Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1262: Magic Card Back

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In this podcast, I see if I can talk for 30 minutes about the Magic card back. (Hint: I did it.)

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so one of the things that happens every morning is I get up and I have to say, what is my podcast today? Most of the time I do not know when I wake up, I do not know what my podcast is and I have to figure it out. Now I have a long list of things.

People give me suggestions. So I have a lot of things I can look at. But every once in a while I say, do I have 30 minutes on topic X? And then I will get in the car and I will drive and I'll see if I have 30 minutes. Now if you're hearing this, the answer is I did have 30 minutes. If I didn't have 30 minutes you just wouldn't hear it. But today, today my challenge is do I have 30 minutes on the Magic Card Back? Yes, I'm going to talk for 30 minutes or try to at least about the Magic Card Back. So we're going to talk about everything we can, everything

you ever wanted to know about the Magic Card Back. Today is your day to learn those things. Okay, so to start with The magic card back so Obviously magic is a card game One of the qualities of card games in general is you have a unified back Stemming from like a deck of cards, right? You that it's important that you don't know what card you're drawing. Randomization is an important part of the game. So you want the back to all look the same. Now remember when Magic first started back in 93, sleeves weren't a thing.

Clear sleeves showed up pretty early in Magic, probably like in 94, Clear sleeves showed up. But opaque sleeves actually took a little while to show up. So the idea was, it was important that the back of the magic back was actually uniform. Now interestingly, the original plan, when Arabian Nights got made, the idea was that the magic back that we

had seen would be the original magic back. And then each new expansion, each new set for magic, would create its own back. So I'm not sure you new set for Magic, would create its own back. So I'm not sure you've ever seen it but Arabian Nights actually had like a purple back. It looks like a Magic card but it has kind of a purple tint to it. And at the very last minute I believe Scaffoli is convinced Richard that the uniformness of the back was pretty important. And so at the last minute they changed it. But be aware the way we

print you have the fronts and you have the back. So changing something you could do you could do pretty late in the process because obviously the printers already had the backs to the original cards. So I believe the back of the card was designed by Jesper Mirfors. Jesper was the original art director of Magic. I think the Magic logo is medieval Gaudi, I think, is the name of the font. It's possible that's the font of the original names, and maybe that's not. But I think this is medieval Gaudi. And the interesting thing is because the Magic card back

doesn't change, but we'll get into that. We've talked about changing, but we'll get into that. There's a lot of decisions and things made early on that haven't been changed, even though they could be. For example, the Magic logo has a little TM next to it, which is a trademark. In trademarks, there's different levels of trademarks. Actually, higher than a TM is a little R in a circle, which means a registered trademark. So the interesting thing is when they first put the game out, it just had a normal trademark.

I think they later got a registered trademark for it. Like if you, if you see the magic logo outside the back of a card, I think you get the little R in a circle, the register trademark, but we didn't want to change the magic back. And so it still has the TM trademark on it. Um, the other thing about the logo is when we first made magic, the idea was they made it blue. The back of a magic card, the logo is blue. They figured out pretty early on, I mean, by the time I was working at Wizards, I think they had figured this out, that actually yellow works better as a logo.

And the reason for that is one of the big points of a logo is to stand out on shelves, to have people see it. And the yellow logo is just a lot more dynamic. So Magic hasn't really been blue for a while. And the other big thing is this is the old Magic logo. A number of years ago, we changed the Magic logo. So if you've ever seen newer stuff with Magic, it has a completely different logo. So if you've ever seen newer stuff with Magic, it has a completely different logo. So like on every possible level,

it's not TM anymore, it's not blue anymore, it's not this font anymore, it's not this style anymore. So it is really interesting that this is kind of the old-school Magic logo because it's on the back of the cards. And the other neat thing about this that on some level because the back of the card persists, because that's what's on Magic, you know, there is kind of this bit of history that stays forever on Magic that's kind of cool that I kind of like. Okay, so let's continue on the card. So next on the card, we come to the color pie, the color wheel.

And so it's in order. So at the top of the card, it's white. And then it goes clockwise, blue, black, red, green. I don't know. People have asked me, is the reason white's at top? Whenever we order the colors, we go in what we call WU Berg order, white, blue, black, red, green. And the ques- and like so when we make files, when we do collector numbers, that's just the order that we put magic colors in. And it's also in the wheel order, right, goes in order.

