Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1277: Betrayers of Kamigawa

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

This podcast is another in my quest to cover every Magic expansion.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, I have this ongoing quest to have a podcast on every single expansion. And so I've been going through them and covering the ones I haven't yet done. So it turns out that we're up to betrayers of Kamagawa. So I, in fact, did a bunch of podcasts on champions of Kamagawa. I will go over a little bit today on champions.

but I'm going to set up betrayers, and then I'm going to talk all about betrayers. Then at some point in the near future, I will talk about saviors of Kamagawa. Okay, so Champions of Kamagawa was sort of Bill's last sort of block design as head designer. So what happens is I take over as head designer

in the middle of Champions of Kamagawa block. In fact, the very first set that I had any responsibility the head designer was, in fact, on Betrayors of Kamagawa, this set. Now, it was way far along. I more was just trying to, both Petraeers and Saviors was more of me trying to, like, get them to the point of what they were doing. It's not really to Rabnika that I have a big, like,

the first blocks that I'm in charge of where I have a big input. Betrayers and Saviors are more me just trying to make sure the sets live up to what they were trying to do. So real quickly, there's a little update on Champions, so we get into Petraeers. Bill's idea for champions was he really wanted to do a top-down block. And nowadays, we do that all the time. But back in the day, it wasn't something that we had done all the time. And Bill's idea was, here's what he wanted to do.

Let's build a cool world, first and foremost, and after the creative has built a cool world, then we'll make a magic set to reflect that cool world. That was Bill's vision. I think we had narrowed it down to three things. It was going to be mythology. It's either going to be Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, or Japanese mythology. Those were the three things that he thought were very evocative.

Obviously, we ended up choosing Japanese mythology. We would later do Greek mythology in Theros. We would later do Egyptian mythology in Amuncad. So all of these eventually got done. But those were the three. I think it got narrowed down. the last two were either Egyptian or Japanese and obviously we chose Japanese.

The set, because it was built creative first, it got himself in some problems. One of the big lessons we've learned from Champions and beyond is you really want to back and forth between creative and design because there's things, what happening in Champions was because things sort of got designed from a flavor standpoint, mechanics ended up being very ham-fisted

that a lot of, like, all samurai have Bushido, you know, things like that, where it was, you know, all moonfolk bounce things, all snake tap thing. Like, it got very, we represented a particular thing in a very consistent way every time. And I think that wasn't, in retrospect, looking back, I don't know, with 2020 in hindsight, I don't think that, I think you want a little more nuanced than that.

But anyway, so champions did a bunch of things. It had three named mechanics and then a bunch of themes and sort of unnamed things. The big element of the set was there's this spirit theme. There were a lot. The flavor of the story was the human word versus the spirit world. Basically, the emperor ends up taking something from the spirit world that really upsets the spirits and causes this giant conflict. So there was a sub, I think called

Arcane, which was a creature, sorry, a spell type. It's a subtype for instance and sorceries. And so Spiritcraft were cards that cared about whenever you cast an arcane spell or a spirit, a spirit or an arcane spell. There was a mechanical, Bishito. Bishito had a number on it, And whenever you attacked or blocked, you gained that plus N plus N.

So Bishito 2, whenever you attacked or block, I'm sorry, whenever you got into combat. Whenever you attacked and were blocked or whenever you blocked, you got plus 2 plus 2 if you had Bishito 2. Then Soul Shift was whenever this creature dies, you didn't get to return another spirit to your hand. there was splice onto arcane this was a spell mechanic that allowed you from your hand to spend mana to sort of graft it onto an arcane spell

arcane only wanted an instant sorceries and then we had flip cards flip cards were cards in which there was two orientations you could flip the card 180 degrees and one side you'd play the one side first but it'd flip into the second side so it was kind of a precursor to double face cards So those were the main mechanics

of Spiritcraft, Flipcars, Arcane, Beshito, still ship, spliced. Most of that stuff carried over to Betrayors. Betrayers did, though, have something new. So real quickly, Betrayers comes out in February of 2005, has 165 cards, 55 common, 55 uncommon, 55 rare. Mythic Rairs aren't a thing yet. 55 is important for those that care about collation.

the collation sheets I'm sure were 110 and so it meant everything appeared twice on its sheet so every common was twice on its common sheet and such the design was led by Mike Elliott Randy Bueller was on the team with him and the development was led by Henry Stern along with Devin Lowe, Randy Buehler Paul Sotomay and Matt Place

and like I said the interesting thing for me was I sort of peaked into the very tail end of this I was just giving notes as the head designers apt to do late in the process but I was not really involved in the structure of this although I mean I was involved only because

