7/19/13 Episode 43: Mirage Part III

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. Two weeks ago, I started talking about the design of Mirage. And then last week I continued talking about the design of Mirage. But I was not yet done. So today is Part 3 of Mirage design. So what I started doing last week is, I started telling a bunch of stories about cards. And the idea is I’m just jumping around, the stories are all over the place.

The other thing to keep in mind is that I was not on the design team, I was on the development team for this one. And so I have plenty of design stories that happened during development, but a lot of my stories are more development-oriented or changes that happened during development or last week for example I talked about some art and some flavor text.

So these stories are all over the place. I—what I’ve learned is, I talk about what I know, just because the stuff I experienced or saw is the easy stuff for me to tell the stories, so I wasn’t privy really to what went on during the design of Mirage, other than watching, you know, working on it with Bill during development. But anyway, I’ve got more stories to tell. So I’m going to tell them.

Okay. So today I’m going to start with the Phyrexian Dreadnought. Dun dun dun! Okay. So here’s, here’s—here’s how that card came to be. So what happened is, when Alpha came out, Richard made two cards. One was called Lord of the Pit, that was a 7/7, and the other was called Force of Nature. That was an 8/8. Those were the largest creatures in Magic. Or… natural creatures, I mean. Rock Hydra could get bigger.

Okay. So, then Antiquities, two sets later, the second expansion, Antiquities, had a card called Phyrexian Colossus that was a 9/9! And then a couple sets later in The Dark, there was a card called Leviathan. It was a 10/10! Then a couple sets later in Ice Age, there was Polar Kraken. 11/11! So you could see where this was going. It was a little game we were playing where we kept one-upping ourselves.

So we got to Mirage, I said to Bill, I said, “Bill, Bill! We’ve got to make a 12/12.” And Bill was like “I don’t know. I’m not sure we should keep playing this game,” was basically what Bill said. “I—I don’t want to make a 12/12 just to make a 12/12.” He said “Okay. If you can make a 12/12 that’s interesting, I’ll put it in the set.” So the gauntlet, thrown down.

And so basically I had to go off and make a 12/12 that was interesting. And so I—I came back and I said, “Okay, Bill. I’ve got a 12/12 trampler, costs one mana.” Now, for those of you that might not know this card, it is a 12/12 trampler, it costs one mana, when it comes into play you must sacrifice up to 12 power worth of creatures or sacrifice the Phyrexian Dreadnought. So it has a little extra cost.

But, Bill was intrigued. Bill’s like “Okay, mission accomplished. Challenge—challenge…” you know, “…achieved.” And he put it in the set. And that card has gone on to have some notoriety because if you play it kind of honestly, the card is fine. But there’s a lot of ways to sort of have no expectation of actually saving the Phyrexian Dreadnought where I pay one, I get my 12/12, and yeah, yeah, it’s going to go away, because it’s going to be the 12 power you have to pay, but, you know, it triggers things, or it—anyway, there’s all sorts of shenanigans.

But the card just started with me kind of—I don’t know, I—as I talked about last week, I like sort of having ongoing trends and things. I like little meta things. I liked the Atogs, I liked the mega mega cycle, I might have  had a lot to do with most of that stuff. But anyway, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed is, I feel there’s a—when I say metagame, I mean the R&D term—the players talk about metagame about what to play at a tournament and what’s good.

The R&D metagame, which is a slightly different term, talks about all the things that encompass Magic. That Magic’s not just the playing of the game but everything that comes with it. And a lot of the community building is, I like doing things where people can anticipate things or predict things, and I think that’s an important part of Magic.

Okay. Next! We will talk about Cadaverous Bloom. So this was a card I made. Once again, I did not make tons and tons of cards in Mirage, I made some, I’m just telling the stories because these are the ones I know. People are often like “Why do you always talk about stuff you did?” And I’m like “Because I know what I did!” And so anyway. I will tell—some of these stories are not about cards I did. But hey. Some of them are.

