4/18/14 Episode 114: Twenty Things That Were Going to Kill Magic, Part I

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So today, I’m going to be doing a podcast based on an article I did for our 20^th anniversary. So what happened was, when Magic turned 20, we had articles all tie into the number 20. And so I did “Twenty Things That Were Going to Kill Magic.” Tongue planted firmly in cheek. So basically what I was talking about was “What are the big controversies in Magic’s history where people were like ‘This is it! This is going to be the end of Magic.” And things that—you know, what were the real controversies of the game. And so today, and probably beyond just today, since I have 20, I want to talk about—to kind of give you more in-depth on “What exactly happened?”

Now, I have 20 things to get through, so I’m going to try to go quickly here, since we have a lot to cover. So number one. The introduction of 60-card decks and four-card deck limits. Okay. So when Magic first began, the rule was, you had 40 cards, and you could play as many cards as you wanted. You guys might know this rule as the Limited rules. Essentially when Richard made the game, I think his thought process was that people were going to have the amount of cards not too dissimilar from what Limited is now. That how much are you going to spend? Oh, you know, you’ll buy a starter and a couple—when Magic first started, starters were 60-card decks, and so you would start with like a starter, maybe a couple boosters. But you would have about maybe six boosters worth of cards, which is what we play with in Limited now.

And so the original deck constructions were actually very, very similar to Limited deck constructions. You have to have 40 cards, you need to have as many cards as you want, because well, how many are you going to have? And the thing to remember is that when Richard first made the game, his thought process was that because people weren’t going to have that many cards, he understood that the rare cards in volume would be problematic. He just didn’t think people would have them. And he felt like if the game got to the point where people had that many cards, well then it was a runaway success and they’ll solve that problem later. That’s (???).

So, for the players—now remember, when Magic first started, this is back in ’93, and this rule started I think in early ’94. The way people could communicate—the internet existed but in a very raw state, it’s what they called the Usenets at the time. Kind of basically bulletin boards. It was all—mostly it was text. Most people didn’t have the ability to do pictures yet. I mean, it existed, but most people didn’t have the ability to do that.

And so when we first announced this, it was—I mean think about it. It’s like “All of a sudden, you’re saying to me there’s restrictions.” You have to have more cards in your deck, which means you had to own more cards, you could only play four, so if you had made your deck full of Plague Rats, which was a very common thing for people to do because Plague Rats were common, we’re saying, “You can’t do that.” And so players were taken aback. They’re like “I want to play with my cards. I’m not happy.”

But I think people quickly understood why. Although once again, the reason that it took us a while to understand why is, in order to get why it’s broken, you have to know that broken cards exist. Remember, at this point in Magic, we were not announcing—Wizards was not announcing what cards existed. There was no rarities. Nothing. It was all a big mystery. And so people didn’t know what existed. It’s not like you knew all the broken cards. Maybe, maybe, maybe you had one, and it was early.

People didn’t know that much. The technology of how the game worked was low, so even if you had a broken card, you might not have known it was broken. I mean, it took quite a while for Balance, for example, to even get restricted. And Balance is crazy. But it just took a while for people to understand how good that was.

Okay. The next thing was the creation of the Banned and Restricted list. That happened shortly after. Very shortly thereafter. So the Banned and Restricted list said, “Okay. For the first time, we’re going to tell you there are cards that you own that either you cannot play, or you can only have one of.” And that is—I mean think about it. That is pretty radical, when it’s like—for example, something I often explain to people is, “We don’t like banning cards.” I always consider it a failure when we ban cards, in the sense that we want you to play with the cards we sell you.

Now, the reason we do it, the reason that we do ban cards is that sometimes the environment is bad, and we need to fix it. And here’s the more mega-important thing, which is—I mean, I think the game would be worse if we didn’t take risks and didn’t push the envelope. And the banned list is important because it allows us to take risks, knowing that there’s a safety net in case something happened.

And I think the game would be far worse if we never took those risks. Meaning if we kind of never banned a card, that would mean we were being too safe and too conservative. And I think I would say this—that the greatest risk to Magic is not taking risks. And so I think the banned list is important. We never like to ban something. That is never a happy moment. But we do believe, for the overall health of the game, the banned list existing is good.

