1/17/14 Episode 89: Theros, Part VIII

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. We’ve got twenty-five miles to Wizards. A full tank of gas, half a list of Theros cards, it’s raining, and we’re broadcasting. Hit it.

All right. This is the eighth, and I’m hoping the final podcast episode on Theros. By the way, if you string these all together, it’s kind of like listening to an episode of Limited Information.

Anyway. Last we left, we were in P. And I have like half a page here. We’re going to get through this. Raining helps, because as we all know, people in Seattle drive slowly in the rain. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad. But anyway, we have a little extra time today because of the rain.

So we’re going to start with Purphoros. God of the Forge. Okay. So the story of Purphoros which is interesting is, when you stop and say, “Okay, I’m going to do the colors, I’m going to do five gods that represent the five colors of Magic.” When you got to black, you’re like, “Okay, of course we’re doing Hades, god of the dead. Black.” You get to blue, you’re like “Okay, Poseidon, god of the water.” You get to green, you’re like “Oh, hey, god of nature, god of the hunt.” And even making the Zeus parallel the white. That all makes sense.

The interesting thing is, when you get to red, we actually didn’t do the obvious thing for once. The obvious thing for red would be Ares, the god of war. Red is pretty war-centric, and so having the mono-red god be the god of war is pretty obvious. But the creative team, they came up with a very interesting idea, you will see as the minor gods get introduced, they had a neat idea how to use Ares somewhere else.

And so they came up with the idea of using the mono-red god as being the god of the forge. Hephaestus, in Greek mythology. And the idea of making red something that builds things rather than destroys things.

Which is very interesting, because as I talked about in my podcast on red, red is not just about destruction. It’s part of red, red definitely has its attitude of “I’m going to follow my emotions and do what I feel impulsive to do.” And hey, emotions can be destructive at times, and so red definitely has a destructive element.

What happens is, we’re in a game about combat. And in combat, anger and destructiveness is pretty useful. And so red tends to skew towards that side of red. But every once in a while, when we have opportunities, we try to show that red isn’t only a destructive color, and this is one of the examples.

And we had a lot of discussions whether it’s supposed to be Ares or not. Supposed to be god of war or not. And in the end, I think the creative team made an interesting decision. Because like I said, it’s neat when you can find a way to do something that’s not the obvious way. And that a lot of what we’re doing in our top-down is trying to be obvious when we can, but every once in a while it’s kind of neat to do something that’s correct but a little less obvious.

So next get onto Pyxis of Pandemonium. So for those that don’t recognize it, this is meant to be Pandora’s box. Which, by the way, if you actually know your Greek mythology, Pandora’s box wasn’t a box. I think it was a jar. [NLH—Yes.] And so this is one of the ones where we’re trying to be a little more true to the roots.

The idea of it was we wanted something that kind of, you got it, and then it taunted you to use it was the idea. It taunted you to open it. And we played around with the design a bit. It was fun. And we wanted something that’s both chaotic and tempting. And I felt we ended up with something that’s pretty cool. There might not be any hope in the bottom, but anyway, I thought it did a pretty neat job.

So one of the things about doing top-down card design, individual card design, is it’s not always that you’re wanting to do the exact mechanic. So sometimes the mechanics, like I don’t know what exactly it means to release all the evils in the world but have hope left. I mean, I don’t know what that means. But sometimes the key is to just get an emotional connection. Like the idea of this tempting thing that you just can’t resist, and eventually you open it, and who knows what comes out? Could be very bad things.

We thought it was a neat idea, and that it captured the essence of it, and that a lot of what we’re trying to do when you make a card, is you want to sort of get the emotional essence of the card. Because it can’t do everything the original thing did in the original story most of the time. And that the goal is to make something that’s a good Magic card. Because remember—this is an important thing to remember.

This comes up all the time in Un-design, which is an idea that’s cool to look at, and like “Ohh, cool,” but doesn’t play well fails in its role as a Magic card. Magic cards aren’t just for reading. They’re for playing. And so one of the rules is true for all the Un-cards, and it’s true for every Magic card, but in the Un-world, it’s very tempting to go “Ooh, this is funny,” but okay, yeah, it’s got a funny name, but what does it do? If it doesn’t do something relevant, then you know what? It’s not holding its weight. Magic cards have to be played. If they don’t play well, then they are failing in their major task, which is to be a Magic card.

Okay, next. Rageblood Shaman. So let’s see. Oh, this is the—is this the minotaur? Yes, this is the minotaur lord. So I talked about putting Hurloon Minotaur to shame. Here’s the card that literally puts it to shame. It’s like “I am a 1RR minotaur. 2/3. But… I’m a little better. I make all the [minotaurs] better.”

So we knew we wanted—I wanted to have two minotaur lords. One which was meant for Limited and encouraged the black/red deck, and the other which was just “Hey, here’s a fun minotaur lord.” We knew minotaur tribal was going to be the thing we pushed most tribally. And I wanted to make sure that people—because minotaurs in black are mostly a Theros thing, that if you go through the history of minotaurs, they’ve been all over the place. But they’ve been in red has been their center color. I mean, in Homelands, they were in blue, in Ravnica they’ve been in white, or at least hybrid red/white. 

So, I wanted to make sure that if you just wanted to put together a good old-fashioned “throw all your minotaurs in a deck,” that I wanted to make a mono-red one that you could just play with the red minotaurs all across the time, and that you wanted to make a fun Legacy-style—I say Legacy only in the access to cards, not in the power level—minotaur deck then you could. And so we made that card to be that.

I don’t think when we made the card originally, by the way, we exactly made it Hurloon Minotaur. I think Development actually changed the numbers around because they thought it was entertaining to say—because real quickly, one story about Hurloon Minotaur is the game came out, and Hurloon Minotaur had this very awesome artwork by Anson Maddocks.

But it was a really weak card. But what happened was, there were people at Wizards who didn’t really understand how bad the card was, they just really liked the art. Or maybe they understood how bad the card was and didn’t care. But they really liked the art.

And so in the early days, Hurloon Minotaur became kind of the mascot of the company. The problem as that I think the people who originally picked it understood that it wasn’t that strong a card, but over time, other people at the company that didn’t know the game that well started assuming that this was something that players really liked. And what they missed was, “No, it was a weak card, players didn’t like it.” And that Wizards had this attachment to it, but it wasn’t something players were attached to.

So for example, real quick aside, I know I’m trying to get through this but it’s a funny story. I was called in one day by our marketing person many, many years ago. And this was for Fifth Edition, I think? And they had an ad for Fifth Edition. And Fifth Edition, if I remember correctly, was the one in which Serra Angel left the set. [NLH—Yes.] And so they had this campaign where Serra Angel is writing a postcard to Hurloon Minotaur. And Serra Angel’s like, “Hey, Hurley! I’m off having a great time. Hope you’re enjoying things back in Dominaria. Hey, hold down the fort.” Or something like that.

