Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #593: Mechanic Inspirations

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

In this podcast, I talk about the various ways we create Magic mechanics to answer the question "Where do mechanics come from?"

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast is all about where do mechanics come from? It's a question I get asked a lot, so I thought I'd sort of walk through. I mean, the short answer is many, many different places. No two mechanics in some way are made the same. But I want to talk today about lots of different inspirations and sort of give a lot of examples from different mechanics. Okay, so let's start. I try to organize these. We'll see how good my organization is. Okay, first is sometimes cars are inspired. I'm sorry, sometimes mechanics are inspired by a single card. Two examples.

are inspired by a single card. Two examples. One is, we're in Lorwyn. We're doing a tribal set. We're trying to figure out... We wanted people to be able to connect different tribes together. That it was getting a little bit too siloed. So I remembered a card from Kamigawa Block. A card named Mistform Ultimis.

Which was a very popular card. It was a legendary creature that was all creature types. Because Mistforms in Kamigawa were creatures that you could change their creature type. You could pick a creature type, pick a creature type, and change

it, or grant it that creature type. But the Mistform Ultimis says, no need, I am every creature type and change it, or grant it that creature type. But the Misfurman Ultima says, no need, I am every creature type. And so when we were trying to solve the Lorwyn problem, I remembered that. So the changeling mechanic is literally just saying, oh, let's take this cool thing we did on this one singular card

and make a mechanic out of it. Now the funny thing, at the time, one of the complaints I got was, no, but Mists from Ultimates is so cool. If you make a mechanic out of it, then that won't be as cool a card. And my answer to that is always, look, our job is to make the most awesome game in the world. I don't have the luxury of saying, well, that idea is so much fun, I will just let one card do it. If people enjoy doing it, I'm going to make more cards to do it.

Whether or not they're just other individual cards or a whole mechanic. If people like something, I'm not going to not do it to keep novelty of the one card that did it. Another example of a mechanic inspired by a card is host and suture. I'm sorry, host and augment. It was called suture in design. Host and augment from Unstable. And that was very much influenced by the card BFM from Unglued. Unglued, what had happened was I was trying to make weird cards. I went and talked to all sorts of different people. And one of the people I talked to was the printing people, Caps. And they explained that there was a way for me to overrun the art between cards.

And then I was like, well, what happened? Why would I want to do that? And I came up with the idea of having two cards. And BFM was very, very popular. I think the most popular card in Unglued. So I always was kind of inspired by, oh, how else can I put cards together? So Post and Augment pretty much was just the idea of, well, imagine BFM if, you know, any left side and any right side could go together. It was kind of the inspiration. And that's really what led us down the path to making

Host and Suture. Okay. Sometimes a mechanic inspired by another mechanic. A good example, a couple of good examples. In Return to Ravnica, we were working on Selesnya. We needed a Selesnya mechanic. And I got the idea of Proliferate had been very popular in Scars of Mirrodin. And Proliferate basically said,

for all the counters in play, make one more counter. For each counter type in play, on any going card, you can double counters on them. And I'm like, oh what if we did that but with creature tokens rather than counters? So Populator originally was

copy every single token type or anyone you wanted to copy. That proved to be too powerful so we had to scale it back to pick one. So it still encouraged you to have a bunch because then you had options to choose but it turned into copy one token creature that you have. Unearth. So Unearth was from Shards of Alara.

Grixis was the black centered world. And we were trying to come up with something for Grixis. And that mechanic was just inspired by Flashback, which was a mechanic originally in Odyssey that allowed you to cast things, spells out of your graveyard in addition to casting them from your hand. So you got a second use out of them. And Unearthed really was like, oh, could we flashback creatures? Now we had to figure out how to make that work.

And the idea, obviously, with Unearthed is there are creatures that you can pay a cost and then they come into play, have haste, and then at the end of a turn they get exiled. So you sort of get the creature back, but just for a single turn, which solves the problem of you just recasting them infinite times, which is the reason Flashback had been instant sorceries,

because there's things that you only could use a second time. The Constellation from Journey into Nyx. We had made Landfall in in Zendikar and

Constellation was I think we originally just called it Enchantment Fall like its inspiration was pretty blatantly in its design name

okay well if we rewarded you for playing Land what if we rewarded you for casting Enchantment it was a cool way to care about enchantments. Undying in Dark Ascension.

