5/10/13 Episode 33: Future Sight Part II (Special guest Matt Cavotta)

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay, so last week I talked about Future Sight. And today was Part II. It is Part II. But, something interesting came up. Matt Cavotta needs a ride to work! And for those that remember my podcasting on Planeswalkers, Matt lives right near me and so occasionally he and I go to work together. And I thought Future Sight—the one team Matt was on, the fates were speaking!

So Matt’s going to join us today, for Part II of Future Sight. We’ll get some insight into maybe his take—because like I said. I’ve done a lot of design teams. I’ve been on 50+ design teams. Matt’s been on one. This one. So we’re going to talk to him today about it, and I’m going to try to hit some issues I didn’t hit last time. So we’ll see if we can combine those together.

So a quick reminder before—I’m driving to get Matt right now. So Matt, at the time—Matt has a new job, but his original job was he was on the creative team and he did names and flavor text. And at the time, I was looking for a more offbeat design team to do Future Sight because I knew we were doing a lot of crazy—you know, I really wanted a team that was outside the box thinking.

Plus I really wanted a member of the creative team on my design team, because not only were we designing future mechanics, but we also were hinting at future worlds. And I thought it would be nice to have a person to do that. So Matt was filling multiple roles. So we’ll talk to him today, we’re trying to figure out what his take on all of this was because like I said, I’m—I’ve done a lot of design teams. So I think maybe in some ways I’m a little more jaded—just, I’ve been doing this for a long, long time. But like I said, this was Matt’s one team. So he’ll probably have a different perspective.

So—I’m almost there to pick him up. (???) things you need to know before I get Matt. As I said last time, remember that Future Sight was set up—we knew that Time Spiral was the past, we knew that Planar Chaos was the alternate present, and we knew that Future Sight was going to be a glimpse of the possible futures of Magic. And all that entails. And last time I talked about the timeshifted sheet, and I talked about the Mix and Match cards, and I talked about the Pacts—the Pact cycle.

So today, the goal was to talk about mechanics. But we’ll see—I’m gonna pick Matt up and we’ll figure out where we go. If need be, we’ll have a third part here. I’ve learned that these—the podcasts about the episodes, people like them to run over several episodes. So I’m willing to spend the time and talk about it. Aha! Here is Matt. Let’s pick him up. Okay.

MARK: Welcome!

MATT: Good morning.

MARK: Okay! Welcome to the show, Matt.

MATT: (???)

MARK: I’m in progress. Yes. I have to start when I leave my driveway, because I have to begin every show by going, “I’m pulling out of my driveway.” So, yes. The—my rule is that my podcast is from the start of my drive to the end of my drive. So.

MATT: Have you had any flat tires or any such things?

MARK: I got gas once. I don’t know, I… I’ve been in traffic a few times. So. I always expect, like, more, somehow my actually being in a car mattering, but it only matters like one in 75 shows.

MATT: One of these days, someone’s going to sideswipe you and the show is going to be awesome.

MARK: Yeah, it will be the—the road rage episode. (both laugh) Okay, so here’s what I was saying before you got in the car, was I have been on fifty-some design teams. You’ve been on one.

MATT: One!

MARK: So I said “So, what are the chances of the one I’m talking about is the one that you were on?” So that felt like fate.

MATT: Fate.

MARK: So let’s talk about this, which is—what was it like being on the only design team that you’ve ever been on?

MATT: You know, I have no perspective because like you said, I’ve only been on one. I imagine that 99/100 people who play Magic who are really into it think of how much fun it would be to be charged with designing cards that will ultimately end up actually being put into a card set, and then I’d have to say that it was that! It was very cool. However, I can say that I didn’t experience all that often what it feels like to design a card and then actually see it printed.

MARK: So, what—

MATT: I can only think of two—

MARK: Okay, what are the two cards that—your brain to print?

MATT: The only two I can think of, they both kind of suck. One is the Putrid Cyclops.

MARK: Okay.

MATT: Scry one—cyclops—just seemed funny to me. And the Yixlid Jailer.

