9/6/13 Episode 50: Scars of Mirrodin, Part III

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

Okay. So the last two weeks, I’ve been talking about the design for Scars of Mirrodin. So today I wanted to talk about some cards, and I thought I’d—I—I like—what I started doing with these things is, I’ve started telling the general stories, and then at some point I get to the cards and I feel like, while I explain the stories of the cards, other stories come out. And any set in which I was in charge of, I have lots of stories. So I’m just going to start talking about stuff, and we’ll go from there.

Let’s see. So I have a—a list of cards. Bloodshot Trainee.

So one of the things that we always do is whenever we’re doing a set, we always ask ourselves, “Is there a future-shifted card that could make sense here?” Because our—one of the funs of Future Sight was kind of like glimpsing the future. And so we always take a look. You know, sometimes—not every set makes sense. But every once in a while we run into some things, we go “Oh, that could work.”

And the interesting thing—Bloodshot Trainee would not, at first blush, seem like this is the set it would be in. But what we learned is, because of infect, and because of power mattering so much, we just had more effects that raised your power than normal. Plus we were in Mirrodin, which meant we had more artifact equipment than normal. And so it just was a world in which, like, you could make Bloodshot Trainee work more often. And so it ended up being a good fit.

It’s kind of funny, because it’s not—if I said “Go look through Future Sight and find the, you know, Scars of Mirrodin card,” I’m not sure that would be the obvious answer. But sometimes it’s fun to find things that aren’t the obvious answer if they work well. And Bloodshot Trainee does.

Okay. Clone Shell.

So Clone Shell was—so what had happened was, we had done imprint during Mirrodin block. And so in—by the time we got to Fifth Dawn, there was a lot of thought of like we had done so much imprint, maybe we should not do imprint in Fifth Dawn. And I was like “Oh, no, no, no,” you know, “people will expect imprint. We have to have imprint.” And then the compromise was, “Okay. We’ll do one imprint card, so it’s—say to the imprint crowd a little bit, without—because we were running out of stuff at the time. Or—there was just a lot going on.

And so Aaron Forsythe made a card—so Aaron Forsythe’s first team was Fifth Dawn. That’s Aaron’s first team. In fact, when Aaron was hired to run the website, and--he was on the Fifth Dawn team because we were going to let him write an article because we thought it would be real cool to have an inside view of what it’s like. Anyway, Aaron worked out real well, and when I get to the Fifth Dawn I’ll explain all that.

Anyway, he made a card I think was called Summoner’s Egg. And what was unique about Summoner’s Egg was it imprinted a card, but your opponent didn’t know what the card was. Right away. And so it created some interesting gameplay. So Clone Shell was me taking that exact same technology from Summoner’s Egg and just, you know, shifting it a little bit. But the idea essentially was, “A creature, when it dies, it might become a creature.” Well, you know, if I—if I was lucky enough to get a creature, it does become a creature. But maybe I didn’t, or maybe it’s not that good a creature. You know.

And so it’s the neat thing of “How dangerous is it?” You don’t know.  It could turn into this giant monster, it could be a wimpy thing, it could be nothing. And I like that gameplay a lot, and so Clone shell came from—one of the reasons we brought imprint back, I was very gung ho on finding, you know, trying to do some stuff that we had done less of last time with imprint, and actually we had done one card in Mirrodin block with unknown information. So I was excited to play around with that a little more.

Okay, Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine.

So, originally, back when proliferate was pushed much more toward common, it—there was a vertical cycle. And Clasp was the common, originally, and it had an ETB, an enter-the-battlefield effect, and it didn’t—it wasn’t repeatable, like—I think the uncommon one was repeatable? But anyway—oh, I don’t know what it did, it had an ETB effect and you could sac it. So it did it twice. You did it once when it came into play, and then you could sac and do the second time was the original version.

And then when proliferate—Development sort of pulled it out of common, or lessened it greatly at common, they ended up moving—combining the uncommon and the common together. Because the uncommon had a repeatable Clasp—and anyway, so that cycle turned into like a two-card cycle rather than a three-card cycle.

I don’t believe there’s a fancy name for a two-card cycle. But we do those from time to time, where there’s like one nonrare, one rare, and the rare’s like the bigger version of the non-rare. Usually that’s uncommon and rare, although I guess we’ve done—I guess it’s usually uncommon and rare.

