Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #812: Timeshifted Sheets

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

I talk about the creation and design of the timeshifted sheets from Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work, coronavirus edition. Okay, so today I'm going to talk all about the time-shifted sheets from Time Spiral Block. In a nod to, we have Time Spiral Remastered coming up, and so I'm going to talk all about how the time-shifted sheets came to be. And so I'm going to talk all about how the time shift sheets came to be. And I'll walk through that. We actually did three of them. We did one for Time Spiral. We did one for Planar Chaos.

And we did one for Future Sight. So I'm going to talk about all three of them today. Okay. So when we first – so real quickly, a summation of Time Spiral. So what happened in Time Spiral was we wanted to reset Planeswalkers. They were a little bit too powerful. They were like gods. We wanted to do something to shake things up and have a big event that would allow us

to sort of reset how Planeswalkers function, make them a little more, a little less godlike, a little more human. As part of doing that, I had looked at mechanics that I'd had, and suspend was one of them, and I also ended up using, we ended up using Flash, Flash got keyword for the first time, split second, we realized there was a neat time theme that went on, and that there was a neat time theme that went on and that there

was a temporal disaster was the idea that was resetting everything. But when I realized that I had started as head designer in the middle of Champions of Kamigawa, but Ravnica was the first block that I really got to plan the whole block. So Timesprout was the second block

and I was very, very big. One of the things I did when I took over was I wanted to do what I call block planning, that we weren't just doing a set and then figuring out what to do when we got to the next set. We were planning it ahead of time. In the previous year,

Ravnica block had been what I call the pie method, right? It had been we took something and chopped it into three. What I was interested in trying with Time Sparrow block was something where each set had a progression and a theme, but it fit as part of a larger puzzle. And so the idea was, oh, well, we're doing time. We're dividing into three parts. How do you divide time into three parts? Well, you do past, present, and future. And so that was the idea, that I would do the first set would be about the past, the second

set would be about the present. I'll get to that in a second. That was a complicated one. And the third one would be about the future. Okay. So anyway, we're in the middle of a time spiral. We're talking about the past. And one of the things I realized as we were talking was that nostalgia played a

big role. Like, nostalgia ended up being a big part of what the block was about. It had kind of a time, the mechanics were time-themed, but we also, we really realized that nostalgia, like one of the ways to say, how do I show you the past? It's by bringing up the past. And so in Plane Shift, which was the middle set of Invasion Block, it was Invasion, Plane Shift, Apocalypse. In Plane Shift, we had done this thing where cards had art, but when we went to foil, we got a new piece of art so that in foil half the time it would appear with foil

with the original art, and half the time it had unique new art that you could only get in foil in packs in this thing. This is like pre-Collector's Edition, Collector's Boosters. And this is kind of the early, early, you talk about booster fun type stuff, this is one of the early times of us messing around

and so there were, it was like Tongarth and the, was it the Predator, which is the bad guy's ship, and there was one other card. But anyway, there were three, there were three story-related things.

And, or was it, maybe it was Weatherlight and not the Predator. Actually, I think it is in Plainship. It must have been the Weatherlight. Anyway, we had done this cool thing where half the time the foil were something different. They were a different piece of art. So that inspired me. And so one day in the meeting I said, okay, guys, what if half the time instead of getting a foil of a card in the set, what if you got a foil from the past? foil of a card in the set, what if you got a foil from the past?

And the idea that I pitched was, what if just every once in a while, cool old cards showed up, you know? And I liked the idea that, you know, one of the big flavor that we were playing with was this temporal accident was grabbing things from the past and pulling them forward. That's why in the set, for example, there's like Safi Eriksdottir, who was the person who said, Akhan's run is Valurgoif. That was her last words.

