Last week, I began celebrating my 30th anniversary at Wizards by looking back at the 30 biggest changes to Magic design since October 30, 1995, when I began working on Magic. Last week, I covered the first ten changes. Today, I’ll start at the eleventh change.
11. Two-Color Balance (Ravnica: City of Guilds – October 2005)
Each color has two ally colors and two enemy colors. Limited Edition (Alpha) played up this relationship by making a cycle of color hosers—cards that mechanically punish an opponent for playing a specific enemy color—and one card that allowed an ally to help:
Flash forward to Ravnica: City of Guilds. It was the first block to repeat a theme (multicolor) so I was trying to get as much distance from the previous multicolor block, Invasion, as I could. Invasion‘s main theme was “play as many colors as you can,” so I decided the theme of the Ravnica: City of Guilds block, “play as few colors as you can.” Since this was a multicolor block, that meant using two colors. Because I knew I had three sets to fill and had grown frustrated by the way we held back enemy-color cards, I decided we were going to make a two-color block that treated all ten color pairs equally.
There’s no greater advocate of the color pie than me, but I didn’t feel we needed to punish enemy-color cards just to communicate that they didn’t get along. Magic is more fun when we enable player choice, and weakening half the two-color combinations felt like bad game design. I had just become head designer, so I felt a bit more empowered.
This change not only happened for the Ravnica: City of Guilds block, but it ended up being a core shift in how R&D approached enemy colors.
12. Factions (Ravnica: City of Guilds – October 2005)
When I pitched the idea of a block centered around the ten color pairs, Brady Dommermuth, the creative director, said he needed some time to think about it. While exercising the next day, he came up with the idea of the guilds. Each two-color combination would be embodied by a faction. I was so excited by the idea that I built the entire block structure around it. Instead of putting all ten factions in every set, I divided them up: four color pairs in the first large set, then three in the two small sets.
I also gave each faction their own keyword to emphasize their roles. Each guild was given its own play style and draft archetype. Each guild got a specific identity, look, and specific role in the city of Ravnica. They also got a guild leader and champion, along with a list of creature types unique to their guild. Then, to show how they all worked together in the setting, we made a number of ten-card cycles that would appear in all ten factions. This allowed each guild to get its take on the cycle.
Magic had done factions before, but never to this level of commitment, especially mechanically. Ravnica: City of Guilds was so well received that it engrained factions as a structural tool that we would use again and again, now using it about once a year.
13. Hybrid Mana (Ravnica: City of Guilds – October 2005)
Ravnica: City of Guilds needed to be about two-color cards, so I did what I always do when exploring mechanical space: I dug in and researched what we’d done so far. As I examined design space for two-color cards, I found an interesting divide. Some cards used their two-color cost to enable mixing two abilities from different colors, usually things that had synergy together. Other cards, however, used their two-color costs to more efficiently do something both colors could do. This second group wasn’t combining the colors but exploring the space where they overlapped.
The first category explored the idea that multicolor cards are about combining the two colors because, fundamentally, they were different. A red-green card is both red and green. But the second category explored how the colors were the same. I realized that you didn’t actually need both colors to do the thing being asked. Either color could do it. That got me to explore the idea of a new kind of multicolor card, one that explored not “and” but “or.” What if there were cards that did something that two colors could do, and you could spend either color to cast the card? I was intrigued.
I concepted a bunch of designs and was happy with them. It was a new kind of multicolor card, and it allowed us to do things traditional multicolor couldn’t. For example, it had been impossible to make a two-color spell with a mana value of 1. Excited by my new idea, I showed it around The Pit, our common area for designers. I felt like I had created this really cool new tool and was eager to share it with the other designers. Everyone who saw it had the same basic response: “Yeah, okay.” No one else was excited, but it was my set, so I put them in.
Brian Schneider, the lead developer for Ravnica: City of Guilds, initially took out the hybrid cards (and the pain lands). He didn’t think the set needed them. My plan was to use hybrid mana in Time Spiral. These changes to mana captured the flavor of the set. Brian would later come back to me and ask if he could put the hybrid cards (and pain lands) back into Ravnica: City of Guilds.
Hybrid mana followed the path I assumed it would take when I first made it. It’s just a very useful tool that has a lot of practical applications. A lot of sets have used it in different ways. Recently, we’ve been using it a lot more because it helps smooth out Limited environments.
