Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #13 - Unglued

Episode Date: December 20, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about Unglued.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. So we all know that means it's time for drive to work. So today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite sets of all time, Unglued. And I've worked on a lot of sets and I love all my children, but Unglued is one of my pet favorites. So let's talk about sort of how it came to be, because it's a very different set from a lot of other sets I've done, obviously. So let's talk, in the beginning, where did the set come from? Okay, so at the time, after Tempest was done, so I was now a designer. People were thinking of me as being someone who did design. And so Joel Mick and Bill Rose came up with an idea for a set.

I think at the time Joel Mick was still the head designer developer. I believe it was that early. Joel would later go on to become the brand manager of Magic, but I don't think that had happened yet. So they'd come up with this idea for a set that I think their idea was it would have a different color border because it would be cards we couldn't normally make. Now, they were very vague on what that meant. I think the idea was a set that sort of broke boundaries in some way and allowed us to do things that we were normally constrained from doing. And so they came to me as kind of the out-of-the-box guy

and said, we don't really know what this means. We don't know what to do with it, but we're looking for a set that is just, you know, it doesn't have to follow the rules of a normal set. Now, I think they were thinking more of things that, like, maybe the rules had trouble handling with. I'm not even sure what they meant. But the interesting thing was, what they came to me was that very loose. It was like, okay, different color border, which means you can do things that we can't normally do.

Now, I said, okay, well, what do I want to do? So the thing that inspired me, of all things interesting enough, was I used to do magic. You know, not the card game, but actual, like, poof. You know, here's a dove. Although, I never worked with doves. But I did magic for kids, mostly. I did kid shows. And I would, you know, I took a lot of lessons. So one of the things that I did is I did a bunch of card tricks.

So there was this product that, there was this brand of card people that made card tricks. And all their cards, you know, looked the same because that was the brand of card they were. And so they had a deck of cards that each card just did weird things. Like, look, it's a black three of hearts. Oh, look, it's a nine and a half of clubs. Oh, look, it's a blank card. Oh, look, it's half of its ace of spades and half of its ace of hearts. It just was a whole deck of weird cards. And the idea was, hey, here's neat things. You can come up with tricks you can do.

We'll just kind of give you a smattering of neat things. Do whatever you want to do. And that inspired me to say, well, what if I made this set that just kind of did weird things and we'll let players do with it what they will. The other thing that I really embraced, which wasn't actually given to me as a constraint,

but it's who I am, is I loved the idea of a parody set, of a set that kind of had a sense of humor to it. Now, obviously, my background's in comedy writing, and so I was sort of like, oh, well, if we're going to break, you know, break rules and stuff, maybe we'll also break the rules of flavor that will have a different tone to it. And so I came up with the idea of, look, let's make a set that's kind of fun

and, because one of the things that I really wanted to do with the unset, which I think it actually did a good job, or all the unsets so far, both on Gluten and on Hinge, is say, hey, you know, yes, you can be very serious about magic. There's tournaments, there's all sorts of formats you can play, where if you want to test yourself, magic provides that.

But I really wanted to say, hey, you know what, magic is also fun, you know, and it's goofy, and you can be casual about it, and that I wanted to make a product that said, hey, remind people that this was something that could be fun. And so I really wanted to have a tone of the whole product that said, Hey, you know, you don't take magic so seriously. So the idea I had was, okay, I'm going to break every boundary I can. Um, and so I did that a couple of ways. Now, first off, I did not have a traditional design team like you think of nowadays. The way it worked is I just went around to everybody, R&D and other people in the company, and said, I'm doing this wacky set. If you have an idea, send me your ideas. And so what happened was

the design team was kind of whoever wanted to give me stuff. And then I took it and I tweaked it. And the other thing I did a lot of was trying to figure out where we could have fun. So first off, I said, okay, I went and looked at cards that already existed. We could parody existing cards. That was one space. And then I started saying, well, what can we do that normal cards can't do? And I started looking at the rules, and I went to the rules people. I said, okay, give me all the stuff someone's tried to do that they can't do.

