Big-Picture Questions, Part 1

This week, I'm doing another mailbag article. Rather than focusing on questions about specific cards or sets, I asked my audience to go a little broader. Here's what I posted:

Before I start, I want to clarify a few things. I'm going to answer as many questions as I can, but here are a few reasons why I might not get to your question:

• I have an allotted word count and have learned it's good to be nice to your editors. With so many questions, I just didn't have room to answer them all.
• Some questions had answers that I didn't know or were outside of my area of expertise, and I didn't feel qualified to properly answer them.
• There are some topics I can't talk about yet. Questions around those topics were skipped.

Additionally, I've adjusted the wording on some questions and anonymized them. This is for a myriad of reasons, but I've done my best to maintain the intent of each question. With that said, on with the questions.

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Q: Why make functional reprints of cards with a known history of play? Novice Inspector being similar to Thraben Inspector comes to mind, which impacted Pauper and Pioneer. It's also been relevant with Llanowar Elves and Elvish Mystic and the Elemental Blasts, though those are older.

There's an expression I like to use in game design: "The future can't be held hostage by the past". Magic design is, at its core, an exercise in finding ways to build new sets using the tools from our toolbox, and those tools were created during over 30 years of Magic history. Yes, we're constantly crafting new tools, but Magic's design space isn't infinite. If we can solve a design problem using known resources, we should.

Since you brought up Thraben Inspector and Novice Inspector, I'll use that as my example. Shadows over Innistrad debuted investigate and Clue tokens. That mechanic proved popular and played well. If we find ourselves in a situation where investigate fufills our mechanical design and flavor needs, it's important that we have the freedom to use it.

Adding to that, Magic is at the mercy of the constraints built into the game. For example, mana costs have to come in increments of mana, creatures have to have increments of power and toughness, and so on. When we design cards, there's not an infinite combination of executions that are properly balanced. A 1/2 creature for that lets you investigate when it enters is a good balance. Quite often with any one mechanic, there's a limited number of simple executions.

Years later, we made Murders at Karlov Manor. It was a set focused on the murder mystery genre. Investigate is a slam-dunk inclusion as it both ideally captures the flavor of the genre and plays well. The issue is that Shadows over Innistrad found the proper balance of mana, power, and toughness on creatures that investigate when they enter. An investigating 1/2 for is the perfect tool for a set that uses investigate.

Why not just reprint Thraben Inspector? Well, Thraben is a place on Innistrad. There's no Thraben on Ravnica, so the name doesn't make sense. Why didn't we give the original card a more generic name? First, we like to give cards flavorful names. It's an important way to build the world. Second, when we made Thraben Inspector, we didn't know that investigate would become as popular as it did or that this exact execution would be the perfect balance. This was our very first set-wide use of a noncreature artifact token. We liked the idea, but it wasn't until the set came out and we saw how it was received that we realized that we'd hit upon something we should revisit a lot.

We had two choices. We could have said a 1/2 for that investigates when it enters is forever tied to Innistrad and that we can't use it anywhere else. Or, we could have allowed ourselves to make a second one. We chose the latter. Note that we called the second one Novice Inspector. Because we saw the utility and value of the card, we gave it a name we could use on any plane.

The question is which do we value more, the ability to print a card in any set that needs it, or the balance of larger formats that now have access to two copies of the same effect? I'll be blunt: it's the former, and it's not even close. As I said up front, the future can't be held hostage by the past. Making Magic is already hard. Limiting ourselves to never being able to make second versions of cards is untenable. That doesn't mean we'd reprint absolutely any card with a new name. But as a default, we need the ability to do that.

If having multiple copies of a card causes problems in larger formats, those formats have tools to deal with those cards. Cards can be banned or restricted, for example. Restricting what new cards can be made to prevent issues with older formats is not a viable path forward.

That is why we print cards like Novice Inspector, even when Thraben Inspector exists.

Q: Now that 100-card Singleton Magic is played more often than traditional 60-card Constructed formats, has there been discussion about changing how Constructed formats are played? Have you considered changing the rules of formats to allow for more cards and higher variance or less cards and lower variance?

