Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #582: Creature Types

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

This podcast talks about how Magic uses creature types and the role they play in design.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped my son off at camp. Okay, so today I'm going to talk a bit about the history of the creature type. So technically speaking, creature types are a subtype of creature. They're a creature subtype. But creature types have started since the beginning of the game and are the one element of the game that kind of really straddles the line between flavor and mechanics. And so I'm going to talk all about the history of the creature type today. So I'm a big fan of the creature type, and as you will see, I've been very involved

in the evolution of the use of the creature type. So we're going to talk about that today. So today is a history day. We go back and we learn about sort of how things happen behind the scenes. And in some case, in front of the scenes. Okay, so let's begin with Alpha. So creature types go all the way back to Alpha. Now, when the game first came out, the way they were written, it didn't say creature or subtype. It said summon. So, if

you were a goblin, it would just say summon goblin. It was done for flavor because the idea was creatures are, you summon all the creatures and but it was weird in that it was, the creature cards didn't specifically say anywhere

on them that they were creatures. Um, clearly they implied that they had power toughness. You know, it definitely, you kind of knew they were creatures, but it didn't state that they were creatures. And, um, eventually I think in, I think it was sixth edition rules updated it, um, updated to say that it's now that it was a creature. It might have happened slightly before that. But anyway, but when the game began, creature types existed.

Although, there were a couple rules. One was that there was only one creature type per creature. So if you were a goblin, you would just be a goblin. Pretty much the way it worked is you tended to be your race unless you were just a human and then you were sort of your class, you're what you did. So, if you were a goblin soldier, you were a goblin. But if you were a human soldier, you were a soldier. So, what happened

from very early in magic is both races and classes existed, but usually the only time you saw classes were on humans because if you were some other race, we'd tell you. If you were an elf, we'd say you're an elf.

If you were a goblin, we'd say you're a goblin. If you were a human, we didn't say you were a human. Instead, we'd say what class you were. I think the reason this might have been done early on was not any

anti-human thing. It was just a concern from Richard that too many of the cards would just be human. Because a lot of early magic, there were a lot of humans in early magic. Not that there's not still a decent number. But early magic had a significant amount of humans.

And so I think just to help divvy them up a little bit and keep you from just having all the cards be humans, they made the classes. And the other thing that was interesting was early on,

they had to sort of figure out what you were. So like now, there's some flexibility. Now if you're two different things, we can say you're two different things. But back then, well, okay, are you more this or more that?

And they would figure it out. And pretty much for the classes, if you had a race that wasn't human, the race tended to supersede. Now, artifact creatures got no creature type. When the game began, if you were an artifact creature type, you know, stuff like golem and things,

I mean, clearly there were things that were golems because the golem was in their name, but there was no creature type for it. And so for many years, artifact creatures just didn't have a creature type. Now, when you go back to Alpha,

creature types mechanically mattered pretty early on. I mean, they mattered in Alpha. But not a lot, interestingly. So there were three lords in Alpha. There was Goblin King, who was not a goblin. There was Lord Atlantis, who helped merfolk, although he was not a merfolk. And there was zombie...

Zombie Master? There was a lord for zombies. I think zombie master. Anyway, each one of them were a lord subtype to imply that they led things but they weren't their own creature type. Later, we would

errata them such that they were their creature type but they only affected other things which was slight technical errata out of them such that they were their creature type, but they only affected other things. Which was slight technical errata because if I had two Goblin Kings out before two Goblin Kings out nothing happened. Now they each make the other one bigger, although they don't make themselves

bigger. But it was really weird to have the Goblin King and have a picture of him and he's clearly a goblin and say, oh, he's not a goblin because he looks like a goblin. But we'll get to the grand creature update. Okay, so the way it worked in Alpha was creature types

were mostly flavor. But as with the Goblin King... Oh, also, the thing with the Goblin King and the Lord of Atlantis and the Zombiemaster is there weren't a lot like, for example, Lord of Atlantis, the only merfolk in the entire game at the time was merfolk of the Pearl Trident,

which was a 1-1 for a single blue mana. And the idea was, when Magic first came out, there was no deck construction limits. You could play as many copies of a card as you wanted. So the idea was, if I wanted to play a bunch of Lord Atlantis, I could play as many merfolk as I wanted, but that was the only merfolk that existed. Goblin King had two goblins.

