Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #696: When to Change

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

This podcast talks about when you have to change what you're doing in a design. I give numerous examples of designs where we ended up making big changes.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is all about making changes. So, from time to time, well here's the conflict in action, which is magic, I believe magic is going to last for a long, long time. Magic, I believe magic is going to last for a long, long time. So sometimes we figure out that something we've done is wrong, and we should change it. And on the one side, it's like, well, if the game's going to last a long time, then make all the changes we should make, because, you know, let's say the game lasts hundreds of years.

Well, okay, the first 20 20 some, what does it matter? You want to make sure you have the right thing. On the flip side, there's sort of the inertia argument, which is, look, there's certain things that we've done that are so ingrained into the game that, is it easy to change? And maybe we shouldn't change it, maybe people are used to it being a certain way. And so, whenever we want to change

some fundamental element of the game, that is the conflict we have. Which is, are we want to change some fundamental element of the game that is the conflict we have which is you know are we supposed to make the change or not make the change so i was going to walk through today how we decide when to make a change and um what are the decisions we have to go through and then i was going to walk through a whole bunch of different changes and sort of explain sort of why we did or have in some cases have not made those changes. So that's what today is all about. Making changes. When I say making changes, I mean fundamentally changing something about the game. Obviously, Magic is an ever evolving game. We make new mechanics. I mean, the game's always changing smaller things,

but I'm talking more of a changing something fundamental to the rules themselves and not just adding a new mechanic, which obviously we do all the time. Okay, so let's say we decide we want to make a change. There's a couple questions we have to ask ourselves. Okay, so first question is, how many cards are affected? So one of the things that makes, where magic differs from, let, say, a video game, and I understand that magic has a video component, but a lot of magic is printed on cards. That if we have something, like, if

we were a video game completely, and we wanted to change how something worked, we just make a new update, and all of a sudden, that's how that card would work, and everyone would see it. But we don't have that luxury, at least in the printing part, you know, in the paper part of it. We print a card. People own it. That's it.

That's never changing again. Now, there are times that we do change things, and the real question is when? When do we do that? Okay, so the first question we always ask ourselves is, how many cards are affected? So when we make the change, what does that mean? How many cards

are going to be different than they are now? If we're going to make a change that's going to affect just a small number of things, that's a much easier thing to do. Especially if the cards we're changing happened a long time ago. One of the things to keep in mind is Magic, its growth has gone up over time. So if we're talking about cards that existed very early in Magic's life, there's not a lot of those, speaking by how many people play the game, there's a very small number of those cards, comparatively. But if we're also talking about something where it's like, oh, it's a lot of cards, especially recent cards, that's a much bigger deal. Because the thing we have to worry about is we want the cards to do what they say.

We're very careful about when and how we have cards doing something different than what they say they do. Now, we do things like uplate templates and things. That's a little bit different from what I'm talking about. Sometimes, you know, an old card's written a certain way because that was the template at the time. And so, you know, we're conscious of the idea that things like, there

are things like templates that have to change. We're not going to not change a template because old cards have an old template. We will update things to the current template to make sure they work properly. But anyway, if we're going to make a change, one of the earliest things we do is we go and we look at how many cards are affected usually somebody on the editing team for example whenever we're about to make a change we'll go sort of look through match and go okay, how big a change is this? What is this affecting?

Number two, how easy is the change to Grok? For example, when we introduced dinosaurs that was a creature type that hadn't existed before. But we had made cards that essentially were dinosaurs. Not a lot, but we had made a few. And the real question was, okay, well, if we said every card that was a dinosaur said it was a dinosaur, how good or bad would that be? And the issue is, not that bad.

Like, if you see a dinosaur on the card, and we say, hey, if it looks like a dinosaur, it's a dinosaur, and there was like, I don't know, five or six cards, you know, or maybe a little bit more than that. But anyway, it was a change, but the point is we wanted to add dinosaurs to the game.

We thought it would be something cool and exciting that people would really enjoy. And we said, okay, if we do that, we have to look game. We thought it would be something cool and exciting that people would really enjoy. And we said, okay, if we do that, we have to look back. There's not a lot of cards that need to change. And the ones that do change, most of them it's kind of obvious that are dinosaurs. You know, it's not, like,

here's an example where we didn't make the change, but a similar one, is Phyrexians. So, we did not, we've never made Phyrexian a creature type. So, it's come up, like, oh, well, shouldn't Phyrexians. So we did not, we've never made Phyrexian a creature type. So it's come up, like, oh, shouldn't Phyrexians be a creature type? Eldrazi are a creature type. Why shouldn't Phyrexian be a creature type?

Well, okay, let's say we want to make Phyrexians a creature type. So first off, we look back. There are a lot of cards that are Phyrexians, to the first question. But the second one is actually the bigger problem, which is if I went through time and I plucked all the cards that are actually Phyrexian from a story standpoint, and I took,

let's say, 10 of those, and then I took 10 whores, you know, things that just represent sort of scary things, or whatever, I just, I took 10 other cards that I thought, maybe you might think are Phyrexians and put them side by side. I don't think you can tell. Like, I think if I put the dinosaurs and not dinosaurs, you mostly can tell. But if I put the Phyrexians, there's no it's not, A, Phyrexians

are made up by us, meaning there's no real world comparison and one of the sort of defining traits of Phyrexians is they kind of evolve based on the world that they're, you know, like depends on where they are. They sort of change the thing, but they grow to match the world they're in. So Phyrexians keep looking different. So it's not even like there's just a distinctive Phyrexian look.

