Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #599: Boros

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

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 red-white guild, the Boros Legion.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I've been having a bunch of guild podcasts. We've had Dimir. We've had Selesnya. We've had Izzet. We've had Golgari. Oh, and now we're up to Boros. Okay, so Boros is red or white. So let's start by talking philosophically. Where does red and white come together? So white is the color that believes in peace. Peace through structure. It believes that everybody can get along if only we think together

and act as if the group matters versus acting out for individual reasons. And so white does this by making rules to ensure that everybody, you know, people will do things, you know, people will be swayed by things that will make them do things that are maybe not so good for the group, but are good for them, the individual. And how do you prevent that? making laws, by making rules, by sort of saying, well, this is the way you must do things. And that people, well, if you kind of tell them how to act, maybe you can get them to act accordingly. Red, meanwhile, Red is about freedom through action.

Red believes that you, you know, it wants to be passionate and live its life with purpose and it wants to sort of, you know of be experiencing whatever it can experience. Now at first you might think these are opposites. I mean they are enemy colors, right? A lot of times we talk about the conflict between red and white as a difference between freedom versus security.

That red is all about wanting to be free to do what it wants. But that causes problems because if people can do what they want, it might hurt others. But white, in its quest for security to make sure that everybody's okay, might restrict what people can do. So normally that's... One second.

Excuse me. This is right to myself. You know, normally that's a conflict, but where can they come together? Well, if you take White's quest for peace and Red's sort of passion for doing, you know, sort of doing the right thing, and you put them together and say,

oh, what if you passionately believed in sort of upholding peace? What if you were all about sort of, you know, what if what made you sort of true was being the force, you know, that made sure that people did what they were supposed to do? Because red and white both have the sense of trying to do the right thing. Now, how they interpret the right thing is not always the same between them. But when you mix red and white, you end up getting Boros, which is kind of the police slash army of Ravnica.

That they are trying to make sure, they are passionately trying to make sure that Ravnica stays safe. And so they definitely, like, you get the passion of red combined with the desire to keep peace of white. So it is definitely sort of white ends but a red means. And that the Boros, you know, definitely believe that they'll do what it takes to get the job done. In fact, if you look at police, look at police stories

in media, a very common story is two police partners, one of which is by the book and does everything to the letter of the law and the other is a renegade that kind of gets the job done

but doesn't quite follow the rules. Those are kind of your two cop archetypes. And then you put them together. That is red and white. So the idea is imagine if the police of the world kind of embody the combining of those two things. In Lethal Weapon, why do the two of them... Because they have a shared goal,

even though they function very differently. And then that is Boros. That Boros definitely sort of has its passion for peace, as I like to call it. Okay, now mechanically, one of the obvious things about red and white is they are the two colors that have the smallest creatures. During Selesny, I talked about how white and green are the creature colors because they have the most creatures the reason that white and green differentiate from one another is that white tends to have a lot of small creatures one of white's strategies, actually known as white weenie

is white can do a swarm where it has a lot of small creatures that sort of build an army and that can quickly overwhelm you and they work strongly together. White's big thing is the idea of teamwork, of, you know, the group is stronger than the individuals. And so white has a strategy of being very aggressive. Red also has a strategy. You know, red deck wins or sly, there's been a lot of names over the years,

but where red is sort of like, hits a curve, every turn is playing out things, and then between the aggressive creatures and some direct damage and stuff, it beats you quickly. And so when you mix white and red, you end up getting the most aggressive of the ten guilds, the aggro guild from a gameplay standpoint. White and red both have a lot of small creatures, they have a lot of combat tricks, and they have a lot of team boosting. And you sort of put that all together, and you get a very aggressive, as two-color goes,

you get the most aggressive two-color deck. And Boros have had that, I mean, one of the things that's been interesting when you're trying to figure out where a guild sits mechanically, some you have to stretch a little bit, or you have to really sort of think about where they position. And others become very clear. White and red definitely, you know, they overlap in a very specific space, and so it makes sense that you get the aggressive attack deck when you put them together.

Okay, so let's go back to original Ravnica. So Boros was in the original Ravnica set, not just the block, but the actual set. So it was Dimir and Selesnya and Golgari and Boros. The one interesting thing about the first set, by the way, is because there were four guilds, there was only overlap in white, green, and black. There was no overlap in red, no overlap in blue, because there was only one guild that had red, which was Boros, and one that had blue, which was Dimir.

