#1330: Charms

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work Okay, so today's topic is Charms what are they? Where do they come from? Why do we keep making them? And how do we design them? So I'm gonna talk all about the history and the making of charms today So let me begin by saying what our charms Charms are a spell Usual in insider sorcery, but not always Where you're given three choices and you get to choose between one of the three choices That is what a charm is Many many charms are labeled charms So we're gonna talk about their origin and then I'll get into how we design charms. Charms are interesting They're a challenge to design, but we keep making them. So obviously there's ways to do it. Okay, so We have to go back to the very beginning of magic for this story. So Richard Garfield when he made Magic he did a lot of playtesting and he got his play test teams from different places Some of them he met at the University of Pennsylvania. We're I think that's where he met on the East Coast playtesters Barry right question neighbor But some of them he met at a bridge club that he where he played bridge Bill Rose Charlie Cattino Joel Mick Howard Howard Collenberg Elliot Siegel Don Felice these people So at some point when Richard the game was about to come out Richard said to the different teams, you know at some point we will need expansions So if you guys want to start working on expansions, that would be great. So the East Coast playtesters they worked on Ice Age Barry Reich worked on spectral chaos The the bridge club worked on a set that was called menagerie was the name So menagerie would eventually get made actually broken into two parts. So it ended up being both mirage and visions So one of the things so both they and the East Coast playtesters were playing around with the same concept But they actually solved it a different way and the issue at hand was there are effects in magic That are cool effects, but they're just a little bit too tiny to put on a card Because they were sort of mapping space of what they can do and that the problem when you have a card is When you have to card you're spending a whole card worth to get something and if the effect you're getting isn't worth Like some things were just worth worth less than a mana Well, how do you do things that are worth less than a man? How do you do that? So the East Coast playtesters their solution was to create what we call cantrips Which is well, I get to draw a card along with the effect So the cost of the spell doesn't have to count the cost of the card Which is a real cost in it and so we can do smaller effects if because by making it for example Let's say you make a spell that is one in a blue or just blue And you draw a card with the spell well it doesn't have to cost the full Amount of a normal thing because you're getting the card back and so a cantrip was their answer like oh we can make small effects because As long as you add in the card draw the cost gets to go the cost gets to be a one mana or more The problems a lot of small effects is it's just not worth the mana Oh, but small effect plus a card is worth a man or two mana sometimes more So that is how they solved it Bill and Joel and Charlie the the Brit Club they took a different they took a different path And their path was okay. What if we gave you some option? What if a spell that had a small effect didn't have one small effect? What if it had multiple small effects and they ended up choosing three? and the idea is okay any one effect might not be worth it, but the Flexibility the ability to have action, you know option to do all three that might be enough to make it worth the card And once again the original charms in Mirage costs one mana They were all monocullar cards and they cost a single color of mana Oh and the reason they're called charms. I'm pretty sure this is me speculating, but I believe this is dry in Dungeons and Dragons There are spell effects that you could have that are very minor spell effects so much so that you like You have like spell slots and things you have to do in Dungeons and Dragons The charms are something that are small enough that you you kind of can do them without great effort is the idea And so I think they named them after that. Maybe they didn't that's that's that's it This is me guessing not that I didn't really know that So anyway, they called them charms and so they I think they originally put a cycle in And the interesting thing idea about it was they made a long list of what are effects We would like to try but just a too small and then they found their favorite And then they put them on the card They in fact liked the charm so much that when they ended up making visions. They just made a second set of charms It was so sort of They I think they were very enamored them and one of the things just a little a side note here It turns out that flexibility is is very powerful like it's very easy and I say to you what cards were something I think people Grock the idea of how powerful a card is But the idea of choice, I think people don't realize that Or maybe some of you do Flexibility adds a lot of power to cards and that one of the things it took me a lot of time Because I've made a lot of modal type effects It's just the power of modes the power of saying well you get to choose what you're doing in the moment and Even though your choices aren't major the fact that you have that flexibility is pretty powerful and their charms ended up being Quite effective. So like I said, they liked them so much. They put them in visions as well as into Mirage Okay, so those went out and they were just pretty popular I think the other thing is I the Behind the scenes we designers really like charms because it just made like One of the things we're always looking for is look. There's just a limited amount of design space, right? We're trying to Fight as much design space as we can and charms were really nice because it just opened up like Here effects you couldn't normally do all of a sudden you could use them on cards It just opened up space the charms were kind of making things that we couldn't make before and Just they were popular people liked them, you know, they were they they became something where It's all out of play on the casual on constructed, you know in tournaments. They just saw a lot of play Okay, so the next time we would see charms was in onslaught So onslaught for those don't remember this set this block. I had a typo theme and the idea was You know, we were really playing up the idea and I think there were Eight I think eight there was a bunch of different creature types. We supported Every color got a main one and there were some secondary ones we had that were in multiple colors So when we did onslaught I one of the things that I I think we liked is that the charms just had a nice structure to them and so What if we did charms where one of the charms got to be a typo a small effect? That's typo now normally it'd be very narrow to make a typo effect on a card because you're only going to play that card If you're playing that creature type But the nice thing about the charms is well, I have two other effects, you know Maybe or let's say I'm playing limited for example, and I have some of that, you know You know, I'm playing white and I have soldiers Not all of my creature soldiers some of them are soldiers So I'm willing to put this my deck because let's say I just don't draw my soldiers Well, the card is other effects. So we did charms one again They were one one mana value charms and they were mono colored. So we really didn't reinvent anything It was just us saying, okay Let's let's do this back and then one of the things we'll do is we'll do small typo effects because that's something we want to do when onslaught Okay, the next set we use them was plane shift So plane shift is the second set in the invasion block. So invasion is The first set and what I call the third age of design It's after Bill Rose becomes head designer and blocks start having themes. So invasion was about multicolor So one of the core ideas of invasion was just playing a lot of colors the domain mechanical though a name was there And there just were a lot of things we want you to play a lot of colors So one of the things that plane shift did the third set I say the second set was Played around a little bit more with three color magic hadn't done that much three color Obviously legends with introduced three color had some three color cards and there have been a few other opportunities but Plane shift sort of ratchet up three color a little higher than we had normally done not I wouldn't call it a three color set like Shards of a laur or something like that but it was it was something where we were playing around three color a little more than we had been in the past and So I think I think plane shift had the dragons I think the three color dragons are made of those no no no say those were in the dragons themselves were in invasion But then we played up to them. I think we made the layers and stuff But anyway, we decided to be fun to make make charms, but try something a little bit different So the idea here was what if we made three colored charms and three colored charms do two things that we charms have never done before one was Obviously has effects from different colors all the charms at that point were mono colored cars And the second thing was in order to be a three color charm remember hybrid didn't exist yet It had to be three mana, right? That'd be one man of each color so for the first time ever We were making charms that weren't the tiniest of effects. They got to be a little bit bigger effect You're spending three mana on this and not just three mana three mana three different colors that that is a significant ask So the way we made those charms was because there were three colors in them and there were three effects each effect mapped to a color So let's say we're doing green white blue So one of the effects is a green effect one of the effects is a white effect one of the effects is a blue effect And so the idea of playing green white blue and have access to things and the nice thing about that was it just made a charm unlike anything else there's a little bit bigger so the effects were bigger and Mixing a matching colors just made it feel different Okay, the next time we did charms was in planar chaos. So planar chaos was the second set of the time spiral block We're now into the fourth stage of design stage design. I'm now a head designer And one of the things was I was trying to do more block planning and so the idea came up time spiral was all about time So I divided the sets into past present and future now past and future have a pretty clear identity The present was a little fuzzier. What is in every set to the present? So we did this alternate reality thing sort of a what-if thing where we messed around with the color pie and said what if magic had been different And the idea at the time was that we would push in areas that were sort of Secondary or not breaks. I was trying not to do breaks though in retrospect. I made a few breaks But the idea was what if what if the color pie had just represented things a little bit differently? You know we use card draw to represent knowledge, but what if card draw represent growth? Well, that were the case it would be green and not blue stuff stuff like that and so What we did with the Charms was we I Think once at least one of every child Every charm had at least one ability and maybe two that just did things outside that colors You know it or inside that color is new color pie the color pie of planar chaos So it allowed us to make some things that just were a little bit different because they were doing effects that normally the colored Now once again, there were one man of value. They were mono color. They were modeled after the original And kind of what they in fact the art was done the same It was sort of like imagine mirage had just been different because the color pie was different What were the terms that looked like and that was what planar chaos? Now you can see real quickly as I'm going through these that Every time we do a charm. We're looking for the new take on charms On slot says I'm gonna add a typo component You know plane shifts like I'm gonna go three color planar chaos is like I'm gonna add in color, you know color pie muddling Okay, so the next one we did Was shards of a Lara so shards of a Lara was our first block that was dedicated to three color And so it seemed only appropriate to do three color charm. So obviously we had done them once before in Plane shift, so we were doing them so As is often the case in early magic, we do the ally stuff More than before we get to the enemy stuff, so we'll get to wedge. I'll get there Momentarily, but anyway shards of a Lara kind of ran back what we had done in plane shift one of the things that happens over time is as magic sort of shifts around What axis we have what things are evergreen what effects we started doing more regularly, you know Magic keeps shifting and so as we keep revisiting this we're allowed to get access and do things that are a little bit different again Because shards of a Lara was doing three color. We got to have a little bit bigger effects Okay, after that is return to Ravnica and gate crash so the fun story on this one is I am so normally at the time I would run the large set in the fall But I was training Ken Nagel. He had he did well in the first grade designer search And he had led us set or two and I was interested in letting him try to lead a large set And we were doing return to Ravnica, which was it's a return Returns in general are easier than new and especially Ravnica where we weren't trying to reinvent the wheel all that much With was so I swapped and I had him do that And then I was with Gottlieb Gottlieb hadn't done a large set either So I co-led with Gottlieb to do gate crash So while I'm in gate crash, I make the realization that we hadn't ever done two color We had done one color charms. We had done three color charms We never done two color charms and one of the things that we do in Ravnica sets is we like to do ten color Cycles that run through the whole block So what I did basically is I made some I made some two color charms that went in the Basically return Ravnica did five guilds a mix of ally and enemy and then gate crash did the five that return Ravnica didn't do So I made the five for gate crash and then I went in and I talked to to Ken and I said she has to heads up. Yeah, we're gonna put two colored charms in gate crash And he's like, okay fine. I'll put them into turn around the guy. So So we ended up putting them in the full block And anyway, so the interesting thing about doing two color was now obviously want access to both colors But how do you do with three color now first and foremost? They cost two mana rather than one or three so that was new The other thing we did was one of the effects. So let's say we're doing black red a black red charm One of the effects would be a mono black effect meaning an effect that black did that red didn't do One of the effects would be a red effect something red does the black doesn't do and then one of the effects would be sort of in hybrid space a Black effect that black and red or black or red could do So the idea there's a black effect a red effect a black or red effect And that's how we did the charms in Return rafting a kick crash. Okay, next up is cons of Tarkir. You can see us filling out the color grid So we had done twice Arc or shard, you know a color and its allies, but we had never done a charm with a color and its enemies Yeah, the quick story behind cons of Tarkir. We actually didn't start with the wedged set at all I started trying to I wanted to do a quirky Every other year at the time the third set with a large block that had new mechanics And so I wanted to try something where the middle set was drafted with both the first set and the third set But the first and third set were never drafted together and we needed to come up with a way to explain that So I made a whole team fact the very first ever exploratory team and we came up with the idea of a time travel story So what happens is in the story? Sarkin Vaal returns to his home world of Tarkir Sarkin loves dragons, but the dragons have been killed off by the cons And so he goes back in time back to the small set fate reforged where fate is reforged and he saves Ugen from being killed by Nicole Bolas and because of that the dragons survive and now there's a new timeline In which the dragons haven't been killed and now the dragons run everything. They're the dragon lord rather than the cons And we get dragons of Tarkir Anyway, as we were putting the set together we knew we wanted to differentiate between cons and dragons and we stumbled upon the idea of I think what happened was originally there were gonna be four factions that the creative team created based on four different like sections of Asia and then they realized there's a fifth section they wanted to do and once Brady's pretty down with the leader of the creative team said they wanted to do five factions I'm like, okay Brady, I'm gonna do that. I got a tie to the color. I'm gonna tie the color I might as well do the thing we haven't done yet, which is wedge wedge wedge factions which plans so we did And then once we did that it seemed obvious that we you know, it was you know We had done the ally color block had done ally color charms. It seemed only appropriate They worked the same way. They were three mana one of you know one of each color Okay, next up Was streets of new capena apparently when we knew a three color set so Streets of new capena was another take on a three color block It had been a while since we've done shards of Alara and we were trying to do something new It was a world that we originally called demon mobster world and the idea was we were playing around with a lot of the the genre of sort of crime and so It's a world overrun with crime run by demons because we're a fantasy set Um, and then the idea was that each crime family represented a different sort of genre of crime You know entertainment and so Each one played up a different thing once again. We were on a three color world charms work really nice Three car charms would be fun. So we made another batch of three color charms Um, the latest charms actually are very very recent. They are in the new secret of tricks Haven So once again, we are we were in a world of factions called factions These are enemy colors and it felt only right to sort of tie into that And so we thought it'd be fun Okay, the Two other things where we've done Charms or cycles of charms one was in mystery booster or not was an issue booster. Sorry. Sorry It was the unknown event in One of so at every pro not that not pro tour and every magic on Gavin Verhe runs an event called Gavin Verhe's unknown event and in the event He always has a weird mix of cards and the rules for what you're doing for deck building is always a little bit different He always makes new card stickers for the event the unknown cards And for one of them he did a cycle of charms And because he had access to weird and quirky things because it's an unknown event He can make weird and quirky charms what she did Another thing that we're doing is a mega mega cycle. So what that means is you the mega cycle is something that we did within the Confines of a year normally within a block Mega mega means it takes place over multiple years So we're doing the arch master charms they all have arch in them and We're not even done with it yet But I forget we did the first one first one was in one of my horizons I think people liked it so much we kind of did a charm. They were just a little more powerful and Anyway, we've been doing them every once in a while and so it's a it's a mega mega cycle we're doing There are a lot of one offs I'm not gonna I'm not there are a bunch of things that are essentially charms in the fact that they are three things pick one Which are charms? I'm just gonna talk a little bit about things that we literally labeled charms just cuz I there's too much to talk about So I narrowed it down Like in modern horizons, we did umazawa's charm So the umazawa's jitte, which is a very famous card pretty powerful card It was an equipment that did three different things. So the umazawa's charm Costs one in a block and then it does those you choose from one of those three things that it did We made a charm in moderate three called thraven charm where we once again are playing around with doing sort of more modern mix and match effects In mystery booster we did growth charm where you get to pick actual names of real spells that you're picking from Evil boros charm where it's got hybrid black red and hybrid white black In front of Eldrain That's mine So Prince charming is a character in mini fairy tales So we thought it'd be funny to nod to that So I made a card called charming Prince where it's a two-mana tutu that you have three options when you play it Interestingly, we'll finish there with that is I called it charming Prince and then at some point they changed the name and like what are you doing? Like charming like it's very like I made a charm of a Prince so that it could be charming Prince And I and enough other people complained that they ended up putting it back to charming Prince And then in Wild of Eldrain there's charming scoundrel, which is the same basic thing except it's a two-mana one one that is red Yeah, and has three effects the one other thing that I Mean I think charms influence a lot of things the one other thing that was big enough that we we named them by name our commands So Aaron Forsythe my boss who loves loves modal effects. He was leaving the design for the Lorwin And so he tried something new so rather than here are three choices pick one He tried here are four choices pick two and that became known as the commands And they were a bit more expensive. They weren't they were playing around in a much different space Charms tend to be on the cheaper side not always we have done charms a little more expensive, but The idea of commands is you're doing big splashy things and yet once again Flexibility is powerful. So these are giving you just basic effects, but very powerful basic effects And so you can mix and match And they that the charm the commands became super powerful or super popular and powerful so in strict savin We did them or say dragons of Tarkir. We did two color ally commands Like I said, we had done the charms in dragons. So we did command So we thought it was fun that also reality they have charms we have command that we thought that was fun in strict savin We did the enemy the enemy commands Then in brothers war they did a series of one color commands tied to characters So each command was a different character from the story and then in Lorewind the clips We did two color commands again, but not ally or enemy. It was tied to the five archetypes that were attached to typo which was It didn't line up as our enemy white blue black red green white blue red red black green Those are the five that were tied to you know, Keith Gannon and elves and such Um, okay, so let me talk a little bit. I'm almost to work Let me talk a little bit about the making of charms. How do we make charms? So first and foremost you don't make a charm in a vacuum I mean unless you're making one charm like in modern horizons or whatever But normally we make charms who make them in cycles. That's how we make charms So the way you make a charm is first you got to figure out the structure of your charm Like are you doing one drops? Are they like we got to figure out the man of the rough mana value and the color is it mono color? Is it two colors that three color and then once you know that okay? How much mana is involved in making it how how big of effects are you playing with? So once you understand the mana value and the color or colors of your charms The next thing you need to do is you need to make a list of everything you can think of that could be a charm in that color And one of the things we always tend to do when we make new charms is we look at old charms Like one of our goals is we want to make sure that we're not recreating something we already made Not that we can't do into individual effects from charms I mean that we'd be impossible make new charms if you if all old charms are off limits. There's only so many effects But the nice thing that happens is a couple things one is If you're doing multicolor you get to mix and match things in ways you don't normally get a mix and match And if you're doing mono color Hey, the set might have effects that are unique to that set Maybe we're doing mechanics in that set that we're not doing elsewhere The one challenge is because you have to write three different lines of text. You don't have a lot of room. So Not all mechanics work with charm just because there's not room for the reminder text and in charms Usually charms are lower in rarity commands are higher in rarity just because it's doing more So what you do is you figure out the power level and the color of what you need and then for every color you write every effect you can think of and Sometimes there's effects that are new since you lasted charms Sometimes there's things that are unique to the set you're doing like sometimes There's themes that might not make sense in a normal set but make sense in this set or Maybe there's a something you're bending a little bit for this set that you normally wouldn't do in that color But the set is doing it because of the bend. Oh, we're caring about graveyards the graveyard said Oh, well this color doesn't do that much in the graveyard But we're doing this thing because the graveyard said oh, maybe this that we can do that so You kind of want to make a long list The reality of making charms is there's a lot of mixing and matching That's the the challenge of charms And depending on how big the charm is if your charm gets to be a little bit larger one of it Nowadays we tend to make charms in which one of the effects is something that we're pretty sure you're going to play Removal or something or or maybe not straight removal sideways removal or or something that you think that you're encouraged to want to play And then the idea is the other two effects or effects that we'd like you to get in your deck But we know it's hard to make you get in your deck so kind of a little bit of getting you to you know each of vegetables is Because one of the things that's really cool is sometimes there are effects that are super fun But that players just will never play them in a vacuum And that's one of the things that modal spells in general are great at I want you to have effect X But you're never going to put effect actually your deck one aided So I staple it to some other effects Especially one that you probably will want to play and then you put it in your deck and then every once in a while Oh, this effect actually is exactly what I need in this moment and you get those great Like a lot of the fun of quirky weird effects is when they shine when they work It's very memorable, but you're just getting people to the point where they have that so what you want to do is you want to make a List of your different mechanics And you normally have a list of sort of more powerful and weaker you want to make sure that at least one of your charm effects is something that You know if the if the if the card just did that thing a lot of the time you'd be fine And so you make sure you have one a little bit stronger ability and then two other supporting abilities Depending on your color combination like I said sometimes it's everything in one color one of each of three colors One of two colors, but the third one is a combined hybrid thing. Oh and when you're doing in that space You might have to make a list for the hybrid effects like here's red effects. Here's black effects Here's red and black effects And then what you do is you just start putting them up the board and you sort of mix and match them and the Challenge is that you're trying to keep them off each other You want to make sure the charms don't seem too much like each other so for example If one charm does something in one cut like there's certain effects that are too similar that you only get one of those effects for example White can tap a creature as and red can make something can't block Those are pretty similar not a hundred cent similar, but the play value is pretty similar So if a white's going to tap a creature red's probably not gonna make target creature can't block And so there's a lot of sort of jockeying and figuring what you want to do And normally what you figure out is you first start by putting in the things that aren't the norm like they're special to the set You're in what are the effects that this set wants that other sets wouldn't want what are things you could put on a charm That you would oh we're doing typo. Oh, we're bending, you know, we're muddling the color pie Like whatever it is fit those in first fit the things in That are novel to what you were doing and then you can sort of look past those and figure out what else do you need? Is that thing being the kind of core ability or no, you need to have something that's more evergreen this core Is that filling a certain color do you have to grab another color? and the thing that you tend to do sometimes is you you have to keep making choices because And this is the reason you make the list and the reason you do them all together that as you build them It's going to start causing problems Normally what we tend to do is one of the colors is more pinched in the other colors for various reasons Maybe there's other things in the set. They're eating up space that limits what you can do. Maybe But there's a lot of reasons it can be tight you normally start by making sure you fill in the tightest one first What's the one that's the problem child and then it's kind of a domino effect sort of thing like once Oh, red is the one that really needs to help in this set So we're going to do camp block because you know red red is a limited number of effects, you know And so we're gonna do that. Oh, well since we're doing camp black and red white can't do tap a creature And then you it starts start extrapolating out And the one thing that happens when you make sure I'm could you design them all as a cycle? You'll you'll start with a certain thing and then as you play test you might go Oh, this this one needs a little strengthening and each time you change one You are often unless you're just powering up an element. Oh, it said to doing two damage There's three damage unless you're changing numbers You need to reconfigure every time you're messing with the charms You're messing with all of the charms and a lot of fixing things is you got to yank out all the charms again And you got to go through them But anyway and commands. I mean, this is more our charms they but commands work similarly So That my friends is everything so I'm now at work That is the history of charms the reason behind the charms the how we design charms 30 minutes about charms, so I hope you found my talk today Charming but I am at work. So we all know that means that means is the end of my drive to work So instead of talking magic is time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye. Bye