Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1284: Top 20 Most Influential Expansions, Part 2

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

This is part two of three going over my talk from MagicCon: Atlanta looking at the top 20 most influential Magic expansions of all time.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means, or maybe we don't. This is a rare episode of Drive From Work. So I'm doing three podcasts to capture my talk from Magic Island Atlanta on the top 20 most influential expansions of all time. In part one, I got through the first six. My goal today is to get through the next seven. And then tomorrow, the final seven, on the next podcast. Final seven. So because I was running out of time to get it done this week, I'm doing a

rare drive from work podcast where I end up at home. So I don't do these. I've done some before, but I don't do them very often. Okay, so number 14 in the most influential expansions of all time is Antiquities. So when Richard Garfield's first made magic, he had a bunch of different playtefters. I talked about this last time. One group he had met at University of Pennsylvania, we now refer to as the East Coast play thefters, Scafellius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, and Chris Page. So anyway, magic, basically the way magic worked was magic came out in August of 1993. They printed enough cards for a year.

It sold out in six weeks. So they printed beta in October of 1993. No, really, this is really, this, this, this is enough for a year. Sold out in like a week. So basically, they knew pretty fast that they needed to make more expansions. Richard had talked to his playtefters, and they were working on expansions.

In fact, the East Coast Playtexters were working on a set code-named Ice Age, if you can break that one. And Richard came to him and said, okay, I need you to stop doing that. We need to make an expansion. So they made a small expansion called Antiquities. Also, a little bit of trivia, it wasn't just,

I'm realizing now, it wasn't just the East Coast Playtefters. I didn't mention this in my talk. I believe Joel Mick also helped them with Antiquities. I'm not realizing. I missed that. I missed that in my when I did my panel. Anyway, so Antiquities did a bunch of things that were really interesting.

Probably the two biggest things, and this is why it's on the list. Number one, it was the first magic expansion to have a mechanical theme. Alpha, obviously, it was just lots of cards. Arabian Nights had a story that connected it, but Antiquity said, we are about something. What are we about? We are about artifacts. How do you know that? Well, the set is a lot of artifacts. Every colored card references or has something to do with artifacts. In fact, there are only three cards in the entire set that do not have the word artifact or artifacts somewhere on the card. And it's all lands. There was lands that have for colorists that implied they would cast artifacts but didn't technically mention artifacts. But anyway, the set was very themed. Every single card in the set, other than the lands, some of the lands, directly were an artifact or directly interacted with artifacts mechanically. Also, the other thing that it did for the first time is there was a story.

Richard and Alpha had definitely had proper names. What is Lano War? Who was Urza? But it wasn't really into antiquities where the idea was you were an artificer. You're an archaeologist digging up. artifacts for the past, much like Erzina Mishra were. And from that you're hearing snippets of little story about this mighty war

between these two brothers. And this was the beginning of the Brothers War, which would become a really famous novel, one of the biggest, probably my favorite in the Magic novels. It was, we made a whole set out of it. There's a saga. It's probably Magic's most

famous story. And it all got introduced here. The other thing that Antik was messed around, they did a lot of things first. They did alternate art. Their first sets, the lands had more than one piece of art on it. They, yeah, it's just, I don't know,

they did a lot of exploration as an early set. Like I said, last time when I talked about alliances, I do think the East Coast playstressers were a really clever group of designers, and they were very early in magic, but they definitely toyed around and played with stuff that would go on to be pretty important. And Antiquities was my favorite set before I came to Wizards. Okay, next up, number 13, War of the Spark, February of 2022.

Oh, Antiquities was March of 1994, by the way. So February of 2022, I led the vision design. Dave Humphreys led the set design. And so the idea is our first capstone event set. The story I tell, I told my panel, is I remember talking to W. Doug Byer. Doug Byer does a lot of the creative stuff. It was in charge.

