Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1388: Predefined Artifact Tokens

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

There are a number of frequently used artifact tokens that have their rules attached to their definition in the rules. I talk about them in this episode.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so my topic today, our predefined artifact tokens. Woo! Everyone's waiting for this topic. So there are eight, currently, there are eight predefined artifact tokens in magic. And so we are going to walk through them.

I'm going to go chronologically through their design. Well, I'm going to do the first seven and then I'll throw in the eighth. So, okay, we begin. So what is a pre-de-define? I guess, let me define what a pre-defined artifact token is, which is in the rules, we have some artifact tokens that we define what they are so that we can say that you get the token without having to spell out exactly what it is. We normally do spell it out so you know.

But it allows us to make things that are within the rules. Predefined just means the rules know what they are. And so, I guess I will label them first, and then I'll go through the one by one by one. one. The eight predefined artifact tokens are gold, clue, treasure, food, blood, powerstone, incubator, map and junk. And I'm going to talk about all eight of those today because that is today's topic. Okay, so we're going back to the very beginning. I guess the first of these eight technically is gold. First shows up in Born of the Gods because we are trying to capture the flavor of King Midas. King Macar in

in Pharaoh's terms but so in Greek mythology there is a king I forget exactly how it happens but he he desires that he asks the gods that everything he touched be turned to gold

and they let him do it I guess but then it turns out it's really a curse because he can't touch anything when it first seems this amazing thing truly to be a curse. And so in order to capture the flavor of it, we wanted to turn things into gold.

So the easiest way to do that was to make an artifact token that was called gold. And because we were trying to figure out, well, what's gold? We're like, well, gold is money, right? That's why he's so excited. So anything turned into gold, you could then sort of sell, you know, sacrifice to make mana. So gold basically just has sacrifice

make one man of any color. And so we use that. It was not predefined, by the way, until later, until Ther is beyond death. So at the time we were making, it's just another one. I should stress today. There are a lot of tokens that we make

that are one of artifact tokens. We make lots of different tokens. These are just the predefined ones that do a specific thing. A lot of tokens, you know, are just their artifact tokens and you can do whatever you want with them. or they represent something, but these are the predefined ones.

So I start with gold only because gold was just there as a function. If treasure didn't come later, I'm not sure gold would have ended up getting predefined, but we'll get to treasure in a second. Okay, now we get to what I consider to be the first real predefined artifact token, which is Clue. So we were making shadows over Inestrade. And so the original Inestrade had been, Gothic horror.

And at this point in time, it was our belief that when we did a return, we needed to change something up. We needed to have a big twist. And so the idea was, well, Indistrade was our horror plane. What if we shifted from Gothic horror to a different kind of horror? And so we shifted a cosmic horror, which it talks about inscrutable beings that the idea of most cosmic horror stories it starts as a mystery

and then what they unpeel is things that are so disturbing the horror of it is you learn things that are sort of even not understandable but horror it's so horrible to learn it is sort of the idea but beginning part of a cosmic horror story is the mystery story

so we were doing two sets one was Shadows of Interstrad and one one was Eldridge Moon. And the idea was the Shadows of Interstrad set would be the mystery set and the Eldridge Moon would be more of the whore

the full-blown horror part of cosmic horror with mutations and all that. And so, we wanted the first set to have a flavor of investigation. In fact, what we really wanted was a mechanic called investigate.

Most of the time we make the mechanic first and later name it. But every once in a while we're like, well, we really want this word. What can this word mean mechanically. And so the idea of investigating and drawing a card was pretty cool, right?

