Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #449: Counters

Episode Date: June 30, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about one of the design tools we use—counters. I go through the various kinds and talk about how counters help us expand what we can do in design.

I'm pulling in the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today is all about counters. Not counter spells. That's a different thing. For some reason we have words that mean multiple things in the game. No, I'm talking about things that you use to mark something. So, a little history. We'll go back to the beginning of the game. Back in Alpha, Richard made, I'm not sure what he wanted to say, seven or eight history. We'll go back to the beginning of the game. Back in Alpha, Richard made, I'm not sure whether you want to say seven or eight cards. I'll say eight.

So, he made Fungusaur. Fungusaur was a creature that whenever it got damaged, it got bigger. And you used a plus one, plus one counter to mark that it got bigger. Rockhydra was a hydra that you could spend mana and give it

extra heads. It lost heads when it got damaged, but you could give it a Hydra that you could spend mana and give it extra heads. It lost heads when it got damaged, but you could give it extra heads, and you could spend mana, and the heads were represented with plus one, plus one counters. And then you had Sanger Vampire. And Sanger Vampire would feast on things whenever it killed something. Whenever it damaged something that died,

it would then get bigger, and you would use plus one, plus one counters to mark that. And then there was Scavenging Ghoul. And Scavenging Ghoul was this, it wasn't a zombie at the time, but an undead creature that as things died, it got counters. And then it used those counters to represent that it,

to represent that it got to regenerate. And Living Artifact helped an artifact. And you would mark which artifact it helped by putting a counter on it. Or clockwork beast was a creature that would come, it started with seven plus one plus zero counters and as you attacked or blocked with it, as you used it, it would wind down and you had to wind it back up to put the counters back on it. Or cyclopean tomb was an artifact that slowly turned your opponent's land into swamps, and you used counters to mark that.

Now, Gaea's Liege would slowly turn your lands into forests, but for some reason in Alpha, it didn't say that you marked it with a counter. Now an oracle tells you to mark it with a counter. And being that Cyclopean Tomb and Gaea's Liege are really similar to each other, I'm not quite sure why one didn't. One didn't have a counter to mark it, but I would just point that out. So anyway, my thing here is, when the game began in Alpha, there were eight cards that Richard realized early on that there are cool effects you want to do that involve memory.

Pretty much the rule of thumb in Magic is, anything I do is only going to last until the end of the turn. I'm going to giant growth the creature and make it bigger until the end of the turn. Or I'm going to keep a creature from blocking, or I'm going to gain flying, I'm flying for the turn, whatever. I'm only going to do things for, until the end of the turn. And, if I'm going to do something that's longer than until the end of the turn, then in some way I have to mark it. Now, one second. One way to mark it, obviously,

is through auras, and later equipment, where you can physically have a card that reminds you that you do that. You can have an enchantment, if it triggers, for example, the enchantment can sit out there and say, hey, hey, I'm here, I do this. Sometimes a creature can do that. But anytime you have something that you have to remember is going to happen,

there's a card telling you. But Richard realized that there's some effects he wanted to last longer than the turn. Now it's funny. In Alpha, there are things he had that lasted longer than the turn that didn't mark themselves with a counter. For example, Sleight of Mind would change the color

of something, change the color word of something. Now, most of the time when it changed the color word, it was on a spell, but it could change the color word of a permanent, and then it would change permanently, and it wasn't marked. So alpha was a little inconsistent. I'll be open to that. But my point

is that Richard realized that at times you wanted to do something, and counters were a tool to help you to do that, help you mark things or keep record of things so that you know that. And ever since the beginning of the game, counters have gone on. I'm a giant fan of counters and tokens. But today's not about tokens, today's about counters. So what I want to do today is I want to talk through

sort of like all the different ways we use counters. And one other thing that's interesting, by the way, is I'm going to explain a lot of the ways we've used counters. I'm not even going to explain all the way we could use counters. That one of the neat things about counters is it really does help us. It's a tool to help us open our design space. That one of the things is, you know, the game turns 25 years old next year. And so we've been making magic for a long time. And being that we work in the future, we've been making magic for more than 25 years worth of product. And so the real question is, how do you know,

what tools do you have to be able to expand that space? And that's always a big thing. And counters really are one of the major tools to our disposal to really expand into new space. So today we're going to walk through and talk about what all can counters do. Okay, so first is the major thing that counters do, the most common thing that counters do, which is you can do the changing of creature sizes in a permanent way. So the most used counter we use is the plus one, plus one counter. Now you'll notice, as I talked about alpha, that Clockwork Beast had a plus one, plus zero counter. And over the years, early years, there was plus one, plus, I think there was plus one,

