Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #971: UNF with Chris Mooney

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Chris Mooney was my strong second on Unfinity from the first day of exploratory design to the last day of set design. We sit down to talk about the stories of several card designs.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition. Okay, we're talking about Infinity and I have a guest today. So Chris Mooney was my right-hand person from the very, very first day of Exploratory Design to the very last day of like the Polish, which is the part after Set Design. And so I'm real excited to have Chris here to talk all about lots of individual cards. Hey, Chris. Hello. Excited to be here. Yes, it was a long, it was a very long journey.

But it was, yeah, it was so much fun working on this set. And I'm excited to talk about some of the fun behind-the-scenes stories of these cards. Okay, so the first card we're going to talk about is called Octo Opus. So let me read the card, and then you will tell me the origin of Octo Opus. So, three blue blue enchantment. When Octo Opus enters the battlefield, create a 4-4 blue Octopus Performer creature token named Contortionist, with, at the beginning of your upkeep, you may fold this token in half. It becomes 2-2, then 1-1, half-half, and so on.

Sacrifice Octo Opus, draw a card and an additional card for each of Contortionist's folds. Okay, where did this card come from, Chris? Right, so very early on, you know, like right from the start, you sort of gave us the pitch of what the flavor of the set was going to be. And, you know, we made a list of what we thought would be fun tropes um you know from circus carnival theme park and a contortionist was one that we you know one day i think george fan and i were sitting around and we were like contortionist like that seems like a fun one um and in an unspace of course we were trying to think of you know what are some silly ways to um to engage with that so he thought wouldn't it be funny if

you actually folded something up really small uh like physically representing the contortionist um and of course we were like oh well you know in the past we have made cards where you have to rip them up and they've not been very popular uh people don't like destroying their magic cards but we said oh what about a token because tokens you know they're more replaceable um and you could you could use you know just a scrap of paper laying around to represent a token um so we we got some tokens that were lying around the office so we started folding them up and tried to see how many folds we can get and how small it could get um and so we we were like it's really fun to to fold up you know a token or you know people might you know make their own token out of a napkin and they

start folding the napkin so we thought it was really cute we also thought it was cute to have the creature actually get like halved in size um you know we actually hit we have access to fractional numbers in uh in unsets so we were like oh it should actually become like a half half and so on and so forth um but the real challenge from a design standpoint was like okay you can fold your creature in half but why would you want to do that like why would it be fun to have a creature that gets smaller and smaller uh over time um and so we went through a couple of different iterations on what would be the bonus uh for actually folding the creature up more and more um we went through a couple of different iterations that were not great i don't

remember a lot of them this last one though we were like um well i remember one let me real quick let me explain one thing before we get to the final version yeah i think originally it was a sorcery that made the token right and so you just generated the token and then everything kind of lived and breathed on the token itself right and then this last version was maybe that's wrong so how do we get to this last version yeah because it was we figured out that having an enchantment that at some point you could cash in the enchantment was a lot it was easier to remember it was you know less text the token, so you could really get it small and you wouldn't have to read anything on it or something.

So, yeah, and then, so we ended up being like, oh, like, you know, the longer you can keep it in play, the more cards you can draw at some point. And so we thought that was fun. We thought that, you know, we had a lot of fun folding up the token and seeing how many, like, you can, the thickness of a magic token that comes out of a magic pack, you can only get so many folds on there.

But if you made a token out of a different kind of paper, you could potentially get even more if you can keep it alive that long. Well, we're working on the FAQ right now. I'm not sure whether we're going to let you have other pieces other than a token. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Now, I'm not sure whether we're going to let you have other pieces other than a token. Oh, okay. All right. Well, but we also, if I'm not mistaken, did get a unique, a special token printed for this card. Is that correct? Yes, we did. We did.

In fact, the story behind that's kind of fun. So the idea is we want, in order to make this work, it had to be a double-sided token that every time you folded it, there was the card of the right size with the right power toughness on it. that every time you folded it, there was the card of the right size with the right power toughness on it. And this was a surprisingly hard concept to communicate. Like, I had had numerous meetings where I was, like, drawing pictures on paper and trying to explain the this and that.

