Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #217 - Innistrad Cards, Part 2

Episode Date: April 10, 2015

Mark continues telling the stories behind the cards of Innistrad in part 2.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so yesterday, I'm sorry, last podcast, I started talking about the cards of Innistrad. So today I'm going to continue. When we left off, I was in C, and I'm going to continue in C. So I'm up to Cloister Youth. So Cloister Youth is one and a white, so two mana for a 1-1 human. At the beginning of your upkeep, you could choose to transform it. And if you do, it becomes the Unholy Fiend,

which is a black card. It's a 3-3 horror. And at the beginning of your end step, you lose a life. So this is a very interesting transform card. So it's inspired by The Exorcist, the idea of a little girl possessed by a demon. And so the fun thing about this

card is, you can choose to transform it whenever you want. It's just, during your turn, you can choose to transform it. But, it comes at a cost. So instead of having a little 1-1 creature, you get a 3-3 creature, but something that's going to damage you every turn. And it does damage

you at the end of the turn, so the turn you transform but something that's going to damage you every turn. And it does damage you at the end of the turn, so the turn you transform it, it's going to damage you. And so it's an interesting little choice. I have lost the game numerous times to having an unholy fiend when I didn't want the unholy fiend.

I mean, in the beginning I wanted it, but like black things. So this is another example of a card that starts one color and goes the other color. White does not traditionally get stuff like lose life. So the black side is a black side and isn't white. But it's not undermining anything that white can't do. So we allowed that bleed. Okay.

Next, Cobbled Wings. Cost two. It's an artifact equipment. Enchanted creature has flying. Equip one. The reason I brought this up was this card in design was Broomstick. And then we were informed that

in this gothic horror world, there were witches, because we've seen witches, but they don't ride broomsticks. I guess that's too fairytale-ish. I'm not sure, but it turned out that no broomstick riding, so the broomstick turned into cobbled wings. Next, Creepy Doll. It's an artifact creature that costs five.

It's a 1-1 construct. It is indestructible, and when it deals damage to a creature, you flip a coin. And if you win the coin flip, the creature's destroyed. Okay, so let me explain what's going on here. So, I'm a fan of a singer named Jonathan Colton, and he sings all sorts of fun songs, but one of his songs is a song called Creepy Doll. That's a song all about, you know, it's just a staple of horror,

of the doll that sort of comes to life and usually ends up killing its owner. Anyway, we were doing gothic horror. I'm like, oh, that's a perfect trope. And I wanted to make a little nod to Jonathan Coulton, so I made Creepy Doll. And it was a tricky card to make, because what we wanted was something that kind of scared you, but it couldn't be too consistent. Otherwise, it just sort of shut things down. So we ended up doing this thing. Okay, it's indestructible. You can't destroy the doll. That's the trope, by the way. That you have this doll, and the owner will burn

it, and will do whatever they can to try to destroy it. It cannot be destroyed. So, okay, it had to be indestructible. Let's just follow the trope. And then, I said, okay, originally it had death touch, and it just killed whatever it fought. Well, it's a little too powerful. You can't destroy it. It kills everything. So instead, I made this thing where it kills it half the time. You never know. And what I found was, once I made it random and you didn't know, there was so

much more tension. Because when it has death touch, your opponent's just like, well, it's got death touch. I'm probably not going to attack. I don't want to die. But now it's like, well, I can't not attack and it doesn't always kill things, and so there's a chance it won't kill things. So every time you get involved with the Creepy Doll, you just don't know what's going to happen,

and it made it actually a lot scarier. That always knowing it's going to kill you is way less scary than sometimes it's going to kill you. And it ended up being a really fun card. No, that's not the end of the story. So it turns out that when we made the card, Jonathan Colton, his fans and stuff, obviously heard about it and let him know.

