Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1167: Ally & Enemy

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

In this podcast, I explore why the color are allies with those next to them in the color pie and enemies with those across.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today's topic. Um, we're talking about the history of ally and enemy There's just it's so Basically in the game is the color pie. Everybody knows it look on the back of your magic card If you somehow don't know this, um, there are five colors in magic Each color has two colors that are next to it don't know this. There are five colors in magic. Each color has two colors that are next to it in the color wheel. Those are its allies. Each color has two enemies. Those are its enemies. I've done endless podcasts. I've

done podcasts on individual colors, on the relationship between all the colors, all that. If you want to hear it, I've done all that you know listen to podcasts about it today, I'm going to talk about sort of The history of how we dealt with al-an-enemy And then get into some philosophy and anyway today is a is a history lesson I Enjoy using this podcast partly to be I consider myself one of the using this podcast partly to be, I consider myself one of the historians of magic, so I like to use podcasts from time to time to walk through some of that. Okay, so Richard Garfield makes Alpha, and from the very beginning he

understands that there are ally and enemy. In Alpha, he makes color hosers. That is, things that punish the enemy colors. Now the only thing, the only punishers that exist, the Punisher cards are, I don't mean punishers is the wrong word, but only the cards, hate cards that exist, are things that sort of, and the idea is, when Richard first starts in Alpha, the philosophy he took was that enemies could use the power of their enemies against themselves. So you have like green countering blue spells and there's weird things going on there. Some of it is in flavor for the color and some of it is a little out of flavor. Like karma is making you lose life for swamps, which is something black would do, which is

not really what white would do. But anyway, there are, in alpha, every color has one card that fights one of its enemies, each of its enemies. So there's two cards per color. So the idea that these colors don't like each other that was conveyed pretty loudly mechanically and that these colors don't like those colors. There was a little bit of allyship not a lot. There's a card called Sedge Troll. So Sedge Troll was a red card that got plus one plus one if you had a black or sorry they give you a swamp and play even a black card or a swamp I'm blinking right now

but anyway the idea was I'm a red card in a red deck hey I worked just fine but in a red black deck I'm stronger there wasn't a cycle of ally that wasn't something like Richard was more mechanically wanted to represent the conflict right oh if you want to fight against this color well you go to one something. Like Richard was more mechanically wanted to represent the conflict, right? Oh, if you want to fight against this color, well, you go to one of the enemies to fight against this color. And so that was so and then and then also an alpha to be fair to Richard. He also made a cycle of dual land, but he made all 10 dual lands and they were all equal to equal power. As you'll see that not always the case, but he made them ten dual lands and they were all equal of equal power as you'll see that not always the case

But he made them of equal like they were all they did the same thing. They weren't different There were no gold cards in alpha we will get there Before the year is out, you know, but there's no gold card. So Very early magic definitely communicates the enemy part Tiny tiny communicates the enemy part, tiny, tiny communicates the ally part. And with the lands, you can sort of see Richard saying, well, I want everyone to have access to all the colors. OK.

Next up is Arabian Nights. So Arabian Nights has Curdape, which, like said, Troll. So it's a red card that says, if I have a forest, I get plus one plus one. So the idea essentially was, I'm stronger, I'm a red card that you can play in a red deck, but I'm stronger in a red green deck. And really what it's saying is, hey, in constructed, I go in a red green deck, much like Sedge Troll says,

I go in a red black deck. Maybe you play them limited, although limited wasn't really a thing I guess at the time Okay, we then get to legends so just for real quickly Alpha comes that let me give you the timeline alpha comes out in the August of 1993 Beta comes out like September Unlimited comes out somewhere near the end of the year, beginning of the next year, depending where you lived. And Arabian Nights comes out either in December or January, once again, depending where you lived.

Then in the spring would be Antiquities, which is the second ever expansion that had an artifact theme to it, so that didn't really mess too much with ally enemy. But then we get to the third set which came out that summer, summer of 1994, which is Legends. And one of the big things about Legends, in fact, Legends introduced two big things to the game. One is Legendary, although in Legends, Legendary creatures, Legend was a creature type, not a super type. On everything else it was a super type. That eventually, it eventually becomes super type for everybody. Anyway, and not only did it introduce legends, legendary things, all the legendary creatures were gold. They were multi-color.

