Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #454: Flashback

Episode Date: July 21, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the mechanic flashback. I discuss how it got originally designed and the many different blocks that have used it.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. I just dropped off Rachel at school. Elementary school. She's interning in an elementary school. So I don't often get to start my podcast these days by dropping Rachel off at school. But anyway, so today I have an interesting topic today. So one of the things that I get asked all the time is, over the years, I've made a lot of mechanics. What is the best mechanic I ever made? And I have different things to choose from. Obviously, I've made a lot. But today, I'm going to talk about what I think is probably the best mechanic I've ever made.

And that mechanic is flashback. So, I'm going to talk all about how it got, and all sorts of things about the flashback mechanic. Some stories I've told before, some I haven't. So let's real quickly sort of explain what flashback is for those that don't know, and then I will go into its history and stuff. Okay, so flashback is a spell that goes on instants and sorceries, and it has usually its own unique cost. It has a flashback cost.

And once you cast the spells, or once these spells get in the graveyard, whether you cast them or discarded them or whatever, you can cast these spells out of your graveyard by paying the flashback cost. And if you pay the flashback cost, it exiles upon resolution. The rules say, by the way, that no matter what, whenever it leaves the stack, it's gonna be exiled. Even if it's countered, it still will be exiled. So the idea is, they're spells that essentially you can cast one time out of the graveyard. Always in Instants and Sorceries. And so some of the rule stuff I've told. It's the same rules as casting, so anything that applies to casting applies to them when they're sitting in your graveyard.

You are casting them out of your graveyard. The converted mana cost doesn't change, although things that affect what it costs to cast does affect flashback costs. And it's always exiled. Even if countered, even if something else happens, it's always exiled. Even if counter or even something else happens, it's always exiled. Okay, so let's walk through Flashback's history. So for this first story, we have to go back to the Pro Tour. In fact, to the feature matches of the Pro Tour.

Okay, so for eight years, I ran the feature match area at the Pro Tour. I mean, I also did the video on the final day, but during the feature match area at the Pro Tour. I mean, I also did the video on the final day, but during the first couple days of the Pro Tour, I would always run the feature match area. As I explained, the feature match area was one of my ideas, and it became sort of my little area. And so not only did I select the feature matches, but I also was the head judge of the feature match area.

Usually I'd have one other judge help me, sometimes a second judge. There traditionally was only four matches, so usually two of us were able to handle everything. But they're very high profile matches, and obviously often matches that mattered quite a bit, because a lot of times the ones you featured were important matches. But anyway, one of the things I would do as I'm watching matches is sometimes, oftentimes, there's very dramatic games and it's just exciting to watch and see what would happen. But sometimes, somebody would just get way ahead

and the game wouldn't be all that exciting. And so in my head, I would come up with little extra games to make it more exciting for me. And one of the things I used to do is I would grant abilities to the player who was losing. Sort of like a Vanguard-ish thing. And one of the abilities I granted

when I was just, you know, for fun, like what I would do is I would give them an ability and they'd be like, okay, well if they could do that, what's their right move? So I would try to figure out their moves given that they had an extra ability.

So one of the abilities I would grant is they could cast cards out of their graveyard. In the original version, they could cast anything they wanted out of the graveyard. And then as I refined it, I'm like, oh, it should be Instants and Sorceries, because it's not fair that you keep casting the same creature out of your graveyard.

And so I said, okay, you have a spell, and then the idea is, once you cast it, you get rid of it, so that, you know, the, you have a spell and then the idea is once you cast it, you get rid of it so that, you know, the idea is I can, it's not that I can infinitely cast it on my graveyard, I can cast it one time on my graveyard. I got one more use out of it. And the idea was that you would have two uses. So,

the idea was, it was just something that was like, oh, here's a neat thing, well, they're in trouble, but what if they could cast their instant sorcerers out of the graveyard? And then I would come up with interesting choices and neat gameplays I could do. So anyway, flash forward a couple years, and I am put in charge of Odyssey. Now, the previous year was Invasion. And Invasion really was the start of something new.

