For years Magic: The Gathering had a cycle and series of instant cards known as "laces," but they proved to be a bit too unpopular to keep around.
When it comes to instants in MTG, it can always be a little tricky in seeing what types stick around the longest. Lightning Bolt tends to come back often, with Swords to Plowshares being pretty much the posterchild for successful instants.
Early on in Magic, from Alpha straight through Fourth Edition, there was another type of instant that looked like it was going to take over - laces. These cards, which change the target spell or permanent to a different color, were deemed so important that they kept coming back. Richard Garfield had actually taken the idea of laces from another WotC game, The Primal Order, and applied it in Magic.
For early Magic, each one had a color - Thoughtlace was blue, Deathlace was black, Lifelace was green, Chaoslace was red, and Purelace was white. And player reaction was....not great. While the cards helped evade some blocking, overall a change of color did very little. Panicking, Magic tried another wave of laces for Legends, with the cards not even having lace in their name. But these turned out to be even more of a disaster.
In 1996 laces were tried again for Mirage, with Prismatic Lace. Ten years later, Time Spiral gave them a go with Moonlace. Again, failures each time. After Time Spiral, Wizards of the Coast seemed to have given up on laces altogether within Magic.
For years, fans clamored over whether or not laces would make a comeback again, especially with a spate of new instants popping up. However, in 2019, Mark Rosewater nipped that in the bud, saying that laces, outside of a blue card or two that could change colors. were effectively dead. He also confirmed that they had never been popular.
"Laces weren’t popular when they first came out in Alpha," said Rosewater on his blog. "They were less popular the second time we tried them in Legends. I’m skeptical we’d do another cycle of them. We do occasionally do a blue card that can change colors (although we haven’t even made one of those in a while)."
While a return of individual laces is in question, an entire cycle of laces is pretty firmly not coming back. However, the history of laces show that, while designers might love a certain type of card and keep trying to make it work, sometimes players just don't like it. Or, sometimes they wind up not working in the overall game.
Back in 2023, Magic Untapped covered laces a bit. But, in the years since then, Magic has not budged an inch on putting more out.
