Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #934: Mirrodin

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

This is the first of a three-part series looking at the design of original Mirrodin block.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I am going to do a three-part special where I'm going to talk about the three different sets in the original Mirrodin block. And so I'm going to today talk all about the making of Mirrodin, and then I will do a future podcast where I talk about the making of Darksteel, and then I'll do one talking about the making of Fifth Dawn. Okay, so let's start with the making of Mirrodin. Okay, so we go back to, the set came out October 2nd, 2003, which means that we were working on this, we used to work ahead, I mean, we always have worked ahead, but a little less ahead than right now. So we probably were working ahead about a month, maybe, not a month, a year, a year to a year and a half. Now we work closer to two to three years ahead of time.

But anyway, so it was like 2002, 2001, 2002. And we were making, or we were about to make a brand new set. So Invasion had happened, and Invasion had been the first sort of themed block in which it was about multicolor. And then we had Odyssey, and that was about the graveyard. And we had Onslaught, and that was about tribal creature types. But anyway, I had an idea for something I really wanted to do. My first favorite magic set

at all time had been Antiquities. And Antiquities had been an artifact themed set. And I really wanted to do an artifact themed block. So I went to Bill. Bill Rose was the head designer at the time. And I said, Bill, you know, I think we should do, you know,

we had done multicolor and creature types and graveyard. I said, another really popular theme is artifacts. Let's make an artifact block. Bill said, okay. And so I did a podcast with Tyler Beelman where we talked about making this. And Tyler and I worked really hard in trying to make a brand new world. This was one of the first worlds where it was,

we were leaving, well, I guess, before this, we had, like, Invasion and Odyssey and Onslaught had all been on Dominaria. And one of my big pushes was I really felt we needed to get off Dominaria.

And I said, okay, if we're going to do an artifact set, let's make an artifact world. Because I knew the set needed to have off Dominaria. And I said, okay, if we're going to do an artifact set, let's make an artifact world. Because I knew the set needed to have a lot of artifacts in it. So let's make a world that makes sense. And I think I originally called it Metal World was my name for it. We have to have Metal World. And so my team, my design team, I led it, was Bill Rose, Brian Tinsman, Mike Elliott, and Tyler Bielman.

So my idea basically going in was I wanted artifacts to matter. I wanted to make a set that was all about artifacts. And I wanted a good chunk of the set to be artifacts. And so the idea was, now, back in the day, colored artifacts weren't yet a thing. Like, we didn't even hint at that until Future Sight. And then we didn't do it until the first time until Shards of Lara anyway I knew that we needed to get

color in it so I suggested that we make a lot of activations in color that would later what happened when the set got done was Bill who was the head designer felt that we had too much in it and was pulling some stuff out and a lot of the colored stuff got pulled out.

Also, energy got pulled out. Anyway, so we really started with this idea of how do we enable artifacts? What do we need to do with artifacts? And the idea was, okay, what if a lot of the set is artifacts? Obviously, back in the day, artifacts were all generic, man. So, okay, a lot of decks could play them. We talked about having colored activations, and little of that

remained. Not as much as I originally planned. Just so, like, different decks would want different things. One of the challenging things about artifacts is any deck can play them. But really, the idea was, how can we care about artifacts? And there are a bunch of different ways that we felt we could care about them. Two of the biggest led to two of the mechanics.

So one was, we had been talking for years about the idea that, you know, equipment as a concept. Like, Magic had made swords, but then it was, like, you, the player, had the sword, or we tried to do these things where you would tap it and didn't untap it. And it was kind of flavored like flying carpet or something. It was kind of flavored like the creature had it. But it was kind of a loose connection. And so we had talked a lot about wanting to make equipment and make it something that the game could have.

It would be cool to say, I have a sword and I give my goblin a sword. that the game could have. It would be cool to say, I have a sword, and I give my goblin a sword. The very first version of it we tried was basically exactly like auras, except they were artifacts. So what if we just made artifact versions of auras? But one of the things that came back pretty quick is, you know, if I have an enchantment on a creature and the creature dies, well, I don't expect the enchantment to fall off. But if I have a sword and I give it to my goblin and my goblin dies, well, the sword's still there. So it just kind of felt wrong to act like an aura.