It had Mons Goblin Raiders and Goblin Balloon Brigade, both of which were 1-1 for a red mana. The Balloon Brigade, which was uncommon, could fly for red activation. So it was kind of strictly better than Mons Goblin Raiders, but maybe you didn't have access to both, and Mons was a common. And then the zombie, zombie master, is that right? There was, I think, just one zombie at the time.

And the interesting thing is Arabian Nights had no merfolk or goblins or zombies in it. Antiquities, I think, had no merfolk or goblins or zombies in it. Antiquities, I think, had no merfolk or goblins or zombies in it. Legends was the first set, I believe, that had another zombie. Headless Horseman was a zombie. And I'm not even sure if it had merfolk or goblins in it. I think it did. Well, eventually what would happen, I know the Dark had goblins in it, and the Dark had merfolk in it. So eventually you started seeing more of that. But early on, it wasn't referenced all that much, and usually the

only time we referenced creature types in early Magic tended to be on lords and things. Like, oh, I helped. As time would go on, we would start stretching that a bit more. Okay, in Legends, which was the third expansion, we introduced

a new creature type, Legend. So Legendary was originally a creature type on creatures. It was super type on not creatures, interestingly. So a land would be a legendary land, but a creature was a creature legend. Now, because you can only have one creature

type, and all legendary creatures were legends, none of the, so in legends there was a whole bunch of multicolored creatures at uncommon and rare and they were all of them, every single gold card was a legend a gold creature. Well, there only were

all the gold cards were creatures and they were all legends. So none of them really had any creature types. So for a while, I mean, we eventually would fix this, but the legendary creatures, they weren't anything. They were just legendary. Now, also, when the game began, Legend and there was another creature, Wall, carried rules text.

Wall basically had Defender built into it. And it said, oh, well, if you're a wall, you can't attack. And Legends, the original rule for Legend, A, there was a deck construction that you can only have one in your deck. Although that's more deck construction rules. And the Legend rule was, if this is in play, no card with the same name can be played. So once somebody gets down a copy of whatever, a Bob, nobody else

can play Bob. Bob's already there. And it would lock you out from playing other copies of it. Over the years, we would change that. I mean, how Legend works. Now what happened was, I don't remember the timing of this, at some point, we decided

that we didn't like having the baggage of Wall and Legend. And that wouldn't happen for a while. Because I know that

might not have happened until we get to the Grand Creature update that actually loses their... Somewhere along the way, Wall stopped automatically having Defender. We started making the mechanic Defender, and then all Walls happened to have Defender.

So if you saw Wall, all the old Walls sort of got errata to have Defender, so they worked the way they always worked. But it allowed us to put Defender on things that weren't Wall. So for flavor purposes, if you had a guard that was standing guard that wouldn't leave you, then it could also have Defender. And then Legend eventually became Legendary so that all the things that were Legendary,

it was supertype on all of them. It was kind of odd that it was a supertype on some things and a subtype on others. That was weird. a super tribe on some things and a subtype on others. That was weird. Um, so the first set I work on is Tempest or the first set I lead. Um, and one of the things I was very interested in, as was my team was I liked tribal stuff. I enjoyed the tribal theme. So, um, come Tempest, uh, Um, come Tempest, uh, we, we put both Slivers and Lissids in the set. Um, and we started sort of, uh, like Slivers, for example, was a race where the entire race was tribally based. Um, inspired by the way, by Plague Rats.

Um, Mike, um, Mike Elliott made the Slivers. Um, he had actually made a set of his own called After Ways. I've talked about this. I did a whole sliver podcast. But anyway, he made a set and then before he got to Wizards and then he, when he came to Wizards,

they bought the set and then we put that into Tempest. And you can see as we go along that we start making use of creature types more and more as signifiers. You can see, for example, that masks have spell shapers. There's rebels and mercenaries as well.

In fact, one of our problems was instead of having keywords that were labeled and named keywords, Mike just put things onto creature types and then sort of the idea was, oh, this is what mercenaries do, this is what rebels do, this is what spell shapers do.

And while those were new mechanics, the fact that they weren't named and they were sort of tied to actual creature types made people kind of miss that they were sort of tied to actual creature types made people kind of miss that they were new mechanics. So anyway, here's the behind the scenes story going on is I really think that creature types have a lot of mechanical use to them. mechanical use to them.

