Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #507: Unstable Talk, Part 1

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

I have a special carpool guest, Magic Senior Brand Director Mark Purvis. He promised to come back when we could talk openly about Unstable. And so he did.

I'm pulling out of a driveway, but not my driveway! We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I have another carpool guest. So Mark, say hello. Hello everybody. So Mark Purvis is back! So now that Unstable is out and about, he and I can talk with total and absolute freedom. Last time we were talking and we couldn't share everything because it wasn't known yet. But now we can talk about anything and everything.

So I'm going to let you lead this conversation, Mark. Oh. I will sure do many other podcasts on Unstable, but we get to talk about what you want to talk about. Sure. I want to talk about how much sets like this push the boundaries of what we do. And I'm going to need your help with this quite a bit because you are much closer to how the things that we pushed with this set are being implemented in current things and future things and, well, probably things that we can't talk about. Well, one of the really interesting things is is and i talked about this actually in a podcast somewhat recently rnd did a hackathon where we were looking at future ideas and one of the

interesting thing was how much of a vocabulary about what we could do was shaped by silver border cards yep like we would talk about something they go oh yeah like such and such a card and that in so much of our advanced talk of where we can go, like it was already spelled out because people understood the concepts because of Silver Border cards. It was really, really interesting of like how much that entire week was shaped by us going, oh, well, this Silver Border card, could we bring that to Black Border? So it was really interesting. Well, you know, you and I have talked about since the set has started to become public, one of the pieces of feedback we often get is, I love this card so much, I wish it was in Black Bordered.

And a lot of times we talk about the possibility of bringing those cards, or those mechanics at least, not the cards, into a Black Bordered environment. But I was kind of surprised by some of the things that it turns out don't necessarily work in the Black Border rules system. Yeah, what we found was, there are a couple reasons things would be in Silver Border. Usually, the number one reason something would be in Silver Border would be that it doesn't actually work in Black Border. You might think it works in Black Border, but it doesn't.

So a really good example is... Last Strike, right? Last Strike, yes. So Last Strike got introduced during Future Sight. Last Strike and Triple Strike, because if you can do Last Strike, then of course you can do Triple Strike. And it got introduced, and the idea was, you know, oh, this should be easy, it's just opposite First Strike.

And when they actually tried to change the rules to make it work, it just was super, super, super messy. And it wasn't that we couldn't do it as much as it wasn't worth the pain of doing. It just wasn't worth mucking up all the rule systems just to make a few extra cards. Well, Slow Zombie is one of my favorite cards in the set because it's a great example of a card that plays very differently from how it reads.

Yeah. Usually I like cards when they play a lot better than they read, but this one plays a lot worse than it reads. Yeah, this is one of those cards you have to play with to realize how much of a drawback a laugh strike is. Yep. It's a fine blocker, but if you give all of your opponent's creatures first strike essentially, which is what it does, it can be blocked by an army of tokens and do nothing.

But, by the way, if you put first strike on it, it gains what we now call split strike, and it'll deal damage both during first strike and last strike. So you can make it a pseudo double strike or not exactly true double strike. That's funny. So the other thing that happens, some of the cards, and a good example of this would be Crowstorm. So Crowstorm, the mechanic, is doable in Black Border. But what happened was I went and talked to the developers, and what I said to them is, do we want to do this in Black Border?

And they're like, well, this is really dangerous. If we did it, we'd have to be super, super conservative about it. So I think the card in Unstable costs two and a blue. And it would have cost like four and a blue or five. We would have had to cost it so it just wasn't playable because it's such a dangerous card that there's no... We wouldn't want to jeopardize vintage and legacy and stuff. So the reason I ended up putting it in our set is like, oh, well, I'll make it at the price where cubes

can play it. Because if I put it at a price, you know, it just, it couldn't be competitively priced if we put it in a real Blackboarder set because they really would be worried about it. And so it was kind of a silly card anyway. It had a lot of joke aspects to it. So I'm like, I'd rather put it in the joke set in a way that would be in its kind of fun form that you could cube rather than in its weaker form that we'd have to do in a Black Border set. So that,

there's different reasons things go in a Silver Border set. A lot of them have to do, though, with, like, for example, there's a direct damage spell with Trample.