We'll get back to that in a second. So we knew we were trying to make the army colors that was aggressively attacking. So the first idea was actually Richard proposed Convoke. And I talked about this in the Celestia podcast. He liked the idea of maybe, you know, it's an army working together. Well, what if, you know, creatures could be a resource to get other spells done? And so he pitched the idea of it being a Boros mechanic. And while I liked his mechanic a lot,

basically what I said is, oh, you know, the aggressive element of Boros, not that it can't make use of Convoke, it can, and especially it can make use of the cheaper Convoke, but it was less a ramping color. And a lot of Convoke can be used to ramp up bigger things. But Selesnya was a ramping color, so we moved that off to Selesnya. So the next big suggestion was from Mike Elliott

called Radiance. So here's how Radiance originally worked. So Radiance originally worked and said, okay, you target a creature and then every creature that shares a color with that creature, a creature type with that creature, or a converted mana cost to that creature, also gets affected by the spell. Now note, this is back in the day when things tended to affect everything. When Goblin King didn't just give your Goblins plus one plus one, but gave all Goblins plus one plus one. So gave all Goblins plus one plus one.

So we were definitely in a state of, okay, when I target things, it doesn't just affect my things, it affects all things on the board. So one of the things that would happen in the early version of Radiance is, you know, let's say I have five creatures that are attacking, and you have four creatures that can block. Okay, I now have nine different targets that I can cast this in. And depending on that, who knows what combination of things it could hit.

And it became kind of oppressive to figure out what the world was going to happen. And so, you know, so for example, I have a two-drop red goblin. Well, if I targeted that, I hit all two drops, all red cards, and all goblins. But if instead I hit my, you know, three converted mana cost human soldier in white,

oh, now I hit all humans, all soldiers, all white creatures, and all creatures that cost three. It just was too much. And it didn't take a lot of play just to realize that we were kind of just overrunning. So the next, we said, okay, let's get rid of

converted mana cost. We kind of like that. I'm referring to that in common if we can anyway. And so we just did color and creature type. But even that definitely proved to be complex. Creature types in particular,

while you occasionally could have more than one color, it was a multicolor set, much of the time, especially on smaller creatures that tended to be humanoid, had multiple creature types, sometimes as many as three. And anyway, it was just a lot to calculate. So at the end we said, okay, let's just do color. And color is a little easier, which

is, okay, I can hit a monocolored creature and hit all those creatures, all creatures of that color, or I can hit a multicolored creature and hit those, usually those two colors, because it was Robnika. Or I guess, well, later in the block we had the Nephilim. But anyway, most of the time you were hitting one color or two color. As it turned out after the fact,

even just color could be a bit much at times. One of the cool things we like, though, is if you hit a multicolor card, let's say you have a red white creature in play by hitting your red white creature you hit all your red creatures and all your white creatures now you might also hit your opponent's red or white creatures the tension created by sometimes helping your opponent

or when you were trying to hurt your opponent sometimes hurting yourself it's not ideal, I mean obviously if we did something like that again we probably would restrict it to one self, it's not ideal. I mean, obviously if we did something like that again, we probably would restrict it to one, like, all creatures that are controlled by the same player, probably.

So the biggest problem with Radiance, I mean, Radiance didn't go over all that well. It was a little complicated. But I think the biggest strike against it was it didn't feel particularly not Rakdos, Boros. It didn't feel particularly Boros. I mean, you had to sort of, it's one of those things where

if you pull it back and sort of extract it back a little bit, you can understand the flavor, but the flavor's kind of not quite on the surface. You have to sort of think it through to understand the flavor, and that's usually not the best. One of the things we knew about Boros is that Boros was very combat-centric, that it's the creatures that are attacking

and have combat tricks and boosts that affect combat. And while Radiance could affect combat, it didn't always affect combat, and I think that just made it feel kind of less Boros in general. The mechanic didn't fare very well from the public. They didn't like it all that much.

