Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1385: Being Scary

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Magic has had three different evergreen keywords to express that a creature is scary (fear, intimidate, and menace). In this episode, I walk through the history of all three.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time with their drive to work. Okay. So today I've dubbed being scary. I'm talking all around. Black has had an evergreen keyword that means it's being scary. It has had three different ones.

Fear, intimidate, and menace. And I'm going to tell the story, the evolved story of how it evolved over time. So yes, today is all about fear, intimidate, and menace, so be warned. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning of our story,

which is Alpha, which is often in the beginning. So, actually, before I even get into Alpha, let's get into evasion, and talk about why evasion is important. So, in a game of magic, the

thing that is capable of doing repeatable damage, or the key thing, is creatures. That you play creatures, and the creatures, once you play them, every turn can do damage and ultimately, hopefully can end the game. The problem is, as you get more creatures into play, into the battlefield, you start to get what we call creature stall, which means there is a situation where it's not advantageous to attack. In fact, one of the issues we often deal with is, in the way magic is set up,

defense is a little bit stronger than offense. Meaning, if I choose to attack, I have to make the decision first. I have to inform you of what I'm attacking with, and then you, with full knowledge of how I'm attacking, get to choose how you block. And so there's a slight advantage there. And so one of the things that comes up pretty often is, once you start getting enough creatures into play,

it really becomes disadvantageous to attack. If I have more power than you or larger creatures, I mean, it's not always disemitative. But usually what I don't want to do is I don't want to attack and I lose something more than you lose. And with the ability to block with multiple things, oftentimes we can set up situations where, I'm not going to come out of this attack if I attack. So the answer to that is what we refer to as evasion, which is, is there some way for me to attack? that makes it so less other creatures can block me, even though there's lots of creatures on the board.

So the classic evasion is obviously flying, which started all the way back in Alpha. And flying had a... I mean, I have to talk about flying being the most obvious mechanic, right? I'm a creature, I can fly. Well, who can block me? Other creatures that can fly. But if you can't fly, I fly over you.

And flying is very nice because it says, well, most of the creatures don't matter. The only creatures that are matter in combat are flying creatures. And so now you only have to care about a subset of it. There are other types of evasion. I've done a whole podcast on invasion. And evasion can veer from, you just can't block me. Like we actually have cards to say, I can't be blocked. All the way down to things where when I attack, your you're discouraged from attacking me if I have something like death touch or first strike

it's not necessarily that you can't block me but maybe you don't want to block me okay so let's go all the way back to alpha now so Richard was making alpha he understood the need of evasion flying was put right in there

but black was actually in alpha black might have been fourth in flying Right now, white and blue or primary black is secondary, red and greener tertiary. Maybe greens even slightly beyond that. But the idea is black normally at common will get one flyers, pretty common, maybe one uncommon flyer, where white and blue will have two or three.

So I think there was a flag with Will Loispe, although that couldn't do damage. So black in Alpha didn't really have much evasion to speak. of that, I mean, there was swamp walk, I guess. So landwalk says, if I attack and you have the appropriate type, in this case, a swamp, you can't block me. So there was a swamp walk. There was a little bit of flying. You know, there was a few things that you could do.

But really, Black did not have a lot of evasion. Now, the thing to remember when Alpha came up, about is limited wasn't really a thing yet that Richard designed the game to be played

and sort of constructed and that the cards weren't built for limited. It turns out with limited

Creatures Stahl matters more. I'll get to that in a second. But anyway, Richard didn't really build a lot in.

Although he did build one thing. He did have one slight thing he did. It was an

enchantment called fear. So fear was an aura, and it said, enchanted creature can't be black, except by black or artifact creatures. And the idea behind it was there was another card called terror. Terror could destroy any creature except for black or artifact creatures. And those kind of thematically went together. The idea of one of the tools in black's arsenal is fear, right?

Making people afraid it's something black is good at and takes advantage of. And the idea was, I could use fear. I could use fear as a means to destroy a creature. I could use fear as a means to keep people from blocking me. And the idea was, well, black things, they're used to scary things. It's hard to scare a black creature. And the idea of artifacts were, well, artifacts don't really have emotions, they're artificial. You know, it's hard to scare them.

