Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #509: Magic Evolution, Part 2

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

This is part two of my "Magic Evolution" series where I walk through sets and explain what innovations they added to Magic design.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, a little while ago I did a series on mechanic evolution, where I went through the early parts of magic, starting with Alpha, or Raven Knights, I don't know, I think I started with the Raven Knights. And I went all through, up through, what's the last one I talked about? I think I talked about Fallen Empires. So what I did was, for each case, I was talking about, this whole talk is about sort of magic design evolution, design technology, kind of what did new sets add to the mix. And so I'm kind of looking through the history of magic from a designer's perspective. Anyway, the first one went really well, and people liked it. So when people like something, I do it again.

So we're going to pick up. So I left off at Ice Age. So what we're going to do is we are going to start with Ice Age and go forward. And I'm going to talk about sort of the evolutions, what each set had to offer from a Magic design technology sort of standpoint. So we start with Ice Age. So Ice Age was a pretty important set.

So if you remember, when Magic first hit it big, Richard realized that they were going to need more sets. So what he did is he went and talked to his playtifters and he had different teams design different sets. So one of the teams he talked to is what we call the East Coast playtifters. Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, and had them design a set. So the set they designed was Ice Age. Now interestingly they would later go back and make Antiquities, which came out first. They also would make Fallen Empires that came out first.

But eventually, Ice Age would come out. And Ice Age is interesting in that there's a lot of basic concepts they played around with that Ice Age was important. So one of the most interesting ones is one that you might not even think about, which is the idea of sort of the value of a card. So one of the things that they realized is that when you play a magic card that you get a spell but you're using up a card and one of the things that they played around with is what if you didn't lose the card? What if you had the spell, you spent the mana, but it wasn't a card loss? And so the idea there they were playing around with was the very first idea of a

cantrip is what they called it. So a cantrip is a word in Magic Ease, you know like in D&D or whatever, it's like a little tiny spell. It's a little add-on. It's not a major spell, it's a little tiny spell it's it's a little add-on it's not a major spell it's a little tiny spell so the idea was what if we did some little tiny spells and those little tiny spells the reason it could you could justify doing a smaller effect was you got the card back now what happened in um what happened in ice age was they were concerned that if you got the card back immediately like they had a card called Urza's Bobble that costs zero

and they were like, well we can't make this card that costs zero if you get the card immediately because you would just deck thin, right? If you had a card that costs zero that instantly drew you a card, that's just like having four or less cards in your deck. Now, what we've learned since then is, you know what? We don't

have to make zero costcost cantrips. Drawing the card right away is better. What they did in Ice Age is you drew the beginning of your next upkeep. But there was memory issues. You had to remember you drew a card. And we later learned that just drawing immediately, just draw a card. And then, fine, don't put it on zero-cost things. But the idea of sort of understanding that card

and card evaluation was an important part of it. The other thing that Ice Age did is, now Legends was the first set to have multicolored cards. But if you remember, in Legends, all the gold cards were on the Legends themselves, the Legendary Creatures themselves. And there was a smattering of multi-color card showing up other places, but Ice Age was

the first set that really used multi-color in a way that was a component of the set. It wasn't just a splash on one or two cards. It was something that said, hey, this is a thing that we are doing. It's not the major role of the set. It's not the theme of the set, but it's just a tool and something we can make use of.

And Ice Age was the first set really to start using multicolor more as a tool than as a theme, if that makes sense. I've talked about this a bunch before in that usually when you make something brand new, the first time you use it, you get some splash value out of it. Hey, look at this new thing. And then what happens is you kind of settle down and go, okay, it's not exciting that we did this. We've done this already. But there's interesting ways to use it.

Hybrid Man is a real good example of that. When we first used it in Ravnica, ooh, it's splashy. When we got to using it, like, in Shadowmoor, it's functional less than splashy. Although I guess using a lot of it was splashy. Ice Age also played around a bit with... So one of the things about East Coast Playstashers is they were very into integrated story and cards. So, for example, they made Antiquities,

which is the first set really to have a story with the Brothers War. And what they were trying to do here was they wanted to tell a larger story, and so there definitely is we haven't quite got to the point yet, and we'll hopefully get to it later today, where the story is really clear from the set. But there definitely was more of an

idea of something going on. And there were characters and spells and stuff that played into a larger context of what was happening. Also, other things that Ice Age did was Ice Age really played around with a lot of other concepts. Like Necropotence shows up in Ice Age. That's a card that really talks about understanding the value of cards for different costs. Now obviously, historically, it ended up being powerful,

but it was a neat concept of playing around with the idea of life for cards. That was really, that's the place to kind of put life for cards on the map and really made it a black thing. They also started playing around a bit more with the idea of a lot of risks. Black had always had this element of risk to it. Lord of the Pit showed up in Alpha. But a lot of the risk-taking early magic was, I will get a creature, and there's a downside to the creature. That the creature might

do something that's problematic. They played around with a bunch of spells, not just Necropotence, but also Demonic Consultation, which was a spell where you can go get, you can name a spell and then you kept going until you got that spell. But you exiled the top X cards of your library,

meaning you might miss the spell. You could mill away your whole library. Put your whole library in the graveyard. So they definitely were playing around a bit more in that. They also introduced the idea of snow. They had snow-covered lands, and then they had some cards that cared about snow-covered lands. Now, it's not so much that snow-covered was a great innovation per se,

but the interesting thing about it was that they were playing around in the space of sort of layers of the idea that let's take something that already exists, basic land, and add a layer to it, and then cards can care about that layer. And that is something that really, Ice Age is the first one to really play in that territory. You will see it used a lot more in Magic. The idea, maybe lairs is the wrong word since the rules use lairs to mean something different,

but the idea that you can sort of have a filter, I'll call it a filter, you can have a filter on things and that you can use that filter to represent something and that cards can care about it to represent something and that cards can care about it you know that was something very interesting about it um they also played around this set with cumulative upkeep and the idea there is a cumulative upkeep is a cost that you had to pay every turn but it gets uh keeps going up by one so if you have a cumulative upkeep of one

you pay one then you pay two then you pay three then you pay four, you pay one, then you pay two, then you pay three, then you pay four. That you pay, the cost keeps going up by one. And that really was them playing around with the kind of idea of cost, the idea of Ice Age is the first set that kind of had what I would call temporary cards. Because, for example, when you put a cumulative upkeep on something, it's just not staying around forever. because, for example, when you put a cumulative upkeep on something, it's just not staying around forever.

