Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1149: Exile

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In this podcast, I talk all about the history and design surrounding the exile zone.

I'm pulling away from the curb, I dropped my son off the college. We all know what that means. It's time for my drive to work. Okay. So today is all about the exile zone. Who exciting. Okay. So first, I'm going to talk about the history of the exile zone. Then I'm going to talk about how we use it in design.

It is a zone. So there's a lot of talk of how we use it and what we do with it and what are dangers of it and stuff like that. We'll get to all that today. So first, let's get into the history of it. So when the game began way back in alpha, Richard Garfield actually included the concept of exile, not the word exile,

that wouldn't happen for a while, but the concept of exile showed up on two cards in Alpha. One card was swords to plowshares, so the flavor of swords to plowshares is they make a creature give up, they're fighting ways, they just want peace. They just wanna go off and become a farmer. Leave them be. They don't wanna fight anymore. And the other card was Disintegrate. So Disintegrate was a direct damage spell,

but so powerful that it just eradicated every ounce of them. And in Alpha, there were cards like Animate Dead and Raise Dead, meaning just cause you die didn't mean that your journey was over, that the game could still involve you. But Richard with Swords of Plowshares and Disintegrate, he really wanted to say like, when you left for Swords of Plowshares, it wasn't that you were, you weren't dead, didn't make sense to animate you you had just gone off you lost the will to fight and disintegrate the idea there's nothing left to you how do you reanimate you there's nothing left of you so richard came up the idea of what he what at the time he called removed from the game so okay i will you're gone but not the graveyard isn't gone enough the graveyard is still sort of part of the game if you go, the graveyard isn't gone enough.

The graveyard is still sort of part of the game. If you go to the graveyard, there are cars that can get you out of the graveyard. And Richard really wanted something that's sort of like, once you're gone, this is like real gone. It's like, I think one point was referred to as a graveyard for the graveyard. It's like there's dead and then there's dead dead. And Richard wanted dead dead.

Richard wanted you to be gone. Now for many, many years, and a lot of the time I'm talking about, we were referred to as removed from the game. Eventually in Magic 2010, we said we were looking at terminology. It's when we named the play area, the battlefield for example.

One of the problems with removed from the game is that there are reasons that you will go to the exile and come back from the exile. And I'll get into that in a minute, but the idea of removed from the game wasn't quite right. There were things that were removed from the game. They weren't really removed from the game. Like they showed back up in the game.

I'll get into some of the ways we use exile, but anyway, it just wasn't the right term. It was a confusing term. And so we changed it. We also shortened it, removed from the game was many words, exile is one word. So in Magic 2010, we shortened it. So I'm gonna referring to it as exile,

even though a lot of the history I'll talk about, it wasn't yet exile at the time but just for ease of talking about it. Okay so Alpha had two cards so then we get to Arabian Nights. So Arabian Nights had a card called Oubliette. Now I will state at the time Oubliette was the idea of putting you in prison. And so I needed you to leave the game, but if you got rid of the Oubliette, you came back to the game. So you weren't dead, you weren't in the graveyard, but you were somewhere, but you weren't on the battlefield, where were you? Now, years later, I will get to phasing soon. Oubliat now technically phases,

and as I will explain, phasing actually doesn't use the exile zone anymore, although it did once upon a time. But we will get there. Okay, but the important thing of Oubliat is this idea that the game could say, I'm going to remove you temporarily. Antiquities would also have a card called Taunus's Coffin that had something similar. You got stuck in the coffin and while you're in the coffin you're kind of not there but you could come back from the coffin. Okay then we get to Legends. Legends has a card called Knowledge Vault where you get card you sort of take cards from the top of your library, and you have to put them somewhere,

because the idea is you're making kind of a second little mini library. So, as you can see, Oubliat, Felton's Cane, Knowledge Vault, the idea that I needed something that isn't the battlefield, and isn't my hand, and isn't the graveyard, starts popping up. That there's effects we wanna do, we want things to sit somewhere,

but where exactly can they sit? In the dark, for example, there's a card called City of Shadows. So City of Shadows was a land, and it cared about, it started, you had the ability to exile things with it and then you started caring about what had been exiled. And the reason you didn't want to put it in the graveyard is you had to track it, right? I had to care, you could sacrifice things with the City of Traders and then it mattered what you sacrificed with it.

So you needed an ability to track that. And if you just put it in the graveyard, it'd be harder to track, because how do you know which creature in the graveyard went to City of Traders? But if you exile it, one of the things we discovered is, once something's exiled, once it's not in the graveyard, you don't have to worry about it being in the graveyard. In some level, it just goes off wherever.

