Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #950: Vehicles

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about the history of the Vehicle subtype.

I'm put on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today we're going to talk all about vehicles. I touched upon them briefly in my Deciduous podcast, but I decided that I wanted to go a bit more in depth. The story of vehicles is a very interesting one, and I want to kind of walk through how it came to be. interesting one, and I want to kind of walk through how it came to be. Okay, so the idea of a vehicle goes back to pretty early magic. For example, in Ice Age, there's a card called Skeleton Ship. Now, clearly, it's a ship. In fact, I think it's creature-type ship. I think the idea was, ship. I think the idea was, so, skeleton ship's the first time I can recognize in magic where somebody in magic was like, hey, I want to make a vehicle. And so, at the time, they had no, they didn't know really how to do it. So, they ended up making it a creature. They're like, well,

I want to attack with my skeleton ship. And so, okay, we'll just, we'll make it a creature. And they made ship a creature type, which, you know, like one of the things that's very interesting when you look at sort of creature types is magic sort of, basically what Richard did when he first made it was he just made things that made sense mechanically as creatures, and then he gave them whatever flavor he wanted that matched the flavor of what they did. But, like, walls being creatures is still kind of weird. Like, wall of stone is an inanimate object, right? I mean, obviously, like, mechanically, I get how it's a wall of stone, right? It's blocking your way, you can't get around it, whatever. But when you start tying to what creatures means

it gets weird. So anyway, sorry, a little deviation there. So they wanted to make a vehicle and the best guess they could make was okay, it's a creature. But there's something inherently that doesn't quite like, like a ship is, you know, it's not a creature. It is something creatures use. It is something creatures get into. It's something creatures steer.

So anyway, one of the things that was, like, one of the things that often happens in Magic is there's just a pent-up desire for something that, like, well, this is something we want to do. And clearly we want to represent it in the game. But, you know, like equipment was in a similar spot, where, hey, we kind of want to have a sword you can give to your creature, but it didn't quite make sense as an aura. It's like, we get these things where we recognize there's something we want, but we don't quite know how to do it.

And usually what happens is, we just sort of, one of two things happens. Either we stumble upon it, we make a one-off card that does something, and we're like, oh, maybe this could be the thing. Or we eventually get to a set where we say, you know what? This thing that we keep saying one day we've got to do, today is that day. And so vehicles had been on the list for a while, that we'd wanted to do vehicles. I even think in original Mirrodin, we had talked a little bit about it, but we were doing equipment. We're like, okay, there's only so many things, pent up things we got to do in one set.

So Mirrodin really focused on equipment, but we did actually talk a little bit about vehicles. And it would come up from time to time. And I fundamentally knew it was something we'd have to solve. So anyway, let's flash forward to the exploratory design of Kaladesh. Okay, so for those who don't remember, a little history here. Is originally Amonkhet and Kaladesh, the blocks, they were two-set blocks, were going to be in reverse order. Originally, sort of the Bolas arc, if you will,

started in Amonkhet, then went to Kaladesh. But we decided for a couple reasons, one being the story. Like, we liked that the end of Act 1, which was the second mini-block, would be at the hands of Bolas, and it made sense more in Am Bolas, and it made sense more in Amonkhet than it made sense in Kaladesh. So we chose to swap those two sets during exploratory.

We were, in fact, in the middle of doing exploratory on Amonkhet when we decided to swap them. So Kaladesh got like half the time of exploratory that we normally get. Now, ironically, we now get less exploratory time than I guess half was at that time. The way it used to work back then is exploratory was like six months long, and then we got chopped to three. Now exploratory is two to three months. So Kaladesh, by modern standards,

kind of got a full exploratory. By standards then, it kind of got half exploratory. Anyway, one of the... I think it might have been the very first thing I said at the very first exploratory. Anyway, one of the, I think it might have been the very first thing I said at the very first exploratory meeting is we talked about, like we knew going in that Kaladesh

was going to have a steampunk vibe. It ended up being what we call aetherpunk, but it had sort of a steampunk-ish vibe and that it was going to be about artifacts and that this idea of invention, I think, was very, very early on.