Undying was a mechanic that said when your creature dies, you return it to play with a plus one, plus one counter on it. When it dies, if it doesn't have a counter on it, return it to play with a plus one, plus one counter. And Undying was just me taking Persist, a mechanic from Shadowmoor, and just

swapping it. It was Persist, but instead of minus one,, and just, like, swapping it. Like, it was Persist, but instead of minus one, minus one counters, it used plus one, plus one counters. And then Infect. Infect was, we were trying to, I mean, originally I used Poisonous. And then some idea, some along the way, we got the idea of combining Poisonous with Wither. And eventually it sort of made its own mechanic but it very much was us sort of fine-tuning how to make a poison mechanic

and then realizing that we could take sort of elements of poisonous and elements of wither and sort of smash them into a single mechanic and that's really where it got inspired. Sometimes something gets inspired by a game component. So I just talked about Persist. So Dying was inspired by Persist. What was Persist inspired by? And that

was inspired by, we had a set with minus one, minus one counters. And we literally said, okay, we don't normally have minus one, minus one counters. What can we do with minus one, minus one counters? And Persist was just this idea of, oh, here's a neat thing. You know, here's a way for us to bring back a creature once,

but because it's minus one, minus one, it's slightly weaker. And, you know, this ended up being a neat way to use minus one, minus one counters. Okay, sometimes we're inspired by a rules change. So Morph, what had happened was, early Magic Alpha had a card called Illusionary Mask and a second card called Camouflage, both of which Richard had come up with kind of just weird cards that turned the cards face down, so he didn't know what they were.

But the rules regarding those two cards were really weird. I mean, very... Have you ever heard me talk about it? Like, if I had a face-down card, the following scenario would happen. Like you would try to tear it, and I would have to go, sorry, can't be teared. And then you're like, oh, it must be black or an artifact creature.

And then I'd do something else, and you go, oh, okay, that will work. No, that won't work. And you had to sort of piece it together. But I mean, well, that was in theory fun, I guess. It was very hard. The rules were very inconsistent very hard the rules were very inconsistent so the rules team came up with an idea of okay maybe the way we solve this is we define the state of a face down creature um that a face down creature is a two two creature

um and then from that they come up with the idea of what we can make a whole mechanic out of that you could play it face down and then there's a mechanic that lets you turn it face up. And so Morph just directly came out of the rules team, sort of trying to solve a problem and then realizing that the solution to the problem could create a new mechanic. Okay, sometimes something is inspired by tone.

So, for example, Morbid from Innistrad. Morbid is a mechanic that cares about whether something died this turn. And really it came about because we were trying to create a set where you were afraid of things and the setting where death mattered and that sort of just, it all kind of wrapped

together to go, oh, well, how can I make you afraid of what, you're not sure what's going to happen, but I also want it to be sort of centric to what makes it feel like a horror story. And so I really came up with the idea of I wanted you afraid about when things are going to happen. And when things die seemed like a really moody, flavorful way to care.

And so Morbid just really came out of trying to capture that mood or that tone. Likewise, Delirium from Shards of Alara, not Shards of Alara, from Shadows of Innistrad, had a similar thing of like, okay, the world's all about, everything's going crazy. How do I capture going crazy? And we messed around a lot with the idea of, okay, well, your brain is represented by your hand and your deck. And the idea of going, okay, well, your brain is represented by your hand and your deck. And the idea of going crazy is, well, what if, first we messed around with what if you

milled yourself out? And, you know, milling has to do with like kind of going mentally crazy. And then we eventually came up with the idea of, well, what if there were things in your graveyard that mattered? And we sort of came up with sort of a threshold variant. And the idea was as different pieces sort of, you know, fall to the graveyard, it slowly builds and you start to go crazy.

But it's not a bad thing to go crazy in this world. You like going crazy. And so Delirium really sort of captured that tone. Okay, sometimes we're inspired by a concept. So a good example of this would be vehicles from Kaladesh. We had wanted to do vehicles for a long time and we didn't really know how to do them. We just knew that the concept of a vehicle was cool. And one of the big challenges of Kaladesh was

okay, we're an inventor world. Artifacts matter. It feels like vehicles would be artifacts. And a lot of us think okay, well there's a certain feel we're trying to get here. How do you capture that? Well, what exactly is a vehicle? Well, it's something you ride. It's something, you know, that a creature has to drive it. And then it was about, like, okay, what does that mean?

