Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1360: Layers with Jess Dunks

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

One of the most complicated elements of the Magic rules is something known as "layers." I sit down with the man in charge of the rules, Jess Dunks, to help walk through an introduction to layers.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work at home edition. And so I like to use this time to do interviews. So today I have just dunks the Magic Rules Architect. We're going to talk about something that either I think some of you don't know or you've heard of, but don't know exactly how it works, which is we're going to go into layers today,

which is a very important, but I will say somewhat complex rules. topic. So before we dive into that, Jess, Magic Rules Architect, that's a new title for you. Want to talk a little about that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was promoted to Magic Rules Architects I think last year some time. And it's the main difference between Rules Manager, which is the title I held before, is kind of I lead the, we have a team now that handles Rules Management as opposed are just one person. I lead the work that that team does, and I tend to do more work now with interfacing with other teams about how things in magic touch the magic rules. Our team, by the way, is Eric Levine and Eliana Rabinowitz. They are fantastic at doing

rules management work. I love working with them. They're great. Okay, so my intro today is one of the reasons that layers is very important from a magic design standpoint is there are things we can't do. Yes. And here's the classic example I give, which is if I want to make a spell that says all blue creatures gain flying, I can do that, no problem. I can

make that spell. But if I want to make a spell to say all flying creatures are blue, all of a sudden, no, I can't do that. And a lot of people don't understand you can do anything. Why can't you do that? And the answer is, well,

so there's something in the game called continuous effects. So let's talk a little bit of what what are continuous effects. So a continuous effect sounds pretty straightforward. It's any effect that's ongoing for some amount of time. And this can be something where there's a permanent on the battlefield that has a static ability giving a continuous effect like creatures you control have plus one plus one is a continuous effect. But also it can be created by an instant or sorcery like giant growth, which when it resolves creates a continuous effect that target creature gets plus three plus three until

end of turn. Both of those are continuous because they're ongoing past the point where something resolved. And yeah, so that's what a continuous effect is. And we just, you know, I'm not jumping the gun here too much, but like layers are just the system that we have to determine how continuous effects works. So like in math, for example, if you're doing a complex math equation, you will have learned the order of operations in math, right? You always do things in the parentheses before other things and so on in order of operations. And layers is just that for magic's effects. There's always an order we do them in.

Yeah, I mean, the thing to understand is basically there has to be an answer in the game. If A and B are both there, how do we know the order that A and B happen? And my perfect example, talking about the blue and flying, is either the creature is determined to be blue first or determined to be flying first. Right. And that, so the reason we can go one direction, but not the other direction, is I want, let's say I want to make this spell that says all flying creatures are blue. Well, it's important the game determines what's flying and what's not before determines what's blue and what's not. And as we will see, that's just, that's not the order that it goes in.

Yeah, and that order is set up to try and make the game as intuitive as possible. The example I was, you like to use, it's some old cards involved. But the example I always like to use is a bad moon and darkest hour. And Bad Moon says your black creatures get plus one plus one, and Darkest Hour says that all of your creatures are black. And intuitively players know that now all their creatures are black, so they should all get plus one plus one, plus one. But it's actually the layer system enforcing that.

If we just went in the order of which one ended the battlefield, you could end up in a weird result where you have to calculate your black creatures getting plus one plus one before the other one's becoming black and then they don't get plus one plus one. And it would be confusing. So let's talk real quickly about timestamp. You brought up a good thing. So timestamp is the. concept that your spells entered some order.

Yeah. You want to talk a little about how the game handles timestamp? Yeah. So time stamps, every object and every continuous effect has a timestamp, basically. And that's just the time that entered the battlefield relative to everything else, or the time that an effect was created relative to everything else. And so if you have two effects that we say are in the same layer, which we'll get into what that means. But with two effects that are in the same layer, you order them.

based on their timestamp the time that they happened. But if they're different kinds of effects, so for example, changing a creature's color versus giving it plus one plus one, we don't apply those in timestamp order because we apply them in this layer system we're about to talk about. Right, and the reason for that,

the reason the later system exists in the first place is intuition, right? We want the game to work the way players think it will work. Yeah, so without going too deep on it, prior to eighth edition, there was a very complex system where everything, like every single effect was kind of basically determined to be dependent or not on other effects. And it was very hard to, when you had a complex game state, it was very hard to figure out how it even worked,

even for people that were really in the weeds on it. And that was replaced with the layer system, which has largely been helpful for making the game intuitive where possible. Okay, so one of, just a little bit of a cab before we jump into the layers. Yeah. Let's talk, what is a characteristic defining ability? Yeah. So a characteristic defining ability is a fancy term. we use for any ability that a card has that tells you something about the card defines it for you.