And we knew auras had this inherent disadvantage to them. And we're like, if we're going to make something new, why build in the same disadvantage? So the idea we then played around with was, well, what if it's an object that you, it goes on the battlefield, and then you can do something to give it to a creature. That's where equipping came from. So equipping was our, basically our second attempt at it was, had the equipped version. And the idea really was, the question we had was, how do I make a sword such that I give it to my goblin, and then when my goblin dies, the sword's still there,

and I can give it to a different creature? That's kind of how a quip came to be, is, well, how do you make that happen? And we're like, well, if the act of giving it to something is an ability when it's on the battlefield, we could have it fall off and then have it do that again. And so equipping really came from, how do the rules make this work? How do we have it so that it sort of falls off when the creature dies?

And so anyway, it was a pretty cool idea. And we toyed around a bit with how exactly to make equip work. And I think in the end what we realized was that just there's a cost. Most likely a mana cost. Later on, you know, Magic is fooled around with non-mana costs, but mostly, you know, whenever we have costs, mostly mana is the way we do it. And it seemed like, okay, I pay some amount of mana to get the thing, and then I pay some amount of mana to put it on my thing. Now,

one of the trouble we ran into in Mirrodin is whenever you do something for the first time, it's hard to gauge and understand the power level of how it works. Since then, we've made equipment a lot over the years, and we have a much better understanding of how much should it cost, how much should the equip cost be. There's a lot of different factors that go into it. There's a lot of knobs on it, but we kind of misunderstand.

So one of Mirrodin's problems, I mean, this is an ongoing theme you'll see about Mirrodin, was we undershot on power level on a bunch of things. One of them was equipment. We made some very powerful equipment. Now, we broke things even more than equipment, so the equipment isn't the poster child of the brokenness. We'll get to that in a second.

But it was something that really sort of... It was a good example of us playing in brand new space. Now, equipment almost instantaneously became evergreen. Once we made equipment, we're like, okay, this is a pretty cool thing to have. So once we made equipment,

it went in right away. Oh, I also want to point out, by the way, there's four mechanics in the set. Equipment, Affinity, Entwine, and Imprint. All four of which were named in design, and the name stayed in print, which I think is the only time that has

ever happened where every single mechanic in design kept its design name mechanics kept their design name in print. I think that's the only time it's ever happened. Might be the only time it ever happens, but it did happen once. Okay, so we also were trying to find other ways to make artifacts matter. So the next mechanic we looked to

was Affinity. I think we had messed around a little bit. Mike Elliott had made a mechanic that, it wasn't quite Affinity, but it was something that, I'm trying to remember how it worked. I think Mike had a mechanic where there were, it was some cost reduction thing. And I liked it and I applied it to Artifact.

It was, I forget exactly how Mike's version worked. It had nothing to do with Artifacts. But I liked the, I liked sort of building the cost production, and I liked it scaling based on whatever. And in this case, I applied it to artifacts. So I saw something that was a little bit different and then inspired me to come up with Affinity. So I'll say Mike and I sort of had...

Mike had the original idea, and then I applied it in a way that sort of made it more artifact-y, because it wasn't originally about artifacts. But anyway, and the idea was, well, what if things just got cheaper for the more artifacts you had? You know, and we decided to make it scaling just because it sounded cool. And once again, one of the major themes we were trying to do in original Mirrodin was artifacts matter. The more artifacts, the better. We really wanted you to just play... There were a lot of artifacts in the set. We wanted you to play

a deck full of artifacts was kind of the flavor. And so Affinity really hammered that home and said, hey, you really want to play lots of artifacts because, for example, here's an artifact creature that costs six or eight or whatever and if you have enough artifacts, it's artifacts because for example here's an artifact creature that costs you know what six or eight or whatever and if you have enough artifacts it's free or here are you know colored

spells that cost a lot of mana but if you have enough artifacts they cost you know a single blue mana or something um and affinity was in pretty early we played around with it and um the thing we liked about it was it went on any card type. You could put it on, you know, other artifacts, on enchantments, creatures, instant sorceries. It could go anywhere because it was cost reduction. And it really sort of hammer-hoped the theme and made you say, hey, I just want to play a lot of artifacts, which was part of the goal. which was part of the goal.

We have since, by the way, learned that all-in strategies, where, like, let's, you know, make your deck all this thing, are difficult to balance and are definitely... It's not that we don't do them, we do, but they are a challenge. And especially in the set where, like, the way it ended up, I think over half the cards were artifacts. Which at the time, by the way, like, most sets, you know, had a handful, maybe 5% of the cards were artifacts. Maybe if it had a bunch of artifacts, 10% of the cards were artifacts.

