Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #652: War of the Spark Cards, Part 3

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

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

I'm pulling away from the curb. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. And I dropped my kids off at school. Okay, so last we left off we were talking about War of the Spark. So I'm going through and telling stories by different cards. So we are up to E, I believe. So we're gonna start today with Enter the God Eternals. So this spell costs two blue, blue, black. So five mana total, two of which is blue, one of which is black. It's a sorcery. It says Enter the God Eternals deals four damage to target creature,

and you gain life equal to the damage dealt this way. Target player puts the top four cards of their library into their graveyard, amassed four. Remember, amassed means put whatever the number is. Four plus one plus one counters on an army you control. If you don't control one, create a zero zero black zombie army creature token first. Okay, so one of the things I talk a lot about this was a story. Like, we're telling a story. I mean, not that every magic set doesn't have some story,

but this one was very story focused. And that one of the big things was, when Doug originally sort of created this, there's a whole battle. It's not just, oh, there's a fight. The fight begins in the morning, it goes through the midday, it comes into the dusk, and then it ends at night. It's an all day long fight. And there's a lot of different parts to it. So one of the things that happens, one of the things that Doug definitely wanted to do

was have some back and forth in the fight. Part of what makes the fight interesting is like one side seems to be winning and the other side seems to be winning. So what happens early on in the story is Bolas opens the portal, the Eternals start spilling out and the Dreadhorde army is just killing

civilians left and right and the Planeswalkers and some of the Ravnikans jump in to try to protect them. And first, they're starting to beat back the zombies. You know, there's a lot of zombies, but they're starting to win. And that's when through the portal comes the god Eternals. Okay, so for those who remember their Alen Kkhet Hour of Devastation story, when the Gatewatch went to Amonkhet, they met that there was five gods.

The world had five trials. Each god had a trial. And the gods represented something. And they met the gods. And then in Hour of Devastation, there were three other gods that were the multicolored gods that were Bolas colored. So, blue, black, black, red, and red, blue. And they came and killed four out of the five of the gods.

Ahasuerus got away. But the other four gods got killed. And we just thought, like, oh, the gods are dead. But we find out here, dun, dun,un, you know, Bolas wastes nothing. He had some god corpses. He had some, you know, some zombie-making material lying around. Let's make some zombie gods. So through the portal walks four giant zombie gods.

And like, oh, this is going to be a problem. And so this moment, this spell represents the entering of the god eternals, which is a big turning point where the planeswalkers are winning, but then the gods show up and the gods a little harder to deal with than the average eternal. And so this spell was trying to represent that. One of the things I think they wanted is when there were big moments, I think they liked the idea of having sorceries and instants, having spells

represent the big moment. And so the idea here was there were four god eternals that enter. So let's really hammer home four. Well, we will drain you for four. We will mill you for four. We will amass for four.

So really we're trying to hammer home like, enter of the four god eternal. So the number four, that's why there's so many fours here, is because we're really trying to hammer home that. As I always talk about, there's a lot of aesthetic things that are really nice that you, having numbers repeated definitely feels like

this spell essentially does three completely different effects. It is draining you. It is milling you. It is making an army. And normally those effects don't really have anything to do with each other. But all of a sudden you just, you tie a number to them and it starts making them feel more cohesive.

This is a lot of the power of aesthetics and that having something unify them takes things that normally might be completely disconnected. What is draining and milling and creating creatures have to do with each other. But through the use of a singular creature and a flavor, it's the god Eternals, takes a spell that might seem, you know, unconnected and makes it feel more cohesive and whole. And for that reason, I think it's a pretty cool spell.

Okay, next. Evolution Saga. Okay, so Evolution Saga costs two and a green. So three mana total, one of which is green. It's a 3-2 elf druid, so it's a creature. Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, proliferate. So proliferate is choose any number of permanents and or players, then give each other counters of each kind already there.

So one of the things we do whenever we bring back a mechanic is we always examine it and say, are there little tiny tweaks to how it works that we want to sort of retweak? And we did here with proliferate. What we did basically is before, let's say a creature or a player had more than one counter. You were forced to choose one of the counters, and you only proliferated that counter. This one instead says, look, I look at all... Once you choose a creature or choose a player, you get to proliferate every kind of counter they have. So, for example, if a player has an experience counter and an energy counter, you can choose to give them both an energy counter and an experience counter.

