Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1356: Inertia

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

In this episode, I talk about the pressures of changing things that have been the same for decades.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is inertia. But I used to, I did a series from when I went to talk to my daughter's class when she was in fifth grade. I did a series called 10 games, 10 things every game needs. And then I did a separate podcast in each of those 10 qualities. One of which was inertia, but there I was talking about within a game, the need for the game to end.

that everything you're making your player do has to push toward the game ending. So today is about inertia, but a different style of inertia. So while there is a podcast previously on inertia, not quite the same thing. When I'm talking about today is why things that we think maybe should change

don't change. And that is the topic of today. So I'm talking about inertia of the game as it applies to design at all. So this is not, inertia within the game making the game end. That's the other podcast. It is about how inertia, meaning working on a game that's 33 years old, how that affects decisions we make. Okay. So to start with, I'm going to talk about Manacos. So on a magic card,

so interestingly, when Richard Garfield first in alpha, or pre-Alpha, in Alpha playtesting, The way mana costs work is not the way they currently work. The way it works, have you ever seen like an alpha playtest card? So let's say a card is supposed to cost two generic and one blue mana. The way it would be written on a playtest card is it would say three and then blue. And what that meant was you're going to pay three total mana, one of which must be blue. But that confused people. So Richard Garfield, creator of the game, changed it.

to our current system, which is you see a generic mana and then you see colored mana. You must spend that much generic mana and that much colored mana. But the first number is not the total amount of mana. It's just the amount of generic mana you need. So if you want to pay two generic, or if it costs three, one of which must be blue, it would say two generic mana, two in a circle, and then blue, blue mana. Now, even though that is how it is written on a card, and it's how R&D actually talks about it, meaning, so when we talk about cards, about costs, sometimes we use the color, sometimes we use the alphabet, and the way it works is white is W, blue is U, black is B, red is R, green is G. The real short version of this I've explained before, but people always ask, is obviously black and blue both,

start with B. So they can't both be B. Only one could be B. Blue and black second letter is both L. L we used for the code for land. These are card codes. We used it for land. And then it was U or A. So A was also used for artifacts, so we ended up using U for blue. Now, it turns out the printing people ran into the same problem many years ago, and what they chose to do is instead of B for black, they used K for black. We were unaware of that. We did not, Richard did not use that. And so the system we use now is based from back then, speaking of inertia. But anyway, so that is the way that we use it. So if we're in a meeting and something costs three manna, one of which is blue,

we would say either too blue or two you is how we would say it. But I've learned over the years. That is not really how most players refer to it. Although R&D copies, as it's written on the card, most people, let's say something cost three mana, one of which is blue, they would say blue and two, or blue two. They put the colored manor first.

And I spent a lot of time in energy and a lot of articles trying to say, here's what R&D says it and just try to encourage people to say the same way R&D does, and I have failed. And I think the reality is the reason people want to say the color first

is the color really matters. That this costs three mana, one of which must be blue, well, the blue part matters. Yeah, yeah, the other part is generic, but the blue part matters more. So people want to kind of front load the most important part. That makes total sense. And if we were going to start all over again,

if magic was starting over, in fact, I did a, I wrote an article, and then I think I did a podcast on that article, called Starting Over. It was a fictional story where I used a time machine to go back in time to talk to Richard Garfield before he released Magic. And I just casually mentioned,

some things maybe you'd want to change. And the whole point of the article is me sort of talking about, well, if we were going to start over, here's some things I would change. But the whole point of today is, why aren't we? So let's talk about the man. Because I bring the manna up because if I was going to start over, if you cost three mana, one of which is blue, it would not say two and blue. It would say blue and two, which is how most players refer to it.

I would just put the colored mana first. Okay, but that begs the question. Actually, I figured it was about years ago. Why didn't we make that change? And the answer is inertia. An inertia is why we didn't make that change. So I want to walk through today to talk about what is this force that keeps us for making changes. And, you know, if we think something is the right thing to do, why continue to do it the wrong way?

