Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #936: Fifth Dawn

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

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

I'm put on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so I've been doing a three-part podcast series on the original Mirrodin block. I talked about Mirrodin. I talked about Darksteel. So today it's all about Fifth Dawn, the third and final set in the original Mirrodin block. So there's an interesting story today about this set. I've hinted at a little bit from my other podcasts. Okay, so what happens is first, let me explain the team because there's an interesting story behind multiple of the team members. And then I will tell the story of the making of Fifth Dawn. So the Fifth Dawn design team was myself,

Randy Buehler, Aaron Forsythe, and Gregory Marks. Okay, first let's talk Gregory Marks. So I was at a Pro Tour, I believe in Chicago. Now normally I'm not allowed to see unsolicited material. It's just a thing that I'm not allowed to do. So I was at the event and there was somebody who had made their own expansion and they were playing with people and they asked me if I wanted to play and I said oh sorry I'm not allowed to look at unsolicited material but one of our lawyers

had traveled to the event with us and I think she was standing next to me when he asked. And I said, I can't look at it. And she's like, oh, sure, I'll allow it or whatever. Like, the only time ever, the only time that anybody's ever, any of the lawyers has ever let me look at anything. And I don't even know why.

I don't know when. It's never happened before that. It's never happened since that. But for some reason, in that moment, the lawyer said, okay, you could play his set. So I did. And it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. So Greg had made a fun set. And I sort of made a mental note that, hey, this Greggy Marks seems like a decent designer. So like I had done for no

sorry this is before Shadowmoor so there's only two times I've ever had a team member that was not

an employee of Wizard of the Coast early early Magic did a little bit when nobody was an employee but since

Tempest Forward every set every design team has been people that were employees of Wizardards of the Coast. And only two examples, or sorry, not examples, the only two exceptions to that were Gregory Marks in this set and then Sean Fletcher in Shadowmore.

I had a podcast where I had Sean Fletcher on to talk about Shadowmore, so if you want to hear that, we can do that. Anyway, interesting, Greg Marks would later come to work for Wizards in R&D. So he, while he wasn't an employee at that time, he was on the team. He would later become an employee. So I guess Sean's the only one that did never be a Wizard employee to be on a team. But anyway, so he was long distance. He did not live in Seattle at the time.

So he was on the team, but we would, and this is long before Zoom and all that stuff. So we, I would just send him emails about what we were looking for. He would make designs and then we would look at the designs in the meetings. So, and I did think he came out for one week, like on vacation or something. And so he was in a couple of meetings when he came out, but mostly he was long distance. So the majority of the Darksteel team was me, Randy Buehler, and Aaron Forsythe. Now, that might sound like normal magic making, but Aaron actually, so what happened, the story of Aaron Forsythe, the quick version of the story, is I was tasked with making a magic website back in 2000. with making a magic website back in 2000.

Magic, I mean, Wizards didn't really, I mean, we technically had a website, but magic didn't have any presence on the web. And they said, hey, this is crazy. Mark, go make one. Because I had been editor-in-chief of the Duelist and I have a communications background and a writing background. So I think they put Bill in charge of doing it

and Bill put me in charge of doing it. Bill put me in charge of doing it. But part of making the website happen was we needed someone to run it. We needed an editor in chief. And I had a couple of candidates I thought were good. And it turned out that Aaron Forsyth ended up being the best choice for the position. So I advocated for Aaron to become the editor in chief. And it didn't happen right away. It's a long story. Eventually, eventually, eventually I did get Aaron hired but it it took many months for it to happen. Anyway, so Aaron's first job was at the coast was running the Magic website. So I had met Aaron on the Pro Tour. Aaron was a very good Magic player. He had won.

He had both won the one or came in second in a team Pro Tour. And he had been on the winning national team in 2000. He had made it. He had, I forget what place he came in, third or something in U.S. Nationals. He was on the U.S. National Team in 2000 with John Finkel. Anyway, they won. So he was on a winning U.S. Nationals. He was on the U.S. National Team in 2000 with John Finkel. Anyway, they won. So he was on a winning U.S. National Team, a world championship team. Anyway, very good player. So when we were putting together the fifth on team, Randy and I came up with the idea of, hey, it might be fun to have Aaron on the team. You know, Aaron has some experience with magic.

