Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1366: Getting the Banned Together, Part 1

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

This is the start of a new series, based on a talk I gave at MagicCon: Amsterdam, where I talk about the design of all the cards I had a major hand in that would later be banned or restricted.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today is the start of a series. In Amsterdam, MagicCon in Amsterdam, I did a talk about all the cards I've ever made that got banned or restricted. And because there was a lot of cards to cover and only had an hour to do so, I went really quickly through it.

But I thought it might be fun for the podcast is I think there's a much longer version of the stories that I think I would like to share. And so basically, this is my talk that I gave in Amsterdam, although I should say, I'm recording this before I gave the talk, at least this early parts,

so I haven't given yet. But I know I'm going to. I've been preparing for it. And so I'm going to give the longer drawn-out version of this talk. So if you enjoy the talk, the talk should be on video online. If you enjoy the talk and said, you know, Mark went really fast through some of those,

that's what today is for. Today is to go a little bit slower. Okay. So let me explain... So the talk was called Getting the Band Together. And let me explain the premise of it. So Richard Garfield, obviously, designed Alpha and Arabian Nights.

In between those two sets, I believe he has had 38 cards banned or restricted. And Richard, for a while, held the record for the most banned and restricted cards. But I eventually passed him and continued to pass him. And since I keep making cards, more cards I've made have gotten banned or restricted. So anyway, I currently hold the record for having designed the most banned. and restricted cards. So I thought it would be fun to talk about the design of all these cards that I made that got banned and restricted. So the first thing I need to explain, I gave this little in my talk, is who design what card can get fuzzy at times?

Multiple people can work on the same card. Somebody can make a card. Other people can tweak the card. There's parallel designs where two people make the same card. And there's just general memory issues where you remember something, but someone else remembers it differently. So this list are the cards that I believe I had a majority hand in the design. Not that I designed all of them solo. Not that I, these are the ones that I believe I had my hand in.

Like, there's cards that got banned that I had an influence in. But I'm like, oh, someone else made it and I tweaked it a little bit. So I'm not counting those. It is more than possible, if that quite possible, that some of the cards that I'm claiming here today, it's cards that I had a major hand in that somebody else thinks they had the major hand in. And there's cards that I probably aren't including that I probably didn't have a major hand in,

but I don't remember. So I just wanted to sort of apologize to anybody ahead of time. I made this list based on my memory. My memory could be faulting some things. Or, like I said, there's a lot of reasons why different people can remember things differently. A really common one, like I said, is multiple people designed the same card and turned it in.

And then like, hey, I made that card. Like, well, I too made that card. So that's why sometimes also multiple people can think they made the same card because they did. Okay. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go in chronological order talking about every card that I ever had that was banned or restricted in any format and talk about how the card got made. Note that I'm just talking about the first time a card got onto a banned restricted list. So if the same card got banned in multiple formats over time, I'm just talking about the very first time it got banned. or and restricted.

For those that don't know, banned means the card is not allowed in the format at all. Restricted means you can have only one copy in the format. Vintage, which is the format that has kind of all the cards mostly, is where we tend to restrict things, because the idea of vintage is you can play with all the cards. So if a card gets broken vintage, it's like, well, you can only have one of it, usually.

There are a few things banned in vintage, but less for power level, more like that's a dexterity card, stuff like that. Or an anti-card. Okay, so we're going to start from the very beginning. So remember, I start working at Wizards full time in October of 1995. But we have to make cards. They have to get made.

They have to come into the public. So my first banning actually happens in July of 1997, which actually is within two years. I think the gap that we have now for making magic, we used to make them a little bit quicker back in the day than we do now. Magic goes through a lot more steps and there's a lot more goal. on. So the first card that got banned was from, I think, Mirage, I believe. Squandered

resources. So squandered resources is an enchantment. It costs one black and one green and it allows you to sacrifice the land. And if you do, you can add one mana to your manipole equal to a color that land could produce.

So this is, I will provide some terminology as I go through these. This is what's known as an engine card. And what I mean by an engine card is you put something into it, you get something out of it. In this particular case, you have to sack a land.

