Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #444: Vanilla Matters

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

On my blog, there was some discussion about the mechanical theme of "vanilla matters." (Vanilla creatures are creatures without rules text.) It was a complex topic, so I decided to spend a whole car ride explaining why the "vanilla matters" theme is so hard to do.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is interesting. I came up with my blog. So, back in the set's future site, we printed a card called Muraganda Petroglyphs. And it was a card that gave a reward to vanilla creatures. And so, ever since that, people have wanted to, like, go to Morganda and have vanilla creature matters. And I often say, you know, there's not a lot of design space there, and leave it at that. But today, I decided to write a little lengthier explanation. And it dawned on me that as I was writing this, let's make a good podcast, because

for those that like magic design, this is going to be a really good example of all the sorts of issues we have to deal with, because by explaining the problems of this thing, it'll show you a lot about our design process. So I thought it'd be interesting to say, hey, why is it so hard to do Vanilla Creature Matters? So today I'm going to talk all about that. Okay, so for starters, the idea, let me explain the idea. The idea is Vanilla Creature Matters means I have cards that reward you for having vanilla creatures. Hey, that's awesome. That way it makes even vanilla creatures matter.

That's the idea. And Murgan to Pedrick, I forget what it does, but like all vanilla creatures get plus two plus two or something. Okay, so let's dive in to understand this. So first off, let's talk about the ASFAN problem. ASFAN, for those that don't know, stands for ASFAN. It talks about how many do I get when I open up a booster pack? Am I getting enough? Because whenever we want to care about something,

we have to worry about ASFAN, meaning does it show up enough? So for example, let's say we're going to do a tribal set, where I want you to care about goblins. I use goblins as my example. I need enough goblins to show up that you can realistically get goblins. Because if you're going to care about goblins,

you need to have a certain amount of goblins in your deck. Now, there's a range of how much you can care about something. So let's walk through that. So at the low end is what we call threshold one. Threshold one means as long as I have one,

I then can care about it. So a threshold one card would be like, this creature has flying if you control a goblin. What that means is it's only looking at like, you only need one goblin in that means is it's only looking at, like, you only need to have one goblin in play. So it's not required, it's the low end of what it can require you.

And a threshold one card usually requires you to have five in the lowest, but usually six or seven to be more comfortable. Meaning, what are the chances that I'm going to draw this? Now, one of the things we can do with threshold ones is make them relevant so that you can play them earlier. And hey, they get upgraded later if you happen to play the right thing. But even that, even a threshold one requires a certain amount of play. Now, the other end of the spectrum is what we refer to as effect all,

which is, you know, all your goblins get plus one plus one. Well, that says, hey, the more goblins, the better. The more goblins you have, you know, that end of the spectrum is something that says, you know, hey, I'm really, really heavy linear, meaning, you know, I am better. The more goblins you have, the better I am. Or count me is another good example. What a count me would be is, I have an effect, but the effect is based on how many of that I have. For goblins, for example, there was a creature one time, I'm blanking on the name, but it tapped to deal damage equal to the number of goblins you had.

Well, wow, that thing is so much more effective if you just have a lot of goblins. So that card says, hey, every creature in your deck pretty a lot of goblins. So that card says, hey, every creature in your deck pretty much should be goblins. You should have nothing but goblins. This card is so powerful that you really are encouraged to play nothing but goblins. Maybe one or two super powerful, you know, A-level creatures. But other than, you know, a necrotol or something that's going to kill creatures, other than that, it's super efficient. You're mostly just playing goblins and that kind of thing. And so there's a wide vector. So on the sort of the count me into the spectrum, that's play as many as possible. So in Limited, this issue also is a Constructed issue.

I'm going to start by talking about Limited because Limited does a little easier job of showing the problems. Constructed has its own set of problems, which are a little bit different. But I'm going to mostly talk about limited today, just because it demonstrates what I'm trying to say a little better. And also in design, the rule of thumb is, limited kind of mirrors what we call casual constructed, which is, hey, I'm going to buy some packs, and I'm going to just some packs and I'm going to

just make a deck out of the packs I buy. That kind of mimics limited to a certain extent. And so we just want to make sure that, hey, if you're buying this product and you're just kind of building from what you open, can you build something fun? So what this says is it requires a certain asset to work. If we're going to make a Goblin Matter set, I need enough Goblins to make it work. Now, so the first problem is, okay, how do I do that? I'm going to make Goblins Matter. Well, traditionally what we do in stuff like Tribal is we concentrate it. We don't try to make Goblins something that every color does.