And there are some things where we stopped doing the wrong way. We changed the way we thought. And so sometimes we do change things. sometimes we don't. So that is kind of the goal of today. When and where and how do we... When do we choose to sort of keep the status quo? I'm going to use a couple other examples of things here,

and then we're digging deep why. Another thing is the back, the back of the Magic card. You see when Richard and Peter Atkinson, the original CEO, when they were... When they made magic, they had big ideas in head that they recognized that magic was not just a great game, it is, but it was introducing a new concept, the trading card game, which is very exciting. And they decided that they were going to get into the trading card game business. And in order to get into the trading card game business, they should have a logo, a name,

something that represents the Wizards of the Coast. This is a Wizard of Coast trading card game. And so they made something called deck mafter. And the idea was, if you saw a trading card game and you saw a deck mafter on it, you knew that was a Wizards the Coast branded trading card game, and that meant it was good. So the back of a magic card you'll notice is the word deck mafter. So I think there were four games, I believe, that had the word deck mafter on them. One was Vampire the Eternal Struggle, originally called Jihad, changed the name.

Next was Netrunner, and the last one was Battletech. and each of those three is their other game properties. Vampire The Returnal Struggle and NetRunner are role-playing games. Battletech is a role-playing game, but also there's a live-action game you can play

with pods. It's very cool. So the idea was we did go down that path and make more deck mafter games. But in the end, although some of those games were very good, the games were all very good. The deck math, the idea of Wizards doing trading

card games are at bare minimum having a deck mafter brand never really came came to be we stopped doing it after i think after battle tech um but the magic card still says deck mafter on the back why well all magic cards have the same back and we had that back um in fact not only has that changed the logo that's not the current magic logo in fact it's many logos back um the back of a magic I believe it's a blue logo. We figured out pretty quickly that on shells, blue didn't stand out, and we changed to a yellow logo.

And then eventually we moved away from that whole... The magic logo sort of changed the look and feel of it and changed what we currently use. But anyway, so the back of the magic card has Deckmaster, has a logo we haven't used in ages. And there's a lot of little tiny things that could be cleaned up. So from time to time,

I'd say every three to four years, the conversation. Should we change the back? In fact, if you play in any digital form of magic, either Magic the Gathering Arena or Magic Online, I believe the back is not the same back as the magic back. It's slightly cleaned up. I think the, I don't think deck masters on it, for example. But there we have the ability to make all the backs exactly the same so we can change the back. But in Table Dot Magic, well, there's cards that exist and they have backs and those backs. And so we have not chosen to change them. Another thing that I would change if we could change,

just to give you a few things, we realized a way back that if we could do it all over again, I'm pretty sure we would make instant, not a car type, but a super type. And what that means is that you would not have instance and sorceries. You would just have sorceries. So cards that refer to instant or sorcery would just say sorcery, but some would be a normal sorcery and some would be an instant sorcery.

Also, the flash keyword would not exist. Instant would just go on cars to apply the card has flash. So you would be instant creature, instant artifact, or instant enchantment, whatever the permanent is. So the idea is that instant would sort of communicate when you can play the card. And that would be a super type rather than be instant. It wouldn't be the car type instant, which is just a sub, you know, a car, a single, type. But we have not done that. Why have we not done that? Okay, so let's get into this. So, why have we not changed the manacosts, the card back, the instant card type slash super type? Why,

why haven't we made those changes? And like I said, there are changes we have made. There are things we do change. There are, we change templating. We change sometimes how core every green mechanics work. Lifeling at one point stacked. Now it doesn't stack, meaning if you had a lifelink twice, you would gain twice the life. Now you don't. Just the creature is lifeling. So, lifeling means you get one times the light. You know, one, for each damage, you get one of the life. So, let me walk into what's going on. So first and foremost, I think that the, there's some, so I did a talk many years ago talking about something I called communication theory, something I learned in school when I studied communication. And communication, and communication,

theory said that there's kind of three core things that drive how people function and it drives how media works. Comfort, surprise, and completion. Humans are creatures of a habit. They like things being the way they are. In fact, there was a really famous survey, this is when I went to school, so this survey was done 45, 50 years ago. It's a long time. In fact, it involves a newspaper. That's a long hold it was. The question they asked, was why do you read the newspaper every morning? And the interesting thing was the number two answer was to get the news. To get the news, the number one function of a newspaper was the second answer.

