Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #169 - Onslaught, Part 6

Episode Date: October 24, 2014

Mark concludes his 6 part series on the design of Onslaught.

I'm putting on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so for the last five podcasts, I've been talking all about Onslaught. And today is the final day of Onslaught. I hope. It should be. It should be. We're to S today. The plan is to finish today. So I've been going card by card and just talking about different card stories. And so today I will start in S with Shared Triumph. So Shared Triumph is a white enchantment. When it enters the battlefield, you choose a creature type.

And then all creatures of that type get plus one, plus one. So one of the things that's very interesting when we talk about doing tribal sets is there's two different things that we were trying to do with Onslaught. One was we were trying to make a set that for drafting purposes was tribal. You had to choose a tribe to care about, maybe multiple tribes to care about. But it was something where, you know,

hey, do you want to care about goblins or elves or birds or soldiers or wizards? You know, what do you want to care about? And there are a bunch of different things you could care about. The other thing that we wanted to do was we were trying to enable tribal casual play,

meaning that we wanted this to be the set that said, hey, tribal's fun, go play tribes. Go play tribal magic. But the thing was that it's possible that what people really enjoy might not be the tribes we've chosen. In order to play limited,

we have to pick a select number of tribes. So one of the things that we were really trying to do in Onslaught was just enable in casual play, and maybe possibly in competitive play, I think we thought more the ones we were supporting would be the ones that got to competitive play. But in casual play, mostly, I guess, we wanted you to have the tools to be able to build your own tribal stuff.

So there was a lot of things like Share Triumph in there, where it's like, hey, pick your tribe, and this will be... Let's say, for example, you really wanted to do a... I pick your tribe. You wanted to have your goat tribal deck. Okay, you have some challenge with the goat tribal deck. But let's say you wanted to do it and you take the few goats that exist in Magic. Shared Triumph would allow you to

you know, make all your goats get plus one plus one. So it would enable you better than we had in the past to try to make whatever tribal deck you wanted to make. Shepherd of Rot. 1B, 1-1, Zombie Cleric.

Tap. Each player loses one life equal to the number of zombies. Okay, so this card is interesting in a couple different ways. One is something that we had done in Onslaught a little bit. Here's me starting to goof around for a little bit. Remember that

Mirrodin, which is the set after this set, was the first set to officially do race class. And what had happened was in Odyssey, I began messing around with the idea of dual... Sorry, before that. In Invasion, actually. So in Invasion,

I did this thing where we made some gold cards. It was a cycle of gold cards where I took two different tribes that were popular and then I would mix them together. So like, I can't remember, like, you know, red is goblin and green is elves. It's a goblin elf. Or blue is merfolk and, you know, black is zombie.

It's zombie merfolk. I did this thing where I was specifically crossing over and trying to make a fun gold card that just crossed things over. Now, some of them made sense. Some of them were a little, like, I do believe I made a goblin elf. Like, I'm not quite sure what's going on there, but a little story for you to make up for yourself. But anyway, so in Invasion, I started down that path.

I really, I've always been fascinated by creature types. I think, you know, I was the one who pushed tribal because I really, I've always enjoyed creature types. I enjoyed making tribal decks, you know, and that. So in Invasion, I started messing around with sort of what if there was more than one. Because remember, when Alpha started, what Richard did in Alpha was there was one creature type per card. I've tried this before.

Goblin King wasn't a goblin because he was a lord. And so what happened was, I started testing the waters in Invasion of having more than one. Then, in Odyssey, I started, the Aven were all bird soldiers and the Nentuko were all insect druids. So I started confessing, okay,

well, this race of creatures are these warrior bird creatures, so all of them are always both bird and soldier. And then, in this set, I started a little more saying, okay, well, this card, for example, I go, oh, zombies is one of the races we care about, cleric is one of the races we care about, well, why don't we make a deck both for zombies and for clerics. So one of the things that we try to do that was kind of fun is, when you do a tribal deck, it's neat to just, you know,

hey, play goblins, goblins, goblins, goblins, goblins. Goblins are great. Play more goblins. Goblins! That's fun. But sometimes it's kind of fun to go, oh, well, you know what the clerics like? The clerics like other clerics, but they also like, at least the black clerics, like zombies. The clerics raise the zombies. So I had this neat sort of

thing and said, okay, here's a cleric. Now, he's also a zombie, so he's got to count himself. Oh, another quick thing. Whenever you count things, one of the things we tend to do is make sure that the thing that you are counting, the thing that is counting things is what is being counted. So, for example, this card in a vacuum, let's say you had no other zombies in your deck.

