Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #468: Poison

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the history of poison counters in the game.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I dropped Adam off at camp again. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart. Poison. So I want to talk a little bit. It's an alternate wind condition. And I want to talk a little bit about its history and a little bit about the challenges of designing with poison. Because it is an interesting thing. Okay, so, first and foremost, go back in our time machine back to 1994 in a set called Legends. So in Legends there were two cards. One was called Pit Scorpion and the other was called Serpent Generator.

And those were the first times ever they introduced this idea of a poison counter. And the idea of a poison counter was that if you got enough poison counters, 10, you just automatically lost the game. And the idea was, it was kind of this different kind of way to lose. Normally in magic, you have life gain, you know, you have 20 20 life but you have ways to offset that that my opponent can do 20 damage to me and I can still be alive because I can gain life

the idea of poison was I mean it started as a flavor thing if you notice both the cards are literally things that are poisonous things one's a scorpion one makes snakes but the idea was I think it started because they were trying to capture the flavor of actual literally things that are poisonous things. One's a scorpion. One makes snakes. But the idea was I think it started because they were trying to capture

the flavor of actual literal poison. And so they came up with the idea of this sort of alternate way to win. And what happened was for a couple years, every once in a while we'd make a poison card. None of them were good. All the poison cards

actually were pretty bad. But I noticed that people liked playing, I liked playing with them, just because people like alt win conditions. It was an interesting alt win condition. And in the early days, back in my pre-Wizards Johnny deck building days, I used to try to win with weird win conditions. So of course, of course, of course I made a poison deck. I made a bunch of poison decks. Because it was a challenge to win with weird win conditions. So of course, of course, of course I made a poison deck. I made a bunch of poison decks.

Because it was a challenge to win with a poison deck. Poison decks back in the day were not particularly good. And so once I got to Wizards, I was really excited to make some poison cards. And so I I think there was a poison card in Visions

that I made. And I think that was the last one. I think I was a poison card in Visions that I made. And I think that was the last one. I think I made, I got here, made one poison card, and then R&D decided to pull back on poison. But I wasn't deterred. So when the very first set I designed, Tempest, I decided that I wanted to blow up poison. And so we had done poison in Visions. So I was like, okay, we can do poison.

wanted to blow up poison. And so we had done poison and vision, so I was like, okay, we can do poison. And in fact, the code name of the set was Bogavati, which is like an Indian land of poisoned snakes, I believe. So clear by the code name, poison was meant to be a really big part of it. So I turned Tempest in,

and I think there were like, there were a lot of poison. I don't remember exactly, but it was like you know, 30, 40, 50 poison cards. There was a lot of poison cards. In fact, it was probably on the high end. It might have been closer to 50. And not just creatures that poison you. I had spells that poisoned you. I had all sorts of things that poisoned you. And it was one of the major themes of the set. And then it gets into design or development and it turned out

that I had put a lot in the set. I had overstuffed it a little bit. It was my first time, a very common first designer mistake is I just put way more in the set than fit in the set. For example, the two main mechanics

from the next year from Urza Saga, cycling and echo, were both in my set. And in fact, there was so much stuff in the design for Tempest that I think for like five or six years, every set had a card that originally had appeared in a Tempest design file. Just there were so many cards that didn't get used that were cool cards. So I put it in. I was all excited. And then, instead of 50 cards, they whittled it down to 40, then 30, then 20, then 15, then 10, then 8, then 6, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1, then, you know what? We don't want poison in the game. And they removed all the poison.

They decided that poison wasn't something good for magic. At the time, it was, they were on very weak cards, so the cards were not super sought after, mostly because it was a very niche strategy and the cards weren't particularly strong. But I watched and I realized that a lot of people made poison decks. And one of my beliefs is, one of the ways to understand something that's popular is, if people do something when it sucks, when it sucks, you've got to like it. There has to be something there.

It's the same argument I made when I wanted to put the tribal stuff to make Onslaught have a major tribal theme. My big argument was, look, people are making the Goblin decks and the Zombie decks and the Merfolk decks. They're making the decks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're not any good, but the fact that people keep making them says something, right?

