Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1319: Energy

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

This podcast is all about the journey of the energy mechanic, from its original inception during Mirrodin design all the way to its first appearance in Kaladesh and beyond.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay. So the question for today is, do I have the energy to talk all about energy? I do, luckily. I've left of energy. Okay, so we're going to talk about the energy mechanic today.

Where it came from, how it got made, lots of things about it. So the most interesting thing about the energy mechanics, a lot of you might not know. obviously it premiered in Kaladesh, but that's not where we originally made it. So we're going to go back to the very beginning, the creation of energy, which was actually in the original Miriden. In fact, it was a major, major component of original Mirrodin. So let's go back if we will, back in time. Okay, so Miriden was part of what I refer to as the Third Age of Magic Design.

Bill Rose had become head designer and starting with Invasion, Bill was really big on the idea that every block had a cohesive mechanical theme to it. Invasion was about multicolor. Odyssey was about the graveyard. Onslaught was about typo. So I, before I came to Wizards, I was a huge fan of the set in antiquities. It was my favorite set up until coming to Wizards. And I just loved artifacts.

artifacts for the B's knees to use a 1920s expression. And so I was really excited to do a whole block based on artifacts. And so I asked Bill, I said I really want to do this. And Bill said I could. And I worked with a creative team and helped create the mechanical world of Mirrodin and got very, very invested. So it was a black I was super excited by. So one of the things that I was,

I, when I said, my whole team, the whole design team, was very invested in, was trying to figure out what were cool and different things we could do with artifacts. And so one of the things we did was we went back and looked at all the artifacts from the past that we liked. A lot of them weren't antiquities, but the one in question, the one that actually inspired energy, was from all places, homelands,

which I have officially done what I thought was the worst design of magic. But even the worst design of magic did inspire a pretty cool mechanic. So in one of the best cards in Homeland, the card called serrated arrows. It's actually one of a handful of cards from that set that was played in tournaments. So serrated arrows, for those that might not know, forget what it cost like four, three, four. But anyway, it came into play with a number of counters, three counters,

three arrow counters or whatever and then the idea was you could use them to put minus things so you could kill things and the idea though was you had three arrows that when you got this rated arrows

there were three arrows and the idea was look you could fight once you fight three arrows it you're out of arrows and so I really thought back about playing and just various just looking at fantasy through pop culture through games like this idea of a magical

item that only has so many uses is a pretty, pretty tropey, you know. And I thought mechanically there's something really interesting there and that, oh, I can give you something that's a little more powerful than I normally can give you, but it's, it's not unlimited. There's only so many times you could use it. So we started using, I started making artifacts with charge counters is what we used. And you have so many charges. So I made a bunch of those.

and then one day I made one of them I said well what if this one didn't just require to remove a charge counter from it what if you removed a charge counter from anything and then I just my mind started racing I'm like oh well what if these like played with each other what in the vacuum is like oh I come with three charge counters every time you use me use a charge counter I have three uses

but then I said well what if I intermix them right one if I said you have to remove a charge counter from a card you have or if they were all an artifact, but from an artifact you have. And that way, let's say I had artifact A and artifact B. And artifact A, you know,

did what I, they did different things. Under the system I had, well, A could do three things, B could do three things. But this new system said, oh, A and B together can be used six times. But let's say I'm in a situation where what A is doing is more valuable

to me. It lutes or something. I need to get to a certain card. Oh, I can spend more my energy and diluting. Or, let's say B puts plus and plus one counters on things. Oh, no, I'd rather build up my creature. Like, I can pick and choose where I use it. And that seemed really interesting to me. This idea that there's like this robust system where I'm sort of getting,

when I get so many uses, it's tradable. I thought that was really cool. So we played for a while, and the way it worked was anything, they came with charge counters. And then anything that required you to remove a charge counter just said, I think it would remove a charge counter from any artifact. I think it's what it said because they were all on artifacts. And we played with that for a while.

And so what happened was when you would play, you tended to want to use your things evenly. So let's say I had card A and card B. A loot's card A loot's card A loot's card A and card B plus one plus one counter. So let's say, for example, I decided it's early game. I need to get what I need to get. I want a loot. So I would take a counter off A.

Now, on the next turn, I still want to loot again, but I'd rather take it off B than A, because if my opponent somehow blows up B, I'd lose three uses. But if I use one use from that, now, no matter what they blow up, I still have two uses. Like, there was this economy to manage because you wanted to minimize your ability to get hurt if your opponent blows up an artifact. Because remember, the counters lived on the artifact. So if my opponent blew up an artifact, I lost all uses. Even if the uses there would go somewhere else, I lost those uses of it. I also lost that access.

