Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #730: Michael Ryan, Part 2

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

This podcast is part 2 of my interview with Michael Ryan. We continue talking about the making of the Weatherlight Saga.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so last time I interviewed Michael Ryan, my co-creator of the Weatherlight Saga, and we had so much to say we couldn't get it all in one podcast. So I've had, I invited Michael back. Hey, Michael. Hey, good morning to you. I love this drive through your kitchen. Yes, actually. This is pretty exciting. Can we pull up at the drive-thru up there in the game room?

That'd be cool. Thanks. Okay, so last time we talked about a lot of the characters. We talked about most of the main crew. There's more characters we'll get to today, but before we get to the characters, I want to talk a little bit about the making of the story. So last time we talked about how we were using Joseph Campbell

and his, what was it, the epic hero, the journey of the epic hero, right? And the power of myth. And the power of myth. I mean, his book is called The Power of Myth, but the specific story we were doing, I think, is Journey of the Epic Hero. Journey of the Epic Hero, right. So let's talk a little bit about making of the story. Okay, so one of our goals of pitching this idea was of not just telling a singular small story,

but something that was going to span over a lot of time. And we pitched three years. Why did we pitch three years? Because you get what's called the three-act structure. Three-act structure, and everybody's seen it. You see it in the movies. You know it's there. You may not know it on the surface, but you recognize it as a viewer,

which is in act one, certain moments have to be achieved. In act two, it ramps up and has sort of a semi-climactic ending. And in Act 3, it all comes together to resolve. And we were then taking the three-act structure and applying it then to three acts in Act 1 and three acts in Act 2 and three acts in Act 3. It's kind of like the nine movies that exist now

in the Star Wars saga. It breaks it into sections, but it all goes together. In a lot of ways, we were treating it kind of like a trilogy, where each year had its own story, but the stories were connective and told a larger story. Right. The objective was to have major climaxes happen in the story at the end of each act, sort of wrapping that act up. And then all of it tying together with one huge, epic conclusion that covers all three years of the tale. And then you go back and you do a reset, right? You do, for the next years after that, you do something different.

back and you do a reset right you do for the next years after that you do something different so so one of the things that i was really big on um was one of my pet peeves at the time was we had a story all about this multiverse and we never left the plane we were on it's like why is there a multiverse i mean for so early magic i I mean, Arabian Nights was a weirdie. We later, like, retrofitted it as being its own plane. I believe Homelands was its own plane, and... Is that it? Was Fallen Empires? No, no, everything else was on Dominaria. Other than, so, Rubai is Arabian Nights, and that was, like, retrofitted, and Ogrotha, which is on

Homeland, was a different plane. But other than that, like, it was all Dominaria. Everything was on Dominaria. So, I really, I wanted to get us off Dominaria. That was one of my big goals. So, let's talk, how did Wrath come about? Wrath came about because we started talking about getting out of Dominaria, getting into some place where the villain was kind of in charge already. So that you're flying into the lion's den.

Instead of it coming to you, you're going to it. But you don't want to be there too terribly long. So we were looking for a place that, from the moment that they arrived, it's dangerous and scary. At no point could they feel safe for very long because the villains were all around them. So one of my inspirations, you can jump into any inspiration you had. I always really liked the story of Flash Gordon. Yes. So Flash Gordon. Yes. So Flash Gordon was an old serial.

They did a radio show and comics and all sorts of stuff. It was a pulp novel also at one point. And the whole idea was that Flash Gordon is from Earth and he goes to this planet. What was the planet called? I forget the name of the planet. But he goes to this other planet, and the, the bad guy was the ruler of the planet, Ming the Merciless,

and I love starting from the sense of, here's an outsider, and the bad guy has all the power in the world. He runs the planet, um, and I love that idea that idea of our hero goes someplace in which he is outmatched. The bad guy runs the place. And I thought that was a cool, like, I like really starting your hero at a low point so there's something really to fight against. And you see that, too, in the basis of a lot of the conversation that I remember having with you at the time was Star Wars, the first Star Wars movie, had a classic archetype set up. And so we looked at it a lot and said, well, this is how they did it, but we could do it better. This is how they did it, but we could do it differently. The second act in Star Wars, if you will, is all of the Death Star.

