Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #339 - Supertypes

Episode Date: June 10, 2016

Mark talks about the six supertypes of Magic.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic was suggested by one of my followers on my blog. So today's topic is supertypes. These are no ordinary types. They are types that rise around mortal types. So what supertypes are, for those that might not know,

is if you look on the car type line, there are seven card types in magic right now, which is artifacts, creatures, enchantments, instants, lands, sorceries, and planeswalkers. Once upon a time, there were interrupts and mana sources, I guess would be real technical. But anyway, so a super type is any word that comes before the card type. So there have been six supertypes in all of Magic. A couple of them are pretty obscure, but I will talk through them all today. So the six supertypes are Basic, Elite, Legendary, Ongoing, Snow, and World. I'm going to explain to them what all of those are. And I'll also talk about sort of what a supertype is.

I'll also talk a little bit about why tribal, which seems like a supertype, isn't a supertype. So if you notice, for example, sometimes you have things that come after the word, like creature hyphen goblin. That's what's called a subtype. And all artifacts can have subtypes. In fact, there are subtypes that have gone on all different things. I will probably do a podcast at one point on subtypes, but today is not about subtypes. Today is about supertypes. So a supertype comes

before the card type and it kind of modifies it. It sort of says, hey, there's something special about me. And so let me walk through sort of what the super types are. In general, we don't use a lot of super types. It's pretty rare. And like I said, of the six I named, two of them are located in non-normal and supplemental products. So even though I just listed six, only four really are used. And of those four, well, I'll walk through them. Only a few of them are really used. In fact, only one of them or two of them are used on a regular basis. The rest are pretty obscure and we don't use them very often.

Some of which I would even say we've kind of abandoned. So let's start with basic. Okay, so basic shows up in one place on lands. There are five basic lands. You guys might know them as plains, islands, swamps, mountains, and forests. So basically what basic does is basic says, hey, I'm a special modifier. And the reason that modifier is important is one of the rules of the game has to do with how many of a certain card you're allowed to have. Well, the rule says that you may have four of any one card.

By the way, just for those who want historical relevance, when the game first started, there were no restrictions on cards. Like early Magic, if you look at the Alpha rulebook, first off, decks were 40 cards, not 60 cards, and there was no limitation how many you could have of a card. So people say, why? Well, why would that be so? And the answer is, remember, Richard assumed that people would buy, like people would spend on Magic what you spend on a normal board game. You know, the idea of buying all the cards or buying boxes of cards or, you know, the idea of acquiring as many cards as people do assumes stuff that Richard didn't assume early on. He's like, okay, this is a normal game. People will spend the amount of money they normally spend on a game.

And what that meant is the reason he didn't need to limit how many you could have is just how many you were able to get would limit how many you could have. If you don't spend a lot of money, well, you know, yeah, maybe you could acquire a bunch of commons, but how many commons could you get, you know? If you open up, you know, eight booster packs, you know, you're not even going to get four of any one common. Yeah, you could trade. And I think in Richard's mind, you know, he did expect people to have a lot of plague rash or something that was common that maybe they could trade for.

But it was designed such that if you had a lot of commons, you weren't going to be in trouble. And that the rares, well, yeah, you would have trouble if you could have a lot of rares, but the rares, how easy would they be to get? Richard knew that if the game was a giant success, there'd be some issues that needed to be addressed. But that's one of those, well, if the game was a giant success, there'd be some issues that needed to be addressed, but that's one of those, well, if the game's a giant

success, I guess we'll deal with it then for our issues. Anyway, how many you could have in a certain deck later came about when we started having tournaments. So the DCI, the Duelist Convocation International, at the time called the Duelist Convocation,

was the wizard branch that started running tournaments. And so people had informally started to do restrictions. That is something that kind of the public had done on their own when people were running tournaments. And so when the DCI, or the Duelist Convocation, originally started, they sort of adopted what had been generally consensus, which is 60 cars,

not 40 and four of four of a kind, um, or four car restriction. Um, I don't really know is the kind of thing that kind of like people just got to naturally and then they'd sort of stuck with it. Um, not quite sure where 60 and four came from.

Um, I remember before it was announced that that's the way it should be, we were informally doing that. So I don't, I have no idea actually if that came from somewhere or just it seemed so natural that people did it.

But anyway, once we said that you can only have four of any one card, there needed to be some rule about the basic lands because we did want you to have as many basic lands as you needed. Because obviously you're going to build your deck, you're going to have more lands.

If lands were restricted to four of, none of the game couldn't function, I guess. We have a lot of non-basic lands. But the goal was we wanted basic lands to be this separate thing. So eventually, actually I did not do the research of when this started, but

at some point they decided that what they would do is, in order to communicate rule-wise that you could have as many as you wanted, that they would use a supertype. I think these were always called basic lands, or very early on it was called basic lands. So, the idea of basic being a supertype, it wasn't, it really was like, well, we're already calling these basic lands. I think the rules called them basic lands before they were supertype.

