Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1304: Upkeep

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

In this podcast, I call the upkeep step the appendix of Magic. Why? Listen in as I talk all about the origin and history of upkeep.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is an interesting one. I'm going to talk about upkeep. So where this came about is a conversation I had on my blog where I talked about that I don't know if upkeep is needed anymore. So a number of years ago, I wrote an article called Starting Over.

Now, be clear, I wrote two different articles called Starting Over. one of them was about Mulligans. That's not the one I'm talking about. But I wrote an article that was kind of done as a short story where I go back in time and I meet Richard Garfield and I tell him things he could change if he's starting over. The idea was, if we had magic to do over again, there are some things we would do differently.

I did a podcast number 202. So a while back, I did a podcast on this. But I don't think during that whole conversation, I even talked about Upkeep. So today is more than you ever wanted to know about the upkeep step. And me kind of diving into why I think it is the appendix of magic. Let me explain that metaphor. So I think science is believed that the appendix used to have some important function,

but I don't believe it has an important function anymore. And mostly people have to get removed and stuff. But it doesn't really serve the body. I mean, once upon a time it did. But it doesn't really serve the body. So that is my metaphor of it. of upkeep. I think it's served a purpose once upon a time. But there's so many cards that care about it. Once again, when I always talk about starting over, it's, there's a lot of things that

because of inertia, we won't change. Like magic's been played that way. A lot of cards were made to use that. So it's hard for us to sort of change how it works. That starting over is this premise, like if we had the game to start over, you know, there are things we would do differently from the beginning. That's not that we will change them now. I don't think upkeep's going anywhere. although I we said essentially in new car design really really don't use the upkeep much and we'll get into that today

okay so let's go back to early magic to alpha so in the alpha rule book when it says turn order this is how describes this describes the turn order you untape then you have upkeep then you draw then you have main then you have discard and then you have

end. Those are the six orders. Now eventually what would happen is six edition rules would happen, and six edition rules would start turning things into phases and steps. So the current magic sort of thing is there is five phases.

There's a beginning phase. During the beginning phase, you have the untapped step, the upkeep step, and the draw step. So it keeps those elements of early magic. Then there's the first main phase, and during that you can play land, you can cast spells and creatures. Then there's the combat phase. That's when you attack. You declare attackers, or opponents, declare blockers. And combat happens, and your combat damage happens. Then you have your second main phase, which is just like the first main phase, except it happens after combat. There's reasons why sometimes you want to do things after combat. Then there's the end phase. The end phase has the end step and the cleanup step.

basically there's effects that happen in the end of the turn that'll happen then or things that stop happening the end of turn cleanup is when any damage creature takes goes away obviously you have to do enough damage to destroy a creature during the turn so if there's not enough damage the damage gets cleared so I think so let's go back a little bit I want to talk about early magic because I want to understand or understand I want to explain why

why upkeep existed in the first place and why originally it was actually a pretty important thing. So let's go way back to Alpha, shall we? Okay, so Richard was making the game, and one of the things that's really hard to understand is magic, so many games of Magic have been played. I mean, you know, magic is, it's now, as I've recorded, this is 2006, so Magic is in its 34th year,

I guess, officially this summer, but, so magic, A lot of magic has been played. I mean, a lot, a lot of magic has been played. So there's a lot of things that have been figured out through just, you know, trial and error. When you're making a game, you do some playtesting. It's not that you don't have some idea what your game is, but it's, it is hard to get the rigor in, you know, for example, I talk this all the time. When we playtest, when play design sort of goes through playtesting, you know, play designer has 10-ish people and they play a lot, but the first like five seconds of a set being released,

more magic gets played than the entirety of your first minute, then the entirety of all that play design is done. Because there's millions of players that play a lot of things. And so, you know, when you first make a game, and remember, magic is way more complex than the average game. That there's all, you know, you're not even playing with all the pieces, right? That if you play, you're playing with some of the pieces. And so even just in Alpha, just with, how many,

