Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #555: Unstable Cards, Part 3

Episode Date: July 20, 2018

This podcast is part three of a six-part series on the design of each and every non-Contraption card in Unstable.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so we've been in the middle of the series talking all about the cards from Unstable. So I'm talking about every card minus the contraptions, and we are up to finders keepers. So it's a common sorcery, five in a black, so six men in total, one which is black. Destroy a target creature, then assemble a contraption. So one of the things we wanted to, that was important, was we wanted to make sure that we sort of could get people to dip their toe into contraptions, if you will. And so one of the things we wanted to do was use a couple cards

that just would kind of sometimes get into decks because you just needed it in the deck, and then in limited, so like six mana for a kill spell is not a great card in constructed, but in limited, eh, you tend to run it. You know, kill spells are pretty important. And so the idea was we wanted to kind of dip your toe into contraptions, and maybe once you're playing one or two contraptions, you know, you're encouraged to play a little bit more. So the idea is you draft this somewhat early, because kill spells are good,

and then you go, oh, well, I already have a contraption. Maybe I should draft a few more contraptions. The other interesting thing about this thing is sometimes we make a card and then we stick a creative team with, oh, it's just kill a creature, assemble a contraption. What does that mean? And so I liked a lot the flavor we came up with, which was that you kill somebody, then you rifle their pockets

and find stuff maybe that you can put into your contraption. I thought that was kind of cute. Okay, first pick. It's an uncommon instant. Costs three and a green. So four mana total, one of which is green. Destroy target artifact or enchantment. Assemble a contraption.

So here's another example where we were trying to sort of... You always want to make sure that you get... You get a green naturalize effect in common, but we also want to make sure we had enough contraptions, and this is another example, just like finder's keepers, where we doubled up a little bit, where we made, now this is more a sideboard effect than a main deck effect, although in this set, because of contraptions, and because there's an artifact theme in the set, you might want naturalizes slightly higher than you normally would.

But anyway, this was just sort of, we were, one of the things that tends to happen in design sets is you have needs and you kind of run out of space, and so sometimes you double up on stuff. So this is a good example where green needed a contraption card uncommon, and green needed a naturalize effect, and we started to combine them together. So a couple of funny things about individual parts. So the name first pick is a joke. This is not a card you would first pick. This is a card you would pick much, much later in the pack. That is a joke. A lot of people somehow think, didn't get that we were, our tongue was in our mouth, as you would say. We were joking. And this shows the creature, the hammer's growing on trees.

And there was a lot of debate among the artists of, if you had a hammer tree, what part of the hammer would be, like, where do you pluck the hammer off of? How does it grow on a tree? And there was a lot of debate about what part grows off the tree and where are you snapping it off. I think I wrote this flavor text. I thought it was funny that once you got the idea of the hammers grow on trees, what other,

how else could you grow things? And the idea of saw bushes, I don't know, I thought it was just funny. But like, you know, bushes a lot of times will have things that will catch you so there's a saw you know i thought that's cute okay next five finger discount so it's an uncommon sorcery costs four blue blue so six mana total two which was blue put target non-land permanent into your hand you may spend mana as though it were man of any color the next time you cast that card. Okay, so this was that a couple things. One is, one of the rules about silver border sets is you have to have something about the card that is silver border. By the way, finders keepers and first pick,

another reason they both tack on build a contraption onto basic effect is we're not allowed to do basic effects in a vacuum. Something about it has to be silver border. Contraptions, those are silver border. So here, the thing we do is normally when I return, when I bounce something, when I return, I return it to owner's hand. Well, this does not say owner's hand. This says your hand. So this allows you to do something. In Black Border, one of the big no-no's is you are not allowed to put opponent stuff into your hand. So I can never put my opponent's cards into my hand. It always bounces to its owner's hand. And so in Black Border, one of the ideas is only you kind of handle your cards.

You don't let your opponent handle your cards. But Silver Border, we're above that. So in Silver Border, you can actually go take somebody else's card and put it into your hand. The rider we have on this is because you can get something that's not yours we give you a means to be able to cast it. So the idea is if you pick somebody else's thing

up, this lets you then cast that thing. And it's kind of cute. It's a kind of effect that we might do in Black Border if we allowed this one component to do in Black Border if we allowed this one component to be in Black Border. But anyway, it is definitely something that was something I, early on, I made a list of things that I wanted to do that I knew we couldn't do in Black Border. And I think both Unglued and Unhinged had messed around with having your opponent's cards in your hands in different ways.

