Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1241: Making Mechanics

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Inspired by this year's "Nuts & Bolts" column, I walk through how mechanics are created.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means It's time brother drive to work Okay, so recently I did what's called a nuts and bolts column It's something I write in for my column of making magic. I do it once a year And the idea was it's a column dedicated to people trying to make their own magic sets Now for those that don't make their own magic sets, it's a lot of behind, it's like a lot of technical behind the scenes information. And so every year I talk about different aspects.

I've been doing it for 17 years, I think. So if you want to make your own magic set, there's this resource I've made. I spent a lot of years sort of walking step by step and now I'm sort of going back and hitting wider areas I hadn't hit before. So this year's topic, which I thought was, I ended up doing two articles on, was finding your mechanics.

This is something that I get a lot of questions from people who are doing their own sets. And so anyway, today I'm going to sort of go over a lot of the stuff I covered in the column and maybe hit some new things. One I think about the doing it on the podcast is I have a little more time. So sometimes I can hit some, some things that I don't hit in the article itself. So okay. So where do you find your mechanics?

That's the basic essence. And I think there are a couple basic ways. So we're gonna walk through how you can find mechanics. So number one is the idea that you find the mechanics first. That I'm, usually the way you find mechanics is you're just playing a game of magic and something that you want to happen isn't happening. My example for that is when Magic first came out way back in 1993, I bought a whole bunch of cards.

I bought a little bit of Alpha, then when Beta came out, I bought like two boxes of boosters and two boxes of starters, with the idea that I would, I'd have to find friends and I could sell them cards so that I could have people to play with. But very early on, there was nobody to play with. So what I did was I made two decks, a mono green deck, because I had a crawler worm, and a mono blue deck.

The reason they were mono colors, I didn't understand at the time that you could have more than one color in a deck. So anyway, I had two mono color decks and I remember playing against them and my green deck got really annoyed at the blue deck when the blue deck would counter things because there's nothing the green deck could do about them. Like if green had a card and blue countered it, well that's it. There's no answer to blue's counter spells. So I designed and made a card for the very first time, one of the the first cards which was a card that I would later print as Scragnoth

But anyway, the important thing is the I made the ability you can't counter me. I can't be countered I just said, you know Magic is cool and that there's answers to everything. What if there was an answer to counter spells? What if some spells just couldn't be countered? and so was an answer to counter spells? What if some spells just couldn't be countered? And so that is where I think a lot of mechanics can come from, is just play a game of magic and figure out is there something missing that you would like? Is there something that is be a cool thing that you don't see? Another example of this was I used to run the feature matches at the Pro Tours and so I would I would watch a lot of people playing and sometimes

one player would get way far ahead of the other player and it was the match was kinda boring because it was kinda clear that one player was going to win but it was like you know a controller. It was some strategy that wasn't very aggro-y. So it's slow now like okay Player a is gonna be player B, but it's gonna take ten turns So I would come up with special abilities. I would give to the losing player So in my mind I could like sort of walk through what they could do just to mentally entertain myself And one of the abilities I came up with was the ability that there were spells that you could play out of your graveyard

Anyway, that was my inspiration for flashback. That's where flashback came from So sometimes you make mechanics just cause you sort of the nature of playing magic or watching magic or interacting with magic You just come up with cool things. And so sometimes Sometimes you start a magic set because you just have a good idea for a mechanic. Let's say I wanted to make flashback. Um, I could just start going, okay, I want to make flashback. What kind of set does flashback make sense in? So you can start with your mechanic. Um, that is not mostly where we get our mechanics, but, uh,

another good example of this is We came up with the idea for suspend and then also we had come up with split second and We'd also come up with like we just had a bunch of different things that felt time related I think we had wanted to ever we wanted to make a keyword for flash And I saw a bunch of mechanics, like, oh, these could all go together. We could have a time-related set.

So sometimes you have mechanics and they feel like they go together. So that's the first place you can generate mechanics is just kind of organically making them out of playing magic and then recognizing when you see opportunities. For an inspiring game designer, one of the things that's great is sometimes when you see opportunities. For an inspiring game designer, one of the things that's great is,

sometimes when you build a deck, it's a good exercise to say, okay, if I can make any card that would enhance this deck, like I'm making my own, I'm building a deck, okay, I'm gonna allow myself to build two cards. What would I build? And the reason that's really interesting is, it helps you find gaps of things that don't exist.

