10/4/13 Episode 59: Champions of Kamigawa, Part III

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. So two weeks ago, I started talking about Champions of Kamigawa. And last week,  I continued to talk about Champions of Kamigawa, so this week I will continue yet again to talk about Champions of Kamigawa. I’ve got more stuff to say.

So what I want to do this week, and I gave you a little teaser last week, was I’m going to walk through cards and tell some stories about the making of cards. My little—my little caveat is, this is just a chance for me to tell lots of little individual stories, I’m going to use the cards to jump off. Most of the cards—most of the stories will be about the cards themselves, but sometimes they might just give me another story I want to tell.

Okay. And I’m kind of roughly going alphabetical order, but not completely. So next, I want to talk about the cycle of Deceivers. So the Deceivers were five cards, five creatures, a cycle one in each color, in which they had two abilities. The first ability was {1}: Look at the top card of your library. And the second one was {2}: Reveal the top card of your library, if it’s a land, the creature got a bonus until end of turn.

So these creatures are interesting. They actually started with just the second ability, that’s like “Oh, these creatures could get bigger.” But what we found in playtesting was that it just—it really was this random thing. It’s like “Oh, okay, attack, and then roll the dice.” You know. And that yeah, there are other things that could let you see the top of your library, but there weren’t that many of them, and maybe in Constructed you could work real hard to do it, but it was something that was tough to do.

And so what we realized was, what we wanted the cards to be was more bluffing cards than—than, you know, random cards. Meaning what we wanted it to be was like, “I attack. I know whether or not I have the bonus. Do you think I have the bonus?” And we found that to be much more interesting.

I mean, one of the things that Magic has a long history of is trying to make interesting bluffing cards. And they’re tough. A lot of cards that end up being good bluffing cards—or, cards that started as—sorry. A lot of cards that started as bluffing cards ended up kind of not really working that well. Or, in the case like Cursed Scroll, working too well. 

But this cycle actually was interesting. I’ve seen a number of people playing in Limited where like, you know, there was interesting—you know, you had the extra mana so you would look. A lot of times what you would do is you would look the turn before if you had the extra mana so you didn’t waste your mana on your turn. And then you knew what it—oh no, actually, you draw. You had to look on your turn. Anyway. Okay. But I saw people having some fun bluffing moments. I enjoyed the Deceivers.

Okay, next is Counsel of the Soratami. Oh, so I talked about this last time, but there’s a little story that I want to tell. Which actually has nothing to do with Champions of Kamigawa. It has to do with the core set. But it involves Counsel of the Sora—Counsel—yecch. Counsel of the Soragami.

So one of the things that we’ve gone back and forth on in the core set is how much is the core set supposed to represent sort of generic Magic, and how much is supposed to represent specific worlds that we’ve visited.

And so Counsel of the Soratami got put in the base set because—the core set, because we’re like “Oh, well, hey, it represents Kamigawa. This is a very—you know, it’s not—it’s not—it’s not a boring, you know, it’s a very flavorful card. And it represents, you know, the world we visited Kamigawa.”

But the problem, as I explained last time with Counsel of the Soragami is that people didn’t quite know what it was. It sounds like it’s a creature, I know it’s spelled differently, but it—if you just hear the name, it sounds like a creature. The picture has this—a woman on it, you know, and so she’s just like “Oh, what’s this woman? What’s she doing?” You know. And the answer is, “Uh…”

Like, here’s a similar funny story. Way back in the day I used to play Land Tax. For those that remember. Very, very powerful card. And Land Tax has on it a man holding a bag of money. And it’s an enchantment, so you put it in play. Because it has a guy, everyone would try to Bolt it. Because—“That guy’s annoying me. I’m going to Bolt that guy.” And it’s like, “It’s not a guy, it’s an enchantment…” Anyway, Counsel of the Soratami had the same sort of feeling.

And I really—one of the things that I believe strongly, and like I said, Champions of Kamigawa fell down in this area a bit, is I want to make sure it’s very clear that the creative communicates what the card is. What the card type is. What the card does. And that when the creative isn’t doing that, when it’s confusing the issue, the creative, you know, it’s kind of getting in the way of its role. Its role is to help delineate what cards are and aid in memory, not cause problems with memory. So anyway, I had a beef with Counsel of the Soratami. So.

Next is Cranial Extraction. So in Tempest, I made a card called Lobotomy. And Lobotomy was this card where—basically the idea of Lobotomy was, “I’m going to go after a specific card and, like, remove it from your brain.”

