Last week, I started a mailbag article where I answered big-picture questions about Magic. I had so many good questions that I decided to turn it into a two-parter. With that said, on with the questions!

Q: Why aren't enchantment creatures evergreen like artifact creatures?

There are two different answers for this, which are (probably) related. The first answer is about precedent. When Richard Garfield created Magic, he made artifact creatures. I assume he did so because of a combination of his top-down ideas and his desire to have some creatures any deck could play. Fourteen years later, I created the first enchantment creature as a futureshifted card in Future Sight.

I designed Lucent Liminid as a French vanilla creature, meaning it was just a normal creature that happened be an enchantment. The first set to use them en masse, the original Theros, went out of its way to make sure they also felt like enchantments, which made them harder to create. Artifact creatures, in contrast, originally only had generic mana in their costs, so there was an easy way to delineate them for nonartifact creatures. When we started using mana of different colors for artifact creatures, they had become accepted as a normal part of the game, so dropping generic mana from their costs wasn't a big deal.

We eventually got to the point where we were more comfortable using the flavor to justify the enchantment-ness of enchantment creatures rather than needing a mechanical justification, but that wasn't until Theros Beyond Death another thirteen years later. Magic started with artifact creatures, and vanilla enchantment creatures took 27 years for us to get to.

The second answer is that artifact creatures are creatures that have been artificially made using real, tangible objects. These are many staples of fantasy, like golems, that are artifact creatures. What exactly entails an enchantment creature is a lot vaguer. Each setting in Magic has its own answer. For example, on Theros, they're creations of the gods who are also enchantment creatures. Artifact creatures have a huge lead because, from a creative perspective, it is more obvious what they should be.

With all that said, if I had Magic to start over, would I have included enchantment creatures earlier? I would have. For example, I wish all Illusions were enchantment creatures. I think enchantment creatures are a valuable design tool and would love if they were more integrated into wider Magic. Do I believe that, if we made that change, artifact creatures and enchantment creatures would appear in equal number? Absolutely not. There is a greater need for artifact creatures, so we'd still do them more. I would just like enchantment creatures to be closer to the default than they currently are.

Q: Internally, what is the feeling on battles? Are you happy with their play patterns and the public reception?

We like battles. Most players seem to like battles. If current design is any indication, there will be future sets with battles. Why is it taking so long to get more? We're a bit more careful with new card types. It's just something we don't do very often, so we decided we wanted to wait and see the public's reaction before printing more battles. We work roughly three years ahead. March of the Machine, the set that introduced them, came out in April of 2023.

Even once we decided to officially greenlight them and make more battles, we had to wait for a set that organically wanted them. Our goal wasn't to start throwing battles in sets but rather make them deciduous and allow any set that wanted them to have access to battles. There is at least one set in design right now that did, and battles are still in that set as of now. So, more battles are coming.

I should also note that our first incarnation of battles, Sieges, are not the only way to do battles. In fact, we normally start new things with the simplest version, and we didn't do that with battles. So, not only will you get to see more battles, but you'll get to see us do other things with them.

Q: Why does white always get the short straw in cycles?

The short answer is that it doesn't. We make a lot of cycles, and every color gets its chance to shine and its chance to suck. The more interesting question to ask yourself is why does it feel like white always gets the short straw in cycles?

For those unaware, I have a Tumblr blog called Blogatog. Every day, I answer questions on my blog. I read a lot more questions than I get to answer. There's an interesting trend I've noticed (to be fair, I noticed it long before my blog, but I see it there every day). I get messages from players about how unfair we are toward their favorite color, but those messages are not all about the same color. I get messages complaining about how we treat every color poorly. But how can that be? We make good cards. Those cards are mostly one or more colors. Somebody has to be getting good cards.

The answer to this question is something known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also referred to as the frequency illusion. The idea behind it is that you are more likely to see something once you become aware of it. If you see a cycle where the white card is the worst, you start noticing those cycles more than the ones with strong white cards.

This is the result of several cognitive biases. First is the confirmation bias. People are more likely to seek out things that reinforce what they believe. If you think white has the worst cards in cycles, you start seeking out more examples where white is the worst color in the cycle. Second is something known as selective attention. There's too much data to absorb, so people choose where to put their focus. When something you choose to focus on appears at a certain rate, you assume that is representative of the things you aren't paying attention to as well.

Yes, we do make bad white cards, but we make good ones as well. It's a matter of where you put your focus.

Q: Why was the power and toughness of creatures centered mostly around smaller, single-digit numbers where even moderately larger numbers would have allowed for greater granularity and more particular scaling in combat?

