Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #114 - 20 Things That Were Going to Kill Magic Part 1

Episode Date: April 18, 2014

Mark examines 20 controversies of magic history.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to be doing a podcast based on an article I did for our 20th anniversary. So what happened was when Magic turned 20 that week, we had articles all tying into the number 20. And so I did 20 things that were going to kill magic. Tongue planted firmly in cheek. So basically what I was talking about was, what are the big controversies in magic history where people were like, this is it, this is going to be the end of magic.

What were the real controversies of the game? And so today, and probably beyond just today since I'm 20, I want to talk about, to kind of give you a more in-depth on what exactly happened. Now, I have 20 things to get through, so I'm going to try to go quickly here, since we have a lot to cover. So number one, the introduction of 60 card decks and 4 card deck limits. Okay, so when Magic first began, the rule was you had 40 cards and you could play as many cards as you wanted. You guys might know this rule as the limited rules. Essentially, when Richard made the game, I think his thought process was that people were going to have the amount of cards

not too dissimilar from what limited is now. That, you know, how much are you going to spend? Oh, you know, you'll buy a starter and a couple, magic for starter, starters were 60 card, 60 card decks. And, so you would start with like a starter

and maybe a couple boosters, but like you would have, you know, about maybe six boosters worth of cards, which is what we play with limited now. And so,

the original deck instructions were actually very, very similar to limited deck instructions. You have to have 40 cards. You need to have as many cards as you want because, well, I mean, how many are you going to have? And the thing to remember is that when Richard first made the game, his thought process was that because people weren't going to have that many cards, he understood that the rare cards in volume would be problematic.

He didn't think people would have them. And he felt like if the game got to the point where people had that many cards, well, then it was a runaway success and they'll solve that problem later. That turned out what it happened to be. So, for the players, now remember, when Magic first started, this was back in 93, and this rule started in, I think, early 94, the way people could communicate, the internet existed, but in a very raw state. It's what they called the usernets at the time.

Kind of basically bulletin boards. Mostly, it was text. Most people didn't have the ability to do pictures yet. I mean, it existed, but most people didn't have the ability to do that. And so, when we first announced this, it was... I mean, think about it. It's like, all of a sudden, you're saying to me, there's restrictions. You have to have more cards in your deck, which means you had to own more cards. You couldn't play duplicates, or you could only play four. So if you had made your deck full of plague rafts, which was a very

common thing for people to do, but plague rafts were common, we're saying, you can't do that. And some players were taken aback. They're like, I want to play with my cards. I'm not happy. But I think people quickly understood why. Although, once again, the reason that it took us a while for people to understand why is in order to get

why it's broken, you have to know the broken cards exist. So remember, at this point in Magic, we were not announcing. Wizards was not announcing what cards existed. There was no rarities, there was nothing, it was all a big mystery. And so, people didn't know what existed. It's not like you knew about all the broken cards.

Maybe, maybe, maybe you had won, and it was early, people didn't know that much. You know, the technology of how the game worked was low, so even if you had a broken card, you might have known it was broken. I mean, it took quite a while for balance, for example, to even get restricted. And balance is crazy. But it just took a while for people to understand how good that was. Okay, the next thing

was the creation of the banned and restricted list. That happened shortly thereafter. Very, very shortly thereafter. So the banned and restricted list said, okay, for the first time, we're going to tell you there are cards that you own that either you cannot play or you can only have one of. You know, and that is, I mean, think about it, that is pretty radical. For example, something I often explain to people is, we don't like banning cards.

example, something I often explain to people is we don't like banning cards. You know, I always consider it a failure when we ban cards in the sense that we want you to play with the cards we sell you. Now, the reason we do it, the reason that we do ban cards is that sometimes the environment, you know, is bad and we need to fix it. And here's the more mega important thing, which is, I mean, I think the game would be worse if we didn't take risks and didn't push the envelope. And the ban list is important because it allows us to take risks, knowing that if there's a safety net in case something happens. And I think the game would be far worse if we never took those risks. Meaning if we kind of never banned a card, that means we're being too safe and too conservative. And I think, like, I always say this, that the greatest risk to magic is not taking risks. And so, I mean,

I think the ban list is important. We never like to ban something. That's never a happy moment. But we do believe, for the overall health of the game, the ban list existing is good. Now, when we announced the existence of a ban list and restricted list, it didn't go over well. I mean, whenever you say to people, you know, hey, we're not letting you play with your cards, they're not happy. And this one at least, I mean, the other problem with this one is the people who were in charge of our organized play system when we first began, when Wizards first started out, you know, it was growing so fast that they were just hiring friends and employees and just, you know, whoever they could get in the door.

