1/17/14 Episode 88: Theros, Part VII

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It’s time for another episode of Drive to Make Theros! The podcast that seemingly will not end.

Anyway, for the last six podcasts, not consecutively, but this is the seventh podcast dedicated to Theros. And I’m doing card-by-card stories, talking about different stories from Theros and exploring the design. I’ve been doing an experiment, trying to do a more recent set, and what I’ve learned is I have a lot more stories because I’ve remembered them all. So I just tell more stories about, like, Tempest… “Uh… what was Tempest? I don’t remember…” Anyway. That was my old man voice. I have a very bad old man voice. I do actually do a decent old man voice. That was not it.

Okay. Last we left, where were we at? We were at Hundred-Handed One. Okay. So Hundred-Handed One is a Hekatonkheiras (stumbling over pronunciation) I’m not sure how to pronounce it. I can spell it but not pronounce it.

Okay. So when Ethan made his little book about Theros, it listed all the things that Magic had done that fell into Greek mythology, and all the things it hadn’t done. One of the things he listed on the “hadn’t done” is the Hundred-Handed One.

Okay. So for those that know their Greek mythology, the Hundred-Handed Ones were the creatures that helped the gods overthrow the Titans. Zeus and company, I think it aided them in overthrowing the Titans? But then they imprisoned them because they were powerful and they were worried that they’d overthrow them, I believe. Anyway. I’m not 100% on this one.

But anyway, they were creatures of mighty power. They were huge. Ethan definitely wanted to do Hundred-Handed Ones, and I was fine, and one of the reasons I was fine before is, one of our philosophies for top-down nowadays is that you have to think about rarity with what kind of resonant thing you want. And what we’ve learned is, commons should be something that people just know. So in Greek mythology, look, common’s going to be satyrs and centaurs and Cyclopes, and things you’re just—you’re familiar with. You know what they are. Minotaurs and such.

And the idea that as you get higher in rarity, you can get a little more obscure. And the idea is that it’s fine to sort of dig deep and give a reward to people that really know the source material, just you gotta do that at a higher rarity, not a lower rarity. Like the lesson of Kamigawa was, some of that obscure stuff was done at lower rarities, people were like “What?” And at a higher rarity they still go, “What?” But the as-fan of “What?” is much lower. And it’s fun every once in a while to learn something, but it’s not as much fun—if the basic things aren’t there, it’s hard to latch on. What we want when you first open a top-down set is that the commons are just, “Oh, it’s this!” and “Oh, it’s that!” and just  you recognize things.

And so what you want to do is take things that aren’t so recognizable and use them as a spice. At higher rarities so they show up. And I think the Hundred-Handed One—so the other thing with Hundred-Handed One—so the story of it is, originally it didn’t have monstrosity. But we’re like “Oh,” once we realized monstrosity was a thing we’re like “Oh, of course, it’s got to have monstrosity. It’s a giant monster.”

And white—so one of the things we had done with monstrosity was we had chosen to put it mostly in red and green, and so red and green have monstrosity at common, the quantity and quality is higher. And the idea was that everybody had a little bit of monsters, but white was the least monstrous. White just has the least big creatures, at lower rarities it mostly has tiny things. And it was going to be more the human color and the army color. It had a role to play in the set, but it really wasn’t going to be the monster color. But we wanted to make sure at high rarities we had a few monsters. And the Hundred-Handed One seemed good as a white monster.

So what happened was we made the card… I think the original version, before it had monstrosity, was it could block any number of creatures. I think Ethan made that version. And the idea is, “Okay, it’s a big monster, it can block whatever…” That was the original version. Big monster, it can block as many as it wants to.

And then I think we decided with monstrosity that we’d make the “can block anything” the monstrosity part of it. So the idea is, “I’m big, I get bigger, and when I get bigger, my extra abilities, I now can block anything.” Because the key to monstrosity is, you want to sort of build into something cool. And so the end state, the coolest thing, which is where Ethan started, is “Okay. Giant monster that can block as many creatures as it wants.” It’s pretty cool, that until you get through this thing you’re not going to get to the player, and it can block everything.

