Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1309: Subgames

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

In this podcast, I talk about a very narrow type of design: Magic cards that interrupt the game and initiate a subgame.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, today is subgame day. So subgames, I'm going to talk about something that doesn't exist on very many cards. I think technically there are four cards that have subgames and a fifth card that's kind of an honorary subgame card, which I'll talk about. So today we're talking about what subgames are, why they came up, why we keep making them. but did everything you ever want us to know about sub-games?

And do I have 30 minutes of topics on sub-games? Well, obviously, if you're listening to this, they do. But I, as I'm recording this, do not know whether or not you'll hear this because I don't know if I have 30 minutes on sub-games, but I'm going to try. Once you start getting into the 1,200-plus, I'm very eager on trying new topics I've never done before. So sometimes I pick things that I don't know if I have 30 minutes,

but I'm going to give it my best effort. Okay, so let's start with the granddaddy of sub-games. Let me first describe what a sub-game is. What a sub-game is, is you stop playing the current game of magic you are playing. Usually you use, so far on every card, you use your library. You leave that game aside. Then you take your library and go start a brand new game with your library. And then usually, or at least on all the cards we made so far,

The winner of the subgame earns something in the main game, something that'll help them in the main game. That is the general idea, that you're going to stop playing the current game of magic and play this little pocket game of magic, and then when you're finished with that, come back. Now, designing subgames, so basically, I've designed all the subgames, save the very first one, which Richard Garfield did, but we'll get to that in a second. I'm a huge fan of subgames. I like subgames. they're fun. They, as we'll discuss today, pretty much fall into un territory.

In fact, other than Shahrazad in Arabian Nights, all of them, all the sub-games show up in... They all show up in Unset. That's where they show up. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning. Let's talk to Shaharazade. Because I think when Richard made the sub-game,

he wasn't trying to invent a brand new thing as much as he was trying to do the ultimate top-down design. By the way, the card of Mavada Cherazade, when you ask Richard Garfield what his favorite card he ever made was, he will say Shahrazad. So what is Scheherazade? Let me tell you. So Cherazade is a sorcery for two white mana, white-white, you play a sub-game with your library as your deck, and then the winner of the sub-game, or sorry, the loser. All the people who don't win the sub-game lose half their life. Now, I'll admit, not the most white ability.

We're talking early days here. So the reason this came about is Richard Garfield was inspired, Arabian Nights, the set was inspired by the Thousand One Arabian Nights, the Tales. I guess he was directly influenced by a Sandman comic, Sandman 50. But the Sandman comic was very influenced by, you know, Thousand One Arabian Nights. So the idea of the book or the story, if you've never heard it, is that it's just telling a lot of famous stories of the time period. But it needed a framing narrative, right? How is it one book?

So the framing narrative is there's this ruler and he has a bad habit of he'll get a brand new bride and then grow tired of, of her and then get rid of her and then go get a new bride. And so, Scheherazade is, you know, marries the leader. And she understands that her fate, like, things aren't good for her. That, you know, after one night he'll probably get rid of her. So what she does is she tells a story on the first night and then leaves it to be continued. The idea being, well, here's this really cool. cool story, and if I'm around

tomorrow night, I'll tell you the next part of the story. And the idea is the 1001 Arabian Nights is her, like, she keeps existing night to night, because she's telling these really captivating cool stories. And eventually, after 1001 nights,

I believe he decides he loves her and not to kill or whatever, but that's the framing narrative. And so it's a pretty key element of the story. And so Richard wanted to design the card that captured the idea of stories within stories. And so he came up the idea of a sub-game.

What if you stop playing your normal game of magic and you play a sub-game of magic? It is really, really cool. There's a good reason that Richard picked it as his all-time favorite card. There are a lot of fun Scheherazade stories. I will share one of them right now. This is the one that I was involved in.

So this is my... At least a Scheherazadezad story that I was involved in. So, when for both unstable and for infinity, I was part of Loading Ready Run is a Canadian group that does something we call the pre-pre-release, where before the set comes out, they play with the cards and you can watch them play. Oftentimes, but not always, they invite guests for the two unsets that existed during the times of the pre-release. pre-release, I, sorry, they had multiple guests. I was one of the guests. So for the very first one, they had Megan Maria from Goodluck High Five and Wedge. There were four of us as guests. And so there were, so in, in unstable is a car to call Spike Tournament Grindr, I think is this

full name. What Spike does is it lets you pay Frexian matter, frexian mana to sort of wish. for a card that's been banned, banned or restricted in a format. So Wedge is playing with it. And on the set, on Loading Ready Rudd's like set, they have the moon base, I think they call it, a place they shoot all their shows. They have a couple different places they can shoot, but they have one main area where they shoot. And in the background is the shells with lots and lots of different cool magic things.

