11/27/2013 Episode 75: Enchantments

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 started doing on my Drive to Works are a bunch of what I call “mega-series.” Where they’re all about trying to talk about a topic that’s big enough that I can’t do it during just one podcast.

So one of the very first ones I started was on the card types. I think the very first one was I did planeswalkers, with a guest star Matt Cavotta, and then I did artifacts, then creatures, and then I did land, and then I did instants and sorceries. And now I am left with one final card type, which is enchantments.

And I purposely left enchantments to the end, because enchantments are a big part of Theros block, and so I wanted to be able to talk a little bit about Theros block when talking about enchantments, and I wanted to make sure that it was a known quantity when I did it.

One of the things in general that I’ve been trying to do with this podcast is make it more general and more about kind of the past and make them a little more evergreen, and that my column will be a little more about current contemporary topics. Just so I can carve a little different space, so I’m not saying the exact same things in my podcasts that I’m saying in my articles. So if you do read and listen to each of them, you will get different content. I overlap a little bit, and obviously from time to time in my podcast I will go over topics from my columns, but usually I try to add extra content. Bonus content for you!

Okay, so now we’re talking about enchantments. So what I’ve done for each part of this series is I’ve gone back and tried to get in Richard’s mind, and said, “When he made Magic, why did he make this card type?”

Okay. I think the answer is: well, Richard knew he wanted the five colors of magic. And that if you think about the kind of spells that you want to do, well, clearly for example, you want to be able to throw lightning bolts and do things that have a momentary status to them, that are one and done. You do them and then they’re done. You’ve done the thing.

But he also wanted magic that had some permanence to it. Now obviously, artifacts had a similar quality in that you wanted artifacts to kind of—you had this mighty artifact and it affected all the environment around it. But he also wanted some of that just flavor-wise, “Look, I’m a mage, I cast a spell, and it has an effect. It has a permanent effect.” And so enchantments came about mostly because I think Richard wanted to enchant things.

So I think auras are slightly different from global enchantments. So global enchantments represent just the inherent concept of “I want to change the environment forever, until you dispel it—you Disenchant it or Naturalize it. Whatever.” That it affects the environment.

Where an aura is the idea that I’m using magic, but instead of an environment it’s on a thing. I’m enhancing, I’m enchanting a thing. Now, I don’t know what came first in Richard’s mind. I don’t know whether he had auras first or whether he had global enchantments first.

I use the term “global enchantment,” by the way, because once upon a time we used to refer to them as “global enchantments” and “local enchantments.” We now call them auras, but around the time of Mirage—in fact, there was a pair of cards in Mirage, one that destroys a local enchantment and one that destroys a global enchantment. We never really came up with another term for global enchantments, so…

One of the things you’ll notice in my podcast is, if we once had a word for it and we’ve since decided we don’t want to use that word, but we haven’t replaced that word with another word, I will just use the old word. Fizzle is another classic example, where—I guess you don’t fizzle things anymore, you counter them, but counter means so many different things that if I want to explain the concept of fizzling something I’m just like “Well, I’ll just use fizzle.”

So you can tell my old-timerness shows through a little bit in that I just use some terms that are like “Well, it was functional.” One other little side note, real quick, is I am big on power of words. I mean, we had a podcast on flavor text, one of these days I’ll do a podcast on names. But I’m a word guy. And I’m a big, big believer that words used correctly have great power to them, and so I… in fact, one of my big things in R&D is finding concepts that I think are important and then naming them so that R&D can talk about them.

One of the powers of names is that when you graft concepts to names, you now allow people to have a dialogue about those concepts. And so whether it’s the psychographics, or it’s New World Order, or it’s just virtual cards or even vanilla, vanilla and French vanilla and all that, I’ve been a very big advocate of creating vocabulary for R&D because when you’re able to talk about something, you become conscious of it. It’s just the way language works. That if it’s a concept that isn’t named, it’s so much harder to communicate it, and it’s harder to have a dialogue about it. Anyway. A little side thing.

So I believe that Richard wanted to enchant things, and he wanted it in colors. To say only artifacts could make global things, well, you’re missing a lot of cool magic. You know. There might be neat things I want to do that are very color-oriented.