They don't want to be there. They want to get off. How do we get out of here? They didn't go into the Death Star with a quest, which is the very end of what we had, which is our characters voluntarily go to wrath. They have a quest. They have a quest.

Well, yeah, they have a quest to shut off the tractor beam now. No, no, no, no. Their quest is to rescue the princess. Well, yes. Yeah. Once they discover that she's there, that becomes the quest. I mean, that's not a different from our quest. We were saving princess. Well, yes. Yeah. Once they discover that she's there, that becomes the quest. I mean, that's not a different Marquess. We were saving somebody, too, so.

So, yeah, that's what we worked into it, saying, this is a bad place to be because the bad guys run everything. Yeah. And also, because it's magic, we knew we wanted to make a whole world, right? Magic's all about having cool environmental things. And so when did we figure out it was a manufactured world? I try to think what in the process we'd figure that out. I don't remember a lot about that. I'll tell you the strongest memory I have of building Wrath.

It's a small story. Maybe it circulated around. I remember you and I working on story, story, story, story, story, story. We went to a meeting with a bunch of artists and they had drawings and they said, here are our drawings.

These are lava tubes. We said, what are lava tubes? They said, lava tubes? They're like tubes made of lava. Okay, we said, what are lava tubes? He said, lava tubes? They're like tubes made of lava. Okay, we said, why are you showing us this? We want them in the story. And I remember at the time thinking, this is probably not the optimal way to write. This is a little harder than I thought it was going to be.

I thought it was going to be. Because Wrath was put together as a solid idea of who's running it and how they interact and how the military structure exists and who lives below and who lives above. And then we had to bear in mind

this is a game, and it needs other elements besides our story in order to work in the cards to get the strategies of the expansion itself in place. And so when we had things like Lava Tubes hit the table, we had to say, well, it needs at least a mention in the story to make it work, doesn't it? I remember it being challenging to incorporate ideas from lots of people who all came at it from a different perspective.

And on top of that, not only were... So, what happened was, real quickly, behind the scenes, we pitched this idea of doing a story. The brand team says, okay, let's do it. And then they hired a team of artists. The first time we ever did world building was for this project. They hired a team of artists,

brought them in the building. And the artists include people like Mark Tadine and Anson Maddox, Matthew Wilson. And they brought them in and, like, we had a story, but they then started fleshing things out. Like, in our story, for example, we obviously had the stronghold as part of our story. We had the elves as part of our story. Like, we had the story part of it. And then, not only do we have to work with the artist to sort of make

a world that visually was a world, I was also in charge of Tempest from a design standpoint. And so also, I was trying to, like, slivers were a mechanic in the set. And so Michael was like, okay, what do slivers do? What are slivers exactly? And we had to, like, slivers were a mechanic in the set. And so Mike was like, okay, what do slivers do? What are slivers exactly? And we had to figure out what slivers were,

and we had to weave them into the story. Right, right. The sliver queen then became the relevant character. Right, the sliver queen became a, yeah. And the interesting thing, let's talk slivers real quick. So slivers originally happened because Mike Elliott had made his own set. And in the set that Mike had made, when he got hired, they sort of bought his set. And his set is called After Ways, if I remember correctly.

And this creature fell from the heavens and splintered. And the slivers were all slivers of this one guy. That's why they're called slivers. And so, I'm like, okay, that doesn't make any sense for our world. And so Michael and I said, okay, here's what they are mechanically. This creature grants the abilities to all the other slivers. Well, what does that mean? And so we came up with the idea of these little shapeshifters with a hive mind.

And the idea was that one of them might go study a bird or something and learn how to make wings. And once they got next to the hive mind, because they're all shapeshifters, now they could make wings. And the idea was, if they were in range of the hive mind, the reason they could fly was it was teaching them how to

shape a body part that let them do something. You remember all this? And so we put the Sliver Queen in Volrath's stronghold. That's where she was. She was a prisoner there. Right, she was a prisoner. And she was guarding the legacy. Right, so that she could be both an enemy to Gerard and the company when they arrived,

and potentially an ally at the same time. And this reminds me of a story I just love to tell this story. I tell it to anybody who will listen. When we got the Stronghold, which is the expansion right after Tempest, Mark and I had been talking at great length about the Stronghold itself and how it was designed what it looked like where the rooms were and so this is a moment of reality check for us we said okay this is what we want to do we want to have a big map of the whole place and we want to know what it all is

and then on each card we want to feature something going on in the stronghold that, in theory, you could say, oh, I sort of recognize the room they're in. There's something on the walls that I can recognize. And maybe there's a door in the background that's partially open. You can see something beyond the door in the background. Then another card would have that same thing that was in the background but be from up the hall. If you came out that door and turned a certain direction. Right, then you could figure out the map. be from up the hall.

