Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #686: Throne of Eldraine Cards, Part 1

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

This is part one of a four-part series on card-by-card design stories from Throne of Eldraine.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. Once upon a time, Mark began the Throne of Eldraine card-by-card podcast. So I'm going to, for this podcast and probably a bunch of others, I'm going to go through the set and talk about the designs of specific cards. And talk all about making Throne of Eldraine. of specific cards and talk all about making Throne of Eldraine. So we're going to start with Animating Fairy. So Animating Fairy costs two and a blue. So three mana total, one of which is blue.

It's a 2-2 flying creature, but it's an adventure. So it also has on it Bring to Life, which costs two and a blue. It's a sorcery, an adventure. Target non-creature artifact you control becomes a 0-0 artifact creature. Put four plus one plus one counters on it. Okay, so when we were making the set,

one of the things we definitely wanted to do, and you'll see a lot of this during the Thor of Eldraine podcast here, is trying to capture famous characters from fairy tales. So one of the characters from fairy tales is the Blue Fairy, which is a character from Pinocchio. So the Blue Fairy is a fairy that turns Pinocchio from just a puppet into a living creature. And so we knew we had to make a Blue Fairy, and it was pretty clear we needed to make a Blue Fairy. So that seemed right.

And the Blue Fairy, like her number one thing is she sort of makes Pinocchio, she animates Pinocchio. So it seemed pretty clear that we wanted to do that. Originally, this card was not an adventure, because when we made it, adventures didn't exist yet.

But all versions of this design had always had an animated quality to it. Oh, it animates something. I think originally, the very, very first version of this card, I think animated something... I think we tried a version where it first version of this card, I think, animated something. I think we tried a version where it animated it when it entered the battlefield. And then I think we had a version where it animated it as long as it was on the battlefield.

But I guess we decided that Pinocchio, she animates him and goes away. So it made sense more as an enter the battlefield effect. And then when I think they were looking for adventure cards, they're like, Oh, well, rather than have a creature with an enter the battlefield effect, we can when I think they were looking for adventure cards, they're like, oh, well, rather than have a creature with an enter the battlefield effect, we can make the creature with an adventure.

So it went from being an enter the battlefield effect to being just, oh, well, you can do this and then you can play the fairy. Okay, next. Arcanus Owl.

Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, hybrid. White or blue. Which it means is four hybrid mana, all of which is white or blue. You can spend white mana for it or blue mana for it. It's a 3-3 artifact creature, a bird. It has flying. When our Arcanist Owl enters the battlefield, look at the top four cards of your library.

You may reveal an artifact or enchantment card from among them and put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order. Okay, so this whole cycle, there's ten of these, which are cards. I think most of them are creatures, and one of them is a spell. But they are four hybrid mana. And Eric Lauer, who is the last person to... So basically, I led the vision design, then Mark Gottlieb led the set design, and then they needed to pull Mark Gottlieb

off to work on something else, and Eric finished the set design. So this was one of the latest things added to the file, this cycle. And I think Eric was... We had a mono-color theme in the set, and Eric liked the idea of making use of some hybrid to make things that are

very concentrated, so that you can play these obviously in two-color decks but also you can play them in one-color decks and I think Eric was trying to do more mono-color enabling and one of the tricky things about enabling mono-color is just the amount of cards you have access to gets limited so for example, let's take a normal set if you're playing two colors, you have access to gets limited. So, for example, let's take a normal set. You know, only if you're playing two colors,

you have access to 40% of the cards. If you're playing one color, you have access to 20% of the cards. So I think Eric was trying to just add a little bit in to sort of give you some impetus, allowing you either to play mono color or splash a color. But these also work in two-color decks. So if you're playing two-color, you can also play them. But it allowed you to sort of

push toward mono-color if you wanted to. I think that was the idea of them. Okay. Next. Ardenvale Paladin. Three and a white. It's a 2-5 creature, human knight, and it's got adamant.

If at least three white mana was spent to cast this creature ardenvale paladin enters the battlefield with a plus one plus one counter on it okay so adamant originally started out um the idea we were playing around with in early envision design was alternate mana costs so the idea was in our version of it this card would have been three and a white or one white, white, white. And then it said, if you paid one white, white, white to cast this spell, it enters the battlefield

with an extra plus one, plus one counter. So basically, this is a cycle of commons. The commons are all knights, and they all enter the battlefield, they're adamant, and they enter the battlefield with a plus one, plus one counter. And this cycle, we had this cycle, I i mean we made the cycle in visions um like i said the tweak was uh they stopped doing the the alternate mana cost instead went to adamant um they might

