Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1377: Innovation

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

One of the important parts of doing Magic design is coming up with things players haven't seen before, but how much innovation is the right amount? In this podcast, I talk all about that issue.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is innovation. What exactly is innovation? Why do we use innovation? I'm going to talk all about that today. So I have done podcasts before.

I've touched upon innovation before. I've never had a podcast dedicated solely to innovation. So first, let me define what innovation is. So innovation is the idea that we are doing something that you, the players, have not seen before. And there's a lot of ways to innovate. I mean, the low-hanging fruit is a new mechanic, especially if it's named. But innovation could come in how we structure things.

It could come in how we tweak existing things. There's lots of ways to be innovative. Really, the idea essentially is, you know, magic is 33 years old. and we want you to feel like there's always new and exciting things. One of the keys to a trading card game is that it constantly evolves. That is a game that doesn't sort of sit still. Most games, you make the game, you put it out. That's the game.

The game is never going to change. Maybe you put expansions out at some point, but the point is the core game. Magic is just constantly evolving. We constantly put out new cards. Strategies constantly adapt and shift. And so the real question is, and this is the big question today, is how much innovation is important? How much innovation does a set need? I will argue it needs some, but I also think that people over-evaluate the importance of innovation and design.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have some, but I think a lot of what magic is is like a lot of making something. been cool and new is not just things you haven't seen before, but combining things you have seen before. That when we go out to make a set, it's like one of the things I do, whenever we start making a set, we want to start with some new idea. One of the things that I'm a big proponent of is if we're going to make a set, I'd like to have a goal that some goal that we haven't accomplished before, even on returns. Like I like, I want something about the set to say, okay, we're aiming to do something.

And the reason, and I've talked about this before, but I'll explain it real quick, is, so the way the human brain works is you have neural pathways. And when you learn to do something, your neural pathway learns that. So if I want to learn how to brush my teeth or, let's say drive. I am driving to work right now. The reason I can do a podcast while I'm driving to work is, there's a certain amount of driving that is wrote at this point. That, like, my brain, I've done it enough that I don't have to think so hard about it.

And the reason is, oh, well, my feet know how to push the pedals, and I know the things I have to know, and so I don't have to spend a lot of energy. When I first learned to start driving, I'd pay a lot of attention. I'd be aware of everything that's going on. And not that I don't have to be aware. And obviously, there's other people out there. there's a certain amount of awareness I have to have. And every once in a while, you know, like I'll like safety first,

and I'll pause for a second because I'm worrying about something. And so if I need a focus, I do focus. But the point is I've been driving now, you know, for over 40 years. So a lot of it has been, my brain is shortcut a lot of things. And that's one of the cool things, by the way the brain works is that as you do things, it sort of learns how you do with it. And then when you put it in input, you get the same output. Now, that is great when you want to drive a car.

It is not good when you're trying to be creative. Because the problem there is, if the same output gives you, the same input gives you the same output, well, that's not really good when you're trying to be creative. Like, I'm trying to come up to something that I haven't come up with before. So a lot of the key there is that you just want to mix things and get things. Like, if I start with a goal that I've never started with before, I just will think things they never thought.

I'll examine things they'll never examine. The other big thing we do is we change up teams. When I first got to Magic, although even in the early, early days of Magic, the design teams are usually different. The development teams tended overlap. The first couple years I was at Wizards.

The four of us and then the five of us were always the development team because that's all that was at the time. But even then, we would mix it up a little bit on the design teams. And the reason is you just want different, like, if I sit down with a different group of people, even if I have the same neural pathways, just bouncing off other people will get me

to go places I haven't. So not only do you want to start from a different vantage point, but also just intermixing with different people. The other big thing that changes over time is technology. That when I go, if I was making, you know, Tempest was my very first lead. There's a lot of things that we didn't know back then, so I didn't even consider. But now, now that we've, you know, like every time we make a mechanic, we're adding it to our, toolbox. And not every mechanic ends up being as versatile as other mechanics.

But the interesting thing is you don't always know like when I'm making mechanics, there's a lot of mechanics I've made that I didn't realize when I made the mechanic, sort of the utility of the mechanic. A good example will be, let's talk about a mass. So a mass came about, as I said I was leading, it was called War of the Spark.

And it was our first big capstone event set, the end of the bolus arc, And it was Nicole Bowles and his army of eternal vampires, the internals that were vampires, not vampires, were zombies, the eternals, against most of the plainswalkers you know, what we call the Plainswalker War. So one of the challenges is Nicole Bowles, because he's an individual person,

we needed to have enough cards, we needed common cards and stuff. So we made this army of Eternals, a zombie army of Aminket. The idea in the story was, in order to transport them, he could only transport unliving things. So he made an army out of, a well-trained army out of zombies. He transported them there.