So your resource in is you're forever losing a land. And the thing you're getting out of it is you're getting a manna. So you're trading a land for a manna. Now note, this doesn't require you to tap the land. So I could tap the land for its normal mana and then sack it for

extra mana. And so that allows me to get two manna out of every land, given that land's still gone. But as it turns out, the ability to quickly get extra mana. There's a bunch of different things that cause problems. Like, there's some through lines, I would say, in banned and restricted cards. One is mana. Getting extra mana is very, very powerful.

Mana is, I mean, the main resource of magic is mana. it gates the game. It determines when you can cast cards. So the ability to cast cards quicker than you should, it's pretty powerful. And so cards like that definitely can cause issues. This particular squanded resources was part of what was called a Proffer's Bloom deck.

Proffer's Bloom was another card I made in Mirage. And anyway, it was a combo deck. Probably Mike Long was the most famous one for playing it. He won a Pro Tour playing it. It was, it's a combo deck. In fact, it's one of the first really powerful combo decks. And all the pieces of the combo deck, mostly, all the main pieces, were in either Mirage or InVisions. And the reason, so this was banned in Mirage Block.

And the reason was this combo deck, Proffer's Bloom, was really powerful. So I think we decided to get rid of the resources. I think the idea was this was the thing that fueled the mana. And it was a card that really, if you were using it, you were coming. kind of doing things you shouldn't do. One of the things is I really like making engine cards. I love, I'm a Johnny, right? I like making weird and wacky deck building.

Engine cards just allow you do lots of fun, weird, wacky things. So I like building them. They also have a tendency to be broken. I mean, not every engine card is broken, but the ability to transfer one thing into another, especially without mana. Like this particular thing says, I can get extra mana without spending any. Obviously, spending manna to get mana, I guess, is slightly, slightly...

I mean, there are cars you spend mana to get mana. But anyway, this car lets you get sort of free mana. And yeah, I mean, the idea when we made it was, well, you're losing access to land... You're losing future mana. You're sacrificing lands. But the end result is you can do things where, you know, sometimes you're using the mana you get to get more lands. So you're not even going down lands necessarily.

And just the ability to sort of get all the actual manna you need when you need. need it, especially later turns, or you have a bunch of man. It just was, anyway, super powerful. So that is my first banned cards, one of resources. The interesting people ask me, I should answer the question, which is, how do I feel when my cards get banned? Is that a badge of honor, a badge of shame? And the note I basically give is, I think if we're banning too many cards, obviously

we're failing. But if we ban no cards, I think that also means there's a problem. It means we're not pushing boundaries. I think the idea is we really want to be pushing things and trying things, and we want to be careful not to push things too much. We don't want

to ban too many things. There are definitely times where we ban more cards than we should, and that was a sign of problems on our end. But I think if we made magic, it never ever had to ban a card, I think that means we really aren't sort of we aren't experimenting in places that would probably be worth experimenting.

Not every experimentation ends in cards being banned. But some do. And anyway, I do think, I mean, I've made a lot of cards. I mean, the reason I have the record probably more than anything else is I just have been here. So I've been here longer than anybody else. And I also, early magic, we made a lot more broken cards we make now because we have a much more robust team to stop us from doing that. In the early days, there's just a little. a lot more broken cards than Early Magic, and

Early Magic only had a few people making cards. So I made a lot of... I made a lot of the early cards. I mean, Mike Elliott and I probably made the vast majority of cards from the first, you know, I don't know, six, eight years of magic. And so, I have a lot of broken cards. Okay, so next, we got to

December 1998. This card is banned and restricted. So when I say band restricted, it means banned in every format restricted in vintage. Banned and restricted in standard extended legacy and vintage. The card is Winfall.

