Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #513: Unstable Variants

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Unstable did something different by having various versions of a card with the same name. This podcast talks about how they happened and the great lengths we went to in order to hide their existence.

I'm pulling out my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about keeping secrets. So my time, and obviously you guys are listening to this in the future for me, we've just revealed the alternate versions of the cards from Unstable. So for those that somehow don't know, I assume you do, in Unstable we had 13 variants, meaning there were 13 cards that there were more than one printing of the card. So I'm going to talk a little bit about today, but what the variants were, how they came about, and then the act of hiding them. Because our goal, one of the things about Magic is

that, you know, in the early days of Magic, it was possible to sort of play Magic and not quite know what was in the sets. We actually did a Pro Tour, Pro Tour Atlanta, where all the pros sat down, we handed out Mirage packs that they'd never seen before, and then they had a Pro Tour where they drafted them. It was sealed. And they played with stuff they'd never seen before. And it's just, in this day and age, it's so hard, you know, the age of information, the

internet, it's just, it's so hard to not have people know things. And so we wanted to do something where maybe, maybe we could have a little bit of a surprise. And so what happened, let me explain this, sort of go back in the history of this, is when we first started to do Unstable, if you guys remember my Unstable podcast, in order to get it, or try to get it greenlit, remember we started before it was actually greenlit, we said, okay, well let's work on experimental stuff. The reason that we should do this is we're working on technology that will apply to not just this, but future game stuff.

And so what we did was we really messed around with a lot of things we could do with digital printing. And one of the big things you can do with digital printing is have variance in the way it prints. So for example, Garbage Elemental, which is one of the cards that we eventually made. I'll go through all the variance in a second. elemental which is one of the cards that we eventually made i'll go through all the variants in a second um the original the digital printing version of garbage elemental was we had a bunch of abilities we wrote down every ability we could think of that would go in red every ability that

made any sense in red not just evergreen abilities but like specific keyword abilities from certain blocks anything anything that could go in red and then what we did was we said, okay, you just pick two of the things that are in the buckets. And the idea is, this is what digital printing can do, is that it sort of can make, you would make a whole variance of this card. The idea of garbage elemental would be, who knows what it has? It could be anything. And so you always would have to look at it because every one would be not completely unique. There would be repeats. But it would be, you know, for example, let's say we had 20 abilities

in the hopper and you combine a random two. That's, I think, 400 different potential cards. So the idea is when you see garbage elemental, the flavor you would have to it is oh my god, what is it? What garbage is this made of this time? What was thrown together?

You would have a card that you would always have to look at to figure out what it was. And we liked the idea of having some of that, but when we actually got the greenlit, it turned out that we were too far ahead of technology. We didn't quite have that technology, at least not in the amount we needed. One of the things about technology also is

how many places you have to print this, how many printers have the technology. Anyway, there's a lot to that. But anyway, we realized that we could sort of capture the feel in using traditional printing. And the way that would be is by making multiple versions. And so when you play certain cards, you wouldn't quite know which version it was.

And the multiple printing actually let us solve a bunch of different problems. So I'm going to go through the different cards and talk about them. So first off, let's start with those five common art slash flavor text variants. So four of the cards, Amateur Auteur, Amateur Autour, um, uh, was it Really Slow Zombie, um, uh, Target Minotaur, and, um, Beast in Show, uh, were all art variants and flavor text variants. And then Novellamental was a flavor text variant. Now, originally, the plan with Novellamental was going to be the only flavor text variant, and then all the others were just going to be art variants. But the flavor text people had such fun. Once we made, like,

Amateur Artur, where he's acting out in different plays, they just wanted to write the lyrics to all the plays. So it turns out that in retrospect, what we should have done with the developmental is, like, I wish we could have, like, tweaked the book or something. So, like, each version had, like, Jane Eyre is the book. Eyre, A-I-R.