14. The Great Designer Search (September 2006)
Many years ago, I was having a one-on-one chat with my boss at the time, Randy Buehler, and he asked me the following question: “The Pro Tour has been very good for finding us developers, but we’ve been struggling to find more designers. Do you have any ideas?” I said that I did.
My wife Lora and I watch a lot of television, including a decent amount of reality television. There’s a subgenre of reality television where a show collects people of a certain skill and tests them at the skill to find who’s best at it. What if we did something like that for Magic designers?
Randy liked the idea, and I got to work creating it. One of the biggest challenges was narrowing it down from the thousands who entered it to a manageable number for the main part of it. I ended up creating three tests: an essay test, a multiple-choice skills test, and a card-design test. I used those to narrow the field down to sixteen contestants, then down to eight from there.
The top three contestants for each of the three iterations of The Great Designer Search got to work at Wizards (although not always in R&D). Seven of the nine have gone on to lead the design of at least one Magic set, and all nine have served on multiple Magic design teams. It was a wildly successful program.
Will we ever do another one? I hope so. They’re a lot of work and present a number of unique challenges, but it’s hard to argue with the results.
15. Bonus Sheets (Time Spiral – October 2006)
The Time Spiral block was the second block I oversaw as head designer. It had a time theme that we broke down into the past, alternate present, and future. Time Spiral was about the past, and I was enamored with the idea that occasionally cards from the past would show up in a booster pack. We had changed the card frame a few years back, so reprinting an older card in the retro frame was exciting.
When I first pitched it, I asked if it could happen every 20 packs or so. To add these cards to booster packs, we needed to put all the cards on their own sheet so we could drop them at any rate we wanted. But the more we talked about it, the more excited we got, and we kept raising the rate these cards would appear at. Finally, we just decided to add one retro frame card per booster pack. The “bonus sheet” worked out so well that I decided to make it something all the sets in the block did. They each got their own sheet with a different gimmick.
The bonus sheet would return in Strixhaven: School of Mages, there called the Mystical Archive, and focused on famous instants and sorceries from across the Multiverse. They were all reprints with new art. The Mystical Archive went so well that bonus sheets have become a frequent tool that we use a few times each year, often to add popular reprints to a new set.
16. New Card Types (Future Sight – May 2007)
Magic started with seven card types in Alpha: artifact, creature, enchantment, instant, interrupt, land, and sorcery. Technically, the first new card type was called mana source, but that was just an experiment to make producing mana not cause problems in gameplay. Interrupt would go away with the Sixth Edition rules. The first new card type that had any real type of functionality was kindred—then called “tribal”—which allowed us to put creature types on noncreature cards. While kindred mostly premiered in Lorwyn, it first showed up on a futureshifted card from Future Sight.
But the new card type that had the biggest impact was planeswalker. The idea of you, the player, being a Planeswalker goes all the way back to Alpha. There was even a famous ad campaign back in the day with the tagline “You are a Planeswalker.” While the story would talk about Planeswalkers in card names and flavor text, we never actually made a card that represented one—the closest we got was
During Future Sight design, Matt Cavotta pitched me the idea of making a planeswalker card type. The Time Spiral story was about depowering Planeswalkers, and he felt it would finally make sense to represent them on cards. The original plan was to make three of them (in blue, black, and green) as futureshifted cards, but we didn’t like how they played, so their premiere was pushed back to Lorwyn, where we made a full cycle.
March of the Machine introduced battles, a new card type we haven’t returned to, although I’ve publicly said it’s in at least one set currently in design. Modern Horizons 3 had kindred cards after a long absence, and we’ve announced there will be some new ones in next year’s Lorwyn Eclipsed. Planeswalkers continue to appear in Magic Multiverse sets. Creating new card types isn’t something we explore very often, as the bar for making them is incredibly high, but it’s a tool we’ve used effectively over the years, with planeswalkers being a notable success.
17. Mythic Rare (Shards of Alara – October 2008)
Magic was the very first trading card game, but not the first set of trading cards. As other trading card games got introduced, many of them tapped into features that had been used by trading cards but not in Magic. One day, R&D decided to put together a team to study all the other trading card games to see what they were doing and what we could learn.