and one of the things they have on their shelf was the Scheherazade. I don't know the full story. They got it from a viewer. There's a whole, I apologize, I don't know the backstory of the Cherazade, but I do know that it's sitting on the shelves there. So at one point, Wedge gets the idea to do something a little nutty. So first thing he does is there's a card on unstable, I'm thinking of the name, that you are allowed to turn yourself into a two,

two-headed giant. Meaning, you go get an outside player, bring them into the game, divide your library in half, and each one of you are now, you're playing as a two-headed giant team with a shared life total. So Wedge plays the card and gets me to join him as part of his two-heads. And if that was all of the story, that would be fine. That would be, that, a lot of fun play. but he then uses Spike to go get Scheherazade, which obviously they have because it's on the shelf behind them. Scheherazade has been banned in many formats. The reason it is banned in many formats is sub-games can take a long time.

One of the things I'll get into today is one of the challenges of designing sub-games. Like, Scheherazade, you play a complete game of magic, complete to 20 life. So that, one of the challenges there is Cheherazade itself was really long. The subgame of Magic takes as long as a normal game. So you're just kind of doubling how long it takes. As you'll see as we get to other subgames, we start addressing, okay, the subgame doesn't want to be

as long as a normal game. We'll get to that in a little bit. But anyway, he cast Cheherazade. So it's wedged me as a two-headed giant playing against Cam from a loading ready run. And a very, very memorable moment. I know when people talk about the pre-releases, it's one of those moments that people talk about all the time.

Because it's just, I mean, it kind of shows just what unsets are capable of. Because the idea that you're a two-headed giant inside of a subgame is itself kind of wacky. But anyway, Richard May Shahrazad. It got banned. It just takes forever to play. So Shahrazad was banned. That's the important part of the story.

Not restricted, banned. There's not a lot of formats you get to play Scheherazade in. I mean, unformats because we're... We do wacky things, but normally there's not a lot of formats in which Scheherazade is legal. It's not legal in commander. It's not legal in any legacy format that I know of. It's just, it's a band card. Okay, so I was working on unglued.

And unglued was... So, I've told the story a million times, but the real short version is Bill Rose and Joel Mick came up with the idea of expansion that's not tournament legal. Meaning we can do whatever we wanted to. We're not beholden

to tournaments. And so the idea was what wacky things could I do? So one of the things that was inspired by is that let's go back and look at weird things that had happened in the past. Like Chaos Orb, that's a weird thing that we banned because you were flipping cars.

Oh, that's cool. Let's slip cards. Let's do neat things like that. So I was looking at Scheherazade. So I ended up making a card called Once More with Feeling. It costs white, white, white, white, white, so four white mana. That's a sorcery. All these are sorceries. You exile all the permanent and cards in your graveyard. And then players shuffle their hand into their library, draw seven cards. Your life total starts at 10. and then you exile this card. And then there's a little writer on it saying that it is restricted to me to only have one in your deck.

A little... It has like a DCI, a rod of built into it. So, the idea of this card... This card is technically not a sub-game, and the reason is you never come out of it. It's very sub-game-like. You get rid of the existing game and go play another game.

But a sub-game... technically, when you finish with the subgame, you come back to the main game. This one doesn't have to come back to the main game. So my solution for trying to make it not as long as Scheherazade is, A, you don't come back, so you're done with the main game.

And B, you start at 10 life. So the pseudo-subgame is shorter than the main game. As I will find out, even that is probably a little longer than it needs to be. But anyway, so I made once more with the feeling because I really wanted something that had that flavor. Like I said, because I don't go back to the main game, it is not a subgame.

It is similar in that, leave the main game and go play another game with your deck. So it has a lot of attributes like a subgame, but it's not technically a subgame. But one of the things that I really enjoyed with it is I just like the idea of stop what you're doing and go play a different game. I thought that was super fun. Oh, another question that I often get about it, because the art on this card is a little bit. quirky. There's these two people and then there's this leprechaun. So what happened was one of the jokes in the set is there's a card called free-for-all where there's a fight between pink elephants and leprechauns. And one of the lepracons is knocked halfway off the card, so much so that he

falls into the next card on the sheet, which happens to be once more with feeling. That's why that lepercon is on the card. He's been knocked off another card. If you ever want to look at free-for-all and put it up next to once more feeling, that's where that's where that's. joke comes from. But in the vacuum, if you look up the card, it's like, why is there this random lepricron on this card? Okay, so

like I said, the first thing I kind of learned in making a subgame-ish card was the subgame wants to be less than the main game. Okay, so we get to enter the dungeon. So next unsaid is called unhinged.

