Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #413: Ravnica Cards, Part 4

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

This is the fourth part of a five-part series on the cards of original Ravnica.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so the last three episodes have been all about Ravnica, the original Ravnica, and cards from it. But we're not done yet. We're up to O, so we're going to continue. So, first off, Overwhelm. Five green green, so a sorcery. Seven mana, two of which is green. It has Convoke, and creatures you control get plus three, plus three until end of turn. So essentially, this is the card Overrun, which goes all the way back to Tempest, I believe, which was plus three, plus three, although Overrun also grants Trample. This doesn't grant Trample. But one of the things I keep stressing is that

one of Selesnya's sort of routes to victory is building up its army and then attacking. And it has a bunch of spells that can be used to enhance that. And so the neat thing about this is that it's a spell that allows you to sort of have a giant army but if I'm a little shy I can trade one or two creatures

from attacking instead helping to boost to make everybody bigger. Next, Peel from Reality. One blue instant. You return a creature you control to your hand, or to its owner's hand, and one that you don't control to its owner's hand.

I think this is the first time. Peel Reality is one of the spells we keep coming back to. First off, one of the things in design is what we call what's what's what I'm looking for here where two things are equal symmetry that when you create an effect and a spell and it has more than one effect one of the things you look for is making sure that the two effects feel connected and a common way

to do that is to have the two effects work similarly but slightly different in one way. And a common thing to do is mirroring. This is an example of mirroring. I blah one of mine and blah one of yours. But the cool thing about this is because I get to choose the targets, you know, it sounds like oh well I guess each of us gets disadvantage, except I'm going to choose one of your targets that really is beneficial to unsummon, and I'll choose one of my targets that's beneficial to me to unsummon.

Maybe it's about to die. Maybe it has an enter the battlefield effect or some reason by, you know, or it gets counters when it comes out or something in which resetting it will be valuable to me. And so this is a neat spell where it definitely feels like it's kind of equal, but it's not really, because situationally you can do things with it that make it far less equal. And like I said, it's the kind of spell we keep coming back to, because there's a lot of environments where it's really useful.

Okay, next, Phytohydra. Two green, W, W. So five mana, two generic, one green, two white. It's a plant Hydra, 1, next. Phytohydra. Two green, W, W. So five mana, two generic, one green, two white. It's a plant Hydra, one, one. Whenever damage is dealt through combat damage, each of its damage is turned into a plus one, plus one counter. Oh, I'm sorry. Damage dealt to it, not by it.

So the idea is there's a card called what was it called? It was an alpha. Fungusaur, an alpha. And Fungusaur, every time it got damaged, if it didn't die, it got bigger. This is like that,

but a little bit better, although only connected to combat damage. This is all damage to it is just turned into plus and plus encounters, which means you can't kill it with damage.

That if I attack with this creature and you block it at all, it's just going to get bigger. So you don't block with a zero power creature. And so one of the neat things about this is that you sort of start plinking away at your opponent. And at some point, you know, especially if you can enhance it in some way, you start forcing them to block it. And as they block it, it just gets bigger and bigger and a bigger and bigger threat. And so once you get them to start blocking, they kind of have to to block it. And as they block it, it just gets bigger and bigger and a bigger, bigger threat. And so once you get them to start blocking, they kind of have to continually block it.

And then it just becomes a bigger and bigger threat. Okay, next. Plague Boiler. So Plague Boiler is an artifact. It costs three. At the beginning of your upkeep, you put a Plague Counter on it. And then for one black-green as an activation, so three mana activation, one generic, one black green as an activation so three three

mana activation one generic one black one green put a play counter on or remove a play counter and then if there's three or more play counters on it you sacrifice it and destroy all non land permanents so this is a risk on what an alpha had never all the, which was an artifact that just destroyed all permanents. We've since found that destroying all the lands is not particularly fun, so now when we do this kind of effects, we destroy everything but the lands. So the cool thing about this card is it wants to build up and then destroys everything,

but maybe the timing is not what you want. Neverall's Disc sits in play until you choose to use it. This thing is going to go off at a certain point when you have three counters. But, because if you have mana and you're playing Golgari, you can control when you get the counter. You could, you know, you get one a turn,

but you could remove it if you need to if you're trying to wait. Likewise, you could speed things up if you have black-green. You can, you know, play it and more quickly destroy things if you need to. This is another in the cycle of the artifacts that were guild related. This is an artifact that is usable, like, you know, without black green, it just says I will play it and in three turns it'll blow everything up.

