Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1322: Stretching Boundaries

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

In this podcast, I respond to a post that proposed Magic should "stick to its fantasy roots." As a Magic historian, I make the case that Magic has been stretching the boundaries of what fantasy is since Limited Edition (Alpha). For those who like deep dives into Magic history, this episode is for you.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another. Drive to work. Okay. So today's podcast got inspired by a comment I saw online. Somebody was talking about why doesn't magic stay to its high fantasy traditional roots? And so my article of my article.

My podcast today is talking about why magic has always stretched its boundaries. That that's been a defining quality for magic from the very beginning. So today, I'm going to put on my history hat. And we're going to talk a little bit about stretching boundaries that I, my contention is that magic has been about stretching the boundaries of fantasy from day one. And that is what we're going to talk about today. So we're going to do a little bit of history lesson. Okay, so we're going to start by going back all the way to 1993, which is Alpha.

So Richard Garfield makes Alpha And obviously Alpha was very influenced by a lot of traditional fantasy influences There's definitely traces of Tolkien

of Dungeons and Dragons of Greek mythology A lot of the things that have become to be traditional fantasy very much influenced it that you can see, you know, there are, you know, elves and white knights and like all the things that you would, like, dwarves and the things that you would expect to see in a fantasy thing. So when magic starts in Alpha, yes, there is a lot of traditional fantasy there, that Richard is trying to capture the essence of it. But, but, and I will point, even in Alpha, he goes to great lengths to start defining things a little bit differently.

For example, the angels and alpha are not a traditional take-on angels. The idea of the battle angel is not the traditional way that angels were portrayed. Goblins, the idea of a silly sort of comic relief element of goblins. That was a unique thing. Goblins before that were, you know, like in Lord of the Rings, goblins and orcs are pretty interchangeable. Where in magic, those are completely different things. And so you definitely see an alpha,

Richard, even in alpha, just trying to stretch boundaries a little bit, give some definition of a thing that's a little bit different than you had seen in other traditional fantasies. And he even starts dipping his toe. They're Sanger Vampire. They're scathe zombies.

You see him dipping his toe into other genres, like horror. In the artifacts, there's a time vault. There's stuff like Living Weapon and Clockwork Beasts, things that have a little bit of a, little bit of a science fiction bent to them. I will admit early on in Alpha itself, in Alpha, it is probably the most straightest, there's the most influence of traditional fantasy there.

It is the very first set is a lot of traditional fantasy. But, as I say, even in Alpha, you can see that Richard is stretching boundaries a little bit. But let's get to the very first expansion. Okay, Richard Garfield, creator of magic. So basically what happens is magic sells like gang buffers way faster they expected. Peter Akison, the CEO of the time, and one of the founders of Wizards, goes to Richard and says,

we need to make an expansion. So Richard very quickly makes Arabian Nights. He was inspired by Sandman Number 50, a comic book. And the idea is Richard wants to explain, like, oh, well, I did more traditional Western fantasy. Let's explore a little bit of Persian, you know, Middle Eastern fantasy, very influenced by 1001 Arabian Nights.

So the very first expansion for magic is, and this is from the creator of the game saying, okay, let's go in a different direction. Let's do something we're going to take another cultures take on fantasy. And there's some overlaps, but just you're seeing gins and a frets.

You're seeing witches and just different things that are, you know, there's some overlap, but there's some things that you're distinctively coming from those influences. You know, and that's one of the things Just to point out. First expansion, out of the gate,

we're now shifting away from necessary traditional fantasy. Okay, second expansion is Antiquities. This is done by the East Coast Plastafters. Staphylius Jim Lynn, Joe Pettie, Dave Petty, Chris Page, and then Joel Mick also worked on Alliances.