We make Goblins try to something that some colors do. Usually nowadays when we do Tribal, we try to make two colors care. Because if you make one color care, you're very limited in how much the deck can be built. Because it's like, oh, if all goblins are red, then it's a mono-red deck. And it just limits the kind of variety. But if we say, oh, goblins are red and black, then all of a sudden, okay, now you can make mono-red goblins, mono-black goblins, red-black goblins, red-splash-black goblins, black-splash-red goblins are red and black, then all of a sudden, okay, now you can make mono-red goblins, mono-black goblins, red-black goblins, red-splash-black goblins, black-splash-red goblins.

You know, it gives you a bunch of different choices of how you can build it. The other thing we often will do is, if we're making two colors, usually one's the primary color and one's the secondary color, we often, like goblins, for example, the primary color would be red. You know, Magic has a lot of red goblins.

When we chose to make goblins black in Lorwyn, for example, the primary color would be red. You know, magic has a lot of red goblins. When we chose to make goblins black in Lorwyn, for example, we knew that if you were just building from your collection, you'd have more red goblins. So what we tend to do is we tend to put strong rewards in the secondary color to make it more viable. Maybe you want to play the second color.

If we put all the strong colors in just the main primary color, then you're just really, especially if you're using all the strong colors in just the main primary color, then you're just really, especially if you're using all of magic cards, just encouraged to solely go the mono color. And so by putting strong, it also allows, we know we had made strong goblin cards in the past in red. So by making a few strong ones in black, we've now given you a lot more constructed options. And even just casual constructed options. Okay, so the problem with vanilla creatures is we can't not, we're not going to make a set

with vanilla matters and say, okay, green and white are the vanilla matters colors, so now we're not going to put any vanilla cards in blue, black, and red. So let me explain what a trap is, because that's an important understanding from a design standpoint. One of the things that you want to do is you want to be careful not to put cards in your

set that imply things that aren't true. Because in drafting, if someone's going to pick up your card, we don't want them to go, oh, okay, I got it. So for example, let's say we're making a tribal set. them to go, oh, okay, I got it. So, for example, let's say we're making a tribal set. Let's say black-red goblins are our thing. If we give you a common goblin in another color,

I mean, if we give you a goblin in another color at all, but common's the most problematic because it shows up at the time. So let's say, for example, I pick up a goblin, turn one, pack one, I pick up a red goblin's matter cards. All your goblins are whatever, plus one, plus one, I pick up a red goblin's matter of cards. Okay, all your goblins are whatever, plus one, plus one, something. Next pack, I see a green goblin.

I go, oh, a green goblin, so I pick that up. Now, I'm like, okay, I'm goblins, I'm red and green goblins, you know. I've seen a red goblin, I've seen a green goblin, okay, I'm red green. And then, you start, you know, maybe in the pack three, you pick up a giant growth, or you start picking up some green cards, but you just don't see another green goblin. Where's the green goblins? Other than in Spider-Man. And you're trying to figure out, like,

where are they? You know, what's going on? And then your draft gets what we call a trap, because you saw something, it made you assume something, and now you're going down a path that isn't going to be fulfilled, that we've made a bad experience for you. So what that means is, usually when we have themes, and that theme, I'm talking about tribal as my example, but it could be a mechanic thing, it could be a linear mechanic, you

know, it could be energy, it could be one of many different things, like something in which you want to sort of group those together. When I say linear, that's a word we talk about that the card begets other many different things. Like something in which you want to sort of group those together. When I say linear, that's a word we talk about that the card begets other cards like it. So a lot of what we're talking about today is linear strategies. Like if I see a card that says all goblins get plus one plus one, hey, I want to get

goblins. If I see a card that works well with energy, maybe I want more energy. If I see a card that says all allies get something or all creatures have a particular mechanic or I have something that helps token creatures with embalm or whatever. I do something that sort of says,

hey, you want other things like it. It sends you down a path. And so we're very careful with our cards to be directional because we don't assume that people know the whole set. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the more enfranchised, dedicated drafter might. But a lot of people draft the set. They don't necessarily know everything the whole set. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the more enfranchised, dedicated drafter might, but a lot of people draft the set, they don't necessarily know everything in the set. So we want to be careful not to create traps for them, where it sort of implies to do something