Is the book in the picture. But we could have, I wouldn't mind changing the book, Eyre, A-I-R, is the book in the picture. But we could have, I wouldn't mind changing the book so like each one would be a different book that had a sort of flying pun. Novellamental, by the way, if you don't know, the four pieces of flavor text tell a little tiny story. Not quite a novella. A novella in a flavor text sense. Then what we did is we were trying to make fun Oh, so one of the things that we use this cycle for is one of the real tricky things in making an unset is

it is hard to make simple cards. Because the rule on the unset is if you can do it in black border, don't do it in silver border. Well, all the simple stuff is in black border. It is tricky and hard to come up with stuff that is simple but silver border. One is tricky and hard to come up with stuff that is simple, but silver border. Like, on Hinge, like, one of the reasons

I did the fractions on Hinge was trying to capture some of that stuff. Ended up being more complicated than I meant. Not as much fun as I was hoping. But anyway, so I wanted to make sure that there's some stuff that did some simple rolls. So, one of the things that it let us do by having variants

was, we felt like we could put some actual black border cards, but because there were variants to the card, it was a little bit different. Normal magic doesn't do variants. We're like, okay, that's enough of a reason to say, okay, these aren't just normal cards. And then each of them we made a joke on. So Amateur Auteur

is a 2-2. Originally it was a 1-W 2-2, just a vanilla. Right near the end, it added the sac to destroy an enchantment. We needed an enchantment destruction in the set, and we were just really tight, so we ended up stapling on that. It's a creature we've made before. But the joke was playing around is

hey, every world you go to, there's just a tutu. There's just a tutu everywhere. In fact, the name for the card for a long time was a tutu by any other name. And so we came up everywhere. In fact, the name for the card for a long time was a 2-2 by any other name. And you know, so we came up with this idea of this sort of student production and that they could be, you know,

try to reinforce the idea that this type of character just shows up anywhere. They had this little kid doing a play of doing, you know, we picked four different worlds. I think there's Ravnica, Innistrad, Zendikar, and Theros. I believe the four worlds that we do.

Then, Novell Mental, obviously, is a little story told through... You can figure the order, but there's a fun story there in the flavor text. A really slow zombie. We gave it Laugh Strike, so actually that one was technically a true silver border card.

But we came up with this gag that we really liked of you watch the zombie through the seasons, that how slow is he, that it takes a full year for him to advance on you. And the art ended up turning out real fun. And the flavor text, he says brains but really slowly across all four cards.

We realized after the fact, by the way, that we should have started in winter so that the brr of brains was when it was cold. But we figured that out, unfortunately, after the fact. Then target minotaur, the joke we were playing around with, is for some reason whenever we make kill spells, we love to make minotaurs the target of the kill spell. And so there's a lot of spells in Magic

showing a minotaur being attacked by whatever was happening. And so this spell shows a Minotaur being attacked by four different kinds of spells. Because target Minotaur is always attacked. We ended up, once again, the third is Vanilla. We ended up making a French Vanilla. We gave it Prowess because Prowess played really well on the set. Then we have Beast and Show. And that was making fun of the fact that

we have a creature-type beast that is just so many different things. And the idea that it's a beast, but oh, it could be this, or this, or this. And then we came up with the idea of this dog show thing. Off the pun, Beast in Show. And so we had fun with that, and the artists really went to town on that. That was fun.

Okay, so those variants, the common variants, or the common creature cycle, there were, there's a cycle of them. There's five, there's four of each one. So each one, there's four variants of each of those. So there's 20 of those. Then at common, there also was a secret base. So the secret base is what we'll talk about a little bit, was the the crack in the armor that almost gave us away. But the idea there is we wanted to make a secret base. The card sort of helps you cast things with that

watermark, and we wanted to have one for each of the factions. And then, we had enough, we were able to do a different art for each one. So, each secret base, there's a secret base for each of the five that has their own secret base,

their own flavor text, and their own watermark. Other than the watermark and the art and the flavor text, the cards are the same. But because it cares about the watermark, the cards are functionally different. One card helps you cast a certain faction

where other cards helps you cast a different faction. Then the one other common variant we did was the killbots. So one of the things we wanted is Mariel Kill had this little thing where she exchanges with killbots. So we wanted you to be able to play a bunch of different killbots.

And then it dawned on us, if we gave the killbots different names, it would allow you to have more of them in your deck. So we ended up making four of them so that you could have 16 in your deck. And what we did that was fun is we didn't change the art, we just changed the name. So it's the variant where the name changes.

