8/15/14 Episode 148: Unhinged Part II

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. Last time, I started a podcast on Unhinged, where I was going to go through every card in the set, all 140 cards, and then talk about the set through the cards. So at the end of the podcast yesterday, which was a slightly longer-than-normal podcast, because I went to the dentist, I—sorry, last time you heard my podcast, I got through 18 cards out of the 140. So I did some math, and I realized that if I kept at the same pace, I was going to have more podcasts than I did on Theros. Or close to what I did on Theros. And that was a little long.

So I’ve decided I’m going to continue, but I’m picking up the pace. So I think as I get to things where I’ve already told the major part of the story, I’ll mention the card, but I’m going to try to tell more stories of the cards that matter, and I might be speeding through a few cards just because I want to get through all the cards, but I want to do this not in 8,000 podcasts. So bear with me.

So the first card today is Cardpecker. Which is one and a [W] for a [1/1½] flying creature, and it has gotcha. And whenever the opponent touches the table, you get to get the card back from the graveyard.

So what gotcha is, let me talk about gotcha. Gotcha was a mechanic where if you did the thing that gotcha says you’re not supposed to do, your opponent could say, “Gotcha!” and then get the card out of the graveyard, put it back in their hand.

I think I talked about this in my Lessons Learned. Of all the things I did in the set, this mechanic was the biggest mistake of the whole set. And the reason was, one of the fun things about Un-sets is just the wacky things that you get to do. And the fun, and you want to make something that’s just enjoyable and fun. But in order to avoid the gotcha, what you needed to do was kind of shut down. Don’t talk. Don’t move.

You were so concentrated on—the problem I learned is, when we were playtesting it, our attitude was, “Whatever, we’ll just do what we try to do and have fun and see if we can also not do the thing we’re supposed to do. Oh no, we did it, ha ha.”

But the people that were trying harder not to do it like just, if you don’t want to say a word, don’t talk. If you don’t want to laugh, never try to joke about anything. And like, we did things that just made people shut down. And that’s bad. The mechanics of the fun set should let you have fun and laugh and do things. Anyway, that is definitely one of the things that we try to do, and I feel like gotcha was a mistake. I’ll talk about other gotcha cards as I get to it.

Next is Carnivorous Death Parrot. Carnivorous Death Parrot! That’s hard to say. 1U for a 2/2 flier, and at the beginning of every upkeep, you have to read the flavor text of this card. “Save a kill spell to deal with this guy.”

So this card, a lot of people didn’t realize the joke of this card, which was the flavor text that you have to recite has one word from each—there’s a cycle of five cards at common that are word-based gotcha cards. One in each color. And the parrot makes you say one word that triggers each of the gotcha cards.

So the idea was, if this thing’s in play, you can’t avoid but to trigger the gotcha stuff. So that’s kind of what was going on. Because normally a 1U 2/2 flier is pretty good. But you had to remember to recite his flavor text, it’s a little bit of memory, and it played against the gotcha cards. So that’s what we were doing with Carnivorous Death Parrot. And it’s a parrot because you have to keep repeating the same thing. That’s why it’s a parrot.

Cheap Ass! So Cheap Ass was 1W for a 1/3½, spells you play cost ½ less. So the interesting thing about this cycle, the ass cycle, if you will, was I figured out different expressions using the word “ass.” This one’s Cheap Ass, we had Bad Ass I talked about last time, and then I figured out what the card did based on that.

This card just took advantage of fractions, as fractions were something unique to the set, the thing I liked about fractions was it allowed us to do cards that were relatively simple. Because just referencing fractions was enough to be an Un-card. And so—this card’s one of those cards, by the way, that like in number starts to do something, usually reducing it by ½ isn’t particularly—I mean, it does allow you to get if you have like, normally you couldn’t cast it because you’re one mana shy, this lets you do that. So it did help you cast spells. It was particularly good when you got multiples out.

Cheatyface! So Cheatyface technically costs blue blue blue for a 2/2 flying creature. And you make sneak it into play at any time without paying its mana cost. A lot of people misunderstood--misunderstand this card, not past tense, currently misunderstand this card. What the card lets you do, and the templating of this could have been better is, here’s what the ability of the card is. If it is in your hand, if you legally got the card in your hand, it’s in your hand, you are allowed to try to sneak it into play. If you are able to sneak it into play without them noticing, then it stays in play. If not, then it gets removed from the game.

