Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #229 - Dark Ascension, Part 1

Episode Date: May 22, 2015

Mark starts a new podcasts 4-part series on the design of Dark Ascension.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I'm starting another design series. Last time I talked about Innistrad cards, so I'm doing the Innistrad block. So that means today I'm talking all about the design of Dark Ascension. Ascension. Okay, so the first thing to know is Dark Ascension was, I believe, my 15th design lead, and I think it was the first time that I led a winter set. I have led a lot of fall sets. I've led a number of spring sets. I've led some supplemental things that happened during the summer but interestingly I think up until Dark Ascension I'd never done

a second small set now I've been very involved with second small sets but as far as being the sole design lead it wasn't until Dark Ascension the first time I had done it so what had happened, how did this happen was the upcoming large set normally I do the fall sets but the upcoming large set, normally I do the fall sets, but the

upcoming large set was Return to Ravnica. Ken Nagel had never done a large set, and I felt like if ever there was a set that would be a good training large set, it was Return to Ravnica, because a lot of the key elements had been figured out. And so I felt like going in, we just knew more than we normally knew in a large set. And we felt like that would be a good sort of jumping off point. And then it was decided

that the two sets would both be large, that it would be Return to Ravnica and then Gatecrash. I'm like, okay, I'll let Ken do Return to Ravnica, I'll do Gatecrash. So that gave me a little window. So something most people don't realize

is that starting from Shadowmoor, I have led a design concurrently every week since Shadowmoor, which is many, many years ago, about eight years ago. And so I had a window. If I let Ken do Return of Ravnica, I had enough of a window that I could do the small set, which is Dark Ascension. So the Dark Ascension design team was led by myself,

included Jenna Helland, Zach Hill, Graham Hopkins, and Matt Tabak. Jenna Helland and Graham Hopkins had both been on the Innistrad design team, so that was a carryover. Jenna was the creative rep, and Graham was somebody who we just used from time to time. Obviously, we met him through the Great Designer Search and hired him on. Zach Hill was a dev rep, the development representative. And Matt Tabak was the extra

person. So Matt Tabak is the rules manager and editor. He had wanted to be on a design team. We like to mix up design teams, what we call the fifth slot, although these days we also have a sixth slot. But anyway, Matt was sort of the person who we thought might be needing some new blood. I've had the rules managers before. Mark Gottlieb, back when he was rules manager, used to actually do a decent amount of design. So anyway, it was fun having Matt on the team. He raised the overall height average. And then Tom Lepilli was the head developer. In fact, I think this was Tom's first lead of a development set on Dark Ascension.

And his team included Mark Gottlieb, Zach Hill as the overlap, Dave Humphries, and Ken Troop. Okay, so this set came out on February 3rd of 2012. So, basically what this set was, was an extension of Innistrad. So the

story of Innistrad, for those that remember, is we come on Innistrad, we meet the humans. Things are bad. They're surrounded on all sides by monsters. There are werewolves. There are vampires. There are zombies. There are evil spirits.

Things are going badly for them. And the idea of They're vampires. They're zombies. They're evil spirits. Things are going badly for them. And the idea of the story was that if Innistrad was bad, Dark Ascension was worse. In fact, Dark Ascension was, uh-oh, the humans are facing actual extinction. Like, it's looking so bad that the humans are like, you know, I mean, things were bad. In Innistrad, the humans were in trouble. But what happens is Dark Ascension was supposed to be like the darkest time of the humans. The Dark Ascension of the monsters. And that the humans have never, ever, in the entire time on Innistrad, been in more trouble.

It's looking really dire. For those that know the trilogy, know the third set, obviously some saving is going to happen, but they don't know that, and so it's really important. One of the things they talk about writing is one of the shorthands for writing is, in your three-act

structure, is act one, get your character up in a tree. Act two, throw rocks at them. Act three, get them out of the tree tree. Act two, throw rocks at him. Act three, get him out of the tree. So this is the throw rocks at him part. This is where like, uh-oh, things are not just bad. You're not just stuck in the tree.

Someone's throwing rocks at you. And so this is supposed to be the dire times where things couldn't get any worse. So to accomplish that, I did a couple things. There are two new mechanics in the set. One is called fateful hour. And what fateful hour is, it did a couple things. There are two new mechanics in the set. One is called Fateful Hour. And what Fateful Hour is, it's a mechanic that says, if you are at five or less life, these spells have an extra rider.

