His top pick was 2005’s Ravnica, which established true balance amongst the game’s five warring colors. In second, Innistrad, the 2011 set that emphasized — and revolutionized — the draft format. And at third was Invasion, which arrived 25 years ago in Oct. 2000 and ushered in a new era of Magic: The Gathering.
“Invasion is what I dubbed the beginning of the third age of Magic design,” Rosewater told Polygon the next morning. “It was a huge hit.”
The next morning, tucked into a quiet corner of this sprawling, three-day convention, I’ve cornered Rosewater to talk about Invasion, a block of three sets — Invasion, Planeshift, and Apocalypse — that fused story and gameplay unlike anything before them to redefine Magic: The Gathering in more ways than one.
Two new mechanics that redefined Magic
Before Invasion, in what Rosewater refers to as the second age of Magic, most new expansions were pretty straightforward. Take two mechanics, throw them together, pick a fantasy realm (often one inspired by popular mythology) and boom, you’ve got a new block of cards to sell. Invasion took this formula and made one critical tweak: What if those mechanics and locations were organized around a unifying theme?
For Bill Rose, lead designer during the development on Invasion, that theme was multicolored cards (or “gold” cards in Magic speak). Gold cards weren’t a new idea, but they had become increasingly rare. Ahead of Invasion, the team had purposefully limited the number of multicolored cards in new sets to generate hype.
“We were building up to Invasion being the big multicolor set,” Rosewater said.
With this basic concept in place, Rosewater, Rose, and their colleague Mike Elliott flew to Lake Tahoe, where they spent a week brainstorming ideas for Invasion. (Why Tahoe? Rosewater’s dad had a house there.) They came up with two big ideas that would come to define Magic in the decades that followed: split cards and kicker costs.
Split cards was perhaps the more obvious invention, but also the one that faced the most internal resistance. If Invasion was all about combining Magic’s five colors in creative ways, then a single card turned sideways and split down the middle to feature two spells instead of just one, was the perfect way to bring that theme to life.
“Invasion was all about allied colors, and split cards fit perfectly.” Rosewater said. “Bill loved them, Mike hated them, but two out of three meant they stayed. Richard Garfield [the creator of Magic: The Gathering] thought they were neat. Everyone else working on Magic hated them.”
The idea for split cards originated in another set called Unglued, a satirical expansion that bent and broke the limits of Magic card design. One of the most popular cards in Unglued was BFM (Big Furry Monster), a card so big it was split across two — you needed to have both halves in your hand to play the creature. Players loved BFM, but Unglued failed to hit sales goals, so the game’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, canceled plans for a sequel. Rosewater took the concept, inverted it, and created split cards.
Despite multiple efforts from Wizards to kill the concept (Rosewater recalled having to fend off attempts to squash his idea in development meetings), split cards eventually made it into the set. The plan was to surprise players when they opened Invasion packs, and despite a few leaks, that’s exactly what happened.
“I remember holding my baby daughter at the prerelease and watching people open booster packs,” Rosewater said. “Someone opened a split card, his eyes went wide, he turned it sideways, and then I saw the light go off. He figured it out and just grinned. That moment made all the struggle worth it.”
Invasion’s kicker mechanic also fit nicely into the set’s multicolored theme, albeit in a more understated way. Riffing on the pre-existing “buyback” mechanic, which lets you pay an extra cost to return a used spell to your hand instead of discarding it, kicker lets you unlock better effects by paying additional mana.
“It worked well with multicolor, since you could kick spells with other colors,” Rosewater said. “In Invasion, most kickers stayed in the same color, but the idea was there.”
Both split cards and kicker have since become core features of Magic: The Gathering that frequently show up in new cards without it being a big deal. Rosewater called these “deciduous” mechanics, concepts so fundamental to the game (like trample or flying) that we all take them for granted.
But while Invasion began with several novel ideas that have stood the test of time, the biggest innovation didn’t arrive until the conclusion of the block with Apocalypse.
