Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #576: History of Magic

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

At my SDCC Magic panel, I gave a little presentation about the history of Magic. This podcast is a slightly longer version of that talk.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I had to drop off my son at camp again. Okay, so last time I talked all about my trip to San Diego Comic-Con. And I said that in my panel I did a little thing where I did all of Magic's history in 15 minutes. So I thought I would recreate that here, stretch it a little bit, because I got 30 minutes rather than 15. But what I want to do is sort of cover the history of Magic in 30 minutes. Okay, so we go back to 1993. And the reason I want to do this, by the way, is there's a lot of things in Magic that I think you think of having always been in Magic.

And a lot of those things simply haven't been. Okay, so we go back to Alpha. So in August of 1993 at Gen Con, the very first Magic goes on sale. And this is what we call Alpha, limited edition. So what happened was they printed enough product of limited edition that they expected to last anywhere from six months to a year, maybe even longer. And it ended up selling out in three weeks. So Alpha has some things, I mean, there are some things that started in Alpha.

For example, flying, first strike, trample, protection, all those go all the way back to Alpha. A lot of other things you might think do don't, as we'll see. Alpha had, I mean, there's a lot of basically mechanical things that happened there. There's things that would later get keyworded that weren't yet keyworded. We'll talk about that. Also, Alpha, a couple things a lot of people might not realize.

First off, when Alpha got sold, there were two ways to buy Magic originally. There was the booster pack that we still sell now, and there was what we call the starter deck. A starter deck was 60 cards, and it came with land in it. I think it originally came with two rares, later changed to three rares. And the idea was it was something you could play out of the box. It had all five colors.

It wasn't playable in a loose sense that you literally could play it, but nothing really pre-constructed. It was still randomized. And when Alpha came out, there were no tournaments. There was no deck construction rules. The only rule was you had a 40-card deck that would later be changed to a 60-card deck. But at the time, it was 40 cards. And there was no limits. You could have as many cards as you wanted.

You know, when Richard made Plague Rats, the idea is there might be a deck with lots and lots and lots of Plague Rats. That was allowable. Eventually, when tournaments started, there started to be restrictions. Basically, when the tournament started in early 94, went from 40 cards to 60 cards, and the four of started. Also, there was no banned restricted list when Magic came out. That one also wouldn't happen until tournaments start. So,

Alpha did introduce a bunch of things. We get to see the colors and the mana symbols for the first time. The white mana symbol would get tweaked later during Ice Age, but pretty much the mana symbols as you know them. Tap symbol, not there yet.

We'll get to that in a second. But anyway, Alpha comes out very, very popular, very exciting, sold out immediately. So they went back and they printed a second run of Limited, which we now call Beta. And the idea there was, they said, okay, we really underestimated the audience. We just knew we didn't print enough. So, okay, we're going to print now that we know how popular it is. Now that we know that,

we're going to print enough for six months to a year. That sold out in a week. And so what they realized was, oh, also, one of the early things about Wizards is there were a lot of mistakes made in printing because they were sort of new to printing. And one of the problems with Alpha is two of the cards got left off the sheet. Two of the cards that were supposed to be in limited edition, Circle Protection Black and Volcanic Island, both of which are part of cycles. So their absence was very obvious.

You know, it was clear that it was missing. Although it was funny at the time. I remember thinking, I thought, oh, maybe black was so evil that you couldn't just make a circle protection against it or something. I sort of rationalized why there wasn't one. But anyway, what happened was magic clearly was popular and it was not, the audience was going through the material

faster than they expected. Remember when Richard originally thought about the game, he was assuming people were going to spend, you know, $20, $30

and that it would take time to slowly learn all about the game. But people were now buying boxes and, you know, boosters. So anyway,

they, Peter Atkinson, the CEO, realized that they needed to start making other magic sets. So the first thing they turned to was Richard Garfield. And Richard really quickly turned out a set. It ended up being Arabian Nights, which was the very first magic set that was released. Technically, by the way, I think Unlimited Edition, which is White Border version of Limited Edition, came out in December of 1993, and Arabian Nights, a little bit of it came out in December, most of it came out in January of 94. Arabian Nights was the first

time we'd ever done a booster pack of less than 15 cards. It had 8 cards, and it didn't have a rare sheet. It had a common sheet and an uncommon sheet. And the way we did rares were some cards were on the uncommon sheet just once or twice, and some cards were on the uncommon sheet four or five times. So a U1 would be rare, meaning it shows up once on the uncommon sheet. U5 would be a common, for example.

