Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1378: Getting the Banned Together, Part 7

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

This is the final part of a seven-part 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 get banned or... restricted.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:01 I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time, brother. Drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my getting the band together series. So basically at MagicCon Amsterdam, I did a talk where I talked about every single band card that I ever made that got banned or restricted in any format. So this is, I believe, the final episode, number seven.
Starting point is 00:00:29 I think this is the final one. And so because I had an hour and I had a lot of cards that I had made that got banned restricted, I really had to go fast with the stories. The idea of this podcast is I can take my time and tell the stories in a little more depth. So let's pick up where we left off last time. It was, let's see, in August of 2019, banned in modern, faithless looting, sorcery for one red mana. You draw two cards, then discard two cards.
Starting point is 00:01:00 and there's a flashback of three and a red. So one of the things that we're always looking for is, so we like the color pie. We each one, each color and have its own abilities, and we want them to separate, and regular listeners know that the color pie is really important because we want you to have to go to different places for different things. But sometimes what we realize is that there's something that we do in one color
Starting point is 00:01:28 that really could be in more than one. color. Although one of the things we like best is when we can do things in different colors that are similar, but slightly different for flavor purposes. And the perfect example is looting. So looting is an ability that we've done in blue for a long, long time. Luding basically means I draw a card and I discard a card. Maybe I draw more cards and discount. I mean, I can sort of filter sometimes. But the idea essentially is I'm drawing cards and discarding cards. It's not that I'm going up in cards. I'm kind of going up in card quality, not in total cost. It's not card advantage in the traditional sense that I'm not, I don't have more cards,
Starting point is 00:02:07 but I can trade lesser useful cards for more useful cards. So I'm going up in utility. We call card utility. So I was trying to figure out I wanted to get more card utility into red. So we're like, well, you know, red does have some of this temporary sort of stuff. And so we said, what if we put looting in red? So we made faceless looting. Literally, we called it faceless looting.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Like, it's looting. But then, after we made it, we're like, oh, no, no, no. The better way to do this is blue draws than discards. What if red, because red is more reckless, discard than draw? And so from then on, for the rest of magic, we did what we call rummaging in red rather than looting. So blue had looting, redhead rummaging. except it took us one card to figure that out. So there's one card we made in magic
Starting point is 00:03:01 were red lutes and not rummage. And of course, that is probably the most powerful version. I mean, Fithful Luton obviously got banned. And so one of the things that's frustrating is like we literally just one time, like it took us one card to figure out what we were doing, and now people still think of looting as being a red thing rather than rummaging,
Starting point is 00:03:22 because we made one powerful card with it that people play with all the time. And so that is one of the challenges of making a game that continues on forever is your mistakes live on. And so anyway, that is faithful to looting. I do like rummaging a lot in red. I think of the perfect mix. It makes looting better in blue than rummaging. So blue is better than rummaging.
Starting point is 00:03:46 So blue is better than red added. But it allows red to do something that red needs, which is, okay, I've kind of gummed up. I need something. Well, I can get rid of things I don't need for something I might need. Okay, next, in November of 2019, abandoned pauper. Oath of Nissa. So it's going to cost one green. It's a legendary enchantment.
Starting point is 00:04:06 When it enters, you look at the top three cards of your library. You get a creature, land, or plainswalker from them, and you get to put it in your hand, the rush to go on the bottom. And then it lets you spend your mana as any color for playing plainswalkers. So the way the oath looks, so Oath of the Gatewatch, we were starting to tell a big story, which was the Gatewatch. The five core members, well,
Starting point is 00:04:31 so it was, let's see, in white was Gideon, blue was Jace, black was Liliana, red with Chandra, and green was Nissa. Now, in the Oath of Gatewatch, Lillianna's not there. She comes, like, the next block in a stride. But the idea is we wanted to sort of show
Starting point is 00:04:48 this group of heroes coming together, and because different people were joining at different times, we wanted a way to demonstrate that they were sort of joining the gate watch. So we came up with this concept of the oath. So the oath did is it did two things. It was an enchantment that granted some ability that interacted with planeswalkers because this was a collection of planeswalkers. And it did something when it entered to justify, like just an enchantment that helped you with
Starting point is 00:05:13 planeswalkers usually isn't good enough to play. So what we did is we put an effect on it that allowed you to sort of justify playing it. So it's kind of like a spell when you play it. but then there's an enchantment that sticks around and grants your ability. Nissa, I'm not even sure why Nissa. I mean, Nissa is pretty good. It's good at getting things.