that the set then bails on. So what that means is, when we're putting together a theme, usually we concentrate in colors to avoid that from happening. Also, by concentrating in colors, we help solve some of the as-fan issues, which is, let's say, for example, I need, let's say I am playing, I'm making some sort of robot deck. If we concentrate the robots in red and black, we don't need to make quite as many of them than if we put them in every color. If a theme runs through all the colors, wow, now we have to put support in every color of the level that it can be played with. So that becomes a lot trickier. Okay, but here's the problem

with vanilla. Vanilla existence is not... like goblins are a flavor thing, you know. If we want to have less goblins in the world, you know, we can say, okay, hey, in this world there's less goblins. We can do that. But vanilla creatures exist. Their main function is to provide some simplicity in play. And that, you know, if every card is demanding a lot from you, it just gets overwhelming. And it's nice to have some cards that go, hey, I'm just a vanilla creature, or I'm just a French vanilla creature. French vanilla means you have no rules text. French vanilla means you only have creature keywords. French vanilla. Vanilla means you have no rules text.

French vanilla means you only have creature keywords. So if I'm trying to make simple cards, usually every set we tend to make about five vanillas, about one per color. And we usually make, I don't know, five to ten French vanillas depending on the set. French vanillas being, hey, I just have flying. Hey, maybe I have first strike and flying. Or I have vigilance and first strike or whatever.

You know, you can have more than one. you can still be French Vanilla by having more than one keyword. Usually at common we don't do more than two keywords. So like uncommon and higher usually will have like the three keywords. Every once in a blue moon we do it at common, but we usually don't. Okay, so the issue is we want to have a certain Vanillas and French Vanillas in the set because we're trying to sort of lessen the weight of the set. How much is going on? That what we found is if every card has something going on, it just becomes mentally taxing to track everything.

So what we've learned is, hey, the set just plays better if there's some cards. We also do what we call virtual Vanillas, which are cards that do something, but then for the rest of the time they're in play. Virtual Vanilla means you only matter, they only have an effect that matters the turn they come in and play, and then pretty much after that it doesn't matter. So, if you have an Enter the Battlefield effect, well, it matters the turn you play it what

it does, but from then on out, you're usually a Vanilla or a French Vanilla. So, what we want is we want to make a lot of cards when they're in play, look, they just are what they are. Maybe they have a keyword, but they're basically what they are. You, the player, kind of understand it. You don't have to process it every time. And then we have some cards that have an effect and generate a static ability or have a triggered ability or have an activated ability. You know, we have other effects we can put on things, but we want some number of simplistic things. Okay, so what that means is saying, hey, you can't have any vanillas in your colors is a little, a little much. We kind of want vanillas in the colors.

So it's a little disconcerting to say, well, we wouldn't want vanillas in certain colors. So it's a little bit harder to condense the theme when kind of vanillas are something that's important for us to do and we want to have. And so I don't want to say, well, I'm going to make three colors a little bit more complex because I have this theme I want to run in two colors. Okay, so let's go on the path. Well, let's say, okay, what if you want to run the theme in all five colors? The problem you run into there is, let's get to the Aspen issues, is okay, how many cards you need to make some guarantee that you can have the cards you need? And you start having to have enough Vanillas at common

that it really is going to have a weighty feel. So, for example, in Expert Sets, we do usually about five uncommon, I'm sorry, not uncommon, five Vanilla creatures, usually at common. That's usually what we do. So, from an Aspen perspective, there's 101 at common.

Let's say 100 for math. So basically 5% of the cards are, 5% of the commons are vanilla creatures. Okay, well you get 10 cards in your pack. So you can run the math through that, which is if 1 out of 20 times you get a vanilla and you get 10 commons, that means about every other pack you get a vanilla. Okay, well, every other pack,

so that's an as-fan of 0.5, means you get on average about half a vanilla creature, which means, when I say half a vanilla creature, that means about every other pack you get a vanilla vanilla creature. That's what Asphantom half means, of 0.5. That's not nearly enough if you want to care about your theme. Remember earlier, I said, okay, even the low end of the spectrum, even the threshold one, I want to have enough of my deck that I can assume that I'll have one in play. Even that says, okay, well, I want at least five, you know, and maybe six or seven. Okay, so let's consider the math there.