And this also is the only double-sided token, right? There's no other double-sided token in the set. So, like, for example, I think there's some weird things about this token that we managed to do it, but there was a lot of challenges to it. And it was one of the things that I didn't

100% know. Like, it was one of the cards that I thought might get cut right at the end because we couldn't pull off the token. And what we said was, if we can't do the token, we don't want to do this. Like, it has the token that that's that's crucial to what this card is um but everybody got on board and made it work and it definitely was one of the weirdest tokens we've probably ever made so um yes that is a really cool token to like collect the right and you'll see it when the set comes out but right it, it's a 4-4 on one side, and then on the back, it's like a half-sized 2-2, and then a further half-sized, you know, 1-1, and so on and so forth.

And so it's, yeah, it's really cool. Oh, there's one other thing we did to this card. Once we got the token made and we got signed off on the token, this card used to be a rare, and we moved it from rare to uncommon because we're like, we just want more people folding the token. So we moved it down to uncommon so we can get the, we wanted the token showing up more and we wanted people just literally folding it more because it was so much fun.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Okay, the next card we're going to talk about is called Juggletron. So Juggletron is two and a red. It's an artifact creature, clown robot, zero four. Trample. Whenever Juggletron attacks, you may put an art sticker on it.

Juggletron gets plus three plus oh for each item in its art that's not touching Juggletron, another item, or the card frame. Right. So this was a very early on design. So once we knew we were doing art stickers, I sort of So a lot of, there's a lot of art stickers matter in the set, just with all the different kinds of stickers. But I thought that art stickers were really fun because you could make cards that really cared about what's going on in their own art. in their own art. So I remember we, like I sat down and I designed a bunch of these

and then actually physically drew a bunch of images that we don't normally do this, but I was able to get the images into our internal database so that when we printed out play test cards, it would actually have our hand drawn sketches in there because what the art showed really mattered. And this was one of those, I've got a couple others. think i show some uh in my preview article that i just wrote um but this uh right so the idea of they're just kind of being a juggler but they're being a bunch of big empty space that

you could put stickers in that just felt really fun like art stickers are already so fun as a way to customize the art of your card but then having art that's specifically designed to be customized um felt like a really cool fun idea that you know wouldn't really uh work in any other context yeah well one of the things so there's this card and there's a card called ask uh after aquarium uh which are the two cards that you made a whole bunch two ended up in the set where kind of shape matters is the way i like to think of it like it matters a lot of the cards the stickers matter because something stickered or because it's a hat or something but these cards actually literally the shape of them

matters and that's one of the things we were trying to do in is make cards that make make the things matter in different ways um And so, Juggletron and Astroquarium, although, ironically, Juggletron wants as many small things as possible, and Astroquarium wants as many big things as possible. Astroquarium, there's a crack you're trying to cover. So, like, they go

in opposite directions. One wants really big stickers and one wants really small stickers. And the funny thing about Juggletron was, Annie did the concepting, and I was really clear with Annie about how we thing about Juggletron was Annie did the concepting, and I was really clear with Annie about how we needed lots of space, so you put the stickers. And then the art comes in,

and Dawn, who's our art director, crops it so there's no space. Like, she's like, oh, I don't need all this blank space. I'll just crop in on the robot. And I'm like, Dawn, Dawn, Dawn, Dawn, no. We need the open space and i had to

go back and go you know i had to have her recrop it um because she originally like cropped so tight you couldn't fit anything on it because like she was like cropping out the empty space in normal magic art you don't want a lot of big empty spaces nothing going on but on this card you do want a lot of big empty space with nothing going on. Yeah, one of the challenges of doing art for this set, unlike almost any other set, is art matters mechanically in a way that just it doesn't.

