Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1372: Getting the Banned Together, Part 4

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

This is part four of a new series, based on a talk I gave at MagicCon: Amsterdam, where I talk about the design of all the cards I had a major hand in that would later be banned or restricted.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my Getting the Band Together series. This is based on a talk I did at MagicCon Amsterdam, where I talked about every single card that I ever made that got banned or restricted. The reason I'm doing the series is when I did it as a talk, I only had an hour, and so I was just speeding through things.

but these stories are interesting and they actually go on a little longer than that. So I'm actually doing a multi-part series, obviously I'm up to part four, to sort of walk through all these different things and give you a more in-depth version of what happened. Okay, so last we left, we were up to...

Let's see. I think we had talked about Gifts Ungiven. Had we talked about Gifts Ungiven? That's where I haven't marked. Oh, this is where my... So I did this, the first three parts before, I did two weeks away going to MagicCom Amsterdam and going to San Diego Comic-Con, both of which there are podcasts. Either you've heard already or they're coming that I've recorded.

So I'm going to start with Gifts Ungiven. I hope I haven't told the story already. If I did, I apologize. So, oh no, did I tell the story? I think I did tell the Gifts I'm Given story. So we're going to move on for the one after that. So February 2008, banned in commander, and let's see, ban and commander was Kokusha, the evening star. Four black, black for a five-five flying creature, and when it dies, it drains five life from every opponent, or every player, I think, every other player, and you gain all the life that's drained, all the life that's lost.

Okay, so Kukusha is interesting. So I was not actually on the design team for Champs of Kamagawa. In fact, I wasn't on that whole block I was on any of the design teams. But I was on the development team. And the dragons actually got made in development, not in design. So obviously, James Kamagawa, we were doing top-down Japanese mythology. Dragons are a big part of Japanese mythology. So obviously, we wanted to include them.

So the plan was to do a cycle. But we were really sort of talking about how to do something cool, new and different. So one of the things that we talked about is, what is the down, like, where's the negative part of having a dragon? Like, oh, dragons are pretty cool. They're big, you get them out and tend to win the game when you attack with them. And so I said, well, I guess the thing you most dislike is when someone kills your dragon. So I said, well, what if we made a dragon and that if you attack with a dragon is good, because of a dragon. And if somehow they get rid of it, well, that might be good.

for you too. And so the idea was to put death triggers on it. So the idea is it's a big creature. So this creature it's a 5-5 flying creature. And so, you know, if I get this in play and you don't deal with it, I'm probably going to win the game.

It's a big flyer. But if your opponent does have an answer to it, well, it does come with a pretty good ability, which is it's making your opponent lose life or your opponents in a multiple of a game and you gaining life. So it turns out in a traditional commander game.

Four people, when it dies, you are, they are losing a combined 15 life, and you are gaining 15 lives. Each one's losing five, and you're gaining 15. I guess that was just a little bit strong for a commander. But the idea behind it was pretty fun, and the dragons went over really well. Because we had done before,

the interesting thing was we had done in invasion dragons that had attack triggers, which is like, oh, what's fun to do with your dragon attack? Well, let's reward you for attacking. And this was just a different take. It's sort of like, well, attacking itself is fun. Doing five damage is fun. But, you know, what happens if they get rid of it?

So, anyway, that's where that came from. I thought they actually turned up pretty well. Okay, next, September of 2008, banned in commander, grindstone, is an artifact that costs one, it's from Tempest, three in tap, you mill two, and then if the two cards you mill match in color

you get to mill another two. So this came about from a couple interesting places. I, like I said, I've talked about this in the previous podcast. I like millstone.

Millstone was fun. I like alternate wind conditions and so I do like milling. I also like sort of things that have a little bit of surprise to them. You don't quite know.

like things that have. So there's a card in unglued called Elvish Infersonator. And it's three in the green and then you roll two dice and one dice it's power and one dies it's its toughness. And the reason that card is so much fun

is there's just so much, there's so much, what is, I don't know what's going to be, what's going to be, you know? And sometimes you get a six-six and sometimes you get a one-one and there's a lot of drama there. So I like the idea of

what if we made a millstone where you didn't know how many cars would get milled. And I went through a couple different things. Like I looked at like, oh, what if I mill and flip a coin? But in the end, the one I decided to go with is since you're milling two cards, it seemed cool that we care about the two cards that you're milling.