So, in the original Ravnica block, it's probably if I could redo one mechanic, I mean, there's a few other mechanics I would think about, but it is the biggest miss for me. The original Ravnica, it's the biggest miss for me. And of the Ravnica block, I mean, it and

Haunt both had some issues, but so anyway, now once again, what I mentioned before is there was only one overlap. Boros was the only red guild in original Ravnica, so there was no... Well, let me talk about the white side, and then I'll get to the red side. The white side overlapped with Selesnya. As always, we have the Naya issue where red, white, and green just really overlap well because they share a lot in common. So when playing with Boros, you've got

Convoke. Or instead, playing with Selesnya. Boros liked the cheap Convoke. It was a little less useful of the more expensive Convoke. What we tended to do is we made sure that the white cards tended to be the Convoke cards that could more often get played in Boros, where the bigger things were either green or white-green, so that if you weren't playing green, you were using Convoke more to get small incremental advantage, whereas if you were playing green, you were more doom-r ramping. So if you play white, red, green together, then you just, you get the access to green and

start doing a little bit more ramping, and you tend to move a little bit more into being more mid-range rather than just aggro. It's hard to do aggro with three colors. Sometimes you'll do white, red, splash green, maybe for a big finish or something. But anyway, you definitely could play those colors together. Now, the other side, which is interesting, is while there was no other red guild, because we had off balance of colors,

we had more mono red and more mono blue cards in, because we always balance color. What that meant was, if you were aware of what was going on, you could draft a red-blue deck. Now, you didn't have access to a guild keyword, you didn't have any gold cards, but it was something that you could do. And that meant that if you wanted to, you could draft a white-red-blue deck.

The reason that became more popular is once Guild Pack became the third pack you drafted, you now had Izzet as something you could get to. So it became more... Once you started drafting more than one set of Ravnica Block, usually you were in three colors, and white, blue, red was one of the popular things because first pack you could draft Boros and blue-red,

extra blue-red cards, and then draft Izzet when you get to Guildbound. And the Izzet in general, the red-blue deck in general, tends to be tempo-based, just in nature how red and blue play together. What that means is you have a bunch of creatures and then you're using bounce spells and counter spells and direct damage just to sort of constantly keep the opponent, you know...

It's not that you're permanently stopping them as much as you're temporarily stopping them, and then you can use that opportunity to sort of get in points of damage. So if you combine Boris' more aggressive stance with some of the tempo of Red Blue, you can get sort of a tempo deck that's a little bit more aggressive than normal. Once again, three colors, it's hard to get super aggro, but you definitely can play... In fact, if you played White-Red-Splash-Blue,

you tended to play an aggressive Boros deck and then use a little bit of Blue's tempo stuff to help you get in the final points of damage. Okay, so let's move on to Gatecrash. So Gatecrash, Boros wasn't in Return to Ravnica. It was in Gatecrash. So Gatecrash, if I can name the stuff down my head, Gatecrash had Boros, had Azorius, had Dimir,

had Gruul, and had Sinek. Those were the five. And so what we were trying to do for Boros... Oh, so the interesting thing about Boros in Gatecrash is right before we had started it, we had had the second Great Designer Search. In fact, in between original Ravnica and Return to Ravnica, we had run two Great Designer Searches. The first one happened around the time of... We ran it around when Lorwyn was happening.

And the second one was run right before Return to Ravnica. So anyway, Ethan Fleischer won the Great, the second, the Greatest Diner Search 2. Sean Main came in second. Uh, and each, um, both Ethan and Sean, so the Greatest Diner 2 was a little bit different than the Greatest Diner 1 or 3 in that I asked them to submit a world and then all the challenges were within that world of them building that world. So they kept working on the same set. It's a little bit different.

We were looking for a slightly different skill set in the second Grandstander search. Anyway, both Ethan and Sean had made mechanics that I really liked. Ethan made a mechanic called Evolve. Sean made a mechanic called Battalion. Both those mechanics go into Gatecrash. Evolve will be the Simic mechanic. I will talk about that when I do my Simic podcast. But let's talk Battalion.

Evolve will be the Simic mechanic. I will talk about that when I do my Simic podcast. But let's talk Battalion. So, Sean had made a world that was like, literally was falling apart. And there was a thing called the Blight that was like, the world was getting eaten away. It was sort of a dying world. And one of the things that, within the world, was as the world was shrinking, it was forcing the residents to sort of gather together

and they were coming in conflict with one another. So there was a bunch of fighting. So one of the ways we represent that was a mechanic called Battalion. So the way Battalion originally worked was

it just triggered when you had three or more creatures attacking. The problem was what that encouraged you to do is not have the Battalion creature attack and just have other creatures attack and leave it out of the fray so it's not in danger. Um, so A, that tended to mean you waited until you got four creatures to attack. So, because, uh, four creatures, because you didn't want to attack the battalion creature.

