Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #862: Obsoleted Things

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

In this podcast, I explore the history of the many things Magic has stopped using.

I'm not pulling in 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 be talking all about obsoleted terms. Well, different things have been obsoleted in the game. So one of the things about Magic is it celebrates its 28th birthday this year, and there are a lot of things that Magic has done that it no longer does. So I'm going to walk through today and talk about them. Okay, so first up, card types. Okay, so when Alpha first happened, there were a few card types that didn't work the way we now use them. For example, enchantments. If you were a local enchantment, meaning you are an aura that goes on something,

originally it would say enchant what, meaning you are an aura that goes on something. Originally, it would say enchant what you enchanted. So in Alpha, there was enchant artifact, there's enchant creature, there's enchant dead creature, there's enchant land, and there's enchant wall. So the interesting thing was early on in Magic, if I said destroy target enchantment, and you had something that said enchant creature, you just had to know that that meant it was an enchantment. I guess the word enchant was in it. So I think come 6th edition, we just said, you know what? Things should be labeled for what they are. Enchantment should be labeled enchantment. So we made the enchantment and then introduced aura as a term. And then enchant creature, for example, became a keyword on the card rather than built into the subtype or into the card type.

Okay, next. Another thing that was a little bit different in Alpha was creatures originally didn't say creature on them. They said summon. So if you were a goblin, it would say summon goblin or summon merfolk or summon elf. And once again, if you're going to destroy a creature, okay, I'm going to destroy a target creature. The creature card wouldn't even say creature on it, right? How do you, if you're a beginner, how do you even know that that's a creature? I mean, you can look at it and go, well, it looks like a creature, but once again, we decided when we changed the terminology, instead of saying summon, we just made it say creature. So creature with a subtype. So instead of summon goblin, it's creature subtype goblin. Another thing that was in alpha that was a little different from how

it works now is artifacts originally were mono, poly, and continuous. What a mono artifact meant is that you had to tap it to use it. So instead of having a tap symbol, or tap symbol was in alpha, but instead of saying you tapped it, just being mono implied that it had to be tapped. Poly meant you could do it as many times as you wanted, and the continuous was, it wasn't, there was no activation, just it did something. Those terms did not last

very long. They quickly went away and just they became artifacts. Another card type that's since gone away that was an alpha was interrupt. uh the rules the way the rules work to change a bit i'll get to that a little later but uh in the early game uh before sixth edition um if i wanted to do something and have you not be able to respond to me doing it the way interrupts worked is they're like instance but you can only respond to an interrupt with

another interrupt so if you do something and i cast a counterspell, which would be an interrupt, you could use an interrupt, which would be another counterspell to interrupt with my, but you couldn't use just plain instants. You had to use an interrupt. When 6th edition got done, we sort of cleaned it up and changed how the system worked. And that system basically allowed instants to function the way we needed them to. So interrupts went away. Another thing, so just to point out, in Alpha, enchantments weren't called enchantments. Creatures weren't called, or sorry,

local enchantments weren't called enchantments. Creatures were not called creatures. Artifacts had additional words onto them, and there was a whole card type called interrupt that went away. Okay, the one other thing that is, two other things that have since gone away, card type called Interrupt that went away. Okay. The one other thing that is... Two other things that have since gone away. Card type-wise. For a while, we had a thing called a Mana Source.

It would go on things like Dark Ritual, a spell that produced mana. It was... One of the problems we had sometimes is you wanted to be able to cast your spell to get the mana to cast your spell. And so Mana Source was kind of this thing we put on things that generated mana as a way in the rules to allow you to get the

mana. That went away when we sort of cleaned things up, but for a short period of time there were certain cards that were Mana Source. Also, in Legends, which was the third expansion, we introduced something called Enchant World. The way Enchant Worlds worked is they were enchantments

and when you cast them, they represented sort of you taking the battle to a certain plane. So when somebody cast another Enchant World, any player, anyone that was there would go away. So the idea was there only could be one Enchant World ever. We ended up making those, we took

World from being a part of the card to being a super type. So instead of enchant world, they became world enchantments. So once again, just like enchant went away with enchant artifact, enchant creature, enchant world went away. It worked a little bit differently, but we ended up making world into a super type. So now enchant worlds become world enchantments. We actually did them for a while. I think Mirage might be the last set. Mirage Block might be the last set that had enchant worlds in it.

