Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #147 - Unhinged, Part 1

Episode Date: August 8, 2014

Mark starts a five-part series on the design of Unhinged.

Okay, I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Except it's not! It's a special edition of Drive to the Dentist. See, before I go to work today, I have to go to the dentist. I have some dental work done. So, what that means for you guys is a little extra content today, because the dentist is slightly farther away than wizards. But, I picked a topic that I can gladly, gladly talk about for as long as I need to. Today, I'm going to talk about the design of Unhinged, the second unset. Well, the second released unset. So, I'm going to do something interesting.

Normally, I talk about the set, and then I go through the cards and tell card stories. But for this set, I'm just going to go through all 140 cards. And during the course of talking about all the cards, I will talk about all the background of the set. And the reason I decided to do this is I have stories in every single card in the set. This set is something where there's a lot packed in every card. So I'm going to talk about every single card in the set. Okay. So this set came out in November 19, 2004.

card in the set. Okay, so this set came out in November 19, 2004. There were 140 cards, 55 commons, 40 uncommons, 40 rares, and 5 lands. Okay, the expansion symbol, by the way, was a horseshoe. We'll get to that in a little bit. Okay, so now, the first controversy of the set is, alphabetically, what is the first card? I believe in the numbering of the set, the first card is the believe in the numbering of the set, the first card is the card with no name. But if you ask Gatherer, it believes the first card is Akhan's Run. And the reason is,

Akhan's Run has a quotation mark in it where the no-name card has no word. And so having a non-letter, Gatherer thinks it goes first. But I believe nothing is before something. So I believe the first card is No Name. So No Name is a 1-1 shapeshifter for one and a blue. And for one mana, you can turn its name into any name you want from anywhere.

And also, its flavor text has an ability, which is unique for flavor text, which is you can change its flavor text anywhere. So you can change its name and you can change its flavor text has an ability, which is unique for flavor text, which is you can change its flavor text anywhere. So you can change its name, and you can change its flavor text. And the picture is of a guy in disguise, and you see him disguised as various magic characters. He has like a wallet that shows different IDs showing different characters.

So this card came about because in Unglued, I made, so the shortest name that we'd ever had in Magic, I think there was a whole bunch of three-letter names, like Web and such. You know, Web, Pox. And so I made a two-letter name in Unglued, Owl. So I decided that I was going to make an even shorter name in this set.

And so I toyed with doing a one-letter name, but in the end I decided to have a no-letter name. How's anyone going to beat this? It's a card with no name. You cannot be shorter than nothing. And there's a lot of people that believe its name is like underscore, underscore, underscore, like whatever number times that underscore is. But really, its name is nothing. The underscores just show that it's

not there. And this card was made, one of the things that unsets get to do, that normal Blackboarder sets do not, is we get to care about names. The way it works in Blackboarder is in Blackboarder, you can care about a name as if I can reference a specific card. So something like Keeper of Kukas can care about Kukas, stuff like that. But you can't care about a specific word.

Where one of the things that's going on in unsets is unsets can care about specifically what words are there. The way it works in silver-bordered land, I speak as the silver-bordered rules manager, is that unsets look at the card in question. Black-border sets assume all cards with the same name are the same, and so anything that would differentiate between them, Blackboard doesn't care about. It doesn't look at expansion symbol, it doesn't look at anything that, you know, artist or anything that might differentiate.

Where Silver Border goes, nope, we do that. So what Silver Border does is it says what exactly, the card that's sitting in front of me, who is your artist, what is your expansion symbol? It looks exactly at the card there, Silver Border does. And so this card lets you do some shenanigans with looking for specific names or

caring about specific words. We'll get to Urza's Hot Tub eventually, but Urza's Hot Tub for example, specifically cares about what word is in your name. And this card, assuming you pay for it, can have any name you want. Okay, next. Akhan's Run, which is two red, red, green, and green.

It's an enchantment. At the beginning of your upkeep, you must say, Akhan's Run, it's V, and you name a creature. And then if you do, you get to search your library for that creature and put it into play. That creature has haste and is removed at end of turn. So the idea is, Akhan's, it's the blah, you go get the blah, and then you have it for the turn, you can attack with it. So this is one of those cards, by the way, that is fuzzy. I mean, the only reason it's in Silver Border, well, okay, first off, Akhan's Run is a piece of flavor text from the card Lurgoyf from Ice Age, for those who do not know it. So the card is Akhan's Run, it's the Lurg Goif, Last Words of Safi Eriksdottir.