Okay, so Cadaverous Bloom, what happened was, we had a bunch of gold cards in the set, and we didn’t like the black/green one so we killed it. And so there was a black/green hole, a gold hole, had to be rare black/green. So what I did was I said, “Okay. We’ve got to make a card.” And I said, “Well, what… what does black do and what does green do?” And at the time, black was very much about—or still is, giving up resources for advantage. You know, that you pay life to draw cards.

And I’m like “Oh, well what if black could discard cards and get something for it?” And then I thought about “Okay, well what… what could it get?” And I said, “Okay, well that’s the black part, you can discard cards, so what’s the green part?” And I said, “Well the green part is getting mana,” you know? And I know black was—at the time was number two in mana, it had Dark Ritual and stuff at the time, and—but green could get you any color mana.

So like “Okay. Well, black discards a card to get an advantage, get something, and normally if it was just a mono-black card it would be making black mana. Oh, but this is a black/green card, you can get any color mana you want.” And thus—one of the things that I—I’m a Johnny at heart for those that don’t know this. I love making engine cards.

And—so what an engine card is, is a card in which you take one resource and you turn it into another resource. And they’re fun, I mean they make good Johnny cards because you can do shenanigans. But they also make good Spike cards because often converting resources can be very dangerous. Especially as is the case of this card, where it cost no mana. You’re just turning cards in your hand into mana.

So it allows you to—well, this card caused all sorts of—this card did lots—so the most famous thing this card is for is a card called Pros-Bloom. Or Prosperous Bloom. In which Cadaverous Bloom was played with Prosperity, as well as a few other cards like Squandered Resources.

And essentially what happened was—so before Prosperous Bloom, the thought of combo decks was, people were like “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fun. For the kids.” You know, like, like it was this goofy thing that people did. But it wasn’t a serious thing. It wasn’t something that you expected to see at tournaments or something.

Well anyway, Mike Long shows up at Pro Tour Paris with the Pros-Bloom deck and wins it. And that really put combo on the map. You know, that really made a lot of the pros go, “Oh, maybe I’m not—maybe I’m not really thinking of combo correctly, that combo has the—if it’s fast enough and has enough versatility, oh, a combo deck can be constructed.”

And anyway, it’s funny—one of the things—here’s a funny story is Mike Long—so, at PT Paris you had to use—the format was you had to use Mirage and Visions. It was Block Constructed but Weatherlight hadn’t come out yet. And it just so happens that everything you need to make Prosperous Bloom work was in Mirage and Visions. And Mike was convinced that R&D made the deck, chopped it up, and put it in the two sets. For like someone to find.

And I could not convince him otherwise. I’m like, I’m like “All the pieces were made by different people. Like I made Cadaverous Bloom, I know Bill made Prosperity, Elliott made a few of the cards—like, you know, it’s not all made by one person. I go—and, and… it’s funny, because one of the things—I mean, I—the players always want to assume that we’ve planned everything.

And sometimes we did. But sometimes just we made open-ended interesting cards and they clicked together in neat ways. And, you know, we don’t always necessarily plant things. I know people like to think we do. And I’m not saying we never do, we have. But it’s funny. It’s the expectation of players of sort of what they think we do.

Okay! Next up. Okay. I’m going to ask you some trivia questions now. A few trivia questions. Trivia question #1: Daring Apprentice is a card in Mirage. It is the first card to ever have something happen. Now, this is not rules text. Not about the rules—it’s not—it’s not about what the card does, it’s about—the question is more meta. Like, this card did something in the grand scheme of Magic. That had never been done before. And the answer is: (highlight to see) It is the first card ever to be errata’d before it came out. And here’s why.

The card on it has an ability where you can use it to counter a spell. And at the time, for those that might not know this, when Magic first came out with Alpha, there were actually three different kinds of cards that you could cast during your opponent—you could—sorry, three kinds of non-permanent cards. There were sorceries, there were instants, and there were interrupts.