And it became hard to deal with battalion creatures because they didn't tend to get in combat. So the suggestion we made during the GDS was, what if instead of being a trigger that cared about other creatures, what if it said whenever I or two I and two other creatures attacked. So it still had the three creatures attacked,

but it always required itself to attack, meaning it had to put itself in jeopardy, which meant that there was answers to it, and it meant that we could be more aggressive with what the triggers did. You know, the effects could be more aggressive. Sean worked with that, made a lot of fun cards. I really liked the mechanic. So one of the first things I did when we started Gatecrash—oh, Gatecrash, by the way, I co-ran Gatecrash with Mark Gottlieb. I sort of did the first six months.

He did the second six months. We were all—both of us did it the whole time, but we sort of, I handed over the reins halfway through. Because halfway through, I then went and started working on what was the next set of bin? What was it after Return to Ravn? It was Theros? Yeah, I started working on Theros, I guess. Anyway, so Battalion and Evolve were very early in the file and never left. Battalion was a fun mechanic.

I knew it was a fun mechanic. Um, unlike Radiance, it definitely, because it was all about combat and attacking, it definitely sort of felt very Rakdos. Not Rakdos. I keep saying Rakdos. Felt very Boros. Did not feel very Rakdos. It felt very Boros.

And so I thought that was pretty good. I liked the general feel of it. And the gameplay was kind of cool. It definitely encouraged aggression, which is what you want in Boros, and so it felt neat. Okay, so let's talk about what was on either side of it. Okay, so in Gatecrash, the red side overlapped with Gruul, red-green, and the white side overlapped with Orzhov, white-black. So let's start with Gruul.

So Gruul's main mechanic in the set was called Blood Rush. Blood Rush was a mechanic where it only went on creature cards, and you could discard the creature card and pay mana to create sort of a giant growth-like effect. So for example, let's say I had a 2-1 First Striker. Oh, well if it has Blood Rush, I could pay some amount of mana, and then I could give target creature plus 2, plus 1

and First Strike. That whatever the creature had, whatever the... Plus its power, plus its toughness, and it gains whatever keyword, usually whatever green keyword the creature had. And the idea was, Guru is a little more of a mid-range deck, because when you mix red and green,

your creatures get a little bit bigger. So while it is very creature-centric, as I mentioned before, white, red, red-green, and green-white are the three colors that are the most creature-centric, because that's the way the colors play out. And so red-green also has a lot of ramping, so it's a little more mid-range trying to get larger things.

But Blood Rush really helps because it's an aggressive deck, and the idea of boosting your creatures is helpful. Well, guess what? Boosting your creatures and Boros, also helpful. So, um, Boros could make use of, uh, Blood Rush just from playing with Boros, with its red Blood Rush cards. Or, if you combine it in green, once again, it tends

to be in a somewhere in between an aggro deck and a mid-range deck. A little slower than an aggro deck, a little bit faster than a normal mid-range deck, just because you're combining the elements here. But, you know, Gruul wanted to attack a lot of creatures, so Battalion worked with Gruul as well. So there's definitely the two that got together were very creature-centric and very attacking-centric. Okay, but in contrast, let's say I'm getting together with white-black, with Orzhov. So Orzhov had a mechanic called Extort.

And Extort went on permanents, not just creatures, it could be on other permanents. And what Extort meant is, if you had a card with Extort, whenever you cast a spell, you could use white or black mana. It was hybrid, so you could use white or black mana, and then drain the opponent for one. So if I have one Extort card out and I cast a creature, oh, well, I can pay white or black, and then I drain the opponent for one. So if I have one Extort card out and I cast a creature, oh, well I can pay white or black and then I can drain them for one. So in just Boros, the white cards with Extort were pretty good, just because it was another means to... Look, Boros is constantly going to be playing cards, and it wants to

quickly beat the opponent, so just getting little tiny increments of damage in was really good. Now if you add in black, so you're playing red-white-black, it became a little bit more of a controlling deck. So white-black, the Orzhov deck is what we call a bleeder deck, which is, I sort of, it's a control deck where I'm slowly, through incrementals, you know, what I call paper-cutting you to death, where I'm just, you know, inflicting little tiny bits of damage. The reason Extort was in Orzhov

is a very Orzhov thing. We're like, I'm going to stay there, I'm going to cast my spells, I'm going to protect myself, I'm going to be defensive, but I'm just slowly nibbling away at you, which Extort does a very good job. So when you mix Boros with Orzhov,

it gets a little slower, a little more controlling. What tends to happen is you get in a few early points of damage with your sort of Boros side, and then you sort of clam up and hold the fort, and then finish nibbling them off. So it's a bleeder deck, but a bleeder deck that is a little bit faster because you have some early damage that you get in. So Battalion went over very well. People liked Battalion. And, you know, I think that the first time through,

Boros didn't quite live up, you know, that we, it was one of the guilds that we didn't, you know, walking away from, we were like, oh, we didn't really nail Boros. But the second time in, I felt we did a much better job. As I was a person who, you know, both sets that had Boros in it, I led or co-led, I felt bad that I had not sort of made Boros as Borosian.