So one of the challenges was we wanted to represent the eternal army, but what we learned over time is just making a lot of tokens often can gum up the board. And that representing an army by just making infinite creatures, token creatures, we didn't like the gameplay of it. So the challenge we gave herself was, How do we make an army that represents an army that has a little more dynamism, you know, that doesn't, that's not so defensive. And so we end up with this idea of a mass. And we said, okay, well, what if, you know, your army is represented by a singular creature.

And your army getting bigger doesn't mean you get more creatures. It means this creature gets bigger. And so the idea is your army gets more and more threatening with time. And so, obviously, as the mass works, I'm sure you all know, that I mass for a number. And what it means is if I don't have an army token, creature token, I make one, and then I put that many plus one plus one counters on it. But if I already have one, I don't make another one, I just put plus and plus one counters on it. Anyway, a mass ended up being very useful.

We were doing Lord of the Rings. We said, oh, we need to make an army. We realized time and time again, it's just a valuable tool. And we didn't necessarily, like, it's not often when I make a mechanic that I necessarily know the dynamism of that mechanic. that we're trying to solve a problem, we're trying to do something, and sometimes we solve it really well,

and we're like, oh, okay, this is a problem we're getting again and again, we can use this tool again. Sometimes I'm aware, I mean, when I made hybrid man, for example, back during Ravnika, I was experimenting with the idea of color, and I recognized the idea

that traditional multicolour was and. This card is white and blue, and I was very tickled by the idea of ore. Well, what if I made a card that was white, or blue, meaning you didn't put it in a white and blue deck, I mean, you could, but you put it in a deck

with white or a deck with blue. So I made hybrid manna, which I was very, I was very excited by, and I did see the potential in it, but nobody else really at the time saw the potential. They were like, oh, okay, sure, fine. But I was like, no, no, no. And it's funny, you know, looking back now, hybrid was many years ago,

it's becoming very, I mean, It's just on the cost of being evergreen. We use it so much. Because it just is a very, very valuable tool, especially in limited, to let more people have access to colors. That it just by adding a few hybrid cards in, you now just expand what people can do in limited. It really gives you a lot more flexibility.

The other thing that I should stress is, one of the cool things about magic is the nature of how things get used depends a lot on what's around it when he gets used. My classic example of this will be proliferate. So I first made proliferate in scars a mirroden block. And we were, so the phrexians, the metaphor that I really liked to the phorexians, were they were disease.

And they were, what was it? We had four adjectives for them. They were viral. They were relentless. They were adaptive. And they were toxic. And the idea was, I really wanted to represent sort of the spread of disease.

So originally I made one card that just, for any creature that had a minus one minus counter, it could get another one. Sorry, let me take a sip of water. Okay. So I made one card that said anything that has a minus one counter could get another one, any creature that's a poison counter could get another one. You chose. You chose because the idea really is you're doing it to your opponent.

it and his creatures. His or her creatures. So, I made one card. I really liked it, so I ended making a vertical cycle. And then one of my team members, Mark Globus, to be exact, suggested, well, what if it just did it for any counter? And I love that idea. We had charge counters in the set. So, and charged counters built up rather than built down. So, but anyway, the interesting thing was we put it in the set, and mostly in the set with minus one minus counters and poison counters, Proliferate was more about tearing down your opponent than it was about building up. But then, years later, once again, in War of the Spark, we used proliferate, but that had a plainswalker theme. And so we had a lot of planeswalkers, including uncommon plainswalkers, some of which only counted down.

There was no way within the car to build up. But proliferate built it up, and that worked really well. And the set also had plus one plus one counters because a mass was in it. And so, you know, proliferate with loyalty counters and plus one plus one. counters. Just, I mean, same mechanic, but it played very differently. And the third time in return, it was in Forexia All Will Be One. We had oil counters. We were messing around with a new type of counter. And, you know, we had, we were playing around with the idea of getting a threshold to point. Like, we did a bunch of things that just made proliferate play a little bit differently.

