Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #192 - Scourge, Part 1

Episode Date: January 16, 2015

Mark starts his series on the design of Scourge.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so in the recent past, I talked about Onslaught and Legions. So I'm going to finish up and talk about the third set in the Onslaught block, Scourge. Okay, so what I'll do, as always, is I'll start by talking generally about the set, and then I'll get into talking some card-by-card stories. Okay, so Scourge came out May 26, 2003. It was the 29th expansion for Magic. It had 143 cards, 44 common, 44 uncommon, 55 rare.

143 was the normal size at the time of a small set. The previous set, Legions, actually had 145, which confused a lot of people, but the reason for that was because we were doing all creatures, we tended to need full cycles, so we had 45, 45, 55, instead of 44, 44, 55. Normally the odd cards

gotta be lands or artifacts, but being in all creatures, that was a little tougher to do, and we didn't want to have so many artifact creatures, so we changed around the things a little bit. Anyway, this set was led by Brian Tinsman. The design team was him and Worth Woolport. Worth Woolport, for those of you who might not know, currently is the person in charge of Magic Online.

He was in R&D once upon a time. And I think this is one design on this one set. Randy Bueller would be the lead developer. His name might come up a few times. Okay, so the expansion symbol was a dragon skull. Why? Because this was the dragon set!

And we'll get to that in a second, because it wasn't a particularly good dragon set! As dragons go. Okay, also, this was the last of the old frames. Right after this was 8th edition, the 8th edition frames started in 8th edition. So this is the last of the old, old frames. We've actually changed frames once since then. But the original frames from early Magic, this was the last set to have them.

Okay, so let's talk about what this set was and was not. So the set was marketed heavily as a dragon set. But people were kind of disappointed because there weren't a lot of dragons in it. I think there were four dragons and then a bunch of dragon-related cards. So the big secret is, when Brian Tinsman designed the set, it wasn't designed as a dragon set. Turns out that Brian has a fondness for dragons, and so he put a little bit of dragon tribal in, just because he felt like, well, let's get to what the set was about, and we'll get to how we got to dragons. So, Brian's big theme, this was the third set in the block,

Brian wanted, he wanted to take the things that the block had already been doing, so the block already had Morph. It had Tribal. Double Strike had been introduced. It had Cycling. So Brian was trying to sort of explore some of those areas, but he wanted to also just do something new. So the idea that Brian started with was having a set where the cost matters,

where CMC, Converted Mana Cost, matters. So for those that don't know what CMC is real quick, when you have a spell, if you count up all the colorless mana and all the colored mana, for example, Hill Giant costs three colorless and one red. That has a Converted Mana Cost of four. Three plus one, four total mana. So Converted Mana Cost talks about how much total mana. And this set was all about that mattering. Usually it mattered because it was big. There are a few cards that mattered because it was small. We'll get to that. So the set was about cost matters. It did introduce two new keywords. Well, it introduced one brand new keyword and one variant of a keyword. It introduced Storm,

which we will talk about. Actually, we'll talk about it right now. So Storm was a mechanic that said when you cast this spell, for every spell you've already cast this turn, you get a copy of the spell you're playing. The Storm spells usually did relatively small effects, but if you managed to cast a lot

of spells that turn, they could become pretty big. And it turns out that storm, so I have a thing on my blog, which is my podcast, called the storm scale. And the storm scale talks about how unlikely a mechanic is to be repeated in a standard legal

set. Well, it's called the storm scale because storm is a 10. Storm was, of all the mechanics we ever made, it might be the most broken. I mean, it's up there. It's got some competition. I think Storm was in the set

because Brian was playing around with cost matters. Well, Storm, small cost matters. If you want to play a Storm deck, what you want to have is a lot of very cheap spells. You also might want to have some rituals and things, which also were what fueled Storm decks.