I made up that word. As Borosian as it could have been. So I was real happy with Gaker Rats that it really sort of helped cement Boros feeling very Boros. Okay, so now we get to Guilds of Ravnica. Okay, so Guilds of Ravnica. The Mentor mechanic is one of the five mechanics that were in the set. Two of them were in early vision.

Jumpstart was kind of influenced by something we didn't envision, although it's its own mechanic. But the other two mechanics were made, or not made, Convoke got brought back, and Surveil got made in set design. So Mentor, I'm not sure what came first, the name or the mechanic. They just blended so well together. It was called Mentor in design. And I think the idea was we were really interested in a combat-centric mechanic.

Boros is just, it's kind of what it wants. It wants something that helps it win in fights and wants it to encourage it to attack aggressively. So, Battalion had done a good job of making you want to attack together in groups. One of the reasons Battalion felt very Boros is not only was it about attacking, like Blood Rush was about attacking, but that felt very individual, like I'm going to boost a creature. Well, the thing that Battalion did is said, look, I'm not just attacking you with a singular creature, I'm attacking you with an army, and they're working together. And that feeling of working together was pretty cool. So, I think we were

trying to find a mechanic that let you sort of work together, that made you want to attack with more than one creature. And then we came up with the sort of work together, that made you want to attack with more than one creature. And then we came up with the idea of, well, what if one creature is helping and teaching the other creature? You know, what if it's mentoring it? Well, what would that mean? Well, it's Boros, so if I'm going to teach you, we've got to be in combat together, so we've both got to be attacking. And then in order for me to teach you, you have to gain something from it. And so we like the idea of a plus one plus one counter. So then we're like, oh, well, how do I teach you, you have to gain something from it. And so we like the idea of a plus one, plus one counter. So then we're like, oh, well, how do I teach you?

Well, I have to know more than you do. So we said, okay, if I'm bigger than you, that sort of says, oh, I'm a better fighter than you, so I can teach you something. So the way it worked was, okay, you have to be attacking, and then as long as you have another creature whose power is less than you, you can put a plus one, plus one counter on that. Now, one of the things about Mentor that we always worried about was whenever you have

a hoop to jump through to get something, there's always the worry that the audience goes, oh, a hoop, I don't want to do that, and dismisses it because they assume that jumping through the hoop is a bigger barrier than it is, and they think the upside is not as good as it is. Extort was a similar mechanic in Shards of Alara, where when the audience first saw it, a lot of players were sort of like, oh, I don't know if I, you know,

I'm only attacking with one creature. So basically the mechanic was, if you attack with only one creature, it gets plus one, plus zero for each member, each creature that had the mechanic. And a lot of people were like, I don't want to, you know, Exalted seemed like, wow, that's a big hoop,

I've got to attack alone. But it turned out that having a couple Exalted creatures really made the creature, I'm sorry, it was plus one, plus one, not plus one, plus zero, plus one, plus one. It made the creature that was attacking usually pretty big. So if I have like three exalted creatures really made the creature I'm sorry it was plus one plus one not plus one plus one plus one plus one it made the creature that was attacking

usually pretty big so if I have like three exalted creatures and I attack with my 2-2 it's a 5-5 you've got to deal with my 5-5 and if you deal

with my 5-5 guess what the next thing that attacks also plus three plus three so exalted is a good example of something that seemed onerous but when you started

playing with it it wasn't and I think from listening to the reaction to the audience it was a similar thing where when we first shut off the mechanic um a lot of players like mentor i don't know if that's worth it and oh you know and then they started playing with it and like oh this is actually pretty good and it's pretty interesting um one of the things when you're making a new mechanic that always is good is if you can make players make decisions that are stuff they don't normally make,

