Every year, more and more unique creature types get added to the world of MTG. This has become even more frequent with the rise of Universes Beyond products. There have been many recent crossovers that have added distinct creature types to the game, such as MTG Doctor Who bringing Time Lords into existence.
In a recent Blogatog post, one player complained about Universes Beyond sets introducing types from outside Magic IP into the Magic ecosystem. They mentioned their dislike for creature types like Hero (associated with the mechanically unique Marvel Secret Lair characters) making a comeback after largely being discontinued.
MTG head designer Mark Rosewater stated in his response that new creature types will continue to be created when sets call for them, regardless of whether they come from Universes Beyond or in-multiverse sets. While this is to be expected, he also pointed out that the creation of a two-word creature type in Time Lord was a mistake that he doesn’t want to repeat.
This is an interesting assessment to come directly from Mark Rosewater. This begs the question: what are the issues with the Time Lord creature type, and were there any decent alternatives?
Two-Word Creature Types Are a No-Go
While Mark Rosewater didn’t explicitly explain why the Time Lord creature type may be considered a mistake, it’s easy to assume it’s because it sets a bad precedent. It’s very common for creatures nowadays to have multiple creature types. These types are simply separated by spaces in the type line.
As such, when MTG Doctor Who came out, many players were confused about exactly what creature types some of the cards were. Many of the cards in MTG Doctor Who were Time Lord Doctors. They read as though the creature types are Time, Lord, and Doctor. Instead, though, they only have two creature types, Time Lord and Doctor.
It makes sense why this would be puzzling to newer players, especially. As jdrawer01 points out, keeping the rule that each word in the type line is a different type helps newer players know that artifact creatures like Walking Ballista are both artifacts and creatures, and that Construct is specifically a creature type, not an artifact type.
A Lack of Alternatives
Yet, this Blogatog post sparked some extra discussion on the matter, and some players struggled to come up with a different way to portray the creature type accurately. Andalon-historian suggested simply making “Time” and Lord” separate creature types. While a reasonable fix to the problem, Time doesn’t exactly make sense as a creature type by itself.
dude1818 instead said that Gallifreyan could have been a replacement creature type for many of the Time Lords. However, Time Lord is much more recognizable for people that aren’t the biggest Doctor Who fans.
Likely the best solution would have been to go the route that the creature type Assembly-Worker did and just use a hyphen between words. Time-Lord doesn’t look quite as clean, but it gets the job done and eliminates some confusion.
Overall, it’s nice to see Mark Rosewater acknowledge previous design errors and listen to community input. It’s clear Wizards is trying to put an emphasis on making MTG concepts as easy to grasp as possible for new players, which is definitely a good thing.