But, Lobotomy forced you to go after cards that were in someone’s hand. So you only could sort of get rid of something that they already had. Where Cranial Extraction was kind of a next—the next evolution of that. It’s like, “Well, why wouldn’t black just be able to go after the—you know…”

So, one of the things that’s interesting. The difference between—I talked about this in my black podcast.  Is that blue and black—we try whenever possible to give the colors mechanics that are similar but each have their own slightly take on it. And so—in milling, blue just does the general milling. Like I’m just going to mill—“Forget, I’ll make you forget! You will forget everything!” You know. And sort of slowly grinds you away.

Where black is like “Nah, nah nah nah. If I have a problem, I’m going after that exact problem. I’m going to go in your brain, (pop) Pull that out. Oh, now you don’t know how to do that. Sorry!” You know.

And that—so anyway, Cranial Extraction was us sort of taking Lobotomy and making sort of the—the cleanest version. Because Lobotomy had some luck of what you hit. And it’s like “Well, let’s just make a very clean version.”

And the problem with Cranial Extraction, by the way, was we ended up putting Arcane on it.  In fact, this was a problem with Champions of Kamigawa, is in order to make splice work, we needed to have Arcane spells. And so just some number of spells we would put Arcane on.

And later on when we want to reprint it, we didn’t want to print cards with Arcane because it confused people.  Like, it was just words that didn’t mean anything. And this is one of those cards that we kept wanting to reprint but we couldn’t because it was Arcane. So anyway, it was interesting. One of the—one of the problems.

Next, Eight-and-a-Half Tails.  So this is one of those cards—so something I’ve talked about previously, I (???). When I say that we need to be careful about resonance in doing worlds inspired by real mythology, that doesn’t meant that I don’t think there’s a place to dig a little deeper and find stuff that’s true but unknown.

For example, Theros definitely has some actual Greek mythology that you know what? The average person probably doesn’t know. The difference between Theros and Champions of Kamigawa is, Champions of Kamigawa put the unknown in your face, in common. It came up constantly, like “What?”

Where Theros says, “You know what? We can do that, but we can do it at higher rarities. We’ll do it at rare.” You know. “We’ll do it so they come up more infrequently, and when they do, you go, ‘Ooh, what is that?” Not like—so, it’s the exception and not the rule. And I feel like when you’re doing resonance, the rule, the commons, even to some extent the uncommons, need to be the expectations, what people expect. But the rares and the mythics might be a place where you can sort of educate a little bit.

Like I do like the idea that people play Champions of Kamigawa and learn things about Japanese culture they did not know. That’s awesome. And same with Greek mythology, we want to do that. But what we’ve learned is, in this lesson of Champions of Kamigawa, is that those educational lessons can’t be the cornerstone of the set.

You know, when you have a common doing things that no one understands, it just makes it confusing. If you have a rare that does that, it’s like “Oh, well it doesn’t come up that much and you learn about it.” Like, it gives you a chance to learn the world before you learn the sort of—the teaching cards, if you will. And I like those.

Anyway, speaking of which, Eight-and-a-Half Tails, it’s a very—very Japanese thing. Foxes are very Japanese, and this is a—it is a trope of Japanese mythology—I don’t—my knowledge of mythology is—is not as extensive as the people who made the set. Or—the creative team.

So Eight-and-a-Half Tails was interesting in that we wanted—so, one of the things we try to do from time to time, and we don’t do this at common, but we do this at higher rarities, is mix-and-match abilities that kind of allow a color to do something a little beyond what it normally does. But each of its abilities are something that it can do.

Now, we want to be careful. We don’t want to be so clever—like, one of the classics is blue has the ability to give things –N on their power. It can shrink things.  It also has the ability to swap power and toughness. Well, if you mix those two together, hey, blue can kill things. Well, every once in a blue moon we will let blue do that, but blue really isn’t a killing color, so even though it can do both halves of it, we don’t want to make it easy to do it.

And so, you know—so Eight-and-a-Half Tails kind of does that, which is protection—something white does all the time. Right? And the ability to turn things white—all the colors have the ability to turn things their own color. That’s not something we use a lot, but it’s something they do. Blue’s the color that can turn anything any color. But every color has the ability to turn stuff into its own color. The Laces from Alpha sort of played this up. 

And so what Eight-and-a-Half Tails does is keep things where, you know, it has protection from white, and it can turn anything to white. And it’s kind of cute, and it definitely plays in the protection aspect. I believe Eight-and-a-Half Tails is tricky, and, you know, it’s a very tricky creature, and it’s hard to—hard to capture it, and so we tried to play that aspect up.

Next, the Zuberas. So the Zuberas are based on a card from Legends. Of which I did not write down, so my ability to remember this card—so the card in Legends was a red card that when it went—it was a creature, that when it went to the graveyard, it—I think it Bolted? You know, it did a Lightning Bolt. And I always—we always liked that card. And I think the Zuberas was us just trying to play in that space of the idea of, “Here’s a creature…”

Oh, and the thing that—that it does is, Zuberas were saying “Oh, well we’re going to—we’re going to count ourselves, so when we go to the graveyards we’re going to count how many of us are there.” So if you start playing more Zuberas, the—like, you know, it has sort of a tribal feel to it. And that’s—it does have tribal. And the Zuberas kind of combine.

