Today on Weekly MTG, Magic: the Gathering’s Head Designer Mark Rosewater revealed that colored artifacts would become much more common in order to safeguard the health of the game.

Rosewater said that, going forward, powerful new artifacts intended for Constructed play will have colored mana in their casting costs. This will be a massive change for a card type that traditionally only needed colorless mana to cast.

Artifacts: Magic’s Problem Card Type

Artifacts were one of the original card types in Magic. Some of the game’s most famous and powerful cards are artifacts, from Black Lotus and the five Moxen—Mox Pearl, Mox Sapphire, Mox Jet, Mox Ruby, and Mox Emerald—to Sol Ring, Memory Jar, and Skullclamp.

Magic’s second second expansion set, Antiquities (1994), was themed around artifacts, and was followed by a strong artifact component in Urza’s Saga (1998). Mirrodin (2003) became Magic’s second artifact set, then Shards of Alara (2008) featured an artifact-based shard called Esper, after which Magic returned to Mirrodin in Scars of Mirrodin (2010) for another artifact-focused set. Then Kaladesh became the latest artifact set in Magic’s history with its release in 2016.

Besides sharing artifact themes, those sets had something else in common, too. “Antiquities had problems. Urza’s Saga had problems. Mirrodin had problems. Scars of Mirrodin had problems. Kaladesh had problems,” Rosewater said. “[But o]ne set didn’t have problems—what was the one artifact set that we didn’t have problems with? Shards of Alara. And why? Because we used the color pie [for the artifacts in the set].”

Colored Artifacts Can Help Prevent Problematic Sets

One of the most powerful aspects of the artifact card type is that they are typically colorless (or “generic”) and can be cast with any color of mana. The colorless aspect of artifacts breaks one of Magic’s core mechanics—the system of colored mana—that is supposed to prevent players from playing all of the most powerful cards in the game in the same deck. This means that a particularly powerful colorless artifact can have an outsized impact on the game because it can be played in every deck.

“When you make [cards] generic and say anybody can use this, when you make things that are broken, it causes a lot of problems,” Rosewater said. “Like if we make a broken Red card at least only Red decks can play the card! But if you make a broken artifact that is generic anybody can play it. So one of the things we’ve learned is that it’s very hard to push things when you have generic mana on them.”

“One of the ideas that we’re embracing is the idea of, from a flavor standpoint, [that] we can imbue colors into [artifacts],” he continued. “It’s not something we haven’t done—we’ve been doing it for over 10 years. We’re just upping the amount of [colored artifacts]. We’re saying, you know what? If we make them colored we can push them. If we make them generic we really have to tone them down.”

“But you know what? If we have something like a Bloodsoaked Altar—it’s kinda Black! And if we make it Black we can make a more powerful card.”

Rosewater said that increasing the number colored artifacts, while decreasing the number of colorless artifacts, was being done to safeguard the health of the game by preventing colorless artifacts from warping future formats. “Colored artifacts really [are] the progression of something we needed to do for the safety of the game,” he said. “And I know flavor-wise we can make it work.”

“Moving forward, colored artifacts are just the way life is going to be,” Rosewater concluded. “Not that there’ll never be generic artifacts…definitely stuff for Limited can be colorless. [But] stuff for Constructed would have to be very niche for us to make it [with] generic mana…it has to be the kind of thing that just can’t go in every deck.”

“We still will make generic [artifacts], I’m just saying that [the artifacts] we push for tournaments [are] more likely to be colored. The generic [artifacts] we push will be more specific.”

This trend is evident in Magic’s two most recent expansions. War of the Spark featured Parhelion II, Silent Submersible, Bolas’s Citadel, Mizzium Tank, and Vivien’s Arkbow. Core Set 2020 continued the trend with several more colored Artifacts: Ancestral Blade, Portal of Sanctuary, Bloodsoaked Altar, Chandra’s Regulator, Mask of Immolation, and Wolfrider’s Saddle.

Artifacts vs. Enchantments

Enchantments are another card type that has existed since the beginning of Magic. They are very similar to artifacts in how they affect the game, but the colorless nature of artifacts helped differentiate the two. So how will Wizards maintain the difference between the two card types with the increase in colored artifacts?

“Artifacts and enchantments are just not that far apart,” Rosewater agreed. “They’ve never been mechanically that far apart. And we understand that making these colored is going to make them a little closer mechanically…[but] they were never that far apart [from the beginning].”

According to Rosewater, Wizards will rely on two things to differentiate artifacts and enchantments. “Two things are going to carry the day,” he said. “One is flavor—they’re flavored very differently. [The] second is what interacts with them is different. The fact that certain colors can kill that but not this, or can interact with that but not this, that makes them different. The interaction…is going to make artifacts and enchantments function differently.”