But with black green, you can change the clock. You can make it faster or slower. And one of the things about black-green is black-green definitely has a fascination with life and death. And so it killing a lot of things, definitely black-green is a color combination that can do that. So that's something else you'll notice, by the way, in this cycle, is we made artifacts that while did things that artifacts can do, definitely thematically leaned into the color combination

that it is sort of connected to. So, oh, well, black-green, well, black-green, you know, is more likely to do this kind of thing, even though we can make an artifact that is generic that can do this, it leans into black-green sort of parts of the color pie. Okay, next.

Hold on. Hold on a second. I'm going to take a drink of water. Okay. Next, we get to Pollen Bright Wings. So Pollen Bright Wings costs four green, white. So it's six mana, sorry. One of which is green and one is white.

It's an enchantment aura. Enchant creature. Enchanted creature has flying. And whenever it does combat damage to the player, each damage is turned into a sapling token. A 1-1 green sapling token. So the idea here is we're trying to do a green-white aura. Flying is the white part.

Turning damage into tokens is more the green part. White does token making but usually green is the one that would do it through damages. I mean that's more of a green thing. And the idea is to try to make a spell that we thought was useful but also plays into the theme that Celestia has which is slowly building up its army. And the neat thing about this card is it has evasion. It gives it evasion and then it cares about the

combat damage. So even putting on this on a 1-1 creature, I mean, probably you want to aim for bigger if you can, but even putting on a 1-1 creature just means that every turn I'm generating another counter. And ideally put it on the 3-3 or 4-4,

you know, all of a sudden, because it grants it flying, so you can put it on, you know, it doesn't matter, it grants evasion, so whatever creature you put it on becomes an evasive creature. And, you know, let's say you can get it on like a 4-4 creature,

all of a sudden you're getting four counters every turn and you're doing four damage. That definitely is something. Hold on a second. My mirror was not... My wife always, when she walks by my car in our garage, will turn my mirror so that she can get by, and I forgot to put some. Anyway. Honest to God, driving to work. I really am. Okay. So, Palm Bright Wings is a cool sort of... a different kind of effect. You know, it's an aura that definitely plays into a group strategy, an overrunning strategy, so that's kind of cool. Okay, next is Primordial Sage.

So Primordial Sage costs four green greens, so six mana, two of which is green. It's a spirit, four or five, and whenever you cast a creature, you get to draw a card. So one of the things is green is kind of interesting. Blue is number one in card drawing. Blue is the best at card drawing. Black gets card drawing through some sort of payment, usually life, but it can sacrifice things and such. But it gets card drawing with some sort of payment to it.

Green gets card drawing, but one of the rules for green is it has to be tied to its creatures. And the idea is if green didn't have any creatures, its card drawing wouldn't be effective. So this one's really straightforward. It says, okay, one of the things, for example, that we do in green is green tends to have what we call the cantrip creatures, which is a creature that just draws your card as it enters the battlefield. This essentially turns all your creatures into creature cantrips, that every creature basically gets, when I enter the battlefield, draw cards. I mean, it's a little slightly different than that, but essentially that's the feel of it. And one of the things in general that happens in green is we want to make sure

that green doesn't run out of gas, provided it's doing what green normally supposed to do, which is playing a lot of creatures. Now notice this thing's a little more on the expensive side. It tends to draw you cards later in the game. It's not... we didn't make this super cheap, so this is definitely a powerful effect. We made it a little more expensive to get it out. But it is definitely something that like, you know, once you get it out in the, you know, the mid to late game, it allows you to very quickly sort of find answers to help finish off your opponent. Okay, Privileged Position. This is a hybrid spell.

So 2 and 3 hybrid. So 2 and green or white, green or white, green or white. 5 mana total, 2 generic, 3 green or white hybrid. It's an enchantment. Other permanents you control have hexproof. Now note that this was spelled out, that the hexproof ability didn't exist yet. If you remember, Future Sight sort of,aked and gave a shroud for the first time. We had shroud for a little while, and then we ended up turning shroud into hexproof.

