Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #497: Symbols

Episode Date: December 15, 2017

Magic has had a lot of symbols show up on cards over the years. In this podcast, I talk about them all.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. I dropped my daughter off at her college class. Okay, today is all about symbols. So one of the things about magic is often we will take a concept and represent it in a symbol form. And so today I'm going to talk about all the symbols of magic. There are a lot of them. So let's jump in because there's'm going to talk about all the symbols of magic. There are a lot of them. So let's jump in because there's so many to talk about. Okay, so let's start with probably the most famous symbols of magic, the mana symbols. So that goes back to the very beginning of the game in Alpha. Christopher Rush and Jesper Mirfors. Jesper was the very first art director.

And Chris Rush did a lot of the early graphic design. I did a whole podcast on Chris Rush, by the way. He passed away, sadly, a couple, over a year or two ago. And I did a podcast. You can see that on him. Anyway, they had to design the mana symbols. And so the idea was, what they wanted was, they were circles. They needed to be the proper color. But they wanted some symbology to go beyond just the color. Partly to give a little

extra flavor, and partly we have people who are colorblind who can't necessarily read between the colors. So what they wanted was a nice, clean, easy symbol that represented the color, but you could recognize the shape very easily. So blue and red, I think, were the easiest because blue and red have elemental qualities to them. Blue is the color of air and water, and red is the color of earth and fire. Water and fire tend to be a little bit easier than air and earth, respectively. So they did a drop of water for blue.

They did a swirl of fire for red. Green was also relatively straightforward in that green's all about nature. I think they looked at a couple different things. They might have looked at a leaf. But in the end, a tree seemed to be a nice, simple thing to represent the idea of nature and life. Black also wasn't super hard. Black, one of the things black cares about is death. It harnesses the power of death, death and decay.

And so they stumbled upon the idea of doing a skull, that a skull is a good symbology of death. White was actually the hardest of them. What exactly does white do that translates to a symbol? You know, white has a lot of chivalry to it, and it's very much about the good of the group and about wanting peace, but none of that has a nice simple symbol to it. Eventually, though, they stumbled on the idea that white is the color of light,

that one of the white and black is the difference between lightness and dark, that black likes to work in darkness and likes things to be creepy. But white likes things to be clean and open and aware. And so they ended up making a sun for white. So that since white's the color of light. Now, so those premiered in Alpha in the very first game. Okay, a little trivia question for you. One of the mana symbols was changed later in the game.

I think it was changed for Ice Age. So which symbol actually went through a change? Now, they didn't change what it was. It's still the same shape within the circle. But the graphic design, they cleaned up a little bit. Do you know? The answer is planes. Planes got

changed. The little sun got changed. Actually, a little trivia for you. There were some promo cards made for Ice Age that did not have... It was pre the change, so there's some promo cards that are the old version of the white mana symbol. We used to do some

promo cards where we'd put out cards in advance of them being in the set. So there exist some promo versions of a couple white cards that have the old expansion symbol, where the rest of the set has the new expansion symbol. Little scrapes there. Another mana symbol that premiered with the beginning of the game was the generic mana symbol.

So the generic mana symbol is the symbol that goes in costs, that says, hey, this requires this amount of mana, but anything can pay for this. It doesn't need to be a particular color. It could be colorless. And that is always a sort of, I'm not sure what color to call it, like a gray circle, and it has a number in it. Or it could have an X in it, if there's X values.

But basically it has a number. Anything from, I think we've done zeros and activations, all the way up to, in Unhinge, we have a, we have a hundred, it's a million. We have a million symbol. Oh, and also, I think on, also on Mox Lotus in Unhinge, it makes an infinity symbol, I believe. Also, on Mach's Lotus in Unhinged, it makes an infinity symbol, I believe. But anyway, oh, so one of the funny things about that is Arabian Nights, which was the very first expansion, Richard made a card called Aladdin's Lamp that he wanted to have a generic cost of 10. But at the time, they didn't know how to fit a 10, and they since figured it out.

