Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1251: History of Typal Themes

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

I recently wrote a three-part article about the history of typal themes in Magic. This is my podcast on the topic.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work Okay, so this podcast kind of inspired by a series I did for my article for making magic. Um, I Want to talk today about the history of typal themes? So what do I mean by that? So typal it's what R&D uses to refer to cards that care usually about creature types. So I want to sort of talk about the evolution of it. It is a very popular theme, but believe it or not, it took R&D a little while to warm up to the theme.

So first and foremost, Richard Garfield makes Alpha, the very first Magic set comes out. There were type of themes in Alpha. Two different flavor of type of themes. The first, which would really be the precursor to a lot of what we're talking about today, is three what we call Lords. That is creatures that enhance creatures of a certain type. Lord of Atlantis enhanced merfolk. Goblin King enhanced goblins.

And Zombie Master enhanced Zombies. Those were the first three. Now I should note that in Alpha there was one Merfolk, one Zombie, and two Goblins. Some cards later got eroded to be things. Scavenging Ghoul later became a Zombie, but it wasn't when it got printed. And the Lores originally themselves were not the creature type per se, although Goblin King said Goblin King on it, I guess. But the idea is in early magic, there was no deck.

The deck construction rules were play whatever you want. So if you wanted to play a merfolk deck, that meant you played some number of the Lord of Atlantis's and some number of merfolk of the Pearl Trident. That was now, you know, over time we eventually made more of them. Although like the first, the second merfolk after merfolk of the Pearl Trident was until the dark. So I think the drowned, I think was the next one.

And so it took a little bit of while before a lot of the creature types, like it took a little bit of time. Richard, I think in alpha really wanted a variety. And so there wasn't any one dedicated creature type. There are just a lot of variety of different creature types just to show. But Richard understood very early on that, like, hey, it might be fun to care about a certain creature type that that that is a linear theme that people could care about. Also in Alpha, by the way, just be technical, there were there was a lot of interact with wall stuff. There are three cards that directly called out walls. There's a bunch more cards that called out non wall. And so, you know, there definitely was early on Richard realized that

the creature type mechanically could matter. And's something you know and people might care about it now for early magic There wasn't a lot. I mean, I I think so I once again I got to Wizards in 95 So when I got there, so we're talking early magic the way that R&D thought of Creature types early on was, oh, it's a fun thing casual players enjoy. And yeah, we should make, you know, we, A, you know, we figured out what creature types people tended to like.

We should make more of those. And, you know, people, you know, casual players seem to like the type of cars. We should make some from time to time. But if you look at early magic, there's just a dabbling. There's just a little bit of a, you know, and a lot of the typo things more were top down. Like, oh, I'm gonna make a creature that has a falcon.

So, okay, it boosts falcon, which at the time we later changed falcons to birds. But, you know, the idea is a lot of the early typo was more about, oh, well, this is a flavorful way to capture this idea Even I think in alpha. I think Richard was like oh hey I like the idea of having a Goblin King or what would a Goblin King do well he helps goblins you know So really early magic the typal themes were more incidental And it wasn't thought of as anything serious. It was

really thought of something very fluffy. And the other thing to remember about early Magic, so when I get to I get to Magic in 95 and in 96, early 96, we start the Pro Tour. And then from the Pro Tour we start doing more organized play, we start having in-store play, and. And a lot of the early infrastructure of Magic is built around a lot more competitive play. That was really the focal point in the early days of Magic. Oh, the way we get more people to play is make more sanctioned play.

But sanctioned play should have rules. And then we have a pro tour to aspire to. And eventually we did grand prix's and like we made this whole structure that sort of Was very competitive in nature It is not is not in for a while like the the casual player is something I mean real behind-the-scenes thing is one of the things that was driving us is the data we had Was the things we could record and the things we could record Was as we did sanction play we could record who was playing in sanction play

The casual players what we refer to as the invisibles at the time We we didn't have a lot of data to see them So I think it was it was like we knew they existed, but we had no sense of numbers. So we will, that, that we will, we will get there. Okay. So early magic dabbles, you know, there's a little bit here and there. Fallen empires is the first set that sort of has even what you might call a light type of theme. The flavor of fallen empires is there were in Serpedia, it's in Dominaria and there are five conflicts, each conflicts within a color. So each color, like in green, the elves are growing food and so they're making sapperlings,

but then sapperling get have their own sentence and then it's the the elves versus saplings. And so you have in each color, there is this conflict inherent. And so and then it meant basically that we had themes that played up in each of the two colors. Each color had two themes built into it. And some of those things were a little bit typal, like clearly like my favorite, the saplings was my favorite deck in Fallen Empires.