And since there are two, matching made the most sense. Like, okay, with these two things, I did explore the idea of them not matching. But the problem is, when we did the math on it, not matching, but just, you know, could mill most of their deck sometimes.

We're matching, in a two-collar deck, matching didn't happen too much. Now, in a mono-collar deck, it happens a lot more. And there'll be another card I'm getting to it later today when combined with this card

that allows you to mill out your opponent's entire deck. So this card in a vacuum, I think, was innocent enough. It was combined with something else that caused their problems. But anyway, I do like, like I said,

I like the little mini-game. like the idea you don't quite know what's going to happen. There's drama. I'm a big fan of drama. I have a whole concept that I've done a podcast called Narrative Equity. That one of the fun things that games can do for you is create stories. And this is the kind of thing that is a great opportunity to create a story. Most of the time it's going to mill two or mill four. Like, most of the time, it's not going to mill that much. But every once in a while, you know, you just get lucky and then you get to tell the story. And I'm not talking about comboing with the other card. I just mean, like, I'm just mean, like, I'm going to be a lot. I just mean,

Honestly, like I do it and I happen to hit, you know, three times in a row. That's really cool. That doesn't happen all that often. So it's exciting. But anyway, that is where that came from. Okay, next. June 2009, Band and Commander. It's Braids Cabal Minion.

So two black-black, the legendary minion, creature, it's a minion. Two-two. In the beginning of each player's upkeep, they sacrifice an artifact, a creature, or a land. So one of the things that we do is there's normally a story that goes along. And in this particular case, it depends. Usually the story gets written after the cards are made. But we at least get an outline of sort of the main characters. And for Odyssey, this was Kamal was the main character.

He was a pit fighter in the first book. And so there were a bunch of different pit fighters. So Braids was one of the pit fighters. And the idea of Braids was, she just was this mono black mage that like was like just kind of destructive to the endth degree. And so the idea of the problem with playing against Braids is Braids just constantly destroying things. And it turns out that like if you build around that, like meaning you build things that you can get rid of that are of minor consequence to you. And your opponent, you know, is starting to lose more. and more consequential things,

braids can be pretty good. In fact, I think in commander, as a commander, I assume it was a little too strong, which is why I got banned. I will stress, by the way, this came up in the notes on my... So all the stuff I'm talking about, my actual talk was put up on video.

It's up now. You can go watch it. I got a lot of notes on it. One of the things that I'm good at is understanding how we designed them. One of the things I'm bad at is knowing why they were banned because I was not usually involved

in why they were banned. I'm not as involved in all the format. So, like, I can't... There's some cards where I sort of made a guess of why they're banned, and I was just wrong. I mean, usually, they're powerful, but... So anyway, I apologize. Like, oh, no, it was banned for this reason.

I just... That's not my area of expertise. Okay, next. 2009, restricted in vintage. Thirsts for knowledge. So it costs two in the blue. It's an instant. You draw three cards,

and then you discard two cards unless you discard an artifact. Okay, so this card has a very interesting origin. So I believe this was, I think, in Mirrodin. So we were caring about artifacts. And so Blue, starting in Alpha, Blue always had card drawing, and stuff to recall, brain guys were all. And we liked the idea, I mean, we had a mix.

Blue's card drawing was really good, so we had to be a little careful with it. But the point is we liked card drawing. And then we realized there was a second thing, what we call sort of, sifting or card. The idea is where you're drawing and discarding cards, where it's not necessarily you're going up in number of cards, although sometimes you are, but the idea that you have options and choices and selections.