What does driving a vehicle mean? And we came about with this idea of, okay, you know, you need creatures to sort of turn it on, that it's kind of like a creature that you can attack with it, but only if creatures are sort of driving it. So we came up with the idea of you have to have a crew number, and that means that's how much power of creatures you need to be able to, you know, to crew the vehicle to drive it. But it very much, it just started just started top down from we're going to

call these vehicles what would vehicles be we designed it from trying to match the execution of what you thought vehicles would be sagas from Dominaria were us saying we want to do stories this is a world of history

how do we capture the concept of a story and the interesting thing with sagas is a good example history. How do we capture the concept of the story? And the interesting thing with Saga is a good example of how sometimes we reuse mechanics. What had happened was when we originally had tried to make Planeswalkers, one of the early versions was there were just three things the Planeswalker did. So turn one, it did the first thing. Turn two, it would do the second thing.

Turn three, it would do the third thing. So, for example, I think the early Garak was like, turn one, make a 2-2 bear. Turn two, copy the number of bears you have in play, the number of tokens you have in play. And number three, all bears get plus two, plus two. So the idea was, oh, I make a bear, now there's two bears, I attack with a bunch of big bears. Then I make a third bear, now there's six bears, I attack with one.

It just would grow with time. The problem was, okay, so I make a bear and then my opponent bolts the bear and gets rid of it. Now, the next turn, oh, I get to double all my bear tokens, but I don't have any bear tokens. And the next turn, all my bears get bigger, but I don't have any bears. And it made them feel kind of robotic. It made them feel kind of robotic. It made them feel kind of dumb. Like they were just sort of doing what they were told but didn't have a mind of their own.

We wanted them to feel like they had some agency. But we were trying to figure out how to do a story. We're like, wait a minute. A story has none of that problem. Like a story is, here's what happened. This is what happened. This is the order of what happened. And that we really, when we were trying to create the idea of a story, we're like, okay,

well, we want things to happen. We want different things to happen. And we want them to happen sequentially because that's what a story is. And I realized that the original Planeswalker design, while it didn't work for Planeswalkers, actually was a pretty good design to make sense for stories. And so that's where that came from. to make sense for stories. And so that's where that came from.

Embalm from Amonkhet. Like, really started from, okay, what are the things you think about when you think Egypt? And the idea is, okay, mummies, making mummies, embalming your dead. And the embalm mechanic came about from us saying, okay, okay, we're embalming people. What does that mean?

What does it mean to embalm people? And it's like, well, probably they have to be dead because you only embalm dead people, but then they come back to life because they're mummies. And, you know, a lot of it was just like extrapolating off. We knew the flavor we wanted, and it was a matter of trying to capture that flavor. Another example would be from the original Myrida in equipment.

Like, we knew they were called equipment. It's like, okay, you got swords and shields, Another example would be from the original Myrida in equipment. Like, we knew they were called equipment. It's like, okay, you got swords and shields and, you know, there's these cool things that you want. But instead of you, the player, using them, which is how it had been before, what if the creatures could use them? What if I could give my goblin, you know, a sword? Or, you know, put armor on my elf? Or give a spear to my merfolk? put armor on my elf or give a spear to my merfolk. And so it really stemmed from us trying to figure out,

I think the early version that we did is we tried something that was kind of like auras, but it kind of felt weird in that I give a spear to my merfolk and then you destroy my merfolk and then, well, the spear's gone. I'm like, well, the spear wouldn't be gone. The spear would just sort of fall to the ground and then someone could pick it up and they could use the spear. And so a lot of the way we evolved equipments was literally like, okay, what do you expect equipment to do? I expect to play it, then I want to give it to one of my creatures, and then if they die, okay, well then I could give it to another creature. The sort of making of equipment was very much stemming from,

okay, they are equipment. They're called equipment. What would equipment do? And trying to figure out how to match that. And so a lot of this whole category is, a lot of times we're like, we're doing thing X. What's the top-down thing we want? And then trying to capture that top-down thing,