And also Arabian Nights is definitely... There's a lot of things that show up in Alpha in small amounts. There are token creatures in Alpha, or there's a token creature, the wasp made by the Hive. There's some counters, not a lot of counters, but a few counters, including a plus one, plus one counter. Arabian Nights starts exploring a little more. Richard starts... The lands in Alpha, for example, only tap for mana.

He starts exploring with lands that didn't tap for mana. And anyway, there's some exploration in Arabian Nights. From a printing standpoint, by the way, they printed some of the mana circles for generic mana too dark. So they actually went back on press. So there are two versions of that. manna too dark. So they actually went back on press. So there are two versions of that.

Then, after Arabian Nights was Antiquities. So once again, when they realized they needed to get it set out, they went to Richard to make Arabian Nights, and they went to the East Coast playfasters, people that would end up making Ice Age and Fallen Empires and Alliances.

They made Antiquities. So Scafalias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. And so they decided to build something around a theme. So Arabian Nights was the first top-down expansion. It was built around Arabian Nights, the top-down flavor of sort of the 1001 Arabian Nights. Antiquities had a mechanical theme. It was about artifacts.

Every card in the set, either on its type line was an artifact, in its rules text mentioned artifacts, or was a land that produced colorless mana that you could use to play artifacts. So everything was tied to artifacts. Also, it's the point where the very first story of Magic happens. Up until that point, there were names dropped. And Arabian Nights obviously made reference to the Arabian Nights story. But as far as Magic's own story, it wasn't until Antiquities.

And the flavor is that you are digging up Antiquities of the past. And from that, you're learning of the story that happened long ago is the idea. That the Brothers' War was a while ago from the context of when Antiquities was happening. In it, you get to meet Urza and Mishra, who both were name-dropped in card names in Alpha, but you didn't know who they were. They turned out to be two brothers who had a war, the Brothers' War.

And there would later be a novel that would talk about the Brothers' War. The early, it just was flavor text was kind of hinting at what went on. And then the bad guys we get introduced to are the Phyrexians. So that is magic's sort of oldest

bad guy. It goes all the way back to Antiquities. And so anyway, Antiquities definitely sort of really introduced sort of having mechanical heart, something that we would start doing a lot more of later. So after that was revised. Revised was

essentially what we now refer to as third edition since limited was sort of considered second edition. And revised was white border so back then all cors sets, the first time we printed a card would be in Black Border

and future times would be in White Border. Obviously, we would later phase White Border out. I'll get to that. And when the unsets start happening, we introduce Silver Border. Okay, after Revise is Legends. So Legends was the first large set, other than Alpha, the first large expansion

both Rabianites and Antiquities had come in 8-card packs oh, I talked about printing errors the printing error in Antiquities was common the same common would show up multiple times in the same booster pack and then Legends Legends printing problem was

the uncommons were there was two groups the A uncommons and the B was two groups. There was the A uncommons and the B, set A and set B. And in one box, you only got one or the other. So if you bought a box of Legends, you only got half the uncommons because in any one box, only half the uncommons

were in it. I think that had to do with they must have been two different sheets of uncommons and only they weren't intermixed, so off the line, you got the same sheet of uncommons, so it was all from one subset of uncommons. Legends also introduced two really big concepts to Magic, multicolor cards and legendary cards. So multicolor cards, Magic had obviously had monocolor cards,

the first time more than one color appeared on a card. And Legends, non-creatures, was treated like a super type, or maybe it was a super type, but creatures had a creature type, Legend. And the way Legends originally worked is you could only have one Legendary or Legend per deck. And then, once one of them was in play, nobody else could play them.

