12/21/12 Episode 13: Unglued

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

 Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! So we all know that means it’s time for Drive to Work!

So today, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite sets of all time, Unglued. And I’ve worked on a lot of sets, and I love all my children. But Unglued is one of my pet favorites. So let’s talk about sort of how it came to be, and—because it’s a very different set from a lot of other sets I’ve done, obviously.

So let’s talk—in the beginning, where did the set come from? Okay, so at the time, it was after Tempest was done, I was now a designer, people were thinking of me as being someone who did design. And so Joel Mick and Bill Rose came up with an idea for a set. I think at the time Joel Mick was still the Head Designer and Developer, I think it was still that early. Joel would later go on to become the Brand Manager of Magic, but I don’t think that had happened yet.

So they had come up with this idea for a set that… I think their idea was it would have a different color border, because it would be cards we couldn’t normally make. Now, they were very vague on what that meant. I think the idea was a set that sort of broke boundaries in some way and allowed us to do things that we were normally constrained from doing.

And so they came to me as kind of the out-of-the-box guy and said, “We don’t really know what this means, we don’t know what to do with it, but we’re looking for a set that is just—it doesn’t have to follow the rules of a normal set.”

Now, I think they were thinking more of things that like maybe the rules had trouble handling with—I’m not even sure what they meant. But the interesting thing was, what they came to me was that—very loose. Was like, “Okay. Different color border, which means you can do things that we can’t normally do.”

Now. I said, “Okay. Well, what do I want to do?” So the thing that inspired me, of all things interestingly enough, was I used to do magic. (Part II) Not the card game but actual like “poof,” you know, “here’s a dove.” Although I never worked with doves. But I did magic for kids mostly. I did kids’ shows. And I would—I took a lot of lessons. And so one of the things that I did, is I did a bunch of card tricks.

So there was this product, that there was this brand of card people that made card tricks, and all of their cards looked the same because that was the brand of cards they were. And so they had a deck of cards that each card just did weird things. Like, “Look. It’s a black Three of Hearts. Oh look, it’s a Nine and a Half of Clubs. Oh look, it’s a blank card. Oh look, it’s—half of it’s Ace of Spades and half of it’s Ace of Hearts.” It just was a whole deck of weird cards.

And the idea was, “Hey, here’s neat things, you can come up with tricks you can do, we’ll just kind of give you a smattering of neat things, do whatever you want to do.” And that inspired me to say, “Well, what if I made this set that just kind of did weird things, and we’ll let players do with it what they will?”

The other thing that I really embraced, which wasn’t actually given to me as a constraint, but it’s who I am is, I loved the idea of a parody set. Of a set that kind of had a sense of humor to it. Now, obviously my background’s in comedy writing, so I’m sort of like, “Well, if we’re going to break rules and stuff, maybe we’ll also break the rules of flavor. That we’ll have a different tone to it.” And so I came up with the idea of, “Let’s make a set that’s kind of fun,        and…”

Because one of the things I really wanted to do with the Un-set, which I think it actually did a good job, or all the Un-sets so far, both Unglued and Unhinged, is say, “Hey. Yes, you can be very serious about Magic. There’s tournaments. There’s all sorts of formats you can play where if you want to test yourself, Magic provides that.”

But I really wanted to say, “Hey, you know what? Magic is also fun. And it’s goofy. And you can be casual about it.” And I wanted to make a product that said, “Hey, remind people that this was something that could be fun.” And so I really wanted to have a tone of the whole product that said, “Hey… don’t take Magic so seriously.”

So the idea I had was, “Okay. I’m going to break every boundary I can.” And so I did that a couple ways. Now first off, I did not have a traditional design team like you think of nowadays. The way it worked is, I just went around to everybody, R&D and other people in the company and said, “I’m doing this wacky set. If you have an idea, send me your ideas.”

And so what happened was, the design team was kind of whoever wanted to give me stuff. And then I took it and I tweaked it. And the other thing I did a lot of was trying to figure out where we could have fun.