Why we start with white, why we end with green, why white is top? I think what happened was, I don't think when they made the card back, like remember, the idea of collector number came later. So the idea of Magic having a set order, maybe we made our file in some order behind the scenes, but as far as any sort of public facing thing, it took a while before we publicly said sort of Wuburg order. I think that white is at top because it looks the best. That is why I think white is at top, but I'm not 100%. I've not spent any time talking to the Esper about the backing, the making of the back. But I believe the order was not to like white

goes first as much as this just looks best. I do like the fact that the color wheel is on the back of the Magic card because it does say something important which is look this goes to the very foundation of what Magic is. In fact, I mean long time listeners will know I believe the color pie is the foundation of Magic. The mechanics are based on it, the flavor is based on it, the philosophical underpinning of the game is based on it, the ethos is based on it. It is, to me, there's nothing more central to what magic is than the color pie. Obviously, we now have a whole council of colors.

That's how important the color pie is. And the little balls, like they're done. I just think it was a graphical element that looked cool that I think that Jesper just liked. We'll get to the overall card in a second. But first we have one more feature of the front, the Deckmaster. So there's a logo on the back of Magicard called deckmafter. What is deckmafter? And so this is a really good example of sometimes you do something and you kind of get locked into it even though it ends up not working out. So when Richard first made Magic, I'm not sure whether this was Peter's idea or

Richard's idea, I think it might have been Peter's idea. Peter Ackerson, one of the founders of Wizard and the first CEO. The idea was that not only was Magic a trading card game, but it was introducing the concept of trading card games. And I think Peter really saw the potential in that. And the idea was that, yeah yeah magic was gonna be the first one But they were gonna make more in fact. They did make more Richard made a vampire eternal struggle was called jihad, but then changed that by the eternal struggle. He made netrunner

He later made battle tech. He made Star Wars So we made a bunch of different trading card games and the the idea of Deckmaster was Deckmaster was supposed to be Wizards trading card game brand. So the idea is yeah, Magic's one game and Vampire the Eternal Struggle's another game and Netrunner's another game, but all of them are Netrunner games because they're Wizard branded trading card games. The interesting thing there is Wizards does have a couple trading cards. Right now we have two major ones. We have Magic and then we make Duel Masters which is made in Japan. But Duel Master is not labeled Deck Master and most other Deck Master branded games obviously fell by the wayside.

And most other Deckmaster branded games obviously fell by the wayside. So but once you put it on the card, like it was on the back, like you can't take it off. So Deckmaster remains on the back of a card, even though we don't use it anywhere. My guess is most of you listening to this probably have no idea what Deckmaster means. That's what it means. It was the Magic branded for wizards trading card games also by the way on the back of the card there is a rumor that i unfortunately spread for years because i thought it was true there's this little black mark on the back of the card in the i think the deck mafter logo which i i think there's a rumor there was like a pen

mark that actually got marked and then no one noticed it and got printed it's just part of the marbling yes for came out and corrected this I I falsely said I thought was the pen mark it is not a pen mark it is just part of the marbling of the card okay so now let's get into what exactly the card back represents. Because I think it's pretty cool but I don't know how many people necessarily are aware of it. So the idea is we wanted... so the magic deck, the library, is your deck of spells, right? So the back of a magic card and not just the back of the magic card itself but the starter deck, it represents the book.

It is a tome. It's an ancient tome. And this is the cover of the tome. And if you saw the original starter deck, the starter deck on the side had like pages. Like it finished the theme that the back starts with. So the idea there is it's magic, it's fantasy, and because the library is your deck of spells, it is a tome that holds all your magic. And so that is what the back represents. You can see in the corners, there's the rivets holding the

cover to the book. The oval has a little bit of a light purpleish hue to it. But that is what it's supposed to represent. It's supposed to represent sort of a magical book. The interesting thing is there's not like, I think you'll see in some of the vocabulary, like your library or the graveyard, I mean, we do some vocabulary to try to add some little bit of flavor, but it, but it is something that we don't spend a lot of time on, sort of the metaphor of what the game pieces are. But that is why the back is a library.

OK. So now let's get into the tail of the magic back. OK, so magic gets created. And like I said, the other thing to always keep in mind here is that when Richard first made magic, it was assumed it was going to be like any game. He made the game. He's going to go out.

Hey, if the game's successful, down the road there might be expansions. He had some of his play testers start to make expansions. And so I knew Richard understood the idea of, hey, probably one day we'll make expansions. But nobody, and not that it's any way possible, the phenomenon of the Magic Game. It was so popular when it kept selling out, they started

making expansions immediately. In fact, Richard had to go quickly and make Arabian Nights. The idea really was, I think the way most sets work is you take a game, you put it out. The game is out for a couple years maybe. And then you finally put out an expansion to it. I think that was the thought process originally.