And that's a good example where proliferate showed up in three different sets. But in each set, it did something a bit different. And that's another neat thing where part of the innovation does not have to come with absolutely doing something you've never seen. I mean, that's one of the big things about innovation in general is a little innovation goes a long way. That even just taking a mechanic, that's a tried and true known mechanic,

but mixing it with things that are different, all of a sudden makes that mechanic have fresh life and just feel different and do something different. The other big thing, by the way, talking innovation, is so we have two, I'll call it big camps of design these days. We have traditional in multiverse designs, and we have Universes Beyond designs. And one of the things we realize is universe is beyond is really about matching the property that we're doing, is using all the tools that Magic has available and then bringing to life that property.

The thing that's going to make people buy the, I mean, obviously we want to do a really good job. We want to make sure that when you play it, it feels true to that property. but we're aware that the thing that sells it, especially out of the gate, is the name on the side of the box. Oh, I really like Marvel superheroes, Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, you know, name whatever avatar, name whatever property you want. That's what really excites people. I mean, our job is to bring that property to life, to bring it to magic.

But there's less innovative, because the innovation on some level is that, top-down design to that property. That a lot of what's new and different is, oh, here are things you know, things that are really cool to you, if you're friends with the property, and now we're making a magic game out of them. We're bringing them to magic.

And there's a lot of innovation in that. It's not that we don't ever make brand new things up, but normally the way it works in Universes Beyond is we make it up when we don't have a tool that does it. You know, we early on in Universes Beyond design, we'll figure out what we need to do. How do we capture this? And then we look at what we, like, are there existing mechanics that can capture that?

We make a conscious decision that we want in multiverse sets to be a little more mechanically innovative. You know, they're not relying on a time-tested famous property. It's a brand-new thing. Now, we're, I think we're pretty good at making environments and making worlds. So I don't want to dismiss our property. Our property is good. But it doesn't quite have the, you know, the properties we're working at the universe is beyond. Or like time-tested, classic properties.

And so we need mechanical innovation a little bit more. Now, another big thing on innovation, something I sort of talk about is one of my maxims is don't look outside the box until you look inside the box. And what that means is that I don't believe innovation, for innovation's sake, let's do something different because it is different is good design. The reason you should innovate is you're using innovation to solve a problem. them. And that's another big thing that I, you know, when I think about innovation in magic design, what I really care about is I want innovation use properly. And the idea is, like, in the early days of

magic, when we used to design stuff, we, you know, there was infinite open design veins, right? We, you know, magic hadn't done that much. So there's lots and lots of things we could do. And in fact, in early design, our. attitude was, basically, if we made a brand new mechanic, one or two things was going to happen. It was something we liked enough that we're just going to make it evergreen and let magic have access to it. Or that's it. We used it. Toss it aside. In fact, when I tried to bring back cycling in onslaught, there's a lot of discussion. Like, there's a lot of like, oh, we've done this already. I'm like, no, but we can, I mean, my big argument in the time was, look, you know, mechanics

are a resource, we've made them. If they're good, why don't we use them again? Now, it's funny, at the time with Onslaught, in order to get Onslaught to have cycling, bring cycling back to Onslaught, I had to prove there's something different about it. I had to innovate with it. And my big innovation at the time

was this idea of making a few cards, Lightning Rift, Astral Slide, that made you want to build a cycling deck, made you want to build a deck full of cycling cards. That wasn't normal cycling when we first presented it in Erzaa. like you would splash cycling. There's no reason to play a lot of cycling.

But all of a sudden, if we had a cart that cared about cycling, now you had encouragement to play a cycling deck. So that's how I got it in by making something that was a little bit different than before. So I innovated on it. But now we're really under the idea of, look, we have a lot of tools. We had a lot of problems we've solved. If you're trying to solve a problem, go look. Have we solved that problem before?

and one of my jobs is head designer is that like I'm well aware of how we solve problems. I've been on the vast majority of the design teams, you know, design slash vision design. And I know, you know, as we're trying to solve problems, I've been there. I've been there when we're trying to solve the problems. And so, and not only do I know what we've done, but I also know what we tried and didn't end up doing, but we tried. A lot of times, for example, we make cool mechanics all the time in design, and they're not right for the set they're in. So one of the things that's interesting is that one of my jobs is as we're doing exploratory or even vision, I can pull from the past and saying, hey, here's something we tried before and here's what we didn't, didn't like about it.

And a lot of times, like, for example, energy is sort of the classic example. Energy was an original mirrored in. It got pools for space. We had too much going on. And then just I kept looking for places to do as energy. It took 13 years. But eventually we got to Kaladesh. And like, oh, you know, the world of Obishkar was a really good world to, like, it worked.