But anyway, we knew it was going to be an artifact world and we knew it was going to be a little more advanced. Oh, so what had happened, we had done a set called Magic Origins and Magic Origins, we were going to introduce the five main planeswalkers

that were going to be the core Gatewatch, the starting Gatewatch. I know technically Liliana joined after the other four. But anyway, those were the first five members of the Gatewatch. So it was Gideon and Jace and Liliana and Chandra and Nyssa. And so Magic Origins showed each of them on their plane of origin and it showed where they walked to when their spark happened and became a planeswalker, the first place they went. But that meant that we

needed, like not everybody, we knew that Nissa was from Zendikar and we knew that Liliana was from Dominaria and everything else was coming up in the air. We later decided that Gideon was going to be from Theros,

and Jace and Chandra, we ended up having to make their own world. So Vryn ended up becoming Jace's world, and Kaladesh became Chandra's world. And then, I don't know at what point, like, I think what happened was we started making Kaladesh and really liked what it was. And I think we decided, like, I think we had loosely penciled in that we wanted to do a steampunk set. And then while working on Magic Origins, we realized that we thought that Chandra's home world could,

like, we realized that it had the overlap. So we did a bunch of extra work during Magic Origins to do some preliminary work on what Kaladesh would be. And so when we started Kaladesh, it's not normal when you do a brand new plane that you already have work on the plane. But because of Magic Origins, we did. So we did know kind of bright, like, we knew it had sort of this bright, optimistic feel to it, and that it had a lot of technology.

In fact, artifacts were a big part of the blue-red archetype. So the way it worked in Magic Origins is each plane, the ten archetypes were the ten planes, the homeworlds plus first visit, and so red and blue were Kaladesh kaladesh and it had a strong artifact theme so we knew we knew invention artifacts going into it okay so the very first um exploratory meeting i said okay guys we keep saying we need to make vehicles now is the time to make vehicles so one of the things we started with is we said, okay, what do you expect a vehicle to do?

What is a vehicle? And we said, okay, well, obviously, creatures have to interact with vehicles. What's the point of a vehicle? Well, a vehicle is something that creatures, you know, interact with and use. It moves you from place to place. Okay, what does it mean to move you from place to place? What does that mean? Okay, and so we made a long list of things

that the vehicles could do. I think pretty quickly we got to the idea that, look, if I have a vehicle, I kind of want to get my creatures in it and attack you. That I kind of want, you know, that... I think we got the idea that part of, you know, if we're going to make ships, for example, like Skeleton Ship, well, it would have cannons on it.

It would have things on it that you could use to attack the opponent. I think early on, we just got this idea, like, kind of what, when they made Skeleton Ship, the reason they made it a creature is, well, it just kind of made sense that you attacked with it. What else would you do with it, right? The idea that it would sit around and grant you an ability, that didn't really, like maybe that's a magical item, but they didn't really capture that sense of a vehicle. The vehicle had to have a sense of motion, and the most obvious sense of motion for creatures

is when they attack. They're on your side, they go to your opponent's side. That is the most movement there is. We talked a little bit about, you know, maybe if... We talked a little bit about the idea of, well, what if creatures are on vehicles and then vehicles grant them some ability? But what we realized was we kind of reinvented equipment, right? That if vehicles, I mean,

the idea we toyed around just a little tiny bit was like, imagine if there's a war barge or something. And it says, okay, everybody on the war barge has trample. And then there's some means by which creatures can move onto the war barge. So what it

kind of ended up being like is kind of like equipment that can equip multiple things. But the idea was, you know, if you're on the war barge, well, you can't be on the skeleton ship. So like you can't, you could only be on one thing at a time,

but that thing would somehow enhance you. It was really difficult to track and it didn't quite like, this idea that I hop into the vehicle and attack is, is a pretty cool, like one of the things whenever you're designing something new is that you want to like, what is the cool thing you're going to do? Okay. I, I have this, whatever the vehicle, I have a chariot, I have a ship, I whatever have,

