Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #976: Unfinity Design, Part 3

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

This is part three of a four-part series on the design of Unfinity.

I'm putting on the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so the last couple podcasts, I've been talking all about the design of Unfinity. So last we left our story, we had decided that the attractions weren't working. So the original version is you put them out into the park, onto the battlefield. Everybody could access them. That proved to be just too much of a negativeness for players. The idea that my opponent might win on a resource that I spent, you know, I spent resources on something and it allows my opponent to win. That seemed to be a deal breaker. So we needed, so here's what we knew.

We knew that we had an extra deck. We knew that we had the general designs. Like, we liked the design. So let me talk about that real quickly. So one of the things we did when designing the individual attractions was we said, okay, we made the games, all little mini games where you can win a prize. We made the stands, all things where you could acquire something. And the rides originally

affected creatures. You picked a creature. As time went on, it just kind of became things interacting with the board. Most of them interacted with the creatures because that's just what we tend to do. But not all of them did. Anyway, what we found was we made a giant list of all

the things we expected to see. So we said, okay, what do you expect to see at a carnival slash amusement park? Okay, what we found was we made a giant list of all the things we expected to see. So we said, okay, what do you expect to see at a carnival slash amusement park? Okay, well, you expect to see bumper cars, a Ferris wheel. I made a giant list of everything you expect to see. And then we tried to top down those designs. So most of the attraction designs were like, okay, we have to have a concession stand. What would the concession stand make? We're like, food or life. We went back

and forth, but you're like, okay, you know, we always equivalently eat food with gaining you life, so either it literally gives you food if food was going to be in the set, ended up being in the set, so it made food, or we give you life because life, when you eat food, that's what you get. You get life. Okay, we have an information desk. It draws you a card. Okay, we have a

fortune teller. It'll scry and look into the future. So mostly what we did is we listed what we wanted, and then we did it top-down. There were a few cards where we thought it was a really fun effect. Trash Bin is probably the most famous one,, sometimes what we did is we made a cool card and then we went and saw if we could find flavor that fit that. And sometimes there are things that just lined up. Like, I don't know whether Information Desk was Draw a Card or it was Draw a Card in the Information Desk,

but, like, it all came together. There are a few things like Trash Bin where we ended up going, ah, we like this that you randomly dig through the graveyard and like, okay, well, what's that like? And so, you know, there's a couple of ones where we bench the flavor a little bit. Oh, and the one area we had to bend a little bit more is the mini games. We had, we wanted the mini gameame in flavor to match what you were doing. And so we tried really hard to say, okay, what would you expect to see at a music festival or carnival that kind of does this thing? And that where we could, we did make a list of all the iconic games you would play at a carnival. Some of those we managed to get in.

Some of those, it was very hard on the minigames because we needed the flavor to match what you were doing in the minigame and so you'll notice that some of the stuff like knocking down the milk cartons we ended up putting on a card in the set Grabby Tabby for example references that so some of the stuff we

referenced in other places the games were a little hard the rides and the stands were like, okay, we want a costume shop. Okay, we want a gift shop. Okay, we want a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, bumper car. We could just list a spinny ride. Like, we listed all the things we knew we wanted. And there were a few things that basically the list was longer.

Like, we had 45 cards is what we ended up having. And so, not everything fit. For example, one of our ideas was a petting zoo. So we ended up doing that. There was like a petting zookeeper. So, some of the ideas didn't end up as attractions. We referenced them elsewhere. There were more than 45 ideas. So we couldn't do

every one. But there were a couple we really wanted to do. Probably the one that we wanted to do the most was Log Flume. I mean, there was a bunch we wanted to do like Roller one that we wanted to do the most was log flume I mean there's a bunch we wanted to do like roller coaster that we came up with an easy thing right away log flume was the one that we knew we wanted to do log flume that's when you float in a log and go down the water and you get big splashes and stuff

we knew we wanted to do log flume that's one of the ones we took the longest to figure out what it was but anyway so I guess what I'm trying to say is we liked the effects. We made the effects. We liked the effects. So when we were trying to do the new version of attractions, we wanted an information center to draw you a card. We thought the flavor

was really good on the attractions. It just was a matter of how do you do this? How do you make that happen? So what we decided is a couple things. Number one is we said, okay, when you open it, only you can visit your attractions. Number two, we changed them to, instead of

being their own car type, to being artifacts. Just made it easier to interact with them. And then, as that, attractions were from being a car type to a subtype, so the game stand and ride subtype that was part of the artifact type went away.

The concept of them didn't go away, but they're not labeled necessarily. Okay, so what we decided to do was we liked the idea so I talked last time about how one of the things that's neat about a second deck

is it's a tool. It's not a mechanic. It's a tool that you can do different things with. And Contraptions had done something. Contraptions was all about long-term planning, right? It was all about, I'm going to do something. I can look ahead. I get to know when things happen. When I play something, I know how many turns before it happens. I get to see what effects happen in conjunction with each other. So the contraptions was very much what we call planning mechanic. That I'm going to do something, I'm going to plan and I can try to map out my future turns because I know exactly what's going to happen. We were more interested, we had done that with

contraptions. What I was intrigued by was more what we call reactive mechanic. where the idea is you don't know what's going to happen, and the skill of it is learning to react to it. You can't plan ahead for it, so it's more about, can I maximize what I get when I get it? And that's just a really different thing. The plan ahead mechanic and the reactive mechanic are both very skill testing, have a lot, you know, that require a lot of nuance to play to the best variety, to play them the best you can. But they're just very different. That's kind of what I wanted.

I wanted to introduce a very different kind of mechanic with our second deck. We don't get any second decks right now in other products. Unsets are where we can do them. So I knew I wanted a second deck and I knew I wanted it to be reactive, meaning I didn't want you to know what was going to happen. So that led us down the path of, well, how do we make it so you don't quite know? Well, we were using six-sided dice. And so that seemed like, okay, like we already have a randomizer built into this product is six-sided dice. Die rolling is a thing.

What if we tie the die rolling into the attraction? are built into this product is six-sided dice. Die rolling is a thing. What if we tie the die rolling into the attractions? And the idea was that once a turn, if you had an attraction, you would get to roll a die, and then the die would say which ones were open for you, basically. We did, by the way, do a lot... There was a lot of terminology figuring out what is this. In the end, you open an attraction meant you drew it off the top of your attraction deck and put it on the battlefield,

where visit meant you went to it. So there was a period in time when, I think in the early version of this, the way it worked is when you played it, it came in play untapped. And then when you would use it, it would tap it and they didn't untap as normal. And then during your upkeep, you would roll a die to see what untapped.

That was the earliest version of the dice version of it. So the idea is I would get one free use out of it. So I would play it. I would get one free use out of it. So the idea is, I would get one free use out of it. So I would play it, I would get one free use out of it. And then if I wanted to use it again, I had to have it untap. Interestingly, by the way, the people are wondering, if you notice the impressions are vertical, but in the finished product, they don't tap.

Why aren't they horizontal? It might be cool to do horizontal. We had talked about doing them horizontal, but at the time we made the frame, the mechanic that we were doing at the time had to do with tapping and untapping. And we didn't want to have a horizontal mechanic where you had to tap it.

So that's why they ended up being vertical. Knowing what I know now, knowing where it ended up, I probably would have done them horizontal. But we didn't know that at the time we were doing the frames. up, I probably would have done the horizontal, but we didn't know that at the time we were doing the frames. Anyway, so the idea was you would open an attraction, you draw out your deck, put it on the battlefield, it would be open, it would have a tap symbol on it. It might require mana, it might not, depending on what the effect was.

Even right now, some of the effects do require mana. Most of them don't, but there are of the effects do require mana. Most of them don't. But there are a few that do require mana. But anyway, the idea was that you would open it up. It would be there. You could use it, but it didn't untap as normal. Attractions didn't untap as normal.

The way you untap Attractions originally was during your untapped phase, you would roll the die, and only things that match the number that you rolled would untap attractions originally was during your upkeep phase or I'm sorry during your untapped phase you would roll the die and only things that match the number that you rolled would untap. Early on all the numbers were used so one in the finished product nothing ever has one lit up and everything is six lit up but when we started that wasn't true. But one of the things I knew from very early on was I knew when I talked to Tom Wanderstrand about how

we had to do the sheets for attractions, or no, that was not Tom Wanderstrand. Tom Wanderstrand I dealt with stickers for. I was talking with the person who does their collation, and what we realized was when you put things on a sheet, there's duplicates on the sheet. The way we print is there's not just one copy of a card on a sheet an attraction

because they had their own back had to be on their own sheet because they had their own back the attraction back tells you how to play the attractions much like the contraptions tell you how to play contraptions so the attraction back was different meaning the attraction sheet had to be different so we ended up choosing to do a common and uncommon sheet and a rare and mythic rare sheet. I won't get really into coalition, but anyway, what that meant was there were going to be more than one of cards on the sheet. And so what excited me by that is

I wanted it, since we had things that untapped it, I didn't want them to be, like I didn't want every time you played bumper cars, well bumper cars always untap on a two or four. Always. Whenever you play bumper cars, it's always a two and four. Because what that would mean is, if I was playing bumper cars with spinny ride,

and bumper cars were always two and four, and spinny ride was always four and six. That meant four always meant both of them untapped. Whenever you played it, any time, that was always true. And I liked the idea of having a little more variety of that, from game to game, you know, from each time I played, I wanted things to be a little

bit different than last time I played. I mean, not in individual games, but in I go play at my store one Friday. The next Friday I go play again. I just want that experience to be different. And we had different sheets. And it didn't require changing the art.

All it really required was changing the lit up numbers, which is a very easy thing to change. So we decided that, and the way it worked was, one of the things about untapping that was nice was, you could choose to have it untap on one number, on two numbers, on three numbers, on four numbers. We talked about, I mean, six obviously makes no sense. That's a normal card that untaps. We talked about five, finally decided that five was just a little too close to all the time. So what we decided was, originally it was one through four. We later realized that one just wasn't happening enough.

So we ended up saying two through four. So attractions either untap on two numbers, on three numbers, or four numbers. But that and rarity were ways to control how often something happened. So rarity has to do how often you open it up, at least in Limited. And the numbers is like, how often you open it up, at least in limited. And the numbers

is like how often does this happen? So what we tended to do was we would play with it and like if it was happening too much, well, we'd make it untap on less numbers. If it was happening too often, we reduce the number of, so we could adjust, we can make it happen more or less based on the untapped numbers. Now, eventually what we found was the untapping thing, oh, it turned out that getting the free use out of it made them a little bit too strong. Let me explain that real quickly. So we wanted the things that open the attractions to be mostly free.

What I mean by that is I didn't want to charge a lot for opening an attraction. The reason for that is one of the things that unsets do, it's a little different how normal sets work, is we tend to do very large, splashy things. There's stickers. There's an extra deck. And so what we tend to do in unsets is we like to spread those mechanics across all the colors because we tend to do big, bright things. It can kind of be sad to go, ooh, stickers, it's all about stickers.

Oh, I'm sorry, you're playing black and blue? Well, black and blue aren't about stickers. In a normal set, we do that a lot. We'll say, well, this mechanic is that. But in a normal set, when we do something that's pretty splashy, even then, we often will put it in all five colors, even if we focus it on certain colors. And in this set,

for example, attractions are more about certain colors than And in this set, for example, attractions are more about certain colors than others. Red, green, and black, for example, have more interaction with attractions than white and blue do. But white and blue do have things that open attractions, can interact with them some. Blue does dice manipulation

that matters with attractions and stuff. But anyway, what that means is I want you to sample the new mechanics. I want you to play with stickers. I want you to play with attractions. So I wanted to make sure that the cards that open the attractions were kind of cards that you might want to play anyway. Because let's say, for example, you're not sure you want to play attractions.

Like, well, here's this creature I'm going to put in my deck. And it opens attractions. I might as well try to get attractions. well, here's this creature I'm going to put in my deck, and it opens an attraction. I might as well try to get attractions. So what we had decided, by the way, playing with it,

in the early version of our playtest, you drafted stickers and you drafted attractions, and there's a lot going on. And what we found is drafting stickers was much more a high-energy thing because you had to think about all the stickers and what they did and how it comboed with things and it proved to be just a little bit too much. So we decided that for drafting purposes we're not

drafting stickers. Now if you and your friends all agree and I won't stop you, I just will tell you it adds a lot in. Now if you guys are really advanced drafters and you really want extra things to think about, I'm not saying you can't do it because it's something that's fun if you're signed up for a very complex draft.

But for most people, we felt that was too much. So we decided that we wouldn't have you draft the stickers. And then for the attractions, one of the problems we had with contraptions from Unstable was that one of the strategies was to take a really strong one, like there was this one that made 1-1 fairies, that when they hit you, you drew a card, and just play that.

So that way, every card that opens up your, or makes your contraption, makes this most powerful thing. So, A, we were a little more careful how powerful. I mean, there are some rares that are a little bit more powerful, but we were a little more careful about that. We also had the untap to adjust things a little bit. We had a secondary cost, so we had a little more careful about that. We also had the untap to adjust things a little bit. We had a secondary cost, so we had a knob that was good.

And we decided we were going to minimize, we were going to make a minimum and limit it. So if you're drafting attractions, A, you draft them, and B, you must have at least three attractions in your attraction deck in limited to play an attraction deck. You can't have just one. You must play at least three. in your attraction deck unlimited to play an attraction deck. You can't have just one.

You must play at least three. Now, there are two attractions per booster. It's not that hard, you know, in drafting 45 cards to get three attractions. Some attractions, I mean, like anything, attractions vary how good the attractions are. Although they're somewhat balanced by how often they untap. But anyway, so we...

Sorry, I was going around about it. We wanted to make sure that the openers, that it wasn't too much of the value of the card. If when you open an attraction, you got to use it once, it meant for all intents and purposes, we had to have you pay for that on the thing that opened it. And that ended up making them sort of unviable, except if you went all in on attractions.

And so when we did that, it was either like either you were playing attractions, going all in, or you didn't play attractions at all. And it was much, much more fun if you could splash attractions. Yeah, you can go all in. There's cards that make you go all in. You can have an attraction deck. That's a draftable thing.

But we wanted you to be able to splash it. Both stickers and attractions, we wanted you to be able to play a little bit and have fun playing a little bit because they are fun mechanics. And both stickers and attractions are scalable. And what I mean by that is, hey, if you just have one attraction, you can have fun, or one attraction opener, you can have fun with that. If you just have one sticker card, you can have fun with that. Are there synergies with stickers? Yes. Are there synergies with attractions? Yes. Are there whole things you can do to play around them and draft around them? Absolutely. But, but, it was something we wanted you to be able to do a little bit. So, giving you the free

use was too much. And so what that meant was, we then had, we just had them come into play tapped. And that was just causing some confusion. And what we realized was instead of going through the tap-untap thing, oh, the other thing that the tap-untap thing did was it allowed you to not use it and wait for a future turn to use it. But the idea was you had the opportunity to untap it, so you kind of were encouraged to use it. But it made some designs a little bit tricky, knowing that you didn't have to use them. So what we ended up doing is we changed to say,

okay, instead of untap, tap, untap. Let's get rid of that. Let's just say, and we ended up doing this during the beginning of your main phase, same time you do Saigas. Say, okay, after you've drawn your card, we're going to have you roll a die if you have any attractions, and then just, you get to visit

the things that are lit up. It's not the tap, not the untap, just right then, right there, you get to visit and do it. Now, some of them have delayed effects. Some of them will do something that will affect things later in the turn, like there's a swinging ship that gives you an extra attack later in the turn, you know, when you would have a normal attack.

But we found that we could do things and just either it happens right away because it's something that you could do right away, or if it's something that affected things later, it could set up a delayed effect that would trigger when it needed to later in the turn. And then what we started messing around with was the idea that we wanted,

I wanted a little more highs and lows. Once again, I want to stress that high variance is important. And so we tried this experiment where we had none of them be ones and all of them be sixes. The idea with that was that whenever you rolled a die, there was a dream scenario

and there was a nightmare scenario. Like if you roll a six, you get everything. So you could dream big. You could dream really big. But if you rolled a one, you got nothing. And so there's a fear. There's some fear that things could go wrong. So one of the things that we really played into is this idea that there's this high variance of what can happen. It could literally go from nothing happens to everything happens.

And we played that for a while and it was really fun. One of the things about dive rolling in general is there's a lot of drama built into dive rolling. And on something like Adventures in the Forgotten Realm, we were trying to sort of lessen the drama. We didn't want, like, competitive plays mattering. So we had to do a lot to sort of limit the variance in Adventures in the Forgotten Realm. But here, I wanted the opposite.

Like, this is a set all about maximizing having fun over everything else. Like, we want to make, you know, if you just play Magic because it's just fun to play, we want to maximize that experience. So how do we do that? Well, let's make sure when we're doing variance, we're doing high variance. And the one in the six made it very high variance. And so that's how we ended up. Okay, now that I brought up

Adventure of the Forgotten Realm, let me talk about that a little bit. So we had a little bit longer design period for Unfinity than most sets. Unsets are weird. So we had a little bit longer than Exploratory.

I think our vision was a little bit longer. Our set design was a little bit longer. Everything was a little bit longer. I had a small team.. I had a small team. So I had a smaller team than I normally have because this was a supplemental set. And basically, the trade-off to get more time

was I had a smaller team. And I was happy doing that. So I was on all the teams. Chris Mooney, who was my right-hand person, they were on all the teams with me. The two of us were the only persons, the only people, that were on all the teams. And then I changed things up. In my article, I introduced the whole team.

There's a whole bunch of people, actually, that were, I mean, even though my teams were small at any one moment in time, we rotated a lot of people in. So there were a bunch of people that worked on it. people that worked on it. Anyway, what that means is we had die rolling in our set well before Adventure in the Forgotten Realm

even existed as a product. And then, and this was relatively late into what was going on with Adventure in the Forgotten Realm. Adventure in the Forgotten Realm, that's its own story, but it went through a lot of changes and a lot of different things and the die rolling component came late in the Forgotten Realm. Adventure in the Forgotten Realm, that's its own story, but it went through a lot of changes and a lot of different things. And the die rolling component

came late in the process. And they decided they wanted to do die rolling. Now, 20-sided die rolling. And that put us a little bit in a pickle because I was like, well, we, like, die rolling, like, at this point, attractions had used die rolling, I believe.

So, like, I couldn't just take die rolling out. Like, it was a core part of our set. And we had other die rolling cards. Like, one of the neat things about making Attractions care about die rolling is it allowed die rolling matters cards to be there. So, like, one of the themes in the set is there's cards that trigger when you roll a certain number of die on a die, like when you roll six. And there's cards that care how many dies you roll, like when you roll three dice. So there's different, blue-black, for example,

cares about rolling a particular die roll, that archetype. Where black-red cares about rolling lots of dice. And so we had rewards for different kind of die rolling. But the reason that worked, or part of the reason it worked was there's a main mechanic that roll dies every single turn. And so it made a lot of synergy. So the die rolling was really baked into what we were doing. And so the challenge was, like, this was a Silver Border set. So I talked a lot about this in other podcasts,

but one of the weird things about the evolution of Silver Border was when it was originally made, the formats that it wasn't supposed to be played in was tournament standard and tournament vintage. That's all that really existed at the time. And every other format, every other casual format, it was meant to be

for. You were supposed to be able to play them in Emperor or Prismatic Magic or all the casual formats. When it was originally made, it was meant for it was supposed to be played in the casual formats. Then along comes

Commander, which becomes the definitive casual format, which becomes the major way to play tabletop magic. And because the format got made by judges, they said, oh, well, we want, like, they decided that, you know, tournament legality is important, so they, in the most casual of casual formats, they excluded the most casual of casual cards. But, so, and that had always been a challenge.

There's a lot of cards I make in unsets that, they're silver border in the sense that they're in the silver border set but you know i make cards that like both my main mechanics for unstable both um contraptions and host augment i i think could work in the rules you know i'm saying they're weird they're quirky they do things that we don't normally do but can the rules handle them yeah i think they can so like i have all these people bugging me that, like, could you one day please put host augmented to black border so we can play it? And I'm like,

it's a big ask to go, let's just remake cards we've already made but just change the border color. Like, that's a hard product to get sign off on. And so it's basically, the die rolling really made us have this sort of discussion of what's going on here.

Now, be aware, when this discussion came up, the set had been designed. And I should also mention, this conversation, it wasn't as if we had the conversation when die rolling first got added. No, no, no, no, no. Die rolling got added. It was in the product. It was much, much later. We were very close to being done with the product. And I just had this

sort of like, I'm like, okay, there's black border cards in Magic that roll dyes. We have cards that care about dye rolling in my set and the only reason it's a silver border was this, well, this is a thing that normal sets don't do. But now they did do it.

And I just sort of had this, I mean, the team and I had this big discussion about, like, it's so weird. There's all these cards in the set that, like, people would have fun playing within Commander, but we're telling them they can't because, why are we telling them they can't?

So, the big idea came about of, why can't we let people play with cards if they can play with cards? Like, why is this set sort of chopped? Like, because it's silly? Like, we make silly magic cards. We make very silly magic cards. Like, the tone can't be the reason it's not allowable.

We make cards that are silly. And so I sort of went to my product architect and said, okay, here's a question. Why do we tell people that they can't play with cards when if there was any other product, if we just printed this card in a different product, it would be playable? And that just seemed weird.

So I asked the question. I said, you know, look, there's lots of cards in my set, in the set that I think could be played, and Commander would cause zero, like, rules problems. The rules could handle them. So what we did is we made a mini-team. So it was Jess Dunks, who is the rules manager, Carmen Handy, who is on the play design team, Matt Tabak, who was the editor for the set, and myself. And we sort of said,

okay, let's go through the set and say, if we wanted to do this, would this cause a problem? And so the idea was, Jess was like, yes or no, this is a rules problem. Carmen was like, yes or no, this is a legacy vintage,

like this is a problem in high-end constructed play. But legacy vintage is what we cared about because that's where it would be eternally legal. And then Matt was also talking about, like, okay, either editing challenge. Like, yeah, we can do this, but if we have to put this in magic ease, it might not fit on the card. And so basically we went through card by card and saying, could this be there or couldn't be there? and so basically we went through card by card and saying, could this be there or couldn't be there? And what we ended up finding was there were a bunch of categories we all agreed

are things that just should clearly be, that now became acorn. In order to do this, they all had to be black-bordered. It's very hard to mix black border and silver border, and we had not planned for that, so we ended up using, Universes Beyond had used the expansion symbol to represent Universes Beyond.

It's a triangle rather than the oval. And so we're like, okay, well we have precedence for having the security stamp show something. And so we're like, okay, we can do it there. And we realized there were a bunch of things like physical dexterity or

involving an outside person or you know there are just things that were sort of off-limits that like when I it's not that the rules couldn't handle some of them it's more like well we don't want tournaments to be about certain qualities you know it's not about physical dexterity it's not about you know like if I asked my friend how do we know that your friends not you're not you didn't had of time tell them to say something. Like, so, there are a bunch of things that just didn't work out in Terminus for different reasons. And there's things like, there's certain things that the magic rules can't care about because all cards have to be the same as their English version and stuff like that.

I mean, areas that unsets want to play with because it's a design space we can't normally do. Then, there was some stuff that just would potentially cause problems in Legacy. The set had not been set up. We didn't have a robust playtesting thing. While we did a lot of playtesting in general, we didn't do Legacy

playtesting. So I just wanted to be extra cautious. So the rule of thumb was if Carmen was at all worried about it, like if there's any potential of it being disruptive in Legacy and Vintage, Carmen would bring it up. And

there's a few cards that we could have made work in the rules, but like Nearby Planet probably is the biggest one. But it just, we didn't know the can of worms was opening up. We didn't really have the extensive time to playtest it. And we're like, look, this didn't know the can of worms was opening up. We didn't really have the extensive time to playtest it. And we're like, look, you know, this isn't worth potentially, you know, blowing. Like, the whole goal was, the reason they're eternal legal is not to really cause any ripples in Legacy or Vintage.

Maybe some cards get played there. That's fine. Like, Saw in Half, for example. I could see that getting played. But it's not going to break things in half. We don't want something that's going to disrupt legacy or vintage. That was not our goal. Anyway, we went through the whole set,

and we sort of put things in three categories. It was definitely Acorn, and we had a list of things that had to be Acorn, like I said. We had definitely Eternal, like Dair wrong was a good example, which was there's just no reason that you know, okay, I care if you roll three dice. Well, we have dice rolling. Okay, the rules can handle

roll three dice. So that stuff was just clearly, clearly. And then we had stuff in the middle of like, maybe we talked a lot about the two mechanics. Obviously the two mechanics are the largest crux of the set so if the two mechanics were doable that meant over half the set

really was doable and we talked a lot about them and decided that we could make them work there were a few the one thing to make stickers work in Blackboarder play was originally stickers stayed everywhere.

They stayed in your hand. They stayed in the library. They were a lot like Perpetual, although ironically before Perpetual existed. But in order to work in sort of normal traditional magic, they had to go away in hidden zones. It turns out there were maybe a handful of cards that cared about hidden zones, maybe two or three. It was very

few cards, and we were able to redesign them. Like, the biggest one, there was one that let you regrow a sticker card, right? Well, if the sticker went away in your hand, there's no value to that. So we changed it. This is Rat in a Hat. So now you can play it from the graveyard. So it's very, very similar to drawing and being in your hand.

So, you know, we were able to get a mechanic that allowed it to have, to still care about stickers in a way that didn't undo this. But anyway, we had to do that. And we, oh,

and I had to put reminder text on all the cards that care about vowels, what the vowels were. Because the only stickers were in English, we were allowed to care about the qualities

of the stickers because every sticker had a uniqueness to it that was true. There weren't different, like if the stickers existed in different languages, we wouldn't be able to do that. Normally in Magic, you can't do that. But because the stickers only existed in one form, we were able to mechanically care about them, or care about like qualities in them. I had to define vowels and stuff in the rules and things like that. Anyway, we made the list, and it

turned out over half the cards, when the dust settled, over half the cards ended up on could be eternal, and over a quarter of the rares and mythic rares could be eternal. And we're like, okay, that seems like a compelling thing. Like, why not let people who want to play the cards

play the cards play the cards why are we telling and i did a whole podcast on this i don't need to go into it now but really part of the shifting of it was kind of getting people out of the mindset that like there are a lot of positive things about silver border um and i literally mean the silver border um but one of the negatives is it just created this mindset for not all players, but some players, that somehow it wasn't real magic. It wasn't, that it was this thing that wasn't sort of real. And so another big part

of this is just sort of getting people to rethink how they, even though things that have acorn on them, just literally being black border and not being silver border, I think does a lot to just have people think about them differently, just to approach them differently. And I think that was important. Anyway, okay, so this talk is, I'm now at work. So I think there, I did not get into archetypes or get into,

we had other mechanics and stuff. So I think I'm going to have one more podcast talking about the final, there are a lot of little, I mean, I mostly told the story of stickers and of attractions. But there's a lot of other

components to the set. So I think I will have one more podcast for this series where I talk about all the other things that got added in because I do want to talk about that. Anyway, guys, I hope you're enjoying this. Like I said, I haven't done a longer series in a while. So I hope you're having fun sort of really digging

in deep. But anyway, I'm here at work and I'm parked. 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.