I often talk about Invasion as being the second age of Magic design and the reason is it's, it's, I'm sorry, it's the third age of Magic design. Second age started with Mirage. The thing about Invasion that was interesting was it was the first time that we really did a theme for the block. The, you know, early blocks were more like, hey there's two new mechanics or, you know, but it, this was a, Invasion's first time said, it's a multicolor block. We're going to design the block around this theme. The whole block has this theme. And I really liked that.

And so when it was my turn, I mean, Invasion, Bill Rose, I worked on Invasion. But Bill Rose was the lead designer of that. So when I was doing Odyssey, I was next. I'm like, okay, I want to do that. I want a theme. What theme could I do? And I remembered back to this mechanic, because I had thought a lot about it. I even, by the way, had dubbed it Flashback when I turned it into a mechanic. And the idea was, instead of

something that granted you this ability, what if individual cards granted that ability? That's where I went to. I said, oh, well, what if certain cards let you cast them out of the graveyard one more time? Because one of the things I had realized was with something like buyback, that players seem to like casting spells more than once. But buyback was definitely problematic

because you could just keep recasting it and it was a little on the, you know, it had some power level issues. So in flashback, I'm like, okay, what if I stick it on the spell? You know, what if instead of a global thing, it just goes on a spell-by-spell basis, and it says, hey, this spell can be casted again. And I thought that was a neat idea. In fact, the design name for it was Flashback.

That was the name I gave it. The idea is like, remember this spell? So we called it Flashback. That was the name I gave it. The idea is like, remember this spell? So we called it flashback. That name stuck. And Richard had an idea, Richard Garfield was on my design team. He had an idea for a mechanic that ended up becoming threshold. And I'm like, oh well flashback and threshold are both graveyard things. Ooh, maybe we could do a graveyard theme. And so based on the two mechanics I liked, I walked in Odyssey with the idea of, okay, could do a graveyard theme. And so based on the two mechanics I liked, I walked in Odyssey with the idea of, okay, how do we make this a graveyard set?

And Odyssey's theme was very focused on the graveyard. So interestingly, when I first started to do Flashback, my first assumption was that it would just have one cost. The Flashback didn't have a separate cost, that you would just have one cost. And theback didn't have a separate cost, that you would just have one cost. And the idea was we slightly over-costed it. That was my thought process is, okay, well, flashback spells are a little more expensive

than a normal spell, but you get a cast on the second time, and that would offset them. That would be the thing. But what we found once we started playtesting was it just made them hard to use. Because let's say, for example, I have a spell that should cost three, and I make it four. You know, that wasn't quite enough to justify the fact that I could cast it again.

So, okay, what if I cost five? Well, now here's a three-cost spell that costs five. What happened was if you didn't get it to flash it back, it just wasn't worth the value. So we realized, we changed things up a little bit and said, okay, what if the upfront spell

a lot of the time was just pretty close to normal, maybe a smidgen more, but close to normal, and that the flashback cost was just a bit expensive, you know? And then what we realized was the utility having a free spell out of your graveyard, like, if I cast a spell and do something,

the idea that this, then later on in the game, hey, if I, you know, later in the game when I happen to have enough mana, I just get the spell back, you could actually cost it at a pretty high cost, and still it'd be pretty good. And the funny thing is when you first start playing around, it's one of those things you don't realize when you start playtesting. This is why playtesting is so important, is early on what we did was, like first we did the thing where there was just one cost, then we realized that wasn't right.

So then we tried that there was a normal cost and a flashback cost. But even then, the flashback costs were still relatively close to the main cost, and we kept having to up them. And what we found was really interesting as we played with them is the spell, it really was good, even if you put a pretty big cost on the flashback cost.

That the utility of getting to cast the spell again really sort of had a lot of value to it. And so anyway, we definitely messed around with it. One of the things that was kind of cool was that we also sort of got a lot of sort of interesting utility to it. Like we made, you know, you can make cards. Some of the cards we made were just general cards that did general things.

But sometimes there were things that, hey, if you could sometimes do this in the same turn, you know, sometimes you could do fun interactions and things. But anyway, I ended up putting in Odyssey. There was some debate at the time. I remember having some debates about, is this exciting? Because once we figured out the cost we had to put it at, the second cost looked pretty big. Because once we figured out the cost we had to put it at, the second cost looked pretty big. And so the concern we had at the time was, you know, is this going to be a problem?

