Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that
means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.
Okay, so. I ran—a while ago, for you guys—the Rosewater
Rumble! Where I pitted my sixteen sets against themselves. The winner was
Innistrad—but! I think the set that was really sort of the surprise of the
whole thing was Future Sight. Future Sight was responsible for two of the three
upsets, and the third upset was Innistrad beating Ravnica, which was almost not
really an upset in that when we were picking 1 and 2 we weren’t really sure
which to put first.
So we knew--kind of knew they were going to be the two
finalists, and we weren’t honestly sure which was going to win, so… But Future
Sight honestly surprised us. I did not expect Future Sight to do as well as it
did, but I think I understand why it did as well as it did. So let’s talk
today—today is all about Future Sight.
Now let me start by saying this: I’m a big fan of Future
Sight, I think people think that I don’t like Future Sight. No, in fact as a
designer I’m very proud of it in the sense that it was one of the hardest
designs that I ever did. In fact, in my mind it’s the second hardest design I
ever did, after Unglued, which ironically it was up against in the first thing.
The only reason Unglued to me was a little bit harder than Future Sight was,
Unglued didn’t even know what it was, you know, I had to sort of give a
definition to it. Where Future Sight knew kind of what it wanted to be, and the
challenge was how do you make that happen.
So here’s what happened. I became Head Designer during—in
the middle of Kamigawa block, so Ravnica block was my first time leading the
block. Time Spiral was my second. So, as I explained in the Time Spiral
podcast, we had started with this theme of time, and it kind of quickly
became—nostalgia became a big part of it, and then the block structure that I
set up was past, present and future.
Past was very clear. Like, how do you represent the past,
well show things from the past and cards from the past and things from the
past—you know, the past was very easy. As I’ve talked about in my Planar Chaos
podcast, I eventually came up with the idea of the alternate present, of the
way things could have been, and once I got that hook on it I understood what it
was supposed to be.
Now, Future Sight, I knew what it wanted to be, it was a
glimpse in the future. I understood that. And we had the timeshifted cards, so
I knew going in: Okay. It was a set all about the future, that played into
hinting at what the future could be, and then it would have cards from the future. Which—I remember there
was a comic someone did at the time where they were making fun of it, it’s like
“They’re cards from the future! But they’re in the packs, so aren’t they cards
from now? You know, like, uh…” But I liked a lot the flavor of Future Sight,
the idea of it’s a place for us to have this playground, to tease where Magic was going.
Now normally when you do a set, what you want to do is you
want to concentrate, right? You want to pick a few mechanics and do those few
mechanics. And all my training is all about saying “Okay, don’t go wide,” you
know, “go narrow. Take your mechanics, pick a few, really flesh them out,” you
know, and that the—the strength of usually making a design work is concentration.
But, that wasn’t what Future Sight wanted. What Future Sight
wanted was to go wide. Oh. Before we get to that, let me talk about the design
team. Because Future Sight had a very interesting design team. I don’t know if
I told—so, let’s walk through the design team. So I was the lead, obviously,
Mark Gottlieb was on the team, Devin Low, who at the time I think he was the
lead developer, but he was a developer if not the lead developer, and he was
the Development representative on the team. Those were the two normal ones.
Those were the people who had done design, had been on design teams before.
The rest of the people on my design team had never been on a
design team before. “Well, that’s interesting, Mark, why would you put three
people on your design team that had never done design before?” And the answer
was, I was doing Future Sight. I needed to go to—I needed to find things that Magic hadn’t done. So I wanted some
designers that didn’t know, you know, weren’t used to doing Magic design, that kind of maybe would,
you know, be out of the box a little bit more.
So I had three people. Number one, Matt Cavotta. Who at the
time was on the creative team in charge of names and flavor text. Matt had
always wanted to try his hand on design, he had a very different sensibility,
plus I knew that this was going to be a tricky flavor to match. Because not
only were we showing glimpses of mechanical futures, but we were showing
glimpses of creative futures. So I wanted a creative person on the team, Matt had
talked—had interested in designing, Matt definitely had a very different
aesthetic I thought would be good, so Matt Cavotta was on the team.