And the early people that ran organized play really did not have a lot of experience with organized play. And they did not have a lot of experience with any sort of strategic organized play. And so the people making the decisions, it wasn't R&D originally. R&D now makes the decisions. But at the time, the people choosing what got banned and what didn't really didn't have as good a grasp on the game as one would hope. For example, one of the big problems early on was land destruction. Land destruction decks were really good. So what do we ban? Do we ban Sinkhole, the two-mana land destruction spell that's just insane? No, they ban Dingus Egg. What is Dingus Egg?

It's an artifact that does two damage to you every time a land dies. And Dingus Egg is the kind of thing where, you know, it was the... Excuse me? It was the obvious thing, if you didn't know any better, to put in your land destruction deck because it killed them for doing what you were doing.

But the good players understood that, look, if you're destroying their land, you don't need a Dingus Egg. Anything can kill them. You know, and that, just use more utility cards and find ways to take the utility cards and kill them with the utility cards. You know, creatures that do utility effects or something.

You didn't need to have a dedicated card just to damage them. And so, like, Dingus Egg really wasn't that important to the deck. So that getting restricted was sort of like, well, you guys don't quite get what the problem here is. And so I think early on, not only did the existence of the restricted list and the banned list, you know, cause some ill will, but like the choices made did not engender a lot of,

I don't know, trust on the part of the players. Because the better players were like, what are you doing? Why are these the cards you're getting rid of? These aren't the problem. I mean, they did get rid of the power nine. I mean, some of the broken cards got ridden of. But there are others that were very, very good you doing? Why are these the cards you're getting rid of? These aren't the problem. I mean, they did get rid of the Power Nine. I mean, some of the broken cards got ridden of. But there are others that were very, very good, balanced like I talked about, that took a while before anyone bothered to restrict it, even though

it was a really, really good card. Okay. Number three. Oh, the start of Type 2. So Type 2 is what you might know as standard. So what happened was, when Magic first came out, there was one play to make Magic. It was Magic. There was no formats. There was just one way to play. Even limited when the game first started really wasn't a big thing. But eventually R&D came to the realization that if we didn't ever have any rotation of any kind, if all cards just stayed in the format, the format was going to break under the weight of it.

Or it's going to have major power issues and just get overpowered. I mean, Vintage Jockey today is super pumped and very overpowered. And they came up with the idea of, well, what if we have the main format we push, or one of the formats we push, at the time we didn't know it would be the main one, I guess, although I'm sure we wanted it to be, was a format that constantly was rotating. And it was a very radical idea. Once again, whenever the message from us is, hey, you can't play cards you own, that never

goes over well. And of all 20 things I'm talking about in this podcast and future podcasts, this one actually, I think, was the most, created the most unhappiness. Now, if you've ever lived through some of the ones I'm going to talk about, there was major, major unhappiness now if you've ever lived through some of the ones i want to talk about there was major major unhappiness with the player so it's not like the the audience hasn't got very upset about things but i this was the one that my memory is i mean there were people who were just i mean i guess whenever there's a big controversy if people threaten to quit the game and all sorts of stuff but this one was super serious because people, like, it's funny now,

looking back, looking at Standard, I mean, Standard by now is the most popular format by leaps and bounds. I think people understand kind of the richness of Standard and how it lets people

get into the game and how it keeps things constantly fresh so the environment's changing is what makes, you know, deck building a lot of fun is not that it's exactly the same all the time.

And if you want formats that don't change as much, we have older formats that do that, that are a little more static in how they work. But it's nice to have the main format be pretty dynamic so you're constantly changing things. But at the time, it is very, very easy to see the negative because the negative was immediate, and the positive was less obvious in the long term.