And they are all emotion words. So I think it's Curious Killbot was the one you guys saw originally. And then there was like Enraged Killbot and Delighted Killbot or Deranged Guy. Anyway, there's four different emotions. And the flavor text varies slightly if you take a peek. But the art is the same.

One of the challenges in doing this whole thing was, if you notice, when the dust settled, we had 200 and... How many did we have? It's 279 uniquely different cards. And that is larger than a large set. That's a lot of cards. And so people ask me, for example, why there's not a lot of crazy frame breaking like there

is in the first two. And the answer was, I asked a lot of the set. I asked a lot of the company to make the set. And one of the things I asked for is just to make a lot of different cars with a lot of different art. And so I had to sort of give up on some other things. So in order to get more cars in the set,

I gave up on the crazy frame breaking stuff. I mean, there's a little bit of it, but I gave up on having every car be individually designed. That's really time-intensive and costs a lot to do. Maybe in a future unset, maybe we'll go back there. But I felt it was better to just have more fun. We don't, I don't make unsets all that often. I'd rather have more fun cards and more art and more variants and stuff and forego the frame breaking on every card. Okay, so those were the comments. Now, so those were five, oh there's four kill bots, five secret lairs, so it's nine more. So we have 20 and nine, so 29. And then we had six cards that had rules variants and there was one in every color and an artifact.

So there is a cycle of six. Three of them go at uncommon and three go at rare. Ah, I forgot about that. So the white one is the knight. I'm blanking on my name here. The white one is the knight that has protection. And it has protection from six different things. All of which are strange, kooky things, because we're in Silver Borderland.

Protection from black borders, protection from loose lips. So it has protection from different things, that are just sort of varying different things. Then also uncommon is Garbage Elemental, which just had two abilities. So we treated it like we did... The original card was, there was a bucket that you sort of randomly got chosen from. So what we did is we sort of went to the bucket, made six versions that didn't

overlap in any keywords that we thought were just six fun, you know, because not if you randomly put things together, some of them won't be synergistic. So we made sure we had six synergistic ones. But we wanted the same sense when you see garbage, I'm like, wait, what does that one do? And then black is Spy Sly. Spy Sly

is a saboteur card that it hits you and does something, but what it does when it hits you just varies differently. And it so it can do different things, and they're all sort of un-ish things. Then at rare, we have Ineffable Blessing. That's a green enchantment that whenever you play a creature, you have

to choose some quality. And whenever you play a creature of that quality, you get to draw a card. At least they're all draw a card. But there's a lot of different qualities and stuff that, you know, one of them cares about artist and one cares about border and one cares about, I don't know, there's all sorts of, whether it's slave protection or not. One cares about border, and one cares about, I don't know, there's all sorts. Whether it's flavor text or not. Then there is Very Cryptic Command. So Very Cryptic Command is like Cryptic Command.

It has four variants. But each card, you get to choose. There's four choices. There's four modes. You get to choose two out of four. And then each of the six different cards has four completely different modes. We did make sure that each card, one of the modes was a silver border mode, so the card technically wasn't black border-able. And then there's six times, whatever it's, six times four, there's 24 different abilities. I will note when you play a Very Cryptic Command, you can only choose from the abilities on that Very Cryptic Command,

Extremely Cryptic Command. You can't choose from any of of the 24 you can just pick the four that are on that particular card um oh the one thing i should get into um while remembering it is uh the way the rules work is the rules still have a rule that says you can only have four of any one named card the fact that there are variants does not let you have more than four of them in your deck it allows you to have between them four. Now, you don't have to have the same one. You can have four different Extremely Cryptic Commands if you want to really confuse your opponent. You can do that, but you can't have more than four total of the card called Extremely Cryptic Command.

I'm not a commander. These just kind of got released this week. So commander hasn't made a ruling. My guess is commander is going to follow that. That you can only have one of each named card. But I don't know. So don't quote me on that. I don't know. So, oh, the final variant was on every thingamajig.