So on the original Arabian Nights version of Aladdin's L it has two fives and that confuses a lot of people. Fifty-five? People were very confused by it. So now originally when the game first premiered there's two different concepts. There's what's called a generic mana symbol and there is a Cullus mana symbol. When the game first started the Culless mana symbol... did they use it? Well at some point we started using the Culless mana... it actually didn't start in alpha but we started using the Culless mana... the generic mana symbol for Culless. So if you would tap and add a certain amount of mana, you know like Sol Ring, tap, add and it would be a 2 in a circle.

The problem is those don't mean the same thing. A generic mana means any mana can be used to pay this cost, where colorless means this is colorless. So in Oath of the Gatewatch, we, for the first time ever, put a colorless cost in a mana cost, which required us, now we had to differentiate between them because we couldn't use the same thing. So we ended up making the colorless mana symbol, which is diamond in the gray circle. Now it's a standard thing that we use. So that didn't exist to Oath of the Gatewatch, but you now will see that regularly showing up. Okay, also something you'll see a lot on magic cards is the tap symbol. So the tap symbol originally

in alpha was not a symbol. It just said tap this card or tap symbol. So the tap symbol originally in alpha was not a symbol. It just said tap this card or tap colon. It just literally wrote out the word tap. And then eventually the first symbol they made up was a T in the circle. But eventually once we started getting into other languages, not every language, the word for tap didn't start with T in every language. Not that every language, you know, the word for tap

didn't start with T in every language, not that every language even had a T in it. So eventually they changed it. The next version was, I think, a card. It looked like a card that had been turned. And then eventually they did the version, which is the current version, which is the arrow that goes in a clockwise motion. I should also mention this point. In Shadowmoor, we made the untap symbol, which is the tap symbol, like, reversed. I think it's like, it's the, I think the arrow is dark on the tap symbol, and so we swapped it so it's light on the untap symbol, I think. And it goes counterclockwise rather than clockwise. The problem was, they look similar enough that in a vacuum, that when you weren't expecting the untapped symbol,

especially if you didn't know it existed, it just kind of read like a tap symbol. And people got very confused that they kind of looked at it and it felt like a tap symbol. So I'm not sure whether or not we'll use the untapped symbol again. It's not particularly popular or successful in its regards. Okay, so we have the mana symbols. We have the tap symbol.

What else shows up on magic cards? Well, I should say on almost all magic cards. Next is the expansion symbol. So the original idea when Richard was making the game, for example, when he made a Rabie Nice, which was the first expansion, he was going to change the back of the cards. And the idea would be every expansion would have a unique back so you could tell them apart. They realized right before they went to press that probably would be a bad idea.

Then you couldn't shuffle your cards together without people being able to tell what they were from. Be aware that sleeves didn't really exist way, way back in the day, so the sleeves weren't really an option just yet. They did come along relatively early, although opaque sleeves took a little while longer to show up. Anyway, so instead of changing the back,

they came up with the idea of making a symbol to represent what expansion it's from. So Arabian Nights, for example, is the first expansion had a scimitar. Antiquities, the second expansion, was all about artifacts that had an anvil. Legends was the third one.

It had a Roman column. So what happened was, the idea here is, it was a means by which for you to tell from the symbol on the card where it came from. Now, eventually, during Urza's Saga block, I believe, we started doing rarities. And so in the early days, all the expansion symbols were the same expansion symbol. I think they were usually black.

But now, or actually they weren't black. They were probably silver in the early days. They were like grayish. I guess they were black or gray depending on what the expansion symbol was. There were some of both. Yeah, one of the funny early stories is there were a lot of very simple shapes, but we

started running out of obvious shapes. So in Homelands, it took place on a new world. And so they decided they wanted to show the world, so they sort of made a globe of the world. The problem was that the reason you recognize a globe of the Earth is you kind of recognize the shapes

of the continents. So your brain goes, oh, that's a globe. So when they sort of made up shapes, because it was a made up world, people didn't read globe out of it. And we got a lot of questions like why is the homeland's expansion symbol a cookie? You know, stuff like that. And over the years, by the way, we've definitely

had to extrapolate a little bit. There's not just an infinite number of clean and simple shapes that you can read on expansion symbols. So we've gotten a little more creative in some of our expansion symbols. Anyway, starting with, I think, there's a Saiga block in the middle, I believe. We started doing expansion, rarity symbols on expansions. So now the commons were black, the uncommons were silver, the rares were gold, and then later mythic rare would come along, and that's kind of a reddish orange. So that also affected us. Now we have to

have shapes that work, not just that are readable, that make sense to the set, but also that can work in all the different versions of the rarity symbols. So that definitely made things a little more complicated. Okay, another trivia question for you. So, on a normal set, you will see on almost every card, mine is land, and even some lands have mana symbols, you'll see mana symbols on most cards.