I'm a magic designer so here's probably the biggest thing that I had to do with betrayers even though I was not on the betrayers design team I did design a mechanic on the in betrayers so one of the things that we were trying to do in making champions

is I had not yet become head designer. But I was becoming really infatuated with the idea that we have to plan our blocks. We had done invasion and we had saved the enemy stuff for apocalypse and that had gone so well. And so I was just being much more conscious of, could we save things? And so while we were working on champions, I was not on the champion's design team, but I was on the development team for champions, interestingly. One of the things that I think I pitched a bill is one of the most exciting

things about Japanese mythology is ninjas. I said, what if we held off on ninjas? What if ninjas were the selling point of the second sack? In fact, in betrayers of Kamagawa, the betrayers, the betrayers are the ninja. That's who's betraying.

So, we introduced ninja. So there's no ninjas in champions of Kamagawa. They get introduced in Maturators of Kamagawa. I don't know that's the right call in retrospect, but it is what we did. And I pitched a ninja mechanic. What you all might know is ninjitsu. So the idea behind it was I wanted the ninjas to be sneaky.

And in my mind, because they have magic, because it's a magic said, and they have access to magic, that ninjas were really good at disguising who they were. Not because they were wearing costumes or anything, but because they had magic that they could make you believe they were something that they were not. And so ninjitsu, the idea is, it's a cheaper cost, usually, and it allows you to, if a creature attacks unblocked, you can exchange that creature for the ninjitsu creature. So the idea, and ninjitsu only went on ninjas, all ninjas had in the, the nature of this block was very one for one. All samurai had Bushido's, all creatures Rashido, we're samurai. Same was for ninjitsu and ninjuts. Ninjas uniquely had ninjitsu.

And only ninjitsu creatures were ninjas. So the idea is, I attack with the creature might seem innocent and harmless. But if you don't block that creature, it might secretly be a ninja. And you spend mana and flip it. And then all of a sudden, you exchange it. So that creature comes back to your hand, and the creature that's attacking is now your ninja. I think all the ninjas, or the vast, last majority of the ninjas had what we call saboteur abilities, which is a combat ability. If they deal combat damage to a player, something happens. And so the idea is that you could, one of the ways to get your ninjas through is you'd attack with something either innocent or had evasion or something that for some reason didn't get blocked. All of a sudden, boom,

it's a ninja. And the ninjas can do pretty scary things. When I get to some of the card-by-card stuff, a lot of the top cards in the set are ninjas, so we'll talk about some of those. So anyway, I pitched this idea for ninjas. My memory is I came up with it during Champions, maybe Champions Development. Anyway, I convinced Bill to hold off on the ninjas until Betrayors, and then I came up with the ninja mechanic that I think Bill liked. So my contribution to Petraeus Kamagawa is I got the ninja focus

and the ninja mechanic. That's my contribution. Okay, so the one other other, mechanic that's new to betrayers is called offering offering was on a cycle of rairs the way it works is it has a creature type so there were uh the white one was fox offering the blue one was moonfolk offering the black was rat offering the red was goblin offering and the green was snake offering this had a lot to do we had a lot of um creature animals that were sort of you know creature humanoids based on the japanese mythology like the the the

moonfolk and the rat folk and the snake folk and so the idea of offering is you may play this card at instant speed by sacrificing a creature on the board and then you pay the difference between the mana cost of what you sacrifice and what it is that you cast with offering and so these things because you were sacrificing things the bigger the thing you sacrifice the cheaper this could become And they would be surprised, and you wouldn't expect them. So one of the themes, I guess, of betrayers is a lot of betraying things you don't... Your creature is secretly a ninja. You don't expect this creature to pounce them on board.

And on some level, because you're sacrificing the creature, the flavor sort of the... This creature transforms into the creature, I think, some of the flavor. Or, well, I guess you're making an offerant, so I guess you're sacrificing it. But by sacrificing, you speed it up and you get the thing. So, anyway, that, so the interesting thing about champions is one of the reasons that I became head designer in the middle of this is Bill had been the head designer since invasion. And then when, I think Jim Lynn, so when I first got to Wizards, I was hired by Mike Davis. Mike Davis was the head of R&D. I believe that when Mike went on to do something different,

Jim Lynn became the head of R&D. And then Jim Lynn got promoted to be in charge of like executive vice president, something bigger than just R&D. That is when Bill Rose got, took the position of vice president of R&D, a position he held up and through his retirement. Although, I guess maybe he got in charge of Studio X. Maybe he got a bigger position. But anyway, so he was in charge of R&D.

