Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1330: Charms

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

This podcast talks about the history of Charms in Magic.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is charms. What are they? Where do they come from? Why do we keep making them? And how do we design them?

So I'm going to talk all about the history and the making of charms today. So let me begin by saying, what are charms? Charms are a spell. Usually an incident or sorcery. but not always, where you're given three choices and you get to choose between one of the three choices. That is what a charm is. Many, many charms are labeled charms.

So we're going to talk about their origin, and then I'll get into how we design charms. Charms are interesting. They're a challenge to design, but we keep making them. Obviously, there's ways to do it. Okay, so we have to go back to the very beginning of magic for this story.

So Richard Garfield, when he made magic, he did a lot of playtesting, and he got his playtest teams from different places. Some of them he met at the University of Pennsylvania, I think that's where he met the East Coast playtifters, Barry Rehnquist's neighbor. But some of them, he met at a bridge club where he played bridge. Bill Rose, Charlie Coutino, Joel Mick, Howard Collenberg, Elliot Siegel, Don Felice, these people. So at some point, when Richard, the game was about to come out,

Richard said to the different teams, you know, at some point, we will need expansions. So if you guys want to start working on expansions, that would be great. So the East Coast playdifters, they worked on Ice Age. Barry Reich worked on spectral chaos. The bridge club worked on a set that was called Menagerie was the name. So menagerie would eventually get made, actually broken into two parts. So it ended up being both Mirage and Visions.

So one of the things, so both they and the East Coast Playtrusters were playing around with the same concept, but they actually solved it a different way. And the issue at hand was there are effects in magic that are cool effects, but they're just a little bit too tiny to put on a card because they were sort of mapping space of what they can do. And that the problem when you have a card is, when you cast a card, you're spending a whole card worth to get something. And if the effect you're getting isn't worth,

like some things were just worth less than a manna. Well, how do you do things that are worth less than a mana? How do you do that? So the East Coast Playfactor is their solution which create what we call cantrips, which is, well, I get to draw a card along with the effect. So the cost of the spell doesn't have to count the cost of the card, which is a real cost in it. And so we can do smaller effects. Because by making, for example, let's say you make

a spell that is one in a blue or just blue, and you draw a card with the spell, well, it doesn't have to cost the full amount of a normal thing because you're getting the card back. And so a cantrip was their answer, like, oh, we can make small effects because as long as you add in the card draw, the cost gets to go, the cost gets to be one manna or more. The problem with a lot of small effects is it's just not worth the mana. Oh, but small effect plus a card is worth a manner or two manners, sometimes more. So that is how they solved it. Bill and Joel and Charlie, the Brit Club, they took a different, they took a different path.

And their path was, okay, what if? we gave you some option. What if a spell that had a small effect didn't have one small effect? What if it had multiple small effects? They ended up choosing three. The idea is, okay, any one effect might not be worth it, but the flexibility, the ability to have option to do all three, that might be enough to make it worth a card. And once again, the original charms in Mirage costs one mana. They were all monocallered cards and they cost a single color of manna. Oh, and the reason they're called charms,

I'm pretty sure, this is me speculating, but I believe this is true. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are spell effects that you could have that are very minor spell effects. So much so that you have like you have like spell slots and things you have to do in Dungeons Dragons. The charms are

something that are small enough that you kind of can do them without great effort, is the idea. And so I think they named them after that. Maybe they didn't. That's it. This is me guessing, not that I definitely know that. So anyway, they called them charms.

And so I think they originally put a cycle in. And the interesting thing idea about it was they made a long list of what are effects we'd like to try, but just are too small. And then they found their favorite. And then they put them on the card. They, in fact, liked the charm so much that when they ended up making visions, they just made a second set of charms. It was so sort of, I think they were very enamored to them. And one of the things, just a little, a side note here, it turns out that flexibility is very powerful. Like, it's very easy when I say to you, well, cards were something.