They do a little more. So the idea is, if you're close to losing, you know, as a last-ditch effort, you get some spells that are a little more powerful. Also, we had Undying. And Undying was a mechanic that says a creature with Undying, if it dies, comes back from the graveyard. If it doesn't have a plus one, plus one counter on it,

when it dies, it comes back into play with a plus one, plus one counter. So let's talk about those two mechanics. So Undying is my favorite. I'll go first with Undying. So the way Undying works is sometimes when I go home, I'll talk to my wife. Really, my wife's just a sounding board because she, well, she knows how to play magic. She hasn't

played in ages. And a lot of what I'm talking about is above her head. But it's just, I'll explain things and she'll ask questions. And then in asking the questions sometimes, you know, she helps me figure things out. She's just a good sounding board for me. So the story behind this is, while this was going on, while the whole set was going on, I was really busy. I think we were doing the second great designer search while I was designing Dark Ascension. So I was busy, to say the least. busy, to say the least. And what happened was I got really focused

on making the story about the humans in peril. And I was really, really focused on humans in peril. There was a card called Village Cannibals, I think, in Shroud, where they got stronger when humans died.

And so we took that theme and said, okay, what if the humans are in extra trouble? There's other, you know, sacrificing humans becomes a sub-theme, especially in Black White. So it's like the vampires are eating the humans. And like, the humans are just in deep, deep trouble. And Faithful Hour came out of the design

of trying to make, how do you get things desperate? How do you, how do you, I will get back to Undyne. This all comes into Undyne. It's all connected. So how do I make a set where I say, uh-oh, the humans are in trouble.

How do I get a sense of, you're in deep, deep trouble? And then I related it to the game itself. Well, in the game, when are you in deep trouble? And that's when you're at a low enough life total. There's a point at which you know you're close to losing the game. I'm like, oh, what if we somehow got to that state? We're like, oh, I'm almost lost. Things are bad. And I said, well, what if at that state I do something to help you? So we came up with Faithful Hour. We didn't quite know how much life. I think we actually tried five to start with and then said, oh, well, let's try seven. Let's try three. And five ended up being the right amount. It's a quarter. Five life

is, well, you can see the end is near, but you're not quite there yet. What we found was seven was a little too much. Three, you just died too quickly thereafter. Five proved to be the sweet spot, which is funny. Sometimes, by the way, when you come up with ideas and you sort of guess at something, it's amazing how often your first guess is correct. How often, like, we try something. I'm like, oh, okay, let's try this. Let's try that.

And in the end, it's amazing how often you come back to your very first guess. But anyway, so we had Faithful Hour. It had a sense of you were losing. But Tom Lapilla, once again, Tom Lapilla came to me. This is his first design. And he said to me, I think you're doing something wrong. Which, by the way, major props to Tom.

That takes a lot of guts. I mean, this is my 15th set. I'm the head designer. I design a lot of sets. To come up to me and say you're doing something wrong took a lot of guts on Tom's part. But Tom was correct. I was focused so much on the humans dying

that I wasn't focusing on what Tom thought, because forget the, I mean, the humans dying is part of the story, but really what this is supposed to be is monsters are awesome. You're focusing on the humans are not. So instead of focusing on the humans are not, let's get a little more focused on the monsters are awesome.

And I realized Tom was right. I needed a monsters are awesome mechanic. So I went home, and I'm talking to my wife. I'm like, ah, I need to get, I need to figure out some way to make monsters awesome. And so my wife said to me, she said, well, is there a mechanic you already have that would, you know, capture the sense you wanted?

And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, there's a mechanic called persist. And what persist does is the monster or the creature dies, but then it comes back. And it's a little weaker, but it comes back. Just when you thought it was dead. In horror movies, when you kill the monster, when you kill them, and it's near the end of the film, and there's some upbeat music playing,

and it's like, ah, I finally killed the monster. You know what happens? You didn't kill the monster. The monster comes back. And I love Persist, it's the idea that when you kill the monster, but no, the monster's back! It's not so easy to kill the monster. And Lord of the Woods, why don't you just use Persist? And I said, well, I can't,

because Persist uses minus one, minus one counters, and this set uses plus one, plus one counters, and, you know, I can't, if I'm using plus one, plus one counters, I can't use minus one, minus one counters. And this set uses plus one, plus one counters. And, you know, I can't, if I'm using plus one, plus one counters, I can't use minus one, minus one counters. And then, like, just this Thunderbolt, ding! Like, what if I just made Persist, but with plus one, plus one counters? What if the creature dies, and it comes back, and it's even stronger? Killing the creature didn't even hurt it. It made it stronger.