I took all that stuff. I also sat down with some of the rules people. I said, okay, give me all the stuff someone's tried to do that they can't do. I took all that stuff. I also sat down with some of the graphic artists. So Dan Jelen, he's an artist, works at Wizards doing graphic design. And Dan was my graphic designer for the set. And so Dan and I worked a lot with trying to come up with a look and feel for the set. And I'm not sure if it was Dan's idea or my idea, but we came up with the idea that the art in the set broke the frame. That one of the ways to tell that this is not your ordinary product is the art isn't limited to the art box, if you will. And so one of the defining qualities of the unset, of Unglue and later of Unhinged,

was that the art itself kind of, you know, was able to break out of the art box. And not only that, the way I thought of the undesigned was that the card had a cohesive whole to it. That if the card was doing something, the whole card committed to that thing. That the graphics weren't just an art thing. You know, for example,

you know, if I wanted, I mean, for example, there was a card where, I think it's Ashnod's Coupon? There was a card that self-limited itself. Or is that, well, I forget which card it is. There's a card that self-limited itself. Or is that... I forget which card it is. There's a card that has a sticker on it, like, I'm restricted, but the errata is stickered on the card.

And that was part of the effect of, well, we do this, instead of just telling you it's one per, I'll have the whole joke of, oh, it's errata'd on it. There's a sticker with errata. And then also, I sat down with the graphic designers,

and I said, what visually can we do? And so they explained to me that because of the way we lay out cards on a sheet, we actually could have art cross over between cards. So for example, free for all, there's a fight between the leprechauns and the pink elephants. And there is a leprechaun being knocked out of frame. And then on the card, what was the card? On Rubber, Your Glue, that Leprechaun has been knocked into that frame. So he was knocked off his sheet,

or knocked off his card into another card. And because the sheets were next to each other, we could do stuff like that. We could cross over the art, which is something we never normally could do. The other thing that got suggested to me was the idea that because art could carry over, I got the idea of, well, could we have a card that was bigger than a single card?

To which they said, oh, yes. And that's where BFM came from, is the idea that, you know, we could, since we could cross over cards, I'm like, oh, well, we kind of need to have a creature so big that it had to be, you know, it's bigger than a single card. And I really latched on the idea of a card that's two cards. And it's funny, by the way, originally it was a 100-100 creature with trample. But we decided for some odd reason that this set wanted to follow the core set rules rather than the expert expansion rules. I don't know why that's the case, since so much about the set is so weird.

But so instead of Trample, we had the Must Be Blocked by Three Creatures, because at the time, we weren't doing Trample in the core set. I don't know. Anyway, weird things. Also, Bill Rose asked me to change it from 100 to 99, because he didn't want to break the three-number barrier just yet. So that's why it's a 99-99 not a 100-100. What else?

So we thought in a lot of the cards we were trying to think of how we could stretch boundaries, how we could do things. So like Mirror Mirror, by the way, I really, really wanted to do Mirror Mirror the entire card in Mirror Image. But I was in the minority, and enough people talked me out of it. In retrospect, I wish I had.

I think what we did is the text is mirrored. Like, mirror, mirror, there's mirror, then mirrored version of it. But, yeah, I really wish I had mirrored that. The one thing I love about Unglued and Unhinged is how many jokes we sort of cram into the set. One of my, so one of the guidelines, by the way, when we made the cards was the following rule, which is I wanted things to be funny, but it couldn't just be funny, meaning I didn't want to make a card that's funny for two seconds and then it had no play value. That the card had to be funny but also play interestingly.

And we messed around a lot with the kinds of cards we could do. If you look at Unglued, for example, we had five cards that were multiplayer cards which they were designed to be played in a multiplayer game. We had tokens, which I believe is the first time we ever did tokens. And if you notice

in the tokens in Unglued, I didn't put any power toughness on them, and I didn't even label them, because I wanted them to be a little more open. So, for example, we had a soldier token, but, like, is it a citizen? Is it a soldier? You know, like, it could be any kind of human that you could make. And we assigned them to colors that...

those tokens would make those colors. I remember we went around and around about what tokens to make. And we assigned them to colors that, those tokens would make those colors. And then we went around and around about what tokens to make. I ended up having to make sheep tokens, or squirrel tokens, because that set made squirrels. And the token, anyway, so one of the ongoing things that

I believe strongly about the unsets is they have proven to be great proving grounds. It's sort of advanced work. So much stuff we've done in the unsets have gone on to become staples of magic. The token cards are a perfect example where, like, I was just trying to do something neat and different, and now it's just something that's, you know, every packet has token cards in them. Oh, the other thing is the lands. Let me talk about the lands for a second.

