Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1318: Layering Your Mechanics

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

This podcast is a companion to this year's "Nuts & Bolts" column. I talk all about how to slowly add mechanics to your set.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so once a year, I do a series in my column called Nuts and Bolts, where I just talk about sort of technical design, where I get in deep, and I talk about how to design a set.

And so if you read all the different columns, I just keep walking through, just different skills and things you need to know to make your own magic set. And the idea was that I want, like I like, encourage people making their own magic sets. I think it's lots of fun. I can't see them. But I do think it's a great way to sort of get involved in magic. And I want people that are

really interested in design to have a resource to help them in building their own sets. So that's why I started nuts and bolts. It is just very technical. But what I found is for a lot of people that aren't building their own set, just gives a lot of insight to how design works. And so I've discovered that people like the column, both for those that are, in fact, need the information so they can do their own magic design and others that just enjoy just you know peek behind the curtain so my latest one which i think was number 18 was calling uh layering mechanics so i thought i would do a podcast today to talk about layering mechanics um which is it's an interesting concept that i don't know a lot of people think about so here's the core idea that's important behind it which is your set

is going to have multiple mechanics but um the way you have to put mechanics in your set is you have to put them in one at a time. And the reason for that is, so one of the things I've done in nuts and bolts is I've talked about what's called the design skeleton. And the idea is it's a tool when you're building a set. Basically, the idea is there's slots that you're filling. So we use card codes. All of this is in the nuts and bolts. The card codes is like there's common white one, common white two, uncommon white one. There's a slot for everything. In a magic set, you have so many cards in each color, in each rarity. And then we sort of assigned them like, this is this card type.

This is going to be a creature of this size, you know. And so the design skeleton, which is not, it's a starting point. You can adapt things as you go along. But you want a certain percentage creatures. There's a certain things that how magic designs are generally made. And our set skeleton is the default. And when you're building, I highly encourage people to use a set skeleton because it really allows you to give you a set structure and make you realize what you're missing and what you don't have.

Okay, so when you're making your set, you need to put things into the set skeleton. But every time you put something into the set skeleton, you are filling up slots. As you do that, you lessen what else can go in the set. Once I fill up a slot, no other card can go in that slot. And so the idea of layering mechanics is that each mechanic you put in, is going to limit what can come. And in fact, as you put mechanics in, at some point, it starts dictating what can go in.

What space do you have left? And this is the core idea of a layering mechanics. So when you start, you have a blank, open, empty file. You can put anything you want. So the very first mechanic you put in, you have carte blanche. You can do whatever you want. Now, what I recommend, once again, this is all in the, my articles, before you get to the making your file, which is for us, it's like vision design.

You want to do a little bit of exploratory, meaning you want to sort of figure out what are you doing? And normally when you start a design, you want, the set should be about something. It could be a theme, it could be a top-down flavor thing, just some guiding principle. What are you doing? And that you want to do some playtesting and get a sense of what are cool things? in that space. And the way we recommend play testing,

or at least the way we play test, is you want to figure out what are you testing, and you don't need a lot of cards to test. Usually 8 to 12 is all we need. Whether it's a new mechanic or a new theme, you want to make like 8 to 12 cards that do that. And normally we make either 30 card

or 40 card decks. We tend to do 30 cards just because it's faster. The only reason I suggest doing 40 card is if you play limited, your mind is set up to do 40 cards, and so doing 30 card you have to learn all the percentages again. If you just do 40 card, if you're used to playing limited, 40 card,

does that hate to me? If you're used to playing limited, you understand the 40 cards, for example, you know, 17 lands, 16 creatures, seven spells. You know, you, I'll say, yes. So the idea is that you understand that structure. So I sort of recommend using four.

If you really want to do like we do it, we tend to do 30 more than 40 most of the time. It just requires sort of wrapping your brain around 30, which most people don't have a need to. And then what you want to do is you want to playtest your mechanic and see what you think of it. And the key to exploratory is there's three buckets. Bucket number one is, it's good. I like it. That's a good mechanic. You should put it in the let's consider it column.