Okay, next. Oh, the mana myr!

So, one of the things that we goofed around with was how to do our mana. Because one of the things we knew was access to colored mana in artifact form was important, because we were making a lot more definitions of color this time rather than last time we did in Mirrodin, where there’s a lot more of “Oh, well you want to use this, this requires access to color.” And as I’ll get to, there’s definitely a lot of cards where like, we were like, “Well, it’s usable, but you—it’s maximized if you have the right color.”

And so originally in this slot, we did not have the myr, we had what we called the “mocks.” And I have to spell that for you, because the—it’s a—a visual pun, not an audio pun. Mocks. And what it was was, we were doing like mox, like you know, Mox Jet and stuff.

But they were more expensive. I can’t remember what we costed them at. But they were—they were—Oh, I’m sorry—what were—so they were—how did they work?  They were, they were like mox—I think they were zero cost artifacts that tapped for color, but there was some—what was it? There was some quirk about them because obviously they weren’t—they weren’t straight-up mox. And we were trying an alternate version of them. They cost—maybe they cost mana? They were straight-up moxes but they cost mana? I don’t remember now.

But anyway, what happened was, I’m not sure whether this happened late in design or early development. We were trying to make sure we got more repeat cards in, and we realized that having the—the mana myr, having been creatures, had a bunch of nice things that that helped with, and so it gave us two birds, you know, one stone, it got more, you know, Mirrodin cards, repeats in, and it just—it ended up playing—they played very well with the environment. You know. They definitely allowed you to throw equipment on them and they had some value beyond just providing mana.

Darksteel Axe.

Okay. So one of the things that we were trying to do was we liked the idea of presenting Mirrodin, but create this feeling like Mirrodin has continued to evolve. And so darksteel—so, so originally in the file, we’d actually repeated Bonesplitter.

So what we had done was, the design team early on sat down and said, “Okay. What cards do we want to see repeated from the Mirrodin bloczk?” And we made a long list of cards. And Bonesplitter was one of them, but we started playing with it and basically it’s like Bonesplitter just was a little bit too good, when we made equipment before, in Mirrodin, we didn’t quite realize—like, we didn’t realize how good it was.

I think that it’s—if you look at Mirrodin, it’s clear that we didn’t quite truly understand how powerful equipment was. And most of it—or, some of it was very undercosted. You know. I mean, Bonesplitter being one of them. What happened was, is we wanted to have Bonesplitter but we couldn’t have the actual Bonesplitter. And so we said “Oh, well is there a way to sort of evolve Bonesplitter?

And then we came up with the idea of “Well, you know, darksteel was a big part of Mirrodin, the idea of this indestructible thing, it’s like “Oh, well what if it cost more and make it indestructible. And that way it will feel tougher, and has a—it has a feel of evolution, like “Now the Bonesplitter’s un—you know, indestructible.” But it allowed us to give numbers to it that actually made it, from a play value, a little bit weaker than Bonesplitter. So that we could print it. But I always liked that, like, you sort of came back, and that it felt like Mirrodin wasn’t sitting still. Like, it evolved while we weren’t—while you weren’t there.  

Okay, Dross Hopper and Ferrovore. And Furnace Celebration. So let me—so there’s a theme—I talked about this a little bit last week or the week before, which was—we had a theme in black of sacrificing creatures. And all those were tagged with a Phyrexian watermark. Phyrexians loved sacrificing creatures.

Red had a theme of sacrificing artifacts. And that was a Mirrodin thing. And Mirrodin had done that in the first—you know, in the first Mirrodin. That red liked sacrificing artifacts.

And so what we did was, we had this theme of black sacrificing creatures and red sacrificing artifacts, and then we put a bunch of cards in that said that, like, liked sacrificing things. So that there was a black/red deck that you could draft. Furnace Celebration is one of the few remnants of that, because Furnance Celebration is like, “Whenever something got sacced, you paid two to shock something.”

And originally we had more, you know, the red/black sacrifice deck was—had more going on, and one of the things that in general happens is in design, we try to put a lot of different layers of things in. And during development, sometimes usually something has to go. That they’re, you know, that was the theme that went.