Next, a guy named Ryan Miller. Ryan Miller currently is the
equivalent of me on another product we make, another trading card game we make
called Kaijudo. He is the head designer for Kaijudo. At the time, Ryan was
doing a lot of different designs. Ryan’s a very good designer. But Ryan had
never done a Magic design before.
And one of the problems in general I’ve learned, when you
bring established designers into Magic
that aren’t familiar with Magic, is
they spend a lot of time sort of hitting areas you’ve hit before. That usually
what happens is you want people that are very well-versed in Magic because they’ve set kind
of—they’ve learned the lessons of Magic.
And designers that are well-experienced but don’t know Magic well tend to rediscover a lot of that stuff.
And so, Ryan was brought in because I knew he didn’t knew Magic well, but also I was trying to
use that as a plus in that he might go places we had closed off or hadn’t
thought about because we’d determined somehow we can’t do it, and I wanted
somebody who had that sort of “Oh,” maybe we could go to areas that we had sort
of self-censored. And so I brought Ryan on.
And the last person was an intern at the time, somebody who
would later go in to be in the Magic Pro
Tour hall of fame. A guess? Actually, there’s only two people who fit that
description, one is Pat Chapin but he is not the person. Zvi Mowshowitz! Was
the sixth member of our design team. As you will see in a minute, I’ll talk
about one of the mechanics. Zvi was very instrumental in one of them.
Okay. So what happened was, okay. We’re trying to glimpse
the future. Now, what—Brian Tinsman did Time Spiral, Bill Rose did Planar
Chaos, I took Future Sight mostly because I understood what we were trying to
do. In showing off the future, like “This is a hard set.” I knew it was a hard
set. And here’s the biggest thing. So for example, the time-shifted cards were
from the future. So every single timeshifted card had to do something we’d
never done before. You know what I’m saying?
Like, I can’t just show you something from the future that’s
something we’ve already done. You’re like “Well, I’m glad—the future looks
pretty boring. You’re doing that again?” You know, you can’t repeat what you’ve
done.
Now, a lot of what we did is riffing. Like a lot of the
future we showed you were things that were—things that made sense that we could
do. You know. A lot of it was like “Oh, I hope they one day do this,” and we
did some of that. So, we tried to show you some stuff you’d never seen before,
we had mechanics you’d never seen before, but at the same time, we also wanted
to go down some avenues and explore some things that was kind of obvious, maybe
we could do one day and show what we did. There was a lot of extrapolative
design.
Also be aware that I went down avenues that I never planned
to actually go down. One of the ones I’ll give in the examples is we had an
enchantment that tapped. I don’t want to do enchantments that tapped, but I
felt like when I was exploring all this potential futures, I had to throw a few
things in that I thought were like—you know, futures that people might have
thought we would do, just because it is very, very hard to come up with stuff
you’ve never done. And so I felt like “Okay, I’m not going to—even stuff that’s
normally off limits, I’m willing to sort of goof around and tease at things,
and…
And part of the fun was, the whole idea of the set was,
we’re showing you potential futures. Now, be aware. I had at the time a six
year plan, I think, so I mean I had some idea of where we were going. You know.
I knew—I knew clearly the next year and the year after that and the year after
that, and I had some ideas of where we were going.
So what happened was, a lot of the designs were us teasing
in directions I thought one day we would go. For example, Arbor Dryad—Dryad
Arbor.Dryad Arbor? Arbor Dryad? I guess Dryad Arbor—is a land that is a
creature and a land. Well, I knew we were doing a land block. I knew we were
doing Zendikar. I didn’t know what we were doing with land, so I played around
with the kind of things we can do with lands. Now it turns out, when we went to
Zendikar, we didn’t actually do that. But that was me kind of teasing you and
showing that we’re going to mess around with lands.
