Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #16 - Talking Urza's Saga

Episode Date: January 11, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about Urza's Saga.

Okay, pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for drive to work. Okay, as I pull out today, it is raining. What does that mean to all of you? It probably means an extra long podcast, because here's the secret. Seattleites cannot drive in the rain. Now, here's the thing I don't understand, real quickly, which is, I would understand if Seattleites couldn't drive in the not rain. Now, here's the thing I don't understand, real quickly, which is I would understand if Seattleites couldn't drive in the not rain. You know, it's strange to us that the drive, the

road is not slick. And how do you drive when you have traction? But, because it rains all the time here, so I don't, anyway. A little side note, I don't get it, but hey, my aggravation is your longer podcast. So today, I decided we're going to talk about Urza's Saga.

One of the bigger, uh, I'll call it mess-ups we've had. So the interesting thing about Urza's Saga was I was both on the design team and on the development team. There's not tons of stuff that's true. I love a few. This is one of them. So, let me quickly run through. So the design team was myself, Mike Elliott, I believe

Bill Rose, and Richard Garfield. But that's a little misleading because Richard wasn't on the team. Wait a minute. Why is he listed on the team? The reason is, if you pay attention to my podcast, during Tempest, Richard designed the mechanic called Cycling, which I had a whole podcast on. And we didn't end up using it until the following year, Urza Saga.

So, although Richard did not work on Urza Saga, he gets credit. As a general rule of thumb, while we're talking about credits, I'm a big believer in, you know, being as fair as possible with credits. I would much rather give more people credit if, you know, I don't want people not to get credit for work they've done. And so I'm a big, big believer of, look, if there's any doubt, let's give the person credit. And obviously Richard made a mechanic, which was a major part of the set, so we gave him credit, and rightfully so.

So let me talk a little bit about Mike Elliott and Bill Rose. I've talked about them in previous times. In this set, this was Mike's first large set. He had been on Tempest with me. He and I had done Stronghold, and then Exodus, he led Exodus all by himself. And then this was the first set that he had done, you know, solely as a large set

that he had done as the lead designer. And there was a lot of give and take. Like I said, Mike and Bill and I were the three big designers at the time. We were the ones that would go do Invasion two years later. I talked about my Invasion podcast.

It's like my column. I keep linking things except I can't link in a podcast. But if you haven't listened to my other podcasts, please go do. I'm trying hard to assume you've listened to previous ones

when I do current ones so that there's some continuity. But anyway, I will reference other ones when I know I'm talking about things that you've listened to previous ones when I do current ones, so that there's some continuity. But anyway, I will reference other ones when I know I'm talking about things that you might want to listen to, if you haven't listened to, and I recommend you do. Now, the development team for the set was Mike Elliott, William Jockish, Bill Rose, Mark Rosado, Henry Stern, and Beth Morrison. Now, Beth Morrison was the rules manager at the time. Maybe one of these days I'll talk about the rules manager.

That's a fine podcast. But anyway, Beth was the rules manager at the time. So the five people on the development team were, interestingly, the five people in Magic R&D. What happened was, when I first got hired, for about three years, pretty much, the five of us, I mean, Henry didn't start until Tempest, but during that time, there wasn't shifting development teams, just the guys who were the magic

R&D people, we were the development team. And so, I want to talk a little bit about, I mean, I've talked a lot about Mike, and I've talked a lot about Bill in previous podcasts. Let me talk a little bit about William and Henry. So Henry Stern was a friend of mine. I actually met Henry when I lived in L.A. So before I moved up and took a job at Wizards, I lived in Los Angeles. I was trying to do my writing thing, and for those that don't know, I had some

career down in Hollywood writing for TV. Not a giant career, but some. And I started working part-time at a game store because I was going a little store crazy in my apartment. And in the game store, one day, Henry Stern came in looking for magic cards, I believe. And I had a policy at the time, which was, we had a demo deck that I would show people

because I learned quickly, if I just showed you magic, I could sell you magic in a heartbeat. So I had a little demo deck that I would demo with. And one of the things I say to people is, I will trade you card for card. You had to match a rarity.