Starting point is 00:05:32 It's good at playing things. I'm not sure why. Anyway, but anyway, that's Oath in Nissa. We made, I think, eight oaths, I believe. We made one for the five, I just said, Tferi, Kaya, and a Johnny, I believe. Okay. November of 2019, Band-Ey.
Starting point is 00:05:52 in standard. Once upon a time. This was original L-Drain, I think. I think it's the original L-Drain. So basically, one of the things we do when we work on a set is sometimes we like to come up with names that are awesome names that make sense in the place we're playing in, and then we design to the name.
Starting point is 00:06:12 So Once Upon a Time was designed to match the name. Oh, what does Once About Time do? I should tell you. So it's a one green instant. It is free if it's the first spell you cast in the game, and you get a look at the top five cards your library and put a creature or a land in your hand and rest on the bottom. And so the idea was we wanted to call it Once Upon a Time. It was built from the name.
Starting point is 00:06:33 So we said, oh, well, it should be something you do at the beginning of the game, once upon a time. It's the beginning of the story. And then we liked the idea of, well, what if we did something that if you did it absolutely first, it's free? That felt like a cool thing. We had to figure out what it was. We ended up deciding we liked it in green.
Starting point is 00:06:48 And then, okay, it's a card. The sort of helps get you a card. but anyway, it turns out getting an extra card for free. Surprise, surprise, surprise is pretty good. But that is where that came about. January 2020, ban in modern. Mox opal. Mox opal cost zero legendary artifact.
Starting point is 00:07:07 It's got metal craft, which means you have to have three artifacts, but it can be one of them. And then it can tap one for any color of mana. So I've talked about before that moxes are difficult to build, and moxes often get on this list of cars that get banned. restricted. So the idea of a mox is it's an artifact, it costs zero, it produces mana. Five of them obviously were in alpha, they were very powerful, part of the power nine. We realized that that was too powerful. Like, for example, we didn't make Lotus
Starting point is 00:07:38 pedal where it's zero, you sack it for one manna of any color, and that also got banned. So what we learned over the years is there has to be something that kind of says you can't use it right away. If I can play and immediately use it, at least in the early game, that's problematic. We made this in Mirrodin, or in Scars of Mirridon. In Scars of Mirridon, we decided, we talked about
Starting point is 00:08:01 doing Affinity for Artifacts, bringing it back, but it had gone so awry the previous time, even though we thought we could do it, we thought that it would get people too concerned. And so we decided and said to do a variant. I think Mark Globes made the variant called Metalcraft. Metalcraft basically is a
Starting point is 00:08:19 threshold, threshold mechanic. The original threshold mechanic, threshold, things upgrade when there's seven cards in your graveyard. Basically, metalcraft is you just want three artifacts in play. So the idea is eventually you'll get there, but it takes a little bit of time. Now, Mox Opel itself is an artifact,
Starting point is 00:08:39 so really it needs two other artifacts, so it's an artifact. But we like the idea that, okay, it slows you down a little bit. Obviously, it didn't quite slowly die enough. It got on this list, but We also made it legendary, something we had not done with the early moxes. Part of the code legendary didn't exist in Alpha, but this idea, this is really powerful, so we'll make sure there's only, like, you can't have multiple in play at once. Okay, next up, August 2020, ruined halo.
Starting point is 00:09:04 White, white for an enchantment. You name a card, then you get protection from that card. This basically just did two things I really like. So early magic, stuff like sleight of mind, you could choose a color. I thought choose the color is really cool. It also was this cycle in legends where you could choose, you could choose a color.
