Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #716: Unsanctioned, Part 2

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

This is part two of a two-part series on the design of Unsanctioned. In it, I walk through the designs of all sixteen of the new cards.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking all about unsanctioned. And I got partway through, but I didn't finish. So I'm going card by card of the 16 new cards we designed. And I'm going in collector number order. So I'm in the middle of red. So last time I think I ended with Abstract Iguanart. So this time we're talking Boomstacker! So two and a red, Creature Goblin Artificer. As Boomstacker enters the battlefield, and whenever it attacks, stack two dice on top of it. All dice must be stacked vertically, one on top of another.

Boomstacker gets plus one, plus one for each die in its stack. Boomstacker, our stack, needs combat if able. When the stack falls, sacrifice Boomstacker. Zero, zero. So the idea is you play it, and it becomes a two, two as soon as you play it. And then it has to attack every turn. So on its first attack, it gets two more, so it's a four, four. So it's going to attack every turn. It's a 4-4, then a 6-6, then an 8-8. But, you have to keep the die balanced. And, assuming you don't

give it vigilance or something, you do have to turn the card. That part built into the thing about it. So Boomstacker was a design from Chris Mooney. And what we call a thought-to-print card, a mind-to-print card. Like, he came up with this card, made it, and basically what he made is the version that we printed.

I mean, we might have tweaked numbers a little bit, but, you know, the idea of a... I think originally it was called Goblin Architect. Goblin Architect was his original name for it. But we decided we wanted to play it into make it like the goblins that were from Unstable. Like I said, one of the things we were trying to do is make

nods to a lot of different sets. And so this one was definitely doing goblins a la sort of unstable goblins, um, who seemed obsessed with wrenches and dynamite. Well, I guess most goblins are, uh, love dynamite. Anyway. Um, yeah, like I said, this was a pretty straightforward, um, design and it didn't, it didn't really change much. I think what happened was Chris made it. I tried playing with it. It was really fun. Oh, I might as well burn this up as it comes along.

A lot of people have asked me about it. This doesn't say what kind of dice have to be on it. So people have been trying to go, oh, what kind of dice can I put on it? So they have to be actual dice. Coins are not two-sided dice. Those are coins. Really the smallest die that literally is a die is a four-sided die, which is a pyramid. So not the greatest thing. Mostly what you want to do with these things is use six-sided dice. You can use larger than six-sided dice, but six-sided would be the most stable dice because four-sided obviously are pyramids and hard to stack.

And the next smallest is a six-sided die and six-sided obviously are pyramids, hard to stack, and the next smallest is a six-sided die, and six-sided dice are much more stable than, say, an eight-sided or a ten-sided, which you're allowed to stack eight-sided, ten-sided, stack four-sided if someone knows how to do it, but yeah, you can't, like, stack two-sided dice. You got to stack actual dice, and coins are coins and not dice. Okay, next, Stett Draconic Proofreader. Okay, so this card was four red red, so six mana total, two witches red. It's a 4-4 Legendary Dragon Bureaucrat.

It's a creature, obviously. It's got flying. Whenever Stett Draconic Proofreader attacks, you may exile a card from your graveyard. When you do, Stet Draconic Proofreader deals 4 damage to any target whose name begins with the same letter as the exiled card. White, from 1 white mana, delete the first letter of target permanent or player's name until end of turn. Okay, so this card has quite the story to it.

So, one of the things that we knew we wanted to do was make the cycle of enemy colored creatures. And so, once again, we put them in order. So we knew we have a white with a black activation, a blue with a red activation, a black with a green activation, a red with a white activation, and a green with a blue with red activation, a black with green activation, a red with white activation, and a green with a blue activation. And I think, I think I realized that we had never made an undragon? Is that right? I mean, the, the Sword of Dungeons and Dragons makes a gold dragon, which is uniquely gold. I mean, literally the color gold. So we have had something make a dragon, but I don't know if we've ever had

an actual unstable dragon. I don't think we have. And I decided that I really wanted to have an unstable dragon. Sorry, an undragon, not unstable, but an undragon. So what I said is, what I wanted this card to be

was I wanted it to be a dragon, but it had a white activation. So basically what I said is I wanted this to be comedic. It it to be a dragon, but it had a white activation. So basically what I said is I wanted this to be comedic. It's an unset, so, uncard. So I said, okay, what I'm looking for is a dragon doing something that is very undragon-like that could have a white activation. And so like, okay, so something orderly maybe, because it's, you don't think of a dragon as being orderly so maybe something orderly and so we tried a bunch of different things and so

this design Ari or Arnie the winner of the third grade designer search he came up with this and the idea was one of the things that we like playing around with is I love caring about things you don't normally care about.

