Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #548: Kicker

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

In this podcast, I talk about the history of the kicker mechanic from its start in Invasion all the way through to its use in Dominaria.

I'm pulling out my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the history of the Kicker mechanic. So we're going to go all the way back to the beginning, talk about where it came from, and then talk about all its uses over time. Okay, so Kicker, interestingly, has an origin that predates the game coming out. Dun-dun-dun! Okay, so for those who don't know their history of Magic, when Richard Garfield first invented Magic, he actually had a whole bunch of playtesters in Pennsylvania.

And so what happened was, when it became clear that the game was going to get made, he actually went to his playtester and he said to them that he was interested in having them make some sets. So the playtesters ended up making, there's three different sets they got were made by the playtesters. The first was made by what we call the East Coast playtesters, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. These are people that Richard all met at the University of Pennsylvania.

And the set they worked on was Ice Age. This group would go, now when they make Ice Age, they would later make Alliances, they made Fallen Empires, they made Antiquities. But the first set they worked on was Ice Age. And the nickname for it was Ice Age. The second group was a group that Richard had met through his bridge club. So that was Bill Rose, Charlie Cattino, Joel Mick, Howard Kallenberg, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel. And that group would go on to make a set called Menagerie, which you guys would probably know as Mirage.

Although Mirage and Visions. And then there's a third, so Barry Reich, who was the first person to ever play Magic, a friend of Richard's, when Richard played for the very first time, Barry's who he played, and Barry ended up making his own set

as a solo thing called Spectral Chaos. Spectral Chaos, it was themed about multicolor, and we would later go on to use pieces of it to make Invasion. The domain mechanic, which some of you might know was originally in playtesting called the Barry mechanic, was made. That was probably the biggest piece we took from Spectral Chaos. Okay, so it turns out that Kicker was first played around with in the set

before the game even came out. So which set was it? Was it Ice Age? Was it Mirage? Was it Spectral Chaos? Okay, well, the most logical guess is Spectral Chaos because as I just said, Spectral Chaos? Okay, well the most logical guess is Spectral Chaos because as I just said Spectral Chaos we borrowed stuff from to make Invasion and Invasion was the first set to have Kicker. So was it Spectral Chaos? No, it was not.

Okay, let me give you another piece of information here. The person who created the mechanic Kicker is Bill Rose, now current VP of R&D. Okay, so that means it must have been Mirage, because Bill was the co-lead of Mirage. Nope, it wasn't. Kicker first showed up in an early version in Ice Age. Bill had been talking with the Ice Age crowd, and Bill is what we call a Timmy Spike, which is Bill wants to win. He's very spiky in that regard, but he likes winning with bigger, splashier things. And so he was always trying to figure out how to get bigger creatures in a deck that could still win. And so Kicker came about with him trying to figure out,

how could I make creatures that are bigger, splashier creatures that I can put in my deck and not feel bad about putting in my deck. And they came up with the idea of, what if you had creatures that if you draw them early are small creatures, but you draw them late in the game, they're bigger creatures. And so the earliest idea of Kicker was just kind of a way to get Timmy-ish things in a Spike-ish deck. So a Timmy Spike mentality made Kicker.

I believe the first Kicker stuff Bill messed around with was creatures. And then he started, once he did that, he realized that there was a lot of other design space in it. And so he realized that you can make

spells and lots of things. The more he investigated Kicker, the wider and more space he realized there was in it. Okay, so what happened? Well, Ice Age went through a lot of changes because they started making Ice Age before the game came out, so they were starting

to work on it in, I don't know, 92, let's say. Ice Age itself didn't come out until 94, so it went through a bunch of iterations. Richard's original vision of magic, the idea was that Magic the Gathering was just the first incarnation. And the idea was, as new sets would come out, the idea would be like, it'd be Magic Ice Age. And it would be, he envisioned originally less as expansions and as the game kind of just reinventing itself, and that all the basics would be in each version of

the game, just each incarnation would be a little bit different. So that Magic Ice Age would have a lot of the basic spells you expected to see in the base set, but it would have a slightly different flavor to it. And so the idea was the game would sort of, the basic incarnation of the game would change. Once Magic became real popular, they started getting the idea of maybe more of their expansions, you add to it.

