For the last two weeks (Part 1 and Part 2), I've been celebrating my 30-year anniversary by walking through the 30 biggest additions to Magic design since I began working at Wizards on October 30, 1995. Today is the third and final part in this series, starting with the 21st change.

21. Double-Faced Cards (Innistrad – September 2011)

Bloodline Keeper // Lord of Lineage

When we first started working on Innistrad, we did what we do for most top-down sets: list everything we thought players would expect from the thing we're trying to flavorfully capture in the design. For Gothic horror, monsters were at the top of our list. We'd done a lot of Vampire, Zombie, and Spirit creatures in Magic but only a couple Werewolves. We made two Werewolf cards prior to Innistrad, neither of which were particularly memorable. So, I knew capturing Werewolves mechanically was going to be important.

Here are the parameters I gave my team. I wanted our Werewolf cards to have two states, one human and one werewolf, and there had to be some way that it moved back and forth between those two states. Tom Lapille, a member of the Design team, had recently worked on Duel Masters, a trading card game we make for the Japanese market. They had made double-faced cards (DFCs), which are cards with faces on both sides. What if we used that technology for Werewolves?

I'll admit I was skeptical when Tom first pitched the idea, but I'm a big advocate of playing with things before we judge them. It played well. It only took a couple of playtests before the Design team was all in on double-faced cards. I took a step that I don't often do in early design and talked to our Print team. While Duel Masters was able to do double-faced cards, Magic was printed at a much larger scale and needed additional considerations. There are things that we can do for games at a smaller scale that won't work for a game the size of Magic.

It turns out that we could do it, although not exactly as we originally planned. The early version of Magic's DFCs used a single-sided card that went into your main deck that fetched a double-faced card from outside the game. We weren't able to ensure that the two cards would appear together in the same booster pack, so we moved toward using checklist cards.

There was a lot of internal resistance to DFCs. There were several members of R&D who, at the time, felt it was wrong to print them. But we did, and they were a huge hit.

Double-faced cards proved to have a lot of design space. We started with what we called transforming double-faced cards (TDFCs). We would later make modal double-faced cards (MDFCs). Starting with Magic: The Gathering® | Spider-Man, we started making modal double-faced cards that can transform.

22. Gold Signposts (Theros – September 2013)

Akroan Hoplite Chronicler of Heroes Destructive Revelry Horizon Chimera Kragma Warcaller Pharika's Mender Shipwreck Singer Spellheart Chimera

Last week, I talked about Erik Lauer's desire to make ten two-color draft archetypes as the default structure for sets. Well, that was good and fine for the designers. He laid out his goals, and he could ensure that each set followed through as head developer. But there was a problem. Someone else needed to be buy into the ten two-color archetypes: the players. We could build it into the sets, but if the players weren't aware of it, it wouldn't fully live up to its potential.

The Return to Ravnica block did a good job communicating its archetypes, but that was aided by the guild structure, which meant there was a high as-fan of gold (or multicolor) cards. That loudly communicated the two-color archetypes. Khans of Tarkir was a three-color set, so five of the ten archetypes were three colors. To communicate the five enemy-color draft archetypes, Erik made uncommon gold cards. Theros was the first set with ten two-color archetypes without factions in it, and Erik found his solution.

Sometimes, answers to design problems require a certain amount of subtlety. Other answers require a blunter solution. This was one of the latter. How do we communicate what a two-color pair was up to? Let's make a cycle of ten uncommon two-color cards that specifically spell out the plan for their draft archetype. They were uncommon cards because we wanted them to show up often in Limited, but as they were build-around cards, they didn't feel right at common.

The idea was that, whenever a player drafted one of these cards, it would push them to properly prioritize everything else they drafted in those colors. Theros was the natural evolution of what Erik had started in the Innistrad block. Uncommon gold signpost cards continue to this day.

