1/25/13 Episode 18: Artifacts

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So for today, I’ve been trying to figure out different ways to mix up the podcast. And so I decided that I’m going to talk today about a card type that I haven’t done yet, so today we’re going to talk about artifacts. And I thought I’d talk a little bit about where artifacts came from, and kind of some of the challenges of designing artifacts and, I don't know, just some of the lessons that we’ve learned along the way.

Okay, so let’s start at the beginning. Because as the singing nun says, that’s the best place to start. Why did Richard Garfield make artifacts? And I think the answer is, if you look at Alpha, a lot of what Richard did is he took the concept of a magical duel, and then just extrapolated. He said, “Okay. Well, I’m fighting with magic. What would I expect to see? What are the tropes of fantasy that I would expect?”

And one of the big ones is the idea of powerful objects. Something that’s very much tied into—read any fantasy story, Lord of the Rings, there’s the ring. It’s in the title. Harry Potter had their wands, and all sorts of things. So the thing is, the idea of having totems and objects and things of power, very endemic and core to the idea of fantasy. So Richard is like “Okay, if I’m going to do this, well I should have objects.”

And what happened was, the idea was, well, Magic is tied to a certain style of magic. If I want to throw fireballs, well, I have to commit to a red style of magic. But what if I just want to have an object? Why can’t any mage have an object? And that’s where Richard came up with the idea of colorless. The idea being, “Any deck can play this, it doesn’t have a color requirement.”

Now, the interesting question is, which came first? The concept of artifacts or the concept of colorlessness? Now, I have not asked Richard this question, so I don’t definitely know. But I am pretty sure that he started with the concept of artifacts as a thing, and that that led him down the path to the idea of colorlessness? I don't know. Next time I see Richard I actually will ask him. In fact, if I’d thought about that, I could have called him up before the show. But my advanced planning on this podcast is not exactly top-notch.

Okay, so Richard made artifacts. Alpha came out. And so here’s an interesting thing that people don’t realize necessarily is, so when Alpha came out, what were the hot cards in Alpha? Like, what were the cards that people said, “Oh my God, I need this card.”

Now, there were two cards when I was—for those that don’t know, I started playing the game in August of 1993, the game came out in July, and I went to a convention in Los Angeles, I think it was OrcCon, and anyway, they had Magic for sale. I bought a starter and three boosters, because that was about $27. And I’m like, “Well, that’s what you spend on a game.” And then as soon as I got home and figured out what the game was, I was like, “I should have bought more!”

See, I remember people buying boxes, and it’s like, “Wow. Why would you buy so many boxes?” But anyway, so for Alpha I got a starter and three boosters. My opening rares was Darkpact and Stasis. Anyway.

Okay, so I opened this up. And then, so my question here is, there were two cards that I knew that I had to open in a pack if I wanted. What happened, by the way, was when Beta came out, Alpha was gone, obviously, I waited for Beta, and I bought two boxes of starters, and two boxes of boosters. Is that right? I know for sure I bought two boxes of boosters.

Anyway, the idea was—I think I bought two boxes of starters too. Because my friends—I knew if I was going to get people to play, I needed to get product for them. You just couldn’t find it. It would sell out the day it came in. So I bought a whole bunch.

But anyway, I was ripping open boosters. I set a limit to myself that I could only open one a day. Just to make it last. And this was before Limited or anything, where I didn’t have a use for them. I mean before I opened them.

And so what I’ve learned was, there were two cards that as I started meeting other Magic players, I quickly picked up, there were two cards that I had to open. I had to open. Because nobody was going to trade me for them. No one was going to trade me. What were those two cards?

Okay, the first was Clockwork Beast. Clockwork Beast! Clockwork Beast I think cost seven, and—let’s see, my memory. I think what happens is, it’s a 6/6. Well, it’s a 0/0 creature that comes in with a certain number of +1/+1 counters. And whenever it attacks or blocks, it winds down. And then I think you can pay to wind it back up.

But anyway, Clockwork Beast. Oh, crazy artifact creature. And the other one was The Hive. So The Hive is—I don’t remember the cost of The Hive, four or five. And it’s four and tap, make a 1/1 flying token? Hive token?