Magic had not done that before. Now I should stress that there were two and three color cards, multi-color cards in Legends. All the two color card were ally combinations. So white, blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, or green, white. And all the three color were what we refer to as arcs or shards.

White, blue, black, blue, black, red, Black, red, green. Red, green, white. And green, white, blue. Those were, so the idea is if you were a two color card, you were ally colors. If you were a three color card, you were a color and it's two allies. So when multi-color first gets introduced, like there is no such thing as an enemy multicolor card. There's no wedges. There's no two-color enemy cards. It just doesn't exist. And I think that the idea at the time was, hey, allies are about working together, enemies are about working against, right? So the idea is if you're going to have gold cards, you would have gold cards that work together.

And once again, the important part of today's podcast is when the game first got made, the idea of ally and enemy was, I think, something like, OK, this is really important. And philosophically, this is really important. And philosophically, it is very important. Like when I, when I talk, when I, there's a, there's a speech I used to give to partners, I call this the special sauce talk. And then I now do what's called a senior seminar, where I started to talk about the color pie in it, I spend time talking about the ally colors and the enemy colors like the Phil cycle relationship between them is important

um and in general you know when we make hoser cards we make cards that hurt other cards most likely if it's color based it's the enemy colors um we don't make a lot of ally and me because and when things help each other, you know, when it helps other colors, more likely to ally colors. But anyway, so we first make multicolored cards and literally zero, zero enemy colored cards or wedge, which is a color and it's two. Okay. The next set is the dark.

So the dark decides to do just three multicolor cards. And so what it does is it makes a black-red card, a red-green card, and a black-green card. The black-green card was in a gem called Dark Heart of the Woods. I was a huge fan of Dark Heart of the Woods. It allowed you to sacrifice lands to gain life. Anyway, I had multiple decks that made use of it. There's a story I tell when I go to the Ice Age pre-release that when I see Xurne Orb for the first time I talk to Chris Page who was one of the designers and I'm like, how did you guys make this card? Isn't this broken? He goes, oh no, it's fine. Xurne Orb will go on to get banned later.

And the reason that I I knew in truth like that I knew that Zurn Orb was over the line was I played so much with Dark Heart of the Woods and it just seemed So much better than Dark Heart of the Woods. Okay. So anyway, the dark Kind of introduces I mean technically has the first enemy color card But it's it's part of sort of a little cycle. It's a one-of. It's very quiet Okay, so here's my trivia question What was the first set how many magic expansions into magic before we print a cycle of enemy colored gold cards? Okay, so already

Or maybe nice is one antiquities is two, legends is three, third set. How many sets in? Well, let's walk through them, see if we get there. Okay. Fourth set is the dark, which has dark heart of the woods. So technically the fourth set has one enemy card. So for trivia buffs out there, the first one would be the fourth set, the dark.

Okay. After the dark, we have fallen empires, no gold cards. the force at the dark. Okay after the dark we have fallen empires, no gold cards. Then after fallen empires we have Ice Age. Ice Age does have gold cards but it doesn't have enemy gold cards it merely has ally gold cards. So that's six. Seven is homelands. I don't think Homelands has any gold cards. Eight is Alliances. Alliances has gold cards, but just ally gold cards. It is not until set number nine, Mirage. So nine expansions in, and Mirage came out I believe in the fall of 96 so we're talking three years into magic's existence three years in before the first cycle of any end I mean the first you know everything but

black-green your first red white first white black like the first cycle shows up there three years in so once again I just want to sort of point out that the there really was this idea that working together was an ally thing. And even in Mirage, there were five ally cycles. So five cycles of ally color. So pick an ally color. So white, blue. There were five white, blue cards, but only two enemy ally cycles. So even though they're finally,

we have a cycle of enemy cards, we finally put them in, they're still at a ratio of five to two, allied enemies, five to two. And once again, the idea here is the thought process at the time was, hey, allies work together. And so, oh, the one thing Ice Age did do, by the way, Ashasa stressed it, not only did they just have ally-colored cards, they made a cycle of dual lands, known as the pain lands, and they only made ally pain lands. So now we're starting to impact how you can build your deck. Like if you were building decks back in the day, in the early Magic, you tended to build with ally colors

because the tools to build with ally colors were stronger. Right? I mean, that's really important to understand that the ally enemy thing was so strong that it kind of worked what you could do. I mean, it's not that you couldn't play enemy colors. Now, the original dual ends did exist.