Now, one of the ongoing things—I talked about this when I talked about artifacts is, mechanically speaking there is a thin line between artifacts and enchantments. A crazy thin line. And one of the things that we tend to do in Magic is we stretch boundaries. So one of the things is, we from time to time will take one of the few differences between artifacts and enchantments, and we will stretch those.

And I do them because there’s reasons to do them, and you need to be able to stretch boundaries. But one of the dangers of the boundary stretching is when the boundaries are so thin as between artifacts and enchantments, that the stretching of them… because in my mind, there’s two ways to do Magic. One is it’s an ever-changing game where you’re looking at the current version of the game and seeing that it ebbs and flows. And the other way of looking at it is seeing it as a conglomerate. That Magic is everything. If we’ve ever made a card, that is Magic.

As a designer, it’s hard for me to take the second stance, because I have to believe that I can change things and adapt things, and that if I just assume like, “Well, I did it, I guess I did it,” like it just becomes a hard system to create. The reason we have rotations and the reason we do things and the reason Limited’s important and Standard and stuff like that was we want things to rotate out. We want to have different environments. That Magic is more fun if it’s not just everything—when you’re additive, there’s only so little you can change the environment because things exist.

And so my take on it is, when I stretch enchantment or artifact boundaries, it’s just for a little bit of time, and then they go back. So right now, as an example, one of the biggest differentiations between enchantments and artifacts is colored or colorlessness. You know, artifacts anybody can cast with your generic mana, and they can go in any deck. Where an enchantment has colored mana, and what happens is, like along comes… what was the first set to do it?

I guess Shards of Alara, where we had this concept with Esper, and the creatures themselves were improving themselves to the point where they were becoming artifacts, so it was kind of neat to make all the creatures artifacts. But it now made colored artifacts. And from time to time, like New Phyrexia also we found a different way to do colored artifacts, and once again, in Theros with the weapons of the gods. Like, every once in a while we make something where it makes sense that it’s an artifact and yet it’s colored. And also, I mean the artifact in Theros is an artifact and an enchantment. Talk about blurring the lines in both.

But, once again, blurring the lines in my mind, those are the exceptions and not the rule. And that okay, every once in a while we make colored artifacts, but that’s not what defines artifacts, artifacts are colored, and that, you know, every once in a while we bend that, but the bending of it is a special occasion and that’s not something that’s the default.

The same for example is that enchantments don’t tap. And in Future Sight I was screwing around, we were trying to show you potential futures, I had a tapping enchantment because I wanted to show “Ooh, maybe we could do that.”  I didn’t really have an intention of going there. Although to be honest, here’s another important thing to understand: I always set down rules. I write columns, I have podcasts, I set down rules.  And then we go to break the rules and people get mad at me, they go “You said it was a rule!”

And I’m like “No no no. That’s the default rule. Magic is a game that breaks its own rules.” And the important thing about breaking rules is understanding when and where to break them. Meaning you shouldn’t break rules to break them, you should break rules because you were trying to do something and that makes natural sense.

The perfect example is the equipment—the weapons in Theros, which was it all started with Heliod had a spear. Okay? He had this light spear that he would smite people with. And I’m like “Okay, well that’s pretty cool. Well if Heliod has a spear, how did we not make the Spear of Heliod? That seems pretty awesome. We should make the Spear of Heliod.” 

What happened was that… “Okay, let’s make that.” But then we had this other thing that was like “Well, all the creations of the gods were enchantments. So, you know, the gods are enchantments, their creations are enchantments, well why would the one weapon not be an enchantment? If everything else they make are enchantments. Clearly they made their weapons, but… well, okay, I guess it needs to be—I mean it’s an artifact. It’s clearly an artifact. And it’s by our definition clearly an enchantment.”

So we made sure mechanically it represented both. We’re like “Look, it needs to be both.” “It is both.” You know, there’s not a lot of cases where something should be an enchantment and be an artifact. But we found a case where it made sense, and so we did it.