Now, obviously, you could see the precursor to this in stasis, which was an alpha. Stasis makes you pay for the upkeep, but the lands don't untap. So essentially, it has sort of a pseudo cumulative upkeep, but really Ice Age is the one that took that and really fleshed it out and played around with it a lot more. In general, the other big thing about the East Coast Playtesters, and we'll see this in alliances as well, I'll get to it in a second, is they really, really were designers that loved to experiment with just ideas.

And so Ice Age definitely pushes in different boundaries, discarding the cost they play around with. discarding as a cost they play around with. They're really sort of exploring space. And it's not that Ice Age necessarily, or Alliances, use that space in great volume, but they definitely sort of introduce the idea that there's a lot of concepts that you will see that started in Ice Age or Alliance.

So we'll get to Alliances in a second. Okay, let's move on to Homelands. So Homelands was designed by Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford, aka Scooter. They both worked at Wizards at the time. So the thing they were really interested in, Homelands in some ways was the first magic set made that took into account sort of the audience response,

the audience feedback. A lot of what Homelands was is saying, wow this game was a hit. Well what were some of the early things that people liked? Oh people like Sarah Angel? Well we'll introduce Sarah, the maker of Sarah Angels. People like Sanger Vampire? We'll introduce the of Sengur, where they come from. You like the Herloon Minotaur? Well, we'll show you all sorts of other Minotaurs that are similar to the Herloon Minotaur. There's a lot of... It was the first kind of fan service set.

And it really was trying to say, what do people like? Let's explore that a little more. Also, it really was the first world that took place on a different plane. I understand that technically, technically, Arabian Nights was on Rebiah, but really Arabian Nights was Richard doing, you know, Arabian Nights. It wasn't him trying to make a new world. He was just sort of reflecting something. And after the fact, to explain that, you know, okay, it's the multiverse.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That took place in the world. This is the first time that we left Dominaria in a much more conscious sense. And in the story, the fact that this is a plane of its own, that the planeswalkers went there, is part of the story. Sarah and Faraz, who were in love,

the two planeswalkers in love, sort of hid away there. And there's definitely a whole story about characters as planeswalkers matter. I mean, planeswalkers had been in the story before, but the idea of them being planeswalkers, the idea of them being able to go between planes and that mattering. For all intents and purposes, in the previous stories, they were just the heroes of the realm.

The fact they could walk between worlds didn't really matter. We get to Homeland, it matters. Homeland is also the first set that really went all in on the flavor and that, I mean, Arabian Nights was clearly top down in the sense that Richard was trying to capture an existing mythos. This was the first time where they were trying to build their own mythos in a way that really pushed the design. If you look at something like Ice Age, they were more driven by coming up with cool mechanical aspects of the cards. They were exploring what a card means in many different forms. And so this is the first set that really was like, we're going to start with flavor. Let's figure out how to make flavor work.

Now, I'll be honest, Homeland's had a lot of issues. Probably the biggest one being that the people who made the set didn't really have a lot of experience with either magic or design in general. They were fans of the game. And a lot of what they did had a lot of fan service,

but it didn't have as much polish to it. And due to some internal stuff at the game, and a lot of what they did had a lot of fan service, but it didn't have as much polish to it, and due to some internal stuff at the time, R&D really did not give Homeland the... I've explained the story before, but Peter had promised Kyle and Scott that they could make a set. When they turned it in, R&D didn't think it was a very good set. Peter said, no, we're making this. R&D didn't want to make it. And R&D kind of just sort of say, hey, don't give us sets that aren't good. Sort of said, oh, well, if you think it's good, who are we to make it better?

And they didn't really, I mean, what they needed to do is strip it down to the bare and just redo the whole thing. And they didn't do that because they were trying to make a point with Peter. Ended up making what I have judged as the poorest design set in Magic's history. And like I said, a lot of that comes down to, I don't think the people that designed the set really had the tools and the things available to them to do that. But it is interesting that it really is. The set played around a little bit with character more so than before,

and it definitely sort of tried to build on some mythos, and there's a lot of mythos building in Homelands. From a mechanical standpoint, there's not a lot added. Probably the most important card in my mind was Serrated Arrows, which was a card that came with three uses to it. Serrated Arrows, which was a card that came with three uses to it. It's the card that motivated me to, it sort of led to energy down the path. So if it had anything, it really sort of, I was inspired by the idea of temporary use things, which I think Serrated Arrows is the first. There might be another one that I'm forgetting.

But Serrated Arrows was really powerful and had a lot of focus on it. So that is a card that I think probably had the most sort of future pushing or sort of inspired the most technologies. Then we get to Alliances. So Alliances, in my mind, is almost the anti-Homelands. The East Coast Play of Chifters, I'm a big fan. They, A, had been playing Magic since the very, very beginning.

They were there since Alpha. So by the time they made it, they had been playing Magic for a couple years. And I don't know how much game design experience they had before they made Magic sets, but they had very strong game design chops.