have tweaked the sizes and stuff but um one of the things that we were trying to do so one of the themes of the set in general was the top down of the set was a little bit more of the fairy tales. I mean we did a few top-down Arthurian, but there's a limit to how much top-down Arthurian there is. Most of the Arthurian stuff was more world-building and flushing out the world, and one of the big things of the world was the courts. And there were five monocolored courts, and the courts really played into our monocolor theme. So Adamant was tied to the courts because the courts were the place our monochrome theme. So adamant was tied to the courts because the courts were the place

where we were really in flavor talking about, oh, these are the, it's how the color pie gets sort of infused in the environment. And so the knights are the best representative of the court. So there's a lot of knights in the set. There's a knight tribal theme. And so we tended to push our adamant stuff

onto the knights from the courts. They're not all knights. Like, obviously, we'll get to the leader cycle and stuff, but that was, you know, this is a good example of something that was very simply done. Okay, speaking of another cycle, let's talk about Ayara, First of

Lackthwain. Black, black, black. So she's three mana, all of which is blackwain. Black, Black, Black. So she's three mana, all of which is black. She's a legendary creature. She's an elf noble. Two, three. Whenever Ayara, First of Lackthwain, or another black creature,

enters the battlefield under your control, each opponent loses one life and you gain one life. So you drain your opponent for one. And she also has the ability to tap, sacrifice another black creature, and draw a card. Okay, so let's unpack this. So for starters, there's a couple things going on here. One is that she is the black leader. So there's five courts. Each court has a leader, and we made a

cycle of the leaders, all of which were nobles except for, I guess, the blue court is led by a wizard rather than a king or queen. And so the way it worked is all five of them cost MMM, so three-colored mana.

And they encourage monocolor play. So obviously, for example, if you play her, not only is she black by black, which sort of encourages you to play mono-black, but she also, every time you're playing a black creature, you're draining your opponent for one, and she can sacrifice other black creatures

to draw a card. So really, you know, Ayara wants you to be playing a mono-black deck, much like the other leaders want to play of that color. We also were playing around a little bit with the idea, each court got to have its leader. One of the things that's interesting is the conflict. So one of the things we do when we build the world

is we build what's called a conflict engine. And what that means is there's inherent to the world a conflict, meaning there's something about the world that creates people fighting each other because we're a game all about combat. And so the combat engine in Eldraine is the courts versus the wilds. So the courts obviously represent civilization, So the courts obviously represent civilization. And the wilds mostly represent a lot of the fantastical creatures.

Not all of our, but a lot of our fairy tale stuff falls from that side. Not all of it does. We have some fairy tales that are princes and princess stuff. That falls on the court side. But the wilds, the idea of the wilds is it's mostly the non-humans. But there's a little bit of overlap. Like the idea here is that she leads things, but oh, she's not human.

She's an elf. Much like we get to the red leader and he's a dwarf. So there's a little bit of, there's a little bit, I mean, the wilds is the non-humans, but there's a little bit of overlap. And the courts,

as you'll see with some of the knights and things, it's not all humans on the courts. The humans are... There are not lots of humans in the wilds, but there are some non-humans in the courts. So let's walk through this card. So we wanted to make a black creature,

so obviously we were aggressive. I mean, we made them only cost three mana, so if you're playing a monochrome deck, they're not that hard to get out, but they're a little trickier to get out if you're not. All of them care about creatures in some way, so this cares about black creatures in two ways. One is that you get a drain on your opponent for

one whenever you play a black creature, and notice this enters the battlefield, so this triggers not just off you casting creatures, but making tokens and stuff. And tap, sack another black creature, draw a card. So that is, you can turn any black creature other than herself into a card. The reason it says other and not herself is the flavor is she's willing to sacrifice others to get her gain. She's not going to sacrifice herself.

That wasn't particularly black to sacrifice herself. So she is more about sacrificing others than sacrificed herself. That wasn't particularly black to sacrifice herself. So she is more about sacrificing others than sacrificing herself. Black, we sometimes let black sacrifice itself, depending. The flavor was sort of weird here, so we didn't. Okay, next. Bacon to a pie. Two black blacks, so four mana total. Two, which is black.

Instant. Destroy target creature. Create a food token. And then it says, it's an artifact with two. Tap, sack this artifact. You gain three life. That's what a food token. And then it says, it's an artifact with two tap, sack, this artifact, you gain three life. That's what a food token is. Okay, so the original bacon to a pie was made as an arrest variant, meaning

that you put it on a creature, it's an enchant creature, an aura, and it said, enchant a creature, can't attack or block or use any activated abilities. And then it said, the opponent may sacrifice the creature to gain, I forget whether it was two life or three life. But the idea was I sort of took a creature I baked into a pie and then my opponent, now that it's a pie, well, they can eat the pie.