In contrast, let's take something like Sliver. Slivers were introduced in Tempest. And we had a team design the slivers. Now, I understand there was one corset where we, again, changed them and that didn't go over too well. But the basic sort of talon sliver look, that's something we designed.

So when we went to all the artists, we gave them a very concrete way to do that. So if you went back and looked at all the slivers, minus the one corset, they all look the same. They all have a very similar look to them. Phyrexians, we didn't do that. You know, this was prior, you know, antiquities was pretty early magic. We just drew things that were Phyrexian and put the word Phyrexian on them. And that, you know, the Phyrexians showed up a bunch of different times,

but we weren't super consistent in how they looked. So the problem is, it's not as if the Phyrexians have a unique look that by looking at the card you have any chance to guess whether it's Phyrexian or not. So, when I talk about being easy to grok, grok is a term from, I think, Robert Hyland's Stranger in a Strange Land. And it's a word to mean to sort of absorb it, to just get a natural sense of what it is. And I talk a lot about groking because one of the things about design in general is I want you to get the idea of what is going on. I want you to go, oh, I get it. So when I talk about is the idea

easy to grok, meaning if we make a change, how easy is it for you to get that idea? How simple was it to get that idea? And if it's simple, okay, then we're more likely to want to make that change because the real question is, do you have to learn one universal rule or do you have to learn a lot of case-by-case rules?

If you learn one universal rule, which like, okay, all dinosaurs are now dinosaur. Okay, I mean, I just got to look. I mean, I got to figure out whether it's a dinosaur, but, you know, I have a lot of real world stuff to draw off of. There's lots of movies that use dinosaurs. I mean, I have things that I can work off of and go, oh, well, that looks like a dinosaur. Okay, all dinosaurs are dinosaurs now. Where the Phyrexian in contrast is like, oh, I don't, you know, I almost on a case-by-case basis have to figure out what a Phyrexian is because it's not consistent.

Okay, the third thing we look at is what is the emotional toll of the change? What I mean by that is how much will the audience accept it? And this gets a little bit, I call this emotional inertia, which is one of the things about inertia is you get used to it. You know, One of the reasons it's hard to change something because of inertia is it just gets ingrained. So inertia is two things. One, people get used to it. And the second is we also as designers tend to design around it. So that's another thing of one of the issues is sometimes with some of the stuff we'll talk about, it's not

just a matter of that people got used to it, although that's part of it. It's also a matter of because it was there and it was the way things were, we took advantage of that. Some of the changes I'll get into, one of the biggest problems we had is because of the nature of the changes I'll get into, one of the biggest problems we had is because of the nature of the change, because it was the way the rules worked, we designed with those rules in mind and in some ways made it a lot harder to extract them

because of that. I'll get to some examples in a little bit. Now, the emotional thing is very interesting. There are changes that we've tried to make on some level I'd say we made and then we ended up undoing those changes because there was people inside of the building that recognized that

you know what I, like people outside the building we like this so my classic example here is walls so when Richard Garfield made the game in the beginning, he made a wall of creature type, wall of stone and stuff. And I think the idea was he liked the play

of defenders, of things that could block but didn't really attack. He was doing a lot of top-down stuff. He's like, well, what could block but wouldn't attack? Okay, how about a wall? And so he made a bunch of walls. And walls originally... Defender didn't exist when the game started, per se.

Walls just had Defender built in. The wall creature type had it. We later extracted that from wall, made Defender a thing, put Defender on all walls, and then we were able to make other Defenders that weren't walls. Anyway, at one point, I and Brady Donnerith, who was the creative director at the time, both were very anti-wall. In the sense that creatively it makes no sense. We weren't against

a 0-5 that could block and can't attack. It just was the idea that a wall is a living creature when a wall of stone is literally a wall of stone I wasn't getting this living wall or something in which it was living but the idea of a wall being a creature was just weird

so we took a wall out of the game the wall was gone for a while we didn't make any walls same with merfolk for a while we didn't make merfolk the Same with merfolk. For a while, we didn't make merfolk. The thought was, oh, they're a water base. It's kind of weird. They're fighting in a land battle.

And anyway, in each case, it's just like somebody inside of R&D said, you know what? Ah, players like this. You know, ah, merfolk, whatever. You know, it's fun to have merfolk and whatever. How do they fight on the battlefield? We'll give them legs more of the time. Whatever. We'll figure it out. You know, it's fun to have werefolk and whatever. How do they fight on the battlefield? We'll give them legs more of the time or whatever. We'll figure it out.

And walls, like, oh, walls are fun. I had a wall deck, you know. And anyway, in each case, we brought them back. We took them out of the game. We tried to make that change. Didn't stick because, you know, once you do something, you really get people used to it. And that really, it's easy for that to really affect how you make things. So, for example, let me deviate here. One of the things, let me talk a little bit about Terror, the card Terror.