And so the players are like, what? I can't play with my cards. I don't like that. And like a lot of the things that Standard would go on to do, it was hard to see at the time. And I was, you know, I was in R&D. I was behind the walls. I mean, I was definitely, although I wasn't there yet. But I mean, I, as a member of R&D, I, you know, now I can look back and I go, I get

where they were coming from. I understand. I mean, obviously, we all see why they did it. But it's something where when you really understand the motivation behind it, you get it. But it's hard sometimes. And the players are very focused on here and now, as they should be. It's not their job to worry about the game a year from now or two years from now or ten years from now. Their job is to get with the game right now. And right now, not letting me play all my cards, you know, it's a big downer.

And rightfully, I mean, I understand why they're upset. I think we did the right thing, but... Okay, number four, the Lathne dragon. Okay, so, early Magic, you could buy packs and get Magic cards. Then we did something we called book promos, which was, in order to get these cards, you had to buy a book and send in a slip from the book. You literally had to rip a page out of the book and mail it in.

And that went over K. I mean, most people could get the book. But, in the summer of 1994, in Atlanta, there's a convention, a summer convention, a game convention, called DragonCon. And Wizards of the Coast did a promotion convention, a game convention, called DragonCon. And Wizards of the Coast did a promotion in which if you went to DragonCon,

there was a special unique card called an Alaphne Dragon, which was a small flying red dragon that had banding, which no red card ever had up to that point, or actually since that point. The only red card ever was banding. And it was cute, it was weird, it wasn't particularly strong, but it was unique, and players got upset. They're like, remember, this is pre-eBay, this is pre- Amazon, this is, like, it was not easy to get your hands on things that you did not, you were not there for. So either you were there, or you knew

a friend that was there, but unless you somehow had some connection to the event, you could not get this card. Forget getting four of them to play with if you wanted to have a playset. Just getting this card was impossible. Or very, very hard. And people were just like, what are you doing? And they made a big uproar.

And one of the things, by the way, I wanted to stress, of the things I'm going through today, some of the things I think were healthy for the game. I think having a 60-card deck limitation, four-card cap, an abandoned restricted list, and standard. Those are all good things. Those are all good for the health of the game. I get why players were upset when we announced them, but they were the right call.

I think the last of the dragon is the opposite. We made a mistake. We should not be making functionally unique cards that are super hard to get. Now, one of the things we've done, the new things we've done over the years, we said, okay, we do want to make hard to get cards. It's a collectible. We want to make things that are collectible. But instead of making unique things, we will make versions of it. So for example, last year's San Diego Comic Con, if you wanted those special treatments, yeah,

they were hard to get. But if you just wanted those cards to play with for the game, they existed in Magic 2014. You could buy them, or you could buy packs and get them, or you could trade for them. But the cards existed in a for-sale booster product. Or a for-sale product. I guess not all our stuff now is booster, but

you could buy it in a for-sale product, and that we are trying hard in a promotional stuff to do special things, but things that are not functionally unique. And that came out of the people being upset about this thing, and rightfully so. In fact, we ended up putting it into Duelist, I think, 3, the Nolossian Dragon, so that people could get it. Because we realized we had made a mistake. Okay, number five, Chronicles.

Okay, so Chronicles, so what happened was early Magic had made, had not had a big print run. That, you know, like I talked about how we made a print run and then doubled it and sold out and doubled it and sold out and doubled it and sold out. So Magic was quickly growing, but some of the early sets had a very small print run. So Chronicles said, okay, let's make a product. It was white border, because at the time white border meant reprints. Let's make an all reprint product of stuff that was in sets that people might want, that they weren't able to get their hands on. And so it was kind of meant to be a best of, you know, sort of best of the recent sets.