Like one of the fun things about Silver Border is we just can make qualities of cards like you just get to build things you never build because it cares about a quality you're not used to caring about. So one of the things that Silver Border loves to do is just care about things that Black Border won't care about. So this one cares about names. The reason we don't care about names is all cards that in English are the same card have to work the same. So anything that will differ between cards that are all the same card, for example, different languages which start with a different letter.

And some of the languages don't even have letters per se because they have characters because they're like Chinese or Japanese. So caring about what letter something starts with. In fact, caring about qualities of the name is not something Blackboarder can do. Blackboarder can care if it has a name, meaning Blackboard Border can say, I care if a card named this exists

on the battlefield or something. So there can be interrelational cards. You can have cards that care about the existence of another card, and you name that other card. But you can't care about the quality of the names. If you look back at old, you know, like Doubleheader was a card from Unhinged that cared about having two words

in your name. And we've had other things that care about qualities of your name. So I like the idea that it cared about the essence, the quality of the name. That seemed cool. And Aria had a really cool design where the point of the white thing was it was editing names, meaning it was removing letters from names. So the idea is, in a red deck,

once I can remember, the product has mono-color decks that you have to put together. So what we wanted was a mono-red card that worked in a red deck that didn't have access to white, but got better in a deck that had access to white. And obviously it was built to be a red-white commander.

So, we like the idea that it can do damage to things based on cards that it has in its graveyard, which is an interesting restriction, right? It's something you don't normally think about. And, by having access to white, it just helps you, you know, it helps you give more

options available. It doesn't give you total options we also decided to reference the player I think Ari had this too just because it was fun the fact that you

could erase letters off the player's name seemed fun and I think I mean I know I worked with Ari to tweak this a little bit but the core idea

the idea that it cares about names and that the white part can edit names was all Artie's doing. I mean, essentially the cool part of the card was all Artie's doing. He and I worked together to massage a little bit. I did, by the way, I did work with a play designer to make sure the cards were all balanced, that they were costed appropriately. So, I mean, I...

It's not my expertise, so I did take the cards and talk to people and, you know, make sure that what we were doing was... We want the cards to be... Even though they're silver border, we want them to be balanced. We're willing to push the power level a little bit on some of the silver border cards just because they're not in tournaments, but we do want a general sense of them being, you know, we want them generally balanced. We are a little bit more willing to have high variance on them, meaning in the right circumstances they can do kind of crazy things, but, you know, you really have to set up the circumstances.

This is a good example where, in a deck fine-tuned, where I have a lot of different cards with a lot of different names, and I'm really optimizing what I'm doing, this card can be kind of strong, but it requires a lot of positioning to be super, like, a card that just, every time an attack exiled a card and did four damage to anything is pretty strong. This card's not exactly that, although you can build your deck so it's closer to that. Okay, next, Pippa, Duchess of Dice. Okay, so Pippa, Duchess of Dice, costs two and a green, so three mana total, one of which is green. She's a 2-2 legendary creature,

human noble. So her two green and tap, roll a six out of die. It becomes a green die creature token with power and damage equal to its die result. Two and blue, tap, re-roll any die. So what the green does is it makes dice creature tokens. And what that means is you roll a die, six-sided die, and then whatever you roll, that's the size of the creature. So for example, if I roll a three, it's now a token. It's a 3-3 token. And the idea is I use the dice to represent the token, but it's also still a die. So yes, if I use the second ability, the blue ability, I can re-roll my dice creatures to try to change what they are. So let's say I roll a 2 and it's a 2-2 creature.

Well, I could later on re-roll it and maybe roll a 4. Now it's a 4-4 creature. I can upgrade them. on, re-roll it, and maybe roll a 4. Now it's a 4-4 creature. I can upgrade them. So the idea behind this big card, this was my creation, was I really wanted to I really wanted this to be It started because I

came up with the idea of the dice token creatures. I thought that was kind of cool. That you got a creature. So there was a card in Unglued called Elvish Impersonators where you roll two dice and it was XY, basically. One dice with its power, one dice with its toughness. So it was anywhere from a 1-1 to a 6-6. But it could be any increment in between that.

1-2, 6-3, any increment. And I thought it was kind of fun to plan that space for the token maker, and then it just dawned, the idea I came up with is, oh, roll dice, and the dice are the tokens. Just seemed really cool. And we needed a green card with a blue activation. This is the enemy legendary

cycle. And I love the idea that green just made dice creatures, which was kind of fun. It just produced the creatures and they were variable creatures. But by adding blue in, we could do of fun. It just produced the creatures, and they were variable creatures. But by adding blue in, we could do reroll. And blue is... In both unglued and unstable, we've done dice cards. And there's some...