one of the fun things about Magic is, look, the base game's the base game, and a lot of what you play in Magic is the same things you're playing with. But it's those little tiny things that make you think just a little bit differently about how you do basic things you do all the time, like attacking. And Mentor just makes you rethink a little bit about who attacks and how you attack. The other fun thing you can do with Mentor is, if you do the stacking right, you can actually attack with multiple Mentor creatures. If, for example, you Mentor a Mentor creature,

then that Mentor creature, if you do the stack, you know, the order correctly can then mentor a larger creature because it's big enough to do that. And anyway, there's a lot of fun and interesting things and it definitely had a neat sort of gameplay

interaction. The flavor was just spot on. So when we handed over the file, when I handed over the vision file to Eric Lauer for set design, one of the things Eric always asked me is, he asked me to prioritize my mechanics. So for example, he was saying to me, you know, there's five mechanics, which is the one that's most important to you? Which one do you most, you know, would you like me to keep at all? Because obviously mechanics can change. And the big thing about Ravnica sets is they're dependent upon one another.

So once you change one thing, sometimes it requires changing other things. So I said Mentor. I thought Mentor was not just the most flavorful of the mechanics we had, but kind of the most innovative. It was saying, okay, it felt very Boros. again, it wasn't quite something Boros had done before. I liked how it played. And so Eric said, okay. Eric also liked it. So Eric ended up keeping Mentor in. But anyway, so let's talk about each side. So in the set, on the white side, it overlapped with Selesnya. On the red side, it overlapped with Izzet.

So Selesnya, once again, had the Naya problem, as I talked about in the Selesnya podcast. Selesnya's original mechanic was creature fall, where every time you played a creature, you got an effect plus mentor. The problem was those were just too synergistic. You know, Boros already just wants to spill out lots of creatures, so having something that gives you incremental advantage on creatures being played was just free stuff

for Boros. And so we ended up, Erica and the set design team ended up changing the mechanic. After much thought, they brought back Convoke. Once again, Convoke plays with Boros, especially on the cheaper spells. A little less so on the larger spells, but if you play them together, you can use the larger stuff to ramp into the bigger creatures if you play a red, white, green deck.

Mentor also could work with Selesnya. Selesnya has a lot of creatures it is going to attack at some point so it did allow some opportunity in it but the two mechanics while having some synergy are not too synergistic, which once again is

the problem with when you're combining any two white, red and green decks, guild decks on the blue side so one of the things when you any two white, red, and green decks, guild decks. On the blue side, so one of the things when you build it, you tend to go around the circle, and that, okay, you make sure two works with one,

you make sure three works with two, you make sure four works with three, you make sure five works with four. And then you have to loop back five to one. And that's usually the toughest connection. So the ism mechanic is jumpstart. Now on the surface, it seems like mentor is all about attacking creatures,

jumpstart is all about playing spells. Mentor only goes on creatures, jumpstart only goes on spells. So at first blush it might seem like, why do those have in common with each other? Now as I explained before, when you combine white-red with red-blue, you tend to get a slightly more aggressive tempo deck.

And that was true here. So one of the things that we did, so jumpstart is a mechanic where you can discard a card to replay the spell out of the graveyard. And so one of the things we did, especially in red, is just make jumpstart spells that an aggressive deck would want. You know, and that one of the things, one of the

dangers that Boros gets into, that red-white gets into, is it is very easy for you to sort of empty your resources. Like, one of the problems in general is red and white, especially when you're playing sort of a white weenie strategy, red and white have no card drawing, per se.

I mean, red has a little bit of, it is rummaging where you discard draw, and it's impulsive draw, exile cards for the turn. So it sort of gives you advantage, but only in the immediacy. And so red-white very much is sort of about trying to defeat the opponent before it runs out of resources. And so one of the problems that Boros can run into is, I'm drawing land. And it doesn't need a lot of lands. It plays a low curve. So late game, you're going to draw land. Once you have four or five land in Boros, usually you don't need that much more land.

So if you draw late and you get land, there's not a lot that you can do with that. But Jumpstart says, oh, well, if you're willing to trade that land that you don't need, you can get a spell. You can get a Jumpstart spell, especially. And so it actually turns out that jumpstart, thematically in how Red White plays, actually has more synergy than it's giving something that Red and White can use, which is sort of more card play game.

