Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #502: Slivers

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

In this podcast, I talk all about the history of one of the most popular creature types in Magic, Slivers.

I'm pulling another driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today the theme is slivers. So I'm going to talk about, it's a creature type unique to magic. It's very popular. I'm going to talk about where they came from and sort of how they've evolved through the course of magic. So we'll talk today, the history of the slivers. course of magic. So we'll talk today, the history of the slivers. Okay, so in order to talk about their origin, we have to go back to 19, well, 1998 is when Tempest came out, but we actually were working on that earlier than that. So for those who remember the story, I was hired as a developer, but I really wanted to be a designer. So I'd been talking with Ernst Garfield. I discovered that he had not designed a magic set since Arabian Nights,

and he was interested in working on one. So I went to the powers that be, a guy named Joel Mick, and I said, hey, Richard would like to work on a set. I'd love to lead a set. He'd work with me. And Joel said, okay, I could do that. And I was allowed to pick the rest of my team. So I chose Charlie Cattino and a guy named Mike Elliott. So Mike and I had both been hired as developers.

We both wanted to be designers. We both felt we had a designer in us. And so I put Mike on the Tempest team. So one of the things that happened is Mike had designed a set before he came to Wizards called, I think it was called Astral Ways. And part of his employment was they bought his set. So when I first started working on Tempest,

I said to my team, okay, give me all your ideas. We're not even sure what we're going to do. If you have ideas, send them to me and then we'll look them all over and we'll figure out what we want to do. So Mike sent a bunch of mechanics that was based off things he had done after a ways. One of

which was these creatures called slivers. In fact, they were, by the way, called slivers. The name actually never changed on them. The idea in his story was there was this astral plane or something, and a creature had fallen from the astral

plane and broken. And these were slivers of that person. That's what they were originally. And Mike had been influenced by Plague Rats. So Plague Rats is a card in Alpha that Richard had made. Two and a black for a 1-1 creature. And it gave all Plague Rats plus one, plus one. Also, you could play as many of them as you wanted,

although that part wasn't the part that Mike was focused on. He really liked the idea that here's a creature that granted everything like itself an ability. And Mike said, well, what if we branched that out a little bit? What if instead of just affecting things named plague rats, what if we had a subtype that affected all that subtype? And what if each creature just gave different abilities? This creature, sure, this creature gave plus one plus one, but this creature gives flying. And this

creature gives first strike. And this creature gives, you know, that each thing can give a different amount. And now the cool thing about it was that each one would give their own thing to it. And so Mike made the slivers. I think Mike originally put the slivers in all five colors because he just wanted access to as many abilities as possible. And by having all the colors, you had access to all the abilities. So what happened was when we

first met for Tempest, Mike pitched this idea. We liked it. We thought it was pretty cool. So we put it into the set. So Tempest had a cycle of commons that were 1-1 and a cycle of uncommons that were 2-2. And it had one artifact, Metallic Sliver. So let me talk a little bit about the story,

and I'll get back to Metallic Sliver. So Mike's version of the story, this creature that's split up into many pieces. So, another thing that was going on during this time was a different Michael. Michael Ryan and I had gone to the same powers to be, I guess, and said that we felt magic needed a story. That magic sort of had pieces, but we wanted a large, overreaching story. And so we had pitched the Weatherlight Cycle with the Weatherlight crew. We got signed off on that. And what happened was, in order to make that happen, we had the very first creative

team, well, artists and things. There had been a creative team of people doing continuity and writing art descriptions and things, but they brought in artists. For the first time, we had artists on staff. And the idea was these artists were going to build this world, our first real world building. And so they created the world of Wrath and all the characters. And so one of the things that we needed to do was when we were making the story, I was well aware of all the mechanics. So I worked with Michael Ryan. I'll call Elliot Mike and Ryan Michael, just so it's that. So Michael and I worked with Michael Ryan. I'll call Elliot Mike and Ryan Michael. So Michael and I worked together, and we had to come up with what things represented.

