Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1290: Persistence

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Sometimes, the greatest design skill is to never give up. In this podcast, I talk about times it took a while for an idea to make it to print.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to gather there. Drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast is based on an article I did a number of years ago. The article was called Patience, but I've decided to call this episode Persistence. So one of the many skills necessary, I believe, in my job, is sometimes things take a little while to happen. And that, you know, I'm celebrating my 30th anniversary. working at Wizards. And so it's important to acknowledge that one of my tricks has been to

keep at something. So today I'm going to talk about a number of things that I wanted, and it took me a while to make happen. And I'm going to go in order, this is how the article goes, where I start with the shortest amount of time, and I go to the longest amount of time. And so that is where, so we're going to start today with something that only took me six years, Soul Foundry. So Sol Fondry is an artifact that showed up in, where to show up, time spiral. It's an imprint. So basically, I came up the idea long before imprint even existed. I had made a card in, where was it?

I think it was in Stronghold called Volrest Stronghold. And the idea of it was you could name a creature type and then your token was that creature type. Now, Volus Stronghold, it was always the same size. I forget, like it was a 1-1 or 2-2. I think it was a 1-1. All that you could do with Volus Rath's Laboratory, sorry, or Volus Stronghold, all that you could do, no, no, sorry, I'm confusing two things.

The card in question is Volus Rens Laboratory. Volus Strunghold is a different card. Volus Laboratory allowed you to make a token, and you could make it any token you want, and you could pick the creature type. But I wanted to go further, faster, longer. I wanted to make something that was even more, I wanted you to be able to choose

what it is that you made. And so eventually I came up this idea about what if you remove a card from your hand to say, I'm making this, and then you make copies of that. So anyway, I originally tried to do it on the, there's a card called Phrexian processor in Erza Saga.

For those who don't know, the phrexian processor, the card that ended up being, you pay a certain amount of life, and then you make a token the size of the amount of life that you paid. But the reason that does that and not what I wanted

to do was they didn't at the time we're quite sure how to do it the rules manager like didn't quite know how to make it happen and so I ended up having to change like firstly processed or we already the art

like clearly it made a creature but we had to change it so you paid life to make a certain an end sized creature but I liked the idea I thought the idea was cool and then a couple of

years later, Brian Tinsman pitched a different card, what would go on to be Isocron Scepter. And I realized that that card and my card had the similarity in that you were using a card. Both of them happened to me from your hand, but didn't have to be from your hand. But the idea was you were sort of using another card as a template for what you were making. And I decided that might be cool if we made a whole mechanic out of it. And that was the key to victory this time that I think when I was doing a one-up card where needed all these rules support

that were like, eh, that's a lot of work. But once I said, well, we're making a whole mechanic out of it, then it was sort of worth the work, I guess. And so once I said we were making a mechanic out of it, we were able to do it. And so Soul Foundry, six years later, managed to happen. Next is Delve, the Delve mechanic. So Delve first showed up in a set called Future Site.

So on future site, time spiral block was the past, present, and future, was a time-themed block. And so the future had a future-shifted sheet that showed mechanics, well, showed things from the future. But one of the things I wanted to do was make some mechanics that I thought might be fun to actually make. One of them was delve. I think there were two cards, two or three cards, that future shifted cards that had Delve on three, actually, not the thing of it. But anyway, I really thought Delve was a cool mechanic, and I was looking for a place. to do it. It would take

me seven years to find a place to put Delve. It was a tricky mechanic. Finally, eventually, in Condra Tarkir, the Soltai were about the graveyard. They did this graveyard theme, and it just ended up becoming a perfect fit. Now, it turned out Delve was a little strong, but anyway,

but that was seven years. That was seven years from creation until finding a home. Next, another artifact. Mindslaver. So, back in the day, when I first came to Wizards, I had this concept I called the marquee card inspired by

I think Jester's Mask from Ice Age and the idea was every set should have some card something that anybody could play so usually an art a cullis artifact that did something that we've never done before

like I can't even believe you can do that there's something that just pulled attention and so the card that I came up with for Tempest is called Volrest Helm and the idea of the card was that you could use it to take control of your opponent. You see, I've been trying to solve the problem of...