And the idea here is, the reason we did this is, one, it just makes the card slightly more powerful, and it just makes less clicks in digital. It just makes it a little cleaner of a template. Now, it is true if a player has both a positive and a negative counter, although the really only negative counter, there's not a lot of negative counters, poison being the big one. The idea is if your opponent has a poison counter and an energy counter or experience counter, you have to choose whether to give them both counters,

the positive and the negative, or not give them, and you have that decision to make. That doesn't happen very often. I mean, in general, there's more positive things than negative things. Also, on creatures, the most negative thing you would

find on a creature is a minus one, minus one counter. But because plus one, plus one counters and minus one, minus one counters negate each other, it is very hard to have a creature with both a positive and a negative counter on it. Not impossible, but very unlikely. So this change cleaned it up, made it easier for digital, and just made a

more powerful mechanic. Although every once in a while it does make a decision. Making decisions aren't a bad thing. You know, if I have to figure out whether or not what matters to me more, the poison or the experience counter, that's actually I think an interesting decision. The other thing this card does is you'll notice it says,

whenever a land enters the battlefield, under your control, dot dot dot. So basically that is landfall. So one of the things that Dave Humphreys, Dave Humphreys was the set lead, loves to do is he loves to bring back old mechanics, especially ability words, and stick them in the set as one ofs. So this is a good example of this is landfall. Why doesn't it say landfall? The reason it doesn't is one of the things we always worry about is general vocabulary, That if you put too much vocabulary on a set, it can overwhelm people. But

an ability word doesn't require to have the word. Like landfall, if you take off landfall, the card tells you what it does. And so what we tend to do is we put stuff where, if there's only one spell, if you put landfall on the spell, it makes people believe like, oh, I gotta look out this other landfall card, but there's not.

This is the only one. So we don't label it in sets where there's not multiples. But the idea is, look, it still plays like landfall. Ability words you can't interact with with other cards anyway. You can't do stuff like all creatures with landfall gain because you can't trigger off things that are ability words. Anyway, this was Dave sort of combining proliferate with landfall. One of the things you'll notice here, when I made landfall,

when I made proliferate back in Scars of Mirrodin, I had turned in, the team, we had turned in a much higher as fan of proliferate. In fact, it was meant to be a lot more of a limited thing. But development at the time, play design

at the time, got kind of nervous about it and really, really lowered the amount of proliferate. Now, be aware in that environment, proliferate was more about punishing the opponent, of killing creatures and putting poison on them, where this is more of a building up thing. But anyway, with the play

design team we have now, we were much more willing to be a little more aggressive with our proliferating, more repetitive proliferating, more proliferating at lower rarities. And so a card like this is really nice because Evolution Stage really allows you to sort of build and draft a proliferation deck. This is the kind of card that if you get early, you really can start choosing to take cards that are good to proliferate and building something that can proliferate. Because the key to a proliferation deck is you need to proliferate a lot. And so the spells that allow you to proliferate multiple times are very powerful in helping promote limited and constructed proliferate strategies. Next, Fibblefip Velost.

One and a blue, so two mana total, one of which is blue. He's a 1-1 legendary creature, homunculus. When Fiblethip the Lost enters the battlefield, draw a card. If it entered from your library or was cast from your library, draw two cards instead. When Fiblethip becomes the target of a spell, shuffle Fiblethip into its owner's library. Okay, so Fiblethip first existed in, I think, original Ravnica on a card called Totally Lost. Totally Lost was a card

that put a creature on the top of your library. And they drew this little homunculus. Now, there are homunculi in Ravnica, and the homunculi appear on more than one card. But for some reason, just the way Fibblefip,

and he was named in the, not only did he appear on the art, but he was named in the flavor text. This he appear on the art, but he was named in the flavor text. This is probably a comment. A, the art looked really cute, and then he had a name. By the way, it's pronounced Fiblethipp. So, if you just kind of, there's no vowels in the homunculus' names, but

in this particular one, if you just kind of assume there's eyes, anyway, Fiblethipp. Anyway, Fiblethipp went on to be kind of a crowd favorite. It started with people just making memes out of him. And then we recognized that people liked him. So we made a plushie out of him.

And we made some items. You could buy like a phone case and stuff. And then when we went back to Ravnica, we started hiding him in pictures. He became sort of Ravnica's Where's Waldo. And so Fibletip just shows up a whole bunch now in different pictures on Ravnica, we started hiding him in pictures. He became sort of Ravnica's Where's Waldo. And so Fibletip just shows up a whole bunch now in different pictures on Ravnica. So anyway, the story is I'm working on Unstable. And one of the things that the audience had been asking for is they really wanted to see Fibletip. A bunch of them wanted to see a planeswalking Fibletip. So I knew I needed to make some fun cards.

