8/15/14 Episode 149: Unhinged, Part III

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. The last two podcasts, I’ve been talking about Unhinged, and today I’m going to continue! So so far, the plan I I want to do all 140 cards, and so far I’ve done 49. Which means I’ve got to kick this into gear. Because I’m trying to make this not too many podcasts. So I’m going to go through them pretty quick. So if I have—my goal is to talk about every card, but some cards that I made most of the things I’m going to say, I’ll get through them quickly.

So we’ll start with Gleemax! Gleemax costs a million to cast. You heard me, one million. Legendary Artifact, and you get to choose all targets for spells and abilities.

Okay, so Gleemax, for those that don’t know, way way back in the early days of the internet, back when we had what we call the Usenet, which was kind of like bulletin boards was the early internet. Where people could post messages. And there was a man, I believe his name was Jeff Franzmann, who was making a joke about R&D and claimed jokingly that R&D was run by an alien brain in a jar called Gleemax.

That became a running joke to this day, and the idea that R&D is run by the alien brain in the jar called Gleemax. And this card is making fun of that.

I knew I wanted to have a card in the set that was worth some crazy amount of [mana.] Essentially a card that you could only cast with infinite mana. And we toyed around what to [cost] it, and finally I decided that a million just sounded cool. So this card has a CMC of a million, which allows you to do some fun stuff with it.

And I wanted to do something pretty impressive. And flavor, because the idea is, Gleemax in flavor controls everybody with mind control. So the current version lets you choose all targets for everything. But originally the card was you tapped it to win the game unless an opponent paid you a dollar. But the powers that be didn’t want that to be the card. And so I changed it.

This current card, the idea is, once you get it out, it’s not that your opponent can’t win, but it’s really, really hard. Although getting a million-cost artifact is tough. Now, there are ways built into the set to do it. Meaning there are combos built into Unhinged that allow you to play this card. So even in Limited. I’ve seen people play Gleemax in Limited.

And the flavor text is funny. It talks about how we’re all trapped, and the only way for us to get outside help from the world is Gleemax’s blatant disregard of flavor text.

Okay, next. Gluteus Maximus. 3GG for a 5/5, it’s a creature that when you come into play you have to pick a finger, and that finger must be touching this card or it gets sacrificed. I said last time, or two times ago that most of the physical stuff was in black. That was slightly incorrect. Green has a little bit of the physical stuff.

Green definitely has a flavor of things that there’s some restrictions built into them. These are the creatures that come with restrictions. Where black more has other kind of spells that force your opponent to do physical things.

This card’s shtick, by the way, is that it’s made of glue, and so different pieces of the card have stuck to it. So for example, its power/toughness box isn’t where it’s supposed to be, it’s ripped off and stuck to him. So a lot of people get confused about how big he is. But he’s a 5/5.

Goblin Mime. So 1R for a 2/2, when you speak, sacrifice Goblin Mime. So this card is an example of a card that plays around with the vocal aspect. So one of the things that we do in Un-sets that we don’t do in black border is, vocalness can matter. So like when I talk about Ach! Hans, Run! Or Emcee, those cards are close to something we do in black border. The only thing that’s different is they have a vocal component. In order to use those, you must say something.

Well, with Goblin Mime in play, either you’re going to lose the Goblin Mime or you can’t get the benefits. So those things—that’s how those things aren’t completely black-bordered, they are silver-bordered is, the vocal component—cards like Goblin Mime can interact with them, or Censorship is an Unglued card where you take damage for saying certain things

The coolest trivia about Goblin Mime is that one of the things I try to do is I try to put jokes throughout this whole set. So there are jokes through every aspect of the set. One of which is there are jokes in the foil printings. So if you ever get a premium version of Goblin Mime, the normal version, the goblin’s trapped inside an invisible box. Well on the premium version, he’s trapped inside a premium box. The premium treatment has a box around him.