But anyway, they changed over. Okay, next up, things that got obsoleted. A lot of creature types. I'm not going to read them all here, but there are, I don't know, maybe 100 or so creature types. I'm just going to talk a little bit about why some of them changed in general. Why do creature types get obsoleted? A couple things can happen. One is sometimes what happens is you do something like in original magic, um, you know, early magic, there were like different kinds of birds. There was a falcon or there was a chicken. And, um, what we realized was that

it was hard for us to, for example, make a bird lord because I could make a falcon lord, but then it doesn't help the other birds. So we realized was early magic, we went a little too broad on some things. And so I said, you know, let's consolidate down a little bit. Okay, instead of having every individual bird, what if we just make bird a creature type? And then if I want to have something affect birds, it can affect all birds. Sometimes early magic also would get creature types that were very specific that either matched the name of the card or like like for example early magic actually had a dinosaur and we stopped making it a dinosaur because at the time we didn't support dinosaur um so normally what happens when those go away is

if it falls into something we have already maybe we just make it a beast maybe we make it a horror maybe you know there's some catch-alls that we can use. And so a lot of times when things get sort of obsoleted, it's because we sort of consolidated them for something. Now sometimes, as with Dinosaur, something can be used, then obsoleted, then come back. Like when we introduced Dinosaur in Ixalan, we went back to the few cards that had originally been Dinosaurs and a few that sort of weren't called Dinosaurs,

but essentially were Dinosaurs, and put that in. Another category sometimes is unglued and unhinged and unstable have introduced creature types. And for a while, the ruling was anything in an unset is sort of an official black-bordered creature type. And then at some point, we decided that there's some silly stuff, like um... What is it? Like, the biggest, baddest, nastiest, scariest creature you'll ever see.

There's just some silly stuff that's in there. So we made a rule and we said that those aren't official from... If I'm playing a black-bordered card and I have to name a creature type, I can't necessarily name that. But anyway, there's a lot of different things over the years that have been sort of absorbed into other things or changed to be something slightly different. But there are a lot of those. Okay, next up, obsoleted keywords.

Okay, so I'm going to talk, so I'm first going to talk about obsoleted in the sense that we don't support them anymore. They don't say that. And then I'm going to talk about obsoleted in that we support them. They're still in the rules. If you have a card that has this mechanic, it still can be played as this mechanic, but we don't make any more of them. Okay, so first the two obsolete keywords. So land home. Okay, so first, the two obsolete keywords. So, land home.

So, in Alpha, Richard made a big blue common creature. Sea serpent? I'm blanking on the name of it. Anyway, the idea was it lived in the water. So, Richard said, okay, if you don't have islands, you have to sacrifice the creature. And if your opponent doesn't have islands, you can't attack with the creature. And the idea was Richard was just really trying to capture the sense of flavor, right? Like, well, how do you live in the water?

You know, that's how you represent it. Well, if you have islands, you have water. And if your opponent has islands, they have water. And, you know, as long as you have water, it survives. As long as they have water, you can attack. And we ended up calling this ability Land Home, or the Island Home if it was for islands. There was a Forest Home at one point we finally decided

A, we didn't really need to support that and that we just didn't need the term even if we had it, we didn't need the term so land home and the sub categories of island home, forest home went away okay, next up substance

so there is a cycle of cards that are auras in mirage and the way they work is if you cast them sort of when you could normally cast a sorcery during your main phase uh they're auras that stick around but you can cast them at uh basically with flash uh but if you do then they only stick around at the end of turn. So essentially, like, these spells can be a permanent aura or kind of like a temporary spell. I mean, the aura stands around for the turn.