Starting point is 00:09:24 I think it was legend. Anyway, I like choosing color. I like having to choose it. Oh, I'm sorry. The one in Legends wasn't about choosing color is about changing color, which I also like to do. I also enjoyed things where
Starting point is 00:09:39 you got to name cards. Like Nebuchadnezzar was a card in legends. Medlin Mage is a card that I... Anyway, I like cards to let you name cards. And so I definitely played around that space. I made a number of cards that you get to name card. So this was just criss-crossing those two paths.
Starting point is 00:10:00 Oh, I'm sorry, this is not name of color. I'm confusing. This is name a card. So I like naming a card. I also like giving weird protections. I'm definitely played around with lots of, you know, early magic had protection from color. But I started playing around with protection from a card type
Starting point is 00:10:14 and just started extrapolating from there. So this basically is a car that has name a card and protection and crisscrosses them. So now you can name a card and get protection. I thought that was pretty fun. Okay, January 2020, Band and Modern, Simeon Spirit, 2R, 2 and a red, 2-2, ape spirit. You can discard the card to add one red manate to your manipole. Basically, this is from Planner Chaos. it is just a red version of
Starting point is 00:10:45 what is the spirit guide Elvin Spirit Guide Elvin Spirit Guide also banned restricted just I didn't not in this podcast because I didn't make it but anyway I when we were making Planner Chaos we had a future shift or an alter reality shifted sheet
Starting point is 00:11:04 I'm sure we called it where we showed you cards that you knew that existed in magic but in a color other than you knew them in. And it made sense this card because red was the ritual color that's just being red rather than green. Green more permanent men than rituals.
Starting point is 00:11:19 And so we put it in red. The reality is, it's just very powerful. People keep asking me when we're making the black, blue, and white ones. I don't think we are, so not a cycle. Okay, next, April of 2021. Band and historic brawl. Tainted Pact.
Starting point is 00:11:38 One in a black. Exile the top card. library, you may stop anytime you want, and then put that card in your hand, or you can keep going. But if you ever hit a second card with the same name, you don't get the cards. So the idea is, there's a thing in magic, or not magic, there's a thing in gaming called push your luck. The idea of a push your luck game, Yassi is a good example of a push your luck game, where
Starting point is 00:12:03 I can sort of, I can sort of figure out where I'm at or do I want to push and get better. but there's a risk at pushing game better. There's another really good game called Can't Stop. That's a push-your-luck game. Anyway, the idea in a push-your-luck game, or a constant encounter, anyway, a lot of good push-your-luck games. The idea in a push-your-luck game is that you want to figure out how risky you want to be, and that there could be great things could come.
Starting point is 00:12:25 Being risky, you could get you lots of points. So I wanted to make a tutor that was a push-your-luck mechanic. And so the idea I came up with, obviously, this was pre-commandered, pre-singled being a big thing. I said, okay, you know, there's duplicates in your deck and there's, at bare minimum, there's duplicate lands. Like, how far do you want to push it? Like, eventually, you will eventually get a duplicate.
Starting point is 00:12:47 And so the idea is, how far do I want to push things? I thought it was really fun. I actually liked the card quite a bit. But, especially in the world of Singleton, where you just don't even repeat car. I mean, obviously, you can repeat your land. But even then, you can build your deck such that your land doesn't repeat if you want.
Starting point is 00:13:06 And so you can even build it such that you never, you know, hit the same thing. So that I assume is the problem. Okay, in June of 2021, banned in historic, time warp. Three blue, blue, take an extra turn. Okay, so Alpha had Time Walk. Time Walk was, oh, the funny story is for Time Walk. Originally, time walk, actually it was in red. It was in red, not blue originally, in playtesting.
Starting point is 00:13:33 And it said, opponent loses next turn. meaning the opponent loses their next turn. So if you're playing in a two-player game, you kind of get a go again because your opponent doesn't get a turn. But someone came up to Richard in the playtasting and said, oh, I have a card that's so powerful. It just makes your opponent lose right away.