So, Winfall is two in a blue. Each player discards their hand and then draws a card equal to the cards in their hand. Obviously, we had messed around with this in red with winds of change. But here, the universality and it being in blue,

blue and there's a lot of component pieces to it. And the other thing is Erza Saga block was a pretty broken block. There was a lot going on. And this card allowed you to make pretty big swat. It lets you draw. So I said getting mana is a problem. Well, another problem we tend to have. Just drawing cards. It's another area. And this card for three mana often lets you access a lot of other cards. And if you were trying to combo certain things together, the idea of trading your hand

for a whole new hand was quite powerful. And the reason this came about is one of the things that I was, the early time of me at Wizards, one of the things I was very fascinated with was the color pie. And early, like Richard, when he made Magic made the color pie, and the color pie is awesome. But there's a lot of looseness in the early days that everything was sort of just flavored card by card. And I realized, I mean, one of the through lines of early magic is we need. needed to streamline things so that it didn't work that all decisions were made on a

card-by-card basis. That was not great. The rules were done that way. There's a lot of stuff that was done that way. And I really wanted to say, oh, colors need to have strengths and weaknesses. But if every set, we'd sort of treat the colors differently, then we just, there are, there are no strengths or weaknesses. You know, if green can do that here, but do this in a different set, like, you know.

And so I really started trying to draw the line. I also was very conscious of where are we doing things that can exist somewhere else? And the idea of trading your hand given the first version of it I mean I guess we had done there is a time spiral

which lets you exchange your hand for seven new cards obviously also broken so I mean this one doesn't let you drop to seven time spiral let you draw up to not time twister you discard your hand drunk off to seven So there it's just all, like if I empty my hand, now I get to draw seven cards. Windfall doesn't let you to draw cards you don't have, but it does let you trade in your hand very easily.

And anyway, the thing I'm trying to say is I did a lot of color correcting, I'll call it, or color changing, where I would take effects and say, you know, this effect really either should be in this other color or could be in this other color. Like, for example, I love the card maniflair, but I'm like, you know, that really should be a green card, not a red card. And it took me, actually, way longer than you would think, to make the green version of Maniflare. I mean, eventually did. But anyway, there's a lot of me doing that, windfall with me doing that of trying to shift something

and put it in the color that I liked. So, okay, next up. Also in December of 1998, banned indrestricted in legacy and vintage. Stroke of genius. X2U, Target Player draws X-Cards. So there's a card called Brain Geyser in Alpha. X Blue Blue, one of Richard's banned 38 cards.

It was too good. So another thing that we try to do, what we always try to do, but I did a lot of this normally magic, is what we call power fixing. Oh, Brain Geyser is a fun card, but it's a little too good. Okay, could we make the card but slightly more balanced? And so Brain Geyser is X Blue Blue. So essentially it's, I have to spend some amount of mana,

and then for that amount of mana minus two, I draw that many cards. So what if we add one extra mana to that? We felt three blue mana was a little, at the time, we thought we little bit much. So instead of going X blue, blue, blue, we did X2 blue. So the idea is it costs one more manning. You're paying an extra mana.

Essentially, I'm playing three mana to be able to extra cards for X, right? As it turns out, this is often the case in our power balancing things. The less powerful version is still very powerful. A lot of the cards you're going to hear me talk about during the series are, I took a card that was crazy broken and made it less broken, but still not not broken. And Trick of Genius is a perfect example of that. Drawing X cards for X is very powerful. Okay.

Now we get to March of 1999. These cards were banned and restricted in standard, extended, legacy and vintage. So there are six cards. So this is the first time. Well, I guess in December of 1998, I had two cards banned, not all in the same format. This is the first time I had six cards banned, and they were all over the place. But this is the part where I'm doing a lot more design work at this point. So there's just a lot of cards that I'm making.

So first up is Dream Halls. Dream Halls is three blue-blue. It's an enchantment. It was inspired by Force of Will. What it says is that you can cast any spell for free by discarding a card of the same color as that spell. So this card, I would say, is an engine card. It allows you to turn cards in your hand into mana for intense purposes. And not just one mana, multiple mana.

