieces. For example, rules. The game that most inspired Magic is a game called Cosmic Encounter, which is a great game if you've never played it.

So the way Cosmic Encounter works is each person plays a different alien race and you are having a galactic conquest. And so you have little pieces that represent your, you know, your, I don't know, army. And then you have cards that are, that a lot of the conflicts are done through cards. And that one of the really cool things about Cosmic Encounter is that the cards

let you override things. First off, every player is a different alien, every alien has different power, so players have some natural abilities to sort of break rules, and then the cards themselves break the rules. And so Richard was enamored with the idea of, it's a game with rules,

but the cards let you break the rules. And Magic obviously was very inspired by that. But one of the things that happens when you have interactions and things break rules is you get a lot of weird corner cases. What happens when these two cars get played together? There's a lot of interactions. This is one of the core concepts of a trading card game that Richard really liked.

But thinking back to Cosmic Encounter, Cosmic Encounter, there wasn't there wasn't like a giant, you know Phone book of rules. It was just like hey you figured it out If something came up you and the people you're playing with you figured out what happened and Richard really thought that was fun And one of the funds for him was all these weird things happen And then part of the game is you and your players sort of figure what's going on But that is that works in a much smaller environment, right? If the game is mostly you sitting around with your friends at the kitchen table,

hey, it can support that. But when you start having major tournaments or a big way to play is you go to the game store and play with people you don't know. Like, you need a lot more structured rules. And so a lot of early magic was, you know, R&D saying we have to transition this from what it first got made to be to what it became.

Meaning we had to shore up a lot of component pieces of it. For example, many people, Bill Rose was the forefront of this, but had to clean up the rules. But they had to take the rules from, you know, Tom Wiley, who was the first of this, but had to clean up the rules. That they had to take the rules from, you know, Tom Wiley, who was the first rules manager, once made a flow chart in the duelist to walk through how the rules worked.

And he made it look like a rat's nest because he was making a commentary on the rules. We really had to take that from a system where, like, when you have a thousand cards, maybe you can just handle everything on a case by case basis. But when you have 30,000 cards, you can't do that. And so what you need to do is you want rules that people can learn the rules and then they

can apply the rules to understand how cards work. And that doesn't mean there won't be weird interactions and that they will. But but at least you help people solve problems as best you can by having sort of concrete structures to help them. And so a lot of early magic was trying to figure out how do we get the rules in a clean space and the sixth edition rules. A lot of stuff was done there. Likewise, Richard made the color pie as a means to sort of separate the colors, but it wasn't institutionalized,

meaning set to set, wiggled kind of bit, and what colors could do and not do, and that part of, you know, if you want to keep red red over 30,000 cards, you really have to sort of come up with rules of what red can and can't do, what it's good at, what it's bad at. And so, you know, I spent a lot of time like formula, not formalizing, but like institutionalizing the color pie of saying, look, this is what the color pie means. This is what colors can do, what colors can't do. And now we have a whole team that oversees that. And so a lot of early magic was that. So another big part of early magic was that so another big part of early magic was that

If you think for example, we're gonna make magic and then maybe you know Maybe we make ten expansions like how many expansions the cosmic encounter was a very popular game and it had I wrote ten expansions Like I think Richard was like, okay, we'll make the game. It's popular We'll make a few expansions But Richard understood that the combinatorics of the game was huge, that you can make 10 expansions and probably not have to repeat anything. So early magic definitely had this attitude of, hey, there's so much there. We'll just make stuff and then we sort of thought of things as disposable.

Like if you make a mechanic, either it becomes evergreen or you're probably not going to do it again. And so early magic, just the mindset was, hey, you know, we don't really need to think about the future. The future will be, we'll do other things. But there came a point, so as the story goes, onslaught gets turned in.

First-time design onslaught turned in. Bill Rose was head designer at the time. He wasn't happy with it. So he asked me to take a look at it. And I did a pretty big overhaul in it. I added the type of mechanic. I added morph. And one of the things that I wanted to add was cycling.