Like I said, early on, they thought the back was going to change for each set, because it was going to be a brand new game where, you know, the mechanics interconnected. Anyway, they got talked out of that. Magic's sort of the gathering state as the base thing. But anyway, Ice Age went through a bunch of changes. Once they

realized that they were going to be sort of a standalone, anyway, it shifted a bit. The kicker, which was a cool idea, ended up not making it into Ice Age. I will note there's a card in Alliances called Taste of Paradise

that allows you to spend extra mana to get extra effect. Interestingly, it's a little more multi-kicker than kicker because you can spend it multiple times, but we'll get to there. It all, as we talked about today, this will all come out. Okay, so...

It's time to talk about when... Hold on a second, I've got to drink some water. I'm still fighting this cold. Okay, that's really what this podcast is, is a chance to watch the evolution of Mark's cold. Okay, so let's get to invasion.

So what had happened was we had made Urza's saga block, which was, to use an old R&D phrase, bar-roken. And we got called into the CEO's office and shoot out and told if the next block was like this, we would all lose our jobs. So the next block, we were highly encouraged not to have it broken. So we made Mercadian Masks, which was clearly, clearly, clearly not broken. Although it had a few cards that were overpowered. But still, the status of the whole was powered on some.

So between Urza Block, the broken Urza Block, which drove some players away, and the lower power level of Mercadian Mask Block, which drove some players away, and the lower power level of Mercadian Mass Block, which drove some players away. We really knew we needed something extra splashy. Bill wanted to do something that really would get a lot of players back that had left over the last couple years. So his plan was twofold. One was he was going to take the theme that he had evidence was the most popular theme,

which was multicolor, and then put together the strongest design team he could put together, which at the time was me and Mike Elliott and Bill. Richard, while still working at Wizards, was off making other games. So Mike, I, and Bill were the three strongest designers that were currently working on Magic. In fact, because we so wanted to focus on it, we in fact went away for the first week. So my father, for those who don't know, for many years has lived in Lake Tahoe in California. Lake Tahoe is on the border of California and Nevada. My dad lives on the California side. But anyway, my dad retired early, ended up going and becoming a ski instructor,

Anyway, my dad retired early, ended up going and becoming a ski instructor, and spent many, many years teaching skiing. My dad loves to ski. So anyway, we, R&D in the early days would occasionally go up to my dad's house. Sometimes we'd go skiing. Usually, the first few times we went, it was more vacation. But this time was going to be a working vacation. We wanted to get away and really focus and sort of figure out the basic building blocks of what Invasion was going to be. We didn't know a lot, really, other than it was going to be multicolored. That's kind of what we knew.

And we had looked through Spectral Chaos. So we go up to my dad's cabin. Or not cabin, it's the house. Go up to my dad's house. And so we had figured out a couple things, multicolor. We had figured out that we were going to use the domain mechanic, although we didn't name it at the time, but we called it the Barry mechanic, but the domain mechanic for Spectral Chaos. And one of the things that Bill was interested in is Bill had a mechanic that he

was interested in. And he pitched it to us and said, this is something that he had made long ago, but he thought would make a lot of sense here, and he showed his kicker for the first time. And also, by the way, that week would be split cards. I would pitch split cards. That was a little more controversial. Bill liked it, Mike didn't.

But that was more of an argument about whether they should go on the set. Split cards, this is my reenactment. Bill goes, here's split cards. And Mike and I go, looks good. Put it in. So there's no resistance to Kicker. The funny thing, by the way, is for those of you that know me and my stance on Kicker,

well, I think Kicker is an awesome mechanic. It does have one flaw, which i will bring up right now which is it is so such a wide mechanic that it causes the problem of making other mechanics not feel unique and feeling like they are just kicker um that whenever we do something in which there's additional cost to it not that those always are kicker but people feel like they're kicker and so one of the downsides of kicker was it definitely made it harder for us to do other things that felt different because kicker is kind of so broad. So one of the things I've talked about is if I could undo a mechanic, I mean, never have made it. Kicker is one of the ones I would consider just because it sort of makes it harder to make other mechanics. Once we made it, it's made.