And once again, I think Richard, it's funny, we would later get to a decision that I think Richard kind of in the beginning had in his head, but didn't really voice clearly, which is the idea that all the colors should be able to be played equally. Anyway, okay so Mirage finally makes some enemy colored cards. Tempest, a year later, is the first set that has enemy colored cards that has an equal number, and now there's only ten total, but that the point is there's one cycle of enemy and one cycle of ally. So we finally print enemy cards

in an equal number to ally cards. That itself, and that's, we're now talking 1997, right? Now we're four years in, and for the first time, enemy is at least treated the same in volume. But the other thing that Tempest does is it has the enemy color pain lens.

They weren't in Ice Age. But rather than just being normal, what a pain lens is, is you tap for colors. And then if you tap for one of the two colors, you take one damage. So early, it took us a while to understand how, I mean, other than Alpha, obviously Richard was very generous with dual ends.

We started to realize that was a little too good and we thought it was way too good. We pulled back. Over the years, we realized we could do a lot more. So we've been a lot more generous. I mean, not quite as generous as original dual ends, but we've gotten more than here. But anyway, Tempest made enemy pain lands, but they came into play tapped which is

significantly worse is significantly worse um So what happens is um? Now we get to the point where we start we realize that we need to make enemy things right we realize that like Okay, there's just designs to be made in enemy things. That's why Mirage made them. Mirage was like, we want to have gold cards. There's cool things we can do with enemy colors.

OK, we should do that. And some of those cards were strong. But one of the interesting mindsets you can see in this early days is there's two things we did with enemy versus ally. Number one is, or enemy there's two things we did with enemy versus ally Number one is or any gold cards is we did it in lower frequency So in general like I said temperatures first time or even printed them in the same number. There's only ten in general in the early days and when I say early days like the first ten years of magic plus um

We always did more out almost always did more ally than enemy. And in general, we tended to make ally a little bit stronger than enemy, especially when you talk about support cards. Lands being the biggest thing. The idea that we will support one over the other. The place that's just kind of of loudest in the early days is invasion block Okay, so invasion block was Bill Rose Bill Rose become head designer. He's like we we're gonna start theming our blocks

That the invasion will be a multicolor block. We're gonna play up multicoloredness will be a multicolor block. We're gonna play up multicoloredness. Okay, but how many enemy cards are in invasion? The large set that's all about multicolor. None! There is none. So what happened is invasion and plane shift have all ally cards. There are no enemy cards. And then Apocalypse, the third set in the block, is all enemy. But once again, a large set is not quite twice a small set, but it's almost twice a small set. So we printed about a 3 to 1 ratio of ally cards to enemy cards. And once again, it's not that we made bad enemy cards, I mean there's good stuff in Apocalypse, but just the ratio of what we made meant there was just

it was a lot easier to play allies. There were just a lot more ally cards. There were a lot more, just more, I mean as a general rule, if you make more of something, there's more better of that just because you know, and we also did things like we would, like we were more likely to make when we made a new cycle dual lands, we tended to start with the ally lands. Eventually, often we print the enemy lands, but it would lag behind time. Now, and the other thing we did, just talk about color hoses for a second, color hoses were a regular thing. Color hoses showed up. For a while, it was a standard thing in the set.

If we made a large set, there were color hoses in it. Like Tempest, for example, has some very, very powerful color hoses. Like Parish is a black card that destroys all green creatures. Eventually, we learned a couple things. We learned to tone down the hosers a little bit, that they were a little bit too strong. They punished too much. And we did start making some ally cards where colors that

helped its allies. And normally, when a card would help another color, it would help one of its allies. And when we did off-color activations, they most often were ally-colored activation. So Magic starts in 1993. So at what point, when do we decide that, you know what, treating ally and enemy they were

in some ways enemies were second-class citizens they got less cards they the they got less support you know and they got hoes they got hosers so like you know they're I mean I guess though is the one the one thing enemies did the allies didn't is enemies got hosers, but it would punish you for playing the colors But anyway, okay, so the game comes out in 1993 when How many years into magic does it take for us to go that is wrong? We shouldn't be doing that. We should treat allied enemy colors the same a

Little quick little trivia for you. OK, how many years? Give me a year. How many years in? The answer is 12 years in. It is not until 2005 with the release of original Ravnica. So what happens is I'm making Ravnica. So Ravnica was the first allied color block. I'm sorry, I keep saying allied, I mean multicolor.