So that, by the way, was the first token card in Magic. And anyway. You wanted to get a Hive or a Clockwork Beast, you had to open it in a pack. Not Moxes, not a Black Lotus, not things that would go on to be crazy, but in early, early days—like the sought-after cards, the ones that people talked in hushed whispers, was Clockwork Beast and The Hive. 

So, what does that say? Well, I think what it says is, one of the things about early Magic is, the internet was very in its infancy, there wasn’t a lot of shared information. You get a real sense of kind of—to me in Alpha, everybody as a beginning player.

And so what it says is, it’s a very interesting look at what the beginning player values. And one of the things that I find is, artifacts are super, super sexy. For two reasons. One, creatively they’re just very sexy. The idea of an item of great magical power is very compelling. Because in stories, it’s a thing you lust after. And when you tell stories, I think the thing about them is, magic spells are cool, but something about an object just has this sort of extra feel to it.

I mean, (???) video games, video games are very big on making sure that you get things and they’re physical things, and so I think the fact that they represent something very physical, I think psychologically is important.

And the other thing is, I think the colorlessness really helps make them extra sexy because you’re like, “If I like it, no matter what, it can go in any deck. Any deck can play this. I can play it in any deck.”

Which brings us to an interesting question, by the way, as all my podcasts I’m just going to jump around. One of the big debates we have when making artifacts is, “How colorless is it supposed to be?” Now, I’m not talking about colored mana costs, I’ll get to that in a little bit. I’m talking more about the fact that most artifacts are like, “Well, any deck can play this.” So is it wrong to make an artifact that really, any deck can’t play?

For example, what if I made an artifact that had a colored activation, that said, “Well, anybody can put this in your deck, but to use it, you have to have a certain color.” And one of the philosophies we have followed in artifact design is the idea that we like to create the illusion that most artifacts could be played by anybody. Meaning we tend to avoid—and we’ve made a few exceptions here, we tend to avoid putting too much colored mana into the artifacts.

And the big exception there is when we delve into artifact blocks where we have a lot of artifacts, we’re more willing to weave in color into them. But even then, you’ll notice, what we tend to do is, having color optimizes, it’s not     the only thing. With a few exceptions, normally anybody can use an artifact, maybe a certain color can use it better, but anybody can use it. And that’s a big thing we try to keep through in the artifacts, because that’s a big role of them.

And if you look, I think Mirrodin’s a good example, Scars of Mirrodin, artifact block, where what we tend to do is, we tend to say, “Oh, well there’s always a use for this, but there’s an added use in the right color. And stronger in the right color.”

Now, everyone in a while, for example, we’ll make something like Gauntlets of Might, to use an Alpha example. So Gauntlets of Might made all mountains tap for an extra red, and made all red creatures +1/+1. Now, because it’s Alpha, it affected everybody. And the idea was, “I’m just good for red things.”

Well, why would you play this in a deck that didn’t have red? You wouldn’t. And so even from Alpha, there was a little bit of “Well, I’m good for this color.” But nowadays we’re a little more careful. I mean, we do a little bit of that. But we definitely try to skew them so that there’s some value, that if you needed to play them in your deck, you could.

The other big thing about artifacts—so here’s the other thing about artifacts. When Richard made the game, he’d try to make logical things that would exist. Well, two things he made, one was artifacts, and the other thing was enchantments. And the idea of enchantments was, “Well, I want to cast magic, I’m going to alter the state of things. I’m going to make a magic that has permanence to it and changes something.”

Well, that’s what enchantments came from. And the problem was, global enchantments and artifacts really, from a game design standpoint, are really, really close to being the exact same thing. In fact, whenever somebody writes in to me, like I get this question all the time: “You have to kill one card type        from Magic. What do you kill?” And one of the things that always ends up happening is, you get down to enchantment vs. artifact. Because mechanically they represent the same thing from a game design (???). They’re very, very similar.

And obviously the colored mana cost is obviously something we can change, we have. So I tend to say, “Okay, I guess we can lose enchantments.” Because artifacts are sexier as a thing, and then just have artifacts pick up the slack of what enchantments do. That’s my answer to “what would you get rid of?”  Not that I want to get rid of enchantments. When you have to answer the questions where they give you a decision you would never do, but you have to answer it.

