Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #668: Zones

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Magic has six major zones plus a few others used in various formats. I talk all about them including examining the design space of zone changing.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. I'm gonna have to drop my son off at camp. Okay, so today is all about zones. So Magic has many different zones, and I'm gonna talk all about the different zones today, and sort of, um, just a different way to think of the game. Um, so there are six major zones in the game of Magic, and then there's a couple extra ones that are relevant in other places. Okay, so what are the six zones of Magic?

So first off, there is your library, or your deck. It is where you draw from. So depending on the format, there's a certain number of cards that have to start in your library. 60 is normal, but Commander has 100. There's different formats that require different amounts. Your library is flavored as sort of your mind. Not your current thoughts. We'll get to that. That's the hand. But just like your repository of memories and your whole base of knowledge.

It's what you know, what you as a person know. The library got its name back in the beginning. This is one of the zones that has always had the same name. Some of the zones we'll get to have changed names. But the library has always been known as the library. When Richard made the game, he wanted to give the zones flavorful names, and so instead of calling it the deck, which is what a lot of, you know, generically card games would call it, he called it the library.

Now, you'll notice, by the way, on the back of a card, the magic back actually represents a book. If you've ever seen the original starter deck, not only did you have the back of the book, but the sides were like pages and stuff. But anyway, the idea of it being your library, like I said, the back of the card is even a tome, so it all sort of fits into the library theme. Okay, the second zone is your hand. This is where you obviously draw your cards.

It's what you play out of. Your hand has always been your hand. This one isn't super flavorful. I mean, in the sense that all card games will refer to it as your hand. That's a very common terminology. Richard didn't give it any sort of flavorful turn we've never really given it a flavorful turn it's your hand your hand represents kind of your current thoughts sort of what you're consciously focusing on right now and the idea is the stuff that's in your hand is things

that you can access because it's what you're currently thinking about so when we do discard effects and stuff it talks about messing with your mind but if you mess deep enough like lobotomies and stuff, then that gets to your library. Hand's always been called the hand. It is one zone which has some restrictions. I mean, your library, the only restrictions on your library might be dependent upon your format. Some formats have a minimum size your library

has to be. Some formats might limit how many copies of cards you've got, depending on what tournaments and stuff you're playing in. Most formats limits either... the main thing is you have four of a copy of something or one of a copy of something. Those are the two most common restrictions that you'll run into. Hand, you get seven cards in your hand. There are cards that can shrink or I think even grow your hand size. But if you get above a certain amount, you have to discard cards from it. Okay, next, the battlefield. So the battlefield is the area of play. It's where the cards go, or permanents go when you cast them.

And it is where most of gameplay happens, is on the battlefield. The battlefields are, you play cards that stick around, and then there's a lot of action that happens on the battlefield. Now, the battlefield wasn't always called the battlefield. The battlefield, that term is actually new as of Magic 2010. Before that, it was just in play. And the reason we added the word battlefield was twofold. One was the word play meant a lot of different things. So you played cards, the things were in play, and just using the word play to mean a bunch of different things was causing confusion.

Second, just as Richard gave a name for the deck in the discard pile, we thought that we wanted sort of the area of play to have a more fanciful name. So we came up with a battlefield. So it's been called the Battlefield since the match of 2010. The Battlefield is probably the most dynamic zone. It has the most things happen in it. Like your library, you know, is,

you're getting cards from it, and your hand, you play things out of it. But the Battlefield, you know, is you're getting cards from it. In your hand, you play things out of it. But the battlefield, you're attacking and blocking and activating cards. You know, there's a lot more going on. It's a very dynamic zone, the battlefield. Next, the graveyard. So the graveyard is where your creatures go. Well, where your permanents go when they die or are destroyed.

And where your spells go when you cast them. The graveyard kind of represents two different things. One is it represents kind of a physical graveyard. Like dead creatures go there. But it also represents kind of the past. Like spells you once knew were there. So it definitely has this idea. If you look at mechanics like flashbacks,

there's definitely things that play to the idea of memory of what used to be so the graveyard is sort of metaphorical in that it's where dead things go but it also is where things that once were are and there's definitely a flavor of you want to look to the future, you look to your library

you want to look to the past, you look to the graveyard we played around that space graveyard was a term that Richard made when he made the game. So graveyard, library, hand, and graveyard go all the way back to the very beginning, as far as zones with names that started with those names. There's a lot, I mean, although the graveyard is where things go, there's a lot of cards that have been since the very beginning of the game that can get things back from the graveyard is where things go, there's a lot of cards, and there have been since the very beginning of the game,

that can get things back from the graveyard, which will cause the existence of another zone we'll get to. Next, the stack. So the stack is where spells go when you cast them before they've resolved. It's the place they have to sit so that things like counterspells can happen. So when you play a spell, it leaves your hand, it goes on the stack, happen. So, when you play a spell, it leaves your hand, it goes on the stack, and then depending on whether it's a permanent

or whether it's a spell, it either will go to the battlefield or the graveyard, but we'll get more into that. While the stack has always existed, I don't think it got its name until 6th Edition Rules. How exactly the stacked work changed pretty significantly in 6th Edition Rules.