capture that essence, that feel. Okay. Sometimes things can be inspired by a dream so this was Entwine so Entwine was a mechanic from original Mirrodin the way it worked was

they were all spelled Instants and Sorceries and they had they were modal you could choose one of two things so do A or do B

and then when Entwine said it's okay if you pay the Entwined cost, there's an extra cost you can pay, then you don't have to choose between A and B. You get A and B. And so where Entwined came from, one of my favorite stories,

is I had been working on Mirrodin. Energy had originally been in Mirrodin. Bill had said to me, there was too much going on in Mirrodin, so I ended up taking out energy, which had a big footprint. So there was space for another mechanic, not something quite as big as energy had been.

And it turned out that where I was missing was, I think I needed something on Instants and Sorceries. And so I had all these parameters, and I didn't think about what I needed. But anyway, I'm dreaming. And in the dream, I solved the problem. And somehow I had one of those lucid dreams where I kind of figured out in the dream

that I was dreaming. And I woke up and then I like wrote it down. Like it literally was like I came up with a dream and I wrote it down. So, uh, that's the only mechanic that I have so far that was inspired by a dream. I haven't made one or two cards while dreaming, but that's the only whole mechanic. Okay. Next. Um, okay.

Sometimes things are inspired by former things we had tried that hadn't worked out. Um, for example, affinity from original Mirrodin. We'd had a mechanic where the idea of the mechanic was you could pay... The idea of the mechanic was you paid less if a certain condition was true. And it was something in which you would pay less, but it didn't quite map correctly. And it was something that was true, but it didn't quite map correctly. And it was something that was true, but it wasn't necessarily in play. And we were doing Mirrodin and we cared about artifacts. And I sort of said, oh, I like the idea of cost reduction based on something you care about.

But I said, well, what if we cared about artifacts? One of the things we cared about was artifacts rather than caring about, I don't remember what the quality was. It was something that didn't work. But it's like, okay, I like the general idea of the more you have of something, the cheaper your things are. And so I said, okay, well, what if we just apply it to artifacts? So Affinity Artifacts was just an extrapolation of this previous mechanic, but I took out something, I wish I remember what I took out. I took out something and replaced it with Artifacts. It was just like, oh, this didn't work before. Okay, well, what if we just shift a little bit

about how we cared? Like, I liked the idea of cost reduction from having something that scaled based on how much you had, but the idea was, okay, well, let's apply it to Artifacts, and then it became a mechanic that worked. Another example of this thing, now here's an example of the same thing,

but instead of using an unused mechanic, it was a used mechanic. So we had made a mechanic in, I think, Eventide, called Chroma. It had been based on something we did on a card in FutureSight. I'll get to that in a second.

I had some FutureSight-inspired stuff coming. Anyway, Chroma cared about... Basically, what it said is, I scale based upon the number of mana symbols of a certain color, and I'll tell you where to look. Maybe look in play, maybe look in the graveyard, maybe look in your hand.

It just looked a lot of different places and it scaled on that. And Chroma didn't quite go over too well. But in my heart of hearts, I really believed in the mechanic. So when I was doing Theros, I'm like, okay, is there a way to try to redo this and the idea that I really liked was I loved the idea of caring about the gods and trying to find

a way to sort of do that and we came up with this idea of devotion which was okay what if we lock it you don't look anywhere it's only in play and it has a more flavorful, defined, you know, like, Chromo was kind of a very bland name. The fact that you had to look everywhere made it very disjointed. Like, let's just tighten it up and give it a more cohesive flavor. So you only look in play and it represents the concept of devotion.

You know, and because we had our five major gods, and each one of them was a color, like, oh, well, the more blue you have, the more you care about Thassa, because Thassa's the blue god. And anyway, and it went from being a mechanic that people went, ah, to a really beloved mechanic.

And it really was the proof of sometimes, you know, the key to making something work is just execution. And so sometimes we are inspired by, we try something, it doesn't work, but we're like, okay, just because it didn't work the first time,

maybe there's a root of something we think is good that we can salvage and do something else with. Okay. Sometimes the mechanic is inspired by a theme. So the example of this would be landfall. So Zendikar started because I was really enamored by the idea of having land matter, of having mechanics that either cared about a land or cared about when you played land or affected when you played land or went on lands. I just felt there was a lot of space.