Alpha had 200 something, 200, I think it was 298 in Alpha, and then it was slightly over 300. Alpha forgot to print Circle Protection Black and volcanic island. And then they also added in one more in beta. They added one more picture of each basic land to get above 300. So I think it was, or maybe it was like 295 enough. It was a little bit below 300. The fact that they had to add the basic land says it was a little bit,

least, and it wasn't exactly 300 after. So my guess it was like $2.95 and alpha. But the combinatorics of $2.95 is still if you played every, let's say you only stuck to 60 card decks and you used a

four of rule, which didn't exist at the time. Let's say used a four of rule. Or actually, forget the four of rule. Let's assume it's solid, you're just using one card per. And you're using 295 cards. and you're making exactly 60 card decks. If I wanted to play a game with every possible combination,

so 295 cards, 60 card decks, one of each card. If you have four of each card, the commentary is getting bigger. Just one of each card. It's a single thing. One of each card. How many games would you have to play where between the two decks you have sampled every deck there is a sample? And the answer is

it's a giant number in your lifetime couldn't do it. If you started when you were a child and you lived to 100 and you played magic nonsense, all you did, other than maybe ate while you played and then you slept.

For your entire life, for like 100 years, let's say you started at 5 and lived to 105 and you did nothing but play magic. Every waking moment you wouldn't even like make a tiny dent in the number of decks that exist just with the 295 cards in Alpha. That's the combinatorics.

There's a lot of decks. So just playing everything is impossible. And so a lot of what happens is you sort of, you sort of make shorthands for what you think is working. And in Alpha, they did not have millions of players playing to give them feedback. We have a lot of data. Like when we make stuff now, we have 30 plus years of, debt. Not only has R&D made the game for 30 years, but we've watched people play the game for

30 years plus years. So we've learned a lot. So when Richard was making alpha, I think one of the things you do a lot is what we call theory crafting, which means, like, there's only so much you can play. So at some point, you have to sort of hypothesize things. And so when they were thinking about creatures, the way they thought about creatures is, oh, this is the one thing in the game that's repeatable, right? I mean, there were a few artifacts, a few enchantments that stuck around, obviously. But as far as the thing that's the most repeatable, like, I play a creature, it doesn't go away. I can attack with it every turn, and every time I deal damage to you, your light total goes down. And the wind condition is life, right? And so in the theory crafting

of creatures, they kind of assumed that creatures were a little more powerful than they were. It turns out that while creatures are powerful and a repeatable source of damage, there's a lot in the game to deal with creatures. There's a lot of answers to creatures. A, you have your own creatures that can interact with the creatures. B, there's kill spells. There's a lot of answers to creatures. And so while creatures are powerful, they didn't quite understand that creatures have a lot of vulnerabilities in that they can be destroyed. And there's our answers to them.

And so I think in Alpha, they just overestimated how powerful creatures are. And they underestimated how powerful spells are. And I want to stress, this is not remotely a knock against the Alpha Playtefters. What we're talking about is insanely hard to understand. And I only understand it because I've been making magic for 30 years. And I've been watching the top of the top pro players play. Like there's a lot we've learned because of all this time. because of that

I mean one of the things about Alpha looking back and once again this is not a knock again and this is very very hard and the other thing to remember is Richard did not design the game to be like a tournament game that is what sort of magic became

was not the original vision the original vision was this was a normal game that people would play in their at their kitchen tables and that yeah this is going to be variance variance is fun but each person wouldn't only have so many cards like the idea that people would

go acquire exactly whatever card they want. You know, in Richard's version of it, the game was like, well, your friends have some cards. You can trade with your friend, but if you want to find particular card, you've got to find someone who has that card and get them to trade it with you. That's not inherently easy to do. And so this idea that you just would have optimized deck, that's not really how the game was built. And Richard did understand that certain cards are better than other cards, but rarity,

in that system, rarity matters a lot. You know, if I have a rare card, well, like, it's not that easy to get a rare card. Maybe I have one of them, you know, or if I want to trade for it, it's not easy to find. So, like, the idea was it was a different, the meta game that was being structured was very different. So that's also important to understand that what magic was sort of designed to be, and what magic became and what magic became. And nobody, no one can, you cannot design a game to be the phenomenon that magic became. No one can imagine that's what's going to happen. It's just, it's beyond believing.