We were trying to do this like more positive vibes steampunk, what we call etherpunk. And it just fit really well. And that's the idea is that we want to sort of do things and figure out where we can use them again. Now, on innovation itself, I do believe on in a set, especially in the universe's, I'm sorry, in multiverse set. we want to make sure that there's something new in every set. For example, usually one of our rules is just probably a keyword that is a keyword you haven't seen before. Maybe it's a keyword mechanic. Maybe it's an ability word.

But probably there's some new vocabulary word that you haven't seen. Maybe we're labeling something you've seen before, but not in a concentration that we're doing it, meaning in enough concentration that we're labeling it. Now, that because, being said, we also, I mean, I also think it's important for most sets that we do bring things back, that we don't, the goal isn't to, I mean, I'm not saying we don't make sets with all new things, we sometimes do, but even then, usually all new things, some of them are, are tweaks on existing things. One of the challenges of making magic for the lungs we have is sometimes we make

something and it's a little broader than probably we meant in a vacuum. Kicker's a class example here. Kicker really is an additional cost. It's not, it's kind of broader than a single mechanic. In fact, there's many mechanics that really are just a subset of kicker. So a lot of time what innovation is, is taking something we've done and finding some new avenue to using it. Sometimes that's a subset, like sometimes we make things broader and the innovation is finding a subset within that. And sometimes it's just a matter of doing things, you know, a little bit differently of just introducing things that have a slight different touch to them. I wouldn't, in fact, use an example from reality fracture, since reality fracture is the set coming up.

So one of the things we did in reality fracture was it was a what-if set. And we said we would like to do, are there any mechanics that we could what if? Now, one thing that I pointed out is we tweak mechanics all the time. So it's not as if tweaking mechanic is brand new to a what if set. But I really said to my team, it'd be fun for us, you know, try to take some known mechanics and really push boundaries. Not just tweak them, really tweak them. Go someplace very different than they've been before.

And on that assignment, Jeremy Geist, who was my strong second, Jeremy came in second in the third great designer search, truly a great designer. He came up with an idea. So his idea was to take a mass, the mechanic I talked about earlier, and say, well, what if you amassed instead of a creature, a plains walker? So one of our problems that we were trying to solve in the set is another thing is Jace was the antagonist or is the antagonist of reality fracture. And so we had to figure out how could we represent Jace on as many cards as possible. And so his pitch, originally he actually called it a mass jace. Later we called him Power Jase.

But a mass jace, the idea was, I'm doing a mass. The only difference is instead of making an army token, like a creature token, I'm making a Plainswalker token. And I think his very first, when he first suggested the idea, It was plus one, scry one, I'd say, minus one, scry one, minus three, draw a card. And we ended up changing a scry to surveil, like during vision design, maybe even during exploratory, probably during Vision, though. Sets are either scry or surveil, so we have to pick which it is.

In order, the idea, by the way, roughly, is that half a sets of scry and half a sets of surveil. So we default to scry unless there's a reason to go to surveil. But if you have enough, like, there's a graveyard theme in one of the, schools and so we decided that we wanted to surveil we got signed up on that anyway um empower jace is a really good example of it's a brand new thing it's a really cool thing um is it a brand new mechanic in a vacuum not exactly it was very much very much inspired by a mass but just applying a mass like we've i mean there was one jace that made a copy of himself

but we haven't really made plainswalker tokens in mass i'm absolutely we've had a few cards that could copy things. But as far as a card that specifically makes Plainswalker tokens, other than the one Jace that copies himself, we haven't really done that. That was a pretty new space. And the idea that you can use a mass technology, so you're just putting more loyalty counters on. It's pretty cool. In fact, you know, Jeremy came up with the mechanic. We loved it in Exploratory. I put it in the very first design file for Vision. And it never left. Like, we knew we hit upon something pretty cool. And that's another big thing about innovation, I guess I should say, is you kind of know when you hit upon something new that's, like, when we really do something that's innovative, like, we can tell, we, we the magic, you know, we, the designers are as much hardcore, long-time magic players as all of you.

When we do something new that we've never done before, I can feel it. Like, I remember, for example, when we were testing landfall, and I remember having the game where I was eager to draw a land in the late game. And I understood, like, look, I have never felt that feeling. I've wanted to not draw a land in a late game, but it's, you know, other than having a huge drop, you know, I have my nine drop, I need my ninth land. Other than that, like, once you had the cards you could play, you didn't want to draw more land. You just wanted to draw spells. And that was a really different feeling. And like that's one of the things that's really cool is one of the things about innovation is you want to find moments that that touch upon you in a way that really excite you.