They put it out and once the initial product had sort of sold out, maybe they were printed at once, then they started thinking about an expansion. I think Ice Age was originally planned to be the first expansion, and Ice Age came out in 95. Like, I kind of think that's what, like, I kind of think that the idea was that they'd put out Magic the Gathering, and then two years later they'd put out, oh, also, so the reason it's The Gathering, let's talk a little bit about Magic the Gathering, since we're talking about the back of the card and these are words on the back of the card.

When Richard first made the game, he calls it Magic. During the entire time of alpha playtesting, he calls it Magic. But then when it came time to make the game, the answer that they got from their legal department, which I think was one person, I think Brian Lewis was in the legal department, which I think was one person. I think Brian Lewis was the legal department. But the answer they got was magic is too general a term to be trademarked. We can't trademark the word. It's just too general a word. That when you trademark something, you have to have some uniqueness to your property.

And that a word that's just a general word, it's very hard to trademark that. So then, when they first announced the game, they actually changed the name. It wasn't Magic. It was announced as Manaclash. So when they first announced the game, they did their initial press release announcing the game coming out, they called it Manaclash.

But that just didn't sit right with Richard. It had always been Magic to him. And so he went to the lawyers and said, OK, is there a way that we can call it magic? And the lawyers said, well, if we make the name longer than magic, if magic is part of a longer name, we can trademark a longer name. Magic can be part of something.

And so the idea they came up with is, well, what if there is something that goes along with magic? And the idea was that it would start with magic, would have another little descriptor. And the idea is, it would start with Magic, would have another little descriptor. And the idea is, well, people would probably call it Magic. It had a longer name, but people could shorten it to Magic, and that was kind of the compromise. That everybody could call it Magic, but technically it has

a longer name. So the name they came up with was Magic the Gathering. And I think Richard liked the idea that it sort of pulled people together. I think he was inspired by, I think there is, is there a movie called The Gathering? I think there was something where it was some movie about people coming, throughout time coming together, was it Highlander? I forget where, but anyway,

this idea of coming together really spoke to Richard. Now, the original plan was the first version of the game was gonna call Magic the Gathering. And then in year two, whatever, when Ice Age comes out, it would now become Magic Ice Age. And the idea was that was in Richard's, that's why Arabian Nights was going to have a different back. In Richard's head, in two years when he put out, it wasn't necessarily

that Magic Ice Age was stuck to be mixed in with the original Magic. It's like, it's a new version of it. And I don't think that Richard was thinking about mixing and matching necessarily. It's just kind of like, here's magic and here's the elements it has. And then Ice Age originally was going to be some amount of cards would reprint and then there'd be some new cards in it. So the idea is just we're changing up what the game is in some level, that the mix of cards are changing. I don't think Richard was originally thinking about things going together, but it very quickly became clear that that's how people wanted to use it. And that's why I think Scaff went to Richard and said, oh no no no we need to have the same back. People are gonna want to mix the

rabbi knight cards with their normal cards. And so they did that. Okay so they make a rabbi knights they don't change the back. And so, okay, this is the Magic back. Now, so when I get there, 95, look, this is just the Magic back. But even as early as 95 when I was there, I think they figured out that the blue was the wrong color. That's the first thing they figured out. Oh, it really wants to be yellow. So they started using the yellow logo on packaging. So you look at early Magic, pretty early on, the logo changes to a yellow logo from a blue logo. But look, the card back's the card back. We can't change the card back.

So the idea is, well, OK, fine, the blue logo stays on the cards, but product will start using the yellow logo. And even early on, one of the questions they had is, OK, maybe we should change the logo. Like, okay, we'll keep it the same, it'll mostly look the same, but it'll have a yellow logo rather than a blue logo. Then it matches the product.

And there's a lot of idea like, do we want to be trapped in the past by the back? But there was a big contingency in R&D like, no, no, no, this is the history of the game. That one of the cool things about the game is if you play Magic and then you drift away and do something else and come back to the game, that is important that there's some familiarity in the game. And one of the familiar things is the card back, right? That you see the card back and go, oh, this is the game I

know and love. And so there's a lot of resistance. It said, look, the logo can be different on the on the cards than it is on the box. The reason it needs to be yellow is to grab attention. That is true on the box. That's not true on the cards. So it's fine. There's different color logos for different places. Not a big deal. Then eventually it became clear that Deckmaster wasn't going to work out. Wizards tried a bunch of trading card games, but it became clear at some point that the Deckmaster brand just wasn't going to be a thing. In fact, at some point, I'm not sure when, we stopped putting Deckmaster on trading card games.