plus O, plus O, plus one, plus two, plus O, plus O, plus two, plus two, plus one, plus one, plus two. A lot of changing counters. And we finally said, let's consolidate that. Let's not be so crazy. So our new rule is in any one set, we tend to use just one stat changing counter. Traditionally, normally that is plus one, plus one. Plus one, plus one is super versatile. Like, for example, plus one, plus one plus one plus one plus one is super versatile um like for example plus one plus one lets you do a couple things um the biggest thing it lets you do is

just literally just adjust size that normally in magic if i play a creature um well it's a side whatever it is it is you know that i play something and it's a locked size now with counters it lets me do variable sizes for starter i can do something where like i have that I play something and it's a locked size. Now, with counters, it lets me do variable sizes for Starter. I can do something where, like, I have X in the cost, and it comes with X plus one plus one counters, so I can do variable, like, we call them creature balls. I can do stuff like that. I also can take a creature that

grows over time. Either it grows on a set, you know, either each turn it grows, or it could be, like, when a certain event happens, it grows. There are a lot of creatures that sort of say, if I do thing X, then I get a counter. We do have cards that have variables that you have to keep counting. For example, like star, star, and then you have to keep track of where you're at. We've been actually in that area, slowly moving toward counting once when the thing comes into play,

locking down with counters, then just you know what it is so you're not constantly checking um you also can use plus one plus one counters is you can have things that start with plus one plus one counters and then certain circumstances could remove them so with plus and plus one counters you can also do shrinking um i'll get to minus one minus one in a second but you can say hey you know um triskelion for example was a classic uh it came in with a number of plus and plus one counters and shrinking. I'll get to minus one, minus one in a second. But you can say, hey, you know, Triskelion, for example, was a classic. It came in with a number of plus and plus encounters, and then you can use them to do damage. So that, oh, it was a 3-3 creature, essentially, because it was a 0-0 creature with 3 plus and plus encounters, and I could remove a counter to do one damage to something. Oh, that's an interesting card. Like, do I want

to, you know, that allows us to use size as sort of a resource. I can pay for not all of my creature, but some of my creature. I use that as a resource. The other thing that Plus and Plus McConners have let us do is you also can sort of have things range in sizes. You know, you can do,

we've done some cycling where something sort of grows and range in sizes. You know, you can do, we've done some cycling where something sort of grows and shrinks over time. You can do it where, like the classic is the, what, the homerids? Where, like, they had this spawning cycle and so they varied between being, like, one-ones up to three-threes

and they moved around. You know, plus and plus encounters also allow us to make interesting choices. Like Fabricate, for example, from Kaladesh, sort of said, oh, well, what do you want? You can get this resource in making your creatures bigger or in making more creatures. And, you know, it allows us to sort of

make a lot of interesting choices. Another thing that we do a lot of, let's take a look at Outcast from Conzerthark here. So Outcast was a mechanic that basically granted plus one, plus one counters. What it said is, hey, if you want to take the turn off, not attack, and you want to meditate, if you want to sort of use your time to study or whatever, you can get a plus one, plus one counter. And then what we often do when we have things that grant plus one plus one counters is we had things that cared about them. So some of the things that granted, you know, some of the Outlast creatures not only granted plus one plus one counters, but also

enhanced creatures that had plus one plus one counters. So, you know, all creatures with plus one plus one counters gained something. So we can also use plus one plus one counters as a marker as well. And there's a lot of cool things you can do with that. Like, for example, Graft in original Ravnica, in Descension, technically, was the Simic mechanic. And that allowed you to have a creature come and play with a certain amount of plus one, plus one counters that it then could grant to other creatures as you

play them. And then, one of the cool things was, there's a bunch of cards that granted abilities to things, you know, Graft creatures that granted abilities to things with plus one, plus one counters. Like, I can enhance you, and then the things I've marked, I can now use you. So, plus one, plus one counters have a whole bunch of different usage there. Although, the first category I'm talking about here is creature size. And probably the biggest way we use it is just to allow us to have creatures

that can change with time over the game. Now, some of the time, most of the time, we use plus one, plus one counters. Some of the time, we use minus one, minus one counters. Almanacat right now, we're using minus one, minus one counters. The nice thing about minus one, minus one counters is it allows you to make a little more of a harsh terrain, a harsh setting. Like, one of the things we try to do is we want to use game mechanics to sort of convey something.

And so, for example, in Scarves of Mirrodin, the Phyrexians were invading. They were a hostile force. Or in Amonkhet, you know, the Gatewatch shows up, but it's not the nice, simple world that you think. Even though on the surface it seems nice, there's something wrong about it. And we wanted to sort of get across this,

the sense of the harshness of the world. And in both cases, minus one, minus one counters did a really good job of that. You know, Wither and Infect, for example, dealt And in both cases, minus one, minus one counters did a really good job of that. You know, wither and infect, for example, dealt damage in the form of minus one, minus one counters. It allows us to do persistent damage. Normally in magic,

when you damage a creature, that damage only lasts until end of turn. Now, in general, that I think is the best way for magic to be played. But it's kind of neat every once in a while to have some persistent damage and go, oh, well, when something's damaged, it stays damaged.

