Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #256 - Khans of Tarkir, Part 3

Episode Date: August 27, 2015

Mark continues with part 3 of his seven-part series on the design of Khans of Tarkir.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And yet again, I'm taking my daughter to camp. Okay, so the last two podcasts, I've been talking about the design of Khans of Tarkir. So I walked through how we initially started with a large, small, large. We drafted in the middle. We got a time travel story. Ended up getting clans. There were five clans. We ended up making Wedge. We had to get mechanics for each one. We did. Okay, so now, I think what I'm going to do is start moving on to the card-by-card section, and I'll hit some

other stories about the design as I talk about cards. I think that's the next step I'm going to do. So, starting today, we'll begin with A, and we'll start with Abomination of, uh, Gadol. G-U-D-U-L? Gadol? Anyway, three black, green, blue.

So six mana, one black, one green, one blue. For a 3-4 horror with flying. And when it deals combat damage to a player, you get to draw and discard. And it has a morph of two black, green, blue. Okay. There's a lot of story in this card. A lot of times what happens is the first time I hit something in the alphabet, then I get to talk about it.

Well, this was the very first card, I think, alphabetically. Okay, so black, green, blue means this is Sultai. Okay, so what happened was we messed around a lot. One of the questions of... So, remember, we didn't start with this being a multicolor set. That's not where we began. We began with clans and factions. And remember, the previous year had been Return to Ravnica.

I'm sorry, the previous year had been Theros. The year before that had been Return to Ravnica. So, multicolor had been just to Ravnica. So, Multicolor had been just leaving standard as this came out. So, it wasn't like Multicolor had been a long time ago. It had been relatively pretty recent. And so, one of the

goals of the set was, we wanted to do a wedge set, but we didn't really want to do full blown out Multicolor. We wanted to be careful because we had just done multicolor. And the idea is what we wanted was we wanted a wedge set that had wedge components to it, but we weren't looking for a full multicolor set. What does that mean? Well, the full multicolor set we would do is do a lot more cards that were two color in addition to three color. And our goal was,

well, most of the cards would be three-color. Not all of them. We'll get to that in a little bit. But the idea was we wanted three-color. But we didn't want you to, we wanted to help you a little bit in how your mana production got done. So one of the things that we ended up doing was we made a lot of the common gold cards morph. This is a good example. And the idea being that one of the things people ask is, does morph and three-color make any sense together? Last time we did morph, we did an onslaught in which there was a tribal theme.

And the idea that, oh, well, the morph creatures had tribes that you could flip up, and all of a sudden those mattered, it connected. Well, what does morph have to do with three colors? And the answer is that morph is a good enabler when you're going to more colors. And the reason is, if I get a morph creature that's off color, I can play it even if I haven't yet drawn the color. And once I draw the color, well, then I can morph it up. So the idea is, morph allows you to sort of have a little bit more lax of creatures because you can throw things in that, you know, normally if I have a green card and I haven't drawn the forest, I just can't play it.

But with Morph, if I have a green card, or a partially green card, but I haven't drawn the forest yet, I can play it. And when I get the forest, then I can turn it into the thing it needs to be. Now, with the gold cards, the idea behind this was we were trying to make gold something easier to support. And the premise was that you could splash for your third color if you wanted to. And what that meant is you could play heavenly, you know, match the three-color, or we tried to give you a mana base and a system

where if you wanted to splash a third color, you could. Because the multicolor component is something you want access to, but it's not like a traditional gold set where you kind of want flat. Like, normally when you play multicolor, we try to give you even support, so whatever number of colors you're playing, you play some sort of support to it. This set definitely leaned toward the idea of allowing you to playing, you play some sort of support to it. This deck definitely leaned toward the idea of allowing you to splash for third color, because the idea is you'd have two colors, your third color you might want because you have some powerful three color cards, but we

did in such a way that you wouldn't, you didn't need to be even, you didn't need to have flat in all your mana, that you could have a mostly two colors and a little bit of a third, and we did a bunch of things to help you. The morph, The common goal morph cycle was one of those things. The other thing that we did was, let me talk a little bit about the morph strategy. So one of the things that Eric Lauer did, Eric was the lead developer and head developer too, he morph first showed up in Onslaught

and then it showed up again in Time Spiral. It caused a lot of up in Onslaught, and then it showed up again in Time Spiral. It caused a lot of problems in Onslaught. One of the biggest problems was you didn't know whether or not it was correct to block or not block. So, for example, there were two red creatures. I don't remember their names. But one morphed creature hosed you if you blocked it, and one hosed you if you didn't. And they cost the same amount to un-morph so if you were playing against a red deck and they had a certain amount of mana and a morph creature you were flipping a coin you just didn't know there's no way to understand what

to do and it caused some frustration because one of the neat things about a mystery mechanic is the fact that it can give you clues to help you figure out what to do is cool. The fact that it's just, at some level, flipping a coin, not cool. So we were working really hard to figure out how to make that better. So this wasn't the first time, or sorry, it wasn't the second time we did Morph. Morph got brought back in Time Spiral. And what Eric really liked was how Morph was done in Time Spiral. So Time Spiral's lead developer was a guy named Brian Schneider. And Brian did a couple things to Mor done in Time Spiral. So Time Spiral's lead developer was a guy named Brian Schneider. And Brian did a couple things to morph in Time Spiral.