The number one answer of why people read a newspaper every morning was, it is what I do every morning. It is a habit that I have. And the idea is the fact that it is a habit was a stronger pool than the functionality of the newspaper. of the newspaper. Yes, you want to get news out of the newspaper, which is why you would read a newspaper.

But more so than that, there's something really important about having a pattern to what you do. And this can be seen throughout media. It's true on web pages, on magazines, that you want to have some continuity of what you're doing so the player knows what to expect.

That you want to make sure that things are in their same place that there's a certain expectation. Like back when I was in school, so this is studying magazines, not the internet, because it was forever ago. One thing I talked about is, in a magazine,

there are certain features that are always in that magazine. A lot of this applies to like a website and stuff. And the idea is, you know what to expect and where to expect it. On the back page is this feature, and halfway through is this feature. And there's a look and feel, there's some continuity to it.

even though you haven't read this magazine before, you kind of know some of the structure of it. And I say websites are very similar. That it's really important that people want to feel comfort, right? They want to, they want the thing to be the thing that they know. Surprise, which is a little less true for this thing, but I'm just real bringing up. Talks about how it's fun and it's have things you don't expect.

That's a little less relevant for today. And the third thing is completion, meaning that humans like to complete things. And so in magic terms, if I give you a card in white, blue, black, and red, I better give it to you in green that, you know, that the idea when we do a cycle, oh, there's one in each color. And sometimes we don't do the cycles all in one set. So there's anticipation that we finish the cycle. That is the sense of completion, that people like to see patterns and that have those patterns displayed out. Okay, I bring up communication theory because it plays a lot into what I'm going to talk about now. Okay, so why does what is the power of inertia?

So number one is the idea of consistency, and this plays into the comfort I just talked about, that players really want things to be the same, that this is another, so in college, in when I took communications, they took, they made me take a class called aesthetics. Aesthetics is what my teacher referred to is the science of beauty, meaning that there's certain aesthetics, that the aesthetic comes from the fact that the way the human brain is wired just likes certain things. Patterns is one of them. Continuity is one of them. They like things to be balanced. There's a bunch of things the brain just likes. And so what the average human sees as beautiful, a lot of that comes from matching some of these things the brain really likes. And so it just makes you more comfortable with those things and it attracts you to those things. Okay, so why don't we change the mana symbol, the card back, the card type?

Well, consistency is the first one, especially for the cardback and for the mana cost. That when you play a game of magic, you really kind of want all your cards to seem the same. I mean, it's interesting to note that when Yesper Mereforce and Chris Rush designed the magic card frame way, way, way back for Alpha, they put the name in the upper left-hand corner. They put the manacost in the upper right-hand corner. They put power toughness in a lower right-hand corner. You know, they put the art in a certain place.

They put the cart type line, the rule text box, the artist credit. Like, things were put in a certain place. And with a few tiny exceptions, that is true today. The frame as set up and designed by Yesper and Chris, many, many years ago, 33 plus years ago, still holds true today. And the reason why we don't want to change. the mana symbol or the manacost is, it would be weird to have some of your manacosts work one way

and some work another way. It would just kind of irk people. That the lack of consistency is just jarring. The next thing is not just consistency, but clarity. Meaning we want to make sure that people understand how things work. Well, one of the way you do that is by doing things the same all the time. that by teaching somebody something and saying once you learn this rule,