But for a practical purpose, you could sort of stick it underneath the card. Like, because it's not underneath the card, like because it's not in the graveyard and especially early game where you had it, like the graveyard had an order, we stopped doing that pretty soon. But XL is kind of nice because you can put things wherever you want to put them and they don't have to be in a set, one of the other zones. Okay, Fallen Empires is a card called Night Soil. Night Soil allows you to

use your graveyard as a resource. You could take cards out of your graveyard. Okay, that's cool. It's neat to use the graveyard as a resource, but what do we do with that? Where do we put them? If they're not in the graveyard, they're not in play, they don't go back in my hand, they don't go in my library. You just see this idea that, okay, there's just this value to having this extra place. And one of the things you start realizing is that you don't need a lot of different places. And so the idea that we need a holding zone,

we realize that exile, beside being the place that things are banished to, that go away and don't come back, they also could be a holding zone. Another example of that is in Ice Age, there's a card called Icy Prison, and the idea of Icy Prison is you you take a creature and you make it remove it while it's in the Icy Prison, but if the Icy Prison gets removed it comes back. Now this is a blue card, we later would put this ability in white, what we now call the oblivion ring effect.

It's a staple white ability. And one of the reasons why, so one of the reasons that it's very valuable is sometimes the flavor is, I'm not killing you. I'm putting you in jail, for example, or I'm sending you away. I'm doing something which I'm not killing you. So it's really weird when the graveyard cut represents death, that the graveyard is where you away. I'm doing something which I'm not killing you. So it's really weird when the graveyard cut represents death That the graveyard is where you go So some of the time it's just we want to not kill you some of the times we need a holding spot for you

For example Alliances has a cycle of pitch cards like like force the wills the famous one Where the idea is that you could take a card and you can remove it from the game You know exile it. Instead of, it's, so Force of Will is instead of spending the mana, you can exile a blue card in your hand and pay one life and you can counter a spell. And once again, just like we wanted to use the graveyard as a resource, if, if the idea was I just discarded the card, there's a lot of cards that are valuable in your graveyard. And so we wanted it to be

a real cost. So it becomes exile. Okay. Which brings us to Mirage. So up until this point, mostly we'd using exile as a means to do card by card issues. There's some cards that remove you and they don't want to send you to the graveyard. There's some cards that remove you, they don't want to send you to the graveyard. There's some cards that temporarily remove you. There's some cards that like need something like cards to the library. Like there's a lot of one by one uses. But in Mirage, there's a mechanic called phasing.

So the way phasing worked was if you had phasing, it was an ability, every other turn you were sort of out of the game. So let's say I had phasing and it always happened in the beginning of your turn. So I would play the creature beginning of my next turn or during upkeep I think, it would phase out, meaning it would go away.

And then on the following turn it would phase in. And the idea of phasing creatures was that you had them half the time. So they were a lot cheaper than normal. Sandbar crocodile was like a 6.6. It cost like four mana. It just cost a lot less than it normally would because you only got it half the time. And while we were messing around with phasing, one of the things that I really got into was using phasing as a means to save your creature. Oh, it's about to die?

Well, I could phase it out and phase it out, that means it goes away and then it comes back. And that phasing out proved to be very valuable. It was definitely something that was quite useful. There was frenetic of Freit, for example, that was a tournament card. And there were other cards, the idea of just phasing as a means that getting rid of you wasn't every other turn,

that kind of phasing proved to be not super useful. But the idea of phasing as a means to get rid of you for a turn and then come back did prove to be quite useful. And that finally we have a mechanic that says okay. I need to be somewhere else now interestingly Phasing we would later change how phasing works one of the things about phasing was when you phase out you don't lose your stuff If you have enchantments or equipment or counters, you don't lose that stuff. And when we removed you from the game, the rules of removing you from the game got rid

of that stuff. So eventually what Phasing did is we said, okay, we're not going to remove you from the battlefield. We're just going to treat you like you're not there. So Phasing now no longer uses exile. But it, us messing around with phasing definitely got us to explore more things we could do. For example, in Urza's Destiny, I made a card called Flicker. So Flicker was me responding to some of the stuff we had done with phasing.

