Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1221: Top 20 Most Influential Designs, Part 2

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

This is part two of a three-part series going over a talk I gave at MagicCon: Chicago 2025.

I'm pulling on my driveway. You all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is the second in my series, Top 20 Most Influential Designs. So this is based on a talk I gave at Magic Con Chicago 2025. And last time I talked about the first seven, or I started at 20. So, Mind Slaver, Form of the Dragon, Ajani's Pride,

Mate, Ganti, Lord of Luxury, Ball Lightning, Factor Fiction, and Mishra's Factory. Which brings us to number 13, A Chroma, Angel of Wrath. Okay, so A Chroma, Angel of Wrath is from Legions. So basically in the onslaught story, there was a character, what was his name? He was a, I'm blanking on his name. He had the power to shape worlds, to shape things.

He could create things from memory. And one of the things that he made from just from his memory was a Chroma, Angel of Wrath. And in the story, he died by the time of the second part of Legions. And so the big part of Legions was a big fight between Akroma and Phage. Phage was formerly Jessica who was Kamal's sister and she got warped and anyway she now had a touch where she killed anything she touched. And anyway in legions we really wanted to sort of get the two, I mean the two big characters of the story were Akroma and Phage. And they would later merge together with a third person. But anyway, the core part of this story is we needed to make cards for each of them.

So I set out to make a card for Phage, and I had a design that I didn't know what to do with, but I had a design where the card, when it hit another player, it killed the player. Like it's sort of just one touch and the player was dead. And then I just added on like sort of a death touchy feel. So the idea is, you know, whatever this touches, creature or player,

phage would kill them. That seemed like pretty cool, pretty flavorful, really capture the essence of what phage was. So Bill Rose, so Bill Rose, by the way, designed a Chroma Angel Wrath. So Bill set out to make a Chroma. So Bill's idea was that he would, he just wanted to put a lot of abilities on it. So he gave a Chroma flying, because the Chroma was an angel, that made sense. He gave it vigilance, so the vigilance wasn't a keyword yet. He wrote it out, but essentially gave him vigilance.

He gave it protection from red and from black. It's a white character, and black and red are the enemies of white, and protection was a core white ability. He gave it first strike, because that's a core white ability. He gave it first strike because that's a core white ability. He gave it trample, trample is like tertiary and white but every once in a while white would get it.

And then he gave it haste which doesn't make much sense. It's really the only mono white card that doesn't you know require red mana or a mountain or something to have haste. But anyway basically he just made a whole collection of different abilities and then the funny thing at the time was I did not like it. Not that I was so much against the design and the vacuum as much as I didn't think it fit a Chroma. So I actually tried I pitched a whole bunch of other like more this is what chroma is and this captures the flavor of a Chroma but none of them was exciting as what Bill had designed and Bill was like, look,

this is, you know, a main character. We just wanted to be exciting. We want people to be excited by a Chroma. And Bill was correct. The card came out and a Chroma was super popular. We even at one point, we did a 64 head to head. This is in the days where legendary creatures weren't all that, you know, we did a lot with legendary creatures and a Chroma won the head-to-head contest. So, and then from that, yeah, we, it

earned the right to get a feature week in her name. She's the only legendary creature to have a feature week on the website. Anyway, so Akroma definitely was one of those characters that inspired us. She showed up, you know, we printed, we've just reprinted the card of Chroma a lot. It showed up in a lot of different places. We made a alternate version of a Chroma in red, in Planet Chaos. We made another version of a Chroma. So just, I mean, a normal white version, but like just a different version of the character. We did a Chroma's's in fact in time spiral block we put her in each set in time spiral block after she won the contest we thought

it was sort of cool so her card her original card was one of the on the bonus sheet one of the time shifted cards then she had a time shifted card that was her but if she was a red character rather than a white character and then in the third set in in future site we made a chroma's memorial because she had died and it shows you know sort of reference that she had died so the idea is her she was a character that showed up in all the time sprawl sets anyway um a lot of, I mean, one of the real important lessons to me from this was that the most important thing when you're sort of designing key characters is you want the players to really be enamored by them. I know I, you know, my story background, I really want, you know, legendary characters to match who they are,

and match what they can do, and that is important. I mean, you don't want the characters to feel that they match it, but there also is a little bit about, hey, you want them to be exciting and splashy, and so I think it's a good example where we could have been a little more accurate

to Akrom as far as what she did in the story, but making her more exciting is something that just sort of stood out, and playing up the awesomeness of her actually ended up making a much more exciting card. The big impact of this is what we call kitchen sink design. The idea is it's fun to just make creatures that just have a bunch of keywords.