So if I had a Legendary creature and you had the same Legendary creature, whichever one of us got it into, nobody else could play them. So if I had a legendary creature and you had the same legendary creature, whichever one of us got it into play first got to play it. And the other person had to kill the first one before they could play a new one. So after Legends was The Dark. The lead designer was Jesper Mirfors, who was the art director. Oh, real quickly. Revised also introduced now, it was revised the first time, or

Revised was the first time that we took stuff that was in other expansions, Arabian Knights and Antiquities, and put it into the core set. Also introduced the tap symbol. Now the first tap symbol, so Alpha just said, just literally wrote out, tap two. And then in Revised,

the tap symbol was a T. But then in Revised, the TAP symbol was a T. But then it turns out, since we were translating later, oh, Legends, by the way, would be the first set printed in another language. It would print it in Italian. Italian was the first language outside of English to be printed. Other languages

would soon follow. There were up to 11 languages. But Legends was the first outside of English. And in Revised, the tap symbol was a T. Then it would later become a turned card. Then it would later become, it would have an arrow on it.

So the tap symbol went through a bunch of changes. Anyway, The Dark was led by Jesper Mirfors, who was the art director at the time. And it really was the first

sort of tonal set. It was like, what is the dark side of each color? And looked at, what's the dark side of white? And the dark side of blue? And dark side of black? And looked at all the colors and sort of tonal set. It was like, what is the dark side of each color? And looked at what's the dark side of white and the dark side of blue and dark side of black and looked at all the colors and sort of saw, you know, how could the color sort of go bad, if you will. And it was the first set that had

multicolored cards that weren't legendary creatures. All the legends in the legends were multicolored and all the multicolored cards were Legends. It was an exclusive set. Okay, After the Dark was Fallen Empires. That was also made by East Coast Playtesters. It had a very strong counter and token theme. Alpha did have both creature tokens and had counters,

so nothing completely new, but as a thematic thing, was very strong. And it was one of the early sets that really talked about sort of factioning in any way. Not kind of the modern factioning, and we'll get to that, but more of just, you know, there were some tribal components. There were things that connected. Each color had two tribes that were fighting each other or two groups that were fighting each other. Um, and they were sort of tribally connected. Um, okay. After Fallen Empires is Ice Age. So Ice Age is the first set that was kind of designed, uh, to be played by itself. Um, Legends, while a large set, didn't have a lot of the basic building things you would need.

For example, let's say you were playing Unlimited with Legends, which I don't recommend, and there was an enchantment that wasn't in Enchant World that you wanted to get rid of. Oh, well you have to go to Rare before you have a card that destroys enchantments.

So Ice Age had the staples in it. It was not really optimized or limited. We'll get to Mirage in a second, which more was. But it was definitely a stuff to be played alone. It introduced Cantrips, although the Cantrips in Ice Age, you drew the card beginning of next turn. We would simplify that later, just draw it right away. But anyway, and then that was followed by Homelands. So Homelands was the first set that was kind of consciously on a different plane other than Dominaria. Arabian Nights was kind of retroactively called a different plane, Rabia. But at the time, it wasn't really played up like, oh, here's a new plane.