Like innovation and kind of one of my lessons of today is innovation is a very potent thing, but you don't need a lot of innovation to get the effect that you want. And in fact, as head designer, one of my jobs is, look, I got to dole out mechanics to certain extent. We have a lot of magic to make. and we have a lot more years of magic, and that, you know, we could just innovate to the nth degree all the time, but the problem is it just becomes harder and harder to do that. And that really what we've learned is there's a lot of ways to innovate that aren't, like I said earlier, innovation can be about doing brand new thing,

it could be about tweaking existing thing, or it can be about combining and interacting things in ways we had before. The tweaking and combining is really important, and that kind of when I say look inside, the box before looking outside the box. Do we have things that we've already done that either are tweaked or combined?

Can we solve this problem without having to go outside our toolbox? And if we can, we should. And that a lot of what design is, a lot of early design, exploratory design especially, is mapping out what exists, mapping out what is

there. And a lot of mapping it out is understanding what we have and haven't done and where to expand what we have and haven't done. Some of it, and truly innovative space, meaning here's something we've never, ever done before. That is rare.

Actual, honest to God, you have never seen this before. Not that it doesn't exist, there's some. Magic is pretty deep. Richard made a pretty deep game. But, you know, 33 years in, we have explored a lot of space. In fact, it is rare when somebody

exploratory design comes up with an idea that I've not seen before. I'm not seeing the exact implementation of the idea, but I've been on a lot of Florida design teams. I've seen a lot of blue sky design. And so it is very rare that someone does something that I go, wow, I've never seen that before. It's exciting when it happens,

but most of the time, most of what we're doing, most of our innovation is not true blue sky, meaning it's the thing you've never ever seen before. A lot of it is extrapolated. That's the most common thing we do. And I think Empower Jase is a good example of that. It's a really cool mechanic. It is very innovative.

It is very out there. But look, did we get there by taking a known thing and extrapolating? 100%. It was called a mass jace. And then once you understand that it was used a mass, I mean, maybe if we didn't tell you that, probably you would figure that. I mean, it definitely shows enough of the mass that if you understand structure,

you'd see how it got there. But the key to it really is just, A lot of what we need to do in magic is we want to keep you under toes. We want to do new things. But we can do those new things. The metaphor I like to use is innovation is icing. Iceing is awesome. Ising is exciting.

People might even focus on the icing. I know when I have cake, I like the icing. I like the icing. I think is pretty cool. But you need more cake than icing. If I just gave you an entire cake full of icing, that would not be something that would be good. And that a lot of what makes icing exciting

is the cake to balance it out. And a lot of when we do the design, we have to think about the cake. The cake is important. And that we want to use our innovation carefully and cautiously, I guess I would say. And that's really the sort of challenge there is I think, you know, year two,

look, most of the things you do is innovative. You just haven't done them before. But year 33, 34, and on. A lot of it is trying to find new ways in. And like I said, the neat thing that universe is beyond is that's just a new way in. We've never tried to top-down design this property. And there are a lot of sets that a lot of, I think the innovation comes from the core concept of the set. You know, when we're going edge of eternities, we've never done space before.

You know, when we're a lot of the times, or you know, Bloomboro, we're doing, you know, animals is a very different take. And there's a, there's a mood and a tone we have to capture. And that dictates a lot of things. That's a lot of where the innovation to me comes from is setting out parameters. We are going to make something as a whole we haven't made. And that the more of the whole is something we haven't made, the innovation can rely on that. That we are doing something we haven't done. And once again, I'm not saying we can't innovate within that, but we innovate because we,

because we need to innovate, not because we're not filling quotas, we're not checking boxes. And then, I think the place that most needs the sort of new innovation is we are playing in space we've played before. That's the thing where, okay, like the thing about returns

that can be a challenge is that the plus side is on a return, you have stuff built in. You have things you know you're going to do that you don't start from scratch. But the downside is you've been there before. You've used these neural pathways, And you have to sort of say, how do we rediscover this world in a way that's true to the world,

but offer something new? And there's a lot of challenge there. But anyway, sort of my thought of today for all of you is innovation is important. There's many ways to do innovation. And the key to sort of designing magic long term is being careful with our innovation and how we use it and how often we use it and where we use it. We want it. It's neat. We need to have it. Sets want innovation. I'm not really saying that they shouldn't. But I am saying that we need to be careful about how we use it and when we use it. But anyway, that was the core structure of my talk today is innovation important. There's many ways to do it. And it is something that we need. It needs to be icing to our cake.

Okay, guys, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end by the drive. drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.