And I had a rough idea of the rarity at the time. It wasn't super public, but I had a sense of what was rare and what wasn't. But you could trade me. You had to trade me the same rarity, and it had to be a card that wasn't currently in the deck. But a lot of Magic players, it was a chance for them to sort of get some cards they didn't have. And Henry took advantage of that. It's very funny, by the way. I got yelled at by my manager for doing that at the game store.

But I kept doing it on the fly. So anyway, Henry and I became friends. There was an active Los Angeles Magic Plane community centered around the Costa Mesa Women's Center where Scott Letterby and others ran the tournament. So it was a little ways away from L.A., but that was kind of where the hub of the L.A. magic scene was. And Henry and I were very involved in it. So later, I was asked by Joel or Bill or somebody

if there was anybody I could recommend for R&D. And I recommended Henry. Meanwhile, by the way, what had happened was Henry ended up making top four at 95. He was top two at 95 Nationals, top four at 95 Worlds. He lost at U.S. Nationals

to Mark Justice, and then both he and Mark Justice made the semis, and each of them lost in the finals in 95. Henry lost to Mark Hernandez. And by the way, Henry had like five turns to draw a fourth, and he would have gone to the finals in 95. Henry lost to Mark Hernandez. And by the way, Henry had like five turns to draw a forest, and he would have gone to the finals. And his deck was a great matchup against Alexander Blumke, who won. So Henry was very close to being the world champion, but he wasn't.

Then the following year, I think after we'd already hired Henry, he had wanted one last hurrah. So he played in 96 worlds, and he topped Ford again. So Henry actually has the claim of back-to-back World Top Fours, which not a lot of people can claim. Interestingly enough, Mark Justice can. Henry and Mark Justice both did that. Mark made the finals of the 96 Nationals, but he lost to Tom Champagne, who won. I'll do a little history for you. Okay, so we hired Henry on. Henry was a blast.

I liked Henry a lot, obviously, a friend of mine. But Henry was very particular and definitely he cut to the meat of the bone. He would not mince around. Henry was not the kind of person that, if he had criticism, would at all worry about. He would tell you to be straight. And so one thing I liked a lot about working with Henry was, you know, he would go after the problem, and he would tell you what he thought the problem was. And his instincts were pretty good. The biggest problem that Henry and I had, which is interesting enough, and like I said,

we were very good friends, is I tended to work on a gut level. I remember one time we were sitting in a file and some card came up. I don't remember what the card was, but I said, oh, well, I don't know. I have a bad feel about this card. I'm a little worried. Does anybody else kind of feel

that maybe this card's a problem? And Henry's like, well, what's your facts? Like, I don't have facts. I just have this feeling. And he's like, look, come back to me when you got facts. You know, feeling doesn't do us any good. And I ended up taking Henry aside. I'm like, Henry, come back to me when you got facts. You know, feeling doesn't do us any good. And I ended up taking Henry aside.

I'm like, Henry, I understand, you know, you are a logical guy. But look, I work a little differently. I'm just saying, hey, I got a lot of instincts. My instincts are saying something. I wasn't going to act on my instincts alone. But hey, I wonder if other people are having similar feelings based on whatever criteria they do. And Henry realized that. And we were good. I mean, I think Henry realized that he and I worked really differently.

What I find in R&D is because I'm very instinctual, that I tend to make a lot of gut calls that I don't have at the time evidence to prove. And it took me a while. I mean, eventually, I have enough cred, you know, that people sort of start, like, well, Mark knows what he's talking about. But before that kind of build up, there definitely was a lot of sort of me being a little too, you know, that people sort of start, like, well, Mark knows what he's talking about. But before that kind of built up, there definitely was a lot of sort of me being a little too, you know,

well, I think this feels wrong. And people are like, what are you talking about? Anyway, I like Henry a lot. Henry's go-get-em. You know, definitely a very serious but fun. One of the quirky things about Henry, I like telling quirky things that are outside of design. So Henry, Henry is very, one of the things we used to joke about is

if you ever went to a restaurant with five people and they tried to seat you at a four person table, you would just stick Henry on them. Henry would not let that happen. Henry was not one to let things happen

that he did not want to have happen. Also, as a little quirky trivia note, Henry does not like either gum nor mint. So if you were chewing mint gum near him, he would ask you to spit it out. Anyway, on to William Jockish. So William got the job because he wrote a letter to Richard Garfield. William was a math professor, and I don't know, somehow that letter entertained