Now with phasing, when you phase out, you don't lose your enchantments, you don't lose your auras, your equipment, your counters, but you also don't trigger, when you come back, you don't trigger enter the battlefield effects, which I thought was really cool. I thought, like, it made me sad that phasing didn't do that So I said okay, and so I ended up in Ursus destiny. I think it was a vertical cycle It ended up development ended up knocking it down to a single card, which they put it rare called flicker Originally there was a common and uncommon in a rare version of it and what ended up going at rare was the common version but the idea is I could send you away temporarily and there's two versions of flickering there is till end of turn

flickering so you go away come back and end of turn and there's what we call instant flickering which is you go away and come right back the cool thing about flickering it has a lot of utility to it. It'll re-trigger, enter the battlefield effects, or enters effects as it will be soon. It triggers, it affects that triggers when you leave. It could save your creature if you have negative counters on it. It refreshes your creature to its basic state so let's say you have a creature that comes with a certain number of counters and you can use up the counters well if you flicker

it you can reset the counters for example or if somebody got minus one minus one counters on you you could flicker and get rid of them flickering ended up being so useful that it's become just an evergreen ability that we use in most sets. The only reason we might not use it in a set is every once in a while stuff like Morph, it's very good with stuff like Morph. Sometimes if we're in a set where Exile is very efficient with it, we either use less or more careful with it.

Every once in a while we won't use it. That's the only reason we like flickering. Flickering has proven to be very interactive and there's a lot of fun things you can do with it. Players enjoy it and so it definitely is one of our regular go-tos because it's a pretty fun mechanic. Okay then we get to Tor to torment our next mechanic that needed Exile so in torment we made a mechanical madness so the idea of madness is If I discard this card I can pay a cost to cast it

Now the challenge was basically the idea was okay when you're, when you're discarding, you can cast this, but there wasn't, how were you casting it? And what it turned out to be is, oh, well, if, if when you discard a card with madness, what happens is it exiles it for the turn and you can cast it from exile using the madness costs and that's a good example where sometimes Excel gets used just because we there are things that are hard to do in certain zones that we could we sort of set up exile like to be to be a place from them where you can cast things. Now one of the rules which

I'll get into but I guess I'll get into now. Xcel has two different functions, two main functions. One function is as a removal zone like I need to get rid of things you know and I don't want you coming back I don't want you reanimating I don't want you bringing back. I don't want you reanimating. I don't want you bringing back Like it's sort of a graveyard that is a permanent graveyard because the actual graveyard there's so many effects effects to interact with it. It's far from permanent and sometimes just as a a Balanced thing. It's like you know what I don't want people getting this back

Like for example, I mean we didn't do it in this one but like one of the mistakes of the carbon mineslaver from Mirrodin was you can recurse it and like if we had just exiled it, we could have kept that from happening. So sometimes we use exile as a safety valve because we don't want you getting it back. But we also like using exile as a holding zone where things can go there for a while. Like madness for example. It's nice that it can go there and you can cast it from there.

But the challenge is we still want it to be the holding zone. I'm sorry. We still want it to be the permanent removal. And so we want to be really careful. We occasionally make cards that get things out of exile. I'm not a fan. I really don't like them. I do what I can to stop them. I've not stopped all of them. Although usually right now when we do it is very, very narrow. Like sometimes it's getting back like flashback or something. Because you have to, though flashbacks, another good example. Oh, I didn't talk about flashback.

Flashback actually was an Odyssey. So flashback was a mechanic where it went into the sorceries, they went to your graveyard, and then you could cast them out of your graveyard. But if we just left them in the graveyard, well then you could just keep casting. It'd be more buyback than flashback. And so we needed, once again,

we needed a place for them to then go away. So exile is a perfect example where I cast it, goes to the graveyard, I cast it, and now it goes in exile so that you can't do it. And that's why, because flashback gets used, the second use goes to exile. That's why we made a card to get back, specifically flashback things from exile.

But it is a hard line and we want to make sure that exile like we've talked about should there be two different zones should they be gone forever zone not be the same as the limbo zone you know the holding zone and the answer was well it's been working pretty well sort of the rule is the only thing that should get you back from exile is the card that puts you there Meaning if a card puts you in exile that card can get it back So if I oblivion ring you it was okay getting rid of the oblivion and believe in can bring it back or there's some effects Like I'll get to that they put there temporarily but the idea is that

if Only if you're being used at the holding zone should you be able to get it back? There are a few exceptions there, but we once again, I will get to some of these exceptions, but we need to be very careful Okay next up was Where is it Meriden So Meriden we came up this cool idea. We actually originally had a couple of individual cards. I made a card called Clone Machine, where you took a creature card from your hand. It's an artifact that when you play it,

you took a creature card from your hand, you exiled it. And then that artifact could make copies of the creature. And then Brian Tinsman made a separate mechanic. I think it was an equipment that you put that you exiled something and then every time oh Yes equipment every time you hit them it did a spell from what it was But anyway, I realized that Brian spell and my spell kind of used the same Technology, which is what if you can exile a card from different places and then another card cared about quality to that card. Not just that it went away, but like what kind of creatures are it?