I no longer had that output. But it wasn't just the output. I lost the uses on another output. And so we played with that for a while. And eventually what I realized was that there was a lot of thought and energy that went into when and where and how to, oh, I'm going to use one. which one do I use? And one of the through lines in design is

we want players to have interesting decisions. We want players that you like, we like the idea there's stuff to think about. But one of the challenges is we don't want you to spend time and energy thinking when it's not necessary. A classic example is we used to let you choose the order

your cards went on the bottom of a library. And it mostly didn't matter. You had to get all the way through your library to the bottom before that order mattered. So it mattered in, you know, 0.01% of games. But if I say to you, the player, well, I'm going to let you do this. You're like, well, it might happen. I should, you know, like, it's silly for me to just not take into account because what happens if it does happen?

So, yeah, I probably should do the right thing. Let me think it through. And people were spending time and energy, like really processing, you know, what where it goes. Now, there are other reasons we did it as well, digital stuff. It wasn't just that. But the idea is whenever we can minimize sort of unnecessary thinking, in the sense of are we making you sort of think really hard for something that just isn't

going to matter most of the time, do we need that? And that's something we think a lot about. So I said, okay, what if they aren't counters? Like what if instead of having to track them and keep, you know, what if it's just a number you keep track of? And early on we weren't sure whether it was just a resource that you kept on paper or whether it was an actual counter you got. We were not sure.

But the idea was I play, you know, Artifact A, I get three uses. I play Artifact B, I get three uses. I just track that. It's not as if my opponent necessarily blows it up. Oh, although I will, a little side note here. In Miriden, we actually did a lot more with messing with your opponent's energy. I think blue had a theme of stealing it. I think green, I think, could take it away.

And so there was a little bit of messing with energy in original Mirridan design. When we got to Kaladesh, I'll get there in a bit, we decided not to do that. Probably a mistake in retrospect. Okay, anyway, so. we tried out this idea of, what if you're just tracking this number? And eventually, I think we decided to make it a counter just so there was something to physically track.

We did talk about it could be something in play, but if it's in play, then your opponent can blow it up. We're trying to keep that from happening. And so we did talk about, like, manna, for example, is a resource that there's no physical representation of it. If I add mana to my manna pool, I just have to track that it's there. Now, the one thing about mana

that's not true about energy is mana, basically, you never track for more than a turn. That if I produce mana, you know, it's going to go in my manna pool. The mannepole doesn't quite exist anymore. But I'm going to add mana, or maybe it exists,

but we don't mention it by name. But the idea is it gets cleared. Like, at some point, before the turn ends at multiple points, you know, if you don't use the energy, not energy, if you don't use the mana, it goes away. And so,

manna doesn't have you sort of physically track it, but there's less memory issues. It's really in the moment that you're using it. So eventually we decided, okay, it makes sense to have a counter. So we moved it to have a counter. Oh, and the other thing we did is this idea of if we're tracking it like a resource, let's make a symbol. In the mirroden design, we use the at symbol.

In Kaladish, we would later use an E symbol. But the idea was, when you got the energy, you just would say you get and then show the energy symbol. So the idea of an energy symbol actually predates back to the earliest use of it. Okay, so, oh, and in Mirrodin, the other interesting thing in Miridon is the way the energy worked in Mirrodin is activated energy with one or two rare exceptions only showed up in artifacts. Only artifacts used energy. But spells, and I think every color but green, green, green, green, green, green. because green is grumbly, more grumbly about artifacts, we decided that green, we decided that green didn't really like energy,

so it didn't generate energy, and it was the color that removed energy from the opponents, how we played it then. But the idea was, colored cards could get you energy, and we played around a lot with white prevented damage and gained that much energy, and blue cundered spells and gained that much energy, and black destroyed a creature and gained that much energy. So there was energy, and there was a lot of variance in the way that the colors would get it. Now, so at the time, we had designed development.

It was the old system. The plan was to let development figure out the economy. I'll get into energy economy. So when I look back and see what we handed off and mirrored in, I'm not sure even what it worked. The idea that you could, that the color spells really allowed you to get huge amounts of energy. And that might have been problematic. Anyway, so color stuff got your energy.

Oh, and the artifacts mostly both gave you energy when they entered and you could use it. So they kind of had that charge counter feel to them that, oh, I give you three energy and it requires one energy to use me. So, okay, that's kind of three uses. Not everything required a single energy to use. There were things required more than one energy and we had bigger effects and things. Again, that's one of the knobs on energy is the idea that a certain amount of energy, one energy has to have some value to it. but you can use multiple energies so that you can increment on the size of effect, what we call a knob in development.