So cycling was a mechanic that Richard Garfield had made that originally he turned it during Tempest design. And that when I turned in Tempest, there just was too much in it, too many mechanics. So we had to pull stuff out. And one of the things we pulled out was cycling. Also, we pulled out Echo. I'll get to Echo later in this podcast. So anyway, we eventually did cycling a year later. Mike Elliott led Urza Saga. He put it in. So Mike Elliott was on Tempest with me and Richard. And so the next year he just used the two mechanics we had pulled out cycling and echo and put them in as the main two mechanics of Urza Saga. Anyway, so it was in Urza Saga, we made this conscious decision in Urza Saga to have all cycling cost be 2.

So the whole block, when we had cycling, things cycled for 2, for 2 generic mana. So anyway, I'm working on onslaught, trying to sort of fix it up, and I realized something that would go really well, just fit well, would be cycling. So I go to Bill and R&D and I say, okay, I'd like to add cycling to onslaught. And they're like, well, we've done cycling. And I'm like, yeah, I got that. I got that we did it, but it's a good mechanic.

And I really was sort of, I was advocating, I'm like, hey, why are we throwing away a good mechanic? It's a good mechanic. I need something. The thing I need will be like, why are we throwing away a good mechanic? It's a good mechanic I need something the thing I need will be like cycling would solve my problem Yeah, I could invent something new but why why should I have to invent something new? Like I have it, you know I'm building a house. I need a hammer. Well, we have a hammer. Why am I not using the hammer, you know, and Eventually the compromise that I reached with them was I said, okay, I'll do something new so that it evolves what it means, what the mechanic means.

So the thing that basically convinced, I made two cards that convinced them to let me make it. I made a card called lightning rift and a card called, um, I was there, the card called, uh, the lightning riff was, uh, whenever you cycled, you got to do damage. And the other was called, what's it called? It let you flicker something. I'm blinking on the name of it. You guys know the name of it.

The idea was there were two cards, Aether Shift, Aether Slide, Aether either slide, either slide I think, and lightly ripped. The idea was what it let you do is it said, hey, I trigger every time I cycle something. And the reason that was really important was previously cycling was what we call modular mechanic meaning, hey, you throw a few cycling cards in but there's no reason to throw a lot of cycling cards in the same deck but all of a sudden We made we made you know either slide and lightning rift and oh

Now you want to put a lot of like it took it took cycling from being something that's mostly modular to in some instances could be You know could be linear. It could be something that you want to build around. And that was enough. They said, okay, make it. But what I realized was that that was really me coming to the conclusion of what are we doing?

Why are we not reusing things? And when I became head designer a few years later, I really started one of the, one of the sticks I put on the ground is, look, not only can we be reusing things, we should be reusing things. Like one of the goals of a head designer is you want to maximize design space, right? You want to like magic does have a very large design space, obviously, but it's not infinite. And the, the cleanest part of it is, you know, like, you know, as you make more stuff, you start, you start using up the easiest, cleanest, simplest versions. And so, you know, really the idea is, look,

we've figured out how to do things and that if those things work, you know, there's no reason. I mean, obviously we can make new cards with them. If we bring back a mechanic, we won't just repeat every card, we'll make new cards. But that just needs to be something that we do. So the reason I bring this up the whole context is it really wasn't until we brought back cycling in onslaught that the idea that look, we should be bringing back mechanics. Once we know we should be bringing back mechanics that does sort of ask, okay, well are there things we should be doing which will help us bring back mechanics? That that

is so that's the topic of today. Proof for proof for future proofing. Future proofing is saying what can we do to make things easier to bring back? And like I said, as we'll get into, you don't always want to future proof, but we do want to future proof where it makes sense, where it's logical. So the first place that future proofing comes up, probably the biggest place is in names. Now, I should stress design is not in charge of names. The way it works is we will come up with names in design and we will make an honest attempt to make a real name. But the people who do the naming, who do the card naming, also do the naming of the mechanics, the creative team. And so they have the ability

to rename mechanics and often they do. Mechanics often get renamed. Once again, they don't always. My best record is in original Mirrodin. We had four mechanics. We had a C we had imprint entwine. We had affinity and we had equipment. Women was introduced there. And we in design named all four of them mechanic at all four state. That is the only set I can think of where I was 100% I believe in

the design names making it to the final. So the idea is we want to think about when and where and how are we using it again. So the classic example of a problem a name can get us into is Bushido. So Bushido was a mechanic from Champs-E-the-Kamigawa block. Basically it went on our samurai. So I think only samurai could have Bushido. I mechanic from Champs the Kamigawa block. Basically, it went on our samurai. So I think only samurai have Bushido. I don't know if every samurai I'm not sure if it's completely one for one. Most at least most samurai had Bushido.