Richard and Richard gave him a job. Now William was, in the early days, he was the closest to what we think of modern day developers, meaning he was math based and very much about criteria and, you know, where a lot of the rest of us, I mean, when push comes to shove, Mike and I really were more designers than we were developers. And Bill was kind of 50-50 split. But even Bill did not have sort of a pro player sensibility. William was the one that was most kind of like would make decks and have sort of

actual numerical evidence to try to prove things. The quirky thing about William was he just would get pet theories in his head. And we would have fights where he's like, this card's okay, but if we print this card, it might encourage us to make four more copies of it, and 20 of these cards would be a problem. We're like, well, we're not going to make 20.

We're just making one. He's like, ah, that's a slippery slope. Anyway, William was a blast. William was a lot of fun. The, uh, what's in a fun William story? Oh, here's my favorite William story. Is William used to have pizza for lunch every day. And one day,

he used to order it in. He got it delivered. So one day he gets a phone call. He picks up the phone. He goes, yeah. He goes, yeah, this is William. Yeah, pepperoni. Okay, bye.

I'm like, what was that? He goes, oh, the pizza place called. I hadn't called them. They wanted to make sure that, you know, I got my pizza. And we're like, you got the pizza place to call you? That, my friends, by the way, a fine accomplishment. So anyway, to earn the saga, when we set out to make it,

so let me explain our background here. So Mike, Ryan, and I pitched the Weatherlight Saga. So the plan was, it was a three-act structure story, what we pitched. So the first act took place in Tempest, akin to what happened, although there's a third-turn act where the story kind of wasn't ours anymore. And then in our version of the story, they escape into Mercadia. The Mercadia that we had in mind and the Mercadia that got made in Candymasks are not remotely close to the same thing.

The idea that Mike and I had pitched was definitely a city world, but that's about where it deviates. We liked a lot the idea of, and this was in the scholarship, so maybe this part will stay a little bit, but of people peddling magic. It was a city where magic was the commodity. And because that's what we were

doing, we went down the path of doing an enchantment Matters block. You know, it's a world in which magic's a commodity. Oh, well, enchantments make a lot of sense here. So we went off and made an Enchantment Matters set. And by the way, everybody said, that's not enchantment. So let me explain what happened.

For starters, there was a big shift. The story got taken away from me and Mike. It's some story I'll get to one day. And the team decided that before they went to Mercadia, they wanted to go back to the past and do a prequel and show Urza. Because I think we hadn't really involved Urza in the story, and they wanted to involve Urza in the story.

So we were going to do a prequel. By the way, a little side note, the name we had wanted for the set was not Urza's Saga, but Urza's Odyssey and for some reason we weren't allowed to do it which makes no sense since we did Odyssey not too much later, but anyway it ended up being called Urza's Saga, not Urza's Odyssey and so what happened was

we had a set built around enchantments and they were like, but we want to go do a prequel about Urza, we're like, well but Urza's an artificer. He's all about artifacts. This set isn't about artifacts. It's about enchantments.