The fact that people keep doing something that isn't particularly strong says that, wow, there must be something about this. Like, if winning isn't the reason, well, there must be something fun about it. So I became determined to, well I mean I was determined with Tempest but I was like okay

I will find a way and a place to get poison in the game that was my vow so okay so that was 94 I made Tempest well I'm sorry, 94 was when Ice Age came out. Then I made Tempest.

Tempest came out in 98, so I was working on it in 96, probably, 96, 97. Anyway, in 96, Unglued came out, Anyway, in 96, Unglued came out. And Unglued was out of the gate and very, very popular. For those who don't know, I've talked about this. I believe that there was a big audience for it, but we overprinted. So early on, there was a lot of excitement. People really liked it. And a lot of cards were bought.

So much so that they greenlit Unglue 2 really quickly. I was going to do it, I think, so it came out in 96, so in 97, I got greenlit to do it. So the way the timing worked out was, Tempest had, they had just killed Poison and Tempest, and shortly thereafter, I was making Unglue 2. So I'm like, okay, okay, well, maybe if it was in a black border thing,

maybe it could be a silver border thing. So I put a major Poison theme into Ungled 2. So I'm like, okay, okay, well maybe if it was in a black border thing, maybe it could be a silver border thing. So I put a major poison theme into Unglued 2. In fact, the theme was, there was a theme of animated vegetables, and all the animated vegetables had poison. So the vegetables were bad for you. And I had cards like Mad Beats Down, where they were beets, and, what was it, Celery Stalker, and Rutabaga of the Night, which is a play off of Spirit of the Night. Anyway, I made all these animated weird poison vegetables. And I made a bunch of other cards. In fact, I took some stuff that I had done in Tempest, and they put it into Unglue, too.

And then, Unglue, because we overprinted it, a lot of it, we had to burn a bunch of it, and we had to get rid of a bunch of it. And so it went from being something that they were very excited about to going, oh, I guess people don't like this. So they killed Unglue 2. Very funny. I had art. I mean, it was really late in the process that it got killed.

So anyway, okay. Take number two to was really late in the process that I got killed. So anyway, okay. Take number two to get poisoned in the game failed. So I decided, okay, I got to play the long game. Clearly, they didn't want it in Black Border. And Silver Border wasn't happening anytime soon. So I said, okay, I have to be patient. I have to look and find the right place to do it. Okay, so we flash forward to Future Sight.

So Future Sight was the third. In Time Spiral block, Time Spiral looked at the past, Planar Chaos looked at the alternate present, and Future Sight looked at the future. So we had a bunch of cards that were teasing the future. So this was a great place to tease the return of poison. So I ended up making a mechanic called Poisonous.

So the way Poisonous worked, so original poison, creatures originally had a poison, there was no keyword for it. You just, it would say on it, when I hit you, give poison counter. So I made a mechanic called Poisonous, and worked was, poisonous two meant if I damaged you, you got two poison counters. And we try to make sure that the poison rate was higher than the power rate. So usually your power and your poison were close to the same. Sometimes you did more poison than your power. But if the poison is less, let's say for example, I have a 2-2 creature your power. But if the poison is less, let's say, for

example, I have a 2-2 creature with poisonous one. Well, the problem is I would kill you with the creature at the same time I would kill you with the poison. So we want to make sure that the poison would kill you quicker than the damage would. Anyway, I made poisonous, and I think there were a couple cards with poisonous. There was a sliver that hadous. I think there were two cards with Poisonous. I think a Normal Creature and then a Sliver that granted Poisonous to all Slivers. Which, by the way, won the Pro Tour. A little side note.

That there was a two-headed giant Pro Tour where people drafted, and the winning strategy, the one that won the Pro Tour was a Sliver deck in which often the win for Slivers was Poison. Because if you give all your Slivers Poison and you

sort of Alpha Strike with them, all you needed to do was 10 damage and you won the game. Anyway. So I put that in there as a little teaser of I want to do Poison. Now, R&D let me put it there because okay, I was teasing at things.