I’m a little sad—one of my personal frustrations with Scars of Mirrodin—I like Scars of Mirrodin a lot. But one of my frustrations was, it segmented you a little too much on the sides. That you—we had woven a lot of things in the design to say “Oh, well here’s why black plays with red or why blue plays with white. Or why…” like, we had done more  sort of criss-cross things. And some of that, for different reasons, got lessened.

And I feel that the finished product—it was harder to take elements of Mirrodin and mix it with elements of Phyrexia. And I wish that had been a little—that theme that we had put in the design had stuck a little more.

Okay, next. The Spellbomb cycle.

Oh, okay, so I was talking about this not too long ago. So the Spellbomb cycle was part of—so here’s one of the goals that we have for artifacts in general. Which is—I like the fact that artifacts can be used by anybody. But I also felt that it’s important, and one of the things I think Mirrodin sort of had issues with, is you need to make sure that there’s color in your artifacts, meaning that I want to make sure that the color pie is used as a tool to safeguard the set just like it always is.

And so part of that is to say “Okay, there’s good artifacts, but if you’re—you have to have some dedication to color to play some of them.” Now what I don’t like is—and we’ve done this a few times, is like, you could make an artifact that just requires blue to tap. You know. But then it’s like, my problem with that is, well then it kind of violates the essence of artifacts going anywhere.

And it says, “Well, no, it’s just a blue card,” you know. And we do that every once in a while, I’m not 100% against it if there’s a good value for it. But—but I don’t—I’m not a huge fan of it because I feel like it violates kind of the essence of an artifact. And as an artifact is, “Hey, I am useful to everybody.” And so the Spellbomb cycle was, it said “Okay. We have an effect—we have a little thing, a trinket, you can do whatever, it does something, it’s useful.

But to maximize it, to really get the full value out of it, you need to have the right color, because if you have the right color, then you get to draw an extra card.” And so it’s like “Well, the…” you know, if you’re drafting, you might take this card and you might play it if you’re not in red. But oh, if you’re in red, wow, you’re much more inclined to want to take it. So it definitely allowed people dedicated to certain colors, you know, to be able to play—to get certain artifacts later in the draft.

(Police siren) So you hear the police, that is not for me. So you may be happy to know I am sitting in traffic. I’m—when I go to work, there’s two freeways I take. This is the first freeway, and for some reason—see, the police just went by, which—that’s not necessarily a good thing for me. But traffic for me is always good for you. Yes, I am the one podcast where traffic means extra content.

Okay. So the spellbombs—I liked—we tried a lot of different ways to sort of get the value across. And in the end, I liked adding the card advantage came from the color. That did a nice thing of making certain colors—like, certain artifacts mattered more in color—anyway, I was very happy with how that worked.

Next is Geth!

So it’s funny. When we first mapped out the—the watermarks for the Phyrexians, we made a list. Let’s see if I can remember this because I talked about it the other week. So if you had a Phyrexian ability, if you had proliferate or infect you got it. If you used -1/-1 counters you got it. If you had a death—a death trigger, you got it. If you sacrificed creatures you got it. Those are all Phyrexian things.

And, so the funny thing is, we made this map out, and one of the—one of the editors came to me and—and—because we had outlayed what gets you a Phyrexian symbol. And so Geth didn’t match anything we had laid out. And they came to me and said “Oh, we’re not sure what to do. You know, he—he doesn’t have proliferate, he doesn’t have infect, he doesn’t have—he doesn’t use -1/-1 counters. He doesn’t sacrifice creatures. He doesn’t have a death trigger. You know, he doesn’t do anything that signifies he’s supposed to get a Phyrexian watermark.

And so I said “Oh, oh, I forgot one, there’s one more rule.” And they said “Yeah,” they go, “Uh, he gets a watermark, you know, a Phyrexian watermark IF HE’S PHYREXIAN.” I was like, “Uh,” you know, it’s like, “He’s Phyrexian. He gets a Phyrexian watermark. Here. That’s number six.” So. I apologize when I yell, I know—poor people listening to me. My voice is loud as is, so—I know—I get excited sometimes.

See, the people that ask me “Am I performing?” you know, when I’m on camera, am I trying to be, like, more energetic than normal, the answer is no. So if you ask people who actually know me, this is actually how I am. I’m—like I remember for example when I—my big pitch for Roseanne that got me the show, got me working on the show—they asked me when I first entered if I wanted coffee. And at the end of it they’re like “We see why you didn’t take coffee. You didn’t need it.” So anyway. I have an energetic personality. That is who I am.

