9/6/13 Episode 51: Scars of Mirrodin, Part IV

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. Over the last three weeks I have talked about Scars of Mirrodin. But! I’m not done yet. Last week I started talking about—the first two weeks I talked about the set and how it got made. Last week I—I was telling stories about cards, but I did not finish. In fact, I got up to Mindslaver, which is in the middle of the alphabet. So today is mmm to zzz. M to Z today.

So the first one I’m going to talk about today is Molderbeast. So one of the interesting trick—tricky things about any block is that there’s some theme to the block. And that means you’ve kind of got to shift and make all the colors care about that theme. Now the funny thing is, some themes all the colors have a natural fit, but some themes it’s a little tricker.

So when we went to Mirrodin originally, the question was “What does green do?” Well now clearly green—if you understand the blue/green conflict, it’s sort of a nature/nurture conflict, blue is all about the tabula rasa, the—you can become whatever you want to be. And it very much embraces technology. And artifacts in Magic really represents technology. Green does not like technology. Green’s like “Keep technology away from me.” And so green’s hatred of artifacts comes from its core conflict with blue. And so green is king of artifact destruction.

So we go to artifact world. Well, what does that mean? Okay, green destroys things, but it needs to have a little more identity than that. On top of that, in Scars of Mirrodin, a lot of green’s identity was tied up in the Phyrexians. Because we made the conclusion that green and black make the most logical place for the Phyrexians to get ahold because philosophically green and black are the colors that the Phyrexians had the closest identification with.

And so—but some of the set had to be Mirran. You know, we had eighty percent of the set was Mirran, so some of the green cards had to be Mirran.  And so we had to get an identity for Mirran. And so one of the things we played around with, and Molder Beast obviously did this, is having green care about artifacts that had been destroyed. It plays up in the reoccurring theme of green that green likes kind of the contents of the graveyard. It also likes to destroy artifacts, so it cares about artifacts that have been destroyed. It thematically made sense. So anyway, that’s a little thing we put in, Molder Beast was a good example of that.

So next. Mox Opal. Okay, so one day I’m in the hall, and I pass one of the Brand Managers, and they say “Oh, so we hear we’re going back to Mirrodin.” I go “Yeah.” They go, “Does that mean new Mox?” And I’m like, “Uh, I guess, sure.” So I’m—you know, so I went back to my team (???) “Okay. Brand wants a Mox.” And I’m like “Okay, we’re going back—it’s artifact world.” I did kind of feel like moxes are a special thing in Magic. 

In fact, let me talk about this real quickly. One of my big beliefs is I believe in the power of words. I’m a word guy. And that one of the things that—Magic has done a little bit, I would like to see us do more, is invest words with power. And what I mean by that is, I kind of like when you open up a card and you know nothing about it, and you see a word in the title, you get excited. “Oh my God, this—this word is in the title!” You know, I think that’s very potent.

And part of doing that is being very careful about how you use that word, so that you can—you know—because obviously you can waste a word. You can have a word that’s on some awesome cards, but then you put it on weak cards and all of a sudden the word loses its power.

So one of the words in Magic that still very much has power is “Mox.” And that is because we’ve kept a tight rein on what it means to be a Mox. So in order to be a Mox, a couple things. Starters, you’re an artifact. You cost zero. You produce mana. Those are usually the things for Mox.

Now, one of the interesting—one of the challenging things of doing a Mox is that the original Moxes were, as we call it in R&D, “bah-roken.” And we have to sort of—it is hard for you to have zero mana for an artifact that produces mana and have that be fair. And so when Brand asked for a Mox, I kind of knew I was signing up for something that maybe we couldn’t do, but I was up for the challenge.

In fact, by the way, a little trivia here, the designer of Mox Opal was (verbal fanfare) Scott Johns. Who is Scott Johns? For those that don’t know, Aaron Forsythe was the very first editor of MagicTheGathering.com, and when Aaron came over to R&D, Scott Johns ended up becoming the editor. And Scott Johns is famous for a couple things.