So what interrupts were was, before 6^th Edition rules, there was no stack in Magic. The way it worked was, you could cast your spells, and certain spells, interrupts, said “Hey, if I—if you cast an interrupt, nothing can be played in response except other interrupts.” And in order for counterspells to do their thing, they needed to be interrupts.

So Daring Apprentice was supposed to say on it, “Hey, play me as an interrupt.” But we forgot it. And the card did not work. It countered a spell. And if it wasn’t an interrupt, you know, didn’t work as an interrupt, you couldn’t counter the spell. So we knew that the card wasn’t going to what the card said. And so we put errata out saying “Okay, guys, it works, it works. It’s an interrupt.” Or, you know. Works as an interrupt. The funny thing is, after 6^th Edition, the card got errata’d back. So it was the first card ever to get errata’d, and now it doesn’t even have errata.

Okay. Trivia question #2. What card in Mirage was called Mirage up until the set officially got the name of Mirage and then we changed the name of the card? Now, I know since then we have made sets in which we have, you know, a card in the set had the same name as the set. But at the time we didn’t do that. So what card was it? Shimmer. The card Shimmer was called Mirage during, I don’t know, all of design and most of development. And we were going to keep the name until the set officially got called Mirage.

So real quickly, I don’t think I talked about this last time, another interesting trivia question is “What set had two different code names?” And the answer is Mirage. Okay, that one wasn’t too hard. But what are the two different code names? Well, when Richard first got the set, when he first put it together, the team that made it nicknamed it, you know, gave it a name of “Menagerie,” which means, like, a zoo.

And when it got to Wizards, it got a new nickname, because all the—code name, because all the code names at the time were Macintosh sound files. Real quickly, the reason for that is because when I first started working at Wizards back then, everybody had a Mac. The entire office had Macs.

And whenever you opened a folder, or back then you opened a folder that had the name of a Mac sound, it would go off. And so we named all our code sets at the time after the Mac files because then our folders when we opened them would make a sound. Which sounds silly even though—it sounds silly because it is silly. But we did that.

So Mirage’s code name once it got to Wizards was Sosumi. Which people thought was a joke, like “So sue me, like people thought we were doing something illegal or something. But anyway, I think that might have even been the last—well, Coldsnap had a Mac name to be retro. But I think the—other than that, I think Sosume was the last Apple sound code name. But anyway, the set does have two code names. Little trivia question.

Okay. Let’s see if we can do another trivia question for you. Okay. Telim’Tor is a guy in the set. He’s a character. Telim’Tor is an anagram, much like Mangara was an anagram of “anagram.” What is “Telim’Tor” an anagram of? Okay, and the answer is: Mr. Toilet.

Okay, now the next trivia question is: “Why… why… who is Mr. Toilet?” And to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Toilet was a nickname of Don Felice is my guess? I know it wasn’t Charlie or Bill or Joel. In theory it could have been Howard or Elliott… I believe it was Don Felice. Oh by the way, I made a comment in Part I that I realized was slightly incorrect. So when I said Don Felice—an anagram of Don Felice was Feldon’s Cane. That is not correct. The original name for Feldon’s Cane was Feldon’s Ice Cane. And that is an anagram of Don Felice. But it got changed. So it is no longer.

Now there is another Magic card that has Don Felice as an anagram, and I think it is… Delif’s Cone? If that’s correct? Anyway. Little side note. Okay. Any other trivia questions I can ask here? Oh, before I get into that. Telim’Tor. So there’s a real funny thing about Telim’Tor.

