Four TCGs in Magic's Trench Coat

Magic has had a lot of designers over the years. Richard Garfield and his teams of early playtesters, playing hand-printed cards at student lounges and West Philly pizza parlors, assumed that most Magic players would never own more than a few deck’s worth of cards, and would only trade among their local community.

When Magic became a smash hit, the core assumption of scarcity had to yield its primacy to organized play, which provided visibility and fueled metagame churn. Over the next thirty years, Magic’s card design changed again and again. On a long timescale, these stages are starkly different: Alpha in 1993 had abundant color-hosing and land destruction that are unheard of today. The average creature since 2016 has more than double the rules text than the average before 2000.

Current head designer Mark Rosewater ties these “stages of design” explicitly to which Wizards of the Coast designers were contributing to Magic at any given time. But there’s one group of designers Rosewater omits: the players themselves.

We players design our personal Magic experience through deck construction, but Cube designers and local Commander scenes also exert designer-power through Cube restrictions, rule zero conventions, and generally picking our most fun cards out of the 30,000+ available. Our design influence is, in a sense, lower leverage than Wizards’, since we usually scavenge existing cards rather than creating from whole cloth.

But we have a power that WotC does not: the ability to go back in time. WotC can’t reverse its design decisions without calamitous bans or years of preparation, while local metagame designers can wind back the clock as easily as one deck update. Each era of Magic has its own awesome design flavor, but the flavors don’t always mix well. It’s like Magic is several different TCGs in one trench coat.

Four Games in A Trench Coat

In the last 32 years, some very different design philosophies and development pipelines have shared Magic’s cardback and rules engine. Mark Rosewater attributes seven “stages of design” based on who’s making Magic, but I want to focus instead on the balance of the final cardfiles and the gameplay that emerges, so I combined a couple of Rosewater’s stages, down to four chunks of time. Then I looked at how Magic’s average creature evolved over those periods:

Take a second to let this sink in. Imagine that Magic printed each of these average creatures, decimals and all, so that the average creature from the ’90s is a 3.5-mana 2.3/2.5, with 75 characters of Oracle text (about as much text as Man-o'-War).¹ The average present-day creature, on the other hand, is a 3.58-mana 2.7/2.9 with 175 characters² of rules text (about as much text as Kyodai, Soul of Kamigawa), so it fully outmodes a ’90s creature in combat and offers more ongoing value through its text box, all for the low price of 0.08 extra mana.

The intervening years have similar gradations. Creatures from the 2000s tend to eat the ’90s creatures at a profit, and the early ’10s cards eat the noughties cards, and contemporary creatures nearly³ eat the ’10s cards. It’s harder to perform similar analyses for the wide variety of Magic’s noncreature spells, but expect a similar trend of more rules text for less mana.

It may look like plain ol’ power creep, but the subjective philosophies underpinning each era are also markedly different. Each era displays unique metagames, aesthetics, and qualitative trends of gameplay, creating four different flavors of Magic in one trench coat. These patterns, if we can learn to spot them, can be a hugely powerful tool for us scavengers.

Trading-Card Primordia

Magic’s early design⁴ can’t be interpreted without the surprise success of the trading-card game. Richard Garfield’s team was trying to define what a TCG ought to do from first principles. Many of the things that made Magic catch on – the wide power disparity, the top-down flavor designs, the basic lands in some Alpha rare slots to ensure players had enough mana to build a 40-card deck – were no longer viable in a world where every Magic expansion sold out immediately.

Eventually, Joel Mick’s team ushered in more narrative, draft-compatible blocks, beginning with Mirage and Weatherlight. But throughout this period, the cards themselves hewed to the design principles of Alpha, a curious mix of naïve aspiration and spikeopathic reality. Cards like Phyrexian Dreadnought and Goblin King are perfect introductions to the possibilities of Magic. One tempts players with an irresistably extreme deckbuilding challenge, while the other hints at pre-internet mysteries in the rest of Magic’s cardpool. Magic’s first Legends and gold cards also implied a broader world, lurking just beneath the cover of the rules booklet (included with your purchase).