50% was a giant jump up, you know. And so we really, one of the things that was really cool was the, this was one of the first times we really sort of changed the scale of how the set was put together, in a sense that it took Asfan, it was the first kind of set that really took Asfan and, like, pushed it, like, oh, we want to make artifacts matter, well, what if the artifact As fan is seven and a half or eight or whatever it was. You know, like half the packs were artifacts basically. So that was a pretty powerful, impactful thing to do.

And the other thing about it is making artifact creatures I mean, we did make non-creature artifacts as well, but having a lot of artifact creatures just meant that every deck had kind of access to creatures in a way that was

you really had a lot of choices because normally in a normal set, if you chop up things, you know, I'm playing white, well only 20% of the cards are white. And so, you know, if I'm playing white-blue, let's say, I have 20% of the white cards and 20% of the blue cards, so only 40% of the cards really I could use.

Okay, maybe there's a few generic artifacts I can consider, but that's not something that I can use. There's only so much I can use. In a set where a good chunk of the set was generic, the ability to sort of play a lot of different things went way up. And, for example, Mirrodin was kind of the first set I think where really, you could draft a mono-color deck. That just was a viable thing that you could do.

I think that was the first set that really allowed that. I mean, there were things like Urza Saga where black was just so crazy powerful that you could play mono-black. But, barring a few weird things where it was just unbalanced, this was the first set kind of design where you could play sort of not just monocolor,

but any color monocolor if you wanted to. So anyway, Affinity went in really early. Equipment and Affinity were in from almost the very beginning. And we toyed around with them. We experimented with them. Next is Imprint. So I had come up with a card that I called Clone Machine. Uh, you guys might now know it as Soul Foundry.

Uh, I put it in some set, not, not mirrored in some previous set. Uh, I don't, Tempest, I don't remember where I put it. Odyssey, somewhere I put it. And the rules manager at the time said, Oh, I think I can make this work, but it's complicated. And, you know, and we ended up not doing it just because there was a lot of, it was a lot of rules to support one single card. And then Brian Tinsman came up, I think in Saviors of Kamigawa,

came up with another thing where you sort of, you took a card and then the card that you exiled, the card that was in play, cared about it. And I realized that there was something cool there, that there's this neat customizability going on. And I think we got a new rules manager around Mirrodin. So I love this idea of what if, like, because not only did I want to make a lot of artifact creatures, I wanted to make cool artifacts. Like, one of the fun things to me about artifacts, and you I want to make a lot of artifact creatures, I wanted to make cool artifacts. Like, one of the fun things to me about artifacts,

and you can see that in a lot of artifact sets, is to me, artifacts have a very Johnny quality, Johnny Jenny quality, in that they do weird things that you can build around them. Like, it's kind of fun to just have these artifacts that just do strange things that you then can build around. And I wanted to make sure that Mirrodin, being an artifact set, was chock full of these. For example, Mindslaver was a card I had made for Tempest

that at the time the rules manager said I couldn't do it. And, you know, we had a new rules manager, so I was able to do it here. I was looking for what are strange and interesting. Mindslaver is the one where you take over the opponent's turn, for those that don't know Mindslaver. Anyway, I was looking for what are strange and interesting. Mind Slaver's the one where you take over the opponent's turn, for those that don't know Mind Slaver. Anyway, I was looking for weird and quirky things to do, and I really, once I realized that Brian

and my card basically were sort of connected thematically, I came up with this idea of okay, well what if we had this mechanic, it only went on Artifact, so it's an Artifact set, and it represented you sort of crafting your artifact so that you could sort of shape what it did. And I was fascinated by it,

and so we ended up calling it Imprint. And the idea basically was you had to exile a card. Different cards could exile from different places. Some was from your hand, some was from the graveyard, some was from the battlefield. You just had to sort of get a card. And then the idea was you always... Imprint went on an artifact in the set.

And then it cared... Something about the artifact had to care about the quality of the card imprinted. And ideally in a way that was a little more grandiose than like color. You know, something in which it would be a memory issue if you didn't have it there. Like,

Soul Foundry, for example, where you exile a creature, and then you get to make copies of that creature. The artifact makes token copies of the creature. Might be complicated, but the fact that you can exile, well, you have the card right there. So, for all intents and purposes, you could tuck the card underneath the artifact you're using, so there's a reminder.

