Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1249: Stronghold

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

In this podcast, I talk all about Stronghold (the second expansion of the Tempest block).

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so one of my goals with my podcast is I want to do a podcast on every single magic expansion that has ever come out. And I'm a good way there. But every once in a while I check to see what I haven't done. And I'm going going chronologically So the one that I have not done yet chronologically is I've not yet done stronghold or Exodus So the very first podcast I ever did was on tempest which is the first that I ever led But I never did the two other sets in that block. So I'm going to correct that well, at least for stronghold I'm going to correct that today and very soon. I also do Exodus Okay, so before I can get to stronghold. Let me get you up to date and

Review a little bit about tempest block. So when Richard Garfield first made magic He talked to some of the playtefters and he had them make expansions Now obviously magic ended up more popular than they expected and the extensions had to come faster than they expected But a lot of the earliest expansions, like Ice Age was made by the group that he met at college, the East Coast Playdressers, Gaff Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. Mirage, or Menagerie if it's called in design, was made by the Bridge Club, which was Bill Rose, Charlie Coutinho, Joel Mick, Elliot Siegel, Howard Kowenberg, Don Felice, Lily Wu, I believe. So a lot of the early magic sets were done by playtapters.

And then when the game first started being successful, Peter also asked some of his friends. So Steve Condor and some of his role playing friends did Legends. Jesper Muirforce, who was the original art director, did The Dark. Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford. Kyle ran customer service. Scott Hungerford was on what we used to call continuity, now we call it the creative team. They did Homelands. So a lot of magic. When

I first got to Wizards, I was actually not hired as a designer. I was hired as a developer. And what they said is, look, we have all our designs being done externally. We need to see people internally to develop the work we've done externally. But eventually we got to the point where we started running out of the external stuff and the idea came up that maybe we wanted to start doing it internally. Now remember, I wanted to be a designer. And so when I got hired, I said to them, I really want to be a designer. They're like, well, we're hiring developers.

And I'm like, okay, let me get my foot in the door. And then once I'm there and I know everybody, I'll figure out a way to start doing design. And so one day I was talking with Richard Garfield. Now Richard had done the original game, had done Alpha, then he had done the very first expansion, Arabian Nights. But after that, Richard went off to do other games. He made Vampire the Eternal Struggle and Netrunner and Battle Tech and lots and lots of other games. So Richard had not worked on Magic for a while.

Now when I got to Wizards, we would work during the day and then at night a lot of times we would play games. And so I got to know Richard well. We played a lot of games together and stuff. And one day he mentioned that, you know, he wouldn't mind coming back and working on a magic set. So I saw my opportunity. So I went to Joel Mick, who was the head designer at the time. So before I was head designer was Bill Rose, before Bill Rose was Joel Mick. So I went to Joel Mick, who was the head designer at the time. So before I was head designer was Bill Rose, before Bill Rose was Joel Mick. So I went to Joel and I said, hey, I hear we want to do some internal design. And Richard Garfield said he would be on my design team if I ran a design team.

And so Joel said, oh, okay. And he let me do it. I even was allowed to pick my own design team. I mean, I had Richard. So I got Mike Elliott and I both bemoaned that we wanted to be designers, but we're hired as developers. I put Mike Elliott on the team and then Charlie Cattino I also put on the team. So the four of us we ended up going down to Richard's parents house in Portland for a week. We didn't shave and Mike and I had been collecting up all sorts of cool ideas for Magic. And Richard hadn't made Magic in a while.

He'd been collecting ideas. So we just had an outpouring of things. In fact, the Tempest design had so much stuff in it that we ended up having to pull stuff out of it. In fact, each year at the time, the block would have two named mechanics. So we would have Buy, Back, and Shadow. We'll get to it in a second. But Cycling and Echo, which were the two mechanics from the next set,

Urza Saga, we made, you know, they were in our design file for Tempest. We ended up taking them out and then Mike Elliott led Urza Saga. He brought those back. Anyway, a lot going on, a lot of mechanics. So buyback and shadow. So shadow, Mike Elliott before he came to Wizards made a set that was called Astral Ways. And then when he got hired, Wizards bought the rights to the set, basically. And so that set had three things in it. Three mechanics. It had Buyback. No, Buyback, sorry. It had Shadow. So Shadow was an alternative evasion mechanic.

