Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #617: Gruul

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

This podcast is the eighth in my Ravnica guild series. In this podcast, I talk about the red-green guild, the Gruul Clans.

I'm pulling up in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I've been talking all about the Ravnica Allegiance Guilds. So today we're up to Gruul, the Gruul clans. So this podcast, I'm going to talk all about all the incarnations of Gruul on our three different visits. Talk through the mechanics and just talk through the general philosophy of making Gruul, the Guild of Gruul. Okay, so Gruul is red and green. So let's start by talking a little bit about what red and green mean.

So red is the color that follows its heart, that sort of wants to, you know, it seeks freedom because it wants to do what it wants to do, and it wants to follow its heart and its emotions and its impulses, that it wants to do what just wants to do. And it wants to follow its heart and its emotions and its impulses. It wants to do what just feels like the thing to be doing. You know, Red is pretty emotional. At times can be very destructive. But at times can be very loving. I mean, one of the things about Red is

because it gets framed in a game about fighting with magic, you tend to see the more aggressive, angry sides of Red. But Red is all about following your heart. It doesn't necessarily mean hitting somebody. It can, but it also could mean following passion or following sadness. Like, whatever you're feeling, Red is very big on acting in the moment

and doing what comes to you. Red believes that your body is kind of telling you, your body and your emotions, they're telling you what it needs. And what you need to do is not resist it, but go with the flow and do what comes naturally. Do what you feel like. Okay, green. Green is very much about growth. Green ultimately wants growth.

And it does that through acceptance of it. Green believes that the world is perfect the way it is and that it's made up of all these natural systems that are amazing. Now, Green believes that most people don't recognize the value of what they have. That a lot of what Green wants is people to look around and realize the cool, accept the world around them. And, you know, they want the world to sort of be the way it is. And as such, they very much tend to be into accepting one's nature and that what role do you play? You know, there's a big web in which every creature plays part of this giant web of life.

And green is very much about you have a role to play, and your role is predetermined, and you need to understand your role and fulfill your role, because everybody's serving a purpose in the greater thing, in the greater scheme of the world. Now green also, because it is, you know, nature, while nature has a serene, calm side, it also has a wild side. And the serene side kind of leans toward white, and the wild side kind of leans toward red.

So when you get red and green together, red is the color that acts on impulse. Green is the color that acts on instinct. And so when you get them together, you is the color that acts on impulse. Green is the color that acts on instinct. And so you get them together, you get a color combination that very much is about sort of doing what, you know, just doing what comes naturally. It tends to have a rougher side. Like of all the guilds, it's the guild that's the least tied to any sort of civilization. Like, the fact that we'll even have a guild was more like others said, well, you're in this guild,

more so than them go, let's make a guild. They're not the group that would make anything other than a mess. Or make it chaos. But the idea is that they have banded together. The clans are for example their leader

it's whoever is the strongest they follow whoever is the strongest and there's a lot of change up in the gruel leadership because it just sort of mostly what they want is they embrace chaos they embrace anarchy they're looking to tear down systems not to build systems up.

That's why the fact that they're part of the guild pack, you know, they're the most unlikely guild in the guild pack, in the sense that the very idea of grouping or structure is not their thing. So the thing we really want is, oh, the other thing is, when you look at the gameplay

of Red and Green, Red and Green are the two cow colors that have access to mana. Green does long-term mana. Green does search all land from your library, or like a land-aware elf that'll tap for green every turn, or bird of paradise taps for any color every turn, or furrow ground where you enchant your land. It's very much about permanent long-term mana gain.

Red is about short-term mana gain. Red is about rituals or things that sacrifice themselves for a one-time injection of mana. So red and green have the mana, and red and green, if you go look at common,

barring like the one serpent blue has, red and green tend to have the biggest things in common. They definitely tend to have the slightly larger things. I mean, green is a bit larger than red, naturally, but red is second after green as far as the number

of larger things it'll have. So the idea is, it's the color combination that has mana, access to extra mana, and the color combination that has mana, access to extra mana, and the color combination that tends to have larger creatures. So really what Gruul wants to be is sort of this mid-range attack deck. That's the essence of Gruul. That I just keep playing out creatures, I play them out a little faster than other colors,