Maybe all of them did. And Bushido gives you a Bushido and gives you a boost when you when you get into combat. Plus and plus and like the Bushido one, you get plus one plus one. Now, the problem is Bushido means the way of the sword, I believe, and it talks about the art of samurais perfecting their swordplay, of becoming experts with the sword.

With their, is it katana, I wanna say? But anyway, Bushido doesn't make any sense outside the context of a place with samurai. Like it's not like we can just go to a world and go like the Bushido mechanic now I will say play design is not really up on the Bushido mechanic so that is that is why I don't think it'll return. But there's the mechanic from a gameplay it helps helps things in combat. Guess what all sets of things in combat There's no reason Bushido couldn't return from a game other than slay design not liking it But there's no reason to can't return from a mechanical standpoint It's pretty generic

But we gave it a name that wasn't generic and we just we can't just say well this world that doesn't even have samurai has a mechanic Called Bushido it just stands out now sometimes we can give things very neutral names cycling a fine example of a neutral name i don't even know quite what's cycling i mean you cycle the card from your hand but it's it's a pretty loose name so it's not it doesn't tie the mechanic down to any type flavor so an example um now one of the things about names about like i'll give an example of a neutral name that I think we were a little too neutral on, is when we did Chroma. Chroma was an eventide. And the idea of Chroma was a card would tell you to look in the zone and count all the

mana values in that zone. And it ended up being a little too, one of the things we've learned in general is you want mechanics that sort of inspire you to design around them. And because some cars lift your hand and some in the graveyard, some in play, like, it just, it wasn't cohesive enough. But another thing is, I do believe that when you

are more flavorful in naming your mechanics It just gives them a little more feel to them like the problem with chrome chroma means color in In Latin it's just kind of blah, you know And that we we for those that don't know the story here. We remade the mechanic in original Theros We brought it back. We limited what it did. You now only count things on the battlefield, not in other zones. And we called it Devotion. Now Devotion is a nice name where Devotion is the sweet spot of name for us, where it is flavorful.

It made a lot of sense in the set it was in because it had to do with the devotion to the gods. But Devotion's loose enough that, you know, I think other worlds can have devotion, meaning the idea that a world has devotion is not, it's not so linked to Theros. Other places could have devotion. People could believe in things and such.

Another good example of a name, so in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, we made the mechanic Spree which allows you, it's kind of like a kicker variant, but you can kick it as many times as you want, but for each thing you're kicking, you have to pay the cost for that effect. So it's kind of like, they're sort of like charm, if each charm, if you could do as many charms as you wanted, but you had to pay for each charm is kind of how Speed works. Now, I don't remember what Speed was called early on, but when we do Sats, we have what we call Gate 8. So there's a series of gate meetings and the gate meetings

are where sort of the executives look at Sats and sort of approve things and, you know, different gates are about different parts of the process Gate eight is the slideshow. I used to hear him talk about the slideshow It's now incorporated into gate eight. So gate eight is as many people as possible in design Especially will watch the slideshow with we take notes on cards. We send in the notes and then they address all the notes you'll say oh, this is problematic and then people will address the notes and Gate eight is the final opportunity to change things. Um, the idea at the slideshow is, Hey, we think we're pretty close to being done, but if there's something here, you don't like speak up now. And you know, this is our last opportunity to change things. So at the gate eight meeting, so at the slideshow for all of the Thunder Junction Spree was called Bonanza and Bonanza the reason they gave a Bonanza was the set had a western

villain theme and you know Bonanza is kind of a western there's a super famous TV show called Bonanza and it just has a very western feel to it but the problem was we're like you know wow we think Spree is a really good mechanic and not just good, a pretty open-ended mechanic. Like I was very confident we were going to bring it back and I didn't want to be limited to the world we could bring it back in. I'm not like, okay, we can bring it back. We come back to Thunder Junction.