So the idea essentially is, it’s a card that’s free if you’re able to sneak it in. But the penalty is, if they catch you, it goes away. A lot of people seem to think this card says, “You may cheat in any way  you want, any how,” and like that’s not actually what the card says. If you are doing something else with Cheatyface, you are actually cheating.

Now, maybe your playgroup has a house rule that lets you do shenanigans with Cheatyface, and that’s fine, but be aware if you’re at a tournament or you’re someplace where you’re following the official Un-rules, this card allows you to cheat it from your hand, where you legally drew it, into play. It does not allow you to just cheat however you want to get it into play.

The funny story—I mean there’s lots of funny stories from Cheatyface, one of my favorite stories is, Randy Buehler was playing I think it was at the prerelease, or he was playing Unhinged, I’m not sure where he was playing. And the way he managed to sneak it in is he had his daughter, his baby daughter with them, and she was sitting next to him, and so he snuck it in under his baby daughter. I always thought that was good.

Next is Circle of Protection: Art. So it’s 1W for a Circle of Protection, as it comes into play you choose an artist, and then you can prevent damage [from] that artist. Also, you can spend—so 1W to prevent damage from the chosen artist, and 1W to return the card to your hand. The reason you return it to your hand is so that you can reset thee artist.

So it’s funny. The original version of this card was done by Pete Venters, and it was a wizard protecting himself against famous “bad” art from Magic. Bad in quotation marks. But things that players have often thought of as not great art.

When we redid it—because that was done for Unglued 2. It ended up being—it changed, the new version now protects you from classical artworks. But I think the alternate one might have been done on a promotional card. [NLH—Can’t find anything] [NLH--Update 8/31/14, found it! It's by Mark Tedin.]

Anyway. Next. City of Ass. Oh, there are eight ass cards! So there is Assquatch, there is the five-card cycle, there’s Ass Whuppin’, and there’s City of Ass. So City of Ass comes into play tapped, and you tap to add 1½ colors of mana. Now, when this card originally came out, the game had mana burn. So the idea was, the 1½ was meant to be kind of a penalty, because often a lot of the time you were taking half mana burn.

 

Now, in some ways this card is just better than City of Brass , because City of Brass you take a damage for every mana you get, and this only gave you half a life damage for tapping it. Now, with mana burn gone, the card’s even better. In fact, it’s pretty good. And it’s just a City of Brass that doesn’t hurt you, and if you have multiples or you’re playing Un, where you have Un-costs. It allows you to get extra stuff out.

Oh, by the way, this card art was done by—I think it’s John Avon [NLH—Yes], and it’s very, very funny. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of subtle butts in it.  For those that enjoy subtle butt humor. And the reminder text of this card is, “But…” B-U-T dot dot dot.

Next, Collector Protector. 3WW for a 2/5 creature, for a human gamer. And then for a white, you can give an opponent a nonland card you own from [outside] the game, and prevent one damage. Now by give, it’s permanently—you’re giving away, “Here’s a card, I’m never giving that card back.” One of the things that we do in silver-bordered sets that we don’t do in black-bordered sets anymore is permanent change of ownership. That’s something that we do not do in black border. Ante cards used to do that, we don’t do it anymore.

 

So the idea of Collector Protector is, I just give away excess cards I don’t need to protect myself. Also notice this is creature type “gamer.” At the time I explained last time that this was actually adding real creature types to black-bordered Magic  because at the time, silver-bordered creature types counted, they don’t anymore. Sadly. But anyway, I did add gamer, I thought gamer was a fun one to add. That you could use your Volrath’s Laboratory to make gamers, I thought that was hilarious. Okay. Oh, by the way, the flavor text of this card is, “Here, have a Mudhole.” Mudhole is one of the cards I made that’s considered one of my worst designs ever. From Odyssey. Although it was a rare.

Creature Guy. Three and a green for a 3/3 creature with gotcha—whenever your opponent says “creature” or “guy,” then you get to say “gotcha” and get this back. So one of the things we did is, the words that you couldn’t say, we made—I believe they’re in the name, so not only are you not supposed to say these words, but if you reference the card by name you’re saying the words. As part of the joke. So like you  can’t say, “creature” or “guy,” well those are the two words you can’t say. And he’s a beast, by the way.