But I realized I'd never done the simple bounce spell. So this is one of the effects I believe was pretty early in the file. I think the earliest version didn't have the rider on it, just let you bounce things. But then what we found was it got stuck in your hand a lot, and that was kind of less fun. Because then it was kind of like, you had all these

memory issues remembering that you had it, because it would just get stranded there. So we added the rider disorder so it didn't get stranded there. But anyway, that is five-figure discount. Forest! Okay, well I'll talk a little bit about the basic land.

I don't need to talk about all five, I guess. One of the things that we wanted to do with the basic lands is do something cool and different. We actually experimented with a bunch of just ideas, not actually, not just full art land. But one of the interesting things was once we decided that we wanted to do contraptions and started messing around with contraptions, we got to full bleed and realized we could do full bleed. we got to full bleed and realized we could do full bleed. And one of the things that had happened in Unhinged is we actually had two different versions of the four lands.

We had the ones that ended up going in the set, which had a very, very tiny border. And we had another set that had no border. It went all the way to the edge. And at the time we were making Unhinged, I went around and talked to people, and the general consensus was that was too much. You know, we need to have a border.

You can't have no border. That's crazy. So we ended up on Hinge going farther than we had done on Unglued. So we sort of, and I feel like this was a natural progression. It's to do the thing that we talked about on Hinge, but were afraid to do. Now we're like, no, all the way to the edge. We went and talked to John Avon, who did the land for on Hinge. John Avon's really good

at doing art for basic lands. And so we had him do the art and made what I consider to be one of the most really breathtaking basic lands we've ever made. One of the people asked me whether or not like are unsets not supposed to do far outland anymore

because it's sort of grown beyond unsets? And my answer is, look, doing weird and fun basic lands, unsets put that on the map. Far outlands were an unset thing. And while I'm happy that we're finding ways to take things and push them beyond silver border into black border, well, I guess those were always in black border, but we're glad to take Silver Border things and

move them beyond Silver Border sets. I still like for us to push the boundaries. Lands all the way to the edge is something we had never done before, and so I felt like it was still us pushing. One of the challenges for the next unset, which I hope will happen, is

I believe that basic lands are just an expectation for unsets, and I want to do them, but I want to always keep pushing boundaries and figure out cool ways to do things that people don't expect. So, I have no idea what we're doing for the next batch of full art lands. I'm sure we will do them. I didn't even know they'd be

full art, but the next unlands, I'm not sure what we'll do with them. Okay, next. Garbage Elemental. Uncommon creature. Elemental. 2-4 for 4 and a red. So 5 mana, 1 of which is red. Okay, so the Garbage Elemental is another one of our rules variant cards.

This is uncommon. Like I said, there's 3 uncommon and 3 rare ones. One in each color and 1 artifact. So we already saw everything Majig was the artifact. So Garbage Element mental action is interesting. So originally, if you go back a ways, one of our goals when we first started making Unstable was to play around with new things for collation and for printing. Like how can we do, what can we do with new printing technology?

And one of the ideas we played around with was cards that are not the same card. Because one of the things with new printing technology is that you can make, like, so the idea of this card originally was that we'd have a collection of abilities. Let's say we had, I don't know, 30, 40 abilities. And the idea was each card would pick two of those abilities and, 30, 40 abilities. And the idea was each card would pick two of those abilities and print it on the card. And the idea was, because it would be random, there would just be a huge number of, so if there's 40 things, is that 40 times 39? I'm trying to remember. I think it's 40 times 39. Anyway, it would be a huge number of unique different cards. Now, it turns out that idea number of unique, different cards.

Now, it turns out that idea, while really cool, was something that we couldn't do yet. Even though we worked way ahead and took forever to get the set out, printing technology didn't quite catch up to some of the design ideas we had. Maybe one day we can do that. I hope we can. It's kind of cool. But, anyway, so what we did to mimic it, this is the one card where we try to mimic what the original card was going to do. So this card, we just stuck two abilities on it as if they were a random two abilities,

but just made six versions of it. That'd be cool abilities, cool combinations to get, to get. Um, I think this one, I think we, what we did here is one of them is a normal keyword and one of them is, has some un-qualities to get. I think this one, I think what we did here is one of them is a normal keyword and one of them has some un-qualities to it. So for example,

this is Frenzy 2. So Frenzy is whenever this creature attacks and isn't blocked, he has plus 2 plus 0. Frenzy is one of the keywords that showed up on the future shifted cards

in future site. And then Garbage Elemental can't be blocked by wordy creatures. A creature is wordy if it has four or more lines of rules text. By the way, we miswrote the reminder text for wordy on

Frazzle Editor in Unhinged. It's not supposed to count... It's only supposed to count rules text. It's not supposed to count flavor text because a grizzly bear isn't wordy even though it has lots of flavor text. So we errated it. Ironically, the card that has all the mistakes on it has a mistake on it.