Because enough people played shroud as if it were hexproof, that we decided that we just should make it what people thought it was. So the idea is, this is a very protective spell, because one of the things you try to do when you're doing guild stuff is you want to thematically sort of fit the guild, but you also want to find different vantage points and different things to do. You don't want every guild card doing the exact same thing. And so the idea here is green and white both have some protective elements to them, especially

white. Well, what if... And the hexproof ability, that was something that green and blue do naturally. White gets protection and things, or it did at the time. So blue, green, and white were the three colors that had the most sort of protect-your-creature sort of flavor. And so we liked the idea that, hey, Selesnya's all about building up your army.

Well, shouldn't there be some way to help protect your army? And so there's a bunch of different ways built in Selesnya. I talked about the Hierophant the other day that you could sacrifice to regenerate all your creatures. That was one way. This is another way just to sort of say, hey, hands off. No spells on my guys. Okay, next, Psychic Draw. So Psychic Draw is a sorcery, XUB, X blue black. So it's an X spell that costs one blue and one black. The rest is all generic sorcery. And you mill X cards, gain X life. Mill is to take the top X cards of the target player's library and put it into the graveyard.

Note is targeted. You can use it on yourself, as I talked about with the milling effects. There are reasons in this block why you might want to mill yourself. But anyway, one of the strategies in this, we really wanted, the thing about Dimir is we wanted you to

win in sort of offbeat ways, ways that's hard for your opponent to deal with, in that you're sneaky and you definitely do things that are sort of working on a different vector, so it's kind of hard to deal with Dimir, because you don't quite know what they're up to. Milling is very popular. We chose not to make milling the main strategy, but we made it a pretty supported side strategy, you know, B strategy if you will.

And this was a pretty important card to the deck because X spells definitely allow you to, you know, this is a good finisher card that sort of like I do a lot of milling along the way and then I can save this to the end until I get right to the point where I have just enough that I can defeat them. Remember by the way, when you mill somebody, you know, when Richard Garfield first made the game, he knew he needed an alternate win condition so that the game didn't go forever. And what he decided was, okay, you have a library. When you run out of your library, then you lose. But the technical rule is not that you lose when you have no cards left. The technical

rule is you lose when you're unable to draw a card. So the rules that Richard built in that said, okay, if you ever go to draw a card and you're unable to draw a card. So the rules that Richard built in that said, okay, if you ever go to draw a card and you're unable to, well then you lose. And that way if games get long and drawn out, there's an inherent thing that will end the game. That at some point you'll run out of cards. So if you get into a

stalemate and one of you can't defeat the other, because that happens occasionally, at least there's something built in. Okay, all of a sudden it's no longer about damage. Now it's about a secondary thing. It's about losing cards. Then, in Antiquities, the East Coast playtafters who designed it made a card called

Millstones, where the slang comes from. And Millstone was an artifact that allowed you to tap to mill two cards of target player. And once that existed, for the first time really, I mean, I guess there were decks with alpha where it was a control deck where you would run them out of cards only in that I kept you from doing anything.

But that wasn't really popular. It wasn't really until Millstone came around that people really got the idea that, oh, the win condition could be this thing. It's not just an alternate in case no one can, like, I think when it came out in Alpha, it was sort of treated like, well, sometimes maybe you can't defeat them with damage, what happens? And that was sort of Richard's backup he gave. But Millstone, when it came out in

Antiquities, really communicated to the public that, like, no, no, no, one of the ways you can defeat your opponent is through milling. And ever since then, it's definitely been an important part of something we do. I mean,

every set pretty much has some milling in it. Some have milling large enough, like in Ravnica, that you can actually make it as either a limited strategy or that you can casually construct build-a-decks using mostly cards from that set. Not all sets do that, but Ravnica did.

Putrefy one Black Rean instant, destroy a target artifact or creature, and it can't be regenerated. This is a good example of us trying to make a nice, clean, simple card, and some habits of the time made it not quite as clean as it could be. So I liked a lot the idea of destroy target artifact or creature. The problem you run into generally is the number one artifact destruction color is green,

but green's weakness is it can't destroy creatures. Number two is red, and red can destroy artifacts, but it tends to destroy creatures through damage. It doesn't destroy them, which gets us to white. So white's the one mana color that, okay, it technically destroys creatures, but it tends to destroy creatures through damage. It doesn't destroy them, which gets us to white. So white's the one mana color that, okay, it technically destroys creatures and can destroy artifacts, but usually its creature is more about, oh, if you damage me or hurt me or, you know, I'm the good guy.

