Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1342: The Rule

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

What is "the rule"? Why does Magic have it? (It didn't always.)

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is on something that I don't even know the name of. I'm just calling it the rule. So in magic, we have a rule that says all cards, and this is in Blackborder, unsets work a little differently. We'll get to that. But in Black Border, all cards with the same English name have to function mechanization.

mechanically identically. Meaning, it doesn't matter what version you play of a card. It doesn't matter what set it comes from, what arts on it. It doesn't matter the version you have that all cards with the same name function identically.

Now, interestingly, this rule did not always exist. So we're going to talk a little bit about where the rule came from, why we have the rule, and just talk a bit about sort of, it's a history lesson actually, about the evolution of magic. and the need for the rule. So that's today's topic.

More than you possibly wanted to know about the rule, the thing that it's the unnamed thing that I'm now explaining right now. So let's begin our story all the way back in Alpha. So magic is a card game, which means we have to print the cards. And early on, so when Wizards of the Coast, when Richard Garfield first came to pitch,

not even Magic, he was pitching Robo Rale. and they were a tiny company and they're like, we don't have the resources to make a game with lots of pieces. And Richard said, what can you make?

And they said, well, we have a printer. We can make cards and we have access to artists. We get up cards with pretty pictures on them. And so Richard set off to make a game

to be played in between Dungeon Dragon games, which is what, you know, he made magic. So when Alpha came out, there were a lot of mistakes on the sheets. and mostly they'd just never done this before.

This was a company sort of, like, Magic as a product, it's a pretty complex product, especially when you take into account that it hadn't been made before. Like, it's not like, you know, if you're going to make a trading card game now, well, you can look at other trading card games, but this was them, I mean, they had trading cards to look at, so they had a little bit of things to work with.

But the idea essentially was they were doing it for the first time, and early magic was played with lots of printing issues. And it varied from set to set. I'm going to go through Alpha in a second, but like Arabian Knights, some of the cards were darker than they were supposed to be, so there's like two versions of certain cards. Antiquities,

repeated. You could get the same card twice in your eight card pack. Legends, the uncommonds were split into two sections, A and B. I think they might have been on two separate sheets. And a box either had all of one or all of the other. So if you've got a box of legends, you only got half of the Uncomments. So there were a lot of

printing things early on. Alpha specifically had a lot of misprints. So let's walk through exactly what this. So there are a bunch of different kinds of misprints. First up is what I will call. There's some just editing issues.

For example, Doug Schuller, one of the artists who did Sarah Angel. His name is spelled wrong in the entire set. The there is a bunch of cards like there's a bunch of cards that have the word discard in them

and the word card is all capitalized I assume they were using card for card name or something there are some cards that are supposed to reference mana symbols but reference letters instead like on force of nature it's supposed to cost you green green green green but the card says GGGGG and then there was like a bunch

of artists were just mislaid like COP Red says it's done by Anton Maddox but it's actually done by Mark Tadine. Sagittrell says it's done by Jeff Mengus but it's actually Dan Frazier. Tropical Island says Mark Poole, but it was yes for Mirror Force. So there's a bunch of that.

But probably the real important misprints, the ones that matter for gameplay was the robust of misprints where the card is just not correctly explaining what it is. For example, Cyclopean Tomb was supposed to cost four generic mana. It's just missing a mana symbol.

Elvish archers was a green rare. It was supposed to be a two-one first-right creature, but it was printed as a one-two creature. Orkish oriflum and Orkish artillery. So Orkish artillery was supposed to cost one red-red for a two-three that you could tap it to do two damage to any... Sorry, two damage to any creature and three damage to you the player, I think.

Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I think it damaged to you the player. And that was supposed to be one R and was one R. Orkish Oriflame, which gave all your creatures plus one plus O, was supposed to be three in a red, and instead was one in a red. Red elemental blast, which was supposed to be an interrupt, was mislabeled as an instant.