What kind of spell is it? That it could sort of care about it in a very exacting way and use exile as sort of a means to create things. We call it mechanic imprint. And then the neat thing about imprint is every time you use imprint, so clone machine became soul foundry. So the idea is when I make soul foundry, each time I'm making a brand new soul foundry and what it copies, now maybe my deck wants to do the same thing every time it could do that, or maybe my deck has different creatures and depending on what I draw. And different people will do different things with it because it's whatever

Spell you put into it. It's very flexible and it's another example where using as a holding place has been quite popular and because it's not in the graveyard because you've Removed it you can just sort of stick it underneath the card that uses it So if you have a soul foundry, you can just stick the creature underneath it and it's a reminder of what you have you have a Soul Foundry you can stick the creature underneath it and it's a reminder of what you have. And what we have found over the years is there definitely is other opportunities. In Throne of Eldraine we came up with the Adventure Mechanic. The Adventure Mechanic was, okay we have in Throne of Eldraine they were creatures, we've

done other permanent sins then, but okay I have a creature but I also have a spell how do I have a creature that's also a spell and like well well what if in your hand you can cast it either as the spell or the creature but if you cast it as the spell you exile the creature and then you can cast the creature from exile so the idea was ex like using the holding zone allowed us to make a card where you had options where you could play multiple things. In call time for example we had Fortel. We had this idea of one of the big things in Norse mythology is the idea of omens from the future and I'm predicting the future and so the Fortel mechanic you could take cards that had the Fortel mechanic on it place it face down cost two to place it face down so all Fortel cards cost the same, and then I could cast it from Fortel

for its Fortel cost, which often was less than it would be. And so it allowed me to sort of spend some mana to set it up, and my opponent knew I was Fortelling something, but it's face down, they didn't know what it was. And then what else? In Outlaws of Thunder Junction we had plot that's face up but the idea is I can basically pay for a spell now but use it later. So the exile, there's a lot of really interesting and valuable use of exile. Like I said, it allows you to remove things. It allows you to eat things as a cost. And in a way that's a little more permanent, like you can eat things out of the graveyard. You eat things out of your hand in a way that you don't get the resource out of the graveyard. It can be something that allows it could be a place to cast things like madness.

It can be a holding zone for imprint and stuff like that. So it's been super useful. But so the challenge is so all the way back in Unhinged, I was recognizing even back then that the exile zone, which really started as this, hey, it's gone, started acting a little bit like a second graveyard. So much so that I made fun of it. There's a card called AWOL in Unhinged, and it basically removes a creature, but it removes it, it's like removed from the freaking game forever zone, like it's actually gone.

It's gone, gone, it can't come back. No way to get it back there's no you know that what definitely happens is that I get it there's a lot of utility there's excitement of wanting to go get exile and we're always looking for new things and you know and like hey would you like to get things back from exile I'm like you would but there's a reason it's in exile, you know. And we, so we definitely, so let me walk through some of the areas where we started messing in this area. We made a cycle of, called wishes in judgment. The way the wishes worked is you

got cards you owned from outside the game. Now, when we made wishes. I don't think we allowed you to get things from exile But we made a ruling not too long after that said well it gets things out of the game Exiles removed from the game and we let you get things that were exiled which I think was a mistake in retrospect, but Then in battle for Zendikar, you were fighting the Andrazi that are super weird, so we had what we call processors, so the processors would exile things, and then we had what was the mechanic called? It was called ingest. So the ingest mechanic allowed you to eat things in your opponent's exile zone. Eating them meant they went to their What was the mechanic called? It was called ingest. So the ingest mechanic allowed you to eat things

in your opponent's exile zone. Eating them meant they went to their graveyard. That's because it had to go somewhere. If I eat it out of your exile zone, where does it go? So there's no, even though AWOL exists, there's no actual super forever gone zone. So we put it in the graveyard. The one thing that made me feel better,

although I'm not a huge fan of it, was you don't control it. So if I exile something as a safety measure, at least I cannot ingest it. Like I choose whether I ingest it or not because it's my opponent's stuff. So if you have something dangerous that I just really don't want you having access to again, I cannot ingest it. Where you the player who owns the item don't have the ability to get it back. And like I said, I do get the excitement of messing with the exile zone. The designer in me sees potential. I see what you can do with it.