We errated it and unhinged, and then unstable, when we wrote it out, we made sure to write it correctly. So this is the actual correct wording for the reminder text for protection from wordy. It does not count flavor text. It just counts rules text. Anyway, there are six versions of this card. I don't have them all in front of me, but each one of them has two abilities, one of which is a normal ability,

although as Frenzy shows, we definitely pick and choose to make sort of quirky regular abilities, and then the other one usually is some unflavored ability. Okay, next. Gimme five. Uncommon instant for one white, for a single white mana. You gain one life for each person

who high-fives you the next 30 seconds. Each player in a Silver Border game who high-fives you gains one life. Offer high-fives, don't hit people. So a couple things. One is, we had a mechanic in the set for a while that was called Stopwatch.

And what Stopwatch was is it told you you had so much time to do some goal. And I think this card was one of our Stopwatch cards originally. And the idea was you had to get so many, in a certain amount of time, you had to get so many high fives. I forget exactly how many it was. And then when we stopped doing Stopwatch, we took it out of the file. But then it dawned on me when I was trying to do more involving of other people, something that made me realize that I love this idea of high-fiving people and that getting an environment where it's fun to kind of run around and high-five everybody.

So we ended up putting this back in, but rather than be timed, we decided, okay, I mean, it is timed. You only have 30 seconds, but rather than try to get so many in that time, it's just like you gain a life for every high-five you get. And one of the things we thought would be fun is we want the set to have a lot of cards that generate stories, and we knew that the high five would just like, I got 40 high fives. I gained 40 life. I gained 50 life. And people have posted videos of their high five where the entire story is lining up to high five them.

And a lot of cool stuff has happened. A few things about this. One is, so Glenn was our editor. Glenn made very careful to word this to make sure, because one of the problems we had with Unhinged and Unglued was sometimes people would interpret things in a way that would be a little dangerous. People were chasing people around vile vile and stuff like that. So we wanted to make sure that this was a voluntary

high five um and so we were very careful that at words that you get a life for each person that gives you a high five not that you high five meet meaning and then we said in the reminder text offer high fives don't hit people um we really we really didn't want this to be i go around smacking people and get a life for every person I smack. That's not the card. The person you're high-fiving has to be involved in the high-five. They have to voluntarily high-five you. You can't just hit people.

That's important. Also, what we did to try to also give a little fun is we made the person getting the high-five have a reward. But we had to limit the reward to people playing in a silver-bordered game because we didn't want like, you know, somebody casts this card and then somehow a real black-bordered game gets affected.

One of our rules is silver-bordered games can affect other games, but only other silver-bordered games. We made a card in Unhinged called Ass-whoopin', where you could destroy something in another game. But we made the ruling that you can't sort of, there's a barrier around blackboarder games. The silver boarder cannot pierce that barrier and affect blackboarder games. It can affect silver boarder games. We define silver boarder games as any

game in which someone's playing with a silver boarder card. But anyway, we let the person who's in a silver boarder game gain a life just because of some encouragement. And one of the fun stories I've heard is not just even the person getting the high five who's running around, but the person who gets the high five who is in a situation where that one life made the difference. And I always find it funny of, you know, like I've definitely been playing where like I'm low on life tolerance. And I see a high five and I'm like, I'm reaching my my hand up. I'm like, come on. Come on, person.

Come over here. Let's high five. But anyway, I really liked how that card turned out. Okay. Okay, next. Gnome-Made Engine. So this is a common artifact host creature construct. It's a 2-2.

And when this creature enters the battlefield, create a 1-1 colorless gn artifact host creature construct. It's a 2-2. And when this creature enters the battlefield, create a 1-1 colorless gnome artifact creature token. So this is a host creature, and it makes a little token creature. I think originally when we first made the host and suture creatures, we didn't make any artifact creatures. And this was, I think, a green creature. We made a little 1-1 green creature.