Yeah. I have tried to do that in Black Border. In fact, there's a card in Odyssey called Liquid Fire, which is the jankiest written card, because I made a card that said,

deal five, trample, and it turned into Liquid Fire, which is like, you know, pick some number that adds up to five, and some goes to the creature, and some goes to its controller, you know. And it's one of the things where the way trample is written, it just, yeah, yeah, it works. Like, a lot of what, to me, the best Silver Border cards are is you get it, you get it, you understand it, and if I is written, it just, yeah, yeah, it works. Like a lot of what to me the best Silver Border cards are is,

you get it, you get it, you understand it. If I tell you what it is, it's instantly understandable. But just because it's understandable to humans doesn't mean kind of that the rules parsing system can understand things. So you still couldn't print that in Black Border? We can't, no, we can't.

That's the way Trample is written, we can't. Now, it's funny. A lot of people I agree with you. One of the big comments I get is, hey, why can't this be in Black Border? Now, some of it is we're not there yet. If you look at past, like in Unstable or Unhinged,

you know, Meld kind of shows up in BFM. Forecast shows up in Infernal Spawn of Evil. The packs show up on the slug, the super fast slug. So, a rocket-powered turbo slug. But sometimes it takes us

a while to sort of stretch the boundaries in that a lot of what the silver borders are meant to be is to push boundaries and get people used to ideas so that there's more familiarity and makes it easier maybe one day to get things into Blackboarder. There's definitely things that I did in the set that I would like to see us do in Blackboarder. And this was kind of a way to get me in that direction. You know, like, for example, what people don't realize is sometimes

when I do something where it pushes the boundaries a little bit, I got to get people comfortable. sometimes when I do something where it pushes the boundaries a little bit I gotta get people comfortable like for example let's take host and augment I believe it'll be a day where what host and augment does most of that can be done in Blackboard the losing abilities

when you cover things up that's the tricky part but joining things together I mean Mel does so there's clearly some ability to do that in Blackboard but I love what it was trying to do, and I feel like with time, maybe we could do that in Black Border. I mean, there's a few

elements of it that make us not quite doable yet. One of the other things I loved about working on this set was that even when the cards were... the card file was kind of done, it inspired everybody further down to really think outside the box when they were thinking about how to develop those cards,

how we talk about the cards when the card set does come out. I think about just little things like we were in a creative meeting and we were talking about Sword of Dungeons and Dragons. And Jeremy Jarvis, who's one of the art directors, just, you know, he just had this bolt of inspiration and he got up on the whiteboard in the meeting room we were in and he drew, he drew essentially a sketch of what ended up being the final card that Chris Ron ended up painting and that was, you know, a sword that had a mace for one of the blades. Yeah.

And the sword itself looks like the logo to Dungeon Dragons. Yeah. The ampersand. In Dungeon Dragons, you know, D&D, the ampersand is becoming to be a big symbol for them. And so the sword looks like the ampersand from Dungeon Dragons. And, you know, when we were talking about different cards that we could put in the set itself, we were thinking about our parent company, Hasbro.

And one of the things that this set inspired us to do was when we did Go to Jail, for example. Yeah. Real quickly, so Go to Jail is a white spell. It's kind of like Oblivion Ring. You remove a creature while it's in play. It's an enchantment. And then every upkeep, they can roll two six-sided dice, and if they match, you get out of jail. Right. And it's very, very similar to what happens when you go to jail in the game Monopoly. Yeah.

And so we reached out to our friends across the country in Rhode Island Hasbro and talked to them about what they thought about making a card like this and it opened a lot of doors for us to be able to do some of the silver border stuff that we did for has con we made exclusives with has con that you could only buy at that convention that were inspired by other brands that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro own. So there's a Nerf card and there's also a Transformers card. Yeah.

So this sort of opened the door to other creativity in ways that I don't think any of us anticipated when we first started out working on this set. Or even another one that talks about, one example where the influence came at before the set that influenced it is when we decided to do Valands and do the full bleed, we had to figure out how to do full bleed. That's not something we normally do. But in figuring that out, it made them realize

that the Amonkhet invocations could be used with the same technology. So interestingly, that wouldn't have happened if not for Valands. So it's sort of an influence on a set that happened before Unstable even came out so remember Unstable was in the works for a long time and Dawn Mirren I gotta give her a shout out

because she was the main art director that worked on the set and she spent so much time perfecting those lands and working on the few framing elements that were there and making sure that each individual land was treated separately so that it could really stand out. And I think they just turned out so beautifully.