So we were making a little joke about—or, I mean, Telim’Tor came in from the design team. They were making a joke about one of the team members. And one of the cards—Telim’Tor’s darts, in playtest—er, in design, was called Telim’Tor’s Tiny Darts. Because it pings for one. It’s a very weak thing. But we had no end—no—we had a lot of fun in playtesting going “I plink you with my tiny dart!” And I think the name just didn’t fit in the card. We were going to call it Telim’Tor’s Tiny Darts. But I don’t know if Continuity just didn’t like the name, or—I don’t know. We changed it. It might not have fit. So let’s see. Any other trivia, or just move on? Okay, I’m going to move on and talk about some other stuff.

Okay, so I—from time to time I have mentioned the fact that I have worked on Roseanne. I was on staff for Roseanne. My big—my high point in my writing career for television. But I have never yet told a story of how my Roseanne days affected Magic design. Dun dun dun! Okay, so here’s the story of how a card in Mirage was affected by my time on the staff of Roseanne.

Okay, so for those that might not know how a sitcom writing staff works, so what happens is, you have a room and you have the script and basically you sit in the room, it’s called the Writer’s Room, and just, you go through the script many many times, trying to sort of up the jokes. Just make the jokes funnier. And what will happen is, the way it tends to work is, you—somebody writes a script, or a couple people write the script, and the first week the actors act it out. And then the writers watch the actors. And then they see what works and doesn’t work. And then they make notes where the jokes kind of aren’t working or something, and then they come back and the room, all the writers in the room, try to fix the  jokes.

And in general, because we’re trying to make humor, we’re trying to keep the room pretty light. You know what I’m saying? You definitely want the, you know, if you’re trying to make comedy, you want people to sort of, you know, have a—you want it to be fun. And so one of the things that often happens is, you know, people do things to entertain one another. They tell stories. So one of the writers, one day, tells this story. He had been at the zoo the previous day. And he tells the story about the zoo.

So at the zoo, there’s these creatures called meerkats. So a meerkat are these little tiny creatures. If you’ve ever seen the Lion King, I believe Timor is a meerkat. Like, Timor and Pumbaa. Pumbaa is a big warthog. So Timor—I’m making his name up—is a meerkat.

So what meerkats do is, actual honest-to-God meerkats like at the zoo, is, he’s watching them, and one of the meerkats would see something, and they would sit up. Sit up on their hind legs, and take their front legs, and hold them in front of themselves. Now, this is a recording, so me demonstrating that does not do a lot of good. Imagine if you had your hands kind of held up against your chest, but sort of just sitting there. And you know, just holding—holding down. And like perched up.

And so what happened is one meerkat would perch up. And as soon as one meerkat would see another meerkat perched up, he would perch up. And that would keep going on until all the meerkats would perch up. And then in one minute they would sort of break and all go back to their thing. And he was just saying it was this very funny thing.

So from that, we would play games in the room, so we started this little game that said, “At any moment, any member of the writing team could perch up like a meerkat. And if they did, whoever saw them must also perch like a meerkat. Until every single person in the room perched as a meerkat. And then we would just break. Now the funny thing about this is we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t explained. It just kind of happened—naturally happened one day. And this was a little game we played. Now where it got really fun was when somebody was in the room that wasn’t on the writing staff and didn’t know our little game.

So for example, one day Martin Mull, who was on Roseanne, he played her boss for a while when she owned a diner, anyway, he would occasionally come to the writer’s room and help out. Because he’s very, very funny. He was a comedian and awesome, and so we gladly had him in the writer’s room whenever we could.

So one day we’re in there, and we’re talking about something, and somebody, I don’t even know who—not me—somebody perches like a meerkat. So I see it, I perch like a meerkat. And one by one, everybody perches like a meerkat. But the thing is, you can’t break until every single person perches like a meerkat.

And Martin Mull, who has no idea, has never seen us do this, is sitting there as everybody else in the room is silent, perched like a meerkat. And so he looks around, he’s like trying to figure out what’s going on, and so finally, he makes the meerkat—he perches like a meerkat. And then we break and continue on. And say nothing. And that was just a wonderful moment. Just watching Martin Mull like “What is going on?”