everything else will follow. And so I've talked a lot about Manacoft in the cardback. Let me talk about instant as a super type per second. So one of the problems with changing that is it's not as if we didn't use the word instant. We did. An instant

means something. So if I have a card that says go into your deck and get an instant out of your deck, that means something. Or if I say, go get a sorcery out of your deck, that means something. But under the new guys that,

you know, the alternate version that I'm pitching, the word instant now becomes a super type means something slightly different. If I said go get an instant, you would probably read that as go get any card that has instant as a super type. Okay, well, that would go get

what we now think of instance because those be instant sorceries, but it would also get any card with flash. So now you're getting instant creatures. instant artifacts, instant enchantments. So that's not quite what instant means, meaning you'd be following the rules, but it wouldn't quite be what you thought it meant.

And let's say you're in a card that said, go get a sorcery. Well, under the new rules, a sorcery isn't just what we now call a sorcery, it'd be an instant or sorcery, because all non-permanence would be sorcery. So if I say go get a sorcery, now that card that's only supposed to get you

a modern-day sorcery would, in fact, get you an instant or sorcery. See, that's part of the problem that if we make changes because there are cards that don't have those changes, if the cards that don't have the changes would make sense and do something that you would understand but not work right,

that is a huge problem. I don't want to say, okay, here's the change to instant sorceries and all of a sudden there are cards printed with words on them that would in fact work. If I said, a sorcery from the graveyard to your hand, that does work right now. That means something.

Now, just say we change over instant, all of a sudden the functionality of that card would change. It now wouldn't just fetch what we refer to as a sorcery, it would refresh an instant or sorcery. And that would change the functionality of the card. And one of the things, I mean, obviously, we, so we do do what we call functional errata, where we change things and it changes how cards work. For example, I mentioned earlier that we changed how life language. works. But most lifelink cards, especially the early ones, do not say on them, well, there is reminder text for some, but even the reminder text doesn't in the reminder text explain whether it stacks or not. That's in the comprehensive rules. So we were changing something that you had

to learn and it didn't affect old cards, but it's more the rules change. You have to know how the rules work and nothing about it. Nothing about the original card contradicts the working of it. And that's why that's a little bit different. That we can make changes. As long as those changes aren't contradicted by the old cards, that's where things get a little trickier. That clarity is important. That the reason we do something and we keep to it is there's a lot of teaching.

Okay, another thing is expectation. That one of the reasons that we are consistent is that we are setting players up to expect things. There's a lot of training that goes on in magic. That early magic, for example, there would be cards that pretty much functionally did similar things, but the templates weren't the same. They'd have different templates because early magic templating was a little all over the place. And the problem there is if you play a card and see a certain template and then play another card and there's a different template, well, the expectation is I guess this card works differently. If card A and card B worked the same, they would have the same words on them. So the fact that they don't have the same words on them tells me they don't work the same.

And that's why expectation is pretty important. It helps with clarity and consistency, but it also, we want players to sort of, we want to properly set up the expectations. That is very important. And so we want people when they come to new cards. One of the other challenges of early magic is when every card is different. One of the things about early templating was cards were kind of solved on a card-by-card basis. But what that meant was it was very hard to learn rules and then apply the rules because each card kind of functioned in a vacuum.

The reason sixth edition rules got made. Six edition rules said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a rule system where we teach you the rules. And when you read a new card, if you know the rules and you understand our template, you will understand how the new card functions from the text we give you. And that is why expectation is so important, that you can set things up and you can, it becomes a better means for people to understand and to learn. And a lot of what we want, a lot of the reason for the choices we make is we want to lower

the ability to comprehend the cards. Card comprehension, you know, we want to make it as low as possible. Obviously, we do complex things. Not every card is simple. But where we can, we want to lower. We want to, the more we can teach you, and then when you come to a new card, you bring with it the baggage of old cards to help you understand the new card, the better off state the game is in.