Yeah, another thing that Dawn did is, so originally when we made the set, there were 50 contraptions, 10 in each of the factions. And Dawn came up with this idea of, what if we had the artist drew a giant portrait and then chopped it up. And in order for that to work, you needed nine, because you want

three by three, so if you put them in card sleeves, it makes a picture. So she came back, and we actually dropped from 50 down to 45, so that we could do that, that we could make the picture. And those are incredible. They are also full bleed, and so when you line them up, they form a single picture, and it's just amazing. Yeah, it's really cool. And I think, I know we put the pictures up online, and I think...

We turned them into posters as well, so I believe those are going to be available at, well, it'll have already passed at this point. They were available. They were available at the launch events on the weekend of release at your local game store. Oh, here's something else I can talk about now because it sets out, which I've not actually, I've not talked about any of the things when it came out because it was a surprise. We actually did something to surprise you guys. came out because it was a surprise. We actually did something to surprise you guys. One of my,

one of the things that I miss, by the way, is because I'm an old timer, there used to be a time when you would go to a magic event, like a pre-release, and you didn't know what was in the set. You were like, open, and you didn't know what was there. And it's the, you know, the internet, the age of information. It's really, really hard to be surprised. And so,

what had happened was, early, early in design, we were trying to design to printing technology so one of the things we came up with was variant versions of cards um that would we're changing based on print technology now that didn't we were a little ahead of ourselves ironically for as much as we worked ahead we we were too far ahead for that some of the ideas we came up with although although the future can still, I mean, printing technology is going to go in some really interesting places. Yeah, we did push the boundaries with this set, even though ultimately we weren't able to use that technology on this set.

Yeah, I mean, we used some of it, but we didn't, there's a whole bunch of stuff we didn't use. But anyway, we had this idea of having variants, and then we realized when we moved over that we still could keep that. That one of the rules of magic is a card name well that's that there's only one card with that card name and we're like what if that wasn't the case so we we did this cool thing where we made a bunch of there i think there's 13 cards in the set that have more than one variant now the different variants are for different things some of them are rules variants. Some are art variants. Some are watermark variants. Some of them are name variants.

But it's something we did in which we sort of realized it was a cool thing. And then we spent a lot of energy, a lot of energy to make sure you guys didn't know this ahead of time. Now, actually,

we're recording this before Eve came out. So I'm hoping it didn't crack before. No, previews have started, though. And, you know, we do watch fan reaction to everything that we do, and I've been extremely tickled when people saw Very Cryptic Command.

Yeah. They're like, this isn't that cryptic. Yeah, this could probably be Black Border, and I'm not really sure why this is so cryptic. Well, the second ability is Silver Border, so it technically can't be. But the thing that they don't understand is, the reason we call it the Very Cryptic Command is,

there's six versions, each with four different abilities. So every time someone casts it, you're like, wait, what can it do? And that card in particular also has something really special going on with it, because it was one of the last commissions that we ever gave to... I think it was the last commission we ever gave. Yeah, to Wayne England, one of the best

magic artists, and he's a long-time contributor to making the card sets, or to painting card art. We were doing an homage to Crypt of Command, so he had, I think, done the five original commands back in Lorwyn, right?

I'd have to look that up to be sure, but that sounds right. I think he did, which is why I think we gave him the piece, because he had done it. The way the unsets work is whenever we're making a riff off an old card, if we're able, we're not always able, but if we're able, we like to give it to the same artist.