And hey, we'd get a good article out of it. You know, he could write all about being on a design team. So the original idea was that, you know, hey, we wanted to, I knew that Aaron was sort of itching to do more magic stuff, you know, and it was a good opportunity to, you know, we thought we'd get a good article out of it. So as you will see, it turns out Aaron did so well. He was such an amazing contributor that we just hired him in R&D and got someone new to run the website. So Fifth Dawn was the thing that really got us to our attention. Both new mechanics Aaron made in the set. We'll talk about that momentarily. But anyway, Aaron was on the team.

He was amazing. So that is the design team. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the making of Fifth Dawn. So I talked about last time how there's this bubble that happens where we figure things out, but the audience hasn't seen it yet. And so what happened was we had made Mirrodin. We'd made Darksteel, and I don't think it was until the very tail end of Darksteel that we kind of realized some of the problems we had made in Mirrodin and in Darksteel. So, basically, for those that don't know your history,

the Mirrodin block ended up being a very broken block. One of the most broken blocks in Magic history. Maybe second to only Urza Saga block, which was also crazy broken. Anyway, it caused a lot of problems, and we had figured that out too late to do much to Darksteel, but really before Fifth Dawn had started. So one of the things that we kind of knew going in on Fifth Dawn was, oh, well, there's a whole bunch of things that we need to be careful about. Things like artifact matters, powerful artifacts, most of our mechanics. So we started 5th Dawn saying, hey, we want you to be an inclusive part of the Mirrodin

block. Just don't do most of the things that Mirrodin did. That was the challenge. And so one of the things we had to figure out is, okay, how do we feel like part of the Mirrodin block, but not aggravate the mistakes of the Mirrodin block? And even then, by the way, we did make a few cards. I think the worst was Cranial Plating.

But anyway, mostly, mostly we sort of solved. We didn't contribute too much to the problem of the block, although there's a few cards. Okay. So, the big challenge was how do we do that? I think the answer we came up with was

one of the things about artifacts. So the idea of a colored artifact wasn't really a thing yet. I teased it for the first time in Future Sight. It showed up for the first time in Shards of Alara. We did like I said in the Mirrodin podcast, I did try to involve more color in it in general, more activations and stuff in color. A lot of that got weeded out just because there was a lot going on.

But in general, you could play any artifact in any deck. The colorlessness of artifacts, the generic mana of artifacts is still a pretty core part of artifacts. And one of the things that got us in trouble, by the way. One of the reasons we now make color artifacts a lot more frequently is having everything be colorless gets problematic when any deck can play anything. The mana system is a big part of balancing magic, and

not following the color pie, or just making things that don't care about the color pie have issues with it. And so while we still do make colorless artifacts, generic cost artifacts, most of the ones that are pushed or powerful are now colored, just so we don't imbalance things like we did in the Myrtle Black. Anyway, okay, so the main thing was artifacts were colorless. So we said, well, what if we push in the opposite direction? What if we, like, one of the things that was also true about third sets,

back when we did blocks, we would do the first set, the second set, and the third set. And the way we used to do blocks back then is, the first set would do its thing. It would, like, leave some stuff open-ended, but mostly say, hey, second, third block, you figure that out when you make it. And as we would see, that would prove a problem.

It would greatly influence me when I become the head designer. I'll get to that in a second. So anyway, we just sort of like left it be. So at this point in time, the way blocks tended to work was it was large, small, small. The large block usually had like four mechanics. And each of the small sets had like two mechanics. So Mirrodin had affinity, equipment, imprint, and entwine. Darksteel had modular and indestructible.

And then we had two new things. So the idea we liked was the idea of what if we're the set about multicolor? So a thing we had started doing in third sets beyond solving the fifth on unique problem, we often would take a turn in the third set just because players would go, hey, I'm getting tired of the normal, you know, and we would just sort of shake things up in the third set. So we're like, okay, hey, we normally shake things up. Let's just shake things up a little more than normal.

