Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #598: Golgari

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

This podcast is part of my guild series where I walk through the history of each guild through all three visits to Ravnica. In this podcast, I talk all about the black-green guild, the Golgari Swarm.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so I've been talking about the guilds. So I've talked about Dimir. I've talked about Selesnya. It's now time to talk... I've talked about Izzet as well. Now it's time to talk about Golgari. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning, back to original Ravnica. let's go back to the beginning, back to original Ravnica. So as I start for each one, we talked about wanting to find the common ground philosophically and the common ground mechanically. So let's start philosophically.

Okay, so black is very much about wanting power, and it will get its power through the willingness to do whatever it takes. power through the willingness to do whatever it takes. And that black believes that the key to life is just those that are willing to take the steps and do what is necessary are able to succeed above those that aren't willing to sort of step up and do what it takes. Black is very self-motivated. And it do what it takes. Black is very self-motivated, and it looks out after itself. It believes in the good of the individual versus the good of the group. And so black is very much about

sort of wanting to help itself in the best way it can. Green, oh, and an important part of that is one of the things, black wants to use whatever resources it can. Well, one of those resources is the power of death. Black recognizes that death is a very potent ability, very potent force, and that most people are afraid of it. Most people want nothing to do with it. But black in its willingness to do what it takes will harness death. And death is a big part of how black functions.

Okay, green, in contrast. Green is very much about wanting to accept the world as it is. It believes that nature is the perfect force. It really wants to sort of... It believes in interconnectivity between all things. And it's very life-affirming. It is very... You know, it believes in the importance of nature.

So, obviously, these are enemies, green and black. You know, green is very much about life, while black is about death. You know, green is about sort of interconnectivity, where black is about parasitism. But, where's the overlap? And the overlap is that green and black are the two colors that are the most, or at least they each believe that they are the one that is the most realistic in its outlook. Black believes that, like, it treats the world as it is rather than it wants the world to be. Black is like, you know, don't,

you know, black is like, people are inherently selfish. Take advantage of that. And black really looks at things and says, look, I'm going to try to function in the world the way it is. And green is all about acceptance of, hey, the world as it is is a great thing. So when you get black and green together, you really start to look at sort of the cycle of life. That it plays into the idea of life and death as a larger piece of what's going on. And that

Gogari is about the idea that, hey, you know, life's important, death's important, the whole larger cycle of things is important. And so when you get black and green together philosophically, it is very much about the idea of, you know of every piece of the cycle of life is important. Not just life itself, but death as well. And it's very much the idea of things are cyclical and that there is... It believes that the barrier between life and death is sort of meaningless.

That to Golgari, death is just another part of life, another extension of life. Okay, mechanically, black and green, one of the things we try to do when we look for mechanics is we try to figure out, is there something unique to these two colors that they can sort of lay claim on? And one of the things we realize pretty easily is black and green are the two colors that care the most about the graveyard. For example, black reanimates creatures out of the graveyard. It raises dead to get creatures back to its hand from the graveyard. It casts spells out of the graveyard. It's the card that most often removes things from the graveyard. Green, meanwhile, is the number

one card at regrowing not just creatures, blackish creatures, but anything out of the graveyard. Green also has creatures that return themselves from the graveyard, that does black. And green also has a bunch of cards that use graveyard as a resource, or cards that care about what's in the graveyard. So like, you know, a Lurgoy, if there's a green creature. So black and green,

the overlap we found, which is the obvious overlap, is they're both graveyard-centric. So we're like, okay, that seems like a pretty cool thing. And they also play on the idea of using the graveyard as a resource. That once things die, you're not done with them. You still get to use them.

And so we thought that was a very exciting place. So we started with a really clean, interesting idea for Black Marine. The idea of recycling, of it being centered in the graveyard. Like it had a really strong identity. So the interesting thing in Original Ravnica was Selesnya, Dimir, Boros, and Golgari. And we had a hard time with Golgari. Golgari has actually been been Golgari and Dimir are the two guilds we tend to have the most problem with. And the interesting thing in original Ravnica is we

figured out Dimir. Transmute was actually one of the earlier mechanics we did. But we had a hard time. And we tried mechanic after mechanic after mechanic. I know I've said this before, but I think we tried over 40 mechanics for Golgari. And I know a lot of people are like, okay, Mark just must be exaggerating because he's just using a little bit of hyperbole. And I'm like, no, I'm not.