I think people grok the idea of how powerful a card is. But the idea of choice, I think people don't realize that, or maybe some of you do, flexibility adds a lot of power to cards. And that one of the things, it took me a lot of time. because I've made a lot of modal type effects is just the power of modes, the power of saying, well, you get to choose

what you're doing in the moment, and even though your choices aren't major, the fact that you have that flexibility is pretty powerful. And their charms ended up being quite effective. So like I said, they liked them so much, they put them in visions

as well as into Mirage. Okay, so those went out and they were just pretty popular. I think the other thing is behind the scenes, we designers really like charms because it just made, like, one of the things we're always looking for is, look, there's just a limited amount of design space, right? We're trying to find as much design space as we can.

And charms were really nice because it just opened up, like, Hero Effects you couldn't normally do. All of a sudden, you could use them on cards. It just opened up space. The charms were kind of making things that we couldn't make before. And just, they were popular. people liked them. They became something where it saw a lot of play.

Either casual, unconstructed, you know, in tournaments, they just saw a lot of play. Okay, so the next time we would see Charms was in Onslaught. So Onslaught, for those, I don't remember this block, I had a typel theme. And the idea was, you know, we were really playing up the idea. And I think there were eight, I think eight, there was a bunch of different creature types we supported.

every color got a main one, and then there were some secondary ones we had that were in multiple colors. So when we did onslaught, one of the things that I think we liked is that the charms just had a nice structure to them. And so, what if we did charms where one of the charms

got to be a typal, a small effect that's typal? Now, normally it'd be very narrow to make a typal effect on a card because you're only going to play that card if you're playing that creature type. But the nice thing about the charms is, well, I have two other effects. You know, maybe, or let's say I'm playing limited, for example, and I have some of that, you know, I'm playing white and I have soldiers.

Not all of my creatures are soldiers. Some of them are soldiers. So I'm willing to put this to my deck because let's say I just don't draw my soldiers. Well, the card is other effects. So we did charms. One again, they were one man of value charms, and they were monocolored. So we really didn't reinvent anything. It was just us saying, okay, let's do this back. And then one of the things we'll do is we'll do small typo effects,

because that's something we want to do in enjolte. Okay, the next set we use them was Plain Shift. So Plain Shift is the second set in the Invasion Block. So Invasion is the first set in what I call the Third Age of Design. It's after Bill Rose becomes head designer, and blocks start having themes. So Invasion was about multi-color. So one of the core ideas of Invasion was just playing a lot of colors.

The domain mechanical, though, a name was there, and there just were a lot of things we want you to play a lot of colors. So one of the things that Plainship did, the third set, sorry, the second set, was played around a little bit more with three-color. Magic hadn't done that much three-color. Obviously, legends with introduced three-color, had some three-color cards, and there have been a few other opportunities, but Plainship sort of ratchet up three-collar a little higher than we had normally done.

Not, I wouldn't call it a three-color set like Shards Valour or something like that, but it was something where we were playing around a three-color a little more than we had been in the past. And so, I think Plainship had the dragons, I think, the three-colored dragons, or made of those. No, no, no, sorry. Those were, the dragons themselves were in invasion. but then we played up to them. I think we made the layers and stuff. But anyway, we decided to be fun to make charms,

but try something a little bit different. So the idea here was, what if we made three-colored charms? And three-colored charms do two things that charms had never done before. One was, obviously, has effects from different colors. All the charms at that point were monocolored cars. And the second thing was,

in order to be a three-color charm, remember, hybrid didn't exist yet, it had to be three mana, right? It had to be one man of each color. So for the first time ever, we were making charms that weren't the tiniest of effects. They've got to be a little bit bigger effect. You're spending three mana on this.

And not just three mana, three manna of three different colors. That is a significant ask. So the way we made those charms was because there were three colors in them and there were three effects, each effect mapped to a color. So let's say we're doing green, white, blue. So one of the effects is a green effect.

One of the effects is a white effect. One of the effects is a blue effect. And so the idea I'm playing green, white, blue, and I've access to things. And the nice thing about that was, it just made a charm unlike anything else. It was a little bit bigger, so the effects were bigger. And mixing and matching colors just made it feel different. Okay, the next time we did charms was in planar chaos. So planar chaos was the second set of the time spiral block.