And so I was trying to figure out what to do with my planeswalker. And so I said, oh, well, what if the planeswalker was Fibblefip? That is an idea I had. So I went to talk to the creative team and I said to them, look, I'm thinking of maybe doing a Fibblefip card, but I don't want to do one

if you're going to do it. Like if Black Border is going to do a Fibblefip card, let it be in Black Border. But if you guys have no plans to make a Fiblethip card, I will make a Fiblethip card. And they said, no, no, no, we have plans. We would like to do a Black Border Fiblethip card. So I did not make it in Unstable, knowing that Black Border was planning

to make one. I mean, one of the big things about Unstable, or just Silver Border sets in general, is I like to do things that Black Border isn't doing. So it seems like a golden opportunity. But once I found out they were doing it, I did not make a fiddle with them. So when we got to War of the Sparks,

so one of the problems with legendary creatures from Ravnica is in guild sets, the guild structure takes up all the legendary creatures. It's very hard to get in other legendary creatures because you have a leader of your guild and often you have a champion of your guild, and there's just, there's a lot going on. But when we got to War of the Spark, one of the nice things about War of the Spark was, it was set on Ravnica, but not a guild set. There were just spaces to do

legendary things that we couldn't normally do. So one of the ideas here was, okay, now's the time to do all the legendary creatures people have ever wanted on Ravnica that have been a problem to fit in, but now that we don't have to worry about the guilds, we can fit them in. And Fiblethip fit perfectly in that camp. So I went to... I think we made an early version of Fiblethip.

So Fiblethip's inspiration, by the way, in Time Spiral, I made a card called Norrin the Wary. And Norrin the Wary was a character from Flavortex that had shown up in Alpha and a few other places. And basically the whole joke is he was just afraid of everything. And the reason he had lived as long as he had was he was very wary. He ran away from any potential thing that might be dangerous. And so I thought it would be fun in a time spiral

to make a legendary creature for Norrin the Wary. And the whole shtick of the card was that he's hard to kill. And we felt like it'd kind of be cute to have something in that vein for Norn the Wary went on to be a very popular card. The idea was, it wasn't this was a powerful creature. He's not. He's a little tiny creature.

The saving grace for him was A, he's hard to kill just because he's always lost. And B, that there's something quirky about him that you could build around. So I think that whenever you target him, he gets shuffled into your library, was in the earliest version of the card. Set design messed around with a bunch of different triggers. In the end, they liked this one where he was a cantrip creature. But if you got it in from your library, you've

got to draw two cards. So, like, if you can figure out how to get him into play from your library, you know, he's actually netting you extra cards. Anyway, I really enjoyed that, and I'm happy with how the card came out. So that is filled with him. Okay, next, speaking of legendary creatures. Feather the Redeemed. So she costs red, white, white. So three mana total, one of which is red, two of legendary creatures, Feather the Redeemed. So she costs red, white, white.

So three mana total, one of which is red, two of which is white. She's a legendary angel. She's a 3-4. She's a creature, obviously. She has flying, and she has whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell that targets a creature you control, exile that card instead of putting it into your graveyard as it resolves. If you do, return it to your hand at the beginning of the next end step.

So the idea with Feather is, I mean, mechanically is that whenever you target any creature you control, instead of that going away, it kind of phases or flickers away until end of turn. It's kind of like a buyback spell, except the buyback spell, I mean, it turns all your instant sorcerers into one-turn buybacks. Meaning, I get it, and I can do it again next turn, but buyback, you got it right away, so you can cast a spell many times in one turn.

This keeps that from happening. Okay, so Feather, in the original Ravnica, there was a novel, and in the novel, there was a beat cop, a Boros beat cop, a Boros beat cop named Agros Kos, and he had a partner who was an angel who had her feathers clipped, I think, named Feather. And we made a card out of Agros Kos, but I don't think we knew when we made the set that

Feather was going to be, like, she, we, when we had planned out the novel, I guess we'd known who the main character was, but we didn, when we had planned out the novel, I guess we'd known who the main character was, but we didn't know the other characters in the novel. And so, once again, it was one of those things where, by the time the novel got written, the set had been made. So, just, we never made Feather. And people are like, where's Feather? Where's Feather? Because whenever we make a character that has a name, people are like, where's that character? And so, Feather, we talked about Feather showing up in Return to Ravnica, or in Gatecrash, I guess.

That's where Boros was. But the problem was she wasn't really a main, she wasn't one of the leaders anymore of the Boros. In fact, she never really was a leader of the Boros. And anyway, we almost put her in Gatecrash, and then we talked about putting her, I think, in the Commander deck. There have been a bunch of times we tried to get her in the stats and just never found the right spot. But we were, it was worth a spark. We were in, um, we were in, um,

Ravnica. And we didn't have to worry about guilds. So it was time to do characters people have been asking for. So Feather is another. Now, Feather also does another thing people have been asking for, is a lot of times red, white, legendary creatures, especially Boros ones, tend to be fighting-oriented.