Basically, it's kind of like flying with one exception. So basically, if you have shadow, you can't block any creatures that have shadow. Sorry, you can't block any creatures except the creatures that have shadow. And you can only be blocked by creatures that have shadow. So shadows kind of are on their own plane, their own existence. And that shadow stuff can interact, but nothing can interact with the shadow stuff. And in the story, when they built Tempest, there were some creatures that got trapped in between the Falicos and the Dauphi and, oh wait one, but there were three groups, one in each, the three colors that had shadow that were trapped. And the

white, blue, and black were the colors that had shadow. They were the flying colors because they were the colors that had invasion. So the other two things Echo was in his set, like I said, we had it in our set for a while. Ended up being done in Ursa Saga. And then Slivers, this is where Slivers came from. Mike was Mike saw the popularity of plague rat He thought what if I did plague rat, but instead of just boosting other plague rats

What if it boosts other abilities and granted them abilities and so anyway, he made the slivers We we we contextualize them a bit when we made Michael I put them in story, but So anyway, and then buyback was mechanic made by Richard Garfield we originally had tried doing draw triggers Meaning things that happen when you drew them But there was no clear way to know when you drew something but they like you could hide the information And it was too easy to cheat with it. So we ended up not wanting we ended up choosing that to that and then

Richard then came up the idea of buyback. Buyback, basically you pay extra mana. And then instead of the spell resolve and go into the graveyard, it stays in your hand. So unless you cast it again. So you pay extra mana, you get another use of it because the spell doesn't go away. All the buyback costs in Tempest were generic mana.

OK. All the buyback costs in Tempest were generic mana. Okay, another important part of this story is that when I first moved to Wizards, one of the very first people I got to know was a man named Michael Ryan. He was an editor for Magic, and it turns out he got the task of editing my puzzle book. So before I came to Wizards, I wrote, in the duelist I had a puzzle called Magic the Puzzling. So we actually put a book, a Magic the Puzzling book out. I made the puzzles before I came to Wizards, but it didn't get edited until after I was at Wizards.

So Michael and I spent many late nights him editing the book and me making, you know, he'd ask me questions and I would answer them. Usually he was doing editing, I was writing flavor text, so, or Mirage I believe. But anyway, so we got to know each other from doing the book. And Michael and I are both writers. I was more into writing movies, television, Michael was into writing books, but we're both writers and we bemoan the fact that Magic didn't have a larger story. And so we decided to make one and pitch it. So we made what was known as the Weatherlight Saga. So basically what we did is in the Mirage story, there was a flying ship called the Weatherlight with a captain named Siste.

We didn't make any of that. We said, what if we use that flying ship as a means to build a path that goes from world to world so there'll be continuity between the world. There'll be a larger storyline. Magic didn't have, within each set there was a storyline. Mirage had a storyline. But we wanted something bigger, a grander story with characters that persisted over time that the audience could follow and you know get to know. So what we did is we made a large, Sista already existed, we didn't exist, she was on the crew, the captain, and then we made a whole bunch of characters and one of our goals was we wanted to represent all the different colors of magic. In white we had Gerard, who is the hero of our story. Gerard was born with a destiny that he had, there's an object

called a legacy that were these important artifacts, that using the legacy he was going to save the world. And he didn't quite know what that meant, but he, to protect him, he as a baby was given to a man named Sadar Kondo to raise. So Sadar Kondo had a son named Vhul. Vhul would be important because Vhul would get jealous of Gerard and grow up to be Vhul of Wrath or Vohrath. So Vohrath was the main villain of the Tempest storyline. Anyway, so Gerard was the main villain of the Tempest storyline.

