8/9/13 Episode 46: Instants and Sorceries

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay, so one of the things I’ve been doing in this podcast is a couple of what I call “meta-series,” where I talk about related topics over a long period of time. One of my meta-series is my card type meta-series. So I talked about planeswalkers, I’ve talked about artifacts, I talked about creatures, so today—instants and sorceries!

So I did give some thought to having instant and sorcery be separate, because they are—they are their own card types. But I realized is they’re so intertwined and that a lot of the discussions about them are so connected that I felt I’d be repeating myself if I did them separately. So I’ve decided to join them together into an instants and sorcery podcast day.

So, okay. Let’s go back to the beginning. Whenever I talk about card types, one of the things that I learned early on, as an interesting way to understand things is, to go back and say “Why? Why does this thing exist?” You know. And it’s fun to just think take everyday normal objects. For example, fork and knife and a spoon. Why are these the objects we eat with? And when you sort of step back and think about it, you start realizing how they—how you got to where you got.

So let’s do the same with instants and sorceries. Okay, Richard Garfield. He is making Magic. Why does the game want instants and sorceries? I think there’s a bunch of reasons. First off, I think that when you say “We’re having a bunch of wizards dueling,” you expect stuff like people throwing things at each other, right? Like, lightning bolts and stuff. You’d expect that to happen. So you—part of it is, there’s a flavor you want that it captures.

But mechanically, there’s another very important thing. Which is that one of the things that goes on in a game is, you want a lot of decisions, and you want a lot of—you want a lot of things to happen, but you also want to be careful that you don’t gum things up. And permanents are awesome, but one of the downsides to permanents is that well, they’re permanents. They’re always there. And if you keep playing them, you know, you can get—the board state can get more and more crowded.

So one of the nice things about instants and sorceries is, they’re one and they’re done. That they do their thing, they have, you know, they have an impact, but then they go away. You know. That they—you know, they are over very quickly.

And so—now, you can have instants and sorceries that do very powerful effects. They can have huge effects on the game. It’s not that they can’t be very powerful, but the point is, they’re temporary. They do their thing, it happens, and then you move on. And that, you know, you don’t have to have any memory, really, of the spell. I mean, you’ll see what had happened because of it, but it’s not like it’s another permanent on the board that you have to continually monitor.

Also, and this is another important thing, this has to do with instants, is one of the very important things about the game is—if—so they have what they call an “open information game.” Chess is a famous open information game. Which means everything’s known. Everything is known in chess. You know what your opponent can do, they know what you can do, and when there’s a lot of open information, there’s a lot of pressure on the player to not miss anything. And so what happens is, open information games tend to be very taxing. Because the better players are like “Okay, I know everything, I have to not miss anything.”

And one of the nice things about putting what we call “hidden information” in, is that there’s things that you the player can sort of make guesses might happen, but you don’t know. You know. And that it’s nice that when you don’t know things, it allows you to sort of say “Okay, I don’t—I’ll monitor it the best I can, but I don’t know everything, so I can’t—I can’t think out eight turns ahead because I don’t know what my opponent’s going to do.” You know. And by the way, the hand in general is hidden information that I don’t know—even permanents and stuff, I don’t know what’s in your hand.

Instants are particularly nice in that they allow surprise moments at any moment of the game. Like for example, combat without instants would be—I mean, a known thing. They have their abilities, I have my abilities, and maybe I have to track the board to understand what's going on, but it’s a known quality. As soon as you throw instants in, now it’s like, “Oh, well he’s attacking with that. What does it mean? I should win that fight, is he bluffing me? Oh, does he have something in his hand? You know, and it makes—it makes—it makes combat and other things much more interesting because just the potential.

Oh, let me talk about threat for a second. Because this is important. In games in general, one of the reasons hidden information is very valuable is that one of the ways you influence games is not necessarily threats necessarily, but implied threats. And this is very important. In that one of the things that’s a lot of fun in games is that—it’s—the reason hidden information is a lot of fun is one player has information the other player does not.