And card filtering, another term for it, card filtering is an important part of blue. So the idea was I was interested in making a card filtering card that rewarded you for playing artifacts. Because the idea essentially is if it was an artifact set, blue especially likes playing artifacts. Is there a way to do different blue spells

that make you play, you know, reward you're playing artifacts? So, anyway, I was thinking about this. I'm like, okay, well, clearly a card filtering spell, I'm going to draw cards and discard cards. Okay, well, if I want to care about artifacts, I could say if you have an artifact in play, but that's a little, I don't know, like, I like when the things you care about are,

like the cards you're interacting with are the things you care about. So I have to discard cards, right? Well, if I have to discard cards, I could care about the discarded cards being artifacts. That felt a little bit different. And then I was trying to think of the reward, and then there was just a clean reward, which is draw three, discard two,

unless you discard an artifact. So the idea was that if you're an artifact, it saved you, sort of, you've got to draw an extra card. Normally, the spell is, you know, I'm drawing through discarding two, meaning I'm going up one card, I'm placing the cards that I'm casting, but I have utility. I'm upgrading my hand.

But if I discard an artifact, now I'm going up cards. Now I'm drawing more. I'll end up with more cards than I started with. And so the idea there, it was a pretty cool technique. And it was something we liked so much that it's become a go-to, like, thirst for blank has become a structure we make. I think there's four of them, and I'm sure there'll be more. Oh, I discard a land.

Oh, I discard a creature. You know, I can discard different things. And so it allows us to sort of make, it's a neat way to, make a card filtering card that just cares about some element that you care about, and it can vary from set to set. But anyway, it's a nice, clean design that one of my favorite things when you're designing is where all the cvone of pieces come together, and it does something that's just clean and simple, and I could have done a filtering style where I said, filter, but if you control

an artifact, draw an extra card. But it's not as clean. one of the things that's so nice about design is you want all the component of the cards to sort of refer to each other. And by making the artifacts part of the discard, it just makes it one, it's like one singular thing. I am filtering.

And I can choose what I discard. And that matters because artifacts matter with this card. But anyway, I'm very proud of that card. I mean, obviously, whenever you make a card and then we make many more of it, it's a sign that it's a pretty good model. So, okay, December 2009,

band and commander. We get to the companion to grindstone. Painter Servant. So Painter Servant cost two. It's an artifact creature. It's a scarecrow. So 1-3. And it allows you to choose a color. When it enters, you choose a color.

And then everything, I think in every zone is that color. And so it just turns everything into the color of your choice. Mostly, what I sort of explained is there are a couple things that I really enjoy. I mean, there's lots of things in magic. But in Alpha, there's a card called Slate of Mind. And Slate of Mind lets you choose a color. Color word, technically, I guess. And then you could change one color word to another color word.

And over time, there was more of choose a color. I think choosing a color is quite fun. And there's a cycle of cards in legends that allowed you to change any number of creatures into the color of the card. So, like, the blue one lets you change any number of creatures in play to blue. And I had endless fun making decks

where, like, it mattered. Because that cycle, they all cost one mana. And most of the time, changing color of creatures just isn't worth a card. But the little Johnny and me loved making decks in which, oh, it was worth a card. And so it was definitely a lot of fun. So the idea of being able to name a color and the idea of trying to change colors both attracted me. So this card was just me sort of, a lot of cards, you can see me sort of stapleted two things together. Like, okay, when this comes to play,

I name a color, and then everything's that color. Now, why, the interesting question is, why did I make it all zones? Why not just everything in play? And the answer was, I wanted to interact with the graveyard. I wanted to be able to get back colored of things from your graveyard, I believe. And it also, I think we had effects where you could reveal your hand. I don't know.

It just felt like there's cool interactions. I did not think of, I think painter's servant came out of Shadowmore, so it's after Grindstone. Grindstone was in Tempest, I believe. So I never thought of the combo, I'll be honest. So the combo basically is, I play Painter Servant, I name a color all things, and all cards are that color. So now when I use Grindstone, it just mills out the library because every card in their deck is that color. And so it's a two-card combo to just sort of destroy a player, get a player out of the game.

Because once they can't draw, once they enter the library, they'll, their very next turn when they can't draw, they'll lose. It's a good case, by the way, of I don't think the two cards individually are really problematic. Although I guess Grindstone did get banned before Painter Servant got banned. So maybe Grindstone had some problems. Together, obviously, they're quite potent. That's a good question for me.

Because they were banned a year apart. And I know of them as a combo. So I'm not 100% sure what happened there. Okay, June. June 10th, band of commander, staff of domination. So this was in Fifth Dawn. It's an artifact that costs three. And then it has five activated abilities.