And so he made this, he sort of connected the idea of black an artifact as being immune to fear. And so he made the fear of aura and he made terror. Okay. So the reason, by the way, that he didn't really make a lot of evasion in black was when you're thinking of constructed, Black does have an answer to board stall. It is creature kill. Black is number one at killing things. And so the idea is, well, if things get in my way, well, I can just, I can destroy them.

but let's flash forward we get to Mirage and so Mirage is the first time that we were very conscious about designing for Limited for those that don't know when Richard first made magic when he was actually playtesting it in Alpha or pre-Alpha

in the original playtest he was doing they did play around with Limited they did experiment with Limited a little bit They did a little time into drafting. They did play around limited a little bit. So Richard was aware of that as a concept. But when the game first came out, the idea was you would only buy so much.

And so limited wasn't something like, limited really works if you're willing to just, every time you play, buy more product. But that was the big ask at the time. Limited wasn't a thing that people did a lot with product. So the idea was on playing constructed. Black has a lot of ways to remove things. well, okay, black probably won't get stale made all that often.

But when you get to limited, the thing about limited is, first and foremost, you tend to have less removal. You're at the sake of what you can draft or what you open up if it's sealed. So you just generally have less removed. You can play more removal in constructed. And you just tend to play more creatures. Like I said, creatures are the repeatable form of damage. It's a lot easier to construct it to play with creatures. less. I mean, we've definitely shifted the game to make creatures more valuable so you want to play

with the creatures. But especially in early magic, creatures were a little less valuable than they are now, partly because I think Richard and team, because creatures repeatedly did damage, they overestimated to serve how powerful they were, and they, on average, were a little on the weaker side compared to the spells. The spells tended to be a little bit stronger. So early magic tended to have, um, the creature as fan in decks was just lower. And in fact, there's a period in time, before I got a wizard, back in like in 94, after Legends came out, where there were a couple really powerful enchant worlds.

There's one called Nethervoy. There was one called The Abyss. And there was a period in time in standard, or type two as it was called at the time, where people didn't play a lot of creatures. In fact, a lot of people played creatureless decks. That's when I played my little green-blue we need that because I'm playing creatures.

Anyway, so Mirage comes along. We decide for the first time that we want to care about limited. And once we want to care about limited, we really are kind of forced to say, you know, black needs some evasion. Black doesn't really have a lot of evasion. So first and foremost, we raised the amount of flying in black.

Black had a little bit less flying. We raised it up and said, okay, this is when we kind of made black secondary in flying. We said black really needs flying. And we said, hey, what evasion can we give black? And so in Mirage Block, it's the first time we start sort of regularly using fear. Now, it's not keyworded yet. We write it out. But like in Mirage, Ebony charm, which is one of the charms,

one of its ability is to give a creature essentially fear for the turn. It can't be black except by black and artifact creatures. In visions, there's Sakata Assassin, which has the ability. Razor-Tooth rats in Weatherlight have the ability. Commander Kravinaw Vecke. And then in Tempest, you start seeing multiple creatures having the ability. Like, we realize that just it's an important thing. So we start putting it on creatures.

We write it out. Originally, we write it out. But it just is like, okay, like black needs evasion. And the idea of black being scary and things not wanting to black block seemed like a good way to do evasion. So we first, we finally keyworded it in onslaught. So that onslaught was, I think, 90... Onsulops after...

Yeah, so onslaughts after invasion. Invasion, Auditza. So that's 2002. So the game comes out in 93, and it's almost, almost 10 years later, nine years later, when for the very first time, we take the mechanic,

Fear Mechanic, and we give it a keyword. We called it Fear. That was the name of the aura that originally had it. That was our R&D nickname for it since we sort of named it up the card that did it first. And so, finally, Magic has an Evergreen named keyword that means it's being scary. But there were some problems.

There were some problems with fear. So let's get into those. First and foremost, so one of the things we learned over time was, um, we, so one of the challenges of keywords, of evergreen keywords is vocabulary words are a barrier. That if I want to learn a game,

if I come in the game and I have to learn words, meaning it just doesn't tell me what it does. It says, I have to learn what the word means. Um, some of our vocabulary is fun and, games want to introduce vocabulary. But Magic has a lot of vocabulary that it's introducing to you.