Now, when we announced the existence of a banned list and restricted list, it didn’t go over well. I mean, whenever you say to people, “Hey, we’re not letting you play with your cards,” they’re not happy. And this one at least—I mean the other problem with this one is, the people who were in charge of our organized play system when it first began, when Wizards first started out, it was growing so fast that they were just hiring friends of employees. Whoever they could get in the door.

And the early people that ran Organized Play really did not have a lot of experience with Organized Play, and they did not have a lot of experience with any sort of strategic organized play. And so the people making the decisions, it wasn’t R&D originally. R&D now makes the decisions. But at the time, the people choosing like what got banned and what didn’t really didn’t have as good a grasp on the game as one would hope.

For example, like one of the big problems early on was land destruction. Land destruction decks were really good. So what did we ban? We banned Sinkhole, the two-mana land destruction spell that’s just insane? No, they banned Dingus Egg. What is Dingus Egg? It’s an artifact that does two damage to you every time a land dies.

And Dingus Egg is the kind of thing where it was the obvious thing, if you didn’t know any better, to put in your land destruction deck, because it killed them for doing what you were doing. But the good players understood that “Look, if you’re destroying their land, you don’t need a Dingus Egg. Anything can kill them.” And that just use more utility cards and find ways to take the utility cards and kill them with the utility cards. Creatures that do utility effects or something. You didn’t need to have a dedicated card just to damage them. And so like Dingus Egg really wasn’t that important to the deck. So that getting restricted was sort of like “Well, you guys don’t quite get what the problem here is.”

And so I think early on, not only did it exist and so the restricted list and the banned list got some ill will, but like the choices made did not engender a lot of trust on the part of the players. Because the better players were like, “What are you doing? Why are these the cards you’re getting rid of? These aren’t the problem.” I mean, they did get rid of the Power Nine, and some of the broken cards got written up. But there are others that were very, very good. Balance, like I talked about, that took a while before anyone bothered to restrict it. Even though it was a really, really good card.

Okay. Number three: the start of Type 2. So Type 2 is what you might know as Standard. So what happened was, when Magic first came out, there was one way to play Magic. It was Magic. There was no formats, there was just one way to play. Even Limited, when the game first started, really wasn’t a big thing.

But eventually, R&D came to the realization that if we didn’t ever have any rotation of any kind, if all cards just stayed in the format, the format was going to break under the weight of it. Or it’s going to have major power issues and just get overpowered. I mean, Vintage obviously today is super pumped and very overpowered.

And they came up with the idea of “What if we have--the main format we push—one of the formats we push…” At the time we didn’t know it would be the main one I guess, although I’m sure we wanted it to be. Was a format that constantly was rotating. And it was a very radical idea. I mean, once again, whenever the message was “Hey, you can’t play cards you own,” that never goes over well. And of all 20 things I’m talking about in this podcast and future podcasts, this one actually I think created the most unhappiness.

Now, if you’ve ever lived through some of the other ones I’ve talked about, there is major, major unhappiness from the players. So it’s not like the audience hasn’t gotten very upset about things. But this was the one that my memory is—I mean, there were people who were just—I mean, I guess whenever there’s a big controversy, people threaten to quit the game, and all sorts of stuff, but this one was super serious because people…

It’s funny now, because looking back, looking at Standard—I mean, Standard now is the most popular format by leaps and bounds. I think people understand kind of the richness of Standard and how it lets people get into the game, and how it keeps things constantly fresh so that the environment’s changing, is what makes deckbuilding a lot of fun is not that it’s exactly the same all the time. And if you want formats that don’t change as much, we have older formats that do that, that are a little more static in how they work. But it’s nice to have the main format be pretty dynamic so you’re constantly changing things.

But at the time, it is very, very easy to see the negative, because the  negative was immediate, and the positive was less obvious and long-term. And so the players are like “What? I can’t play with my cards? I don’t like that.” And like a lot of the things that Standard would go on to do, it was hard to see at the time.

