Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1298: 30 Years, Part 2

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

This podcast is part two of a four-part series talking about the 30 big design evolutions since I started working at Wizards of the Coast in October 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 to drive to work. Okay, so last time, I started, there's a column I did, a series that I did in my column, where I called 30 Years, where I looked at the 30 biggest design innovations since I started working at Wizards in October of 1995. So in the first part, I talked about six things. So I'm up to number seven, which is frame design as a mechanical component.

So we go to unglued in August of 1998. So unglued was this project. So basically Bill Rose and Joel Mick came up with this idea of, what if we made a product that wasn't legal in tournaments? And we could do whatever we wanted. We weren't constrained by things. and they weren't sure quite what to do with it, but they liked the idea. And they brought it to me, because I guess I seemed like the most out-of-the-box thinker, I guess.

And so I ended up making the unset, or the first onset. There's a bunch of unsets. And really, I leaned into the idea of both doing more humor, because magically at the time didn't do a lot of humor, and just exploring unexplored space. So one of the things I did in exploring unexplored space is I went to different sections of the company and said to them, hey, are there things we can do that we never thought about?

So one of the people I went to is the graphic design department. Those are the people that lay out the cards. And what they said to me, what I said to them is, are there cool things we can do that we don't do? And one of them said something really interesting to me. They said, well, yeah, so be aware, the way we lay things out on a sheet

is you can have things that cross between multiple cards and we can cut. and that that would show up. And so I was sort of imagining what you could do with that. And one of the ideas I came up with was BFM, a big furry monster, which was a 99-99 creature that cost 15 black mana.

And the idea was it was so big that it had a left side and a right side. In order to cast it, you had to have both the left side and the right side in your hand. And it ended up being the most popular card when we did our market research, The most popular card in unglue, or cards, I guess there's two of them, technically. But it really sort of introduced, and it wasn't even just BFM. I had a card that was sideways.

I had cards, you know, I definitely sort of figured out how to make use of cards to do things that we can't normally do. And that was really the introduction of the idea that the magic frame is not locked. I mean, there is a default. there's the way it normally looks but it can look other ways and that was really the opening of the idea of hey if I want to do

something and I can't quite do it in the way the card normally looks can I change the card and the other important thing BFM does a good job of explaining this is one of the cool things about BFM is it doesn't exactly look like a normal magic card looks like half a magic card

but when you see the two cards together you kind of like the The frame itself helps, like, the idea that I have to cast both of them at once. I mean, the card does say that on it. But even before you have to read that, just seeing it really helps, like, communicate that idea. And that's one of the things that we discovered, like, the sort of discovery of messing with frames is that there are a lot, like, there's a lot of things you can do visually that kind of visually communicate something and can help the player. And that really opened up In fact, the BFM would later

inspire me in unglu-2, which didn't get printed, to make split cards. And so the idea of BFM was, it was a card so big, it had to go on two cards. So split cards were, what if we had a card so small that two cards fit on one card? So I made them for unglu-2. That product didn't end up happening.

So they ended up going into invasion. And split cards were the first, I think, black border thing in which the frame was a, unique frame that didn't quite match. And so that was something that, like anyway, it just really inspired that once you sort of open

up to the idea that the frame can be a design resource, that's been very impactful. And there are definitely things we can do with the frame that helps communicate things that it'd be a lot, a lot harder to communicate without the frame. So anyway, frame as a mechanical element has definitely

been something that has been quite useful. And as time has gone on, a well-been more and more willing to dip into. Okay, number eight, consolidated rules. So I've talked about this, but I guess I'll share the story again just because it's for this particular talk. When Richard Garfield made Alpha, he was making a game that people would buy and play with their friends.