So originally it was done as a white card. It was the one thing in the set that we handed over that sort of equated of you make something into food and then you can eat it and gain life. So the it was the one thing that hinted at where food was going. I don't know how much it inspired food or how much once you have the idea of food, the idea that food gets you life

is just so, I mean if you look at games, especially video games the idea that food is tied to health is, I mean, if you look at games, especially video games, the idea that food is tied to health is, you know, pretty opiquious. And I mean, from a flavor standpoint, why do you eat food? Well, it gives you energy and stuff. So I'm not sure whether or not the early version of Baking Dubai influenced food or whether just when they made food, it was kind of, they followed a parallel design process.

When they made food, it was kind of, they followed a parallel design process. Anyway, once they decided that you're just going to turn the creature into a food, rather than enchant it, it's just like destroy the creature and give them food, that didn't feel so much white anymore. That just felt like more of a black spell. So bacon and pie got moved into black. Now, I've since learned, after having written this, the person who made the first version of this, Allie Medwin,

I don't think converted the white cart over. I think she heard food existed, and in a vacuum just said, oh, what if you did a kill spell that made you into a food? And then I think she might have turned that in, and then the bacon to a pie was already in the set, the name was, so they moved it over. So, I thought it evolved from the white into a black. I think she might have turned that in, and then the bacon to a pie was already in the set. The name was, so they moved it over.

So I thought it evolved from the white into a black. I think the black got made independent of the white, but then they moved the name over because the name made a lot of sense. But anyway, that's a good example of how a lot of things happen and, like, not being there. My assumption is things always follow along because there's some sort of pattern to it, but I don't know if that's always the case. Okay, next. Bartered cow. Three and a W, so three and a white.

Four mana total, one which is white. For three, three, ox. Because cows are somehow oxes, much like dogs are hounds. When bartered cow dies, or when you discard it, create a food token. Okay, so the original, when I originally, I made when you discard it create a food token okay so the original when I originally I made I think it was called

tradable cow is what mine was so mine was a 2-2 in red and when it entered the battlefield you gave it to your opponent

and they had to give you a non-land that they had so you had to exchange it your opponent opponent could trade it for whatever they wanted but it couldn't be a land. And the idea was, you know, I could sort of try to figure out when I'm playing this or maybe I could kill the small things. But yeah, you don't control what you get. But the idea was it was a cow that got traded. So they kept the cow. They ended up sort of changing around and once food was in the

picture, I think they turned it into this thing. Well, it's a cow, but it can become food. And Barger Cow kind of explains that, oh, this is the cow that you trade. Nothing but the mechanic trades the cow anymore. In fact, I think the only way to trade is Oko's Ultimate lets you, can make people exchange things. So I guess with Oko on the battlefield you can exchange your cow for something else. But the cow no longer

has built into it the trade. Even though it still represents Jack's cow from Jack and the Beanstalk that he trades for magic beans. Okay, continuing along Jack and the Beanstalk. Beanstalk giant. Six and a green. Creature Giant. Beanstalk Giant's

power and toughness are each equal to the number of lands you control. Star, star. And then it's an adventure card, so its spell is Fertile Footsteps Two and a green. Sorcery Adventure. Search your library for a basic land card, put it on the battlefield, then shuffle your library. So the idea on the adventure

cards is I can cast Fertile Footsteps for three mana, I then exile Beanstalk Giant. He's a giant. Beanstalk Giant, and then I can later, when I have seven mana, I can cast the Beanstalk Giant. So the idea is in early game, it lets you go get a land,

and then late game, it sort of rewards you for how much land you have because it's a star-star creature. We went through a lot of different designs with the giant. For a while, we had a beanstalk that when you had enough mana, you could sacrifice it to make a giant. So like if the beanstalk was a wall, but then when you got some amount of mana,

you could spend it to make a big giant. And I think for a while, we had a giant that just was a wall, but then when you got some amount of mana, you could spend it to make a big giant. And I think for a while, we had a giant that just was a giant by himself. We did a bunch of different versions. One of the things in general is we knew we wanted to represent the beanstalk giant. Fairy tale characters go pretty up there. And I think when they were

messing around with adventure, that it made sense that, you know, I think they liked the idea, my guess is it got made mechanically first, that this was a bottom-up design. They're like, oh,

you fetch land, and then a creature that's as big as how many lands you have, oh, it all ties together, and they're like, oh, what could this be? And they're like, oh,

oh, what if this was the Beanstalk Giant? Because I know we've done a lot of different Beanstalk Giants. Next, Bell of the Brawl. By the way, not my most favorite name in the set, but one of my favorite names in the set. It's an awesome name.