So what happened was, I think the original version was, I don’t remember the size. But whatever size, you do monstrosity, it gets some counters, and now it can block everything. And we were in a meeting, and somebody—I don’t remember who, I would give credit if I remembered who it was, said, “Well, shouldn’t it be ‘it can block 99 more things?” And we laughed, and we laughed, and then I’m like “Okay, we’re using that.”

Because one of the things that’s very important in any Magic set, but top-down sets especially, is that you want to find mechanics that sort of have a little bit of novelty in expressing flavor. And the reality is, the 99+ is just cute in the sense that I’m sure there will be games in which it matters that it can only block a hundred things, but we thought it was kind of neat, that the 99+ was just a flavorful way to say what we wanted to say. That just had a little extra oomph to it.

And one of the things that’s funny, we’ve gone on this path. Early Magic was all about that. Just “Throw whatever makes the card the coolest it could be!” And there’s a lack of consistency, which was a lot of cards in Alpha didn’t all work the same even though they were similar, because each card kind of handled the problem individually.

And then what happened was, with time we were like, “Okay, we need to consolidate that. We don’t want cards working almost the same way. Cards need to work the same way.” So we went to the other end of the spectrum, which is like—“No novelty text, no trinket text, cut to the bone. What does the card do?” And then eventually we came back around and it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got to be careful, we want to be consistent, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use trinket text.”

So trinket text, by the way, there’s novelty text and trinket text, which are slightly different things. I will define. Trinket text is something that adds flavor to the card that really in gameplay is not going to matter most of the time. A good example is you have a knight with protection from dragons. Well, how often is a knight—like first of all, dragons fly, the knight doesn’t fly. How in the world is it going to matter?

Now, hey, there’s some dragons that have direct damage effects, that can activate to damage things. Oh, they can’t hurt the knight. I mean, it’s not that it never comes up, but hey, having a knight with protection from dragons has a flavor to it. We call that trinket text. It doesn’t matter much, but it adds something.

So novelty text is Hundred-Handed One. So novelty text says, “Okay. We wanted the creature to block any number of creatures. Well, blocking 99 additional creatures is functionally very similar to blocking any number, but it has more novelty to it. That it just reads funnier.” If the card exists and it just said, “Block any number,” that card’s not as cool as “block 99 extra.”

And so novelty text means that it doesn’t tend to change the functionality, it just takes the functionality that exists and puts it in a fun way. The other example of that, although this one didn’t actually come, is Door to Nothingness. That Aaron and I had originally wanted it to say, “Destroy target player,” rather than “they lose the game.” I think we wanted “Destroy target creature or player.”

And the reality is, it’s very similar to “target player loses the game,” but it just felt cooler. “Destroy target creature or player” felt cooler than “Target player loses the game.” We’ve done “Target player loses the game” a lot, and we’ve never done “destroy target player,” plus “creature or player” is kind of cute. Anyway. That is novelty text. And that is what the Hundred-Handed One is up to.

Next is Hythonia the Cruel. The Cruel! Okay, so Hythonia the Cruel and Keepsake Gorgon started in the set, Keepsake Gorgon was Baby Gorgon, and Hythonia the Cruel was Momma Gorgon. And neither of them was legendary when we made them originally. And the original version of the card was they both had deathtouch. Because they’re gorgons. And Baby Gorgon, its monstrous ability, monstrosity ability—it was called monstrous in design, so when I say “monstrous,” I’m thinking monstrosity. Its monstrosity effect was destroy target creature. I think it still is.

And then Momma Gorgon had this cutesy thing where it did one damage to everything in play. And the reason that was cutesy was it had deathtouch. So that meant its damage would have deathtouch, which meant it killed everything. And Development kind of rightfully said, “Yeah, yeah, stop being so cutesy, it just destroys everything.”

Oh, let me talk about “non-gorgon.” I’ve joked a lot, if you see me in an interview at the Pro Tour, and at my column, about how I did “non-gorgon” because I wanted to create our own world of Greek mythology where gorgons knew love. In the actual Greek mythology, gorgons affected each other, it was a punishment, it was not meant to be something great, the fact that nobody could look at them without dying, even other gorgons, the point of the curse was that it isolated them. When nobody can look at you, it’s very hard to have a relationship with somebody.