So that is one of the many jokes. Like I said. There’s jokes in the legal text on the box, there’s jokes everywhere. In fact, as I’m going through this I’m going to point out a lot of the jokes that exist for people that might not know.

Goblin Mime is one of the five cards, by the way, in which we did this promotional thing where there was alternate art for five of the cards, and all the art that we used was art that we had for Unglued 2, so we already had the art. The red one was Goblin Mime, the green one was Granny’s Payback, the blue one was Mise, the white one was Circle of Protection: Artifacts, and the… what am I forgetting? The black one was Booster Tutor.

Okay. So let’s move on… Goblin S.W.A.T Team. So 3R for a 2/2, but if you say Goblin S.W.A.T. Team and your opponent doesn’t notice you said it, you get to put a +1/+1 counter on it. This card is a fun little minigame. A lot of my favorite cards are just ones in which it’s a little game you’ve got to play.

So this game is, I put this card out, it’s a 2/2. Four mana for a 2/2 is nothing special. But if you manage to say the name of the card and your opponent doesn’t realize it and swat the card, it starts getting bigger. And so the game with this card is to try to sort of casually reference the card in a way that the opponent forgets that they have to do it.

And I’ve had a lot of fun times with Goblin S.W.A.T. Team. Goblin S.W.A.T Team, it’s a very interesting little minigame, because if you do it too much, you constantly remind your opponent that they need to swat it. So you’ve got to be careful not to do it too much, but you want to do it enough that you have opportunities to try to make it bigger.

Goblin Secret Agent. So this is 2R for a 2/2, first strike. At the beginning of your turn I think you have to randomly show a card from your hand. So this card kind of breaks the rules. One of the rules of Un-sets is it has to be something we can’t do in black border. I’m not sure we would do Goblin Secret Agent, the flavor, in black border, but we for sure could do the mechanic. So this card kind of breaks the rules. That really, really this shouldn’t be silver border.

I mean, there are a few cards where we kind of justify with flavor, this is one of them. The purist in me says, “Oh, I really think—I wish I had done something so the card mechanically was just over the line to the Un-world.” I do like that the entire text box is a secret agent card showing the guy. So I think that’s cute. Instead of “license to kill” he’s “license to be killed.”

Okay, next. Granny’s Payback. Granny’s Payback is seven and a green for a sorcery that says, “You gain life equal to your age.” So Avatar of Me tended to reward—was slightly better for the younger player. Granny’s Payback is much better for the older player. I have played Granny’s Payback on numerous occasions.

Because no matter what—even if you’re in your teens, it’s worth something. But it’s like me, you’re in your forties, it’s really good. My favorite part of this card actually is in the—instead of having flavor text, or in place of flavor text, it looks like a comment field like we have on Multiverse, our database for cards, and in it the—Brandon Bozzi, who’s BB, who’s on the design team, has a quote like, “I don’t get it, all these components don’t seem to come together. It’s about gaining life, and there’s a granny killing things…”

And then my response is, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in flavor text.” Which is a joke in that oftentimes when things don’t quite make sense, it’s the job of flavor text to take disparate elements and make them make sense. So anyway, a little meta-joke.

Graphic Violence. Two and a green instant, all creatures by the artist of your choice get +2/+2 and trample until end of turn. So this is another artist matters card. Cute thing about this card is its flavor text looks like a warning, like on a pack of cigarettes, talking about the Dominarian Surgeon General.

Anyway, in looking back, this is one of the ones where we have white card that permanently grants +2/+2 and then a temporary +2/+2, I wish the numbers had been a little different just to differentiate the card. I might have made this card a little bigger just so it would be a little more… maybe +3/+3.

Under the current color pie, by the way, +2/+2 to the whole team is now white. Green has to get +3/+3 or bigger. So this card has a few issues long-term.