You'll see tap symbols on a lot of cards, but not all the cards. You'll see expansion symbols on all the cards. There's one more symbol that shows up in almost every Magic card. What symbol is it? Dun-da-dun-dun! It is the Artist symbol!

A little paintbrush. It's on the bottom of the card. So what happened was, originally, we just spelled out, like, I don't think we spelled out Illustrated, but we, like, I-L-L-U-S period or something. And what we realized was, when we went to different languages, we needed to then translate the credit. The name we didn't translate because that's their name. So what we realized, we made a little symbol, which is a little paintbrush to represent this is the artist, then we didn't have

to say it in words and didn't have to translate it. So the little paintbrush represents artists. to say it in words and didn't have to translate it. So the little paintbrush represents artists. Okay, so let's talk about some symbols that are not in every set, but are in some sets. So first we'll start with hybrid mana. So hybrid mana first showed up in Ravnica, the first Ravnica. I was experimenting with how to represent colors. Because the guilds were two colors, I was representing how to mess around with mana that could be about two colors. I came up with this idea of,

how about a symbol that means I can be one of two colors? Obviously, generic can be any of five colors, but what if I'm more specific? This is, you must use red or green mana to cast this. So we talked a lot about how to make the hybrid symbols. In the end, we ended up just making them sort of a yin-yang shape of normal mana symbols. So a red-green hybrid symbol would be a red swirl of fire,

the red symbol, and the green tree. And so you would recognize going, oh, I see a red symbol mana symbol. I see a green mana symbol. Oh, this is one or the other. We did a variant on it in Shadowmoor, a red symbol, a mana symbol, I see a green mana symbol, oh this is one or the other. We did a variant on it in Shadowmoor, which is technically called mono-colored hybrid, it's often known as two-brid, and that is where it is either mana or it's two.

And so those symbols were hybrid symbols except one symbol is the colored mana symbol, one symbol is like a generic two. And the idea there is you must pay either this color or pay two. Okay, similar to that is Phyrexian mana, which showed up in New Phyrexia. So Phyrexian mana looks like colored mana, but has a Phyrexian symbol, which is like a phi, I guess, the Greek Greek letters it's a circle with a line through it and so that represents the idea of a Frexian mana symbol is you must spend either that color mana or two life to cast it it was the idea of the Frexians had taken over the Mirrens and we wanted to represent that and we wanted to do some colored artifacts we We wanted a different way to show that. So all the permanents that have Phyrexian mana are also colored artifacts.

Also, talking of costs, we have snow mana. So snow mana came from Coltsnap. The original Ice Age had snow-covered basic lands. And there was such a thing as snow-covered lands. When we discovered, in air quotes that you can't see, the missing third set, which was a gimmick, by the way, for somehow people

when we released Cold Snap, we told people we found it in a file cabinet, like tongue-in-cheek. Like, it had been lost and we found it it kind of like they find old episodes of tv shows and stuff um and anyway randy bueller who was more of a straight guy was the one that did it and they didn't realize he was joking and everyone thought we were being serious and we weren't anyway um uh cold snap was a riff off of ice age or you're

missing the third set and so we came up with snow Snow Mana. So Snow Mana looks like a little snowflake, and it shows up in costs that you can spend Snow Mana. I believe any permanent that produces mana that itself is snow has the quality of snow in its mana. And that, and you'll see it, I think we have it both,

for sure we have an activation cost. Did we put it in mana cost? I don't think we did it in mana cost. Although, I mean, it you'll see it, I think we have it both, for sure we have an activation cost. Did we put it in mana cost? I don't think we did it in mana cost. Although, I mean, it would work in mana cost. Okay. Next. Uh, the loyalty symbol first showed up in Lorwyn on Planeswalkers.