I investigate. I learn things. Drawing cards is knowledge. Well, investigate leads to knowledge. That seemed pretty clear. The problem we ran into was turning every draw card into investigate. There's only so many draw card effects we get. You just don't get a lot of draw card effects. And so it was a little like the problem was if we just made in fact straight up draw a card, we couldn't make much of it. But then we didn't. came up the idea of, well, what if it isn't sort of drawing a whole card? What if it's drawing part of a card? Like half a card? Well, what does that mean? How do you draw half a card? And the idea we came up with is, what if we make a token that you still had to spend mana on to get the card? So it wasn't,

you got the card straight out. You got a token that would later let you spend some man to get a card. But normally when we charge you for a card, we charge you about four mana. And this was going to charge you two mana. So the idea was you had access to a card cheaper than normal. That's what we said sort of half a card. And once we did that, that allowed us to make a lot more of them. And so, Investigate in the set became one of the big mechanics. And investigate means you create a clue.

The clue tokens are two tap and sack. Actually, I don't think they sack. I think it's just two and tap. It's two sacks. They don't tap. It's two in sack, draw a card. And for the first time, we really made it a major component of the set because it was tied into a mechanic.

And what we found was it was really fun. Players liked it, it had a lot of utility. It was very useful. And this is kind of as learning the value. I mean, we had done artifact tokens, I mean, you know, WASP tokens, which were artifact tokens, were in Alpha. So, I mean, artifact tokens existed in the game for a lot of,

long time. But the idea of it being a structural piece of the set. That, oh, I mean, in this particular case, we tied it into a mechanic straightly. You'll see in the future we stopped doing that. But the idea was, oh, here's something.

It represents a thing. Although, I admit a clue is a little more vaguer than some of the ones we'll start to make. Although a clue is an object. It is a thing. But it's a little more amorphous, I get. So the idea essentially is we started using and really liked it. And so it became, in general, the way design works is we try something new.

If it works, we put it in our arsenal in our toolbox and go, okay, that's interesting. So it really, the use of clues, which I said, was just us trying to solve a problem originally of how to get half a card, ended up being something that we really structurally liked. And really is kind of the precursor of the pre-cursor of the pre-term. predefined artifact tokens. I know gold technically is there first, but that's... And then once again, I think gold only got predefined because of treasure, which we'll get to in a second.

Okay, so now we cut ahead. A couple years later, we're working on Ixelon. So Xelon had pirates in it. And we were really looking for a way to flavor the pirates. And so one of the things that we thought about was remembered gold. Oh, pirates like gold. What if the pirates got gold? The problem was, I think originally we had gold.

I think we used gold. But in the second Ichelon set, they had a mechanic where it was like Convoke, but it was for artifacts. Blinking in the name of it. You guys know the name of it. So the problem was when you use gold, you could tap the gold for, you know, the convoy. for the convoke, and then you could sack the gold because it didn't have a tap as part of its cost. It just was

sack, get mana. And that was too good with a mechanic in rivals over Ixelon. Or rivals of Ixelon. And so they decided, well, let's add the tap in. And once they were doing

that, we also realized that gold was a little more limiting. Like, obviously the the pirates would like gold, but not every world would have gold per se. And we needed to give it a new name. So we called it treasure. Treasure being something that's a little more...

I mean, we liked the idea that this... like clues had taught us that we could probably make use of something like this. Making manna was pretty functional. And so we were fixing the small problem with gold, making it a little more bleak, so we made treasure. So treasure is tap stack,

add one mana of any color. The other thing we would... learned later, we didn't learn this for a little while, is one of the techniques we learned with Treasure is because it has a tap in it, you can have Treasure come and play tapped, which delays by a turn its usage, which is a way to make Treasure that's a little weaker, which we've started using. But anyway, we recognized Treasure had a similar quality of clues, that mana is pretty universal. We did make one mistake in X-Lon, which the pirate colors were black, red, and blue. Red

obviously is king of short-term manner production. So red is number one in treasure making. But number two really is green. Not the green was a pirate. Black is allowed to get treasure if it really pays the cost to get the treasure.