I know it's funny. Matt Place, who used to be an R&D developer, used to tease me all the time whenever I said I wanted to make lands matter. He goes, lands matter? If only lands could matter in the game. Anyway, so when we started the design

for Zendikar, basically what I said to my team was, okay, let's examine all the design for Zendikar, basically what I said to my team was, okay, let's examine all the ways land can matter, all the ways mechanics can care about land or be on land, whatever. And Landfall came about just because it was kind of the purest version of this. The idea was, I want to care about land. Well, what are the most, you know, what's the most, what do lands do? And the biggest thing they do is you play them. You play lands. And like, okay, well, what if I reward you for doing that? I'm going to do it anyway, but what if in this world

I reward you? And maybe if I'm rewarding you, maybe you think about when you play your lands. Maybe you hold the land back for a reason, or maybe you want to fetch more lands, or just play with more lands. It just makes you sort of think and care about lands. Like, one of the things I really, really like that kind of cemented Landfall was there was an early playtest game with Landfall where I needed the land

to do something to win the game, and it's late in the game, and I'm like, come on, draw land, draw land, draw land. And I'm like, when do you hope to draw land in the late game? That's a different experience. And it really sort of cemented that we were doing something kind of cool and different. Okay. Sometimes we are inspired by other games. An example for this is Transform. So in Innistrad, I really wanted, I said to my team,

let's figure out a way to mechanically make werewolves. And I said, look, they're going to have two states, because what's a werewolf? It's a human that turns into a werewolf. And that a werewolf without the human state was kind of missing, especially for a set that was about horror. Like, it was important to me that our werewolves weren't just werewolves. I wanted them to at some point be humans and turn into werewolves. That was important to me that our werewolves weren't just werewolves I wanted them to at some point be humans and turn into werewolves

that was important to me so I said to the team okay I want to capture werewolves the only thing I'm going to tell you they have to do is at some point be humans and at some point be werewolves everything is up to you and Tom Lepilli who was on the Innistrad team

had got inspired by something he saw in another game that we make called Duel Masters Duel Masters is a game we make for the Japanese market trading card game. And they had cards that were printed on both sides, that you had one card and it could transform and turn into another card. And so I was really excited. Well, I'm sorry. Tom was really excited.

I had a different mechanic at the time. Tom was very excited by the idea of maybe this could be our werewolves. I actually was skeptical at first. I'm sorry. I was not time. Tom was very excited by the idea of maybe this could be our werewolves. I actually was skeptical at first. I'm sorry, I was not excited. I was skeptical at first. Just because it felt like, wow, that was a big step to take. But I'm always willing to try things. I always, you know, I never write things off without experimenting and playing with them.

And as we played with it, it became clear pretty fast that, oh, no, this was the coolest way to do werewolves. And it required us to sort of figure a lot of things out. Originally the way it worked was that you had a card that went in your deck, a card with a back, that said, oh, go get this double-faced card. And when you got the card, then you would go get it from your sideboard, wherever it was, and then put it into play. And then it turned out that we couldn't have cards together in packs at the time, and now we're starting to get that technology, it's all with BattleBond, but we didn't have it

at the time. So I had to figure out a way to do that, and so what we came up with is, well, what if they just go in your deck? We had learned that like 95% of people playing constructed events played with sleeves. I'm like, okay, well, what if you just head in your deck and then it just flipped over? But very much it was inspired by seeing what we had done or what Duel Masters had done. Okay, next. Sometimes it's inspired not by a pre-mademade card but a card in the set that you

are making the example of this is proliferate so the very first proliferate card wasn't a mechanic it was a singular card it was like um spread the plague or something and it just said okay for everything that has a minus one minus one counter it gets another one for every player that has a poison counter it gets another one um and every player that has a poison counter, it gets another one. And I'm just like, oh, well, you know, we have this counter theme. We're playing the Phyrexians as this disease. Oh, this is a kind of neat way to sort of spread the disease. And then I realized that it was kind of cool.

