Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #490: Unstable, Part 3

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

This podcast is the third and final part of the story of Unstable's design.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to run up the drive to work. Okay, so the last few podcasts I've been talking about unstable. So I'm talking all about the design and sort of how it got made. Okay, so last I left I talked about the making of the factions. Oh, by the way, I called the white-blue faction, it's the, um, I was calling them the order of the sprocket, but they're actually the order of the widget, because we ended up using the, um, I was calling them the order of the sprocket, but they're actually the order of the widget, because we ended up using the word sprocket for our contraptions, so I forgot that. So, um, I was listening to yesterday's episode, as I normally do on the way

home, uh, and realized that I said that wrong. But I like the episode, so, okay, I said the word wrong. Um, one of the things that's tricky when you work on something, especially for a long time, is that different things will have different names oh the other thing that I think I messed up is I was calling so it's host and augment and I think I was calling it suture because that was a name instead of augment it was suture for a while

and I think I called it suture on yesterday's podcast so you get a bunch of old terms because I've worked on this a long time with other names so I apologize for that but I like yesterday's podcast. So we're leaving it be. Anyway, picking up where I left off, I was talking about the faction. So I want to talk about a few other themes. So yesterday I talked about, or in the previous podcast, I talked all about the contraptions, obviously.

I talked about the host and augment. And I talked about the dice rolling. There's some few other themes that are woven in mechanically so let me talk about some of those other themes. Okay first and foremost we have something that we called outside assistance which we almost actually gave an ability word to but we ended up not. So what what it is is there's a bunch of cards I think it's a cycle plus there's an artifact where you are required to go talk to somebody

who isn't playing in your current game and then you have to do something with them. Get information from them, have them make a decision, try to high-five them. That you're doing something which you're bringing a person into the game. Oh, actually, there's a cycle, there's an artifact, and there's a gold card. But anyway, the idea is that we wanted to have some variance, and we wanted to sort of create some socialization. We wanted to sort of, like, one of the fun things about this set is that it sort of is going to force you to interact with the environment around you.

And the idea that is fun is, look, maybe you're playing in a game store and there's other magic players that are friends of yours that you get to pull in and have interesting things. Maybe you're playing at home and you call over your mom or someone who doesn't even know necessarily what they're saying. We set it up for most of them in which you can ask anybody and they'll answer the question. And maybe their answer helps you, maybe it doesn't. But anyway, I like the idea that one of the things that, you know, I talk about the spectrum

of fun to serious, that one of the things that makes Magic fun is interactions. It's the fact that, you know, like, I've talked about this before, that if you look at the top 30 games in America, 29 of them are video games, and one of them is us. One of the, what I

actually consider to be an advantage of our game is that there's personal communication. You know, you're not sitting in front of a screen. You're actually interacting with somebody face to face. And that is really powerful in that I wanted to make some cards to sort of encourage that. And there's a lot of fun

um, okay, I'm not gonna there's a story that that Mark Purvis I don't know, because I think Purvis is going to do another Drive to Work, but it involves outside assistance cards, so a little hint to the story to come. Also, something else I did is, one of the reasons I did the factions, I think I wanted to do the factions for the factions sake, but something I liked about the fact that I had factions was that I could do watermarks. So for those who don't know what a watermark is,

on a card, for example, whenever we do guilds or when we did Skars and Mirrodin and there was the Mirrons and the Phraxians, I think we did it when we did the wedges in Khadzad Tarkir, that we create a symbol for them. And then that symbol is behind in the rules text. We call it a watermark, which is a light symbol that goes behind the text.

Now, one of the things about watermarks is there are certain qualities of cards that we're not allowed to care about in Black Border. And the reason is that, for example, we might reprint a card in a set, and in that set we tie it to a faction. So it's possible, for example, that there's a card that in the set is connected to a faction so it gets a watermark, but another version of the card doesn't have the watermark.