You know, is this going to look exciting to people? The other thing we did do in Odyssey is we did a little bit of, I'm expensive up front, but I'm cheap to flash back. So somehow you can get me in the graveyard, I'm awesome. cheap to flash back. So somehow you can get me in the graveyard. I'm awesome. And then we ended up putting other mechanics in the set that allowed part of making a well part of making threshold work was giving you enablers to be able to discard things to get things into your graveyard. You know that led us down to Passing Torment. We did Madness and we did a lot of sort of interactions. A lot of graveyard centric stuff is, hey, I have cards that care about being in the graveyard, and hey, I have ways to discard cards.

So we also made a bunch of flashback cards where if you got it, like, it wasn't particularly, it was expensive up front, but it was actually cheaper than normal in the graveyard. So, if you managed to somehow discard it or mill it or something, get it in the graveyard, you could then get a very efficient spell.

But you had to jump through the hoop of getting it to your graveyard. Or, if you ever got to the point where you just could cast it, then I could quickly cast it a second time. So, we put it in Odyssey. So, I love the design. I think Odyssey was Randy Buehler's first lead development. And Randy likes mechanic. There was never really any danger of it getting kicked out. I argue with people about it, but Randy really understood it and saw the value in it.

So we put it in. So for Odyssey, we put it in all three sets. It was in Odyssey, Torment, and Judgment. And it was a big hit. Like, there's all this concern, will people like it? What we discovered was, you know what's fun?

Doing spells twice. That's what's fun. It proved to be, actually, it did a couple things. One is, it's just inherently fun. Like, catching the spell again is fun. Getting things out of your graveyard is fun. You know, there's neat interactions where you can discard cards or mill cards. And there's interactions where you can sort of make use of the mechanic that way.

And the other thing that we found, obviously we played more with it, is it's very skill testing. There's like, it is a, it's one of those mechanics that ends up being like, essentially what you're doing is you're raising the number of cards in your hand. Kind of what happens is when you play it, it's kind of like you're drawing a weak version of it, kind of. So there's some, there's inherent card advantage too because I'm really getting two spells out of a single card. And it's proven to be a very valuable

tool for, I mean like as you'll see, we put it in other sets and it is it definitely adds a nice layer of interesting choices to any set you put it into. Okay, so we do it in those sets and then some time goes by and we come to time spiral.

So time spiral, let's see my order of things, yeah. So time spiral, I was looking for a mechanic. So if you remember correctly, the set had this theme of past, present, and future. So I was trying to figure out, I wanted to bring back a mechanic that for each of the things sort of played into what it was. So for present day I went along with the idea of, I took fading, I redid it as vanishing, but the idea of how do you about the

present? Well how about something that's not going to last very long? You've got to live in the now. And then I put scry in the future site. Well how do you tell the future? Well, how about something that's not going to last very long? You got to live in the now. And then I put scry in the future site. Well, how do you tell the future? Well, you look into the future. So I was trying to figure out what mechanic I wanted to represent the past. And that one seemed pretty clear, flashback. The name was perfect. The mechanic was like, literally is like, you know, I look in the past and I get to play things again. So I put Flashback into Time Spiral as the past mechanic. That is why, for example, Time Spiral does not show up in Planar Chaos because it was meant to be the mechanic that tied into the past. So it went in the first set.

Now, there was one card in Future Sight. And the reason for that is we did the mix and match spells where I took mechanics that I thought were cool together and I mixed them. So there was one card a card called Martialing Cry it was a sorcery that gave all your creatures plus one plus one

and vigilance and it had cycling two and flashback three and a white. So the cool idea of this the combo I liked about this was that if you chose to cycle it, you then later could flashback it. Like sometimes early on,

you know, sometimes you want to, it's hard to make use of your thing. And oh, Martial and Cry costs one white white and then costs three white for flashback cost. So for example, if you don't have double white, I could cycle it, get a card for it, and then on three white for flashback cost. So, for example, if you don't have double white, I could cycle it, get a card for it, and then on the next turn, I could cast it, assuming I don't have two white, for example.

