Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #550: Magic Evolution, Part 4

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

This is the fourth in my "Magic Evolution" series where I go through every Magic set and talk about the design innovations of each one. On today's podcast, I talk about the Odyssey and Onslaught blocks.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the fourth in my series called Magic Evolutions. So the point of this series is I'm going through magic from beginning to modern day and talking about each set in order and saying what new thing did it add? What was the design technology that got added by the set? And talking sort of about, this is kind of like a, from the perspective of a designer, kind of the history of design by looking at magic. So I'm going through each set and I think I'm up to Odyssey.

So today I'm going to talk Odyssey probably on slot. We'll see what time I have. So we'll begin with Odyssey. So today we're going to talk Odyssey probably on slot. We'll see what time I have. So we'll begin with Odyssey. So Odyssey, for those that don't know, came out, when did Odyssey come out? Odyssey came out in 2001, I believe. Okay, so Odyssey, the main mechanics of Odyssey, Odyssey had a graveyard theme and the two big mechanics in it were flashback and threshold. So let's talk a little bit about those, because each of those actually were pretty revolutionary for their day. So we'll start with flashback. So flashback, the idea of flashback were they were spells that you could cast twice. the idea of flashback were they were spells that you could cast

twice now we had done buyback in in Tempest a few years before a number of years before and buyback allows you to repeatedly cast the same spell by paying extra mana when you cast it to be able to

put it back in your hand this worked a little bit differently flashback, the idea of flashback was that it had a use that you can not only cast it in your hand. This worked a little bit differently. Flashback, the idea of flashback was that it had a use that you can not only cast it from your hand, but you always cast it from the graveyard. And while we had done cards that could come back from the graveyard

before, they were always creatures. Nether Shadow, for example, was an alpha, and we'd made a lot of Nether Shadow variants over the years of zombie type cards that sort of could bounce back out of your graveyard and come back. Also, phoenixes tended to do that as well. But this is the first time we really let spells... We had used graveyard as a cost a little bit before.

There have definitely been a few sets where you could use cards in the graveyard as a cost to do something. But the cards themselves, the ability that you can cast cards out of your graveyard was relatively new. The closest we had was, there was a card called Yawgmoth's Will that was in Urza's Saga that temporarily let you cast cards out of your graveyard. So that was probably, we had sort of loosely messed with the idea of cards in your graveyard having some use as a spell unto itself. But this was a whole mechanic that let you do that. And it really, I mean, obviously, the history of flashback, flashback is one of what I call the powerhouse mechanics, meaning it is something that we often bring back as a mechanic. It's a very popular repeating mechanic.

It came back numerous times. It came back in Time Spiral. We did it again in Indusrod. Amonkhet kind of did flashback, although a variant of it. It's the kind of thing where it's a mechanic that I expect us to bring back on a regulatory over many years. It's just a very strong, solid mechanic. And the interesting thing about Odyssey was... So Invasion was the first set where we had a block that had a theme and we really followed

through on that theme. But Invasion was very much about multicolor. It was about a quality of the cards. Where Odyssey was about the graveyard, meaning its theme had to do with a component of the game rather than a quality of the cards. And the idea there is, let's have a set in which we use one zone and give it extra relevance that we don't normally do. And like I said, the graveyard, I mean, Weatherlight was a set that had a graveyard theme. And there were a lot of sets that had smaller graveyard components to them. The dark messed around the graveyard a little bit.

I mean, there were sets before that had a little bit of a graveyard theme. Weatherlight was the first set that that was a major theme of the set, Odyssey was the first time that that was a block theme, not even just a set theme, but an entire block theme. And I do think that Flashback really sort of set the standard for the kind of mechanics we can do

using things out of the graveyard. Threshold, interestingly, was the first threshold mechanic. So what a threshold mechanic is, so specifically, threshold was a mechanic that said, if you have seven or more cards in your graveyard, then anything that is threshold basically turned on, meaning there was some bonus it got. So once you had reached the threshold in your graveyard, then anything that is threshold basically turned on, meaning there was some bonus it got. So once you had reached the threshold in your graveyard, all the cards that had threshold got a bonus.