And we do, you know, we've done a bunch that of three, we've done some that have four, we've done a few that have five, we've done I think two that had six, we've done one which is recently in Modern Horizons three, did one that had seven, seven abilities. And so that is just something we continue on. It is like one of the things about design is you just want a lot of sort of tools in your tool belt and the kitchen sink design is simple in some ways but very potent and people really like them so we do that.

Okay that is why number 13 was a Chroma Angel of Wrath. Okay number 12 is the Shocklands. So the Shocklands were in original Ravnica. So basically the way they work for those that some of don't know it is their lands that enter you can allow them to enter play tap their dual lands. If you enter play tap no damage to you or you can take two damage you know pay two life and have them enter untapped. So the origin of them is we were making Ravnica and I knew obviously the Ravnica was centered around enemy color pairs. One of the things we had learned

from doing invasion which was the first multicolor block is we really did not support it well enough with mana so we were trying to be better about supporting with mana. So I wanted to make dual ends I thought were cool so the the inspiration for the dual ends was I just thought back and said what are cool dual lands we've done? And the two ones I really like most were the pain lands from Ice Age. Those were dual lands that you could tap for colors or if you tap for one of two colors it you did damage to you. Or the other ones I like from the tap lands from invasion were to a dual ends that came and play tapped The problem was that both of those were a little on the weak side

There was there was there was room like I remember when we originally made Tap lands we thought we were like pushing the boundaries and it turns out we weren't at all We can do like obviously nowadays we do tap lands with gain life or do damage to the opponent or scry. And there's other things we do now. Like that's not enough. So the idea I had at the time was, well, instead of like, what if we made a land that was both a pain land and a tap land? And so the idea I liked is, okay, we can come play tapped, you know, or you can pay, you

know, you can pay some life to have it like come untapped. The reason by the way, originally the way pain lands work, they literally damage you and paying life seemed a little cleaner. Plus, instead of like constantly tracking it, which was a lot to do, especially when your opponent has a whole bunch of lands and their piles, like it's harder to track when dual ends are being used. So I said, okay, let's just make it simpler. About how much life you lose using a pain land. The answer I came to is about two. Okay. So what if I just upfront made you pay that to upfront? So the idea is hey using it, you know, we will lose you lose to life

But instead of like tracking over time just pay it up front. So that was just to make things cleaner and so anyway, the story is We make these lands and then I put them in the file and I hand them off. And Brian Schneider is the lead developer of Ravnica and he was like, ah, they felt a little complicated to him. I was trying to explain to him that the reason I don't think they're so complicated is it's kind of like you have a choice tapped or untapped and if it's untapped you pay

life if not it's tap but it was more cohesive I felt than anyway he said he was interested in trying other things so they tried like 20 other dual ends and then eventually Brian came back to me and said you know what I actually think these are right we tried a lot of other things and then we eventually, you know, I decided to give these a try and you know what? I really liked them. So, you know, can I have them back? Interestingly, a little side note is not only did Brian take out the dual lands, he also took out hybrid and in the same case, Brian came back and said, can we put hybrid back

in? And this by the way, no strength against Brian, just a little side note. I think it's okay for people to question things and try things and try other things. And Brian, hey, he realized that, you know what, that was in fact the thing that made the most sense. And so he did come back and say, Hey, I was wrong. You know, as I put them in a little funny story, by the way, just to tell was not, and this wasn't in my talks, a little bonus stories when listening to my podcast. I did a panel, I think Chicago in 2024 with Aaron where we were talking about Ravnica.

I think Ravnica remaster was coming out or something. So we were talking about Ravnica. We had a panel all about like, because Ravnica is a pretty foundational set. We did a lot of things that came from that. So the idea was we were talking about Ravnica and before we do the panels, we always do run-throughs. We do a couple run-throughs.