They tend to be aggressive. And in Commander, aggressive decks just aren't particularly strong because you tend to run out of steam, and everybody starts with more life, and there's more opponents you have to defeat. So instead of having to take 20 points from one person, you've got to take 40 points from three or four or five people. So aggressive decks don't work quite as well. So

one of the issues is red and white decks tend to be very combat oriented, especially in Boros. And so we've got a lot of requests for can you give me different things to do with my red and white? Give me commanders in red and white that just do different things. And so we saw an opportunity to do feather, and we saw an opportunity to do something that's a little bit different that is

a red and white deck you can play that might do some cool stuff in, because repeatable spells, for example, people are always asking about white and red getting more card advantage. And this is a good way to get card advantage, where, oh, whenever I cast a spell targeting one of my creatures, I essentially draw a new card. I mean, at end of turn, it's the card I already had, but essentially I'm going up in card advantage, that I'm able to cast these spells every turn, and that helps really sort of up the virtual card advantage. I mean, it's not even virtual. It's real card advantage. You're not drawing new cards, but you are essentially drawing cards that are the cards you already had,

which can be very powerful as it allows you over time to sort of build up your hand. Anyway, that was Feather. Feather actually has been quite popular, so I'm glad. I know it took a while to get Feather out, but I'm glad people are enjoying Feather. Okay, next, the finales. The finales were a cycle. Are they rare or mythic rare? I think they're mythic rare.

So they are cycles that are X spells, meaning they're all sorceries. They all cost X colored mana, colored mana. We call M. M stands for colored mana. It used to be C, by the way. C used to stand for colored mana. But then we made colorless mana, and C is now colorless mana. So we now use M to mean mana of... We use this like in cycles.

This represents colored mana. So XMM in design speak would mean X and the appropriate mana of the color in its color. And each one of these represents a big climactic moment in the story. But the cool mechanical thing of it is they're an X spell, they do something. But if X is 10 or greater, so if you spend 12 or more mana on it, the effect goes into overdrive. So let's go through that.

I'm going to go through these in alphabetical order, so not Woburg order. So, Finale of Devastation. X, green, green. Sorcery. Search your library and or graveyard for a creature card with converted mana cost X or less and put it onto the battlefield. If you search your library enter a graveyard for a creature card with converted mana that costs X or less and put it onto the battlefield

if you search your library this way shuffle it if X is 10 or more creatures you control get plus S plus X and gain haste until end of turn

okay now green is king of getting creatures out of the library this can get them out of the graveyard green does not normally reanimate things

so this is a little bit of a bend for green green normally can get them out of the graveyard. Green does not normally reanimate things, so this is a little bit of a bend for green. Green has creatures that can get themselves out of the graveyard. It doesn't traditionally reanimate other things. So this is special here. This is a little bit of a bend. But overall, green is number one in getting cards out of a library. And the idea here is that if I do this late enough, if I have 10 mana, I can get a creature

that costs 10 or less. Note, by the way, X isn't locked at 10. You can spend as much mana as you want. So if for some reason you have an 11 cost to 12 cost creature, you can spend more mana. The idea is that 10, most creatures you can go get. But at 10 mana,

if you spend 10 green green, I can go get. But at 10, you know, if you spend 10 green, green, I can go get a creature that costs 10 or less from anywhere, graveyard or library, put it in play, it gets plus 10, plus 10, and haste. It can attack right away. I'll note, by the way, that Finality of Devastation is a card in this set

that allows you to get Fibbleswhip into play from your library. So, while the card wasn't necessarily designed, it wasn't designed to be built around Unlimited. It's a rare card. We did know that, okay, well, if it happened, I mean, not that you'll get Fibble Fib and Finale of Devastation all that often,

but it is possible, it is possible to get two cards off of Fibble Fib within Unlimited. Okay, next, Finale of Eternity, X, Black, Black. So it's an X spell with two Black mana. Sorcery, destroy up to three target Eternity. X, black, black. So it's an X spell with two black mana. Sorcery. Destroy up to three target creatures with toughness X or less.

If X is 10 or more, all creatures from your graveyard go to the battlefield. Return all creatures from your graveyard to the battlefield. So the idea here was, I think they toyed around at some point with killing X creatures, but it just proved to be a little bit too powerful. So now it's like, oh, well it only ever kills three creatures. The reason you want X to be bigger is you've got to kill bigger creatures if you have a higher X. And the reason you want to get to ten black black is not only do you kill things, but you then rise all the creatures out of your graveyard.

I think this ties into Liliana rising the zombies. So anyway, it's zombie-oriented. That's another reason the finale is sort of tied into raising creatures from the graveyard. And in general, there's an aesthetic that's nice in that, oh, I kill your creatures, but ha-ha, if I have enough mana, not only do I kill your creatures, but I get creatures back. Okay, next. Finale of Glory.

X white-white. Sorcery. Create X 2-2 white soldier creature tokens with Vigilance. If X is 10 or more, also create X 4-4 white angel creature tokens with Flying and Vigilance. So the idea here that's cute is you get lots of 2-2s. And to be honest, just getting X 2-2s is pretty good. This card is very good. Especially in Limited.

But if you ever get to 10 white, white, not only do you get 10 2-2s, you get 10 4-4 Flying Angels, all of which have Vigilance, so to sort of tie them together. Finale of Promise. So Finale of Promise is X, red, red. So X mana with two red manas.

