Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1300: 30 Years, Part 3

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

This is part three of a four-part series talking about 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 out the parking lot. We all know what that means. We don't. It's time for another drive from work. So I'm doing a series right now where I'm talking about, called 30 Years, based on an article series I did in Making Magic, my column, where I'm talking about the 30 innovations, design innovations, since I started working at Wizards 30 years ago on October 1995.

I thought it was going to be a three-part episode. It turns out it's a four-part episode, I believe. And so in order to get all four parts done this week, I am doing a rare, although less rare, drive from work. I actually did a drive from work not that long ago. But anyway, it's enough. I don't want to say my time's getting full, but I'm doing podcast 2N from work. Okay, so last we left, I talked about number 14, which brings us to number 15 bonus sheets. And for this, we have to go to time spiral in October of 0.6.

So, Time Spiral had a time theme. One of the ideas was we were, we had a bunch of mechanics that we thought were interesting mechanics, suspend, and what else was flash, and we had a mechanic we took from cold snap, split second. But anyway, we had this time theme, and I was really big. This is my, this is the second block that I led as head designer that I oversaw. And so I thought, oh, how do you divide time into three parts? And it became very apparent that it wanted to be past, present, and future. And so the first set, time spiral, was all about the past. And I came up this cool idea of, what if occasionally cards from the past actually showed up in your booster?

And we had already changed the frame in eighth edition to the new frame. And so the idea was, well, what if old cards showed up in the old frame and just, You know, and originally when I first pitched the idea, I said, oh, you know, like what if every 20 sets and 20 packs, an old card shows up? And then as the idea started getting steam, like, well, how about every 10 packs, five packs, three packs, two packs, every pack! And so eventually we made what we called the time shifted sheet, which the idea was, so when I say a bonus sheet, what that means is when we print cards, normally common gets its own sheets, Common gets its own sheets. Rare and Mythicry normally share sheets. But the idea is we make cards, we cut them up, and then there's slots that you get the cards. And so common has its own slots. Uncommon has its own slots and rare mythicry share slots, which is why we can put them on the

same sheet. But the idea is that what if we made a separate sheet? What if we made a sheet that was its own thing? And it was a really interesting idea. I mean, the technology to make a separate sheet works. We can just make a sheet and put it in its own. own slot. But it really wasn't kind of an out-of-the-box idea at the time. And I liked it so much that I ended up doing time-shifted sheets for all three sets that block. So time spiral had cards from the past in the old frame of actual cards that you'd seen before. And then for Planter Chaos, the time-shifted sheet showed cards that you knew in a special new alternate reality frame, but in a different color than you knew. You might know rafing.

of God, but do you know it as damnation? Which is just a black wrath of God. And then for FutureSight, we had cards from the future, cards that haven't even been printed yet, that were showing up in past, much like Time Spiral had cards from the past. This is cards from the future. It had a future

frame and stuff. But anyway, that was really exciting. It was a cool thing. And then during Strixhaven, I handed off to Yanni and Yanni came up this idea of well if this is the the main school of the

multiverse in magic well what if they were aware of all the different spells from across the multiverse? What if they had a collected, a mystical archive if you will. We came up the idea Yanni had the idea of what if we had a bonus sheet of instance and sorceries with special art and

the idea is they would show up and you can see special lands for you know special spells from across the multiverse. And that went really well. And really, bonus sheets have just become this cool tool that we can use. We use them quite a bit nowadays. We do, like in Universe's Beyond, we do our original material on them. And anyway, we just have done a lot of different things.

And it's become a really valuable tool and an interesting way to get old reprints in. And mostly these days, bonus sheets are used for older cards. Like I said, time spiral. Not time spiral. Planner Chaos and FutureSight did. future cards. So we don't do that quite as much. It's not off the table or anything, but it's just proven a real fun way to get old cards into the system and do a lot of fun things and have themes. So anyway, bonus sheets have become quite the task.