Okay. Greater Morphling. So Greater Morphling is six blue blue for a 5/5 creature with…. One two three four five six seven abilities. So if it can gain any—it lists a whole bunch of keywords, which it can gain. The reason that it can’t just say, “Gain a target keyword” or “target creature with a keyword” is the rules don’t allow that. So whenever we have you gain a keyword, we have to spell out the keywords. So we listed all the keywords that were available at the time.

It can become the colors of your choice, it can have the expansion symbol of your choice, it can gain the artist of your choice, it can become +1/-1 or -1/+1 like the original Morphling, or it can untap like the original Morphling.

And like Unglued, Unglued had a card called Spark Fiend, in which it was a giant text box with a little wee teeny-tiny art box. This has the same kind of joke. The art box isn’t quite as Spark Fiend, but the idea is that it’s such a big text box that the Greater Morphling has to peek out his head because there’s not room for the art.

 This obviously for those that don’t know is a reference to Morphling from Urza’s Saga. And I try in the Un-sets, I like doing some parodies of famous existing cards. So this is one of them.

Next is Head to Head. Head to Head is one of the five alternate subgames. Not—Enter the Dungeon is a Magic subgame, but there’s five that you play different games. So I’ve talked about I think we’ve already done the staring contest and the rock, paper, scissors, so Head to Head you’re playing a version of Twenty Questions, basically Seven Questions. Your opponent looks at the top card of their library, and then you get to ask seven yes or no questions to figure out what it is.

And so the thing that’s kind of interesting is, you want to sort of get some knowledge from what your opponent is playing. So you don’t necessarily know everything in their deck, but you know some things, and the more you’re familiar with the deck the better a chance you are of getting it. Anyway, if you—it costs 1W and an instant, and if you win the minigame, you prevent all damage for the turn. By one source. All damage from a single source.

Next, Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil. Eight black black, flying, first strike, trample, for 8/8. And if you say, “I’m coming too,” you can spend 1B—sorry, as you search a library, you can say, “I’m coming too.” If you spend 1B you get to put it from your library into your hand.

Okay. So Unglued had Infernal Spawn of Evil. That came about because Ron Spencer was drawing an illustration for some specter in some set, and he drew this cute little mouse with a cup of cocoa. With like marshmallows in it. Because normally, outside of Magic, his past illustration he had done a lot of kids’ stuff. And so he was just showing off, he was making fun of this evil specter  is this cute little thing.

And I thought it was hilarious, so I asked him to redo it so we could use it for Unglued. Well, hey, why don’t we continue the trend? There’s a few cards in Unhinged that are continuations of jokes from Unglued. So if you have Infernal Spawn of Evil, and it had a son, it would be Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil.

So anyway, this card has two lines—its title is two lines. One of the things we can do in Un­-sets is we can adjust the card. So we just made it a bigger title bar so we could fit it in. This creature, it says “Beast Child,” and then “Beast” is scratched off and “Demon” is written in. That’s a joke to the previous card, Infernal Spawn of Evil, which said “Demon” was crossed off  and “Beast” was written in. That was making a joke of the fact that we had stopped supporting “demon.”

Now, “demon” has been supported again, so this joke is like, “Last time it was beast, but now it’s back to being a demon.” So a little joke for those that were unaware.

And the Infernal Spawn of Evil had an ability that was in your hand, you could say, “I’m coming,” reveal it to—I think you paid some mana, to drain your opponent for one. This card, the Infernal Spawn, is like his daddy, but his ability works not in your hand but even farther back in the library. If you’re searching your library, you can search him out whenever you’re searching the library.

Next, Island. Beautiful! I’m very, very happy I got John Avon to do the art for these cards. They turned out really good. I think I told all about these last time when I did Forest, so we’ll continue to move on.

Johnny, Combo Player! 2UU, 1/1, for “Searching your library for a card and put that card into your hand, then shuffle your library. So this is a continuation of a cycle started in Unglued, which had Timmy, Power Gamer. And now we had Johnny, Combo Player. Which does mean—when I finally get a third Un-set printed I am on the hook for making a Spike, the third of the psychographics.