The thing that I think he’s most famous for is, for those that know the Magic hall of fame, Scott has five Pro Tour Top Eights. Every other person on the planet who has five Pro Tour Top Eights and is eligible for the Hall of Fame is in the Pro Tour Hall of Fame. Scott is the only one who is not. Which is crazy in my mind.

On top of that, Scott has had huge contributions to the game. Not only did he work on our website, but he worked on other websites and did a lot to advance sort of the field of reporting and the field of covering Magic. It boggles my mind that Scott is not in the Hall of Fame. Especially since –one again, let me state this. Every other person on the planet qualified who has five Top 8s. Like in my mind, I—maybe it’s just automatically supposed to get in with five Top 8s.

I mean—and it’s crazy, because every other one has been voted in, so I mean clearly there’s some message of that seems to be a watermark. Anyway. For those of (???) that can vote, vote for Scott Johns. He deserves to get in the Hall of Fame. It’s crazy that he’s not in. His contributions to the game over and above his Pro Tour play, like, are awesome, and, like I said, five Top 8s. Anyway. Aside of my little—my little rant.

Okay. Next. Myr Battlesphere. 

So for starters, that is fun to say. So what happened was, myr were always there. When we did in Mirrodin, myr were created—so what happened was long ago, Magic somehow through a series of things, gnomes became the go-to artifact creature for a while.

 Which is kind of weird, because gnomes, if you know anything about fantasy, aren’t artifacts! They’re not artificial. They’re creatures. And I think that like Legends has, like, Quarum Trench Gnomes, which are an actual creature.  Gnomes were like artifacts, and like Bottle Gnomes and Clockwork Gnomes. 

Anyway, Brady finally said, “Enough, enough. Gnomes aren’t artifacts.” And so Brady decided he’d come up—we were in an artifact world, he’d come up with a new fun artifact type. And he came up with the myr, which were based on the myrmidon from Greek mythology.

And the myr were a mega-hit. A mega-hit. Everyone loved the myr. And so when we were coming back to Scars of Mirrodin, we knew—we knew we were doing the Myr. That—slam dunk, of course we’re doing the myr.

So what happened was that when—when the design handed over to development, the thought was that we had a lot of myr cards, and we had a lot of cards that actually were good myr cards. But we were missing a little bit of the whimsical myr cards. And so one of the things we’ll do is, we’ll put together a little subteam, a little design team that meets for a week or two, that was a very specific focus.

And the myr—so we put together a myr design team that was really just saying “Hey, let’s jazz up myr a little bit.” And so I think the person that ran the team was Aaron Forsythe. At least he was on the team. I do know that Aaron Forsythe made—or I believe he made Myr Battlesphere. Still fun to say. And anyway, it just—the team was definitely trying to—they knew there was a myr contingent out there that just loved playing with myr and wanted to make some sort of more social fun sort of myr cards. And Myr Battlesphere was a direct result of that goal.

Next, Myrsmith and the Smith cycle.  So what happened there was, one of the things about returning to Mirrodin was, like I said, eighty percent of Scars of Mirrodin was Mirrodin. And I wanted to definitely revisit things that we had loved about Mirrodin, but I also wanted to find some new ways, some new mechanics, and new—and so one of the things I was very interested in is the idea that—because the Mirrodins love artifacts. And we toned down the artifact-matters-ness of Scars of Mirrodin, meaning Mirrodin like screamed from its lungs, like “Play artifacts! Play lots of artifacts! Play play play play play!” And—that’s my imitation of Mirrodin.

And Scars of Mirrodin, we wanted that but the volume turned down a little bit. Not quite turned to eleven, as they say. And so what we did is, mostly we did a lot of what we called “Threshold 1.” Or—I guess “Threshold 3.” Metalcraft. Which is you needed some artifacts, but not—but not—like your deck didn’t have to be full of artifacts.