And we just have to be careful how much vocabulary we introduce. Some of it is the more flavorful the names, the better. Flying, for example, has a lower barrier because, well, if I want to explain to what flying does, really I'm like, well, what do you think a flying creature would do? And yeah, it kind of does what you would expect. And so we need to be careful. with that. And as a side effect of that, one of the things we realize is we really wanted to optimize our evergreen keywords as much as we could. That if we're going to, like, if once you pass the

barrier of it's in the game at a basic level, we want to be able to use that as much as we can. And fear really didn't make a lot of sense outside of black. I'm not saying we never put it on another card, but very, very rarely. And we really really, we really, wanted to spend. And it turned out that Red really also needed an evasion ability. It had like first record. It had a few things. Haste sometimes where if you don't

on the first turn if you didn't plan for it, I can sneak in with haste. Red had a few things that it could do. But it really wanted a keyword. And we wanted in general to be able to like, we wanted to be able to use fear in more places. But the nature of fear

only be blackable by black or artifact creatures, really kind of pushed it into black. And so the question we asked ourselves is, can we do it a little bit better? The other problem we had with fear is, like I said, we chose the name based on the name Richard had given it in Alpha.

And the reality is, fear was always a bit weird because the ability itself is not fear. You're not making the creature fearful. No, you're making the creature scary. you're making the creature induce fear. And so the name fear was just a, it was an odd name for it. It was kind of backwards.

It wasn't really what it was. So when we were making Magic 2010, so Aaron Forsyth really came up to his idea, he wanted to sort of redo the corset. The corset had been struggling. And his idea, for those who don't remember this, is one, for the very first time we brought in new cards. We're like, oh, hey, magic, if we need things, we can design it.

That's the flexibility of making a magic set. For up till then, if you were making a core set, you could only reprint cards, which oftentimes made it very hard. Like, we'd reprint things we didn't want to reprint because we didn't have a lot of choices. So he said, let's just make new cards when we need them. And he really advocated the idea of resonance

of things should really match, you know, let's build things that people know what they are and they make mechanics that reinforce and that does what I think it would do. And so in that thing, he said, we really said we need to get rid of fear. Fear is not doing what it needed to do. So in Magic 2010, we get rid of fear.

But we realize we kind of, like, it's feeling a function we need. So we decide to come up with a new version of fear. And like I said, the new version, really had to do two things. One, it needed a better name, needed to imply it's scary. And two, it needed to be able to usable in more colors, especially in red. So we changed fear to intimidate. So intimidate says, I can't be blocked except by creatures that share a color with me or are artifacts.

Again, artifacts at the time, we're still colorless. We hadn't quite got into colored artifacts yet. So what happens is originally we playtests with Jessica can only be. black by my color. And what we find in playtest is we just want the ability to have a little bit more answers to blocking, and so we add back in the colors. So in Zendikar, which came out right after Magic 2010, we actually premier the Intimidate keyword. And the nice thing about it, Intimidate did a couple things Fear didn't do that we liked. It allowed us to put in more colors so we could put it in So now, Intimidate is primary in black, secondary and red. And occasionally we use it in other colors.

And there's also some interesting, if you somehow add colors to your creature, you can add colors to creatures, it makes more creatures blockable. If we put fear on a multicolored creature, oh, more creatures can block it. Now, fundamentally, the challenge we find with Intimidate, Like, fear actually had one more problem. And while we'd solved two of the three problems, we didn't really solve this last problem with intimidate. And that is one of the things you want when you make a mechanic

is you want what we call dynamism. Dynamism, dynamism, you want to be dynamic. It's a hard word to say. You want to be dynamic. What that means is you want your opponent to be able to do something about the things you're doing, that you want to have gameplay, that there's responsive gameplay. Oh, if my opponent does A, I can do B.

So, for example, we phased out landlock. I talked about landwalk earlier, swamp walk, island walk. And the problem we had there was, if I have swamp walk, that means if you are playing swamps, basically if you're playing black, I'm unblockable. If you're not, I'm not. So either I have this ability that you, and how do you deal with swamp walk? What, destroy all your swamps? Like, it's not a viable answer.

And so the reality was it was a mechanic that just said, well, if you're, in this, one situation, there's nothing you can do about it, and this other situation, my car basically has no ability. And intimidate was a lot like that. Obviously, the artifact things added a little bit to it, meaning at least it constructed, if I thought it was going to run into intimidators,

okay, I could add some artifact creatures. Maybe in limited either way to do that. Maybe I don't, depending on how many artifact creatures are in the set. But we really realized was it had the same problem, Landlock had. because it's color-based, it's like, okay, let's say I'm intimidated on a black creature. Okay, well, if you're not playing black, what do you do with my creature?