And I was in R&D, I was behind the walls, I was definitely—although I wasn’t there yet. But I mean, as a member of R&D, now, I can look back and like “Oh, I get where they were coming from. I understand.” I mean, obviously we all see why they did it, but it’s something where when you really understand the motivation behind it, you get it, but it’s hard sometimes. And that the players are very focused on the here and now, as they should be, it’s not their job to worry about the game a year from now or two years from now or ten years from now. Their job is to (???) the game right now. And right now, not letting me play all my cards, it’s a big downer. And rightfully—I mean, I understand why they were upset. I think we did the right thing.

Okay, number four. Nalathni Dragon. Okay, so, early Magic, you could buy packs and get Magic cards. Then we did something we called “book promos,” which was “in order to get these cards, you had to buy a book and send in a slip from the book.” You literally had to rip a page out of the book and mail it in.

And that went over okay. I mean, most people could get the book. But in the summer of 1994, in Atlanta, there’s a summer convention, game convention, called DragonCon. And Wizards of the Coast did a promotion in which if you went to DragonCon, there was a special unique card called Nalathni Dragon. Which was a small flying red dragon that had banding, which no red card had ever had up to that point. Or since that point. It’s the only red card ever with banding.

And it was cute, it was weird, it wasn’t particularly strong, but it was unique. And players got upset. They’re like—because remember, this is pre-eBay. This is pre-Amazon. Like, it was not easy to get your hands on things that you were not there for. So either you were there, you knew a friend that was there, but unless you somehow had some connection to the event, you could not get this card. Forget getting four of them to play with—you wanted to have a playset. Just getting this card was impossible. Or very, very hard. And people were just like, “What are you doing?” And they made a big uproar.

And one of the things, by the way, I wanted to stress of these things I’m going through today, some of the things I think were healthy for the game. I think having a 60-card deck limitation, a four-card cap, and a banned and restricted list, and Standard. Those are all good things. Those are all good for the health of the game. I get why players were upset when we announced them, but they were the right call.

I think Nalathni Dragon was the opposite. We made a mistake. We should not be making functionally unique cards that are super hard to get. Now, one of the things we’ve done, the new things we’ve done over the years is we’ve said, “Okay. We do want to make hard-to-get cards. It’s a collectible. We want to make things that are collectible, but instead of making unique things, we will make version of it.

For example, at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, if you wanted those special treatments, yeah, they were hard to get. But if you just wanted those cards to play with, for the game, they existed in Magic 2014. You could buy them, or you could buy packs and get them, or you could trade for them. But the cards existed in a for-sale booster product. Or a for sale product. I guess not all our stuff is now booster. But you could buy it in a for-sale product. And we are trying hard in our promotional stuff to do special things, but things that are not functionally unique.

And that came out of people being upset about this thing, and rightfully so. In fact, we ended up putting it into Duelist… I think #3. [NLH—Yes.] Nalathni Dragon. So that people could get it. Because we realized we had made a mistake.

Okay, number five. Chronicles. Okay. So Chronicles, so what happened was, early Magic had not had a big print run. That I talked about how we made a print run and it sold out, and doubled it and sold out, and doubled and sold out. So Magic was quickly growing, but some of the early sets had a very small print run. So Chronicles said, “Okay. Let’s make a product…” It was white-bordered, because at the time white-border meant reprint, “Let’s make an all-reprint product of stuff that was in sets that people might want that they were never able to get their hands on.” And so it’s kind of meant to be a “best-of,” sort of the best-of of recent sets. I think it had stuff from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and Legends, I believe. And also at the same time, in Fourth Edition, they also brought back some other cards.

And so here’s what the problem was is, if you understand supply and demand, when supply is low, demand is high. And what that means is, a lot of these cards from early expansions had a very high value level. Because there weren’t that many of them. And along comes Chronicles and Fourth Edition, and takes cards that existed in some quantity, and I’m making up these numbers, so these are completely made-up numbers, but I’m trying to demonstrate a point her.

Let’s imagine there were 20,000 of a particular card. And then along comes Chronicle, and now there’s 100,000 or 200,000. Like, the amount of cards literally were quadrupling or quintupling or just—all of a sudden there were a flood of the cards, and the cards that had a special value because there weren’t that many of them, all of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of them.