Anyway, I shared this story with R&D. And they thought it was very funny. We even played the meerkat in R&D for a little while. Back in the day, by the way, a little side note is, when I first got to Wizards, there was a thing that we referred to as The Game. And what the game was, there was a series of rules about what you had to do, and if you didn’t do those things, you—I don’t know, got punched in the arm or something? And—so basically, there was a whole bunch of rules.

And the game was this multilayered complex thing. Like there’s certain words you couldn’t say, and when certain words were said you had to do certain things, and if you did something if not, then you couldn’t talk, until someone said your name, and it was complex. It was just this little game. I think Skaff had designed this game, he and his friends during college. But anyway, for a little while, the meerkat game got merged into The Game. And R&D did it for a little while, and it entertained us.

But anyway, when we were doing Mirage, the meerkat—because we were doing the meerkat thing, we decided to make a meerkat. And so the meerkat—I don’t even know that the card had anything to do mechanically with the card as far as it being a meerkat. That having a meerkat in the set was 100% tied to the Roseanne meerkat game that I brought to R&D.

Okay. Next. Grinning Totem. Okay. So. I love—I get a lot of theories, for those of you that read my column, you get to hear about my theories. Many of my theories I think have proven to be pretty valid and become a pretty—a staple of how R&D functions. But sometimes I come up with a theory that kind of doesn’t quite work out the way I thought. You know, doesn’t quite prove itself.

So I had a theory, when I first got there, of what I called the “marquee card.” The idea of the marquee card was, I thought that every set—well, Ice Age had just come out before I got there, and Ice Age had a card called Jester’s Cap. So for those that don’t know, Jester’s Cap is a card that allows you to go into your opponent’s library and permanently remove three cards. You know, from the game.

And before that card, we had never allowed people to touch other people’s libraries or take cards out of the game. We had never done that. And so the card was really eye-catching because people were like “Oh my God, this is amazing.” Even whether it was or it wasn’t. It just was really out of the box. And I said, “You know, maybe what we want every set to do is have one card,” and I thought it needed to be an artifact or a land, meaning it needed to be part of any deck. That part of being a marquee card was this crazy did-something-you’ve-never-seen-before, but that anybody could play.

And so I decided that we should have marquee cards. And so I went to Bill and I said, “Bill.” I explained my theory, I go “We need a marquee card.” And Bill is like “Well, if you made something good enough, I’ll put it in.” You know. The gauntlet’s thrown. A lot of Mirage is gauntlet-throwing and me trying to make cards.

And notice what happened. A lot of my design on Mirage was, we’d get a hole—one of two things. Either we’d get a hole and I’d try to fill it, Maro is an example of that, or I felt we had a need and I would say to Bill, “Here’s our need,” and Bill would say like, “Well, make a card, and then if there’s—A., if the card is good enough, and B., I can find a spot for it, I’ll put it in.”

Sometimes I would—I’d combine those, I would go, “There’s a thing I want to make and there’s a hole” and I’d combine them together. But anyway, so I said we needed to have a marquee card. Bill’s like, “Well, make a card.” So I made Grinning Totem. And so for those that don’t know, Grinning Totem is a card that allows you to go in your opponent’s library and cast a spell out of your opponent’s library. You’re casting their spell. We’d never done that before.

I mean now it’s funny because, like whenever we do something, later Magic does more of it. You know. And now the idea of messing with your opponent’s library, you know, taking cards out, or doing some things with their cards, or casting their cards, don’t seem quite as crazy.

Now be aware, by the way, there was a card in Alpha that allowed you to cast a spell out of your opponent’s hand. Word of Command. But we’d never let you cast a spell in your opponent’s deck. So anyway, I made Grinning Totem to be that. It definitely created some excitement. But it—I later realized that the marquee card—I don’t know, my theory didn’t quite hold out.

