Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1296: 30 Years, Part 1

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

This podcast is part one of a four-part series talking about the 30 biggest design evolutions since I started working at Wizards in October of 1995. This is based on a three-part series I did in my Making Magic column.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today is the start of a series called 30 Years, based on a series of articles I did in my Making Magic column. So to celebrate my 30 years working at Wizards, what I did is I went back. So I started working at Wizards full time in October of 1995. And so I went back and looked at the 30 biggest design innovations, the things that changed how we did design that happened in the last 30 years. Now, it's not like one per year. It's just 30 things that all. I mean, the rules of this was it had to happen starting with October 95.

So there's a few things that happened before that, not counting of those. And it had to be something that I thought really fundamentally changed design some way. Maybe it was a new tool, maybe there was a new way to think of things, maybe it was a new process. There's a lot of different kinds of things I listed. But the core of it is these are all things that since I started working at Wizards got added to design in a way that changed how magic design weren't. So for each one of these, I talk about the thing that started it. And I walk through. So once again, the thing I like to do when I do podcast versions of my articles is I just have more time to sort of go into more depth.

So this is kind of like the article, but there's a little more there because I have extra space to do so. So, we shall begin. I'm not even sure how many podcasts this will be. I have 30 items total to talk about, obviously, but I want to go a little more in depth than I did in the article. Okay, so number one, we go back to Mirage in October of 1996. So just for, I started in October, I started in October of 95. The first that I'm working on is alliances, which actually comes out later that year.

The gap between when we worked on something and when they came out was a lot less back then. And so I start, in fact, most often when people start working in R&D, they have what they call a gap. And what that means is you were a player and you played and you knew sets, and then you start working on sets, you know sets because you're working on them, but there's a gap.

Stuff that, it's, R&D stopped working on it because by the time you get here, we're done with it, but it hasn't come out to the public yet, so you haven't played with it. And so it's this area that you don't know really well because it's in between your area of experience. I had no gap because the last set I played with out in the real world was Homelands,

and the first that I started working on when I got to Wizards was alliances, the very next set. Now, I was working on the tail end of it, but I didn't work on it, and so there was no set that, like, that's the largest gap ever. the gap between homelands and alliances is eight months, which was the largest

ever gap. And the time between us working on something and coming out was a lot shorter back in the day. We worked much, much farther ahead than we used to. Okay, so anyway, starting the Marage. Mirage did a couple things. Marage did a couple things. Marge actually has three things on the list. But I will go in order of the way I put the list. And number one,

designing for limited. So when Richard Garfield made magic and the Alpha Playtester played magic, way back before the game came out, I think Richard's first, I think, started making the game in 91. That's early playtesting. I think it was like two years of playtesting

before the game came out. So, they used to actually do limited play with early magic. I know Bill, for example, was really into the idea of drafting. I know that they had done stratomatic baseball. Stratomatic baseball is a game where you get cards that represent

actual stats of actual baseball play. players, and they did a version of it where they would draft. So they kind of applied things they had done in other games to magic. So the idea of magic being played in limited goes back to before the game even came out. But even though they were aware such things existed, early magic did not design for, it just didn't design for limited. That wasn't something that they did. and one of the things that is really interesting when you sort of

I talked about this a bit in my podcast on the 20 most influential sets because Mirage was one of those sets. You know, early magic, it's not that people didn't try to play sealed with early magic for example, not a lot of draft, but and it was

not a great experience. I mean, it was you did it because it was better than nothing, I guess. But by modern standards, you and look back at a lot of early magic sets. And in fact, what was it? There was some event where they were, I think it was unlimited,

but they were opening up in limited packs and they were drafting unlimited. And unlimited, by the way, is basically, Alpha is limited, and limited was the blackboarder version of it, and then unlimited, with a few minor art changes in that too, plus Alpha left out Circle Reduction Black and Volcanic Island. basically it's beta as you know with a white border rather than black border

so anyway there was a big event they got their hands on unlimited packs like okay we're going to draft unlimited and it was the most painful thing to watch and mostly like the classic example is like so much of white white didn't even have that many creatures

at common in fact I think it had four creatures capable of attacking only one of which had a power greater than one it just had all these circles of protection and just doing lots of other things And to be fair, there's a lot going on. Like, Limited has a lot of component pieces to it. And it's not really to Mirage.