That, my friends, is a monsters are awesome mechanic. So I talked to Tom, and Tom liked it. He was a little bit worried just because it's pretty powerful. It's like, you know, can we cost a creature that you can kill it once and it comes back even better? So we did a lot of things to make sure that it wasn't too defensive, because Tom wanted these monsters to be more aggressive.

It's not like I have a blocker, you finally get my blocker and I have a bigger blocker. We didn't really want to do that. So you'll notice a lot of the undying things either encourage you to attack or discourage you from blocking. For example, some of the comments, like one of them just can't block.

Well, how do I keep it from blocking? It can't block. And so we did a keep it from blocking? It can't block. And so we did a bunch of little things to sort of definitely encourage attacking. When we get to the card-by-card stuff, I'll talk about that. Now, the set also brought back all the stuff we had done before. Probably brought back Flashback, it brought back

Morbid, it brought back Transform, it brought back Double-Faced Cards. I'll talk about all the Double-Faced Cards as we get to the card-by-card stuff, but one of the things we definitely wanted to do was I really was happy with how the double-faced cards played on Innistrad. I wanted to continue that. A, I wanted to

find some more tropes that we could play around with, and B, I wanted to stretch a little bit. We pretty much did everything straightforward. Mostly, other than Garruk, they were all creatures, and they were creatures that turned into creatures. So we experimented a little more. You'll see in the set, we definitely made some double-faced cards

that did things that are a little different. We continued Curses. We continued Grave Dread Matter. We continued Tribal. We actually upped Tribal a little bit. One of the things this set did was, the monsters were there in Innistrad, and if you wanted to play a monster deck, you could.

And even in Draft, if you opened the early-right card, and if you wanted to play a monster deck, you could. And even in draft, if you opened the early right card, you had some ability to draft a tribal deck. But we sort of opted a little bit, probably opted a little too much. We'll get to that. Once again, I get to the card by card. I made a cycle of... And by cycle, I mean for everybody but the humans.

So it's a cycle. One of the things Innistrad did a bunch of is cycles in which four things got it and the fifth didn't, because we were trying to show that the humans were isolated so we would have cycles of everybody but the humans. We did that here where we made monster lords for every tribe but the humans.

And then we put that one into the final set. So there is a tribal human card but it doesn't show up until the humans finally get the things start going their way in the third set. We'll get there. The other thing I did is, besides Undying and Faithful Hours,

I also had a big human sacrifice theme playing off of what we learned from the village cannibals. So there are a lot of cards that either sacrifice humans or a carrot if humans died. There's a common trend where you can sack a creature and then if it sacks a human, you get a bonus. So there really was a deck, and it was focused mostly on black and white.

They really said, ooh, you might want to sacrifice humans. So the set as a whole had 158 cards, 64 common, 44 uncommon, 38 rare, 12 mythic rare. Those numbers might seem wonky, and they are, and the reason is because of the double-faced cards. The double-faced cards do some weird things to us. The face of the set, by the way, was Soren. There's a cool picture of Soren, like, wiping blood from a blade. The only weird thing about that is, why is he using a blade?

He's a vampire! I don't know why he needs the blade, but it's a cool picture. Okay, so that, my friends. So what happened was, I got the set, I designed it, Tom gave me a little input, I adjusted it. Really what we were trying to do, as we were moving to the new model of large, small is the block, we were changing this around. But at the time, one of the goals when we did large, small, small, or in this case, large, small, large,

was that the small set that came after the big set, the winter set, usually was trying to just be more of the big set with a little bit of a twist, but more of the big set. It wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel, especially because we always had a third set to do, and we had to sort of save some space for the third set. So the second set was a lot more like cling to the first set, try to be just more of the first set. So this set very much was like more of Innistrad. Now, people love Innistrad. You like your double-faced cards? There's more double-faced cards. You like flashback? You like morbid? You like any of the tribes? Here's more of all that. You like curses? You like

graveyard matters? Here's more of all that. But we did add a few tiny twists, and like I said, we added two mechanics. We added a human sacrifice theme. We upped the tribal a little bit. But anyway, let's get into the card-by-card, and I'll talk about sort of what we did as I hit the cards.