But we did want people that wanted to play that sort of style of just load up on artifacts, we wanted to give them a little—a little bit to play with. If you wanted to draft that, we wanted it to be draftable, but we didn’t want it to be something you were forced to do.

And so the smith cycle, these were all creatures, they were mono-colored creatures that whenever you played an artifact, you could pay one to get an effect that was in that color. And like the Myrsmith made a little myr. And—a little 1/1 token. And so—I mean, it was kind of there to do that. I liked it a lot because it was definitely this kind of thing that was functional and made you care about artifacts, but it was pretty simple.

I cycled them out because—like one of the reasons we also do cycles is just for complexity reasons, like “Oh, here’s a neat thing, each one can do its own thing, but it’s very simple. They’ll all work the same. And, you know, they cost the same to use.” Anyway, the Myrsmith was there to help—help give Mirrodin a little more of a—just something new and different. But also playing into the general themes of Mirrodin.

Next. Necrotic Ooze. So Necrotic Ooze combined my love of oozes with my love of copying things. Oh, and my love of the graveyard! Necrotic Ooze is like “Ohh, three loves all together!” I’m not sure where that metaphor is going. But anyway, I loved the idea of a card that copied dead things. I think I made an ooze because I like oozes. And the idea, anyway—I mean, I feel like one of the things I like about black is that black has a resource in the graveyard that’s a little different. Like, green and black kind of use the graveyard as a resource.

And so I—it’s kind of neat to go, you know, “Well blue copies things in play, but black can copy things in the graveyard.” I thought it was an interesting place to play. I mean, blue’s messed there a little bit too, but I guess in Planar Chaos, so I’m not quite sure what that means.

Okay. So, Necrotic Ooze, yeah, I guess I just sort of made the card, and made an ooze, and it wasn’t so much made to be—it wasn’t one of the things that was like endemic to this set. It was just kind of a cool card. And in fact, at one point we talked about removing it just because it didn’t have anything particularly to do with this set, but one of the things is you want to make sure there’s just random fun cards. And not every card has to plug into the theme.

And this card thematically worked—I mean, it mechanically worked with the other cards. Anyway, so we left it in, we thought it was cool.

Platinum Emperion.  So one of the—so in Mirrodin, we made a card called Platinum Angel. So for those that don’t know this story, what happened was we decided we wanted a metal angel, we thought that would be cool, we commissioned the art for it, and then like “Okay, we better figure out what our metal angel does.”

And we knew we wanted to do something different. We knew we wanted it to be a little more show-stopper-y if you will. And I don’t remember who came up with it, but the whole idea of “you can’t lose the game.” Like “oh, that’s pretty impressive. If it’s in play, you can’t lose.”

So when we were coming back, we didn’t want to repeat the angel because we had—it’s been in a couple base—core sets, so like it—it kind of—it’s being used there. So we’re like “Well, let’s come up with something that’s similar but not exactly the same.”

And then somebody—I don’t remember who—came up with the idea of, you know, locking your life total. Which was a lot like “you can’t die,” but it’s different. And that’s kind of what I wanted. That “platinum” had a—a similar quality to it, but it wasn’t just the same thing retreaded. Or retread. Anyway. I—Platinum Emperion was us sort of saying “Hey, we want to make—acknowledge, we acknowledge Platinum Angel, but, you know, we shake it up a little bit.”

Prototype Portal. So when we made Fifth Dawn, when we got to the third set, there was this—some of R&D felt that we should just not do any more imprint. That we had done a lot of imprint, there was a lot going on, and I said “No no no,” I go, “I think people really love imprint. I think they’ll be sad if they come to the third set and there’s no imprint. So let’s compromise. Let’s have one imprint card.”

Now, the imprint card we ended up going with was Summoner’s Egg, designed by Aaron Forsythe. 

And it, you know, had a face-down thing that we had never done before. But the card that I wanted to do in that slot, the one I made for the slot, was—Soul Foundry had been very popular, Clone Machine if you will—and—from, from Scars of Mirrodin. Sorry. From Mirrodin.