We've mapped out some color pie for dice cards. One of the things is blue is the color that rerolls dice, and green is the color that tends to make a lot of... You know, red and green rollrolls dice, and green is the color that tends to make a lot of, you know, red and green roll the most dice, and green cares, probably cares the most about the rolls of dice. And so this seemed like a neat thing, where it's a token maker, which green does, but it cares about what the rolls are, that seem very green, and the fact that it can re-roll

can be blue. And that seemed pretty awesome. Okay, next. Spirit of the Season. One green green, three three creature, tree folk spirit. When Spirit of the Season enters the battlefield, it gains haste if it's summer. Put a plus one plus

counter on it if it's autumn. You gain five life if it's winter. If it's spring, search your library for basic land card reveal. Put it in your hand and shuffle your library. This is another Chris Mooney special. And once again, brain to print. What he made is the card that I think we made. We did talk a little bit about what goes in...

He thought very much about, okay, what happens in summer? What happens in autumn? What happens in winter? What happens in spring? I think the idea that he started with was the idea that spring got you more land, right? That spring's a time of rebirth.

So that made a lot of sense. Um, and then I, I think he thought of other things that like, haste was a really cool thing for this car to have. So like, what makes the most sense? Well, not winter. You're sort of, you know, but summer. Oh, summer's the time you get out and stuff. So, okay, summer would be the time that has haste. And then, um, I think the idea was, oh, well, um, I think it was winter is

you sort of lock yourself away because it's winter and maybe that'd be life gain. And then autumn is like, okay, I'm gonna, I gotta go out and brave the elements, but, uh, it's not quite winter yet, not quite summer. So we did plus one, plus one counter there. Um, anyway, uh, I really liked this design. The reason I ended up putting it here was, um, I decided that, um, this is a box set that will get played. Like, one of the things about making, about caring about seasons is usually if we make a normal unset, it comes out at a certain time and a lot of the play of that is limited, but the limited gets played a lot in conjunction with that one time.

Where I felt like a box set had a little more life to it, meaning, yeah, people will play it when it first comes out, but it's a box set, they'll come back to it. And I felt like things that cared about the season would have more relevance, you know, hitting around. Okay, next, Surgeon Commander. So on the card, it said Surgeon, like it used to say Surgeon General, General's crossed off and it says Commander. So the card technically said Surgeon like it used to say Surgeon General General's crossed off and it says Commander so the card technically is Surgeon Commander um it's a legendary creature

3-3 it's a Wombat Bat Chameleon so this is clearly playing into Unstable it's one of the creatures um from uh the Crossbreed Labs obviously the Crossbreed Labs are creatures that mix and match different animal parts.

And so, this is one of those. So, the reason that it's that is, this is, oh, so one of the things that I wanted to do here was take things that I missed in Unstable that people were asking about. So in Unstable,

we had the host augment mechanic and we, I made a commander for host augment in white-green. What's his name? Dr. Jumble. He's a white-green. He's got the dinosaur head. Jumblemorph. Dr. Jumble... He's a white-green. He's got the dinosaur head.

Jumble Morph. Dr. Jumble Morph. Anyway, but the problem there was there were a lot of people that wanted to play with all the host Augment creatures, and because he was a white-green, now given white and green focused on Augment, and there were more white and green hosts in Augment cards than any other color, but there were ones in other color, and you couldn't play them in the deck. So I decided to go out of my way

to make a five-color legendary creature that you could do that with. And so the trick was, I decided to make it a mono-green card. This wasn't part of the cycle. The cycle of the legendary creatures was all two-color. But I decided to make one more because I thought we really missed out. I decided I wanted to

be base green because I wanted to be a hodgepodge of the animals that made more sense in green. So mostly what I wanted to do is figure out something that rewarded you for playing Host Augment. It's hard to play a Commander Host Augment deck. You know, there's a lot... It's not... While it's fun,

it's not particularly powerful. So I wanted to give you a really powerful legendary creature. So the idea I played into is a lot of times what we do is say, I'm going to reward you for doing the thing that we want you to do unless you draw a card. So I said, okay, whenever you augment something, draw a card. So the thing I realized though, is if you play all the hosts and all the augments, it's still not enough cards to make up a deck. So I'm like, well, what else is kind of like augmenting? And the answer is enchanting. Like, augmenting something is a lot like enchanting something.

