Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #642: Retired Mechanics

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about Magic mechanics that just didn't make the cut and had to be retired.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today's topic is retired mechanics. So, there are things we've done in Magic that we said, you know what, we're never doing that again. There are a bunch of mechanics that we might never do again. Today is not about things that, if you ever look at my Storm scale, for example, stuff like Storm, which is a 10. Every once in a while, an Assault Metal product, maybe we make a Storm card as possible. I'm not talking about mechanics that we don't make often or maybe we don't make. I'm talking about things that we've said we're not making anymore. That's what today's topic is. And I'm going to walk through them all and explain why we're not doing them anymore.

There's two basic categories. Category number one is, there's just something about it that we don't think it makes sense to do. Complication or rules interaction or just something that says, you know what, we're just not going to do this again. Second category is where sometimes we make a mechanic and realize that we erred a little bit, and we make a new mechanic that kind of fixes the mechanic, and the old one's retired because if we're going to do it, we'll just do the new one, the fixed version. So some of the retired mechanics are just, we've since made a better version of it,

and so the reason we'll never do that version is we've made a better version of it. of it. And so the reason we'll never do that version is we've made a better version of it. Okay. So I'm going to start with, uh, some mechanics that go all the way back to the very beginning to alpha. So we'll begin with banding. Now I've talked about banding before. I did a whole podcast on banding once. Um, and I just talked about bands with others, uh, recently in my top 10 Worst Mechanics podcast. So, real quickly, I'll... For all these mechanics, I'll explain what they do, just for people that never know. Banding is a

combat mechanic that says, on attack, you may band together any number of creatures, as long as all but one of them has the banding ability. They must be blocked as a single entity, and then you, the controller of the creatures, as long as all but one of them has the banding ability, they must be blocked as a single entity, and then you, the controller of the creatures, decides how the damage happens to them,

not the person blocking them, which is normally how it happens. On defense, similar thing, that you have a band of creatures that must block together, and all of the creatures on defense, only one of the creatures on defense must have banding for you to have a defensive band. Anyway, the reason banding has been retired is a couple things. One is it's just complex. It's a very, very complex mechanic. I mean, I gave you the super, super short version here.

I mean, I tell numerous stories about how, you know, I'm interacting with the top players in the world and like they just don't understand banding. The other problem with banding is I don't know whether or not we can even write the reminder text and fit on a card. It is not a short reminder text. It's a very complicated reminder text. So early Magic, we didn't write reminder text on the card. Just like this is a basic rule. You got to know it. And since then, especially in the core sets, we tend to put on at least low rarities reminder text. Banding doesn't have reminder text that can fit. So that

is a big strike against banding. Here's a sign the mechanic is too complicated. You can't write out what it does in the confines of a magic text box. Because we do a lot of complicated things that do fit. So the fact that it can't fit is very telling. We have, by the way, we have messed around with mechanics that are in similar space. Solban probably being the most famous from Avacyn Restored. We like the idea of creatures cooperating together. That's something we like.

And we've looked for ways to sort of help do that. But even, it's funny, even Soulbond, which was sort of like a pseudo-replacement for banding, itself was kind of complicated and maybe too complicated. It caused a lot of confusion when it was out. The judges always tell us at previews and things what people do and don too complicated. It caused a lot of confusion when it was out. The judges always tell us at previews and things what people do and don't get. And Soulbond was like light years ahead of what most,

like what the average player can understand and understand. Soulbond was beyond that. And it caused a lot of judge concerns. Okay, next. Okay, next is land walk. So land walk is, um, uh, actually multiple mechanics, uh, forest walk. I mean, take any basic land type. Um, so in alpha, alpha had, I think everything but planes walk. It had swamp walk. It had Island walk. It had Swampwalk, it had Islandwalk, it had Mountainwalk, and it had Forestwalk. Plainswalk was the one that we did the least.

The joke being, it's very hard to sort of sneak through a Plains. But most of the other abilities showed up at some rarity. We also did variants on Landwalk. There was Desertwalk and Arabian Nights. Occasionally we would do blank walks of special lands that make sense. So the problem with land walk is the gameplay.

This was actually killed by play design, ultimately. Because the issue is if I have mountain walk and you are playing red, you just can't stop this creature. Like, there's nothing you can do to it. I mean, you can destroy it with spells, but it's just an

unblockable creature to you. Where, if I play somebody that isn't playing red, it's a little too... It was the variance between people playing the right color and not playing the right color, and there wasn't even anything they really can do about it, barring

killing the creature. The reason that you... Now, if you look at a lot of our invasion mechanics, we like things where there's some means by which you can interact with it. Not that it's like... I mean, we make the occasional unblockable creature. They tend to be small. We don't do it a lot.