Something additional happened without them. Also, it wasn't just spells. It wasn't just permanence. Sometimes spells in your hand could also get stronger if you were at a threshold. And we have done a bunch of threshold mechanics over the years. A threshold mechanic is any mechanic by which once you reach a certain state, cards get

better. But threshold was the very first threshold mechanics. One of the reasons I think we refer to them as threshold mechanics. Richard had made threshold and he was really interested he liked the idea that there are things that upgrade over time

but that cards in graveyard was an interesting way that the natural state of the game eventually got cards in the graveyard. And so it sort of said

to you the player okay you can there's some things you can do to try to reach the state but naturally you're eventually going to get there.

The game will get there. Normal just magic play will eventually get you there but maybe you want to see if you can get there faster. Is it by casting more spells? Is it by sacrificing creatures, discarding cards? You know, what resources do you want to use? The other big thing about Odyssey was Odyssey was messing around also with a larger core concept which was there's something in the game called card advantage and what card advantage is it says that if I essentially are if you count all the permanents I have on the board and all the cards I have in my hand if I have a larger amount of cards in hand plus cards in play than you do, I'm at an advantage. So the things I can do that help either get me more of those things than what

it cost me to get them, or things that allow me to lower your cards in hand impermanence, you know, things that sort of change card advantage. That whole idea that you're fundamentally ahead. Card advantage means that you're ahead. In the game at the time, card advantage was just such a strong concept.

I actually was trying to play around with that. I often talk about how the set was a little on the spiky side. But it did do something interesting. I mean, at least for people who were appreciating it, is it really took this card advantage and really messed with it.

All of a sudden, because of threshold, because of just a lot of rewards we gave you, you would do things you wouldn't normally do, card disadvantage things, because there was an advantage to get there. For example, we had cards where you could discard to gain an ability on a creature. There were times because of threshold, the correct answer was to discard multiple cards to those discard enablers. Not even

because you cared about the enabler, but just you wanted to get the cards in your graveyard. And that was a very different sort of concept. A lot of other things that Odyssey did, I mean Weatherlight definitely was the first to really pl different sort of concept. A lot of other things that Odyssey did. I mean, Weatherlight definitely was the first to really plumb sort of the design space of graveyards.

But Odyssey did as well, and Odyssey really spent some time sort of playing in that space. One of the most interesting was something that we had first done in, um, Tempest, which was a card called Kindle. Uh, so Kindle was a spell that had been inspired by Plague Rats, a creature from, um, Alpha. And the idea of Kindle was, it was a direct damage spell.

Um, I think it was one and a red, and you did two damage. But then, for every copy in your graveyard of Kindle, you did an extra point of damage. So you did two damage, then three damage, then four damage, then five damage. And the idea was that they were cards that you sort of cared, that you used the graveyard as a marker to show you used them. I actually played around with that. There's a cycle of Kindle spells. We even had some Kindle spells that reference other things other than itself,

meaning if I or this other thing are in the graveyard, meaning that there were, like the giant growth, Muscle Burst, I think was the name of the card. There was a card called Diligent Farmhand, which was a creature that Muscle Burst counted in itself and Diligent Farmhand. So now there are two different cards

you can care about. And that meant that if you can get Diligent Farmhand in your graveyard that also can make your Muscle Burst bigger. And we brought back Atogs. There was a cycle of A-Togs. A-Togs were creatures that first appeared in Antiquities. The original A-Tog cost one and a red for, was it a one-two creature? And the idea was whenever you sacrifice, you could sacrifice an artifact for no cost, and you could give it plus two, plus two. So it sort of turned

resources on the battlefield into size advantage temporarily for the creature. And we ended up making a bunch of different atogs over the years, always eating different things to make itself temporarily bigger. And we got from very concrete things like artifacts to a little less concrete things like turns. ChronoTruck allows you to sort of give up a turn to get bigger. You got bigger, but you then didn't you sort of gave up some stuff in the future that you were sort of borrowing against the creature's own future.

So anyway, we did a cycle, we did a multicolor cycle of A-Togs, where the idea was each color would eat something. And because they were multicolored, you had two different things you could eat. So the card that ended up being the breakout card of that cycle was Psychic-Tog, you to discard cards to make it bigger and eat cards out of your graveyard to make it bigger. And as a theme from the set that would play out, graveyard as a resource can be really potent and very powerful. And there's a bunch of cards that sort of showed. Odyssey ended up being one of the sets that, on the surface,

didn't look that powerful, but ended up actually being really powerful. The power level of Odyssey was pretty high. Okay, so after Odyssey was Judgment. And not Judgment, sorry, it was Torment. So Torment did something we had never done before, which was it weighted the set toward a color. So in the story, Kamal was the good guy and the Cabal were the bad guys. It was a group.