So one of the other reasons to have a supertype also was, if a card says go and get a basic land, it doesn't have to name the five basic lands. It could say go get a basic land, and then all basic lands say on them basic land. say on them basic land. It allowed us in tournaments also or it allowed us for constructed in the rules to say you may have four of any card except for basic lands of which you may have as many as you want.

And I'm sure we listed them out too. But anyway, so basic is there. So the big question about basic is people have asked me is could we put basic on other card types? Like, for example, let's say we wanted to make, so like Relentless Rats are a card we made, inspired by Plague Rats, that the idea was you give as many Relentless Rats as you want.

It just sends it on the card. You get as many as you want. And we've made a few of those cards. The question is, could we use the technology of BASIC to allow us to just say, hey, yeah, you can do that. to allow us to just say, hey, yeah, you can do that. I talked with our rules manager, Matt Tabak, and his answer to that was that it was not that easy to do that,

that BASIC had been tied to LANs in some ways that you couldn't just sort of toss it on. I actually didn't get a lot more detail out of him. I asked, this is like years ago that I talked to him about it. tossed it on. I actually didn't get a lot more detail out of him. I didn't... This is like years ago that I talked to him about it. We had talked about trying to put basic on a creature, and there are some problems. Basic really needs to be tied to lands

by the nature of how the rules work. And we just don't do the, you may play as many of these as you want in your deck often enough to really worry that much about it that we can write it out when we do it. We do it pretty infrequently, so it just wasn't a big deal. But anyway, so the answer to the question for those is, can we have a basic creature or rat and then make a new Relentless Rats? The answer, according to the rules right now, is no.

Rules are flexible. Rules can sometimes change. So it being a no now doesn't, I guess, mean being a no forever. But it does at least mean currently the rules do not allow that. Okay, so anything else about basic? Anything else about basic? That's a fine question. One second, I gotta

cut over. Okay. Safety first. Next, let's move on to the next cut over. Okay. Safety first. Next, let's move on to the next supertype. Elite. I'll bet you that most of you, when I read off that list, when I got to Elite, it's basic Elite legendary ongoing snow in a world. And even the hard course of players who've been around for a while

on Elite and on ongoingngoing said, What? What? So Elite has never shown up in a normal product. So Elite is from the Theros Challenge decks. Face the Hydra. So untapped Elite heads deal double damage at the end of Hydra's turn. So we needed some way to have certain heads that dealt double damage at the end of Hydra's turn. So we needed some way to have certain heads that dealt double damage.

I guess at the time we needed to tag them in some way, so they decided to make use of supertype technology. So it's interesting to say that of the six supertypes I read, two of them don't exist in normal products is a sign that we just don't really use supertypes much to advance things. The goal of supertypes, I guess, is to take something that's important and put someplace like, so the difference between a supertype and a subtype is we've stopped having subtypes carry rules information, meaning once upon a time there were creatures

legends and creatures wall and both of those carried rules baggage. The creature legend meant if you were a legend, you had all the baggage of a legendary creature and if you were a wall, you couldn't attack. You basically had defender built in. And the problem was we had

cards that changed creature types but those cards started having functionality reasons. Because if I changed you to a wall, then you couldn't attack. If I changed you to a legend and there was another one in play, then depending on what period in time, either they both would die or one would die. It would cause things to happen. And we finally decided that we liked having things be able to change creature type

or be all creature types or whatever a la Changeling, that we didn't want to have any wolves baggage in the creature type like it felt wrong to us that like it'd be creature wall and just you had to know the walls couldn't attack and the flavor helped you there so what we did is we turned wall

we added defender and then all walls, what we basically said is all walls have defender, and then all walls, what we basically said is, all walls have defender, we eroded all old walls, and all walls moving forward always have defender. We don't make walls that don't have defender. We make defenders that aren't walls, so that also allowed us to stretch out that ability, so the ability wasn't only tied to walls. But there's a one-to-one correlation with wall. If you have wall, you have defender. That makes it a little easier to do backward stuff than if you ever see a wall in the past. Yeah, I mean, at least it's a general rule to learn. Then with legend, we ended up turning

legend into legendary. So I'll get to that in a second when I talk about legendary. So elite was just a solution to a problem. I did not work on this deck, so I know they were, so for those who don't know, during Theros block, we made challenges that you did in the game store. Um, and so one of the challenges was called Face the Hydra. So the idea was, I think it was the first challenge. First you fought the Hydra, then you fought the Minotaurs, then you fought, uh, a god or gods okay so the idea of