That usually the invasion we build in, it's sort of like, okay, there's some answer to it. Maybe you have to block some more creatures, you know, there's some answer to it, and it's not just, oh, are you half-implaying this color? Well, nothing you can do. And so, it was especially problematic,

Forest Walk proved to be one of the biggest problems, is green has the least amount of creature kill, although it does have fight cards. And a lot of times, Forest Walk, it's like, if they're playing a forest, it's not easy for them to kill creatures. A lot of green's defense is blocking. And so making a, oh, you're playing green? Well, I guess you can't block this was definitely problematic. So anyway, that is why land walk went away. And like I said, we removed all versions of it.

Like, land walk and protection are these two mechanics went away. And like I said, we removed all versions of it. Landwalk and protection are these two mechanics that we've made that kind of, they're one word, but there's a lot of branches off on how you can do it. And so Landwalk was one of those. But anyway, Landwalk retitled. Okay, also from Alpha, regeneration.

Oh, but Landwalk if I didn't explain. Landwalk was if you have the appropriate land type, you can't block me. That was Landwalk. Okay. Regeneration. So Regeneration was an ability. It usually required mana and it said

well, it's changed a little bit. In Alpha, when the creature died, you would pay the mana to bring it back to Originally it Alpha, when the creature died, you would pay the mana to bring it back to like, originally it was, if this creature goes to the graveyard, you can pay this mana cost, and then returns to the play tapped. And then over time,

with 6th edition rules, it went from being sort of reactive to proactive. You kind of had to buff your person before the damage that would get them would happen. And so the idea is, oh, I regenerate my creature, and now, the next time it would die, instead it stays in play, tapped, removed from combat.

Regeneration definitely had a lot of moving pieces going on, like the idea that it got removed from combat, the idea that it came back, it was tapped. There was a lot of little things about it. Also, when we changed regeneration from the original version to sort of the post-6th edition version, it kind of didn't match its name anymore. Like, one of the things about regeneration is like, oh, I'm harmed, and then I regenerate. Kind of the way the mechanic was working was more buffing.

Like, oh, I'm going to put a buffing spell on you, so if some harm comes to you, this spell will protect you. And so regeneration didn't quite fit. Like, how it actually worked in the rules didn't quite... I mean, originally it did, but the redone version didn't quite match the flavor. It also was an activated ability. Most of our evergreen keywords aren't activated.

And it was a lot going on. So what we ended up doing with regeneration is we realized that one of the things that's similar, not identical, and there's some differences, but similar, was an activated indestructible to end of turn. In a lot of places functions similarly to the way that regeneration works. So now we don't do

regeneration anymore, but we did move indestructible, normally green and white did indestructible, we now allow block to do indestructible in the places where it would have regeneration. So that's how we replace regeneration. Okay. Next. Land home. Okay, so land home was seen on Sea Serpent. It was in Alpha.

The way land home works is, and Island Home was the most common form of this, is Sea Serpent and Island Home. What Island Home is, is you cannot attack unless the opponent has an island, and you have to sacrifice your creature unless you have an island. So it originally was designed as a means to explain water-based creatures. So the idea is, oh, well, I have a sea serpent. Well, my sea serpent can only live in the water. So if I don't have islands, meaning I don't have water, it can't be there.

And if you don't have islands, meaning there's water on your side, it can't attack you. It was one of those things that was super flavorful, but it didn't play particularly well. It had a one of those things that was super flavorful, but it didn't play particularly well. It had a lot of the issues that Land Walk did, where the variance between having something and not having something was a really big deal. And it was wordy.

Having something that kills itself under certain conditions was not ideal. So it just sort of got killed for a lot of different reasons. I mean, some play design, some sort of just templating, some just sort of ugliness. Also, we didn't tend to make a lot of them. It was most often used with islands just because the flavor of the water made the most sense. We did make a forest home creature.

Might have made a mountain home. I know we designed one. I don't know if we actually ever printed it. But anyway, land home got removed just because it, A, we didn't use it enough to be an evergreen keyword. And B, it just kind of,

it was clunky and it kind of did some stuff we didn't do anymore. We don't really do a lot of destroy, you know, sacrifice this if condition isn't true. We just don't do that much anymore on creatures. So, anyway, it just kind of played out as something

that didn't quite do what it needed to do. And so, Land Home went away. Also from Alpha, Anti. So, Anti isn't technically a keyword. Although, I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's a keyword. I'm not sure how to technically count Anti. So, a keyword. Although, I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's a keyword. I'm not sure how to technically count anti. So when Magic first started, the way the game worked was

when you started your game, you would draw seven cards, and then your eighth card would be basically exile. Some people played face-up, some face-down. I think it was supposed to be face-down, officially in the rules, but some people played face-up. And then the winner of the game got the loser's ante card. So the reason ante existed was when Richard was first making the game, he assumed that people were going to purchase it like a normal board game or something.

