Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1301: Resources

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

There are a lot of costs you can pay other than mana. In this episode, I talk about different types of resources in Magic.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast topic comes from my blog. Someone wanted me to talk about all the possible resources in magic. So obviously, first and foremost, the main resource is mana. That's what the game runs on. It's the core resource system.

But one of the cool things about magic is there are a lot of different ways to spend other resources, and that manna is, while the most popular way to spend resources, not the only way to spend resources. And so today, I'm going to walk through all the possible ways to spend resources. Okay, well, first and foremost, probably the most popular way to spend resources. I think the way I'm going to organize this is I'm going to talk by zones. I'm going to talk about how you spend in each zone. But before I get to the zones, the one I'll talk about that it's not a zone-based one,

but it's a very popular one, is life. You can do life payments, the idea being, and life payments sometimes are by themselves, and sometimes are in conjunction with manna. That is true of all these resources today. Some of these resources can be done independent of manna, and often they're done in conjunction with mana. So life payment usually is centered in black. Black is sort of king of life payment.

Black, one of Black's things is, it gets access to most parts of the color pie, but often with additional costs that other colors don't pay. So black has access to card drawing, but normally you're paying some costs. It's not always life, but life is the most common cost that is associated with black drawing cards.

Okay, now let's get into the zone. So we're going to start with the battlefield. The battlefield, I think, is the most commonplace for you to have extra resources to spend. Okay, so first and foremost, there is sacrifice. Sacrifice is the idea that I can take one of the things I have in play, and I can usually send it to the graveyard. I could technically exile it, I guess, or put it on the bottom of a library.

But essentially, the idea is I have a thing, it's going away, I'm probably not seeing that thing anymore without some spell that helps me see that thing again. You can sacrifice a creature. In fact, you can sacrifice any permanent. a land, enchantment, a plainswalker, a battle, you can sacrifice any permit that's on the board. The most common thing to sacrifice would be creatures. All colors can sacrifice creatures to some extent, but they vary quite a bit. Black does a lot of creature sacrifice.

Red does some, green does a little less, blue does a little less than that, and white is more likely to sacrifice itself, meaning a creature that sacrifice itself versus sacrificing another creature. is sacrificing another creature. But that's another thing when you're talking about resources. The payments you can do can not just be for you the player, I mean, you the player are paying them,

but it also can be on an activation rather than a spell. So if it's on an activation rather than a spell, sometimes the sacrifice is the very creature that you're using. Oh, this creature has an ability, but in order to use the ability, you have to sacrifice the creature.

All colors can do that. All colors can have creatures that sacrifice themselves. White, for example, one of the differences in black and white is black is more likely to sacrifice others to help itself and white is more likely to sacrifice itself to help others. So white having sac effects on creatures that allow you to do things that are helping other creatures

is very in white. We're black is a lot more like, I'm a creature that sacrifices other creatures, but often I get better for that sacrifice. So as far as sacrificed creatures, right, that centers in black. Sacrificing artifacts and enchantments. That's something Black still can do.

Red probably slightly better at sacking non-creatures. In the last maybe five, ten years, we've sort of upped the amount of non-creature sacrifice that Red is doing. Black is still allowed to do some of it. Usually, in Black is sacrificing something that's not a creature, like Black's allowed to sacrifice any permanent. We do let Black do that. and red can sacrifice creatures,

but red is more likely to be the color that sacrifices non-creature specifically. And like I said, I guess any color can have some amount of non-creature sacrifice. It depends on sort of what and where. Black and red do the most sacrificing. In fact, black red as an archetype often sacrifices,

has a sacrifice theme. That's very common. Besides sacrificing something, you could also, I mean, you can, I would say, you can exile something. Really, exile normally is a more severe form of sacking because there's lots of ways to get things back from the graveyard and there's really not a lot of ways to get things back from exile. So exile is a little bit more of a permanent, as I will get to, the graveyard itself can be its own resource.

So if you sack something, you now still have a resource in your graveyard. If you exile it, we don't really let you spend your own exile as a cost. We let you spend your opponents a little bit, and I'll get to that. The one difference that exiling has from sacrificing is that sometimes we could exile for a while.

