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

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a question that I often get from amateur designers that I thought I would spend a whole podcast on.

So today I'm going to talk about mechanical depth. And what that means is when you make a brand new mechanic, how can you tell

how deep the mechanic is, aka how many cards can you make of it? One of the things that's really

important in magic is when we make a new mechanic, it's a resource. And that that new mechanic

might be used more than just the set we make it in. If it's a good mechanic. It's a resource and that that new mechanic might be used more than just the set

we make it in. If it's a good mechanic, it might come back. So one of the things that's important

is to understand, hey, how many cards can we make with this mechanic? So I want to talk a little

bit about how we do that, about how we... Now, once again, it is not like there's a procedure where we get an exact number.

It's just a ballpark.

And pretty much when I talk about design depth, I tend to put it into three buckets.

Bucket number one is, it's big.

It basically is as big as we need it to be.

We could bring it back as many times as we

want to bring it back. It is a very robust mechanic. Medium is, hey, there's enough to bring it

back. It can be done some number of times, but there is a point in which it'll be hard to bring

back. There is a point in which you'll probably, at least use up new space. I mean, I guess you could always bring it back and do what you've done before.

But as far as branching off and doing things you haven't done before, there's some limitation.

And then small is, look, you can fit it in one set.

You really are going to struggle to fit it in the second set.

You know, it's a mechanic that has enough space maybe to do once.

The other thing when you're looking at mechanics is different sets need different amounts of

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