6/14/13 Episode 38: Unglued 2

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay. Well, I am not pulling out of my driveway, but it still is time for Drive to Work! So my daughter Sarah forgot her glasses and I had to go to school and give her her glasses. So today’s Drive to Work didn’t work out quite the way I planned. So I thought maybe the topic of today’s Drive to Work is a set that didn’t work out quite the way it was planned.

I often talk about sets that I’ve designed that made it to print. But there is one set that I designed, and I mean designed completely, I finished the design, that didn’t see print. And that set was Unglued 2.

Okay, now. Let me explain. For those that might be confused, so Unglued came out. Back in… ’97, ’98, and it came out to a lot of fanfare, people were very excited, it was something new and different we hadn’t done before. But—and, so we decided, because this set hadn’t come out yet, that we go “Ooh, this is a smash hit! Let’s make another one.” So they right away, before the first one even came out, we started doing work on the second one.

And what happened was, for those that don’t know, Unglued… we had a bad habit back in the day of not understanding our print sizes correctly, and misgauging things. And for a while we were really good at printing way too much. And the problem is, if you print way too much, it doesn’t matter if you’re successful. If you overprint it something, it starts becoming not successful because you have materials that you’ve printed that aren’t sold. Which is a negative profit.

Anyway, Unglued—too much Unglued got printed. It just… I think today we’re much better at understanding the audience, and how big it’s supposed to be… but back in the day everything was like “This will be another smash hit,” and people didn’t get that the Un sets, you know, have a niche audience, much like our supplemental products, but they’re not, you know, not everybody wants to play. It’s something that’s for a subset of the audience, not the whole audience.

Anyway, it got overprinted, didn’t do that well, comparatively because of the overprinting, and so the set ended up getting put on hiatus and never made. But I want to talk about designing the set today because I actually designed a whole set. And some of it would later get used in Unhinged, which is the second Un set. But once again, I’m not talking about Unhinged today, I’m talking about Unglued 2. In fact, our working name for it was “Unglued 2: The Obligatory Sequel.” I mean… I don’t know that we actually would have called it that, but that was what we were tentatively calling it.

So there’s a couple things that I learned from Unglued that I wanted to apply to Unglued 2. Interestingly, some of them did not get applied to Unhinged. But—so one of the things that I liked about  Unglued was that it had a theme to it which was this chicken theme. But the chicken theme in Unglued kind of got layered on near the end, it was something that was meant as a smaller sort of theme that kind of ended up being a little bit of a bigger theme.

But it wasn’t that big a theme, you know. For all the chickens—I mean, maybe there’s fifteen cards in Unglued that reference chickens or have a chicken on it. You know, there was not… for as much as, you know, I tried to have the chicken theme, it didn’t—it was a pretty minor thing. And so I decided in the second one, I wanted to have a theme that was a little more pervasive. So what—what comedy theme did I choose? I chose animated vegetables. “Animated vegetables?” you say. Yeah. Yes I did.

So one of the things I did is we had this vegetable theme, and the vegetables—I said to the artists, “Hide a vegetable in your artwork.” So the idea was, every single piece of art for Unglued 2 had a piece of—a vegetable hidden in the artwork. Now the fun part of this is, some of the art for Unglued 2—and by the way, all—we—we went so far that the art was done. You know, like the cards were very, very—I was done with the design file, we had gotten all the art in.

We hadn’t laid the cards out yet, and in Un sets that’s a much more complex process because normal sets you get the art and just you plunk them in the borders, and you know they go where the art goes. But in Un sets, the art breaks the borders, a lot of them have treatments to how it looks, that, you know, the card frame could be, you know, busted or split or something’s knocked out of it or—all sorts of things can happen, and so we hadn’t gotten to that part. But we did have all the art.

So some of the art from Unglued 2 got used in Unhinged. And the funny thing is—not all of the art, but if you look, there’s a few Unhinged cards that have, like, vegetables hidden in the art. Which makes no sense out of context. But if you ever wonder—if you ever find a spare carrot or something, that’s what’s going on.

So one of the things that I wanted to do in Unglued 2 was I wanted to sort of have a little more theme than I did in Unglued. And I—I knew right off the bat what I wanted to do. I—this is not a well-known fact, was always a big fan of poison. And what happened was, I got to Wizards, I believe that I was here for Alliances, which I think had one poison card in it. I was here for Mirage which had one poison card in it. And I was here for Visions which had one poison card in it. And after Visions, it was decided “Eh, we’re not going to do poison. It’s not worth it.

And I thought that was a bad idea. I like poison. I’m a big fan of poison. Now obviously, many, many years later, Scars of Mirrodin, I would bring poison back. But that was not my first attempt to bring poison back. My first attempt to bring poison back was Unglued 2.

So at the time, I thought like “Okay, well we’re not willing to do poison, fine, that’s perfect for a silver-bordered set, it’s something we won’t do in black-bordered Magic.” And I had this idea of animated vegetables, and so I mixed them together, and the idea was, the animated vegetables were all creatures with poison. And I—in my head, I had some ad campaign—like, you know, “Not all vegetables are good for you.” You know. Something like that.

And so we had like for example, I’m trying to remember—and clearly, they were all puns because this was Unglued and I was doing it. So like there was “Mad Beetdown,” which was like beets with spears running down a hill. There was “Rutabaga of the Night,” which was a parody of spirit of the night. There was “Celery Stalker,” there was… what else? They were all like this.

They were all… and then, one of my favorites is one of them—all of them were animated except one of them was just called “Broccoli” and it literally was a plate with a piece of broccoli on it. And I—that tickled me to no end. I don’t know how that would have played in the real world but it tickled me to no end. That broccoli was so dangerous it didn’t even need to be animated.

Okay. So, I had my poison vegetables. And the idea essentially was, they—they worked like poisonous, in Future Sight, the mechanic poisonous, I think it’s where poisonous first came from is, I think I—I’m not sure if I called it poisonous. It basically is they would do so much poison if they hit you. And I think instead of doing the unblocked thing—so there was a card called Swamp Mosquito in—I think Alliances? Where you don’t block it. It’s a zero power creature, but if you don’t block it it does poison. These were “No, no, no, like if I hit you I do so much poison.” It’s like “Don’t let them hit you.” I thought the flavor was better than if you don’t block it does it, that felt weird to me.

And so, I mean yeah, it was kind of the early version of poison, so when I did poison in Future Sight like I was thinking Unglued 2. (???) take a drink. Back in my days of communication school, one of the things they taught is that when you do verbal stuff, you know, audio type things, they stress that you always need to drink a lot of water. And not sugary drinks, not things that coat your throat. But anyway, as I drive I’m trying to keep my—my voice lubricated so that I can continue to talk for thirty minutes. Which is—anyway—let’s stay on Unglued 2. Drifting off here.

So. So we had the poison theme, and we had all the poison vegetables. Then—the other thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to riff off of things from the first Unglued. So the most popular card in Unglued—so we do what we call a godbook study, which means we do market research, where we take people and we show them cards in the set. And we have them rank all the cards. “What do you think of this card? What do you think of that card?” You know. And “Do you like the name of this card? Do you like the flavor text? Do you like the mechanics?”

So the card that did the best in the godbook study for Unglued was… actually it was two cards, it was B.F.M. left half and right half! They were number one and two. That’s my favorite, by the way, that the market research people listed two cards. You know. Anyway.

One of the funny things about the market research is for a long time we used some services, and then people who did it didn’t really know Magic so they would just look at things. So for example, in the godbook study for Unglued, the lowest card was Blacker Lotus, and the second lowest card was Chaos Confetti.

Now, Blacker Lotus was a card in which it’s zero mana cost, you sac it for four mana, but you have to rip it up. It was like better than black lotus, but it’s only usable once. And the Chaos Confetti, you ripped it into shreds and you threw it, and wherever the pieces fell, it’s like Chaos Orb but you made confetti out of it, which was based on like a Magic urban legend. Anyway, that’s the bottom one and two of Unglued.

And the note they have is “We can’t—we found no correlated evidence for why these are the bottom two cards.” You know. Like, “People like the name for Chaos Confetti, but they don’t like—“ Like, you know. It’s like “Hmm… why are the only two cards you rip up the bottom two cards?” So we decided then and there not to do rip-up cards.

Which is funny, because I actually had made a rip-up card called “Iron Man” that was a good creature, but if he ever died you ripped him up. So if the game ended and he was in play, you’re fine. But if he ever went to the graveyard you ripped him up. It was based on—not a lot of people know this, but there’s a format called “Iron Man Magic,” where the way it works is, whenever a card goes to the graveyard, instead of going to the graveyard it’s just ripped up. So the idea is, anything you play in this format could just be demolished. And spells are instantaneously demolished. You cast them and rip them up. And creatures, if they survive they survive, but if they die you rip them up. So I had a card called Iron Man that when he went to the graveyard you ripped him up. But anyway, that one didn’t get made.

The other thing that the godbook studied did—dice-rolling cards did poorly. I—I don’t know. That’s always the ones that I—so I—because of that, we ended up not doing dice-rolling in either Unglued 2 or in Unhinged. I’m a little dubious in retrospect, I think—I don’t know, I think players have a love/hate relationship with dice. One of these days I’ll do my random—I need to do a podcast on randomness. I did a whole article on it, but it’s a really interesting topic and I will talk about it one of these days. Maybe one of these days soon, because it—anyway.

Okay, so. The most popular card was B.F.M. And so I’m like “Okay, how do we riff off BFM?” So first I explored the idea of a card that required more than two cards, you know? What if it required four cards? Or three cards? Or… but the problem I had was, it was hard enough to get two cards out. Like, what—and it was a 99/99 creature. Like, what was I going to do, you know what I’m saying? What—like, I don’t know, I just felt like “Yeah, it would be harder to get out, but B.F.M. was already really hard to get out.” I didn’t feel like there was much more of a challenge to make.

So I said “Okay, let’s go the opposite direction.” I said, “Okay, instead of having one card that’s so big it’s on two cards, what if you have one card that’s so little that two of them fit on one card?” And so I said, “Okay, well what do you do with that? What do with the card once you have two cards on one card?” And I said, “Well the obvious choice is, you can choose! It can be either card.” And this is how split cards got made in Unglued 2. It was me trying to riff off B.F.M.

So what happened was, I thought they were pretty cool, because of the frame treatment I thought they were out there enough that I was like “Okay, we could do this in silver border. I mean, it’s two cards in one card, that’s pretty weird. I mean, we’d never do that in black-bordered Magic.” And so we—I made—the funny thing is, they weren’t silly at all. They were actually—when we made them, they were very straightforward.

Now, I hadn’t yet gotten the naming convention. The “blank and blank.” That would happen during Invasion, when we actually did the cards, and Creative just named them with like normal names, and it didn’t have any cohesion of the card, and that’s when I came up with the “blank and blank” convention for naming. Anyway, but these were pretty normal.

It’s funny—one of the things that I’ve realized looking back at previous Un sets, you know, Unglued and Unhinged and Unglued 2, is that—there’s different kinds of cards in it. And one of the cards I call—is what I’ll call “cube cards.” Which is—there’s something about it that’s weird, that makes it silver border, but, you know, it—there’s something—they’re normal enough cards that you could throw them in a cube. They work fine.

They’re not silly, they’re just, you know, like I know, probably one of the most popular cube cards that’s from Unhinged is the split split card. So—even though Unglued didn’t get made, split cards got made, and then Unhinged did a split split card. It’s actually five cards—it’s a split card with two split cards, and then one of that split cards is split to split card, allowing me to get all five colors of Magic onto one card. Who what why when where, it’s called. And that card I know is very, very popular in cubes because it’s quirky-looking, you know, but it’s just a card that has five uses, in five different colors, and it’s very functional.

Another one I know people like a lot is Blast from the Past, which was the origin for the mix and match cards, also from Unhinged. Where it has buyback and flashback and kicker and… maybe madness? Anyway, it had a whole bunch of abilities that were all… they went on spells. And it allowed you to mix and match them and do neat things.

And the card is a little complex, and they reason it was in the Un sets was, you know, at least I thought at the time, “We’re not going to have another set where I can take four or five mechanics from the past and put them all on one card.” So I felt justified putting it in silver-bordered. But that card gets played in Cube all the time. Anyway, so the split cards were kind of like that. I made them to be kind of fun and functional, and not very quirky.

What else did Unglued 2 do? I mean, Unglued 2—there was a bunch of cards that ended up in Unhinged, like Booster Tutor came about in Unglued 2. The idea was, I was very interested in—I was trying—one of the things that I—I messed around a lot with Unglued 2 that you would see me doing more in Unhinged is saying, “Let me take something you know that’s just a Magic thing and just push it one more level.” So for example, you know, Demonic Tutor, the original tutor in Alpha, you went into your library and got a card. Okay.

And then—we did wishes, right? Where you went outside the game and you got a card. You went to your sideboard or your collection. So it’s like “Okay, let’s go farther.” You know. Part of the Un sets is “Go farther.” Like “Okay, what can I get? Well, it’s not in my deck, it’s not even in my collection.” I go, “Oh, I gotta go get a booster pack.” You know. And the idea was, you’d be playing in the store and you’d have to, like, “Booster Tutor!” You go buy a Booster Tutor and sit down and open it up. In fact, the art for Booster Tutor, the original one, the one in Unglued 2, took place in a shop.

But we couldn’t—you know the art was really good, all the product was dated at the time. Like one of my problems is, some of the cards I made—not that the cards weren’t funny, but they just got dated quick. For—I’ll give you some examples. So there was a card in Unglued 2 called Bob from Accounting, and one called Poodle Boy.

Now, how old-time are you? Do you recognize those Magic references? We did a series of commercials, what I will dub the best Magic commercials… fifteen years ago? Around the time of this set, that we were making the set. And one of the things is, what are they testing? An Orgg, or something? And they send in a goblin but the Orgg just deals with the goblin right away or something. So they go “Okay, send in Bob from Accounting.” And Bob like walks in, and he turns around and there’s just this giant Orgg there, and he screams. And like, and then they—cut to them watching and they make some comment about how Bob’s not doing too well.

And then Poodle Boy was a commercial in which they… they were making fun of—they were talking about Vizzerdrix. And so they showed like putting a bunny in, and a chainsaw, and something else, and a wrestler maybe, and then out came Vizzerdrix. Like, you made—it mixed things together, and it made, you know, from these—from a wrestler and a bunny and a chainsaw, you got Vizzerdrix. Which was this crazy bunny thing from back then if people don’t know the card. And so the joke at the end was that the guy delivering the mail was Poodle Boy, that obviously this experiment didn’t work quite as well as Vizzerdrix.

So anyway, Poodle Boy and Bob from Accounting were in the set. Like I said, I have art for them and everything. One of these days, maybe I’ll do an article where we show you all the art we didn’t use from Unglued 2. And talk about what they all were. That might be a good article.

Okay. So, what else did I do that was outdated? Oh! So the other thing I did was I used some Magic slang. So back in the day, shows the slang, they used to call any aura that beefed up a creature’s toughness, they would call it “pants.” Sometimes they would call it “fat pants.” Because I think “fatties” are still around, so Ken Nagle loves the fatties. So the term “fat pants” meant you beefed it up, and so there also was a Magic slang at the time where you used “some” to mean “very.” So like “That was some match we played.”

So I made a card that was called “Some Fat Pants.” And what it was was, it was an entire army inside a single giant pair of pants. The art done by—I would say Phil Foglio, but (???) J. Claymore Flapdoodle. Anyway, the entire army was in one pair of pants. It was called Some Fat Pants. But that joke didn’t make it—once the slang was gone—I mean it’s funny, because I think Unhinged made Mise, which was slang that also has kind of fallen by the wayside, but it’s funny watching Magic slang, I mean that’s another whole topic for a podcast, just talking about different phraseology. Phraseology. Is my music man showing?

Okay. What other cards? Let’s see, what other cards did I make that never saw the light of day? Oh! I made a cycle of djinns that all had puns in them. There was—let’s see if I can remember them. The Cotton Djinn, which was the white one, the Hydro Djinn was the blue one, the… Rummy Djinn was the black one? Is that right? No no, the Sloe Djinn was the black one, the Rummy Djinn was the red one, and the Slim Djinn was the green one.

And they actually were messing around with caring about colors… Invasion also… I’m not sure why they were in Unhinged, looking back. They had puns in their names, but their mechanics… they were cards that got better if you had a majority of a certain color, and we ended up using the mechanic in Invasion as well, and I’m not really sure—in retrospect, I’m not really sure why they were—I mean, I liked the puns, but I’m not sure why they were there.

Oh! The other one I did is… some of them, just people gave me puns I thought were funny. So one of the things I thought was very funny was I had a chicken theme in the first set, and so somebody loved the chicken theme and said “Hey, next year when you do an Un set, you should do a card called “Bantam of the Opera.” With a chicken dressed like Phantom of the Opera. And we did that.

So there also was a card called Tequila Mockingbird, which showed a mockingbird in a bar. Which is funny, by the way, because for a long, long time we have not shown, you know, tobacco or alcohol, we don’t show those on cards, and so it’s kind of funny—oh, Tainted Monkey. Tainted Monkey from Unhinged is actually a card in Unglued 2. It was a different name. I don’t remember, like it was Monkey See or something. We were—because you ask me, “Why was there a monkey as a fortune teller?” I think I liked the art, the art was awesome, although if you notice by the way, right by his foot, there’s smoke coming out of his foot. And that’s because he was smoking a cigar. And we had to take out the cigar. So.

But I loved the art, so we ended up making Tainted Monkey. I’m trying to think which other ones—there was a card called Dolphin Boy, that—the thing about Unglued 2 that’s funny is that—I was definitely having a lot of fun with just coming up with crazy things. Like I said, some of it—I’m trying to remember how much of it got into Unhinged. Some of it got into Unhinged.

Oh, Granny’s Payback. In fact, there were five cards that we did a promo for. One of each color. Of which Mise was one of them, Booster Tutor was one, Granny’s Payback—four of those five—not Mise—four of those five were cards that I’d used in the original Unglued 2 that we reused, but we redid the art. But we had art for them, so in the alternate that—we made alternate cards for some promotional thing. But we had the art and that’s one of the reasons, like we already had the art so we made the promotion, so like I think you see the original Booster Tutor’s art in that. You see Granny’s Payback the original art.

Also, by the way, I think on Mise you see the dogs playing poker. Now, that—I made a card called Poker Table in which you had to use your cards as if a hand of poker, and converted mana cost was the number and your mana symbol—your color was your suit. And you were making poker hands using your Magic cards.

Anyway, the most awesome thing about that whole thing was, we got that piece of art, which is dogs playing Magic. Which is one of my favorite pieces of art made for Unglued 2. We ended up finding a home for it in a promo card for—I just couldn’t—I tried—I decided the Poker Table card wasn’t that good, so I ended up not using it in Unhinged, but I loved that art so we just tried to find a home for the art. But it’s tricky because it’s dogs playing Magic, so it’s—finding the right spot for that was tricky.

I’m trying to—it’s funny, the… so—oh, real quickly, let me tell this story, I guess I’m talking about the making of Unglued 2, but let me tell a little bit about how I discovered that it wasn’t going to see the light of day. So what happened was, I had finished the file, I designed all the cards, we had commissioned the art—in fact, Jesper Myrfors, the original art director, was back in R&D at the time. He had left and he came back. And he was there during the period of time where we were doing Unglued 2, so he was the art director. Jesper Myrfors was the art director for Unglued 2.

And so we had the art made, the art came back, and like I said—oh, here’s something we did that I completely forgot! Okay—this is the fun of doing the card thing. A crazy thing that we were going to do was scratch-off cards. I completely forgot about that! Until I was thinking in my head of the different visual art. And so the idea was, we were testing the idea of having cards that would have three lines, and you’d scratch it off and see what it did.

And then to keep you from knowing exactly what was going on, we would make multiple versions of the so there were altered versions. That all looked the same, but that way when you scratched off one line you didn’t necessarily know what the other two lines were. Although once you scratched off two lines you knew. But we set it up so like, you know, there might have been ten copies, and, you know, the first line on half of them was one and half of them was the other, and mixed them up so that there was variety but you know if you scratched off and the top one was the same line, there was more than one card that did that. So you didn’t necessarily know the other two.

And they were all themed as scratch-off tickets, like lottery tickets and stuff, and they all had—all the cards, all the art was done as if they were lottery tickets. And the interesting thing about that is, we did some tests on that, but it’s funny, one of the downfalls is the fact that you kind of knew once you scratched off the second one what the third one was. It was always kind of like a little sad, but I always loved the idea of “What’s going to happen? I have no idea. Ooh, what’s going to happen?” And you’d do something. And that was across all the colors. Anyway. So. Another thing we did in Unglued 2.

Anyway, so the art had come back, we were just about to start to do the design framework. So one of the things about Un sets in general is, the layout time of making the art. Normally what happens in Magic is, you know, you get the text. You get the art. You get the name and everything, and you know, the editors put them in place, and they just plunk in—you know, the people who lay them out, literally it’s a program, they plunk them in. And they have to go back and look at them and make sure they’re right. But most of it’s automated.

Un sets are not automated. Un sets are done hand by hand. I mean card by card. (???) way it would work is, the person would lay them out, and then—the guy who’s the graphic designer, and then we would come back and, you know, the art director would give notes, and I—the R&D person would give notes, and you know there would be a bunch of notes to sort of define the card, to slowly get it spelled out, because there were a lot of jokes and layers and just different things we were trying to do.

And if you look at the Un cards there’s just a lot of attention that goes on in each one. In fact, there’s a great article, the guy that did the layout for Unhinged did an article talking about that. And he talked a lot about the little tiny teasers, the little Easter eggs he put in, it’s a really cool article. And I forget his name. But if you look under “Unhinged and layout” maybe you’ll find it.

So what happened was, the art came in, we were about to start the layout process. Which is a long process. So, I mean when I say we were far along, we were far along, but we weren’t—we had a ways to go. It wasn’t quite done yet.

So anyway, Tyler Bielman, who would later go on to be in R&D, at the time—real quickly, I’ll tell the abbreviated Tyler story—so Tyler started as a marketing person. As a matter of fact, a freelance salesperson. And—in fact, I was working on The Duelist as the—I was working on The Duelist as the editor-in-chief and Tyler and his partner Mark—Mark Jessup—both of which come to work for Wizards, eventually—came in to pitch ideas for The Duelist for ads. And I didn’t like his pitches, and—I remember that meeting, I’m like “Yeah, I don’t like any of those.” And that was my first meeting with Tyler, it was like shooting down all this stuff that I’m sure they worked very hard on.

But both Mark and Tyler would end up working at Wizards, Tyler started working on the Brand team, Mark would go work in the Marketing team. In fact, Mark was work—Mark was in—doing advertising and stuff for a long long time. He left a couple years ago. But he was there a long time.

Tyler then, after he left Brand, would come to R&D, and I worked closely with Tyler, he ran the creative team for a while, and Tyler and I, along with Brady, were very instrumental in putting together the world of Mirrodin. And so—and Tyler was on the design team for Mirrodin. Anyway, Tyler was definitely on a bunch of sets, he’d do some design work. And anyway, this was when Tyler was in Brand.  So Tyler was the one sent down to me. And he’s like the junior member of Brand, I believe. And Tyler was like “Mark, we need to talk.” And it’s like, he said… I forget. Basically he like said that they’re putting this on hiatus.

And now I came from Hollywood, right? And in Hollywood, when you’re on hiatus, hiatus means it’s gone. And so he was trying to sort of—I don’t know, let me down, but the second he used the word “hiatus” I knew it was dead. Like the second he used the word “hiatus” I’m like “Oh, you’re killing it.” You know. And he was like trying to softpedal and say “Well,” and I’m like “You’re killing it, right?” And he’s like “…” and I’m like “Look. If you’re killing it, just tell me you’re killing it.” And I go, “Don’t use fancy words, you know, hiatus, I’m from Hollywood, I know what hiatus means. We’re not doing this, right?” And he’s like “Yeah, we’re not gonna do it.” And thus got dashed to the rocks Unglued 2.

Like I said, I salvaged a bunch of it for Unhinged. I think when I do my Unhinged one I’ll—I’ll take a look so I have a little more knowledge of what I—when I do the Unhinged podcast I will try to do a little research to talk about what I stole from Unglued 2. And like I said, maybe I’ll do an article for Unglued 2 one of these days. There’s a lot of art that’s fun to look at and I don’t think it’s going anywhere else. “Hey, Bob from Accounting.”

So anyway, that is the story of Unglued 2. The set that I made that never made it to print. So anyway, I’m glad you were here today, I stayed in my parking lot a little extra because I know I stole some time in the beginning and I wanted you to get your full podcast out of me. So anyway, thanks for listening today, and I guess it’s time to go make the Magic.