Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1142: Designing Tokens

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about how we design tokens and the cards that create them.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. Okay, so today is all about designing tokens. Now I have done a two part podcast on the history of creature tokens and I did a separate podcast on the history of artifact tokens. So today I'm talking about tokens in general. The vast majority of the tokens we make are creature tokens,

although we do make more and more, we've been making more artifact tokens. I will get into all of that. So let me just, for those that have not listened to these other podcasts, I will do a little tiny history, but the crux of today will be talking about actually designing tokens.

What are the things we think about? Why are tokens important? You know, everything you need to know about the making of tokens. How to design tokens. Okay, so first let's go with a little history. So the very first token existed in Alpha. So the very first token goes back to the very beginning of Magic. On a card called The Hive. I've talked about this card so the hive was an artifact that made little

wasp tokens, little 1-1 flying tokens. The reason Richard made it was he liked the idea that there was a hive and it can keep making little wasps but in order to do that he needed to make a token. I'll get into tokens in a second, the practicality of tokens. But anyway, Richard wanted to do something. There was no way to do it without a token. So he made a token. Now, Alpha is very limited in its uses of tokens and counters. Both exist, both are there. they're used in light amounts now part of the reason for that is a lot of what tokens do is it lets you extend design early magic had plenty of design space so they would occasionally come up with

the car where they needed it as we do in more and more designs you will see it starts tokens definitely open up some space and allow us to do some stuff that, you know, 30 plus years into Magic becomes very useful for us. Anyway, Richard made the Hive in Arabian Nights. I'm sorry, in Alpha. Then in Arabian Nights, he made two more cards and made tokens, Rook, egg and bottle of Sulamane. Rook, egg was a creature that when it died, it was a 0, 3 egg and it dies and makes a 4, 4 rook. So sort of it was using a token to represent a transformation, right? I started this smaller

thing. Oh, but when I die, I become a bigger thing. And then bottle of Sulamane, you basically flipped a coin and half the time you got a five five genie, a flying genie, and half the time you didn't, a gin technically. So that once again was the idea of here's a thing that can produce a permanent that the card itself is not. Antiquities then would have Tetravis. Tetravis did this interesting thing where it had plus one plus one counters, but you could turn those plus one plus one counters into one one flying creatures.

So the idea is the Tetravis could be a four four or a three three and a one one or a two two and two one ones or four one ones. That it gave you some flexibility. It went back and forth between being a counter and being a token. Then in Legends there's even more Master of the Hunt made wolves, Boros Devil Boon made demons, Hazan Tamar made sand creatures, Serpent Generator made poison snakes. And so you start seeing the expansion of the Dark had a card called Dance of Mini that made a token that copied something And then we get to fall in empires and fall in empires

Really was the first step that had tokens be a larger theme so much were they a theme that in the duelists? We actually made a punch-out sheet to help you as a as a resource Now early in magic. I also should explain Other than the punch out things that showed up in the duelist, if you made a token, it was just up to you. Use a glass bead, use a quarter, whatever you can find to make them to represent it, go use that item to represent it. It wasn't actually until Unglued in 1998, where I made tokens. So, Ungloud was a set that just did weird things and so I liked the idea of just using cards to do things we hadn't done before and one of the thing I made is I made I think six tokens. They weren't labeled

just because I was trying to maximize their use but it just was a card with the picture of a creature and I picked things that I thought players most likely would make tokens out of. So there was goblins and there was soldiers. And there's different things I think people would want tokens. There was one token, the squirrel, which was unique to that set because that set made squirrel tokens.

But other than that, it was just tokens I thought people would need. The idea of making tokens, so many years later, the brand team decided they wanted to start doing advertising, ad cards. The reason being, what they learned was, there was no one place that all Magic players went to. If you wanted to advertise to all Magic players, there was no one place on the internet, there was no one magazine, there was no one place at all you could see everybody.