What if we plucked her right before Valurgoif got her, and she showed up? So we were able to make a Safi Eriksdottir card, and we made a Mishra card, and we made a bunch of characters from the past that we pulled forward. And the idea was time is sort of, you know, because there's like a

temporal accident here, it's grabbing things from throughout time. So it'd be neat if in your booster pack what if it was just grabbing things from Magic's past. That was the idea. Now at the time, I think when I first pitch things sometimes, if I'm not sure how they're

received I tend to go low I mean I said okay so the way I originally pitched the time shifter sheet was I said okay imagine if whenever you get a foil half the time instead of the normal foil you would get a

foil from the past and I think the idea is I'm like maybe we double the amount of foil so you still get the foil from the past. And I think the idea is, I'm like, maybe we double the amount of foils so you still get the normal foils at the normal rate. So I wasn't trying to lessen the normal foil, but I was saying, hey, some of the time in your pack, this card from the past would show

up. And then as I got some reception, I was really worried when I first pitched it that people were like, no! And I'm like, well, it's just an infrequent thing that happens. It's kind of cool. And what I found was people were a lot more receptive to it. And so what happened was

early on, it was like, oh, half the time when you get a foil. And then it's like, well, what if we did it every 10 packs? How about every 5 packs? How about every 4 packs? Every 3? Every 2? How about every pack? And so in the end, uh, that the idea that I was a little worried people would be nervous about, everybody got so excited that we ended up putting it one per pack. Okay. So the way it worked for those that don't know, I'll tell you a little bit

about collation here. Um, so when we make a sheet of magic, we literally print a whole bunch of cards on one sheet. Um, now it depends, different sheets are different sizes. Um, the sheets we were printing on at the time we did that were one, what we call 121, which means it was 11 by 11. If you imagine, uh, 11 cards stacked on top of each other horizontally and vertically, uh, that that's 121 cards. And so what happens is you print it, you print the fronts, you print the backs, and then they have a machine that chops them into the individual cards.

But that is how we print it. So when we are doing collation, one of the things we can do is we can choose for any slot in the booster, we can pick whatever sheet we want to pull it from. Now, normally in magic, you're pulling from the land sheet, the common sheet, the uncommon sheet, the rare sheet, and sometimes there's more than one of those, and you are dropping those in slots. So for this set, we wanted you to get a time-shifted card in every slot. So what we did is we had our own time-shifted sheet, and the time, that was 121, at least when we were printing, those were 121.

So we got 121 cards on the sheet. So what happened was we actually gave Aaron Forsythe, who was on the design team. So the design team was led by Brian Tinsman. I was on the team. Aaron was on the team. And I think Devin Lowe was rounded out the team. Anyway, so Aaron got put in charge of the time-shifted sheet. Now, early on, the original idea was that these just be cards from throughout Magic,

and we were putting all sorts of crazy things on the sheet. And then what we found out was one of the big issues that came up was how weird was it to have a card that came out of what we then called a standard legal booster that wasn't standard legal. And so we ended up – so Aaron basically got put in charge of the sheet. So he would make – he would pick all the cards, make a choice of 121 and then come and show it to to us. And show it not just to us, but other people and get notes and stuff. And we'd give notes, and he'd show it around and get other notes. And then he kept tweaking, and Aaron was constantly, constantly tweaking it. So anyway, early on, there was just crazy stuff on the sheet because it could be whatever. And then we made the decision that, oh, well, if you actually think about it, you know,

what if we made things that were, by putting them in the sheet, we made them standard legal. So then we decided, okay, well, let's make cards we're willing to have in standard. Because that makes them also exciting in the sense that when you get them in your pack, not only can you play them here in limited, but you can play them also in constructed, in standard.

So anyway, Aaron then had to change the sheet again. The sheet went through, I have no idea how many, how many iterations, but over a hundred. I mean, Aaron was constantly changing the sheet and fiddling with this and changing that. Um, one of the things that he was trying to do when making the sheet was we really wanted to show off kind of the breadth of what magic was.

And so there were a lot of, we were trying to pull from all over the place. So they showed up from a lot of different sets from a lot of different times. Oh, the one rule was that all of the cards had to be in the old border. So this was after 8th edition. So in 8th edition, Magic came out. We had a border for quite a while. And then in 8th edition, we changed the border. The old border was a little bit harder to read.