Anyway, so Gerard was our main character. Also in White, we had Sarah. Not Sarah, yeah Sarah. We had, oh not Sarah, sorry, Hannah. Hannah was the engineer of the ship. She and Gerard would get involved. We also had Oram who was the healer, which she was a Samite healer. Then in blue we had Urtai who was a young upstart wizard that was a little cocky but good. Then in black we had

Krovaks who was a nobleman, as you will learn in the story today, things would happen to him. Then in red we had Tanngarth. And Tanngarth was a minotaur, a proud minotaur that was the first maid on the ship. We had, and we had Squee, who was the cabin boy, our comic relief. Green was Mirri, she was a cat warrior. She was a good friend of Gerard's And then there was an artifact. It was car who was the keeper of the legacy So we made this whole crew and then the storyline the real short version storyline is

Gerard It studies magic with Bultani along with Ruffalo's who's, Lennor, Elf and Mirri. The three of them become good friends they end up joining the Weatherlight because the Vhull, Vorath Stole all the legacy and spread it like sold it off because he didn't want Gerard to be able to meet his destiny The Weatherlight had the job of finding all the items and getting them back. They got Gerard and Mary and Ruffellos to join them in that quest. During that quest, which took many years, at the end of it, Ruffellos got

killed by Mournfren Gallivray. And anyway, it was such a harmful thing for Gerard and Mirri. They left the ship. So the story begins. Sissi gets kidnapped. Tangarth comes to Gerard and says, Gerard, we need your help. And so Gerard gathers together a bunch of characters, including getting Mirri back on the ship. They get Urtau, they get Krovak, Stark's daughter Takara had been kidnapped

by Bolrath. And so Stark says, if you show me, I'll tell you how to get to the stronghold, which is where Bolrath was keeping the prisoners in Borg for a set called Stronghold. And anyway, so we made that the preamble ended up being in Weatherlust, at Weatherlust. We pitched to a guy named Rick Aaron who was so excited he wanted to start right away. He put together the very first sort of world building team which included people like Mark Tedin and Ansematics, they're wonderful magic artists. Anyway, we built Wrath, Wrath was this artificial plane that was made anyway. So the story of Tempest is the Weatherlight coming to Tempest. As soon as they get there, they are met by another flagship called

the Predator. It was led by a man named Breven Elveth, who's like the right-hand man of Full Wrath. He knocks Gerard overboard thinking he kills them or the Gerard doesn't die and he steals all the pieces of he takes all the legacy off the ship including Karn, Karn's part of the legacy. And then Tongarth ends up in his boldness jumping aboard the ship and they end up finding him. So not only do we have to rescue Sisay and Takara but we now got to rescue Karn and Tongarth in addition. Jarrar ends up meeting Eladamri, who's the leader of the elves and who themselves have a beefy-conspire wrath.

And there's a master plan. Basically, what's going to happen is they're going to get inside and do the rescue, but they're going to open the gates to allow the elves to attack the stronghold. That's the master plan. And the story of Tempest ends with them getting into, they have to go through the death pits of wrath and the furnace of wrath. The furnace of wrath is where they meet the slivers. So anyway, our story begins with Stronghold when they get inside the Stronghold and the

story of Stronghold is the story of them rescuing everybody. There's a lot that goes on. Gerard thinks he's found Volrath, but it turns out to be a shapeshifter that's not Volrath. The other big event that happens is, so I won't get into the details of this, but there's an angel named Selenia who was part of a cursed artifact that Krovex owned. Krovex fell in love with her.

That's part of the curse. Anyway, when they're there in the stronghold, Selenia attacks. She's trying to kill Krovacs. Miri gets in the way to protect Krovacs and gets injured. And then this traumatic event, Miri kills Selenia. The killing of Selenia finishes the curse, and then it turns Krovax into a vampire. In fact, in the set, we have Krovax. So one of the things we did with the legendary creatures, the crew members, is we doled them out one by one because there weren't that many of them. So this set had Krovax in it. Two black black for zero zero that enters with four plus one plus one counters. During your upkeep you have to sac a creature you have to feed him and if you do he gets a plus one plus one counter. If you don't he goes hungry loses a plus one

plus one counter and then for one black mana he can fly for the turn. The design for Krovax is what I kind of had wanted Sengar Vampire to be. Sengar Vampire definitely has this flavor of oh I I feed on things and I get stronger. But the way it was designed up, people just never blocked it. So it didn't get a feed much. And I like the idea of an upkeep. Caution. Like, oh, he's a vampire now.