So Bell of the Brawl is two and a black. It's a 3-2 human knight, so a creature, obviously. It's got Menace. And whenever Bell of the Brawl attacks, other knights you control get plus one, plus zero until end of turn. So we decided, I mean, early, early on, we knew we were going to do knight tribal. So one of the things in general when we make a set, we know that there's going to be some amount of tribal.

I mean, tribal sets have a whole bunch of tribal. But even the average set usually has one or two tribal things. We did two, there's basically two tribal themes in the set. One is knights, and that is woven throughout the courts. We decided to focus our knight tribal into white, black, and red. There's knights in all, all five courts have knights, although blue and green have a lot less knights because the knight tribal is in more white, red, and black. So there are blue knights, there are green knights, there's less of them than there are the other three colors. And a lot of what we did is we tried to make knight tribal,

something that, you know, just cards that sort of were flavorful. And this is a good example where, okay, it's a 3-2 menace. It's not a bad card, but look, it's going to reward your other knights. So when it attacks other knights, it doesn't reward itself. But if you pick up this card and look, you're probably going to play a 3-2 you know, a 2-B 3-2 menace. It's not that

bad a card. But it's like, oh, well, she helps other knights and now you're like, oh, maybe I want to play more knights. You know, and then this is one of those cards that definitely sort of hints at, like, maybe you want to play a knights. You know, and then this is one of those cards that definitely sort of hints at, like, maybe you want to play a little more knights. And when we do themes like this,

we like the idea of having cards that are simple, that sort of like, hey, you're kind of encouraged to play it anyway, and then it says, well, kind of for free, I get this knight tribal, hey, maybe I want to be a little more conscious, maybe I want to play a little more knights. And it's little designs like this that sort of can push somebody

that might not be caring about the tribal, but just you pick up a few of these cards and you kind of want to play them anyway. And then it's like, oh, well, since I'm going to play these cards, maybe I just want to take a few more knights or add a few more knights in. Or maybe I'll take a card that's a knight

that I wouldn't play, but go, oh, I got some knight rewards. Maybe this as my 23rd card is better than this other 23rd card. Like when you're drafting, for example. Because I mentioned it. The other thing we did, which I will get to eventually, as far as tribal, is we did our...

I'm not sure if it's our first, but maybe our first. We did what we called negative tribal, where we rewarded you for tribes of not something. And in this case, it's not human. Non-human. The courts are primarily... I mean, there are some non-humans in the courts, but the courts are primarily human,

and the wilds is primarily not human. And so one of the ways to sort of play up the wilds and play up some of the fairy tale-ish stuff is to reward non-human. For a while, we did this thing called mystical. I think it was called mystical. And it's like, oh, if you're an artifact or an enchantment or a fairy,

you're mystical. And we messed around a lot with the idea of, oh, you're something that's magical. And eventually what we realized is all the things we wanted to count were everything that wasn't a human and so we eventually said, oh, well, let's just say non-human instead of

listing six things let's just say non-human. But anyway, we'll get there. Beloved Princess. So Beloved Princess is a creature costs one white mana, so just W, white mana for a 1-1 lifelink creature

and Beloved Princess can't be blocked by creatures with power 3 or greater. white mana, so just W, white mana, for a 1-1 lifelink creature. And Beloved Princess can't be blocked by creatures with power 3 or greater. So we knew we wanted a princess. We went back and forth on what to do with the princess and how to make the princess work. In the end, the idea was, we went for this princess that sort of her, A, she can gain you life, and she...

Somehow, the bigger things can't handle her. She somehow can deal with the larger creatures. The larger creatures won't harm her. She's so beloved that the bigger creatures just won't mess with her. And so that was... We made a bunch of different princesses over time. I think this one, though,

I think this one got made in Vision. Or some variant of it got made in Vision. I believe. Okay, next. Blow Your House Down. So this is a sorcery. It costs two and a red. So three mana total.

One of which is red. Up to three target creatures can't block this turn. Destroy any of them that are walls okay so this was a top down card meaning we started with a name blow your house down

one of the things that we were doing we were doing top down and this is a normal procedure is not just think of things we want to do but also think of names we want

so one of the exercise we'll do is usually we'll ask the creative team to provide and sometimes we do it ourselves, but to provide us with a list of just cool names. Once upon a time, happily ever after.

