Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #697: Planeswalker Evolutions

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about the many different ways we've evolved the planeswalker card type since its introduction.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast is based on a topic I made for a head-to-head that you guys have already done. So, one of my challenges, so I do a thing on my Twitter, for those who don't know, called Head-to-Head. It goes over the course of three weeks. I give you 16 things to vote on, two things a day. They do a bracket, and then someone wins. And so I'm always looking for a challenging thing of finding subjects of magic that have at least 16 things in them. So one of the ones I did relatively recently, for me it hasn't happened yet, but for you it should have already happened, is I did a head-to-head about planeswalker

innovations. So I thought I would talk through all 16 innovations I put on, and I might mention one or two I didn't put on, and then talk about, today's topic really is talking about planeswalkers and how we've evolved planeswalkers is really the theme, but I'm going to talk sort of evolution by evolution, if you will, or innovation by innovation. Okay, so let's start with double-faced cards, creature to Planeswalker. So these first showed up in Magic Origins. So the flavor of Magic Origins was we were showing the origin of the five first Gatewatch members, which was Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nyssa. So the whole point of it was we were showing the origins. So Sean Main, who was in charge of the was, we were showing the origins. So, Sean Main, who was in charge of the set, came

to me and said, look, we really, the whole point of this is showing where they came from and capturing the moment they first sparked and became a planeswalker. What would be really cool is to have creatures that transform

into planeswalkers. But at the time, you know, we had done the double-faced cards in Innistrad block, but we really hadn't done them anywhere else. And so the question was, was it okay to do them somewhere else? And so he came to me, and I said, that sounds awesome, you would be crazy not to do that. And I gave him my blessing, and I said, yeah, that sounds amazing. So we did them in

Origins. They were a big hit. One of the things about them that ended up being very popular is on one side, there are legendary creatures. On the back side, there are planeswalker. It allowed you, for each of the characters, to use them as a commander. And up to that point, there wasn't a Jace, for example, you could use as your commander. In Brawl and in Oathbreaker, you can use planeswalkers as sort of your commander, but in normal commander, you can't. And so this

I mean, we have made commanders that can be your, sorry, planeswalkers that can be your commander. I'll get to that. But that is not something that we had done specifically, especially with a lot of the more popular, better known characters like the Gatewatch. But anyway, so we did it there. And then when we did Core 2019, which was last year's Core set, it was based around Nicole Bolas.

And it was telling the origin story of Nicole Bolas. So, Ethan wanted to do the same thing with Nicole Bolas. And we said, okay, yeah, that sounds cool. So we did Nicole Bolas. This is a very frequent request. Players like these

sparking planeswalkers, to give them a name. Meaning that they start as creatures, legendary creatures, and they turn into planeswalkers. I get requests for this all the time. Part of it is, it allows people to make commanders, and part of it also is just, it's kind of flavorful, it's kind of cool. It's not a... I mean, it's a planeswalker in the sense that it turns into a planeswalker, but because it starts as a creature, and you have to jump through a hoop to get there, it allows us to make... The Planeswalker side

gets to be probably a little more powerful than we make straight up, or vice versa. We get to make things that come out a little cheaper, and then can turn into a normal... One of the problems is, if we make a Planeswalker that only costs one or two mana, it's hard, as Tybalt has shown,

it's hard to make it particularly powerful. But if we make a legendary creature that costs one or two mana, that you then have to jump through a hoop, you know, you can make a planeswalker that's more normal to a normal planeswalker. Or if you make the creature cost a little bit more, you can get an even more powerful planeswalker, because you have to jump through the hoop to get to the planeswalker. But anyway, a very powerful innovation. Okay, next, no plus abilities. Okay, so one of the things we did when we first made planeswalkers is we made a basic default outline for them. So the idea is normally on sort of a default planeswalker,

you have a small plus ability, something that will allow you to go up in loyalty. And usually it's something small, but something that, you know, you might want to do every turn. Then there is a negative ability that is a smaller negative ability. It might not be just minus one. Sometimes it's minus three. It might be a smaller negative ability. It might not be just minus one. Sometimes it's minus three. It might be a little bit more. But it's sort of a medium-sized ability, but it's usually a negative ability.