And we heard from him, and so we made a deck. Tom Lapilli and I were the masterminds behind making Creepy Doll. I had come up with the idea of doing Creepy Doll. Tom was on board. I designed the card. But Tom and I were partners in crime here. We're both fans of Jonathan Coulton. So I got Tom. Tom made a deck

for Jonathan Coulton. We mailed to Jonathan Coulton, who at the time did not play Magic, I believe. And he now does! This whole incident, we sent him a deck, and he played with it. And he had some other people he worked with who played. So there were other people on tour with him who played. But anyway, he started playing. And so a weird thing, one of the things that ever happened to me is I signed for the creepy

dolls that were in his deck, I signed. And then we had him sign creepy dolls for me. So it's the only time I ever signed a card for someone and they signed the card for me. So I have, someone my desk. I have four creepy dolls signed by Jonathan Coulton, and Jonathan Coulton has four creepy dolls signed by me. And then I had fun on Twitter. We actually had a chance to interact on Twitter a little bit, and he thanked me for the card,

and so he's much welcome. I'm always glad when we can make a few nods to pop culture. There's another one coming up. I'm not sure if we'll get to it today, but it's... Innistrad has another very fun little Easter egg, pop culture Easter egg. Okay, next.

Curse of the Stalked Prey. So this is a red enchantment. It's a curse. It's an aura, but it's an enchant player. And when a creature deals damage to you, that creature gets a plus one, plus one counter. So remember, you put a curse on a player, usually on your opponent.

And so the idea is, every time something damages them, plus one counter. So remember, you put a curse on a player, usually on your opponent. And so the idea is every time something damages them, it gets bigger. So a couple things. First off, let me talk about where curses came from. So in Unglued, I had a couple cards where you were doing something directly to your opponent. Like one of them was called Handcuffs, where they had to keep their wrists together.

And anyway, I came up with the idea of, since it literally was affecting your opponent, I said, well, can I just say enchant player? We have enchant creature and enchant enchantment. And it was unglued, so no one could tell me I couldn't do it, so I did it. So there was an enchant player. So when we were doing curses, it dawned on me that there's a perfect player here. I'm not just enchanting anything. I'm enchanting my opponent. So I went to the rules team. I go, look, I know we did this in Unglued,

which does not mean we can do it in Blackboard of Magic, but could we do Enchant Player? And they thought it over like, yeah, why not? Sure. And so we made it in Enchant Player. A little nod of the unsets influencing Blackboarder. Now this curse originally was made, I think, by Richard Garfield. And it was originally a green curse, not a red curse. And it was called Curse of Tastiness, I think it was.

Because the creatures are just so tasty. Oh, I'm sorry. It makes you so tasty. And so when the creatures eat upon you, it strengthens them. They get stronger. That was Richard's. It got changed to red because during development, development added in what we call the Slith ability, that the vampires, when they deal damage to you, some of them, get plus one,

plus one counters. And so essentially this curse was granting that ability to your opponent's creatures until they moved it to red. One of the downsides of this is, one of the things that was supposed to happen in Innistrad was I was trying to isolate the humans, and one of the ways I did that is I made a few cycles where there were cycles in all the colors but white. So white sort of stood

out as not being part of the cycle. There were supposed to be curses in all the colors except white. And then in Dark Ascension, when white finally got a curse, it was showing that darkness had finally hit the humans. Except, I didn't really explain this well to Eric, who was Eric Lauer, who was the lead developer.

And so he didn't know that it was important that all the colors but white have a curse. So when he took Tastiness Curse, or Curse of Tastiness, and he changed it from green to red, he didn't make another green curse. So there's not a green curse. And so if you're ever wondering why there's no green curse,

there was supposed to be. When this card got changed, they should have made one, but my fault, though. I didn't do a good enough job explaining it. I don't think I put it in a document that we hand off, and so Eric just didn't know something that I had done that was clever. But when I wrote down in my... When you design design after development, you write

a document called the Philosophy Handoff Document. And you explain all the stuff you're doing. And there's a lot of stuff going on. It's one of the things I neglected to mention because there's so many moving pieces. Hold a second. My throat is scratched. I'm going to take a quick drink of water. For those that listen to this podcast,

I drink water all the time. And one of the reasons is, when you're talking nonstop, this is true for radio or anything when you're talking a lot, you need to keep your throat moisturized. Otherwise, you strain your cords. Anyway, I'm just trying to do a good job here of talking

without getting all rusty on you. Okay, next is Curse of the Bloody Tome. It costs two and a blue, so three mana for an enchantment, an aura, or a curse, enchant player, obviously. At the beginning of your upkeep, you have to mill the top two cards of your library.