And that’s not us saying “Oh, from now on, enchantments and artifacts can just be the same thing.” No. It’s like “This one case, it made sense. In Esper, it made sense that the creatures of Esper were colored. Or in Rise of the Eldrazi, I think we made colorless enchantments. I’m not 100% sure, but we could have if we didn’t.  My gut is we did. And so it’s possible to make an enchantment that doesn’t have color. You know, it’s possible. We could have made—I think we did. If we didn’t we could have, but you know. That was a case where “Okay, the Eldrazi are colorless. We could do that.”

But essentially, the dividing line is enchantments are meant to be colored things, enchantments are meant to represent magic with permanence. Oh, so here’s an interesting thing. One of the things we did divide is for a long time creatively, we kind of just said, “Oh, well what is this? Oh, it’s a magical thing?” And we would make enchantments that represented magical things, and we made artifacts that were magical things. 

 

And finally we said, “Okay, okay. Here’s the creative difference. Maybe mechanically we will bleed a little bit from time to time, but let’s make a very clear definition of what is creatively an artifact and what is creatively an enchantment.” So first off, we said, “Okay. Artifacts are actual, physical things. A tangible thing. Why can red destroy artifacts? Because they’re actual, physical things that he can blow up. Red can blow them up.” I don’t know why I said “he.” Red’s really not a he or she. Red can blow them up.

Okay. So what is an enchantment? Well, an enchantment is magic, and it can take form in the sense that it’s magic with a form to it, but it’s magical energy. That if I have an artifact, it’s a thing. I can knock on it. Someone made it. It’s a thing. But an enchantment is created from magic. I mean, some of the enchantments don’t even have form. But the things that have form, they have to have a magical form. 

So for example, let’s say I have an equipment that gave a creature +1/+1, and I had an aura that gave a creature +1/+1. Well, the equipment has to be some physical thing. It’s a sword. It’s a weapon of some kind. Maybe it’s armor. It’s something. It’s some tangible, physical thing.

 

But for the enchantment, maybe it enhances them in some way. Maybe it makes them bigger. Maybe it makes them stronger. That it’s magic that’s affecting them. And then maybe it’s a magical armor or a magical sword, but then it has to be clear in the art that it is made of magic. That it is a sword literally made of flame or it is some sort of physically made of light armor that’s magical.

And more likely, by the way, that the magic would enhance the creature or change the creature in some way. So if you’ll notice, for example, the +1/+1 equipment is “Why is the creature stronger and tougher? Oh, well they have something. That thing they have is helping them. They’re a better fighter. They’re more defensive. Whatever.” Where we tend to make auras that literally enhance and change the quality of the wearer. Meaning that you are buffed in someway, it physically changes you. Where the equipment doesn’t change you, it gives you something, and the aura changes you in some way. That’s how we tend to do it. When it’s a physical thing sometimes, you have to have a giant fist or something that’s made of magic. But usually we like the idea that the aura is enchanting you, the creature who has it.

 And the other thing we said is, we’ve started saying “Okay.” Like for a while, we were doing enchantments as being a place and like “Okay,” we said, “Look, no…” We divided there. We said, “Okay, actual places are lands.” We said actual buildings we decided could be artifacts but not enchantments.  Enchantments aren’t buildings. Buildings have a tangibility to them. Now the tricky thing about lands and artifacts is lands represent places, and sometimes places have structures on them. And so there’s a thin line and we try to divide there more between land and artifact.

 

Like I said, the default is that artifacts are colorless and enchantments have color, the default is that artifacts can tap where enchantments do not tap. We actually had a radical proposal at one point. During Mirrodin, Tyler Bielman—Tyler Bielman was Brand Manager for a while—assistant Brand Manager for a while, and he was in charge of the Creative team for a while. He and I worked together on Mirrodin. We did the initial work on “metal world” and then Brady came in and revamped a bunch of stuff.

And Tyler and I were trying to revamp artifacts. And one of the things that we were looking at is maybe drawing a harder line. And the proposal we made at the time was, “Okay. What if artifacts didn’t do global effects?” That you could have equipment or you could have some stuff that—like the idea was that we made equipment more “You tap to use it.” And that global effects were taken out of artifacts and given back to enchantments.