Anyway, Mark Gottlieb, back when he was the rules manager, was trying to make this work, and the rules were causing problem. So Mark came up with a very novel solution, which is he granted all five of these cards a ability called substance. That did nothing, but it allowed him to refer to it, and by having it, it allowed him to make it work. We later figured out, I don't know if it was Mark, but

some rules manager figured out how to do it without substance, and so substance went away. Okay, let's talk about some keywords now that are obsolete in the sense that we don't make new ones, or super infrequently. I'll talk about that in a second. But these are keywords that really we don't make anymore. So first up is banding. So banding is a keyword that allows your creatures to sort of band together, if you will, in combat. And what that means is it gives you some control as a person who has the banded creature. It allows you to sort of make your creatures all team up.

And on offense, it makes it harder for them to, you know, it's scary to block them. And on defense, it makes it easier for you to sort of figure out, like, you could team up your small guy with your bigger guy and let your smaller guy go. scared to block them and on defense it makes it easier for you to sort of figure out like um you could team up your small guy with your bigger guy and let your smaller guy go um the big thing about banding essentially is you get to a side where damage goes and so for example if you have a small bander instead of the damage killing your big creature you could put it all towards your little creature um banding went away i think the reason i i describe this best is i was a judge at the 1994 world championships um in or sorry 95 95 95 world championships which was in uh seattle uh was at

like the red lion hotel by the airport um but anyway the number one question we got at the World Championship, like the thing that the most people needed to ask about that they didn't understand was banding. And we're like, if the best of the best, if the top tier players don't understand how banding works, how do we expect the average person? And the funny thing is every once in a while, somebody on social media goes, I understand it and I'll talk with them. And about 90% of the time when I talk with them, they don't understand how it works. Just because banding, it works differently on attack than it does on defense.

And just how it interacts with other keywords and stuff is complicated. And we have done other stuff like soul bond and exalted. And we have done other things that were sort of similar that have a similar flavor space, although they work slightly differently. Next up is Fading. So Fading showed up

Where was Fading? Fading was in was it in Urza's Legacy? Is that right? No, no, Urza was a little later. Fading showed up. It was in a middle set. Anyway, Fading was an ability that said, when I enter the battlefield, put so many counters on me, fading in. And then when you couldn't remove a counter, it went away.

But that couldn't remove a counterpart through people. Because basically, you would take off the last counter, and then one more turn, it would stick around. But everybody thought when you took the last counter it would run away. So in Planet of Chaos, we changed up fading into vanishing. And it was basically fading except it worked the way that people thought it worked. And so we fixed that. Oh, I think fading was in Nemesis.

I think fading was in Nemesis. Next up, fear and Intimidate. So Fear, so the unlabeled, essentially, there's a card called Fear in Alpha and there's a creature that basically had the Fear ability, which means I can't be

blocked except by black and artifact creatures. The idea being I'm so scary that black creatures are used to it, so they're not afraid and artifact creatures they have no feelings although some do but anyway the

we ended up keywording it and so fear meant can only be black by black in artifact creatures it really only went on black creatures because it didn't make a lot of sense that non-black creatures would have it eventually we and also fear was weird by way, because the creatures with fear were not fearful, they were fear-inducing. And so fear kind of implied that they were afraid.

So at some point we changed it over, we made fear into intimidate. So intimidate worked just like fear, except what it said is, I can only be blacked by creatures that share my color or are colorless. And so that was a better version. It allowed us to put it on more cards. In the end what we realized was, your opponent didn't have a lot to say. Meaning if I

have a card that has Intimidate on a red creature and you are not playing red, and not playing any artifacts or colored creatures, you just can't stop me. There's just nothing you can do. And what we realized is we like to have a mechanic where,

hey, it helped getting through, but your opponent could do things to stop it. And Menace ended up being what we changed to. So Fear and Intimidate both sort of went to Menace, and it ended up in the same colors and stuff. Like Intimidate was in black and red mostly, and Menace is in black and red mostly. Next up, Landwalk. This is another mechanic starting in alpha. Landwalk said, if my opponent controls a certain color, so I have Forest Walk, if my opponent controls a forest, this creature can't be blocked. So this was kind

of like Intimidate, but reversed a little bit. Meaning, if I'm playing my opponent, I have an Island Walk creature, and my opponent has an island, there's nothing they can do about it. I mean, they could maybe destroy their own island if they have a way to destroy lands and only have one island out. But it really was non-interactive, and so it went away because we didn't like that. I will point out that I think there was a Landwalk card in Modern Horizons 2. One of the things we realized with Modern Horizons, because it's sort of having fun, that we've been letting Modern Horizons be a little more about pulling things from the past. So you do see Tribal the card type showed up there. Oh, I should bring that up, I guess.