And one of the rules in Blackboard about cards is, whatever the card is, you go by its English name and then all copies of the card are treated identically. That it doesn't matter, you know, whether the card has a watermark or not, or who the artist is. All the cards have to be treated the same. So anything that might vary between the cards, such as artist, such as watermark state, such as collector number, you know, such as, you know, there's all sorts of things that we are not allowed to care about in Black Border. That Silver Border, that's a great space for us.

That Silver Border has a rule that says you care about the specific card you're talking about. If I want to care about an artist, well, I look at the card in play and who's that artist? I don't care about the artist on other copies of the card. I care about the copy I have. And so what that means is that we're not normally allowed to care about watermarks. But, in Civil Borderland, I thought it would be fun. So, having watermarks on the factions meant that, A, we could care about the factions in a way that normally you can't care about them.

And, B, we could make a few cards that cared about watermarks in general. Like I said, there are a couple cards, there's a cycle of cards that care about the watermarks from the set, and then there's a couple cards that care about any watermark, and the idea is you pick a watermark and you can build your deck around it, and then that thing helps that watermark. And so you don't normally get to make watermark matters cards, but hey, it's Silver Border. You know, one of the fun things, in my mind,

Unset do a couple things. They do three things, really. One is they let us experiment with the future. They let us try something that isn't yet part of the game and see how people react. And some of them, as shown,

sometimes eventually that will become part of the game. The reason it's Silver Border is it's exploring new space that hasn't been explored before. Sometimes it is looking at something that through technicalities the game can't do. Watermark Matters is a good example where it's not that Black Border, you know, it's pretty straightforward what it does it's just a matter

of Black Border you know there are certain rules and stuff that things it can't do based on things for the larger system

and so there's things you can do that are understandable that just technically don't work so the other thing Unsett does is kind of

make cards that we'd like to make that just for technicality reasons we can't make. You know, Staying Power was a card in Unhinged, for example, where until end of turn effects didn't end. And that's a fun card, and I really tried to make that in Black Border, and it turns out that for just some rules reasons it wasn't possible. But like, it's a cool card. I want it to exist in Magic. I want people to make decks out of it. Okay, I put it in Silver Border because it can't exist in Black Border.

Third category are things that are kind of silly. Like the whole package is something that we probably wouldn't do in Black Border, even though the component pieces are possible in Black Border. For example, there's a card in Unstable called Crowstorm, which it's not that any of the individual pieces couldn't be done in theory, that it's more of what makes it funny is the total package. The idea that I'm, you know, Stormcrow is a card that has kind of become

the Chuck Norris of magic cards. People joke all the time about the power of it. And it's just an in-joke. And the idea that you would have a Storm card that gets you Stormcrows called Crowstorm is funny. And the reason we ended up putting it in our set is it's kind of hard

to put in a Blackwater set. It's just that's not normally the tone we take and it actually is a card that could be dangerous in some older format so like doing it in a silver board set led us to kind of have fun do silly do the the fun version like what you don't want to do is do a version where you have to neuter it just so it doesn't cause any problems and then kind of the joke isn't carried as through as you wanted but those are the three kinds of things that we tend to do is you know things that we

things that we might one day do things that for technicality we can't do or things that tonally or something that sort of there's a reason we wouldn't quite do it in normal silver border okay so um is there anything else that sort of, there's a reason we wouldn't quite do it in normal Silver Border. Okay, so um is there anything else?

Like I said, there was a little bit of an artifact theme. As I get through the factions we'll talk about the artifact theme, but that was another thing that wove through was contraptions are artifacts. We're talking in Inventor World, they were making artifacts. One of the factions, obviously, themselves are artifacts.

So there's a lot of artifacts that runs through the set. Okay, let me take a quick drink and then we'll talk about how the factions divvied up the different abilities. Okay, so first let me talk a little bit about how we design a normal magic set. In a normal magic set, what we tend to do is we divvy up the abilities. That we don't necessarily put all the abilities and all the colors. And the reason for that is that we're trying to give color identity. That, oh, well, you know, for example, in Ixalan, for example, well, that's a bad example, maybe in Amonkhet. In Amonkhet, we decided that we wanted to do in Balm, and we really put in Balm in white and blue.