So I made a site, I made a vertical cycle out of it. I think it was black. And then at some point, I I'm like this is just cool let's just expand this and then Mark Lobus another member of my team had made this

well why limit it to just minus one minus one counters and poison counters what if it's all counters I'm like oh yeah I mean this set has those things but yeah

that's kind of cool it'll just give you more backward compatibility more things you can do with it and so yeah proliferate just sort of started as a singular card and then just kept growing as we realized how cool the effect was. Sometimes cards are inspired by numerous cards we're trying to make.

So imprint from Mirrodin was a mechanic in which you took a card from various zones, you exiled it, and then the card cared about what you exiled. And the way that card came about was, I'd made a card, I tried to make a card, I guess I should say, in, what set did I try to make it in? Some set, obviously, before Mirrodin, that I called Clone Machine, which ended up being called Soul Foundry. clone machine, which ended up being called Soul Foundry.

And the problem was, it was just kind of a weird thing, and I don't know, it ended up getting sort of knocked out of the set. And then Brian Tinsman made a card that was similar, where you exiled the card and you cared about the end. It just dawned on me that both these cards were kind of

really cool cards. Oh, I think what it was, was I had put it in a set and it got knocked out for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the card. And then Brian independently made a different card in his set. And I saw that and said, wait, wait, instead of doing this

as one of, we could make this a cohesive mechanic. And then Inferno was kind of inspired by, like, oh, here's these two different cards trying to do something, but they're doing something similarly enough that we can bind this together and make a mechanic out of it. Okay. Sometimes cards are created by other people in other places. An example here is the Great Designer Search.

So we have run three now. example here is the Great Designer Search. So we have run three now, and each Great Designer Search, one of the cool things is anything made by the contestants, we can use. And so, for example, Battalion, which was the Boros mechanic in Gatecrash, which was when you attack with three or more creatures,

it triggers. Or I think when you attack with this creature and two other creatures, it triggers. We also had Evolve, so was a battalion that was made by Sean Main. Evolve was made by Ethan Fleischer, who had won the secondary design, so Sean came second. Evolve was creatures that whenever a creature came into play that had a higher power or toughness, this creature got a plus one, plus one counter. And we ended up putting that in the Simic.

In fact, it's funny. They're both in Gatecrash. Like, Gatecrash was the first set I worked on since the GDS2 happened. And I said, oh, this is a good Boris mechanic. Oh, this is a good Simic mechanic. I put them in. Also, Prawitz from Khans of Tarkir.

Jonathan Lauchs had made it in also the second grade designer search. That was a mechanic that said, oh, you get plus one, plus one. Remember, you cast a non-creature spell. And we had tweaked something John had done. So sometimes our ideas come from us. Other people make them in a place

where we're allowed to copy them. Normally we can't look at outside design, but the Great Designer Search we are allowed to look at, so we used it from there. Also, some of the designs came from FutureSight. So we made a set many years ago called Future Sight where we made future shifter cards,

which were cards from possible futures using mechanics that didn't yet exist. And Delve from Concert Arc here, Delve was a mechanic where you could remove cards from your graveyard and make your spell cheaper. We put that in Soltai, one of the factions that had a death theme in it. Contraptions.

There's a card called Steamflugger Boss that we had made as basically kind of a joke using terms that didn't exist in the game. But Aaron made the mistake of letting the audience in on the joke that it was just a joke. And then the audience was like, you must make contraptions. And it took years to try to figure out how to crack that. But eventually, with the help of Silver Border, I was able to do it.

And so Instable had contraptions. And also, I mentioned earlier, Chroma showed up in Eventide. Chroma was actually, there was a card teasing Chroma in Future Sight as well. Sometimes, so I talked a lot about inspiration. Sometimes mechanics come about because we're trying to solve problems. So for example, sometimes a mechanic

can come about because it's solving a structural problem. Bestow is my example for this. So we were doing, we were in Theros. I'm drinking water here. I'm getting a dry throat. Okay, so we were in Theros.

We wanted enchantments to matter. And the problem we were running into was that you normally play about 16 creatures and about 7 spells unlimited. And it just wasn't enough enchantment. Even if every card you play that wasn't a creature wasn't

enchantment, it just wasn't enough enchantments. And we wanted enchantments to matter. Now, we knew that caring about enchantments was coming later in the block and journey, but we still wanted to have enough. We wanted enchantments to have enough of an as-fan that they were relevant and meant something.