Also, this cycle has a limerick on it. We did a limerick in the previous set, in Unglued on the double cards. So we decided to do another limerick. So there’s a limerick on these cards.

Next, Curse of the Fire Penguin! 4RR. For a card that nobody understands is enchant creature. So here’s what you’re supposed to do with Curse of the Fire Penguin. When you cast Curse of the Fire Penguin, you turn it upside down, and notice that this card fits over a normal card. It’s got a creature type line, a rules text, and a power/toughness. You’re supposed to take all three of those elements and place it on top of the card you’re enchanting.

So the card you’re enchanting now becomes a 6/5 creature with trample, and… what does it say? When the creature dies, you get Curse of the Fire Penguin back. So the idea is, I spend my six mana to turn a creature into a 6/5 trampler. And then when that enchanted creature dies, I get back Curse of the Fire Penguin.

So why, why didn’t we make it clearer in—what happened was, we couldn’t find reminder text that fit. Notice because we had to fit the room to fit the upside down card to go on top of the card, we only had two lines of rules text. They tried and tried and tried, and could not find two lines that actually did it. So we decided to go with the more funny, didn’t quite clearly explain it because we couldn’t explain it clearly, and so we went with more of a “Let’s make it kind of fun and weird.”

It is one of the cards that’s confused the most people. I was hoping that the layout would help explain to people, that if you see you turn it upside down, that it fits right on top of the card, but anyway, that’s what you do.

Next, Deal Damage. 2RR to deal four damage. With gotcha, if you say “deal” or “damage.” So this is another card that has the limerick on it. And it’s another one of the cycle of gotcha “say two word” cards.

Next, Double Header. 3UU for a 2/3 flying creature. When it comes into play, you may unsummon a creature that has a two-word title. So this is a card that’s making reference to the number of [words] in a title. Something that can’t be done in black border, because in black border, all cards are equivalent. So whether you have your English version or a non-English version, it’s all the same. So it couldn’t be like, “Well, in English it’s one word, but in French it’s two words.”

That doesn’t work in Magic. If it affects one card, it always affects that card in the same way. It doesn’t matter in black border what version you’re playing of the card. Silver border, it matters. Note that this card, by the way, does itself have a two-word name. So you can do shenanigans. Where it can return itself. So you can spend three mana if you need to trigger something, or… we purposely gave it a two-word name. And Double Header was cute. Notice that it references the fact that it gets two named things, but itself is a creature with double heads. Anyway.

Next, Drawn Together. This is a white enchantment for two white white, as [Drawn Together] comes into play, choose an artist. Chosen creatures by the artist get +2/+2. This card was illustrated by Pete Venters, and it is full of all the different cards Pete Venters did. So if you’re a fan of Pete Venters—Pete Venters, for a while, I don’t think this is true anymore, for a while was the artist that had drawn more Magic cards than any other artist. I think other people have passed him. I think—he might still hold the title. He’s made hundreds of cards.

But anyway, Pete had a lot of fun with this. Pete also did the Circle of Protection—Art, he did this one. Pete Venters used to, by the way, work at Wizards. He was on the creative team. For example, the era of Tempest, he’s the one that did the names and flavor text and card concepting for Tempest, for example.

Anyway, Drawn Together was another of our artists matter cards, the idea is, “Oh, well if you play…” This is if you play a creature deck all by people—the same artist, +2/+2, it’s very, very good. So it’s another thing to push you in that direction.

Duh. So this is a black instant for B that says, “Destroy target creature with reminder text.” And then the reminder text reminder text, because of course you have to have reminder text to tell you what reminder text is, says, “Reminder text is any italicized text in parentheses that explain rules you already know.”

That’s us making fun of—a lot of people dislike reminder text. The reason is they find it insulting that we have to tell them, and I keep trying to say to them, “If you know what it means, the reminder text isn’t for you.” But there are people out there that really, really get upset by reminder text. And I mean, we don’t stop doing it because the people who need it, and I don’t care that the people that don’t need it get frustrated by it. Because it’s not for you. So stop reading it. There’s not much I can say.

This also has—the flavor text on this is a Post-It note. Also, if you notice in the art, by the way, that the creature in the art, it looks like lightning, but the creature in the art is being squooshed by parentheses. By like lightning parentheses. But they’re parentheses. Making fun of the reminder text.