But then we realized, we were doing the math and the as fans, that we kind of needed artifact creatures to help make sure that you could fill out your... If you wanted to play Host and Suture, you wanted to give extra cards that anybody could play. So we ended up making a bunch of artifact creatures. And then what we did is we moved over the abilities that made sense in artifact. And making a token felt pretty artifact-y. And not that colors don't make tokens, but it definitely felt like that.

And then, for fun, we made it a gnome token. The artifact token in the set is a gnome token. There are a couple cards that make them. I think this is a card, by the way, that I originally had. There's no race-like gnome on. And then it got cut for some reason, and I convinced Kelly to put it on the other

card, but anyway, this was, like I said, it was a green card for quite a while. Okay. Go to Jail. So when Go to Jail enters a battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until Go to Jail leaves the battlefield. At the beginning of upkeep of the exile card's owner, that player rolls two six-sided dice. If he or she rolls doubles, sacrifice, go to jail. Okay, so we came up with this pretty cool idea. Well, we already had dice as a component, and I forget who came up with this card.

But the idea was to mimic go to jail from Monopoly. So in Monopoly, you can get a card that says go to jail, and then you don't get out of jail until you roll doubles at every turn you roll a card. And dice mattered, and we liked the idea that you were put away, but you didn't know how long, and then also the person who's in jail gets to roll dice, and sometimes that's good. And so it just was, it interacted with everything. And we liked a lot, so we liked the idea that it was kind of a nod to go to jail. So it turns out that Monopoly is a Hasbro property. So we actually said, let's go talk to Hasbro and see if we can actually just call it go to jail.

You know, we could have kind of made a subtle nod to it without it being called go to jail. And then those who were in the know would kind of figure out what we were doing. But we thought, look, we're having fun. This is Hasbro. Let's go see if we can do this. So now at Hascon, we actually made three cards that referenced other games, one of which we'll see later in the set, so Dungeon Dragons. The other two, one referenced Grimlock, referenced Transformers,

and then there was a card reference to Nerf. That's the first time we'd ever gone to talk to other, we'd ever referenced other properties outside of Wizards. But this set got made before that, and actually, Sword of Dungeons and Dragons, I'll talk about that. That was already always in the set, although Dungeons and Dragons is down the hall, so that's a lot easier to talk to.

But we did go through the steps and talk to them, and we got thumbs up from the Monopoly people. And so we actually got a call to go to jail. We even made it all caps, because it's all caps in the game. Go to jail is in all caps. So we did it in all caps. But anyway, this card has been a lot of fun,

and it really plays... It really is one of those examples where... Like, when we rolled the dice, the reason we started originally was not because we thought of dice interactions but because we thought we were able to roll dice there was dice rolling in this and it turns out that making the opponent roll dice sometimes does some weird things usually it's positive to roll dice so sometimes like i need to lock away their big creature. Oh, but I need to give them access to dice rolls. For example, on game night, I was playing... Which game was it?

I think it was the first game. I was playing Josh. And he had two creatures, one of which was, like, a 6-6 creature, and the other grew every time he rolled a certain die. The beaker, the sacred beaker. And... But I ended up... The bigger creature

was going to be more of a problem, but then he was rolling dice, so the things start getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it was really interesting on how I kind of had to get rid of the 6-6, but I was setting myself up for a danger. And I ended up solving that and won that game. But it was a really neat interaction, so I really enjoy how that's played.

Goblin Haberdasher. So this is an uncommon creature. Goblin Haddificer. A creature, Goblin Haddificer. 2-2-2-R. That's a new thing, Haddificer. And it says it's got menace. And then other creatures you control hats, other creatures

you control wearing hats in their art have menace. So first off, let me add to the questions that everyone's asking. Why wasn't this haste? Heberdasher, it was haste. That's where we started. Heberdasher granted haste. It turned out not to play particularly well. So we ended up putting menace

on, which played a little bit better. That is where we started, because Heberdasher gains haste. It just didn't play particularly well. So we ended up putting Mendous on, which played a little bit better. That is where we started, because Haberdasher gains haste. It just didn't play that well. So we went through a lot of iterations on this card. It started as Haberdasher, started as looking for hats. Not something else. I had messed around in the other

unsets about caring about art in some way, because Black Border is not allowed to care about art, because we'll do reprints and the card could have different art, but all versions of the card have to be the same mechanically. So Black Border can't care about art. So I love the idea that here's a set where, you know, Silver Border can care about that. So I like making a few art matter cards.