It was a black-based group and they were winning. So to try to show that the world was sort of imperiled, we made it a black leaning set. What that meant was we put more black cards in and less white and green cards. That is the first and really only time we've done this. We've done a little bit of weighing in the future, but nothing to the level we did in Torment. And really, we've kind of shied away from doing too much weighting of color. The idea we played around with in Torment is more people would draft black

and less people would draft white and green. And the way we did it was just the aspen of black was higher, there were more black cards, there were more black cards at lower rarities, and then white cards appeared at lower numbers and at higher rarities. And we made sure there

was some powerful white green cards from a construction standpoint but limited really was about sort of black dominating. Like I said that's one of those things where it's something people ask for all the time for us to do weighted color things and there are sets that wanted I mean original Innistrad actually weighed a little bit toward black. Development ended up undoing that because it didn't play well. But this is definitely us going all in on the concept that players had talked about that we had never done. And so if you ever sort of say, hey, did you unbalance colors? We have.

I'll talk about Judgment in a second, which we did the opposite of what we did in Torment. Torment also messed around with a mechanic I think we called the Nightmares, which were creatures that, when they entered the battlefield, took something away, and then when you got rid of the Nightmares, you got that thing back. And there were

various things. It could be a creature, it could be cards in your hand, I think it could be life. The idea essentially was this black creature is stealing something temporarily. We ended up liking the gameplay of that. The interesting thing is most of that mechanics, we actually

put it in white. That white is now the color of I come and temporarily remove things, but if you get rid of me, you get it back. White is the conditional answer color. It's the color that most often says I have an answer, but if you get rid of me, you get it back. White is the conditional answer color. It's the color that most often says I have an answer, but if you have an answer to my answer, you get your threat back. But Nightmares, in fact, Nightmares

was interesting. Nightmares was originally created by Richard, and they were in Odyssey. One of the reasons that Richard gets credit for being on the Torment Design team, even though he wasn't on the Torment Design team, was we had borrowed an idea he had come up with in Odyssey, the Nightmares, and we used it.

But all in all, the biggest part of Torment was trying to further play in the space that Odyssey did. We start messing around with other flashback costs. Flashback in the first set was all mana.

Torment, for example, we start messing around with life payment or flashback costs that involve life payment. One of the things in general about flashback is usually when you flash things back, they're more expensive than the original spell. Not always. We play it around with the reverse, obviously. And what we did in Torment is mess around with the idea that the spells could be cheaper if there's some life payment to go along with them. In fact, there was an entire cycle of cards where you could pay.

The blue one ended up being... what's it called? Probe. Something probe. I'm blanking on the thing. It'll come to me. The blue one ended up being the powerful one there because it's a card drawer. Paying life and drawing cards is pretty good. But anyway, and the other thing we had messed around a bit in Torment, which we haven't done a lot of, is the idea of four card cycles. So what we had done was, in a few cases, like we made a land cycle where it was, it played around with black and each color. So there was a black and white land and a black and blue land and a black and red land and a black and green land. So we made some four card cycles. We don't often do four card cycles.

These days, I guess every once in a while we'll do a vertical cycle where we do a rare and a mythic rare. But there's not a lot of ways to do four card cycles. And the idea of the interrelationship between a single color and four other colors is kind of cool. It's harder to execute a lot of the time.

Most of what I chalked Torment up to was us willing to try things. One of the things to remember is I think it's great that we're willing to push in directions we haven't pushed before, and sometimes we learn that we don't want to do that. That's not a bad thing. I like the idea that magic is always sort of pushing boundaries,

and that one of the things of evolutions is not everything is, and this is great, let's do more of this. Sometimes you try something and say, okay, I'm glad we tried it. I'm glad we pushed it in a new direction. I'm glad we let the players experience something they hadn't before. But we've learned from this, you know what, this really isn't something we want to do again or do much. And I think that's a valuable lesson and an important thing that you can learn. So I mean,