So first off, I said, “Okay,” I went and looked at cards that already existed. We could parody existing cards. That was one space. And then I started saying, “What could we do that normal cards can’t do?” And I started looking at the rules. And I went to the rules people, I said, “Okay. Give me all the stuff someone’s tried to do that they can’t do.” I took all that stuff.

I also sat down with some of the graphic artists. So Dan Gelon, he’s an artist, works at Wizards doing graphic design. And Dan was my graphic designer for this set. And so Dan and I worked a lot with trying to come up with a look and feel for the set. And I’m not sure if it was Dan’s idea or my idea, but we came up with the idea that, “What if the art in the set broke the frame?” That one of the ways to tell that this is not your ordinary product is, the art isn’t limited to the art box, if you will.

And so one of the defining qualities of the Un-sets, of Unglued and later of Unhinged was that the art itself kind of was able to break out of the art box. And not only that, the way I thought of the Un-design was that the card had a cohesive whole to it. That if the card was doing something, the whole card committed to that thing. That the graphics weren’t just an art thing.

For example, if there was a card where—I think it’s Ashnod’s Coupon? [NLH--Once More with Feeling] The card itself limited itself—or was that—I forget which card it is. There’s a card that had a sticker on it, like, “I’m restricted.” But the errata is stickered on the card. And that was part of the effect of, “Well, we do this, instead of just telling you it’s one (???), I’ll have the whole joke of ‘Oh, it’s errata’d onto… there’s a sticker with errata.”

And also I sat down with graphic designers, and I said, “What visually can we do” And so they explained to me that because of the way we lay out cards on a sheet, we actually could have art cross over between cards. So for example, Free-For-All, there’s a fight between the leprechauns and pink elephants. And there’s a leprechaun being knocked out of frame. 

Then, on the card I’m Rubber, You’re Glue, that leprechaun has been knocked into that frame. So he was knocked off his card onto another card. And because the two were next to each other, we could do stuff like that. We could cross over the art. Which is something we never normally could do.

The other thing that got suggested to me was the idea that because art could carry over, I got the idea of, “Well, could we have a card that was bigger than a single card?” To which they said, “Oh yes.” And that’s where BFM came from, which is the idea that since we could cross over cards, we’re like, “Oh, well it would be kind of neat to have a creature so big that it’s bigger than a single card.” And I really latched onto the idea of a card that’s two cards. 

And it’s funny, by the way, originally it was 100/100 creature with trample. But we decided, for some odd reason, that this set wanted to follow the core set rules rather than the expert expansion rules. I don't know why that’s the case. Since so much about the set is so weird. But instead of trample we had the “must be blocked by three creatures.” Because at the time we weren’t doing trample in the core set. I don't know. Weird things. Also, Bill Rose asked me to change it from 100 to 99 because he didn’t want to break the three-number barrier just yet. So that’s why it’s a 99/99, not a 100/100.

So a lot of the cards, we were trying to think of how we could stretch boundaries, how we could do things. So, like, Mirror Mirror, by the way, I really wanted to do the entire card in mirror image. But I was in the minority and enough people talked me out of it. In retrospect I wish I had. I think what we did is the text is mirrored, like “Mirror Mirror,” there’s “Mirror” and then a mirrored version of it. But yeah, I really wish I had mirrored—one of the things I love about Unglued and Unhinged is how many jokes we sort of cram into the set.

So one of the guidelines, by the way, when we made the cards, is the following rule. Which is I wanted things to be funny, but it couldn’t just be funny. Meaning I didn’t want to make a card that’s funny for two seconds and then it had no play value. That the card had to be funny but also play interestingly.

And we messed around a lot with the kind of cards we could do. If you look at Unglued, for example, we had five cards that were multiplayer cards. Which they were designed to be played in a multiplayer game. We had tokens, which I believe is the first time we ever did tokens. And if you notice, in Unglued, I didn’t put any power/toughness on them, and I didn’t even label them, because I wanted them to be a little more open.

So for example, we had a soldier token, but like “Is it a citizen? Is it a soldier?” Like, it could be any kind of human that you could make. And we assigned them to colors that those colors would make those tokens. I remember we went around and around on what tokens to make. I ended up having to make squirrel tokens because that set made squirrels.