And that does something pretty powerful. And the card is costed so that you can only use that ability usually once or twice. But it gives you some other options. And usually that ability is more potent. And a lot of times what you want to do is play your Planeswalker and right away use that ability because it's a much more

potent ability. And then normally the third ability is a negative ability but much more expensive. Something that's more than your loyalty is when you start. I mean you can't use it right away. And that's what we call the ultimate. And usually that's something you have to work up to, but ultimates are usually super powerful. The way we like to think of it is, if you get the ultimate off, it just really increases your

chance of winning the game. It doesn't guarantee you'll win the game, but it is a huge benefit. And so if you can get there and get the ultimate off, it will swing the game in your favor pretty heavily. So that, you know, once again, not that you can't lose, but it really helps you win. But the ultimate is something normally you work up to, which means you have to do the possibility enough times to get there. And usually that takes some amount of time. Plus your opponent might be trying to knock you down by attacking the planeswalker or

doing damage to it or something. So anyway, that is the default planeswalker. That's where we started. Now, there's a lot of innovations off that theme. Sometimes, for example, you do two plus abilities with a minus ability. Sometimes the minus ability is something that is achievable right away or doesn't take super long, but you have two minus abilities. Like, we've messed around. But one of the ones that we, I think we did for the first time on Shark and the Mad, I believe, was no positive abilities, only negative abilities.

And that meant that without external sources, there was no way that it was just going to go down, that you couldn't build up towards something. And an all-negative planeswalker is just built a little bit differently. Because, for example, if there's no plus ability, you can't make the negative ability beyond them, because there's no way to get the extra... So an all-negative means you have some choices of what you can do, but it is going down. I mean, external to things like, you know,

proliferate or something, you know, there's no way for it to be going up. We will later use this technology when we got to the Uncommon Planeswalkers, which I will get to momentarily. Okay, next is, oh, next is Uncommon Planeswalkers. Okay, so one of the things... So when Planeswalkers first premiered, it was in Lorwyn. Lorwyn did not have Mythic Rares. So the very first Planeswalkers were rare. But as soon as Mythic Rare happened, very shortly thereafter, Planeswalkers were Mythic Rare. So we were in War of the Spark. We wanted to have a giant war with lots of planeswalkers.

And we realized the only way to do that was to have a whole bunch of planeswalkers. Well, there are only 15 slasher mythic rares. If we wanted to have more than 15 planeswalkers, there really is no way to even pull that off without finding other way to do it. So we decided that we were going to make rare and uncommon planeswalkers. As I said, rare planeswalkers had existed before, but uncommon planeswalkers were brand new. So the uncommon planeswalkers, part of what we were trying to do is figure out a way to make them feel more uncommon. And so what we ended up doing was, after a lot of experimentation, was the idea of not putting positive things on them.

That the uncommon Planeswalkers only had one single negative ability. We also put a static ability on it, which I will get to shortly. So we put a static ability on it, and we put one negative ability. So the idea was that when you get an uncommon Planeswalker, they're going to do something so many times

and then go away. The neat thing about that is because you only have socommon Planeswalker, they're going to do something so many times and then go away. The neat thing about that is, because you only have so many uses out of them, you don't always use their abilities every turn. That is not true. Normally, for example, if you have a normal Planeswalker, where they have a plus ability, you're, like, encouraged to use them every turn.