And the idea was that it was something that really was a white-blue thing. And I think we had one red and one green, no black in Amonkhet. And the idea, we do this often, where it's like we focus it in one color sometimes it's completely absent from another color sometimes we sprinkle it in this set I felt like we'd waited so long for contraptions that it felt wrong to isolate contraptions to just one color or just a couple colors

so I'm saying with host and augment is I didn't want you sort of not having the ability to have some fun with the main mechanics. So I spread them through the colors, but what I did do is I put themes and the sort of build around cards were put in certain things. So let me talk to you. So the main three themes I had to work with was contraptions, host and augment, and dice rolling. So let's start with the order of the widget. Order of the widget? No, order of the widget.

Order of the widget. It used to be order of the sprocket, so I get confused. Order of the widget. Okay, so the way it works is we decided they were the cyborg. So they themselves were going to be artifacts. And so I liked the idea that they had an interesting

relationship with contraptions. And what that is is that they make use of artifacts. That one of the themes of the widget is they are all about repurposing artifacts. And since one of the cool qualities to contraptions that was set up before I even started this, I mean, when we first did FutureSight, we made some rules to go along with contraptions. And one of the things is we identified contraptions as being an artifact subtype. So I knew they needed to be artifacts. I was playing into that. So the fact that you're building and that you can use artifacts as a resource was kind of cool because if you're building contraptions, it allows you

to have the contraption help you as a resource. So we decided that the cyborgs were going to have more of an artifact-th theme focus and be more contraption focused. But contraptions in a way where they have the tools they're more fine. They have the ability to sort of prune their contraption. They have the ability to rearrange their contraption. They're the ones that build contraptions but are more subtle and thorough in how they that build contraptions but are more subtle and thorough in how they build their contraptions.

They can better craft the contraptions to do what they want them to do. The other faction that I wanted to be contraption, to have a strong contraption flavor, was the goblins, because Steamflugger Boss is what started it all. And I like the idea. So what we decided to do for Steamflugger boss was

they're really good at building contraptions, but they don't have the finesse. So the idea is if you want to just make a contraption with lots of pieces to it, having lots of things happen, the goblins are better at that. If you want to build a contraption with a little bit more control, a little more finesse, and you're setting up combos

a little cleaner, the cyborgs are for that. So the idea was each one sort of, I gave contraptions to two colors, but each one sort of used contraptions in a slightly different way. Now, I also, all of them have some contraption stuff. The supervillains were the third group that I gave a little bit of contraption stuff to. contraption stuff. The supervillains were the third group that I gave a little bit of contraption stuff to. The idea being that they, the supervillains are up to something. And so their stuff, the interactions they get with contraptions are, they take advantage of having a big contraption

translates to them doing other things with it. So they sort of make use of their contraption. So their contraption, I mean, the supervillains can build contraptions, but they also sort of have larger goals with their contraptions. So each one of them is given a kind of different way in how they do them and what they do with them. Okay, then we get to host and augment.

What we found was that the clearest faction that wanted to mess with Host and Augment was the Crossbreed Labs, because they themselves, obviously, are creatures sort of intertwined together. And so what we decided to do was to make Host Suture. So we had talked about whether or not the Host Suture was supposed to be watermarked, and that we originally had made did we end up doing? I don't think the host and augment are watermarked. I'm not 100% on that. They were watermarked at one point, but it became a little fuzzier. Like, some of them were clearly, you know,

the artifact creatures made more sense as being from the order of the widgets, but I don't think we ended up watermarking them. Anyway, the theme of Crossbreed Labs is they're the ones that play most interestingly with the Host and Suture. We also