So we then made a card called Revenant in Stronghold, I believe, that where Hans goes not again, which, if you know anything about the story, makes no sense, because it's thousands of years later on a different world. But anyway,

not a different world, same world, but many years apart. So anyway, Hans and Safi became characters that we made reference to, because that piece of flavor text is a very, very famous piece of flavor text. In Time Spiral, we made Safi Eric's daughter as a card, which I was very proud to make. And then anyway, I decided it would be fun for the first time ever to have a card based on a name of flavor text. And what better to have that than Akhan's Run.

This card is one of those cards that mechanically is not too far away from what Black Border could do. In fact, it's probably one of those cards that if we wanted to do in Black Border, it would have to cost a lot, and maybe it'd be so cost prohibitive that we wouldn't do it in Black Border, but I believe technically we could. I was just

trying really hard to match the flavor of Akon's run. I love the art, by the way. Quentin Hoover did the art on this. In fact, this was the art. So the way I announced the set was on April Fool's. This came out in November. On April 1st, I announced,

during April Fool's, I announced the release of Unglued, the second Unglued, Unhinged. And it was done in such a way which was like, am I messing with you because it's April Fool's? Or am I really announcing something? Because if it was existing, wouldn't it be cool to announce it on April 1st? And I did a poll the next day, and I said, okay, yesterday on April Fool's Day, I made an announcement. How many believe I was telling the truth? And it was 50.1 for yes, 49.9 for no. So it's probably the best April Fool's prank I've ever done,

which is the announcing of an actual set. And people got all in a tizzy. They're like, it's real, it's not real. And like, anyway, it was a great fun to watch. And I had a lot of fun watching it. And Akon's run was the art that I ran with it was a great fun to watch. And I had a lot of fun watching it. And Akon's run was the art that I ran with it, because it's amazing art. It shows a man, a Viking, Hans, I assume, running away from just a horde of creatures chasing him.

So it's pretty funny. Okay, next. Aesthetic consultation. So for one black man, it's an instant. You name an artist, and you remove cards from the top of your library from the game, you exile them, and to reveal a card of the named artist. And then you get to put that in your hand. So this card was just like Demonic Consultation

from Ice Age, except it's looking for artists. So let me talk about Artists Matters. That's one of the themes of the set. So because Silver Border is allowed to care about the qualities of an individual card, because, for example, in Black Border, we might have multiple, the same name, you know, just take a card we've done a lot, Naturalize.

We've done many, many Naturalizes or Giant Cards. There's some cards we've just done a lot. You can't care about the artist in Black Border because every card that has the same name is supposed to be the same. So artist is one of the qualities that Black Border isn't allowed to care about. Well, since Blackboarder isn't allowed to care about it, the rule of Silverboarder is, I cannot do any card that

Blackboarder could do. That's why I cheated a little bit with Otcon's run. So I was looking for things to do that I can't do. Well, caring about qualities that are uncarable in Blackboarder makes a lot of sense. So one of the themes of Unhinge was artist matters. So there's a whole bunch of cards that say, oh, well, when building your deck, if you

build a deck that uses similar artists, you will have a stronger deck. And that's something people don't normally build. You don't normally say, oh, I'm going to build a Rebecca Gay deck. I'm going to build a Kev Walker deck. You know, the idea of I'm going to pick an artist and build around an artist was very unique. And so we made a bunch of cards to do that. Okay, next, Ambiguity. So Ambiguity is two blue and blue. This is a hard card to sum up. See if I can, I'm going to read this to you, which is tricky because I'm writing. So whenever a player plays a spell that counters a spell that has been played, or a player plays a spell that counters a spell that has been played,

or a player plays a spell that comes into play with counters, that player may counter the next spell, that player put an additional counter or any permanent, that that has already been played but not countered. Okay, did that make any sense to you? Basically what it did is it was making fun of the fact that the word play and the word counter both had multiple meanings in magic and so basically what the card said is