It was like white on. Now we have sort of the nameplates are flatter and we have black on them. The old ones were, they were very flavorful, but they weren't easy to read. They weren't very practical. They were hard to read from a distance. And, but anyway, because we were doing the past, we decided we, we really wanted to show off, um, the old frame, so the rule was everything had to be old frame, so it had to be from before 8th edition, 8th edition and Mirrodin is where it started, and so, um, uh, Mirrodin, Kamigawa block,

uh, and then Ravnica, and then Time Throw, so we, we were pulling from things that weren't from the last like three years. Anyway, so we made – no. Aaron – the whole team really wanted it to be something that was kind of showed off the past, had some fun. We purposely put a few cards on there. Like there's a 1W for 1-2 there's a, uh, a one W for one, two called squire, which is a bad card. And we thought it was kind of fire,

funny that like, like sometimes you got a really amazing cards and sometimes you got squire. Um, and so there was a lot of, it was really trying to show up the breadth of what magic had been and all the cool things. And there were one of mechanics and it was just something that really, who like the idea we wanted is that the cards were sort of fun and cool, but who knew what was going to pop up? Because we didn't – I don't think we shared the Times Pearl sheet right off the gate.

We sort of let people – in fact, we didn't even tell people – so I got to tell this story real quick. So what happened with the Times Pearl sheet is an interesting story. So it was supposed to be secret. We, in fact, had talked with the brand team and said we think this is a cool part of the set and we think there's enough

exciting things to market that could we just keep this secret? Could we not tell people about the time shifted sheet? And then when they show up for the pre-release, they'll find out. The problem was that some playtest cards got leaked. And one of the playtest cards where the cards have a card code, right? So like RG01 means rare green 01.

You know, the first rare green card. So one of the cards had a B in place of where you would see C for common or U for uncommon or R for rare. Mythic Rare didn't exist yet for M. But anyway, so there was a B there, which was for bonus sheet. And so at the time, no one quite knew what to make of it. But everyone sort of acknowledged it was weird because it wasn't one of our normal rarities, and they didn't know what that meant. And then when we put out the announcement, somebody accidentally listed the cards.

They listed the number of cards in the set. They listed the time shift sheet. Now, the funny thing is we had not purposely counted them in the set. For things like on Magic Online, you couldn't redeem them, right? So they were counted a little bit differently, but we missed that, so we accidentally put out the wrong number. Like, I think 422

was the number with the sheet, and it was like 301 without the sheet. So we put out the number 422 and then said, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, we mean 301. But then the audience was like, wait, wait, what? Why would you accidentally say 422? And then they looked back at the B from the thing. And so there's this theory that they had on the websites, on the people that were speculating, that there was

some mystery sheet because they figured out that the difference between 422 and 301 was 121, if I did my math right there. Anyway, the number we gave and the number – there's 121 difference. Hopefully my numbers were 121 different. So anyway, there was a lot of debate among the audience of whether or not this mystery sheet existed or not. And so sadly at the pre-release, those in the know. Oh, the other thing that happened was when we had given out marketing images, a chroma ended up getting used in an ad. And so there was a TV ad

where they used the chroma card. So they got the card from it, but the card from it had the expansion symbol. Remember the purple, I'll get to the purple expansion symbol in a second. But anyway, there was an ad that showed this chroma card and it clearly had an expansion symbol in a second. But anyway, there was an ad that showed this Chroma card, and it clearly had an expansion symbol with a color you'd never seen before.

So anyway, by the time we got to the release, those in the know that were on the rumor sites kind of knew the time shift to see it existed. They didn't know what was on it, but they did know it was 121 cards. Now, a lot of people who didn't read the rumor sites didn't know that, so there were some surprises, but it's kind of funny that that got revealed in a way we did not intend. And it got revealed

like there's a whole bunch of things that happened. We accidentally shouldn't have released the right number, and we accidentally should have used the achroma in the ad, and there's all these things that should have been caught that for weird reasons like the achroma thing is funny. The person that would have caught it on the brand team was sick the other person was brand new and didn't realize it you know and like anyway there's a whole bunch

of things that happened to make that come out i wrote a whole article by the way about if you're curious to hear about this whole story of how the audience figured it out and we did a few things to try to make it not quite as clear what we were. We did a few things to try to make it not quite as clear what we were doing. I did some tricky things to try to hide it a little bit. Anyway. Oh, so let's talk about the expansion symbol on the Time Shifter sheet.

So, originally we were thinking of having a completely different expansion symbol just to represent that. Because it was, like, when you redeemed it on Magic Island, you didn't redeem the time treasure sheet.