So one of the ongoing things that I believe strongly about the Un-sets is they have proven to be great proving grounds. To sort of advance work. So much stuff we’ve done in the Un-sets have gone on to become staples of Magic. The token cards are a perfect example, where like I was just trying to do something neat and different, and now it’s just something that—every pack has token cards in them.

Oh, the other thing is the lands. Let me talk about the lands for a second. So what happened was, Chris Rush, who’s the artist that did Black Lotus, and numerous other cards early in the game, used to work at Wizards. And he and I were traveling to some event, I don't know, Origins or something, and he started talking about how he had this awesome idea for land cards.

And what he said was, he said, “Look, everyone knows what land cards do. Why don’t we make use of the whole card? Like let’s take the illustration and just make the whole card the art.” And that people know what they do. You see the word “Forest” on them. And I always thought it was a  neat idea, but somehow Chris never made it happen.

So I’m like, “Okay.” I was trying to do different things. I go, “It’d be neat if we do lands, and make the lands kind of different.” And in the end what we decided to do was, we put lands on their own sheet so they could be black-bordered. Because we decided, “Oh, well this is something that anyone could play with.” Because it wasn’t limited. So lands looking different didn’t cause any problems in actual play. And we decided to put one per pack because we thought it would be something kind of cool that everyone would enjoy.

And then in Unglued, I sort of made them as big as I felt made sense. And then it’s funny, because in Unhinged, I’m like, “You know, we could go further.” But in Unglued, I like a lot sort of the sense of it opened up the idea of full-frame art. And we would go on to obviously do full-frame art. Zendikar did full-frame lands, we’ve done full-frame art for promos. And that’s another thing we’ve kind of experimented with, that really sort of opened up what Magic cards could do.

Now a lot of the things for me—some of the cards were things that I’d tried to do in normal Magic, and just never quite made it in. But a lot of the cards I did were more me saying, “Well, what space can we goof around in?” So let me just talk about a few of the cards, because…

So one of my favorite cards, it may be my favorite card, I love this card so much, is the card Squirrel Farm. And the idea was that I liked the idea of a card that allowed you to put a skill that you might have that Magic cards never test. And that skill was knowing artists. 

And I built a Squirrel Farm deck when the set came out. So I’ll get back to the Squirrel Farm deck in a second. So the prerelease, which was at Gen Con that year. I built the deck to go play at Gen Con. That’s where my story is going.

So let me explain this real quick. And then I’ll get back to Squirrel Farm. So we were having this meeting about what to do—we decided that instead of having a wide prerelease, we were going to have a single prerelease. It was going to be at Gen Con. And I was going to go. I was very excited. And my plan was, I was going to Head Judge it. For those that don’t know, once upon a time I was a Level 4 judge. I used to judge the feature match area, I was in charge of the feature match area at Pro Tours.

And so I was very excited. I’m like, “Okay, I’m a qualified judge, this is my set.” And I wanted to make sure that the set at the prerelease captured the essence of what we wanted the set to be. Meaning I really wanted to make sure we played up the fun of it.

So we were having some brainstorming meeting about what to do at the prerelease, how to make it different. So you understand at a brainstorm, you’re just tossing out ideas. Right? So if someone says, “Oh, we could… have confetti,” or someone else is like, “Oh, maybe we can have people change seats,” or… people were just throwing ideas out.

Now, the set has this theme of chickens. Which I will also talk about that in a minute. So in the middle of the meeting, we’re just brainstorming, I’m like, “I could Head Judge in a chicken suit!” [Scroll down] The meeting comes to a halt. Like it stops. And they’re like, “Okay, yeah, that’s what we’re doing.” Like, “I thought we were brainstorming!” “No. You’re Head Judging in a chicken suit.” And I’m like, “Okay…”

So anyway, so then we rent a chicken suit. Actually, I got a chicken suit. Which by the way, gave me, like… I wore the chicken suit for the whole thing, and I ended up getting really sick because there was dust I guess on the feathers. And I got like pneumonia or something from it. Not that I wouldn’t have done it again in a heartbeat, but I got really sick being the Head Chicken.