you were sort of going on your own the flavor was you were on your own you know you're a hero on your own journey and first you had to fight a great monster so you had to fight the Hydra this paralleled what Elisabeth had done when Elisabeth

went on her journey in the story and so you had to fight Hydra and their cards representing different heads and the idea is you had to kill the heads but as you kill some heads you can make other heads and then certain heads were extra hard and they essentially

they needed some way to signify that and so they used a super type technology interestingly we are much they needed some way to signify that and so they used the super type technology. Interestingly, we are much more hesitant in actual normal expansions to do that. We don't tend to introduce super type. I mean,

it's not that we're unwilling to do it, but we're very hesitant, obviously. If you look at the list of seven, basic and legendary is something you see normally. Snow and World is something that we've done in the past but really don't do anymore.

Snow, maybe. We'll get there. And Elite and Ongoing are stuff that we use for self-made products that were unique to those products. So, anyway,

Elite was just a special means by which to label heads. So, anyway, not a lot to say about Elite. There's no great... I don't expect normal expansions to start using Elite or anything. Okay, next. Legendary.

So, interestingly, Legendary, I did an entire podcast on. So, I'm going to do the abbreviated version here if you want to hear more about... I mean, my podcast is more about the history of Legendary and the rule about it and stuff. I'm going to talk a little bit about it as a super type today. But if you want more on the history of Legendary.

Like I said, the real brief version was it started as a creature type, had baggage on it. Although, interestingly, creatures were Legends, but other things were Legendary. So Legendary actually existed. There were legendary lands, for example, back in Legends. So, legendary as a super-prime actually goes a way back. Just for some reason, we split out the creatures from the non-creatures. And so, one of the other reasons of doing that was we could just make them all legendary. So, what legendary says is

a couple things. This rule has changed. If you want to hear all about how the rule has changed, you can listen to my legendary podcast. I'm going to talk about how the rule currently works. So how the rule currently works, and then that currently works, is if you play a legendary permanent, and the only things currently that are permanent

are legendary, I'll get to Incident Sorceress in a sec. So if you play a permanent that is legendary, if you have another one in play, meaning I play a legendary creature named Bob, and I already have a Bob in play, what it does is it says, hey, hey, hey, that's legendary.

You can't have two Bobs in play. You must sacrifice one of the bobs. You choose which one you want. And so the reason sometimes, the reason you'll play a second one is to sort of reset it to its original state. For example, you might have a creature that has pacifism on it or something which the new one would be better for you. You it or something which the new one would be better for you, you can choose to keep the new one if it's beneficial for you. It's usually the reason you'll play

one if you already have one. If not, usually you keep it in your hand so once it dies then you can play it again. For a long time you couldn't play it. There would be a rule if anybody had it in play but now the way the legendary rules work is I can have a copy and you can have a copy. I can have Bob in play and you can have Bob in play. We each have our own Bob from, I don't know, our own point in time or something. And legendary, we tend to put it on things. Usually it's

on things that are designated as a flavor thing. This is an actual character or object. It is a thing of importance. Usually it's used for story purposes of like, this is a unique thing. This is not just, there's not just many of this thing. There's one of this thing. It's Bob. There's only one Bob. And so Legendary is mostly meant to mean that.

Since Legendary has this sort of uniqueness quality to it, every once in a while, development will come to us and go to creative team and say, oh, wow, this card is problematic in numbers. Can we make it legendary just so you can't have more than one? Mind Slaver was a good example,

that having multiple Mind S slavers was problematic. So they came and said, do you guys mind if it's legendary? I mean, could there be one of them rather than a lot of them? And usually when we need it for the rules, creative team works with us and says, okay, yeah, we'll figure out a way to make this

a one-of-a-kind thing. More often than it's done on artifacts than it's done on creatures, but every once in a while we'll have a creature. Sometimes when creatures that are legendary, if they're real cheap sometimes, allows us to push them a little bit, because you can't get

multiples in play. As a general rule of thumb, as I explain in my legendary podcast, development can push them a little bit, because there's a little bit of a downside, especially on cheaper ones. But as a general rule, being legendary is more a flavor thing

than a developmental thing. Although, like I said, there's times when it matters. For those that don't know, the commander format, legendary is also important because in the commander format, you need to pick a commander,

basically a specific character that you built your deck around, the commander of your deck. The rule there is the creature must be a legendary creature. So when we make something legendary, one of the big tensions right now of legendary is

that if I make a creature legendary, that means that players are dissuaded from having four. I mean, not that you can't play four if the creature's important enough. But because you can't have more than one to play at once, it sort of dissuades you a little bit from wanting to play more of them.

