We all know what that means.

It's time another drive to work.

Okay, so today's topic comes from my blog.

Somebody wanted me to talk about cameo mechanics.

So I guess I should start by explaining what are cameo mechanics.

So cameo mechanics are when we take an old mechanic, an existing mechanic,

and we put it in a very small dose.

It's usually on one card, maybe two, three cards than most.

The idea is, it's just showing up in a little tiny bit, but we're referencing actual

mechanic and using the name.

So I'm going to talk about how we started doing that, why we started doing that, and what

rules we have for

our cameo mechanics. But first, because I love talking magic history, let's start by going

through the history to get to where we got to cameo mechanics. Okay, so in the beginning,

we go all the way back to early days of magic.

So Richard makes alpha back in 1993.

So I show up full time in 95.

And at that point, the rules at the time were, you know what, we got lots of mechanics,

magic is lots of design space.

We don't need to reuse things.

So when we would make a mechanic, one of two things would happen. Either it would become evergreen, and then any set could use it, or it would be like, okay, we've done that, put it in the pile, let's do new things. And there's a bunch of mechanics like tumor of upkeep and rampage. There's a bunch of mechanics that showedume of Upkeep and Rampage.

There's a bunch of mechanics that showed up in early sets, and then we try to put them in other sets.

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