There's a card in Alpha called Word of Command, where you've got to cast a card of your opponent's hand. But the problem was, when I cast it, I can, you know, my opponent could respond to it. And so a lot of the times the card I'd want to cast, they'd cast in response to me trying to do the Word of Command. So my solution to that problem was, well, what if instead of taking...

Just getting to cast one spell, what if I take control of your entire turn? What if I take control of your turn and then I get a look at your hand and decide what you do for the turn? I make all the decisions for you. And I thought that was perfect. Voreth had this object called Vowler's Helm

that he could take control of other people. Anyway, it's perfect. The perfect lineup. And then, again, the rules management time goes, yeah, we can't do this. And so it got changed, and Voler's Helm, it ended up being like a control magic. You can control a creature,

but not nearly exciting. We had control magic. So that wasn't nearly as exciting. But years later, during Mirrodin, Mirrodin really wanted to do a lot of weird and quirky artifacts. It was the first time we were doing an artifact theme. So I went back and I looked at my notes of all the different things I had made that were quirky artifacts. And I came across Vobras Helm at the time.

And I went to the, there's a new rules manager and I said, could we do this? And they're like, yeah, we can do that. So one of my persistence techniques is just to outlasts rules manager. and find new rules managers. And the last one said we couldn't do it. Can we do it? And then eventually one of them says, yeah, we could do it.

So Mind Slaver took, I think, seven years, from 96 to 2003. Okay, next is proliferate. So, proliferate first showed up in Scars of Mirrodin. We were sort of, we were reintroducing the phrexians. I really loved the Frexians as this theme of disease. and so I ended up making this mechanic called proliferate that was playing into the idea that it was

you know taking all the tokens which in that set were minus one minuses tokens and poison tokens but kind of spreading the disease but I realized we had made it such that it affected all tokens so I'm like okay this is a really fun mechanic people really liked it is very flexible I just thought it was a pretty cool mechanic

so I wanted to bring it back so we tried a bunch of different times I'm trying to remember the order here we tried to make it the cynic keyword. We tried, we put it in a bunch of different places. Oh, we tried it in Kaladesh and in Etherrevolts. And the problem we kept running into was proliferating plus one plus one counters

is so much stronger than proliferating about anything else that it just became about prolifering plus one plus one counters. And finally, we found a set, which ended up being March... I'm sorry, War of the Spark. And the idea was it ended up being this Plainswalkers set.

It's all about planeswalkers. And that the one major mechanic, which did use plus and plus encounters, was a mass, but it only ever put them on one creature. So when you got to proliferate, well, it made your army one stronger, but it wasn't like he had a whole host of plus one counters making all your creatures stronger.

It was making one creature stronger. So after a lot of attempts, we finally managed to find a place that we could do it. So proliferate, the return of proliferate took eight years. Okay, next, heartbeat of spring. So in Alpha, there's a card called Manaflare that made all your manna, all your land tapped for an extra mana. I adored Manaflare.

I made a lot of decks with Manaflare. But when I got a wizard, one of the things that I, one of the things that was really important to me is I spent a lot in time and energy on kind of cleaning up the color pie. You know, Richard had made the color pie, but a lot of the way he was used was very much on a case-by-case basis. And one of the things that we did, one of the early things that sort of the second wave of R&D did, was trying to adapt magic to a system that was constantly making sense. And so, like, Bill Rose cleaned up the rules.

I cleaned up the color pie. I'm like, we need to be consistent. What does each color do? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? And I spent a lot of time of energy sort of getting colors, getting a fact, to the right color. Well, one of the things that clear to me is green was the color of

land, green was the color of manna. Like, if anybody should have manna flair, it's not red, green should have it. And so, I'm not sure I called it heartbeat of spring, but that's what ended up being called. So I said, we should do this. And I started putting in sets.