And so one of the problems we have right now, this is one of my pet peeves about the Legendary mechanic, or super type, is there's a tension. That if I want you to play four of them and have multiples that play at once, I can't make it legendary. But I want it to be special, and I want maybe you to play it as a commander,

I need to make it legendary. And every once in a while, I have a cool character that I really want, I have a neat mechanic that I would want you to have multiples, and I can't. And so, it is weird sometimes. I'm not very fond of the legendary uniqueness rule. I get the flavor behind it, but, I mean, for example,

if you have two legends that are the same character but are different creatures, for example, you have Macaeus and whatever zombie Macaeus is called, or you have Kamal, red whatever zombie Macaeus is called. Or you have Kamal, Red Kamal and Green Kamal. Or if you have Mirri, an alternate version of Mirri, that those can be in play at the same time. The game already lets you have those

in play. That if we have multiple versions of a legend, you can have two different, you know, a copy of each version of a legend in play and the legend rule doesn't do anything about that. And like, I don't know if that makes any more sense. But anyway, my two cents on the legendary rule. If it was up to me, it would not have... Uniqueness would be separate from it.

Some cards that need uniqueness would have uniqueness on it, and I would only do uniqueness more for gameplay reasons than I would for flavor reasons, and I would disconnect them. That's minority opinion. No one's saying that's going to happen anytime soon, but my opinion. Legendary, by the way, is not identical to,

but is similar to, the way that Planeswalkers function for Planeswalker uniqueness. The rules do work similarly to each other, not identical. The biggest difference is Planeswalkers look at the player, sorry, planeswalker subtype. So if you're a Jace, all planeswalkers that are Jace say Jace, and then the planeswalker

rule applies to all Jaces, not just any one copy of Jace, but all Jaces, where legendary creatures don't do that. Legendary creatures can't say, hey, are you another copy of the same character? It doesn't do that. So legendary creatures can't say, hey, are you another copy of the same character? It doesn't do that. So legendary things have appeared on all permanent types. We have made

legendary artifacts. We've made legendary lands. We've made legendary enchantments. Legendary lands, by the way, we stopped doing for quite a while because under the,

there was a rule for a while that when I played my legend, I destroyed all legends. And, I'm sorry, there was a rule for a while that said when I play a legend, I destroy the other legend and play and keep my legend.

And so, I'm taking this back. There was a rule in play, sorry, I'm messing this up, where I would play my legend and then it locked out anybody else from playing their legend. That's the rule I'm messing this up. Where I would play my legend and then it locked out anybody else from playing their legend. That's the rule I'm thinking about. And then we changed it to say,

well, at least mine blows yours up. The problem is that it would make the gameplay with Legendary Lands when there's a lot of sort of, I'm playing Legendary Lands just to blow up your Legendary Lands was not particularly fun gameplay. So for a while, we just stopped doing Legendary Lands.

And we just said, you know what? Yeah, it's a famous place, but there's a lot of ley lines in that famous place. So yeah, the name sounds very proper as if it's a singular place. But yeah, there's multiple ways to get man out of that place so we can have multiple lands. That was sort of our pseudo flavor answer to the fact that we didn't want to do Legendary Lands. Since we've changed the rules to the current rules, that each

person can have one, we now it's not as problematic. So you just want to have a legendary land that's good, you can have one. I can't destroy yours. So that gameplay went away. There's been talk about legendary instants and sorceries. The biggest problem is that the rule

about legendary is tied to permanence. And so if we made legendary instants and sorceries, the biggest problem is that the rule about legendary is tied to permanence. And so if we made legendary instants and sorceries, that wouldn't mean anything because, you know,

you can't have instants and sorceries in play at the same time by the nature of, I mean, I guess you could say they couldn't be in the stack together,

but... So the problem there is if we just made them legendary by name and it only was a tag that other things could care about then it wouldn't do anything and people would feel like hey why isn't it doing anything other legendary characters do something

but ironically if we try to make it do something it wouldn't work like the permanents work and then it's legendary would mean different things or different permanent types so it's tricky it's really a no-win or different permanent types. So it's tricky. It's really a no-win situation. I mean, maybe one day we'll solve that one,

but it's something we've definitely spent time and energy trying to solve, and thus far, we have not had a lot of luck solving it. Brian Tinsman made cards called Epic, and that was his attempt at making legendary instants and sorceries. I that was his attempt at making legendary instants and sorceries. I don't think they actually

said legendary on them, but the way they worked was it was a mechanic where when you played it, you weren't allowed to play any spells for the rest of the turn, but this spell would go off every turn.