Okay, well, this card still has tap everybody loses a life each turn, because it's a zombie. That's a very common thing we do. Because if this card itself wasn't a zombie, it makes what we call an A-B situation, where in order to work, you have to have A and you have to have B, which just makes it a lot more complicated. I'm not saying we don't occasionally do A-B, but it's much, much nicer if the thing you care about is built in. That way, the card works by itself and doesn't have to have other cards. The other thing that's going on here, obviously, this is during Onslaught, so it counts all zombies, not just your zombies. But this card is interesting in that everybody loses life.

And the idea is that I am playing either zombies or clerics. Well, I'm playing zombies for sure because of this thing. But I might be playing mostly clerics. This card will work in a cleric deck. And the idea essentially is, okay, I'm playing black. Odds are I'm going to be a little ahead of you. The idea is I'm going to be a little ahead of you on damage. And the reason that it's okay that everybody loses life is,

if I'm ahead of you on damage, then it's okay. And black has drain effects and has ways in which to lower you and get me up. And so, if I just have a few drain effects along with this, this will help me win. And this card, by the way, in limited, was actually quite good. Okay, Shock. So Shock is an instant for R, for one red mana, that did two damage to target creature or player. So Shock is an interesting story,

because in Alpha, Richard made Lightning Bolt, R deal three to target creature or player. Lightning Bolt was much beloved, and it was very powerful. And eventually we said, you know what, that can't be... One of the problems you have is, if something is overpowered, especially at common,

it warps everything around it. It's very hard to make a good direct damage spell when, like, Ardu3 is there. It's just tough. It makes every other direct damage spell at lower cost just look really sucky. So we're like, you know what, we need to pull back. We need to do two damage. Two damage is good enough. Two damage will get played.

I think at the time we were under the impression that Lightning Bolt was gone forever. Obviously it came back. So I mean, Lightning Bolt is kind of over the line, but something that every once in a while I think we're willing to entertain. But anyway, we needed to have a new baseline. So this is tricky. When you make a new

baseline, there's going to be resistance because it's not like... We wanted the simplest version of the card, and we wanted lightning bolt but two damage. And so, like, there's no way in the world

it's not going to look like a weaker lightning bolt. It just is a weaker lightning bolt. That's what it is. And so I said, okay. First off, we needed a really cool name, and we looked around, and we

finally decided on shock. One of the things that happens with names is in the early days, we weren't super careful. I mean, the early, early days. I mean, what's the card name? I don't think the people who named the cards even thought about, like, oh, we have

20 plus years of cards to name. No, it's like, what's a name? Good enough, that's a name, that fits it. And there was no thought about sort of oh, we have, you know, 20 plus years of cards to name. No, it's like, what's a name? It's good enough. That's a name. That fits it. And there was no thought about sort of saving good names. And then once I started getting involved in doing the creative, one of the things I really, really stressed was we need to save the good names.

We have to stop, you know, wasting good names on unmemorable cards that we're never going to reprint. And that if you have a really good name, you want to put it on something that you think you're going to reprint. And so I started getting into the mindset of the idea of is this a card that's going to need, that's coming back and that needs to have a strong name.

Okay, so I remember we bounced around a bunch of different names. I think Shock had come up with a name that we had thought of using a couple times. Like, no, no, let's save that. That's a really good name. Let's wait for a direct damage spell

that we know is going to be reprintable. So when we got here, we're like, okay. Shock's a nice name. I shock you. It's simple, good verb. And, you know, one of the things in general about naming is that instants and sorceries often want to sound good in verb form. They don't always have to be verbs, but to sound good in verb form.

They don't always have to be verbs, but they sound best in verb form, usually they're verbs, because people want to say, I blank your, especially this, I wouldn't do drug damage to creatures, or my opponent. I blank the creature, I blank you. They want something that sounds cool. I shock you, I shock your creature,

that sounds pretty cool. And the next thing we did is we talked about did we want to sort of slowly get to where we're going? Did we want to make a spell that's R2 with a little rider before doing R2 plain? And we're like, no. Let's just get there. We knew this was good enough. We knew that people would

actually play R2. In limited, it's amazing. And in constructed, it's still good enough that it sees play. Anyway, so we bit the bullet, we did it. The response at the time was definitely grumbly, meaning that one of the

things we learned is people never like strictly worstes, although Magic does them all the time. I mean, Alpha, like, Alpha had strictly worstes within Alpha. Like, you have Grey Ogre at Common, and then at Uncommon, you have Flying Grey Ogre, the rock, and then at Rare, you had, I think, Flying Grey Ogre with Fire Breathing, I think?