So there’s two reasons I did non-gorgon. One is, I felt I wanted our gorgons to know love. But the mechanical reason, there’s actually a mechanical reason, which is that by putting “non-gorgon” on Hythonia, I was making a Gorgon tribal card. And what that meant was, “Oh, I have a card that kills everything except gorgons. Oh. Well, you know what would go well in that deck? Other gorgons.” And so for example, Keepsake Gorgon goes well with Hythonia, because if you have Keepsake Gorgon in play, and then play Hythonia, well guess what? You kill everything except both of them. They both remain. And so it was a way to add a little bit of gorgon tribal. There’s not a lot of gorgons in the set. But Magic has enough gorgons that look, you can use Hythonia to make a gorgon deck.

Okay. So how did Hythonia become legendary? So this story is a cute one. So what happens is, we get the art in. So Jeremy Jarvis is the art director for Magic, does an awesome job. One of the things Jeremy does is when art comes in, he picks the best art, what we call Tier 1 art. And the reason is, we pick images that we want to use for marketing and like as we’re trying to sell the set, these are the best images, let’s use these images. And Hythonia was one of the Tier 1 images.

And Creative finally said, “Oh, this is so awesome. We really want to use this in a lot of places. This seems so awesome this can’t be a generic gorgon. This has to be a specific gorgon. Like, she looks awesome.” And so Creative came to Development I think at the time, and said, “Guys, do you mind if we make this legendary?” And Development said, “Oh, no problem, it’s very powerful, legendary is fine.” And so we made it legendary. At creative’s request. Because the art was so awesome, we wanted to make this a character.

Next we have Kragma Warcaller. So this is a black/red card, it gives haste and +2/+0 to minotaurs. Okay, so one of the questions that I get about this card is, “Hey, wait a minute, it grants haste and +2/+0. Why is it black/red? Red can do that.” And the answer is “Black can do that too. Black can also give +2/+0 and haste.”

So one of the things we do when you talk about gold cards, there’s a bunch of different types of gold cards that we can do. I did a podcast I believe on gold cards. One of the things is the intersection, where you find something that both colors can do, and then you give it at a bargain price because multicolor costs are harder to get than a simple cost.

So if I have a card that costs 2B or 2R, I can get a spell that costs 1BR that does more than either 2B or 2R can do. And so what happened was, we wanted to make it a black/red card, because there’s a cycle of uncommon cards that are encouraging different draft strategies. And this card is meant to be, I open this, pick one, pack one, that I want to go “Ooh, I want to go minotaurs.” And then it’s setting you up and it’s red and black and says to draft black minotaurs and red minotaurs and lines everything up.

And so we really wanted this to be something that sort of sends you down that path. Also, we knew minotaurs were going to be fun. We put them in black and red in the set, and we wanted to make sure that if you’re going to make a minotaur deck, that we definitely encourage you to play red and black.

Now note, we made a rare mono-red minotaur lord, that if you wanted to go bigger than just this set and in casual make a mono-red minotaur deck, we gave you a very good minotaur in mono-red. That’s not for Limited, so we put it at rare.

Once again, when you look at rarities, and like I said, I’ll do a podcast on rarities one of these days, rarities have a lot to do with Limited. And so if something’s meant for Limited, it usually goes at common or uncommon, and if it’s not meant for Limited it goes at rare or mythic rare. Every once in a while it’s not meant for Limited and goes at lower rarities for complexity reasons, but usually if it goes there it’s something that could work in Limited. If it causes a problem for Limited, we always get it out of common and uncommon.

Okay. Next, Labyrinth Champion. Oh, so this is a guy who has heroic Shock, meaning when you target him, he shocks something, does two damage to a creature or player. We had him at common originally. So we decided early on, or middle of the way one, that we wanted white and green to have heroic that makes them bigger, and black would have the small effects—white would get a single +1/+1 counter and a small effect, where green would get more +1/+1 counters. And blue and red were going to be more spell-oriented while white and green were a little more creature-oriented. Black kind of cut the difference. And so we wanted blue/red to have a little more like, “I generate a spell when I target it.”