So in one of the run-throughs, I'm talking about designing the shock lands and Aaron goes, yeah, I don't think that's right. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, you guys, you didn't make the shock lands and Aaron goes, yeah, I don't think that's right. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, you guys, you didn't make the shock lands. Like we, we tested like 20 different dual lands. Like we, we, you know, we came to them by just trying lots of different things and we made them in development. They weren't made in design. And I said, no, that's not the case. So I have all my old files. So I went back and found the handoff file for Ravnica. And in the handoff file are the Shocklands.

And then I explained to him that what he didn't know was that Brian had turned them down and that they had tried other stuff and that Brian had come back. So Aaron had always thought that the development team had come up with him. He didn't realize when they finally got to Shocklands is because Brian just decided to try the ones

that I'd handed off. So that was really interesting anyway a little and it was okay I'm sorry you're right which means having receipts always good. Okay so that is why number oh so sorry so the influence of Shocklands I didn't talk about that. So Shocklands the one other thing I didn't mention is one thing I just forget is Alpha had the dual lands and Richard had made it such they were both land types. And we really had not gone back to that. Other than the basic lands, we had not put land types on anything.

And I was really intrigued and I said, hey, let's put them on. So I put the land types on the shock lands. So I forgot that part. Okay, so the shock lands did a whole bunch of things. One is they've become a pretty staple of like what's the sort of what the ideal is of a dual land. I think a lot of things like work around them. Like the shock lands have really become like the perfect example of what dual land should

be and power level and everything. So we did we did three things that really have followed suit. One was, once again, Duallands did this first, but I do believe that Shocklands really brought it back to the forefront and said this is okay to do. And so the idea of Duallands having basic land types, you know, Shocklands really was the one to sort of say, hey, this wasn't a one-off, this wasn't a fluke, this really is something and it's a knob that we should have. And like I said, up to that point, somehow it was sort of like, oh, like the idea that dual

lands were just a little over the curb, people sort of said, well, and part of that is because they're basic land types. Like, no, no, no, I think we could add the basic land types. And so it definitely allowed us more freedom to do that. Another big thing it did is the idea of, I have an option for how I use it and it comes and play tapped or it can pay life and it doesn't come play tapped. It's a tool we've used that a lot, like on MDFCs,

there's a few individual cards, but it's an interesting tool and it really sort of says, hey, I can have options on, because one of the challenges about making lands in general is that we try to make them so they're not strictly better than a basic land. And so a lot of times that means they need to come and play tapped. And so one of the problems we'd run into is how to get stuff that allows earlier utility

and having the resource of using life to untap them was valuable. The final thing it did is early magic, I think the way we thought of cycles is we just kind of use them where we needed to use them. I'm sorry, we would use them once and then go okay we've used them, okay toss them aside. Like we thought them as being very disposable. The idea that we would do things and we'd want to come back and reuse those things. In the early days of Magic, Magic felt like we have infinite things we can do, whatever, you know, and it's only later that we really realized, no, no, no, it's a resource, you know, hey, there's a lot of good designs and good mechanics and good cards and we need to bring that stuff back

and that's okay and we really sort of got in the mindset that, you know, we had to think of our resources as something, our things as resources that we wanna come back to. As part of that, a lot of the early dual lands just used names that were not reprintable. They would often reference specific worlds, you know, places on specific worlds, or, you know, people, things that just made it harder to then put these lands on a different world.

So we named the shock lands with names that were generic so that they could go other places. Yeah, they made sense. They fit the guilds they were in, but we wanted the ability to put them other places. And then the irony is the shock lands mostly just showed up on Ravnica. But it did get us down the path of trying to be more conscious at time of naming things appropriately. Okay, that is why number 12 is the Shocklands. Number 11, Panharmonicon from Kaladesh.

So Kaladesh's theme, we wanted to do, we were inspired by like steampunk was the original idea, and we ended up sort of doing our version with called etherpunk. But we liked the idea of rather than the being sort of dour and dark, what if it was brighter and optimistic? And then we got the idea of the Inventors Fair, and I really got enamored of the idea of an artifact set, but where the artifacts were thought of as inventions, of showing off their creativity. One of the things I've always, I mean, I've always been a huge fan of artifacts.

