Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #692: Throne of Eldraine Cards, Part 4

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

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

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so I've been talking all about Throne of Eldraine. So the plan today is, I think today's going to be the final episode. So we'll start with Outlaw's Merriment. One red, white, white. So four mana total. One of which is red, two of which is white. It's an enchantment. At the beginning of your upkeep, choose one at random. Create a red and white creature token with those characteristics. Either you're making a 3-1 human warrior with trample and haste,

or a 2-1 human cleric with lifelink and haste. Or a 1-2 human rogue with haste, and when this creature enters the battlefield, it deals one damage to any target. So this is definitely a quirky card. It makes three different tokens, which is not something we do all that often. But I think the only other time we've done it

is a card called Beastial Menace. And this one's even a little weirder in that Beastial Menace makes 1-1, 2-2, and 3-3. And this is making 1- little weirder in that Bishel Menace makes 1, 1, 2, 2, and 3, 3. And this is making 1, 2, 2, 1, and 3, 1 with different abilities. Anyway, this card represents Robin Hood's Merry Men.

That's why it's Merry Mint. Ha ha. For a while, by the way, this had a name change and my note was that I don't think you're going to get Merry Men without a little bit of help. And so the note was probably the word Merry needed to be in the title. But they came up with the idea of Merriment, which I thought was pretty cool. So I thought that definitely was pretty neat.

Anyway, this is a quirky enchantment. I like it. It is definitely... It is a very... The idea that you produce it, not that you produce it, but randomly, it's not something we do all that often. So I kind of like it.

I think it's cool. It definitely makes you sort of have to deal with things in that you don't always quite know what you're getting. And so every turn you get a surprise, but I like it. I think it's kind of cool. Okay, one second. Hold on, let me navigate through some traffic here. Safety first.

Okay, and the next one we get is Queen of Ice. So Queen of Ice costs two and a blue. So three mana total, one of which is blue. She's a two, three human noble wizard. She's a creature. Whenever Queen of Ice deals combat damage to a creature, tap that creature. It doesn't untap during its controller's next untap step. And then she's an adventure card. So the adventure is Rage of Winter, one and a blue, sorcery, adventure. Tap target creature. It doesn't untap during its control or its next untap step. Okay, so this is what we call the Freeze ability. And it makes sense because she is the Queen of Ice.

So probably this story is best known from Frozen, the Disney film. But actually, it goes back. The Ice Princess, or Ice Queen? Snow Queen. Snow Queen. I think it was called the Snow Queen originally. It's actually from Hans Christian Andersen, the same person that originally did Little Mermaid. So this actually is a fairy tale from the same era of the

source material. And we knew we wanted to do one and it seemed pretty clear when we made her that she needed to freeze things. That made a lot of sense. And there's a, like like i said there's an ability in blue um the first version of her was just a creature and then i think when they were making um when they were making adventure cards the idea that oh the spell could be to freeze something and the creature freezes things as it interacts with them we thought was kind of cool uh and then the creature freezes things as it interacts with them. We thought it was kind of cool.

And then I assume once she got that ability, they made her a 2-3 so she'd survive some number of attacks and stuff. But anyway, that's for the Queen of Ice. I think in our playtest, what was that? We had a...

What do we call her? We had some cutesy name. I'm blanking on her cutesy name. We had a cutesy name in playtest blinking on her cutesy name. We did cutesy name and play test. But anyway, that is the Ice Queen. Okay, Questing Beast. Two green, green. So four mana total. Two of which is green. It's a 4-4 legendary beast.

It's a creature. Vigilance, Death Touch, Haste. Questing Beast can't be blocked by creatures with power 2 or less combat damage that will be dealt by creatures you control can't be prevented and whenever questing beast deals combat damage to an opponent it deals that much damage to target planeswalker

that player controls so let's walk through this vigilance, death touch, and haste all green abilities green is secondary I think in all of them. But anyway, they're all abilities that green can do. Questing Beasts can't be blocked by creatures

with power 2 unless they're called Daunt. And green is primary in Daunt. Combat damage that would be dealt by creatures you control can't be prevented. So this is not normally in green. Normally this is in red. Red's the one that more often says you can't prevent damage. Normally this is in red. Red's the one that more often says you can't prevent damage.

But this is by combat damage from creatures. Red usually puts it on spells. So, I mean, not something we do a lot in green, but I guess green can do that. Whenever a question beast deals combat damage to an opponent, it deals that much damage to target planeswag that player controls. A little bit different. We have what we call a super trample, where even if you block it, it still does damage to the player.

So this is a version of that, I guess. So anyway, Questing Beast is an actual creature from Arthurian legend. It's one of the ones that's not as well known. When I went around and asked people. But we thought it was cool. We liked the idea of a legendary beast. Anyway, so we ended up making it, but this is one of those kind of like the hundred-handed one in Theros where if you know it, this is pretty big if you know the story, but

not as well known for people that sort of kind of know the story. We don't know it quite so well. Okay, next. Wrinkle, Master of Pranks. Two black black. He's a legendary creature. He's a 3-3 fairy rogue. He's got flying, and he's got haste.