And there’s—so one of the things that’s fun is, you can make computers play two games against each other, but mostly it’s humans playing against each other, and that one of the fun things for humans to do is to try to read the other person. You know, to try to pick up a sense of what they’re doing. And like I said, this is something, you know, computers are bad at.

Because it has a lot to do with sort of just reading somebody and a gut sense of another person, and it’s a whole bunch of things. Body language, just watching what they’re doing, you know, and that one of the real funs of games is, one person pitting themselves against another person. You know. And part of that is, has to do with bluffing, has to do with reading people, you know, has to do with—that you want your game—not all games do this, but I think it’s fun when your game has an element of the person that’s brought into it, and that I’m trying to sort of gauge you as my opponent. As a person.

That there’s this sort of human relationship going on, and that one of the fun things about Magic, instants and sorceries do this well is, “Okay, I attack with my creature. You block. Or you’re thinking of blocking. But you’re like, “Okay, I can read what’s on the board, I know what’s going to happen, I know what would happen if nothing else interfered.” You know.

So for example, you have a 3/3 and I attack with a 2/2. Now, in your head you’re like “We both know that that creature’s going to die. That there’s no reason to attack with that creature. Now, one of two things is true. Either he has a trick, he has a Giant Growth or something, or he wants me to think he has a trick and he’s trying to bluff me. He’s trying to get through, and I might not block because I think there’s a trick, even though he doesn’t.” And all of a sudden, like just the existence of instants. Even if the instant isn’t there. That’s one of the beauties of this. Is that the implied threat of things can make things happen.

For example, in—let me show you other places this shows up in Magic design. We talked about morph. Okay? So morph is a card, a creature, that you can play facedown as a 2/2. And a lot of people, we talked about playing off-color morphs where I put a morph into play, that is a 2/2, but I—it’s of a color I can’t—I can’t turn up. I can’t turn face-up. And one of the things people miss is that they go, “Well, whatever. So you can just play it as a 2/2.” No no no. I can play it more as a 2/2. If I play a face-down morph guy, I know that I can’t turn it up. You don’t know that I can’t turn it up.

And so the implied threat of a face-down 2/2, when it can turn into other things, is different than just me playing a vanilla 2/2. Meaning if I just had Grizzly Bear in my hand, and put a Grizzly Bear into play, that is a very different thing psychologically than me putting a morph into play. Even if it happens to be that it is just a Grizzly Bear, because I can’t do anything other than have it be a 2/2. My opponent doesn’t know that, and because of that there’s extra value to the card.

And this human element of having implied threats is very important, and a big part of some of the dynamism of Magic. Or of any game, but Magic since we’re talking about Magic. And that—it’s something instants and sorceries do very well. I’m not saying only instants and sorceries, other cards obviously are hidden in your hand and they also have that, but instants are particularly nice because they bring this element to every moment of the game.

Okay, so let’s—let’s—let’s—let’s get the big question out here, which is—okay, so when the game started, Richard actually had three spell types. There was instants, there were sorceries, and there were interrupts. So what were interrupts? Real quickly, let me talk about interrupts.

When Richard first started the game, the timing of the game was not as locked down. I mean, I know right now that Magic has had twenty years to kind of fine-tune its rules, and it’s a pretty lean, mean fighting machine right now. I mean, not that there aren’t areas it couldn’t be leaner, but Magic—Magic has done a lot in twenty years to consolidate its rules. Early Magic, a lot of the rulings were like “This works this way and this card works that way,” and things were Band-Aided together. Like, card-by-card, you know, the rules kind of worked different ways different cards needed it to.

And when Magic first came out, Richard knew he like wanted spells that responded to other spells. But he didn’t want all spells to respond to other spells, at least that was his thought at the time, so interrupts were a way to go “Well, I want to do counterspells, you know, I want to do stuff in which you play a spell. Then I go “Wait wait wait, I want to stop this before you do anything else.”

But when the Sixth Edition rules came around, once they had the stack it’s like “Well, here’s the order by which you can respond to things,” the idea was, I could do a counterspell, and then either you respond to my counterspell or not, but then my counterspell resolves, and now we go back to the stack. Right? And so the Sixth Edition rules said “Well, we don’t really need interrupts.” And interrupts went away.