And Magic is 32 years old. We've made about 29,000 cards. So obviously we've done a lot. We haven't done everything. It's actually kind of surprising how often I'll find things like, oh, we haven't really done that yet. So that's the first thing,

just exploring known space and finding things. But the most common way we find mechanics So that's the first thing, just exploring known space and finding things. But the most common way we find mechanics is by first figuring something out. Like I talk about how you always want to start each design at a new vantage point. And long-term listeners will know, I'm a big believer that the way to be creative is starting from a place you haven't started before. That if you start from the same place you have before, you hit the same neurons in your brain, you go down the same neural pathways, you end up with the same

answers. And if you're trying to get different answers and do new things, we'll just start from a place you never started before. So a lot of mechanics for us start from, okay, we are doing a Gothic horror plane. We are doing, uh, Greek mythology. We're doing Egyptian mythology. You're starting like top-down or not even top-down but just figuring out what your set's about. For example, Zendikar, I recognized that we hadn't done a lot with land themes. I really thought there was space to play

around with land. You know, Mirrodin was playing around with artifacts. Theros was playing around with enchantments. I mean, you can pick a card type you like, or you know, just pick something so you have a focal point to start with. And then you get to do some brainstorming. You know, if you're doing top-down, okay, what do I expect players to want to see in Gothic Horror?

And we quickly got to the idea of monsters matter and the graveyard matters and death matters and transformation matters. And you quickly sort of, as you dig into what your theme is about, you find things. Like double-faced cards came about because we were trying to figure out how to make werewolves work.

And so a lot of times the way you can find your mechanics stems from starting with your theme, you know, starting with, and that can be a top-down theme, it can be a mechanical theme and then just exploring. Like one of the things we do in exploratory design all the time is we just map out the space. Okay, I want to care about, you know, let's I'll use Dragon Storm. I just cause it's at my recording is the most recent set.

I record ahead of time, so I'm not sure if it was that when you hear this. But anyway, the idea is, okay, we're going to go to Tarkir. We want to have dragons. We want to have wedges. And there's five factions we care about. Okay. So the factions all have definition You know, there's a lot of different ways to start crafting your set But then the mechanics come out of I need to serve whatever it is. I got giant dragons. Okay I need a mechanic to put on giant dragons. Well, one of the challenges of dragons is they're expensive

So what can I do? Well, it'd be nice if the dragons had some secondary purpose so that I can put them in my deck, even though I can't cast them a lot of the time. And that's how we got to Omen. You know, a lot of, you know, similarly we got to adventure in Throne of Eldraine because we were trying to capture fairy tales. So whatever it is, you want to sort of figure out what is it you need? What does your set need?

Innistrad, you know, we said, oh, we want to do monsters. Okay, that means typal. Let's do monster typal. And from that we figured out, oh, well, we can make this ally color cycle where, you know, we figured out that we really wanted the zombies in blue and black because it matched the different type of zombies there were.

There's some necromancy, I raised the dead and there's some scientists that I build the dead and black and blue made sense. And then it made sense that the vampires could be black and red and the werewolves were red and green. And then we said, oh, if we do that, humans can be green and white. And then we had white and blue left. Like, oh, that can be ghosts and white. And then we had white and blue laps like, oh, that can be ghosts and spirits. And we sort of filled that in.

And then we wanted death to matter. The morbid mechanic literally just came out of us going, okay, how do we make death matter? Or what if things cared about if something died? And you know, so a lot of the candidates can just be extensions of figuring out what it is you're trying to do. And what I would say when you're doing

in your early exploration, just figure out what do you care about? You know, Theros, for example, early on we decided that we liked the, the feel of the gods was gonna be represented by enchantments, that the gods themselves would be enchantments and that their creations would be enchantments.

