Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #480: Scry

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

In this podcast, I look at the history of the scry mechanic, from its premier in Fifth Dawn all the way to it becoming an evergreen keyword action.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I dropped my son off at camp. Okay, so today, recently, I just posted a podcast where I talked all about flashback and the history of flashback. And people liked it. And they said, do more podcasts about mechanics. So today, I'm going to talk all about Scry. Okay, so let me start by saying what scry is. It's now evergreen. We'll talk about how it got to be evergreen, but just in case you don't know. Okay, so scry n, n being a number, means look at the top n cards of your library and then you may put any number of them on the bottom of your library in any order you like and any number of

them on the top of your library in any order you like. and any number of them on the top of your library in any order you like. So let's say I scry for three. I would look at the top three cards. I then could put one, two, or three cards on the bottom of my library if I wish, in any order. And then I could put one, two, or three cards on the top of my library in any order. So today, so I want to start with an interesting story of how a top deck in the top eight of 2,000 U.S. nationals resulted in Scry existing.

Most people don't know this story. So today on Drive to Work. Okay, so, um, this story is all about a man named Aaron Forsythe, who created Scry. So let me walk you through how he went from being in a top eight and winning by a top deck to making Scry. Okay, so what happens is Aaron is playing in U.S. Nationals. I think U.S. Nationals was in Florida. For a bunch of years, we used to have U.S. Nationals at the Worldwide Sports Center down in Anaheim, sorry, down in Orlando. And so I'm pretty sure that's where this one took place, if I remember correctly. I think this took place down there. Okay, so what happened is

Aaron was playing a mono green deck. I'm trying to remember. I know the basis of the deck, the MVP of the deck was Deranged Hermit, which was a card I made many years ago that made... It had Echo, I think? It came in play and made Squirrels, and then it had Echo, I think. It came in play and made squirrels, and then it boosted squirrels.

But anyway, it was probably the strongest squirrel card I've ever made. So anyway, Aaron was, I don't even know who he was playing, but he was in the quarterfinals. So the thing about U.S. Nationals, or all Nationals, is that the top four people make the team. nationals or all nationals is that the top four people make the team. So at U.S. nationals making top eight is cool but really it's about making top four because top four is what gets you to the team. So Aaron was playing in his quarterfinal match and this mattered a lot because really the winning this match meant you got on the national team. I mean winning all of them meant you'd be U.S. national champion. He didn't do that. John Finkel. So for those that don't know, the year 2000 is the year that John Finkel managed to win

U.S. nationals and the world championship and the world team championship all in one year. But we'll get there. Anyway, so Aaron is playing against, I'm not sure who his opponent is, but playing somebody in the top eight. And it's a really close game. It comes down to the—I think they're tied. It comes down to the final game in a tied match. And Aaron needs—I'm not even sure what card he needs exactly.

I remember Aaron sold the story, but I remember the details of the card. But Aaron needs some card, and at the last possible moment, he draws it. And manages to win the game, get on the U.S. team. Then later that year, he's in Brussels because Nationals that year, I'm sorry, not Nationals, Worlds that year was in Brussels. And the way the team event worked was it was four on four. But if there was a tie, because it was four, the team captains would play off. So what happened was John Finkel, they're playing four, the team captains would play off. So what happened was, John Finkel,

they're playing again, in the finals, it's the US versus Canada. And John Finkel is playing, who's he playing? Ryan. That's Ryan's last name. I'm blanking on his last name. He's playing a pro player named Ryan. Okay, it will

come to me. Who was a very, very good player. And anyway, but the deck matchups were in John's favor, and it's John Finkel. So John wins his game. And then the other two people lose their game. So it's now down to Aaron. If Aaron wins this game, then John gets to do the playoffs against Ryan in the finals. But if not, then they lose. So Aaron, once again, it comes down to Aaron being able to win. And he pulls it out. He wins.

John wins in the tiebreaker. And the U.S. wins. U.S. national champions. And from there, that sort of opened up, you know, Aaron went from being somebody that, you know, occasionally played in pro tours to being, you know, on the winning U.S. national team. And that really opened up a lot of doors, allowed him to do writing.

The writing eventually would let him do editing. So he eventually sort of parlayed that into a part-time job where he was editing a magic website. I don't remember the magic website, but he was editing a magic website. That caught my attention because at the time, in around 2000, I was being asked by Bill Rose to put together a website for Magic. Magic didn't really have a website, nothing regularly. And so I put together the first version of magictheathering.com. That's when Making Magic started, Latest Development started, House to Cart. Anyway, and I was looking for an editor.