And so they called me in and they said—they called a bunch of R&D people in. And like, “Hey, what do you think?” And I’m  like, “Oh, okay, let me see if I can translate to how the players will read this. So basically the ad says, ‘Hey, remember that card you really liked that was pretty good? Yeah. That’s gone. Remember that card that you didn’t like that kind of sucked? Yeah, that’s still there.” I go, “I don’t know that that’s the campaign you want to go with.” But anyway, we’ve made a better Hurley.

Next. Rescue from the Underworld. So this I think is my absolute favorite card in the set. I think it just sneaks out past Chained to the Rocks. Only because I love when we make a card that we could not make anywhere except here. And the reason is, without the top-down flavor, this card doesn’t work. In fact, the card takes a little—lets black dip its toe into flickering, that’s not normally a black thing. But the flavor carries the card. It’s an awesome, awesome card.

So, obviously for those in Greek mythology, Orpheus was the lyricist. I mean, lyricist in he played a lyre. Not lyricist as in he wrote songs. But he was a musician. I think he played a lyre. I think also he was blind? [NLH—No.] But anyway, he played like the most beautiful music ever, and so beautiful that he could do crazy powerful things because his music was so lovely.

And he lost his loved one, and she was taken by Hades down the underworld, and he went down to rescue her, and then he was allowed to take her because—I don’t know, he played music and soothed the savage beast, or something, and basically the rule was he couldn’t look back until they had gotten out of the underworld. That if he looked back he would lose her. And so he steps out into the sunlight and he’s like “Ahh, we did it!” And he turned around to see her, but she hadn’t stepped out yet, so she was technically still in the underworld and he lost her forever. But anyway, this is a little happier version. If you notice in a lot of our stories, we go the happier way. It’s like “The gorgons can know love!” “Orpheus can rescue his loved one!” Its’ the romantic in me.

So anyway, this card came about in that same meeting we made Chained to the Rocks, we literally were trying to capture the sense of Rescue from the Underworld, and I love the concept that the creature has to die to go to the underworld to bring the other one back. And that is—it’s so compelling—and the reason it’s my favorite card and the reason it ekes out Chained to the Rocks is Chained to the Rocks is a card that we’ve done. We do all the time. It’s got a little extra twist, it’s a mountain, I mean it’s a little different, it’s not exactly what we do, I mean it’s a neat twist and it’s very flavorful. That’s why it’s my second favorite card.

But I feel like [Rescue from the Underworld] just does something we’ve never done. This is a black card unlike any other black card you’ve ever seen. I mean, black does have reanimation, but this has other tricks, it does neat things. The one thing is, we actually made it a sorcery, and Development was the one that decided that it was so much fun they’d turn it into an instant. Because there’s a lot of tricks you can do if it’s an instant. And so anyway, I really loved how the card turned out, it’s crazy fun to play, it makes wonderful stories. Anyway, my favorite card in the set. Rescue from the Underworld.

Next is Scholar of Athreos. Okay, so this is an example—so something we’ve been starting to do in our sets, so hold on a second… (sound of drinking water) okay, something Development started doing a few sets back, I think this happened in Innistrad maybe? Something that Erik, Erik Lauer is the Head Developer, the equivalent for me, I’m the Head Designer, he’s the Head Developer. He really likes using off-color activations in cards to help Limited.

Because one of the things that off-color activations do is they sort of say, “Hey, if you are playing these color combinations, I’m much more attractive to you.” And so they’re cards that float a little bit, because if you’re not drafting both colors, the card’s less in value. Now, you might take it later on, because the card can be played in a mono-color deck. So the cards that if someone needs them they can get them, but if not they float and then they can be late cards for people that need them in certain colors.

And what they do is they definitely give you some guidance on what these color combinations are doing. And so this is an example—what happened was, I did not do that in Innistrad design, and Erik added that. If you notice, I think there’s off-color flashback is what he did in Innistrad.

So something that we try to do now, and now Design just does it, Erik has convinced us it’s a good thing to do, is we build this in, that we normally have a cycle or two of off-color stuff that helps push in certain directions. Well, one of the things Design does now is we map each color combination and what it’s supposed to be doing in the draft. Just to make sure that we’re providing the right number of cards so that you can do the thing you need to do. And then sometimes we have gold cards, sometimes we have off-color activations, sometimes we have both, to sort of push you and encourage you in the right direction.

Okay, next. Sedge Scorpion. Okay, so one of the things that I’ve talked about is that we were doing a lot of building up of giant creatures. And that we took some of the normal answers and took them away. But we wanted to have answers, meaning we wanted to make sure that if your opponent builds up this giant monster, that there are answers to it.

So one of the things we did like, one of the answers we did, was deathtouch. And the reason deathtouch is interesting is one of the things that is pretty good is, and this is what we do in white a lot, is answers to answers are interesting. Meaning that I get an answer—so for example, you build up your giant guy. I get out my deathtouch. Okay, you don’t want your giant guy to die to deathtouch, so now you stop attacking. He’s holding him off. But if you can come up with an answer to the scorpion, oh, once you kill the scorpion, you can attack again.

 

And so it makes that dynamic gameplay, where like “Oh, you can address it and slow them down, but if they find an answer to your answer then they can start attacking again.” So it sort of neutralizes the threat, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate it. So that it allows neat gameplay, where like, “Oh, I have this thing, they have an answer to my thing, okay well they slow me down until I get the answer.” And so that gameplay is nice, and it doesn’t punish you, it’s not the card disadvantage that a Terror would have. But it does require you to work around it, and it gives the person a defense to fight against it.

Because the key is not that we don’t want to give you answers. We want to have answers. Every set is supposed to have threats, and it’s supposed to have answers. And our job is to make sure that we give both interesting threats and interesting answers. But the key, and this is what I’ve tried to explain in previous podcasts, is when you are making your environment, especially in Limited, you want to make sure that you have answers to your threats, but you want your answers to be appropriate to the threats that match the environment you’re trying to make. If you have answers that are too good for your threats, then your threats don’t have any teeth. If you have answers that are too weak for your threats, then your threats run wild. And you want to find a nice balance.

And one of the things Theros does is that Theros provides a whole bunch of answers to the threats, but the thing that’s interesting is, they’re not quite the normal answers. And you have to learn, for example, there’s certain things in this (???) like deathtouch or unsummoning that are a little bit stronger than they would normally be in a normal environment. And you have to sort of adjust and figure out what the strong answers are here. And that’s one of the things in general, by the way, that I like a lot, which is I like each environment to shift the value of different answers so that part of playing an environment is not just figuring out what to do, not figuring out the threats, but also figuring out what the answers are to those threats.