let the supervillains have a little bit. The primary playing with Host and Suture was Crossbreed Labs. Secondary was the supervillains, who we thought sort of the idea of, there's a little bit of a supervillain quality to, I've taken a pony and crossed it with a camel. It had a little bit of a supervillain feel to it. So the supervillains were not primary in anything,

but became secondary in a bunch of different things. That they were kind of the group that messed with inventions and contraptions and messed with host and augment. And they also messed with dice. We'll get to that in a second. So then, the final thing was

figuring out who interacted with dice the most. We liked the idea that the goblins loved dice and loved the randomization of dice. So they tended to let you roll more dice. And they more often used dice to determine things. So the goblins more often result to randomness because that's the nature of goblins. But the spies, we thought it was neat if the spies had more the ability to manipulate the dice.

They let you re-roll the dice or increase dice rolls. So that the spies may interact with dice, more control the dice. So the spies are less random and more controlled. And the goblins are more random. So the goblins more often use dice as a means to understand things. And are more likely to roll more dice. But the spies have more of the ability to interact with the dice to do that.

We also gave the supervillains a little bit of dice rolling, just because they kind of sat in the middle because we gave some dice manipulation in black for the... So the spies have blue-black manipulation and the red-green have dice rolling for the goblins. So there's a nice cross-section where black had a little bit of finesse and a little bit of die rolling, because black and red each had some of that. The other big thing that we did for the factions was we would try to understand what each one of them was up to. Oh, another thing that I did, by the way, is I was in charge of doing the cosmology.

Normally, we build a world, the creative team will do a lot of world building. But there wasn't as much allocation. Usually, supplemental sets get less time. And there still was an entire set. Like, there's a whole set to concept. And, you know, there's a lot of work to make. There's a lot going on. So when I was putting the set together, I spent some time working on sort of the cosmology.

And one of the things I wanted is, I wanted each faction to function very differently from the others. So let's walk through the factions. So first is the cyborgs. So I love the idea that the leader of the cyborgs was essentially a computer. I mean, a magic fantasy computer. A steam-powered computer, if you will. Or steam-powered slash magical, you know. But the leader, the idea is the leader of the cyborgs is somebody, the idea was, as the story goes, he was once a man, but he is a man no longer.

You know, that he started as a person, I guess, I don't know the gender necessarily. That it started as a person who kept upgrading themselves to the point at which they were no longer a person and were now a computer. And in the set, there is a legendary artifact that represents, so it's not even a creature, it's just a legendary artifact that represents the leader of the Order of the Witches. Next was the spies. I like the idea that the spy was a shadowy organization and that there was a hierarchy,

but that it was a little bit foggy, that the idea was not, you know, that, for example, the person running, running the spies was like people, you know, it was sort of this mysterious figure that people didn't know that much about. And then I also wanted to make sure

that there was some, like, master spies and things that people looked up to. But the idea was sort of borrowing from something like James Bond. Like, well, you have your star, you know, James Bond-type spy that people look up to. And then you have kind of, you know, M

that's sort of like, eh, people don't know everything. You know, it's sort of like, and in fact, we wanted it to be a little shadowier than that. Where it's like, people don't know everything. It's sort of like, and in fact, we wanted it to be a little shadowier than that, where it's like, people don't quite know. It's kind of a mystery boss. I like the idea that there's just, the person pulling the strings is kind of hidden. And that's just a play on the spy metaphor.

So the idea is, the spies, the Asians have a hierarchy. It's just a little bit clouded, and not everybody quite, everybody kind of knows who they report to, but they don't necessarily know people above their... The chain of command gets foggy as you go higher.