So every thingamajig. Oh, Knight of the Kitchen Sink, by the way, was the white card. I think it's called. Just because it has everything. Who knows what, you know. And the card shows a knight that's just carrying everything in the world around. Oh, the other fun thing about them is the flavor texts are all different. Sly Spy, by the way, when Sly Spy first came out,

the flavor text talks about what SNEAK stands for. And people are like, hey, why'd you tell us? And then when you see all the flavor texts, you'll realize that each one has a different answer. So what does SNEAK stand for? No one really knows. There's a bunch of... By the way, I wrote that flavor text, so I spent a lot of time writing down all the possibilities

for all the words and what they could be, so I came up with six different versions of what SNEAK could stand for, so I was very proud of that. Okay, every thingamajig is an artifact, and what we did is it has three activated abilities, all of which come from pre-existing magic cards, two of which come from existing black border artifacts, and one which came from existing silver border artifact. So everyone has a little, has some un-quality to it, just like the Extreme Encrypted Man. We want to make sure it's an un-card, a silver border card. But anyway,

and we mixed and matched things that we thought were synergistic and fun together. So the cards, each card kind of does its own thing. Also in the art for Everything Majig, we told the artists all the cards we were referencing, and at least one card for each of the six versions, one of the cards that it's referencing shows up in every thingamajig. So if you see any one in every thingamajig, you can figure out the three artifacts it comes from. At least one of those artifacts is in the art.

You have to look closely, though. So there are a few variants within our variants. Pretty much the idea is the art stays the same on the rules variants. The art doesn't change. There are two exceptions. One is on Sly Spy, one of his abilities

affects creatures facing right and one affects creatures facing left. And so he swaps. I forget which direction he faces. On the correct one, he swaps. So on one of the versions that cares about the certain side, we flip him so he's facing that side.

So Fly Spy faces one direction five out of six times, and the opposite direction one out of six times. So that's that variant. And then probably the most touching variant, when we were making Extremely Cryptic Command, the original commands were done by Wayne Englund, back in Lorwyn,

I believe. And so when we were parodying it, we wanted to go to the source. We can't always do it, but when we can, we like going to the original artist that did the original painting and let them riff on it, let them sort of make fun of their own stuff. And the artists usually really enjoy it, and it's a lot of fun to sort of parody yourself. So anyway, we assigned him the card. He sent in his sketch. So the way it works is, the first thing the artist does is they do a sketch

so that you can approve the sketch. And then once the sketch is approved, then they'll paint the painting. Well, in between him sending the sketch in and us sending it back to him, he sadly died. Now, we had another artist step up and fill in and finish the painting

sort of based on the inspiration of what Wayne had drawn. But we, you know, Wayne has been a wonderful artist for magic. We really wanted to do a little tribute to him. And so we decided to do is we took one of the variants and instead of being the normal art, it's the sketch. It's Wayne's sketch. And what I did was I tweaked the card so that it has a Wayne England mechanical reference to it. So that if you want to sort of make a Wayne England deck, here's a card that will sort of empower you to do that. And anyway, Altar Pro, we mentioned this in the other show, Altar Pro made sleeves and play mats based on Wayne's sketch. If you buy those, money gets donated to I'm blinking on the charity

right now. It's a very, very good English charity that Wayne's England had picked out. Wayne's Widow had picked out. Anyway, if you like that and like the Wayne stuff, I was really touched we were able to do that. So anyway, there are six variants that each have,

six rules variants that each have six versions. So that's 36. So if you add 36, what did I say? 36 and 20 is 56 plus 9 is 63. There were 216-ish cards. When you add 63, that's 279. So the set has 279 cards. That's a lot of cards.

Like I said, that's larger than a large set. Just let that sink in. That's larger than a large set. Anyway, so let me talk a little bit about the act of keeping the secret. So we made these variants and we really, really wanted to have a little bit of a surprise. So the idea was we weren't going to tell anybody. We wanted people to sort of be surprised. The ultimate goal of the Dream of Dreams is that somehow we'd actually make it to the release event and people wouldn't know. The problem is we have to send the boxes early enough for the people who are selling them to be able to make sure they get them and be able to run the tournaments and stuff. And some people open those boxes up and the internet's the internet.