And one of the things I like about artifacts is, they really, more so than almost any other card type, pushed the boundaries of what was possible. That's just, like, I remember the first time I ever saw Chaos Orb, which you would flip in the air and it would destroy cards it touched. I just like, what? You can do that?

You know, and the other one that really stuck to me was Gesture's Cap in Ice Age, which allowed you to access the sideboard mid game. And I was like, what? You know, and it made me realize an idea that I really was a big fan of is the idea what I called it the marquee card I said you know what large sets should have an artifact something that's colorless that just does things you've never seen before that people can put in any deck

that like I like the idea that every set had one card that just broke broke your brain a little bit like I didn't know you could do that. And over the time I would try to do that. And eventually what I realized was it gets harder and harder to make those. But we were making Kaladesh and I really wanted to have a little bit of like, oh, I didn't know you could do that. So one of the cards that I had made when I was trying to make sort of in the marquee days was a card called Morari in Odyssey that I had made when I was trying to make sort of in the the marquee days was a card called Morari in Odyssey that I led. And Morari, the idea of Morari originally was it just

copies all intents and sorceries. Eventually we had to develop it and ended up like you had to pay three to copy it. But the original version of Morari, by the way, cost more and just copied everything. But anyway, I was really, I mean, just a little, my history is, there are certain things that I've always been enamored on. One of them is copying. Fork is a card that showed up in Alpha, the red card that you copy spells, and I put Fork in so many decks, so, so many, I really like Fork. There's something, I mean, I also, I like clone and dopleganger and copy artifact. And I mean, I really liked the idea of, of copying things. I thought that was super fun.

And I used to do a puzzle column and in my puzzle column, I even do copy effects all the time. They were super fun in a puzzle column because there were so many options that, okay, I can copy something. Ooh, what do I need to copy? And they were, they were great for puzzles. But anyway, I loved copying so I decided that I wanted to make an artifact that copied things so I was just trying to find something

that was different so in once again tell them story I did not tell them in my talk in return to Ravnica we were trying to find a mechanic for the Azorius. And I came up with a mechanic where this card, all these Zung creatures, they were all creatures that had an enter the battlefield effect, or now an enter effect. But the idea is that instead of doing their enter effect, they could copy somebody else's enter effect. And originally at one point, they copied any Enter effect. It didn't have to be eventually they ended up being only cards with this mechanic for rules reasons but but anyway I was playing around with things that could copy other things

Enter effects and it was really fun. Now that ended up getting killed and we ended up doing like detain or whatever but but I played with that and experienced that it was fun and so I had it in my brain the idea that copying enter the battlefield effects once again enter effects um would be something fun there was a little bit out there we didn't anything like that um and it felt like fun like for an enchantment like okay play not enchantment for an artifact and play this artifact then okay just playing the deck with lots of you know effects. And anyway, I, so I made it. And I, so I introduced the idea of an additional time.

When you do this thing, do it in an additional time. And that became very much a go-to sort of thing. And we've made, in the talk, I just run through all the different effects we've done. Whether certain things enter, or certain things die, or they attack, or they're damaged, or you flip them up, or, you know, they're just infinite things.

There's lots and lots of triggers. And so the idea of copying triggers really became something fun and we do it all the time now. So anyway that is why number 11 is Panharmonicon. Okay number 10 Platinum Angel from Mirrodin. Okay, so Mirrodin was during what we call the third age of design.

Bill Rose was the head designer. When Bill Rose became the head designer, he had this idea of what if blocks had themes? So Invasion was about multicolor. Odyssey was about the graveyard. Onslaught was about typal. And Myrn was gonna be about artifacts. So the idea that I was,

and doing an artifact set was something that I had been, ever since Invasion did multicolor, I really wanted to do artifacts. I'd been in Bill's ear and saying, okay Bill, we gotta do artifact block, we gotta do artifact. block. So finally he said okay Mark time to do your artifact block. And in fact Myrden was one of the first sets where we did sort of what I would call modern world building. We had done I guess the very first set to really do that was back during Tempest when we were doing the Weblight side side we brought in the team today, there was some world building done there but

Kind of what you think of is modern world building how we build now I think Mirren was kind of the first set that really did that where we the Those who don't know the way we build the world as we bring in a team for like three weeks and they Extrapolate things and build things and we you know They they build the whole world out of it make a style guide that we send the world is we bring in a team for like three weeks and they extrapolate things and build things and we, you know, they, they build the whole world out of it. Make a style guide that we send the artists. Anyway, Mirren was the start of that. And the idea of Mirren that we were very enamored was it was an artificial world. And the world was like kind of had mechanics woven into it.

