Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #835: Unsanctioned with Matt Tabak

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

I sit down with Magic editor Matt Tabak to talk about the creation of Unsanctioned, the Un- box set.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So, continuing on in my series of interviewing people to talk about sets we made together, today I have Matt Tabak, and we're going to talk about Unsanctioned. Welcome, Matt. Thank you, Mark. So, I, too, brought my own special guest. I have allergies along with me today, so apologies for that as my voice is a little scratchy this morning. So as I understand things, you go through an introduction, then you introduce me, I start talking, and then 30 minutes from now, I have to stop talking. And I admit that's going to be a challenge because I talk a lot, but I'm pretty confident I can do it. Now you want to talk about, okay, sorry. Hi, Mark. Glad to be here. Okay. So I have told the story of unsanctioned. So we're going to start from you telling the story. So what is your earliest memory of unsanctioned? Oh, I remember there being

conversations of, we wanted to put some new silver-bordered content into the universe um especially for our fans that enjoy uh commander with uh silver-bordered cards so i kind of remember this is just sort of like something you were talking about and like hallway conversations back when we existed in hallways um and then i did not get the opportunity to be the editor for unstable but i'm a great lover of silverboard sets um as opposed to my back when i was the rules manager my public persona um was anti-silverboard sets because i was the rules the blackboard rules manager and I hated you know fun so but secretly privately um I'm a huge fan of them and I love working on them so I got uh I was not the editor for Unstable but I jumped at the chance to be the editor for Unsanctioned

knowing that there were going to be new cards okay so real quick just for the audience in uh this project was originally called Parachute. Parachute! And the reason it was called Parachute was Gavin Verhey was assigned the task of making a project that was not tied to anything, could come out any time, and that it would just sit there, and when we needed something in an emergency, we could pull the ripcord on the parachute,

and we could print the set. If you imagine the year's schedule as an emergency, we could pull the ripcord on the parachute and we could print the set. If you imagine the year's schedule as an airplane, we could jump out of the airplane whenever we felt like it to fill a gap. And so he came up with the idea of doing a silver-bordered box set. He came and talked to me. I was all bored because I always like to make more silver-bordered cards. And it was kind of... We had a couple different

products where we had mashed half decks together. It's something we had done... Well, we had a couple different projects we had tried to do it on. But anyway, the idea was for this thing is imagine we had five half decks, one of each color, and then you could smash them together and you and your friends could play.

And the idea was it would be a lot of old unsets, uncards, but that we would make some new stuff to help sell the thing. We'd have some new things in it. Yeah, this was the idea, like you said,

two half decks. So it's five 30-card decks, and you and a friend, or an enemy, or a relative, or whomever you chose uh would grab two of them smash them together and play each other um that was sort of the recommended way to play um but you could really you could do whatever you wanted you could you know grab two decks and split up the third one you could go one on. You can play them as individual decks. So in some ways, there were two different challenges

in making the set. One was, originally there were going to be 15 unique cards, three of each color. We ended up adding a 16th. We ended up making a land. So there was a making of new content,

and then there was a wrangling of old content. So I want to start, I've actually spent some time talking about making of new content, but I've not talked at all about wrangling of old content. So I want to start, I've actually spent some time talking about making of new content, but I've not talked at all about wrangling of old content. So why don't we start there? So what did this project entail?

Well, so obviously, so we grabbed a bunch of old cards from previous unsets and the biggest kind of challenge there is in between when we were putting this set together and when those older sets came out is we've had several frame updates right magic cards look differently now than they did then and a lot of the gags on uncards are visual and a lot of them kind of rely

on the card frames in different ways right either breaking Either breaking the frame or, you know, modifying it in some way to kind of sell a visual gag. So a lot of these, unlike, you know, when we take a reprint and throw it into like a blackboard reprint and throw it into a product, it's generally just putting the data into a new, you know, putting the art, putting all the text into a new frame. It's a pretty straightforward process. We do it all the time. For Silver Border, there's just a wide variety of weird stuff you have to deal with, including in some cases cards were not taken for unsanctioned because there were parts to the visual gag that we didn't have anymore. Like the art is stored on different layers for different effects and such. I'm not a graphics person, so apologies. They're expert people who do this. That we just, we didn't have,

and we didn't have the means to recreate. Like given enough time and resources, sure, we could have recreated them, but this project was allotted a certain amount of time and resources. We have to work with what we got. We're all very busy. So we just had to disqualify certain cards because we couldn't recreate the visual gag that they held.