If you took the move against me, I can get you. But white doesn't often destroy. So it's one of those spells that if we want it to be lean, mean, and efficient, we need to put in a multicolor. And so we ended up putting in black-green, because black is number one creature structure, and green is number one artifact structure. It felt theme. The reason it has the rider on it is, at the

time, a lot of our destruction effects had the anti-regeneration clause. Why? I think that came about because the very first card that killed creatures, which was Terror back in Alpha, had the little rider. I'm not sure why.

Just for a while it became this thing that black creature destruction spells do. And eventually we said, you know what? It's extra text. It kind of just hoses regeneration for no great reason. It's kind of like, well, regeneration sucks against black, and we finally decided that we could do it occasionally,

but it's something we didn't need to do all the time. And then eventually, regeneration got phased out, and now it's like, we just let the cleaner destroy the creature. You know? And not, let spells that work around that work against it, and not worry about the spell not killing everything.

Okay, next. Razia, Boros Archangel. Four red, red, white, white. So a total of eight mana, four generic, two red, two white. It's a legendary creature. It's an angel, 6-3. It's got flying, vigilance, and haste. And you can tap it, and the next three damage dealt to a creature you control

is dealt instead to another creature, another target creature. So basically, you can redirect damage. So if somebody tries to do damage to one of your creatures through combat damage, through direct damage, and Razia's untapped, which it should be because it's got vigilance, you can redirect the damage. So it's pretty potent. Notice it's red and white.

So flying is something that, while more white than red, red does get. Vigilance is a white thing. Haste is a red thing. So it basically gave us something that both colors can do than something white does

than something red does. And then the other ability, the redirection ability, technically white is the color of redirection, but red is also the color of direct damage. And so while this obviously is redirection ability, technically white is the color of redirection, but red is also the color of direct damage. And so while this obviously is redirection, the idea that it's using it to sort of damage things has enough of a red feel.

One of the things, by the way, when we made this, we made the guilds, we decided that we wanted to be careful about what creature types went where, and that we felt it was more interesting if we sort of saved certain creature types for certain guilds and not had every creature type show up in every guild, other than, I think, humans. And one of the things we did is we decided that angels were going to be, I think we restricted angels to Orzhov and to Boros. And so Boros, this is one of the leaders, and Razio was, like,

we've always played up angels as being sort of battle angels, and, you know, Boros is the soldier color, so why not have one of its leaders be like a really kick-ass battle angel? And so, anyway, this card was very popular. Okay, next is Razio's Purification. Four red-white, so, anyway, this card is very popular. Okay, next is Razia's Purification. Four red, white. So, six mana, four generic, one red, one white. It is a sorcery.

Enchanted player chooses three permanents and then sacrifices the rest. So, a lot of destruction in this block. I talked last time or previously about the thing that destroyed all the non-token creatures. I talked today about the disc variant. Well, here's another one that destroyed. Now, this is kind of related to a spell called Cataclysm. Cataclysm was a spell from many years back where you got to choose, was it one thing? One or two things, and then destroy the rest.

This is a little more generous, and that allows a little bit more to survive. But the thing about this is kind of like pick your best things and then everything else is going to go. And hopefully, the idea essentially is you don't use this unless your three things are better than their three things. And so you sort of hold on to this. And you can definitely time this so you can sort of, you know, try to capture a moment in time where you're a slight technical advantage to

them as far as which of your abilities are better. And this is particularly good against something where the deck's a little more spread out, where it has things of equal value, where you can try to sort of unbalance a little bit by having a few stronger cards. Razia's Purification works very well with Razia, by the way. Surprise, surprise. What else for Razia Purification? I think that's it. Okay, next is Recollect, Tuna Green, Sorcery.

Return target creature cards from your graveyard to your hand. So one of my favorite cards in Alpha was a card called Regrowth, which was exactly this card except it cost 2 mana instead of 3 mana. It was still green. And Regrowth proved to be just a little bit too good, but not just a little bit too good. And so we kept trying to sort of re-figure out, and so this is one of our takes

on how to redo Regrowth. Turns out, Regrowth kind of wants to cost two and a half mana, and that two mana's a little too strong, and three mana's a little on the weak side. But here we are trying to see if we could do it at three mana.

I mean, it's a fine spell, and especially for decks that aren't trying to be top-tier tournament cards, this card is plain useful. But I never... Somehow at three mana, just, I don't know.

It's funny how you can go from one mana to one more mana, and that one mana can be kind of slightly too good, and one more mana is slightly too weak. But it happens. Magic definitely has...