So you don't plan for that. Anyway, my point is they really thought that creatures were sort of more powerful than they were. And so they felt they really needed an answer to help address how powerful creatures were. And so the idea was,

well, if we want to make powerful creatures, we really need a system, a balance, a check for powerful creatures. And that is what upkeep was made to be originally. the idea is, oh, I can have a Lord of the Pit but, you know, there's a cost. Now, Lord of the kids' upkeep costs required you just sack a creature.

The most often upkeep cost was mana, like force in nature made you pay for green mana. But the idea essentially is, oh, well, these creatures are big and powerful, but they require a constant, you have to upkeep them, essentially, right? And so the idea was that upkeep was this important balancing system. Like how are we going to keep creatures in check? Okay, if we want to keep creatures in check,

well, we really need to make sure that there's some way by which we have knobs on them or more knobs. And that's why upkeep was created originally. I think that there's a lot of, like, the logic behind it was pretty sound. If you honestly believe that creatures are going to be a problem to balance, you want to sort of mix in a tool to help you balance them. And the idea really was, because Richard understood in his heart that you needed to make big, exciting monsters, that you wanted creatures that were just big and exciting.

He understood that. And the idea was that, you know, in order to make sure we do that, he just wanted... And I think what happened is, like I said, Richard didn't quite understand the vulnerability of creatures. And just, like, one of the, so one of the things that happened early magic for those that might not be aware is in like 94, 95, where magic is really starting to come into zone. Like, the game comes out in 93. And for the first year in 93, there weren't a lot of tournaments because no one could get their hands on cards.

I think the first event I ever went to was, I think I went to one event 93, very poorly planned. and mostly just hey, just, hey, magic players come and play with each other. It wasn't like a structured event or anything. And then I remember the first kind of like tournament I played in, I played in, I went

to Westwood, which is where UCLA is. And on campus, they were having a tournament. And I will never forget this. So I sit down and my opponent has a deck. This might sound like I'm exaggerating. I swear I'm not.

His deck was like a foot and a half high. It was this giant deck. It felt like he just had every card he owned in his deck. And he called it his Leviathan deck. And then I thought he called it that because it was so big. No, no, no, no. Within that foot and a half worth of cards, he had exactly one Leviathan.

Leviathan is a card. That's early magic. talking upkeep. It has a crazy upkeep cost, and you have to like sack lands and attack with it. It's not a good creature. He managed to get it out and kill me with it. So that was quite the game. I had some problems. When you lose to a Leviathan, that's the sign that you had some problems. Anyway, early magic did not have a lot of organizational stuff. It wasn't until really 94. Like the summer 90s, It's the first big event. That's a U.S. nationals happen.

And then the first world championship was also in 94. And early magic, you just didn't play creatures. Like, the strategic thing to do, and the reason you didn't play creatures was creatures just in balance weren't very good. Like, one of the stats I say is if you take alpha and you ignore stuff like reserve list or color pie violations, or things that we just wouldn't print today, not for power level, but for other reasons. If it's just power level, I don't think there's a card in Alpha

we can't print today because of power level. There's one or two cards like Lano where elves that like, you know, okay, it's a little bit warping standard. Obviously, it's currently in standard, so we can't print in standard. So, I mean, I think there is no creature that for power level reasons that you can't print today.

Whereas there's infinite spells and artifacts and enchantments, all sorts of other cards. There's all sorts of non-creatures from Alpha that you couldn't remotely from a power level standpoint and print today. And so early magic, there's a period in magic where you just, it was insane to play creature. It was after Legends came out. There was a card called the Abyss in Legends.

And the Abyss every turn made someone to sacrifice a creature. It wasn't just the abyss, but the abyss played a big role. But anyway, there was a period in time where in Constructed Magic you weren't supposed to play creatures. Now, I played a creature deck because I'm a rebel. I played my little blue-green weenie deck. This is the deck I played in 94 Nationals. I published this online.

It basically was like script spites and flying man and then unstable mutations and giant growths and berserk and regrowth and basically it's just like I'm going to play a night birds of paradise and concurrent crossroads. I'm basically going to play little things that produce mana, Lenore elves. And then one of those little things,

things that produces mana or my little one-one flyers are going to turn into this giant thing that's going to kill you very quick. The deck actually had technically had a turn to one kill, although that was like theoretically possible, it never happened. Although I would often kill in turns two and three. The deck did, it was very a fact. I played that deck by the way in 94 nationals. Now 94 national, not nationals. I did play, I maybe played in the world championship. I went to, it was in Milwaukee at Gen Con that year. I played in the world championship. It was single elimination. And so I think I won two or three rounds.