It's not killed, but now it's weaker than it was before. And it also allows you to have smaller creatures do damage and have some relevance to it doing damage. You know, a 1-1 with Wither, for example, you know, normally if I attack with a 1-1 and you have a 2-2, a 3-3, a 4-4, you just chump block it, right? It's not a big deal. Oh, but Wither says, okay, you can block me and you'll kill me, but forever you'll be affected by the fact that you did that.

And that is definitely, you know, pretty cool. So people ask, why? Why did you do minus one, minus one more often? Why are you so miserly with your minus one, minus one use? The major reason, first off, the reason we don't mix them is we like the idea that when you glance at the board and you see a creature and it has counters on it, you mostly know what that is.

Um, that if you start mixing and matching them, like, there's a point in time, in fact, uh, there's a card from the dark called Frankenstein's Monster. And so what happens is when you play the card, um, you remove some number of creatures from your graveyard, and for each creature removed, you put a counter on it. But you can put either a plus two plus zero counter, a plus one plus one counter,

or a zero plus two counter. So I would look across here, Frankenstein's Monster, and let's say it had three counters on it. Okay, well, three counters. Let's see. It could be a 5-1 or a 4-2 or a 3-3 or a 2-4 or a 1-5 or a 0.6. Okay, I don't have a lot of information. Those counters don't tell me a lot. And so what we realized was we wanted to make it easier to process.

We understand, by the way, that counters are an extra element to the game. That counters come at a cost. They open up a lot of design space and we do use them because of that. But they come at a cost and we have to be careful how often and where we use them.

Obviously, Amiket is messing around with trying the perforated tokens as a tool to maybe help you to get, so you can differentiate different, like one of the problems we have in general is normally we're careful about how many counters we put

on creatures so you understand what the creature is. And so the reason we made the perforated tokens is if something is, for example, exerted, you know, the counter doesn't say, hey, I'm bigger. It means I'm exerted. And so we, because there was a memory issue, we didn't want to put a counter on it to remind you. We sort of use the perforated things, kind of pseudo-counters to help you. But anyway, the reason we don't do minus one,

minus one as often as plus one, plus one is there's less design space in it. And people go, wait a minute, they're equal and opposite. Shouldn't they have equal design space? And the answer is no. And the best way I can explain this to you is, I have a 2, 2 creature. I can put an infinite number of plus one, plus one counters on that creature. The game will allow me to keep building and doing that as much as I want. Minus one minus one, I can put one minus one minus one counter on it. When I put the second one on it, it's dead. So the problem with minus one minus one counters is they remove things and they sort of stop things from happening. They slow down the game and they, if you're not careful with them, they make it harder for things to happen. And the state they move toward is removal.

Where the state the plus and plus one counters move toward is, you know, more encouraging. Like, if my creature gets big enough, then I want to attack with it. Or if my creature gets small enough, I can't attack with it. So it both sort of... One promotes more, you know, the game ending, and the other is there's just only so much I can do with minus one, minus one counters because if I put too much on, I've just

killed the creature, then it's gone. And like I said, I'm not saying there's zero space in minus one, minus one counters. Obviously, you know, we did Scarves of Mirrodin, we're doing Amonkhet, but we'll do other minus one, minus one counter blocks. It's not as if it's not as if they're useless. There's, in fact, some interesting space to put there.

And one of the spaces that we definitely played around with a bit, which is a little bit easier to do with minus one counters, is if you want to use creatures as a cost, you have to build it into the creature. Like, I can make Triskelion, and then Triskelion has the cost of itself. But one of the cool things we were able to do with Minus One Minus One Conquerors is says, part of my cost is that you use up the resource of an existing creature, not one that comes with that thing. In fact, for a while, we had a mechanic called Ruthless in Amonkhet, and the way that Ruthless

worked was, I would kick my spouse, like, oh, you know, I can do three damage to a creature, but I could also do three damage to the player, its controller, if you, you know, put a certain number of minus number of counters, let's say one, on a creature you control. So let's say Ruthless won. It's like, oh, well, do you want this extra ability? Well, then you've got to weaken one of your creatures. And we liked that because it felt very ballsy, and it was a harsh world.

