Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #494: Kicker

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

In this podcast, I talk all about the history of the kicker mechanic, from its start in Invasion to modern day.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Just dropped my daughter off at a college class. Okay, so today we're going to talk about a mechanic. Kicker. So, kicker is one of the mechanics that we've brought back a number of times. And it's a pretty popular mechanic. So I'm going to talk about the origins of it. I'm going to talk about sort of where we used it. And talk about my beef with it. Because I have a pretty popular mechanic. So I'm going to talk about the origins of it. I'm going to talk about sort of where we used it and talk about my beef with it because I have a beef with it.

So I will talk about that, talk about what I don't like about Kicker. So anyway, let's go back to the beginning. So the story begins back in 1998, 1999 when we were designing Invasion, which came out in 2000. So first, let me talk a little bit about, for those that heard my podcast on the ages of magic, Invasion was the beginning of the third age of magic.

So let me talk a little bit about that, because that influences where Kicker came from. So one of the things that happened in the early days of making magic was when we make a set, it's just like, you know, what are your two mechanics? Every set had two mechanics. It's like it's flanking and phasing. It is buyback and shadow. It is cycling and echo. You know, the early sets just kind of had this expectation that there would be two named mechanics. That was kind of how it worked.

expectation that there would be two named mechanics. That was kind of how it worked. And really the mechanics didn't necessarily thematically connect or anything. So one of the things that I thought was important that I really liked was this idea of having more of a

thematic connection of the block. And so I had talked a lot with Bill Rose and he and I both agreed that one of the cool things we could do was make a block that was about multicolor. That was the first theme that we wanted to explore. And the idea was that not only was it a theme, but it was something that would drive the design, something that we would pick mechanics and things because they fit into what we were doing. that we would pick mechanics and things because they fit into what we were doing.

And so we started... So the way Invasion started was when Richard had first made Magic, he asked different playtesters to design sets. And one of the sets was designed by a guy named Barry Reich, whose nickname was Bit. Barry, by the way, is the person when Richard first came up with Magic, he was first playtesting it. The very first game he played was against Barry.

Anyway, Barry had made a set called Spectral Chaos that had played into the idea of the theme of multicolor. And not just, I mean, he was planning to introduce multicolor, but also really explore what multicolor meant, look in the design space of it. Now, as it turns out, Steve Conard made a set called Legends, Steve Conard and his design team, made a set called Legends that was really revolving around a lot of the characters that he and Peter Atkinson and that group had played in their role-playing games, and he introduced multicolor as a way to introduce legendary creatures.

That in Legends, the only gold cards were the legendary creatures and the only legendary creatures were the gold cards. Technically, at the time, they were creature-legend. Legend was a subtype originally, not a supertype. Well, it was a supertype and non-creature.

But anyway, so what happened was multic multi-color was this thing that we we use here and there i mean legends had it and then starting from legends it was just something that sets would have a little bit of like the dark i think had like three gold cards um and then not every set had gold cards but they would show from time to time and usually it was something that showed up in a small amount you know there would be 10 15 20 maybe gold cards, but they would show from time to time. And usually it was something that showed up in a small amount. You know, there would be 10, 15, 20 maybe gold cards in the whole set. And so one of the ideas is we knew players liked gold cards. We knew that that was something exciting. And so we thought this would be a good theme. And so the third age begins, and begins

with Invasion, with an idea of let's build the set around the theme. Let's make the theme matter. So the theme was multi-color. So that meant that the mechanics we used in the set had to tie into multi-color. So this is where Kicker comes from. So one of the ideas that Bill had, and to the best of my knowledge he called it Kicker. I don't remember the name of Kicker being anything other than Kicker. I think that was his playtest name. I will also note, by the way, one of the challenges in general is there's a balance when naming things between trying to have some flavor so there's a flavorful name for it, but not having so much flavor that you kind of tie it to a specific set and you can't reuse it somewhere else.