And so the idea, what they realized is in the booster pack, that's the one place every Magic player looks is in the booster pack. So they started making ad cards. And the idea of the ad cards, it wasn't even, it wasn't advertising other things, it was just advertising Magic products. Okay, you play Magic, are you aware that magic online exists or magic, you know, magic or reen exists? Are you aware that we're doing something

with somebody else that's a magic theme thing? Ultra post sleeves or whatever we were doing. We could advertise, you know, the people that were making magic things. When they made those, they paid for them, but to give them some extra utility, they told us, R&D, okay, whatever you want to put on the back, you can put on the back. So we're giving you sort of half a car to do something with.

And while we did a bunch of different things, probably the biggest thing we did is we started making tokens. So let's get a little bit into why are tokens such a valuable tool? Why do we want to make tokens? I think the answer first and foremost is it just lets us make things we can't normally make. It expands our design. And it does it in a bunch of different ways.

So let me walk through sort of what tokens do for you. First and foremost, one of the things in general about magic cards is there's a one-to-one correlation between card and object. So let's say for example, I have a creature card. Okay, well what am I paying for the creature card? I have a mana cost, so I'm paying for the mana. Maybe I have additional cost, maybe I'm paying life or discarding a card.

And then I'm paying the cost of the card. That that's another cost that people don't think too much that We talk about card advantage. There's it literally is a card that when I play a card, you know I I've used a card. I know one less card in my hand. Like I only draw one card per turn And so the idea of the card being one for one is And so the idea of the card being one for one is very solid. But the things that tokens do is it allows us to not open that up. For example, there's a card called Ambassador Oak.

It's a 3-3 that makes a 1-1, 1-1 token, a squirrel token. It's an elf token. Originally, when I made the card, I called it Moose and Squirrel. And it was a moose and it made an elf token. Originally, when I made the card, I called it Moose and Squirrel, and it was a moose and it made a little squirrel. But a Basseter Oak actually is a tree folk that makes an elf, I think. Anyway, the real important part is it's a 3-3 card that makes a 1-1 token. Okay, notice now you have one piece of cardboard, but you're making two objects.

And so that is important. Now making the object can be for a bunch of reasons. One, maybe I'm making a permanent mix, a second permanent. Maybe I'm, I have a spell, but it also makes a permanent. Um, like for example, one of the nice things about tokens is you can make tokens with any car type. I can make a token with an instant, with a sorcery, with an artifact, with an enchantment.

And when I'm trying to care about things, it's a nice way, like one other thing, for example, just use Wilds of Eldraine, we wanted to have enchantments matter, right? But it is hard to have enchantments matter because there's only so many enchantments you get in your deck. Unless you make enchantment creatures, which is sometimes the answer

You know in a in a let's say in a seal deck You have 40 cards 17 lands 17 creature of 16 creatures seven spells roughly all those seven spells You need your removal you need your card, like all your utility has to be there. How many of those can be enchantments? And so it just becomes limiting. How do we get a lot of enchantments in? The thing that a token will do is it adds extra value.

So let's say I make, we had the roll tokens, for example. So I can make creatures that make a roll token. So although that's a creature, it's making an enchantment. Even though the card itself is not an enchantment, it's generating an enchantment. So tokens allow us the freedom to add extra value to cards. In Strixhaven, for example, okay, we're trying to get as many instances and sorcerers as possible. Well, if you have instances and sorceries that make tokens, all of a sudden, you have cards that can go in your creature slot,

but count toward, you know, instances and sorceries. Now, a lot of the tricks of making sets work is you care about something, and then you gotta make sure the thing you care about has a high enough as fan that it's relevant. Oh, I want to care about artifacts, enchantments, instance, sorceries. Caring about creatures is the easiest just because normally in a normal deck, a good chunk of your deck is creatures. So caring about creatures is a little bit easier. But even then, sometimes you're caring not just about creatures in general.