Before I get to the question, let me correct some presumptions you have. Commander is the most-played tabletop format. If you count all Magic played in all the ways it can be played, Commander is not the majority of play. In fact, I believe there are more games of one-on-one Magicthan 100-card Singleton Magic. This is me having some fun with statistics. Individual Commander games are far longer on average, and digital games, the vast majority of which are two-player games, tend to have longer play sessions and include significantly more games played per session due to game length.

So let me rephrase your question slightly. A 100-card format (Commander) has proven very popular. Has that influenced us and made us rethink card limitations for two-player play? The answer is yes and no. I'll start with the no.

Commander decks include 100 cards rather than the usual 60 cards. Commander is a Singleton format (meaning your deck can only have one copy of each nonbasic card), whereas Constructed formats allow for up to four of each nonbasic card (known as a play set). This greatly increases Commander's variance. In general, increased variance is more fun. Each game of Commander is more likely to look different, so you won't have the same experiences from game to game. The problem is that increasing variance lowers the impact of skill in the game. Having the same things happen often and learning the best way to optimize when they occur adds a lot of skill to the game. Many one-on-one formats are focused on tournament play. In that venue, you want skill to matter more, so the play set limitation is important.

Have we done exercises about the best ways to optimize the value of skill in one-on-one Magic? Yes. Obviously lowering the number of copies of a card you can play increases variance. What if there was a Constructed format where we increased the number of copies of a card you can play to five or six? Would that be more skill testing? The problem is that, at some point, you make things too consistent and games begin to prioritize deck matchups over individual skill. Also, all of our metrics developed over three decades of balancing Magic have been done with Constructed formats, so changing that would require us to unlearn a lot of core truths about how we design cards.

This leads to another interesting question. Does all one-on-one play have to be competitive? Commander has clearly shown there's a huge audience who enjoys variance. Could we bring more variance to two-player play? Absolutely. That's a topic R&D is spending a lot of time on. Instead of asking ourselves whether we should change deck limits for existing competitive two-player formats, we are focused on whether there might be potential in making a new two-player format that's more casual in nature. We think there's room for it, but the nuances of what that format should be are complex.

Q: Why are the card types what they are? I am looking for insight into why artifacts and enchantments are mechanically different in name only, but also why instants and sorceries are only different for timing rules.

Lands are the core resource of Magic, and creatures are the main means of doing repeatable damage. Those two haven't varied much since the game's beginning, other than us recognizing that the game is at its best when creatures are more central to gameplay.

Artifacts and enchantments have always been similar structurally, but they began with one core difference. Artifacts were designed so that any deck could play them, while enchantments were tied into the color pie. The problem is that the color pie is a core element of Magic for balance purposes. You really don't want one deck playing all the best cards, so spreading cards across the five colors is key.

This means we can't push the power level of colorless cards too much. And, trust me, we learned this one the hard way—many, many times. If you make an overpowered card that absolutely any deck can play, those decks will play it and it will become very hard to ban your way out of the problems that creates. That means that if we wanted to make powerful artifacts (and we do), we have to make them one or more colors.

Once we eradicated the most important difference between the two card types, the line between artifacts and enchantments got fuzzy. There are a few aesthetic choices we make (you don't tap enchantments as a cost, for instance) to make them feel different, but mostly the separation between them is a creative one. Artifacts are tangible objects while enchantments are intangible ones. Even that can blur at times.

If we had it to do over again, I'd be tempted to have one card type that represents noncreature permanents (I have no idea what we would call it) and have "Artifact" and "Enchantment" be subtypes for that card type. This would allow for all the colors to interact with "Artifacts" and "Enchantments" differently while still having a stronger sense that they're the same thing.

This brings me to instants and sorceries. They're two different card types because Richard Garfield wanted to cleanly communicate when they can be used and chose card types to do that. (Early Magic didn't have supertypes.) Longtime readers will know that if I could recreate Magic, I'd have instant be a supertype and have sorceries be a card type. All permanents with flash would just gain the instant supertype.

Why don't we just change artifacts, enchantments, instants, and sorceries as I just spelled out? Because inertia is a powerful force. Billions of printed cards look a certain way, so changing that is a big deal.

Sometimes I see new players get confused by mana costs because of the number in the generic mana cost before the other mana symbols. They think that the generic mana cost number is a total that includes the other symbols. Have you or would you consider swapping that around?