And we talked about that, and we said “Okay,” and we listed all the artifacts that were important that were global and said “Well, what if Howling Mine isn’t an artifact, it’s just a blue enchantment,” and “What if…” you know, and we looked at all of them, and we thought about making a clean break, but in the end people decided that there’s just cool artifacts that kind of like effect the entire stage, and they were kind of neat, and there’s some things that you wanted to do in artifacts that made real sense to the flavor of an artifact. You know, the idea of this mystical orb that enchants everything.

So we ended up not doing it. We talked about it, and it would have been a much cleaner divide mechanically, but one of the things—here’s a good aside to talk about, which is one of the things that’s tricky is, there’s a lot of things that flavor does for you that—flavor is dangerous in that you want to be true to flavor, but if you follow flavor all the time, it messes with your mechanics.

Like, one of the truisms that I’ve said is “Look. Any color, you could come up with an in-flavor way to explain why any color will do most anything.” You know. That the colors are robust. The philosophies are robust. You can come up with things.

And the classic example is the bees in green. Right? Green has insects and it’s nature, and bees, but the problem with bees is that what bees want to do, the flavor of bees, is they want to fly, and green doesn’t do a lot of flying, and they want to cause damage because bees damage things. And green doesn’t really do direct damage to other creatures.

So you know, one of the things that’s dangerous is that we would do this thing where someone would come up with a card, and mechanically the card didn’t really fit, but flavor-wise “Oh, it was this.” And one of the things that I’m trying to get across to R&D is that just because something is an awesome flavor fit, that the color pie is important. And that flavor is more flexible than the color pie.

And sometimes, to get the flavor you need is just a multi-color card. That every possible flavor cannot be covered by mono-color cards. And that sometimes “You want to do it right? Look. You want to do angry bees? Maybe it has to be green/red or green/black or something in which…” or actually, green/red’s not great because of flying. Maybe green/black. You know, that you have to do something that can convey the things you need to convey.

And that just because you can come up with a flavor, you know, and the flavor fits within the color pie, doesn’t mean that that is justifiable to make the card. And the reality is just, I mean when you come to sort of the center of it, which is that mechanics don’t have the flexibility of flavor. Flavor’s just so much more flexible.

And that we’re trying to stay true to philosophies, but just because the philosophy can bend in a direction, you have to make choices of where you’re bending your philosophies. And that if you bend too far, you can cause problems. And like I said. The enchantment/artifact bend is one of the areas that we goof around with the most, but it’s a dangerous area.

Part of me, the mechanical side of me thinks that maybe Tyler’s and my idea was a good idea, just make it hard and fast. But in the end we’re like “Okay, that’s good flavor we’re giving up, we want to be careful,” you know, you don’t want to abandon good flavor, but at the same time we can’t be (???) to flavor and have mechanics suffer for flavor. So there’s a balance. It’s a tricky balance.

I mean, one of the things as we’re twenty years in is like, “Shouldn’t we have figured this all out?” And the answer is, the reason we haven’t figured it all out is on a case-by-case basis we have to make decisions. You know, New World Order is all about saying, “We want to limit complexity.” That doesn’t mean there’s no complexity at common, it means we have to be careful about where we choose to put it.

New World Order, 20% of the cards get complexity at common, essentially. Like, there’s a certain number of cards that get red-flagged that we’re allowed to do, and the core of it is saying “Well how do we want to use this?” That’s a big part of design, by the way—it’s not that you can’t do something, but understanding restraint.

I’m going to give you a parallel, which is that I’m on a diet. And my diet basically is that I was having too many sweets. And obviously you eat a lot of sweets, you gain some weight. I had too much weight, I wanted to lose some weight. And what I realized was—it wasn’t just sweets. I was eating more than I needed to eat.

But what I said is, “Okay. Here’s what I need to do. I need to figure out when sweets are important to me,” because I knew if I cut them out, I would just never—any situation in which I go “I’m just never doing something that I want to do” eventually will fail. You know. Because it’s just human nature. That you can’t give up something that you inherently want. Because human nature overridingly will rationalize it away and push you towards it.

So what I said is, “Okay. The key to making a diet work for me was allocating it. As saying ‘I get some sweets, but only a little bit, and I have to figure out where and when it’s important to me.” And that way, every time I went to have a sweet, I say “Oh, is this important? I only get so many sweets a week. Is this important? Is this something that’s worth using that allocation?” And it’s been very successful. I’ve actually lost twenty pounds. It’s been very successful for me to say, “Look, food is something that I need to have some of, I need to eat, but I need to be cautious about when to eat. And I can’t just eat. I have to go ‘Am I eating for a reason?”