what do I want to do with it? Okay. Well, I want a creature to hop into it because flavorfully I, there needs to be a creature,. I have a ship. I whatever have. What do I want to do with it? Okay, well, I want a creature to hop into it because flavorfully there needs to be a creature guiding it. And then I want to attack with it. That's kind of what I want to do. And so all the ideas coming together in the sense of kind of what you want to do

and how it made sense in the game and where the fun seemed to be implied it wanted to attack. So we actually said, okay, are we reinventing the wheel? Could vehicles be a new kind of creature? You know, could they be artifact creatures? And we said, well, it's not a vehicle. Like, the goal wasn't to have a self-driving car or something.

The goal was that somebody is using this item, that a vehicle... We decided there really had to be a relationship between creatures and vehicles. That the idea that I just cast a train and it attacks you didn't feel right. That it just being creatures felt wrong. The skeletonship answer did not feel organically right.

And so, pretty early on, like I said, it didn't take us that long to get to this because when you start looking at all the options, it becomes clear that you kind of wanted the vehicle to have some ability to attack.

So, I think one of the earliest ones we did is they were creatures that couldn't attack or block, but you could use a creature to remove that ability. And then that was sort of like, once again, we were calling them creatures. Like it just felt odd to write creature on the timeline. Like they're not creatures. So we said, okay, what are they? Well, they're artifacts, right? They're built objects. They're artifacts. Okay. How can we have an artifact that can attack? And that's when we came up with the idea of what if they turn into creatures? What if they're not inherently creatures?

What if they don't have creature on their pipeline, but some condition could make them into creatures? Something could turn them from an inanimate object into a creature. And so the idea was a vehicle plus a creature makes the vehicle be able to attack. That is what we wanted. And so the idea was that we would, like, this was radical at the time. It might not seem so radical now. But the idea of we can make a card that has power and toughness on it, but it's not a creature.

You can't just attack with it. So the big question then became, okay, how exactly am I... I'll use the term crew. We didn't actually... I don't think we called it crew. I think we called it drive early on. You have to drive the vehicle. I think the problem came up in that there's lots of vehicles you don't drive, per se.

But anyway, so the idea was, okay, how exactly... We knew we wanted to interact with the creature. We knew the creature wanted to be kind of inside the vehicle. And that once they were, the vehicle could attack. The other thing that we kind of knew was that the vehicle would protect the creature. That one of the flavors is, you know, if I hop in my car and my car crashes,

well, maybe the car is toast, but the person is saved. That part of what vehicles do is also protect the rider, the driver. Okay, so we said, how exactly do we do this? What do we do? So we knew we wanted the, like, we didn't want the creature to be, we didn't want the vehicle attacking and the creature attacking. Because, like, well, if the creature's in the vehicle, they can't separately attack. So we said, okay, so the creature's got to get in the vehicle.

What does that mean? How do we do that? So we talked about, okay, well, creature taps. So I think the original idea was just you tap a creature in order to do that. But then we found that we didn't have any. So I talk a lot about knobbiness, which is when you're doing play design, you need to have knobs to control how easy or hard something is to do. Right.

If every single vehicle required just tapping of a creature, well, then, you know, it's very hard to make the bigger things. We knew we needed a knob. So the knob we initially used talked about how many creatures it took to crew it. So originally like crew three meant, okay, you need three creatures. Three creatures have to crew this. And so the idea was some things recruit one, just one creature. Some recruit two, you need two creatures. And some of the bigger stuff recruit three. You need three creatures to do this. So anyway, that is what we handed off.

We made it such that it would need its own frame. I'll get to the frame in a second. And it was an artifact that you needed to tap some number of creatures. And when you tap them, it animated. It became a creature until end of turn. And then you can attack with it. We did, by the way, talk about whether it was supposed to be until end of turn or until your next turn. Like, was a vehicle supposed to be something that once you used it, you had full...