Likewise, there was the Myr… what’s the Myr’s name? There
was a Myr that was an artifact creature, it was in a blue frame, but it’s also
an artifact creature, and at the time we were sort of teasing—especially with
the creative—we were teasing that we were going to go back to Mirrodin and that
the Phyrexians had invaded. And so that was a little clue there about that. But
it turns out that we ended up using the colored artifacts in Alara, Shards of
Alara block, so when we got to return to Mirrodin we didn’t do that, so a lot
of times—a lot of Future Sight was us sort of knowing areas we were going and
playing with it.
Now a few of them we knew for sure, we definitely planted
some stuff for the very next set, or you know, the next year’s worth of sets.
So you notice all four sets—Lorwyn, Morning… Morningtide, Shadowmoor and
Eventide all had a card—you know, we planted the stuff that’s near. And then, we’ve
always sort of whenever we do a set we look and see.
And I happen to know for a fact that there’s a couple of
Future Sight cards scheduled right now to come into future sets. Now, I mean, they haven’t happened yet, so—but
they’re currently in sets right now. So it’s something we constantly look for,
and it’s one of the things I thought would be fun about Future Sight is we’d
have this sort of game that would go on for a long time. It both teased our
future and had us sort of have fun sort of recognizing it.
One of the problems we’ve run into is, a lot of times the
creative and mechanical, we would guess at a mechanical future, and creative
would guess at a creative future, and they don’t always line up. That’s been
the biggest problem where “Oh, we want to do this card, but that’s not a
creative we’d use.” And, I mean, the premise we always gave was, these are from
potential futures, so some would come to pass, some wouldn’t come to pass.
Now, so the timeshifted sheet—we’ll talk about that first,
because that is one of the major elements—okay, so the rule I said for the
timeshifted sheet said, “Anything on this sheet had to be something we haven’t
yet done but could do.” And some of the “could do” might be “Well, I don’t think we’re going to do that,” but it’s
teasing at different things.
Now the one thing that I should point out is the frame real
quick. So each time we had a timeshifted sheet, we used a different frame. The
first set had the old frame, the second set had an alternate frame with where Magic could have been, which was kind
of a reworking a combination of the old frame and the new frame and a different
frame. I love the Planar Chaos frames, by the way, I think I mentioned that in
the Planar Chaos podcast.
The future cast frames were, we had actually toyed with
changing Magic’s frame, I mean we
did change Magic’s frame, but we had
explored it with a much more radical way to change Magic’s frame. So, the Future Sight was actually a peek into that
frame. Like, the—we had, when we were planning to redo the frame in Mirrodin,
you know, the 8th Edition frames as people call them, we toyed with
a lot more radical ideas, like having the mana cost on the left side, because
we thought that way when you spread your cards you can see them, we had like
little symbols to represent the kind of cards—all this technology that we were
thinking of doing, when we went to the future we ended up using that. Like we
had done a lot of work to make those frames. There were a few additional things
we did, and it’s funny. The symbols for the different card types, I think Magic Online later used those, so it is
funny that the little things we did ended up getting used.
So the other thing that we did with the future shifted stuff
is A. we wanted to show you things we might actually do, we had mechanics and
things from the future, B. we—some of them, there were a couple things that we
thought were funny. Let me talk about a few individual ones.
So Tarmogoyf was made originally because I wanted the
following joke, which was: “These are the card types of Magic. And it would list card types that didn’t exist. Now when I
first came up with that joke, I planned to just list whatever. Some card types
that were just—sounded interesting. “Oh my God, what’s that?” But! Because I
made Tarmogoyf pretty early on in the process.
But in the middle of that, Matt Cavotta came to me with the
idea of doing planeswalkers. Now Matt and I, Matt was my guest for a whole
Planeswalker podcast if you ever listen to that, and I liked the idea—we ended
up doing them, we tried to do them in Future Sight, but we couldn’t quite—we
were close enough that we knew we had something really cool, but not close
enough that we were confident putting them in.