I wish I could think of an example of one. While you're thinking, I want to point something out. So both unglued and unhinged, the first two unsets, the way we made it is each face of the card essentially was one piece of art for all intents and purposes. I mean, we had an artist draw the actual art, but we had a graphic designer sort of hand-make each frame individually, like literally put it together. So it was like the whole of the card

was kind of a graphical piece of art, if you will. Now, Unstable didn't do that. Unstable sort of dropped them into the frames, kind of how normal magic does it. And this product had frames. So when we're trying to recreate old stuff, as Matt says, there was a lot of complexity because we couldn't just reprint what we had,

let alone updating to new frames, even of just the component pieces of what we had was not something we could just bring over easily all the time. And we ran a few cards my favorite of which is probably look at me i'm r&d where you know when you reprint a card that's been around for a while if there's been or changes to its oracle text like its official card text you just print the new text on the card and you're good to go like in we do this in almost every magic set there is look at me i'm r&d um kind of has a cool thing so the original printing of it in unhinged it has uh some text and it's got a bunch of handwriting on it changing the text well let

me read it for the audience so you know what it uh. So, look at me, I'm R&D, two and a white, enchantment, as, well, actually, it's hard to read this because it's got change writing on it. The official Oracle text, I guess, is, look at me, I'm R&D, enters the battlefield, choose a number and a second number, one higher or one lower

than the first number. All instances of the chosen number in the full text of each permanent spell and card in any zone are changed to the second chosen number. But it looks like a playtest card. Yeah, it looks like a playtest card. It looks like a sticker on a moat, a silver-bordered moat,

which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but whatever. We sold the joke. So the original printing, like, on the original printing, it says 2WW for the mana cost. And it's crossed out, and 2W is written next to it. And there's some, like, an instant is

printed on the sticker, and it's crossed out, and it says Enchantment. I believe that handwriting is Randy Bueller's. It is. It is Randy Bueller's, yes. Okay, cool. I thought it was Randy Bueller's.ler's so and it also has at the bottom it has written spork because unhinged had a gimmick where there was a hidden message spoilers at the bottom of each card one word per card you put them in collector number order and it spells out a message well taken out of context none of that makes sense so we're reprinting the card. So what we did for unsanctioned is we basically recreated the gag. We put it on moat. We did a new sticker

with some updated look as to how, you know, stickers looked at the time. We started the printing with the modified text that Randy wrote. And then we made a bunch of changes to, to represent its Oracle text. Now on look at me and I'm R and D the unsanctioned version, it's my handwriting. And I'll tell you, it's hard because I did it with like a, um, uh, what do you call it? Uh, pen on screen, a stylus. Um, not it's my handwriting but it's not exactly my handwriting it's like when you sign for a credit card statement or something you know when you use your credit card and it looks like you're a three-year-old uh so it starts you know so we started with the older wording and then like comes into play is crossed out for enters the battlefield

things like that and i believe at the bottom here's a little easter egg for you uh there's a date and time at the bottom the time is 108 51 a.m md is next to it that is digital artist mike domain who was an enormous help in this set put all that. I believe that's his birthday. Okay. Then there are some numbers after it. I believe that is his pin. So if you can find Mike Domain and acquire one of his debit cards,

I believe you're good to go. No, I think that's the art ID, actually. Right, so, okay. So we went through a lot. So the idea on this set was we wanted to reprint things. I know Chris Mooney worked a lot on this project, sort of helping put decks together.

I know Gabby worked on this project. I know Max worked on this project. And anyway, a part of this was trying to make decks that were... Each deck had its theme, but it blended together with the other colors. So each color kind of did something, but they blended when you mixed them together. And we were trying to

sort of hit, we were trying to show off all of the fun of Un Over the Time. So like, we wanted some ungluedness, and some unhingedness, and some unstableness. And then some new stuff that was I guess, unsanctionedness. Yeah, it was kind of a cool opportunity to make, like, you know, there was host augment. So let's make a new card that plays with that.

That's one of them, right? Right. So what we did is we made a new host, a new augment, and a new five-color commander that you could play with host-augment. Which is tricky when you can only make minor-colored cards, but we did it. Yeah, Surgeon General Commander, which has the

line of rules text, tap at W, U, B, R, or G as a clever, I mean, I'll say clever, but as a workaround to the commander rules that looks for mana symbols in your mana cost or rules text to determine what decks you can go into. Instead of just saying tap, add one mana of any color.