And that—we liked it a lot—we were playing around a lot with life and death, and the kami have a lot of themes of life and death. You know, I’ll get to two cards that are straight up that. But anyway, I did enjoy how the Zuberas kind of have some fun gameplay. Brought back something we had had fun with before, but it had a tribal element to it. I thought that was pretty cool.

Next: Forbidden Orchard. Okay, so one of the things that we do from time to time—we don’t do a lot of it, but what I call “traveling cards.” And the idea of a traveling card is, it’s a card that by definition changes ownership. And usually the way it works is, I get some bonus out of it, but the downside is I give it to somebody else.

And this card is a very popular card in casual multiplayer. Where it’s kind of like “I get some color, and then I give it to somebody else and then they get some color.” And there’s a little bit of a political thing to it because you get to choose who gets the card. But anyway, it’s one of those cards that like—one of the things people don’t realize is that there’s a lot of things we do. And some things we do at a very high level, like every set does them.

But some cards, you know, we do at a much lower level. That they’re not intended to be an every set thing. It’s like “Eh, once a block. Or once every other block.” And that—you know, there’s certain subsets of cards that we slowly add to over time. And that what people don’t realize is like—there’s hundreds of subsets we probably, you know, service on some level, and that this is one of the little ones that we—maybe every other year, every third year.  It’s not something we add a lot to very quickly, but over time, if this is the kind of thing you enjoy, Magic has slowly been doling them out.

Next is Gifts Ungiven. So, in Tempest I made a card called Intuition. . And Intuition said, “Go get four cards out of your graveyard…” Sorry, “Three cards out of… not your graveyard. Get three cards out of your library. Put them into your graveyard…” Sorry. It was four cards. Four cards… and then your opponent chose—agh, I’m messing this up. Intuition says “Get four cards out of your library. Show them to your opponent, and then they choose… two of them, I believe? And two go in your graveyard, two go in your hand?”

And so my intent had always been that they were four uniquely different cards. But I didn’t say that in my template. And I think I handed off the design with it saying “Just get four cards.” So in development, the—they sort of abused the fact that you could get the same card. And I’m like “Oh, no no, guys, guys, guys, guys…” It must have been three cards for Intuition. Because I think—I’m pretty sure that Gifts Ungiven is four cards.

Anyway—and it kind of got abused, and I said “Well guys, no no no no, it’s supposed to be different cards.” And they’re like “Oh no, this is fun.” And I could not convince them—even though the intent of the card—the point of the card was it’s supposed to be four different cards. Or three different cards. You guys all know. I can’t look it up. The fact was it’s supposed to be different. And anyway, I could not overrule them, they would not change it, and so Intuition went out, you know, carefully (???), you know, make sure you—you know, make sure your cards get turned over exactly like you want them to be.

Anyway, so during Champions of Kamigawa I remade the card. I’m like—in fact, the funny story is, I was inspired by John Hughes. So John Hughes is a director. John Hughes made a movie called Pretty in Pink. For those that—and the premise of Pretty in Pink is, Molly Ringwald plays a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and her best friend is Jon Cryer, from Two and a Half Men fame, and—by the—this is long ago, they were, you know, they were kids.

And she falls for this rich guy played by—I think Andrew McCarthy? But anyway, the way—it’s a love story, but the story—she comes to realize that, you know, that what she really loves is the guy that’s been by—her best friend that’s been by her side all along. And she gets together with her best friend and that’s the end of the story.

So anyway, they made this film, and then they showed it, and the audience—what Hollywood studios do is before the movie comes out, they preview it in front of a test audience and get the reactions. And the test audience was upset. They really wanted Molly Ringwald to get with the rich kid, not the poor kid. You know. And they’re like—so the studio went back to John Hughes and said “Okay, you’ve got to change the ending.” And he’s like “What?” And he’s like “No… but no! You’re missing the whole message of the movie.” And anyway, they made him change it. And he wasn’t happy.

And so he changed it, and she ended up with the rich kid, and—I remember when I first saw the movie I was so mad because the movie leads you to the ending it’s supposed to have. It’s not like he redid the whole movie. He just changed the ending.

So anyway, he was so upset that he made another movie called Some Kind of Wonderful, which is the exact same plot, he just swapped the sexes. Where instead of a main female character it’s a—the main character’s male. But it’s the exact same story, just ending the way he wanted to end it. Anyway. The—this is my version of that story. It’s just like “Okay, guys…” You know. “I want to end it the way I meant to end it.” So I made the card. Probably more than you needed to know about Gifts Ungiven.