And then, you know, and that's a good example, like Theros, I realized by studying the source material that it was very aspirational. That the idea that there's heroes and monsters and gods, and that each one of them gets more powerful with time, and heroes go on journeys, and monsters evolve, and gods sort of grow, and you know, and that we came up with like,

oh, the heroic we came up with like, oh, the heroic mechanic came out of us trying to find a way to play up the idea of heroes. And the other thing that sometimes happens, devotion is a great example, that's where we were trying to figure out how to get the influence of the gods. And we ended up saying, you know what,

there's a mechanic that kind of does this and it didn't quite work exactly. Maybe we could tweak that. You know, we took a mechanic called chroma that I thought was a really cool idea But it kind of landed with a thought and like well, maybe we didn't do it right Maybe we can retweak it. So sometimes finding mechanics is bringing back mechanics. It's not even doing brand new mechanics It's saying you know what? This is a perfect mechanic for this space. Sometimes it's tweaking old mechanics saying, oh, there's something that worked, but there's something about it didn't quite work

or there's a way to take it for the new theme and shift it a little bit. You know, a lot of fun mechanics come about from, you know, like for example, in a Tarkin Dragonstorm, we wanted Timur to care about both spells and large creatures. And we're like, how do you care about spells and large creatures? And then we got this idea of, oh, well, what if we do a flashback variant, but you were allowed to tap your creature to lessen the cost?

And so it was a really neat way, it exactly did that, you know, and that a lot of times you get into mechanics because you give yourself constraints. Now that gets to the next area of where you can find mechanics is as you start building your set what happens is you start making holes. You start making gaps. Like as you start building your set there's things that are missing. And some of those are on the technical side. You need manna smoothing. You know there's things that we know as people who build all the time that you need. But as a general rule, what I would say is, okay, I've made a mechanic that goes on creatures. Okay, maybe you want a mechanic that goes on spells.

Maybe you, you know, sort of figure out what you're not doing, figure out where the gaps are. And a lot of mechanics are filling in the gaps. A classic example of that is we were working on Kaladesh, Rachel Kaladesh, and I knew that, like I literally wrote on the board the things that we needed. We wanted something that dealt with creatures.

We wanted something that had a little bit of flexibility. We wanted to care about either plus one plus one counters or care about tokens. And as we sort of walked through it, I literally on the spot came up with Fabricate just saying, well, okay, we need mechanics as A, B and C, and we sort of pieced it together and then it ended up working, you know.

So also sometimes your mechanics can come about because you're trying to fill gaps in in what your design is and so there's a lot of Neat ideas and a lot of things like but the invention is the mother of necessity is the expression Which means a lot of times as you figure out what you need you can design things that fill that gap and as I said earlier When you start from a different vantage point, you make things you would never make. And starting from here's the restrictions because here's what's left in the set I'm making. Here's the gaps. Here's what we need. You oftentimes come to really interesting ideas that you might not have naturally come to

because you're starting from a different set of parameters and you can make a lot of really cool things. Okay. So, so far I'm just talking about the idea. How do I get the idea for the mechanic? And like I said, there's a bunch of different ways, but once you get the idea, probably for every mechanic that we print, R&D makes 50, 60, 70 mechanics that don't see print, a lot of making good mechanics is making bad mechanics or is making mechanics learning from adapting them. You know, even the mechanics that we do print, you're not seeing the first iteration of that mechanic. You're seeing the 12th, 14th, 18th, 20th, you know, you're seeing us evolving that over

time. So the next thing is once you think you have a mechanic, you need to play test that mechanic. That is really important. We do a lot of what we call theory crafting, which means taking all the knowledge we have of having made magic and sort of thinking through how things will work. But all of that is just thought. All of that is just us making some logical assumptions. In the end, you will not know if your mechanic is any good until you actually play your mechanic.

And so in early vision, in exploratory design and vision design, especially exploratory design, what we like to do is we like to do play tests. So here's how we do it. It's pre-constructed, meaning we bake the decks. Usually you're going to add in the new mechanic that you're testing. It can be anywhere from about four to eight cards. You want enough of it that you see it, but you want so much of it that it dominates. You want it to be a little on the high side so you see it, but not so high that you can gauge it. And other than the new mechanics that you're making, those that you have to make

them, they don't exist yet. You can sort of fill in, we either make 30 card decks or 40 card decks. I recommend 40 card decks because most people have played limited and there's a lot of shorthand that you've learned from playing limited because limited is 40 card. You can build 30 cards. You can play just with 30 cards, we often do. It just requires learning some new metrics and stuff and 40 plays just fine. So the idea is make your new cards and then build a deck that reinforces what you're doing. A lot of the times I would say go to something like foundations, that's just a very simple basic set, core sets are great. The goal is not to build up your deck with really complicated things

because that muddies the message. The goal is to fill it out with much more straightforward, simple things so that your focus isn't seeing on the new mechanic. That if you're trying to learn a new mechanic and you're putting really complex things in your deck, A, you just get a lot of complex interactions and then it muddies the message a little bit.