So for the slivers, it's like, okay, here's these creatures, that when this creature's in play, other creatures have got an ability. Okay, what does that mean exactly? So we came up with the following, which I thought was pretty cool. It was a race of creatures that are shapeshifters. They have the ability to change their shape. And they're a hive mind. And what that means is that once one person knows something, once one sliver knows something, the other slivers know it, provided that they are in proximity. The sliver's hive mind has a limit of how far it can stretch. And it's not particularly far,

which in the story becomes important. So the idea is, let's say one of the slivers goes and sees birds and studies birds and figures out how to grow wings, how to use its shape-shifting abilities to grow wings. Well now it's able to fly because it knows how to grow wings. And if it goes near the rest of its hive, well they now understand how to grow wings. So since all, with the hive mind intact, now all the slivers can fly. They can grow wings. That's why it's called wing sliver. It's talking about what abilities the sliver could learn.

The muscle sliver learned how to increase its muscle mass, so it got stronger. And so the idea is each of the slivers sort of added to the troop. Now in the story, the Weatherlight needs to get there in Wrath. They need to get to the stronghold to rescue a whole bunch of people at this point. And the way to do that is they're going underneath the stronghold through a bunch of different areas. The death pits of Wrath, the furnace of Wrath. A bunch of areas that are super, super dangerous. And the idea is it's the only way there, but it's super dangerous.

But they need to rescue their friends, and so they do it. In the furnace, they meet the Slivers. That's where the Slivers live. So the story behind the Slivers is Volrath is a shapeshifter and very obsessed on shapeshifting. So he finds these things, and we don't know why, we don't know where, but he had brought them to Wrath to experiment with and to study. The metallic

sliver, by the way, is a sliver he made to study them. You'll notice that the metallic sliver, A, is the only not, it's an artifact creature and it's the only sliver that doesn't grant abilities. It's just a receiving sliver. It just gets the ability. It doesn't grant them. And so

that was the spy that he had put out. Now, eventually what happens is the slivers produce a sliver queen. They're very bee-like. The sliver queen is what runs the slivers and produces more slivers. And when they do that,

Vorath is onto them, because he's spying on them with his metallic sliver, and he's able to kidnap or capture the sliver queen and he puts it in the stronghold and what happens is when he gets the pieces of a legacy, so in the larger story, Gerard, by prophecy,

Urza had made a weapon called the legacy weapon and then broke it apart into component pieces that were referred to as the Legacy, different artifacts. And the idea was that Gerard was supposed to grow up to wield the Legacy Weapon to defeat the Phraxians. Karn, by the way, is the protector of the Legacy and a piece of the Legacy himself. Anyway, Karn gets kidnapped and the legacy gets stolen

when the ship gets attacked. And so anyway, the Volrath ends up putting the legacy pieces guarded by the Sliver Queen. And Karn has to get them back. And Karn is able to convince the Sliver Queen

that the pieces of a legacy are to Karn what the slivers are to the Sliver Queen. And he actually appeals to her. So people often ask if the slivers are to the Sliver Queen. And he actually appeals to her. So people often ask if the slivers can ever become planeswalkers. The average sliver is not particularly sapient, but the Sliver Queen is sapient.

So maybe, maybe it's possible. The slivers themselves are a little more, like I said, they're a little more animalistic. But the Sliver Queen has a little more, like obviously Karn could reason with it. But anyway, that's the role the slivers play. Oh, metallic sliver, by the way, was originally going to be silver sliver.

But when we got the art back, it wasn't silver. Now, I don't think we told the artist to draw it silver. I think we... The artist scripted something like metallic sliver. We thought it would just be silver. And then it came back like a copper color. So we ended up changing the name to metallic sliver. Another fun story from Tempest is when we made muscle sliver.

So muscle sliver is one in a green for a 1-1 creature that grants all creatures plus one, plus one, plus one. So essentially, it's a grizzly bear, right? It's a 1G22. Except it's better than a grizzly bear, right? It's a 1G22. Except it's better than a grizzly bear because it makes other slivers bigger. And at the time, I don't think we had obsoleted a grizzly bear before. And it's funny, in retrospect, we've obsoleted a grizzly bear so many times. But at the time, we hadn't done it. And it was a big discussion.

There was a big fight about muscle sliver. But in the end, we chose to do it. One of the things in general you'll notice is slivers were a deck pretty early on because at the time in Magic, we didn't make creatures quite as powerful as we later would, but we had done that with the slivers. So the slivers actually were decently powerful. Hold on one second. I have hiccups. I've got to take some water. Okay. Okay, I'll get rid I have hiccups. I've got to take this water. Okay.