And there was a card called Funggal bloom that allowed you to put extra counters onto funguses because the way saplings worked is funguses got counters on them. And every turn they got a counter. But every time we remove three counters, you made a sapling token. So they slowly over time built up a little sapling army. But fungal bloom sped up how often you got counters. And so like it is a good example where we started finding different ways to use typal themes that, you know, early type of themes were a lot more like everything of this get plus

one plus one. And we started realizing that you can start adapting your typal themes to the, to the set, to the theme you're doing, to the archetype, or whatever that creature is doing, you can sort of push toward that and mechanically make it matter. So, Fawn Empress was not remotely what I would call a typal set, but it did have light typal themes, and the connective tissue,

the thing that Fawn Empress really did is said, hey, we're gonna make a lot of the same creature type a lot you know enough that you could probably build a deck out of this set out of that creature type and that is something once the four of rules exist and obviously an alpha you can you know play how many more folks riding you wanted but once the rules started existing that the four of it became a lot harder to play typal themes because we weren't going out of our way to make sure the typal cards

were necessarily the strongest and you just needed the volume you needed to make it work. In general, the typal strategies were just a little on the weaker side, which brings us to onslaught. So onslaught, I did a whole podcast on onslaught. The real short version of onslaught is the set gets turned in from design. Bill Rose is the head designer. He's not real happy with it. He feels like it's missing. It's just, um, it had two mechanics,

the two mechanics that were handed in with it. This is back in the day where it sets had two main mechanics. Um, he wasn't happy with either of the two mechanics, so he asked me to sort of do a pass on it. So one of the things that was in the design was the Mistform creatures were in the design. So the Mistform creatures were creatures that had the ability to change their own creature type. The thing though was other than a few high rarity cards, the Set didn't really care about creature type. But I thought the Mistform were cool. So one of the things that I've been noticing is that their typal themes were very popular, but they were horrible. Which as a designer, you know, rings a bell in my head. Like people keep playing this and it's horrible like

there's something about it right there's something I mean poison was similar where people kept playing poison decks and the early poison cards were bad and part of me said okay well that doesn't really tell inside if something's powerful a lot of people play it well maybe the plane because it's powerful when a lot of people play something and it's not powerful, like, okay, people must like this because it's not because it's powerful. So I went to Bill and I said, here's what I would like to do. At the time when Bill took over as head designer, the one of the big innovations of Bill's sort

of reign is block started having themes. So invasion was the first set that Bill oversaw. Invasion had a multicolor theme. And then the next set after that was Odyssey. It had a graveyard theme. So I go to Bill and I said, okay, what if we had a typal theme? What if the main mechanical through line of this block is creature types, is typal themes. And Bill was a little hesitant at first, cause he's like, you know, we were very tournament focused and at the time, like playing typal decks was considered to be like not serious.

Like you're not, you know, like, and so his worry was that the competitor players just wouldn't like the theme. And so what I said is I go, Bill, look, the data says that they're popular. People like playing typal themes. The construction players, my pitch was, look, they're gonna play whatever's strong.

The reason they don't play typal themes is not because they inherently don't like typal themes, it's because they play what wins and they don't win right now. But I said, imagine, imagine if we made a set where it was the right strategy. Let's take a theme that we know is popular and casual. What if we introduced it to competitive players?

And my pitch was, I think they'd like it. Like I, I mean, two things. One, the competitive players will in some level go in the direction of where the strong cards are. But the other thing is I didn't think type of themes like casuals liking it didn't mean it was just a casual thing. It just meant it was a theme that wasn't supported. So the only people that played it was casual. So I pitched to be like, look, I really think that this is a theme that everybody can get behind. I think it's a popular theme. And so anyway, so we, we, Bill Gizzy, okay. I really, I redo the set a lot and add in all these types of themes.