I mean, technically augments are creatures, but auras are a lot like what an augment is. An augment is a lot like an aura. So I said, okay, well, what if you augment or enchant? That way, hey, there's a lot more auras. So you said, okay, well, what if you augment or enchant? That way, hey, there's a lot more auras, you know, so you can, unless you sort of add extra stuff to the deck so that you can further build this in.

And then, I got an idea, a wonderful idea. There is an upcoming set that has a mechanic called Mutate. And Mutate had a similar flavor. You know, it... I can't get too into Mutate,

but let's just say when you guys see Mutate, it definitely feels like it belongs with Augment and Enchant. And so I went and got permission. I knew this product was coming out February 29th. And I'm like, okay, I want to print this. You know, is it okay? Teasing the future.

The one thing I will say is, Steamflugger Boss, when we made that back in FutureSight, we had no intention of ever augmenting, or not augmenting, of never assembling a contraption. That was just, I was just screwing around. We were joking. Ha-ha.

We thought it was funny, the words that you'd never heard before, right? And it was just, we thought it was funny to have one feature like ours that just had terminology you've never heard.

And then Aaron wrote an article where he admitted that we had no intention of ever making it, but never said that to the magic audience. And so, it just became a thing

and eventually I made it. I eventually had to make a contraption just because there was such a, what does it mean? What does it had to make a contraption just because there was such a... What does it mean? What does it mean to assemble a contraption? So we now learn when you make up a new term

that you've never heard before, it should be a natural term. So we will see this. I'm not saying when or where just yet, but we will see this. And so it is a hint of the future. Okay, now the other trick I had with this card was I needed it to be five color.

We teased with the idea that it could have a five color activation on it, but like, you're just never going to reach that in these decks, and they'll kind of mean. But one of the things I did like is the idea that all I needed to do was get the mana symbols on it.

And it dawned on me that I could have a tap for mana. And I like the on me that I could have a tap for mana. And I like the idea that it's a card that taps for mana. It could not only be a mono green card, but it could help provide the colors to help you play your hosted augments. That felt very useful. The problem is, that is, when we want you to tap for any color, the way we actually template it is tap, add one man of any color. That's how Bird of Paradise works.

But if I wrote that, that is not a five-car identity. So we toyed with a bunch of things. We talked about maybe tapping for white, blue, black, or red, meaning it's a green card, but it doesn't help you get green. It just helps you get the other colors. But in the end, this is an un-card.

I decided that I would just template it differently. And then after I'm done with the cards, I'm going to talk about flavor text. But the flavor text of this card literally was written to explain to you the joke that we templated it different on purpose. We did that on purpose. Also, the name. This card really is making a lot of jokes of, look, I'm meant for Commander. Okay. Next. Next is the underdome.

Where is the underdome? Okay, next is the Underdome. So the Underdome is a land. It taps for one colorless, or you can tap to add one mana of any color. Spend this mana only to play Silver Border cards. Okay, so originally I mentioned that there were supposed to be 15 new cards. This Underdome was not in the set originally.

But as we were making the cards, I thought that the cycle of Legendary Commanders, the two-color Legendary Commanders was important. So every deck had this card that got better if you had this second color. Now some of the time, maybe you'd add that second color. You know what I'm saying? If I'm playing a white deck, maybe I add black. If I'm playing a blue deck, maybe I add red. But other times you don't.

Other times you're not playing enemy color combinations. So we did design the cards so they worked without the second color, but it was a little bit unsatisfying that you couldn't quite get there. Now, obviously, we had made Surgeon General, I'm sorry, Surgeon Commander, and that helped you tap for any color. So in the green deck, there was a little help, and green had a little way to help you. Eventually, what we decided was, what if we added a land that could tap for any color?

That was a silver-bord a land that could tap for any color? That was a silver border land that could tap for any color that we would put in all the decks just as a means to help you sometimes, even if you're not playing the second color in the other half mini deck, that you would have access to occasionally be able to do the second one. Not all the time, and we made sure that the

monocolor version was functional, so if you didn't get to the second color, it still did stuff. But it increases the chance of you getting there. Remember, because one was in each half deck, when you mixed them together, you would have two that would show up, so there'd be two in your deck. We teased with a whole bunch of things. There is a card called City of Ass, which was from Unhinged,

that added one and a half of any color mana. And we talked about whether it made sense for that, but I know half mana confuses people, especially in a set that doesn't even have... We didn't do any of the half stuff here, so there's nothing that uses half mana and things like that. So we decided to make a brand new one. We got permission to get one more piece of art,