whenever you play a spell that has counters on it or you play a spell that comes into play with counters oh right, whenever you counter a spell that has been played or play a spell with counters on it, wait, wait. Right, whenever you counter a spell that has been played

or play a spell with counters on it, so either you counterspell something or you play a spell that comes with counters on it, if you do that, then you are allowed to either counter the next spell or you are allowed

to put counters on the next spell. I think that's right. Anyway, the whole card was goofing around with the idea that magic has words that aren't clear. And so ambiguity was basically saying and this is another one of those things where not

sure we couldn't do this in Black Border except it's so confusing we would never do in Black Border that this was a card made to be confusing something we do in the unsets that we don't do in Black Border where in the Black Border we go way out of our way not to make things confusing I'm not saying we never make confusing cards but we don't try in Black Border, where in Black Border we go way out of our way not to make things confusing. I mean, I'm not saying we never make confusing cards, but we don't try to make them confusing.

Where this card very much was trying to mess around. So, ambiguity also does something quite fun. So, one of my favorite things about ambiguity is, if you take ambiguity and you flip it over to the back, you'll notice that the upside is upside down. That if you take the card with ambiguity, the word facing upright, and flip it, the back is upside down. If you take the card with ambiguity, the word facing upright, and flip it, the back is upside down. Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm thinking of Topsy Turvy. That's not true.

The ambiguity thing is the art, if you turn it upside down, is a different picture. That's what it is. If you turn the card upside down, it has a picture either direction. So it's an ambiguous picture. That it has one picture if you look at it upright, and a different picture if you look So it's an ambiguous picture. That it has one picture if you look at it upright, and a different picture if you look

upside down. The upside back thing actually is a different card. We'll get to that. Okay. Next, we get to Artful Looter. So Artful Looter is a 1-2 human wizard that costs two and a blue. It's a looter, which means you can tap, draw a card, and discard a card. that costs two and a blue.

It's a looter, which means you can tap, draw a card, and discard a card. And then whenever a permanent comes into play that shares an artist with another permanent you control, you untap it. So the idea is it's a looter that gets to draw and discard a card in blue. We do those all the time. Except whenever you play a...

Is it a permanent? Yeah. Whenever you play a permanent that matches the artist of another permanent in play, you get to untap this. So every time you get to do that, you get more cards. So this is another card that wants to go in an Artist Matters deck. Pick an artist, and then you can build around

that. The, uh, we also were playing around, once again, that, uh, so looters are, um, what we call, uh, it's our nickname for cards that, um, you draw a card and discard a card in, ability in blue. And I think it started because there was a card called merfolk looter.

Was that in Tempest? I think that was the first looter. Anyway, the name looter caught up. So we occasionally use looter, but I always find looter sort of funny. So this card is using looter to mean what it actually means, or the more common use of it, which is you steal things. And so artful looter, you see him, he's stealing a painting from a museum because he's an artful looter. He's stealing art.

But in the card game, he cares about art and he's a looter in magic sense. We were playing off a little pun there. Also, you'll know in the flavor text, one of the things that we try to do in unsets is goof around a bit with the flavor text. And so this has a headline. It says, Priceless Pick Pilfered.

So instead of having a normal flavor text, sometimes we have other things there. Because the way that unblued and unhinged were done is each card was laid out. The way we thought of it was the whole card was a piece of art, not just the art in the frame. And so we would have a graphic designer make each card individually. And what would happen is they'd make cards, we would put notes on the cards, and then they would go back and constantly make changes. And so we could do fun stuff like have the flavor text be a headline from a paper. Okay, next. Ass Whoopin'. Okay, so this is one white and a black. It's a sorcery. Destroy target silver border permanent

in any game you can see from your seat. So this card allows you to destroy cards not just in your game. So the idea of this card was that we had... Okay, let me talk about the ass theme, if you will. So one of the things that I was told by the brand team when this set was being put together is

they wanted me to be a little more sophomoric in my humor. They thought Unglued, interestingly, was a little highbrow, and they thought that they would like me to get a little more broad in my humor. I said, okay. And so I invented the Donkeyfolk, that all were referred to as ass in their title. And there are six cards. There's a cycle of them.