There’s a lot, by the way—you really gotta look at the art in Unhinged. The art has really got in on the jokes. And there’s a lot of really, really fun like—if you just kind of look at what’s going on. And the fact that like the guy who does like reminder text, he’s being crushed by parentheses. It’s funny.

Next, Dumb Ass. So this is part of the ass cycle. So this is 2R for a 3½/2, at the beginning of your upkeep, flip a coin. If you lose the flip, target opponent chooses whether Dumb Ass attacks each turn. So the idea is, half the time—2R for a 3½/2 is a very good-statted creature. The downside is, half the time you don’t get to control whether you attack or not. And it’s got two toughness, so a lot of times it’s like, “Oh, I can block and kill him, okay, I’m going to make you attack.”

So the idea is—once again, this is top-down from the name “Dumb Ass,” “What would Dumb Ass do?” I’m like, “Well, what if he was powerful, but not real smart? And that was our…” The other thing that we did was we didn’t do any dice-rolling in Unhinged, but we did a little bit of coin-flipping. Randomness is fun. I look back at Unhinged and I go, “Maybe I made a mistake, maybe I just should have had dice-rolling in it.” I like variance, especially in silver-bordered sets, but anyway, this was top-down Dumb Ass.

Next, Elvish House Party. Four green and green for a */* creature, and [Elvish] House Party has power and toughness equal to the hour, using a 12-hour system. So here in America, we have one through 12 a.m., one through 12 p.m. And so whatever hour it is, if it’s 11:42, it’s an 11/11. It’s 2:33, it’s a 2/2.

And so one of the things that’s fun about this card is it matters when you play it. Obviously, black-bordered card never does it, but something in silver-bordered card we don’t do that much is the idea of—for example, if you’re playing this card either at noon or at midnight, it’s a 12/12! It’s really good for six mana. But if you’re playing this at one, it’s a 1/1, that’s a horrible cost for [six] mana. So there are some fun stories for example of somebody playing in a tournament that began at noon, and it’s like 12:59,  and so they’re casting spells and doing things because the only way to deal with the thing is to get the game to 1:00.

Next, Emcee. Two and a white for a 0/1 creature. Whenever another creature enters the battlefield, you have to say “Now…” What is it? “Now entering…” Oh, “Presenting…” and you say the name of the creature, and it comes into play with a +1/+1 counter.

So this is a good example of a card we can kind of do in black border Magic, but with a little added something that we can only do in silver border Magic. And we could make a card that just has, “All your creatures come into play with a +1/+1 counter.” But we decided that to make it a Un-card, we added a vocal component, because there are things in silver border that care about what you say, and we like the idea that you could forget. You had to remember to do this.

And it also—one of the things that’s fun is we like you to do things in which it makes the overall thing fun. And when you’re playing in a tournament and you hear people, “Presenting…” we do a bunch of things where if you’re playing in an Un-tournament, that there’s just things going on around you that you understand what they are, but it’s fun hearing other games happening. And that’s a key part of it.

Enter the Dungeon. Black black for a sorcery. Players have to play a sub-game of Magic under their table, starting at 5 life. Using their libraries as their decks. And then after the subgame ends, the winner gets to go through his library and Demonic Tutor for two cards, basically. Go get two cards.

So we did a subgame… each of the Un-sets has done a subgame. The subgame was first done by Shahrazad, , Richard did it in Arabian Nights, and a subgame is “Stop this game, go play another game, and then come back.” Once More with Feeling was a subgame in Unglued, Enter the Dungeon.

 

So somebody—we wanted to do a subgame… I’m trying to remember who came up with this. The idea was, let’s do a shorter subgame, so only to five life. Just so it’s not as long. One of the problems with subgames is they take forever. Like, okay. Let’s do a shorter subgame, and we were just trying to find a way to add a little spice to it. And… I don't know if it was me? Somebody came up with the idea of, “Let’s make you play under the table.” Because most of the time you’re playing on a table.

Oh, which the rules question is, “What do you do if you’re not playing on a table?” And the answer is, “Do the best you can.” My favorite is if you’re playing on the floor, if you’re capable, go to the floor beneath that. But anyway, do the best you can, improvise if you’re not playing on a table.

