The History of Two-in-Ones, Part 1
One of the many hats I wear is being a historian of Magic and Magic design. From time to time, I like to explore how mechanics were created and how they've evolved through the years. Today's topic is inspired by a mechanic from the latest set, Duskmourn: House of Horror.
Rooms are a mechanic in a subset I call "two-in-one cards." These are cards that represent two cards but exist on a single card, although possibly on both faces. The line I'll draw is that the card has two distinct names, and they often, but not always, have two distinct arts.
Opening the Door
Our story begins in 1993 with Limited Edition (Alpha), when Magic first released. Richard Garfield made a cycle he called "the boons." This was a cycle of one-mana instants that created an effect using the number three, consisting of
Unglued
(Big Furry Monster, Left Side)
(Big Furry Monster, Right Side)
In 1998, Unglued premiered. It was a set designed to explore mechanical spaces that normal sets did not at the time. One of the areas it explored was printing. Were there new mechanics we could make if we had the freedom to stretch the boundaries of what the art and frame could do? One of the things I did to answer that question was meet with our graphic artists and printing people. They gave me a long list of things we technically were able to do that Magic didn't currently do. One of those ideas was to stretch the art across two cards. That led me to the idea of B.F.M., a creature so big, a 99/99, that he required two cards, consisting of a left side and a right side. To play him, you had to have both in your hand.
B.F.M. was the highest-rated card (or rather, cards) in Unglued according to our market research. So, when I was working on Unglued 2, I decided to riff on the idea. If the audience liked a card so big that it required two cards to hold it, what about cards so small that two of them fit on a single card? I dubbed these designs "split cards." I designed a cycle of five, each of an ally-color pair. Both cards were either an instant or a sorcery. Because each spell was its own "card" with its own cost, I gave each a name. These five cards would be the first two-in-one cards. Unglued 2, unfortunately, was put on permanent hiatus, and it seemed as if these split cards would never see print.
Invasion Block
Flash forward to the year 2000 as we were designing Invasion. The set and block had a multicolor theme. I really liked the split cards from Unglued 2 and was hoping to find a new home for them. Being that they were designed to be of two different ally colors, Invasion seemed like a good fit. I showed them to Bill Rose, the set's lead designer, and he liked them and put them in. Mike Elliott worked on Invasion design alongside me and Bill. He didn't like them and felt we should take them out, but Bill and I liked them, so they stayed. I should note that, other than Unglued, no Magic product had deviated on how the frames looked. Part of the shock of split cards was how different they seemed from normal cards.
Other than Richard Garfield, who wasn't working on Magic at the time and liked the innovation of the split cards, Bill and I were the only fans of the split cards at Wizards. At the very first development meeting, lead developer for the set Henry Stern started the meeting with, "Can we just get rid of these?" I was also on the development and replied, "We have to at least play with them first." The Magic brand team also wanted to get rid of them. This was back when the Magic brand team and R&D were separate entities, before Studio X. But Bill managed to convince them all to let the split cards stay.
Little by little, people played with the split cards and found them a lot of fun. As we looked at other layouts for the cards, none were as charming or as intuitive to play as the split-card layout. Invasion came out, and split cards were a huge hit. Their visual novelty was seen as a big plus, and the fact that one card had two different spells on it, each with their own name, was seen as exciting new mechanical space.
It's interesting when you look back, that originally, the idea of two-in-one cards was seen as a novelty. The fact that they were different from normal Magic cards drove player excitement. With perfect hindsight, I think it taps into something much deeper. Magic cards are essentially a canvas that the game designers get to illustrate. There's something potent about the idea that your card is more than just one card, that it's capable of being something grander. As you will see, two-in-ones is a theme we will continually revisit and expand upon.
Apocalypse, the third set in the Invasion block, had an enemy-color theme (the first two sets were focused on ally-color pairs), so it redid a lot of the popular mechanical elements from Invasion and Planeshift, one of which was split cards.
Odyssey Block
A year later in 2001, Odyssey came out. Richard Garfield was busy designing other games, but from time to time, I was able to convince him to join a Magic design team, usually ones I was leading. He was toying with the idea of cards that changed states over time and eventually landed on the graveyard as the impetus for this change. This was because the graveyard started empty and wasn't a resource you had at the beginning of the game but would naturally fill up as the game progressed. It was also something that you could influence and would make you alter your play.