We would later, by the way, parody Gifts Ungiven on a holiday card called Gifts Given. Although—maybe the holiday card—maybe I should save that the—maybe I’ll do a holiday cards—that’s actually not a bad podcast. Maybe I’ll do a holiday card podcast.

Okay. Glacial Ray. So Glacial Ray is actually kind of controversial. Why is it controversial? It’s got nothing to do with what it does. It’s a direct damage spell, and the—the creative team decided “Oh, well a bunch of the set took place in a cold setting.” And they’re like, “Well, what if we used the weapon of ice? It’s glacial! It’s a glacial ray! It’s an ice ray!”

And there’s a lot of controversy because red tends to be more heat, where blue is cold. And blue tends to use ice. And there’s this big, like “Well, but red isn’t the ice color. Blue’s the ice color. Is that okay?” But, you know, “What if I want to do an ice beam and do damage with ice?” Well, blue can’t do that. You know. And it was very controversial. I think in general people kind of—I think if you were in a setting that’s all cold and you’ve got to give red some access to cold, but anyway, it just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. So anyway. I’m not sure how many people realize that Glacial meant cold, but if you look at the art, it does.

Next is Godo,  Bandit Warlord. So this might be—I believe this is one of the most popular commanders of Ken Nagle. And the funny thing is, we were trying to make a bandit warrior, and so we gave him this flavor of he goes and gets equipment. But since that time, we’ve sort of put that in the color pie of white, not of red. So Godo kind of sits out of time. Out of place. He’s a man without a color pie.

So he does something that nowadays we would do in white. But at the time, I think it’s the first time we actually did it, it just was done on a—you know, flavor basis, and so anyway, Godo had that ability.

Hana Kami. So, this is an interesting card. This card was just in Modern Masters. This was one of those things where, when a set gets very parasitic, where like “Okay, oh we have a lot of Arcane cards. Well, let’s make Arcane matter. Not just with splice onto Arcane, but with other cards.” And so this card was like “Green gets Regrowth , like, what if it gets to Regrowth an Arcane card?”

And so this is one of those things that if you dig deep, the reason I think Limited actually works well is all this parasitic interconnectedness works really well in a set where that’s what it is. And if you’ve played Modern Masters, I mean, this card is very exciting. That—if you decide to go down the Arcane path, it does some neat things to allow you to have extra utility with the Arcane cards.

Next. Heartbeat of Spring. Okay, so Alpha had a card called Mana Flare. And Mana Flare said, “All—all lands, everybody’s not just yours—tapped for an additional colored mana when you tapped them. So your mountain would tap for an extra red. And such.

And what I realized early on, after I got to Wizards was “Mana Flare really isn’t a green spell. I mean, isn’t really a red spell. What’s red about it? It’s a green spell.” You know, red—red’s not about creating more permanent mana. I mean, red would later go on to be the ritual color, but I mean, even back—even back then it wasn’t the ritual color yet. And so I realized that “You know what?” I think I—I think it was Urza’s Saga. I think I said, “You know what? Green should have—you know, green should…” Oh no. Was it Urza’s Saga? It might even have been Tempest.

Anyway, either Tempest or Urza’s Saga I’m like, “You know what? Green should have Mana Flare.” So I made it and put it in the set. And it got cut for some reason. Usually what happened was, like, we wanted to do a variant on Mana Flare, in artifacts, where we wanted it—different reasons why just—we ended up—it got cut. You know, something else was too close, or it got cut for numbers. Whatever.

And so I think I tried to put it in Tempest first. Either Tempest or Urza’s Saga. But—so anyway, it got kicked out of there. And then we tried Mercadian Masques, and then after it got kicked out of Masques I tried Invasion, and after Invasion I tried Odyssey, and after Odyssey I tried Onslaught, and after Onslaught I tried Mirrodin. And finally, after like eight years or something, the card finally got made.

Like I literally—so one of the things I’ve learned about Magic design is you’ve got to be patient. If you have an awesome card, eventually you’ll find a home for the awesome card. It’s just a matter of sort of being diligent and finding—you’ve got to find a set in which that card shines, and usually that’s when the card has the best chance. When thematically it just really fits with what’s going on. But anyway, Heartbeat of Spring was me—me not giving up.

So next, the Honden. The shrines. So Brian was very gung-ho… was it Brian? Well, once we knew that legendary was going to be a theme, something that was going to be a little more than normal… I think this is Brian. It might have been the development team. We decided we wanted legendary enchantments.

What did legendary enchantments do? And also—in the theme of making the set as parasitic as humanly possible, we said “What if these shrines cared about other shrines?” And flavor-wise it made a lot of sense that, like, you got different shrines to different oni, and as you got more shrines they benefited from one another.