Like Champion is a good example. So Champion was a mechanic in original Lorwyn, where a creature would come into play, and the cost of playing that creature is you had to exile another creature are the same creature type as the creature with champion. You champion an elf or something.

And the idea is, as long as the champion creature is in play, the other creature is exiled. But if the champion creature ever goes away, you get the extra creature back. So the idea is we can use exiles at a cost that's a temporary cost, meaning while this creature's in play,

this is exiled. So if we want to do have a duration of something, we normally have that be exiled, not graveyard. We don't tend to do duration. It's not like put it in the graveyard, until. If we're going to do until, normally we use exile for that. So when I say you can exile as a cost, the one other thing exile it can do is you can add a duration to it. The most common

duration is while this other permanent is in play. That's the most common thing we do. If we do exile until, there has to be some sort of recognizable thing on the board that you understand that when this thing leaves, there's a duration, you understand what the duration is. In theory, by the way, we could, as an additional cost, you know, exile something until end of turn, exhale something for multiple turns. There are costs associated with that. We did, in fact, there's the suspend mechanic from Time Spiral Block where to get a cheaper cost, you have to basically suspend the card for a certain number of turns, meaning you're paying time. So we can use exile as a means to

sort of pay time out because you can exile for a durational period. The next thing you can do is you can, what we call bounce, meaning you could put a permanent back into your hand or technically back into its owner's hand. We don't let you put cards into your

hand that you don't own. So normally if we have you bounce something, it says return it to its owner's hand. Meaning if you've stolen something from your opponent and then you bounce it, it doesn't go to your hand. It goes to your opponent's hand. But anyway, one of the white and blue tend to have creatures that, as an additional cost to play them, you have to bounce another creature to your hand. So the idea is it's cheaper than normal, but you have to march the creature.

We also let green sometimes do bounce usually as an upkeep cost, meaning every turn you have to return something to your hand. But anyway, white, green and blue, we do let do bounce costs. and the idea is that it's just a way to get some extra it's a resource in the sense that this thing you'll not have to cast again. One of the things I will note about all these costs is that there are ways to turn the costs into more upside than downside. Obviously, bouncing something, you know, having to recast something

in general, that's a negative. You know, you're losing something that you have to recast. But let's say you have something with a strong enters effect. well, bouncing it might be advantageous to you. So sometimes some of these costs can be, you know, one of the fun things about magic is you can turn things to make what might be a negative into a positive.

So some of these costs like bounce can be a positive in the right situation. Yeah, I got to bounce a creature, but if I bunched a creature with a strong entrance effect, I get that entrance effect again. So that's where, while it's still a cost and a resource, it can be used advantageously. The other place that you can send something

is to a library in another zone. more often than not we tend so if I put it to the bottom of the library that's just basically exile with the exception of you have the potential to draw it again especially if you shuffle your deck or something

so it goes to your library it keeps you the reason we might do that is we don't want to give you the resource in the graveyard or we want you to have the potential to draw it again so there's three things you can do when you put it to the library which is you can put it on the top of a

the bottom of a library, you can shuffle it into the library. Or you could put it some number down. You can put it two down, three down, four down. You can control where it goes in the library or can be randomized it to the library. If you're doing top of a library or top few cards of a library, then you're delaying the spell.

It's like, well, I lose it for some amount of time. One of the things that's really common, well, we'll get to that in a second. So the idea of bouncing to the library is either I'm getting rid of it. if it's going to the bottom or shuffled in, or it's a delay, and I know I will get it back, but it'll take time for me to get it back.

One of the things about sending things to the library is... I'm not sure how... I know in Commander for a while, when things went to the Library, they didn't have a chance to go to the Commander's Zone. I think they'd change that rule, where they call tucking, where you take a commander and send it to someplace other than the Command Zone.

I'm not really up on whether... I know for a while, whenever went to the library, you didn't get a chance to put it to a commander, but they might have changed that. So I'm not sure. But anyway, there's a period of time where sending to the library kept them from being able to play it again

from the command zone. So that at one point was relevant. Okay. Sending things to other zones, though, is not the only other costs. A very common cost we can do, in fact, so common that we have a symbol for it, is tapping.