But you basically wanted to have a lot of cheap spells, so that by the time you cast your Storm spell, it was turning from a little effect into a big effect. And it turns out that Storm is so powerful that anything we've made that had Storm on it, that unto itself would allow you to win the game, that's all it needs. That it might be like, oh, one damage to a creature,

to a player, one damage, and then, nope, high enough storm, you can kill players. So, the other mechanic that was new, as far as a name mechanic,

was land cycling. So, usually you would say the land you could go get. So mountain cycling lets you get a mountain and forest cycling lets you get a forest. The funny thing is, this mechanic had nothing to do with cycling. A lot of people think that Brian got there by evolving cycling, like it was an evolution of cycling. And in fact, it came from a completely different

place. What Brian was trying to do is the set had this theme of converted mana cost matters, and Brian was really trying to push large converted cost matters, decks where that was true. And so what he wanted to do was make cards that you would put in your deck that had a huge mana cost on them, but wouldn't cause you trouble if you got mana screwed. You know, if you didn't have mana, oh, well, I'll make these giant creatures that you could turn into a basic land if you got mana screwed. You know, if you didn't have mana, oh, well, I'll make these giant creatures that you could turn into a basic land if you need it. So the idea is,

if I draw this early in the game, oh, I just convert it into a land. But if I draw it later in the game, then I get to play my giant monster. And so, completely independently, Brian figured out that, like, the right cost for discarding the card and getting a land was two mana.

And so he came to me at one point and asked my opinion. At this point, I didn't actually take over as head designer until the middle of Kamigawa Black. But Brian and I were friends. He definitely wanted some advice. I'd done more sets than he had at the time. And so he just asked

my opinion. And so I said, you have a mechanic where you take a card in my opinion, and so I said, oh, well, you have a mechanic where you take a card in your hand, you spend two Kolos mana, you discard it, and then you get a card from your library. I'm like, that really sounds a lot like cycling, and so I convinced him that rather than being its own mechanic, that he should make it feel like a cycling variant. So instead of just land grab or whatever we called it, it was land cycling. It turns out later,

it turns out that it mattered because this block had cards that cared about cycling. You know, after a rift cared about cycling, lightning rift cared about cycling, after a slide cared about cycling. So the idea was, by making land cycling cycling, it now could work with the cycling cards. And so it was actually very nice to help the idea was, by making land cycling cycling, it now could work with the cycling cards. And so it was actually very nice to help the cycling deck, because the cycling deck did need access to land.

And so that worked out well. Now, Brian did put in his set... Brian likes dragons. No mistake there. And Brian did put a bunch of dragons in. He actually made one or two dragon tribal cards. I think what he did is he might have put in four dragon-related cards, of which two of them

had a little bit of dragon tribal. And that's what Brian did. In fact, when the set comes out, the actual dragon cards that are in the set, I think mostly were made by design. But I'm not sure whether it came from development or brand. Somebody decided that this set would be sexier if it was the dragon set.

Scourge, the dragon set. And they said, well, there's some dragon tribal in it. There's some dragons. And the development team took some of the convertedverted Maticost matter stuff and themed it like it was dragons. So there's a cycle, we'll get to cycles in a second.

Or actually, we'll get to cycles right now. So there's, one of the cycles was called the Dragon Auras and they were all

auras that if they were in your graveyard and you cast a creature of a Converted Maticost 6 or greater, it would snap onto it from the grave. And these were flavored as dragon auras. Now the reality is when Brian designed them, they weren't specifically designed with dragons

in mind. They wanted to go on big things and the set had a lot of different big things. But they happened to work fine with dragons and by seaming them with dragons, it sort of helped increase the dragon-ness of the set. Now, one of the big mistakes, I believe, is, I believe if you're going to do a dragon set and sell it as a dragon set, you probably want a little more dragons than four. And when I say four, one of them didn't even, it wasn't even a dragon,

it just turned things into dragons, which will count, but it's you know, I think there was anyway, there was only three or four actually creature type dragons in the set. As far as other spells, there was an uncommon cost matters mechanic, I'm sorry