I believe the first that I put it in, I think was Tempest. Let's see. No, the first one I put it in, actually is when I first got there. So, it would have Mirage is when I first put it in. But anyway, I would put it in the set and it would stay, there's nothing wrong with the card,

but then it would get pinched for numbers for something, and it was never like, the set wasn't about that and so it always would lose out to, well, we can do that later, we need to do such and such. And this is at a point, by the way, where the core set only did reprint. So if I wanted to get something in the corset,

I first had to get it into another set. My goal long term was to get it to the core set. I thought it was a basic effect that we should have in green. and it took me it wasn't until Champions of Kamagawa so it wasn't until 2004 that I managed to finally get it into a set

so it was nine years of me constantly putting in sets and having removed and putting in sets and once again it wasn't even people didn't like it it wasn't they didn't think it was appropriate for the color because obviously it was it was just a matter of oh we have other things to do and the set's not about that

Okay, next up, Ambassador Oak So I made a card Which originally I called moose and squirrel And the idea was it was a 3-3 green creature That made a 1-1 token Now the 3-3 was a moose And the 1-1 was a squirrel And I'm not sure whether a moose was actually a moose

It might have been like beast But anyway, I try to get moose and squirrel everywhere I loved the idea that it was two creatures on one card that early magic hadn't done like there was one for one like I have a sorcery that makes a token but I like the idea of I'm a creature but I make a second token I get two creatures for the cost of one card and we had messed around with that a little bit with making multiple tokens but I realized the idea of a creature that made a token and for some reason how long do you think it took for me to make ambassador oak 12 years 12 years took a long time um actually the story is I kept putting in sets and kept getting takes

out. Once again, like Heartbeat of Spring, it wasn't that people disliked it. It wasn't that people didn't believe that we should do that or Green could do that. It was just, we had other things to do, and it was a common. So, like, you know, did the set need this? And early on, we were a little more stingy about making tokens. I think as time went on, we started making token cards and stuff like that. We've got a little more willing to do it. Anyway, in Morning Tide, Morning Tide was led by Mike Turian. And Mike Turian, and Mike Turin, no. needed, he was trying to make something that could hit different, because Lorwyn and Morning Tide had a typel theme,

and he was just trying to make something that could help two different groups. So he ended up making a true folk that came with an elf. And anyway, I'm not sure how, I mean, obviously I had put it in sets for a long time. So Mike probably subconsciously was aware that I've been trying to make the shape. But he made it. The set that finally got it wasn't the set that, I put it in, Mike put it in, 12 years later. Okay, next, Beastile Menace.

So Beasiel Menace, we had made a card called Cone of Flame, where you did one damage to one target, two damage to a second target, and three damage to a third target. So inspired by that, I made a card called Cone of Creature. We made a 1-1, a 2-2, and a 3-3. And I tried to put that in lots of different places. You can see a theme here of me trying to make green cards. Green cards and artifacts, that seems to be at this list.

But anyway, it just kept getting pushed off. It kept not getting made. And then eventually, in World Wake, the card gets made. And so I write an article about it, talking about finally the card got made. And then my editor at the time, Kelly Diggs, informed me that he, in fact, had made the card. He was unaware that I'd been trying to make it.

In fact, I had written an article many years earlier about, here are some cards I'm trying to make that I haven't got into sets. yet. And I mentioned Beecho Manus specifically. So when the card got made, everyone assumed that I had put it in the set because many years before I wrote an article about how I was trying to put it into magic. And it turns out that Kelly

unaware, parallel design, unaware that I'd even made it, made it. Now, nowadays, by the way, we sort of a rule that we don't make multiple different tokens with one card. So we occasionally break that rule, but usually in high rarities, and we don't do it very often. But anyway, so Beech Steel Menace took

14 years to get made. Next, Energy. So, Energy first showed up in original Mirrodin. I was playing around. One of the things that I liked was I looked at the card, serrated arrows from Homelands, and it did this thing where you got three uses out of the card. And I thought that was kind of neat,

that, like, I have artifacts only have so many uses to them. It was very D&D to me. And then it dawned to me that there might be something cool if, what if each card came with so many uses, but you could use them between cars. So if I, and then eventually it became cleaner rather than having it sit on cards, that it just became a counter that I have. So we ended up, we called it energy. I thought it's pretty fun and did this interconnective thing that added some stuff.