And blue really isn't supposed to get treasure. So we kind of didn't quite put it in the right colors off the bat. So nowadays you'll see it in red and green and occasionally in black. We do it in white a little bit as a tax. We're like, don't do this unless I get a treasure,

although we have to be careful to do that in ways that it's not too easy to get the treasure because white is not supposed to get a lot of man in generation. Okay, next up was Throne of Eldrain. So we were making a... This was our Camelot slash fairy tale set. And we were doing a lot of fairy tale tropes. And one of the things we realized pretty early on

was, you know, There's a lot of food in fairy tales. And so we decided to make a food token. Life gain was another really obvious thing that all the colors have a little bit of access to, although, I take that back. Not all the colors. Red and blue don't really gain life.

But green, black, and white do. And we realized that, like, it was another sort of slam-dunk flavor. The fairy tales liked having food. There's just lots of different foods there. And so a treasure is two tap sack. You gain three life.

So this one, we talked about whether or not we wanted to be just tap sack or manna. We learned from clues is we like manigating it. Obviously, you can't manigate mana. That doesn't make much sense. But you can managate other things. And so we like the idea of giving it the same cost as clues. and then three life, for two men, a three life ended up being the right amount. And food has also gone on.

I mean, treasure in food are, I mean, all of these predified artifacts tokens are technically deciduous, but treasure and food are like almost evergreen. We use them a lot, a lot, a lot. The other ones we use some, but not nearly as much as treasure and food. And the thing about, oh, the one thing we learned about food, was life gain, the challenge of life gain is it makes the game go longer. That if I'm just gaining a lot of life, now instead of each of us being a 20, we're at a higher number. So one of the things we started learning with treasure that was less important with, I mean, we did this a little bit with clues,

was the idea of giving you alternate uses. Like I said, we did do it a little bit with clues. Maybe we did a tiny bit of treasure. Treasure doesn't really need it. But the idea is we want to give you food. Food is really flavorful. But actually, we don't want you always gaining life with it. So what we started doing is giving you other ways to use food.

So the idea is here's food. I generate a food. You can use it to use life, which is generically good. But here's other ways to use it. I can eat food and get bigger and different things like that. And so food really taught us that when we make tokens structure, One of the things we want to do is it allows us to give you other means to use it, which just makes other shapes of things.

It was kind of necessary for treasure just because of the life gain. But it really, like I said, we had messed with that a little bit of the clues, but treasurer really cemented the importance of when you use a structural artifact token or earning any token that's structural to the set. You want to let cards give you other means to use it. Okay, which leads us to blood, interstrade, crimson vow. It was the vampire set, a vampire wedding set. And I led the set.

And so I was interested in figuring out how to make something that was very vampire-like. And so the idea very early on we had was blood tokens. The reason, by the way, it's an artifact token. Is blood still a thing? It's tangible. So we make an artifact. Enchantment tokens are things that are sort of like time or like chance or I don't know. things that are ephemeral, but not things that have a substance to them.

And so we spent a lot of time figuring out what we wanted blood tokens to do. This is another one where, I guess most of these, I guess clues started as a functional card draw, and we later named them. Treasure was kind of we needed the man up, although we wanted to call it treasure. Food, we started with food and then figured out what it did, although life gain was such an obvious choice. Blood was a little trickier. early on we tried blood adding plus one plus one counters

which later turtles would do with mutagen it's not predefined yet but maybe one day we make a predefined to make plus plus one counters the challenge we had with that the idea essentially was oh the vampires drink the blood and get stronger the problem was the reason to have blood

is to have alternate uses so that some of the vampires could drink the blood rather than use a player using the blood. And the vampires wanted to get bigger. So plus one plus one counters kind of contradicted what, like the whole idea of having blood was you, the player could use it for one purpose or the vampires could use it for secondary purpose. And the thing that they flavorfully most wanted to do was get bigger. Plus one plus conunders had a few other issues.

That was the biggest one. Is it just sort of flew in the face of what we needed blood to do? We experimented with a bunch of different things and we ended up with something that we liked we functionally liked a lot which was what we call rummaging. So it's one tap, discard a card, sacrifice, draw a card. So essentially it allows you to turn a card in your hand for a new card.