We're now into the fourth stage of design, stage of design. I'm now a head designer. and one of the things was I was trying to do more block planning. And so the idea I came up, time spiral was all about time. So I divided the sets into past, present, and future. Now past and future have a pretty clear identity. The present was a little fuzzier. Isn't every set to the present?

So we did this alternate reality thing, sort of a what if thing, where we messed around with the color pie and said, what if magic had been different? And the idea at the time was that we would push in areas that were sort of secondary or not breaks. I was trying not to do breaks, although in retrospect I made a few breaks. But the idea was, what if what if the color pie had just represented things a little bit differently? You know, we use card draw to represent knowledge. But what if card draw represent growth?

Well, if that were the case, it would be green and not blue, stuff, stuff like that. And so what we did with the charms was we, I think, at least one of every charm. every charm had at least one ability and maybe two that just did things outside that colors or inside that color's new color pie, the color pie of planer chaos. So it allowed

us to make some things that just were a little bit different because they were doing effects that normally the color. Now once again, they were one man of value, they were monolored, they were modeled after the original and kind of what they, in fact, the art was done the same. It was sort of like Imagine Mirage had just

been different because the color pie was different, what were the terms of looked like? And that was what planar chaos. Now, you can see real quickly, as I'm wondering through these, that every time we do a charm, we're looking for the new take-on charms. Onslaught says, I'm going to add a typal component.

You know, plane shifts, like, I'm going to go three-color. Plainer chaos is like, I'm going to add in color, you know, color pie muddling. Okay, so the next one we did was Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara was our first block that was dedicated to three-color and so it seemed only appropriate to do

three-color charms. So obviously we had done them once before in Plainship. So we were doing them, as is often the case in early magic, we do the ally stuff more than we, before we get to the enemy stuff. So we'll get to Wedge. I'll get there momentarily. But anyway, Shards of Alara kind of ran back what we had done in Plain Shift. One of the things that happens over time is as magic sort of shifts around

what access we have, what things are evergreen, what effects we started doing more regularly, you know, magic keeps shifting. And so as we keep revisiting this, we're allowed to get access and do things that are a little bit different. Again, because Shards Valara was doing three-color, we got to have a little bit bigger effects.

Okay, after that is return to Ravnikka and Gate Crash. So the fun story on this, this one is, I'm, so normally at the time, I would run the large set in the fall. But I was training Ken Nagel. He did well in the first grade designer search. And he had led us set or two.

And I was interested in letting him try to leave a large set. And we were doing return to Ravenica, which was, it's a return. Returns in general are easier than new. And especially Ravnika, where we weren't trying to reinvent the wheel all that much, was so I swapped and I had him do that and then I was with Gottlieb.

Gottlieb hadn't done a larger set either so I co-led with Gottlieb to do Gate Crash. So while I'm in Gate Crash, I make the realization that we hadn't ever done two-color, we had done one-color charms, we had done three-color charms, we'd never done two-color charms. And one of the things that we do in Ravridges sets

is we like to do 10-color cycles that run through the whole block. So what I did basically is I made some two-colored charms that went in the... Basically, Returned and Ravnik, did five guilds, a mix of L.N. Enemy, and then Gate Crash did the five that Returned and Rebiting it didn't do.

So I made the five for Gate Crash. And then I went and I talked to Ken, and I said, just a heads up. Yeah, we're going to put two colored charms in Gate Crash. And he's like, okay, fine. I'll put them in Returned Ravnica. So we ended up. of putting them in the full block.

And anyway, so the interesting thing about doing two color was now obviously we want to access to both colors, but how do you do with three color? Now, first and foremost, they cost two mana rather than one or three, so that was new. The other thing we did was one of the effects, let's say we're doing black red, a black red charm.

One of the effects would be a mono-black effect, meaning an effect that black did, that red didn't do. One of the effects would be a red effect, something red does that black doesn't do, and then one of the effects would be sort of in hybrid space, black effect that black and red or black or red could do.

So the idea is there's a black effect, a red effect, a black or red effect. And that's how we did the charms in return after a gig crash. Okay, next up is Konzerak here. You can see us filling out the color grid.