One sec. Okay. Whenever Wrinkle, Master of Pranks, deals combat damage to a player, choose any number. So there's three different abilities you can choose from. One is each player discards a card. Second is each player loses one life and draws a card. And third is each player sacrifices a creature. So the idea with with Wrinkle is chaos will consume but you get to control what chaos you want. So whenever you

do something, it's affecting everybody. So, you know, if you make your opponent discard a card, you have to discard a card. If you make your opponent a sacrifice creature, you've got a sacrifice creature. If you want to lose a life and draw a card, you've got to let your opponent lose a life and draw a card. So whatever you do, you're letting everybody do. So Rankle, I think, is sort of a riff on Rumpelstiltskin. We had made a bunch of different versions of Rumpelstiltskin. And I think this card, my guess is

that this card got designed not top-down from Rumpelstiltskin, but they were kind of making a cool fairy lord. And they realized, oh, this could make sense as Rumpelstiltskin. And so I think this ended up being a Rumpelstiltskin. And so I think this ended up being our Rumpelstiltskin. But like I said, we had a Rumpelstiltskin for a while that messed around with, you know, turning straw into gold and wanting to take your babies.

We messed around that space. And I think this card was designed just as a cool card unto itself. And then we realized that the flavor made some sense, so we put it there. Okay, next is Return of Nature. So Return of Nature costs one and a green. Instant, choose one. Destroy target artifact. Destroy target enchantment. Exile target card from a green. Instant. Choose one. Destroy target artifact. Destroy target enchantment.

Exile target card from a graveyard. Okay, so this is kind of like, I mean, it's a naturalized variant. One of the things that's happened over time is, as we've been trying to get better at answers, we've been letting white have access to disenchant every once in a while. And since green is slightly better at this than white, we've been trying to say, okay, well, if we let green have disenchant, we can up it a little bit and we can give green a little bit more for its naturalized. So the idea here in Return to Nature is it's naturalized, but you get one extra option, you know, one more mode. You can destroy an artifact, destroy enchantment, or you can exile target cards from a graveyard. And there's enough shenanigans going on that we felt it was not a bad idea

to give green a little access to remove it. Normally black is primary in removing cards from graveyards. Green is secondary. White gets to do a little bit. But anyway. it. But, anyway. And then we ended up tying it to

turning the pumpkin, the carriage back into pumpkin. In fact, there's two different cards that kind of references that. I think each independently felt like they were fun. But the idea here is, if that's a, if the enchanted carriage happens because a spell's put on it,

well, if you get rid of the spell, ah, it just goes back to being a pumpkin was the idea. So I thought that was cool. Okay, next. Revenge of Ravens. Okay, so three and a black. So four mana total, one of which is black. It's an enchantment. Whenever a creature attacks you or a planeswalker you control,

that creature's control loses one life and you gain one life. Okay, so at the end of Cinderella, I think it is, in the Grimm's Fairytale version, I believe ravens come and peck out the eyes

of the stepsifters. I think the stepmother is put in a barrel full of nails and rolled downhill. But I believe the stepsifters have their eyes peck out the eyes of the stepsisters. I think the stepmother has put in a barrel full of nails and rolled down a hill. But I believe the stepsisters have their eyes pecked up. If you've never read Grimm's Fairy Tales, they are grim. That's where the word grim comes from, I believe. When you say something is grim, I think it comes from Grimm's Fairy Tales. So, yeah, kind of grim.

We had a card called Eyes Pecked Up by Birds or something for quite a while. I think we changed it to a slightly less graphic name. But, yeah, we had this card pretty early on. We knew we were doing Grimm. And I think we also had Barrelful of Nails as a card for a while. Anyway, one of the issues that happened when I was pitching doing fairy tales is a concern from up above that they're juvenile in nature. Because if you think about fairy tales, you think of Disney, you think of fairy tale books.

There's a lot of fairy tales that are delivered to kids. And so, yes, it is a very sanitized version of it. But fairy tales are so much part of our culture that you do see, like, for example, Once Upon a Time or Grammar, both TV shows, and then there's lots of movies. The idea of dark fairy tales is used just as much. And so one of the things when there was concern about

how the world might feel too bright, one of the things I said is, look, if you look at the source material, you know, if you look at what people have done with fairy tales, look, you can go as light and as bright as you want, but you also can go as dark and creepy as you want. There are a lot of examples of pretty creepy fairy tale stuff out there. So it is not as if you can't do some darker stuff. So we specifically early on made stuff like, you know, pecked out by birds

and stuff just because we were trying to say, look, yeah, you want to have some gruesome kill spells? You can do that. You've got to figure out what's right for the world in the set. But, you know, it is not as if the source material prevents you from doing darker stuff. Okay, next.