and this was done pretty late. I think Chris also came up with this design, so we decided to make a brand new one. We got permission to get one more piece of art, and this was done pretty late. I think Chris also came up with this design, and this design is very... We've done other ones like this where it taps for any color, but it specifies what you can do with it, and I like the idea that this enables silver-bordered cards, but not, you know, if I put some silver-bordered cards in my deck, like, yeah, if I'm making an all-silver-colored deck,

this is very powerful and helps me. But there's a lot of restrictions of only playing Silver Border cards. So we're like, okay, yeah, yeah, this land's very powerful in an all Silver Border deck, but there's a lot of restrictions to playing an all Silver Border deck. And we also thought in a deck that's playing a high percentage of Silver Border cards, like maybe a host-augment deck, it just helps you be able to play it. So anyway, that was where it came from. Okay, so now what I'm going to do

is I'm going to go back through and talk about all the names and the flavor texts of cards that had flavor texts. Okay, so Flavor Judge. I believe the format, I think the format's called flavor judge. At least you have flavor judges in the format. Because we want it to be a flavor judge, we call it

the flavor judge. And the flavor tax is, and now they're trying to make a brick wall on my property fight a dinosaur to the death. So we knew we wanted it to be a player describing what's going on. We had a lot of different things. I think we it was a matter of, we had two lines to make fit.

It was a matter of finding things that fit in the two lines that we thought was funny. We went through a lot of different variations. But in the end, I don't know, we thought the idea of making a wall fight was funny. Okay, next, strutting turkey. We knew this wanted to be a turkey, so it's something turkey. It had to have an adjective in front of it because it needed to be covered up in a turkey path at that point I'm not sure why we called it strutting

maybe we thought it was a funny sounding thing circadian night owl oh, a strutting turkey had no flight protects circadian night owl came about because we started with the pun night owl the card was built around night owl and then once we knew it was a legend, we said okay we started with the pun Night Owl. The card was built around Night Owl.

And then once we knew it was a legend, we said, okay, it really needs to have a name because it's not just a generic Night Owl. It's a certain Night Owl. And then we came up with the idea of using Sir because Sir had been in Eldraine. That's Y-R. And so we were looking for a word that...

We were looking for a pun with Sir. And I came up with Circadian, which I was very proud of, which played into the theme of night and day of rhythms and stuff. So anyway, I think this is the name I'm proudest of in Unsanctioned. It is a pun name on several levels, and it's very funny. It is my favorite name. Next, Alexander Clamilton. It is my favorite name.

Next, Alexander Clamilton. So Alexander Clamilton was... Chris Mooney came up with it. We were trying to get clam puns. We had a whole bunch of clam puns. Like I said, clam and he changed up. But once we heard that, that was the best clam pun. Now, it did not have flavor text, but Chris did write flavor text for it.

Who lives, who dies, who shells your story. But we just couldn't fit it. We tried, we tried. There's a lot of text on it. It just didn't fit. Okay, next. B.O.B. Bevia Beebles. So all the Beebles in history have B's in their name. Bursting Beebles, Bubbling Beebles, Blurry Beebles. They're all alliterative with B. So I knew it wanted an alliterative name. But I also knew it was a collective, right?

It's not just one Beeble. And so we came up with the idea, I think this was my name, the idea of blank of blank where it was B of B because it had to be alliterative for Beebles. And so, Bunch of Beebles,

we ended up, all of them, Bevy sounded funniest Beebles. And so, Bunch of Beebles. We ended up all of them. Bevy sounded funniest to me. We had a whole bunch of names. We found out all the words that can mean a collective that starts with B. And it came down to either Bunch of Beebles or Bevy of Beebles. And Bevy of Beebles, I don't know, just sounded a little funnier to me. But the thing I like

also about Blank of Blank was then you could call it Bob. That it got to be B-O-B. And originally it was Legendary Planeswalker, I think, Bevy of Beebles. I'm like, no, no, no, Bob. So anyway, I wanted this to be something you could refer to. I thought Bob was funny. There was no room for flavor text. Rings a bell.

So we knew that you, we knew we wanted the bell component into it. And the idea that it does some familiar to it. Uh, I think this card, like, I think when I first named it, I called it, I think I originally called it Name Rings a Bell, and then we shortened it to Rings a Bell, like it was just a tighter name and Rings a Bell and Name Rings a Bell, I mean, you got the, you got the essence of what it is. Um, the flavor text is Ding Ding Ding.