The biggest takeaway from this investigation was the following fact: every other trading card game, other than Magic, had more than three rarities. Trading cards had a long tradition of having rarities that appear at a rate of less than one per pack. The other thing we discovered as we looked at our own rarities is that our rares had a wide range of rates at which they appeared. What if we called one end of the spectrum rare and considered a new rarity for the other end? We called that new rarity “mythic rare.”
We had spent years defining each rarity from a design perspective, so creating a new rarity took a lot of discussion in R&D. Even the version of mythic rare we began with has evolved over time. Mythic rares also gave us a means to make cards designed for Constructed formats and Limited formats. Now, mythic rare cards are a core part of how we design Magic.
18. New World Order (Zendikar – October 2009)
Matt Place was a former Pro Tour champion that came to work in R&D. He and I became good friends. One day, he and I were playing at the Wizards of the Coast’s employee Prerelease for Morningtide, and we both recognized something. A lot of employees were playing one match and stopping. That wasn’t something that normally happened, so Matt and I talked to several employees that dropped after one round. They said the games were overwhelming, there was too much to track, and that it just wasn’t fun for them.
Lorwyn was a typal set that cared about eight species creature types: Elemental, Elf, Faerie, Giant, Goblin, Kithkin, Merfolk, and Treefolk. Morningtide focused on five different creature types that were classes: Rogue, Shaman, Soldier, Warrior, and Wizard. Most creatures had a species and a class creature type, meaning that there was a complex web of interconnected pieces. It was just too much for a lot of players.
This led Matt and I to come up with a new idea that we called New World Order. To keep complexity in check for less-enfranchised players, we needed to clamp down on how complex we made our commons. The core idea was that the commons, which made up two thirds of the cards in a booster pack, defined much of the complexity for a newer player. New World Order would move many things out of common and added a system of what we called “red flags,” or things that you should look at twice when doing them at common.
New World Order was also important in making R&D think more about large, holistic systems rather than just evaluating each card in a vacuum. Many of the staple principles of New World Order are still core elements of how we make commons today.
19. Commander (Magic: The Gathering—Commander – June 2011)
Sheldon Menery was a level 5 competitive Magic judge. He was in the army stationed in Alaska. Whenever he moved to a new town, he would find the local game store and meet new people to play Magic with. His play group even made their own format. Sheldon was fascinated by it and added some tweaks.
He then started playing the format with judges at the Pro Tour. After the event finished for the day, Sheldon and the judges would sit around and play this new format, which they dubbed Elder Dragon Highlander as originally, each deck was helmed by one of the five Elder Dragons from Legends. The format grew as more players learned about it. Eventually, Wizards decided to make a product dedicated to it. The product was so popular that we quickly made it a yearly thing.
Obviously, Commander, as the format was eventually called, went on to become the largest tabletop format. It completely changed how we design Magic and led to us creating a Casual Play Design team focused on how each card played in a casual setting, including its impact on Commander.
20. Draft Archetypes (Innistrad – September 2011)
While designing Innistrad, we decided early on we wanted to have a monster theme, which we based around creature types. We started with Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies. We also included Humans, as the monsters needed their victims and one of the themes of the world was that all the monsters were formerly human. As we mapped out the creatures to colors, we quickly realized that they corresponded cleanly to ally colors. We added Spirits to fill in the fifth color combination, white-blue.
Then, in development, the set’s lead developer Erik Lauer decided he wanted to give each enemy color combination its own theme. Erik looked at how the Ravnica: City of Guilds block had ten two-color archetypes stretched out over the entire block. He felt Innistrad Draft would work better if each set could define each of the ten two-color pairs. To help communicate the enemy pairs, he added enemy color costs to flashback cards.
Innistrad Draft worked so well that Erik instituted the ten two-color archetypes as a default standard for each set moving forward. This is a trend that continues to this day, with the caveat that the ten archetypes aren’t always two colors. Three-color sets, for example, have five three-color archetypes and five two-color archetypes that overlap with two of the three-color archetypes.
Drop and Give Me 20
And with that, we’re two thirds of the way through my look at the top 30 design innovations since I started. I hope you’re enjoying the look back. As always, I’m eager for any feedback, be it on this article or any of the elements I talked about today. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Join me next week for part three.
Until then, may you keep finding ways to improve your own processes.
