Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #943: Basic Lands

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about the history of basic lands and how their evolution over time influenced the rest of Magic.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. So today we get basic. Basic lands, that is. So today I'm going to talk all about basic lands for 30 minutes to tell you, hopefully more than you ever knew, about basic lands. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is sort of the history of basic lands because I don't know how many people know the history of Basic Lands. Okay, so, quick recap, for those that have not heard the story, this is a very classic story. So, Richard Garfield and his friend Mike Davis come to Seattle, Washington, to Wizards of the Coast, to try and sell Richard's

game RoboRally. So for those, by the way, that have never played RoboRally, the premise of the game is you are robots and you are racing through a factory, but you get cards that represent programming, going straight or right or left or going forward, and you have to kind of program what's going to happen. But you don't know what the other robots are going to do, and so anyway, chaos ensues. It's a very fun game. Anyway, so they meet with Peter Atkinson, who was the original CEO of

Wizards. And what Peter says is, wow, this seems like a really fun game. But the problem is the component pieces are too expensive. It's basically too expensive. We're too small of a company. We can't make a game with this many component pieces to it. And what Peter says is, look, here's what I can do. I have access to a printer. I have access to artists. So I could make cards with art. That's what I can make. So Richard goes home and comes back with the idea of a trading card game, makes magic and such. But what a lot of people don't know is when Richard came up with the trading card game, it's not as if he made the game from scratch. He actually made use of a game he already had that I think he called Five Magics. And so Five Magics is, well, was, I guess. He never made it. But I think it was very influenced by sort of the German resource games.

Catan or Settlers of Catan might be the most famous example, though that game actually came out after Magic came out. But the idea where you have component pieces and you're getting resources and you can make a sheep or something. You get your resources and you're building up your resources and you can trade resources and stuff. I think the earliest version was influenced by that. And so because

of that, because it had a board-centric thing, because you were going somewhere to a place, so he called it Five Magics, and the idea was each magic was associated with a place. And the reason, like I said, the reason it needed to be a place

was because of the nature of the kind of game it was building. I assume it was some sort of tile game or something. Anyway, so early on, when Richard first came up with the idea, there was this sort of connection between a land and the magic. So when he got over to magic and he made it a trading card game, he realized that he needed a resource and so he liked the idea of, you know, of mana and then he said, okay, well the mana has to come from somewhere, okay, why don't we

keep the land connection? So he sort of carried it over from the previous version of the game, but it made a lot of sense. Like there needed to be resources and, you know, he wanted the mana, but you got the mana from the land, which is, I think, how the previous game had worked. So he just sort of ported it over. Now, as far as I know, the five magics, the five colors of the five magics, were the same colors that magic has now. It was white, blue, black, red, green. I believe it was always those five colors.

And a lot of that just came from Richard sort of looking and trying to find things that naturally made sense. Like white and black magic made a lot of sense. And then, you know, having elemental magic and blue and red made a lot of sense. And then nature magic and green. So I think... Hold on a second. I'm going to take a sip of water. Okay, so Richard basically was trying to line things up. And so I think the way, if you look at it, a lot of the lands, I think, if I know correctly,

at it. A lot of the lands, I think, if I know correctly, that I believe forest and mountain and swamp were there in the previous, like pre-magic. You know, red was the color of fire and earth, so mountains made a lot of sense. I think he might have looked at stuff like volcanoes, but volcanoes are kind of mountains, so anyway, he liked the idea of mountains. Forest being, you know, green being forest, which is very, very clean. You know, what's the most sort of greenest thing you can think of that's a land type?

And forest is that. And then I think he likes swamp just in the sense that it had this sort of dark, creepy sort of vibe that black magic wanted to have. So those three lands, I believe, were in the precursor. Now, the other two went through a bunch of change. So Richard did know that he wanted blue to be associated with water because it is tied to the element of water and air, but there's not a lot of land in the air. So I think early on, I think he originally referred to it as coast. Because Richard's idea was, oh, he wanted it all to be connected.

Because in a land-based game where you're using tiles and stuff, you're connecting them together. And so he wanted it to be water-based but connected. Like, you want to be able to put your mountain right next to your blue-based thing. And so a coast let him do that. to be able to put your mountain right next to your blue base thing. And so a coast let him do that. Once he got away from having to sort of have the relationship between them, it was no longer a tile type thing, that they're just individual cards represented it, he was a little bit freer to sort of reference whatever he wanted.