We tried a huge amount of mechanics. So in the end, we used a mechanic called Dredge. Now, let me explain what the mechanic was when I turned it over. Because what design turned over is a little bit different than what ended up in the set. So what design turned over was a mechanic that said instead of drawing a card, you may draw this card from the graveyard instead. That was it. There's no self-milling.

And the idea was, these cards are weaker than normal. So you are playing a creature and you're playing a spell. The spell is a little weak for whatever the mana cost is. But the reason it drags means if you ever need that again, you can just choose to draw it. So the idea was, I think the first card we ever made

was like a 5-mana 3-3. Well, 5-mana 3-3 in green, that's not particularly good. Green normally gets a... Well, these days green can get a 3-mana 3-3. I think back then it got a four mana 3-3 with upside. You know, it could have trample and whatever other stuff. So the idea was, essentially, it was about a mana,

mana and a half over what it would normally be. But the idea was, okay, the 3-3 is not the greatest creature in the world, but if you really need a 3, if you just need a body, you know, okay, you 3-3 is not the greatest creature in the world, but if you really need a 3-3, if you just need a body, you know, okay, you can get it back. And what we did is we tried to make spells that, you know, the idea was they were weaker, but they could be something where they could help you set something up, or by recycling it, it could let you sort of combo something.

And anyway, that is what we turned over to development. So in development, they decided to change it up a little bit. So the big thing they did in development is they added the rider of there's a number, and then you milled that many cards if you wanted to get it back. So dredge three meant first mill three cards from your deck, and then you can get this back. The idea being that it put a limit on how many times you could dredge. This is why they added in the milling, is that there's a resource of your deck,

and you only have so much space in your deck to do that. So it sort of limited how often, because one of the concerns in general about dredging might be, oh, you just never draw anything, and you're always just sort of limited how often because one of the concerns in general about dredging might be oh you just never draw anything and you're always just sort of getting things back and it might be repetitive repetitive play obviously was an issue and so the self milling

was a way to restrict it and it was kind of cutesy in the thing of oh well I'm milling away things to get this one card back I'll put other things in my graveyard. And Golgari is, you know, the king of caring about the graveyard. It has spells that want things in the graveyard or spells that are active in the graveyard. And so self-milling was kind of something that Golgari kind of wanted to do.

So the idea was it sort of was a way to restrict the amount of times you used it in a way that was kind of flavorful. And to be honest, it was very clever. I was very, when I first saw it, I'm like, oh, that's very clever. I liked it. It was a neat, it was synergistic. Now, the funny thing is, I think that they underestimated the value of putting more cards in your graveyard. Meaning, yes, it did, on some level,

restrict how many times you could do it, but it also did a lot of enabling of what was going on. So it ended up being... I think what I turned over was powerful, and what development ended up printing was even more powerful. That the self-milling was so synergistic

with what the guild was doing that I think it made it more powerful. Okay, so let's talk about Golgari. So Golgari was the one guild in which both sides of the guild, both colors, had another guild in the pack. You know, Selesnya, for example, didn't say the pack. Selesnya was white-green. Selesnya and Golgari both did, because Selesnya was white-green, Golgari was green-black. So they both had another color.

Demir had blue that wasn't in the pack, and Boris had red, which wasn't, I mean, there wasn't another guild in that color. There was only one blue guild and one red guild. So, Selesnya and Golgari, I'm sorry, both were the two that only had. So, Golgari shared with black and shared with green.

I mentioned this in previous podcasts, but just in case you're listening to these in isolation. The thing that black, green, every monocolor, we had a theme we played into. And green's theme was that we produced tokens. And it worked nicely with Selesnya, because it was a gold-wide strategy, it liked having tokens, and it played well with Convoke, which was Green's mechanic. And Black liked having tokens,

because Black was big on sacrificing creatures, and it was just good fodder to sacrifice. The thing we played with in Black was we played with sacrifice. That was the thing we played with in Black was we played with Sacrifice. That was the thing we played up in Black. And Black did a bunch of sacrificing.

And a lot of the sacrificing were control-ish things. So the idea was Demir could use it because it won the control features. And Black was interested in sort of cycling things into the graveyard and access to tokens with green. So it just worked cleanly, and it did something that was very played nicely. So the set came out. Dredge was very popular,

probably because it was really powerful. Players traditionally, historically, have enjoyed mechanics that are very powerful. So Dredge, I think, was the highest-rated mechanic in the block, if I remember correctly. But anyway, players liked it. Okay, so now we get to Return to Ravnica. So Return to Ravnica, Golgari was again in the first set. So the first set had Selesnya and Golgari and Izzet and Zorius and Rektos. Okay, so this time, well, we knew going in

that we wanted to do a graveyard mechanic. The interesting thing in general with Ravnica sets is, you know, the first time that we were building them, there's a lot of definition of trying to sort of define what exactly they were.