So the information did come out. We then shared the information with all of you so you know all the variants and we wanted everybody to call the same variant by the same name. This is variant A, this is variant B, this is variant C and such. Yeah, one of the things we found is we caused a bit of chaos. We kind of were trying to create chaos. One of the fun things of unsets is just to do things that we won't normally do in a normal set. But this one definitely

my name is probably cursed by a few people outside of Wizards. Not the players. I think the players had blasts. But people who have to like differentiate them for different reasons, for business reasons and stuff. Okay. So the idea was we were not going to tell the public.

It would be a surprise. We wanted it to be a surprise. We wanted people to open up the pack to see that the variants were there. So it meant a couple things. First off, it meant not revealing any of the cards through any means by which we did it. So, for example, I shot a Game Nights episode. I carefully went through and made sure that every version of a card was the known, what we call the A version, was the known version and not a non-known version. We went through Gatherer to make sure that Gatherer wasn't showing it.

Turns out Gatherer has a problem showing multiple versions of the same card. So the solution that we came up with is once the information is public, we will list a link on all the gathers that go to the article that shows all the variants. The gather itself can't show all the variants. It can show the name variants. We'll get to that in a second. That's one of the ways it almost gave us up. And then we had to make sure, like in the FAQ, in articles,

we were very, very careful wherever we went to make sure that nobody referenced it. And we thought we had it tight, and we were good, and nobody would know. So one of the things we always knew was going to be the hardest one is secret base really, if you're at all savvy about how we do cards, really, really says quite loudly that, hey, there must be more of these. Because if we just cared about, the A version was the spy. We thought it was funny that the spy, which is the secret hideout, I mean,

it's the one secret base that isn't really a secret. That's the one we showed everybody. And if we were just going to make a secret base that only affected the spies, the agents of sneak, we would have worded it differently. We clearly worded it to reference the watermark. But we wouldn't need to do that if there was only one watermark. So people were kind of wise that maybe something was going on. And then, loading, ready, run.

By the time you see this, I'm, in fact, leaving very soon. Later this week, I leave to go to Victoria to shoot what we call the pre-pre-release, which is neither pre nor a pre-release. But it'll be fun. I hope it'll be very fun. I assume you guys have seen it already.

I'll probably go, oh, that was awesomely fun. And so they ended up doing a little sketch about Unstable that I was completely unaware of. So I didn't do any of... Every time we put it somewhere, I made sure people had the right card. So they got their hands on some cards, and

they mistakenly ended up reading flavor text off a secret base that wasn't the agents of sneak. Now they didn't no one saw the card. I'm not even sure if they had the cards. I think they might have been I don't think they had the cards when they made it, so they sort of

referenced things, but didn't show them. So because they didn't show the card, people thought maybe they were making things up or having fun or making an extra joke. So people sort of wrote it off as, not that, oh, they read a secret base, but it's not. But there were a few people that were like, wait a minute, it seems odd that there's not more secret bases because of the way it's templated. And there is that loading and ready to run, but it didn't really get much traction. So luckily that didn't spill the beans.

Another thing we did was we put out the tokens for the set. And that one of the tokens was a goat token. And the goat token is made by one of the everything majigs but not the a version that was public and so i realized we put it out there in the public said what is this a goat token we've seen all the cards in the set there's no goat token and i'm like oh no we gave ourselves up and they're like oh i guess urza makes goat tokens because urza is a planeswalker that you have to go on online to see what he does. So you didn't know what he did.

So when they saw a token, they're like, oh, well, we have a card that we don't know what he does in a token. He must make the token. Even though that actually wasn't where the goat token came from. So that was fun. The next problem we ran into was

we were about to do a gather update for Unglued. Unglued first, not Unglued, sorry, Unstable. Unglued and Unhinged are going up. By the time you've heard this, they should be up already. As part of the Unstable release, we did an Oracle on both Unglued and Unhinged to get, I mean,

like Unglued still said summon. You know, summon Goblin. But anyway, we were doing an update and Unstable was going into Gather and we realized the night before, um, the variant cards only, we had to pick a variant because Gather can't even show multiple variants, but, um, the Killbots were unique in that they had four different names.

So we can't show different cards that have different names. And we realized like the night before, Eli, Eli Shiffrin, who's the rules manager, who does a lot of interacting with multiverse and stuff, or not multiverse, I'm sorry, gather, realized this right before. So we at the last minute went up and had to say to them, no, no, no, don't show the three kill bots that aren't curious kill bot. Don't show them. And they were able to take it out that night. So we show the three kill bots that aren't curious kill bot. Don't show them. And they were able to take it out that night.