Where the Uncommon Planeswalkers are more like, oh, I'm kind of like, you know, I'm sort of like a spell you can do a couple times. Obviously, it can be attacked so that your opponent has some answer to that. But it's something that you can use when you want to use. And so the Uncommon Planeswalkers were very interesting, and they played very differently from the way the rare Mythic Rares tend to play because the lack of a plus ability. Now we did try when we were doing uncommon planeswalkers we experimented

with having just one plus ability but what we found was you were tracking something that just didn't matter at some point you know that like a plus ability was like oh every turn I get to do something and then the fact you had counters at some point, you had so many counters it didn't matter that your opponent was going to be attacking it. But because it could matter, you had to keep track of the counters. And so it was a lot of kind of endless bookkeeping. Like if you just make a trigger ability that every turn it does something,

you know, like that was basically the same thing. If I made a trigger ability that said every turn do something, because your opponent could still attack it. So it just wasn't the best way. With static abilities, it wasn't the best way to do that. So we tried just plus ability, because we were doing a single ability. We tried plus abilities. We tried negative abilities. If the negative abilities played really well,

the plus abilities didn't play really well. So we did the negative abilities. Will we ever do an uncommon with a plus abilities didn't play really well. So we did the negative abilities. Will we ever do an uncommon with a plus ability? I don't know. What we did in War of the Spark was we gave them two abilities, one which was a static or triggered ability, and one which is a negative ability.

I like how those particular ones played. So I'm not sure what happens if we ever do an uncommon with Planeswalkers again. I guess we did Chandra. We did do an uncommoncommon Planeswalkers. We did Chandra in the course, and she had, I think, two abilities. No, no, she had three abilities, but they were simpler, I believe. Anyway, I did like the Uncommon Planeswalkers. I would like to mess around with doing them again in the right set. It's not something I think should go in as a default. But I do believe there will come a day where it makes sense to have some uncommon Planeswalkers, and I'm happy with how we designed them. Okay, next. Referencing named mechanics from the set.

So the first one that technically did that was Garak, I believe, in Innishrod. He was a double-faced Planeswalker. I'll get to that in a second. But he technically had Transform on him. The first one that did it, barring double-faced cards, was, I think, Narset in Dragons of Tarkir. She referenced Rebound. I know Oko references Food.

It is something that we were very hesitant to do early on because we wanted our planeswalkers to feel above the world they were on, I think. That we wanted them to feel more... Like the mechanic was tied to the world, so when the planeswalker had the mechanic, it felt like they were more tied to the world. And so we originally started doing them... We were very consciously not using named keyword mechanics in the set. We used

evergreen keywords, but not ones that are unique to the block that they were in. We've since realized as we're doing more and more planeswalker designs, that that was a big sort of space to leave off. So I think we're little by little getting more willing to use the name mechanics in the set just from an idea of, look, the mechanics here now, we can use it, and it just makes a Planeswalker we couldn't make elsewhere. Like, one of the things I often talk about is

Planeswalkers are probably our most popular card type, and they're the card type that has the least amount of design space. Them and Lands are the two that are the most limited. And so we've been slow rolling a lot of these innovations. We've also been sort of taking our time to get there, because we want to make sure that we're exploring all the space we have before opening up new space. But obviously, I have 16 innovations here,

so we're constantly looking at ways to tweak Planeswalkers. But anyway, using named abilities is something I really think we're getting more comfortable with, especially as we are trying harder and harder to make Planeswalkers that don't feel like Planeswalkers we've made before. That's one of the biggest challenges we've is, especially when you have, you know, similar characters. Like, Chandra's had, I don't know, like 14 planeswalkers or something, you know, and,

you know, like a singular character has certain mechanical requirements to them. So planes, you know, Chandra is a pyromancer, so she's got to do direct damage. The idea of finding ways to interact with new abilities that are new to the set just allows us to tweak the Planeswalker. That is something I expect us to be doing more than we have

been in the past. Okay, next. Emblems. Okay, so it's funny. The first Planeswalker Okay, next. Emblems. Okay, so... It's funny. The first planeswalker to have an emblem was Elsbeth. Although she...

If you go back and look at the original card that had the... The original card didn't use emblems. Oh, so emblems, for those that don't know, planeswalkers can make these... It's a card... Is it a card type? Yeah, it's... I'm make these, it's a card is it a card type? Yeah, it's I'm not sure if it's a card, it's it's own thing

thus far we've not made anything interact with emblems that probably is going to change with time only as we're looking to expand and find new ways to interact but anyway, emblems are, they're enchantment like things. They're not enchantments, meaning they can't be

naturalized or disenchanted. But they're like enchantments, although not technically enchantments, and they create a static ability. The idea is sometimes we want the Planeswalker to sort of create something that has some permanence to it. We call it an emblem. Like I said, Elspeth was the first one to have the emblem. I'm not sure the first one that technically had, like, Sorn, maybe, that had it written on the card.