But we did make a mechanic called “Split Second” in Time Spiral block which had a lot of the feel of the interrupts, kind of like “I’m doing this, sorry, you can’t do anything about it.” You can’t respond to it. So a lot of interrupts early on, it’s like “Well, I do this,” and the weird thing was there were things like Red Elemental Blast, Blue Elemental Blast that counterspelled but also destroyed permanents. So it allowed you to, like, “I destroyed this but you couldn’t respond to me destroying it. “ Which at the time was quirky.

So anyway, instants and sorceries got made because Richard wanted this “one and done” moment and wanted some surprise and different things. Okay, but why—why sorceries? Why not make every—every spell an instant? Every, you know, non-permanent an instant.

And the answer is, it goes to the root of what makes games games. So I’ve talked about this multiple times, but I’ll talk about it again. A game is not made to be easy. Most—most things, you know, the designer of most things are trying to make them as easy as possible. But that’s not the point of the game. The point of a game is to challenge the player.

In fact, game players come to games because they want to be challenged. Usually mentally, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, but usually you’re in for a mental challenge. And what you the game player says is, “Okay, game designer, what you got?” You know. And you want to test yourself. Now, sometimes you’re testing yourself against the game itself. Sometimes you’re testing yourself up against other players playing the game. You know, a lot of times both. But the issue is that you are trying to see what you’re capable of doing.

So what that means is that you—when you buy into the whole game experience, you are buying into making things not as easy as possible. You are buying into limitations. So why do sorceries exist? Because limitations are good. You know, limitations have a lot of value. One of the biggest things they do is they force you to make decisions at times when you don’t know everything.

So for example,  one of the downsides of instants in general is that the correct thing to do with an instant, usually, is hold it until you absolutely need it. Wait until you know you need it, and then use it. Where sorcery says, “No no no no no. You’ve got to decide. It’s your turn. Do you want to use it now? Because, you know, you might not be able to use it later, or it might not be relevant later.”

You know. There’s moments when you have to choose to use it. And that you could make mistakes. I could choose to not do something, and by the time I have the chance to do it again, I can’t do it. Or it’s not relevant anymore. Or the card—I had to discard the card. Or whatever. You know.

And that sorceries create limitations that make you have to make decisions. And being that’s what games are about, it’s forcing you to have to make decisions and work within limitations so sorceries are like—on some level, why are there instants? Now, I’ll get to that in a second. I mean, instants do some good things. But sorceries exist because you want limitations in games. You want to force players to have to make choices. You know, choices are good.

 And, you know, you want players—or, actually, to use my own terminology, I actually mean decisions and not choices. So one of the things I talked about—I did a column on this. This is the difference between choices and decisions. And I used the wrong word. Let me correct myself.

So a choice means an option. The way R&D talks about it. So a choice is “How many choices do you have?” You know, Naturalize has two choices. You can destroy an artifact, or you can destroy an enchantment. You know, Cryptic Command has—(???) math it, but you—two out of four or whatever that math is. You have a whole bunch of options of what the card can do. It can do these two or these two or these two or these two or these—you know.  There’s a lot of…

Decisions are when you sort of have to like come to a forking point. Where like “Oh, I have this sorcery in my hand, and I have a decision. Do I want to play it now, or risk that it will be relevant a turn from now?” You know. And that choices are good, but choices can get you in trouble. Because you don’t always want to give your opponent—your players too many choices.

Some—I’m not saying you don’t ever want to give them choices, and it’s nice to have some cards that are flexible, and we do, but choices are very powerful and we—we have to charge you for choices. You know. And if we—if we the game designer give you too many choices, we are not doing you a favor. We are making the game too hard.

So—one of the things, just to jump around here. One of the things that comes up a lot, a common mistake is the—you’re dumbing down the game thing. Where people are like, you know, “Why are you taking away choices from us?” You know. And sometimes decisions from us. And the answer is that Magic—for all this talk about how we’re simplifying things, Magic is a complex game. A very, very, very complex game.