So if it's 0.5 per pack, you get six packs in limited. That is three. You would get three vanilla cards. Okay, well, that's not enough. We're saying that you want to have five to seven to sort of play a threshold. And that's a threshold one thing. That's what we do for the low end of the spectrum of caring about it. You would need five to seven in your colors. Okay, now let's say we do one

per pack. We double the number. That's ten now. We do ten a common. Okay, let's run through that. Now that means in your six packs you get five. Okay, you say, okay, I said the do 10 of common. Okay, let's run through that. Now that means in your six packs, you get five. Okay, you say, okay, I said the low end is five. Ah, but the problem is that's going to be spread across five colors. I need five to seven you can play in your color pair. So let's say you're playing a two-color deck.

If you're playing a two-color deck, that means that 40% of the cards are relevant for your deck. Okay, so when I say you have an As-Fan of 1, and you have 5 cards, now we take 40% of that number. So 40% of 5 is 2. So now, 2 of... So you now have 2 cards that are viable in your deck. So hopefully you can see where this is going.

Okay, so if I have 2 that are in my deck, and I want to get up to five in my colors, you know, um, okay. How do I do that? Um, okay. So I now need, uh, I'm shy by, uh, I need to get, I'm at 40%. I'm at only at 40%. So I need to go up. I'm at two. I need to get to at least five and ideally you want like six. So we're talking like three times that. So what's the as fan we're talking about? We're talking about an as fan of about three. Now, once again, that's if every color wants to support this. Okay. Maybe, maybe I guess, I mean, so you can start to see the problems here, which is if I want you to have enough vanilla cards to matter, I have to, and I, we kind of want vanilla cards in all the colors, then it starts to become a messy thing.

They become, making it big enough to work requires, one second. Sorry. Okay. Making it big enough to work requires a volume of vanilla creatures that aren't particularly going to be attractive. Okay, so let's talk about that. Which is, one of the things that you need to do, one of the things you're able to do with goblins, let's say, is... Let's say, for example, that you never draw your goblin card. That you're just playing with goblins. Well, I can make your goblin experience fun because I can just make fun

cards that make a fun deck that happen to be goblins. You know what I'm saying? I can make an experience for you that if you just play with goblins, I can make a fun deck because I'm making... The restriction that you have to be a goblin, there's some restriction there. There's a little bit of a size restriction, although welin, there's some restriction there. There's a

little bit of a size restriction, although we've done some bigger goblins. So, like, we've done, like, we've done goblins as big as, like, 5'5". Usually it's either one mutated goblin or a whole bunch of goblins. You know, we tend not to do goblins that are much bigger than 5'5".

And even then, we don't do 5'5 goblins all that often. But we've done it. So, but the point is, within that range, I mean, so goblins limit your size a little bit. There's a little bit of a gobliness feel to them. Goblins aren't too much of a problem because they're a staple in red, meaning

we use them so often that you'll expect a lot in a goblin. Goblins have a lot of range of what they can do. And you can play with them pretty easily. So, okay, a goblin, Goblins have a lot of range of what they can do. And you can play with them pretty easily. So, okay, a goblin, really, you have lots of choices and lots of options. Take something like fairies was a little trickier, because we decided that all fairies have to fly.

So that put some restrictions on how big they could be and what they were capable of doing. Sometimes we do something like tree folk. We tend not to make too tiny a tree folk. So, I mean, sometimes there's size limitations. Sometimes there's flavor limitations. We had an issue with Minotaurs and Theros because the creative team didn't want them smaller than 3-3.

So there are issues that we run into there. But I still can make interesting cards. The problem with the vanilla creature is I have zero to work with. There's very little I can do. Now, ironically, the one thing I can do with vanilla creatures is I can do some creative stuff with them, and I can have them have a fun creature type. So one of the few things I can do with vanilla creatures is I can make them relevant for tribal. But we tend to focus what we do.

So if we're making you care about vanilla creatures as that's our thing to care about, then we wouldn't probably make a tribal thing. So, like, the one thing I can do with vanilla creatures that's interesting gets cut off because if I'm doing a vanilla matters theme, I'm probably not doing a tribal theme.