Right. You'll notice in the flavor text, it says, so Surgeon Commander, it says Surgeon General, General Croftop Commander, three in a green, three, three, legendary creature, wombat, bat, chameleon. Whenever you augment, enchant, or mutate a creature you control, draw a card, tap, add, white, blue, black, red, or green. And then the flavor text says, likes, augmentation, fluffy animals, and creative templating. So that's a joke, by the way, because it's not how we template the card, as Matcha said. We would normally say, tap, at one man of any color, except that wouldn't allow this to be a five-color commander.

So we templated it differently to do that, and then our flavor text is us going, well, hey, we know that we didn't do this correctly. I have been told, I can't vouch for this completely, but I have been told that the surgeon commander is female, and the only way you can tell are the buttons on the lab coat. Oh. I don't know

if that's true, but that's what somebody told me. So here's another story about this card. So Mutate came out Mutate didn't exist yet when this set came out. The very next set after Unsanctioned came out was Ikoria. And originally this card just,

it was whenever you augment or enchant a creature. But I knew Mutate was coming out, and I said, you know, it works really well with Mutate, so I went and got permission to put Mutate on the card, knowing that it would be like a teaser, because Mutate didn't mean anything.

But everybody seemed, everyone thought it was a fun gag. You know, it was a like a teaser because mutate didn't mean anything. But everybody seemed to thought everyone thought it was a fun gag. You know, it was a cute little teaser for things to come. And hilariously for those rules-minded, template-minded folks, whenever you mutate a creature you control is not at all the

wording we would use in Black Porter for that. But, you know, there's the... For what we knew of the mechanic at the time, it was a reasonable attempt. Right, we did it a little early. The other thing that's funny, by the way, so this thing is a wombat bat chameleon. So we did not...

We didn't decide it was a wombat bat chameleon ahead of time. We just let the artists draw whatever they wanted. That's what they drew. And then we just... We said, well, what does it mostly seem like? And like, well, you can see the wombat in the head and has like the bat wings and had like a chameleon tail. So we just like named the things we could see that fit.

Yeah. If that were a Blackboard card, it'd be legendary creature beast. Beast is often shorthand for, don't know they drew something um so do you have any other memories of cards that uh caused you problems in putting together uh brother i can't even remember what i worked on yesterday i'm supposed to um some of the uh more uh more problematic ones as far as the graphics go. Like, we had to recreate Growth Spurt.

So, Growth Spurt, real quickly, Growth Spurt, one in a green, instant, roll a six-sided die, target creature gets plus X plus X until end of turn

where X is the result. The tricky part probably is the flavor text. The flavor text looks like a personal ad. It says, more to love. Friendly, nature-loving, bunion-esque SEM seeks SEF, looking for a huge commitment. SEM is single elf male, I believe.

Oh, okay, that makes sense. So that one was a fun one. Interestingly, so on Magic cards, if there's enough room, the highest or the largest text size we use for rules text and flavor text is nine point. Growth spurt, that rules text is ten point because I thought we could get away with it. And we did. I thought we could get away with it. And we did. Yeah, the other thing about the card, for those that obviously can't see it since this is an audio podcast,

is it's an elf that's growing bigger because it's a giant growth effect, so big that he's breaking the top of the card, which, once again, was all built with an old frame, right? This was unglued. So it was, like, you know, several frames back. And so they had to sort of take all the pieces and recreate it.

So it's a lot of work because there's a lot going on. We encourage you to visit gatherer.wizards.com and play along with us as we take a walk down memory lane. Another interesting fact, in addition to the visual gags, is that because so much time has passed since the previous sunsets, sometimes the meaning of cards has changed. This doesn't happen very often, but one notable place where that happened, not Old Foggy, it's Blast from the Past. Oh, I'm sorry, it is Old Foggy. Old Foggy is a...

Let me read Old Foggy first. Two green. Okay. That is GG. Summon Dinosaur. Phasing. Cumulative Upkeep 1. Echo.

Fading 3. Bans with other dinosaurs. Protection from homerids. Snow-covered planeswalk. Flanking. Rampage 2. It is a cornucopia of old, sometimes difficult to understand keywords. And this card was designed, by the way, by Mark

Gottlieb. Who is of a certain age. I believe I might be older than he is. That's fine. So Old Foggy has a couple interesting abilities, and this was pointed out in the unsanctioned FAQ, which we called the FAQ T-I-K-P-W-A-M-O-M-B-S-I-A-T-H-T-T-A-S-T-T-T-E-T-M-O-T-W-S-T-A-A-A.

