Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #810: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 2

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

This is part two of a two-part podcast where I interview Richard Garfield about the design of Arabian Nights, Magic's very first expansion.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so last time I had Richard Garfield, and we were talking about Arabian Nights. But 30 minutes was not enough! So, it's part two. So, welcome, Richard. Hi. Good to be back. Last we left, we started talking about some cards. I might ask you a few questions about the set in general, but I definitely want to get to some individual card stories

because it's fun to talk about how individual cards got made. Sure. So I'm going to start with one that has always fascinated me. Jeweled Bird. So let me read it, and then we can talk about how Jeweled Bird got made. So it's an artifact, a mono-artifact, as it's written on the card.

It costs one generic mana. Draw a card and exchange Jewel Bird for your contribution to the ante. Your former contribution goes to your graveyard. Remove this card from your deck before playing if you're not playing for ante. So you have to first explain to our audience what ante is, since for a lot of them, they have no idea what that is.

Yeah, ante is a pretty interesting stage in Magic. When Magic first came out, an official part of the rules was that you would cut your opponent's deck and flip up the top card, and that was the stakes of the battle. And I fully expected players to not play that way when they didn't want to, but having grown up playing things like marbles, where it was more exciting to play marbles for keeps, it was something I also expected a lot of players to like doing to add a little

spice to their game. The other reason why I liked ante was that I figured that a lot of players wouldn't feel comfortable trading cards. It was something that that that that's the sort of interaction which sometimes makes players uncomfortable. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure that cards circulated in the environment. I didn't want the same person to be stuck with the same deck forever, even if they didn't want to engage with trading. even if they didn't want to engage with trading. And so ANSI was a way to change that where they would lose some cards and have to adapt to that and gain some cards. And this was before Magic was such a huge success

that that really wasn't an issue. There was just so many cards floating around that people, that building new decks out of the collection was generally not a problem. And even the person with the lowest tolerance for engaging with other people didn't mind trading in the sense that other people would give them all their common cards, that sort of thing. So it became less important. And that's one of the reasons it disappeared. I mean, it disappeared really because my estimation of how much people liked it was way out of kilter. And most people really hated it.

And that's certainly understandable because we had trouble keeping up with the printing at the beginning. And so cards were much, much more valuable than I expected. They were much, it was hard. It was so hard to get cards that, of course, you didn't want to lose them just to random card flips. And so I think it was the wrong decision, even if we could have kept up with demand. But as it was, it was doomed from the start.

Anyway, that brings us to Jeweled Bird. Yes. And so Jeweled Bird allows you to have some power to manipulate what the ante was. And I forget, this replaces the ante with the Jeweled Bird, is that correct? Yeah, exchange Jeweled bird for your contribution. So instead of the normal card you have ante, you've now ante'd up the jeweled bird instead. Yeah, so clearly this was done before we had killed the concept of ante. But I still liked the idea of playing with that as a mechanic,

even though I think I could probably see the writing on the wall. And the drooled bird, I honestly forget whether it comes from a specific story or it's a general thing that appears a bunch of Arabian nights. But there were definitely, I think there might have been a bunch of drooled birds floating around, but there might have been a story I was thinking about at the same time. there might have been a bunch of jeweled birds floating around but there might have been a story i was thinking about at the same time but it's this uh um it's it's basically a treasure and this idea that you give up this treasure in exchange for another treasure that might have come up in one of my stories i don't remember um one of the interesting things about it though was i remember i wanted to make this card uh in some sense. And in those days, what it meant to be a free card was still evolving. There were a lot of players who felt that if it costs zero, it's free.