Ironically, that would later become true, but at the time it was... So there are a bunch of things like that where the card is literally isn't saying... It's technically wrong. That it's saying something about the card that isn't true. Or in the case, it's like in Doom, just missing something that you need. There actually was one more category. I use Island Sanctuary as my example here. So the idea of Island Sanctuary is you are on an island.

So creatures can't harm you unless they're... they have flying or island walk, right? Unless they can get to the island, you're safe from them. But the way it was worded is that you may not take damage from any creature that doesn't have flying or island walk. Well, remember Orkish Artillery, the one that did damage to you? You did two damage to any target and did three damage to you. Well, it doesn't have flying or island walk.

So the Alpha Island Sanctuary would protect you from your own Orkish artillery. Now, the idea that wasn't the intent. The intent of the card was the opponents, but there are some examples where we wrote things and didn't quite write them in the cleanest way possible. So when Beta came along, they fixed things. Oh, we also, the sheet left off Circle of Section Black and Volcanic Island. We were just left off the Alpha Sheets.

They showed up in Beta. So Beta, they ended up, they changed some things around. They corrected a bunch of their mistakes. They cleaned some things up. Things like Island Sanctuary, I believe, changes. I believe the beta island sanctuary is different in text than the Alpha Island Sanctuary. So suffice to say, there were just cards that were different. Now, in early magic, the way the rules worked was you played the card as it read,

meaning you cared about the actual version you had. So I remember there were people who had decks with Alpha Orkish Artilaries because it would cost 1R and Alpha Island Sancturaries because it protects you from damage from it, And the idea is if you wanted to play that deck, for starters, you needed the Alpha Island Sanctuary because no other island sanctuary worked that way. And if you wanted the cheaper orchestra artillery, you needed the Alpha Orchestra artillery.

Now, you could play with the beta, but that costs one red red, so it costs more mana. But that was the idea in early on was... And it's pretty simple to explain why that was the case. And I've talked about this a lot, but it's important for this lesson today. When Richard made magic, he made it to be a normal game, a game you would buy in the game store and probably play at home with your friends.

Richard did not, I mean, and this is no strike against Richard, Richard could not, you can't imagine magic becoming what it did. That's not the kind of thing you plan for. It's an awesome thing to happen. But the idea essentially was, you know, and remember, when magic first came out, the Internet was in its infancy. or, you know, the World Wide Web didn't exist yet, I believe. So, like, looking things up was not easy.

And people didn't have cell phones, or at least not cell phones, that you could look up information on. So early on, the idea was we wanted, you know, Richard wanted to make sure that you were aided by the game pieces. And so the easiest way to understand what's going on is, well, read the piece. Your card says what it does. And if cards were slightly different, well, that's okay. Just, you know, read the actual physical card you have.

And that made a lot I mean early magic That made a lot of sense In the sense that Oh I'm playing You know in my house With my friends This card

Well it's how it functions That's what it says And the idea that the card should match What the card says Was super important And the other thing Is early on in magic When we would reprint cards

We would take that as an opportunity To clean up things even things in which, well, technically this is slightly different. Like I think, like Castle, the Alpha Castle, I think gives you plus zero plus two if you're not tapped,

and I think the later castle is like attacking creatures that aren't tapped or like it slightly tweaks what it is. And the idea at the time was, early magic had such small print runs than when we were doing, like, we're reprinting cards into later core sets, so many, most people who will play the game

will have this later set. So we would actually change cards a little bit to clean things up. Like, oh, well, this is not how we templated originally, but this is what we meant. And the idea originally was, okay, well, you know, as we print later cards, most of the people have later cards, we'll fix it in later cards. But eventually, eventually we started running into trouble. And so I often talk about

I, so myself along with Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, William Jockish, and Henry Sterner, sort of what I call the the second age of R&D. The first age were people that were part of the playtest team, although technically Bill was part of the playtest team, who came to work at Wizards and, you know, this was scaffold, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Richard, obviously.