He was part of the bridge group. Anyway, so alliances is the first real story of magic. It's telling the Brothers War, or at the Brothers War. It introduces the First. which it becomes one imagines classic villains. I would say that the Brothers War,

while it definitely has some fantasy elements to it 100%, also starts leaning in towards science fiction. It is about inventors inventing giant inventions and having this war with them. Already, it's the second expansion, and now, you know, and the Phrexians, as villains, are given they play a smaller role in the story, but they have very much elements of both horror

and science fiction built into them. So the very set of expansion is starting to already dip into the science fiction into things. Then we get to Legends. That's the third expansion. So Legends, so Steve Conard, who's the lead designer of Legends, as one of the

five founders of Wizards and a good friend of Peters, they used to play Dungeon Dragons together. And Legends is them using their Dungeons and Dragons adventures to inspire a new set. I do think that Legends has more traditional fantasy

and nothing like either Rabian Nights or Antiquities did but even then you definitely see other cultures sneaking in you know you definitely see once again even in Legends they're sort of pushing a little bit at what things can be we get to the Dark Fourth expansion and the Dark says yes for Mere Force

the Magic's First art director that he led the set and it's looking into the dark underbelly of what colors are. It's really sort of exploring mood and tone. It's the first image expansion that's kind of top down from tone.

You know, it has this darker mood. And that is really exploring things and looking at, once again, trying to find, you know, influenced by some real world influences and definitely making commentary. The next set is fallen empires. Now, fallen empires,

again, I think you see a little more traces of some traditional fantasy. There are goblins and elves and myrfolk. But also, the elves are making saplings. It's like these living plant creatures, which is something pretty new. Thralls, you know, homerids, that you're starting to see,

yeah, there's some traditional fantasy there, but it's starting to combine with other, pushing in boundaries and expanding what it could be. After Fallen Empires, we get into Ice Age. Ice Age is influenced by Nordic culture. It is very much, it's a world in which Terseerre where everything's frozen over as a result of the Brothers War

and all the destruction at the end of that from the Cilex. And if you look at things like Yokelhops or of a Lurgoy that like they're using a lot of Scandinavian influence to shape it. Okay, so after Ice Age

we get into Homelands. So Homelands is the first time we kind of constantly go to a new place. Robaya technically, after the fact, we said it was a different plane.

But Ogrotha's the first time that we actively say we're going to a brand new plane. Now, given that plane was more influenced by things people liked in alpha, it's kind of the way I described it. You like Sanger Vampire?

Well, here's the whole Sanger family. You like Sarah Angel? Oh, well, she's a character in there, or Sarah is a character in her angels. You like Hurland Minotaur? There's a race of Minotaur's. It definitely took a lot of things that it felt people liked. But it was crafting its own world and the sort of combined things that are growth that's doing. Once again, not traditional fantasy.

Its influences weren't traditional fantasy. Now, it's influenced by Alpha, that itself has influenced by traditional fantasy, so it's not zero. But also, just the idea of minotors intermixing with dwarves. and vampires. It's not your normal traditional fantasy setting. After that, we get to alliances. Now, alliances was not, also designed by these close play chapters, was not designed to be an expansion to Ice Age. That was kind of done after the fact. But we ended up making it sort of the first expansion. So then we get into blocks. So I'm going to start talking about blocks rather than individual sets. So Mirage takes place

on the continent of Jamora, which is an African influence. Basically, it's sort of Dominaria's sort of take on Africa. So once again, that is not traditional fantasy things. That is, you know, magic really likes to sort of figure out where it can stretch things. So the idea of cultural influences is a big part of it. You know, let's go to different parts of the world and use that world's mythology and, you know, and fairy tales and different things of the different parts of the world to shape things. Okay. So after Mirage is Tempest.

Tempest, we make up a brand new world. Once again, pretty sci-fi-coded. Just the idea of sort of a made world, stuff like the slivers. You know, there's... And one of the things you'll see, one of our through lines is we always put an element... We do take things that you recognize. There are elves in wrath. There are murfolk in wrath.

But they are, you know, our take on elves, our take on murfolk. You know, the root-water murfolk are not your normal murfolk. You know, one of the things that magic decks to do, and this is from an art side, is, look, we do a lot of goblins, but they don't all look identical to each other. We do a lot of murfolk, a lot of elves, you know, and that different worlds have different takes on them. The just as we're stretching the boundaries of what something means from a subject matter, we're also doing it visually. Like one of the rules very early on was we actually stopped doing pointy hats that one of the...

I think this was Yesper, but one of the things in magic that a lot of times the stereotypical wizard in fantasy was like a guy in robes with a pointy hat was like stars and moons on it. And Yvesper said, none of that. We were doing something new, no pointy hats. And so if you look at magic, there's not a lot...