an uncommon cost matters spell cycle, and those were all instants and sorceries that when you cast them, looked on your side of the board and figured out what the highest

converted mana cost on a permanent you control. I talked about this previously during both Onslaught and Legions. There's an interesting dynamic going on here

where there's a fight between looking at your things and looking at all things. And what happened was, coming into this, the default in magic was, oh, well I just care about all things. All goblins get all things. And what happened was, coming into this, the default in Magic was, oh, well, I just

care about all things. All goblins get a bonus. But what happened was, as development started developing the set, they started changing some of them to be yours for developmental reasons. The CMC is a good example. Well, we didn't want to discourage the opponent from playing big things, so it only looked at your things.

And that tendency, you could see it sort of, we started from a developmental place, but eventually we realized that players just kind of assumed that their stuff works on their stuff and not their opponent's stuff. And the tension that got created, for most players,

I mean, there's some high-end players that really enjoyed that tension, but for most players, like, if I'm playing a goblin deck, I don't want to think like, oh, should I play this goblin card because maybe my opponent has some goblins out? Next, there was a cycle called the decrees, which was a rare cycle. So decrees all had big effects, and they could be cycled for smaller versions of the big effect. And we'll get to a couple of decrees when we go card by card. Even some of the cycling got pretty big even the smaller effects were still pretty big comparatively

next there was a cycle, a common of the land cyclers, that's a, there was a plain cycler and an island cycler, they were all creatures and they were big creatures that you could cycle there were a cycle of instant storm cars, a common that did little tiny things

you might get some extra bonus out of it, oh one of the things about storm by the way a cycle of instant storm cards to common that does little tiny things. You might get some extra bonus out of it. Oh, one of the things about storm, by the way, is we made a decision when we made it of whether or not it was one spell that got magnified or got copied into multiple spells. And the reason it cares is if it's one spell, you can counter it. If it's many spells, you can't.

And at the time, we were worried about counter spells, so we said, okay, why not? And it turns out that Storm has this interesting quality that it's really, really hard to stop with counter magic because, I mean, we've since made a few spells to help you, but in general, it's like, oh, I'm going off and I'm making, you know, 15 copies.

How many counter spells do you have? Enough to stop enough of them and I'm not going to kill you? You know, and it makes it very hard to fight with counter magic. Finally, there was very hard to fight with countermagic. Finally, there was an uncommon cycle of war chiefs. War chiefs all allowed the creature type that it was to be cost for one less, and they granted some ability to creatures of that type. They were sort of the lords of this block.

So what else was? So we had the cost matters, obviously the decrees, there's dragons, there's tribal, there's cycling and land cycling, there's more double strike, there was morph,

there was storm. I know with morph, the other reason that Brian liked the converted amount of cost matters is that morph gave you the ability to have things you could play cheaply,

but then later in the game turn them up and become very expensive things. And so I think Brian felt that played nicely in the game turn them up and become very expensive things. And so I think Brian felt that played nicely into Cost Matters. Cycling also allowed you to cycle away expensive things. So I think Brian got to Cost Matters because

Cycling and Morph, which were the two mechanics already in the set, already played into that space, and that's I think how Brian got there. Story-wise, for those that care, so what happened earlier on the block, so the onslaught block is a continuation or at least is in the same setting

and has the same main character as the Odyssey story. So the main character is Kamal. By this part of the story, he's green now. He's the Fist of Carusa rather than a pit fighter. So anyway, Kamal had a sister named Jessica. Jessica got turned into Phage, this being who's very touch-killed that you guys saw in card form in Legions.

And Phage ended up having a fight with Akroma. Akroma was the creation of... What was his name? The guy who wandered the desert. His name will come to me. Ixador. Ixador was a pit fighter. He and his beloved were forced to the desert

and she died and he realized he could create things from his mind and made an angel in her image. And then the Cabal and Kamal sounds like a comedy duo. Kamal and Cabal had to team up to stop him. And then the Cabal and Kamal, sounds like a comedy duo, had to team up to stop him. And then there was a big fight between Phage and Akroma, and giant

explosion, and they become Corona, the false god. And Corona becomes a big part of this story. There's a, basically, eventually in the end, Kamal is able to free his sifter, both from Corona and from Phage, and get her back to be Jessica. Karn then takes her to a place called Argentum, which you guys might know as Mirrodin, where he introduces her to Memnarch, and she stays.

