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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#1018: Unreleased Mechanics

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 March 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this podcast, I talk through numerous mechanics that we've designed but never published.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work.

0:06.0

Okay, so from time to time I get suggestions on my blog for topics. And so today is one of those topics.

0:16.0

So somebody said they would like to hear about unreleased mechanics. So today, I'm just going to talk

0:22.7

through a bunch of different mechanics we've never made. And in some cases, some of the

0:28.6

ones we haven't made went on to influence ones we did make. Although, none of the ones I'm

0:35.0

talking about today, we've done exactly what was originally done.

0:40.2

But, so one of the things, let me first explain this.

0:43.3

We come up with mechanics all the time and that not all mechanics make it into the set.

0:49.3

That part of the nature of design is we try things.

0:53.2

And the reason that a mechanic might not make it,

0:56.6

some of the time it's like, oh, there's not quite a good way to do it,

1:00.3

or we haven't figured out how to do it, or, you know, maybe it's broken.

1:04.3

Other times, it's just a matter of, well, it didn't quite fit what this set was doing.

1:10.2

The classic example of that is energy.

1:13.3

So originally in original Mirrodin block, I made energy as part of the theme of artifacts

1:21.4

and that they had this energy source.

1:24.8

What ended up happening was I did too much in the design, it got a little bit

1:28.9

overstuffed. Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time, said, okay, we need a, you know,

1:33.6

you have too much here. And the easiest thing to take out that didn't like impact other things

1:37.9

around it, which is another, by the way, good sign of, or another good reason that mechanics

1:43.5

get taken out

1:44.2

is that they're not as synergistic

...

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