23. Exploratory Design (Khans of Tarkir – September 2014)

Dig Through Time

In the fall of 2010, we held The Great Designer Search 2. Ethan Fleischer came in first with Shawn Main coming in second. We ended up offering both of them a six-month internship in R&D, which would later become a full-time job. This version of the competition had focused on worldbuilding, with each finalist submitting their own idea for a Magic block. The challenges focused on creating elements for the first set in their hypothetical block. Following the competition, I was interested in working with the two of them in this area.

It turns out, I had a pretty big idea for the next block, which would go on to be the Khans of Tarkir block. Early on, I decided to start a team with them to explore how the block might want to handle it. The idea was that the block's first and third sets would be large sets and the second set would be a small set. The small set would be drafted with each large set, but the two large sets would never be drafted together. While I liked the idea, I had no idea what kind of block would make sense with that structure.

I called this team an Exploratory Design team, and we spent many months figuring out how the structure of the Khans of Tarkir block could work. That team created the time travel theme where the first set is in the modern day, the second set is in the past, and the third set is an altered present. We also developed several of the mechanics that would later be used in the set (the main one being manifest). I was so happy with how the team worked out that I decided to do it again for the next block, Theros.

Exploratory design is an opportunity for a team to explore all the issues facing the new set before we start building out the set's blueprints, and it has proven so valuable that it's now a core part of the design process.

24. Disciplined Subgroups (Council of Colors – August 2015)

As I explained in the first part of this series, early Magic was designed to maximize the excitement of each individual card. As Magic grew, R&D had to consolidate game components and clean them up so they were consistent over time and products. I already talked about the rules, but another aspect that needed a lot of wrangling was the color pie. The core concepts of the color pie's philosophy were there from day one, but there was a lot of work to be done creating consistent rules about how each of the colors functioned. As a champion of the color pie, that work fell to me.

I spent a lot of time cleaning up each of the colors' mechanical definitions and helped steer cards to the proper color for their effect. For many years, I served as the default last line of defense for the color pie, ensuring that we didn't print any cards that broke the color pie. I encountered two big problems, though. One, it wasn't official. If I said we shouldn't do something, another designer could just as easily say, "But I want to." Two, as we made more sets, I gained more responsibilities as the head designer and lead for many releases. Some things started falling through the cracks.

Mark Gottlieb first suggested the idea of forming a group whose responsibility would be to monitor the color pie. We called it the Council of Colors, and we gave each color a counselor to oversee it. For a more detailed history of the Council of Colors, here's my last article on it.

It has been an amazing thing to watch this group grow and evolve, becoming this key part of R&D that monitors something I feel so passionately about.

The success of the Council of Colors has spawned many other subgroups, each with the goal of overseeing an important aspect of the game. Our Commander, Universes Beyond, Casual Play, and Acquisition teams are all still going strong. It really shows the power of a group to oversee vital game elements.

25. Vision, Set, and Play Design (Dominaria – April 2018)

Jaya Ballard

When I first got to Wizards, sets were designed by outside parties. R&D was then responsible for development, which meant being a second set of eyes that would do further work on the set. The metaphor I used was that the Design team was the writer and the Development team was an aggressive editor, helping maximize the effectiveness of the book and making cuts and alterations where needed.

With Weatherlight, R&D started handling design, but we decided to keep the design and development processes separate. Having projects change hands made for better designs. That process continued for over two decades. Then Erik Lauer did what he did best: he questioned a long-standing process. Was there a way we could do it better?

The key proposal was to change our two-step process into a three-step process. I'm not counting exploratory design, which was the one thing unchanged in the transition. The early part of design became vision design, and the later part of development became play design. The final portion of design and start of development turned into set design.

This process ended up being a lot cleaner and solved a lot of individual process issues that had built up over years. It is still the way we design sets today.

26. Collation as a Design Component (Dominaria – April 2018)

When making cards, we have to care about their physical production, which includes printing them. For those unaware, cards (and not just Magic cards, most playing cards or trading cards you're familiar with) are printed on large sheets. Magic's most common size is an eleven-by-eleven-card sheet. The sheet is then cut into individual cards which are then put into something called a feeder. Each booster pack has a certain number of cards from each feeder. Different feeders usually have different rarities in them.