Like  I said, any good Limited environment, what you want your audience to do—and once again, I tie what I say back to things I’ve done before, to show that it all interconnects, is you want some comfort, you want the audience to just have things they know. “Oh, it’s Magic. There’s a Giant Growth in green. I know what colors do what functions. And those basic functions show up in every set, so I know what to expect.”

 

I want surprise. I want some things that don’t happen in every set. I want some things in which—“Ohh, in this set that’s better! Or this is normally good, but in this set it’s not as good.” The classic example is when I did Mirrodin, that I put both Terror and Shatter in the set, because traditionally, Terror was very good in Limited, and Shatter was not so good. And in that environment, Shatter was very good, and Terror was okay. But because it didn’t kill artifact creatures, it was weaker than normal. And the idea was, in a draft, I mean not always, but a lot of times you wanted to take Shatter over Terror. That’s not something that normally happens. And so having an element of surprise is very important.

And then, once you set up all the patterns you’re doing, then there’s a sense of completion. Meaning you create expectations for your audience and then you have to follow through on your expectations. And so once again, comfort, surprise, and completion rears its pretty little head. And it very much applies to how sets are put together.

Okay, next. Shipwreck Singer. Okay, so this card was always meant as a top-down siren. One of the things that we were trying to figure out—this is actually the interesting card where what we did first is we figured out what it was supposed to do because it’s a siren, and then we figured out what colors it was. A lot of times we start like “Oh, I’m making a black card. Well, what does a black card do?” This was not that. And in top-down sometimes you do this.

So we said, “Okay, what does a siren do?” So for those, in Greek mythology, I think the sirens first show up actually in the Odyssey. I think. [NLH—Yes.] The idea of a siren is, they’re creatures that sit on the rocks and they sing. And their songs are so lovely that the sailors are lured, and they crash their ships on the rocks. And then I think the sirens eat them or something? I’m not sure what the sirens do once they crash them on the rocks. [NLH—Maybe?] But anyway, they’re creatures that seem lovely, but end up being cruel and evil. Little subtext of “What seems beautiful is not always beautiful. And that might be harmful.”

So we knew we wanted something that would lure things in but also be destructive, right? That’s what a siren is. So it seemed clear to us that a siren would try to get you to come to it’s side. So we said, “Okay, it lures you into attacking. And then it has the ability to punish you for attacking. Because it has to lure you in, make you attack, but then because you’re attacking, now it can hurt you.”

So we had the idea of forcing you to attack. And that ability is done in red and blue. And then we had the idea of damaging an attacker. And there’s a couple different ways to do that. White can damage attackers. I mean, red can damage anybody. Black obviously can do –X/-X, so it can do that conditionally. So we played around with what we wanted.

So part of it was—okay, mechanically the first part needed to be blue or red, the second part needed to be white, red, or black. We said, “Okay, well what do we want? Well, sirens live at the sea, right? They make the soldiers crash into the reef. So, well, they’re sea-based. So we really kind of want some blue flavor in there. So okay, the first part can be blue or red, we’ll make it blue. Now we need the damage. And well, let’s look at the flavor of a siren. They’re pretty malicious. They are selfish creatures, and they’re kind of on the dark side. So we thought, “Oh, black makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, since we want to do blue and black, since that matches the flavor, we’ll just make it –X/-X because that’s how black would do it.”

And I like how the card turned out. One of the things that you try when you make top-down cards is you want to sort of get the flavor where you need it to and get the mechanics where you need it to, and it worked out really well with the flavor (???), the color matching was good, the mechanics were good. Anyway, I’m very happy with it. It turned out to be a nice card.

Okay. Sip of Hemlock. Okay, I mentioned this way long ago. Way back in the beginning of the podcast series. I was talking about Jenna. So Jenna Helland was the creative team member that served on the design team, and she was the person who did the card concepting. So I want to talk about card concepting, because this is my card where I want to talk about card concepting.

So what happens is, the design team makes cards. Now, some of our cards, we try to flavor all the cards we can, especially in a top-down set, but some of the cards, like this card was—I think it’s destroy target creature and its controller loses two life. Okay, it’s just a pretty vanilla thing. Right?

So I’m sure we named it something. I’m sure Ethan when he typed it in put some name on it that had something to do with Greek mythology. But it gets to Jenna, like “Oh, whatever, okay. What is this?” And Jenna, what she’ll do, as the person who’s doing the card concepting, is she made a long list of things that she thinks are really good and had a nice strong feel of Theros.

And so what she did was, whenever we would turn in a card, what she would do is she’d look at our card and go, “Okay. Well, the design team top-downed this as such-and-such. Does that make sense? Does that make sense for the concept?” And whenever it did, she’s like “Okay, this is a top-down siren. Oh, perfect. Perfect perfect. Blue/black, that’s right, okay. Awesome. I’ll show a siren.”

But sometimes she gets a card and she goes, “Oh, okay, yeah, the thing they want, there’s nothing special here, they just want a kill spell. Okay, let me go look and see what I have on my list. Because if I have something…” Like anyway, so my example here is “Oh, kill a creature, lose two life.” So she’s looking, and she gets the idea, “Oh, hemlock.” Okay, so this is actually not Greek mythology, this is actually Greek history.

So back in the time of ancient Greece, one of the things that would happen is if you had done something wrong, and you were essentially sentenced to death, they would make you drink poison. Hemlock being the poison. Socrates, by the way, I believe is famous being forced to drink hemlock. [NLH—Yes.]

And so it kills you, and the idea is, “Well, here’s a neat death. If I say I’m going to kill you by forcing you to drink hemlock.” Well, that’s pretty Greek. That’s about as Greek as it gets. And so she’s like “That’s a cool idea, we’ll do this, that’s where the life loss comes from, that I’m forcing you to do this, so it hurts you, but it kills you.” And then she makes the thing up, and then it adds this nice layer. And that what the creative’s doing, or Jenna here, as the card concepting, is that if every card can just find a way to just add a little extra—one of the things that I think card concepting does it that let’s say we want to do a top-down set.

Well, Creative starts, and we come up with everything we can think of that’s top-down, and we design to it. And then Development, they get extra things they think of, and they add things to it. And then when it gets to Creative, she’s like trying to figure out where there’s more nooks and crannies to sort of stick in extra flavor.