I think it had stuff from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and Legends, I believe. And also at the same time, in 4th edition, they also brought back some other cards. And so here's what the problem was. If you understand supply and demand, when supply is low, demand is high. And what that means

is a lot of these cards from early expansions had a very high value level because there weren't that many of them. And along comes Chronicles and it's 4th edition, and takes cards that existed in some quantity, and I'm making up these numbers, so these are completely made up numbers, but I'm trying to

demonstrate a point here. Let's imagine there were 20,000 of a particular card. And then along comes Chronicles, and now there's 100,000 or 200,000. The amount of cards literally were quadrupling or quintupling. All of a sudden, there was a flood of cards, and the cards that had a special value

because there weren't that many of them, all of a sudden there was a whole bunch of them. And the people who owned those cards, who had collected them, because remember early on, Magic is a trading card game. For some people, it's a game. For some, they're trading cards. For. For some people, it's a game. For some, they're trading cards. You know, for a lot of people, it's both. And for the people who

collected the cards, it kind of undercut the value of their cards, and they were really upset. Now, problem number five led into problem number six. So number six was the reserve list. So let me explain what the reserve list was. So what happened was we made these cards. A lot of people flipped out, and they were very upset. And so we were trying to say to the collectors, look, we're not going to undercut your stuff. We're going to reprint some stuff, but we're not going to reprint everything. So we said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

Every set, we're going to pick 80% of the... Originally it was uncommon and rares, and later the uncommon part got taken out because it was confusing because the uncommon is applied to certain sets but not other sets. Let's just make it clean and clear, just rares. And the idea was 80% of all rares would go on a list,

and if it's on the list, we promise never to reprint it. If it's not on the list, we reserve the right to reprint it. But if it's on the list, we will not reprint it. Now, the reserve list is super contentious. And the problem was, some people are like, I want access to the cards. I want those cards. I want you to print those cards. And us saying we're not going to print them made a lot of people unhappy. Even today, it makes a lot of people unhappy.

And the problem we're caught in is there are people that very very much don't want it to print the reserve books I know they're not as public on social media because the loud portion very much is against it but we hear from them and they very much do care and while I will go on record I mean I've gone on record many times

I don't think it was a great decision to make it in the first place but I do believe that we was a great decision to make it in the first place, but I do believe that we have a responsibility. We made a promise, even though I wasn't even here when the promise was made. In fact, almost nobody in the building was here when the promise was made. But we as a company made a promise. There are people that very much do care and want us to keep our promise, and so we are keeping our promise. I think it's important. I think that as a company, that like your word is valuable. And I want people to build, we want people to trust us.

And so as much as I understand how people, a lot of people want us to break the reserve list. It's something that, it is something we did in fact promise that there are people, and a decent number of people, though they're not super vocal online, really do want us to keep, and so we are keeping it. Next, pitch cards. So, Alliances, first set I worked on, had five cards

in it. Force of Will being the most famous of these, and what pitch cards were, was you didn't have to spend mana for it. Instead of spending mana, you could pitch or exile, basically, a card from your hand. Actually, did you exile them? You might have.

Actually, you might have just gone into graveyard. No, I think you have. I forget. Anyway, everyone says, first of all, you know you have to get rid of a blue card from your hand to pay for it. You also pay to life. A couple of you pay to life. Anyway, but the idea was, it used to be when you were tapped out, your opponent knew you couldn't do anything.

And now, since your opponent's tapped out, you still could do stuff. Well, there were people who thought that was a horrible idea. That we were taking something that was just an intrinsic part of magic. Knowing that your opponent would be tapped out, meaning that you now have the flexibility to do something, with a security that they can't do anything, really rubbed some people the wrong way. Now, others loved the card. Loved, loved, loved. In fact, First of All is a much beloved card.

But it was a good example of how when sometimes you change something that people take as a given, it is very disconcerting when you take away the given from them. And people were actually quite upset that pitch cards existed. In fact, the story at the time, I told this in my Alliances podcast, which was in our own company, there were people in our game support or customer service, it was called at the time, that didn't think we should make them. They wrote letters to our CEO and said, you need to take these out of the set. This is fundamentally wrong. We can't do this.

Now, R&D believed in them, and I think that the important thing is the idea that Magic is a game in which we don't want people to ever rest on their laurels and say, well, I know this is true, and that we wanted people to say, oh, well, it used to be this wasn't true, but now it is, and that that's how the game changes. And so I think pitch cards were a very, very important step forward in us just doing different things and making you rethink strategy. And that every time we do something radical, people step up and we'll have some more coming. But usually I find that it advances the game and does good things for the game. Okay, next is premium cards. Okay, so with Urza's Legacy, we started printing cards, what people call foil.