But emblems solved the problem. For a while, we tried the thing where it would say, for the rest of the game, blah, and just, there was no memory aid or anything, and so emblems was kind of our fix for that um we use emblems quite a bit it just allows us to make sort of long lasting effects and one of the fun things to do especially on emblems is just grant you a really powerful ability that now you

can do this uh and there's a lot of um a lot of times we make emblems of things that are hard to make on cards because they're so powerful that they have to be so expensive. But since you have to jump through the hoop on a Planeswalker, it allows us to make them, especially on ultimates, like I say. Emblems aren't only on ultimates. We do have emblems you can right away cast, for example. Usually they're not as powerful.

The big thing on emblems is thus far we've made a choice not to interact with emblems, meaning we don't have any effects right now that can destroy emblems or care about emblems. I do believe with time, as we make more and more emblems,

we'll eventually start doing things that have some interaction. I don't think we'll make it easy to get rid of them since you have to go through a lot to get them. That's why we haven't made stuff that destroys them. But I could imagine with time that we make things that have some interaction with them. Okay.

Next. Two Planeswalkers on one card. Okay, so this is the Royal Scions from Throne of Eldra. And this is Rowan and Will appearing on one card. And what I mean, appearing on one card, what I mean is, it's one Planeswalker card, it's two characters, and in the subtype, both subtypes exist. So, for example, the Royal Scions, I believe, is creature type,

I think it's Will Rowan. I believe it's Will first, because Will's on the left side of the picture. It's, um, I think that's why on that card it's Will than Rowan. Um, because normally we refer to them as Rowan and Will. Um, the, um, so I've been, people have been asking for two Plantsworkers on a card forever. It's a very frequent ask. And usually it is asked for two Planeswalkers that have some, when I say relationship,

I don't necessarily mean romantic, but have some connection to one another. I get, name any two characters that have some interaction and people, oh, what if they were on a card together? I did seriously consider putting two Planeswalkers on a card for War of the Spark. Because back when I thought that I only had a handful of Planeswalkers,

one of the ways I was thinking of getting more Planeswalkers on the card was putting two Planeswalkers per card. There was a period of time where I thought maybe I could get eight Planeswalkers max. Like, well, if I put two per card and I can squeeze to eight, and that's 16 characters, at least that feels a little bit more. So I did toy with the idea. We ended up deciding just to do more Planeswalkers, but I did toy with that idea.

I'm not saying we won't do more of it. I mean, I think we don't want to put two Planeswalkers on our card without really there being some real meaning for it. Ronan Will ended up being the perfect ability because the shtick of Ronan and Will is that they are twins that share a spark. What that means is, if they want to planeswalk, they have to planeswalk together.

They can't planeswalk independently. And so, I mean, we're always looking for sort of new and unique planeswalkers and we liked the idea of twins, and so the idea that twins are shared as a spark, which is interesting. So one of the tricks of doing Rowan Will

was we need to convey the sense that they planeswalk together, right? So what we did in Battle Bond, which is the first time they showed up, is they had partner with. So when you get one, you go get the other. So we decided for War of the Spark to demonstrate them by showing them as being on the same card. Anyway, like I said, we have to find the right flavor place to do it again. I mean, A, we might do Rowan and Will again, obviously, but

I do think there's a chance for having known existing planeswalkers come together if we find the right reason for it. But we do have to find the correct situation. Okay, next. Turns into a creature. So I think Gideon did this first. Sarkhan also does it. So the idea is it's a planeswalker that themselves become a creature,

and then usually that means they can attack. The tricky thing about it is planeswalkers are a lot easier to, I'm sorry, creatures are much easier to kill than planeswalkers. So usually when we turn them into a planeswalker, we give them indestructible or something, so it's not just like, hey, I'm Gideon, I become a creature,

and he's murdered or something. We make it a little bit harder. I mean, you can get in a fight with him, although I guess indestructible makes it hard to kill him. But anyway, one of the things we were looking for with Gideon is Gideon really had this essence of he likes to get in a fight. He's a planeswalker. He's not just throwing spells at you.