I mean, like, I can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once the players have the concept of Kicker, that's not, that cost isn't undoable. So, you know, I mean, I'll talk about using Kicker again. But anyway, for those who might know, I like Kicker. Kicker does a lot of good stuff. It is a really strong mechanic, and there's a lot of fun things you can do with it. But it does have its dangers. I'll talk more about that in a little bit.

Okay, anyway, so the reason that Bill was excited by Kicker was that he definitely wanted the set to have a lot of Timmy appeal, and he felt that Kicker allowed us to make things that really, you know, would let you put stuff in your neck and have big moments. Interestingly, by the way, one of the things we learned about Kicker... Oh, let me tell you a story. A lot of you have heard of this story. It's a classic story. But I don't feel like I can do a podcast on Kicker

without telling the most famous Kicker story. Dun-dun-dun! Okay, so this actually was during Invasion. kicker without telling the most famous kicker story. Dun, dun, dun. Okay, so this actually was during Invasion. So at the time, while I was doing more design than development, Magic R&D wasn't that big. Not like now. And so everybody chipped in to the FFL. FFL is the Future Future League. That's when we play standard ahead of time so that we can sort of figure out how an environment is going to work.

And so what happened was I was not particularly, well I'm a fun Johnny deck builder. I build weird wacky decks. I wasn't really good at building efficient decks. I tended to build quirky decks. So the deal I struck was Randy Bueller would build my decks for me and then I would play them. And so this way Randy could build a bunch of decks and I could try some of them. So Randy gave me this,

I think it was a red-green deck. Mostly it was just creatures and spells. It was pretty mid-range, you know, play things up the curve and attack. And so that week I went 4-0. Now remember, remember, a lot of R&D came from the Pro Tour. A lot of them sort of, you know, kind of how they got into R&D was they had a lot of chops as a strong Magic player. That was not me. And not

that I'm a bad Magic player, playing Magic forever, but I mean, I'm in R&D, I'm on the bottom end of the spectrum. So when I go 4-0, people sit up, they go, oh, Mark went 4-0. That deck must be good. So anyway, Randy was watching me play the final match, because I'd gone 3-0 already, and Randy was curious, because I was winning, so he wanted to see me play. And at the end of it, I won the game, and then he asked me, he goes, late in that last game, you played the grizzly bear for two mana, but you had five mana. And I'm like, well, yeah, it's a grizzly bear. I can only play it for two mana. He goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Those aren't grizzly bears. Those are kavu titans. I couldn't find any kavu

titans, so I just put grizzly bears in. Sorry, I was supposed to tell you those were kavavu Titans. I couldn't find any Kavu Titans so I just put Grizzly Bears in. Sorry, I was supposed to tell you those were Kavu Titans. A Kavu Titan costs 1G. It's a 2-2, like a Grizzly Bear. And for 3 green-green, so 1 in the green is a 2-2. For 3 green-green, it's a 5-5 Trampler. You put 3 plus 1 plus 1 counters on

and again, trample. So what had happened was because I thought it was a grizzly bear, I'd always played it as a grizzly bear. So Randy informed me it's not a grizzly bear, it's a Kabu Titan. So the next week, I go two and two. And I'm like, what's going on? When the card was worse, I did better, and when the card was better, I did worse. What's going on? And that's when I realized my problem was, once I knew it was a 5-5 trampler, I stopped casting it as a 2-2 creature and started only casting it

as a 5-5 creature, or most of the time casting it as a 5-5. And so what I said is, okay, for the third week I said, okay, here's my new roll. If I can cast it as a 5-5, I will, but if I can't, I will cast it as soon as I can. Sorry. And if it's a 2-2, it's a 2-2. Like, cast it as soon as I can cast it. Don't cast it as a 5-5 unless I have 5