One of the things you see in Ice Age, and even more in Alliances, like Alliances really, in some ways, I often talk about how Unsets is me exploring a new space. In some ways, you could say that Alliances is the first sort of, maybe it's like Future Sight, you know,.5. Like, it's Future future site.5. It's future site before future site. They really were exploring in space of what could be done.

The idea that it was a continuation of Ice Age really wasn't something they were doing, by the way. That was something that was added on by development, that we were trying to find a way to sort of connect things and we were moving toward a block where we wanted it was kind of the precursor to the block model but really what they were doing in alliances is they were coming up with a lot of one-off cards a lot of interesting ideas and one of the things

you'll note if you go back and look at alliances there's a lot of one-off cards that we would later go back and explore as all-out ideas um some of the precursors to Kicker are in there. Some of off-color activation stuff is in there. There's just a lot of space they were playing around with. And it's not... The interesting thing there is Alliances is not like, oh, we had a major mechanic and we were pushing in a certain area. It's a lot of one of, what if we try this?

What if we try that? It's a lot of experimentation. Alliances, to me, is a really, really cool set. I mean, probably the shining point of what they did would be the pitch cards. So the pitch cards were a cycle of five cards, Force of Will being the famous one, in which instead of spending mana, you could pitch a card. So once again, one of the themes you can see between Ice Age and Alliances

is they're really, really interested in what the value of a card is. You know, cantrips say, well, what if it doesn't cost a card? And Forrest of the Wolves is like, well, what if it costs a card but it doesn't cost mana? You know, there's all these different elements of them exploring in this space. It's a big theme

they like. They also play a lot with the understanding of alternate colors. They have a cool card where you spend mana, and then you can spend mana of a second color to enhance the effect. A lot of sort of kicker technology, that's a precursor to that. And just like the pitch card show, one of the things they were really big on is saying, what is a rule?

Can we just break the rule? What if we do something, you know, and if you listen to my Alliance podcast, there was a lot of controversy about Alliance at the time, especially because of the pitch cards, and that there's a belief that it was pushing in directions that magic should not push. And it's really interesting in that

what I think was going on was that they were just testing out the space. In a lot of ways, I mean, there wasn't a future shifted set of cards, but it did a lot of what Future Sight did, where when I was in Future Sight, I really was like, I and my team were like, what haven't we done? What couldn't we do? And we were really sort of feeling out other places and other possibilities.

That is what alliances did. And like I said, it's more on a card-by-card basis than it is by a mechanic basis. I'm trying to think if alliances even had a mechanic per se. I mean, it had the pitch cards. But as far as a named mechanic, I don't even know. I mean, we continued some stuff from Ice Age. And once again, we did that more so than they did. Age. And once again, we did that more so than they did. Now I will

note, by the way, from Ice Age, both Cantrips and Cumulative Upkeep just became a standard element of Magic. Now Cumulative Upkeep eventually went away as an evergreen thing, but both of them became things that just Magic did for a while. Cantrips, obviously, are still with the game.

We use Cantrips less just because there's... we have to be careful. It's still a tool in our toolbox, and it's evergreen. Any second, we use Cantrips less just because there's, we have to be careful. It's still a tool in our toolbox, and it's evergreen. Any second, we use cantrips. Okay, after alliances, we get to Mirage. Okay, so Mirage, probably the Mirage is the biggest thing. Mirage was also done by Alpha Playtest Group. They don't have a fancy name.

I don't know why East Coast playtesters get a name. These guys don't. But it's Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Coutinho, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard Kallenberg. If they ever have a name, they're known as the Bridge Group. Richard met them through Bridge.

There's a Bridge Club that they met. And they made Mirage and Visions. Now, the interesting thing about Mirage was because it took longer to come out, now the interesting thing about Mirage was because it took longer to come out that one of the ideas that we were really interested when we did Mirage is getting the sense of

limited being a thing like one of the things if you ever played Ice Age for example if you played Ice Age Legends Limited was atrocious it didn't have basic effects you needed. Like, if you wanted to destroy an enchantment, you had to go to Rare, I think.

You could bounce it with Boomerang. But, like, there just wasn't answers to things. And there were things set up there that were just so not designed for Limited. I mean, Legends is, to call it painful, is probably undersung how painful it is. Ice Age was playable in the loosest sense, you know, but it really, really wasn't designed with limited in mind.

The biggest sense of that was the creature ratio was just off, that you would open up a booster pack and you could get three or four creatures and do that a couple times, and it's really hard. And once again, spread across colors. One of the biggest problems when you played Ice Age Seal was your creatures tended to find your colors. Didn't matter if you opened a strong spell, it was like, what color are my creatures in? And you often played three colors just so you had enough creatures to play. Flying was so powerful because it was so infrequent. These cosplay testers

weren't big fans of flying. Fallen Empires, for example, only had one activated flying and one spell that granted flying until end of turn and killed the creature. They weren't big on flying, but flying is important. You'll notice we get to Mirage,

by the way. So Mirage said, let's design a set really thinking about limited in mind. And one of the things is a lot of evolution has been made. There's a lot of improvements.

It's not like, but Mirage in my ways is the Model T from a percentage of drafting. It was the first one that you could honestly draft. It was a draftable set. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could technically draft Ice Age but it was not a fun experience where Mirage, like I said, we learned a lot from it. You know, it's kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, a modern-day sports car is better than a Model T, but the Model T, hey, before that,

there wasn't a car that worked. There wasn't really limited gameplay, and that Mirage really took a lot of energy to try to get there. So the two mechanics that Mirage had was flanking and phasing. Flanking was an ability that said whenever you're blocked by this creature, assuming you don't have flanking, you get minus one, minus one.