You could use it for attacking or blocking. We ended up saying no, if you're going to attack with it, I mean, let's say it's Vigilance, if you're going to attack with it, you couldn't block with it. And so why did it say look, when you want to use it, use it. We try to avoid having memory

beyond, I mean, we occasionally do it, but we try to avoid having memory past the end of the turn. This was going to be a whole mechanic, so we decided that we didn't want to go beyond the turn. So we said, well, if you want to block, just don't attack, and then when it's your opponent's turn to attack, you can tap it then and there to block. We had talked about did we need to do it at sorcery speed, but what we realized was it had to be a creature before you declared an attack or before you declared a blocker.

So you couldn't really do it mid combat in a way that was problematic. So we just didn't need it. So we really didn't want you doing it mid combat, but because you had to declare it, it had to be a creature before you declared an attack or blocker. That kind of solved our problem. Okay. So that is what we handed off to Kaladesh development. This is

back when, back in the design development days before we got to vision design, set design, play design. Okay, so what happened was Ian Duke and Eric Lauer co-led Kaladesh design. I know that Ian was having problems

because one of the things when you're working on a mechanic is especially on the play design side of things, on the development side of things, you figure okay, what's the best way to do this? And the best way to do

the current crew system was tokens. It's like, oh I could have a spell that makes two tokens or three tokens, and that tokens, there's not a lot of value to attacking with them. So if I can turn my two or three small tokens, my little one-ones, into a giant creature, wow, that's a huge upgrade. And so what happens is when a certain way is the best strategy, you kind of have to gear your balance to that strategy.

So sort of like, well, it's so good with tokens, we have to balance it. So if you have tokens, it's not too good. And then what happened was if you didn't have tokens, it just was horrible. You're having to dedicate two or three creatures. When we're talking big creatures, not little 1-1 tokens, was just too much. So the vehicles became feast or famine. Like, oh, if you're playing a weenie strategy, oh, they're good.

And if you're playing anything else, they're not. And so they weren't sure how to solve that problem. So interestingly, our story jumps to a completely different design. So I was on Ixalan. So I co-lit Ixalan with Ken Nagel. So one of the things we were trying to do in Ixalan was we wanted locations to mean something. We're like, okay, this is a set about exploration. What if we care about locations? What does

locations mean? So we came up with this idea that you would play locations. I think they were lands. And then we wanted you to meet some condition by which you would then flip it over and then you would discover something on the land. And on the other side, I don't know if the backsides were all lands with better abilities or whether some of them were other things,

like you found artifacts or something. I think my gut is they were simple lands that turned into much more grandiose lands. And the actual Ixalan did end up having double-faced lands or double-faced cards in which you did something on the front that represented exploration that got you to land on the back. Anyway, because we knew that Kaladesh was doing vehicles

I was trying to stay off vehicles so we came up with a different set so instead of caring about how many creatures we said what if we care about totality of power so you had to tap some number of creatures and I think early on

I don't even know if you tap them. I think you moved them to them originally or something. Maybe you tapped them. But anyway, we came up with a system where I'm going to use explore. Obviously, I don't know. The Finnish product had explore and that meant something different. So we had some

sort of flavored thing like, you know, I'll call it exploration. Exploration. So exploration four meant, oh, you know, I'll call it exploration. Exploration. So exploration four meant, oh, you have to commit four power of creatures to this land before you do what you need to do to flip it over. So I had heard that Ian was having problems. And so one of the things in general you do is if you find something later on in design, chronologically, like Ixalan came out after Kaladesh, so it was Kaladesh, then Ixalan, blocks. So I went to Ian, and I said to Ian,

look, I know you're having some problems with vehicles. There's something we've been trying with locations in our set that maybe solves your problem. We've been using, instead of tap number of creatures, we've been using tap necessary power. And the idea that was cool about that was three one ones and the three three carry the same weight. So being a bigger creature meant something. Interestingly, when I first pitched it to Ian,