There's a few, but there's not a lot of pointy hats. But there's not a lot of, here's the traditional way things have done, that a lot of what we've done. And when we work with our artists, we give them a lot of latitude. I mean, there are style guides and things, so world look uniform. We give a lot of latitude to push things and invent stuff. And Tempice was our first world guide, our first time we brought people in. Mark Tadine, Anson Maddox, a bunch of other people were all in the original team.

And we designed Raff to be this brand new place that was a really different thing. And like I said, while there were elements of fantasy there, it had a lot more of a sci-fi underpinning to it. Okay. After Tempest, we go to Erza Saga. Urzosauga was a return to Dominaria, mostly. Although even there, we're seeing phrexia for the first time. We're seeing Sarah's Realm, which is like floating islands. And, you know, well, if all your people are angels with wings, you know, you could

have things floating in the air that they fly to get side to side. Then we go Mercadian Math. Mercadian Mask is a mercantile world. where the physics, the physics don't work as normal. Like there's this thing on the planes that everyone sort of thought was a tornado. Nope, it's an upside down mountain. How does that work? I don't know.

Mercadian mask also did a lot to sort of play into the tropes a little bit and subvert them. Oh, the gobbins are really smart on Mercadia. You know, that trying to find different elements. But again, the theme line here is it is taking elements you know and subverting them and twisting them and doing something different. Next is invasion. So invasion is an alien race, the phrexians, are invading dominaria. Very, very sci-fi-coded. And, you know, once again, this is the big finale of the Weatherlight Saga.

There's this giant storyline. You know, the Weatherlight Saga is about a flying ship. You like, you know, when Michael and I were creating that, a lot of our influences were things like Star Trek, you know, of having this crew go to different places. And a lot of the interesting thing about the multiverse itself has a lot of science fiction elements to it. Science fiction is very much about what if, about taking some premise and then building a world around that. And that's a lot how we build our worlds when we do new worlds.

They're very what if in nature. Okay, after invasion is Odyssey. So Odyssey and Onslaught, the two blocks next, take place on a continent called Oteria. So early magic rather than go to other worlds most of the time, we would more. move around Dominaria. So we're on Terseerre. We're on Jamura. We're on Otaria.

Ataria has like the pit fighters and, although there's two different parts. There's like Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario. The Onslaught was about typo, but we, Odyssey, not knowing where we were going with Onslaught, I had not used a lot of the base creature type just to shake things up and do something different. So we then had to explain how that,

where all the gobbels come from since we've been seen the gobbled left. So it was different parts of Oteria. But again, we are leaning in and doing things and sort of pushing in different directions. Then we get to Mirrodin. Okay, so Mirren might be the most science fiction codids that we had done yet. It's a world made of metal, an artificial world made of metal that Carn accidentally, we're not actually, Carn made.

He accidentally got tracked him to some ferexian oil, but we'll get to that. But anyway, it's a world in which all the inhabitants come from other places, but the longer they stay there, they start to ingrain with the world and start to have metal

growing with inside them. There's vertigrating stuff that grows, and that once again, a very science fiction take on things. Next is Champs of Kamagawa. This is, again, we're doing a top-down world, the first top-down block, where we're taking another culture.

And this tastes Japanese mythology and building a whole world influenced by that source. And like I said, we had done Mirage, we had done Ice Age, you know, we had done Arabianites. Like the idea of using other cultures and not just letting, like a lot of traditional fantasy is very shaped by a very specific part of the world. And we are expanding on that and saying, hey, there's lots of other cool influences and neat mythologies that we can be more than just a very narrow slice. After Champs of Kamagawa, we get to Ravnik. Ravnika is a city world.

It is the most urban thing we had done by a lot. A lot of traditional fantasy tends to be like medieval times from a technology level, and we are going way past that. Ravnika is probably past the Renaissance. I mean, it's not quite modern day, but, you know, it definitely is more modern, more urban, and just the concept of the guilds themselves. Like, we're inventing our own cosmology.