That's number 15. So number 16, new card types, starting with FutureSight in October, or not October, May of 07. So the idea was we were doing FutureSight. And, um, so during, uh, future site design, Matt Kavada came up to me. He was actually, he was on the, uh, the creative team, but he was on the design team for future site. And he said, you know, look, we're revamping, uh, planeswalkers, you know, uh, the whole point of the, of the time spiral story was there's this big event that was kind of depowering the planeswalkers so that we could put them on cards was the idea. Um, that it'd make, uh, and so.

we did a bunch of design. The original plan was we were going to do the blue, black, and green ones on the future shifted sheet. Lo my list, a whole new card type you've never seen before in the future shift sheet. Ended up not working out. But it turns out, interestingly,

while working on Lorwyn design, which was the next set, we came up this idea of making, of turning non-creature cards into putting creature types on non-creature cards. And in order to make that work, we had to make a brand new card type called, at the time, tribal. We're not called Kindred. And so the idea was, actually, there's a card in FutureSight on the Future Shifter Sheet called Tarmogoyf.

And one of the gags I thought was really funny was that Tamergoif would care about car types, and then I would list car types that didn't even exist yet. And so we ended up listing Plains Rocker there. We also ended up listing tribal there, but we did actually make one card with the tribal card type in FutureSight. So that's why I listed FutureSight. But one of the ideas, when Magic first began, Richard had seven cart types. There was land, creatures, artifacts, and enchantments. Oh, sorry, there were six.

No, no, there were seven. And then there was sorceries, instant, and interrupts. Interrupts were, instances were sort of divided into two subsets early on, instance and interrupts. Interrupts went on things that had to interact with other spells like counter spells or things that produce manna. With the sixth edition rules, we cleaned it up and we didn't need to do interrupts anymore. So interrups went away. So then there were six cart types. Now, there was at one point manasaurus, which was us trying to clean up how mana happened and technically, I guess, it was a cart type, but it kind of really wasn't.

not in the sense that it did anything new but with Tribal and with Plainswalker we were making a brand new card type and we were doing it in a big splashy way and you know Plainswalkers for example just were something unlike anything we'd ever done they represented obviously the Plainswalkers but it really had a whole new resource system

and I mean creatures could attack it so there was an answer to it built into the game and then Tribal was more of us trying a way to get creature types on the cards, and it was a means to do that. Later, we would do battles in March of the Machine, which was, oh, these are these attackable things

that represent sort of actual conflicts in different places, and they were different planes. It's not, I mean, we've got to be careful. New car types is not, there's a really, really high bar for new car types. The goal is not just make new car types whenever we want to make new car types. We really need to do them

because there's something special we're doing with them that isn't being done somewhere else. If we can just make something and it just makes sense as an artifact or enchantment or a creature, we should do that. But we have had opportunities to make a few things,

and, you know, it has definitely been something that's been pretty cool. Plainswalkers obviously became a core part of the game where tribal, now kindred, is a very infrequent part of the game. Battles got introduced, and as I've said publicly, battles are coming back.

I can't stay win or where, but we do have a set in design that has battles in them. And so that is just something that we can do in that it's not something we've got to do a lot and something we've got to be careful with, but it is something available to us, the idea of new card types. Okay, so next is number 16,

or I'm sorry, number 17, mythic rare, and this was in Shards of Alara in October of 2008. So one of the things we did, we did this study at one point. So Magic was the first trading card game, not the first trading cards. And after us, there are a lot of trading card games that follow the magic's footsteps.

So one of the things we did at one point is we said, let's take a look at all the other trading card games. And what do all of them do? Can we learn anything from them? So one of the thing that's really interesting is I believe all the ones we looked at, all of them, I believe, did more than three rarities. You know, Magic when it first started, had common, uncommon, and rare. And part of that was the way the sheets work. there's a common sheet or uncommon sheet or rare sheet. I think Richard

sort of matched it on what we need to do to print them. But we kind of realize that you know, maybe like one of the things that was really common in trading cards which was copied by love of other trading cards is the idea of a rarity that was rare than once per pack. You know, in magic, like

well, the rare is you get a rare every pack. Well, what if we have something rare than a rare? And then when we looked at sort of how we had done things, It turns out that, you know, some sets have, you know, 53 rairs in them. But, like, if you go back in Early Magic, there was Ice Age had 121 rairs. So the chance of you getting a rare from Ice Age was way, way more infrequent than getting a rare from a lot of the other sets later on. And what we realized is, oh, maybe what we want to do is separate out the bottom end of a rare from the top end of rare. So the bottom end of rare is more what we called rare.