But anyway, so I brought it back in Time Spiral. Time Spiral also, I believe, was the first set that did off-color flashback costs. I don't think we did that in Odyssey. So the idea was, one of the cool things about flashback is because it had a cost, it could allow us to put it in the secondary color. Now the trick when we do that is, you've got to make sure that the secondary color is something, you know, it's a little bit hybrid-like.

Because if I can cast it for one color and recast it for a second color, well, fundamentally the thing I'm doing has to be something both colors can do. But it's a neat way to sort of get people to splash into a second color. It's a way to sort of make a multicolored card without it actually technically being a multicolored card. Okay. Then next, actually next is not even so next is Shards of Alara next is Shards of Alara so Shards of Alara

I don't know if I've done the podcast on Shards of Alara so one of the ways is we ended up Bill really wanted the idea of it being tricolor world but just the arcs not the wedges wedges would be later obviously and so he went to the creative team and he liked the idea of

some sort of factioning of the arcs and the creative team came back with a really interesting idea what if there was a world that something happened and it fractured into five and each world only had three colors of mana that two colors were missing and that the worlds were shaped by the fact that whichever was

the central color, whichever color had its two allies but none of its enemies, okay, well, that color gets to thrive. You know, what do you do in a world where white has no enemies or blue has no enemies? You know, what happens? And the creative did a really neat job of coming up with five very distinct worlds. You know, Bant was a world where, sort of a Camelot-y, high fantasy world.

And Esper was a world where, sort of a technology world where people have started replacing themselves with artificial parts. And, what's next?

Next is Grixis. It's sort of a very cruel world that's slowly dying with, you know, no, you with no life slowly seeping out of it. Jun was the red world, which was kind of this more wild sort of chaotic world.

And then Naya was the green world, that's this lush sort of, had a little bit of a South American vibe to it. But anyway, one of the worlds was Grixis. And so we were trying to find a Grixis mechanic. And so we had done a lot of different things. And the thing about Grixis, because it was the black-centered world, was it was very death-oriented. And so you're trying to find something that could play into that. Like, you know, black is very

death-centric. And it actually inspired me because I... One of the things... The reason that we had done Flashback originally on Instants and Sorceries was that if you put it on permanence, you keep getting them back. And we didn't want you... Like, the goal of it wasn't that you got to cast it endlessly. It's that you got to cast it once. So in Flashback we just put it on Instants and Sorceries.

But, when we were tooling around there, I experimented with the idea of what if we could do Flashback for creatures. And I believe... What did we call this? I think we called it Flashdance of the Dead is what we called it because it was kind of like flashback but also

like reanimation so the idea we came at we ended up calling this Unearthed was sort of doing creature flashback and the way it worked was that I had creatures and when they die I could pay their Unearthed cost if I pay their Unearthed cost then I get to bring them back with haste for one turn and

they could attack for one turn or do whatever they want to for one turn but then they got exiled at end of turn. So the idea was it was my version of a flashback spell for creatures and we had tried a bunch of other things. In fact we had a different mechanic for real quickly. There was a mechanic we had tried a bunch of other things. In fact, we had a different mechanic, real quickly. There was a mechanic we had, the trigger of things dying. Kind of like Cabal Ghoul, where every time something died, you'd get a trigger. We ended up making a cycle. And there is, I assume, a blue, black, and a red one. We ended up doing it in, I think we ended up doing it as a as a a limited set of

cars is that right or was that in john i'm not trying to question whether the junk mechanic anyway um we played around with a bunch of things so i bring this up because this was you start to see flashback start to stretch its wings a little bit. That flashback was such a cool mechanic that we actually started saying, okay, how else could we use it? And so Unearthed was sort of like, you know, not quite flashback, but a different kind of flashback. And Unearthed, by the way, was popular. I'm sure we will find Unearthed.