I'm caring about goblins or merfolk or elves. Like I'm caring about a subset. And so tokens allow us to sort of pack more in to get extra value that we can make something that generates something beyond the thing itself. And so you get to have sort of the spell and sometimes the permanent and an additional thing. So that allows us to make something that is, you know, we can make more permanents than there are cards. So like one card can generate

multiple permanents. The other things that tokens allow us to do is if we want to have effects that result in permanents. Let's say I want to make a triggered ability that does something or I I wanna make an activated ability that does something. The idea that the thing I make could be a token means I have the ability to generate something as an effect that can stick around. That is why Richard, all the way back when he made the hive, made tokens.

He's like, oh, I want this thing on every turn to have the potential to make a creature. Well, how can I do that? Now, there are other tricks you can, you know, search for top of your library. We do that some of the time. You can tutor. Like, okay, there's other ways to have one card generate a second card, but there's only so much we can do with this. There's only so much library manipulation. But the nice thing about tokens is, oh, the other thing about a token is

because you're not paying the cardboard for it, you know, it's sort of a free thing. That if I make my three three that comes with a one one, I mean, it's not that I might not be paying for it in the mana costs, but it allows me to get this extra something. And it can be very marginal. Like, you know, a

one-one is not insignificant, but if you make a one-one, it's not a giant amount of things. And a lot of the tokens we make, I mean, we do make big tokens. It's not that we don't make a larger token because we can make larger tokens. But a lot of our tokens, especially if they look like the artifact tokens, they tend to be something that is kind of worth less than a card. And so it allows us to be a rider. That's another thing we like to do sometimes. We want things to like, oh, I'm gonna do a spell

and then have a little tiny something, making a clue or making a treasure, sometimes can be that small rider. And so it really just gives us this other sort of commodity that we can design around. Okay, so the big question is how and where and when we want to make tokens. What are the limitations for tokens? You know, when we're designing tokens, what can they and can't they do? So first and foremost is this idea that a token is an extra thing.

If we're going to make a token, usually on the card that generates the token, we have to tell you what the token is. So the information about the token needs to be on the card that generates the token. Now there are some exceptions and high rarities, but generally speaking, if we make a token, the token maker has to tell you what the token does.

So what that means is Tokens themselves need to be a little more limited than normal cards Partly because we have to fit it on the card We have to tell you partly because there's just a memory issue You have to remember what it does now the more token cards we make the you know as a play aid the easier that is but as a general rule of thumb the you know as a play aid the easier that is but as a general rule of thumb tokens there's a higher barrier to understand if I make a card you can just read the card if I make a token it's a little trickier and yes we make token

cards but let's say you don't have a card and you're you know you're using an upside-down card or you're using a die or a bead or whatever I keep using glass beads no one uses glass beads. Glass beads used to be all the thing once upon a time. Back in the early, early days of magic, people would like carry around glass beads with them. No one does that anymore, so I am showing my age every time I talk about glass beads.

Maybe there's a few people out there that do that, but not a lot. Okay, so the first and foremost thing about making a token is you have to be limited on how much you're doing. Like, you have to, the token can't do that much. So let's talk about creature tokens and non-creature tokens. So when talking about a creature token, power and toughness I get, it has to be defined

by power and toughness, I need to tell you what color it is. So when you create a token, you basically create color, power toughness, and then it has any abilities, you have to list what the abilities are. Oh, and it'll have a creature type. One of the rules about creature types for tokens is, the default is it has one creature type. We're trying to make it simple to remember, so normally it has one creature type. We're trying to make it simple simple to remember So normally is one creature type we occasionally break that rule as a default

If creature type really matters, you know, there will be times when we add an extra creature type But but the default is it's a color power toughness and a creature type Most tokens are what we call vanilla, meaning that's all they do, that they're just, they're a body. And because of token, like we make less and less cards that are vanilla, just because we have only so much space, we wanna make things relevant.