I'm going to start with Beguiler of Wills. So Beguiler of Wills is three blue blue, five mana for a 1-1 human wizard. Tap gain control of target creature whose power is equal to or less than the number of creatures you control. So one of the things that we were trying to do with the human deck in general was trying to go wide like what are the humans best attributes what can the human do better than anybody else is try to generate a lot of humans and so this card is funny normally

humans went green white because that's where the human tribal goes green white but we definitely wanted to make sure that blue-white had something. And so blue-white got to play around with spirits. And one of the things that humans and spirits did is there was this theme where humans die and become spirits. And so generally, the human spirit deck tended to have more creatures than normal for blue-white. And so we played up a little bit the idea of, you know, if you lean towards some of the human stuff, play some of the spirit things

you can definitely have a lot of creatures and plants but Gilerwills was definitely sort of giving the white and blue decks something to do which is a little different. One of the things when you're building archetypes in general, especially for Limited is certain archetypes go in certain directions and when you find an opportunity to just tweak it a little bit

you push in different directions just to make you know we want when you draft not to always be the exact same thing. Now, certain archetypes, you know, red-white's always going to be a little bit faster. Blue-white tradition is going to be a little bit slower. But we like to mix it up and give you different things. Okay, next, Black Cat. Black Cat is a one and a black, two mana for a 1-1 zombie cat. and when it dies, the opponent has to randomly discard a card. Okay, so Black Cat was a top-down design. We literally, in a meeting, on the board, wrote Black Cat on the board, and said, what does a Black Cat do?

And we said, okay, well, Black Cat clearly is bad luck. What is a Black Cat? A Black Cat is bad luck. So we said, okay, well, how do you do bad luck. That's what it was. What is a black cat? A black cat is bad luck. So we said, okay, well, how do we, how do you do bad luck? We later came up with the idea as well, okay, the bad luck is from killing a cat. You don't want to kill a black cat.

And so if you kill the black cat, that's when the unlucky thing happens. And what's unlucky, we said, okay, you randomly lose a card because that really had a sense of, oh, bad things can happen. And randomly losing a card is very invasive.

We tend not to actually do a lot of random discard these days because it's so invasive. But the idea that we put on a creature and that you had some control because the creature had to die before the random discard happened, it definitely was the thing that kind of could scare you a little bit and that had the feeling we wanted. Now, Black Cat was made in Innistrad design, and it was in the Innistrad file.

And at some point, we ran into a numbers issue, and we had to push it off, but I was doing Dark Ascension, so I'm like, okay, it's not, so one of the things that happens is, when you have a card, and you have to, you have to leave your file, but you like it, what you tend to do, especially if you're the first set, is you give it to the next set, and so in our case, we gave it to the second set. Now, the person who's running the second set doesn't have to use it. It's just like, here's a card. But I was in a rare case where I was doing the first set and the second set. And I really liked this card. I was sad that it had to leave. I really, really liked it. But it's what we call a number crunch, where there was just a couple, two drops in black that we needed to make things work. And like, okay, but I'm going to put it in.

I really, really wanted to do it in the second set. And I knew that when we got to the third set, we were going to change things around. So really, it needed to go in the second set. And I made sure to find a place for it in the second set. The reason, by the way, it's a zombie cat was we were trying to build up the zombie deck. We realized the two-drop could use a zombie,

and so we ended up making a zombie cat just so the zombie deck could we realized the two-drop could use a zombie, and so we ended up making a zombie cat just so the zombie deck could make use of it. We figure the black cat in our world, you know, we could change it up a little bit. It's an unliving, unliving cat. Cats, by the way, Sanctuary Cat was in, I think, Innistrad,

and then Black Cat. We learned from Innistrad Block that cats are surprisingly very popular. The way it was described to me is apparently people who like magic also like the internet. So anyway, we've learned that cats are popular. Next, Blood Feud. So Blood Feud is a sorcery in red for four red reds, six mana. Target creature fights another target creature.

So this card is interesting. So the fight ability is a keyword action where it says a creature gets to basically right now kind of get in combat with another creature. I apply my power in damage to you. You do your power damage to me. There's a few abilities that care about power, like life, length, and death Touch and stuff that apply there.