If I have a card that costs six to cast, I can discard a card of the same color for six mana, essentially. This card is mega, mega busted. I was inspired by Force of Will. There's a whole cycle of cards and alliances what we call the pitch spells where in order to cast a spell, you can pitch your spell the same color. The point there in pitch spells,

and not that pitch spells aren't very powerful, is you have a lot of say on what, like you determine what are our pitch spells, right? I'm like, okay, these are the effects I'm choosing to make a pitch spell out of. Dreamow's just turns any card into a pitch card. And that's one of its biggest dangers is There are cards that are very expensive that are hard to cast,

and the reason we do that is we want to make it hard to cast them. Well, if I just have to discard another card of the same color, I mean, this card costs five, but fine, on turn six, I can start dropping pretty large things. The funny thing about Dream Halls, by the way, is when Dreamhalls was in... What was Dreamhalls in Earth's Legacy, I think? I think it's in Erz's Legacy.

When it came out, there was a magazine being called Inquest at the time that talked about. Like, we made Dueless. Inquest was a magazine made by somebody else. They picked Dreamalls as the worst card in Stronghold, which is hilarious. I remember when I read that, I'm like, okay, I don't know for sure whether it's broken, but like if this card is good, it is very good. But anyway, obviously it was. It was not the worst card since it was obviously banned.

Next up, it was a recurring nightmare. Two in a black. It's an enchantment. you can take a creature in your hand, you have to sacrifice a creature and return this to your hand. And if you do, you may take any creature card in your graveyard

and put it onto the battlefield. So this card was inspired by a card called Hell's Caretaker, which was in Legends. And I love that card. I put that card in so many decks. So that was basically this card although as a creature,

meaning you had to return the creature to your hand. You had a sack of a creature and return the creature, I think, in order to return a creature from the graveyard. And I just loved that card, and I just wanted to make an enchantment version of it. And what could go wrong?

Hells Caretaker never caused any problems. Well, well, the ability to sort of do it repeatedly and it being an enchantment and not a creature. Creatures are a lot easier to answer. Everybody has a creature answers in their deck. Not everybody has enchantment removal, so it just became a little harder to deal with. This is another engine card for all intensive purposes.

It allows you to turn one creature in play for a creature in your graveyard. Obviously, you're getting rid of very tiny little creatures and getting very big creatures. So the trades you are making are usually... And there's a lot of ways to get big things into your graveyard that you've never cast in the first place. So you're getting things that you normally couldn't get into play, at least at the time you're getting it in play. And it was very powerful. Next is Earthcraft. Earthcraft is an enchantment, costs one in a green,

that you tapped an untapped creature you control to untapped target land. So this is another engine card. It allows you to turn untapped creatures into mana. That also is very powerful. So this card was kind of... One of the things we like to do sometimes with enchantments is turn everybody into a blank. And so this card turns everybody into a card called Laidruid. Laydrewd was a card from Alpha

I think it's two in a green I think it's a one-one you can tap it to untap a land and the card has seen a little bit of play I think one copy of Laidreouard was actually in Zach Dolan's deck of the very first World Championship deck

in 1994 I'm not saying you should have played Laidreux but I believe it was in his deck but anyway it allows you to untap things like Liber of Alexandria that's why I was in his deck because you can untap any land So anyway, Earthcraft was turn all your creatures into lay druids.

That is pretty powerful. And once again, it allows you to turn a resource that doesn't really cost you anything to generate mana to play things much faster than you could. So Dreamhalls, recurring nightmare, and Earthcraft were all very much engine cards that all really lets you cheat on mana in different ways. Okay. Speaking of cheating on mana, next is Fluctuator. Fluctuator was

an artifact that cost two it was also I believe in Erzda's legacy and it says all cycling costs cost two less Now note when we made cycling cycling cycling first appeared in Erzda Saga block In fact, Richard Garfield made cycling He originally turned it in, we put it into Tempest design Tempest was oversoft

and so the two main mechanics in Erzusaga both were originally in Tempest design which was Echo and Cycling. Anyway, cycling, as Richard designed it, it allows you to spend manna, always two in Erza Saga, to take a card in your hand, discard it, to replace it with another card, draw a new card. And Richard made them all cost two.