Next—Glimmerpoint Stag.

Okay. So, one of the tricky things about—is we wanted there to be answers to infect in different ways. So one of the things about infect is, you block the creatures and I slowly nibble down your creatures. And so one of the things we wanted to do is figure out some ways to help—to help heal, you know, the infected creatures in a way.

And so one of the ways we came up with—so, it’s no secret, I am a giant fan of flickering. I love flickering. Love love love love flickering. And the reason—one of the reasons I like it is, I consider it to be like a Swiss army knife. Like there’s so many things you can do with flickering. There’s just so many—it’s just one of those things that I’m—I mean, I’m a Johnny, right?

There’s so many—like, just having a flicker in your hand, you’re like “Oh, there’s so many possibilities!” You know, it’s just the kind of card that, like, you know, whenever I draw a flicker effect I’m like “Oh man, what can I…” I just start getting excited. Because there’s so many different possibilities. And then there’s so many neat tricks you can do.

But anyway, the reason we used it here was, beyond the normal tricks, you still could redo ETB effects and this and that, but it—I felt like it—it did this neat thing where it helped with Mirrodin. Like it was a—it ended up being this neat Mirrodin helper that was very subtly a Mirrodin helper, and here’s how.

For starters, if your creatures had been infected and had -1/-1 counters, it cleared them off it. You know, if my 4/4 is now a 1/1, I flicker it and now it becomes a 4/4 again. Also, it helps with ETB effects. Enter-the-battlefield effects. But enter-the-battlefield effects were defined as Mirrodin things, because death triggers were defined as Phyrexian. So it worked really well with Mirrodin, and it didn’t work as well with Phyrexian.

 So it was one of those things that just—I realized that the flicker effect like—not that the—oh also, it also reset charge counters, because what happened was, Mirrodin had all of the—all of these artifacts, that like you would use all their counters. Well, flickering allowed you to reset them.

And the other thing we did, by the way, is we didn’t have—things that had a use, they had charge counters, we didn’t sacrifice them when you had no counters left. Because we know because of metalcraft and sacrificing artifacts and different things, that there was value in having the shell left. So that also allowed this card to have some fun, and sort of reset things that had got down to the nub and you can get them back.

And there was a big fight about that, because usually when you use something up we want it to go away, because we want to clear off the battlefield. Like, it was not doing any function, but we felt like there was enough function here that we should keep it around.

Okay. Glimmerpost.

So one of the things that’s fun is, most of the time when we think about Magic, our—our main focus is Standard. That is where—I mean, but, but—we do also think about larger formats. And so one of the things that’s fun sometimes is to say okay. Like we knew—I knew, I mean at the time I don’t think Modern existed yet, but I think Extended existed? That I knew there would be a format where you could play the original Mirrodin and Scars of Mirrodin together.

And I was just very excited about the idea of having another Locus. That we had done—what is the original called? See, this is where my—my inability to get names off the top of my head causes problems. There was a card in—you all yelling at your—loud right now. There was a card in Mirrodin that you could tap, and you got the amount of mana equal to the number of Loci you had. And it had “post” in it.

Okay, I’m not going to remember it. It’ll come—maybe later on, like “Oh, it’s so and so!” Anyway, we wanted to have another loci so that you could play together, this one was made to be a little weaker because the other one was like defining, like, large environments with lots of cards. But we liked having the loci and I thought it would be kind of fun. We knew it wasn’t going to be a Standard issue, it would just be an issue for larger formats.

(Police sirens) Okay, more police. Something is going on up here. And I’m sitting in traffic. So—luckily, I have a long list of cards to talk about.

Okay, next, Gollum Foundry. Golem Foundry. Golem Found—Gollum Foundry. That’s hard to say.

So that card in playtests was called “Robot Factory.” And the reason I made it was that we were trying to make artifacts have a range of how many artifacts you wanted to play. And that I wanted to make sure that every artifact matters card didn’t make you play lots of artifacts, but I wanted to make a few cards that really said, “Hey, you know, you really kind of want to have some artifacts,” and that you wanted some that were like “Hey, this deck really wants you playing a lot of artifacts.” And so Golem Foundry made for that purpose of saying, “Okay, hey, you know, we…” One of the strategies could be drafting a lot of artifacts, and then you had a card that really kind of rewarded you if you had enough artifacts.