Okay, so I had it in the file, and it was a big part of the Mirroden file. Like, it was, I don't know exactly, but 60 cards, something like that. It was a pretty major mechanic. So then I turned the file in. So at this time, Bill Rose is still head designer. I don't become head designer basically until like Ratnika, or in the, middle of Kamagawa black technically. But anyway, Bill is still a head designer. And so I hand it off to Bill. And Bill's notes to me was, there's too much going on here. And he said, I don't think we could do

both the artifact matters element of the set and the energy. That it's too much. So he said I needed to take one of them out. I took out energy for a couple reasons. One, while energy was on artifacts, there was an artifact connectivity to it. I was really trying to make an artifact block. And, you know, affinity for artifacts and artifact matters and all that stuff was much more about artifacts. So I felt that was more important to keep. And energy, I felt like I could build another set around energy. Energy, I was very excited by energy.

But I said, okay, okay, I will take energy out. So I did. Then we ended up replacing it. I had one card in the file that wasn't late. that was an imprint card, clone machine. What did a clone machine become? Sometimes I forget the name of the actual card. The card that you put a creature underneath that you imprint a creature,

and it makes copies of that creature. Soul foundry. Soul foundry, I think that's right. So anyway, I took a card that I had in the file and sort of blew it up into a whole mechanic. And then from the last mechanic, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and in my sleep, I came up with entwined, and I woke up and burned it down.

up and wrote it down. So anyway, we took out energy and ended up putting some stuff in that wasn't quite as big as space as energy had been. Okay, so we now take energy out of the set. But I was intended using energy. I really liked energy. I mean, I understand what Bill was saying. I understood why we had took it out.

I wasn't, I agreed with him. I wasn't, there was a lot going on. So the idea was, I'm going to find a new home for energy. Remember, this is mirrored in. So, like, a set would come along, like, ratification. Ravnika comes along. I'm like, oh, could one of the guilds use energy? Or maybe all the guilds use energy?

And like, okay, that doesn't make sense. Although I did, I think I considered it not original Ravnika. Then when we came back and returned to Ravnika, I toyed for a little bit of the idea of what if it is it was energy. Because, you know, that's what they do? It's like, what if it is? But, anyway, the problem is the guilds have to overlap. And so it didn't quite make sense there. It's not the kind of mechanics

overlaps well. Then, what else? We talked about it for Esper when we were doing Shards Galara. I think concepts are here we talked about a little bit. Anyway, it came up a bunch of different times. I kept trying to find homes for it. And there were a couple sets

where I think it was actually in the set for a little while, and then we realized it wasn't working out and we pulled it. So eventually, eventually we get to Kaladesh. And so that set started out as the idea of let's do a steampunk set. That's where the idea originated. But one of the ideas we had is steampunk tends to be a little dark and grimy.

And we had the idea of, well, what if we do a brighter version of it? What if it's not a sort of pessimistic steampunk set, but an optimistic steampunk set? We ended up calling it either punk. And then when we were figuring that out, like this world of invention, I was like, oh, well, it's another artifact set. And like, energy made a lot of sense. So I went, so in exploratory design, what we did is I said, look, I want to explore energy. But what I did, I just have been very interesting. What I did is I walked through the initial idea for energy.

And then I said to them, there's lots of different executions. And I walked through all the different executions. We can have counters. We can have this unnamed thing. You can get a counter. Like I walked through the different things. And what we did is the team tried all the different versions of it. And then I said to the team without trying to influence them at all, you know,

what incarnation of this do you like best? And the team was unanimous. They liked energy. The version we did is what they liked best, which is what I'd come to in Mirren. But it was very nice just having a completely separate group of designers come to the same, you know, realization after having playtested it. So what happened is once we did that exploratory, I was pretty sure I'd found my energy set.

It just thematically made a lot of sense. So I went to, I think Doug Byer, I assume, and I said to him, okay, we really, we're going to do energy. And so they ended up working it into the creative. The idea of the ether that like this world has this, you know, Obeshkar, as it's called now, has this natural ether source that it can tap into. And that allowed them the reason that the world of exploration is they just had such, you know, they had so much access to this energy that it really shaped their world.

So energy became this pretty core part of what the set became. I would say, so we have what we call a foundational, you know, or, you know, the mechanical heart. Usually there's one mechanic that, like, the set is sort of revolving around that mechanic. It's not always true. There's some sets, faction sets sometimes. It's not. But often there's one mechanic that's kind of the defining mechanic.