We refer to it as premium. Real quickly, why does Wizards call them premium when everyone else calls them foil? And the answer is we make more than one trading card game, and that over the years, not all our trading card games use foiling for their premium cards. And so it's important to us that we have a similar term we use for all our games. And so because not all of our premium cards are foil, we refer to our premium cards as premium cards so that we can be consistent. I understand that in Magic, most, in fact, we've made a few premium cards that weren't

foil, very special things. But I understand that most of them are foil, but when made a few premium cards that weren't foiled, very special things, but I understand that most of them are foiled, but when I call them premium, that's why. So what we did is, one of the feedbacks we've been getting from collectors was that Magic was a little too easy to collect. And so we

decided, okay, let's add some added value. And what we did is, we said for every card in the set, there's going to exist a version that is, we said for every card in the set, there's going to exist a version that is in premium. Premium being, in most cases, foiled. But a special version of the card. And the idea was, the premium version appears at a much lower level rarity,

or lower frequency, than the normal card. And so, if you're a collector, collecting the premium version of the set is a much bigger task also for players it's just some added value here's a prettier cards if you want to bling out your deck or something here are cards that you can chase that are fun cards that functionally are the same but just a little bit different and people want to sort of chase after that well some people did not like the premiums which is funny because uh it's sort of added value it's like here these cars are, you know, have extra value to them, and we're just adding them to the product. Before you didn't have them, and now you

have them. And if you don't like them, trade them to people that do like them. But there were people that were upset. And they felt like, some people just didn't like the foils. Some didn't like what the foils represented. You know, some people felt like, I think Magic's too hard to collect. Why are you making it harder to collect? Although we stressed

you don't have to collect the foils. That's for people who opt into it. But anyway, people were upset. Number nine. The sixth edition rules. This is probably number two on the thing that upset people the most. So what happened was

early magic had a hodgepodge of a rule set. The way it worked was, every time we'd have a problem, we kind of solved the problem on a case-by-case basis. And what that led to was a band-aid ruling system, where there wasn't any consistency to how the game worked. You kind of had to know card-by-card how things worked. And that's a problem. It's hard to learn a game in which, well, this card has a rule that works differently than this card's rule, and why do they work differently? So what 6th edition rules are set up to say is, okay, let's unify how rules work. Let's have a

straight, unified system so that all the cards work the same. But doing that meant we had to change a bunch of things. Interrupts, for example, went away. Interrupts got folded into instance. We added something called damage on the stack that at the time was controversial and people couldn't believe we were doing it. Ironically, you'll see later they got mad when we took it away. We added the stack, you know, blasting first out. I mean, we did a lot of things to sort of clarify things. You know, protection finally got exact rules on how it worked, and we cleaned things up.

But the problem with cleaning things up is, look, not everything worked exactly the same. And there was a very, very big outcry against what people felt was us fundamentally changing the game. And like I said, we tried to explain that what we were doing was improving it,

and that we were doing something that was good for the long term. But once again, it required you in the short term learning new rules. Cards you had didn't quite work like the way they used to. And that people

were resistant. And there was... It's the first time we really overhauled the rules. I mean, obviously we do other rule overhaul. Not as big as 6th edition. And it was disconcerting. And if you want to go back and read some of the posts from the time, you would think

the sky was falling. People were really, really unhappy about it. And like I said, the only thing I remember people being more unhappy about was the introduction of standard type two. And in some ways, you could argue that there was more noise because the internet was louder at the time. Like when we did type two, that was just the usernets. I mean, they were on the bulletin boards and yelling, but it was a lower volume of people. By the time 6th edition rules came out, the internet was in more bloom, and there were magic sites,

and there really was, it was much easier, and there were soapboxes for people to have, and at the time people were writing columns. There was really a place and a means for people to express their unhappiness. So in some ways, I think people were slightly more happy with Type 2, but they were maybe louder here because they had a louder microphone because of the Internet.

Okay, number 10, Magic Online. Okay, so we had planned from pretty early on that we wanted to have a computer version of Magic because not everybody lives in a town where they can easily find other people to play with. If you live in a big city, sure, but if you live in a small city, it might not be that easy. You might not be near things, might not be near a game store, near something where people are playing. Plus, there are also people who, their lives have changed. They have families, you know, or they just don't have the ability to get away as easy. But late at night, they can sit at home and play.