And design is very similar, which is you get resources allocated to you. There’s things you get to do. But just because you get some doesn’t mean you get as much as you want. And as a designer, you need restraint. I don’t talk about restraint a lot. I think I talk a lot about the free and open creative mind, and do what you need to do, and early in design it is very true that you need to sort of explore. And if you want to try out twenty mechanics, try out twenty mechanics. If you want to try out twenty mechanics all at once, if you have a reason to do that, fine.

Early design is about sort of indulging to a certain extent. But later on, that there comes a point in design where you need to allocate and say “Okay, I have a resource.” And a very good example is, I have a cool new mechanic. But common can only be so complex. How much of it do I want to put at common? Where do I want to use it at common? What’s the best place to use it? You know, complexity is a lot like sweets—lower rarities especially, where it’s like I don’t get a lot. I’ve got to pick and choose. And when I choose a card, that’s like me choosing a sweet, I go “Is this really where I want to spend the points? Is this where I want—you know, is this where complexity’s going to do me good?”

And part of the time, you know, one of the ways that New World Order has done us a lot of good is just making me and R&D in general have to think about when and where we do things. Much like my diet is just me saying, “Okay, when and where am I going to have the things I want to have?” You know. And that I think there’s times before where we’re like “Ah, whatever, sure,” and we’d just make commons that, in the big picture, we shouldn’t.

Just like I would eat things that I didn’t care if I ate them, it just tasted good and I ate it. But when I stopped to think, I’d go “Wow. I only get so much sweets a week. Is that worth my sweet?” And the funny thing is now, my quality level of my sweets is so much higher because I just don’t eat garbage. Like, when I go to eat something, I’m like “Okay, I’m going to allocate, and I’m going to make sure that I have something that I want.” And that I’ve cut out a lot of junky sweets. Like, “Really? Did I need…”

Just like New World Order cut out a lot of junky complexity. It’s like “Really? Do we need that? No.” And so—I mean one of the fine lines, I mean it’s interesting that this conversation comes up particularly with enchantments, is that we have tried to figure out where to toe the line on enchantments and where we get to have our sweet treats, if you will.

Notice the only artifact enchantments in twenty years of the game are on five super-high-profile cards. That are very, very evocative of what we’re trying to do. The idea of having gods with equipment, I mean it just goes to Greek mythology. And we wanted that. We’re like, “Look, Heliod has his spear. He has it. That’s important. And if Heliod’s going to have his spear, we want you the players to have the spear!” You know.

And I feel like “Did I allocate it correctly? Did I put it in the right place?” I think I did. And it’s not saying “Hey, artifacts and enchantments mean nothing, it says, “Look. Here’s a place, here’s a tiny place that just—look, the stars align, it’s important, they’re rare cards, it’s a cycle, it’s something that has a lot of focus. It’s okay. I’m going to do it there.”

And that trying to figure out when and where… I mean, actually one of the problems with Future Sight, when I look back on Future Sight is, Future Sight wasted… Future Sight, if you will, was the idea of me saying, “Okay, oh, I’m going to fill this up with just every treat you can imagine.” And it’s kind of like someone comes… and I think the reason people love Future Sight is, it’s fun to go to a room full of treats and sample. And “Ooh, this is good. Mmm, that’s good. Mmm, (???), and mmm, tasy,” and I have a little of this and a little of that and you gorge yourself. Right?

And at the end of it—I don’t know how good you feel, but during it you feel awesome because just—it’s a taste sampler of all this deliciousness. But in the end you probably have a stomachache, and then it makes it that much harder next time I’m going to deliver something, you go “Oh, yeah, I had that before, I had had that once before.” And it’s like, “Oh, like…” You know. I’m not sure if having the one place you have an enchantment that taps, like some random card that no one remembers? Like, that’s where I’m getting my—anyway, I feel like Future Sight—and a lot of my lessons here is that a lot of early designs I wasted a lot of stuff.