So this is an art matters card. Now it has led to a lot of, is this a hat? Is that a hat? So in the FAQ, I define a hat. There is a lot of nuance that goes into what exactly a hat is. The biggest question I've answered is the Brainiacs have this dome-like brain thing that has their brain in it. And the answer for that is that is not a hat. That is their head. That is not a hat. But then we got into a lot of things about helmets and this and that. So helmets are hats.

And anyway, in the FAQ, I spell out all the definition of hats. But this was, I feel like every unset, for some reason I, well, not for some reason, but there always is some card in which I have to define an English word and then go, here's what a hat is. Here's what food is. Anyway, so that hat was, this card was that for this set.

But anyway, it's a fun card, and I love the idea that you can build a deck around it, and it's my hat deck. Innistrad, by the way, has a lot of hats in it if you want to find a set with lots of hats. Okay, next. Graveyard Busybody. So it's a rare creature, human spy, star star, for four blue blues, so six mana, two which is blue. All Graveyards are

also your Graveyards. And Graveyard Busybody's power and toughness are each equal to the number of cards with flavor text in your Graveyards. So first off, I think and Toughness are each equal to the number of cards with flavor text in your graveyard. So first off, I think that the card started with just the second ability, which is gain control of everybody's graveyard. But the concern was that it didn't really do anything unto itself. about flavor checks and graveyards to make having somebody else controlling someone's graveyard mean something just within the context of this card.

The other big question is whether or not you can gain someone's graveyard in a normal game. I went and talked to Eli about this and it does a lot of weird quirky things that we decided this was the right place to put it. And I like the extra ability that gives it some meaning beyond that. And I like caring about flavor text.

So caring about flavor text on creatures and graveyards is definitely kind of interesting. So it definitely ends up being sort of a weird flavor-based lurgoyf, which is kind of cool. And as far as caring about the opponent's graveyards, there's just a lot of neat, weird things you can do.

We let you gain control of the opponent's stuff, but we don't normally let you gain control of the opponent's zone of the opponent. And so this one definitely does quirky things. Okay, next, Ground Pounder. Common creature, Goblin Warrior, 2, 2, 1, and a green. For 3 and a green, roll 6 out of die. Ground Pounder gets plus X, plus X until end of turn where X is the result. And it says whenever you roll 5 or higher out of die,

Ground Pounder gains trample until end of turn. Okay, so once we decided to bring dice back, we had dice and unglued, and then due to the poor reception of some of the cards, I didn't bring them out to unhinged. Upon further research, I realized that it was more an execution thing than dice as a whole. Because I really did enjoy how a lot of dice played. And especially because Magic has gotten a little more of a casual crowd since the early days, I decided to bring dice back.

There's a card in the original set called what is it? It's a chicken. It's a green chicken. Chicken Wall or something. I'm blanking on the name. Anyway, it has the thing where you get to roll die. You roll two dice and then it gets plus

X plus X whenever the die rolls matches, but then you sacrifice it if you ever roll... I forget what it is. So it kind of did the thing that we weren't supposed to do, which was you had upside, but you had this downside that was kind of just made you apprehensive sometimes to roll the dice. Oh, I know what it was.

You rolled the dice, and if you got doubles, you got that much bigger. But if you rolled a certain combination, then it died. Or maybe if you rolled doubles twice, it had this thing where it got bigger, but it could be destroyed. So I said, okay, let's try to take that idea, simplify it a little bit. So the idea here is it gets bigger. You only roll one die. It doesn't some of the time work. It always works. So instead of it sometimes working, sometimes not

working, now it always works. Now it scales. Plus one plus one is not as good as plus six plus six. But the idea is you want to roll the die. It's always good to roll the die. If you have the mana, of course you should roll the die. And then the idea was we gave you, we like it to scale and we like to have a lot of variance in unsets. Meaning I like the idea was we gave you, we like it to scale

and we like to have a lot of variance in unsets, meaning I like the idea that your die roll can be eh, not so much, oh my god, that's back breaking, could win the game so we decided that we wanted to give you a reward if you rolled high enough so originally what the card did was

if you rolled a 6 you got trample, but the problem we ran into was the template, because of the cards in black, squirrel power and lab squirrel, there's a bunch of cards. Oh, scheming squirrel, sorry. Lab squirrel became scheming squirrel. There's a bunch of cards in black that let you make a die roll one or two higher than normal. So you can roll higher than the six. So what we didn't want is, if we said if you roll a six, we didn't want to punish you for rolling a seven or rolling an eight. So we said, okay, well,