So that was Brian's attempt to try to do something that felt legendary. Like this, you're not going to know, because once you cast this spell, you can never have another copy of this spell because you can never

play spells again. I don't think that said legendary on them. That was Brian's inspiration of where that, the epic mechanic came from. Okay, anything else about legendary

before I move on? It is one of the two supertypes we do use on a regular basis. I think the popularity of the Commander format has upped our percentages of Legendary things. We now make a little bit more Legendary stuff than we used to, just because Commander's

so popular and just gives people more options for their deck. The Commander format has also pushed us toward making less mono-colored Legendary characters. We tend to make more multi-colored now, just because they work better for Commander oh let me say this by the way

this comes up all the time there are people who like legendary cards that aren't necessarily Commander players so one of the every time I make a legendary card that doesn't play well in Commander I get people yelling at me because like how dare you make this card

it doesn't play well and I'm like look look look not everybody who appreciates legendary is a commander player there are other people that appreciate you know having named characters legendaries were popular in fact the reason the commander format picked the legendary creatures is because there are players that already liked the sort of flavor of oh it's an actual character, and I'm going to have a character to run my deck by. And so I feel like the reason the kind of the commander adopted it was there were always a subset of players that enjoyed it.

And so I can't design every single legendary creature just for one format, because not everybody who enjoys legendary creatures even plays that format. So from time to time, I will make a card that's a cool card that you might want multiples in your deck, even though obviously in commander, that's not going to be so. For example, we made an ability called Grandeur in Future Sight,

which was we were hinting that one day maybe this mechanic will come back. And what Grandeur does is Grandeur says that you may discard other copies of the same legend to have an ability. And the idea being is since I can't play the second copy, I now have a use for the second copy. People keep asking for Granger to come back, and the problem we've run into is because Commander's become so popular,

Granger's awesome, except it doesn't work or barely works in Commander because you can't have multiple copies of the same legendary creature. It's a mechanic kind of made to design for specifically not commander. So it's tricky for us since legendary is so tied to commander. I mean, I'm willing to make individual cards that might not work for commander, but it's weird to make a mechanic tied to legendary that doesn't work for commander.

Anyway, that's the fate of grandeur. Okay, next we go to ongoing. This is another super type that even if you're a pretty die-hard magic player you might go ongoing what is ongoing and the answer is ongoing is from arch enemy another supplemental type so arch enemy for those that don't know was a product we made um where the idea was that you um it allowed one person to take on multiple players. So it was loosely inspired by a product years ago

that Bill had come up with called, what did Bill call it? I think I've talked about this. Bill had a name for it. The idea was that we, Bill's original idea from many, many years ago

is we would make cards, it'd be a product that, oh, Power Lunch was the nickname for it. The idea was, it would make a product where the cards were all on power level with ancestral recall. The idea, as Bill said, is imagine a set in which ancestral recall is average power level. So these are cards

all of that power level, and then the idea was, one person would take on multiple people. That was the idea behind Power Lunch. So eventually we made Arch Enemy, and it followed that basic idea. The idea is I'm sort of like the supervillain, and many of you are going to take me on. And they have, what are the Arch Enemies called?

They're called, are they the arch enemy spell? I forget the card type. They're special spells the arch enemy casts. Maybe they're called plots. Anyway, I did not look that up. Anyway, they're special cards, they're oversized cards that only the arch enemy can cast. And they're the thing that helps give juice to the Arch Enemy so that they can take on multiple people. The idea of Arch Enemy is one person plays the Arch Enemy deck and they can take on

some number of creatures. Depends on sort of how you build the deck. It was designed, I think, in the original playtest, or the original product, to take on four, I think. But anyway, the idea is that if you're playing the arch enemy You have these powerful arch enemy spells that you can use to take them on

And so the arch enemy spells were all sort of designed. I think to be sorceries you played them on your turn But they needed a way to essentially make enchantments But they didn't want to have multiple different types of they wanted to be a singular card type. So they needed a way to sort of have effects that lasted because sometimes you want to do something and said hey until such a condition is met this is going to happen. So what ongoing was it was a super type that allowed you to cast

an arch enemy spell and have it function kind of like an enchantment. If it was a normal magic card, it would have been an enchantment. It would have been an enchantment that said, hey, when condition X is met, you sacrifice me. So instead, ongoing, I think they're plots, ongoing plots, you're doing something, and then the plot continues, usually until some condition is met. So it allows you to do sort of more

have more, I don't know what's the word, but have longer lasting effects. And ongoing is another thing where there's no real need for it in normal magic. We have enchantments in normal magic. I think the reason that it exists in the product is they didn't want to make multiple card types that were...

It just made it easier if the arch enemy had one singular card type. And so, once again, I think they're plots. I've not played tons of arch enemy, and I played many years ago. So the idea is they only wanted one card type that was the big card type. They didn't want to... It would be confusing to have different ones. So they decided they would have the ongoing plots that would stick around.

I'm not sure why that was a super type versus... I guess subtypes don't carry rules baggage. That is why it had to be a super type. It's because subtypes don't carry rules baggage. Anyway, so ongoing... By the way, if you want to... If you have people who are really diehard magic players, this is a fine trivia question, which is name all the supertypes. And there are six of them.

