Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #586: Flickering

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

This podcast is all about an unnamed but commonly used mechanic, one where you exile a permanent and then return it to the battlefield. R&D calls this ability "flickering" (it's also known as "blinking"), and this podcast will talk about its history, from its start in Urza's Destiny to present day.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, and I'm dropping my son off at camp. Okay, so today, try something a little bit different. I'm going to talk about general mechanics, something we use all the time in magic. I'm going to talk about where it came from and how we use it, and then talk a little bit about some famous cards that use it. So I'm going to talk about flickering. Okay, so flickering means when you exile a card, most often a creature, but you exile something and then you return it either right away or you return

it at end of turn. R&D refers to right away as insta-flickering and end of turn it's just flickering it comes from the first spell that has it called flicker which was in Earth's Destiny, I'll get to that it's also sometimes called blinking because there's a card called momentary blink that was very powerful sometimes it's called sliding because there's a card called afterslide that was pretty powerful but anyway, I want to talk about where this ability came from it's something we use in most sets

where exactly, what is the origin of flickering Um, but anyway, I want to talk about where this ability came from. It's something we use in most sets. Um, where exactly, what is the origin of flickering and why did it come about? Okay, so first we need to go back to Mirage. So Mirage, uh, came out in 1996. Uh, it was the first sort of, I say it's the first set of the second age of magic. Um, it's the first set that kind of clearly had a block built into it. We kind of, sort of had a block for Ice Age, at least it had a

second set. Mirage was the first set in which, we had a block, there was Mirage, then Visions, then Weatherlight. It was a full block. And Mirage and Visions were designed by some of the early playtefters. I had a recent podcast talking about the alpha playtefters. Well, Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Cattino, Don Felice, Howard Kallenberg, and Elliot Siegel designed Mirage and Visions.

And in it, they had an ability called phasing. So what phasing is are creatures that are only there half the time. What does that mean? So if a creature has phasing, the turn you play it, it comes into play. Then in the beginning of the next turn, it gets exiled. And phasing, anything that's on it, enchantments or equipment or counters, stay on. Normally, as you will see when you normally flicker things, what happens is

they're considered to be refreshed. They start anew. And so if you have anything on you, they go away. That is not true of original phasing. So the idea of phasing was, turn one, you play it. Turn two, it goes away.

Turn three, it comes back. And it basically has haste, so you can attack with it right away. And the idea is, it's just there every other turn. That's how phasing worked. And I thought phasing, so when I got there, I was not part of the design team, obviously, for Mirage, but I was on the development team. And one of the things that I was fascinated by with phasing was the idea that things could either phase themselves out or that you could phase other things as a, as a means to, well, there are a couple of things that I liked. Now phasing, I'm trying to remember phasing. Phasing either, it, I think it didn't trigger,

enter the battlefield effects, but I think it triggered, leaves the battlefield effects. I think that's how it worked. It worked one way and not the other. I was really fascinated by the idea of phasing as a means to protect the creatures. So for example, there's a blue dragon, I forget the name of it, there's a blue dragon mirage that I made that could phase itself out, that it was a means by which it could protect itself. itself out. That it was a means by which it could protect itself. And then I made a bunch of individual spells that you could phase something. And that was the part that I was really interested in. It was not necessarily the fact that the creature was there half the time. That to me was less interesting. I was much more interested in phasing as a tool. So flash forward a few years.

at phasing as a tool. So flash forward a few years. So Urza's Destiny. At the time, R&D, there was not a lot of people in Magic R&D. I think there was five of us at the time, or five full-time Magic R&D people. So it was me and Bill, Bill Rhodes,

Mike Elliott, William Jockish, and Henry Stern. And there were a bunch of other people in R&D, but R&D was doing a lot of games at that point. Now we're a little more focused on the games we do. But there, we were doing the Harry Potter game and the Major League Baseball game. And we were doing Battletech. And there was Netrunner and Vampire the Eternal Struggle.