mana. And then I went 4-0 the third week. So it taught me an interesting lesson about Kicker, which is less experienced players, like myself, at the time, tend is less experienced players, like myself at the time, tend to optimize the cards. And one of the things about Kickr is

some players won't play the cheaper version, just playing the bigger version. Now, once again, there's nothing wrong with that in the sense that it's okay if people, as long as people are having fun, on some level,

it's just like they put a 3GG55 trample in their deck. Hopefully with time they'll realize that the card is more versatile than that. But something to keep in mind that people will, with kickers a lot of times, try to optimize. That doesn't mean we don't make cards that have choices, just that sometimes people will optimize and try to get the better of the choices. Okay, so anyway, Bill comes up with this idea. And then one of the reasons I think Bill liked it, by the way, in this set was

because it was a multicolor set, it also meant that we could kick in additional colors. So, for example, you could have a green card that kicks for red. So Invasion, by the way, ended up having an ally flavor. It originally didn't, but Henry Stern and I both independently came up with the idea of holding off on the enemy color stuff and making the final set on the block, which ended up being Apocalypse, just the enemy color stuff.

It just meant that all the off-color stuff was ally. Okay, so we did that. We also came up with a rule to try to figure out when we were using generic mana versus colored mana. So there ended up being three kinds of spells. There were cards that used generic mana,

there were cards that used colored mana but their own colored mana, and cards that used colored mana but of their ally. The rule was, if you were paying generic mana, you were only making the effect bigger. If you're putting plus one, plus one counters on creatures, you're putting more plus one, plus one counters on creatures. Or, I'm sorry, if you're making a creature, you're putting

plus one, plus one counters on it, you're making it bigger. If you're making a spell, instead of doing two damage, you do four damage. If you're playing generic mana, all you're doing is upping the scale of the effect. Now, if you're paying colored mana, you get an additional ability. If it's a creature, maybe it gets a keyword ability. If it's a spell colored mana, you get an additional ability.

If it's a creature, maybe it gets a keyword ability. If it's a spell, maybe it is doing an additional effect. But the way it worked was, if you spent colored mana, the spell didn't just get bigger, you also got some secondary ability. It might be another effect, it might be something that adapts the spell, but you're doing something beyond just making the scope of the spell bigger. So in Invasion, what else did we do? We also had a cycle of cards that you could kick. There were sorceries that you could kick them

to cast them as instants. Rout was probably the most famous of those. We also had Skizzix, which was kind of a ball lightning variant where it was a creature with trample and haste, a high-power, low-toughness creature with trample and haste, that got sacrificed at the end of turn. But if you kicked it, instead of gaining an ability, it lost an ability. It didn't go away. So we definitely messed around a little bit. I mean, we realized there were a lot of different things we could do,

so we tried to rein it around a little bit. I mean, we realized there were a lot of different things we could do. So we tried to rein it in a little bit. Everything invasion made use of mana. All the kicking was mana. So then we get to Plane Shift. In Plane Shift, we start messing around with other costs. So maybe you could sacrifice something or, you know, that we figured out what are costs other than mana that you could do to do the spells.

And so we definitely mess around with things in which, oh, well you can there's other resources you can take advantage of in order to kick the spell. The other thing that we did was we both Mike, Elliot and I had come up with an interesting way

to make use of the kicker that was a three-color thing. So what we had done was we decided to push that back to the second and third set. And since they were similar, we put one in the second set and one in the third set.

I don't remember how, maybe Bill just decided. So the second set, so Plane Shift had what was called Battle Mages. So the way Battle Mages worked is there was two, you had two different kicker costs, one in each of your allied colors. So let's say you were a white card, you had a blue kicker cost and a green kicker cost. One of them was cheaper, and we went around the circle. So it was always like the one clockwise was the one that was cheaper.

So one of them was slightly cheaper and had a smaller effect, and one of them was more expensive and had a bigger effect. All of these were effects when it entered the battlefield that did the effect. So the idea essentially was I had a creature. Usually if it was a creature, it might have had a keyboard on it. And so I could do no kicking, just get the creature. I could kick the small kicker and get a small effect. I could kick the big kicker and get the big effect.