Threshold isn't technically a two-in-one mechanic, but it was an important step in realizing the value of cards that represented two distinct concepts.
Unhinged
Also in 2004, Unhinged would give its own take on split cards with a split card made up of split cards, one of which was yet another split card. This made it five total cards in all, one of each color. This was the first two-in-one-style card to have more than two names.
Champions of Kamigawa Block
In 2004, we were in the middle of development for Champions of Kamigawa (one of the rare sets where I was on the development team but not the design team) when the team decided we were low on splashy effects. I pitched an idea that Richard Garfield and I had been talking about: having two cards on a single card. The whole conversation, interestingly, started several years back when he and I talked about how threshold didn't do a great job of showing two states.
At the time, only split cards did this and were always instants and sorceries. Richard and I had been brainstorming on ways to do two-state permanents. We came up with a card that could be turned into a second card by rotating it 180 degrees. The idea was that the text box would be small but include a name, rules text, and power and toughness. The art box would have two pieces of art that were intertwined and facing different directions. We called them "flip cards." The idea was that having two names and two pieces of art would sell the idea that the creature went through a transformation.
Champions of Kamigawa would have two monocolor cycles, one at uncommon and one at rare. All ten cards were creatures that flipped into other creatures.
Betrayers of Kamigawa had another uncommon monocolor cycle of flip cards where each creature flipped into a different creature. In this case, a non-Spirit would flip into a Spirit.
These were novel and caught players' attention at the time, but they had several problems. The biggest was their practicality. When you turned them sideways, usually to attack, it was impossible to tell which side was correct. Some players rotate their cards to the right and some rotate them to the left, so there was no clear way to read which version of the creature was correct when it was tapped. Another big problem was that the cards didn't look that nice aesthetically. The art was seen as muddled.
In 2005, Saviors of Kamigawa, the final set in the Champions of Kamigawa block, would do a tweak on flip cards making a rare monocolor cycle that started as creatures and flipped into enchantments. This was the first time a permanent other than a creature appeared on a two-in-one card. These shared all the issues that flip cards had had in the previous two sets.
Dissension
In 2006, Dissension, the third set in the original Ravnica block, brought split cards back. Each set in the block focused on a handful of the two-color guilds, and the Dissension design team was looking for a novel way to give the seven guilds not featured in the set a couple more spells. Their solution was a cycle of ten split cards, each with different two-color cards that overlapped in one color. This was the first time a two-in-one card was composed of multicolor cards.
Planar Chaos
In 2007, Planar Chaos, the second set in the Time Spiral block, introduced the first monocolor split cards. All three of them were part of a mono-red vertical cycle, with a common, uncommon, and rare card. Planar Chaos's theme was an alternate-reality present where the mechanical distribution of the color pie had been done differently. Split cards were in red to show how they could embody the chaos of red.
Innistrad and Dark Ascension
In 2011, Innistrad would provide our second take on two-in-one permanents. We were trying to figure out the best mechanical execution for Werewolves, as they were the most novel thing in the new set. We knew we wanted to capture the idea of a Human turning into a Werewolf. One of the ideas that came up during our brainstorm was something we had done in another trading card game we make called Duel Masters, which is made specifically for the Japanese market.
Duel Masters had double-faced cards where we printed a card on both sides. What if we had a double-faced card where one face was a Human and the other face was a Werewolf? Then, under certain circumstances, it could switch back and forth. Duel Masters didn't put their double-faced cards into the deck but instead had them in a separate zone. You could use other cards to bring them into the game. Our initial idea was to have a single-faced card that went into your library and would fetch the double-faced card from outside the game when you cast it. The double-faced card would act, in certain ways, like a token.
For this version to work, we needed both cards, the double-faced card and the singe-faced card that fetched it, to come together in a booster pack. Some of our printers couldn't do it, and even the ones that thought they could weren't able to promise it. While searching for other solutions, we came across some marketing research that showed 95 percent of Constructed games are played using sleeves, almost all of which have opaque backs. What if we just printed the double-faced version? We then came up with the idea of a card that listed all the possible double-faced cards in the set, which we called a checklist card. You could check which one this particular checklist represented before deck building if you weren't playing with opaque sleeves.