So it had that nice feel. We ended up doing it but not keywording it, so there's a few cards that do it, but we ended up using it a little bit different. We didn't quite—now there's cards that just have a resource of having to do that. It's not a choice, I think, mostly. Although the choice we did give you is you could put it on itself or put it on other creatures, and then some of them give you resource for itself. You know, both minus one and plus one, plus one. Oh, the other itself. Both minus one and plus one plus one.

Oh, the other neat thing about minus one minus one counters is I can show growth, but growth that's locked. So for example, plus one plus one counters, if I let you grow it, it's just going to grow. I mean, I can artificially tell you you can only have so many counters. But the nice thing about minus one minus one counters is let's say I have a 5-5 that comes into play with four minus one minus one counters. And every time you do something, it removes a minus one counter,

it gets to grow, but in a controlled, locked way, in the sense that it's going to stop at five. So there are some cool things minus one, minus one to do. We are going to continue to do them when it makes sense, but we don't mix and match them. So, but anyway. The one other creature size thing that I will bring up is level counters. So, level counters showed up in

Rise of the Eldrazi. So, Brian Tinsman designed that set and he had made a card back in Eventide. He was on the time for Eventide. What was the card called? It was a card that had three states that you could spend mana and upgrade to its second state

and spend mana and upgrade to its second state and spend mana and upgrade to its third state. And I'm blanking on the card. It's red and white. You guys are all yelling my name right now. He really liked that card. It was fun. It was very popular with the players.

So he decided to make a whole series of cards that did that. And so the idea was, on level up cards, was that you could pay to level them. And then at some, sort of like D&D, they went up in levels. And then at certain levels, it would come with a change in power toughness and or a change in abilities. So for example, let's say a level up costs three mana. Two and a red, let's say on a red creature. So every time I spend two and a red, I can level it up one

and then maybe at level three it gets bigger and then at level seven it gets bigger. So it sort of gets this resource that says, hey, you can make this creature bigger, but there's some mana you have to spend over time to sort of improve it. And there's three separate, both power toughness boxes and rules text boxes.

So it literally would sort of, as it upgraded, the creature would change. Now that's a bit more complex than plus one, plus one, minus one, minus one counters. It's changing abilities. I mean, sometimes plus one, plus one counters will say, hey, if you have than plus one, plus one, minus one, minus one counters. It's changing abilities. I mean, sometimes plus one, plus one counters will say, hey, if you have enough plus one, plus one counters, it'll grant ability or something, you know, get so many. And then when you have so many, you get trampled.

We'll do stuff like that. But this allowed us to do a much wider swing of things. And you know, we get grant abilities and not normally with plus one, plus one counters, if we're putting something extra on, usually it's a ability, where this was allowing a little more space than that. Level up was complicated, but it just sort of definitely shows how you can use counters to change creature size in different ways, and change creature abilities as well. Okay, the next thing you can do is you can use counters to mark progress. So my example of this one, first

example, will be quest counters from Zendikar Blanc. So quest counters, like, we are an adventure world. I'm going to send you on a quest. And when you do this thing a certain number of times, I will reward you. Well, how do we do that? Well, we put an enchantment out and then it says, okay, every time you do this, you get a quest counter. And then when you have so many quest counters, you can trade them in. So the cool thing about that was that here's a place where a counter says, okay, we can track progress over time. We can sort of see what's going on, and we can say,

oh, well, you know, you have to do this three times. Each time you do it, we can mark it. A similar thing would be in Amonkhet with brick counters. You know, we really wanted to make monuments. We were doing sunny Egypt. Like I explained, there's two big sort of trope space to hit. One is bright and sunny

living Egypt, and one is dark and dusty dead Egypt, or the Tomb Raider stuff. We decided not to do the second one. We'll do more of the first one. It was a living civilization. And one of the things whenever you see movies about sort of Egypt during the height of Egypt is you see them building things. It's just kind of one of the tropes of ancient Egypt. They're building the pyramids or the Sphinx or whatever they're building. They're building

stuff. And so we really wanted not just having monuments there but the idea that the building of monuments itself was part of the experience, part of the trope of Egypt that we were trying to capture. And so by using brick counters, we could sort of convey the idea that you're building things. Oh, another point that I, I'll bring it up here. One of the other neat byproducts of using counters is the fact that the counters have a name, you know, that you go on a quest. So you get quest counters, you're building monuments, you get brick counters,

that they really help give some flavor to it. Although one of the funny things is one of the rules we have on counters is we try not to use the same name unless it's doing basically the same function. So if we made a new cycle of quests that send you one quest, okay, we can use quest counters,

that's no problem, it's doing what a quest counter counter does but we wouldn't use quest counters in a different context on countries that do a different thing um and so sometimes we want to use a word but because we've made so you know like i at one point i was going to list all the words and sort of read off all the different things i'm like okay there's a lot that's a long list um but you know and we sometimes run into things like oh we want to that, but we used it on this thing. And one of the things we really weigh now is, is it long enough? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we used that really early to be something slightly different. But, wow, it's been 20 years.