That the very nature of the world was mechanical and that you know the seas were made of mercury and the blades of grass were I mean were literally blades. And so the idea was it was a metal world and even the creatures had like metal woven into their anatomy that they like. The idea was this world was a world of metal because we were doing an artifact set and we just wanted to have a lot of artifact creatures and so anyway we spent a lot of time and energy building that so one of the ideas we had was what if this world had an angel an angel made

of metal an artifact creature that was an angel. And we liked the idea so much that we in fact commissioned the art before we even knew what the card was going to do. That is not something we do, I mean we almost never ever do that, that's very very rare. There are some cases where we have art and we have to kill the card and make a new card, so we do design art sometimes, but usually it's because we need to design and the art's already done. There have been a few experiments with us designing to art. So we've done it on a few occasions, but it's something we do pretty rarely. But anyway, so not only did we have the art for Platinum Angel, I think we named

it, I think we knew it was Platinum angel. And so the question was, what exactly did platinum angel do? So one of the things, just a little about the speech, for each of the cards I talked about, cards or cycles I talked about, I went and figured out who was the designer that made them. Some of which I was there for, so I just remembered, some of which I had to ask around, I didn't, like I knew the East Coast plate defters made alliances and alliances made Antiquities, but I didn't realize that you know, David Petty specifically made me for stuff just to play back. Um

Anyway, so I was trying to figure out who made platinum angels So the the design team from Meriden was myself, Brian Tinsman, Mike Elliott, Bill Rose, and Tyler Bielman. So I didn't remember making it. Now be aware, I've made a lot of cards. Sometimes I do something and I forgot that I did it, but I just don't remember making Platinum Angel. And I went back and looked at old files and I looked at, I found some files of me pitching ideas for Platinum Angel, but none of them was the final Platinum Angel. So I called Brian Tintfitz Oh, it seems like maybe some Brian did Brian does know I didn't make Platinum Angel So I called Mike Alde. He goes no I didn't make Platinum Angel, but I think Bill did so I talked to Bill

Bill goes I didn't make Platinum Angel. Tyler didn't make Platinum Angel. So I thought oh, maybe maybe um Maybe it was done in development. So I call and talk to Randy Buehler and Randy was like, I have no idea. He led, he led development. He goes, I have no idea who did this. So I went back and look at my old articles. I'm like, maybe I talked about it and you know, in the past I knew who did and I just forgot. And I found an article where I referenced Platinum Angel and I go, I don't know who

did this, but I think it's a great design. So this is the only card in all of my 20 things that I don't know the designer. So I just call the mystery designer. So anyway, we were trying to design Platinum Angel. We were doing a top down of the art Platinum Angel. So obviously we knew a few things. It's an artifact creature. It's an angel.

We made it a 4-4, it flies. But we wanted something, and like I said, sort of remembering back to the idea of the marquee. So we felt this car really had to go, what? I didn't know you could do that. And somebody, a mystery designer, pitched the idea of you can't lose the game and your opponent can't win the game. Like while this isn't play, you just can't lose.