We talked about Unearthed coming back in Innistrad, which I will get to in a second. Obviously, we want Flashback, but we were looking at Unearth as a possibility there. I do think you'll see Unearth again. I think Unearth is a pretty cool mechanic. Okay, then we get to Innistrad. So I was doing Innistrad. So Innistrad had a graveyard theme. I, in fact, originally resisted using flashback because I was concerned that I didn't want Innistrad feeling too much like Odyssey. And Odyssey was a graveyard set that had flashback. And so I'm like, well, maybe I shouldn't use flashback. So I looked at a lot of other things.

And in the end, it's just like, oh, flashback was so right. It was so perfect. And so we decided to put Flashback in. Eric, once again, by the way, in development, would do off-color Flashback. I think he really liked it in Time Spiral, and it helped him do some stuff that he wanted to do. So one of the interesting things about Innistrad, by the way, is there are actually only three mechanics in Innistrad, although kind of a fourth, and I'll explain in a second.

So there was double-faced cards, so it had transform. One could argue maybe the werewolf mechanic was a mechanic. And then it had morbid, and then it had flashback. So we used the double-faced cards to show sort of the dark transformation. We used the morbid cards to talk about how death obsession of the world. And we used Flashback to be graveyard science, which we talked about sort of what's more, you know, gothic horror than things

coming back from the dead. And so, we definitely had a lot of creatures that returned. And then we had the spells and Flashback. One of the things is, I was trying to just use less mechanics overall. I mean, obviously, you'll see this theme coming back around in modern day. But one of the nice things about Flashback was

it is a really deep mechanic, and so it let us make a lot of cards, and it let us do a lot of things, and one of the things that you talk about with mechanics is how deep they are. Now, obviously, Flashback only goes to instant and sorcery, so it's got that limitation. But essentially anything you can put on Instant or Sorcery with a few exceptions can work as a Flashback card. You really can add Flashback to just

about any effect. Now certain effects work a little better with Flashback. There's certain kinds of things that have some synergy, but Flashback is a pretty wide open thing. And so Innistrad and Dark Ascension use Flashback. Obviously, for Avacyn Restored, which was the third set in the block, we did a mechanical reboot, so Flashback didn't stay there. But anyway, the...

Once again, like, every time we use Flashback, it's a big hit. You know, it is one of the player's most favorite mechanics. Did it win? I did a head-to-head on old mechanics. I think Flashback might have won that poll. I'm trying to think what the... It was in the finals that it didn't win. I think it did. I think it did win. I think Flashback did win. Anyway, so speaking of other ways to make use of it, let's talk about Amonkhet. So Amonkhet, Amonkhet started

with this desire to, we knew when we studied Egypt that Egypt had this obsession with death. That's just a big thing about Egyptian mythology. Ancient Egypt, they were very very focused on death. Not that a lot of cultures weren't, but and so we were trying to very focused on death. Not that a lot of cultures weren't. And so we were trying to figure some stuff out. We ended up actually getting two different mechanics, both of which were kind of flashback variants. So Amiket had not one, but two flashback variants.

So the first one came about because we were trying to capture the idea of mummies. The idea that you die, you get embalmed, then you come back as a mummy. And we fiddled around. I talked about this during the Amonkhet podcast I did not long ago. And in the end, we ended up with this technology where when you flash it back, you get a token. And this solves, by the way,

the problem I had with Unearthed was the reason I had done Unearthed, the creature comes back just for a turn, is I didn't want you casting the creature again, and I didn't know how to guarantee the creature wouldn't go back to the graveyard if it died. And so, by making the token copy, we actually figured out a solution to that. So now we have Embalm,

which is kind of like another version of a flashback creature, but this time when I flash it back, I only get it once, but it's permanent. I get to keep it as a creature. The copy, the clone technology on tokens allowed us to make something that was kind of unearthed, but a more permanent unearth. Now, that said, you have a lot more flexibility when the creature only comes back for a turn. You can push things a lot more.