Then I met someone whose deck was made to beat my deck, and I lost to them. Nowadays, I think that deck in a round Robin actually, it was many game pretty interestingly. And I had concordant cross swords to deal. Anyway, okay. So, so there's a point in time

where creatures are just misunderstood. And so Upkeep existed as a means to sort of of be this additional cost, this guideline. But essentially what happens is, as we start working with it, like one of the, like, so I, Magic comes out in 93. I'm freelancing in 94 and parts of 95.

And in the October of 95, I start working at Wizards. And that is the beginning of, I did a podcast in this. So there's sort of like the first wave of R&D, which is mostly Richard and a lot of the alpha play textures, Scafellius, Jim Lynn. Dave Petty, Charlie Catino is in between first and second wave. But the second wave is me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, William Jockish, eventually Henry Stern. And a lot of our job was, okay, we now understand what magic has become. Like I said, Richard didn't design magic for what it became because no way he could have known that.

But now we're sort of, we have the new wave taking over running Magic R&D. And we understand what magic becomes. We've seen what magic became. And so a lot of what we do is start to sort of institute things. It's during this group's reign, we start doing magic for limited. We start cleaning up the rules. I start cleaning up the color pie. Like we start sort of saying, hey, if this game is going to be what it is, not what

originally was imagined to be, but what it became, there's just things we have to clean up. And one of the things we realized very early on that we needed to clean up was, We needed to make creatures better. And one of the interesting things, by the way, about that real quickly is we have spent years making creatures better. Like we started back in 95 making creatures better, and we kept not making them good enough. They kept being able to be better. We spent decades in proving creatures. But one of the things that we quickly realized was we didn't really have a great need for upkeep.

like creatures like if you really needed a creature to cost more okay have a higher mana cost maybe there's some costs when you cast it like upkeep had two problems one is the creatures were kind of weak anyway and so just having upkeep wasn't necessary

another thing was there's a memory issue of upkeep which is I just got to remember every turn to do this thing now there's a side effect of not doing it and the side effect of not doing it is you lose the creature. So, I mean, there's some incentive to remember to do it, but it's very easy, especially if the upkeep is, like, if the upkeep's a giant cost, you just never play the creature. And if the upkeep's a small cost, it's easy to forget to do the upkeep.

So we really, really move away from doing upkeep. I mean, if you sort of look at the game, early Alpha had infinite cards with upkeep, right? I mean, a lot. In fact, in Ice Age, they made cumulative upkeep. Let's do a, let's do a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a very interesting upkeep. So cumulative upkeep is upkeep where, let's say it costs one. Then on the extra you pay two. You pay an additional one. Then three, then four. It just

the cost keeps going up by whatever the so if it's blue, then it's blue-blue, then it's blue-blue. It keeps going up by that cost every... So cumulative upkeep is like upkeep, but even more serious. And so we mostly figured out that we didn't need it. Now, another interesting thing is when Richard made upkeep, mostly it was like, hey,

I have creatures that you have to upkeep. It's a cost. And we want to make that to remind you to upkeep them. And so the cleanest way to do that was, well, that has to be a real repercussion. And the repercussion was a big repercussion. He lost the creature. But Richard wanted to be clear,

like, in tournaments, the worry was, or not tournaments, because I don't think of a game play. But it's just in gameplay. I think Richard wanted to be clear, when did I not pay the upkeep? Right? If I have to pay for my lord of the pit, if I don't do that,

he just wanted to be clear that, you know, that, okay, you haven't paid the upkeep. So the reason upkeep was stuff before draw was drawing a card was a clean, like you've got to remember to do it before you draw a card. That's the time. And if someone draws the card, that's the sign they didn't pay the upkeep. Because if you had done upkeep after draw, you know, how do you know when main face?

It becomes, like you wait for them to cast a spell. Like it's a little fuzzier. But if the upkeep was before drawing a card, you had a clean, easy way to tell that's when upkeep happened. So the idea is if I have a creature with upkeep and I draw a card, and I haven't paid the upkeep yet, well, I lose my creature. Like, it's clear what happens. The problem, though, is, like, sort of long term is we do want spells that every turn do something, right? There are cards and effects you want to do. It says, hey, every turn do something.