And so Bestow, which was a mechanic that said, oh, I'm a creature, but I also can be an aura, allowed us to make something that sort of made, it allowed us to make enchantments matter in a way that we wanted to. And that by, because they were also creatures, it just upped the amount that you could put in your deck. That every Bestow creature I played could be an enchantment if we wanted it to be an enchantment, if you needed an enchantment, but if you didn't, it also just got to be a creature. And because of that, it got to be an enchantment creature, which meant that it just increased the amount of enchantments being there and us caring about enchantments. Sometimes a mechanic

is the glue of the set. Historic from Dominaria is a good example of this, where I wanted history to matter, and we figured out, okay, well, what represents history? And we're like, oh, well, legendary things and famous artifacts from the past and stories that tell about the past. These are all the things that mean history.

And then Historic really was, okay, I want history to matter as a theme, but all these things are kind of disconnected. How do I sort of convey history as a mechanical theme? Okay, let's make a mechanic that pulls all these things together and says, hey, I care about history, and sort of conveys that. But really it was created as a means to solve the problem of how do we make all this different part feel like a singular thing and not unconnected things. Sometimes a mechanic is extrapolated

by just trying to figure out what the open spaces are in your design and tie your design together. Fabricate is a good example. This is something that I had a podcast not too long ago with Scott Van Essen. We were talking about Cowardash. And what he said was, so basically we had a meeting where I'm like, here's the problems we have. Here's what we need. Here's the open spaces. Okay, here's how we would fill them. And I made Fabricate, I don't know,

I just talked through what we needed and in the meeting just sort of, and I guess we have Fabricate. I sort of created Fabricate just out of thin air of these are the things we're trying to do. You know, we care about counters, we care about tokens. Is there a way for us to sort of tie that together in a way that sort of, you know,

makes the set feel more connected? And Fabricate was just kind of an offshoot of here's the open space in the set and here's the way to tie it together. Sometimes mechanics sort of evolve from you're trying to do something in the set and then making a mechanic is the best way to do it. So for example, in original Mirrodin, I had this idea of having some artifacts be only usable so many times using charge counter technology like that we had seen on serrated

arrows. Like, oh, you have arrows, but you only get three uses of them. You get a wand, you don't have so many uses. That there were charges, that you only got so many uses out of your equipment. I'm saying equipment, your artifacts. And then I stumbled on the idea of, well, what if

you didn't care about where you got the charge counters from, just it needed charge counters. So I had to use artifact A. Artifact A can be used three times. Artifact B can be used three times. And I was like, well, artifact A or B can be used six times or some combination of six times. And then

I realized that the easier way to explain it was to grant a counter to the player. That like the amount of bookkeeping from caring about all the different counters and all the different things you had and caring about, you know, every time I took a counter,

I had to do this math of, oh, where's the best place to take the counter? And what, you know, I don't want to become too, you know, if my opponent destroys an artifact, I don't want to become too vulnerable to that. So I have to spread it around and, you know. But anyway, it just became complicated.

And, you know, energy was a clean way of sort of helping to track it and make it. It also gave it a little bit more of a flavor and a feel to it. So energy came about because I was trying to figure out how best to sort of execute on that. Sometimes mechanics come about because the rules or the templates dictate them. Devoid, for example, was never meant to be a mechanic. I just, I needed, in order to make the set work,

I needed to have, I couldn't have so many colorless things. So I came up with some ideas of, well, I couldn't have so many colorless things that cost colorless mana. So I, oh, well, what if some of the Eldrazi things cost colored mana,

but they were colorless because all the Eldrazi things are colorless. So that way I can care about colorlessness, because that was the theme of the set, but I didn't have color pie problems because I still made you spend the mana. And it turned out, in the way the rules worked and we had it templated,

it really needed to be a mechanic. And so it ended up being a mechanic just because it needed to do that to work. Sometimes mechanics come about because we're trying to do something and it's the natural execution of it. So for example, in Amonkhet,

we liked the idea of things that encourage you to attack. And so early on, we're like, well, what if things, that if you attack, the end of turn, you die. So like,