Can we reclaim a certain name? And we've done that a little bit. But in general, we try to make names have uniqueness to them. Oh, the other thing about marking progress is I use level counters to talk about changing size. But level counters also essentially mark progress in a similar way. So it's a crossover between the two. But that's one space that counters I enjoy is that I can sort of say, okay, there's a larger thing going on here.

I'm not asking you to do just one thing. I'm asking you to do unconglomerate things. A lot of magic is like, do this one thing and immediately get the reward. Pay this mana, get this effect. But I like with counters that you sort of can draw that out and do things that are bigger than just the turn.

In a lot of ways, that is one of the things that counters do for us, is it allows the game to have a continuity beyond the turn, because we didn't want to roll with memory issues. In general, we don't ask you to remember things beyond the turn it is. And every once in a while, we'll sometimes ask you for the beginning of the next turn. We'll do that sometimes.

Like, rebound goes off now at the beginning of your next turn. But pretty much anything beyond your next turn, we like to give you something to mark that by in the new use counters. Okay, now we get into marking time. So there's a bunch of ways to mark time. So marking time means one of two things usually. Either you only have so much time in the game or you only have so much time until the game. So, for example, suspend use time counters to say, hey, how much time until

I get my spell? So the idea of suspend was, I have a spell, it's cheaper than normal, but I'm paying the cost of time. So, like, oh, normally this costs four mana, I get it for one mana, but

it's going to take me four turns before I get it. So yeah, I'm saving a bunch of mana, but I'm spending time in place of the mana. And the way we were able to do that is we could use the time counters. You would exile the card from the game, and then you would count it down. You can mark it.

So just like, for example, you could use it to count up with the progress, you could use it to count down as a means to mark time. The other thing is we had a mechanic called vanishing, which was a redone version of fading, that you put counters on to mark how long it stays in play. Like, for example, in this case, I get a creature that's cheap, that's pretty powerful, but I only get it for, say, let's say three turns. And so each turn I take off the counter. The way I was fading was when I couldn't remove a counter and it went away, and then vanishing is when I took off the last counter and it went away. People were playing fading wrong, so we brought it back. We changed the name

and slightly tweaked it so it would play better. So the idea is, you know, you have so many counters, and then how do I know how many turns? Well, when you take off the last counter, it goes away. Also, like hatchling is something we'll do. I think we did hatchling on the 1313 Innistrad Ludovic's test subject, I think it was called. So the idea there is, oh, I have an experiment I'm hatching. I have this egg I'm hatching. And I'm counting down time until it hatches. So there's an example. I mean, in general with time, we tend to count down with time because it's so long until something happens. So sometimes it's a country you count up. Sometimes it's a country you count down. Usually the decision of whether you count up or down is are you trying to move towards something or away from something so for example if something's going to happen in so many turns um i normally will go down

like oh in three turns well let's keep track of how long before it happens um but with something like a quest where i'm like the way you mentally are processing it is how many how many have i done oh i've done it twice well I still need to do it. And a lot of that, I mean, obviously we could have done quests like it has three counters. Every time you do a quest, take one off. But there's some flavor to it. In quests, it's like I'm doing

this thing, so I want to mark that I've done it. Where in time, it's like I'm marking time for something until it happens. Okay. Another thing that you can do is you can use counters to mark the states of something. So I'm going to separate this into

a couple different categories. The first is to mark the state of yourself. So for example, depletion. So depletion counters are something we first did in Ice Age, I think. So depletion lands were lands, they were dual lands, but when you tapped them, the negative. So depletion lands were lands, they were dual lands,

but when you tapped them, the negative was, they come into play untapped, is that you put a depletion counter on them. And what that means is when you get to untap, if you have a depletion counter on it, you remove the depletion counter

instead of untapping. So essentially what it means is the cost of these dual lands is they only untap every other turn. And so that way, it's a means by which you can mark the state of them so you can keep track of that. Other example would be divinity. So divinity was a counter we used in Champions of Kamigawa

on the gods. They weren't called gods. I mean, they were flavored as gods. We didn't have a god creature type yet. And so the way it worked is each of these came in with a divinity counter. And as long as you had the divinity counter, they were indestructible. You couldn't destroy them. But, if

you removed the counter, you could do something powerful. There was a powerful effect you could do that required the removing of the counter. So it created this interesting thing, which is kind of like, you're a god. You cannot be destroyed. But, you could do something powerful. But the cost of doing it powerful is you open yourself up is kind of like, you're a god. You cannot be destroyed. But you can do something powerful. But the cost of doing it powerful is you open yourself up to, you know, you make yourself vulnerable.

