Last week marked my 30th anniversary of working on Magic: The Gathering at Wizards. In celebration, I’m writing a three-part article about the 30 biggest changes to Magic design since I started on October 30, 1995. My goal is to walk through exactly how each change came to be.
1. Designing for Limited (Mirage – October 1996)
The idea of a format that requires adapting to cards from randomized boosters goes all the way back to Limited Edition (Alpha) playtesting. Playtesters had played previous games where cards were drafted and brought those ideas to Magic. I was personally playing Sealed Magic as early as 1994 (it was harder before that as getting booster packs was very difficult).
However, the sets weren’t designed for drafting. There were only four common white creatures in Alpha, just one of which could do more than 2 damage. Legends had only one common red creature capable of dealing damage to an opponent. Ice Age had three fliers at common (a 1/1, a creature with cumulative upkeep, and a creature with an activated ability that gives it flying that died the turn you activated it). Players had to draft what they could because there weren’t many other options.
Mirage changed that. It was actively designed with Limited in mind. The designers thought about creature curves, evasion, and removal. When the set was developed, we ran Limited playtests and made changes to improve the gameplay. Limited play has gone on to be a cornerstone of Magic, and its something we’ve been iterating on for decades.
2. Blocks (Mirage – October 1996)
If you want to get technical, Alliances was sold as an Ice Age expansion but wasn’t designed as such. Every mechanical or creative reference to Ice Age was added after the design was handed over. And Alliances was the first set I worked on, so even if we say blocks started with Alliances, it still fits the theme of this article.
Mirage, in contrast, was designed alongside Visions. I think it was originally a larger set, but when the designers realized they had too many designs, they broke it down into a large set (Mirage) and small set (Visions). This meant the two sets were designed to be played together. Mirage introduced mechanical concepts that were then expanded upon in Visions. This would become the template for all the blocks that followed.
For those curious, Weatherlight was designed by Magic R&D and wasn’t thought of as a third set as later third sets would be. It had its own mechanical theme, the graveyard, and its creative set up the story: the Weatherlight Saga. It took place on Jamuraa, the same setting as Mirage and Visions, and it used the same keyword mechanics as Mirage and Visions. The story built upon an element—the Weatherlight—that had been introduced during the story of Mirage and Visons.
As I assume most of you are aware, R&D would eventually do away with blocks, but they were such a cornerstone of design for over two decades. It felt wrong not to bring it up here. Not every innovation lasts forever. Oftentimes, we evolve beyond previous improvements.
3. Cross-Set Design (Mirage – October 1996)
This story begins during the development of Mirage. I think it was the first day, and we were going through the file to talk through various cards when we came across the following card:
Rampaging Elephant
2G
Creature — Elephant
1/1
Sacrifice an untapped Forest: CARDNAME gets +2/+2 until end of turn.
What’s your first impression? My guess is it won’t match mine. The very first thing that popped into my mind, which I instantly blurted out, was, “This is an
Huh?
Before coming to Wizards, my favorite card was
Rampaging Elephant was a small creature that let you sacrifice Forests for a temporary +2/+2 boost. I suggested that we make two small changes. We changed it from a 1/1 to a 1/2 and turned it into an Atog. We would later change “Sacrifice an untapped Forest” to “
But I had grander plans. I didn’t just want to turn this card into a green
4. Enters Effects (Visions – February 1997)
There are many challenges to designing a card file. Some of the card file’s slots are creature spells and some are noncreature spells. You normally have more creature spells than noncreature spells, so sometimes you run out of space for effects that you want. Where do you put those extra effects?
Also, you have a lot of creatures, so you want them to be different. But if creatures have too much text on them, it can lead to complicated board states. Ideally, you want creatures that have some impact but go on to be simple vanilla creatures. How do you do that?