Robber of the Rich. One and a red. It's a 2-2 human archer rogue. So it's a creature. It has reach and haste. Whenever Robber of the Rich attacks, if defending player has more cards in hand than you, exile the top card of their library. During any turn you attack with a rogue, you may cast that card, and you may spend mana

as though it were mana of any color to cast that spell. Okay, a bunch of things going on. First off, this is top-down Robin Hood, for those that didn't figure this out. The reason it has reach is because he's an archer. And in the picture, while he's not shown, I don't think he's shown firing an arrow, you can see he's carrying a crossbow., not crossbow, he's carrying a bow.

And anyway, we tend to use reach on archers. Red is, by the way, secondary in reach. We don't do reach tons, so being secondary in reach is not a lot, but red is secondary in reach, so that's something red can do. I think it has haste to communicate the idea that he's fast. Robin Hood's quick, quick with the bow. And the idea here is how do you get Robin Hood? What do you do? And the idea is, well, I rob from the rich to give to the poor. In this case, the rich is you who has more cards than me. And the poor is me who has less cards. And the idea that's cool about this is, so he essentially does, sort of does, what we call

impulsive draw, except if you're attacking with him, you can get it, and then that turn you can cast it. But it's not just that turn. Once he's stolen something, on any turn that you can attack with a rogue, he's a rogue by the way, you can do this, but not just him. And rather than just say card name, whenever you attack with card name, we open it up to say rogue, that way now the deck can be woven into a rogue themed deck. We do that sometimes where

we could do the narrow thing or do the slightly broader thing, and the slightly broader thing just opens the card up a little bit. So saying rogue just opened up the card a little bit, lets you play with other rogues, you know, just makes a little bit. So saying rogue just opened up the card a little bit, lets you play with other rogues, just makes a little bit of rogue tribal where there wasn't any. And so I think that's kind of nice to do.

Okay. Next. Okay, one second. Okay. Next is... Next is what? Oh, the seven dwarves. Okay, next is the seven dwarves.

Okay, so seven dwarves cost one and a red. It's a dwarf, a 2-2 dwarf. It's a creature. Seven dwarves gets plus one, plus one for each other creature named seven dwarves you control. A deck can have up to seven cards named seven dwarves. Okay. So we knew we wanted to do the seven dwarves.

So here's how the story goes. When I first came up with the idea of doing the fairy tale set, I got the green light. I'm like, okay, here's an awesome idea. What if the set had exactly seven dwarves? And so I said that to Kelly, Kelly Diggs, who was in charge of doing the creative stuff. And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's a horrible idea. A, seven cards. That's a lot of cards. B, trying to maintain an exact number of creatures, that's just putting a weird constraint on it for very... Like, yeah, it's a funny joke, but wow, there's a lot of time and energy that has to go into making that joke work. So instead of trying to do seven different cards, none of which really refer to Snow White,

how about we make one card that refers to the seven dwarves? And I said, okay, so how do I do that? And I was really torpid. And then it dawned on me that if I wanted you to have seven dwarves, rather than have seven unique dwarves, what if the card let you have seven dwarves? Well, how would you get seven dwarves? And I,

I toyed around with the idea that it made tokens, like, uh, it was a dwarf that enters with six other dwarves, you know. Um, I, I toyed with that, just a spell that made seven dwarf counters, and, um counters but we had a lot of cards like the three bears and stuff that were making numerous counters

and also making seven to something is a little bit much it would be really expensive to make seven one ones for example and anyway a lot of different things

that wasn't quite working out so then I toyed with the idea of what if I could get seven of the same card out. Now, obviously, we have limits of four, but then it dawned on me, like, we do stuff, what R&D calls relentless, based on relentless rats,

where, oh, you can have as many as you want in your deck. And it dawned on me, well, what if I didn't let you have as many as you want? What if I said you can have up to seven? Where I get to put the word seven on the card. You can have up to seven of these. And I thought that was a pretty cool way to communicate, oh, oh, it's the seven dwarves. You can have up to seven of them. I thought that was a clever way to sort of lock it and give you the opportunity to get seven. Okay, so once we figured that out, that was the first thing we figured out. Then it was like, okay, well you want to have multiple of these out at once.

And so we tried a bunch of different things. Mostly what we tried were cards in which it cared about the other seven dwarves out. So the goal is to get all the seven dwarves out. In the end, after trying lots of different things, we fell back to the granddaddy of this effect,

Plague Rats. Now, I will note that Plague Rats doesn't technically have the relentless ability you can't play as many plague rats as you want but when richard garfield made the game made alpha made original magic um there was no deck limit so plague rat was designed to be something you'd put a lot of in your deck even though it didn't say you could the game didn't restrict you at the time so richard's intent had always been that you could play as many plague rats as you wanted. And the reason we made Relentless Rats, we put that line on it, was we were just trying to make plague rats as kind of they were envisioned.