And so if you only spent $20, $30 on it, you would sort of work through your cards quickly, and you might sort of get bored of your deck after a while. So the idea of ante was, oh, well, it'll create some flux within the system so that people's decks are constantly changing. Now, it turns out Magic sold way better than Richard sort of anticipated. The people were spending more than $20, so there wasn't a, you know, people weren't having plenty of influx and change in their decks. And so the need for ante wasn't there for that regard, and it just was not, not, not, not liked by the audience. I mean, it might be the mechanic most

hated. Like, in early, early days, back when, you know, alpha, beta days, like, if you would sit down and play somebody, the first thing you would say to them is, no ante? Like that's how you would start games. No ante? No, I mean, I won't say nobody. Most people didn't play for ante. I did have one friend who ran, he had a game store

and we used to go to his game store to play and one night, like once a month, he'd have ante night and we would play. And I had my special ante deckdeck that I would play. It was a mono-black deck. The black had the best anti-card. Anyway, anti, gone. Okay, next.

Fear and intimidate. So fear wasn't keyworded in Alpha, but there was a card called Fear that essentially had fear in alpha. So it was an ability that showed up in alpha. So what fear means is I cannot be blocked except by black creature, artifact creatures and black creatures. The idea being I'm so scary that only a fellow black creature who's not that, not that intimidated or an artifact creature that has no emotions can block me because I'm generating a sense of fear.

So that was in the game just on things and it's the kind of thing we for a while just put on cards and eventually we did it enough we decided to keyword it and so we keyword it fear. The reason we called it fear is because the card that, that's what vernacularly everyone called it, because that's

the first card that had the ability. It turns out to be a weird name since the idea is you're not, the creature that has fear is itself not afraid, it is inspiring fear in others. So the name is a little wonky and we decided we wanted to branch it out a little bit to make it a little bit more flexible. So fear became intimidate. So intimidate was the same thing,

except it was now, I can only be blocked by artifact creatures or creatures that share my color. So, um, artifact creatures and creatures that share my color. So it was kind of like fear, but open-ended to, oh, well, if it's on a black creature, it's essentially fear.

But if it's on a red creature, it can't be blocked by artifacts or red creatures. If it's on a black red creature, it can't be blocked by artifacts or black creatures or red creatures. And so, now Intimidate went away for similar reasons to why Landwalk went away. It was a little too harsh in that, let's say I have a creature with Intimidate that was red. Okay, well if my opponent isn't playing Artifact creatures or red creatures, it's just an unblockable creature they can't deal with. And so, once again, the variance was a little bit high.

So we ended up turning this into Menace, or it got replaced by Menace. And the reason is, Menace does a lot got replaced by Menace, and the reason is Menace does a lot of what we like. It has the flavor of I'm scary, but what it means is, it doesn't mean you can't block me, it just means, oh, I need to block you with two things, so any deck has the ability to make that happen.

Like, Menace is nice in that it helps with evasion, helps get through, but it's not as if the opponent is just, you know, it's not as if, opponent is just, you know, it's not as if, oh, all the decisions about whether or not I can do it have already been made. Oh, you're playing, you know, black intimidate card,

and I'm not playing artifact creatures that are black? Nothing I can do about it. I mean, I can try to kill the creature, but there's no way to block it. Where if someone's like, menace, it's like, okay, well maybe I tackle this creature, that holds things back, or play creatures with my hand. Like, there's like, okay, well maybe I tackle this creature. That holds things back or play creatures with my hand. Like there's things I can do to, I can interact with the fact that Menace exists. I can do stuff.

That's why we like Menace in that it's a little bit more interactive with all the various cards that can do that. Okay, next. Barry. So Barry was a keyword we had for a little while that said, so in early magic there's a card called Tear. What Tear said was destroy target non-artifact, non-black creature. Black had this thing early on about having trouble affecting black and I guess in general you were scaring things and you couldn't scare artifact or black creatures.

But anyway, destroy target non-artifact, non-Black Rager, it can't be regenerated. And that it can't be regenerated was a rider that we put on a bunch of cards early on. I'm not sure why we were hosing Regeneration. It's kind of funny, because Regeneration wasn't causing a problem. It wasn't as if, oh wow, Regeneration's so strong, we need some answers to it. But for some reason we made enough cards that said you can't regenerate, I think a lot of the reason was

flavor, like oh I'm burning you to a crisp, what's there to regenerate I'm just integrating you, what's there to regenerate but it was one of those things two things, one we realized we didn't need to hose regeneration.

Regeneration just wasn't even getting played that much. The last thing we needed was all the good kill spells. The whole point of regeneration is to deal with destruction effects. Well, why are we putting can't be regenerated on or destruction effects? The whole point of maybe doing every once in a blue moon, but as a thing often enough to have a keyword was a mistake. So we stopped putting that rider on them. And we stopped making regeneration.