He at one point thought about ocean, but in the end he decided that he wanted it to be a land. And so, okay, well what's a land that's tied to water? And the idea that he liked about island is, well it's a land. I mean, it's clearly land. But it is defined by water. Like, in order

to be an island, you're not an island unless you are definitionally surrounded by water. So, I think that's why he liked about island. So the final one, the one that was the toughest for him to name was Plains. I think he tried, this is the one that he tried a lot. I think originally it was farmland, but it sounded a little silly and required sort of some civilization that, you know, maybe every magic world wouldn't have. He then tried countryside, but that sounded strange to him.

He tried pasture. He tried prairie. He tried steppe. And, like, prairie he thought was too U.S.-centric, and steppe was a little bit, like, too Russian. In the end, he ended up with plains. So I think what got him there is, A, white is associated with light,

so he wanted something that was sunny, and he wanted something that sort of felt like where people would live, right? Someplace, where would you set, you know, this is, white's kind of, you know, all about people, and so, like, where would the community set up? Where would they be? And so, I don't know if you've shaped, like,

Little House on the Prairie or something, but just the idea of a plains had the sense of, oh, you could farm there and you could build houses there. It just sort of had that right feel to it. Now, one of the questions that comes up all the time is plains is the only plural of the land. There's no mountains or forests. And what Richard said about that was the problem with plain is it has another meaning. You know, when I talk about a plain, like if I said, for example, if you say a forest beast, well, clearly it's a beast from the forest.

But if you say a plain beast, well, is that a beast that's just not very, you know, a very simple beast? Like, it sort of has this dual meaning that doesn't really help. And when he looked up in the dictionary, there's no difference between, he said, there's no difference between mountain and mountains. Mountains is just the plural. But plains and plain both show up in the dictionary

as kind of separate entities. And that plains isn't really a plural of plain as much as sort of what people also refer to it as. And so I think it just sounded better by ear to Richard. That's where planes came from. So anyway, that is where the five basic lands came from originally. Okay, so he decides that he's making magic. He's going to have his resources.

His resources are going to be lands. He makes use of the basic lands. Each basic land is associated with one of the five colors. basic lands associated with one of the five colors. And so the next step was trying to get it into the product. So let me explain a little bit about Alpha for those who don't know Alpha. When Alpha was sold, there were two different ways to buy the product. There was booster packs, 15-card booster packs, and there was starter decks.

Starter decks were 60 cards. And the idea with the starter deck was it came with sort of, I mean, it was all five lands, but it came with, you know, I don't know, a third, 40% of the deck with lands. So it gave you enough lands that you sort of could play. Now, they decided that they were also going to put some lands in the booster pack, but that wasn't, they just ended up putting lands on the sheet. So common, uncommon, and rare all got lands on it. Now, one of the things to remember early on was Richard was trying to hide sort of what was what rarity. Like, in Alpha, there was no rarity symbol. Richard really wanted people to not know what was going on, and part of playing other people

was learning about the environment. So he really was trying hard to sort of, on purpose, like, make it a little less clear what was going on. And so part of that was the lands were just spread across all the sheets. Now, one of the sad things about that, for those who don't know anything about collecting alpha,

is when you open an alpha pack, the rare sheet had some islands on it because he um and it's all islands on the rare sheet because he was trying to get the as fan to line up so because the rare sheet shows up less it was all islands and the islands on the rare sheets that art shows up on other sheets so it's not even like the rare islands a unique piece of art. It's not. So sometimes when you buy alpha, your rare slot, the rare card, you know, rare in quotes, in your pack is a land, which is, you know, wah, wah, not happy times. But anyway, so early on when you first started playing Magic, you could buy a starter deck and get a set number of lands.