And he came up with the Bullis story. So he was telling me the Bullis story and he gets to the end of the story. He goes, okay, the story all wraps up in a dramatic finale. Bullis has taken his eternal zombies from Aminket and then trapped almost every Plainswalker we know for a giant showdown because he is trying to steal the sparks from all the Plainswalkers, regain his former glory, and become godlike once again. in the Plainswalker War

I think he actually did call it War the Spark in his initial thing but anyway so I was like oh okay there's a planeswalker war okay so how many planeswalkers are in it all the planeswalkers were almost all the plainswalkers and I'm like

okay Doug I get like three planeswalkers cards and so I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out eventually as you probably know the final set has 36 planeswalkers in it plus a buy-the-box was tessorite which was a 37 planeswalker

so the set did a lot of things first of foremost it really advanced plainswalkers in a big way it was the first set that did static ability building zone plainswalkers and it yeah there are a few things like garrick that sort of did that but at first as an actual static ability not some of a larger mechanic it was the first uncommon plainswalkers the first hybrid plainswalkers the first planes walkers that only had negative abilities and like you can only use them so many times and there was no inherent way to build them up

but there was proliferate and stuff you know it was the definitely the set so we had done proliferate for the first time in Scars the Mirrodin but we really liked proliferate and one of the challenges was we kept trying to bring proliferate back and it kept not working out this is a set where we finally did bring it back

and really showing that you know you could use mechanic in a completely different way. Proliferate in Scars of Mirrodin was all about minus one, minus one counters and poison. It represented disease. But in this set, it was all about plus one, plus one counters and loyalty counters because it was about plainswalkers. Speaking of plus one plus one counters, we also introduced the amass mechanic. We were trying to solve the problem of how to have a giant army that wasn't just infinite creatures gumming up the board. And so we came up with a mechanic where if you don't have an army, you make a token army. And then if you do have an

Army, you just put plus one plus one counters on it. It's a mass N, not with mass zombies, I guess. But anyway, a mass is going on to become a really popular mechanic that we use many times. You know, it really sort of took a theme and hammered it home, and it did, like I said, it was the very first capstone event set.

It's not about the environment as much, it's about the story and what's going on. Anyway, and it's the only, in the history of magic, it is the only expansion um that took place on a set at the same place as the set before it and sold more than the set before it that's the only in the history of magic the only set to ever do that okay that's why uh war the spark number 13 number 12 dominaria so dominaria came out in um september of 2018 again i led the set

design vision design and dave humphre's let the set design uh so dominari was really challenging because early magic we mostly we stayed on 10 years we were mostly just on dominaria

you know magic started on dominion alpha and then you know we went to Arabian nights and we later retroactively called it rabia

and other than that Ogroth took us sorry Homeland took us to Ogroth when Michael and I started the

weather life story we got us off the plane a little bit to go to wrath but mostly we kept coming back to even when we

try to leave we kept coming back. And Dominaria, there was like 30 to 40 cents to take place in Dominaria. Well, what happened was we wanted to like sort of return to Dominaria, but we wanted to update Dominaria and make it more like a modern plane. And all of our modern planes had a, you know, they were about something. Oh, Innesrod's the Gothic horror plane. Rabnika is the city plane about guilds. Like each of them were about something. And Dominaria was about so many different things that it didn't have an identity. And so one of the challenges is we had to figure out how.

to make it have an identity. In the end, what we realized was we liked the idea that it was a world of history, much like you, the players who, hey, there's all these sets that you played with it if you were an old-time player. And there's all these stories that come, but they're not just made

up just for the plane. We, the players, experience the stories. And so having history, we thought history was a fun theme. But in order to make history work, first of all, he said, well, what represents history in the game? And the answer was the graveyard.

It's where, when creatures die is where they go, when Spelisk gets cast is where they go. It's really the past of the game. But the previous year, Amund Kett had done a major graveyard theme, and after us, Ther's Beyond Death, was going to do a major graveyard theme. So we were sort of told, don't do the graveyard. Oh, to be fair, we were told by me. I told us not to the graveyard, but I knew that we had graveyards before and after.

So we looked at it and said, else can we care about? What else represents the past? I'm like, oh, there could be mighty objects of the past, you know, antiquities, if you will, artifacts. There could be legendary creatures that themselves, I think, on my panel, I showed Nicole Bowles. He's thousand years old. He himself is from the past. And the third thing we came up with is the idea of maybe representing stories, but how can you represent stories, which brings us to a different, a story about making stories. So when during FutureSight, Matt Kavada came to me and pitched the idea of, hey, why don't we do cards that are

Plainswalkers? They're the major part of our story, our major characters, and the whole point of doing time spiral block was to sort of re-textualize the Plainswalkers so that we can do more with them. So why not make cards out of them? So we ended up trying to make them. They originally were going to be on the bonus sheet.

