10/3/14 Episode 162: Enchantment World

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’s topic is an interesting one. One of the things I’m always trying to do on the podcast is to figure out, “What are things that I can do in a podcast that are best done in a podcast, and aren’t done in an article, or aren’t done through some other means. My blog or whatever.

So one of the topics (???), so I work ahead, so for you guys, this is the distant past. But I just recently—the State of Design article just went up last week. Or this week. And so there’s a lot of discussion that it generated, which is good, it’s why I write it.

So one of the big questions was, I talked about—one of the mistakes I felt that I made is that I knew people wanted an “enchantment matters” element, and I withheld it to try to make the third set something exciting, in retrospect I probably should have started in the second set. But anyway, but it led to the following discussion. The following question keeps popping up.

“Okay, okay. Theros was fun. But when can we expect the enchantment block that is to enchantments what Mirrodin is to artifacts? When can we expect that block?” And what I realized was, it’s a complex answer. It’s more complex than I could answer on my blog. It’s the kind of thing I might be able to do in my article, but it’s very—I only have one article a week, every other week is a theme week, I just don’t have a lot of spare weeks in my articles.

So I’m like, “You know what? This would make a good podcast topic.” So the question is, today’s podcast is, “enchantment-matters world. Where is it? When can we expect it?”

And what I’m trying to say today is, not that you—let me be clear. I’m not saying that it will never happen. But I’ saying that it is a lot harder to do than I think people realize. And I want to explain why it’s so hard.

One of the things that I like doing with my podcast is kind of going in-depth, and saying, “Look guys, when you dig down deep, there are a lot of issues.” Like, one of the things I find interesting, when new people come to R&D and watch the process, that one of the comments they always get is, “Holy moly, you guys discuss everything.” That there’s details that you don’t think about. That is not even a detail the average person even contemplates, that we might argue days about. We might argue months about. That there’s so much little nuance of what we do, that we spend a lot of time and energy on it.

So here’s an example where I’m going to dig deep today. I’m going to talk about some design, some really dig down deep in the dirt design information today. And talk about sort of what you can and can’t do.

Okay. So in order to understand today’s topic, I need to explain a couple things. First is, I need to explain the concept of volume. Another way to talk about this also is as-fan, which obviously I talk about all the time.

So what that means is, if you want something to matter, there is some volume at which it has enough of a presence that it can matter. Now, what that thing is varies from thing to thing. It’s not that everything needs to be the same volume. But there needs to be a volume to make something matter.

For example, let’s say we’re doing a set with a tribal component. And I want to have goblins matter. Well, I need to have a certain number of goblins in order for goblins to matter. You’ll notice in both Onslaught and Lorwyn, which were strong tribal things, that almost all the common and uncommon creatures were one of the creature types that mattered. That in order to get the volume we needed, we couldn’t waste any space.

 

Like, in Lorwyn there were eight creature types, you were one of the eight creature types. And in fact, notice in Lorwyn, we even—even with that, even with limiting ourselves to the eight creature types, we ran into a problem with still needing a little extra boost, so we made changeling, which was based off Mistform Ultimus, that allowed a creature to be every creature type.

And what changeling was, was like the glue we used, so whenever you’re saying, “Are there enough blah?” Well, “blah plus changeling” was the number you had to look at. So by adding changelings, and making changelings at a certain percentage, we were able to just up the number of every single creature type that mattered. And that’s why changeling was in the set.

Okay. So the number one issue is this understanding volume. And like I said, different things need different volumes. It has to do with how many do I need to have at a time to make it matter. And I’ve talked about this before. That like, what we call “threshold 1” is, do I just need to have one in play? Like, imagine for example, so we’ll talk about goblin cards is what I talked about earlier. A threshold 1 goblin card would say, “If you have a goblin in play, I gain blah.” Or “If you have a goblin in play, when you cast me, you get this extra bonus.” Or whatever. Which means that I just have to have a goblin. I don’t need tons of goblins, I just need a single goblin.

The other thing that we often do is things where they’re scaling, which says, “For every goblin you have in play, do one damage to target creature or player.” Or “All goblins gain…” whatever. Those say, “Oh. Play as many goblins as you can.”

So  if you have more of threshold 1, you can be lower in your volume. You just need enough that people can have some expectation of having one in play at a time. Which means a threshold 1 might mean you need to play… six, seven, eight maybe. And if you want things to scale, well then you need to have a lot more.