Because you're getting rid of a card in your hand, it's not card advantage, it's card utility. We can do more of them. And we spent some time talking about Like, a lot of times blood is used in magic rituals. So the idea is like, well, if you, the player are using it, you're using it as a component in your ritual, and the idea to use that to get more magic felt right. I do admit blood is not the slam-dug flavor that, like, food or treasure is.

But the token is very, very useful, and blood as a flavor is very universal. So I don't know if there's a perfect answer for blood. Like I said, we tried a bunch of things. I do like how blood came out. I do like the functionality of how it works. I do think it's a really fun token. I admit the flavor is a little more tedious. Tenuous, sorry is the word I'm looking for.

But I do like how to play. I do think it's a very fun mechanic. And the idea of like I have a murderer that leaves blood behind, stuff like that is super flavorful. Okay, next up was, really is the Brothers War. technically the first one appears at Dominaura United because we were teasing the Brothers War. So basically, we were telling

the story of the Brothers War. We were going back in time, telling about Erza, fighting Meshra. And one of the things that was very key to that story is the Power Stones. It's the thing that they find in the Cave of Coelos that allows them to start building on the machines that starts their war.

So it's kind of the crux of what they're doing. So we really wanted to have power stones in the set. It's another example where we wanted a defined token to fit something flavorfully, and then we had to figure out what it did. So in the end, Powerstones tap for Cullus Mana, but it can't be used for non-artifacts spells. What that means is you can cast artifacts with it,

because they're Powerstones, or you can activate things with it. We spent a lot of time trying to word it to understand what we wanted, but we liked the idea, because there's a bunch of ways to use mana to do, activations in the set. We wanted to make sure that you had access to that. And

flavorfully, obviously, one, you'd get artifacts. It's the Brothers War and their artificers and such. We did put, I think one, I think it's not Carn, maybe. We put one of them in Dominar United to tease it was coming in the Brothers War. Since, obviously,

they're native to Dominaria, so the idea that there's still be a power stone lying around made sense. Okay. Next, we get to incubators. So this is March of the Machine. So one of the things is now we've done a lot of these predefined tokens. We really enjoyed sort of what they brought to the table.

We like how they can be structural components to sets. And we like that they do a lot of cool and different things. So one of the things that I was thinking about is what had a lot of things. we done yet? What is the obvious thing that we hadn't done yet? And what I realized is we hadn't yet made a token that made, sorry, we hadn't made an artifact token that made creature tokens. And I like the idea, much like clues were like half a card. I liked the idea of kind of like half a creature. The idea that I get something, but I didn't need to spend mana to turn it into a creature. The reason that's so important, the reason you want the managates is it just lets us, it allows us to make it cheaper to just put it on more cards.

It just allows us more utility. If the thing we're making has too much value into itself, then the card you stick it on can't do anything because this card is so much value unto itself. But if I give you something that, well, it's got potential to be something, but you still have to invest some mana in it, we can stick that in a lot more places. The other thing that I was really intrigued by was we had made double-faced cards, but we had never made double-faced tokens. And I was really interested in the idea of could we make double-face tokens?

So the idea we originally had was, okay, I think we call them cocoon. There are incubators in the final side. We call them cocoons in playtest. I think everything else, like clues and treasure and food, I think those names actually were the names we used. used, like blood was the name. But, and Power Stone was.

But incubator, we called cocoon. That's the one we had a different name. And so the idea was that you would make a cocoon, and then you would spend man to turn into a creature. So originally, I think it was like a two-two creature or something. But then, once we realized we had a double-faced card, I was actually inspired by the amassed mechanic, a very inspirational mechanic.

A mass of the mechanic we had made in War of the Sparrow. where we were trying to represent the army, the eternal army of Nicole Boas. And rather than make infinite tokens that gummed up the board, we come with the idea of an army that grows with time. But the cool thing there was a mass-headed number on it and it let you put a number of plus one plus-one counters onto the army token. And I liked the idea of that adjustability. So we were thinking about, well, is there a way to adjust the size of the token?