The other thing, by the way, that ended up being a little, me causing my own problems is in Odyssey, one of the things in general was I was a big believer in creature types. So actually before, let's roll back the clock a little bit. In Odyssey, what happened in Odyssey was we had a creative team and right before Odyssey, they like little by little they were leaving and the last one left right before Odyssey and so Bill came to me and said look I don't have anybody new names and flavor text for Odyssey I'm gonna I want to go hire a new team but could you do because I had done unglued I think so like I had actually

done create plus I mean Bill knew I was a writer like he said could you just do names and flavor text and part of doing names and flavor text is doing creature types. And so one of my things ever since I got to Wizards is I was a huge fan of typal themes in general. I was a big champion of typal themes. And so a lot of what I did was I tried to find opportunities where we could push typal themes.

So for example, when I first got to Wizards, artifact creatures just didn't have a creature type. And I was a big person saying, hey, shouldn't every creature have a creature type? And I convinced the rest of our team, like, okay, yeah, artifact creatures have a creature type. And then when I was doing Invasion, I convinced Bill to do these hybrid, not hybrid throwing work, because hybrid is a mechanic. These creatures that were a combination of two different creature types. There was a multicolor cycle, like it's a goblin and an

elf. Ooh, you know. And then when I did Odyssey, because I was in charge of the creature types, I started making, for example, Avans premiered for the first time. There are bird people, but I didn't just make them bird. I made them bird soldier or bird wizard. And then there were the Nantuko, and the Nantuko were like insect people. But instead of just being insects, they were insect druids. And so I was trying to find opportunities where I could get multiple creature type on the line.

And as part of my experiment Odyssey, I decided it might be fun to like just push some creature types that had less exposure. So instead of doing, uh, Goblin and merfolk and elf, um, I, I push other things I did dwarf for red. Uh, I think I did squirrels and green along with I've been in to go in the even and then uh Anyway, I was just doing different so we got to onslaught and all of a sudden we needed to care about we If we're going to do a typo thing, we wanted to hit our major like the most popular types

So we had to go and do so all of a sudden like the previous that had no goblins in it And now we had to care about goblins, which wasn't ideal. Um, but, but it was an important lesson as we started getting into type that part, one of the things about typal is it's a larger ecosystem. You got to think about that. You really want to make sure that, Hey, if I'm going to make about goblins, you want to make sure the preset might have some goblins in it. And so that introduced to that. So anyway, the story, by the way, is so I put a bunch of things into onslaught. I put the typal theme, I put morph and I put the returning of, um, of cycling. Um, and going into the pre-release R and D was really excited by morph.

And the, the, the, the conventional wisdom from R&D was that the takeaway and the pre-release could be like Morph's an amazing mechanic. And they came back from the pre-release and the takeaway was everybody loves Typal. That was the takeaway from the pre-release and they were kind of like surprised. I'm like, guys, I've been saying this for months. Like I've been really pushing that typo was the hot thing. But it wasn't until they saw the players react to it and then realize how excited people were for typo that anyway.

So, uh, onslaught block puts typo on the map. It makes us realize that they're a real theme that like, that it's not just something that casual players like. It's something that magic players like. And if we want more competitive players to play, we just got to make good things. And all of a sudden, you know, we're making decks where there's, like one of the things that Onslaught also did is previously when we were making goblins, we just made goblins, right?

It just like, so if you want to make a deck full of goblins, well, you played the goblins that existed, but it wasn't that there was necessarily a great goblin synergy going on. But in Onslaught, we're like, well, we're going to build synergies. The goblins are going to do something. The elves are going to do something. And so with it, we start, one of the things you start seeing is we start getting identities to creature types, meaning like, oh, elves kind of like manna. Oh, goblins tend to sacrifice themselves. Like we started, one of the

things you start realizing on slot really helps us cement this is the idea that, you know, part of making a long term cohesiveness to creature types is just giving them a general feel. And then when we do type of themes within a set, especially for limited really have those all play into the same mechanical purpose and starting to do typal sets really made us do that then the next set is mirrored in and mirrored in was another project that I was involved in so the creative team and I really wanted to make sort of to mirror something that we had involved in. So the creative team and I really wanted to make, sort of, to mirror something that we had done

in Dungeon Dragons. In Dungeon Dragons, you have a species and you have a class. You're human or elf or orc, and you're a fighter or a wizard or a cleric. The idea that we pitched that what if every creature type is not, you know, a monster or something, but like a more humanoid creature had both a species and had a class. So you could be a goblin, but also be a warrior. You can be an elf, but also be a druid.