The famous example is power and toughness. So like a card like Tarmagweif tells you what its power and toughness is in its text box, and then it's got a little asterisk in its power and toughness box, because that ability is defining the characteristic of its power and toughness. So if something has an ability that was printed on the card, not when it gained later, was printed on the card that tells you what it is. And it's not like a trigger-der activated ability. It's usually a characteristic defining ability.

And those things are importantly always considered before any other effects, regardless of like timestamp or anything like that. Okay, the one last vocabulary word before we jump in. This one I know we're going to touch lightly, but I just want to talk about what is a dependency? Dependency, yeah. I actually briefly mentioned this slightly earlier, but a dependency, is when one effect is dependent on another effect. So as I mentioned, sometimes when you apply things

in timestamp order, you would get an unintuitive result. And if two things are in the same layer, which we'll talk about what that means in a second, but if two things are in the same layer, sometimes one effect can change what another one does. And the most obvious example of this is that if you have an effect, let's say you have a creature that says all your creatures have trample on it,

And then you have another effect that removes abilities from the first creature. If you were to apply those just strictly in the timestamp order, everything would get trample before this creature loses its ability, which doesn't make sense and is not intuitive. So the fact that you can't apply them in the timestamp order, that's just called a dependency because whether or not the creature that says all your creatures have trample can actually do anything is dependent on whether or not the ability exists. And that, so we ignore the normal order and we say, okay, what's it dependent on? And we make that work. Now, the dependencies are actually quite rare and somewhat complex. And they only exist, again, to enforce that intuitive end result because you would not think, well, all my creatures have trampled, but this doesn't have the ability. That's a very unintuitive thing to think.

In fact, if you're listening now, you're probably having trouble following that because it wouldn't make any sense for it to work that way. Okay. So let's jump in. So the idea of layers at the very brief concept is we have to have an order for continuous effects. Then we want to apply them in the most intuitive order possible. And so what we've done is the rules are they're broken into seven different layers. And then some of them have sub layers. We'll talk with that a little bit.

So let's start with layer one. So layer one. Oh, sorry. Before we jump into that, though, actually you mentioned, you mentioned something I want to kind of highlight. is that they're done in this particular order, but they're done constantly. So every time anything happens in the game, all of these effects are re-evaluated

to see what things look like. So it's not like layers are, we figure out the order once and then until end of turn, it's that way. It's just every time, there's a constant calculation going on by the game. Anyway, sir,

you were going to talk about layer one. Okay, so layer one is copy effects, copy and mutate effects. So let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, layer one is listed A and B. So also like it's face down. So layer one has two separate sublayers

for a reason you'll understand momentarily. One is the copy effects and mutate effects. Copy effects are like clone where it enters the battlefield and becomes a copy of something else. And mutate is a mechanic from the Akoria set. And both of those things happen in the same layer. and they define kind of what its base characteristics are. You know, when you play a clone, it just copies whatever's printed on the thing it's cloning,

or if you clone another clone, whatever it was already copying. And then the second thing that you were about to mention, there's the other sublayer, which is effects that turn things face down. This is also kind of setting its base characteristics, but has to be determined after any of those copy effects. And the reason real quick, the reason copy effects come first is, Those copy effects might copy other continuous effects. Yeah, we don't generally want them to do that.

That isn't how it's historically been done. And so copy effects, you know, if you've played a lot of magic, you know that copy effects don't copy like plus one plus one counters, for example. If you play a clone, it's not going to copy the counters on the card that you're copying. And if copy effects happened later in the layers process, they might do that.

Okay. So, yeah, basically copy effects, copy, only what's printed on the card and not any of the other effects. Right, right. So they don't want, because cards can get other qualities to them, we don't want to copy those other qualities.

Yeah. Okay, so the very first thing we do is copy and mute it. So the second layer is control changing effects. What does that mean? I mean, those are very straightforward. The control changing effects are things like active trees, which takes over a creature for a turn or mind control, which takes over a creature as long as it and the mind control

are on the battlefield. Any kind of control changing effect is applied here. And most control changing effects are pretty straightforward. They really only do one thing, which is set control for somebody. It just determines who has it. Yeah, just determines who has it. This comes after copy effects because there are sometimes abilities on a card that can determine who controls it. So when you copy something like that, you want that ability to work properly.