Now the funny thing is even to today, I still get people asking me to bring back Barry. Like we don't even support regeneration anymore. So I don't know if people just like the word. But anyway, it was a word we supported for a while. And then I think we killed, I think 6th edition we killed it. We haven't used Barry in a long time. But interestingly, old timers every once in a while will bring up, like, oh, you bring Barry back? And I'm like, why would we bring Barry back?

We don't even do the thing that Barry was. Okay, next. Let's talk about phasing. Phasing first showed up in Mirage. Actually, I'm not sure whether or not phasing is supposed to be on this list or not. We did do a phasing card in a supplemental set, so I don't know. Maybe phasing is not supposed to be on this set. The one thing I will point out is a lot of the stuff we liked about phasing card in a supplemental sense. I don't know, maybe phasing's not supposed to be on the set. The one thing I will point out is

a lot of the stuff we liked about phasing when we made flickering. So I made the card Flicker in Earth's Destiny and a lot of what the flickering mechanic was made to be was the part of phasing that I found the most interesting

which was the self-phasing as a means of protection. So flickering was designed as sort of a more common way. I mean, the part of phasing in which the creature's only there half the time, not particularly all that interesting. The idea of phasing as a means to sort of protect things was interesting.

And then when I made Phasing... Not Phasing, sorry. I didn't make Phasing. That was made by the Mirage team. Flickering, which I did make. Flickering was trying to plan the space where we thought it was interesting. And Flickering fixed one thing.

The way Phasing works is Phasing does not trigger enter the battlefield effects. So when a creature gets phased out and phases back in, it doesn't trigger. But a lot of the fun was the fact it could trigger. So, for example, flickering does it. I mean, the thing that was weird about phasing was the creature goes away and it comes back. Well, we have rules

about creatures that are brand new creatures, and phasing didn't follow those rules. So what we did with flicker is we changed it so, look, the creature has gone away. Now act as if the creature's come for the first time and follow all those rules. And it just was a little bit more intuitive. So, I have phasing on this list like I said. Maybe from a nostalgia purpose we'll make the random phasing card in a

stealth metal set, but phasing in any practical way has mostly been replaced by flickering. And by flickering I mean exile target creature and then either return it immediately or return it at end of turn. There's instant flicker, which is right away, and normal flicker, which is end of turn.

Okay, next. Shroud. So, Shroud was an ability that said, I cannot be the target of anything, of any spells or abilities. We introduced a bunch of mechanics in Future Sight on future shifter cards,

and that was one of the mechanics we introduced there. And the idea of Shroud was, in some early sets, Lurker, I think, was in the dark, and there was a card in Legends that had pseudo, sort of, pseudo Shroud. But anyway, we had made cards over and over and just said, hey, you can't target me. And so we decided to make that into a mechanic and called Shroud.

The problem we had with Shroud was that players were playing it incorrect. The assumption was, oh, things can't, you know, I can't be targeted by spells. Well, okay, my opponent can't harm me. I mean, of course I can play spells on myself, because why would I have a creature

that didn't let me put, you know, if I want to giant growth my creature or put enchantment on it, why wouldn't I be able to do that? It's my creature. And so people were playing it wrong. So eventually what we did is we said, okay, instead of trying to make people play it the way it's supposed to be played, let's just make it what people are playing, because we

can't seem to sway people. And so Shroud became hexproof. So what hexproof means is I can't be the target of spells or abilities. I'm sorry, by the opponent. By other players. I can target it. I can put an ore on it. I can giant growth it. You spells or abilities. I'm sorry, by the opponent, by other players. I can target it. I can put an ore on it.

I can giant growth it. You know, it's my creature. I can do whatever I want, but it has resistance to magic from other things. Now, interestingly, I do think Shroud, Shroud's the kind of thing that if the players played it right, like I had a choice if I could control whether we did Shroud or Hexproof. From a design standpoint,

there's some reasons to want Shroud. Shroud is more of a negative than Hexproof. But there are times where it's just nice to make it so you can't target either. Like, for example, Invisible Stalker from Innistrad was a creature that can't be

blocked or targeted. But I think it was Hexproof and not Shroud. And that's the kind of card where nobody being able to target is better than just me being able to target it. Because Unblockable with big creatures is... Oh, I'm sorry. It's Unblockable... Unblockable He right, unblockable, yeah, unblockable hexproof, sorry, hexproof and any kind of evasion is really, really hard to deal with, and so, um, the idea that I can have a hexproof creature and you can buff it up makes it so sometimes it's problematic

because you can't block with creatures, but you can't get it with spells, and so Shroud does some nice stuff in that it says, oh, well, if I have Shroud, I'm hard to kill, but it also makes me hard to buff it up. And so there's some nicest for Shroud. The problem is, this is my number one lesson in my podcast for the 20 years, 20 lessons. You can't change your miniature. Like, if people intuitively believe something,

you're really fighting a lot to try to fight it through that intuition. And, man, people did not want to play Shroud to Shroud. They wanted to play it as hexproof. So while there are some reasons why I like Shroud, I do understand why it needs to be hexproof. So that is why Shroud became hexproof. Okay, next. Fading. Or no, next is Substance. Substance is a funny story. Okay, so there's these five cards, a cycle, in Mirage.