So we're like, oh, maybe we're supposed to have it different. But it was in the same booster pack. We thought that would be confusing. So we said, okay,

we'll keep the same expansion symbol, but we'll give it a new rarity, if you will. And so we came up with the purple. So the funny thing is, we said, okay,

what color should this expansion symbol be? Well, right now, we have black for common, silver for uncommon, gold for rare. We're like, okay, well, what color should we make it be? Well, right now we have black for common, silver for uncommon, gold for rare. We're like, okay, well, what color should we make it? I'm like, well, let's stay away from magic colors. So we decided not to do white or blue or red or green.

And that led us with yellow and purple and orange. And brown, I think. Brown just looks kind of ugly. It just didn't look good. And it was kind of hard to read brown, especially versus something like black. It just red is dark. Yellow ended up being too close to gold,

which was rare, so we couldn't use yellow. So it came down to either purple or orange. And I think we decided we just liked the way purple looked. Interestingly, a couple years later, we had to do Mythic Rarity, and we ended up using orange in Mythic Rarity. So,

the orange we didn't use, like, we ended up using purple for the time sheet, and the orange ended up getting saved, interestingly, and ended up getting used in Mythic Rare. Okay. So, we made the sheet. Aaron spent infinite time.

We tweaked it. It came out. Oh, and so the way we did it was it was one per booster. So every booster had one time shifted sheet. And the way it was done in Time Spiral was it was separate. So you got your normal rare. You got your commons, your uncommons, your normal rare. And then this is before Mythic Rare. And then you got your commons, your uncommons, your normal rare, and then, this is before Mythic Rare,

and then you got a time-shifted sheet, and your time-shifted card could be common, could be uncommon, could be rare. We, um, they all had a purple symbol, so there was no differential there, but as far as getting the card that

once was, like, a rare, you could get a card that had previously only been a rare card in that slot. So it let you get sort of two rares. Okay, so we do this. So that was pretty clean. The time shifted sheet in Time Spiral was a pretty clean, simple idea.

I mean, it was the first time we'd really done anything like that. So it definitely was kind of innovative for its time. But it was very straightforward. Okay, it's a set about the past. Ooh, what if every pack just had a card from the past using an old card frame and stuff? So that was very simple.

So we didn't know that we were going to do a time-shifted sheet in Planar Chaos, the future site. In fact, the original idea was it was a time spiral thing. It's about the past. We're moving away from the past. Okay. But we had gotten so fond of the time structure sheet.

It was just so much fun. We had a lot of fun with it that we thought about it. Bill Rose was the lead designer for Plan or Chaos, and I was the lead designer for Future Sight. I saved Future Sight for myself because I knew it was the most designer for Planar Chaos, and I was the lead designer for Future Sight. I saved Future Sight for myself because I knew it was the most complicated one

because making a set of things that don't exist but could exist was just a very complicated theme. So what happened was I came up with the idea. We weren't planning to do a time shift machine in either Planar Chaos or Future Sight, but then one day while thinking about things, I came up with the idea of what we ended up calling preprints or future shifted cards.

I said, what if, you know, the cards, the cards from in time spiral were from the past? What if we had cards from the future? What if, you know, what if we did the same thing we had done in time Spiral but backwards? Now, the fun thing about this was, well, Cards from the Future, like, the future doesn't exist. So we were making cards. So what we said was Cards from a Potential Future.

Although I will admit we have gone out of our way to try to, whenever we can, to actually print Cards from the Future Shift Receipt. So, hey, it appeared for the first time in this set and then was pre-printed back in future site. And so we, anyway, I decided that I wanted to do that. I thought that was a cool idea. So once I decided that future site should have a time shift receipt, okay, well then Planar Chaos needed one,

what I call the Rule of Three. If the first and third expansion do something, people expect the second. They expect kind of, if you do it on two of them, they expect it on three of them. The only exception is if something gets introduced in the second set, then it could be in the second and third set and not in the first set. That's the only time when people don't get grumbly

about the Rule of Three. This is back when we did blocks. Okay. So we spent a lot of time trying to think about how do you do the time-trigger sheet? Like what do we do? And then the funny thing is when I first tried to get Bill on board, I wanted him to lead. Bill didn't understand because it was a set about the present. Well, isn't every set about the present?