Like I, it's the kind of mechanics that I wanted more access to. So I, and numerous others, I was the only one, the note we gave at the gate eight meeting was okay Bonanza is too world-specific could we be a little bit looser this mechanic is more open-ended Could we and so we ended up changing the name to spree the spree is nice because you know a crime spree like it It tapped into the villain theme, but it's just a more open-ended general word More worlds gonna have spree on it that That, you know, it's definitely something that's not as locked as Bonanza was.

Now, the other thing, so I'll use Universes Beyond as one of the things that comes up. I mean, we do a lot of top-down sets, obviously. Universes Beyond are kind of top-down even more so, you know, because a lot of what we're trying to do in the Universes Beyond design is we're trying to capture the flavor of the property that the universe is beyond is and that words become really important in a universe is beyond like you're trying to capture a very specific flavor and so one of

the things that can come up a lot of times is hey maybe they're doing some for the first time that is something we might want to do again so one of the conversations we have to have is what kind of name do you want to get this? Now with the Universes Beyond, we do have the ability to bring back the mechanic and name it something different. And on some level, we have the opportunity to do that anywhere. For example, another good example there is in original Theros, we made a mechanic called Montrossity.

And the idea is you can activate it once. When you do, the creature becomes monstrous. Normally it gets plus one plus one counters on it to kind of remind you you cast it. But when we were doing Return to Ravnica, we liked Monstrosity for the Simic, but the idea that they don't think of themselves as monstrous, and so the word was was wrong And so we ended up doing adapt and adapt was

Basically us reskinning monstrous except we made one we didn't make one tiny change the main way Monstrosity works is once you use it once your monstrous. Yeah, the counters are there to kind of help you remind it But it's not the counters that dictate it with adapt So they're gonna kind of help you remind it, but it's not the counters that dictate it with adapt. Adapt cares whether you have counters. So if somebody puts counters on my adapt creature, I can't adapt it. It's got counters on it. If I adapt my creature and remove the counters, I can adapt it again because all adapt cares

about are the counters on it. Now in retrospect, I'm not sure making almost monstrosity, but changing the name. Probably in retrospect, we should have just made it the same and not made it almost the same but slightly different is probably my take on it. So the point is we do have the ability to come back and rename things if we want, but I will say that there is a lot of advantage of continuity. Partly because vocabulary is a cost. If we want people to talk about our game, it's nice if two things aren't the same. You know, people have heard me say to no end

that it bugs me that scry and surveil are two different words. I, if I had to do over again, I mean, surveil would be something like scry from graveyard or scry to graveyard or whatever. Meaning they're almost exactly the same, except they're slightly different in one way and they have two different words and that that The more you do that the more you bifurcate sort of mechanics the trickier it gets the harder to communicate

The other issue is sometimes we do cards that care about things for example. I made Cards that cared about when you cycle well Let's say we made brand new cards that are just like cycling, but we didn't call it cycling. We changed the name. Now all of a sudden those cards that work just like the cycling cards don't interact with a card that cares about cycling. And that causes dismay.

So when you change names, you also sort of disconnect some mechanical connection. And so it is tricky. Part of future-proofing is it's not like the answer isn't future proof everything The answer is is it give every names a little less specific so that you know Because sometimes we make something like I don't think we're ever bringing that back now We have been wrong in that case But a lot of times one of the reasons I tend to think we're not bringing backs is just the design space isn't deep enough

Like okay. Wow, we really max out that design space. I just don't think we're going to be able to do a lot more with it. Spree was open-ended, I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, I think we're bringing Spree back. But there's mechanics we make, like look, Cypher's a good example, it's a blue-black demir mechanic. Now, we didn't do Cypher in the other three colors,

so there's space in the other three colors, but we mapped out blue and black. I don't know, like, were, we were scratching to get, to get cards there. And so that mechanically, I just don't think that mechanics coming back or if it comes back maybe for one set and not blue and black, but so like part of future future proofing is figuring out when and where and why and how, you know, like you want a future proof where you think you need the future proofing. And you want to figure out the trade off

of flavor versus not flavor. There's a lot of value in flavor. Words are meaningful. So I'm not saying that we should never use flavorful words, we should. I'm just saying that part of future proofing is trying to be more careful when you do and when you don't.