Where Ogrethra, the plane of Homelands, very much was its own plane. It was magic finally going to another plane rather than traveling around the same world. And Homelands really was one of the early sets that did a lot of trying to lead with the story and made a lot of designs based on the story. A lot of what they did in Homelands is found things that were popular in early magic

and sort of brought it into the story. People like Sarah Angel, well, guess what? Sarah the Planeswalker's here. People like Singer Vampire, well, the race of the Singer family is here. You know, stuff like that. Okay, so Homelands is followed by Alliances. So Alliances was the last non-15 card pack. In fact, it's the only, I believe, 12 card pack. So it had nine commons, two uncommons, and a rare. And it was a smorgasbord of new ideas. There's a lot of mechanics that you'll later see fleshed out that like one of cards, not a named mechanic, but things

that would later get named, show up in alliances. And it's the first time a small expansion tied thematically to a large expansion. So Alliances was a continuation of Ice Age. Now, up to now, from beginning of Magic through Alliances is what I call the first age of design. And that era is more known at focusing on individual card, meaning the design was trying to optimize card by card. Each decision was made on what would make this card in a vacuum the best card it could be. Okay, so now we get into Mirage.

Mirage is the second age of design. We started getting into the era of the blocks. And so the way the blocks worked early on was there was a large set in the fall, small set in the winter, small set in the summer. And Mirage was the first set that very much was built for Limited.

We thought about Limited. Not that there wasn't a lot to learn. We got much better at it. But it was the first set where we really were conscious of trying to make sure things were playable in Limited. Because Ice Age saw a decent amount of seal play, but it was pretty painful. You could open up decks and just not have enough creatures

to make a viable deck. I mean, it really wasn't suited to sealed. And so Mirage definitely started to think in that way. Mirage also... Well, Mirage continued telling the story. After Mirage was Visions. So I think Visions was the first

small set that came in a 15-card booster pack. So Visions came in a 15-card booster pack and it was the first set to have enter-the-battlefield effects. It had four of them, I believe. But the first set to say, when I enter the battlefield,

an effect would happen. Visions was followed by Weatherlight. Weatherlight was the first graveyard set. Weatherlight was the first graveyard set, and it was the first it introduced the Weatherlight saga. There were a few characters that showed up in Mirage and Visions, like Sis A was in Mirage and Visions. Or maybe just Visions. But anyway,

the Weatherlight saga was a brainchild of me and Mike Ryan. The idea was, let's have a story that's bigger, that transcends a single set or a single block. Because up to that point, every story was told per block. And this is like, this is larger than that. This is going to be a story that's going to go across blocks with a group of characters that travel from plane to plane. And so we introduce in Weatherlight.

Then we get to Tempest. So Tempest was the first set that had pre-constructed decks. It was the first set that had a pre-release card. Oh, I didn't mention this before. I did a whole podcast on pre-releases. Ice Age was the first set to have a pre-release. There's one. Homeland also had one. Alliances, I think, had a handful.

And Mirage was the first one in which there were 50. There were lots of them. But Tempest was the first set to have a pre-release card. And Tempest was the first set, I mean Weatherlight and Tempest were the first sets that really started integrating the story in the art itself.

We did it a little bit in Weatherlight. We did it a lot in Tempest. Then there was Stronghold and Exodus. Exodus is the first set where we had rarity symbols and we had collector numbers. Because remember, Richard's original vision

was that you would explore and learn as you played, and so he didn't want telling people what the cards were, because he wanted the exploration to come out during the play. Problem was, between the magic coming out, the internet had started to happen and, or at least,

had come more to the forefront and keeping information in just wasn't really viable anymore. And so we decided to, let's just, let's help you collect your cards and let you know what rarity things were

because we wanted people to trade and help people sort of know which card was of which rarity things were because we wanted people to trade and help people sort of know which card was of which rarity. Okay, after Exodus was Urza's Saga. So we went back in time to sort of continue telling the story and involved Urza. Urza's Saga is probably best known for being the first real broken environment, what we call Combo Winter. And it resulted in us banning a whole bunch of cards.

Also got R&D chewed up by the CEO. The only time that's happened, I believe. Urza's Legacy was where premium cards, aka foils, first showed up. So we had a parallel set of premium cards that you could get. That's the first time that happened. And then Urza's Destiny... had a parallel set of premium cards that you could get. That's the first time that happened.