It's fine to tease at poison. It was on two cards. Neither card was particularly ironically, they thought, not tournament relevant although one of them won the Pro Tour later in Limited. So, I got to put a couple cards in Future Sight.

To me, that was kind of like announcing I was going to try to find a place for poison. So we flash forward to Scars of Mirrodin. So Scars of Mirrodin, we were trying to fit, the big thing with Scars of Mirrodin

is I wanted to, we were reintroducing the Phyrexians. And I wanted the Phyrexians to feel scary. I wanted the Phyrexians to feel like, oh, I really should be

worried about them. These guys are scary people. Or scary creatures. And so we wrote down, what was it? We listed four words. They were toxic. They were relentless. They were viral.

And they were, one more word. Anyway, toxic was one of the words. And so I decided that poison would be an interesting fit for them. That they kill you in a way that they sort of corrupt you and kill you in a neat and different way. So now this was designed. Remember, Tempest's design I put poison in. So just being in the design doesn't inherently make it guaranteed that it's going to make it all through the process. So I really wanted to deliver something that I thought was a superior experience to make people want to do that.

Okay, so the first thing we did is we went and got the mechanic from FutureSight, which was Poisonous. And so the idea is, oh, this is Poisonous 2, this is Poisonous 3. And we started playing with it. And the problem we found And so the idea is, oh, this is Poisonous 2, this is Poisonous 3. And we started playing with it. And the problem we found with it was, well, two things. One is, it was very locked. So I mean, it was locked, meaning if I say Poisonous 2, I'm only giving you two poison.

So let's say you have six poison and I attack with my two, two poisonous two creature. What people tend to do, they're like, oh, I mean, if you have other means to get rid of it, maybe block it. But let's say you have some choice to make. You're like, oh, well, I know I can't die to the poison. I only have six poison. Okay, I'll let that through and I'll deal with something else. And that there was no

suspense. There was no... The poisonous creatures weren't particularly scary. They didn't even get scary until I had enough of them that you couldn't block them all and you were at a point where I had lethal poison damage. Up until then, it was like, eh. And another problem with it was

there wasn't a lot of interaction. The only interaction that happened was if I could use it to grant evasion to my creature. That if I had poison, it's okay, I want to hit you. Well, if I can make the creatures... Now, I should note at this point, by the way, we hadn't yet added We hadn't added Wither yet. We hadn't added the minus one, minus one part to infect yet. It was just poisonous. It literally just

gave you poison. And the only cards they interacted with were cards that sort of helped get you through. Made you unblockable, you know, grant you poison. And the only cards they interacted with were cards that sort of helped get you through. Made you unblockable, you know, grabbed you flying. So, it was very limited on the cards that would interact with it. And then one day, I can't remember how we made the switch over. The idea was

we were looking for a way to make it more dynamic. And it came up, well, what if, what if instead of um, oh, I know what it was, I know what it was, is we had looked at Wither, and Wither had a template that said, if this creature, if this damage is a creature, that damage is done in the form of minus one, minus one counters. So we were inspired by Wither when we made the first version of Infect, which just said, damage to players is turned into poison counters.

And the reason I liked that was, okay, now you have six poison and I attack with a 2-2 creature, now you're not sure whether you're supposed to block with me or not. Because who knows, maybe I have a giant growth and you'll be dead. So it

allowed the poison creatures to have a much more scary quality. Because you didn't quite always know what they would do, it made you have to worry and sweat about them a little bit more. It made them scarier. Instead of being some known quantity that I can ignore for a while, every time something hit me, I had to go, Oh, do I think he could boost or something? And putting equipment on it, putting enchantments on it,

like anything that naturally boosts just now makes them more powerful. And in Scars of Mirrodin, we were on Mirrodin, so we had, there was an equipment sub-theme, because Mirrodin is tied to equipment. So it just naturally sort of fits some stuff together, and it made it much more dynamic. And the other thing it did is a lot more things care about power than, you know, I mean, there are

