Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1266: Mercadian Masques

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

This is another podcast in my ongoing quest to record a podcast about every expansion. This podcast is all about Mercadian Masques.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time with their drive to work. Okay, so one of my goals with this podcast is I want to do a podcast on every magic expansion released. And I've done a lot of them, but I've not done all of them. So I'm slowly working my way through. So the next one, starting from the beginning, that I haven't done yet, is Mercadian Masks. Mercadian Mask came out October 4th, 1999, co-named Arkhammed.

80s. It is the first set in the Mercadian Mass Block, the large set. It has 350 cards. 110 commons. 110 commons. 110 Rares. Clearly we had 110 sheets, 10 by 11 sheets at the time.

And Mythic Rare was not a thing yet, so there's no Mythic Rarers in this set. Its expansion symbol was a stylized mask, because there was a mask theme of the name itself. Even though it's spelled with a Q which we'll get two. It's referring

to masks like you wear, I believe. Okay, so this set, the lead designer set was Mike Elliott and the design team was Mike Bill Rose and myself. The development team was led by Henry Stern and

involved Henry, Mike Elliott, Robert Cicera, William, Jockish and myself. The art director, two art directors, Dana Knootson and Ron Spears. Okay, so let me set the scene to understand the world in which we were making Mercadian

maths. So the previous set had been the Urza block, had been the Urza saga block. Basically what happened is so Michael and I had pitched the Weatherlight saga

and our original story was three was a three block story, a three arc story. The first block was going to be in wrath. The second one was going to be on Mercadia, a brand new world we had made up. And the third one was going to be made on Dominaria. That was their original plan. When the story got taken away from us, one of the things they wanted to do was more imbued the story with the pre-existing story of magic. Now, Michael and I had made connections to it. Hannah was Barron's daughter. Ertai was from the Tularean Academy. It wasn't that we were disconnected from before. for. But the thing that was decided, and once again, this was not Michael and I is doing. This is after

we were off the story, was that the mastermind behind the entire thing would be Erza. That Erza was the man behind everything. And so, they added a whole block about Erza. That's where Erza Saga came from. And Erza Saga went into the past and

explained stuff. Now, another contextual thing to understand was, when I was hired. I was not hired to be a designer, but a developer. And I think our development team at the time, it was me and Mike Elliott and Bill Rose and William Jockish and eventually Henry Stern. Me and Bill and Mike are more designers than developers, to be honest. William had some developer sensibility, but looking back, you know, like we would end up

hiring people off the pro tour. Randy Bueller, Mike Dornay, Mike Turin, Matt Place, Brian Schneider, we would hire people that had a lot more development skills, you know, or play design skills than we have, we had at the time. So Erzosa Saga was probably the most broken block we have ever made. Mirdin would get in the ballpark of it, but I don't believe even Mirden was as broken as Urza Saga block. Urza Saga block was pretty, pretty bad. It created what we called combo winter. banned a whole bunch of cards and anyway um the result of that of ursosa saga kind of imploding was we got called into the office of the president at the time CEO um peter akison and he chewed us out and he

threatened us and said if this ever happens again you're all fired the only time i ever was threatened with being fired um so we were in the middle of working on mercadian masks i believe when that meeting happened. So Mercadian masks won the power level of it. It was a little lower. We didn't want another Urzosauga block. So for starters, Mercadian masks definitely existed in this different sort of places.

The other big thing that went on was when Michael and I first pitched the idea of Mercadia, we pitched this mercantile world. But the idea that we had in mind, And like we, Michael and I were not remote, maybe we called them Mercadia and we had set like a mercantile world. We had a very, very different take on what we wanted the world to be. And I've done podcasts on our alternate story. But anyway, so there's a schism between design and the creative at this point because I was the connection between the two.