Or, anyway. Like, there was just strictly better even in Magic and Alpha, and it is the nature of a trading card game. We're just making lots and lots of different things, things ebb and flow. Not every card's at the same power level. And you're going to make cards that, you know what? Yes, we've made a card that's strictly better than that. People always gripe a little bit.

The more high-profile the card, you're making it worse than. In some ways, the more grumbly they are. Although, usually if people understand the card is too good the audience goes oh okay like when we made Time Warp which was Time Walk but cost it

funny it's still slightly too good but in Tempest it was 3 U U instead of 1 U and the response was oh okay I get Time Walk back yeah I knew Time Walk was crazy good I will accept it at a lower cost a lot of people didn't realize at the time the Time Walk was crazy good. I will accept it at lower cost. A lot of people didn't realize at the time that the Lightning Bolt was too good.

It was one of those changes, like, it's very, very easy to see, you know, way over-costed by multiple mana, maybe the thing's broken, versus, well, it's good. You can play it a lot. Is that too good? You know, so...

Okay, let's pick up the pace. I'm not picking up the pace. Next, Sylvos, Rogue Elemental. Three, green, green, green, for an 8-5 elemental legend. He has trample, and for green, he regenerates. So this is another one of the pit fighters, and he was just made to be a

beast. One of the things we did with the legends is we just, we were trying early in magic, one of the big mistakes was creatures were just too weak. That when Richard had originally kind of figured it out, the balance between spells and creatures just was a little off. You know, Richard is an amazing designer. Richard, not as strong a developer as he is a designer.

And really, there wasn't kind of like development like we have now. And so they were just a little bit off, not into the world, but off enough that early Magic, you just didn't want to play creatures. They just weren't good enough to play, you know. And there were a few exceptions every once in a while, but really, like, there was a period of time around when Legends came out. Now, it didn't help that there were things like the Abyss around, but we're, like, just playing creatures. I actually had this little tiny green-blue weenie deck,

and the reason I played it was it was considered, like, idiotic to play creatures. I'm like, damn it, I'm playing creatures. And so I played this little weenie rush deck. But I was like, you know, the Johnny in me was like, I'm playing the thing that no one says to play, you know. Because it really was, I mean,

conventional wisdom was like, what are you doing with creatures in your deck? Creatures are just inefficient. We set out to change that. Part of what we were trying to do in Onslaught was just make some big creatures that were, you know, impressive. And then we were doing Legends, so we really wanted to make for Legends something to go,

wow, that's impressive. That was Syllabus' like, I'm big, I'm bad, I'm mean, 6 mana, 8-5, trample, regenerate. You know, if I get on the board, you're going to have troll dealing with me. Next, Skirk Commando. 1 RR, 2-5, trample, regenerate. You know, if I get on the board, you're going to have troll dealing with me. Next, Skirk Commando. 1-R-R, 2-1 Goblin. If it deals combat damage to you, you get to do 2 damage to target a creature.

And it has a morph of 2-R. So this is the other common. I talked about the first one that was a First Striker. It was like a 3-1, 4-1 First Striker I talked about earlier in a podcast. So the problem is, that card, you didn't want to block because it turned into a creature that was going to kill your creature. This creature, you did want to block because if you didn't block it, it would hit you

and then kill your creature. And so you were kind of just like, damned if you did and damned if you didn't. And so that was one of the early problems with Morph was you want to make sure you set up clean messaging. Like, one of the things that Eric Lauer did in Concepts Archeated that brings Morph back, and Brian Schneider did when Morph got brought back in Time Spiral. I believe that Eric took a lot of the inspiration from what he did from what Brian Schneider did,

was to make sure there was clear messaging. So if you know what you're playing, what colors your opponent is in, that you have some logical ability to sort of make some guesses of what's going on. You don't know everything. There's some surprises, but there's some logical guesses you can make. And you're not like flipping a coin. And playing against red in common in Onslaught was frustrating because you had two options that happened all the time that you were supposed to do the exact opposite things.