Okay. The last big thing I'll talk about is history. So I'm going to use a metaphor, using another product metaphor here, which is going to be Lego. So Lego, for those who know, are little bricks. I assume most you know what Legos are, but little bricks that you click together to make things. So when I was a child,

I was a huge fan of Legos. And I had a big box of Legos, and I used to play with them all the time. And I remember one day, my mom, after college or something, was like cleaning the house, and she's like, Would you like your old box of Legos?

And I said, absolutely! I had fond memories of my Legos. So I had them, and I put them aside, and they were, you know, I had them in my house. And anyway, my son Adam became a big fan of Legos. And Legos had changed a lot since I was a kid. When I was a kid, they mostly had pieces.

It weren't even that many pieces. There was like, the classic was two by four, but two by four, two by two, I think there's two by one. Maybe there were a few one-by-ones and maybe some 10 by two. There wasn't a lot. The idea that here, go build this thing, here's all the pieces, that would come later. The idea of other brands, that will come later. But anyway, my son got into Legos and Legos were pretty different from when I was a kid,

but I found my box of Legos in my house and I took it and I poured it into my son's box of Legos. Why? Because his Legos worked with my Legos. Even though there were new things, obviously, there were pieces that didn't exist. Every piece that I had was still true. In fact, once I mixed it in, you couldn't tell the difference. between my Legos and my son's Legos.

That, my friends, is history. And the reason I bring up Lego is magic in a lot of ways is very much like Lego. If you opened up, like I, for example, opened up multiple Alpha packs. I have cards of my Alpha Pack. If I mix them into my son's cards, other than the rounded corners,

that's the one thing we change very fast. Alpha have different corners. As a beta forward, the cards are all the same. But let's say I use beta as my card. example here. Alpha just have the one thing that we change the card shape. But if I have beta cards, I open up my beta packs, my son could put them in his deck and there's no different, no different differentiation from cards of today. I mean, there are a little bit of differences. Maybe we have evolved the frame a little bit. But the point is the functionality of the cards

work just fine. That if you want to take a, if you want to take a grizzly bears from, from, from beta, you can put it in your deck right now. No problem. It works just fine. And, A lot of things like the mana system and the card back are the same. And so that is important that there is something about, like as magic gets cross-generational, there's something very powerful about I recognize the thing my son is playing with or my daughter is playing with as what I played with. That I can see, like, the idea that things carry off over time is really powerful. When magic kind of hit that barrier of second generation, you know, here are people who grew up playing magic,

who are now teaching their kids and their kids are growing up playing magic. That is super powerful. And a lot of that is the fact that the cards you opened up as kids are still playable by your kids right now. Now, as I said, it is not as if we never change things. We have changed the card frame multiple times. We've changed templating more than I can count. many, many times.

We have changed, slightly changed the art ratio. We have changed how the evergreen mechanics work. We've changed what is an evergreen mechanic. We've changed the rules. Like, we have made changes. It is not as if we never change.

Magic actually changes a lot. The real question is, when we make a change, how does that change affect things? Now, there are some changes we make where we sort of swallow and say, okay, there's a little bit of discontinuity, but we're trying to work toward the future.

And the one of the things we do talk about is we like to think the game is larger forward than backward, meaning the game exists for 33 years. I have every faith the game's going to exist for far more than 33 years going in the future, meaning more of magic is in the future than the past. And there's a lot of the things we would make in the early days saying, hey, we might as well do it now,

the sooner we make the change, the sooner the majority of cards are that way. But there are a few things, and I mean, I brought some of them up today. There are a few things that just, it is kind of the way magic is. And even though there are reasons to want to change it, the power of inertia is a powerful force. And the reason I bring it up is not to dismiss it. In fact, in some level to say, hey, there are some things that you sort of have to weigh. And one of that is we want consistency.

We want clarity. We want expectation. We want history. There's a certain amount of magic that has weight to it that we want that continuity. And, you know, the line is an interesting line. And the reason we have conversations about the card back is like, well, you know, our data says, you know, 96% of players playing open. opaque sleeves, maybe it wouldn't matter. Like, there are definitely conversations we have.