Meaning he wasn't thinking about the tournament scene. wasn't thinking about in-store play. Those are all much bigger concepts that came later. He was just making a fun game. And so what he did was the rules kind of just supported the cards in a vacuum, meaning here's what the rules, here's how this card in a vacuum works best. And that the rules were kind of custom-suited per card, that the way the rules tended to work is this card did this,

and that's just how this card works. And that card does that, and that's how that card works. And in a world where, you know, magic was just alpha and that's all it is and it's not played in tournaments or stores or, you know, that's probably fine. But once you start saying, we're going to create a system by which I'm going to show up in my game store and play against a stranger I've never met before in a tournament where there's things on the line, all of a sudden, like, it's important that everybody understands the rules and understands the same rules. So one of the things that happened is one of early, one of R&D's early tasks in Magic was kind of adapting the game to not what it originally been designed for, but what it actually had become, which was this giant phenomenon where people were playing with strangers, in stores, in tournaments. And what that meant was we needed to consolidate things. That's true of other things, color pie and other things, but probably the most important was, The rules needed to work consistently.

The idea, the philosophy behind the Sixth Edition rules. So, obviously, the consolidation rules I'm talking about happens in Sixth Edition in April of 1999. And the idea is, like, I remember the head design or the head rules, the rules manager the time. Tom Wiley did an editor in the duelist to explain how the rules worked. And he made it look like a rat maze because that's him. was symbolic of what the rules were like. That it was just, it was not an easy thing to understand. And so the idea of the Sixth Edition Rules is,

let's teach people basic rules that then, that then they could apply to other cards. That if I teach you the general rules, then when you see new cards, you can apply that, and most of the time, you'll understand how they work. So the project was spearheaded by Bill Rose,

although many, many people worked with him. And the idea was, I mean, this is where the stack came from, for example. Before six-ish rules, there was no stack. There was no last in, first out, you know. A lot of, I mean, not everything, some other stuff came later, but a lot of the things that you, that probably if you're a magic player that you just think of as the rules as they are, you know, early magic had batches and a lot of interesting things.

Like, you know, if I, it did, the order, if, if, if you, lightning bolt to my creature, in response, I giant growth the creature. Now, under the current system, it mattered what order. Did you giant growth first, or do they lightning bolt first? It matters whether or not the creature survives. But in the pre-6 edition times, that wasn't the case. And there was a lot of chaos. One of the things I joked about, like, protection worked like five different ways for a while.

Like, there was a important time where wrath of God didn't kill creature protection from white. but once the rules had to sort of solidify and explain things, that wasn't the way it worked anymore. So anyway, there was a lot of... I remember when the 6th edition rules came out, there was a lot of worry at the time because the players were like, you know, I don't want to learn a new system,

but once they did, once they got the new system, once they understood the new system, it just was cleaner, it was simpler, and it just made understanding how the card... Like, before 6th edition, it was kind of like, you just had to learn case by case, card by card, how things worked. And some of them that was true in one card wouldn't be true in another card.

It was very, very complicated. So the Sixth Edition Rules did a lot to help consolidate that. And that was hugely, as the people making the game, that helped a lot. Because we need to understand how the cards work. And so having a through line made it a lot easier for us to make the cards. Okay, number nine, digital magic. So Magic Online in June of 2002 becomes a thing. obviously many years later we will get arena so the idea of digital magic is we want magic is a fun game

we want people to be able to play it when and where and how they wish one of the ways of doing that was making it available online and the reality is yes we like when people it's fun when people can go to their game store and play it's great when they get people over to their house and play but sometimes you don't have that availability and there's a little bit of availability and there's a a lot of people who love magic, but their schedule is not as free as it once was. And, hey, they could carve out a little bit of time at the end of the day or something, but they don't have the ability to travel to play or have people over their house to play. And that became yet another way that people could experience magic.

And that one of the things we've learned with time is, as you grow older, as you get sort of more responsibilities, as you start getting married and having their family, like time becomes more and more valuable resource. And Magic Online has proved, and Magic Arena, has proven to be a way that other people can get access. And there's some people that are just grew up in a more digital life. They prefer interacting digitally. Or they live in a place where there isn't a game store nearby, where if they want to play with other people, you know, online is the way to do that. And the big thing is, and this has always been true, whenever we design for magic, we have to take all of magic into account.

that we have to think about where and how people are playing and we have to design being aware of that. So part of having digital being added, it did a lot to expand how and where people could play magic, which is great. But it also said to us, we now have some responsibility. So one of the big things that start happening with digital is, you know, we have to start thinking about,

is, you know, extra clicks is a good example. Okay, you know, every time you make someone make a decision, there's extra clicks than digital. And a lot of the question we have to ask is, where are the extra decisions making a lot of impact? Where do they matter? If something matters a very tiny portion of the time, do we need the extra click?