And once again, that's a perfect example of kind of just neat spaces we can do with counters. And that's a pretty cool concept. But it just requires memory. And, okay, counters answer very cleanly and simply. And it allows us to do stuff like that. Okay, the other thing that we do is we will mark... oh okay, one more example of marking state itself, is what we did in the last, I think the last commander set, or two commander sets ago. Experience counters. So one of the problems we were trying to solve is so in Commander you have a commander

and it's a legendary creature that sits in the command zone and you can cast it whenever you want it's like automatically always castable. Now once it's killed it costs two more to bring it back the second time and then four then six, it keeps going up by two. But the idea is you can keep bringing back your commander and often you do. It's a big part of it.

Your deck is built around it. So one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way where your commander has some continuity over the game. And like, how can we do that? And the problem is every time it comes back out, it kind of starts over again. So we came up with this idea called experience counters.

We said, okay, well, what if it did something and it marked it with these counters that didn't go away? Now this is an example where the experience doesn't go on the creature, it goes on you, the player. I'll get to more of these in a second. It affects the creature, the creature cares about it, and it's using you as the marker to put it. But essentially it says, hey, I have so much experience, and the reason it sits on you, the player, is so that it doesn't go away. But it allows you, every time you bring it out, it allows your commander to get more powerful over time

because it keeps this experience. Okay. You can also use it to mark the state of others. So, for example, there's a card, one of my favorite cards in Tempest, called Bounty Hunter. So Bounty Hunter said when I enter the battlefield, I put a bounty counter on target creature. And then I can kill that creature. You know, and the flavor is really good, like it's a bounty hunter.

Once he's marked you for death, the flavor text is like, once you're marked for death, the world is made of glass. I think that's the flavor text. But that was a neat kind of thing. It's like, it can't kill everything, it can kill just one thing. But it sort of has to find the thing, choose the target, and then you now know that this thing is going to kill that thing if you don't deal with it first. So other examples, there's a card called Orification,

which we were messing around with the idea that when you attack, your creatures get turned to gold. We were trying to make a white version of No Mercy. No Mercy just kills anything that damages you. So white, we did a version where if you attack me, sort of a king-minus defense, that you get turned to gold, and so it turns you into a defender. And the idea is sort of like, it's a way to mark that,

oh, this has happened, you know. No Mercy kills you, I don't have to mark it, let's put it in the graveyard. But now it's still in play and has a different state so we can mark it. Another example was paralyzation. There's a card I played in one of the very first decks I ever played called Venerian Gold, where you were putting things to sleep. And the idea was, or I'm sorry, you were paralyzing them. You were putting them to sleep.

We'll get to sleep in a sorry, you were paralyzing them. You don't put them to sleep. We'll get to sleep in a second. You were paralyzing them. And so you would put them on the creatures, and you can mark that they were paralyzed. Now, this is also a crossover, not only is it a mark state in others, but also a count-on function where it would mark how long they were paralyzed for, that they would slowly come off, so they'd slowly deparalyze. Also, we've used sleep counters to show that something's been put to sleep. So, and there's a lot of neat flavor there.

I've done something to you, often tap you, but like with a bounty hunter, not always, you know, sometimes something different. And it sort of shows, okay, there's this long-lasting effect that's going to matter that I want to track, and I can do that. Okay, so we also can mark state not just on the creatures or on permanents, but also on you, the player. So the two big examples of this, one is poison. So poison is something where if I give poison to my opponent, so the first poison card was a card called, what was it called?

It made snakes, what's it called? It was in Legends. It made snake tokens. I'm blanking on it. It made snake, in fact, there were two cards that are poisoned in Legends. But the idea was, and they were both, one was snakes and the other was like a scorpion. And the idea is they're creatures that literally poison you.

And so if you let this creature bite you, well, then it poisons you. And if not poison, it will kill you. And so there's this neat thing where, you know, poison was able to take a state that talked about you the player. You know, I now have a goal that if I can get enough poison to my opponent, I will win the game. And it keeps it, you know, it just, it now puts the, it's an alternate win condition. You know, I can use conjures to say, oh, here's this neat thing I can do and I can track it. And all of a sudden, okay, you now have to care.

And it allows us to have things that have more of a continuity to them because my one creature that does poison, not only can it do poison, and maybe I track it, but now I can play with other creatures that do poison. It helps me build a deck around it. So conjurers definitely allow us to coalesce themes and allow players to build with them. Now, filibuster is the opposite. Filibuster is a counter that you put on yourself and if you get enough filibuster counters you win the game.