So, for example, if we're mocking a certain card, we'd like to have the original artist that did the original card do the sort of homage to it. And we do that when we can. We can't always do that, but we do it when we can. So what happens is, the way the art process works is, the artists first draw a sketch and send it in to us so that we can okay it. The reason they do a sketch is sometimes there's a detail that's wrong or there's something that you know it gives the art directors a chance to sort of comment before it's all done because we don't want it to be all done and then say you need to change things so so wayne has sent in the sketch and then sadly um he died he died before he was able to do the painting yeah um and so we

actually were we were like what are we supposed to do here you know what do we want to do and we really wanted a way to sort of make a nod to Wayne. So what we ended up doing, because there are six versions of the card, what we were able to do is somebody else, I don't know the artist off the top of my head, but somebody else stepped in and I think tried to paint it kind of how Wayne would do it and did an homage to Wayne. And then one of the cards, we took his original sketch, the pencil sketch, because that's all we had,

and we put it on the card. And you'll notice that in each card there's one of the four abilities, kind of an un-ish ability. So one of the things that we did in Unhinged is we did some Artists Matter stuff, which isn't a major theme in Unstable, but we did make, there is a Wayne England, one of the abilities literally cares about him. So on the card that's his card, not only is it his art, but we actually, his cards are better when using that card. So I thought that was cool.

Yeah, and it was, I think, a nice homage to him. And, by the way, I think, I know this and I don't think, Ultra Pro made playmats and card sleeves of the original sketch art, and all donations from those sleeves, those playmats, are going to a charity. I believe it's the British Art Foundation.

Yeah, it's a charity picked by his family. So all the stuff there is being donated to that in his honor. So once again, this is being recorded after the fact. But Altapro probably still has them if you haven't seen them yet. So you can pick them up. Altapro, by the way, I think did four different images. So there are other besides the Wayne sketch. There's Selfie Preservation.

There's Earl of Squirrel. there's Squirrel Dealer. Yep. There's a bunch of different stuff. A lot of Squirrel stuff. Yeah. So the art in this set is also just so phenomenal. There's, you know, because it was above and beyond what we normally do, it was an opportunity for us to go outside the normal artist roster that we use for a regular magic set. We ended up coming off with some really talented new people.

Yeah, in fact, here's the stat I know. So Dawn was really, one of the things about doing unsets is it was on top of a lot of other things we do. So Dawn used it as an experiment to try new artists, and 12 artists that got used in the set got brought over and are doing normal Black Border Magic now. So yet another contribution to Black Border Magic. We found a whole bunch of new artists. We should do these more often

than, you know, every, what, 10, 12 years. You and I agree on that. I actually got asked online which is if I had to say how often I would do them, how often would we do Silver Border? What do you think? I think I said online somewhere like three to four years.

Yep. You want to do something that's special, but not something that a whole generation of players have never seen it. That feels wrong. Right. Thirteen years is wrong. That I know. That feels wrong. 13 years is wrong.

That I know. One thing I think would be interesting to at least talk about is the possibility of making some kind of deck product that would have silver border cards in it. Like, a lot of people have asked about being able to play with silver border cards in their commander groups. And, you know, the commander rules committee is not a group of, they're not Watsi. Right, they're external to Wizards. They're external, so that's not something that we necessarily control. But I always say that if you have a play group that will let you play with Silver-Bordered Cards, by all means, put that Earl of Squirrel in your green deck. And what you'll find is there are different kinds of Silver-Bordered Cards.

Sometimes if you talk to your group, they're fine with Earl of Squirrel, which is not that far away from a black border card, where something a little sillier, you know, where you're putting your head on the table or something, maybe they don't want you to do that. Although that's a good card too.

Yeah. Well, I think there's you know, there's fewer physical feats in this set than there were in previous sets. Yeah. One of the philosophies I took on this set was that I wanted a little bit of sprinkling of the weird, but have it be a little tiny addition, not a major part of it. So if you enjoy that, there's a little bit of it.

But if you don't like it, you can avoid it easily. It's not something you need to do. In fact, the saucer, the one that puts your head on the table, I changed it such that the etv effect that kills things like if you want to keep the body around you need to put your head on the table but if you just want to kill something with it yeah you don't have to put your head on the table so like the main point of the card is killing something so if you really just want to kill it fine it can be a kill spell you know the head head on the table is for a little extra bonus but it's not the main thrust of what the card is so yeah i may have told this story before,

but I remember when Unhinged came out, it was right after my son was born. And there's a card in that set that if you are damaged by it, you have to scream at the top of your lungs. Oh, yeah, Red Hot Hottie. Yeah, so that was not acceptable to my wife when my newborn son was trying to take a nap and she was trying to take a nap.