What you really want to be is, hey, these are nice simple mechanics, or nice simple cards, and so it lets my mechanic shine through. Again, the idea is that you really wanna test the mechanic. Sometimes we'll even start the game where we'll draw six cards instead of seven and have a card with our mechanic

that we just put in our opening hand. I will say early on when you're playtesting, it's not environmental. Keep drawing till you get seven cards that mean something. You're just wasting time to mulligan or play bad games. Once you've balanced the environment, you do wanna play with mulligan, so later in design we will.

We wanna experience how the players are playing. But early on, when you're just trying to see things, none of that matters. You just want to get as many games as possible, you're seeing the things you want to see. And the thing that I would always say is when you play early on, take notes. I would recommend having paper with you and pen and pencil. And as things happen, everything you observe, write down. And I know it sounds silly, but it is really impactful of you writing down things

that matter as they matter, and then being able to go back and look at that. Because after you're done, your memory gets a little bit tainted in a couple of different ways, and that it's very easy to forget first impressions or forget a concern you had. And I take notes write everything down if you're concerned about something or something is weird you don't like a card or if you

really do like a card that's also super valuable if you play a card and you really enjoying the card it's important to mark that you really liked the card and what will happen is as you play test a couple games you'll learn a couple things one is the mechanic fun like a lot games, you'll learn a couple things. One is the mechanic fun. Like a lot of times you'll play and go, oh, it isn't fun. So in Exploratory Design, we have three buckets. Bucket number one is it's good.

I like it. That means in Exploratory Design, we can move on. Exploratory Design is just testing on it. But essentially bucket number one is that's good. You can use it. Bucket number two is that's bad. Get rid of it. But essentially bucket number one is that's good. You can use it. Bucket number two is that's bad. Get rid of it. And it's really really important to learn things and put things in bucket two. Finding out something that's bad is great. Very don't feel bad if you have a play test and it goes horribly wrong.

Those are actually good play tests. You learn a lot from those play tests. The ones that are actually the worst is like it's okay. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. Like it's just you're kind of on it. That's the worst play test. Anyway, bucket three is it's not right, but there's maybe some way to make it better. Maybe you can tweak it. And so you want to figure out when you've done something right, when you've done something wrong or when okay, it's not quite there, but there's something there that's cool and so and there's no mid-game if you need to tweak things tweak things mid-game there's no reason to wait it's not like you have to sort of wait it you know the whole idea here is you want to process things as fast

as you can you're trying to learn if you start playing a card and right away you realize it's wrong it's too cheap or it does the wrong thing. Just change it on the fly. We do that all the time. And then what will happen is you'll figure out whether or not you like the mechanic or not and more importantly you want to figure out why. If you like it, why do you like it? What is fun about it? Where is what I call the fun center?

What about the mechanic makes you excited? And the other thing you'll find is, let's say you're testing a new mechanic and you make six cards. No one's saying if the mechanic is good that all six cards are good. Like one thing you might recognize is, wow, I like the mechanic and I like these two cards,

but these four cards are not as good as these two cards. Well, why are these two cards better? And what you'll find is not every mechanic shines in every execution. That there's things the mechanic does where it's better than other places and you want to figure out what those are. So what you want to do is play, get the information, and then normally you want to tweak. Normally it doesn't take much more than one play test to get information to tweak things. Sometimes it takes more than one.