And I sort of got ceremoniously kicked off doing story. And so there's definitely a period of time here where there's not a great connection between story and flavor just because the two teams were not getting along great. And so the Mercadia that got designed is just a very weird place. Like one of the things they were really into was like a world where physics don't work the way you think they work. Like there is this thing in the background of one of the arts, I forget which art it is, one of the basic lands. And it looks like a volcano. But no, it's like an upside-down mountain or something. Anyway, so there was a lot of disconnect between the story and the creative at the time.

I mean, we did try to connect it, but it was... We had very little input into what the world was. And the world had a lot of, like, everything's backwards. Like, the goblins are smart and stuff like that. So Mike Elliott Did the Mike Elliott was the lead designer on this So Mike

Mike came up with What we ended up calling Rebels and Mercenaries Rebels were creatures That you had to spend Manna to go fetch out of your library Another rebel that cost one more And mercenaries got you a creature

That cost one less Now doesn't they go rocket scientist to realize that going and getting more expensive things is better gameplay than, or stronger gameplay than low. So rebels ended up being the powerhouse of the block because you would play your one drop and go get your two drop and then go get your three drop. And so one of the things about magic that's important is the randomization is a pretty important part that I know, I don't quite know how the game's going to play out because there's not consistency. Well, having a whole mechanic about tutoring and

consistency really meant that, you know, you got your one or two drop and then the whole thing got going to go and, you know, and you knew kind of exactly what was going to happen. So, rebels ended up being the powerhouse. Like when they had, like when they did the, at the pro tour, they did the recadian mass block. It was a rebel, I think there were only two decks. There was a rebel deck and there was a control deck. I think that was it. Those are the two choices you had.

And so it was a, it was. was pretty narrow as far as, from a constructive standpoint, Rebels really sort of overran everything. Mercantaries existed and unlimited. You could play mercenaries. They did mean something unlimited. Although the problem you ran into unlimited with rebels and mercenaries was your chain would get broken a lot, meaning each rebel got something up to one larger than it, right? So if I opened the one drop and the three drop, my one drop didn't get my three drop. And so rebels were a little, rebels, mercenaries were a little easier because you could get something smaller. And if I get the four drop, maybe I had the one, two, or three drop.

But anyway, the rebels and mercenaries were the main sort of mechanic. Oh, something else I should mention about McCandy masks. So as you'll notice, all the mechanics have run. through today. None of them have names. Rebels and mercenaries were creature-type rebel and mercenary, and they had a shared line of text on them. But there was no, you know, for example, nowadays we would call it something, recruiting or whatever we would call it something that, oh, I go get other rebels, oh, I go get other mercenaries. But there's no label on it. So one of the big things that happened during this block was a complaint that the set didn't have any mechanics.

Um, this is, this is, uh, one, before Mercadian Mass, the way we tended to function was we know, each set normally had two mechanics. Those were named. Um, and this set has, uh, I think, I think we thought of, um, rebels and mercers as being one thing. I know they work differently from each other, but they're essentially the same mechanic except one goes up and one goes down. Um, the other mechanic, uh, at least, uh, as we thought of, um, there were a bunch of mechanics. I mean, did have mechanics, was what we called spell shapers. So spell shapers, also a creature type. The way a spell shaper worked is you could spend mana and sacrifice a card to generate an effect.

The way I like to think of it is it turned a card in your hand into another spell. Not technically what it did, but sort of the flavor. It's like, oh, I have the balloon peddler. Well, the balloon peddler can turn any card in my hand into a jump. You know, and so the idea essentially is Spell Shaper just turned your cards. It gave your cards a secondary purpose.

And that included land. Let's say late game, I draw land. I just don't need the land. Oh, well, I can turn into spells. Spell Shipper is of the mechanics in the set, of the new mechanics. I think it was probably the one I liked the most. And it's the one that I mean,

I don't know whether we'll label them spell shapers or not, but I do think it's the kind of thing we could bring back one day of the stuff in Mercating Mask. Rebels and we've kind of really cooled on tutors as mechanics. So I don't really see rebels or mercenaries as a mechanic coming back. Maybe a one-of-or-something, but not as a whole mechanic. The other thing that was in the set, and this was my influence.