And for a while, Bill kept on being the head designer. So he was both VP of R&D and head designer. When he went up, at the time, the director of R&D, the job he had had, the part of being the director went to Randy Bueller. So Randy Buehler was doing the managerial stuff of overseeing R&D. But the actual design, Bill sort of kept on doing. Bill kept overseeing it. I think Randy realized that Bill was just a bit overtaxed.

And so Randy was the one that pitched me taking over his head designer just because Bill had to run the whole department. And he was quite busy. Anyway, Champsacamagawa was very much Bill's impetus. Bill wanted to see a top-down block but Bill was not super hands on on this particular set and that part of that is

Randy realizing that Bill just a little bit overhead like Bill was just doing a lot and so I was on the development team partly because the set needed a lot of design refinement

the early design Brian Tinsman had done had led the design for Champs and Kamagawa And there just was a lot of, when the set got handed over, there's some uncertainty about what exactly we were and weren't doing. And I was on the development team just trying to clear some stuff up. Like flip cards got added during development. Splice onto Arcane got added in development.

I had a big hand to both those. So in a lot of ways, what I was doing by being on the development team was kind of doing what Bill didn't have time to do. which was a lot of the refining what was going on. And because of that, I think that's why I ended up becoming hip signer. But anyway, one of the challenges we learned, like, for those who don't know the history of James Kamagawa, we were on the tail end of, but the step before was Erza Saga. Erza Saga had blown everything up.

It was sort of the tail end of when I was hired, me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, William Jockish, and then eventually Henry Stern were kind of the magic design team, and we did all of the design and development. And Erz de Saga was kind of things blowing up and like, you know what, we need people that are more trained for development than us. Henry Root was the only one that had any sort of pro tour experience and so we started hiring more pro tours and we got Randy Bueller

and Mike Dornay and Matt Place and Mike Turney we started hiring more people, Bright Schneider we started hiring more people that had more sort of development experience but because of that because Urza Saga was kind of exploded and caused all sorts of problems

what we were called Combo Winter we really try to pull back and Chamis Gama Camagawa was a little lower powered. We had made a choice in design, which I had a big hand in. We were trying to figure out what our theme was. We decided to lean a bit into legendary, and so James Kamagawa, every single creature at rare was legendary, and then some uncommon.

So it had a percentage of legendary creatures way, way higher than we'd ever done. We were just trying to lean in something that would make it splashy. the idea was we were doing flavor and so flavor's all about characters and we were just trying to lean into that but Champions of Kamagawa had a lot of issues there were a lot of I think because Bill was a little overwhelmed

that champions kind of got a little off track there's a lot of cool things about champions obviously we eventually did come back to it but in its day partly because it was low power partly because we were very much inspired by

Japanese mythology, the problem we had learned was not enough people at the time were well versed in Japanese mythology. I think Japanese mythology has had a much larger role in pop culture than it did at the time. So I think people are a little more aware now than they were then. But while we were pretty

faithful to Japanese mythology, a lot of people, it just read as weird to a lot of people because they weren't familiar with it. And a lot of our spirits were definitely very strange. Anyway, champions went on to not be so it was

not a very well-selling set and in market research for a long time or maybe forever it was the lowest rated world we'd ever had in a time we were raiding world in fact I think it's still the lowest rated

but anyway it did poorly in all the metrics that we measure that's why it took so long to come back to champions to Kamagawa because we really sort of missed the boat in a lot of ways the interesting thing about

portrayers of Kamagawa was The ninjas were actually quite popular, and ninjitsu was quite popular. When we came back to Kamagawa, we only brought back two things, I mean, in any big way. One was Njitsu. The other was channel, and it was less that channel was an amazing mechanic, and more, it was something we could work with that did actually come from original Kamagawa. So, Nijitsu really was the one, I guess, big success, mechanically speaking. Okay, so let's talk about some of the top cards, many of which for ninja. So let's talk about that.

Although the first one, the first two or not. Heartless Hidescu, Hidisogu, Hidisugu. Three red red, four, three. He's a legendary creature, an ogre shaman. And he has tap. He deals each player damage equal to half their life total. Which is just very powerful. Oh, so one of the interesting things, and this is a good example.

At the time we made it, us making half the creature's legendary was mostly us trying to lean into some flavor. saying, oh, it's the flavor set. It's all about characters. So we're doing way more legendary creatures we've ever done before. It's not till years later when commander takes off, where legendary creatures take on the secondary purpose of being commanders that I think is really where Kamagawa found its footing. Because early magic, we were very actually shy about doing legendary creatures.