Mirage is the first set where we're like, we're going to design with the limited in mind. We're going to think about that. We're going to put creature curves in at the low rarities to make sure that when you draft, you can build things. And the other thing that's really interesting in looking back, by the way, having this worked on magic for so long. There's so many things we did in the early days of magic.

Even Mirage, where we were trying to make limited work. Like, Mirage, for example, has a common expel, a common red expel to do damage, a common, which you would splash that in any possible deck you could get. And just the idea of, I mean, there's just things that, like, it took us a while to get to. And so it's funny when I look back at the early sets, which were, like, Mirage is actually a draftable,

set. You can play it in limited. Like Ice Age was basically unplayable. I mean, inlimited. You can play it constructed. It just wasn't designed. We played in limited. And it was such a warped thing that it, I mean, I did it. I played it. But it was not

a core experience. So anyway, just the idea that we think about it, the idea that we're thinking about okay, we want to make sure we have a range of creatures a different curve. We need a certain amount of invasion. We need We need removal. Like, one of the classic things, like, in legends, is if you want to destroy enchantment,

especially a non-world enchantment, I think you have to go up to, like, rare, before you have a card that can destroy enchantments, or even that, to destroy them, maybe it bounces them. But, uh, but anyway, there's not a lot of answers. Like, one of the things now is, like, what are the threats? We have to have answers to the threats. Like, there's a lot in buildings limited where you're like, okay, this is all people get.

And we have to make sure the as fan of a low rate. is right. So Mirage was the first set to actually do that, to think about it. And it was light, light years better than the sets before because it thought of it. Was there room for improvement? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things is, you know, one of the cool things about magic is, you know, we've had 32 years of constantly improving upon ourselves. And so the limited now is much, much better. I mean, I think we've gotten really good at making very, very fun limited environments. But it came from a lot of iteration, a lot of trying things and Mirage is the very beginning

all the way, so Mirage is the second set I ever worked on. First set was alliances. And Mirage, the four of us at the time, me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jockish were Magic R&D and we were, like, nowadays, who's on the development

team? Back then, it's like, we all were on the development team. We're on every development team. So there's a while where I just did every development team because we were Magic Arndee, and so there wasn't, like, there was just enough of us to make a development team. we were always a development team. Okay, which brings us to number two, blocks.

So early in magic, each set was kind of its own separate thing. Interestingly, when alliances came out, so when alliances came into R&D, R&D decided that they liked the idea of having some continuity between sets. Now, I should stress, the East Coast play stretchers, scaffolded, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, The people who designed alliances did not design it to be Ice Age 2.

In fact, every single thing in it that was at all reminiscent of Ice Age was added in development. You know, we added a couple cantrips in, we added in some snow. I mean, not even a lot. There's not, if you actually look at alliances, there is very little overlap with Ice Age. And the most of the overlap that exists is us adding that in. They really, Alliance was just them exploring, doing new things. it really was meant to be its own set. But we kind of...

So, one of the things that goes on is... Magic... I mean, it's really important to understand that the magic resources back then, the design team was four people, and the creative team, I think back then was two or three people. We did not...

There weren't infinite people working on magic. Right now, I mean, I can't even name of every working on magic there's so many people working on magic. You know, if you count all the designers and the creative... of people, you know, there is 80 people, something like that? I mean, there's a lot

of people working on magic. I might have been undercutting some stuff. There's a lot of people working on magic. That just wasn't true back in the day. And one of the ideas was like we knew we wanted some cohesion for the year. We also wanted to start building our own worlds, but we didn't have a lot

of people. So part of, blocks existed for a bunch of reasons. One was just to make it a little bit easier to make sets. Like, oh, if we take a set and we put it in the same place, we just once a year have to build a world. And, you know, when the world building team was a couple people, you know, that, that was enough. Building one world a year was a lot. And so, anyway, the idea of Mirage really started the formal idea of doing blocks. Now, part of that was, so Bill Rose was part of what we called the Bridge Club. Those were the designers that