So, okay, what can I do to make vanilla creatures interesting? There's not a lot. I can make them creatively fun. The creative team can go, and maybe we do full art, like in Future Sight we did full art basics, so I full art vanilla creatures. So maybe, maybe there we can do something we can mess around with, we can mess around with that, but there's a lot of design issues, which is just having a lot of vanilla creatures with nothing

going on. Remember, a lot of the ways we do vanillas in the set is we do virtual vanillas, which is they do something, but after they do that thing, you know, we have a lot of cards that have like an enter the battlefield effect, or haste essentially is virtual vanilla. You know, there's a lot of things that are okay.

Look, once the dust settles, look, I'm just a vanilla creature. But they do something. So they don't get a count for vanilla matters. So next problem is, to have the volume of vanillas we need, I have to put a lot of vanillas in the set. And then we're talking a volume higher than core set,

you know, like core set was meant for beginners. And like there we would have more volume higher than Core Set. You know, like Core Set was meant for beginners and like there we would have more vinyls than possible and the volume I'm talking here would be higher than Core Set levels of Vinyl creatures. So like that's okay, how do I make that compelling? How do I make these cards compelling? There's not a lot I

can do there. It's pretty hard. Okay, now okay, that's the Aspen problem. How do I make enough vanilla creatures that it can matter, that it's relevant, that you can get away and do the things you want to do that make these cards worthwhile that...

And in the volume, they're just not... It is hard to make exciting vanillas. None possible. So, I mean, we can make... Oh. The other problem with Vanillas is we can push Vanillas. It's not hard to push Vanillas. I mean, it's not like

we can't do it. It's just we only get so much power level per set, and push Vanillas really are only attractive to more enfranchised players. Why is that? Because lower level players are bad at looking at power at what we call cost stat ratio. Oh wow, for that

cost and those stats, that's a good deal. Now there's a few exceptions. If you make a one drop two two, a lot of people can figure out that's not too bad. But it is tricky. People don't, when we make what we call a pushed vanilla creature, it is usually tough to realize how good that is. Now, usually the ones that get the most notice is we make a really big creature for as cheap as we can make the really big creature. But there's only so many of those we can make. So the other problem in the vanilla is not only can't we make it exciting from a design standpoint, like I can't do anything with them to make them exciting from a gameplay standpoint,

even from a power level standpoint, there's a limited amount of how much power we want to put into them. Now we do occasionally push our Vanillas, but usually because they're in theme. Usually because there's a tribal theme and we push one that plays in the tribes. Or, you know, there's a three-color theme, so we push, you know, there's a multi-color theme, so we push a multi-color card. You know, there's places where we'll do it where it makes sense. But in a set of all vanillas, we're not just going to push lots and lots of vanillas. You know, maybe in a set we'd push one vanilla creature.

So it also means that we have cards we want to make a large volume of that I can't make exciting with design and we can't make exciting with development or don't want to make very many of them exciting with development. So anyway, okay, so vanilla's have that problem. Now let's talk about the other end of the problem. Let's make cards that make vanilla creatures matter. So first off, normally the way we would do it in a, let's say we're making Goblins matter, is a lot of what I would do is I would make Goblins that make Goblins matter. That allows me a couple things. One is, if my Goblin matters card is itself a Goblin,

hey, I get accounted for how many Goblins I have in my deck, so it gets up my ass fan of Goblins. And there's a lot of tricks of things we can do. So, for example, a very common thing is I have a card that activates to affect a goblin. Hey, but I'm a goblin, so it can always activate to affect itself, but it can affect other things.

But in a vacuum, you know, when we talk about an A-B problem, an A-B problem is I have a design where the A category of cards needs the B category of cards to matter. For example, with Madness, I need discard. Madness doesn't matter unless things are being discarded. So the Madness cards are the A cards, and then I need cards that force discard as the B cards.

And then there's a lot of problem with A-B things. You have to work them out. We do them, but it creates a balance of, now I need enough A things and I need enough B things. So, to make Vanilla Matters, like to make Tribal Matters, we solve that problem by crisscrossing, which is, hey, I'm a

goblin that affects goblins, but I myself am a goblin. So, let's say, for example, I have a goblin that says you know, target goblin gets plus one, plus one in haste until end of turn. Now, I can always use it on this thing. So even if I have zero goblins in my deck other than this card, hey, the card has value to it.