And once again, my master plan is just trying to get more creature types on lions. The creative wanted it because it just added more flavor. I wanted it because it gave us more hooks. We could do more things with it. And that is when we invented human by the way. So human did not exist prior to Mirrodin but once we did once we needed a species on things well what are what are the humans? So we did human. Interestingly, when we, when we got R and D sign off on doing humans, uh, the agreement we made at the time was that we wouldn't do any human type of cards. That was agreement at the time. So anyway, um, type of themes are in her back pocket. We know it's there. So the next time we look to do typo themes is, is Lorwin block.

So Lorwin morning tide. So at this point I become head designer. And that one of the things when I became head designer, I was definitely more excited. Like I'm a huge typo theme fan. So it's definitely something I'm thinking I'm being more conscious of. So we make Lorwin, I'm like, let's go, let's do it. And so Lorwin is really like the typal theme, push to 11. It was really us, we picked eight creature types and almost every card with a few exceptions, high rarities is one of these creatures, other than changeling.

I'll get changeling in a second. But anyway, we make the, we really push aggressively. And then we need what we call typo glue. I come up with a mechanic of changing based on miss from ultimate, the card I made back in onslaught or Legion technically. Um, and, you know, changing this could be any creature types. So it was a, it was a new tool to play with creature types. I had this clever idea that in Loroan, we would do the species. And then in Morning Tide, we would do the classes. And it got complex, so complex in fact,

that us, Matt, Place and I, watching some of the non R&D employees at the employee pre-release of Morning Tide, got us to come up with the idea of new world order, that there was too much complication in common. And so it really showed us like we over, on some level we over indexed. Lorwin was us, like on some level,

when you're trying to understand where things are, going under can teach you something, going over can teach you something. We went over. The problem with Lorwin is what we call a siloing problem where once you draft early, once you say, oh, I'm in goblins, it just dictates like goblins are in these colors, you know,

and I'm just going to take goblins. And like, I really will pick a card that's not a goblin. There's a few cards that are so good. Maybe I picked them, but mostly I'm like, oh, I'm in goblins. I should take goblins and like I really will pick a card that's not a goblin there's a few cards that are so good maybe I picked them but mostly I'm like oh I'm in goblins I should take goblins well goblins aren't these colors and you know it really dictates where you're at I'm gonna dictate your draft and so we were a little bit a little like it we over indexed on it but I still recognize it as being a fun thing so the next time that we really did a larger type of thing was Innistrad. So when we were doing our brainstorming for

Innistrad, like, okay, we're doing a horror genre set. What do you expect to be in it? Monsters was super high. And not just any monsters. There was a group. So the three we knew we wanted to do were vampires, werewolves, and zombies. And we're like, okay, those are like iconic, like monster movie monsters. And we knew we'd have some other monsters, but like those were the main ones. And when we were mapping them out,

I realized that they actually mapped pretty neatly to ally color pairs. That, you know, vampires, well, first we had zombies. Zombies made that there were two types of zombies there's neck necromantic zombies where you raise them with magic and there's like scientific zombies where you like Frankenstein you build them in a lab so we made the first black and the second blue so zombies were black and blue and then we realized that vampires if we lean a little bit

into the the ferociousness of it that we can make them black-red. And then we realized that werewolves could be red-green. And then also I realized that we wanted humans because all the monsters in the structure come from humans and you need victims, obviously. So humans were green-white. And I'm like, oh, we just need one more, one more, we need one more monster that is white-blue. We realized that spirits, ghosts could be that. So we ended up having five creature types

that were very central, that were like ally connected. But one of the things that I chose to do was I said, okay, instead of leaning into typo really heavily in that, this card says zombies, so play lots of zombies. I said, I really wanna build a thematic structure. Like zombies, I'll use zombies in Mike Spannell. I wanted to capture the zombies of horror movies, right? And zombies in horror movies,

any one zombie is really not that scary that most people can handle a zombie. They're slow, they're dumb, you know, they're not. A zombie in a vacuum, one zombie is not that much a threat. What makes zombies a threat is not that there's a zombie, is that there's an endless wave of zombies. And I really wanted to capture that endless wave of zombies feel.