Energy became that for original Kaladesh. And so what we did was we made some changes. So we decided it was no longer locked to artifacts. One of the ideas in the set was we were going to do colored cards. And we did a little bit of colored artifacts on the Gearhawks, but not a lot. But one of the ideas we wanted is a lot of the, even the people of the world, they had technology at their hands. And so energy just represented technology in a lot of ways. So any card, any color we could get it.

The rule we set up when we did energy in Kaladesh was, with a few exceptions, if you produce energy, you use energy. If you use energy, you produce energy. and the idea was that every card is self-sufficient if I get a card that comes in play with two energy and I can use an energy to gain flying okay that creature has two uses of flying like that works fine in a vacuum

now one of the things we realize is so energy is what we call parasitic mechanic and what that means is if I want to play it with other cards that care about energy there's no other place to go. It's only in the set. Now, we do do parasitic things, and the other thing is,

when you return to parasitic things, it becomes less parasitic. As we'll talk about today, energy's now been in a bunch of different places. So when we make an energy card, there's more uses. It now ties into an existing system rather than be only usable

with other new things. So it was parasitic, and it was a brand new resource system. In fact, interestingly, when we handed over Caledish. So I designed, I did design with Sean Mayne. He and I did design together. And we handed off to Eric Lauer and Ian Duke. And one of the mechanics we had handed off was called inventions, which you all might know is lesson learn. So the idea was the lessons instead of

being instance or inventions instead of being lessons were artifacts. So when you, you went, instead of learning an instant sorcery, you went and got an artifact. So it's the same basic mechanics. In some ways, it might have worked a little bit better with instant sorcery. But anyway, that was a mechanic. When we handed it in,

what they said to us was, you have two very complex systems there. We can do one of them. Do you want energy or do you want inventions? And this time, I chose energy. So we left energy and took inventions, out inventions would later become lesson learned. So now we get into what we call.

the energy economy. So the idea is, if I give you ways to get energy and when you give you ways to use energy, the inherent danger is what you'll do is use the ways easiest to get energy and then use the energy on the most powerful output you can. So the idea is,

all my deck is really ways to gain energy and my output is the most powerful thing. That's not really what we want. Part of the fun energy is I'm giving you choices and options so that you can go back and forth. And what we really want you to do is in the moment at the time, you know, if one of them loots and one of them plus plus one counters on, one game, maybe it's all about looting. One game is maybe a plus one counters. Third game, maybe it's an even mix. It just depends on what's going on.

But we don't want it's like, you know, oh, you know, artifact C is just more powerful than anything else. So, of course, you always use the energy in artifact C. So in order to make that not true, essentially, so whenever you make a resource, I use mana as my example, each mana is worth something. So if something requires one mana, we have a general sense of what one mana, like literally we spend a lot of time energy on this. Like one mana, this is what you get for one mana. This is what you get for two mana. This is what you get for three mana. And that we have to understand the resource.

And the idea is if one card is giving you something, we want to make sure that we're maximizing what you're getting for three mana. You occasionally, like on mana, you have cards that are worth less. I mean, there's some variance in mana. But with energy, we're like, if it costs three energy or two energy or one energy, we want it roughly the same as an other thing that costs one energy or two energy or three energy. We want, when you have the option to use your energy for artifact A or artifact B or card A or card now with limited artifacts, we want that choice to be an interesting choice.

And so part of what that meant was in development, Eric and Ian had to build an economy like, what does one energy buy you? What does two energy buy you? What does three energy buy you? And that had to be sort of consolidated. And then once you figure that out, then it's sort of like, okay, well, how much is it worth to get one energy? So what, you know, when we're costing things, how much does that cost? and we had to sort of figure out exactly sort of where it went and how it fit in.

Energy obviously ended up going in Kaladesh and Ethera Vault. It was a big part of the set. We, dealing with new resource systems is very difficult. And it was the major part of the set. So we were a little probably more optimistic with it than we should have been. There were cards that got banned. There were definitely some things that were really powerful ways to use your energy. So, but it did get used.

People did like energy. It was something. It got a generally positive response. It was in the original Godbook study. It was one of the most popular mechanics in the set. It might even have been the most popular mechanic in the set. Anyway, people like energy. But it kind of burned us just because it's hard to balance.

So we actually didn't make any energy for a while. We actually sort of let it be. and the next time it gets used is actually in a universe is beyond product. Fallout. So I think Chris Mooney did the vision design, handed off to Annie Sardellis, and one of the decks was a science deck. And that one of the things they were trying to capture is just feel of, oh, well, you know, in the property they were trying to capture, energy is a resource. You know, it's something that you have to care about. And so it just made perfect flavor sense.