Okay, then you've got the supervillains. Well, the supervillains, I decided, had to have a cadre of supervillains. That they had a sort of a league, if you will. They're a league of deathly doom. They're a bunch of different supervillains, and. They're a bunch of different supervillains. And so there's a bunch of different supervillains in that tribe

that sort of, they meet together and then they as a group make decisions. Each one of them has their own subsection and they kind of rule their subsection. But I love the idea of the supervillains like nobody trusted each other, so, you know, there's sort of a, there's the

cadre at the top that are, you know, the biggest villains, and that they don't really get along, but kind of there's this tension, and that, I like the idea that their hierarchy is, there's no one person in charge, because no one, nobody trusts the other person in the supervillains, and I thought that was very fun. The goblins have no

leadership. There is there is like goblins that others look up to because they're kind of like the masters of what they do. So there's admiration but the idea actually is that the goblins is a democracy. That the goblins all, I mean, I mean a true democracy. Like, if the goblins want to decide something, all the goblins get in a room and all the goblins vote on it.

That, I love the idea that in some ways the people with the fairest, the fairest run, the fairest run organization is the goblin. Now it's kind of chaotic because the goblins are chaotic and, you know, what the goblin, like how the goblins choose to vote is, is highly chaotic. Um, like one of the things we wove through, um, this was creative, came up with this, but it was funny, is this idea that they're obsessed with hammers.

They're just obsessed with hammers. but it was funny, is this idea that they're obsessed with hammers. They're just obsessed with hammers. And so that a lot of times, I like to believe that, you know, sometimes if you want to get something through, you just promise everybody a hammer and you get stuff through. They'll vote for you. Now, the Crossbeat Labs was the trickiest.

I liked the idea that it was a collective. I liked the idea that because it's white-green, that the group is looking out for itself. But the thing I like is the idea that there are leaders, and the leaders are chosen from within, that they sort of have proven themselves from within. And so the CrossFeed Lab does have people that rule it, but very much kind of the rise to power in the Crossbead Labs is that you've shown some sense of perfection. That one of the big things for them is this idea of, have you found your true inner animal?

That part of the discovery process in the Crossbeads Labs is, you know, what is your true torso and what are your true legs and what is your true head? And the ones they really come to admire and the ones that end up taking a leadership role are the ones that really understand that. And the Crossbeads Labs is also a school that, so the people in charge are not just sort of in charge. They're also the teachers. Essentially what happens is sort of the people that have proven the most experience become the teachers, and that's the leaders of the Crosby Labs. And their main leader right now is a doctor. He's smart.

And so they really value sort of that education and that knowledge. Not in the sense, I mean, obviously they're not blue, but in the sense of he truly has sort of found his ultimate form and that he can share that with others and that he's sharing sort of his wisdom. I guess they're more wisdom related than they are knowledge based necessarily. But anyway, so each one of them was given

sort of a general feel. And then, so one of the things is I decided that I wanted to make sure that I spread the themes into all the colors just because we don't make a lot of unsets. And the last thing I wanted to do was make a really cool thing,

only let some colors do it, and then, you know, the next unset, assuming we would have another unset, like, who knows how long until that would happen. Now, the big thing about, okay, so now I've gotten all the themes. And I worked real hard, and I worked with the creative team. Oh, so let me explain. So what happened was I built the five factions.

I and my team built the five factions. And then the creative team brought in some artists. Normal world building is like a three week. I think we had a week, I think. But the idea was

I explained each of the each of the factions and the essence of what they were about and then the artists went to town and the artists were obviously given this vein of look, you've got to be lighter, this is funny, this is humorous and so they turned the cyborgs into these steam-powered creatures that had a very...

and the thing I kept talking about is how they kept sort of adding mundane objects to themselves, and so they worked that in and gave them a very kind of fun look. For the Ancients of Sneak, they really played around with how to sort of hit spy ideas but be over the top. Another thing they worked with, not just what the people looked like, but what the inventions looked like, because these were mad inventors.