But coming back, okay, you know, when I get to Simic and I get to Azorius, those are the two that changed a little bit. But most of the other guilds pretty much were how we had done them the first time around. It just was a matter of finding a new mechanic, a new identity for them.

So the thing that we were very interested in was the graveyard. And I think the idea that we played around with is is there some sort of resource in the graveyard? I think we decided this time to put it on creatures. I mean, Dredge could go on creatures, but Dredge

didn't just go on creatures. And we were interested in something that was more creature-centric, I believe. So we tried a bunch of mechanics. Once again, Golgari proved to be the, the interesting thing about graveyard mechanics in general is that, um, and we learned this with Dredge, is they're kind of dangerous. Um, the ability to use your graveyard as a resource can be very potent. Um, and you just got to be careful of how you do it.

It's not that it's impossible to do, but it does require a lot of balancing. I mean, graveyard as a resource is a really powerful tool. Someone recently wrote an article all about things that make limited environments great. And one of the things they really liked

was having graveyard play a role in the set. Not every set has graveyard playing a big role, but it is a fun thing to play around with. And obviously, Gogari, that's the space Golgari plays in. So we tried a bunch of different things. The thing we ended up with was called Scavenge. Scavenge was

when on creatures, and the idea was you could pay mana to exile the creature from the graveyard, and then you put a number of plus one, plus one counters on another creature, the ones on the battlefield. And then some of them could also grant additional abilities, I believe,

if I remember correctly. I think the earliest version of it, it granted everything the creature was, was the earliest version. So if you had keywords, it granted the keywords. If you had other texts, it granted the other texts. And I think we simplified it because it was proving to be a little bit much. Once again, guild mechanics.

You kind of want guild mechanics not to be super complicated just because there's a lot going on. The other thing that we liked is we were playing around with plus and plus one counters. That's something that has been an ongoing... One of the things in general you're sort of playing around with Golgari is you want the graveyard to have an impact, not just unto itself,

but you kind of want it to affect the battlefield in some way. Like, one of the big things about what Golgari is all about is the idea of that it is using the dead as a resource. And so usually that means you're gaining some advantage through using the graveyard in some way. In Dredge, it wasn't card advantage per se since you were not drawing, but card utility. That you were sort of getting the things you needed

because of it. With Scavenge... Scavenge or salvage? Scavenge, I think. No, salvage. Or salvage. Sorry. We changed names during the designing of it. I think it's salvage. The idea behind it was that

once your creatures died, that the other creatures could make use of them. And so, you know, the utility of the creature wasn't gone once it went to the graveyard. And that played out pretty well. So let's look at the guilds on the sides. So this one, Golgari is green and black,

so on the black side you had Rakdos, red-black, and on the green side you had Selesnya, white-green. So Selesnya and Golgari, especially when Golgari is more creature-centric, like it was in Return of Ravnica, you already have, you know, basically what was going on was Selesnya was populate,

Golgari definitely has things. So the token creatures weren't great necessarily for putting into the graveyard because they disappeared. They didn't go to the graveyard. But if you wanted to stick counters on something, and there still was a little bit of sacrificing going on. So anyway, the counter theme and the general creature theme of Selesnya tends to work with Golgari because Golgari, I mean, the one thing that they have in common is both of them are about sort of overrunning your opponent with resources.

Green tends to do that by producing it from the hand, you know, and using its resources. It makes creatures have value unto themselves and makes it easier to get out more creatures. Where with Golgari, a lot of times that extra value is coming from the graveyard, not from your hand. But in both cases, both Selesnya and Golgari want to overrun you. That's a very green strategy. And so green wants to overrun you by just infinite creatures. Black wants to overrun you by using resources from the graveyard. And sometimes it's creatures, sometimes it's other things. Like an example of Return of Ravnica, your creatures

are getting bigger. It's not that you're getting more creatures, like in Selesnya, you're just getting fewer but bigger creatures. Scavenger allows you to grow. I'm blanking. Okay. You guys know the name of the mechanic. One was the design name, one was the final name. I think Salvage was the...

I'm blanking now. Which was the design name, which was the release name. One was Salvage was the... I'm blanking now. Which was the design name and which was the release name. One was called Salvage, one was called Scavage. Maybe Scavage was the actual name. Anyway. I'm not going to worry about it. Okay, the other side was playing with Raktos.