Spells in general, spell mechanics are tough. Kicker is a pretty nondescript. I mean, it's a pretty meta-gamey, you know. I think we like to think, I'll kick the spell. That sounded good. But there's not a lot of flavor to it. But anyway, Bill liked the idea

of spells in which you could spend extra to get extra. I don't know. I think the earliest spells were just generic mana. Just like I do two damage, but I could pay extra and do four damage, stuff like that. But the thing that I think Bill liked was that because you were paying extra amounts

of mana, those extra amounts of mana could be other colors. And so one of the things that Kicker did was it allowed us to sort of weave in stuff into the set, but it had a multicolor bent that it could do. And that was one of the things that we were excited about.

So the idea was the set actually did there's three different types of kickers. There are kickers that are generic mana. There are kickers that are colored, but are colored within your same color. And there's kickers that are colored that are outside your color, that you're going to a second color. And the idea was that, so we actually worked this out. So generic mana meant all you were doing was increasing the intensity of the spell.

You know, it's a giant growth for plus two, plus two, but I can kick it and it's plus four, plus four. You know, it just increased the intensity. If you put coward men into it, we allowed you then to add extra elements to it. And I'm going to get to my beef with Kicker in a second, but one of the things we did in Invasion was we really explored all sorts of things we could do with Kicker.

We didn't really rein it in at all. And so one of the things we played around with, with colored mana, was you could just do a secondary effect. And we didn't even make that secondary effect always... One of the things that we eventually get to, and I'll talk about this in a second, is we wanted the spells to feel cohesive, so when you kicked it,

the spell feels like it's just more of the spell. But in Invasion the first time through, we really were willing to do things like do effect A and kick it and also get effect B. Do effect A and Effect B really connect to each other? Eh, not necessarily. Maybe you can find situations

where they work together, but it wasn't something where they inherently went together. So in Invasion, we really played around a lot with the different kind of things we could do with Kicker. We put Kicker on every spell type. It went on creatures, it went on instants and sorceries.

It went on enchantments. I think we even did it on artifacts, I think. But it could go anywhere. One of the things about Kicker is it's very flexible. That any kind of spell you could pay extra for. And like I said, we played around with a bunch of different things.

One of the things that, for example, I always like to do is I love exploring space, design space. And eventually what I learned, and this took me a while to learn, was that you kind of want to conserve space. Well, in the early days, just to give a little mindset, when we used to make keyword mechanics, the thought process in the early days was they were disposable. Well, that's just for this set. We're never using that again. And so what we tended to do was we blew out the mechanic. We tried to find every different way to use the mechanic because like this was the one shot to do it. And Kicker, if you look at Invasion Block, Kicker shows up in all three sets and we really did explore all sorts of different ways to use Kicker. That we didn't have the mindset

of, oh, this is something that's really has a lot of space to it. Let's find some small area to concentrate on and then later when we bring it back we'll do more stuff. We didn't do that because it's not the way we thought about it. Like, for example, one of the things we did is we did a lot of creatures, for example,

that you pay mana to kick into an ETB effect, an enter the battlefield effect. And that was a way to sort of have a creature that also could do a spell. And then, like, in Plane Chase, not Plane Chase, sorry, I always mix this up,

Plane Shift, sorry, Plane Chase is the, when you have planes and stuff, that's the supplemental to that. Plane Shift, like, Mike Elliott had made a, it was a planes and stuff. That's the supplemental to that. Plane shift. Mike Elliott had made a it was a creature that had two different

kicker costs in two different colors. I think they were three color. I mean, it was a monocolor card, but to optimize you had to spend three colors. And then it did two different effects. And the two effects had some synergy with each other. And then I at the same effects. And the two effects had some synergy with each other. And then I, at the same time, came up with a different, similar,

we put that in Apocalypse, called Evolvers, where the idea was that if you kick it, you could change what the creature was. And then the way the Evolvers worked was kind of cool, was if you kicked the first effect, you gained some ability. If you kicked the second effect, you got a different ability.