I'm not 100% sure. I don't know if Star Wars, the Star Wars treatment card game, had Deckmaster on it. I know, I know for sure that Vampire Turner's Struggle did and Netrunner did. I'm not sure if we made a game for BattleTech. I'm not sure if BattleTech had it on the back. It might have. I don't remember Star Wars. Maybe Star Wars did. I don't remember it having it on the back. But anyway, at some point, it was clear that the deckmafter word was no longer viable. Like we're just not using it.

So someone said, okay, maybe we print the back, we just take off deckmafter. It's the same, but it's just take off deckmafter. And the same thing is like, no, either the back's the back, you know, and that one of the things we discovered for tournaments, like it mattered that you could tell what card was what. We already had issues on the Pro Tour that just the printing, like Ice Age, for example,

was like a little bit, was it lighter or darker? It was just a little bit different than other printings. And so people that really could understand like, oh, that's an Ice Age card. And that was just not good. And so that idea was quashed. Then at some point we changed the logo. And so that idea was quashed. Then at some point, we changed the logo. It's not just the wrong color logo. It's not the logo.

Magic has changed its logo. And so again, this is a reoccurring theme of we should change the back. And there have been different like There was a guy who worked in our duty mark Globus who did lots of an R&D he was in the first great designer search Globus Was the biggest advocate of us changing the back and the idea is once we change it Well, once you pull off the band-aid we can change the logo. We can get rid of deck master We can in fact, I think his idea is, look, let's just make, like, the back we made made a lot

of sense back in 1993, but it's kind of outdated. Let's just make a more up-to-date Magic back. And you will notice, by the way, on digital platforms, like on Arena and on Magic Online, the card back is different. Basically, what they've chosen to do is make subtle changes. I believe the card back in digital is, I think it's the old logo, but it's yellow and not blue. It doesn't have Deckmaster. It's just cleaned up a little bit.

And so where we can and where it's uniform, the reason we can do it in digital is all the backs are the same thing. So whatever we change it to, it's uniform. It still has the uniformness to it. The problem with printed cards is we printed them. And so we can't change cards we printed. Anyway, there's been a lot of conversations. We've had a lot of talk.

I would say every couple years it comes back and we had this conversation of should we change the card back? I think we've kind of settled into there were not changes to the card back. We've had, I mean, I would say that there was a point, there was a point where it started to get some momentum and there really was big,

I think Bill squashed it in the end, Bill being the PP of R&D, but there was a lot of serious talk about should we change it. And there was a period of time where if you asked me if it would change, like right now, will it change? I'm pretty confident it's not going to change. There's a point in time where I'm like, I'm not sure, maybe. But anyway, I believe the Magic Back is here to stay. What else?

Like I said, the challenge of 30 minutes is, so what else is there? Oh, here's something I can talk about. So the Magic Back is printed slightly differently than the Magic front. And I'm not quite sure what the treatment is, but it's a little more exacting of a treatment, just because we want a certain richness to the back.

And so there's extra printing that goes into the back. The back's a little bit more complex. So the way we print cards is we print the backs first separately and then we make sort of blank sheets if you will. And then then we print on the other side. But the magic back gets printed first. And in fact some of those blanks get sent to wizards. We use them to make playtest cards. So when we print our playtest cards, we have a whole bunch of blank magic cards, which is us taking magic backs. So real quickly, for those who don't know how printing works, the sheet is a large sheet, usually 11 by 11. It could be 10 by 10. There's

a couple of different sizes. So every card on,, I say 11 by 11, it's 11 cards high and 11 cards wide. We print that and then there's a chopper that chops them. I think, I believe magic cards are bridge size. There's like poker sized bridge size or the two sides of cards mostly. These are bridge size, I believe. So the idea is they, and then they chop them. So with the blank things, they can chop blanks

and give us blanks, so we use the blanks. And but what that means is because the back is printed differently than the front, it changes a little bit about how we make things. So for example, if we are making double-faced cards, a lot of people assume we could just intersperse double-faced cards, but we can't. The magic back is different than a face.

So we can't put double face cards on the same sheet as single face cards because we can't mix backs with fronts because the backs have a different mix to them. So for example, that means when we do double face cards, they have to be on their own sheet. Yeah, there's a lot. One of the other really interesting things about Magic is there's a lot that goes into the printing of Magic.