But anyway, this definitely led to a lot of fun. I know when I did the Unhinged prerelease, I judged it dressed as a donkey. I made numerous rulings under the table. Which is always fun. I always climbed under the table, when there was a ruling under the table I climbed under the table. And the art is of two wizards actually fighting under a table. If you’ve never noticed that.

Next, Erase (Not the Urza’s Legacy One). 2W. If you control one or more permanents that share an artist, you may play Erase (Not the Urza’s Legacy One) without paying its mana cost.

Okay. So the key to this card is that it’s free if you happen to have two permanents that share the same artists. One of the things that we were trying to do is, in Unglued, I wasn’t as conscious about making it self-sufficient for draft. Partly because of how long it was, and partly because I thought you’d be drafting other things.

What I realized after Unglued is no matter how much I told people that you could mix it with other stuff, people liked to play it by itself, so we built this one so that if you play it by itself, the things you needed were there, and it needed enchantment removal, I made this card, tied it into the artist theme.

The funny thing is the card was originally called “Erase,” because if you look at the card art, there is literally an eraser erasing what’s going on in the picture. And then after I made the card, I discovered that there is already a card named Erase in Urza’s Legacy. And then I said, “Okay,” and I embraced that, and so I just changed the name to “Erase (Not the Urza’s Legacy One).” But anyway, that’s one of those happy coincidences where like that name is so, so much better, I’m kind of happy it was in Urza’s Legacy.

Next. Eye to Eye. So this is another cycle. We had a minigame cycle where you had to stop and play a minigame. So this one is two and a black, you and target creature’s controller have a staring contest. If you win, destroy that creature. Now, I, by the way, am not particularly great at starting contests. I’m okay. But not wonderful. But the idea was there’s a cycle of cards, one in each color, I think they’re uncommon, where—stop the game, do a little mini-subgame, a subgame that’s not very long, not a Magic subgame, but a different game. Black is a staring contest.

Face to Face. Oh, so you can tell the cycle, they’re all “Blank to Blank.” Body part to body part. So the next one is Face to Face. It’s the red one, 1R, you and target opponent play best two out of three Rock, Paper, Scissors. If you win, it deals five damage to that opponent. So it’s a Lava Axe for [three] cheaper, but you have to win two out of three Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Okay, Farewell to Arms. 1BB for an enchantment. As Farewell to Arms comes into play, choose a hand attached to an opponent’s arm. When that chosen hand isn’t behind its owner’s back, sacrifice Farewell to Arms, and if you do, the opponent has to discard his or her hand.

 

Oh, so the idea is, one of the black subthemes in the Un-sets is physical stuff, where it forces your opponent to have some physical—well, either it forces you to do some physical constraint, or forces your opponent to do some physical constraint. It adds a little physicality to Magic. Normal Magic play does not have a lot of physicality. I mean, early, early Magic was like Chaos Orb but we stopped doing that, so definitely—I don’t do a lot of it, and it’s related to one color, so if you really hate the physicality stuff, I mean your opponent might play it, but you stay out of black. Or just don’t play the cards you don’t like.

And this one was definitely fun, where it makes you not be able to use one of your arms. If you play two of these cards, you can make someone not use both their arms. The one nice thing about it is, it does have a buyout clause, which is if you just don’t want to do the shenanigans, there’s a cost to buy out—just, “Okay, just throw away your hand.” Then you don’t have to do the shenanigans. So another very common thing for this card is for someone to use up their whole hand, have an empty hand, then use their arm because there’s no longer a downside.

Fascist Art Director. 1WW for a 2/2, WW, Fascist Art Director gains protection from the artist of your choice until end of turn. Oh, by the way, the flavor text is I believe a letter to I think the parents—Jeremy Cranford was the art director at the time, I think it’s a letter to his parents talking about how he’s cruel and he’ll make a good art director. Anyway, we were just having fun, we were trying to poke fun at ourselves. So there’s different roles. So the art director is someone who the person picks what artists do what card. So we do a lot of behind-the-scenes things here, you’ll see in a minute we’ll get to another—there’s a bunch of cards here, like the first Unglued reference, the Ultimate Nightmare of Wizards of the Coast Customer Service, that’s part of the team. This set references editors and R&D, anyway, we kind of like making references of this.