And so one of the expressions is blow your house down. That's very, like one of the things we're looking for is what name would we not use in an environment that's not this? Like where else would we use blow your house down? Look, it goes in the fairytale set or the name's never getting used. And so the more that we can use the fairytale names in a fairytale set,

just the more we're making use, like names are a resource, the more that we can, A, make something flavorful, and B, just make something that we're not going to make anywhere else. Okay, so what does blow your house down do? anywhere else. Okay. So, what does blow your house down do? Well, clearly it had to destroy houses made of sticks and straw. Not that we had, I mean,

we actually joked at one point about whether we wanted to have, like, house of straw, house of sticks, house of brick. It wasn't space for it. I mean, we did do a little bit of, I mean, there's some Three Pigs references in the set, this being one of them, but we didn't do that. So the idea we knew is, okay, we want to destroy houses. Well, how do you flavorfully destroy houses?

That we don't really, is it destroying artifacts? Because if we build a house, maybe it'd be an artifact. And then we said, you know what? What if we're destroying walls? Houses are made of walls. You know, that felt like a pretty flavorful thing. But the problem is, you know, I know Alpha had Tunnel, which destroyed a wall. Destroying a wall unto itself, there's not that many walls in the set.

It's kind of something that doesn't have enough value by itself. So we knew that just destroying a wall wasn't enough. Okay, so who's destroying walls? Well, that's Red. And blow your house down. Red felt like it made sense. The other option could be Blue, because Blue's the color of air.

But we were talking more about the big bad wolf. So we felt like Red made a lot of sense. If we wanted to destroy walls, Red made sense, and we thought the flavor bad wolf. So we felt like red made a lot of sense. If we wanted to destroy walls, red made sense, and we thought the flavor was okay. So what can we do? What we decided was we wanted to do something in which destroying a wall could be secondary, because it's not going to be the primary thing.

So we came up with what we call panic effect. And what R&D calls a panic effect. I think the general public more refers to them as falter effects. Ironically, a lot of R&D calls a panic effect. I think the general public more refers to them as falter effects. Ironically, a lot of R&D lingo comes from

an early spell that does it because we just will refer to something and the audience tends to make a logo on the stuff that gets played more. So panic wasn't really played as much. It just was one of the early things that did it, where falters, that card that got played a lot. So anyway, the other

thing i think r and d when we talk about false so we tend to talk about nothing can block it where panic means i pick and choose which creatures can't block it so i think r and d but we we slice things a little thinner because we have to talk about them anyway we knew we wanted to do something that kept things from attacking um the other trick we gotta use, and we use this very effectively in this set, is one of the things about fairy tales is there's a lot of association with numbers. So for example, we're doing three little pigs. Well, three.

So the idea is, oh, well if I make this three, if I say Blu-ray Hearthstone, I go, okay, up to three creatures can't block, it sort of makes a reference subtly to the three pigs. You know, it's like, oh, we're from the story of the three pigs and look, we're referencing three while he was trying to get the three pigs. So it makes

a little nod. It's one of the little tricks for aesthetics is using numbers when numbers can have meaning in what you're doing in top-down can be flavorful. And then the idea was to combine the effects. Rather than just up to three creatures can't block, destroy our walls, it's like, oh, we'll let you, we'll just layer them just, up to three creatures can't block, destroy all walls, it's like, oh, we'll

let you, we'll just layer them over. Up to three creatures can't block, oh, by the way, are they walls if they are destroying them? So the idea is, it allows you to destroy walls if you want to destroy walls, but it ties it into the panic effect. So the idea essentially is, you know, I'm not targeting

different creatures for the panic effect and for the walls. So, anyway, that's Blue Ruff. I thought that came together. I like that quite a bit. Next, Bog Naughty. Okay, so three black blacks, so five mana total, two witches black. It's a three three

fairy, so it's a creature. It's got flying, and for two and a black sacrifice of food, target creature gets minus three, minus three, in the line of turn. So one of the things that we want to do with food is, okay, obviously, food gets you life. So there's things that make food tokens. And, okay, you can use food to get life.

But the other thing that was kind of cool to do was, can we let creatures use food for other purposes? So here's a good example. With the bug Naughty, what else can you do with food? Well, you can eat the food, or you can throw the food for other purposes. So here's a good example. With the bug naughty, what else can you do with food? Well, you can eat the food, or you can throw the food. Food fighting, that's another sort of tropey thing to do with food. Like, okay, well what if this thing

just hurls food at things and harms creatures? So the idea is you can take a food, you can use the food and gain three life, or with this card, now you can help destroy a creature. You can wing it at the creature, and if the creature's small enough, three top hits to lower,

you can actually destroy it. Or, maybe in combination with blocking or something. But anyway, the thing I like a lot is it just turns food into something that is a different animal. Let's use food in a different way. Which I think is one of the neat things of making a new token is giving you some utility for how to use it.

Okay. One second. Okay. Next, Bone Crusher Giant. So Bone Crusher Giant costs two and a red. Okay, next. Bone Crusher Giant. So Bone Crusher Giant costs two and a red. It's three mana total, one of which is red. It's a four, three giant.

