Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1132: Sixth Edition Rules

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Back in 1999, the Magic rules had the biggest change in the history of the game in conjunction with the release of Sixth Edition. In this podcast, I walk through the major changes that happened.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work Okay, so today I Realized I did an article a little while ago Where I have a two-part article that I talked about like the design innovation of every year And I realized I missed something important and that is the six edition rules So I decided as penance for forgetting it, I'm gonna do an entire podcast on sixth edition rules. What were the sixth edition rules?

What changed? Why'd we do it? All of that will be today's topic. So everything you ever wanted to know about the sixth edition rules. Okay, let's start with what are the sixth edition rules? So in 1999, one of the core sets called sixth edition came out and along with it came a series of rules changes.

So let me get into the bigger picture. I have to go back to alpha to sort of explain why six edition rules were so important. Okay, so when Richard was first making the game of magic, remember he was making it to be an average game that you would play in the store, you know, you go and you spend your $20 and you have a bunch of cards and then mostly you're playing with your game group at home. And Richard thought in that dynamic where the game is just a small kitchen table game that part of the fun of a modular game might be figuring out what happens when weird interactions

happen. And so there was a rule book, Alpha came with a rule book, but the rule book just explained the basics. And the idea is if Card A and Card D do something weird, hey, you, the play group, figure out what's going on. I think Richard had always sort of, it had been fun for him when they played games and weird interactions came up. And I think Richard had always sort of, it had been fun for him when they played games and weird interactions came up. And I think Richard understood that more interactions would come up. You know, magic by its nature, like I said, it's modular. There's a lot of computerics to it.

You know, there's lots of cards that connect with other cards. But I think he really thought that the idea of what happened, what interactions happened, that that could be part of the experience. And that you and your friends figuring out that social, he really thought that that could be part of the experience and that you and your friends figured out that social he really thought that that could be part of it. But once again Richard did not picture what magic became nobody nobody could you can't assume you're making a phenomenon.

And one of the things that happened when magic got as big as it did is a lot of the gameplay left to the kitchen table not that there's there's still lots of kitchen table play, but there's a lot of organized play. There's sanctioned play with tournaments and the idea that I would go play somebody that I don't know, that's not a friend, that I'm at a store, a pickup game or a tournament, or maybe there's a game night where I could, you know, go and people are all meeting at the same time.

But once you live in a world where magic gets that big, where there's interactions, there's tournaments with real stakes on the line, the rules, you want the rules to be a little cleaner. A lot of the way the rules were made when magic first got made was they were made to maximize each card. That each card would get a ruling that sort of maximize the card in the vacuum.

So Tom Wiley, who was the first rules manager, once made a flow chart for the original rules that he put in the duelist. And he made it look like a rat maze because Tom was very subtly saying that the rules were kind of like a rat maze. Because each decision got made based on the card, you had this thing where things were non-intuitive because different cards would function differently. And so something that worked one way on one card wouldn't work the same way on another card. So a lot of early magic, well once again, this is no slight against Richard. Richard could not have predicted what the game became.

He designed the game to be what he thought it would be, what most normal games are. And when it got to the size and scope that it got, it needed, like one of the things we spent a lot of time on in the early days was sort of making things work more intuitively, making, like having continuity in the rules or like in the color pie. I spent a lot of time and other people early on just making the color pie a little more cohesive and like there's certain colors don't do certain things and certain colors are,

like a lot of it was there, but the continuity wasn't there. And that one of the things early magic did was say, okay, let's have the same things work the same. Colors work the same, rules work the same. There's rules for rarity that work the same. Card types work the same. That we sort of wanted things to,

once you learn how something worked, we wanted that knowledge to apply more. We didn't want to teach you a rule for one card, and the next time you have a new thing, you have to learn it all over again. We wanted to be more. We don't want to teach you a rule for one card and the next time you have a new thing you have to learn it all over again. We want it to be consistent. And so the idea behind the six edition rule change was, okay, can we revamp the rules and design them in such a way that it is that learn once you learn the basics of the rule set, you can assume how the rules work. You can read a new card and not having to read the rules, just knowing the basis of what existed that you could play the new card. And you can fit,