But I was trying not to make that a requirement. What happened in Mirrodin, original Mirrodin was we pushed that a little too hard. It was kind of like, you know, if you committed to the artifacts, well you really had to commit to artifacts. We wanted to make sure that you didn’t always have to do that. But I wanted a little of that. There were people that go, “I’m going to draft any artifact I see,” you know. “I want a deck full of artifacts.” And I wanted to have a few cards that helped them, and Golem Foundry was one of those.

But—it is funny, by the way, that Golem Foundry was one of those where sometimes I get used to a name just because it tickles my fancy, and Robot Factory was one for me. And it’s one of those things—whenever someone says Golem Foundry I’m like “Oh, oh, oh, oh, Robot Factory.” Like, I—my brain just—kind of like Chainsaw, Trepanation Blade in Innistrad.

Where it was Chainsaw for all of design. Actually, we changed the name in design to try to get a name that would stick. That wasn’t—couldn’t be Chain—we couldn’t call it Chainsaw. Anyway. That’s an Innistrad thing. Although I already had my Innistrad podcast. I’m sure I talked about it for my Innistrad podcast.

Okay, next, Grindclock!

So Grindclock is an interesting card. So one of the things we knew—once we knew that proliferate was going to be a major part of the set, I was very gung ho of playing around a lot with the charge counters. And so one of the things that I always have fun with is trying to figure out how to make things function a little differently. And so the charge counter issue was—I liked the idea that I had a card in which I had to figure out the value of the charge counters.

So Grindclock, for those that don’t remember, is you could tap to put a charge counter on it, or you could tap it to mill your opponent equal to the number of charge counters on it. And so the thing that I thought was a lot of fun is, like well what’s the right strategy here? You know. How—how many turns do I take to build it up vs. how many turns do I use it? You know.

And that the—the more I build it up, the better it is once I use it, and there’s a nice—it’s one of the cards that I call a—a “math card,” which means that you say to a player—because there are different kinds of Magic players. And some players really, really enjoy having a card and just like—so min-maxing is a term that we talk about—I think comes from role-playing. The idea is trying to take every advantage you have and get the most benefit out of it.

So for example, when we’re talking about min-maxing role-playing, it’s like building your character so that you are getting the most out of what you have available to you. And then in gaming, we use a term to mean somebody who just tries to squeeze all the advantage they can out of things they have. And Spikes, in general, are min-maxers, because part of sort of proving dominance and showing what you’re capable of doing is figuring out how to take a card and getting the most you can out of it.

Okay, we have now passed the accident, so now I’m traveling again. So Grindclock to me is a math card. It’s a min-max card, which is like, it’s an interesting decision. And like, I like to make some of these cards, every player—all these different kinds of players exist, you want to make sure each kinds of players get a card.

And this is a fun min-max card, because it’s—and the interesting thing is, it’s not always the—what the correct call is varies based on different factors. For example, how many cards your opponent has in their library is very important. So if you get this out early game vs. getting out late game, the actual decision is a different decision. It’s not—it’s not always the things that you need to do. Plus, because there’s mana involved, I mean there’s other facts, but I kind of like the decision-making that it made it have.

So Grasp of Darkness.

So this card originally started as—I think it was called “Black Lightning.” And it was B—originally it was B, instant, target creature gets -3/-3 until end of turn. And the idea was, it was kind of like a Lightning Bolt. I mean, it couldn’t hit players, so it was strictly worse than Lightning Bolt, but—or not strictly worse because it’s -1/-1.

And then what happened was, it just ended up being to good, and so in development it got toned down so that it—it had value, and it—I think what they wanted was, they didn’t mind the heavy dedicated black deck having it, but it was a little too splashable, a little too easy to use. And probably a little too powerful. But anyway, I always liked Black Lightning. Which by the way, for those that don’t know, is also a superhero in the DC universe. A little trivia for you listening to my show.

Next is Ichor Rats.

Okay, so Ichor Rats was interesting. So the thing about Ichor Rats was, we were trying to—so I knew I wanted most of poison to be damage. That I—you had to have creatures and they damaged you. But I—I liked the idea that there was one way. And one way, I did not want to make this something easy to do, but there was one way to be able to get the first point without hitting your opponent. Just because I knew proliferate existed, and I thought it might be neat to have a deck that’s just a little tiny bit different. Where I can get that first point, and then I can sort of proliferate it out. And so Ichor Rats had a lot of flavor, the idea kind of like they spread disease, and so the mere presence kind of poisoned you a little bit.