Three of them, blue, black and red, we're going to be, not blue, black and green, we're going to be on the bonus sheet in FutureSight, but we ran out of time to figure out how to do them, so they ended up coming out at Lorain. But one of the early versions of them, the way it worked was they had three abilities. Turn one, you do the first ability.

Turn two, you do the second ability. Turn three, you do the third ability. Turn four, you go back to the first ability. So the predecessor to Garrick, named Fendari, I believe. Turn one, you make a three, three beast. Turn two, for every beast, you make another beast. Turn three, all your beasts get plus three for three. and trample. So the idea of the flavor of is I make a beast. On turn two, I copy it. Now I have two

beasts. Now all my beasts get plus super three. I attack with two beasts that are now six six creatures. On my fourth turn, I make another beast. On my fifth turn, I copy beast. Now I have four beasts. And then they all get plus plus plus a three. But the problem is let's say turn one, I make a beast and then you bolt my beast. You destroy it. Okay, well turn two, nothing happens. I have nothing to copy. Turn three, all my beasts get plus three plus three and trample. But I don't How many beasts? So the idea is like nothing happens, and it just made the Plainsbocker feel like an idiot. Like, you know, why am I going through, like, it made them feel dumb, and they didn't give them agency. So we ended up shifting to the idea of, okay, they have loyalty, and you can,

you can help, they'll do things for you, but you can, you can sort of pick and choose what they do, so it made them feel more smart. But we were trying to figure out stories. It dawned on me that the problem that early Plainswalker design had was how it just wouldn't change what it was. But that's not a downside for stories. That's what a story is. There's chapter A, chapter two, chapter three. That's the story.

And if weird things happen, that's the story, that's what happened. The stories don't need agency like Plainswalkers did. So we ended up using those to make them. And then those are what became sagas. Sagas would go on to become a very powerful... I mean, originally they were something we did in Domini But they quickly became deciduous. We do them in all sorts of places now.

They're a valuable tool in multiverse, a valuable tool in the universe is beyond. There's just a lot going on, a lot that we're doing. So anyway, we said, okay, we have artifacts, we have legendary things, we have sagas. What if we just made those matter? What if we put those together? So originally when we wrote it, I just said, okay, like Joyira was, whenever you play an artifact or a legendary thing, thing or a saga, draw a card.

But the problem was, people would read that list. It's like, why these together? They didn't understand the list. So much so that the notes got back to Bill, and Bill, when he was doing the review, said, yeah, we're not doing this mechanic. And I'm like, no, no, no, Bill, it's the glue that holds everything together. Where the history said, it's the key. And Bill was like, look, I will give you four weeks.

But if you can't make this make sense, people don't understand it. It doesn't matter. It's not glue. If no one understands what you're doing, it's not glue. So you need to figure our way to make this make sense or pick something else, do something different. And so I said, okay, to make the shorten the story, in the end, what I realized was I had to see, I had to be blunt.

If these things were about being historic, well, instead of listing them out, I just said, whenever you play a historic spell, this happens. Okay, what's it historic spell? Then reminder text, I explain it. But by labeling it and making it up front, doing what we now call batching, it really changed how people perceived it.

Now when I said, we never cast a historic spell, they go, oh, you're casting a historic spell. Well, tell me, what is our historic spell? And I tell you, like, I see, that's an historic spell. Batching has proved to be very popular. We've done it with outlaws and a bunch of other places. So anyway, War of the Spark did sagas.

They re-did planeswalkers. They did all this stuff to really be something cool and different. So that is why War of the Spark is number 13. Number 12. That's why Dominaria was number 12. Sorry. Dominaria did sagas, did batching.