And the people who own those cards, who had collected them—because remember, early on, Magic is a trading card game. For some people it’s a game, for some, they’re trading cards, for a lot of people it’s both. And for the people that collected the cards, like, it kind of undercut the value of their cards. And they were really upset. Now, problem number five led into problem number six. So number six was the Reserved List. So let me explain what the Reserved List was.

So what happened was, we made these cards, a lot of people flipped out, and they were very upset. And so we were trying to say to collectors, “Look. We’re not going to undercut your stuff. We’re going to reprint some stuff, but we’re not going to reprint everything.” So we said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Every set, we’re going to pick 80% of…” Originally it was uncommons and rares, and later the uncommon part got taken out because it was confusing because uncommons applied to certain sets but not other sets, so “Let’s just make it clean and clear, just rares.”

And the idea was, 80% of all rares would go  on a list, and if it’s on the list, we promise never to reprint it. If it’s not on the list, we reserve the right to reprint it. But if it’s on the list, we will not reprint it. Now, the Reserved List is super contentious. And the problem was, some people were like, “I want access to the cards. I want those cards. I want you to print those cards.” And us saying, “We’re not going to print them,” made a lot of people unhappy. Even today it makes a lot of people unhappy. And the problem we’re caught in is, there are people that very, very much don’t want us to reprint the Reserved List. I know they’re not as public on social media, because the loud portion very much is against it, but we hear from them and they very much do care.

And while I will go on record, I mean I’ve gone on record many times, I don’t think it was a great decision to make it in the first place. But I do believe that we have a responsibility, we made a promise, even though I wasn’t even here when the promise was made, in fact almost nobody in the building was here when the promise was made. But we as a company made a promise, there are people that very much do care and want us to keep our promise, and so we are keeping our promise.

I think it’s important, I think that as a company, that like your word is valuable, and we want people to trust us. And so as much as I understand how people want us to break the Reserved List, is something that we did in fact promise, that there are people, a decent number of people, though they’re not super vocal online. That really do want us to keep. And so we are keeping it.

Next. Pitch cards. So Alliances, first set I worked on, had five cards in it. Force of Will being the most famous of these. PICTURE And what pitch cards were, was you didn’t have to spend mana for it. Instead of spending mana, you could pitch, or exile basically, a card from your hand. Actually, did you exile them? [NLH—Yes.] It might actually have just gone to your graveyard. No, I think they were—I don't know. I forget. Anyway, everyone who’s played Force of Will, you know you have to get rid of a blue card from your hand. You also had to pay a life. A couple of them you paid a life.

Anyway, what the idea was—it used to be, if you were tapped out, your opponent knew you couldn’t do anything. And now (???) tapped out, you still could do stuff. Well, there were people who thought that was a horrible idea. That we were taking something that was just an intrinsic part of Magic. Knowing that your opponent was tapped out means that you now have the flexibility to do something with a security that they can’t do anything. Really rubbed some people the wrong way.

Now, others loved the card. Loved loved loved—in fact, Force of Will is a much-beloved card. But it was a good example of how when sometimes you change something that people take as a given, it is very disconcerting when you take away the given from them. And people were actually quite upset that pitch cards existed. In fact, the story at the time, I told this in my Alliances podcast, which was in our own company, there were people in our Game Support, or Customer Service, as it was called at the time, that like didn’t think we should make them. That wrote letters to our CEO and said, “You need to take these out of the set, this is fundamentally wrong, we can’t do this.”

Now, R&D believed in them, and I think that the important thing is the idea that Magic is a game in which we don’t want people to ever rest on their laurels and say, “Well, I know this is true,” in that we wanted people to say, “Oh, well it used to be this wasn’t true, and now it is.” And that’s how the game changes. And so I think pitch cards were a very, very important step forward in us just doing different things and making you rethink strategy. And that every time we do something radical, people step up and we’ll have some more coming. But usually I find that it advances the game and does good things for the game.

Okay, next is premium cards. Okay, so with Urza’s Legacy, we started printing cards, what people call “foil,” we refer to it as “premium.” Real quickly, why does Wizards call them “premium” when everyone else calls them “foil”? And the answer is, we make more than one trading card game, and that over the years, not all our trading card games use foiling for their premium cards.