So the loyalty symbol, um, usually the Planeswalkers, um, have three, uh, loyalty abilities. Sometimes they have four. Um, and sometimes a double-faced cars, they get sicker and more. But it's on the left side. It shows how much loyalty. Either there's a plus or a minus before the number. So... Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

The loyalty... I'm saying this back. Well, there's two different symbols. There's the loyalty symbol that shows how much loyalty it comes into play with, and that's the bottom right-hand corner, and there's a variant of that that shows the cost that has a plus and minus. Is that all the same? That might all be the same symbol. Well, I mean, slightly adjusted, I think, but anyway, the loyalty symbols show up on planeswalkers, and it shows how much loyalty they have, and then shows them how much loyalty you gain or lose by using an ability.

Next, we have level symbols. So level symbols showed up in Rise of the Eldrazi. We had a mechanic called level up. And the way it worked is a creature that had this would have usually three different levels. And then it would show you, if it left, you would spend mana to get level counters and then it would tell you how many level, you would spend mana to get level counters. And then it would tell you how many level counters, what the creature was at that level. So the level symbol was kind of an arrow, essentially. Sort of imagine like a rectangle with a triangle on the right-hand side that makes it into an arrow. And so it showed you how much level up counters you needed to level up, to go to the next level.

And then beside that would be a text box and a power toughness box that would go with that. Okay, next symbol, the tombstone icon. So this goes back to Odyssey. So Odyssey had a graveyard theme. And so we made a bunch of cards that cared about the graveyard. Odyssey had a graveyard theme, and so we made a bunch of cards that cared about the graveyard. And so what we did was we wanted to make sure that there's some clue to tell you when there's a card that mattered in the graveyard. The main thing, obviously, was flashback, but there were a few other cards that had functions in the graveyard.

So any card that had a function in the graveyard, we would put a symbol on it, a little graveyard symbol, to tell you. The intention was that we were going to keep that symbol, and that it was just going to be something magic did to tell you when something was active in the graveyard. The problem was, right after Odyssey, or shortly after Odyssey, I think, in Mirrodin we were redoing the frames, and we figured out while we were working the the tail end of it we figured out that mirrored in the new frames wouldn't fit the symbol and so we um made the call to audible to being just an odyssey block thing um and so only odyssey block have a little a little tombstone symbol next the planeswalker symbol so uh the brand team many years ago decided So, the brand team, many years ago, decided...

Someone on the brand team was, like, driving in their car one day, and they saw a McDonald's. But the sign didn't say McDonald's. The sign just had the golden arches. You know, the yellow arches on a red sign. And it didn't even say McDonald's. The restaurant didn't even announce its name. And the person who was driving said, that's interesting.

Look at that. That symbol is so synonymous with the product that they don't even have to tell you the name of the product. You just know what the product is. And so they decided that magic should have one of those symbols. So we talked a bit. And we decided that we'd like a symbol that kind of represented magic as a whole and the planeswalkers. And so ended up calling it the planeswalker symbol. So if you notice, it's a symbol that has five points at top that come down to one point. So the idea is there's five colors of magic, that five colors come together. Also, if you ever have seen, we don't

do this often, but the few times we've done planeswalking, where you physically can see planeswalking, usually the act of making it makes a little symbol look like a planeswalker symbol a little more abstract than the symbol. And we started that planeswalker symbol using it on a lot of products. If you've ever bought a t-shirt with us, oftentimes on the back of the shirt we'll have a little planeswalker symbol. But anyway, it became synonymous. And then in Future Sight, on the future shifted cards, we made these brand new cards.

And one of the things we did is we identified the card type with an icon on the card. And we used the Planeswalker symbol there. And then we made symbols for all the card types that went there. We would later use those on Magic Online to represent car types. So there's a car type for each. Shapes are tough, and I don't know off the top of my head, but there's a shape for each of the car types.