And that's one of the challenges for the development team of trying to cost things, is things don't always line up exactly on the evenness of the mana cost and so sometimes it's like well if I do this cost it's slightly this, that costs slightly that and a lot of times

we have to tweak cards to try to get them to sort of maximize at the cost they're at next remand, remand is one in a blue it's an instant. It says counter target spell. And if countered, you put it into the hand instead of the graveyard draw card. So the idea is it is...

It counters the card, but it doesn't get rid of it. It's kind of like memoryapse, except instead of them losing a draw because it goes to the top of their library, you gain, it's a cantrip. And so anyway, it's a cool spell and definitely was, it's awesome

play. It's a neat spell. Next, Rootkin Ally. Sorry, Rootkin Ally. Sorry, Rootkin Ally. Four green green. It's an elemental warrior. Three three. It's got Convoke, and you can tap two untapped creatures to give it plus two plus two to end your turn. So this is a card that you want to have a lot of creatures. You can get it early. So for example, let's say you have six creatures, two of which are green. I can play this on a turn in which I don't need to spend any mana other than tapping

those creatures, and on the next turn, without even playing an additional creature and just using the creatures that I used to put this into play, I can attack with a 9-9 creature if I want. So, and this just plays into the idea, one of the things that green does from time to time is tapping creatures to boost itself. And so that's naturally an outlook of something that green already does. And so tying that to Convoke is pretty fun because Convoke says, hey, I need creatures to tap and this ability says, hey, I need creatures to tap.

And so it ties together pretty well. Sacred Foundry land. When it enters the battlefield, you can pay two life, or it enters the battlefield tapped. So this is the rare, what we call the shock lands. I designed these, the idea behind these when I designed them was, I liked the idea of dual lands that were optional, that you could sort of choose whether or not you wanted them to be more traditional, like, do you want them to be traditional dual lands?

And that they could come and play and act a lot like dual lands, like traditional magic alpha dual lands. But obviously there had to be a cost, because dual lands are a little bit stronger than we normally do for our lands. So the idea was, okay, if you want them to be traditional dual lands, you need to pay two life. And, if nothing, they can just be enter the battle tapped lands.

So you sort of can choose which you want. Now, originally when I made the cycle, development to take on it, they thought they were a little clunky looking. And I was like, no, no, no. Conceptually, it's just, when you play them, do I want untapped lands or tapped lands just as a cost to do that

and I finally convinced them that you can think of it as just being a choice when you play them and then they came around I very consciously, by the way, put the land types on these I know there's a lot of interactions they have land types, I know you could do things

like fetch them. So that was a very conscious decision to do that. Okay, next. Savra, Queen of the Golgari. Two black green for a legendary creature. It's an elf shaman. Two, two. Whenever you sack a black creature, you may pay two life.

And then each other player sacks a black creature. Whenever you sack a green creature, you gain two life. So this is part of the cycle, the legendary creature cycle, where you care about the two colors. And the neat thing about this is that the black and green work together because the black one has a life payment and the green one gains you life. So the cool thing is if I sack a black one, I can pay two life, make my opponent sacrifice something. If I play a green creature, I can gain two life.

But if I play a black and a green creature, then I can just make my opponent sacrifice something. Because the life payment and the life gain offset each other. And I was really proud of the design. It's pretty clean. I like that. Scatter the seeds. Three green, green instant. Convoke. Create three, one, one sapling tokens. Green sapling tokens. So this was the Convoke. Create three 1-1 sapling tokens, green sapling tokens. So this was the Convoke card that kind of, what I used to call Convoke Ritual.

Because what it does is, it makes, if you're playing a heavy Convoke deck, this just makes future Convoke cards cheaper because it's giving you essentially three mana for Convoke cards. And even if you're just playing this card, for example, I spend five mana and I play three 1-1s,

even if I do nothing else, you know, the next one of these I cast only costs green green, or actually these are green, only costs two generic mana because the things I just cast allow me the next one to be three cheaper. And so Sky of the Seas was definitely made to be like a Convoke enabler that if you want to play heavy Convoke, it really just helps you do that. It's also

useful in a vacuum. It's also useful making tokens and stuff. But it was definitely made for the Convoke deck. Okay, next. Sign of the Wild. One green, green avatar, star, star. Its power and toughness is equal to the number of creatures you control. So in Alpha, what was the card called?