There's no way to lose while this isn't play. And that felt really cool. And I mean, I think once we had that, we were like, we got it. And it's a kind of effect that we've used a bunch of times. There's something really fun about it. We put it on another angel. We've done cards that sort of do it temporarily. We even did a demon where we did the opposite. We needed a drawback for the demon. And the idea is, oh, you can't win the game while you know, you can't win

while the demon is in play. You have to get rid of him before you can win. So the interesting The interesting lesson of this one is the, I mean, this is a card we've printed a lot of times. It was very impactful and I think it really sort of hammered home the, like there's an elegance to the card that is very nice and there is a simplicity. The idea that you can do something that shocks people and really Like a lot of times I talked with minds laver I you do cool things but in mind slavers like okay, I can I can write it in a short sentence But then I have to explain it and that takes lots and lots of text

It is cool to be able to make designs that are that sort of out of the box and shocking but simple. And that's something we always I mean I think Platinum Angels really become the standard by which we sort of try to hold ourselves to it from time to time it's like not everything that is you know eyeball jing that really makes you go what is necessarily complex or necessarily wordy and it is the perfect example of just a nice easy simple, simple, easy to understand concept. I can't lose. I got it. That really sort of, and you don't need a lot. I mean, that's flying because it's an angel, but like it doesn't need to be busy. It's so elegant.

That's the thing I like the most about it is how exciting it is and how awesome, you know, flavorful it is, but yet how simple it is. It's not easy to do that. So when we do, it definitely stands as a beacon. Okay. That is number 10, um, platinum angel. Okay. Number nine, number nine is miss form. Ultimates Okay, so legions, for those who don't remember, basically a normal set has some percentage of creatures and some percentage of spells. Normally it's like 55% creatures, 45% spells, normally. But the idea for legions was, what if, what if it was 100% creatures? So legions was a legions was all creatures. And it was continuing the story of Onslaught.

So this is the same thing by the way that had a chrome in it, but a different story now. So Mike Elliott had made a mechanic called Miss Form in Onslaught, he was the lead designer of Onslaught. And the way a misform creature would work is that you can spend one mana and then you could until the end of turn you can make that creature any creature type you wanted to it was additive you could add a creature type to it and the idea was you know

onslaught ended up having a very strong typal theme and so it's fun that the misforms could go oh you cards that help your goblins. Well for this turn I'm a gob and I get aided and so it played nicely with the typal theme In fact, by the way I think Miss Form had a lot to do with a typal theme for those that don't know I did a whole podcast on onslaught Mike had turned in the set Bill wasn't happy with the bill was lead designer And I did a pass on it and And the thing I really pulled out was, at the time, Misform was in it, but the typo theme was way, way turned down.

And I'm the one that always said, hey, let's turn this theme way up. You know, this should be what our block is about. Like we should have a typo block. And I got Bill a board and anyway, so the ended up, the Misf from was really inspired me to turn up the dial of because at the time the the type of thing was just very low and I'm like I thought it was cooler my the idea that I was really enamored by was I knew

that players liked making typo decks and the table decks mostly sucked like they weren't particularly good. And one of the things is when players follow backwards to do something that's not even good, that's a sign there's something really potent that the players like. And anyway, that got me to convince Bill to really make onslaught a typo block.

But anyway, I have a podcast on onslaught if you want to go listen and find out how onslaught became what it was. Anyway, back to our story. So I was working on legions and I decided that I wanted to make a rare legendary creature that was the ultimate misform, misform ultimate. Right? And so basically sometimes we do this is we're making a rare card. Mythic rare wasn't the thing yet. And I asked myself, okay, I want to make the most splashy,

coolest version of this ability. So what is the best form of Misform? So at first I was like, okay, well, what if you spend one and you can pick more than one creature type? No, we can do better than that. What if you could pick one and be all creature types? No, we can do better than that. Okay, what if you don't even pay one?

What if you just are all creature types? And what if you were all creature types. Now we can do better than that. Okay, what if you don't even pay one? What if you just are all creature types? And what if you are all creature types, not just in play, but in everywhere? In your hand, in the graveyard, in the library. You know, I could, if I could fetch a goblin, I could fetch miss from ultimates. If I could return a goblin from the graveyard, I can return miss from ultimates. If I could show you a goblin in my hand, I can show you miss from Mr. Ultimate. So that was the idea. It was just sort of the ultimate version. And the car was super popular when I came up, just because it kind of like played in every type of theme. I mean, you had to be playing blue, but no matter what you were playing, if you had a type of thing, you were playing blue, it fits. You have a Murph of deck. Oh, you can play Mr. Ultimate. He's fine. And even better than

that, you could play multiple different type of effects and he you know He he worked with all of them So basically Mr. Walters did a couple things one is The idea of being all inclusive of like just the power of the word all oh This card is all this creatures all colors or it has all the names or that's all the abilities you know the idea of the power of all really made me realize that also the idea that things could have qualities in other zones really was exciting and so we that that is a well we've gone to a whole bunch of times but probably the biggest impact is I was working on Lorwin.