For those who remember Early Magic, early Magic had both instants and interrupts. And instants could respond to instants, but interrupts could only respond to interrupts. And just the way that spells played out was a bit different. When 6th edition rules came along, they built in the last and first out system where I play a spell, you play a spell, but then the last spell resolves first so it allows you to do things like counter my spells or if I want a lightning bolt to your creature, you can giant growth it to save it from the lightning bolt.

And in six edition rules, I believe that's when they called it the stack for the first time. We do not mention the stack. We mention the library, we mention. Like, we mention the library, we mention the hand, we mention the battlefield, we mention the graveyard. We don't mention the stack a lot. I'm not saying we've never mentioned it. We have, but we don't tend to put the word too much. And the major reason is that most players get confused by the term,

even though they understand how to play their spells. A lot of people don't think of their spells as existing in a zone while it's resolving. I don't think of their spells as existing in a zone while it's resolving. I don't think people think that way. It's true, it's how the game has to work, but we've discovered explaining it too much tends to cause more confusion. Most people don't really think of it that way, and so when we sort of start explaining it, they're like, what is this new thing that I've never heard of before? When the answer really is, well, you played this,

you just don't know that it's its own zone. Some people argue that we should say it more, that if people don't understand it, we need to more use it, but we've learned in general, if players get things without the terminology, forcing the terminology down their throats does not tend to work out well. The final main zone of Magic is the Exile Zone.

So the Exile Zone goes back to Alpha, but it was originally called Remove from Game. The problem was, when you remove things from the game, there were effects that occasionally brought things back that were removed from the game. And it felt like, well, it was removed from the game. How is it coming back? It got removed from the game. And so that name for the zone was confusing. So in Magic 2010, when we changed in play to Battlefield, we changed remove from game

to exile. So now you exile things and they are in the exile zone. Now the exile zone has two functions. One is the send things away that you don't want to come back. And although I'll admit we've been, I don't like us bringing things back from exile that aren't purposely brought back. Which I'll get to the second part in a second. We do occasionally let things come back from exile. But mostly exile

is there as a means to put things that don't come back. That graveyard has a lot of reuse. We like exile being not the thing where you get things back. And from a play design standpoint sometimes you want cards that you only want to cast once and you don't want them to come back so they'll exile themselves or something

that's an important tool to have the other way exile is used is kind of a limbo where I have a card that has to send something somewhere while it's there it's not part of the game but it is possible that the thing that sent it there can bring it back. Oblivion Ring is a fancy example. We're like, while Oblivion Ring is out, this creature, it's gone. It's in exile. But if you get rid of the Oblivion Ring, it comes back. So sometimes the use of exile is not that it's forever gone, but it's temporarily gone. And rather

than having a limbo zone, we talked about that actually. We felt like the exile zone could double as that. And that the idea is if you go to exile, the thing that sent you there should be able to bring you back if need be, but that it shouldn't be something where, you know, it shouldn't be something where we're just easily getting you back from exile.

There are cards that get you things back from exile. We definitely dip into there, but we have to be careful because a lot of the point of exile is being able to have the safety valve of things that aren't coming back. Okay, there's two other zones other than the main six zones. So the next zone is the command zone. So the command zone is where we put things. Commander being the most famous format to use it.

But I think like Pl plane chase uses it. Maybe archenemy might use it. I'm not sure. But anyway, it's a zone where you can put things that aren't in play, that aren't in the hand, that aren't in the library, that aren't in graveyard. It's just another where to put things. The commanders in commander, this is where they go. And in the commander format, whenever a creature would be put into another zone

from the battlefield, you can instead put it into the command zone. The final zone is a silver border zone. It exists on one card, on a card called AWOL. It is the absolutely removed from the freaking game forever zone. So I got frustrated that we made a removed from game zone that we kept bringing things back from.