So, when Richard Garfield first made the game, he made a card called Terror. Terror said, destroy target non-artifact, non-black creature. And the idea was, I'm scaring something to death. Well, artifacts don't have emotions. How do you scare an artifact? What are they afraid of? And then, ah, black creatures, they're used to seeing pretty awful stuff. You know, it's hard to scare a black creature. So the idea of terror was, I'm going to eliminate some things from a flavor standpoint. Now Richard kind of

understood that, you know, having some restrictions on what you can kill is probably a good thing. But really, he put it in mostly because of flavor. Okay, flash forward not even that far, a few years, and we, all of our kill spells

started having this restriction on them. Non-artifact, non-black. And eventually we dropped the non-artifact just because it was wordy. But for many years, we, like, oh, black just can't kill black things. That's just a weakness of black. Why?

Well, it doesn't make any flavor sense. Like, black's not unwilling to kill black things. Black's willing to kill anything. And the fact that we had this restriction on it actually was making black bad at creature destruction. And finally we had to ask ourselves, okay, well, why is

non-black on these cards? And we're like, inertia. It's just like Richard made a card, and we're like, oh, that's the way it works. And we just kept doing it. And eventually we sort of said, okay, it's causing problems for the game. And like, do we need it? And we said, oh, no, we don't need it.

But it's very easy to get caught up in the inertia of going, well, it's the way things have been. It's what players expect. It's what we expect. And then not making those changes. But at some point you have to say, oh, okay, early on we made changes, but that doesn't, you know, the decisions that got made earlier in Magic that might not have been the right decision, and that's the big tension of figuring out, okay, well, yeah, we made that decision.

Like another classic one is back when we used to have multiple sets drafted together. Now all sets are one set that drafts by itself. But back when we had multiple sets drafted together, large, small, small, in the olden days, the way we drafted the boosters was you would go in order the boosters came out. So let's say at the end of the cycle, the end of the block, you would go large, first small set, second small set. The problem we were running into is that the second small set, and even to some extent the first small set, second small set. The problem we were running into is that the second small set, and even to some extent the first small set, it was really hard to have themes in those that matter.

Because let's say we put a theme in the third small set. Well, you didn't get the cards to the third pack. By the third pack, you were pretty set on your way. You know, you couldn't build around anything when on the third pack. Because even if you tried, even if, like, let's say we, the way we would make it work is we'd make the themes really loud. So the idea was, well, hey, be aware this is coming. Maybe if you could draft some cards that would set it up it would really pay you off in the third pack. But it was strategically

not a good choice because you just didn't know you were going to get it or not. And to set yourself up for something that you might not just get could be disastrous in the draft. So I remember one day Eric Lauer asked, why are we drafting in this order? Could we just draft backwards? Could you just draft the latest release set? Go second small set, then first small set, then large set. And what happened was, when you

did that, all of a sudden, things in the third set mattered way more. It was the very first thing you saw. And it really changed things. And it's a good example of a change we made. It wasn't as if the original decision making like, once we sort of

thought, oh, this is just better. This just solves problems we've been having with the second and third packs that we just did it that way because we did it that way. You know a lot of times you make decisions not because you've clearly thought everything out but it's just kind of what comes to mind and once again with inertia you keep doing things. Okay, the fourth thing we ask is can the game work without it? And the reason I ask for this one is, sometimes we change something fundamental about the game because we're adding

new things to the game and the new things won't work without changing the game. And as somebody who makes new things, look, we need to be able to change our game to make new things fit in. Now, a lot of the times we make something new, you know, it's like, okay, well, can we fit it in in a way that doesn't really negate anything that exists before? But sometimes, you know, usually what happens when we make something, you know, really new is it requires us to rethink something that, like, the rules didn't take into account that weird thing would happen. So a classic example would be split cards. So I want to do split cards.

I really liked, I really thought the way that we laid them out was very intuitive. Here's two cards. They're both there. Oh, they could be either card. It seemed, you know, that layout made people understand how to play the card. And it looked cool. I mean, everything about split cards really grabbed attention and said this is a neat and interesting thing. Okay, so the problem was there are cards that say, oh, what's the mana cost?

Or often the converted mana cost of a card. Now, normally on a magic card, there's only one cost. So what is it? Well, it's that. The one cost it has. But all of a sudden, we made something where there were two cards, and each had a cost. What was that? And that meant that we had to make a new rule to understand that. Now, that rule

didn't affect too many things, but it did require us to sort of cement that down. Now, sometimes we have to figure something out and the ramifications of solving something has spillover. Remember I talked about how many cards are affected? That is something that often comes up when we're trying to do something new.

Okay, what do we have to do to make this work and what impact does it have? Now, sometimes the impact as it has is big enough that we go, you know what? That's not worth doing. Classic example would be triple strike. So, in I think it was Future Sight,

I think it was Gottlieb, Mark Gottlieb came up with the idea of doing last strike and triple strike. The idea being last strike was the opposite of first strike, meaning it happens after normal damage. And the idea was, oh, we can introduce last strike,

so things that are super slow is the flavor, and then we can introduce triple strike. So the rules manager at the time, which interestingly I think was Gottlieb, looked and said, okay, well what would I need to do to change the rules so that we can do this? And it turned out it needed, like it was a major overhaul of the combat rules.