And now we’re suffering the consequences to a certain extent. That it’s like “I only have so many tools at my disposal to surprise you and do cool things, and every time I do something that I’ve done before, I have to find a new way to do it. Or I have to find a creative context that it makes sense in. And it becomes harder and harder.

I mean, one of the tough things about my job is that I always joke that the audience is the Borg. Because in Star Trek, one of the big enemies is the Borg. And once you do something against it, it learns about it. So every weapon is only usable once. Once you use a weapon on it, it adapts, and now that weapon’s no longer usable on it. And I joke that the audience is like the Borg, like I have my tricks, but…

Now, I mean, we can repeat things, and time helps us a little bit, and players are excited to see things come back. So it’s not 100% true that I can’t reuse things. But I have to be careful, and using something that isn’t really using it to its potential makes it harder for me to use it again. It’s kind of wasting something, and that’s careful.

What else about enchantments? I think the thing about enchantments is—and Theros plays into this, which is let me talk about auras for a second. Auras are this interesting thing, in that when you make the game and you study beginners and you study sort of the learning curve of a player, one of the things you learn is that beginners tend to do what they think is fun. And that beginners make this false assumption, which is if they think it’s fun, they assume it must be good.

Now, to be fair, in design, a lot of what you’re trying to do is make sure the things that are the most fun are good. And so I think where it comes from is that when you play games, if you play good games, the most fun part about the game usually is good. And one of the things in Magic which is interesting is, we have found sections of the game that the players enjoy that happen not to be that good. Auras is a classic example.

In that auras seem awesome, like my creature gets better and now I can beat you up with my bigger creature. But because card advantage is so important, the idea that your opponent can spend one card and you lose two cards, like, I had a creature with an enchantment on it and they destroy it, well now I’ve lost two cards. That that disadvantage in card advantage makes auras usually not good.

And we have spent twenty years trying to figure out ways to make auras better. Because here’s the thing. People like auras. They are fun. They are fun. In fact, I used to do a thing called Deck Clinic, where we’d go to conventions and I’d sit down and people would show me their deck, and I’d give advice on how to make their deck better. And one of my common deck advice back in the day was, “Here’s a tip. You want to have more creatures than creature enchantments.”

People would love creature enchantments. Beginners love creature enchantments. And one of the reasons I knew Theros would do well is, one of the maxims is if I see people doing something, and it sucks, the strategy sucks, but they keep doing it, what I say is “Oh, they enjoy it. They’re having fun. Because they ain’t winning.” And winning is fun to, and sometimes you’ll do things just because it wins. You know, it’s intoxicating, winning. And you use the mechanics that you don’t find fun, but they win, because winning is fun for you. 

But if you keep playing something and you keep losing, I mean the reason I knew poison had a lot of fans. The reason I knew tribal had a lot of fans is in the early days, they sucked as strategies. But people did them, kept playing them because they were fun. And I knew that if I made an environment where—we’ll call it a Voltron environment, which means you build it up. You know, you have a creature and you keep building on it.

But I knew if I made an environment like that, where it strategically actually was the right thing to do, that people would have a blast. Because you know what? It’s fun. Auras are fun. It’s fun building things up. And one of the things we’ve done over the years is we know auras are fun. And so we’ve tried to come up with every possible way we can think of to try to make auras better.

You know, in Mirage we did auras that you could cast as an instant, essentially, they went away at end of turn. Essentially they became instants or enchantments. But they could double as instants. (???) just make flash, like auras are so bad you (???) flash good enough, you know, that’s an advantage

Tempest had what we called “flickering,” although flickering is a bad term because it means something now. But we called them flickering at the time. We had enchantments that you could return to your hand. Auras that you could return to your hand. So the idea was, if you had mana open and your creature’s about to die, you could put it back in your hand. Or you could move it if you wanted to put it somewhere else.

Urza’s Saga had the Rancor enchantments, that if they were on the creature and died, you got them back into your hand. We’ve done—Licids in Tempest, where they were auras that hopped off and became creatures, and hopped back on and became auras. Over the years, we’ve tried all sorts of different things. We’ve had cantrips. We’ve tried auras that had ETB effects, like in Ravnica we did a bunch of auras that had an effect, so a lot of their value was in the effect vs. the aura. We’ve experimented over the years to try to make auras good. I mean, Bestow is the latest in just going, “Hey, auras can be good.” You know, we did auras that when they fell off gave you a creature.