The interesting thing was, I think we were planning to do something with her in the next part of the story. She's in Mirrodin. The next set is Mirrodin. But we don't. We do hint, it is hinted that she is a planeswalker, but we never saw Jessica again, so I don't know. Maybe one day. So the tribes in this set, because it's a tribal set, beasts, birds, clerics, dragons, elves, goblins,

illusions, soldiers, wizards, and zombies. I can't remember whether there were any slivers in this set. There were slivers in legions. I don't know if there were slivers in this set. I don't remember whether there were any slivers in the set. There were slivers in Legions. I don't know if there were slivers in the set. I don't think there were. There were four themed decks.

Goblin Mob, which I think was a little weenie red deck. Goblin-based deck was a red deck. Max Attack, which was black-green, I think was a

Converted Manicost Matters deck. Pulverize, which was blue-red, I think was a Spells Matter that made use of some of the cycling. And then Storm Surge was white-blue, and think, was a Spells Matter that made use of some of the cycling. And then Storm Surge was white-blue, and that was the Storm deck that did fun Storm things. Okay, now that we've talked all about the sets, let's dive in and talk about some of the cards.

Okay, I'm going to start with Accelerated Mutation. So Accelerated Mutation was an instant. It costs three green and greens, so five mana. It's a target creature. It gets plus X plus X until end of turn, where X is the converted mana cost of a largest permanent you control. So this is one of the cycles of CMC matter cards. So this is interesting. One of the things Brian was playing around with,

and this is very interesting, because this cares about creatures, and most often the biggest thing you have are creatures, it's a spell that just gets better with time. You know, early on, maybe I'm making a 3-3 into a 6-6. And you didn't have to use it on the creature that was the biggest creature. But often, if you're going

to attack, you might as well use it on the biggest creature. So this also had, you know, there were times in which, for example, you might have a 7-7 with a Converted Manacross to 8, with this spell it becomes a 15-15. You know, and if it had Tramp or something, you know, a 7-7 with a converted mana cost of 8, with this spell it becomes a 15-15, you know, and if it had Tramp or something, you know, you could, this spell definitely sort of, this whole cycle, as you went along just got stronger as the game went

on. So it had this nice, natural sort of evolution that depended upon the board state changing, but the spells would get stronger. They were costed as if they were middle of the road, meaning... I think developers assumed that, like, you were getting, like, a five or a six, so if you got above that, you got more than you normally would.

But if you did much smaller than that, you would get less. Okay, next. Alpha status. Two and a green for an enchant creature. Back then, auras weren't called auras yet. They were called enchant creatures. So the aura gave plus two, plus two

for each creature in play that shares a creature type with it. Now note, this wasn't just your side. This was everybody's side. So if you stuck it on a goblin, well, it got plus two, plus two for every goblin in play. So one of the things that was done,

this is very common for third sets, is there's a lot of tribal going on, but one of the things that we often do, and Brian did in this set, is make some what we call open-ended cards, which are cards that are linear, meaning they want a specific thing, but they don't tell you what that thing is, they let you pick the thing. So this is a good example. Assuming you can play the card as green, so you have to be playing green, assuming that you can play the card, it doesn't matter which creature type you care about, just that you care about a creature type.