And by mill, what I mean is, take the top two cards of your library and put them into your graveyard. Mill is our slang for that. Comes from millstone, the first card they ever did in antiquities. This is an interesting curse, because it's one of the few curses that you quite often want to put on yourself. Most of the curses

are pretty bad, you don't want to do it yourself. But it turns out that blue, both in blue-black and in blue-green, has a reason to want to mill itself. And so sometimes people use this curse and enchant themselves. That's the reason, by the way, that we made it enchant player and not enchant opponent, was we realized there's some fun opportunities where maybe you could enchant yourself. So anyway, we did do that.

And then this was the biggest one where we knew you might want to do it on yourself. Okay, next. Dark Thickened Wolf. So Dark Thickened Wolf is one and a green for a 2-2 creature, a wolf. And for two and a green, it gets plus two, plus two until end of turn. You may only use that ability once per turn.

Okay, so it has the ability we call the Root Walla ability, named after a Tempest card called Root Walla. And so the idea is, it has a giant growth kind of built in, that you can spend mana and make it temporarily bigger, but you can only boost it once per turn.

So this basically is, fills a slot of what we call a Grizzly Bear, a bear. Grizzly Bear in Alpha was one and a green, two mana for a 2-2 creature. Now, on the weak side, green constantly gets you better than that, and every set, there's at least one green 2-2 creature. Now, on the weak side, green constantly gets you to do better than that. And every set, there's at least one green 2-2,

usually with some extra ability. Sometimes there's more than one. In fact, in this set, there's more than one. So one of the things, this is a wolf. So one of the things we were doing with the werewolf,

so we were doing tribal. Werewolves had a problem, which was every single werewolf is double-sided. And what that means is, in order to have a werewolf, you need a double-sided card. Well, and maybe you see the problem here, we were limited in how many

double-sided cards we had. Plus, we wanted double-sided cards not just in green and red, which were werewolves were, but in black, white, and blue. So, all, I think almost all, or all the green-red cards are, well, Garak is it, I guess. Other than Garak, I think all the green-red cards are... Well, Garruk is it, I guess. Other than Garruk, I think all the green-red cards are werewolves.

So everything that could be a werewolf was a werewolf. We even made a few more red and green cards just because we wanted more werewolves. But there was just a limit. There's only so many werewolves we can make based on the limitations of double-faced cards. And be aware, double-faced cards had to be on their own sheet. The way we ended up doing them, each pack got one double-faced card. Anyway, we only had so many werewolves we could do, but we wanted werewolf tribal to be a thing. So what do you do? There's not enough werewolves unto itself to support werewolf tribal. And the answer was wolves. Okay, well, werewolves

are a kind of wolf. Werewolves. Although, that's interesting. So one of the big debates, by the way, when we were talking about the creature type line of werewolves was what were we supposed to put on them? Were they supposed to be wolf? You know, was it a wolf beast or something? Or were we supposed to use werewolf? I fought very, very hard for werewolf because I feel like I'm a big, I'm a word person. I believe there's a lot of power in words. And so I believe the word werewolf, we had had a werewolf before, but they were always in the title.

And I wanted to bring werewolves to the game, as I said in my podcast on Innistrad. I told my team, if we can nail werewolves, if we can sell werewolves, if werewolves can be something amazing, the set is going to do great. Because werewolves were the things that we hadn't really done before

that I just wanted to show off and do in a cool new way. And we did. I mean, about as splashy as you can get. But anyway, I wanted the word. And so we had a big argument. Brady, who was the head of the creative team, really wanted wolf and did not want werewolf.

I really wanted werewolf. So we had a big fight over it. In the end, I managed to convince enough people that Werewolf was correct, and so we went with Werewolf. The one thing we ended up having to do was originally Werewolves were just human on front and then Werewolf on back.

But we had cards and stuff where we wanted to reference Werewolves in zones outside of in play, outside of the battlefield. And so we put Werewolf on them so you could search for a werewolf. We could reference werewolves in means outside of the card. So what it meant was, on the front side, they were human werewolf. On the back side, they were just werewolf.