he was a bit skeptical. I think Eric liked the idea. I think Eric was more receptive and Ian was a little skeptical, but, you know, they were having a problem. And so he was like, okay, well, we'll try this. And then I think after one play test, Ian came back and said, oh no, it's working really well. So we get, Ixalan ended up, you know, changing out how he did his double-faced cards, but's working really well. So we get, Ixalan ended up changing how it did its double-faced cards. But we then adapted that. So that ability got moved over,

and that basically is what ended up becoming vehicles. The one other thing we had to solve is, we decided early on that we wanted the power and toughness to be on the card. Like, one of the possibilities was, it would say

you know, crew 3-3 or something. Like, somehow it would say it in the rules text of the card. But we felt like, oh you know, when you're attacking, when you're in combat, you really want to see the power and toughness. But then we said, okay, if we do that we want to make sure you understand it's not a creature, because when you put power

and toughness on something, it really, you know, feels like a creature. Only creatures do that. So we decided we would give it its own frame. At the time we made vehicles, I think in my heart of hearts, I knew that if we did it correctly, it was the kind of thing that maybe we would want to do again. But I was just trying, like, so I was trying to make the best version that I think could be used other places. We were trying to make the definitive version. And I was optimistic in that I thought there would be places for us to use it again.

So when the idea of a frame came up, this is back in the day where we were a little, like, nowadays we're much freer of making frames. This was not at a time where we were hesitant. Like, when I made split cards, like, it was a major, major deal making a not normal frame.

Cow edition was around the time where, like, we were willing to make other frames. It wasn't kind of as taboo as it was in the early days. But we still weren't doing it every set. But we decided that vehicles were something pretty cool. People had really enjoyed them. We knew they were flavorful.

We knew they had a lot of potential. So we decided that we were going to give them a frame. And I think Liz Leo was the person who did the frame. We've had a bunch of different people that do frames over the years. Anyway, and we ended up giving it sort of a darker brown. When artifacts had changed to their current frame, we had moved away from brown to silver for a bunch of reasons.

The biggest one is a little too close to land. But then over the years, land has changed. And so we said, oh, you know, maybe we could use the brown a little more. And it ended up having some lines onto it. It had some texturing. We wanted to make sure it didn't just look like an artifact creature, so that it had its own unique look. And we came up with it, and, you know, it ended up being pretty cool. So what happened was we put vehicles into Kaladesh and hit the revolt. They were too good. A, we put a bunch of common.

B, they were all colorless because that's just what artifacts mostly were back then. And C, it was a brand new thing. And one of the things when you're playing in space that you don't really understand is sometimes you're more aggressive than you need to be. And so vehicles ended up being very aggressive. It really sped up Kaladesh, and it was a major, major player in both limited, Kaladesh Limited and Standard with them.

In fact, there were a couple cars that were so good that they ended up in older formats as well. So anyway, we liked them. And we didn't know by the... We didn't know at the time in Kaladesh they were necessarily coming back. We didn't know that. But we did Amonkhet.

And I... Was there one? There might have been like a war barge or something. Or no, a funeral. We ended up putting, I think, one vehicle in, which was... There was a funeral boat or something. I think we put one in.

And the idea, like, what we didn't know when we made them in Kaladesh, I mean, I had a heart of heart they'd come back. I thought they were cool. I thought they'd come back. That's why we did a lot to kind of make sure that they were very flexible and usable in a lot of places. And then I think in Amiket, we're like, well, we don't, there's not a lot of need. So I think we just put one in. And then we got to Ixalan and we're like, well, we're doing pirates. Like we

can't not do pirate ships if you're going to do pirates. So I think we made a bunch of ships. I think the only thing there were ships. But one of the things we've kind of established was, pretty early on, was we like these. They're flavorful. They hit something that really we've had trouble hitting, and these do a good job of hitting it. But we didn't feel, like we sort of said really early on, like Amiket was kind of where the assiduousness of it came out was we like these but we don't have to commit to a lot of them like there are worlds in which hey there's one cool vehicle and so we Amiket really was we we really just said look we're gonna use them as we want to use them we shouldn't make

more than we need and the other thing that we sort of came out of that after sort of Kaladesh was this idea that, you know what, as a default, they shouldn't be common. Not that a world can't have common, you know, if a specific world makes a lot of sense and vehicles are core to the element of what the world is, it's not that we can't do common vehicles, but we said, you know what, they really are functionally, they're a little more complicated. They carry a lot of weight. They're strong. You know, okay, we're going to make them an uncommon and up default thing. Once again, default.