For example, for example, so it took them years to teach a computer to play chess at a level good enough that it could play against, you know, high-level chess players. I mean, years. I mean, decades it took them. You know, Big Blue and such. And chess is—whatever. It’s sixty-four squares, and each person has, what, twenty-four pieces? And, you know, there’s only six unique pieces. Like, the number of options in Chess is—a computer could actually map it. It is a finite number of choices. Finite in a sense of, like, really finite. Not like giant finite, but, you know, smaller finite.

Whereas Magic—Magic has thirteen thousand pieces that all interact in very bizarre ways, you know. And there’s an element of bluffing and reading and all sorts of stuff to it. You know, there’s lots of things. How long before we can build a computer that can beat a top-level Magic player? I mean, it will happen one day, obviously, but we’re far away. We’re far away. You know. A computer can play chess pretty good. But it can’t play Magic pretty good yet.

And that’s because Magic… and chess is a complex game! Chess is a very complex game. But Magic is way, way, way, way more complex than chess. In the sense that there’s just so many more factors and decisions that have to be made. Like in a chess game, how many moves are there—I don’t know how may moves. Fifty, sixty, seventy? I’m not sure how many moves in an average chess game. You know. But how many, you know, decisions are there in a chess game? You know. And the answer is, under a hundred usually? You know. Now, each decision in chess is very important and such.

But in Magic, you’re making—you’re making decisions constantly. All the time. You know, one of the things for example that is funny is, is like—the first decision you have to make is “What am I playing? What am I putting in my deck? I have to make a deck.” So before the whole thing begins, I’ve got to make a deck. That is super complex. But let’s say someone gives you a deck. Fine. You don’t even make the deck. Someone gives you the deck.

Okay. Next decision is what order to play things in. You know. I get cards, I get mana, what order do I play things in? That is a pretty big—just that game is pretty complex. Okay. And a lot of people mess that up. A lot of people do not play the things in correct order. And, just because you can play something, just because you can cast it, doesn’t mean you’re supposed to cast it.

Okay, next, on top of—after that, then we have permanents in play. Making decisions about permanents in play. That’s even more complex than casting stuff out of your hand. Partly because there’s more options, partly because it’s repeatable and you’re making decisions all the time. You know, you have decisions about when to attack, and block, and when to use activated abilities, and all sorts of stuff. How to tap your mana. That’s a whole complex series of things.

Okay, and now, we haven’t even gotten to your opponent yet. Now there’s making decisions based not on your own criteria, but on your opponent’s criteria. What do they have in play? What are they doing? You know. And then on top of that, the next level is not basing things on their—on what they have done, or what they have, but what they could do. You know.

A big part of Magic, for example, I know Mike Turian has—we’ve chatted about this quite a bit. Of how when you get really good, like, watching what your opponent does. Not at what they play, but in how they think and how many seconds they take to do something. To try to gauge, “What are they thinking about? How long do they think about this? Oh, well they made me stop at this moment. That implies they have this kind of spell.” You know. And so there’s all this, like on the top level, just trying to read your opponent and look at their gameplay and understand from their gameplay what their deck is and what the cards are in their hand. Okay.

So add all that up. That is meta-meta-meta-meta-complex. Sorry. Mega-mega-mega-mega-complex. That—the idea—I mean, if we are trying to simplify the game, it is not because we ever have any belief we’re going to get it to a point in which it’s simple, it’s because it is a crazy complex game that we’re trying to keep from being too complex.

The analogy I always use is, the analogy of fire. And that sometimes I feel like people externally are treating it like we’re trying to build a campfire and we have some kindling down, and like “Oh, be careful, because you might blow the fire out!” And then I’m like “No no no. Here’s the—here’s the analogy. It’s a five-alarm fire burning down the building, R&D is using every scrap of water it can to keep the fire from engulfing the building. You know. And I feel like people are like “Be careful, don’t put it out,” and there’s not really the fear of it going out. Nothing we’re going to do is going to make Magic not very complex. Anyway. My little side—my little side (???). Back to the instants and sorceries.

So. There are a lot of decisions to make in Magic, and that sorceries help enhance decision-making. So why do instants exist? Instants exist for a couple reasons. Number one is, there are some cards that we cannot make if they’re not instants. You know, one of the reasons cards are instants is, they don’t make sense—they don’t make sense otherwise than being instants.