He's going to fight. And so to convey that, we liked the idea that he turned into a creature. Every single Gideon did that. It really was one of the ways to one of the flavors of the Gideon character is that as a planeswalker, he would always get in the fight.

Sarkhan, we also use it because Sarkhan can turn into a dragon. And so I don't think every Sarkhan has done it, but some Sarkhans have done it. So it's one of the things that he can do. He's able to transform into a dragon.

How do we show him transforming into a dragon? Well, kind of got to become a creature because it doesn't mean anything. It turns into a dragon. So he can attack as a dragon. And that is kind of cool.

Will we have other Planeswalkers in the future that turn into creatures? Yeah, I mean, yes, if we have the right flavor. If we have a character that likes that. I mean, Gideon also, sadly, is no longer with us. Spoilers.

So, barring some of those where we bring back old Gideon or something, if we want to use that ability, it requires us to do Sarkin or some other creature. Other planeswalker. I do think we'll do it again. I think it's very flavorful, so I expect us to do I mean, do Sarkin or some other creature, other Planeswalker. I do think we'll do it again.

I think it's very flavorful. So I expect us to do it again. Okay. Next is... Loyalty added based on effect. Oh, so this is... So normally the way you get loyalty is you have a plus loyalty ability. So in Planeswalker, it enters the battlefield with some amount of loyalty,

in the lower right-hand corner, and then the plus ability means if you use this ability, oh, and just for people to know, the plus ability is flavored as something the Planeswalker wants to do. Like, oh, this is fun for me. Yeah, you asking me to do this only makes me want to stick around longer. I like doing this. And a negative ability is like, well, it's somewhat draining.

Like, I don't want to do this too much. If you ask too much of me, I might just leave. So the idea of, so most loyalty, the way you gain loyalty is by having a plus loyalty ability, when you've gained loyalty. There's some abilities that either are zero or sometimes minus

that get you loyalty through some means. Usually that's a variable means. For each blah, or like, the idea is it's not a locked number that you get. Otherwise, it would just be on the loyalty building. It's something that's scalable. I don't remember the first one that did this.

We've had a bunch. There's the Gideon that did it. There's a few that have done this. But the idea we like a lot is it allows you to interact with the environment a little bit more. And it makes it something that if you build around, the path to the ultimate is different

because part of what you're doing is caring about something and it just gives you some directional deck building that is interesting. We have to be careful with it because normally we can, as we're trying to balance the Planeswalkers, we know how long it takes to do something. You know, minus proliferating or something. And so this really, this is a little trickier to balance.

But it's flavorful, it's fun, it allows the card to interact with the battlefield and the rest of the cards in a way that Planeswalkers sometimes don't do as well. So it is a pretty cool ability and something that I do expect us to see again. Okay, next is static or triggered abilities. Okay, I will admit on this list that I'm about to say, there were Can Be Your Commander and Transform Triggers. Both existed before what I'm talking can-be-your-commander and transform triggers both existed before what I'm talking about happened. So the very first static or triggered ability, I think it was Garak who transformed, and then we had the planeswalkers in the commander set

that could become your commander. But what I mean is a more normal, straightforward static or triggered ability. That happened with War of the Spark. Players, sorry, designers have been wanting to put them on Planeswalkers forever. And I held them back. I'm like, not yet, not yet, not yet. And when finally we did a set where Planeswalkers were the theme, and we were blowing up Planeswalkers, I said, okay, now is the time. And it allowed us to make a lot of Planwalkers, especially the uncommon planeswalkers,

that really functioned a little bit differently from the normal planeswalkers. One of the neat things about a static ability is... So one of the things we did when we made planeswalkers is we built them roughly off a thing called structures that Richard had made for original Ravnica. And the idea for a structure was it represented a building, it had a static ability,

kind of like an enchantment, but you could attack it. And when we were making Planeswalkers, I borrowed that. I liked that as a base to build on. And so when we were making Planeswalkers, clearly I had structures in mind. I mean, we added a bunch of stuff

to the Planeswalkers, but that was the base of the idea of structures was something that I really liked. I loved the idea that you could attack it. One of the reasons to get rid of it is use your creatures as a resource. I thought that was a brilliant idea. So, we made use of that.