X spell with two red manas. Sorcery. You may cast up to one target instant card and up to one target sorcery card from your graveyard, each with a converted mana cost of X or less, without paying their mana cost. If a card is cast this way, we put it in your graveyard, just turn

X out instead. If X is 10 or more, copy each of those spells twice. You may choose new targets for the copies. So the idea here is this, the red one works kind of like the black one. It lacks how many things it affects. Like, you're only ever casting one instant and one sorcery. But the more X you spend, the bigger it gets to be.

And since you're not paying for them, essentially, you're kind of paying for them with your X spell. And if you ever get to 10 red red, not only do you get spell A and spell B, the instant and the sorcery, you get three copies of the instant and three copies of the sorcery. I mean, you get one spell and two copies, but I mean, you get three of them,

three of each. And so instead of just doing two spells, you have six spells. So that's a pretty, pretty big effect. Finally, finale of Revelation. X, blue, blue, sorcery, draw X cards,

and then if X is 10 or more, instead, shuffle your graveyard into your library, draw X cards, untap up to five lands, and you have no maximum hand size

for the rest of the game. And then you X out. All these, by the way, did I say you X out? Oh. Maybe not all of them you X out. Maybe this one you X out.

Yeah, just this one. This is the most dangerous one, probably because it's a card drawer. So the idea here is you get to draw cards. If you spend 10 mana, not only do you get to draw 10 cards, or how many mana you spend,

10 or above, but you get mana back so that you can cast. One of the biggest problems with the spell is normally if I'm spending, I want the X to be as big as possible, I'm drawing a lot of cards,

that I don't always have mana to then cast the spells that I'm drawing. But if you cast it for the bigger version, then I get five mana. So I get to essentially cast one of my medium spells. And then, because it's dangerous, we exile it. They don't all exile. That's just the blue one. Okay, next. Next.

Flux Channeler. So Flux Channeler costs two and a blue. It's a 2-2 human wizard. It's a creature. Whenever you cast a non-creature spell, proliferate. So this is another repeatable proliferating card. This is another card to let you sort of build around Unlimited. The idea here is one of the things that we're trying to do a little bit different is make different color combinations care about different things. And so one of the things that blue does is really cares about spells and allows you to mix and match. And for example, if you want to make a proliferating deck in which you want to be more spell heavy, you can do that.

Also, remember that proliferate plays with amass. And so blue is one of the colors that amasses. So another thing that's what you do is if you have a lot of the amass spells and blue are spells. So this also just makes all your amass spells a little bit stronger because they just make your army bigger.

Anyway, it's funny. When I made Scars of Mirrodin, I wanted a lot more of this kind of stuff and it ended up getting pulled out, but I'm excited to see it in this set. Okay, next. Gideon Blackblade. So, one white, white

legendary planeswalker Gideon. As long as it's your turn, Gideon Blackblade is a 4-4 human soldier creature with. As long as it's your turn, Gideon Blackblade is a 4-4 human soldier creature with indestructible. It's still a Planeswalker. The second thing is, prevent all damage that be dealt to Gideon Blackblade during your turn.

Plus one, up to one other target creature you control gains your choice of Vigilance, Lifelink, and Indestructible to end your turn. Minus six, Energy, exile target non-land permanent. Oh, and he has a loyalty of four. I don't think I said that.

So the idea is you get him into play. He's a creature. On your turn, he's always a creature. Four for human soldier and indestructible because that's kind of his thing. By the way, one of the things we try to do is we try to make sure that each planeswalker has a mechanical identity that is uniquely their own. Gideon is one of the strongest identities.

Gideon gets in the fight. Gideon becomes a creature and gets into the fight. And that's a real telling element of all the Gideons. Well, Gideon isn't just going to stand back and cast spells. He's going to fight. So he always becomes a creature. Here, he's a mythic rare. We have four slots of the mythic rare.

He's the only one that does two slots for static slash triggered abilities. Why this isn't one ability? I mean, it protects him in a couple different ways, and it needed to be two abilities. I'm not quite sure. And his plus ability is sort of to help others, and then his minus is very useful and answers a lot of issues. So, you know,

he starts with loyalty four and ultimately it's minus six, so it doesn't take that long to get to the point. And that ability is very useful. In early design, we played around a bit with this planeswalker playing up his story beat a little more. You know, his big sacrifice.

Spoilers. And for a while, we actually had a version where he could sacrifice himself to protect other things. But it was a little bit rules complex. And anyway, we ended up... It was a cute idea and it was very flavorful, but it didn't end up playing quite as well. So we ended up not doing it.