Now, when people say to me they want enchantments like artifacts, Mirrodin was definitely in the second camp, it was a lot of scaling effects. I mean, there was a little bit of threshold 1, but there was a lot more scaling effects. When you played original Mirrodin, it’s like the more artifacts you have, the better. Affinity for artifacts, you’re just like, “I’m cheaper for every artifact you have, play a lot of artifacts!”

These spells aren’t good unless you have a lot of artifacts in play. And a lot of the things we did in that set were very much like, “Okay, every time I play an artifact, something happens, every time I sac an artifact, something…” You know, it just said, “Play a lot of artifacts.”

So what people—when they say they want enchantment version of Mirrodin, okay, that’s saying you want scaleable stuff. Now notice that constellation, in Journey into Nyx, was scaleable. We’ll get there.

Okay. So number one, volume. There’s the volume problem. Number two is what we call the “card definition problem.” So if you ever listen to any of my podcasts or read any of my articles or read my blog, I am a purist when it comes to delineations between subsets. Cleary the place I’m the loudest about it is the color pie. I want white to be white and blue to be blue and black to be black and red to be red and green to be green. I want each color to have a clear delineation from the other colors.

The same is also true for card types. I don’t harp on this as much as I do on the color pie, but I want creatures to be creatures and enchantments to be enchantments and artifacts to be artifacts and lands to be lands. And that there are rules we set up. And like certain card type do something but don’t do something else. Lands tap for or get you mana. They’re mana-affiliated. With rare occasion, we don’t do lands that aren’t connected to mana in some way.

Enchantments enchant things. They might be local, they might be global, but the flavor of enchantment is, it’s adding a magical element to something. That it’s forever changing something by granting on a magical element. Artifacts are things. They’re physical things that you are using that have magical properties. So it’s important that there’s delineation. Okay? That’s issue number two.

That I believe it is bad if—one of the things you have to be careful of, and this is true of colors, this is true of card types, that Magic pushes you toward doing what you haven’t done. There’s a lot of inertia to say, “Ooh, we haven’t done this thing. Let’s do that.” And so there’s a lot of impetus to bleed.

And if you notice, every set, we’ll do something and we’ll bleed a little bit. We try hard to sort of not break anything. But we bleed a little. But there is inertia to sort of go to places you haven’t gone before. And on some level, the reason I hold so fast, the reason I’m just not willing to make red cards that destroy enchantments is, you gotta hold firm.

Colors have to have weaknesses. There have to be things that, “Oh, I don't know, this color can’t deal with that well.” And you want to make sure that there is—the reason that you might not play mono-red or might need to splash a second color, or if you’re playing whatever color you’re playing, the reason we want you to sort of think of going to a second color is, that color does something better than the color you’re in. You might want that other color.

And card types are very similar in that if you blend them all together—I mean, as is, artifacts and enchantments already, there’s a thin line. I mean, one of the things that happened, in fact if I had Magic to start all over again, I would draw a much harsher line between enchantments and artifacts.

In fact, little story, during the design of Mirrodin, the original Mirrodin, there’s a man named Tyler Bielman, who was on a design team of Mirrodin, also at the time he was (???) the creative team, he and I did an exercise where we tried to delineate artifacts from enchantments. We were trying to rehaul artifacts, and we were going to toe  some hard lines. And one of the lines we were going to toe, which is what I would do if I made Magic over again, is we said, you know what? Global effects? Not artifacts’ (???). Artifacts don’t do that. Artifacts, you use the artifact. That enchantments will be the thing that goes, “Okay. Everything now does this.”

And that the idea was, Howling Mine shouldn’t be an artifact. It should be an enchantment. Winter Orb shouldn’t be an artifact, it should be an enchantment. That enchantments do global things that change the nature of the world. And that artifacts physically do things.

We didn’t make that change. There was too much—one of the things of the games is, there’s things just where you get enough inertia that it’s hard to change. When I talk about, “I’d do this differently,” well, we’ve got 21 years of inertia. It’s hard to undo things. There’s certain things that the game is just committed to, and it’s hard to—some things are just hard to undo. But anyway, artifacts and enchantments are already close. We just have to be so careful.

Okay. Number three is New World Order. I have a whole podcast on that, if you have no idea what I’m talking about. In a nutshell, New World Order says, in order to make sure the game is accessible to newer players, we toe a line at common on complexity.

Now note, that doesn’t mean anything about uncommon or rare or mythic rare. People just love to say, “Oh, New World Order is dumbing the game down.” And I’m like, “We still make the cards at uncommon rare, and mythic rare we would always make!” But at common we are making things  a little less complex.