 And so I wanted to make Soul Foundry but for artifacts. You know, you put an artifact in it. And at the time I don’t think we had every made artifact tokens. I mean, we made artifact creature tokens. But we had never made artifact tokens, and the thought was that it was a little too special. That, you know, maybe we should save that, and so we ended up not doing it.

So anyway, flash forward to Scars of Mirrodin. And I said to the team, “Okay,” you know, “Let’s make some new and cool imprint cards.” I believe every member of the team—maybe four or five, but my memory’s every member of the team, turned in—turned in the card. Every member (???) turned in Prototype Portal. Like, everyone said “Oh, you know what was an awesome imprint card? Soul Foundry. You know what would be great? Let’s do it with artifacts.” That everybody turned in.

And so people also—people often ask me why… “You know, the cards credit the artists. Why don’t the cards credit the designers? Why don’t you give credit to the guy who designed the card?” The answer is multifold. First is, we don’t always know who did the card because, you know, sometimes someone did it but didn’t remember they did it, or one person did one part and someone did another part, and someone else tweaked it, and it got tweaked in development. Like, many hands were in it.

Or sometimes, like Prototype Portal, kind of everybody designed it. It just was—it was an obvious thing that was hanging there, and a lot of people went down the same path and made the same card. And which is very funny, by the way, that—as someone who leads the sets, when a lot of people turn in the same card I know that. I see it. But they don’t see it. And so what will happen is, I’ll get Prototype Portal, I’ll put it in the set, and then everybody goes, “Woo, my card is in the set!” Which is fine, it’s cool, I like people to have ownership, but none of them know that they aren’t the only person that made the card.

Okay, next. Ratchet Bomb.  So Ratchet Bomb was—what’s the card called? I made a card in Urza’s… Legacy? Urza’s Saga block. Where you put counters on it and then you destroyed everything that had that many counters. See, this is—when I do my car show, my podcast… Engineered Explosives? Is that right? I think that’s right.

  

 And I really liked—Mike Elliott and I had (???) at the time. He wanted it to be “that many counters or less,” and I wanted it to be “equal to.” Because my argument was, if it was “that or less,” you just constantly put it on and it some point it’s just, it’s a Disk and whatever. And I’m like “No, no, but if you have to choose, then you’re like “Oh, do I want two? Do I want three?” Like, each time it’s an interesting decision. And I thought this was a cooler card.

Anyway, Ratchet Bomb was me—we needed to have card counters matter stuff. And it was me just kind of taking that, redoing Engineered Explosives and making it a “charge matters” card, just because that was a theme in the set.

Sword of Body and Mind.  Okay. So what happened was, we had Sword of Fire and Ice and Sword of… the black/white one. Argh. Light and Dark? Uh… something… Light and Shadow? I forget. Anyway, the—we had done those two cards previously, and that the thing was, we hadn’t meant it to be a cycle. We just kind of made one and then made this other one, and then the audience is like “What are you doing? Where’s the rest?” And so I realized that we had two enemy combinations, and that meant that well, we had three sets, there were three more not done. We could finish out the cycle.

Now yes, yes, by the way, people were like “Where’s the allied cycle?” I consider the cycle done. One day, might we want to do an ally cycle, a separate ally cycle? Maybe. It’s on the table. I’m not saying we never will. But I feel like this cycle is done.

Okay. So, we had three things to do. We had green and blue, we had black and green, and we had red and white. And so the idea was “What went where?”

And so the first thing that I said is “Okay, well these are all going to be Mirrodin-themed.” So that meant the third set needed to look first. Because it had the trickiest time. Because in the third set, like only 10% of the set was Mirrodin. So I’m like “Okay, well what—what would be left?” And it turned out that the rebels were red and white. We’re like “Okay, why don’t we take the red and white sword and put it at the end? That way it makes sense that it’s—it still has the Mirrodin watermark, it represents, you know, the last holdout of Mirrans.