But I really... I mean, I normally envision when we do the Planeswalkers, we tend to take a very flavorful stab at them. And then as they get into set design, they have to play around with making sure they're, you know, they're playable

and standard and stuff. And so they tend to have to tweak them to make sure that that works. Okay, so I talked about the God Eternals. So let's talk, let's go more in detail on the God Eternals. So there's a cycle of God Eternals so let's talk let's go more in detail on the God Eternals so there's a cycle of God Eternals

now note there's a missing red God because Hazoret did not die I will get there we did fill in the red God with a native from Ravnica also a God

although not a zombie God okay so God Eternal Bantu three black black for a five six legendary creature so zombie God it's got menace when God eternal Bantu enters the battlefield sacrifice any number of other permanents then draw that many cards when God eternal Bantu dies or is

put into exile from the battlefield you may put it in its owners library third from the top okay so a couple ways we built the gods. First off, all the gods had a creature ability in their version in Amonkhet. We kept that. So Bantu had Menace, he has Menace now. We wanted a little bit of continuity. They all had Indestructible in their Amonkhet versions. We wanted to make it a little bit easier

to deal with them so that they, like, you could actually make them go away for a while. Now given, they come back so their Indestructibility, like, rather than make them harder to destroy, it's sort of like, well, they keep coming back. So it has a flavor of indestructibility without actually being indestructible. So that was us sort of making a slightly less indestructible indestructible. And then their other ability, it had to fit to their overall flavor.

Remember, the gods each had sort of a flavor to them, what their trial was about. And like Bantu was ambition, I believe. So the idea of doing what it takes to get what you want is very much a Bantu thing. So his ability really does that. Like, hey, you want to get ahead and get cards? Well, you can do that, but it's going to cost something. And that's your creatures. And so, or your permanent, sorry, not just creatures.

But anyway, that is Bantu. So God Eternal Kefnet. So Kefnet was two blue blue, so four mana total, two of which is blue. He is a legendary creature, zombie god. He's four five. He is flying. You may reveal the first card you draw each turn as you draw it. Whenever you reveal an instant or sorcery card this way,

copy that card, and you may cast the copy. That copy costs two less to cast. So whenever you draw instant or sorcery, right then and there for two less, you can cast the instant or sorcery. And then he has the shuffle back in thing that all the gods have. So once again, Kefnet had flying originally. He has flying here.

He's all about wisdom. So we have a card drawing ability. He's all about knowledge. I think knowledge was his thing. So once again, Kefnet had flying originally, he has flying here. He's all about wisdom, so we have a card drawing ability. He's all about, I think knowledge was his thing, so he has a card drawing ability that ties into that. God Eternal Oketra, three white white, so five mana total, two witches white, three six legendary zombie god, a creature obviously, double strike. Whenever you cast a creature spell, create a four-4 black zombie warrior creature token with vigilance. So white was all about solidarity of getting along with others. So as you cast

creatures, you get more creatures, get more zombies. And then when she dies, she shuffles in. Note, by the way, the reason it's dies or exile is originally it was just die, and then when playing with the cards for play design, I was playing with them for standard, I think they decided to make the cards viable and standard than needed at the exile clause. So anyway, that's when they also got shuffled in for exile as well as for dies.

Oh, the other note we got on Oketra is a lot of people are like, why doesn't she have reach? Because in the story, Oketra, she has a, her weapon is this bow, and she Gideon gets this pegasus that she ends up taking out. And she's like, oh, in the story, we see her. She kills the pegasus. That flies. She should have

reach. And the problem is it's a cycle. The gods all have the ability they had originally. No god has two abilities. And so part of trying to keep them consistent. Also, she had a bow before, by the way. She did have a bow. Like, she has the same weapon she had before.

She didn't have reach last time. So anyway, even though there is a story point, the balance of the cards and making the cycle work the same and having them overlap with the Amaket stuff, we decided just was more important than this one story moment of her firing down the Pegasus. Finally, God Eternal Ronas. Three green green, legendary creature, zombie god, 5-5, death touch.

When God Eternal Ronas enters the battlefield, double the power of each other creature you control until end of turn. Those creatures gain vigilance until end of turn. So basically you make them, you double their power and you give them vigilance. And then when it dies or is exiled, obviously it's the third from the top.

Green, Ronas was all about strength, so it makes things stronger. And once again, it's just sort of an effect that if you can use this, it just gives all of your creatures a big boost. The Eternals ended up being very powerful. One of the notes that we got was that in Limited, they're very hard to deal with. I mean, I know these things were pushed for standard.

And normally, we don't worry too much about mythic rares. Like, mythic rares tend to be bombs in limited. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, yeah, maybe we were supposed to put a few more answers specifically for the gods in at lower rarities. I know blue has made a transformation. But there's not a lot of other clean answers of the gods at common because

of a mass there's no pacifism and no lockdown some cards that normally you would use to deal with the gods we don't have because we're we sort of didn't want to harm armies anyway I don't know if in in retrospect,

maybe we're supposed to make a pacifism and not work on token creatures or something. But anyway, I have gotten the note that the gods are a little bit harder to deal with than people like Unlimited. So, message received. Okay, next is Huatli's Raptor.