So what happens is in Odyssey I decide that I'm going to just make some creature types or some creatures that have more than one creature type. For example, we have the Aven which are the bird people. And rather than just make them birds, I made them bird soldiers.

And then Nantuko I think were insect druids. And the idea was I was like, well, we've never seen Avon before. I'm just going to say these are what Avon are. Avon are bird soldiers. That's just a thing. They're bird soldiers.

And so you can see the earliest sort of me starting to mess around. The other thing that I did for those that know your history, in Odyssey, I also experimented with trying to do some of the less common creature types. Instead of goblins, we had dwarves. Instead of elves, we had centaurs. Instead of merfolk, well, we had cephalids. I'm not sure that was the best experiment. But I was

very cognizant of trying to sort of have new type of creature types and play around and expand with what creature types could be. And there's a lot of behind the scenes of me sort of pushing to try to stretch a little bit what we could do. And Odyssey is a good example where, you know, you can just see on the Avens and then in Tuco and stuff that I'm just, I'm pushing where I can. Oh, the other interesting thing was Odyssey Block was the creative team had left for various reasons.

And we were in the process of getting to building up a new creative team. And so I was asked by Bill to oversee names and flavor text and creature types for Odyssey. Which I did. And you can tell that once I'm in charge of creature types, I start messing around a little more with them. I start branching out which ones we do. I start putting more than one on a card. You can see that I'm definitely sort of trying to stretch the muscles a little bit of how we can use creature types. Okay.

Then comes Onslaught. So Onslaught was interesting. So Mike Elliott had made the set. And I had been brought in after it had been handed over to... Bill was trying to figure out... It was a little bit disconnected. He was trying to know what the set was about. And Mike had made these misformed creatures that were creatures that could change their own creature type.

But the set didn't have a lot in the set that actually cared about creature type. So I saw this as an opportunity to pitch something that I'd been wanting to pitch for a while, which is the idea of tribal as a theme, that creature types could be a theme for a set. So what happened was Bill had asked me if, you know, he wanted me to look at the file and said, you know,

sort of give my opinion. And I said it was a little, it wasn't as focused as I like to see the sets. It needed an identity. And so seeing that Mike was playing around in sort of around the periphery of creature types, I went to Bill and I made the following argument. I said, if you go out and look decks that people play. At the time, I used to go to a lot of conventions at the time, and we would do this thing called Deck Clinic. And the way Deck Clinic worked is anybody could bring their deck,

they would show it to you, you know, a Wizards person, and I would give them feedback on how to make it better. And one of the things that was really interesting, because it really gave me an insight into what were people playing because I was fixing decks. and tribal themes were very popular and so what I said to Bill I said look here's what I find interesting tribal themes are popular people bend over backwards to build tribal themes and they suck they suck so here's how you know that people like something when they bend over backwards to play something that sucks, that means there's something there that people really like.

And I said, look, I just, you've seen it. You've seen goblin decks and merfolk decks and zombie decks. You've seen those. They're something that players really enjoy building.

What if we actually made it the theme for a block? And I said, you know, the remnants are there. Mike has the component pieces. We have to dial it up a bit. And so Bill agreed. And the thing that happened was

sort of Mike and I had a lot of back and forth and I kept just raising up the volume. I'm like, no, it can be louder. No, it can be louder. And anyway, Onslaught eventually i mean mike mike finally understood i mean it took me a little while to convince mike but he finally sort of got on board and saw the value of the tribal stuff um and so uh onslaught was our first tribal tribal set um tribal block actually and, in it, I think it was

in Legions, um, I made a card. Mike had made the Mistforms. The way the Mistforms worked is you could spend a mana to, um, change their creature type. Um, and they were a cool part of the set because

they sort of tied together the various tribal cards. And in fact, we'll get to Lorwyn in a second, but when I made, when I was working on, I think it was Legion's, I designed a card called

Mistform Ultimis. And Mistform Ultimis was all creature types. He was legendary. He was a legendary creature, but it was all creature types. He was legendary. He was a legendary creature, but it was all creature types. And at the time, the way I know that we hadn't changed the wall rules yet, I think we had changed legendary at that point. I think we had.