definitely things that help you get through, but there's even more cards, and all those cards still matter. Getting through still matter. But now we added every card that cared about power. Equipment that affected power not matter. Ores that affected power not matter. Giant growths or any sort of effect that boosts power not matter. All of a

sudden, there's all these different spells, and you get a lot more options of how you can interact with it. The other thing, by the way, real quick, which is we started using Wither and decided that Wither flavorfully matched the Phyrexians. And so for a while, some Phyrexians had Poison and some Phyrexians had Wither some Phyrexians had wither. And the idea essentially was, well, they're toxic. Maybe they're toxic to you.

Maybe they're toxic to your creatures. And then at one point, we crossed the streams. We made a creature that had both wither and poison. Not poison. It's an early form of infect. And it played. The flavor was so good, we started doing that on more cards. And eventually what I found was, like, most of the cards with infect had wither on it.

I'm like, why are we adding that exchange? Let's just make it part of infect. So we took away wither and just put the wither ability into infect. Okay, so let's talk about some of the challenges of designing poison. So one of the truisms that I've always held about poison is I do not like, I like the fact that you can't get rid of poison. There is a card called leeches made in homelands. That's incredibly weak, but I never liked the card. So why? Why did I feel that way? Well, number one, one of the complaints we always get about poison is, how does it feel

different from life? Why isn't it, you know, isn't that just another life track? And the answer was that A, obviously it's a different amount, and B, the thing I really liked about it was

unlike life, like let's say my opponent, they start to give him 20 life. How much damage do I have to do to defeat them? Well, maybe 20, maybe more than 20, you know. I mean, there are games where I've done 40 damage to my opponent because they've been gaining a lot of life, and so I wanted to sort of change it up and say, okay, that poison sort of has absolute, and it also made poison an interesting answer. Because let's say your opponent has a lot of life gained. Well, I could put some poison in my deck, and hey, it doesn't matter how much life they have.

They could be at 200 life. They still die to 10 poison. So I really like the idea of poison being an alternative to dealing with, for example, when life gets out of control. When life gets hard. And I like the idea that it's had sort of a locked state to it, that you knew what it was and it wasn't variable.

The other thing that I, the reason I didn't want to get removed is that I wanted poison to be something that had a different feel to it. And what I found was once you couldn't remove poison, every poison just felt, it just made poison feel a little different. Like you're just one inch closer to death. With life, because you know you can gain life, it's sort of like, well, okay, I'm at some low life amount, but am I really? Maybe I've wasted my time to get back.

Every time I get poisoned, I'm one inch closer to death, and nothing is going to change that. So I held really firm on the fact that I didn't want anything removing poison counters. So people say, but poison, there's antidotes. If you actually get poisoned in real life, there's answers to that. And I'm like, I get that. And oftentimes we work really hard to sort of match flavors where we can. But sometimes the thing I cared more about was having

poison have its own feel, you know, both emotionally and mechanically, that I cared more about that than I cared about it necessarily matching everything about poison in the real world. Okay, it's magical poison. It works a little bit differently. I think that's okay. There's this belief that part of doing top-down things is that you want to capture every aspect of it exactly. And my point is, better designs is capturing the feel of it than capturing all the physical similarities of it.

That sometimes people get so caught up in it working exactly the same that what they miss is what you want is not, like in writing, in writing one of the things they tell you is your goal is to understand what you want, how you want people to react to your character and then do things that force the reaction you want and that don't... one of the biggest problems sometimes is in the drive to reach for realism for characters, you do things that contradict the emotional impact you're trying to have. And that's a big truism of storytelling, and it's true for game design, which is how people react in real life versus how they react in fiction is not the same.

That what I might really do might read as false in a script, for example. That there's a lot of classic examples of, here's something that really happened and now I'm going to put it in a script. And the audience goes, I don't believe that. And so one of the things you have to do is when you're designing something, it is not, don't fall in the trap of trying to capture every little nuance of it. What you're trying to do is capture the feel of it. So what did I want with poison?