So Raktos had this mechanic called Unleash where it had creatures. it also had a creature mechanic and then you could choose whether or not they came with plus one plus one counters and if so, then they couldn't block so the interesting thing when you played there's actually a teeny tiny bit of anti-synergy

which was if you choose to not put counters on your creature so that it doesn't block you now don't want to put plus and plus counters on them using scavenge because it makes them not be able to block but if you're already putting a counter on them and they can't block anyway well the extra counters don't matter

but you know it did want to have creatures both the strategy of Golgari and of Rakdos was very creature-centric. And so they actually sort of worked together well. The nice thing about Rakdos is it gives you access to red and direct damage and can help clear the way. So if you're playing red, black, green, you can kind of keep building up, play for a mid-game, and then use your red as control to get your stuff through.

And if you're playing with white, then it becomes more of a go-wide strategy, and you're overwhelming them, but through volume more so than just size. Okay, that was Return to Ravnica. So now we get to Guilds of Ravnica. So Guilds of Ravnica, Golgari was again.

So Golgari and Selesnya have been in the first set and together all three times. So Selesnya was, so it's Golgari, Selesnya, Izzet, Boros, and Dimir. So it is the same guilds as original Ravnica plus Izzet.

Which meant that Golgari is interacting with the same things it interacted with the first time. On the green side, it's Selesnya. On the black side, it is Dimir. Okay, so we, once again, we struggled a bit with Golgari. We tried a bunch of different things. You know, we really played around with different graveyard mechanics and different... We actually looked at some old

mechanics. There's a mechanic called Unearth, which was the Grixis mechanic in Shards of Alara where dead things... It's kind of like flashback for creatures, where if you unearth something, the creature comes out of the graveyard for the turn, but then goes away at end of turn, so you sort of get the creature back before a turn.

We played around with unearth, we played around with a bunch of different things. The problem we were running into was, we were trying to play nicely with the stuff around us, and that was proving a little problematic. So Eric had made a suggestion for a mechanic that he called the Necrobloom. We ended up calling it Undergrowth. And the idea was it's a mechanic that cared about dead things. So what that meant is it would count creature cards in your graveyard. So the idea is

one of the things that Eric felt was important was he didn't want to be constantly checking. Like one of the problems was something like Lurgoyf, which is a creature that's star, star, or star, star plus one, equal to the number of creature cards in your graveyard, or I think Lurgoy goes to all graveyards,

but anyway, is you're constantly checking, how many now, how many now, how many now? So the idea that Eric had, that we like and followed through on, was all these cards just check once. That they care, they're scalable effects, but they only check once, and they care about creature cards in your graveyard.

So for example, you know, there's a couple creatures that come into play. One of them is base 2-2, one of them is base 0-0, but has haste. And the idea is, you get plus and plus encounters when it comes into play. There are other cards that, you know, can boost creatures, or do different scalable effects in black and green, that count your dead creatures. This mechanic proved to be pretty good,

and because it is used in the graveyard as more barometer than resource, so real quickly, graveyard as resource means that I'm using up my graveyard to do something. Scavenge, for example, hey, I had to remove the card from my graveyard to use it. So I was limited how many times I could use it

because I had to literally use up my graveyard. Delve, for example. Oh, Delve was another mechanic we looked at, but Delve proved to be a little bit too strong. Delve was a mechanic originally in Future Sight that we did as the Sol-Ti mechanic in Concepts Arc here. Ended up proving to be a little too strong. We didn't think we could do it, but we did look at it. But Delve is another thing where

you're using up the graveyard to make your spells cheaper. So graveyard barometer means I just look at the graveyard. That I care about the graveyard and the contents of the graveyard, but I'm not using up the graveyard. I'm not, you know, for example, let's say I'm playing Delve. I don't want you know, for example, let's say

I'm playing Delve. I don't want to buy too many Delves in the same deck because they use the same resource. Whereas Undergrowth, I kind of encourage to play Undergrowth cards together because it wants me to get a lot of creatures in my graveyard and that, you know, having

multiple in my deck just encourages me to have cards in my deck that are making that happen more. And so, you know, once you in my deck just encourages me to have cards in my deck that are making that happen more. And so, you know, once you kind of commit to making a few undergrowth cards work, eh, you might as well throw in more undergrowth cards. So anyway, Eric gave us undergrowth, and we did a lot of fun stuff building around it. So the tricky thing was making it work with the ones around it. So Demir was on the blue side and Celestia was on the white side. So Demir, the mechanic that we ended up making Demir, which is a set design made, was Surveil. Surveil is a scribe variant where you look at the top end cards of your library.