And then we realized, because it was a double-faced token, that if we put plus one plus one counters on it and then made the back side of it a zero-zero-zero creature, we could define how big the creature was. Very exciting. Remember the day we came up with that? It was very exciting. And so the idea is that you incubate for some number, which means put that many number counters on me, and then it's always two to incubate. So the idea is

not all incubates are the same. If you incubate one, I can send two man to get a one run. Nothing special. Maybe if I have nothing else do with a man, I'm sure. But if I incubate for five, for two men, I get a five-five. That's a, that's a steal, right?

And so that allowed us to really have a lot of flavor. And the idea is incubate one could be a very minimal thing, a minimal add-on, where incubate five, that's a lot of the card if you're making a five-five.

But that ended up being pretty cool. The backside ended up being phrexians for flavor purposes. The interesting thing about incubate is we really did tie it to the Frexians. If we wanted to do the same thing with a different version, we could, but it probably wouldn't be

incubate. Only because the backside, I think is definitely Frexians, although the word incubate also is a little Frexian. But I did like how they turned out. The one other challenge we learned is double-sided tokens on the production end were a little harder than we thought they would be.

I mean, we did them, but it turns out the way we make tokens that we make normal cards are a little different of each other and we don't normally define what's on the back of a token anyway we can but behind the scenes it was a little trickier I mean we were able to do it but a little trickier next we go to lost caverns of Ixelon

maps so original Xelon had an explore mechanic explore meant you looked at the top card of your library if it was a land it went into your hand if it was not a land you discarded it and the creature who explored

because it's always a creature that explores they get a plus one plus one counter um there was a similar connive in um in um

what's it called uh my blink of my name it's um it was ice uh ice hockey uh was streets of streets of

New Cabana anyway uh So the original Xelon had Explore as a mechanic. So we were back in Xelon for lost caverns of Xelan. For those that know the story, originally, it wasn't even Xelan. We were going to make a brand new underground world. And then after we handed off from Vision in early set design,

the creative team decided rather than build a brand new world, they'd rather than mechanically tie it to Xelon. And so once that happened, set design was now on the hook or figuring out how to make it feel like Xelon. It was what we call a backdrop set, meaning the majority of the set was about the new thing, which was underground. So the set wasn't required to do tons of heavy lifting,

but we wanted some, even a background set, which a little bit of grounding in the world you are. And so they come up with this idea of map tokens. Map tokens are really interesting in that it's what we call an embedded keyword, meaning map tokens allow you to one tap sack target creature explores. But explore itself is its own mechanic.

So you then have to define explore. It is not something we do very... The reason I think we did here was the idea of a map was such a slam dunk and what does a map do but let you explore. We are an X-Lon. And the explore mechanic was coming back. So it's not something we'll do often.

I don't think we're going to do a lot of predefined artifact tokens that do a non-efficient. basic effect, not evergreen effect. Because Explore is, I don't even know if Explore's deciduous, but it's for sure not evergreen. We're the other things, you know, like,

draw a card, gain light. Those are basic things we do all the time. But anyway, maps were pretty cool. Okay, the final one, which actually was not, the only one that was not in a Premier set, was actually in a commander product, Fallout was junk tokens.

This Annie Sardellis who did the fallout, she made these. So the idea is, in the game, I believe, you collect things in the video game. And she was trying to get the idea of, hey, even random stuff you pick up, sometimes there's value to you. Like junk can have value to you. And so she wanted the idea that, hey, sometimes you can just find things and they can help you figure out problems and such. So junk says tap, sack, you look at the top card of your library and then you have, I think it's until end of turn to use it. I did not write this down.

