Recently, Magic's lead designer Mark Rosewater gave a talk on what he considered the most influential card designs in the game's history. It was a fascinating insight into the game, its history, and Mark Rosewater himself. Today, I want to talk about some of the standouts.

A quick note, though: Mark's talk was an hour long and featured 20 cards. I don't have the word count for that, but I've narrowed it down to five of the cards that stood out to me. There is plenty to say about all of these cards (obviously, since Mark Rosewater spent an hour on them), but I had to pick a handful so here they are.

Doubling Season

"What if we double them all?"

Starting at the top, this one is very interesting to me. Mark said that the cards were in no particular order, but as a limited-focused Spike, this card even being on the list stands out. I see the appeal: doubling stuff is cool, and it is quite strong, but influential? Well, a lot of the cards on Mark's list can be explained by The Rule of Cool. Doubling stuff is cool. It reads well and it is very elegant: oh, you're going to make a token? Have two of them. Oh, you're putting counters on something? Here's an extra one on the house. It looks appealing, and it actually plays pretty well, too - in the right circumstances. It's a great example of how Magic can appeal to a variety of players for a variety of reasons.

Magic 2011 Titans

"Titans are really cool"

I started playing Magic seriously in 2010 and these were some of the first chase mythics I ever played with. All of them have cool stories to go with them, even if their tournament repertoires are a little uneven. Obviously, Primeval Titan has been a competitive mainstay since its original printing, but all of them saw play in standard. Amusingly, Frost Titan - widely considered the worst of the bunch - was the best in a Titan vs Titan duel, because it just stopped the others from doing anything. They went onto influence a ton of other designs, most notably Frost Titan effectively having Ward 2 years before Ward became a keyword. "Enters or Attacks" triggers are also commonplace nowadays, but in 2011 this was as new as it was powerful.

Mirage Charms

"What if these three spells were all on one card?"

Cryptic Command is one of my favourite cards of all time and you can trace its lineage directly to the original charm cycle. These speak for themselves, really, having paved the way for so many mechanics and cycles that it would take up a good chunk of my word count just to list them all. They showed that a Magic card can do more than one thing at a time, and that even when those things are niche or not worth a card on their own, having the modality is powerful. While the power level and desirability of charms has varied wildly over the years, some fraction of a charm cycle almost always sees play.

Fact or Fiction

"We need to make more cards for Spike"

While a lot of the cards on Mark's list are just "cool cards," this is one of the few that speaks directly to tournament players. Indeed, most of the reason it appears on the list to begin with is because of that very fact. In his talk, Rosewater discusses how Wizards hired Randy Buehler from the Pro Tour specifically to design cards like Fact or Fiction and to help create cards that were better in the hands of a good player. FoF still appears in supplemental products to this day, and the "make piles" design regularly appears on brand new cards.

Ajani's Pridemate

"Why not both?"

This 2/2 for two may look innocuous, but it deserves its place on Rosewater's list. It is the epitome of rewarding players for doing something they already want to do, while also being a great example of how to turn one input into a different, but still positive, output. Gaining some life? Cool, how about we grow your Grizzly Bear at the same time? Like a lot of card's on the list, we take things like this for granted nowadays, but Ajani's Pridemate was a trailblazer in its day, and it was still a playable card when it showed up in Foundations Limited.