Early magic does not have a lot of choices of legendary creatures. You know, we would do a set, and the whole set would have three, four, five legendary creatures. So Champions was the first time we had done legendary creatures in any volume. And so when Commander came back, it's just with the set that kind of all these undiscovered things. When people, one of the things about Commander sometimes

is you want to find Commander that you haven't seen other people play. You know, you've got something uniquely your own. And Champions had a lot of kind of hidden gems that people found. And I think a lot of the resurgence of Kamagawa came from Commander. And so, interestingly, our legendary theme that at the time, I have a famous saying I say, if your theme is not a common, it's not your theme. That came from our lessons from Chamacama Gawa.

That we did this thing where all the legendary creatures were legends, right? All the rare creatures were legends. But that was hard to tell. When you opened up a pack, you might not, your rare might not even be a creature. And the end of your rare was a creature, okay, I happened to get a legendary creature. It took a lot of packs where you realized, oh, All the rare creatures are legendary. That just, it's, my whole lesson there is,

and really nowadays it's more, if your theme isn't in low enough as stand, it's not your theme. Like, people have to feel to recognize what's going on. And in, like, for example, in Dominaria, we would do this thing where we had a legends theme, and what we did was a legendary creature in every pack. Well, that's a lot easier. You don't have to open a lot of packs

to realize everyone has this legendary creature in it, which is a lot more than all the rare creatures. So, anyway, that is, I think a lot of the popularity of champions and betrayers, you know, have to do with all these legendary creatures. And I think Heartless Siddhi is part of that. Okay, Umazjite. It's an artifact and equipment that costs two, and you can equip it for two. And it says, whenever you deal combat damage, whenever equipped creature deals combat damage,

put two counters on Umazazjit. And then you can move a counter to do one of three things. You can give a creature plus two plus two. You can give target creature minus one, minus one, or you can gain two life. Now, the interesting thing, I actually did design this card. When I made the card, the second ability was not minus one, minus one. It was add mana to your mana pool. During, like, editing, late, late in the process, during editing, they realized that the rule,

didn't work that I don't remember exactly but somehow the trigger getting mana just the timing didn't work and they couldn't allow it to be mana so late in the process they had to make a change and I guess they decided to make it

minus one minus one that ended up making this card really really powerful and anyway this card ended up being one of the more broken cards and a big part of it is it could kill things. That was a big part of it. Okay, next up. Ink Eye, Servant of Oni, four black, black,

5-4, legendary creature, rat ninja. It has ninjitsu for three black black. Its main mana cost is four black black. And then whenever it deals come at damage to an opponent, you get to regenerate, aka take a creature card from their graveyard and put it on the battlefield under your control. And then for one in black, it could regenerate. Um, So the idea was, if this thing could get through, it could steal one of your opponent's dead creatures. And it had nojitsu because it could sneak through. And even if it couldn't, you know, it was a,

it's a five-four creature with regeneration, right? That if you attack, you can't kill it because it's got a regeneration. And it's big enough that it can kill probably what you're blocking. So it slowly chews through the other side. So it's a pretty powerful creature. Next, misblade Shinobi. Miss Blade Shinobi costs two in the blue, so three mana total, one of which is blue.

it's a 1-1 human ninja and whenever it deals combat damage to an opponent's got a saboteurability as the ninja's do it bounces one of their creatures meaning it puts one of their creatures from the battlefield back into their hand now unlike inkai servant

this one's heart like it's just a 1-1 yeah you can ninjitsu it in and only for one man so it's good at doing that one surprise thing after that your opponent knows it's there so it's ninjitsu is the vast majority. But if you can someone give an evasion, you know, make it unblockable,

there are other tricks you can do with it. And betrayers did have means to do that because it was the ninja set. Ninja of the deep hours. Three in a blue, four mana total, one of which is blue. It's a two-two. Human Ninja. Its sabbatore ability is you get to draw a card.

And so once again, the idea is I ninjitsu it out for two mana, one in a blue, which is half its normal cost. I get the creature out and I get to draw a card, which is pretty powerful. Throat slitter. You can see all these top cards here are ninjas. Throat slatter is four in a black, so five man a total, one of which is black, two, two. When it deals combat damage, I'm sorry, it's a creature type that's a rat ninja.