you know, most of the time and now magic is complicated. There's a lot of moving pieces, even now there are still rulings and stuff we have to do, but a lot of the basics, the rules being consolidated worked on a lot of the basics. So the sixth edition rule change was the biggest of its kind. In fact, of all the rule changes Magic has gone through, I would say two big rule changes and a bunch of small rule changes. The second most, the second biggest was Magic 2010. But that is, that was not as big as the sixth edition rules. In fact, one of the biggest things about match 2010 is we'll find out is undoing one of the rules

of sixth edition rules. Okay, so I'm gonna walk through all the changes or most of the changes. I might miss a few minor changes. There were a lot of moving pieces, but these are what I see as the major changes to the sixth edition rules. And I will stress,

if you haven't been playing Magic since 1999, a lot of this will just be, yeah, that's how the rules work. Meaning you've learned to play Magic, the things that were not true until Magic, until sixth edition, you know, a lot of these might seem like, yeah, that's how Magic works. Well, it wasn't always how Magic works,

part of the lesson of today. Okay, probably the biggest thing the sixth edition rules did is they introduced the stack. And the idea of the stack is that all spells and abilities go in a singular place. There's an order to them, left in first out, I think borrowed from computing. So to explain the difference, I'm going to talk about how card interactions worked pre this rule and after. Okay, so my card in question is, I want, I'm going to bolt your creature. You're the creature that is a 3-3 creature.

I'm going to bolt your creature. And you respond by casting Giant Growth. Okay? your creature and you respond by casting giant growth. Okay. Before the sixth edition rules, before the stack existed, there was something known as batches. And the idea is damage stayed to the end. So the idea was if I bolted your creature, so there's two different version of this. There is I bolt your creature and you giant growth in response and you giant growth your creature and I bolt it in response. So under the rules now, under the stack, it depends what order that happens in because

the cards go on the stack in the order that you cast them and then get happen in reverse order last and first out. So the idea is let's say for example I have a 3-3 and you cast a lightning bolt on it and then I cast a giant growth on it. Under the current rules, okay last and first out the giant growth happens, the creature is now a 6-6, then your lightning bolt happens, oh three damage is not enough to kill my 6-6, it survives. But, if I giant growth my creature in responds to you Lightning Bolt it, then the Lightning

Bolt's last and it happens first. The Lightning Bolt happens, does three damage to my 3x3, it gets destroyed, and then my Giant Growth will fizzle because there's no creature to Giant Growth. Okay, if you go back to before 6th edition, the way it worked was damage was always kept to the end. So no matter whether I giant growth first or last, my creature was going to survive because the damage from the lightning bolt wouldn't happen till the end. Meaning my creature was always going to get the giant growth before the lightning bolt happened. Um, and the, um, damage prevention. Anyway, there were a lot of non-intuitive things.

For example, the current system, like how the lightning bolt versus giant growth works, is a lot dependent on who's responding to what. Meaning, I want to do this, well wait, before you do this, I do that. And that's a lot more intuitive. Okay, other things that went with it, batches and series were oscillated, mana sources for a while, because they didn't,

so the way the rules worked, well, let me talk real quickly. There used to be something called interrupts. Interrupts were, in sixth edition, interrupts got erased, turned into instants. The way instants and interrupts used to work was, instants work like they do now, interrupts could only be responded to by other interrupts.

So if I cast a counter spell, you could only respond to me with another interrupt. Now, counter spells are interrupts, so you could respond to my counter spell with a counter spell, but there's certain things you couldn't respond to me with another interrupt. Now, counter spells are interrupts, so you can respond to my counter spell with a counter spell, but there's certain things you couldn't respond to because they weren't interrupts. Because generating mana was important, like for example, I need mana

so that I can cast my counter spell, spells that generated mana were normally also interrupts. And for a while, they were made what were called mana sources. Anyway, sixth edition cleaned that up. Interrupts got removed, turned into instants. One of my favorite thing is red elemental blast, which was an alpha, was it was supposed to be an interrupt because it countered spells, but was accidentally listed as an instant. And then it got errata to be an interrupt but then with six edition rules it got a Rada back to an instant.