Okay, so that was Tempest. So Tempest had 11 slivers in it. Then in Stronghold, we had another cycle of slivers, an uncommon gold cycle of slivers, ally colored. This is back in the day where we did more ally stuff than we did enemy stuff. So we wanted to make a cycle, we made an ally cycle. And then we made the Sliver Queen,

which was the first ever legendary five... In fact, I think it was the first ever five-color creature. We happened to make it legendary, so also the first legendary five-color creature. But I believe it was the first five-color creature in Magic. I think Mike originally had had a five-color creature. But I believe it was the first five-color creature in Magic. I think Mike originally had had a five-color

in his set. My contribution, I think, to this card was I wanted it to make sliver tokens. But anyway, we made the Sliver Queen, and that ended up being our super popular card, especially in Commander, because there's not an infinite number of five-color commanders.

So anyway, we made a Sliver Queen. So Stronghold had six more slivers. We didn't end up putting any slivers in Exodus. We were mostly doing them in cycles, and so we just didn't have five more slivers to make. So we stopped there. So Tempest Block had 17 slivers. That was enough to make a sliver deck. People were making sliver decks. I think it was somewhat competitive even back then. Crystalline Sliver, which is the white-blue sliver from Stronghold that makes slivers. You can't target them.

Made the deck pretty powerful. It was hard to deal with them. Anyway, so let's flash forward now to Legions. So, Legions is the second set and the first small set in the Onslaught block. So, Onslaught was our first tribal block. And Mike Elliott had led both Onslaught and Legions. And when he was making Legions, it was an all-creature set. That was the gimmick. We had a gimmick of Legions. It was nothing but creatures.

And Mike was like, oh, we have this tribal theme and it's all creatures. You know what we should do? Let's make more slivers. Now Mike, as the father of the slivers, loved his slivers, and so he brought them back. And he brought them back in style. So Legions had three cycles of slivers. A common

1-1 cycle, an uncommon 2-2 cycle, and a rare 3-3 cycle. And so what we did is, because it was a little bit later, we could reshuffle some stuff. There's some keywords that now were keywords that had been keywords before. And Michael also did a lot of

taking abilities that weren't keyworded, but putting them on cards. For example, I believe this is where Menace shows up for the first time. Now, Menace wasn't keyworded yet. It was just, you know, we used to call it the Goblin Wardrum's ability. And I think he's stuck in red, which is where back in the day, it was a red thing.

So he, and he also made some rare ones, so he was able to make a little more splashy stuff, but he made another 15 slivers. So now we're up to 15, 17. His 32 slivers. So now we're up to 15, 17. It's 32 slivers. Then in Scourge,

they made one more sliver. Brian's team made Sliver Overlord, which was another legendary five-color 7-7 sliver that boosts the slivers. So that's up to 33 slivers. Okay, so the... Mostly what happened in Legion's block

was just trying to flesh out... I mean, we had seen... We had seen the sliver decks, and so Mike was just trying to give more sort of fleshed-out versions. We continued the idea of balancing them all. They were in all the colors. And the idea was that a full-flesh

sliver deck, I mean, it didn't have to be five colors, but if you wanted to play the, you know, the sliver queen or the sliver overlord, for example, you need to play five colors. So sliver decks tended to be five color. Michael also added a few things to make it a little bit

easier to play the slivers. So their second appearance had a lot more of sort of sliver support to it. also added a few things to make it a little bit easier to play the slivers. So, their second appearance had a lot more of sliver support to it. And because he made a lot of slivers, he really filled in the gaps

and did a lot of what slivers had done. So that was, we had 33 slivers and people were making sliver decks. Oh, another important thing to talk about is so I I talk about the things being parasitic. So it's a term we use in R&D. What parasitic means is that the mechanic relies on things only found in the set that it is from. So for example, when slivers first showed up in Tempest, it was a parasitic mechanic, right?

You needed slivers. Well, the only place you could find slivers was in Tempest. So a sliver deck really relied on other slivers. Now, each time you make more of a parasitic mechanic, it becomes less parasitic. And slivers, by the way, are a good example of a fun, well-liked parasitic mechanic. I often talk about parasitic as being a negative. Really, it's a restriction to be aware of. You can't do too much of it. One of the cool things, though, about parasitic mechanics is the more you repeat them, the less parasitic they become. So in Tempest, Tempest block, okay, it was pretty parasitic to Tempest block. But now you bring them back in Lesions and Scourge in an Onslaught block, and now, okay, you can now, in Standard, you would play them there. But now in a larger format at the time,

in standard, you would play them there, but now in the larger format at the time, I'm not sure, extended or whatever, whatever the larger format was back then, you now could play a sliver deck that combined both the old slivers and the new slivers. Okay, the next sliver appearance would be Time Spiral. So Time Spiral, in the story, we decided that we wanted to kind of reset our planeswalkers.