That stands for frequently asked questions that I know players will ask me on my blog, so I'll answer them here to try to save them the trouble, even though many of them won't see this and ask anyway. There's a running joke for those who don't know. Every FAQ gets longer in its name. Like the original FAQ from Unglued was...

It was an FAQ with like three or four other letters, and then each one just has been getting longer and longer. So because of changes in the way phasing works and the way echo works uh well the change to echo isn't really that important the change to echo is that instead of just saying echo and now says echo and a cost um so if it just said echo on an older card it's the mana cost um that's not the weird part. So Old Foggy is actually phased out when its Echo ability would trigger, so it doesn't trigger that turn. And then by the time the next turn comes around when Old Foggy phases in, it's too late for Echo to have triggered. You've controlled

it for too long. So in effect, Echo does nothing on that card. It doesn't actually work. Except in the rare cases where someone gains control of Old Foggy, but in the base case of just playing it, Echo doesn't do anything. So that's just kind of a fun consequence of time proceeding since these cards were released. So another little Easter egg people might not catch it. So Old Foggy got made along with a card called Blast from the Past. Godly made both of them. And Blast from the Past is another card that just throws a lot of keywords onto the card.

On Blast from the Past, there's a goblin in a time machine. The same set had an artifact called Time Machine. And the goblin's flying in the time machine, and in Old Foggy, the time machine has crashed, and you can see it in the back. The time machine has crashed, because the goblin went back in the path where

old Foggy was and crashed. Okay, so here's... I have another card to talk about. I have no idea. I have another card to talk about. Let's talk about Chicken a la King. Chicken a la King! So, um... It was an opportunity to also

get in Oracle changes, so one of the big ones was we decided chickens should just be birds. Right. So what happened was we had a thing called the Grand Creature Update, which was many, many years ago. And at the time, in Blackboarder, because we didn't apply it to Silverboarder,

in Blackboarder, everything that was a bird got updated to a bird. So early Magic had like, falcons and things, and they just all became birds. But we had never, so one of the things about Unsanctioned was, we had never updated,

at least, especially in print, any of the, um, I think the Oracle text, during Unstable, Matt, actually, I think you updated, or that happened for this. When did you update Oracle for the Civil War cards? Oh, for this update? Yeah, that was... Oh, it was probably...

I don't know. Anyway, so what happened was, this was the first chance for us to really update Unglued and Unhinged. I mean, Unstable was mostly contemplating. But there's a lot of things, and one of the things was, there's a chicken theme in Unglued. And we're like, well, if we really updated

it, they wouldn't be chickens, they'd be birds. And Chicken Isle of King is a lot more powerful if it can reference birds than if it can reference chickens. So when we reprinted it and changed its bird, which we did, and changed its ability, so Chicken Isle of King is one blue blue, two two, creature bird.

Whenever a six is rolled on a six-sided die, put a plus one plus one counter on each bird. You may roll dice only when instructed to. Tap an untapped bird you control, roll a six-sided die, like now. It's a reminder text. During the chicken revolution, the king managed to keep his head while the others, well, just ran around.

That's one of my favorite flavor texts. But anyway, we made this card a lot more powerful. There's a lot of debate, by the way, behind the scenes of whether it was okay to change chickens to birds. I think both you and I were on the make the change camp. Yeah, I was on team bird. A chicken is funnier. Like, the specificity of chicken is funnier than bird. But at the end of the day, there's a an entire flock of commander players

with bird decks i imagine uh that that appreciated this change and yeah i like the compatibility with more cards um i mean it's it's probably not something like it's something we do in Black Order, right? When there's a creature type update, if we decide, and bird is effectively a new silver-bordered type? I don't know. Yeah, but anyway, we update. So all the chickens... There's a few other chickens in the set, I believe, but all of them

updated to bird, and Chicken-O-Lot-King matters because its rules text got updated to bird. It now affects birds before it didn't. Yeah, there were a number of birds in the reprints. I'm scanning the new cards now. I don't remember if we made any

new birds. Yeah, Strutting Turkey is a new bird. And Circadian Night Owl, both of those are birds. But neither are chickens, but both are birds. Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. But we also brought back... I think there's some old chickens that we brought. I think there was that we brought. Anyway, we updated.