Because he was legendary, I believe. Or maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it didn't matter that... Well, the one thing we didn't miss from Ultimis is we said it can attack as if it wasn't a wall. So it was all creature types, but being a wall didn't make it not be able to attack. And later that would get errata'd,

because wall would no longer, by definition, make you not be able to attack. And so that errata would tick that off. But anyway, Mists from Altus, I really liked the idea of something that was legendary that just was everything. You didn't have to make it everything. It just was everything. Okay.

So Onslaught comes about, and we're really pushing tribal as a theme. So I felt like it was time to go to the next level. So the next project was something that I cared about. And I talked a lot with the creative team. And they were all on board. Was the idea of race class. So I talked about earlier that every creature type had one creature type on it. Either it was its race, it was a goblin, it was an elf, or it was its class.

Oh, real quick, quick aside. One of the things that we realized as we started to identify race and class was that there are these hybrids. And what I mean by that is, some things it's very clear what they are. And some things like, oh, is that a race? Is that a class? The two classic ones are zombie and vampire. Like zombie. Like clearly you could have a zombie soldier,

which usually if there was no race listed, it meant you're human. For some reason zombies, if they're human, we don't list it. But if you're another race, we do. Or you could be a zombie goblin. So, you know, zombie kind of cross between, are you a race or a class? Same with a vampire. Like, is

a vampire a race? But also, it's kind of a thing you do. So the idea of a race class was in Dungeon Dragons, you have a race and you have a class. So for example are you human? Are you

elf? Are you half elf? Are you a dwarf? There's a bunch of different choices of what you can be. And then the classes, are you a fighter? Are you a cleric? Are you a wizard? What race are you of? And then what's your job, essentially? What do you do?

And race class has been very effective for Dungeon Dragons. And so, one of the things I wanted was I just wanted to get more creature types onto the card. And the reason I wanted to do it was somewhat selfish, in that it just made, gave you more mechanical identity and made you care more. And also, my thought was, let's say I have a goblin warrior. Well, if I want to care about goblins,

why shouldn't I care about him? If I want to care about warriors, why shouldn't I care about him? Like, the fact, it just was weird that like, oh, well, if I want to care about soldiers, I guess it's human soldiers because, you know, everything else is defined by its race. So anyway, I talked a lot

with the creative team about it. And Mirrodin was where we were changing over, in 8th edition, I guess we had changed the card types so we decided to make a push and try to convince the powers that be in R&D that we wanted to start doing race class obviously by the way I think I figured out during onslaught block that we really

should have race class it just couldn't get done fast enough to make it happen during Onslaught, which is weird, since Onslaught's the set that really wanted to have... I mean, it was a tribal set.

So it's quirky that the set after, the block after the tribal set is when we sort of revamp tribal. But in some ways, Onslaught really... I think once people... So one of the stories about Onslaught is, so Onslaught has morph in it, which is a cool, a really cool mechanic. And so a bunch of R&D folks thought that what was going to be the defining thing about the

Onslaught block was that it had morph. And I had said in meetings, I said, no, guys people will like Morph. Morph's a very fun mechanic but it's a tribal block. That's what the takeaway is going to be. It's a tribal block. So we went to the pre-release and everybody's like, oh, it's a tribal block. Everyone's all excited about being a tribal block and, you know, Arne came back in a meeting and everyone, not everybody, but a lot of people were like, wow, they really, so I mean, they like Morph, And everyone, not everybody, but a lot of people were like, wow, they really, so I mean, they like more, but this is a tribal block.

And I'm like, I've been saying that for months. For months, I've been saying that. So I think the success of OnSlot kind of loosened people up to the idea that creature types played a little bit more of an importance. And I think that's part of the reason why. So what happened was, in order, a little behind the scenes, is in order to make a change like this, R&D will have meetings. At the time, this probably was the Tuesday Magic meeting because nowadays it would be card crafting,

but we didn't have card crafting back then. So Brady Dobermuth made a presentation, and it was talking about, like, here's how this is used in other games and why this is important. And then I had provided a bunch of material about why mechanically it would matter if we did that, like why it would increase design space. And anyway, we went and we pitched it. And I know there was some hesitancy at the time.

The biggest holdup, by the way, was in order to raise class, it made us do something we had been avoiding doing, which is label humans as human. And a bunch of people were very uncomfortable with naming humans. I don't know if it brought it too close to home. I'm not quite sure why, what the concern was. But what we said at the time was, it was interesting, we said, well, you know, we don't have to care about human as a race too often.