We first saw them in the Future Sight frames, and now they appear on Magic Online. Okay, next, the Chaos symbol. The Chaos symbol is a symbol from Plane Chase. So Plane Chase is a game, it's a supplemental set, we've made more than one, where the premise of it is you are dueling, and there are larger cards called Plane Cards that tell you what plane you're fighting on. Depending what plane you're on, it influences the battle. Plane Chase was kind of influenced

by something called Enchant Worlds that existed back in Legends where only one could be in play at once and affected how the game played. Now, the way that Plane Chase works is each turn, there's a die called a planer die. And you can roll the die. And on the die is a planeswalker symbol and a chaos

symbol so the planeswalk symbol means that you planeswalk you change the plane you go to a new plane the chaos symbol means that something happens on the world and there there's sets that have um or i think every world has a chaos effect meaning if you roll the chaos symbol this effect happens so usually there's a static ability um and then there's an ability that can happen. I guess some of them only have a Chaos ability, or some of them— most of them have a static ability and a Chaos ability. I think some might only have a Chaos ability. We've messed around with them a bunch.

Okay, the Chaos Symbol. So that shows up only on plain cards and on the planar die. Next, the DFC symbol. So we've done three different sets of DFC symbols. The first one showed up in Innistrad. On the front was a sun, on the back was a moon. Then they showed up on magic origins. The front might have been the creature symbol,

and the back is the planeswalker symbol. And then we went in Eldritch Moon. Well, we went back in Shadows of Innistrad, and in Shadows of Innistrad, I believe it was, again, a sun and a moon. And I believe on Eldritch Moon, the front side was the moon, and then the back side was sort of this, um, Amrakul, or Drazi sort of symbol. Um, so whenever we do double-faced cards, oh, we did, okay, there must be symbols, I didn't write this down, uh, there also are double-faced cards in Ixalan, so that

has, I didn't write that down. There's obviously symbols on those as well, and they wouldn't be the ones I just named because none of that makes sense. But they're symbols that make sense with that maybe like a compass or something? I can't remember what they were. But anyway, they appear on double-faced cards in Innistrad. Next! In Kaladesh, we introduced Energy.

So Energy is a little lightning bolt, and it's another resource, and cards can give you energy, and cards can spend energy in cost. Not in mana cost, but in cost on the resource. And cards can give you energy. And cards can spend energy in cost. Not in mana cost, but in cost on the card. And so we made this little symbol. So it represents a token that you get, or a counter that you get, that you get to keep. And those counters can be used to spend mana.

Obviously, you guys are playing. Energy is played a lot right now. So I'm sure people know of energy. Okay, next. I'm trying to think where these came from. The color indicators. So I know we use them on double-faced cards. Do they pre-exist double-faced cards?

I'm not sure. So what happened was, I think they showed up for the first time on double-faced cards. So we were making a card. So for example, Garak in Innistrad, the front side of Garruk is green, but the back side of Garruk is black and green. He transforms, he gets cursed, and now he becomes black and green. Well, how do we tell you that? And so what we did is we make a symbol that goes on. So whenever we need you to know the color of the card and there's not a mana symbol

in the upper right hand corner to tell you because that's the way you normally know or if the card has a color quality different than its mana symbol we make a little symbol that tells you. I guess the devoid

has a keyword since we didn't know how to show you in the symbol that it was colorless. But if a card is a color other than what it normally is, or if the backs have a card that doesn't have mana cost, we have this little, it's a circle basically that's a color usually. So if it's a red card, just a red circle. But that is used to indicate, that is used to indicate what color it is. Okay. The last symbol

is a little different kind of symbol. So we have these things called watermarks. So what a watermark is is behind the rules text of a card. It's a symbol that we can do and then we can put the text over the symbol but the symbol you can draw it out so you can see the symbol. So the first place I think we did a watermark was an original Ravnica. We

made up symbols for the ten guilds and so each of the ten guilds had its own symbol and then we had certain rules when you got a guild symbol you go read my articles I talked about this quite a bit it had to do like there were five layers of how connected to the guild you were and I think three and up got a got a symbol but basically it's like are you using the keyword mechanic are you multicolored or are you monocolored but using an off color activation meaning do you need two colors to optimize yourself or do you reference either the color or the basic land type of another color.

But anyway, we used it there. And the thing we realized was it allowed us to start using that symbol elsewhere. For example, in Return to Ravnica, we gave away pins in the pre-release boxes. And we made shirts and stickers. We've really been able to use those symbols and do a lot of cool things with them. And there's a lot of identification that comes with symbols. So it's been pretty fun.