Richard got for the people who were the alpha playtefters that Richard found from his bridge club. Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Catino, Elliot Siegel, Howard Collenberg, Don Felice, Lily Woo. These are people that he met

through the bridge club. And they came and were alpha playtefters. They would go on as a team to design Mirage, known as Menagerie in his, it was his code name. What ended up happening was it was so big, by the time that

it came to Wizards, it actually got broken to two parts. It was Mirage and Visions. And so, part of the reason the first block happened also was they'd already designed two things. Like, it already was bigger than one set. And what we realized was that tying sort of the set

to the year made a lot of sense. Now, interestingly, Weather to Light actually was not super-connected. I mean, it was part of the mirage block in the sense that it used the same mechanics. One of the things we started with Mirage is, okay, we're going to introduce mechanics

in the first set of the year, and those are going to be the mechanics for the rest of the year. There'll be two mechanics. The flanking, phasing was Mirage. And that's, now, with time, we would adapt. Eventually, we got to the point

where new sets would just have new mechanics. They would carry over some of the old mechanics, and the block definitely had a location and a world in common. It had some mechanical identity in common. But that first year, really it was mirage and visions that were designed together. Weatherlight was kind of done, Weatherlight was actually ended up being done in-house. It was the first, well, Tempest was the first in-house set, only because it started before Weatherlight.

Weatherlight was the first in-house set to be released. But when I first got to Wizards, the design was mostly done by designers outside the building. Like a lot of the playtasters were doing the designs. And then once R&D sort of got established, we're like, okay, we probably, like, once we went through the outside of the design, designs. The idea was, well, we should probably do these designs in-house. We have an R&D team. And so, starting with Tempest and Weatherlight, we started doing design internally. But anyway, blocks, while eventually Magic moved away from blocks, blocks were really fun. I mean, for 20-plus years, blocks are the nature about how we did things.

And it added a lot of, you know, it made years feel a little more cohesive. I mean, there's reasons we moved away from them. But there's a lot of good things blocks did. And blocks allowed us to make a lot of magic at a time where we had a lot less resources. Now that we're in the world where we can have, you know, dedicated teams making each set unique and different, we can do different worlds. That just wasn't possible back then.

And a lot of design, a lot of magic design is sort of the evolution of the design of watching how, like, we improve upon things. And we wouldn't have gotten past blocks without having blocks. Blocks were really, really important. And we did a lot of cool things with blocks. There's a lot of fun designs.

You know, as the very beginning of my time as head designer was really about reshaping block design and I'm very proud of the last stuff I did there. Okay, the number three thing that Mirage did, my number three on my list, is cross-set design. And what that meant is before then, every design was designed in a vacuum. that we made a set and what came before it, what came after it, eh, that wasn't, the designers

didn't even think about that. I'm not even sure if the designers knew what was before or after, because they were designing in a vacuum. And so the idea is that they would make something and then they'd turn it in and sets, we didn't really think about sets in relation to each other. But Mirage and Visions for the first time got handed in and they went together. The Visions was meant to follow on Mirage. there were themes started in Mirage that continued in divisions.

And so the idea of, you know, we really started saying, what are we doing, where are we going? And it would allow us to start thinking about, oh, well, next year we want to do this. Let's think about that. And sometimes it meant do things to lead into it. Sometimes it meant starve the audience of something, so it'd be exciting when you saw it. But, you know, Mirage really was the beginning of us thinking in bigger terms. Like, in some ways, when I talk about the evolution of magic design, one of the ways to think about it is just we keep getting bigger in scope.

In some ways, Alpha was about maximizing each card in a vacuum. Each card was meant to mean the most flavorful thing in a vacuum. But they didn't interconnect. The systems weren't built in there, meaning, you know, the rules for each card was made for that card. So there wasn't a consistent sense of rules or color pie or whatever. That would come later. And then, eventually, instead of focusing on the individual,

cards, started focusing on sort of larger themes, then the set. Now we're starting getting into thinking bigger than just the set, and we're saying, hey, we're going to make something. Let's think about how things interact with other things. And that cross-set synergy was really important, and it's become a big part of how we make magic. Okay, number four, we get to Visions. So Visions in February of 97 enters effects.