And a lot of these people were, had done early designs and, you know, we're helping getting the game off the ground. But there came a point where magic, you know, had matured a little bit. It was like two years into magic. And they were interested in doing other things, Richard wanted to make other trading card games and other games. And mostly Wizards was growing as a company, and they wanted to do other stuff. So they hired the five of us, basically, to sort of be in charge of running magic.

It's not that they never got involved in magic. They did. They peaked their head in from time to time. but as far as the day-to-day like the development teams at the time were the five of us I mean Henry didn't start until a year after the rest of us but we were the development team

it wasn't like there was different development teams every development team was the four of us me Bill Mike and William and eventually when Henry joined Henry and one of the things that I think started happening that we that us became very aware of is

that when the game is just as small game that's played in people's houses, it's okay that cards work differently. It's okay that the card at my house and the card at your house don't work the same. You might not even be aware that's true. But once the game started shifting where, hey, I might go to a game store and there's sanctioned play and I can play a game with something on the line against a stranger that I've never met before.

That's just a very different thing. and so what we spent a lot of time on early on was consolidation and continuity that early magic when it was like one of the things that I want to stress none of when I talked about this none of this is a knock against Richard Richard designed the game for what he intended the game to be

and what he thought the game was what the game most likely would have been but magic kind of did things that no one expected and And like early on, so Richard, the game that probably influenced Magic the Gathering the most was the game called Cosmic Encounter. So Cosmic Encounter really briefly, for those that have never played, you take the role of an alien

and you're sort of conquering the universe. You're taking over parts of the universe. You're fighting over planets. And the way that a lot of this stuff happens is, the way conflict happens, is you have cards. And a lot of times when you're challenging somebody, you're flipping up cards. but a couple things.

One, there are cards that change the nature of how things work. So the game has rules, but there are cards in the game that change the rules, but you break the rules of the game. And each alien has a special power. And so each alien has a rule unique to themselves. And so as you're playing the game, A, each time you're a different alien and the aliens play differently because the way they interact with the game is slightly different because usually they inherently break a rule or get some special ability to the other the other aliens don't.

And you have cards that break the rules. And so a lot of time what happens, which Richard really enjoyed, is you get interactions you'd never seen before. Oh, I'm this alien and you're that alien and I have this card and you have that card. Oh, I've never encountered this mix of things before. What will happen? And what Richard really enjoyed, and this is fun if most of you're playing with you and your friends is let us figure out what's going to happen and that we're going to have a debate and

talk through things and that there was a lot of fun to Richard in like part of playing the game is finding these weird things that happen and then sometimes huge the players have to figure out what's going to go on and that is a lot of fun when you are at home with your friends and your playgroup that can be very fun but if you're at a tournament with something on the line playing a stranger, it's not great to have to argue with the stranger about how the rules work when each one of you has a really strong incentive

to work a certain way. And so, we realized we needed to start consolidating things. For example, and I've talked about this, a lot of the evolution of magic is us pulling back about how much we care about things. In early designs, like the rules, were very much designed on a card-by-card basis.

In fact, so Tom Wiley, who was the original rules manager, he needed to write an article in the duelist, the magazine we had once upon a time, to show how batches worked. Before there was a stack, there were things called batches, and they were a little complicated. So Tom was writing a flow chart to show you how it worked. And to demonstrate a little, making a little commentary on the rule system,

he made it look like a rat maids. because it was that complicated. And so a lot of what we wanted to do early on was we wanted to create continuity. So Bill, for example, took upon himself to really clean up the rules. I mean, he worked with other people, obviously, but there was the Sixth Edition rules,

and that introduced the stack, it got rid of interrupts, it just did a lot of things to clean up and streamline the rules. And the idea was, we wanted the players to learn the rules, and once you learn the rules, all the new cards followed the rules you knew, and that it just made it easier to understand how things work.