It is hard to make embalmed creatures. I mean, we made them, obviously, but it's trickier to make them because you have to sort of justify the creature coming back on a permanent basis. When you just unearth them, you know, you got some utility out of them, but it wasn't equal to the full weight of the creature. The other mechanic that we did called Aftermath. So Aftermath actually ironically started us with us playing around in split card space. We had done, we had a brainstorming session. We were trying to figure out things that would play nicely with delirium. And we came up with the idea of split cards

that had one side instant and one side sorcery. So that you could get instant and a sorcery into your graveyard with one card. That went through a lot of iterations from its original brainstorming and in the end we ended up making a card that essentially was sort of what we called split back because it's kind of a cross between a split card and a flashback card. And the idea for Aftermath is you cast the card, and then you, I'm sorry, you cast the first part of it from your hand, and the second part you can only cast from the graveyard. So essentially what it was was it was a flashback spell, but you're not flashing back the same thing you cast originally.

So that I have a different spell. And those were fun because we could make effects that sort of work together. So if you had enough mana, you could cast the first part and then flashback the second part all in one turn. Like I said earlier, we tried to occasionally make flashback spells where you'd want to play it more than once in a turn so that playing it the second time and flashbacking it, you could do some combo potential.

But with Aftermath, because we can design the effects and they are two different effects, it made it a lot easier for us to do that. So, okay, so we managed to use it a bunch of times. Also, I will say that in the future plan, there was another set upcoming that really wanted to use flashback. And it made a lot of sense, mechanically made a lot of sense.

But we ended up going a different route with it. But I, well, I don't know definitively when flashback's coming back. I do know that it's such a popular and fun mechanic that I just believe it's a matter of time before we see flashback again. I really think flashback is a, like I said, best mechanic I ever made. And I think there's a lot of arguments that it's one of the best mechanics Magic has ever made, let alone something I personally have made. Okay, so a little trivia here.

How many cards exist with Flashback? So you guys all can guess. Okay, the answer is 113. You guys all can guess. Okay, the answer is 113. So flashbacks, by the way, have we made, I'm trying to think if we ever made some flashbacks, fellas,

in other supplemental sets. I don't know. I didn't write that down. I do know the total is 113. Okay, what color, next terrific question, what color has the highest percentage of all the flashback cards, of the 113 flashback cards, what color has the highest percentage? In the flashback cards, of the 113 flashback cards,

what color has the highest percentage? In fact, I'll give you a clue. Over one-fourth of all flashback spells are in one color. What color is that? And the answer is red. What's number two? So red is 26%. What is 21%? Green. Number three with 19%?

Blue. Number four with 17%? Black. And in fifth place with 14%? White. So one of the things about flashback is when we did flashback, we definitely like when we first brought it into um into odyssey we put it in all the colors um but one of the things we've done over time especially so i think in odyssey it was pretty even i think we might skew it a little bit towards certain colors um and then we brought it back we started doing more so like i know when we brought it back in time spiral that it was it was it was a green and red thing um and then when we brought it back in Time Spiral that it was a green and red

thing. And then when we brought it back in Innistrad, everybody had access to it, but once again, I think red and green were the colors we pushed

toward. Why red and green? That's an interesting question. We do, like, Innistrad did have a black theme with Flashback with zombies and making

zombie tokens that a lot of, in fact, we had a vertical cycle at one point, but I think I can cut back. Usually what happens when we have a theme, we want to sort of focus in on the theme, and so what we did was we usually pick a couple colors to focus it on,

and red and green have been the flashback colors we've been set a focus. I'm trying to think why. I mean, a lot of times it has to do with what other things are going on in the set. Like, I think in Time Spiral, it was a matter of divvying up different themes we had,

and it just ended up there that that's where it ended up. I guess when I think about it in Innish Rod, we definitely, it wasn't, I think certain colors had the flashback enablers. It's not that all the colors didn't have access to flashback,

just certain colors more played into the flashback deck, if you will. So, I'm not too far from work, but let me, now that I've walked through the history of flashback, let me talk a little bit about it from a design standpoint. Where I think, why I think it's such a strong mechanic. So, number one is, I think it makes use of one of our most valuable resources, which is the graveyard. Because one of the things in general is it's nice when you can find ways

to elegantly do something that if you didn't do it elegantly, would be a lot of text. Imagine, for example, if when I cast this, I exiled it. Then I could cast it out of exile and then put it somewhere else. There's a lot of words I can use to explain this, but the fact that I can use the graveyard as a resting place, it's pretty clean and simple.