And so one of the obvious spells—so one of the things, by the way, is every year we have new mechanics. And every time we do a new mechanic, the very first place we look to in red is damage. Now, I explained this I think in the red podcast, that I think damage is grouped together as like one thing, when really it has a whole bunch of different functions and red uses it very usefully, it’s has a lot of functions that you can use it for.

And so obviously, when we’re thinking about heroic, it wanted red, it wanted spell effects, Shocks, direct damage makes sense. This one got moved around a little bit. It ended up going to uncommon because we have a rule in New World Order that says if you’re capable of killing multiple creatures you get red-flagged, which means you have to justify yourself at common. So usually a card capable of killing more than one creature is not at common. And this thing is. So I think we had it at common for  a day or two, and we’re like “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s uncommon.” We moved it to uncommon.

I do enjoy, by the way, that separating heroic things that make themselves better vs. heroic things that generate effects just makes very different styles of decks that play differently. And one of the things that’s very important is when you make a mechanic, trying to give breadth to the mechanic. The thing I like about heroic is, while the trigger’s the same, different kind of heroics work very differently. How you’ll do things just—it’s a very different animal from “I want to build this up” to “I want to use it to build a deck around.” And the Shock one, or draw cards—there’s certain heroic ones that really let you sort of craft a deck if you’re willing to do that.

Okay, next. Lightning Strike. Okay, so Lightning Strike threw me a little bit. So when the set comes out, I have a blog, for those that are unaware, called Blogatog. It’s on tumblr. And I answer questions. I also post my comic there, and I post my podcast there and I post my columns there. But the biggest thing I do there is I answer questions.

And so one of the first things that happen, is I started getting all these questions about Lightning Strike. “Lightning Strike? Why wasn’t this Searing Spear?” And I was a little taken aback. Mostly because it’s a common. And I understand when we take a card that’s a valuable card that people have, you know, you have a rare, mythic rare, and we just reprint it but change the name, okay, now it’s annoying, you have these cards, now you’ve got to go and get other versions of these cards. And I understood that, but I feel like at common you’re going to open four of these. If you get a box, you’re going to open four of these. And I didn’t think it was that big a deal. R&D didn’t think it was that big a deal. It’s like “Why are people so upset by this?”

And what I’ve come to realize is that it’s the principle of the thing. I think what happens is, we do something that’s upsetting, and then we do it enough that—like, it’s not that this one’s really upsetting. It’s not that hard to get four Lightning Strikes. But it’s kind of the principle of the thing. We had just done Searing Spear as some sort of promo, I believe, an alt-art promo. People were like “Look, it has a promo. I want to use it. Oh, the exact card exists but I can’t use it.”

Message heard. I didn’t realize that is something people were as touchy about as they are, which is important for me to understand, because if something concerns you guys I want to address it, and so okay, I mean that’s very important, it’s why I have my blog to learn things like this. So let me explain how it happened, because as you will see, there was never an opportunity to be Searing Spear, and I’ll explain why.

So what happened is, we had a spell. I don’t remember what the spell did. But it was a direct damage spell. And I assume it had something with the mechanics of the set or something. As we normally do. And so it got concepted as Lightning Strike, and we got a lightning bolt—we knew we wanted a Lightning Bolt-like spell. I mean, Lightning Bolt we did not want to bring back. We talked about it, but it’s very powerful and it warps the environment and causes all sorts of design issues. I’m not saying we’ll never reprint Lightning Bolt again, but it’s not something we want to do a lot, and in the big picture we did it relatively recently. I know it’s been a few years. But it’s not something we want to run all that often. It’s supposed to be very infrequently.

So we do want to do a lightning spell, so Creative—like, Jenna was doing the card concepting, and like “Oh, direct damage spell, good, good. We can’t call it Lightning Bolt, but Lightning Strike. You know. Because the gods throw lightning.”