And most people will not know two of them. So it's a good, I don't know, magic player bar bet kind of thing. Okay, let's move on to Snow. magic player bar bet kind of thing. Okay, let's move on to snow. Okay, so snow came about from a set called... I think the super type for snow... Well, Ice Age happened, and Ice Age had snow-covered lands.

And then it had things that cared about snow-covered lands. And then when we made Cold Snap, so many years later, we needed to make a summer set. And so we needed to come up with a gimmick for our summer set. So the gimmick we came up with was that it was a lost set. Much like in Hollywood, sometimes they'll stumble across an episode of a TV show, usually an old TV show, that kind of got lost with the ages and no one realized it existed. Like the Honeymooners. They found some lost episodes of the Honeymooners.

So we thought it'd be funny to do a lot, because Ice Age had Ice Age and Alliances, but all our other blocks had three sets in them. And at the time, it was only blocks that didn't have three sets. I mean, obviously, now we do two-set blocks. But at the time, all sets had three sets except for Ice Age. So we thought it would be funny to find the lost Ice Age set. That set ended up having all sorts of problems. One of the biggest problems, by the way,

is when we announced it, normally I'm the one that does tongue-in-cheek stuff, but Randy decided he wanted to announce it, just because he and I, I did the design column, he did the development column at the time. Anyway, Randy wanted to announce it. I'm like, okay, fine did the design column, he did the development column at the time. Anyway, Randy wanted to announce it. I'm like, okay, fine.

The problem is Randy's a pretty straight shooter, that Randy isn't known for joking around. I'm the one that, you know, our R&D's run by an alien brain in a jar. We use a time machine to fix problems, and I have an evil twin, and I tell some tall tales. Randy doesn't. So when Randy said we found a lost thing and a thing,

people just believed him. Like, oh, they did. They found a lot, you know. And they didn't quite get the tongue-in-cheek quality that he was going for. And so later when it came out that we had just,

we were making it up, it was a gimmick, people got mad at us because like, you said you really found it. I'm like, okay, we were, that was never the intent,

just Randy was a little too much of a straight man and not much of a comedian, so. But anyway, one of the problems we made when we were making Cold Snap was when we went back and looked at all the mechanics from Ice Age and Alliances, we found the following problem. Either the mechanics were so good,

like cantrips, or cumulative upkeep, well, I'm not sure cumulative Upkeep is good, but we liked it enough that we had made it, we had brought it to the game. So there were Cune of Upkeep cards outside of Ice Age block. There were Cantrips outside of Ice Age block. And so

the things that we really liked we had used and so were no longer unique to Ice Age. So we really had a challenge of what do people feel is... Like pitch cards, for example, was something that had been really unique to Alliances, but we had brought them back in Mercadian masks. So pitch cards no longer felt like a unique Ice Age thing. We'd already brought them back in another product.

So one of our challenges was how to feel like Ice Age, because we actually wanted to use mechanics from Ice Age block, because it was the third set in the block. So one of the ideas we came up with is snow as a supertype. So the idea is, well, what if the quality to the lands was something that was applicable? And so we came up with the idea of snow mana. And so snow mana was a special kind of mana that you could only get from snow permanents. So it turns out that retroactively, snow-covered plains was a snow kind of mana that you could only get from snow permanents. So it turns out that, retroactively, Snow-Covered Plains was a snow basic land.

And that anything that produced mana that was a snow permanent produced snow mana. So anyway, supertype on things. Usually snow went on to things that, um, had the strong, I think they went on things originally that just produced snow mana, but we also might have put it on some things that just had heavy flavor of being snow related because there were a few things I think preferred to snow permanence. Um, anyway, it's a supertype that was mostly used to sort of, um, allow us to sort of retroactively get snow-covered. Because in Ice Age, there was snow-covered plains, islands, swamp-mounted forest,

and there were cards that cared about them. But the tricky thing was, those cards were allowed into tournaments at the time, but they weren't allowed. So we had to sort of explain why you could play more than four of them in a deck back then, but not now. And anyway, so we ended up making them snow basic lands. So being basic meant that at the time you could play four of them, but because they were snow, they weren't normal basic lands. And so they rotated with Ice Age. Anyway, it was a convoluted answer.