Tribal the card type, Once again, we support it in the sense that tribal cards are tribal. And if you care about tribal, I mean, it does have it. But we really don't make much new tribal. As I was sort of pointing out, Modern Horizon 2 had one new tribal card and a land walk card.

So we don't like Modern Horizon since it dipped that toe in a little bit. But for most, like in normal premiere sets we just all these mechanics you know and tribal we're talking about we don't we don't use next up is shroud shroud is introduced in future sight it says nobody can target me uh but the problem was people played it as if nobody but me can target my creature uh and so we ended up changing shroud to hexproof because hexproof is what a lot of people thought Shroud was. Next up, Regenerate.

So Regenerate is, Mechanic goes all the way back to Alpha. Regenerate is about, it said, well, originally Regenerate was, when you went to the graveyard, if you had Regenerate, then you could pay a certain amount of mana and bring it back. But then with 6th edition rules, it ended up being, well, instead of happen when you die, you can spend mana to sort of put up like a shield, if you will, a regeneration shield. And then if you would die instead, it comes back. But it's a little weird. It didn't really match the flavor of regeneration. And so we ended up having regeneration go away, and mostly we replaced it

with indestructible to end of turn. It gets most of the function of what regenerate did, which is, oh, I'm about to die, oh, I can spend the mana, make myself indestructible, and now I wouldn't die where I would have before. And so indestructible has been filling a lot of that role.

Also, ante. Ante was, in fact, Anti was part of the game when Magic first came out. The way Anti works is when you draw your original hand

of seven cards, you take an eighth card and that card, the winner of the game, permanently gets the eighth card from the other player. It was never very popular.

In fact, when I first started playing Magic, one of the things you would set down would go, no Anti. player. It was never very popular. In fact, when I first started playing Magic, like, one of the things you'd set down, go, no ante. So ante was not very popular, and then it became an optional rule, and then it just got removed from the rule. So now ante's gone.

So I guess ante is truly... ante is truly obsoleted, because there is no... there's no more ante. Some of these other things I'm talking about. Another thing we did obsolete was a bunch of counters. The following counters all got obsoleted. Plus 0, plus 1, plus 0, plus 2, plus 1, plus 0, plus 1, plus 2, plus 2, plus 0, plus 2, plus 2, minus 0, minus 1, minus 0, minus 2,

minus 1, minus 0, minus 2, minus 1, minus 2, minus 2. Early Magic had a lot more individual counters. Now we only do plus 1, plus one, and minus one, minus one. Other than a few things like Modern Horizons, we tend not to put them in the same set. But we sort of consoled that just having so many. We like it when you're playing the game and you look and you see a counter on the opponent's creature. You know what counter it is,

and so you can figure out the stats of the creature. When there's all this stuff rolling around, it was hard to do. Okay, obsoleted rules. The Planeswalker Redirection Rule. Originally, the way it worked was, if I wanted to, let's say I had a Lightning Bolt or a Shock or something, and I wanted to hit your Planeswalker, I had to hit you, the player,

and then I had to redirect it from the player to the Planeswalker. Eventually, we said, you know what, let's just say the cards can, let's just change things and say, okay, this can hit target creature or player or Planeswalker. And so we just list Planeswalker as an option now. Also, the Planeswalker uniqueness rule, there used to be a rule that said if I have a particular Planeswalker out, I can't have a second of the same Planeswalker out. When we made Planeswalkers legendary, it got folded into the legendary rules, and legendary rules say that. So we were able to do that. Okay, next. Obsoleted concepts uh batches so in sixth edition we replaced batches with what's called a stack batches were very complicated it had to do the order you do things and how the

effects got resolved and i don't even want to try i don't even truly understand i i know bits of it but it's just really, really complicated. We once made a thing in the Duelist where we represented it with a Gnat's Rest to show how complicated it was. Okay, Bury. So Bury meant destroy a creature and then it can't be regenerated.