However, the reality of early gameplay rarely features these appealing cards. Why play Goblin King when burn and color-hate are lower-risk? Early control like The Deck needs zero creatures to secure a win, so Dreadnought is wasted space. And, in many cases, the extreme-downside threats just died to Swords to Plowshares, or rotted in hand because of omnipresent mana denial and prison. Urza’s Saga exemplifies this perhaps best of all: a set that is nominally about enchantments, with sweet-looking creatures, where players mostly died to Turn 1, artifact-fueled noncreature combos.

While we’re talking about destruction and repetition, don’t forget The Abyss, Strip Mine, Winter Orb, and Rishadan Port. Meanwhile, cards like Rhystic Cave, Chains of Mephistopheles, and Benalish Hero are nightmares to parse, explain, and/or adjudicate. Every era has its own fault lines, so this isn’t a criticism. However, as a designer-scavenger, the broken outliers are worth paying extra attention to, since they are our best indicators of where the fault lines lie.

Indeed, even the innocuous cards from Magic’s primordium tend to follow the pattern of the era’s infamous villains. We’ve got the “interest payments” mechanic; the “pay the rest by mail” mechanic; the “re-finance your card” mechanic; creatures that repeatedly tap and destroy and protect and loop and prevent and counter.

When an old card “still holds up” in contemporary Magic, like Mother of Runes, it’s often because the card indulges the worst design impulses of its era. If Magic’s designers still believed in the gameplay patterns of repeatable protection, then Mother of Runes would probably be power-crept by now – the fact that she’s still the best-in-slot is damning. (That said, WotC loves the cheap heat of a “fixed Mox” or “fixed Strip Mine,” efforts that often backfire and create their own abominations.)

As player-designers, we have the privilege to actively opt into (or out of) this design philosophy. I know lots of sweet cubes (and commander decks!) that intentionally embrace the primordial feeling of early Magic, setting clear expectations of combo silliness or of old-school naivete. These subjective choices are ultimately up to the designer, but heuristics about the patterns of the era can simplify our scavenging decisions.

• Abundant resources: top-down flavor, interaction, combo, negative costing
• Scarce resources: creatures as cool as they look, combat
• Power watchlist: repetitive play patterns, Urza’s-block-style combo
• Quirks: cards that break Magic’s rules, incorrect printings, wide range of art styles and qualities

TCG Concept Albums

Y’all know those big rock albums that commit with all ten toes to an absurdly ambitious, never-before-seen concept, complete with pyrotechnics and animatronic stage dressing? Yeah. That’s, like, every Magic block from the noughties. They proclaimed their novelty in all caps, all the time: ENEMY COLORS! the GRAVEYARD! the CREATURE TYPE! the COLORLESS (read: free, busted) ARTIFACT! the LEGENDS OF ACTUAL JAPAN! the SYMMETRICAL GUILD PAIRS! BASIC LANDS AND (for some godforsaken reason) HOMELANDS NOSTALGIA! TIME TRAVEL! more CREATURE TYPES but one type bribed the refs! HYBRID MANA! the THIRD and sometimes even FIFTH COLOR!

Even though I admire the sheer chutzpah involved, most of these gimmicks don’t have enough juice to justify the squeeze. Ravnica, arguably the high point of this period, has like five guild mechanics that missed (some pre-nerfed) due to their fundamental clunkiness. Outside of the overcommitment, though, these sets are doing important work to refine some of the prevailing assumptions of the prior decade, making Magic’s baseline gameplay more intuitive and appealing.

Some examples: quietly retiring the Circle of Protections and expressing the color pie in healthier ways. Spiritmonger’s sheer swag, rather than an arbitrary suppression of enemy color pairs. Shocklands striking a balance between the ABUR duals and Lantern-Lit Graveyard. Cool creatures pushing combo and control into healthier play patterns. Repetitive play patterns mostly taking a back seat to dynamic decisionmaking (except during the greatest-hits nostalgia concept albums, of course).

• Abundant resources: grindy card advantage, bold mechanics, color-pie definition
• Scarce resources: moderation, mechanics that deliver the fun
• Power watchlist: New mechanics with the wrong numbers on them
• Quirks: Some wild flavor and mechanical in-jokes

Most of these changes are excellent adaptations to Magic’s ever-increasing stability as a competitive game. Present-day scavengers may notice, however, that the changed design paradigms create some incompatibility with existing cards. Again, the average Concept Album creature eats the average ’90s creature outright, and has nearly double the rules-text count. No coincidence that creatures like Flametongue Kavu and Mulldrifter from this era became shorthands for “powerful creature with immediate value.” Scavengers can easily design around these changes to suit our goals – but only as long as we know the disparity exists.