And there was a period of time where we were making lots and lots and lots of trading card games. And so magic was sort of spread a little thinner and that there was less people dedicated to just magic. So, when we did Ursa's Destiny, I asked if I could just do it by myself or maybe they asked me if I could do it by myself. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I ended up designing,

I was the design team. Other than Arabian Nights and Alpha, that is the only, the only sets that had a single person design team. Other than Arabian Nights and Alpha, that is the only set that had a single person design team. And so one of the things that I was doing in Urza's Destiny was the way the set designs worked back then was the third set didn't really invent new things, at least not new keyword things, that you just would take the things that existed in the block. So I was in Urza's Saga block. That meant I had cycling and I had Echo, and those were mechanics I had to play around with.

So I decided for a little flavor, I would make five vertical cycles with non-named mechanics. So what a vertical cycle is, it's a common and uncommon, and either a rare or mythic rare. Obviously at the time of Earth's Destiny, there wasn't mythic rares yet, so it's a common or uncommon or rare. So for each color, I came up with a little theme that I played into that color that was played into the larger themes of the set. And so for white, I really like this idea of sort of taking what I was doing with phasing, but cleaning it up a little bit. Because there were a lot of weird rules to phasing. Things stayed on it.

It didn't trigger, I think, enter the battlefield effects. And so what I decided to do was, I liked the cleanliness of take a creature, remove it, exile it. So at the time, by the way, it wasn't called exile yet. It was called remove from the game. But it was very confusing to say, remove this creature from the game. It was called Remove from the Game. But it was very confusing to say Remove this creature from the game. Then it comes back to the game. Well, wasn't it Remove from the Game?

So we changed to Exile. Anyway, I liked the idea that you exiled the creature, it was gone, and then when you brought it back, it was like a fresh new version of the creature. In fact, my working name for the common, I believe, of my vertical cycle was Tabla Rasa, which means blank slate. The idea that you just get a start all

over again, a fresh start. So what happened was I made my common was an instant for one mana that exiled the creature and then immediately brought it back. So once again, flickering

is what I refer to as I exile until end of turn. Instant flickering means I exile and immediately bring it back. Usually, if you're going to exile your own things, instant flicker is better because it's gone for a very brief amount of time. If you're going to affect your opponent's things,

normal flicker until end of turn is better because you can, like, remove things that can block and stuff. So, you know, it's just gone for a longer period of time and it being gone might matter. Normally, by the way, when we do flickering nowadays, the default to flicker is only affects your stuff. I mean, we do make stuff that affects your opponent's stuff, but, like, that's usually costing a little extra. The default is only affects your stuff. I mean, we do make stuff that affects your opponent's stuff, but that's usually costing a little extra.

The default is just affect your stuff. The reason for that is it does stuff like hose auras and things that necessarily were not... Like, if a card can hit both you and your opponent, it's more powerful to hit your opponent and can do nastier things to your opponent. So we have to cost it for hitting your opponent, which means then things to your opponent. So you, we have to cost it for hitting your opponent, which means that you don't tend to use it on yourself,

which is where a lot of the fun things are. So normally when we do it, we tend to say, okay, most of the time it just going to hit your stuff. Um, anyway, I made a common that was just a spell. I think it was a white instant that,ered, an instant flickered as an instant. And then I had an uncommon that I think was repeatable, and I had a rare that flickered multiple things, I believe. But anyway, the idea was, you know, it's a civility, and at first it's just one thing, and then it's more as you get higher in rarity. So I was not on the development team as I was the design team,

and usually the lead designer was not on the development team, and I was the lead designer. So at the end, they ended up taking away the vertical cycle, and the common, they added a mana, and they made it a sorcery, and they moved it to rare. So Flicker, which is the first card that had the effect, I call it Flickering, Flicker ended up being a watered-down version of what I originally had made and got pushed to rare.