And so they had a lot of fun with kind of all the spy equipment and what they were up to. Then with the supervillains, they weren't very stylized. The idea of what do the, so for a while on the set, we had these things called goons that ended up called brainiacs. Those are the creatures that have like brains in a jar

on their head. And the idea is we wanted some henchmen. We knew we had to have henchmen in the thing. So in each case, as they were drawing, we talked about the needs we'd have of that faction. Like, we needed henchmen for the supervillains. And we wanted different major characters. They started

doing some character work because we wanted different sort of different sub-factions of the supervillains. And then for the goblins, they sort of figured out kind of what the goblins looked like. I think the obsession with hammers came from this part. And just kind of what exactly do our steam floggers and how do the goblins function and stuff like that. That was all worked out. And then crossbreed labs

is the one where I think it went from an idea, you know, it went from this weird idea to something real. I talked about how we wanted these hybrid animal things and they went to town with it. The artist had a blast.

And the Crossbreed Labs went from being the things that everybody was like, what? To like, oh, wow, that's awesome. The Crossbreed Labs really shone during this week of, maybe a week or two, of sort of world building. Okay, so once we had our world building, we had our factions, we knew what they looked like, we had our mechanics,

they were intertwined. So another big thing about the unsets is sort of individual card design. That one of the cool things is when you can do anything you want, when the shackles are taken off, one of the things I want to make sure is I want to make sure that all, that we're hitting a lot of different things. So first thing we did is we went and looked at are there things in which, what are the expectations people would expect? So there were some cycles that we had done in both Unglued and Unhinged.

We looked at all of them and we tried to design cards for all of them. In the end, we only kept the cards where we think we really had done something cool. So for example, we did make an Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil. It just, the problem was,

the first one worked well in your hand. And the second one worked well in your library. And like, there's no farther back to go. And we played around with stuff, but it just felt like there wasn't mechanical space to make it work. And that we were sort of, I didn't want to just do a joke where it was a joke, and you laughed at the card, and then the card wasn't fun to play, it wasn't interesting to play.

But, for example, there were other themes, like, for example, we had done Timmy in the first set in Unglued, we had done Johnny in the second set, like, well, gotta finish the second graphic, so we did do Spike. So, we tried to figure out where there were things. And the other thing that I did is, I went back and I looked at cards that had been really popular in previous unsets. Stuff like, you know, the sub-games,

the putting things together ended up being Host and Augment. Vile Mile or Cheaty Face. I took cards that I knew people had fun with, or Yet Another Ether Vortex. And I kind of figured out what was kind of cool about the card, and then tried to make something that was different, but sort of played in a similar space. try to make something that was different, but sort of played in similar space. You know, like

Yeti and the Vortex was really this fun idea of something coexisting in two zones at once. That it's both on top of your library and on the battlefield. And there was a lot of neat interactions there. So like, I looked for a card that got you in two zones at the same

time. A different zone. I mean, battlefield's one zone, but I now played around with the hand, obviously. And so the idea is I really was sort of goofing around with finding themes that people had liked previously and doing one-up cards. And then there also were some cards that, like, whenever I try to get something in Black Border

and I get stopped by the rules team, I save it. I'm like, oh, that's a cool card. Oh, okay. Well, I guess we can't do it technically in the rules, but I like it, and so I will save it. And there's a bunch of cards that show up in the set where I really did try.

One of the things that people are going to say to me when the set comes out is, hey, why is this in Black Border? And like I said at the beginning of the podcast, one of three reasons is going to be it. Either, yeah, maybe one day Magic will do it, but it hasn't done it yet. Yeah, you might think it works,

but the rules really don't let it work. Or this total package is hard for us to actually do. It's not that the pieces aren't possible to do, but it's the whole package together with tone and everything. It's something that we wouldn't do in a way that I think would satisfy people but we could do it

in that way in the Silver Border set and so I made a lot of different cards the other thing that we did is oh oh well

part of what we had to do is I had to make the cards that hit our themes and reinforce our themes I then made some cards to help interconnect some of the themes so that there's reasons. Like, one of the things I want is you might make a contraption deck or you might make a dice rolling deck, but maybe you make a contraption dice rolling deck.