Starting point is 00:13:55 And he said, oh, opponent loses next turn as if they lose the game next turn. And so Richard realized that was confusing. So instead of removing a turn from somebody, he ended up making it you gain the turn. And he moved it from red to blue. So obviously became Timewalk. So anyway, I was making Tempest.
Starting point is 00:14:15 Tempest was my first design lead. And I like TimeWalk. TimeWalk is really cool. It's a fun card. So I'm like, look, I just want to do Time Walk. I just want to, we'll make, let's make a fixed timewalk. Timewalk costs one in a blue. So I'm like, okay, I could just double it, right?
Starting point is 00:14:30 I'll just double it. It's two and two blue, blue. Two blue. I doubled it. It's double. And like, oh, okay, maybe that's not enough. So I added one more mana. Three blue, blue, blue. The original spell was one in a blue.
Starting point is 00:14:45 This is double plus one. And still too good. I will say extra turn cards are tricky because they are so powerful. And we do do them, but we've learned we kind of got to jump through a little more hoops than just spend mana. Spend mana. spend manna is not that hard to do. And so nowadays, we tend to make you jump through more hoops than just spending mana.
Starting point is 00:15:10 But anyway, that is time war. Okay, March 20203, banned an oath breaker. Three cards. Trade secrets, ad nauseum, and tooth and nail. I will go through them one at a time. Trade secrets, one blue blue. Draw four cards. The opponent discards. You draw four cards.
Starting point is 00:15:28 The opponent draws two cards. Your opponent can choose how many times they want to repeat. this. So I combined a couple different cards. There's a card called chain lightning that was in Legends where the idea was, I shock you, but then if you want, you could pay
Starting point is 00:15:45 mana to, I mean, when I say shock, sorry, I do three damage to you. It's like a landing bolt. You could then pay mana to do three damage to me, but then I could do mana to pay damage to you. So the idea is you could keep repeating the spell as it goes back and forth. The other
Starting point is 00:16:01 thing we had played around a little bit with the idea of my opponent gets a resource, but I get more of the resource. So I combined those. Okay, we're going to do something where my opponent gets an advantage, I get more of an advantage, how much does my opponent want to do this?
Starting point is 00:16:18 And so, anyway, that is where trade savers come from. Ad nauseum, three black black. It's an enchantment. Oh, I'm sorry, it's not a chambre. It's a sorcery thing. So Bob Marr is a pro player that won the Magic Invitational. And Bob wasn't sure what card to make.
Starting point is 00:16:41 So at the next pro tour, I said, okay, Bob, we're going to make the card of this pro tour. While you're here, what we're going to do is you'll play in runs. In between runs, I'll design a card. I'll show it to you, we'll tweak it, and we'll get to something that you're happy with. So Bob wanted a creature. He wanted something in black. He wanted something that got you card advantage. And so, so sort of taking a lot of his prompts.
Starting point is 00:17:07 I made this card. It's one black, two, one. And then at the beginning of every turn, you draw a card, but you lose life equal to the man of value of the card. Bob did say, does it have to be, could it be optional? I'm like, nah, not in black. Like, black has to be like, okay, like, yeah, you get some advantage, but it can come back to burn you.
Starting point is 00:17:25 That's very much black nature. Anyway, Bob signed off and he liked the card. The card went on to be very popular. In fact, it's a nickname Bob. And Dark Confident was the name of the card. So Ad Nauseum is me kind of making a spell that's Dark Confonant. And the idea essentially is you can bob as many times as you want, meaning I can draw a card and then lose life equal to its amount of value. And then I can choose to keep going as many times as I want.
Starting point is 00:17:53 Now, obviously, the danger is you're losing life and you don't know exactly how much life you're going to lose. But anyway, this is me just sort of turning Bob into a spell. I think Bob was a fun spell. It's a little strong, obviously, because it's on those lists. But it's definitely a fun spell. Tooth and nail. Five green green. You choose one.
Starting point is 00:18:14 Go get... You tutor for two creatures. Go get two creatures out of your deck and put in your hand. Or put two creatures in your hand onto the battlefield. And if you pay extra... Entwined for two. So it's three... It's sorry.