So when I first got to Wizards, the very first set I worked on was alliances. And the controversial thing of alliances were the pitch cards, Force of Will being the most famous. And the idea was, and I did a podcast on alliances you want to hear about this, The idea of the pitch cards was instead of paying the mana cost you could pay a different cost, and that cost was discarding a card of the same color.

A few of the cards, like, first of all had an additional cost of one life. But the idea essentially is, normally in magic up to that point, if you were tapped out, there's nothing you could do. I think Chris Page edited my puzzles, was inspired by my puzzles to make cards that you could cast, even if you were tapped out because in my puzzles, I always had the opponent tapped out,

so they couldn't do anything. Once pitch cards existed, they had an empty hand, so they couldn't do anything. Anyway, I was really fascinated by alternate casting costs. And so we really played around with that in the set. The idea of, it's not just discarding a card. What if you pay life? What if you give your opponent life? What are other things you could do that are alternate costs?

The one interesting thing is while we, in general, try to overall lower the power level of the set. I do think the power level is down. Alternate casting costs are just really powerful. So some of the more powerful cards in the set are the alternate casting costs. Just because the ability to cast a spell without having to pay mana is quite powerful. So we definitely play around in the space. Again, though, the alternate casting costs are not labeled. And there's not a named mechanic.

So we have mercenaries and rebels. We have spell shafers. We have alternate casting costs. None of that is labeled. So we get into the sort of, the problem. We also had recruiters. I think recruiters were creatures that could fetch a particular creature type out of your deck.

I think they did that as an ETB effect as an entrance effect. We also had depletion lands. Depletion lands enter the battlefield tapped with two counters on them. And then you could tap and remove a counter to add two mana of a color. There's a cycle of them. So, for example, the white one would enter with two depletion counters, and then I could tap it to add white-white to my mantas. We've since learned, by the way, that adding more than one mana is generally a problem.

Our thought process was, well, you can only do it twice. They're limited. Then you run out. You have no mana. But it turns out even being able to do it twice. Just getting more than one mana really is valuable. The other thing we did from a land, another land we did was a storage land. So these edge of the battlefield tapped, and the way these worked is you could tap them to add a counter,

and then you could tap, or you could tap them to remove any number of counters to add that much colored mana. So the idea essentially was, if you didn't need the land on this turn, you could store up the land for future turns. So it's interesting here, both the land cycles we made allow you to get more than one mana on one turn, which is the thing we don't even do anymore. So even though we were um even though we were trying to depower things we still did things that interestingly today we wouldn't do

now I will say these both enter the enter the battlefield tap they're kind of slow I'm not saying these are particularly powerful but they do well I think that the police lands ended up being decently powerful you can see we're messing around with space that we later decided not to mess around with

the other funny thing about the set is I think this is the final set that have dark ritual in it, which is pretty nutty. Dark ritual comes on 93 and Alpha. It takes us six years, six years to realize that maybe drug ritual is a little bit too good.

We did things like Blame Spector. It wasn't Spector's fault. It was not Spector's fault. It was Dark Ritual. So this set is the last set to have Dark Ritual. And one of the, my point here, is I don't really think it's until invasion, which is

after Mercadian masks. It's not really until invasion that kind of the modern sense of development even begins. We hire like Randy and Mike Donay and like the I mean, we had hired Henry before but one man can only do so much.

So we just started hiring more people off the pro tour and getting more more expertise. And I think as we did that, just in general, you can see us getting better at figuring out the right levels for things. I mean, even then it takes a while. One of the thing that's really interesting when you look back at magic over time is

there's lessons that we learned, but it took us a while to learn. You know, there's things that you look back, and I mean, as someone who, you know, been designing forever and I look back, there's things when I look at old saps that I just cringe. I'm like, what were we thinking? Like one of my favorite stories is in Tempest. Mirage had a common ex spell. And so I said, okay, I'm going to fix the common X spell. I'm going to add a second red mana. So it's not easy to splash. Not going, you know, maybe a comment shouldn't have an X spell in it. No, no, no, no. I'll make it harder to splash.