And so there are a number of cards where I had to convey to Annie and to Dawn, like, okay, this physical element of the art, it really matters. So anyway, Juggatron is one of those cards they were yeah you know one of the big ones in terms of that art thing was the hats because hats are a theme and there were a couple of cards that we had to say like hey could this have a hat

or you know like like this looks like it's wearing a hat but it really needs to be a bigger hat so that everybody knows for sure um and so yeah it was very interesting right there's and design cooperation there's a point where the art comes in when the art's finalized where the set leaves allowed to go to the artist i mean art director a little bit and go oh could we maybe tweak this one thing and i used all my sort of tweaking art points on getting hats on white creatures. Because white-black is our hat, our draft archetype. And black was fine. But white, there was a lot of, like, ambiguously hatted creatures.

And I had to go back and go, could a park leader, could it be clear that a park leader is wearing a hat, please? Stuff like that. Okay. Next up. This next one was a very contentious card. Surprise Party. Oh, yes. Okay, so let me read it. Let me read it.

Two in white, enchantment. When Surprise Party enters the battlefield, yell surprise and put onto the battlefield any number of printed clown robot tokens that aren't touching each other that you hit on the battlefield before you cast Surprise Party and that weren't spotted by an opponent

before you cast Surprise Party. Robots you control control get plus one plus oh and have vigilance okay talk about the origin of surprise party right so there's a couple of gags that sort of at this point i would call running gags where they're fun popular ideas for uncards that we sort of try to bring back over and over and this one is in the cheaty face space so the original uh not the original unset but um the original cheaty face was in unhinged and then unstable had a entirely normal armchair and both of those cards were cards where you you hid them on the battlefield and then you could surprise your opponent be like haha you didn't see it but i snuck it on there um and so during i think vision design we were like let's make another card where you hide things but what if this time you could hide more than one uh we like

the idea of if you're really sneaky you can get even more things into play than normal. And so that's why the idea of Surprise Party came about, which was you hide tokens, and then when you cast it, you get to put all the tokens onto the battlefield. But this was a very challenging card because we kept on discovering more and more different ways that it was too easy to get a bunch of tokens out so for example i remember in a play test somebody just had a bunch of a stack of tokens in their deck box and they were like haha here they are um and so we were like oh that doesn't feel right or like you know someone had like a bunch of them hidden like you know all like right on top of each other

uh underneath their play mat um and there so we were like the idea of this card is really fun it's really fun to see hey how many can you hide it's a push your luck thing right the more you hide the the greater chances that someone will find them um but we didn't so like for example that's where the the rule about oh they can't touch each other came from because that really made you start to hide them in different places rather than trying to stack them all on top of each other um but you know it took us a long time we went through many many many iterations because we kept on finding little things that could really be annoying um but i remember that for me i was uh i was very uh a really big defender of this card and really tried to make it work because i just believed so strongly in the fun of in a couple of those early play tests people just like surprise and then you

have a good bunch of tokens it was such a great moment and i was like i think it's worth it to try and make it work because it's so much fun when it actually does go off yeah so the very first time this card ever got played i was playing donald who was our play designer in vision design and he didn't know this card's existence so that he was completely unaware this card ever got played, I was playing Donald, who was our play designer in Vision Design, and he didn't know this card's existence. So he was completely unaware this card existed. And I believe I hit like 14 clowns.

I mean, I went ahead of time. I knew I had it. I hit them, and then all game long, I was seeding them everywhere. And then this card, I agree. We were back and forth on was this fun or was this not fun. The one big thing we did near the end is we kind of made it a card that if you're playing robots,

look, you don't have to hide any robots. You can just, like, the robots get plus one, plus one vigilance. We added that in to say, hey, if you don't want to hide things, it's still worth playing in your robot deck. And that, you know, you don't have to play that minigame. Right. That really helped a lot because one of the main reasons that we were struggling with it was because um it used to just be a sorcery that made the tokens and it was like okay well if they catch you now that card just doesn't do anything because they're now they're aware they know that you're hiding them

um and so making sure that it had sort of like a default mode um really helped it to be like right it raised the floor up a lot and that meant that we could keep it alive keep it in the set and allow people to have those awesome moments and yeah i totally remember that like i think that that was really the time mark that solidified like this card is awesome because right you were able to hide it like one was under your deck box one was under the play mat one was under the deck like you one was under the playmat, one was under the deck. Then just figuring out how can you hide them in different areas, that was really so much more fun than having