And then Urza's Destiny Arabian Nights was Richard had done that by himself and Urza's Destiny was the only set as of Tempest design came in-house. So prior to Tempest, all those designs were done by freelancers. Tempest Forward the designs were, well technically Weatherlight Forward but Tempest started all those designs were done by freelancers. Tempest Forward, the designs were, well, technically Weatherlight Forward,

but Tempest started design for Weatherlight started design. So Tempest was the first set designed in-house, but Weatherlight was the first set in-house to be released. And Urza's Destiny, I did by myself. So Urza's Destiny was the only set, once we brought it in, once we were doing it in-house, to be done by one person. So one of my claims to fame. Okay, after Urza's Destiny was Rokadian Masks.

Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Before we get there. After Urza's Legacy, but before Urza's Destiny, in between, was 6th Edition. So, of course, about every other year, of course, it would come out. The reason I bring up 6th edition is two big things. One is that we introduced new rules. And up to that point, I talked about how we're in the second age of design. First age of design, the problem with maximizing cards in a vacuum is that you have two cards that each by themselves are pretty cool, but they don't work that well together.

And that's one of the issues at hand is trying to make sure that it works well together. And to do that, we needed to rewrite the rules to get templates and to get the rules to say, oh, here's how these kind of cards work, so they all work the same. There's a lot of things done in the 6th edition.

The biggest rule change we've ever had introduced the stack, got rid of interrupts, and did a whole bunch of smaller things that a lot of which are rules you might not even know. Like it used to be, if a blocker was tapped, it no longer dealt damage.

There are a lot of little rules like that that slowly went away. The other thing that 6th edition did is it introduced the keyword haste. So haste was an alpha on Nether Shadow, a black card, interestingly. And even then, it only had haste when it came

or, well, it only came back from the graveyard. Maybe it had it all the time, but it was a card that kept coming back from the graveyard. Anyway, we finally named it and gave it a keyword. Okay, so then there's Mercadian Mask. Mercadian Mask's nemesis and prophecy. Not tons of innovation there. At least not a lot of firsts were there. After that was Invasion. So Invasion is the start of what I call the Third Age of Design. And this is the era of blocks starting to get themes. Invasion was a multicolor block.

Odyssey would be a graveyard block, and so on. So Invasion also introduced split cards, something that I actually had designed for Unglue 2, a set that had never come out. Unglue, by the way, came out, I think, after Earth's Destiny. Introduced the idea of silver borders, introduced full art land,

introduced token cards, so did some stuff. So Invasion, Plane Shift, Apocalypse. So the other important thing about this block is we made a conscious choice to save the enemy cards, that Apocalypse was an enemy color set. So Invasion and Planeship did allied colors, and then Apocalypse did enemy colors. And that is kind of the proto version of block planning. The idea back in the day is this first set would just make the first set, and then the second set

would figure out what they could do the first set didn't do. And the third set would figure stuff they could do the first and second set didn't do. And the third set would figure out stuff they could do that the first and second set didn't do. There wasn't a lot of planning out. And Invasion was the first set that kind of did it, not quite as much on purpose, but kind of backed into it. Okay, so after Invasion is Odyssey,

Torment, and Judgment. So Odyssey was a graveyard block, the first graveyard block, whether it had been a graveyard set. And we experimented with a bunch of stuff. We started playing around more with cards that were active in the graveyard, even a little symbol at the time, a little graveyard symbol, that lets you know the cards can be used from the graveyard. Not that there weren't individual cards, but we had a whole mechanic flashback. And Odyssey, not Odyssey,

Torment and Judgment both had their colors unequal. Black was higher and white and green were lower in Torment, and then reversed. White and green were higher and black was lower in Judgment. Ended up not working out that great, so it's not something we do anymore, but it's something we experimented with. After that, the next block was Onslaught,

Legions, and Prophecy. That was the first time we did tribal as a theme. Also, Morph got introduced there. So, Legions, by the way, introduced Double Strike. So what had happened was, we had done a thing called You Make the Card,

and one of the suggestions for the mechanic for it, it was a green card, was Double Strike. Well, Double Strike wanted to be in the colors that had First Strike, because Double Strike has First Strike built into it, so we ended up putting it in white and red, so it didn't make sense on the You Make the Card, but we liked it and we put it in. So Double Strike finally makes it into the game. Then, I think that summer is 8th Edition.