Because one of the goals of our set is, we want Theros to just ooze Greek mythology. Right? We want (???) from every pore. And so one of the ways to do that is I know that Design and Development are trying very hard mechanically to make that happen. Jenna’s doing the card concepting. Doug and other people are making sure that the names and the flavor text are just dead on, like the names hit, there’s words that say “Greek,” and there’s flavor text that represents the kind of things you want. Jeremy Jarvis and his artists are just making sure that the style is right and the look is right, and it has sort of a Greek feel, and how it looks.

One of the things that happens, by the way, is there’s a thing where the creative team does a world-building, where they get in artists and they do concepting and they figure out the look and the feel of the world. And that one of the things that Jeremy does every year, which is I think very, very cool is there always is, when you think of any particular genre or any particular feel of a mood or a tone, that the art style will lend itself toward that. If you notice in Innistrad, it’s set—I mean, it’s set in a location, it’s a very Eastern European sort of feel, but also it just was dark a lot. Even when it wasn’t dark it was just cloudy and there was rain and it just has this very foreboding feel. There wasn’t like sunny fields, that he made sure to capture the tone.

And not only is the subject matter and the tones important, but just the style of artist, meaning I know when we say “Okay, we’re doing such and such,” Jeremy will be like “Oh, I know what artist I’m going to get.” And so what he does is he handpicks artists each year because those artists and their style reinforce the feel we’re trying to get. And that’s why there’s a shift in artists every year, partly to shake things up, but partly because “Oh, each year requires a certain style of art.” And he’s matching artists to sort of get that feel.

And anyway, it’s something that like, there’s a lot of stuff the creative team does that when you just see the set, you feel it. And you might not even be able to consciously understand why you feel it. Why the Greek set feels so Greek. But everything about it. Every nook and cranny. The card concepting, the names, the flavor text, the mechanics, the art. We push to make sure that everything is having that feel as much as we can.

And I really think you feel that. And it’s something that I’m very proud of, and Innistrad and Theros have showed that one of the reasons I think top-down is something we can do well is we can make every nook and cranny ooze the thing we’re trying to get.

Okay. Next is Spear of Heliod. Okay. So let me talk a little bit about the origin of the gods’ weapons. So what happened was, I explained this on Erebos, each of the gods was taken by one of the team members on the creative team, or there’s more than five, but five of the creative team members each took one of the gods. I don’t remember who did who. But I do know Doug Beyer did Heliod.

For those unaware, Doug’s been on the creative team for quite a while. In fact, the very last task I had when I was running the creative team was hiring Doug. It was my last official act as the head of the creative team. Doug’s been around for a long time. He’s in charge of names and flavor text, and also helps oversee a lot of story stuff. He wrote The Secretist, which was the story for Return to Ravnica, the e-novel, the e-novella.

Anyway, Doug was in charge of doing Heliod. And so Heliod, the idea of Heliod was, as I explained before, one of the (???) of the gods was we didn’t want to just straight up do—a bunch of people asked this. “Why didn’t you just do Zeus? Why did you make up other names? That’s Zeus. Call him Zeus.” And the answer is twofold. One is that we are trying to create something that is our own. And that the second we use stuff that’ s not ours, A. it sort of pulls people out of the world and B. it becomes less our world. It’s less something we control.

For example, we wanted to make a pantheon that tied to the color wheel. Well you know what? The gods don’t exactly—I mean, Zeus does not clearly tie. I mean, if you really looked at it, he has a white component, but he has a red component. One can argue he has a black component. And that we are trying very hard—so what we wanted was the embodiment of white. And so he definitely had a bunch of Zeus in him, but he also had a lot of Apollo. He’s about the sun. He is the sun god. I mean, he is the leader, so he has a little King of the Gods vibe.

So we wanted a little Zeus, we wanted a little bit of Apollo. He’s got a little bit of Athena in him. He definitely is one that cares about judgment and being fair. But one of the things that we wanted was because he had a little bit of a Zeus vibe to him…

Now Zeus, for those of you that don’t know, he threw lightning bolts. That was his thing. And lightning bolts are really, really tied to red. And so it was weird to give him a lightning bolt. We made sure we made Lightning Strike in the set. To show that there were gods throwing lightning. But it’s not really Heliod throwing lightning.

So Doug came up with this cool idea for a spear. Which has a name. I don’t know the name off the top of my head. Starts with [a K]. [NLH—Khrusor.] And the idea was, this was the tool, that if Zeus thought someone was up to no good or whatever, he wanted to smite somebody, this was his tool of smiting. And that’s make an awesome name, by the way, for an artifact. Tool of Smiting! One day.

Anyway, so in his write-up, Doug made this. So one of the things we did is they all did their write-ups about the gods, and then we asked for them because we knew that we had to design the gods, so we asked for them. And this was something early. We figured out we wanted to do gods early. They figured out gods pretty early.

Like, sometimes in Design, we don’t get to do design some of the legendary characters because we don’t even know who they are before design ends. Development doesn’t always know that early. Now, if they do, we design the things, and if we don’t they end up being done in development, sometimes Design does it in development and sometimes other hole-filling will do it. Development might do it. But anyway, we do the gods early. So we were trying to make the gods.

So we were reading the description of the gods, and I don't know, Doug had a paragraph about the spear of Heliod. And we’re like, “That’s awesome.” And so “Okay. We’ve got to do…” I walked into my team one day, I’m like, “Okay, Jenna, Spear of Heliod. That’s a thing, right?” And she’s like “We’re doing Spear of Heliod.” And then we realized, then we went down the path, like “Oh, we do this, it’s going to be an enchantment artifact…” I talked about this. We figured this out. “Oh, that seems pretty kind of cool and pretty special.”

And then we looked at the other gods and we realized Nylea had a bow because she was a hunter. Oh, and Thassa had her bident. So Heliod had a spear, Thassa had a bident, and the bident and the spear were played up, like “These are the weapons of the gods.” They had names and everything. And when we realized that Nylea had a bow, though it wasn’t a big deal originally, it’s just like, “Well, she’s a hunter, she has a bow.”

So we went back to the creative team and we said, “Okay, well look, we see that Heliod has a spear, and Thassa has her bident, and Nylea seems to have a bow. Could we give the other two…” And it’s pretty clear that Purphoros would have a hammer. He’s Hephaestus, he’s god of the forge, and so him having a hammer made a lot of sense. And so really, it was kind of like, “Okay, well could we give Erebos something?” And I think Brady was the one that came up with the idea of giving him a whip.

So anyway, the reason we ended up with the cycle of gods’ weapons was we really wanted to do Spear of Heliod. And then once we went down that rabbit hole it’s kind of like, “Oh, in for a penny, in for a pound. I guess if we’re going to do this, we should just give all five of the gods.”