So Mirage also had Fading. And they were auras that if you cast them, you could cast them at instant speed, basically. They could gain Flash, essentially, although this is prior to us naming flash. You could cast them with flash, or cast them essentially as instant, but if

you did, then they went away at any turn. You sacrificed them at any turn. So the idea was if you cast them on your turn, sort of at sorcery speed, when I say instant sorcery speed, that's not technically, that's more vernacular than a real thing. There's only one speed in magic. But I mean, if you cast them like a sorcery, at the time you could cast a sorcery speed, that's not technically, that's more vernacular than a real thing. There's only one speed of magic. But I mean, if you cast them like a sorcery, at the time you could cast a sorcery, they were ores, they stuck around. If you cast them essentially with flash, meaning when you could cast an instant,

you would get the surprise and get the value for that turn, but then they would fall off. And there was a period of time back when Mark Gottlieb was rules manager that we had changed some stuff and at the time the rules weren't working for those five cards. Just the way we had changed some rules stuff and they weren't I'm not sure what the rules issues was. To solve this problem Mark came up with a creative solution which he gave them an ability called substance and substance didn't do anything

it just was a sort of band-aid that made them work in the rules and it was kind of a running joke for a while because literally substance was just like a quality you had that let the rules like with it as a quality the rules could define substance and

just make it so it worked but But it didn't really grant anything to the cards. It just sort of said, if you have Substance, the card works the way you would assume it works. And then later, I think Mark figured out a way to do it without Substance, and so Substance went away. So Substance was a mechanic, kind of a jokey mechanic in the sense that it literally did nothing. The Seinfeld of magic mechanics. It was a mechanic about nothing. It didn't do anything other than sort of be and the rules could care about it being that to fix something. But anyway,

substance has since gone away. So the mechanic that didn't do anything now doesn't do anything officially. Okay, next. Fading. So fading, where did fading first show up? Fading first showed up... Um... Where did fading first show up? Fading first showed up in Urza's Legacy...

Where did fading first show up? Oh, no, no, no. Nemesis. Nemesis, I believe. So, fading was a mechanic that the creature came out, and it came out with a certain number of fade counters, and then you would remove them every turn, and when you couldn't remove one, it went away.

So, for example, you'd have a creature that would have three fade counters, and then you played it, and then the first upkeep, you'd take it off, you could attack. Second upkeep, you take the second one off, you can attack. Third one, you take the third one off, still can attack. Fourth turn, you go to take a counter off it, the counter wasn't there, and it went away. The problem with this mechanic was

fighting intuition. So like, oh, it's got three counters on it, and when the counters are gone, it goes away. But it wasn't when the last counter was removed it went away. It was when it couldn't have a counter removed. I think we did this because we were trying to match the way you get decked. Because the way decking works is, I don't lose by drawing the last card. I lose by being unable to draw a card.

I think that's what we were mimicking. The problem is, oh, that did not care. People did not understand that. Like, people, you know, um, and, I mean, essentially what would happen is people would play the card, and then they, they would sacrifice it. And then the cards

were weak, because the cards were designed to be around for three turns, and Ewing was going to be around for two turns. And so people were like, I like this mechanic, it's sucky. And then, like, it turned out it was actually a decent mechanic, I mean, strength-wise. It could be a powerful mechanic. So essentially what happened was, in

Time Spiral Block, in fact, in the second set, in Planar Chaos, because it was all about the present, I like the idea of, here's a mechanic that's about the now, right? It's not going to be here that much longer. Use it while you got it. But fading

had that issue, so instead of making fading, we just made vanishing. And all vanishing was was just to fix fading. That's all it was. It was just like, okay, we'll put one extra counter on it, and then just, when you remove the last counter, it goes away. So the creatures before that would have three counters on it, thus staying around

for three turns, now there's four counters on it, still staying around for three turns, just when you remove that fourth counter, it goes away. And so vanishing was just a fixed fading, and it's exactly fading minus when exactly the counter comes out. So that's the kind of thing where, like, it's funny when you go back and look at old mechanics that we have issues with, like another classic example is flanking, which was from Mirage. So flanking was a mechanic that said,

if I am blocked by a non-flanking creature, it gets minus one, minus one. And the reason we said non-flanking creature with the flavor of the mechanic was you were on horseback. And so if I, on horseback, fight someone not on horseback, I have this tactical advantage because I'm on horseback. But if I fight someone who's on horseback, well then, you know, I don't have my tactical advantage. We're at the same height. And while that flavor was cool, like, for starters, almost nobody understood that the flavor of flinking was horseback. Um, it's one of those things that when I bring up an article, people always go, oh yeah, I didn't know that. Um, and so the flavor, I mean, it was done mostly for a flavor purpose that people didn't even get the

