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

Okay, so today is a topic I got from my blog. I'm going to talk about fixed cards.

And what I mean by that is sometimes we'll make a mechanic and we'll later realize that we could have done it better, that we could have done it differently.

And so we make a new mechanic with a new name that is similar to the old mechanic, but slightly different in some way.

That's what I'm talking about today.

Now, before I get into that, I should stress that oftentimes we will change how mechanics work.

Sometimes, for example, we will change them, but we won't change the name. We'll just retroactively

change them. A classic example will be Echo. Echo first appeared in Urza Saga. When you play an

Echo Creature, on the second turn it was in play, you had to cast it again.

You had to pay what's called the echo cost, which was equal to the mana cost.

When we brought Echo back in Time Spiral Block, we changed it.

So the cost you had to pay was ridden out.

In original, like in Urzosauga, it was always tied to the mana cost of the card.

So when we brought it back, we just eroded the old cards to have the mana cost as the echo cost.

So, I mean, the cards essentially played exactly how they did before.

It more expanded how we could use in the future. It didn't really change how any of the old cards worked.

Other examples, convoke or hideaway. You know, we've definitely taken things where we want to

change them a little bit, but we feel it's not so much that we need to change the name.

And then there are stuff like companion, I guess, which we realized we had done something wrong,

and right in the moment we sort of eroded it to fix it because it was broken.

That's an abnormality. We don't do that kind of thing very often.

Companion might be the only time that I can think about having done that.

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