And so we leaned into the idea of multicolor. Like one of the neat things about artifacts is you really could play more colors if you wanted to because the bulk of what you were playing was colorless. So it was a little bit easier to splash colors. So we came up with this idea of a five-color theme. So we came up with this idea of a five-color theme. So if you're playing Fifth Dawn, what you want to do is have access to all five colors' mana.

Not that you need spells of all five colors. We just wanted to have mana of all five colors. And so Aaron had come up with a mechanic called Spellburst. Spellburst? Sunburst. Sunburst. So the way Sunburst works is, if it went on creatures, it went on artifacts with a generic cost, for every different color mana you used to cast a Sunburst creature,

it entered the battlefield with a plus one, plus one counter. And then on a non-creature, it entered with a charge counter for each color you used to spend. So the idea essentially is the more colors you used to cast it, color you used to spend. So the idea essentially is the more colors you use to cast it, the more powerful it would become. The bigger it would be if it's a creature, the more uses it would be. Charged gardens usually had uses. So the more powerful it would be. And the

idea was, okay, hey, we're moving away from the monocoloredness of artifacts into some of the multicoloredness and just trying to change things up. Now, one of the things I mentioned earlier was we didn't know we were doing this when we started the block. So one of the things that was frustrating was Mirrodin was basically done at the time we were doing fifth dawn and Darksteel was mostly done.

So we were able to add a few artifacts to produce multicolored mana, a couple, in Darksteel. Nothing in Mirrodin because it's too late. And then we added stuff in Fyffdawn. Now remember at the time, so this is back when blocks happened, but at that time, the way blocks worked for draft was you would draft the first set, you know, set number, you know, 1-1 111. Then you draft this. When the second set came out, you draft 112. And when the third set came out, you draft 123. So one of the big problems was when you were drafting the set, it was the last thing you drafted. So you would try to set yourself up, but you didn't really know whether you had the tools to do what the third set was asking you until you got there.

to do what the third set was asking you until you got there. Now, when Eric Lauer started, he was one that said, why aren't we starting the draft with the latest set that came out so that that could, you know, that set has the largest impact on the draft? And we changed to that. We hadn't thought of that, interestingly. Sometimes it's very interesting in R&D. Somebody will just mention something

that's kind of obvious to them that just because of whatever tradition, how we did it, we just hadn't thought of it. And as soon as someone brings it up, we're like, yeah, that's better. We should do that. Anyway, the fact that Mirrodin block worked the way it did, where we didn't understand where it was going, and the first set really didn't help with the third set, greatly influenced me.

And that when I became head designer, so I became head designer mid-champions block, which is the next block that followed. Although the first block that I really got in shape was Raffinicka, the following one. But it really shaped me, the idea of block planning, that it's not enough to just do the first set and go, hey, small sets, you'll figure it out. You needed to figure out from the very beginning how all three sets were going to function, what they were going to do, that you had to have a plan ahead of time for the whole block. And this set, this block, as well as

other blocks, really shaped me and made me, when I became head designer, really, really push that as a big thing that was important to me. Sorry. Just getting a drink because I was perched. Okay. The second mechanic that Aaron also came up with was Okay, the second mechanic that Aaron also came up with was, I think Aaron was intrigued by something that both smoothed the game, meaning, what was something that would help the game play better? And I think he was looking for something a little spiky. And so he came up with Scry. So for those who don't know, Scry I mean, Scry's no evergreen, so hopefully you know, but

Scry number, look at that number of cards off the top of your library and then put any number back on top in any order and then on the bottom in any order. So it's sort of, you've got to smooth out your draw saying, oh, let's say you sunburst not sunburst, you Scry for two. Oh, those are two cards. There's one card I really want.

This other card, eh, it's a land. I have plenty of land. I'll put the land on the bottom and I'll put the spell on top. But it allows you, it did something that was very nice in that it allowed to give you some decisions. Like, one of the interesting things about magic, at its very core, is the randomization is

important. We want a shuffled deck. Like, magic wouldn't be fun if you just started with the same cards every game. The fact that you don't know what you're getting is a big part of the drama of magic. But, at the same time, we want to give you tools to sort of adjust that and deal with that. It's not that we want to take the randomness away. We don't, because randomness is fun. But we want to give you tools to make sure that, like, on any sort of scale of randomness. I talked about this in my Magic Tools podcast, there's a range.