flavor. I mean, even though every flinking creature, uh, minus one that was a centaur, haha, um, was shown on a horse. But, you know, at least horsemanship, we had the word horse in the ability, so you're like, oh, it has to do with horses. Anyway, flanking is one of those mechanics, I didn't put it on this list today, but I will say, we are more

likely to bring flanking back in a renamed version than have that version that has the cares about flankers. No one remembered that. The flavor didn't carry through. And it was this little tiny thing that just messed people up in a way that

it didn't really make the mechanic, like it wasn't that it was done to make the mechanic play better. It was done for flavor reasons and the audience didn't even catch the flavor reason. So it was kind of confusing people and causing problems

and the whole reason for doing it was that, ooh, this is cool and flavorful, most people didn't even pick up. So, anyway, a little side on flicking. Anyway, so fading became vanishing. I'm not sure whether we'll even do vanishing again, just because it's a downside mechanic,

and players are not super excited by downside mechanics. The idea is I'm getting something much more powerful for cheaper costs than I normally will because I only get it for so many turns. In my heart of hearts as a designer, there's reasons why we might want to use vanishing, and there's places maybe it'll make a lot of sense. So if vanishing is not, we'll never do it.

But there is a barrier because players in general don't like mechanics, you know, mechanics they perceive as being negative mechanics. And this is a mechanic that reads as, hey, you know how normally you get your creature for as long as you, you know, until it dies? Yeah, this one's just going to die early. It's not, as far as sexing goes,

one of the sexier things. Okay, next. Chroma. So, Chroma was a mechanic first seen in Future Sight on one card. And what Chroma was, it was a mechanic that said, I'm going to tell you where to look. Count mana symbols. I'm going to tell you where to look and what mana symbols to look for.

And then that will be a number and there will be an effect based on that number. Now Chroma was really widespread. You know, look on the battlefield, look in your graveyard, look in your hand. It really went anywhere and everywhere. And we ended up, so it was in Feature Site as a one-off. It ended up showing up in Eventide. And it just didn't really go over well in Eventide. A,

we were a little bit cautious with the cards we made, so they weren't particularly powerful. But B, it just wasn't quite evocative. Chroma's a pretty generic name. Chroma just means color in Latin, I believe. So, it had kind of a non-flavorful name. It had enough different

uses that it was hard to sort of remember exactly how it got used. And it just, and it wasn't on particularly powerful effects. It just, it kind of just was like, eh. Like the response I got back from people, people didn't dislike it. They just, it was just like, eh, it's okay. And in my heart of hearts, I knew that it was a cool mechanic so when we were making

Theros many years later we were trying to solve the problem it was an enchantment the enchantment matters part of it didn't come from Journey but it was a set that had a lot of enchantments especially auras and that meant there were a lot of extra things sitting on the battlefield you had more permits than normal and we were trying to find a way to capitalize that and one

of the design members a guy named zach zach hill um suggested chroma and i'm like i like that i like the space it's playing in but we need to fix it i think we did chroma wrong um and what i said is i want to have a very flavorful name and I want to reign in what you're looking for so it's just cleaner what you're doing we went back and looked at Chroma Cards I think all but two of them or three of them looked on the battlefield let's stop looking at other zones

there's not that much design space let's just look on the battlefield and then we changed it to the idea of devotion like okay we're on a Greek mythology world, Theros, and the gods are there, and we really like this idea of showing this allegiance to the gods. And then we realized that we could take the gods

and use this mechanic, like, unless enough people believe in the god, they sort of stay this amorphous enchantment, but enough people believe they come down to the earth as a this amorphous enchantment, but enough people believe they come down to the earth as a creature, right? And we thought that was super cool. And so we did devotion, and it went over like gangbusters.

I mean, it's kind of funny. Like, one of the things I find very interesting when we do stuff like this is we did a mechanic as Chroma. I mean, once again, not hated, but I mean it was a very blah response. We change it up a little bit we fine tune it, we condense what it does, we give it a more flavorful name, we stick it in a world that's more organic to what's going on, and all of a sudden this mechanic, everyone's like, eh

people love. Like Devotion was a very, very popular mechanic. And that, the thing it teaches me is how important execution is, that you could have a mechanic, like, executed right, a mechanic could be loved,

or it could be sort of ignored. And there's a lot of details that go into doing something right. So that, anyway, that story is a very interesting lesson in that. But, anyway, because we have devotion, there's no reason to have chroma. Chroma is just a weaker version of devotion. So if we're ever bringing back the mechanic, it'll be coming back as devotion. It will come back as chroma.