You know, we could just have it be a race, but not name it, you know. Now, in the back of my head, I knew one day we'd care about humans. Obviously, we did, as you all know. But when you're doing behind the scenes and people are worried about something, you're like, well, you know, we'll get to that bridge when we come to it. I don't think we have a need to do that right now. And it took us a bunch of years before humans mattered. In fact, I think humans didn't matter until Innistrad. I think Innistrad's the first set where there was human tribal.

And the reason for that was we were doing a tribal, the set had a tribal component to it, and we cared about the other four, the monsters, if you will. The vampires, the werewolves, the zombies, and the spirits. And so, it was weird to not care about human, just because there are a bunch of things you wanted to do, where it's like, oh, well, this helps

only humans, or helps anything but a human. It was a very clean divider between monsters and not monster. Okay. So, Mirrodin was successful. We managed to get race class across. And then, you know, humans finally become a thing. And then comes Lorwyn.

So Lorwyn was... Lorwyn was the next time we'd done a tribal sort of set. And this time, it's funny. Remember I was saying, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up to Mike? In the end, I think Onslaught actually ended up being a little low. But when we came back to do Lorwyn, we definitely juiced it up again and said, okay, we're turning this to 11. Probably was a little too high. Looking back on it, I think Lorwyn probably pushed it a little too much. A little bit too much on rails for what they say in the draft, which is like once you

committed to a creature type, it was hard to sort of not just draft that creature type. Okay, so Lorwyn had a big theme of tribal. And there were eight tribes, to see if I can remember them. It was merfolk, elves, goblins. So a lot of the basics. Treefolk, elementals, fairies, and Kit-Kit. Did I say there were eight?

Did I say eight? I? Did I say eight? I feel like I'm missing one. And wizards? And wizards. No, no, no, no. Sorry. We waited for class until morning tide. What was the last one? So it was goblins, elves, merfolk.

Oh, zombies. Zombies. And the way it worked was each monocolor had one. So white had kithkins, blue had merfolk, black had zombies, red had goblins, green had elves. And then we had elementals and treefolk and fairies that crossed over and were different colors. The other thing we were playing around with in Lorwyn

was when Shadowmoor came, we shifted the colors a little bit to give you sort of, oh, well, part of the... I mean, this in the end wasn't a great idea, but the flavor was, oh, the elves are kind of mean and they're green and black. But when the Aurora comes, hey, while they're still mean, they're kind of the nicest ones in this world. And so they become green and white rather than green and black. And there was a sort of subtle shift in color in all of them.

And then in Morning Tide we did class matters where for each color it was wizards or soldiers. Each color had a class that mattered. And we made this grid where because we were doing race class

I'm sorry, we weren't at this point we were doing race class. Because we were doing race class, I'm sorry, we weren't, no, we weren't, yeah, at this point we were doing race class. Because we were doing race class, your goblin soldier could care about, goblins could care about it, and soldiers could care about it. Now, when we were doing this, I realized that we were, we needed to sort of get some glue

to hold it all together, and that's when I thought back to Mistform Altanus, which was a card I talked about making during... I made during Onslaught Block. And the idea was, what if we just made a creature that had all creature types and it being Changeling?

Then Changeling was a mechanic. So if you had Changeling, you just had all the creature types. And then what had happened was people really, really liked Mistform Ultimis. And there's this weird dynamic sometimes when people like a particular card to not repeat it because it'll make the card less special. But one of the things we realize in making making Magic when you have so many cards to make is like, you know what? The card can be less special. Magic doesn't have

a luxury to go, here's a cool thing people really enjoy. We'll do it on one card. That just isn't, you know. And so I said, okay, people like this card. We're just going to expand it and made a whole bunch of changelings. Changelings were nice because they allowed card, we're just going to expand it. And made a whole bunch of changelings. You know, changelings were nice because they allowed you to sort of take cards that cared about different creature types and play them together. In fact, one of the things you could draft

was, there were a couple different ways to draft changeling decks. Where it's kind of like a bunch of changelings and then all the different things that cared about creature type. Because all of them, changeling would, you know, all of them would affect changeling. because all of them would affect Changeling. Also during Lorwyn, because we were kind of focused on creature types and it felt thematic to Lorwyn, we did what was called the Grand Creature Type Update.