So it's a card that was misprinted except it is now not misprinted because the rules changed to make its misprint real. I always thought that was funny. The damage prevention stuff I just talked about was obsolete. It changed like how the lighting bolt worked. It also changed how regeneration worked it used to be that I didn't regenerate things till after they'd taken damage that the um Damage prevention happened at the end. So lighting bolts are damaged. It's damage prevention. So slightly different Um, but what happened is let's say for example you lightning bolted my 3-3 but it had regeneration on it. After my creature was about taken the damage I could use the regeneration meaning there was an opportunity after damage to do healing but under

the the stack that doesn't work that way anymore. Damage is now targeted. Damage prevention is now targeted. It tends to make more of what we call the shield. So the idea is, let's say I want to regenerate. The way it works now is you cast lighting bolt on my creature with regenerate. I see that the lighting bolt is on the stack, meaning I understand my creature is about to die. So I spend the mana on the regeneration and I make a regeneration shield. And what that means is, when it would go to the graveyard instead, it gets, you know, it follows the rules of regeneration.

It, you know, it goes back to the battlefield, tap, move from combat. But the idea essentially is, regeneration used to be I'm about to die, I now regenerate. And now it's like, I to be I'm about to die, I now regenerate. And now it's like, I sense that I'm about to die. So ahead of time, I sort of buff my creature, I make a shield around my creature.

Which was, I mean, it worked fine within the rules. And for most gameplay uses, it worked fine enough. Meaning, I see what's going to happen. But it didn't match the name or generation as well which was not ideal. Okay the next thing that introduced was the idea of triggered abilities. So if a card says when, whenever, or at it becomes a triggered ability and triggered abilities like any spell or ability goes on the stack. It's not resolved.

Before things were resolved mid spell, that doesn't happen anymore. The idea now is things go in an order. Things are on the stack, spells and abilities go on the stack and whatever spell or ability was left in happens. And so there's an order for things happening under the system before six edition rules things could happen while other things were happening it got pretty messy now and once again the stack number uses all abilities so they can be triggered abilities activated activated abilities, static abilities work a little bit differently that gets into layers but that layers is not a topic for today.

Okay another thing that it did is it cleaned up it made the turn have five phases. The phases are beginning, main, combat, second main, and end step. Technically, I think it's pre-combat main phase and post-combat main phase, technically. The beginning step has three, I mean beginning phase has three steps, the un-tap step, the upkeep step, and the draw step. Upkeep is when you un-tap your things,

I'm sorry, un-tap is when you un-tap your things. Upkeep is when certain untap your things, I'm sorry, untap is when you untap your things, upkeep is when certain, at beginning of turn, things happen or sometimes upkeep costs happen, and then draw is when you draw your card. Then there are two main phases and a combat phase. Combat used to be part of the main phase. It was like a step of the main phase, I think before Sixth Edition rules.

It became its own phase. And instead of having one main phase in which combat was a sub-part of it, there's two main phases. So there's a main phase before and after. Why two main phases? Basically because there's some things strategically you want to do before combat. For example, cast a Haste creature. Buff my creature so it's bigger in combat.

But there's some things you want to do after combat that I, for example, let's say in combat something happens, it allows me to then do things that take advantage of stuff that happen in combat. So they made two main phases so that you could do things before combat and do things after combat. things before combat and do things after combat. The combat had five steps. Beginning of combat, declare attackers, declare blockers, combat damage, and end of combat. So the idea is I say, hey I'm going to attack. That's when you can respond if you want with tapping or fetch or something. Something you want to do before I declare an attacker. Then I declare attackers, I say what my attackers are.

Once again, that can be responded to. Then you say what your blockers are, that can be responded to. Then we have combat damage. All these can be responded to. And then end of combat is when all this stuff happens that lasts until the end of combat. The one other change that happened here is

combat damage got put on the stack. This was a big difference in 6th edition. So what that meant is, let's say I have a creature that has a sac ability. I could attack with the creature. Let's say I have a tutu with a sac ability. You have a tutu. And you attack me with your tutu. Under 6th edition rules, I could block your tut-2 with my 2-2, put damage on the stack,

