Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #621: Simic

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

This podcast is the tenth and final in my Ravnica guild series. In this podcast, I talk about the green-blue guild, the Simic Combine.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so I've been doing all the guilds, and so far I've done all of them but one, which leaves the Simic Combine. So it's the final, the tenth and final guild. So interestingly, Simic is the guild that has been in the last set every time. It was in Dissension in the first original Ravnica block. It was in Gatecrash in the second one. And it's in Ravnica Allegiances this time around. So Simic always waits till the end, apparently.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about green and blue. Okay, so green is the color that believes that the world is perfect the way it is, that really you have to stop and admire what is around you, that is the color that's like nature is this beautiful, wondrous thing, and only if you truly stop to understand it can you really appreciate it, and that green believes that the whole point of the world is not to change the world, but to understand and acknowledge that the world is perfect the world is not to change the world, but to understand and acknowledge

that the world is perfect the way it is. Blue, in contrast, Blue being the enemy of Green, is very much about the blank slate. Blue believes the goal of life is perfection, is making yourself the best that you can be. And Blue believes through education, through tools, through technology, that, you know, through experience, that people can become what they need to be, that people are blank slates that can be formed. And so when you blue and green, obviously the inherent conflict is the nature-nurture conflict. You know, what is the thing that makes people who they are?

Are they born that way? Is it their genes? Or is it experience? Is it life that makes them that way? Can you become what you want to become? Or are you sort of destined to be what you were born to be? That's the inherent green-blue conflict. So what happens when green and blue get together? Well, the idea is you take green's love of nature and you combine it with blue's desire to improve upon things, and you get a guild that wants to improve upon nature.

So the idea for Blue-Green is that they love nature. They love it. They think it's awesome. They're huge fans. But it's like, ooh, is there a way to make nature even better? And so they are scientists. They very much are about experimentation. But it's experimentation on the biological side of things. It's sort of like, this creature is really cool

and this creature is really cool. What if we combined those creatures? Wouldn't that make an even cooler creature? And so the Simic are very much about sort of they love the idea of can we just give nature a little nudge? You know, the idea

is, oh, eventually nature might crossbreed these things. It could eventually happen. We're just speeding it along. We're just, you know, they're big on, hey, evolution's this cool thing, you know, we could help evolution along, maybe speed it along a little bit and improve upon it.

That at the core is what the Simic is all about. Okay, so one of the tricky things about the Simic is they very much are about, they're very creature-based. They're very about what can we make that's a creature. And so we have made their guilds very focused on creatures.

And, in fact, because we're all about experimentation and sort of improving up on things, we found a mechanical hook for the Simic. And that mechanical hook was the plus one, plus one counter. So many, many years ago, going all the way back to Alpha, Richard had the idea of, hey, what if you want to have cards that sort of enhance creatures? How do we do that?

And the idea is, well, what if we have counters that just represented this improvement? And early Magic messed around with a lot of different counters, but in the end we settled with plus one plus one counters. We occasionally do minus one minus one counters, but most the end we settled with plus one, plus one counters. We occasionally do minus one, minus one counters, but most of the time we do plus one, plus one counters. And they're just the perfect building block of,

hey, I'm making things better, or they're improving, or they're getting bigger. There's a bunch of flavor reasons you can use them. But it seemed like a good fit for the Simic, who was constantly experimenting and trying to improve upon their creatures. So the very first mechanic we ever made for them was called Graft. There were 13 cards. It was in Dissension.

So let me... Graft would have a number with it. So Graft N, whatever the number is. This permanent enters the battlefield with N plus one plus one counters on it. Whenever another creature enters the battlefield, if this permanent has a plus one plus one counter on it, you may move a plus one plus one counter from this permanent onto that creature. So the idea is, I have a creature,

it comes with some number of plus one plus one counters. Then, whenever another creature enters the battlefield under my control, I can move counters from my graph creature onto that creature. Now, in addition to that, a lot of the graph creatures cared about what had a plus one plus one counter on it. A common thing to do with graph might be, oh, well, I have graphed and I put a counter to something, but I can make target creature that has a plus one plus one counter on it that I control fly. So the idea is, oh, well, if I graph graph something not only have I made it bigger and better but I've now made it such that this thing

can interact with it so not only did graph add plus and plus one counters but often it interacted with the plus and plus one counters so the fact that you were putting a counter on something also meant that you could interact with it and grant it an ability and that

one of the things that was cool is one of the things we were trying to do with the Simic is the idea of building a better creature. That we loved the idea that you, the player, could sort of work to make your creatures better. And so the idea of Graft is

oh, well I have the ability to add plus one, plus one counters so I can change the size of my creatures. And then a lot of of the graph cards, and a few of the non-graph cards, or some of the graph cards and some of the non-graph cards, allowed us to interact with things that had the counters, so you could further sort of adapt what they are. And so one of the neat things about playing Simic was that you could make, you sort of could improve upon and make your creatures better

and sort of build your own creatures as you're playing. That's what we wanted in Simic. The other thing that we did with Simic, and one of the challenges we had at the time was the inspiration for the Simic, when we originally put together, was The Island of Dr. Moreau. So that is a novel, it was later made into a movie, I believe, where it's about this sort of mad scientist

that's creating sort of hybrid humanoid animal creatures. And I think that was kind of the inspiration of... The thing that was important about the Simic was the creatures that were being made weren't just random creatures. They were hybrid creatures. They were either, it fell into kind of two categories. One was taking something that already exists

and just magnifying its qualities, sort of making mutants, if you will. And the other was making hybrids, where you take two or more different creatures and blend them together. And so, one of the things that was tricky was the set right before or the block right before Ravnica block was Champs of Kamigawa block. And one of the themes of Champs of Kamigawa block was

that there was a lot of animal humanoids. You know, there were rat people and bunny people and snake people. And there just were a lot of, just because of the Japanese mythology, there were a lot of, oh, I am an animal, but I'm humanoid. So we were trying to be careful not to do too much of the humanoid animal straight up because of Chimekamakawa. So we leaned a little more into the this plus this sort of flavor. And then what we found was that we could have some fun with the creature type line

because we are sort of blending things together. And the audience really, I think the, of all the guilds as far as the ones that just had some sort of fun playfulness to them, I think the Simic was one of the ones that people latched on to the most. I mean, the Izzet have some silly stuff and some fun card names,

but it really was the Simic that was just making, you know, I'm a crabfish. I'm just taking things and combining them together in interesting ways. Like, I know there's one in Raptant Allegiances that is a turtle and a crab and a crocodile.

And that's just kind of fun. You know what I'm saying? Obviously when I made Unstable, I played around in that space a little bit and just tried to go to the next level where the things made them even sillier than they were in the Simic. Which you would think would be hard,

but the artists were up to the challenge of just randomly put as many creatures together as you can. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. So that was Graft. There were 13 cards with Graft. Graft was relatively popular. It wasn't, I would say, it wasn't in the highest echelon, I guess.

But it was probably the second one. Normally when I grade mechanics, when I do articles on them, the Stormscape articles, I put them into four categories. Like top 25%, next 25%, next 25%, bottom 25%. This is in the second category of

the 50-75% approval rating. So pretty good. Well liked. Not as beloved, I guess, as the very top tier, but pretty well liked and people enjoyed it. One of the things when we made Graft that was really interesting to us was trying to figure out how best to use it. There was a card, we called it Wall of Hats. I'm not sure of the actual name, but it was a card that couldn't attack or block but had graft and the idea was oh all it does

was enhance other creatures but since it can't attack or block there's no pressure to keep stuff on it you can't even attack or block with it and I know that card for example caused a lot of raised eyebrows but one of the things that's fun with Simic I think is I think Simic and to a lesser extent, Izzet,

are fun to kind of go, here's crazy things! What do you think of these crazy things? You know, there are guilds that kind of lean a little bit more toward doing the crazy stuff, which I enjoy. Okay. Now, the other thing to remember is, in Descension, Simic is green-blue.

The only overlapping color in all of Descension was Azorius was white-blue, and Simic was green-blue. The only overlap in color in all of Descension was Azorius was white-blue and Simic was blue-green, so they overlapped in blue. Blue was the only overlap. Rakdos was the other guild in Descension and Rakdos did not overlap with either Azorius or Simic. So

the Azorius mechanic was forecast where you were revealing cards from your hand to create effects. There wasn't, I mean, there wasn't lots of inherent synergy there. I mean, clearly there was a lot of flying creatures in the Azorius. Because of the nature of Kamigawa, we also were sort of restricted in how much control we could put into Azorius in Descension, so we ended up making a little bit more about flying creatures

and evasion, and flying creatures plus graft was pretty good. Grafting things that have evasion built into them already was good. There's a little bit of token making in Azorius, so I mean, there was some synergy. The other thing to remember, though, was by the time you got to Descension,

you were drafting all three sets. You were drafting Ravnica and Guild Pact and Descension. So, really, we were interacting not just with the blue guilds in this, but the blue and green guilds in all of the things. So, in Ravnica, we—let me go through the blues first, then I'll go through the greens. So, we did Azorius already in Sension. Uh, the two blue guilds, I'm sorry, there was one blue guild. The one blue guild in, um, Ravnica was Dimir.

Um, and Dimir had Transmute, which was a mechanic that lets you trade your cards in for other cards. Um, yeah, I mean, the synergies, I guess, between, uh, is if I have things that can sort of sneak through because once again, Dimir had a lot of evasion and a lot of means to sneak through boosting your creatures that can sort of sneak through are as good blue, red was Izzet there probably was the least amount of overlap between Izzet and Simic in the sense that Izzet was so spell-centric and Izzet was so creature-centric.

There was some creatures in Izzet, and so there's some overlap there, but probably the least of the blue overlaps. And then finally there was... what am I forgetting? There's blue-black, blue-red, and blue-green. No, not this blue-green. Blue-white. Oh, that's it. There's only four. Okay. I've done them all. As far as green, in Ravnica, there was Golgari, which is green-black. Golgari kept bringing things back from the graveyard. And so it was pretty creature-centric.

It played fine with the craft. There were plenty of things to do. And there was some themes uh there was a little bit of theme in um in mono green of putting counters on things and then caring about um well there's a little bit of theme counters and there's a little bit of theme of making tokens uh so token making worked with graft and a little bit of caring about counters or size would play. The other green guild in Ravnica was Selesnya. Selesnya, once again, very creature-centric, so plus and plus encounters worked well with Selesnya. And the last green was Gruul.

Gruul was all about getting creatures in and doing damage. It already was putting plus and plus encounters on its stuff, so the graph creatures that was putting plus and plus encounters on its stuff. So the graph creatures that cared about plus and plus encounters played nicely with the Gruul cards that naturally got

plus and plus encounters. So there was synergy there. Okay, that was a ritual for Ravnica Block. Let's come back to Return to Ravnica Block. So Simic was in Gatecrash, which was the second set.

So once again, remember, five sets were in Return to Ravnica, five sets were in Gatecrash, and was the second set. So once again, remember, five sets were in Return of Ravnica, five sets were in Gatecrash, and then Dragon's Mace had all ten in it. So the mechanic in Gatecrash that we used was called Evolve. So Evolve has interesting—well, let me explain what Evolve is. I'll tell its history. So Evolve says whenever a creature enters the battlefield under your control,

if that creature has greater power or toughness than this creature, put a pulse of pulse of counter on this creature. So the idea of evolve is a creature that says, oh anytime I play a bigger creature and either power or toughness, I get bigger. So you have this little game you're playing where you're trying to keep upping the creature so that this creature keeps getting bigger.

And there often was times where you could chain the evolves a little bit where as if you can make one evolve thing bigger, it can make another evolve thing bigger. They could chain together. Anyway, the

actually, the chain together is slightly incorrect. What I meant is that when the creature would enter, you get to make all your creatures bigger, and so they would sort of come bigger together. Sorry, I implied that a little bit differently than I meant. But it did mean that you can play multiple Evolve creatures together,

and then you're encouraged to play high-power or high-toughness creatures, so then your entire army of Evolve creatures evolves. So Evolve came about, Ethan Fleischer was in the second-grade designer search, and so the second-grade designer search, we asked them to build a world. So Ethan had built a, the premise of his world was that it was going to start as this prehistoric world and then evolve over the course of the block. That we would jump a lot of time each set. Interestingly, it's an idea that I had also had

that originally was going to be the set where Theros ended up. And it turned out it required too many different worlds to build to the creative team at the time. So we audibled into Theros. But anyway, I liked the idea. I thought it was a cool idea. So you've started with prehistoric world because you want to sort of go back as far as you can so you have room to get forward.

And prehistoric world, it meant dinosaurs. So Ethan was really fond of having an evolution mechanic because, you know, it was dinosaurs. And his whole block theme was the idea that this world was going to evolve over time. So when he first made the evolved mechanic,

it did a whole bunch of things. Really, his initial version was do something and the thing gets a plus one, plus one counter. And what that thing was varied greatly. So I originally said to Ethan, I said, you're all over the board. Why don't we concentrate a little bit? And so one of the cards he had made essentially was evolve

although he only cared about power at the time I said oh if I play a creature with a greater power I get to get bigger and I said to him instead of like every single evolve creature working differently felt wrong so I said well let's

let's first condense let's see let's just maybe each color evolves in a different way so green ended up doing this and other colors did other things. And then as we moved along, I finally said to him, I go, you know what? I think the way you're doing green is just more interesting.

What if that's just your mechanic? I don't think you need every color to even do it differently. And so Ethan then ended up doing that. And it was a fun mechanic. So basically, I sort of knew that it made a lot of sense in Simic when I saw Ethan did it. And so I put it in my back pocket like, oh, this is a good Simic mechanic. Sean made Battalion, which was the

Boros mechanic, so I had some mechanics in my pocket that I knew we could use for the guilds. Anyway, when Gatecrash rolled around, I'm like, okay, I got it. I mean, day one, I'm like, let's use Evolve. I mean, we talked about some other things. We tried some other things.

But really, Evolve was clearly a good mechanic. It was fun. It fits Simic really well. It played into the plus and plus one counter theme. It played nicely with the graph cards. Because although the Evolve creatures tended at plus and plus counters on them, the graphed creatures often would grant abilities plus and plus counter creatures, so there was synergy there between graphed and evolved.

The one change we made, and I think this was made, I'm not sure whether we made this an end of design, beginning of development, which was originally it only cared about power. It didn't cared about power. It wasn't, it didn't care about both. It was just saying, oh, we'll have a more powerful creature come to play. But then we realized that there's just some fun,

like what happened was we kept, in order to make Evolve work, we kept making high power creatures like 4-1 or 5-1 so that we can get things a little bit cheaper that would trigger that. And we realized that if we cared about toughness, it allowed us to go the other way as well. And it's a little bit cheaper that would trigger that. And we realized that if we cared about toughness, it allowed us to go the other way as well. And it's a little bit easier to make low-power, high-toughness creatures

than to make a lot of high-power, low-toughness creatures. So we did that, and it worked beautifully, and we kept it. So it was... But other than that, Evolve was one of those mechanics that, like I said, Evolve evolved a bit while Ethan was working on it in the Great Designer Search 2 but once we brought it to Gatecrash, other than adding, changing power

to power or toughness, the mechanic really didn't change really what we spent a lot of the time on when working with with Asimic was and with Evolve, was just trying to make the enablers to with Evolve, was just trying to make the enablers to make Evolve work better.

Anyway, so there were 13 cards with Evolve. So 13 with the draft and 13 with Evolve. Ended up being 12 with Adapt, so didn't continue that 13 theme that I didn't even realize we had. Okay, so let's look at Gatecrash. So Gatecrash is drafted by itself. So

the green overlap was Gruul, and the blue overlap was Dimir. So Gruul had a mechanic where you could discard cards to basically giant growth

your creatures, and then also grant them abilities. So if I had like a 2-2 Trampler, or 3-3 trampler I could, you know, discard this card, face mana, and give my creature a plus 2 to 3 and trample, for example. So that, I mean

it was synergistic in the sense that they were both creature-based strategies. It didn't, there wasn't, you weren't able to use it in a way, or actually, could you use it when it entered the battlefield if you, in response, made it bigger? I'm not sure if that worked or not.

Trying to figure out when it checked about whether it was bigger or not. I mean, the one thing I do know was they were both creature-based strategies, and in general, Gruul had a lot of bigger creatures. And so one of the things that was nice, green in general is the big creature color, that if you were mixing some of the Gruul cards with Simic, well, you tended to get bigger creatures, and bigger creatures were very good for Evolve. And so also the other thing we were trying to do in Gruul is because

this mechanic boosted power and toughness, we'd like to mix up the power and toughness a little bit. So, for example, we were able to make like a 4-1 that you could discard to do plus 4 plus 1. The 4-1 worked well with Evolve, and also it worked nicely in Gruul.

So that combo worked well. And then with Dimir, Dimir's mechanic was Cypher, which was spells that after you cast them, you attach them to a creature, and then every time that creature dealt combat damage, that spell effect would go off. There was some synergy there I mean one of the things about it is because of Cypher Dimir well Dimir tended to have a lot of evasion

I mean partly had evasion because partly it had Cypher because it had evasion but the evolve I guess it wasn't I mean there was some and there was some creature elements there, and putting... I mean, I guess there was some

more... I guess... It's like Gruul had more high power, low toughness stuff, and I think Dimir had more low power, high toughness stuff. So there was a little bit of synergy there. And also, as your creatures got bigger and bigger

it made sometimes you would cipher on a big creature just so it was hard for your opponent to get in the way of the creature but yeah I guess once again there were synergies there and there was creature based stuff but now that I'm looking back at it it wasn't the mechanics weren't inherently hugely

synergistic, I guess. One of the challenges as always of doing Dimir is capturing the flavor is sort of hard. So, anyway. I'm now looking back. I'm like, okay, those synergies were not as high as they could be. I think the Gruul Simic played a little bit better

than Simic Dimir played, to be honest. Okay. So let's get to the Ravnica Allegiances. So, so the mechanic we wanted to put into Simic, so the very first meeting we had, remember, Guild of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiances vision design with one team, was we wrote all 10 guilds on the board,

and then we wrote up every mechanic we could think of, existing mechanic, that we thought could fit in a guild. I posted this picture on one of my articles. And one of the things that came up real quickly is proliferate. Now, we have been trying to get proliferate back in. So proliferate first showed up in Skars and Mirrodin. We were, one of the themes of the Phyrexians was that they acted like a virus. And they spread like a virus.

So, the... Polyphred originally was me trying to play into that. I think we originally made one card that did it. Originally, what it did was... It took poison counters and minus one, minus one counters and gave an extra one to any creature or player that had one. And then I realized, or not I realized, well, I realized that it was worthy of more than just a card. I think I made a card out of it, then I made a vertical cycle out of it,

and I'm like, oh, this might be a mechanic. And then Mark Globus, who was on the design team, said, why restrict it to minus one, minus one counters and plus one, plus one? I'm sorry, minus one, minus one counters and poison.

Why not just let it do it to any counters? And we had had charge counters in the set, and so I was like, okay, that's a pretty cool idea. So we did that.

And proliferate was a big, big hit. I think Infect got rated higher than proliferate in the, but those two mechanics were the, like, scored really, big hit. I think Infect got rated higher than Polypherate, but those two mechanics scored really, really well. Both of them were in the top 25%. And I think Polypherate, people really got drawn to it just because there was so much flexibility.

Like, Magic uses counters. There's all sorts of counters. So, okay, add counters to things. There's all sorts of cool and neat ways that you could do that. And so, I knew that proliferate was popular. So, one of the things that I've said is,

okay, how do we bring proliferate back? Players like proliferate. And one of the things I was kind of encouraged by was, it might be fun to bring back proliferate in a world very different than it first showed up in. The first set it showed up in was a minus one, minus one counter world with poison, where like more often than not, the reason you were proliferating

was not to gain advantage for yourself, but was to hurt your opponent. Now there were charge counters, there were some reasons you would help yourself, but more often than not, in Scars of Mirrodin block, especially in Limited, it wasars of Mirrored and Block, especially in Limited, it was more of a negative thing.

You were hurting your opponent with proliferate. I liked the idea of bringing back proliferate in a world where you're helping yourself. It just made proliferate play in Limited very differently. So we were working on Kaladesh, and it seemed like, oh, this is a world with energy counters, and plus one, plus one counters were a main theme.

Oh my God, this is a world all about building and inventing things and counters are just a big role of that. This is a perfect way for proliferate. So we brought proliferate in. The problem was because energy counters and plus one counters and there's, right, because the plus one, plus one counters played such a big role, and they were proliferated so good with plus one, plus one counters, it kind of dwarfed, like, energy just didn't matter. It's like, oh, all my creatures get yet another plus one bigger,

and, oh, I get one energy. Like, the energy part didn't really matter, and the plus one, plus one counter was so powerful, I get one energy. The energy part didn't really matter, and the plus one plus one counter was so powerful that it was warping things. And so we tried and said, okay, this is not working. So then in Aether Revolt,

there was a different team. I had run the Caledon, or co-ran with Sean Mayne, the Caledon team. I was on the Aether Revolt team, but I wasn't running it. Mark Gottlieb wasran with Sean Mayne, the Caledon team. I was on the Ether Revolt team, but I wasn't running it. Mark Gottlieb was. And it was a different, other than me, it was a different team.

And that team said, you know what? Wow, proliferate seems so good here. Let's see if we can make it work. And so we tried, which we made a second attempt to try and make proliferate work. And in the end, it failed. I mean, it was a tough task. If Caledon felt it didn't work, making it work where you're adding yet one more set was a tough task. If Kaladesh felt it didn't work, making it work where you're adding yet one more set was a challenge.

We tried, and we had some clever ways to try to do it, but anyway, it didn't work. So, okay, we had tried in Kaladesh block, but maybe that was just, plus one plus conners were such a strong theme, maybe it was okay. You know, and this time, like,

we could, we had a little more control of the Plus and Plus McConners in this set, you know, obviously we liked the idea that the Simic used Plus and Plus McConners, but we'd have a little bit of control of what we'd do with it, and maybe, like, proliferate just seems so perfect, so flavorful for the

Simic. so we tried it um we did a lot of fun things with it actually vision handed it over to set design with proliferate in it um there are some challenges and there's some things we tried to do um but one of the cool things was we found some neat ways to use synergy with it and we found a way to blend it. Like, for example, in the Vision design handoff, Azorius so the two guilds that overlap with it in Rapture

Allegiance is Azorius' white-blue overlaps with the blue of Simic and Gruul's red-green which overlaps with the green of Simic. So, at the time, Azorius had this mechanic that allowed you to

take any Enter the Battlefield effect and turn it into any other Enter the Battlefield effect that you had. And a lot of proliferate went on Enter the Battlefield effects. It's a good and clear place to use it. So, it just worked really well with what Precedence was the name of the Azorius mechanic. And then in Gruul, Gruul at the time had this mechanic that rewarded you at

end of turn if you had dealt combat damage. And Simic was creature based, so, um, they were playing pretty well together. Um, and one of the things that it let us do was, um, it was a way to get plus and plus encounters

on things that we didn't proliferate, so, um, we were able to make some synergy. We thought it was fun. The problems we got to set design, um, it, were able to make some synergy. We thought it was fun. The problems we got to set design, if proliferate was not quite as synergistic as, there were other things that were a little bit more synergistic. And I think there were a bunch of mechanics that they liked that used plus one, plus one counters. Like they really liked Riot, for example. And the problem was that

proliferate is just so strong with plus one plus one counters that having a lot of very dedicated plus one plus one counter themes made it kind of tough to balance. And so, once again, the funny thing is, each time proliferate's gotten in trouble, it's been from being too

synergistic. It is too good. Now, we will find a place where the balance is there. I mean, I do get that players want proliferate, and we are working, we will find a place. But it is interesting in that every time we try to make proliferate work, the challenge of proliferate is not a lack of working, but working a little bit too well, ironically. Anyway, so they couldn't

do proliferate. So they ended up doing another mechanic. The mechanic they decided they wanted to do was Monstrous. So Monstrous is a mechanic from Theros. Basically, the idea of Monstrous is that you have an amount of mana. It's Monstrous, or is it Monstrosity?

I think it's Monstrosity. Monstrosity N. And then you pay some amount of mana, and you put N plus one plus one counters on it. And then, once it's Monstrous, once you've activated that once, you can no longer activate it. So then, once it's monstrous, once you've activated that once, you can no longer activate it. So the idea is, one time once,

you can make it bigger. Originally, I think, when we made the mechanic in Theros, it had use once per game on it. And then, in the end, we just changed that to, well, just, if you become monstrous, and the way you'll know that is if there's counters on you. And we made

careful in Theros not to make it easy to put counters on other creatures or to remove counters from creatures. So if a creature had counters, you knew it was monstrous. So the problem with monstrous, I mean, monstrous worked really, really well for what we wanted, just two small problems.

One was that one of the things that Simic likes to do is make use of plus and plus counters, and it likes to add plus and plus counters and move plus and plus counters. Monstrous was a little weird because one of the reasons

we were able to do it in Theros is, oh, well we didn't add or subtract counters, so if you saw a creature that had counters, you knew it was Monstrous. You just knew. But in Simic where we wanted you to be able to add and subtract things, so if you saw a creature and had counters, you knew it was monstrous. You just knew. But in Simic, where we wanted you to be able to add and subtract things, right? You're improving on creatures. You're enhancing creatures. We wanted you to be able to add and subtract.

And so the memory issue became pretty daunting. The second thing is, Simic will also use plus and plus counters as a resource. And so the fact that you could have a creature and then eat a ball's counters and then now there's nothing to tell you you couldn't put more counters on it was confusing and kind of frustrating. You kind of wanted to put more counters on it. The other issue was the word monstrous. While other guilds might look at what

is being made by Simic as monstrous, you know, oh look, it's a crab turtle crocodile. That's kind of monstrous. The problem is the Simic wouldn't see it as monstrous. And we always, in guilds, we name the guild mechanic from the point of view of the guild. So the idea of a guild, since the Simic would never see their own things as monsters, the word monstrous would kind of rank false as the name of the Simic mechanic. So we had two problems.

Creatively, we didn't really want to call it monstrous, and mechanically, we wanted to tweak it a little bit. So we said, okay, let's just change the name, make it the cleaner version that we want. So we called it Adapt. So here's how Adapt works. Adapt says cost, Adapt N, so N is whatever number. If this creature has no plus and plus counters on it, put N plus and plus counters on it. So the big difference between this card and, or sorry, this mechanic and Monstrous is it no longer cares about whether it's Monstrous or not. It just looks to see if there's counters on it. So in a world where you can add and subtract counters,

there's two things. One is, you now know whether or not you can have counters by the fact of, are there counters? Like, you now know whether or not you can activate it on whether or not there are counters. You don't have to worry about where it came from or how it got there. It's just, are other counters are not.

The memory is much cleaner and much simpler. The other issue is that because you can use counters as a resource, you're able to refill a creature. So it's like, oh, I can use this and the counters get used for other things and now it's empty. Now I can adapt again and I can get the counters back.

Now, one of the complaints about this is there's a little bit of anti-synergy since Simic has the ability to put plus one, plus one counters on things that you are less inclined to put plus one, plus one counters on an adapt creature because you're shutting off its ability to adapt. That is true. We did make it such that in the set, for limited especially, you only put plus one counters on your

own thing. So your opponent isn't shutting off your thing by putting plus one, plus one counters on it. It's not like, oh, I can adapt and add three counters and to my point it puts one on it to stop the adapt. That doesn't happen. It is true that you have to be careful when putting your counters on things

about when you put it on adapt and when you don't. When you're mixing it with old sets, it doesn't have a problem with Evolve, because Evolve put counters on themselves. It does have a problem with Graft, in that you kind of don't want a Graft on it. Or, I mean, the one positive with Graft, I will say, the one synergy with Graft is

if you adapt a creature, now a Graft card that cares about plus and plus encounters can affect that card. So there is synergy with Graft, but there's a little bit of anti-synergy in that you kind of don't want to Graft onto an Adapt creature. We got that. We made sure that it worked well within itself

and, you know, like I said, there is a reason you would play Graft with Adapt. It's not like there's no synergy there at all. Now, as I've said with the other podcast, Routed to Allegiance, like I said, as me recording this, it's not even out to you guys yet. It's not even, I mean, you guys have played in pre-release,

but it's not for sale yet. So, I mean, I guess you bought something for this. But anyway, it's not officially started going on sale. And so I don't have the feedback yet. One of the complaints I got when the set first came out was people thinking, like people not getting that we knew it was monstrous and we were adapting it to adapt.

There were some people that felt like we were trying to pull fast forward on you, like, hi, you'll never notice that this is monstrous and we were adapting it to adapt. There were some people that thought like we were trying to pull fast forward on you, like, ha ha, you'll never notice that this is monstrous secretly. What happened there was we announced the things over the break and I don't have articles over the break, over the holiday break. So my first article, my first preview article, as I walked through all the mechanics, I was very open and in front about, look, we essentially reprinted monstrosity, just we changed it for the following reasons I was very open and in front about look, we essentially reprinted Monstrosity, just

we changed it for the following reasons I just walked through. But because I hadn't yet sort of gone through there, there was a little bit of I don't know, people thought we were trying to pull fast, but we weren't. In fact, the thought process for us was

we thought of each set as having a reprint mechanic that the Selesnya brought back Convoke, and we thought, let's make it brought back Monstrosity. Yes, we changed the name. We slightly tweaked it, but we're like from a reprint strategy, it's

very, very close to us bringing back Monstrosity. And if you want to play Monstrosity and adapt cards together, you can. Like I said, the only issue with Monstrosity mixing in Simic is there's some memory issues remembering if you've done Monstrosity or not. And because countries get moved around, that can get a little complicated. Okay, so I will now share a secret with you. Simic is my favorite guild to play.

The interesting thing is, if I self-identify myself in guilds, I self-identify as Izzet. In fact, I don't, if you ever heard me rank my colors, I think green is my lowest amount of colors. Like, I believe that I am red, then blue, then white, then black, then green.

So the funny thing is, I don't really relate philosophically to Simic. For example, Dave Humphries is one of the folks in R&D that leads a lot of sets. He was a biology major, and his favorite guild is Simic. You know, that's the one he identifies with. So it's funny.

The reason I think I like playing it is it's one of the most Johnny of the guilds. You know, it has a lot of synergy and a lot of sort of creativity. Like, it's funny. a lot of sort of creativity. Like, it's funny. The is it from a flavor sense is all about creativity in that they're the mad inventors. But when you actually get to sort of the gameplay,

because they're based on instant sorcery, it's a little tricky. The creativity is not as imbued in them, where Simic is just all throughout Simic. They're just, you know, you've got to sort of make your own creatures, and that's a lot of fun. And so, um, whenever I have a chance to play, I tend to

play Simic when I can play Simic. Um, whenever we go to pre-release and stuff and I get to pick a box, I tend to pick Simic. I really do enjoy Simic. Um, and I also enjoy plus-one, plus-one counters. Um, I enjoy doubling things. That's a big thing that Simic will do. Um, I enjoy cloning things. That's a big thing that Simic will do.

I enjoy cloning things. A lot of the mechanics that I as a player enjoy tend to fall in green-blue. So green-blue does counters, does doubling, does cloning. There's a lot of cool things there that I enjoy. There's a lot of fun cards that I enjoy. Like in Guild Pack, for example, things there that I enjoy. There's a lot of fun cards that I enjoy. Like, in Guild Pack, for example, I was able to make a doubling...

Guild Pack was Dragon Maze. Anyway, there was a green-blue card that doubled things. Anyway, there's a lot of fun stuff in Simic, and so I, as a player, enjoy Simic. Let's see, I'm almost at work. Do I have any lot of fun stuff in Simic, and so I, as a player, enjoy Simic. Let's see, I'm almost to work. Do I have any other final comments about the Simic? The Simic are interesting in the sense that they are locked mechanically. Oh, let me put this

up. One of the things that came up when we were previewing the Simic was there's a group of people that are like, really? Plus one, plus one counters again? And one of the things that I had to say to that was I don't see the Simic's tie to having a strong mechanical tie be a bug. It's a feature to me. I mean, if every single guild

could have a strong mechanical tie, we'd do that. The reason we don't is it's just hard to. I like having a very strong exacting identity. I like the fact when you play the cards together from different blocks, you know, if you take

all the watermarked synod cards they do play together. And the reason is that they're just a strong clean, cohesive theme. And the other thing to remember is that when I talk to the Simic players, when I talk to them that really enjoy Simic, they love the plus and plus encounters. Like, the funny thing is, like, one of the things that's challenging is

not every player likes every guild. I'm not trying to make everybody like the guild. I'm trying to make the lovers of the guild love the guild. So if I'm making Simic, I want to make people who really enjoy Simic enjoy Simic. I don't care if people that really enjoy something different are like,

oh, well, really, I don't like to play Simic, so why do you keep making it the same? Well, that's what Simic is. Partially is, we're going to do other factions on other worlds at other places where we're going to have to take two and three color combinations and make new factions. And when we do that, we're going to have to be able to have an identity

that's not the guilds. So A, making the guilds tight and clean, you know, just opens up future space for us to do other things. The idea of Simic is not, this is not every possible thing we can do with Blue-Green. This is one thing we can do with Blue-Green, doing it

well. And the people that really enjoy the Simic, the people that I know that are just waiting for the Simic to come out, its identity is a big part of it. They enjoy the counters. I enjoy the counters, you know what I'm saying? I love moving counters and doubling counters and enhancing things.

One of the reasons that I always like playing the Simic is I like the style of play of the Simic. I enjoy it. And so all of a sudden you said, oh, this time, yeah, it's not going to do the thing it does. I, the person who really loves it, go, why? Why wouldn't you make... I love the thing it does.

Why wouldn't you do the thing it does? And that is why we do plus and plus one counters. That is its theme. It's all about adapting creatures. Now, it's not to say you couldn't ever make a Simic mechanic that doesn't have plus and plus one counters. That is its theme. It's all about adapting creatures. Now, it's not to say you couldn't ever make a Simic mechanic that doesn't have plus and plus one counters, but it has to really play into the theme of what we're doing. I mean, Poliferate is a good example where

Poliferate enhances plus and plus one counters, but doesn't create plus and plus one counters. So if we had made Poliferate the Simic mechanic, it would have required us to do a lot of other cards around it making counters. So, if we had made proliferate the Simic mechanic, it would have required us to do a lot of other cards around it making counters. So, that's a good example of a mechanic that doesn't, like, directly make counters, but realistically

it does make counters. So, like, it allows you, I mean, it plays in the same kind of environment that you want the other stuff to play, which is I want a deck with lots of counters on things in order to proliferate. But anyway, it was a pretty loud note that I heard about the people that were like really plus and plus encounters. But the more I sort of broached the topic on my blog and listened to people, all the

Simic fans were like, no, no, do not listen to them. This is awesome. Keep doing the awesome thing. You know, keep Siming awesome, basically, is the note I kept getting. So we did. And for those that really want Blue Green to do something different,

I promise one day somewhere there will be other days with other factions in other worlds and we will find other identities for things. For example, on Ixalan, Blue Green was the Merfolk colors, right? And Merfolk weren't normally in green, so we played merfolk in green, and we really did some stuff with them that was a little bit different,

that wasn't the same thing that we were doing in Simic. And so that's a good example of having a blue-green tribe and something we pushed that was trying to do something different. I mean, specifically trying not to be Simic also, because Simic was coming up. But that's a good example of us doing blue-green and doing it in a way that wasn't Simic. But anyway, let's see how much traffic today. Oh, that's why I was chatting at the end.

I had extra traffic today. So anyway, I'm now at work. I hope, by the way, before I finish this, I hope you guys enjoyed all ten of the Guild podcasts. They were fun to do. But anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the. They were fun to do. But anyway, I'm now at work. 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.