MARK: Okay, what does the Yixlid Jailer do?

MATT: Cards in graveyards do nothing. They have no abilities.

MARK: Okay, yeah.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: Well that’s a neat card.

MATT: Yeah, it’s a hoser. People sometimes actually play with it. Whereas the Cyclops lurks in binders.

MARK: It was played in Limited! Yeah, not every card, you know—I mean, one of the things people don’t realize is, we make tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of cards, and so few of them actually make it to print.

MATT: The other thing that I wasn’t aware would happen is that while you might not design start to finish a card that gets printed, you dabble on all kinds of cards as a team.

MARK: Yeah, well people ask me all the time like “Why don’t we credit the designers on the cards?” and I’m like, “Well, with the artist we know who drew the card. With the designer, like—“

MATT: Four names attached to one card.

MARK: Yeah. And a lot of times, someone has an idea and someone tweaks the idea and someone else says “Why don’t you do this?”

MATT: Right.

MARK: You know. And it’s very, very hard at the end of the day to know, some cards, who even made the card.

MATT: Right.

MARK: You know, I mean, some cards, like I said, there’s definitely cards where I made the card and no one touched it and I know I made the card. But like last episode I was talking about some of the cards I made in Future Sight. And I was talking about the timeshifted cards were extra hard because of the rule that said “It had to be something Magic’s never done before. And that’s—I remember, so I said, when I put together the team, three of the six members of the team had never been on a Magic design team before. Which was very bizarre for a Magic design team.

MATT: Right.

MARK: But I was trying to…

MATT: Get out of the box.

MARK: Yes. I wanted out of the box. I thought you were an out of the box guy, so… and another thing that I talked about is, we were trying to show off not just future mechanics, but future creative elements. Why don’t you talk about that a little bit?

MATT: Well, there are a small handful of ideas that we thought we would get to at some point, and you and I talked yesterday about the Sarcomite Myr.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: We had an inkling that Phyrexia would be back.

MARK: Well, we, I mean Sarcomite—for those who don’t realize, we knew that the Phyrexians had invaded Mirrodin when we did Mirrodin.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Like if you go read the novel, I mean, the fact that the Phyrexians are invading was worked into Mirrodin. So we knew we were going to go back. Now the big change—I talked about this in my podcast on Scars of Mirrodin was—we thought we were going to go back to New Phyrexia, and just—and at the end of it, “Oh my God! It was Mirrodin!” But we ended up going to Mirrodin, watching them get taken over.

MATT: We also planted a Lorwyn card directly in.

MARK: Yeah, I think we planted cards from the whole next block.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: I think there was a Lorwyn, an Eventide, a Shadowmoor and a Morningtide card all put in.

MATT: There was… I can’t say that this is actually going to happen or not, but we put some dinosaur stuff—

MARK: Was it Muraganda?

MATT: Yeah. There’s that. And I think we did—wasn’t there a dinosaur of some kind in there?

MARK: Yeah, there was, there was.

MATT: Was it Imperiosaur in there?

MARK: Yeah, I think so. I think so. There’s some dinosaur stuff in Future Sight for sure. I mean, one of the things I think we did was, we knew some worlds we were going to go to, and then we knew some worlds that we thought one day we might go to. And then you guys just screwed around a little bit.

MATT: Right. And then there was, of course, Coward World that we planned on going to at some point.

MARK: Yes. All right, here, so let me ask you a question. So the card that I get the most questions about—see if you can guess this. Of all the cards in Future Sight, the card that generates the most conversation, that I get bugged the most about, would be what card?

MATT: Tarmogoyf?

MARK: Tarmogoyf is the one that people talk about as far as being the most powerful. But I get a lot more mail about another card from Future Sight. See if you can name it.

MATT: Putrid Cyclops?

MARK: Yes! They go, “When are you going to make more Putrid Cyclopses?” And Yixlid Jailers. Could you please make more of that? No, I’ll give you a clue. It involves assembling contraptions!

MATT: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

MARK: Steamflogger Boss. Do you remember anything about the Creative of Steamflogger Boss?