It was something to sort of give us some flavor at the time. People ask all the time, okay, do you think snow is going to come back? Snow mana or snow supertypes? They're pretty tied together, by the way. If snow mana comes back, probably snow supertypes come back. And the answer is, I say, I think on the Storm Scale, I've

stuck it at a 7, that's what I said. It's the kind of thing where it wasn't particularly loved as a mechanic. It definitely had some wonkiness to it. It is not something that I expect us to bring back. But if we happen to be in a world where the flavor is just perfect and we find a way mechanically where it's relevant to us, yeah, I could see it coming back. I mean, it's the kind of thing where but my caveat there is we really have to

find the right place for it where it does something for us. It was not such an awesome mechanic that I would bring it back without a lot of other things supporting it. But we will visit other worlds that are snowy. I think a snowy world, it's not like there's only one ever snowy world. I think we will visit other worlds that are snowy. I think a snowy world, it's not like there's only one ever snowy world.

I think we will visit other snowy worlds. So there's a chance when we revisit a snowy world. I mean, whenever we have a world in which snow is a major part of it, it's a cold world with snow, I'm sure we're going to talk about it. So it'll be something that will come up. I don't think we would do a heavy, cold-based, snowy world

and not talk about whether we wanted snow or not. Not saying we necessarily would have it, but it'd be part of the discussion. Okay, next, World. Okay, so World started as not a supertype. So it started in the set Legends. So, they were called enchantments already. They were called enchant worlds.

And the idea was, the flavor was, when you have an enchant world, it's dictating where the fight is happening. You're having a magical duel. Well, now you're having a magical duel in this place. So, all the enchant worlds represented places you could have a duel. And then those places had some limitation that would affect the dual. And then the idea was if you cast a different enchant world, it would get rid of any enchant worlds that were already in play. So like, I for example played Concordant Crossroads in my deck back in the day, and Concordant Crossroads gave all creatures haste.

The nature of the world. Everything has haste. And there was a point in time in Magic Constructed where there's two... There's the Abyss and Nethervoid, which were two very, very mean black enchant worlds.

Now world enchantments. That really dominated gameplay. It's so much so that you needed to play enchant worlds to deal with them. Nethered Void, in particular, makes spells more expensive. So, enchant worlds,

there were a lot of cheap enchant worlds that you could play. There's a few cheap enchant worlds. And they showed up in all the colors. So, for example, if someone played one of the black enchant worlds, and you were playing a color that couldn't get rid of enchantment, say red or black, your answer was you had to play enchant worlds. Anyway, at some point when we made supertypes, I think supertypes happened in 6 editions, my guess. I did not do that research, but that is my guess.

That's when supertypes started existing. We decided to convert that over to a supertype. Once again, we didn't want rules baggage in subtypes. And so instead of worlds being a subtype, we wanted to be a supertype. of Enchant Worlds being a subtype, we wanted to be a supertype. So Enchant Worlds became World Enchantments. And what Worlds meant is

it's actually kind of the opposite of how Legendary functions. Or, opposite of how Legendary used to function. Legendary is a little different now.

But when I play a World Enchantment, I get rid of all other World Enchantments. That the latest played World Enchantment go away. Legends, by other world enchantments. That the latest played world enchantment go away. Legends, by the way,

for a long time, legendary, that whatever got played first, the other ones couldn't get played. So they worked a little differently from each other. People ask about enchant worlds all the time,

or world enchantments. It is not something we thought was particularly good gameplay. Yes, there was a point in time in Magic where you had to deal with it, so it definitely was relevant. Even for a while, it was tournament relevant. But we never really liked the gameplay.

And in general, when you're fighting, usually there's a world you're in, and we're trying to get you cards from that world. So, like, in order to flavor world enchantments, we'd have to have you go into other worlds. And usually it'd be a bit weird to have a product where, like, hey, we're on Innistrad or wherever, but here's lots of other worlds that you could go to.

So that'd be kind of quirky. If we ever did it again, it would be most likely in a supplemental product where some product that might be about bouncing from world to world or something. That's the best chance of their return is we get to some supplemental product where the flavor of the product is traveling to lots of different worlds. At least the mechanic is playing to the theme of the set and not playing against the theme of the set. Because most sets, you're pretty much stuck.

I mean, you are where you are, you know. One of the interesting things about sort of our dueling is, in Magic, is usually you're kind of somewhere when you duel. You might pull things from other places, but you're still sort of in one place. And so, I mean, not that you couldn't jump from world to world in a duel. And, you know, I can imagine in other media, like in a movie or a TV show or something,

that you'd want to see more of characters jumping between worlds when they fight, a little more dynamic. But the gameplay doesn't really tend to match that. Okay, so now I've got to spend a little bit of time talking about why a card type or a card type that everyone thinks is tribal is not tribal i'm sorry it thinks is is a super type it's not a super which is tribal sorry so a lot of people think tribal is a super type it acts like a super type um in fact it modifies card type so one of the things about tribal is back during lorwyn we needed to, or we wanted to put creature subtypes on non-creatures.