So I tried to do a lot of different versions of Plague Rat. I did a lot of riffs on Plague Rat. And in the end, what we realized was, you know what? Plague Rat is good. Let's just make Plague Rat. So we ended up making, I think for a while we were joking we called this Plague Dwarf. I mean, it was always probably called Seven Dwarves. But our playtest name was Plague Dwarf. And the idea was it works just like Plague Rats, but one change. Plague Rats cost, I think it was two and a black for a 1-1, and we made this one

and a red for a 2-2, so creatures have gotten a little bit better since Alpha. Some people have asked why we didn't make it a 1-1 so when all seven are up, they were all 7-7s. We just wanted to make the better, more playable card. The problem was, if you make it a 1-1, it might not be worth putting in your deck,

and sometimes people are like, oh, this would be clever, and the answer is, well, yeah, but then it wouldn't be as good a card, people might not play it. So we wanted to make sure people played it, so the 2-mana 2-2 version just was better than, we couldn't make a 1-drop 1-1, that would be too good, and a 2-drop 1-1, you know, a 2-drop 1-1, so anyway, we ended up with a two drop two two. The other question I get about this is why wasn't there seven pieces of art? That would be so awesome.

So one of the things to keep in mind when you're trying to do something is we like to do things that surprise and delight the audience. We like to do things like, oh, that tickles me. And one of the things that is easy to forget is sometimes what sounds like a great idea in a vacuum is actually a lot more complicated. For example, the way we do alternate art

is we commission extra art and then on a sheet, like on the common sheet, we actually, cards show up more than once on the common sheet. And so if, let's say for example I mean, it can vary how we do our commons but there might be three, four copies or so of a single card, but there's not seven

so the problem is, in order to do seven, I mean not only do we have to order seven arts, which we can do, that actually is a lower hurdle but it requires us to completely redo the sheets I mean, not only do we have to order seven arts, which we can do, that actually is a lower hurdle, but it requires us to completely redo the sheets. And possibly, to get seven pieces of art, one of two things would have to be true. Either the dwarves just show up at a higher rarity than other cards that are common, or it requires extra sheets. And extra sheets, especially on a product that's being printed in all 11 languages,

is super pricey. So the idea is, okay, well, if we want to do this gimmick, which, yeah, we think would be fun, we have to commission six extra pieces of art. We have to change how we do collation. It might require us either printing extra sheets or it might require us changing sort of the rarity of Seven Dwarfs so it shows up more often than a normal common and some other commons it lessens how often they show up. Like is the joke

is it worth that? And the answer is like oh it's a lot of stuff eh no it's not worth that. So we made sure the art itself had Seven Dwarfs in it and we didn't do that. But I know a lot of times when people come up with ideas, it's sort of like, in a vacuum, this sounds fun. Yeah, it does in a vacuum. But we have to actually figure out whether it'll work not in a vacuum, but through actually making the product. So that is what went on there. Okay, so next.

Sorcerer's Broom. So Sorcerer's Broom costs two generic mana. It's a 2-1 artifact creature. It's a spirit. Whenever you sacrifice another permanent, you may pay three. If you do, create a token that's a copy of Sorcerer's Broom. So the idea here

was we liked the idea of a broom that just stopped replicating to make more and more and more of them. Perhaps you might get some idea of our inspiration. But anyway, we thought it was fun. The idea of the broom just kind of gets out of control.

And it allows you to build a different kind of deck than you might naturally think about, which is something in which sacrifice matters. So, you know, there's some sacrifice themes in the set. And so it's kind of fun to say, oh, well, one of the ways you can use your sacrifice is as you're gaining other abilities off it, you can keep replicating this. And notice, every time you sacrifice, you can keep replicating this. And notice, every time you sacrifice, you get to make another one. So you can sort of build up this

army of brooms that we thought was pretty funny. We like the army of brooms. Okay. Okay, next. Spinning Wheel. Okay, Spinning Wheel. Okay, Spinning Wheel costs three generic mana. It's an artifact. It has tap, add one mana of any color,

or five and tap, tap target creature. Okay, so Spinning Wheel is a very important card because it's the card where I first realized something really important about the set. So what we had done is we had gone through all these different fairy tales that we had made and we'd written down, like we literally we went through the stories and said okay, okay, in this story, what goes on? And every time we could have a possible card we'd write it down. So let's say I was doing

Sleeping Beauty, you know, I was doing Sleeping Beauty. I would start, it could be like invitation to a christening or whatever. Invitation or not invited or mad at the

slight or curse or fairy's help mad at the slight or curse or fairies help or you know banished to the woods or

spinning wheel because obviously she's picturing the spinning wheel so you know you want to think of all the different

things that go on in the story of whatever in this case Sleeping Beauty and make a giant list of all the different things that you can do.