Whenever Bone Crusher Giant becomes the target of a spell, Bone Crusher Giant deals two damage to that spell's controller. And it's an adventure card. So Stomp, one and a red, instant adventure. Damage can't be banned at this turn. Stomp deals two damage to any target. Okay, so what is going on here is, A, we're trying to make a flavorful giant card.

Well, what does a giant do? Well, the giant can stomp you and hurt you, and he doesn't like it when you target him. So one of the things we're messing around a little more with is, for a long time we had done hexproof. And hexproof was, first we had Shroud, which is nobody can target it. Then we had hexproof, which is nobody else can target it.

But hexproof is a little bit problematic. So we've been messing around with something in which, okay, what if, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can target it. It's not that you can't target it, but there are repercussions for targeting it. We also are messing around with frost armor, which is the idea that it costs more to target it.

But this is more like, okay, it's not that you can't target it, there's just a cost to target it. And so here is, the giant's going to hit you. You try to mess with the giant, maybe you'll get the giant, but he'll hit you on the way out. So the idea is targeting him, there's an impact of targeting him, which is there's damage. So if you want to target him, yeah, you can, but it comes at a cost. So sort of

the actor trying to kill him with spells and stuff will cause you to take some damage. So I thought that was cool. And this is the other thing I like about the adventure cards is they get to tell a little story. It's just this kind of cute little story about your giant and how, you know, he likes hitting things. And if you try to mess with him, he'll hit you.

So, you know, I thought it was kind of cool. Okay, next. Ah, the castle. So this is a cycle. So I'm going to go, I think I'm going to go in alphabetical order. But I'm going to talk about all five castles. So we knew that we wanted to make, we decided not to do dual lands

because we had a strong monocolor theme. We also knew we wanted to show off the castles. We had five courts. Every court had to have a castle. So we decided to make a rare cycle of monocolor, no, monocolor is the wrong word. I mean, lands that were single-color.

Lands aren't colored, but it provided for you a single color. And so the idea is normally we well, let me tell you the card and then I'll walk through the pieces. So, Castle Ardenvale. Land. Castle Ardenvale enters

a battlefield tapped unless you control a plains. Tap, add white. And then two white, white tap. Create a 1, 1 white human creature token. Okay, so a bunch of things there. First off, we like the idea that this taps for white, so we don't want to make it strictly better than a plains. So you have to already have a plains, otherwise this comes in tapped.

Hey, it's not a major disadvantage. It's a tiny disadvantage, but it's something. What it means is if you're splashing this, it's going to come and play tapped. But if you're playing a white deck, um, it won't. And this card kind of encourages you to play a white deck. Like one of the things that we do about the court cards is the court cards really encourage you into the mono-color theme. Well, this is a card that doesn't come in play tapped unless you have a Plains, and it requires two white mana to use,

which doesn't count it, obviously. So this really wants to be in a mono-white deck. If you play it in a mono-white deck, you know, it's mostly going to come in play untapped, and it's going to let you make creatures. The other thing we wanted to do was each of the courts had something that mattered to the court, what we called

the virtue of the court. So white cared about loyalty. White was all about loyalty. The round table is a circle of loyalty. White very much played into the idea. We took these different aspects of knights and then divvied them up between the five courts and the five colors. So white, white's the creature of, you know,

white's about caring about everybody, right? So if white's all about sort of the interdependency between people, oh, well, what matters most into a knight? Loyalty, the bonds you make with your other knights. And so white really plays up the loyalty. And so a lot of that is white has a lot of stuff where it reinforces sort of a go-wide strategy because a lot of loyalty is things help each other. So the idea of making a token is something that's very white.

It's very white court. It plays into the theme and just makes it a cool card. Okay, next. Castle Embreath. So Castle Embreath enters tap unless you control all mountains. So this is the red one. This is the red court. Tap, add red. One red, red tap. Creatures you control get plus one, plus O until end of turn. So the red court was about courage, was about, you know, not being afraid and so we made red be a little more

aggressive than normal, be attack, a little more attack oriented than normal. Red does attack. Once again, it's not as if we're playing the things the color doesn't do. We're just kind of heightening something. White has always been about interconnectivity between the creatures. So loyalty made sense. Red, you know, red does have an aggressive streak, so it really played into the okay, you want to be aggressive. Red's all about courage, not being afraid. Attack. You know, the Red Knights will go into the thing, and so

giving it a boost for attacking creatures really plays into Red's aggressive nature, plays up the idea of courage. Castle Garenbrig. Land. So Castle Garenbrig enters the battlefield, taps, lets you control a forest. It's the green. It's the Castle Garenbrig enters the battlefield. Tap. Let's control a forest.