I think Torment, while a lot of what we learned was stuff we didn't want to do again, I do think it's an important lesson. So Judgment was the final set of the block. Judgment was the white and green set. So what had happened in Torment was we did more black than normal, a normal amount of red and blue, and less white and green. So when we get to Judgment, we reverse it. It's more white and green, less black, same amount of red and blue. And it suffered from a lot of the problems that Torment suffered from in that when you don't give enough of a color

it makes it hard for that color to be relevant. Something we did do, by the way, in Torment, Judgment, and Torment, is we brought back, Torment brought back Sengur Vampire and Judgment brought back Urnum Djinn. Both of which were

cards that were perceived as being very powerful cards in early Magic, but because of the fact that we had really upped the power level of creatures, they ended up being not quite... And people had fond memories of them when they actually played them, like, oh, this is nowhere near

as strong as my memory of this card. And for both cards we'd actually, as part of our ad campaign, sort of highlighted that we were bringing them back. And we learned the mistake there is be careful when you bring things back that players have, like bringing something back in which players would have a high perception and a low reality when they play it is a dangerous thing to do and not something you kind of want to do as a key selling point

of the set, as a focal point of the set. I think it's okay sometimes to bring back cards that were powerful in the past and that are playable in the present but I wouldn't, we'd probably not be spending highly on them like we did there. The other thing that we had in Judgment was the Incarnations.

The Incarnations were creatures that when they were in your graveyard granted you an ability. They sort of had a global effect, but in your graveyard. And the way they worked was they were all creatures that had an ability and in your graveyard they granted all creatures on the battlefield your ability. So it's a red creature with haste.

But when it hits the graveyard, all your creatures have haste. They're all named after emotions. And once again, we were messing around with graveyard matters, and so here's the idea of spells that sort of creatures that essentially kind of turn to enchantments. One of the big lessons we learned

with a graveyard block was one of the biggest problems when you focus on a particular element of the game you don't normally focus on is you need to make sure you ramp up the answers. So once we have all these threats sitting in the graveyard that are active in the graveyard, you need more ways to deal with threats in the graveyard. And normally in Magic, it is not something that... Magic doesn't normally allow you to get rid of cards in your opponent's graveyard, because in a traditional set, it doesn't mean anything. It is something that Black does a little bit,

and in a set in which it matters, we let White also go after the graveyard. And we also, one of the things that happens when you focus on a theme is you realize you have to, like, same thing that would happen with Mirrodin

and happen in this set with the graveyard is not every set normally has a lot of interactions with the graveyard. For example, traditionally speaking, red doesn't do that much stuff in the graveyard. Normally black is the color that has the most interaction with the graveyard.

White and green have a little bit. Blue and red don't have a lot. But one of the things we found is we carved out space. So because the graveyard is a regular part of the game, we made sure that each color had some interaction with the graveyard. For example, we made sure each color could bring back something from the graveyard is a regular part of the game, we made sure that each color had some interaction with the graveyard. For example, we made sure each color could bring back something from the graveyard. You know, what things, different colors would bring back different things, but we made sure that there was some flavor sort of, okay, well, what could red bring back or blue bring back? And we would

give identities to that. So when we are doing things that are in the space of graveyard, we now have things we can use. And so part of the color pie, what we've learned over time is not only do colors have to have identity things they do regularly, but they have to have color identity for things they do occasionally. So that when we're in sets and we care about certain things, oh, well, this, you know, red can care about the graveyard. It doesn't most of the time. But when it does, here's how Red cares about it.

And Odyssey Black helped us define a lot of that. I think one of the reasons that the set worked as well as it did was an understanding that we had to make sure that every color had its own connection. Okay. All in all, Odyssey, like I said, the big takeaway from Odyssey as a block was we were definitely a little too spiky. I talked about this in my Lessons Learned. And it definitely was a set where we experimented a lot more with different resources. We did a lot more with discarding from hand.

Oh, something else I forgot about that was in Torment. Torment introduced Madness, which is a mechanic we saw returned in Shadows over Innistrad.