So what happened was Chris Rush, who's the artist that did Black Lotus and, you know, numerous other cards early in the game, used to work at Wizards. And he and I were traveling to some event, I don't know, Origins or something, and he started talking about how he had this awesome idea for land cards.

And what he said was, he said, look, everyone knows what land cards do. You know, why don't we make use of the whole card? Like, let's take the illustration and just make the whole card, you know, the art. And that people know what they do. You know, you don't need the word forest on them. And I always thought it was a neat idea, but somehow Chris never made it happen. So I'm like, okay. I was trying to do different things.

I go, what if it'd be neat if we do lands and make the lands kind of different? And in the end, what we decided to do was we put lands in their own sheet so they could be blackboarded. Because we decided, oh, well, this is something that anybody could play with. It wasn't limited because, you know,

lands looking different didn't cause any problems in actual play. And we decided to put one per pack. We thought it was something kind of cool that everyone would enjoy. And then in Unglued, I sort of made them as big as I felt made sense. And then it's funny because on Hinge, I'm like, you know, we can go further.

But in Unglued, I liked a lot sort of the sense of just it opened up the idea of full frame art and we would go on to obviously do full frame art, Zendikar did full frame lands we've done full frame artist promos and that's another thing that kind of we experimented with

that really sort of opened up what magic cards could do now a lot of the things for me, I mean some of the cards were things that I tried to do in normal magic and, you know, just never quite made it in. But a lot of the cards I did was more me saying, well, what space can we goof around in? So let me just talk about a few of the cards because, so one of my favorite cards, maybe my favorite card, I love this card so much,

is the card Squirrel Farm. And the idea was that I liked the idea of a card that allowed you to put a skill that you might have that magic cards never test. And that skill was knowing artists. And I built a Squirrel Farm deck when the set came out. So, well, I'll get back to the Squirrel Farm deck when the set came out. I'll get back to the Squirrel Farm deck in a second. The pre-release, which was at Gen Con that year. I built the decks to go play at Gen Con.

That's where my story was going. Let me explain this real quick, and then I'll get back to Squirrel Farm. We were having this meeting about what to do. We decided that instead of having a wide pre-release, we're going to have a single pre-release. It's going to be a Gen Con. And I was going to go. I was very excited. And my plan was I was going to head judge it.

For those who don't know, once upon a time, I was a level four judge. I used to judge the feature match area. I used to be in charge of the feature match area at Pro Tours. And so, I was very excited. I'm like, okay, I'm a qualified judge. This is my set. And I wanted to make sure that the set at the pre-release captured the essence of what we wanted the set to be, meaning I really wanted to make sure we played up the fun of it.

So we were having some brainstorming meeting about what to do with the pre-release, how to make it different. So you understand, in a brainstorm, you're just tossing out ideas, right? So if someone says, oh, we could have confetti, or someone else is like, oh, maybe we can have people change seats. People were just throwing ideas out. Now, the set had this theme of chickens, which I will also talk about that in a minute. So in the middle of the meeting, I'm like, we're just brainstorming. I'm like, I can head judge in a chicken suit.

The meeting comes to a halt. Like, it stops. And they're like, okay, yeah, that's what we're doing. I thought we were brainstorming. No, you're head judging in a chicken suit. And I'm like, okay. So anyway, so then we rent a chicken suit. Actually, I got a chicken suit, which, by the way, gave me like,

I wore the chicken suit for the whole thing, and I ended up getting really sick because there was dust, I guess, on the feathers, and I got like pneumonia or something from it. Not that I wouldn't have done it again in a heartbeat, but I got really sick being the head chicken. And not that I wouldn't have done it again in a heartbeat, but I got really sick being the head chicken. And then the way we ran the event was that we made up a list of things you got tickets for. And the tickets were for crazy, weird things, clucking like a chicken.