Now, there’s lots of other things going on that aren’t New World Order. People like to think New World Order is 8,000 things when it’s actually one thing. And the one thing is, is simplifying complexity at common. Okay. So those are the three problems. I’ve laid out the problems. Now let me talk about what’s going on here.

Okay. So, I want to make an enchantment set à la Mirrodin. Enchantments, enchantments, enchantments. All enchantments! Okay, so here’s the first problem. The volume problem. In order to get the volume you need to have like scaleable enchantment effects, you need to have a certain threshold or certain volume of enchantments.

Okay. Let’s assume that you—let’s take creatures (???). While creatures are 55% of a card set, that’s really not the number we need to be looking at. We need to be looking at, especially for Limited, what we call the as-fan. How many can you expect to play? So in Limited, a Limited game, you’re going to play roughly 16 creatures, 17 land, about 7 spells.

So let’s assume that you say, “I’m going to play—everything I can, I will play an enchantment. Every non-creature I will make an enchantment.” Which means you have seven enchantments in your deck. And that means I’m not playing instants or sorceries, I’m not playing artifacts. I have to figure out how to use—all my kill cards somehow have to be enchantments.

Let’s assume you could do that. Which would, to be fair, be kind of hard. But let’s assume you could do that. This is what we did in Theros. And what we found was, it’s just not enough. Even if all seven of your cards are enchantments, it usually just isn’t enough. And what that means is, in order for you to get the volume you need, you need to dig into creatures.

Okay. So let’s explore that. Now we get to the delineation problem. So here’s the first problem. Which is, how you feel like an enchantment. Now you’ll notice, by the way, in Future Sight, there’s a card called Lucent Limind. Which was a 3/3 flier that was an enchantment creature.

Now originally, when I designed the card, it had a global effect. All creatures get +1/+1 or something. And then to simplify the card, I think Mike Turian, who was the lead developer, needed to move it down in rarity, but anyway, he ended up chopping off the effect and just made it a vanilla creature.

And the problem I had is, well what exactly makes that an enchantment creature? That it’s a dangerous precedent when you’re like, “Well, I’m just going to label it. Why is it an enchantment creature? Because the word ‘enchantment’ is on it.”

You know, that doesn’t—the thing that’s nice about artifacts, and this is why I think Mirrodin is a much easier job is, [artifacts] come with two very strong things. One is, they have a colorless mana cost. Which is very distinctive. Now, I mean, yes, yes, every once in a blue moon we do Eldrazi or something that has colorless mana. But most of the time, the colorless cards are artifacts.

Now, the second thing is, artifacts have a pretty strong creative vision, right? They are physical objects. It’s a sword. It’s an orb. It’s an amulet. When I say to someone, “It’s an artifact,” you have some sense of what we’re talking about.

Enchantments are fuzzier. Artifacts are  a little cleaner. So when I want to make an artifact, all I have to do is make sure the flavor’s there, and put a colorless mana cost on it. That means I can make artifact creatures. In fact, Richard in Alpha made an artifact creature. They can be vanilla. The thing that defines them can be done in the mana cost. And in the creative.

Which means that you can make very, very simple cards and feel like it’s an artifact. Another thing that’s helping you is, the idea of artifact creatures are pretty natural. That a golem is an artificially made creature. It’s a mythology long before the game existed. Or a scarecrow, or whatever sort of creature you want made up that’s a created creature.

Now, once again, if I had the game to do all over again, I would rethink how we flavored magically-made creatures. For example, if Alpha had started and illusions were enchantment creatures. Maybe even elementals were enchantment creatures.

We could have defined a way to go, “Oh, in the game, this is the flavor of enchantments, it’s something which is magically made. Oh, it’s components put together, it’s a golem carved out of silver, oh, that’s an artifact. Oh, it’s a creature made up of magic, it’s an illusion or it’s made of magical energy? Oh, well that’s an enchantment.” We could have done that. We didn’t.

And so the problem now is, if I want to do enchantment creatures, I have to justify them as being enchantments. Now, I can’t just do something we’ve done for years and years and years and have them called enchantments. We’ve missed the boat. I can’t just say, “Oh, that’s enchantment creatures. But that’s the 20^th one of those we’ve done.” Because it would just be non-intuitive. The players have built up enough expectation, it won’t make sense anymore.

Okay. What that means now is, in order to make the volume, I have to have creatures that are enchantments. But in order for creatures to be enchantments, I have to make them feel like enchantments.