A one, a two, a three, a four, a five. I'm going to go backwards just for drama purposes. So the five-tap draw card was the very first thing. I knew I wanted to draw a card. Normally it's four in tap to draw a card, but those are cards in which that's all the card does. and so because you had other abilities, it felt like, okay,

it'd be a little bit harder to draw a card. So that made it the five. I think the next one I did was the two. I wanted to do gain life. Two-tap, gain-one life felt right. Then I ended up doing four-tap target creature. I thought that was useful, but it's pretty good. So it had to cost four.

And then it allowed me to do three-tap, un-tapped target creature. And then the cool part, I'm not sure when I came up with this part, but this is one of my favorites, is one is just untapped this card. So the idea is that I can reuse these different abilities. Like, if I have enough mana, I can do all sorts of things. And the thing that's really fun about this card is, because of the functionality, you can do four different things. It can gain you life.

It can tap the creatures. They can untap creatures. It can draw you a card. So as much mana as you have, it can optimize all your mana. And obviously, that proved to be quite good. It got banned in Commander. But anyway, in design, we do a lot of sort of aesthetical number things. You'll notice that.

This is a really good example. What's one, two, three, four, five. This is really hard on play design, by the way, because when you make this, you're not giving, I mean, you can change what the artifact costs or the card costs, but I'm really locking them in, and it definitely makes it tricky to work with. This particular card worked out really well, and I think it's a lot of fun, but most, of the time when we start doing tricky things with numbers, they often get changed just because it's hard

to keep up. Okay, next, June 2010, Band and Commander. Sword of the Meek. Okay, so Sword of the Meek cost two. It's an artifact, which equips for two. So if the equip creature is a one-one... Oh, no, sorry, equip creature gets plus one plus two, and whenever you play a one-one,

you can return this artifact from the graveyard to the play attached. So this card was inspired by a card in, what was it? In Legends called Pendlehaven. So Pendlehaven was a land that tapped for green, and it tapped to give plus one plus two

to a one-one creature. So the reason I have funness for this card, so way back in the day, before I got to Wizards, there was a period in time after Legends came out, We're due to a bunch of cards, the abyss, Nethervoid. They're just, people weren't playing creatures. Like, literally, like, the standard environment was don't play creatures.

And I'm a contrarian deck builder. So I'm like, I'm building a creature deck. So I made this little green-blue weenie deck. The idea, essentially, is mostly I get out a Scrib Sprite or a Flying Man. I make it really big and I kill you relatively fast. And so one of the things that is that I'm going to be a little bit of the thing. about it is, in order to do that, I'm giant-grothing and I'm using unstable mutation

to make it bigger, but then I have, because I can only have one, I have a berserk in the deck, which doubles the power. Berserk's from Alpha doubles the power of the creature, creature gets sacked at end of turn. But usually if I'm using berserk, I'm going to kill them. And with regrowth, which I also only have one, there are times where I could berserk, regrowth, berserk.

Anyway, the deck had the ability to get a lot of mana, So the ability to take your 1-1 and turn it into a 2-3 before you start adding things to it is valuable because I'm going to berserk it, sometimes double-beserk it. So it just gives me extra damage. A lot of time the key to that deck was I needed to take them out in one turn because the berserk was going to kill my creature. Now that I couldn't survive that I killed, I had other creatures. But, you know, so just trying to do as much as possible. And the nice thing about Pendlehaven is it taps for green. my deck plate was a green, a green blue deck.

There's really no downside to it, or minimal downside to it. And it just made my... Let me do more damage. So I really liked that card. I was inspired. We were making equipment, and I liked the idea of... There's a little card that really likes 1-1 creatures. Now, obviously, you can equip it on anything.

We're trying to make it a general equipment. But the idea that it comes back from the grave when you play a 1-1, I thought it was pretty cool. It also lets you do fun things like you can sacrifice it and, you know, you can get it back. So anyway, a fun card. Okay, which brings us to August of 2011. Band in Modern, six cards. I think my record at one time was during, was during Mirred in where I got eight cards band.