And like I said, we are building upon things. Now, at the time, believe it or not, there was some sort of like, you know, Raphneika. This isn't traditional fantasy. No, it's not. It's not traditional fantasy. But I, once again, that is not what Magic. Magic's core is sort of, like,

flexibility. Like I, one of the whole things here is magic is a trading card game. And the idea is we're going to offer you a lot of different things and then you choose what pieces you want to play with. Well, one of the ways to make that the most exciting is really stretching the opportunities. Yeah, we could make, all the cards could just be the same things again and again, but it's nice that we change things up. And it's not that we don't, you know, look, we've given you elves in many different forms. If you like playing elves, we've done that, or goblins or Murpho or whatever. We've also offered a lot of other options, that if you want to do things that are a little less traditional fantasy-coded,

you can. Okay, after Radhiko is time spiral. We're messing with time. And yes, we're looking back to the past, but we're also looking to the future. We're looking to alternate realities. Again, we're starting to dip into themes that are much closer associated with science fiction than with fantasy.

You know, this idea that, Yeah, we can look at the past or we can look at alternate realities or we can look at the future, you know. And once again, very much testing boundaries at all the times. After Times, Spirder was Lorwin and Shadowmore. Okay, so this, a world inspired by Celtic mythology, but we're doing something a little bit different. We're showing you a world that goes through radical transformation. And it is true that the life side of the world has some influences in traditional fantasy. you're seeing giants and fairies, some of that.

But also, when you go dark, you start seeing more creatures, once again, more Celtic creatures. And even the creatures that stay, just the look and feel, the moods, the tone is a bit different. You're seeing, once again, some more elements of horror sneak in. Okay, after a lore win is Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara, we literally take a world and break it in five. That the way it works is the world gets shattered into five shards.

and each shard is missing two colors. So each shard is one color and it's two allies. So what is the world like in a world where white has its allies but not its enemies? So we ended up creating five unique worlds, one of which Bant is very high fantasy coded. So I should stress, it's not that we don't do high fantasy. It's not that we don't do traditional fantasy. If you want your elves and dwarves and, you know,

If you want to do the highest of high fantasy, we got you. It's there. And Bands is a good example of us doing that with knights and castles and, you know, the chivalry and all the stuff that you might associate with kind of high fantasy traditional, traditional high fantasy.

But we get to Esper. Esper, once again, another very side-stictions element. It's a place of cyborgs, essentially, of people who are upgrading themselves. through technology. We get into Grixus, which has a little bit of edge of horror to it.

It's a world to which life is gone and they're sort of eating everything that leads, but a world of death. We get to John where it's the Battle of the Midiest, where the biggest survive, or we get to Naya

where nature's gone, you know, unfettered that this nature has run its course, giant creatures. And the idea is each one of those is very much a magic world.

I mean, they're each centered on a magic color. But other than Bant, I would say none of them are, I mean, Naya has some elements maybe. But there's a lot of us, once again, pushing in different directions. Then we get to Zendikar. So Zendikar is one of us starting to look at what I would call genre exploration. So this is Adventure World. Now, the core adventure world comes from Dungeon Dragons and like, and there's a lot of fantasy there.

but it's really pushing a genre, the idea of, okay, you know, we have, and even then, even in our adventure world, we put the Aldrazi, which is, once again, a combination of horror in science fiction. You know, these alien monsters that are eating the world and are imprisoned inside of it. And then after Zendikar, we get, oh, sorry, after, not Zendikar, after, after, after, Shards of O'Alarah, I'm sorry, after Zendrika, I don't know, Shards of Lara, Zendikar, said Zendikar. We get to Scars of Mirrodin. We come back to Mirren, so our first

sort of major return, and we discover that the Phrexians, our old-time villain, are there and invading. Again, it's kind of what they do. And we watch the fall of Myriden. There's a major war. And like I said, it just, we create new

phrexia. That is, you know, a much more horror-coated world. And we see villains acting, you know, it's once again, making a different sort of feel to it. Okay, after

Scars and Mirren is Inistrat, okay, once again, we go full throttle in looking at genre as influence. This is Gothic horror. And before I talk about a lot of times, we take fantasy tropes and put them in, this is us doing horror. There is vampires

and zombies and spirits and werewolves. And Those things had shown up in magic before. Alpha had a zombie and had a vampire. But now they become the center stage. There's not us doing elves and goblins. It's us doing fantasy, not fantasy. Doing Gothic horror.