And how we marked what ability you had was the first effect was smaller and put a plus one, plus one counter on the creature and gave the ability. And then the second ability cost more, put two plus one counters on it and gave the ability. So you could look at the card and like, if I have one counter, I have this ability. If I have two counters, I have that ability. And if I have three counters, I have both this and that ability. But it's a good example of just looking at all the, between the Battle Mages and the Volvers.

Like, we definitely were not holding back. And so we tried and did a lot of different experimentation throughout the whole block. And like I said, Kicker is extremely flexible. In fact, now I'll get to my beef, because my beef sort of, I realized the error of our ways after we had made Invasion. And what happened was, we went to make some other mechanics. And what we realized was that, in some ways, Kicker is not really a mechanic. It's a tool.

It's like you can spend extra mana and get extra effect. That's a little broad to actually be just a mechanic. There's a lot thinner ways to slice that up. And in fact there's a joke inside R&D that all mechanics are either split cards or Kicker. Which means that the majority of mechanics either are modular, meaning you have choices to make, or they're additive, meaning I can do something extra to get extra. You usually pay mana.

And so the problem we ran into was we would make other mechanics, and the players would go, oh, that's just kicker. Why do you just call it kicker? You're just making stuff you've made before. And what we realized was there's a lot of space to divvy up. I pay extra and get extra. You know, there's whole mechanics where it's like I pay extra and I get this one thing. This thing I get extra. You know,

and so, and even if the mechanic wasn't technically a kicker, because sometimes in order to make it work, we had to do something that was a little bit different than kicker. It felt like kicker. So one of the problems we had to do something that was a little bit different the kicker it felt like kicker so one of the parts we have a kicker was it really kind of undercut future expectations because people just saw this wide swath of design space is just being one thing and so it really when we would innovate and do other things it just sort of diminished what they were and had if we never done kicker it just would have diminished what they were. And if we'd never done Kicker, it just would have been,

oh, here's another cool mechanic, rather than, oh, that's just Kicker. The problem was that Genie sort of got let out of the bottle. You can't put the Genie back in the bottle. Once the audience knows of Kicker's existence, it's not as if... A lot of people ask, once I realized this, why do we do kicker again? It's like, well, you know, it had some function and people liked it and it was a very popular mechanic.

And look, we can't, people can't unlearn stuff. Like the, the, the error of it is people learn something that we didn't want them to learn, that we'd rather slice that up and make, you know, rather than it being one mechanic, have it be 20 mechanics or 40 mechanics or whatever. it being one mechanic, have it be 20 mechanics or 40 mechanics or whatever. And the reality is, we still do make mechanics that essentially are subsets of Kickr. But we know that in doing it, we sort of

there's a cost that came from doing Kickr first. So anyway, what that meant was so come Time Spiral, Time Spiral block was this block all about nostalgia and we wanted to bring back mechanics. Well, Kickr is popular, it's flexible, has infinite design space. Okay, we're going to bring back Kicker. So we brought back Kicker for Theros Block.

Not Theros Block, sorry, for Times Square Block. So one of the things that I said is, having realized the mistake of Kicker the first time, I said, okay, here's the one thing I want to do with Kicker. Let's rein in a little bit what Kicker is. Let's not let Kicker be everything. Let's sort of define Kicker as something. So at least it's a subset of what sort of larger Kicker is. That makes the word Kicker not everything that is the tool, but kind of make it more of a mechanic, if you will. So the idea that I liked, and kind of playing in space we had done before, is the idea of Kicker is you're optimizing the spell, meaning you're making the spell better. So what that meant was one of two things. Either you're just

enhancing it, that I'm doing the spell and I'm doing more, that makes the spell feel like you're making the spell better. Or if I have another effect, that effect has directly tied to the spell and feel not like I'm doing a secondary thing but I'm making the overall spell better. For example, I kicked the spell and now you can't counter it. Or I kicked the spell and now it can't be prevented. Or I do something in which the thing I'm adding enhances the spell, what the spell is doing. It makes the spell feel like I've upgraded the spell, not that I'm doing. It makes the spell feel like I've upgraded the spell,