And then the way we ran the event was that we made up a list of things you got tickets for. And the tickets were for crazy weird things, clucking like a chicken if you had a card that made you cluck like a chicken, or just pulling crazy things off. And if you did that, then you got a number of tickets, depending on how hard the thing was to do. And then at the end, we raffled off lots of prizes. 

Oh, and also winning a match got you a ticket. So winning did something for you, but it really wasn’t by far the only way to get tickets. There were a lot of ways to get tickets. And so we really were encouraging players to have fun and embrace it.

And, by the way, the audience took to it, like that was an amazing prerelease. I mean, just people were having a great time, and they were just wholeheartedly embracing the spirit of the set. Which was awesome.

 In fact, here’s where I knew I had made a mistake… I’m walking down, and I hear the following: the first person says, “Okay, I attack you.” And the second one goes, “Wait, wait, wait. In response to your declaration of attack, I remove my pants.” I’m like, “Uh-oh.”

So Hurloon Wrangler, which has denimwalk, one of the things I was trying was, I wanted to make some simple cards. And so one of the ways to do that         was to take basic abilities like landwalk, and just tweak them a little bit. And so I was thinking, “Well, what is a common occurrence that might happen?” Like, “Oh, well your opponent might be wearing jeans.” It never dawned on me, as God as my witness, it never dawned on me that people would take off their pants.

Now, I know in retrospect that if I thought about it for just really five seconds, I guess I could see that coming. I honest to God… but here’s the funny thing. So I didn’t think people would take off their pants. But I did actually have a card in the original design that made people take off their clothes. Kind of.

It was called, “Disrobing Scepter,” like “Disrupting Scepter,” and the way it worked was that when you used it on your opponent, they’d either discard a card or remove a piece of clothing. I think in my head I thought it might be something… I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, Brand rightfully killed the card.

I would later put the card in Unhinged just so Brand would kill it again, just kind of tradition. But anyway, Disrobing Scepter did not make it. Hurloon Minotaur did, although like I said, I did not anticipate that card… anyway.

Oh. The chicken theme. So, for some reason, when I started making cards, I made a parody of Rukh Egg called Chicken Egg. So Rukh Egg’s a card from Arabian Nights that got repeated in a couple core sets, that basically put in play, it’s an egg, the egg hatches, and it’s a Roc, I believe.

So I had this idea of making a Chicken Egg. I thought it was a funny parody. And I confused everybody because the token didn’t fly, even though the Rukh token flies. But it was a chicken, and I’m like, “Chickens don’t fly.” But then I later learned that chickens do fly, although not very well.

And then from that, I decided to make a cycle of chickens. And so you’ve got Free-Range Chicken and Mesa Chicken, and then once I had the chickens I decided to make a Lord of the Chickens. Chicken à la King. Which I think that that joke came from my wife. My wife did a bunch of the jokes in the set. I think Chicken à la King was her suggestion.

I think Chicken à la King might have my favorite piece of flavor text in the set, where it talked about during the Chicken Revolution… I don’t remember the quote. But it joked around about how he kept his head but everyone else just ran around. Because they’re chickens with the heads cut off.

And I love Chicken à la King, and anyway, once I realized there was kind of a mini chicken theme, it started snowballing. Somehow, I guess we told some of the artists there was a chicken theme. And so some of the artists started putting chickens in their art. And anyway, the set ended up having a mini chicken theme. Which obviously is why I dressed as a chicken for the prerelease.

Which led to one of my odder occurrences at Wizards. So I’m walking down the hall one day, and Joel Mick, the guy who at the time was the Head Designer and Developer, who was one of the people who gave this project to me, stops me in the hall and goes, “Mark, I have to ask you a question.” I go, “Yes.” He goes, “Are chickens funny?” And I’m like, “What?” He goes, “I see there’s a strong chicken theme in Unglued. Are chickens funny?” And I’m like, “Why, yes they are. For example, the classic comedy tool, the rubber chicken.”