But each one of these would do something, but it would count the number of shrines you had. So for example, if the white one gave you life and the red one did damage, well if you had two shrines, right, the white one gave you two life, the red one did two damage. And so they were legendary, so the fun thing about this was, it made you want to play a five-color deck because you could only have one out at a time, but they were played with each other was the idea. Anyway, I think they were fun. I mean, it did not help the parasiticness of the set, but they were fun. I did like them.

Okay, next. Iname, Death’s Aspect, Iname Life Aspect. So one of the things that designers do is—I talk a lot about aesthetics. About how—there’s just things that humans like. Balance and structure and just—humans have—you know, human brain works a certain way. So one of the things designers love to do is make cards that parallel each other, but like really parallel each other.

So the interesting thing about this card, let’s see if people ever noticed this—I assume some people did. Okay, so what happens is, Iname, Death Aspect—when it comes into play, when it enters the battlefield, you go to the library and take as many cards as you want and put them into your graveyard. So what it does is, when it enters—when it is born, it creates death. Right? It takes things and puts them into the graveyard.

And Iname, Life Aspect—when it dies, when it goes to the graveyard, you get to take cards from your graveyard and put them into your hand. Right? So the Death Aspect, when it comes to life, brings death. And the Life Aspect, when it dies, brings life. I think that’s cool. But it is—it is definitely a—a—one of those things where we’re trying to create some parallels, and I enjoy the hell out of this stuff.

We talk about the scale of Melvin to Vorthos, and this is a very Melvin thing. Of just—the intricacies of making all the things work in a mechanical way that has a kind of pleasing thing, and that—these cards actually have both a Vorthosian quality and a Melvil--Melvinian quality.  (laughs) I’m inventing words as we—as I drive. Hopefully that’s not too dangerous. But anyway, I—I like those cards. Those cards have a lot of flavor but also have a very kind of neat mechanical elegance to them.

Okay, so next. Isamaru, Hound of Konda. First off, by the way, I did mention this before. Konda, or should I mention Konda—is Konda coming up? No, he’s not. So Konda was the bad guy. And he’s white. He’s the bad guy and he’s white. And the good guy’s black.

So one of the things when Konda first got named is Gerrard’s father—or Gerrard’s adopted father was named Sidar Kondo. He never actually had a card. I tried to get him a card in Time Spiral, but not enough people were convinced that anybody knew who he was. He’s been referenced in a few pieces of flavor text, and he’s an important character.

What happened in the Weatherlight Saga is Gerrard—it’s preordained that Gerrard’s going to be the chosen one, basically. That prophecy had said, and they’re worried that the—his parents are worried that the bad guys are going to come after him. So they send him to live with a friend of theirs named Sidar Kondo who adopts him and raises him. And Sidar Kondo’s other son, biological son is Vuel, Vuel would grow up to become Volrath. For those that don’t know the Weatherlight saga.

But anyway, I really wanted to do Kondo and they wouldn’t let me do Kondo. And then when they named him Konda, I’m like “Konda, we have a Kondo! Like, how do you…?” And they’re like “No one knows Kondo!” So they named him Konda. And to this day it bugs me.

Anyway. Speaking of which, Isamaru, Hound of Konda. This card came about because somebody somewhere was in a room and said how you can’t make vanilla legendary creatures. And I, being the—the challenge (???), I was like “Oh, of course you can make vanilla legendary creatures.”  They go, “No no no. Legendary creatures have to be something special and cool. And vanillas are the opposite of that.”

And I said, “I can make a vanilla legendary creature.” They go, “Okay, you’re on.” So I thought about it, and I said, “Okay, W 2/2.” And *poof*! The other thing that I did that (???) a lot was, in order to make our legendary theme work, I really pushed that we needed to get some uncommon legends, so we needed to push the theme down.

I hadn’t quite figured out that it didn’t work because we didn’t have commons, but I was trying to get—I was trying to get the as-fan as low as I could. Or as high as I could, to be fair. Meaning I wanted to make sure you opened a legend in as many packs as possible. And so we tried to make some uncommon legends. And Isamaru was perfect. Right? It was flavorful, it made sense as a legend, but it made sense as an uncommon. And it was vanilla. So it worked out pretty well.

Okay, next: the dragon cycle. Okay, so the dragon cycle as turned over from design had a (???)… no no, sorry, had activated abilities. That you would spend mana, tap them, and they would do very powerful things. But my problem was, I go “That’s being mean. Here you go…” Especially for like Timmies. “Here you go. Here’s a powerful, giant dragon. And now, let’s tap him.” Like… what? What?