It's not that you, the lesson of today is not always future proofing is trying to be more careful when you do and when you don't. It's not that you The lesson of today is not always future proof everything or not never future proof. It's there's a balance to be had. Okay So what else do we have to future proof? The next thing is cost So my poster chop this one will be echo So remember when I talked about how we made cycling and echo Tempest and they got kicked out and they got putters the saga Well Echo is the other mechanics Echo was made by Mike Elliott As part of his astral ways he made a set for him before he became the Wizards Astral ways had echo in and had slippers in it and then when he got hired by Wizards They they bought his set and so we could use his stuff in sets and we did

so at the way echo works is So we did. So the way Echo works is you play a card and then on its second turn in play you have to pay its Echo cost, which was defined as its mana cost, or the card goes away. So the idea is a lot of things with Echo would have some enter the battlefield effect. Avalanche Riders, the card that Darwin Castle made for winning the second ever Magic Invitational and the first Magic Invitational to be made. It entered the battlefield and it was a stone rain. It destroyed a land.

And it had haste so you could destroy a land and attack with it. But if you wanted to pay the cost the second time, you got to keep the body around as a 2-2. Maybe you wanted the body, maybe you didn't. The body wasn't as valuable as the two damage and the destroying the land. But hey, if I did have something better than my mana, I could do that. So anyway, we did Echo and we baked into Echo, pay the mana cost again. Why?

It was just the easiest way to do it. All the cards we made, it worked fine. But okay, flash forward. So we're working on Time Spiral and Time Spiral wanted to bring back a lot of mechanics from the past. So we brought back Echo and we realized you know there's some space we didn't explore. Why does the Echo cost have to be the same as the Mana cost? And then we said you know well what if we wrote after Echo we wrote a Mana cost and said well this is what you pay. And if that max the mana costs, okay. And then pay the mana cost, but maybe it's different.

And then a lot of us make some designs we couldn't make before. Um, now in that particular case, we had a sort of a rata of the old card. Now the old cards work as they say. The errata is, oh, well, the echo thing that's not written on the card is the mana cost. And if you read the card, it says the mana cost. So it's good example where we retroactively fix something but it doesn't really change the original cards. If you read the

card it still does what they say. But it's a good example where whether or not like if you bake the mana into the spell into the mechanic then you don't have the flexibility. Now sometimes you want to do that. Sometimes it's fine. Sometimes it's not. And Echo was a case where we realized that, you know what, it's worth writing here because it gives us some flexibility.

Now interestingly, cycling, which we made the same time as Echo, we didn't, which is ironic, I mean looking back from my story today, in that we didn't, which is ironic. And I mean, looking back, you know, from my story today in that we didn't think we were bringing Echo back. So why, I think the reason we did it there was it felt more like a cost maybe than Echo did. I don't know.

Like it felt like, like it was an activated ability in the hand, I guess. And so we wanted like, it felt like we were to bury that inside the thing. So we wrote it, even though we made everything too. But that did allow us when we came back to do cycling that we could change the cycling costs. Not that cycling one was necessarily a great idea, but we could change and we could do

colored cycling costs or three or four or whatever. We could do other things. And so one of the questions is in general, how do we want to, when we do mechanics, do we want to bake in the cost? Now, the real question is, are there variable costs? If there are variable costs, obviously we want to do it. The tricky thing is when at first they're not variable costs, we have to ask ourselves, do we think there'll be variable costs?

And we sort of have to walk through that and figure that out. Normally nowadays, if we think there'll be variable costs, we tend to put the mana. Like we tend to write out the costs. And most of the times these days, if there can be variable costs, the set that introduced it will have variable costs. So, okay. Next up numbers. You can lock in numbers.