 

By the way, one of the funniest things about this card is, read the board behind the guy. Ed Beard, who did this art, Ed “Feed Me” Beard, Jr. He put a lot of funny things on the board. You want to read it.

So by the way, you might notice that all the names have little nicknames. And so because it was an artist matters set, just for a little fun, we let all the artists have nicknames. And the way it worked is, we told each artist they could pick their own nickname. If they didn’t want to pick their nickname, we picked one for them. I think we then ran it by them. But anyway, just to play up the artist theme we gave all the artists nicknames. And I think if an artist shows up multiple times, each card it gets a unique new nickname I think is how we did it. [NLH—Yes.]

Next is “Fat Ass.” Fat Ass is 4G for a 2/3½, it gets +2/+2 and trample as long as you’re eating. So the funny story behind this card is, we have a whiteboard in R&D where occasionally we’ll write up questions. A lot of times they’re serious questions, but sometimes they’re goofy questions. And I put up on the board, and this was an actual question, is “Is gum food?” So the question was, if you’re chewing gum, should Fat Ass get its bonus. And we eventually ruled no, in the FAQ, gum is not food. And that you had to actually be eating something. You can’t just be chewing gum.

And the idea of this card is it’s a meta card, which is like, “Okay, if I want to maximize this card I need to have food.” So normally when you go to a Magic tournament, the list of things you need to bring are like, “My cards, my deckbox, my counters. Maybe a [die] to roll, a pad of paper to keep your score.” Ah, but at an Unhinged tournament, you need to bring extra things. Like for example, some food to eat.

Next, First Come, First Served. 1W, the attacking or blocking creature—it’s an enchantment. The attacking or blocking creature with the lowest collector’s number has first strike. If two or more creatures are tied, they all have first strike.

So the idea here is—this is a good example of a white card. That on the surface, it feels like it’s trying to be super even. But did you happen to notice that white comes first on collector number? And so I wanted to do a card that cared about collector number. I just was trying to find different things about the card to care about. Collector number’s not something that you can care about in black border.

And so the idea was, “What if we did something in which collector number mattered?” And so the idea was the lower collector number the better, ironically—I mean not ironically, but in a cute way, it’s a white card but “Hey, white gets the bonus. Oh, isn’t it convenient that white happens to be lowest?”

Also, you’ll notice in line, those are all creatures that begin I believe with the letter A and B. Or actually might all be the letter A. I think what we did is we told the artist, “Have all these creatures standing in line,: and they’re all creatures recently—in Magic’s not-too-distant past at the time that started with A.

Next, Flaccify. 2U, counter target spell unless its controller pays 3½. So this is another one of our simple fraction cards. You can kind of tell why I really liked having fractions in the set. It allowed us to make a lot of really—I mean relatively light text cards. And Flaccify is one of those. I mean it’s just very straightforward.

Next, Forest! Okay, so one of the things we did in Unglued was we had full art frame basic lands. It was an idea I got from Chris Rush, Chris Rush, the artist who did Black Lotus among other things, had always wanted to do it. I loved the idea. When I was looking for something different to do with Unglued, I got the idea of full art land.

So this time I wanted to do full art lands again, but I wanted to do something a little different, so I decided to push it a little more. How full art could we go? So it turns out, by the way, I got down to two versions. There was this version, that had a little teeny tiny border, and I had a version that had no border, that just literally went to the edge. Same art, obviously. I had John Avon do the art, John Avon does amazing art. And so I went to our art director and go, “Please please please, let John Avon do the art.” And he did. And John Avon did amazing art.

So one of the things that happened was, we decided to do the—I mean it was my call, I chose to end up with a tiny border because I showed it to a lot of people and there were just a bunch of people that felt like without the border it didn’t feel like a Magic card. I personally liked the no-border one better. I thought aesthetically it was a little cooler looking. But I ended up going with the border because enough people made the comment that it didn’t feel like a Magic card that I changed it.

Next, Form of the Squirrel. G for enchantment, as Form of the Squirrel comes into play I put a 1/1 green squirrel token into play. You lose the game when it leaves play. Creatures can’t attack you, you can’t be the target of spells or abilities. You can’t play spells.

So the idea is, you turn into a squirrel. This is a play off of Form of the Dragon. This is the card that caused the most problems in templating. For a while it was like—my favorite template that we didn’t go with was like, “Put a squirrel token into play. This is you.” Or “It’s you.” Or whatever.