cause damage like spells and abilities use the stack, and then after damage on the stack, I could stack my creature, either to ability it had or to another creature, something else. But the point is I could sacrifice it and because the damage was already on the stack, the damage would still happen. That was very non-intuitive. It really felt like you were sort of messing with people. Like when you would do that to less experienced players, it felt like you were cheating. Like, well, your creature wasn't there to fight. So how did that creature both kill my creature, do damage to it, and sacrifice to do something else? So in Magic 2020,

not 2020, in Magic 2010, and the rules changes there, one of the biggest things is damage left for the stack. And so maybe one day I'll do a Magic 2020 podcast. But the idea is the six edition rules added damage to the stack. It made things with a sac, made sacrifices in fact, a lot more powerful. and it did some other things, but that's when it got added there. Oh, and then the end step by the way had the end step has end of turn and cleanup. So things that happen at the end of turn. So you end of turn allows you to respond to it so you can do instance and things at end

of turn. Also it's when end of turn things would trigger. If something happened at end of turn, that's when it would trigger. And then clean up, you know, if the creature had damage but wasn't destroyed, the damage would get removed. You know, it would sort of clean up and everything goes back to its neutral state. So the end of each turn, you know, whatever happened to your creature, if it didn't, if it wasn't a permanent effect, it would go away.

And we've, once again, things, and something that happens at end of turn gets triggered at the end of turn step. Things that last until end of turn get cleaned up at cleanup. So at end of turn and until end of turn are slightly different things. Okay, now the other thing that happened to Sixth Edition Rules were,

so the person who led the team was Bill Rose, now the VP of Tabletop Magic, and Bill led it, I think Joel Mick was on the team, the rules, most of the rules team at the time were on the team, I don't remember exactly when Sixth Edition Rules were made, I'm not sure what the rules manager most of the rules team at the time were on the team. I don't remember exactly when six station rules were made. I'm not sure what the rules manager was exactly then. But anyway, one of the things that I know Bill

had been asking about was, were there rules that weren't serving their purpose? Meaning, magic, especially in early alpha, there were a lot of rules that were in the, that had kind of small purpose and like, do we need those rules? Interestingly, one of the rules that we didn't get rid of because I and then a few others fought to keep it

was mana burn. There's a rule in alpha that said, if at the end of any phase, if I have mana in my pool, I lose one life for each mana in my pool. And the reason for that is there are cards like mana flare. There's ways in which you can get more mana than you need. And the idea was, and there's some spells in alpha that even took advantage of this,

trying to punish you for not managing your mana. Ironically, although I was one of the people that kept it from going away in sixth edition, it would leave in the 2020 and 2010, he said 2020, the magic 2010, uh, change. And I was probably the lead person to get it removed. Um, anyway, what's good. That's for another podcast, but we considered removing man of burden. We didn't, uh, some little rules. We didn't, we didn't remove a bunch of rules. Uh, and once again, for people that weren't playing for a long time,

you might not know these rules ever existed. Uh, okay. Um, weren't playing for a long time. You might not know these rules ever existed. Okay. Um, there was a rule in alpha that said a creature that was tapped, a blocked a blocker that was tapped, um, did not deal damage. So for example, early magic had a card called twiddle where you could tap or untap a creature in a car called ice manipulator, which was an artifact that you could tap a creature so if my opponent blocked my creature let's say I

have a 3-3 and they block with their 3-3 if I have a spell or ability that can tap that creature save with twiddle that blocked tapper would not deal damage it was a way that twiddle allows you to win like to win combat I have a 3-3 you have a 3-3 all right tap your 3-3, oh I tap your 3-3, your blocker, so now I will do 3 damage to you, but you won't do 3 damage to me. So it was a trick, it's one of the reasons like, Twiddle used to be played a little more in games than it is nowadays.

But anyway, it didn't come up much, and much like the damage on the stack, it was very non-intuitive, and because we were changing over rules, something we always look at is magic adds stuff all the time. We have to look for opportunities to remove things and the real question is, is it carrying its weight? Is it doing enough that it's worth having that rule?