Midrange Combat Blocks

As Magic recovered from the bobbles of Mirrodin, Kamigawa, and Eventide, simultaneously absorbing the lessons from smash-hit Ravnica and adopting a bold new comprehensive ruleset, a third design consensus emerged, one focused around creature combat.

Magic’s designers then believed that combat was the game’s most decision-rich phase, and Standard in particular ought to be designed around this premise. Magic 2010 came with new rules that streamlined combat (good riddance, stack-based damage), and its creatures were intentionally powered up at all points of the mana curve. For one of the first times in Magic’s history, games revolved around creatures that played as cool as they looked, from Thragtusk to Baneslayer Angel. Expensive cards – even the 6-mana Titan cycle! – were extremely playable, and in Standard, you actually tapped six lands for them, delivering on a promise of a range of deck speeds.

Aesthetically, these blocks began to fuse thematic storytelling and mechanics into distinct moods. Whereas the ’90s featured clusters of top-down designs, and the ’00s reinvented color and cost and subtype, the Midrange Combat Blocks use Magic’s gameplay to intentionally communicate mood. Infect doesn’t make sense apart from New Phyrexia’s body-horror plague and the Mirrodins’ doomed, metalcraft-fueled resistance. Fate Reforged created a radical alternate-presents draft format, but its emotional resonance comes form Tarkir’s five khanates and its draconic invaders. Innistrad’s double-faced cards might have been a cheap gimmick, except that double-faced werewolves fit like a glove into the gothic gloom of Morbid, Flashback, and monsters-matter.

Standard bans in this era were extremely rare, with Jace and Stoneforge Mystic offering too few examples to extract any pattern. If I’m forced to identify a gameplay flaw, it is in the lingering anachronistic expression of color pie through drawbacks and extreme hate pieces. Finally, after 20 years, we get creatures and thematic mechanics that are truly plug-and-play – every color is equal, and every deck has a reason to care about creature combat. It’s a shame that these quality-of-life features don’t extend to hamstrung spot removal and extreme sideboard tech.

• Abundant resources: harmony between flavor and mechanic, creature combat, full-curve gameplay, self-evident appeal
• Risky power: Bigger cheat targets for older enablers
• Quirks: most removal is severely limited

Arena Eternal

Kaladesh in 2016 brought the most Standard bans since Mirrodin. An entire mechanic was mis-balanced, colorless artifacts continued to be busted, and an overlooked two-card infinite combo wrought havoc. The balancing failures of Kaladesh precipitated an overhaul in Magic R&D’s design process, which coincided with an ever-increasing prominence of Commander and the development of Magic Arena. No change was decisive on its own, but in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hastened the adoption of Arena, paused 1v1 competitive Magic events, and simultaneously fueled a collectibles bubble large enough to subsume Magic.

Three design consequences emerge from the new, pandemic-shaken status quo. Arena was announced in 2017 and was likely developed alongside Kaladesh. Its clean online interface and automatic rules enforcement allowed more complex and fiddly mechanics, like Dungeon, Ring Temptation, and Battles. An in-person Commander pod or Legacy game might drown in game-state updates, but Arena handles the rules instantly, and with a fun animation, too.

Second, Eternal-focused design precipitated a dramatic change in power-level balancing. Creatures are getting bigger; entire sets are balanced explicitly to shake up Eternal formats like Modern and Commander. Competitive play might suffer from the resulting oversights, but bans are less impactful now that 1v1 play is not Magic’s most visible form of advertisement.

Third, the pandemic’s collectibles rush coincided with the Throne of Eldraine debut of Project Booster Fun, the direct-to-consumer Secret Lair initative, and eventually with Universes Beyond crossovers. Before 2019, if you wanted a unique card art, you pretty much had to find an alterist or a good printer. Hasbro harnessed these DIY subcultures, wrapped them in booster-pack plastic and a proprietary holostamp, and sold them back to Magic’s community for $39.99 plus shipping (or $1,000, in the case of those trashy Alpha proxies). As a result, Magic’s profits are less tied to the quality of the gameplay or the health of its local communities.