If you came out that door and turned a certain way, you could figure out the map. And you could figure out the whole map. And we wanted to have it be that if you got the entire expansion and you figured out the map, you'd see that there was a place that was missing, like a room that hadn't been explored, a door that was half open and nothing, nothing inside was ever revealed.

And then you would enter a contest or you would get a card that represented that room. And so we took this to the artist or else in a room to tell the artist. And, you know, Mark and I talked very excitedly. We both we both talk loud. We both talk fast and more excited. We are the louder and more excited we get. And the artist didn't say anything. They just looked at us. We work off. We go. We're off we go. We're talking about this, talking about that. This will be great.

You go out in the hall. And finally, the guy who was headed that team said, that's impossible. We can't do that. You two are going to come up with another idea. And I remember Mark and I looking at each other like, this doesn't sound that hard. So all you artists out there listening right now who think that Mark and I were insane, this idea is not over.

I still cling to this idea. So, by the way, there was another cool idea we had that, I mean, we left the project before this came to fruition, but do you remember the plan for the small set after Mercadia Masks, the second set in Mercadia? Do tell. So, in the story, so what happens in the story

was Volrath hides out on the Weatherlight as a crew member. And so, in the small set, so in our version of the story, the whole second year was on Mercadia. As it played out, only the first set of the second year was on Mercadia, but in our version of the story, the whole year was on Mercadia. As it played out, only the first set of the second year was on Mercadia,

but in our version of the story, the whole year was on Mercadia. And in the small set, what was supposed to happen, and this kind of happens in the story, is Stark gets murdered. And so we wanted to do a murder mystery where between the art and the flavor text and the names, that we would lay all the clues, and there'd be a big murder mystery of who killed Stark.

And the correct answer was this character, but secretly there was really Volrath. So Volrath was the actual answer. And you had to figure out that Volrath had snuck aboard the ship, and that's how we were going to reveal that Volrath was on the ship. Now, that plot point did happen. Volrath did kill Stark, but we didn't have a giant murder mystery built around it.

Yeah, and the murder mystery followed on the heels not too previously in Stronghold with the map. We were saying, what else can be done with the card game itself that integrates with the story? And the

murder mystery thing was totally Agatha Christie. You know, all the calls would be there. You could figure it out. You know, I'm sure you've seen mysteries where, you know, at the 11th hour the detective says, Aha, but here's the thing that none of you knew, and that includes the reader or the viewer. We had a really good plan for you'll be able to figure out which crew member it was.

And it was going to be a key crew member too, by the way, because then you say, well, what happened to character X? Where are they, Volrath? Oh, so real quickly, Volrath in the story that you all know ends up taking the place of Dakar, which is Stark's daughter.

But in our version, that was not, our original version, what character, do you remember what character he was? No, I think I do,

but I don't want to say and look like, God, you wrote it and you can't remember it. In our version, Tongarth, he takes the place

of Tongarth. I thought it was Tongarth, yeah. But that ended up changing after the story, after we left the story, it changed. So the idea was, the murder mystery, the answer was Tongarth, but Tongarth is secretly But that ended up changing after the story. After we left the story, it changed.

So the idea was, the murder mystery, the answer was Tongarth, but Tongarth is secretly Volrath. So you were sort of, it was multi-stepped. You had to figure out it was Tongarth, and then realize it wasn't really Tongarth. So it was a layered murder mystery. Okay, so we have this idea of someone, Port and Gerard, gets kidnapped, end up making it sissy, and he's got to go rescue her.