if you roll six or higher. But the problem is, if you don't know the existence of the black border, of the black cards that raise your die roll, it just reads really weird. If you roll't know the existence of the black border, I'm sorry, not black border, of the black cards that raise your die roll, it just reads really weird. If you roll six or higher on a six-sided die, how do I roll six or higher on a six-sided die? And it just was confusing. So the answer was to take all the cards that gave you a reward for rolling six

and make it five rather than six, five or higher. That way, if I say five or higher, it doesn't throw you because there is a higher number on a six-sided die. And we had to retweak. I think this one we didn't have to change much because the granting of trample was, well, good. It was more, it was acceptable on a five or six based on what we cost it.

But anyway, yeah, this card started, once again, this is a card that we had really early on. The dice rolling was one of the earliest things we put in the set. And like I say, other than changing the five to the six, I don't think this one changed much. Okay, next, Grusilda, Monster Masher. So she's a rare legendary creature.

She's a zombie villain, 4-4, for three black and red. So five mana, one black, one red. Combined enchanted and equipped creatures you control have menace, and three black red tap, put two target creature cards from graveyards onto the battlefield, combined into one creature under your control.

Its power is equal to their total power, its toughness is equal to their total toughness, and it has their name, mana cost, type, and text boxes. So the idea is is what she does is she combines things into these

monster mashups this is something I actually tried to do in real Black Border Magic there's a card called Dracoplasm in Tempest which is the first time I tried to do this and then Dracoplasm ended up being, you just sort of picked something and then added some other stuff on, and I think

you made it into a dragon or something. It did turn quite a bit. But I did originally try to smash two creatures together from the graveyard. The flavor was kind of fun. But anyway, it's one of those things that I tried to make, went away, and I just kind of forgot about and this was finally the time where I said oh wait because it's weird

that I'll come up with things and then I make some more and it says I just forget oh yeah here's a weird card I made so I remembered I had this card we made it such by the way

so it says combine enchanted and equipped creatures combine means anything that gets put together so the things she makes is combined. Host and suture is combined. Meld is combined.

So anytime BFM is combined. Anything, it's a new term that we made for this. But anytime you sort of put two things together. And then we added equipped and enchanted just to sort of give her a little extra, you know, a little viability. But anyway, she is one of the Cabal. There's four members of the Cabal that run the Legion of Dastardly Doom.

She is one of them. She has a little bit of a Bride of Frankenstein kind of look about her to give her a little sort of monster feel, because she herself is a zombie, so we want to give a little Frankenstein feel. She's more like a Frankenstein zombie than a necromantic zombie. But anyway, that is Grusilda. Okay, next, Half-Kidden Half.

So this is an uncommon creature, although it's an augment card. It's an uncreature cat, plus one, plus two. So what that means is, plus is power by one, and it's tough augment card, it's Uncreature Cat, plus one, plus two. So what that means is, plus is powered by one and toughness by two, and then it overrides it to make it a cat. And then whenever you're dealt damage is, the way augments work is they give you a new trigger.

So this triggers whenever you're dealt damage, and then it has the augment cost, which costs two and a white for this card. What that means is that you can spend two and a white in your hand to augment a host creature on a battlefield. So,

when we first made the augment, most of them were called half something, half something. Because we wanted you to get the idea that these were augmented. Originally, I think had kitten as a host creature but we didn't have it as a suture creature and then i think it was kelly that came up with the idea that we could have both a cat or sorry a kitten adorable kitten and have a creature that's half kitten half so that you can make the half kitten half kitten um the only mistake i think we made on this which is an awesome joke is we should have

colored this cat. We had the same artist do both cats, and the cats look the same. We should have had the cats be different colors. So half kitten, half kitten is the same adorable kitten, just half of it is like tabby, and half of it is black. I think that would have been a funnier joke. But anyway, this thing

is pretty potent if you ever played half kitten, half kitten. It is, because adorable kitten gets you D6 life, this thing is pretty potent if you ever played Half Kitten, Half Kitten. Uh, it is, uh, because Adorable Kitten gets you, uh, D6 life. Uh, and this is whenever you take damage. So the cool part about getting Half Kitten, Half Kitten is anytime someone damages, you gain up to six life. So there's times in which someone will damage you and you go up in life. Uh, I actually, on my, if you watch my, my, uh, the same game I was talking about playing with Josh on the, the first game on Game Nights. Um, when we did the Unstable show. You can see me get a half kitten, half kitten.