I mean, sometimes they had a class in addition to their race. Like they were human something, werewolf. But anyway, that's the story. Anyway, so we decided that in order to make werewolves viable as a tribal thing, we needed to have a little more support. So we came up with the idea of wolves and said, you know what? The werewolves,

they run with the wolves. And so we made a bunch of wolves to go with the werewolf deck. So one of the things we learned is what the werewolf deck really wanted was it wanted the ability to use mana but not cast spells because the way you turned the humans into the werewolves was by not casting a spell. So by making supporting cards that were wolves that use mana it allowed you to sort of get the you know

get something out of your mana yet also have the ability not to cast anything and turn them into werewolves. So Dark Thinning Wolf is a good example of something where I played on turn two, and maybe on turn three or four, after I've played some werewolves, I might use the mana for this ability rather than casting a spell. And so you'll see, we have a few other wolves coming up, but the werewolves and the wolves both

try to, often on the front, give you means to use your mana. The reason it was often done on the wolves, by the way, and not the werewolves, is the werewolves already had a lot of text, because they had to have the conversion text, how to transform a human into a werewolf. And so because they had to do that text,

there was just less space on them. And so the wolves didn't have any job other than being wolves, so we had a little more room to play and to do activations there. Okay, next. Daybreak Ranger. Two and a green for 2-2. Human Archer Werewolf.

There's my example. So he's a human archer. And you can tap to do two damage to a flying creature. And then beginning of any upkeep, you transform it if there are no Spell to Cast. Because it's a werewolf. Then when it turns, it becomes a Nightfall Predator, which is still green.

It's a 4-4 werewolf. But it has the ability, it becomes a Nightfall Predator, which is still green. It's a 4-4 werewolf, but it has the ability, R and tap, fight target creature. And then, obviously, it has the convert back if you cast two or more spells, or if anybody cast two or more spells. So, the idea here, so this was an interesting one. So, the idea was, on the front,

it was an archer, and it could kill flying creatures, something green can do. On the back, it could fight. So the idea was, early on, it could only hurt a subset of things. And on the back, it could fight anybody, and it got bigger. Now, the card was made by design to be mono-green, because green can do both those things. Green can kill flyers. Green can fight. But they wanted to make one or two more cards

that encouraged you to play red and green in your werewolf deck. And so this was they changed the backside activatability development did from green to red to start encouraging in drafting to play a little more of a red green deck and just encourage having some red in your werewolf.

And the idea being is it was a werewolf where you might take it if you're just playing green, but you're a little more excited to take it if you're playing red. It's just a much stronger card if you're playing red in addition to green. Okay, next, Deadly Departed. Four white whites, so six mana for a 5-5 spirit. It is flying, and if it's in your graveyard,

your humans enter the battlefield with a plus one, plus one counter. So, like I said, there's an interesting relationship between the humans and the spirits. As we were trying to craft something, the spirits were the ones trying to help the humans. They're the only... So one of the things we did is, the monsters were in red, green, blue, and black,

and the good guys were in white, right? The humans were in white. But what we found was there was one other tribe in white, which was the ghosts. So what we decided was the blue ghosts were the mischiefists, the poltergeists, and the mean ghosts, if you will, and the white were the benevolent ones, the ones that were trying to help their ancestors. And so what we did is we made it so the blue and white deck can play together, the spirits work together, but we also tried to make this flavor of the white ghost would be the kind of,

the things in white were the good things. We don't normally make white good and black evil quite as crisply as we did in the set, but we were playing into tropes of horror, and so horror has a very strong good-evil dichotomy, so we played up with it, and white-black was a pivotal point. Like I said, it's not something we normally do. It's something we did here because it made sense in the top-down what we were trying to do. And so we decided that the white ghosts were good ghosts.

And this is a good example of, oh, you know. And the funny thing is a ghost has to be dead. The spirit has to be in your graveyard to do its thing. Now, by the way, in Odyssey, we introduced a little graveyard symbol that said things were active in the graveyard. Now, we didn't continue to use that symbol, but this would have a little tombstone on it. It is a card active in the graveyard. This set has a bunch of things because it has flashback, obviously, and then it has a few other cards that actually do things well in the graveyard.

Okay, Delver of Secrets. It is blue for a 1-1 creature, a human wizard. Beginning of your upkeep, you look at the top card of your library. You may reveal it if you choose. If it's an instant or a sorcery, you transform the creature. If you transform it, it becomes Insectile Abomination, a 3-2 human insect

with flying. For those who don't recognize this trope, almost all the double-faced cards are me doing me and my team doing classic horror tropes. So this is The Fly. It's a 50s horror film. It got remade in the 70s or early 80s with Jeff Goldblum.