Bucket number two is, no, it's bad, meaning we've saved ourselves time and energy. Don't do that mechanic. And then number three is sort of, it shows promise, but it's not quite where you want it to be. Bucket three is where you might fiddle. You might design something, and if something's a bucket three, might tweak it a little bit and try it again. But anyway, the reason you want to do that is you want to make a bunch of ideas that are interesting. And one of the biggest things about doing exploratory is trying to figure out what's the most exciting thing you have. You know, as you're exploring your theme, what mechanic most excites you?

So when you talk about what to start with, there's a couple parameters you can start with. You can do it different ways. Because it's the biggest, it's the most open and you have the most flexibility, you might start by going, this is the thing that most defines what I'm doing. This is the definitional thing. Okay, put that first. It might be, this thing is the most complicated. It needs the most space to be able to do it, and I want to do it.

Okay, you could put that first. It might be something that it's the most open flexibly so you know you can connect the most space. things to it. So you want to start there so you create something that's the most flexible. There's a lot of ways to start, but the issue is the first mechanic and usually the second mechanic, sometimes the third mechanic,

you have some say of what is going to be. And then you get to a point where the set determines to you what it needs to be. We'll get there. Okay, so pick your first mechanic. I tend to like to pick of my favorite mechanics. I either tend to pick the most

directional, meaning the sets all but this, so this is its core, or I pick the thing that's most complicated, meaning it'll take the most, it's the hardest to fit in. Usually, those two things are linked for me. I really like to be the mechanic that's the most core to what we're doing has some of the most novelty to it. That doesn't always work out, but when that does, that's why I like to start. But pretty much figure out what is, what are you doing that's the most interesting and the most thematic of what you're trying to do? You want to start in that ballpark. If the most interesting and the most thematic are all one thing, a great starting point.

Okay. So what you want to do is put it in your file. What I recommend when you initially put it in your file is put it in every color that color pie wise can go in. Not every mechanic can go every color because you might be doing things like certain colors don't do. But every color that can do it on the first play test, put it in general, put it in more color. you know, put it, eventually when you're making a file, you tend to pull back. Not every mechanics in every color, or at least not focused in every color. Eventually, when you get to, like, doing limited archetypes, you will want to focus your mechanics

in certain place, especially at lower rarities. But at this stage, you're not there yet. Mostly what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out what shape the mechanic wants to be in. And so what I recommend is, I'd rather aim a little high than a little low, only because it's easier to understand that something's too much than to understand that something's not enough. Too much, you will...

It just is a lot easier to sort of go, oh, I'm above where I need to be, I need to come down, than it is to go, oh, it's under what I need, I need to come up. So what I recommend is fill in your file with your first mechanic. And you can be generous with your first mechanic.

I mean, not, don't go crazy, but, you know, you could spread it through colors if you can, spread it through rarities. Although I will say in early play tests, You can playtest with commons and uncommonds You don't have to have rarers to playtest In the early playtest So if you're just trying to make it simple

Sometimes people will do commons and uncommon Eventually you will mix rairs in We used to do all common Playtests back in the day We've discovered that You kind of want a little bit Not that you need a lot of uncommins in early playtest

But you need some There's some Especially now that With play boosters We've shifted a little bit. And there's some stuff that really only shows that it's uncommon that you kind of want early on. But anyway, what I would say is fit your mechanic in.

Put it in every place you think it makes sense. And then fill in the rest of your file with existing magic cards. And what I would recommend is simple magic cards. The reason you don't want to put complex things in is you're trying to understand your mechanic. And if you combine your mechanic with other complex stuff, it just gets hard to understand

what your mechanic is doing. So I recommend putting in corset, foundations, just pretty simple, straightforward mechanics. Cards. Just things that, like, do basic function. And you're using your design skeleton, if the hole is for a giant growth,

maybe it's put giant growth in. You don't have to reinvent the wheel or anything. You know, it just put, direct damage, okay, just pick a simple direct damage, though. It doesn't need to be very complex. And the reason is what you're trying to do is you're trying to understand your mechanic. You're trying to see how it plays. And what will happen is you will play

it and you will discover the following. A, first of all, is it fun? You know, like maybe you play and you go, oh, this isn't fun. And if it is fun, which cards are the most fun? That one of the reasons you want to try a lot of different things is mechanics will shine in certain spaces. But it's not obvious. I mean, one of the things having done this for a long time is some of the stuff I'm telling you, I can shorthand, sometimes in theory crafting before I even make a set, just because I have a lot of experience. I've made a lot of cards. I've played a lot of games. I have a lot of, I have a sense of how a mechanic will play by looking at mechanic in a way that you guys won't just because you haven't been making magic set for a long time. So what I'm recommending is there's nothing that beats playing. If you want to understand your mechanic, you have to play it. That there's just, I mean, even for me, even for someone who does do some theory crafting and stuff, I still, until we play a mechanic, we don't understand mechanics until we play it.