And the idea essentially is, when you play this you become a squirrel, and you’re just super vulnerable, but no one can harm you because now you’re the squirrel. There’s weird combos you can do with this card, and just trying to win with it’s fun. It has some uber-Johnny qualities. I also thought it was very funny. I’m not—we don’t do squirrels in black border right now, or not in normal expansions, and so in Un-sets I always try to put squirrels in just because I think squirrels are funny, and they make sense here! So I always try to make a few squirrel references in any Un-set I do.

Fraction Jackson! It’s two and a green for a 1/1½, for green, tap, return target creature with a half on it from your graveyard to your hand. So we did a lot of fractions, so I wanted to make a build-around-me fraction—I wanted you to build a fraction deck. And so in order to do that, I needed to have a card that made you want to play a lot of cards with fractions. So this seemed like a nice clean way, it’s a green card that gets fractions back. Obviously it has fractions, so it gets itself back.

Fraction Jackson, by the way, is a play on a movie starring I think Carl Weathers [NLH—Yes], Action Jackson, which might be a somewhat not-well-known reference, but that’s what the reference is.

Okay, I am at work, but because of my quest, I’m going to do two more cards, and then I will call it a day. Actually, I’ll do three more cards. Then we’ll get through the letter F. So I’m going to sit in my parking spot here and quickly do three more cards just so we can get through these. Because I don’t want this to be a forever number of podcasts.

Framed! is 1U, tap or untap all permanents by the artist of your choice. Flavor text is, “Who knew an 8” by 10” could feel like a 2” by 4”?” That’s a very funny flavor text. So the idea is, it’s a piece of art that looks like a normal Magic art, but then someone is framing it, literally putting a frame around it in the art. I thought that’s cute. And it has an exclamation point. It’s one of I think three cards that have exclamation points. [NLH—Seven, two in Unhinged.] Un-sets like exclamation points. This is another artist matters card. Pretty simple and straightforward.

Then we get Frankie Peanuts. One of the legendary creatures! 2WW, 2/3, at the beginning of your upkeep—it’s a legendary creature, elephant rogue, at the beginning of your upkeep you may ask target player a yes or no question. If you do, that player answers the question truthfully and abides by that answer if able until end of turn.

Frankie Peanuts is a very fun card. The reason it’s legendary is I didn’t want you to have more than one in play at once. That said, there’s lots of shenanigans. I just got an interesting question online on my blog about Frankie Peanuts and Staying Power. Yes, they work. Yes, if you have Staying Power out and they answer a question, they are obliged to follow that question to the best of their ability for the rest of the game. A combo for you.

Frankie Peanuts has gotten a lot of questions. People are always like, “Can I do this? Can I do that?” And the idea is that this card is supposed to let you set up some fun things and ask people questions. There are some mean things you can do with the card, (???) doing the mean things, and I made it legendary to lessen the number of mean things you can do. But anyway. I think Frankie Peanuts is a lot of fun.

Finally, Frazzled Editor. So Frazzled Editor is a 1R human bureaucrat, 2/2, it’s got protection from wordy. So this actually, ironically has errata. Frazzled Editor is the card that the text is written incorrectly, ironically not on purpose. Protection from wordy is not supposed to count flavor text. It’s how much text you have on your card that’s actual rules text. Not flavor text.

Anyway, this card definitely—make sure you read the flavor text, its flavor text is a… there’s some spicy jokes in this set. Because I try to do my family-friendly podcast, I’ll just say read the unedited version of the flavor text.

Oh, I will mention by the way that all the text, all the writing, all the editing that’s done on this card was actually done by Del Laugel, who is our editor. So the Frazzled Editor is edited by our actual editor. Her husband is Randy Buehler, who at the time he did the writing on Look at Me, I’m R&D. And so it’s cute that the two cards with writing on them by R&D folk were married. So anyway. Little… for you.

Anyway. I’ve gone through F, so I’ve ended on Gleemax. Next time, we’ll talk Gleemax. So hopefully, at my faster pace we will get through this. I hope you guys are enjoying our trip through Unhinged. This is one of my favorite sets, so it is really, really fun to talk you through.

Anyway, I’m now in the parking lot, which means it’s time for me to be making Magic. Thanks for joining me, guys.