Well, I'm making, what am I making? Exactly this. So the fact that you X out the card and could stick it with it meant that, okay, there's memory issues, but the card is sitting there as a memory issue. And the other thing was, this, we had our new rules manager.

I want to say, my guess is it was John Carter. That's my guess who the rules manager was. I apologize if I have the wrong rules manager. But anyway, we had a new rules manager who was, you know, eager to sort of figure out new things. And they, I showed them imprinted. They were excited. And it turned out that I was worried because there had been problems with the clone machine. I was worried that it would lose work. But it really ended up being not a problem at all. And it more became an issue on our end. The rules could support all sorts of stuff.

I really laid down the law that said, okay, it only goes to artifacts. It really has to shape something in a way that goes beyond simple memory. That it really is impactful. And we made a bunch of... It turned out that imprints are hard to design. They're very flavorful, and there's some really fun ones that we did make, but they're a challenge to make,

and we ended up not making a lot of them. In fact, I think Fifth Dawn, the third set of blocks, I think I had one of them in it. Just enough to say, hey, this was a thing in the block. Anyway, so then. So what happened was we also had energy.

So we, one of the, real quickly, the energy story is I liked the idea of something like serrated arrows, which was from Homeland, where you had three charges, right? You had like three arrows, basically. And I liked the idea of artifacts where you had so many uses. So we used charge counters. And then it dawned on us that it might be fun if you could use charge counters from any of your artifacts. So like if I had two different artifacts, each had three uses, that I could crisscross

them. And then I realized the simplest way to do that was rather than caring about the counters on the cards, was just give you the player a counter and then you could use that counter on whatever you wanted to use it. So we made energy pretty close to the way it ended up in Kaladesh and then what happened was when we turned the file over Bill said look it's it's a little there's a little too much complexity going on you know um affinity and all the the artifacts already were a big challenge. Energy just was a little bit too much.

He also, I had a lot more color entwined into things. And Bill pulled out, not all of it, but pulled out some of it. Because Bill, I mean, Bill was trying to simplify things. I think I would not have pulled the color out in retrospect. But I get why, I mean, Energy made a lot of sense in Mirrodin, but I get why he got pulled. I mean, there was a lot going on. But the one thing Bill did bring up was that he felt we were missing something. And what he felt we were missing was something spell-oriented.

Affinity went on permanence. Imprint went on permanence. Equipment was a permanent. There was nothing that went on permanence. Imprint went on permanence. Equipment was a permanent. There was nothing that went on spells. And so he said, can I find a spell mechanic? And the other thing was, I think we were looking for something that, for more mana sinks, so you could spend your mana on something. And so I went to bed one night.

Like, I think I had figured out all the parameters of what I wanted. Okay, it needs to go on spells. It needs to let you spend extra mana. It needs to be something that... There were a whole bunch of parameters, I guess. And I went to bed and in my dreams, I dreamed... In my dream, I saw it.

Oh, sorry. The mechanic was Entwine. So Entwine is a mechanic where it's a modal effect. It has two effects. And then if you pay was Entwine. So Entwine is a mechanic where it's a modal effect. It has two effects, and then if you pay the Entwine cost, you get both effects. And the idea is the effects are synergistic. So combining them usually gets something greater than some of its parts. But anyway,

I had this dream. I like, in the dream, I made it Entwine, and then I woke up and wrote it down. Like, I remember waking up and writing it down. It's the only magic mechanic I ever remember making in my sleep. And it ended up being a really fun mechanic. It filled all the roles we needed. And so Entwine was the final thing that we had added to it.

Okay, so I've got a few other elements of the set. Let me talk about Artifact Lands. So I was really trying to find ways to sort of hammer... So what happened creatively, for the first time in forever, we were making a brand new world. The last time we had made a brand new world was Tempest. So it had been a while.

There was Urza Saiga... Oh, sorry, Mercadian Mask. Mercadian Mask was the last time we had made a brand new world. But anyway, since Mercadie Masks, so there have been four or five years, four years, I think, since Mercadie Masks, we wanted to make a brand new world. The creative team was a bit different

than it had been back then. Tyler Beelman was in charge of it. Brady Dommermuth was there. Jeremy Cranford, I think, was the art director. there. Jeremy Cranford, I think, was the art director. Anyway, so the... Tyler and I had spent a little bit of time talking about what we could do.