But one of the reasons I really try to tow the line is you have to understand the purpose of what you're doing. And Excel has an important purpose and if you sort of bleed away the safety of it It really like we then don't have answered You know I'm saying like we made this mistake with mind slaver But I was gonna do mind slaver again or make effect like mind slaver or something in it that I need the ability to say Hey, once you use it, for example nowadays most I need the ability to say, hey, once you use it, for example, nowadays, most, um, extra

turn effects, we exile the reason why, well, it turns out if you can, you know, recurse a time walk effect, an extra turn effect, well, then the game doesn't end. I mean, or the game for you does it like you just take infinite turns. So it's something we now do most of the time. If you take an extra turn, we have an exile itself. Like that's an important tool and so as you know one of the big things that you learn when your head designer is There there are areas you should push in areas you shouldn't push and I'll use my house metaphor

Which I like to use because building sets is like building a house Let's say I want to redecorate. Some walls you can tear down, it's okay. You can tear down the wall. The wall's decorative. But some walls are load-bearing, and you don't want to knock down load-bearing walls. You don't want to knock down a wall and the house collapses because it was a thing holding it up.

There are rules in the game that are load- load bearing rules. Exile being one of them. The color pie. There's things that are very, very important that hold an important structure to the game. And there's this desire when you're experimenting, when you're blue sky and when you're coming up with stuff we haven't done before, you want to push in areas that we haven't done. Some areas are fine. We haven't done it because we hadn't thought of it or just haven't done it. But some areas we haven't pushed in because we're not supposed to push in areas that we haven't done Some areas are fine. We haven't done because we hadn't thought of it We just haven't done it But some areas we haven't pushed in because we're not supposed to push in those areas that those areas serve important function And we don't want to dilute those and that's why we have the console colors. That's why we have play design

That's why there's a lot of things that we have in place to make sure that we're not eroding things that are important and the exile zone It is so attractive from a game design standpoint And we've definitely nibbled around the edges and I I'm constantly vigilant to make sure that we're careful You know, there's just things that you there are things that matter because the nature of what they are important that said the nature of what they are important. That said, exile is super valuable to us. The idea, all the different things I talked about are, and even more, like one of the things about exile is

sometimes we come up with new things and new abilities and exile, you know, like madness was a great example where we were trying to do something. It's like, okay, how do we do this? The rules don't quite work. We wanna cast it, but it can't be in your hand and the graveyard doesn't make sense. And like exile was just the answer, right? Exile, it is a very valuable tool. And the reason we labeled it was we do use it quite a bit. One of the notes we get from players is

sometimes we're a little over, like the problem with exile is there's not a lot of answers to exile if you kill my creature I can get it back I can reanimate it if you exile my creature I don't have that ability so just as it's a safety valve we have to be careful how often we use it and one of the dangers is when there is a graveyard set when things in the graveyard matter or there's like indestructibility, we're doing gods that are indestructible. Like there's certain things where exile is a tool to help avoid running into problems, but into itself, if you exhale too much, that self can cause problems and we're aware of that.

And so I definitely get the note sometimes. So white is primary and exiling, black is secondary. Any color can exile, I think red is the third, but any color can exile things, depending on what you're doing and how you're doing it. If you're eating things out of the grave, you're going to exile. If you're flashbacking, you're exile. There's certain things that you're just going to exile.

That's how it works. But I do understand that we have to be careful. It's nice that exile gets around things. You know, if I'm indestructible, you can be exiled. Um, you know, if there's creatures that come back, you know, there's creatures that keep returning from the graveyard. How do you answer those? I like that exile exists as an answer for some of that stuff, but I, I meant we need

to be careful and, um, sometimes I think we exile cause it's a little cleaner in what we're doing, but there are environments where it's really hard to make things stick around because there aren't good answers to exile. And it is when we over index on exiling that there's this pressure from the audience to have answers to exile, which itself causes problems. So it's something we, it's a good note for us that we need to be careful when and how much we use exiling. It is something we can fall prey to a little bit when it's the easy, it's a good note for us that we need to be careful when and how much we use exiling. It is something we can fall prey to a little bit when it's the easy answer to one of our

problems and I get that. But anyway, I hope you guys appreciated sort of seeing all the, all the things that exile is and can be. I do love the exile zone. There's a lot of fun things like flickering is one of my favorite effects. I do a little flickering. There's a lot of fun things. Like flickering is one of my favorite effects. I do love flickering. There's a lot of fun things. I like imprint.

I mean, I like flashback. There's lots of uses that are, a lot of my favorite things make use of the XL zone. So I do think it's a valuable thing. I do think it's great that we have the tools to keep it from abusing things, to answer things. All that is great. But I admit, I understand,

we have to be careful how often we use it. And I will tell you I will be ever vigilant trying to keep people from turning the exile zone into a second graveyard. But anyway guys, I'm now at work so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. But I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.