A good example might be a damage-prevention spell. Or a counterspell. Like, reactive spells in general. So how do I react to you if I can’t play it at a time—you’re—the spell you’re playing, I have to react to it. Well if I can’t play it at that moment—you know, if you play a spell, and I want to counter it, well unless I can do it right then, it’s—it’s of no value.

So one of instant’s things is that it allows you to play spells at times you would need to play spells. Another thing it does is it opens up some possibilities for interactions. You know, instants definitely give you more—more options, more choices. In when you can do things. And now—and once again, this is just instants and sorceries. Instants give you more choices, but they don’t always give you more decisions. And that’s where sorceries and instants (???).

And what I’m saying is, if I have a spell that does something. Let’s say I have a spell that’s going to destroy a creature. Well, I just wait until the moment in which I most immediately need this creature to be destroyed. You know. Like you’re attacking, and they go “Oh, okay, he’s about to do damage to me, and before it does damage I’ll destroy it.” Whereas a sorcery, I have to say “Oh, I don’t know what he’s going to attack with. Well, what do I think he might attack with? Like, what is the biggest threat?”

You have to sort of—with an instant it’s like “I wait to see what the biggest threat is.” But with a sorcery, I have to make decisions before then. Because I don’t know. And so, you know, instants give you more choices and more—more options, but sorceries tend to give you—make better decisions. They force you to sort of make more decisions.

Now instants—I mean, one of the things that’s tricky is, pretty much the rule of thumb from when you make something a sorcery vs. make it an instant is, could it be a sorcery? You know. Pretty much any time you make a spell, you say, “Okay. Could it be a sorcery?” Now, some of the time you go “No, it doesn’t even work. It’s a counterspell. It can’t be a sorcery.” And other times it’s like “Well, when do you expect to use this?”

So Giant Growth is a good example. Now, you could make Giant Growth a sorcery, and occasionally we do, but you know what? Giant Growth really is about combat. You know, that—that is its major role. And so well, it kind of needs to be an instant because the time in which it’s really designed for, it needs to be an instant.

Another example, like I talked about kill spells before. Now kill spells can be sorceries, and often we mix them up, we make some sorceries and some instants. But you know, sometimes you want some flexibility, you know, I mean—it’s not that flexibility is bad, you know, flexibility is good, and flexibility is more powerful.

So another game design tip here, which is your audience will always ask for power. For example—mostly will as for power. There’s a few exceptions. For example, when people look at cards, whenever we preview cards, I always tend to get the same questions. Question number one is, “Couldn’t that be cheaper?” And the answer there is “Yes it could be cheaper, but, you know, there’s a meta-structure going on, we have a power level we’re trying to keep, you know, making one spell cheaper means  one other spell would have to be more expensive. In a general sense.” You know, that we can’t just make a spell more powerful in a vacuum, because it—we are trying to keep the whole set at a power level. Not just any one individual card.

The second most common question I get after (???) cheaper is I’ll make instants—I’ll make sorceries, they’ll go “Well, couldn’t that be an instant?” And the answer there is “It could be, but what’s the—what’s the role, what is it trying to do?” You know. It—increasing choices, like I said can lower decisions, and so it depends on what the card is trying to do. Now if the card is trying to be used at a time when instants are valuable, then yes. Very often we’ll put instant on there.

And sometimes, you know, we’ll shake it up, every once in a while we’ll—we’ll say “Normally we don’t give you the option of the instant, and…” For example. There’s sort of those we tend to do at sorcery speed. One of the most classic is card discard. You know, we make you discard a card.

And the reason we do that is, it’s not a lot of fun to not let someone play their card. You know, that I draw a card and you go “Oh, before you even have a chance to play it, I make you discard it.” You know. Unless it’s an instant I won’t be able to play it. That’s not a lot of fun. Now every once in a blue moon, we’ve made discard of instants. It’s a rarity, but we do do it. But in general, that’s the kind of thing where, you know what? It’s just less fun if we make it—let you cast it at instant.