The first multicolor block after Invasion. Invasion did multicolor, like five years, Invasion came out in 2000. Five years later we were doing our second multicolor, it's a very popular theme, we're doing our second multicolor block. Invasion had been really about playing all the colors. Domain was the thing there. It really would just play lots of colors. So I was trying to be a multicolor block that was as

different from Invasion as I could be. So that led me down the path of, OK, well, if Invasion's about play as many colors as you can, Radnic will play as few colors as you can. But it had to be a multicolor block, so as few colors means two colors. And I needed to sort of fill the space, like I sort of decided, and once again, I'm not sure, it's funny looking back, I think in my heart of hearts, I knew that it was wrong that we treated multicolor enemy color differently. So I made a decision I mean very very early on one of the first

things I did is I said okay we're gonna make a two color block and we're gonna treat all color pairs equally. And I sort of like that the funny thing is one of the things that you do early in design is you have to sort of just put some Stakes in the ground to build around right and that was one of the probably the earliest aches It's a multi-color block. It's two color all ten colors are all ten pairs are treated equally And that is that idea that got great dominance who was creative director of the time to come back with the idea of gilts Well, if we have ten two color pairs, let's creatively build around those Let's make those not just a thing in the set but a thing in the world

And I was so excited by guilds and I really leaned into it and then we made the conscious decision to Do the pie method we divvy them up. So it was four three three but once again, and we made the conscious decision, so like original Ravnica, if I remember correctly, was Selesnya, was Boros, was Demir, and was Golgari. So notice, two of them are ally, two of them are enemy. That was very conscious then the first set they had four that we wanted two ally and two enemy. And then the next two sets had one and two ally, one enemy, one and two enemy, one ally, just because that's what was left. But anyway, I think what, I mean, so basically in 2003 is when I became a head designer. Ravnig is my first time, Ravnig is the first block that I was head designer for. I became head designer. Ravnica was my first time. Ravnica was the first block that I was

head designer for. I became head designer in the middle of James Kamigawa block, but that was already in motion. The large set had been done. I mean, I was trying to sort of finish Bill's vision of what Bill wanted. And anyway, Ravnica really ended to be very popular. So obviously, we've been back to Ravnica numerous times. So it became a very popular setting. But the other thing that Ravnica really did was it, in a very loud way, made this transition to the world we live in now, right? Where, like now, when

we make dual lands, one of the things that Play Design is very conscious about is making sure that we've equal representation of dual lands. And usually that means that we do ten card cycles and we try to make sure that all ten will, I mean sometimes five on one set five in the next set, just by the nature of how we do 10 card cycles and we try to make sure that all 10 will, I mean, sometimes five on one set five in the next set just by the nature of how we do dual lands. But the idea is we want environments that have access to roughly an equal amount. Like the, we, Ravnica really was us giving up on this idea that enemy have to be worse in some way. And ironically, I think in some level, when I went back and looked at this and I I kinda look at the original dual lands. It's funny I think Richard had that idea

all along and that we kind of we leaned a little bit too much into enemy and ally. And that the idea that the support for them should be any different. And by support, I mean two things. A, the quality should be equal. And B, the quantity should be equal. You should be making just as many enemy color cards as you make ally color cards.

Now, we do make ally sets and enemy sets. And the other thing that has happened is we have made more ally sets than enemy sets. Part of that interesting thing is, so let me tell the story of Dragons of Tarkir. So the plan, I was aware that we had, because of early matching, because it took 12 years before we decided to treat them equally, enemy colors are kind of at a little

bit of a loss in eternal magic, right? They're a little bit behind, because early magic, just if you can use all of magic, there's more ally cards than enemy. And it's a harder thing to catch up on, because we want in standard to make sure it's balanced. So we don't want to be uneven. So there's other places we can catch up. I know we've definitely done a lean more toward commander of making more enemy things just because there's less out there. But anyway, I'll just give an example of how sometimes you

try to do one something and it doesn't work out. So the plan for Conditurkir block was that we were going to do, it's the world of dragons, and then, sorry, world of no dragons, world of kanz. And then someone goes back in time, Serkan goes back in time, changes the path, and now there's a world of dragons. And we wanted the two sets to be very different from each other