It’s interesting—I mean, it’s definitely one of those things where—it’s us showing some restraint. Because I know whenever I talk poison, there’s lots  of players like “Oh, just give me a spell that gives my opponent poison.” And I’m like “Well, you know, I want the interactivity.” I definitely want—the thing I like about most poison being on creatures is there’s interactivity to it.

That if I just had to cast spells and poison you, what’s—well, I stall until I get the spells and then I hit you? It’s not nearly as interactive. And having the creatures requires—like, one of the things about infect being on creatures is, your opponent always has some answers because they have creatures. You know. And we purposely made the poison creatures—with one or two exceptions, to be fragile.

Meaning that most of the time, when you got in a fight with a Phyrexian creature, it might do damage to you, but there’s  a good chance you can kill it. I mean, more—the uncommon ones might be a little larger, but, like, the common ones usually, usually, there’s exceptions, had one toughness. Meaning if you could fight this thing, odds are you could kill it.

Now it’ll kill you, or if it doesn’t kill you, at least it permanently damages you, but, you know, by making infect be on creatures then you had answers. Ichor Rat was my one, “Well, we’ll play around a little bit,” you know,  and I wanted there to be a black/blue proliferate deck. Where you sort of just, you know, taint them a little bit and then you get them. And Ichor Rats was kind of filling that role.

Liquid Metal Coating.

So there’s a couple things in the set that I would go back and change. I know there’s people that heartily disagree with me on this one, but I don’t like the fact that this turns enchantments into artifacts. I understand the Melvin quality of “It’s neat to have all the ways to turn things into other things,” but the—I guess the Vorthos wins out on this one, which is “Why am I turning this intangible thing into a tangible thing?”

Like I get—I get art—taking land, or taking creatures, I get turning those into artifacts. I can see that. But I—but one, I don’t see the flavor of enchantments becoming artifacts. I don’t get that. And the second thing is that it gave red this really easy way of destroying enchantments that really wasn’t the goal of the card and kind of—really was not what—I mean, like obviously players will—players will take the cards and use them in ways that are beneficial.

And I don’t—I  don’t begrudge the players that, I kind of begrudge us not seeing this ahead of time. Because the—it was not supposed to say “Oh, red would…” I mean, red has artifact destruction, so having a card that turns things into artifacts and then having artifact destruction—that’s a fine combo for red to have. Even when enchantments don’t show up. And the fact that now red has this much easier than normal answer for enchantments, that does not make me happy. So I—like I said, on a couple levels I was not super happy with that card. I mean, it was very popular, but…

So next is Lux Cannon.

So Lux Cannon, I believe—I believe its playtest name was Killing Machine. And the idea was, you just could build up and you destroy anything. In general, Creative I think did an awesome, awesome job. And so what I’m about to say really is—I’m not trying to dig at Creative other than I—this is the one—the one card where I—I wanted this over-the-top name like Killing Machine, and Lux Cannon was a little underwhelming. Like I said, Creative knocked this thing out of the park, so I’m really picking on a one tiny little thing that I—I was hoping for a little more badass name than Lux Cannon. Something that just kills anything. So. But one again, you know. Just as Trepanation Blade is Chainsaw, this card will always be Killing Machine to me.

Memnite!

Okay, so we figured out that we could do a zero 1/1, which is one of those—it’s one of those things that seems more dangerous than it really is. I know that a lot of players are like, whenever you get something for nothing, you know, it—in fact, it’s a funny—I’ll tell you a funny story.

So Richard Garfield was talking to someone that we were thinking of making a game for. And they made the comment about how, “Well, just don’t break it like you broke Magic.” And Richard was like “Oh, like Moxes or something?” And the guy is like, you know, “Ornithopter.”

That was his example of how Richard broke Magic. And like, Ornithopter? Ornithopter? You know. And so you notice, in Alliance there’s a 0/3, and the flavor text for it is making fun of this, it’s something about how, you know, “You can’t stop the horrible thing! It’ll destroy us all.” And it’s like a zero 0/3.