Because the correct thing then is to deny the person the opportunity. Because if I can keep you from like—for example, I draw a card. If it’s a permanent, and I hit you in your draw step, you cannot play that card. You don’t have the opportunity to play that card. If it’s an instant, you can. But if it’s a sorcery or a permanent—anything but an instant, I just got the card without you having a chance to respond. And if I do my discard as a sorcery, well that means on your turn you have a chance to play it. You know.

And then one of the things about discard is—and it’s funny. Stone Rain’s the same way. Land destruction we do as sorceries as well. Because one of the things about the game is, we want to make sure that you have a chance to play the game. You know. We want to give your opponent means to stop you, but what we’ve learned is, if we make Magic—if I have too much ability to keep you from playing, the game is just not fun.

Now I don’t know—for those that haven’t been playing a long time, when Magic first came out, for example, there was a card called Sinkhole which cost BB to destroy target land. And then there was Stone Rain and there was… what was it? It was a green one. Ice Storm.

And so there was a bunch of ways to destroy things. Strip Mine came around in Antiquities, and—so early on in Magic, there was a means in which we played a deck where you almost never had land. You know, it’s just—I never let you have land. Maybe at most you had one or two land. But like you just didn’t have land at all, and eventually I destroyed all your land. Well, you know what? Sitting there while my opponent does stuff and I can do nothing is just miserable. You know. Same way with sort of a counterspell deck, where like “Okay, I counter that, I counter that, I counter that.”

Like, I can’t do anything. You know. And that wasn’t much fun either. And we want land destruction and counterspells, you know, to be viable options, meaning we want them to be tools, we want them to exist, but if we give it to high a power level it just makes a non-interactive deck. And so one of the things we do with sorceries sometimes is we say “What are effects that, you know what? We kind of want to hold them back a little bit.” You know. I don’t want a Stone Rain instant because that way I play my land, you just blow it up before I can use it. You know. I draw a card, you make me discard before I can even use it. And so those kinds of things tend to get sorcery on them.

Another reason we use sorcery sometimes is where we think the card will confuse the player and make them play incorrectly. For example, a lot of times when we grant haste, we make it a sorcery because, for example, let’s say we make +2/+0 and haste. We tend to make that a sorcery. Now, it could be an instant, and the reason you might want to make it an instant is hey! +2/+0 is valuable. You might want to surprise them in combat.

But since haste is there, we kind of like—people—it just feels weird. (???) you want to use the haste, well how do I use haste when I’m playing it as an instant? Well, you can’t. You missed the window. And some people—you know, less experienced players, might even think that “Well, it says haste, so I must be able to use the haste.”

And like, so, we have to be careful sometimes when we choose what—whether a thing’s an instant or sorcery, that if we think people will—might play it wrong, we’ll also make it sorcery to help—help encourage that. And, once again. Sometimes it’s a sorcery because we’re trying to make the decision an interesting decision. You know. “Hey, you can do this thing, but you know what? You’ve got to choose on your turn to do it. You can’t just do it when it’s convenient.”

You know. Here’s Wrath of God. Okay. We’re not going to allow you to—we’re not going to let you just blow up things whenever you want. You’ve got to do it on your own turn. You’ve got to gauge, “Is this the right turn? Or do I want to wait until next turn?” You know. And by next turn, do they come up with an answer? Do they make me discard it? Can something happen? You know. And that sorceries, like I said, lead to excellent decision-making, and so sometimes part of making something a sorcery is saying “Is this card more interesting, you know, if we make the player…” you know, will it—will it play—have more play value if we make the player have to make the decision?

Now, the other thing we’ll tend to do is, pretty much your—I would say categories fall into three—three clumps. There is “pretty much must be a sorcery as the default.” There’s “must be an instant as the default.” And there’s cards—effects that are like “Well, it could go either way.” So the first example, like I’ve talked about, is stuff like, you know, land destruction, card denial, and—things where we’re like “You know, we really don’t want it instant speed.” We might make an exception once in a blue moon. But—but look. That’s what we want. The opposite side is like counterspells I’ve talked about, which are—look, it’s got to be an instant. You need—you can’t have a counterspell that isn’t instant. Doesn’t work.