So tapping is another cost. And the idea is, This is very common. I mean, you can do a couple things. You can do it as an extra cost on a spell, like Conspire, which is a mechanic from Shadowmore, where you could copy the spell, but you had to tap two creatures that shared a color with the spell, for example.

And we have costs like crewing or station or, you know, there's different things we've done where part of the cost is tapping creatures. Sometimes it cares about the power of the creature tapped or some quality of the creature tapped. When tapping is involved, that can matter. It doesn't always matter. Obviously, there's a tap symbol. I mean, this extra cost is so frequent

that there's a symbol associated with it. So that's a sign that's used a lot. And when you tap something, there also could be a duration to the tap. You could tap something and then just untaps as normal. or you could tap something and it doesn't untapped until duration, much like the exile.

For example, old men in the seeds and old cards from Arabian Nights and it has an ability where it can steal something and you tap the creature to do that and as long as a creature remains tapped and you can choose not to untap it, you get to keep the creature. That the duration, for as long as you have this thing,

you must keep this thing tapped. So sometimes tapping can be used as a duration. Sometimes it's just a one-sharp. shot way of showing you sort of use the permit for the turn. The other reason we like to use the tap symbol is it keeps you from using something multiple times. That if a card has to tap, the card only, you know, if you have to tap this card to do it, and once you're in a tap state, you can't tap the card anymore.

It's a way to limit something to once per turn. And so that is pretty common. We also can have you add or remove counters, depending upon whether those counters are good or bad. Let's say you have plus one plus one counters. Well, removing them is... I mean, we definitely have some cards where we make you remove counters.

Most of the time, counters are beneficial to you. So normally when we have you removed counters, we consider that a cost. The one time we will add counters as a cost is something like a minus one, minus one counter where there's a downside to having the counter. So it could be as an additional cost of the spell, you have to put a minus one, minus one counter on something, for example.

that would be a cost. Mostly with counters, it's about having sets in which the counters matter for something. I know, for example, in Ferexia all will be one, we use oil counters. And oil counters, in a lot of ways, we're just used as a means to track resources. Another way, by the way, you can spend counters

is something like energy. I guess that's technically, that's not on the battlefield, but we can also give you the player counters that we then can make you use. So energy is a resource system where you can, you the player, get counters, and then there's things that let you spend with those counters.

And that's a good example of its own independent resource system, much like life is an independent resource system. Another thing you can do in play is you can have a threshold. and what that means is in order for me to get something something has to be true about the state of the board metalcraft was a mechanic from Scars Amiridon

and what Metalcraft said is if something is true then and that something was you have three or more artifacts on the battlefield your spells got stronger so this is I didn't know whether or not to include stuff like this

it's a resource in the sense that you, the player, have to actively make things happen. So that's why I put it on the list. The idea that, like, one of the things, for example, that definitely happens, morbid is a mechanic from original Innesrod that cares if something's died this turn.

Raid is a mechanic from Conjadarkir that cares if something's attacked this turn. There are definitely things that sort of reward you if something has happened. and they do require you, the player, to have to do something, and often that doing something might come at a cost for you. For example, with a raid, maybe I attack with a creature that I normally wouldn't want to attack with.

Maybe it's disadvantageous to attack with it, but I want to gain the benefit of it. So those can be thought of his resources. I mean, one of the thing about today that I should stress is what exactly is a resource and what is a benefit is hard to gauge, right? Is bouncing a creature a negative, a cost? Mostly it is, but there are times when there's a lot of upside to it.

For example, one of the ways we do costs talking about the battlefield is I can give something of mine to my opponent, for example. So that's another thing that I can do. I can give something away. I'm not putting it to another zone, but I'm giving it to my opponent. And so that can be a cost. that in order to do something, I have to give my opponent something. Maybe it's the creature that I'm activating. Maybe in order to cast a spell, I need to give them something.

But the interesting thing is there's stuff like Donate, where that's the effect. Donates a spell that makes you give something to your opponent. It's not an additional cost as much as it's an effect. And that's where this gets fuzzy. What's an effect? What's a cost is tricky. But the idea that I give my opponent something that is mine is definitely, I mean, there's a cost to that. Another thing that you can do instead of giving something that is yours is you can make resources that you give to them.