It's not useless. And it encourages more goblins, but it still has a function. Even if I only end up with a couple goblins in my deck, you know, or even if I have a bunch of goblins, but this is the only goblin I draw, it's relevant. But the problem is, you know, Vanilla Matters has a special problem, which is the second that you put something on a card,

it takes away its Vanillaness. So I can't make a card that cares about Vanillaness that is Vanilla. Like, it's kind of the, you know, it's the catch-22 of Vanilla Matters design, that anytime I make something affect Vanilla Matters, Like, it's kind of the, you know, it's the catch-22 of vanilla matters design. That any time I make something affect vanilla matters, I'm removing it from being vanilla matters. Okay, so for starters, I walk down this path that makes it an A-B problem.

And like I said, that in a vacuum is solvable. We do A-B problems all the time. But here's the next batch of things, which is okay, so let's say I try to make vanilla matters. How do I do that? Well, a common way we make things matter is by grafting abilities onto them. Hey, all your creatures get

some bonus or something. We have to be very careful because I can graph power toughness because going up in power and toughness doesn't actually change your vanilla status. I can change your creature type, although once again,

I don't think being vanilla matters means that tribal probably is not the thing. And anything else I do to you, any other bonus I give to you, any other thing I grant you, once again, takes away your vanilla status. So if, for example, I want to say all vanilla creatures get trample,

I have a rules problem. Because, okay, hey, creatures out there, I look and see for my vanilla creatures. I go, hey, look, I have a vanilla creature. Well, I give you trample. Okay, you now have trample. Then the static ability checks again and goes, hey, wait a minute,

you creatures that have trample, you're not a vanilla creature, you can't have trample. So it takes it away. But then the game goes, wait a minute, vanilla creature, you don't have trample. And so you can't make static granting abilities other than power toughness. You know, so like I can't,, I can do it temporarily as one shot. I can do it as triggered. I mean, once again, for each one of these, it's not that the problem is unsolvable,

but it makes a problem. So, for example, I can't do static abilities that grant, let alone I have the problem in general static abilities that I have the volume problem. But even, let's say... So, anything in which I affect things that have vanilla matters become more problematic.

Now, the solution there is the reverse, which is, okay, I guess I could have things that care if I have vanilla things, and you can do that, and you could do some Threshold 1 theory. But we already entered the other problem, which is if too many of the things that

matter, so for example, usually threshold one wants to be permanence. And normally threshold one is on creatures, right? Normally hey, I gain flying if you have a goblin or whatever. That is going to go on a permanence. The reason we tend to put it

on permanence is because if I have a goblin or whatever, that is going to go on a permanent. And the reason we tend to put it on permanence is because if I have a spell, let's say I have a spell that says, hey, I get better if you have a goblin. Well, I can't play that spell until I have a goblin in play if I want to matter. Now, we still do that. Usually the way we do those kind of effects is, you know, target a creature.

So I'll just use, let's assume there are red-green goblins. I make a giant growth. You know, so normal giant growth is target creature is plus three, plus three. So let's say I made target creature is plus two, plus two, but if it's a goblin, it gets plus four, plus four for green. So the idea is it's better than a giant growth on a goblin, but worse than a giant growth on anything but a goblin. Well, the nice thing about that is giant growth is the kind of effect that a lot of times I don't need the extra bonus, so it's still useful even if I don't have goblins out,

but hey, once I have a goblin then it goes up in usage. But it is the... Okay, then we get into the rules thing is, okay, now I want to care about things that are vanilla matters. So it, well, sorry, I'm jumping off. So anyway, it is harder to do it on spells than it is on permanents. But every permanent you put it on, you're chewing in your space that could fill up with your vanilla creatures. So you have a problem there. Okay, now let's talk about spell space.

Okay, so I want to do this. I can't do static abilities. That's really hard to do because it turns them off. So it creates rules problems. I can't really do static abilities. So let's say I just want to affect it. Let's say I want to do the giant growth thing.

Okay, now we get into the templating problem, which is I want to communicate to you that things that are vanilla get affected as you can see on Petra Hydroglyphs just writing that out so it's clear is very messy

how exactly do I vanilla isn't a term it's a nickname it's a design term I use vanilla all the time, and you guys are like, the player base is slowly picked up in the vernacular because I share R&D lingo with the world, and the world picks up a lot of the lingo.