And when Ornithopter was published, which was a zero cost card for zero two, I think. Yeah, zero2 flyer. Yeah, people thought that was just a broken card. It was like dividing by zero, because they didn't recognize that the major cost was the card itself. And Jeweled Bird sidestepped that in a different way, because when you played the card, you drew a card to replace it, so there was no cost in some sense to it other than its mana cost. And so some people cite that as being the first cantrip even though it wasn't until later that we began to think of cantrip in the same way

as a sort of standard way to make uh make a cost adjustment right ice age would introduce cantrips and that that was i mean i guess ice age existed at the time in your mind because it was something that had been worked on but yeah i might have uh it's possible the term cantrip was around back then, but I don't think so. I think that thought really started to evolve when we were arguing that Ornithopter was not the most broken card of magic. And so there's two possibilities. And so there's two possibilities. One is that after that hit, we began to think of that as that term separately, and possibly it was at that point that Arabian Nights started to add cantrips proper,

because Ice Age might have started to add them that way later. Or I could have that just the timeline wrong, and that might have been there already. So yeah, I don't really remember. Okay, next thing I'd like to ask you about is the djinns and ephrites. So every color but white had a djinn and had an ephrite. Probably Juzam djinn and Ernim djinn are probably the two most famous of that cycle. What prompted the Jin and Afrit, I'll call it a cycle, it's missing in white, but it's in the other four colors. was there because gins and afrites are just such common elements of the arabian knights that it felt like uh they were a generic element like the like the uh jackals and the and the asps and the

whatever the desert storms and the nomads uh that they should be part of the common background uh and and so that's why i wanted to have a lot of them. And being as if I wanted them to be generic rather than specific, that's why they've all got, I think all of them, no, no, some of them have genuine Arabian names, but a lot of them, as we mentioned before,

are Easter eggs named for family members and friends. And so that's why they are there. And the reason why it's a partial cycle is because there's some conflict. There's some conflict. To me, white manna at the time had this religious sense to it in addition to whatever place it had in the context of magic. of Arabian Nights, sort of there seemed to be something where this whole lot of guys was there was something that opposed it that didn't have djinns and afritz. And so I wanted to maintain that a little bit. And so that's why it was a partial cycle. The set did have King Suleiman in white, by the way, which was a 1-1 creature that you could tap to destroy a djinn or a freak.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was that sort of thing where it was sort of the – it felt to me like white should be the anti-djinn and anti-freak color. I forgot about Suleiman, yeah. Okay, so something we touched upon last time, but we didn't really get into depth. One of the things that intrigues me as a sort of historian of magic design is you really started exploring lands in a way that, like I said, Elf really just tapped for mana. And here, so there's Bizarre Baghdad, Desert, Diamond Valley, Elephant Graveyard,

Island of Walkwalk, Library of Alexandra. There's also City of Brass, but that just produces mana. And Oasis. What sort of, I want to walk you down, what got you to start doing other things with lands? Like, where did that come from? Well, it's certainly a natural thing, and

I think I mentioned last time that I wasn't sure whether this was brewing in my head at the end of Magic the Gathering development or not, but now that you list those cards, I'm thinking that this is a consequence of the top-down design, that I had all these things that I really wanted to have in the game,

and many of them sounded like lands. And that's almost certainly where it came from and so that's that really made me expand what i what i was doing with the lands because uh once you you have uh for instance the island of walk walk you want to put that in the game you can't make it a creature it's kind of lame to make it an artifact uh so it's an island. And then how are we going to make a whole bunch of islands that reflect what they do in the stories as best I can? Well, you're going to begin sort of expanding your toolkit some. So it's interesting that some of the lands you still have produced mana and some of them don't produce mana. How did you decide which ones produced mana and which ones didn't produce mana?

I would have to see them case by case. I'm sure that if they had – I'm sure the ones that didn't. I had a specific – I was trying to reflect that place as I saw it within the mythos that I was designing for. So easy is Library of Alexandria. Having that be not for mana, but having it be for cards is natural because it's a library. It does tap for mana.

So City of Brass, Desert, Elephant Graveyard, and Library of Alexandria and the Mountain all tapped for mana. Bizarre Baghdad, Diamond Valley, Island of Wok Wok, and Oasis didn't tap for mana. Okay. So let's go through these. So, but Library did tap for cards as well. Correct, correct. So let me read these.