It is hard to kind of make vanilla cards that have the functionality we need and limited, but tokens come with another card. So a lot of our vanilla space has started sort of being into tokens that the tokens are a lot of where our vanilla's show up but vanilla tokens are fine they come with something else so vanilla's are great and like I said we have to define color and size for them and creature type okay we are allowed to put some extra abilities on them.

The one sort of freebie, there's two. There's two evergreen abilities that you kind of have free reign to use if you need to. One is flying. And the reason for that is evasion is really important. A lot of times having evasion on tokens is important. Flying is the go-to. It's also the most flavorful mechanic we have, one of the easiest to understand mechanics we have, and it is the Evergreen mechanic we use in the largest volume.

So the idea is if I just tell you it's a flying creature, with every faith you understand what flying is. We don't feel a need to remind you what flying does. It's so ubiquitous in the game. It's okay. The other Evergreen ability that we're willing to give our um sorry as a default is haste. The reason for that is haste uh we've constantly called it virtual vanilla the idea being if you after the first turn the cards in play if it functions as vanilla we call that a virtual vanilla so creature with haste is virtual vanilla yeah it can attack the turn that enters the battlefield but after that first turn it's just what it is you know if all it has is haste so

putting haste on a token is not really problematic and it allows us especially in certain colors like red to use tokens in a slightly different way we do also sometimes do temporary tokens. That the idea there is, it's a token that goes away at end of turn. So, well, that's not an evergreen keyword. Sacrifice at end of turn is another thing, once again, that you only have to remember for this turn.

Now we are allowed to use other evergreen abilities. So any evergreen ability, if it makes sense, we can use it. Vigilance, for example, is one that we use quite often. Sometimes we'll make spiders with reach. I mean, any evergreen keyword is allowable. We have access to it. We want to be careful, you know, how often we're making something and certain abilities, like death touch, you don't want too much of it. So we are allowed to make

any evergreen keyword we want. Every once in a while we'll make one that is more than one. We don't do that a lot, but we can. The other thing that's allowable is if the set itself has a creature keyword, a recent example would be toxic from toxic one from, for example, all of the one. Okay. Poison was a really big theme of the set. It had this creature keyword. Okay. What was important, we made a token that had that creature keyword So that is allowable to us and in addition

We do have the freedom to make a token that is not just evergreens The mercenary token from outlaws of Thunder Junction is a good example That is a tap ability, you know plus one plus O to target creature uses a sorcery Now I will say The more that we deviate from the norm Like for example, I don't think we would have made a mercenary token as a one of token I'm Maybe maybe at a high rarity maybe but most likely if we're going to do something that has sort of that complexity to it

We're really going to make it a key feature of what's going on. And in that particular case, that token was one of the themes of the set. Like there's a lot of mercenary tokens made. And so it was something that you had to learn, but, and that's another trick. When you're trying to do something where there's memory issues, a lot of times leaning into it. Same thing we did with Toxic. We use the Toxic token a bit, the Toxic 1 token quite a bit. The idea is if you're doing something over and about, so the norm is you get so many

vanilla and within vanilla, I'll come flying in haste and sack it in return. You get all those that you want. Whatever you need to get, you can get, well, not whatever, I'll get to the limitations in a second. But you can get those and from a memory standpoint, those aren't too bad if you keep them in check. Once you kind of are using a keyword of the set, so it's not an evergreen keyword, or you're doing something like mercenaries where it's additional tax, it's a little more, you want to sort of consolidate. Normally if we're going to do that, if we're going to do that if we're going to do a non evergreen keyword token usually there's

In most sets there only be one maybe maybe two And once again at high rarity sometimes if it's a special thing We will make exceptions when it's not really going to take limited play It's a lot more about constructed what we're a little more forgiving there But it is a general rule when we add a token, especially a common and uncommon, if it's out of the norm, usually we're focusing on it. We're making a whole bunch of it. So you learn that that's in this limited environment, this token is important. Now, another important thing to understand is there is a hard cap on how many tokens we can make.