So we need to determine if something is a copy before we can determine who controls it. There aren't very many cards and magic that do that. Most of them are old, but that is the reason for the order. Okay. So number three, another thing we don't do that often these days is text changing effects. Yeah, text changing effects in modern magic are very limited. They do exist famously like exchange of words from Infinity does this. So there are a couple others.

But mostly nowadays, there are things like overload. Overload does change the text of the card when you pay its overload cost. And text changing effects are just that. Sometimes a slight of mind will change. changed, you know, the color word, for example. We don't do it very often nowadays, but they live right after control changing effects. And after, significantly after copy effects, which again, it's important. Okay.

So layer number four is type changing effects. What does that mean? So type changing effects, this is where we start to get to the really interesting stuff. Most of the weird stuff that can happen in layers tends to happen in layer four. A type changing effect can, is any effect that changes, the super types, card types, or subtypes of a card. So it might make something legendary or not legendary. It might make it an artifact instead of a creature.

It might make it have all creature types. Changeling is an example of a type-changing effect that is also a characteristic defining ability, something we mentioned earlier. So it's a static ability on the card that changes all of its creature types. well it gives it all of its creature types I should say and it lives here in layer four and also something that comes up a lot

is changing land types can happen here as well and so why why is this sitting here as people understand the ordering yeah so the ordering I mean after you have copy effects and text changing effects you don't want to have type changing effects after the those things as those can sometimes be influenced by that.

But more importantly than that, it's coming before a lot of the other stuff we have. We have tons of effects in magic that will affect power and toughness or add abilities or change colors based on what a creature type is. So we need to be determining the types for permanence before we get into any of those other things. So this is situated in this spot so that it can be before. all of those other effects. Okay.

Layer number five is color changing effects. Color changing effects are effects that change of color. Again, very straightforward. And they're situated here. Again, you know, sometimes your color can be influenced by a card type or a creature type. And your color can, a permanent color can change what abilities it has. So you might have a card that says red creatures have haste, for example. and we need to know that something is red

before we get to that point. Yeah, we're now getting into my example from the very beginning. The reason blue creatures can gain flying is, okay, level five, we say they're blue. Uh-huh. Which will segue into level six. So six is ability adding and removing effects.

Uh-huh. And so this, we'll walk through what this is. Yeah, ability adding or removing effects is anything that causes something to gain an ability. Like if you have something that says your creatures have flying, as you mentioned earlier, that's an ability adding effect. Anything that says something loses abilities can cause anything, any ability to be lost. And this can sometimes have unintuitive results, especially if you're removing a characteristic defining ability from earlier in the layers. One thing that people ask about sometimes is changeling.

Why can't we grant changeling to something? And if you look at cards like Mutavalt, for example, Mutavalt, people think of it as something that gains changeling when you activate it, but it actually doesn't. The text of the card says it gains all creature types. Because if you added changeling in layer six, that's after we've determined to the types of the card, and Changeling weirdly just wouldn't do anything.

So one of the things we can't do because of this layer system is grant changeling to something and have it work intuitively. So we just don't. But generally speaking, there are tons of things that add abilities based on something's basic characteristics such as

whether or not it's face down, what it is, what it's copy of, and its types especially, sometimes it's colors. So it has to be after all of those things, but we do end up with some unintuitive cases. So real quick,

I've used this my sole example. So if we say all blue creatures gain flying in level five, anything that turns things blue would turn them blue in five. And then we get to six, okay, well, everything you expect to be blue is blue. Now all those things can gain flying. Yes. If we take the reverse, we say everything with flying is blue.

By the time we get to the thing that cares about what games flying, we're past the thing that cares about color. So you would assume if I told you all flying creatures become blue, you would assume every creature was flying is now blue, and that's not the case. That wouldn't necessarily be the case. Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be the case. And you, you implied, but I want to explicitly state one thing that's true about these effects,

is that when you're implying these effects in the layers, you only apply them once. So we would never go, okay, we'll apply this effect in layer six. Oh, we, or layer five. Oh, we got to layer six, and now we need to go back and check something. The game rules don't do that. They only apply each effect once. So if we did have some. something that said all of your creatures were flying or blue,

it wouldn't affect anything that had gained flying properly. Right, and that's the issue with layers is, you just would get non-intuitive things. Right. Granting change, like everyone thinks they know how that works, but it wouldn't actually work the way they think it doesn't. And it, you know, it would be intuitive for it to work that way. Unfortunately, the system of layers does create some design constraints

that are really hard to get around. round. And if we could build something that was both understandable and solved that problem, we would. I've tried. I've spent a fair portion of the last five years at Wizards trying to figure out if there's something better we can do. This system is very entrenched in magic, especially with small stuff. And it is very good at creating intuitive outcomes most of the time, but it does have some of those design constraints. Okay. So let's get to let's. So layers is power and toughness effects. Yeah.