On the flip side, Blue and Red tend to play a tempo deck. And tempo decks do want to attack. A lot of tempo is, okay, I have some creatures out. Usually my creatures are nothing, they're not that important creatures, but if I can just, you know, bolster blocker or bouncer blocker, or make my creatures unblockable,

or do little tiny things that I can get through for incremental points of damage. Well, mentor just helps you get a little bit extra damage in, and so, you know, it can work. You know, at first blush, what seems like two mechanics that would never intersect or never work, the decks actually have some intersection, so you can play red, white, blue. You know, and if you play red, white, splash, blue, it can still be a little bit aggro. If you play a blue-red splash white, it tends to be a little more controlling, using some white-spot

controlling aspects. If you're making a true red-white-blue deck, it tends to be a slightly faster tempo deck. Although, once again, white and red can play a bit slower. So sometimes you can combine to make a tempo deck

with a little bit of a slower tempo deck. It depends which card you're drafting. Because white has things that lean toward being a little bit slower that go into Selesnya, and a little faster that go into Boros in Guilds of Ravnica. The one other issue, let me raise the, what I will call the white-red commander issue. So one of the problems,

well, magic, when we make magic, we make magic to be, you know, a normal magic set. It's for all formats. We're going to make cards for you. You play whatever format you want. Commander has this problem that it does something that other formats don't do.

First off, I think it's the only majorly played format that starts at 40 life. So playing an aggressive strategy is hard because you've just doubled what you have to do to defeat somebody. Second thing is Commander tends to be played multiplayer

and, you know, exhausting all your resources to beat somebody works when and then you've won the game. But it doesn't work with, and now there's other people to deal with. So if you sort of go all out and take somebody out, well then you're easy pickings for somebody else to take you out. So red-white has always had a bit of a struggle in Commander. And we've been working to try to make sure that red and white, can we find ways to expand things that they can do to give them more tools.

red and white, can we find ways to expand things that they can do to give them more tools? But one of the challenges we always get is there's a lot of desire in Commander to have red-white cards that are doing a slightly different strategy than aggro. Because aggro is just not a particularly strong strategy in Commander. The problem is, that's what Boros is all about. You know, Boros is, like I said, their heart is in combat,

and they're about being an aggressive deck and attacking with creatures. So one of the problems we run into is kind of the heart of what Boros is really is not something synergistic with Commander. And so whenever we make cards, especially red-white cards, especially red-white legendary cards, there's a complaint of people wanting to do different things. And, like I said, the challenge in a Ravnica set is we're trying to make cards that stay true to feeling Boros,

yet maybe can expand opportunities in Commander. And that's something we work on. I will say that we have better opportunities in products that aren't Ravnica, where we're doing a red-white that aren't beholden to anything, to make more and quirky different kind of cards. Like, for example, in Kaladesh, red and white was themed as being the vehicle colors. So we were able to make a legend that was all about vehicles, which that's very different. That's not something that normally red and white does.

And so we look for opportunities where we can push red and white in different directions. With Boros, we're always trying to find ways in which we can make Boros cards that kind of help there. But it is a challenge. It is hard to solve that commander problem and feel very much like you're make Boros cards that kind of help there. But it is a challenge. It is hard to solve that commander problem and feel very much like you're from Boros. So the, as I've been saying about all these podcasts, you know, I can look back and say, oh, original Raptor, okay, Boros stumbled a little bit.

Second time, Boros really hit the mark and did really well. You know, this time in, we were very focused on trying to learn from what we'd done before, but the set has just come out as I'm recording this, so in general, I'm hearing

comments and stuff, but I don't have enough really to, I don't have that or anything yet to sort of say how things did. I have heard a lot of anecdotal feedback, a lot of stuff I was talking about earlier where people were playing with Mentor going, oh, wow,

I really misjudged this mechanic until I started playing it. And ooh, it's really neat and fun when I play it. I'm making a lot of cool decisions that I had not made before. And so I'm happy to hear that. But once again, that's all anecdotal. One of the things, having done the job for a while, you learn is anecdotal evidence is important and you can learn things.

But it is not always symptomatic of how the larger audience feels. One of the things that I've come to grips with is the people who reach out to me are not always the average audience because if you're invested enough to follow me on social media, it's already a little more enfranchised. So I have a good sense of what the enfranchised crowd wants. I hear less from the non-enfranchised crowd. So anecdotal data tends to tell me stuff about a certain subset of the audience, but not necessarily all of them,

which is why the actual data is important. Nonetheless, I like Boros in Guilds of Ravnica. I think it's fun. I think it works well with the guilds on either side of it. And I'm hoping you all are enjoying it.