Okay, we go on to the next. Oh, we have a bunch of these in a row because we're in the halfs. Half orc half is an uncommon creature. Orc warrior gives plus three, plus one. It has trample, and they have the beginning of each end step if opponent was dealt damage this turn with an augment of one RR.

So once we had the naming convention of half end step, if an opponent was dealt damage this turn, with an augment of one RR. So once we had the naming convention of half, blank, half, so in D&D, you can play an orc, but there's also half orcs. I believe half orcs are one of your parents is an orc, and one is a human, I believe. It's a cross between humans and orcs, just like half elf.

But anyway, half orc is a D&D joke, and we were already doing some D&D jokes, so we decided to do Half-Orc. And this is one of the ones that grants you an ability when you put it on, that not only do you get plus three, plus one, but it also gets trample. And then this thing is an end-of-turn trigger that cares about whether or not you've done damage. And the nice thing about it is the creature itself has trample, so it increases the chance that you got some damage through to the opponent. So it sort of helps enable that you maybe can make this happen. Next, half shark half. So this is an uncommon creature. It's a fish,

grants you plus three, plus three at the beginning of your upkeep, and then augment five blue. So this is, it literally just happens every turn. You don't have to do anything. It just happens every turn. So this one costs a lot. It costs six mana to augment. But it can definitely do something pretty cool. So the interesting thing about this is, in the original,

if you ever saw the first mock-up of Host and Suture we made, Dan Emmons, one of my team members, actually drew it, it was there's a card called Card Shark that was a creature that drew you cards and then there was, we put I think we put Half Ninja

at the time we called it Half Ninja Half rather than, now it's called Ninja. So that card was I think Half Shark Half is what was the ninja card, I believe. Or maybe the ninja card is when you do adult damage. Anyway, we decided to put the shark in the front half.

I'm not sure why, in retrospect. The back half has this, anyway. We were trying to figure out what was funnier, the front half or the back half. I mean, the front half has all the teeth, obviously. And maybe we snuck in the fin. I guess the fin's the most identifiable thing for a shark. But anyway, we ended up... So there is a shark.

So you can't have half a shark, and you can't have half a ninja, but you can have a ninja with a shark. I did like the card drawing card being card shark. I thought that was funny. But it ended up being merman. I think that was the card drawing card being card shark. I thought that was funny. But it ended up being merman. I think that was the card. So we had always planned for there to be a shark.

There ended up being a shark. It just didn't quite end up on the half we thought it was going to be. But I do like the card. And, by the way, half shark, half man, which is on the merman, where every turn you draw a card, is a really good combo. Although this is a good combo just for everything, because it's just like every turn it happens. That's pretty good. So if you're drafting Half Shark, it's really good.

Also really good is Half Squirrel. Half Squirrel Half. So Half Squirrel Half is an uncommon creature. It's a squirrel. It gets minus one, minus zero. So whenever a non-token creature enters the battlefield, augment G. So this thing is

very cheap to augment. It is the only one that grants you minus, it lowers your power. But whenever a non-token creature enters the battlefield it's a pretty potent it's a pretty potent trigger.

It's funny. Half squirrel, half pony, by the way. We ended up having a rad ordinary pony, which I'll get to eventually. Because half squirrel, half pony basically just was an infinite combo that as long as you had any other... Enter the battlefield effect, which is any host creature, it just just went off infinitely which proved to be a little too much so we had to

We had to tweak the pony, but anyway it's nice to know that one of the that the dangerous combo of Of the set was half squirrel half pony so anyway Next hammer helper. It's a common sorcery. It costs three and a red. So, four mana, one of which is red. Gain control of target creature until end of turn. Untap that creature and roll a six-sided die.

Until end of turn, it gains haste and gets plus X plus O, where X is the result. This is another challenge we have in making Uncards. They have to be silver-bordered. So, this is us saying, hey, we want to have a threading effect. How do we make it un? Well, one of the reasons using dice is really nice is it's a very easy way to add stuff on. So this is like, oh, I steal it and then I boost it. Well, how do I boost it? Oh, I roll a die. This is another one we made pretty early on. But it's a good example why dice are just a really, really valuable tool for the unsets.