But then one of the notes I got from Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time, was my set had too much in it, which was a common note at the time. I tended to stack my sets pretty full. And so Bill said I needed to take something out. Energy was the thing that was the easiest to take out. but it was less interconnected with other things in the set. So I took energy out. And I really wanted to find a home for energy. I liked energy quite a bit.

So whenever we were working on a set, eventually I became head designer. Whenever we were working on a set, I'm like, oh, what energy fit here? And my goal was I wanted to find a place where it fit organically. And so I would try it and stuff, and usually it didn't quite do what he wanted.

The flavor wasn't quite there. It didn't have to be called energy, although I liked the name energy. and then eventually what happened was we made Kaladesh and so Kaladash the original idea of Kaladish was we wanted to a steampunk world

that had an element of invention to it and once I realized there was an artifact-based world and that it had this invention theme it just seemed like the perfect fit so what happened was we actually played around with it early in exploratory one of the things that I said to the team is, here's this idea I had.

I don't necessarily want to do it the way I did it before. So I gave them the parameters without telling them how I did it. And so we experimented with a bunch of different ways to do it. And in the end, the team decided that the way we had done it the first time was the best way, with a counter that goes on the player. So anyway, we ended up putting it pretty early. And it went in so early, and we had such confidence in it that we ended up building a lot of the creative around it. So the idea of the ether, like it ended up becoming like,

very central to what Kaladish now Avishkar was. The idea of this world that has this natural resource that because of it lent itself to become a world of exploration and invention. And I always thought that was cool.

So energy took 15 years... Oh, I realized I skipped over one. So, okay. I'm going to jump back a little bit. I realize I'm trying to go in order. I miss one. So let's talk on sets. So I made unglued in 1998. Then six years later, I made unhinged.

Now, remember, I made unglued. We made unglued too. They got put in my hiatus. So it took six years to make unhinged. Unhinged, I will admit not my best of the unsets. The gotcha mechanic was a mistake. The artist matter, the fractions. None of that quite landed the way I hoped.

There's some fun individual car designs. But the set is a holistic whole, probably my weakest of the unsets. But anyway, when I made unglued and they canceled unglued, they said, we're not making any more unsets. And so when I got on Hinge Made, I was pretty happy. That took six years. But I wanted to make another onset. But they said no more unsets. So what ended up happening was I found some fellow, it turns out to be what we call the Council of Marks, Mark Purvis and Mark Globus.

There were two other people that really wanted to see more unsets. and so we hatched the plan. And the plan was, well, what do we need to do to make an unset? What exactly, like, what do we have to do to convince them to do that? And so what we said is, we have to prove why it's advantageous. So Mark Purvis ended up putting a document together talking about financially, like, all, well, I said, I put together a talk about all the things we had done that unsets had done that had let us later do other things.

Oh, we made BFM that later led to meld, stuff like that. Or we made token cards at the first time. Florida land cuts with the first time. There's a lot of things we did in unsets that then went on to become very popular in normal blackboarder magic. So I made a report about that. Purvis made a report talking about how the financials that he thought we just misunderstood, that if you actually look at how much it sold, it did very well for its time. We just overprinted it because we didn't understand supplemental sets.