You know, if you had a car that made you cluck like a chicken or just pulling crazy things off, you know. And if you did that, then you got a number of tickets, depending on how hard the thing was to do, and then at the end we raffled off lots of prizes oh, and also winning a match got you a ticket, so winning did something for you, but it really wasn't by far the only way to get tickets, there were a lot of ways to get tickets and so we really were encouraging players to be

and have fun, embrace it, you know and, by the way, they the audience took to it, like that was an amazing pre-release. Um, I mean, just, people were having a great time, and they were just wholeheartedly embracing the spirit of the set, which was awesome. Um, in fact, here's where I knew I had made a mistake. Uh, I'm walking down, and I hear the following. Uh, the first person says, um, okay, uh, I attack the following. The first person says, okay, I attack you.

And the second person goes, wait, wait, wait. In response to your declaration of attack, I remove my pants. And I'm like, uh-oh. So, Herlin Wrangler, which has Denim Walk, one of the things I was trying was, I wanted to make some simple cards. And so one of the ways to do that was to take basic abilities, like Land Walk, and, you

know, just tweak them a little bit. And so I was thinking, like, well, what is a common occurrence that might happen? Like, oh, what do you point out? Might be wearing jeans. It never dawned on me, I swear, as God is my witness, it never dawned on me that people would take off their pants. Now, I know in retrospect, if I thought about it for just really five seconds, I guess I could have seen that coming.

But I honest to God. But here's the funny thing. So, I didn't think people would take off their pants, but I did actually have a card in the original design that made people take off their clothes. Kind of. It was called Disrobing Scepter, like Disrupting Scepter.

And the way it worked was that when you used it on your opponent, Disrobing Scepter, like Disrupting Scepter. And the way it worked was that when you used it on your opponent, they'd either discard a card or remove a piece of clothing. I think in my head I thought it might be something... I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, Bran, frankly,

killed the card. I would later put the card in Unhinged just so Bran would kill it again. Just a kind of tradition. But anyway, Disrobing Scepter did not make it. Hurdle of the Minotaur did, although I don't think, like I said, I didn't really, I did not anticipate that card. Anyway. Oh, the chicken theme. So, for some reason, when I started making cards, I made a parody of Rook Egg called Chicken Egg.

So Rook Egg's a card from Arabian Nights that got repeated in a couple core sets. And basically, you put in play it's an egg, the egg hatches, and it's a, uh, a rock, I believe. Um, so I got this idea of making a chicken egg. I thought it was a funny parody. Um, and, uh, I confused everybody because the token didn't fly, even though the Rook token flies. But it was a chicken. I'm like, well, chickens don't fly. And then I later learned that chickens do fly, although not very well. And then from that, I decided to make a cycle of chickens.

And so I got free- range chicken and mason chicken. And then once I had the chickens, I decided to make a lord of the chickens. Chicken a la king. Which I think that joke came from my wife. My wife did a bunch of the jokes in the set. And I think chicken a la king was her suggestion.

I think chicken a la king might have my favorite piece of flavor text in the set. Where it talks about during the chicken revolution I don't remember the quote but it joked around about how he kept his head but everyone else just ran around because they're chickens so their heads cut off

and I love Chicken a la King and anyway, once I realized there was kind of a mini chicken theme, it started snowballing. Somehow, I guess we told some of the artists there was a chicken theme, and so some of the artists started putting chickens in their art, and anyway, the set ended up having a little mini of a chicken theme, which obviously is why I dressed as a chicken for the pre-release,

which led to one of my odder occurrences at Wizards. So I'm walking down the hall one day and Joel Mech, the guy who at the time was the head designer and developer who was one people who gave this project to me, stops me in the hall and he goes Mark, I have to ask you a question I go yes, and he goes

are chickens funny? and I'm like, what? he goes, I see there's a strong chicken theme in Unglued. Are chickens funny? And I'm like, why? Why, yes, they are. For example, the classic comedy tool, the rubber chicken.