I mean, once again, I do this all the time, so maybe it'll take you multiple games, I guess. Play as many games as you need to figure it out. And it's also good to play test at some point. Early early on, you just be you and the few people that are making the set. Later on, you want to start playing with other people just to get some first impressions. You don't need outside people when you're doing the early, early stuff

because you haven't even figured it out yet. But then playtest, playtest once or two, three times, start to figure some things out and then make changes. Maybe completely get rid of the mechanic if it sucked. If you really liked the mechanic, maybe understand what about it. Maybe try to figure out which cards were the great cards and make some more cards that lean into what you liked about the cards that you enjoyed.

If the mechanic is sort of iffy, can you tweak it? Wow. How would you tweak it? Like what are you learning about, you know, oh, well, I don't really like when this does that or this we did mechanic in a certain way, but you know what is much better if we do this other way and that a lot of um a lot of important design work early on comes from understanding how the mechanic shines and how the mechanic is best um try to have a good example of this the like for example um when we were first working on landfall, we tried a lot of different mechanics.

We eventually get to landfall. We're like, oh, being recorded on lands is cool. And then what we found was that one of the neat interactions from playing landfall was sometimes you didn't play a land when you could, right? That normal magic, you kinda, other than maybe bluffing at the end, where like, I only have one card and it's a land, maybe I hold onto it to make my opponent think it's something.

But other than that, pretty much any land, play a land, right? It's mostly advantageous to go up and land. But when we were playing with Zendikar, there's a neat thing that happened, which is I could play a land, I go, oh, I don't want to play a land. And the things that were real fun is having situational effects where you don't just want it every turn, you want to sort of wait or build up or do something where you can maximize what it is.

The other thing, by the way, as you start cementing your mechanics, you will then start building around them. You know, as we started figuring out what made for fun landfall, it then said, oh, well, there's certain types of cards, you know, your mechanics, as you start giving them space, will start dictating things around them. And I do say you want to get your one or two main mechanics in the set early because you're going to want to make those mechanics shine. And part of making them and doing the work early on is understanding what they need to do,

you know, and that a lot of times you're, you're going to have some major themes that are going to warp your set. We'll make sure that your major themes are leaning into what your mechanics are Like I said, sometimes your mechanics come from your themes Sometimes your themes come from your mechanics, but there needs to be a really tight mesh between your themes and your mechanics So like you want the audience to feel like of course this theme that mechanic had to go together That they don't even know which came first. Like if we're doing our job, you don't know the order by which we do things. It's top down, bottom up. You don't necessarily know because we made it seem so organic that, well, it could have been either way. The other thing, by the way, if you make a mechanic, so the other big question is

how much space should mechanic fill? How big is mechanic supposed to be? What is your design space? So the thing I say is once you know you want mechanic, once you say, okay, we've done some play testing, I have some confidence in this, one of the passes that I like to do is to just design everything I could possibly imagine. Just design, design, design, design, design. Just make lots and lots of mechanics. Make common cards, make uncommon cards, make rare cards, make mythic rare cards. Just design, sort of push the boundaries of what you can do. And one of the things I recommend is go to something like foundations and just go through common and go okay what are all the effects. Now I did a there's an

article I've done twice now called the Mechanical Color Pie where I walk through all the different basic effects. You can use that. Just make a lot of cards with a lot of different effects. And the reason is one of the ways to really see the limitations of your mechanic is to understand where you can design where you can't. And so what I explained in the article is there's a bunch of parameters to look at. Number one, can your mechanic go on all car types? If not, what car types can it go on? Can it go in all colors? If not, what colors can it go in? Can it go in all rarities? If not, what rarities can it go?

Understanding and this is an important part of being a game designer is a magic game designer is understanding what do each of the car types do? What do each of the colors do? What do each of the rarities do? Because what you want to do is if you understand the basics of sort of what each of those are as you're making cards, you'll start to see your boundaries. That the reason I like the vast exploration. Now one of the things is as you do it more, I've been doing this a long time, I can start to figure out the limitations without having to make all the cards because I can start making some of the cards and I can extrapolate. But that just comes from years of experience. If you're new or don't have

those years of experience, yeah, just make as many cards as you can. And then you can playtest those cards as well. And what you will find is as you start to design cards, you'll start to see where you get into trouble and what you will find essentially is there's only so many cards you can make with any one mechanic there's a limitation you'll run into and it's not once again it's not just a matter of how many can make in total it's how many can you make that can go in the same set yeah maybe there's four different versions of a direct damage spell you can make but you're not gonna put all of them in your set so the other question is which ones are shining and where do you want them to be?

