As the old wisdom goes, what people want and what they need are seldom aligned. This is especially true in Magic: The Gathering. Players constantly bemoan the inefficient nature of new cards, all the while knowing that a few positive tweaks could be enough to break the game. Certain mechanics are loved by players and hated by designers for this very reason. This week, Head Designer Mark Rosewater revealed that Snow is one such MTG mechanic.
Debuting way back in 1995’s Ice Age, Snow has been part of the game for nearly 30 years now. Over this time, many players have grown to love its distinct aesthetic and gameplay implications. Turns out that while this love is deep and crisp, however, it certainly isn’t even. According to Rosewater the Snow mechanic creates a major design problem, making it a bit of a bugbear for the game’s developers.
Was The MTG Snow Mechanic A Mistake?
“Alakasizca: I’m a little confused here: you don’t want to use the supertype snow in all cards linked to snow because that’s a slippery slope, so you only use it for sets with a heavy snow theme, like Kaldheim. Can’t you just use the same logic for Kindred? I mean, why is it ok to have snow spells in a set with a heavy snow component, but it isn’t to have kindred spells in a set with a heavy typal component? Or do you consider snow spells a mistake?
Mark Rosewater: Many in R&D consider Snow a mistake for exactly this slippery slope problem.”
Mark Rosewater, via Blogatog
As a standalone answer, this is fairly vague. While Rosewater doesn’t go into more detail in this specific post, we can go a bit further back to see what he means.
In a 2023 article on the current Storm Scale standings, Rosewater talked about Snow. In this piece, he mentioned that “There has been a lot of debate in R&D about whether all cards that match the flavor should have the supertype, but there’s a big worry that it leads down a slippery path where we include a lot of extra words for minimal mechanical payoff.” This issue, of card complexity, is really the problem at the heart of Snow from a design perspective.
Generally, when we talk about mistakes in Magic: The Gathering we mean power outliers. Mechanics like Affinity or Companion, individual broken cards like Oko, that sort of thing. The problem with Snow, however, is of a very different kind. Adding Snow to a card doesn’t have any huge power-level implications for most formats. It does, however, make the card more complex.
As Rosewater notes in the Storm Scale article, “Snow requires the monitoring of snow permanents. As this can be any permanent type, it sometimes is hard to keep track of.” This refers to instances where cards specifically interact with Snow permanents or require Snow mana. Adding the Snow supertype to random cards in a set would likely not cause this issue, but it would add extra complexity with no gameplay payoff.
Kindred Spirits
This discussion of the MTG Snow mechanic on Blogatog ran in parallel with a similar discourse on Kindred. In an earlier Blogatog post, Rosewater notes that Kindred poses the exact same design problem.
“It’s a slippery slope. Once one card that references a Goblin is a Kindred Goblin, then why isn’t every card that references a Goblin a Kindred Goblin? Soon there are a lot of words on cards that have very little mechanical value, and we start having problems when we want to put other words on cards.”
Mark Rosewater
This came in response to a question from Conjureucg on the feasibility of exploring Kindred more as a design space. As you can see, this is the Snow problem all over again. Slapping Kindred on cards might make sense in a lot of cases, but it also adds complexity that is, in many cases, unnecessary. Modern Magic: The Gathering design is all about streamlining, after all.
Unlike Snow, Kindred also has pretty major gameplay implications in most cases. Any given MTG set likely doesn’t automatically have any Snow-themed cards, but almost all of them have some number of typal support cards. This means Kindred isn’t a ‘free’ flavor add the same way Snow often is. This likely accounts for the positions of the two mechanics on the Storm Scale. Snow sits at a reasonable five, while Kindred is all the way up at nine.
That said, we do actually see both of these mechanics in the modern game; just not in mainline sets. Commander precons regularly feature one or the other, and they’ve both shown up in different Modern Horizons sets too.
As a strategy, this makes perfect sense since supplemental products like these don’t have the same complexity ceiling as mainline expansions. Subsequently, there’s less need to worry about players getting confused by extraneous text. They also feed into more powerful formats, where the gameplay implications of the mechanics are less relevant.
Pros And Cons
What’s interesting is how, despite all of this explanation from Rosewater, plenty of players still want to see more Snow and Kindred in the game. Americanlantern, for example, said of the pair: “I don’t think this matters much. Players like those things and they could easily cameo in sets.”
Should Wizards change their tune, there would be positives to this development, specifically Snow and Typal decks in older formats getting more tools to work with. Snow is a fairly parasitic mechanic as things stand. As a result, the pool of options for Commander players building fun Snow decks is very limited. This is less of a problem for Kindred since typal archetypes get plenty of support, but it would still be nice to see more, particularly in non-creature form.
That said, everything comes with a cost, and Snow and Kindred have hefty price tags indeed. Snow isn’t the basis of any busted meta decks right now, but it does have a ton of tools in older formats. An insane draw engine in Scrying Sheets and efficient removal in Skred, to name just two. Broadening the pool of Snow cards would remove the built-in downside of the supertype, and would almost certainly lead to broken decks very quickly.
On top of that, modern Magic: The Gathering sets already feel pretty complex in most cases. Just look at Aetherdrift, for example. Two brand-new mechanics, a bunch of returning cameo mechanics, a heavy focus on Vehicles and Mounts; there’s a lot going on there. Imagine if Wizards had ladled even more words on top. Not ideal.
Ultimately, it’s probably for the best that Snow and Kindred remain sometimes-friends, rather than evergreen allies. In any event, absence makes the heart grow fonder.