So Madness was a mechanic that if the card is being discarded, you may spend a certain cost to cast it. Essentially, if you could discard

this card, you can cast the card, meaning it allows you to double up on resources. This card is counting as a discarded card to get whatever benefit you get for that, and if you spend the mana, you can also cast it. Using discard outlets allowed you to make your spells cheaper and

double dip in that you've got to count the card twice. You've got to cast it and count it as a discarded card. That is a good, Madness is a good mechanic, by the way, where we discovered that it really required a strong environment to work. That was one of our first big use of what we call A-B mechanics. What that means is your mechanic, which is A, cares about a quality which doesn't appear on the card, discarding in this case. So in order for madness to matter, other cards have

to discard. So not only do you have to make madness cards, but you have to make discard enablers. Now, obviously that block and its theme on the graveyard wanted a lot of graveyard enablers. So the set already had them. It's one of the reasons Madness worked. But it is something we have to be careful about, and it really made us aware of how AV mechanics work. Okay, let's get to Onslaught. So Onslaught was interesting in that it used a theme that we had dipped our toes into, but very lightly. And Onslaught was us really, for the first time, committing to it as a major theme. And I'm talking about tribal.

So what tribal means is, tribal with a lower T. Not the card type, tribal with a capital T. We'll get there when we get to Lorwyn. So the idea was, tribal is caring about creature types, cards that care. And we had done a little bit of it. Alpha obviously had three cards, three lords that cared about creature types, but the big idea of this set was, this was a theme that had never been strong that players had shown a lot of love for.

And the idea was, well if players like to play it when it's weak, what if we made it strong? What if we said this was a viable strategy and allowed people to play it in a competitive way? So Odyssey was our first dip into the tribal theme. It's funny looking back. We definitely were kind of light on the theme. Nowadays, when we do tribal themes,

we tend to be a little bit heavier when it's the major theme. We do do tribal themes at the level we did them in Onslaught, but we will do them a little heavier. But the thing it did do, well, one is probably the biggest lesson, technologically-wise, is Magic at the time really hadn't conserved itself too much with the sets around it.

It was always kind of like, when we get there, you know, like, the job of a set was to look backwards and make sure that it was having some synergy backwards. But that was the job of the set. Like, I'm making a fall set. Well, let me look at the set before me and make sure that I have some correlation with the set before me. And what Onslaught taught us is we have to look ahead. We can't

just look back. Because one of the problems we ran into is Onslaught did this little experiment I was the leader of the experiment, by the way, of not doing our normal creature types and experimenting with different creature types. Instead of doing goblins in red, what if we did dwarves? You know, instead of doing elves,

we could do centaurs, or we could make insects matter. You know, with that, it really was sort of saying, let's do some different creature types from normal. But then Onslaught decided that it wanted creature types to matter. It really was sort of saying, let's do some different creature types from normal. But then Onslaught decided that it wanted creature types to matter. And all of a sudden we had this problem where we kind of want goblins to matter, but the entire previous set had no goblins in it. And so there's lessons there.

The other big mechanic that Onslaught Block did was it did the morph mechanic. So the morph mechanic's a mechanic where you have cards in your hand that have the morph ability. For three mana, you can play them face down on the table, and they are two two-colorless creatures. And then anytime you want, you

can pay their morph cost, and if you do, you turn them face up, and now they're that creature. They turn into that creature. Now, morph is us messing in brand new space. Probably, there's, usually when you make a mechanic, there's some level of innovation you're playing around with, and sometimes you're just playing in space you've completely played around before.

Sometimes you're sort of doing tweaks on existing space, and sometimes you're just playing in space you've completely played around before. Sometimes you're sort of doing tweaks on existing space. And sometimes you're just finding brand new space. And Morph is the latter. Morph is, I mean, Morph came about because there were two cards in Alpha, actually, Illusionary Mask and Camouflage, that had you play cards upside down. And neither did a really good job of what exactly that meant and so there's a lot of confusion in the rules and so the rules team in order to sort of figure out how they worked came up the idea of defining a face down card as a locked thing and then from

that they came up the idea of doing a mechanic that cared about it um and um they came to me and i was very excited by it and anyway, that led to the Onslaught Onslaught having Morph. Oh, the other big innovation of Onslaught was we brought back cycling, a mechanic that first appeared in Urza Saiga. At the time, the reason cycling being brought back

is pretty important is while we had brought back is pretty important is, while we had brought back unnamed mechanic, like Mercadian Mask had done the pitch mechanic for a scene in Alliances where you pitch a card instead of paying the casting cost, we had never brought back, I mean, we had made mechanics evergreen. I guess we had brought back something in that. We had done it, Ice Age did cumulative upkeep, and like, oh, maybe that should just be part of magic. And we made it evergreen for a while,