Like, I’m defending chickens to Joel. Like, you know, the staple of comedy. Now, luckily for me, chickens are funny. So I was able to defend it. But it was this very serious, like, Joel meant it. He was like, “Am I using the right tool? Are chickens funny?” So I was able to defend chickens.

And back to Squirrel Farm. See, I’m jumping around. By the way, for those who want to go, “How does Mark Rosewater’s brain work?” this is what the podcast is for, because I… “Bing, bing, bing!” I’m just jumping around. This is how I think all the time. I’m just talking aloud. So you guys get to experience the chaotic mental processing of me.

Okay. So anyway, Squirrel Farm. So I liked the idea of making a card that rewarded you for knowledge that wasn’t something that normally you get rewarded for. And so I loved the idea of, “Okay, well do you know your artists?” I think art is a huge part of the game, obviously we had this wonderful (???) of artists that do our art. They do an awesome job. And I thought it would be fun to hey, pay them a little due. Like, “Hey, do you know your artists?”

So the fun for me is, I made this deck for… so what happened was, I was going to Gen Con, the prerelease was one day, but the rest of the time I was going to be there, I was going to gunsling. I was going to gunsling with Unglued decks. And so I made a Squirrel Farm deck.

And so the key to the Squirrel Farm deck was, other than my four Squirrel Farms, I believe that I—I tried not to—I had a lot of one-ofs. And even cards where I had duplicates, if I could, I would have multiple pieces of art. So the deck just had all sorts of different pieces of art. Because what I learned is, a lot of people don’t know their art. But that wasn’t the best part of Squirrel Farm. That wasn’t the best part. I could get lots of squirrels.

The best part of Squirrel Farm was showing them a piece of art, and then figuring out how long you had to wait before you could show them the same piece of art. And my best, the fun of my deck was, I would get so many squirrels off the same cards. Like literally I’d have three or four cards in my hand, I just would rotate between them. And part of the skill of that deck was learning about how long people could process before you gave enough information that they forgot something they had learned three minutes earlier.

Because like, once—first of all, I show them the first time, they don’t know it, okay, like “Okay, okay, it’s Dan Frazier. Okay, Dan Frazier.” And then I’d wait long enough, like, “Who was that again?” And then  “Okay, I’ve got to remember. That’s Dan Frazier.” And then I’d mix it up a little bit, they’re like, “Who is that?” Like, “Dan Frazier.” “Aaah!” You know. Anyway. I enjoyed my Squirrel Farm deck.

Another deck I had, which I had a lot of fun, was Mine, Mine, Mine! which was a card in which it allowed you to take all your library and put it into your hand. In fact, by the way, the art for that, the guy in the art is Dan Gelon, because he did the card art, and he was the guy who did all the layouts, I explained, so that is a little teaser.

Oh, by the way, Dan Gelon, because he was both an artist and the guy working on the set, he did a lot of in-jokes. One of which was the Wheel of Fortune parody. Strategy, Schmategy. All of the—there is a wheel, and all of the things on the wheel were the different suggestions for the Unglued expansion symbol. Obviously we went with the egg to match the chicken, but that was all the different things that was on there.

And once again, I talked about this earlier but let me stress this again, one of the rules about Un-sets is, I just try to cram in as many jokes as I possibly can cram into a set. That I just—I look for every nook and cranny. There’s jokes in the art. There’s jokes in the flavor text and… oh wait. I’ve got to talk about the secret message. I have not talked about the secret message.

Okay. So, one of the ideas I had when we were doing this is, I said, “Okay. I want to cram lots of stuff in here.” So one of the things I decided is, “I’m going to make a secret message. And I’m going to hide a secret message in the cards.” Now, at the time, Magic had never done a secret message. And so I thought it was pretty cool to say, “Okay. I’m going to put something in there.”

So what we did was, down by the legal text, we put a word after the legal text. A little tiny thing. And then for Unglued, I made it simple. It was just in collector number order. Just put these together, collector number order. You had to notice it exists, then you had to think to put it together. And then, we talk about a lot of things, but I wanted to sort of maximize the jokes.