Oh, it did one other thing real quickly. The idea of every pack has a legendary creature in it. Last time we made Legendary Matter, which was in Kamagawa, Champions of Kamagawa, we made all the rairs legendary. It's something in common. But that was hard to tell. Like, how many packs you had opened up before you caught

that all the rare creatures were legendary? Six packs, seven, it took a while to understand that. But in Dominaria, every pack had a legend. You could pick that up very quickly. We could tell that you. You could expect it. And so it really took the theme. And that was the idea of communicating the theme through constancy.

This is what the set does. Every single pack of the set does this. It became a really good tool for helping people understand what the set was about. Okay. Okay, that's number 12, Dominaria. Number 11, Theros. So Theros came out in September of 2013. I led the design.

Eric Lauer led the development. So originally, it's going to be a completely different set, by the way. The block was going to be... I had this idea of a block that played out through time. So the first set was prehistoric. There's dinosaurs and cavemen and whatever prehistoric stuff we wanted to do. And then the second set flashes forward, thousands of years in time, and now it's medieval times, and we get to do a fun medieval set.

And the third set flashes through time, thousands of years, and now we're in the future. It's the most future success we've ever done. And the idea it was, this idea of, you know, you're on a singular world, but seeing that world in radically different ages of time. The problem is, so Brady Dominus, who's had the creative team at the time, said, look, we can't do that. what you're asking for is three worlds.

I know you say it's the same world, but it's not. It's really three different worlds. And at the time, they had like four people. Like, we're not staffed up to make three worlds. We're staffed up to make one world. So I have suggestion. Here's my suggestion. Set one.

Let's go to our own version of Greek mythology. We've talked about it forever. Let's go there. Let's do that. Second set, let's stay there. We'll stay in Greek mythology world. And third set, you got it. We're still in Greek mythology world.

Maybe, maybe we could do a little bit of visiting, like, the spirit of the gods or something. But mostly, it's the same world because we can build that singular world. And he also said, you know, we also talked about doing more stuff in the enchantments. Maybe we do some stuff in the enchantments. So the interesting thing about that world is we started by saying we wanted up gods. It's mythology, Greek mythology, the gods are pretty important. We made gods for each color. We made gods for each two-color pair.

And then we realized that, you know, taking the suggestion that he had given about enchantments, we're like, okay, maybe the way we represent the feel of the gods is enchantments, that the gods themselves and the creatures they can summon, creatures of the gods are enchantment creatures. And that would allow us to have enough as-fans in an enchantment set to do enchantments. Now, we had done enchantments once before in Erz de Saga block, but the problem was, A, we had a lot of broken artifacts in that set, and the creative team, when they named the name of the cycle for the story,

called it the artifact cycle. So it was an artifact cycle with broken artifacts. It's hard to tell that it was an enchantment set. So we really I wanted to do it right. I really felt like enchantments are, I mean we had done all these artifact sets and enchantments are just as key

to magic as artifacts are. So we did it. So Theris really put enchantment sets of enchantment blocks on the map and really reconfigured how we did them. And when we were trying to make the enchantments that God's work as enchantments, We came across this idea of, we loved the idea of it's the devotion of the people that matter for the gods.

But how do we do that? And that's when we came up with the idea of Kroma. So Kroma was a mechanic. When I was working on FutureSight, not FutureSight, Fifth Dawn, I had Aaron Forrest. I thought at the time was running the website. I had him join the team. The idea being he was going to write an article all about it and that'd be a fun thing to do. and he was a pro player.

I knew he'd have fun being on a team, and I thought he'd be valuable to have him. He ended up being really valuable. He made Scriy, he made Sunburst. He did such a good job. In fact, we hired him to be on R&D. Obviously, he's my boss now, so things worked out well for Aaron.

But anyway, Aaron pitched a card called Little White Butterflies, and you showed your hand, and for every white manned symbol in a card in your hand, you made a 1-1-butterfly token. And I liked the card so much, I said, look, this isn't a singular card.

this is the whole mechanic. We've got to save this. So I didn't put it in FIFT on. I later would put one card phosphorescent feasts in future site and then that card would get repeated again even tied where chroma appeared.