To make double-faced cards, they had to have their own sheet, so we ended up making a slot in each booster have one. This gave Innistrad's double-faced cards an as-fan of one, meaning there was only one in each pack. The one sheet had cards at all four rarities, with twenty unique cards in total. Since it was its own sheet, if you got a rare or mythic rare double-faced card, you'd also get a rare or mythic rare single-faced card in the booster. When we were designing them, we called them "double-sided cards," but were reminded by editing that all cards have two sides. These cards had two faces, so we changed our official name of them to "double-faced cards," or DFCs. It wasn't until the release of modal double-faced cards (MDFCs) that we retroactively referred to these as transforming double-faced cards (TDFCs).
Double-faced cards fixed a lot of the problems that flip cards had. Each state had its own face, so it was easy to tell which version you had. Also, having two independent art boxes allowed for a much cleaner and more impactful creative package. We discovered that having two pieces of art allowed us to tell two-part stories, which was something new for us artistically. The fact that most Magic cards only have one piece of art often causes challenges for cards that try to represent something that goes through a change.
That's not to say DFCs don't have their issues. They're logistically complex, requiring either sleeves or checklist cards. They force you to flip cards in your sleeves or bring a card in from outside of your deck. They have information that you can't easily see from your hand, especially if you don't want to tip off your opponent that you have it. From a business side, DFCs add a lot of extra production demands.
We premiered double-faced cards at a party during PAX West. We had a curtain on stage that we pulled back to reveal a giant version of Stalking Vampire. There was dramatic music, and the card turned to reveal Screeching Bat. There was some polite clapping, but no one seemed to get that we were showing them a single card that had two faces. They thought we showed one card and then showed a second, completely different card. They both "transformed." Hmm, what did that mean?
I had brought a copy of
Innistrad would come out to great fanfare, and the double-faced cards were an instant hit. There was a small minority that really disliked them. Some felt it broke a rule in Magic that shouldn't be broken. Others didn't like all the logistical issues I explained above. The vast majority, however, saw it as an exciting innovation. DFCs were the highest-ranked mechanic in the set, one of the highest rankings of anything we'd ever seen.
Dark Ascension, the smaller set that followed Innistrad, had thirteen double-faced cards, which were also on their own printing sheet and appeared once per booster pack. The one innovation was that, while Innistrad only had DFCs that were a creature on both sides (and one planeswalker on both sides at mythic rare), Dark Ascension had two DFCs that started as artifacts, one of which wasn't even a creature on the back face.
Avacyn Restored, the third set in the Innistrad block, was a large set with mostly new mechanics and chose not to do double-faced cards. The reasoning behind this was that there were some players who disliked DFCs, a number of them being Wizards employees, and they were worried they'd be a colossal flop. The internal compromise was we kept them to just the first two sets. The biggest complaint about Avacyn Restored was the lack of DFCs.
Dragon's Maze
In 2013, during our second trip to Ravnica, Dragon's Maze revisited split cards. This time, we introduced a new mechanic called fuse. Fuse allowed you to cast both sides of the split card at once. There were three cycles, one of two ally-color spells, one of two enemy-color spells, and one made up of multicolor spells, hitting all ten two-color combinations between them. Fuse was born out of the excitement we saw with TDFCs where the player had the ability to access both cards of a two-in-one.
Magic Origins
In 2015, we released a core set called Magic Origins, where the focus of the set was the origin story of the five first members of the Gatewatch: Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nissa. Because the story told of the first sparking of each character (the moment where they first accessed their ability to planeswalk), we made a cycle of five mythic rare legendary creatures that turned into planeswalkers. These worked a little differently as the legendary creatures exiled themselves and returned transformed. These "flip planeswalkers" were hugely popular.
They came about because Shawn Main, the lead designer of Magic Origins, was trying to discover the best way to show planeswalkers igniting their sparks on a card. He wanted to see the characters as legendary creatures and then as planeswalkers. Shawn felt that this two-step reveal was key. I asked him that, if he could do whatever he wanted, what would he do? He said he'd make them as double-faced cards. So, we did that.
I see the "flip planeswalkers" as an inflection point were designers became empowered by the idea of these two-step stories. Double-faced cards, as well as other two-in-one technologies, are a tool. If an idea took two cards to convey, a single Magic card could do that. The fact that the players seemed to adore two-in-one cards only encouraged us.
It Takes Two
Our story isn't finished yet, but that's all the time we have for today. As always, I'm eager to hear your feedback about today's article and the concept of two-in-one cards in general. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok) with feedback.
Join me next week for part two of the history of two-in-ones.
Until then, may your cards do lots of cool things.