I'm like, well, it's about alternate present. It's about what if it's the present, but it's an alternate reality? What if magic was different? And so Bill just didn't understand this concept, so I made some cards. It's a black Wrath of God. And the card

that really got to Bill was, I made a white memory lapse. So the card memory lapse from Homeland but in white. I'm like, white's about delaying. So the idea I said to Bill is, there's a lot of things that have been done some way but you could imagine,

what if Wrath of God had just been a black card instead of a white card? That makes sense, black's about creature killing. What if white's about delaying? What a black card instead of a white card? That makes sense. Black's about creature killing. White's about delaying. What if Memory Lapse had been a white card? Now, Bill, interestingly, had made Memory Lapse. Bill had designed it. It was originally in Mirage.

And then Bill came to Wizards to do an interview for the job that he ended up getting. And while he was there, they had him sit in on a Homeland Development meeting. And they ended up making a hole, a blue hole. And so Bill recommended, said, well, here's a card from Mirage you guys can use, and he gave them Memory Lapse. So Memory Lapse was Bill's card. So anyway, when I said white Memory Lapse, like, it just made Bill click. He's like, I got it. White Memory Lapse.

Like, that's a cool thing. Here are things as they could have been. So the idea of cards that you know but color shifted had been part of the topic from the very beginning. And then at one point, we were racking our brains trying to understand how to make a time-shifter sheet. And then I think it was Mark Gottlieb that made the suggestion of, well, what if the time-shifter sheet are just the cards, the actually shifted and colored cards?

You know, the memory laps, the memory laps didn't end. You know, the memory lapses, the memory lapses didn't end up making, the white memory lapses didn't end up making instead. But obviously the black wrath of God became damnation and that did. What if those were the time shifted cards, the ones that were specifically cards you knew, but color shifted?

And that seemed really cool. So what we did is, because we knew that they, because the rest of the set had the normal frames of the current 8th edition frames and we – in the time shift sheet in Time Spiral, we used the old frames, the pre-8th edition frames. We said, OK, well, let's make – what if the 8th edition frames had just been different? so we sort of, I sat with the designers and they took a couple takes on it we had a lot of notes back and forth and we ended up coming with

sort of like a what if what if 8th edition frames had just ended up a little bit differently and that's what we ended up using for the time shifted, the color shifted sheets cards and that ended up being very straightforward because we had wanted to do a bunch of color shifting

just because it was a fun thing to do. Oh, and the other thing we did is each of the cards was creatively designed, it was named, and the art was done as if it was a card from the very set that the original appeared in. So if you go look at the art,

the art of every card was taken as if that happened in the same set, just a different, you know, it had been a different color. So all the creative was matching where the card originally came from. Anyway, we had a lot of fun with that. And because these time-shifter cards were new, like the time-shifter cards in Time Spiral were all repeats.

So we gave you one per pack. We decided that one per pack—I think we had 45 Color Shifter cards in Planar Chaos. And if we'd given you one per pack, that would have made them— I think the cards in Time Spiral were two times as rare as a rare, is how it ended up playing out. And so that would be a little bit too rare. I mean, Mythic Rare wasn't even a rarity yet. And so we decided instead of giving you one card, we would give you four.

So you had three commons, and then you had one slot that was either uncommon or rare. And, like, I forget the drop rate, but, like, three out of four was uncommon and one out of four was rare, or maybe two out of three was... Something around there. So we made it so it matched it so that the the rarity between uncommon i think uncommon to rare is one to three so i think we did three than one is my guess but

that is me guessing um but anyway so we we made that frame we put it in. In Planar Chaos, you could open up your normal rare and your uncommon slash rare color shifted slot could also be a rare. So you could open up two rares. Okay, which leads us to Future Sight. So Future Sight, one of the things that was fun for Future Sight is, A, we once again went to the card frame people.