And the reason we did it is there were a lot of cards that were clearly something, but technically weren't. So a classic example is a Goblin Rock Sled Team from, I think, The Dark. And it was a flavorful Goblin card where these goblins, they're riding basically a sled down rocks. Not little bright, those goblins. But the problem was, it was given the creature type of rock sled. And, I mean, it was called Goblin Rock Sled, and clearly in the art it was goblins. And there was a lot of goblin tribal.

People cared about goblins. And so what would happen is somebody who just didn't know any better would go, okay, well, clearly it's a goblin. It says it's a goblin in the name. It shows that it's a goblin in the art. It's clearly a goblin. And they would play in a tournament, and they'd want to interact with some goblin card, and somebody who knew the rules better would go, excuse me, that is not a goblin. So we decided we would go back and we fixed a bunch of things. So A, there are a whole bunch of legends that didn't have any creature types because they had just been legends. And now that we had moved legend to a super type, they in fact had no creature types.

So we went back and we fixed all the legends. We went back and gave creature types to the early artifact creatures that didn't have a creature type. We also went back and said, okay, if you're a supported creature type and it's clear that you're that, it's in your name or it's just, it's in your art in a way that you can't miss, we're just going to label what that is. Now,

there's a lot of gray area and one of the sort of controversial things about the Grand Tribal update is that some of the changes aren't so obvious. Like, some are. Like, okay, Goblin King is a goblin. He looks like a goblin. He's a goblin. Goblin Roxlet

is a goblin. Look, it says goblin. It is a goblin. But there were some that were a little subtler, where we had to make some sort of calls about what something was. Is this human? Is it not human? Remember, by the way, we had to add human in, because none of the early cards had human. So every single card that was a human

had to have human added in the Grand Creature Update. So in the end, we updated a whole mess of cards. A lot of it made things more intuitive, but some of it, not all of it. Like, the story we tell is, I think Mike Turney is at an event, Not all of it. The story we tell is, I think Mike Turney is at an event and he is playing, I don't even remember what the

card is. It's some archer or something. And it's something where his opponent is playing an effect that's going to answer something, but he needs to name creature types. So Mike says to him, what is the creature type? What creature type are you naming? And so he looks at Mike's cards and he names whatever it was. I don't know whether it was a soldier that became an archer or an archer that became a soldier, but he names what is printed on the card. And then Mike says, well, sorry, that's not what the card actually is. It's been eroded.

And, well, I mean, it was one of those things where, like, technically Mike was in the correct in the sense that it was, in fact, what Mike said. So, I mean, Mike wasn't breaking any rules or anything. And to be honest, on the Pro Tour, look, people play super tight. It's the Pro Tour. There's a lot on the line. But we realized what a feel-bad moment that was. That like, I'm not sure what the card is. I literally pick up the card.

I look at it. I look at what's written on the card. I look at what the card seems to imply. I name that and then, nope, that's not what it is. And so we realized that we have to be careful when we go back and do things. Like, there are a lot of things that, like, one of the classic examples is, I think if I had it to do all over again, I'd be tempted to, like, have Phyrexian, for example, be a creature type. There's some cool things you could do where you affect Phyrexians.

But the Phyrexians showed up a bunch of times without a creature type. And so it felt weird. Like, we kind of passed the point a bunch of times without a creature type and so it felt weird like we kind of passed the point where it got to be a creature type but I don't think we get to just go back the Grand Creature Type made me realize that there's a lot of confusion that can be made that when the cards are what they say they are

that's kind of good and we fixed most of the intuitively weird things where like it's clearly clearly clearly a goblin yet somehow it's not a goblin um so we try to make sure stuff like that and we are much more exacting now like the way creature types work um is design has the ability to make something a particular creature type if it's mechanically relevant. But if not, then the creative team has the luxury when concepting the card to make it whatever they want to make it to fit the flavor of the card. So the idea is I make a red creature. Does it need to be a goblin or whatever? Let's say, for example, there's a goblin tribal in the

set, that there's a card that cares about goblins. And I want to make sure that there's enough goblins that if you want to play that card, there's enough goblins. We will label and say... Either we label and say, this needs to be a goblin, or sometimes what we do is we say to them, end number of cards.