them all in a stack. And I was like, we've got to save this card. I really want to fight for this card. The other thing I remember is you were where I was hiding them and Donald wasn't, and you were trying not to laugh the whole time. I just kept hiding them. I remember, anyway, that's... The other thing, by the the way is the reverse of octo octopus octo opus i think the card started at uncommon and i'm like okay let's let's make this a little less common

a thing that happens in some level if it happens more infrequently it's more fun and so we moved it up to rare so and we also i another thing that we did is you know it wasn't always flavored this way but at some point i was like i think yelling, not only is it just kind of like a fun flavor thing, but also it is actually relevant because if you yell surprise and you show all the tokens, everyone else who's like in your draft is like, they've got surprise party. And it sort of like changes the dynamic. And I thought that was really fun as well. Okay. The next card to talk about is called Autograph Book. So it's an artifact that costs two.

Two generic mana. Autograph Book enters the battlefield with a page counter on it for each person who signed it. Three and tap, remove a page counter from Autograph Book, draw a card. Okay, so this, I think this was your card, right? Yes, this was my card. I think this is, it's a card that is incredibly near and dear to my heart. It's actually a very fun story about this card. So back before, like when I was very young, like way before I worked at Wizards,

I would, you know, like make my own custom cards just for fun as a hobby. And I, you know, would be involved in various online, you know, online forums back in the days when forums were the big thing. And there was a forum I was a part of that had a game where, you know, they were like, here's a prompt and make some cards. And one time the prompt was, you know, make some un-cards, you know,

make some silver-boarded cards at the time. And so I, you know, I love Disney and just theme parks in general. As a kid, I would always have these autograph books. And I really liked this idea of just an autograph book that, like, actually physically got people to sign it. That seemed like a fun concept. It seemed like a fun thing in magic you know we do these tomes uh that draw you cards uh and so just having one of those but like actually physically you got people to sign it and then it would also kind of give people a way to oh like if you go meet your you know favorite designer or your favorite pro player or your favorite content creator you could have autograph book be the card that they sign for you um so but but i was you know i was very young i just like

this is a fun idea so i made it um and it just stuck in my brain i never thought that i would ever get a chance to make that a real card but flash forward many many many years and we're making an unset and not only are we making an unset we're making an unset that's flavored around theme parks i was like this it's all come together like a many many years journey but now autograph book is a real deal uh and i can in the physical world get people to sign it um and so yeah this is definitely a very special card for me. Yeah, this card got made pretty early on, and I don't think it changed much. I mean, we might have fiddled with the cost or something, but I mean, it I think pretty much was what you made. It's a brain to print, as we call it. This was very much sort of as you turned it in is what it ended up being.

Yeah, we played around a couple of times, you know, changing numbers or changing exactly what it did. But ultimately, it kind of landed back in the original spot and um yeah i'm very i'm excited to sign autograph books i'm excited to get my autograph books signed by other people um i have uh and i've also got a bunch of playtest autograph books from all the drafts that we did in the office where all the office people signed them it's just a really fun card uh to play um both just having your friends all sign it or having like actual you know notable people sign it um so yeah this one definitely has a special place in my heart i'm really happy that we got to make it okay the next card myra the magnificent two blue red a legendary creature human human performer, 2-4.

Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery from your hand, open an attraction. X and tap, exile target instant or sorcery card with mana value X from your graveyard and choose an attraction you control that doesn't have a midway counter on it. Put a midway counter on it. Whenever you visit that attraction, copy the exiled card. You may cast the copy without paying its mana cost. that attraction, copy the exiled card. You may cast the copy without paying its mana cost.

Okay, so Myra as a character got made very, very early on. In fact, Myra the Magnificent's Intergalactic Astratorium of Fun I think was like one of the early names, like that name just stuck around forever. Yeah, so

this was like straight out of the world guide it was basically like you know the world building team and don who's the art director they came up with this character they're like this is the you know the founder of the park so the the walt disney if you will of this uh you know theme park circus amusement park um and so we knew we wanted to make it as a legend and my big thing was that um we we we're at that early stage we didn't really know what we wanted our legends to do we didn't know exactly what and but my big thing was that this is the founder of the park she made the park she's sort of invented all of the you know different attractions and stuff so i really think that she wants to have a heavy attraction theme she wants to feel like she is creating you know

a theme park with all of these interesting things um the interesting thing about myra is that in uh in limited uh blue and red aren't the the biggest attraction colors um black is really the the central point of attractions in the set um so my idea was basically all right we this character really feels blue red based on the flavor and the story that we made for her um so how could we tie in something that blue red tends to care about with attractions and that's that's where the idea of incense and sorceries allowing you to open attractions then you sort of imprinting those spells back onto the attraction. So they start going off and make this crazy, you know, really strong midway. That just seemed to come together really well.

And, you know, we played around with various different, you know, costs and whatnot. But I think that central idea of she makes a very unique midway that is, you know, special because she's the one who created it. That stuck around. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting is whenever you do a theme, you want to make sure there are legendary creatures that play in your mechanical themes, because you are commanders that people can sort of play around with. And one of the things we were very conscious in this set, and there's 30 legendary creatures in the set, that's very high. And the reason for

that is there's not actually that many Uncommanders. You know, there's not, you know, Unsets haven't had that many legendary creatures in them. And so we wanted to sort of push a little bit. And the neat thing about attractions are they're in a deck that aren't tied to color. There is no color identity for the attractions. So, you know, Myra lets you play all the attractions. There's 45 different attractions. So, I mean, you can pick and choose which ones you want, obviously. But, you know, you have a lot of options how you play Myra because you have access to all of them,

even though she's only a blue and red card. Right, and it was important that we really like, or I really like the idea that she had some input that allowed you to open attractions since, right, blue and red have slightly fewer attraction openers than maybe some other color combinations. So this way in Commander, you could really build a deck that had a lot of instants and sorceries and then use those as the ways to open attractions. Right. You'll notice a lot of our, or not all of them, but we were conscious of making some legendary creatures that cared about attractions that made sure that they could open them since there's only so many openers in the set, especially per color. Okay, next up is Mobile Clone.

So Mobile Clone costs two blue blue, four total, sorcery. Using a mobile device, take a picture of target creature. That device enters the battlefield as a token that's a photocopy of the picture picture creature photocopies include auras equipment counters and stickers in the shot don't touch other people's phones without permission and be careful if you do where did mobile clone come from this is another card of yours i think yes yes um so this card so i guess uh early Exploratory, you sort of were telling us about the various things that we wanted to do in the set. We knew at the time what the theme was.

We knew at the time that we wanted to use stickers. But one of the other things that you said to us was, hey, this is, we should consider the fact that almost everybody nowadays has a mobile device a cell phone normally a cell phone but you know could be a tablet or something else um but most people have mobile phones smartphones nowadays we should consider that available to us in our realm of design and so we actually went through a good number of different um you know phone based designs not a lot of them ended up sticking there's two big ones that you know i can recall but so the idea for mobile clone was basically um we had this idea of an uncard a clone that copies everything about a creature and that's something that a lot of players sort of when they play a clone if they've

if they're just starting out if they don't know the rules they sort of tend to think oh well you know my creature has plus one plus one counters on it doesn't my clone have that size boost oh my creature has an aura on it does it get the things from that and that's not how the rules of normal magic work but we thought it would be cool to make a an un-card clone that did count all of those things um and so really that idea of a clone that counted everything and the idea of phones now being available sort of came together to make this card it's like oh how will you remember all the stuff what if you just took a picture uh hey if you take a picture what if you just use your phone as the actual card itself um and so

really those the blending of those two ideas came together really well to create this card yeah there's a lot of controversy about cards like this like i said um and we'll talk about the other phone card in one second there's only two cards that ended up sort of being phone cards um and there's a third card that's a social media card you know but um yeah but the uh there's a lot of talk about is this a good idea or bad idea in the faq you are allowed to draw a picture like if you don't have a phone you you can draw a picture of it it's not nearly as endearing as as taking a picture with your phone um but you don't have to have to have a phone but there's a lot of controversy about like should we make a card

not everybody has a phone although most people have a phone um we ended up making this rare and we we limited how many cards we did but we thought it was such a a cute card we left it in and then we spent a lot of time on the reminder text about like how do people handle other people's phones and stuff like that yeah the uh we definitely made sure that the phone cards were at higher rarities so that they didn't show up all the time. But there is just something that's so fun about taking a picture with your phone, putting your phone on the table, and, like, I attack you with my phone. Like, it's just, it's a really, like, kind of visceral, fun experience. So I'm glad that, right, unsets have, you know, this is true of the phones.