Yeah, yeah, maybe you can play some artifact creatures, but it's not the greatest of answers. There's no gameplay answer. There's a deck-building answer, but not a gameplay answer. And one of the things we liked is it is better if there's answers. Now, when we talk about evasion, there's two types of... So there is what we call prescriptive answers and what we call sort of natural answers. A prescriptive answer means that we have to make cards specifically for it. Flying is probably the best example here.

Flying does deal with flying, but you know else? We made a whole other mechanic reach to deal with flying. We make cards like plummet and we make cards that specifically deal with flying. That flying is such an important thing that we prescriptively make cards to interact. with it. The problem is you really have to have a high enough as fan of cards to do that. There's enough flyers in the set that it does

make sense to do that. But how many creatures are we going to make with fear or intimidate, right? Not that many. Maybe one, maybe two. And so prescriptive answers don't make sense. So whatever we do, we need to be something where there's a gameplay answer, not a

prescriptive answer that you have to have specific cards. And it turns out we actually did have an answer. Something that was made many years ago back in 2004. So 2004 had a set called Fallen Empires. And so Fallen Empires,

for those who don't have fallen empires, the idea was every color had two warring groups in it that were fighting against each other. And in that set, there's a card called Goblin War Drums. and when Goblin Wardrums, it was a red card, actually, and it said, your creatures cannot be blocked by one creature. In order to block a creature, you have to be blacked by two or more creatures. It was an enchantment.

But it was interesting, and it was a kind of ability. We put on a couple of other cards, and when we realized that it was neat about it was, normally, for example, if I'm playing an evasion like flying, well, you have to have an answer to flying. if I'm playing But, but if you look at other Earlier I talked about like First Strike

Or Death Touch First Strike is interesting Because First Strike says If you don't have a large enough creature I'm problems because I would destroy your creature Without destroying my creature Yeah you can chump block me But it's harder to deal with me

But one of the answers of a First Strike that's really interesting is If I block with multiple creatures yes, you'll destroy one of my creatures, but my other creature can destroy you. Like, there are answers to first strike. There are ways by which, yes, I might lose a creature,

but I also can deal with your creature. And there's something really interesting about that. So we played around a little bit with a goblin wardrobe ability, as we called it at the time, and we like this idea like, okay, a lot of times, especially early in the game, this thing's unblockable because you just don't have enough answers. And depending on how you attack, maybe, you know, if you only have one creature, zero or one creatures left, obviously I can attack.

But it's now something you have to think through and deal with. And we thought that dynamic was really cool. And so we thought, like, okay, what if we did this? What if we made this the ability? And I think we wrote it on a few cards originally just to test around with it. But the more we played with it, the more we really liked it. We thought it was pretty cool. And so the idea essentially was, okay, I'm scary.

And so the reason I'm scary, well, the answer to being scary is, well, I'm not blocking you alone. You're too scary to block alone. But if I get something to block with me, you know, you're scary enough that I want a friend. I want someone working with me. And that dynamic was really interesting. And like I said, it created an invasion. that was kind of a sometimes evasion. And the other cool thing about it is, remember, black and red are the two most colors about removal.

And so another cool thing is, if you leave back two creatures to block my menace creature and I destroy one of the creatures, now my menace creature's unblockable. That dynamic was really cool. So anyway, in Magic Origins, which was a corset, a fancier corset, Magic Origins is the set where the five members would later be the original members of the Gatewatch we meet each of them

we see them on their home plane we watch them spark and see the plane they visit to when they first spark it's actually pretty cool it's the first cards that have the double-faced plainswalkers that have their legendary creature on one side and then the planeswalker on the other side because it represents some sparking

anyway in that set That's the first time we introduced the idea of men. Well, we named menace. We'd done it, written out before. And the thing that I do like about men, the thing about menace, I mean, menace went in and menace has stayed. I don't see us replacing menace. I think menace is great. It does exactly what we want in a way that's very flavorful and really interesting from a game play standpoint, which I like.