So part of doing the set was trying to take old cards and bring them updates to new standards. Any other cards you can think of that kind of had weird changes when we updated them? So I'm looking through the set right now um a more prepared podcast guest of course would have a list ready to go i did have a short list ready to go but i've exhausted all those stories so and there's so much time yet to fill so i'm just going to keep talking and scrolling and talking and scrolling so here i'll while you look i will tell a quick story so one of the things that we did with the new cards was when Unstable came out, basically the new cards wanted to do a couple things.

One is, there are a bunch of things people have been asking for that we didn't deliver Unstable. For example, like Infernia Spawnington III Esquire. We had made Infernal Spawn of Evil in Unglued. We made Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil in Unhinged. And we talked about making it unstable, and we ended up not making it. But a lot of people were sad that we didn't make it.

So we decided to make it here, for example. So Inferna Spawnington the Third Esquire, nay, Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil. I believe we didn't go with that name. I think the frame was a factor there. Yes, we couldn't fit it and we didn't have the ability. The previous sets could change frame a little more than we could. So, yeah, we couldn't fit it in.

Yeah, I believe that name came from Chris. No, Ari. Came from Ari. Ari Neat came from Ari. Oh, it came from Ari. Yeah. I believe that name came from Cress. No, Ari. Came from Ari. Ari Neat came from Ari. Oh, it came from Ari. Okay. Sorry, Ari. That rhymes.

I will try not to apologize often. The thing that's super cute about this card, so this card real quick, is 10 and a black. Creature, it says Demon Beast Grand Gile, but Demon's crossed off for Beast, and Beast is crossed off for Demon. Flying First Strike Trample Haste.

This spell costs three less to cast for each card you reveal this turn. When Inferno is spawning to the third Esquire, it enters the battlefield. You may say, I'm here. If you do, it deals three damage to target player. And then it says, see evil, hear evil, speak evil. So the real cute... Oh, go ahead, go ahead. To kind of go through the whole gag there,

the original Inferno spawn of Evil in Unglued had Demon crossed out. It said Summon Demon, and Demon was crossed out for Beast. And then we revisited that joke for Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil in Unhinged, where it was Beast Child, and then Beast was crossed

out for Demon. Real quickly, behind the scenes, Magic way back when had demon when it started, and for reasons I won't get into, but we decided to stop doing demon, and so we stopped doing demon for a while, and instead of demon we called them beasts.

So when the first card came out, I was making fun of that, the fact that we weren't doing demon anymore. And then when the second card came out, we had gone back to calling them demons again, so we were making fun that we had done that. And then the third card was came out, we had gone back to calling them demons again, so we were making fun that we had done that. And then the third card was just making fun of the first two cards. Right. I'm not sure what we're allowed to say about why we stopped using demon, but it probably was because the demons we communicate with requested it. And we should placate them if we can. So for Inferno Spawnington III, of course we wanted to revisit the gag.

if we can. So for Inferno Sponged in the Third, of course we wanted to revisit the gag. So, and I believe this was a joke I came up with. It's creature, demon, beast, grandchild and the demon is crossed out for beast and the beast is crossed out for demon. Yes. And then it's grandchild instead of child because the

second one was child and the rest was grandchild. Again, in my chicken scratch playing the role of penmanship there. Are all the writing your writing? All the writing is my writing. The other thing about this card, just like little subtle things, is like

the first card cost 6 black, black, black. So it was 9 mana total. The second card cost 8 black, black. So it was 10 mana total, but only 2 black mana symbols. So obviously the third one had to cost 10 and a black, which is 11 mana, but only one black symbol. And then the power toughness went 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9.

So there's lots of patterns. And then the first one had flying and first strike. The second one had flying, first strike, and trample. And the third one had flying, first strike, trample, and haste. We kept adding things to it. It's not very common where names and mana costs will fight for space um and this happens like when it does happen it can happen it happens in black border sets it happens everywhere where if it if a name is real long like if a mana cost is long it has like four or five

mana symbols the name can only be so long in this one the name wanted to be super long, so of course the mana cost needed to be two symbols to fight for space. Like, you can have Esquire or you can have a third or fourth mana symbol choose and of course Esquire is funny, and when making unsets, you always do the funny thing. Also, luckily, it followed the patterns. I mean, it worked out. Everything worked out. It followed the pattern that we needed. I mean, Infernius did not have to be

a lawyer. He didn't have to be an Esquire. He's funnier as an Esquire. Right. Esquire is funnier. Right. I do want to point out, before we move on to a different card, that Ron Spencer did the art for all three cards, did an amazing job, and each art refers to the art that came before it,

so the art also plays really nicely in the evolution of these cards. And all three of the cards were in the product, by the way. Unsanctioned had all three of the Infernal Spawns. So really this was just an opportunity, especially on the reprints, to update text if we could. We also added in some reminder text gags where we could.