They were kind of godlike early on. They really could do almost anything. It was hard to tell stories about them. So, we wanted to reset the power level of our planeswalkers. So, we created an event called The Mending. And what The Mending was is the universe, the multiverse was falling apart. In order to keep it from sort of breaking, the Planeswalkers had to give up their sparks to mend it,

which they did, some voluntarily, some less voluntarily. And what happened was that we made a set that was, so Time Spiral was past, present, future. It had a time theme and it had a very strong nostalgia theme. Now we, I don't think the, I don't think the Time Spiral team originally put in slivers. I think the development team decided to put slivers in, if my memory serves correct. So one of the things we did in Time Spiral, so Time Spiral had two common cycles, an uncommon cycle and a rare cycle and an an artifact, and then an artifact called the Hivestone, which boosted all slivers, or, sorry, made all creatures into slivers.

So it allowed you to make a sliver deck with non-sliver creatures and then turned everything into slivers. So the idea was we made a lot of cards and we really sort of flavored them. So what Time Spiral Block let us do is we did a lot of nostalgia slivers, which is we took slivers and we made slivers that were nodged to previous cards. Hey, this sliver makes every

sliver into this thing. Like, one of the ones we did is we had a red sliver that gave all slivers the ability to black and regenerate, regenerate for black mana, which was Sedge Troll. So like all your slivers become Sedge Troll. And so we

had a lot of fun of sort of doing this nostalgic thing. It allowed us to create some slivers we'd never made before and it allowed us to sort of do some fun nods to older cards. We also did some more experimenting. Like one of the slivers I made here, that in retrospect, I decided it was a mistake, but I

made it here, was I made Juzam Sliver, which turned all your slivers, sorry, all slivers. At this point, slivers still affected all slivers. It made all slivers Juzam Jins. And so the idea was, it was a 5-5 sliver, but all slivers lost you a life every turn. So what it did is it granted a negative ability to slivers. Now, when it affected all slivers, it ended up becoming this kind of anti-sliver card, meaning you didn't play it in your sliver deck,

you played it against other people's sliver decks. But it goes a little bit into the spirit. After the fact, I'm kind of sad I made it. I mean, I like experimenting, but I'm like, oh, the idea of the sliver is the hive mind wants to get along and help each other, and a little antithetical to that.

But we really did make a lot of fun slivers, and it was neat in time spiral that we were able to make some slivers that just went a different vector. That being able to kind of be nostalgia and sort of do throwbacks just allowed us to make some entertaining slivers that we wouldn't normally

make. We also, as normal, allowed us to sort of do some catch-up. This always happens when we make slivers is usually the evergreen mechanics will shift ever slightly and it allows us to sort of catch up on some stuff that now is a keyword that hadn't been a keyword before. Okay, next was planar chaos. Time spiral was the past. Planar chaos was the alternate present.

And we played around with an alternate reality and the big part of it is we messed with the color pie. So what we did is we did a what if. What if the color pie had stayed true to its philosophical underpinning but we had assigned abilities differently was the idea. What if Richard had just done the color pie a little bit differently?

Didn't violate the colors in the sense that the colors were still true philosophically, but it made different choices mechanically. So what we did there, there was a common cycle and an uncommon cycle. The common cycle was us playing into the new color pie. So it was slivers that were following the color pie of Planar Chaos. So it allowed us to sort of tweak some things because we had shifted around

where the evergreen mechanics were in the set, for example. So we were able to sort of say, oh, well, in this world, this mechanic's here, so we can make slivers. So we did that. And then the uncommon, I think,

were more homage slivers that sort of were references to older slivers. So we did that. And then the uncommon, I think, were more homage slivers that sort of were references to older slivers. We liked that shtick. I think what we did there was... Actually, were all the homage slivers in Planar Chaos? I think we did some of them in Time Spiral. But this was

all famous creatures turned into slivers. Okay, future site was the future. So the idea was, there was three time-shifted sheets. The Time Spout time-shifted sheet had cards from the past reprinted

with a purple border. Not a purple border, purple expansion symbol. All three of these had purple expansion symbols. The Planar Chaos time-shifted sheet were cards you know, but redone in a different color. Color-shifted cards.