And so it’s important to us that we have a singular term that we use for all our games. And so because not all of our premium cards are foil, we refer to our premium cards as premium cards, so that we can be consistent. I understand that in Magic, most—in fact, we’ve made a few premium cards that weren’t foil. For very special things. But I understand that most of them are foil. But when I call them premium, that’s why.

One of the feedbacks we’d been getting from collectors was that Magic was a little too easy to collect. And so what we decided is, “Okay. Let’s add some added value.” And what we did is, we said, “For every card in the set, there’s going to exist a version that is in premium.” Premium being in most cases foil. But a special version of the card. And the idea was that the premium version appears at a much lower frequency than the normal card. And so if you’re a collector, “Ooh, collecting the premium version of the set is a much bigger task.” Also, for players, it’s just some added value. “Here’s some prettier cards. If you want to bling out your deck or something, here are some cards you can chase that functionally are the same, but just a little bit different and people sort of want to chase after that.”

Well, some people did not like premium. Which is funny, because it sort of added value. It’s like, “These cards have extra value to them, and we’re just adding them to the product. Before you didn’t have them and now you have them. And if you don’t like them, trade them to people who do like them.” But there were people that were upset. And they felt like—some people just didn’t like the foils, some didn’t like what the foils represented. Some people felt like, “I think Magic’s too hard to collect, why are you making it harder to collect?” Although we stressed, like, “You don’t have to collect the foils, that’s for people to opt into it.” But anyway, people were upset.

Number nine: the Sixth Edition rules. This is probably number two on the things that upset people the most. So what happened was, early Magic had a hodge-podge of a rules set. That the way it worked was, every time we had a problem, we kind of solved the problem on a case-by-case basis. And what that led to was a Band-Aid ruling system, where there wasn’t any consistency to how the game worked, you kind of had to know card-by-card how things worked. And that’s a problem. It’s hard to learn a game in which, “Well, this card has a rule that works differently than this card’s rule,” and how? Why do they work differently?

What Sixth Edition rules set up to say is, “Okay. Let’s unify how rules work. Let’s have a straight, unified system so that all the cards work the same.” But doing that meant we had to change a bunch of things. Interrupts, for example, went away.  Interrupts got folded into Instants. We added something called “damage on the stack,” that at the time was kind of controversial and people couldn’t believe we were doing it. Ironically, you’ll see later, they got mad when we took it away. We added the stack, last in first out, we did a lot of things to sort of clarify things. Protection finally got exact rules on how it worked and we cleaned things up.

But the problem with cleaning things up is, look, not everything worked exactly the same. And there was a very, very big outcry against what people felt was us fundamentally changing the game. And like I said, we tried to explain that what we were doing was improving it, and that we were doing something that was good for the long-term. But once again, it required you in the short-term learning new rules. Cards you had didn’t quite work like the way they used to. And that people resisted. And there was—it’s the first time we really overhauled the rules, and obviously we do other rules overhauls, not as big as Sixth Edition, and it was disconcerting.

And if you want to go back and read some of the posts form the time, you would think the sky was falling. People were really, really unhappy about it. And like I said, the only thing I remember people being more unhappy about was the introduction of Standard, Type 2.

And in some ways, you could argue there was more noise because the internet was louder at the time. Like when we did Type 2, that was just the Usenets. I mean, they were on the bulletin boards and yelling, but it was a lower volume of people. By the time Sixth Edition rules came out, the internet was more in bloom, and there were Magic sites, and there really was—it was much easier, and there were soapboxes for people to have. And at the time people were writing columns—like, there was really a place and a means for people to express their unhappiness. So in some ways, I think people were slightly more unhappy with Type 2, but they were maybe louder here because they had a louder microphone because the internet.

Okay. Number ten. Magic Online. Okay. So, we had planned from pretty early on that we wanted to have a computer version of Magic, because not everybody live in a town where they can easily find other people to play with. If you live in a big city, sure, but if you live in a small city, it might not be that easy. You might not be near things. Might not be near a game store or near somewhere where people are playing.