And by the way, for those that doubt it's about enchantments, go to Gatherer, search for Urza Saga enchantments. You'll be interested to see how many enchantments are in the set because the answer is a lot. Anyway, so then it becomes about Urza, even though we built it about enchantments. And set, because the answer is a lot. Anyway, so then it becomes about Urza, even though we'd built it about enchantments. And then to make matters worse, the creative team dubs it,

which goes on the box, the artifact block, or artifact cycle, I think. The artifact cycle. We're like, okay, it's Urza, the artificer, it's called the artifact cycle. Yeah, I'm not sure our enchantment theme's going to come through all that strong. And then, on top of it, the set had

a lot of broken cards, some of which, not all of which, but some of which were artifacts. So, it didn't really go down in history as being the enchantment block, even though, especially in Limited, it very much was. Anyway, so, what happened was, the two main mechanics

were cycling and Echo. Cycling was made by Richard Garfield. Echo was made by Mike Elliott, both of which were made during Tempest Design. Or to be fair to Mike, I think Echo actually came from Mike had made his own set, which, can I remember the name of it? I don't remember the name of it. It's the same place as Slivers came from. I don't remember the name of it. I don't remember the name. It's the same place as Slivers came from. I don't remember

the name of his set. But the idea was there was some great creature that fell to Earth and broke into Slivers and I don't remember what Echo had to do with it. But anyway,

Mike had this set and when he was hired, Wizards bought the set. And so a lot of Tempest had stuff driven from that set that Michael had done. One of which was Echo.

And I liked Echo, but it just, I mean, we had too much stuff going on, and it got pulled during development. I actually put it in the design, although in small numbers, and they decided that it was worthy of carrying more weight, so they took it out. It's funny,

by the way, that we've been shifting away in recent days from doing what we call downside mechanics. And Echo is very funny that it's an upside or it's a downside. People tend to think of it as downside because, oh, you have to pay this extra cost. What they're missing is really what happens is here's the cost. You've got to spread it out over two turns. That's a positive ability.

But anyway, usually when the positive is it's cheaper than it normally would be, that's a little harder for people to get because most people aren't good at costing cards, so they don't get that it's a mana cheaper usually. Okay. Now the other mechanics that were here is

so in Ice Age, the Ice Age team introduced a concept that got nicknamed cantrips. A cantrip, by the way, if anyone's ever wondering, is a small magical spell. It's meant to mean, if you're a wizard, it's a little showy thing that isn't particularly powerful, but just, you know, if you kind of want to show off

you're a wizard. There's small little tiny splashy effects. So the idea of cantrips, oh, they're little small effects. In Ice Age, they delayed the draw of the card because they wanted to make a card called Urza's Bobble that was broken. So they convinced themselves they needed to delay the draw until the next turn. In Mirage, we figured out that, no, you could just draw the card. It wasn't necessary.

So anyway, we brought cantrips back, and cantrips became sort of evergreen, but not completely evergreen. Bill and Joel, I believe, at the time, felt that cantrips were better served if they weren't used all the time. Now, I fought against that because I feel like the thing that you keep is something in which there's great excitement for it. I have this thing, I take it away, when I come back, people are very excited for it. I just didn't feel cantrips was the kind of thing like, oh, now with cantrips, I just

didn't feel this kind of thing was going to excite people. And I felt like it was a really good tool because a lot of times when you're costing something, sometimes it's hard to get the effect you want at the right cost, and cantrips allows you to goof around, especially with really cheap things. Sometimes you have effects that are smaller than one mana. Well, how do you make those? Well, if you make them with your cantrip, you can make, you know, one, two mana spells

that can do that. You can make that effect that you normally couldn't. So anyway, it was decreed that we could not have cantrips in Urza's Saga, because we had cantrips in Mirage, I think, and Tempest. So heaven forbid we had exhausted cantrips. We had to give them a rest. So I got to thinking.

I said, okay, well, what is a cantrip when you boil it down? And I said, okay, a cantrip is a spell in which you get an extra card. So you don't lose card equity. So I was like, okay, well, what if we change it?

Instead of it costing mana, but you're not losing a card what if it cost a card but you didn't lose mana now how do you do that well clearly you can't just be able to cast it without a cost because then the cost doesn't mean anything so that's when I stumbled across the idea of spells

in which you had to have a threshold to cast it but once you did you got the mana back. And I decided at the time to untap your land rather than add the Manitou Manipal, which is funny because there is a card in the set that actually adds the Manitou Manipal, the black card, the 2-2 creature.