The flavor was you're on horseback, and so you're at a tactical advantage. And then phasing was a mechanic that had you leave play. Every other turn, your creature went away. Phasing, for example, I mean, Richard technically made a card called Oubliette, which is probably the first, and there were Swords of Plowshares and Alpha. Richard had messed a little bit with the idea of things go away and don't come back, and then Oubliette messed around with the idea

that things go away and can come back. But it really was Mirage that really sort of said, let's take the exile zone, it wasn't called the exile zone at the time, and really make more use of it. And they really started playing around with phasing. Now phasing, originally phasing was

you went on creatures and they went away and came back. But we started messing with phasing, even in Mirage, where phasing started being a defensive thing, where if you were in trouble you could phase yourself out so you could protect yourself. It really is the first set that started playing with the exile zone in a larger way. Obviously, individual cards existed.

But it's the first set that really started playing in that space. It also... The idea that your creature's only there half the time really did this neat thing where it had to sort of understand costing in a little better sense. What does it mean to cost something and to be there every other turn? And the other big thing Mirage did, by the way, is it was the first set that really, really thought about curves,

because that's so important and limited. The idea that I need, I want to make sure that I can have something every turn that I can do, so that when I'm drafting, I can think about, okay, what am I doing? Do I have early game? Do I have middle game? Do I have late game? And then flanking was really the idea of, it's the first mechanic outside of evergreen alpha stuff that starts saying, what else can we do in combat space? What else can we do? And that combat mechanics have become a pretty big staple of expansions.

And so that was definitely the set that... The other big thing to realize is Mirage was the first one to kind of take its mechanics and advertise them

as kind of the key selling point. A lot of earlier sets, it wasn't really like you go back to something like Legends, it was gold cards and legendary creatures

that were the selling point. It wasn't like there were mechanics per se. And if you look at something like Ice Age, okay, there are some mechanics. There's cumulative upkeep, there's cantrips, but once again, I mean, I guess cumulative upkeep was named, but it wasn't quite like, here are the new

mechanics per se. I mean, there was new things added. Mirage really was the first set that said, okay, it's a new set, we have new mechanics, and we sold it. It's flanking and phasing, and that really was kind of part of how we sold it. It also was the first block, that not

only did we care about it for limited, but we sold it in a very different way. We sold it in a context of, this is something that is going to be a cohesive element and that we sort of identified, I mean, obviously things will change over the years, but it really was us sort of giving an identity and giving sort of a larger sense of here's the role it's going to play.

Now Mirage played around in a lot of space. It messed around with some sort of engine stuff, engines in which you trade one resource for another. Ice Agent Alliances have been the first really to mess in this space

but Mirage did a lot more. You see stuff like Cadaver's Bloom, like Squandered Resources. Now obviously I'm naming cards that went together and made a very destructive deck

called Prosperous Bloom. We learned from some of our mistakes but we really were playing around in space of what could you do with engines, what is resource trading. Also, you start to see a sort of, there's a little bit more interweaving of story in the sets.

It'll get a little stronger in a second, but you start to see a little bit more of a nod toward that, especially in the flavor text, is where it's the most noticeable. Okay, so Mirage was followed by Visions. Visions was also designed by the same same group. Visions' biggest contribution was probably Enter the Battlefield effects. That's the first set where they show up. There was, I think, four cards. There was Octavia Rangitang,

there was Necrotal, there was Manowar, and there was Night of the Mist, which is the one... Normally people name the 187... Sorry, I shouldn't call him that. When people enter the Battlefield effects... Sorry, I'm using old, old magic slang.

There were four... I think there were four cards that entered the Battlefield effects, but three of them went on to be really powerful and very iconic, which is Manowar, Necrotral, and Octavia Orangutan. And the idea of creatures having a sort of a sorcery component to them was pretty powerful and pretty important. And so, you know, Visions introduced that.

Now, the interesting thing is, at the same time that set was being worked on, I was working on Tempest, and independent to that, we ended up messing around in similar space. But Visions is the first set that came out, so it's the set that sort of defined the mechanic, even though, ironically,

there was some parallel design going on in Tempest. The other thing that Visions did was they messed around with the idea of cards carrying about other cards. There's two creatures that you can, if both of them are in play, you can go get the Vy'ashevan dragon. Is that right? Vy'ashevan dragon?

And so it's definitely playing around in some space. One of the big things about Visions is it was more conscious about thinking about constructed play and thinking about what kind of effects have value to them. I mean, if Mirage was kind of the first limited set, Visions was the first set that really, really started thinking about organized, constructed play in the sense of trying to make individual pieces that sort of fit into larger decks and stuff of trying to start to fill in gaps

Okay, now we get to Weatherlight So Weatherlight, what happened is at some point I'll tell the story in full earnest The short version is a guy named Mike Ryan and I, Michael and I were story people, we're writers, we felt like magic really needed an ongoing story so we pitched the Weatherlight Saga, they said yes and they were eager to start. So we ended up, we were originally going to start in Tempest but we decided to do, because they were so excited, to do

a prologue in Weatherlight. So Weatherlight was the kidnapping of Sisay, and then the crew of the Weatherlight goes and gets Gerard, who had left a while ago. Gerard ends up getting a bunch of people, including Mirri. They end up meeting Krovaks. Tongarth and Squee were already on the ship. Karn was on the ship.

Although he was deactivated. They go get Ertai. So they started sort of putting together a crew to go rescue to go rescue Sisay. And the story is doing the lead up. It's the first time

we really did a set where we are directly telling stories through the art kind of what had happened in Antiquities was they were trying to tell a larger story but hint at it like you were you know you were archaeologists digging up and trying to piece together the story.