not that I'm doing a secondary ability. And we try to be careful about where and when we did secondary things. Now, the one exception we did allow is we did allow kicker effects, where the idea is I'm a creature, but if you kick, you know, I gain an enter the battlefield effect if you kick into me. Because we do enter the battlefield effect so often on creatures that we felt it did feel like oh, I'm upgrading my creature

rather than I'm getting... Rather than feel like, oh, I have a creature and now I have a spell, it just feels like I have a creature with an ETB effect. So we felt like that made sense and that tied together. So we... Oh, wait, wait, I just realized something. A kicker did show up someplace before it showed up

in Time Spiral. In Unhinged, so in the second unset, so the unsets are sets we make that are kind of fun and really explore in space we don't normally explore. Mark Gottlieb made two cards. One was called Old Foggy and one was called Blast from the Past. And both of them, we did an old card frame, and they were taking old mechanics and bunching a whole bunch of old mechanics on the card. So Flash from the past was making fun of the fact that every time we do a new keyword mechanic,

we put it on direct damage, just because that's kind of the first thing we ever put it on. And so he took a whole bunch of abilities, like Flashback and Buyback and Kicker, and put it all on this one card. So Kicker showed up on Blast from the Past. And in fact, the reason that reminds me is

one of the things we did in Future Sight is we did what we called Mix and Match, which was inspired by Blast from the Past, where we took two old mechanics that didn't coexist, but were synergistic together. Because one of the cool things I found with Kicker was Kicker and Flashback, that's pretty cool. Kicker and Buyback, that's pretty cool. There's a lot of neat things you can do when you sort of combine things. And so

one of the things we wanted to do when we were doing FutureSight is part of sort of looking at the future is saying, let's take elements of the past, but mix them together in ways you've never seen. That part of the future is a combining of the past. And so we used Kicker and Time Spiral. It actually, I believe it was in all three sets. So it was in Time Spiral and Planar Chaos and Future Sight. And we did a lot of different things with it, but we did hold it a little bit tighter than we did last time. And then the third time we brought it back

was in Zendikar. So the reason it ended up in Zendikar was Zendikar was the land block. It was all about land themes. We had made up landfall. And we did a lot of things that rewarded you for playing land. So what we knew is what that did was

it kind of encouraged the audience to play more land. If land's important, maybe I want to play a little bit more than normal. But what that meant is the side effect is you ended up getting more land in play, more land on the battlefield. And so I wanted to find a mechanic that let you use that extra mana. Sort of part of the synergy of a land set is not only do we reward you for having land, but we reward you for playing land, we reward you for having land. And so we wanted to bring back a mechanic.

Now, oh, another important thing. So somewhere around Shards of Alara, like I said, there was a period where we thought of mechanics that we brought back, or we thought of mechanics as disposable. And then during Onslaught, I was trying to figure out, I really liked Morph, and I convinced the Powers to be, you know, the R&D team to put Morph in the set. And I was trying to figure out something to complement that. And I realized that what I needed was a mechanic like cycling.

And I tried a bunch of stuff, and then I finally said, well, why? Why not cycling? Why couldn't I bring cycling back? And there were a bunch of stuff and then I finally said, well, why? Why not cycling? Why couldn't I bring cycling back? And there were a lot of people really skeptical. We've done cycling. I'm like, well, what if I, you know, have a little twist to it? And I brought back like cycling matters. And we did a few things cycling hadn't done before. But once we brought cycling back and the audience loved cycling, it really made us realize that we had to rethink of how we did mechanics. Mechanics were a resource. They weren't this disposable thing. They realize that we had to rethink of how we did mechanics. Mechanics were a resource. They weren't this disposable thing.

They were something we had to be more careful with how we used. And as the head designer, I started realizing one of my jobs was conservation. There's not an infinite number of ideas. That there's only so many really strong, solid, elegant ideas. And part of sort of maintaining space was, look, we have this resource of mechanics that we know. We should be making use of them. And so I sort of said a dictum saying, on average, I wanted every set to have at least one returning mechanic.