So I made a zone, and the whole point of this zone is it never comes back. I mean, next game, but for the remainder of this game, it's never coming back. It is what the exile zone really wants to be. It's truly gone. And it's on a card called A-Wall. So that card exists on one card

in Unhinged in Silver Border, but it is technically a zone. Okay, so now I want to talk about all the zone interactions because a lot of the fun of zones is their interactions. So we're going to go through. Okay, library to hand. That is known as

drawing a card or tutoring a card or impulsing for a card. So drawing cards, you take the card off the top of your library or some number of cards off the top of your library. Tutoring is when you go into your library and get whatever card you want and put it in your hand using shuffle afterwards. Impulse is you look at the top and

some number we give you and you can pick some number of them to put them in your hand. The rest usually go on the bottom of your library in either an order or a random order depending on how many there are. But anyway, this is an effect that happens all the time. Library to battlefield. From time to time, we let you go into your library

and put things directly onto the battlefield. The most common way we do this is for land, land fetching. Oh, the last thing, by the way, library to hand is something that all the colors have access to. Everybody can do cantrips. Everybody can impulse or tutor to a certain extent. Blue is the one that does it the most. Blue does the most card drawing, the most impulsing.

Black is the color that has the generic tutors, but everybody has access to that. So all the colors have Library to Hand. Library to Battlefield. Green is king of Library to Battlefield. Green is the one that most often gets lands and puts it on the battlefield. And green is the one that most often gets lands and puts it on the battlefield. And green is the one that most often gets creatures and puts it on the battlefield. Other colors have some ability to do it. We let white and blue get artifacts.

We let all the colors sort of get their own land type every once in a while, basic land type. We let a little bit of tutoring, not tutoring, a little bit of going to get a certain creature that matches, you know, go get a goblin, put it into play. We've done a little bit like that in red. So once again, this is something that green is primary, but other colors dabble a little bit. Library to graveyard. The most common way this happens

is milling, where you make someone take the top sum number of cards in the library and put it into the graveyard, or you do it yourself. Milling is in blue and black, also common in artifacts. That's not a color, though. The other ways you get library to graveyard um there are a few cards I think there's a few cards that can get themselves

in the graveyard, not a lot but anyway, milling is the main way to library to graveyard. Library to the stack um there are a few cards that let you cast cards off the top of your library um, usually the top top of your library. Usually the top card of your library is played face-up,

or you have the ability to look at it, and then you can play cards off the top of your library. And that is how you get from a library to the stack. Library to Exile. Every once in a while, in a set that cares either about the graveyard or cares about exile, we will have cards that, instead of milling you, will exile cards off the top of your library. So instead of putting your top two cards in the graveyard or cares about exile, we will have cards, instead of milling you, we'll exile cards off the top of your library. So instead of put your top two cards in the graveyard,

we'll put two top cards in exile. We don't do library exile all that often. Next, hand to library. We occasionally do things where you draw some number of cards and you put some back. Blue will do that. In the past, both black and green have done a little bit of making people put stuff from their hand on top of their library. Green doesn't do that anymore, and black doesn't infrequently.

There's not a lot of hand to library, but there's a little bit of... You're sort of giving up a draw for something, and the way we have you give up a draw is putting a card from your hand on top of your library. Hand to battlefield. This is something green tends to do. Creatures from hand to battlefield.

Blue sometimes has done effects which will do permanence. White will sometimes get enchantments or artifacts. So hand to battlefield is just a mean. Green, for example, also does land from hand to battlefield. It's just a means by which, instead of casting it, you're directly just putting it onto the battlefield. Hand to graveyard. This is most commonly discard.

Either you make someone discard so they're forced to, or you discard as a cost when you're choosing to discard. Either way, the card goes directly from your hand into the discard pile. Hand to stack. This is casting a spell. So whenever you cast a spell, it leaves your hand and it goes onto the stack. I will get to where it goes from there as we get to the stack portion of this. Hand to exile. This also happens in sets that care about

graveyard and or the exile zone, sometimes instead of normal discard we will make you exile cards but there's not a lot of hand exile next, battlefield to library this is blues domain mostly, what I would call super bounce where the next one is battlefield to Hand, that's bounce. That's when you unsummon a creature. When you take a permanent and put it back in its owner's hand.

And that is primarily in Blue. So both Battlefield to Hand and Battlefield Library are Blue. Blue can sometimes put things back in your hand, but sometimes if it's got a more powerful effect, you can put it all the way to the top of your library. Every once in a while, there are also creatures that when they die, instead of going to your graveyard, they get shuffled into your library, they go to the top of your library, or they go to the bottom of your library.

We've made all of those. And so there are permanent, usually, creatures that we usually put that on a creature because we don't want you reanimating it out of the graveyard. But anyway, Battlefield 2 Library also can happen that way. Battlefield to Hand, traditionally it's Bounce. There are some cards that when they die, instead of going to the graveyard, they return to your hand. We've done that on creatures and on auras, on enchantment creatures usually. Battlefield to graveyard.