That's what people might not know the card, Richard. Library of Alexandra is, once again, I'm reading the original Arabian Nights version because it's fun to read that. Tap to add one colorless mana to your mana pool

or draw a card from your library. You may only use the card drawing ability if you have exactly seven cards in your hand. That sounds right. And so that, obviously that was capturing,

like it was a place of knowledge, right? Right, right was capturing like a place of knowledge, right? Right, right. It's a place of knowledge. And we had had a lot having a library be card draw very natural from the base set. And and you wouldn't expect that, in fact, to be out of place in magic today as a as a connection. in magic today uh as a uh as a connection um the uh the reason why i've got the mana there is probably because uh i was um uh not it's a little hard for me to get into my head back then but i imagine that that i did not want to completely disassociate the two because uh because you're going to still need some mana in your deck and uh and and it might be difficult uh if you've got a lot of cool abilities on these cards uh that you want to play with to put them in your deck because they're taking the slot of

your mana production so it could end up posing you so that that could have been my head with uh trying to put on mana where it was natural as often as possible okay so let's like there like there the ability is so simple it's easy to attack mana on yeah uh unlike something like we talked uh about uh drop of honey reflecting that story on a card you know i don't think it quite moves you to micro text but it's know, it's getting close. Okay, so let's talk about, Bizarre Baghdad's probably the most famous of the non,

the ones that don't tap for mana. So Bizarre Baghdad says tap to take two cards from your library after which you must immediately discard three from your hand to your graveyard. If you don't have three or more cards in your hand, discard your whole hand. No spells may be cast between drawing and discarding cards.

Okay, boy. So, yeah, it's all speculation, but my guess is that, I mean, that sounds like a bizarre ability. So it's definitely because you're drawing and exchanging. And so definitely top-down design. I was trying to reflect the bizarre. And it's quite likely that that was a matter of if I had my brothers, it would tap for a colorless mana as well. But just didn't feel like it was necessary, that it was desirable.

But it's starting to get a little bit wordy. Okay, one more land I want to talk about, then we'll move some non-lands. Desert. Desert was a really interesting card, and it was the one card that, I think it was the land that showed up the most. It was the lowest rarity land, I believe, other than, I'm not sure where Mountain was at, but Desert showed up multiple times in the pack,

and there were multiple on the sheet, so Desert had the lowest rarity of the lands. Where did Desert come from? Do you remember the design of Desert? Oh, the audience, real quick. Desert says tap to add one colorless mana to your mana pool or do one damage to an attacking creature after it deals its damage. Yeah, well, I mean, clearly having a bunch of deserts in Arabian Nights felt

like something we should aim to do. And anything you want a lot of, you want it to generate mana because it's taking up a drop. So I think that was my compromise. I wanted to have a lot of deserts. I didn't want to pin it to a particular color mana so it's colorless so give a little bonus ability to do damage to creatures seems pretty reasonable um uh i don't yeah i i i i think i think what i you know what what I really wanted was for deserts to be as prominent a part of that environment as mountains and islands and swamps and so forth were.

Just because deserts feel like, I mean, they're not like Bazaar of Baghdad or Library of Alexandria, which feel like a very special thing. Deserts are super generic on the same level as Iowans. And so I wanted it to be reflect. So I wanted it to be ultra common, and I was trying to do an ultra common card that people might play with a bunch of. So one of the interesting things about Desert is there's a card called Camel in the set,

which is, it's a one white mana for 0-1. It says Bands. article camel in the set which is uh it's a one white mana for zero one it has uh it says bands all creatures attacking in a band with camel are immune to damage done by deserts whoa yeah very top down did you did you make like when you made deserts how long was the gap between making deserts and making camel uh it was probably pretty close. Probably pretty close. I probably, you know, the design process, the way I did it, where I was reading

Arabian Nights and taking down notes about what elements I saw in it, I probably just had this huge list of things, deserts and camels and, you know,

asps and so forth. And so they were probably pretty close to one another. Okay, so next I want to ask about one of my favorite cards from the set. Old Man of the Sea. So Old Man of the Sea costs one blue blue, so three mana total, two which is blue. Summon Marid. I'm reading the original Raby Knight's card. Tap to gain control of a creature with power no greater than Old Man's power. If Old Man becomes untapped, you lose control of this creature.