Obviously, we did Charm Spell. We did a bunch of different things. Anyway, or Charm Sleep. One of the items from Cinderella was the spinning wheel. And because, for those who know the story, on her 16th birthday, she pricks her finger on the spinning wheel,

and it puts everybody, well, it's supposed to kill her thanks to the help of one of the fairies. Instead, instead of it killing her, it'll put her in a deep sleep as well as the rest

of the kingdom into a deep sleep. So anyway, I want to do spinning wheel, but when I was making spinning wheel, it dawned on me like, oh wait,

there's another spinning wheel in Rumpelstiltskin. He sews, not sews, he spins straw into gold. And so he also uses a spinning wheel. And so I'm like, oh, what am I supposed to do here? Which spinning wheel am I making? Am I making the Sleeping Beauty spinning wheel that puts you to sleep, or the Rumpelstiltskin spinning wheel that makes gold? And then I decided, it made me realize, oh, let's do both. I mean, for the first time I realized the overlap between fairy tales. Like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, fairy tales do reuse a lot of the same components.

So what I decided was, well, let's make one that does both. So there's two abilities. So the first ability originally was you tapped it to make a gold counter and a gold counter could be exchanged for any color mana. We've done gold counters before. So the idea is it literally makes gold

or you can tap a creature with it. I think it used to cost less to tap the creature. I think the early version cost like two or three to tap a creature. Or you can tap it to get gold. When they ended up making food counters,

they decided to get rid of gold counters, and so gold went away, and so this turned into mana production. Once again, the whole reason gold... In magic's term, mana is sort of the money you spend to cast spells, so whenever we want money references, we tend to use mana.

So, okay, well, if we're not going to do gold, let's just produce mana. It's producing stuff that you can cast your spells with. That was always the intent. And then, through playtests, we learned that the tapping ability was pretty strong, so we ended up making it cost five. This card is sort of costed for limited. And in limited, it's a pretty good card. But anyway, the spinning wheel is so important because it really got my mindset and the idea of overlap, that one of the things that made fairy tales so much different

than the horror stories of Innistrad was that the elements of the stories you're telling get repeated a lot. There's not, I mean, horror is a little repeating and the monsters repeat, but the story elements don't repeat quite as much as they do in fairy tales. And it really got me down the path of one of the ways for us to sort of care about fairy tales in a different way to make the top down different is to make this mix and match model where you really got to sort of, you know, you could play the story tell out the fairy tale out as you know it, or you can mix and match stuff and have stories that are your own sort of story.

Okay, next, Steelclaw Lance. Black and a red. It's an artifact equipment. Equip creature gets plus two, plus two. You can equip knight for one generic mana, or you can equip for three. So the idea here is it's lance. It is better with knights. Knights are better with a lance. And technology we've played around with, I think we did with Pirates. The idea is this thing. Oh, we did it with Pirates.

Did we do the Pirates? I think we did it with Pirates. Anyway, the idea that equipment is something that is better in the hands of a certain creature type. In this case, oh, Knights are better with the Lance. Then we make it cheaper to equip. And the nice thing about this is you you can play this, anybody can use it, it's costed as if it was for a generic creature, but then we give you an extra special bonus which says, hey, if you're playing knights, if you're not playing knights, maybe you want to play some knights, and just kind of encourages you to play knights. And we kind of knew we had to have a lance

I mean you can't do a kingdom without a lance with knights we are almost done here I believe we're going to finish next one second next is tempting witch okay tempting witch is two and a black it's three mana total

one of which is black it's a one three human warlock that's a creature when tempting witch enters the battlefield, create a food token. So a food token is an artifact token that you can spend

two and tap, sack, gain three life. And two, tap, sacrifice a food, target player loses three life. Okay, there's a lot going on here. So first off, we're doing the witch from Snow White. She offers an apple, but the apple's a poisonous apple that puts Snow White to sleep.

So she's offering food but unlike most food she can make the food do bad things so if you have the tempting witch you gotta be careful because she can use food and harm somebody normally food helps somebody

but the witch can tempt you and she can harm you with the apple so we thought that was kind of cool. We had a different version of her before food existed, but once food existed, the idea of her luring you with the apple felt pretty cool. Also, if you

notice the art, it has that... One of the things that's fun is to sort of do a riff on things, and that creepy witch with the little baby hands... Anyway, it's very creepy. Oh, the other thing about this card, it's a warlock. So one of the things we've been talking about doing forever is we so far have five, we have four spellcafter types. We have cleric centered in white.

We have wizard centered in blue. We have shaman centered in red and we have druid centered in green. We've been wanting to have one centered in black for a long time and we just finally we are on a set where there just was a lot of things where we can make use of that. The big question is whether it be Witch or Warlock. Those were the two choices available.

The reason we end up going with Warlock is A. Warlock's become very, very popular in video games and so it's just there's a familiarity with it that a lot of people have, especially younger people. And the second thing is that there are some real world religions that call the people witches. And so while we decided that we don't mind a witch in a name,

where we're showing the art and stuff, the idea on a creature type, where a lot of times it gets isolated and you don't have the direct correlation, we decided that that we would end up using Warlock and not use Witch. We did go back and forth, and I do know that the source material we're playing with,

which is Fairy Tales, has more witches by name, obviously, than Warlocks. But we just decided that we needed to make the right decision overall and not necessarily for this set in a vacuum. That's why. I think if we were... There were other factors going on. And like I said, there were other factors.