So it was this weird, it started as kind of this weird, just weird rare effect. But I really liked it. I really liked what the effect was. I mean, one of the things about it is that there's a lot of utility to flickering. So, for example, number one is

if anything is in trouble, you could flicker it away to save it. Because the system is about to destroy it. Well, if you flicker it away, well, now it's not there when the spell that would kill it resolves, if you flicker it away, well, now it's not there when the spell that would just kill it resolves, so it's saved. You also get to refresh

things. So if something comes into play with counters that you use, then you get to refresh it and start again with more counter. So like Triskelion's a famous artifact from originally in Antiquities, where it comes with three plus one plus one counters, and you can remove the

counters to deal a damage. Well, if I do all my damage with it and then flicker it, because it's a 1-1 without the counters, then it refreshes and now you have the counters again. You also can reset off Enter the Battlefield effect. So if it does anything when it enters the battlefield, and we do a lot of those kind of things,

if you flicker it, it'll make that happen again. You get to re-get the enter the battlefield effect. If you have a leave play trigger, it also will trigger leave play triggers. If you have something negative on it, like in a set with minus one, minus one counters, where, you know, by flickering it, you remove

things that are problematic. Also, if somebody puts a pacifism or something, some sort of aura that's preventing your creature from being able to attack. You can use Flicker as a means to get rid of an aura on it. So Flicker has a lot of uses.

I really thought it was kind of a cool thing. So what happened was I just kept using it. Like, you know, I put it in Earth's Destiny and it got sort of watered down to less than I meant. But, you know what? put it in Earth's Destiny, and it got sort of watered down to less than I meant, but, you know what, I was on more sets, so I kept using the ability, and eventually I got R&D to see

kind of, they kind of see what I saw in it, which was, oh wow, it really works well with so many different things, like one of the reasons that I think flickering has just become a staple is it's just a really fun interactive ability that just makes lots of cool things happen. And as you will see, I'm going to go through a bunch of cards with it, but there's just a lot of cool utility that comes with it. And so essentially what happened was

I started using it. We eventually branched it out, not just in white, but in blue and well, uh, white and blue seemed to be the colors. They're sort of like, let's start afresh. Um, and it had a lot of the, it, it, it, it, it was a nice ability to sort of crossed over to a white and blue. And so, uh, I think it's primary in white and blue is tertiary.

I think in black only because black can kind of kill things and bring them back from the graveyard, which is not that different from flickering. But anyway, I wanted to... So let's talk about some cards. So there's a... We've made a lot of cards over there. So this is just a sampling of the cards. These are not all the cards that use the build. This build actually has been on quite a number of cards. But I thought

I would just sort of go through, and by talking about a bunch of different cards, I'd hit sort of, you know, the kind of things that you can do with them, the kind of designs that you can use. So we're going to start with Aetherling, which is a four blue blue, so a six mana total, two of which is blue. It's a four five shapeshifter.

It's from Dragon's Maze. And it's got four abilities. It's one of the, we have a bunch of Lings that originally morph Ling, and then we've made, well, we have a bunch of Lings that originally morph Ling. And then we've made, well, we're in the process. There's this ongoing very long cycle that one day we will finish of Lings. Although Blue got two.

It got morph Ling and then it got Aether Ling. So Aether Ling has four abilities. The first ability is it can flicker itself. What that means is if you use this ability, it goes away and comes back at the end of turn and the reason we did this is this is flickering as a defensive thing so if a creature can flicker itself what that means is essentially for one blue mana

anything you're going to do negatively to my creature I can answer by just saying well it's gone for the turn. You targeted it well it's gone for the turn. You try to put an aura on, it's gone for the turn. You targeted it, well, it's gone for the turn. You try to put an aura on it, it's gone for the turn. Anytime there's something negative that would happen to it, I can use this as a

protective, reactive thing. Now the creature also, you can spend a blue mana to make it unblockable, you can spend one mana to make it plus one, minus one, or one mana to make it minus one, plus one. The last two abilities all the lings have is the plus one, minus one, minus one one plus one um the last two abilities all all the uh the lings have is uh the plus one minus one minus one plus one because it's it's a shape shifter so it can sort

of change the shape um but the other abilities that it has normally uh the links normally have um five abilities i think this one has four but normally most of them have five um but anyway we use flickering here in a purely defensive matter that this card is just oh here's a means to use something that blue has that's defensive okay next astral slide I would argue this is the card that put

that put flickering on the map so astral slide is from onslaught it's an enchantment for two and a white so three mana one of which is white. And whenever you cycle a card, you get to flicker a creature you control.