And the top end, we invented a new thing called Mythic Rare. The idea of Mythic Rare, originally it was 1 in 8. How was it 1 in 7? The idea essentially is you had a card rarity that just you didn't get every booster pack. That every once in a while, instead of a rare, you would get a mythic rare. And Mythic Rare really allowed us, it was an interesting tool for us because it showed of so infrequently. Like, for example, one of our problems is sometimes we make cards that are fun and splashy and really cool, but they just cause all sorts of problems in limiting.

And rares show up at a decent amount in limited, but mythic rairs don't. And so one of the things we realize that we have a really cool card that's really fun for constructed, but causing problems unlimited, now we have an answer to someplace we could put it. And there was a lot, I remember when we first introduced Mythic Rare, I had an article all about. it. And I was spending a lot of time trying to guessing what we thought Mythic Rare would be. And it turns out that some of our ideas were right. Some of them evolve with time. But the one thing I did say in the very first article, which I still believe to be true, is that Mythic Rare wants to have a dream. Meaning, when you see a Mythic Rare,

there has me something that you can really, it has the attention to achieve something big. Not that necessarily you needed to be big, but something about it really sort of said that it allows you to dream as a deck builder, or it allowed you to, you know, when you got in play, there's something cool that could happen with it. But Mythic Rare is obviously become a pretty important part of, I mean, obviously, every set is now a Mythic Rare. And just in the way we build rarity and we think of rarity,

that we've carved out of space for Mythid Rare, and that, you know, plainswalkers tend to be at Mythic Rare. You know, certain core identifying elements of the set, you know, like characters and stuff tend to be at Mythic Rare. So it's definitely a place to do the extra special stuff. And it's become a pretty, like I said, a pretty standard part of the way we make magic. Okay, that was number 17. Number 18, New World Order, Zendekar in October of 2009.

So what happened was, we actually have to go back to Lorwyn. In Lorwyn, I came up with an idea, something I thought was very clever. So OnSlaught had done, it was our first typel set. And Lornerun was our second type. set. But one of the things that we weren't able to do with onslaught was the set after Onslaught, the pluck after Onslaught mirrored in, was we introduced us the species class creature type, where we have a species and we have a class. And the idea was most things that were more, you know, humanoid-ish, would have two creature types. For magic,

for the longest time, you can only, we had a rule, in fact, for a while, you can only have one creature type. And so if you were a goblin or an elf, you got your species. But if you're a human, we didn't say human. We said what you did. You're a soldier, you're a warrior, you're a cleric. And eventually we decided it was just more flavorful if we could list both creature types when it made sense. What is your species? What is your class? What do you do? So since that happened after Onslaught, I was very intrigued by the idea.

We'd started up my reign of head designer. I was really trying to do a lot more. I liked the idea that each set had its own identity. And so I came up with the idea of what if Lorowin did species typo and Morning Tide, the small set. So remember, Lorwin and Shadowmore were two mini sets. So Lowerman was one big set, Morning Time was a small set,

then Shadowmore was a big set and Even Tide was a Small Set. So the block was kind of this four-set block, but it was made up of two mini blocks, each of one large set, one small set. So the idea was to separate Lorraine from Morning Tide. Lorwin was about species typo, and Morning Tide was about class typo. So in Lorain, we cared about Kifkin

and myrfolk and goblins and elementals and elves and fairies and giants and tree folk. But in Morning Tide, we cared about like soldiers and wizards and rogues and warriors and druids, I think. So the idea was we cared about different things. But anyway, the reason I'm explaining this is, so I was at the employee pre-release. In fact, I was with Matt Place. And we were watching people play. And what we realized is people were playing one match and then leaving. Like, it was just a couple.

It was like a little bit into the play previously that it was almost empty. We were like, what's going on? So Matt and I went and talked to a bunch of the people and said, why didn't you play a, why did you just play one thing? And what they said was there's just too much going on. That we had cards that cared about creature, about your species and cards that carried about your class. And so there were cards, you know, most cards have both. So it's like, oh, and the kind of intricate web of carrying all the things going on. And they're like, it was just too much.