And the tap blocker rule was really in the weeds. I mean, if you were a Dyer Magic player, like I knew the rule existed. I twiddled many a blocker, but it just wasn't necessary. And the other thing it did is it really punished blockers. One of the things is not that you don't want surprises to happen and we've leave giant gross and things, but it kind of made

people even more nervous to block than they are now and it just was deemed not necessary. So that rule got taken away. Okay, there also used to be a rule that said you lost the game only if you end a phase at zero life, which meant that there were combo decks that would do things and spend their life. And as long as you before the phase ended, you got back up to a positive life total, you were fine. What we found was the people that use that rule almost exclusively were running combo decks and it just, it like like It wasn't a rule like it was a rule that only aided as a kind of gameplay that we didn't necessarily need to make stronger

Like I'm gonna do infinite combo things and some of beat you before my turn ends But I'm gonna take a lot of time to do that We wanted I mean it's not that we don't want combo dex to exist they do exist and they can't exist But we felt like this rule had no purpose other than to help combo decks and we didn't feel a great need to help combo decks. So we changed it. So now you lose the game if a spell resolves and you're at zero. In the middle of a spell resolving, you technically can't go to zero if the spell takes you down

and gets you back up. I don't know if there's a lot of spells that do that, but technically you can do that. But now whenever a spell resolves, if you're at zero life, state of the actions will, you will lose the game. Okay, another rule we had, artifacts. So, static artifacts are artifacts that generate an ability. So, there was a rule early on, not only did blockers turn off when tapped,

meaning they didn't do damage, continuous artifacts, static abilities on artifacts turned off if you tapped. I mean, in some level, it also turned off tap abilities, but you couldn't tap it if it was tapped. So that is kind of still true. It came about because there were two cards, Winter Orb and Howling Mine. Winter Orb only let you untap one permanent turn, and Howling Mine. Winter Orb only lets you untap one permanent turn, and Howling Mine let each player draw an extra card during their draw step.

So if you had like an Ice Manipulator, you could tap Winter, so Winter Orb you would tap before your turn, so all your things would untap, and then you let Winter Orb untap, and then the opponent, so you tap at the end of your opponent's turn, and then your opponent only untap one thing per turn, but you gotta untap and then the opponent, so you tap for the end of your opponent's turn. And then your opponent only untapped one thing per turn,

but you got to untap everything. And howling mind is I would draw two cards and then I would tap the howling mind before my opponent's turn. So they only drew one card. So basically this was designed to set up these combos, but it ended up being really problematic. The idea that anything could turn off, R&D constantly forgot about this.

There's a whole deck, Sands of Time deck, where we just kind of forgot that you could shut off Sands of Time. Anyway, the idea that you could just shut off Static Abilities were like, it causes more danger than anything. So what we did in 6th edition is, we took the two cards that players enjoyed Which was winter orb and howling mind and we changed the text to say if this is untapped Meaning those cards now shut off if you tap them because that's what the card said now with hindsight I don't think either a winter orb or howling mind needed that text I believe the combo with

with ice manipulator wasn't necessary, I mean it was I believe the combo with ice manipulator wasn't necessary. I mean, it was... Anyway, just like with looking back, I think both of those cars are plenty fine without having to make them one-sided. Those cars definitely were built to not be one-sided, because it doesn't cost it not to be one-sided. So anyway, we changed the rules that artifacts

turned off when tapped. Like I said, that was... Some of the rules we changed were because... I mean, there's different reasons we changed the rules. Some of the rules were, look, we don't want you to learn a rule that just doesn't come up much and this rule doesn't come up much enough to learn it. Sometimes it's like well and sometimes it was like not only is it is it hard to learn but it causes problems. The zero life rule caused problems with I'm not saying problems it just made combo decks even stronger and they were already stronger. They were strong enough especially at the time we made the rule. And like tapped artifacts turning off was as much an R&D decision as anything.

It just caused it made it a lot harder to design static artifacts when you could turn them off. It just made them a lot harder to design. The other thing that got done was modes were now made such that you had to say choose one to pick a mode. There's a lot I mean I didn't get into all this there were some language changes that happen I mean obviously stuff like interrupt went away. A lot I mean Magic 2010 did more of renaming basic things, like that's when Battlefield got named. But sixth edition, I think Haste got named in sixth edition. So before that it was written out,

but for the first time, I talked about this in my article, but I'll talk about it here, since not all you read in my article. One of the things that happened over time was, we definitely figured out the abilities that we liked to use a lot. And then we realized that like some vocabulary is okay. And if you're going to use something every set, that's where you want to spend your vocabulary