8th Edition is known most for having a couple things. It introduced the new frames. It got rid of white border. 8th edition was all black border. The new frames, by the way, had bigger art and had cleaner. Originally in Magic, the title bar was in white on a darker title bar in a font I think called Medieval Gaudi that was just hard to read. So we changed the font, we inverted it

so it was dark print on a light background, and we changed up the frames and stuff and made a new card frame as of 8th edition. Also, artifacts used to be brown, and they got changed over to silver. Land and artifacts were a bit too close to each other, so we kept land as being darker, more brownish, and we made artifacts silver.

Okay, then we get to Mirrodin. So Mirrodin is the first set that introduces equipment. It's the first set that introduces equipment. It's the first set that introduces race, class, and creature types. When Magic first came out, creatures only had one creature type and artifacts didn't have creature types. We changed the rules so all

creatures got creature types, and then if you had a job, you would have race and class. So you would be a human and a soldier, for example. Mirrodin also was our first themed artifact block. Dark Steel introduced Indestructible, and Phyton introduced Scry. So that's a block that every single set in the block introduced a new evergreen keyword. Interesting.

Or I guess equipment isn't a keyword, but it introduced a new evergreen element to the game. After that was Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, Saviors of Kamigawa. So Champions of Kamigawa is where Vigilance, as a keyword, gets premiered. Obviously, Sarah Angel and Alpha had the ability, and for a long time we just called it the Sarah ability,

informally. But with Champions of Kamigawa, vigilance finally becomes a key word. The other thing is Champions of Kamigawa was the first time we tried a top-down block. Obviously, Richard had done Arabian Nights. But as far as having a whole block that was sort of themed around top-down flavor, it took Japanese as influence, and it was built around that. The set didn't do all that great, but it has since grown into a very passionate

sort of fan base after the fact. After Champs Kamigawa was Ravnica. Ravnica is the start of what I call the fourth age of design. That is the era of block planning. Ravnica being the perfect example. When we had ten guilds, we chopped

them up so that four, then three, then three. We clearly thought about how the whole block would work together and built around that. Ravnica also introduced hybrid mana, and it introduced modern-day factioning. It introduced

using watermarks for factioning, and it did a lot to really make us rethink about how we could build blocks and how we can sort of present things. So it really was a big changer. So Ravnica was followed by Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight.

Time Spiral introduced the mechanic Flash. Once again, as is the case for most of these, stuff like haste and vigilance and flash, the game had done it before. We just finally decided that we would keyword it. This was the time, by the way, where I pushed to try to get rid of sorceries and make everything instant,

make instant a super type. I failed in that and ended up being flash. Also, Time Spy was the first set to have a bonus sheet where there was extra Also, Time Spiral was the first set to have a bonus sheet where there's extra cards, and I think it was the first set where you were guaranteed something in every booster, which was

a card from the time-shifted sheet. The idea of every booster having something in it I believe started in Time Spiral. The first set to do that. Planner of Chaos was the first set to mess around with the color wheel. Not a great idea in retrospect. Future Sight introduced a bunch of keywords.

Death Touch, Life Link, and Reach. Also Shroud, but that ended up no longer evergreen. We were really sort of, I was trying to revamp, and I realized that we just needed to have more keywords. And so I used Future Sight as an opportunity. We sort of introduced them in Future Sight, and then the very next set, they showed up. Because they were in the future shifted sheet.

Ooh, in the future, there'll be these keywords. Look, they're here. Next is Lorwyn. So Lorwyn, Morning Tide, Shadowmoor, and Eventide. So Lorwyn introduced Planeswalkers. They weren't really used much. I mean, they were in the set. They weren't part of the story yet. And the original plan was they would be really used much. I mean, they were in the set. They weren't part of the story yet.