But anyway, we introduced it. You will see us using it more. I don't know how much we're going back and changing old things. I mean, I think there was one card with Warlock on his name. That'll probably turn into a Warlock. But I'm not sure how much we're going to do. But moving forward, we're definitely going to be doing that. Okay, next, the Cauldron of Eternity.

Ten black black. So 12 mana total, two witches black. Legendary artifact. This spell costs two less to cast for each creature card in your graveyard. Whenever a creature you control dies, put it on the bottom of the owner's library. Two and a black tap, pay two life, return target creature from your graveyard to the battlefield. Activate this ability only any time you can cast a sorcery. So this is our version.

So there's five legendary artifacts that are tied to the courts. This is the black one. This is our version of the Holy Grail. And our version of the Holy Grail. And our version of the Holy Grail raises you from the dead. Black's a court all about persistence. So raising you from the dead, how to be more persistent than not dying.

And one of the things that runs through all of these is that they cost less based on some criteria. It varies from thing to thing. This one costs less depending on how many dead things you have. But anyway, the Cauldron of Eternity. Okay, next.

The Circle of Loyalty. Okay, so this is the white one. Four white, white, six mana total, two witches white, legendary artifact. The spell costs one less for each knight you control. Creatures you control get plus one, plus one. Whenever you cast a legendary spell, create a two-two white knight creature, token with vigilance, and three and a white and tap create

a two-two knight creature token with vigilance. So this is the round table. I admit that this is one of the ones that was taken a step away. The idea is it's the circle that you walk through to prove that you are loyal. It's magical. It's circular. It's tied to knights. I do know that from talking to people on my blog, not everybody quite got that this was our take on the round table. I admit it's extracted a little bit.

But anyway, this is the take on the round table. White cares about loyalty. And this was made super knight-focused because it was a round table. And so white was one of the knight tribal cards. And we really wanted one of these cards to made super knight-focused because it was a roundtable, and so white was one of the knight tribal cards, and we really wanted one of these cards to be very knight-focused. The Great Henge, seven green greens, so nine mana total, two of which is green. This is a green court.

Legendary artifact. The spell costs X less to cast, where X is the greatest power among creatures you control. Tap add green green. You gain two life. And whenever a non-token creature enters the battlefield under your control, put a plus one plus one counter on it and draw a card.

Okay, so the Henge is the green court. They care about strength. So this is all about caring about how big a creature you have. It gets cheaper based on how big your creatures are. And then it lets you cast things and it lets you make creatures extra big when they come into play.

And it also helps you draw cards. Okay, the Magic Mirror. This is the blue court. Six blue, blue, blue. So nine mana total. Three witches blue. Legendary artifact. The spell costs one less to cast

for each instant and sorcery card in your graveyard you have no maximum hand size at the beginning of your upkeep put a knowledge counter on the magic mirror then draw a card

for each knowledge counter on the magic mirror so the magic mirror is in the blue court blue court is all about knowledge knowledge is very much tied to card drawing

is a big part of that and so the idea with magic mirror is I just learn more the longer the magic mirror is around the more I have it we were looking at longer the magic mirror is around, the more I have it.

We were looking at magical items. Magic mirror is a pretty big one from fairy tales. It's all about learning things. It made a lot of sense in the blue court. We made our magic mirror humongous. But it is a pretty cool giant thing. Notice that the fifth of these was ember cleave. I already talked about all the rest had the in it and and Embercleave did not. But those are the cycle. So the red one was Courage, and so it gets Excalibur, basically. There was a point in time where all these items, you went on quests.

We had a mechanic called Quest for a while, where it would give you, it was an enchantment, it gave you three different things you had to do. As you did them, you would mark them off with counters, and then when you did all three of them, you could trade it in either for a spell effect that was on the card, or in the case of the legendary items, you could trade it in for the legendary item. And those were sort of elaborate tokens that couldn't go in your deck. The only way to get them was to do the quest to go get them. But when we got rid of quests, we liked how a lot of the

artifacts worked, so we ended up turning them from artifact tokens into actual artifacts, and then added in the thing to reduce their mana cost, because obviously they didn't have a mana cost when you got them on quests. The Royal Scions. One blue-red. Legendary

Planeswalker. Will Rowan. So it's Will and Rowan. It's Will first because I think Will's in the left of the art. Plus one, draw a card, then discard a card. Plus one, target creature gets plus two, plus O, and gains first strike and trample until end of turn. Minus eight, draw four cards when you do. The Royal Signs deals

damage to any target equal to the number of cards in your hand. Oh, by the way, it was three mana total. Loyalty, five. You got five loyalty when it comes out. And you got two pluses and one minus. So you can loot. That's a very blue effect, although red also has rummage. You can make a creature get

plus two plus zero, first rank, and trample to end of turn. That is leans a little more toward the red side of things. And then draw four cards when you do deal damage. That's combining blue and red, which is blue draws you the cards, red deals damage, you put cards in your

hand, but they're tied together because the more cards in your hand, the more damage it does, and so this is nice and balances sort of the blue and the redness of the card, since it's both Will and Rowan. People have been asking forever for us to do two Planeswalkers on one card.