So I went and looked at all the different Magic sites to see people that, because I needed somebody that I knew could edit a magic site. And I looked and I found a bunch of different people. In fact, I ended up finding three candidates that I thought were good candidates. But one of which was Aaron. Aaron really impressed me. He had done some editing and he'd done some writing. And I liked his writing.

I liked his editing. And I'm like, I thought Aaron. So it turns out the other two people didn't end up working out. But Aaron, I called Aaron up and I said to Aaron, I go, you know, might you be interested at working at Wizards? And Aaron, I think, I'm not sure whether he said yes right away or he talked to his wife first. He and Ann might have discussed it. But eventually he called and said, yes, I am interested. And there was a lot of rigmarole.

At the time, technically, it wasn't the position to report to me. So I wasn't hiring it. It was in online media. But I was the person sort of in charge of content. So I needed to work very closely with this person. So I kept pushing for Aaron. And eventually, eventually, Aaron got hired. It's a longer story than that.

But eventually, Aaron got hired. So anyway, so the first couple of years that Aaron worked at Wizards, he was the editor-in-chief of MatchesWithTheEther.com, the very first editor of the website. And then, for Fifth Dawn,

I came up with an interesting idea. Maybe I didn't come up with it. Maybe Randy came up with it. But anyway, somebody came up with the idea of, wouldn't it be cool to put Aaron on a set, on a design,

so that he could write about it? So that, you know, and Aaron obviously was a pro player. We felt like Aaron definitely knew magic, that he'd contribute to the team. But the reason we stuck him on the team, really, was we wanted to sort of create the opportunity for him to write about it. Now, interestingly, it was an interesting team fit on. So the team was me, Randy Buehler, Aaron, and a guy named Greg Marks,

who I had met at a Pro Tour who had made his own set. Now, normally, I can't look at sets if someone makes their own set. But for some random reason at that Pro Tour, our lawyer, for the one time ever went to a pro tour and was just there. And I somehow was able to talk to the lawyer and say, can I look at this? And for every weird series of events, somehow I was allowed to look at it

and I liked it. And I ended up putting Greg on a set. So Greg, awesome. So the team was me and Randy and Aaron and Greg, although Greg was long distance. He didn't work at Wizards. He would later work at Wizards. Separate story. Anyway, so the problem we had during Fifth Dawn was Fifth Dawn was the third set in the Mirrodin cycle. So Mirrodin had a few issues, if you know your history.

Mirrodin Darksteel kind of broke standard. Like, mega broke standard. Like, probably the only format that broke standard more than Mirrodin was Urza Saga. And if you don't know anything about Urza Saga, that's a low bar to clear. Or high bar, sorry. High bar to clear.

Or it's a low bar. Anyway, whatever. It depends whether you're going under it or over it, respectively. But anyway, we, Fifton was in a weird place, which was,

we had done a lot of things in, we'd done a lot of things in the first two sets that I was told, like, hey, hey, hey, you know those things? Yeah, don't know those things? Yeah, don't do those things. So I was allowed for example to sort of have a little bit of mechanics, but like I couldn't make an affinity card that was any good.

And I wasn't supposed to, you know, like they're like, well, all these major themes you did. Yeah, let's pull back on that. So my team and I had this really weird challenge of kind of making a set that fit in the environment but was completely different. Now Aaron actually came through. In fact, both mechanics from the set Aaron came up with. One was sunburst, which was our answer for, hey, here's a completely different thing you can do with artifacts. Play lots of colors. But the other was a little mechanic called Scry, which is

today's topic. Aaron was really interested in the idea. Aaron is a spike at heart. I mean, he wanted to get a mechanic that sort of was kind of, was doing a lot of sort of subtle work and helping you just get the things you needed. And I remember when I first saw Scry, I was a little bit worried. It was a little too, like, I understood what it was doing, and I realized that it had a valuable,

so like it was doing something, but my worry at the time was that it'd be so subtle that people wouldn't quite get what it was doing. But I always like to play test stuff, and like, okay, it seemed interesting. And I generally liked what it was doing. But I always like to play test stuff, and like, okay, it seemed interesting. And I generally liked what it was doing. My issue was more about perception than it was about actually...

When you actually played the mechanic, it was fun. You know, it does what we call deck smoothing, which is it just sort of helps you sort of get to the cards you need to get to, helps your mana, helps you sort of draw the... If you have combos or things that need to go together. If you have synergy, it helps you get your synergy. And anyway, we played it. It was fun. So we ended up putting it in the set.