We want to tighten up the range. It's not that we don't want variance, because we do, but we want to be careful how much variance. And we don't want non-games. We don't want games in which you just don't draw what you need ever and nothing happens, you don't do anything. And so stuff like Scry is very valuable. So what happened with Scry was we put in the set, people really liked it and more importantly R&D really liked it. And then it's like every time we could find a place that we could use it, we did. Oh, we're

in a Greek mythology setting? Well, in Greek mythology they like to look toward the future. They did omens and things. That's Scry. Okay. And. You know, and we kept putting it wherever we could. And then finally it was like, okay, we just keep using this whenever we can. This is just valuable enough a tool.

Let's just make it evergreen. So it ended up becoming evergreen. Okay. So by the way, I did not mention this before. So this is tomato. Fifth on was tomato. It was bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

Back when we did the block sets, we had codenames that went together. I mentioned the design team. The development team was led by Brian Schneider. It was Brandon Bozzi, Randy Buehler, Mike Duanet, Mike Elliott, Devin Lowe, Henry Stern, and Worth Wolpert. When it's that long a list, that does not mean everybody worked on it at once.

Usually, back then, a development team would be four or five people. That just means a bunch of people changed over time. Once again, this is back during the design and development portion, before we got to vision design, set design, play design. The set was 165 cards, 55 commons, 55 uncommons, 55 rares. As I mentioned in the Mirrodin podcast,

we had pulled 44 cards out of a large set in this block, adding 22 to each of the small sets. So the small sets used to be 143 before we added that in and it became 165. Okay. Also in the set, there were a few other mechanics that were not named.

First off, there was a little theme we called the cog theme. So we did want to care about artifacts. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is it was an artifact set. It was an artifact block. We did want artifacts to matter. So one of the things that's interesting is it wasn't artifact set. It wasn't artifact block. We did want artifacts to matter. So one of the challenges was finding ways to sort of make them matter

in a way that wasn't going to cause bigger problems. So one of our themes was called cogs. So cogs were any artifact that costs one or less, mana value one or less, so zero or one, basically. And the idea was these tend to be very little insignificant artifacts. You can't do that much for one mana. And the idea was that we gave you things that interacted with them

that let you tutor for them or get them back from the graveyard. We gave you things that interacted with them so that you could start using them in a way... Like, one of the things I was interested in this set was I wanted to lean a little more into some fun combo stuff because there's a lot of broken things already going on.

We didn't want to be too much on the aggression side. So like, okay, I'm going to give you fun pieces you can do cool things with. So there was definitely a little bit of an experimentation theme. Not that the whole block didn't have a little bit. That artifacts push you toward the quirky. But I wanted a little more combo thing going on. I will talk about, I specifically made a four-piece combo that I'll talk to you in a second. Anyway, so we had a little theme about cogs. We had our prismatic

theme, as we called it, which is kind of a five color. Sunburst was the loudest part of that, but there were a few other things. For example, we had these cycle of rares called the Bringers. So they were cards that cost seven, whatever the color was, seven colored mana, colored mana. So they were a nine mana value card. They were creatures, but you could cast them for white, blue, black, red, green. So if you had access to white, blue, black, red, green, you could cast this much cheaper. So this prismatic flavor was played out in other ways throughout the set. And we had a cycle of beacons.

So beacons were splashy spells that you shuffled into your library instead of putting into your graveyard. It was based on a mechanic that I think Mike Elliott had made. Actually, I think it was based on an individual card I had Mike Elliott had made actually I think it was based on an individual card I had made that Mike Elliott then made a mechanic out of for Onslaught

originally we ended up pulling the mechanic from Onslaught but what we realized was on common cards it's just annoying you're shuffling constantly but as an occasional thing on super splashy cards where it'd be really exciting to draw it again the idea of shuffling it in, we thought, made sense.

So we borrowed it from something we hadn't done before. We also had made, we leaned a little more into color, like we had these color-aligned equipment. I think the classic example of that was cranial plating. That was something where it was an equipment, and then you could move it for colored men. For example, cranial plating costs two. It's an artifact equipment.