It's about a man who experiments, a scientist who experiments with teleportation and accidentally gets his DNA mixed with a fly. I don't know who I'm ruining it for yet. Anyway, this is telling the story. So be aware, when I made this card, I was trying to make a goofy card that was the fly. I was not trying to make a tournament staple.

Now be aware, in design, I'm never trying to make a powerful card. I'm just trying to make a fun card, and then design hands over development, and development decides what they want to push and what they don't. So when I made this card, it was just a goofy fly joke. I mean, I was trying to make a reference to the fly.

And I like the idea of, just thematically, you know, a scientist, and in our world, scientists are wizards, but you have scientists messing with things they shouldn't mess with, and he gets transformed. And all that's there, I mean, he's a wizard, he becomes a human insect, like, the whole thing is there. This is one of those cards, he becomes a human insect, like, the whole thing is there.

This is one of those cards when I made it that you're like, like, I thought Jekyll and Hyde was going to get through. I wasn't 100% sure whether or not the fly was, but it did. Originally, by the way, in design, for a while you were looking for a creature, rather than instant or sorcery, and it both

was too easy to do and didn't feel blue enough. One of the arguments I get about this card all the time is it turns into a 3-2 flyer, and it costs blue on the front side. So people are like, that's an efficient flyer. Blue's not supposed to have efficient, cheap creatures like that. I'm like, well, you do have to build your entire deck around the fact that it

cares about instants and sorceries. This card's not good in a deck full of creatures. It's good in a deck that has a few creatures and mostly has lots of instants and sorceries. That's what blue's all about. a deck full of creatures. It's good in a deck that has a few creatures and mostly has lots of instant sorcery. That's what blue's all about. Blue's the spell color. So this is an efficient creature

in a deck dedicated to spells. So, and like I said, blue's weakness has to be that it needs a certain style of play. This card requires that style of play. It doesn't let you just have a little weenie beat down all creature deck. It doesn't let you just have a little weenie beat down all creature deck. It's not what it lets you do,

which is something that Blue is supposed to be bad at, but that's not what this card is. Okay, next. Demon Mail Halberk. Four mana for an artifact. It's equipment. Equipped creature gets plus four plus two, but the equip cost is sacrificing a creature.

So this was sort of cool. It was a piece of equipment where the idea was it required sacrifice to use. And it's a pretty cool card. It's very efficient. In fact, it's a pretty good card limited, because limited often you have a creature you don't care that much about. And you know what? Plus four, plus two is pretty good.

But this definitely played in the sense of we wanted some sacrifice outlets it helped with morbid it just helped the general tone of things the flavor of this card is dead on this is just one of the nice things about when you do top-down design

is this card is pretty simple but it really because of the flavor it just shines so much that it really just I don't know takes on another level of just coolness to me

anyway it is an example of just coolness to me. Anyway, it is an example of just a nice, clean design that's just spot-on on the top down. Okay, next, Deranged Assistant. It costs one and a blue, two mana for a 1-1 Human Wizard. Tap, you mill the top card of your library, and once again, take the top card of your library, put it in your graveyard, and you add one mana to your mana pool. So this does a couple things.

So blue, obviously, is the self-milling color. Blue also has access to colorless mana. A lot of people forget that blue can do that. One of the reasons that blue does that

is blue's number one artifacts. So often, where there's artifacts involved, we give blue access to colorless mana so it can play artifacts. It's not blue mana. It can't cast its own spells,

but it can cast artifacts, or it can help cast its spells, but it can't cast the blue part. And so this card kind of combined with me that it did something that was like, one of those fun things where you do something that's a cost, and then the player feels smart because they're like, I'm using the cost as a positive thing.

And this card was a very beloved card. Used a lot in Limited. Okay, next. Desperate Ravings. Costs one and a very beloved card. Used a lot in Limited. Okay, next. Desperate Ravings. Costs one and a red, two mana to draw two cards and then discard a card at random. And you could flashback it for two and a blue. Okay, so something that happened during development is

we put flashback in the set. Flashback was obviously added by design. But development realized it was a valuable tool to do something. One of the things that development likes is having some cards that really push you toward two-color combinations. In recent times, we've been doing a lot more of just two-color cards. But one of the tricks you can do, other than multicolor, is you can do something like this, where I cast a card and I flashback in another color. And so one of the neat things about that is that you get a card that

really to maximize it, you want it in a red and blue deck, because you can't use it twice unless you're playing red-blue. So anybody who's playing red, maybe they'll take it. It's possible. Blue is not useful at all, or not very useful. You've got to get it in your graveyard. But red-blue is very useful. You can use it twice.