interestingly enough. But we had never done mechanic, a named mechanic, let it go away and then brought it back. And so cycling was the first time we had brought back a mechanic. And I think that we also, the other interesting thing about cycling was the previous times we'd done cycling we had been very tight in how we did it you always cycled back by spending mana and it was always in fact exactly 2 mana 2 generic mana

but once we came back we experimented with colored activation costs sorry, colored cycling costs we messed around with cycling costs I mean, colored cycling costs. We messed around with cycling costs. I mean, not in this set, but in the next set I'll talk about cycling. We talked about non-mana costs.

And we also started caring about cycling, meaning you had cards that cared when they cycled. And we messed around with cards that did things when you cycled them. That not only did you draw a card, but it could do other effects as well. So it really demonstrated how we could play around with mechanics by bringing it

back and then sort of delving deeper into what it could do. And it was interesting playing around with cycling just because cycling, there's a lot of component pieces to it, and we really had a chance to sort of mess around with different things. We also realized that it was a little more powerful than we

thought. We had made two different cards, cycling matter cards, Lightning Rift and Astral Slide, and both of them, especially Astral Slide, went on to be constructed cards of people building Astral Slide, and both of them, especially Astral Slide, went on to be constructed cards of people building decks around. In fact, there was a... We had made a card, I think, in Legions that

allows you to cycle for a reduced... No cost? Anyway, I think we broke things and had to get rid of it. Fluctuator was the card. Is that right? Fluctuator. I think I got that correctly.

Anyway, so there's a lot of interesting things we learned from Onslaught. I mean, I really think that we sort of got to mess around with Tribals the first time. We got to bring back a mechanic we hadn't done before. And we messed around in really, really new space. The face-down space, the idea of an unknown element, of the sort of bluffing built into them, something we hadn't really done on that scale before. So Morph was a really interesting experiment.

It ended up being a very powerful effect. We actually would bring it back in Time Spiral and in Cons. So anyway, it was definitely a new space there. Then with Legions, and Legions was us trying something new on a larger scale, which was the whole set had a, what I like to call a gimmick, which was it was all creatures. Every card in the pack was a creature.

There were no non-creature cards. And it was really interesting to Every card in the pack was a creature. There were no non-creature cards. And it was really interesting to sort of play around with that space and sort of see what you could do. We definitely did some playing around with can you fulfill other card type's needs through one card type? Meaning, if I have a creature,

can I do things that sort of let it fill some of the needs of instants or sorceries or enchantments? And the answer was we could. By putting a flash mechanic on, well, by putting an enter the battlefield effect on creatures, you could replicate sorcery, especially if the creature was minimal. And by putting flash on it, you could replicate instants. If the creature had a static ability, it could replicate enchantments. So there was a lot of sort of crossover and so by limiting ourselves to just creatures

we're able to experiment a little more with how to use creatures and the ways that creatures can mimic other components in the game legions also brought back Slivers. You know, that's definitely something. Slivers were originally in Tempest, and it's a real good example of a linear mechanic that people really were drawn to. I talk a lot about parasitism, where if you do something that's only good with cards in its own block, in general that's a bad thing, but slivers have proven that sometimes it's a good thing and that one of the interesting things about linear mechanics

is that the more you do them, the more you bring them back, the more they start to take on a general sense. That when we brought back slivers, and there were already slivers, the slivers were less parasitic. They now could be tied into something else. And it's a way to say how you can do themes that are insular, but if you do them enough, they start sort of broadening out.

Okay, the final set today from Moments at Work was Scourge. So the interesting thing about Scourge was that we really experimented with the idea of the third set in the block kind of really going out and testing out new themes and new mechanics. Scourge is actually, while it had a little bit of a tribal component, it had a dragon theme to it. I guess dragons are typically a tribe. But dragons really weren't something that we had... While there are a few dragons, I think, in the block,

it was a tribal that... A very different kind of tribal because it was caring about something that was big, which is a little bit harder to do. Also, the theme kind of got added. Not that Brian didn't have a little bit of a dragon theme in his set, but development really pushed it up and made it more of a theme to sell the set with.