But what we've learned over time is we actually prefer you having the knowledge of the draw. I mean, the reason I think Richard Port upkeep for draw was because the upkeep case in early days was, here's the cost you have to pay if you don't cost it. There's a ramification for it. So let's use draw as a reminder that you haven't done it. But nowadays, it's more like we have effects that are cool effects. We just want to have happen every turn. It's not a cost to keep it around as much as is this just cool thing happens.

And we would rather you have the information about. your draw before you do it. The perfect example here is sagas. Sorry, let me take it at me. I've not been talking. I've been off for a little bit. My throat's getting sore. Let me take a quick trick.

Got to build my throat muscles up to talking. I'm going to drive to work. So we want you to sort of have information. So when you're doing sagas, okay, a cool thing's going to happen. Well, we would rather you sort of know what's going on in your hand when you have the saga.

So we could have put Saiga up I mean, upkeep literally is a thing built into the game to say, well, for things that happen every turn, but we constantly didn't do that. We constantly put it at the beginning of main phase because we wanted you to have the information. And, you know, you'll notice that more and more, like, we have discovered that if we're going to make you do something every turn, it's better gameplay if before it happens, we let you in on what's going on this turn. It's a lot less fun to go, well, depending on what I draw, I might change things.

You didn't have to do calculations. It just makes more thinking, right? If I do it before I draw, now I got to map out all the different possibilities that could happen based on what I draw. Or I can just let you draw it first, and then you have that knowledge, and it just makes the decisions easier. It's not better gameplay if you don't have the knowledge. It just makes you think more. And one of the things we're constantly looking at in gameplay is where are the situations, that we're without need making you sort of what we would call tink, right?

Like, where are we making decision points that we don't need to make decision points? Decision points are great. We want to have them, but we want them to use them in the right place. What we don't want to do is make turns take extra long because we just made it take extra long. Like, if you have an effect that matters and you haven't drawn yet, the correct thing to do is to walk through the different scenarios and go, well, if I draw a card A, B, or C, I want to do this.

If I draw a D, or F, I want to do that. Or if I draw a land, I want to do this. Okay, what's the most likely scenario of the things I've talked about? And go, oh, well, I guess it's this. So probably I should do that. And then if you draw the other thing, like, I just, I played the odds, but, you know. And so that's when we've sort of moved. That we kind of realized that beginning a main phase for repeatable effects

is just cleaner. It's simpler. It makes the game go smoother. And so what's happened over time is, like, upkeep has this function, but its timing isn't quite what we want. And so over time, we've sort of moved away. In fact, when we make little beginner guides for people about here's the turn order, the shortest version of it doesn't even list upkeep. It's just not worth teaching players in the very beginning because we don't really use upkeep in new card designs. So in the game, they're going to learn how to play, whatever the starter game they're playing,

that kind of upkeep costs. So it's not something they have to worry about. So the interesting question is, I'm almost to work here, if we had it to do again, would we have upkeep, but move it? Should upkeep exist, but have upkeep happen after draw? Should it be un-tap, draw upkeep? Like, is it good for the game to have a dedicated time when decisions get? get made. And that, to me, is an interesting thing. It is interesting to the idea of, here's the point in time you make decisions. The big question is, is it necessary? One of the

ongoing things we're constantly thinking about is, you know, I talk about the barrier to entry, right? We have to teach you how to play magic. And the more things we have to teach you, you just the harder it is to play magic. Now, as I said, sometimes we just don't teach you things. And maybe we don't have to teach you upkeep regardless of where it is. But a lot of what we learn is kind of the less phases, you know, the less steps, the less things we can have that we don't have to teach you the better. And I'm just not sure upkeep is worthy of having its own special step that we have to tell you about. That's the reality is, is it worth it? You know, is it something that, I mean, one of the things is we're constantly adding things to magic.