Starting point is 00:18:28 It's 5G. But if you pay an extra two, you get to do... both things. So either you get to go tutor for two creatures or you get to put two creatures from hand on the battlefield. But for seven green green, you can go get two creatures out of your deck and put them on the battlefield. Obviously pretty powerful. So the story here, which is a fun story, is if you remember in a previous episode, I talked about making energy and energy being pulled from Mirrodin. There was too much going on. I had to pull something. So when I pulled Mirren, there was a big space gone. And so I needed to replace it with something. Not something as big
Starting point is 00:19:01 as, you know, not as big as energy, but something small. And we slowly figured out what we wanted. We wanted to be a spell mechanic. We wanted to be something that you could spend mana on. We sort of got all the parameters of what we needed. And anyway, one day, I'm in bed, sleeping, and in my dream, I come up with this idea. And somehow, in the dream, I figure out that I am dreaming.
Starting point is 00:19:29 and then I wake myself up and then I write it down. So I kid you not, this mechanic was made. I dreamed this mechanic up. Now, once again, I should stress. I've been thinking about it. We'd spent a lot of time
Starting point is 00:19:44 figuring out the parameters of what we wanted. This was just my subconscious working away at trying to solve a problem. Why it solves it when I was sleeping? I don't know. I'm glad I woke up and wrote it down. But anyway, and I think this was one of the very first cards we made with a mechanic.
Starting point is 00:19:59 When I first made the mechanic, one of the first things I made. This might have been the very first thing made, but very, very, very early I made this card. But anyway, if you ever have the true question of, what is the mechanic that Mark dreamed up? This is the one.
Starting point is 00:20:14 Okay, next is May 2004, banned vintage legacy and pauper, or band restricted. Oh, no, no, this is banned. Oh, okay, so, sorry, and now understand where I'm at. Okay, so,
Starting point is 00:20:28 Basically, we're at the point of the story where I think at this point I'm at something like 81 cards. Richard, remember, Richard was 38, I think. Richard had 38 band cards. So I passed him in Mirrodin, and I made, I made so, I mean, Richard's not designing magic cards anymore, so, you know, he's not catching up to me. Or even, you know, every once in the blue moon he comes in, you know, he doesn't make that many. cards when it comes because he's on one set. But anyway, I'm like, okay, you know, hey, I have a good lead, but other people are going to work on magic for a long time.
Starting point is 00:21:08 You know, maybe one day somebody will catch up to me, you know. We have a lot more formats. There's more things to be banned restricted in, you know, or maybe we make a brand new format that bans a whole bunch of new cards. And I go, maybe somebody catches up to me. That was my thought. My thought was, yeah, I have this, I have the lead right now. but I'm like, you know, I don't know for all the time I will have the lead.
Starting point is 00:21:30 You know, maybe one day someone will catch up to me. Then we come to May of 2004. So, ban, not restricted, banned, in vintage, legacy, and pauper. Every single card that places a sticker on another card, and every card that opens an attraction. So this is all from infinity. So let's talk affinity a second. So affinity is an onset.
Starting point is 00:21:56 I, for those that somehow don't know this, unsets are my baby. I made unglued way back in 98. Bill and Joel Mick and Bill Rose came up with this idea of what if we had a set of magic cards that had a special border, a silver border that weren't playable in tournaments, that they were about casual play and not tournament play.
Starting point is 00:22:24 And they thought of me because I was the most out-of-the-box design and I really loved casual play. I was probably the most casual play of the folks at the time. So they came to me and they said, we don't know quite what to do with this. And I said, okay, I'm excited. So I decided to add a lot of humor to it, to do some parity,
Starting point is 00:22:42 to really push the boundaries of what was in a booster pack. We did four lands. We made token cards. We made like BFM. We had two cards that'd be joined together. We played around with how cards were laid out. I did all sorts of things. I really pushed boundaries.