And it's not always an easy decision. Sometimes we want to change things. Like, oh, should we? And we do. And sometimes we want to change things, and we don't. We did a thing called the Grand Creature Update many years ago, where we said, hey, early magic creature typing wasn't great. We have a much better system now.

You know, let's just clean it up. And so we went back and we threw Oracle. So for those that aren't aware, because cards change and we want all cards to function the same, there's a tool we have called Oracle, where it's an official document that you can see through Gatherer and other places also have access to it, other databases. But the idea is there is an official way every card exists that we update whenever we change things. So if you want to, so if we go on a print a brand new magic card, every card is the latest. version of it that matches current like templating technology and stuff. And if you go on the gathering or other databases, you can see the latest template. And that we, so in Oracle, we change a bunch of creature types. The problem is there were some cards where we didn't just

add creature types. That's a little less worrisome, although not negligible. But we also chain some. So there's a real classic example. There's a pro tour where a player was using an effect where he had to name a creature type to affect things on the battlefield. And so he looked at the opponent's card and named

the word on their card. Then the other player called the judge and had the judge informed him that because of the grand creature update that wasn't the card's creature type anymore. And that he had officially named something

that did exist, but even though it was printed on the card, was not what the card was. And because of that, the guy lost the game. That's pretty big, right? I'm not sure what to do. I look at the card in front of me. After reading the card in front of me and using that to make my decision,

I lose because that card does not properly represent what it is. I bring all this up because there's a lot of doubt right now with the Grand Creature Update, was that the right call? In fact, we're very, very careful about updating creature types now. The place we're most likely to do it is where there's intuition that would lead you astray. For example, sometimes we add a new creature type, and there are cards in the past with that creature type in its name.

We don't always do this, but often, you know, we will try to update that. Or recently, for example, we created a book sub-archotype for artifacts. So we went back to everything that's clearly a book, and we made a subtype book, for a. example. But it is, and even when to do that, like we're not, we are not super consistent. I'm not a fan of it. I like consistency. So the idea that dog a detective is not a detective. I'm not a fan of that. I do wish we made new creature types and old cards literally named the creature type in the name in a way that implies it is it. I mean, there are giant spider's not a giant because giant is an adjective and not a noun.

So there is some of that. But the, that's That is the big decision for us right now is trying to understand when we make a change what is helpful and what is hurtful and What's where does a nurse you have to win where it doesn't and the reason I did it today? It's not a clear answer It is not as if I can say here is the line and if you're on this side of the line we will always change you and you're that side of the line We will never change you there is a certain amount of Judgment that comes into it and and that's why I bring it up. It is a tricky issue, but I mean, I do agree. Like, I know I've done polls online asking people to, should we change the magic back? And by far, at least the enfranchised

players that are on my blog, do not want to change it. That is part of magic. And it's part of magic's history, you know. And it's the same reason we're not changing the man of it. I think changing the manacost would just throw people. It's very funny, by the way, in future site, when we can do a future frame and be able to change the frame elements, you will notice I did put the color manna first. So there's one little tiny inkling in magic where I did do that because it needed to look different and so I leaned into that. But that is one of the things I did in making that. I also, if you'll notice in the future site frame, put it on the left side so you can fan your cards. It runs on the left side of the card. You can fan your cards and see it more

easily when fanning. So anyway, future site you can notice in the future site frame, there's me playing around a little bit of what if I would do if we had to start over. We're not, there's no plans to go to the future site frame. Just, that was me messing around. But anyway, guys, consistency, clarity, expectation, history. That is the things that we look for when we try to decide whether or not inertia should win the day. But anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. I like looking at different kinds of things.

Today was a little bigger picture sort of thing, but I like talking about those. So anyway, guys, that is all I have to say on inertia. But anyway, I'm now at work, so I all know what that means. It means it's time for me to stop talking magic and start making magic. So anyway, guys, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.