He and the crew go to this brand new world that's this dangerous place, which was Wrath. Now, what we pitched originally was a three-act story. Year one, block one, was on Wrath. And there's a few differences between how the story played out, but mostly the story, other than Krodak's turning evil and Mirri dying,

most of the story from the first year was our story. Second year, we did go to Mercadia. What Mercadia was and how it played out was a little bit different, but we did go to Mercadia. We were there the whole year. And then our final year, where were we in our final year?

Were we coming back to Dominaria? Yes, we were back in Dominaria. Yeah, back in Dominaria. With radical changes, as I recall. Right, right. So real quickly, behind the scenes, in our version of the story, and someday I'll tell you this full story. They end up going through a portal, but it's a temporal portal.

So, because the Phyrexians, our story had the Phyrexians attacking. That was always part of our story. Urza being involved wasn't part of our story, but the Phyrexians invading was part of our story. And they're rushing to get home because they've learned about the Phyrexian invasion from being in Wrath. And they go through this portal,

which ended up being a temporal portal. And they end up getting there like 80 years later or something. And Ertai is there as an old, old man. So if you're ever in Wrath and Storm, there's the bookend thing of Wrath and Storm, there's this old wizard

talking. Yes, that was supposed to be Ertai. That was Ertai, yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some of the characters we didn't talk about last time. Okay, so let's start. So we had Volrath characters we didn't talk about last time. Okay, so we had Volreth. We didn't really talk about Volreth too much. We liked the idea. We said we liked the idea that he was related to the main character in a way,

because we were doing Joseph Gamble. So we ended up making him a shapeshifter, because for story reasons, that was important. Yeah, we could move him around then. We could keep him in the limelight if he could assume another form that, you know, any time that Gerard would run into Volrath, he'd obviously want to kill him.

So if we could shapeshift him and make him somebody else, he could still be instrumental even when it looked like he had been defeated because he was always going to be around. Is there anything else we... I mean, the... Volap's motives were entirely driven by the legacy. Yes.

Well, he wanted to screw over Gerard. Like, he definitely... A lot of his motivation was he felt rejected by his father and rejected by... and he blamed Gerard for that. I also seem to recall him when we were making notes about it, that he had a desire to

get a hold of Karn and convert him, his morality in some manner. I don't remember specifics of what he wanted him to do, but he knew that Karn was part of the legacy. Yeah, he torches Karn. That happens in some manner. I don't remember our specifics of what he wanted him to do, but he knew that Karn was part of the legacy. Yeah, he tortures Karn. That happens in the story.

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. He ended up with Volrath for some time. Yeah. Okay, let's talk Grevin for a... Grevin Ilvec. Oh, by the way, let's talk about the N and the L. So some of the characters, like the Oracle, is Oracle Envec. Grevin is Grevin Ilvec. What is N and L? What is that? I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, of the characters, like the Oracle, is Oracle Envec. Grevin is Grevin Ilvec.

What is N and L? What is that? You'll have to remind me what it was, but I seem to recall. I mean, it's one good, one bad. I don't remember what we stole them from. So there were three civilizations that lived in the forest. The Kor, the Vec, and the Dal. Right.

And in fact, there was a myth within them that someday an outsider called the Korvech doll would come to save them. Right. And in our version of the story, that was in fact Gerard. And in our version of the story,

they invade the castle and they win. In the story that got published, they didn't win. They got defeated. But in our story, the elves did win. So if you are part of the community, you're N.

So Nvec, Ndal, Ncor means that you are an accepted part of the community. But if they kick you out of the community, you're ill. So if you're Ilvec, Ildal ill-core, that means you've been rejected. So Grevin ill-vec was part of the vec, but had gotten kicked out. And he was one of

Volrath's guys. He flew a ship called the Predator, if I remember correctly. He was the right-hand man of Volrath. So I know exactly where Grevin came from. Do you remember where Grevin came from? No, no. Tell the story. So we were studying these stories,

and somewhere I read something talking about how there has to be a smart villain and a strong villain, and that usually if the main villain is strong, the sidekick is smart, and the main villain is smart, the sidekick is smart, and the main villain is smart, the sidekick is strong. And I thought that was a neat dynamic. It's like, well, we have a smart villain. Okay, we have to have a strong sidekick.