And that's the kind of question. Now, one of the things that always comes up is there are a lot of people that are mad that tabletop magic has to change things because of digital magic. And my answer there is tabletop magic changes stuff all the time. It changes things because of different formats people play.

It changes because of limited, because of commander, You know, it changes, there's all sorts of reasons. It changes because of tournament play. Like, there's lots and lots of different reasons that magic adapts. And that digital, look, that's how some people play magic. That we, there's no first and second, it's not like there's first class and second class and who gets to play magic or who we get to care about.

We care about everybody that plays magic. And the answer is, if there's something that's very annoying in one way to play magic, that we can minimize in a way that doesn't impact the game very much, we will do that. I do understand that when we say target opponent rather than target player there is a little bit of utility lost in some formats that could track it in a way that digital doesn't, but digital with extra clicks, has extra baggage on. But, you know, a lot of people play digital magic. It is not a tiny portion.

It is a pretty big portion of magic games played. And so that is important. And the other big thing, by the way, is having to think about digital ended up being a really good way of thinking about through some complications. That if we're trying to do something, digital's like, wow, that's not easy to implement. We have to sort of say,

how easy is it for anybody to implement? And a lot of times, it serves as a good sort of canary in the coal mine, if you will, for excess complication that we didn't really realize was there. That sometimes when someone has to program it, they start asking questions that you never thought to ask. But they have to ask, because they're programming it,

that really does a good job of making us think through about how we're using things. But digital magic has been a big impact and really has affected how we think about magic and what we do with magic. Okay, number 10, typal theme. So this is OnSlot in October of 2002. So the interesting thing about Onslaught was,

originally, when the set was handed in from design, it had a very light typel. theme. I think what was called? The creatures that you could change that are a creature type. The moon the moon miss forms. The miss forms. The miss forms were in the set.

But there wasn't a lot of things to reward you for that. The ability to change your creature type really was designed as well, in constructed, maybe you care. Limited it just didn't matter. And when it got handed over, Bill Rose felt the set was a little, it didn't have enough oomph to it.

He said, can you take a look at it? And one of the things that I noticed seeing the misformed things is I said to Bill, look, there's a trend I've noticed, which is we occasionally make typal cards, cards that care about creature types. They are very popular. Mostly, they suck. Most of our early typele cards weren't that good. Yet, people were constantly playing with them.

And so what I said to Bill is, look, when we have something that is low power level, yet people are still playing with them, that says this is something. think people are excited by. So what if we took this theme and made it good? Like I said, I really think this is the theme that people will get behind and be excited by. And Bill looked at the data and he said, okay, let's try it. And so, on slot, we made a bunch of changes to Onslaught, but one of the big changes

is we added in a typal theme. And I was correct. It went over like gang busters. And in fact, even though the set had a lot other. of things going on. And morph was played a big role. Cycling return. There's a lot of other things going on.

Front and center, the communication from the public was, it's typo. You know, we like typo. That was the major sort of takeaway. And an interesting thing is looking back at OnSlot, there's a lot of things, like, we only kept each thing in one color. We limited what you can do. The Aspen was kind of low, surprisingly. We also had things that were like way too swinging.

Like, we did a lot of things, I think, incorrect with it. it was the proof of concept. It really did show us that players really do enjoy typal themes, so much so that we go back to typal as a theme about every other year as a major theme, I would say. And then on most sets, I would say the vast majority of sets have at least one archetype, one draft archetype, that has a typal component.

And even sets that don't have a strong typele component have a little bit of Tybal component you know like it's just there's something very powerful about I want to build a deck pick a word and find cards with that word

and put them in the same deck together and Tybal just does that beautifully I want to care about whatever you know pick your creature type ally spiders I mean you know every magic set these days

has or almost one has something to care about and that you know it's also fun to introduce new things and have new things you can care about. But it's also fun to have old things come back. And one of the neat things is, you know, when the new set has allies in it, there's old sets that care about allies.