Anyway, so, from the very early on, we understood that we could put static abilities on them, and it definitely made them have some of the attractiveness of the original structures and that they sort of could act like enchantments you could attack. When we were working for... originally when I was doing World of the Spark, not everyone was going to have a static ability originally and then or static slash triggered ability but eventually we decided just to make it it sort of a feature of the set

and gave it to all the Planeswalkers. So what I mean, by the way, for static trigger ability is it's an ability that just does something. Static would mean all creatures get plus one, plus one, or something. So I'm just, this is true. It's like an enchantment. This is like a global enchantment. Or triggered means when something happens,

when a certain event happens, this effect will happen. And so we introduced static and triggered abilities in War of the Spark, I mean, barring the few exceptions I gave. And it is now something that just we can do with Planeswalkers, and it's something we do do with Planeswalkers.

This is definitely one of the additions that as soon as we added it, it's just something that we now have on the table and you will see more of them. There are some upcoming sets that I know of. So, it is definitely something that really opens up and allows us to add some extra flavor to the Planeswalkers. I mean, I held off on it because

we needed sort of map space, but now that it's available to us, I do think we'll be able to use it very effectively. Next, abilities that enters with X loyalty. This was on a Nissa. So the idea is Nissa had X in her cost, and then she entered with X loyalty. So what makes this different than most is most of them, it's a locked loyalty. When you summon this planeswalker, or not summon them, but you cast the planeswalker,

when they show up, they have a certain amount of loyalty. Mithra was like, well, the more mana you spend, the more loyalty I get, and it changes sort of her clock, if you will. And so that was a different kind of way to do a planeswalker. And they are tricky. It is a tricky one

to balance because you don't have complete control of where they start. You know, the player, when you're trying to balance it, the player has the ability to start wherever. So, for example, the ultimate can't be off limits necessarily because if they spend enough mana, they can get there. So, you have to build it a little bit differently. But I do think it's pretty cool

and it's the kind of thing that you get to build Planeswalkers that are a little bit different. They're hard to balance, so I don't think we'll do it a lot, but I do think you'll see it again. Okay, four loyalty abilities. Okay, so when we first made Planeswalker cards, in fact, when we made the original frames, I said to the person who was making our frames, make one with four. We're going to do four. Like, I knew that was the thing we were going to do. Normally, Planeswalkers have three loyalty abilities, but every once in a while, to make something special, we'll do four.

So the first one with four was Jace the Mind Sculptor, which is a pretty famous card because it's quite strong. But since then, we have done... Garak got a... A lot of times when you're the feature of the set, Garak was the face of a standard set. He got four. Chandra, when she was the face of the set, got a four. Standard set, he got four.

Chandra, when she was the face of the set, got a four. Or she got a four when we went to our home world of Kaladesh. Nicole Bolas got a four. So in War of the Spark, Nicole Bolas and Liliana and Gideon, one of them was a static ability. Gideon, two static abilities.

But they got four abilities. So it's something we do from time to time. It is not something we do a lot. It is complicated, so we sort of do them, but every once in a while. And we try to spread them around. I don't think we've done two, four with the same character. I don't think.

But it is something we try to spread around, just give different Planeswalkers the opportunity to have four abilities. Next, partner with. So this showed up on, this was in Battle Bond, and this was Rowan and Will.