And Mark was like, okay, well, how many cards are we making if we do this? A couple? Maybe one with Last Strike, one with Triple Strike? Maybe we push it three or four, but not a lot of cards. You know, it's for future site. We were making future shifter cards. We were kind of just hinting at where we could go. It really wasn't adding a lot to the system. And it was going to cause a major major change. So the decision was

you know what? This isn't worth it. You know, this is going to cause enough problem with enough different things that, you know what? We're not going to do that. And Silver Border has definitely, there's a fair share of cards, you know, trample on a direct damage

spell, or destroy target player. There's things I've tried to do in Black Border, or like, there's an effect that says, you know, until end of turn lasts forever. You know, there's things that I've tried to do in Black Border that just really cause problems.

And so Silver Border, the reason I like them in Silver Border, by the way, is there are things in which the reason we don't do them is not that the audience can't understand it in a vacuum, is that to make it work within the rules, you have to do a lot of changes that would affect other things. But

in Silver Border, it's just like, eh, it works. I'm allowed to go, eh, it works. And as long as the thing I'm asking of the audience is pretty... Like, Last Strike and Triple Strike are not that hard to grok. They're not that hard to put your brain around. It's just weird when you're trying to rewrite the rules to make it work. So that's where Silver Borders kind of shines is, look, the rules of Silver Border are kind of gunky by their nature,

but the idea is, yeah, yeah, yeah, it works. Goblin Bookie works. Goblin Bookie's a card where you get to reflip a coin. But the idea is that reflipping a coin or rerolling a die, it's tricky because it's a resolving effect, and it's really not the correct window to reply to it. Silverboard are like, you know, when you do it, you know. Like, it's not that the idea is hard to understand,

but it doesn't quite work within the execution. So anyway, some of our changes that we aren't willing to make to black border, I will make in silver border. So one of the nice things about silver border is it lets us do things that are kind of intuitive, things that are grokkable, but problematic with working within the rules. Okay, so those are the things we look at. How many cards are affected? How easy is the change

to grok? What is the emotional toll of the change? And can the game work without it? Those are the four main things we ask. So let's talk a little bit about some of the changes we've made over the time and whether or not the change made sense or not. Okay, so I'm going to talk first about some early changes. Now, the other thing that I'll bring up as we go along here is part of will the audience accept it, the emotional toll and stuff, has to do with time, meaning some of these changes we made very early. And the earlier we made the change, the easier it is to do it because there's less expectation of something.

So some of these early changes are very early. Okay, let's start with ante. Okay, so when the game started, there was a rule, not an optional rule, a rule baked into the game, that said draw seven cards, and your eighth card gets put aside. That's your ante. The winner of the game gets the loser's ante. So when Richard was first making the game,

one of the problems he was trying to solve is he assumed that people would not buy a large amount of cards. The idea being that, oh, well, the average player, you know, how much do you spend on a game? 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 40 bucks, you know. People would buy cards, but people would have, you know, a shoebox of cards and that would be it. Richard understood that there was a world in which that wasn't true, but he figured, okay, in that world the game's a rousing success and will solve any problems we come up with later.

But anyway, in a world where people were buying 20, 40 bucks and that's it, that's all they ever bought. There was a flux problem where the game wasn't changing enough. So Richard's solution to that, sort of influenced by his days playing marbles as a kid. Marbles is definitely a game where you play and you can win other people's marbles. That's part of the nature of marbles. So he said, okay, well what if I bake into

the game this attribute where there's a flux that as you play your friend, eventually, what if I bake into the game this attribute where there's a flux that, you know, as you play your friend, eventually, you know, sometimes you'll lose and you'll lose cards, or sometimes you'll win and you'll gain cards, and that will change your collection, which will change what you do. And the idea was he thought it was a neat way to have a system of cards where you don't have a lot of cards, but there's change in the system.

Okay, so the game comes out with anti, and it is almost universally rejected. Like, I remember the person who taught me how to play explained to me that this anti rule existed and that we weren't going to do it. And in fact, when you used to do a pickup game back in the day, in the early days of Magic, you would always start by going, no anti?

Like, that was just like... In fact, at some point, it became so ingrained that no one played for ante that you would say, ante? Like, if you wanted ante, you would sort of ask... They started with saying no ante, saying, assuming that the game starts with an ante, so let me make sure

that we're not playing with ante, to the point where it's assuming you're not having ante, and I'll just... If I want to play ante, so let me make sure that we're not playing with ante, to the point where it's assumed you're not having ante, and I'll just, if I want to play ante, I've got to check with you. Anyway, it was just universally hated. Magic was very much a game about making a collection, and building a deck, and fine-tuning your deck, and kind of like randomly losing maybe the most important card to your deck in a game. You know, like, I had this deck and I spent all this time building it,

and then, oops, I just lost one of the key pieces. It was just really, it was not something the players liked. So, we made the call pretty early in to just, at first we made it anti-optional, meaning we made it not the default way to play. Then eventually we just, no, I mean, it was just so unliked, we just jettisoned it

as even an optional thing. But it's one of the things, like, so, how many cards were affected? In some level, all the cards, but in some level, none of the cards.

I mean, it didn't, I mean, the really thing that affected it is there were anti-cards is what it really affected. There were, I mean, there's been, there it is there were anti-cards is what it really affected. There were... I mean, there were a handful of anti-cards. Alpha had, I don't know, four.

And then a bunch of expansions had a few. So there were maybe ten at most, you know, eight to ten anti-cards. That's what was affected. And essentially, it was saying you can't play with these. So that was the real cost, you know. But, you know, but, you know, so how many cards affected?