I couldn't keep up. So they stopped playing. I was like, oh, okay, that's a bad sign. Because a lot of the things about the employer pre-release is in R&D, you know, R&D is people who are diehard magic players. We are people who played magic and, you know, were very invested in it. And, you know, we're pretty enfranchised players. But there's a lot of people at Wizards who like magic, who play magic, some of which learn magic when they got the job of wizard. some of which knew magic beforehand, but weren't diehard players necessarily.

So we have a lot more casual players. So when you watch the employee pre-release, it's very telling of how magic will interact with a little more casual players. And the fact that so many people just couldn't handle it was not good. And it got Matt Place and I talking, and we ended up coming with this idea that we called New World Order. And what they said was, how do we make sure that a newer player doesn't get overwhelmed with all the things we're doing? And the answer was commons. It turns out that two-thirds of a booster pack is common. So if you don't buy a lot of boot-jurbacks,

if you're a newer player, you just bought seven, eight booster packs. Most of your cards are common. So if we could keep a check on the complexity of common, we could do a lot to sort of handle how complex cards were for lessened franchise players. We called that New World Order. The very first set that it took place in was in Zendekar. And even then, we sort of ramped up.

Zendikar did a little bit. and we did more as sets followed. But the idea was, can we sort of keep complexity and common in check? And even now, a lot of the things we started way back then are still true to today. We invented a thing we call red flags, where if certain things are happening at common, not that it can't happen in common, but you should look at it when it happens and be aware of it. And a lot of those ideas really very much carried through. And that was, and like I said, New World Order, just the idea of having philosophies of thinking about how we

think about the set in a larger context was really important. It definitely influenced a lot of things down the path. Okay, next, number 19, commander. In June of 2011, we made the very first commander decks made by Wizards of the Coast. So the origin of commander is Sheldon Mennery, who was a common head judge of the pro tour, very active in the judge scene. he was in the army and he got stationed at different places

and wherever he would get stationed someplace new he'd find a local game store he'd find magic players and he'd find a new crowd to play magic with. So he was in Alaska and the group that he found to play with had made their own format something they called Elder Dragon Highlander

and the idea basically was you picked one of the five elder dragons from legends and you built a deck around it. They were all three-collar decks built around one of those five dragons. Sheldon really liked the general bones of what it was, and he took it

and he adapted it and basically turned it into what we now know as commander. He started playing with the judges at Pro Tours and little by little this format spread. Enough so that in 2011, or enough time for us to make it for 2011, we said, you know what? Every year we were making

experimental products, we said, what if we made Commander Decks? So we did. We put them out. There were, I think, five And they went over really, really well, so much so that we decided to make it a yearly product. And so in 2012, we quickly put something together. But from 2013 on, every year, we had Commander decks. And eventually, for those that know, Commander became a dominant the... It's the most played tabletop format now in Tabletop Magic.

And it is, you know, I mean, it is so shaped... I've talked endlessly about how we reshape elements of the color pie to make sure that we could play it. In fact, we used to have just one play design team, sort of a competitive play design team. We made a whole second play design team, what we call the casual play design team. They don't just look at Commander,

but a Commander is a big part of what they do. Commander Playtests are not built into our process. I mean, it's, you know, Commander is completely reshaped how we make magic. And I think that the fact that we made Commander decks did a lot to help speed up the adoption of the commander format. The fact that Wizards did a lot to sort of make it easier to get into

by making decks, by just raising awareness. I think a lot of people didn't even know the existence. You know, it was a very niche thing until we started doing more, so more people got exposed to it. But anyway, obviously, Commander became a huge thing and has greatly impacted how we make magic.