And so, you know, really sort of leaning in and it's saying, hey, this is okay that, you know, you can sort of, fantasy is adjacent to a lot of other genres. So after Indistadt is returned to rabble. So that is another return. Once again, very urban. You know, us defining our own sort of urban urban fantasy setting.

Then we have Theros. Theros, therose influenced, obviously, by Greek mythology. Now, Greek mythology is interesting in that a lot of traditional fantasy, a lot of Western sort of fantasy, is very influenced by Greek mythology. Even then, we, you know, 100-handed ones, we're finding things that aren't, you know, yes, there's minotaur.

and gorgons. There's some of the stuff that you did see falling through fantasy. And the other interesting thing is not that we did this alone, but the idea of taking things in Greek mythology

that were unique things. Like there was one minotaur in Greek mythology. There were three gorgans in Greek mythology. But we're expanding it. Minotaur's as a whole species, not just a singular creation.

You know, in Greek mythology, I think it was someone made it, you know, the minotaur. But now I was like, This is a species. Like, you can be a minotaur, and people could collect minotors and make minotaur decks, and they become something much more expansive.

Minotors get a cosmology, and, you know, they, we write about them as a species. Okay, after Theros's kinds of Turk here, we continue pushing sort of real-world influences. This thing is influenced by five different parts of Asia, and taking a lot of different elements of looking at, you know, how to build a world in which there's multiple influences,

not just a single influence, but multiple influences. Okay, after, let's see, after Concertar here, it's Battle for Zendikar. We're back on Zendikar. Again, we're not even doing adventure world, really. We're doing a giant fight, a war with his alien creatures, the Eldrazi. Then Shadows over Inestrade. We're back on Inestrade, but instead of doing traditional gods, horror, we're doing cosmic horror.

We're changing it up and sort of looking at a different subgenre. Then we get to Caledash. It's just doing our take on steampunk, what we called aetherpunk. But rather than do a lot of steampunks a little more pessimistic style, we go optimistic,

we make a world of invention, a world flush with ether. I mean, like, we really take our, we take something that has a lot of background, but use the influence. to make something uniquely our own. That is also not traditional fantasy, but something that's very fantasy adjacent.

Then we go to Amicat. Amicat is influenced by ancient Egypt. But we weave in part of our definition. It's like it is part Egypt and part polus. We take our villain mastermind dragon and a lot of his influence. And like, what would a world be shaped if a villain shaped the world?

Then we go to Ixelon. It's our Mesoamerican influence thing. Starting to take, like I said, we were really pushing for influences from as many different places as we can find them. Then we go to Dominaria. We finally go back to our home after many years and

explore, you know, one of the things about Domini is this idea that there's all these different influences, that it's not world of one singular influence, but of multiple influences. And I understand sort of the context of that. We then go back to Gilds of Ravnika and Ravnika Legions where we return to Ravnika for third time.

Again, playing up our urban aspects, which leads in to the War of the Spark. We have this giant Plainswalker War. And like I said, it's us showing, like even from a story level, that, yes, we have a lot of elements of traditional fantasy in our storytelling, but we add on top of that. Like the Plainswalkers, which are core to the War of the Spark, are our own take on it. In a lot of ways, Planeswalkers have a lot of sort of superhero coding to them.

These people who discover their special and have special powers and can go places and do things that ordinary people can't do. And some of them band together to try to do right for the world and protect it. You know, that has a lot,

a lot of... You can see that there's a lot of influences from different genres and such. After that, we have... We go to Throne of Elders. Throne. Throne of Eldrain was us doing fairy tales and Camelot. So us doing Central Europe, doing England, and really looking at the, you know, sort of a cross between, like, fairy tales are really interesting in that sort of, it's a mythology, but it has sort of an underpinning of, it's teaching lessons and things. We then go back to Theros.

We get to see the underground and learn about the underworld and, you know, tap into the idea of different worlds have different sort of connections to death. We go to Eichoria, a world influenced by monsters and looking at monster tropes. We go back to Zendikar to sort of recapture the sense of adventure world. We go to Kaltheim. We had been to Ice Age before,

but now we're doing sort of Norse mythology rather than, I think Ice Age was a little bit of a mud. There's some crossover there. Strix Haven. Another time, we're looking at doing genres. We're looking at the magical school genre. We go back to Inestrade from Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow. And tapping, again, sort of re-upping our look at the Gothic horror genre.