And then Mark Globus did some research into what are the things that we as a company want to do. Like if unsets are a place for experimentation, where do we want to experiment? And eventually what we came to is there were a lot of new printing techniques. And so maybe what the onset was supposed to be was what if we used it to test different printing capabilities so that we could use it as a test case to see what new things we could do. And so we looked into printing, got a lot of things about

what can printing do, and so we got all this information of things that were up and coming in printing. And then we build a whole set around it. And then once we... So we built the set without there necessarily being

a promise the set was getting made. We designed it before it was on a schedule. But once we had it, we then said, you know, we have this thing that we made, and it tests some stuff we want to test. And so we eventually got sign off and got Green Lake. Now, the interesting thing is, along the way, a lot of the things we were testing for printing, by the time we got to actually make this set, weren't viable yet. So originally, like, the set itself has some cards that are different versions of the same card. originally we were going to play around with printed demand were like in the thing there'd be cards that were unique

to this none of that happened the capabilities weren't there yet the other thing that happened was the set finally got on the schedule but it kept getting pushed back because other things would pop up modern masters I think popped up and like oh we need to find a spot for modern masters well we'll just push the unset back and then we came up with the idea in Kaladish

And Kaladish also had this kind of flavor of a sort of, what's the one I look for? I just said that. It was sort of, um, solar punk sort of, sort of a vibe. We were looking at, and so anyway, like we kept getting pushed back. I think we got pushed back three times. I think we got pushed three separate years. But finally, finally, Unstable came out, did really well. Probably the set that surprised people the most.

We ended up getting reprint. We ended up getting like three reprints. Anyway, it did very well, and it took 13 years to come out. Okay. Finally, the last one, this took the longest. So in 1994,

Legends came out. I'm sorry, 1994. Is that right? No, 19, yeah, 1994. Legends came out. In Legends, there were two cards. There was Pit Scorpion and there was... What was the other one called?

Pit Scorpion and snake... Serpent generator. And both of them made use of a new mechanic called Poison. Poison said that when this creature damages you, you get a poison counter, and if you ever get 10 poison counters, you lose the game. And I was, from the moment I saw poison, I was enraptured with poison. So when I came to Wizards, my goal was I wanted to bring poison and make poison a major component of a set.

That was my goal. And so, in fact, in Tempest, Tempice's code name was Bogavadi. And Bogovadi is like this Indian world of snakes. Because we were trying to reference that we were the set all about poison. And so I turned over the set. And I think when I turned over the set, there was like 30-some poison cards. And then as we went in development, like it went from 30, down to 20, down to 15, down to 10, down to 5, down to 1, down to 0. And then R&D as a whole side of, you know what, we're going to stop doing poison.

So not only did poison get removed from the set, but we stopped doing poison. We stopped making more poison cards. Like we had made, every once in a while we'd make a poison card. They always were pretty sucky. But I said, you know, if we just make good poison, people wouldn't embrace it. So poison got removed. So that was a huge obstacle in my way. But this is the set about persistence.

So the next thing I tried was unglued 2. So unglued got made. Out of the gate did really well. So they said, okay, let's do unglu2. So ungluid 2 had a major poison theme. In fact, all the poison things were vegetables. I thought animated vegetables that were poisonous is just funny to me.

So we had a, I had a poison theme. It was a pretty major theme. And then Unglue 2 got pulled from the set. Not from the set. Got pulled from the schedule. I mean, and it was very far along. We had art. I mean, the set was done as far as the cards.

We had art, or mostly them, we still play that thing. And we had art for the cards, and it got pulled. And so, I was like this ongoing quest. The next place that I decided to try poison was we were making FutureSight and we were doing future-shifted cards. So I was definitely playing around with like what weird things might magic do in the future.

So one of the things I said, well, what if we bring back poison? And we made a mechanic called Poisonous. So for the first time we made a mechanic out of it. And there were two cards, I think, that had poisonous in FutureSight, one of which was a sliver. They gave all slivers poisonous.

That would become pretty famous because there was a pro tour, a limited pro tour, where there was, it was a team pro tour, I think, where the winners were these guys that kept drafting the poison slivertack. It must have been time spiral. And they won with poison. So it was kind of famous for that.