So but here’s the interesting thing. So what is the difference between artifacts and enchantments? That’s really important. Because when you’re defining artifacts, you’re supposed to keep them away from each other. So one of the defining things of enchantments is color. And we have broken that a couple times. I’ll get to that in a second.

The other big thing that we do is that artifacts tap, and we do not have enchantments tap. We will allow enchantments to occasionally, and not that much, have activated abilities that you can only use once per turn. We tend to do that very limitedly. I think I made up a word there. [NLH—Nope.] Because of artifacts.

And one of the things we try hard—so the other big thing is, because mechanically they’re pretty close, we actually try really hard creatively to separate them. So what is the difference between an artifact and an enchantment? And early Magic blurs this like nobody’s business. But we’ve been better recently. And the difference is, an artifact is a thing. A physical thing. I pick up, it’s a thing. I mean, it might be a real large thing, a building, maybe, but it’s a thing. A physical thing.

A red mage can destroy it. Because it’s a thing. They can blow it up. It has substance. If I throw a lightning bolt at it, it should break. I mean, not in game terms obviously, since it can’t hit artifacts.  But I can Shatter it, if you will.

The idea of enchantments is, it’s something made from magic. So if it has physical form, it has to be made of magic. So in the early days, you’ll notice some auras had a lot of the flavor of like, “I’m making this magical object.”  And we had to be careful, because artifacts are magical objects. So now if you notice, if an enchantment ever makes something, it’s clearly like made of energy. Like it’s not like you’re using an enchantment and it makes a thing that looks like a sword or a knife or a dagger. It’s like, “A dagger made of magic!” So like it has a very non-realistic quality to it. Because to separate them, enchantments are magical things that are literally made of magic, where artifacts are concrete objects.

So, to answer the question, if the color definition is so important, why do we break it? And to answer that, what happens is—and this is true of anything, but in Magic, we tend to have rules, and then when we feel it’s the right place to break a rule because we’re doing something we think is important and core to what’s going on, that’s when we break it.

And so during Shards of Alara, we were trying to get Esper and figure Esper out. And the flavor of Esper—so Esper was the world based in blue that had white and black, was devoid of red and green. And the idea we liked a lot, the creative team, the world they built, was this idea of blue—the conflict of blue/green is this nature/nurture conflict, with the idea that blue believes that everything is born as a blank slate. Blue believes that knowledge is power, and that you can make anything into anything.

Green says, “No.” Believes in destiny. “You are what you are. You were born with all the things you have. Your genetics and your genes—whatever you’re born with, that is who you are.” Where blue’s like, “No. I could take anybody, if I give them the proper training and build the proper tools, anybody can become anything.” And so the idea in Esper was that these people were constantly trying to improve themselves. And so they were going beyond sort of the norm and they were replacing pieces of themselves with magic.

And so the thing we had there was, it kind of had this interesting cross between they were kind of magically changing themselves, but there was permanence to what they were doing. They in fact had arms and legs and—etherium was the name of the object. But they actually had things. And so we’re like, “Well, wow, this is an interesting gap. It’s made of magic, so it has an enchantment sort of quality, but they’re concrete things.”

And so another thing was, we were trying to give Esper an identity, and so we’re like, “Okay. Well, blue loves artifacts, it’s the number one color that cares about artifacts.” And that has to do with the blue/green conflict. That when you believe you can become anything you want, well, you embrace all tools. You embrace technology. And artifacts, in our game, represent technology. And so blue is king of technology, so blue has the affinity for artifacts.

And like, “Okay, in a blue-dominant world, if they were making themselves better, it seems like they’d move towards artifacts. They’re blending themselves.” Well at some point, I mean essentially they would be the fantasy equivalent of cyborgs. And so we said, “Okay, well this seems like a place where enchantments and artifacts are crossing. Okay, we’re going to bite the bullet, we’re going to make some artifacts that are colored.”

And the interesting thing, by the way, little tidbit is, in Future Sight, notice there was a card, “Sarcomite Myr.” So what happened was, when we made Future Sight, the creative team knew that we were going back to New Phyrexia. As I’ve talked about in my article, which I recently wrote but for you guys was many weeks ago, I talked about in the six year plan, about how we knew we were going back to New Phyrexia. We didn’t know we were going to go back to Mirrodin. We thought that it was going to be a big reveal that New Phyrexia was Mirrodin. But we were going back to New Phyrexia.