You may put any back in any order. And then the cards you choose not to put back go to your at the top end cards of your library, you may put any back in any order, and then the cards you choose not to put back go to your graveyard rather than the bottom of your library. And what that means is it allows you to put things in your graveyard that you want in your graveyard. Well, why is that important? Well, if you're playing Golgari, you want to put creature cards in your graveyard.

And so it is a means in a way to sort of fuel your spells by getting stuff into your graveyard. So Surveil, for example, can start helping you find the cards you want and fill up your graveyard with creatures. So when you play Dimir with Golgari, you know, Golgari has some aggressive elements and it has some control-ish elements. Golgari has some aggressive elements and it has some control-ish elements. Essentially, when it plays with Dimir, it's leaning into its control-ish elements. And when it's playing with Selesnya,

it's leaning into its more aggressive elements. Or its more creature-focused elements, let's say. So with Dimir, if you're going to go into... You're going to play black, black, green, blue, soul tie, essentially, then it's going to be a little bit more controlly, it's a little bit more of a card advantage, you're going to be

trading stuff off, and then you're going to be using the Golgari part of it to sort of bring back resources, and or take advantage of the fact that you have stuff in your graveyard, like with Undercrown. And it allows you to play a little more grindy control game. Because the one nice thing about general, about, you know, Golgari tends to strengthen over time.

You know, as more things end up in its graveyard, it has more power. Well, one of the things Demir likes is to play a little bit slower of a game. So a slower controlling game, actually, Golgari has that control aspect because in general what control is about is stalling the game until you have the advantage. And that Golgari definitely has this edge about, hey, the longer the game goes, the more the graveyard gets filled up, the more power I have. So a lot of Golgari's strength tends to come in playing a little bit slower and playing almost a literally grindy game to sort of have the advantage. So if you mix it with blue, it just sort of leans into that

side of the equation. Now if you mix it with white and with Selesnya, now you're playing a more creature-oriented thing. Now, the one thing to remember is Golgari likes creatures. The one thing about creatures is if you play creatures, some of them will end up dead. If you play creatures that are all aggressive about attacking,

some will end up dead. So when you play Golgari with Selesnya, it tends to be a little more aggressive because what you want to do is Selesnya's going to be good at getting out creatures and getting out bigger creatures, and if you're sort of aggressive with those creatures, if they die, then Golgari can take

advantage of that fact and it just gets more powerful. So adding black to Selesnya allows Selesnya to be a little bit more aggressive in what it's doing with its creatures. Selesnya, allows Selesnya to be a little bit more aggressive in what it's doing with its creatures. Selesnya, kind of in a vacuum, usually has to build up so it can overwhelm. But when it's

playing with Golgari, it can be a little bit more aggressive because creatures dying fuels up the Golgari side of things. Now, as I said, after each set, Dredge was very, very popular. Scavenge, oh, I was very, very popular. Scavenge, oh, I didn't mention Scavenge. Scavenge

was, my memory was, it was in the second tier, so it was the second tier is 50 to 75% approval, which means it wasn't one of the most loved mechanics, but it was liked. I mean, I think the issue with Scavenge

was, it was one of those things where, like, people recognized that there was advantage to be gained from it, but it wasn't particularly... It just wasn't as exciting as some other mechanics. I think a lot of times mechanics that excite people are ones where you kind of get to do something you feel you don't normally get to do. And this was a little bit more about making use of resources,

and it helps you win games, but it was a little less splashy. I do. And this was a little bit more about making use of resources and it helps you win games, but it was a little splashy. I think Dredge was a little splashier. The other thing that Scavage had to live with is it was living in the shadow of Dredge. So when the previous time we were at the block and the block had like the be-all end-all, super powerful

mechanic, when you had to come back and had a merely fair mechanic, I think a lot of the Golgariari folk were sort of expecting Dredge 2.0 or something, which we couldn't do because Dredge was too good. But when we do returns, one of the things to be aware of is a lot of how people treat things

is in relation to what they know from before, assuming they were playing when the first one came out. But Ravnica decks, we tend to return on, like, our cycle's a little bit shorter. So most people,

or the majority of people, I should say, who played Return of Ravnica at the time hadn't played Ravnica. Not all of them. I think it was Six Year Gap, I think.