Or if you bought a booster pack, you could get zero lands, one land, two lands. I think I've seen like five or six. Like, you could get a pack with like six lands, I think. Maybe even more than that. So, there's a lot of variance early on when you get land. Okay, so,

so the plan was this is the core element of magic. I think originally there were, were there three pieces of art? I know when they made Alpha, I think there were two pieces of art. And then they realized if they made, Alpha left off two,

there's two cards that got left off. So Protection Black and Volcanic Island accidentally got left off, not on purpose. There were some collation mistakes in early magic. Anyway, they realized when they put those in that if they added one more Art of Basic Lands, they could say

over 300 cards. Because the Basic Lands are just enough to get over 300. So, I think there were two arts in the first one. There was a third art added in beta. Now, the next thing that happened was Arabian Nights. So Arabian Nights, the plan for Arabian Nights was it was going to be sort of a brand new magic set.

And the original idea was it'd have a brand new back. It would have its own unique back. It looked like a magic back, but it was more purple. The first magic encyclopedia actually shows off the back. If you go online and Google Arabian Night Back or something, you probably can find it. Anyway,

at the pretty last minute, I mean very close to printing, Richard made the decision to just use the normal magic back and not have a special back. But because it was going to have a unique back they made basic land to go into Arabian Nights. And so the idea was

if you wanted to play with just Arabian Nights there were Arabian Night lands that you could use that had that back. At the last minute they decide to not do that so they have to change the sheets so they pull all the basic land off the sheets. And I think there was an original art for all the land, I believe. Anyway, they pull them all off, except they forget one. So one of the great trivia questions is

what basic land appears in more sets than every other basic land? And the answer is mountain, because in Arabian Nights, there was a mountain that got left on the sheet. And so it's a mountain. Like I said, I think it's new art, I think. And it has an Arabian Nights expansion symbol on it, a little scimitar.

The reason that matters, by the way, is City in a Bottle was a card in Arabian Nights that destroyed everything with an Arabian Nights expansion symbol. So the interesting thing about, like, people sometimes would play the Arabian Nights mountains for, like, style points, but it was the only land that got destroyed by City in a Bottle. So sometimes you'd play for style points, and it would work against you,

where if you had normal mountains, they wouldn't be destroyed by City in a Bottle. I think City in a Bottle since got errated, so it only destroys things that are originally from Arabian Nights. It no longer destroys mountains. But anyway, that was the first small set to have land in it. Next up was

Antiquities. There was not... Arabian Nights and Antiquities had non-basic lands but Antiquities did not have any basic land. So next we get to Legends. Legends is the first set, first large set, and that we sort of established that, okay,

if you're a large set, you have basic lands. And so there were new basic lands in Legends. Okay. So anyway, and then for the small sets that follow, so after Legends was The Dark. After The Dark was Fallen Empires. And then after Fallen Empires was Ice Age. So we'll get to Ice Age in a second.

Anyway, The Dark, Fallen Empires, I believe, had no basic land. So the next big set was Ice Age. Ice Age had basic land. But the designers of Ice Age wanted, like, the flavor of Ice Age, for those that didn't pick it up from the title, was the world got really cold. It's an Ice Age. Due to the ramifications of the Brothers War, Terrasier, which is the whole continent, basically got thrown into an Ice Age. And the designers, the East Coast playtefters, so Scafilias,

Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, when they made Ice Age, they wanted to reflect the fact that it was icy. So what they came up with was, not only did they have normal basic lands, but they also had what were called snow-covered basic lands. And so the idea of snow-covered basic lands is, oh, they're just basic lands, but they have this quality to them, snow-covered. Now, the idea of snow as a supertype wouldn't happen until Cold Snap.

So when Cold Snap came out after Ravnica, original Ravnica, so it was years later. But it just had the five lands. It treated them like they were, I mean, they are basic lands. They were basic lands, except they were snow-covered. And so in the set, there were cards that cared either positively or negatively about you having snow-covered lands, your opponent having snow-covered lands. So essentially, there were cards that cared. And then I think the reason they made them basic lands was,

oh, maybe I want my whole deck to be snow-covered forests or snow-covered mountains. By making them basic, based on how the rules worked at the time, it allowed them, it just was a simple way to let you put as many as you wanted in the deck. Now, I think in retrospect, looking back, if we had to do all over again, probably the way we would have done it, I believe, is we would have made them non-basic lands. Maybe we would have said you can have as many in your deck as you want. Maybe we would have thrown that in there if we wanted that.