Now, here’s the next problem. The blurring the line between creatures and enchantments. We put static abilities, global abilities on creatures. So having a creature that says, “All creatures get +1/+1,” yeah, we did that in Alpha. That is something that’s…

Now, I’m willing to put global effects on creatures and try to go with a straight face, “Those are enchantment creatures.” But even that is kind of hard, because like when we did it, one of the things you’ll notice is, the reason we went with bestow creatures in Theros is, those feel like, “I’ve never seen those before. Oh, I see why those are enchantments. They can be enchantments. They can be auras. And they can be creatures. Oh, that makes perfect sense. That’s why those are enchantment creatures.”

But it was hard—and we tried. Born of the Gods for example, definitely made some creatures with effects. And one of the things you’ll notice is, one of the things we did on a lot of them is we put two effects on it. Two global effects. “Is this enchantment enough? It does A and it does B!” Because if you just do A, it doesn’t feel—because creatures do it so often, it’s hard to feel like it’s an enchantment creature.

Then, we have a second problem. Which—this is where New World Order starts peeking in. Let’s say I’m willing to just accept creatures with abilities that would go on an enchantment. Just with a straight face—if this card, if it didn’t say “creature” on it and I read it, would I go, “Okay, this seems like an enchantment.” Good enough. Good enough. There’s some issues, there’s some blurry lines, it’s not clean, but let’s assume I’m willing to like suck that up.

Okay. Here’s your next problem. If you look at common, how many global enchantments do we normally do at common? The answer is usually zero. Every once in a while we’ll do one or two, I mean there’s a few things we can do.

In fact, the funny thing is, we’re more often to have a creature with a global ability at common. So we can do some. But a handful, not that many. Even if I’m willing to stretch it. I’m not sure we’d get up to the volume we needed. We’re not getting the as-fan we need.

Plus, here’s the following problem. There’s two different kind of enchantments, right? There’s local and global. I’m not sure those are the technical terms anymore, but I’m using them because Magic does this thing where we have terms for stuff, and then the terms go away. Except there’s no new term for it. Like “fizzle.” Anyway. As far as I’m concerned, things still fizzle. They do not counter, because counter means too many things.

Okay. So the problem you run into is that you—if you have too many—well, there’s local and global enchantments. Local will go on a creature or on a thing. Could be on an artifact or on a land. Global will just sit there. Global effects, especially if they only hit a subset, can make a complicated board state.

For example, I have one enchantment that says, “All white creatures are +1/+1.” Now I have another one that says, “All soldiers get +1/+1.” Now I have to look at my board. I go, “Okay, all white soldiers are +2/+2, all white cards that aren’t soldiers are +1/+1, and all soldiers that aren’t white cards are +1/+1.”

Or imagine—it doesn’t even have to be +1/+1. Let’s say all soldiers have first strike. It’s like, “Okay, well white soldiers are +1/+1 and first strike, and soldiers have first strike if they’re not white, and then if they’re white but not soldiers they get +1/+1.” And you can imagine, it doesn’t take long, if you have a bunch of global abilities, before they can get complicated. Especially if they are affecting a subset.

Now on the other hand, local enchantments, or auras, are much simpler. It’s like, “Oh, it’s sitting on that creature.” I can look at it, I can go, “Well, that creature has an enhancement,” and maybe whenever I have to care about the creature I look to make sure how big it is. But unless that creature attacks or blocks, yeah, at the time I need to figure out what that is. It’s easier to track. So what we did in Theros is we said, “Well, let’s see if we can make use of local enchantments.” It’s just easier to keep track of the board state.

Okay. So, there’s just a number crunch problem, how many enchantment creatures can we make? Because there’s only so many enchantments we can make, and then we can make some enchantment creatures.

Now, here’s the next problem, which is, one of the things people complained about in Theros block was there wasn’t a lot of global enchantments. And the reason there wasn’t a lot of global enchantments—part of it was, is we were trying to make the enchantment creatures stand out. But another problem was, we were just using up all the enchantment space. That there’s only so many different enchantment effects before you’re just like, you’ve used them and you’re bumping (???) one another.

Like one of the problems you run into is, there’s a certain amount of space for certain things. There’s a certain amount of space for artifacts. A certain amount of space for enchantments. And for creatures. Now, every once in a while you can steal from one for another. If you notice, what we did in Theros is, some of our auras kind of filled the role of other cards. We have an aura, I think it was flash, +2/+2. Oh, well that’s a lot like a Giant Growth. Now, it’s a Giant Growth that sticks around, it’s a little bit different. But it had a lot of the functionality of like a Giant Growth.