And so this card came about because I was... At the time of Onslaught, we had never repeated a keyword mechanic. Other than making it evergreen. If you wanted to repeat it, it had to be evergreen. Otherwise, if we had done it once, that's it.

We're not going to do it again. And I'm like, okay, guys, this seems silly. The set would love cycling. Like, I remember when I first was working on Onslaught, I was trying to, Elliot had turned it, Mike Elliot had turned it in, and Bill Rose had helped me to tweak it a little bit with Mike. And one of the things that I really was looking for was it was missing a mechanic. And I was like, well, I mean, it's kind of like cycling. And then I'm like, well, why could it just be cycling? Why can't

we bring back a mechanic? But one of the things I got when I talked to R&D was they're like, oh, well, you know, if you're going to bring it back, can you do something different with it? So the one of the things I decided to do we hadn't done before was care about cycling. Like, cycling matters. So I made two cards, Lightning Rift and Astral Slide. Lightning Rift did two damage. Astral Slide flickered a creature.

And the idea was, every time you cycle, you get to do something. So both cards, when I turned them in, didn't cost any mana to use, but Lightning Rift, they ended up adding mana to it. So when you cycle, you have to pay mana to do that. But the Astral Slide's like, ah, flickering, whatever. That's not that bad.

So they left it alone and didn't put in a mana cost on it. Turned out to be quite powerful. Flickering can be very, very powerful. And especially flickering where you can constantly do, you know, every time you cycle you get a flick or something. And flickering did a bunch of cool things. So, like, whether or not you're refreshing things or reusing things or, you know, you can use it to untap things, essentially,

there's a lot of neat things you can do with it. And so, you know, it was a very powerful card. And it was the first time, I believe, where, because it was a powerful, repeatable effect, that you could start building around it. And this is the idea where people just say, okay, I'm going to make a deck. Now it's a flickering deck. What do I want to put in the deck? You know, Astro Slide says, everything in my deck should be something I want to Astro

Slide and Flickr. So it was the first time really that became the center of a theme. And it was very popular and people really enjoyed it. And so I think Astro Slide really sort of cemented the mechanic as being something people liked. Okay, next. Brago King Eternal. Two white whites, so four total, two of which is white. A legendary creature. He's a spirit. Two, four. He's from Conspiracy.

He is flying. And whenever he deals combat damage to the opponent, you get to flicker any number of your creatures. So this is using flickering as kind of a reward. It's a saboteur ability, meaning he has to do damage. But if he does damage, wow, he gets to really flicker whatever he wants. So this is like a flickering commander. This says, okay, we're giving you a commander. He's got flying.

So, you know, he's going to be able to do a lot of flickering. Well, you better fill your deck with things that want to flicker. He obviously is white and blue because those are the colors that flickering is in. And so he wants access to all the things in white and blue. But this is a good example of us saying, hey, flickering's fun. Let's make a commander that can flicker. This is very much us making a flickering commander.

And the fact that it can flicker any number of things really lets you sort of fill up your deck and do a lot of cool stuff. Cloudshift is from Avacyn Restored. Cloudshift costs one white mana. It's an instant, and you instant flick or something. You remove it from the game, exile it, and return it right away. So Cloud Shift is interesting.