So we crisis averted. So there was all these different times and periods where we were trying to keep the secret as late as we could. Like I said, if I could make it last to the release event, I would have. We couldn't. So it ended up breaking

I think Monday. Monday of the week of the release. So the release was Friday. Monday, I think the thing that got us was they were sorting and they found the Wayne Anglin sketch of Very Cryptic Command. And it really pulls your attention. Like, what is this?

Like, maybe you don't realize the Sly Spy is swapped. And, I mean, probably you notice the comments where the art changes. But the rules vary because the art doesn't change most of the time. It's easy to miss it. It looks very similar. If you're not really paying attention, you can maybe not notice that they're different. But the way in England was so different that it made people look at it. And so they put it up and then people realized

oh wait, the rules are different oh, there's two different extremely cryptic commands and then little by little people said, oh, I found one and anyway, the crack's in the wall and people started posting it oh, one of the things, by the way,

one of the hard things about doing this was a bunch of the jokes rely on the variance for the joke. For example, Extremely Cryptic Command is extremely cryptic because instead of having four modes like normal, there's six different cards each with four modes. So when I play Extremely Cryptic Command, you want to play around with Extremely Cryptic Command, it is hard to do.

But the audience didn't know that, so when we first put it out, they're like, why is this, what makes this a black, a silver border card? And I'm like, well, one of the abilities

is technically a silver border ability, which is true. They're like, well, that doesn't, that joke seems to fall flat. Or they were asking about the creatures that were just black border, you know,

Auspicious Auteur, or Target Minotaur, or Beast and Show, all of which are just blackboard or cards. And I'm like, well, to make limited work, you know, we just did some simple cards. So we said, okay, we'll make a suit of cups and put silly pictures on. Then people were mad about the kill bot, who were like, I can't believe you made Mario kill, and there's only one kill bot? How, you couldn't make a couple kill bots? Um, and then, like, garbage all mental, people didn't quite get the joke,

and anyway, there was a whole bunch of cards that, like, didn't quite make sense. Um, people felt it was unfair that Agent Sneak's got a secret base and no one else got a secret base. So anyway, I got a lot of, uh, a lot of feedback about things that I knew like there was answers to, but I couldn't tell them yet. The good thing is when the story broke,

when people found out, like one of the comments that I kept getting on Twitter was, okay, okay, that is an extremely cryptic command. I got a bunch of people like, you know, I don't often get a, I mean, every once in a while I get an apology. But I probably have been apologized more for people doubting Extremely Cryptic Command than I have for almost anything in recent time. That people really were like, okay, okay, we owe you an apology. That, my friend, is extremely cryptic. So one of the things that... So, I mean, it was fun.

So once the things started coming out, and the neat thing was, because we didn't tell you that there was variants, and we didn't tell you how we did the variants, I mean, there was, there is an order to them. Once again, there's five commons, one in each color, that are art slash flavor text variants, which there's four of.

There's secret base, which there's five of. There's kill boss, which there's four of. And then there's six rules variants, one in each color plus artifact, three at uncommon, white, black, red, three at rare, green, blue artifact. So there is a pattern. Eventually you can figure it out.

But when you don't know that there is a pattern or what cards are doing or what we're doing or what kind of variants we're doing or how many variants we're doing. Like I said, we did, what did I say we did? We did 63 variants. So that's, actually, 63, that's incorrect. 63 is not counting.

Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did I do the numbers wrong? I did do the number. I double counted. 216, oh, I did the number, I did the math wrong. 216 assumes that one of each variant gets counted, and there's 13 variants. Oh, I did do the math wrong. So I told you there were, what did do the math wrong. So I told

you there were, what did I say? I said 279. That's wrong because I double counted 13 variants. So 266. Okay. There's 266 cards. Okay. I'm glad I caught that before the show ended so that I got it correct. I double count because we showed you the first one of each of the variants. At the end, I was counting all the total variants that existed, but one of each of them was already counted. So the 266. That is still larger than a large set, so that claim is still true. 266.