So, anyway. And again, even though I was hired as a developer, I was very clear from the very beginning. I was more of a designer than developer. Okay. The one other thing the set had a little bit of is it did, also, one of the things I don't like,

it has some creatures that any player could activate. This is not something I'm a fan of. Mostly because I think there's a lot going on a board, and you really have to pay attention to what's going on your board. So the idea that there's things on my opponent side that I could activate and use is just a lot, and it's not a place you normally look. So I'm not a huge fan of that, although we did do some of that.

Okay, so I'm going to walk through some cards we made in this set. Oh, before I do that. So the set came out, a little sort of at the time. The set came out. It was in standard with Erza Saga Block, which was Barokin. So at the time, Mercadian Mask was, it was pretty looked down upon. It obviously was much weaker than invasion on purpose. And the lack of new mechanics, you know, there just was a, it definitely was one of those sets that came out and kind of just had a lot of negativity.

Also, the creative world building was not very popular. Mercady was kind of this place that was weird. weird for the sake of being weird. And so people didn't quite understand it. So anyway, the world didn't test well. The set didn't test well. The set didn't sell great. So looking back, Mercantia mask is not considered one of the highly...

Oh, another funny story. So at the time, the creative team was not part of R&D. Now, Studio X, you know, the magic team are all together. So we're under, like, the creative team and design. have, you know, are under a branch of the same, like, you know, Aaron oversees everything, for example. So, so the idea essentially is, at the time, there was a disconnect. They decided to name the novel Mercadian Masks, M-A-S-Q-U-E-S.

And we didn't like that name, but it wasn't our call. And I mean, and the thing we said at the time was like, well, if you're going to call it mask, can we spell it M-A-S-K-S? people like, because like no one knows what NASQES is. You know, it's like a fancy way. I don't even know quite what I mean. I think it means NASK, but in a fancy way. I'm not even 100% sure what it means.

But anyway, we did not like the name Mercadie masks. And in Rebellion, for a little while, we changed it. So every card name in the set, if it had a K, instead it was changed to QU. and so there's a lot of silly playtests cards from around that time. Anyway, let's get to the card. Let's talk about the cards. So, first up, is the card that I made that was a mistake, but it's very powerful. Called Bribery.

Three Blue Blue Sorcery. You search your opponent's library for a creature, and you put it on your side. I think I was just trying, I mean, once again, a lot of times when you're making cards, I just wanted to make a super exciting card. I'm like, I like to control magic. What is like the strongest control magic you could do? What if I stole a card not from my opponent's side of the battlefield, but from their very deck? The problem with this is, and the reason I think it's a bad card design, is what you don't want to do is discourage people from playing things that are fun for them.

And really what bribery says is, oh, silly you, playing a giant creature, you know, because I just search for your deck, whatever creature, whatever cost, and I can put it on my side. And so the last thing you wanted to do is play a creature in your deck that maybe you couldn't even cast, but I'm going to get and put it in play. And so for a while it really discouraged people playing larger creatures. We want people to play larger creatures. So I think Briber just kind of crosses the line.

Like it's one thing to steal from you, but it's another to sort of like go in your deck because it's a little bit too far. It is a powerful card, so people do play it. High market is a land. Taps for Colis, or you can tap and sack a creature to gain one life. I think this gets put into decks

A is a way to get creatures in your graveyard or sack creatures if you need them The other thing is if your creature is going to die anyway A lot of times you can sack it Just to get some life out of it But it sees a bunch of play Black Market It's an enchantment for three black black

Five mana two which is black Whenever a creature dies You put a counter on this And then the beginning of your first main phase I believe you get black mana equal to the number of counters on it. So it is a way in black to get a lot of man, especially

in a border state where a lot of creatures die. Commander, that happens. So it sees a lot of play. Snuff. So snuff is an instant, three in a black, destroy target non-black creature. It does not get regenerated.