What happened was I had essentially made this card as the original flicker in Urza's Destiny. It got changed. So it's many years later. It's on Avacyn Restored, and I'm like, I'm just going to do it again. And this time, it stuck. It stayed at common. So I don't know for trivia questions, if you can name a card that I submitted twice, one time it got turned into a rare and one time it stayed at common. There's a little trivia for you. Eerie Interlude. So two and a white. Eerie Interlude.

So two and a white. It's an instant. This is from Shadows Over Innistrad. And you can flicker any number of your creatures. And this, as you can tell, is messing around with it. Like early on, we do pinpoint stuff, and then we start saying, oh, well, what if you could flicker a bunch of different things?

And flickering definitely did some cool things,, um, you know, uh, it allowed you to, usually the reason you see flickers in sets is it just has synergy with what is going on. Um, and like I said, there's so many different ways to have synergy. Um, now it is possible to have anti-synergy by the way, the, the, or, or I would argue too good a synergy. Um, When we do morph, we have to be careful about flicker effects,

because if you flicker a morph creature, you play it three mana for a face-down 2-2, but when you flicker it, it goes away, and when it comes back, it's not morphed, so it just comes to play as its normal thing. So if I flicker a morph creature, I play three to play it face-down,

and by flickering, I circumvent the cost. And that is, I play three to play it face down, and by flickering, I circumvent the cost. And that is, I mean, obviously very synergistic, but it's a little too synergistic, a little too good. So we tend to be careful with our flicker effects when we know we have morphed things in. So like, flickering is used in most environments, but there are a few things that are so synergistic, we have to be careful. Okay, Felidar Guardian. This is from Aether Revolt. Three and a white. It's a 1-4 cat.

When it enters the battlefield, you insta-flicker a permanent, meaning you remove a permanent and return it to play. So this card caused all sorts of problems because normally when we do this card, we say creature. Normally when we do these kind of cards, you get to flicker a creature. That's normally what we do. But I think this set was in Aether Revolt and we're like, oh, well,

you know, artifacts are a big thing here. We're in an artifact set. Probably we should be able to flicker artifacts. And for some reason, like, oh, rather than write artifact or creature, let's just say permanence, what harm could come from it? Well, it turns out that there's this little planeswalker called Saheeli,

and when you flicker Saheeli, it made an infinite combo and caused all sorts of problems. So, because essentially, I don't remember correctly how this works, you could flicker Saheeli, Saheeli had an ability that she used the turn she came into play where she could copy a creature. this works. You could flick her Saheeli. Saheeli had an ability that she used the turn she came into play where she could copy a creature. And so essentially what would

happen is they could each make the other and do it infinitely. And all you needed was something that just wanted infinite creatures and you won. So anyway, we ended up banning this card just because normally we have a troublesome pair and one is mythic and one is uncommon. We will ban the uncommon just because normally when we have a troublesome pair, and one is Mythic, and one

is Uncommon, we will ban the Uncommon. Just because people get far less upset when we ban Uncommons and we ban Mythic Rares. This is one of those cards that makes me sad in that if we had just said Artifact or Creature, it would have been fine. It wouldn't cause all the problems.

It would have been around to be a pretty fun card in the cat deck, because Amonkhet had a cat deck that this would have played really nice in. Okay, Flicker. I talked about Flicker. Flicker is from Urza's Destiny. It's just the original flickering effect. Next, Flickering Spirit. Three and a white, 2-2 Spirit. It's got Flying from Time Spiral. And for three and a white, you can flicker the creature. You can instant flicker it.

Remove and bring it right back. So basically this was, there was a card in, was it Legends? Legends or Ice Age? Called Blinking Spirit. I think it was Ice Age. Called Blinking Spirit. And Blinking Spirit was a creature that you could spend mana to... It wasn't...