MATT: Uh… I think that was one where our tongues were firmly planted in our cheeks. I don’t think any of us dreamed that this would actually come—

MARK: No, no we didn’t.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: Aaron actually admitted in like—right after it came out, he admitted that it was a joke and we never planned to do it. And I’m like, “Aaron, why did you tell them that? Now we’re destined to like somehow have to figure out how to do it.” So, I was like “It’s a joke! The beauty of the joke was we didn’t tell them the joke!” So, it’s kind of like—remember, uh in Dr. Strangelove, that the Russian in Dr. Strangelove invent this machine that’s supposed to, like, scare everybody else—like, it stops nuclear war by being this—like, “If you bomb us, we’ll bomb everybody.” It was a machine.

MATT: Right.

MARK: But they never told anybody about it. Like, “We have to tell people about it or else it doesn’t work!” Okay, so. In front of you is a list of all the mechanics in the set. Well—all the non-evergreen mechanics in the set.

MATT: You know what might happen on this podcast that makes driving matter?

MARK: Okay, what?

MATT: It’s when Matt vomits from reading in the car.

MARK: I’m driving! So… one of these days, someone keeps—you and I will have to do this on a future podcast. They want to do a podcast where I answer questions, but I can’t do that while I’m driving, so I’ll have to have someone else in the car to read me questions. So maybe one day we’ll do that. We’ll do a “Ask Mark and Matt day.”

MATT: Okay.

MARK: Okay, so.

MATT: Wow, that’s a lot.

MARK: Pick—I mentioned this in Part I. So, before—before Future Sight came out, like Planar Chaos previously, there were 56 keywords in Magic. How many keywords—well, they’re not even all there because the evergreen ones aren’t there. There were 48 keywords in Future Sight. Those are just ones that were introduced in Future Sight.

MATT: These are all from—

MARK: Well, okay. These were new, and these were…

MATT: Okay.

MARK: Extra ones brought back. That doesn’t include flying and first strike and stuff like that.

MATT: What is typecasting?

MARK: Uh, like wizardcasting? So like, wizardcycling—wizardcycling, it’s called.

MATT: Okay, I remember that.

MARK: Yeah, one of the things that was interesting about making mechanics was, so a lot of what we were doing is what’s called extrapolative design, which was—we weren’t trying to surprise you with things you’d never seen before, but a lot of what we were trying to do is design obvious places we could go from stuff we had done. For example, we had like a morph cycle. Remember the morph cycle?

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: And so…

MATT: (???) evolving.

MARK: Right. And so the morph cycle was a vertical cycle in which—normal morph takes creatures and they morph, so we took the other permanent types that existed at the time, because planeswalkers didn’t exist yet although they almost did, and we took a land and an enchantment and a… artifact, and then each one of them morphed into that. Okay. So pick one of these and then we’ll talk about it.

MATT: Let’s talk about… grandeur.

MARK: Oh, grandeur! Okay, what do you—what do you remember about grandeur?

MATT: That was the legend ability—

MARK: Yes, yes, that was the ability that went on—

MATT: It was actually pretty cool.

MARK: It was very cool. Do you know who designed the grandeur ability? I’m sure you don’t, but…

MATT: Hmm… no.

MARK: A little trick question.

MATT: No I don’t.

MARK: No one on the design team, so that’s why it’s a trick question. It was designed by Bill Rose. Who was the VP of R&D. Bill had come up with the idea—so one of the things that—one of the ongoing problems, maybe I’ll have a whole podcast on this, because it’s—the legendary—you know, legendary—the supertype “legendary.” The problem is, it’s this awesome thing that we want people to be excited about, right? These are characters that are unique. Except the legendary ability is just a downside!

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: It’s like there’s no—I mean, I guess you can play Commander with it. But other than that, it is—there’s no great advantage to being a named character other than now you can’t have more than one in play.

MATT: Right.

MARK: So Bill said, “Is there anything we can do to make the legendary ability better?

MATT: Right.