That's my high. It's not really a brag. I'm just, that was, things weren't horribly wrong. wrong and I made a lot of the cards. Okay, so in August 2011, Bend and Modern. Encessual Visions. So, Insetual Visions has no mana cost. It is blue, though.

It has Suspend 4 for a single blue mana, and it's based in ancestral recall, which is an instant that says target player draws three cards. So the idea on this card was suspend was a mechanic we did in time spiral. I actually

invented it before time spiral. We made it and realized that it had more, it had more value than just being, like it wanted to be a whole mechanic. The idea that I can trade time for mana. That, oh, my card can be cheaper if I'm willing to wait for the card. And one of the things we realized is that we could mimic some powerful cards. In fact, we made a cycle, a six-car cycle because it's an artifact, where we could mirror powerful cards.

The idea was you had to suspend it. It didn't have a mana cost. the only way to play this was suspending it. So the idea is in Central Recall for Blue. So it's the same cost of Social Recall. The only thing that's different is I'm giving up time. And in this case, I'm giving up four turns. Well, it turns out on Turn 1, we have nothing better to do.

Casting a Social Recall, even if it takes four turns to get the cards, is still quite strong in why it got banned. But it was a fun cycle. And the other thing that was neat was, in Time Spiral, there were some cards on the reserve list that we couldn't reprint. Remember, we did the bonus sheet of old cards. But this allowed us to sort of made nods to them without actually reprinting them.

Next, bitter blossom, one in a block in shamans. At beginning of your upkeep, you may pay one life, not may. In beginning of upkeep, lose one life, and then make a one-one flying black ferry road. So I made a card called Frexing Arena the year or two before. Frexion Arena, you lost the life to draw a card. So I like the idea that,

So, Fricksonianina was inspired by necropon's. Necropotent's let you pay life for man. This was like, well, it's kind of like every turn you get. You get to do it once a turn. Very powerful, very popular. So we were just making a deck. We were making, this is Morning Tide, I believe. And we were caring about, one of the decks was fairies, fairies and rogues.

And so I was just trying to make something that the fairy deck would want to play. And so it's just the idea of, well, let's just take the same framework of Frexian Arena. and instead of a card, you get a creature. And it turns out, I thought a creature was slightly weaker than a card, but actually it's pretty on par, I guess. Constantly getting one-one creatures, especially in a deck that cares about the fact that they're fairies, was quite powerful.

Okay, dread return to black-black sorcery. You put a creature card in your graveyard onto the battlefield, and you could flash it back by sacrificing three creatures. So flashback was made. mechanics that I made during original Odyssey. The story I told this many times, but the real quick version is I used to run the feature matches at the Pro Tour. I did a lot of sitting around watching people play.

And whenever I would watch a match and one person got way ahead was kind of boring, I would make up special powers for the person behind just to imagine what would they do if they had that. And one of my special powers was the ability to play cards out of your graveyard. And that seemed neat. So I ended up putting that Odyssey had a graveyard theme. So it seemed like a good fit. So once we did that, early on, all the flashbacks for mana, we started messing around with alternate mana costs.

I think the first one we tried was on a white card, a battles creature, I think, where you tapped white creatures. Well, this one made you sack creatures. I thought it was kind of cool because he's getting creatures back from the graveyard, but its flashback costs puts creatures in the graveyard. And you get one creature back and it makes you sack face three creatures. So the idea essentially is you're not really going up in creatures. but you can go up in utility and the fact that you don't have to pay for it once again one of the through lines

on this whole series is things I do that get banned and restricted avoiding paying mana either generating mana or avoiding mana meaning letting you do things way before you should quite powerful and in fact many of my band cards fall in that category another popular category

is drawing a lot of cards okay Golgari Gravetrol 4 in a green for a 0-0 creature that enters with a plus 1 plus 1 counter for every creature in your graveyard 1, remove a plus 1 in a counter

regenerate it and then that is Dredge 6 Now the most powerful thing about this card might just be the dredge number So when I made dredge So Golgari is one of the It's the Black Green Guild in Gild in Ravnika