What we were trying to do in Weatherlight is just show you the story. Like, there's beats and moments in the story where you see it. And you can piece things together to get, oh, you know, for the first time, I mean, Tempest will do this even more so, but for the first time, there's like sequential things happening in the art that you can sort of get

a sense of the story that's happening. And Weatherlight's where we started with doing the flavor text, having people write the characters' voices. So you start to get a sense of who these characters are. Really to understand characters, voice work's really important. So we did a lot of flavor text. And what we had done at the time was each character was assigned to a writer. For example, I had Karn and Ertai were the two that I did. So I really started to craft, like, what does Karn sound like? What does Ertai sound like? Michael took Gerard. Anyway, all the characters got written by somebody and there were people... I think most characters wrote one character. I wrote two. But most people were writing a single character. Now

Weatherlight, interesting enough, from a mechanical standpoint, really had nothing to do with the Weatherlight. The Weatherlight part was added very late in the process. It was not built with the Weatherlight in mind. We more figured out what we were doing and then found places we could tell the story we needed to tell. So, for those that ever wondered,

Weatherlight was designed, bottom up, it's a graveyard set. It's the first graveyard set. It's the first set that really decided to focus on the graveyard. There are other sets that definitely had graveyard mechanics, graveyard cards in it. But Weatherlight's the first set that said, okay, we are going to be a graveyard set. We are going to tell, we are going to focus on the graveyard, we're going to care about the graveyard.

They didn't really add named mechanics or anything, but they did sort of make a major theme out of the graveyard, and really, it's the first set, well, Antiquities is the first set with a theme, which is artifacts, but this is the first set that really uses a game zone, the graveyard, as being a focal point, and so this is the first set that really uses a game zone, the graveyard, as being a focal point and so this is the first graveyard themed set

it played around, so I often talk that there's two ways to care about the graveyard one is as a resource, I'm eating things out of the graveyard or I'm using things up of the graveyard and the other is a barometer, meaning I care what's in the graveyard. Whether I played around with both, it was a little more graveyard as resource and graveyard as barometer, but it definitely had area playing around.

In a lot of ways, it was kind of like to the graveyard what alliances was to set design, which was they just took an area and just played in it. Later on, what'll happen is, we start getting more focused when we make a graveyard set. What exactly are we doing in the graveyard? This set was more, let's try things in the graveyard. And there's a lot of experimentation. So it's the first set that did a lot of experimentation with graveyard mechanics,

to sort of figure out, okay, how exactly does this work? What's going on? And it was definitely a set where not everything worked, but there was a lot of interesting idea of Graveyard as a resource where it eat it up. There were cards that worked in Graveyard. I mean, that wasn't the first set that did it, but it explored it a little more depth than previous sets had.

I mean, Alpha had a card that Nether Shadow know, Nether Shadow jumped out of the graveyard. But usually before this, it was just about coming back from the graveyard. And this is the first set that started talking about maybe you have some utility in the graveyard. Okay. After Weatherlight is Tempest, my baby. My first set.

So Tempest, for starters, we were trying to tell a story. I will admit, we still are not really top-down yet. We were building our set, and when we got permission to do the Weatherlight, we did weave in the Weatherlight story throughout the whole set. So the story is very, very woven through the flavor in the art. In fact, you can go online and see this. There's a storyboard we made that so many of the pieces of art are about the story that you can lay them

together and tell the story. I mean, Tempest is probably the set with the most, we're just showing the story directly through the cards. But that was done more creatively than it was done mechanically. The big flavor of this, the big mechanics of the set were shadow and buyback, also had slivers. Those were woven into the story, but weren't, weren't, like, shadow, we ended up finding a way to make shadow relevant to the story, and we added in the Douthi and the, the Sultari,

Sultari, is that right? And the Thalcos, I think, or the Three Shadows. And we sort of built the world of Wrath and explained the stuff. And a lot of what we did was we built the world knowing the mechanics, so the mechanics were incorporated into the world. Like in Weatherlight, it was just dressing, where the slivers show up in the story. There's different elements that we made relevant in the story.

As far as mechanics, Shadow was us playing... It's the first time we really played around with what I would call a second sort of combat area. Obviously, there is interaction with evasion. We had done evasion before. We had done flying and such. But this is the first step that says, okay, I mean, in some ways,

there's a card in Alpha called Raging River. In Raging River, you divide, you put a river, you know, Raging River happens, and then you divide your creatures, and then they're on one side or the other of the river. So one of the things that Shadow did is it sort of played into space in a larger way,

which in some levels, there's like, either you're in Combat Area A or you're in Combat Area B, that the Shadow creature is only interacting with the Shadow creature. So it's the first time we made kind of a parallel combat zone. You know,

it is an interesting space. It is not something we... We've visited a little bit, but it is definitely sort of... One of the interesting things about combat evolution, like, for example, with Mirage, we played around with the idea that, you know, there's advantage to interacting

and not interacting, and in Tempest, there's advantage to interacting and not interacting. And Tempest is like, oh, well, maybe it's the idea of where do you want to interact and how do you want to do this. The buyback was probably the one that had a little more impact. Buyback, once again, is the first mechanic that has kicker-like qualities to it. No, it predates kicker. That kicker was all about additive cost. And this was the first kind of additive cost where I want to do something and for extra mana.

Now, once again, like I said, in alliances, there is individual cards that say, hey, you can spend extra mana. But this is the first mechanic we did where it's just built in the mechanic. I can cast it for cost A or for cost B and if I cast it for cost B,

hey, I get something for that. Buyback was definitely us playing around with the idea of what does a card cost. Like I said, Ice Age started the theme, but we picked it up. Okay, well if I'm not losing the card, what does that cost? And there's a direct card cost. Like I said, Ice Age started the theme, but we picked it up. Okay, well, if I'm not losing the card, what does that cost? And there's a direct mana cost.