And anyway, green is primary in fighting, and red is secondary in fighting. The problem with this card and why it's in red is, the funny thing about it is, this is like the ultimate fight. I can make two creatures fight. Normally when you fight, one is your creature and one is your opponent's creature. But this card says, no, no, no, no. I can just make any the ultimate fight. I can make two creatures fight. Normally when you fight, one of them is your creature and one is your opponent's creature. But this card says,

no, no, no, no. I can just make any two things fight. And the problem was, the reason we can't give it to green is, green is supposed to use its creatures to kill other creatures. The idea is, if I have a green deck

and I have no creatures in play, it should be very hard for me to kill your creatures. And so this card falls in the category of, oh, this just kills creatures without you having to have creatures. So it can't be greens. So we ended up sticking in red. I mean, it has a lot of flavor of, like, you get two creatures and you

use... A lot of times what I like is you use red mana, red magic to sort of inflame emotions. And the idea is you get people to kind of act short-term a way they might not normally because their emotions sort of overrun them. And this is like, ah, making two people pick a fight. That's pretty red

from a philosophical standpoint. So anyway, we made Blood Feud in red. It's expensive because really if used correctly, you can make it kill two creatures. So killing two creatures, you know, we made it six mana. And even then, that's pretty good. Very good in limited. Okay, next.

Briar Pack Alpha. It's three in the green, four mana for a 3-3 wolf. Very good limited. Okay, next. Briar Pack Alpha. It's three in the green, four mana for a 3-3 wolf. It has Flash, and when it enters the battlefield, target creature gets plus two, plus two to end a turn. So this essentially is like

a giant growth wolf. One of the things we like to do, so when we've, I think I talked about this in Innistrad, but when we made Innistrad, we were trying to make sure there was enough tribal,

and because the werewolves were locked into being double-faced cards, we didn't have enough werewolves to pull off what we needed for a tribal deck. So what we did is we made the wolves, which are companions to the werewolves, and are designed to play well with the werewolves.

So this is definitely one of those cats. The Flash green is one of the colors, green and blue are the two main colors to get Flash. And so one of those cats. Flash Green is one of the colors. Green and Blue are the two main colors to get Flash. And so one of the fun things to do with Flash is to put on Enter the Battlefield effects that essentially you'd want to put on Instant. Well, this is a little mini Giant Growth. Well, Giant Growth is the kind of thing you want to play as an Instant.

So this card can do a lot of neat things, especially on defense, because not only can it jump in and block something, because it's a 3-3, but it also can make it something else stronger. So this card allows you to do some really defensive blowouts where your opponent attacks, and they're not prepared for the 3-3 or for another creature to get bigger. Next, Burning Oil. It's an instant 1R. Card name deals 3 damage to target an attacking or blocking creature, and you can flash it back for 3 and a white so one of the things we did with flashback spells, this is something that I actually

I didn't start in Innistrad but Eric Lauer, that lead developer Innistrad started was trying to help the different 2 color archetypes, he made flashback cards where you could flash back the effect in a second color so he did that in Innistrad so in Dark Ascension flashback cards where you could flash back the effect in a second color.

So he did that in Innistrad, so in Dark Ascension we decided we'd make some to continue the theme. The trick about it is, and this is also true of hybrid, is trying to find mechanics where both colors can do it. And this is a fine example, which is white has the ability to do damage to attackers or blockers under the idea that white doesn't tend to, you know, white's federation-like, that it doesn't make the first blow. But if you harm it or you get in a fight with it, well, then white can do something. Red is king of direct damage. Well, any subset of direct damage red can do. So what we did is we did the subset of red damage that white

can do. That way, red could do it and white could do it. So this card is definitely a good example of a card that's capable of both red and white. And the way we did it is by taking an ability that is one color does a subset of another color. I'll talk about different things as we get to them. Okay, Chalice of Life is an artifact that costs three. You tap it to gain a life. If you ever have ten more life than your starting life total, you get to transform it.