We have a budget. So when we make a token, we have to get art for that token because whenever we make a token in the set, there's a few exceptions. For example, sometimes when we make copy tokens, we don't always make a token to represent the copy. But usually if we're making a token in which it has a color, it has a power toughness, it has a creature type, we make the paper token that represents that.

Especially, especially, especially if it's common or uncommon. We do try to make all the tokens in the set. But anyway, my point is there is a budget. We have to get art for that. There is a limited number of, I mean, as with any set, there's an art budget. You get allocated so many pieces of art. Okay, well, if because we make tokens

and tokens have to have art, we get allocated so much art for tokens. Now, I've talked about this before. When you make a set, we wanna do double-faced cards. We wanna do punch-out cards. There's things you can do that eat into the budget that need extra money and all sets have some amount of extra money budgeted into them. So you have to go to your product architect.

For example, when we made Embalm, which was the mechanic in Amoncat, where there were creatures that when they died, you can embalm them, basically make a mummy version of them. We made a token for each version of the, creature was involved had a unique token for it because it was making a copy of itself That aid in our budget. We had to go and get special permission to do that and so the idea is Not that we can never exceed our default but it it There's only so many things we can do in any one set so if you're going to push past your normal limits you're eating into sort of the special area

and that doing that might mean you can't do something else. The other thing that we tried to do just for simplicity sake is we try to consolidate our tokens. So for example, if one of the rules is if there is a white 1-1 token, we try very hard, there are reasons sometimes we're not 100% but we try very hard to make it the same token. If we're going to have a 1-1 token, okay what is it here? Let's say okay it's a soldier token or it's a warrior token. You know, usually what we pick will have to do with either a combination of is there a mechanical need like, oh, let's say there's a warrior theme in the set. Okay. Okay. Probably our tokens are warriors just so we can get extra as fan of caring about that type, that creature type. Or maybe there's a flavorful thing.

Oh, in this set, they want to do clerics because clerics matter. Whatever it is, we will pick something and then we'll try to stick to that. Every once in a while, there's a reason for something where they can't be the same, but usually without exception, or with occasional exception, the default is if we have a token

that's locked to a certain size and color, it will be the same creature type for everybody who makes that token. Also, another trick we use sometimes is let's say we're making a 1-1 token, but green really wants its 1-1 to be an elf, right? But this token, the flavor of it, it's not an elf. Sometimes what we'll do is we'll make tokens of other colors. Like let's say the 1-1 is a soldier but the green is an elf. Like we have two 1-1s, one in

green, one in white. And the card we're making in green for flavor reasons really really really can't be an elf for whatever story, whatever. We occasionally will have it make another color. That's one of the ways sometimes we'll lesson on tokens is if this is the only card making something, instead of making tokens own color, when we have existing tokens, sometimes it'll make a token in that color. That's why sometimes we make tokens make things in other colors. The other thing to keep in mind is just overall, because there's only so much art per se, we do try to limit how many tokens we have just in total number. Now the normal thing we've, I mean, when you make a set,

we have a general sort of feel about how many tokens you can have and so normally the rule of thumb is when you first start making the set, just make whatever tokens you want to make, don't worry about it. And then, as you advance, the question you have to ask is, is this token holding its weight and is this token being unique important? Like a lot of times what happens over time is A, will we need tokens that aren't doing their job? Like tokens an extra, a token has extra weight on it. So one of the things if you have a design that has a token on it, the question is how important is that

token? Do you need the token? And that those cards get extra scrutiny because we're extra careful with tokens. And we also, as time goes along, we'll consolidate. Oh, well, we have a 1-1 cleric and a 1-1 soldier. Okay, we don't need both. Which one, you know, can this be a soldier and a cleric? Like I said, sometimes that's a creative issue to solve. Sometimes it's, I mean, mechanically we will say this has to like,