I'm defending chickens to Joel. Like, you know, the staple of comedy. Now, luckily for me, chickens are funny. So I was able to defend it. But it is very serious. Like, Joel meant it. Like, he was like, am I was able to defend it. But it was very serious. Like, Joel meant it. He was like, am I using the right tool? Are chickens funny?

So I was able to defend chickens. And back to Squirrel Farm. See, I'm jumping around. By the way, for those that want to go, how does Mark Rosewater's brain work? This is what the podcasts are for. Because I'm just jumping around. This is how I podcasts are for. Because I just, bing, bing, bing. I'm just jumping around. This is how I think all the time. I'm just talking aloud. So you guys

get to experience the chaotic mental processing of me. Okay, so anyway, Squirrel Farm. So I liked the idea of making a card that rewarded you for knowledge that wasn't something that

normally you get rewarded for. And so I loved the idea of, okay, well, do you know your artists? I think art is a huge part of the game. Obviously we have this wonderful, you know, contract of artists that do our art. They do an awesome job. And I thought it'd be fun to, hey, little a little do like hey do you know your artist so the fun for me is I made I made this deck for so what happened was I was going to Gen Con the pre-release was one day but the rest of the time I was going to be there I was going to gunsling I was going to gunsling with with unglued decks and so I made a squirrel a squirrel farm deck and so the key to the squirrel farm deck was,

other than my four squirrel farms, I believe that I tried not to, I had a lot of one-ofs. And even cards where I had duplicates, if I could, I would have multiple pieces of art. So the deck would just have all sorts of different pieces of art. Because what I learned is, a lot of people don't know their art. But that wasn't the best part of squirrel farm. That wasn't the best part. You know, I get lots of squirrels. The best part of Squirrel Farm

was showing them a piece of art and then figuring out how long you had to wait before you could show them the same piece of art. And my deck, the fun of my deck was I would get so many squirrels off the same cards. Like literally I have like three or four cards in my hand I just would rotate between them and part of the skill of that deck was learning about how long people could process before you gave them enough information that they forgot something they had learned

three minutes earlier because like once, first of all I show them the first time they don't know it, they go okay okay it's Dan Frazier, okay it's Dan Frazier and then I wait long enough, they go who was that again okay Dan. They go, okay, okay, it's Dan Frazier. Okay, it's Dan Frazier. And then I wait long enough. They go, who was that again? And then I, okay, Dan Frazier. Okay, I got to remember.

That's Dan Frazier. And I would mix it up a little bit. They're like, who is that? Like, Dan Frazier. Ah! You know. Anyway, I enjoyed my Scrollfram deck. Another deck I had, which I had a lot of fun,

was Mine, Mine, Mine, which was a deck, I'm sorry, a card in which it allowed you to take all your library and put it into your hand. In fact, by the way, the art for that, the guy in the art is Dan Jelen, because he did the card art, and he was the guy who did all the layouts I explained, so that is a little teaser. Oh, by the way, Dan Jelen, because he was both an artist and the guy working on the set, he did a lot of in-jokes, one of which was the Wheel of Fortune parody, Strategy Schmattergy. There's a wheel, and all the things on the wheel are the different suggestions

for the unglued expansion symbol. Obviously, it went with the egg to match the chicken, but that was all the different things that was on there. And went with the egg to match the chicken. Um, but that was all the different things that was on there. And once again, I talked about this earlier. Let me stress this again. One of the rules about unsets is I just try to cram in as many jokes as I possibly can cram into a set that I just, I, I look for every nook and cranny. There's jokes in the art, there's jokes in flavor text, and, and, um, oh, oh wait, I got to talk about the secret message. I've not talked about the secret message.