It's the green. It's the green court. Tap. Add green. Two green. Green. Tap. Add six green.

Spend this mana only to cast creature spells or activate abilities of creatures. Okay, so the green court is all about strength. So it really has this thing that plays into its creatures.

And actually green is the creature color. Notice that the activated abilities cost different things the white one costs 4, the green one costs 4 but the red one costs 3 we wanted to have 2 colored mana in the activation but other than that it could be whatever it needed to be to match the effect

green also tends to be color-oriented. Green is the color that often produces mana. And so the idea here that you can... It produces green mana because it's the green card. It doesn't produce any color because we're trying to play into the green card. And note that we, instead of writing green, green, green, green, green, green, we said six green in the... It's a new template.

What we learned during many times, but Kaladesh was probably the big lesson, is if you put too many of the same symbol in a row, it just becomes hard to grok what that is. And so now, I think if it's more than three, I think the new template is we write the number as a word. So instead of saying the green man symbol six times, it'll say six green man symbol. Yes, that matters for unstable because there are a couple cards, at least one card,

at least a count, that literally cares about numbers, and the previous version didn't have numbers, and this has numbers. So hey, it actually matters. The new template actually means something somewhere. I mean, it also makes it easier to read, which is why we did it. Okay, Castle Lachthwain.

It's a land. Enters battlefield. Taps unless you control a swamp, because it's the black court. Tap, add black. One black, black tap. Draw a card. Then lose life equal to the number of cards in your hand. So the black court's about persistence and about, once again, in a very black way, doing what needs to get done.

Black doesn't give up. So black really plays into the idea. I mean, like, you know, white is the idea of the knights have to work together and red is they have to have courage and not be afraid. And green is, you know, they have to be as strong as they can be. Black is about we do what we got to do to get the job done. Black is about we do what we got to do to get the job done. And that one of the things that's very interesting is I like sort of playing and finding the positive aspects of black. And the idea of persistence is, look, we don't give up.

You know, we're willing to do what it takes and we don't give up. And that's not always a negative thing. I understand that a lot of times black goes into the dark places and, you know, I'll do things like play with death or stuff. But it also gives me the idea of, you know, I have the willingness to do what I need to get the job done, that there's positive aspects of it, that that's always necessarily a negative thing. Although, once again, we're playing in black space here, we're sort of like, black is willing to get the resources it needs, it's willing to take some damage.

And last of the castles is Castle Vantress. So, enter the battlefield tapped, unless you have an island, because obviously it's the to take some damage. And last of the castles is Castle Vantress. So enter the battlefield, tap, unless you have an island, because obviously it's the blue castle. Tap, add blue. Two, tap, tap, tap, scry two. So blue is the court all about knowledge, that if you want to be the best you can be, you have to learn about your foe.

That being a good knight is also being smart, and so they're very oriented on knowledge. So obviously, you get to scry. You get to learn about what's up and coming. You'll notice, by the way, that these themes that I'm talking about not only do the castles play in these themes, we play in those themes in the modern colored themes of the colors. White is about loyalty.

It has a little bit more interactive stuff than normal. Blue is about knowledge, and it's a little more card drawing and scrying and things that help it learn about things. Black is about persistence. It has more things that get things out of the graveyard and just more things that let it be persistent. Red is about courage. It's a little bit more about attacking than normal. Green is about strength. It's a little bit more about size than normal. So really we played into this quite a bit to try to get the general essence of what the castles are. Okay, next, Cauldron Familiar. So it costs a single black mana.

That's a 1-1. It's a cat. It's a creature. When Cauldron Familiar enters the battlefield, each opponent loses one life and you gain one life. So enter the battlefield. It drains the opponent for one. Sacrifice the food. Return Cauldron Familiar from your graveyard to the battlefield. So once again, this is playing with food in a different way. The idea here is, I think the flavor is if you put out food, it attracts cats.

Not that it's necessarily the same cat. Obviously, it's not a zombie cat. I think the flavor here is just, oh, you put out food, it attracts cats, and now you have a cat. And a cat, it's a black cat. And so your opponent's afraid of the black cat because, oh, it's, you know, black cats are bad luck and stuff. So I think that's the flavor going on here. Once again, I like the idea that it's playing with food and a little different. I think black and green are the two colors that, from a draft archetype, mess around with food. Meaning if you see colors that are doing things with food beyond just gaining you life,