And, yes, that means we will not do, like, come think you're a graveyard or something. But I think that that cost is acceptable that's another thing about by the way when you're designing mechanics is there's this worry

sometimes I know with more novice designers of giving up something that I want to make my mechanics so it maximizes

every possible thing I could do and that I I get the desire to want to make your thing as flexible as possible, but flexibility is not the primary goal you're looking for. It's important, something that you do care about, but there are a lot of other things that have to matter. One of the big things is that your mechanic is organic and flavorful

and conveys what it's doing and is evocative enough that, you know, like part of making a mechanic is making sure that people can play it correctly and can enjoy it. And making decisions that allows the most design orientation, you know, design competence. That's just not the primary goal. And I know a lot of people when they're designing, that's really important. Like I've got to maximize every moment and I have to put a number on it rather than lock it into a number

because I just want to keep open the possibilities. And the reality is most mechanics, there's a thin version of the mechanic that's the fun part. And the goal is not to do everything. The goal is to find the fun part of the mechanic and concentrate on the fun part. So if you have a design space of like 10% of it's fun, I'd rather define it so that 10% of it's fun is the majority of what you're doing.

Not like, oh, I can make a lot of cards that are the not fun part. No. Design it so that you're concentrating on making what's the fun part of the mechanic. Okay, next, flip cards. So in Champions of Kamigawa, we came up with this idea for creatures that could do something and then evolve into a second creature. Now, we had messed in that space before, threshold, you know, a lot of threshold mechanics, like threshold, where if you meet a certain state, then the creature gains some bonus. We had made stuff like that before.

But the attempt with flip cards was to do something a little bolder, you know, represent the two states. It's not just, because the thing about something like threshold was, probably I show you the upgraded state, but I'm just showing you one state. And what we liked the idea is, could something change, and we show you both states. So, the way flip cards worked is, you would have one side,

and this is the side that had the mana cost on it. And then, if you flipped it 180 degrees, there was another card that you could see went upside down. And so, and the art was done, so one of the arts was facing one way and one the other. So essentially, you had a frame

that let us... You could play the card as one of two different states, depending on which way it was up. The idea was really cool. The problem with... Well, one of the problems with flip cards. A was when you tapped the card,

say you attacked the creature, now there was no real way to tell which side, like it was face up. Sorry, it was untapped. You knew what it was. What's the top side? But if I attacked, like, oh, well, did he tap clockwise? Did he tap counterclockwise? Like, all of a sudden,

like, it's now, you just can't tell what it is. And in creature combat, that's pretty important. Um, and so, the other thing was the frame was kind of ugly. It's just hard to get two different cards on one card. I mean, split cards kind of look cool, just cause

it looks like two little mini cards. Um, we didn't, it didn't quite work that way. You also can't have split cards on the battlefield. So, it just ran into the problem of being a bit awkward to use.

And awkward, and it didn't look great. I mean, this is another big thing. I mean, one of the other lessons as we're getting to the batch mechanics that changed because we had a better way to do them is a lot of times you try something, in a kernel of what you try, there's an interesting idea there, but some of the execution choices aren't quite right. So flash forward to Innistrad, and we were trying to solve the werewolf problem,

and we were inspired by dual masters to make double-faced cards that had two different faces on them. And what we found was it had its own challenge. We had to come up with checklist cards, and how do you deal with it if you don't have opaque sleeves and stuff. But what we found was

that having two sides in which each side got to be its own thing, rather than trying to have two sides in which each side got to be its own thing rather than trying to have two states in one card just made a cleaner experience. It allowed us to more text per card, which allowed more design space.

It allowed us to have more art that helped. Like, the way it worked on flip cards was it mostly just showed the creature. There wasn't much space for anything else.

But now that you had a full art box where you could tell a story. You could see the human and then the werewolf, but there was some story. It wasn't just a human and a werewolf. It was a human that had some role and the werewolf, and you could sort of see the relationship between the role of the human and the role of them in werewolf form. And a lot of the other devil face cards really gave us this means to tell the story. It's this cute little girl that gets demonically possessed. It's a wizard that messes with things he's not and becomes the fly.

You know, there's a doctor, you know, that is messing around and becomes a darker version of himself, stuff like that. And having the two sides really allowed us to convey things in a way that was just cleaner. And the funny thing is what we found out is the logistics of dealing with a double-faced card ended up being not nearly as problematic as two faces on the front of one card for a permanent in play. And so it was kind of cool in that we had the opportunity to do something.