Or I could kick the small kicker and the big kicker and get both effects. And the two effects were synergistic, so kicking both of them had some value. And that was done as a cycle, and like I said, the small was like clockwise around and then the big was counterclockwise. I forget which direction, but they all matched up so that every kicker, green was

small on one and green was big on another. Then, in Apocalypse, I created the vulvers. So what the vulvers were was it had two kicker costs. Because it was in Apocalypse, they created the Volvers. So what the Volvers were was it had two kicker costs. Because it was in Apocalypse, they were the enemy colors. One was a smaller kicker cost and one was a larger kicker cost. You can see there's a lot of similarities here.

The smaller kicker cost put a plus one plus one counter on you and granted you an ability. The bigger kicker cost put two plus one plus one counters on you and granted you a bigger ability. So much like the Battle Mages, you have the same sort of thing. I could play the creature without taking any mana, and it'd be the plain version. I could kick it once and get a plus one, plus one counter in ability. I could kick it twice, I'm sorry, I could kick the larger thing and get two plus one, plus one counters in the bigger ability, or I could kick it on both, and then I'd be plus three, plus three in both abilities.

And the idea that was kind of cool about this that I was real proud of is because you put a different number of counters on it, if I looked at the creature, I would know what abilities it had based on the counters. No counters, no abilities. One counter, the first ability. Two counters, the second ability. Three counters, both abilities.

But because they were so similar, we broke them up. The other thing that we did in Apocalypse was we got to do off-color. What we had done is we'd saved all the off-color stuff for Apocalypse. So Apocalypse got to mess around with things that had kickers in the enemy colors. So anyway, we introduced it. That was Invasion Block. That's the first time we did kicker.

Like I said, we were pretty straightforward. I mean, we did introduce some non-Kicker costs. We had sorcerers that became instants. I mean, not technically. You cast them like they were instants. And we messed around with stuff like the Battle Mages and the Volvers where there was layers of things you could kick and had different combinations of things.

Okay, now we flash forward. So, after Invasion, I think it's not until Time Spiral, so a bunch of years. After Invasion is Odyssey, then Onslaught, then Mirrodin, then Champions of Kamigawa, then Ravnica, and finally Time Spiral. So, Time Spiral itself actually didn't have any new kicker cards. All the kicker cards in Time Spiral were on the bonus sheet. So, there was a couple. And so, the bonus sheet, for those who don't know Time Spiral, Time Spiral was a nod to the past.

It had a time theme and had a nostalgia theme. It also took place in Dominaria, but kind of like post-apocalyptic Dominaria. had a nostalgia theme. It also took place in Dominaria, but kind of like post-apocalyptic Dominaria. And there was 121 cards on their own sheet, what we call the time-shifted sheet, and the time were the old... As a Mirrodin, we upgraded to a new frame,

so they were the pre-Mirrodin frame, and they represented cards from the past. And the way it worked is, every booster pack had a slot that got you a card from the past. And we thought that was pretty cool. Okay, so the Time Spiral itself did not have any new kicker cards. But Planar Chaos did.

So Planar Chaos was a what-if set where we were messing around with an alternative present. There was a past, present, future theme to the block. And the present, to make it interesting, since we wanted to make it a little different, was an alternate present, an alternate reality present where the colors worked a little bit differently. So we brought back a lot of mechanics, a lot of mechanics in Time Spiral.

And so while Kicker had not been on new cards, it was on new cards in Planar Chaos, interestingly, we segregated mechanics to colors. So Kicker only appeared on green cards in Planar Chaos. Trying to sort of play around and just give identity to the colors in Planar Chaos. Kicker was in green. And so like we had a vulvar that was an enemy vulvar rather than an ally vulvar. And you know, we just played around with some what if stuff. we had a vulvar that was an enemy vulvar rather than an ally vulvar. And, you know, we just played around with some what-if stuff. We had a card that kicked to draw you cards

because green, in this world, was the card drawing color and, you know, stuff like that. Then in FutureSight, all the kicking in FutureSight was what we call mix-and-match, which was, we did this thing where we took mechanics that were from the past and put them with other mechanics that were synergistic.