Next, Skirk Prospector. R for a 1-1 Goblin. Sack a Goblin at R. So this is one of those things where usually when I can play a card for one mana, and I can turn some resource into mana

with no restrictions, no mana, you know, that card's going to be good. In fact, this card is the kind of card that if your opponent plays this turn one, you should just get scared. It's like, oh no, oh no, bad things are going to happen.

Because this enables... One of the things that happened with the Goblin deck is the Goblin deck became this combo deck, where Goblins just could do these crazy things, and that, like, out of the things that happened with the Goblin deck is the Goblin deck became this combo deck where Goblins just could do these crazy things and that like out of the blue would just kill you all in one burst. And Skirk Prospector is one of the big ones to blame for this because it enables

shenanigans. It is a shenanigan enabler. That's hard to say. It is a shenanigan that should have been the name. Shenanigan enabler. Okay, next. Slate of Ancestry. It is a shenanigan. That should have been the name. Shenanigan enabler. Okay, next. Slate of Ancestry. Slate of Ancestry. Slate of Ancestry.

Some hard words today. That's an artifact that costs four. For four, tap and discard your hand. Draw a card for each creature you have in play. This was another card we built around to say, hey, build whatever tribal deck you want. This will work in any tribal deck. Now, it only works in tribal decks that you have a lot and a lot of creatures,

but if you have a deck where you're playing lots of little weenie creatures, for example, or lots of tokens or something, this card's a lot of fun, and really lets you quickly refill your hand. The other neat thing about it is, if you're playing a weenie deck a lot of times, or not even just a weenie deck, but a deck with lots of creatures, a lot

of times what happens is you empty your hand and then you don't have a way to refill it. So this is trying to say, okay, you're playing tribal decks, you're going to empty your hand because you're going to play all these creatures? We got your back. We'll help you. Next, Smother. 1B instant, destroy a creature with converted mana cost 3 or less.

So black has the ability to kill things. This is kind of a subset. It's going after small things, but cheap things. So it's funny, I'm going to talk about another spell coming up real soon, and this spell sort of goes after CMC.

The only problem in general is, so CMC stands for Converted Mana Cost. For those who don't know what that means is, let's say you have Hill Giant, which costs three colors mana and a red for a 3-3. Its mana cost is three and a red. Its converted mana cost is four. You need four mana to cast it.

Converted mana cost doesn't care about what colors or anything, just how much total mana does it need. And we use that from time to time to reference and do things. So this thing kills little things, things that cost three or less. My only issue with it is Converted Manicost has confused people. We tend to keep it out of common, not always, but we tend to keep it out of common

just because it's terminology a lot of players don't know. We have searched for other words. We search high and low. We love to get a word that somehow just conveys what this is in a way that's shorter. Like, Convert to Manacost is long. But we've yet to find any terminology that is any clearer and changing.

It just looks like a changing. It seemed wrong. So we're still stuck with Convert to Manacost or CMC, as we say. I mean, Black, by the way, because Black is king of creature kill, it can do any subset of creature kill. Smother is trying to say, okay, I can handle cheap things. Because we had a lot of big, fun things, we're saying, okay, well, one of the ways we'll give you

is something which, you know, can't deal with everything, but can deal with early threats. And also it has, oh, no, no, it doesn't. I was going to say something that's not true. Next is Sparksmith. 1R for a 1-1 goblin. Deal X damage to target creature where X is the number of Goblins.

This card was what made Goblins broken and limited. Because this thing is what we call repeatable kill, and it is... It's crazy. It's just really good. Like, it's bad enough. When you get a creature that can tap to do 1 damage, that's bad.

That can shut a lot of things down. We've stopped doing that a comment. That card is problematic. Well, Sparksmith shuts everything down. It doesn't just shut down one toughness creature. It shuts down creatures. And so it was just overboard. It's not that hard to get enough goblins in play.

You know, you pretty quickly get three goblins in play, and that kills most of the creatures your opponent's going to play. And even then, while they're not playing things, you're just playing more and more goblins, and eventually you can deal with anything. So anyway, a broken card that... I'm mistaken on our part.