And so we don't really use regenerate anymore and even then we decided that we just wanted, like early on for some reason we kept posing regenerate. Like, like hey the whole point of regenerating is you regenerate so we stopped using that ability and so um we stopped using berry i still get people from time to time asking us to bring back berry although we don't have regenerate so i don't know why that is um instead of using berry now we'll use destroyer sacrifices you know we use other stuff okay damage on the stack so when six additional rules came around uh damage

like other things like spells would go on the stack so i could for example block your creature put damage on the stack so your creature will get damaged and then i can sacrifice my creature for something and now it's like oh no like you know if you want to do damage the creature has to be there to do damage so damage doesn't go on the stack anymore mana burn so mana burn when alpha came out there's a rule that said if I have extra mana at the end of any phase, it gets cleared, and I lose one life for every mana cleared this way, or take one damage for every mana cleared in this way.

Anyway, it was one of those rules that you had to learn that just didn't come up much. The story I always tell is, my design team, we decided to test to see if we could get rid of mana burn a month later like okay how did the games go and it hadn't come up in any of the games so that was a big sign that maybe it

doesn't happen enough to make people learn it uh next carrying mana over to another phase uh i i some point that we let you do that between phases but that's not how it works anymore um and then uh we used to have text that said during this phase do something and that got replaced with uh a beginning of phase or end of phase like there's now a trigger time that it happens a phase out zone oh it used to be when you got phasing when something phased out you went to a whole new zone called the phased out zone now you stay on the battlefield but you are sort of ignored by certain effects so you're treated as you're not there but you are still there and then indestructible used to be a word that just meant cannot be destroyed and became a creature i became a car sorry became a keyword that keeps things from being destroyed um that's a very subtle thing, but what happened was people were playing as if indestructible was a keyword, and it wasn't.

And in a few interesting, weird cases, it mattered. So we just made it into what people thought it was. Okay, next, obsolete terminology. Caster became controller. Early on, if we cared about who the caster of the card was, but it got weird because if I took control from you, I was the caster, even though I didn't cast it. So we changed to Controller. Casting cost changed over to mana cost.

And then converted mana cost changed over to mana value. So casting cost became mana cost when we got rid of casting. It's funny. We got rid of casting, made it play, and then later, casting came back. But during that time period when casting went away, caster went away and casting cost went away. And then

very recently, we took converted mana cost, which nobody understood. It always confused everybody, and we changed it into mana value. So the idea that mana cost and mana value are related, both have mana in their name, but they're different. By the way, for those who don't get it,

mana cost is like if shock costs one red mana, the mana cost is one red mana. The mana value is one. You know, the spell only costs one mana due. It used to be converted mana cost, now it's mana value. Counts as, we used to do this thing where, because there's a period of time where we only put one creature type on a creature, and so if we wanted to be more than one creature type, we had to say counts as. Now we just sort of put it there. We don't really use counts as anymore. The in-play zone became

the battlefield. This happened with the 2010 rules, Magic 2010. And then because of that, comes into play became enters the battlefield. So it used to be you had CIP effects for comes into play, and those turned into ETB effects for enter the battlefield. And also leaves play became leaves the battlefield. So once you begin the battlefield,

a bunch of terms followed that. Also is put into the graveyard from the battlefield became die. Basically what we found was people were just using the term die and it was easy to understand and it was way shorter, and so we just converted it over and no one seemed to have a problem with it.