This card also, like Goblin Secret Agent, ehh, little too cheaty in that it’s not really—I mean it could be done in black border.  I mean, it’s a Legendary Creature—Human Gamer, I mean the flavor we couldn’t do, but it’s a little—it’s another card I wish I’d had a little more silver-border-ness to it, but…

Okay, next. Keeper of the Sacred Words. Human Druid, 2/3 for 2G, two and a green, as it comes into play you name a word, and every time your opponent says a word it gets +3/+3 until end of turn.

Now, there was a card in Unglued called Censorship, where when it came into play you named a word. It was a blue card. And your opponent took two damage every time they said the word. So this is similar except the bonus is instead of them taking damage is, this thing gets bigger.

And there’s a lot of fun. One of green’s general flavors in Magic is the idea of things that constantly grow. And so this is something that just can grow and get much bigger. And one of the things that’s very fun about this, if you pick the right word, my tip for you is—words that are like articles, like “The” or “And” or “Um” or “Huh” or “Yes” or “Go,” [NLH— “The” is the only one of those that’s an article.] things in which your opponent might just say them and not realize they’re saying them, are very good words.

And I’ve definitely—I had a game with the thing once where I—it was—let’s see, it’s 2/3, so it was a 14/15. Because my opponent said it four times in one… anyway.

Next is Kill Destroy, which is part of the gotcha cycle in which you can’t say the two words that are in its name. SO this is 1BB, destroy target nonblack creature, it’s an instant, but if [your opponent says] “kill” or “destroy,” you can say gotcha and get it back.

Ladies’ Knight! So Ladies’ Knight was top-down from the name Ladies’ Knight. So Ladies’ Knight is three and a white for a 2/2, flying, spells that players play that are wearing at least one item of women’s clothing cost one less to cast.

So this is a reference to—I mean, there is a card in Unglued called Sex Appeal that rewarded the—let’s see if I can get this word right. I think gender is the correct word? [NLH—The card says “sex,” but “gender” appears to be what he meant. “Gender identity,” to be precise, but that’s getting too technical even for me.] Whichever gender was lower in the room got a bonus. And so I wanted to do something that was in a similar vein.

So this is like, “Okay. Anybody can take advantage of this, but you need to be wearing ladies’ clothing.” And the idea is, “Well, ladies kind of get that for free,” so that ladies don’t have to worry about it. They’re wearing ladies’ clothing. But men can out of their way to wear ladies’ clothing if they want to get the advantage here.

You’ll notice in the art, by the way, and this is true of most of the art. All the random characters in the art usually are characters from the story. So like hanging on him I believe is like Akroma and Phage, although I don't know why you want Phage hanging on you.

Also the knight is coming out of Nevinyrral’s Disco, which I think is cute. And in the background, by the way, you’ll notice a pegasus that’s standing there that you can see. That is for us to make sure you understand that he flies. So even though he’s not flying in the art per se, in the background you can see his mount, which is a flying horse. Because we needed him to fly for balance reasons.

Next, Land Aid ’04. ’04 because that’s when the set came out in 2004, which is a sign that that’s too long ago, we need a third Un-set. Contact your local representatives. Okay, GG. A green green for a sorcery. You search your land for a basic land, and put it into play tapped. But if you sing the whole time, it’s untapped. So basically, this is Rampant Growth for GG, but you have to sing to get it. And I think humming—I think we said that humming does count.

 

Okay. Next, Laughing Hyena. 1G for a 2/2, and its gotcha is if [they] laugh you can get it back. This is, in my mind, the single worst gotcha card, because it’s bad enough that it makes people not talk, but making people try not to laugh, I thought that would be fun, like it’s so hard not to, but what I found is people would go out of their way not to get into situations where they might laugh.

And like, they literally would like, “I don’t want to lose, so I’ll try not to have fun.” And that’s bad design. My friends, bad design. It is a hyena, by the way, which is why it’s a laughing hyena.