And to my surprise, people did get it. I was a little worried. It would be a little too subtle. What I found was the experienced players for sure understood it because it was actually a really good mechanic. It just actually helped you. You know, it smoothed out everything. And even players that didn't quite get the nuance of it, in general, hey, they liked looking at cards that were coming up. They

did get a sense of, I'm making things better. And so people liked it. It was a popular mechanic. So, 5th Dawn came out, Scry, very popular. Now, if you'd ask me back then and there if you know there's not that many mechanics

for example that we've done four or more times that we've brought back three different times Scry is one of them which we're talking about today but there's not a lot of mechanics to do that

did I know when Scry got made that it was one of those mechanics I did not but so the first time it got brought back is we were doing Time Spiral Block, which was two years later.

So Fifth Dawn was part of Mirrodin Block. Then we had Champions of Kamigawa Block. Then we had Ravnica Block, three years later. Then we had Time Spiral Block. So Time Spiral Block had this block, I had taken over as head designer as of Ravnica, and I was very into block planning.

So I came up with this idea of the past, the present, the future. So Future Sight was all about the future. So what I wanted to do for each of the sets is pick a returning mechanic, because the theme was, there's a nostalgia theme, obviously, running through Time Spiral. I don't know. And so the first set, to represent the past,

I brought back Flashback. Like, the name, it just felt like I'm looking to the past to find things. That felt really past. For the present, we took fading, we revamped it and called it Vanishing. But the idea is I have something, it's not here for a long time, while I'm living in the present. It's not going to be here, you know, it wasn't here the last turn, won't be here in a couple turns, but it's here now, make use of it now.

That felt very present to me. And then for the future, I like the idea of scry. Because for those that don't know, the word scry means to look into the future. The idea of scry, the mechanic, is you are sort of looking into the future and helping make decisions based on your knowledge of the future so that you improve the future for yourself is the flavor. Now, we did a couple things in FutureSight.

One is we started messing around a little bit more. FutureSight had this theme of mixing and matching. And I really was interested in sort of combining scry with different things. So the first thing that we did, and I think this is when we turned it into a keyword action. Originally, when we made it, it was just scry and it was just a normal keyword. But then we realized it was a little more interesting and we could do more with it if we turned it into a keyword action, which is like a verb, like a fight is a keyword action. And the idea is a keyword action just you use as an action that happens. And so that ended up letting us do a little bit more with it.

Now, for those that don't know, the way that scry works is you always do things in the order you read them. So, for example, if it says Scry 2 and then it says draw a card, what that means is I first look at the top two cards in my library. I can put the two cards wherever I want, on bottom, on top, one of each. And then after I'm done, I draw a card. Now, if it said draw a card Scry 2, what I would do is I would first draw a card. Then I would look at the top two cards and scry and figure out what I want to do. Traditionally, what we tend to do is if a second effect on the card matters with scrying,

we'll put scrying in the order so that it can interact with it. So, for example, if you're going to draw a card, usually you scry first before you draw. The other big trick we did with scry is sometimes we reveal the top card of your library and then care about some quality of that card, but we let you scry first so you can set that up. So let's say I do something where you're doing damage equal to converted mana cost at the top card of your library. Well, if I gave you scry three first, you can set it so the highest cost card that you have on the top three is now on top of your library. So the other thing that's funny is a little trivia for you. Once we made a keyword action out of Scry, the way we fixed it is we went back to FutureSite,

and that's Fyfton, and we added a period. So, for example, in Fyfton, if there was a card that said Scry 2, in 5th Dawn it just said Scry 2. But we went back and now in Oracle it says Scry 2. Period. So if you ever want to ask a little trivia question, which is name a series of cards that got errated with punctuation, the answer is the Scry cards in 5th Dawn. Okay, so we've used them in Future Sight. They made a lot of sense. We definitely played around with kind of how you can interact with it.

It was pretty useful. I think I was even happy to describe the second time I used it in Future Sight, just because I started to realize all the things you could do with it. Okay, so now we flash forward to Magic 2011. So Eric Lauer, this is one of the early sets that Eric Lauer led.

And so Magic 2010 was what Aaron had done the year before. He'd reinvented the core set. He started putting new cards in it and just really introduced a new kind of core set. Well, one of the things that Eric thought when he did 2011 was that he was having some problem with some deck smoothing issues. He needed a deck smoothing thing. And at the time, the core sets just used old cards. And so Eric was like, well, could I bring back a mechanic? Could I have, you know, could the core set not make a new mechanic, but could it just bring back an old

mechanic? And so he decided to bring back Scry. And not only did he bring back Scry, but it sort of created this new thing for the core set. The core set now would bring back a mechanic every year. And so in future years, Bloodthirst and Convoke and Slivers, they would bring back different things to use in the core set. But the first one was Scry. And it was because Eric loved Scry. And the reason Eric loves Scry

is I think he figured out that one of the things that Scry does really, really well is it helps synergistic sets. That if you want, if you have a lot of things that come together, a lot of pieces, but what you want is you want to draw the pieces so the pieces can go together.