This is destruction. This is when a creature dies or a non-creature gets destroyed. Well, I mean creatures get destroyed. But whenever something dies or is destroyed, traditionally, unless something else says not to, it goes from the battlefield to the graveyard. You also can sacrifice things from the battlefield to get them to the graveyard. But those are normally how you get that. Battlefield to the stack?

I don't know. This is the one I was thinking about. I don't know if there is a battlefield to the stack. We've talked about letting you recast cards you have in the battlefield. But normally we'll flicker them to do that rather than have you cast them, so I don't know if we've done a battlefield to the stack. I can't think of one. Battlefield to exile, that is a destruction effect. Well, sorry.

You're getting rid of a permanent, but you're trying to get rid of it more permanently. White is kind of king of exiling things. It goes all the way back to Swords of Plowshares and Alpha. Other colors can't exile. Any color is allowed to exile. Normally exile shows up more in sets that care about either the graveyard or exile. And so that's when things go from the battlefield to exile. Next, graveyard to library.

There are a few cards. There are some cards that go from graveyard and put it on top of library. There's some things that put it on the bottom of library. We've heard of both of those things as restocking. And there's some things that shuffle into, you can take things from your graveyard and shuffle them into your library.

Normally when you take things and shuffle them into your library I think green is the color that does that most often. When you take stuff and put it back on top of your library, black is most often the color that does that. Graveyard to the bottom of your library. Yeah, I'm not sure who does that. I mean, once again, black or green. I guess restocking to bottom is mostly been green. We don't do that effect very often.

Grave to Hand, that is primarily black, although green, well, black or green. Black has Raise Dead type effects. Green has Regrowth type effects. I guess all the colors can do a little bit. Blue can get Instant Sorceries and Artifacts. Red can get Instant Sorceries. Everyone's in blue moon artifacts white can get

planeswalkers and artifacts and enchantments I believe anyway they all have some every color has some access to the things they care about green is the color that can get anything graveyard to battlefield that's reanimation black is king of that Green's the color that can get anything. Graveyard to battlefield.

That's reanimation. Black is king of that. White will do it for small things. Green has some cards that reanimate themselves. And then when you get to other permanents, like I think we've let white reanimate enchantments and artifacts. We've let blue reanimate artifacts. So there have been a bunch of different ways to go graveyard to battlefield.

Graveyard to stack. That is things like flashback. That is cards that you can cast out of your graveyard. Flashback probably being the most famous example of that. But graveyard to stack means you're literally casting out of your graveyard. Usually if you do that, it then gets exiled. Graveyard to exile. That is what we call cremating. That is when you want to get rid of resources that your opponent has usually. My opponent has a flashback spell, something that

I don't want them to have access to. I can use spells to exile it. Sometimes exiling some from the graveyard can be used as a cost, where it's a cost to you to use it, and then you're exiling usually your own things as it means to pay a cost or something okay stack to library stack to library I'm going to do that

I cannot think of a lot of stack to library effects we might have had I think we've had a few of a lot of stack-to-library effects. We might have had, I think we've had a few, yeah, yeah, we have had a few spells that you cast them and then they shuffle into your library after they resolve. Rather than go to the graveyard, they shuffle into your library.

We've made a few of those. Not a lot. Stack-to-hand. There are a few effects. Either stuff like buyback, where if you pay a certain cost, the spell, instead of going to the graveyard, goes back to your hand. There are a few effects. Either stuff like buyback, where if you pay a certain cost, the spell, instead of going to the graveyard, goes back to your hand. Or there's a few counterspells that stop the spell, but instead of sending it to the graveyard or exile, instead send it back to your hand.

There's a few of those. Stack to battlefield. That is casting a permanent. When you cast a permanent, it goes to the stack, and then fundamentally, unless it gets countered, it goes from the stack to the battlefield. Stack to the graveyard. That is what happens to instants and sorceries. So after you cast instants and sorceries, it goes to the stack. When it resolves, then it goes to the graveyard. Stack to exile. There's a handful of spells

that we consider to be dangerous, like timewalk variants and things, where we will have the spell exile itself, so it's not sitting in the graveyard to be able to abuse to get back out. Also, there are a few counter spells that will send things to exile from the stack, like counter this and then exile instead of...

Well, I'm sorry. It'll say counter and exile, or sometimes maybe just as exile. Is it counter? Maybe it's counter if it's exiled. But anyway, there's a few counter spells that can get things to exile. Okay, next. Exile to library.