And what it lets you do is flashback really gives you extra... It essentially lets you draw cards, but in kind of a subtle way. It gives you extra utility, but it allows you to do it in a way that is... you extra utility, but it allows you to do it in a way that is, you know, it, I mean, the nice thing about it is the graveyard adds a lot of nuance. There's a lot of skill that comes with it. There's a lot of depth to play.

And that one of the nice things about flashback is, while a pretty straightforward mechanic, okay, I can cast it out of my graveyard. I mean, there's a few rules to learn, but not much. It mostly, I mean, you have to understand that once you cast it, it goes away. That you only get to cast it one more time. But it's a pretty straightforward thing, and it follows all the casting rules. So it's a pretty straightforward mechanic. But it has

a lot of the elegance of, like, one of the things in Indusrata I think that it really worked well is it's the kind of mechanic that's easy to understand. Beginners don't have trouble understanding how it works, but that sort of mastering the value of it and when to cast it and when to flash it back and understanding all those elements, it's proved to be really skill testing. So it's been a very, like it has this nice balance between it's flavorful, it does something

people inherently want to do, but it has enough strategic depth that when you put it in a set, it just adds a lot of value. Now, it also has the ability to cross colors, the fact that you can do flashback cross of different colors, allows you to use it as a means to sort of lock together certain colors for themes and stuff. It also is a mechanic that you can easily push like some mechanics it's hard to make constructive values out of this is really easy it's got a very simple knob to use and so it's easy to develop it's got a lot of design space to it i talked

about earlier you know literally any instant or sorcery spell with really few exceptions can essentially gain flashback there's no effects that can essentially gain flashback. There's no effects that can't use flashback. Or almost no effects. So it has a lot of utility to it. It's got a deep design space to it. It's very easy to develop. It's easy to use in higher

level play. It's got a lot of nuance in it. Those are all really strong things. Those are things that make you want to just make, like, one of the things I find interesting is flashbacks, one of those spells, where numerous times I've wanted to use it in sets

and the answer is, oh, we've used it too recently to use it again. You've got to wait a little bit. Or we've recently done something that's flashback-ish, like Unearth or Aftermath or whatever, oh, you can't quite do it there it's the kind of mechanics that we always wanted to do and a lot of times when we're mapping out the future

one of the things is we tend to do a lot of graveyard sets and so whenever we do a graveyard set it is always like, ooh, can we do flashback? Flashback? It's a graveyard set. Can we do flashback? So in that way, it's been really good. Now, there's a few downsides to it. Let me walk through those. The biggest is the memory issue of I have something that matters, but it's sitting not... One of the worries we have from this is a lot of the ambush problems,

which is you attack, I have a car in my graveyard that's going to destroy you, and it was public knowledge and you just looked, you would have saw it. And so you feel dumb because there's open information that you didn't pay attention to. And we try to be careful of stuff like that. So one of the things we've definitely leaned toward with flashback is we tend to make them sorceries unless they're reactive. What that means is

if it's something I can do at any time then we make it a sorcery to keep you from being able to surprise flash it back on people. If it's reactive meaning well yeah it's an instant because I want to react to things, but it's not the kind of thing most likely I'm reacting to mid-combat, then we'll make instants

out of it. Like, Counterspell's a good example where, eh, I'm not really using it in combat unless there's some spell happening in combat I have to react to. Now remember, when we first made Flashback or Odyssey in general, we made a little icon for the graveyard. A little, uh uh looks like a little

tombstone and the icon meant this card is active in the graveyard um it didn't just go on flashback spells because there were a few other things that were active in the graveyard in the Odyssey block um but then we went to the new card frame in Mirrodin which was shortly thereafter and the new card frame couldn't support the icon at the time. I think maybe now it can, I'm not sure. But we ended up having to remove the icon after Odyssey block, and so there still is some memory things going on. I mean,

you know, I would say your strengths, your weaknesses are your strengths push too far. Well, the versatility and the amount of extra skill it adds to it, the problem there is it also has a lot, there's extra memory. You're making your hand bigger, essentially. And your opponent's making this hand bigger in a way where you see cards in their hand. And so there's a bunch of you sort of having to monitor what they have