I've got to remember that. So this week I will probably make that reference. I'll make sure I get the right number. Oh, the one other thing. Let me talk about variants that people ask. I'm not sure how the commons work, but I do know that the uncommons and the rares, they are designed such that the combined card shows up at the rarity it is made to show up at. What I mean by that is, you are going to get an extremely cryptic command at the same rate you would get...

If there was only one extremely cryptic command, you would get it at the same rate you would get... If there was only one Extremely Cryptic Command, you would get it at the same rate. Meaning, it shows up in packs. Extremely Cryptic Command, the card as a whole, any variant combined, shows up at the same rate as a rare would show up. But there are six of them. So that means that the variants actually show up

at one-sixth the rate. So, getting an individual variant, they're pretty rare. They are a bit rarer than Mythic Rares. But, you will get one of them at the rate that you get the card. So the cards

combine equal, uncommon, or rare. They equal the rarity combined at that card. So the cards combine equal uncommon or rare. They equal the rarity combined at that rate. So you will get Extreme Encrypted Command at the rate of a rare. You just won't get a specific... Hope that makes sense.

I don't know how the commons work. The commons might be a little bit different. I don't think... Actually, probably the commons work the same. I know for sure the uncommons and the rares work that way. Actually, probably the commons work the same. I know for sure the uncommons and the rares work that way. Actually, probably the commons.

I think we did the same for the commons, that you're going to get one of those at the rate you would get a common, but the individual versions of it are going to show up at a higher rate. I assume all the rarities probably do that. I know 100%. I know that's how uncommons and rares work. I think that's probably how commons work. Once again, you can play four combined copies of the card.

You can't play four of version A and four of version B, but you can play two of version A and two of version B. They can add up to four. You are allowed to swap them between games. So let's say you write down your deck list at a place where they make you write down your deck list. You are allowed to swap in between games between them. That is allowable. You just have to make sure

that you only have four total copies of the named card in your deck. So the interesting thing about the variants was like I said, it was a pretty big surprise. In Unhinged, we had a card called Super Secret Tech, which was a secret card that only showed up in Premium

that we didn't tell anybody about and kept on gathering for a long time. And so when we first announced the set, we announced it as 216-ish. The reason we said ish is, there are, by the way we count collector numbers, there are 216 cards, but there are variants. So we didn't want to say there are more than 216, because in some ways there are 216. We didn't want to say there wasn't more than 216, because in other ways there are more than 216.

So we used ish. Now the funny thing is we use ish to sort of say, well, you know, it doesn't quite mean what you think it means. And people read that as, oh, there's another secret, you know, super secret tech or something. But it was a pretty big surprise. And like I said, it was a big ask. For example, of the variants, let's see, there's

four that are art variants, so there's four times three is twelve, plus the four of, um, so it's sixty. For example, there were sixteen extra pieces of art we commissioned just for the variants.

You know, and that's for those who know anything about making magic cards, that's not a cheap expense. That's a real expense. And all the cards had individually laid out.

I mean, there was a lot of extra work that went into it. So, I want to tip my hat before I'm almost done today is trying to make, or making this work. I actually went off pretty well. Making this work took the energy of a lot of people and a lot of people worked really hard to make the variance a thing. Um, there was a lot of extra editing and extra design work and extra card printing and layout and, you know, and then a lot of secrets behind the thing

and making sure people didn't reveal stuff. And so a lot went into making it work. So I want to thank everybody who spent a lot of time and energy to have a little secret extra surprise. And the thing that's fun is, and the thing you'll find when you get a play, or you've already found, I guess, since you have played, is it is neat that when you run across these cards, you'll quickly learn what the variant

cards are, that you just kind of know, oh, I don't know, which one is this? And I know, like, when someone attacks me with a Sly Spy or Target, I'm not necessarily a Target, or a Garbage Unmatch, I'll have to, like, look and go, oh, what version is this? What's it doing? But anyway, I had a lot of fun. I'm really, really so pleased we got to pull this off.

It was a fun surprise and I love when unsets can do things that people don't expect and so this was a real fun one. So anyway, that, my friends, is probably everything you need to know about the variants and all the stuff we did with the variants for Unstable. Anyway,

it is now time for me to, I'm not at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.