Well, this much mana, and you get to keep the card. And it also, you'll see, with us playing around, if you look at Mirage, its mechanics tend to go on permanence. Both flanking, well, flanking was only on creatures, and phasing, we put phasing on enchantments as well as on creatures.

Actually, was there any phasing artifacts? I don't think there were. But this is the first time we really are doing a spell mechanic, a named spell mechanic. And that buyback really got us sort of, I mean, the idea, I mean, it's now just commonplace for us to take the basic effects and staple on things. But this is the first place we were sort of played around that space.

Slivers is us playing around in very parasitic space of, like I said, I did a Sliver podcast not long ago, The Slivers were inspired by Plague Rats from Alpha. Slivers really, they were an interesting idea, and it was kind of a bold thing to do at the time. And they were definitely super parasitic. You want Slivers, you've got to get them from this set. But it really hit large with the audience, and in such a way that sort of, we make sliver things from time to time.

Like Allies in Zendikar are a good example of sort of new age slivers. I mean, they're sliver variants. And we like what we've discovered. It really taught us of there is parasitic space is not necessarily bad. There's fun things you can do with it. You need to be careful where and how you use it. But there is a lot of coolness to it. And it really played into the idea of buildup.

Creatures that kind of build up over time. That was the first time you saw that theme. That was a very popular theme. Much like buyback, by the way, was the first time we played in the theme of using cards more than once that's another thing we've come back to a lot another thing that we did in Tempest was the licits so the licits were creatures

that could turn into enchantments or specifically at the time they were a bit complex rules wise but you could see us first messing around with the idea of changing between states, of the idea that a card could be one thing

and turn into a different thing. You had previously seen things get animated. Obviously, in Alpha, Richard had animated artifact, and there were artifacts that could come to life. But other than artifacts becoming creatures, and then Mirage, I guess Mirage had... Oh, no, no, sorry.

I'm thinking of Urza Saga. Urza Saga started playing around with enchantments coming to life. We'll get to that in a second. But anyway, it definitely sort of... It was us sort of really examining dual natures of things and the ideas of things changing in between. That's something you'll see more of us.

Okay, let's get on to Stronghold. So Stronghold continued the story. We introduced the spikes. So the spikes were a mechanic where they came with plus one plus one counters and then you could move the plus and plus counters to other creatures or some of them allows you to then use them for other resources you could gain life or you could regenerate the creature or you could do various things this was not the first time we use plus and plus encounters. Alpha had plus and plus encounters.

I think Alpha had plus and plus encounters. Let's see if that's correct. Alpha had tokens for sure. No, Alpha had plus and plus encounters. It's a fungosaur. Alpha did have plus and plus encounters. It had creatures that grew themselves. But this is the first time that we used

plus and plus encounters more as a resource than as a tool. Like, the way it was used up to this point was, creatures can get bigger, how do we represent their getting bigger? Well, we'll have a marker to show the creature's gotten bigger. And so, plus one plus one counters early on were more of, it's just a marker on a card to sort of keep track of, it's a memory aid, if you will. The thing that spikes did is said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not just a marker, this is a resource that I can take this and I can put it on a creature and I can move it to another creature.

And maybe that creature can spend it to do something with it. And it really was the first time we started playing around with, this is a theme that, you can tell it's my mechanic, it's a theme that we've explored extensively, is the idea of the utility of plus one, plus one counters as a mechanical space. In fact, there are few mechanics that we use more than plus one, plus one counters.

It's proven to be a really, really valuable tool in magic design. Also in Stronghold, well, the first thing we did there is, so we introduced buyback in the first set, and Shadow. But the second set, we started messing around with buyback. We did alternate costs.

And the idea being that, you know, buyback in the first set just had mana cost to it. And I think it's Stronghold. Is Stronghold there? Is it Exodus where we started doing all... I think it's Stronghold. I think Stronghold has...

I think we just start doing... Do life payment? Well, we definitely looked around. I mean, I know that we, one of the things that happened as we evolved buyback is us started to push and think of different ways it can matter and different resources. One of the cool things about the early block designs

is because we had the same mechanics throughout the whole block, we'd figure out how to evolve the mechanic within the block. Now we tend to do something and then save the evolution for the return of the mechanic. But in the early days, we didn't expect the mechanics to return. So part of putting it in a block

is for us to sort of milk it for all the versions of it. So we try stuff as it went along. Now Exodus was obviously the third set in the Tempest block. You can tell us pushing a lot more. We start to sort of... The set has a bunch of us redoing famous old cards to try to sort of recapture them um you'll that's a theme uh it starts in tempest but it gets more earnest uh in exodus and even again in ursa saga where a lot of

what i was doing and other people were doing is we were the second generation of magic designers. So we were going back to look at the first generation and saying, what can we do? Can we take things that have been done before and improve upon them? In some cases, we made them broken, but we were trying to sort of say, oh, this is cool.

Is there a way to do this? Like Recurring Nightmare, for example, was me trying to recapture Hell's Caretaker from Legends. And just clean it a little bit. Obviously, power level was not necessarily my forte, so there's a bunch of cards I made during this time period

that were, when I say fixed versions of previous cards, fixed but broken. But the interesting thing in Exodus is we once again did a lot of experimentation. This has the oath cycles in it where we're talking about trying to do catch-up features

where if you're behind... We learned an important lesson there, though, that you can... If you design a card that says, well, if certain things happen, it will make people build their decks in ways to make sure that happens. Oath of Druids is a good example. Oath of Druids was a card that says, well, if certain things happen, it will make people build their decks in ways to make sure that happens. Oath of the Druids is a good example.