Now, when I say on average, that means some sets might have more than one. Some sets might have less, you know, none. Less than one would be none. And, you know, the idea, though, was I wanted to always look. That every set should say, can I find a mechanic that I can bring back that will enhance what I'm doing? So when we were looking at Zendikar, I needed something that spent a lot of mana. Well, we had a mechanic that did that that players liked that made a lot of sense. So we brought back Kicker.

And to make it a little extra, I had this idea for this variant on Kicker called Multi-Kicker. So the idea of Multi-Kicker was normally if I cast a spell, I can only do the Kicker once. So let's say I do two damage, and if I kick it, I get to do two extra damage. I do four damage. Well, multi-kicker says you can kick that extra part as many times as you want. As many times as you want to spend. So with multi-kicker, instead of doing two into four, I can do two or four or six or eight or ten. I can make it as big as I wanted based on how much mana I wanted to spend. And I thought that was excellent because it was a world

with lots of mana. Now, as we played around more with Zendikar, what we realized was there was a lot of neat things going on in Zendikar, and that we had a little more than we needed. And Multikicker was kind of an extension of Kicker. So what we decided to do was, let's just do Kicker and do Kicker a little more normal.

Just bring back Kicker. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. Just bring back Kicker. We hadn't have to reinvent the wheel. Just bring back Kicker. We hadn't done it for a while. And then in Worldwike, the first expansion, we would introduce Multikicker. So that would be kind of the twist for the small expansion. And so we brought back Kicker

and then we introduced Multikicker. And once again, people really liked it. So it was, like I said, here's my thing with Kickr is oh let me talk about the other sort of technology issue with Kickr so one of the things

when I talk about technology I talk about this a lot when I say design technology what I mean is as we design magic we figure things out we figure out ways to do things we figure out tricks

and different ways to make cards or to do things. We figure out tricks and different ways to make cards or to template things or to make mechanics or create interactions. And that as we make something, you learn from it and you get better at it. That this is true of any field. That the more you do something, the more you learn. You take those lessons, you apply them and then you get better at the thing you're doing. Technology improves over time. That is, you share and realize things, you advance. So one of the things that we had advanced over the years is, Kicker does this thing where it says to you, hey, pay cost A, and then if you pay cost B, this extra cost, then you get this extra ability. But the way the kicker works is it gives you the cost and then it gives you what you have to do extra.

But the thing is it requires the player to then do the math. And what we've learned along the way is if the first spell costs three and the upgraded spell costs five, why make you do the math? Why not just tell you what it costs? And that is just a little bit easier for the player if we spell it out. And that one of the things that's interesting is, you know, we go back and forth on kicker, partly because, look, we've done it a certain way,

and partly because of things like multi-kicker. The alt cost, you know, doesn't quite let you do multi-kicker. So there's reasons to not necessarily want to do that. But it's interesting when we look back at kicker, how if we're doing two different modal things, often now we will do the thing where we just tell you what the second cost is. And part of me says, is Kickr better that way?

I'm not sure. I get you don't get multi-Kicker if you do that. And you always have to kind of weigh of how much potential future design versus just simplicity of use there is. Oh, so here's another Kickr issue to deal with. So I'm going to tell a little story. I told this story, I think, in my I don't know if I ever told this story in my podcast. It's a pretty famous story, so you might

have heard it, but it's a good story. So, during Invasion, at that point, I'm mostly a designer, but I still do a little bit of development. And I definitely played in the Future Future League. There wasn't a lot of R&D at the time, so everybody played in the Future Future League.

We now have more people and more dedicated people that, you know, well, I do a little bit of playtesting. I don't really playtest Future Future League anymore. But anyway, I was not the greatest deck builder. I was a Johnny deck builder. I would build weird and wacky things. So they wanted to test sort of competitive stuff. So

Randy built me this mono-green deck, and so I went and played it. And I went 4-0. You usually have four matches a week. I went 4-0 and I had the best score of the week. No one else I think had gone 4-0 that week. And so Randy, I guess, was watching my final match, which I won, obviously. And after we're all done, Randy goes, I'm confused. You had

five mana, and you played the Grizzly Bear as a Grizzly Bear. Why? And I'm like, because it's a Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear is one and a green for a 2-2. And Randy goes, oh, oh, oh! Didn't I tell you? Those aren't Grizzly Bears. Those are Kavu Titans.