And we figured out that if you can do a zero 0/3, you can do a zero 1/1. And we had kind of known this, we said “Okay, well, artifact’s the best place to do this.” And we went back and forth, we—for a while we talked about it being common, and then they were worried that—that there was a draft strategy that could get a little degenerate.

And, you know, we didn’t—like, in normal Constructed, you can only have four of them in your deck. But the—if they were common—in fact, somebody did this, where they just—every one they saw they drafted. You know. And in three packs, you know, they were able to get—I don’t know. Twelve, thirteen of them? And they just mulliganed until they got a hand of four or five of them, and then just attacked.

And it’s not even that that necessarily was—it wasn’t a great percentage of the time, but it won enough that it was just kind of annoying. And we decided that “Okay, let’s—just make it uncommon, it’s kind of a sexy uncommon anyway, people will be excited, you know, it’s—we don’t often  make a zero-drop 1/1, so we felt like it made sense—it made sense at uncommon. So it got moved up.

Mimic Vat! 

So—so, one of the things we did when we looked at—when we (indescribable sound effect)--I wonder how—so this gets transcribed. So Natasha transcribes this. And so whenever I make sounds, I always wonder if she transcribes the sound. So like “Okay, Natasha..." (repeats sound effect, laughs).

By the way, I’m very, very thankful that Natasha transcribes this—this podcast. One of the things that’s hilarious to me is that his podcast is really, really made as an aurial—as an aural thing, that I’m talking, and I’m telling stories, and that when you listen to me, it makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny, because when it gets transcribed she writes down everything.

And so I—which is a wonderful service, there’s a lot of people either that can’t hear or that don’t have the time to listen to the podcast, I’m very happy that she transcribes it. But it is just—it’s funny reading me talking, you know. Because I talk in half sentences, and I jump around, and—and when you listen to me it kind of makes sense, but when you read it—I just think I come across a little—a little crazier than I am. Not—not that I’m not crazy. But anyway. So--(disappointing unfun transcription of the sound effect. If you want to listen to this passage it starts around 31:50.)

Okay. Back to—back to Scars of Mirrodin. Mimic Vat!

So, when we did imprint in Mirrodin, we tried a bunch of different things. And I’ll be honest, I think some things were more successful than others. The big successes, I think, were—of imprint was Clone Foundry and Isochron Scepter. And the one—because there was one more that copied. The ones that copy things were very successful. And that I—we definitely wanted to do some more copying.

But one of the things I realized was that it might be fun if you had a card that there was copying, but you had less control over the copy. And the idea was “Okay, well what if, you know, my…” My idea was, “What if I had some random—randomizer, or somewhat randomizer, that kept changing what it was?” And then I came up with the idea of it dies. So every time it dies, whatever dies gets imprinted on it. And so if you want—if you want something to imprint, you could do that, but then your opponent could like go, could kill something and then it could change it.

And I thought it was neat because one of the things in general about imprint stuff was it is fun to imprint things and I liked the different choices, but I thought it was also neat to play around where when you imprinted it wasn’t always the same thing wasn’t happening. That imprint cards could change value over time, they would be doing different things. And so Mimic Vat was me goofing around in that area.

Like I said, we didn’t do tons of imprint, my guideline was “Just do enough imprint that it—it hits—like let’s do the interesting imprints. We don’t need to do tons of imprints, let’s just pick the cool stuff and do that.” And Mimic Vat, I—I like Mimic Vat a lot. I think it is—it is one of those cards that just has lots of fun play value.

 And like I said, it’s—once again, it’s very Johnny-ish in my mind. Not that Spike can’t enjoy it, and not that Timmy can’t enjoy it. But it has a lot of this quality of trying to figure out—but one of the things about Johnny is I think people focus on Johnny in the deckbuilding—everyone thinks about Johnny in the deckbuilding part. They go “Oh, Johnny really enjoys making fun decks. And making weird things happen.”

But another thing about Johnnies is that Johnnies enjoy being in the middle of a game and getting presented with  options, and then figuring out what to do on the fly. Like it’s fun to preplan things, but it’s also fun to sort of, you know, to have your—your improvisational Johnny moment, where like—making decision on the go.

Like, Johnnies like to be clever not just ahead of time, but also in the middle of the game. And like earlier I talked about how Johnnies tend to like flickering because there’s just so many things you can do with flickering. And I feel like, that—there’s a lot of—that having things that create variance in the game allow Johnny to kind of on the fly come up with fun things to do.