And I was very excited for chroma. I really thought it was a cool mechanic. And it kind of landed with a thought. So when we were talking about Theros, we were like, no, chroma is kind of what we want. But man, chroma did poorly. And that's why I said,

well, maybe we could remake it. And I said, you know, there's a couple problems with chroma. A, it had a bad name. Chroma just means color and Latin. It wasn't very evocative. It doesn't, and didn't have a lot of flavor. It also was all over the board. It wasn't very concentrated.

You looked at lots of different places. But the chroma cards didn't all go into deck together. It didn't have a dream of something you would build. We wanted to be more concentrated. And anyway, the idea is we came up to devotion. What if devotion was chroma, A, was a better name. better flavor, and we only come to things on the battlefield. So that way, all your cards, at least of the same color, would go on the same deck.

If I had a devotion to red card, well, all my devotion to red cards wanted to go in the same, basically, minor red deck. So we tried it again. It was very successful, and it became the poster child for sort of how we redo mechanics. Whenever we talk about it, it is the one we talk about of, it went from zero to hero, right? It went from nobody liked it to being one of the most popular parts of the same. set. Also, just the enchantment theme in general really gives a lot of the goal of using enchantment creatures as a function. I mean, we tease enchantment creatures in FutureSight,

but this was the first set with enchantment creatures. And the enchantment frame, we didn't do it right away, but eventually would become the actual enchantment frame. So Theros was super influential. It just did a lot of things, introduced a lot of concepts, and that is why it is number nine. Oh, no, not number nine. Number 11. Number 10 is Legends, came on June of 1994. Steve Conard was the lead designer. Scafellius was the lead developer. So I talked earlier about how Richard talked to the playtefters

to try to get them to make sets. Talk to the East Coast Playtefters and others, which I'll get to. Peter Ackison did the same thing. He went to people in the company. Homelands and the Dark and Legends were all sets that were made by people internal to Wizards. Steve Conard, by the way, I first met him.

He used to do a thing called a caravan project where they would drive around from game store to game store and have little like days where come meet, they would bring magic artists with them and then usually they would get some local people. I did the one of Los Angeles, so I was the puzzle guy at the time. But anyway, that's where I met Steve. I worked with Steve for many years. And Steve was a longtime friend of Peters. He was one of the five people that founded Wizards of the Coast.

and he really was enamored by the idea of making a magic set that was inspired by the D&D role-playing game that he and Peter had done. And so they really went through and they found a lot of cool flavors. Now, the interesting thing was very early. Richard and the East Coast Playtexifters had made the first two sets. This was the third expansion. And Steve really didn't know how to, like, I showed some cards in my preview panel.

And the cards would just say sort of wonky things and like, okay, let's figure out how to actually... Like, there's no templates or anything. You know, this card reverses the spell and the spell goes against the enemy and then instant tap and, like, what? What does this all mean? And so Scaf had to sort of piece it together

and figure it out. Legends was famous, I think, for two things. Number one, to introduce gold cards. The idea that, you know, Alpha had the five colors, but for the first time, the colors were together. Now, in the set, there only were, I think, allied cards and shard cards. I don't think

there was any enemy cards. I know there wasn't an enemy cards or wedge cards. But anyway, it introduced that, and it introduced legendary things. Originally, they were some in legend, but eventually, I mean, the lands were legendary. So the supertap did exist in legends, but

it didn't get applied to the creatures right away. Anyway, legendary would go on become a pretty staple and important thing. In fact, if you think about gold cards and legendary cards, you think about one of the most famous cycles in the set, the Elder Dragon Legends. Nicole Bullis being the faint most famous

of the five. Those five guys would lead directly to the commander format. E.D.H. stands for Elder Dragon Highlander. And the reason for that name was originally, you only had five commanders you could choose from, the five elder dragons from Legends. So

Legends, you know, commander is a huge part of magic. And Legends literally invented gold cards. Legend cards, and the Elder Dragons. So it could not be more the forerunner of the commander format. So that is why Legends is number 10. Number nine is Odyssey, October 2001. I led the design.

Randy Bueller led development. So it is a set. Invasion came before it and that was all about multicolored. But Odyssey was all about the graveyard. We had done a few sets that had graveyard themes before, like Weatherlight had some graveyard themes. But this is the first set that sort of went all in on the graveyard and tied its mechanics to the graveyard.