Eight to ten, I think it was. How easy is it to change to Grok? Well, don't play these cards. Pretty easy to Grok. We're not, this rule is gone.

If it references this rule, it's gone. Pretty straightforward. What is the emotional toll? Not a lot. People hated it. People hated ante. So,

in fact, almost the opposite of an emotional toll, like a happiness. I think people were happy when we said we were officially doing it. People hated Antti. So, in fact, almost the opposite of an emotional toll, like a happiness. I think people were happy when we said we were officially doing it. And can the game work without it? Yes. Yes, it could. I mean, Antti definitely played a role. But like I said, a lot of why Richard wanted Antti in the game had to do with something that ended up not being true. Richard had sort of built the game assuming that it was played by a much smaller player base, buying a lot less cards. As Magic turned out, players ended up buying a lot more people,

well, A, a lot more people played, and a lot more cards were bought per person. So that ended up not being necessary. So anyway, anti, should we change it? Yes, we should. Okay, so let's talk about a few changes from the 6th edition rules. So when the game first got created, there were three different kinds of spells. There was instant sorcery and interrupt. So interrupt was, the idea of interrupt was, if you know, what's it called, from Ice Age, I'm blanking, not from Ice Age, it was from, it was from Times Pro, was it Time, I'm blanking on the name of it.

There's a mechanic that we use that says you can't respond to this. It goes on spells that you're not allowed to put anything on the stack when it's on the stack. Split second. It's called split second. And interrupt worked a lot like split second, except that you could respond with interrupts. So the way interrupts worked is if I have an... Actually, the stack itself didn't exist. I'll get to that in a second. But the idea was, if I cast a spell, you can respond, for example, with an instant.

Or you can respond with an interrupt. If you respond with an interrupt, the only thing you can respond to that interrupt was another interrupt. So, for example, counterspells were interrupts. One of the ways the game handled counterspells at the time. Now, the reason that you couldn't respond was prior to the stack existing, things happened what was called batches. Anyway, to make counterspells work is how it had to work.

Well, come 6th edition, they figure out that we can make, by using the stack, by making a stack, we can make counter spells work as instance. We didn't need them to be a different card type. So the change was, okay, let's not have interrupts anymore. Okay, so how many cards affected? Some, not a huge number, but I would say at the time, 40, 50 cards maybe. Mostly Connor spells. How easy is the change to grok? Okay, it was a very universal change. Does it say

interrupt on it? It's now an instant. All interrupts are now instants. It was pretty easy to grok. It was, do you see this word? It's that word. What is the emotional toll? Um, I mean, anytime we change anything, there is some, I mean, but I think players, one of the reasons we changed to the stack in general in sixth edition was that nobody really

understood how the batches worked. There's a famous article in The Duelist, Magic's magazine back in the day, that Tom Wiley, who was a rule manager at the time, he made a graph to show how the rules work, and it was decorated as if it was a rat maze, which I think Tom thought was funny, but it kind of really, I mean, it let open some truth that was a little more truthy

than I think maybe Tom was thinking, which is, you know, a rat maze is a term meaning that nobody understands it because it's too complicated. And that was the original rule. Nobody understood the rules. I mean, I at the time, for example, was judging. I was judging prior to 6th edition. And man, it was complicated. It was not quite as straightforward. And the stack really

made things a lot simpler, a lot cleaner to understand. And so there was some toll. It was a change, but it wasn't that much. I think people, once they started playing with the stack, they found it was just easier to understand. And can the game work without it? Well, I mean, one of the things about making the change is, you know, we were saying that we were sort of shifting over to a different way to work,

and this is a good example of a change where the game worked easier with the change than before. Batches were a lot more complicated, and it was a system that wasn't adaptable. One of the things that the stats was very nicely is it's a rule set that you can click things in and make them work very easily. Where batches, there was a lot of... One of the problems about the early rules

was there was a lot of what we call band-aiding, where you had to make a lot of one-of exceptions. And then it becomes really, really hard to learn the rules, because there's lots of, well, normally it works like this, but... And the more exceptions you have, especially card-by-card exceptions, the harder it is to learn the rules. So anyway, we wanted to change interrupts. Okay, we can change interrupts. And there were a few other changes in 6th edition. Obviously,

the stack was a big change. So, there were a few small rules that we changed. Like, one of the rules that used to happen was, if an artifact is tapped, it's turned off. And the idea being that, oh, if I have a Howling Mine and I have an Icy Manipulator, I can tap my Howling Mine on my turn so the beginning of your turn is not untapped

and you don't get to draw the card. You know, I could tap a Winter Orb to shut it off. There were definitely things that were designed that were kind of cute with, oh, well, I could shut off an artifact. The problem was that we, R&D, time and time again, had problems because we'd make an artifact that did something, especially one that had any sort of situational, that affected the environment,

and we would just always forget you could turn it off, and then all sorts of shenanigans would happen when you could turn it off. Sands of Time from Visions is a classic example where it was this card that did this weird thing, and we just forgot that you could just turn it off. It's very hard to make artifacts that affect the environment when you can just turn them off.

Because what it means is, you just use it offensively against the opponent, and any kind of cost that's supposed to balance it now doesn't matter because you've turned it off. Like, you know, when Winter Orb only affects your opponent, it's really, really powerful. I mean, Winter Orb is already powerful, but when it doesn't affect you, you know, it just becomes kind of crazy. So, we made a decision to change this.