And the middle ground is stuff like creature destruction. Where—look. It is valuable as an instant, but it’s valuable as a sorcery. And that, you know, sometimes we’ll give you an instant and sometimes we’ll give you a sorcery. We’re trying to mix it up.

And that one of the things that is fun, from a design standpoint, is to try to understand how to use a sorcery or instants so that you maximize what the cards are doing. You know. That you can—sometimes you want the instant because the gameplay is better. Sometimes you want the sorcery because you force more—better decisions. And you make—you make the player have to make decisions and they create better gameplay. And so when something’s an instant and when it’s a sorcery actually is an important skill. From a design standpoint. Of understanding where you want it to be.

Now, it’s also a tool for the developers in that sometimes, if you’re trying to weaken something or strengthen something, you can shift it between instant and sorcery. And the other tool from a design standpoint is, one of the things the game is very good at, one of the tools of design, is to say “You know what? We’re going to make rules and limitations.” And that not only does that help the player have limitations, because that’s important part of the game player, but it also says every once in a while, you know, we can break from the default.

And—and one of the things that’s kind of neat is, to say “Oh, well normally we make, you know, Wrath of God a sorcery. Normally, Wrath of God—you know, mass creature destruction is a sorcery as a default. But hey, every once in a while we make it an instant, and now that’s an exciting card. That’s a card that has some value that you’re not used to. We have to charge for it, but, you know, it allows us—like I said.

One thing I find very funny is, I will write columns, and I’ll lay down the rules. I’ll go “Here’s the rules. Here’s the rules for whatever the thing the rules is for.” And by the way, I did do an article on sorceries, where if you go online, I lay out “Here’s all the effects that we tend to do at sorcery speed.” I mean, it goes through my head, and I realize that that’s something better in written form, where I could think about it and write it all down. When I do stuff off the top of my head, I’m doomed to forget things. So you can go read that, there’s an article, I don’t remember the name of it, but if you look up “Rosewater Sorcery” I’m sure you’ll find it in our search field [Editor’s note: I think he’s referring to either It’s About Time or Slow and Steady].

Okay. So, the… the… by having the… having a choice for the designer, it definitely also means that sometimes we can, you know—oh, I know what I was saying. I was talking about how I—I do articles and I write rules. And when I do that, people will always write and say “Well, you broke the rule here.” Or—or we’ll then break the rule, and they’re like “You said you can’t do this!”

And what I’m trying to say is, “Guys. Magic is about having rule defaults. But we’re a game that breaks the rules. We’re a game that just does—you know, that does things—like, part of the point of our game is, the reason we make rules is so that we have the flexibility to later break the rules. And that’s part of the fun of the game is if you make a rule and hold fast to it, when you finally get to break it, it’s kind of fun. Because you’re—you know, you realize it’s something special you don’t normally get to do.

And that’s one of the big things with a trading card game in general is, that you can’t let everybody do everything all the time. A. Like I said, you lessen some of the decisions, but also you kind of take away some of the fun. That part of—part of what makes breaking—having a game that breaks its own rules is to hold fast to the rules. The rules are important. Just because a game breaks its rules doesn’t mean the rules aren’t important, they’re very important. And just because we break a rule once doesn’t now mean “Okay, now we can break this rule,” it means “No, there’s a hard default, we break rules as exceptions for special cases.”

And that—you know, I know, one of the things that’s funny is, once we break a rule, once we make a card that does something that we’ve never done before, the player base is like “Okay, you’ve got a precedent, now you can do this.” And I’m like “No no no no no no no no.” You know. Just because we did something might mean—like, for example, a very common thing is, we’ll do a block structure in which—let’s say we do a graveyard set.

Okay, well normally, you know, black and green and white are the three colors that have some graveyard interaction. Blue and red don’t have that much. But you know what we’ve done, we’ve carved a little bit of space out for blue and red, so that when we need blue and red to have graveyard space, there’s something that they in fact can do. And so it’s very important that we don’t do that all the time, it’s kind of like when we need it we do it.