Starting point is 00:22:56 And I really, really enjoyed it. And so the idea was every once in a while. Usually it was a while in between unsets. Usually, for most of the times, a decade or more between unsets, a few exceptions. But anyway, so one of the things that I had done in unglued was dye rolling. Because I thought die rolling was super fun, but something magic didn't do. We did coin flipping, but we didn't do dye rolling. So anyway, I make unhinged, I make unstable.
Starting point is 00:23:26 So I'm working on Infinity, the fourth onset. There also is unsanctioned, which was a boxing. But anyway, the fourth boost release on unstable. So I'm working on it. And while I am working on it, it's one of those things that keeps getting, gets pushed back a little bit, just to unsets in the nature to get pushed back. So while I'm making it, they make the set, Dungeons and Dragons, Adventures in the Forgotten Realm.
Starting point is 00:23:54 And Adventures Forgotten Realm was Rolling Dice. in a standard legal set. And because we had, so the flavor of Unfinity was Dawn was my art director, she'd been my art director for Unstable, and I went to her and I said, I want to do a top-down set. I want to do an unset where we pick a flavor
Starting point is 00:24:15 and design around the flavor. We'd never done a top-down unset before. I asked her, what was something she always wanted to do that she didn't think we were going to do? And she said, space opera. And I had always wanted to do a circus. So we decided to do a space opera circus. End up being sort of amusement park carnival
Starting point is 00:24:32 or just give us enough space to play in. And so we played in that space. We ended up making something called attractions. Attractions had a separate deck like contraptions did. But the idea is you roll a die, meaning you don't know if they'll go off or not. So you have attractions open, but there's variance on what's going to happen each turn.
Starting point is 00:24:54 So you have to roll a die. And because we were dye rolling for attractions and a die rolling was always a big unthing we did a lot of stuff with dying when die rolling was super fun. And then we also did stickers. Stickers were we had done stickers in other products
Starting point is 00:25:10 we looked at like legacy games and it just seemed like a lot of fun like you want to upgrade your card that seemed pretty cool. So anyway, we were working on the set. It was deep into the set and one of the things that always bug me so when Commander came around
Starting point is 00:25:25 became a big four. the commander was like, we're putting casual first and foremost. This is the format all about casual play. But because the person who championed it was was Sheldon, Sheldon Menary, and Sheldon was a level five judge. He's like, oh, we can't have cards that aren't clean and cleaner
Starting point is 00:25:47 in the rules, so he banned the un-cards from the format. You could play anything you wanted that wasn't, you know, banned-restricted, but you couldn't play uncards. And I'm like, you, so you made a casual format, and the most casual card is made. The card is made for the, the most casual end of the format, were banned in the format. Which always like, I, seriously.
Starting point is 00:26:08 The originally when we made Silver Border, the idea was, look, tournaments, silverboard meant not in tournaments. That's all the, you know, anything outside of that, that's not tournaments. You know, all casual play was not tournaments. So anyway, I always had tried to, do things in Silver Border that we wouldn't normally
Starting point is 00:26:27 do in Black Border, but I was now in an infinity spot where we were making like die rolling cards, which I couldn't take out. They recorded what we were doing. They recorded one of the mechanics. But yet there were things that like, it sad to me like if you, this die roll on card, you can play, no problem in Commander. This diRole card, oh, this is off limits.
Starting point is 00:26:46 And I'm like, okay, there's just cards that shouldn't be off limits. So I went to the powers of B and I said look, I have cards in my set that just, there's no reason people can Commander can't play them. There's nothing wrong with it. And so they said, okay,
Starting point is 00:27:00 what would you like to do? And I said, could I just make the cards that are playable and Commander, just make them playable in Commander? And so what we ended up doing was we put an acorn symbol on cards. That was kind of like the silver border. If you have an acorn symbol on you, you're not playable, and
Starting point is 00:27:17 Legacy is the format where, like, Eternal Legal means you're playing on Legacy, Vintage and Commander. That's where we make things legal. There's no just legal and commander. That's not a thing we do. I think we should, but it's not a thing we currently do.