inspired kind of like Berserk from Alpha. Like, okay, you double your power, but at the end of the turn you die. And then we realized that was a little bit too harsh. And so Exert came about, we're like, okay, well, what can I do to you that is a cost

but isn't quite as daunting as, and your creature dies. And they're like, oh, well, what if instead of dying it just doesn't untap? You know, I can make it better in some way, but then it exerts itself, and now I can't attack with it next turn. And that seemed like an extension of what we were trying to do, but in a way that, you know, sort of fit the play style we wanted. Sometimes ideas

come about because I'm just trying to sort of go into new space. So, for example, the Evoke mechanic, which was a mechanic in Odyssey? Where was Evoke from? Well, Evoke is a mechanic where originally what I was trying to do is have instants and sorceries that you could kick and they turned into creatures. So, like, oh, I draw two cards, but if I pay extra

mana, now it's also a creature. And it turned out that turning instants and sorceries into creatures, the rules really, really did not like that. So the solution we ended up coming with were creatures that when you enter the battle, they had an enter the battlefield effect, and then unless

you paid extra mana, you sacrifice them and end a turn. So the idea essentially was, it's a creature and a spell, or just a spell, depending on how you wanted to do it. So instead of being something that you paid extra to gain extra, you paid extra to keep something so it didn't go away. And that's

where Evoker came from. Sometimes mechanics just get sort of made whole cloth. They're not made while working on a particular set. They're just made like I'm off on my own, doing something else, and I come up with it.

The story of Flashback is I used to run the feature match area. I was a judge for the feature match area. I ran the feature match at Pro Tours. And I used to watch a lot of really good players play Magic. So a lot of what I was doing, there wasn't tons to do. The one thing about judging the feature match area is I had the best of the best people playing. They knew what they

were doing. I mean, not that there weren't ever judge calls, but most of the time they knew what they were doing. They tended to know the rules well. You know, there wasn't a lot of need for them to come to me. I was there if they needed me, but, you know, a lot of judging the feature match area was literally just watching them play, which is awesome that they were feature matches.

But one of the things I would do whenever somebody would get behind is I would make up little handicaps for them just to try to make the game more interesting. Like, oh, well, what if they could do this? What would they do then? And one of the handicaps I came up with was spells that you could cast out of your graveyard. Like, oh, what if all your instant sorceries you could just cast out of your graveyard? Kind of inspired by like Yawgmoth's will. And then it dawned on me that that might be kind of a cool mechanic. That it might be neat if you could cast your things out of the graveyard.

So when I was working on Odyssey, one of the ideas we came up with was the idea of maybe this was a graveyard set. I'm like, oh, oh, I have a mechanic that cares about the graveyard. But it wasn't as if Odyssey cared about the graveyard. I mean, it wasn't, I didn't create flashback because it was like, oh, there's a set about the graveyard. What graveyard mechanics can I do? I made it completely in a vacuum,

and then when I found a place where it made sense, then I said, oh, it makes sense here. Let's do it here. And definitely, you know, as we get more designers, and now we do exploratory design. We also, some of the mechanics, something like vehicles, you know, obviously was inspired by the idea of a vehicle.

Also, a lot of it happened, you know, during exploratory when we were messing around. But anyway, the point of today was trying to show you that there's no one singular place mechanics come from. It's not like, how do you make mechanics? Well, let me give you the four-step process to making a magic mechanic. Magic mechanics come from all different shapes and sizes.

You know, and pretty much the two biggest categories they fall into is they're inspired by something, whether or not it's something we previously did before in magic, something we tried to do before in magic but didn't work, or just trying to capture the top-down-ness of something that we're trying to do. Or, the second category is you're trying to solve a problem in the set.

And the mechanic comes about because it's the solution to the problem you're trying to solve. Those are the two if I had to, you know, make categories, those are the two big categories. I'm inspired by something or I'm problem solving. And one could even argue, I guess, the inspiration. I was inspired by the problem I was solving.

So I guess a lot of this has to do with inspiration. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's show. I'm always fascinated by how things came to be. And so hopefully, I know a lot of these individual stories I've shared before. A few of these might be new and a few of these might not be heard in the context

of how we make them. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means 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.