Okay, so one of the ideas I had when we were doing this is, I said, okay, I want to cram lots of stuff in here. So one of the things I decided is, I'm going to make a secret message, and I'm going to hide the secret message in the cards. Now, at the time, Magic had never make a secret message, and I'm going to hide the secret message in the cards. Now, at the time, Magic had never done a secret message. And so I thought it was pretty cool to say, okay, well, I'm going to put something in there. So what we did was, down by the legal text, we put a word after the legal text. A little tiny thing. And then for Unglued, I made it simple. It was just in collector number order. Just put these

together, collector number order. You had to notice they exist, then you had to think to put them together. And then, we talked about a lot of things, but I wanted to sort of maximize the jokes. So what we ended up doing was the hidden message was, here are some cards that

didn't make it, and then some of them were actual cards I tried to get in that the name was funny, but, you know, it, the card wasn't funny enough to, it didn't play funny, um, some of them were just, I don't know, names I thought were funny, um, I think Disrobing Scepter might even be there, uh, anyway, so I stuck this hidden message in, and, and that, that's the kind of thing the set was doing. I just was like, what else could we do, you know? Uh, um, and then the other thing that I tried to do a lot of was, I tried to play up a lot

of different kind of jokes. Uh, like, one of the jokes I'm very proud of is a card called, uh, Bronze Calendar. Um, and the, the card's called Bronze Calendar, um, and it was a takeoff on Stone Calendar. So Bronze Calendar did what Stone Calendar did, which is it made your spells cost one less, but you had to talk in a silly voice because it was on. It also, I made it cost what I always wanted Stone Calendar to cost, because I love Stone Calendar, but I thought it was one too expensive.

But the art shows a bronze calendar, not a calendar. Even though the name is bronze calendar and the flavor text makes some silly quote about, I mean, I'm just making fun of the kind of stuff we write. I had a lot of fun, by the way, with the flavor text. I was in charge of the name of the flavor text, of trying to write, like trying to parody the style of namings and flavor texts that we do. You know, that like one of my favorites is what's it called? Lexivore? The one that eats his own

card. And on it, there's a piece of flavor text you have to read because he's eating his own flavor text, so you have to piece it together. And we did this thing during Mirage where we would have some thing and go like, elvish expressionression for blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, you know,

flinging the monkey. Elvish Expression for plucking the chicken, you know. And where each name was circular and didn't mean sense to each other. I feel like I'm just throwing cards out here. So Mine on Mine was fun. Incoming.

Oh, I loved incoming. So incoming was a card that just, you went through the library, and you got any number of permanents you want and put them into play. I made a squirrel farm deck, for example, when I went to Gen Con. I made an incoming deck.

And my incoming deck killed you with BFM, I believe. It would make a BF come into play, and then I did something to give it haste. Oh, probably, and then I did something to give it haste. Oh, probably, anyway, I did something to give it haste so I could attack you with it right away. Incoming was fun. The other thing, for example, that we did, and Incoming demonstrates this, is something that Dan Jelen did, which was awesome, was we did a lot of texturing. For example, if you look in the rules text, the text box, there's footprints behind it.

This is before, by the way, before really we did water, water mups and stuff, that the unsets, and once again, paving the way for lots of different things, the unsets were doing textured backgrounds, and like incoming has footprints in the background because you see something running. And, yeah, one of the things that was fun, the way Dan and I would work is,

he would print up the card and show it to me, and I would make notes, and I'm like, oh, well, this show could be fun if we did this, and this would be fun if we did that. And we kept going back and finding new ways to break out things and new ways to change things. Oh, another thing that we had a lot of fun with is trying to...

We felt like we sometimes would use the flavor text to make visual treatments. The example there is the giant growth. You roll the dice for the giant growth. Not great names at times. But anyway, the flavor text for that was a personal ad from the elf, I guess, who had been supersized, supersized being the unhinged version. And it was like, you know, single white elf or whatever.

But it looked like a little newspaper. You know, we did a lot of that kind of stuff. Oh, here's another funny story. So we did, after we did Unglued, we did market research on it. We did a god book study. And so the number one most disliked card was Blacker Lotus. For those that don't know what Blacker Lotus is, it's a lotus that gets you four mana, but you have to rip it up to use it.

And then the second worst card was Chaos Confetti. Chaos Confetti was, there's this urban legend about a guy who took his Chaos Orb and to win a game, ripped it into small pieces and used it as confetti to destroy his opponent's entire side. So I believe Jeff Donae actually gave me that card. Someone who used to run tournaments for Wizards, was our tournament manager for a while.