What cards go on what sheet and the decision for which slots each booster pack has is a process we call collation. Part of doing Magic design involves understanding how collation will impact set design. We use the math behind these sheets to decide how many cards we have of each rarity. As a business, we want to minimize how many sheets we need to print for each set, so a lot of care (and a lot of math) goes into figuring this out.

For most of Magic's early life, collation was just a means by which we made the cards we wanted to make. Yes, we learned how to do collation better over time, and that impacted how we made sets, but we didn't truly take advantage of what collation could do as a design feature. Dominaria had a legendary creature theme. Because we don't often make common legendary creatures, the theme usually has a bit of an as-fan problem. We can fix that by increasing the number of uncommon legendary creatures. But in Dominaria, Dave Humpherys, the lead set designer, had a different idea.

In Innistrad, we introduced double-faced cards. Because they had to be on their own sheet due to having a different card back, we were able to give them their own slot in the booster pack. We had done something similar with the timeshifted cards from Time Spiral. But in the case of Innistrad, it was just us turning a bug into a feature.

Dave realized that each booster pack having a guaranteed, prescribed thing was very powerful. It created a potent message and made for a fun moment when opening a booster pack. What if we solved the legendary as-fan issue by creating a slot for them? Again, this wasn't something dictated by other needs of the set. Could we engineer our collation to allow us to create a focal point in every booster pack? The answer was yes. It went over well and has become another useful tool for design when we want to communicate loudly about a theme.

27. Batching (Dominaria – April 2018)

Jhoira's Familiar

Dominaria was Magic's main setting for most of its first decade. Eventually, we started traveling the Multiverse on a regular basis and rethinking how we made our settings. Because we created a bunch of them, we wanted to make sure each one had its own distinct feel. Ravnica was a multicolor city world. Innsitrad was a Gothic horror world. Zendikar was an adventure world. Theros was a Greek mythology word. And so on and so on.

Many years later, we decided it was time to finally return to Dominaria. Our goal was to make it feel in line with our other settings, but one of the challenges was that so many expansions had been set on Dominaria that it didn't have a cohesive theme. That required us to figure out a theme to pull the plane together thematically. After much thought, we ended on a theme of history. Dominaria is a setting with a lot of history, both in-universe and in-game. We landed on the the tagline, "A world whose present is defined by its past."

Vision Design spent a lot of time thinking about how to mechanically capture the idea of history. The low-hanging fruit was the graveyard. It's where past spells end up and where creatures go when they die. Unfortunately, a block from the previous year and a set from the upcoming year had a graveyard theme, so we looked elsewhere. We ended up focusing on artifacts (objects of the past), legendary things (characters and places from the past), and stories (tales of the past). For that last one, we created a new enchantment subtype: Sagas.

Here's an example of how Jhoira, a card that focused on these three things, looked early on:

Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain
2UR
Legendary Creature — Human Artificer
3/3
Whenever you cast an artifact, a legendary spell, or a Saga, draw a card.

The problem we ran into during playtests was players didn't understand why those three things went together. Bill Rose, who was then the vice president of R&D, played with the set and disliked these cards. He told me they needed to be removed. I said it was important because the theme was the glue holding the structure together. Bill gave me a month to solve the problem, but he said if I didn't, it would have to be removed, and I would need to find new glue. It was a daunting task, but I was determined to solve the problem.

I tried using the creative text on the card:

Jhoira, Lover of History

But that didn't work. I tried using an ability word:

Historic — Whenever you cast an artifact, a legendary spell, or a Saga, draw a card.

Players just skipped over it. No matter what I tried, the playtesters weren't getting the flavor.

With just one week left, I decided to be a bit more bold. What if I didn't tell you what the three things were in the rules text? What if I just keyworded it and explained what it meant in reminder text?