So you can use counters in different ways. Here's more for tracking state where you're trying to figure out what's going on. It gives you sort of a lot of these blur. This also is making progress, essentially. Like, as you poison your opponent, you can slowly see the progress you're making. The one thing I'll note is, like, not that I like removing poison, but Leeches is a card that exists that can remove them. So it is Mark You State in the sense that it's not just progressional,

although it obviously is also progressional. Okay, next. just progressional, although it obviously is also progressional. Okay, next, let's talk a little bit about another poison counter, Loyalty counter. So talking about marking utility. So the neat things about Planeswalkers is when we first made Planeswalkers, the earliest design we did was we had them have three effects and then every turn in order they did the effect. So turn one they do the first effect, turn two they do the second effect, order, they did the effect. So turn one, they do the first effect. Turn two, they do the second effect. Turn three, they do the third effect.

And there are a lot of cool cards, but what we found out about it was that it felt kind of robotic. So, for example, let's say the original Garruk, I think the way it worked is, it's like make a token, make a token, you know, overrun your team. So it was like make a 3-3 token, make a 3-3 token, everybody gets plus 3, plus 3, and trample. But the problem was, let's say you get rid of my tokens, that sometimes he would overgrow... Who was that?

Sorry. He would overrun everybody, and there would be no one to overrun, and he felt stupid that he was doing it. So we wanted to give more agency. So we ended up making loyalty counters. And so what loyalty counters was, was that we gave this resource to the planeswalker, and the flavor was, hey, you're asking for a favor.

You know, how much goodwill do they have? How loyal are they to you? And some people are very loyal, some less loyal. And then depending on what I ask you to do, either you're happy to do it, and that makes you more loyal because, hey, thanks for having me do that, or, eh, that's what you really want to do, so you get a little less loyal because you're like, oh, look, don't ask me to do that. And normally on a planeswalker, the default is there's a small plus ability,

there's a small to medium minus ability, and there's a large minus ability that we call the ultimate. And usually the ultimate, it doesn't necessarily win you the game, but puts you in a place where you have a very good chance of winning the game. And so the thing there is we needed to sort of be able to monitor what's going on because we wanted to make a little game. It's like, okay, I come out with so much loyalty and I have a mission. Now, in some ways, I think these categories blend a lot. Obviously, there's a little bit of marking and resource here, but also it is,

you know, I mean, you're marking how you're doing, but it really does something unique in that it sort of allowed us to take a new component and build something within that component. You know, Planeswalkers have a sense of agency now. You feel like they're working towards something. It gives them a personality. And one of the things we really wanted with the Planeswalkers is to feel like characters. Is to feel like they want to do something and there's a certain quality to them and by using loyalty counters we were able to do that. So that's another example of where loyalty count like loyalty counters allowed us to bring the planeswalkers to life. Like mechanically speaking it gave them, it made them feel you know it gives them a personality. Like, like let's take

a step back with that. Like with the advent of counters we can give cards personality. Like, let's take a step back with that. Like, with the Advent of Counters, we can give cards personality. You know, that's really cool. That's something that, I'm not saying you can't do that without the Counters, but it definitely allowed us to expand and to do something with the Planeswalkers that gave them a larger mission. Otherwise, they would be very localized per turn, and this gave us something where there's a larger scope to them. So another thing that it lets us do is it allows us to mark costs. So the example I'll use for this is our age counters.

So there was a mechanic for a long time called cumulative upkeep, which started in Ice Age. It was actually an evergreen thing for a little while. The way it worked was you had a cumulative upkeep of a cost and then every turn on turn one you didn't pay anything when you cast it. Then on the first turn you had to pay

its upkeep and cumulative upkeep meant that you paid the upkeep equal to the number of times it had been in play. So let's say for example it's a blue mana. So on the first upkeep I spend one blue mana. On the second upkeep equal to the number of times it had been in play. So let's say, for example, it's a blue mana. So on the first upkeep, I spend one blue mana. On the second upkeep, I spend two blue mana. On the third upkeep, three blue mana. You know, if it cost one and a red,

then the first upkeep it was one and a red. Then two colors, then two red. Then three colors, then three red. Then four colors, or generic, sorry. Four generic and four red. Age counters allowed us to essentially add this cost. And the idea was,

you know, normally with cost, the cost would have to be somewhat locked. I mean, we occasionally do costs that care about a variable. So sometimes we'll do that. Like some variable in the game that naturally grows and we make you care about that. But outside of that, this allows us to just do costs in a different way. And like I said, it's, cube of upkeep was a neat thing. And originally when we designed

Ice Age, it just had you do it. And eventually we used counters because they realized it just was too much. So there are definitely examples in early Magic where we tried to not use counters, realized from the actual using of it that it caused you problems, the memory issues. And so now, like I said, we are willing to make you remember things up to the beginning of your next turn mostly. And if it goes much beyond that, then we're marking it with a counter or a card or something. Okay. Another fun thing that counters can do is it can sort of give some sense of permanence. So for this one, we'll talk about Blaze counters. So Blaze counters were... What set was Blaze Counters in? What was Blaze Counters in?