And anyway, the card was a common, and just was kind of having fun, like, hey, relive the urban legend, essentially. And one of the things, by the way, that I loved is, like, that card, Mark Tadeen, who did the original Chaos Orb, came and parodied his own work, and that was a lot of fun.

I loved, the artists seemed to have a lot of fun with the set, which was really cool, and I loved that. Anyway, so we did this, number one worst card on the God Book was Black Lotus, number two worst card was Chaos Confetti, and the people

doing the research came back to us and go, yeah, well, we can't find any correlation between these cards, because we've looked at their flavor text and this and that and their names and neither one seems to have a dislike in the same area. People seem to like the art, but I'm like, so you can't see

why this is number one and number two. Like, well, perhaps you're not, like, you know, reading the cards. Anyway, it turns out people didn't like to rip up their cards. Who knew? I mean, we had some other mechanics

we messed around with. We did dice rolling. That's another big thing. I really like dice rolling. I thought dice rolling did fair in our God Book study. Not great. Oh, here's another funny story.

Speaking of Dice Rolling. So, Elvish Impersonator was one of the cards. And Claymore J. Flapdoodle, who, by the way, just as a record, I think it's very fair that he steals so blatantly from the lovely stylings of... I remember Claymore J. Flapdoodle. so blatantly from the lovely stylings of... I remember Claymore J. Flapdoodle, and I'm blinking on a wonderful artist that did lots of magic art in the early days, Phil Folio. I am a little offended that Claymore J. Flapdoodle

so blatantly stole what I felt from the working of Phil Folio. But anyway, so we get the sketch in for Elvish Impersonator, and he had done early Elvis. Leather jackets, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Look, Elvish Impersonators, like, they do

old Elvis. I mean, when you think of stereotypical, so I wrote back my, because I was doing all the card concepts. So one of the weird things about the set is I did the card concepting, I did the names, I did the flavor text. And I'm glued with, like, I was the guy doing everything on the set. You know what I mean? I had a lot of people give me stuff, so I had a lot of people submitting things.

But I was in charge of all the different things going on. The guy was doing the layouts because I was helping with Dan, you know, making notes on that. Anyway, so I actually wrote back to Claymore, and my note was, no, no, no, Old Elvis. So he came back and gave us Old Elvis. I think there's some young Elvises in the background, maybe, his little nod to wanting young Elvis. Mostly what I said is Old Elvis is funnier. You know, we were trying to do comedy. And a lot of the set, by the

way, like, Joel stopped me in the hall. It's funny that, like I said, my background's comedy writing. I've done improv. I've done stand-up. I've written for sitcoms. So I have a lot of background in comedy. Normally in magic,

I don't get that much opportunity to use my comedy chops, if you will. And so it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to just sort of go to town. I mean, I love magic dearly, you know. And to me, to truly, truly parody something, you have to love the thing you're parodying. Because I feel like, you know, you have to really know it well to be able to parody.

And I had this tons and tons of fun with Unglued, just going all over the place, you know, to try to just, you know, get in every little joke I could. Like I said, part of it was being able to make fun of the style of naming we did or the style of flavor text we did. Because back then I was doing flavor text all the time.

Anyway, so I put the set out. We go to Gen Con. We have an amazing, amazing pre-release. And what I found was the set found its audience and it kind of connected

with people in a way that a few other sets I've done had, in that, especially the first one. I mean, because once we did the first one, then people knew we could do it, where when we did the first one, hey, it didn't exist yet. Like, that's one of the important,

my little design lessons snuck in here, is that it's very hard sometimes when you're doing something to understand that people don't know what they don't know. Your audience doesn't know. And that when you show them something that they've never seen before, they don't know it's possible. They don't know it can be done until it's done.

Sometimes, for example, we'll come up with thing A and thing B, and thing A is, we think, better than thing B, but thing A isn't working. And it's hard to go to B because A seems so awesome. But it's like, well, the audience doesn't know you had A. They never saw A. B is awesome. B will be fun to them. Don't kill yourself because you know A exists. You know?