Ah, a nambo, if you will. Okay, so by the way, talking about stories, last time you were on, you said, oh, we got to tell the story. I said, oh, no, no, we can't. Oh, right, right. So let's tell the story of, by the way, were you the opponent for this? No, I wasn't even present. Oh, you weren't even present, okay. I may be getting the facts a little wrong. Oh, I thought you were the opponent. In fact, I think in my article I said I thought you were the opponent for this? No, I wasn't even present. Oh, you weren't even present. Okay. So I may be getting the facts a little wrong.

Oh, I thought you were the opponent. In fact, I think in my article I said I thought you were the opponent. Okay, so we were doing a playtest. It was a development playtest for Unstable. And one of my favorite things about this set is the stories that it generates. And so that's why, you know, even if I don't have the facts straight, it's sort of moving

on into legend. But I believe it was Ben Hayes. 100 ben hayes that's for sure and he was play testing the set and he was in a position where he was going to lose but he had kind slaver out on the table and uh a kind slaver for those that don't know is mind slaver except instead of you taking over their turn you have somebody external to the game take over their turn and you're not allowed to advise them. So, I believe he chose Brian Hawley. No, no, no, no. He chose Tim Aiden.

Tim Aiden. Okay, great. Tim Aiden is a long-time pro player. He actually worked at Wizards for a while as an editor. Some of you might know him because he was on, not only was he on Jeopardy, but he won eight times in a row and ended up going to the championship. What's it called? Tournament of Champions going to the championship, the tournament champions. And he got past the first one.

He was in the semifinals and he lost. But Tim is quite a character. And he is kind of known for being a bit dour. So Tim is busy editing. And Ben needs someone to use the kind flavor. Yeah, and if he used correctly, it can get Ben out of this jam. It can actually probably win him the game. And this is all taking place in the pit.

Right, during work, because we're playtesting. And so he activates kind slaver. He picks Tim. And as the story goes, Tim gets up from his desk, walks over, looks at the board, spends about 20 seconds deliberating, and then just turns all the creatures sideways and kills Ben. And Ben's like,

why did you do that? And he's like, maybe you shouldn't choose me next time when I'm working. Yeah, he's like, it was an educational lesson. Don't choose me. So, the thing, one of the things that's funny, because the outside assistant cards is something that was very controversial

for a while, and I really, really pushed hard on them, because I was, one of the things I like about unsets is I like having a high-level variance. That one of the things that makes things fun is you can't always expect what's going to happen. And we had dice rolling, and host and suture and contraption, just a lot of things that

have a high variance to them. But I was trying to find, what's another way to just have things be unknown? And what I thought was, oh, well, what if you involve other people? You know what's really unpredictable? Other people. Yep, exactly. And, you know, one of the things we talked about was, well, what if you're just playing in a situation where there's only two of you, but you have this technology now where you can just

text a friend or tweet something and see if you can get a response to... I'm hoping, by the way, one of the things I think will be good stories is when people pull in non-magic players, kind slavery is a hard one because you're actually playing the game, but most of them just make a choice. Show them their hand and they pick a card

or they just pick something. Or do you like squirrels? And everybody's going to say yes, unless they have a black, black heart. Yes. Um, or you try to high five somebody. Yeah.

Although in that case, you want them not to high five you. So you have to pick someone who you don't think will high five you. Um, and one of the things I realized is funny is that there's a metagame that gets played here that if you play the unstable long enough, you start to understand what people are asking. So when someone says, do you like squirrels? You know that they want you to say yes. And then it's like, well, I'm going to say, yeah, you start to understand what people are asking. So when someone says, do you like squirrels?

You know that they want you to say yes. And then it's like, well, I'm going to say, I know they want me to say yes. You know, unless you feel like, you know, being a troll at that moment, which has happened to me in play tests. Yeah. So there's a lot of,

we have a lot of outside assistant stories. Oh, here's, here's one of my favorite stories. It involves you. Okay. So I was playing Spike. Spike Tournament Grinder, I think the card is called. So it lets you activate to go get a card that's ever been banned, restricted in a constructed format. Yep.