You want to make an elf deck? This can go on the elf deck. You want to make a beast deck? Well, this can go on the beast deck. You know, whatever you were doing, this didn't, it said it had to go on the tribal deck, and even then, in limited, it was plenty fine in a deck that, you know,

because it was so concentrated, if you were playing green, you had enough creatures that over you know, because it was so concentrated, if you were playing green, you had enough creatures that overlapped that this was worth playing. Okay, next. Ambush Commander for three green green. It's a 2-2 elf. Forest you control are 1-1 green elves

and still land. And then for one green second elf, giant growth. So, this is a good example where it was trying to just take things a slightly different way. One of the things that was going on at the time was

green for a long time had both vertical and both grew wide and grew tall. That it would spill out lots of little one-ones and care about how many creatures you had, and it would give you mana to make giant dudes. At some point, we realized that white and green were too close to each other,

so we decided that white would become the go-wide color and green would go the go-tall color. So white has more of a little token-making now. It is more of the small creatures. It is more of the rewards for having a lot of creatures. But at the time, that was still Green's thing. And so that's what Green was trying to do here, is take advantage of the animating lands thing.

So all of a sudden, now your lands are not just creatures, but they're elves, in which the deck cared about. And so it allowed you to both get more elves for all your elves' tribal cards, and let you go wide for the wide strategies. And then it had a sack thing in it where it allowed you to turn your creatures essentially into a spell.

And here the spell was giant growth. Okay, next. Ancient ooze. You know, I like my oozes. Any ooze is good ooze to me. Okay, so Ancient Ooze is five green greens, seven mana for a star star ooze. Its power and toughness is equal to the total converted mana cost of all your other creatures.

So this was a converted mana cost mana cost card that just said, Hey, the more you got, the bigger I am. Green already had a strategy of playing lots of creatures and playing big creatures, and so this fit really well into a green deck. And this is one of those kind of cards that just in Limited was very, very good, because Limited's all about playing creatures, and often you get in a creature stall, and this thing just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's eventually going to break through.

At some point, your opponent can't handle a 25-25 or however big it gets. It's also in my theme of trying to make the most awesome long-term ooze deck. Next. And oozes, by the way, tend to grow over time. So this card not only fit nicely in what green was doing in the set, it also fit nicely in what oozes do in general.

A Fero Runecafter. 3u for a 2-3. 3 and a blue. 4 mana. For a 2-3 wizard. Whenever a creature is turned face-up, draw a card. So this card is interesting. It doesn't care about you turning a card face-up. It cares about anybody. So you can use it in two ways. One is

you can use it just by playing with a lot of morph creatures. All of a sudden it's at a lot of morph creatures. All of this has had a lot of morph, but blue and green, I'm sorry, blue and white, I believe,

were the two colors that most cared about you messing with morph, un-morphing things. And so this blue one's like, okay, whenever something gets turned face up,

I get a card that's pretty good. It makes me want to play a lot of morph things. Also, blue has a bunch of morph things that it can manipulate and turn back down,

like the Wall of Deceit from Onslaught. And so Wall of Deceit with a Federal Runecapture allowed you to draw many, many cards because you keep putting it down and turning it face up. Okay, next. Arc of Blight. It's an artifact for two. Three-tap sack, destroy target land. I just want to jump with this card to talk about how things have changed.

Back in the day, we considered, like, Stone Rain was just the cost of doing business. And, like, I think Stone Rain for a while was the most reprinted card. And then one day, we kind of came to the conclusion of, you know what makes magic more fun? It's when you get to play your spells.

And things that keep you from playing your spells, we should tighten up a little. Not that they should go away. You know, there still is land destruction, but we should just make it a little bit harder. You know, really on turn three, me disrupting your land flow, it could be pretty substantial.

And there are a lot of environments where all it took was me one turn to knock you down a peg, and then you were just behind the whole game in a way that was very hard to come back from. And so... Anyway, the point here is, here's something that allows a player not playing red or black or green,

which are three colors in Destroyer Land, on turn three to Destroyer Land. I mean, you had to waste your turn two. It wasn't quite as efficient as Stone Rain, but it was definitely something that I don't think we'd make something this easy now. Next, Aven Forestier.