So one of the things, I’ll give you a little warning, is not all the gods have a special weapon. Only the major gods have a special weapon. So for those that are waiting for the ten more weapons of the gods, the minor gods, they don’t get their own weapon like the major gods. Because it’s good to be a major god. That was a horrible accent. What was that? I was trying to do Mel Brooks. It’s supposed to be a French accent, I guess? That was not a French accent.

Okay. Every once in a while I’ll do a correct accent. Other times I do woefully, woefully bad accents. I actually took, by the way—in my youth I took classes. I acted. And I actually took a bunch of classes in dialects. And then what you do is they basically show you all the vowel sounds and some of the consonant sounds that aren’t the same, and like “Oh, whenever you would say the “ah” sound, it’s “ay.” For example. And then so you would read the words. And the key to doing dialect is learning what the shift is on those letters.

And there is a period in time that I actually was decent, because I learned them and remembered them all. Problem now is I don’t remember any of them. So I’ve lost it. But in my youth, when I kind of knew it, I could actually do an Irish accent. Now it’s pretty pathetic. It is lost, it’s a skill that has to be kept up. By the way, doing dialects is really, really hard. If you see people in films doing dialects, and they’re doing it really well, then you should be impressed, actually. It’s very, very hard to do.

Next, okay, the temple cycle. Okay, so one of the things you have to understand about how Design and Development works is what lands go in a set. Especially lands that are going to be relevant to Constructed. I mean, if there are more Limited things Design does them, but if there’s something that is going to be relevant to gameplay, Development makes the call on what lands go where.

And it’s almost become a running joke, because what makes sense for the Standard environment, it almost feels like it’s directly wanting to contradict. The classic one is Innistrad, where I created this theme of this very, very strong allied color theme. We had five tribes, they all were allied colors, and so the set had very, very much this theme of “Okay, I’m going to play allied colors.” Especially in Limited. And then the dual lands we needed were enemy colored. I’m like “Enemy colored?” It’s like, “Nothing about my set says enemy color!”

And I actually—out of protest I made the slots for them, and then I put in lands we would rather have in, knowing two seconds in, I knew Erik would take them out. I mean, I gave him the slots for them. I did put a note in the file, “If perhaps, you want to have enemy dual lands, they can go right here.” But I refused to do it on principle, in that it had nothing to do with my set.

But anyway, the scry lands obviously were designed by Development. For starters, they added scry to the set, so that should be one big tip. So the interesting thing about scry lands, so I will answer this question, as people always ask, which is when you look at the guild lands, the gates from Return to Ravnica, those were common. And then you look at the scry lands, and they are rare. And people are like, “What? These seem almost the same. They are both come-into-play tapped dual lands that have a small effect.”

So let me explain a couple things. Number one is let me explain how the default works. If we make come in tapped lands, especially ones that do anything other than just come into play tapped, those are defaulted to uncommon. In a normal set, they go at uncommon. It’s where they go.

Now, what happens is, the reason you change out a default is a set has a particular need. So Return to Ravnica is a multicolor block. It has a very, very strong multicolor theme. Because of that, it is very important that we give you the tools for Limited to make sure that you can play multicolor strategies. Two-color strategies. And so the key to doing that was making sure that you have the lands that can do it.

And so essentially what happened was, they needed to go down to common. There’s no way to make that happen. And because we had the pain lands at rare, we did not want to do just generic come into play tapped lands. In a perfect world we would have, but because of the [shock] lands we felt like the [shock] lands were already strictly better, essentially you can life to get them untapped, that’s strictly better. And having the land type is not strictly better, but it’s mostly better. It is mostly upside.

And so like, making commons in which the rare versions feel like they have two upsides felt like a little much, and so we came up with the gates as a means to like make them matter a little bit, and then we made the gates relevant in the set. And so we moved them down to uncommon, and then for reasons that were very particular to the set we added a little extra something. But normally those should be at uncommon, especially with a little added value.

So when you get to this set, okay. Default is things want to be sitting at uncommon. Except while it might seem like counting as a gate and scrying for one are equal value, they are not. Scrying for one actually is much better. That if you are playing Constructed, unless you happen to have one of the few gate matters cards, very, very few of which are remotely Constructed, you would want to have the scry land over the gate land almost every time.

And on top of that, one of these days I’ll do my rarity podcast where I talk about rarities, and one of the things I’ll explain is that the tightest rarity is at uncommon because so many things need to be at uncommon. And so uncommon’s always fighting for space. And so what happened was, we decided that it was cramming a lot at uncommon, the Limited game didn’t need it, they were decently strong cards, and like I explained in the land thing, look, one of the reasons that lands sometimes will go to rare is we do want you to make sure that we have enough cards that when you open the pack you’re excited to get the rare you get.

And having lands that just go in any deck that are good, or any two-color deck, or even if you’re a lesser player, having lands that people will just trade you for, so that you can get the things you want, we found that people like that. And so we try to make sure that we put exciting cards. Lands that we know will see Constructed play are one of the things that will be happy with, that is a card that has value that when you open a pack it’s a value card in your rare. And that we try to have balance, and so we tend to push things down when we need it for a Limited environment, when we don’t need it in the Limited environment we will push it up.

And this is the case right here, where we were squeezed at uncommon, we needed more spells and less land, we wanted to have the five spells vs. the land, we felt the land would do better at rare, it also was better value. So anyway, we pushed them up. So that is why they are separate.

I think in general, by the way, the reason people don’t quite get how good the scry lands are is that I don’t think people really realize how good scrying is. It seems pretty minor, but the thing about Magic is, since the game can often be decided—like a very common practice is when you lose, that you look at the next card on top of your library. And I mean it’s a bad habit because it teaches you bad habits, but you’ll notice on certain games, like, “Oh, the next card is the card I needed!”

So very much in Magic, there are games in which you are one away from getting what you need. And that scrying means that that doesn’t happen. It means at the end of the game, when you look at the top card of your library, if that would have helped you, you would have had that card in your hand. And so I know that scry 1 seems on the surface like it’s not that big a deal, but it’s actually a lot more powerful than it seems.

Also, something else funny is, we made Nykthos to be the top-down temple, because we wanted a temple. And then Creative decided that temples were important, and so these got turned into temples. So if we had known these were temples, we might not have made the top-down temple, which might have not led to Nykthos being made! So for all, it was probably good it happened this way, because Nykthos is doing good work. But it’s funny that we made a temple because there weren’t temples, and then Creative was like, “Oh, we need temples,” and then added more temples.

Next, Thoughtseize. Okay, so Thoughtseize is a powerful card from Magic’s past. When we were making Modern Masters, one of the cards—we made a list of cards that we knew players wanted, that we wanted to put in Modern Masters. But one of the things that Erik did is Erik said, “Okay. We wanted to make sure that there’s a few cards that we can put into normal expansions that Modern might want.” And so we held off, and we ended up holding Mutavault and Thoughtseize.