Anyway, the interesting thing it was a six year gap I think um anyway um the interesting thing about this talk about uh Guild of Ravnica was um we I mean

one of the things we like to do with the with the um guild I mentioned before that if you mix together all the

um sort of the watermarked cards of the guild they should play nicely together um and the reason I say the watermarked is to sort guild, they should play nicely together. And the reason I say the watermarked is definitively things that are clearly, clearly Golgari.

If you mix Golgari from original Ravnica and Golgari from Return of Ravnica and Golgari from Guilds of Ravnica, they should feel like a unified guild. But at the same time, we do like sort of tweaking things a little bit so that if I'm playing Golgari in one set, it's not that it doesn't feel like Golgari,

it's not that it doesn't have a lot of overlap with Golgari from previous sets, but we do want to have a little bit of a unique feel, like there's some things that's a little bit different. You know, for example, this Golgari plays a little bit more with Barometer of the Graveyard than some of the past Golgaris. And that just makes it play like a little bit different, Barometer of the Graveyard than some of Pascal Gari's. And that just makes it play a little bit different, not that much different. It still cares about the things Gari cares about.

And when you mix and match it with things from other sets, it still works together. It still has its general theme. But it does make playing it just a little bit different. I mean, one of the things that our average players play up to about 10 years now, meaning our Ravnica sets are less than 10 years apart.

So we now know if you're playing a Ravnica set, odds are the majority of people who play with a Ravnica set have played with the previous Ravnica set, and are not insignificant and have played with all Ravnica sets. And so we do like having things be a little flavorful different. Not enough that you can't mix the cards and play together, but enough that just, you know, there's a little bit of a sense of what's going on.

The one thing, by the way, to address one of the issues with overgrowth is people who are like, that's not a mechanic. You've done that before. And the answer is, well, we named something we've done before and made a mechanic out of it.

It's not as if we've never encountered creatures before. Obviously, their boyfriends and stuff have existed. But my answer to that is, we have now made over 18,000 cards. A lot of finding mechanics, like this idea that everything we ever do must be a unique thing that you've never seen us do before in cards, you know, with 18,000 cards. Not that it's impossible to do that, but it's not easy to do that. And in fact, one of the things we often do is say, oh, is there anything we did in small number that might be fleshed out and be more fun in larger number? You know, it's not as if we've never made cards to count creatures in graveyards before.

We've never made it the theme. We've never made it something that you build your deck around. And one of the neat things about you know, undergrowth is, you can especially in draft, for example, or in constructed, you can build around that. You can say, okay, I'm going all in on this, and I'm going to, like,

one of the cool things in general about draft is if you want to do the undergrowth strategy, well, guess what? We've made cards that work well with undergrowth so that if you draft those cards, you can really make an undergraph-themed deck. You can draft an undergrowth deck, which is kind of fun to do. Or not just draft. You can build one and construct it as well. Generally, the thought process is anything you can draft, you can build.

Because if the components are there to draft it, clearly the components are there to build a deck. Now, there are things you can draft that are just not strong enough to be tournament things. So I'm not saying everything you can draft is a tournament viable thing. That's for sure true. But it definitely is something you can build for at least casual constructed, at bare minimum.

Because if there's enough things... I do understand that draft's 40 cards and constructed's 60 cards, but in draft, you're not necessarily getting everything you need. Where in constructed, you can exactly pick what you need. So if it's a draftable theme, it's almost always a buildable, at least casual constructed theme,

if not a tournament theme. And that's why... One of the things I know in general is... People like... And that's why I wouldn't be, like, one of the things I know in general is people like, whenever we're bringing, reminiscing something before, people are like, hey, that's that. And like, yeah, you know, Surveil's kind of like Scry, and Jumpstart's kind of like Flashback. Yeah, that is true. You know, as Magic gets older and older, one of the reasons, you know, the reason we're bringing back more mechanics, you know,

is that, look, there's only so many resources we have available and we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes we will because, you know, like Surveil is a good example where the slight tweak actually is important. And Undergrowth is a good example where it's just something where, yeah, we've done in isolation, but it's nice to do it as a, you know, a unified theme. Okay.

Anyway, I'm driving up to Wizards right now. So that, my friends, was Golgari. There's a lot of, um, I think Golgari is a lot of fun to play. And, um, while it is definitely one of the more challenging ones to design, um, it is a fun, it's a fun guild to design. Um, hold on one second. Sorry, trying not to hit a truck. Safety first.

Anyway, I know that Golgari has lots of fans, and so I hope you guys have enjoyed Golgari through the ages. But anyway, I'm now parking 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