The reason we waited to make him a vampire was we just didn't realistically think that the crew would take him aboard if he's a vampire. I said it's funny now because the current crew of the other one, like does have a vampire. But anyway, that was us completing him. I will say when I get to Exodus I'll go more into this. It was our plan that Krovax even being a vampire was going to stay on the ship. That the crew

you know they already cared about him he was part of the crew so they weren't abandoning him once he turned into a vampire. We felt that that's how you got a vampire on board is you got them to accept him first before he was a vampire. Mirri gets injured as we'll see in Exodus Miri is not supposed to die in Exodus which spoiler for Exodus. We'll get there Basically behind the scenes, I guess important Michael and I get brought on to do the story We're in charge of it during weather light during tempest during stronghold in the middle of Exodus

We stopped being charged with the story, which is a story I'll get to when we get to Exodus. As far as Stronghold, we are there for Stronghold. Like Tempest, Stronghold has a storyboard, which you can see probably online somewhere, where we tell the story of Tempest, but through a storyboard so that you can see what's going on. And there's a lot of component pieces. They rescue the various people. Karn frees the Sliver Queen. Oh, Sliver Queen shows up, by the way. So the Sliver Queen was Magic's first ever five-color card. It had a woofer cost, white, blue, black, red, green. And it's a 7-7 that for two mana makes one-one slivers. Now note, it doesn't enhance slivers anyway.

She is the mother of all slivers, or at least of these slivers, and so she produces slivers. So she's very, very good in the sliver deck and sliver decks want to be five-color. We've made a whole bunch of legendary five-color sliver cards over time. This was the very first one. And not just the very first sliver one, the very first five color both card and legendary creature. So that was something that you need to draw and hold. Karn and the sliver queen Fon. Because Karn feels possessive over the legacy like she feels possessive over the slivers. So the slivers by the way came from another world, the sliver home world. Voroth found them there.

They, like him, were shapeshifters. He was intrigued by them, so he ended up pulling some so he could study them. That's why there is a metallic sliver, which is not a real sliver, which is why it doesn't grant abilities. He put it as a spy so he could learn about the slivers. That's him. Okay, so let's talk about Schrunk Hole here. So what happened is we continue the mechanics. So back in the day, there'd be two named mechanics in the

block. They'd be introduced in the larger set, and the two small sets would do more with them. The buyback was all generic costs. There were 12 buyback cards in Tempest. There are nine in Shrunk Hole. Oh, once again, Stronghold's a smaller set. It's 143 cards, 25 commons, 44 uncommons, 44 rares. I think rares far from being a thing yet. And I just mentioned Sliver Queen. Sliver Queen, and there's a bunch of slivers I'll get to in a second that are multicolored.

This is the last multicolored cards until Invasion. We sort of stopped doing multicolored cards for a while to build up some excitement for multicolored. OK, so buyback, there were 12 buyback cards in Tempest. There are nine in Toronto. The two innovations is that there's some colored buyback costs. So they're more intense.

And there's one buyback card that requires you stacking the land. It's a non-mana buyback cost. We didn't do a lot with shadow. There's one more shadow card in each color. So there's one white, one blue, one black shadow card. And they do new things, but on a card-by-card basis. There's more slivers.

There's an ally color of slivers, so gold slivers for the first time, and the sliver queen. And then there are a few new things that we introduced. Also, there's more Lissids, sorry. Lissids were creatures that could turn into enchantments and go back and forth. In the original Tempest, I designed cards that could be either creatures or enchantments, and Mike designed a card that could be both and go back and forth. So we tried the more complicated version. We liked it, although for a long time the rules team did not quite know how the list works. They've since figured it out. Okay, things that were in the set. So there

was a mechanic that I originally had in Tempest that we ended up moving to strongholds, but we put one card in Tempest as a teaser, the Spikes. So we put what we call baby Spike. I forget what the actual name of it was. But it was for one green mana it was a zero zero that came with a plus one plus one counter and then for mana you could move it to another card. The idea of the Spikes is all the Spikes have the ability to move the Spikes so if you move to another Spike you can continue to move it around. The Sp spikes could sort of move the counters between them But once I moved it to a non spike well now it's locked in place now. I can't move anymore