I think there were three mix and match kickers. We matched kicker with convoke, we matched kicker with split second, and we matched kicker with vanishing. Kicker and convoke turns out to be really strong, by the way. So in general, one of our rules, by the way, about kicker in all

of Time Spiral block was, and this was not just kicker, it was all the mechanics. Because we were bringing back so many mechanics, I didn't really want to innovate on the mechanics. I wanted them to sort of come back as they were. So we didn't really do much innovation with Kicker in

Time Spiral Block. We mostly brought it back. And we played within our themes, we did what-if with it, we did the mix and match, but we didn't sort of really mess with innovation of the mechanic. Okay. Now we flash forward again. This time to Zendikar. Another quick water break here.

Okay. So what happened in Zendikar was Zendikar was the land set, Lands of Beluza. And one of the things we realized as we started sort of making mechanics that cared about land, landfall being the biggest one, is it really encouraged you to not miss your land drops. Well, how do you not miss your land drops? Well, maybe you play a little extra land or you search land, or you do things to get land in play. And what that meant was, in general, people ended up having more mana. So one of the things we knew we wanted

was we wanted something that lets you use your extra mana. Now, we really had not used Kicker all that much. Obviously, we brought it back in Time Spiral. We brought everything back in Time Spiral. But we said, okay, you know what? We haven't used Kicker in a while. Let's bring Kicker back. And there's something else I was really interested in trying.

Because we had a lot of mana, remember back to the Alliance's Taste of Paradise? I always had liked how that spell lets you pay costs multiple times. And so kind of inspired by that, I pitched the idea of multi-kicker. What if there were spells that you could kick but you could kick it as many times as you wanted

so instead of kicking it once and getting some number of plus one plus one counters what if it was a smaller kicker cost but each time you got a plus one plus one counter and you could kick it as many times as you wanted so it turned all the spells kind of into adjustable spells that really could be as big as you needed them to be so it turned out when we were doing there's enough other things going on spells kind of into adjustable spells that really could be as big as you needed them to be.

So it turned out when we were doing there's enough other things going on in Zendikar that we ended up not putting Multikicker in Zendikar itself. By the way, the playtest name for Multikicker was Multikicker. That name never changed. And we ended up pushing it back to Worldwig. So Multikicker ended up in Worldwig.

So it turned out that Zendikar didn't really do too much innovation with Kicker, because the big innovation we had planned to do was Multikicker, and that, like, I think Multikicker might have even been turned, no, actually, I think we pulled it right before design ended. I think we knew, I think we decided that we were going to give it to Whirlwake before design handed it over to development. But it happened late in the process, and so Kicker in Zendikar was pretty straightforward.

I think we focused... I'm trying to remember this. I think we focused it in red and green. We decided that Kicker... All the colors had some access to it, but we wanted a kicker deck to be more of a certain strategy. So I think it was red and green was the strategy. I'm not 100% on that, but I did my research for that one. I forgot to check about that.

But anyway, so Whirlwake then did multi-kicker. Rise of the Eldrazi, which was the last set, sorry, the last, yeah, the last set in that block was completely different mechanics. The Eldrazi escaped and all crazy stuff was happening, but it didn't use the mechanics from Zendikar and Worldwake. So there was no kicker in the last set. So we had

Kicker in Invasion and Plane Shift and Apocalypse. Kicker in Time Spiral and the Bonus Sheet. In Planar Chaos and Future Sight. And then we had Kicker in Zendikar and Worldwake. So that's eight. Eight sets so far with Kicker.