I'm going to use another old mechanic called threshold. So threshold was from Odyssey also made by Richard Garfield So Richard was trying to come up with a mechanic where things had two states where they could change over time the idea being that The creature would be you know a tutu but then with time becomes a four-four Yeah, they gave it it would upgrade over time what Richard realized made the most sense was The graveyard is something that starts empty and ends the game full as you cast spells as creatures die like as the game progresses the

Graveyard has a natural state that will and so he liked using that as the barometer to figure out when things changed. And the cool thing about threshold also is you can actually do things to fill up the graveyard. I can choose to cast spells that I normally wouldn't. I can discard cards. I can stack creatures. I can attack or block. I can do things where I can fill the graveyard up if I want to.

And that was interesting strategic decisions. So when Richard first came up with a mechanic, I think he actually seven was the number he first came up with We did at times experiment with having two different numbers. I think at one point we tried having like four and seven And what we found as we experimented with it is you really wanted one number having different cards that change at different times was really hard to track and So we realized that we just wanted 7. 7 was the right number. So we baked it into threshold. The mechanic is not threshold 7.

It's threshold. What does threshold mean? It means 7. Now the interesting thing with that particular thing was there's a long period of time where we said, you know what, if we write out things that could be mechanics, but in this set, we're not gonna list it. We didn't always put the word when we wrote things out.

That if it wasn't the main mechanic of the set, we would just write it out and not put the word. So we did a bunch of sets that have cards that had threshold in them, but we didn't label them. And because we didn't label them, sometimes Play Design would go, you know what? We think eight is right, not seven. And so there are definitely sets where you care about the graveyard, but the number is

not seven, the number is eight. But interestingly, now that we were back in the area of, you know, if we're going to do something, if we're going to have a thing trigger on the land being played, just call it landfall. So we made a lot of more things deciduous one of them being one of them being threshold. And so now when we use threshold threshold means seven. So we're now sort of trying to use seven when we do things just and also I think we realized that it just makes better since you know we have a lot of games like commander that play

lots of different cards. But the more we can be consistent the better just so there's not as we said, having some cards go about seven, some eight is not ideal. But anyway, that that does say when you make something you want to think about numbers and it's the same thing as cost. Do we think the number will change? If we think the number is not going to change, there's not a lot of great value to adding the number.

They're adding a number in which the number because the implication of the number kind of says to people it could change. Why is there a number? And so when it doesn't change, people go, wait, well, if everything's already seven, why are you telling me threshold seven? So as a general rule, if we don't like, looking back at threshold, I mean, obviously we,

we were figuring a lot of things out. I don't think it's wrong that threshold puts the number in it. Cause I just don't think we want a lot of different threshold. I, the one thing I guess in retrospect is I wish even when we didn't label threshold that we kept it at seven just to be consistent. So now whenever you care about graveyard thresholds, it's always seven. Um, but other things that we can do that we have to care about is sometimes we bake in colors Or bake in cough or bake in creature types

Extort for example was a mechanic was the With the the original mechanic in gate crash and basically when you get out an extort card Whenever someone casts a spell, you can spend white or black mana to make them lose a life. I'm sorry, whenever you, whenever you, they cast a spell, whenever you cast a spell, you can spend, so it allows you to use your spells to sort of drain your opponent or not drain and make them lose life. But we, we put into it white or black mana because we decided that one was was one was not enough one

generic man was not enough and two was too much so we ended up making colored but it's a little bit weird meaning if you want to do that mechanic again they're like baked into the mechanic is white black hybrid mana which is weird if it's not specifically a white black guild mechanic so now one of us maybe believing that we didn't think we'd bring it back and we haven't thought to bring it back. So maybe that was the right call, but that is it's baked into it. Another example where we sort of baked things in that we did get in trouble was a mass. So a mass was originally in War of the Spark.

Nicole Bullis was the bad guy. He was facing off against most of the planeswalkers and he had this zombie army that he got from Amonkhet, the Eternals. And so we needed to represent the Eternal Army. And one of the things we had done in the past a lot when we wanted to represent that is we do tokens. But one of the things we've learned is just having a lot of tokens on the battlefield itself causes problems. It comes up to board, you know, we start saying like can't block and the question we had was, is there a way to do this that didn't have the problem of infinite tokens? And so what we came up with with the masses, well, what if when you amass there's a number

and then you, if you don't have an army, you make an originally a zombie army token and you put that many plus one plus one counters on it. And then if you get another amass card, if you already have an army, you just put more counters on it. So the idea is the army grows, but the army is not represented as many creatures. The army is represented as one singular creature, but a singular creature that grows over time.