I wanted that to be a possibility. Or maybe you want host and suture and you want dice rolling. I did some crisscrossing of stuff so that I wanted the themes to show up in number. Also, it's fun in that both Contraptions and Dice Rolling, you can play in lower number. And even Host and Augment, you can play plenty of Host Creatures. Like, if you're playing a bunch of Host Creatures in your deck, sometimes you can throw in an augment card. I mean, you need

host and augment is the most AB of the mechanics, so you do need enough host. But host, there's a lot of them, and they're pretty generic in that they're just ETB effects. So, there's really no damage of putting host creatures. There's no harm that if you never see your augment cards, the host creatures work fine. So, you can put a bunch of host things in your deck and then throw an augment or two, even if you're not playing a lot of hosts. But I really was trying to sort of do that up. And then one of the things that happens over the years is there's times when I or somebody else come up with a card. Like often, kind of people have been trained that if they come up with an idea that doesn't

work in Blackboard, or they send it to me. You know, hey, we made this in a set, but I don't think we can do this, or here's a cool idea, or here's a riff on something you've done before an unset. And I keep those. I collect those. So another part of sort of designing an unset is

finding all the component things in individual cards. Like, for example, there's a card in this thing called Animate Library, where we've joked about that card for a few years, and I'm like, you know, I just like, oh, we should make it. Like, it started as kind of a joke, because you can't actually animate your library in Black Border. For example, like, in order for it to work,

your library would have to be on the battlefield because you can't attack unless you're on the battlefield or unless rules let you attack. Anyway, it gets kind of messy in the Black Border rules. Silver Border, like, eh, whatever. But it's a card we had talked about when I finally were able to actually make it. And there's a lot of those,

there's a lot of individual cards like that. So one of the fun things about the Unsets are that I want to leave room to have a lot of those, there's a lot of integer cards like that. So, like, one of the fun things about the unsets are that I want to leave room to have a lot of fun. I want to have themes, I want to make sure, oh, let's start drafting for a second. We originally tried to make it for sealed

and for draft, and what we found was a lot of our themes, in order for them to work in sealed, we had to up the as-fan of them. But if we did that, then we could play around with less themes. And one of the things is, we don't make a lot of silver-bordered product.

I really, I wanted it to be pretty dense. I knew it was an introductory product, and we don't get to make a lot of un-products. So I wanted to make sure that we were delivering enough that for the fans, this is, you know, even if we make another one, and knock on dashboard we do, it's going to be a little while before we made another one, and that I want to make sure that we're maximizing what the product can offer. And so we decided that rather than try to make it for sealed,

and in events that maybe we played once, I mean, the set doesn't even have a pre-release, it just has a release event. What if we just said, you know what, in the release event, draft it. Conspiracy, you drafted it, that's what you did. So we're like, okay, this is like conspiracy. It's just meant to be drafted.

And that allowed us to sort of tie some themes together and allowed me to concentrate some stuff so that when drafting, you could get enough things to make the theme work. And we really spent a lot of time trying to make it fun for drafting. Like I've said in the previous podcast, there's a lot of variance in it

to make sure that, you know, it's a small set. And I want you to be able to draft a small set unto itself. And I want to make sure that you have different experiences. It's not the same game again and again. And so we purposely made it dense in themes. We made those themes crisscross in color so that you can try themes out in different colors um there's a lot of individual build around stuff more so than a normal set so there's individual cards you can get like okay this is a weird card let me you know there are a bunch of rares and few in comments for example where if you open it you're like okay i'm doing this i'm all in let's see what what can happen um and so we really sort of built a lot of things