Starting point is 00:27:30 So the idea was, I just picked the cards that I thought were playable and commander that didn't cause a problem. And then we tried to price everything such that they just weren't going to be an issue in legacy or adventure. The power level didn't need to be high.
Starting point is 00:27:42 And so, and we talked to, I talked to the Rules Manager, and we figured out that both attractions and stickers were fine. The rules could handle them. I had a tweak, I tweaked stickers slightly.
Starting point is 00:27:54 stickers had to remove in zones you couldn't see. Originally, stickers were permanent, meaning if you're shuffling the library, it's still on the card. But once we made them black border sort of legal, they could only stay on in public zones. They could stay on the graveyard, they could stay on the commander zone, but they couldn't stay on if they went into your hand or into the library. But it was a small change to let people play.
Starting point is 00:28:18 So anyway, we make that change. We tried really hard to cost things correctly, as is often the case when you miss on one card that causes the problem. So there's a card called Blink Goblin where the idea was when it entered, you put a sticker on it for his name, and then you got Red Man equal to how many vowels were in his name. Well, one of the stickers could produce six vowels.
Starting point is 00:28:39 There's A, E, I, O, U, and Y, because it's Y as we counted Y. There's only one sticker that did. And there was a whole system where you randomized stickers, so you weren't guaranteed of what stickers you had. But there were enough fours and fives and a six. I think there was 1-5-1-6 in a bunch of fours. Even four-manor, I guess, was good enough. And five and six were amazing.
Starting point is 00:28:59 And so people had to play... So this card with stickers started getting played in vintage. And once again, our intent was never, ever, that people were playing these cards. It just... We wanted to let you play them in Commander. So eventually, enough people got frustrated with Mind Goblin that we decided that we needed to ban Mind Goblin.
Starting point is 00:29:16 But rather than just ban Mind Goblin, which was the only card-causing problems, they decided to get rid of all of the the stickers and the attraction because both of them required you to bring extra components and if you were being like if you were coughing things from your opponent like oh well I better have my sticker sheets and my attraction so they decided
Starting point is 00:29:34 just to ban all of them from all the format save commander which is really what they were made for in the first place so there were how many were there there were 55 cards that added stickers and 26 cards that added open attraction.
Starting point is 00:29:57 So 89 cards. I led every element in the set. I led exploratory, vision, and I let set-dines. The only set design team I've ever led. I live the whole thing. I helped with play design. I worked on everything in that set across the way.
Starting point is 00:30:11 Anyway, so that is 89 cards, which gets me to 170 cards. So the answer is, is anybody going to beat me? I'm not sure anymore. I might have this record for all time. The final story real quickly, I'm almost done here, is I thought, and I thought 170 was going to be the story, and then while I'm making my talk, I get another card band.
Starting point is 00:30:34 June 2026, band and pauper, Seeker of Skybreak, wondering a green, 2.1, elf, tap, untapped target creature. It broke, I believe, with Hawkeyes Bow from Marvel superheroes, which whenever you became tapped did a damage, I think. And so Secret Skybrae can tap it on tap itself so you can infinitely tap it is the idea. The problem there is we just didn't have the another technology yet. Like the card should just say untap another creature.
Starting point is 00:31:01 Like the idea that you can infinitely tap itself really wasn't on purpose. We just didn't have the another technology yet. I know that sounds silly, but that is true. So anyway, guys, that is my final card. That is 171 cards banned or restricted with my hand. majorly in them.
Starting point is 00:31:22 As I said in the very first podcast, I'm possibly, I missed some cards that I did have a hand in. Maybe I named a few cards that other people had more a hand in than me. It's hard sometimes when making cards just because the memory and there's parallel design. Anyway, lots of stuff goes on. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. This was, like I said, my talk was an hour long, which you can see online. This was seven podcasts, which is well over three hours.
Starting point is 00:31:47 So I had a lot, I had a lot more stories that I can say. in one hour. So I hope you guys enjoyed hearing this series. Maybe I will pick another topic like this to do another series of this kind. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this jaunt through all the different cards that I made that ended up being problem. Anyway, guys, I am now at work, so although that means, it means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

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