So green and a white for a 2-3 Vigilance Dinosaur. And when Huatli's Raptor enters the battlefield, proliferate. So I think this card pre-existed Huatli. Like, pre-existing being Huatli's card. So one thing we did with all of Planeswalkers is we gave them a signature spell, which represented their kind of magic. Huatli's big thing is dinosaurs.

We wanted to have a dinosaur. So we said, okay, we should make one of the creatures hers. This card, I think, was white-green already. The proliferate is in white-green and blue. And it fit. It just thematically sort of fit. So I think we made this and then later realized that it makes sense being like, we could make this. We knew we needed a dinosaur. We knew Huatli was white-green. This card was white-green. Like, oh, this could be Huatli's dinosaur.

Sort of all came together. But the card was first designed, I believe, in a vacuum as a proliferate helper for white-green, and then realized that, oh, that makes sense. That could be Huatli's dinosaur. So Huatli, the sun's heart. So two in a hybrid mana. The hybrid is green or white. So two and green or white.

A legendary creature Huatli, loyalty seven. Each creature you control assigns combat damage equal to its toughness rather than its power. And then minus three, you gain life equal to the greatest toughness among creatures you control. So the idea here was we were trying to make an ability that that quietly plays with dinosaurs and

bigger creatures. We wanted an ability that, like, played well with bigger creatures, but also worked in limited, that didn't require big creatures, just was better with bigger creatures. And so we ended up using what we call the Dorne ability, which was first seen on Dorne

in I think it was Lorwyn. And Dorwin was green, white, black, and had this ability that did damage equal to his toughness rather than his power. It was done at the time as kind of a tree,

like an unofficial tree folk lord. It didn't say tree folk, but tree folk tend to have a lot of toughness, so it worked well with tree folk. That ability proved to be pretty popular. We've brought it back a number of times. I think now it's base green, primary green, secondary white.

So green and white seem like a fine place to put it. One of the challenges in general with bringing all the planeswalkers into the set is each one of them had things that kind of connected to stuff that made sense in their home world that may or may not make sense here. There's not a lot of dinosaurs here, so giving her

exactly dinosaur tribal would have been weird. There just wasn't enough dinosaurs to make it work. But we gave her an ability that plays well with dinosaurs. If you want to make a dinosaur that can put Whatley the Sun Tart in it, it'll play nicely there. The other thing we did is we wanted to tie the static ability

with the minus loyalty ability. And by once again, this is another trick of how aesthetics works, is by connecting them, by having something connect them, like, oh, they both care about toughness, and all of a sudden, life gain and damage, which don't normally seem, you know, necessarily all that connected, start feeling connected, like, oh, she cares about toughness, or she cares about toughness for

comet damage, she cares about toughness for life gain. So, the other white green planeswalker, which is Ajani, at rare, also has some life gain. We talked other white green planeswalker, which is Ajani at rare, also has some life gain. We talked a little bit if it was okay that they both had life gain. We decided that A, life gain is such a good part of green white. It's pretty universal,

meaning every deck can use it. And how we were using the life gain, which is different enough, we decided it was okay that they had life gain without having the same life gain. But anyway, that is where HOTLY came from. Okay, next, Ignite the Beacon. Instant.

Search your library for up to two Planeswalker cards. Reveal them. Put them into your hand. Shuffle your library. So one of the things we tend to do, we don't do a lot of tutoring these days. Tutoring means go to your library, get a card, put it into your hand. But when we have a theme,

we like to make sure people have access to the theme. So we did want to put, uh, we once before had done a card that was capable of, I think we did a, um, uh, Indominaria. I think we did a, um, card that tutored for, um, historic things, which Legendary is a subset. Um, so this card specifically is just, uh, I mean, which Planeswalkers is a subset. So this card specifically is just... I mean, which Planeswalkers is a subset. This card just gets Planeswalkers. But it gets you two of them. And we kept it in white, which is where we're doing tutoring for Planeswalkers.

Anyway, there's a lot of Planeswalkers in the set. And a lot of Planeswalkers that do niche things that we thought were kind of cool that you could go get them. But anyway, it was super in- theme, so we did a tutor here. Okay, next. Ilharg, the Razeboar. Three red bread. Legendary creature. Boar god.

Six six. Trample. When Ilharg, the Razeboar, attacks, you may put a creature card from your hand onto the battlefield tapped and attacking. Return that creature to your hand at the beginning of the next end step. And then when it dies or is exiled, you put three from the top. So we made Ilharg the red part of the god cycle.