Some number of cards needs to be... You know, like, oh, we need to have six goblins. Three commons, three uncommons. You could pick which ones you want to be, you know, like, oh, we need to have six goblins, three commons, three uncommons. You could pick which ones you want to be the goblins. And sometimes there's cards in which, oh, well, this affects goblins and we want it to affect itself, so it needs to be a goblin. So sometimes we sort of specify it has to be. Sometimes we're laying out larger general works about what we need to give creative a little more flexibility. Like, oh, for the ass fan, we need three commons, three uncommons. You can

choose whatever you want for that to be true. Oh, the one thing we did, by the way, the one joke which I thought was pretty funny, we did do a joke during the Grand Creature Type update. The only creature that we did not give a creature type to that has no creature type is Nameless Race. We

thought that was kind of funny. But everything else, we made sure that it has a creature type to it. One of the reasons that's also important, and the reason why it came up in the first place, is we've made cards, for example, that affect things, and the way it affects them is naming a creature type. And it was very odd to say, okay, pick a creature type, and the artifact just didn't have a creature type, even though in some cases it even was like an artificial version, you know, it's a metal dragon. Okay, all dragons get a

bonus, and you can argue, well, it's not a real dragon, it's a metal mechanical dragon. But we, anyway, we finally put that on there so stuff like that could get affected. So as of Battle Bond, there are 238 unique creature types some of which, not all of them

are ones, like we have ones we support and we, sort of three buckets, there is support in that we do them on some regularity, there is don't support and we consciously don't make any more of them, and then there is the middle round which is, well sometimes we do it but it's not on a regular basis consciously don't make any more of them. And then there is the middle round, which is well, sometimes

we do it, but it's not on a regular basis. And sort of what's in what bucket has changed. Like one of the big things recently is we finally made a minion after not doing minions forever. Part of the Grand Creature update was we retired some creature types, and most of them have stayed retired.

But there's a few like minion that there were some people really wanted to see a minion come back, so eventually we brought back a minion. creature types. And most of them have stayed retired. But there's a few like Minion. People really wanted to see Minion come back. So eventually we brought back Minion. There also are some creature types like Squirrel and Beeble. There's a few that sort of the creative team just aren't fans of.

And so we mostly keep them out of Black Border. Silver Border, we'll do both of those. I guess Squirrels occasionally gets done in Black Border and supplemental sets. But anyway, there's definitely some of that. One of the ongoing things in general is we've realized that players like Tribal, so every set has some Tribal to it. Sometimes it's just a little bit, you know, like something like Kaladesh cared about thopters and servos and things, but just a little bit where you go to Amonkhet the very next block and like zombies were a big, big part of the block. And so zombie tribal was

a big part of what was going on. One of the things in general, when we do tribal nowadays is if we mechanically care about the tribe, we tend to put it in two colors, just to give you some flexibility, help Asvan for draft, and just make it a little more dynamic in how it can be used. So, for example, zombies in Shadows of Innistrad was blue-black, where zombies in Amonkhet was white-black. So normally, for most creature types, they're centered somewhere. Zombies are centered in black. But if we find the right

place and time, like vampires is another example where we've found places to do blue vampires and red vampires and white vampires. We are a little bit more willing to bleed creature types than we are mechanics from a color-pice perspective

that, yes, merfolk are based blue, but if you give me a reason bleed creature types than we are mechanics from a color pipe perspective that yes, merfolk are based blue, but if you give me a reason and a place why they might be a secondary color to something else, we're much more flexible with that. And we're more willing to sort of bleed creature type flavor than we are sort of mechanics. Mostly because bleeding mechanics

literally breaks down the game, where bleeding creature types adds some flavor but doesn't particularly cause too much harm. Anyway, how we doing on time today? Just a little bit of traffic. So that is me talking all about creature types. So creature types have definitely evolved

over the years and we've definitely changed things but if anything, it's become more ingrained. I didn't get too much into it. Obviously, Innistrad did a small tribal theme. Ixalan is the latest one where we did a bigger tribal theme. It is something we continue to do this day.

My guess is that you're going to see more of Innistrad levels of things than you're going to see a lot of Ixalan. I think Ixalan, well, I'll get to Lessons Learned from Ixalan one of these days. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today'sed from Ixalan one of these days. But anyway,

I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast, and I hope you enjoy Creature Types, because they're a lot of fun. But anyway, I'm now parked, so we all know what that means. It 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 guys next time.