And all of a sudden, yeah, the new set cares, but the old set cares too, and you can mix and match. And now I have, I create something that's brand new that doesn't exist in the new set or the old set. It's a combination. So anyway, typal themes have been definitely a really impactful, useful tool that we've been able to use. Number 11, two-color balance in Ravnika, 2005. So, early magic, when Richard introduced magic, there was no gold cards.

It wasn't until Legends, which is the summer set of 94. So about a year after Magic is introduced, the following summer, we introduced gold cards for the first time. And even in Legends, I believe Legends just had ally colored cards and shards. I don't think there were any enemy-collar cards or wedges in legends. In fact, the first enemy-colored gold card was Dark Heart of the Wood in the dark in the next set. And there was one of them. There were three gold cards in the dark.

Two were ally. One was enemy. And we eventually did do some enemy-colored stuff, but we always did it at a lower amount. Even when we had a block dedicated to multicolor, the large set and one of the small sets were about ally, and one small set was about enemy. but that one small set was really popular, Apocalypse. So when I became head designer, one of the things that I was really big on was trying to really plan blocks out.

And when I was looking at Ravnikah, I realized I was trying to make not invasion, so I was trying to make a gold block that wasn't about playing all the colors. So obviously, it's play as few colors as possible, but to be gold that meant two color. That led us to making the guilds and such. But one of the things that I'd said,

the thing that actually led to us making the guilds is I made a decision very early on before the guilds existed. I said what I want to make is a block where we do two color magic and all the two colors are the same. Before that, generally, we would make ally cards more plentiful, higher in quantity, and more powerful, higher in quality. In fact, for a while, dual ends were just better, other than the original dual ends in alpha, dual ends were just better if they were ally than her enemy. Ally got more dual ends. They were stronger. Like, we would give enemy the same dual ends, but they came and played tap, stuff like that. Oh, you get pain lens, but they come and play tapped. And we just made less cards for enemy things. So when I was making Ravnikah, I said,

look, I just want to treat them all the same. And the idea at the time, the reason we did this was, hey, allies get along. So they have more cards, and it's more plentiful. And enemies don't get along, because they have less cards, and they are a little harder to use. But we sort of came to was, while it did a good job of reflecting on the color pie, that wasn't that important. What was more important is we wanted to optimize people's ability to build magic decks. And there's five colors. So that means there's 10 two-color pairs. Why are we handicapping five of the two-color pairs that just made magic less fun?

And so I sort of, interestingly, I put my foot down during Ravnika saying, this is what we're going to do this block. But like, once we did that, we didn't go back. The idea that somehow that enemy is a second-class citizen to ally, gone. Once Rabnika sort of put them on the same footing, they stayed on the same footing.

And that was really important. And it's something that a lot of the stuff I'm talking about in this series might be, you didn't even realize that wasn't always the case. And Rabnika, by the way, is 2005. 2005, right?

That is 12 years into magic's beginning. In the first 12 years of magic, ally and enemy weren't on evil footing. That's a long time. 12 years. But since then it has been.

Okay. Next. Number 11. Or not number 11. Yeah, number 12. Factions. So this is also part of Rabnika. So obviously, I like the idea of there being 10, two-collar pairs, treating them all equally.

I pitched this idea of the creative team. So Brady Dombermuth was the head of the creative team. He said, let me think about it. And then like the next day he's exercising, and it came out the idea of what if we make factions based around each of, we made guilds around each of them. And then I went, I leaned all into it. I loved the idea. And I said, okay, well, what if we literally chop up the sets based on the guilds? What if each guild got its own keyword?

What if each guild, you know, we made cycles and each guild got its part of the cycle? And I really, really leaned into saying, what if we went full throttle? Now, Magic had, like, light factions. Like, there have been flavor factions. Fallen Empires, for example, definitely had five... And those were factions that had some light mechanical definition to them. But it was something that you had to sort of... Like, Rabnika was factions in a much louder way.