Oath of the Druids was a card that said, if you're behind in creatures, you can go tutor for a creature. So the Oath of the Druid deck had no creatures in it, or very, very few creatures in it, or creatures you could sacrifice, because the idea was it wanted to constantly go get creatures. So heaven forbid your opponent play a creature, then you can go get whatever creature you need. Usually you'd use it up,

and then next turn you'd go get another creature. So it was one of the earliest sort of tool belt kind of decks where you could tutor the things you needed. Oh, Mirage did, by the way, play a lot in the tutor space. There was a whole cycle of tutors in Mirage. There was Vampiric Tutor and Mystical Tutor. I don't remember them all. We made a whole cycle, although the red one took a while for us to make.

But anyway, Tempest Block was definitely us stretching our wings a little bit. Tempest was the first in-house, I mean, technically, technically, the first one that came out was Weatherlight. That was done in-house. But Tempest was started first. So Tempest was the first one we had begun work on. And now we're in an area where the people who are the developers are the people that are designing. Now we would switch off teams so the person who led design didn't lead development. But we're starting to see

it's a change in the process because we're making things ourselves. Up through before Weatherlight, those were all external sets that somebody made that wasn't R&D, that R&D was the second set of eyes for. Tempest is the first set, really, that Tempest Block, where, like, I had made it. I was on the design team. I led the design team. And I was on the development team. I didn't lead the development team. Henry Stern led the development team. But I was on it.

And I clearly was able to sort of voice concerns or explain things. Interestingly, Tempest tried to do a bunch of things that ended up getting pushed elsewhere. There's a lot of experimentation. I tried to do poison that got pushed off. Both echo and cycling got pushed off, which we'll get to in a second. But there was a lot of experimentation that went on in Tempest, and that would seep into sets for a while. Okay, after Exodus was Urza's Saga. So the interesting

thing about Urza's Saga was, we... There was a big break between... Michael and I basically got kicked off story, and I'll get to that story one day. But anyway, there was a big schism between R&D and the creative team at that time, mostly because I had been the link, and basically the link had been severed.

So we designed the set to be an enchantment set. Interestingly, that's not... The set ended up being all about Urza, and Urza is this master artificer, and we made a bunch of broken artifacts, and they called it the Artifact Cycle. So nobody really remembers it was the enchantment set. But we did a lot to play around with enchantments. This is the first set that really had a theme.

Well, I'm sorry. Antiquities was the first set to have a card-type theme. It had artifacts. This is the first time we did an enchantment theme and we played around a lot with enchantments. Over the years we had done a bunch of stuff to try to figure out how to make auras not have the card disadvantage they inherently did. Urza's Legacy would later bring us the Rancor cycle where part of the strongest we've done it where

it just died and you got it back. Urza Saga also we messed around with the idea of building up over time. We did a bunch of growing enchantments where either the enchantment just got a counter every turn or every time you did something you got a counter every turn, or every time you did something, it got a counter. It's the first time that we really were doing a lot of work with time. Obviously, Time Spiral will get even more into this theme. But the idea of time as a resource of, I can do something, and so the Grown enchantments were, you played it, every turn it got a counter, and then you could sacrifice whatever, and the effect was based on the number of

counters. So the idea was the longer I let it grow, the bigger the effect is. It's kind of a precursor, in some ways, to some of the, what Suspend will be playing around with. And we really were sort of, and then sometimes we also played around with the idea of this is something

that you can do something to improve it, and then pay it off, but you had to do something rather than just time. We also played around with waking enchantments, which were enchantments that started not as creatures, and then if certain conditions were hit by your opponent, they turned into creatures. This is us messing with trap space, sort of you getting react, your opponent, you know, you getting react

on your opponent doing something. Also, it's us playing around with sort of making things that aren't creatures. Creatures, like I said, we've done that a little bit with artifacts. Hadn't really done it too much with enchantments. I guess we had one enchantment in Mirage, was it an enchantment that can, or act,

sorry, an enchantment that animated. Urza Saga, what else did Urza Saga do? Well, okay, it had two mechanics. It had cycling and it had... What's the other one? Echo. So those are both really important ones. So cycling is us playing around

with the idea of giving alternate uses to cards, of what if every card came with an alternate use built into it. Cycling was the cleanest, and Richard came up with mechanics, of what happens when a card stays dead in your hand. And maybe there's an interesting resource where the reason you'll put cards that are a little

more situational in your hand is we give you the means to get rid of them if you need them. You can trade them in if you need them. I've done a whole podcast on cycling um a lot of cool things you know cycling really is one of our diehard mechanics one of our mvp mechanics and there's a lot of dynamism of sort of making choices and when to use things and how to design cards so that there's the options available to you. Then we had Echo. Echo is us messing around with

costs. And this is us messing around with the idea of paying costs beyond one turn. This is a theme we mess with from time to time of different ways to pay for things and sort of messing with the essence of how does casting spells work this is also us playing in

sort of downside space which is I mean I guess it's not technically downside but it reads a lot like, I have a creature, but I lose it unless I have to pay next turn two. And that a lot of that is if you understand the value of the card, oh, it's worth it for the cost, you know, getting it to turn early,

but it was perceived negatively, and it really made us rethink about how we thought about how mechanics are received. Now, Urza Saga also, by the way, for those that don't know your history, I talked a little bit about us messing with engines. I continued that exploration, and it got even worse. We also messed around with car drawing. We messed around with cost reduction.

with card drawing, we messed around with cost reduction, and what I call the evil triad, that engine cards, card drawing, and cost reduction, if you put those all together, you make combo craziness. And Urza Saga ended up being an insanely broken set. Probably the most broken block we've ever made. You can argue whether it's it or Mirrodin, but the pro tour with it was insane.