I wanted poison to be scary. I wanted poison to be something where you're kind of afraid of poison. You know, like if you see a poison snake coming towards you, you're not like, well, I don't think that, I don't think that snake has enough poison to kill me. This is not the way you think. You're like, oh my God, this is a poisonous snake. Let's get away from him. You know, even if you read a book,

you're like, well, one snake cannot kill you. They do not have enough venom to kill a human being over a certain weight. So if you weigh over 100 pounds, a single bite of the snake cannot kill you. Your response to that is not one of, oh, well, now that I understand it can't kill me, okay, I guess it can bite me. No, it's a snake.

It's poisonous. You know, you're afraid of it. I wanted you to be afraid of the poison creatures. I wanted poison to be, and I want poison to be a different kind of wind condition. You know, and one of the things that I, one of these days I'll do, have I done a podcast on wind conditions? One of these days I'll, I'll talk about wind conditions. But, um, the, the big issue for me with poison in general was that there's something about

it that captured people's attention. There's something that really endeared people to it. So anyway, anyway, so I put infect out, and let me tell you, this is an important part of the story. So I put infect out and it is an important part of the story. So I put an infect out, and it is super polarizing. We look at the God Book study, and it's the number one mechanic. It's the most popular mechanic in the set.

But, it's also the least popular mechanic in the set, meaning that people vote for favorite and least. Now, overall, it was the most popular mechanic, meaning more people voted it their favorite mechanic than people that voted it low. So while I say there was lovers and haters, the lovers outnumbered the haters. But what I found is there are a lot of fans of Infect, a lot of Infect gets played, but there are a lot of people that dislike Infect.

And one of the biggest complaints, here's one thing that's funny is, I get a lot of complaints. The two biggest complaints about Poison is, A, it feels too much like life, and B, you can't get rid of Poison. Which I always find funny, since those seem to be contradictory complaints. You know, I think one of the keys of any kind of game is, you want to sort of find ways to make things that are similar but a little different. The fact that it's kind of like life but not exactly life to me is good. It means that there's a lot of interactions you can do. You know it's easier to grasp how things will work but at the same time it just is a little bit different. Now people who dislike it complain that I've lowered the life total from 20 to 10. And I'm like, I have, but, big aftrick, you have a much smaller pool of creatures to pull from.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've lowered your life total, but with the promise that, well, instead of having, you know, 10,000 creatures to choose from, you now have 20 creatures or 30 creatures to choose from. And given that some of those creatures are in colors that, you know, like, don't support poison as much as others, like, okay, let's say I want to play mono green or black green. Like, I have a lot less choices. Like, just mono green, I want to play a mono green poison deck. Okay, I got 10, 12 choices. Some of those are bad, you know what I'm saying? Some of those are not particularly strong cards. So, you are playing, there's a

cost that comes with doing that. Yes, I do get to lower your, effectively your life total to 10. But, I can't play 99.9% of the creatures. You know, I can't play most of the creatures that exist. So, okay, that's a big drawback. Now,

there's some positives to it. That's the whole point of anything is, okay, well, I have to restrict myself, and what can I do within that? And, yes, the fact that we made, in fact, Tide of Power means there's all sorts of things in larger formats where you can do

really quick kills with it. But, like, the fact that it keeps getting played, the fact that you know it it there are people that that love it and so it's very funny that one of the things that I that comes up a lot is people are like I hate this thing, my friends hate this thing, so you should not do this thing. And then my answer to them is, okay, are you in the majority? Do the majority of people hate this? Is this something the majority of players really don't like?

And when you do the research, you're like, oh, no, actually, more people like it than dislike it. And the people that like it really like it. So I'm like, okay, well I'm not as inclined to get rid of that. You know, when you... Now, the thing that always gets brought up

when I bring this argument is something like counterspells. I'm like, okay. You know, we existed in a world where counterspells were super strong, and you had the deck where I counter everything. Was that generally liked? No, it was hated.