We gave them names. We gave them symbols. Because, you know, we... Because they were... gold cards that you got to see. Like there were different frames you got to see. I think we put pin lines for the first time in Ravnikah. That, you know, we, well, factions on a light level had been done. They had not been done at the volume that we had. And it was even like when you come to the pre-release, although maybe choose your faction wasn't in actual Ravnika, but we were

very, very loud. You know, we very were the idea that this is something in our advertising that you would choose. I don't know whether or not we did the pre-release I don't remember whether the pre-release for Ravnika actually separated out the gills It might have, I don't remember That might have been returned to Raffnick I'm not 100% sure

But anyway, factions, the idea of identity It turns out that one of the things Magic does really well is self-identity Meaning Magic is a game where you, the person playing the game gets to define what you're playing with how you're playing with it You know, that you can choose your format, you can make your own formats, you get to build your deck.

There's so much about self-identification, and the guild's really loud, that the color pie has always been this really potent, powerful thing. But when you started combining colors, it just made this really, it just made people be able to see themselves in a way that's really cool. And, I mean, it ended up being so potent, so powerful, that it just became something that we have made part of magic. We do faction sets about once a year now. And when I say faction sets, I mean there's a faction. It is identity. Usually there's a watermark for it. It's got a name.

It represents something. And early on, we did factions. Like, the low-hanging fruit was factions based on color. And we've done a bunch of those. We've done two-color. We've done three-color. But at some point, you have to go beyond that. For example, trick-shaven's like, well, okay, we're going to do two-color factions,

enemy factions, but we're leaning on the resonance of school. this is the math faction this is the history faction this is the science faction you know and each one of those starts to get a sense of an identity that we can you know we've learned that factions

there's a lot of ways to do factions and a lot of the fans the players you guys really enjoy factions and it's become a giant tool in our arsenal okay so that is factions number 12 number 13 hybrid mana I've been talking a bunch about hybrid Man. I did a whole podcast on Hybrid Manna.

The real version for those that haven't heard of those podcasts, I was doing my preliminary work for Ravnika. So this also was in Ravnikov in 2005, October 2005. I was experimenting with what it meant to be multicolour. And it dawned on me that there were two different types of multicolored

cards. There were ones in which you took, let's say you're a red-green card. It's a red element and a green element mixed together in a way that neither red nor green could do. But another subset of cards we did, was it's something both red and green can do, but you get to do it for more, for less.

Like, oh, red and green can do this, but because red and green are doing it, you get to do it, we get to make it a little bit cheaper, but you get to do it more powerful. But I realize that's interesting space, that that wasn't and space. Like, the first is, well, here's a card you can do because it combines red things and green things.

And you can't do this car if you don't have access to red and access to green. But the second set of cards was more about, oh, we don't need a red, access to red and green, you really need to access to red or green. And I came up this idea of what if we made a symbol that wasn't an, that wasn't an and, but wasn't or? That I just require one of two different colors. And the story of the time when I made it, I was so excited. Like I, one of the reasons I have my job, my head designer is I'm really, really good to seeing potential,

which is kind of the most important part of my job. I have to see cool things that don't exist yet and go, now that's a cool thing. We should do that. And it's not so easy to see things that don't exist. It's actually, it's tricky. And the perfect example is I made the hybrid man and I was so excited. I'm like, this would be, I've made this awesome tool. And everybody at the time was like, okay.

Like, nobody was that excited to buy it. No one disliked it. No one said we shouldn't make it. This, no one was really as excited as I was about it. And so what ended up happening is I put it in the set. Brian Schneider, who was the set, the lead developer of the set, Actually took it out when he started. There was a lot going on.

He goes, I don't think we need this. And then he later came back and said, I think we're a little light on splash. That does seem splashy. Could we do that? And I said, yes. And so, anyway, hybrid came out. It's actually the highest rated mechanic.

Mechanic, I put that in quotes, in Raphneka. And it has become a very, very useful tool. I was correct. Right now, we've been trending up using it because it's proven to be a really good tool for limited. One of the challenges in Limited is that, you know, you want to open up and give people more options and choices. And Hybrid just does that.