I did by the way—well, I tried to make a marquee card for Tempest, interestingly enough, Volrath’s Helm—or Helm of Volrath. I think it was called. But the card that got put out didn’t end up being the card I meant to be the marquee card. The marquee card was supposed to be—because Volrath with his helm, could control people’s minds, was supposed to be Mindslaver. But we couldn’t work it out. There’s some rules issues and mana burn was causing us problems. But anyway, I would later go on to do it in Mirrodin, but that card was made to be the marquee card of Tempest although it never ended up in Tempest.

Okay, next. Goblin Tinkerer. Okay. There’s three things that I love. I mean, more than three, but three that matter for this case. And when I say love, I mean Magic-wise. I love my family and such. Okay. Number one! I love artifacts. Like before I came to Wizards, my favorite set bar none—well, I mean I loved Alpha, but my favorite expansion was Antiquities. Why? Because it just—artifacts! You know. I loved artifacts. I still do love artifacts. I did make Mirrodin, and I made Esper, and I made Scars of Mirrodin. So. I—I am a fan of artifacts. Anyway, I love—A. A. One. I love artifacts.

Two, I love changing things into other things. My favorite card, or one of my favorite cards in Antiquities, was Transmute Artifact. Which I would later go on to tweak with Tinker. Okay, I would later go on to break with Tinker. But Tinker was just me trying to like take what I loved about Transmute Artifact and just, you know, simplify it a little bit. A.k.a. I guess break it in half. But anyway, I love changing things into other things.

Three, I love the graveyard. Love the graveyard. So for example, by the way. If there ever was—the following format ever got made. The format is a Designer’s Choice. Where you pick a designer of Magic, and then you could play any card that designer made in your deck. The winning deck of that format, I believe, would be Rosewater Dredge. Because I—not only did I make the dredge mechanic, I have made like 95% of the cards you would need to make the most awesome dredge deck ever.

Because I love the graveyard. You know. Bridge from Below, Narcomoeba—I don’t know, name it. I have made a vast, vast majority of the cards that use the graveyard very powerfully and efficiently. Including making the dredge mechanic. So anyway, take those three things together, take a love of artifacts, a love of changing things, a love of the graveyard, voilà! Goblin Tinkerer. Anyway, that was definitely me just making the kind of card that I would like to make.

Also, another thing that I liked about the card was it’s what I would—used to call a puzzle card. Which was, back in the day, I made Magic: The Puzzling. Which was, you know, like a chess puzzle except it was Magic, and you were in-game, and like, you know, win the game or something. You’d have some objective. Usually winning.  And Goblin Tinkerer was an awesome puzzle card. Because all you had to do is put a couple artifacts into play, a couple artifacts in your graveyard, and like, now you had all these interesting options. And you—it really was—with one card you had all these, you know, avenues for the person solving the puzzle to go down and figure out what they could do. And so, it’s definitely—both the kind of card I loved as a player and the kind of card I loved as a puzzle crafter.

Okay, what is next? Next is—oh, another trivia question. What was the first Mirage card to be printed? Now this is a trick question, and probably not one you know unless—unless I talked about this during Homelands. The answer is Memory Lapse,  Because Memory Lapse, although designed by the Mirage team, actually came out during Homelands.

How did that happen? Well the way it happened was, Bill Rose had come out to Wizards—I think he might have even been doing his interview for the job, but he came out for some reason. And then while he was there, they were doing the final touches on Homelands. So he sat in. And they had a hole for a counterspell. And so they might have even had the art—I’m not sure. But anyway, they had a counterspell. I think this actually was late enough that they might have had the art.

But they needed the counterspell. And so Bill said, “Oh, I have a great counterspell, it’s in my set.” You know, in Menagerie. And so they ended up taking it because they needed it, because it was like last—they just needed something good, and Bill had a good spell. So they put it in. So Memory Lapse ended up coming out before Mirage, the set it was designed in. There’s some other cases of that happening. We often will steal from the future.