It's ninjitsu is two in a black, and its sabbatore ability is destroy a target non-black creature controlled by that player. So when I hit the player, I get to pick one of the creatures that isn't black because it took us forever to get rid of the non-black thing in Alpha, Richard make terror and didn't hit black creatures. More for flavor because the idea is you can't scare a black creature to death. But we kept that rider on black for a long, long time before we finally said, why can't black kill black creatures? Black is fine with killing black creatures. Black has no problem killing black creatures. So we finally got rid of that restriction. But anyway, it's here enough. So this was really nice in that you could kill something. Like I throw something at you

that maybe it's unblockable or flying or maybe just something that I overwhelm you and you can't block it. And boom, I get to kill one of your creatures. So that's super powerful. Okay, but last, my last card to talk about is Kira, a great glass spinner. So one blue, blue for 2-2, it's a legendary creature of spirit. It's got flying, and it says creatures you control have the following ability. The first time a spell or ability targets that creature, counter it. So it sort of protects your creatures. Here's another good example of probably a creature that's kind of sat around for a while,

and then when commander came out, it's like, oh, well, this is a person. kind of valuable thing to have if you can guarantee you have it and you can kind of build your deck around in. So, like I said, the, I really believe that the commander was a big boon. Like, it's funny because looking back, if you've ever read articles and stuff, I was the one who made the recommendation to do legendary creatures as a theme. Mostly what happened, what happened in Chim's Kamagawa was one of my reoccurring things in meetings and design meetings, a development meetings, was, what's our theme? What is the set about? What's it about? And they go, it's Japanese top dot. Oh, I got it. But mechanically, what is our theme? What are we

doing? Like what, you know, what's the mechanical heart of the set? And at one point, someone said, oh, well, it's about flavor. It's about legendary creatures. And I go, okay, if legendary creatures is our theme, we should make it our theme. We should push it. We should do it. And so So the idea of making every rare creature legendary was me trying to be very loud. Now, obviously, I miss the sense that unless you're looking at the set as a whole, it's hard to granularly see that, meaning by opening a booster pack, it's hard to see that. And that's what my lesson came from. But the idea was it was loud, and I was just trying to do something that was bold.

And it was bold. And it's funny how I think it wasn't bold enough in its time, mostly because the message messaging was like with modern technology, as we learned with Dominaria, what we should have done is guaranteed a legend in every pack. Same thing we did in Dominaria. That's a better technique. It's a cleaner way. Essentially, I mean, Dominaria basically did the same thing and just found the cleaner, better way to do it. That's what I would do in retrospect. The other thing that obviously that we did in Kamagawa Neon Dynasty is not only do we lean into mythology, but we also leaned a lot into the Japanese influence in pop culture. I think one of the things that's nice is that one of the larger problems with the original Kamagawa was there wasn't enough stuff that was familiar to people. And I think that when we came back, the blending in Neon Dynasty, I thought it was nice, where there was a lot of old mythology that maybe you do, maybe don't, or maybe recognized from original Kamagawa, but it had a lot of things that were a little more recognizable. I think that was nice for our return.

But anyway, I look back at betrayers, like I said. I don't know whether or not holding off ninjas for the second set was the right call. I think it hurt the first set in some ways. Once again, I mean, I do understand my thought presses at the time was I wanted our blocks to have more definition between sets. And once I become head designer, I'm much more aggressive about that. You know, Raffinik goes the next block. You can tell those, you know what's coming. You know each set is doing something that's uniquely it's only, you understand what's happening.

And so I think making this the ninja set was my way of trying It's like early versions of me trying to do what I eventually would do in a much louder way It turned out ninjas were pretty popular and ninjitsu was pretty popular I think that this set in some ways The ninja theme and ninjitsu, the mechanic in particular

ended up being the one kind of big success mechanically from the Champs of Kamagawa block Like I said, it's the only thing that we've brought brought back numerous time in numerous different places because of how much players do you like it. We've done it in modern mafters. We've just done it in a bunch of places. So it is kind of the one big success. So I guess looking back, Betrayors had the one theme and the one mechanical thing that ended up being kind of the one success of the block.

So I guess hands off to Petraeers for that. A lot of ninjas still get played and a lot of legendary creatures from Betrayers still get played. So, anyway, that is the legacy of Betrayers of Kamagawa. I guess it always will be the first set that I had a little chance of looking over. Like I said, it was very late in the process. But anyway, that is betrayers. So I guess as we continue on with this series, we'll start getting the sets that I actually had a little bigger hand on. Although the next one, Sayers Kamagawa, I had a little hand in it, but not as much as I would later sets.

because it was well underway. But anyway, that is Petraiser of Kamagawa. I hope you guys enjoyed the walkthrough. But as I'm now at work, we all know what that means. It means to 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.