And then what happened was, the card turned out to be too good. And Development figured out late enough that they didn’t want to mess around with the card. So what happens when Development needs to charge late in the process, the normal thing they’ll do is they’ll change it to a card that’s already existing. And the reason for that is, it’s an understood thing. Searing Spear is a card that Development understands the power level of it, it’s a card that actually means something in Constructed, but in a way that’s not scary to them. And so it was a late enough change that they said, “Okay, we need to change to  a known thing.”

Now, they wanted to change to Searing Spear. The problem is, it was so late in the process that the art was already done for Lightning Strike. There’s a god throwing a lightning bolt. Well, that’s what the art is. And so Searing Spear didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t a spear, it wasn’t on fire, and the art didn’t make any sense for Searing Spear. So the answer was, “Okay, it’s a common, look, we’ll just give it a new name.” And so they ended up saying, “Okay, we’ll do Searing Spear, but we’re going to have to change the name.”

But it’s not as if they knew the whole time they were doing Searing Spear and just changed the name. It was out of the necessity of trying to fix the problem. And so if they decided to reprint Searing Spear and change it for the sake of changing it, I understand maybe that people would be upset. But I’m trying to stress that that wasn’t the case, something happened, they didn’t want to break the environment, and so all the reasons behind it were very rational, sound reasons, but it did end up resulting in a Searing Spear duplicate that’s not called Searing Spear. So anyway, it does now allow us a little flexibility, it is an ability we want to use a lot, and sometimes fire makes sense, and sometimes lightning makes sense, so it gives a little flexibility to match our world in the future, and I think that is good.

Loathesome Catoblepas. So Loathsome Catoblepas, real short story here, was also like Hippocamp, where Ethan really wanted to do it, and so it just was another one of just trying to show—one of the things when I try to do these stories is the idea that there’s context and there’s ongoing things that are happening, and one of the most important things about being on a design team—or when I look for designers, I look for skill. That’s very important.

But another thing that is also equally important is part of being on a creative team is spending a lot of time in a small room with these people. That you want people that make the process fun and entertaining. And so we goof around a lot, just because part of the creative process is being light and loose and having fun. And so one of the running jokes of our things was, Ethan was just trying to get—he had a short list. He wanted a Hundred-Handed One. He wanted a catoblepas. He wanted a hippocamp.

And I used to tease him. I mean, not that I didn’t want that, not that we didn’t label those things, not that we didn’t encourage him to do that, but it just was a running joke. Where he was in charge of the file, and if I didn’t name something, he could name it, and so he would come in and go, “Okay, it’s a Roaring Catoblepas!” And the joke is he would say this and I’d go, “Really, Ethan. Really. Catoblepas.” And we would joke. Anyway, it was a running joke and it was funny.

I mean, the thing I’m hoping when I talk about some of these stories is realize that look, I want to get some of the humanity behind—these are people making the sets, and I’m a big believer of trying to share who we are, and that we’re not just the man behind the curtain making stuff. That we are people. And—anyway. I will move on.

Mistcutter Hydra. If I asked you—I mean, Aaron did a little question/answer at the last Pro Tour. So if you weren’t there, for those that might not know the answer to this question, what Greek trope did Mistcutter Hydra start as? And the answer is Hercules! And you’re like “What?”

And the answer was, we had Hercules. We wanted to do Hercules. So the original version of Hercules, like maybe like some number of enchantments on it, it was trying to match the labors of Hercules, and like you needed seven enchantments, but Hercules had twelve labors, and it didn’t make sense. It was just impossible to play, and getting seven auras on something was crazy. So we changed it.

We came up with a card that I liked a lot. So much I liked a lot that I’m going to make the card. So I’m not going to tell you what the card did. But it did something that on the surface—it was one of those things where—I will say this, it was a 12/12 for not a lot of mana, and it had a restriction. And the restriction seemed easier to overcome than it was. But it was this neat restriction that you really like were challenged to beat the restriction.

And the problem was two things. One is, Creative didn’t like having Hercules be a 12/12. We were tying a bunch of stuff together, and we were trying to make him the most powerful human ever. Because he was a demigod and super-powerful, and we had a big fight about how big he was supposed to be.