And then, in Future Sight, they were cards from the future. Well, potential futures. So we made a cycle of slivers that all had abilities you had never seen before. You know, slivers have Frenzy, or Absorb, or Poisonous. So the idea was, I think they had Fate Seal. They had five different abilities, and all of them were brand new abilities. They were all time-shifted, futuristic cards.

So it was Sliver's grinding abilities that... How do you make new Slivers? Well, how about grinding abilities that don't exist yet? We also, in Future Sight, made the Sliver Legion, which was a five-color sliver. Also 7-7. It was legendary, like all the other previous ones. And it was a card I had made years before, an artifact called Coat of Arms, that made all... you chose a...

Oh, all creatures got plus one, plus one for every other creature of its creature type. This did that, but only for slivers. So all slivers got plus one, plus one for every sliver. So basically, the more slivers you had, but only for slivers. So all slivers got plus one plus one for every sliver. So basically, the more slivers you had, the larger the slivers got. And so the Sliver Legion really made giant slivers. We also made the Sliversmith Spellshaper. There was a cycle of six cards,

one each color, and an artifact that tapped to make a token that was an existing magic card. And so the artifact made metallic sliver tokens. So it tapped to make a token that was an existing magic card. And so the artifact made metallic sliver tokens. So it tapped to make metallic sliver. And then there was a Vidalcan Aether Mage. There was obviously a sliver theme in the block. So Vidalcan Aether Mage allowed you to bounce your slivers.

The reason you would do that is a bunch of the slivers had when a sliver enters the battlefield effects because we were branching up with the kind of stuff we were doing. And also, strategically, sometimes slivers had when a sliver enters the battlefield effects because we were branching up with the kind of stuff we were doing. And also strategically sometimes your opponent might have a sliver you want to bounce their sliver. Maybe you want to bounce their sliver because it's granting some ability you don't want right now and so you bounce it.

So the interesting story about Future Sight, or not just Future Sight, the Time Spiral slivers is, so we did a pro tour that was I think it was a two-headed giant draft in which players in teams of two would

draft the time spiral block, all three sets in the time spiral block. And I don't know their names because I did not look this up ahead of time, but there were two guys, Americans, brothers, I think they were friends, not brothers. Anyway, they had come up with a strategy for drafting

the block, which involved a sliver strategy. And what they had found was, in Two-Headed Giant, slivers worked really well. I have slivers, and you have slivers. They all help each other. So the idea they came up with was, let's just force slivers. No matter what's going to happen, we're going to draft

slivers. And it was a strategy that wasn't popular elsewhere, so they were able, you know, if you are just saying, I'm going to take slivers over everything else, you can get the slivers. And so, they were able to do this, and they ended up winning the Pro Tour. Now, here's

the cool part. There's a sliver that we made in FutureSight called Poisonous Sliver that granted Poisonous 1 to all slivers. So Poisonous 1 says whenever you deal damage to a player, you give them a poison. And so one of the things they did is, it's a common, Poisonous Sliver is a common in Future Sight. So they drafted, they drafted all the slivers they could, but one of their win conditions was getting Poisonous sliver out. Because then you could hit with a team of slivers and usually kill in one hit.

Because a lot of times, you know, there were enough slivers that you could just smack them and do one big hit. Or sometimes you hit them multiple times, but it just required... With the poison, it just required you to do 10 damage and sliver damage, not 20 damage and sliver damage. With the poison, it just required you to do 10 damage to sliver damage, not 20 damage to sliver damage. Anyway, they won, and they won with poison. The winning, the final game in the finals was won with poison. So, as a big poison fan, slivers were able to deliver a poison win at the Pro Tour, which I will forever be thankful for.

Okay, so that was Time Spiral. Time Spiral block really, I mean, A, we were able to bring slivers back because we brought a lot of things back. We brought a whole bunch of mechanics back, so it was fun to bring slivers back. But we also were able to use them to really play around in interesting space. We could make homages to cards of the past. We could color shift. We could make mechanics from the future. You know, Sliver's really worked well with a lot of the themes of the block, and so it allowed us to make more. So we added a whole bunch of new ones. Let's see. One, two, three, four cycles times five. That's 20. So 21 in Time Spiral.