So the idea that we could take was essentially a spell and staple it to a creature. Like one of the things that early magic is there were creatures and creatures had abilities, but the abilities usually were tied to the creature like attacking or, you know, it had an ability that helped it with combat or if it dealt damage to the opponent or if it wasn't blocked. It was very more battlefield-centric that the creature was about being on the battlefield and doing things on the battlefield. But one of the things that the vision design

people thought up, and interestingly, by the way, on Tempest, we came to the same idea. When I was working in Tempest, I hadn't seen

visions yet because we hadn't got there. And so I hadn't seen the file. So in Tempest, it's the same thing. I don't know how

visions got there. I'll tell you how Tempets got there, just only because of the story I know. So we originally we came up with this idea of cards that when you drew them they had effects, they had draw triggers. So the idea is

it was a lightning bolt that, you know, for, you know, two damage, you can do four, you know, for two, you can do four damage, which at the time was a lot. Anyway, but the idea is, or maybe it was two and did five damage, but it did some damage to you when you drew it.

You know, it's like, oh, I get to do, I get to do a lot of damage for a little bit of mana, but when I draw it, it does two damage, me. The idea is that it triggered when you drew it. And we tried to make that work and like, well, how exactly, if I have something that damages me and I'm a two life, well, what if I just didn't tell you I drew the car? How would you know it's secret? How would you know I even took the damage, right? And it became a weird thing where, you know, we talked about, could we make the back's different? Because opaque sleeves weren't a thing

yet. Like, okay, it's a got a different back. We'd draw it you to point in the, oh, show it to me, it's a different back. In the end, we ended up not making it. But in trying to sort of take some of the things that we enjoyed, we started taking the effects. Instead of being draw triggers, we made them happen when you played the card. And so, like, I think like Gravedigger, in its earliest, earliest incarnation, when you drew the card, you got to get a cart back from your graveyard. So instead of doing that, we just said, well, when you play the creature, it does that. So that's how we got there. Vision's got there on their own, doing something different. But the idea of sort of stapling a spell, essentially to a creature, especially to a vanilla creature or a French vanilla creature,

something that isn't complex. One of the things in general, I mean, I've talked about this a bit. So when I say virtual vanilla, what virtual vanilla means is, other than the turn you play it, past that turn, it's just a vanilla creature. And one of the values of virtual vanilla is it allows you to have some nuance when you play it, but then look just easy to track on the board. It's not doing a lot on the board. And Enter's effects really were one of the best ever virtual vanillas, right?

I play it, something happens, so it's impactful. But then all I have left is just as vanilla creature that will interact with combat, but it's not a real complex board state. And so Andrew's effects proved to be really, really valuable. Obviously, they're a staple of every set we make now. Just because you have so many creatures, that's another big thing. Creatures make up over 50% of your cartpool. right? So if I'm trying to get spell effects in, I can run out of space. There's only so much

room for spells. So one of the tricks we've learned over the time is, let's say, for example, I really need a particular kind of spell, and I run out of space. I just don't have enough spaces for them. I can stick it on the creature. And over time, we've done different things. You also can put flash on the creature if you want it to be an instant style effect that's reactive. But anyway, entrance effects have just been, I mean, it's interesting to me, like, one of the things that I'm fascinated as a designer is when you come up with something, you're like, how did we not do this already? Like, entrance effects is one of those things that, like, I'm kind of shocked that Alpha

didn't really do entrance effects. Now, given there's a lot going on, there's, I mean, there are a lot of moving pieces. I mean, I get it. Richard designed a lot, a lot of things. But it's kind of interesting that that effect just took a little, you know, and not too, It's too long. Happened to 96. So it didn't take that long to happen.

But anyway, just an example of a nice, clear, very functional thing that we use all the time. Okay, number five, telling the story through art and mechanics. So this is Weather to Light, July of 1997. So the story behind this is Michael Ryan, Michael Ryan's a friend of mine. He was an editor. He and I were good friends. We're both writers. And we kind of moaned how magic didn't really have an ongoing story.