The reason Erik wanted Thoughtseize for this set was that we were messing around with enchantments, black has a weakness against enchantments, he wanted to make sure that black had a good tool, and that discard is one of black’s good tools against enchantments, because it can get them before they come into play, and so Erik decided this would be a good place. He thought that Standard could handle Thoughtseize. So anyway, Thoughtseize, one could argue might have been the first card in the set. I started design knowing Thoughtseize was in the set. And so it was there from day one, it never moved, and that is how Thoughtseize got there.

Oh, by the way, for those of you that are looking at your clock going, “This is a long broadcast,” because according to my clock I have passed the forty-minute mark. As I said up front, it is raining, it is raining hard. Maybe you can even hear it. Traffic is making it mega-slow. So I don’t know if I’m going to meet my all-time record. There’s no bread truck overturned. But I have a ways to go to work.

Which by the way, I’m going to finish this today. I am going to finish! But I have a long podcast. So a little extra-long podcast. See, not many podcasts turn traffic into awesomeness. This is that podcast. There’s my tagline.

Okay. So next is Titan of Eternal Fire. So Titan of Eternal Fire—so one the things that we did is we wrote down every single thing we could think about that would want to be in Greek mythology. Every character, every object, every place, everything. Every story beat from stories. We just wrote everything down we could think of.

And what happened was, we made a whole bunch of stuff. Now, some of the stuff ended up getting pushed back to later sets, so some of the stuff we made you’ll see in Born of the Gods or you’ll see in Journey into Nyx. Some of the ideas we had, the later teams would redo it, like our version wasn’t the best version, and so we ended up cutting it because it wasn’t quite shining, and then someone else goes, “Oh yeah, I have a better way to do it,” and we’d do it again later on. Some of them also didn’t make it.

When the dust settles, I know you’re going to say, “Where was blah?” I guarantee you, no matter what blah you name—I don’t guarantee, but most of the blah you name was tried. Most of the stuff that didn’t end up in the set, we did in fact try. For different reasons, the card just didn’t line up, or sometimes we had a neat flavor and we did a good top-down, but it just mechanically didn’t quite gel with the set. For different reasons, things didn’t quite make it. But I mean, there’s a lot more goodies in Born of the Gods and Journey into Nyx, as far as—I mean, “hey, remember such-and-such from Greek mythology.” We have some more top-down stuff that’s reminiscent, you’ll see.

But anyway, Titan of Eternal [Fire] is Prometheus. So Prometheus is a Titan. The Titans actually I think predate the gods [NLH—More or less correct..] He was one of the Titans. I believe Prometheus was the one who actually made mankind. Like molded them out of clay or something. [NLH—Yes.]  And so he was very possessive of mankind. The gods, they were like—I don't know, they liked to torture mankind. The gods had been very fickle.

So by the way, if you ever study Greek mythology, one of the things that’s very interesting is, the Greek take on the gods were “What would humans be like if they had god-like powers?” And their gods were very human in the sense of they reacted like humans. They were full of the emotions you expect. But the idea was, these were powerful gods, they could do anything, well what would happen if you could do anything?

And so there’s a lot of squabbling. A lot of the tales are sort of the fights between different gods. And the gods are petty in a lot of ways. That they are not all that lofty most of the time. Most of the time they’re getting caught up in their own petty things, and that’s the way the Greeks saw their gods, that the gods were kind of like them, but just all-powerful.

Anyway, Prometheus loved his people. And so he decided—at the time, I guess fire was a thing of the gods. The gods had fire. And so he realized that for his people to thrive they needed fire. For protection, to cook food, for warmth, for different things. And so he brings down fire to humans and gives them fire. And then, obviously he’s punished for it, he gets chained to the rocks, I talked about that in Chained to the Rocks, and then he later gets freed by Hercules, but anyway. That is the tale of Prometheus.  

So we wanted to make a Prometheus. And so obviously the thing we were trying to do is, “Okay, what does he do? Well, he gives fire to the humans.” And so we were real literal. Like, “What if he gives humans firebreathing?” That’s about as literal as it gets. “I will hand fire…” Because Alpha had a card called Firebreathing which (???) creature, you spend red mana, it gets +1/+0, Shivan Dragon, which was a dragon is clearly flavored as having firebreathing. It had that ability. And so early in Magic, it cemented the idea of red mana activation, +1/+0, that is firebreathing. And so the idea is, it is Prometheus giving fire to the humans. So that’s another card.

So one of the things that happened was, when I first started, in design we started with minotaurs really being the only tribe we were pushing. And then as we did design, we realized that there was just some stuff that wanted to reward humans. And so we did a little bit of human. Development would ratchet it up some. I mean, it was there in Design, but Development turned up the volume a little bit.

Next. The Triad of Fates. Okay, so in Greek mythology, there were three women. One was young, one was middle-aged, and one was old. And they spun the web of life. And so anyway, we knew we wanted to do the fates. We knew the fates—there’s three of them. But the fates are a single entity that have three components of it. And so it was important that we had the sense of three.

Now this card went through all sorts of changing. And in the end, we didn’t know what color it was. We kept trying to make things that make sense, and like the siren this is a card where we kept trying to do top-down. In the end we decided that it made a lot of sense if it was white/black. Only black the fates have this sense of they very much set order and they choose things, but they also kill you, they determine your death, so we felt like it probably had a neat white/black vibe to it.

And if you notice, there’s three different abilities on the card. And the idea is each ability goes along with one of the fates. One’s the one who spins the web. That creates life. And one’s the one that measures the web. And one’s the one that cuts it, decides when you die.

Anyway, that’s exactly us sort of messing around, and each of the activations represents each of the fates. And we liked the idea of fate counters because we wanted to sort of get across that these were the fates. Anyway, it was one of the trickiest cards. We knew we wanted to do the Fates on day five, and it took us to the end of design. This is I think pretty close to what we handed over. I mean, Development tweaked it some, but this was the design we handed over.

Okay, next. Triton Fortune [Hunter]. Oh, look, okay. So the second we decided—I mean we made heroic. Originally Heroic was +1/+1 counters. Then we decided we wanted to mix it up a little bit. And so once we knew that, we said, “Okay, well we’re going to have some colors more get abilities for the creatures, meaning that the heroic makes the creature better, and some are going to generate effects.”