And the other thing is as you start finding limitations, that is going to start showing you holes in your set, which then you will fill with other things. Oh, I like my mechanic, but it only goes on creatures and it's combat oriented. Great, you know, build the set and make all the combat stuff you want, but oh, I'm really missing a spell mechanic. I'm missing a mana sync mechanic. I'm missing things that the mechanic I do have isn't servicing, and that is how you're going to find the other things to go in. The other thing, and I explain this in the article, is once you have a sense of how big your set is, you want to do what we call figure out your Asfan. In the article, I'm not going to do it here just because it's very technical,

but the idea essentially is what an As, it stands for Asfan, it means if I open up a booster pack, how many cards would I have of that subset of things? An Asfan of one means in the average booster pack, I would have one card that did that. You can look and I recommend taking figuring out so whenever you're making a mechanic get a database that you like figure out mechanics that are similar to your mechanic and then look at their ASFAN look at how they get used that part of designing magic is making use of the 32 years of magic already designed. Like I said, we have 29,000 cards. So if you don't know how to build something, odds are we've built it,

go look at how we did it, and then you can extrapolate. Now, the closer you are to what we've done, the easier it is to extrapolate. The newer you're doing something brand new, the harder it is to extrapolate. But odds are early in your design career, you're more likely to design things close to what we've done than far away. It's a lot harder designing stuff that you've never made, we've never made before. But early designers, that's not where they tend to go.

They tend to extrapolate things and do tweaks, unknown things. And that just, you know, make sure you're looking at what we've already done to do that. And it's a, once you figure out your assfan, find the mechanic like you figure out it is Asfan. Probably the Asfan wants to be similar and that it just starts to tell you about how much space. So really figuring out the space of mechanic is how many cards can I make and how many cards do I want to make and how filled they want the set to be.

As a general rule, people tend to put in more mechanics than they should. People tend to over-index on their mechanic, newer designers especially. So one of the things to do as you start playing, it's okay to overplay it a little bit so you can see it, but then you've got to start pulling it back and figure out where you need to be. The other advice I give to people is if you're trying to make a change, it's easier sometimes to go far in the other direction. In fact, there was a guy named Warren Wyman who used to be in charge of security at Wizards.

And I remember he was talking to R&D at one point, and he talked about how he used to be in the army, and he would fire mortars. And the idea when you're firing mortars is you have to figure out the target. So what he said is, if you are short, the next time you fire, make sure you're long, that you'll figure a lot out by being on the opposite side.

And that's the same kind of thing. If you think your mechanic is too shy, you don't have enough, make too much. If you think you have too much, make a little less. And keep trying out in your set where the best way to figure out the sweet spot is to be both too low and too high that gives you information to help gauge where it wants to be. Anyway, we're out of 30 minutes. So like I said, that a lot of making mechanics is taking the time and energy to work through

them, to understand them, to play test them. And there's a lot of iterations. No mechanic, it's not like we make a mechanic and we're done. Most mechanics that we make, we play test and it goes through 20 iterations. It goes through lots of iterations and that what you will find the more you play it, the more you'll figure out what works and doesn't work and the better it will be. Especially if you're an early designer, like I do this all the time. So I have a lot of short hands. I have a lot of things that I've learned because I've been doing it for 30 years,

almost 30 years. But if you're new to this, it'll take time. You know, it's fine that, you know, part of making a magic set, you're in no rush. You don't have a deadline you have to meet. You don't have a set that's got to come out at a certain time. And so take the time and energy. Eventually, once you're happy with your mechanics, you do want to start testing them with people that aren't you, and probably people that aren't on your design team, so that you can get outside magic players opinions on things. Once again, listen to their complaints.

Their solutions might not be the right solution, but usually their complaints are hitting on something. If they don't like something, there's something about it that needs to be addressed how they would address it is not always the correct way to address it but they are at least correct and there's something about this it doesn't feel right to me okay guys that is my talk on making mechanics but I am at work now so you all know that means means the end of my drive to work so instead of talking

magic it's time for me to make in magic I'll see you all next time bye bye