We later brought cycling back, we've done cycling at other costs. But at the time, every single cycling costs in Erzda Saga block cost two. So when Fluxter Wader says two less, it really is saying all the cycling cards that existed at the time were free to cycle. Oh, that turned out to be very good. Mostly because once you got Fluxterator out,

it allowed you to sort of go get exactly the kind. Like, if you filled your deck with cycling cards and the cards you needed for your combo, the second I get fluctuator out, I go immediately to my combo. Every single cycling card just cycles away and it proves to be problematic. I can't remember.

This card might have been emergency banned. That's how bad it was. But anyway, it was definitely, we had to ban it. Next up. Tap lotus pedal. This is a card from Tempest. Basically, it costs zero, and you can tap and sack it produce one color, one manna of any color. So the idea was, I knew Black Lotus was a problem. Black Lotus is zero mana tap for three man of any one color. And I'm like, well, maybe we can make a fixed Lotus. What if we, it just sacked for one mana. And the funny thing about this is, this is what Treasure does. Treasure is an artifact that you tap and sack for one mana. Lotus pedal, by the way, if we made it today, would probably be a treasure

some type. But, apparently, when you get a treasure for free, when it doesn't cost anything, it is, in fact, quite problematic. So, another example of fixing a card where the fixed version of the card is not as strong,

not as broken as the card I'm fixing, but still baroken. And that card, even today, sees a lot of play. Next, memory jar. Memory jar is an artifact that costs five. So you have to sack and tap it and then each player discards their hand

draw seven new cards and then at the end of the turn all the cards that they drew get discarded and they're old... You exile your hand in the beginning and you get your exiled hand back. So the idea essentially is you get to draw a new hand kind of like Time Twifter but just for the turn.

And I thought like Time Twifter was fun what if I just restrict you for the turn? What if, you know, I gate you by the turn? And it turned out, it was a neat idea. In fact, impulsive draw would kind of use some of this technology later on. But at the time, it was still too good. The reality was, if you had means to be able to play things,

the ability to sort of just draw a new hand, even if the hand went away, just drawing it for the turn, very powerful. Okay, now we get to June of 1999. Band and standard was Mind Overmatter. Two, blue, blue, blue, blue, that's six mana, four of which is blue. Allows you to discard a card to tap or untapped an artifact, creature, or land. This is another engine card.

It allows you to turn a card in your hand. It lets you get a resource of tapping or untapping something. Mostly it's land. I mean, I'd say, mostly it's mana. That's the number one reason to use. The other thing that went on at this time, by the way, is we are now in Erza Saga Block. Erza Saga Block had a card in it called Tilarian Academy.

So Tilarian Academy is one of the cards that I did not put on my list because I was not primarily responsible for making it. I think Mike Elliott made it. But I will say the original Tilarian Academy tapped for Kolis Mana. So my contribution to Tilarian Academy, Talerian Academy is realizing that we had five different lands in the set that we could color code. And so I said, oh, because I, Gaius Cradle, Sarah Sankton,

and Tulian Academy all tap for Coles originally. I said, oh, well, artifacts could be blue, and chemists could be white, and creatures could be green, and, you know, these other cards could be black and red. And so anyway, I made a Tulian Academy tap for blue, not colors. Is it broken in only colorless to call us? Yes. Is it more broken for taps for blue?

Yes. But anyway, I think the thing that pushed minor matter over the edge was the ability to discard a card to untapped Tolarian Academy, meaning one card gets turned into lots and lots of mana. Definitely is problematic. Also, with stuff like Dreamhalls, you could get... Mind of matter is hard to play, right? Six mana, four of which is blue. But if I have Dreamhalls, I can play it. Even a deck that has a little less blue in it.

But anyway, it's another. And then when I made this card, I liked Twiddle. Twiddell was a card in Alpha. And really, when I made the card, sometimes the most broken cards had the simplest and easiest of starting. I just, like, what if I could turn every card in my hand into Twiddle? What if every card in my hand was, like, I turned every card in my hand into a split card. It could either be, you know, this or Twittl.