And Scry is just really good for just helping you get to the things you want to get to. It helps your mana. It helps spreading synergy. It just sort of... It's one of those pieces that just makes the game play better. And it does it in a way that's a little bit subtle, that you don't quite realize quite what it's doing, but it just makes things play better. So Magic 2011, Eric put it in.

It became the standard for core sets bring back mechanic. All went well. It was much beloved. Okay, so we flash forward a couple years to Theros. So, I had led Theros, and in Theros I had a big theme of gods, heroes, and monsters. And one of the things that I wanted to do was, I liked the idea of growth. That if you're a hero, you go on a journey and that you become better

of yourselves. And then now we did the heroes grow, but the monsters grew and the gods grew. That, you know, the heroes had the heroic mechanic that the more you targeted, the more effects you could make. The gods, I'm sorry, the monsters had monstrous, which allowed you to upgrade one time into a bigger monster. And the gods had devotion, that the more followers you found, the bigger your effects could be.

And the gods themselves required a certain amount of devotion to become creatures. And so I made this high synergy set and I handed it over to Eric. And what Eric found was, because a lot of what I was doing was, it was all about building up and you needed the pieces to build up. What Eric was finding was

that it just wasn't happening quite quick enough. And he needed some way to sort of make the synergy come together and so he looked to Scry. Now normally when someone adds a mechanic to a set they'll come to you know the developer will come to the designer and say hey look I'm doing something I just want to sort of loop you in so he came to talk to me and said how do you feel about Scry going in the set. Now A I understood what he was trying to do was you know, knead together a lot of the synergy that I put in. But also

the ancient Greeks, this was the top-down Greek mythology set, were very very much about telling the future. About soothsaying and omens and scrying. So the idea of bringing scry into a top-down Greek set was super they, lots of sense. And so I was like, wow, that is a slam-dunk suggestion. You know, I understand how it helps the problem you're trying to solve, and it's a super flavorful fit for a top-down world.

So I was all in, and Eric brought it in, and Theros just played wonderfully. So flash forward a year or two more, we're, from Magic Origins, we decided we wanted to change up some things, some evergreen stuff. Intimidate was causing us some problems. It was really, the swing of it was like, oh, is my opponent playing a certain color?

Wow, it's really hard to deal with. And both Intimidate and Landwalk had a higher variance than we wanted. So the idea was we were going And both Intimidate and Landwalk had a higher variance than we wanted. So the idea was we were going to place Intimidate with Menace and we were going to place Landwalk with Prowess. Prowess had been introduced in Kanzasar Kyr.

We had been looking for a red-blue overlap. We really liked how it played, and so we were taking... The other thing we were doing, though, is we were going to downgrade protection from an evergreen mechanic to a deciduous mechanic, meaning we weren't killing it, but it was going to show up a lot less frequently than it did. And that meant we had a slot for evergreen. In general, one of the things we try to do is we try to keep a cap on how many evergreen mechanics we have.

green mechanics we have. And so we kind of knew when we were downgrading protection that we had a little bit of an opening for something. And so Eric I believe it's Eric. If anybody suggested this, I think Eric did. Because Eric, no one loves Scribe more than Eric.

I think it was Eric that suggested that, what if we just made it evergreen? And Eric's argument was, look, we're always trying to find deck smoothinggreen. And Eric's argument was, look, we're always trying to find deck smoothing mechanics. And look, we could keep reinventing the wheel every time or we could just take the one that's the best one we've ever found that's both

flavorful and plays well and is beloved by players and just put it in. You know, make it a keyword. Yeah, it's a keyword action, but put it in a keyword action. There's a lot of debate about it. usually the keywords the evergreen keywords we use

mostly are creature keywords but we we got what Eric was saying and there's a lot you know what I'm saying he made some really strong points and so after

after a bunch of discussion it wasn't just a slamped on yes I think for an idea for example we're playing the intimidate with menace, you know, with a much easier sort of discussion. But the added cry was something that was a little bit different. But as we walked through the reasoning, and I got on board pretty quick.

I believe what Eric was saying, and I did see the value of adding it. But anyway, we brought it in. My big issue when we brought it over was I just wanted to make sure that we sort of looked at the color pie. And my take on it was I think every color can have access to scry, but I don't think every color is supposed to have access to scry on an equal basis. But evergreen mechanics aren't equal on color. You know, like First Strike's white and red. Everyone's in a blue moon and black.