He is a god. He's not a zombie god, so he's not, he's unlike them. He's the gruel prey to him. We had, the creative had put him into the story

because they knew there was going to be a gap in red and sort of made this opportunity so when we needed to get there, we could fill out the god cycle. And so there is the god in red. Given not a zombie god,

not carded Lazotep or anything, some people were mad that the gruel god was not red-green. The issue was it was part of a cycle. We were trying to be clean. People get really upset when we make cycles that are mechanically a little bit off,

so we didn't do that. It's one of those things where, you know, I call the Vorthos versus Mel problem, or a Vorthos versus Mel problem, where some people like flavor above all. I don't care if cards are not exactly the same if it matches the flavor. And some players are like, no, no, no, you make cycles. The cleanliness of the cycle is important to me. I don't care if it's not 100% matching flavor if the design is there. And so that is the point where Vorthoses want one thing and Mel want another.

Vorthoses and Mel often can overlap and agree and want the same things, but in this particular case we leaned more toward the Mel way of thinking of making a cycle and making it clean and connected. People really dislike when our cycles are not kind of connected. And so we did that here. Given that it's not a zombie, so I mean, it's not perfectly connected. They're not all zombie guys.

But because zombies don't matter, they matter a little tiny bit. They don't matter a lot. Most of the zombies that matter in this is zombie tokens, of which these aren't zombie tokens. So we decided that's where we'd have the disconnect, where we'd have the flavor disconnect, but

mechanically have them line up. Anyway, Ilharg is borrowing an ability from a card called Sneak Attack that I made way back in Tempest. We've done a few cards that you, I think Sneak Attack has inspired a few other cards. Sneak Attack, though,

once you use the creature, it's sacked and you never got the creature Attack, though, once you use the creature, it's sacked and you never got the creature back. This, when you use the creature, you get to use it for a turn but then it goes back to your hand. So you don't lose the creature. So anyway, that is cool.

And I think there have been a bunch of... We knew once we said there's a giant Borgod that people would go, oh, where's the Borgod? Make a Borgod card. So we kind of

threw ourselves a path to catch. Sometimes you can do that where you can say, oh, let's set ourselves boar god that people go oh where's the boar god make a boar god card so um we kind of threw ourselves a path to catch um sometimes you can do that where you can say oh let's set ourselves up sometimes we write stories and we have no intent necessarily making the card um or we write the stories after the cards are done or whatever uh sometimes like this when we made it up like we i believe that i think the boar was made knowing that they wanted to fill it in i think that's where the boar came from um i'm not 100 sure on that that's me guessing was made knowing that they wanted to fill it in. I think that's where the boar came from. I'm not 100% sure on that. That's me guessing.

But I knew that they were aware there wasn't a red god, and they wanted to make sure that they could make the cycle. So that was thought through. It wasn't like an accident. Like, oh my god, there just happens to be a god that could be red. That was very much thought through. Okay. How are we doing here?

Let's see. I just got to work, but let me see where we're at. Okay, I'm going to stop on I. There's one more I and then I'll stop and next time we'll pick up with J. Okay, so we're going to

end today with Invade the City. One blue-red sorcery, a mass X where X is the number of instances of sorcery cards in your graveyard. So the idea here is that we wanted to... Amass shows up in three different colors. It shows up in all the bolus colors.

Red, blue, black, and red. And so we wanted to definitely give you an opportunity to build a different kind of amass decks. And so the red-black amass deck is very, very creature-based. Oh, no, I'm sorry. There's a blue-black, a red-black, and a blue-red.

I think the blue-black is the creature-based one, and I think the red-black is a sacrifice-based one, where one of the things that black and red do is they make a lot of creatures, is that one of the ways to play with proliferate is, not proliferate, sorry, with amass, is amass every time you use amass. If you don't have a token, you make a token. Now, one way is to build up the biggest possible token you can,

but the other way to play it is constantly be sacrificing your token so that every time I'm playing an amass card, I'm getting another creature essentially, and you can use a mask to take advantage of, as a means to generate creatures for advantage. I think black and red plays that way.

Anyway, blue and red is more spell-oriented. Blue tends to have a mask more on spells. Red kind of cuts the difference, and I think black is more on creatures. So, when you play with blue and red, or maybe I said that backwards. you play with blue and red, or maybe I said that backwards. Anyway, between blue and red,

there's a bunch of spells that there's a blue-red deck where you can play a mass where it's more spell-oriented than it is permanent-oriented. And blue-red already has some other spell stuff going on. So anyway,

that was designed to give you just a different... Whenever we put a mechanic in more than two colors, especially if we put it in three colors, we think about the different archetypes we might a mechanic in more than two colors, especially if we put it in three colors, we think about the different archetypes we might draft

and make sure that if I'm playing that mechanic in those color combinations, that I'm just drawn to do slightly different things. That way, if I play a blue, red, and masked deck, it just is different

than my black, red, and masked deck or my blue, black, and masked deck. Okay, guys. I am now at work. So, I hope you guys are enjoying it. Obviously, I just finished I, so we've got a few more podcasts to do. I hope you guys are enjoying it. Obviously, I just finished I. So, we got a few more podcasts to do.

I hope you guys are enjoying it. It's fun talking War of the Spark. But, 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. Bye-bye.