And the original plan was they would be an occasional thing. That's the only time they show up with the whole block is in Lorwyn. They don't show up for the rest of the year. They'll show up a year later in Shards of Alara, but they did not show up. So they were an instant out-of-the-gate hit, and we ended up, obviously, they became the centers of our story. Times by all the block before, by the way, a key part of the story had been there was this major multiverse accident and it was sort of a resetting of our planeswalkers.

They had to give up their sparks to save the universe and the new planeswalkers were depowered. The old planeswalkers were kind of like gods. It's hard to tell stories with gods, so we depowered them some. Okay, after Lorne was Shards of Alara. Shards of Alara, Conflux, and Alara Reborn. So this was the introduction of the Mythic Rares.

Mythic Rares did not exist before Shards of Alara. It's the first time we put basic land in every pack. We replaced the common with a basic land. Every pack had one. And it was the last tournament packs. The reason we did this was the tournament pack that I talked about selling in, this was the last time we did that. And knowing that the tournament packs were going away,

we wanted to start getting people in the habit of seeing lands in packs because we wanted to make sure people had a place they can get their lands. After Shards of Alara was Magic 2010. So that was the first core set that had new cards in it. It also had another rule change. Not quite as big as 6th edition. But Magic 2010 took damage off the stack, got rid of mana burn it did a few things

probably the second biggest rules change I think in Magic, although way smaller than 6th edition so after Magic 2010 was Zendikar so Zendikar was the first set kind of built under New World Order. I mean, Shards of Lara kind of

backwards adapted to it, but Zendikar was the one that started with it. So Zendikar, World's Wake, and Rise of the Odrazi. So previously with Lorwyn and Morningtide and Shadowmourne andide we messed around with smaller blocks like two set blocks

the thing we were messing around with Zendikar is the idea of having a third set that's a large set that's mechanically not connected so the mechanics that were in that were in Zendikar and Worldwake were not in Rise of the Adrazi obviously the introduction of

Landfall and Land as a theme for a set and had an adventure world theme. And then Rise of the Odrazi, we introduced the Odrazi! Another big villain of magic. These inscrutable alien creatures from the blind eternities

that are very hard to understand and cause lots of chaos. Then after Rise of the Odrazi with Scars of Mirrodin, Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, and New Phyrexia, that was us sort of experimenting with the idea of playing around with tournament structures, the pre-release from Mirrored Impure Siege. You chose there was a war between the Mirrored and the Phyrexians. You chose the Mirrored side, the Phyrexian side and you got a booster pack and different booster packs

and different cards in it. And then the third set, New Phyrexia, we didn't tell you whether it was going to be Mirrored Impure or New Phyrexia. There was going to be a war and depending on how the war came out, the set would be called something. But we didn't let you know what the set was going to be named until right before it came out. And us messing

around sort of with the way we did events, but that's really a starting place for us to do that. Okay, so after Scarves of Mirrodin was Innistrad. So Innistrad, Dark Ascension, and

Avacyn Restored. So Innistrad, Dark Ascension, and Avacyn Restored. So Innistrad introduced double-faced cards and it introduced the fight mechanic. Fight was keyworded for the first time. And I mean, Dark Ascension sort of followed

on that. Avacyn Restored was the first time we had done a large set where we had a little bit more connection. It was its own large set with its own draft experience, but we had connected a little more than we did with Rise of the Eldrazi.