And there weren't exceptions. The editors, Dell, for example, Del Lago, the editors at the time, Dell, Dell starts like in 99, I think. But anyway, early on, the editors took around themselves to start figuring out sort of consistent templating. One of the challenges of Early Magic is, you'd have two cards that kind of did the same thing,

but they wouldn't have the same words on it. So another thing of consolidating is we want all the things that do the same things to have the same words, that we want things to be clean and clear. And that when we printed, reprinted cards, well, we stopped doing sort of what we call functional errata. We didn't make them work differently. We did change their template. We did make sure that they wanted to play as clean as they could. And then I took it upon myself to really start cleaning up the color pie.

Early magic was kind of all over aboard, you know, and I'm like, look, I want kind of. powers that strength and weaknesses, that if we don't, we aren't consistent with it. You know, if Green's weakness is this, but then we make a card that undoes Green's weakness, well, is that Green's weakness? You know, and so, so there's a lot, a lot of that sort of second wave of R&D, a lot of what we were doing was starting to consolidate the game, make it a game consistent. Make sure that if you understood how something worked in one place, it works the same in the other place. And as you started to learn things, there was continuity between them. Okay, which gets us to the

rule. Now, I was, I did a little research on, I was trying to figure out when Oracle started. Oracle was, so I do know, so in 2002, we started Magic Online. Magic Online was the first digital implication of magic, or

the first time we did digital magic. Magic would be able to come later. And in order for us to do that, we needed, we needed, like, the computer had to have continuity. If two cards worked the same, the computer had to treat them the same. And so I know we were doing early work. So the game came out in 2002, but we were probably working on it in the late 90s, starting to figure out how to make

it work, how to make digital magic work. And that one of the keys to digital magic working was the idea that if you and I had the same card, obviously online, it had to work the same. And so we realized that as we change things, as we updated templates, we needed some way to just make the, what's the version of everything. And we had a database. We called the gathering. And so we invented Oracle. And Oracle says, this is the most up-to-date wording for every card in existence.

And the reason the Oracle was important was it created a sense of continuity. It allowed digital to have just a straight-through line and everything. And so my best guess is I think Oracle, I think Oracle's creation, I mean, I'm not sure the chicken and the egg. I'm not sure if digital made us make Oracle or we made Oracle, which allowed us to then start to pursue digital. I'm not quite sure the order of those things happen. But anyway, we create Oracle.

And once we create Oracle, once we can say, okay, there's a definitive answer for what the latest template is, that's when the rule got made. And the idea is, okay, there exists. And at this point, the other thing is the Internet had evolved a bit. The worldwide web happened. I mean, now we could have a website and, you know,

there are cell phones and, like, now you can start to check things. Although we're talking, I guess the internet existed. You could look things up. Maybe cell phones weren't quite a thing just yet. Cell phones are slightly later. Or cell phones that you could look things up. Cell phones existed, I guess, but not cell phones you could search the internet on yet. That's coming.

That's really, you need to get stuff like the iPhones. So anyway, we make this rule and we say, if you're playing a card, no matter what version of the card you're playing, it doesn't matter what printing. Was it the alpha printing? Was it the fourth edition? Was it seventh edition? Was it reprinted in an expansion? Whatever. Those are the same.

That if a card has the same name, it's the same. And what does it do? Ah, it does what Oracle says it does. And that beget a lot of rules. we started saying we didn't want to do erata, what we call functional erata, which is we were very careful about changing how a card worked. I'm not saying we never

do, we do occasionally, we have to, but we're very careful about when and how we do functional rata. Now, I will say, when we made this rule, we came up with a small problem. And the poster child of this problem is a card called City and a Bottle. So City in a Bottle was a from Arabian Nights.

So, in fact, Richard Garfield, so the story of Arabian Nights is Magic comes out. Magic is planned to be out for like a year. Like, there was, Richard had the people started to work on expansions, but the idea was the expansions would be a year in, two years in.