We said, okay, we're not doing like the color shifted frame was an alternate reality version of the 8th edition frame. But now we said, okay, let's imagine we're just... So a bunch of the things we did were things that I suggested because they were some stuff that we talked about. Well, if magic was done all over again, we might have done it this way. So we moved where the mana system, where the mana was, so you could

fan your cards and see it. And we did it so that the color came first, because that's how people wanted to talk about it. And we put a code that was a visual code to tell you what card type it was. So we did a bunch of things. We sort of, like, re-envisioned and, like, maybe in the future, you know, this kind of stuff gets incorporated. So we made a special

futuristic frame. And then what we did for the creative on the future shifted cards is each one, the creative team thought of places we might go. So just like we were making mechanics that one day we might do, the creative team was coming up with worlds that one day we might do. And so if you ever look at future sites, there's a lot of kind of hinting at the kind of places we might be.

You know, like we definitely tease, like maybe we do a Greek mythology set. So some of the stuff we did came to pass. Some of the stuff we hinted at didn't. Much like the mechanics, some came to pass and some didn't. The same is true with the creative. Oh, and one of the things that's really

interesting, one of the cards, it was a direct damage spell. What was it called? It's a direct damage spell that's colorless. I'm blanking on the name of it. You guys won't know the name of it.

On it, not only was the art hinting at the future, but the flavor text was also hinting at things that didn't exist yet. That flavor text mentions... Oh, blink. I'm blanking on this. The dragon from Tarkir. Ugin. It mentions Ugin for the first time. And so Ugin, like, wasn't even

a thing yet. Like, we just made this sort of oblique reference to Ugin and, like, I joke that there's few cards that have inspired as much creative as that one piece of flavor text on the card. Like Ugin wasn't even a character.

And we mentioned Ugin. Who's Ugin? And that inspired all sorts of stuff. But anyway, so we really had fun. One of the things that I had done was I was planning to keyword some cards. So in Future Sight, we ended up keywording Lifelink and Death Touch and Reach and Shroud.

Shroud would later become Hexproof. But anyway, we put those on future cards so you could see the cards from the future that mentioned these things that had never been keyworded before. And the very next set, we keyworded them. We also made reference of – there were ones that made – like there was a cycle of cards that made reference to cards that existed. But the white one referenced a card that had not existed yet that was pulled from the future we

anyway we definitely sort of had a lot of fun of teasing things that like I thought maybe one day we would do and there were a whole bunch

of mechanics some of them went on to become mechanics like an early version of Chroma was there, which later became Devotion. Delve was on there for the first time. Anyway, so there was definitely a bunch of things

that we hinted at mechanics. And some of those mechanics we've used. And some of those cards we've used. Anyway, so the future shifted sheet, there's 81 cards on it. So what we ended up doing there was we made a system where you got a randomized amount of them. So I think you got between, like, 5 and 10 in your pack of mixed rarities. So future site, interestingly, you only got one rare slot.

And the rare slot could or couldn't be a time shifted card, but there only was ever one rare slot could or couldn't be a time-shifted card, but there only was ever one rare slot. So a fine trivia question is, in Time Spiral, what sets could you pull two rares from, not counting foils? And the answer was Time Spiral and Planar Chaos you could, but not Future Sight, just in the way we dropped things. But anyway, once again,

because so much of the... there are 81 cards, and they were cards you'd never seen before, and they were very much... we knew the future-shifted cards were a very big exciting part of the... There are 81 cards, and they were cards you'd never seen before. And they were very much... We knew the future shifter cards were a very big, exciting part of the set. We wanted to give you more of them. So, like, Time Spiral, the past was kind of like a little bit of, like, you know, a little flavoring. So we didn't need... One per pack was fine.

And the color shifter stuff, there's a little more, so we gave you more. And then Future Sight was very much the center of what was going on, so we gave you a lot more. But anyway, it's funny, because when looking back, it was a very exciting... Nowadays, if you look at a lot of the stuff we do,

it's interesting to me, as a magic historian, looking back in the past and seeing us trying things for the first time, and then being successful, and then it becomes a well that we can go to and try different things with. And so the idea of a bonus sheet that now might seem kind of quaint at the time

was a new thing. So that, my friends, is the full story, at least 30 minutes worth of it, of the time-shift from Time Spiral block. So anyway, I hope this was interesting to you. It was fun to reminisce. But, I see my desk. So we all know what that means.

It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys had fun today, tiptoeing through the past. And if Time Spiral sounds fun, Time Spiral Master is coming your way soon, so you might enjoy that.

Anyway, I gotta go. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.