Letter Bomb. Is six mana for an artifact. When it comes into play, you sign it and you shuffle it into target player’s library. They must reveal cards when they draw cards. When they draw this, they take 19½  damage.

So this card was originally in… what set was it? Originally in Tempest, I think. And we couldn’t—Mike Elliott designed this card. But we realized that we couldn’t shuffle the card into your opponent’s deck. The problem was, we didn’t know how to differentiate their copy of the card from your copy of the card. We solved it here by making you sign it, but that’s not a technology black border will allow you to do.

Also, by the way, in the premium version of this card, there is a note on—I don’t want to give it away, but there is a note in premium. So if you have the premium version, on the Letter Bomb there is a note written out in the premium.

Next, Little Girl. Little Girl is half a white for a ½/½ creature. So one of the reasons I liked fractions was that it allowed you to do things like this, where I made a vanilla silver-bordered creature. That’s hard to do, it’s hard to make a vanilla silver-bordered creature.

The funny story about this is, when we commission—Brady Dommermuth, the person who was commissioning this, didn’t want to specify sex/gender of the person in the art. And so he said, “Look. You draw our description, and we’re going to have the artist draw it, we’re not going to tell them what to draw, and if it comes back…” Like I wanted to call it Little Girl. “If it comes back and it’s a girl, then we can call it Little Girl. But I’m not going to tell the artist to draw a girl.”

So I wrote this art description—I did the art descriptions. That said… actually, Brady did most of the art descriptions, I think I did this art description. But the art description was, “There’s a tiny little child clutching their stuffed animal, and they’re cute and dainty,” or something like that. And then we got back a little girl. So I was allowed to call it Little Girl.

But anyway, this card has been pretty popular. I toyed around with this card having—we didn’t have the basic—if I had the technology now I would have made it a basic creature. Have as many as you want. But at the time, I had to put that in the rules text, and I wanted it to be a vanilla. So I didn’t do that. I thought about it, I thought it would be fun to have a deck where you could just spill out a whole bunch of little girls.

Look at Me, I’m R&D. So I did a card in Unglued called Look at Me, I’m the DCI, with spectacular art! For a dollar. So this time, Randy Buehler was the one—it’s Randy Buehler’s writing on this card. And what the card does is it’s two and a W for an enchantment, and you get to name two numbers. You name a number, and then a number one up or one down from it. And you can change all copies of that number to the higher or lower number. So it lets you sort of fiddle with what things can do. It’s a fun card.

The card, by the way, looks like an R&D sticker, and it’s stickered on the card. We tried to sticker it on something—one of the things people get outraged is when they see us stickering things, because we just put it on cards. And whenever we put it on a card that people like really want, they always go, “What are you doing?!” So we tried to find a card to sticker it on top of to raise eyebrows. So we stickered it on Moat from Legends, which is a very popular white card.

Next, Loose Lips. Enchant creature. It’s blue. So as Loose Lips comes into play, it’s an enchant creature, choose a sentence with eight or fewer words. Enchanted creature has flying. Whenever enchanted creature does damage to the opponent, the opponent must either say that sentence or you draw two cards.

So this is a good example of  a card that is flexible enough to allow people to do with it what they want. I could have given you a sentence and forced you to say the sentence I gave you. And Carnivorous Death Parrot does that a little bit. But for purpose. This one is like, “You know what? Let’s have some fun. You and your friends can figure out however you can most have fun doing this. And you can figure out whatever that is.”

That one of the things I think is fun is, I want people to sort of like—like, I’ve seen people do very different things with this. And that’s just because what they and their friends wanted to do. Like in R&D, the way we used to play this is, we used to come up with a sentence that was antithetical to the person you were playing. Just so you would make them say something that they would never say.

For example, if someone had mine, it might be, “I love bananas, yum yum.” So every time they hit me I have to go, “I love bananas. Yum yum.” For those that don’t know. I hate bananas. If you don’t read my blog, you don’t know my hatred of bananas.