It allows us to make a lot of pretty simple, straightforward cards that are... Like, if die rolling existed in Black Border, this is the kind of card we... Maybe we do in Black Border. I mean, there's reasons we don't do die rolling because of the variants. But, I mean, this is... As far as what it's doing, it is a pretty straightforward card. Yeah, yeah, it's die rolling, but... This is the kind of thing,

like a lot of cards we can't put on the, like we can never ever program a magic online. The dice rolling cards you can, very clean, very straightforward, not going to cause any problems. Computers know how to roll dice. So anyway, I like this card because it's clean and straightforward.

Oh, also, by the way, another little thing we added into the goblin explosion errors is when they were designing the faction, they came up with this idea that the goblins were obsessed with hammers, which ended up playing throughout the set. If you look at it, it's a running joke throughout all the goblins, and they're obsessed with hammers. And so it's just kind of funny that this is somebody who's like a goblin that

he's the fixer for getting you hammers, because everybody needs their hammer. So anyway, I thought that was kind of funny. Next, Hammerfest Boomtacular. Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped Hammer Jammer. Hammer Jammer. So Hammer Jammer is an uncommon creature, Goblin Warrior, 0-0 for three and a red,

so four mana, one which is red. As Hammer Jammer enters the battlefield, roll a six-sided die. Hammer Jammer enters the battlefield with a number of-sided die. Hammer Jammer enters the battlefield with a number of plus-level counters on it equal to the roll. And then whenever you roll a die, remove all plus-level counters from Hammer Jammer and then put that many on it.

So the idea is when you play him, you roll a die to set what his power toughness is, but then anytime you roll a die for anything, it resets his power toughness. If you roll two dies at the same time, like for go to jail, you get to pick which one you want.

But anyway, the idea essentially is he's a guy who's as big as your latest die rolling, which is a lot of fun because it makes you really think about when you want to roll your dice. And it definitely creates some fun interaction. Like, do you want to roll, is he low enough that you want to use your die-rolling card

before he attacks, so maybe he's bigger? Or, no, no, no, he's already big. You want to attack first with him, and then roll later. That's kind of cool stuff like that. And, you know, I... It's a fun card that has a lot of neat interactions. Okay, last card for today, because I'm at work, but I'll finish up my Hammer stuff.

Hammerfest Boomtacular. So I want to tell you, this is the one card well, actually, let me tell you what the card does, and I'll give you my little note about it. It's an uncommon enchantment for three red red, so it costs five mana, two of which is red. So

whenever you cast a spell with a goblin explosion watermark, Hammerfest Boom Tactical deals two damage to target creature or player. Um, so this is the site, uh, I explained earlier with, um, uh, Rumor of My Death, is there's an uncommon cycle of, uh, faction watermark matters that you can build around in draft. This is the one for the goblins. Um, so the idea here is that one for the goblins. So, the idea here is that whenever you

cast a spell, it has it. So, my note on this card is, it's the one card where I wanted a different name. I think the name I wanted A, didn't fit, and B, I think they wanted to have a name more themed. My name, by the way, was Totally Original

Red Uncommon. And the reason I wanted that name is, this is an effect we do all the time when we care about something, we want to care about it, and we want to draft around it. It's like, okay, here's a red uncommon that says whenever you do this thing, you know, you cast a card with this effect, or you use this effect, or whatever. Whenever you do the thing in question, hey, you get a shock. I think the first one was done whenever you cycled a card. Lightning, what was it called? Lightning, I'm blanking on the name.

Okay, you guys are yelling out the name. But anyway, there's a card in Onslaught. Whenever you cycle the card, you've got to do, you've got to shock something. You've got to do two damage to something. And that card went over so well. Lightning Rift, Lightning Rift. That card went over so well. Lightning Rift. That card went over so well that it's something we do all the time.

It's just an easy go-to place. It's a fun build around. People get it. And so it just seemed like I was looking at different things to do here. I'm like, why am I fighting the inevitable? This is just a cool, clean effect. So then I named it

Totally Original Red Uncommon. Anyway, I don't think the name fit. We weren't doing... In the past, we've done some names that were bigger than normal. We weren't doing that this time. And Kelly, I think, really wanted... He had a fun, creative... The Goblin sort of the fest.

Anyway, it's less music and more straightforward hearing damage. Anyway, that, my friends, it's less music and more straightforward hearing damage. Anyway, that, by the friends, that's Hammerfest Boop Dracula. Okay, so I will continue on next time. Obviously, I have a lot more cards to talk about. I hope you guys are enjoying this. There are a lot of neat things to discuss.

But anyway, I'm at work. So we all know what that means. 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.