The idea of you have to block two creatures block me, love that. really much gets the idea of I'm scary. And the amount of interesting interplay that comes with it is great. In fact, Menace is so good. We're always on the lookout of the other. There are more things like Menace where it just makes neat, dynamic decisions.

The other thing that's fascinating to me is I don't know when Magic Origins came out, but magic origins is within the last, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, maybe slightly longer than that. maybe 15. But anyway, the idea of how long the game took to get to menace. But also, I guess this is another thing.

I talk about this all the time, but this is a good example, is part of the design process is what we call the iterative process. The iterative process says, I take something, I make it, I get feedback, I make tweaks based on that feedback, and then I play test it again, right?

So the idea is normally in a normal magic design, we make things, we try things, we play them, oh, we learn something, we tweak them, and that is the essence of how we make a magic set. But the iterative process is not just a singular magic set, it is magic as a whole. And today's is exactly that, which is we recognized, I mean, magic started and it didn't have something. or it had it in tiny, tiny doses. I guess you could argue that Richard did, in fact, put a little bit of it in alpha. So it was there. I mean, we had something to work with.

But the idea was it was there in very low doses. It wasn't really focused on. And as we slowly started to understand, like, early magic didn't have limited. So once we had it limited, we started realizing we needed this thing. And then we looked to see what tools were available. And so we borrowed the thing that Richard had made. Okay, here's a flavorful way. to express this.

We play with it for a while. And once again, it's not just like, mostly an iterative. I talk about playtasting, but now, okay, we make a mechanic. We name the mechanic.

We play with it for a while. Eventually we name it. We put it out there. We get people playing with it. And then we say, you know what? This is not, we can do better than this.

This is a bit limiting. So we try a new version of it that expands what we can do and gives us answer to some of the problems we've been having. and then we name, we make it, we play with it, we name it, we play with that for a while. Eventually we realized, oh, this itself still has problems.

Is there a way to make something better? And then we look back and we pull for something we had made that we thought we liked, and again, we experiment with it, eventually we like it enough, we name it, and then it moves into the system, and now it's a core part of magic. Like menace, like if you play magic now, menace is just one of the things that is part of the game. But, as I sort of explained today, it took time to get to menace. We did not start at menace. Alpha did not have menace.

And that sort of, as we worked the system and played around, we've figured out little by little. And one of the reasons I think magic is so strong right now, well, I mean, and to be fair, when Richard made Alpha, the core game, it is shocking how many things Richard got right. Like how many just out of the gate things Richard got correct. but Richard, I mean, A, Richard cannot predict what the game would become. Magic sort of grew way, way bigger than he ever could imagine. And B, you know, look, part of making magic is we get to learn from it and then we take to apply those learnings that we are iterating the game of magic. I think, for example, limited is the best it's ever been.

And this is no slight to any of the previous designers, a lot of which for me. It's just that we keep iterating. We learn on what comes before. We apply those lessons and those become organic lessons. And it's really neat that when you look back, at some point maybe I'll do a podcast unlimited, but like the idea of Ravnik introduces the very concept of sort of archetypes. And then an indistrade builds on those and cementes that idea.

And, you know, there's just this evolution of us learning things and figuring things out. Eventually, for example, we figure out the idea of the gold sign pose. There's a lot of things that we figure out along the way, and that we build upon that. And that each, as we invent new tools and create new things,

we find new ways to advance magic. And the fear story, today's story really is that being scary is an awesome idea. Black needs evasion and the flavor of I'm a scary thing and that makes me harder to block than normal is awesome. Did we get to the perfect answer right away?

We did not. We spent many years with a suboptimal answer. It wasn't a horrible answer and it did serve the game at the time, but we kept figuring out a better way to do it. And I really think menace is the best incarnation of that. Maybe we'll find something even better, although I'm pretty happy with menace. But anyway, that is kind of today's story. Today's story was I just took a sliver, one tiny thing, being scary. The idea that Black wants to have some creatures that are scary and because of that hard block

and how we evolve that over time. And it's a really good example of the nature of how magic functions. You know, the cool thing about magic is there's these little tiny slivers, but there's hundreds and hundreds of them that we keep iterating over time and making better. And that is why magic is at, I think, I think Magic Limited is at the high point it's ever been because we keep building on that. So anyway, guys, it's interesting that being scary,

we got better and better at being scary. So I am now at work. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my 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.