I want, so I said, okay, what I wanna do is not a fast deck. What I wanna do is a slow deck and it just slowly builds up zombies where at some point you just overrun them with zombies. That's what zombies are. And so we built the whole black blue sort of archetype around this slow controlling strategy and then gave you tools to build up zombies but slowly build up zombies. So the idea was I wasn't winning fast but I beat you by attacking with a giant army of zombies.

And then for each of the creature types we we figure that out We gave them more aggressive play to to vampires and in development Eric ended up giving them a life thing where you you want to Get your opponent down in life, and then they get better Werewolves we came up with double-faced cars, and there was a whole like sort of werewolf mechanic where they started human But then they all turned into werewolves because it's night Spirits had a little less flavor early on. We did better later with spirits. And then humans, we had a lot of sort of, they were resourceful. We made a bunch of equipment that were better in humans

and that, you know, by necessity, they were resourceful. But the interesting thing about the set is, I think we had one card at common that mentioned each of the creature types and they were all, I believe, threshold threshold one meaning you just needed one to care and at higher rarity especially rare we made we made some type of so if you really wanted to make a zombie deck in constructed we did make some at higher rarity more some more zombie type of cards for you like oh it doubles it here it makes half the number of zombies you have. So the more zombies, the bigger. So if you play a bunch of zombies first, you know, it'll be

even better. Um, and industry was a really big hit. And it really taught us that like, um, the themes are super strong, right? The idea that, um, I want to play a deck full of zombies is very compelling, but it really hammered home that part of making you want to play zombies isn't just there's cards that say, hey, zombies are good. Not that those shouldn't exist, people like those, but that there are that the zombies themselves have an inherent strategy that make you want to play other zombies. And the idea is if you do that, you didn't need a lot of sort of actual Typal cards to make that like you want a little bit you want a little bit of

encouragement to go hey maybe you want to play zombies maybe that maybe a few of your cards that aren't zombies maybe they could be zombies and to sort of push in that direction but also by making the zombies just inherently play well together you start doing that. So what happened is we do that in Innistrad and we really, Innistrad was really instructive in that it showed us that typal themes were very connective but we didn't have to be quite so heavy-handed. And then what sort of started happening was, like concept Turk here, we were trying to find a way to connect white and black.

And we realized that, oh, well, a lot of the white and black creatures happen to be warriors. Well, what if the way we did connective tissue for limited was we just cared about warriors? It just gave you a thematic theme and it connected something that was naturally already there Um, and it proved really popular. And so we started saying, oh, okay, you know, um Like typo is not just an overall thing, you know, I mean one of the big Shifts in magic the industry was a big part of is You know one of the reins of of sort of bill as you know, the evolutions of bill was You know blocks before bill had no theme and then Bill introduced a theme when I came in as I sort of built on that I mean a lot of technologies that's you know standing

on the shoulders of giants you know I said okay now that we've explored you know sets as mono themed you know the one of the cool things is let's pick themes that we can then use our mechanics as paint like Innistrad wasn't of sets as mono themed, you know, the one of the cool things is let's pick themes that we can then use our mechanics as paint. Like Innistrad wasn't just, yeah, I had a whore theme. The thematic thing was a flavor theme, but then we could have some graveyard component and we can have some typo component.

And we like, we could start taking different aspects. And instead of having set B, oh, it's all graveyard. The graveyard is a component of it. Typo is a component of it. Typal is a component of it. And that's a lot of the lessons there. And then, you know, as we start building things like some cons, we start realizing Typal is glue that can be used to connect smaller things like draft archetypes. Then we get to Ixalan.