Aaron Forsyth led that design. And one of the things we were doing, Lorwin had a typal theme. And one of the problems we were running into was everything was very siloed. Meaning if you cared about goblins, you only cared about goblins. So all you wanted is goblins.

And we wanted some stuff that was more connective tissue. Like I wanted cards that the Goblin player and the Elf player might want, for example. And a lot of times when we do that, we think back to the past and we say, hey, have we done anything like this? And so I thought back to Misfrom Ultimates and I'm like, that is perfect. Why don't we just make Misfrom Ultimates into a mechanic?

Now interestingly, there was some resistance at the time and the resistance was, hey, this is a really cool card. People really like it. If we make a mechanic out of it, we want to make the card less special. And my response to that, and I got some of this from the audience when we made Changeling.

And my response to that is, look, we have to make a lot of cards. A lot of cards. I mean, we have 28, 29,000. We have a lot of cards to make, and we keep making them. Magic is a hungry monster. We do not have the luxury to go, oh, here's a really fun thing. Let's just do one card.

We don't have that luxury. That if something is fun, we're going to do it again. I mean, kind of the evidence of this entire talk is we do something, players like it, so we say, hey, let's do more of that. And so the idea that we're just going to not do something to keep the one card special is just not the way magic works. Anyway, so we made Changeling. And Changeling ended up being great.

It was really what Lorewin needed. We brought Changeling back a couple times. It was in Modern Horizons, the first Modern Horizons. It was in Kull-Time. So anyway Horizons. It was in Kaldheim. So anyway, it's just become a very useful tool. And so that is why Misform Ultimus is number nine. So anyway, you might notice that I've hit the past 30 marks. There's some traffic here. So you get a little bonus content today. So that is why I'm still talking. But anyway, I haven't got you with, I'm not done with the third anyway, so.

Although, I'll give you a trick. When I have traffic sometimes, and I realize I have more time, I'll pad my story so you can hear more stuff. I mean, all good content. Like I said, this is the podcast where traffic means more content for you. Okay, the last one we're gonna talk about today

at number eight is Doran the siege tower. So Doran was in, this is in Lorwin. Like I said, Aaron led it. This was designed by Devin Lowe. Devin led the development for part of the time. I think most people led the development. But anyway, so the idea of Dormin, so Lorwin had, we decided we wanted a typo set,

and we picked eight creature types. See if I can remember them all. So six of them were two colors. So that is merfolk, elves, goblins, fairies, Elves, Goblins, Fairies, Kithkin, and what's the last one? They'll come to me. What was the last one? Anyway, six of them had two colors. I love when I can't remember something. I always imagine that people at home screaming the things that I'm forgetting. So once again, Goblin, Elves, Merfolk, Kithken, Fairies. Okay, it's going to come to me.

We had one which was Elementals, which, oh, was the last of the six of the two color ones. Then we had one that was five color which was elementals, and we had one that was three color, which was tree folk, which were white, black, and green. And tree folk were a little interesting. I think that we had five that we sort of did at the base level and then we had three that we showed up a little bit less. So one of the questions was what to do with tree folk. So the way it worked was most of the tree folk were green. There were 16 tree folk cards.

I think there were 11 at common, one of which was an or and one of which was a spell because tribal not called kindred was introduced in Lorwyn. I think there were five uncommons and there were three rares. Once again, mythic rare wasn't a thing yet. And then there was one for colors, I'm sorry, I was talking about rarities. There were 11 commons, five uncommons, three rares. And then in colors, most of them were green. There were I think two mono black and two mono white.

And then there was one black, green and white, which was the rare card. So we knew we wanted to do a legendary creature for each of the five tribes, sorry, eight tribes, the eight creature types. We wanted to do a leader of that group. So we wanted a legendary creature that was sort of a leader of the group. So we knew there was a leader of the tree folk. We knew he was black, green, white. But the real question was what does he do?