We really liked this idea of an artificially created plane. Tyler and I had come up with this three-year story that didn't end up happening. I've talked about it on another podcast. But anyway, when it got to the actual creative team, they were all in on the idea of some sort of metallic world or artificially made world. And then they come up with this idea

that it was a world that was artificially created and that something about the world over time slowly imbued metal into the inhabitants. And so what happened was somebody, Memnarch it turned out, had pulled things from other worlds into this world and enough time had gone by that we had started to see the native creatures

start to, you know, their bodies, the metal started entering their bodies. And so, now, we had artifact creatures that were more mechanical in nature, and then we had creatures that had elements of metal in them, although we had not yet done colored artifacts, so they weren't artifacts. Later on in Esper, we would start, like,

oh, you're part artifact, we'd start making you an artifact, but the technology didn't exist yet. Also, we made the mirrors. I did a whole podcast on the mirrors recently, so you can go listen to my mirror podcast. You know, so we wanted to sort of craft a brand new world and make things that were fun. You know, we wanted the world to have a lot of creature types people know, but we wanted it to be, you know, uniquely that. have a lot of creature types people know, but we wanted to be, you know, uniquely that. So once we had made this sort of artifact world, I liked the idea of artifact lands.

And the idea being, well, since lands are, you know, you don't want your lands to get destroyed, and that this set was going to have a lot of artifact destruction, I said, okay, well, being an artifact has some pluses, you know, because there are things that count artifacts, but it has some minuses because people are going to be playing artifact destruction standards. So, yeah, be careful how many

artifact lands you play. That was the idea in my head. But anyway, so it turns out that I was a bit naive. It's funny, at the time the developers talked about whether they were supposed to pull them or not, and I actually said to Randy, I said, Randy, look, if you need to pull them, pull them.

I think they're cool. I think they do a lot of fun things, but I get it if they're being degenerate or something, you know, if you need to pull them, pull them. And Randy in the end decided not to pull them. And they ended up being problematic. I think we banned six... I think there were five Artifact Lands in Mirrodin, and we

did another one in Darksteel. And at one point we banned all of them. In fact, by the way, a little piece of trivia, I think it was the Artifact Lands, because I made all six of them, that got me... Like, at the time Richard Garfield had designed more banned cards than anybody.

And I passed him in the banning of the Mirrodin stuff. I had made a lot of the Mirrodin stuff, including all the Artifact Lands. And I think it was the Artifact Lands that put me over the top. I'm not proud of having, I'm just, the fact that I have more banned cards is not something to be proud of. I'm not proud of it. I'm just pointing out that, I mean, I just made a lot of cards. And I made a lot of cards early in Magic where development was still finding its feet. But anyway, so Artifact Lands was a cool—and to this day, I think Artifact Lands, when used kind of for fun, they do a lot of fun things. So what happened, by the way, for those that don't know, as happens oftentimes with Artifact Sets, things got a little out of hand.

as happens oftentimes with artifact sets, things got a little out of hand. Affinity got quite strong, although the affinity that I should point out wasn't, I mean, it had affinity in it. As time went on, it had less affinity in it. But it really was this mass of using all these powerful artifacts. And one of the challenges was, it had the problem we called the blob,

which was, because it used so many colorless things to it, that if you just banned one thing, it could survive multiple bannings because it was just using so many different things. And the fact that it had such a colorless base let it splash colors pretty easily, so that not only could it have the best artifacts,

generic artifacts, it could have the best colored cards as well. Anyway, the Mirrodin block was one of the, from a constructed standpoint, it caused a lot of problems. And if you know your history, all artifact sets, well not all, a lot of artifact blocks have had issues just because it's hard to balance artifacts. It's the reason that we started moving toward colored artifacts, because

when every artifact's generic and you have a lot of power there, it just, it powers up everything and it's a really hard thing to stop. And so, that's the reason why we still make some generic artifacts, but whenever we want to kind of push an artifact, we make it colored, because that's one of the ways to sort of

balance it so that it's, not every deck is playing it. Anyway, there was a lot of other cool things in the making of Mirrodin. You know, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out sort of how best to make artifacts happen. How, you know, the, I mean, the mirror, a great example of, like, we liked the idea. Like, one of the things that's interesting is, I'll use the mirror as an example, but it's sort of symptomatic of a larger thing,

which is, what do artifacts do? Oh, artifacts produce mana. Okay, well, what if we took stones, and instead of being, like, we took a lot of, here's something that magic had made. So stones were two manas that you tap for one color. I think they enter tapped and you tap for one color. We said, okay, well, what if instead of being...