You would think it was a vintage tournament from the way people were playing. They were winning on turn one and turn two. It was just kind of insane. So one of the things that's really interesting about it was we learn, I mean, mistakes are great educators. I did a whole podcast on mistakes. Mistakes are great educators. And let's just say Urza Saga was a very educational thing. We sort of broke a whole bunch of things. And in breaking them, we kind of defined the outer limits of what we could do. And so in some ways, Urza Saga, I mean, it was a big mistake,

make no mistake, but, you know, we got chewed out by the CEO. But, but, it really did a lot to teach us sort of where some of the breakpoints are. Urza's legacy, probably, of all the sets I'm talking about today, was probably, it had the most, like, tournament utility in it. You know, it definitely was. I mean, Visions I talked about being one of the most tournament utility in it. It definitely was... I mean, Visions I talked about being one of the earliest sets that did that. This did it in spades.

It was just... If you go back and look at it, there's so many cards that are just so sort of historically important cards, and they all sort of clump there. Other things you can see in Urza's legacy is we really start playing around more with the themes, we start playing around trying to understand what

cycling meant, and it's really us sort of doing a little bit more experimentation. We played around a little more with Echo, we started doing Echo with enter the battlefield effects, in Urza's, I'd play around with leave the battlefield. We'll get there in a sec. But Urza's Legacy really was us sort of doing more experimentation in this place. So Urza's Destiny, the last one we'll talk about today, for those who don't know your history, I was the design team for Urza's Destiny.

Other than Arabian N Knights, which was Richard, I think Arabian Knights and Urza's Destiny are only teams of one that designed a set. Now Urza's Destiny was interesting. A lot of what I was trying to do was, this was the point in time where we kept the mechanics all the way through. So I had Echo and I had cycling, and I really, really wanted to explore what that meant. I introduced something called, well, I called it cycling from play,

the idea of instead of trading resources in from your hand, what if you could trade for it in play? I really started messing around with leaves play or death triggers in a way that, I mean, not that Magic didn't have any death triggers, but I started playing around with it in a much more systematic way. I connected it to echo, so there was sort of interesting choices of did you want to keep the creature around? Now there's some options where you could let the creature go, and it was beneficial to not pay the upkeep. And I did a lot of work on...

I was really caring a lot about how do you craft cards that you build decks around. If you look at Ursa's Destiny, what you'll see is a lot, a lot, a lot of decks came out of that. There were a lot of individual cards that became something that whole decks were built around. And I played around in that space. You know,

the cool thing for me for Urza's Destiny, and I think this is because, like, at this point, I designed some cards. I designed Tempest, and I designed, oh, I hadn't done Odyssey yet.

Odyssey would come. So, I guess Urza's Destiny was my second set. Well, I might have done Unglue before I did Urza's Destiny, but around there. So, Urza's Destiny was my second set. Well, I might have done Unglue before I did Urza's Destiny. But around there. So, Urza's Destiny was my second set. So, it's really me playing around with a lot of just themes and things that I found interesting.

But doing so within the context of mechanics available at the time. But there's a lot of... There's more tutoring there. There's more... I played around with enchantments a little more. I played around with the growing auras. I did a lot of experimentation. And that's another big thing you'll see.

I talked about this with alliances. You see some of it in Mirage and Tempest. You see some in Urza's Saga. The early days of Magic, there was a lot of experimentation going around. A lot of, oh, what does a card mean exactly? And what does it cost to have a card or what if i

don't lose the card or what if i don't lose mana but i have to lose two cards like there's a lot of experimentation of us trying to understand mana costs and alternate alternate costs and like you can see us mapping out the space the this is sort of the it's the area where we now have people making magic sets that for a living make magic sets you know it's not freel the, it's the area where we now have people making magic sets that for a living make magic sets. You know, it's not freelancers,

it's not, and the interesting thing there is we were not just designing sets, we were developing sets. So, we learned a lot from sort of, we would develop things,

learn things from that and then try to adapt. Like, one of the funny stories is we made a card in Mirage called Keravec's Torch, which was Richard made a card called Fireball and a card called

Asynegrate, which were direct damage spells. He had made them in Alpha. So we were trying to explore that, and so what we did with Keravec's Torch was mostly it was just an expel. It had a little rider on it. But, um... But the idea essentially is, and we put it at common,

and then it just was people were splashing red left and right. So in Tempest, I'm like, okay, clearly we need a common expel, but I don't want people splashing it. Let's put two red in its mana and then make the effect powerful enough that even then you'll splash it. And then eventually we start to learn, like,

oh, maybe the X spell shouldn't be at common. Like Urza Saga famously, we put Pestilence in it at common, which is just, I mean, a so overpowering effect that it, like, just warps the drafting environment. Like, one of the things about Urza Saga is we were building for Limited,

but we had a lot to learn, for example. Urza Saga Limited, I think, could support five black drafters. I mean, not five monoblock drafters, but five different people could black... There's so much black there. So I will get there next time I talk about this. We really haven't got to modern development yet. so I will get there next time I talk about this of we really

haven't got to modern development yet that a lot of the developers of the time, me and Elliot and them, were more designers than we were developers and there was a lot to learn about sort of how to make that better but that's for a future talk

but anyway that is Ice Age through Urza's Destiny. It's a pretty golden time of design. There's a lot of things we're exploring for the first time. There's a lot of themes we hit. There's a lot of stuff we touch upon

that we'll come back to. Obviously, this is where cycling first shows up. It is definitely a time of us coming up with cool and interesting things anyway guys, I had a whole bunch of traffic today, so that was way longer than I expected, so you got almost an hour

of content, so yay traffic anyway, I'm now at work, so I hope you enjoyed today's talk, but I'm now at work, so although that 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