And if you transform it, the Chalice of Life becomes the Chalice of Death. And then the Chalice of Death has the ability, tap, target player loses five life. Okay, so first off, one of the goals with our double-faced cards in Dark Ascension was we wanted to do some things that hadn't been done before. Well, the first thing, the easiest, the lowest hanging fruit was, so in Innistrad, all our double-faced cards were creatures, or we had one planeswalker, Garak. So we hadn't done any other card types. Now, based on transformation, we need our double-faced cards to be permanent, because the way it works in Innistrad is it comes out with something, usually an innocent thing, and then it turns into a not-so-innocent thing, what we call dark transformation.

So, by the way, there is a lot of design space in double-faced cards, including design space, with things other than permanent, but that wasn't what Innistrad was doing. including design space, were things other than permanent. But that wasn't what Innistrad was doing. Innistrad was doing dark transformation, you know, things that transform into, you know, more happy things that transform into darker things. That's what Innistrad was doing.

I like double-faced cards. It's a great mechanic. It's the kind of thing we will find other uses in the future. I have a lot of ideas how to use it. But one of the ways when you have something cool and neat is to not overuse it. The key is not to say, here's a new mechanic, let's come up with every possible way I could use it. No. Let's figure out how it's being used,

max out that usage up so in the future when I come back, I can do new and different things with it and not just have to do the exact same thing. So that's one of the things that was important to me was I really wanted double-faced cards to be about dark transformation. But hey, no one says you

can't transform other things. And so I forget who my team suggested this, but the idea of an artifact where you use it, but at some point it can transform into a darker thing. And the neat thing about this thing is it has this nice parallel where you gain life up to a point where you get

high enough where your opponent loses life. The reason it says 10 above was we knew we had different formats where people started with different life totals. So instead of saying 30 life, assuming you're playing a two-person game, we said higher than you started with. Because commander, for example, you have 40 life. And we didn't want this to instant transform in commander. So that's why the thing says 10 larger than your starting life. In fact, I'm pretty sure commander was the major reason. There's also two-headed giant.

There's some other formats where you start with more than 20. Okay, next. Chant of the Skiff Sane. So it's an enchantment. It's an aura. It costs two and a blue, so three mana. Enchanted creature gets minus 13, minus zero.

So pretty much, this mechanic, blue doesn't affect what we call shrink. Ironically, shrink comes from a card in green from Homeland, I think. Anyway, blue now has the ability to do minus n, minus zero. It can do as an instant, or it can do as an aura. And the idea is, it can prevent,

it doesn't kill things, but it can prevent the damage. White actually now prevents damage, but blue can sort of reduce power as a means to prevent damage. One of the things we did in Innistrad we decided to carry along here was we had a 13 theme. 13's an unlucky number. We were doing Gothic

Horror. So one of the things we tried is to find places to stick 13. Originally, I think this card got turned in at like minus 7 or something. A high enough number that, for all intents and purposes, the creature you put it on isn't going to damage things. But we're like, well, hey, 13's a thing. We'll just make it minus 13.

So that's a little higher than we normally do, but once you get up to minus 7, minus 8, I guess it's about the same. Okay, next. Chill of Foreboding. It's a sorcery for 2 and a blue, 3 mana, that all players have to mill the top 5 cards of their library. Once again,

mill means take the top top... take the top 5 cards of your library. Once again, mill means take the top five cards of your library and put them in your graveyard. One of the themes of this block was graveyard interactions. There are definitely a couple of color combinations that really like to mill and take advantage of what you mill.

Blue-green was the major one they did. Blue-black did it a little bit with zombies. So the idea was you get things in your graveyard and then care that you have things in your graveyard. And also there was some strategies that allowed you to mill out your opponent. So this deck is kind of... It says, hey, might you want to mill your opponent at the same time help yourself? And the neat thing about this card is it definitely kind of fed itself.

If you get other copies of this card when you mill yourself, you still could use them. And so this card definitely went in. There was, when you drafted, you could draft a mill deck in Stride Limited. Okay, next. Chosen of Markov. So this is a double-faced card.

On the front side, it's a two black, three mana, 2-2 human it has tap tap and untap vampire you control to transform and then once it transforms it becomes a 4-4 vampire so one of the neat things we did is we were showing how

the humans were losing so one of the cool things we did we did this at common maybe common and uncommon is for each of the monsters we made a double-faced card where on the front side it was a human and on the back side it was the monster. So you've got to see a human die and become a zombie or submit to a vampire and get turned into a vampire. Or, I mean, all the werewolves all started as human anyway. But also I think there was a spirit where it was a human that died into a spirit.