And so the development team came up with effects that a lot of ways were hybrid effects, things use it twice. And so the development team came up with effects. A lot of these were hybrid effects, things that made sense. And this one was skirting the lines. Interesting. We hadn't yet brought rubbing or red-looting into red yet. And so the reason this was red was

the random discard. And the reason it was blue is you're drawing cards. And so we sort of did this thing where red didn't go up in card advantage because you had to use the card to get, you had to cast this card and to lose a card. So you were spending two cards to get two cards. So that allowed it to be red. And then blue

it's like, well, it's a little more red than blue. Blue doesn't tend to discard randomly but it thematically fits. And like, okay, blue can draw cards. And so we were able to make that the flashback card. Okay, speaking of flashback cards, the next one is Devil's Play. So Devil's Play costs X and a red. So X being

a variable cost. It's a sorcery. You get to deal X damage to target creature or player. And you can flash it back for X RRR. A little side note, by the way. R is red. Whenever we cost things, we always cost things using the letter.

So W, U, B, R, and G. And so we often in R&D refer to cost by the letter, just because that's what we read all the time. So if something costs two and a blue, we just read it as 2U, because that's just literally what you're seeing. So numerous times in files I'll make a card that costs RRR so red red red and I'll call it like

rascally pirate or something because the card's RRR. And then at some point I realize that the audience will never see R's, they'll just see a red band symbol and it'll make no sense and so I keep making that joke and then realize it'll never carry to the actual card. But anyway so this card the idea we wanted was a flashback fireball,

or a blaze, technically. Can't split it. And just a red X spell that you could flashback. And one of the things that was fun was trying to figure out, well, what's the right cost? Because we have X in it, so we kind of wanted, you know, we wanted X to be the only color thing, and so we had to use red mana. And so the question was, okay, well, we know XR is Blaze, and Blaze has a little extra room on it, so what does the flashback version cost?

And there's a lot of debate. I think they went back and forth between XRR and XRR, but it turned out to be so good that it ended up going XRR. Okay, next. Diagraph Ghoul. Black for a 2-2 zombie and enters the battlefield tapped. So this was an interesting debate. Back during Tempest,

I had a bad habit of making zombies, 2-2 zombies that cost one black. I made two of them. One of them did one damage to you every turn, sort of, unless you had a zombie. And one of them... What did the other one do? There were two of them. And because they made two of them and What was the other one? There were two of them.

And because they made two of them and there was hatred, there was this really fast zombie deck that used hatred in Tempest Block because of my love of making 2-2s. So somehow I got another 2-2 zombie. This one's a little fair because it comes to play tapped

and we've made creatures better since back then. So this card's not quite as overpowered as those old ones were. But anyway, I like... We did a shtick with zombies of... A lot of times, coming in to play tapped, we were really trying to get the flavor of just... They lumber in.

They're not particularly fast. You know, I... I think I explained during the Innistrad podcast that I'm a big believer of slow zombies. I don't like fast zombies. I know video games have made a lot of fast zombies. I think slow zombies, to me, are the cool thing. I just love...

I love the fact that, like, an average person, anybody should be able to kill a zombie. Any one zombie's not that hard. They're slow, they're dumb, but you get a bunch of zombies, it gets scary pretty quickly, so... Okay, next, dissipate. Dissipate costs one blue blue.

It's an instant, and you get a counter-target spell and exile it. So this is a reprint. And the reason we brought it back was because of Flashback. That we wanted to be able to counter a Flashback spell and not have them be able to flash it back. And so, this was

a good reprint. One of the things we always look for is trying to find things that can come back in a place where they can just do interesting work. And so Dissipate is a neat card. I mean, the reason Exiled, when it first got made, was for other shenanigans in the graveyard. But it works really well as an answer to flashbacks, so we put it in.