But there's actually four different sub layers of this. Yep. So, okay, so first is, effect from power, toughness, affecting characteristic defining abilities. Yep. So the example of Tarmagwef that I mentioned earlier is exactly this.

It's a characteristic defining ability that sets its power and toughness. Now, you always apply characteristic defining abilities before anything else in that layer. So this is almost kind of a remote, minder to do that. The sublayer is just like pointing out that it's really important for that to happen. Okay, so layer B, apply any power toughness setting effects. This is any effect that's going to say like that creature is a zero zero or that creature is a two two. That doesn't say like plus two

plus two, it just sets what its power and toughness is. And we can give you an example of that? Yeah. Like classic examples are things like turn to frog, which I think makes it a 1-1, if my memory is correct. And, you know, that's going to override. You play Turn to Frog on Tarmagoy, it's going to make it a 1-1 because it's applied after that characteristic defining ability. But then you get in, you could still add other effects later on. Like if you played giant growth on it, which we're about to get into, if you played

giant growth on it earlier, it's still going to continue to get that plus 3 plus 3. Okay. So on C is apply any power toughness changing effects that don't that doesn't set it and change from counters. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, that's that's several things at once. There used to be a separate sub layer for counters some years ago. It's like plus one plus one counters. But we just combined that with other effects.

So the giant growth effect I was talking about lives in the same layer as plus one plus one counters. So anything that's set that changes creatures power toughness without setting. it is then applied after the things that set power toughness. And that's mostly, that's, that's effects. So this is where the plus N plus, yeah, plus N plus. This is some of the most common effects in magic, is things that change power toughness,

is, it comes up all the time. So something gives plus two plus O, it's applied here. If something puts a plus one plus one counter on something, it's applied here. This is all, the vast majority of effects in magic touch this layer. And then D is affects the switch power and toughness. Something we've been told not to do. Yeah.

So D is affecting effects at switch power and toughness. It sounds fairly straightforward when I say it's the last thing that's applied. So you always apply every other effect. And then you apply switching power and toughness. As soon as I say that, generally people go, yeah, that makes sense. I understand how that works. And then when you go through an example of it, they go, wait, no, I didn't understand. understand how that works. That came out unintuitively. And so we don't tend to do it these days

because it can be fairly confusing. And I can give an example, but it is confusing, which is that let's say I give a two, two creed. You have a two two bear cub, and I give it plus one plus oh. And then I play something that switches its power toughness. Now, so far, this is straightforward. If you give it plus 1 plus 0, it's a 3-2. If you switch it to power and toughness, then it becomes a 2-3. That part's straightforward. And then I play another effect that gives it plus 1 plus O. Now, because we're not doing these in timestamp order, because these are separated into layers,

we're going to apply that plus 1 plus 0 before we apply the power and toughness switching. So it won't be a 3-3, which is what a lot of people would have expected. it will actually be a two-for. And that's weird. And that's one of the reasons that we don't do it as much anymore is that it has the unintuitive outcomes, especially with combat tricks. Yeah. One of the things we've learned is, I mean, from behind the scenes, whenever we're doing

things that lead to unintuitive consequences, we try not to do those things to try to lessen the unintuitive consequences. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say a fair portion of layers aside, a fair portion of, our team's job is to look at things and say, okay, but there's this weird corner case. How often is this going to come up? Does this matter? Do we really want to do this?

And that's a fun puzzle to be solving. Yeah. And so from a design end, there's a lot of little things I have learned. Like, I don't know layers nearly as well as Jess does because this is just a job. But I do know where I get in trouble. Like, I know what I can't do because layers get us into trouble. One of the classic examples is you want to do some effect that, like, I want to grant you abilities from a graveyard, right? Like, I want to do something.