MARK: And Bill came up with the grandeur ability, so for those that don’t remember, what the grandeur ability says is you can discard extra copies of it to have an effect. And the idea was that… that way if you drew a second one, it wasn’t a dead card anymore.

MATT: Right.

MARK: And we it in a cycle… I think it was a cycle?

MATT: I think so.

MARK: Now if I remember correctly, all the legends were ancestors of famous people? Is that correct?

MATT: Oh, now I’m remembering?

MARK: Right? They were like all—I think they were all…

MATT: Was Blackblade one of them?

MARK: Yeah, Blackblade was one of those. Right. There’s Dakkon Blackblade’s… I don’t know, grandson or something?

MATT: There were some kids, there were some kids in the…

MARK: Yeah, I mean it was us doing future generations of known characters.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Like I said. That’s more extrapolative design. Like instead of making brand new characters, we riffed off characters you knew and showed their offspring.

MATT: I think that that’s a pretty cool ability.

MARK: It is.

MATT: I’m surprised that we’ve never used it since.

MARK: We will. In my mind, if I take all the abilities that we introduced in Future Sight, they fall in three categories. Category one is for sure for sure we’ll do them again. Now, it takes a while to get to some of them, we have to find the right place for them, so just because we haven’t done them doesn’t mean I’m not interested in doing them. There’s a bunch on there that I’ve actively been looking for places to put it.

MATT: Do you imagine that grandeur would apply only to your own self? Or would—could I discard any legend with grandeur to use that ability?

MARK: Oh! I think it’s just—I think it’s just your guys. I don’t think if your opponent has a guy in play, you can discard yours…

MATT: If I have Legend A with grandeur on the board but Legend B with grandeur in my hand, can I discard him for Legend A’s bonus?

MARK: No. That’s not how grandeur works. Grandeur says that you can—

MATT: It’s all about me.

MARK: Yeah. Legend A can discard other copies of Legend A. Now what I thought you were asking was, what if Legend B is another version of Legend A, right?

MATT: You know what card I want to see?

MARK: What?

MATT: I want to see a legendary rat lord who you can have any number of copies of that guy in your deck.

MARK: Okay.

MATT: What is that card? Relentless Rats?

MARK: Well, there’s Relentless Rats… yeah, that’s the one which you get as many as you want. It’s based on Plague Rats, which allowed you to play with lots of Plague Rats.

MATT: And it has grandeur, of course.

MARK: Yeah. Rat grandeur.

MATT: That’s my all rat lord deck.

MARK: So we’ve made a few rat lords. But nothing—

MATT: It doesn’t actually have to be a rat lord.

MARK: Yeah. You know what I realized, I goofed up on Gatecrash? I didn’t make an ooze lord. That—I dropped the ball on…

MATT: Nothing says “the city” like an ooze.

MARK: Well, and the Simic—the Simic have lots of ooze. It would have fit. A Simic ooze lord would have fit. Okay, pick another ability.

MATT: I pick… fateseal!

MARK: Fateseal! Okay, so what is fateseal? What inspired—Fateseal is extrapolative design. What is fateseal?

MATT: Is fateseal like scry on your opponent?

MARK: Yes! It is negative scry! So one of the things I did was, because we were doing past, present, future, I wanted to make sure there was one unique mechanic for each set that played up that theme. So the past was flashback, right, because that’s remembering the past, and the alternate present I did vanishing, which is a redone version of fading, because it was all about “you get it right now but it goes away,” and then for the future I saved scry. And then I said, “Well, scry you can only use on yourself, what if you used scry against your opponent?”

MATT: Have we used that since?

MARK: Well, okay. So I didn’t finish this before. So there’s three categories: category number one is, “Definitely. I’m looking for a place for it, I believe one day we’ll do it.” Category number two is,  “I don’t know.” I think assembling contraptions falls in this one. It may be—maybe if we can find a way to do it, I’m willing—the category two I’m willing to do, but I’m—they’re more challenging. They’re not slam dunks. Like category one is “Look, I know we’ll find a place.” Category two is “I don’t know, maybe.” Category three is “I don’t think we will ever do this mechanic again.” I think fateseal falls in category three because it is the most unfun, violating…

MATT: Doesn’t that seem very Dimir, though?