But them being basic lands but not being the normal basic, caused some problems that I think, in retrospect, so here's the problem that was explained real quickly. So snow-covered lands showed up in Ice Age. Well, at some point, we introduced Standard, Type 2 at the time, and things rotate out. So at some point, Ice Age rotates out. But people would show up at stores, and they might have a snow-covered forest

or a snow-covered swamp in their deck. Not because they were trying to. Just, hey, they just had a pile of basic lands and threw it in and what does it matter? It's a swamp. But the way the tournament rules work, if the card is not legal and standard, yes, if snow-covered swamp is legal and standard,

you can have as many in your deck as you want because it's a basic land. But if it's not legal and standard, you can't play many in your deck as you want, because it's a basic land. But if it's not legal and standard, you can't play it. So people would get losses in their game stores because they were playing this basic land that, because it had fallen out of standard, wasn't legal. And obviously those decks,

I mean, they weren't people trying to do snow covered shenanigans because the snow covered cards were gone. They just didn't realize it. And so it caused some problems. Like I said, because they are the way they are when we brought them back. So Snow-Covered Lands came back in first Modern Horizons 1

and then in Cold Time. Or sorry, they first came back in Cold Snap and then they came back in Modern Horizons and then they came back in Cold Time. In Cold Snap we came up with the snow supertype and we started expanding upon it. So snow showed up and things like only the lands, only the five lands had an ice age, but we start putting in other

things. Made snowman, I did a lot more with snow. Anyway, those were the next five basic lands. So there's 11 basic lands for those who don't know that. So there's the five original basic lands. There's the five snow-covered basic lands. The 11th basic land showed up in Oath of the Gatewatch. Ethan Fleischer led that design. He was trying to sort of bring the feel of the Eldrazi, and we tied the Eldrazi to Culleth's mana. And so he said, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we use colorless mana,

like, kind of like a six color. It's not exactly a color, but it has a lot of function of, what if colorless mana as a thing, like, you know, you could cast a spell and require specifically colorless mana. Not generic mana, that can be anything, but it has to be colorless mana. In order to do that, we had to come up with a whole mana symbol, a little diamond, so now there's a mana symbol. For a while, we had used the same symbol for two different things,

and once in mana cost, it could mean different things. We had to make a symbol for it. Before that, we used the same symbol, but really, we shouldn't have, but we did. Okay, so when that happened in Oath of the Gatewatch, now Cullus Mana was a thing. So Ethan made up Waste, which is basic lands to tap for Cullus Mana. Now, Waste are interesting in that they're basic lands,

but they have no land type. And so you can't sort of... If you go fetch a basic land, you can go get it. But if it says name a basic land type and then go get it, you can't because it doesn't have a basic land type. Anyway, those are the 11, those are the 11 lands. Okay, so the next part of our story is in, well, okay. Chris Rush, I have told the story before, but we're on the basic land, so you get to hear the story again. Chris Rush was,

worked on early magic. He was, I think, the first person who did graphic artists. He designed the mana symbols, for example, for magic. He also was a card illustrator. He did Black Lotus and lots of other cards. Anyway, Chris had come up with an idea.

Chris realized that basic lands didn't require a lot of text on them. Back in the day, they actually would say, tap, add, you know, green mana, g-mana pull. But it was very simple what they did. People knew what they did. People were playing them all the time. And so he said, you know, green manage your mana pool. But it was very simple what they did. People knew what they did. People were playing them all the time. And so he said, you know, what might be fun is,

you know, we really have more real estate to play with art than we do on most cards, because most cards have to convey something. Basic lands, everyone knows what they do, but they don't have to convey a lot. What if we were able to use the space on the card to do full art? What if the whole card was art?

And so he pitches this idea, and it just gets poo-pooed. No one seems to, eh, I don't think the players care about that. You know, it might be a hassle. Whatever reasons they gave, no one seemed interested. No one seemed to think the players would like it. Now, at some point, you know, Chris and I were friends. He tells me about this. I think those are awesome.

And so what happened was I was making Unglued, and Unglued was the weird set, doing weird things. So I was like, well, I think these are an awesome idea. I'm going to put them in here. I think players will really like them. In fact, I thought players would like them so much, I put them in every pack. I thought players would really like them. In fact, I thought players would like them so much, I put them in every pack. I thought players would really like them.