So we had done twice Ark or shard a color and its allies, but we had never done a charm with a color and its enemies. The quick story behind Conchert here. We actually didn't start with a wedge set at all. I started trying to, I wanted to do a quirky, every other year at the time, the third set was a large block that had new mechanics.

And so I wanted to try something where the middle set was drafted with both the first set and the third set, but the first and third set were never drafted together. And we needed to come up with a way to explain that. So I made a whole team, in fact, the very first ever exploratory team, and we came up the idea of a time travel story. So what happens is, in the story, Sarkin Vall, returns to his home world of Tarkir. Sarkin loves dragons, but the dragons have been killed off by the Khans. And so he goes back in time, back to the small set, Fate Reforged, where fate is reforged. And he saves Ugin from being killed by Nicole Bowles.

And because of that, the dragons survive, and now there's a new timeline in which the dragons haven't been killed. And now the dragons run everything. There are a dragon lord rather than the cons. And we get dragons after. here. Anyway, as we were putting the set together, we knew we wanted to differentiate between cons and dragons.

And we stumbled upon the idea of, I think what happened was, originally there were going to be four factions that the creative team created, based on four different sections of Asia. And then they realized there's a fifth section they wanted it to do. And once Brady's Brady-Darmitz, the lead of the creative team, said they wanted to do five factions. I'm like, okay, Brady, if I'm going to do that, I've got to tie it to the color. I'm going to tie it to color. I might as well do the thing we haven't done yet,

which is wedge, wedge factions, wedge clans. So we did. And then once we did that, it seemed obvious that we had done the ally color block had done ally color charms. It seemed only appropriate. They worked the same way. They were three-manna, one of each color. Okay, next up was Streets of New Capena.

Apparently, when we do a three-color set, So, Tracy New Capena was another take on a three-color block. It had been a while since we had done Shars of Alara, and we were trying to do something new. It was a world that we originally called Demon Mobster World. And the idea was we were playing around with a lot of the genre of sort of crime. And so it's a world overrun with crime, run by demons because we're a fantasy set. And then the idea was that each crime family represented a different sort of, sort of genre of crime, you know, entertainment.

And so each one played up a different thing. Once again, we were on a three-collar world. Charms work really nice. Three-colored charms are specifically fun. So we made another batch of three-collar charms. The latest charms actually are very, very recent. They are in the new Secrets of Strickshaven. So once again, we are in a world of factions, colored factions.

These are enemy colors. And it felt only right to sort of tie into that. And so we thought it would be fun. Okay. The two other things where we've done charms, cycles of charms. One was in Mystery Booster. Oh, no, it wasn't Mystery Booster. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

It was the unknown event. So at every pro, not pro tour, at every MagicCon, Gavin Verhey runs an event called Gavin Verhe's Unknown Event. And in the event, he always has a weird mix of cards, and the rules for what you're doing for deck building is always a little bit different. And he always makes new cards, stickers for the event, the unknown cards. And for one of them, he did a cycle of charms. And because he had access to weird and quirky things, because it's an unknown event,

he can make weird and quirky charms, which he did. Another thing that we're doing is a mega-mega-secle. So what that means is usually a megacycle is something that we did within the confines of a year, normally within a block. Mega, mega means it takes place over multiple years. So we're doing the arch master charms. They all have arch in them,

and we're not even done with it yet, but I forget we did the first one. First one was in one of the Modern Horizons, I think, and people liked it so much. We kind of did a charm that were just a little more powerful. And anyway, we've been doing them every once in a while,

and so it's a mega-megeyco we're doing. There are a lot of one-offs, I'm not going to I'm not there are a bunch of things that are essentially charms in the fact that they are three things pick one which are charms I'm just going to talk a little bit about things we literally labeled charms

just because there's too much to talk about so I narrowed it down like in modern horizons we did umazawa's charm so the umazazazade which is a very famous card pretty powerful card it was an equipment that did three different things so the umazawa's charm cost one in a block

and then it does those, you choose from one of those three things that it did. We made a charm in moderate as three called Thraven Charm, where we once again are playing around with doing sort of more modern mix-and-match effects. In Mystery Booster, we did Growth Charm, where you get to pick actual names of real spells that you're picking from. Evil Boros Charm, where it's got hybrid black red and hybrid white black. In front of Eldrain, this next one's mine. So Prince Charming is a character in mini fairy tales

So we thought it would be funny to nod to that So I made a card called Charming Prince Where it's a two man of tutu That you have three options when you play it Interestingly, the funny story about that is I called it Charming Prince And then at some point they changed the name And like, what are you doing?