And then it was either green/blue or black/green. And so I wasn’t sure what to put where. So I was doing Scars of Mirrodin, Mark Gottlieb was gonna lead Mirrodin Besieged, which was his first lead he had done. So I went to Mark Gottlieb and I said to him, “Look, I have two swords, you can have whatever sword you want, I don’t—whatever you don’t want, I’ll put in my set.” And Gottlieb, his two favorite color combinations are black and white, and black and green. And so he’s like “Oh, well, I’d love to have the black and green one.”

And I’m like, “Okay.” You know. The black and green kind of in my mind felt most the Phyrexian, because—even though it was going to be Mirrodin watermarked, but I was like “Okay, well maybe we’ll put that in the middle set that’s all about the war. And then I—okay, I’ll take the blue/green one and put it in the first set.”

And—Body and Mind came together pretty easily. What—it had a funny name for a while. What was it? It was something about… ah, I don’t remember. I remember it was something—something and bear. Because it made a bear token. Uh… I don’t remember. Argh! So—this is where my podcast and my memory do not play nicely. (Sword of Bears and Bounce.)

Okay, next is Tainted Strike.  So what Tainted Strike was, is one of the things I wanted with—with infect was, I wanted—I didn’t mind people playing all-infect decks, I knew people would do that. But I also wanted people to mix and match infect with non-infect. And—that for example, I wanted you to, like, sometimes have creatures attacking that weren’t infect, but then die to infect.

And so Tainted Strike was a card that we could sort of say “Okay, here’s something where people might not expect it, and out of the blue a creature that doesn’t seem like an infect creature can turn into an infect creature.” And I really liked that it—it added a tension even when there weren’t just infect creatures sitting in front of you. Or you got hit by a couple infect creatures, but then some non-infect creatures came out, you couldn’t even still—you had to be a little bit nervous. You know, that one of the things we were trying with the Phyrexians is we were trying to get you on edge.

In fact, it’s funny. Another side—one of the things is, I’ve (???) a lot is, I made infect, and in the godbook studies, of all the ways we market things to figure out whether people like them, it did very, very well. It was the top-rated mechanic in the set for example.

But there’s a contingency that really dislikes infect. And I was trying to figure out what it was. And I think I finally—I finally hit upon it, which is one of the things that I worked so hard to do was, I wanted the Phyrexians to feel really violating. I wanted Phyrexians to feel like—just like “eugh.” You felt dirty. They were this virus that kind of infected you.  

And we worked really hard, like, to give the Phyrexians—like we wanted them to be—in my mind, they’re the Lex Luthor to Magic’s Superman. They’re the main bad guys in my mind. I mean, one could argue it’s Nicol Bolas. But in my mind, the Phyrexians are like—they were the first big baddies, and I love them. I really feel like they’re the staple Magic bad guys. So I was trying to just make a set where mechanically, you felt just the—the sheer evilness and the ugliness of the Phyrexians.

And so part of doing that was creating a mechanic that’s invasive and scary and slowly hurt your creatures, and—and poisoned you in a way that you just couldn’t get rid of it. And what I realized after the fact when it was done is, I think I succeeded a little too well. That one of the reasons people hated infect is, it makes them feel bad. Like, on purpose, like I was trying to—I was trying to imbue our bad guys with really, like—like just “ugh, these are bad guys.”

And I think what happens is, there are a bunch of people that are like “I don’t like playing with infect. It makes me feel bad.” You know. And so it’s funny that like—on some level I think one of the—the visceral reactions is something that I created, in that I was trying to make our bad guys really, really feel like bad guys.

And I think I succeeded—I succeeded almost too well in some regards. That I—I think there’s players that really—it—they are—it makes them uncomfortable. And so—anyway, it’s a weird—my goal is to make people uncomfortable, I did. Did I succeed or not? That’s an interesting question.

