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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#1010: Mana Value

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Games, Magic The Gathering, Leisure, Game Design, Mtg, Ccg, Mark Rosewater

4.8743 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this podcast, I talk about how this concept came about and how we design for it.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm playing my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to have their drive to work.

0:05.0

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about manna value. Exciting.

0:11.0

Okay, so first, for those that might not know at the top of their head, what a manna value is, let me explain.

0:16.0

Okay, so let's say you have a grizzly bear.

0:18.0

A grizzly bear costs one generic mana and one green mana for a two-two creature.

0:22.6

The mana cost of the creature is one generic and one green.

0:26.6

The manna value is two.

0:29.6

So what manna value means is you count up all the mana in it,

0:33.6

the amount of mana, and it's a number equal to the amount of mana you have to spend

0:38.2

for it, but converting everything to a singular number. So if a spell costs three in a blue,

0:44.7

that's a manor value of four. If it costs four red red, that's a manor value of six. It's just

0:51.4

the number of mana you have to pay. So manna value as a concept actually goes

0:58.1

back to the very beginning of the game. There were three cards in Alpha, animate artifact,

1:03.4

spell blast, and sacrifice that made use of the concept of manna value. Now it wasn't called

1:09.1

manna value at the time. In Alpha, they just

1:13.0

called it casting costs. But it's a little bit confusing since casting costs kind of meant two

1:18.0

different things. What we now referred to as mana cost and what we refer to as manna value.

1:24.2

So it became clear pretty early on the casting cost just, it was ambiguous what we meant.

1:29.4

So then we started calling it total casting costs, which wasn't much clear.

1:35.2

In fact, I wouldn't say it wasn't super clear at all.

1:37.7

Then came Sixth Edition.

1:39.7

So Sixth Edition invented the term mana cost instead of casting cost.

...

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