Like Charming, like it's very like I made a charm of a prince So that it could be Charming Prince And I ended up, Other people complained that they ended up putting it back to charming prints. And then in Wilds of Eldre, there's Charming Scoundrel, which is the same basic thing, except it's a two-man-a-one-one that is red and has three effects. The one other thing that, I mean, I think Charms have influenced a lot of things.

The one other thing that was big enough that we name them by name are commands. So Aaron Forsyth, my boss, who loves modal effects, he was leading the design for Lorwyn. And so he tried something new. So rather than here are three choices, pick one, he tried. Here are four choices, pick two. And that became known as the commands. And they were a bit more expensive. They were playing around in a much different space. Charms tend to be on the cheaper side. Not always. We have done charms. It's a little more expensive. But the idea of commands is you're doing big, splashy things. And once again, flexibility is powerful. So these are giving you just basic effects,

but very powerful basic effects, and so you can mix and match. And they, the charm, the commands became super powerful, or super popular, and powerful. So, in Strickshaven, we did them, or sorry, in Dragons of Tarquere, we did

two-color ally commands. Like I said, we had done the charms in dragons, so we did command. So we thought it was fun that also in reality, they have charms, we have commands. that we thought that was fun. In Strickshaven, we did the enemy, the enemy commands. Then in Brothers War, they did a series of one color command tied to characters.

So each command was a different character from the story. And then in Lorwin's Eclipse, we did two color commands again, but not Ally or Enemy, it was tied to the five archetypes that were attached to Typo, which was, it didn't line up as ally or enemy. white blue, black, red, green, white, blue, red, black green. Those are the five that were tied to, you know, Kithkin and elves and such. Okay, so let me talk a little bit. I'm almost to work, but let me talk a little bit about the making of charms. How do we make charms?

So first and foremost, you don't make a charm in a vacuum. I mean, unless you're making one charm, like in Modern Horizons, whatever. But normally we make charms, we make them in cycles. That's how we make charms. So the way you make a charm is, first you've got to be a charm. to figure out the structure of your charm. Like, are you doing one drops? Are they, like, well, you have to figure out the

rough mana value and the color. Is it monolour? Is it two color? Is it three color? And then once you know that, okay, how much mana is involved in making it? How big of effects are you playing with? So once you understand the mana value and the color or colors of your charms,

the next thing you need to do is you need to make a list of everything you can think of that could be a charm in that color. And one of the things we always tend to do when we make new charms is we look at old charms. Like one of our goals is we want to make sure that we're not recreating something we already made.

Not that we can't do individual effects from charms. I mean, it would be impossible make new charms if all old charms are off-limits. There's only so many effects. But the nice thing that happens is a couple things. One is if you're doing multicolour, you get to mix and match

things in ways you don't normally get a mix and match. And if you're doing monolour, A, the set might have effects that are unique to that set. Maybe we're doing mechanics in that set than we're not doing elsewhere. The one challenge is because you have to write three different lines of text. You don't have a lot of room. So

not all mechanics work with charm just because there's not room for the reminder text. And in charms, usually charms are lower in rarity. Commands are higher in rarity just because it's doing more. So what you do is you figure out the power level

and the color of what you need. And for every color, you write every effect you can think of. And sometimes there's effects that are new since you lasted charms. Sometimes there's things that are unique to the set you're doing. Like sometimes there's themes that might not make sense in a normal step, but make sense in this set. Or maybe there's something you're bending a little bit for this set that you normally wouldn't

do in that color, but the set is doing it because of the bend. Oh, we're caring about graveyards. The graveyard set. Oh, well, this color doesn't do that much in the graveyard, but we're doing this thing because it's a graveyard set. Oh, maybe in this set we can do that. So you kind of want to make a long list. The reality of making charms is there's a lot of mixing and matching.