You know, it had hinted at the brothers. you know, the Brothers War and stuff, but it just didn't have an ongoing story. Like, why don't we have an ongoing story? Like, one, you know, and so we ended up pitching to the brand team, the Weatherlight saga. Michael and I wrote it, made it a three-act story, made characters, and we sold this whole thing. And the magic brand team was very excited about so much so that they wanted to start right away.

And so we originally started planning in Tempest. Like our Tempest is kind of the beginning of the story as we had planned. It. We had a three-act story. Tempitz was Act 1. But they were so excited that they said, well, you know, we're going to call this at Weatherlight and you're going to start setting up the story. We're so excited to start. So Weatherlight ended up being sort of the, I don't know, the preamble to the story. So we introduced the crew. We mostly tell the, mostly the story is Sisa is the captain of the Weatherlight. She gets kidnapped. And the crew, needs to rescue her. So they turned to Gerard, who had once been the first mate of the Weatherlight,

many years ago, who had left because of a tragedy. Raffellos had died. And Gerard and Miri, who was, Gerard, Miri and Raffellos

were very, very close. They set it under Maltani together. And, um, turns out Gerard had a thing called the legacy and he was destined to do something important.

Um, and Sissé was there trying to help him. It turns out the weddlet was part of the legacy. But anyway, things go awry. Morn friend kills Raffellos, and both Gerard and Mirr are like, okay, we can't handle us anymore, and they leave.

But when Sissé gets kidnapped, the crew, led by Tungarth, decide that they need Gerard's help. They need to go rescue Sissay, but they don't know who took Sissay. They don't know where she is. You know, they need help. So they go find Gerard, and so the story of Weatherlight is them. sort of putting together the crew again. They get Girard, they get Miri, they end up picking up

Krobacks, they pick up Ertai, a lot of the crew gets far. I mean, Hannah and Tom Garth and Squee were already there. Karnen ends up being deactivated on the... Anyway, all the characters sort of show up through this story.

And so there's a little bit of story of how Gerrars and then Stark gets introduced. And anyway, we learn about them starting their quest and it ends with them going through the portal to go to Tempest and that's sort of the start

of the main part of the story but so what happened was the decision to do this actually happen after the first art wave was done so Michael Ryan and I working with Pete Ventress who was doing at the time we were called continuity

but the creative team he was the one that was doing all the art descriptions and stuff so we worked with Pete to come up with the story that we could tell in the second half set of cards. The other thing we did do is we looked at the first half set of cards, and on a few of them, we found cards that were apropos and then did some flavor text. So there's some flavor text, you know, like one of the cards talks about Sissé's mom.

Just like if the era came back, we're like, well, this could be Sissay's mom, and we'll talk a little bit about how Sissi got raised. We found opportunities to use existing art. And one of the cards that had been commissioned, but we had already been commissioned, was, there was a gollum. And so it was originally going to be named Silver Gollum. And we thought, oh, maybe it would be Karn. But we hadn't done any of the effort.

Like, well, we'll let it come back. And if it seems good for Karn, maybe that'll be Karn. And it came back. It was a little smaller than we wanted Karn to be. So we ended up calling it Steel Gollum. But anyway, so that is the first time we really said. We are going to tell you stories. And I mean, I will say the antiquities did is the first set to have any kind of story.

It tells the sort of, I should say, it hints at the story of the brothers' war. It doesn't really tell a full story. It mostly tells you there's two brothers, Erz and Mishra. It tells you a little bit of other characters, Ashton, Tanos. And it sort of says, okay, there's a big fight and destructive things happen. But you don't really know any of the details of the story. It's kind of hinting at a story rather than telling you a story. And the idea they were playing around with antiquities is like,

your archaeologist is digging things up. and, you know, you're slowly piecing together this larger story. But the idea in Weatherlight is we are telling you the story. We are going to show you the pieces of the story. And that when you learn the story, like, oh, here's this bit of the story.

Here's this bit of the story. We're introducing you to characters so you can meet them for a first time. You know, as a trip is traveling around, you're seeing whether I travel around and pick people up and you're seeing them, Marraxas was kind of the bad guy of that story. And you see Marraxas.