But as you can see, we start getting in a pattern here. Oh, something I forgot. Scars of Mirrodin, I forgot. Scars of Mirrodin was the start of the Fifth Age of Design. The Fifth Age of Design is where we started forgot. Scars of Mirrodin was the start of the fifth age of design. The fifth age of design is where we started taking more conscious thought of

the emotional impact. What feeling, what emotion were we trying to evoke? And Scars of Mirrodin played around a lot with introducing the Phyrexians and like,

how do we do that? And then, you could see like in Innistrad, I really was trying to set a tone of it's all gothic horror set and make you feel afraid

and stuff like that. Anyway, so Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, after that was Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, and Dragon's Maze, we sort of revamped guilds, did 5.5.10 rather

than 4.3.3, and each of them was in a large set, you start seeing the large sets start showing up more. First time we had a large set show up in a winter set. After that was Theros. So Theros, Board of the Gods, Journey into Nyx. You see us doing more top-down. We're doing

Greek mythology. And we're definitely sort of experimenting more. We were doing more stuff at tournaments, fight the Minotaur, fight the gods, and what was it, fight the... There are things you could do at the events

where you start playing around more with that. After that was Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged, and Dragons of Tarkir. This is what I call the sixth age of design, where we start getting much more conscious of the blocks around it so that, like, we're not just thinking about what this block is doing, but what's the block

before it doing? What's the block after doing? And started mapping things together and theming things together. And then after that is Battle for Zendikar. Sorry. Before... Sorry, I jumped ahead. Before we get to Magic 2015, which was after, I think, Return of Ravnica,

we slightly changed the frame. Oh, I'm sorry, it was after Journey. It was after Journey into Nyx. We slowly changed the frame, not quite as much, added the holostamp for rares and mythic rares, and put the information at the bottom so that you could read it when we do collation. Then, after dragons,

we had magic origins, where we introduced menace. And it really was the start of the weather... not weather, I'm sorry, of the gatewatch. It started the gatewatch story. Obviously, in Battle for Zendikar, we introduced the gatewatch, and

they get together an oath of the Gatewatch, and then we continue on with Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon. That's the beginning of the era of the two-block, where we do two blocks a year, where each block is large, small, large, small, kind of mimicking what we had done with Lorwyn. So the following year is Kaladesh and Aether Revolt, and Amonkhet and Hour of

Devastation. Kaladesh would introduce vehicles that would become deciduous and Amonkhet would be us playing around with sort of doing top-down again this time playing around with Egypt.

We also start doing a thing where we mix cultural top-down with flavor where it was a combination of Egypt but with Bolas because Nicole Bolas was playing a big part of the story. Then, follows that is Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan

and then Dominaria. So, Dominaria is the start of what I call the 7th Age of Design and the reason for that is call the seventh age of design. And the reason for that is behind the scenes, we changed how we made magic sets. So for many, many years, we had design and development. And for the first time, we changed our processes to vision design, set design, and play design, which sort of redistributed a little bit how we made things.

In a world where we're making more worlds per year, it helps us be able to do that. And anyway, Dominar is also the start of what I call the 3-in-1 model, where we do large set, large set, large set, each playable by itself, draftable by itself, with a core set. And Core 2019 was the return of the core set. And the big change is we started integrating in all the beginner products. So the Welcome Decks and the Deck Builder's Toolkit and the Planeswalker Packs, everything was built, maximized

to make those the best they could be while building the Core 2019 to create a whole onboarding experience to make the Core set the best on-ramp we can make for new players. And that, my friends, in... How long do we have here? 30 minutes. What is the first 25 years of Magic? Hopefully what you see today

is a lot of things. And I didn't get to all the firsts of Magic. I didn't really talk about a lot of the starting of the tournaments. There's a lot of things that happen. But hopefully you'll see today that a lot of the starting of the tournaments. There's a lot of things that happen. But hopefully you'll see today that a lot of keywords that you might think have been there forever haven't. A lot of people are surprised, for example, that Vigilance barely makes it into Modern. Or, I'm sorry, that it's in Modern. That introduction of Vigilance is within the sets that are in Modern, for example.

That's a little sooner than a lot of people realize. The introduction of vigilance is within the sets that are in modern, for example. That's a little sooner than a lot of people realize. Anyway, I hope today showed you that there was a lot of first goes on. Get a little insight in how magic has changed over the time. And just get a little sense of the history of magic. Hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means this is 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.