It just lets more colors have more access to more different things and just ends up making a better limited environment. So we've been leaning recently into Hybrid. So anyway, hybrid is, like I said, it was kind of exactly what I envisioned when I first made it was, it's a pretty versatile tool. It allows us, you know, there's been a lot, like I remember when we were making Fate Reforged. Faber Forge had this weird sense where it had to play nicely with a three-color set and play nicely with a two-collar set. Well, how do you do that? If you make things three-collar, then the two-collar can't play them.

But if you make them two-collars, then they don't feel like they make sense with three-color. Hybrid to the answer. Like, we had one color and then one hybrid. That didn't overlap the first color. So it had three colors in identity, but you could play it for just two colors. And so it allowed you to sort of fit the, when you draft it with a three-collar set, well, still had a three-car identity, and we drafted it with a tool car set, you can cast it. And so, just a great example where a hybrid really saved our bacon.

Okay, so the last one today, number 14, is the great designer search. So the great designer search started because my boss at the time, Randy Bueller, said to me, look, we have a good way of finding developers. The pro tour is a great place for us to find people that are really good at developing sets, of figuring out how to make sets better. But we don't have a really good tool to find designers, people that are at the beginning end of the process. We need people that are good at blue sky design,

people that can make things, you know, and we don't know where to find that. Do you have any ideas? And I said I did. I go, my wife and I watch a lot of TV, and one of the things we like to watch is reality television. So there's a whole subgenre of reality television where it's like, find people that have a skill,

Project Runway, Top Chef, America's next top model I mean there's tattoos and Lego building and anyway there's infinite ones of them. The idea is find people that are really good at this thing give them challenges judge them on the challenges

and little by little eliminate them until one is left and I said what if we did that for magic design? What if anybody who meets the criterion because the prize was an internship they had to be a certain age they had to be able to work in America and there were some restrictions because

they had to be able to actually meet the conditions because the whole role of this was to find people we could test. But the idea was we did this for all intents, a better word, sort of a reality show thing where we would find anybody that met the criteria

could apply. It allowed us to find designers from anywhere. In fact, we did. A lot of people, thousands of people applied in order to do it, we had to narrow it down. So there were three test that I made, there was an essay test, and then there was a multiple-choice test, and then there was a design test. And from that, the very first one I narrowed down to 16, the second and third

one I narrowed down to eight. I, the judges. And it ended up being this really valuable tool. Alexis Jansen won the first one. Ken Nagel came in second. Graham Hopkins came in third. All three of them ended up getting jobs at Wizards. Not all of them in R&D. Both Alexis and Ken one six-month internships. Graham ended up getting a full-time job. And then both Alexis and Ken ended up working full-time at Wizards. The second one was Ethan Fleischer one and Sean Main and Scott Vanesson and all of them came to work at Wizards.

Once again, not all in Magic Garden, D, but they all were at Wizards. And then the third one was Ari Ne, Jeremy Geis, and Chris Mooney. and all of them all three of them actually came to work in R&D specifically and of the nine of them I think all nine had served on magic design sets seven of the nine I believe have led a magic design set so it ended up being this really really efficient way

to find new designers it's a lot of work and I will admit that there's a lot of a lot of I mean because it's actually a job hiring thing there's a huge amount of of, of, there's a lot of red tape and things around it. It's not easy to do. It's a lot of work and it's hard to do.

But I cannot argue with the success. We, I mean, to this day, I mean, I still have people I work with every day. Like right now in R&D, I work with Ethan Fleischer. I work with Chris Mooney. I work with Jeremy Geist. Like, these are people who we would not necessarily have ever found them, if not for the great designer search. And so, it did in fact find great designers.

It searched and found great designers. Anyway, guys, that is, so I'm chugging along. I hope you guys are enjoying this look. Once again, there's an article, this is a three-part article that I did. You can read about it in the article. I'm trying to go in a little more depth in my podcast because I have the ability when I have more time to talk about it. So even if you read the article, I think there's more details you're getting here that I didn't talk about in the article. But anyway, guys, I am now at work.

So we all know what that means. It means at 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 all next time. Bye-bye.