Okay. Next, Magical Hacker. It’s 1U for a 1/2  creature—Human Gamer, for a U, you can change all pluses to minuses or all minuses to pluses. A lot of people ask me if we can do this in black border. I’ve been told by the Rules Manager that we cannot. For no other reason, it’s confusing what it means with planeswalkers. And I don’t think you’re allowed to turn the ultimate into a plus.

So anyway, I think for rules reasons we can’t do this, I’m pretty sure for developmental reasons we probably can’t do this. Oh, I will note, by the way, two things: one, that the flavor text for this card is leetspeak, and if you look in the reflection of the glasses of the Magical Hacker, you will see Magic Online.

Next, Man of Measure. One white white for a 2/2. If you’re shorter than your opponent, it has first strike. If you’re taller than your opponent, it has +1/+0. So the idea is, this card changes what it is based on who you’re playing. Which I think is pretty cool. I will say that when I play the card, it tends to be a 2/2 first striker.

And the thing we’re careful of is we wanted to pick something in which it wasn’t clear which is better. Which is better, 2/2 first striker or 3/2 creature? It’s dependent. Sometimes a 2/2 first striker’s better, sometimes a 3/2 is better. It depends on the circumstances. And so I kind of appreciate that this has interesting choice. I also a lot like Man of Measure the name. I think it’s a cute measure. So down the side there’s a ruler, and on the bottom there’s a picture of someone that looks a lot like Napoleon.

Okay, Mana Flair. M-A-N-A F-L-A-I-R. 1R, add one red mana to your mana pool for each nonland permanent that shares an artist. And so this is another artist matters card, it sort of allows—it’s sort of a ritual. I’m playing around with—there’s a big question of whether we can do homonyms in Magic, meaning two card names that sound the same.

So the answer in silver border apparently is yes! Because Mana Flare, M-A-N-A F-L-A-R-E, is a very famous Alpha card that lets you tap your land for an additional mana. This card in the flavor text also has a haiku, I did haiku flavor text. I realize that it’s not often one can do haiku, and—anyway, I wrote the haiku.

Next card is Mana Screw, which is an artifact, it costs one,  for one you can flip a coin. And if you win the flip you get two mana, if you lose the flip you get none. So one of the things about this card is that it’s playing around with the concept of mana screw, where sometimes you need mana, you don’t get it, and this card is sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. The fact that you generate mana means you can always use it to try to generate more mana. So if you have one mana, you can always try to like turn that into enough mana to cast a larger spell. So there’s definitely a lot of this is a high-variance card.

And the picture is of like this majestic, giant screw with all the five colors behind it. Anyway. I like the art. And the flavor text talks about how there’s no more darker force in the universe than that of the Mana Screw.

Next is Meddling Kids , two white blue for a 2/3 creature, as it comes into play you choose a word of four letters or more. And then nonland cards with a title of that word can’t be played. Silver-bordered, obviously, because you can’t reference words in titles in black border. The card is a play on Meddling Mage, which was Chris Pikula’s winning card for the invitational. Meddling Kids is a slight nod to the Scooby-Doo TV show.

The reason I limit you to words of four letters or more is I didn’t want you to do “of” or “the,” you know, I didn’t want articles and things. I wanted you to actually name a word. But—and the nice thing about this is, you can always—at bare minimum it’s Meddling Mage, you can name a word in the thing you’re most afraid of. But sometimes you can be clever and you can double up and get more than one thing.

Mise! So blue mana, you name a nonland card and reveal the top card of your library. If it’s the named card, you get to draw three cards. So essentially, it’s an Ancestral Recall if you can properly identify the top card of your library.

This card is not really silver-bordered. It’s another one that like—so we were trying to do a top-down Mise card. “Mise,” for those that don’t now is Magic slang that basically means get lucky. Like, you know, you’re in a situation where you should have lost but you didn’t. And mising often involves topdecking. So the idea is, you topdeck what you need to get lucky. Is the flavor of the card. So the mechanic matches the flavor, but it’s not super silver-bordered.