And some of the spikes not all of them also gave you with like spike theater allowed you to turn the puzzle planner into life And so there were different ones that also could turn them into things so you could trade in the counters for other things So the spikes mostly premiered in. I mean, there was one in Tempest. But the spikes were here. Another thing that we did was what we called the Encore mechanic, which was in white. They're cards that had a zero activation that you

redirect to damage. So the idea essentially is any damage that's done to an Encore, you could redirect to another creature you controlled. We also did more with Flowstone. Flowstone was in red and it gave plus one minus one. It was part of the flavor of the world, but we wanted to give red something that allowed it to do some pumping, but the idea is it got stronger, but weaker on the top is when you used it.

So those were the main mechanical things as far as introducing new things, but we did have a whole bunch of cards that were very popular. So I'm going to talk through some of the cards and just talk a little bit about their design. So ensnaring bridge is an artifact that costs three generic mana and it says that creatures with a power Greater than the number of cards in your hand can't attack you So the idea is if I can empty my hand Basically, this function kind of like a one-way moat which keeps keeps your opponent from attacking you

And so there are definitely a lot of decks that made good use of that Especially decks that could be a little more aggressive. So that I'm aggressive in attacking you, but because I'm aggressive I can empty my hand and then you can't attack me. Intruder alarm. So intruder alarm was enchantment, cost two and a blue. It said creatures do not untap as normal, but whenever a creature enters the battlefield, untap all creatures. Not just your creatures, all creatures. This is back in the early days where most of our effects were global. We later started realizing that when you did things

you wanted things to affect you a lot of the time. Maybe effects like this might be global. There's reasons to want it to be global. But, anyway, this one was global. And it was used in a whole bunch of combo decks. Especially if I have tap effects that I want to reuse. Every time I play a new creature, I can tap things again.

And there are ways to tap to get creatures, for example. So you can make loops and things. Next is Shock. So Shock costs one red mana. It's instant. It deals two damage to any target. So in Alpha, Richard made a thing we refer to as the Boons. So it was a cycle of instants spread across

rarities. I think originally it was all in the same rarity but some of them were better than the others. So the white one, Healing Sam, could either prevent damage or gain you three life because it's always had a three in it. Ancestral Recall was a blue one, you could draw three cards. Dark Ritual was a black one, you could get three black mana. Red was Lightning Bolt, you could do three damage to any target. And green was Giant Growth, plus three, plus three. So as it turns out, and Social Recall was really, really broken. Dark Ritual was broken, but not quite as much as that Social Recall.

Lightning Bolt was over the curve, but not quite as much as that Ritual. Then Giant Growth was perfect, we still make it. And then Healing Set ended up being a little on the weak side, so we've made it strictly better than Helens have. Or we've made it better than Helens have, it was strictly better. But anyway, it was clear that the lightning bolt was a little bit too good for standard, so I made this car, I named this car too. So the idea was, it just was a fixed lightning bolt, and we still use shock from time to time, so it's a nice clean clear. It's a good name. Okay, next up is mox diamond we made

a new mox we were a little nutty what are we doing so it's a zero cost artifact is what mox is are it could tap for any color but when you played it you had to discard a land and so that was the extra cost but yeah yeah, it turned out you often have a land in your hand. This is not a, like, Moxedum was very strong. So even though it was weaker than normal boxes, it was still very strong. Volres Stronghold is a land that taps for colors and for one in the black you can tap and put a card from your graveyard on top of your library. So Volrath's laboratory was part of what we call a mega mega cycle. So we made a card in Mirage that was called Teferi's Isle and it had a blue flavor to it,

but we didn't have room to do five legendary lands, so we just made the one. Then we came up with this master idea of what if every block for five blocks in a row, we added another one of this cycle. We had done cycles within sets, we had done cycles within blocks, but we had never got that was a mega cycle within a block. But we never gone beyond, that's why it was a mega mega cycle. So we did the blue one, Burrish, Isle, and Mirage. Then in the next block in the second set, so Mirage was the first set, then in the next block in the sexo mirage was the first set then in the the next block in the second set which is stronghold