and remember what they have access to. For you, it just makes your hand bigger. So from a decision point point there's extra decisions so in general what we found is we have to be careful when you use flashback because it itself is a mechanic that adds a little more complexity than in a vacuum you might realize so it's the kind of but but it's a very deep mechanic so what I've learned is when you put flashback in a set, you tend to have less overall mechanics

because you can use flashback a little bit more and it's soaking up some of the complexity. Now, the good news is, you know, once I have a couple flashback spells in my set, I might as well have a bunch. Once I'm monitoring the graveyard, I'm monitoring the graveyard. So usually what happens is there's a cost that comes with using flashback, which is there's a certain amount of complexity, but it's

a sunk cost. So once you do flashback for a few spells, hey, you might as well do them for a bunch, and the mechanic is pretty deep. I'm right by the office. The final thought I have on flashback, I'm trying to think of other sort of ramification uses of it. We have found that it does some good stuff

for both trying to get some fluidity and long game stuff. The nice thing about it is it adds a more control-ish element because Flashback isn't super relevant usually till later in the game now we do make some cheap flashback spells we get a flashback something it's cheap up front cheap to flash it back um sometimes what you'll do there is if we have a set if the set cares about casting of spells if spells getting like just say for example i mean prowess is now an evergreen mechanic but uh let's say we were making the jess guy or something something like that and then hey it matters that you're casting spells we can make cheaper spells with it so that the fact that you're casting multiple

things for turn can matter for example in innish rod um it played into the werewolf mechanic we made a bunch of cheap flashback spells so if you were fighting down werewolves and wanted to turn the werewolves back into humans oh well here well, here's some cheap flashback spells. You could cast them twice, and that could shut off the werewolves. If you're trying to push more toward a control aspect, you just can make effects that are a little bit bigger, but have more expensive flashback costs. So the idea is, if I can make it to the later game, which is what control decks usually are about, then I have a lot of power.

So the idea is, a lot of how control decks work is, I stall, I stall, I stall, and then I get to the point where I start getting the advantage. And flashback gets to be that. So that's one of the, I mean, like I said, flashback is also super versatile. The fact that I can make it a very cheap thing.

Plus, like I said before, if you have a set that's very graveyard-centric, you also can do the thing where the flashback costs are cheaper than the normal costs. So now the game is get these things into your graveyard, discard them, mill them or something. So flashback not only has a lot of the other elements, but it's very flexible in how you use it.

Like from a set design aspect, it is a very sort of potent tool. And I think probably, like I said, I did this thing where we polled everybody in the pit, R&D, and sort of asked what people thought were the top five mechanics of all time. And there was some disagreement, but I believe Flashback made almost everybody's list.

And on numerous people's lists, mine included, it was number one. And there's some awesome contenders. There's some awesome intent, I mean, contenders, there's some really strong magic mechanics, obviously. But I think the reason people put it so high is, you know, it has so much versatility in building,

it has so much depth in play, it has so many, you know, it has interesting knobs for constructed, and we just know how easy it is to play. So it just, it is an awesome mechanic. So anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying my, I'm trying to figure out whether I should be doing more. I'm trying to figure out where to focus, you know, when you get 450 podcasts in.

So one of the things I'm trying here is looking more at history of individual mechanics and things. So if that's something you guys enjoy, you can enjoy it today. I've done a few in the past. I did a cycling podcast long time ago. Um, uh, and I've done some on stuff like hybrid and split cars and stuff that are, I'm not sure if there's mechanics exactly, but, uh, if you guys would like to see more mechanic podcasts where I sort of walk through kind of how they got made and how they got used and where, where they got used. Um, I'm happy to do that. So my little tag off for today

is if you like today's and you'd like to hear more about sort of individual mechanics I would love to do that but so I'm now actually pulling into Wizards I'm actually driving to work

not driving to school I'm actually driving to work so I'm pulling in today I'm pulling into my parking lot so we all know what that means we mean this is the end of my drive to work instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys next time bye bye