The only reason it probably can’t be done in black border is—at least at this cost, is it’s just too good. One of the things about the power level of the Un-sets is because they’re not played in normal tournaments, that we—the power level’s pushed a little bit on these cards. Just to make sure that when you mix them with other cards, we want to make sure you play enough of them, we definitely are willing to push the power level line just a little bit.

Next is Moniker Mage. So Moniker Mage is 2U for a  2/2, for one blue mana you can say your middle name and it gains—can’t be the target of spells or abilities, so essentially it gains shroud, or what we now think of as hexproof, although it is technically shroud. Because you can’t target it after you use that ability. And if you use one blue mana and name your opponent’s middle name, then it gains flying.

So this is another little metagame card where if you use your middle name to give it an ability, in other games, or even in this game if your opponent has one, like your middle name is a secret that other people might not know. And so do you want to give up the secret so you can power up this card? But in doing so, you power up other people’s, because now they now your name.

And the art shows—I think it’s Jaya Ballard? I think? [NLH—Yes] That she’s in a little shop with little trinket license plates, and all the names on the license plates are all Magic-specific names. They’re all names that you only see in Magic.

Next is Monkey Monkey Monkey. Three and a green for a 1/1 creature. As Monkey Monkey Monkey comes into play, you choose a letter. And then it gets +1/+1 for each nonland permanent whose name begins with that letter.

So the idea is that you want to build a deck around a singular letter. M being the most obvious, because it starts with M, but you want to build a deck. And so we like to make cards that make you sort of build in different ways. For example, building around an artist is something that the set does that you don’t normally do. Well this card says, “Build around a letter.” Get all of your permanents to be the same letter.

And in the art, by the way, you’ll notice that everything in the art starts with the letter M. There’s a mask and a manticore and a mermaid, and just all sorts of things that begin with the letter M. And the flavor text, “many matches make more madcap monkey mayhem,” note all starts with M. So… anyway, I like the name Monkey Monkey Monkey.

Next is Mons’s Goblin Waiters. So this is R for a 1/1, creature—Goblin Waiter, and then you can sacrifice a creature or land to add ½ a red to your mana pool. So this and Little Girl are the only two cards in the set that reference half mana. One of the—oh, I’m sorry, City of Ass also gets you half mana. So one of the questions I’ve definitely gotten is, “If you have half a red mana and half a white mana, can you cast a one-drop red/white hybrid card?” And the answer is, “Yes you can.”

Mons’s Goblin Waiters is obviously a parody of Mons’s Goblin Raiders, Mons was a person in R&D, a longtime friend of Richard Garfield’s, and so I thought it would be fun to make another Mons card. The art’s really fun, this is another art done by Venters, and it’s a lot of goblin mayhem. So it’s very funny. The flavor text is like sort of written-out menu. Things you can get at this restaurant.

Next we have Mother of Goons. 2B for a 3/2. When a creature an opponent controls is put into a graveyard from play, you have to sacrifice it unless you insult them. So this card has a memory issue, which is you have to remember to insult the creature every time it dies.

So this has one of my favorite stories. So I was judging the prerelease, dressed as a donkey, I got called over to a match, it was under a table, so I had to get under the table. It was Osyp Lebedowicz and somebody else who—there was an event going on, and a bunch of pros dropped by to play.

So anyway, Osyp had a Goblin Mime out and he was not allowed to talk. And so the question was, he had a Mother of Goons in play, his opponent had a creature that died. He was trying to insult the creature using hand gestures, because he wasn’t allowed to talk because of Goblin Mime. And the ruling I had to make is, does Mother of Goons require you to verbally insult the creature, or is any kind of insult as long as it’s clearly insulting okay? And I ruled that it did not need to be verbal, and so Osyp was able to keep Mother of Goons using his hand signals to insult it.