Anyway, there was a lot of pieces going on to make that into something that we were telling you, not just after the fact, not just in a side place, but really trying to tell you through the card set themselves. You know, one of the challenging is magic is a trading card game. It is not easy telling a story in a trading card game. But we've learned that you actually can do a lot of storytelling through cards. And Weatherline is really our first time of trying to do that

and using all the common pieces, using names, using art, using flavor text. And like I say, I will give a tip of the hat to antiquities. which definitely was doing, you know, some earlier versions of this. It wasn't really using the art, per se. That's the biggest thing that Wedlight really did, is actually show you actual characters and actual moments of the story. Okay. So one last one today, which is number six, world building.

Okay, so this is Tempest in October of 97. So once we announced the idea of a Wedlight saga and the brand team said, we're doing the Wedlight saga, they started putting together a team. Before that, like Pete Venters was doing what we called continuity. He was doing art descriptions. He was sort of making sure that all the cards had art that made sense with what the cards did. But there wasn't really any larger world building.

Like a lot of Mirage, there was no, there wasn't like a style guide made. But when we were deciding to tell the story, the Weatherlight saga, part of the Weatherlight saga was we had invented this brand new world named Rath. And no one knew what Rath looked. So they got together a bunch of artists, included Mark Tadine, Anthematics, Matt Wilson. There were a bunch of different people.

And we, for the very first time, I would consider modern world building. Like, we actually figured out what Tempeth looked like. We figured out what the slivers looked like. We figured out what Vol-Rath looks like. We figured out, you know, all the different component pieces. And also, I would say, this world building team also did some of the characters.

work, they ended up in Weatherlight, but really the beginning of all their world building was really done for Tempest. So I'm naming as Tempest, although there were a few tiny elements of it that showed up in Weatherlight. But anyway, the idea is, okay, this is what exactly does Wrath look like? We knew there was the Sky Shroud Forest. We knew there was the root water depths, which was where the Moorfolk lived. We knew there was a stronghold. We knew that the slivers live somewhere, and there's like the death pits of wrath and the furnace of What did all that stuff look like? We had to draw pictures of it.

And so the first time we had a team that did world building and figured out exactly what things looked like and what does flowstone look like and all that stuff got figured out. And not just that it could figure it out, but it allowed us for the very first time to make a book that allowed us to share with the artists. This is what things look like. And that one of the big parts of world building is you want the set to all feel cohesive. Well, how do you do that? Well, if you want everything to feel cohesive, you need all the artists that are drawn.

drawing it to draw something similar. So if we say, okay, here is what Skyshout, Sky Shroud looked like. You know, here's Sky Shroud Forest. Here are the elves. Here are the core, the Vec and the Doll. We can start doing all this work on figuring out what the world building is and then make visual things so everybody who's doing it who's illustrating it are working from the same thing.

And at the same time, Michael and I did the very first sort of world building of who are the Skyshoud. And we created this whole thing of where they came from and how their name. and, you know, we did a lot of work sort of defining who they are, same with the Rootwater Murphoke, you know, that each one of them had a very defined quality to them. We sort of defined what the slivers are, what does it mean, why do they work the way they do? All that stuff had to get worked out. So it got worked out both in world building and in visual world building, that the whole

thing got put together. And that has just become a staple of magic, right? The idea that we spend time and do world building and put everything together is just core to what magic is. And so, you know, I think that it is a lot of the whole point in this article is, we'll do something that at the time is like, okay, that makes sense. And then just it becomes so invaluable, so much a part of what magic is. Like the idea that magic has these defined worlds that you can come and see what they are and, you know, the worlds feel lived. And that's a lot of magic strength, is that the world's feel so cohesive. Well, how do the worlds feel cohesive?

Okay, mechanically, we do a lot to make them feel cohesive, but creatively we do a lot. And a huge part of that is all the work that gets done on the world building. And even now, when we make sets, we have a member of the world building team on the Exploratory design teams and Vision Design teams, so that we're building them in conjunction so that when you're playing, it feels right and matches what the world is. Okay, so anyway, guys, I got through the first six. So, but like I said, I want to go into a little more depth here, and I have infinite podcast to do. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the beginning of 30 years. 30 years, part one.

Anyway, of course, I'll be doing more of these, but I hope you enjoyed the first one, and many more coming your way. So anyway, I'm at work. We all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.