It's a 1w1w bird soldier flying, and whenever a creature is turned face up, it gets a plus one, plus one counter. Remember I said that blue and white were the two colors that cared about morph, or things turning face up? Well, here is white's version of that. So white, blue's drawing your cards, because blue's more of a control color.

Well, white is building up its creatures, because often white is defeating you with flyers, which is a very common white strategy. So it's a little flyer that keeps getting bigger as you play morph things. Next, Bladewing the Risen. Three, black, black, red, red. 4-4-4, dragon legend. So he's flying, he's a 4-4 fly black, black, red, red. 4-4-4 dragon legend.

So he's flying. He's a 4-4 flyer because he's a dragon. One of the things we decided a while back is our dragon fly. I mean, for a while we were messing around. I mean, there's worms, I guess, which are flightless dragons. But even the worms have become less dragon-y looking. And the things that are super dragon-y, they fly. Dragons fly. And this thing, when it enters the battlefield, are super dragon-y, they fly. Dragons fly.

And this thing, when it enters the battlefield, gets to animate a dragon, which means take a dragon from a graveyard. I'm not sure whether it's your graveyard or all graveyards. I think it's all graveyards. But it might just be your graveyard. I didn't write that down. Anyway, when you play it, it gets you to reanimate a dragon, and block in a red,

all dragons get plus one, plus one, until end of turn. So this was one of those dragon lords that Brian had made, because he thought it was cool, that when the development team looked at it, they're like, well, there's kind of a dragon theme here. There's some dragon tribal, and there's some big dragons. But Bladewing the

Risen was very popular, and being legendary, I know that he sees some plays, and I've heard some commander decks built around him. He's just very good in dragon tribal, and so if you're making a dragon tribal deck, the vast majority of the dragons are in red,

and there's some in black, but between black and red, you get most of the ones you need. Okay, next, Bladewing's Thrall. So two black black for a 3-3 zombie. It has flying if you control a dragon, and whenever a dragon enters the battlefield, you can return it from the graveyard to play. So the cool thing about this is,

one of the problems of having dragon-helping cards is dragons don't come out until late in the game, and so if you have a card that says, well, I need a dragon, a lot of times it's like, it's bad to play, because you don't have the dragon yet. But this card says, no, no, no, here's what you do. When you get to four mana, if you have two BB,

play me. I'm a 3-3 creature. I'm not an amazing 2BB, 3-3 creature, nothing amazing, but play me. So at some point I die, you know, use me like a creature, use me where you need to, and point I die, you know, use me like a creature, use me where you need to, and at some point, you know, when you play your dragon, I'm going to come back. And now I'm going to come back, I'm going to come back as a 3-3 flyer,

which is pretty efficient, especially since I'm free when you play the dragon. So it's like, essentially it's like you get a 3-3 for 4 mana that says, hey, later in the game, your dragon comes with a free 3-3 flyer, which is pretty good. Next, Brain Freeze. It's an instant for 1 and a blue, so 2 mana. Target player puts the top 3 cards of their library into their graveyard, what we call milling, colloquially.

And so this is mill 3. Storm. And this proved to be a very good card. So here's what we learned about storm cards. It turns out in some formats, most formats, and especially in older formats when you have a lot of ways to get mana quickly, it is not that hard to get a very high storm count.

So if your storm effect magnified by a large number, would kill somebody, it is a good kill card in formats where storm can thrive, which is most formats. So Brain Freeze has been a very popular kill. One of the reasons I think it's so popular is it's very hard to defend against. You know, counterspells have trouble stopping storm, and it's not like damage that you can redirect, you know. There's not a lot of answers to it. There's a few, but not a lot.