Next is Thrummingbird.  So Thrummingbird is interesting because originally when I made the set, proliferate had a lot larger role in Limited. Because blue had a lot of cards in common, and Thrummingbird was in common. Because what I realized about it was, I wanted to have a lot more cross synergies between—(???) between the—like, the way it ended up based on how (???), like you’ve chosen a side, and you were the Mirran side or the Phyrexian side.

It is harder to mix and match, and one of the reasons I loved proliferate, the reason I pushed it down to common, was so, you know, there was this whole charge counter theme going on. On the artifact side. And so there was a reason to mix blue with white or blue with red, to play around with the Mirran side of it. Proliferate as a Mirran helper. Or you can mix blue with poison, and make a poison helper. Or you can mix and match and do some weird combination thereof.

And I—I mean I understand why Development did what they did, it is a complex mechanic, but—but, I mean from a design standpoint I wish we had extracted complexity from somewhere else. Because I feel like the set lost a little something in Limited. Without having proliferate to serve the role it was supposed to serve.

Next, Tower of Calamities. Tower of Calamities is a funny story, which is we made four towers in Mirrodin. It was not meant to be a cycle, we did not color-connect them in any way. But players were like “Oh, this one gains life, that’s kind of white.” And “This one mills. Why, that’s kind of blue.” Like, and they assigned all of them. And they said, “Oh, well, you’re missing one.”

And they decided that we were missing—I think we were missing black. Was what they decided we were missing. So we decided like “Okay, we’ll finish the cycle.” You know, like “People feel like we’re missing it, okay. We didn’t intend that, but you know what?  That’s what people—people really want it, okay, we try to deliver,” so we made a tower that finished the cycle.

Also, each of the towers cost a different amount, so we made this cost like—I think  they were four in a row, this cost one more than that. So it fit the pattern, it even had a little black background to it. It did a black thing.

Okay, next, the Trigon cycle. So the Trigon cycle was, I was trying to make more charge-counter-matters, and at the same time I was trying to make color matter more in artifacts. And we came up with this idea of something that had so many uses, that was refillable if you were playing the color. And what it meant was, it was playable outside the color, in fact some of them were very good and you played them outside the color. But you know what? It was a little better in-color.

 

And so it sort of served two different roles. It made charge counters matter in a very neat way, but it also allowed color to matter. And it also tied into proliferate obviously, you know, one of the ways to get more, even if you’re off-color was to proliferate them, which was cool.

Trinket Mage.  So when we made Scars of Mirrodin, I had my design team write down every Mirrodin card, Mirrodin-block card they wanted to reprint. And we went through, and we had, we tried, you know, a whole bunch of different things that ended up being either too good or did not quite work, or—but in the end, one of the ones that people really wanted was Trinket Mage. And we’re like “You know what? Trinket Mage is pretty awesome. Let’s put Trinket Mage in.”

And it played nicely, we knew that artifact block is a lot more likely to have a lot of cheap artifacts in it. And so it did—it worked, worked well with it. Same reason it worked in Fifth Dawn, it worked really well in Scars of Mirrodin.

Next, Tumble Magnet.  So the lesson of Tumble Magnet which I think is the same lesson of Rishadan Port, is I keep trying to make innocent cards, and I just need to like—I’m making a little colorless card, I need a little tiny effect, like Tumble Magnet was, I was just trying to make some charge counter cards, because I wanted charge counters to matter. And I just needed a tiny effect that made sense on an artifact, I’m like “Oh, well, okay, tap a creature.” That sounds innocent. Tap a creature. You know. Low-key effect, you can do it three times, okay.

I—man. I—that effect—tapping things is powerful. I have to keep remembering that—that especially mult—being able to tap things multiple times is powerful, and that I keep making it thinking “Oh, this is nonchalant,” like one of the things that’s funny is how often I just—I make a card as filler, I’m not, you know, and then it ends up being like a major player. I mean this is in Limited, but you know.

It is funny that like, people seem to think that, like, you know, that Design says “This will be the good thing. And I’d be like, “Design does not do that. Design does not figure out what is the good thing. Design figures out what is fun, passes it on to Development, Development, you know, then reinforces what they think is fun, and then they push things they think are fun to play.