You know, the two main mechanics of the set, which I guess we'll talk about, was Threshold and Flashback. Threshold is not only institutional in what it did. Threshold allowed you to upgrade your card if you had seven more cards in your graveyard. It introduced a kind of mechanic. In R&D, we now refer to a Threshold mechanic, of which Threshold was the first one.

And there are a lot of mechanics like Metalcraft, and such that are built around you reaching a certain threshold, if you will. So it very much influenced us. Flashback was the spell that lets you cast a spell twice. My creation, and I named it as the number one

mechanic of all time in my top 20 things. Flashback has become so deciduous now as a threshold, both threshold and their decision mechanics to use them all the time now. And flashback, there's lots of like harmonized or Jumpstart, there's this whole mechanics that are riffing off what it's doing.

Flashback just become, so the two main mechanics became staple mechanics of the set. The graveyard theme became one of the core themes that we use all the time now. And it was the first set to introduce there was a little graveyard thing on the cards that worked out of the graveyard. It was originally going to be a thing

we were going to carry it through magic, but then we changed the frames in Meriden and it didn't fit anymore. But just the idea of iconography that represents mechanical function. you know, outside of just the mana symbols, that all came from Odyssey. So Odyssey did a lot of cool things and why it's my number nine. Okay, our last one of the day, because the last seven I'll do on the next podcast,

is Zendikar, original Zendikar, October 2009. I led the design, Henry led the development. So the story behind this one was I was always thinking of things to build blocks around. We had done blocks on multicolour, on graveyard, on artifacts. And I said, you know what I think is really interesting? Land. I thought there's a lot of potential in mechanics centering around land.

I did not get a lot of support at the time. But Randy Buehler, who's my boss, felt like, well, you got to let Mark innovate from time to time. And so he felt like every five-year plan, I got one block that was kind of Mark innovating, Mark trying something different. And so I, he put, it fifth out of five, but eventually

we got there to Lanzapalooza, as I called it. Now Bill was a bit skeptical, and once again I mentioned this in my pet. It's Bill's job at the time to be skeptical. The reason these stories are all like, Bill says, prove this to me is because that was Bill's job to make me prove it to him. And each time, I had to prove it. And it was

because I had to prove it that I found a better way of doing things. So anyway, that was Bill's job. So Bill said, I don't know about this theme, Mark. I'm going to give you two months. Come back in two months. If I don't think you're supporting the theme properly, we're going to change the theme. So in those two months, we built 46 land mechanics.

The final one, the one that was, the one that stayed was landfall, which again, another really cornerstone deciduous mechanics that we use all the time now. And more important than anything else, it taught us a really important design role, which is that a lot of time you have tension, and it's okay to have some tension in your design. But it's also okay to do things in which the player gets to do the thing they want to do and you reward them for it. It doesn't mean there's not strategic decisions. There are. You choose when to play the land. But for lower players who don't want to think about it, they just play their land and get a reward. It's fun giving cookies to people for things they want to do.

And that really hammered home. That's one of the biggest things of Zendikar is understanding that. It also had this like typel theme. Ally was the thing. It really sort of cemented the idea that you know, typel is popular. But we don't have to do typel sets or not typel sets. We can have typele be a component piece of a set. We can have one single creature type being something that matters and plays a role in the set. And Allies did a really good job of that and really cemented that idea. What else? Zendikar. Yeah, I mean, I think Zendikar also, it was one of, I think Zendikar and Radvig and Indistria that we're talking about,

really were fundamental sort of new places. It made an adventure world, something we would come back to. It would inspire us to make a D&D set eventually. It just was a very influential set. Obviously, we went back to it multiple times because of the world that was really compelling. It also was the introduction, although very lightly teased in Zendikar.

But introduce the Aldrazi. So anyway, that was why Zendikar is number eight. Okay, I got seven more to go, but luckily I have another podcast. So on the next podcast, I will do the final. Part 3 of my top 20 most influential mechanics, not mechanics, expansions at all time. But anyway, guys, I'm now home. Because remember, this was Drive to Home.

So instead of talking magic, I'm not going to make magic. I'm going to go eat dinner. So instead of talking magic, I'm eating dinner. But anyway, guys, that means this is the end of my drive from work. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.