MARK: It is very Dimir. We’ve—we talked about doing fatesear for Dimir. Fateseal, sorry, for Dimir. But it is just the most unfun thing. Like, we’ve been spending all this time and energy trying to like take things we think they just suck all the fun out of the game, and that mechanic is really like… I don’t know. It’s—it is fun-sucking as fun-sucking gets.

MATT: Are there any others in the “we’ll never do that” section?

MARK: Well, if we get to one I’ll tell you.

MATT: How about… fortify?

MARK: Fortify! Okay.

MATT: I don’t remember fortify.

MARK: Well… what do you think fortify is?

MATT: I have no idea.

MARK: It gives you vitamins to make you stronger?

MATT: Yes.

MARK: No. Fortify is equipment for land.

MATT: Oh. Oh!

MARK: Yes. So that is in the category one. I’m looking for a place to use it. I need the right place—I mean, the thing with—

MATT: I can think of a place.

MARK: Well, I mean—

MATT: But we can’t talk about this here.

MARK: We can’t talk about it here. This is not the “riff on the future stuff.” So… that’s what they want, by the way. They go, “Just—yeah, just do a podcast on Huey or something.” You know? Okay. So fortify was artifacts—equipment for land. We had actually talked about doing it in Zendikar, because Zendikar was a land set, but we had a lot of other stuff going on, and anyway, it just—it didn’t seem like the right place. But I—it’s category one. There will come a time and a place… we will do it, I believe.

MATT: Yeah, that seems cool.

MARK: Okay, next.

MATT: What about aura swap? What is that?

MARK: Aura swap! So aura swap was—

MATT: It’s just like… I trade an aura in my hand for one that’s on a guy?

MARK: Yeah. I believe that’s how it worked. Basically the idea of aura swap is, if a creature has aura swap, then it has the ability it has—but, it could change at any moment into another one.

MATT: Oh, so the creature has it, not the—

MARK: No, no, no. The aura has it. But if the aura has aura swap, that means it could transform into an aura that’s in your hand.

MATT: Got it.

MARK: So—any creature that has aura swap, we have to, you know, be suspicious that it could change. I guess that’s category two… it’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s a tricky one to use is the problem. Like some of the other ones, like no no—I know we can use them. I know where to go, I know how to use it. This one, it’s tricky.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: It’s not a category three, it’s not like we’ll never do it, but kind of like I have to find the right way to do it. It requires a lot of finesse. And it’s tricky.

MATT: It also requires friends. You know, if auras don’t already kind of matter, are they going to be enough of a thing to even warrant shining another spotlight on it?

MARK: Yeah, no no no, it definitely—it’s a linear mechanic in that, what that means is, it requires other cards of its kind, or a certain kind, so right. You’d have to have an aura deck to make aura swap really matter.

MATT: What about the lifelink, deathtouch, shroud, and reach. Did we just rename those?

MARK: No, we introduced them.

MATT: Those didn’t exist?

MARK: Yes. Those did not—I mean, the—they—they weren’t keywords.

MATT: Got it.

MARK: So what happened during Future Sight was, I had been meaning—one of the problems I had run into was, I felt we were too stingy with our keywords, and I really wanted to spread them out. I really wanted to—because what happened was, “haste was a red thing. Only red had haste.” And what I—my feeling on keywords is, it’s this valuable commodity, what are we doing? We have to spread them out a little bit. Because from a design standpoint, we kept making the same cards. We needed a little more flexibility. So my plan was, and it happened during Future Sight, was to introduce them, give them keywords, and then spread them out in colors. So the ones that got introduced—lifelink, which at the time was mostly a white thing, we spread to black, deathtouch, which was mostly a black thing, we spread to green, shroud, which was a green thing got spread to blue although blue and green had both done similar things.

MATT: Right.