Unhinged is like six years later. I decide I want to make a subgame. And we had already, I mean, Scheherzad is in white. I did once more feeling in white. I'm like, this is kind of fun. Let's see if we can move it to another place, another color. Let's share the fun.

Let's have another color and have a subgame. So the idea of this one was pretty simple. You're just playing a subgame at five life. So it's like play a subgame, but it is shorter than, it's not 10 life, which is what once more feeling. It's not 20 life, which is shares that. It's five life. And the idea is, okay, doing five damage will take a couple turns,

but it won't, you know, it's a much shorter game. But, I mean, sub-games at the time were off-limits. We had banned the one we had done. So it was very square game for un. But I wanted to make it a little more fun, a little more un-ish. So I had this idea of What if you played under the table? So it's called Enter the Dungeon.

And the idea is not how do you play a subgame because one of the things about playing subgames is the main game is still there. So I'm like, well, if your main game's there, maybe you go play it somewhere else. How about under the table? And I think that's super fun. And so

and then the winner of it because it's a black card, the winner gets to tutor for a card of their choice. Demonic Tudor sort of classic black card. We've made a lot of other versions of that card. But anyway, the idea, when you win, you win a card of your choice from your deck. So it's a decent, you know, it's a good prize. Now, once again, the thing about subgames that we've always done is that we reward the winner of the subgame with the prize. So one of the challenges is,

Whenever I make a card in which my opponent, through no means of their own, they don't have to put this card in their deck. If they can gain something from, like, I cast the card, I spend the mana, I have to put the card in my deck, and then they can gain bonus from it. We have to be very careful with those.

It is hard to make people play those because from a constructed standpoint, it's just tough to do. It's not often worth playing. Now, the one good news is the people that like playing sub-games, are people that like to do wacky things. And so at least it's the crowd that's most willing to allow the opponent maybe to get an advantage. So we've kept the subgame flavor of the, like there's something online for the subgame.

We could make a subgame in theory where if you, you, the person who casts a subgame win, you get a prize and your opponent doesn't. But that's not really how we've done subgames. And there's something fun about they're really being something on the line of the subgame, not just you getting something, but something really on the line. So all the sub-games, as you will see, the winner gets a prize. And yeah, you the player play the card is putting in your deck, and your opponent who doesn't play the card in their deck can get a prize out of it. But it's just, I don't know, there's a lot of fun. So my answer to the dungeon story is I'm playing in the Infinity pre-pre-release.

And I hope what is the card? There is a card, I'm blinking on the name, that you take a picture. of yourself copying an existing card and then you post that on your social media and then people can guess and you have to say guess what card I am and then people guess the card and if they guess

oh and then you are allowed to tutor with this card what's the name of the card? You can tutor for any card that someone is named in your thing so I actually made I took pictures of myself doing two cards doing enter the dungeon

and doing tug-of-war I'll tell the tug-of-war part of the story we get to tug-of-war. But anyway, I put it, I get people to say, enter the dungeon, and then I went and talked,

so when we do pre-pre-releases, the way it works is you're always paired against somebody. And so we normally do our drafting the day before. We come in, we do drafting the day before, and then the next day is all for, and we film it and they show it the next day. But we do the drafting the day before,

usually. And then we do the, at least both times I've done pre-release, we've done it before. And then the day of, it's live and you're playing all the games. So in the draft, I drafted the card that allowed me to go get other cards. And I remember playing with Scheherazade in the first, you know, in the unstable pre-release. And I'm like, okay, here's a chance for us to do something fun. So my deck was black and green. I think I was playing squirrels. Well, anyway, I was, it was a black and green deck. So I knew that I could get, I could cast black or green cards. So there was a green, there's a green subgame card, Tug of War, which I will get to.

And there's a black into the dungeon. So I went and talked to James, who was one of the producers, and said, look, I want to go get the subgame cards. Can you get me enter the dungeon and tug a war? So I will tell the Enter the Dungeon part of it. So James goes and he finds Enter the Doe. He sent someone out, they go to the store, they go get, Enter the Dungeon. And then the other big question is we have to play Under the Table. Now remember, this is a filmed thing.

So how exactly do we play, how do we film this if we're under the table? And that's why the reason I went to James is not only did I need him to get me a copy of Enter the Dungeon, but I needed them to figure out, okay, how are, How exactly are we going to film us playing Enter the Dungeon? So they worked it out ahead of time. And the best part was Kathleen, who I was playing against from Loading Red and Run, didn't know that I could do this. And once again, Enter the Dungeon isn't in a set.