So what we ended up doing was, the hidden message was, “Here are some cards that didn’t make it.” And then some of them were actual cards I tried to get in that the name was funny but the card wasn’t funny enough. It didn’t play funny. Some of them were just, I don't know, names I thought were funny. I think Disrobing Scepter might even be there. [NLH—Yes.] Anyway, so I stuck the hidden message in, and—I mean, that’s the kind of thing the set was doing. I just was like, “What else could we do?”

And the other thing that I tried to do a lot of was I tried to play up a lot of different kind of jokes. Like one of the jokes I’m very proud of is a card called, “Bronze Calendar.” And the card is called Bronze Calendar, and it was a takeoff on Stone Calendar. And so Bronze Calendar did what Stone Calendar did, which is it made your spells cost one less, but you had to talk in a silly voice because it was Un. It also—I made it cost what I always wanted Stone Calendar to cost, because I love Stone Calendar but I thought it was one too expensive.

But the art shows a bronze colander, not a calendar, even though the name is Bronze Calendar and the flavor text makes some silly quote about—making fun of the kind of stuff we write. I had a lot of fun with the flavor text, by the way, I was in charge of the names and flavor text. Of trying to write—like trying to parody the style of names and flavor text that we do.

Like one of my favorites is… Lexivore? [NLH—Yes.] The one that eats his own card. And on it there’s a piece of flavor text you have to read, because he’s eating his own flavor text, so you had to piece it together. And we did this thing during Mirage where we would like have some thing and go, “Elvish expression for blah blah blah.” And so I was like, “Flinging the monkey’—Elvish expression for ‘Plucking the Chicken.” And each name was circular and didn’t make sense to each other.

I feel like I’m just throwing cards out here. So Mine, Mine, Mine was one. Incoming! Oh, I loved Incoming! So Incoming! was the one where just, you went through your library, you got any number of permanents you wanted and put them into play. I made a Squirrel Farm deck, for example, when I went to Gen Con, I made an Incoming! deck. And my Incoming! deck killed you with BFM, I believe. It would make a BF come into play and then I did something to give it haste. Oh, probably… anyway, I did something to give it haste so I could attack with it right away. Incoming! was fun.

The other thing for example that we did, and Incoming! demonstrates this is, something that Dan Gelon did, which was awesome, is we did a lot of texturing. For example, if you look in the rules text, the text box, there’s footprints behind it. This is before, by the way, before we did watermarks and stuff. That the Un-sets… and once again, paving the way for lots of different things. The Un-sets were doing textured backgrounds. And like, Incoming! has footprints in the background where you see something running.

And one of the things that was fun, the way Dan and I worked is, he would print up the card and show it to me. And I would make notes, and I’m like, “Oh, could we… this joke would be funnier if we did this, and this is funnier if we did that.” And we kept going back. And finding new ways to break up things and new ways to change things.

Oh, another thing that we had a lot of fun with is we felt like we sometimes would use the flavor text to make visual treatments. The example there is the Giant Growth… you roll the dice and a Giant Growth. I’m not great at names at times. But anyway, the flavor text for that was a personal ad from the elf, I guess, who had been super-sized, Supersize being the Unhinged version. And it was like, “Single white elf,” or whatever. But it looked like a little newspaper. We did a lot of that kind of stuff.

Oh, here’s another funny story. So, after we did Unglued, we did market research on it. We do a godbook study. And so the number one most disliked card was Blacker Lotus. For those that don’t know, Blacker Lotus is—it’s a lotus that gives you four mana, but you have to rip it up to use it. And the second worst card is Chaos Confetti. Chaos Confetti was—there’s this urban legend about a guy who took his Chaos Orb and to win a game, ripped it into confetti and used its small pieces to destroy his opponent’s entire side.

So… I believe Jeff Donais actually gave me that card. Someone who used to run tournaments for Wizards. Was our tournament manager for a while. And anyway, the card was a common, and kind of just was having fun, like, “Hey, relive the urban legend,” essentially.