what the creature type is the token is something most often determined by R&D, by the design. Creative, if it doesn't matter what the token is, we have one card making one token, the creative sometimes will decide that for flavor. If the tokens cross between different things Usually that's R&D figuring out what we need it to be mechanically The other thing about when like when making tokens is So sometimes we'll design mechanics around tokens For example a mass is a good example, right? So a mass came about, we were trying to make an army. Originally we were like,

okay we'll just make lots of zombie tokens because it was an undead army. But having a lot of tokens can come up the board. So that's another, I guess, larger thing is while tokens have the added advantage of being an extra resource, that can cause problems. I mean, the reason we like tokens is that it's extra fodder. You can sacrifice it. It helps you go wide. It helps you get the ass fan of something that you need up.

It's giving you extra volume, but that can cause problems. So sometimes, for example, we have to be careful not to get too many tokens Not not because of art budget not because of complexity But just because it can cause problem gameplay so that there's a lot of limitations on it So anyway, we made a mass because we didn't want to make a lot of individual tokens And so we made one singular token And the idea is if it doesn't exist, make the army token. It's a mass N. If it doesn't exist, make an army token, put N plus and plus encounters on it.

If it already exists, just put the plus and plus encounters. So it basically, there's only ever one army. And sometimes what we do, and army is a good example of this, sapling is another example. Sometimes we make things that are unique to tokens. I think sapling was more of a feel thing. Amass was, in order to make the gameplay play the way we wanted, we only wanted you boosting this one thing.

So in order to boost this one thing, we had to give it a creature type that was unique to it. So sometimes tokens, when you're making them, you have to think about what it wants. For example, in making the mercenary token We made sure to make that part of the outlaw batch We wanted to be a singular thing in fact when we first made the mercenary token We in fact didn't think mercenary would be elsewhere on the set later

It turned out once we batched it with outlaw the creative team kind of needed it, so we used it But we do think about when you make the token how you use it Another example is fabricateate, for example, from Kaladesh. We made it either you choose whether the creature comes with so many plus one plus one counters or so many one one, I think they were servos, artifact creatures. And there's a lot of value. Tokens are such a cool resource. We can build mechanics around them. They do a lot of work helping solve problems they

solve the asset problems in strict saving in wilds of Eladrain a lot of times and the other thing I haven't really gotten into is artifact tokens right a lot of times you know we're trying to get a general feel it's the mystery set we have clues it's the pirate a general feel. It's the mystery set. We have clues. It's the pirate set. We have treasure. It's the fairy tale set. We have food. A lot of times tokens can also fill in certain feels.

There's a lot of different things that we can do with them. So it is a very, very valuable tool. Tokens are something that adds a lot But it comes at a cost and it's something we have to monitor. It's something we have to be careful about Unchecked can cause issues, you know wilds of Eldraine definitely for example one of the things we're looking at now is We didn't within booster packs It was hard to get enough cards of auras to represent all the things you were using in gameplay.

We got that note. One of the things we're looking at is how do we do that? How do we make sure? There's a balance. I think tokens do a lot of amazing things, and there's a lot of fun gameplay, and a lot of unique designs that come out of tokens that wouldn't exist without them. I mean, I wouldn't want to have to design the set without tokens.

Not that we can't, but they are such an important tool and a great problem solver. And in general, by the way, tokens are very popular. The Hive, I've talked about like the very first card that had it, was one of the, the Hive is not a strong card, but it was really interesting that early in magic, it was so popular.

It was at the time the only token maker, but also just the idea of tokens from the very beginning excited people. We know people like tokens. We know they're cool. And a lot of the issues of today is we wanna use them, they're valuable design tool, but it's just, we have to be careful

how we use them and when we use them. So anyway guys, I'm now at at work I hope this was an interesting look at sort of how we design tokens but as I'm at work we all know what that means we use the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time bye bye.