Kamagawa Neon Dynasty, we're looking not at Japanese or somewhat a Japanese mythology, because we're going back there, but we're also looking at pop culture influences, that a lot of, you know, we sort of modernize the world or parts of the world, and we get to be looking at that. We then do Streets of New Compena, a much more modern take,

influenced kind of by the 20s. And once again, like getting, you know, one of the things that both Kamagawa and Streets of Newcompaneda did is really look at modernity. There's a lot of stuff. in those sets that are much closer to modern and us sort of expanding that fantasy doesn't have to be the medieval

the dark agent. After that we do Dominar United, so we go back to Dominaria then we do the Brothers War, we go back in the past and once again dip into a lot of what I think it has a lot of science fiction elements of giant creatures

battling each other. We didn't go to Phorexia all will be one. We We tap more into new phrexia and the phrexing creatures. Like I said, the phrexians are very much us pushing way outside traditional fantasy. I mean, there's definitely evil and darkness and stuff in traditional fantasy, but a lot of the stuff the fractions represent, like I said, is elements of whore and elements of science fiction. March of the Machine, we tell a story on an epic scale,

larger than we'd ever told before, of our villains attacking almost everywhere. We then get to Wilderide. We go back and take another look at fairy tales. Lost Caberns of Ixelon. We go back to our Mesamerican influence and go even deeper into the influence. Murder of Calove Manor has us playing around with genre space looking at murder mysteries and outlaws of Thunder Junctions. It's us looking at westerns and playing into the theme of villainy. Bloomborough has us looking at another genre

the animal, the sort of animated animal genre. Then Duskborn, we get about as modern as we've ever gotten and looking at like 70s and 80s inspired horror. Tarkir, we go back to our Asian influences. Edge of Attorney says us doing actual space opera. You know, there's not much more boundary pushing than that. much like Inestrade really push off into doing horror without much fantasy there, mostly looking horror.

Edge of Eternities does the same thing. There's a little bit of traces of what goes on. There's definitely magic there. Both Inestrade and Edge of Eternities are us playing in other genre spaces, but there's plenty of magic there. And then obviously, Lleman Clips is us returning. But my major point today is magic has never been about, oh, we're just fantasy.

We're high fantasy. That is what we are. From the very get-go, from Alpha, that you could see from the first indication, Richard was pushing in new places. The second he did an expansion, he went, again, you know, like I said, it's not you have to like wait to see,

it's not like over the years we started to try. I mean, we continued stretching. I think what happened was we stretched more and more, and what we discovered as we got successful, as people liked what we did, we continued the stretching. But stretching boundaries is, I would say

definitionally, my point today, my topic thesis of the day, stretching boundaries is what magic does. It is what magic is, is what magic has always been, that this idea of return to your core high traditional fantasy roots that's not, it is not as if magic has just been

about high fantasy. It has been, you know, we want to see other cultural influences, we want to see other genre influences, we want to make up some stuff that is all our own, that no one's ever done before, and that all of that together gets to be magic. The magic is the sum of all of those parts. And it's not, it is not as if we've drifted from some ultimate goal.

We haven't. Magic has been about stretching boundaries. We continue to stretch boundaries. And we just, really the history of magic is just finding new ways to stretch the boundaries. Edge of Attorney is a great example where, you know, I don't think we could have done space opera 10 years ago. But it's really cool that we can do it now. And I think that every time we stretch boundaries, it makes it easier as to stretch new boundaries.

That is the nature of magic. Magic is a trading card game. We want you to find what you most love and be able to make things. And if you like animated animals or space opera or Gothic horror or whatever space we've moved, it's a little bit different.

If you like Mesoamerican influence or Asian influence or African influence, we want you to find the thing that speaks to you. and in order to do that, we stretch the boundaries. We really sort of, that's what magic is all about, is showing that fantasy can be so many different things. And that, that my friends, that is my talk today.

So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed sort of that thought process, that look at things. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's 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.