I will note that it only goes on creatures. If you have an artifact or enchantment, if those trigger on going to the graveyard, we spell it out. But for creatures, we say die, just because creatures die where other things don't die. Okay. Next. Put a token onto the battlefield

got replaced by create a token. We do a lot of token creation and we decided it'd just be cleaner to just make a word that described what that meant. And create ended up being the word. And it's definitely been something that's been much like dies. Like, whenever we can change terminology and it doesn't throw people,

people just, like, it does what they assume for it to do. That's usually a good upgrade in that you're adding, you're chopping out words, but you're not really adding vocabulary because the card just does what it feels like it does. Those stuff are great. Next up, removed from the game, got replaced by exile. So here's the challenge with that particular one is originally you could be removed from the game, but there were effects that would sometimes bring you back. And so it was kind of a, it was confusing people. Like, well, am I really removed from the game if I can come back? Am I not, am I not not removed from the game if I can come back from that? And so we decided during 2010, that's 2010,

when we were updating, like, you know, play to Battlefield, we came up with a term for this called Exile. Which is funny, by the way. There was a card called exile that removed a creature from the game. In, I think, alliances. So, anyway, I think that's where we got that name from. Okay, next up. Unblockable got replaced by can't be blocked.

Okay, so here's an interesting story. So, back when we changed indestructible into a keyword, so indestructible was just an English word, but it was confusing people, so we decided to turn it into a keyword, so we made indestructible into the keyword indestructible. We wanted to do the same with unblockable because people really read it as a keyword, but what we found was there's enough different ways. Like the whole idea of a keyword is you want things to be said the same so that you have to replace the same text. Ability words, it doesn't have to be exactly the same. It just has to be the kind of the same and you can use an ability word. But for keywords, it's literally a substitution. Instead of saying thing X, I mean this. Now, you can do things with

keywords like keyword N where there's a number and then, okay, it changes based on what that number is. And there are keywords that sort of have some variables built into the naming. But essentially, if you don't work the same, you can't be keyworded. So we tried a keyword unblockable. It just couldn't be keyworded. And so we decided, well, since people read it as a keyword and we can't make it a keyword, let's change it so it doesn't feel like a keyword. So unblockable became can't be blocked um for the

wondering why we that by the way that's one of the the rare situations where we took something and made it more words we don't do that very often um luckily the cards that tend to be unblockable i mean it's not a lot of word changes um and it's the kind of cards that have it don't don't really need to be super short. Okay, next. Unaffected by summoning sickness. Became haste. Yeah, one of the funny things is... It's funny.

Summoning sickness is a term that we used to use in the game. And we don't use it on cards anymore. We really haven't replaced the concept with other words. So it's not really like we replaced the word. We just decided that the word shouldn't go on cards. And so, when we and we also realized at some

point early on that haste was a really good ability. We wanted to put in a lot of cards, and so it allowed us to get some sickness off the cards, because I think that was the only time we used it. And it allowed us to sort of give it a name. So, like, one of the reasons you want to make keywords is you think there's going to be a lot of

repeatableness going on and you want to be able to do that. Anyway, guys, I think that is all the obsoleted and retired terms. Like, one of the things that's very fun as a wrap-up today is it's really neat when you go back and look at the history of Magic that Magic has gone through a lot of changes. I think these changes were for the good.

I think the game keeps improving and getting better. I mean, I think one of the reasons Magic is so amazing is it started as an amazing game, and we've had 28 years of iteration of just constantly improving upon it to make it even better. 28 years of iteration of just constantly improving upon it to make it even better. But one of the reasons I wanted to do today's podcast is just sort of explain to you, like, hey, you know, part of the history of Magic is, yes, we've had successes. Yes, things have been added to the game that didn't start as part of the game. But likewise, there's some things that were part of the game and that had slowly gone away because, I mean, sometimes the terminology changes. Sometimes the whole concept goes away.

Sometimes, you know, we consolidate into something in a way because, I mean, sometimes the terminology changes, sometimes the whole concept goes away, sometimes, you know, we consolidate into something in a larger collection. But there's a lot of reasons, but, you know, that is a big part of magic. That magic, as it grows, not only is it gaining things, because there are a lot of things that are part of magic that did not start part of magic, but it's also losing things along the way. And when I say

losing things, sometimes, you know, it's changing. It's not always a loss. Sometimes it's a change. But anyway, that was the point of today's episode, to sort of talk about all the various things that we've obsoleted over the years. So, I hope this was interesting to you. I'm always fascinated on kind of

watching how the game changed, especially mechanically. So, anyway, this was a lot of fun for me, but I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see y'all next time. Bye-bye.