And I think not a lot of people agreed with me and Chris that they'd be awesome. In fact, very few people agreed with Chris and I. But they're sort of like, eh, they're weird. Mark's doing the weird shit. Whatever. They saw them as a quirky novelty.

But anyway, Unglued comes out. They're wildly popular. The most But anyway, Unglued comes out. They're wildly popular. The most popular thing in Unglued, although people did like Unglued, but the lands were the breakaway. And people just adored them. Then in Unhinged, the second unset, I'm like, okay, well, people love them.

They're an un-thing. I'm going to do them again. And so the next time we did, the'm like, okay, well, people love them. They're an uns thing. I'm going to do them again. And so the next time we did, the first one, it's funny, in the early unglued, I tried to make the art big, and then we ended up sort of making it, there's a decent amount of frame on them. It's still bigger than normal, but a decent frame. So when I was doing unhinged, I said, okay, let's see if we can go wider. And I tried a bunch of things, including a frameless version.

And people were like, that's too much. That's not a magic card. So we ended up doing much bigger art on Unhinged, but there still is a little teeny tiny frame. Then, by the way, when we get to Unstable, I just made the frameless versions, which people love too. So anyway, but what happened was Unhinged came out, players loved them. So we were working on Zendikar.

Zendikar had a land theme. And Brady Domenev, who was the creative director at the time, said, well, we're trying to care about land. Players love full-art lands. What if we just put full-art lands in this product? And everyone was like, okay, that sounds great. So for the first time ever, full-art lands came to a non-unset. And then they just sort of snowballed from there.

Amiket had some, and we just, we started making them more and more, and then Booster Fund came along, and then now it's almost like, I don't know if every set, but almost every set has four-art lands. The vast majority of them have four-art lands. That's just something we do now.

And so, okay. But let's go back a little bit. Okay, the other thing about basic lands is originally, as I explained in Alpha, they showed up in, they were just on the sheets. And they showed up in whatever combination of orders you would happen to get. So come Shards of Alara,

we decided that we wanted to change how we did lands. So it used to be that lands, I think after, except for the very early days, lands, um, were going on the common sheet, I think. And then come Shards of Alara, we're like, okay, let's, let's put lands on their own sheet. Let's stop, let's stop having's stop having lands be sort of randomized and just let's lock it down. Oh, I know.

Here's what happened. With Shards of Alara, the starter deck went away. And that was where people were getting their lands, the beginners were getting their lands. So, like, okay, now we kind of have to have lands and booster packs because we need people to be able to get them. And so what happened was they came up with the idea

of what if we, instead of having 11 commons, we have 10 commons and then have a land slot. So every booster would have its own land slot. And the land got its own sheet, got its own rarity. For those that don't know, by the way, another fine trivia question is when you talk about how many different rarities are there, there are more than four.

Common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rare are the main rarities, but one of the rarities for example is land. Land is a rarity. Token's also a rarity. Anyway, there's a bunch of rarities. So that is when we made the, we gave basic land its own slot, and we gave it its own land sheet.

The other things that started happening, and BasicLand, in some ways, was the precursor of this, is once early on, so we saw with stuff like Unglued that, oh, you take BasicLand and you do something with them, they excite people. So we were trying to do it. We had a program called the Guru Program, where we were trying to get people to teach other people how to play. And the idea was, hey, you teach people, and then you document that you taught them, and then you send it in,

and then we send you the special lands, which were called the Guru Lands. And I think they were special ones. I forget. Anyway, they were special.. I forget. Anyway, they were special. They had their own art. And anyway, they were hard to get

because the only place you could get them was through this program. And so these became very popular. And then we did a series of basic lands where we ran around the world

and we took real world places from like different places where magic was sold. And then we made those into basic art. And we let each region give away the land from their region. And those were very popular. And when it started teaching,

basic lands were kind of the precursor to booster fund, if you will. What we realized with basic lands was, look, it was very easy to get Basic Lands. Oh, the other thing that Basic Lands did was we started doing this thing where for stores,

we would sell them a box of Basic Land, like a land box. So if you open it up, it has five wrapped, you know, a wrapped bunch of plains, a wrapped bunch of islands, swamps, mountain forests. And then the idea is that the stores could buy this so they had access to it. But anyway, my point was, between the fact that there's just lots of lands

and lots of places and stores had lands, early Magic it was hard to get land. Early Magic, when you were struggling just to find some packs in the store, it was difficult. The only reason I had lands early on was I had bought a box of starter decks, and so I had a lot of land from all the starter decks. But had that not been the case, you know, land was something a lot of people struggled for. I remember early on I gave lands to people because I had excess lands and people didn't have them. But once magic sort of became the runaway hit it was, and magic was everywhere, getting lands became a lot easier.