But anyway, so I put it in FutureSight, sort of teasing of the idea that one day we would do poisonous. Not that I had any, I mean, I don't need to let me put it in there because, like, okay, he's teasing something, that's fine. Nothing, you know. But the next week came around was I was working on Scars and Mirrodin. So basically what happened was, in Invasion Black,

at the end of the Weatherlight saga, Gerard and company, the Weatherlight crew, defeats the Pherxians and wipes them from the face of the multiverse, which was a big decisive victory. But we liked, we really liked the, we liked the Frexians. And so, Brady Dahmerf and I came up with a plan to get them back. So when we first made Mirrodin, in the novel, we made this little tiny tease about how the bad guy, the story, finds this oil and rugs it in his fingers, and we don't even talk much about it. And there's a few subtle things in Mirrodin, just a little hint that something's going on in the background.

Very, very light. So the idea was one day we would return to Mirridon. In fact, the original plan was we'd return to Neufrexia. and then only at the end of the block we realized that this once was Mirrodin kind of like Planet the Apes sorry, spoilers to Planet the Apes. At the end of the planet of the Apes,

they realize that he's not on a foreign planet and his Earth. It's from the 60s, so if I spoiled that for you, I apologize. So the original plan was we were going to, it was going to be new Forexia, we're going to meet the phrexians, and then only at the end of this, do we realize that this used to be Meriden. I eventually realized that wasn't quite right. We ended up

going back to Meriden, made scars of Myriden, and the new phrexia was the end of that block, meaning we watched the mirroden falls the Frexians. That was a cool story. We didn't want to, we shouldn't miss that story. That was more exciting than, oh, by the way, did you know? And once we started working on phrexia, I'm like, okay, I'm going to bring the phrexians to life.

And that's when I said, oh, this seems perfect. They're a disease. That was the metaphor we're working at. And when we sort of were talking about the phrexia, we picked four words to describe them. They were adaptive. They were viral, they were relentless, and they were toxic. And once I realized that we had this disease theme, poison was the perfect fit. And there was a little bit of resistance, but we built the set out, and the set was pretty fun,

and we made poison sort of this alternate wind condition, so most of the time you didn't win with poison, but occasionally you could try to win with poison. So eventually, I did manage to get poisoned in the set. So that was a mere 16 years. years later. So that is our theme of the day. Now it works. Let me wrap up.

There's a lot of cool ideas. Not every cool idea necessarily makes sense right now. And I want to say for most of these, I should point out, it's not that them taking along was inherently a bad thing. A lot of times it was finding the right home. You know, energy or poison are both great examples where, you know, we really took our time and like, let's find the right place. Let's not just throw it anywhere.

let's not just say, I want this thing, so whatever, we wanted to find the right home for it. And the idea of connecting poison to the phrexians, of tying energy to Avshkar, like, finding the perfect match, when we finally did it, it really, like, you know, we really built the world to Ajkar around the idea that energy as a concept existed.

Who the phrexians were and the disease flavor was really enhanced by poison. You know, each of these cases, you know, the idea of waiting to do soul, foundry until we made the imprint mechanic. Finding the right home for Delve. You know, figuring out how to do mind slaver. Finding the right home for proliferate.

Finding places for heartbeat of spring, for Ambassador Oak, for Beechio Menace. You know, find, getting the right slat to get unstable out. Each one of these, they took time. But I think in some level, we ended up with the best version of things because it took time and it found the right home.

And so I think when I talk about persistence being an important skill, of being head designer, it's magic. There's an expression I use all the time. I say magic is a hungry monster. And what that means is we make a lot of sets. We're going to keep making a lot of sets. We're going to have a lot of needs for mechanics.

And that my goal is, I shouldn't do something just because we came up with it. I shouldn't even do it just because it's fun in a vacuum. I should do it because it's the perfect fit for the set we're doing. And we make so many sets that if I make something that's not the perfect fit for here, save it. Wait, figure out where it goes. and that a lot of, you know, being patient, of being persistent is saying, look, we'll make cool things. We should then figure out the coolest way to use those cool things.

And that's not necessarily about doing it as fast as you can. It's not about speed. It's about quality. It's about finding the right home. And a lot of these stories were about finding the right home. And when we did, it was an awesome place for it. So, persistence, a good skill, as is patience. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's talk, but I'm now at work.

So we all know what that means? It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all guys next time. Bye-bye.