For example, you can give them a token or tokens. And the idea there is I'm generating something, but rather than I getting it, I'm giving it to my opponent. Thus, like there's a whole mechanic called gift in Bloomberg where in order to get an upgrade, I have to give something to my opponent. And that would seem like a negative. So, yeah, it's a resource, it's a cost. But in something like Commander or politics are a play, maybe giving my opponent something is beneficial to me. I'm now making an ally that will help me.

So once again, that's where resources and costs definitely get fuzzy. That one of the fun things about magic is trying to take things and adapt them and turn them in something that maybe you take something that's a negative and make it a positive. It's still spending resources. But anyway, just to bring that up. Okay, next, let's get to the hand. Okay, there's a couple things you can do from the hand. One is, and the most popular thing we have you do, is discard a card.

That means I take a card from my hand and I put it into the discard pile. That, once again, that could be a side of a thing on a spell. A creature could make me do that as an activation. Or I could have a cart in my hand that is part of using the card that makes me do that. Cycling, for example, is a mechanic where I have to discard the card my hand, but then, as a result of that, I get to draw a card. But the cards in your hand are resources. If you don't, you know, you get to use them.

And by discarding them, you're giving up this potential resource. So discarding is pretty popular. We also can do discard. So normally discard is to graveyard. We can have you discard to exile. Once again, that's just a little more severe version of discard, discard. Because you're not going to graveyard. Graveyard, as we'll get you in a second.

having cards in your graveyard can be a resource where exiling cards, the exile zone, there is a way, we'll get to exile in a sec, but the exile zone, there's not a lot of ways to make resources out of it. So normally exiling a card from your hand rather than discarding a card from your hand is more downside.

We also can have you put that card on the library. Once again, top of the library, bottom of a library, shuffled into the library. So top of the library, one of the tricks we've learned is if we want to make the opponent give up a draw. One of the neat ways to do that is to put some number of cards from your hand on top of your library. So let's say we put one card on top of the library. Probably what happens is you look at your hand.

You'll pick something you probably can't cast this turn. And then on your next turn, you'll draw the card back. So what's really going on is it's not so much you're losing the card because you probably put a card you couldn't cast anyway. but instead of drawing a new card, you're drawing that card. So it's a neat way for us to sort of spend future draws as a cost. Now, we can't also just say you can spend draws. That's something you can do. But it's a little bit cleaner and easier and there's less memory to it.

We just put a card from your hand on top of your library. We also put your card on the bottom of your library. That's a lot like discarding and are shuffled in. Shuffled in is nice in that, at least psychologically, you have the feeling that you can get it back. That's why, for example, omen cards, after you cast the omen, you could shuffle the card in because we want you to have the dream of drawing the dragon again, and so shuffling in can do that. The other thing that you can do from your hand, that's kind of unique from your hand, is reveal. And the idea is your hand is hidden information, and that hidden information itself can be a cost.

So the idea is sometimes we want you to do something and the cost of having to do it is the idea is to reveal it from your hand. Now there's two interesting things about that cost. One is there's actually some cost of losing the hidden information. I have something, now I have to show it to you, now it's not a surprise that I have that. And you, my opponent or opponents,

can play around the fact that you know that. The other thing that is interesting about reveal from hand is you have to have it in your hand. And some of these costs, the interesting thing about costs is sometimes the cost are more in the moment and sometimes they're more deck building. For example, if I have a reveal cost of my deck,

one of the things I have to think about is my ass fan of my cards that I'm playing with. Oh, well, if I really want to make sure that I can reveal a goblin to you, I probably have to have a lot of goblins. Otherwise, it's hard to know that when I need to reveal a goblin, I have a goblin.

But at a certain threshold in my deck, a certain as fan in my deck, I increase my ability to have that happen. So once again, reveals the cost that's a little more of a deck building cost than in the moment costs. I mean, you are revealing information, so that means something.

But in order to sort of meet that cost, and that's one of the interesting things about a lot of these things is a lot of these resource things, some of which work naturally in the game, I'm going to have cards in my hand to sacrifice, I'm going to have life to spend, but I can't build around that.

I could put life game in my deck, so I have more ways to gain life, that meaning I have more ways to spend life. You can build around these costs, And that's a lot of the fun of the additional costs is they're made such that you can't build around them. Okay, let's get to the graveyard. So in the graveyard, you can do a couple things.