And it was a neat way to represent an army that solved a lot of the gumming up the board problems that the tokens did. And so that was pretty cool. And so anyway, it solved the problem that we had, but we baked into it that it made, that it was a zombie army token and it made, and they were black.

It was a black zombie army token. So flash forward a couple of years and we're working on Lord of the Rings and we need to make an orc army and we're like you know we've made mechanics that worked really well that did this exact thing but a mass makes zombies so we had to go back and say okay well what if instead of making zombies what if we said a mass and named okay what if what if we originally had done a mass zombies and this could be a mass orcs and that tells you what the army is.

And then, you know, we make the rule. So if I have an orc army and a mass zombies, it adds to the army, but now it's an orc zombie army. So anyway, we made that change. Interestingly, we still haven't changed the color. Meaning if you make an army with a mass, it's black. It's a black army. And so one of the things, even then I'm not sure

whether we won't change that at some point to like, we want to make goblins and they're not black or whatever, whatever, whatever army or elves or something we want to make that we don't want to make black. And so the, that's a good example where we didn't quite future proof it as well. I don't think we realized when we were making it the usefulness. Like one of the things that's tricky and why future proofing can be a little bit hard is you don't always realize when you make something that ends up being successful, you don't always necessarily realizing in the moment what you're making. Sometimes you do. I'm not saying you never do, but like we were trying to address a very specific

thing there and so we're like okay well, I don't think we made a mass. We're like, hey, a mass is going to become a go-to staple for us, which it has become. It just answers the problem very cleanly in a way that just comes up. And especially like, universes beyond is really like one of the things we're trying to do more. It's like, OK, we're trying to capture the specific flavor. We can't adapt it.

That is the flavor. And so, anyway, a mask has become a good tool and that the fact that we weren't able to do that is a good example. The one last thing I remember, I hit some traffic while I went along. One last thing, I'm here at work, but I'll finish real quick, is one of the things that we can do is sometimes when we realize that we made a mistake we can go back and fix it if the fixing of the thing is subtle or if the card originally didn't dictate the thing we're changing lifelink is a good example lifelink originally stacked

meaning if I had two instances of lifelink on a creature I got double the life when I did damage we change that but when we that, we could just change lifelink because no card with lifelink on it had that in the rules on the card, that's how it worked. It was in the comprehensive rules, but it wasn't on the card itself. And so we felt like, look, we can change the comprehensive rules, the card itself is not contradicting you. What we really have problems with, we changed something, the card is just telling you something completely different.

Convoke is another one where we slightly changed how Convoke worked. Convoke originally in Ravnica, it reduced the cost of the spell, and then we brought it back in Magic 2015. We wanted it to be an alternate cost, which has some very subtle implications, and it only matters in really high level play. But we thought it led to better play, it was more intuitive, and so we did make the change. So sometimes if we don't correctly assume something, we can move back and change things. Anyway, the major point of today's topic of future-proofing is we do want to be conscious of the future, we do think of mechanics as a reusable resource, and so there is a lot of give and take that comes of trying to figure out when and how and why

We'll want to sort of future proof something there's reasons we don't there's reasons that flavor will win the day There's reason that what we're doing this current set wants to do something specific But it is something we think about and you know whenever we look at mechanics Wherever we're sitting in the gate eight one of the questions that always comes up is oh How are we going to want to use this mechanic in the gate eight, one of the questions that always comes up is, oh, how are we gonna wanna use this mechanic in the future? Will we wanna use this mechanic in the future? And is it worth the time and energy and the work it needs to do that such that we can bring it back?

And we have to weigh that. And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. And sometimes we say no and we're wrong. And sometimes we say yes and it doesn't matter. So anyway guys, that was a little extra bonus content today Sometimes we say no and we're wrong and sometimes we say yes, and it doesn't matter. So Anyway guys that with a little extra bonus Content today because I've got some traffic that is future-proofing. So if you guys enjoyed the topic, but I'm not at work So we all know that means that instead of talking magic. It's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye