7/12/13 Episode 42: Mirage Part II

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, last week I started talking about the design of Mirage. But I didn’t finish. So I’m going to continue talking about it. So for starters , I mangled the story last week. So I did a little research, to have a better understanding of what the story was. I was in the ballpark, but I made a few mistakes.

So there were three different nations, and the three nations—remember there were three that were sort of in conflict? So there were three nations, and the nations were the Zhalfirins, which were a military kingdom, the Femeref, which were the religious state, and the Suq’Ata. Which was a trading province. And they are—when the story begins, they’re having squabbles amongst themselves, but a planeswalker named Teferi has been doing experiments and phased out the entire continent of Jamuura. Which is where this takes place.

And when the story begins, I think it has just come back. And that gets the attention of Kaervek and Mangara, and Jolrael I think. And so what happens is, Kaervek is the bad guy that comes and he kidnaps Mangara and its’ the Jamuurans trying to stop Kaervek. That’s the main thrust of the plot. And so essentially they have to gather together, and they get the heroes together, and they end up using the Weatherlight ship to travel there, but the main part of the story is trying to free Mangara from the Amber Prison.

But the—when I talked about the three different states, it wasn’t the—last time I was sort of implying that it was built around the mages. It wasn’t. It was actually built around the areas. The different sections of Jamuura. You know, the different people.

Anyway, what I want to do today is tell some card stories. And these are all over the board. These are—once again, a lot of my stories will be things that I was directly involved with because I know them, but I just wanted to talk about just a lot of different stories. I mean mostly I want to jump to different cards.

So I’m going to start with my favorite card in the set, because it has a personal attachment. So most people know my nickname is MaRo, but not everyone might know why. And Mirage is why. So there was a hole—we were making cards one day, we made a hole in rare green.

And I said “Oh, I have a neat idea for a card.” And basically the idea I had was, it was a card that got bigger—it was as big as your hand. You know, it was */* where * was your hand. And I liked—green has this flavor of growth and the idea of a lot of green’s creatures, you want to sort of start small, and they keep getting bigger over time. And so I thought it was a good fit for green. It’s interesting the Maro ability makes sense in blue and green for different reasons. I mean, green plays into the growth aspect, where blue plays into the knowledge aspect. So it’s an ability we use in both.

But anyway, Bill Rose was taking down notes. And when he wrote the card down, I didn’t have a name for it. And so he just wrote down “Maro,” which is—what Bill used to do in our mail system was, he would try to figure out the shortest number of letters that you had to type to get somebody’s name to show up. And for me, if you typed M-A-R-O, I was the first name that showed up. Because MA is Mark, RO is Rosewater, it’s the first two letters of my first and last name.

So the card came out and then it just ended up becoming my nickname, so online I get called MaRo constantly, and that comes from this card. I love the card Maro, I’m a big fan of it, the artwork has an awesome story too.

 So last week I talked about Sue Ann Harkey, the art director of Mirage, and she was at an art show and she saw this picture that she loved. Now be aware. This was a piece of art that the artist just made as a piece of art. It wasn’t for Magic, it wasn’t—it was called The Green Man. And she was captivated. She’s like “This is awesome.” So she bought the rights to the picture. So Maro is unique in that it’s one of—maybe the only one where the card wasn’t made for Magic. It was just an artist made a card, and we bought the image.

Now I later actually bought the photo. It’s one of my four Magic photos that I own—four pieces of Magic art. I own Maro, I own Look at Me I’m the DCI, I own Mise and I own Jester’s Sombrero. So. Anyway, they’re all cards that have some personal attachment to me, you know, that I have some personal attachment to. So. And—anyway, that’s Maro’s story. Next we talk about Lion’s Eye Diamond.

Okay, so Charlie Catino, who I brought up before was on the design team. He wasn’t on the development team but he was on the design team. And he was trying to make a bad card. Charlie loves making bad cards. And one of Charlie’s beliefs is, that you know, the set has to have some bad cards. And Charlie was in the camp of “Well, you know, every set should have a few really bad cards.” And so Charlie was trying to make a really bad card.

So the card he made was, it’s an artifact, it costs zero, and if you sacced it and sacced your entire hand, you could get three colorless mana. So I saw this card and I said “Okay, Charlie, if you’re going to make a bad Lotus, you know, bad Black Lotus, at least make a Black Lotus.” So I convinced him to change it to be three cards—you know, three mana of one color like Black Lotus. So the idea is, “Okay, it’s just a really bad Black Lotus.” Black Lotus did that and didn’t make you discard your hand, Lion’s Eye Diamond made you discard your hand.

And the interesting thing about Lion’s Eye Diamond is that at first it was—I mean, we got angry mail, “Why’d you make this card?” Whenever we make a bad card, we’ll get people who are like “Why did you make this card?” But the funny thing is, it didn’t turn out to be all that bad. In fact, I believe it is now restricted in Vintage, it’s banned in Legacy… it is a powerful, powerful card. Because it turns out that getting a Lotus—even with discarding your hand—still can be very powerful. And so Charlie did not quite accomplish his task of making a very, very bad card.

Speaking of very, very bad cards, here’s another card to talk about: Horrible Hordes. So that’s a 2/2 Rampage 1. Rampage, for those that might not know their Legends, was a mechanic that showed up in Legends that was actually evergreen for a little while in Magic. What it meant was, if I was blocked, for every creature beyond the first creature blocking me, I got +N/+N where N was Rampage N. So Rampage 1 means “So this is a 2/2 creature, that if you block him with more than one creature, it gets +1/+1 for each additional creature beyond the first.”

So one of the reasons we stopped doing rampage, by the way, is rampage—the “beyond the first” thing is annoying. Because what it does is it says “I just don’t matter almost all the time.” You know. Because opponents know it has the rampage, so, you know, first of all, people do not block with multiple creatures all that much. I mean it happens, but not as much as you think it does.  And second, when they rampage, you didn’t have to do that.

And this card was almost a joke because it’s a 2/2. Like a lot of the other rampage cards are big.  Like, you know, a 4/4 or a 5/5 where you kind of have to double-block it to kill it. But a 2/2—a 2/2 can just be chumped by a 2/1. You know. And so the card was originally I think called Horrible Horrible Hordes, and then they shortened it to Horrible Hordes because Horrible Horrible didn’t fit. But the card was made to be bad, and the name was kind of like thumbing the nose at you, like “I’m a bad card!” But even—the funny thing is, even that card did see some play in Limited. Even as horrible as the Horrible Hordes were.

Okay, so the next card—Foratog. Okay, so Foratog was just made by the Visions design team to be some kind of nature spirit or something. And I saw it, and I—in fact, the stats were—it was a 1/2, and you sacrificed a forest and it got +2/+2 until end of turn. And I was like “Hey, that—that’s an Atog!” You know. It had—it even had the 1/2 stats, it sacced something and got +2/+2. You know. And I think originally it might have been—it might have been G? G and tap? And I convinced them to sac a forest.

Anyway, it was very, very close to an Atog. And I’m like—little side note. So Antiquities, up until I worked for Wizards, Antiquities was my favorite set. I’ll talk about Antiquities. I loved Antiquities. Loved loved loved Antiquities. And I was a huge fan of Atog.

Now for those that don’t know, when Antiquities first came out, Atog was a hated card. Hated card. People hated it. They didn’t really understand—actually, it’s a pretty powerful card, but people didn’t get how powerful it was. And it was—I think it showed up, it was a common, and then it showed up in Revised I think, and so like at one point in Magic it was the most-printed card in Magic. And so people somehow didn’t like Atog. But I loved Atog.

And so when I saw this chance to sort of make a new Atog, I was very excited. And I remember I had to sell it a little bit, but they—it wasn’t that hard. They’re like “Oh, okay, yeah.” They too sort of had—they had some appreciation for Atog. And then once I did that, like this set wheels in motion.

One of the themes today is, a bunch of cycles—cycles that start in Mirage that go bigger than Mirage. And so one of them was the Atog cycle. So what happened was, we ended up making—in this set we ended up making Foratog, which is a green Atog. There already was a red Atog. And then we made a blue Atog, Chronatog in Visions,  we made Necratog, a black Atog in Weatherlight, and then in Tempest we finished it off with Auratog, a white Atog, so we made a little Atog cycle.

And that was pretty much my doing. I—people have their pet agendas, and I love Atogs so I wanted to make sure that we made more Atogs in the game. So I did do that. On my current list is figuring out how to get Atogs back. They’ve sort of drifted away. But I’ve not loved the loss of Atogs!

Okay. Speaking of cycles, I now need to talk about the Mega Mega Cycle. So the card here is Teferi’s Isle. We used to make a lot of Gilligan’s Isle jokes about that card. You know, “Here on Teferi’s Isle.” Anyway, so what happened was, we had this card. So Teferi was a main character, and what happened was, he had taken a big chunk of Jamuura and phased it out.

And so we loved the idea of a land, you know, that itself had phasing. But since Teferi was a blue mage, we’re like “Oh, it should tap for blue.” But we had this dilemma that normally when we tap for a color, we make a cycle. And we didn’t really want to or have room to make a full cycle, so we came up with this idea. We said “What if this was part of a cycle? It’s like the Auratogs.”

But we went a little further. Not just a cycle. A mega, mega cycle. We decided to make a cycle larger than any cycle we’d ever made. Or—larger in time. So what happened was, Teferi’s Isle shows up in the first set in Mirage block. Then, in Stronghold, the second set in Tempest Block, the next block, we made Volrath’s… Volrath’s Stronghold? So we made the black one, and then in the middle set—I’m sorry, the third set of Urza’s Saga in Destiny, we made the green one… and then the next year was Mercadian Masques, and then the second one… did we make the red one? And then in the first set in… what was after Mercadian Masques? In Invasion we made like the white one? (Editor’s note—Teferi’s Isle, Volrath’s Stronghold, Yavimaya Hollow, Kor Haven, and Keldon Necropolis.)

So like it was a cycle that took five years to make, it went first set, second set, third set, second set, first set, so we even did a little pattern. But anyway, that’s the kind of dedication, taking five years to finish a cycle. There was a—I don’t know, one of the things I enjoy is I like having larger patterns happen in Magic. And when I can, I try to do those.

It’s a little trickier nowadays than it was back then, because back then because it was the same group of people doing every set, like, if we wanted to set something and four of us decided, well we were the development team every set and we could make it happen. Now there’s lots of different development teams and so it’s a little harder to have a single agenda go through. You’ve got to push a little harder to make that happen.

Okay, so, next. Let me talk a little about—a little about my flavor text writing. So there’s two pieces of flavor text—three pieces of flavor text that I wrote for this set that I wanted to talk about. So first is—first I’ll talk about the one that has lasted the longest. So what happened was, on this set we got the art in earlier than we nowadays do.

I think the art came in—the way the art waves worked back then, we actually had the art in earlier than we now do, and so when we were writing flavor text I had the chance to look at the art to write the flavor text. And so we got the art back for Pacifism. Which is this creature, sort of mean-looking creature, but he has this kind of look on his face like he’s been—he has a spell on him and now he’s all pacified.

And I just—something about him just, I don’t know, I decided to give him a name. I think I called him Grokk, I think? Grakk. Grakk. And I—I had this little thing about how this was the first time that he had a warm—warm fuzzies. Anyway, the piece of flavor text I wrote on a lark, I thought was fun, and it has just stuck around. Like, I don’t know how many pieces of flavor text I still have, in like the core set, but so far, Pacifism… keeps sticking around.

One of the running jokes in R&D is because the card says, you know, “for the first time,” is that every time we’ve reprinted it we should have said “for the second time,” “for the third time.” But anyway, that’s a piece of flavor text that somehow hit a note and stuck around.

The second piece of flavor text was for Dwarven Miner. So Pacifism was “For the first time in his life, Grakk felt a warm and—warm and fuzzy?” Is that right? So the flavor text for Dwarven Miner was “Fetch the pest—fetch the pestridder, Paka—we’ve got dwarves in the rutabaga.” And that—I was so tickled by that flavor text. Just the idea that like in Jamuura, the dwarves are kind of like, you know, pests. Like “Oh, you’d better go get the exterminator, we’ve got dwarves in the rutabaga again.” And I just—somehow, I was—this one tickled me to no end.

And I got in a big fight with our editor at the time, a woman named Darla. Because she kept wanting to change little words. You know. Like instead of—I think I had “We have dwarves in the rutabaga,” and she wanted to say “dwarves…” like, “…beneath the rutabaga,” and I’m just like “Nooo, that blows the rhythm of the joke!” And so like I really loved the (???) flavor text, and like I had this drag-out fight with Darla about whether or not it should be in or beneath or ‘neath or—anyway.

The third piece of flavor text I wrote might possibly be the greatest flavor text I’ve ever written. For a card called Reparation. So what happened was, back in the day, this was my young’un days when I was a single man, and pretty much I lived at Wizards. I mean I didn’t technically live—I had an apartment, but other than sleeping I was at Wizards all day long.

I mean the way it worked is, I’d get to work, I’d work all day, at night-time all of us would go out to eat. In fact, one of the stories is, when I first started dating Lora, she’s over at my apartment and she goes to the cabinet to get something to eat because she’s hungry. And she opens it up and there’s nothing. She opens the fridge, there’s nothing. There’s literally no food in my house. She’s like “Where’s your food?” And I’m like “Oh yeah, I don’t eat here.” Because back in the day, just R&D ate out every meal. Which probably wasn’t the healthiest thing for us, but we ate out every meal. And so I was—I never ate at home. In fact, I was barely at home.

So anyway, I was at work late one night, and I mean late. Two, three, four in the morning. And I’m working on some flavor text because I was—I was a die-hard working machine. We also goofed around and played games, I mean it wasn’t just work and we had fun. And work was fun.

But so anyway, it was late at night, and we had just gotten some new art in, I was writing some flavor text. But I got the art from Reparations. And I’m like “What the—what in the world is this art?” And it was this couple, a dark-skinned couple with, you know, robes, and there’s like a white man that looks like a priest character, and he’s handing them this bag that looks like, you know, it has gold or something in it. And in the background, you can see flames. Like—like—you know, like things were on fire. And I’m like “What? What in the world is going on here?” And so—now given, I’m punchy, punchy tired. So I write the flavor text “Sorry I burned down your village, here’s some gold.”

And I—I really, really I wrote it because of Michael, so Michael Ryan, who was at the time an editor for Magic, he and I would later go on to be the people who did, or started doing the Weatherlight Saga, he and I were the ones that pitched the Weatherlight Saga, (???) tell that story.

But Michael and I are up late working on flavor text, and I’m just—I think I was trying to just make Michael laugh. I don’t even think I was serious. I don’t think that I was like trying to make flavor text as much as I was trying to make Michael laugh. And I showed this to him, and he started giggling. And I started giggling. And we laughed and we laughed and we laughed, and I’m like “I’m turning that in!”

And then they used it! I—as, whatever as my witness, I—I—when I saw that actually was chosen, I was flabbergasted. Because I thought it was funny. But I’m like—like—I just didn’t think it would be picked. But anyway, it’s one of my—of the ones I’ve written, it’s one of my favorites. I mean, I like Dwarven Miner and (???) other ones I’ve written—I wrote it when (???) but not in Mirage, about the advantages of using zombies (???), and I wrote a couple ones for Jaya Ballard. I wrote a bunch of Jaya Ballard ones. That I liked a lot. But you know, fighting fire with fire.

Anyway. Okay. On to the next card. Let’s see. How about Brushwagg? This one’s funny, I—I know we got Brushwagg from--from the design team. And the  interesting thing about Brushwagg is somehow, I mean we decided just to give it, like, to give it a name, and then just its creature type was its name. Somehow just the whole package of Brushwagg—there are fans of Brushwagg. I have letters that say “When are you making more Brushwaggs?”

And the thing that I don’t know by the way about Brushwagg is, if you’ve seen it, there is like this looks like this giant tumbleweed, and then there is this cat. Now, the question is, is the cat part of the Brushwagg, and that like he has this like porcupine-like middle part? Or is the Brushwagg eating the cat and the cat is the victim of the Brushwagg? I have no idea. I don’t know. I don’t know. But maybe one day we’ll make another Brushwagg. It is a card that I get a lot of—it gets a lot of attention for what really is a silly card that is not particularly powerful.

Okay, next. Skulking Ghost! Okay, so another thing that Mirage did is it introduced a bunch of things that went on to be just things Magic did. And the  funny thing about Skulking Ghost is that the idea was, the card was made is, it’s this ghost. And like the second you sort of even approach the ghost, you know, it’s ephemeral. Right?

And so the funny thing is, R&D started calling that ability “Skulking.” And we would—like I think we  made a Skulking Cyclops. And the hilarious part is, the skulking wasn’t the mechanic! The ghost was the mechanic! Like the ghost disappears because he’s so ephemeral. The skulking was just an adjective for the ghost. But we started calling it skulking. In fact, we still do. It’s the nickname in R&D for that ability.

Now, what happened is, originally it was in black because it started in black, but at one point we said “You know, this makes a lot more sense for illusions.” Right? That you make an illusion, and then as soon as you—once someone questions the illusion, then it pops. You know. Like it has reality until someone questions it and then it goes away. And so we’ve kind of shifted it over to blue. Blue needed it. So instead of skulking now—it’s sometimes called skulking, but it’s the illusion ability.

Another ability that started (???) was Stalking Tiger. We still refer to that ability as Stalking. What Stalking Tiger is, is you must be—you can only be blocked, sorry. You can only be blocked by one creature. It’s something we put on green. So usually it goes on bigger creatures, it says “Hey, only one thing can block me,” and so it becomes hard to deal with if, you know, if it’s on the bigger side, because only bigger things can block it. Small things can just chump it, but you can’t double-block it.

And stalking, by the way, I like way better than rampage because it has a similar impact but it’s just simpler. It’s easier to grok. We do occasionally do new rampage, by the way—we don’t call it new rampage, where everything gets a bonus, but that’s not something we do tons of.

Okay, next. Let me talk about art! So there are a couple cards in the set—so Sue Ann Harkey, who was the art director, was an amazing art director in the sense that she got wonderful artists, so they drew amazing paintings. I mean, this is—just as a—if you wanted to put the art up in a museum, you know, this set has a very cool feel to it. It had a lot of the African background, and it just was very neat. And she found a lot of artists that went on to be staple Magic artists. Sue Ann Harkey was an awesome, awesome art director.

But one small problem with Sue Ann was she didn’t know Magic. She did not know Magic. And so what happened was that we would do things, and we would get art back that didn’t work with what the card did. So I’m going to talk about a couple examples of that.

First is Goblin… Scouts. So that card in the design file was Dwarven Scouts. But the card right now makes 1/1 mountainwalkers, but originally it made 1/2 dwarves. And the problem was, we got the card back, and we’re like “Those aren’t dwarves. Those are goblins maybe trying to dress up like dwarves?”  Like they looked like goblins. They did not look at all like dwarves.

And like I said. Sue Ann was not super familiar with fantasy. You know? That she came from a background of fine art, and so, like this—she didn’t really get distinguished between “Oh, this is a goblin and not a dwarf.” And so it didn’t look like a dwarf. And so we had to change the card.

Another card we made is Sunweb. So Sunweb originally was not supposed to be able to block I think white creatures. And then we got back the art, and it’s a giant like white dragon in a net. You know. And—and visually speaking, I understand that a dragon doesn’t necessarily have to be a white creature, but like you don’t want something that’s just all white. Especially in the sense that it had a white dragon. Like so we changed it so it couldn’t block small things. But like “Oh, well that’s a white thing.” Like, “The card that can’t block white things can’t be shown blocking a white thing in the art.” So we changed it so it could not block smaller things. Because the smaller things sneak through the web is the idea.

The other one was Waiting in the Weeds. So, I’m a squirrel lover…  hopefully that won’t be taken out of context… I’m a big fan of squirrels. In fact, when we get to Urza’s Legacy, we’ll talk about how I did the card concepting, you might notice there are a lot of squirrels in Legacy. I also picked the creature type for Odyssey—a bunch of squirrels.

Anyway—but anyway, I was gung ho to get squirrels into Magic. They did not exist yet in Magic. So there’s this card that made these tokens, and I’m like “Oh, this could be squirrels. This could be squirrels!” And so I talked to the R&D people and I’m like “Here’s our chance, guys, we can make squirrels.” And they’re like “Well, uh…” and I’m like “Guys, guys, guys. Squirrels.” So I cared, they didn’t, so we made a squirrel. I mean, they didn’t dislike squirrels, I think I convinced them squirrels were awesome. But I got them to go along.

So I made the squirrels, and then the art description for this thing was, “All these creatures are hidden  in the bush, you can’t even see what they are, you just can see the reflection of their eyes—their irises or whatever, their eyes.” So like “Okay.” So we get the art back, and it has these cats in it! Like the artist put the creatures in it! Like you weren’t supposed to see the creatures! And we’re like “Oh, okay, I guess they’re cats…” And I had to change it. And so like Waiting in the Weeds was supposed to be the first squirrel card in Magic! And it was not. I would later get squirrels in. But that  always made me sad because that was a great chance to have the squirrels that we so much beloved.

Another thing to talk about when we’re talking about art is, this is not something we do at al anymore. But back then, one of the things that would happen a lot is, we would get art in and then the art—eh, doesn’t quite match the card we had. And so we used to do is we’d have meetings where we’d lay out all the art, and then we’d have all the cards, and we’d assign them one for one.

So the first thing we do is like “Here’s art that has to go with this card.” You know. “This shows this thing, that’s this, oh.” You know. The only card this can be on. But what we’d end up with is, we’d have about 30 or 40 pieces that were a little ambiguous exactly what they were, and then we would try to mix and match stuff to make all the art fit. Because sometimes, the art that came back didn’t quite work for the card that we’d made, but we were able to sort of shift things around.

Now, like I said, that does not happen anymore. But back in the day, back in the time of Mirage, that very much was. I mean, we made 20, 30 swaps in art. And like I said, it stemmed from—Sue Ann would make gorgeous things but not all of them quite lined up. And so we fixed them sort of by shifting things around, you know, sometimes we would move mechanics.

Okay. Next—as we’ve been talking about swapping. So let me talk about Gibbering Hyenas and Mtenda Lion. So, Gibbering Hyenas is a 3/2 for… 2G I think? That can’t block black creatures. And Mtenda Lion was a G 2/1 that your opponent can pay blue to stop it. Now originally, those were swapped. Originally, Mtenda Lion was a G 2/1 that can’t block black creatures. But the idea was, it’s a 2/1! Who’s blocking? You’re going to attack with him. But it turned out at the time, we were afraid.

Now obviously, the creature curve has improved much over the years. But at the time of Mirage, it was thought that green couldn’t have a G 2/1. That’s slightly too good. Which is funny, because white got a W 2/1, but we just thought like somehow green couldn’t do that. And obviously, you know, as recent sets have shown, G can get a 2/1, in fact it can get it in hybrid and have an ability on top of it. But at the time it couldn’t.

And so we swapped those two cards around. And  I think it’s funny because I think that Mtenda Lion was—we thought it was going to be this really powerful card and then last minute we had to switch it, and it ended up being something that like, you know, more of a footnote than a card that really defined something at the time. But when we were there, we really thought it was going to be something that was going to be, you know, a little bigger.

Next, Unyaro  Bee Sting. My bane! My bane! So this card—I’m not sure what card has caused me more frustration in all of Magic. Probably Desert Twister, which when I get to Arabian Nights I’ll talk about. But anyway, this might be—this is up there. Because somehow this established that like “Oh, green can do direct damage because bees are green.”

In fact, Aaron Forsythe, if you ever get a chance to spellsling against him, he has a duel deck that he has made that’s a special duel deck that he made just for spellslinging, and it’s called “Birds vs. Bees.” And he always likes to show it to me because he knows it riles me. That bees—I—I think bees have been misappropriated in Magic, and somehow they’re used to allow green to have direct damage when it should not have direct damage! That is wrong. I mean, it can hit fliers or whatever.

But anyway. Unyaro Bee Sting is one of those cards that like I didn’t like at the time, I tried to stop it—that’s, by the way—here’s one of the most frustrating things about Magic is, when you see something, and you go “This is wrong. I need to stop this.” And you fight to stop it. And you fight to stop it. And you fight to stop it! And you cannot. And you just cannot convince enough of the people that it needs t obe stopped. And then it happens. And then the next time people are like, “Oh, we’ve done it,” and you’re like “Noooooo!” Ay yi yi.

So, somehow bees—bees will be the death of me. I don’t mean literally. Hopefully I won’t get attacked by—“MaRo attacked by bees.” But holy moly. In fact it’s funny, because when I get to sign—people send cards for me to sign. And the #1 card people ask me to sign is MaRo, because it’s the one named after me from Mirage. #2 is Look at Me I’m the DCI, I did the art for it, I’m the artist. And #3 is Hornet Sting. Hornet Sting! Like, it’s not just cruel, I mean, like, you go to, like, Bill Buckner and like “Here’s the ball that went through your legs and like you lost the world series. Could you sign this please?” Maybe someone did that. I have no idea.

But anyway, Mark Rosewater making a sports reference is actually somewhat, like, minute and detailed. So just a little side note, when I was in college, I’d never really been into sports. I went to Boston University, I was there in the summer of ’87, ’88, and I got into baseball because it was Boston playing New York and they were playing at Fenway Park right down the street because I lived on… right near there. And we literally, when people had home runs, I could hear them screaming!

And so I said “Okay,” I got really into it because a lot of people from New York in the school, and like that was—I got my dreams crushed and hopes and like “Okay, why am I taking an interest in sports?” Anyway. So. Sports had a chance, and it crushed my dreams, and so I moved on.

So, let’s see. What other cards can we talk about? Raging Spirit! Let me talk about Raging Spirit. You’re saying, “What could Mark possibly have to say about a Hill Giant, 3R 3/3, that for two mana can make itself colorless?” That card screwed me over. That’s what I can talk about it.

So back in the day, I used to make a puzzle column called Magic: The Puzzling. And basically I would make puzzles in which you had to solve them. Modern-day Duels of the Planeswalkers has something similar, where like—I basically had chess puzzles, where like “The game’s in play and here’s what goes on and here’s what you have. And here’s what your opponent has in play, and win this turn, or, you know, do something difficult.” Usually it’s “win this turn.”

So anyway, I had this puzzle that I’d made. I had made a book of puzzles. The puzzles were very popular, so before I came out to Wizards I actually made a puzzle book. And I made fifty puzzles for the book, but in the end we decided to make twenty—the book be twenty-five puzzles. So I had twenty-five puzzles that I had already made, so I decided I wanted to use these puzzles, so I thought I’d repurpose them in The Duelist. But because there were new sets coming out, I would try to redress them and add things that had to do with the current set to make them feel current.

So one of the things I did is I had a Hill Giant in my puzzle, so I swapped the Hill Giant for Raging Spirit. I said “Oh, okay, it is a Hill Giant that can turn itself colorless.” And the fact that it could turn itself colorless broke the puzzle. In fact, I think it might be the first puzzle where like I had to make an apology “Oh, the puzzle doesn’t work.” Because I changed the Hill Giant for Raging Spirit. That card broke my puzzle! Anyway.

See, that’s my little memory of that card. I’m sure other people are like “I won Limited all the time with it” or whatever. But. To me, it’s the card in Mirage, or one of the cards in Mirage that I hold my vendetta. You know. Whatever. Eighteen years later, curse that card.

Anyway, I see Wizards coming up in my front range. So I look at my list, I have lots more cards to talk about. So I am not yet done. I will—I’m going to spend another—another—at least one more—probably just one more. I don’t have that much more. I have enough to talk for another car ride in.

But anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying my—my glance through Mirage. I’m trying something a little new, in that I’m trying this idea of spending some time where I go through cards. Where  I actually talk about individual card stories. I do that on—I do that in my column, whenever sets come out, and people like them, and I thought it might be fun to do that. Anyway, I’m experimenting with this. So I’ve got to get some feedback what you think.

But anyway, I’m now—it’s time for me to go to work, so thank you all for listening, and it’s time to go make the Magic.