Now, how many cards did it affect? It affected all artifacts. But, it affected them in a way that didn't change what the card did. It affected them in a meta sense, if you will. And we did change a few individual cards that we liked the fact that you could turn them off to say, if untapped,

to have the effect like winter, like I think we did do it winter orb, which was a mistake, but like howling mind stuff. We later figured out that it wasn't a plus to those cards that they turned off, but we did make that change early on. Is the change easy to grok? Yeah.

Pretty much we're saying this thing that happens that not even a lot of players knew happened doesn't happen anymore. This thing you can't do anymore. That change is a pretty easy change to grok. What's the emotional toll? We got some grousing from sort of the more established players that knew the rule

and took advantage of the rule. You know, if you had a deck that, you know, a winner of a deck where you shut it off so that it didn't affect you, and that's how your deck worked, look, we were essentially saying, don't play that deck anymore. So there was, yes, there was some emotional toll to that. Not tons. There weren't a lot of players doing that, but there was, yes, there was some emotional toll to that. Not tons. There weren't a

lot of players doing that, but there was enough that, you know, when we changed, in fact, it was so disliked that even some of the players that did it, when the signs that usually a good change, that even some of the players that did it go, you know, okay, that's, you know, yeah, yeah, you could do that, but I'm not sure that was particularly fun. You know, even people who did do it, some of them were like, okay, I get it, I get it, that wasn't great magic. Or people that understood the sands of time thing were like, okay, that was, yeah, things kind of break when you can shut off artifacts.

There were players, even players who took advantage of it that did sort of acknowledge they understood it. And then, can the game work without it? Yeah. The game can handle taking rules away a lot easier than it can sometimes adding things, but it depends what you're taking away. Certain things, like you can't take away something

that has to work because then you have to replace it. But a lot of things were like, oh, here's a weird thing that happens. Okay. This weird thing doesn't happen anymore. You know, it's not as big a deal. Um, the other change we made at the same time was there used to be a rule that said if a blocker was tapped, it didn't deal damage. And the idea there was you could use your icy manipulator again. They block my creature, and if I tapped it with my icy manipulator,

I would get to damage their creature, but they would not damage my creature. So it really made blocking hard to do when there was any sort of tapping effect, especially in Icy, but Twiddle or whatever. And that was one of those rules that very few people understood. It wasn't super intuitive.

So how many cards did it affect? On some level, all and none. I mean, it affected all creatures, obviously, but it didn't change what the creature said. So, I mean, it didn't affect the cards sort of outright. I mean, it affected them in a meta way, but not in a, no one had to play the cards and say, oh, my card says I can do this, but I can't.

How easy was the change to Grock? Once again, it was taking away a rule most people didn't know. The emotional toll? Yeah, some players knew how to do it, and whenever we take a trick away from the established players, they're like, oh, but I like that I knew to do that because I was smart and I knew to do that.

And the answer we always give is, look, there's always going to be things baked in the game where the more experienced player knows to do things that the less experienced player doesn't know to do. But we have to be careful when and how we do those. This wasn't leading to good gameplay. It was preventing a lot of blocking. We want some amount of blocking.

So we took it away. Can the game work without it? It's another example where we're moving something, game work just fine without it. Okay, so let's talk about a change that Bill tried to make in 6th edition that I stopped, that years later I would lead the charge on, which is mana burn. Okay, so mana burn, for those that don't know this rule, once upon a time, when you tap mana, you would add it to your mana pool and at the end of every phase I think, you would clear

you would clear the mana and any mana that was unspent would do a damage to you. And it was called mana burn. And the reason it existed is there were things like mana flare, you know, there were effects that would add more than one mana. And so it made you have to be careful about when you added extra mana because if you didn't do it properly, it could hurt you if you didn't use it. I, in fact, had an entire magic puzzle based around understanding

how to correctly use mana burn to defeat your opponent. So anyway, Bill wanted to change it during 6th edition. It was a rule that not a lot of people understood that didn't come up all that often and Bill wanted to change it. And I, once again, the emotional, like, oh, but

I used to make a lot of mana flare decks and I made a whole puzzle and I was like, oh, mana flare, it's a cool, quirky part of the game and I defended it and I mean other people defended it too but um enough of us defended it that Bill ended up not taking it out years later I really we were making Magic 2010 changes I'm like you know what I know I fought this change but wow was Bill right in the first place how often does this matter and so the classic story I tell is we decided to try taking away Mana Burn

for a while in design and saying, okay, just don't play with Mana Burn. And after a month, we had a meeting to say, okay, how'd it go not playing Mana Burn? And it had not come up in any games we had played for a month. Now, that said, it does come up. I'm not saying it never, ever comes up.