And so we end up making Grevin the villain that beats you up because you're so strong, right? They're the physical threat, where Volrath is the mental threat. Yeah, it's not unlike later on, if you stick with the Star Wars thing. You have Tarkin, who is the manipulative leader, and Vader, who is his right-hand-go-out-and-kill-people-for-me thug. Yeah. We had something comparable.

Right. Volrath was super, super smart and manipulative and with great insight and when you want somebody pounded down he sends out Grevin to do it and in the story he's Volrath kind of like torturing people so he's grafted a new

spine onto onto Grevin which makes him very powerful but is in great pain all the time he's in pain yeah He's in constant pain. And so, in our story, in Act 1, the idea was we wanted to meet the villain, but not the main villain. So we had, right,

the person who sort of kicks his butt. In the story, you want your butt to get kicked early, if you're the hero, because you need some space to come back from. So, his early butt-kicking is by Grevin, who shows up in another flying ship, the Predator. Oh, and also, one of my

favorite moments of the whole story, so Grevin is Il Vak, he's from the Vak, so Vati is Il Dahl, he's from the Dahl. And when Grevin's aboard the Predator, he basically went there to beat up Gerard in Steel of Legacy. Vati, who's second in command aboard the Predator, he basically went there to beat up Gerard in Steel of Legacy. Vati, who's second in command on the Predator, figures out that, hey, I could fire upon the ship.

And, hey, if I happen to kill Grevin, you know, I'll save the day. And if I happen to kill Grevin, then I get to be in charge of the Predator. And it ends up knocking Gerard overboard. But Grevin does not get knocked overboard, so Grevin comes back, and so Vaad has kind of ruined Grevin's whole plan, and Grevin is pissed, and there's a little story that takes place on three cards, on Vaad Ildal, Repentance, and Diabolic Edict, if I remember correctly, and it basically is Grevin coming back going, what did you do, and then he kills him, because how do you show your bad guy's a bad guy unless you can watch him kill somebody?

Unless you kill some of his people, that's right. And that falling off the ship put Gerard amongst the people who lived below, which included the elves. Yes, yes. Oh, by the way, it's the people that ask all the time, how did Gerard survive the fall? He trained magic under Multani. That's how Miri and Rofelos, he used a magical spell to save himself. That's why he didn't die.

People are like, how did he not die falling from Soiab? Exactly. Oh, the other thing, by the way, is he also gets caught by Selenia at one point. There's more to the story. Oh, so let's grab it. Let's talk about Selenia. Do you remember the history of Selenia? Yes, I remember her history, but please, go right ahead.

Well, so, what happened was we made... She had been part of Crovax's estate. She had been a guardian for Crovax. We had made the crew, and we were done with the crew, and like, oh, we didn't make an elf or an angel, and so we ended up making Rufellos being sort of Jard's old friend. And then we wanted a way to bring the angel to the story.

And we needed a way to get... One of the challenges of doing a story is, it's fine and dandy to go, okay, the bad guy kidnapped someone from the good guy. Okay, go rescue them. But how do they know where they are? How do you get there? And so we ended up involving Selenia

as the way to get them there. And we had to get all the crew. Like, we had to kind of gather the crew. So in the Weatherlight story, Tongarth and Squee and Hannah and Oram are all on the ship. But Gerard isn't. Mirri isn't. Ertai isn't. Krovax

isn't. There's a lot of going and gathering people. And we needed a reason to go get Krovax. isn't, there's a lot of going and gathering people. And the reason, we needed a reason to go get Krovac's. And the answer there was he had the means to help them get back to Wrath, to get to Wrath. And he was motivated personally because Selenia had been on his estate. She had been something of a magical prisoner. And he freed her because he thought she would stay. Well, he loved her, right? And he freed her because he thought she would stay well he loved her right and he loved her and he thought she'd stay and as soon as he let her go boom she

was gone right she's so she went to rap and that's where he wanted to go right there's a cursed artifact that she was part of that she that she was tied to that was part of his family and so the idea was um he had this angel that kind of had to do what he said because it was tied to, that was part of his family. And so the idea was he had this angel that kind of had to do what he said because it was tied to this artifact. But he fell in love with her. So he freed her because he was in love with her, showing her that he was in love with her. And then she left the second she could leave. But she went to Wrath and then