I think that's in black and green. Okay, next. Charmed Sleep. One blue blue, so three mana total, two which is blue. It's an aura enchantment. Enchant creature. When Charmed Sleep enters the battlefield, tap Enchanted Creature. Enchanted Creature doesn't untap during its control or its untap step. Okay, so the idea was when you're doing a top-down set,

a lot of times you're designing cards top-down from certain things. But one of the things you also do is say, Hey, are there cards that already exist? Then mechanically we could just change their name and man bam we got it so one of the things we knew we wanted to do is we wanted to do a charm sleep a sleep spell that puts you to sleep obviously sleeping beauty that's a major role of it and snow white is also part of it um it's just you know it's a trope you know you want to put someone in a magical sleep. And it turns out, well, we have the card Claustrophobia,

which basically is, I lock you away, now you can't do anything. Now, you know, in Claustrophobia, for example, I'm trapping you inside of a coffin. Sometimes we play it like I've frozen you in a block of ice. Well, putting you to sleep also makes perfect sense. Tapping as sleeping is something we played up in this set. Sleeping is a motif that pops up a little bit in

fairy tales. So the idea of I put you to sleep made a lot of sense. And so we just took claustrophobia and changed the name. This is something we did very early on, never changed. Blue needs a lockdown spell for Limited. And this was just, I mean, the flavor was dead on.

It did exactly what you expected it to do. I will get to True Love's Kiss later on. But we knew, anyway, it just did what we needed it to do. Okay, next. Charming Prince. My favorite name in the set. So Charming Prince is one and a white. It's a human noble, so it's a creature, two, two. When Charming Prince enters the battlefield, choose one. You can scry for two, you can gain free life, or you can exile another

target creature you own, return to the battlefield under your control at the beginning of the next end step. Okay, so when I first made Charming Prince, I loved the idea that it was Prince Charming from the fairy tales, but it was a charm. So back in Mirage, we made these spells that were tiny little effects that were too small to go on a normal spell. So instead of, what we did is, one spell let you do any of three things. So, oh, well, each one of these might be too small for a card, but the choice between all three was worth a card.

So we made, both Mirage and Visions had charms. And then over the years, we've made a whole bunch of charms. We made them on Ravnica. We made them, we've made two-color charms and three-color charms. We made all sorts of charms. So in Magic, a charm is something where you get the

three small choices. So we were doing Prince Charming. I loved the idea of Prince Charming becomes Charming Prince and Charming Prince is a prince that is a charm. Originally, the first version of it was

enter the battlefield destroying an enchantment. The second ability was put a plus one, plus one counter on a creature. And the third ability was gain some amount of life.

How much life did you gain on this one? You gained three. I think it was gain four life. So the idea in the original card was, okay,

well I can enter and I can wake you from your spell. I can wake you from the charm sleep. I well, I can enter and I can wake you from your spell. I can wake you from the charm sleep. I can destroy enchantment, so I can wake you up from your charm. Number two was I could marry you. And if I marry you, then I strengthen you. Oh, I think it actually might have been, sorry, I think it

might have been, put a plus on plus on up to two creatures, is what it was. Because the idea is, oh, the two creatures get married and now they're stronger for being married. Or, gain life, oh, I can live happily ever after. And we usually equate happiness and life gain. We've done that before. So the idea is,

oh, well, the prince can come and save you or marry you or just live happily ever after with you. But then, we made, what was it called? Night of Autumn, I think it was called? In Guilds of Ravnica, there's a Celestnia card that enters the battlefield and has

a white-green card that had three effects. I'm like, no! So, I worked for a while to try to see if we could change that card, but it was part of play design and they had very specific needs for it. So anyway, it ended up staying as it was. So what I said

when we passed over the card from Vision, we said, look, please, please, please keep the charm structure. Charming Princess of Charm is very cute. It needs to wake up the creature from the charm spell. The charm sleep. You know, it's Prince Charming,

so they've got to be able to wake up the princess. And, please keep the charm. Please keep the three effects. So, what happened was, it turns out they were able to keep the life.

I think they changed it from four to three, but they were able to keep the life, I think they changed it from four to three, but they were able to keep the life. So you're still going to be happily ever after. To wake you up from the sleep, I think they ended up doing the flicker effect. And the nice thing about the flicker effect is not only does it wake you up from the sleep, it also... There's a few other things that I think it helped you with.

But it could wake you up from the charm sleep. And then the scrying came from the idea that you could use it to learn about things. I think we're messing around with white men being a little bit more scry. And so the idea is that the charming prince, the Charming Prince could come to your aid by informing you of something and warning you of danger to come. And so, anyway, that was Charming Prince. I'm very proud of the name.

That's my favorite pun in the set. So, okay, how we doing on time here? I'm now at work. So, okay, we're up to Charming Prince. That's a fine place to stop. I will stop with the Charming Prince. So, anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today. It's fun talking about all the Throne of Elden cards,

and I have many more to talk about, so we have some more podcasts to do. But anyway, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. And 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.