But I mean, Tumble Magnet was never like conceived as this Limited, you know, this strong Limited card, it was just—I needed—it—it has three charge counters on it, it’s an artifact, what does it do? What artifact counters—you know, what do artifacts do?

Next. Untamed Might.  Oh, Untamed Might. So the interesting thing about Untamed Might was, we were very careful in the set about Giant Growth because we knew that Giant Growth was very efficient with—with infect. And the idea I think was that—that maybe at a slightly higher rarity it might be fun to have a card that could kind of surprise get you with infect.

I’m—it’s funny, if I look back now with all the knowledge I have, I don’t know if this was a mistake. I mean, like once again, I mean, we don’t set the power level, so I mean, it’s not something Design would know. But it was us pushing in an area that was kind of asking a little bit for trouble. I mean, I think that infect did a fine job in Limited. I mean, this helped. I mean, one of the things that’s interesting is Development had to balance it, that we wanted infect to matter but not too—matter too much. You know.

But Untamed Might in my mind is like maybe a mistake, maybe we shouldn’t have done that. Maybe an X Giant Growth was not—not what we wanted to do in Infect World. I mean, obviously it worked well, but maybe too well. Or—not even it worked too well, it’s not even a power level thing, it just—it—it just made the kill infect a little too easy at times. And like—what to me was fun about infect was you had to work for it. That they were fragile creatures, and then like you—you kind of had to do something that was a little bit hard to do. And I just wanted to make sure that like you had a little extra to try to accomplish what you needed to accomplish. But anyway. Untamed Might.

The final card I’m going to talk about today is Venser.  So I am a big fan of Venser, I often point out that—that Venser is my favorite planeswalker, and the only planeswalker to ever be killed! By the creative team. I don’t know if that’s coincidence or not.

So I—most--most of the planeswalkers get designed more during development. I mean, Design will make them, but Development will re… fiddle them quite a bit. And there’s three planeswalkers where I feel like I did the majority of the planeswalker. The original Garruk in Lorwyn, Nicol Bolas I did the first two abilities—I didn’t do the third ability. I didn’t do the ultimate. But I did the first two.

And by the way, the third ability, when I designed the card, was take control of your opponent for two turns. Because he was—he was the ultimate puppetmaster. But they ended up saving that and it went on Sorin about—I regret it, I thought that was the perfect puppetmaster ultimate. I feel the one he has is—it’s a little Time-Spiral-y, like “Oh, look, it’s referencing its original card.” I don’t know. I’m less a fan.

Anyway, Venser—I was  a huge fan of Venser, and so I was very involved in designing Venser. So the cool thing about Venser is, Venser’s big schtick was teleportation. He was very good with teleportation. So every ability on his card was all about things that made sense as being themed teleportation. And so—I mean—the other awesome thing about it, one of the reasons I love it also was that flickering worked really well as a flavor of teleportation. So I love the fact that he has a flicker ability, and—anyway, I just—I like how he came together.

I’m kind of really sad he died because I would love to reprint him, I think it’s a really fun card. And it is kind of—it saddened me that that card had to go because I really like it. And I like the character, I think he was a fun character. I mean, not that characters shouldn’t die, characters should die. I think stories don’t have consequences if characters never die. So I’m not against killing characters.

But anyway. I am now in my space and I’ve gotten to the end of my list, so I guess that is going to wrap up Part IV of Scars of Mirrodin. Part IV of IV of Scars of Mirrodin.

So anyway, I hope you all enjoyed listening to—to me—I don’t know, ramble on about Scars of Mirrodin. It was definitely a set that—it was a hard set, it was one of the more—emotional up and downs of sets I’ve done, but I’m really happy with how it came out and I feel like it—it really did re-introduce the Phyrexians in a way that would like really put them on the map and give them a strong mechanical identity, that were both things I’ve set out to do.

So anyway, thank you very much for listening, it’s time to go make the Magic.