When this new system works, there are clear benefits for scavenger-designers. We get to cherry-pick the right mix of complexity and novelty. The power creep makes older bombs more affordable, while providing a steady supply of new hitters. We get synergies and throwbacks to our old favorites. Aesthetic variations make the micro-cultures of card alters and custom crossovers broadly available.

But this system is fragile. When the balance knobs break (as the emphasis on fast-paced Eternal expansions guarantees), entire mechanics become radioactively incompatible with the design philosophies of earlier eras. Imagine trying to play 2003’s dinky Morph creatures alongside 2024’s beefed-up Disguise. Even for a scavenger explicitly interested in facedown creatures, the callback cards and revisits can be counterproductive simply because the raw stats don’t mix, let alone the just-similar-enough-to-confuse rules templates. If that’s true for cards as weak as Disguise, you can forget about massive power spikes like The Initiative, Companion, 40K, Adventures, and both iterations of Energy.

The synergistic interactions between cards can be another point of breakage, especially in a three-year Standard. Proft's Eidetic Memory, Up the Beanstalk, and Heartfire Hero are all innocent enough in a vacuum, but in such a large Standard with so many words per card, some “cat combos” and underbaked threats will inevitably slip through the cracks, turning into unstoppable engines, even if they don’t end the game quickly enough to be called “combo.”

• Abundant resources: strong creatures, diversity of effects, novel mechanical space, throwbacks to older design space
• Scarce resources: backwards compatibility on rate, paper-first complexity
• Power watchlist: Unbeatable synergies that fall short of combo
• Quirks: the most aesthetic variation yet seen, especially since NEO

Scavenging Strategies

Magic is four games in a trench coat: the naive slugfest of the ’90s, the high-concept ambition of the ’00s, the crunchy creature combat of the early ’10s, and the full-speed synergies of the present. Each era has its own feel, its own strengths, and its own failures of design. If you, like me, have struggled to make pet cards keep up in Commander, or to recapture a particular gameplay style in Cube, then we can use the knowledge of Magic’s eras of gameplay to create new possibilities:

Strategy 1: Pick One Era

My cube ATAVUS traffics near-exclusively in cards from the Midrange Combat blocks. By automatically excluding most cards from after 2014 or before 2008, I don’t have to do as much balancing work to achieve my desired style of gameplay.

Strategy 2: Filter by Philosophy

That said, I still keep one eye on new releases for ATAVUS, using the Midrange Combat design philosophy as an evaluative filter. Fell may be from 2024, but it fits right in to the elegant, creature-centric gameplay of the 2010s. On the other hand, Aang, Master of Elements is an easy misfit on aesthetics, complexity, and power level, so I ignore it. Usually, this ends up that I’m choosing low-rarity, weak cards by contemporary standards, but those weaker cards can still be an individual good fit for an older style of Magic.

Strategy 3: Constructed as a bridge

Modern circa 2015 combined the strongest threats from Mirrodin block with the strongest creatures and removal of newer sets, creating a gameplay pattern that hybridizes two different eras of design. For scavengers, such combinations help us predict what happens when we mix and match between different eras, like when present-day powered cubes cherry-pick the enablers from the ’90s and extract them to a more creature-focused context.

Strategy 4: Consistency is for suckers

You can also go full power-level anarchist. “So what if Akki Underling and Akki Ember-Keeper are leagues apart on power level? So were Healing Salve and Ancestral Recall, but people had a fun time with Alpha!” And yes, balanced gameplay is indeed overrated, as long as the unbalanced gameplay is still fun. That’s another reason to value a retrospective look at Magic, to examine how and why Magic’s prior definitions of fun succeeded or failed.

Strategy 5+: ???

If I’m sure of anything, it’s that none of my generalities should be prescriptive or exhaustive. If you’re deadset on a particular style of gameplay, you can (and should) question the eras I propose, and find counter-examples, and create your own definitons. Go forth and scavenge!

Thanks for reading, as always. May you find a design philosophy of Magic that delights you, and failing that, may you create your own.