Okay, I activate it and they're like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. What cards can I get? So I go, there's a big cabinet where we have all the old R&D cards. And I'm trying to find a banned, restricted card. The problem is those cards are good and, you know, they're in decks. They're just not in the cabinet. So I'm like, okay, what can I get? Like, what banned banned restricted card. The problem is those cards are good, and they're in decks somewhere. They're just not in the cabinet. So I'm like, okay, what can I get? What banned restricted card can I get?

So I remember that when Legends first came out, legendary creatures during the length of Legends and Homelands and I think Ice Age were restricted. And so I'm like, oh, so we actually had a Legends box. All that was there was the jinkiest of jink because anything good had long disappeared from it. But I found a Senatian Falconer, which is like a 4-4 for six men or something.

Anyway, that's the only thing I could find that was banned and restricted. So I get that. I play it. I actually did win with it, by the way. But you were so embarrassed that you, the next thing you saw me, you brought me a um from the vault

exiled yeah but you said please keep this for all future playtests because that was embarrassing at least you can pull a channel or a yeah well that i mean that's a pretty part of that yes well the whole box has everything so right and then whenever we would use spike that that's the thing we would always use whenever we spike and we pull something out and there's actually some really really good cards in that yeah so um yeah one of the fun things by the way has been so i'm the unrules manager so i get a lot of questions and it's really interesting in that there's this line that people try to is how far can i push things you know like for example like it says six-sided dice as long as any dice was six-sided, no.

It has to have a one, two, three, four, five, and six, and have an equal chance of rolling one, two, three, or five, or six. And I like people get creative, and I'm willing to let people

sort of stretch a little bit, but then there's kind of like, look, you're just breaking the entire spirit of it. I don't care if you're a quote-unquote, you know, it doesn't say a six-sided die

that has six, you know, I don't care. Six-sided die, we're defining it. That's what a six-sided die is. Right. There's certainly a spirit you have to take when you play, or else you could rules lawyer almost every single card to death. Yes.

That's my job is I want to let the fun through without letting the sort of the unfun. I mean, there is a rules lawyer card. Oh, let's talk about that real quickly. You try to kill rules lawyers so many times. It is... It's one of those cards that does so many things that are

so hard to grok that I was worried that people were going to not love it as much as you do. But it is, in fact, beloved by a large... I'm getting a lot of questions. Really, but it is, in fact, beloved by a large I'm getting a lot of questions about it. So, really what it is

for those that have never played with Rude Lawyer, essentially it's a platinum angel. I mean, it's a weirder platinum angel, but basically as long as this is in play, you can't lose and your creatures, well, they can be destroyed, but they can't die. No, they can be destroyed, but

if they have zero toughness, they don't leave. But I don't think they leave even if they're destroyed. No, no, no. State-based doesn't stop destruction. Destruction destroys destruction. Trust me, having to answer questions about this, I've gotten very good about it. But anyway, there's a lot of weird things that happen, though.

We take the state-based effects away, so I'm getting a lot of questions like, if I do things that you like... Some of the questions are not that they'll ever, ever happen, just, hey, hypothetically what would happen questions. I can't answer all of those, but I do answer the practical ones where like, this will actually come up in a game, what should happen?

But anyway, we made good time. We did. Any final thoughts before we because we actually just arrived at work. We're at Wizards of the Coast. No, I just really appreciate all the feedback that we've been getting about the set. It sounds like people are really excited and happy,

and our goal is to make a fun game, and I think we did it. Yes, and I just want to thank you, by the way, because I've been wanting to make it unset forever, and it really... If not for you and Globus' help, it would not have happened. So I want to thank you guys. The council

of marks came through. It did. So anyway, I hope you guys, if you've somehow not played Unstable yet, or you should have by the time this comes out, go play Unstable. It's a really fun, even if you just play it once in the draft format, I'm not saying you need to, like, construct decks or anything. Even if it's just a simple draft format, it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of

cool stuff there, and it is fun, even if you love taking the game super seriously. It is nice every once in a while not to take it so seriously. But anyway, that is all the time we've got for today. So I want to thank you for joining me, Mark. Thank you. And we're now at work, so we know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.