So we really wanted a means to allow people that weren't able to play in the current system to play. And the idea there was to do Magic Online. And our goal with Magic Online was to try it as much as we could, capture the feel of paper. That's always been our goal with Magic Online was to try it as much as we could capture the feel of paper. That's always been our goal. And part of that was we didn't treat the game any differently. Like, a lot of video games act very differently. We didn't treat it as much like a video game as we treated it like an online version of Magic, of the paper game.

And so we did a lot of things. I mean, part of the most controversial was we sold packs And so we did a lot of things. I mean, probably the most controversial was we sold packs much like we sold packs in paper. And at the time, most computer games didn't do that. I mean, now the idea of buying virtual objects is a little more commonplace. But at the time, it was really, really radical. Games didn't do that.

They didn't sell you virtual components that you had to pay real prices for, you know. You would pay a lump sum, and they'd give you whatever you needed. And also there's a lot of concern that once, you know, the computers happen, what would happen to the stores? Would people stop coming in and no one would play and the stores would all dry up and then people were forced to play Magic Online? Anyway, there were a lot of concerns early on because no one quite understood the impact of Magic Online. And, you know, there was a lot of nervousness on all different levels. I guess, funny, there were people who wanted to play it online and were mad on our choices of how to execute it, and there were people that didn't want to play online and were

worried that online existing would impact them outside of the online world. And luckily, as time has shown, you know, Magic Online has gone on to become a very key part of Magic. There's a lot of people who play on Magic Online, and a lot of people who, their exposure to Magic is through Magic Online. So anyway, I'm almost to work, and since I've hit the halfway spot,

and it's clear I'm not doing 20 things before I get to work, I just want to do a little recap for today. So one of the things you'll see as I go through these things is I'm not trying to belittle the response of the audience. I believe when we do things that are radical that it is perfectly acceptable

for the audience to have a reaction. I think that's perfectly okay. The thing we've tried to do more of, and I think that we've gotten a little better, it's why some of the earlier stuff I think in some ways have had bigger outroars, was we're trying to do more of explaining to you guys why we're doing what we're doing. And I feel like in a lot of ways, you know, me writing my column every week and a lot of the other behind the scenes stuff we do, we've gotten a lot better at letting you guys understand our thought process.

You know, I think if standard were introduced today and I could explain the long-term ramifications, I could talk about why we want to do this, I think more people would have gone, oh, okay, I get it. I see what you're saying. I understand the reason you want to do that. Now, I'm not saying no one will be upset. We do things now that people get upset.

But I think that we have a means now to better explain why we do things and that it tempers it. One of the truisms of having worked on this game forever is people are going to get upset. Any change we make, any single change we make, people are going to get upset. It's the nature of the beast. It's the nature of humans that, you know, change is scary and we're a game about change. And so every time we do something and the more radical we do, the bigger reaction we tend to get. But, you know, the good news is, you

know, I look at all these things and one or two of them clearly were mistakes that we went back and fixed, like the Lathne dragon, you know, in Chronicles. But a lot of them were like, you know what, it actually was for the good of the game and it's very hard, I mean, it's very easy not to look back and go, oh, yeah, standard was very important. Oh, yeah, 6th edition rules were very important. You know, a lot of the things I'm talking about today, like, with 20-20 vision of time, oh, you get why we

did what we did. But, you know, in the moment, it's a little harder to see. And like I said, I do not begrudge our audience having reactions. In fact, I love the fact that you guys care so much that every time something happens, you do care. You know what I'm saying?

One of the things we always say is, you know, we should be happy whenever there's an outcry about something because the player base being emotional is a sign that they really, really care about what we're doing. And that, I mean, as they say, you can't buy that. You can't buy player investment, you know. You have to earn player investment. And I'm very happy that we spent so many years

building it up and making people care and really, really, you know, be invested in every decision that Magic makes. That makes me really happy. So anyway, I'm now here at work. And I'm halfway done with my trip through the 20 things that are going to kill magic. So join me tomorrow, or sorry, join me next time when I'll do the second half of 20 things that are going to kill magic.

But as much as I like talking about magic and magic history, even more, I like making magic. So I'll talk to you next time, guys. Ciao.