No one, once again, magic, so for those who don't know the story, is Wizard of the Coast prints enough for what they think is going to be a year supply, or six-month to a year of supply. and they get sold in three weeks. Then they make beta.

They make a whole bunch more. They make beta, which is significantly more than alpha. And they're like, okay, this time we mean it. This is going to be a year of supply. And it goes in a week. And then eventually they get unlimited. But Magic was doing so well that Peter came to Richard and said, we need to make an expansion.

So Richard very quickly made an expansion. And he made it based, there's a comic called Sandman. and Sandman Number 50, which I think is called City in a Bottle, I think that's the name, has a story that has a Persian flavor to it. And so Richard really became enamored with taking the book 1001 Arabian Nights,

which is a collection of sort of Persian Arabian stories and turning that into a set, being inspired by that. Some could argue the first universe is beyond. So Richard made it. It was not a lot of cards. It was like 78 cards, I believe. it was not a lot of cards

it got sold in eight eight card boosters but it was something to put out because Richard wasn't quite sure about how people were going to interact with the expansion like originally by the way Rabin Nice was going to have a different back

a pink back and Scaff I think talked Richard out of it at the very like right before he was going to go to print and they realized they wanted a continuity between the sets but anyway because Richard didn't know

how people would respond he made a card to call city in a bottle which, again, I think the episode 50 was called City of the Bottle, I believe. And what City of the Bottle did was, it got rid of, if you activated it, it was kind of like Nemerald disk, except it only destroyed cards from the Arabian Nights expansion. And so, and I think at the time he just said, oh, destroy any card with an Arabian Nights expansion symbol on it. Now, when we got to the rule, we rendered this problem. There are cards that were in Arabian Nights

that were later in third edition or fourth edition. And in third or fourth edition, they didn't have an Arabian Nights expansion symbol. So, if I, for example, because the set was originally going to have different backs, they put all the basic lands in it. In the last minute, decided not to do that, they removed the basic lands from the sheep,

except they miss one. There's a mountain. So there is a mountain with an Arabian Nights expansion symbol on it. And people used to like to play with a mountain because it was very rare. It was a way to show off. But if your opponent had a city in a bottle and you had that mountain, it would get destroyed by sitting in a bottle. And so, for example, now normal mountain was slightly different mechanically

from Arabian Knights Mountain because the Raven Knights Mountain got destroyed by sitting in a bottle. And so we got this first contradiction. Well, if we're saying that every card is mechanically the same, we can't say, well, cards interact with it differently. And so they ended up changing sitting in a bottle. The way it's now worded it is, it says all cards that originated in Arabian Nights, and then it lists the cards.

So it doesn't count mountain. The Oracle version basically says, I will destroy the following cards in as a long list of cards. It doesn't define it by B. In fact, maybe it doesn't even say first print in Arabian Nights. Because all it says is destroy the following cards, and it lists the cards that so happened were the cards in Arabian Nights. So, we now realize, oh, well, there's things that are on cards that change from printings.

A card, for example, might have an expansion symbol, but get reprinted, have a different expansion symbol. It might be one rarity, but we'll get reprinted, be a different rarity. It might have one artist, but then have a different artist, have a different collector number. Maybe it has a wider mark. All of a sudden, there are some qualities that we are no longer allowed to make. mechanically care about because the rule says we need things to be the same. That it's important that no matter what you do, you know how the card functions. That it's not like, I'm plagued this my point.

I go, what version of the card do you do? Oh, that's the Arabian night version. You're like, that was just too much. And so now the unsets picked up. One of the things that the unsets like to do is where is there a fun design space that Blackboarder can't do? And one of it was caring about these things. It's fun to care about rarity or expansion symbol or artists or watermarks.