It said equipped creature gets plus one plus O for each artifact you control, which ended up... The reason this was a problem was it was so easy to get artifacts, artifact lands, and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, for black black, you could move it to another creature, attach it to another creature, and then have equipped cost of one. But the idea that you could at instant speed move it to another creature made it super powerful. Because if I attacked with two creatures, for example, or multiple creatures, whatever you didn't block, I can make this. Especially in a deck that was sort of all artifacts. It just could be so big.

Okay. The other thing that we did in the set was we finished off a few things. Well, one big thing. I talked about the Cauldre cycle. The Sword of Cauldre was in Mirrodin. The Shield of Cauldre was in Darksteel. The Helm of Cauldre. So it was an. The shield of Cauldre was in Darksteel, the helm of Cauldre.

So it was an artifact that cost three equipment. The equipped creature has First Strike, Trample, and Haste. And then for one mana, if you control the sword, the shield, and the helm, you can make a 4-4 Cauldre token and then equip all three things to it. And it was equipped two.

Helm of Cauldre was equipped two. So the idea there was, it was the first time I think we made a cross-block cycle. Where if you played all three of them together, they worked together. And that was pretty cool. Another fun thing that we had done in this set was, this was another set with You Make the Card. So for those that have never experienced You Make the Card, it's a thing we do where we go to the audience on the website and say, like week one might be, hey, pick a color. This particular time, I think it was pick a color or artifact.

So you can pick colored or colorless. If you pick a color, we say, what card type do you want? So I think the first one we ever did, we just let you pick a color. They picked green. They said pick a creature creature pick a card type they picked creature and they ended up making what's the card called

Mr. Baby Cakes was the design name it was a little creature that got bigger anyway I have to remember the name of it so that was the first you make the card we decided to do a second you make the card on the second you make the card beside picking a color and I think we didn't give you

green since we'd done green last time, in its place we let you pick artifact colors. And so players pick colors and they made an artifact. So Crucible Worlds costs three. You may play lands from the graveyard. It's probably the most powerful of the you make the cards. There have been four you make the cards.

And it was a very elegant design, a very cool design. Oh, for people asking, just because I bring up You Make the Card, when do we do another You Make the Card? I do hope we do another one. They are a crazy amount of work. Oh, I didn't finish explaining You Make the Card.

So anyway, the audience picks the card type, and then you submit mechanics for that card type. And then you help vote on what cost and what power toughness if it's a creature. And you pick the artist. And you pick the sketch. And you pick the flavor. You write flavor text. And you pick the flavor text you want. The idea is at every point along the way anything the audience can vote on, the audience votes on.

We've made some pretty cool cards with it. When is there another one? I hope we'll do another one. They are an insane amount of work behind the scenes. I ran the first two. I think Ethan ran the second two. And so they're tricky to do. I hope we do

another one. I think we've made some fun things from them. It's just definitely some challenges. Anyway, how are we doing on time here? I'm not quite to work yet. So, I'm going to talk about a few... Well, sorry. Let me wrap up, and then I'm going to talk about a few cards that were in the set.

So, the set came out. It obviously wasn't nearly as problematic as the first two sets, other than a handful of cards. I mean, I know Criminal Plating was one of them. The set ended up being not nearly as problematic, although it's a high bar. I'm very proud of Fifton.

There's a lot of fun inventive cards for all the Johnny Jennys out there. There's a lot of interesting build-around cards. Anyway, I was happy with what we came up with. I was frustrated that we hadn't figured out ahead of time where we were going, although I guess we didn't know it was going to break. But anyway, it did inspire me and influence me when I became head designer to change how we made blocks. So it did have an impact on me.

Okay, so now I want to talk about some of the cards. So one of the things that I had talked about earlier in the podcast was I had made four cards that were a combo. Let me explain. So they were called the Stations. So there was Grinding Station. These are all artifacts. It costs two. Tap, sacrifice an artifact. Target player mills three cards. And whenever an artifact enters the battlefield, untap card name. Blasting station costs two.