But in the point of the games we were playing at the time, it never came up. Sort of said to us, okay, how often does this happen? And mana murder is the kind of thing that you had to teach people early on. Anyway, no one understood it. I remember my early days of trying to understand mana. Until I saw Mana Flare, I didn't even get how you could get more than, like, why would you put mana in your pool and not spend it? Because back in the day, it was like, well, I have the spell, I'll put exactly that in my Mana

pool, and I'll spend it. And anyway, so we looked at how many cards were affected. This is one of those things, again, where not, I mean, it affected Mana, but as far as, there were a few cards that took advantage of it. Like I said, we tend to build around systems, so because Mana Flare existed, there were a few cards that sort of said, I'll punish you for not spending your mana, but we knew that Mana Flare was there to keep you from, like right now, if I said, I'll punish you for having any untapped lands, well you can just tap

your lands. I mean, it keeps you from casting spells, but there's no reason you can't tap the lands if you want to avoid some punishment or something. So without that restriction, there are spells that really don't have much teeth. What is it? What is that? There's a red card that damages you from alpha.

It damages for every spell that you have. It's like for every land you have untapped. Power. Power something. Anyway, that spell without mana burn is kind of useless, so it affects a few cards. Not a lot. How easy is the change to Grok?

Pretty easy. I think the majority of people don't know mana burn exists. It was something that most people didn't learn, and you didn't really need it to play magic. What's the emotional toll? that's something it was one of those things that like didn't matter a lot but every once in a while mattered and when it mattered it really could matter

and there were games that every once in a while would hang on it so there was an emotional toll even to this day not too much anymore but every once in a blue moon I get an email would hang on it, you know, so there was an emotional toll. Even to this day, I mean, not too much anymore, but every once in a blue moon I get an email, oh, you ever bring Man of Burn back? You know, and it's something that at the time we did it, people were like, oh, what are you doing? And just the way that I and some R&D had fought for it back during 6th edition, there are

people that are really like, oh, it means something to me, and it stands for something. And, you know, now one of the things I explain is that magic is constantly adding things to it. We're constantly coming up with stuff, and some of the stuff is like, that's so good, we're going to make it evergreen or deciduous, or, you know, we're going to do it some amount of the time and make you learn it, because it's something that you're going to encounter a lot in magic. And if we want to add new things, it means occasionally we've got to take away old things. Otherwise, the game just becomes unwieldy to learn. And Mana Burn is a good example of, look,

it's complicated and it just doesn't come up a lot. You know, would we rather have equipment and vehicles or have Mana Burn? It's like, oh, well, equipment and vehicles are more flavorful and, you know, do stuff that's a little more interesting. You know, Mana Burn doesn't come up that much and we don't really even make that many effects that make multiple mana these days.

It's not something we do a lot of. So just, you know, the rules becoming more and more obscure. Like, okay, fine. Let's just not make people learn this rule. And can the game work without it? Yes, the game can work easily without it. Okay, so let me talk a little bit about some stuff that I've... Well, let me talk about a change where I want to make a change,

and we've made some changes, but not the change that I'm most interested in. And that is Legendary. So originally, Legend on creatures was a creature type and not a super type. And then on every non-creature permanent, it was a super type. So legendary land, and I think legendary artifact, but it was a creature-legend, or a summon legend, I guess, back when it first appeared. We eventually turned them all into legendaries to clean them up.

That's the first change we made. Once again, that was the kind of change where it didn't affect things too much. We had tried to strip out the... We didn't want

creature words that had rules text and creature subtypes that had rules text buried in them. So we turned Legend to Legendary. Ah, that's not...

It affected a bunch of cards, but the change was pretty easy to grok. If it says Legend, it's Legendary. It's not hard to understand. Emotional toll, it didn't really change how the cards worked, so not that big a deal. And the game obviously worked with it. Okay, but then we realized that Legendary didn't work all that great.

And we have changed Legendary a bunch of times. Early on, there was a rule that said you can only have one of each Legendary card in your deck. We changed that rule. Early on, there was a rule that said you can only have one of each legendary card in your deck. We changed that rule. At one point, if I have a legendary card out, nobody can play any future versions of that card. And then we changed it to you can play it, but then one of them goes away, which allowed you to sort of refill things.

Like, if I have a Planeswalker and I play a second copy of them, and the early one has less loyalty, I could let the less loyalty go away and keep the newer one. We eventually changed the rules so that every other player can have a copy of that legend, not just you. So if I play a copy of a legend, it lets me from playing other ones. Or it only cares when I play other ones. Other people can play one. And each of those times, we of said, how many cards affected?

How easy is the change to understand? What's the emotional toll? Does it help the game? Can the game handle it? And oh, that's another thing. When I say, can the game work without it? Also, does it make the game better? It's not just a matter of, can the game handle it? But, how does the game handle it?

How good is it for the game? Each of the legendary changes, we decided that was a good enough change that we should make it. It made legendary play better. The audience could understand it. It wasn't too different of a change. But one of the changes I've tried to make is just stripping off the negative ability altogether off legendary. It just causes a lot of pain. There are restrictions on how many Legends we can make, partly because

of the nature of Legendary and it being a drawback. It makes it hard to make some cards for people that don't care about Legendary. If I want to make a Creature Lord, the players, the people who play Commander would love to make it Commander so they can make a deck around it. But people who don't care about Commander want to play four of them if they stack. So, like, it makes tension that would just go away. The problem is, and the reason this change hasn't happened, is how many cards affected? Okay, all the Legends.

How easy is the change to Grock? Not too hard to Grock in the sense that, okay, it just doesn't do anything anymore. What is the emotional toll? Well, the one thing is, there are some things that are woven into the game that were because, like I said, you design to the restrictions you have.