You called that Barry at one point. The reason this card is powerful is it has an alternate casting cost of pay for life. so the idea is any deck that's allowed to play it obviously commander you have to have a black color identity

any deck that's a lot of play it can put it in their deck and for four life destroy a creature which is pretty powerful because there's some colors that really have trouble destroying creatures so definitely this was us one of the things we found

by the way from a lot of our alternate casting costs is you need to be careful that you're not allowing decks like colors to play things like for example green It's supposed to have trouble killing creatures. I mean, it has stuff like, you know, fight and things. But anyway, the idea that a green deck can just play this and just for a life-kill creature, it's like, oh, hey, well, I'm glad I can just undo my weakness

in my mono-green deck just by paying some life. So that's something we have to be more careful about. Coastal piracy. So coastal piracy costs two and two blue mana. It's an enchantment. It grants all your creatures what we have nixed. name an R&D, curiosity, which means whenever your creature deals

combat damage to an opponent, you get to draw a card. The curiosity is definitely an ability. I mean, we call curiosity because it originally was an enchantment called curiosity that granted to the creature enchanted. It's since an ability we've stuck in blue and green. It's a cool way for

a card advantage, but it requires you to get a creature through. And normally, I mean, sometimes we put it on flyers, but a lot of times we don't put it on invasion, so you have to figure how to get it through. This particular thing just does it to your whole team, which can be pretty powerful. And so, especially in any kind of deck that just can overwhelm the opponent or even just attack with more creatures than you can block. Maybe a lot of them are tokens or something. It just lets you draw some cards, so a pretty cool card.

Misdirection. It's funny. I made misdirection as well. So I've made a bunch of cards in the set that I can now consider mistakes. Well, I don't know. No misdirection is a mistake. It's just very powerful. So misdirection allows you to redirect a spell. It costs three blue-blue-blue as an instant. But it's a pitch card, and you can pitch a blue spell. So instead of paying three-blue-blue, you can just pitch a blue card to redirect a spell.

It's not quite force-of-will. But in some ways, it can be... I mean, Force-of-will is a stronger card because force-the-will stops anything. This doesn't stop anything. but the things that it does stop, not only does it stop it, but it messes with them. Oh, you want to destroy my creature? Why don't you destroy your creature?

You know, that not only do you stop it doing what you don't want it to do, but you get to do something different that's to your benefit usually. I do think misdirection is probably a little stronger than it should be, but it is often the same decks to play for and really tend to play misdirection.

It's a little bit environmental debate, You have to have things that you can misdirect, but there's always kill spells and stuff. So there's usually things you can misdirect. Sometimes when there's just board sweepers, it doesn't do good with board sweepers. So there are environments that it doesn't make sense, but it's pretty strong. Ancestral Mask. So Ancestral Mask is an aura. It costs two and a green, and it gives the enchanted creature a plus two plus two

for each enchantment you control. So obviously this itself is an enchantment, so it just naturally is plus. 2 plus 2 if you didn't have nothing else on the board because it counts itself. One of the ongoing things, Erza Saga had done an enchantment theme. I know it got overshadowed by us calling it the artifact block, but it did have an enchantment theme. There were a lot of enchantments. And I think we were just, like one of the things you'll notice over time is

that we tend to do a lot of artifact synergies and we do less enchantment synergies. And so I definitely was always in the camp of trying to find more opportunities to do things with enchantments. It's another card I think I made. It's funny looking back. Some of the cards, like, people always ask, sort of how do you know what you made and what you didn't make?

And some of it is, I remember making it. Some of it is I made it and I got grief, like bribery I got a lot of grief for. So, I mean, A, I remember making, but B, I know a lot of grief for it. So, but sometimes, like, oh, like, like, for example, in special masks, I have a vague memory.