This is just a guess as I haven't specifically asked Richard about it. I assume the reason is that he felt ease of play was more important than the need for extra granularity. Even other trading card games that use more digits tend to use multiples of 10, 100, or 1,000 to keep combat simple.

One small exception that I was directly involved in is Duel Masters (a trading card game Wizards makes specifically for the Japanese market). The normal stats for that game are four- or five-digit numbers ending in three zeros (1,000; 2,000; 3,000; and so on), but we use 500 for that game's version of first strike. A 1,500 will defeat a 1,000 but lose to a 2,000.

Q: Why have we been getting many more token producers in the last decade than in all previous years?

There are three answers to this which are, of course, a bit intertwined. First, token-making effects are part of our design zeitgeist right now. I often talk about iterative design loops where we try new ideas for a set, playtest them, get feedback, and use that feedback to make changes. While individual sets have their own iterative loops, Magic design as a whole also has iterative loops. R&D designs Magic sets, the players play with them, we get feedback on what they like and dislike, and that feedback influences the design of future sets.

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If you take all the data from all the players, be it actual hard data, anecdotal data, interactions with players online, and beyond, it morphs into the zeitgeist. You can think of it as a general sense of what the current player base enjoys. It's not any one player but a conglomeration of all players. And the zeitgeist loves tokens. So, we make more tokens. If the zeitgeist shifts and stops liking tokens as much, we'll shift and make less of them. But as someone who has interacted with the zeitgeist for three decades, tokens have always been popular.

Second is that we now put tokens in boosters. I put the very first Magic creature tokens in Unglued boosters, inspired by play aides I saw in Japan. Players liked them, so we started putting them in other boosters. Putting tokens in boosters enabled us to up their frequency in sets because the logistics of playing with tokens became less complex.

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Third, as we started using more creature tokens in sets, we learned how useful they were in creating our set structure, building draft archetypes, and solving basic design problems. For example, Strixhaven: School of Mages and Secrets of Strixhaven needed to up their number of instants and sorceries without lowering the creature as-fan. Creature tokens to the rescue!

So, players like them, we have the tools to lower logistical issues, and they help improve design. That's why we make more cards that produce tokens.

Q: Why is the upkeep step before the draw step?

When Richard made Limited Edition (Alpha), he leaned on capturing top-down flavor. One of the ideas he really liked was magic that required constant attention. Sure, you could summon powerful creatures or cast impactful spells. But to keep them around, you had to keep spending mana. If you didn't, there would be a cost to pay. Maybe the enchantment would go away or the creature would attack you.

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This meant there had to be a clear indication of whether a cost was paid. This led Richard to an idea. What if there was a part of each turn which signified that you had passed the point where you could pay the upkeep costs for your creatures and spells? The best answer for that was drawing your card. It's something you did every turn, near the beginning. If he put upkeep costs before drawing the card, there would be a clean indicator for when you missed paying it. So, he put the upkeep step before the draw step.

Many years later, R&D had really moved away from upkeep costs. They had memory issues, and frankly the cards didn't need them. But we still wanted to have effects that happen once a turn. Those were fun. The problem: if we put them before the draw step, it added extra thinking time as you now have to think through all of the things you might potentially draw.

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R&D generally tries to cut down on unnecessary mental processing. For example, whenever cards went to the bottom of your library, you used to have to order them. Because their order could potentially matter, players would spend several minutes thinking through how best to optimize the choice, but it almost never came up. It just wasn't worth the time and mental processing it generated, so we changed the effects to put the cards on the bottom in a random order to take away the need to make that decision.

A lot of upkeep costs were like that, so we started moving some of them to the beginning of your first main phase. Rather than have you guess what card you would draw before the effect, we just let you know so you can make the decision of how to use that effect with full knowledge. That shift in how we template these effects, of course, made players ask about moving the upkeep step. Those effects feel like upkeep effects. Why not move the step to where we would prefer it?

Well, the answer is inertia, which relates to many of my answers last week. There are a lot of cards we've made over the years that use the upkeep step and were designed to be used with the current upkeep. Changing it would cause a lot of issues, so we could just leave it be and move new effects to the beginning of the first main phase when we feel that's the better template.

Q: What is the best reason to break from the set skeleton that you've seen so far?

For those unaware of what a set skeleton is, here's my original article on them and my latest article on modern set skeletons. Set skeletons are a tool that design uses in initial vision design to start building a design file. Each slot in the set is labeled to tell you what goes there, usually what color it is, what card type it is, if it's a creature, what range of mana value it has, and what the general purpose for the spell is if it's not a creature.