The reason we put that there was, originally it told you to say ding when you ring the bell, but we had trouble fitting that in. And so we put it in the flavor text to sort of like say to you, oh, you know, when you ring a bell, you know, say ding. So it was a way to sort of get you to say ding without having to actually have the word say ding. Um, okay, next, A. A Cornelia fashionable filter. I think I mentioned this last time. A Cornelia was the name I got

because I was trying to fit a squirrel word and a name together. Originally, it was a Cornelia goth squirrel, like goth girl, but we found that squirrels pronounce differently by different people and not everyone would get in the pun. So anyway, then we renamed it Fashionable Filter, because she steals things.

Bat was always called, well, once we knew we were doing a bat, I think, in fact, one of the reasons we did it is so we could have a card called Bat, because Bat just went well with other things. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Okay, Infernius Spawnington, the third Esquire. We could not fit Inferno Spawn of Inferno Spawn of Inferno Spawn of Evil on a card. We had to squeeze to even fit Inferno Spawn of Inferno Spawn of Evil on a card. But I already came up with this idea of Inferno Spawnington, the third Esquire.

I already came up with this idea of Inferno Spawnington the Third Esquire. The idea, like, you know, I'm the third, but my name is a little fancier, so we thought that was super funny. And it fit. And the flavor text for that was See evil, hear evil, speak evil. And we only had one, it was a very wordy card, we only had one line per text. I really, I was trying to wordy card, we only had one line per text.

I really, I was trying to get something to play to the fact that it's the father, you know, it's the grandfather, the father, and the son. And so I stumbled upon the idea of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, but I realized, oh, they are evil, that they're the infernal of evil. And so the funny thing was, well, they're evil, so of course they do it. Of course they see evil, speak evil, and hear evil.

Speak evil, hear evil, speak evil. It is see evil, hear evil, speak evil. I think that's the order of the book. Anyway, I spent a lot of time trying to find something that was really, that matched the essence of what it was and fit on one line. So I'm very happy with that. Okay, next. I'm referring to this one individual.

It's Abstract Guanart. I think in the original name, I think I called it a guanart because I wanted to be... I wanted a name that was a creature that started with an A. I don't know. I liked the iguana and art going together. And then I think we added an adjective, too, to make it abstract iguanart.

So abstract iguanart flavor text. There's another moving piece by artist El Gecko. That was Ari's flavor text. The idea that it's a lizard. We thought it was funny that it was a lizard. And the fact that El Gecko, I'm sorry, El Greco is

a famous artist. So since it's a lizard, El Gecko, we thought it was very funny. Boomstacker, like I said, was originally called Goblin Architect, I think. But we decided we wanted something. We wanted to position him like he was a member of the Goblin tribe from Unstable. I'm blanking on their names.

Explosioneers. The Goblin Explosion Ears anyway so we wanted something that felt a little more like a something that the goblins named themselves and in the art he was stacking dynamite we were trying to replicate the idea of stacking something in the art so

Boomstacker just felt like what a goblin might call them. So we thought that was funny. And it did not have room for flavor text. Stets, Draconic Proofreader. So we liked the idea that it was a Draconic Proofreader. It's a dragon.

But it needed a name. So what I did is I went to the editing team and I asked them, I said, it's a proofreader. what would be a funny name? And they recommended Stats, because Stats is an editing term, which I think, I don't know what editing term means. It either means keep this as is, or you must change this. I think it means keep it as is. But anyway, it's an editing term, so I thought it was funny that the proofreader had an editing name. terms, because I thought it was funny that the proofreader had an editing name.

And also, Stacks did not have room for flavor text, because a lot of the enemy ones that had the activation just had a lot on it, so it wasn't able to get it. Okay, next is Pippa, Duchess of Dice. So when I named her, I was looking for a name. Originally she was Dice Queen and Pippa Dice Queen. I looked for a name that was an actual name that had a dice feel to it. And then I realized that Kate Middleton, who married Prince Andrew, had a sister named Pippa.

And I remember she was in the news. And I remember Pippa was a name. And like, oh, well, the little dots on dice are called pips. So it felt like a really good name. I think that changes from Dice Queen to Duchess of Dice, because not enough people were getting Dice Queen as a reference to Ice Queen, which is the Hans Christian Andersen story. Oh, and actually,

it's Snow Queen. It's not even Ice Queen, is it? Maybe that's why we changed it, because it's the Snow Queen, not the Ice Queen. Anyway, I was referencing Ice Queen, but I actually think the story's called

the Snow Queen, not the Ice Queen. Okay, and Pippa did have flavor texts. Pippa's was, when it comes to following her orders, it was do or die. I think that's my flavor text. Pippa's was, when it comes to following her orders, it was do or die.