Number 20, draft archetypes. This is Inistrade. September 2011. So Eric La, I made, I did the design for Interstrike, handed off to Eric Lauer, who did the development, and in it, he was really fascinated by the idea of, what if we made sure that when you drafted, every two-color pair had something it could do. Now, in the design, we had built into the design, one of the things we really wanted to do in the stat is care about monsters. And so the way we did that is we ended up, originally we had werewolves and vampires and zombies. But as we were laying out on the set, we realized that they lined up nicely with two-color

archetypes, I'm sorry, with two-color ally color pairs. And then by adding in spirits for the ghosts, we made five. So white-blue was spirits, blue-black was zombies, black red was vampires, red-green was werewolves, and green-white were humans, the victims of all the monsters. And so we really had sort of mapped out five of the archetypes by how we did the typo. Well, Eric was interested

in giving definition to the other five. So what we ended up doing is he took some of our flashback cards and he put other colors, enemy colors on them, to try to educate you, like, oh, well, if you're playing this kind of deck. And so it was really the earliest of us doing archetypes. I mean, obviously, in

Ravnica, we, over the course of the block, we had done 10, two-color archetypes because we were doing the 10, co-repares. But Eric realized the idea of what if instead of that's mapped over the whole block, what if we did that every set? And there really was the first sort of conscious effort of making 10 draft archetypes that were defined in how the set was built. And it really was beginning of something key. I mean, draft archetypes are a big part of how we make magic now. I mean, it's just it's a key element of magic making. And so it is very much reshaping.

how we did it. Okay, now we get to number 21. Also from Innestrade. Double-faced cards. So this is also in September of 2011. So what happened was we were doing the monsters, we were doing vampires and doing zombies and doing spirits.

Now, all of those, magic had done quite a bunch of. But werewolves, at the time of Innesrod, we had done two werewolves, both in Mono Black. Lesser Werewolf and, I don't know if the other werewolf was, but two werewolves. neither were particularly good cards and I really believed if we were going to

sort of capture what we wanted to do in Inestrade that were really had to shine I really wanted to do something that brought werewolves to the forefront so I said to my design team I set some parameters I said here's what I want I want two states I want a human state and a werewolf state and the werewolf state is much stronger than the human state and I want them to change

between human and a werewolf how do we do that you know give me an environment where we can have humans that turn into werewolves and back into humans. So there were a bunch of different things pitched. One of this, by the way, was Day Night. Day Night Actors, was one of the original ideas pitched. But the idea that really took form was from Tom Lippelli,

who had recently worked on, we make a trading card game just for the Japanese market. In fact, I was one of the five people that designed it. It's called Dual Mafters. And so, the idea was, what if we made use of a tool that Dual Mafters had used, double-faced cards? And the idea of a double-faced cards, you print on both sides.

Normally, Magic has a front face, and the back is the card back. Well, what if we didn't have a card back? What if we had two faces? And I admit, I was a little skeptical when we first did it, just because it was a little bit out there. But my rule of thumb, when you're trying stuff early on, is try it. You never know. And it played great. So much so that I actually did something that I don't normally do.

In Vision Design, I went and talked to printing. I went to talk to people that did are printing, saying, okay, I know we're doing this. in, or we have done this in dual mafters, but Madge is a much bigger game than dual mafters. There's things that dual masters can do that we can't do with a scale that Magic has to do, because magic has to print in so many more printers and, you know, such

a larger volume. But it turned out it was something we could do. Originally, the plan was that there would be two cards. One would be a one side, a one face, you know, a single face card that would go in your deck, and then when you cast it, you fetched the double face card that was kind of like an elaborate token

that you would go get. but it turned out that there was no way to guarantee that the two cards would appear together in packs so what we did is we did some research and realized that at the time was like 90% of constructed was people playing with opaque sleeves

so if they're playing with opaque sleeves anyway could we just make double-faced cards we ended up coming up with the solution of the checklist card and so we ended up making double-faced cards and there was a lot of tension by the way at the time There were a lot of people internally that didn't want to do them.

There were people in the brand team and an R&D that were like, we should not be doing this. And even when it came out, there was maybe like 10% that were really anti against the idea. There's a lot of logistics that come with double-faced cards. But the majority of players, I'd do a lot of them. They were the top-rated thing in Innesrod, and they were very exciting. We would later do modal double-faced cards. Transformers you play side A and then you transform into side B and sometimes back to side A.

You chose between A and B It's kind of like a split card But they were permanent They could go on the battlefield And once you chose one That's what it was Then in Spider-Man We made

Modal transforming double-face cards That they're transforming but can be modal You can cast either side We've cast side A You can transform to side B But anyway We have found infinite design space In modal double-face cards

And so We've made a whole bunch of them We've done a lot of things There's a lot of cool things We can do with them They're very flavorful They tell stories and so it has been a big, big hit.