Two more cycles. So that is 31. And another cycle, 36, 37, 38. So 38 slivers in Time Spiral block alone. Remember previously, I think there were 33 slivers I had said. So now we're up to, let's see if going to do math in my head, 71 slivers. We're now up to enough slivers that you can make a commander deck

of just slivers. In fact, we've started getting to the point where you can pick which slivers you want. And be aware, there's also in, in, what's that? In Lorwyn Block, we'd later make the changelings, which are a whole bunch of creatures

that were all creature types. So we would then add other technically, those are recessive slivers in that they don't grant abilities, but they do count as slivers so they get the abilities. Okay. Next.

Magic 2014. So one of the things that happened is in Magic 2010, or for, Aaron Forster has made a product called Magic 2010, which was a revamping of the things that happened is in Magic 2010, or for, Aaron Forster has made a product called Magic 2010, which was a revamping of the core sets. It was trying to go back to kind of the beginning of Magic, make things more resonant.

And one of the big things that Aaron did was the idea that the core set could just make new cards, so it could design the things it needed to, and make nice, resonant cards. And then in Magic 2011, I think Eric Lauer came up with the idea that maybe we wanted to bring a mechanic back in the core set. So, I think he brought

back Scry the first time, and he brought back Exalted, and a bunch of different mechanics. It would be one each year. So in Magic 2014, the mechanics they decided to bring back was slivers. But there was a few changes that needed to get made. One is

we had been wanting, we had changed how tribal cards had worked. In Alpha, the Goblin King gave all goblins plus one plus one. What we eventually found was it was both not how players seemed to think it worked and it created unnecessary

tension. I have a Goblin deck, and I want to play my Goblin King. Oh, you have some Goblins. Oh, am I supposed to play my Goblin King? And so we decided to shift it over. But every time we had brought back—the two times we had brought back Slivers, we had brought them back kind of as they had been. I think in Time Spiral Block, there's a big decision because I think by Time Spiral block, we had shifted, um, to the new version of how we did tribal,

but it's the Nostalgia block and we're like, well, we're bringing them back to be nostalgic, we should bring back the way they were, um, but we decided this time that we're going to keep doing slivers and we do think we're going to keep doing slivers, we needed to update them mechanically, so we shifted them. So now the slivers only affect your slivers. Um, note that doesn't really change how slivers play with one big exception is it changes the mirror match. In the mirror match it mattered and for the hardcore magic player that would be important. For the average player it didn't matter much. Most people don't play mirror matches, and

having talked to a lot of Magic players, the sliver mirror match where slivers affected each other created decisions. Were they fun? Did it make a more fun gameplay? Not necessarily. They required a lot of not playing slivers, and that's, I mean, part of a sliver deck is playing a lot of

slivers, not not playing the slivers. The other thing they did was when we first made the slivers back in Tempest, we had brought in a team of artists to be an internal group to do all the visuals and stuff. And they had come up with a look for the slivers. And it had sort of a thorny sort of look. It had a very particular look. But after 71 different pictures of slivers, the creative team was like, wow, these are hard to draw and not just make them look like every other thing you've ever seen. Could we take a different

approach on slivers? So they had come up with, way, way back when Magic, in like 1996, we made a video game called the MicroPose Magic the Gathering game. And they had made up a world called Shandalar, its own plane. So we ended up using Shandalar as a place in Core Sets to do things we wanted to do in Core Sets. So they made new slivers and they put it in Shandalar. Oh, I didn't explain the story real quickly. So I explained how slivers got to Tempest. Oh, I didn't explain the story real quickly. So, I explained how slivers got to Tempest.

They were brought to a homeworld we've never seen, to Wrath, by Vo Wrath. And note, there was a lot of things in Wrath that had been plucked from other places. The core, we later learned, were plucked from Zendikar, for example. Anyway, what happened was, when the invasion happened, Wrath got overlaid on Dominaria. The two planes sort of merged into a singular plane. That brought

the Slivers to Dominaria. Then, on Oteria, these really bright scientists decided they'd experiment on the Slivers and figure out how they ticked. And that went horribly bad, and the Slivers, I think, overran Oteria. And then in Time Spiral, we were back on Dominaria. So so far, we've only seen them on Wrath and on Dominaria. So in this world, we went to Chandelar.