So the idea was, our double-faced cards were sort of, one of the ways to show you the play to the humans is you just could see on the double-faced cards all the humans are turning into monsters. And one of the neat things, at the pre-release for Dark Ascension, where we called the Bite Game, it was an unofficial name. If you look at the monsters,

you realize that a zombie bites you, you become a zombie. A vampire bites you, you can turn into a vampire. A werewolf bites you, you become a werewolf. A ghost, I don't know if a ghost bites you, but a ghost can damage you

to the point where you die and when you die, you become a ghost. And so we had a game at the pre-release where some people got assigned one of the four monster types, and then if they beat somebody in a match, that person transformed into that monster type, assuming they weren't already a monster. And then

at the end of the thing, you saw which monsters... If you were human and survived the whole thing, you got a little reward. Or if you were in the monster tribe that had the larger number of monsters, you got a small reward. But anyway, we definitely were playing around with the idea of a lot of number of monsters, you got a small reward. But anyway, we definitely were playing around with the idea of a lot of

transformation of monsters slowly turning the humans into monsters. And that's the other thing about, we were trying to, the idea of why the humans did so bad is, not only are the humans slowly shrinking, but every time a human dies, they tend to turn into some monster that just means there's even more threats. So it's like, as the

humans dwindle, just the threats get more and more. Okay, next. Counterlash. It's an instant for four blue blues, six mana. You counter target spell, and then you can cast a non-land, which shares a creature type, with this card. So if you counter a creature,

you are allowed to play a creature from your hand without paying its mana cost. If you counter an artifact, you can play an artifact without paying its mana cost. So you get to counter a spell, and then you get to play one of your own that matches it. So why does it say non-land? For things like Dryad Arbor,

that's a creature land, there's some things in Magic where it's a land and has an additional creature type. The creature land is one that jumps to mind. We can't let you for free play a land. It just causes problems. So we said non-land just to avoid, in any circumstance where the land overlaps.

Just to make sure that doesn't happen. We also had artifact lands in the six of them in the Mirrodin block. So anyway, we just wanted to make sure that you weren't playing lands and so we had to say non-lands, because non-lands, lands can overlap. Okay, the final card of the day.

I'm pulling the driveway. Pulling it in that driveway. Pulling it to the parking lot. Crushing Vines, which was an instant. It's green, two and a green, so it is three mana, and you've got to choose one. You either could destroy target flying creature or destroy target artifact.

So one of the things is whenever we make cards, they have to get concepted. Somebody has to figure out what the art looks like. This is my example of the creative team. Every once in a while we make a card that functionally, this card functions just fine. We're in an environment that has a lot of flyers,

you know, green can destroy things. It's like, hey, destroy something, your choice. One of two things green destroys.

But we actually go concept this, like, okay, you can destroy a flying thing or an artifact. What exactly

the two things that can destroy are flying things and artifacts? So, this is one of those things where creative really has to sort of dig deep. And in the end,

there's no way they're going to solve this perfectly. There is nothing that that's the two things it destroys. So they get creative. You know, it's like, oh, there are vines that have grown, and so they crush things, and they can crush flyers or artifacts. It's not a perfect fit.

And we know, we have to be careful how many of these cards we make. This is what I almost call the anti-Vorthos card. It has no flavor. It's melving all the way. It's a card that has function, and from a functional standpoint, it's like, hey, it's a modal card. It destroys two things that green can destroy.

That makes sense. But it has no flavor. So we've been careful not to make too many of these cards. This is definitely the poster child we've used of, let's be careful how many of these we make, because there's just no way to really flavor them and flavor them well. Not that it means we shouldn't make them, but just keep them in limitation.

Don't make too many of them. And then hopefully Creative can sort of like, oh, it's crushing vines. But anyway, so this is part one of Dark Ascension. I'm going to go through the cards today, or in the series. So we will do as many series as we need to, as many podcasts as we need to, to talk about them. I got up through C, so we've got a few more podcasts here.

But anyway, I'll walk through and just explain a lot of fun things about Dark Ascension. And then obviously later on, not right after, but later on, I will get to the third set in the block, which is Avacyn Restored, where finally the humans are looking a little brighter for the humans. But anyway,

I've just pulled in my parking space, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of making magic, no, I said that backwards, instead of talking magic, it's time to be making magic. I'll talk to you guys soon.