What's a new reminder text gag? The one you actually, the one you read a little bit ago, for Chicken A La King. You may roll dice only when instructed to, and then like now. Those are new. That was new. There's a couple new ones.

Of course, there's a new Wordy card. So adding a reminder text is in some cases a functional change. Does Wordy count? No, Wordy doesn't count reminder text. Wordy doesn't count reminder text. Never mind. Yeah, so Alexander Clamilton is Wordy. Alexander Clamilton is wordy Alexander Clamilton

that was of course that was my favorite card I was of course we all regret the amount of time it took to make that card we would have liked it a little closer to Hamilton's premiere but so the big challenge with that one someone said they were going to try to get Lin-Manuel Miranda

to sign one. And I never saw if they were... I like to believe somebody managed to do that, but I haven't seen it, so... Yeah, if you're a listener and you did that, please tweet. So Alexander Clamilton, real quick, two in the blue. It's a legendary creature, Clamfolk Advisor Rebel. It's a 0-4.

Whenever you cast a wordy spell, scry 2. A spell is wordy if it has four more lines of rules text. One red tap. Choose target creature you don't control. Reveal the top card of your library. Alexander Clamilton gets plus X plus O until end of turn, where X is the number of lines of rules text on the revealed card. Alexander Clamilton fights that creature. Alexander Clamilton. He's living on the beach with you. So this card came about because we wanted to have a clam folk.

We were trying to riff off old sets. Unglued had done this joke. I was trying to play in the idea that there are we humanize animals all the time. So I was trying to come up with the silliest way to possibly do that. And that ended up being clam folk. And so

we wanted to do a Clam Folk. I think Gabby had originally pitched Calamity Jane, I think was the first thing that got pitched. Calamity Jane? Yeah. Which is, Calamity Jane was a Wild West, a character from the, well, not character, but a real person from the Wild West. But our fear was not enough people knew

who Calamity Jane was. And it's also a little American-centric. And so, although I guess Alexander Klamath is also American-centric, but at least there was a major musical about him. So we decided to, we decided to, we said to the pit, okay, we need another K clam pun for a character.

And I think it was Chris Mooney that came up with Alexander Clamilton. And we literally, I think he said it, like, we're done looking, let's figure out how to do Alexander Clamilton. And, uh, Chris was also the one that had, Chris also got us to add Rebel. I thought that was it.

So. Yeah, Rebel was nice. As this card moved through development, there are so many Hamilton-related gags you want to do. The dueling part of it, the wordy joke, there are just so many aspects you try to work into the design.

Unfortunately, you only have room for a couple. So the big thing about it is we ended up saying, okay, he's wordy, so that it references a writer, and that his activated ability is basically a dueling ability since he died in a duel. Like, you're like, yeah, I want him to have, like, vanishing, so you'd be like, why does he write like he's running out of time? Yeah, there's so many, so many ways you can go there. And Chris had a great flavor test. A card that was pretty simple in idea, but actually executing this a second time was really tricky, and that's Who, What, Where, When, Why.

So Who, What, Where, When, Why is a five-way split card. So, for those of you who did not follow my advice and are not looking at Gatherer and cannot see the card, imagine a four-way split card, but the upper left card is itself a two-way split card between Who and What. No. So, real quickly, who is X in white? Target player gains X life. What is 2 in red? Destroy target artifact. When is 2 in blue? Counter target creature spell. Where is 3 in black? Destroy target land.

Why is 1 in green? Destroy target enchantment. So, they deal with all the card types. But, you know, it's a 5-way split card. So, we had to put this into the new frame. This required a lot of actual manual work um and the result is pretty good like the modern magic frame that information at the bottom the set code and the language code and the artist credit and the collector number

that the positions of those are locked um for production purposes um everything else on this is kind of a custom Mike Domain job. So shout out Mike Domain, who's a digital artist here at Wizards. We had to basically just rebuild this from scratch with the modern card frame. And I think it came out really well. It looks good. Yeah, the reason we included it was it's a very popular for Cube.