But you don't see first strike there's some blue and green for example that just because something's evergreen doesn't mean that every color has access to it so the ground rules we laid down was every color did have access everybody can do scry one that everybody

just like everybody can do a cantrip draw a card when you play the spell we gave everybody access to scry one but what we said is look the dominant scry color the color that makes the most sense with Scry is blue. Blue's all but information. Blue's the one that, you know, likes to sort of, you know,

blue's the smart color that uses advanced information, and Scry plays directly into what blue is doing. So blue gets Scry more often and gets higher Scry numbers. Thematically, number two was white from a color pie philosophy standpoint. White is very much about structure and planning,

and it makes sense. The tricky thing there is white's not really a card drawing color. Now, I'll give you, scry's not card drawing. So we let white have some scry. I think black is probably number three. Black also, from a flavor standpoint,

also does a bit of, like, dark magic sort of looking at the future type stuff. So there's some stuff there we played around with. Green, when we do it, we tend to play around with the idea of sort of wisdom. Green definitely is a color that sort of looks to the past to see what it can learn, and that we can play in sort of looks to the past to see what it can learn and that

we can play in sort of the wisdom space. Red is the trickiest because the idea of red planning ahead at all is really not super red. That's why we keep red Scry, usually just a Scry 1. But every once in a blue moon, sometimes we've made cycles. Red is Axis. We don't do Scry

a lot in red, but red can do Scry. Okay, the next thing is once once we made scry evergreen, there was another scry evolution, which is the mulligan. So, I know we've been trying to fix the mulligan for a little while. So, way back in 1996, I think, we introduced the Paris Mulligan, which the Paris Mulligan is if you don't like your hand,

you can redraw, but you get one less card. That was the Paris Mulligan made by Matt Hira, by the way. And we had been meaning to update it. It had been years and years since we updated it. And one of the things,

I know they tried a whole bunch of different things. And one of the things that Eric actually liked the best was the idea that it's the Paris Mulligan, but with the rider that you get a scry if you at all turn in your hand. The problem was, when scrying was not a normal thing, not an everyday thing, it was hard to do that. It just felt weird. And we said, well, maybe we don't call it scrying. Maybe we just spell it out.

But then, once we made Scry evergreen, once it was like, oh, Scry's just going to be a thing, we're like, oh, then we can just have the Scry Mulligan, like, we can just tell you you can Scry, because Scry's going to be something we make people learn. And I don't know, I think the Scry Mulligan predated, like, I don't know how much influence it had, and I think we chose it to be evergreen

because we wanted it to be evergreen but I think one of the small pluses of doing that is we realized that we then could do the mulligan so I don't think the mulligan was really the thing that tipped it over or anything but it was a nice little bonus when we realized that we could do that so anyway I'm almost to work so a few quick questions for you for people that might not know a few little things you might not know about scry.

Number one, can you scry for, if you scry for zero, what happens? If you scry for zero, nothing happens. You don't get a look at zero cards. So sometimes you can scry for X and you can pick X. Scrying for zero for all intents and purposes doesn't do anything.

And like I said, you can do them in sequence. So remember whenever you read it, remember that if sentence one says scry, then you do the scry first. If sentence two says scry, then you do whatever sentence one is before

you scry. And that's how you usually, by the way, you'll notice that if at all scrying matters, we tend to have you scry first. If manipulating your deck matters to the other effect um but every once in a while there's things that go the other way um okay the other question people often ask is can you put all the cards in the top so let's say it's scry four can i put all four cards on the top or all four cards on the bottom and not put some on the others the other yep yes you can um when we say put any number on the top or bottom um any number if you want to put all on the bottom but all on yes, you can. When we say put any number on the top or bottom, any number,

if you want to put all on the bottom but all on the top, you can do that. That is allowable. So anyway, I'm driving up to work right now. So that, my friends, is probably more than you, well, maybe some of you wanted to know about Scry. You said you wanted to have podcasts about things. But anyway, that is my podcast on Scry. So like I said, I...

Scry to me is one of the great mechanics. When you ask us sort of like, what are top 10 mechanics of all time, Scry falls in that list to me. That it really ended up being this... Like I said, it both does really good things for gameplay, it creates interesting decisions, and it's just flavorful. Like a lot of mechanics we make that are sort of effects are kind of

gender, I mean, flavor neutral. And this one is not. This one has lots of flavor. But anyway, that, my friends, is all about Scry. So once again, if you guys enjoy this, let me know. Maybe I'll do some more mechanic podcasts. But I am now sitting at work.

I actually had a quick drive-in today. So anyway, thank you guys for joining me. And as we all know, 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.