and I play, especially because of green, my curve is a little bit better. And so, you know, it is just sort of a non-stop, like Boros, for example, is more of an aggro attack deck. And Selesnya is kind of build up, build up, build up,

and then at the end I attack for usually one big sort of explosive attack. Gruul is kind of in the middle. You know, Gruul is definitely the color that's sort of like, I'm going to keep playing creatures and I'm going to keep attacking,

but I'm going to ramp up. I'm not going to be quite as fast as Boros. You know, white is the fastest color as far as small creatures. Green is, I guess, number two, but red is probably number four. So it has some small creatures that can fill out your curve. I mean, red is number two at small creatures, but it's more

about sort of, you know, it's not just attacking with lots of small creatures. It's just attacking with a one drop, then a two drop, then a three drop. It just keeps building up. That's how red-green gr Gruul plays the best. Okay, so we knew that we had this attack-oriented group. They're very much about sort of just building up and attacking. So we needed to find them a mechanic. So in the first Ravnica block, Gruul showed up in the middle set in Guild Pact along with Izzet and Orzhov. The interesting thing about the small sets is because there were three guilds and six colors there's only ever one overlap in color. That overlap in Gruul was red so there was an overlap. The overlap of Izzet and Gruul did overlap.

But we'll get to that in a second. Okay, so let's talk about the mechanic we chose for Gruul. Bloodthirst. So Bloodthirst says, if an opponent was dealt damage this turn, this permanent enters the battlefield with N, N meaning a number that is picked, plus one plus one counters on it. So the idea essentially was,

I want to be attacking. If I get through and I deal combat damage to my opponent, now it doesn't need to be combat damage, it doesn't need to be creatures. You can actually also hit them with direct damage. You know, red's in this guild, so you just got to hit them some way. And the idea is, if I've damaged my opponent,

my new things just get to be a little bit bigger. And so what this mechanic was nice is, Gruul's all about sort of attacking mid-range with big fatties, if you will. And so one of the things that this does is it allows you to get out creatures

that are slightly bigger for their cost provided that you've been playing an aggressive game. And one of the things that are built in is not only does it have to be a creature, but red has direct damage and stuff, so sometimes it's red doing direct damage that will do this. So Bloodthirst was

a very fun mechanic, very popular, so much so that it's one of the guild mechanics we brought back. Actually, we brought it back in Magic 2012, and it was centered not in red or in green, but in black. It was tied to the vampires in that set.

And so the idea is... I mean... It's a nice... It's a pretty straightforward mechanic in that one of the things I like about mechanics, especially with guild mechanics, is they have a very clear flavor message and a very clear play message. And this is, hey, I'm going to make bigger creatures if you're being aggressive.

So hey, attack with creatures, deal direct damage to your opponent. Do that, play aggressively, and I'm going to then make it easier for you to continue to play aggressively. I'm just going to give you bigger creatures. So anyway, Bloodthirst was one of the most popular mechanics in the original. Not just Guildfax, but the whole block.

Convoke was very popular. Bloodthirst was very popular. I mean, obviously, both of those, for example, we brought back later. They were both players like them. They were simple and they made good, both of those, for example, we brought back later. They're both players like them. They were simple, and they made good. Both of those got brought back for the core set. So the thing to remember in Guild Fact was the one overlap was with Izzet.

So Izzet had a more tempo-y deck, cared about instants and sorceries, and it had a mechanic called Replicate that made its spells, that you could cast the spells multiple times. The major way we overlapped with Replicate is Red made sure that the stuff it was doing in Replicate was more combat-oriented or damage-oriented, more something that if you were playing Gruul, you might consider wanting to play those cards.

Once again, green had the mana. It had the mana acceleration. So, replicate was allowed to do that. We also made sure that the red creatures... One of the things that could happen

if you're playing Izzet is if you're playing some of the bloodthirst red creatures, we made sure that there were some, you know, that you could occasionally play Bloodthirst and Izzet as well.

The Overlap of Izzet and Gruul is always a bit challenging because Gruul is so creature-based and Izzet is so spell-based that, you know, we need to, I mean, usually the way we do it is so spell based that you know we need to usually the way we do it is

when we make individual spells we look at what the mono red cards are since it overlaps in red and make sure that the red spells can have some ability to go in either deck not all of them some of the red spells go in one some go in the other usually when you're making

a guild set, you are trying to make sure that your mono-color cards usually have some function in both the guilds they overlap. Sometimes not as much as that. Sometimes the best ones are ones that really make sense in both worlds, in both guilds. There are some that lean, like I'm better in one guild, but you can play in the other guild. And then there's a few that that lean, like, I'm better in one guild, but you can't play me in the other guild. And then there's a few that are like, well, I'm really for the one guild. I don't

expect the other guild to play me. We try to minimize that last group just because the more overlap there is in the mono-color cards, the more flexibility and the more variety when you play it that comes up. The more things will just work a little bit differently each time you draft.

Okay, that was Guild Pack. Okay, so then... The Gruul return, this time in Gatecrash. Oh, I just realized something. So the Gruul... I realize this thing as I'm just talking. The Gruul has the distinction, and I'm not sure if it's the only one that did this,

is that it came out in the second set, each of the, it came out, it was in Guildpact, then it was in Gatecrash, then now it's in Ravnica Allegiances. So it was always second. Real quickly, is that true of all of them? Well, it could only be true,

so the first set that had two was Izzet and Orzhov and... Oh, it is also true of Orzhov. So, now that I think about it, Orzhov and Gruul have always appeared together. They were together in Guildpack. They were together in Gatecrash. And they are together in Ravnica Allegiances. So, just like Azorius and Rakdos have always come together, maybe next time we do it, we'll try to separate

these up. Anyway, let's get on to Gatecrash. Okay, so Gatecrash, the way we had done original Ravnica was 4-3-3, meaning four guilds in the first set, three in the second, three in the third, it was large, small, small.

And the idea was you drafted all of them together. So one of the downsides, for example, of Gruul is there was never an opportunity in original Ravnica where you could just draft Gruul. I mean, you could try drafting mono-red and mono-green cards in the first pack and then draft Gruul in the second. It's back in the day where we did, I think we did 1-2-2. We later...

This is before we used to draft the first set earliest. Well, now we just draft the set you're playing. But back then, it's the first time... In the early days, you would go... So if you were playing the first, second, third set, you draft the first set, then the second set, then the third set. And then we'd change it so you draft the third set, the second set, the first set. You drafted the most recent thing first,

which allowed you to build around it easier than the way we did it here. Okay, so in Gatecrash, what we changed up was, instead of a 4-3-3 model, we did a 5-5-10 model, where it was a large set drafted by itself, a large set, first large set is five guilds, second large set is the other five large set drafted by itself, a large set, first large set is five guilds, second large set is five, the other five guilds drafted by itself. And then, um, Dragon's Maze, the third set was a small set and then you drafted it with all the whole block.

Um, so it was us experimenting a little bit. So this set was made to be drafted by itself. It was also made to be drafted with Dragon's Maze as part of a three block set, but it was primarily made to be drafted with Dragon's Maze as part of a three block set, but it was primarily made to be drafted by itself. Okay, so Blood Rush is a ability word. It has a cost.

You then discard the card. Blood Rush always went on creatures, and then target attacking creature got something. And what that something was is it was always on a creature, so it always got a power toughness boost equal to the power and toughness of this creature.

So if it was a 2-2 creature that had blood rush, when you discarded it, target creature would get plus 2, plus 2. Then, any ability that creature naturally had, so let's say it was a 2-2 First Striker. When you use Blood Rush, the target creature will get plus 2, plus 2. Sorry for the hang-ups. Will get plus 2, plus 2 and gain First Strike.

So essentially what you were doing was, by discarding the creature, you were temporarily kind of imbuing what the creature was into another creature. Imbuing its power and toughness as sort of a temporary giant growth and imbuing its effects as, you know, until the end of turn, granting the effects. Now, this was a different, I mean, one of the things

that's interesting about doing guild mechanics is you're trying to find ways to stay true to the guild, but, you know, just working in different directions, trying different things. The thing that Blood Rush did,

which is a very different take on how Bloodthirst was, is Blood Rush sort of said, you never know when I'm going to, like, it really made, grew a lot more dangerous because as the other player, if they have a little bit of mana open and some cards in their hand, it's like the ability to giant growth

was so much easier. You know, in a normal Gruul deck, let's say, you know, green has a common giant growth effect. What are you doing? Green has a giant... Sorry. Some traffic. So normally green will have a giant growth effect in common

and red will have one, like usually a power pumping spell. Sorry about that. Safety first is always my thing. So I was maneuvering some there. I'm now safely on the part I was maneuvering. Okay, so green normally has a common giant growth effect. Red will have a common power pumping effect.

And that's usually it. There's maybe two spells in common that, you know, I mean, red sometimes will also have a combat trick that's not power boosting. It may be like grant first strike or something, although that often grants power. So anyway, you went from a thing where you're as fan of giant growth effects

was way smaller. So all of a sudden with Blood Rush, look, there's a number of creatures that can turn into giant growth effects. So it just made every attack a little bit scarier. And the reason it played nicely, one of the things we like to do is we like our mechanics to,

our guild mechanics in the same guild to play nicely together. So one of the things that like to do is we like our mechanics, our guild mechanics in the same guild to play nicely together. So one of the things that's nice when you put Bloodthirst and Bloodrush together is Bloodthirst you want to get through, right? You want to be able to do the damage so your creatures get bigger. And normally when you're playing

just Bloodthirst, your opponent's kind of aware that you're trying to get the bonus, so they're a little more apt to block you because they want to stop the bloodthirst. But with Blood Rush in the mix, they don't know when you can make your thing bigger. So it allows you to much more easily either actually have an answer or bluff an answer and get your creatures through. Now, Blood Rush, one of the things with Blood Rush that we talked a little bit about is

we like to build mechanics for the style of player who plays. And one of the things about the Gruul player is the Gruul player leans a little more Timmy. It's a little more about just playing bigger and bigger creatures and attacking. It has a bit of a Timmy-Tammy sensibility. But one thing we've learned about the Timmies and the Tammies of the world is they don't particularly like discarding their cards. The one reason this was a little bit different is most of the time when you're discarding, either you're killing a creature or you're getting an extra damage that's really important to get into.

Sometimes even winning the game with it. So we're like, okay, the guru player is not the one that willy-nilly wants to discard his cards, but it seems like the situation where you're going to discard your cards would have some sort of attractiveness to that player, and so we left Blood Rush. We need to talk a bit about it.

But anyway, Blood Rush stayed. So now, let's get to Ravnica Allegiances. Okay, so the mechanic that Vision Design made was called Turmoil. So the way Turmoil worked was it went on permanence. It was an ability word. It said, at the beginning of your end step, if opponent was dealt damage this turn, effect. And the idea was, okay, it kind of was like a bloodthirsty turn effect. And the idea was okay,

it kind of was like a bloodthirsty type effect, except rather than you getting plus one plus one counters on your creatures, other things would happen. And it always happened at end of turn. So maybe it did damage, or maybe it made a token, or maybe it you know, it would do something

that was of value to you, something that was valuable at end of turn. something that was of value to you, something that was valuable at end of turn. And that was what we turned over. We thought it kind of played a bit into Bloodthirst, but did something a little bit different. And it would play nicely with the mechanics that were there before, but we hadn't quite seen this before. Originally, by the way, we had Enrage,

which is the mechanic on the dinosaurs, if you take damage, if you're a damage trigger, we had made that for Gruul, and it found out at the same time, in completely parallel design, the Ixalan team had designed Enrage for the dinosaurs, and the rule is the earlier team, if they need it, gets it, because the later team has more time to work on it. And so Ixalan was way before us, a year before us, so they took Enrage, and we had to get another mechanic.

So when Turmula got turned over to set design, they liked it. In fact, there were a couple of them that at the end of turn, what they would do is they would put mana in your mana pool. I'm not sure whether it didn't clear or whether it was a delayed effect when you got the mana. But the idea was it gave you mana to spend next turn. Or maybe it gave you... I forget exactly how it worked. But we had a version that gave you mana so that you could use your mana on the next turn.

And they really liked that, and they ended up giving it not to Gruul, but they gave it to Rakdos and then tweaked it to make Spectacle. They liked the idea of something that cared about you doing damage, and Gruul had already done Bloodthirst and gotten bigger. They liked the idea of damage prevention. You know, the raptors really have this thing about enjoying pain, enjoying inflicting pain, and so it made it kind of cool to put it there. And so they did cost reduction.