Anyway, Yawgmoth... I'm so bad with names. You guys... Priestess? No, Priestess Yawgmoth... I'm so bad with names. You guys... No, Priest Yawgmoth is from Antimony. Anyway, there's a card there. People can look it up. So, I pitched the idea of free spells, which were, okay, well, this spell only costs...

It costs four mana, but if you have four mana, you can untap four lands. So it turns out the untapping lands would kind of come to burn us. And let me explain. So we had made a bunch of different lands that did different things. Three of them were lands that tapped and gave you mana equal to a certain card type. So one tapped for creatures, one tapped for mana equal to enchantments, and one tapped for mana equal to enchantments, and one tapped for mana equal to artifacts.

I don't know why we didn't do lands. Maybe that one felt broken. I have no idea. And so it ended up being Gaze, Cradle, Serra Sanctum, and Tolarian Academy. Originally, all three of them tapped for colorless mana. But meanwhile, we were making two other spells. I'm horrible with names. But one involved black mana, one involved red mana, and we realized that we had five spells

that could all hook into color. And we thought about it, we're like, oh, well, creatures make a lot of sense as green mana, enchantments make a lot of sense as white mana, and artifacts make a lot of sense

as blue mana. So, yes, what is my contribution to Toledan Academy? Saying, wait, wait, colorless, how about blue? Yes, yes, it, the free mechanic, and I made Toledan Academy tap for blue mana.

So I might be partially responsible for some of the craziness about to happen. And so, the free mechanic, because it untapped things, had this weird thing, because the set had multiple ways to get more mana out of, you know, multiple mana out of a single land,

it allowed you to not only have a free spell, it actually was negative mana, because you could go up in mana. And that's one of the problems with the free spells, is normally, if you, if a spell's too strong, you can add one mana to it and weaken it. But the free mechanic, there are spells that get stronger when you add mana to it.

So, like, it's a weird mechanic. It might be the most broken mechanic I've ever made. I don't know. I made a bunch. I made Dredge. I think... Anyway, it's a pretty broken mechanic. Now, the funny thing is, we put...

Is it recall? Not recall. See, here's what you'll learn about, by the way, as a designer. I have way too many... Magic has made 13,000 cards or something crazy, and my brain cannot keep all the information. Plus, when I make cards, by the way, another side thing, I never use the real names of cards.

I'm playing playtest cards. I have goofy names. It's not Trepanation Blade. It's Chainsaw. And so when it finally gets called something else, I'm like, what is that? Oh, yeah, chainsaw, you know. So, anyway, one of the side effects is my name recognition, or recollect, my name, the ability to recall a name. My ability to speak, obviously, is not going so good today. So, we made the free mechanic.

Oh, the other big theme of the set was enchantments. So, we did a bunch of things. We put powerful enchantments at lower rarities. You know, like,estilence and Common. That was smart thinking. And then we... So we made two different mechanics based on enchantments. One was what we called Sleeping Enchantments.

This was a Mike Elliott creation. And the idea was, I'm an enchantment, but when you do a certain thing, I wake up and become a creature. And each color had its own kind of thing that had to get done. Like blue cared about spells, and green cared about permanence, and I think black, you had life payments? Anyway. So the idea was, here's enchantments, and then your opponent sort of had to say, well, do you want to do this thing? Because if you do it, or sometimes if you were able to do something,

you could wake this thing up. The other one was what we called growing spells. So Mike Elliott had made a card called Treasure Trove that was in Tempest. And I like Treasure Trove a lot. Basically what happened was Treasure Trove lets you grow, and every turn you've got to put a new counter on it. And the more counters, the more cards you've got to look at to pick what card you wanted.