It was greatly, greatly, greatly disliked. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have counterspells. We do have counterspells. It's not like we got rid of counterspells. You still, every single magic set has a counterspell in it. We lowered the power level of counterspells to make sure that you can't make a deck of nothing but power of counterspells. And Poison, I will will point out was not a major

player in standard it was not something that was dominant in standard uh it has become a relevant deck in larger formats because the larger formats have a lot of tools to interact with it um but it's kind of weird to say hey you made something made something, and in this format, there's a lot of tools to make it good. Okay, if it gets too good, we'll ban something. You know, like, larger formats, like, things have to compete with pretty powerful stuff in larger formats. So the fact that it can compete means, okay, it's kind of cool. There's something different you can do with it.

Now, Commander, I know it's annoying in Commander. I think Commander should change its poison total. We change its life total. I don't know it changes life total, I don't know why poison total doesn't change. If your life total doubles, why doesn't your poison total, I don't know, double or whatever it needs to do to be at the appropriate level.

I guess it's Commander's 30 life now? Anyway, I don't play a lot of Commander. But, um, it should be corresponding. I'm not sure why it's not. But we don't control that. So please, if you love playing Poison and like playing Commander, and your friends get mad at you,

send messages to the Commander people and say to them, hey, hey, hey, why doesn't Commander work the same way as Leif works? Why doesn't it have the same percentage to shift? Anyway, will we see more poison? That's a funny question. I will say this. Infect has proven,

developmentally, was definitely tricky to do and had a lot of impact on the set around it. One of the, probably the biggest strikes to infect from our standpoint is it really made us

sort of not do some things in the standard environment around it because you know we wanted to make sure that it wasn't so dominant in standard and so we were careful about that and that's one of the reasons it wasn't is that we were careful about the environment we created. So I mean there's cost to that. So will we do poison again? I don't know whether or not we'll do infect again. Maybe. Maybe we'll do infect again. Like I said, there's a lot of fans, but it is, there might not be a mechanic more divisive than infect. The people who like it really, really like it, and people who hate it really, really hate it. And the designer in me kind of like

stuff like that that it could be that polarizing that you know it can go from such high highs to low lows it's kind of cool um and i talk all the time about making a game where people are passionate and you know in some level the things that make people passionate are gonna make other people passionate against it so it's a tricky thing i i do think in fact i don't want to unmake infect or anything i'm glad it made Infect. I do believe that we will see Poison again in Magic's future. Here's the question.

Will we see Infect again? Maybe. Will we see Poison again? I'm pretty sure that we will find other ways to use Poison. Just because, for example, I can see making a card

where there's a different kind of win condition, and then just going, hey, isn't that really poison? And then just changing it to poison. So I don't think we've seen the last of poison. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we've seen the last infect or not. I would do infect again. But I understand that there's a lot of people concerned about infect,

and I know development's concerned about Infect, so for those Infect haters out there, it's not a sure thing that Infect's coming back. But anyway, I'm almost to work, so Poison to me is flavorful. It is interesting. It does have a unique quality to it, and I like that it makes a little kind of metagame

that people can build around and do things with. Is it powerful in larger format? Yeah, yep, yes it is. But it's competing in some really powerful things. And so, you know, I feel like, you know, if vintage gets to have dredge and storm, okay, look, it can have poison. And actually, I don't even think poison,

I don't even think in fact is all that great in Vintage. I think it's more of a modern thing, I think. But anyway, I'm... I like the mechanic. I like Poison in general. I think that it is cool to have alternate win victories. I think it's flavorful. I think there's a lot of new designs that come out of it.

I think it leads to some deck building that can be interesting so anyway I, as I started this thing am a fan of poison and I do see future to poison although it might not be in fact that future poison might go some different routes and even if we do one day bring infect back

I do hope to bring poison in different ways that are different than just infect that is something I plan to do at some point. Anyway, I'm now in my parking space or a parking space. I don't have my own parking space. Every time I say that, people think like I have my specific like, you know, mark stamped on it. I don't. Anyway, I'm in the parking space.

So we all know what that means. It 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.