Why? Because we keep trying new things, and some of them work, and some of them are really cool, and some just make the game better. And then we make those a staple part. They're not always Evergreen. Sometimes they're deciduous, and we use them when we need to. But the point is, magic keeps adding things. And so one of the things that's important is we really have to constantly say to ourselves, are there things we just don't need? And I think upkeep's in this weird space where there's enough cards that care

about it that's hard to get rid of it. But we really, like, we do not teach you upkeep when we teach you how to play magic. It's kind of there. At some point, if you get old cards that care, okay, you'll have to learn about it. But it's just one of those things

of, like, if we had to do magic all over again, one of the things to me that, that, the, driving force of redoing magic, I mean, we're not redoing magic, but if we, of the thought experiment is we want as few of things as possible, because there's so much, there's so much cool things we want. It's, there's really this exercise of what don't we need? Like, what can magic exist?

And the reality is, if I just tell you at the beginning of your main phase do something, you'll do the beginning of your main phase. Like, it doesn't need, you know, I mean, the reason upkeep had a time and a place was it was a cost mechanism that Richard wanted to be very clear about. And with time, we kind of learn we just don't need it. Like I said, it is the appendix of magic. And that

it's the thing that had a function once upon a time that really doesn't have a function. And the one thing that's really interesting, like one of the things about Commander being a popular format is old cards get played. Like when I talk about something not being true, well, something is not true

now in current magic and one of the things that we are constantly doing is we are constantly trying to make the best version of magic we can. We're not ignoring things that exist as I've mentioned this before. One of the challenging things about

Commander is it's a format on some level defined by our mistakes like, you know, because oh we made a card, we'll never make that cardigan because of a mistake, so that's the only card that does that. So now rather than have a different card to do that, well, that's the only card that does it, because we don't think we should do it.

And so, a lot of what we're trying to do is sort of look forward and understand where the cleanliness... Like, a lot of game design boils down to... And then this is true of any art. I mean, my background before I did game design was a writing. And so much of writing is you write something,

and then when you rewrite, you keep asking yourself, do I need this? I mean, you occasionally... add things when you write. It's not that you never add things, but you mostly take things away when you rewrite. That editing usually is about can I get across what I'm doing now with less? And then that is true of game design. It's like, can I have less? You know, whenever, like, one of the things about making a new game is, you know, really figuring out what you need and what you don't need. And like I said, magic has so many component pieces to it. And there's a lot of things that are completely. but they add a lot of value to them. And so, do I want them? Yes, I do. Up gives a really interesting thing where there's definitely complexity there.

There's definitely, like, design space there. But one of the things that we talk, I talk a lot about, is what I call practical design space. And what that means is there's a lot of theoretical design space, right? There's a lot of things you could do. The game could do this. But the difference between theoretical design space and practical design space is, is what is actually good for the game, what will make the game fun. And there's a lot of theoretical space that's not practical space.

And upkeep squarely falls in that. I'm not saying there's zero use of upkeep that could be good. It's not zero. But we've learned over the years that it's not high. And there's a lot of things that we do in upkeep. We really don't need upkeep to do. I don't really think we need it as the additional costing mechanism. that Richard really built it to be.

That we don't need. Do we want reoccurring effects? Yeah, we do. Do they want to happen then? Mostly no. Do we need a whole step named for them? No, we don't. So that's mostly my talk today.

So the real question is, do we need upkeep? And the answer is, no. I don't think we do need upkeep. If I had magic to do again, I don't think I would put upkeep in the game. We're not getting rid of it. Upkeep's not going away. Are we de-emphasizing it?

We have. Like I said, I think if you learn to play magic, I don't know if we even tell you Upkeep's a step right away, just because it just doesn't come up or matter for any recent cards. Yeah, you have to learn eventually because if you're playing a format

like commander that is old cards, you will run across it eventually. So it is something you have to learn. Anyway, that is my thoughts on Upkeep. I hope... One of the things I like to do with my podcast is just sort of reminisce and think about things and talk things through.

And on my podcast, I talked about how I didn't think Upkeep, if I had to do again, I wanted to do Upkeep. and people are like, why? I'm like, oh, let me just do a podcast. It's the kind of thing that if I have 30 minutes to talk about, I can explain it, but trying to answer on my blog is just be a complex, you know, it's very complex to do in a little answer. So, anyway, guys, that is my thoughts on Upkeep. So anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see y'all next time.

Bye-bye.