The other thing that Brian was messing around with is he really was trying to experiment of sort of pushing your themes in different directions at the end of the block. It's interesting. We would later find in later sets when we kind of completely revamp. Like, there'll come a time where

the third set starts going down different paths, but those, it's kind of its own thing. The problem with Scourge was still drafted with the first two sets, and it did use a lot of themes from the first two sets. So although it was trying to do some new things, the fact that it was kind of connected to and saddled to draft-wise,

the older kept it from really making that stuff matter, and that a lot of the themes that Brian had been playing around with didn't quite come to fruition as much. Brian was really interested in the idea of larger creatures, and not only did the set pay attention to dragons, but it paid attention to mana costs in general. And one of the things that Brian was playing around with is the idea of,

what if we made you care about big converted mana costs? And so so the idea was it was a resource that you could tap into um the thought process he was playing around with is tribal already made you have a board presence a little more than normal what if it mattered and you know he messed around like there's a card that costs eight mana that was a creature, a 1-1 creature, a wizard, I believe. But the idea was it had morph so you could get it into play cheaper.

But the reason it cost so much mana was that was a bonus of the card. The fact that it had a converted mana cost of 8 meant that other cards could refer to it

and you would get a huge bonus off it. Kind of a lesson to this is realizing that if you're going to branch out on new themes it's really hard to branch out on new themes at the end of a set. Even though Brian was trying to create some

synergy, it just required you sort of going to different paths and caring about some different things and the fact that the draft, at the time, you drafted it third and it only had one card. One pack. It was very hard to sort of make those themes work. So, um...

But it was definitely, Brian was playing around with the idea of converting mana cost as a thing. Magic had messed around a little bit before with it. I mean, there were some individual cards that cared. But usually never as a quality on the battlefield.

Or seldom as a quality on the battlefield. And so Brian definitely played in that space. It's another one of those things where you realize... Two things. One thing is we realized that Converted Manacost was a more complex topic than we thought. two things. One thing is we realized that converted mana cost was a more complex topic than we thought. The idea that mana cost

and converted mana cost are separate things and that understanding what it means that you count colored mana as well as the generic mana to get it. While the more enfranchised players had no problem with it, the people that played a little less.

Converted Manicast is not a term we refer to all that often because it's confusing. And so it definitely was messing around in space that wasn't something very obvious. And this reinforced to us that it was something that we had to be careful with. And one of the lessons in general is just because something exists in

the game of Magic doesn't mean it's something you're supposed to lean on. The stack is another good example where we don't tend to refer to the stack. It exists in the game and most people understand the basic concepts of it. But when you mechanically care about it and lean in that direction, you realize that people's understanding is very simplistic and it makes it hard for them to sort of function. So Converted Manicast mattering made us sort of realize we have to be careful when and how and where we care about Converted Manicast. And it also sort of brought to light the idea that if we're going to play around with themes,

if we're going to shift themes, we have to do it in such a way that the set has more presence. And I think that the lessons of Scourge really sort of highlighted to us years later when we do a third set that had a radical difference. It taught us some means for how to do that better.

The final thing about Scourge I will talk about is Brian had had a Converted Mana Cost Matters theme. There were a few dragons in the set and there were a few cards that cared about dragons. Brian had not planned

for a dragon theme. It kind of got pushed on because they were trying to find a way to make it feel a little more tribal. In the end, it kind of disappointed people. One of the things we realized is when you push a

theme as the theme of the set, there's expectations on how much that theme would show up and how much that theme would matter in Limited. And it really was, in fact, this is not even the only set where we sort of implied dragon-ness and then didn't deliver. We would do that later in Dragon's Maze. I'll get there eventually. But it really was interesting to understand sort of how we sold the set and how we sold it in a way that sort of made people unhappy and that we have to be careful of, you know, this was Mercadian Mask is where I coined the term. If your theme isn't a common, it's not your theme.

But this was a good example of a set that while it tried to weave the theme in some ways into common, it just didn't do a strong enough job and that the theme was kind of lacking. And so players were upset because they sort of felt like it wasn't delivering on the promise that the set was giving them. But anyway, I'm now parked in the parking lot. So that is all the time for innovation talk we have for today.

This is an ongoing series. It's not consecutive. But I will come back. So next time we return after Onslaught was Mirrodin. So we'll talk about all the lessons of Mirrodin. But anyway, that's all the time I got for today. Because we all know what that means. It's 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 next time.