You may choose not to untap Old Man as normal. You also lose control of the creature if Old Man dies or if the creature's power becomes greater than Old Man, and it's a 2-3 creature. That one certainly has a story. As with a lot of these more elaborate and almost all the rare cards, they have a specific story in mind. Old Man of the Sea, the story was, I think it was a Sinbad story. He goes to this island and some old dude is there and gets him to bend over, uh, uh, to help

him or something. And then he jumps on his back and, uh, squeezes his neck between his thighs and his thighs. They're strong. They're like nutcrackers. And, uh, and so basically he rides around Sinbad for weeks because now Sinbad's his horse. And Sinbad eventually manages to fool him in some way and get him off and brain him and go on his merry Sinbad adventure ways. And so that's why Old Man of the Sea takes control of something. And another interesting aspect of that story is Old Man of the Sea, if you look into it, actually, I think it means

orangutan. So orangutan, the roots of that word are old man, man, or something like that. And so the supposition, I think, is that he ran into an orangutan. The orangutan is doing that stuff. And so that's pretty cool. I mean, the whole Arabian Nights is filled with all this interesting stuff. But the connection between Old Man of the Sea and Orangutan has helped me in a number of trivia competitions. I think, by the way, this might be the first card

that you tap and can choose not to untap it to continue its effect? I don't know. It might be. I don't remember. I know Antiquities does some, but I don't know if Alpha had any. Okay, so this reminded me, there's a card called Sinbad in the set, so

one blue, one one, summon Sinbad, tap to draw a card from your library, but discard that card if it's not a land. A more, we can talk about the card in specific, but a more interesting general question is, you had a lot of named like, Sinbad is specifically this one character from the story

um did you ever toy around with the idea of legendary is that something that you ever even thought of at the time uh I thought about it yes I thought about um it but I but I think I think I never seriously entertained uh restricting you to have one of these guys. And I really don't like the whole rule of limiting you to one of a creature in magic. I find it sort of having the story drive the gameplay. And I think the gameplay is generally weakened by your inability to get more than one in play. And it leads to all sorts of awkward situations, like if they're legendaries and you put out a legend and it kills another one. Anyway, you and I have been on design teams.

You know that I've got a lot of negative feelings about the legend mechanic. Just so you know, Richard, I'm sure you're aware of this. I, at work, for years, I mean years and years and years, I've been pitching them to take Legendary and make it a marker, but take off the negative writer on it and just say, it's just a marker, things will care about it, but it doesn't come with a necessary negative to it. But I've not won that fight. And of course I would love that. will care about it but it doesn't come with a necessary back you know a negative to it but i've not won that fight so and of course i would love that you know it's like i have no problem with

legend as a keyword that is important uh i just don't like the mechanical interpretation uh i think that once you start caring about whether there's uh two sin bads in your deck that you've got a whole lot of more important uh important inconsistencies in the world to worry about. We won't go into it, but there's just a lot. Once you start worrying about it, you're going to end up hurting gameplay by

the end of it. I did not really seriously think of limiting Sinbad to one. I did have misgivings about having a named character. And I'm sure that I thought, well, maybe I have a Sinbad in the game because of that. But in the end, I decided to go with it, obviously, because I thought that the flavor was just too good.