But wait! There's one more. So the final set, sorry, the final set to Kicker is Dominaria. So the way this came about was, um, one of the things I said when we first, um, were putting it together was we, we knew there was going to be a nostalgia theme in, in nostalgia theme in Dominaria. We were going back to Magic's home. It's the 25th anniversary. We knew the world we were getting into. And so one of the things I thought was important was, I mean, we normally bring back a mechanic. On a normal set, we try to bring back one mechanic every set, or I'm sorry, every block

we try to bring back one mechanic. Sometimes we bring back more than one, sometimes less than one, but we are conscious about trying to reuse mechanics when they make sense. And so I decided what I really wanted for Dominaria was not just to bring back a mechanic, but to bring back a mechanic from

Dominaria. Now, including things set on Wrath, because Wrath got overlaid on Dominaria, so Wrath is now on Dominaria. Now, including things set on Wrath, because Wrath got overlaid on Dominaria, so Wrath is now on Dominaria. I think there are 33 sets that originally set on Dominaria or Wrath. And so I decided that it had to be something from one of those worlds.

And we made a list. So the first thing we did is we tossed out, a few of them had become evergreen, so we tossed those out. A few of them had become evergreen, so we tossed those out. A few of them were no longer supported. They did things we didn't do anymore. A few were things that just weren't good mechanics, that just, there was no way of bringing them back, you know.

Some of them had limited design space, it's like, it wasn't that we shouldn't have done them the first time, but wow, it's going to be hard to do them the second time. Like, it wasn't that we shouldn't have done them the first time, but wow, it's going to be hard to do them the second time. And when we sort of started cutting through it, and then the other thing was, sort of, we wanted something that was remembered as being something cool from Dominaria. So we didn't want something that was kind of not memorable.

So anyway, we had all this criteria. When the dust settled, we ended up having three choices, three things that really felt like Dominaria. We had cycling, we had kicker, and we had flashback. And each of those mechanics, all of them had come back in time spiral, and each one of them had come back at another time, meaning we knew they were good mechanics, we brought them back. So these were heavy hitter mechanics, and I wanted

a heavy hitter mechanic. So I looked at all of them, and I decided it was clear we were using flashback. Because Dominaria had a theme of history, we're talking about the past, like flashback literally means, you know, connecting to the past,

remembrance of the past. So flashback was a slam dunk obvious answer. But then we realized that Amonkhet had done Aftermath. And Aftermath were kind of split cards meet flashback. In fact, we called them split back in design. And we're like, oh, this is going to be in standard with us. Do we want to do flashback in a set? Well, in the environment, there's another mechanic that's essentially flashback.

And we talked about it and we argued for a while because, wow, wow, does flashback fit our set. But we decided, oh, okay, okay. Flashback, okay, we don't want to repeat a mechanic that we had just done and beaten standard together. So we begrudgingly gave him a flashback. So that left cycling

and kicker. Okay, well, cycling, there's a lot of cool things about cycling. But wait, the same set, Amonkhet, that took flashback from us, took cycling from us. Amonkhet had cycling. I wait, the same set, Amonkhet, that took Flashback from us, took cycling from us. Amonkhet had cycling. I'm like, oh! So it's like, okay, okay, Kicker,

I guess we choose you. Not that anything against Kicker. I like Kicker. I do like Kicker. Like I said, the genies are out of the bottle as far as Kicker being the broad mechanic that it is. So, we brought it back. Kicker's a little bit quirky in its thematic tie into it is. So, we brought it back. Kicker's a little bit quirky in its thematic tie into the set.

Like, it's tied to history and nostalgia. It's more of a meta thing. Like, people remember... Like, one of the things about the set is the set is nostalgic. And so, Kicker is nostalgic, and Kicker does have remnants to Dominaria, because Invasion, which is a big Dominarian set,

was the first set to have it. And, in fact, Time Spiral Block, which was the second set to have it, also on Dominaria. So, two different, I mean, Zendikar wasn't, but two of the three times we'd seen it was on Dominaria. But, mechanically, it didn't, you know, a lot of the other things in the set sort of interconnected. Like, Historic and Saga

kind of click together. I mean, you can make a legendary creature that is kicker and then there probably is one or two. It doesn't click quite as much in. The thing we did like about it was that it was

it's a good workhorse mechanic. One of the things that we did need was we wanted some way to spend your mana. One of the things in general you want to make sure every set has is you want to make sure in late game that people have means and ways to spend their mana. It's not always on spells or extra costs.