It was a lot like Flickering, but it wasn't exactly Flickering. Oh, you could put it back to your hand. Blinking Spirit, you could pay mana to put it back in your hand. So it was a very hard creature to kill, because whenever there was a problem, you would return it to your hand. But then you had to cast it again. And so the idea

here is, I think Blinking Spirit costs zero to blink. Sorry, zero to put back in your hand. So it was almost impossible to kill it. It just would always return to your hand whenever it was in threat of being in trouble. So we thought it would be fun in Time Spiral to make reference

to Blinking Spirit. So we made one,. We used the technology at the time, which was flickering. So the idea is, it's got all the advantage of it, except well, the advantage it has is you don't have to cast it again. But the disadvantage is that

if you don't have the mana you can't save it. So it's sort of we made a modern age Blinking Spirit, sort of a nod to Blinking Spirit, but with modern technology. Flicker Wisp. This is from and you can't save it. So it's sort of, we made a modern age blinking spirit, sort of a nod to blinking spirit, but with modern technology. Flicker Wisp. This is from Eventide. So one white white for three one elemental

and it's flying. And when it enters the battlefield, you can flicker another creature. So we made a bunch of these. This is something we like to do a lot,

which is a creature that enters the battlefield and flickers other creatures. It's just a lot of fun. It does cool things. And as you'll see, it's just an effect we come back to. Ghost Away. Ghost Away is from Guildpact.

Two and a white instant flicker all your creatures. So one of the things we discovered is the flickering's so good, and there's certain decks where you're just happy to flicker all your creatures. And a lot of times there's cards in which you care about things coming into play, or you care about,

you know, you have different ETB effects. Sometimes there's some synergy like allies or something, where there's a lot of, you know, if they disappear and all come in together, they get to both have their effects but count each other. Okay, Mist Meadow Witch. So one and a white-blue hybrid mana. So two mana total, one of which is white or blue hybrid. It's a 1-1 Kithkin

Wizard. Two white-blue yet a flicker creature. A creature you control. I think it's a creature you control. I didn't write that down. I believe it's a creature you control. This is in Shadowmoor. This is when we're doing a hybrid spell, and one of the things that's nice is white and blue can do this. So we

can make a creature that does it. That's both white and blue. The tricky thing about this card is it really, it secretly really is a white-blue card, because the activation cost requires white and blue. I'm not sure why we didn't make it hybrid-hybrid. Interesting question. I don't know why we didn't do that. Maybe we wanted you to play it in a white-blue deck, and it was a hybrid set, so we weren't making multicolor cards. Not quite sure why we did that. Okay, Momentary Blink. This is another, probably this and

Astral Slide are the two most famous of the flickering cards. So it's an instant for one and a white. You flicker a creature you control, and then flashback three and a cards. So it's an instant for one and a white. You flicker a creature you control, and then flashback three and a blue. So this is another example where you interlap white and blue. In Innistrad,

I put flashback Innistrad, but when Eric took the file over to do the development, he liked the idea of having kicker costs that were in allied colors because there was an ally theme because the monsters overlapped ally themes. And so he had you

instead of giving you a gold card he gave you a card that you could use but then you could flash back in a second color which really encouraged you if you picked up this card to play those two colors. And it was a fun flavorful way to sort of do that. Momentary

Blink is a pretty strong card and definitely saw a lot of play. In fact, like I said, some people prefer it as blinking and the reason literally is because this card was just played a lot. Next, Obadot. Obadot. Obadot to the Ghost Council. One white, white, black,

black. It's a 5-5 legendary creature, Spirit Advisor. When it enters the battlefield, you drain your opponent for two, meaning they lose two life and you gain two life. And then you have the ability at the end of turn to flicker the card to the next turn. And this is an example where this is a creature that doesn't flicker other things, it flickers itself. But because it hasn't entered the battlefield effect, the fact that you flicker other things. It flickers itself. But because it has an enter the battlefield effect,

the fact that you flicker it means it gets to reuse this. And I think that's kind of cool. Did it just flicker itself? I think it can flicker... I think it can flicker any creature. I don't think it just flickered itself. I didn't write that down. But I think it could flicker anything.