Keldon Warrior. Right? Keldon Warrior? It's a card in Alpha that was a red creature that said, I'm star, star, equal to the number of creatures you control. And eventually we decided that, well, that's not really a red thing. Red is like number four in creatures. So we moved it to green, and we made green the care about the number of creatures you have.

And then at one point after this, we had a big meeting, one of our card crafting meetings, and we decided that, you know what? White really wants more. Green and white are separated by the fact that green is the large creature color and white is the large number. White goes wide and green goes tall. Well, if you have a creature that cares about having

lots of creatures, that seems to be more of a white thing than a green thing. I mean, it does allow you to go tall but it cares about going wide. And so we decided to move it over to white. And so this ability is now in white. It's not in green. Occasionally, occasionally we'll do it in green-white.

But anyway, this was meant to be another sort of Selesnya enabler. It says, hey, you want to play a lot of creatures? You want to play a lot of tokens? Well, this just gets bigger the more creatures you play. And it's in mono-green because at the time, that's where it went. Like I said, ironically, now, if we redid it again, we'd put it in mono white.

Searing Meditation. So, Searing Meditation is one red white, so three mana, one generic, one red, one white, it's enchantment. Whenever you gain life, you may pay two to deal two damage to a target creature or player.

So the idea of this is this is what we call an engine card. It converts one resource into another. So this converts life gain into damage. And so the idea essentially is, normally when I gain life, I'm only

winning in the game in the sense that I'm playing defensively. But this says, okay, now gaining life can actually be a win condition. You can win with life. And the idea being is like, okay, now you can build life as a means to protect yourself and be defensive. And while you're doing that, this card will now convert that resource into a win condition. card will now convert that resource into a win condition. And the thing that's kind of cool about it is, you know, the reason it's red-white is the idea of taking a resource that white uses and then adapting it to a more red style of play is a neat thing you get to do when you combine colors.

And that, you know, it's what we call the means and the ends. That one of the ways when you combine colors sometimes is you take the means of one color to create the ends of the other color. You know, it's like this card's all about damage, you know, wanting you to play a lot of life gain, which normally is a

means to be defensive, but the ends of which you're using it for is to be destructive, which is more of a red thing. Okay, Seeds of Strength, green-white instant. Target creature gets plus one, plus one until end of turn. Target creature gets plus one, plus one until end of turn. Target creature gets plus one, plus one until end of turn. So this card actually had that line of text three times.

And the reason is, is the idea of this card was you could give up to three different creatures plus one, plus one. And we tried a bunch of different ways to write this out, but people always got confused as far as how many creatures you could target and how big the ability got.

But the interesting thing was we wanted you to be able to put this on the same creature. We didn't want it to say it had to be three different creatures. And so we tried writing it out in a lot of different ways, and the rule sets got really ugly. So finally we came up with a really simple solution,

which is, what if we just give you three abilities? And each ability, that way each one is clear that you can just do this however you want to do it. It ended up being the cleanest. And then it had a little bit of novelty to it. I don't talk a lot about this, but one of the things when you're designing is you want to look out for novelty you don't want to lessen what cards do for novelty you don't want to make a card novel for the sake of being novel without making it playable but we can find cards that do something and that by being novel we are

efficient in what we're doing but also it lets the player sit up a little bit and have a laugh or just look at it or just do something where it sort of draws attention to itself in a positive way. That's good. Novelty is good when used correctly. Just the key to novelty is novelty can't be used solely for novelty's sake. It has to be serving the larger purpose of the card. But on this card, not only does it serve a larger purpose, it solves the templating problem we had. So I feel that was pretty good.

Okay, next. Selesnya Evangel. Evangel? I think it's Evangel. Green, white, elf shaman. It's a 1-2. 1 and tap. Tap a creature. Oh, tap an untapped creature you control, and then you create a 1-1 green sapling token. So what was the inspiration for this card? Interestingly, the inspiration for this card came from an Unhinged card called Utabi Kong. So what happened was, when I was making Unhinged, I was trying to find just fun jokes.