Allies and enemies
Magic: The Gathering’s iconic color wheel organizes the game’s five elements (Mountain/red, Forest/green, Plains/white, Island/blue, and Swamp/black) into a circle. This isn’t just a random order either — the placement of each element matters. Colors that touch are considered allies (like red and green), while those that don’t are enemies (like red and blue). Today, all of Magic’s colors intermingle and mix pretty much evenly, but that wasn’t the case before Apocalypse.
“Ally colors tend to be stronger than enemy,” Rosewater said, “but also there was just more ally than enemy.”
He estimates that before Invasion, there were fewer than 50 multicolored cards in total for each enemy combination — sometimes fewer than 30.
“Enemy was always the poor little brother that never got the attention,” Rosewater said. “The idea that it had its day was very exciting.”
Wizards of the Coast originally planned to include enemy-color gold cards in the initial Invasion block, but ultimately pushed them to Apocalypse. This was another innovation at the time. (What if we saved some ideas for the second and third set in a block, rather than dump them all out at once?). It also solved another issue.
“One of the problems when we were playing with 10 color pairs was that it just was a lot,” Rosewater said. “Well, what if we don’t start with all 10?”
Apocalypse’s enemy-color cards became yet another surprise of the Invasion block (one that blew my mind as a newly minted 12-year-old Magic player in the early 2000s), but whether Invasion was your introduction to the game or you’d been playing for years, it was a welcome change.
Mike Turian, a competitive Magic player at the time who went on to work at Wizards of the Coast, told Polygon the set felt “revolutionary” when it was first released.
“It was really cool and dynamic,” Turian said. “It was a multicolor set and you could play a five-color deck. That really wasn’t a thing before.”
What if Magic had… a plot?
Invasion also influenced Magic in one big way that had nothing to do with card design or gameplay: it gave the game a story. For Rosewater, who worked as a TV writer on the hit sitcom Roseanne before joining Wizards in 1995, a cohesive narrative was always the missing element.
He and the team decided to center that story around the crew of the Weatherlight, a flying ship first introduced in a 1997 expansion of the same name. The Weatherlight and its crew would fly from one location to another on various adventures, giving Magic a recurring cast long before the introduction of Planeswalkers. The game already had recognizable characters, like Urza (a powerful and morally ambiguous wizard) and his brother/rival Mishra, but the idea of a multi-year narrative that connected each new expansion like seasons of a TV show was uncharted territory.
During those adventures, the Weatherlight crew eventually discover plans for a full-scale assault of Magic’s original setting Dominaria by the Phyrexians (biomechanical monsters from an artificial world created by the evil eugenicist Yawgmoth), setting the stage for Invasion.
“The Phyrexians were always my favorite villains and I wanted to use them in a bigger way,” Rosewater said. “They invaded Dominaria because we wanted jeopardy, and, at the time, Dominaria was the home of Magic.”
The fact that this story of an interdimensional invasion forced all the various factions and colors of Magic to unite against a common enemy was also, apparently, a “happy accident.” Back then, the narrative and card design teams didn’t work together that closely, something that’s changed significantly in the decades since.
“The story and the mechanics weren’t planned together,” Rosewater said. “But once we realized what was going on, we leaned into it. And so a lot of the flavor of it was: OK, why is it a multicolor set? Because everybody in Dominaria has to come together to stop the Phyrexians.”
Invasion’s legacy
Invasion might be Magic’s third-most influential set, according to Mark Rosewater, but its legacy is arguably greater. Would we even have Rosewater’s number one pick, Ravnica, which gave names and personalities to the game’s 10 different two-color pairings, without Invasion?
Five years later, when Rosewater set out to design Ravnica, he created it as a direct counterweight to Invasion.
“Invasion was all about playing as many colors as possible,” he says. “So I’m like: What’s the opposite of that? OK, play two colors. And that’s how we got to the guilds.”
But for Turian, who left the Magic pro circuit for Wizards of the Coast just in time to work on Ravnica, Invasion’s impact goes even deeper. In the decades since, Magic: The Gathering has pushed even further into gold cards, especially in response to the popularity of the Commander format, which is built around powerful, multicolored creatures.
“What Invasion showed Wizards was there was a lot of love for multicolor,” Turian said. “To me, Invasion was really the moment Wizards recognized that gold cards are cool and awesome.”