And one of those products was we wanted to get some uncards out that we knew people liked playing in Cube. And so we made sure to include it. I think it, I forget what deck, it had to go in one of the decks, so we're like, it's five colors, but one of the decks played it, so whatever deck was in could at least play, I don't remember which color deck we put it in.

Do you remember? I don't off the top of my head. It's definitely one of the more black border silver border cards like the the foundation of it just it being a five-way split card is something that the black border rules could handle um obviously it has some presentation challenges but all of the spells themselves are really like simple utility type effects that are good and cute because he gives you a lot of options and a lot of, you know, contingencies. Like, sometimes you need to nuke an enchantment,

and sometimes you need to counter a spell. Yeah, Blast from the Past has similar qualities, where it's actually pretty... Unlike Old Foggy, that's not very functional, Blast from the Past is just super functional, and so that's another uncard that people like to drop in that Black Border can handle. It is just very weird and complex.

Yeah. So we also Sword of Dungeons and Dragons. This is our last card, and then we've got to wrap up. Okay, it's worth mentioning. Sword of D&D was originally one of the Hascon promos.

That is incorrect. No, wait. It wasn't Hascon. It wasn't originally. Sorry, it was one of the Hascon promos. That is incorrect. No, wait. It was a Hazcon. It wasn't Hazcon. It wasn't originally. Sorry. It was one of the Hazcon promos. I threw in the word originally there. That's not right. So what happened was Unstable made Sword of Dungeon Dragons.

We went to the Dungeon Dragon team and got permission and made Sword of Dungeon Dragons. Meanwhile, Hazcon was making three cards for the Hazcon box, and one of them, for reasons I can't really get into, but we couldn't end up making it. And so like, what are we going to do? And we

said, well, we do have another product with a magic card. It's sitting in Unstable. And so they pulled it and put it into Hazcon. Did it get new art, or did it have different art in Hazcon? It must have had different art or no. No, same art.

Um, the, the treatment that the Hascon promos use makes it, you know, it's shiny. It looks a little different, but it's the same basic art. Um, so it was in Unstable. It was a Hascon promo. It came back, uh, in Unsanctioned. Uh, all of this, of course, is a way for me to pitch and uh or not sell to you the listener um there's a lot of magic sets fighting for your time and attention i'm not exactly sure when you're going to be listening to this but i do want to mention

an upcoming set adventures in the forgotten realms, which is hopefully a thing I can say. Otherwise, we have already stopped recording and nothing I say matters. Yeah. Philosophically speaking, you could argue nothing I say matters in any case. What am I really doing here? I don't know. Is anybody listening to you, Matt? Hopefully you're getting me.

Is anybody listening to you, Matt? So that's just a way to kind of bring it into the future, into the now. Right. The AFR is coming and it's awesome. We often say that unsets really pave the way for Blackboarder products. And what I want to believe, this is my headcanon, is we made Sword of Dungeon Dragons. It came out unstable. Everybody saw it and they're like, oh, we could do Dungeon Dragons themed magic cards?

We should do a whole set. And so they did. So I want to believe that this inspired the whole set of Dungeon Dragons. Wizards of the Coast, a bastion of innovation, had these two major entertainment properties, Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, for a quarter of a century.

And it finally occurred to us that we could probably do some sort of crossover. Right, they saw it. They saw it in our attention. It would be the beneficiary of this innovation. Anyway, by the way, definitely pick up AFR, Dungeons & Dragons' Adventure in the Forgotten Realm. It's really, really cool.

We previewed a few cards yesterday as of the taping of this, but a few weeks ago as of when you hear this. But anyway, Matt, you know what? I see my desk. Okay, well slow down because I have one more thing to say. Okay, one more thing. Walk slowly. Back to Unsanctioned.

If you have not, I implore you, please do an internet search on the World Wide Web for unsanctioned FAQ or unsanctioned release notes. We packed so many jokes into that thing. We think you will really enjoy it. cards. Thanks to this podcast. Read through this thing. I think it's a fun read. Mark did a great job. I pitched in a little bit. And I don't think it got enough play at the time that it should have. So read that thing. It's awesome. Now that's out of the way, I can see my desk. I've made it to work. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So thank you for being with us, Matt. My pleasure, Mark. Anytime. Okay, guys. That's it for today. And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.