It might have been end of next turn. Essentially it is what we refer to either as impulsive drawing or sometimes we call it bottling in R&D. The idea was Red has this back when when Commander first became a big format. One of the challenges was that card draw was really, really important in the in commander. And red and white did not have card draw. And so one of the tasks

that the council color set out to do is to say, okay, we really need to have some card draw in red and white. Let's figure out how to get card draw that feels natural to that color. So for red, what we decided was, we liked the idea that

red had access to things, but it had a use it right away. So it's, its card draw is not long term because one of the challenges about card draw essentially is red isn't a long-term planning color. And card draw has a lot of long-term, I draw something

now and I use it later. So the idea we came up with, there's a card what's a card called? Called Elkin Bottle, which was in Weatherlight? It's in

It's in, I think it's Weatherlight. It might be, it's in that era. It's in a small set in that era. I think it's weather the light. And, or, yeah. So Elkin bottle is a play on Klein bottle, which is an optical illusion where a bottle sort of feeds in on itself. Like, like, it has like no, is a never-ending surface.

Anyway, the idea there was we wanted to make a card drawing card tied to it. And the idea was that you draw cards, But you have to use them right away. You can't wait. And that was just one card, but we really thought it was cool. And so we said, well, what if we do that? What if Red's card drawing is, well, I got to draw cards, but I don't get to keep the cards.

It's like use it or lose it. And that felt really red. I ended up referring to an impulsive draw, like in articles and podcast and stuff. So most people know it as impulsive draw. You know that's what I call it. R&D in lingo still sometimes calls it bottling because Klein Bottle is referencing the original card that did it. but the idea of bottle doesn't really convey what it is

or impulsive draw it sort of gives you a little sense of the flavor what it is. That's why I call it impulsive draw just because I like at least externally giving nicknames that help convey what it is to help you understand what you're doing what you're doing with it.

But anyway, Annie put that in, I think it was just, it might have been in more than one deck for sure, maybe it's in more than one deck. In fact, it probably isn't more than one deck. It's for sure in one of the decks. Anyway, And that is, I get a lot of requests for junk. The one thing I will say is the lack of mana on it.

Well, I get why Andy did that. Andy did it so that you can have the mana to spend to cast a thing. The challenge is it's pretty powerful. And so if we had to do it, maybe we'd add mana to it. Once again, managating things is really valuable. It allows us to, it makes it much easier for us to use it. So anyway, I'm almost to work here. So some of these clue and treasure and food and blood, most of these I think that there's some

deciduousness to them. Powerstone incubator, well, Powerstone incubator are very specific in flavor. Powerstones are a very exact thing that exist on Domini. Maybe there's power stones other places, I don't know. Incubator, the Baxphrexian. So those are a little harder to make deciduous. Map has the problem of the embedded keyword. I think in a world we're using Explorer, we use Map.

But kind of you're not going to put Map in a set. Probably that doesn't have Explorer as part of it, is my guess. And so... And then junk... I think we will do some version of junk again. We might rename it and put some mana to it just because having no mana is problematic. Gold, I think that we just like treasure as the better version of it.

If we ever have something where the flavor of gold is the slam dunk, we need the flavor of gold that is something that we would think about. But I think obviously we'll use treasure. But Clue and treasure and food and blood are all, and MAP to some extent, are all pretty super flavorful. I mean, maps embedded. But anyway, so those are those. my friends are the predefined

artifact tokens. Will we make more predefined artifact tokens? Probably. There's a few spaces of things that we haven't quite done. Mutagen is I don't think it'll be called mutagen. I assume one day will make

sort of what I would call the in the multiverse version of mutagen, making a plus one-plus encounter. So that, I could see us doing that one day. I can see us cleaning up junk one day. And there's a few other... I don't want to give away all goods,

but there's a few other things we've toyed around with it. Maybe... Maybe we could make into counters. So I do think there'll be more predefined counters at some point. Although there's not an endless number of them. Predefined means we think there's enough use to them and there's some functionality that we want to predefine them. But anyway, guys, as I'm driving up to work,

that is all the predefined artifact tokens. So I hope you guys enjoyed my podcast today. But as I'm at work, we all know what that means. It means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you all next time. Bye-bye.