he had a bond to her. So he knew, he was connected to her and knew where she was at. And that's how they got to Wrath. Okay, other characters characters let's talk about eladomri eladomri so eladomri is the leader of the elves so do you remember eladomri i i do i remember eladomri quite for some personal reasons okay uh i remember the discussion about let's get the elves in and more importantly at the time i think there was a mechanic that had said that

you you had i think you had said we haven't had like an elven lord somebody who's all of the elves the set had an elven lord in it and it and they all got gave everybody forest walk if i remember correctly yeah um and so when we were inventing the character we were noting he's a leader he's interested in rebelling against Volrath, but he's trying to keep his people isolated. And we got down to naming the Eladamri name, if you're not

familiar with it, folks. My stepdad had just started playing magic, maybe a year before, and it was crazy. I just loved magic. Everything was magic. Magic, magic, magic. And I, you know, you get a lot of phone calls at 1 o'clock in the morning saying, I just did this. How does this work now?

Oh, hold on, Dale. Let me wake up. Well, I did it in an instant, and then this happened. Now what happened? He was really into it. So when we got to name characters, because Mark and I were building this whole story ourselves, because Mark and I were building this whole story ourselves, we named him for my stepdad, Dale,

and my mom, Irma, who would get up at one o'clock in the morning and play magic with Dale. So if you take Eladomri and just flip the order, it says Irma Dale. And so it's sort of an homage to my folks. So also, by the way, real quickly, I also, I the way, real quickly, I also, I did something similar.

So Ertai ends up going to the portal. They have to go through this portal to get out because the ship gets broke. When the ship gets fired upon by Vati, it breaks the thing

that lets them transport interplanarly. So they need to go through a portal to get out of the plane. And Ertai goes to the planarly, so they need to go through a portal to get out of the plane, and Ertai goes to the planar portal. There's a character there, the Sultari Emissary, and her name is Lena, and Lena's named after my mom, so.

I, too, named the character after my mom, so. We got our folks into the game. So, El Domri is looking to lead all the elves. I think they're called the Skystroud elves. Yeah. He was leading them in rebellion to free all of Wrath from Volrath. And when he found out from Gerard why Gerard was there, he promptly threw in with him. Right.

And they believed he was the Corvec D'Aus, meaning they believed that he was going to be the person that was going to save the elves. And in our story, he was going to be the person. That was a true story. It ended up changing a bit as the story played out for you guys. Okay, I'm just running through characters real quick because I'm almost to work. The Oracle, do you remember the Oracle? Oracle and Vec? I'm almost to work. Um, the Oracle, do you remember the Oracle, Oracle and Vector?

I do remember the Oracle. The Oracle was the one who first revealed that there was a, uh, uh, Cor, um, Corvette doll, that there was someone who could unite everybody. Um, and I remember where that particular story element came from. Um, that the idea of the Corvect doll that the Oracle told him he was going to be. I had read a series of books by Stephen Donaldson called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and Covenant, the main character, ends up in a land, and they believe he is an ancient

hero because of his physical status. He's missing two fingers on one hand. And they had a historical figure called Beric Halfhand, and they thought he had come back to save the land from the evils of the villain. So the Saint, this is sort of a similar concept, not unlike King Arthur, in fact. Oh, you pulled the sword out. Therefore, you're this dude. And now we expect you to do all the dude stuff.

It was a very mythical Joseph Campbell kind of moment to say, you have a destiny greater than you're aware, and others know it. And it was interesting that, we thought it was kind of funny that Gerard had a different destiny. Like, the idea that you have a destiny, you show up someplace and they go, you also have a destiny here. We thought it was kind of funny.

He's already rebelling against the first destiny and now there's a second destiny. We thought that was kind of funny. Okay, so here's the one character we hadn't talked about. Takara. Takara, yeah. I remember one thing about Takara. So Takara is Stark's daughter.

The reason that Stark helps them and tells them, like, he's the one that knows where the stronghold is and stuff. So do you remember anything about Takara? I remember something about Takara. Well, tell me what you're remembering. I remember that she had rejected him. She had taken care of him for a long time.