Whenever you cast a historic card, draw a card. (Artifacts, legendaries, and Sagas are historic.)

We tested it and everyone understood it. They needed to focus on the connective word rather than a list. If the word did its job, they would read the list and say, "Yeah, that makes sense."

Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain

This led to what we now call batching. A batch is a collection of different things. They can be a mix of card types, supertypes, or subtypes. Besides historic, we've created the party, modified, and outlaw batches, and there are more coming. What I enjoy about batching, beyond its ability to be flavorful, is that it takes existing Magic components and allows players to create something new with them.

28. Creation of Producers (October 2018)

For many years, R&D was what we called a service department. Our job was to design cards. The Magic business was done by another team. In the fall of 2018, that changed. Rather than having the different teams that make Magic scattered about, all of them were brought together under what we call a product team. The group was tentatively called Studio X. We thought we would eventually change the name, but Studio X stuck because we liked it.

Part of this change was the creation of a new role in R&D called a producer. The producers existed to help the designers do many things outside of designing Magic sets. They set up schedules, book rooms, print playtest cards, and do an endless series of tasks that, up until this point, individual designers were doing. Of my list of 30 improvements to design, this is the only one that is not outward facing, meaning there's no way for you, the players, to know this change happened, but it has been so crucial and helpful to the design process that I felt obligated to include it. So thank you to M.K., Nico, and Sam for making our jobs so, so much easier.

29. Project Booster Fun, Collector Boosters, and Secret Lair (Throne of Eldraine – October 2019)

Magic is a trading card game. We spend a lot of time on the game part, but the trading card part is also very important. People enjoy collecting Magic cards. How could we up the collectability of our game? Magic had always made small gains in this area (foil cards, some full-art cards, and more), but we had never made a concentrated push in that area.

The idea was simple. What cool things could we do visually with Magic cards? Were there new treatments we could explore? Could we consider using new artists, such as people further away from our traditional style? It turns out there was a lot we could do. We called this new venture Booster Fun and started it with Throne of Eldraine. Technically, Collector Boosters came first as we tested them with Ravnica Allegiance, but Booster Fun took Collector Boosters to the next level.

I also want to mention Secret Lair, which also plays into this space. By selling products directly to fans, we are able to make much smaller print runs, allowing us to experiment with cards that only need to connect to a small niche of players to be commercially viable.

All three of these ventures have been wildly successful.

30. Universes Beyond (Secret Lair x The Walking Dead – October 2020)

Aaron Forsythe noticed how often players liked to talk about what their favorite characters would look like as Magic cards. On my blog, I would get endless questions asking me what color popular characters would be. This led Aaron to pitch the idea of a new subset for Magic, something he called Universes Beyond. This series would take other properties and bring them to life as Magic cards.

We tested the idea in the spring of 2020 in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths with Godzilla Series Monster cards, which put Godzilla characters on cards from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. That fall, we would make our first official Universes Beyond product, Secret Lair x The Walking Dead, featuring new-to-Magic cards.

We ramped up into Commander decks, starting with Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks, and eventually into full sets, the first of which was The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™. While the product line has been polarizing for some fans, it has proven wildly successful.

I often talk about how Magic's biggest weakness is its barrier to entry. Going from knowing nothing about the game to knowing enough to play is a big leap. Chess is intimidating, and it has six unique pieces. Magic has over 30,000 game pieces. Once people learn Magic, they get hooked by the fun of the game. Universes Beyond has proven to be a valuable tool for bringing in new players because their love of what we're adapting helps get them over the initial barrier to entry. Once they learn to play, it is much easier to expose them to all the other things the game has to offer. It has also proven to be quite effective in bringing back lapsed players.

30-Something

And that, in about 9,000 short words, is a look at the 30 biggest design innovations since I started working at Wizards 30 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the look back. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article or any of the items 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 when I talk about my core theme as a writer.

Until then, may you have 30 years of doing something you love.