sort of became the runaway hit it was, and magic was everywhere, getting lands became a lot easier. And then that's when we noticed that people were having fun putting these harder-to-get basic lands in their thing. And it really sort of showed us, like, you know, if I wanted to get an island, I could go to a local store and probably they'd just give me islands. But the Guru Island was, you know, not that easy to get your hands on. And so the basic lands are one of the early things that really sort of taught us kind of like customizing the art and doing fun things with the art

and making, you know, making variants of things was something that players would really enjoy and have fun with. And so lands really were this big lesson of ours of how much people can really appreciate having something that, like, ooh, it's not that easy to get. And lands were kind of neat in that you weren't limiting access to game pieces or anything.

Basic lands are basic lands. You know, if you needed to play, any basic land would suffice. But it did allow... It was an interesting lesson. And I think, you know, basic lands really taught us a lot about stuff like floral lands, stuff like

sort of alternate versions of art and things and in some ways was a real precursor for booster fun oh, the other thing I forgot the history of lands was so lands originally in alpha used to say tap, add a green mana to your mana pool.

Funny, in Alpha it literally said that. There's no symbols or anything. No tap symbol. I don't even think it had the green mana as a symbol. It just said, literally, tap to add one green mana to your mana pool. And then, when we were working on Portal, Portal was a product we made that was for beginners. And so we were trying to simplify things. And so, you know, the only card types are sorcery, creature, and land. There's no artifacts, no enchantments, no instants, no planeswalkers. So while doing that, we did some testing.

We did a whole bunch of testing. And one of the things we tried was take... The text on lands was throwing people. Because, for example, it made a beginner have to go, what's a mana pool? And it just... It was confusing them. And so we tried just putting the symbol on it.

And what we found was beginners had a way easier time when there was a symbol rather than words on it. And so we made that change for Portal Three Kingdoms. Not Three Kingdoms, for original Portal. Anyway, though, and we started thinking about it, like, okay, it's easier for beginners. It just looked better. It was nice that the land sort of didn't have to have words on them, and it also meant that when we made the sheets, we didn't need to translate them. Anyway, there was a bunch of bonuses.

Aesthetically, it looked nice. Anyway, so we decided, as I think of 6th edition, to make that the default. So basic lands, instead of having any text, would just have the mana symbol. Now, I know we made a secret lair where we did all text basic lands in Adventures of the Forgotten Realms, and I think in Baldur's Gate? I'm not 100% sure. I know for lands in Adventures of the Forgotten Realms, and I think in Baldur's Gate? I'm not 100%

sure. I know for sure in Adventures of the Forgotten Realms. We put flavor text on them because we wanted to capture the adventure feel of traveling the world. So anyway, we've definitely experimented a lot and tried a lot of different things. I mean, part of what

I want to say today is, you know, the way you can tell Magic's history is deep is I'm only talking about five cards today. Well, technically 11 cards. But I'm only talking about a small tiny handful of cards and just how much this has shaped and changed.

It's interesting to me, telling the story of Basic Lands, how much we learned about things. How much we learned about what players like the Basic Lands was us dipping our toe into different things and helping us learn but anyway

I've told you all there is to tell about the Basic Lands anyway I hope you guys enjoyed today it was definitely fun. One of the things that I enjoy as a historian of the game is getting into some of the nitty-gritty. And, you know, when you have a podcast where you've done 900-plus episodes,

I get to get into some of the nitty-gritty. So I hope you guys enjoyed getting into the nitty-gritty of Basic Lands today. I think it was a lot of fun to talk about, and I hope you guys all enjoyed it. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. That means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed today's talk, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.