And while the back hasn't changed in how it looks from the naked eye, I know they spend a lot of time and energy sort of cleaning it up technically. Not that it really matters for you guys. I guess in the end, a Magic Card back looks like a Magic Card back, which is the intent. But how we make it in the process behind, I know has changed. And the other big thing is Magic originally, when we

first started making it, was printed on one printer, Card of Monday in Belgium. That was the original Magic printer. We still print with Card of Monday. But we make far too many cards Cardamonday printing using all expresses printing non-stop could not print all the magic cards and the other big thing is part of The logistics of it is we now have stuff around the world

So we can print closer to where we need to send the cards because one of the big costs of cards is shipping cards So where you're sending them. Well, if you have printing places that are closer to them, then you save on shipping costs. In business, these things, they don't matter. But the magic, if I had, so here's your question, is how many different printing presses have printed the magic back?

And a number of them. We have a bunch of different printers we use now. And over the years we've used different printers. So there's been a wave of different printers. Yeah, one other thing is fun to me. So early in Magic, we made a product that was a deck of cards. And the deck of cards had a Magic Back.

In fact, I think it was made by Card of Monday. I think card of money did it. I try to remember. I'm not sure whether they might've done it as a, as a treat for us thing. Oh, you know, um, and I have them and we, we sold them for a very period of time. And then we stopped doing that. Um, just cause we realized that the magic back, we really wanted it to be like, when you see a magic back, you know it's a magic card. And so the magic deck of cards is a super rare item. Like we printed it back in, I don't know, 95, 96,

and we've never made them again. So that is definitely, the other interesting thing is because it's important that we can't, so like, let me tell the Ice Age story really quick. So Ice Age comes out in. So, Ice Age comes out. In the printing of Ice Age, the backs were printed slightly lighter, I think it was lighter, than normal.

And what that meant is, if you were playing unsleeved, without opaque sleeves, and you looked at the Magic Back, and you were really good, it wasn't... To the naked eye, it was a little hard. But if you sort of could learn, there was a subtle difference between an Ice Age back and a normal back, a non-Ace Age back.

And that actually caused some problems at the Pro Tour. There were some unscrupulous people that were taking advantage of the fact that they could tell whether the top card of their library was an Ace Age card or not. And the reason that's important is, for example, what if all your land was from Ice Age? Then you could tell when you have a land on top of your library. What if certain spells that exist in Ice Age, you know. So it definitely allowed some shenanigans.

And so after that, there was a lot more precautions took. Like one of the things we realized is it's not only important that the card look the same just from the general play, but like's a real functional, we have competitive play and tournament play, so it's really important that they look the same. And so we've spent a lot of time and energy improving that process to make sure that, and that's one of the reasons I think the Magic Back isn't the same as the Magic front. That there's a lot of extra energy and time spent to really have it be a very consistent. And that's really important to us and that's one of the reasons that we can't mix fronts and backs is because more time is spent on the back. In fact, I'm not sure, I know

there's some printers that don't even do the back and that there are at times we printed the block printed the back at one printer and then shipped them to another printer now maybe nowadays that's not true maybe we'll have printers that can do the back but I know there's a point that was true okay guys I've just arrived at work we're at 28 minutes so to my great surprise I've in fact talked almost 30 minutes so any final thoughts here on the card back? I will say that there's something about the card back that is very welcoming to me. You know, magic, well magic, there's only so much

continuity in magic. I mean, the card back's not the only thing. We have the color pie and the mana symbols. And I mean, there's other elements. But there's something really comforting about, like, it's neat to me that everyone's talking about the card back's not the only thing. We have the color pie and the mana symbols. And there's other elements. But there's something really comforting about, like, it's neat to me that every time I play Magic and I draw, especially at work, we don't do a lot of

sleeping at work sometimes. So I'm playing a lot with where I'm seeing the card backs. And there's something, the idea that 30 years in that I get to see the same thing, there's something really enjoyable about that. And in fact, I had a baseball cap for a while that was the Magic Card Back on a baseball cap. I think we were going to make them.

The partner sent us a model of it. We ended up not making it, but I liked it so much that I took the, I got the, um, the test one and I wore that until it wore out. I, I don't wear anymore just because I kind of wore it out. I think I still have it, but, uh, anyway, uh, I have a great fondness for the magic back. I hope today's podcast, all about the magic back was interesting. I hope you enjoyed me talking for in fact, 30 minutes about the magic magic back. I hope today's podcast all about the magic back was interesting. I hope you enjoyed me talking for in fact 30 minutes about the magic card back. I did it. Woohoo! Anyway guys I'm now here at work so we all know

what that means. That means instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.