What exactly does Doran do? That was the challenge. Like what is king of the tree folk do? So one of the things we had done in the set on all the tree folk was we wanted to give them sort of a mechanical cohesion. So one of the little things we did is we decided that every tree folk in Lorwin Block would have a toughness higher than its power.

The original, the very first tree folk, iron root tree folk in alpha was a three, five, and it's not, we have made square-statted tree folk and maybe one or two that have power greater than toughness, but most of the time it just became a thing we did where tree folk and maybe one or two that have power greater than toughness. But most of the time it just became a thing we did where tree folk tended to be known for their toughness, right? That one of the things about a tree is it's very tough. It's got bark and roots and it's hard to fight a tree. A tree is pretty sturdy. So we liked the idea that it was sort of toughness.

They were toughness-statted. So one of the questions that Devin had to figure out is, okay, how do I make toughness-statted matter? How do I make toughness... Because one of the things about game design in general is you need to make the game end. You need what we call inertia. Meaning, I have a podcast called 10 Things Every Game Needs. Which you can listen to, it's from many years back. Based on an article I did. And one of the 10 things was inertia. Meaning, your game inherently has to end.

You have to build into your game the means by which the players will make the game end. Meaning, the act of playing the game has to push players toward the end state. Otherwise, the game never ends and you sit there and nothing ever happens. And so, for the little side, when I was, when my daughter was little, my kids were little, occasionally we play shoots and ladders. That's an example of a game that doesn't have inertia.

The idea for those who never never place you ladders is You're rolling dice on a board. You're trying to get to the end and some of the times you land on Ladders that you climb up so you skip spaces, but sometimes you land on shoots and shoots send you back And my pet peeve whenever I we play shoes and ladders is they always put the same amount of shoots and ladders Shoots are like slides They always put the same amount of shoots and ladders. Shoots are like slides. And then the idea is like just put more ladders than shoots. Like make the game end.

The number of games I had to cheat to let my daughter win just so the game would end. You know I would roll and count it wrong just so I wouldn't hit the shoot and the game would end. Anyway, that's the importance of inertia. So David is trying to figure out how do I make toughness make the game end? And then he came up with a pretty clever idea. Because what if this creature said, instead of using your power, you use your toughness, that creatures damage with toughness.

And so what it said is, hey, I want you to build a deck of creatures with higher toughness and power, that you want toughness status creatures. And it's like, it makes the game game end it just makes them more powerful it turns toughness status creatures into more powerful creatures for purposes of doing damage and that was great for tree folks because all the tree folks had higher toughness so essentially the idea is if you play Doran in a tree folk deck especially in a loreman tree folk deck he just makes all your tree folk more powerful then the clever we gave him up I his power toughness is 0 5 which is very clever because obviously does just makes all your tree folk more powerful. Then the clever, we gave him up,

his power toughness is zero five, which is very clever, because obviously it does damage with his toughness, not his power. But anyway, we made that card. It was very, it was instantaneously loved. That ability, the idea of toughness, turning toughness into power,

is something that we, R&D refers to it as the Dor and ability. Um, so I mean, something it's just something we go to again and again, and it was a really clever solve for something that's really nice, which is, um, making toughness aggressive. And so it is, it's an ability we go to again and again. And so, uh, anyway, that is why Dora and the thieves tower is number eight. So anyway guys, I can see the building from here.

So I have one more podcast. I will do the final, the final seven in the last podcast. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying this. Like I said, oh, by the way, if I hadn't reminded you, I did a talk in Chicago. The talk I did is online. You can go, if you like Google for like, I don't know, Mark Rosewater and, you know, top 20 most influential car designs, hopefully you will find this talk. And so, the talk live, I have a lot of slides,

like images, and I'm trying to make it so that this, like I'm covering a lot of the same material in my podcast, but A, I'm telling some stories I didn't, and there's some stuff I did in the talk that I don't do here. So the talk and the podcast, while they cover a lot of same ground, there is a lot of differences.

And so if you enjoy this, and you want to see the talk, the talk is up so you can see it. Anyway guys I'm just about to get to Wizards and I'm way over time so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.