Like—you know, when you get a giant dragon in play, you know what you want to do? You want to attack with a giant dragon. So I said, “Look, let’s… instead of giving them activated abilities, let’s give them death triggers.” So the idea was when they die, they’ll do cool things. You know.

And the idea is, it creates this nice “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” moment. Because like I’m going to have a dragon. I’m going to attack with it. Well… either I’m going to kill you with my dragon or you’re going to do something about it. And if you do something about—well hey, that’s going to suck for you too.”

And the dragons were hugely popular. They might have been the most popular thing in the set. Or—they’re very, very near the top. Now, a couple of them were super-powerful on top of that. But people just liked them.

One of the worries at the time was the complaint that the death trigger—like, people wouldn’t like the death trigger. Because one of the things we’ve learned is that lower-level players, they don’t—higher-level players look at the death trigger and they’re like, “Okay, I have to think about when it’s going to die and time it correctly.” You know. But what we found with lower-level players is, it’s just like a happy thing when it dies. Like, it dies? “Ooh, now I get this.” You know, it—they don’t tend to plan ahead, but they’re happy when it happens.

And so the people that—the more advanced players, you know, the dragon oftentimes would die because they planned for it to die. Where the beginning players are just like “I’m playing a dragon. You killed my dragon? Hey! Good stuff happened.”

Okay. Next. Kiki-Jiki! Okay, so for those that do not know, I love copying things. Very much. I’m—I might clone myself if I could. You know. I’m a huge fan of copy effects. And so I think this one was just me saying—oh and I—I also—I’m also a big fan of sort of here and now effects. Boom, you get it, boom it’s here, then boom it’s gone. And I’ve done a lot of effects like that in the past.

So this was me kind of saying “Oh, I love cloning, and I love kind of use it or lose it cards,” you know, cards that—one of the things for me that’s fun of the “use it now” cards is that I think there’s a lot of fun—so for example, there’s a format called Mini Masters, for those that have never played it. Here’s how you play Mini Masters. By the way, a format invented by myself and Henry Stern many, many years ago, and then I put it in the Duelist back in—before I worked for Wizards, like ’94.

And the way it works is, you open up a pack of—a booster pack of cards. Do not look at it. You add in fifteen lands, three of each basic land type. Shuffle them together. And then you play. And like I said, you don’t look at it. And then the idea—in a true Mini Master, if you want to play future rounds, the winner takes the loser’s deck. It’s kind of the advanced way to play.

It’s based on a format called Grand Master I used to play down in L.A. before I was a—back when I was just a Magic player. And Grand Master is the same basic concept but with a starter deck. And that came with land, so it—Mini Master is a little bit different.

But anyway, the thing I love about Mini Masters is that it forces you to play with cards you might never, ever, ever play with. And what happens is, when you have to use cards in the moment, cool things happen. You know, cool things just happen that, when you’re kind of forced to use cards you never use, well, you know what? You find exciting ways to use them because hey, you have them. You know?

And I feel like cards that say “Use it now” just say “Well, find a way to use it now.” You know. And that I like making Magic cards that kind of force your hand a little bit. I’ve talked about this before, but I love making cards that have weird—weird constraints, and you just have to figure out how to make the weird constraints work.

Now, obviously, that’s very Johnny. My Johnny is showing. But I do think those cards are fun for everybody, in that if you make cards that people will play—especially in Limited, which is—the barrier is lower—that you create a lot of fun moments. And so—I mean, Kiki-Jiki obviously has tons of Constructed ramifications. He’s played a lot. But I—I don’t know. Kiki—I—if  I had a list of like my top ten cards I’m proudest in designing, and I—you know, I’ve made thousands of Magic cards. Kiki-Jiki’s up there. I’m really—I am a Kiki-Jiki fan.

Next is Marrow… Marrow-Gnawer. Marrow… Morrow? Morrow-Gnawer. Marrow. Marrow-Gnawer, because it’s bone marrow. Anyway, for a long time we—people had bugged us to make a rat lord. I think this is the first one. One of the things we try to do—my plan, before Magic goes away, although it’s going to outlive me, so my plan—or I go away, I guess, is I try to make sure that I find every creature type and at some point find a place to make a lord.

Because tribal is very popular, especially in casual, and it’s like “Oh, you love this obscure creature type? Hey, look for you, it’s…” you know, “It’s Jojo, Goatmaster.” Okay, I have not made the goat lord yet. But one day.

So here’s another quick aside is, the goats. For some reason, there is a subset of people that love goats. I do not know why, it’s not a large subset, but they are—they are letter writers. I get a lot of letter-writing about people saying, “Where are all the goats? We need more goats.” In fact, when I—when we made the Goatnapper in Lorwyn but didn’t put a goat in, which I tried to stop, I got a lot of mail about that. Anyway. The goat people are out there.