One of the rules of R&D is, whatever set is chronologically coming out the next, has priority if they really need something. So if you’re desperate for something and the set that’s coming out after you has it, I mean, barring that thing being crucial to the upcoming set. You usually can take it. It’s like, because that set has some time to replace it. Where you’re like under the gun and got to get it out the door. So we borrow from the future quite a bit.

Okay. Next. Consuming Ferocity. So this is an example of a card that was an awesome idea, another card I did, an awesome idea that didn’t quite play out the way I hoped. So the idea that I had about the card, which was—was very simple. Was, you know, you—you enchant it, and then—the idea of the spell was, you make this—you give this thing some magical energy, and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Until that magical energy just burns them out. And destroys them.

And so the idea was that you cast it on your creature, and it gets better and better, but in true red fashion it kind of burns itself out. Like, it just, red—not thinking the long game. And so I made the card, but what ended up happening was, the—it just got more complicated than I really meant for it to be.

That just the—this is what happens from time to time, it happened with suspend, is when you make a card, and you—you know, you… like, in your head it’s a very simple idea. But when you actually have to write it out and put words on cards, then it just gets a lot more complex meaning there’s busy work that you have to do and make the player do that just is like “What? What?” You know.

And Consuming Ferocity is exactly one of those kinds of cards, where like in theory, like, in the mindspace and the idea of it is pretty simple, right? But when you actually write it out and people are reading it, it’s the kind of thing your read twice and you go, “Wait, what? What happens?” And suspend is an even worse—where like, the idea of, you know, I get it for cheaper but it takes four turns to play, but when you have to manipulate all the counters and everything, it just—it confuses people.

And so one of the things we do now in design is, we actually will template things—well, rough templates, but we actually will have the Rules Manager do rough templates early so we can look at something and understand it, like “Oh, is this going to be as easy as we think it’s going to be?” Because one of the things that happens a lot in design is, you make something and you think it’s going to be super super simple and obvious and intuitive, and when you actually write it out, it’s not. That the way—what you need to do with the game mechanics to make it happen makes it not—not as—it doesn’t shine as much.

That—and that one of the rules of design is, you have to understand the means by which you have to communicate your game mechanic to the audience. That you have to go through templating. You have to go through the rules. And that sometimes, what seems so obvious isn’t when you actually have to communicate it. And that’s a very important lesson to have.

Another important lesson to have came from a card called Ekundu Cyclops. So that was a card that, whenever another creature attacked, it had to attack. You know. And on the surface it seemed pretty cool. It’s like “Well, you know…” It’s a card that says, “Well, if people are attacking, I’m attacking.” You know.

And—but here’s the problem. It’s a card that had to do something, but it cared about another card. And the problem is, people would attack all the time, and like they just wouldn’t look at their Ekundu Cyclops. They just wouldn’t look at it, and so like, they had nothing to remind them that “Oh, by the way, you have to attack.” Because the card said “Hey, if something else happens, you have to do something.” And people would miss it all the time.

And what we learned is that, you know, it’s bad to make—you have to be careful to make a card in which, like, “I must do something, but something else must happen.” And that—we do do some triggers and stuff like that, you have to be careful, but usually we make the trigger big enough that it matters. But the problem especially with Ekundu Cyclops was, sometimes like the player, you know, it wasn’t that they weren’t thinking about it, they were just like “Oh, I can’t attack with it” and put it aside, and then a new creature comes out and they’re not even thinking about Ekundu Cyclops.

And once again. That’s an example of design that, like, seems simple, and then in actual play people kept messing up on it. And so we don’t do that exactly anymore. What we’ll do now is, we’ll make a card for example that says, you know, “If—you know, if I attack, you know, something else must attack.” Or “I must attack with something else.” Or, you know, things in which it sort of reminds you that—the card itself says “Hey, I must be involved with other things.” And not like “You must remember even when you’re not looking at me that I might have to do something.”