MARK: And then reach—reach only existed—we didn’t spread reach anywhere. In fact, there’s a big question of who’s supposed to get reach other than green… I think it’s white is supposed to be secondary reach? But we very rarely do reach in any other color.

MATT: It didn’t need it because it has—

MARK: Because it has fliers. Yeah. Maybe red? I’m not sure who needs reach. But the reason we did it was, I didn’t care if we had it, I didn’t need it keyworded, because it’s not the kind of thing we tend to use in keyword form a lot, because—oh, the reason we need keywords is, when you make a cycle of things, and you’re doing some new things, and you need to give them variety, we tend to give them creature keywords, but we needed a single word, and so when they’re spelled out it’s hard to fit on the card, that’s why we needed to keyword them.

MATT: Especially in this set.

MARK: And reach, by the way… we made reach not because I needed it from a design standpoint—the rules team needed it because it made it easier to write the flying text. Because if you just—if flying is, “I can only be blocked by creatures with flying and reach” then it just defines it. Although it’s a circular logic where, like, reach and flying define each other by the other.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Kind of like the dictionary when, like “What does this mean?” it gives the synonym. “What does that mean?” it gives the first word. So. Okay. Give me another one.

MATT: Absorb.

MARK: Absorb. Oh, absorb! Okay. So the idea of absorb was, we did a trading card game called Star Wars. Star Wars the Trading Card Game. And it was a Richard Garfield design, and then I was in charge—I worked with Richard on the original design, and then I was in charge of doing the very first set. Like the core set. And one of the abilities… I’m not sure whether this ended up in the first set or not, but the idea of armor. The idea that when you shoot something, it takes less damage because it had armor. And so absorb was the idea of taking that mechanic that we had come up with for Star Wars and bringing it to Magic.

MATT: So what ends up with absorb? Is that a creature ability?

MARK: Yeah, it’s a creature ability. So what it means is, Absorb 1 means that every point of damage the creature takes, it takes one less.

MATT: Oh, so if—I got it.

MARK: Right. So the—so the—so, what category… where is absorb? One, two, or three?

MATT: Um… I don’t know.

MARK: So, you would think one, because “Hey, it’s a clean ability. It’s really flavorful. But it’s two.

MATT: It’s kind of hard to—for a—

MARK: Why is it two? Why is it two and not one?

MATT: (???)

MARK: No, no, I mean, I think we could convey—I mean the idea is, I don’t know, I’m not sure absorb was the best word, but the flavor of armor was pretty cool. Like, I’m harder to hurt. I thought the flavor was cool.

MATT: Is that the reason, because it’s not correctly flavored?

MARK: No, no no no no no. It’s a Development reason, actually.

MATT: It’s too good?

MARK: It’s really, really, really fricking—Absorb 1 is really good. Like insanely—like we didn’t realize how good it was until we made a couple, and then we’re like “Oh, this is insanely good.” And that’s not even—you can start comboing with things, or like—

MATT: Let’s say… you can’t be… let’s say if you have five toughness and you have Absorb 1, someone can’t shoot two spells at you to kill you.

MARK: Right!

MATT: They have to over—it has to be such overkill.

MARK: Correct! Like we—I forget what size we had. Imagine, right, you have a 5/5. It’s like—two lightning bolts is not enough to kill you.

MATT: Right. That sucks.

MARK: You know. I’m not saying we’ll never—that’s why it’s in category two. But I do admit that it’s a developmental problem. And whenever I bring it up, like a couple times I said “What do you guys maybe think of absorb?” And Development always says… okay, I’m making a face that you can’t see on audio. But I’m—a grimace.

MATT: Yeah, a grimace.

MARK: Yeah. So anyway, I like the flavor of absorb. I think absorb is a very cool flavor. And it worked a little better in Star Wars, where we didn’t have—Star Wars had a lot more damage happening. So reducing one damage—it was a die-rolling game, you had a lot of dice, so reducing one damage wasn’t this big deal when people were rolling, you know, eight dice or twenty dice or whatever. Okay, next one.

MATT: Gravestorm.