Oh, and what I’m saying is, I try hard to make lords. So Marrow-Gnawer is us making a rat lord. Certain creature types are more popular, those—those are more likely to have got one earlier because we know they’re popular. If it were like, you know—I have an ooze lord on my list, I want to make an ooze lord. There’s otherstuff—there’s other lords I want to make. You know. In fact, I was happy that Theros block actually manages to hit a lord which has never been done before.

Okay. Next—oh, also, by the way, people ask me about Kiki-Jiki, why he says “non-Legendary.” And the reason’s pretty obvious, if you think about it, which is he’s not an assassin! His goal isn’t to kill—remember, at the time—now this is not true, but at the time, if I put a second legend into play, it would kill the first legend. At the time of Champions of Kamigawa. And so, if Kiki-Jiki copied legends, he could just destroy—he just could kill legends. And that wasn’t his role.

Next is Myo—the Myojins. So the Myojins—Theros obviously has us playing around with gods, but the Myojins was our first take on gods. Now, we didn’t actually put gods on the card. Like, the creature type wasn’t god. It was spirit. (???) probably should have said “God Spirit” or “Spirit God.” Myojin in Greek mythology are gods, or equivalent to gods. I mean, they’re like gods, I guess.

And they were our version of the gods, I mean they had the divinity counter which said “As long as they had the divinity counter they’re indestructible, but if you wanted to do this awesome effect, you—then—the idea         was that they were—in their own realm were invulnerable, but if they came to our realm then they were vulnerable was kind of the flavor we were going for. Anyway. I thought the Myojins were cool.

Otherworldy Journey. It’s funny. So in Urza’s Destiny I made a card called Flicker. In fact, I made three cards called Flicker in Urza’s Destiny . We’ll get to Urza’s Destiny. I made a vertical cycle. But I’ll get there in another podcast. But anyway, I—I’m a—I’m very fond of Flicker. I—I think I’ve said this before, but I consider Flicker to be the—the Swiss Army Knife of mechanics. It just does everything. It just—there’s so many things you can do with flicker. I love flickering.

And so this one was interesting in that we made a flicker, so it’s until end of turn, but the idea was the thing that went away got better. And so you could use it on your own guy and lose your guy but make it better, you could use it on your opponent’s guy but the downside was you improved it. So yeah, anyway, I thought Otherworldly Journey was a pretty fun, cool card that kind of gave you—I liked cards that somehow had different uses for you and your opponent, but you know, like, how you use it on each of them is different. And here it’s like positive and negative, so how do you want to use the card? Anyway, I think it’s fun.

So Rend Flesh and Rend Spirit. So one of the things that is true is this was a war. Like, one of the things that I wish we had done a little bit better, I mean I—I’m happy for example with how Mirrodin Besieged did this is, that it was a war. There was a war going on. The humans and the—the creatures of the natural world were fighting creatures of the spirit world. And it was an all-out war. I mean, really. The flavor of the set was all-out war.

Now, I know Magic does war a lot. I mean, we’re a game of conflict. And we’re a game of environmental story, so wars—wars—wars play well, if you will. But I feel like there wasn’t a lot of really hammering home “These guys hate those guys.” There was a little bit. And Rend Flesh and Rend Spirit were one of the best ones, actually.

So what we had done is we took our—our—you know, our—our kill—our—our Murder, our Dark Banishing, you know, our kill card in the set, and we broke it in two. And one just killed spirits, and one just killed non-spirits.

And I thought that’s actually pretty cool. It definitely—in general, one of the things I believe is, while I like some kill—just can kill anything, I also feel that narrow kill is very cool. It’s actually for Limited, where I get a kill card and I’m like “Oh, but I can’t kill that particular thing,” and I have to figure out how to use it. Just like, I think like counterspells, it’s fun to have counterspells which it doesn’t counter everything.

And so this both did that and had some flavor. You know. And it was funny, because one of them ended up being a decent Constructed card, and one of them didn’t, because other than this set there weren’t a lot of spirits. So non-Spirit, well, that kills a lot of things.

Because before that, by the way, black tended to have the rider of “non-black” on it. We—we’re a little more loose on that these days. And so the one thing that was very nice about Rend Spirit was that it destroyed black creatures. Now, it didn’t destroy black spirits, but if you were playing the larger game, you know, I mean there were a lot of spirits in Kamigawa, but Magic as a whole didn’t have a lot of spirits. And so we gave black a kill card that, you know, could deal with black creatures.

Next. Sensei’s Divining—Spinning Top? Is it Spinning or Divining? I wrote ”Spinning” on my list, but I actually think it’s Sensei’s Divining Top. Which—yeah, it is. So that’s—that’s one of those cards. Sometimes when you look back, like you have a broken card or the card is really, really good, and you go, “Ooh, was that your intent? Were you trying to…” Like, no.