Okay, next. Ordinary Pony. This is an unstable card. In fact, on a stable card, I had a Rata. Two and a white. It's a 2-3 horse. When it enters the battlefield, you flicker a non-horse creature you control.

And the idea was, it's a horse, so this is a common thing we do on flickering cards, where we want you to flicker something but not flicker itself. Sometimes we say flicker another creature, sometimes we'll say flicker a non-whatever-it-is. So flicker non-horse, well, it was the only horse in the set, I believe. So really, it just couldn't flicker itself, it was a cutesy way of not letting it flicker itself. The problem we had with this card was, there's a card in the set called Half Squirrel Half that says whenever a creature enters the battlefield

as a trigger, and this card flickers. So if you put those two cards together, it allowed you to infinitely flicker the same creature. And since there are all these hosts that enter the battlefield effect, it just lets you infinitely do some enter the battlefield effect.

So we had a ride of this card. So the card now says you can flicker any creature that hasn't already been flickered. So you can flicker everything once per turn, but you can't flicker the same thing multiple times per turn. And the

final card to talk about before I get, I'm almost to the office, is Restoration Angel. So Restoration Angel costs three and a white, I'm almost to the office, is Restoration Angel. So Restoration Angel costs three and a white, so four mana, one of which is white. It's a 3-4 Angel. The card's from Avacyn Restored. It has Flash and Flying. And when it enters the battlefield, you instant flicker a non-angel.

So again, it's using this technology of, I want to flicker something else, so I won't flicker my thing. Non-angel is a little more meaningful in Avacyn Restored because there was an angel theme. So non-horse really was just not me in Unstable, but non-angel actually did restrict you a little bit on some of the angels. The interesting thing about this one is it has flash. And what that means is we often make a creature that enters the battlefield and flickers another creature and you do fun combo trick stuff. We also often make spells

that save your creature that you can cast it as a means, like Cloud Shift is a good thing where you can use it to save your creature. This card kind of does both. And the idea is this angel can arrive at the last minute and protect something.

Now, it can also do all the fun combo things, but because it has flash, that means it can be used protectively. And the reason we said non-angel, A, as it means

to not flicker itself, but also the idea of, well, this angel comes and saves things. Well, it doesn't save other angels, so there's some flavor to that. I mean, we understood

by doing this, we restricted a little bit what we used and limited, but the flavor was really strong, so we thought that was cool. Anyway, I'm almost to work. The thing I wanted to say, well, two things. One is, I'm trying something new where I'm talking about the history

not of a specific, not of a named mechanic, but kind of an evergreen ability that we use. So if you guys think this is interesting, let me know. I'm always looking for new things to talk about since I'm, you know, I'm up to 600 podcasts. So always looking for new topics. The other thing is I'm just a huge fan of flickering. This is one of those mechanics that I kind of willed into existence. I mean, it's quite possible somebody else would have eventually got there,

but it definitely was my baby, and it took a little while to get ready to warm up to it, but now, I think now that people have played with it enough that they really realize the versatility of it. I mean, it really is the Swiss Army knife of sort of evergreen mechanics. It really does so many different things. It's one of the reasons that it just constantly gets in sets is no matter what your set's doing, like I said, in fact, the only problem we ever have is it's too synergistic, as in with Morph.

We're like, not that it's not good, it's just a little too good. Like, that's when we have to be careful about it. That's when we don't put it in a set. It's because it's too good. Like that's when we have to be careful about it. That's when we don't put it in a set because it's too synergistic. So that's quite the mechanic that its biggest problem is too much synergy. But it's a fun mechanic. I hope you guys enjoy flickering as much as I do.

We'll keep making it in white and blue, maybe occasionally in black, maybe. It's tertiary. But anyway, that is all I have to say about flickering. I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. And like I said, if you enjoyed this idea, if you want me talking about more sort of evergreen, non-named effects that we do,

I'm happy to talk about more stuff. But I started with flickering because flickering has a warm place in my heart. But anyway, I'm now parked, 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.