What if we made those creatures? And the fact they have summoning sickness keeps you from tapping them on the first turn. And the fact that creatures makes them a little bit more vulnerable so you can destroy them with creature destruction as well as artifact destruction. And so we had a lot of fun sort of seeing, like, one of the neat things about doing a set

that's really themed toward one card type is it's fun to say, hey, normally we make this in this card type, but, hey, we want to make it. So, for example, we made artifacts that fundamentally acted like sorceries because they entered the battlefield and didn't affect. Equipment, in a lot of ways, had some functioning like auras did.

And we made a bunch of artifacts that had static abilities that were very enchantment-like, although enchantments and artifacts overlap a lot. And we made a lot of artifact creatures. And we took a lot of... creatures and we took a lot of... I mean, one of the fun things to do was we looked back in Magic and said, what are fun artifacts from the past?

We did a lot of riff on existing artifacts that people liked. We took some of taking artifacts and tweaked them into creatures. You know, we really had a lot of fun sort of saying, what can we do and how can we do this? We also...

The other thing that we got to do, and this is unique, true of any set in which you lean into themes, is we really got to explore how do all the colors care about artifacts. Like one of the interesting things is in a vacuum, in the default, not every color cares about everything. So one of the things when you make a set in which you lean into it, like okay, blue is the most friendly to artifacts. Okay, but now we're making a set all about artifacts. How do the other colors care about artifacts? And it's where you start seeing sort of, like, red sack artifacts is a larger theme. It existed before that,

but we started pushing it a lot more. White sort of affinity for, I mean, obviously, equipment didn't exist until then, but we started giving white this affinity for, I mean, affinity might be the wrong word, it's that with affinity. We made white sort of tied to equipment in a way that went on from there,

where they really like equipping their creatures. They're building their army, and so they like equipment. And so there's a lot of themes that we wove in that were part of sort of, that have become sort of ingrained in how, like one of the things that happened post Mirrodin, I think, is I think we just started going up a little bit in artifacts overall. Not every set, it varies, but I think on average

the number of artifacts we made is higher post-Mirrodin than it was pre-Mirrodin. And that, you know, we, like I know, we... Like I said, we've embraced colored artifacts and other things with it. But the thing about Mirrodin that was really interesting is it was very popular. People loved the theme.

It was also very, very powerful. So part of the reason it was popular was the power level. Like I said, affinity probably was the most powerful thing. But there was a lot of artifact synergy that was insanely powerful. Equipment was over-costed at the time, although we've since fixed equipment. Entwine and Imprint both saw some play, but Affinity really was the runaway from Mirrodin.

Oh, by the way, the set size, and I'll just think about the set. So the set was 306 cards 110 commons 88 uncommons 88 rares one of the interesting things we did

during this block was prior to this sets actually had been bigger they had been 350 and what we did is we took 44 cards out of the large set

to add 22 cards to each of the small sets so we made the large set a little bit smaller and made the small sets a little bit bigger. The other thing that happened for the first time in Mirrodin is we introduced the race class model, which was the idea that creature types

on things that were more humanoid-ish, one of the things would represent what it is, and one would represent what it did. So before that, for example, you could be a goblin or you could be a wizard, but you weren't often a goblin wizard. And as of this set, we said, okay, if you're a goblin wizard,

you're going to be both a goblin and a wizard. Also, Mirrodin was the set, because of that, that introduced human. So human, for the first time, showed up in Mirrodin. Also, a little history in Mirrodin. Also a little history on Mirrodin. Mirrodin we experimented with. We changed the artifact frame. Well, as of 8th edition, we changed the frames. So the artifact frames were different. And Mirrodin was the set where we tried not putting color in activation costs.

Sorry, what I mean by that is if you had a red activation cost on a card, the red symbol wasn't red. Huge mistake. I think we did it for one set and it was clear right away. None of us, by the way, in R&D wanted to do that. I think it was like a cost-cutting measure that I think people said, oh, it'll be fine. No one will have a problem with it.

And the people immediately had a problem with it. Also, there was a problem at the time that the artifacts in the white cards looked a little too similar, which in a set all about artifacts was not ideal. But anyway, that, my friends, is the story of the design of Mirrodin. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm at 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. See you next time.