We did bulrush stronghold then in the next set which was The green one yag maya hara in earths destiny. That was the third set in the block Then in the next set in nemesis We did core Haven the white one which was the second set of the block, and then in the final fifth block, which was Invasion, we did Kelten Necropolis, which was in the first set. So it was five years, we went first set, second set, third set, second set, first set. A lot of style fun, but anyway, Volrath Stronghold was the second one, and it saw a bunch of play. things out of your graveyard is could be good Then we have dream halls. So dream halls cost three blue blue. It was an enchantment. So in uh,

Alliances we made a cycle we called pitch cards Force of wills the famous one most famous one and the idea was there were spells that you cannot pay their mana If you discarded a card of the same color. For some of them, like Force of Will, you had to pay some life for Force of Will. Anyway, I made a card called Dream Halls and the idea was it turned all your cards into pitch cards. You could get any card for free if you pitched a card of the same color. So the crazy thing was there used to be a magazine called Inquest and whenever a set would come out, they'd show all the new cards and they would pick the worst card of the set and they picked Dream

Halls as the worst card of the set which is like oh come on guys this might be broken like future hint it was broken we did have to ban it but anyway I just I always thought of it as the strongest worst card ever as selected by Inquis. Next we have Grave Pact. Grave Pact one black black black. So four mana three, which is black is enchantment. It says whenever you have a creature that dies, your opponents have to sacrifice a creature. If I'm gonna lose a creature, you're gonna lose a creature. And obviously you set this up in decks where you're making a lot of token creatures and you're just it allows you to sort of destroy all their creatures because usually your deck can produce more creatures than they can

and so great fact a very powerful card. Next, Horn of Greed. Horn of Greed was an artifact that costs three and it says whenever any player plays the land they draw a card. Well if your deck allows you to play lands more often Because there's ways to fast by no different ways to do that. You can take advantage of it. It's card. It's all play in certain decks Burgeoning it was enchantment for one green whenever opponent plays the land you can put a land from your hand onto the battlefield This is popular. I believe in commander because it helps you ramp in green and ramping in Commander is quite good. Also, we had Fling. Fling was a red spell that costs one and a red. You sacrifice a creature, but then you dealt damage equal to that creature's power to any target. You are throwing the creature at something.

to that creature's power to any target. You are throwing the creature at something. And then finally, my last one I'm talking about today is Mana Leak. So Alpha had a card where you tax the opponent for X. But then I said, well, it's a little cheaper, it costs two mana and then they have to pay three extra. So we were messing around with kind of what are more efficient ways to do taxing In spells and obviously manolique was quite good very good. She still sees a lot of play. Um, so anyway, uh Stronghold went over quite well tempest was very well received stronghold was well received. Um Like I said the the story that it was early on in the Weblight Saga. So we, um, Oh, so basically real quickly, the, the, what's going on in the

Tempest story is the crew gets to Tempest. They get in the fight with the predator and meet the elves in the first set and have to sneak into the castle. The second set is all about sneaking in the castle and rescuing everybody. Uh, and then the third set is about getting out of the castle. Um, basically what happens is about getting out of the castle. Basically what happens is they drop off Urtai, there's a gate, because they have no way to, the item that let them travel through dimensions,

through planes, got broken and they attacked by the predator. And so there is a gate that they can open, they hopefully can open, that they could go through So urtai has to go talk to Lena the sultari emissary of sultaris the white the white one um and He has to convince her to open up the gate so that that's where we leave right now The crew is trying to rescue everybody, but things are going on And as we will see The story will take a sharp turn,

not really in the direction that I wanted. But that's all for next time for Exodus. Anyway, guys, this is Stronghold. So it was a fun set. It built on a lot of things that Tempest did. It made a lot of individual cards. It saw a lot of play. Did the first five-color card,

first five-color Legendary Creature. It just made a lot of play. I did the first five color card, you know, first five color legendary creature. I just made a lot of fun spells. Not introduced to spikes, but had more spikes. Had the Angkor creatures. Had more elicits and more slivers and more of all the goodness of Tempest mostly. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this this tour of the Stronghold. And in the not too near distant future, I will be doing a podcast all about Exodus, the third set in the block. But anyway guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means.

It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.