I've interacted a lot with beginner Magic players and haven't seen this. Ironically, that's where mana costs started. When Richard first created Magic, mana costs were written differently than they are today.

For example, let's say you had a spell that cost three mana, one of which needed to be a black mana. Today, that cost would be shown as . In pre-Limited Edition (Alpha) playtesting, that cost would have been written as . The told you how much mana you had to pay in total, and the told you that you had to play at least one black mana. Richard found time and time again that playtesters would read as being a four-mana spell requiring one black mana. That happened enough that he changed the system of writing mana cost to match the players' intuition.

But the thing that didn't happen until the game came out was the realization that players wanted to say the non-generic portion of the mana cost before the generic part. Using the example, when you ask most players to say what the cost is, they will say, "one black and two colorless." (Technically that cost is generic, as colorless mana is a separate thing, but that's what the majority of players say.) I have spent much time trying to get players to say costs as we say them in R&D, (in the order that they're actually written on the card) to no avail.

If I had to recreate Magic, I'd change the order to have the non-generic mana symbols come first, but consistency is super important, so I don't think it's a change we're going to make after more than three decades.

I did have an opportunity to change it once. When we were making the futureshifted cards for Future Sight, I moved the mana cost to the left side (so you can see it when you naturally fan the cards) and had the non-generic mana symbols come first if you read the mana cost left to right.

Magic has changed a lot along the way, but there are a few aspects that are so core to how we've always done it that it becomes very hard to change, and I think the way and order in which mana costs are written is one of them.

Q: Will we ever get a playable game piece that's bigger than a single card, like oversized cards or the triple-faced cards from Duel Masters?

In supplemental products? Yes, and we still do them on occasion.

What about larger cards or cards with more than two faces in Play Booster boxes, like something you get with a whole box? It's possible. We've included oversized cards in booster boxes before.

How about something in a booster? I would say it's unlikely. Not that we haven't tried. Let me walk you through two attempts.

Edge of Eternities was handed off from vision design with what we called "cosmic" cards. They were twice the size of a normal card. Wizards made the Transformers Trading Card Game, which had giant cards in it. You got one in every booster. Obviously, the boosters for that game were larger. But we knew there was at least a possibility that we had the printing capacity to do it.

There were two problems. One, the size and scope of Magic print runs, especially premier sets, can make things possible at a smaller scale impossible at the size Magic functions. Smaller print runs, for instance, can print at a single printer. Magic's scope requires it to be printed at numerous printers, all of which need to meet the criteria of what we're asking. A small price increase per card in a small print run can balloon into giant numbers when you get to a bigger scale.

Two, all printed Magic cards are based on a specific size and shape for boosters. Changing to a different size of booster, at least for normal releases, creates several complex problems.

But what about a large item that can fit into a traditional booster? Duel Masters has triple-faced cards. The best way to think of them is three normal cards that are attached side by side on the long end of the card. They can fold on top of one another. In Duel Masters, they start outside of your starting deck and are brought into play. They start folded, so each card is the size of one normal card. Then you unfold it once, making it the size of two cards. Then you unfold it to the size of three cards. (Three cards attached side by side have six faces.) Could Magic ever use this technology?

No, for one of the prior reasons and one new reason. The scale of Magic, again, causes numerous problems. It's just not something we can do with Magic being as big as it is. The new reason is a weight issue. The material needed to attach the cards together has enough weight that it makes the booster slightly heavier, which means you can figure out which boosters have them if you weigh them. This means that even if we could figure out how to do it, we'd have to put one in every booster, which creates new issues.

This means there's no way to do it in a booster. Yes, we do have mechanics like meld where we can turn multiple cards into a larger object (sort of). But Magic has many other avenues to get larger objects into players' hands, so if we come up with a cool new mechanic that wants larger game objects, we have some options. The biggest issue is that we have to have a way for you to play without access to the bigger object, as some people will only encounter the new mechanic or game piece through boosters. The bigger object has to be an optional addition to the experience. But for players who are interested, we could produce it.

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Answer in Kind

That's all the time I have for today. But fear not, I had so many questions that there will be a part two next week. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article or any of my answers, be it through email or social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week for part two.

Until then, never be afraid to question things.