So that was the thought process. We were going to New Phyrexia. And so Sarcomite Myr was designed by Creative to be a card to go into that block. Into what at the time was New Phyrexia block and then would become Scars of Mirrodin block.

But before we got there, we were in the middle of doing Shards of Alara, which was a couple of years before that. And sometimes when you’re doing design, you look for the easy answer. And so the subteam that did Esper was myself, Mark Gottlieb, and Mark Globus. What I call the “Mark Subteam.”

And we were talking about “How do you represent this concept of them rebuilding themselves?” And Gottlieb was like, “Well, aren’t they just all artifact?” Like, “Why don’t we just make everything artifacts?” Because I was talking about the cyborg idea, like kind of they’re cyborgs. And as soon as Mark said it, I’m like, “Man, that’s perfect, it’s just simple, it’s clean.” And one of the things you look for in design is having nice clean effects.

Anyway, we ended up biting the bullet and using it there. And the problem is, Sarcomite Myr didn’t make sense there, so we couldn’t make Sarcomite Myr. And by the time I got to New Phyrexia, we weren’t doing the colored mana quite the same way, so we were trying to mirror the creative and the mechanics and they ended up getting separated. So we couldn’t reprint the card in either place, even though the card kind of both hinted at colored artifacts was something we knew we were going to do, and hinted at return to Mirrodin which we knew we were going to do. Anyway.

If you look at Future Sight, by the way, there’s a lot of clues. A lot of clues to stuff we hadn’t done yet, by the way, so we’re not quite done. Future Sight’s gonna keep showing up from time to time. In surprising places I think too.

Okay. So artifacts have to be concrete. They have to have permanence. We want them to have colorless mana except for special occasions. So what goes into designing artifacts?

So one of the interesting things is people often ask me, “Do artifacts have a color pie?” And I’m like, “Well, yes and no.” No in that there’s no philosophy for artifacts. They don’t have—it’s not like “artifacts represent something.” No, in fact, they’re the antithesis of artifacts. They don’t have philosophy. Like if I have a powerful ring that does something, I have a ring of invisibility, well, there’s no philosophy. Put it on, you’re invisible. It kind of transcends philosophy.

So in that regard, they don’t. But mechanically, if you talk about the color pie mechanically, then they do. And what I mean by that is, there are certain things that artifacts do, and do enough of, that we think of them as being artifact things.

What are those things? Well, the two biggest, or the biggest is mana fixing. And the idea that we don’t want artifacts to be—in the default world, artifacts are supposed to be something kind of special. That if you go read fantasy stories, it’s not like Lord of the Rings—there’s a ring! I mean, there actually are rings. But there’s not tons of rings, there’s just a few rings. And they’re special. When you find a special magic object, it’s special. You’re not falling all over magical things.

And so I believe in Alpha for example, artifacts were uncommon at the lowest. There were no common artifacts. And so the only artifacts we do now tend to be ones that have an important function. The most important function is mana fixing. Either mana smoothing or color fixing with mana. And so at common, we tend to put that in. We tend to put in usually…

So the way it works is, in a large set, there are 101 commons. One hundred and one? What? The way it works out, and I don’t want to get into collation too much because (???) talk about collation, but the way it works out is, there is this extra card. Basically you have 100 commons, and there’s a card that shows up at kind of a rarity in between common and uncommon. The 101^st card. We call it common, but it shows up at slightly lesser rarity.

So whenever you’re doing commons, the colors—at common we tend to have color balance, meaning there’s the same number of red cards as green cards as black cards as white cards as blue cards. So if you want to do artifacts, either you have the 101^st to do one artifact, or you have to do five. And if you do five, those can be lands or artifacts. So if they’re cycled lands, that eats up five slots. So you could do colorless land or you could do artifacts.

Some worlds call for that. Sometimes there’s enough flavor. Usually common artifacts A. are mana-fixing, they use the 101^st slot most of the time. Sometimes we have a word that’s just flavorful. Like in Innistrad you’re like, “Oh, well there’s certain concepts you want to get across.” And so sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll put artifacts at common in worlds where we just need it for flavor purposes. 