We did contemplate it during War of the Spark when we were trying to get a lot of Planeswalkers in the set before we decided just to have so many Planeswalkers in the set. Back when I thought we'd only get eight Planeswalkers, I'm like, oh, what if all of them were combinations? Then I have 16 characters, but when we ended up putting all the things into the set, we realized we didn't need to combine them.

So since these guys share a spark, it seemed like the right place to do it. Okay, Trail of Crumbs. One and a green enchantment. When Trail of Crumbs enters the battlefield, create a food token. Whenever you sacrifice a food, you may pay one. If you do, look at the top two cards of your library.

You may reveal a permanent card from among them and put it in your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order. The idea here is Hansel and Gretel puts the crumbs so they can find their way. We tied it to food because bread is crumbs. It also helps you find things like the gingerbread house, which is

an item made of food. And so let's green do something which is both create food and then use food in a different way than normal. In this case, allowing you access to look at cards. Trapped in the tower. One and a white, enchantment aura. Enchant creature without flying. Enchanted creature can't attack or block,

and its activated abilities can't be activated. So this is our arrest. We decided to do a Rapunzel reference here. So Rapunzel's trapped in a tower and can't go anywhere, so the way we arrest you is we put you in a tower. Originally, this card said, can't attack or block creatures without flying, but what we found was, because the idea was, oh, you can block flies as you're up in a tower, but we found that people just forgot, people treated it like it was an arrest, that you couldn't

do anything, and then all of a sudden, you would attack with a fly, and ha-ha, the creature blocked, and you didn't expect it. So we ended up changing it to be enchant creature with flying. One of the cool things about this, by the way, is if you want to get out of the tower, if you temporarily grant your creature flying, it will make the enchantment fall off. So if someone's trapped in the tower,

and you can make them fly, they can fly out of the tower, and then they're out of the tower. Okay, True Love's Kiss. Two white, white instant. So four mana total. Two of which are white. Exile, target, artifact, or enchant Kiss. Two white, white instant. So four mana total. Two of which are white. Exile, target, artifact, or enchantment. Draw a card.

Okay, so we knew we wanted True Love's Kiss. We knew True Love's Kiss needed to wake you from a sleep spell. We ended up making Claustrophobia into our sleep spell. So we knew that we needed to destroy an enchantment. That way it would wake you up from the sleep spell. But then we made Glass Casket. And Glass Casket ended up being an artifact and not an enchantment. That way we would wake you up from the sleep spell. But then we made Glass Casket. And Glass Casket ended up being an artifact and not an enchantment. But we also wanted to wake you up from, you know,

if Snow White's asleep, you've got to wake her up too. So we said, okay, we'll just make it artifact or enchantment. We'll just make it sort of a disenchant. I think it ended up being exile just to make it feel a little bit different. And then I think you gained life originally in the first version, but it wasn't quite, they wanted to make it a little bit better. So they ended up making it Drunk. I made it a Cantrip instead.

So anyway, and we knew we wanted True Love's Kiss to really make sense. True Love's Kiss, the reason it's not in red, people always talk about how we say red's the color of emotion and finally you showed something about passion. Why wasn't it red? The reason was it needed to wake you up from the Charm Sleep spell. That was an enchantment. Red specifically can't enjoy enchantments, so

red just didn't let us need to do functionally what the card needed to do. And so, sadly, it couldn't be red. In a vacuum, yes, True Love's Kiss could clearly be red, just we needed to mechanically do something that red could not mechanically do. So, unfortunately, we weren't able to do that. Okay. Weapon Rack.

So, Weapon Rack is an artifact that costs four generic mana. Weapon Rack enters the battlefield with three plus one, plus one counters. Tap, move a plus one, plus one counter from Weapon counter from weapon rack onto target creature activate this ability only when you can cast a sorcery um it's funny a lot of people ask me if this was inspired by serrated arrows because in a lot of ways this isn't a negative serrated arrows um and the interesting thing is it is and it could have been but it wasn't. I think we were trying to make plus one, plus one counters matter in a couple different ways. And we just liked the idea. Oh, I know.

We also were trying to make something that felt... We made a list of things that were very Arthurian. And the idea of having a whole bunch of weapons that you could distribute. Anyway, so we ended up without... I mean, obviously, looking back, yes, it's a reverse serrated arrow. We only realized that after the fact, which is kind of funny. Which, I mean, that very well could have been

inspiration, just ironically was not. Okay, so next, Wicked Guardian. So Wicked Guardian costs three and a black, four, two, human noble. It's a creature. When Wicked Guardian enters the battlefield, you may have to deal two damage

to another creature you control if you do draw a card. The original version in playtest was called Evil Stepmother. And originally it was like a shade that you could spend mana to give it plus two, plus two, but another creature you controlled

got minus two, minus two. So the idea is it could get powerful, but at the cost of other creatures you had. I think that ended up being a little too good and so they ended up making it a one-shot rather than repeatable. But anyway, I like the idea that this card really benefits off you having to harm other things.