So—in fact, the story about Tarmogoyf, which I haven’t told
this, I might—I tell this story a lot so I apologize if I told it already—I
made Tarmogoyf. Then, when the Planeswalkers were going to be in the set, we
were going to have three planeswalkers in Future Sight, one of which was green,
we removed Tarmogoyf to put in the planeswalker. So instead of the joke
mentioning the card type, we just show you a new card type is the idea. But
then when the planeswalkers weren’t ready we pulled them out, and Mike put
Tarmogoyf back in.
And it’s funny—literally, Tarmogoyf was made because I
thought it was hilarious to have reminder text to show you other cards. And
then, once we figured out that we weren’t going to do planeswalkers, just like
“Oh, this is awesome, I can show you a card type that in fact is going to exist
in the near future.” And that was even better. Like I actually, it’s an
actual—I mean, I actually show you in the future. And at that time we had also
figured out that in order to make the thing we were trying to do in Lorwyn,
which is the next set, work, we were going to need the Tribal. So we ended up
putting the Tribal on it too because okay, here’s two new card types that were
going to show up next set. Which is pretty damn cool.
And the reason—what happened was, I had a long list of
things I could do, and one of my things was “Lhurgoyf variant?” And the other
was “Card that shows reminder text of card types,” and then one day my brain’s
like “Mmm! Mmm! Interesting!” And then I’m like “Okay, well, Lhurgoyf cares
about things in the graveyard, card types are something I could care about,
boom!” And I put them together. When I made the card, by the way, I believe it
was 2G for a */*--it might even have been 3G for a */*. Either 2G or 3G.
And the reason it was */* is I hate *+1. I hate it. Like
whatever, just make it nice and simple and easy to grok and, like I don’t think
you need a *+1. Like, whatever, fine, nothing’s in your graveyard, you can’t
play it. It’s not t hat big
a loss. Wait until you have some things in your graveyard.
But what happened was, when Mike—Mike Turian was the lead
developer, when Mike took out Tarmogoyf to put in the planeswalker, and then
had to put it back, he did it from memory. And because Lhurgoyfs are */*+1, he just assumed it was */*+1. And
so—and he also lowered it to 1G. So—while I made Tarmogoyf, Mike kind of made Tarmogoyf if you will.
So, okay. So, the other—what else did we do? Oh! So the
other thing we felt would be funny was to make some—a few cards that were kind
of just jokes. So one of the cards I made, I forget what it did, but it like
“When you blagh a blorgh, you splingh a splorgh,” or something. You know, I—it
was just these made-up words. Or I think it was—you know what it was was, it
made up a creature type that sounded silly, like, “All blorghs get +2/+2 and
something.” You know.
And Aaron liked where I was going, where I was just making
up something that we didn’t really plan to support, but he thought we didn’t
push it far enough. So Aaron took it and tweaked it and turned it into an earlier
version of Steamflogger Boss. And his Steamflogger Boss, it was whenever you
erect a monument—whenever a whatever, a rigger erects a monument, it said erect
two monuments. And then in Development, someone decided that we probably
shouldn’t be erecting things. That, I don’t know, it sounded bad? Anyway, we
changed it to assembling a contraption.
And the idea was, it would be this card that kind of hinted
at, you know, this future that who knows what’s going on, and it was kind of
funny. And it was our intent that we were just joking. But then Aaron goes and
tells people in his column that it was a joke. And I’m like, “But Aaron, that
whole--that joke is funny when you don’t tell people it’s a joke!”
And then once Aaron said it’s a joke, that we had no
intention of making assembling contraptions and stuff, then of course, what is
the—like, for example, I did this thing where I asked my Tumblr audience what
are the top then things that they wanted—well, I didn’t ask top ten, but I
asked them what it is they most wanted to see. And like in the top 5 was
contraptions. Like contraptions have become this giant thing because we sort of
threw the gauntlet down. And then Aaron was like “Oh, we can never do this.”
And so, ay yi yi… and the problem was, we didn’t make it
easy for us, so the contraptions are on my short list of like “If one day I can
solve contraptions, I should make contraptions.” But there’s a whole… yeah,
yeah, it is, uh, if you ever go read the rules about it, like, “you, the player
assemble contraptions, or at least sometimes the creatures assembled
contraptions, so what does that mean? Why are they assembling them?” And it’s
an artifact subtype, and ay yi yi.
Anyway, it has become one of the things that people bug me
about most, which means that I’ve spent some time thinking about it. It is a—it
is very tricky. It is very tricky. But I promise you this, the day I figure out
how to do them, I will look for a place to put them.
Oh, also on the timeshifted--here’s another funny story
about the timeshifted sheet—normally when Development makes holes, what they do
is we have hole-filling. That there’s people in R&D and outside of R&D that
they’ll go to to fill holes. And so normally, once I hand over a set, I’m not
very involved in hole-filling. Usually they come to me like when they’re having
real trouble filling it, and then I’ll try to help them, you know. But
normally, normal hole filling can usually fill holes.
The problem was, the normal hole-filling team was really bad
in filling timeshifted holes. Because it has to be something you’ve never done,
but something that you maybe could do. And that’s just—that’s really, really
hard. I mean, when I talk about this set being so hard in design, trying to
wrap your brain around, like, things that you could do but haven’t done—I mean,
it’s very hard to make. They were very, very hard to make.
So what Mike Turian would do, is when he had a hole, he
would just come to me. I would just fill the holes. They didn’t even go to the
hole-filling team. He tried a couple times, and it—it just proved fruitless for
the hole-filling team. It just was a little bit too hard. Required a little bit
too much kind of intimate knowledge of sort of what’s coming up, and what could
be done. And I’d spent the whole time working on the set, so I was in that
mindset. So, Mike would come to me.
And so, right before the set was going to go to print, he
came to me and said “Okay, Mark, I need two cards. I need a blue card and a
black card.” And those—and I made those cards in—I sat down in one session, I
made those two cards, they were the very, very last things to go in the set,
and they were Narcomoeba and Bridge from Below. Which would both go on to be
pretty good cards.
One of the (???) about Future Sight—I mean, there’s a couple
things. A., Mike Turian is known as a developer that definitely pushed
boundaries power-level-wise. But also, I think the reason Future Sight ended up
being very powerful is, Development—it is hard to understand something you’ve
never played with before. And normally in a set—you know, I will throw one or
two curveballs at the developers. You know, I’ll have one new mechanic that
they’ve never dealt with. But usually the other mechanics are things that are
similar, and they have some idea.
But this set it was like I was just throwing curveball after
curveball after curveball. Like, this one works in the graveyard but not in
play, and this one does this, this one—like, holy moly, you know, like, every
card was a curveball. Especially the—especially
the timeshifted sheets. And so they were like—I think one of the things
was, it was hard to figure out, and like gauge the power level. You know. And that’s
why Future Sight, I think has a higher power level than most in that there’s
just so many weird cards that do weird things, like, “well in the right
circumstances this could be good, but like, is it normally good?” I think that’s
part of why it ended up the way it did.
Okay, another big part of the set is what I called Mix and Match.
So Mix and Match was inspired by Mark Gottlieb, in Unhinged Mark Gottlieb made
two cards. One was called Blast from the Past, and one was called Old Fogey.
Blast from the Past was a burn spell that used every spell mechanic Mark could
come up with, and Old Fogey was a creature that used a lot of creature
mechanics.
Now, Old Fogey was a little more jokey than Blast—Blast from
the Past was more a straightforward, like, hey, here’s a burn spell with five
mechanics. Where Old Fogey definitely had some more jokey keywords. But both of
them were kind of like “I’m using a lot of keywords from the past, and putting
them together.” In fact, when I wrote the FAQ for Unhinged, for each of them, I’m
like “Here’s how they…” you know, “Here’s the mechanic. A with B works this
way. B with C works this way. C with D works this way.” You know. And I sort of
walked through what happens when you combine mechanics.
And what I found was, you know, like with Blast from the
Past, you know there were a few duds, but most of the mechanics actually worked
kind of interestingly. In that you could, you know, do this and then do that,
you could kick it and then you could buy it back. And so you get a large effect
but you still get to keep it. You know. Or you could kick it and flash it. And
stuff like that. It was kind of neat. Although it turns out that buyback and
flashback, even though they share the back, they don’t work together.
So I liked that idea, and I felt like how often were we
going to be in a place where we could do Mix and Match? You have to, like—you
know, normally there isn’t an environment that has that many things where we
can mix and match them together. We made this decision that, you know, we were
going to like explore mechanics from the past, and so, you know, the first set,
Time Spiral I think had twelve returning mechanics and two new ones. I believe
that’s what happened. And then along comes the next set and that adds a couple,
and—anyway, I said “Okay, let’s do Mix and Match.”
And so I put Zvi Mowshowitz—what I said to Zvi is, “Okay.
Here’s the mechanics that I’m willing to bring back,” and it was a pretty
lengthy list, and I said, “Okay. You—for each one of them, rank them from one
to five. One means—or five means ‘awesome. This is an awesome, awesome combo.
This is really cool, you’ll feel clever.’ Two means—er, sorry. Four means good,
but you know, not great. Three means it’s okay, two means it sucks, one means
it doesn’t even work. It’s a non-bo, as we call it, or bombo.”
And so he went through and he took all of them and he ranked
them from one to five. And then what I did is, I made sure to put all the fives
in, I think I got all the fours in, and I got—I think most of the threes in.
Might not have got all the threes in. I got all the fours and fives in.
And so we just mixed and matched and that was the kind of
fun of it was what happens with this mechanic and that mechanic? Because
normally what I explained at the time was, “Look, the only way to get mechanics
together is if they’re in the same set. And while we do bring back mechanics,
A. we don’t tend to bring back too many mechanics at the same time, and B. at
best there’s two mechanics that could, you know, merge for a card.”
And so I was really excited about Mix and Match being
something that we could—give a very distinct feel, and it felt a lot like the
future to me, which is “Well in the future, that’s where you see things we’ve
done, but, you know, put together in different ways.” In some ways that spoke
to me what the future was. It’s taking what Magic has already done, but mixing and matching them in different
ways. And so I thought just—these cards were something that really sort of had
that future feel to it.
And it’s one of the big things, by the way, I’m big on feel
was, I wanted the Future Sight to have the sense of, you know, you’re exploring
this future that was different. And I looked for mechanics and things that had
that sense. For example, I saved scry for Future Sight because scry to me was a
mechanic that was all about seeing the future. I mean literally it’s called
scry, which means to look into the future.
Also, we had the pacts, which were—interesting story, Paul Sottosanti,
who was on the design team for Planar Chaos, was inspired by a card in Unhinged
called Super—Turbo-Powered… uh, what’s it called? Turbo-Powered Slug. I’m… that’s
not the name. It is Super-Powered Turbo Slug? Agh. Okay, this is the problem
with driving the car… it was a card from Unhinged. It was a little slug that
had super-haste, and I can’t remember its name… Super Turbo Charged… Argh. Anyway.
That card. You know what card I’m talking about.
But he—during Planar Chaos, he came up with the idea of the
Pacts. Which was cards in which you paid for it in the future. You paid for it
next turn. But I said, “Wait, wait, Paul, that’s a Future Sight mechanic!
Right? I get to do a spell now and I pay for it in the future?” And so I stole
it and put it into Future Sight. Because—I mean it was a neat idea, but I mean
it was perfect for Future Sight.
Now, a lot of people, by the way, there was a big debate
about the whole “lose the game” thing. And the reason I did that—why did I have
you lose the game instead of some other negative is, I felt like if I gave you
another negative, and we tried this, what you ended up doing was just building
a deck to play around the negative. And that wasn’t the point.