I don't remember here. Blaze Counters were on Obsidian, Fireheart, Zendikar? I'm going to say Zendikar. I might be wrong. And what it did was, it was a creature that was super hot that the idea is it would start fires. And then even if you got rid of it,

there's these fires, and the fires hurt you. And, you know, it has a sense of permanence to it, and it gives an extra sense of flavor. That's another thing that, like I mentioned earlier, the names give you flavor. But it allows us to really sort of, you know, talk about the, it lets us give a little extra personality to things. Okay. The last category I'm going to talk about today is talking about energy as a resource.

Sorry, talking about using counters to mark a resource, to do energy, to do something in which it allows to have a resource in the game. On some level, you could argue loyalty is a resource, obviously. Energy is a little bit different. And the idea of energy was loyalty is a resource, obviously. Energy is a little bit different. And the idea of energy was, energy is a more traditional resource. You do something, you acquire it, and you could spend it.

But what we wanted to do was we wanted qualities that functioned different than mana. Usually the resources that work in the game is you acquire them and then you can spend them. But we wanted something that had sort of that, the permanence, like sometimes it's like, oh, we sacrifice this creature to do something. We wanted a sense of permanence, but we wanted the fluidity of a mana system,

or like a mana system. So what we were allowed to do with counters for energy was say, okay, we'll put this on you, the player, that allows us to connect different cards together. And that's another thing. Like, for example, where energy started, oh, I talked earlier about, sort of talked about uses of stuff.

So like, you know, way, way back in like Homeland, there was serrated arrows that had arrowhead counters. And, oh, I only have so many arrows. When I fire all my arrows, my arrows are gone. And eventually we moved to charge counters. The idea of, I have a magical item. But my magical item is not infinitely useful. A lot of times, you know, if you play other fantasy games, you know, Dungeons & Dragons or something,

like, oh, my magic wand, well, it has three uses. I don't have infinite uses. And so we use charge counters to sort of represent that and then energy came out of us trying to expand that of saying well what if when i got a charge counter i didn't i wasn't just using it on this thing what if there was some sort of energy that allowed me to use it between things so instead of having card a they gave me you know uh two uses and card b gave me two uses and A that gave me two uses, and card B gave me two uses, and card C gave me two uses, what if I had six uses to use anywhere I wanted between three?

Which is how energy came about. So it's interesting that counters allowed us to do the earlier technology of it, like serrated arrows or charge counters, where I had so many uses, but it also let me use the combined thing where I'm like, okay, I want to take it to the next level. I want to be able to sort of make it into a resource. And so the cool thing with energy was the fact that I'm keeping on me, the player, now meant, A, it was easier to track.

I had less counters sitting around. You know, one of the problems we had when we were trying the charge counter version where you could use them between each other was just there was a lot of, oh, well, this card is those counters and this card is those counters, this card is those counters, where with energy is all consolidated. How much energy do you have? I got six.

Okay, I can keep it on one place, one total. My opponent can just get one number from me. You know, they don't have to, like before when they're sitting on permanent, it's like, well, if I kill this permanent, I got rid of three energy. Do I want to do that? You know, it just added a lot of complication

that wasn't really necessary. So that's one of the big caveats today about counters is we also work really hard to figure out the cleanest, best ways to use counters. That sometimes the best ways, for example, to use counters is not to muddle up and put lots of them on permanents, but rather put them together

and put them on the player. So, I'm almost I'm almost to Rachel's school, so I just want to wrap this up by saying kind of the joy of what, to me, is the miracle of creatures, of what makes creatures

sort of the special thing that they are. And the answer is that they are a really interesting and diverse tool. That, you know, I talk all the time about one of the neatest things about designing the game of magic is I'm always looking to find new spaces, to go to new areas. And in order to do that, I really, like any sort of artist, like I need my tools to do that. And what the counter has done for me and all the other designers is it really has opened us up to say, hey, there is a different way to go about this. There's things you're allowed to care about that you normally can't care about.

There's ways to track things. There are ways to give permanence to things. There's things you're allowed to care about that you normally can't care about. There's ways to track things. There are ways to give permanence to things. There's ways to sort of monitor things. And then the ability to do that, the ability to go

the extra length to find the extra thing is really something special and something unique. And so, today was a nod to counters of saying, I love you, Counters.

You do cool and interesting things. And anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my little talk today all about Counters. But I'm here at Rachel's school. So, I know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time.