First and foremost, you can exile cars from your graveyard. The idea of your graveyard as a resource is a pretty popular thing. We have whole mechanics, like escape from Theris Beyond Deaths, or collect evidence from murders or perils of manner. The idea that I have things to make graveyard and that's a resource, delve, dredge, you know, the graveyard is a resource, there's something very valuable. And so one of the things that's fun is things naturally go to your graveyard.

So we want to make sure that you can chew and eat it up. The other thing that you can do is you can remove cards from your library, sorry, from a graveyard to the cost, but instead of them going to exile, they can go to your library. We call that restocking in R&D lingo. Usually when you restock, it goes to the bottom of a library because there's no utility to that, or there's less utility to that. It's now back in your deck.

So if you have the means to search your, if you have a tutor or something, maybe you can now have access to it. If I put it on top of a library, I mean, technically we can argue that's a resource, but really that's more advantageous because you get to draw it. So, I mean, we also could say technically

you can take cards from your graveyard and put them in your hand. It's hard not to see that as gaining resources than spending resources. So I didn't really list it as a resource, although technically a card could make you do that. We're more likely to make it to do as an effect than as a cost. But it is something, I mean, that is something that you can do. Also, there are thresholds that can go on in the discard pile. The most common threshold is threshold, which is having, seven or more cards in your discard pile, much like threshold states on the board, you know,

sometimes it makes you work extra hard to get there. Threshold in the graveyard is interesting in that you'll naturally tend to get there overtime. Spells go to the graveyard, creatures die to the graveyard. Like eventually you'll get stuff in your graveyard. But you can do things like spend discard to speed them up. And that's another interesting thing is how some resources can fuel other resources. Discarding is a resource. But discarding does add things to my graveyard. Sacrificing is a resource, but sacrificing does add things to my graveyard. So there are means in which I can spend one cost and then help pay another cost. Okay, next up is the library. The main way we spend stuff from your library is milling.

Milling usually means you take a card or more from your library and put them into your discard pile. The idea being, mostly the issue of milling is you lose the game if you're unable to draw a a card in your library. So the idea, if you spend enough milling, it can cost you the game. You can lose by milling too much. We haven't done a lot with milling as a cost. We've done a little bit. And sometimes we use milling as a cost.

We tend to use a bunch more cards, like mill 10 cards or something. Technically, you can do exile rather than mill. If you want to keep the cards out of the graveyard, you can do exile. The keyword mill sends them to the graveyard. Most of the time, we're milling, but you can't exile them. Also, technically, you can draw a card. That's not really seen as a resource. Mostly, I guess, letting your opponent draw a card is more seen as, like, a lot of the things that are, like, for example, if I say to my opponent, you may put a card in your graveyard into your hand, that can be seen as a cost.

We're putting a card in my hand is not. Saying to my opponent, you can draw a card, is seen as a resource where me drawing a card is not. Normally, I, the player, if I'm gaining benefit from it, and once again, as I said, this does get fun. fuzzy. But if I'm getting benefit from it, like it's hard to call drawing a resource. You know, it's additional cost to cast a spell, you must draw a card. We could do that. It's not,

but it's hard to argue that it's really a resource since you're kind of gaining, you're gaining something. The last zone to really, that you really can spend from, and we don't do much from this, is the exile zone. The normal way you spend to the

exile zone is not that you remove things from exile as a cost for yourself, but you remove your opponent's cards in exile and put them into their graveyard, meaning you are turning them from cards they don't have access to to cards that maybe they have access to. We did this, the processors in Battle for Zendakar. So you can, and the one other thing we can do in exile

is we can do threshold things in exile. You are a lot of count things in exile. And so we don't do this a lot, but we could have something where, oh, a certain conditions are met in threshold, then you can, you know, you can, that meets some cost. Okay, there are a few miscellaneous. So first and foremost, I mentioned this along the way, but just reminding, anything that could be a benefit for you, if instead you do that for your opponent, I give my opponent life. I let my opponent draw cards. I give my opponent permanence. I give my