And so, it was a, it just proved to be a very good kill card. It's also in blue, and surprise, surprise, a lot of older decks, especially Vintage and Legacy, play blue. Okay, next. Call to the Grave. It's an enchantment for four and a black, five mana total. At the beginning of each player's upkeep, he or she

sacks a non-zombie creature, and then at the end of any turn, if there's no creature, sack card name. So this is a cross between the Abyss from Legends and Pestilence from Alpha. So Pestilence was this card that said, oh, it allowed you to sort of kill things, you could spend mana and do damage to things,

but at the end of any turn, if there's no creatures in play, oh no, the Pestilence needs creatures to survive and go away. The Abyss, meanwhile, was an enchant world, black enchant world from Legends, that made every upkeep have a player sacrifice a creature. So this card is kind of like the Abyss, but instead of making you sacrifice a creature,

it has an important difference. It makes you saturate a non-zombie creature, which means played in a deck with zombies, it kills everything but your zombies. Also, because it is the pestilence rider, where it goes away if there's no creatures, zombies become even more important there because the zombies can't

be killed by it, but get to count for it to keep it in play. And the flavor of this is pretty good, which is that there's disease, the zombies carry disease, and so they're not affected by the disease, the disease doesn't kill them, but they're carriers.

So as long as there's zombies around, the disease sticks around. And there's a pretty potent card in a zombie deck. The zombie decks at the time were not, we talk about the standout sort of constructed decks at the time, the zombie decks weren't quite as high as, like, Goblins or Elves. But, anyway, a very good zombie card. If you're playing Legacy Zombies, that's a card to take a look at.

I mean, not that Legacy Zombies is an amazing card, but, you know, hey, zombies are fun. Next, Carbonize. Two and a red for an instant. Deal three damage to a target creature or player. If it's a creature, it can't regenerate. And if it's a creature, it gets exiled if it dies that turn. For some reason, well, in Alpha, there was a card called Disintegrate. The flavor was, not only does it burn you up, there's nothing left. There's no body.

There's no necromancer raising you from the dead. There's no body. And carbonize is the same kind of of flavor that I'm just burning you up but one of the things we realized is we had regeneration and other things that we would use

and that we kept making spells that hosed regeneration and we're like at some point we finally said you know what there should be answers to destruction it shouldn't be like

I burned you and what can you do and so we stopped making so many exceptions so carbonized is the kind of spell that we just don't do as much anymore. I mean, we do it occasionally. We'd like to have some answers that you can board in. But usually the idea is, if you have an answer, it comes at an additional cost,

meaning that there's some cost to getting the rider. It didn't just come free on the spell, which is how we often did it back in the day, back in the onslaught days, in the scourge days. Okay, so one more. I've caught the wizards, but I'm looking for a parking spot, so I'll talk about Char-tooth Cougar. So Char-tooth Cougar is five and a red for a 4-4 creature. It's a cat beast, and it has fire breathing.

But more importantly, it has mountain breathing. Am I not mountain breathing? Mountain cycling 2. And what mountain cycling 2 meant is that for 2 mana, you could discard it, and you could go through your deck and find a mountain. And then you could put the mountain and you could go through your deck and find a mountain, and then you could put the mountain from your library into your hand.

It was our cycling variant, except it wasn't a cycling variant. Except we made it a cycling variant. So this is a good example of what land cycling was trying to do, and there's a cycle of common creatures. This is an expensive creature. It costs six mana. Well, early in the game, if you don't have six mana, you can

turn it into a mountain, and then you can toss it away. But, later in the game, if you don't have six mana, you can turn it into a mountain, and then you can toss it away. But, later in the game, if you need it, this is a really good card. And not only is it good at six mana, it has fire breathing, so as much mana as you have, as much red mana at least, you know, it could do a lot more damage. And so Charged with Cougar was a really good example of

the kind of thing that Brian was trying to do with land cycling. Okay. Well, how'd we do? Ah to do with land cycling. Okay. Well, how'd we do? Pretty average ride today. Okay, so I'm now at work. Being that I got to see, that's a good sign. Then I'm not done yet.

Not that I ever finished on the first thing. So we got a bunch of podcasts to go. I'm going to talk about a whole bunch of Scourge cards and share different stories all about the making of Scourge. But I have parked in my parking lot. So we all know what that means. Yep, it's the end of my drive to work. And it means that it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye.