Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #650: War of the Spark Cards, Part 1

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

This is part one of a five-part series on card-by-card design stories from War of the Spark.

I'm pulling away driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, and for the next bunch of podcasts, I'm going to be talking about War of the Spark. And I'm going to be going through the cards and talking about a lot of cool cards and how they got designed. So we're going to start with Ajani the Great Hearted. So it costs two green white, so four mana total. One green, one white. It's a legendary planeswalker, a Johnny. It has a loyalty of five. And

remember, every planeswalker in this set has a static ability, a static or a trigger ability. So his static ability is creatures you control have vigilance. His plus one ability is you gain free life. And his minus two ability is put a plus one, plus one counter on each creature you control,

and a loyalty counter on each planeswalker you control. So, interestingly enough, Johnny started as the white-green hybrid planeswalker. And his ability... So back then, in vision design, we only had the uncomcommons had one ability. Either they had a static triggered ability or they had a minus ability.

So his original card was minus... I don't remember the numbers, but it was a minus ability and it put a plus one, plus one counter on target creature. We thought that that's a nice overlap in green and white. You can put plus one counters on things. And Ajani's whole shtick as a character is his magic works on others.

And that he's somebody all about helping others. Ajani's big thing is his magic is sort of centered on being able to help other people. So putting plus one, plus one counters on others felt really good. sort of centered on being able to help other people. So putting plus and plus encounters on others felt really good. Now, we originally had decided to put the main Gatewatch at Rare, and then when it got into set design, they're like, Johnny's Gatewatch, he should just be at Rare.

So they moved him up to Rare. And they moved him up to Rare. So originally when we did design, the Uncommons had one ability, the rares had two abilities, and the mythics had three abilities. And then we decided, or I think set design decided, the mythics would have four abilities, the rares would have three abilities, and the uncommons would have two abilities. And everybody would have a static or triggered ability. And so that meant that Johnny needed to have three abilities. So, first off was they kept

the ability to put plus and plus encounters on creatures, except they made a couple changes. One is, instead of putting it on a creature, it put it on all creatures, because it was a rare. And they also liked the idea of, well, it's putting counters on things, on your allies, but why not put loyalty

counters on your planeswalkers? We've been looking for different ways to add, I mean, obviously, Plifrey was in the set, but we were looking for ways to add loyalty to planeswalkers. So it felt really cool that if a Johnny's out, he helps your team, he helps your planeswalkers, he helps them all. That felt very flavorful. The plus ability

needed to be a little bit on the smaller side just because the minus ability is pretty good um so we ended up giving him a life gain ability because he's a healer so that made a lot of sense um and then there was a lot of give and take on the static abilities um static slash triggered abilities um one of the things that uh we realized is some of the easiest to do was your creatures, creatures you control gain something, have something. You have some basic ability, some evergreen ability. And we bounced those around a bit. It's clear that vigilance is a green and a white thing.

So the real question was whether the green-white hybrid planeswalker should have this ability or whether Ajani should have this ability. And I think it bunched around a bit. And I think they ended up, when we get to the green-white, the uncommon is Huatli. When I get to Huatli, we'll talk about Huatli. But I think they decided there was a better choice for Huatli. And so once that was true, I think Ajani just was the best place to put it. And it is thematic.

He made the creatures bigger, so giving them vigilance, there's some synergy there. So we ended up giving synergy. Next, Angrath, Captain of Chaos. Two, so hybrid hybrid. So two, black or red, black or red. So it's a black or red hybrid, meaning you can spend either black or red to cast it.

So you can cast this card for two black black, two black red, or two red red. He's a legendary planeswalker, Angrath. Loyalty, five. So creatures you control have menace. And then minus two, amass two. So this card was very tricky. Black and red. We were trying to find something we liked where black and red overlapped. The static ability was pretty easy because black and red shared menace.

And black and red at the time also shared haste, although we've been sort of swapping green and black with haste, so red and green ended up being more doing the haste stuff. But menace made a lot of sense. The real issue was we liked the idea of some Planeswalker amassing, just because it's an ability in the set, and the ability to amass multiple times

can be pretty powerful. So the interesting question about the red-black Planeswalker is, we have three choices. You have Ingrath, who is naturally black and red. His previous card was black and red. You have Tybalt, whose previous card was mono-red, but the character is black-red. Him being black-red made a lot of sense for the character. And the other one is Avnixilis, who his previous two cards were mono-black, but once again, as a character, he's pretty black-red. So we're like, okay,

we can do any one of these three, and with a straight face, say they're black red planeswalkers. I think we ended up going with Angrath for this card because he was the one that was naturally black red because we needed mono colored cards, and we felt like it's easier to believe doing obnixilous and mono black and doing tibble and mono red

no one was going to the previous cards were that so no one would bat an eye. Where angras if you made a mono black or mono red people go hey I thought he was black red. Now one of the things about planeswalkers in general is our belief is that planeswalkers have a core color or colors

and we try to make sure we do those colors when we do the character. Angrath is pretty evenly split between black and red where I think Obnixilus is core black and Tybalt's core red. I do think you could do either of those as black and red, but that is their core. And so we try to make sure that... I mean, I do think you could get away with doing Angreth probably in minor red. He makes more sense in minor red than minor black.

His abilities skew a little more toward the red side. But I think we decided it made sense here. So the Amass, I actually made a mistake in my article on this. I thought the reason we decided to give him Amass was that he was on Bolas' side, but he's not. I thought maybe Bolas definitely he's very good at manipulating people, so I thought maybe he manipulated Angrath. But it turns out that Angrath, his ability

essentially, one of his abilities is the ability to sort of influence others and in a very sort of reddish way and temporarily sort of gain control of others. And so the mask was sort of shown as that, is that he's making use of the army. He's not on Bullets' side, but he has some influence over the army, I think is the flavor. I agree. Looking at this all again, maybe putting a mask on Liliana would have made more sense, since in the story she obviously is the one controlling the army.

So that's one of those things that, like, if I had to do again, maybe we'd stick a mask on Liliana and not on Angrath. But it did, we did have some, I mean, even though black and red actually do overlap a decent amount, they overlap more in creature space and spell space. So trying to find a good spell that made sense that went on the black red ended up being a little harder than we thought. And the math did a really good job of being something that worked well as a minus planeswalker.

It did work very well on it. And so we ended up going with that. This is definitely one of those examples where we liked the design of the card. And then it was a matter of trying to figure out the character, and the character was a little bit of a stretch, where other cards, we made the card based on the character. You know, there's a little bit of each.

This is definitely, we made a card, we really, really liked the mechanics of the card, and then found some flavor to sort of talk about what it was. Okay, next. Arlen voice of the pack so four green green so she's four generic mana two green mana so six total two of which is green legendary planeswalker Arlen

loyalty seven each creature you control that's a wolf or werewolf enters the battlefield with an additional plus one plus one counter on it and then minus two create a two two green wolf creature token so

she started as an uncommon green card so in uncommon we had two cycles of mono color and then one so two five color you know two mono mono color were five card cycles and then one, so two five-card, you know, two mono-card were five-card cycles, and then one hybrid cycle, which was a ten-card cycle.

So there was essentially ten mono-card and ten hybrid cards at Uncommon for Planeswalkers. Arlen had always been mono-green. The character is red-green. We could have made her red-green. The thing about red-green is there's just a bunch of choices for red-green. We've made a bunch of different red-green characters. Uh, I think Samut is who we went with red-green. So, uh, it's funny. Certain combinations we don't have a lot of choices.

Like, um, when I get to, um, uh, Nahiri. We kind of needed Nahiri in the set because we don't have a lot of white-red planeswalkers. And Nahiri really was it. Likewise, Vraska for black-green because the only other black-green we have is Garak, and there's a reason he wasn't here. But... So, we decided that if Arlen wasn't

going to be red-green, werewolves lean a little more green than red. We definitely sort of... One of the things that Indus tried was we wanted to shake up the monsters and everybody couldn't be black. So while we knew that werewolves wanted to be green, we ended up putting them in red and green

because, you know, there's wolves and stuff in red. We felt like it could make some sense. And werewolves definitely have a little bit of a... a little bit of a flavor of when they turn a werewolf, they sort of become unhindered and do things they wouldn't normally do. It had a little bit of a red vibe to it. But we felt Arlen at core felt a little bit more green than red. And we wanted her to make wolves.

So the shtick of the character Arlen is that she's a werewolf, but that it is the moon in Innistrad that changes her. So whatever state she is in, when she planeswalks, she stays in that state in the new plane. And only by going back to Innistrad can she turn back to whatever version. Or can she change to the other version. So in this version, we had her in her human form. I'm not sure I don't know why the human form, but we had her in the human form. I'm not sure that this is... I mean, I don't know why the human form, but we've had her in the human form.

And we liked the idea that she had an affinity for wolves and werewolves. That's an Innishrod thing. One of the things we try to do with each of the planeswalkers is we like the idea of them having a little bit of a flavor of their natural plane. That part of...

Oh, well, Arlen is from Innistrad. Well on Innistrad wolves and werewolves kind of go together mechanically. So she also cares about wolves and werewolves. That she clearly was made to go in a werewolf deck. And a werewolf deck also uses wolves because all the cards that care about werewolves care about wolves. That's something that we

made a thematic connected thing. Just because there's only so many double face cards we could do in Innistrad. So to fill out that tribe, we had wolves fill out the werewolf tribe. So all the werewolf matter cards affected wolves and werewolves. Her first ability, originally when we made the card, it was just the minus make a wolf ability. Although I think the very first version of the card was loyalty 7, two make a make a wolf i think that was her might have been minus six she might have gone away um the one thing that we did by the way when we

added in the static triggered abilities on the cards is um on the minus ones is we tended to make them um odd most of the time um or better yet we made them such that if you use the card, that they often will stick around. Like, she has an ability that affects her wolves, so instead of having an even loyalty, she has an odd loyalty. So she can use it three times

and then still be around to affect them. And, with just one proliferate, now if you want to, you can make another wolf. Although, making the wolf, if you sac her to make the final wolf, I don't think that

wolf comes into play with the most of the post-predator. I'm not really sure about that. Anyway, we talked about whether this card wanted to get moved up to rare, just because making a lot of wolves is good. But we realized that, nah, it's okay. It's pretty straightforward, so we left her at uncommon.

The other reason was, there was a lot of competition at rare, and her card made more sense at uncommon than some of the other Monogreen cards made. Oh, the other thing that came across, something that came up with this card, is how she looks. So one of the notes I got was that she looks a bit younger than her previous card, and that was a big deal. We like the idea that we have Planeswalkers that represent lots of different things. So I did

some research on this. Arlen is middle aged. Arlen is, I think, in her 40s? Late 40s? Early 50s-ish? I mean, I think the character might be older than that, but I mean as far as the sort of the outward looking of the character. And the model version of what people draw off of, it's interesting.