I mean, if we had done it... If we're going to do it, it should have been rare, and probably we should have at least had a mana cost on the activation or something to help you out a little bit. Next, SWAT. 1 BB instant. Destroy target creature with power 2 or less. Cycling 2. at least had a mana cost on the activation or something to help you out a little bit. Next, SWAT. 1 BB instant. Destroy target creature with power 2 or less. Cycling 2. So this is, it's interesting that Smother and

SWAT are in the same set. They're similar and their names are similar. I would have made their names a little less similar. They're both, you know, short S words that are verbs. Only because just remembering, like, I SWAT is the two power or less, and SMOTHER is the

for a macro, they're a little close. I would like to separate them a little more. SWAT is something similar where it's going after small things. One of the things we were trying to do is we really want you to build up to get some bigger things, and so at Common we tend to put some things that couldn't handle some of the bigger creatures to give you some

answers, but still allow us to make the bigger things. This one is cycling just because late in the game sometimes it becomes useless or it's not nearly as powerful. Okay, symbiotic beast. Four green green for a 4-4 beast. When it dies, you get four 1-1 insects. So this was actually a vertical cycle. There was symbiotic elf, which was a 3-G-2-2,

and symbiotic worm, which was a 5- 2-2, and Symbiotic Worm, which was a 5GG, so 5 green, green, green, 8 mana, 7-7. So the idea was, you get a creature, a 2-2, a 4-4, 7-7, and when it dies, you get the equivalent in 1-1 tokens. So the idea is, you kind of have to kill it twice, and the

second time, it's harder to kill, because it's broken up. Next, Siphon Solve. 2B Sorcery, 2 and a black sorcery. Do 2 damage to each player, and then you gain 2 life for all damage. Every damage you do, you gain life. So the idea is you drain a player for 2,

but it works in multiplayer. So if you're playing in an 8-person game, I can drain seven other players. They each would lose two. I would gain 14. So the goal of this card when we made it was to be a multiplayer card. And the idea was, oh, okay, 2B, drain two. It's not

particularly great, but it's an okay card, whatever. We make bad cards all the time. But in multiplayer play, wow, it can be really good. And this card has definitely influenced a lot of multiplayer cards.

In some ways, it might have given us some bad lessons because scalable effects in multiplayer can get very dangerous. This particular one, maybe it's okay.

I mean, I guess it's problematic in really big multiplayer games. But it definitely led us down a path. We really, we had a, we were big fans of this card. And a lot of multiplayer cards that were kind of aimed at multiplayer were inspired by this card. This card definitely led us down the path of a certain thing. And we recently realized that part of the fun is, I mean, it's not that you can't have some scaling, but having scaling to the, like this card

kind of sucks in two player and it's crazy good in A player, that maybe we want the variance to be not quite as deep. Next, Tempting Worm. One and a green for a 5-5 Worm. A 5-5, two mana, 5-5 Worm. Why wouldn't

you play that? But wait. When it enters the battlefield, each opponent can play any number of artifacts, creatures, enchantments, or land and put them on the battlefield. So this card says, okay, I get a 5-5 for two mana, but whatever permanents you have in your hand, although not Planeswalkers because Planeswalkers didn't. It's funny, this card doesn't

actually let you do Planeswalkers because we didn't say permanent, we spelled it out. That's another quirky thing about how magic works, is that sometimes in the past, we would just say permanent to be clear, and those now work on planeswalkers. Sometimes we spelled it out, and they don't, so this card happens to not work on planeswalkers, but

all non-planeswalker permanents get to come in play, so it's a risky, risky move. There's some fun things you can do. Sometimes you'll combine it with effects where you get a peek at your opponent's hand so you can see what they'll get if you do it. Next, Threaten. 2-hour sorcery.

Untap target creature, and you steal it for the turn. You gain control for the turn, and it gains haste. So originally, Blue had this ability. It was a card called Ray of Command in Legends where it was an instant, and you steal the creature from the turn and get it back.

That was most often used actually defensively, where you would attack, I'd take your biggest creature, block your next biggest creature, and then I would prevent the damage of two creatures while killing two creatures. Well, usually I would try to steal a creature and block a creature in which both creatures would kill each other.

Ideally, if they were the biggest, that would be the best. What we decided here was we wanted to make... We decided to move this ability to red. The temporary stealing, we're going to move to red. But since we really wanted to be aggressive and not defensive, we changed it to sorcery. But I believe this is the first time

the effect shows up in red. At the time, we had done a big discussion on color pipe. We had like, we had this Tuesday meeting called the Magic Meeting. And for many, many weeks,

we went through and tried for everything that every color could do. And we said, who has the most things? Who has the least? Who needs it? Red definitely needed some stuff.

Blue needed to go down a little bit. And we decided, because red has sort of the trickery, the trickster aspect, that we ended up giving temporary.

The idea is Red can manipulate emotions, and it's not good long-term. Blue's the mind manipulation, but Red can sort of like, you know what, I can sort of get you upset or I can feel your emotions for a little bit. I can get you to act in my interest for a little bit, but not too long.

And Fred and I, I don't know if it was a comment here. We eventually decided that it's just something red could use and we moved it down to common so now it's an ability you often see in red common true believer white white for 2-2 cleric you can't be the target of spells or abilities

so essentially it gives you what we now will call a shroud it's funny this is pre-hexproof although I guess there are a few cards in it in Hexproof. This was us messing around. Targeting wasn't keyworded in the Shroud or Hexproof.

But it just was kind of like, I play this guy. He was definitely made for Constructed. This card has Development written all over it. Development loves making WW2-2s. It's the kind of card that gets flashed easy in a white weenie deck. And this definitely was

enabling like, oh, there's some threats out there. Here's a nice clean answer to some of those threats. And I don't know how this card got made, but it's the kind of card development does or pushes. So that's my guess. Undead Gladiator

is one black black, so three mana for a 3-1 zombie barbarian. Aha! Dual creature types again. For 1B, discard a card and you can return it from the graveyard. And you have to play that during your upkeep. And it is cycling 1B.

So see what we're doing here. So we decided we wanted to have a creature that you can get back. Black often has that. It's just some zombie that keeps coming back. You can't stop the zombies or the skeletons, whatever we do. The undead, they keep coming back. And so we wanted the idea, one of the ways we get the endless wave of undead is we get this creature that keeps coming back and that has that feel.

The clever thing this card is doing is it ties it into cycling. Why is cycling matter? Because it allows you to cycle the card early, and later when you have the mana, you can get it back. So cycling this card has less cost than normal. Normally when you cycle a card, you're giving up the card. I mean, you're not going down card advantage because you're drawing a card, but you're giving up access to the card.

And this card says, nope, you're not even doing that. So feel free to cycle me the first time because you can just get me back through the way I work. I believe this seems like the kind of card I made. I think I made this card. It's my, the Johnny in me that says, woohoo. Okay, next is Vizara the Dreadful. So she costs six mana,

three and three black, so three black, black, black, five, five, Gorgon Legend. And she is flying, and you tap to destroy a creature, and that creature can't regenerate. That ability used to be called Bury. For a while, in Alpha, Richard made Terror, which said destroy target creature can't be regenerate. That ability used to be called bury. For a while,

in Alpha, Richard made terror, which said destroyed type creatures can't be regenerated. And for a while, that was the default. So much so that eventually, we made a word for it called bury, which meant destroyed creature can't be regenerated. And then we decided that, you know what, we were unnecessarily hosting regeneration really for no reason.

Like, the whole point of regeneration is to survive things like terror effects, right? Survive, you know, creature killing. And so we stopped doing... On most cards, we stopped doing the anti-regeneration rider, and so Barry went away. There's people who love Barry that even today bug me, like,

why do I use Barry anymore? Like, we don't even use the can't-be-regenerated clause, which is what Barry is, so... Anyway, Vassara was another of the pit fighters, and she is mighty, mighty good, because she's a 5-5 flyer that can destroy creatures every turn.

So we joked that she was the Flying Abyss. So Abyss is a card from Legends that is an enchant world, which means that it goes away if another enchant world comes in play, but essentially it's an enchantment. And it says at the beginning of every turn each player must sacrifice a creature. And so what it does,

it just kills all the creatures one by one. Vasara is like an Abyss except it just kills, you get to choose what dies. And also I think Abyss affects both people where Vasara does not affect you.

You will not kill your own creatures. You will kill their creatures. And, once their creatures are dead, or once the threats are dead, then you get to fly across from five every turn. Um, so I'm pretty sure, uh, Osep, I talked about him winning, uh, PT Venice, which was, um,

the onslaught, uh, block constructed. I think he had Vassara. Vassara showed up a lot in that top eight. Vassara was some good. And anyway, this was a big fan favorite. People really liked it. I think whenever we do like, vote for your favorite legend of all time,

Vassara always makes like top eight. You know, it's one of the most popular. People really like Vassara. I mean, she's crazy good, so. Surprise, surprise. Okay, next. Void Mage Prodigy. Blue, blue for one of the most popular. People really like Vasara. I mean, she's crazy good, so... Surprise, surprise. Okay, next. Void Mage Prodigy. Blue, blue for a 2-1 Wizard.