The idea was that these were a different race of slivers, so they had a different look to them. They're a little more humanoid looking, which allowed the creative team to have a little more option of kind of how they looked and gave the artists a little more flexibility. So anyway, in Magic 2014, the other thing that they decided to do was they wanted it to be, one of the reasons to bring back the mechanic was to be able to do something where making a drafting, make the mechanic relevant in drafting. So what they did was they had a rare cycle, one in each color,

then three uncommons and six commons. It was in two colors, I think. They also had hive stirrings, which made one one colorless tokens. And they had the sliver hive, which, oh, I'm sorry, the sliver hive, I'm getting ahead of myself. And they made a thing that made sliver tokens. And they had the sliver hive, which, oh, I'm sorry, the sliver hive, I'm getting ahead of myself. And they made a thing that made

sliver tokens. So it was weighted towards certain colors. I did not look this up. I think they were red and green. Might have been green and white. It was some combination of red, green, or white. It might have been all three. It was either two or three of those colors. For sure, for sure, for sure it was green.

I think it was green and red. Maybe green, red, white. I did not look that up. Anyway, so Slivers, every time we'd ever done Slivers, had gone over Gangbusters really popularly. And it didn't go over so great this time. So a couple things.

First off, we had started doing a mechanic every set. And we, up to this point, had done a keyword mechanic, a named mechanic. I mean, keyword, some of them might have been ability words, but they were all, had a name with it. Slivers kind of hide a little bit. Like, it is a mechanic, but it's not a named mechanic.

And so, for starters, people were a little grumbly. They felt like we hadn't brought back a named mechanic. Then, we made the mechanical change, and some people were a little bit grumbly. More of the older players. We actually had done... I'll get to the research in a second, but some people were upset that mechanically it had changed.

And then, the biggest disappointment was the look of them. Now, let me stress. We did a bunch of research, and what we found was, if you had never seen the Slivers before, if this was the first time you saw the Slivers, remember, we had it done in a time spiral, so there was a gap.

People liked them. They liked how they looked. They liked how they played. They were actually very positive about them. But if you ask people who were Magic players who had played with Slivers before, they were very unhappy. People liked the Slivers.

They liked how they looked. Some of them liked how they played. And there was a big backlash. And there was definitely, especially online, because the online community is more our established community. You know, newer players are a little less involved in the online stuff. There was a very loud

outcry. How dare you? We did a lot of research. What I found was they were more upset about the art. There were some people that were grumbly about the mechanics. found was they were more upset about the art. There were some people that were grumbly about the mechanics. So the people were very split on the mechanics. I mean, I talked to a bunch of people

that were big sliver players and the people that were diehard sliver players actually didn't find, or a lot of them did not find the mirror match particularly fun. So I had plenty of people even who loved slivers who said they didn't mind the mechanical change. So a year later in Magic 2015, oh, the other thing was every time we'd ever made slivers,

we had made a legendary gold five card sliver and we didn't do that. So they're also upset about that. So in Magic 2015, we decided to fix things a little bit. So we made an uncommon cycle that I think, I think they look like the old slivers, I think. And then we made a sliver hive, which was a five color sliver that also made 1-1 tokens. And so sort of try to appease people a little bit. We did a lot of research and what we discovered was that there was a lot of nostalgia for the slivers. I mean, one of the things about the slivers is most of the creatures we do, we didn't invent them. Dragons, goblins, elves, you know, vampires.

We didn't invent them. They weren't our creation. And there's a few things that magic had made that really were something we had made. And slivers were one of them. And so a lot of people felt like we had done something, they had an identity, and we were kind of not doing their identity. But, so, I think what we ended up with is

there exists a couple different types of slivers. The slivers on Dominaria and on, well, Wrath and Dominaria are the same slivers, basically. Look one way. There's slivers on Chandelar. They look a different way. We know that there's a home plane for the slivers, because that's where

Volrath got them from. We've never talked about where, at least publicly, there's no knowledge of where the sliver plane is, where the home world is. So let me talk a little bit about the future of the slivers. So obviously they exist on a couple of different planes. I don't know whether that means that they have some means to travel between planes,

or someone brought them between planes, or whether they're just, I mean, there are creatures that show from multiple planes. So the other big question is, one of the big questions of the multiverse is, there are goblins on many, many different planes. Do they just evolve independently? Or was there some, I don't know,

big philosophical questions about, but there are slivers on multiple planes. The slivers are very popular. Like I said, we've made, with the last batch, let's see real quick,