It turns out that both problems have the same solution. What if we could put staple spells on creature cards? That’s where the idea of “comes into play” effects came from—now simply “enters” effects We already put triggered abilities onto creatures, so what if the trigger was simply that they entered? Visions was the first set to make use of this technology. While it existed on more cards, it was these three high-profile creatures—
Interestingly, during Tempest design, which I led, we would arrive at the same idea, but we were unaware of what the Visions Design team had done (large sets started earlier in design than small sets, so Tempest design began before Visions got to development). Our path there was slightly different. We had designed cards that triggered when you drew them. When that mechanic didn’t work out, I had to tweak the designs, so I changed them to having a triggered effect when the creature entered the battlefield. I’m always intrigued by parallel design, so I thought I’d point out that two different teams ended up in the same place.
Today, enters effects aren’t just evergreen; they’re an essential tool in building modern sets.
5. Telling a Story Through Art and Mechanics (Weatherlight – June 1997)
When Magic began in Alpha, there wasn’t a story, per se. There were proper names in card titles, and a hint of environment through card concepts and flavor text. Antiquities was the first set to tell any kind of story, hinting at the story of the Brothers’ War rather than telling it. It gave players glimpses here and there through flavor text, which included proper names that showed up in card titles. But you never actually met the characters, and most of the items from the story that showed up on cards were objects, pictured long after their use in the story.
When I first got to Wizards, I was in the process of finishing a book of Magic puzzles based on my “Magic: The Puzzling” series in The Duelist. My editor was a man named Michael Ryan. We were both writers and quickly formed a friendship. One of the things we would talk about was how Magic didn’t have an ongoing storyline, so we decided to pitch one. We called it the Weatherlight Saga, as our story revolved around a flying ship and its crew. Our pitch went well, and the Magic Brand team was eager to get started on the story right away.
Back in the day, sets would have two art waves, and Weatherlight was just about to start its second art wave. Michael and I worked feverishly to create a preamble to our story and looked for a handful of cards that didn’t yet have art. We would use those cards to show story beats. We didn’t get a lot of cards, but we were able to hit key story beats and introduce the audience to a handful of new characters.
Tempest would expand upon this idea and had the story spread across 60 cards in the set. We even made a storyboard of the cards with a sentence descriptor for each, which we put into The Duelist. This idea would eventually evolve to what we now call the Story Spotlight cards, where we show key scenes from that set’s story.
6. Worldbuilding (Tempest – October 1997)
The Weatherlight Saga was also important, as it led to Magic‘s first Worldbuilding team. To make sure the story and worlds felt cohesive, we hired a number of artists—including player favorites Mark Tedin and Anson Maddocks—to work together and create unified style guides, which included detailed explanations of each setting and character.
In the past, one of the challenges had been that if we wanted to show a character on two different cards, we had to hire the same artist to illustrate both cards. That became harder when the scope of our stories grew. We needed a document that showed the artists what key things looked like so they could draw them in a way that players would recognize.
This was a huge step up in how we built sets and would become a cornerstone in our process of making new worlds and creating new characters. It was also the start of Design working hand in hand with Creative to make cards that were holistically connected.
7. Frame Design as a Mechanical Component (Unglued – August 1998)
Unglued came about because Joel Mick and Bill Rose had an idea for a new kind of set: “What if we made cards that weren’t tournament legal, and thus, wouldn’t have to follow many of the constraints of our normal designs?” They gave me the project because they saw me as the designer who was most willing to stretch boundaries.
I did a lot of things while making Unglued, but the piece that’s most important to this story is that I went and talked to our graphic designers. I told them I was interested in learning things we were capable of doing but had never done. They brainstormed a lot of ideas, but here are the two that excited me most. First, card sheets are printed as large sheets of interconnected cards. That meant art could cross over from one card to the next if they sat next to each other on the card sheet. This led me to create what ended up being the most popular “card” from the set,
B.F.M. was a creature so huge (a 99/99) that it took two cards to capture it. It had a left side and a right side, and you had to have both in your hand to cast it.
The other innovation was the idea that we could create each card as an individual piece of art, meaning that we could alter the frames to do whatever we needed with them.
We could turn the card sideways, lengthen the name, or change the size of the art and text boxes. We could adapt the card however we needed to serve a mechanic.
The popularity of B.F.M. would lead me to design the split cards for “Unglued 2.” If players liked one card so big it took two cards to hold it, how about two cards so small that two fit on one card? “Unglued 2” was canceled, so I took the idea to Invasion, which was where split cards premiered.