So when one of them showed up, the other showed up. Well, they're twins in Sheriff's Park. Will we ever do partner, I mean, A, will we do partner again, partner with again? Well, right A, will we do partner again? Partner with again? Well, right now, we've only done partner with

in a commander product. I don't expect to see partner with outside of commander just because it's very commander-centric. Not commander. It's in BattleBot. It's very two-headed giant-centric. The whole point of it was

you got one to get the other so that two people could play things that shared together. I don't know if Partner With will come back. If Partner With does come back, there's a decent chance we'll make another set of Planeswalkers with them. But I don't know. Partner With is one of those things

where we are careful about how much we do tutoring. It's a mechanic that's kind of tutoring built in to a certain extent. It definitely has commander implications. Anyway,

this is one that I don't know how often, if you said to me of all the things I'm saying today, what's the one that maybe we don't get another one? Partner With is one of the ones that I could pick. Okay, next. Double-Face, Planeswalker to Planeswalker. So the first Double-Face Planeswalker was Garruk.

Interestingly, and the second one was Arlen. So Arlen was actually going to be in the very first Innistrad because we love the idea of a werewolf planeswalker. But then we realized we had a story moment we could show, which was Garruk, who was mono-green at the time, being cursed and turning black green. And that seemed like a cool moment to show from green to black green. And so we did that on the first one. And then we did, when we were back in Andeshrad and we had double-faced cards again, we did Arlen, who is a werewolf Planeswalker. The shtick of a double-faced...

So planeswalker, planeswalker usually is a transform card, meaning that you play side A and then you transform into side B and that we need... Something about the character has to be transform-aic about the character that you...

You know, you start as something and you become something else that flavorfully makes sense. Garret gets cursed. You know, Arlen turns into a werewolf. The other thing that is interesting is the creatures to Planeswalkers are similar in that they transform into, or I don't think they technically transform, but they essentially transform. So, I mean, we're always

looking for things that turn, planeswalkers that transform in some way. They're cool. So, restriction one is we need the right flavor. Restriction number two is we need a set that has double-faced cards in them. Innistrad sets have double-faced cards. There's a few other worlds that have tapped into them. Ixalan used some double-faced cards, them. Innistrad sets have double-faced cards. There's a few other worlds that have tapped into them.

Ixalan used some double-faced cards, although those were very tied to lands. So we need a world where it makes sense. And so I do think we'll see double-faced Planeswalkers again, only because they're much beloved, and double-faced is a cool design space. And I do think there's other interesting transformational things we can do with Planeswalkers.

But that is something that I do expect us to see more of. Okay, next. An ultimate, a zero ultimate with a condition to use. So what that means is normally you have to build up to an ultimate, meaning I have to get enough loyalty to use the ultimate because it's a big negative loyalty. One other thing we've done is having a planeswalker where the ultimate is zero meaning you can use it anytime

you want but there's a condition so you can't so the idea there is that we gate the ultimate not by loyalty but through a different means um usually loyalty is just fine for gating gating the ultimate so most of the time it will be loyalty but this is just something that we can use as a means to sort of just if we want to care about something a little bit different usually the reason to do that is we want you to we're trying to make the card have some build around quality to it

and it just lets us care about something that's a little bit different we haven't done this a lot but I do think it's something you just lets us care for something that's a little bit different. We haven't done this a lot, but I do think it's something you'll see us do more of. Okay, can be your commander. Okay, so this was, we did this originally in a commander product. We made a cycle.

So, trying to remember these. It was, Nahiri was the white one. The blue one was Teferi. The black one was human version of Nixilith. The red one was Daredi. And the green one was... Oh, what's her name?

The half-elf. Fraylies. Fraylies. Anyway, there are commander players that really, really want... Not all commander players, but there are some commander players that really, really want, not all commander players, but there are some commander players that really want planeswalkers to be able to be your commanders. Planeswalkers aren't necessarily designed to be commanders normally, and they don't all play great as commanders, although there's a whole format called Oathbreaker where your sort of commander is a planeswalker.

And in Brawl, you can use planeswalkers as commanders. Anyway, so in a commander product, I don't remember the year, but they made a cycle of commanders, or sorry, a cycle of planeswalkers that can be your commander. And they were specifically designed to be interesting commanders.