And so Unset's can and do do that. And in to one of the differences is sort of the golden rule of Unplay, when you're playing with Uncards, it, in fact, does look at the actual card you're playing. So if there's a card in an Unset that wants you to cut the number of lines of text, you don't look up the Oracle, you just look at the cards you're playing. That whenever the cards care about qualities of a card in Unworld, you have to look at the actual card you're playing.

playing. And the idea is Unworld is not normal tournament magic. You're not going to show up and play a stranger at a store with something on the line in an Unset. So that's where we sort of allow that to live. So sort of Richard's original vision does live on Un-Card. So we are

if you want to care about things like watermarks or rarity or whatever, we can. There are cars that do that in the Unsets. And but so the rule got created and we've been pretty consistent about it. In fact, the reason

this whole podcast came about is one of the questions I keep getting asked is, can you take some of the cards from unsets that now work in the rules, die rolling being the easiest. When I first, like when Unglued came out, there's a card in Ungleud called Elvish impersonator.

And what you do is you roll two dice and the first dies is power and the second dies is toughness. So this is variable card. It can be meaning from 1-1-1-up to a 6-6, kind of a fun card. Early on, die-rolling wasn't a thing in Blackboarder, So if you wanted to play the card, it had to be silver-bordered, there was no die-wrong. But then along came the first Dungeon Dragon set, which had Di-Rong.

Now, he'd roll D-20s, but D-6s do work within the rules. And so the idea is people are like, hey, I want to play Elvish Impersonator. Can you just print a Blackboarded Elevation Personator? And the trouble, this is where this came about, is there are two rules right now. One rule says that all cards with the same English name can be played. As long as it's in real cards, there are cards that have different. backs and things, things like pro tour decks or there's different things we've made with the gold borders in different backs. But those aren't, I mean, those aren't actual magic cards in the sense that they're not, you know, they don't have normal backs.

On cards have normal backs on them. And so there's a rule that says all cards are saying English name function the same. There's another rule that says if you have a silver border, or now an acorn, you're not playable in tournaments. So if we made a black border card of something that existed in Silver Border, we had this weird situation where can I play the Silver Border card? If I follow the rule that says all cards

with the same name function the same, I can. But if I follow the rule that says all Silver Border cards are not tournament legal, I can't. And the tool rules contradict each other. And up to now it's never been an issue, but it's something that people are asking for, and I'm explaining we have to solve that issue. That's where this whole topic came up from.

But one of the reasons I wanted to do today, the reason I wanted to do this podcast is that a lot of the evolution of magic, a lot of the history of magic design, is us having to adapt the game to the needs of the game, to the needs of the audience. That Richard made the game to function in a certain way, which was great, but when the game started functioning a little bit differently,

the game had to adapt to the environment it was in. And by the way, that is true throughout the history of magic. when commander started becoming a thing, the game had to adapt a commander. Like, as different things happen, the game has to adapt, that the players like things and want things, and so the game adapts to the needs and wants to the players,

and so we keep shifting. And that's just an ongoing thing. You know, the... Like, I'm talking today a lot about the need for continuity, but that's just early magic. That's just... Early magic was not built to be... You know, early magic was made

that cards could be different. one another, even if they had the same name. And we realized there came a point with that just that didn't make sense in the world we were living in it, and so we had to change it. But anyway, guys, I hope you enjoy it. I have fun doing these podcasts to sort of dig in a little

into the history and the philosophy of the history. Like, one of the neat things to me as I look back is looking at why and how things changed. That it is kind of cool that you know, it's just kind of cool that magic itself, like

you know, this is my 31st year working on magic and I get people all the time like, aren't you tired of working on magic? I'm like, no, no, no. Magic sort of keeps evolving and keeps changing. And part of it is every set has different challenges for design. But another part of it is the game itself

keeps evolving. And that's one of the things that's really neat and exciting to me. And so anyway, that, my friends, is the history of the rule, which still exists. Will we ever solve the Black Bordered Un thing? I'll try to solve that. But anyway, I hope you guys

enjoy this little peek into history. but I'm at work, so we all know what that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time. Bye-bye.