And Mimic Vat is definitely one of those cards where the Johnny in me is just like “Oh, there’s always neat things that can happen, and things come up I never would have anticipated because I didn’t prepare for it.” Because there’s definitely times where something dies and like “Oh, I never would have thought to want to copy that, but in this situation I do want to copy that.”

And—so anyway, Mimic Vat definitely excites my Johnny if that doesn’t sound—doesn’t sound bad. Stirs the Johnny within me. That might still sound bad. Anyway, I—there’s no way. There’s just no way, no way me making this statement that doesn’t come out—doesn’t sound questionable. So let’s just say that I like (???).

Okay, the next card. (singing) Mindslaver! Slaver of minds (/singing). I will try to keep singing in my podcast (???).

So what happened was, Mindslaver originally was going to be in Tempest. In fact, Helm of Volrath was scheduled to be Mindslaver. But at the time the rules people were nervous. And there was the mana burn issue, although we ended up just saying whatever—and now it’s gone, so now it doesn’t matter. But anyway, we didn’t do it. The rules team—rules team got nervous, and didn’t know how to let you take control of your opponent, so we pushed it off.

And then when Mirrodin happened, I said “Oh, this is an awesome card.” I was looking—I was looking for just out-there artifacts that were cool and did some different things, and I remembered—I remembered Mindslaver, and I said “Oh, Mindslaver’s awesome.” You know. “I should do Mindslaver.” And this time the rules people said “Yeah, we can do it.” So that was great.

But one of the things about Mindslaver is that—the thing I love about Mindslaver is, it’s what I call a “story card.” And what that means is, when you play the card, you make stories. You know. That it’s a kind of card—like I’m sure if you could record every Magic conversation, that there’s a good number of conversations that start with “So I played Mindslaver.” You know. And like it just leads to neat, interesting situations.

In fact, it creates a lot of what I call puzzle moments, where you’re like “Okay…”  it’s like one of my Magic: The Puzzling things. It’s like “Okay, what do I do?” And taking over your opponent’s turn and trying to just sabotage them for a turn—it’s fun. There’s a lot of neat things that happen there.

Now the problem is, is that it—it’s pretty violating. That, for the guy doing it, it is fun! But for the guy being done against it, it is fun the first couple times it happens. Because it’s novel. But then eventually you’re like “Ugh, not again.” And so Mindslaver got in this weird place where it was what I call “beloved and behated.” Yes. I invented the word “behated.” So—trademarked. Behated.

It is a card that evokes strong emotions out of people. Some people really like it, some people really hate it. And so when we made a list of cards to bring back, I put Mindslaver on it. I feel that Mindslaver is like an iconic card, it’s cool, it’s fun, it makes stories. And then other people we’re like “It’s one of the most unfun cards of all time!”

And so we had this fight back and forth, because it is this card where like it creates strong, strong feelings. It is loved by some, and it is hated by others. And so we went back and forth. For a while we were talking about doing a variant of it that exiled itself, which would answer that problem. Because the most—the biggest problem with it is when it gets recursed.

That’s one thing that’s fine, lose a turn, it’s another thing when you lose every turn. And so we were going to redo a version of it, and change it a little—change the numbers and add in the exile—it removes itself so that it doesn’t cause that problem. But we went back and forth, and in the end I guess it was decided that it was pretty nostalgic and it felt very much like Mirrodin, and the thought was we were a little bit low on repeat Mirrodin cards, and it was really high-profile. And so we decided to bring it back. So anyway. That’s how Mindslaver ended up in the set. For those that belove or behate it.

Anyway, I am now at work, and I look at my list. I am like halfway through the list I had made. So you know what that means—yes, four parter! So I will do—next week I will do the fourth part. I’ve never done a fourth-parter. So you guys will be here for the very first four-parter. Well, I guess I’ve done my Lessons Learned. So—I’ve done meta-series that get up to four parts. But I’ve never done a review of a set that’s gotten to be four parts.

But you know what? You guys seem to like the review of the set, so I’m willing to talk about this as long as I have material to talk about. So anyway, next week join me, we’ll talk more about card stories. But now—ooh, I was—I’m late, because my traffic. So a little extra—little extra podcast for you today. But anyway, it’s time for me to go because I’ve got to go make the Magic.