And then, the ability which we really liked that I thought played well, Development did not like at all. And in the godbook poll, in the rare poll, it didn’t fare that well. An internal thing we ask people in the building what they think of it. It didn’t do that well.

And so at some point, they realized they needed a card that had to fit developmental purposes. And so what they did is, they’re like “Okay, we need a green card with a tournament function,” that I think they were worried about Delver or something blue. And so they needed to scrap a card to make a green card that was good against this particular archetype. And the team didn’t like this card. I tried to save this card, in fact they tried to kill it multiple times and I like came to the card’s defense. Usually as Lead Designer I will jump in once in a while on a few cards that I really think matter. I felt this mattered. I really wanted it.

At some point it got changed from Hercules to a Hydra because the creative team didn’t think it could be Hercules, and like “Fine, fine, fine, it’s not Hercules.” But I liked the card mechanic, so I said, “Fine, it can be a Hydra.” And they got art for hydra in, so when they needed to change things it was late enough that they couldn’t change the art. So they ended up deciding that they wanted to use the hydra. So my card—the team’s card, actually, went bye-bye. So I will try some other day. One day when Hercules shows up, I mean this card, not necessarily Hercules, I will tell you.

Next is Nessian Courser. So Nessian Courser was a card in Future Sight. So one of the things that happened in Future Sight was I was aware, as I was designing Future Sight, that it was getting a little complicated. For those unaware, it is the most complicated set in the history of complicated sets. And so one of my ideas was I was trying to figure out how to do future-shifted cards that could have a new frame that felt like they made sense in the future-shifted frame, but weren’t complicated.

So one idea we came up with was full-frame common vanillas. And the idea was, “Oh, it’s a special frame, so the reason it’s future-shifted is ooh, the frame. It’s a full-art vanilla.” Because vanillas don’t need a text box, obviously. They’re vanillas.

And so we made a series of vanillas. And we also went to the development team or maybe the development on the design team and said, “What are vanillas we’ve never made? We’re trying to make some new vanillas.” And pushing some places, and we made a few powerful vanillas.

But anyway, Creative had the world as an oyster. One of the things Creative was doing during Future Sight was they were looking at future worlds. Like, “Here’s a hint of places we might go.” So on this card, it was a centaur, so they made like a Greek-inspired world. And that was the little nod in Future Sight that one day we might do a Greek mythological-inspired world.

So when it came time to do the set, whenever we do the set we look at Future Sight and say, “Oh, is there a Future Sight card that makes sense here?” When it does, we try to use it. We don’t always use it. We’re not slaves to Future Sight. But when we find opportunities we look.

And I realized that this card was a perfect fit here. The name was made to match the world, Nessian has Greek roots, I believe. Anyway, so we knew this was the perfect place. Obviously we don’t reprint art in new sets, so we knew it had a new piece of art. But we’re like, “Oh, this is a very cool place.”

I did tease that there was a Future Sight card. I guess in retrospect I made a mistake. I think the problem was that I set up expectations for a crazy Future Sight future-shifted card and we got a very plain future-shifted card. So I think I made a mistake of expectations. I’m not sure what I should have done.

But anyway, I like sort of teasing, guys, but when I tease you I have to be careful not to leave you—like normally I lead you down the path of “It’s a 12/12 creature that costs one mana! 12/12 trampler that costs one mana.”

But I think when people read that, they have expectations that “Of course there’s a drawback, how else could we have a 12/12 trampler for one?” Where this, people were just expecting the world, and then they got a little bit unhappy when I didn’t give them the world. So a mistake on my part.

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx! I have no idea what accent that was. So this card started as a top-down card. Basically, what happened was, we wanted to make a temple. Because temples were very big. And the idea was, “Oh, it’s a temple to the gods.” And so one of the ideas we had was “Oh, well there’s temples to the gods. Oh, well let’s make use of devotion because it’s a temple.” And then the cleanest idea of devotion is, “Oh, we’ll do a devotion—something that helps your mana, it’s a land.” So like “Temple has to be a land. Devotion makes sense to temple, mana’s tied to land,” we all mixed together and we ended up with Nykthos.