It's true with dexterity cards. It's true with die rolling. But unsets have some mechanics that not everyone is a huge fan of, but hopefully they will be able to find something in the set that they enjoy. Okay, so let's talk about the other phone card just because, while we're on the phone topic. So, this is phone

a friend, three blue blue, sorcery, call someone and ask them to choose one. If they don't answer, an opponent chooses one. Don't explain anything else, you choose targets. A, gain control of target If they don't answer, an opponent chooses one. Don't explain anything else. You choose targets. A. Gain control of target creature you don't control. B. Choose target creature you control. Create two tokens that are each copies of it.

C. Take an extra turn after this one. D. Draw seven cards. So this is another of your... I believe this is another one of yours. Yes. This is my sort of brain to print card for this. I mean, there's a couple of others that stayed the same, but this one I very distinctly remember. This one and yeah, like Annie's animate object are two where it's like, this is from exploratory and it survived all the way. out sort of over time with the with the phone idea but this card was immediately like when you said phones are on the table i was like we have to make a card where you call someone it's just so such a fun idea for you know like outside assistance is something that you know people

are already do and i've you know i've played a lot of games of unstable where someone will you know call up their friend to ask them if they like squirrels or something. And so I really like the idea of formalizing it as the flavor of the card is you call someone. And in terms of, okay, so you call someone, so then what does that do? Why would you call them? And to me, the very obvious answer was the classic, classic, like who wants to be a millionaire lifeline phone a friend, where you call someone, you give them the options, and then they sort of just have to give you their best guess. And what's really fun about this card is that you can phone someone who, you know, is really into magic.

You can phone someone who doesn't know anything about magic. You know, just like in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, when you phone a friend, sometimes they know exactly, you know, what the the answer is and sometimes they have no idea and they just make a best guess um but i i was so i was really enamored with this i remember we we played it that first you want to tell the story of the first time we cast it and explore yeah so the first the first time we cast it i i get the card uh so i call my wife, Laura, who, I mean, many, many years ago played Magic, but hasn't played Magic in ages. And I believe if she picks A, I win the game.

But, I mean, I'm not allowed to tell her what's going on, and she has no Magic. It's not really a thing that even I explained to her. And I'm like, I'm just sitting here like, she can't hear me, but I'm like, A, A, A. And then she ends up picking C, I think, take an extra turn. but I'm like, A, A, A. And then she ends up picking C, I think, take an extra turn. And I'm like, no!

And everybody started laughing. And I put it on speaker so that everybody in the room could hear it. It was one of those moments where the second that happened, I'm like, how do we not make this card? Everybody stopped and was focused on it. We had multiple

games going on and every game stopped so they could hear my wife say what she was going to do you know it's just um it's like kind of when annie attacked with a hand sanitizer you know with the uh there's just moments where something happens you're like okay we're printing this card and that that was like once that happened i mean i don't know how we're not printing this card yeah i um yeah so i agree like that was such a special moment i was like i you know i made the card i wasn't sure i thought it would be fun but it turned out to be so awesome uh this is a card though that like is also a good example of where sort of the the game design of onset comes in

because it's like okay cool you call someone up they choose options that's a really fun idea for a card but it took us a long time to get the exact stuff right. There's four options and trying to make sure... When we picked these options, we tried to make sure that they were things that someone without a lot of magic knowledge could understand. So the idea of take an extra turn, draw seven cards, gain control of something. These are things where if you haven't played magic you might be able to understand what that means like take an extra turn like you know you've you've played a board game probably where you're taking an extra turn that's pretty strong drawing seven cards

that's a lot of cards um but also things like oh well we made it so that if they don't answer your opponent picks um that was a thing of like you know if they don't pick up like we don't want you to call another person and another person and just stall the game out. So having your opponent choose, I mean, they're all still quite strong, so even if you get the worst one, like, you know, that's still an okay card to cast, but it was a lot more fun to just, hey, just skip ahead and keep the game moving. Don't delay by calling

people over and over again. Okay, so we have one last card to talk about before we have to wrap up for today. And this might be one of the cutest cards in the set. Carnival Barker. So two and a red for a creature, dog employee, 3-3. Tap.

You have 30 seconds to lot a creature you control to any people outside the game. Until end of turn, that creature gains trample and haste and gets plus X plus O, where X is the number of those people who applauded. Activate only as a sorcerer and only once. So I think this was my card right yeah so i think from very early on the idea of a carnival barker of like you know it's a carnival barker but it's a dog everyone was like of course what a cute idea we have to do that um and i remember though that we we were like okay for sure this card is in the set we're definitely going to make it but it took us a long time to figure out what it should do

i remember for a while it was kind of like an mc variant uh mc being an older unhinged uh card but it was like when a creature showed up you would like you, top it up or something. Yeah, so MC was an unhinged. And ironically, if MC had not been made, we might have just done MC for the Carnival Barker. But because MC existed, I was really enamored. The thing that ended up making this design was, what does a Carnival Barker do? And I'm like, well, his job, you know,

the job of a Carnival Barker is to get you'm like, well, his job, the job of a Carnival Barker is to get you to come see the thing that they want you to see. They're trying to sell you on, ooh, this is an amazing thing, come watch it. And so I'm like, well, how do we duplicate that in a Magic game? And that's what came up the idea of, well, what if you're trying to

get people to applaud it? What if you're trying to get people invested in it? And yeah, originally, I think you could use this card multiple times like okay that's that's just too much i would we'll just make it once so so the the i remember basically my contribution to this design basically being that at some point we figured out okay like what if like you're trying to get people to come look and you know like we there are versions where it's like you're trying to get someone to pick it up like so they could look at the card and be excited or you're trying to get people to come look and you know like we there are versions where it's like you're trying to get someone to pick it up like so they could look at the card and be excited or you're trying to get and i think that we were bouncing a lot of ideas around in

this space and at some point the exact the exact text on this card i think came from me where i was like all right you can only do this exactly once in the game because it's it's very repetitive and annoying to try and get people to come over and over and over again but the idea of someone shows up and it's like all right this is my one chance i'm going to do my best performance trying to get as many people to show up as possible and get this one huge attack on um right so like the thing about like you can only activate it once 30 seconds um there's a scaling reward with the number of people who applaud. So, you know, even if you, you always get haste and trample. But if you can, you know, even just one or two people applauding, it's like, all right, that's a little bonus.

And I think once we landed on this design, we were like, this was the most fun version. Where it was really focused on, you know, instead of every creature or every turn turn it's like just one time per game you know of course there's there's occasionally times where it gets bounced or something but for the most part you're not doing it as often which i think one of the things that we've noted about a lot of these cards in the past like the same thing is true with uh with phone a friend uh and it's why it's a mythic is that there are things that are really fun to do but they're not fun if you do them over and over again you know in every game or even just like you know if it happens a couple times over the course of the night like that's the the peak fun is that it

only happens every so often and so for a lot of these cards we put them at rare and tried to make them more powerful so that they wouldn't show up in as many drafts you wouldn't draw them as often but when you did you would have a good time yep and with that i guess we'll have to wrap up for today so uh i've i've made it back to my desk or i made it to my desk um but thanks i want to thank you chris for being with us like the this set took a long time to make uh more so than the normal set uh it had a longer everything basically um and And so it is fun finally talking about it. And I'm glad you and I worked on it forever. So it's fun to discuss all the different ideas with you.

It's so nostalgic now. It's like when I see the cards, it's like, oh, I remember back in the day when we made this card. So anyway, thank you so much for being with us, Chris. Thanks for having me. And everybody else, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to us, Chris. Thanks for having me. And to everybody else, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.