um the other thing i try to do is i knew that silver border gets played in cube a bit so i try to make sure that there's a bunch of themes that could go into cube um obviously um uh i knew stuff like contraptions and dice rolling and host and augment were, were on the silly side, but all were there. One of the things that, uh, in general that I try to do is there's a lot of themes that people like, and there's some themes what I'll call fringe themes. For example, um, uh, things that involve dexterity. Like I've done in the past things where you're balancing things or holding things or can't use body parts and that there's people that really get into that. It's kind of fun. Like it's not often I have to play magic, but both my hands are behind my back. You know, you know, that doesn't happen much. So I wanted a

little of that, but there's other people that it's not their favorite part of it. So what I tended to do is get little pockets of that. I concentrated it. Like the physical stuff's more in black. So if you really, really dislike the physical stuff, well, maybe stay away from black. Or even then, it's not a high theme in black, so you can play black without doing it. But that's something I worked on is trying to make sure that all these little themes that people appreciate show up enough that if you want to if you want to kind of build around it you can um they're not so high that you necessarily will build

a whole limited deck on it but there's enough that if you want to sort of build a deck especially if you combine it with previous unsets that you can build a deck and do some cool stuff around it um and then for drafting i i worked really hard to weave those themes in. For cube, I tried to make sure that there were plenty of cards that did cool, fun things. Not in a wacky way. I mean, I'm not saying there aren't some cards that are a little on the sillier side, because some people like that. But I wanted to make enough cards that are kind of offbeat but practical for cubes. And then I just made sure to have a lot of legendary creatures.

Not every legendary creature was necessarily made for Commander. There was some fun character stuff we did, and I knew that I wanted to make some neat interactive cards. But I tried to make sure that some of the legendaries really, really would let you do fun and goofy things in Commander. So I was conscious of making sure that some of the legendary stuff, and I made more legendary stuff than normal so that we'd have more shots at Commander.

I will stress, not every legendary creature was made for Commander, as is true in normal magic. Sometimes we just have a cool idea, the character represents something in our story, and it's legendary for reasons beyond Commander, because Commander's not the only reason something in our story, and, you know, it's legendary for reasons beyond Commander, because Commander's not the only reason something's legendary. Oh, another theme that I wove in,

although this theme's getting a little overblown, was a little overblown in the previews, or before the previews, because there's a squirrel theme. It's not a giant theme. I put enough squirrels in that if you wanted to make a squirrel deck you could. It's a green-black deck, interestingly, if you want to play a squirrel deck. One of the things, one of the cosmology things I played up was it was a mad scientist world and they've done so much

experimenting that they eradicated mice, the white mice they use got eradicated and they were forced to turn into squirrels for all their lab experiments. So there are lab squirrels. That's a little detail that I like about it. It was fun building that. But anyway, we spent a lot of time making sure that the way it worked was, it was in design forever. It was in design for many years. And then it was in development for many years. In fact, we had three different lead developers. Billy Miranda was the first lead developer. Then Dave Humphries

was the second lead developer. And then Ben was the final lead design. And each of them definitely added something to the file we spent a lot of time and energy actually doing development Unglued had almost zero development Unhinged, Randy Buehler was on the team so I had a developer on the team

to kind of, from the team, help with development but this is the first set where I had a development team, now I was on the development team the development team in fact Mark Purvis and I, two of the biggest, were both on the development team. The other members of the team moved around a little bit but I actually, this is one product, not the product I can say that in. I was in the very first meeting of the very first design all the way through the very last meeting of development that I did it I I was in every

meeting for the entire run I also was the architect for the product so I was there there are a few products I was more involved with at every level um I even worked really hard with Kelly on names and flavor tech so I was I was involved at every level of this product because um if you can't tell, the unsets are my baby. So anyway, that, my friends, in three podcasts, is the design of Unstable. I will at some point do podcasts on individual cards. I'm not sure when I'm going to do that. There's a lot, a lot of stories from individual cards. I will get to that.

But I didn't want to have too long a run. So this is going to be it for now. I will come back another time and do some unstable cards. But anyway, I'm now at Rachel's school. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So I hope you guys enjoyed Unstable and enjoyed all my stories. But it's time for me, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.