Gruul doesn't... Gruul's... Instead of getting cost reduction, Gruul tend to like going bigger, which is why we have blood thirst, where raptors is a little more about trying to get your threats out. Like pain is kind of a thing that helps you. So anyway, that went to Ractos. So what that meant was that they needed to come up with a different mechanic for Gruul because they had given

the Gruul mechanic away to Ractos. And I know there's a lot, like one of the guidelines we have is if you mix all the cards with the guild symbol together that it would play together there would be a cohesiveness to the play.

So one of the things they were looking at is okay, what exactly can gruel do? And interestingly, the inspiration for the solution to the problem came from the Rakdos mechanic. So, like, Rakdos taketh away and giveth. So, Rakdos had a mechanical unleash in Return of Ravnica

where creatures could come into play with a plus one, plus one counter, and if they did, then they couldn't block. So it's sort of like you could choose to have an upside, but if you chose the upside, you got a downside. Or you could choose neither. And that got kind of mixed reviews, because

even though you were getting a bonus, it came with a negative. So the idea was, what if you did the same kind of thing, but rather than add a negative to the plus one, plus one counter side, just added a different positive to the other side. So the idea is, okay, you get plus one, plus one counter, or what? They tried a lot of different things, but the thing that played the best was haste. But there was one small problem.

And that is, at the time, red is primary in haste, black was secondary in haste, and green was tertiary in haste. And what that meant was green didn't do haste a lot. It got it on special occasions, especially for constructed. especially for constructed a long time back Eric and I came to a happy understanding where we really needed black needed it for as fan and for limited and for just

having an effect that overlapped black and red but green needed for constructed but it didn't need it a lot so the deal with structures okay look we'll give it tertiary and green like you know once or twice a set on a constructed card, you can use it. It's not something that's going to show up at low rarity.

It's not something that's going to be relevant for limited most of the time. But it could be there for constructed, and so we did that. So the problem was that usually if you're tertiary, you do not grant the ability. That if you're primary or secondary, usually primary grants it. Sometimes secondary grants it. For, like primary grants it, sometimes secondary grants it. For like a mechanic, we'd let that. But tertiary, it's like, ah, it's not really what green does. So they came

to the Council of Colors and we had a discussion. And one of the talks that's always been going on is that green really can make good use of haste. Obviously, for constructors, they've made good use of it. And so the idea that came back was,

why are we handicapping green? And so the argument was, maybe green deserves haste more than black. And we looked at it, and what had happened was, since that time, we had made Menace, and Menace overlaps in black and red. So black and red had an overlap. And it turns out it constructed the only place that Black

tended to use Haste in two places. One is on death effects where things come back from the graveyard. They have Haste so they can just attack. And usually on things that Red and Green didn't do, like flying, for example. Red and Green don't really have a lot of flying. So we decided it is, okay, let's make

green secondary in haste. We sort of swapped green and black. Black is tertiary, with the idea that on cards that come back from the graveyard, or cards that needed it because they were something red and green didn't do. And on some level, black's kind of on the edge of secondary for tertiary. I would say black is kind of still secondary, but less secondary than it used to be. And we moved green up. We said, you know what?

Green's a lot of fun with these effects. There's things we can do with green that we wouldn't do with red. And so we decided to make haste secondary in green, which meant that now we could just do this mechanic. I mean, at one point we were debating, what if we just said it's okay for the set? Not normally what green does, but it's very gruel, it plays in what's going on here.

What if we just make an exception? We had talked through that. But in the end, it just felt like green needed... We had an ongoing debate of how often green was supposed to get haste. And, you know, there was a compelling argument made that, look, the game is just better with green having more haste.

And the reason we decided to do it also was some abilities are best when centered in fewer colors, and some abilities just are broad enough and kind of intrinsic enough that going a little wider with them is okay. And Haste is the kind of effect we can make a lot of use of. Haste might, I mean, Flying is number one as far as overall how often it shows up of every mechanic. But Haste might be number two. We make a decent number of Haste cards.

Haste cards really help for Constructed. And it's just a fun, simple mechanic. There's a bunch of different ways to use it. And so we just made the decision to add it in. So with that decision, Riot was acceptable. And we added Riot in. And Riot proved itself almost instantaneously. Oh, let me talk about the overlaps.

I didn't do that. I didn't do that for the last set so in Gay Crash green and red red overlapped with green overlapped with Simic and red overlapped with not is it

not, oh Boros, with Boros so luckily Boros light typing giant growth effects, that worked really well, Boros, with Boros. So luckily, Boros light typing giant growth effects, that worked really well with Boros. And Simic had a, Simic cares about plus one, plus one counters.

And so the idea of making things bigger, you know, that, there were a lot of things that interacted with size, so both Boros and Simic could make use of a Blood Rush. As far as Ravnic Allegiance, once again

Simic is the overlap on the green side, and on the red side, was the overlap this time, is Raktos. Raktos is the overlap. So the one thing about Riot is Raktos has a mechanical spectacle that the one thing about Riot is Raktos has mechanical spectacle that it wants to get damage in. So having haste creatures,

or having just larger creatures, if you choose a plus and plus encounter, that may be able to get through through their size, played nicely with spectacle. And Simic has a monstrous mechanic which it's called, what's it called? It's called Adapt. Um, and so,

uh, in general, Simic has a bunch of cards that care about size. Once again, the same, um, Simic is very creature-oriented and caring about creatures, and so things that can make the creatures bigger, um, can be helpful. Um, yeah, so creatures that, I mean, um, in some ways, I, I, um, Riot works a little bit better with Rakdos than it works with, um, Simic, but it works with Simic. Um, it definitely is something where there's, there's some value to it. And, um, you know, the, the Simic does care about size a little bit. So there's some size mattering stuff going on, I think, in red in this set. Because both Simic and Care and, you know, making you care in Gruul. Size mattering makes you sometimes want to choose the plus one, plus one counter thing.

So anyway. And size mattering just makes you want to adapt. So one of the ways to sort of make those two overlap a little bit is you see some size matter stuff going on there. One of the interesting things in general about the making of Gruul is that

Gruul is very visceral in sort of its feel. A lot of times I've talked about sometimes you're trying to match like some guilds are more about corning off a portion of the game and others are more about sort of capturing a feel. I said that Rakdos, for example,

was more about capturing a feel where something like Golgari is more about, oh, the graveyard is kind of his thing. I would say that Gruul leans a little bit toward Rakdos in this regard, in that, yeah, I mean, it centers on creatures and combat, but it's also a little bit more oriented on the flavor of the recklessness, and, like, we want you to attack.

We want you to make a guild that wants to be turning sideways a lot. And we want you to be ramping up. You'll notice over all the visits that we're trying to do things that gets that sort of style of play, that gets that feel that you are you know, I'm Gruul, get out of the way

and I'm barreling through with giant creatures. We like that sense. We've attacked it a bunch of different ways. Like, one of the interesting things about Gruul has been that if you look at

the different mechanics they use for Gruul, they all play in the same deck, they all have the same sensibility, but they really attack it from different directions. And that's one of the signs that the guild has

a very distinctive sense for trying to get a sort of feel to it. And I enjoy that all the guild mechanics definitely have that feel, even though kind of the entry in is a little bit different. And when you put them all together, they play nicely together, because there's a

unified feel to a gruul deck. Even though the individual mechanics actually are coming from different vantage points. Much more than some other guilds that sort of hit the theme a little more straight on. So anyway, I'm coming up to work. I hope you guys enjoyed Talk of Gruul. You know, it is one of the guilds that when you sort of make the mechanics,

you really have to play because the key of making sure you have a good gruel mechanic is the general sense of what it encourages for you, the gruel player, and how it makes your opponent who's playing against you feel. The gruel are dangerous and reckless and a little bit scary. And so we like the idea that we're playing against gruel that the other player isn't necessarily playing by some of the normal rules of magic. That some of the normal strategies about how to attack aren't quite true. That they're a little bit more reckless and a little bit more willing to do kind of crazy things, which matches the general feel of Gruul, and we like that. So, anyway, Gruul is a lot of fun to design.

I hope you guys enjoyed the walkthrough gruel today. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Bye-bye.