The popularity of split cards was the beginning of us, in main sets, starting to think of the frame as a design element; one that could be adapted to reinforce, and sometimes even enable, a mechanic. Nowadays, we even have a point written into every set’s schedule where we examine whether the new set has any frame design needs. Most of the time, the answer is yes.
8. Consolidated Rules (Sixth Edition – April 1999)
When Richard designed Magic, he expected the game to be played at kitchen tables. He could not foresee the phenomenon that it would become. To him, the rules being a bit inconsistent and messy was a feature, not a bug. Richard wanted each card to shine, so the rules were constructed on a card-by-card basis to allow each one to be as cool as possible in a vacuum. Part of playing Magic would be arguing with friends about what you thought would happen when two cards interacted.
That system worked fine for a small game exclusively played with friends. It was not ideal, though, when played with strangers at game stores, often with stakes. The rules being fuzzy was a problem. R&D understood this, so we went about fixing it by overhauling all the rules. This project was overseen by Bill Rose and would premiere in Sixth Edition, the latest core set at the time.
Bill’s goal was simple. He wanted to create a network of rules that worked consistently across all cards. If you learned the rules, you could then apply them to new cards and properly understand how they worked. Bill worked with the Rules team and spent a great deal of time cleaning up the rules.
The initial reaction wasn’t great (players, as a rule, tend to dislike change), but as the players got to play with the new rules, they were slowly won over. The rules of Magic being a clear, interconnected system is now a given.
9. Digital Magic (Magic: The Gathering Online – June 2002)
From its origin, Magic has been a physical card game. To bring the game to a digital platform, we needed it to function in much of the same way as it did physically. This means randomized boosters and building a collection of cards.
There was a lot of pressure to move away from this system, but we chose not to. In the end, digital gaming changed more to match Magic Online than Magic Online changed to match digital play. MTG Arena would eventually come along to give a bit more of a video game sensibility to Magic gameplay.
Digital Magic also affects how we design cards, similar to how we design cards for certain formats. Does a design add extra, unnecessary clicks? Are there restrictions that might cause significant programming time with little practical implications for tabletop play? Is there a way to make the card a little simpler for digital Magic without sacrificing what allows it to play well in tabletop? These are all now questions we consider when designing cards.
10. Typal Themes (Onslaught – October, 2002)
Alpha had three cards that referenced specific creature types: Goblin, Merfolk, and Zombies. The idea of typal themes was there from the beginning, but it was mostly dismissed by R&D as a casual thing that didn’t have a role in tournament play. In other words, it was something individual cards could do, but it was never a theme we focused on.
Onslaught had just been handed off by the Design team. Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time, wasn’t happy with it, so he asked my opinion. I said it was a bit lackluster, so Bill asked what I would do to fix it. I added a mechanic that the Rules team had pitched to me—morph—and brought back a nonevergreen keyword for the very first time: cycling. But neither of those are key to this story.
The original design had some Mistform creatures that had the ability to change their creature type, but little in the file cared about their ability to do that. That led me to ask, “What if they did matter?” While I spent time understanding what the tournament players were up to, I was also intrigued by what the more casual players were doing. One of the things I noticed was how popular individual typal cards were. Even though they weren’t very powerful, casual players loved playing with them.
Casual players seem to adore typal designs. This got me to pitch the following idea: what if we made them good? My hypothesis was that tournament players weren’t avoiding them because they didn’t like them but because they just weren’t good enough. If we made strong typal cards, I proposed that tournament players would play them and, of course, casual players would keep playing them.
Bill gave me the go-ahead, and Onslaught became the first set, and eventually block, with a typal theme. It would go on to be a huge hit, and it completely revamped how R&D thought of typal themes. They’ve become so important that most sets nowadays have at least one typal theme, even if it’s just one draft archetype.
Ten Going on Thirteen
That’s all the time we have for today. I hope you enjoyed this look back at the evolution of Magic design since my start at Wizards. As always, I am eager for any feedback, be it on today’s article, any of the elements I talked about, or if you just want to wish me a happy anniversary. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Join me next week for part two.
Until then, may you look back at your own personal history with Magic.