That's the challenge of charms. And depending on how big the charm is, if your charm gets to be a little bit larger, nowadays we tend to make charms in which one of the effects is something that we're pretty sure you're going to play, removal or maybe not straight removal, sideways removal, or something that you're encouraged to want to play. And the idea is the other two effects are effects that we'd like you to get in your deck, but we know it's hard to make you get in your deck.

So kind of a little bit of getting you to eat your vegetables is because one of the things that's really cool is sometimes there are effects that are super fun, but that players just will never play them in a vacuum. And that's one of the things that modal spells in general are great at. I want you to have Effect X, but you're never going to put Effect X in your deck. Un-Aided.

So I staple it to some other effects, especially one that you probably will want to play, and then you put it in your deck. And then every once in a while, oh, this effect actually is exactly what I need in this moment, and you get those great, like a lot of the fun of quirky weird effects is when they shine, when they work, it's very memorable. But you're just getting people to the point where they have that. So what you want to do is you want to make a list of your different mechanics. And you normally have a list of sort of more powerful and weaker.

you want to make sure that at least one of your charm effects is something that, you know, if the car just did that thing, a lot of the time you'd be fine. And so you make sure you have one a little bit stronger ability and then two other supporting abilities. Depending on your color combination, like I said, sometimes it's everything in one color, one of each of three colors, one of two colors,

but the third one is a combined hybrid thing. Oh, and when you're doing in that space, you might have to make a list for the hybrid effects. Like here's red effects, here's black effects, here's red and black effects. And then what you do is you just start putting them up the board and you sort of mix and match them.

And the challenge is that you're trying to keep them off each other. You want to make sure the charms don't seem too much like each other. So for example, if one charm does something in one... There's certain effects that are too similar that you only get one of those effects.

For example, white can tap a creature and red can make something can't block. Those are pretty similar. Not a hundred percent similar, but the play value is pretty similar. So if white's going to tap a creature, red's probably not going to make target creature can't block. And so there's a lot of sort of jockeying and figuring what you want to do. And normally what you figure out is you first start by putting in the things that aren't the normal, like, that are special to the set you're in. What are the effects that this set wants that

other sets wouldn't want? What are things you could put on a charm that you would? Oh, we're doing typal. you know, we're muddling the color pie. Like, whatever it is, fit those in first. Fit the things in that are novel to what you are doing. And then you can sort of look past those and figure out what else do you need. Is that thing being the kind of core ability or no, you need to have something that's more evergreen that's core. Is that filling a certain color or do you have to grab another color?

And the thing that you tend to do sometimes is you have to keep making choices because, and this is the reason you make the list. and the reason you do them all together, that as you build them, it's going to start causing problems. Normally what we tend to do is one of the colors is more pinched than the other colors for various reasons. Maybe there's other things in the set that are eating up space that limits what you can do. Maybe, whatever, there's a lot of reasons it can be tight.

You normally start by making sure you fill in the tightest one first. What's the one that's the problem child? And then it's kind of a domino effect sort of thing. Like, once, oh, red is the one that really needs the help in this set. So we're going to do Camp Block because, you know, red is a limited number of effects. And so we're going to do that. Oh, well, since we're doing Camp Black and Red, White can't do Tap a creature. And then it starts extrapolating out.

And the one of the things that happens when you make charms, because you design them all as a cycle. You'll start with a certain thing. And then as you play test, you might go, oh, this one needs a little strengthening. And each time you change one, you are often, unless you're just powering. up an element. Instead of doing two damage, you just three damage. Unless you're changing numbers, you need to reconfigure. Every time you're messing with the charms, you're

missing with all of the charms. And a lot of fixing things is you've got to yank out all the charms again and you've got to go through them. But anyway, and commands, I mean, this is more about Charm State, but commands work similarly. So, that, my friend, is everything.

So I'm now at work. That is the history of charms. the reason behind the charms, the how we design charms, 30 minutes about charms. So I hope you found my talk today charming, but I am at work. So we all know what that means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking to magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.