So Kavu Titans are this card invasion where you can spend one and a green for a 2-2 or spend three green-green and make it a 5-5 trampler. And Randy, instead of putting stickers in the file, just threw in four Grizzly Bears with the idea, oh, well, it's like a Grizzly Bear because it's a Grizzly Bear up front. And I, not realizing they were Kavu Titans, just played them like Grizzly bears with the idea, oh, well, it's like a grizzly bear because it's a grizzly bear up front. And I, not realizing they were Kabu Titans, just played them like grizzly bears. So now, for the next week, I knew they were Kabu Titans. I knew that for three green green,

I can get five five trampler. So the next week, I go two and two. And then, after realizing that, I said, okay, what if, for the next week, I okay, next week I'm going to make a new rule for myself. And the rule is, if I can cast it as a grizzly bear, I do. If I can cast it as a Kabu Titan, if I have five mana, I do. But if not, I just cast it as a grizzly bear. And in that version, I went back to going 4-0.

And in that version, I went back to going 4-0. And what it made me realize is something that we've learned happens, which is one of the effects of stuff like Kicker is there are certain players that see the optimized form and always want to get the optimized form. And so one of the dangers sometimes of making Kicker is that some of the players don't see it as 2 mana or 5 mana. They just see it as 5 mana. Because I obviously want to get a 5-5 trampling creature.

And so that's something else we learned with Kicker. So one of the things I'm trying to point out here is... Kicker has a lot of pros. It has infinite design space. It has, you know... There's a lot of cool things you can do with it. The players like it a lot. It's very flexible. It lets you do a lot of things.

The cons with it is you have to be careful with it. In some ways, it really is more tool-to-mechanic. You know, it is something that really allows you to stretch to areas you're not supposed to stretch to. It requires a little bit of math in a world where we're making the players do less math. And it has a little

bit of an optimization thing that makes beginners play it kind of not the perfect way. So, I have mixed feelings on Kicker, in the sense that there um, there, there's things about it that, that are, are, are not ideal, but, but, but it, it is a good mechanic.

It really is a good mechanic. And there's a lot of fun stuff you can do from it and the audience adores it. So, um, but if you ask me, does Kicker have a future? Of course, Kicker has a future. Like, for example, in, um, in the Storm scale, I do the scale to talk about how likely something's going to come back to a standard legal expansion. So one is an evergreen mechanic

like flying, just we do it almost every time. Two is a deciduous mechanic like hybrid where we don't do it all the time but it's something that any set that needs it can use it. And then three are what I call sort of the staple mechanics. These are just, we've made good mechanics that have a lot of depth and players like them. And you know what? We're just going

to keep bringing them back. And then as long as magic exists, every, in years, we'll probably bring it back again. And flashbacks in this category, cycling's in this category, kicker to me is in this category. As much as I gripe about elements of Kicker, it is a really solid, strong mechanic that players really like. So for the Kicker lovers out there, I know we'll do Kicker again. Like I said, if I could redo things, if I could change the world,

I'd change time. I might have done things a little differently. Probably what I would have done is been narrower, like have Invasion introduce a narrower subset of Kicker and name it a little bit differently and define it as this more specific thing.

And then later, but, you know, I don't want to mess with time. I know that goes badly. So anyway, that, my friends, is all sorts of things about Kicker. Like I said, hopefully, one of the things I got, notes I got from you guys is I've been doing more podcasts talking about sort of the history and evolution of mechanics. So you guys seem to like this, so I'm trying to do more of them. I'm running out of mechanics that we've done three or more times.

There's not that many mechanics that we've done that many times. So, I mean, Kicker's one of them, but I'm running out of those. So, anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today. A little peek into the Kicker mechanic. But I am now sitting at work. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

See you guys next time.