Okay. Next—so one of the things that I talked about last time was how Mirage came up with some things we hadn’t done before, like they were the first sets to do them. I talked about stalking and skulking, and one of the ones I forgot about was the card Thirst.

So what happens is, in Limited, it’s important that every color at common has some way to deal with creatures. White obviously had pacifism effects, black had creature destruction, red has direct damage, green now has Prey Upon-type effects, before it would try to do more stuff with Lure or things in which its creatures would try to (???) your creatures, I think Prey Upon’s a better solution.

But anyway, blue needed something. Like, “Well, how could blue, you know…” Because blue doesn’t destroy things, it’s not blue’s thing. And yeah, blue could counter creatures, but what happens if blue can’t counter them? So we wanted to give blue some answer to it. And the idea we eventually came to which has now become a pretty staple part of blue in common is the idea of a lockdown card. That blue has an enchantment that says, “Well, you don’t untap.” You know. And sometimes it taps your creature, sometimes it doesn’t. But it gives blue kind of an answer. And Thirst I’m pretty sure was the first time we had done this. It was the first card to do that.

And one of the things about Mirage that I like to explain is that Mirage is, was—I don’t know, ninth set to come out? I mean, it was a relatively early set. And what happens is, whenever we make new sets, we always stumble across new things, and like one of the things that makes the game awesome is we keep experimenting, we keep finding new things that work, we bring those things to the game proper, and that each set kind of evolves our technology of kind of learning what we can do. And I think Mirage was a big step technological-wise. There’s a lot of individual things that got done that went on to become just how Magic functions. You know.

On top of that, Mirage is the start of what I call the Silver Age of design. It was the first set really that had block design. It was the first set where Limited—the thought of Limited was a big part of how the set got designed and developed. You know. And that Mirage was a milestone. I think that when you look back these days, it seems a little on the bland side only because, you know… For example, the story I tell is I was in film school, and we saw a film called The Great Train Robbery. And when you’re watching this film, it seems like the goofiest, you know, like, it just seems so childish, but like, you know, the (???) is, you know, we have none of the effects. It’s all very silly. You know.

And at the end of it, you know, I’m watching it, and this is the dumbest thing, and my teacher’s like “No no no no. See how they were at the train station, and then the next shot they’re at the bank, you know, or that, you know, that meant that they’re at one place, and if you cut, now you’re at another place. And the audience goes, ‘Oh, they’re at the same place.’ You cut back and forth, the audience will believe they’re at the same place. Because that didn’t happen before this film. That didn’t exist. Something that’s so ingrained in your, you know, mental mapping of how you look at film, something that’s like just a given. Just that is how film works. This is the stuff that did it.”

You know. And that, you know, yeah now it looks so simplistic because, well, it did something they hadn’t done before. Mirage did a lot of that. There are a lot of neat innovative things that, like, Mirage did, that when you look back, it might look a little on the bland side, but that’s because things you take for granted, they’re just part of Magic, were, you know, a key element of being there. So.

Anyway, that is—I’m now at work and I’m parked. I’ve actually been parked for a minute. But I wanted to finish up. So anyway, I—I hope this is—my final part of my Mirage three-part. Like I said, I have great respect for Mirage design, I think that Bill and Joel and Charlie and Don and Elliott and Howard made an awesome set. You know, I think the development team was coming into its own. And we really—this was the first real set the four of us developed.

And I’m very proud. I think like, you know, in the test of time, Mirage was a good set that did—led the way to a lot of things. It wasn’t the most exciting set, but I think it laid a lot of groundwork and I think it did a lot of good solid things that got built upon. And I feel like it has, in my opinion—in my mind, a very central place in Magic history. Like I said, it’s the start of the Silver Age of design. That’s a pretty big deal. So.

Anyway, I’ve got to go make some Magic cards now, so it was fun talking all about Mirage design, but it’s time to go make the Magic.