And we decided that blue and red made the most sense. They’re the spell colors. And so it just made a lot of sense. It made a lot of sense for them to be where we focused that. And so obviously, the very first time—I talk about in red that whenever we use a new ability, and we put it in red, like the very first thing we just by default make is damage. Well, the same thing happens to blue. When you do a new ability and you put it into blue, the first thing that always happens is draw cards.

In fact, here’s something from the other side. If I had to list all the notes that I got from Development, and like wrote them down, and then I went back and I said, “Let’s collect and see what’s the most common note I get from Development,” the most common note might be “Too much card drawing.” Design loves card drawing. It’s fun, it enables you to do more stuff. But the problem is, card drawing is dangerous. I think in my article once I showed that like if you take all the cards that have ever been restricted in Vintage, like the tournament that’s the most powerful tournament, there’s cards that are so powerful you can only have one of them, like three quarters of them are card drawing. They’re all about card advantage. And it’s dangerous. I mean, blue gets to do it, it’s something we are allowed to do, but we’ve got to be careful with it.

But anyway, heroic was one of the key mechanics in the set. I really wanted to do something special. Draw a card made perfect sense, like “oh, every time you target it, you get to draw a card. Well, that’s pretty potent.” We tried it at common, the folly that it is. I mean, one of the things Design will do—oh, here’s a little thing, let me talk about this.

By the way, if I sound like I’m going off and just telling extra stories today, we’ve just passed the fifty-minute mark. I am nowhere near work. I am sitting in traffic. In fact, I am going to be late to my first meeting. And I should have been to work—you guys know, it takes me thirty minutes to get to work! So I have no idea—I don’t know if there’s an accident—maybe there’s a bread truck somewhere. But anyway, we are going to break the record. In fact, we are at fifty-one minutes. So before I go back to my podcast, we have now set a brand-new record for Drive to Work! I think the last one was like fifty-one minutes and… I don't know, thirty seconds? So we are—actually, we haven’t technically passed it yet, but we’re just about to pass it right now. But anyway, you are listening to the longest Drive to Work so far.

And here’s the funny thing, which is if this was a normal day, if I was just driving to work and I was this late to work, I’m late to my meeting, I’m sitting in traffic, I would actually be very upset. But, I’m doing my podcast and I love doing my podcast! So this is why I have two podcasts a week, because I enjoy doing it. It makes my drive to work more fun. Ooh, is this an accident? Ahh, it looks like there might be an accident. That might be why we’re so late. But anyway, we’ll see. What am I talking about? Oh, I’m talking about Triton Fortune Hunter.

Oh, so I’m talking about we love making card-drawing cards. So here’s the thing I’m going to talk about, which is one of the things I’ll do a lot of times in design is I will put things in common that in my heart of hearts I know aren’t common. But that I really want to understand how they work. I’ll give you a good example. Which is this card. I want a heroic that draws cards. In my heart of hearts, if you asked me, “Is that card going to end up being at common?” No. The card that’s Shock. Is that going to end up being common? No.

But sometimes I’ll put those at common because what I really want to see is, I want to see the games where those cards get drawn. Because those are going to be the exciting—the real exciting heroic games, that’s not going to happen all the time, the reason they’re uncommon is so it’s not a common occurrence—ooh, traffic’s picking up! I think I figured out why it was so slow. So I still have a ways to go but we are heading toward work.

Okay. So I will put things at common because I want to see the volume of them. And so that’s a very common trick is to take the things that you want to understand, put them at lower rarities so that in your playtest you raise their as-fan and it happens more, and then once you understand it, then you can raise their rarities. So that’s what happened with this card. Which is I knew it would do really good things, I knew that we needed to—especially in the white/blue deck—really encourage you. Like, the white/blue deck says, “I’m a heroic creature. And you want to target me as many times as you can.” You jam full your deck things that are going to target these things.

Well other things, like the white/green deck, oh the rewards you get, especially in green, is good enough that maybe, look, if you just target it once, that’s good enough, you don’t necessarily need to target it many times. But white/blue is like “No no no. I get this card (???) this card. I get this card out, and like, I want to target this baby as many times as I can target it. And I will put more instants and sorceries in my deck, because I want to get extra value to try to target these things.”

And then one of the reasons that’s awesome is, it just makes different heroic decks. It pushes you in different directions. But anyway, that card was a card we knew we were going to make. We made it very early. But it took a while to get there.

Okay. I’m on my last page! Which is a little tiny bit. I only have three more cards to talk about. And I’m not that far from work. Although we’re going to pass the hour mark? That’s my—we’ll see if we pass the hour mark. I’ve never ever—new frontier. I do want to get to work, though. As much as I’m enjoying my podcast. I would like to get to work! I’m going to be missing a meeting in two minutes. In fact, I’m missing Card Crafting, which is one of my favorite meetings, we talk all about very important things in how we do card design. And so I do not like to miss it.

Okay, next card is Underworld Cerebus. So when I made this card, one of the things I said to the team is, “Guys, there are cards we can try, there’s cards we can mess up on. But there are a few cards we just gotta nail.” When we were doing Innistrad, I said that was the werewolves. We’ve gotta nail the werewolves.

So this set, I go, “You know, one of the things—we’ve gotta nail Cerebus. Or Cerebrus? I think it’s Cerebus. [NLH—It’s Cerberus.] There’s a comic book that I always confuse it with. So Cerebus is—I think that’s the correct card name? If I’m pronouncing it incorrectly, pronouncing it like the character from the comic, I apologize, it’s my comic brain.

So [Cerberus] is a three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell! Or I don't know if they’re gates, but guards the entrance to the underworld. So we wanted to make a ferocious three-headed dog. And we knew we were going to do it. It’s one of the most iconic things there are in Greek mythology. Magic does monsters well. How could we not do the three-headed dog well?

And so we spent some time and energy. I was really happy with its design. I love the fact that it was cool, it made sense it was [Cerberus], it had a flavor with the graveyard. So anyway, I think it was very neat, and I’m happy that we spent the time and energy to get it right. And every once in a while we finish a card, and in design we’ll do a card and I’m like “Nailed it!” So anyway, this is one we nailed the card. That once we got it, “That is the card. That’s it. We got it.”

Okay. Next. Vanquish the Foul. So the interesting thing about this card was when we first decided—so one of the things that happens is, this card was influenced by packaging! So one of the things you do when you make packaging is you want to figure out—we’ll call it the “key art,” which is what do you want to see on the box?

So one of the things is you have a figure that there’s some—we call it face of the set. So Elspeth is coming—okay, Elspeth’s been dressed--and we’re like “Okay, what do we want to see? We want to see Elspeth dressed in like Greek clothing, holding like a spear.” It’s like, “I’m Elspeth.” Right? And one of the things we wanted was there’s a couple different—like the booster box, and there’s different boxes we have to make stuff for.