Next, Doom Traveler. Doom Traveler is a 1-1 for one white mana. It's a human soldier. When it dies, you get a 1-1 flying white spirit token, creature token. So once again, I said that we did this tie between humans and spirits. Mostly it's done in white. And the idea that humans can

die and become spirits. And so that's one of the little flavors that goes on in white. White generally has a token theme. It has a go-wide theme. And this is part of that. That I have a creature that I can somehow make use of and still get a creature out of it. This card definitely was a very interesting card, and

got used in a bunch of different ways. Next, Elder Cathar. Two and a white for a 2-2 human soldier. When it enters the battlefield, you put a plus one, plus one counter on target creature, or if that creature's human, you put two plus one, plus one counters. So this was one of ours

trying to help the humans. One of our big flavors in all of the tribes was, and this is generally true in tribal stuff, is the tribe likes itself. Tribe wants to help itself. So humans,

humans are trying to help out other humans, and this guy will help out whoever he can, but you know what? He's more willing to help other humans. He's a little more helpful if he helps a human. Okay, next.

Elite Inquisitor. White, white for a 2-2 human soldier. It's got first-strike vigilance and protection from vampires, werewolves, and zombies. So one of the things we were trying to do is we wanted to get the sense of some monster hunters, of people that fight the monsters

and are particularly good at it. And so the idea of this one was, how do we reference a monster hunter? And eventually we came up with the idea of, well, what if we give him protection from the monster races? Four ended up being a little too many to write on the card. Three ended up being the right amount. And because the spirits were split between half being good and half being bad, and White also interacting with spirits in a positive way,

said, okay, our monster template will be vampire, werewolf, zombie. So when we want to sort of say monster, either we say non-human sometimes, or we spell out vampire, werewolf, zombie. So when we want to say monster, either we say non-human sometimes, or we spell out vampire, werewolf, and zombie. And that's, by the way, when you realize that they're all at the end of the alphabet. It's V, W, and Z. It's funny that we go alphabetically, and vampire comes first, and it's V. I find that funny. Apparently, monsters like to be at the end of the alphabet.

Anyway, this was definitely made a card to be very strong, something that could fight the monsters. And Development, I know in Design we first made it, I know we had all the protections on it. I think Development sort of made it cheaper and added extra abilities and just made it a little more aggressive. That was Development's doing and not Design's. Okay.

Next is my favorite card, doing and not designs. Okay. Next is my favorite card, which I'm going to end on my favorite card in the set. That'll be my final card of the day today for you. And I'll almost be done with E. I actually have one E next time. But I'll begin next time. I'll tell you in a sec.

Okay, so, my favorite card in the set. Endless Ranks of the Dead. Two black black as an enchantment. At the beginning of your upkeep, you make X to two black zombie tokens, where X is the number of zombies you have in play, rounded down. And so the idea was you wanted to get some zombies in play, and then you play Endless Ranks of the Dead. And what it does is it does what I want you to do with zombies,

which is it turns your zombies into a horde of zombies. Then if I get this down, my opponent's like, I better start killing zombies quickly, because there's going to be, a lot of zombies really soon, and the idea is, you know,

you are going to overrun those zombies, unless they kill you first, because this is just going to make, an endless rank, of the dead, and so, anyway, I,

this was my favorite card, then, mechanically, was my favorite card, and then, they put on my favorite card. Then, mechanically, it was my favorite card. And then they put on my favorite piece of art in the whole set on it, which is this stained glass window. It's actually Avacyn in stained glass. And you see the zombies poking through from the other side. It might be my most favorite piece, other than maybe Maro.

My favorite piece in all of Magic. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece. And if you've never seen it blown up, it's like, it's prettier on the card and even prettier when it's blown up because there's so much detail on it. Anyway, this is my favorite card because, like, this just embodied, I love making a card that just, like,

this is what the set is about. It's horror, it's zombies, it's, it just, I don't know, it just, it rang true. It hit every note correctly and it just made me super, super excited, so okay, so I'm going to wrap up for today the beginning of next podcast

will be another one of my favorites, which by the way got made in the, I think in the same meeting, or very close to the same meeting both of these got made in meetings, which is Evil Twin, I'll take it back Endless Runs to the Dead I made outside of a meeting but Evil Twin, which is what I'll start with next time, I made, my team made it

together, our whole team made it, a combined effort in a meeting. I'll talk about it next time. But for right now, I've just parked my car, so we all know what that means. It means it's time to end my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time.