But anyway, the set came out. The response was, I mean, with the target demographic, I will say, phenomenal. Phenomenal. Now, a lot of people did not like the set because, hey, it really is not meant for everybody. There's people that take their magic very seriously, and here's a set where people are taking their pants off and rolling dice and ripping up cards. I mean, another big thing I try to do is I wanted to have a strong, um, physical component. Um, I wanted to have a lot of verbal components. Um, oh, here's another good story. I feel like today is just, oh, here's a good story. Um, Night

of the Hokey Pokey. So the card was given to a guy named, the artist was named Keb Walker. Uh, for people who know the art history. Very, very big, influential magic artist. One of the best artists to ever do magic cards, although, I mean, he's an amazing artist, but one of the, you know, real top cream of the crop. So he was given the card

Night of the Hokey Pokey. Now, he is English, for those that don't know this. So he wrote back to our, who was the art director at the time? Jesper Mierfors, maybe? he wrote back to our, who was the art director at the time? Jesper Mierfors, maybe? Anyway, I'm not sure who was the art director at the time. But anyway, he came back, and the note was, what is the hokey pokey?

Because the art description was, show this knight dancing the hokey pokey. And so we had to call him up, and the art director had to say, okay, well, see, you put your right hand in, you take your right hand out. Anyway, they described to him what the hokey pokey looked like so he could draw it. And like I said, the thing that was hilarious for me that was a lot of fun was, right, I can make you click like a chicken or do the hokey pokey or, you know, balance things on your hand or hold your wrist together or,

you know, or like censorship. Oh, here's another good story. So censorship's art, um, uh, I believe the card was in Exodus, I'm thinking. And, um, there's a woman and we ended up cropping the bottom part of her cause it was a little, I don't know, too revealing or something. They decided to crop the art because they felt like it wasn't appropriate. So what we did is we took the cropped out piece of art and then blurred things and, you know, and then censored it basically. But the art to censorship is a censored piece of art. That's the kind of jokes, people.

That's the kind of jokes that we're putting in. By the way, if you want, if you go online, I forget the name of it, I wrote an article in which I highlighted, I think, a hundred jokes from the un- for Unglue that you might not know. You know, like the fact that bureaucracy literally is held up with red tape. Um, or that, you know, spark be spelled backwards is craps, because the card, you know, made you play craps. That's another one, by the way. Spark Fiend is one where I knew I wanted to have a little tiny art box and a giant text box and I didn't quite know what I wanted to do but, like, I eventually came up with the idea of, okay,

we're going to play craps. We have dice, let's play craps. And then Spark Fiend is spark backwards is craps, although with a K but we thought we spelled it with a C. People would get confused how to pronounce it. But anyway, if you read that article, I have lots of jokes and I explain them all. Like I said,

I don't know. It was one of the most satisfying sets I've ever done. I think both because I just had a blast doing it and because it kind of meant so much for me. I mean, I like competitive magic. I'm glad magic is something people can really demonstrate what they can do at, and I'm glad there is the Pro Tour and all that.

But to me, in my heart, magic is fun. Magic is something that I've always enjoyed just enjoying you know and that to make a set which really you know climbs the building screams at the top of his lungs

magic is fun you know I'm just glad to be to have a big part to do with that and I mean Unglued was like I said

one of the most personal things I've ever done one of the things I'm proudest of it's had a huge impact on magic you know it's funny how much like when I like I said, one of the most personal things I've ever done, one of the things I'm proudest of. It's had a huge impact on Magic. It's funny how much, like when I, every time I go to pitch a new unset, I keep trying to hit the point of, look, we learned so much from unsets. Unsets are like kind of beta, the ultimate beta test where we try

things to the point in which the audience tries them too. And I really believe that unsets are an awesome thing. I love the message they give. I love what they do for design. You know, and it was awesome. I really enjoyed doing it. I'm now at work. In fact, I've been at work for a couple minutes here.

That's why today's is slightly longer than normal. Also, it rained today. You know why today's was a longer thing? Because Seattleites cannot drive in the rain. But today's an extra long special thing because it was an extra special set. So I'm here, I gotta go, I hope you enjoyed my talking on Glued, and it's time to make the Magic Cards.