I think that's my flavor text. Anyway, I wrote like 20 pieces of dice pun flavor text. But in the end, we liked the idea. We thought die was fun because she, you know, the character had a very kind of like Queen of Hearts off the head sort of feel to her.

So the idea that, you know that she'd do what she says. So the pun with die felt a lot of fun. Okay, Spirit of the Season was named by Chris when he turned it in. So we made it a Treefolk Spirit so that it in fact was a spirit. But, oh, and of the season because it cares about what season it is.

So Spirit of the Season made a lot of sense. Um, yeah, that's, anyway, that was a pun that Chris had come up with. Uh, so, Summoned for All the Wrong Seasons. Um, so that was just, uh, I don't know, a pun, but that was funny. Um, you know, Summoned for All the Wrong Reasons, but we're playing with seasons. So, because it was season-centric, we really wanted to have flavor texts that cared about seasons. Next, Surgeon Commander. So this card we knew, the joke of this card was we were ham-fisting a card for Commander in a way that we

were sort of being obvious about and making a joke about. So when Commander originally was called Elder Dragon Highland or EDH because originally when the format first started you only could play the Elder Dragon from Legends. You only had five choices of

originally. And they were called Generals. And so it's I liked the idea of, we joked that the Surgeon General is a thing that exists in America. I liked the idea of we joked that the surgeon general is a thing that exists in America it is somebody who

is in charge of the medical things and so the idea that it was surgeon general but it got cropped off and became surgeon commander because instead of the term general now it's a commander played into the joke that commanders were once called generals and the reason the generals on there is if I said surgeon commander by itself, it would be

a deep cut to get that expression surgeon general and generals became commanders. So we left general on there to help play into the joke. Then because of our templating, like we templated, as I explained, differently than it should be templated, I wanted the flavor text to help explain that. So the flavor text for Surgeon Commander is Likes, Augmentation, Fluffy Animals, Creative Templating. So Creative Templating is a nod that we know we didn't template it correctly,

that we templated specifically to work for Commander. And Augmentation was added in, obviously, because the card was made to care about Augmentation, because it's an augment helping card. And then the middle one was just something funny, so we added Fluffy Animals. That card's making us, like, nod. There's a card in Unhinged Call of Fluffy Bunnies attack, so making a little tiny nod to that.

But anyway, so that is that. And then the final one is Underdome. Underdome is a play, obviously obviously on Thunderdome, which is a Mad Max thing, we were trying to make something, oh, we knew, we decided that we would take that, so what the picture is, is it's the boxing ring that takes place from the key art, so the chicken was from the key art, the boxing ring is from the key art. It's where the goblin and the squirrel were going at it. And we needed a name for that. We felt like, you know, that's where

that was something fun that felt tied to the product in a way that was fun. And because it was a last minute thing, we thought it was nice to tie to the box. And we had a bunch of different names. We went with Underdome because we liked the idea of un because it's an un-card that goes with un-things.

So we think having un in it. We had a long discussion whether it was supposed to be un-hyphen-derdome or just Underdome. Obviously, we ended up going with no hyphen. And the flavor text is, in that battleground of a ring, the rules aren't nearly so black and white. Obviously, we're playing the fact that it only works with silver border things.

If you mix black and white, you get silver and you get gray so that's where it came from okay I'm at work I wrote down a few other things to mention so I will quickly mention these just because they're funny stories and then I gotta stop so a few extra things to tell you Topsy Turvy had a funny story where the card is rotated upside down.

It's part of the joke of the card from its back. And because of that, we couldn't place the security stamp would go in the wrong place because it was upside down. And so the solution to that problem was to lower its rarity from rare to uncommon so that we didn't need to put the security stamp on it. Now, technically, that matters, um, if you're playing, um, Rare Be Gone, that Rare Be Gone will get rid of the unhinged version of Topsy Turvy, but not get rid of the unsanctioned, but that's okay, like, like, like, yeah, yeah, okay, fine, this version is slightly different, I mean, and I mean slightly different, uh, but we thought that was okay. Timmy got new art.

It's a very boring, long story. But we found it very late in the process that it needed to have new art. We came up with the idea of maybe changing it to Tammy. And then doing new art of female because we wanted to do Tammy. But we had advertised in the box how many new cards there were, and it was technically a new card, even if it repeated all the text, because it's anyway, there's stupid, stupid things behind the scenes. If I had realized earlier in the process where I had time and I could have got funding for Johnny,

I would have changed Tammy and Johnny with new art to Timmy and Johnny to Tammy and Jenny. Had I come up with it, I didn't think of it until we had to redo, for other reasons, had to redo Timmy. And then for, like I said, stupid, dumb, behind-the-scenes reasons, it couldn't happen. Anyway, Johnny, by the way, we didn't change his, we didn't get new art, but we did change the cards in his art so he has an infinite combo

he has a combo we changed the cards to a different combo Chicken on the King I mentioned got changed so that well all the chickens got changed to birds

and Chicken on the King now refers to birds so actually it's a much more powerful card so go make a Chicken on the King deck Pointy Finger of Doom got new flavor text nails and destruction on point the last one made fun of Magic Players I thought it was kind of funny but okay deck. Pointy Finger of Doom got new flavor text.

Nails and Destruction on point. The last one made fun of Magic Players. I thought it was kind of funny, but okay, we decided not to make fun of Magic Players. Look at Me, I'm R&D. Because the text changed on the card, there was new writing on the card, so it had different writings on the card than it was last time. I think Night of the Hokey Pokey got new reminder text for what the Hokey Pokey is, because we think it's funny to change it every time we do new Oracle text. And Booster Tutor got the promotional art. It's not new art. It was the art

originally for Unglue 2 that we used for, we did a series of promo cards when Unstable came out of Unhinged cards. And we liked that art. I decided to have that art. We liked that art. Okay. That, my friends,

is hopefully everything you wanted to know about Unsanctioned. So I had a blast. And thanks to, especially Ari and Chris, who probably did the, along with me,

did the lion's share of the work, of the design work. And thanks to Gabby and Chris and Max, who worked on the decks. Those are three people that did the most work. Gabby did all the initial work and then Max and Chris

did the final work on the decks. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed this. Like I said, I'm trying to have this come out near to the release so that I can encourage you to go buy it because it's much, much fun.

Like I said, once again, let me recap what you get when you buy this product and then I will go. You will get 10 four lands, one of each land type, once in foil, once in non-foil. So 10. And then those are unique. And then you get token cards for all the things that all the tokens that show up in this, including for the first time ever ever a giant teddy bear token, a Beeble token, I'm not sure we've made Beeble tokens before, a Beeble token,

and it makes a gold token for the dragon, which existed in Unstable, but you get it. Anyway, and then there are five 30-card decks. Every deck has 12 basic lands of a brand new piece of, uh, uh, there's a squirrel

basic lands. So there's 12 new, I mean, they're all the same, you know, the, the white deck is all the 12 of the same planes. There's only one of each squirrel land, but you get 12 brand new, uh, basic lands of the, of the squirrel lands. Um, you will get an underdome in each deck. So there's an underdome per deck. So there's an underdome per deck. So there's five underdomes. So not only are you getting, when we say 16 brand new cards, one of them you get five copies of. And then there are three cards in each deck which are brand new cards.

So of the 16 new cards, you get one of 15 of them, and you get five of underdome. But underdome is the kind of thing you might want to stick in a bunch of different decks. So anyway, so that is, if you count... And there's reprints! So beyond the 12 basic lands, the Underdome, and the three new cards, everything else is a reprint, and we've never, other than the promos of Unhinged for Unstable, we've never reprinted any Silver Board cards. And we really went out of our way to pick

a lot of cards we thought people would really enjoy and have fun with. So there's a lot of, there's stuff from Unglued and Unhinged and Unstable. So there's some stuff that's not been on the market. Like, Unhinged came out in 1998. So there's some stuff that has not been printed in over 20 years. Is that right? Not 20 years, but is that right, 20 years? Yes, in over 20 years. I'm correct. In over 20 years. So anyway, this product is,

I mean, if you at all, at all care about Silver Border, this is just filled to the brim with goodness. And if you don't care about Silver Border, find a friend who bought one and play with them first. Play with it. It's really fun. It's a lot of fun. Silver Border, especially in this product,

which is playable by itself. You don't need anything else. Oh, by the way, my recommendation, if you don't want to, there's a booster to another product. If you don't want to go get other boosters, way, my recommendation. If you don't want to, there's a booster to it or the product. If you don't want to go get other boosters, it's fun, but if you don't want to do that, because you are playing with four of the five mini decks,

you can take 15 cards off the remaining deck to act as a booster if you want to keep it within the product and not need to go get other boosters. So, there's a budget way to do boosters if you want. I think it's fun to open the boosters, but I get it if you don't have boosters lying around. You can do that with the fifth deck that you haven't used.

Okay, guys. Anyway, that's everything about Unstable. 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.