You can do all your thinking in the world as you want. It's not until you actually get it down and see it interacting that you truly start to get the understanding of it. But anyway, so play, build your, build out your mechanic, put your mechanic in, build out your deck, put a lot of other stuff in, play. And then what I would recommend is at the end of the playtet, or do a bunch of playtests. at the end of it, figure out what cards you have that you like most and figure out what cards you like the lease. The cars you like lease cut or change. The cards you like most, not only keep them, maybe make more to like them. That the idea is you are sort of letting the gameplay dictate the shape of what the mechanic wants to be. And the idea essentially is if there's too

much in the set, you can go down to the amount of mechanic. If there's not enough, you can go up. if you do something and you feel like you're missing something, you can add it or if you've done something that doesn't work, you can take it out. The idea is you do a bunch of play tests and let the mechanics sort of take the shape that it wants. And again, everything else you're just filling in with existing cards. That you're sort of letting your mechanic find its space.

And I will say if you're not used to doing this, if you don't have reps in doing it, it might take a little while to do that. And that's fine. The other thing I need to stress is the timetable we have in making sort of, you know, official magic sets is not the timetable you and amateur have. You can take all the time you want. You know, we have a schedule and debt. And even then, we do spend a lot of time.

Even you spend as much time as you think you're going to spend on it, probably less time than we spend on it. We spend a lot of time. But my main point is there's no rush. If you need to do a lot of playtest to make, to figure out the shape of your mechanic, do a lot of playtest. The one thing I would say is after every playtest, think about what you've learned and make changes. It doesn't need to be major changes. They can be minor changes. And you can play out a bunch of games.

It's not like you have to change after every game. But have a playtest session when you play a bunch of games. And then learn something from it. The key, the idea is we talk iterative design, do something, play with it, take notes from it, figure out what you learn from it, then adapt and change your cards based on the notes. And if you need to add cards, you know, the nice thing about using existing cards is those are essentially empty holes. If you need the slot, remove the repeat and put in your new card.

If you make a vacancy, you can always stick in a reprint. Like, just let your mechanic be where it wants to be. The reason you're using existing magic cards is you need to test it, but those are just filler so that you can test it. So at some point, you're going to get the mechanic. You're going to figure out the space you want from mechanic. You're not done, by the way, with your first. first mechanic, but you'll get to a point at some point where at least you get the general

sense of where it wants to be. That's when you get to mechanic two. And the interesting thing about mechanic two is you now have a limitation. Mechanic one is taking up some space. So what you want to do is, oh, I didn't mention it before, what I would recommend doing after you do your sort of exploratory design and you have a bunch of mechanics is put your mechanics in the order that you're interested in them. The order you think that

you think they are good fits for your set and you're excited by them. And ideally your number one wants to be where you start, but there are reasons not always start with number one. But what I would say next is once you fit your first mechanic in, look

at your list of mechanics. Your prioritized list of mechanics. And what I would do is go to the lowest one, or the best rated one, highest on your list, that isn't yet in the file. Maybe that's number two because you put number one first. Maybe that's number one because you decided to put a difficult one in that wasn't number one in first. So you put number two in, or sorry, you should attempt to put number two in or the next one in.

And what that means is figure out what you would need to do to add that to the file and see if you can fit it in. Normally, normally, normally, your first mechanic always fits. your first mechanic usually fits. It is possible to make a mechanic that just can't fit, meaning it's not a mechanic that's a good fit for magic. That's hard to do, so odds are you'll make a mechanic that fits. Your second mechanic usually will fit unless you pick two really, really big mechanics.