Like not every planeswalker really is designed in such a way that it makes a good commander, but those set of five were made to be commanders. It was so popular that we did it again. We made another cycle of five. And so this is something that the fact we've done it twice should show that there is some popularity in it. So, yeah, I do think this is something we'll do all the time, but I do think it's something that

from time to time we will do. I do think there is an audience that really likes having Planeswalkers that can be your commander and when we design to it I think we can make Planeswalkers that make fun commanders. So I do think we'll see more of it. Not

often, but I do think you'll see it again. Okay, the final ability of my 16 was Hybrid Mana. So that's another request I've gotten a bunch of, is where are Planeswalkers with Hybrid Mana? And the answer is, it's really hard to build. I mean, Planeswalkers are already hard to build. But the actual limitation of every ability that you put on it must be accessible by two different colors is a very

steep, it's very hard. Like, planeswalkers are so hard to do. But in War of the Spark, we were making uncommon planeswalkers, and we had a drafting issue, which is because we were making planeswalkers, and we wanted planeswalkers to be part of Limited, we were running into a color balance issue, and it turned out that hybrid was our solution. Now, the fact that they were uncommon, and they didn't do as many things, when I made them, they had one ability, and after the fact, they had a static ability,

a static triggered ability, and one negative ability. But that was enough that they were simple enough that we were able to make some. And so we made one of all ten color combinations. So there are now... Will we ever make hybrid in the future? I'm not saying we won't. I'm saying they are hard to do. They made a lot of sense in World of Spark because we were trying to make

planeswalking something that mattered in draft. And having uncommon planeswalkers were very important in pulling a lot of that off, and using hybrid ended up being a very important tool there. So I do think, I mean, A, I do think there's a chance that sometime in the future, not in the near future, but if we ever have another War of the Spark-like thing that you might see uncommon planeswalkers, they were very, very important to making War of the Spark-like thing that you might see on common Planeswalkers. They were very, very important to making War of the Spark work, the Planeswalker part work. Will we ever see a

hybrid Planeswalker outside of that? Of, like, just a one-of somewhere? I do think if we ever have a character that is in two colors, and when we make it, it just turns out it could be hybrid, and there's a reason for making it hybrid, we'd definitely consider

that. So it's not off limits. It's just hard to do. So it's the kind of thing, well, will we ever do it? We might, but we're going to have to get lucky to kind of get to someplace where it makes sense. It's just, it's a hard thing to build. Not impossible. Anyway, those were the 16. I just got to work, but real quickly, a few other ones I talked about that I didn't end up using. Using X as a loyalty cost. Chandra had done it in the very, very first, when we made Five Planeswalkers,

the very first Chandra did it. And I was talking about innovations. And I'm like, well, it's hard to call something you did the very first time you did it an innovation because you'd done it. So anyway, I didn't include that one. I thought of using coin flipping, did the very first time you did it in innovation because you'd done it. Anyway, I didn't include that one. I thought of using coin flipping, which is

something that Raul had done and was a little quirky that we hadn't done before. Adding a little bit of sort of randomness to it. And the other one I talked about was Urza for Urza Headmaster from Unstable actually has you go

log on and his condition is dependent upon on the website. You know, you have to click the button to see what happens and there's a whole bunch of variable things that can happen. I didn't include that because he's silver border, not black border, and everything else was a black border thing, so I didn't include it. There are a few other innovations that I could have used that I didn't use.

I don't know. Of those, I mean, we do use Exit of Loyalty. That's something we do use. It's something you'll see more of. Coin Flipping, I do think we might use Coin Flipping again. I think there's some fun things of having some randomness in the ability so you don't quite know what's going to happen.

The website thing, I think, was an unstable thing. I don't think that's coming to Blackboard anytime soon. Anyway, I'm now at unstable thing. I don't think that's coming to Blackboard anytime soon. Uh, anyway, I'm now at work. I hope you guys enjoyed today's sort of jaunt through all the innovations of Planeswalker design. Um, and hopefully you had fun doing the head to head, which shouldn't be over by now. Anyway, 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.