And so this joke requires a little visual. So if you're on Gatherer, go look up the card Utabi Orangutan. It was in Visions. And look at the background of the card. Not the foreground, but the background of the card. It was something that got noticed. And so when I made Unhinged, I made a card in which I created a creature that was kind of like Utapi Orangutan, except it was bigger. Utapi Kong is a larger creature. So Utapi Orangutan enters the battlefield and destroys

an artifact, and Utapi Kong just goes bigger. It's bigger, it goes bigger. But anyway, I played up a joke in the background of it. My joke was kind of in the background, so I was making a Tabi Kong. Tabi Kong's making fun of Tabi Rangatang, but kind of subtly because the main joke's in the background. But I wanted a means by which to represent

the joke in the background. And so I came up with the idea of tapping two creatures to make a token. And that obviously has its own, you know, ha-ha little sort of flavor to it. But I realized that I kind of liked the idea of two creatures

making a creature. So when we were in Selesnya and we were doing a card that, you know, kind of made two creatures, I thought it was kind of fun to do that. And so,

but here, this card is one of the cards, and so it just says, okay, if I can get along with another creature, then we can generate and make a creature. And once you've made a creature once, then that creature, from a mechanical standpoint, can then be used with the Evangel to make more creatures. It is funny where and how that uncards will come to influence black border cards one of the reasons

I really like the unsets is I will do a lot of things where I'm not trying to do normal magic I'm goofing around like that design came across

from me trying to top down humor so anyway that always gives me a kick okay the final card for today, because I'm close to Rachel's school, is Selesnya Guildmage. So once

again, all the guildmages cost two hybrid mana. So this costs green or white, green or white. It's a 2-2. And this is an elf wizard. Like I said, we mixed up the classes, but they're all magic based. Okay, so it has two abilities as do all the guildmages. For three and a green you make a 1-1 sapling token and for three and a white all creatures you control get plus one plus one until end of turn. So of all the guild mages this

was the one that I think was the strongest. It's the one that actually saw tournament play. Now once again I should stress, not that I don't think this is the strongest, but sometimes when we make a cycle the reason that a certain card gets played isn't necessarily that it's the strongest. It is that the combinations of things it does happen to be beneficial that there's other cards in the environment that do it. The good example here was it turned out when Ravnica came out, green and white was in a really good place and had a lot of powerful cards. Some of which came from Ravnica, but some of which came from other sets around it.

And so it turned out just having a good... Like green, for example, getting out a two-mana 2-2 that has pretty significant upside is just a good card. And that white tends to have a curve anyway. And then I think about hybrid mana is as long as I'm playing white or green spells,

look, turn two, I should be able to get it out. I can't play spells that produce colorless mana. But okay, if I'm producing lands that produce green or white, a two-drop hybrid allows you in a... Normally, when you're playing two colors, a two-color card, a card that costs one of one color, one of another, even though in theory you can get it on the second turn,

a lot of the time that doesn't happen. You don't always have both colors in your opening hand, or, you know, by your second turn. And Hybrid kind of solves all that, which is one of the cool things about Hybrid. But anyway, Selesnya Guildmage, obviously it's playing into the Selesnya things. Making tokens was a big part of Selesnya Guildmage, obviously it's playing into the Selesnya things. Making tokens was a big part of Selesnya, although as I've talked about, it was a big part of monogreen strategy.

One of the things we did is we gave green, white, and black all sort of strategies for their monocolor that overlapped the two guilds they were in, and that had effectiveness both places. the two guilds they were in, and that had effectiveness both places. And token making, in Selesnya you overran people, and token making in Golgaria you tended to sacrifice them as a resource. And so token making helped both. The white side, likewise, noticed that green is going to overwhelm you, so boosting everybody late game can help you.

And white in Boros is about aggro attacking. Well, a two-drop 2-2 that can boost your team also is effective. So we made this card such that it can go in a Golgari deck. It can go in a Boros deck. But it's at home, and it does its best work in a Selesnya deck. And so that was the goal of all the guild mages, was that either guild could play... Sorry, there's three guilds. Either guild that used one of the colors could play them,

and it was most effective in the guild that used both colors. Now, green was in an interesting place. One of the reasons this is so powerful is Selesnya was the one color where green and white both showed up in other, I'm sorry, Golgari, Selesnya and Golgari

were the two that its ally color showed up because if you were playing green and white, there also was Golgari and Boros. If you were playing green and black, there also was Dimir and Selesnya. But anyway,

I'm now driving up to my daughter's school so we got up to S. So I think we have one more podcast and we'll get done with Ravnica. But anyway, as I'm here, up to my daughter's school. So we got up to S. So I think we have one more podcast and we'll get done with Ravnica. But anyway, as I'm here, we all know what that means. It means the end of my

drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Okay, guys, I'll see you next time for probably the final Ravnica. Bye-bye.