Like, we were just making card—oh oh, I think we made it to go with the Deceivers, by the way! Remember the Deceivers, the ones that—I think originally we had—they didn’t look at the top themselves, and so—and I think that was an original purpose, and then once the Deceivers could look at it themselves, we changed it… I mean, now it goes to the top of the library, so now—now it doesn’t work with Deceivers, because by nature if you look, you know, it—it’s—(???) goes on top.

But anyway, I think the original purpose of it was—was to help with the Deceivers. Anyway. And like I said. It wasn’t made to be this awesome card. It was actually just made to be the flavorful card. And then we just kind of missed—we didn’t’ realize how powerful it was. A lot of broken cards end up that way.

Finally, my final card, which ironically is Time Stop. Which will also end up being Podcast Stop. So the thing about Time Stop that’s awesome is, we came up with a card—I don’t remember who came up with it, I’d like to say Elliott? But I’m not sure who came up with it. Elliott led—oh, no no no, I’m sorry, Elliott didn’t lead the set. Tinsman led the set. So maybe it was Tinsman? I don’t know. One of the design team did it. Not me.

And so the idea was, end the turn. And originally it was a lot—the text was really complicated. Like, finish the (???) turn, all spells—like, it started explaining everything. And then someone just said—maybe it was Del, or like in templating, they said “What if it just says ‘End the turn?” And the reminder text takes all that complicated stuff and explains it.

And it really was a big shift. I think this card actually was one of the cards that pushed us toward our modern templating philosophy that says, “Make the text easy to understand, and hide the nitty-gritty in the reminder text so that, like…” Because if I spell it out on the cards eight lines long, you’re like “Oh, what does this card do?” But if I just say “End the turn,” and then in its reminder text I tell you, you’re like “Okay, end the turn. I get a general sense—well, let me see the details of that. But I—I get a general gist of what this card does.”

And I believe that there’s a lot of power in the flavor of the templating. And that’s something that we’ve become much more conscious of in the last five years. I mean, this is more than five years ago. But that was us—that’s the peak of us slowly learning this lesson of “Templating can be flavorful.” And that templating can help get across the card. And that—with a little more leeway, that we don’t have to talk in strict Magic-ese all the time. That sometimes we can talk more vernacularly that’ll make it easier for people to understand it, and then we can use reminder text for stuff to help people, you know, get the—the mechanics of what exactly is going on.

Anyway, with that, I have finished going through all my cards that I wanted to talk about. So I believe this is going to be the last of the Champions of Kamigawa podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed them. I also see that I have some traffic today, so you guys got a little—little extra bonus. Which is good. Let me finish my card. Actually, the traffic gods are smiling—or podcast gods—whoever you want to be, were coordinating this correctly so I got to finish with my cards.

And I had fun talking about Champions of Kamigawa. It was up and down. I mean, it was not the high point for Magic. I have said before that I think the block might be the low point for Magic design as a block. I mean, Homelands is probably the least—Homelands is the lowest set, as far as design, but I think Kamigawa is the lowest block. So…

And there’s a lot of debate on—like on my blog about people who love Kamigawa, and how dare I say that Kamigawa is not that great, and the reality is we use a lot of metrics, you know, we look at—at market research, we look at Magic Online, we look at sales, we look at tournament play. I have a lot of social media, I get a lot of emails—I mean, we have a lot of means to get feedback.

And the reality was, this was—set was a miss. I’m not saying people didn’t love it, I’m not saying there weren’t fans of it. I’m not saying that it—it didn’t do some things correctly. Because everything—you have to look at things, things will go right, things go wrong, I think this set did some things right, and we did borrow some things from it. But it did more wrong than right.

And I feel that—kind of looking back on it, I like to think of it as a block where we learned a lot of lessons. I talk about how your mistakes help you grow and your mistakes help you better, and that you don’t always learn from successes as much you learn from your mistakes. Well, this was a very, very educational block.

I’ll do other podcasts talking about Betrayers and Saviors and we learned plenty there too. And like I said, I’m not trying to be down on it in a sense of—I know there’s people who loved it. There’s people who love everything. And it’s awesome that people loved it. I know there’s people that really got into the Japanese and that weren’t put off by it, and that’s great. And there’s people that learned a lot about Japanese culture and that’s great. And I love the fact that people love this set.

It is just my job as the guy who makes the set to be honest and say, “Were we successful?” And to be successful, part of that means that we make our audience happy. And we did not. We did not make the majority of the audience happy. And so in that regards we failed in the set. This block.

Anyway, but hey, trying to talk to you straight, tell you the news, and anyway. That was Champions of Kamigawa block, like I said, we learned a lot, and guess what? It’s time to go make the Magic.