Okay, speaking of named characters, here's another one of my favorite cards from when the set first came out. because I thought that the flavor was just too good. Okay, speaking of named characters, here's another one of my favorite cards from when the set first came out. Ollie from Cairo. So two red red, summon Ollie from Cairo. It's a zero one creature. When Ollie is in play, damage that reduced you to less than one life

lowers you to one life. All further damage is prevented. I cannot remember what, a specific obviously a specific story uh i forget what he is i think i seem to remember him being a really likable guy uh but i i i really can't remember what his what his shtick is i'd have to go back and read the original stories yeah one of the things that i you did in arabian nights i mean you did someone alpha but really arabian nights is really pushing boundaries. Like Scheherazade is another good example

where it's really kind of like, I remember when I read this card for the first time, I just couldn't believe it got printed. I'm like, I can't lose while this creature's out. It just really shocked me in a real fun way. So, yeah, I want to bring up one other thing which came to mind when you brought up Old Man of the Sea, and that is Serendib Afrit. Okay.

Serendib Jim. And it's because of the language thing again. Orangutan literally means old man or old man of the sea. I forget which. But Serendib also has a similar sort of thing. Serendib literally means salon. And C-E-Y-L-O-N, salon. And this is pretty interesting because then that begs the question, is this related to serendipity? And weirdly, it is. And that word comes about from this novel.

I think it was French, and it was super popular, I want to say in the 1800s maybe. popular i want to say in the 1800s maybe um and and it had this person with all going through all these adventures uh uh the the book itself might have been called sarin dib i'm not sure um but in any case he was going through uh that he was going through sarin did so long and he kept on getting out of problems just by strange coincidences and happenstance it was like a sort of sloppy novel writing where it's like oh and then he stumbled upon the answer to whatever was the problem was and so people began to refer to that as serendipity so uh it's a complete aside from magic but it's so cool that you look at Serendib Afrit, and that's Salon, and you look at Serendib, and that's the same root as Serendipity for this really super weird reason.

Well, see, you come for the magic history, and you learn all about Wyrda. So it's going to be extra things. Okay, so the next card I was curious about, Curd Ape. So it's a red mana, single red mana for an ape, summon ape, 1-1. Curd Ape gets plus one, plus two if you have any forest in play. This was another card that saw a lot of play

because it was... Yeah, that was super good. It was very good. That is, of course, one of the issues with, you know, that we began out with by being really reluctant to put my stamp of approval on this game because it did not have the same playtesting. Almost all this stuff was straight out of my head, straight to the table. And it was playtested, but it was playtested not by my usual players.

They were generally, I have no idea how much time they were able to put into it because they were really busy with other things, magic related. And I don't I have no idea how good they were. But in any case, because of that, there were things that were overpowered, even more so than than I intended. And anyway, yeah, that was one of the one of the powerful ones. What what what was specifically your question about it? I was curious, was it just a top-down making an ape? Is that where it came from, you think? No, that was a common, I believe.

And so I think Kurd ape was just there were apes and Arabian Nights, and then Kurd was one of the terms which was from Arabian, and who knows, it might have meant desert. I forget. I'd have to look it up. I've looked up a bunch of these things and a lot of them Google doesn't recognize. I pulled them out of the back of some really old tomes, so again, they might have been heavily anglicized, but they are all at some level authentic, even if they've been filtered through several levels

of unreliable translators, which includes me. Okay, so next card that a lot of this, I assume they came from TopDown, but here's a card that has caused me some a lot of arguments at R&D. So it's a card called Desert Twister.

Four green greens, Sorcery, destroy any card in play. Would this just top-down Desert Twister? Well, I believe that that's probably a common. Is that a common? I can look. I don't think Desert Twister is a common. Hold on a second. I'm looking. It is an uncommon. It is an uncommon.

Yeah, my theory is that in general, I believe that the commons were less likely to be top-down. They were just generic elements that I built as flavorfully as I could. But the desert twister being uncommon may have come from a particular story that I forget. But it sure sounds like a generic term that I just wanted to see in the game as well. I forget how it was designed. And it was probably green because it's nature? Is that what you think?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As far as the color pie, You know, the color pie has changed a lot over the years for a number of reasons. The bones of it are certainly there from the start, but it was not something which I felt had to be adhered to as strictly as it does these days and it did back then soon the reason for that is because I viewed the cards as being more limited than they were so for example if you only buy a few decks of cards uh and you trade with your local play group it's perfectly fine having whatever things which are out of your color pie in a particular color because generally red does what it's supposed to do.