We’ve done all sorts of things. Coming they help you. Going they help you. We’ve just upped the strength level of auras. Part of getting people to play auras is saying, “Well, you’re two for one but it’s really good.” “Yeah, yeah, it’s really good, so maybe it’s worth the two for one if you can get enough, you know, it gives you enough card advantage for what it’s doing that it’s worth it.”

And I mean—auras are particularly fun. So the other thing to talk about enchantments, I guess, is something they did in Legends, something that at the time they called “Enchant Worlds.” Which we now call “World Enchantments.” And the flavor of those were that you—your battle had literally been taken to a new place. And that new place you’re battling has rules and an environment that affects your battle. And then when you played a new one, you got rid of the old one because now you’ve shifted to a new—you’re now in the new world fighting with the flavor. 

And it had mechanical issues, so we sort of didn’t continue them for mechanical reasons. But the flavor was kind of cool, and it definitely did some neat things that you can do with enchantments of creating a game state, of creating a sort of world.

Another big thing that we’ve been going back and forth on is enchantments kind of by flavor want to mostly be global. Meaning if I shift and change the nature of the world around me, doesn’t it change for everybody? But we’ve learned mechanically that those are tricky and they’re hard, and a lot of them like become worse for you because your opponent gets to take advantage of it before you get to take advantage of it.

And so over the years we’ve been leaning a little bit more towards having your global enchantments just aid you and don’t aid your opponent. I mean, sometimes with flavor we’ll make ones that still affect everybody. But we’ve been doing more and more of the global enchantments that affect you and not everybody.

Oh, the other big thing that happened, I guess, is  there’s a big shift the hatred. So early on, when Magic first started, that Disenchant really was the definitive enchantment removal spell. And the reason was that it had such utility to it that you could play it in your decks, because well, it had both enchantments and artifacts.

And so one of the things we realized was that we shifted things. So we realized that the green/blue conflict really has blue hating artifacts. That green is all about natural things and disliking artificial things, and while there are a few artifacts that green likes because they aren’t artificial, they’re natural, but a lot of it, like, are man-made and created and they’re really not green’s thing. And so I realized that green needed to be the #1 card to hate artifacts.

And so what we did is we said, “Okay.” We shifted—we realized that it was weird to have white and red and green all have artifact destruction. And so what we said is, “Okay, red likes to blow things up, it’s a good definition of red. What we’ll do is we’ll allow red the best artifact destruction spell, and white the best enchantment destruction spell, singularly, but we’ll make the best combined one in green because that way green in the end will kind of be the best at destroying artificial things.”

And the flavor of Naturalize is, when you use magic, you have technology or magic that’s changing the natural order, green’s the one that comes along and goes, “No, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.” And so we liked the idea that green’s flavor of not wanting artifice, we were able to give it Naturalize to do that. And so that was a big shift. The funny thing is that the end result of that was, we ended up making white a little bit more the focus of individual (???) and green the focus of either/or.

Anyway, I’m at work. Hey, I drifted today. Today’s a drifty day. I mean, I think the things I said were interesting. One of the things that I’ve learned about my podcast is really my topic is a chance for me to get a jumping-off point, and then I kind of try to stay on topic, but I go places that I think would be interesting things to talk about. And that makes for the best podcast. I’ve tried a little bit where I structure things, where I have an outline and I look at the outline, and I don’t know. I tend to find my most interesting podcasts are the ones where I just let my brain go where it wants to go. So today was a little deviation. I talked a lot about enchantments. But I definitely hit some other things.

So anyway, I finished a mega-series. I’ve never finished a mega-series before. I don’t think I’ve finished one. Anyway, so now, until I make a new card type, we have now talked about every card type in Magic! And hopefully you guys have enjoyed the series. Obviously I have other mega-series going, and I will continue to make new ones. But it is fun to actually finish one. So that, my friends, are all the card types.

And because I am now parked in my parking lot, I realize that it is time for me to be making some of those card types. So goodbye for now, because I need to go be making Magic.