Yes. And then he, she didn't want to follow where he was leading. Right. Stark is not the greatest guy. Takara was generally a good person. And for a while she took care of her dad and eventually realized that she just didn't like who he was and refused to help him. And she had actually left him.

She had gone off on her own. But Volrath recognized that he needed Stark's help. And so he recognized that Stark still cared about his daughter. So he kidnapped her. So the one thing about Takara is we were trying to make sure that all the characters were visually different. And so the one thing I remember about Takara is Gerard had, like, brown hair, and Hannah was a blonde, and Orm had black hair,

and we're like, how do we make her distinctively different? We'll give her red hair. Red hair. Dakara had red hair. And so that was just like, so you want to confuse Dakara with any other character, and so we gave her long red hair.

So before Chandra's time, this was our first red-headed character in Magic. The one thing that I don't know if people know is that in the game, there came a point after we had gotten this far in the story, we had

everybody lined up, people were doing things, we got this soap opera going on, lots of battles, lots of cool stuff going on. We did what were called Vanguard cards. Yes, yes, yeah. And Vanguard cards were oversized cards. I'm sure people actually still have them around. They're oversized cards

that you set to one side, the impact of the entire field of play with granting certain bonuses or creating certain circumstances. It gave you an ability for the game. Yeah, for everybody. And all of the characters that we've been talking about were on those cards. Well, there were 16.

So we did two series of them, and I think the first series were all the original Weatherlight, and the second series had some Urza characters in addition to some Weatherlight stuff. But most of the characters we talked about, not all of them, but most of them, did end up on a...

on a... Yeah, on a Vanguard card. So, like, there was a Meraxus card, and a Multani, and an Aldamri, and a Volrath, and a a Takara and all that stuff. And Cid Arcando, actually. Yeah, Cid Arcando, yeah. So Takara's interesting, by the way.

Of all the characters we've named, let's see, Takara, Lena, I mean, the Oracle in Vec was a role more than a specific person, although there was a specific person at the time. Everybody else, I think we've made a card art, although there was a specific person at the time. Everybody else, I think, we've made a card out of. A normal magic card, not a Vanguard card.

But I don't... I think both Lena and Dakar, we have yet to make... One day we will, but we haven't yet made a magic card out of, so... Well, I think at the time, we had... This is another related story to the El Adomery. At the time

that we did Tempest, we did an Eladomri card. Yeah, yes. He was out of the spot. The reason Eladomri kind of exists was I had made an Elf Lord and I wanted the Elf Lord to matter and so we, like, some of the story was us

Tempest was kind of being made and so I don't know whether we made Eladomri so I made an Elf Lord or whether I made an Elf Lord so we made Eladomri. I think we made I made an Elf Lord first and then we made Eladomri. You know, I don't know if your peanut butter was in my chocolate or my chocolate was in your peanut butter.

But the slivers were mechanic before we added them to the story. There were certain elements of the story that we made to make sense out of elements like the death pits of Wrath make sense out of elements like the death pits of wrath and the furnace of wrath were cards in the set and then we ended up weaving them into the story.

They have to sneak into the stronghold and the way to do that is to go underneath it, but they have to go through the furnace was where the lava tubes were, the furnace of wrath, and then the death pits of wrath were all these zombies and stuff that did dead stuff. And I think the furnace is where the slivers end up. They end and then the Death Pits of Wrath where all these zombies and stuff were, this dead stuff. And I think the Furnace is where the slivers end up.

They end up fighting the slivers in the Furnace. Yeah, that was the first time. Yes. So anyway, that, my friends, I'm almost to work here. Oh, hey.

I think we talked about all the major characters and a lot of the major story points, so it was fun having you on. Thank you so much for having me on. If you could just drop me off on the corner up there, I know you've got to go to work. Appreciate that. So maybe in the future at some point

I'll have you back and maybe we'll talk about the story that never was, or at least the original version of the story. I would love to talk about that. So maybe at some point we'll talk about the original story and not necessarily the version that ended up on the cards. But anyway, I am at my den, so we all know what that means.

This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic with Michael, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you for joining me, Michael. Thank you for having me on, Mark. I appreciate it. Okay, and thank you all for joining us. So we will see you all next time. Bye-bye.