And—so sometimes we’ll—we’ll—you know, we’ll stretch something, and then people go “Oh, that’s awesome, you should do this,” and I’m like “Well no no no no, that was for this purpose.” And maybe in the future we’ll find another need to do it. You know, I mean like another classic example is a lot of people liked the red vampires in Innistrad. And I’m like “Okay, that was fun, and they served a purpose in Innistrad, and I’m glad we did them, but that’s not our default. Vampires are black.” You know. Every once in a blue moon, if there’s a reason and a purpose to make them in red, we’ll consider making them in red, but just because we did a set where we had red vampires does not mean “Okay, vampires are now red now.”

You know. That the game—essentially the way it works is, when the pendulum swings, that, you know, you can—you can loosen one part of the game, but you have to tighten up everything else. You know, I talk a lot about how—you know, in story writing, in—especially on TV, that like you can—you can break a rule, but it’s important when you break one rule that you hold fast to the other rules. That you don’t want to break too many rules at the same time. You know. That one of the things that grounds Magic is that every year we do the same things, and then one or two things we do different. But everything else is the same. So you have a basis for grounding, but that you can appreciate the things that are new.

Okay. So—I’m almost to work, so let me wrap up my instant and sorcery talk. I think the instants and sorceries are a very valuable part of the game. I think they… like I said, they—they add a lot of important sort of splash in a way that is here and gone that’s kind of cool. And, like I said, I mentioned this very, very early on, but it’s an important one, is the—one of the things that Richard did when he made the game is he said “Okay. I got two wizards dueling. And…” it’s like “What do you expect people to do? What do you expect there to be?”

And one of the things you expect is just giant huge effects. But you can’t do giant huge effects every turn. The same way you don’t want to break the same rule all the time. That’s it’s kind of neat to have a giant effect, because normally the giant effects aren’t happening all the time. You know. And it’s neat to have something where like “Okay, some major things happening.” And it’s a one-time thing, but it’s a huge effect. You know.

I mean, creatures in general, I mean there are creatures with ETB effects that are equivalent to large spells, obviously, but most of the time creatures are like, they come in, and they’re supposed to have, you know, an incremental change over time. Like they do this thing, and, you know, hey, if they’re in enough turns, they really can matter, but on any one turn, they just do a small thing. You know. And that permanents in general tend to be smaller things. And if they are larger things, usually there’s some buildup to get there, or they’re really expensive so by the time it happens it is a big thing but they do the thing late in the game.

But anyway, I do believe that like Richard wanting to make a lightning bolt, you know—I don’t mean the card Lightning Bolt, just to make a spell called “Lightning Bolt” was very important. And that instants and sorceries—I also believe open up a very important creative space. Not my area of expertise, so I didn’t spend a lot of time talking about it, but I do—the—the thing that I sort of as a throwaway in my first thing, that is very important. The fact that, you know, the amount of things you can do with sorceries and instants.

Like another problem we run into that instants and sorceries solve from a creative standpoint is—for a long time, for example, planeswalkers weren’t even on cards. And even now, you know, that they’re on cards but they’re, you know, planeswalkers are mythic rare, and so if you want to have a planeswalker show up or a character show up, you know, one of the things that’s really nice is, instants and sorceries allow you creatively to show a lot of the things that no one else can show you.

Because a permanent has to show the permanent. If I have a creature, I’ve got to show you the creature. Maybe, maybe someone’s interaction with the creature, but even then, usually for a creature to be a good illustration, it’s just the creature. And instants and sorceries allow us creatively to be able to show other elements.

And so, I mean to recap, I mean instants and sorceries have huge mechanical means, they allow us to have impacts on choices, on decisions, they allow us to help interact with different parts of the game, they have a nice surprise value, but in the same sense they don’t clutter up the board. So anyway, instants and sorceries do all sorts of good things, they creatively do good things, it’s—like I said. I mean, all the card types do good things, that’s why they’re still there. That is kind of the value of what they do.

But I am now at work, and so it is time for me to go in. But I enjoyed talking to you about instants and sorceries. And I hope you’re enjoying this meta-series. So anyway, I bid you adieu for today, and it’s time to go make the Magic.