Normally in a magic set, you can have one, what I'll call a dominant mechanic. That's like, sometimes we make, if something has like 40, 50 cards, said, that's a dominant mechanic. We don't make a lot of those. You can't have two dominant mechanics. So if you're first and second mechanic

are both dominant mechanics, okay, it's not going to fit. But barring that, barring two giant mechanics, usually your second mechanic will fit. It might need to be adjusted a little bit. Maybe the colors you were initially thinking, you know, again,

you are free at this point when you start to put in whatever colors you like. As you progress, you will start shrinking colors. So one of the things that can happen is, As you're trying to put your second mechanic in, if the first mechanic is kind of in the way of the second mechanic, well, as a general rule thumb, your priority list should go.

If two doesn't fit because one's there, one wins. But you can think about, you can think about, is my first mechanic, sometimes you can trim things. And so let's say your first mechanic's a little big and you're trying to fit your second mechanic in. It is okay to trim if you need to. so that the second mechanic can fit space. If the first mechanic can easily allow that.

But what you shouldn't do is if the first mechanic has space that it needs and wants to be there, you need to let it be there. And if the second mechanic doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. And you go to the next mechanic. You know, let's say you put in mechanic one. And then when you go to put in mechanic two, mechanic two is like, I, it just, it doesn't fit in the thing. Well, okay, go to mechanic three.

So at some point, you'll find the second mechanic that does fit. usually the first new mechanics pre-exist. What I mean by that is they are mechanics you want to stick in. Oh, another thing I should stress, by the way, is your mechanics do not all need to be new mechanics. The first mechanic that you're trying to find the shape of probably should be a new mechanic.

But if you want to put in repeat mechanics, you can put in repeat mechanics. What I would normally say is I would let you do the new stuff first because the new stuff has the most flexibility. But if you really, really, really, want to repeat mechanic in, you can put that in. Like I said, I probably wouldn't put in first, but you could put it in second if you need to be. Okay, so you'll put your second mechanic in,

and then you do the same thing, which is you fill out the, whatever isn't filled in by the first or second thing, make sure there's cards to fill those spaces, you know, existing cards, and then play, and do the exact same thing you did with the first mechanic, which is let the second mechanic find its shape. Now, while you are playing your second mechanic, secretly, not secretly, but you're also playing your first mechanic. So you will continue to learn about your first mechanic. And the reason you have a priority list is if your first mechanic, if you realize your first mechanic needs to expand, that you need to give priority to your first mechanic, and that's

your priority list. If one to be optimized needs to be a little bigger, then maybe two needs to get out of its way. Usually, if you've done enough play test, you generally have a sense of one before two comes in. But the idea is you're going to play one and two together. you're going to start figuring out. And once you have two mechanics in your set, you want to start looking for synergies. And what a synergy means is places where the mechanics, where you want to play the two mechanics together.

The idea of a core synergy is mechanic A and mechanic B are better for being together. Mechanic A does something the mechanic B likes. It is not crucial that your top two mechanics, they can exist and not be same. synergistic, but you'll be happier. Your life will be better design-wise if there's some synergy between them. It does not need to be 100% synergy. It could be as simple as there are a few types of cards that both mechanics are interested in. And that's another thing that you will learn, by the way, is from a set skeleton standpoint.

As you play with your mechanic, you might also learn there are cards that my mechanic like, card shapes. like one of the things as you fill things in with existing cards, you might shift them to be existing cards that play nicely with your mechanics. And then you want to note that. You want to note and say, oh, okay, I see this mechanic likes playing

with this shape of card. And as you're putting in new mechanics sometimes, that new mechanic could fill in that shape of card. Oh, my mechanic A really likes cards in the graveyard. Oh, well, mechanic B, could do a few things that get cards in the graveyard. Like, you want to look for those synergies. And part of the playtesting is understanding where your mechanic shines

and what your mechanic most wants to be there. And that's a lot of what playtesting is, is letting your mechanics have their shape and form. And the idea essentially is what you were doing is, my metaphor here is you're like cooking, you're adding in an ingredient and you're tasting it. and then once you sort of have a sense of where the recipe is, that's when you get to add the next ingredient in.

But you want to get a really good sense of where something is before you add more stuff in. And that's why I talk about layering is each mechanic you add in is going to heighten and enhance the structure that you're making, the set that you're making. Okay, so now we get to Mechanic 3.