Okay, the next place we used watermarks, I believe, was Scars of Mirrodin. we used watermarks, I believe, was Scars of Mirrodin. Scars of Mirrodin was a conflict between the Mirrins and the Phyrexians. And so what we did is the Phyrexian had the Phyrexian symbol, obviously, the circle with the line thread. And then we made a Mirrin symbol for the Mirrins,

which is sort of a circle with line threads, that's how I describe it. But anyway, once again, we made shirts with that, and we used watermarks on the cards. One of the reasons that was important was we wanted to just show the spread of on New Phyrexia,

of Phyrexians, of Myrden. And so the idea is, the first set, I think there's like 20% of the cards said Phyrexia, and the second set, 50%, and the third set, I think it was like 90%. So you just could see Phyrexia growing over it. The other place that we used watermarks to show factions was in Khans of Tarkir. We actually, by the way, did three different sets of them.

So the first set had the wedges, the clans that were three color. So that was Abzan, Jeskai, Soltai, Mardu, and Timur. And they represented the five parts of the dragon. The claw of the dragon, the wing of the dragon. And so that represented

them. And then in Fate Reforged, we went back and it was kind of a proto version of them. So they had symbols that only showed up, I think, in the center color, I believe. But it was a proto-version of it. And then when we went to Dragons of Tarkir it was an altered version where

they were based on the dragons and there were two colors and once again we used a version of it. So you could follow, the base color follows all the way through, but there's three different versions of it. In Khans, for example, we did another thing where we did shirts and things where people could identify. The one other place that we've used watermarks is on the story cards.

We have cards that represent the points in the story. And there are some number of them. It used to be five in every set. Now it varies. There is a watermark of a planeswalker symbol to show you that it's a story card. So if you ever see a planeswalker

watermark on a card, that means it's a story card. Also, look at the bottom. It'll tell you the bottom. It'll say one of five or one of four, however many there are. Are there any other watermarks? Oh, the one other symbol that you might have seen on a magic card is the wizard symbol. So wizards has a little shooting star. We have used that occasionally on promo cards. And I think there might have been some watermarks with the wizard symbol in some promo cards as well.

I'm sure I'm missing... For promo, like, I think we've used DCI as a watermark on some promo cards. There are some watermarks for promo cards that I'm forgetting. I know we used the wizard star. I know we used DCI. But anyway, there are a lot of watermarks. And normally, by the way, watermarks...

So one of the things about a lot of these symbols is the way the rules work for tournaments is whenever you see a card, you treat every card as the English version of that card. And there's a definitive version of it. And all cards are that version. So since there are some things that change between cards, like watermarks,

watermarks cannot be affected by rules. Same with expansion symbols. There were some cards early in Magic that did care about expansion symbols. There were cards that would wipe out all the cards from expansion. We've redone them in Oracle, so they literally name all the cards that they affect. Because you can reprint a card,

so it might not have the same expansion symbol on it. Now unsets can care and obviously unstable is now public. There was a watermark, a tiny watermark matter theme because that's something you can care about in Silver Border that you can't care about in Black Border. Same with expansion symbols. Silver Border will

care about expansion symbols. That's not something. You can care about mana symbols because that's consistent across all cards and tap symbols are consistent across all cards but expansion symbols

are not and the watermarks are not. But anyway, so that, my friends, is all the symbols. So one of the things

I want to say that's really cool is the power of symbology that really, you know, we've made a lot of shirts and a lot of shirts we make are of the symbols of mana symbols uh we've done tap symbols

we've done expansion symbols we've done faction watermark symbols um i even have a hybrid symbol that was especially made one um but anyway there's a lot of cool stuff and people really so identify um symbols are very powerful very potent. We try to balance it. You know, we don't want to have too many symbols, because we've learned there are games where you play them and there's just like the very first thing you see is 18 symbols. It's like, whoa, whoa, too much. So we try to make sure that we use our symbols carefully and not overuse our symbols. But as you know, you can see that we've been more willing in more recent days to

explore frame changes and all sorts of different things. And part of that is being willing to look when we need to to get interesting new icons when they make sense. Try not to introduce too many at once or anything. But anyway, hopefully today was just a look at sort of the symbology

of magic. And there's been a lot of symbols over the years. So it was kind of fun talking it all through. But I'm at work. So that means, well, 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.