And so I like the idea of these growing enchantments. So I made some and put them into Urza Saga. I would later, by the way, do growing auras in Urza Destiny. But we'll talk about that when we get to Urza's Destiny. And so I made those. I mean, the set had a lot, like I said, cycling also worked really well with enchantments, because a lot of enchantments that were conditional,

that you could cycle away. So anyway, let me talk a little bit about some of the interesting stories for cards. So two cards in the set were not supposed to be in the set and got changed at the last minute and forced us to redesign them using the art already commissioned. So one was Morphling. Morphling was originally going to be Clone. At the time, the rules manager said Clone doesn't work and we pulled clone from sets. And we thought we had a new way to do clone. So we were going to bring clone back. That's why, if you look at the art,

the art is a riff on clone. But at the last minute, it turned out the rules manager was uncomfortable, so we changed the card. But we felt we needed to make a shapeshifter, so we made a creature that just could do a lot of things to change itself that ended up becoming Morphling.

Ended up being a pretty strong card. The other card was Phyrexian Processor. Originally, that was Clone Machine, what you guys might know as Soul Foundry from Mirrodin. The card where you take a creature from your hand and exile it and then you can make copies of that creature. The technology at the time did not work.

They didn't think I could exile a card and reference it. Anyway, later during Mirrodin, I tried it again and we were able to make it work, but we had a change at the last minute, so we ended up saying, well, it makes creatures, but instead of you using a card in your hand,

what if you pay some life and then it's as big as the life you pay that was our fallback sneak attack let's see it was called Blitzkrieg in design I'm a Johnny at heart I think sometimes I make cards

just because I'm excited to see what crazy thing you can do with it and I think it was one of those cards where I just I could imagine 8,000 fun things to do with it, and so I made it. I think the card ended up being a little more powerful than I had intended. Yawgmoth's Will is interesting. So Yawgmoth's Will, so a lot of times

you ask who made Yawgmoth's Will. And this is interesting. I made Yawgmoth's Will. And Mike Elliott made Yawgmoth's Will. We both made the card independent of the other. Mike and I did this on our cycle as well, in Tempest Design. We made the same card. I know our cards

were a tiny bit different, but they were very close. My card was very much about casting things out of the graveyard, the same impetus that would lead me to make Flashback a little later. I'm not sure where Mike went from. Mike might have been following a regrowth idea. Anyway, he and I made basically the same card, and then Michael

just sort of combined them together in the file. What else? Oh, Karn Silver Golem. So Karn, we had made a bunch of cards called Vanguard that let you

start the game with a different hand size and maybe a different life total and it gave you the player an ability that you had for the whole game. And so we decided at the time when we were doing this, since the Weatherlight saga was what we were pushing,

we were going to make all the Vanguard cards based on Weatherlight characters. And so we had this neat idea for a Vanguard card that animated all artifacts. And so we ended up giving it to Karn because he made the most flavor sense. I mean, no one made perfect sense, but I'm like, okay, Karn had a tight artifacts. So when we were making his card, Nerds of Saga, that card had been very popular, and we kind of got swayed, and so we ended up making the card

have the same basic ability to animate artifacts. But I was a stick looker, because in the story, Karn was a pacifist. He was the gentle giant archetype, for those that care about story. And so I knew he needed to be decently big, because he was a giant golem, but I also knew that I didn't want him killing things

so that's when we came up with the whole if he blocks, like he's hard to kill he gets plus zero, minus four, plus four so he's hard to kill because he's tough but he himself doesn't harm things and I wanted to reflect that let's see

Gilded Drake was the same thing that led me to make what's it called? Some tricks. Uh, where you donate. Uh, and donate wouldn't show up until Urza's Destiny, which was a set that I made, uh, my set all by myself. We'll talk about that one of these days.

Um, but anyway, I liked the idea of you having things that once your opponent, your opponent didn't necessarily want. And so Gilded Drake was me kind of just playing around with, well, here, you get this, but there's a negative thing that goes with it. Plus, I always like juxtapose. I liked exchanging things, so I thought that was kind of... Anyway, that was one of my babies. Voltaic Key.

So here's the thing I find interesting is, sometimes you're trying to make a grandiose big card and you do. And sometimes you're not. You're trying to make just a little dink. And I was just trying to make like, oh, well, it's this thing and it just lets you kind of reuse your artifacts. And I really wasn't trying to

make anything broken or problematic. I was just like, oh, this kind of cute little card has function. I love open-ended cards. Other cards are like, what are you going to do with this? Hey, let's make it. Let the players try to figure it out. You know, I always think that's kind of fun. Fluctuator was me wanting to build a deck with cycling. I just thought it was kind of neat to make a cycling enabler.

Because a lot of cycling... Cycling didn't require you to play with a lot of cycling cards. It really was a mechanic where you just splash where you want to. And I just thought it would be neat to say, hey, put a lot of cycling in your deck. And another of my broken cards. It's funny, by the way,

I did not actually pass Richard until Mirrodin, but I have the lovely acclaim of having designed more banned slash restricted cards than anybody else in the game. Richard had a good jump, good head start, and Urza Saga helped me,

but it was Mirrodin that put me over the top. I made all six Artifact Lands, for starters. So anyway, Flux Raider is another one of my lovely contributions to the ban list. So what else? Priest of Titania. I think that was a Mike Elliott creation.

I know that I was very gung-ho on Tribal. That's part of the onslaught story but anyway I think Mike made that some chance I made it but I'm going to give credit to Mike because something in the back of my head says that it was Mike and not me so by the way one of the things is sometimes as a designer you remember cards you made

just because whatever it tickles your fancy or something about it you just remember making. And sometimes you don't remember because whatever, you make a lot of cards. Sometimes cards

like God Most Will were more than one person's creation. Sometimes cards one person made it and one person tweaked it. So people ask me if I've done cards.

I know some of them and I kind of know the more famous ones because I've learned. I went back and looked. Like for example, I didn't realize I made Sneak Attack. This is an interview with me and the Duelist

where I said I did make Sneak Attack. And one day, I'm going through the file because what happened was, for Urza Saga, I made cards that I shipped to Mike because he was a lead. And so one day, I'm just going through to see if I, look for cards that I'd never made, and I see Blitzkrieg, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I made Sneak Attack.

I'd completely forgotten about it. And the funny thing is, it's my kind of card, you know, but I just didn't remember. And it wasn't until I went back and looked at my file that I handed in that I'm like, oh yeah, I did in fact make this card. And that happens a lot. Anyway, I'm pulling

into the parking space here at work. So I hope you guys had fun today chatting about Urza Saga. I didn't even get to... Okay, I will finish my story. I will sit in my car to finish the story. The one final piece I did not talk about, which was the set broke in half and exploded

and made combo winner and caused all sorts of problems with magic. It's the one and only time that we ever got chewed out by the CEO and threatened, too. We were told that if the set, if we did that again, we were going to be fired, because, I mean, we broke magic in half. I mean, to be fair to Peter, the CEO,

we already needed to do better. Urza Saga, I mean, there's a lot of exciting ideas, and we made a lot of cool cards. And in the big picture of things, the block and the set is chock full of powerful things. But it is one of the things that led us down the path to realize we needed to sort of change how we did development. I think it directly led to down the road getting people like Randy Bueller,

Mike Donais, and eventually, you know, Matt Place and Mike Turney and Eric Lauer. And the whole idea of getting people off the pro tour that are established, people with a proven track record to figure out what's broken and how to fix it and stuff like that. But anyway, we did. We got called in his office. We got yelled at. It is one of the lows for me.

Like I said, I've never been that much of a developer, even when I was a developer. At least, I take that back. I'm a good developer. I'm not good at power level. I'm not good at that style of development. And so I did not... Urza Saida might be the all-time low point for development in Magic history. So being on the development team, I just have to own up and say

I think there's some fun design. I think there's some bad development. I'm responsible for some of each. So I will own up for that. Anyway, work beckons. So I hope you enjoyed my chat on Urza Saga today. And because

it was raining, I think you got a little extra bonus material. So anyway, I gotta go, because it's time, I think you got a little extra bonus material. So anyway, I gotta go, because it's time to make the magic cards.