Like, I have to use the card and do something. And so I set it up. And then my fear was I needed someone to guess correctly. But I did a pretty good job of mimicking and getting under the table. And I have a lot of people who follow me. So a lot, a lot of people guessed it what it was. And Megan Marie helped me film it, you know, shoot the picture. Anyway, so the audience does guess it correctly.

James is able to get a copy of it. We figure out how to do it. And then we're just in the middle of us playing. I'm like, okay, I play, enter the dungeon. And Kathleen's like, what? And I explained to her, I go, we're going to play under the table. And then the camera people are like, okay, back up. And they had figured out how to do it.

And literally within a minute, they were ready to shoot us under the table. So the most awesome part of this was we purposely didn't tell Kathleen. So Kathleen is just like breaks her brain, like what's about to happen. So we play a subgame. I do not win the subgame. I lose the subgame and thus lose the match. But it was a great moment. So right now I'm two for two in unprepared releases playing in a subgame.

Okay. Next up is the countdown is at one. so to unstable. This is three red red for sorcery. Play a sob game, this time at one life. And then the winner, all damaged, or sorry, all damage dealt to the losing player, or any losing player, I guess, is doubled.

And so the idea here is, I would try to make it even faster. You know, five life, that's too slow. So we say, okay, one life. Like that idea, literally it's first blood. And the interesting thing about one life, life is that it completely changes the dynamic of how you play. One drops are king.

Like you're really being super careful in what you're doing because you just have to do anything to get damage to them. And so the game tends to be a bit faster. We did play, I actually did play the countdowns that won when I was playing in the unstable pre-release. I forget whether I had it or someone else had it. I don't think I had it because I think I played black-green in that one as well. Because that's the one I think I played squirrels at.

But anyway, I think I was playing it somebody else to put. So in a, in a, in a, unpre pre-release, I have played Scheherazade, enter the dungeon, and the countdown of the one. So I played a number of subgame cards. And like I said, the, the cool thing about the subgame cards is trying to figure out both what makes the game itself fun. You want the subgame to be different some way. And what make, what kind of price? you giving. Now, this is the first time where the prize is a static effect. Scheherazade and Enter the Dungeon both do a one-shot effect. Oh, my opponent loses half

life. Oh, I tutor for a card. Those are effects, but they sort of are kind of like spell effects. Enter the, I mean, Card Down is at 1 is the first one where it's kind of like, oh, I now have this spell in play. In fact, I believe, I'm not sure whether actually the card isn't in play, but, oh, no, is it a card in play? No, it's a, sorry. The card isn't in play, but the effect lingers. Okay, which gets us to Tug of War. So I made essentially a white, or very close to a white subgame card in unglued. I made a black one in unhinged.

I made a red one in unstable. So I'm like, okay, it's got to be green or blue. I ended up making this one green. So this is called Tug of War for green sorcery. You play a subgame starting at five life. but you get to start with three permanents from your library, from your main game library, in play. So the idea that I'm playing around with here is,

okay, it's a little more life, five life, not one, but I'm going to let you start with some stuff in play. The game's not going to start at absolute zero. The game's going to start with something going on. And there's some fun, interesting choices of like, well, what kind of things do I want to do? You know, I could choose land if I want to speed up my development, but my point is probably getting creatures and things.

don't have some way to block their creatures, maybe I lose right away, because it's only five damage, right? And the winner in the main game gets to take one of the three permanents that they put into the subgame and put it into their main game. That's the prize. One of the challenges of this card was it was a pretty wordy card, and so the prize, we had to be very careful of the prize, so we didn't have a lot of words to explain what's going on. So letting you sort of keep one of the cards that you're always.

already referenced was the easiest way to do it. Okay, there's two stories of Tug of War. Let me finish telling the pre-previlly story, and then I will tell the other story. So what happens is I want to do, I want to play two sub-games. I did not open a Tug-of-War, and so the challenge is

the only place to get a Tug-O-War is from the, from Infinity, which isn't out yet. obviously we're in the pre-release. So they look at everybody's cards, meaning did somebody open a tug-of-war? And it turns out nobody opened, it's a rare.

So nobody opened a tug-of-war. So I did, in fact, I think put the picture up because I wasn't sure whether they were going to find it. And someone did name it, meaning if we had found a tug-of-war, I could have been a different game. Probably, by the way, had we found the tug-of-war,

my plan would have been in one game with Kathleen, probably first, play tug-of-war if I can. and then the second game, make the second one be enter the dungeon, because that was the crazier, I guess, won. But I have played Tug of War. I have played Tug of War, just not in the pre-pre-release, but I have played Tug of War.