The thing is, we don't really break a set skeleton because they're just a guide to start with. As the set evolves, it can and will move away from where it started. That's a natural function of the set skeleton. It's not meant to restrict you. Almost all designs end up in a place that's different than where it started.

What are the biggest reasons to move the furthest away from a set skeleton? Usually, that involves structuring your set on a game element that's not normally at the center. Sets built around a card type other than creatures are a good example. "A plus B" mechanics (mechanics that require another component to work, like how madness requires discard) are another good example. Things that require a change in the as-fan of a component, usually up because you're focusing on it, cause the biggest deviations from the standard set skeleton.

Q: Why can't lands be cast as spells?

Lands work differently than every other card type because they're the core resource of the game. To properly balance them, the game needs to have a very precise process for you to play them. You want them to be free to play because they're what enables you to play your spells, but you need to restrict them because the pace of the game is determined by the amount of lands you play. That's where the "one land per turn" restriction came from.

Couldn't the game support lands having a mana cost? No, for three reasons. One, no matter what cost you put on them, the game will still allow you to play one per turn. So, you can't give them extra abilities to offset the mana cost. (Although you can give them enters abilities that require mana.)

Two, the ability to pay mana to play extra lands is a huge balance issue. This means that, even if we could put mana costs on them, we'd have to make them high costs, so they would look horrible and still create balance problems. "Looks bad and could potentially break the game" is a bad combination for cards.

Three, there isn't a clear answer for how they would work that's not unintuitive. Lands work a certain way. Making them also act like spells while still being lands is just ripe for confusion.

Q: What differentiates the effects you put on sorceries versus instants?

There are two main differences. The first is the effect's connection to combat. Do we want you to cast this spell in the middle of combat? I'll use Giant Growth and Overrun, which are both from Magic: The Gathering Foundations, as my examples.

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We very much want you to cast Giant Growth during combat. It's a combat trick, and it's something we want you to be able to bluff having. We think it makes for a more dynamic combat. In contrast, we don't want you to cast Overrun in the middle of combat. We want you to cast it before you choose to attack. We want your opponent to be aware that all your creatures are bigger and have trample before they block. If it was a surprise in the middle of combat, it would mostly be game over. But by casting the spell before you attack, you at least give the opponent a chance to survive. It makes for better gameplay.

The other reason is the draw step. As a general rule, we want you to be able to cast the spell you draw. I'll use Pilfer from Foundations for this point.

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If Pilfer was an instant, you could use it in response to your opponent drawing a card and make them discard it before they ever get a chance to play it (if it wasn't an instant). By making Pilfer a sorcery, we give the opponent a turn to cast the card before you can force them to discard it.

There are other reasons, but these are the two biggest.

Q: After listening to your podcast on the "quirks" of Alpha, the game seems fundamentally unplayable until Sixth Edition. How did Magic survive its infancy?

Recently, I released a podcast episode called "Quirks of Limited Edition (Alpha)" where I explained the many things that the game used to do that it doesn't do any more. Things like artifacts shutting off when tapped or tapped blockers not dealing damage in combat. The point of the episode: there are a lot of staple things about the game that players might not realize weren't always that way.

So, how exactly did players enjoy Magic? First, the core game of Magic, which was there from day one, is really fun. Yes, I believe we've done a lot to improve it over the years, but we started in a pretty solid place. But more important from that is what I call the Model T effect.

For those unaware, the Model T was the very first mass produced automobile (made by the Ford Motor Company). When it first came out, it was quite exciting. Why? Because it was the only one of its kind. If you wanted to buy a car, that's what existed. Does it pale compared to modern cars? Sure. But modern cars didn't exist when the Model T came out. The thing it was being measured against was buggies and horses. And it's a huge step up from those.

Magic is the same. Alpha was a huge leap forward in gaming. When it came out, we weren't comparing it to other forms of Magic. We were comparing it to other games. In that comparison, it was amazing. Most importantly, we didn't know what we didn't know. For example, the rules had a lot of room for improvement, but that was hard to understand without seeing a better version. And each version of Magic improved, so your standards of what to expect improved with it. Most of the time, the latest version was the coolest version with the latest design technology.

So how did Magic survive? By being the latest version of something awesome for the time.

"I Need Some Answers"

And that ends another mailbag article. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article or on any of the answers I gave. You can let me know through email or social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week when I talk about the Lorwyn Five in preparation for Reality Fracture.

Until then, may you keep finding the answers you seek.