Wicked Wolf, two green green. So four mana total, two witches green. It's a 3-3 wolf creature. When Wicked Wolf enters the battlefield, it fights up to one target creature you don't control. Sacrifice a food. Put a plus one counter on Wicked Wolf. It gains indestructible until end of turn.

Tap it. So this also goes into the food deck. The Wicked Wolf... This is the Big Bad Wolf. Big Bad Wolf likes food. He wanted to eat the pigs. He wanted to get Little Red Riding Hood and her basket of goodies, as well as eat Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. So anyway, he likes to eat the pigs. He wanted to get Little Red Riding Hood and her basket of goodies,

as well as eat Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. So anyway, he likes to eat. So the idea is food matters in the green-black deck. So this is a different way to care about food. Notice he doesn't generate food. He only uses food. I think he's one of the only cards that only uses food. He doesn't generate food.

But anyway, the idea is he's a big, bad wolf. He can get bigger by eating. He eats the's a big bad wolf, he can get bigger, and by eating, he eats the food and gets bigger, and he can fight. If you can put the damage on the stack for him to fight, then eat the food, so he's bigger at the time you're going to fight, and indestructible, of course.

Originally, when I first made this card, he entered the battlefield, you exiled the creature with a power less than his power, until he went away. So if you remember the Mechanical Color Pie article where I talked about Green having the Banisher Priest effect, that was what I was thinking of. I really liked that on the Wolf. I thought

it was defendable of Green doing secondary Banisher Priest. We had a big conversation in the Council of Colors. Not enough people agreed with me, so we ended up not doing that. But that is why I was so convinced we were going to make that card, I put that in the Mechanical Call of Duty article. It ended up not coming to fruition.

But for those wondering when I said, banish a priest within the colors yet it never showed up, that is why. I'm at work, but so far I'm going to finish real quick. Wishful Merfolk, one and a blue, three, two, Merfolk, Defender. One and a blue, Wishful Merfolk loses Defender and becomes a human until end of turn. This is Little Mermaid. This card was made early on.

I don't think it changed much. One of the funny things about it is this card was made before we had the non-human matters card. And so it's kind of cute in the way where it's a non-human but can become a human so you have to be careful when you're doing non-human effects whether it's a human or not which i thought was kind of cool which is cottage land swamp tap to add black which is cottage enters the battlefield tap unless you control three or more swamps when which is kind of enters the battlefield you may put target creature cards from your graveyard on top of your library um this was another of our common cycle that common lands

a tapped for a color mana, but required enough of them to come untapped. These are all tied. The Witch's Cottage, we were referencing. There's a bunch of different... Having a cottage for the witch

shows up in a bunch of fairy tales. The idea here is the witch can bring back things from the dead. Made a lot of sense. Witch's Oven, one artifact. Artifact costs one generic mana. Tap, sacrifice a creature, create a food token. If the sacrifice

creature's toughness was four or greater, create two food tokens instead. So the idea of witch's oven was it's a witch's, it's the oven from Hansel and Gretel. They push her into the oven and originally it made you, it made you...

You could kill a creature with it, but it seemed a little too gruesome. This one's less gruesome. But anyway, so once we had food, the idea that you could cook things in it, that you could cook creatures and make them into food, we thought was a little on the gory side. But like I said, there's some dark stuff here.

Okay, and then, my final card, and then I will be done. Wolf's Quarry. Four green greens, so six mana total, two witches green. Sorcery. Create three 1-1 green boar creature tokens when this creature dies, create a food. So the idea is we want to make the three

little pigs. Pigs are boars in magic, much like dogs are hounds and once the three bears we went around a lot because we wanted to make three bears we wanted to make three billy goats grow up, we wanted to make three pigs, in the end we ended up putting the

bears on Flex and Truder and then this allowed us to do this one separately and then we made the goats be, you give your opponent. So we shifted them up a little bit. In the end, like the clean version, then mixed three little pigs, and then we added the food thing that when they die,

you get food out of them. So the idea is, yeah, you get little one-ones, but little one-ones that you get to trade in to become food, and that made them feel a little bit different. The other thing is, because we don't have talking animals, we couldn't really play up anything about the pigs that had, giving them, like, in our version of the story,

the wolf just chases them because the wolf wants to eat them. There's no building houses or anything. So, anyway, we liked the idea of having three little pigs, referencing three little pigs, without referencing kind of the pigs talking part of the story since we didn't have talking animals. Woo!

Okay, guys. Well, in four podcasts, that is all the Throne of Eldritch stories. I hope you guys enjoyed these podcasts. It was fun. I had a lot of fun making the set. A lot of fun talking about the set. So, you guys, I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did.

But I'm now at work. So, we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.