It is a fun card. Okay, the other story of Tug-O-Wor, which is an interesting one, is, so when we made Unfinity, I realized a good chunk of the way into the design, and we were in set design, that we had, there was a set that came out, Dungeon Dragons, Adventures Vigone Realm. And it had die rolling. It was standard legal.

And die rolling had always been a core unthing. So I had cards in my set that the only unthing about them was they were rolling dice. And it's really weird that, like, well, you can't play these in Commander, even though you play those other die rolling cards as a Commander. Like, the only thing different about them was die rolling. And die rolling was, like, deemed okay for standard.

So it dawned me that I just had some cards that probably weren't going to cause problems in legacy play. And so we came up the idea of, well, why not? We just let people play the cards. The cards that aren't going to cause a problem in legacy. Let people play them. Why not? Have fun. So what we did is I went through,

we had a team that went through all the cards, and we evaluated whether or not we could put them into normal, you know, legacy magic. And so one of the things for each card is, just dunks is the rules manager. I would run by desk, like, okay, do the rules work? Can we do this? And so when we got to Tug-O-Wore, just goes, yeah, we can do that.

And I'm like, really? You just, yeah, the rules work. We have rules for sub-games. So on the Gate-8, it's what we call it, it's the slideshow when we show everybody the cards. For Gate-8, Tug-O-War was legacy legal. It did not have an acorn on it.

And the number one note, number one, like, what happens is you do the slideshow, have notes, they send in the notes, and then you have to review all the notes so you can make changes. The number one note I got is, please, please, please, make Tuggo War Acorn. And so the interesting thing about that is, it's a good, it's an interesting example where sometimes things are acorn, civil borders, not because the game can't handle them, but because we choose, we don't think it's a good thing.

Like, the problem of subgames is they just take a lot of time, they take a lot of space, and it just sort of like, look, if people want to opt into that, that's fine, but it should be something we, it definitely should be the kind of thing people opt into. And so we decided that, I changed it. I made it acorn. So, right now, all the sub-games, you can't, you cannot play any of the sub-games in the legacy legal format, including Commander. But if you rule zero with them in, have your fun.

You know, if you opt into doing them, can. And I think I think sub-games are super fun. It's not the kind of thing we want to do a lot. But like I said, I've purposely done one every, you know, every unset. I mean, the four unsets, every

onset basically, like I said, one's more the tailings not technically a sub-game, but it's very sub-game-ish. I have a sub-game in every one of the unsets. And if they let me do more unsets, I will make more. I am aware, by the way, for the purest out there, the completest, I owe you all a blue subgame.

I was in the middle. I'm making sort of a cycle of subgames. There are one in each color. There's no blue one. So if and when and how I get more on cards made, I'm aware that at some point I need to make a blue subgame. I actually have some cool ideas for it. But anyway, that, my friends, is subgames.

If you've never played a subgame, and given none of them are legal in most formats, they are super fun. They are time-consuming. They can be a little, and you have to find an extra place to play. I mean, there are some logistics to them. But, like I said,

I have such fun stories. Like, I, like, I just have fun stories. Like, it's the kind of thing. Like, I remember at the unhinged pre-release. I was at SoCal. Gen Con used to have a SoCal one for a little while. And I remember, Osip Wibittowitz, who was a pro player,

he was playing in the event, he called me over, and I had to get under the table because they were playing a subgame for Enter the Dungeon, and I had to go under the table to make a ruling. The ruling was, by the way, he had a card called Goblin Mime that made him not be able to talk, or he lost the card if he talked.

And they had another card where he had to insults cards, and it's like, well, does the insult have to be verbal? Can he insult it with his hands? Like, can he communicate the insult without verbally giving the insults? And I really could. But anyway, like I said, I have such, it's not hard that all these sub-games, I have fun memories with them. So if you never played a sub-game, I hardly talk about, try one of them if you can. They're super fun.

Like I said, they are challenging to make. The key to a good sub-game, by the way, is you don't want it to last too long. You want something dynamic to happen in it. And it's awesome if the subgame does not play out like your normal game. A lot of the ones, like your lower life totals or like the Tug Awards let you get extra cards. So I really like when there's something going on that's shorter and there's some different dynamic that's just shaking things up a little bit.

That is where I've, for any future subgames I make, I really do like the dynamic of having things be a little bit different. But anyway, That is basically everything I have to say about sub-games. So, I guess that means I'm, well, I'm driving around the parking lot right now, so I am here at work. So anyway, what does it mean? I forget my thing. You all know what it means, if even I'm forgetting what it means.

It means on the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I hope you guys enjoy today's podcast, and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.