Also, by the way, Mother of Goons, if you look behind it there’s all this graffiti on the card. All the graffiti—in fact, this is true of all Un-cards. Whenever there’s something in the background, look at the background. Read the words. All the graffiti is referencing stuff in this set or Unglued.

Like for example—oh, there’s “Word to yo mother,” which is referencing this card. But in the background there’s stuff like, “It’s coming!” Which is from Infernal Spawn of Evil. And then BFM has tagged itself and such. So anyway, look at the flavor text, there’s lots of fun stuff. I think there’s even graffiti behind the rules text. In the text box.

I have just got to work, but I’m going to finish Ms because I’m trying to burn through this. So I’m going to quickly get through the Ms and then we’ll bid adieu.

Next is Mountain , which is super pretty. But I’ve talked about the basic lands. Next is Mouth to Mouth. Mouth to Mouth is 3U for a sorcery, you and an opponent have a breath-holding contest. If you win, gain control of one of their creatures.

This is another one of the—this is another one of the minigames, the non-Magic minigames. There’s one in each color. They’re all blank to blank. Mouth to Mouth. Body part to body part. The naming convention I like, by the way.

Anyway, this one is probably the biggest swing. Meaning getting one of your opponent’s creatures is a big deal. And so I’ve seen a number of very dramatic breath-holding contests. So… and this has a weird piece of flavor text. “Interesting tidbit: Surveys show that the card Ow has one of the most popular pieces of flavor text in the Unglued expansion.”

Which is true, but the flavor text on Ow talked about how some flavor text had nothing to do with the card it’s on. Anyway, that’s a meta-joke there. For those that never understood that flavor text. The flavor text it’s referencing in Ow is making fun of the fact that some flavor text doesn’t match the card. Which this one doesn’t.

Next, Mox Lotus. For 15 mana, it’s an artifact, tap: get infinite mana in your mana pool, for 100, add one mana of any color, you don’t lose life due to mana burn. Which is not necessary anymore. If there actually was Oracle text for this card, that would take that off.

Mox Lotus came from the idea that we wanted a card called “Mox Lotus,” I wanted to do something awesome, and finally I said, “Okay, what’s awesome? How about it just taps for infinite colored mana?”

Then we decided it might be more fun if it tapped for infinite colorless mana, and then you had to spend a huge amount of mana to activate it, so we made it 100. But the point is, you have infinite mana, it doesn’t matter. For all intents and purposes, this allows you to tap for infinite colored mana.

But—the funny thing is, this thing used to be much more dangerous. Because it used to be if they could destroy this card you would lose the game, because the mana burn would kill you. But now there’s no mana burn—oh no no, you don’t lose life from mana burn. Well, sorry. It used to be—right. If you destroyed this card,  this card kept you from having mana burn, so you would die to mana burn. But now there is no mana burn. So Mox Lotus got significantly stronger. It used to be literally lose the game if your opponent Naturalizes it. No longer true. Not that anyone’s using Mox Lotus in competitive play, but it did get stronger.

Finally, my last card of the day, My First Tome. Three for an artifact, one and tap, say the flavor text of a card in your hand, target opponent has to guess that card. If they can’t, you draw a card. So this is—Squirrel Farm is a card in Unglued that allowed you—you had to show a piece of art from your hand and they had to guess the artist. And if they got it wrong, you got a squirrel. 1/1.

So this—getting a card is worth more value than getting a 1/1 token, but it is easier to remember flavor text, what the card is than to remember artists’ names. And so this one—it’s a little harder to get more than one card off of a card. And the thing I like about this card and Squirrel Farm is I really like the idea of having different skill sets matter, and I like the idea that Magic knowledge—all of a sudden like just being knowledgeable about Magic, like being someone who’s learned the flavor text pays off. And I think that’s really cool.

So anyway, that is M. So hopefully--I’m burning through this, hopefully you guys are enjoying the tiptoe through Unhinged. But I am now parked. So that means it’s time for me to be making Magic. And I’ll talk to you next time.