And what we can do is we can say, okay. You can maneuver things a little bit, so you can take effect that are normally not in one area and push them there. We do that in artifacts a lot when artifacts matter. We take effects that normally aren’t in artifacts and push them in artifacts. And there’s some space to do that within the delineation of the card types, there’s some space to do that.

But there’s not infinite space is the issue. It’s not like—so, enchantments have less total space of things you can do. Because enchantments are just narrower than artifacts. For example, because artifacts can do global effects, and they have equipment, like pretty much anything enchantments can do, artifacts can do.

But artifacts can do more things. They can tap. You can use them more—like, “I have an ability that I can use once per turn.” They also can function a little more like creatures in that regard, where it’s harder with enchantments. I mean, enchantments can activate, but there’s only so many times you can say once per turn, and—I mean, you can grant tap abilities on an aura.

But anyway, okay. So the problem is, we need the volume. In order to get the volume, we’ve got to go to creatures. There’s limited space in creatures, there’s limited space on just enchantment design. And so the thing we run into is that there’s just a number of volume issues.

Now, let’s go to the other place. Now, let’s talk about the cards that make it matter. The enchantment-matters cards. So constellation. Let’s talk about constellation during Nyx.

So constellation’s the kind of thing people were talking about. “Okay, every time I play an enchantment, something happens.” Well, the other problem we run into is, the kind of cards you can do that make enchantment matter, there’s less cards you can do.

For example, a lot of the ways you make things matter is making creatures matter. But unless you have enough volume of creatures, making enchantment creatures matter, there’s only so much you can do with that. And like, you can only have so many effects. Like say, every time I cast thing X, I get a small effect. There’s just a limited number of effects you can do that with.

And, and here’s the other thing, this is a development thing. Constellation, there were two restrictions. One restriction was how many different effects can we do. But that wasn’t the biggest restriction. The biggest restriction is, there’s only so many of those you can do. That there’s some threshold point where—especially when they’re their own thing. We did that on purpose. But especially when I’m an enchantment and I care about enchantments. You can only make so many of those cards. If I can fill up my deck with nothing but constellation cards, it gets overwhelming.

One of the interesting complaints that I have is, “Where was the enchantment land? Mirrodin got an artifact land, why didn’t Theros get enchantment lands?” And the answer is, “Because Mirrodin ruined it for everybody.”

We didn’t know any better. When I made the artifact lands in Mirrodin, I didn’t understand what I was doing. We had never done anything like that before. And voila, it broke everything. So what it turns out is, being a land is so important that just being this other thing that you care about, even if you come into play tapped, is just too good.

Especially if you wanted things like constellation. The reality is, we could not make Eidolon of Blossoms and make an enchantment land. The two cannot coexist. And we wanted to do Eidolon of Blossoms. We wanted to do constellation. And it’s like, “Look, I only could make one or two enchantment lands. And then if I make those, there’s a whole swath of cards I can’t make.” Well, that’s why it didn’t make it.

So the other issue is that, not only do artifacts have the ability to do more volume, the artifacts have more just general design space you can fill in, but because of those things, because you can spread it out more, you can spread effects out more, you can spread it over more cards, you can dilute it a little more. That enchantments get less diluted. And so having effects that care about enchantments A. means there’s less of them, and B. it means that they’re more dangerous, so you have to be more careful of how many you have in the environment.

Now, look. In a perfect world, as I said in my State of Design, probably we would have started constellation in Born of the Gods. Maybe, maybe there were a few cards in Theros that hinted at it. But even Theros was so full that probably the enchantment-matters stuff wouldn’t have been there. It would have been in Born or Journey. I could have started it a set earlier.

But even then, even then, that isn’t what people were asking for. What people were asking for is, “Where is my enchantment-matters block like Mirrodin?” And what I’m trying to say today, the reason I’m having this podcast, the reason I’m talking about this for 30 minutes, is I don't know if it’s possible. I don't know if we can do that.

And in order to do it, one of two things is going to have to happen. Either we have to have some breakthrough and go, “Oh, here’s some clear way that we can communicate and do the things we need to do in which it all feels right and people intuitively do the right thing, or we talk ourselves into breaking one of the rules.” And the problem is, the rules I’m telling you are pretty important rules.

I mean, the enchantment is so—like I said today, enchantments blur so much with both artifacts and creatures that the last thing I want to do is give up more definition for enchantments. Like, it already is in a place where I feel it’s tenuous at best.