The point of those cards were, I get a card now that I pay
for next turn. And so I needed to do something to ensure you paid for it next
turn. I wasn’t trying to make a super-Johnny card that you built around the
negative, so I’m like “Okay! How do I make you pay? Well, if you don’t, you
lose. That’ll make you pay.” You know. And—I mean, pacts had a little bit of a
problem with people forgetting and losing, which wasn’t really the point, and I—obviously,
that’s the biggest downside of pacts. But, I do enjoy the idea of you’ve got to
pay now—er, later, you’ve got to pay for what you get now. You know, I’ll
gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.And I enjoyed them. The pacts are
one of my favorite cycles in the sense of I love the gameplay of them. The idea
that, you know, I get my resource now but I’m indebted to pay for it later.
Anything else about Mix and Match cards? Sprout Swarm for a
while—I think that was a cool card, I think convoke and buyback went well
together, it was a mistake that it ended up being common, you know, I don’t
think in playtesting we realized, obviously and development didn’t realize the
power, you know, it kind of floated a little reindeer—under the radar a little
bit. Of how powerful it was. And I know in Limited it’s one of the big
frustrating things about Future Sight, and obviously, like I said, that’s more Development
than Design, but if we had been a little more on the ball… I don’t know. I do
like, I mean I like the mix and match of the card. I guess the rarity was
wrong.
So here’s something else that—to think about, about the
complexity of the set, which was before the set—if you looked at the set as of
Planar Chaos, how many mechanics existed in Magic? How many did Magic
have, if you went to the comp rules? And I believe there were fifty-six. You
know. So there were fifty-six keywords that existed before Planar Chaos—I’m
sorry, before Future Sight came out.
Okay, how many keyword mechanics were in Future Sight? Now, it introduced a whole bunch. But how many
were in Future Sight? And the answer is forty-eight. By the way, Design turned
over fifty-one. Gottlieb ended up pulling, as Rules Manager pulled a few out
during Development. But think about that. There were fifty-six in existence,
there were forty-eight in Future Sight. You know. I mean for people that want
to sort of say “Oh, you know, Future Sight, it’s not—it’s not that complicated.”
Know. Baloney. Baloney. Baloney! It’s insanely, insanely, insanely
complicated.
Now, I understand—I understand that there are people who enjoy
that. And obviously, I think the reason that Future Sight did so well in the
Rosewater Rumble is, I was on Twitter. This is my dedicated, enfranchised
following, right? You know, these are the people who are like, “I want to follow
Mark on Twitter.” These are people who have been playing Magic for a while, a lot of them. And—I mean, like, I always talked
about Future Sight being my art house film. Which means it got critical raves,
people loved it who saw it and got it, but it had a bad opening weekend.
You know, Future Sight did not do well, and the reason was
there were forty-six key—forty-eight!
Forty-eight keywords! Forty-eight—let’s
imagine you were new to Magic. Okay?
We normally, normally in a set, you know, we’ll put four, five mechanics, maybe
six if we want to push it. But I mean you know that’s—that’s about it. And if
we’re doing five or six, like, they’re simple. We’re making sure not to do anything
too complex. You know.
And understand that--out of the forty-eight, some of them
were evergreen keywords. So let’s take those away, there were still like thirty
keywords! You know. And some of them are very complex and we’d never done them
before! They’re from the future, you know. Plus we had mechanics that were just
on one card or on a couple cards. And like it was—it was a lot. You know? And—like
I said, I’m not disappointed that we did it, and I think that Future Sight had
a lot of fun to it.
But anyway, as I’m looking at my sheet, I realize that I
have a lot more to say about Future Sight. In fact, I haven’t talked about a
single mechanic. And there are forty-eight of them! So I’m going to—I’m going
to come back next week, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about a lot of
the individual—I think I’m going to talk about the mechanics next week mostly,
because there’s forty-eight mechanics to get through. Thirty minutes, forty-eight
mechanics, can I do it?
So next week I will talk about sort of a little bit more
about Future Sight, and hopefully you guys have enjoyed today’s Part I, and
next week will be more Future Sight. But I am now at work, I parked in the
parking spot, so it’s time for me to go in, so I guess it’s time for me to make
the Magic.
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