I'm pretty sure I made this. And it's the kind of, knowing me at the time, like, I was very pro-enchantment at the time and trying to do more enchantment things. And also, I was constantly trying to make playable aura. So, like, it has me written all over it and the kind of thing, like, at the time. And I vaguely, vaguely, I kind of remember making this.

I'm pretty sure I made this card. But there's definitely cards that I made that I forgot that I made. Like, I look at, like, uh, like black market. It seems like the kind of card I made. Coastal piracy I made for sure. I made misdirection. I did not make high market. I don't believe.

And I don't 100% know he made Black money. It's possible that Elliot made it. And Snuff Out, I think Snuff Out, I think we were playing around with Black doing life as an alternate cost. I was involved. If I didn't directly make the card, I was involved in it, so.

Okay, the last card I'm going to talk about today is Food Chain. Food Chain is an enchantment for tuna green. You can exile a creature. If you do, you add X mana of any color where X is the mana value of the creature.

But you can only spend this manna to cast creatures. So the idea essentially is, what is called food chain, is you could feed your creatures to other creatures, sort of. It's sort of the flavor. Like, oh, I have a small creature. Well, my small creature will feed my big creature, so I get my big creature out. That is

actually, it's funny. I did not necessarily mean to pull this card's eye design, but I also made the food chain. I think I made food chain. I'm pretty sure I did. But anyway, I'm at work, so I can wrap up now. Mercadian Mask, I think there's a lot of fun designs in the set, a lot of fun individual designs. I actually honestly like spell shapers.

I do like alternate casting costs, although they're dangerous, but I mean, I do think they're fun. Rebels and mercenaries looking back, I'm not, I mean, I get it at the time. I just think that tutoring mechanics, the repetition of play, the fact that, so many decks when you played Rebels just it was the exact same game game after game I just think plays against what makes magic the most fun um but like I said I think there's a lot of fun individual things there's a lot of cards that definitely have seen a lot of play there's a lot of fun stuff here um I think I think the audience I think recated masks the the appreciation of recadian masks has grown a little bit with time like I think his initial it being

so much weaker than the urs of saga and not having any mechanics in it uh and stuff I and and the creative. I mean, I think there's a bunch of stuff that kind of soured at the time. I think with a retrospect, I think there's a lot of fun individual designs in it, and I think over time some of those have stood out. So, I got to look and see. I'm not sure whether or not I've done, so Nemesis and Prophecy are the two sets in this block. The fact that I've not done Ricadian Mask yet makes me highly skeptical that I've done Nemesis and Prophecy.

But if I'm not, those will be upcoming. But anyway, the reason I'm doing all of the expansion podcast is I just, I like, I consider myself one of the historians of magic. I really want to make sure that no matter what the set is, that we can walk through and talk about it and hear about it. And every set has highs and lows and every set, like, there's not a set that didn't make something that people still play with, obviously. There's a bunch of cards I've talked, but obviously see lots of play. So I do think it's important to talk these through. Mercadian Mask, I chalk it up as more a set about learning things than anything else.

I think we made a bunch of mistakes, but we learned from them. I think we stopped making tutoring mechanics. We started understanding, Mercadian Mask really, probably the most important thing to us is making us understand the value of labeling things. I think that was probably the most important takeaway. And after McKinney Masked, we got even more aggressive about labeling things. I think we went in the other direction in a good way,

which is saying, you know what, let's over label rather than underlabel things so that people have terminology and language and people can talk about things and so that that is a big thing and you know there's a lot of lessons that come out of it I mean what I say this was sort of a learning set in that I think we made a lot of mistakes that we learn from I mean just as I'm going through cards and looking stuff like bribery I'm like we don't make stuff like that anymore and we learn from that so anyway not every set is necessarily the best set ever this that was a learning experience, I do think it has

some fun things in it. I think that it's an initial impression was a little unfair. But anyway, guys, that is Mercadian masks. So I hope you enjoyed the jaunt through the set. But anyway, I'm at work, so we all know what that means that means instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to make it magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.