We can make a common if the world needs it. But vehicles went from being sort of something that we can use when we want to use, in any number we want to use, and starting an uncommon as the default rarity. Another thing that happened, and this was, I mean, one of the problems of Kaladesh in general was it really hammered home the problems with generic mana as the sole way to do artifacts. That whenever you do an artifact block, you want to make powerful artifacts.

Well, if there's nothing gating them, if there's no colored mana, it really just lets all the powerful glom together. We call it the blob problem, where it's hard to solve because, well, there's all these powerful things working in conjunction. And then every deck can play them. If you make a powerful artifact, any deck that wants to can play it. I mean, we do try to make some more niche. But, you know, if you make just a generally powerful artifact,

then every deck in the format plays it because everybody has access to it. So one of the things we decided was we wanted to start doing more colored artifacts. So in War of the Spark, we started doing colored vehicles. So in War of the Spark, we started doing colored vehicles. And so nowadays, any second of vehicles, vehicles can exist in generic mana. But if we want to push it, if we're trying to really make it something that has constructed potential,

those tend to be colored. Not that every colored vehicle is necessarily constructed, because there's some playful reasons to do colored. Not that every colored vehicle is necessarily constructed because there's some flavorful reasons to do some, but I don't think we tend to do purposely competitive vehicles in generic manner anymore. The other thing is

as we have made vehicles and like I said, they were in obviously Kaladesh. We had one in Amonkhet. The few of them were in Ixlan. Dominaria, we're like, oh, we're back in Dominaria. We must do the Weatherlight.

The idea of legendary artifacts became a cool thing where, ooh, there's this, like, the Weatherlight is a great example where, in the Weatherlight saga, it was so much an important part of the saga, it was in the name of the story. It was the Weatherlight Saga. So we had a chance to sort of do the Weatherlight.

So it quickly became something that we really recognized was something important and something that Magic really wanted and could use. And so, I mean, vehicles, like I said, instantaneously, the very next block we use them. So, and I'm happy with where vehicles ended up. I feel like it was something that Magic needed. It was something that there was a lot of desire for. And I really, I'm really, really happy. Like, a lot of times we do something and after the fact, we're like, well, that wasn't quite as good as it could have been. I think we did a great job in vehicles. I think vehicles really have hammered home.

Yeah, I didn't, I'm almost, I'm here at work. The one thing I didn't get too into is we spent a little bit of time talking about should you be able to use them right away? Should they inherently have haste? We fundamentally decided that we liked them, haste being a thing, we liked, you know, vehicles being fast, so we wanted haste to be on them, which meant okay.

It also meant that sort of there was a, if I play a powerful thing, you know, if every single vehicle had haste, it was hard for us to make all the vehicles, if that was true. So we ended up not doing that. I think that is all the vehicles if that was true. So we ended up not doing that. I think that is all the main things. Modern Horizons 2

didn't have Dermotaxi, which is the first vehicle with no crew cost. And then I think there was the funeral car in Crimson Vow. So we started experimenting. I didn't get really into the experimentation of vehicles. It is something we've done enough now

that we've definitely started playing around with what things can be. You know, the idea of vehicles having another function until they become a vehicle. The idea that, you know, vehicles could become a vehicle in a means other than crew. Like, we've started messing... Or the idea that you could crew specifically,

like, you know, that a certain kind of thing is better at crewing. I think we've done that. If we haven't done that, maybe a tiny hint of things to come. Although I think we have done that. But anyway, there's a lot of fun and cool things in vehicles. I'm very proud of their design

and I'm happy that we were able to make them, and that they are now part of Magic. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and I'm at work, so we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking Magic, it's time for me to be making Magic. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.