Well, we have a mechanic all about literally energy. as a resource. And so it even had a little lightning bolt as its symbol. You know, when we made the symbol, by the way, for Kaladash, I knew that I wanted to be open-ended because we could use it other places. So we made sure to pick a symbol for it

that was like, it did tie to Kaladish, but not only the Kaladish. So it's something we could use in other places. So anyway, we ended up using it in the science deck. And then in Modern Horizons 3, one of the things they'd like to do in Modern Horizons is

go look at decks in modern that people enjoy playing that aren't quite there. That it could use a little bit of a power boost. And so they chose the Aldrazi and they chose energies, the two big pushes. And they made a whole bunch of energy cards. And all of a sudden, okay, you want to play modern and you want to play energy? Okay, here's a whole bunch of more energy cards. And so energy started becoming decent and modern. One could argue maybe a little too good in modern.

But anyway, it saw a lot of play. And then the final place that showed up is we were making Atherdrift. And so Ather Drift, the idea of Ather Drift was we were doing a race across three different places.

And one of the places we had to include like, Kowadish was, besides being the home of energy, was the home of vehicles. It's the first time we had done vehicles. And we're like, oh, well, this is a race. The race is all about vehicles. And it just felt like not doing, not returning to what we used to call Caledith. Now it called Abishkar.

Not going back to Averagecar made, like, it made no sense not to go back to Averagecar. So we did, obviously. So one of the things we did in design is we just put energy in the set. There was one point where I was trying to get mechanics from all the different places we were visiting. In the end, we sort of pulled back from the other two. But we did sort of lean a little bit into, Abish Car is kind of the home of the race, essentially. They're the ones that fund the race. So there was a little bit more object car in there.

Obviously, we had vehicles, which had become evergreen. So when we handed off the file, the end of the file, there was just energy in the set. One of the notes we got was there's a lot going on here. You'll see a note whenever energy gets handed off in the set. It's like, there's a lot going on here. I don't show we can do energy and this other thing you want to do. So I headed off to Yanni Skolnick who did the set design.

I did vision design. And Yanni said, well, let's see if we can do a little. bit of energy. We actually, by the way, in Vision, spent a lot of time in energy trying to understand how do we make energy in a way that is fun for limited but also fun for constructed. So we did a couple things, by the way. One of which we did is the idea of we were a little bit stingier with getting energy, but we had a lot of very novel energy outputs. And the idea is in Limited, it'll be a little bit harder to get energy. It's a little bit more of a resource you have to fight over. But in Constructed, there's lots of ways to get energy of the old cards,

and the new car is just giving more interesting ways to make use of it because there's more innovation. We also played around a lot with the idea of alternate cross. One idea we played around with, well, what if it's energy or a mana? So, like, if you don't have the energy, you can spend mana, it's just a way to save mana. So we experimented with a bunch of stuff. Yanni did try to save energy.

He ended up putting energy in one archetype. I think it was blue-red. And the idea was, okay, there's not a lot of energy here, but if you're playing blue-red, Blue Red's kind of the avish car folk, and they use energy, and so we had that. It ended up being just too much to what was going on. So what they did instead is they moved it to one of the commander decks. So one of the commander decks for AetherDrift was an energy deck.

And so that used a lot of old energy cards, introduced new energy cards, made a commander that cared about energy and a backup commander who cared about energy. So that is what we did there. So AetherDrift is the final place. The big question is, will we do more energy? I think the answer is yes. It is a resource we've invested a lot of time in. I do think that energy is a complicated and difficult mechanic

to use in a large way in a set, in a premier set. That's not to say we'll never do it, but the bar is high. What's more likely is to use small amounts of energy. One of the things that I always point out is if we want to make a card that just has limited uses in limited, we could put energy on it and in limited, especially that's the only card

in limited with energy, it is a limited use card. But it then ties into a larger ecosystem. So I'm not completely convinced people to it. I really want to try one day just doing one card with energy. I haven't convinced me wanting to do that yet. But I'm trying. But anyway, I do think energy is cool.

I do think we'll find other places where the flavor of energy is very strong. Like the reason it ended up in the Fallout deck is it was such slam dunk, you know, flavor that we used it. So I do think we'll find other places where the flavor's just spot on. So I do think we'll make more energy. It is, like I said, a trick mechanic. It's hard to do. It's hard to balance. It's very hard to, the other weird thing about it is what it does in larger formats

is not very different than what it does in smaller format. So that's interesting. But anyway, guys, that is the story of energy. And I managed to keep my energy up the whole way through. So I'm a big fan of energy. I really do like the mechanic. I think it's fun. to have some alternate resource things. I don't think we want infinite alternate resource, but energy is one of the core ones I do like. But anyway, that, my friends, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means

is 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.