Let's say we had a card that we didn't want to have two of them play at once. Like Grok's Thumb, for example. Being able to flip multiple coins got a little too good, so we just made it legendary now you can't have to corrupt thumb at one point um if we change it back uh i talked about how we might need to make a unique a unique keyword meaning the thing the drawback that um the drawback that uh

legendary has my thought was we might want to uh them like we did with Walls and Defender. And then on the few things that needs it, we'd put it on it. But knowing what had it and what didn't, even though most of it wouldn't have it, that would, that understands to grok that that's harder to grok. The emotional toll is huge. A lot of people

really have been, they love Commander and love Legends and have been playing for a long time. And the Legend rule in its sort of vacuum is flavorful. I mean, there's a lot of disconnect from it. If I have two different versions of the same character, I can have them out. I can have a copy of a character. You can have a copy of the character.

There's a lot of this is one guy that, you know, one character that doesn't really hold true a lot of the times, but there true a lot of the times. But there's a lot of connection to it. There's a huge emotional toll. Every time I bring it up on my blog, I have people like, no!

So it has a big thing. And can the game work without it? Yes, but there's a lot of things that we've woven around it. There's a lot of ways we've done it. And 26 years in, the inertia, like extracting that becomes a little hard to do. It is not an

easy thing to do, and it's the kind of change that I don't know we'll make. I mean, I would like to make the change. I think long term for Magic, it would do some good, but it comes with all the different costs I'm talking about, and so I don't know if it's a change we're going to make. Okay, so

I'm almost to work, so I'll talk about one last change that we haven't made to walk through this again, why we haven't made it. So if people have ever read my articles about talking about what I would do if magic started all over again, I talk about how I would prefer instant not be a card type. I prefer instant be a super type. And the idea being that instead of having instant sorceries, you'd have sorceries, normal sorceries, and then you'd have instant sorceries. And instant sorceries would be what we now refer to as instants. But when I want to refer to instant sorceries

as a singular thing, which you want to do a lot, you would just call them sorceries. Then, flash as a creature type, or flash as a mechanic, would not exist. If I wanted to have a creature with flash, I'd have an instant creature, or an instant artifact,

or an instant enchantment. So if I wanted something to have flash, I'd have an instant creature or an instant artifact or an instant enchantment. So if I wanted something to have flash, I would just put instant on it. It does a lot of things that are really nice. It cleans things up. It makes it so I can refer to instant sorcery as a singular thing. But why have we made that change? Well, there's a lot of... So let's go through it.

How many cards affected? A lot of cards. Because instants and sorcerers have been something for the length of the game, we've made a lot of cards that care about them, and a bunch of them care about them individually. A lot of them are like, I can return an instant from your graveyard,

or I can... I can regrow a sorcery from your graveyard. I can copy an instant from your graveyard. Or I can regrow a sorcery from your graveyard. I can copy an instant. There's things that care about one of them without caring about the other. And so there's a lot of things affected. How easy is it to grok?

That's probably one of the biggest problems. So if I say, return target sorcery from the graveyard to your hand, that card exists. There's cards that say that. Okay, well, what that means now is return a modern-day sorcery to your hand. But if we made the change, that rules text would mean return a modern-day instant or sorcery to your hand. But the point is, that rules text would make sense. Like, if you picked up a card and printed on it was return target sorcery

from a graveyard to your hand, from your graveyard to your hand, you would go, oh, assuming we made the change, oh, I can get instant or sorcery. But the card actually means no, just sorcery. So there would be cards written one way that make sense, that work within the rules,

but that's not what the card does. So that's a big change. Not only is it not easy to grok, like it's you'd have things in which you think you can grok it because it does make sense in the rules, but that's not actually what the card does because we've changed the language in a way that changes the

identity of what things mean. So old cards written with old language make sense in new language, but not the way it made sense in the old language. Emotional toll, that's another one. I think people have a lot of attachments to instant. I will say, by the way, that I think the instant change,

it would be easier from an emotional standpoint to make than the legendary change. Like when I talk about instant, I have more people going, yeah, do it, than I do with legendary, where I don't have a lot of cheerleaders for my legendary change. There's people that are indifferent, and there's a lot of people that don't want to do it, but there's not a lot like, yeah, do it. With the instant change, I have more people championing it than I do that.

So emotionally speaking, it would be a little bit easier. But there would still be people that would not be happy if we made that change. And then, can the game work? Yeah, yeah, the game can work with it. Does it make the game better? I think it does in some subtle ways that I think are important but aren't super obvious. So it's one of those changes where it is not, it affects a lot of cards. It has a big issue to do with how easy they are to grok, especially pre-printed versions

of it. And, I mean, it has some emotional toll. I'm sure that's the thing stopping me. I think the audience is a little more accepting of it than some other changes I might talk about. And so it's one of those changes where, you know, like, it's hard enough change to make with enough inertia that it's not something I think we will easily do. And it's not a change I currently expect us to make. It's one of those changes like back in 6th edition.

Like, ooh, maybe I could have made that back in 6th edition. But I think we've definitely, we're far enough now that I'm not sure whether we can make that change. So anyway, I'm now at work. I hope today shows you the idea of how we're willing to make changes, but there's a lot of things to take into account and then not everything is so obvious why we should or shouldn't make a change.

But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it and gave you a little insight into the process. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's time to end my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.