When we made it, we had no idea it was going to be the powerhouse it’s become. I’m not sure if Development tweaked its numbers or not. I do know that like I said—it’s funny when you make a card that becomes this tournament staple, and really, we were just trying to make a top-down temple. Our goal was not lofty—I mean it was lofty, but we weren’t trying to make a powerful card. We were just trying to make a flavorful card.

And it ended up being—I love, by the way, when the super-flavorful cards happen to be good tournament cards. I think that’s cool. It’s neat. I’m happy devotion is showing up in Constructed like it is in the sense that here’s this mechanic that I really wanted people to love, and now that it’s getting played I think people are really falling in love with it. Chroma never really got quite this reception, so I’m happy for that.

Okay. Polukranos! Okay, so Polukranos—the card was originally called Fight-O-Hydra, and when you used the monstrosity, it said, “It fights all creatures!” And that’s—one of the luxuries of being in design is you can just write words that sound like they make sense. But at some point, somebody has to look at those words and go, “You know what? That doesn’t actually work.”

We try to have that happen during design. Sometimes the rares and the mythics will fall through only because we spent a lot more time on the mechanics. The things that happen a lot to make sure all that stuff works, because if any one card can’t work it’s easy to change, but if the whole mechanic doesn’t work that can undermine your set significantly.

So it turns out Polukranos couldn’t fight everything. Erik did the best job he could to try to retain the general essence of it. I’m a little sad in that I’m not the biggest fan of green doing damage to creatures. It does have a little bit of a fight feel, so I can justify in my head I guess. It’s a little sad to me that it can’t fight everything. I thought that was awesome.

The other thing I guess that was one of Erik’s issues, which is a very strong issue, is it tended to destroy lots of creatures but always die, and like you kind of wanted to have this cool creature in play, and so that’s true. You wanted this giant creature in play.

So as I explained earlier today, the monstrosity—the monsters, we ended up focusing in red and green. The idea being if you’re drafting, that red and green is where the monstrosity deck, the monster deck is going to be. There’s monstrous in other colors, I believe black was next in line for monsters, and that blue and white had the least amount of monsters.

Oh, I think the way it worked was white was the least. So green was the most, then red, then black, then blue, then white, is my memory, is how it played out, that white didn’t make a lot of sense for monsters. Blue has some serpents and things, so blue had a little more sense for monsters. Black had all the gorgons, and it had plenty of things that made a lot of sense there. And then red and green were the monster colors, they’re the colors that at common have a little bit bigger things, especially green. So anyway, that is Polukranos.

I have now arrived at Wizards. So I need to wrap this up. I finished almost another column. All but one. But I guess next time—I’m hoping I’ll be able to finish this off with one more—maybe next time I’ll have to pick up the pace. I got up to P though. So next time you join me, I will finish off P, and hopefully get through the rest of the alphabet.

One of the big tests that I will discover with this set of podcasts is “How many podcasts on a topic is too many podcasts?” I’m not sure. But anyway, we are testing the waters. It’s on something that I know you guys like, it’s me talking about actual design stuff, so I’m hoping this is something that people like. Hopefully not every future thing will be this long. I think this was a byproduct of me just being recent, so I know it in my head very, very well.

Anyway, as always, I love talking design, I love talking Theros. I’m very, very proud of Theros. I mean, I’m proud of many sets that I’ve done, but Theros definitely was one of the ones that everything lined up, and really it shines, and I feel like in the last couple years I’ve done some of my best work, Innistrad and Theros are two of my best sets I’ve ever done. And I’m really happy about that.

It’s funny that they’re both top-down. I mean, one of the things I’ve been experimenting with, you guys will see this in upcoming years, is trying to do some stuff that’s not top-down that invests a lot of how we’re doing design now in a different way. I want to use Fifth Age of Design on things other than top-down. Only because we can’t do top-down every year. There’s only so many things that make sense in top-down. And you want to mix it up anyway. Magic is best when you mix things up.

So anyway, thank you very much for listening to me go on and on and on and on about Theros. But I guess it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you next time, guys.