words. Like, okay, if I'm going to use haste all the time, okay, let's name it. Haste, by the way, was called celerity internally by R&D named after the ability in Vampire the Eternal Struggle. Celerity just means speed. But we ended up changing the name to Haste because no one knew what celerity meant. So to give a little context, I'm almost almost to work here. Sixth edition. Oh, so let me talk about what happened when sixth edition came out. So we announced we were changing the rules, we do the sixth edition rules. And the backlash when we announced it was huge. I think the reason was it just seemed like,

hey, people knew how to play Magic and people knew their little tricks and we were sort of messing with the basics of it. So what we actually did was, at the time was the dualist invitation, later the magic invitation, was being held in Barcelona that year. And so we had that event held under the Sixth Edition rules. Randy Bueller had actually written a book on Sixth Edition rules, and Randy was actually in that event.

And so Randy and I were helping everybody sort of make sure they understood six edition rules. The event went pretty smoothly. And I wrote a whole article about 20 things that will kill Magic. This was one of the 20 things. Change of six edition rules just because change is scary and it requires you to learn things and the game now works a little bit differently than you know. And when you spend a lot of time and energy learning the nuances, hey, you know, you moved

my cheese sort of thing. Like I knew how that worked. Why do you change it? But once people got used to Sixth Edition rules, once it sort of became the standard, I got a lot of players come back to me who would complain to me about the change and said, okay, you're right. This is much better. And now Sixth Edition, like this is why I feel bad.

I didn't include it in the article six edition rules I think are was a major upgrade in the game and that there's a lot of different ways that R&D has improved the technology of the game over time I talk a lot about card design but the system design rules for example is a, you know, adapting the rules and part of changing the rules is part of it is allowing consistency so that people can understand how things work. But another important part was if we're going to make more cards and we're going to build on magic, you want a very stable foundation. You don't want every card.

If every card requires you making a new rule, that becomes unwieldy and as is magic has 27,000 plus cards and the rulebook is inches thick and that's after six edition rules right so you know we understood that it was important for just the health of the game not just the play of the game that's also important but the health of the game and the design of the game that we needed to consolidate some things we needed to you know trim some rules that weren't necessary we needed to consolidate some things. We needed to trim some rules that weren't necessary. We needed to consolidate things. And so the end result of the Sixth Edition rules is, it really sort of did something that Magic needed.

A lot of, I think a lot of the early years of Magic were us taking what was at the core an awesome game and adapting it to what it became, which was a phenomenon. You know, we had to change the game to make it something like when Richard first made Magic the idea was maybe, you know, a year or two later maybe you make the first expansion. The idea that there'll be many expansions every year that we would make thousands of Magic cards. You know, that was not something that Richard like Richard knew there would be more cards. There'll be many expansions every year that we would make thousands of magic cards You know that was not something that Richard nest like Richard knew there'd be more cards He knew there'd be expansions, but not at the rate that magic would end up being

Nor at the time you know I mean everybody wants to hope their game lasts it becomes an eternal game of eternity But you don't know that when you make a game and most games You know most games don't last that long. You know, the average game, you know, 95% of games come and go. And I might be kind of claiming that 5% stay. It might be closer to 1%. But most games come and go. And so, you know, Richard was trying to make a robust system that could be built upon,

but he had no idea how much it would need to be built upon. And so a lot of early magic was expanding on that to sort of fixing up the system to make it more robust so that we could build on it. And there is, you know, sixth edition was crucial to that. You know, I talk about how Bill Rose and his contributions to magic and he's done a lot for magic. One of the big feathers in the cap for me for him was his lead of Sixth Edition rules.

And I think that Sixth Edition, it's funny, like I said, if you play magic now, it's just the way the rules work or a lot of the way the rules work. But that wasn't always the case. You know, I feel sort of like what Bill is to the rules a lot of ways I'm to the color pie that I said hey this is a system that really needs that is really cool in the concept of what it is but it needs a lot of execution to make it for you know to make it this amazing thing that will last a test of time. But anyway guys I hope you enjoyed my walkthrough sixth edition but I'm now at work. So we

all know that means means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to making magic. So I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.