I do my math. So we were up to 73, and we had made, in Magic 2014, we had made 5 and 9, that's 14, plus a card that made them 15. So 73 and 15 is 88, and then we made 6 more. So 88 and 6 is 94. So we had made 94 slivers or cards that made sliver tokens. 94, that's a lot of cards. Like I said, you can easily make a commander deck,

and that's not even getting to change things. So we've made a lot of slivers. It's no longer quite the parasitic mechanic it once was. You know, when you go to, when we give you new slivers, you have 90, what did I say, 96? 96 slivers, 94. 94 slivers available to you. So you have a lot new slivers, you have 90... What did I say? 96? 96 slivers. 94. 94 slivers available to you.

So you have a lot of slivers. And that's not counting, like I said, not even counting changelings and other friendly things you can do with slivers. I think we learned from Magic 2014 that we need to be careful. One of the things about making something and sort of making your own is people have some association with it. So we've got to be careful. I do believe that we're not going back to the mechanics.

Slivers are working the way that tribal cards work now. I understand for some diehard Sliver players in the Sliver match, it means something to them. But we're making the choice to make the gameplay easier. In general, I actually think it makes the gameplay better. You can disagree with me. I do believe that. But we're not planning to change that. As far as the look of the slivers,

I think that the creative team heard that there is definitely some attachment to the slivers in their old look. So I think we'll be more conscious of that. What do we hold for the slivers going forward? I will say this. The slivers are very popular. Magic 2014 now standing. The slivers are very popular. Magic 2014 now standing.

The slivers are a very popular mechanic. People like them. They go way, way back to Tempest. They've been part of Magic for over 20 years or 20 years next year. By the time you hear this, maybe it'll be 20 years. They are part of Magic

and there are a lot of Sliver fans in R&D. So, I do think we will look out and find places for Slivers. Like I said, they're on multiple planes. Here's the one challenge. Let me put my designer cap on. I guess I always wear my designer cap.

Is, they are not easy to put in a set. I will say that they take up a lot of real estate and they require a certain amount of support to work. And what that means is, if you put them at lower rarities, that means you're committing to them to be a draft thing. And then there's a lot of support. Usually slivers either have to be concentrated in colors.

And when we did that in Magic 2014, that was another thing that people were a little grumbly by. But if we want to make them draftable, we either have to concentrate them, or it has to be in a set that really has the means for people to play a lot of colors. And so they have to kind of go someplace that thematically they will fit.

So they are not easy to fit in. It is not just like we can slow slivers in anywhere. Slivers really have a decent amount of baggage that come mechanically. And then flavorfully, we've definitely played the slivers up as being something that is somewhat of a threat to the world they live in. I guess not every slivers necessarily need to be. But it also, what role slivers play is the kind of thing that we can't ignore in the story, that slivers have

to be on enough cards to mechanically be relevant, that we have to understand their role in the ecosystem and what they mean. And so, like, what I'm saying is, I do think slivers will return, but with a major caveat is, it requires a lot of effort on our part, so it's not

something that's easy for us to do. So I don't think slivers are going to be something you see lots and lots, but I do believe, you know, when I say if versus when, I think it's a when and not an if. I do believe we will do slivers again. But I will say, one of the cool things about this, and I'm almost to work, so I'm just wrapping up here,

is it is kind of neat to be on the ground floor of something where, like, I love the fact that I was involved. I mean, they're Mike's creation, make no mistake. But I was very involved, for example, in their creative, for example. I mean, the sort of the shape-changing hive mind, that part I was very involved in. I mean, the mechanics Mike made. Although I've designed my share of slivers, obviously.

But I have a lot of joy being involved in sort of making one of Magic's unique creatures. That is really cool. I think it's neat that we made them and that they will always be part of Magic. That's why I'm saying I have no doubt we'll do them again.

They're such an iconic part and really a unique part of magic and the magic story. So I think that part is pretty cool. But anyway, hope you guys enjoyed. I like doing people. I've gotten the notes you guys want me to do more mechanical history podcasts. And by the way, this was a request on my blog. So people had said they wanted to see a Sliver history podcast.

So here you go. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope this podcast was as much fun as Slivers, or at least close. Slivers are very fun. Anyway, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So, instead of talking magic and Slivers, it's time for me to make magic. I'll see you guys next time.