For blue, blue, sac a Wizard. Counter-target spell. So, anyone know... Void Mage Prodigy was the winning card from Kai Buda when he won the Invitational in Cape Town. So, Kai wins. His original card, we had to tweak it a little bit. It was something similar.

It was something where you could, a creature that you could sacrifice to counter spells. Now, the idea of this thing was, you know, this was a UU21 stack itself to counter. And Wizards was tribal, something we were supporting. So, we were trying to make a card that might be good. And then, in development,

development realized that Blue was causing problems, so they nerfed the Wizards. And, well, this card, I mean, this card is good, but what happened was it was the only good Wizard card in a world in which all the Wizards were nerfed. And so this card was good, but blue

was just not that good to play right then, and wizards in particular weren't that good to play, so this is the kind of card that I think will show up when people have access to whatever wizards they want to play, and there's really good wizards. So the card is actually really good, but it never really quite got the showing and standard

that a lot of other Imitational Cards. The other thing about this card is Kai Buda did appear in the art. We ended up doing a promotional version of the card where we redid the art. We thought this one didn't look enough like Kai, so we redid it a little bit, make it look a little more like Kai.

But anyway, a lot of people, by the way, the nickname for this card is Kai, because it's Kai's Imitational Card. Finally, my final card, and then I'm done. Words of War. So Words of War was an enchantment for two and a red, and then for one mana, the next time you would draw a card, instead, you got to shock something.

You got to do two damage to something. And this was a cycle. So it was words... Let's see. The white one was words of worship, the blue one was words of wind,

the black one was words of waste, the red one was words of war, and the green one was worlds of wilding. So some fun naming. And the idea was

each one of these was an enchantment where you could pay one mana and you could give up your future draw to have an effect. So essentially the idea was pay one mana, and you could give up your future draw to have an effect. So essentially the idea was,

for one mana, I could make my next spell, instead of getting that card, I guarantee that I get a card, and that card, at this moment, costs one and does this thing. This is one of those cycles that never quite worked out.

I think development ended up sort of pulling back a little bit, just because there's repetition of game issues. Like, if every turn I can just do something and never draw

and all I'm doing is doing this thing, then the game comes to kind of boring. So it's one of those cycles. It's probably a design flaw in that sometimes design makes things

that development, when they go to develop, it goes, yeah, there's really no way to push this without making something that's probably not going to be all that much fun.

So I think this cycle ended up being more of a limited thing than a constructed thing, because development didn't want to push it for constructed. I don't think any of these guys were playing constructed. Someone writing goes, there's the following deck that was made use of in Worlds of War.

Anyway, that, my friends, is the final card from Onslaught, that I'm going to talk about, at least. So the last six podcasts, I think it's been six, I've talked all about Onslaught, and I hope you guys have enjoyed it. My little wrap-up on Onslaught is as follows. I think it was a very interesting set. We definitely explored some stuff we hadn't done before.

We really sort of committed to tribal for the first time, which paid off in spades. We introduced Morph, which really sort of committed to tribal for the first time, which paid off in spades. Morph, we introduced Morph, which really sort of opened the book and sort of made us open our minds a little bit about how crazy we could do it. It's the first time we really did something that was really like, wow, that's really,

I mean, I guess we had to split cards, but I mean, it was furthering us of kind of doing things that were a little more off the beaten track, that we were getting a little more comfortable with kind of shocking the audience and just doing things that people didn't more off the beaten track, that we were getting a little more comfortable with kind of shocking the audience and just doing things that people didn't think we might do. We brought back cycling, so we really

started committed to the idea that we could just bring back named mechanics. That's just something that Magic can and should be doing. So I think Onslaught was really, it's interesting as you look historically, like, it really started a bunch of different things. It really ended up being a pretty important set.

And so, anyway, I was glad to talk about it and it was fun being involved with it and I hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about Onslaught.

So the next time I do one of my design podcasts, it won't be for a little bit, I will, of course, be doing Legions, the all-creature set, and I'll talk about

how that happened. But anyway, I've now parked my car, which means this is the end of my drive to work. So thanks, guys, for listening. I'll talk to you next time.