Now, it is possible that you can fit in Mechanics 3 from your existing mechanics that you're interested in. Maybe there's a repeat mechanic that you know the shape of it because last time we did it, it fit in a similar shape. That's one of the other big advantages, by the way, of using existing things is you have our sets to template off of. You can see what we did with them. And not that you have to copy what we did with them,

but probably, as we know what we're doing, if we did certain things with mechanic, that kind of is instructive of where the mechanic shines best. Okay, so if your third mechanic fits in, that's fine. But at some point, whether it's your third, fourth, maybe fifth, but probably not. Probably before that. You will get to the point where none of your existing mechanics are fit in. Now, maybe you can adapt a mechanic. Maybe a mechanic idea that's a little more complex than you need. You could simplify it. Maybe there's a mechanic that instead of being in many colors, you put in one or two colors.

But essentially what you will eventually get to is a point where you're existing, you've run out of existing. things that fit the needs of what you got, that you can't fill in your file with mechanics you have. And this comes in every set. Means you have to start making mechanics to fit what you need. And the idea there is what you want to do is understand what you're missing. So there's three things in the article I talked about, there's three things most sets want that you might want to keep your mind on.

One is that you want, you want, uh, you want places to put your mana, what we call a manna sync. One of the ways magic works is you ramp up over time and you play bigger and bigger spells. But eventually you get to a point where the amount of mana you have outpaces the amount of spells you have. Either because you catch your spells, your hand is empty, or just, okay, I'm drawing a card to turn,

but I have more mana than most spells in my deck can last. So what you want is you want ways to be able to spend the extra mana. Maybe that's like additional costs like kicker to a spell. Maybe that's additional costs like flashback where the card's extra utility. Maybe it's activated abilities on the board, on the battlefield. But the idea is you want manasink somewhere. The manisink could be a core mechanic. It could be individual cards.

But normally we tend to look at our mechanics. Like, do we have a manasink mechanic? You don't 100% have to have one, but it's nice to have one. Another thing is what we call card flow, which is, your deck is randomized. You don't necessarily get things in the order you need them. So you kind of want a ability to sort of go searching for what you want. And a lot of that has to do, whether it's, you know, looting or rummaging or impulsing,

or scrying or surveilling, just things that help you sort of get through your deck. You want to make sure you have some of that. Some mechanics are nice because they are card flow mechanics. It's nice to have a card flow mechanic. You don't inherently have to have a card flow mechanic. but that's something you want to keep an eye on. And also, you need to have combat as important in magic. There's going to be creatures, especially limited.

And so you normally want a mechanic that is combat focus. So a Manasic mechanic is nice. A card flow mechanic is nice. A combat mechanic is nice. You don't need all three of those. You can't, I mean, the set will need them, but sometimes you can fill that in with cycles or with individual car designs rather than whole mechanics.

But as you're looking at your mechanics, those are generally things that you want to have in your set. Okay, so now you have some stuff in your set. You have empty spaces and you need to make a mechanic. So the thing I would do there is first figure out what your spaces are, what colors is it in, what card types is it in. A real common thing we'll do is we do mechanic one and two and they're both creature mechanics. Like, oh, you know, we need a spell mechanic because we need something, you know, our creatures, have a lot of stuff on them, but our spells don't. Or vice versa. Everything's on spells and nothing's on creatures, or maybe I want artifacts or enchantments to hold some weight. Like,

you want to look at sort of what colors there's vacancies in, what card types there's vacancy in, what rarities there might be vacancies in. Like sometimes I have something more like, oh, common is, I have a lot going on in common. Hey, maybe I need a mechanic that isn't a common. Or vice versa, maybe I need something that is more a common. Like, you want to, to look at what's not there and what's not there is going to start dictating what you need. And what I would recommend is make a list of the things like of your needs of your set. Oh, I need a combat mechanic. I need a spell mechanic. I, you know, figure out what's not there that you don't have and write that down.

What colors could you, you, you know, what colors doesn't want to be in? Like, where is, what is the whole that your set has? Because the idea is you need to then make them make them. mechanic to fill the hole. Now, this is a good place where returning mechanics is very nice, that one of the things you can look at is, is this something magic has had to do before? Existing mechanics are great because they exist. And we've designed cards for them. By the way, if you bring back a returning mechanic, you can make new cards for them. No one says that you can only do repeat on a repeat mechanic. You can make new cards.

But the returning mechanic will have some definition and will help you understand what you So the first thing I will look at is what already exists that fills what you need. Then, once you make a list of what could be there, you want to start saying, okay, if I can make something, what would I need? A classic example of this, so when I was working on Kaladesh, we, energy was already part of the set. We had been doing a lot with artifacts. We had some counter-s synergy.

We had some artifact matter synergy. and we were trying to find our last mechanic. So once again, I did the exact thing I'm talking about now. I go, oh, I need it on creatures. We're kind of light on creatures. I want something that goes on creatures. I wanted it to care about counters, and I wanted it to interact with artifacts in some way.

And when we started listing all that out, we realized, oh, well, what if we made a mechanic that was a creature, that you could choose to either have it come with plus one plus one counters or come with a number of tokens, of artifact tokens, artifact creature tokens. This became Fabricate. But Fabricate literally, I was in the meeting. I was in the meeting walking through what we needed,

and as I walked it through, it just came to me in the meeting. Not often we do that mean, but literally, like, I'm just explaining what we need, and I came up with it as a... Like, oh, well, we could do this, this, and this, how about this? And so a lot of time, that is... What I would recommend, if you have a hole, the same experiment,

the same play testing you were doing during exploratory you can do again, which is if I'm trying to find a new mechanic, you can try things out and test them

and make little test decks and play them. You know, you might want, and it's fine to go through a bunch of mechanics to figure out what works best.

You know, we have a lot of experience with filling in mechanics to fill in holes. We do it a lot. It's a huge part of design. So, you know, a lot of times

we'll fill something and put it right in the file. But once again, Again, if you want to do playtesting, before you get to play testing your file, if you want to do individual decks, if you want to do preconstructed and work it through and try out different things to find them when you're happiest with, that is a fine thing to do. Eventually, you'll want to put it in your file. And once again, then fill out the blank spaces with reprints, and then play again. And once again, it's the same idea here is see how it plays, you know, what shape does it want, where does it go, what cards are the most fun with it. And each new mechanic, look at how it interacts with the old mechanics.

One of the things you'll need to figure out as a designer is how much synergy you want. I would say you don't want zero synergy, but I would also say being over-care of being overly synergistic. It's a very common trait with new designers, which I, a phase I went through, where you just want to make the utmost of synergy. Everything is synergistic. The reason that can get you into trouble is if you make your strength, too tight, meaning everything's too interdependent, when you need to make changes, it becomes really hard to make changes.

That, for example, let's say later on a mechanic isn't working and you need to rip it out. If you intertwine things too much, it becomes an impossible to replace it. That it's so exacting in what it is that nothing else will fit the whole. So you do want some synergy. You do want your, like you do want things to, like, A, there's direct synergy where mechanic A and B directly play well together. Then there's indirect synergy where there are things that are neither synergy A or B, but play nicely of synergy A or in B.

Oh, they both really like this kind of spell, so you make sure to put that kind of spell in the set. So anyway, what you're going to do is you're going to fit in your mechanic. I'm just calling it three. Maybe it's four. So anyway, you're going to do that. And then the question is, you know, you want to. to have in a set somewhere between three and six mechanics is normally what we do.

If it's three mechanics, one of them probably wants to be a dominant mechanic, a pretty big mechanic. If you're doing six, none of them want to be a dominant mechanic. And I will say six is pushing it. We have done six. So three to six is kind of what we will do. Six is the upper limit, three is the lower limit. We do three more than we do six. Five is a sweet spot. if you're making a faction set where you're making factions and every faction has a keyword, most faction sets want five factions. It just plays nicely with the colors. We have messed around.

Like, original X-Line had four factions, but that, even we had problems with that. So if you're doing factions, I would stick to five factions, and I would divide them by color. They can be monol color, they can be two-colored, they could be three-colored. At least early on, if you design a whole bunch of sets, you want to start looking fancy, there are fancierge of things you can do. We just, a Lormon Eclipse, for example, just played around with having the five dominant

draft strategies not be all out of our enemy, something new for us. But anyway, if you're early in doing magic design, I would stick to factions of five if you do fact. And you don't need to do factions. But the idea is you're going to keep sticking mechanics in

until your set is full. And when I say full, I don't mean every nook and cranny. You'll have lots of individual cars. You have cycles. It's just that you have enough that, like, okay, I don't think I'd fit another mechanic in, or I don't want to fit another mechanic in. Just because you can fit something

and doesn't need you need to fit it in. Like, we make sense with three mechanics, that is fine. The only thing I would say is make sure the mechanics are filling the needs of what you need, and that if not, now, the thing that happens after mechanics is you're going to, the next thing you start looking at is cycles. Now, sometimes cycles are part of mechanics. a lot of times you'll cycle out things that are mechanics.

But you also start want to look. Basically, the largest structure is mechanics. The second larger structure is using cycles. Cycles traditionally are five card, and either one in each color is normally the cycle, in the same rarity normally. But you can do vertical where there's three or four in each rarity. In a vertical cycle, sometimes you have a rare

and a mythic rare, sometimes just a rare or a mythic rare, depending on how you want to build it. Anyway, so once you have enough mechanics that you think you're doing what you need to do, and there's really generally space, you know, there's enough space for you to fit other things in because the set wants to have other elements to it. It's not just mechanics. You want a lot of individual cool cards. Although I will say that if you have a design skeleton,

it's really not to get to rare and mythic rare that you have more what I'll call a carte blanche design, meaning most of your commons and uncommonds have a duty to fill. They're doing something. You don't have the luxury of just going, I want to do whatever. Not that you can't make a cool spell and find a home for it, you can. But rare and mythic rare is like you have less sort of slots that you're filling from a design skeleton that you can make things that are just generically fun and less,

oh, I'm building on this archetype. The commons and uncommonds have a lot of work to do to make all your draft archetypes. Now, I can say, by the way, if you're building a magic set and you don't want to worry about limited, you don't need to. You can build a magic set and say, hey, I'm never grafting the set. I don't need to worry about limited. I'm just sort of talking about how we build the set. Limited is a huge part of how we craft set.

So when I'm talking about how we do things, I will talk about limited because it's a big part of our structure. I think limited is nice because it gives functionality to all your cards that you're going to make comments and uncommonds that aren't going to have constructive potential. but they can have a lot of limited potential. The other thing that you don't need to worry about that we do worry about is we try to make sure that every premier sets for every format or most formats, at least the major ones. So like we want to make sure there's stuff for standard.

We want to make sure there's stuff for Commander. There's stuff for sealed and for drafts, especially push your draft. You know, we want to, if we can, you know, we're aware of different formats that exist. Obviously, we don't design for every format. There's a lot of formats. But at least the major ones we do. So guys, I have some traffic days. You got a little extra bonus time here.

So that is probably more than you needed to know about layering. If you want, I did write the article on it. It's called Nuts and Bolts, I think 18 layering your mechanics. There is some details in there that I didn't put here. I walk through some questions. There's some stuff I did there that I did. When I write articles and then do podcasts on them, I don't like to repeat exactly the content. and I like you to be able to read the article

and listen to the podcast, and each of them have a little bit different. So if this is valuable to you, you liked what I said today, I would heartily recommend reading the article, there'll be some stuff in the article, or maybe I explain something in the article a little different than I explained it here that helps you.

But anyway, guys, that is a full drive-to-work worth of layering your mechanic. So I hope you enjoy that. And like I said, if you've never built a magic set, I heartily recommend go look at my nuts and bolts columns. I have, I've been new. for 18 years. Actually, actually, there's more than 18 columns because numerous years I've had two partners. So there's over 20 nuts and bolts columns. And like I said, it's very useful stuff.

Note that magic design is shifted over the year. So that's reflected in the nuts and bolts. But as you read them, there might be things in early things that have shipped for how we do it. But I recommend reading all of them. I think they'll be very useful. I mean, if you want to design your own set, I think they'll be very useful. Even if it's interesting thing how magic is made, it might be fun. but so anyway guys I am now at work so we all know what that means it means at the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you all next time bye bye