Sorry, there's seven because there's a donkey lord. But anyway, we had already made them, and I think this card originally had a different name. It just was a different card. This card originally was made by Randy Bueller, who was on my... Oh, my design team, by the way, can you remember my design team?

It was me, Randy Bueller, Brandon Bozzi, and who was my last person? Randy was my development representative. There was no development team. Randy just would do development on the fly as we were doing the design. Maybe Brady Donner was the last member of my team?

I'm blanking on the fourth member. It was a four-person team. It was a lot of creative people because a lot of the set, a lot of doing on sets is matching the overall flavor of the card. And, like, the whole card is something rather than just... And you have to make the whole joke work. So, you know, having creative people helped a lot. So, anyway, this card originally...

Randy came up with the idea of a card that destroys stuff in other games. And then my tweak on it was that it only destroyed silver border permanents, because we needed a way to make sure that it was only messing with other silver border games. Because let's say people are having a serious tournament, and people are having fun next to them. Well, we don't

want people that are in a serious tournament like, uh-oh, this card's affecting me. So we said, okay, by only being able to affect silver border cards, that meant, well, that means you're only affecting a game that's chosen to play on cards. And so that's the restriction we put on it. We made it that you could see from your seat

just to give it limitations, so you couldn't just walk around the room and destroy whatever. And then we decided that we wanted this to be the pre-release card, and so to tie it into the set's themes, we said, okay, well, let's somehow, let's figure out the set's themes and tie it in.

And then we came up with the name of Ass Whoopin'. And then what we did is, the art showed a pair of boots that had just been smoked as if it had been destroyed. And so then we put on the art, we got commissioned this art of this little donkey folk that's an angel playing a harp with wings

and a little halo to show that the creature that had died in the art was this donkey folk. That's why we call it Ass Whoopin'. Ashes to ashes, donkeys to dust.

That was the flavor text. So we really hammered home that Geddit is destroying a donkey so we can call it Ass Whoopin'. And that was the privilege card. Which was a pretty good privilege card because it's the kind of thing that works best in a large tournament, right?

So, have a tournament where you're playing Unsets, well, this throws some chaos in there. Okay, the next card is Asquatch. And so this looks like, the art looks just like the famous Sasquatch picture, with Sasquatch walking in the woods, a blurry picture of him walking in the woods. And anyway, if you notice in this picture, he's flipping off the camera. I don't know if people notice that. And the reason is, we always talk about how our products are PG-13. And so I said if a PG-13, in a PG-13 film, there are a lot of swear ones. And we don't swear, but how about we just end up slipping off the camera?

And it's really subtle. Most people didn't even notice that we did it. But if you look at the picture, Asquash is slipping off the camera. So anyway, he is a four and a red for a three and a half, three and a half. We'll get to that in a second. Each other donkey gets one and a half, one and a half. Whenever another donkey comes into play, untap target creature and gain control until end of turn, that creature is haste. So it steals a creature.

So it's a donkey lord. It grants all donkeys plus one and a half, plus one and a half. And whenever you play a donkey, it gets to steal something for the turn. Now, the reason that it has fractions and it grants fractions is, one of the themes of the set is fractions. I was trying to find a way to add something

simple to the set that was different but wouldn't be super complex. And I came up with the idea of fractions. Not just any fraction, a half. At the time, I thought it would be pretty simple. That, you know, when you see something that has fractions, it's a three and a half, three and a half. It's pretty straightforward what it means. People understand how damage works and how, you know, to kill this, you have to do at least three and a half damage to it.

Which pretty much means doing four to it. Unless you have something in the set that might do half damage. It turned out to be that fraction damage was a little more complicated than I thought, that just the math of saying, I'm at 20 and I take 3.5 damage. Well, what am I at? Not that you can't figure it out, but it's a little harder to process than you think. It's a little harder to go, oh, well, that's 17, but wait, I took an extra one, so it's one, oh, oh, it's 16 and a half. You know, it takes a little while to process that.

But anyway, to tie the donkeys in the set, I gave all the donkeys fractional, either fractional power or fractional toughness or both. And so this set has fractional power and grants fractional power. And then I just gave them a little, a little threatened,TP threading ability just to make your donkeys... Because Donkeyfolk was the theme of the set, one of the things in Unsets is because I'm giving you a lot of weird themes, I want to make sure I give you the cards at higher

rarities that tie those themes together so that, for example, I knew people might want to make a Donkeyfolk deck. And so AskWatch is there to help make that happen. Next, Adelaide Igpe. Five and a white for a 3-3 creature. It's got double strike, but if you ever don't talk in Pigladin,

which is a particular language, then it goes away. So this card is... So a lot of the questions with this card is, this card is in Pigladin. Pigladin is a language, a variant of English, where you take the front consonant and you put it on the back of the word and then add A. So pig, instead of being pig, is Igpe.

So there's a big debate, by the way, of whether the creature type of this card, because at the time, other cards could use creature types of unsets. In fact, I was very, very careful in picking my... Like, I only added a few new creature types because I knew it was the one thing in Silver Border that affected Black Border. And then, like, maybe a year after this came out, they said,

nope, Silver Border stuff's no longer legal in Black Border. So, like, your Volros, your Volros laboratory can't name pig anymore because there's no pigs in Black Border Magic. I feel that's a travesty. But anyway, the question was, is this card an ig peg, technically, or a pig? And the answer is it's a pig because the card's in another language. So we have cards in other languages, you default to the English version of the card. Anyway, so it's a Pig.

It's one of the few Pigs in Magic. And Keb Walker drew this, it was a very cute Pig in a toga. I remember I said, let's give it to Keb. I know Keb Walker will do an awesome Pig in a toga, and he did. Also, the flavor text, I don't remember off the top of my hand, but if you translate the flavor text, this is another one of the flavor texts where if you bother to figure out what it says, it just kind of jokes with you that really, did you try to figure this out?

The flavor text is something like, this doesn't say anything, but you can figure it out for yourself. Okay, next, Avatar of Me, two blue blue, creature avatar, for a star star creature. So Avatar of Me costs one more to play for each ten years you've been alive. Its power is equal to your height in feet, and its toughness is equal to your American shoe size, round to the nearest half. Avatar of Me's color is the color of your eyes.

So this card did all sorts of weird things. The idea was that it was customized based on who played it. So the older you are, the more expensive it is. So this card is better for younger people, but it's more powerful the bigger you are. So usually the older you are, the bigger you are. And usually the older you are, the bigger your feet are. So the idea is if you're smaller you get it cheaper and if you're older you tend to get it bigger I'm in the worst case scenario where I'm older but smaller so this card was not particularly effective for me

so do you round? I'm 5 foot 5 foot 5 so I have 8 and a half shoe size so for me right now, I'm in my 40s, so this would cost 6 blue blue

for a 5 8 1⁄2 that's hazel, because I have hazel eyes. Oh, and the other thing this did is it added some colors to Silverboard of Magic. Not that Silverboard of Magic wasn't already full of colors, but all eye colors now are technical colors that cards could be. So hazel is an eye color, and pink is a color, and brown is a color. Anyway, I mean,

blue and green are already colors. But this card had a lot of fun. People really seemed to enjoy this card. Okay, next, AWOL, which for those that might not know American slang, it's a military term that means absent without leave. So, it's a two and a white, and it's a military term that means absent without leave. So it's a two and a white, and it's an instant, and it says remove target attacking creature from the game, then return it from the remove from game zone, and put it into the absolutely remove from the freaking game

forever zone. Okay, so what this card did, and this card kind of, it made a new zone, that's why it's a silver border card. So at the time, we had the Remove from Game zone that's now called the Exile zone. And it bothered me to no end that it would say Remove the card from the game,

and then later cards would, like, interact with it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Stop interacting. It's removed from the game. So I made my own new zone that's removed from the freaking Game Forever zone. In the art, there's a creature that's missing, and he's torn out, and you can see through the card to see the back of the card, and the creature is AWOL. We don't know where he is.

But we'll find him because he's somewhere else in the set. That's one of our jokes in the set, is that the AWOL guy is gone AWOL, and you've got to find him. But we will get there. He shows up later in the set. But remember, the AWOL guy, gone AWOL! And you've got to find him. But we will get there. He shows up later in the set. But remember, the AWOL guy, we'll find out. Next is Badass. So he's 2BB for a 3.5-1, and his ability is 1 and a black.

He's a donkey zombie. For 1 and a black, Grawl, regenerate Badass. And his flavor tech is he's search for land in search of good ass. And there's a little somewhere we had a little novel the romantic novel like the Harlequin romance novel

of badass that was in one of our supplemental things something had that the graphic designer made the novel that we're referring to so this card

is a silver border card because you have to growl to activate it we don't do a ton of what I call acting silly stuff. We do a little bit. We did more in Unglued

and there's a little bit here. But we limited it because the rule is we don't make your opponent act silly. You have to act silly because you choose to play the card.

Like in Unglued 2 I had a card called Little Teapot where I made your opponent sing the Little Teapot song. But we chose not to do that here. It's like, okay, if you want to do something silly, you can do something silly but we don't make I made your opponent sing a little teapot song, but we chose not to do that here. It's like, okay, if you want to do something

silly, you can do something silly, but we don't make you make your opponent do something silly unless they steal your stuff. And even then, we toned it down a bit. There's not a lot of act silly cards. This one makes you growl, which is, I mean, a little silly, but not crazy silly. The cards are donkeys. Obviously, it has

three and a half in its power, so it has a fractional power. And all the donkey folk have asked in theirkeys, so obviously it has three and a half in its power. So it has a fractional power. And all the donkey folk have ass in their name. And obviously we found expressions that have dual meanings. So badass, he's a mean ass, but badass also is an expression, obviously. We often joke in Magic that Magic has badass creatures, so that was also an in-joke as well. Bingo, or B-I-N-G-O.

Bingo is a one and a green for a 1-1 creature with trample. And then, on the picture, there's a grid that shows numbers. Now, I forget, there might only be one version. We actually

had, the artist gave us multiple versions of the grid, so I don't remember whether or not, if this card appeared on the sheet multiple times, we might have changed the grid. So it's actually possible for the collectors out there that there actually is multiple versions of this card. I know we had planned to do it, and I don't remember whether or not we did it or not.

It's an uncommon, so there's a chance it's on the sheet multiple times. Anyway, something to check if you have bingo the one on gather the top thing is 1, 4, 2 so if you look in your card

if it's not 1, 4, 2 then there are multiples what happened is every time you cast a card whatever the converted mana cost is you put a counter on it

and if you ever made a bingo then the creature got plus 9, plus 0 plus 9, plus 9 for each set of three numbers so every bingo you get you the creature got plus nine, plus oh, plus nine, plus nine for each set of three numbers. So every bingo you get, it gets an additional plus nine, plus nine.

And there is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So he has the ability to be a 73, 73 creature if you cover all nine things. And then his flavor text is there was a farmer who had a hound. I'm making fun of the fact that I cannot win this fight to make dogs dogs.

Every time it comes up, there's been like three different times, imagine we've made this choice that all dogs are subtype of hound, creature type hound, which is crazy, because hound is a subtype of dog. Not all dogs are hounds. Hound is a kind of dog. We consolidated all our cats, make all our

cats cats, but I, for the life of me, just cannot win this fight. Every time it comes up, I make a plea of hounds or some type of dog. We have dogs and cards that aren't hounds, but we call them hounds. And then always I lose to the fight

of hell hounds are awesome and hounds sound more fantasy-like and I lose the fight. But anyway, I was making fun of the fact that they're all... Okay, next. Blast from the Past.

So Blast from the Past. So Blast from the Past is a Mark Gottlieb creation. So it is an instant that is two and a red. It has a whole bunch of abilities. Madness for R, Cycling for 1R, Kicker for 1R, Flashback for 1R, kicker for 1R, flashback for 1R, buyback for 4R. It deals 2 damage to a creature or player, and if the kicker cost is paid, put a 1-1 red goblin token creature into play. So, one of the fun things about this is it makes a 1-1 goblin token creature. So in the background, by the way, you'll notice is the Goblin in the Time Machine from the Time Machine card. The Goblin in the Time Machine shows up in both the old cards.

So Unhinged had the new card frames, but Blast from the Past and a later card called Old Foggy are the two cards that are referencing old cards, and so they're in old frames. So Blast from the Past is an old frame. It even has a little, because it has an ability in the graveyard, it has flashback, it has a little tombstone exit like we did in Odyssey. Anyway, the idea is you can mix and match all these abilities. Not all of them work. In the unglued FAQ,

I actually go through which combos work and which don't. The big one that doesn't work is buyback and flashback are actually a nambo. If you flash something back, you can't also buy it back. It'll just get exiled. But anyway, this card has become super popular in cubes. And the reason it's in the Silver Border set is we just normally don't have all these mechanics showing up in the same place. And so normally we just don't have the ability to do this.

That's why it did it in Silver Border. This card would later go on and inspire the Mix and Match series of cards from Future Sight, where we actually I mean, we only did two per card, but Future Sight went a little nutty and did a lot of old cards, and so anyway, this card there are a couple cards in this set that definitely inspired

things in the future. This is one of them. This inspires the Mix and Match cards in Future Sight. Next, Bloodletter. So this is two and a black for a zombie that's a 2-3 zombie. And so when the names of three or more non-land permanents begin with the same letter, sacrifice Bloodletter. If you do, it deals two damage to each creature and each player.

So the idea is he blows up. How does he blow up? Well, you need to have three cards in play that all begin with the same letter. So this is a card that cares about names and cares about letters. So something else that Black Border can't do is this card says, I'm going to look at cards and see what their name is. The problem in Black Border is officially the name only references to what is the English name,

meaning that if Keeper of Kukas looks at Kukas, well, any version of Kukas works, although Kukas might be the same in all languages. But any card that looks at another card, what it means is I'm looking for a specific card with this name, so it doesn't matter on the language, because it just says, well, this card that's unique, and here's the English name to show that it's unique. This card says, no, no, no, no.

I care about what letter things start with. So the card with no name, for example, works with this card, that you can grant it a name that begins with the same letter. And this card's a lot of fun, by the way, because you don't always want to blow things up. I mean, obviously, in your deck, you want to blow things up, but there's sometimes an interesting case where you're like, you might have the thing you need,

and this card makes you play with a whole bunch of cards with the same letter. I mean, obviously, it encourages B, since it says B, but this is another different way to build a deck, a deck in which you care about starting with the same letter. And that's one of the big things about the end cards, on here especially, is I liked making cards that made you do something different,

and also might make you build a deck in a different way. And so Bloodletter is one of those. Next, Booster Tutor. Black, instant for one black. Open up a booster pack, take a card, put it in your hand. So this card has gone on to be a super, super, super popular card. It's used in cubes a lot.

Obviously, Conspiracy just did a card that was a nod to this card. I tried, actually, at one point to see if we can get this card into 8th Edition. 8th Edition was doing this promotion where there was one card from every set. And so I was trying to see if we could get Booster Tutor in it. The problem is you can't have Silver Border and Black Border cards that share the same name. And then I said, well, can we make a Booster Tutor that is uniquely functioning the same but has a new name?

And the answer was Bran wasn't willing to do that in Black Border. Well, we did in Conspiracy, so I guess not in tournament legal sets maybe is what Bran didn't want to do. But anyway, this card is super, super, super fun. Like I said, a lot of people put it in their cube. Oh, so the story is I'm playing Booster Tutor for the very first time in playtest.

I'm the very first person in the world to ever cast Booster Tutor. And so I'm like, okay, this is a sacred moment. I've cast the first Booster Tutor. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to open up an Unglued. Nothing seems more apropos than the first Booster Tutor ever being cast to open up an Unglued pack. And I open up and I'm like, ugh, I need the land and I took a land.

So that was the dramatic first ever Booster Tutoring is me getting a land. I didn't actually open up thinking I'd take the land, but when I realized I really needed the land, it was one of those moments where I'm like, oh, I need the land. That's less wacky than I was hoping for. Next, Bosom Buddy.

So Bosom Buddy is three and a white for Elephant Townsfolk. That's one four. Whenever you play a spell, you may gain a half a life for each word in that spell's name. Okay, so this is another card that cares about names. Normally you can't reference names because the English version, for example, it's possible that the English version of the name

is one word, where the German version is three words. Or more likely, the English is three words and the German is one word, but a long word. So you can't do that

in normal Blackboarder, but I thought it was a lot of fun. I also am messing around with fractions because you can get a decent amount of life. And so this card obviously combos with the card coming later in the set. There's a card later in the set that has a

really long name that this combos with, and that's in green, this is in white. So the white green deck has a little bit of life thing it's playing around with. But anyway, and then Bosom Buddy, this is definitely one of those cards where I'm not sure what came first, whether we got the art or we got the name first.

The art is like a it's a loxodon, like in a support group, and he's hugging one of the people in the support group. The support group, by the way, has if you notice in the background, all the characters in the background of the art are famous magic characters. So I think that if you

look at the background, I think this is in the cabal. There's Chainer and there's Brage. So I think that if you look at the background, I think this is in the Cabal. There's Chainer and there's Braids. So I think this is like, it's the Cabal having a support group, which somehow there's a Loxodon in. Okay, next card is Brushstroke Painter Mage, which is three and a blue for a human wizard, which is a two, three.

And you can tap it, and target Permanent Artist becomes the artist of your choice. So we have Artist Matters. So if Artist Matters, why not have a card that can change artists? In the art, you see a guy changing a creature into a Picasso-like version of the creature.

And the flavor text is, he gives credit where credit isn't due, making fun of the fact that if you change the artist, the artist's credit is not what it now has because he's changed the artist. The name, by the way, Brushstroke Painter Mage, is also us making fun of our naming convention of taking two English words and cramming them together to make new words.

And so we're making fun of it. Anyway, that's the kind of stuff with a lot of jokes that are subtle, where I'm not sure the average person realized we were making fun of our own naming convention that's the kind of stuff where there's a lot of jokes that are subtle, where I'm not sure the average person realized we were making fun of our own naming convention, but that's what the card was doing. Okay, well, I am at my destination.

How much time have I spent? Ooh, okay, I'm going to do one last card, and then I'll end for the day. Bursting Beebles. Two blue for Beeble. Two and you for Beeble. That's two, two.

Bursting Beebles unblockable as long as defending player controls two or more non-land permanents to share an artist. And the flavor text says, like thousands of others, the Beebles quit magic for several years following the release of the Mercadian Masks. Oh, that's us being a... Okay, so what's going on here is

the very first Beebles showed up on a Duelist magazine drawn by Jeff Marincola. And so what happened was we liked it so we had him put it in other magic art. It showed up around the area of Stronghold, I think. And for a while, Beebles showed up and we thought they were very cute. But then

the creative team thought they were a little too silly and so they ended up getting removed from the game. So Beebles had now been relegated to Silver Border. So of course, I'm going to do some Beebles. And Beebles had this flavor of unblockability, of conditional unblockability. So of course, I'm going to do some Beebles. And Beebles have this flavor of unblockability, of conditional unblockability. So since we had an artist theme, I thought it would be fun

to have it be unblockable, you know, Beebles being unblockable based on shared artists. So the idea is if you have... Oh, if defending player control... So this is... This was a card that worked, meaning if your opponent had artists that matched, then you could overrun them.

So this was a counter. So there's a bunch of artist matters. There's only a few cards. Most of the artist matters helps you if you have matching artists. This is one that hurts you where the Beebles aren't blockable. And the reason this is here is in Silver Border play,

it's hard a lot of times... Sorry, not Silver Border. In limited play, it's hard a lot of times not to have overlapping artists. And so this card would definitely show up in limited. It's more of a limited card. The Flavor Text is making fact of the fact that the last time we had a Beeble, I believe, was Mercadian Masks.

And Mercadian Masks happened to be a point where a lot of people had left Magic, because Urza Saga was kind of broken, the mask was kind of boring, and it was a lot of exodus of people during masks. And so we were making a joke. There's some bitter... There's some caustic humor here in our onion sets.

In the art, by the way, you see the beables are falling, there's a picture of beables and they're jumping out, and they're falling over the card. They're jumping out of the actual art frame into the other part of the card, which is something we do on sets. But anyway, so I've gotten through bursting beables. So 1, 2, 3,

4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 cards. Okay, this might be a long series of podcasts. But anyway, I, I, hopefully, one of the things that I like about the set is there's lots going on, the cards have a lot of fun jokes in them, and it's a very

telling of, uh, parody jokes are fun because they point out a lot of quirky things that we do. And so anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the first peek into Unhinged. And there's many more to come. And so I will bid you guys adieu because I am parked. And it means it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you guys next time.