And so the idea of a vanilla creature, you see that talked about. It has more relevance for us than it does for you. Most people don't. It's not often you need to care about a vanilla creature, so the reason to have to understand the word for that doesn't come up. But anyway, there's no vocabulary for it, which means that when we want to say it in text,

we have to write it out. We have to say, and it is wordy. So when I say target creature gets plus two, but if it's a goblin, it gets plus four, plus four, that's really easy because I can say if it's a single word, if it's a goblin, you know, but when I have to say if it is a creature, I don't remember the text exactly, but you know a creature that doesn't have any other text on it or whatever, you know

I'm sure whatever it is to say it is a mouthful it's enough of a mouthful that I can't even figure it out off the top of my head like I can't even go, out off the top of my head. Like I can't even go, what would it be? You know, maybe something about a creature that doesn't, I didn't look up Mergander petroglyphs. I assume it has some terminology. But anyway, it is a mouthful. So even on spells where you want to care, wow, every card you make is going to be kind

of wordy. And one of the things we want to do is we want to make sure at Common that we control our wordiness. So one of the things I talk about with New World Order is I talk about red flagging. So New World Order is the thing I met, placed, and I created years ago to try to make Common simpler. And the way it works is,

I have a whole podcast on this, that certain things you get red flagged for. So one of the things you get red flagged for, and what red flag means is, hey, you seem complex. You know, I don't think you're supposed to be a common. Let's check you out. And we're allowed to let so many red flags through. Usually about 20% of your 10 to 20% can be sort of red flag cards. You get a certain amount of complexity. Okay. Well, the problem here is every card you're going to make that's going to reference this, especially spells,

it's going to get hard to reference it without it being kind of wordy, meaning you're going to start red flagging a lot of cards. But, if I want the theme to work, I have to have a low enough as fan that you have enough cards that care about it. Remember, we don't just have an as fan problem of the thing that cares about it we also have an as fan problem of i need enough

things that care so for example let's say i want to care about goblins i need to have enough goblins but i also need to have enough cards that care about goblins otherwise i'm not encouraged to make the goblin deck like for example let's say i have one card that cares about goblins well i might have lots of games where I never draw that card. Now, once again, we can design it such that the goblin deck doesn't need the goblin tribal card to be

interesting or fun, and so it's kind of gravy. So, for example, I can make a rich... I can make a lot of neat, fun goblin cards that you can play together that will thematically work together that if you never, ever get a Goblin Matters card, it's still a fun thing to do. But Vanilla Matters, they can't do that.

They're Vanilla creatures. So, like, it's really, really important. Like, the problem to remember is, let's say I... Okay, so I make a deck that has enough Vanilla creatures that I hope I have enough of them that I can get one in play to have it matter.

By itself, it doesn't do anything. And the problem with a bunch of vanilla creatures is that they actually, there's some inherent problems. Like, one of the things we have to do in Limited is we have to make sure there's things like evasion. We want to make sure that you're going to break creature stalls. And so there's a whole

bunch of mechanics and things we do to help break creature stalls. Plus, the other thing we do sometimes is we use creatures as a way to sort of, we build into the battlefield effects. We give them sorcery-like qualities to help do things. So when you have a lot of vanilla creatures, I can't solve those problems. How do I keep a stalemate from happening? I can't. The second I write anything on the cards that are not vanilla.

So there's no way inherently to fix vanilla matter cards within themselves. So is the experience of just playing vanilla cards fun? If I don't draw my vanilla matters, is it fun? No, it's not. It's just vanilla cards. I mean, especially for a franchise player, it's simple. And it's going to run into problems because the things I normally would do to fix those problems I can't do. Which means,

oh my god, it's even more important that we have the no matter cards in enough volume that it matters, because it's only fun if you draw the card. We have to make sure you draw the card. But then we run into the As-Van problem that any kind of card that's going to care is naturally going to be a little

more complex. So anyway, there's that issue. There's like, in order to template it, we make cards that are kind of complex that are hard to understand, which makes us not want to put them in common. But if we don't have stuff in common, we can't possibly make the Aspen to make it matter enough. If we don't make it matter enough, then it's just not fun gameplay. Because without it, it's, you know, it's vanilla gameplay. It's as simple as it can be. So as you can see, now another problem is, if I start raising up my vanilla thing, here's another problem I run into. I have a certain number of effects that I've got to get into a color.