And one of the things, by the way, that I love, is like that card… Mark Tedin, who did the original Chaos Orb, came and parodied his own work. And that was a lot of fun. I loved—the artists seemed to have a lot of fun with the set. Which was really cool. And I loved that.

Anyway, so we did this. Number one worst card on the godbook was Blacker Lotus, number two             worst card was Chaos Confetti. And the people doing the research came back just like, “Oh, yeah, but we can’t find any correlation between these cards. Because we’ve looked at their flavor text, and this and that, and their names, and neither one seems to have a dislike in the same area, people seem to like the art…” I’m like, “So you can’t see why this is number one and number two.” I’m like, “Well, perhaps you’re not like, you know, reading the cards.” Anyway, it turns out people didn’t like to rip up their cards. Who knew.

And we had some other mechanics we messed around with. We did dice rolling, that was another big thing. I really like dice rolling. I thought--dice rolling did fair in our godbook study, not great. Oh, here’s another funny story, speaking of dice rolling.

So Elvish Impersonator was one of the cards. And Claymore J. Flapdoodle, who by the way, just for the record, I think it’s very unfair that he steals so blatantly from the lovely stylings of… I remember Claymore J. Flapdoodle, and I’m blanking on a wonderful artist that did lots of Magic art in the early days. Phil Foglio. I am a little offended that Claymore J. Flapdoodle so blatantly stole what I felt from the working of Phil Foglio.

But anyway, so we get the sketch in for Elvish Impersonator. And he had done early Elvis. Leather jacket, and I’m like, “No no no no no, look, Elvish Impersonators, like, they do old Elvis.” Like, when you think of stereotypical—so I wrote back, because I was doing all the card concepts. So one of the weird things about this set is I did the card concepting, I did the names, I did the flavor text. And Unglued was like, I was the guy doing everything on the set. I had a lot of people give me stuff, so I had a lot of people submitting things, but I was in charge of all the decisions going on. Like, I was doing the layouts, because I was helping with Dan, you know, making notes on that.

Anyway, so I actually wrote back to Claymore, and my note was, “No no no, old Elvis.” So he came back, and gave us old Elvis. I think there’s some young Elvises in the background, maybe. His little nod to wanting young Elvis. Mostly what I said is, “Old Elvis is funnier.” You know, we were trying to do comedy.

And a lot of the set, by the way, like Joel stopped me in the hall, it’s funny that, like I said. My background’s comedy writing. I’ve done improv. I’ve done standup. I’ve written for sitcoms. And so I mean I have a lot of background in comedy. And like, normally in Magic I don’t get that much opportunity to sort of use my comedy chops, if you will.

And so it was a lot of fun to just sort of go to town. I mean, I love Magic dearly, and to me, to truly, truly parody something you have to love the thing you’re parodying. Because I feel like you have to really know it well to be able to parody. And I had just tons and tons of fun with Unglued just going all over the place to try to just get in every little joke that I could. Like I said, part of it was being able to make fun of the style of naming we did or the style of flavor text we did. Because back then I was doing flavor text all the time.

Anyway, so I put the set out, we go to Gen Con, we have an amazing, amazing prerelease, and what I found was, the set found its audience, and it kind of connected with people in a way that few of the sets that I’d done had, and that—especially the first one. Because once we did the first one, then people knew we could do it. Where when we did the first one, hey, it didn’t exist yet.

Like, that’s one of the important--my little design lessons snuck in here, that it’s very hard sometimes when you’re doing something to understand that people don’t know what they don’t know. Your audience doesn’t know. And that when you show them something that they’ve never seen before, they don’t know it’s possible. They don’t know it can be done until it’s done.

Sometimes, for example, we’ll come up with Thing A and Thing B. And Thing A is, we think, better than Thing B, but Thing A isn’t working. And it’s hard to go to B, because A seems so awesome. But it’s like, “Well, the audience doesn’t know you had A. They never saw A. B is awesome. B will be fun to them. Don’t kill yourself because you know A exists.”