I've learned that making them triggered and not static and not continuous makes it a lot easier for us to do things, where if at the beginning of some step, I grant something, I can do that without causing problems. But if I try to make continuous, it'll end up not working the way you think it'll work. Yeah, that can definitely happen. So let me think. I'm trying to think of a good example off the top of my head. But, oh, yeah, an obvious example is something like creatures you control with 10 power have trample. That's not a static ability that can work because the power and toughness layer is after the ability granting layer. So when we go to grant the abilities, we haven't calculated yet what its power and toughness

actually is based on all the effects. So it wouldn't apply to the right set of creatures. But if you make it a triggered ability, then instead of constantly updating the set of things it applies to, when that triggered ability resolves, we ask the question once, okay, what things have to have 10 power? Okay, that's what this applies to. Those creatures get trample. And those creatures will continue to have trample regardless of what happens to their power. Like something else could happen into their power later and they'll still have trampled. But the fact that we're not constantly trying to evaluate which things have 10 power makes that feasible as a one-shot triggered ability as opposed to a static ability that's always

trying to figure out what it applies to. Yeah, another real common trick we use is if we want to do something that's power, toughness, switching, instead of actually switching power and toughness, we will do plus and minus it. We will just hardwire in what the change is rather than, say it switches power and toughness. Yeah, there are a few things that happen like that, where we say, you know, yeah, it gets plus seven minus end.

That is a little bit wordy, unfortunately, but there are a few ways that we do that. Well, what I'm saying is, let's say I have a one five creature. Instead of swapping its power of toughness, if I give it plus four minus four, now it's a five one creature. Everyone understands that. And it does work in the system, in the layer, in the right way in a way that doesn't cause non-intuitiveness.

And that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of, I said, my job is not to have the complete, I understand later is enough to know what cards will make the cause problems and cause unintitiveness. And then we can avoid that. There's little things we can do to avoid the unintitiveness by understanding the system and not making things that sort of lean into the non-intuitive parts. Absolutely.

There are actually a ton of those. So when we run into a problem where we see a design that maybe wants to do something in the wrong order, we'll often come to a designer with a menu of options and be like, here's how we can do this that doesn't create a problem in the layers. Do you want one of these effects? And usually the answer is, yeah, that's fine. And Power to switching is a weird one and can create those same situations. Yeah.

So anyway, any final thoughts? as we walk through, like, when, uh, well, we should say this. People who want to know more about this, who this touches some interest in them, but obviously we just briefly touched upon it, what means do people have to learn more about the later system? Um, uh, if you're the kind of person that really wants to delve into this, uh, you could start, but we have the comprehensive rules document that you could, you could start looking in there.

Uh, but if you're in between wanting to do that, which is a daunting document, to look into and listening to the intro to layers that we've talked about here. Sometime and then, I'm not sure of the exact timing that it's gonna go up, but sometime between, sometime in the next month-ish, the Rules Team has an article that's gonna be published on our website about that.

And I think that's a great place to look into a little bit more about how the layers work. And it's also more likely gonna be easier to follow when you're reading text and looking at examples as opposed to in the audio format. where you're trying to track all these individual things that we mentioned. Yeah, anyway, yeah, the most of today what I'm hoping to do is just give people some general awareness. Layers is complex enough.

I have no, no one like listening to this and go, I got it. I got all layers. And a lot of what, we're not really going in today, but a lot of, I know the rule team's job is the non-intuitive part of it. And how do we, like a lot of our job is, if we're doing our job correct, you can ignore most of layers because everything we're doing works the way you think it will work. Yeah. And that's 100% true. The vast majority of the situations where people hear about layers are because something happened

unintuitively. The layer system works to make the game intuitive most of the time, which means that it's invisible most of the time. So the times when it becomes visible, people are like, oh, this is weird. Why do we have this system? It's like, because it makes 99% of magic work. intuitively, but this 1% is weird. But yeah, a lot of our job is to kind of hone in on how do we make magic intuitive?

How do we avoid those issues you were talking about where it gets confusing? So anyway, I want to thank Jess for joining us today. Like I said, the goal of today really was to take something that's a pretty complex topic and give some introductory and give you guys some general working knowledge. Next time someone says layers, you go, oh, I just understand what? layers are. Maybe all the intricacies aren't quite known yet, but you understand the general of what it is. Yep. Just an order for how we apply effects. And I think it's a surprisingly good system, even though it has some design constraints. I appreciate you having me on, Mark. It's always

a pleasure to talk. Well, thank you so much. I've had Jess on time of time. He's one of my most frequently requested guests. I didn't know that, actually. That's awesome. People want to hear. And so I plan to just on again because there's many more complex rule topics to talk about. So thank you, Jess, so much for joining us. And to everybody else, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So I want to thank everybody for joining us, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.