So think of it in, let's say I'm making goblins. Well, I have certain red effects I need to do. I need to do some amount of direct damage. I need to destroy artifacts. I need to panic, which is make things not block. I need to do some combat tricks. I need maybe a land destruction. There's a bunch of different effects I need. And oftentimes you run out of space in your spell slots

because we tend to have more effects than necessary always spell slots and the way we pick up the the slack there is by doing some of the stuff we might do in spells on creatures hey what if this creature entered the battlefield destroyed an artifact or what if this creature when it attacked made a creature not block you know like i can take some of the effects that sometimes go outside of creatures and put them in creatures so one of the tools we have available to us is because creatures have values for things they can do, I have some flexibility of where I stick things. So that's a really important design thing. So now you come back to me and say, hey, hey, hey, more than normal amount of your creatures need to

be vanilla, meaning I have to now start fighting for space to do things, and I have less... It cuts down on my flexibility. It cuts down on my ability to sort of make a robust set. And remember, if I have a vanilla set, which vanilla matters, and I already have the problem that, look, you just have vanilla creatures, it's not interesting, you put more pressure on me from the other stuff to make the other things, like, interesting,

to make sure there's a dynamic gameplay. So vanilla creatures both make a need for more stuff on other cards and limit my ability to do that. So on top of everything else, they both kind of create a problem that it specifically makes it hard to solve. This is the problem with Vanilla Matters

is that the constraints of Vanilla Matters put more restrictions on you and they're the type of restrictions that make it harder to make the set. So it's like, okay, I got to make Vanilla Matters and there's all sorts of problems with it, but just the mere existence of upping the vanilla cards makes it harder for me to even design the set because I have less flexibility and less room to do what I need to do. So my goal here today, I'm not far from racial skull, is there's a lot of vectors here. You know, does Muraganda

Pedroglyphs in a vacuum, is it a cool card? Is it a one-of-one-time weird thing? Yes! Yes, it is. And a lot of people have had fun making their Muraganda Pedroglyphs decks. The issue at hand is not... There's a big

difference between I can make one card once that's entertaining, and I can make it as a theme that can support limited play, for example. You know, that is... I'm not going to say impossible. Like I said, there are some solutions. If you put a gun to my head and said,

you must do this, how do I do it? I would make it a threshold one thing. So I would make you have to play the least number of vanilla as possible. I would do a little more token making because technically tokens are Vanilla if you don't give them an ability. I would

work hard with templating to see if maybe we make the word that says what a Vanilla creature is so we can define it so that we could refer to it. So maybe I would use that to help. I would try to have more cards that care about creatures in general. So I would make mattering about creatures a theme

so that I had, for example, like a creature that's star, star equals number of creatures in general. So I would make mattering about creatures a theme so that I had, for example, like a creature that's star, star equals one of the creatures you have. That maybe I can make something where, or something like every time a creature enters the battlefield, you do something. I can make something where the things around it care about their creature-ness so that the fact

that, I mean, I would have to look and say what does a vanilla creature have, what values does it have? The other thing I wonder now as I walk through this is like, is there a way maybe to have a little bit of tribalness? Because at least they have tribal on them. You're fighting design space problems, though, because the same kind of cards you'd want to use for vanilla matters

are the same kind of cards you'd want to use for tribal. So that might be a dead end. But I guess I explore if, are there things that I can do in tribal that I can't do in vanilla matters? I'd look at that. But anyway, as I try to explain today, like, if I had to solve it, there are paths I would go down to try to solve it, but the real question in the end is, are you making compelling play?

You know, I talked about before, I did a whole podcast on, don't do something to prove you can do something. I don't want to make Vanilla Matters just to prove I can make Vanilla Matters. I want to make Vanilla Matters because it's an awesome theme. It's something that makes fun gameplay.

And so as I explained today, it'd be crazy hard to design. But the other big problem is, so I make it. So you're playing with a deck full of vanilla creatures. How much of the time are you having fun? Is that a fun thing? I think there's a little bit of novelty to it.

I think that's why people like Morgana Petricola. It's because it's super novel. But I believe it's a novelty that would fade quickly. And even if we couldn't make it work, I worry that I'm just making you play with, on average, I'm making a less fun Magic experience on average. There's just, it's more games with less

going on that's simpler, and that while that maybe, maybe is okay for a beginning entry-level thing, for a more enfranchised set with players, that's not something I would want to do. So anyway, that, my friends, in a long drawn-out way, is why Vanilla Matters is a really hard thing to do. But anyway, that, my friends, in a long, drawn-out way, is why Vanilla Matters

is a really hard thing to do. But I'm not at Rachel's school, so we know what that means. It's 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 guys next time.

Bye-bye.