But anyway, the set came out, the response was—I mean, with the target demographic, I guess I will say phenomenal. Phenomenal. Now, a lot of people did not like the set, because hey, it really is not meant for everybody. There’s people that take their Magic very seriously, and here’s a set where people were taking their pants off and rolling dice, and ripping up cards.

Another big thing I tried to do is I wanted to have a strong physical component. I wanted to have a lot of verbal components. Oh, here’s another good story. I feel like today is just, “Oh, here’s a good story.” Knight of the Hokey Pokey. So the artist was named Kev Walker. For people that know their art history, very, very big influential Magic artist. One of the best artists ever to do Magic cards. He’s an amazing artist. One of the real top cream of the crop.

So he was given the card Knight of the Hokey Pokey. Now he is English, for those that don’t know this. So he wrote back to our… who was the art director at the time? Jesper Myrfors, maybe? [NLH—Not sure.] Anyway, I’m not sure who was the art director at the time. But anyway, it came back and the note was, “What is the Hokey Pokey?” Because the art description was, “Show this knight dancing the Hokey Pokey.” And so we had to call him up, and the art director had to say, “Okay, well see, you put your right hand in, you take your right hand out…” Anyway, they had to describe to him what the Hokey Pokey looked like so he could draw it.

And like I said, the thing that was hilarious for me, that was a lot of fun, was, right. I could make you cluck like a chicken or do theHokey Pokey or balance things on your hand or hold your wrists together, or like Censorship. 

Oh, here’s another good story. So Censorship’s art, I believe the card was in Exodus, I think? [NLH—Yes, Keeper of the Mind.] And there’s a woman, and we ended up cropping the bottom part of her because it was a little, I don't know, too revealing or something? They decided to crop the art because they felt it wasn’t appropriate. So what we did is we took the cropped out piece of art, and then blurred things and then censored it, basically. But the art to Censorship is a censored piece of art. That’s the kind of jokes, people. That’s the kind of jokes that we’re putting in.

By the way, if you want—if you go online, I forget the name of it. I wrote an article in which I highlighted I think 100 jokes from Unglued that you might not know. Like the fact that Bureaucracy literally is held up with red tape. Or that Spark Fiend spelled backwards is “Kraps” because the card made you play craps.

That’s another one, by the way. Spark Fiend is one where I knew I wanted to have a little tiny art box and a giant text box, and I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do. But like I eventually came up with the idea of “Okay, we’re going to play craps. We have dice. Let’s play craps.” And then Spark Fiend… spark spelled backwards is craps, although with a k, but we thought if we spelled it with a c people would get confused how to pronounce it.

But anyway, if you read that article, I have lots of jokes and I explained them all. Like I said, I don't know, it was one of the most satisfying sets I’ve ever done. I think both because I just had a blast doing it, and because it kind of meant so much for me. I mean, I like competitive Magic, I’m glad Magic is something people can really demonstrate what they can do at, and I’m glad there is the Pro Tour and all that.

But to me, in my heart, Magic is fun. Magic is something I’ve always enjoyed just enjoying. And that to make a set which really climbs the building and screams at the top of its lungs, “Magic is fun!” I’m just glad to have a big part to do with that. And Unglued was—like I said, one of the most personal things I’ve ever done. One of the things I’m proudest of. It’s had a huge impact on Magic. It’s funny how much—every time I go to pitch a new Un-set, I hit the point of, “Look, we learned so much from Un-sets. Un-sets are kind of like beta—the ultimate beta test where we try things and to the point that the audience tries them too.” And I really believe that Un-sets are an awesome thing. I love the message they give. I love what they do for design. And it was awesome. I really enjoyed doing it.

I am now at work. In fact, I’ve been at work for a couple minutes here. That’s why today’s is slightly longer than normal. Also, it rained today. You know why today’s was a longer thing? Because Seattleites cannot drive in the rain. But today’s an extra-long special thing because it was an extra-special set. So I’m here, I’ve got to go, I hope you enjoyed my talk on Unglued, and it’s time to make the Magic cards.