MARK: Gravestorm! Okay, so gravestorm is a variant of…

MATT: Storm?

MARK: Storm! Very good! (???) some easy ones (???). Gravestorm was a—I came up with gravestorm. I was trying to come up with a tamer storm was the idea. Because storm—storm is this mechanic that I always joke is kind of like the relationship that went bad, that you keep thinking maybe next time it will go better, and so every time you rekindle it, it goes horribly again, and then you’re like “Okay,” you know, “Okay,” you know, “That’s it. I learned my lesson.” And then somehow you keep going back and going, “This time it will work!” And storm has burned us every time we’ve ever used it.

MATT: Did gravestorm burn us?

MARK: Well… gravestorm’s problem is, it’s just too much like storm, I think. It’s just, I mean we did it on one card and I think it was okay, but it’s not the kind of card you can put in lots of mechanics because it just, it has—I mean, it’s not quite as broken as storm, but that’s, you know, like… it’s—I don’t know, it’s like comparing, you know, it’s not quite as much a dictator as Mussolini? But you know—notice I went to Mussolini because everybody does Hitler. So I’m trying to—trying to go to different—

MATT: Yeah, branch out. How about… frenzy?

MARK: Frenzy. I love—frenzy is a mechanic that I like a lot. Frenzy is “Frenzy N,” and if you attack and are not blocked, you get +N/+0. And we’ve made a few cards—I mean, not called frenzy, but Magic’s had a few cards that have done this. I like frenzy a lot. Development does not like frenzy and so we always—we have this constant fight. Because I think frenzy is a real cool mechanic. And Development doesn’t like it. So—

MATT: So it only triggers when you’re not blocked.

MARK: Right. When you’re not blocked. I don’t even understand why they don’t—I mean, I kind of understand. But I think it’s a neat mechanic in that it says “Hey, hey, you’d better get in a fight with me or else I’m pretty dangerous.” It kind of encourages combat. But Development does not like it. So I have tried to get frenzy in multiple times, and each time Development has sort of said they didn’t want to do it. So I’ll put this in camp two, in that it would be camp one if Development liked it at all. So I’ll put it in camp two in that—I need to, you know, slowly warm them up to it.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Okay, we have one last one before we’re going to get to work.

MATT: Transfigure.

MARK: Transfigure. Okay, so transfigure was a take on transmute, which was the Dimir mechanic from Ravnica, and transfigure—I think our creatures—

MATT: Did you just do it from in play instead of in your hand? Is that what it—

MARK: Well, no no no, I mean transmute was from in your hand. But transmute was, I can turn any spell into any other spell that has the same converted mana cost.

MATT: Right.

MARK: I think transfigure are creatures that turn into any other creature with the same mana cost.

MATT: Right, but isn’t—aren’t they in play?

MARK: They’re in play, yeah. So that is—so the idea is that I attack with this thing, and then I can—if I have the mana, I can turn it into any other creature with the same mana cost as me. Trans—the problem with transfigure is the same problem with transmute, which is again a developmental issue—I mean, a design issue too, which is what we call repetitive gameplay, where part of the fun of Magic is that you want different things to happen in different games, and if the same thing keeps happening then it becomes kind of boring, and so we’re very dubious of mechanics that say “Hey, every time I play, the same thing is going to happen.” And so tutors tend to lead to that. Okay, anyway—so guys, we have not gotten through all the keywords. I want to talk about all the keywords. So I will do a Part III next week. Matt probably won’t be with me.

MATT: I’m out!

MARK: “That’s enough! I’m done!”

MATT: I’m done with this!

MARK: So I want to thank Matt for joining us today, and we will have him in the future. He’s our—he’s my most—now it’s your second show, so now you’re my most, uh, my most used guest, I guess.

MATT: I’m honored.

MARK: So, anyway, thanks for joining us, and guys, next week we’ll do—I’ll talk about the rest of the mechanics. Maybe my thirty minutes in, maybe—we’ll see. It’s a lot of mechanics. So anyway, thanks for joining us, and it’s time to go make the Magic.