I'm sorry, costs three. You tap it, sacrifice a creature, deal one to any target. And then whenever a creature enters the battlefield, untap it. Selving station costs six. It's an artifact, obviously. Tap. Return a cog, basically. An artifact that costs mana value one or less

from your graveyard to the battlefield. And whenever a creature dies, untap card name. And finally, the last one was Summoning Station. It costs seven. Tap. Create a 2-2 P pincher colorless token. And whenever an artifact goes to the graveyard

from the battlefield, untap it. So the way this works is they chain with each other. So for example, blasting station mills, but, what is it? Whenever a creature goes to the graveyard, what is it? Whenever a creature goes to the graveyard... What is it? Is that the one?

For example... Sorry, I'm doing this wrong. Summoning Station makes a creature and Blasting Station, whenever a creature enters the battlefield, untap it. So the way each of these worked is that you were able to... Like, one of them sacked a creature, another character went and the creature went in the graveyard.

One of them sacked an artifact, another character went and the artifact went in the graveyard. I think the, so yeah, the basic idea was that these chained together and so that if you had two of them out and the out condition of one was the in condition of the other, they would link together. Then if you got all four out, they would make a cycle and they would basically let you win the game. You did, by the way, need one cog, one artifact with a mana value of one or less.

You did need this. You needed these four and a cheap artifact and then you would basically win the game. I thought it was a cool idea and it took a long time to design it. It took a long time to sort of piece it all together. But I was very proud of how it all came together. Okay, next, another fun card was Door to Nothingness. So it was an artifact that costs five, entrance battlefield tapped. For Wooburg Wooburg, so white, white, blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, green, tap, sacrifice it,

target player loses the game. So real quickly, the original design was actually Destroy Target Player or Creature was the original design. And I thought that was the, when I made that card, I thought it was the most entertaining card in the world. Both Aaron and I really liked it. But the rules manager at the time said, we have awards for a target player. Like, if you want them to lose the game, you say they lose the game. You can't destroy a player.

That isn't something we could do. So I wasn't allowed to do it. I later made an unstable. I finally made the cart unstable. What is it? It's the counts card. Oh, yeah. I'm blank the card unstable. What is it? It's the Count's card. Oh, yeah. I'm blanking on names today. But there's a...

What's his name? Count Von Doom, is that right? Baron Von Doom? Baron Von Doom, I think is his name. Anyway, he has a legendary creature card that you have to count down from five. But when you get to one, you get to destroy a target player, which I was not allowed to do in normal magic. Another fun card we came up with was Staff of Domination. So an artifact that costs three.

One lets you untap the Staff of Domination. Two tap lets you gain life. Three tap lets you untap target creature. Four tap lets you tap target creature. And five tap lets you draw a card. And so the idea is, no matter what mana you have, you can use the mana on the Staff of Domination. And we spent a lot, we really wanted to do an artifact that had activation of one, two, three, four,

and five. And we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do that. One of the ingenious ideas we came up with was that the one untapped it, so that that allowed you to have different values where you could use even beyond just one through five. And I thought that was, I was tickled pink.

I really, one of the things that I was, like I said, there was a lot of really cool design work in the set where it was just very innovative, sort of neat designs, and I appreciated that. Okay, another sort of cool Engineer Explosives. So this was an artifact that cost X. Sunburst.

So that means when it entered the battlefield for every color you spent for this put a charge counter on this. And then two sac destroy each non-land permanent with a mana value equal to the charge counters.

But it had to match exactly. So let's say, for example, my opponent had a lot of two drops. If I am very careful about only spending two colored mana, and I put two charge counters on this, then I could sacrifice it to destroy all permanents that had a mana value of two. It was a very interesting thing. It's a fun way to use Sunburst. And the way that it's kind of cool, Matt,

because you cared about certain numbers, it wasn't always like a lot of our cards were like play as many colors as possible this was a little nuance of oh how many colors do I want and there are interesting challenges sometimes where like oh I don't

I need more access to colors or more of a certain color they're like I don't want it to be three I want it to be two and so I have to write so I get the right you know colored mana to do that. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Okay, another combo piece we made. And we were very conscious in trying to, like I said, be a little more combo-ish in this set. So Quirk Clan Ironworks. It was an artifact that costs four. It says, sac an artifact,

add two, colorless mana to your mana pool. That was the other card we made in the set that I think caused some problems. It's a very cool card. It's what we call an engine card. An engine card means it allows you to turn one resource into another resource. And so the example here is

it lets you turn artifacts into mana. And the way that's very valuable is there are ways to generate artifacts and there's ways to generate artifact tokens and such. And so there are decks that would use this very efficiently to produce some sort of artifacts which then uses to fuel some sort of mana.