Okay, number 22, Thero, September 2013, gold signposts. So Eric Lauer kept hammering away this idea of making the 10-2-color archetypes. He had made them an industry. But the one thing that he realized is, even though we, the designers, put them in the set, that the players didn't really quite understand that they were there. That we could write articles and talk about them, but only the most enfranchised people would understand what's going on. So Eric came up with a pretty cool idea.

What if we were just really, really loud? So he put them in uncommon. He made them gold, so they'd be both colors. And what if we just were in your face, that if you drafted this card, you couldn't avoid doing what the thing did. The gold signposts were telling you very loudly what it was. And it was like sometimes you want to be subtle. Sometimes you want to be blunt. They were very blunt.

But they proved to be a really effective tool. People liked them. And it did a really good job of just sort of communicating in a nice simple way on one card. what was going on. And gold signposts become such a standard. I mean, they're the default for how we do sets now. Not every set necessarily have to have them. Once again, a default means you can not do them.

But pretty much, most magic sets nowadays have gold signposts. They just become, I mean, and now we, in fact, some sets have multiple gold signposts. Sometimes we do two gold signposts, but just having one core gold signposts has become pretty standard. Okay, the final of the day, before we wrap up for today, was number 12. Exploratory Design happened in Kahn's of Tarkir in September of 2014. What happened was we had just had the second-grade designer search. Ethan Fletcher and Sean Main had just joined R&D as interns. And so what we had done different for the second-grade designer search from the first-grade designer search

is we did this thing where each one of them submitted a world. It was part of their design test when they first were trying to get in. And the idea was they built a world, and then all the challenges were them designed things within their world. And so one of the things that I was really interested once we hired them was, I wanted to further test their sort of world-building skills and they're, you know, I wanted to sort of look at something

holistic. And it turns out that one of the things we had started doing was every other year, Magic was large set in the fall, these are northern hemisphere seasons, small set in the winter, small, sun, the spring. But every other year, we had been doing large, small, large. and the large set was its own thing with its own mechanics that was separated from the first large set.

So I had a cool idea. I really liked the idea of doing a set where we had a large set, then a small set, then a large set, but the middle small set played with both large sets. So it would be large sets, so set A, A, A, A.A. Then when set B came out, you'd play A, A, A, A.B. And when set C came out, you'd play C-C-B. So the idea was that the middle set would play with both the big sets.

But I didn't know what that meant. I didn't understand what that was. so we had some extra time before we were starting design so I got together as me and Sean and Ethan and Dan another designer named Dan and we just started working on this problem and we brainstormed what could it be are you traveling from one place to another

like we came up with all these different ideas in the end we came up with the idea of the time travel story we go to this place something's wrong about the place our hero goes back in time which is the second set where he changes something and the third set is the alternate timeline, how the world was now that it's changed. So it made sense that the past played with the present timeline. It made sense the past played with the alternate timelines.

And anyway, it made a lot of fun flavor. And that was such a useful team. I was so happy with all the work we had done. That team made manifest, for example. We adjusted a lot of things. And I really loved that it allowed me to approach kinds of Tarkir with all this insight that I didn't normally had when I started a vision design. And I had called it Exploratory Design just to give it a name, and I so fell in love with Exploratory Design that from that point forward, I just added it. That Exploratory Design just became a way we do design.

And even when we switched over away from design development to Vision Design, Set Design, and Play Design, we kept Exploratory Design because it's such a valuable tool. It really, just having the ability to do Blue Sky Design and not worry about a file and not worry about what the set is going to be, but just like explorer aspects of the set has proved to be invaluable and it's been a really, really useful tool.

So anyway, exploratory design and another tool we invented that we use every set. So anyway, guys, I'm now at home. So next time will be the final of this four-part series. I hope you guys are enjoying it.

But as I'm at home, we all know what that means or maybe we know what that means. I'm not normally doing this, but it means it's time for me not to be talking magic, not to be making magic, but to be making dinner. So anyway, guys, I will see you all next time.

Bye-bye.