It's just a way to sort of take a lot of what, like I think we took the cool thing of flip cards and we found a way to invest in them, something that just made people focus on the things we wanted them to focus on. It wasn't, like a lot of times distractions get in your way of enjoying the cool part. I mean, one of my themes today is as a designer, you want to figure out what makes mechanics you're doing the coolest they can be. And a lot of the things that makes us retire mechanics is when you are getting in your own way, that you've made a little tiny flavorful thing that mechanically doesn't

work or it's non-intuitive or, you know, you've made a choice in flavorful thing that mechanically doesn't work or is non-intuitive or you've made a choice in how you've worded it or named it or something about it is keeping people from getting the flavor. I look back at something like flanking and it's a really interesting thing. Why didn't people get the horseback thing? Why wasn't that something they understood? a really interesting thing of why didn't people get the horseback thing? Why wasn't that something they

understood? And that definitely is something that I always want to keep in mind when making a new mechanic. Anyway, that is all the retired mechanics. Now, this

list was a little bit subjective. I could have forgotten something. And there's probably some mechanics there are some mechanics that I don't think we'll ever do again. You know, bands with others. Although, once again, bands with others means a subset of banding. But, for example, I recently did a top ten of mechanics I don't like.

Sorry. What I thought were the worst mechanics, obviously. I don't like them because they're bad mechanics. Some of those mechanics, I don't know. I mean, probably if I listed them bad mechanics. Some of those mechanics, I don't know. I mean, probably if I listed them as the worst mechanics of all time, the chance of them coming back is low, although not impossible. And some of those might be like Chroma or like Phasing

or something in which we are flip cards. We're like, okay, there's something here we like. Like a good example is Haunt. Haunt, the flavor is amazing. The execution is not. I can imagine this one day saying, okay, let's take this flavor and let's do what Haunt was trying to do

originally and just do it better. I mean, that would be very cool. It's something that, jot down something we should do. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. One of the things that is really interesting to me about

Magic, I mean, Magic's in its 26th year now. It's constantly iterating. It is neat to watch how our mechanics have changed. Interestingly, even the mechanics that we haven't changed the name, we're constantly, like, whenever we bring back a mechanic,

we often will tweak it. You know, we brought back Morph, we brought back Convoke, we're just bringing back Proliferate. In each of those cases, we made little tiny changes that just made it a better mechanic. Now, if the changes are small enough, we don't need to change the name. Like Proliferate, as an example. So Proliferate just came back in War of the Spark.

Proliferate originally the way it worked was for every player and or permanent, if you choose it you then picked one counter type on it and gave it an extra one. But if they had multiple counter types, you had to choose which one you wanted.

Now, the new version of it says, look, they get every counter. So, if they have, you know, an energy counter and an experience counter, they get an extra energy counter and an extra experience counter. You know, now, as with any mechanic that we tweak, there's the

occasional problem where my opponent, for example, has a positive and a negative counter, or I have a positive and a negative counter, and I have to decide what I want to do. A, I don't think that's necessarily bad gameplay. I have a positive and a negative counter, and I have to decide what I want to do, A, I don't think that's necessarily bad gameplay. I think having decisions every once in a while where I have to decide what to prioritize I think can be pretty cool.

But overall, more of the time, we make more positive things than negative things. So you're more likely to get in a scenario where you have two positive counters than one in which you have a positive and negative. And on creatures, plus one, plus one, minus one, minus one counter. So the two most common counters we do negate each other. So on creatures

it's even less likely that will happen. But anyway, it's a good example how we do try to update things from time to time. Sometimes we'll, if we need to, if the mechanic can't be salvaged, we will come up with a new version of it. You know, if fading becomes vanishing and stuff. But a lot of the time, we'll

try to fix up the mechanic in a way that we can keep the name and just tweak it slightly. Like I said, that's something we do a lot. Anyway, I hope today was a good insight into sort of, in a lot of ways, Retired Mechanics is a story of lessons we've

learned in how to make mechanics. Every time we remove something, you'll notice, by the way, the things get removed for a few main reasons. A is confusion. People aren't playing it right. B is non-intuitive, which is people aren't playing it right. Confusion is they're not playing it right because they don't understand it. Non-intuitive is they're not playing it right because it doesn't do what they think it will do. not playing right because they don't understand it.

Non-intuitive is they're not playing right because it doesn't do what they think it will do. And then play design, sort of

gameplay reasons where it just doesn't play quite as well as we want it. Those are the three main reasons that we will

retire mechanics. And that covers, I think, just about everything I talked about today. Let's see real quickly. Banding was

confusion. Fear Intimidate was gameplay. Landwalk was gameplay. Shroud was intuition. Regeneration was gameplay. Landwalk was gameplay. Shroud was intuition. Regeneration was gameplay. A little bit

of complexity. Fading was intuition. Chroma was... Oh, well. Chroma was it just wasn't sexy enough. I guess that's the fourth category of we didn't present it in a way that was as flavorful as it could be. Phasing was complexity. Flip cards was presentation.

Berry was we didn't use it enough. Land Home was we didn Flip cards was presentation. Berry was we didn't use it enough. Land Home was we didn't use it enough. Substance, no reason for that to be. And Anti was, I guess players didn't like it. So that's another one. Players might just really not like it. Which kind of ties into, also, being non-intuitive means it just doesn't do what they think it does.

There's something tied into that. Anyway, my friends, that is Retired Mechanic. So I hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means is that's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

See you guys next time.