And usually you spend the mana to make more artifacts. Usually the way that an engine works is you're finding some system by which from the mana I get, I can make more artifacts. So I'm going up with mana over time. Like, oh, I sacrificed an artifact, I get two mana. With that two mana, I can make two artifacts.

You know, back and forth. This is another thing that played nicely with cogs and stuff. We had a bunch of ways to interact with cheap things. And so cheap things worked really well with plant ironwork, so that was definitely one of the things that interacted with it. One final card I'll talk about.

I'm almost to work. So for those that do not know, I love doubling, and so I made a card called Doubling Cube, which by the way, in design was called Doubling Cube. So for those that also don't know, Doubling Cube, which, by the way, in design was called Doubling Cube. So for those that also don't know, Doubling Cube is in Backgammon mostly,

although I guess it gets used in a few other games. But it's most famous in Backgammon. It's a die you use. The way it works is when you're playing a game for points, like you're playing Backgammon, whoever wins the game wins a point. So the Doubling Cube says, hey, let's play this game for points. Like you're playing backgammon. Whoever wins the game wins a point. So the Dublin Cube says,

hey, let's play this game for two points instead of one point. But if you don't want it, you can concede right now and I only win one point or we can continue playing this game for two points. And then the other opponent,

the other player, now has the ability, if they want any point, to double it again. So it'd make it worth four points. And you can make it worth four points. And you can make it worth eighth points. The idea of the doubling cube is, strategically, when you're playing a game with lots of games and you get ahead, it allows you to take games that you kind of know where it's going and

end the game. So anyway, the doubling cube is a very cool thing. Growing up, I played a lot of backgammon. My family liked playing backgammon. And my mom and I, in particular, used to play backgammon all the time. So anyway, it was something... I loved the idea of making a cube called a doubling cube. And I looked at a lot of things to double.

I love doubling. And what I ended up coming up with was something that doubled mana. So it costs two. It's an artifact. For three and tap, you double the mana in your mana pool. So the idea is... Now, obviously, it costs three.

So it really is only good with making larger bits into even larger amounts. Because if I only have a little bit of mana, I have to pay three to do it. So I really need to have four mana in my pool before I'm starting to gain access to things. Because if I have three mana in my pool and I spend three, well, I get three, but I just spend three.

Anyway, I think I made the card and then I begged the creative team to keep the name. I'm like, please, please, please. You know, look, we're a game. Like, gamers like our game. Dublin Cube is a fun gamer reference. So anyway, they did keep it, and so we got Dublin Cube in. And I think the other thing that's interesting is whenever I make doubling cards,

I always put double in the text. And oftentimes they have to say things like X, where X is the amount of whatever you're doubling. But this time I think they actually said double. So it's one of my few doubling cards I made that the word double gets to stay in the rules deck. So excited by that. Anyway, guys, I am moments from work. So I had a lot of fun making Fifth Dawn.

Like I said, it was a daunting start. We had a big challenge in our way. But one of the things that's fun sometimes, some of my favorite magic stories are where you kind of get backed in a corner and you have to figure it out. And I was very proud of our solution. I think there was a lot of fun stuff there. It led to a lot of interesting gameplay in different formats.

Both Sunburst and Scry saw plenty of play. Like I said, Scry was so popular, it ended up becoming Evergreen. So, you know, I look back at the end, we found Aaron. I mean, we discovered Aaron. I mean, we knew who Aaron was. But, like, we discovered Aaron's design skills, and we ended up hiring Aaron. So, 5th Dawn definitely had a lot of implications and affected a lot of things downstream.

Like I said, it really cemented some stuff for me about block planning. So, it was a very influential block, even though if it was the weakest block in the Mirrodin block, although that's not. Being the weakest block in the Mirrodin block is not much of a bar tactic leader. Anyway, guys, I am now at

work. So, we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. Anyway, guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about the making of Fifth Dawn and about the entire Mirrodin block. It's been fun talking about it. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.