So one of the images we wanted was Elspeth with like a hydra defeated in the background. Because we wanted something that’s like, “Hey, not only am I dressed in Greek clothing, but I’m here, I’m in Greek world, and I’ve done something really Greek.” And so what’s a very powerful, tough creature to defeat? Well, we look at our iconics. And okay, dragons, cool, we do dragons a lot, but dragons, while they are in Greek mythology and that’s why we used them, they’re not as iconic Greek mythology. In fact, I have to tell people, “Yeah, they are in Greek mythology.”

So sphinxes are very much part of Greek mythology, but sphinxes aren’t really monsters. I mean, they can be, but we felt like killing a sphinx didn’t feel right. Demons, while they kind of exist, were not iconic enough. And there were no angels, because angels don’t really fit in Greek mythology. But hydras, oh, that’s one of the iconics! Defeating the hydra is like one of the labors of Hercules. It felt like very monumental. And so we decided that having Elspeth defeat the hydra was going to be something that we would show on packaging, it ended up becoming a key part of the teaser video beforehand.

But what that meant was, okay, we needed to show her beating the hydra. So one of the tasks that Jenna had for the card concepting is one of the cards has to show her defeating the hydra. That’s in the story, it has to happen. We want it, it’s going to be on the box, we’ve got to see it. And so Vanquish the Foul was the card where Jenna’s like “Oh, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Okay. Okay. This is the perfect place.” And she stuck it there. Put the art, and we got a chance to show her defeating the hydra.

Oh, the other reason, by the way, that we needed to do—a little (???) behind the scenes is, the way we do the videos ahead of time is we take the art that we’ve done for the card sets and we use different techniques, special techniques to give motion. But we need the actual paintings to be able to do that. And so they knew that they wanted to show her killing the hydra. So it was important to have that image so they could use that for the video. So some of the times, if they know the images they want for the video, they’ll make sure that we have images on the cards where they have the components available to make the video.

Okay. The final item on my list! By the way, if this had not been a crazy, crazy long day, I never would have got through my list? How are we doing? Oh, coming up on an hour. Holy moly. Okay, guys, hopefully my double-length podcast is not a problem for you. Because in twenty seconds, I will have been doing this for an hour. And I’m now late for my meeting. Anyway, thank you guys for sticking around for the extra, extra-long episode. I did not know when I left my house that the rain would cause such a delay. Although there was an accident. That’s why. Okay, guys, it is now (verbal fanfare) an hour long! You were here. You were here for the first time. Hopefully not a too frequent time.

Okay. Last card to talk about: Witches’ Eye. Okay, so if you watched anything with Greek mythology, we’ll use Hercules the Disney cartoon. So one of the things that Hercules did is they took the Fates and they took the idea of the eye of wisdom, they sort of combined them so there’s the three witches that share the eye. Those are actually separate things. The Fates are one thing, and then the witches that share the eye, those are different Greek tropes, but Disney combined them. A lot of people think of them as being one thing, but they’re actually not.

The witches with the eyes—I’m not even sure if there were three. There might have just been one? [NLH—There are three.] It was part of the Perseus story. Perseus is the guy who slays Medusa. He is trying to—I’m trying to remember the story exactly. He needs to get to Medusa, and he needs a special sword, and he needs a special shield in order to fight her. And along the way he meets the [witches.] And [they have] the information he needs. And he takes [their] eye, and in order to get the eye back, [they give] him the information.

But anyway, the Witches’ Eye, anyway, once again it’s one of those tropes that you see in Greek mythology, I mean Disney used it, it’s one of the tropes of Greek mythology. So we knew we wanted to do Witches’ Eye.

The funny thing is, we made a Witches’ Eye and I have no idea what it did. We just knew that we wanted Witches’ Eye. And then when Development added in scry, they said, “Oh, this is perfect!” It foresees the future. The idea of the eye of the witch is, and the reason Perseus needed to know this was [they] could see things that normal people cannot see. [They] knew things normal people cannot see.

One of the tropes, by the way, and this is not just Greek mythology, is the idea that they loved the idea that the person who could see the future is blind. It’s a trope. The idea that “I can see things others can’t see. But I can’t see what they can see.” And so this was a take on the trope. Obviously, I mean we have a card, a blind soothsayer in one of the cards. It’s a trope we (???) played up in the set. 

So anyway, when Development took it over, they decided, and they gave it scry. And so that’s how—I mean, scry is perfect, it’s exactly what the card needed to be. I don’t know what we did. We did something, because we made Witches’ Eye, Witches’ Eye was in the set. It’s in the file.

So anyway, I am very close to work! Man, I am a little torn here. Am I supposed to get to work or am I supposed to wrap up? I guess I will wrap up since I’m not supposed to end until I get to work. Even though today is a monster, monster podcast. Thank you for listening, guys.

So once I get to work, I’m going to wrap up right away, because I don’t need this to be any longer than it is. So let me wrap up by saying that Theros was my… seventeenth published Magic set, I believe? I think Gatecrash was my sixteenth, I did the Rosewater Rumble. So it’s my seventeenth published Magic set. And so I’ve done a lot of sets.

And it has really taken a soft spot in my heart. Both Innistrad and Theros, really, I believe that a lot of good Magic can be done that’s not top-down, but recently we were experimenting more with top-down. I feel like Innistrad and Theros firmly, firmly put us on the map and said that this is something we’ve learned how to do and we can do well. That bodes well for future top-down design. In fact, I can see the seven year plan, so there is future top-down design.

The reason we don’t do it every year is A. we like to change things up, I think what makes Magic special, it’s not all the same, and secondly, that there is not an infinite number of cool top-down things. I think horror and Greek mythology are two of the best because they are very deep and they have a lot of cards we can make and they have a lot of monsters, and a Magic set has a lot of requirements, and so to be able to pick something it has to be able to meet those. Not a lot of other ones do, so there’s not an infinite number of them, so we have to be careful and space them out.

Anyway, I had a blast making Theros. It was very fun. I’m very, very proud of it. It’s probably one of the best sets I’ve ever done. I think it and Innistrad probably fight for the best set I’ve ever done. I mean, Ravnica gets in there.

But anyway, I’m tickled pink that I got to be part of it. I know this was a very, very long series of podcasts, I never, ever thought I would do eight and secretly I did nine and called them part eight because I did two in one. But anyway, I was very happy to do this, I hope you guys enjoy this mega, mega podcast series. Please give me feedback. I probably won’t do anything this long until I hear from you guys again whether I should.

But ahh, I see Wizards, and I’m late for a meeting! So guys, thank you very much for being here, thank you very much for listening to all the Theros podcasts. But I really, really, really need to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.