opponent permanence, which could be tokened or given for my own permanence. I let my opponent get things back from the graveyard. I let my opponent get things back from exile. You know, anything in which I'm doing something that normally would be considered sort of a gain for me, and the cost of doing something is letting my opponent do that, that can be done as a resource. So, granting opponent things that would be beneficial can be seen as a resource. Although, once again, as I mentioned when I was talking about gift from Bloomberg, in a game like Commander, where there's politics involved,

oftentimes giving up something for the opponent can be a benefit for you if it allows you to sort of give political gifts to other people as a means to ask for favors. So even that isn't necessarily a cost, but I'll call it a, I will call it a resource in the sense

that on average you're giving something up. The one other thing that we have played around with is giving up something that is non-tangible. The most common thing there is giving up a turn, a step, a phase. Like, Cronatog is one of the A-Tog cycle. He's from, I think he's from Stronghold. Anyway, he gives up a turn, meaning in order to untap him,

or in order to make him bigger, he eats turns. He's a chronotog. He's time. So we can definitely do... I already talked about you giving up like untaps, for example. You could skip your untapped step, which means your things don't untape. You could give up your combat so you can't attack.

You could give up your draw steps so you don't draw. Anything in which there's value to you, you could give that up. So that can be a cost. It's not a cost we do a lot. Likewise, you could give your opponent a turn that's kind of like giving up a turn, although in multiplayer it plays out a little bit differently.

So there is definitely that. The one zone I didn't talk about just real quickly is the stack. So the zones are, you have stuff in your hand on the battlefield, in your graveyard, in exile, or in your library. And the one other zone, not counting silly unzones, is the stack. I guess technically you could give up things on the stack. Um, we don't tend to reference the stack, so that's not super easy for us to do. Um, but in, in theory, I could counter my own spell as a means to get an upgrade for something. So I, I, in theory, could use the stack at the pay a cost.

It's not super easy to do that. Um, I'm being kind of theoretical here. Um, and the interesting thing about this, I'm almost at work, so we'll wrap up here is, anything is fair game that we can spend any cost that we can come up with. So, and like with energy, like one of the things, like, for example, we can make something up and give it to you and then let you spend it. Energy being one example, but also like the paw prints from Bloomberg. There's a cycle of rairs that give you so many paw prints, and then you can spend them to do something. You can think of that as a resource. We definitely have

have sort of modal spells where we let you have choices. In some theories, that is a resource. And we can, like with energy or the pop prints, we can just make things up and give them to you and then say that has value to it. Some things inherently like tokens, creature tokens are creatures and you can use them as you would use any creature. You can sacrifice them or attack with them and such. Or we also sometimes give you like clues or treasure or food. Now those are artifacts so you

could sack them as an artifact or they come built in with the ability to sack themselves to generate something. But we can invent whatever we want and we can make new things. We could make, like, we can invent our own resource that we let you spend. Most of the time, as I talked about

today, is trying to make you take advantage of things already inherently in the game. Now that we can't make up new things, energy worked just fine, but it's nice when you can sort of take the existing game components and make them resources. So anyway, that, I think, was a pretty thorough look. I'm sure I forgot something. One of the things I do when I'm doing a thing like this is I'll, you know, I'm getting ready.

I will go through and I will take a sheet of paper and just outline making sure I'm hitting everything. And today's one of those things like, okay, what can we do in play? what can we do? What can we do in the battlefield? What can we do in the graveyard? So I think I made a pretty exhaustive lift. I'm sure I forgot something.

Somebody can go, oh, this one time, this one thing, we gave up this, and I didn't remember. But anyway, resources are a very valuable tool for us. Manna is very flexible and very, I mean, a great costing system. But one of the neat things about magic is that there's just other resources available and that it just gives us the designers, more nuance, which gives you the players, more choices. And that

is just a lot of fun, and there's a lot of neat decisions to make. Like, one of the challenges in general with the cost is is it something that means something? Is it something people want to do? It's also fun sometimes making costs that you can circumvent. We do that all the time. Stuff like Bounce is really fun for things like that.

But anyway, it is a great... Ironically, resources are, for R&D, are resource we can use when designing the game. So I hope today was a good look at all the different resources, and I hope you enjoyed it. But as out now at work, we all know what that means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking to magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.