Um, I'm trying to think, any other final Borosian thoughts? The thing that I've most... I like a lot in the stories, the Boros have played a big role because, like, for example, the very first Ravnica novel, the protagonist was essentially a beat cop, you know, a Boros soldier. And Argus...

Argus... I don't know his name. Argus something or something. Argus. Anyway, he... I like the idea that Boros is very ingrained, and we hear a lot of stories that Boros has a very distinct role within the world that I think is cool. And from a mechanical sense, we've really sort of

under, like, one of the things of having done this world three times now is we're really cementing and getting a good sense of how the things, how the guilds feel. You know, I mentioned before that one of the things we always try to do is make sure that if you take all the watermark cards, just representing the things that are most in guild, and mix them together, that they blend together.

That there's a cohesion and a consistency to the guild. And I think that Boros, while Radiance was a little off the beaten track, even then, it still plays into the larger strategies of what Boros is trying to do. So I like that. Anyway, I am almost to work. How are we doing on time today? Oh, we had a little bit of extra time.

Must have had some traffic. So let me just sum up here and talk about what is going to happen with the guild. So I came up with the idea of doing the guild. Originally my plan was just to do all ten guilds, but then I realized, oh, if I can talk about, you know, because I've been able to talk about guilds of Ravnica, I had three different blocks to talk about, and you know, I need to fill up 30 minutes, so that extra time was well used.

And when I, having done, originally what happened was, behind the scenes, is the very first one I recorded was Azorius. And then I realized while doing Azorius that because Raging Allegiance isn't out yet, you guys don't know the third mechanic for Azorius. And it was just like one less thing I could talk about. So I said, okay, well let me skip Azorius for now, let me do Dimir first. And when I did Dimir, I'm like, oh, well having three sets versus two, three blocks to talk about is just, you know, more robust.

So, okay. So what I decided to do was I was going to do the Guilds of Ravnica. So this is the fifth and final of the Guilds of Ravnica guilds. So if you haven't heard them, I did Dimir, I did Selesnya, I did Izzet, I did Golgari. I did, today, I did Boros. So I'm going to take a break from this series

until Ravnica Legions comes out and we know the other five mechanics. And then I will pick up and I will do, in Woburg order... Oh, for those that don't... Real quickly, just because we have a second. The order I'm doing these in is the order we list things when we list guilds,

is we first list the allied colored guilds in Wuburg order, meaning there's a color by which we, if you ever look at the mana cost of spells, there's an order that we put certain colors in. And so, for example, for the ally colors, we do white-blue for Azorius, we do blue-black for Dimir, we do black-red for Rakdos, we do red-green for Gruul, and then we do green-blue for Azorius, we do blue-black for Dimir, we do black-red for Rakdos, we do red-green for Gruul, and then we do green-white for Selesnya. We're going around the circle.

So each of the allies starts with a different color. And then, for the enemy, white-black is Orazhov, blue-red is Izzet, black-green is Golgari, red-white is Boros. And green blue is Izzet. So once again, ally each one starts with Wulberg. Enemy each one starts with Wulberg. And then we put them in those orders. That's the order I recorded this in.

Is ally and Wulberg, then enemy and Wulberg. That's the order of our guilds. So that will mean is when we pick up, back up this thing, I will first do Azorius, then I will do Rakdos, then I will do Gruul, then I will do Orzhov, and then I will finish with Simic. But anyway, I hope you guys have been enjoying this series.

It is fun to look back. For some reason, I mean, Ravnica, for those who don't know, has become the most popular world we do in all our surveys. You know, there are other worlds that people really like. People love Dominaria and people like Innistrad and like Zendikar. And, you know, there's other worlds that people really enjoy. But Ravnica is right now the top-rated world that we do. And every time we come back, people are very excited.

Like, we always worry, like, okay, we're returning, and people are, like, really excited. And they're like, we're going to return again. People are very excited. Like, we always worry, like, okay, we're returning and people are, like, really excited. And they're like, we're going to return again. People are really excited. So, um, you know, provided Ravnica survives this storyline, um, hopefully we'll maybe see more in the future. Well, maybe. Um, so that,

my friends, is everything there is to know about Boros. Um, I hope you guys enjoyed, uh, the first series, the first five of this series. It's been fun talking guilds and I hope there's been some insight. But anyway, I'm now driving into Wizards.

So I thank you guys all for listening to this podcast. Like I said, you got a little extra content because of traffic. But as I'm driving into Wizards, we all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. I'll see you guys all next time.