I think that the first artist to draw her drew her slightly older than her model state that she looks on, like what everybody gets from, you know. One of the things we make is we make sheets so that everybody can draw the characters the same. And so, um, we sort of have a Bible of characters that, like, oh, this is, this is the, here's the character's front and back, this is their, what they look like, and every character has certain qualities to them. Like, um, Arlen has red hair, but she has a little white tufts at the bottom of her hair. Um, but anyway, I think the first time that Arlen got drawn, uh, the artist skewed a little, like, just made her look a little bit older than she did. She, like, for example,

Jaya is 70s, 80s. Jaya has gray hair. It's definitely an older female planeswalker. Arlen was meant to be middle-aged. Not young or anything, but not quite as old as Jaya. And, you know, for example, her hair isn't gray. Her hair is red, but she does have a gray, the tip of her hair has this gray, it's sort of, I don't know what to call it, but she does have gray on the tip of her hair. But anyway, we went back and looked and the character does match, the character in the set does match sort of the look of the basic

character. I think the first time she appeared, that one artist, because one thing about having lots of artists do the same characters is, there's a little bit of skew in how they do the character. You know what I'm saying? There's a little bit of nuance. It's one of the reasons we tend to stick the characters in certain outfits, and we tend to have

certain elements of the characters. It's not a mistake that Liliana has her tattoos, that Chandra has her fire hair, that Jace has his, you know, his, I don't know what they're called, but the tattoo-ish things. They're not tattoos,

but the white things that are on him. You know, there's a reason that our characters have sort of qualities to them that are unique in that when you see them, you go, oh, I get it, I get it. You know, I know,

it's a reason also in comics why superheroes have outfits and things, that, you know, there's some variance in how people draw things, and so having some stuff that helps cement and remind you of that. But anyway, that's because I know that issue came up with Arlen. So, canonically, Arlen is middle-aged. She has always been, that is what the character is. Okay, next. Ashiok, Dream Render. Legendary Planeswalker Ashiok.

Loyalty, five. Spells and abilities your opponent control can't cause their controller to search the library. So he keeps it in front of the searching library. Oh, his ability, by the way, he's one HH. So one hybrid hybrid. Hybrid being blue or black. So one blue or black, blue or black.

So you can spend three mana to cast him. You can cast him for one blue blue. I'm sorry. You can cast Ashiok, or cast them, for one blue black, one blue black. Sorry, talking about Ashiok, I'm not great. I'm my third person. And I don't know, by the way, the style guide for Ashiok. I don't know if technically the style guide is supposed to refer to Ashiok in third person. And I don't know, by the way, the style guide for Ashiok, I don't know if technically the style guide

is supposed to refer to Ashiok in third person. I think a lot of times when we talk about him in text, we talk about Ashiok in text, we just say Ashiok. But, for example, when I'm talking off the top of my head, it is hard to do, so I'm going to try.

I apologize if I mess up. But you can cast Ashiok for one blue-blue, one blue-black, or one black-black. The minus ability, minus one, target player puts the top four cards of their library into their graveyard, then exile each opponent's graveyard. So blue and black do not have a lot of overlap. Milling was the obvious choice, because it's the one thing that's repeatable that blue and black can do. So this card was first designed as a hybrid card. I think the way we did it was, I think

the hybrid cards were all minus originally and the mono color, maybe we mixed them up, maybe that's not even true. Anyway, this started as a minus milling card. That's what it did. In set design, they did two things. One is they added the static ability. And the static ability is tricky. There's not a lot

of clean abilities that you... that overlap in blue and black. And so they... I know they spent a lot of time trying to find something. This one was tricky to do. In the end, they decided because Ashiok is library-focused, okay, well, what if the ability

interacted with library? So the idea of, oh, well, your opponent can't search their library while Ashiok's in play. Then, I'm not sure why they added, the set design team added the rider on the graveyard. I mean, it's something else that blue and black can kind of do. To be honest, it's more of a black ability than a blue ability. Black and white are the colors that most often exile cards from graveyards.

But, I mean, it's a bend for blue. Something blue, I guess, bendy can do. And I think that was... My guess that was added for some gameplay reasons. There was something... I don't know for sure. This is just me hypothesizing. But my assumption is

there was something in gameplay that they felt they needed. Because you clearly could have just milled. The fact that it has the extra rider is there's some gameplay reason they felt they needed. Because you clearly could have just milled. The fact that it has the extra rider is there's some gameplay reason they needed it. And this just seemed like the place to put it. That's what I read from this. I don't actually... I'm not sure what that was, though.

So I don't know what caused that to happen. Okay, next. Awakening of the V2 Ghazi. Three green greens, so five mana total. Two wishes green, instant. Put nine plus one plus one counters on target land you control. It becomes a legendary zero zero elemental creature with haste named V2 Ghazi.

It's still a land. So in the story, in the War of the Spark, to try to help save the day, Nissa shows up and she awakens Vitu Ghazi, which is the Selesnian, like the holy tree, it's a giant tree the Selesnians pray to. So it's a big spiritual thing to the Selesnians. Anyway, she wakes it up, animates it,

and has it join the fight. And we needed a way to represent that. So the idea made a lot of sense is awakening a land. You know, animating a land. I mean, it was a pretty clear idea. The big question was how best to do this. I think they talked about for a while having a land that awoken itself. That didn't quite...

You want to get the sense that Nyssa did it. Because in the story, N Nissa awakens it. So I think they decided instead to make it a spell. I'm not sure why they made it an instant. I mean, instant obviously allows you some surprise value. Maybe they thought it was fun to like, ha-ha, you don't know this, but I have a 9-9. I think there also was some talk whether it was supposed...

whether it could be any land or whether it was supposed to be like a forest or something to represent it as a tree. But I think there also was some talk whether it could be any land or whether it was supposed to be a forest or something to represent a tree. It's one of the ones where gameplay trumped flavor. I think if you were just going off flavor maybe we would make it a forest. But it's just a better card if it's not limited to forest. So we made it any card. We used a lot of the text that we've used on Zendikar. Like for example, this used the Awaken rules text. So Awaken was a mechanic on Zendikar.

This represents Nyssa doing something. She's from Zendikar. So the idea of Nyssa sort of awakening something and using the awakening template, it's not technically, not labeled as awakening, but one of the things that Dave did in Dave Humphrey's set design is

he made a lot of nods to other mechanics in the set, and so awakening was one of them. And then there's this decision of how big it was supposed to be. I think they went with 9.9, because they just wanted a sense that it's really big. And I think they went instant,-9, because they just want to get a sense that it's really big. And I think they went instant, so you could surprise value.

They obviously give it haste. Whenever we awaken something, we give it haste. Just go, you don't have to remember whether or not you played that land this turn. And then it became an elemental, because it was an awoken land. So, awoken lands, we make elementals,

and then it got named. And it's legendary, obviously, because there's one Bidugazi, so we don't want you playing two Bidugazi at once. Flavor-wise, it's a singular thing. So anyway, I thought that was a pretty cool design. It is nice, by the way, when you have a story point where you just have a nice, clean, cool mechanic. Sometimes you do story points, and you have to work hard to figure out how to represent it.

This was the one that's pretty clean. It's like, I wake up a land and turn into a giant creature. Well, let's wake up a land and turn into a giant creature. I thought it was pretty cool. Okay, next. Bioessence Hydra. Three green, blue. So five mana total. One of which is green, one of which is blue.

It's a hydrant mutant, a creature. 4-4. It has tram blue. It's a Hydra Mutant, a creature, 4-4. It has Trample. Bioassets Hydra enters the battlefield with a plus and plus counter on it for each loyalty counter on Planeswalkers you control. And whenever one or more loyalty counters are put on Planeswalkers you control, put that many plus and plus counters on Bioassets Hydra.

So one of the things that we liked was trying to make cards that interact with planeswalkers in a fun way because it's not often that you can care about planeswalkers like one of the problems is normally planeswalkers there's two or three planeswalkers at Mythic Rare and so that says oh you just can't make a lot of cards that care about planeswalkers yes the oath cards did care occasionally we do cards that care about planeswalkers

it's just not something you do a lot of but in a set with 36 planeswalkers. It's just not something you do a lot of. But, in a set, with 36 Planeswalkers Unlimited, 37 Unconstructed, you finally get someplace where you actually can do that and care. And so this was kind of a fun card that we got to make that was kind of a Planeswalker

matter creature. Like, basically it's like, oh, I want to play this in a deck with lots of Planeswalkers. And that was a cool thing. And a cool thing we could do only here, like one of the things I always talk about is, I love finding cards that we just can't print anywhere, we could print here.

And the reason for that is, A, they feel special, you haven't seen them before, and B, it just saves design space. If I make a card that I can make here but nowhere else, then I've just, I'm, it's being as efficient as possible in design space. If I make a card that I can make here but nowhere else, then I've just, it's being as efficient as possible in design space because, oh, well, I've used a card that literally would go nowhere else. So, you know, I'm not wasting

a resource. Nowhere else could use this. I'm using it here. And I love finding cards like that. I find them to be very valuable. Okay, next. Bleeding Edge. So Bleeding Edge costs one black black. It's a sorcery. Up to one target creature gets minus two, minus two until end of turn. Amass two. So the reason it says up to one is if you just want to amass something you're not required to have a creature in play. Let's say, for example, you have creatures and your opponent doesn't. I'm not required to have a creature in play. Or you're not required, I mean, let's say, for example,

you have creatures and your opponent doesn't. I'm not required to shrink my own creature to a mass. I could just say, I'll use it on no creatures and a mass. That's why it says up to one. So a mass was interesting. So a mass came about because we were trying to solve, how do you make the Dreadhorde? How do you make the Eternal Army?

And like I said, originally, the mechanic we tried for a long time, you made 1-1 zombie soldiers, and then if one of them attacked, they must all attack. If one of them is blocked, they must all block. It was a pretty cool mechanic, and it definitely was very, very different from how tokens normally work, in that it made your tokens kind of work together. So, for example, if you were attacking with a 4-4 and I had four 1-1s, I couldn't, over the course of four turns,

chump it each turn with a 1-1. I had to sort of... Or, let's say I had three of them, or four of them. Maybe I would just trade them. But if I had three of them, I couldn't block... If I got a chump, I had to chump with all three. I couldn't chump with one over three turns. But the problem was that we had

a bunch of mechanics that anything that cared about go wide, anything that affected all your creatures, just got more powerful. And we had a lot of static abilities in the set because of the planeswalkers. So it just was causing problems. It sort of, affecting all your creatures was just a little more problematic. And so we ended up, the solution we came was, well, what if instead of thinking that it's each unique, what if the army, because occasionally we make creatures that represent more than one creature. And so what if the army was a singular creature that had the

similar vibe of, look, they attack or block together. That's what the individual mechanics were doing. You know, the individual tokens. But then it allowed us to sort of consolidate what you were doing. And if you wanted to make an en masse deck, if you grew your army, you could make a very powerful and scary army, but it was a singular creature. Because of that, we definitely were careful about what, for limited, like there's no pacifism, there's no lockdown blue card, that we took the things that would really harm the fact that it was

a singular creature and took them out of limited so that they're not a limited issue. In constructed, those stuff gets played a little less and you have some more answers for what you're doing. We also like that a mask gave you two completely different routes that you could go down. And essentially is, do you care about the size or the body? What I mean by that is, you could make an Amass deck

where the goal is just to get the biggest Amass creature you can. A lot of Amass cards grant abilities to the Amass creature, so you could just sort of make the biggest, scariest, nastiest Amass creature you could. You know, build up the biggest army. Or, you could play a deck

that has a lot of resources where you want to be able to sacrifice creatures, because every time you could. You know, build up the biggest army. Or, you could play a deck that has a lot of resources where you want to be able to sacrifice creatures because every time you make an amass, every time you amass, if you don't have a creature, you make a creature. So in a deck that does a lot of sacrificing, amass is nice because it's just constantly making you creatures. And then you can take advantage of the fact that each

amass spell gets you a new creature, and then use that as a means to constantly have a resource to sacrifice. Oh, the one other thing about bleeding edges, just a good example of a nice thing we'd like to do for aesthetics is, it's minus two, minus two, it's a mass two. I know it sounds silly when I talk about this,

and I talk about how having numbers match just makes people happier. But it does. You know, I've talked a lot about the importance of aesthetics and just things. Humans love patterns. They love things that sort of feel right. And having numbers match up like that just feels good. And it's not something that's intellectual. It's emotional.

But people are emotional, so I do think the aesthetics of Raycan are very important. Bloom Hulk. Three and a green. So four mana, one green. It's a 4-4 plant elemental. A creature, obviously. When Bloom Hulk enters the battlefield, SPASH! I'm just kidding.

When Bloom Hulk enters the battlefield, proliferate. So we brought Proliferate back. We had tried to get Proliferate in a whole bunch of sets. We tried it in Kaladesh, we tried it in Aether Revolt, we tried it in Ravnica Legions. Basically, my big goal was

players really liked Proliferate, and I really wanted to bring it back in an environment where it was about building up and not knocking down. Proliferate first showed up in Scars of Mirrodin. That was really about representing the Phyrexians. There was minus one and minus one counters. There was poison counters.

That proliferate in that environment was really about tearing down the opponent. Not that you can never use it on yourself. There were charge counters and things you could build up, but really in that environment it was more about tearing down the opponent. I like the idea of bringing proliferate back and making it more building yourself up. And so we knew the set had a planeswalker theme. We wanted to find a way to help you build up the planeswalkers, especially because we knew we had the minus planeswalkers.

And so we wanted some way, since they weren't naturally going to be able to build up, we wanted an external way to build them up. Proliferate seemed like a great choice, but we were worried. We had tried three times before to get it up. It's always funny to sort of joke about the Monty Python Holy Grail. He's like, I built a castle in a swamp. No one said I could build it. So I built it

in the swamp and it sank. So I built a second castle and it sank. I built a third castle it burned down and it sank. So I built a second swamp castle and it sank. I built a third castle, it burned down and it sank. But I built a fourth castle and it stayed. Proliferate felt like that. Like I tried and I tried, but this time it lasted. And so I was really happy that we finally got proliferate to stay. And one of the things that we did, we ended up putting proliferate in blue and green and white.

Blue and green are the natural spots for it. It's where they kind of go naturally. Obviously, we wanted to put it in Simic when it was the Bravest Bill of the Legions. I think white became the third color because white puts plus and plus encounters on creatures and white has a planeswalker

affinity thing. White's been the color that's most tied to Planeswalker. So it just felt right. It felt like that was the color that, you know, external to blue and green that are very much about building up things that already exist. So we put it in those colors. And one of the things that are just more,

when I put proliferate into Scars of Mirrodin, they were very afraid of it. Now part of it was, it was, instead of building up, it was knocking down. I mean, there's some reasons they were very afraid of it. Now part of it was, instead of building up, it was knocking down. I mean, there's some reasons why they were afraid of it. But anyway, they pulled a lot of it out of common, and a lot of what original Scars of Mirrodin had done was it used proliferate to build a lot of things in common

for how you would build decks. And when that got torn out, it really limited some of the choices you had. So here, I'm really happy that they were much more willing to have more proliferate in the set, have it at higher AS fan, and really make it part of some draft strategies. And it's really cool. This is a good example just of a very simple card.

Look, four mana for a 4-4 is pretty good. The fact that you get a proliferate, you're not paying a lot for that proliferate, and it's really nice in that there's just a lot of things going on where that proliferate can just do some cool things. So I really like the nature of how that works. Okay, the next card, Bolas's Citadel. Three black, black, black. So it is a

legendary artifact that has six mana total, but three of which are black. So a lot of black, but it's Bolas. And then you may look at the top card of your library at any time. You may play the top card of your library. If you cast spells this way, pay life equal to its converted mana cost instead of paying its mana cost. And then tap Sacrifice 10 non-land permanents.

Each opponent loses 10 life. So the idea here was, this was Bolas sort of built a giant building in the middle of town. We saw him doing an Amiket, kind of MO. He did it again in Ravnica. And we really wanted to make something that was daunting. Now, one of the things that R&D has made a decision, after Kaladesh and sort of all the problems, we realized that, look, we've made a lot of artifact sets.

It's burned us almost every time. Players like artifacts, and we like the ability to push artifacts, but colorless artifacts really, with generic cost, cause a lot of problems. So what we've decided is we are just starting to make colored artifacts more of an evergreen thing. Something that you're just going to see in most sets. more of an evergreen thing. Something that you're just going to see in most sets. Now, not every artifact, some will still be colorless with a

generic mana cost. But the ones we're going to try to push are more likely going to lean into colors. This obviously was Bolas's Citadel. It makes sense that it's black. He's base black. And so, that's why this is colored and why it's a lot of color. But it allows us to really put... If this card costs just six,

it could be nowhere near as powerful as it can be being three black, black, black. This really says, hey, I'm good, but I'm good in a dedicated black deck. You can't just splash this card. You've got to be playing a lot of black. And then because of that, we really can push it because now not every deck is playing this. A dedicated black deck is playing it. And, you know, that

was important. Now, it's using something we've seen before, most often used in blue, but we've seen it in green. We've seen it in red in the... We've seen it in red in the... in Unhinged on Yet Another Ether Vortex.

The idea of using the top of your library, putting it face up, and using it as a resource. Blue did Future Sight, which you can cast any card. Green did Oracle of Moldiah. Is that the right card? Which did, got you land. Anyway, this card can get you any card, but it's black, so it has to do it in a black way. So the idea is, you can cast any card you want,

but, and you don't even worry about color restrictions. You can play things that aren't even black. But you gotta pay, it's converted mana cost in life. So for those that are unaware, converted mana cost means, so let's say a spell, if this spell costs three black, black, black. It's got a converted mana cost of six.

How much mana is in it? There's six mana in it. And then its mana cost is three black, black, black. So converted mana cost, so for example, if, obviously you couldn't have this in play. Well, you could have it on top of your library. You wouldn't cast it because it's legendary. But if you did, it would cost you six life to cast it. Not three black, black, black, but six life.

Obviously you would not do that. But the idea here is it would cost you six life to cast a knot, three black, black, black, but six life. Obviously, you would not do that. But the idea here is it gives you access to cards, but the life payment really gives you some restrictions. So it's a good example of a fun black card where, hey, I have access to something, but it comes at a cost. Black very much comes at a cost. And then, because we wanted this to feel like an endgame sort of card, because Bolas uses this, we added in the tap Sacrifice 10 Nonland Permanence. That takes a while to get to. You're not going to get there so often.

But you're using his ability, so his ability can help you get Nonland Permanence. And so it has this sort of synergy between the two abilities. And it definitely made it feel like Bolas is trying to win the whole thing here, trying to win the game. And it allowed you to have moments where, you know, when you put this out, your opponent feels afraid. You know, much like

when the citizens of Ravikin see that Bolas has put up his citadel, they are afraid of the citadel. And that made a lot of sense. I mean, the flavor-wise was very cool, and definitely connected. Okay, guys. of, I mean, the flavor-wise was very cool and definitely connected. Okay, guys. Well, I'm now at work.

So, obviously, this is going to go on for a bunch of podcasts because I have lots to say about War of the Sparks. There's a lot of cool cards, a lot of cool designs. Hope you guys are enjoying it. We have more to come. But I'm at work. So, we all know what that means. It 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 next time. Bye-bye.