Now, note, I didn't make it cost blue. That was probably, if every card required you to spend mana and then do it, it's a little I mean, probably still broken to Flare and Academy, but we'll put some of that on Tilleran Academy. But anyway, anyway, mind of matter was Baroque. Next, June 1999, banned in Erza Saga Block, Voltaic Key.

So, Laetia Key was an artifact. Costs one to play, and then one and tap to untape an artifact. Basically, there was a card called Kondola... Kondelabro? Kondalab. Candelabra. Candelabra of Tannos,

which was in Antiquities. Tiquities was my favorite set before I came to Wizards. And it allowed you to untapped land. Now that allowed you to untap a bunch of lands. And then Janjur's saddlebags lets you untapped artifacts, I believe.

And then, anyway, like I said, I liked Laid. I liked the idea of untapping things. And so I said, oh, what if I make a Laidruid for artifacts, sort of? But it's an artifact

rather than being, you know, it's an artifact that untowling types artifacts. Anyway, so it seemed like fun. The problem is, one of the things we also like to do at the time, is make artifacts to produce more than one mana.

And so it definitely, essentially what Voltaic key is, it ended up becoming something that could had a lot of utility, because untapping artifacts can be very powerful to let you repeat artifact effects. But it also lets you sort of have mana. That if you had artifact sources of mana,

it just gave you extra mana, especially, I mean, it costs one to tap. So they have to produce more than one mana to go up in mana. But we have, you know, but also monoliths and things. And so it just allows you to sort of generate mana in addition to its other utility, which is pretty good. And so, and again, like I said, it's funny. Like, both Lotus Petal and Voltaic Key are like just commons, just little tiny things that I thought had texture that would be fun.

I didn't see them remotely as being dangerous. Now, be fair, I'm balancing cards. Not my forte, but I did make them as things I thought were fun, not realizing quite how strong they were. Okay, next we get to August of 1999. Banned and extended, Yagboss Bargain. So, Yagbos Bargain. So there's a card in Ice Age called Necropodens.

And necroponans, you skip your drawstap. and then it allows you to pay one mana to later in your turn basically to get a card. You can pay one mana for one card. So the idea essentially is you no longer get free draws but you have the ability

to turn life into draws which is pretty, once again, an engine card, pretty powerful. And so I was trying to make a more fair necropotence, a fixed necropotence. And so the idea was there's a card called greed from early magic

where you spent two life to draw a card. And greed never caused any problem. So I'm like, okay, what if I make a necropotence, but instead of it costing one life to draw your card, it costs two life. And so I cost it black, black, same as necropotence. The one thing I did is necropotence is necropotence. thing were delayed you drawing the card, and that just felt like extra text to me. So I said, well, if I make you pay two life, maybe, maybe I can make necropotence.

It's two life for card, not one, but you can get the card right away. In development, they decided that they wanted, they're like, well, if Mark's going to make necropotence, let's just make a new necropotence. Why do two life for one? So they'd change it to one life for one card, and then went up to six manner, rather than black, black, it now caused four black black. And anyway, apparently getting drawn life for cards is really powerful. Whether it's necropotence or young was bargain.

There's an interesting question, which is more broken between necropotence and young ones bargain. I mean, necropotence is cheaper, so it's faster to get out. But I don't know which is more broken. Once again, judging power level not my thing. Anyway, as you can see, I just got to work. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 11, 12. I talked about 12 cards. Do you know how many band cards I have? Little heads up here. I think I have over 170 band, but a whole bunch of them are swath of cards I'm not going to talk about.

So I think I have like 90-ish cards to talk about. So this will be a multi-series. Maybe not every. Maybe I'll go a little faster on some future ones. We'll see. But like I said, there's lots of fun stories here. And I thought this, I mean, I'm always looking for content for my podcast. So hearing me talk about making band cards seems like fun. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed part one. There'll be many more parts. But I'm at work. So we all know that means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.