Ixalan, the quick version of Ixalan is, it really wasn't going to be a typo set. It was going to make use, Richard Garfield, main mechanic called the Edge in Vampire the Eternal Struggle. I was very inspired to make a mechanic around that. And that's what we were originally going to do. But then Shawn Main ended up making a mechanic called,

called the Crown, the Monarch, the monarch in a conspiracy, conspiracy two, and conspiracy take the crown. And it was too close. So we, we left it there. And so I, and I had, when we started, I had to come up with a new theme and I was looking at what we were doing. And I originally, when it was pitched by creative,

there were two factions, then I asked for three factions. So they made a faction of pirates. And then I realized that the natives of the world had dinosaurs, I'm like, oh, there's a lot of fun here. That if we could care about pirates and dinosaurs, oh, and the conquistadors of the world were vampires. And so like, okay, we have vampires, we have pirates, we have dinosaurs. I go,

look, let's get one more. And then I took a structure that I actually built for cons because originally that for factions and I put that in. But anyway, one of the things we did in Ixalan is we were trying hard to do something a little different type of, but the creative really didn't want to like, they didn't want changelings. They didn't want multiple creature types on the same card. So it's when we ended up kind of not putting in the type of glue on that went badly. It really sort of showed me the like, um, no, we did have the one thing that excellent did have is it did have typeal themes and in general, especially

constructed, people enjoyed that. Dinosaurs were very popular, pirates were popular. It wasn't that the set didn't have popularity. I mean it was a little oversimplified, we had some issues with it. But the mechanics really, we didn't, it's one of the sets where like the creative was amazing and we didn't quite live one of the sets where like the creative was amazing and we didn't quite live it up into mechanics but interestingly we would go back to Ixalan we realized that having a type will be a component of the world was

cool like in Caverns of Ixalan there was dragon type in fact there was a little bit type of everything and there was dragon table was built in as a draft record I think red green so. So one of the things that was on is we tried to do a larger typal theme we have some issues with it and one of the things we realized is typal themes are like typal themes are this weird thing where players really like them they are hard to make especially in limited they're very hard to make which brings us to Bloomberg so my last one talked about is Bloomberg So Bloomberg actually very much tried,

we had a typal theme in Bloomberg. It was called fellowship in design. And the idea was you would add creatures to your fellowship and then the cards just cared about your fellowship. So it'd be like, it'd be something like Otter Fellowship, add otters to your fellowship. And then all creatures in your fellowship get plus one plus one or whatever.

And the idea was you would slowly build your typal theme over time. It ended up being a cool theme that played well once you understood it, but it was complex and it ended up being a bit too much. They ended up taking it out. And one of the things they realized was, and this is kind of where we're standing with typal themes right now, is that it's hard in a whole set to care about typal mechanically. It just causes too much interconnected issues. So what bloom bro did is kind of less than we're talking about before is it followed kind of

the Innistrad model where look, mostly the reason you want to play frogs is frogs will do the same thing. Squirtles do the same thing. That if you play the creatures together, there's just a built in synergy to them. And we can just put a light amount of typal, usually not very low because we don't want, we want it very light for limited. In constructed, we put the cards that carry the higher rarity. So if you want to build in structure, you can. Um, but that kind of is the model for typal, which is allow the themes to exist, make limited more about, well, these creatures happen to play well together. So you'll think of it as a frog deck, but actual frog typalness in limited is light.

There's a little bit, there's enough there that you can feel it, but not so much that gets heavy handed, not so much that you get siloing. But anyway, I think what we've learned over things is the typal theme is very popular. People really like the typal themes. It is something we should do on a regular basis. Almost every set nowadays has a little bit of typal in it. It's very common. One of our archetypes, not always, but often one of our archetypes has a typal component.

It's a nice, easy way to, it's a nice clean way to connect things in a way that mechanically it's easy for us to do and we do like larger typal themes but like as Bloomberg shows we're trying to find more ways to lean into in a way that's not just cards loudly screaming at you play this play this play this because that can that especially limited gets us into trouble anyway that my friends is the history of typo themes. I hope you enjoyed it, but I'm now at work, so I don't know what that means. Means the end of my, what does it mean?

It means 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 all next time. Bye bye.