Plus, there’s also people who their lives have changed. They have families. Or they just don’t have the ability to get away as easy. But late at night, they can sit at home and play. So we really wanted the means to allow people that weren’t able to play in the current system to play. And the idea there was to do Magic Online.

And our goal with Magic Online was to try as much as we could to capture the feel of paper. That’s always been our goal. And part of that was, we didn’t treat the game any differently. Like, a lot of video games act very differently. We didn’t treat it as much like a video game as we treated it like an online version of Magic. Of the paper game. And so we did a lot of things. I mean, part of the most controversial was, we sold packs much like we sold packs in paper.

And at the time, most computer games didn’t do that. I mean, now the idea of buying virtual objects is a little more commonplace. But at the time, it was really, really radical. Games didn’t do that. They didn’t sell you virtual components that you had to pay real prices for. You would pay a lump sum and they’d give you whatever you needed. And also, there’s a lot of concern that once the computers happened, what would happen to the stores? Would people stop coming in and no one would play and the stores would all dry up, and then people were forced to play Magic Online?

Anyway, there were a lot of concerns early on. But no one quite understood the impact of Magic Online. And you know, there was a lot of nervousness on all different levels. I guess it was funny. There were people who wanted to play it online and were mad about our choices of how to execute it, and there were people that didn’t want to play it online and were worried that online existing would impact them outside of the online world.

And luckily, as time has showed, Magic Online’s gone on to become a very key part of Magic. There’s a lot of people who play on Magic Online and a lot of people who their exposure to Magic is through Magic Online.

So anyway, I am almost to work, and I think I hit the halfway spot. And it’s clear I’m not doing twenty things before I get to work. I just want to do a little recap for today.

So one of the things you’ll see as I go through these things is, I’m not trying to belittle the response of the audience. I believe when we do things that are radical, it is perfectly acceptable for the audience to have a reaction. I believe that’s perfectly okay. The thing we’ve tried to do more of, and I think we’ve gotten a little better, that’s why some of the earlier stuff in some ways I think had bigger outroars, was we were trying to do more of explaining to you guys why we’re doing what we’re doing.

And I feel like in a lot of ways, me writing my column every week and a lot of the other behind-the-scenes stuff we do, we’ve gotten a lot better at letting you guys understand our thought process. I think if Standard were introduced today, and I could explain the long-term ramifications, I could talk about why we want to do this. I think more people would have gone, “Oh, I get it, okay, I see what you’re saying. I understand the reason you want to do that.”

Now, I’m not saying no one would be upset, and we do things now that people get upset. But I think that we have a means now to better explain why we do things, and that it tempers it. Like, one of the truisms of having worked on this game forever is people are going to get upset. Any change we make. Any single change we make, people are going to get upset. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s the nature of humans. Change is scary. And we’re a game about change. And so every time we do something, and the more radical we do, the bigger reaction we tend to get.

But the good news is, I look at all these things, and one or two of them clearly were mistakes that we went back and fixed, like Nalathni Dragon and Chronicles. But a lot of them were like, “You know what? It actually was for the good of the game.” And it’s very hard—I mean, it’s very easy now to look back and go, “Oh, yes, Standard was very important. Oh yes, Sixth Edition rules were very important.” That a lot of the things I’m talking about today, like with 20/20 vision of time, oh, you get why we did what we did. But in the moment, it’s a little harder to see.

And like I said, I do not begrudge our audience having reactions. In fact, I love the fact that you guys care so much that every time something happens you do care. One of the things we always say is, “We should be happy whenever there’s an outcry about something, because the player base being emotional is a sign that they really, really care about what we’re doing.” And that—I mean, as they say, you can’t buy that. You can’t buy player investment. That you have to earn player investment. And I’m very happy that we spent so many years building it up and making people care and really, really be invested in every decision that Magic makes. That makes me really happy.

So anyway, I’m now here at work, and I’m halfway done with my trip through the 20 things that were going to kill Magic. So join me tomorrow, or sorry, join me next time, when I’ll do the second half of “20 things that were going to kill Magic.” But, as much as I like talking about Magic and Magic history, even more, I like making Magic. I’ll talk to you next time, guys. Ciao.