This is the original Ravnika The very first Ravnika Raptureka, City of Guilds. So we had four, there was Boros, there was Salasnia, there's Demir, and there was Golgari. We figured the other three much, much faster. We spent a lot of time on Golgari. We knew we wanted to be grave-oriented, black and greenish out of the grave, and we made a whole bunch of mechanics. So the dredge that I turned over was that all it did was it said,

anytime you would draw a card, you may instead draw this card than the card you're going to draw. And then I just made them on the weak side. I think originally the first one I made was four in green, four and a green, so five mana for three three. That's just not very good. Five manna for three three is nothing to write home about. But

late in the game, when I have lots of mana, hey, sometimes I just want a three three. That sounds great. And so that was the original idea of Dredge. We handed it over. Brian Schneider was the lead of the development team. And I guess they wanted it to have a

little more going on with it. So what they did is they added a number to dredge. And what it meant was whenever you played the card, you had to mill that many cards. So dredge six men. Whenever you got it back from the graveyard, you had to mill six cards. And so the idea was, is that right? Yeah, you had a mill six cards. So I think, oh, what happened is right. So as you dredge, you start getting more dredge cards into your discard pile, which made it much more, like the idea is I dredge, and as I dredge, I'd get more and more dredge cards in my graveyard, and now I have more and more choices of what to draw.

Anyway, I do think the version of dredge that got printed was a very interesting version, and I thought they added an element to it that was cool. I don't know whether they made it more powerful or not, But, um, but, um, but anyway, that is dredge. Next, umazazate, it's an equipment, uh, two mana for an artifact equipment, uh, equipped two. Uh, whenever equipped creature deals combat damage, you get to choose between one of three things. The equipped creature can get plus two plus two, target creature can get minus one, minus one,

or gain two life. Okay. Um, now, I, I should stress, I'm not the balanced person. When I, ever I hand cards over, there's a whole other team that's supposed to balance the card. So on some level, things being unbalanced isn't exactly my, I mean, sometimes I make things that are so hard to balance that, you know, they get unbalanced. But anyway, the interesting thing about this card was when I made this card, there was a slight difference. So notice it's an equipment that costs to, that cost two to equip. And one of the abilities is plus two plus two to the equipped creature. One of the abilities is gain two life.

The third ability was not minus one, minus one. it was add two black manna to your mannipole. So you'll notice two, equip two, plus two, gain two life, two black manas. So there was a little two theme as running through it. It turns out right near the end in editing, they caught and realized that adding mana causes some weird things in the rules.

And basically, it was the wrong time to add manna. The mana was being added at a weird time. And so they ended up having... to change him. And so on the fly, they change it to minus one, minus one. Now, I don't know if the card is broken, even if it's two black mana and not minus one, minus one, minus one. But I do know the minus one, minus one is very good. So that change, I think, is the thing that helped push it over the edge, but I'm not 100%. Like I said, why things are broken. It's not my forte as much as, how did I make them in the first place? Okay. Next, Valakut, the molten pinnacle. So this is a land

from original Zendikar. Tap to add R. Oh, enters the battlefield tapped. Tap to add R. And then whenever a mountain enters, as long as you have five other mountains, it deals three damage to any target, just like a lightning bolt. So the idea was we had landfall in the set.

So landfall cared about when a land entered. So at rare, we want to do things that were a little jazier. And so I thought it'd be fun to do kind of a landfall, but for mountains. And not just any mountain, but like once you have enough mountains. So once you have six or more mountains,

you start getting a free lightning bolt. That felt pretty cool. And so I feel bad. In one of the previous podcasts, I talked about Talarine Academy cycle where I didn't make Tularean Academy, but I did convince him to make it blue and St.gham White

and Gays Cradle Green so he can make a five-card cycle, land cycle. The red card in that cycle, is so bad. Ben Bateman asked me. Ben Mametman didn't interview with me. And one of his questions was,

why is it so bad? Why did you make this? So I like the fact that at least there's one land cycle where the best one in the land cycle is red to make up for the bad red in that cycle. Okay.

Next we got up to September 2011. Oh, I realize something. I am driving into work. Okay. I think I'm going to... We're at 30 minutes and I'm driving into work as we speak. So I'm going to wrap it up for now.

So anyway, guys, I hope you are enjoying this series on all the band cards, band restrict cards that I made or had a big hand in. But as I'm at work, we all know what that means. It means 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.