There's not a lot of ways back from exile. There's a few. We have had a few things that have allowed you to take things from exile and shuffle them into your library or put them on the bottom of your library. We've done a few of that. Exile to hand, those are wishes. Wishes let you go get things in the exile zone and put them into your hand.

Usually the exile says from out of the game. So if you're playing not in tournament, you actually go to your collection to get things. In a tournament, you can only go to your sideboard or go to your exile zone. So that is the most common way to get stuff from exile into hand. Exile the battlefield. A, there are cards that put things in limbo and bring them back. So like Oblivion Ring, I said before, that you can Oblivion Ring something, and then when Oblivion Ring goes away, the creature will leave Exile and come back.

Flickering in general tends to do this, where you send something to the Exile Zone temporarily, either to come back right away or at the end of the turn. That's a way to get things from Exile to Battlefield. Oh, that's also a way to get things from Battlefield to Exile, a temporary thing. I did mention that before. There also are a few spells to get things back from exile and put them on the battlefield. Not a lot. And usually it's pretty limited in what you're allowed to get.

Exile to Graveyard. The processors in Battle for Zendikar did this. That you could get stuff from the opponent's exile zone and then put it into their graveyard. There haven't been tons of things that get from exile to graveyard. That's the one that pops to mind. And then exile to the stack. That's a hard one.

Have we ever done exile to the stack? That would require you to cast things that are in exile. Have we ever let you cast... Like, have we ever let you cast a flashback spell from exile? Have we ever let you cast... Like, have we ever let you cast a flashback spell from Exile? Have we ever let you do that? I don't know.

It doesn't jump into mind, Exile, to stack it. Some of these, like, when you see, as it goes through the zones, some of them are very, very clear that, like, we do them all the time. Like, stack to battlefield, or stack to graveyard, or battlefield to hand. They're just things that are just normal magic. Like, a lot of these zone changes. Like, one of the things I'm hoping you're seeing today from me talking about zones is

one of the things that I enjoy as a game designer is there's a lot of different ways to look at the game. You can chop up magic in a lot of different ways. And zones are an interesting way to think at the game. You can chop up magic in a lot of different ways. And zones are an interesting way to think of the game. The idea that things exist in zones, and then, hey, part of the game is playing around with those zones. And you'll notice, so I had six zones going to five places, so that's 30 different interactions. Almost all, I mean, there's one or two we haven't done, and even then the one or two we haven't done, even then the one or two we haven't done

maybe we did a card, I'm forgetting the card but it's interesting to see how many zone changes does exist and how many are like normal everyday magic does them there's a lot of zone changing in normal magic in fact there's even a few spells that do multiple zone changes

where it sends something to one zone you know, like there's a card of living death which puts cards from the battlefield in the graveyard, and also puts cards from the graveyard into the battlefield. And we've had a few cards that sort of go to this zone, then go to that zone, so we definitely have messed around a lot. I mean, the zones are an integral part of the game, and part of the fun for us is sort of figuring out how we can do things.

Another trick we'll do in design sometimes is see a card where we interact with one zone in a certain way, and then go, ooh, what if what we did in that zone we did in this zone, and we definitely messed around. Now, I will say, each zone has its own rules. You know, when you're designing for different zones, you have to be very conscious of what zones can and can't do. roles of different zones. You have to be very conscious of what zones can and can't do. For example, we're very careful with the library because we don't want too much repetition of play, so we're careful how often you get things from there. With graveyard, we don't want you to make it too easy to get giant things out too fast, so we're very careful

on what kind of cost when you get things out of the graveyard, especially if you're getting it to the battlefield from hand. Like I said, Exiles is an ongoing debate about what should and shouldn't be able to get out of Exile and how hard should it be. And then there's also stuff like the Command Zone. We're often talking about, you know, do we want to make use of a zone in different ways?

You know, the Command Zone started as one function, but as we've looked to make other functions, we'll add things in and put things there. Like the exile zone mostly started as a place to send things away not to come back, but then we found a means to use it as a limbo zone, and we made more use of that. So,

anyway, I hope you guys enjoy. One of the things I enjoy about the podcast is letting you guys sort of look at magic in a lot of different ways, because we, the people who guys sort of look at magic in a lot of different ways because we, the people who make magic, look at it in a lot of different ways and the zones is an interesting way to look at magic that if you haven't designed the game

might not be a vantage point you've thought of in terms of sort of how the cards play into the zone so I hope today's podcast has been fun for you it definitely is insightful, hopefully, and just a different way to see things. So to all the zones.

Anyway, zone play and zone change is a lot of fun. So you shall see more. But I am now at work. So we all know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.