The other big difference obviously is a world about artifacts, and then lots of common artifacts, because hey, the world’s about that thing, while—like I like to say, “If it’s not at common, it’s not your theme.” If you’re doing an artifact set, well, that’s the place where artifacts have to be common. And that’s where you can do a lot more artifacts.

The other thing—so lowest rarity they tend to be mana fixing and they tend to be flavorful. Equipment is often when we’re going to do commons, and the reason is, equipment is very flavorful and it’s the kind of thing where, “Oh, there’s a special object” or something.

Usually things that the—an artifact that--there would be an ongoing thing that the planeswalker will use. Like I have this object I will keep using. We tend not to do those at common. We tend to use those at uncommon and rare.

And even at uncommon, we like to keep things kind of simple, so that the things you’re doing are basic things. Anything that tends to be weird tends to go up to rare. That if we’re doing something that’s kind of a little out of the normal path. We do it at rare.

Now, the exception is, in artifact blocks we tend to rotate down rarity of what artifacts do. So things you normally see at uncommon, we tend to do at common. And that’s because we had to get the numbers up. There’s no way to do enough common artifacts, which an artifact block needs, without expanding what artifacts can do. So normally in an artifact block, common gets to do what uncommon does. Uncommon gets to do some of what rare does, and then rare does the top end of rare.

So what other effects do we tend to push toward artifacts? Well, we like tomes, so we like the idea of card drawing. I think milling has very much become synonymous—I mean, milling is a blue thing, but in some ways if it’s primary in blue, it’s sort of secondary in artifacts. Most sets have some milling artifact.

I mean, we tend to have an artifact that helps you deal with creatures. Oh, here’s a good thing. So one of the limitations of artifacts is the color pie in a sense of not what artifacts can do, but what they can’t. And one of the ways we look at that is, if you want to have a color have a deficiency,  you have to be careful. In that if you don’t, artifacts will fill in the deficiency. Classic example is Alpha.

So one of blue’s weaknesses is it’s very bad at board removal. It doesn’t get rid of things. It can counter things. It can steal things, it can bounce things. But it doesn’t have destruction. It can’t destroy things. And so in Alpha, what happened was, there was a card called Nevinyrral’s Disk. Which by the way, is “Larry Niven” spelled backwards, because Richard was making an homage to an article in a Larry Niven book. Discworld, I believe. Or one of the Discworld books. [NLH—Not Discworld. Ringworld, maybe?]

Anyway, and so it turned out that Nevinyrral’s Disk was very cheap, very easy to use, and it was really good at destroying permanents. Which was blue’s weakness. So one of the reasons that I think blue was so dominant in the early game—A., it had crazy blue cards, but on top of that is, its one weakness was really efficiently filled in by artifacts. And so that’s something we’re very careful about now. In that if we want things to have weaknesses, we have to be careful how we do it.

Now, some weaknesses were like, “Okay, if it’s expensive enough, we’re willing to let that happen.” And some of them, it’s like, “Well, we define the colors by a complete absence of being able to do that,” those we’re more careful of. Like, we’re very wary to put like enchantment removal in artifacts.

Another thing, by the way, is we want the artifacts to sort of complement and give you some tools, but sort of not circumvent the color pie. In fact, interesting side story, when I first made Mirrodin, my original design had a lot of color in it. I had a lot more “This is optimized if you use certain colors.” And at the time, Bill felt like I was not making a pure artifact set because there’s so much color in it.

And I really, really wanted color, but I didn’t know why—one of my problems is I’m a very intuitive designer. Meaning I do things, and I understand I want them, but—like now I’m the Head Designer, so I don’t have to explain myself quite as much. Still some, obviously. But not as much. Where back then I wasn’t the Head Designer, and I had an idea, and the Head Designer was like, “I don’t think this is the right call. Why are you doing this?” And I couldn’t explain why.

And it’s funny. I would later go on to figure out why, because all of Magic would later go on to figure out why. But I didn’t understand why. And what I realized was, is the thing about artifacts that is very dangerous is that the color pie is a fundamental important safety tool of Magic. It is the ultimate safety net.