It does a direct damage and if green has a little bit, that's okay. As it turns out, with the amount of cards that people were getting and the uh the the you know how enthusiastic the trading market was everything else it meant that that uh you could have a single common card or uncommon card or rare card it didn't matter you could completely disrupt the color pie and you could make it so that whatever made that color special wasn't special anymore and that wasn't something that i really anticipated and i don't think I really fully appreciated that for you know for a while certainly not not here and so all my color decisions were sort of guidelines not rules and that's what why for example you know you've got psychic

blast in in the original magic it was direct damage and blue yeah but you know it wasn't very common so who cares i mean i mean it was common but it wasn't like a common you know it's like if you as you fanned the cards it wasn't all that much of it so blue in general was not the direct damage color uh um since players have so much control over that i can't do that you know we couldn't do that uh as much as i wanted yeah Yeah, one of the things you bring up, which is really interesting, is how you can't predict what Magic became. There's no way you can design it and know where it was going. It was not something that was predictable, really. And so a lot of early decisions were based on, yeah, people spend 20 bucks and buy a starter and two boosters or something. What

is that game experience? If everybody has a something. Like, what is that game experience? If everybody has a handful of cards, what's that game experience? Right. And that's, I mean, for me, that was an incredibly ambitious vision, right? Because that's already everybody paying $20 to play a game, which you would imagine normally one person would buy for $20 to entertain their group with. So that's already, whatever, four times more than somebody has a right to hope for.

And the fact that that was, you know, orders of magnitude off was just something beyond my prediction, way beyond. So anyway, I can see my desk here in the distance. Is there anything about Arabian Nights we didn't touch upon since this is our wrap-up here? Anything you wanted to touch upon that we didn't talk about, about Arabian Nights? Maybe, oh boy, there was one thing with Island, where gosh, there was one land where you tapped it and sacrificed a creature

and you got something oh yeah diamond valley diamond valley yeah the story behind diamond valley is just another uh another one which is uh pretty cool you i mean every one of these ones you can like arabian nights is just just good reading it's a lot of fun but let me say the card before you explain the story of the card just so the audience knows the card diamond valley it's a lot of fun let me say the card before you explain the story of the card just so the audience knows the card diamond valley it's land tap to sacrifice one of your creatures in exchange for a number of life points equal to its toughness note that this ability may be used after blocking has been declared that's the original rabianite sporting yeah so i think this was another sin bad card uh i wouldn't wouldn't swear to that but uh some adventurer um ended up on this island with a bunch of merchants and there was this valley uh um that they were all standing on the edge of with

clips and um and the valley was filled with diamonds uh there was just diamonds everywhere down there but it was so treacherous down there because of the poisonous snakes that were there that you couldn't go down there. camels and tying ropes to them and throwing them off the edge and then pulling them up and pulling the pulling the uh the diamonds from the corpses uh for some reason that that was the best source of sticky material they had uh and uh and so anyway that is the story behind this really sort of weird card anyway they all have stories like that. It's pretty cool. And the Arabian Nights is just as a mythos a lot of fun. So the takeaway from these two podcasts

is go Reba Arabian Nights and Sandman number 50. Yeah. I may have that number wrong. I haven't looked it up. But yeah, if you look up Sandman City in a Bottle, that's the name of, that might be the name of the issue. It's really good.

Well, anyway, Richard, I want to thank you. This has been a lot of fun. It's very funny. I tend to do all these podcasts where I talk about stuff that I did, so it's really fun to talk with somebody else about what they did. As a historian, I eat this stuff up. It's really fun to me to hear how individual stuff got made and stuff like that. So I get to be the fanboy for this episode.

So that's fun. Well, thank you. I hope it finds some resonance with the people who listen to you. So guys, I'm at my desk. 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. So Richard, thank you so much for being on both these episodes.

I have to have you back in the future. We'll talk about other sets you've done. That'll be great. Look forward to it. Okay, guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.