33 Years Later, Magic’s Head Designer Reveals One of His Biggest Regrets

At a glance, the core mechanics of Magic: The Gathering are fairly simple. You can play one land per turn, generating the magical energy called mana that you need to summon creatures. Attack your opponents with those creatures, reduce their life totals to zero, and you win. Instants and sorceries represent magic cast in the moment, while other cards remain on the battlefield as “permanents.” But once you examine how Magic classifies those permanents — and why artifacts and enchantments are considered fundamentally different things — it all becomes much more convoluted.

After 33 years, even Magic head designer Mark Rosewater thinks the game may have drawn that particular distinction in the wrong place. Functionally, artifacts and enchantments feel pretty similar. They’re noncreature, nonland permanents that do… something. Artifacts represent something physical like a weapon, vehicle, or some kind of machine. Enchantments manifest persistent magical effects from curses, divine blessings, or entire sagas that tell a story over multiple turns. To put it another way, artifacts provide universally accessible tools, while enchantments express the particular magical capabilities of each color.

Mechanically, however, the distinction has become only murkier with time. In a recent two-part “Big-Picture Questions” column, Magic head designer Mark Rosewater admitted that, if he could rebuild the game from the beginning, he would be tempted to combine artifacts and enchantments into a single card type.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

“Artifacts and enchantments have always been similar structurally, but they began with one core difference,” Rosewater said. “Artifacts were designed so that any deck could play them, while enchantments were tied into the color pie. The problem is that the color pie is a core element of Magic for balance purposes. You really don’t want one deck playing all the best cards, so spreading cards across the five colors is key.”

Historically, artifacts are colorless, but over time, more powerful artifacts were given colors so limit how many decks could use them. “Once we eradicated the most important difference between the two card types, the line between artifacts and enchantments got fuzzy,” Rosewater said, adding that the separation between the two is mostly “a creative one” at this point.

Artifacts are tangible, enchantments are not, and that line has gotten increasingly blurrier over time as Magic has printed artifact and enchantment creatures in all sorts of colors. Artifact creatures have been around since the early days of Magic, whereas Rosewater himself introduced the first enchantment creature with 2007’s Future Sight set.

“If we had it to do over again, I’d be tempted to have one card type that represents noncreature permanents (I have no idea what we would call it) and have ‘Artifact’ and ‘Enchantment’ be subtypes for that card type,” Rosewater explained. “This would allow for all the colors to interact with ‘Artifacts’ and ‘Enchantments’ differently while still having a stronger sense that they’re the same thing.”

Magic already has the perfect name for this

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Rosewater may not know what to call this hypothetical card type, but “Relic” feels like the natural choice. It’s broad enough to encompass both physical objects and lingering magical effects without favoring one category over the other. Most importantly, it actually sounds like something that could appear on a Magic card’s type line.

“Manifestation” also comes to mind, but that’s likely too many characters to appear on a card. “Marvel” would have worked rather well had it been introduced in the early days of Magic, but these days, it’s more commonly associated with the ongoing Marvel Comics crossover.

An ordinary piece of Equipment might read “Relic — Artifact Equipment,” while a Saga could become a “Relic — Enchantment Saga.” Artifact and Enchantment could still matter independently, so existing distinctions between them would survive despite the new classification. In a way, using something like “Relic” would be a much cleaner alternative to the “historic” card classification, which somewhat arbitrarily lumps together artifacts with legendary spells and sagas.

Theorizing about this is, in many ways, probably a moot point. Rosewater seems to have resigned himself to the fact that it may be too late in the game’s history to change any of this, noting that “inertia is a powerful force” and that retroactively changing billions of printed cards is perhaps too big a deal to even seriously consider.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Rosewater’s follow-up column nevertheless demonstrates why the abandoned idea remains appealing. Artifact creatures have existed since Magic began, but the game’s first enchantment creature, Lucent Liminid, didn’t appear until 2007’s Future Sight. It took another 13 years for Wizards to become comfortable printing enchantment creatures whose card type was justified primarily through flavor rather than some kind of forced mechanic.

If artifacts and enchantments had always been presented as two forms of the same larger concept, perhaps enchantment creatures wouldn’t have felt like something that shouldn’t exist. It’s far too late to turn every artifact and enchantment into a Relic without confusing millions of players. But after 33 years, Rosewater’s retrospective makes one thing clear: Two of Magic’s foundational card types probably never needed to be separate in the first place.