And so, like I said, the thing to remember, and hopefully this is—my goal of today’s podcast is that design is layered, meaning it’s causal. That what you do in one thing affects other things. And a lot of what I want to do in design…

Like today, for example, I’m trying to say, “Okay, what do I need to do if I want to do an enchantment-matters block à la Mirrodin?” I’m like, okay, I need volume. That’s the first thing. Number one I need volume, and what is my volume? And I’ve got to figure out my as-fan. And there’s some technical stuff I would probably do. I’m like, “Okay. How many as-fan do I need, how… exactly how many commons and uncommons, what’s the volume I have to get to make this work?”

The second thing is, then I say, okay, where am I getting this from? I need this much. Well, what I have available isn’t enough, meaning that’s what gets me into creatures. Like, okay, I have to figure out way to make enchantment creatures work. I just can’t make the whole thing work without enchantment creatures.

And then once I do that, then I start getting into the complexity issues. Well, okay. How do I make the enchantment creatures matter, make them feel intuitive, but not have this problem where I override the complexity issues that have to do with New World Order.

And that—to be fair, I mean, as much as I’ve talked about this one topic today, I’m really talking about design in general. Which is, no matter what my design is. If I’m starting with a weird block structure, or I’m starting with a top-down design, or I’m starting with 10 two-color pairs.  Whatever I’m starting with, it makes me say, “Okay. I have a parameter…” And this is why it’s important in design to start with some parameter.

I know some people are going to ask about Khans of Tarkir, like, “Why a draft structure?” Like, it’s just different! It was a different place to start. It’s not even that I built the block around the draft structure, I used the draft structure to figure out what I would need to do to lock in parameters, use those parameters to find an interesting structure, which is the time-travel story, and then built around a time-travel story.

My point is, one of the things that’s important when you start your design is, something has to be absolute. When I talk about “restrictions breed creativity,” one of the things is, when you have nothing to hold onto, when anything is possible, you kind of freeze. Because you’re like, “Well, anything is possible, that doesn’t help me.”

And what you need to do is, if you don’t have a restriction, make a restriction. And what I like to do when I start a design is say, “Okay. Here’s a thing that matters. This thing matters. And this is a non-negotiable. I have to do this.” And that gives me a restriction to start on.

The way I always talked about it is like, you need to get traction on your design. And like if there’s nothing there, there’s nowhere to get traction. So what you need to do is just commit to something. And by committing to that thing, you make your first point of traction. And once you have your first point of traction, you can follow along.

My sort of goal of today is to walk you through, “What do I need to do to do an enchantment world à la Mirrodin?” And the answer is, “Wow. There’s a lot I have to do, and there’s some problems to solve.” I have to solve the problem of how to get the volume of enchantment creatures that I need in a way that reads, without violating what enchantments are, in a way that feels natural.

And then, I have to figure out how to do the enchantment-mattering stuff in a way that Development can develop, that we have enough design space to design and Development can develop. Both of which are giant issues.

So what I’m trying to say today is, for all the people that are begging for this thing that seems so obvious, it’s not so obvious. It’s not—my goal of today is to sort of say, “You’re probably not thinking…” Like just because artifacts can do something, doesn’t mean enchantments can do something.

You know why it’s not that hard to make land matter? Because 40% of every decks are all land. Why is it not hard to make creatures matter? Because a lot of your deck are creatures. That’s not true with enchantments. Why is it easy to make lots of artifacts? Because it’s very flexible in what it does.

That artifacts normally are a smaller percentage, but you can make them a larger percentage because artifacts just have more to hang your head on. They have a little bit cleaner and more delineated flavor to them, and the colorless mana cost—having something that defines them, that sits in the mana cost, that doesn’t sit in the rules text, is really important for being able to make a lot of cards.

And so why is it so hard to do enchantments when we can do artifacts? Because they’re just different card types and they have different rules and do different things. And that it’s very easy to look at Magic and go, “Well, you did something with Thing A, I want the same thing with Thing B.” It’s not always that simple. And the goal of today’s podcast is, it’s not that simple. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m not saying we can’t do it, I’m not saying I won’t continue to try to figure out how to do it. But I know what people want. And what I’m saying to you is, it’s just not that easy. It is not a matter of, “Oh, just do it.” “Oh, you did artifacts, just do enchantments.” It’s hard.

Anyway, I have now parked my car, which means that it’s time to end my drive to work. So thank you guys for joining me, I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll talk to you next time.