Sometimes it's in activations. There's a bunch of different ways to make it happen. But it's an important thing that you want to have happen so anyway we took Kicker and we put Kicker in Kicker went Kicker went in during Vision, we figured out during Vision

that we couldn't use Flashback but like in the middle of Vision maybe Vision is Vision for Dominaria. This was back when Vision was six months because we had to get moved. We later moved to the three-in-one model and then it ended up turning into a four-month period.

But anyway, at the time I think it was six months. So I think we had Flashback maybe like half the way in, three months in, and then we switched over to Kickr. And Kickr really was, there was never every, I don't think, I'm trying to think of evolutions in Kickr. There's not tons of evolutions

in Kickr. I mean, one of the things, oh, one of the things in general, let me talk a little bit about, I said I'd mention, I earlier talked about how Kickr has this problem that it can get a little bit too broad. So one of the rules when we brought Kickr back for the first time ever in Time Spiral,

I made a rule that we've been trying to follow, which is, I think it's important for mechanics to have identities, meaning that mechanics are about something, and that if you get too broad in your identities, it becomes hard for people to sort of focus, and it loses a little bit of what makes it special. Plus, Kicker already has the broadening problem of we don't want everything to feel like Kicker. So one of the things that we did was we laid down a rule that said that kicker just makes the spell better.

Now, that doesn't mean it can't add an ability, but if it does, that ability has to be organic to the spell. It doesn't want to be like it does a second thing. We want it to be that it's reinforcing and the overall spell makes it better. Like maybe I have a spell and if I kick it, it can't be countered.

Well that is an additional ability, but it makes the spell feel like now it's a stronger spell. So it's not that you can't add additional abilities, but the overall feel of it is we want you to feel like you're just making it better. Now there's a bunch of fuzzy space there.

One of the biggest is ETB effect, like adding an ETB effect. In some ways, it's adding a special thing, but in some ways, we let those happen. It's sort of a matter of how organic. The thing we try to avoid now is that I'm doing something that just feels like it's an added-on thing. Like, I do this,

and now I do a second ability. We try to avoid doing that in Kicker these days. But anyway, so let me end by talking about the Storm Scale. So if you'd asked me a while back where I put Kicker on the Storm Scale, I might have said something like 2, because I was like,

oh, maybe we'll figure out some way to break it up and not have to use Kicker and use other names. But I found like, ah, Kicker's just a part of the game. We're way past Kicker not having the impact it does. And I think we've got to be careful to make sure that Kicker has an a part of the game. We're way past Kicker not having the impact it does. And I think we've got to be careful to make sure that Kicker has an identity to it. But Storm Scale, it's a 1.

Oh, I guess actually technically 1's Evergreen. So it's a 2. Okay, I guess before I would say it's a 3. Now it's a 2. So I had that wrong. Sorry. But it is definitely... It is...

Kicker's the kind of mechanic that, um, when you talk about mechanics, they're, they're actually different. I mean, to give a little phrase, there's normal mechanics, evergreen that we use all the time. There's deciduous that we can use wherever we need. Uh, and the next layers where I would put Kicker is mechanics that I call the powerhouse mechanics. They're so good. They're so efficient. They're so clean. They're so efficient. They're so clean.

They have lots of design space. They have knobs for doing development. They're just such good mechanics that, like, we will bring them back on just a faster scale than most mechanics. Like, most mechanics, we don't want to bring back too fast. We want people to kind of, you know,

long for the mechanic. But this is a workhorse mechanic, and so it's something we will bring back on more frequency. So will we see Kicker again? Of course you'll see Kicker again! It's a workhorse mechanic. Not workhorse. Actually, sorry, I used workhorse mechanic for something else. But it is a powerhouse mechanic. It is a mechanic that really allows us to do cool things. It's got lots of design space. It's just an awesome tool in our tool belt and we will use it many times. Okay, guys. I'm now at, I'm now parked. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be

making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.