Because if I do something crazy, well, it’s limited to one color. So what that means is, any one color can’t do everything. And so by having things colors can’t do, we build in weaknesses. So if I’m limited on colors, I have weaknesses. And then you, my opponent, can play into what my weaknesses are. So I have an amazing red spell, well maybe you have an enchantment that deals with me and I have trouble dealing with the enchantment. All of a sudden, oh, there’s an answer to what I’m doing.

Artifacts, though, fill in things and allow you to not have holes. And the biggest problem, like when we went to stop Mirrodin block and we were trying to ban cards, what we found was, we couldn’t just ban one card. Because they had so much adaptability, they could pick and choose and grab, and we called it “the Blob” at the time. The problem was, you’d nick off a piece of the blob, well, urggh, rest of the blog keeps coming. That it requires banning a lot of cards to deal with that. And I think the core of that has to do with respecting just a valuable element of the game, which is the color pie.

In fact, one of these days, I will do a podcast on the color pie. And just talk about the philosophy of the color pie. The color pie, in my mind, is the most important thing of Magic. It is at the core of everything. Like, the best thing Richard did. Anyway. I’ll do a podcast on that. Because it’s an awesome topic.

But anyway, that is the deadly element of artifacts. You have to make sure that your artifacts do not upset the core of what you’re doing, and do not upset the color pie. Because the color pie is there for a very important reason. And it does a lot of good. And bad things come when you circumvent it.

Now that said, I think artifacts serve a great role. I think they can be a lot of fun. I think artifacts—the other thing that artifacts do, we learned this when we were doing Mirrodin actually, it’s interesting, that artifacts have this quality of a little bit of a weirdness to them. I think that there’s a lot of Johnny that we tend to put on artifacts.

And I think part of that comes from that there’s this mystique of magical artifacts. Like, “I find this orb. What’s this orb do? It does strange things!” And that you kind of—an orb can do anything. That a lightning bolt, it’s kind of got to do damage or something. A lot of spells, like they’re very narrow in what they can do flavorwise, because well, I’m throwing bolts of energy. Well, what could bolts of energy do? Damage? Maybe blow something up? Like, there’s only so many things it can do.

But I have a glowing orb, what can it do? It could do anything. It could be anything! And I think that’s another important part of what artifacts do, is that they let us design-wise, kind of go to strange places that wouldn’t normally make sense. Like there’s a lot of artifacts that if I went and looked at, and took out of artifacts, like “What is this?” But if I say, “Oh, it’s a glowing orb,” you’re like, “Oh, okay, glowing orb.”

Now, that said, I think there’s a lot of top-down. We do a lot of top-down artifacts as well. I mean, artifacts are neat in that you can take cool ideas and (???) them, but you can also say, “Hey, I’ve got a Jar of Eyeballs. What does a Jar of Eyeballs do?” And you can come up with that. And I think there’s a lot of fun top-down-ness. And that’s another thing about artifacts, from a design standpoint, is they both fill in gaps of what you need, but at the same time they can lead you down very nice resonant paths.

But anyways, I’m at work. So I will have to talk artifacts another day. It’s clear—sometimes I get here, I’m like, “Whoo, I made it!” And other times, I’m like, “I’ve got a lot more to say.” So I’m sure I will do another artifact podcast. Hopefully today gave you a little bit of insight.

So, one thing today. I’m trying to take feedback from the audience. And my tagline when I leave every day is I say, “I’m going to go make the Magic cards.” Which I think, by the way, if anyone knows the old Dunkin Donuts commercials, where the guy would wake up early in the morning and go, “Time to make the donuts.” And like at the end of the day, “Time to stop making the donuts.”

Somehow I had that in my mind. And so I used to joke when I’d go to work, I’d go, “Time to make the Magic cards.” But someone pointed out, or multiple people pointed out, that my article is called Making Magic, that’s my column. And that what I do is not just related to the cards, although I do make cards. But bigger. That I’m not just making Magic cards, I’m making Magic. Because a lot of what I do is block design and set design, a much bigger scope.

So I’ve decided, taking feedback from my audience, I’m going to change my outgoing tagline just slightly. So anyway, now that I’m at work, I have to go, because it’s time to make the Magic. I’ll see you guys all next week.