Hey, it's an enchantment, but it's a goblin enchantment, or it's a, you know, it's a, I don't know, elf artifact or whatever. We wanted things to sort of have some flavor. And in order to solve that problem, the rules manager at the time, Mark Gottlieb, said, okay, you want, there's a rule that says that with the exception of instants and sorceries, which we're allowed to share a supertype, card types can't share subtypes. That if you're a goblin, which is a creature subtype, you

can't put that on a land, or can't put that on an enchantment. So the way around that that Mark came up with was having some word that sort of signified and said, hey, I can cross over. If you see this, this allows you to put something that's not normally on this type on that type. So the big question is, why did that have to be a card type and not a super type?

And the answer is, I don't really know. I've talked to numerous rules managers over the years. Well, I guess really Mark and Tabak, since the two, since the rule existed. And neither one of them really has made me understand why. It's very complicated. It has to do with a lot of technical stuff. But for some technical reason, it needs to be a card type. I really don't understand why. I wish it could have been a subtype. I'm sorry, supertype. Only cause it really acts like a supertype. Like whenever, for example, I say name supertypes, people keep wanting to name tribal. It really, in many, many ways, functions like a supertype. People keep thinking of it as a supertype. It even has rules like supertype had

rules. But technically speaking, it is not. So the other thing about a supertype. It even has rules like supertype had rules. But technically speaking, it is not. So the other thing about a supertype, by the way, is every once in a while we have a card that cares about card types.

Delirium right now in Shadows of Innistrad does. Like Tarmogoyf, a very famous example that also does. Tribal count. You get a count. Your Tarmogoyf is one bigger.

You get to reach delirium if you have three card types and tribal. Tribal does count as a cardarmogoyf is one bigger. You get a reach delirium if you have three card types and tribal. Tribal does count as a card type, so it is not a super type. So, for the one areas where it matters that it's a card type, it is a card type. The reason we haven't really made super types matter,

the game could allow us to do that, is like I said, of these six that I named, only two of them really ever show up. So there's not much we can do with it. And the problem is basic lands, we can't control how many you have. So if I said to you, super type matters, well, first of all, you could just put your basic land types that, you know, you just use basic lands. That's not particularly much of a restriction. And if the other thing is legendary we're more likely to make legendary matter

than we are to make super types matter we have by the way in the past another thing about, I should mention this about super types is the other thing it allows us to do is we call it tag which means anything that's on a card we, well

I should take that back. There are some things that we're allowed to reference in Black Border and some that we can't. For example, we are no longer allowed to reference an expansion symbol. The reason for that is, I could have a card from one set that has

an expansion symbol and a reprint of that card from a different set with a different expansion symbol and the rule is is you play all cards with the same name identically. So if there are aspects to them like rarity or expansion symbol or even names because there's different languages

we, I mean you can care about what the name is but you can't care about qualities of the name. Silver Border messes with all this because Black Border can't. But anyway, super types are unique, or I'm sorry, are not every version of the card has to have a super type.

So super types are black, they are a tag that you can care about in Black Border. Legendary is the one that we've most often cared about. I'll tell you the fact, we do care about basic. We actually, most sets will have, like, go get a basic land for your deck. So we do care about basic, we do care about basic. We actually, most sets will have like, go get a basic land for your deck.

So we do care about basic. We do refer to basic. In fact, we probably prefer basic more than refer to legendary because we do have card fetches that say basic land. So we do care about basic. We do care about legendary. If we made another super type, we're more than free to care about that.

That is something Black Border can and does care about. Anyway, I'm almost to my daughter's skull. So let me recap now since we're... So if you ever want to have that bet, say, can you name all the supertypes in Magic? And the answer, once again, is basic, elite, legendary, ongoing, snow, world.

Tribal is not. So if you say tribal, you're incorrect. So there's six of them. The ones you remember is Elite is from the Theros, Challenge decks face the Hydra. Ongoing is from Arch Enemy. So two of them are not normally used. And both Snow and World are...

We haven't done them in quite a while. So anyway, it's an odd bet if you want to make it. But anyway, that is probably more than you want to make it. But anyway, that is probably more than you want to know about supertypes. Like I said, will we ever make more supertypes? My guess is, of course, we'll make some more supertypes. It is a tool in our toolbox. It is not something we want to do willy-nilly. Obviously, we don't make them very often, which means it's something we're careful about. But, I do believe we will come today where the answer to the problem is a supertype, and I'm not against

making more supertypes. I wouldn't want to do it without a good reason, but I also believe that look, snow and worlds exist. We can make one that, I do think we can even make one that's a block-specific thing, if it really is what it was called for. So anyway, my guess is yes, we will see more supertypes. Although

it's something I don't expect to see anytime soon, but it's something I think we could do. But anyway, there's everything you ever wanted to know about supertypes but were afraid to ask. And I'm now at my daughter's school. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be

making magic. I'll see you guys next time.