And we as we were designing concept arc here it became clear once once creative wanted five factions We had never done a wedge set before In our in our quest to like do that to even things up I really wanted to do a wedge set because we had never done one so I wanted to make a bunch of wedge cards I thought that was important. And then my plan for Dragon Stark here was to be an enemy color. So I knew that we were a little bit behind on enemy things. So I'm like, oh, we'll do a wedge set. You know, we'll do a wedge set, which we haven't done before. And we'll do another enemy set. We're behind on enemy sets, right? And I was all set to do them. Okay, I'm

going to right the wrong. This block is going to correct the injustice of the past. And then Eric Lauer comes to me and he says, okay, I love, he did the, Eric did the, he led the development for ConsentDarker. I love the wedge, it's great. We need more wedge, it's awesome. He goes, but, he goes, DragDark here can't be enemy. I go, why can't it be enemy?

He goes, look, when you draft a wedge set, the correct way to draft it is you draft the enemy colors. The reason you draft enemy colors in a wedge set is if you draft enemy colors, you then have two options of where to go for three colors if you end up playing three color. If you draft an ally thing, then you're trapped, you only have one option.

There's only one thing you can play. You can only play the wedge that is the ally with its shared enemy But if you draft enemy colors, you have two different options of where to go For example, let's say you draft blue and red Okay, well you can then draft green to go teamer or you can graph white to go just guy You have two options. So he says the problem is if you make dragons enemy it's going to be too similar to tons of contract here tons of here is going to be about drafting enemy so I ended up changing the ally because we were trying

to make it different and so but it's a good example where I wanted to be enemy and end up being ally another interesting case is in unstable I was making a faction set and I my first thought was oh let's lean into enemy enemies a little bit behind but because of what's the name of it the guy that does contraptions a steamflugger boss because of steamflugger boss. Because of steamflugger boss, I knew and because contraption because steamflugger boss is tied to contraptions, I knew that I wanted steamflugger goblins. I really I needed to make a faction which steamflugger boss belong. And the problem is neither red white or blue red worked.

Made sense. It really ended up needing to be red green. And then once I went down red green then it ended up being allied. But like I once again I started with an enemy and I tried to make enemy work and the nature of it didn't work out. So it is tricky, it is hard to catch up because premier sets need to be balanced so that standard is balanced. So it's it's something that maybe in supplemental sets, it's not a tricky thing. We do in commander deck stuff, we've leaned a little bit toward the enemy stuff

to try to make that up. So we understand in Eternal there's a little bit of a gap because when you spend 12 years making a gap and then everything's even, you don't correct that gap. So we're aware of it and it's something we're slowly trying to fix. But it's tricky because we want standard to be even.

So our tools to adjust it aren't the greatest. But I think we're slowly getting there. Anyway, I think the point of today, once again, my history lesson is that the big lesson was, and this was the big turning point, is you want flavor in the game, and flavor is important, the color pie is important, the philosophies are important. But one of the things we realized was that gameplay has to drop flavor. When flavor and gameplay sort of butt heads, that in the end, you gotta let gameplay win out.

And something that I think looking back, Richard got, because of how he made the dual ends, like it's important that you have equal access to all the colors. That I don't, you know, we can make hosiers and things, and there's things we can do that can play up philosophically the conflict between the colors.

We really can't use the conflict between the colors, we really can't use the formation of the game, meaning it's not good for the game to say it's easier to play ally than enemy. Ally is stronger, ally is more plentiful, the resources for ally are better. That just leads to bad gameplay. And so we really have come around on, okay, we can't use quality and quantity to define the difference between ally and enemy. We can use flavor on the cards, we still can do hosiers to a certain extent. When you talk about colors helping other colors outside of something like Ravnica where there's all 10,

we lean a little bit toward the ally helping each other. So I mean there's touches of it, and there's a lot of flavor there. But what we realize is mechanically for the game is just a better game if we play up the ally and enemy things mechanically at a much lower scale. And that a lot of the early philosophies of using that, like strongly representing that through gameplay, just ended up with worse gameplay. So that my friends is the history of ally versus enemy. So I hope you guys enjoyed it, but I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means the end

of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.