One is he restricted the colors in. I think it was mostly a blue thing. There were some higher rarity ones, but at low rarities for limited purposes, mostly it was blue. And then what Brian did was he made sure that if your morphed creature was above a certain level, that it got more expensive. And what Eric called it is,

he had a word for it, I think, if it could destroy, well, I don't remember the word Eric used, but his thing is, if I get in a fight, I'm a face-down 2-2 creature,

I get in a fight with a 2-2 creature, when I unmorph, do I win the fight? And win means I kill the other creature and I survive. So if you can survive a fight with a 2-2, you had to cost a minimum, which ended up being 5 mana. So the idea was, before your opponent has 5 mana, you know you can block their 2-2 with your 2-2. Now you might trade it, it might bounce, but you won't lose your creature without them also losing their creature at four or less mana.

And that allows you early on to be a little bit more aggressive on blocking creatures and making some trades without being blown out. So that obviously can be seen here. Notice the play of the card straight up is six mana, to play it, un-morph it is 5 mana. So once again, if you're able to play this turn 3, then you get access to it in turn 5 rather than in turn 6. The other thing we did is, the creatures that come, and we'll look at a couple of them, but this one, for example, has a combat ability, sorry, combat damage ability, which meant if I deal damage to my opponent, something happens. The reason that's fun in Morph is, I attack

with a Morph. You're not sure what to do. If you let it through, because it's scary, maybe you don't want to block it, all of a sudden, ooh, I have a combat damage. I have a Saboteur that can take advantage of the fact that you didn't block me. Anyway, see, a lot of things in one card. Okay, next, Abzan Ascendancy.

White, black, green enchantment. When it enters the battlefield, you put a plus one, plus one counter on each creature you control. And whenever a non-token creature dies, you put a 1-1 white spirit creature onto the battlefield, token creature onto the battlefield

with flying. Anyway, so let's talk about that. So the Ascendancy started in design as something completely different. So one of the things we were trying to do was we had a series of what we called Empire Cards. And the idea of an Empire Card was it was an enchantment that granted you an ability, but it got upgraded if you controlled... I'm trying to remember how it worked.

The idea was you would fight over having control, and if you had control of the Empire, then it was more powerful to you. And the idea was the empire only affected you, but your opponent having control of it meant that it had a reduced effect. And so you would fight over empires because having control of the empire allowed you, the controller of it, a more powerful effect. The problem we ran into was the way empires ended up playing out is you would put them out and the game was just all about the empire.

And instead of trying to win the game, you would just fight over the empire. So, for those that have listened to my 10 Things Every Game Needs podcast, one of the things I talk about is inertia. That you want your game to naturally push towards completion. And what empires were doing was saying, instead of the things I talk about is inertia. That you want your game to naturally push towards completion. And what Empires were doing

was they're saying, instead of playing the game of Magic, let's play this game. And you would just fight back and forth. And it wasn't really ending the game. I mean, it would grant you an ability. Sometimes that ability would help you win. But what we found was it just shifted the focus onto this. So

we turned over the empires to development and what development said is, these are causing problems and you know what we're missing? Let's just have, like Eric had done and looked at what we've done in three color and we just didn't have a lot of simple three color enchantments. And so Eric said, okay, why don't we

just make cool enchantments? And the idea was I think they ended up having one static ability and one triggered ability. I think that's how the sentences work. We'll see some other sentences. I know they mostly had two abilities. One or two might have had one ability.

I think most of them had two abilities, though. And they all had a static ability. I think most of them had a triggered ability. Okay, next. Abzan Banner. It's an artifact for three. You can tap it for white, black, or green. And for white, black, green, tap, sack, you can draw a card.

Okay, so another thing we were trying to do, and this is another tricky thing that development does, is you want to have enough mana that players can do what they want to do, but not so much mana that the color pie is just... doesn't matter. We have made mistakes in the past when we have such a rich, robust series of mana that decks will just play

you know, like there's one period in time, it wasn't even super long ago, where like you were playing you would play three or four different spells with double mana in their costs all in the same deck. Like I have a white-white spell, and a red-red spell, and a black-black spell, and they're all all in the same deck. I'm like, what?

You know, um, one of the things that's important to us is the mana pot, the mana the color wheel is very important, and the mana system is very important. We don't want you having access to everything. There's a big safety valve in the game that says, hey, well, if you want to really go heavy in black,

it's harder to go heavy in other colors. And so if we fix mana too easily, we cause problems where we blur what the color wheel means. But on the flip side, if we don't give you enough mana, like original Lara had this problem, which was we just didn't give you enough mana. Like, original Lara had this problem, which was, we just didn't give you enough mana fixing, and it just...

Like, in order to... One part of the game was saying, play lots of colors, and one part of the game was saying, don't, because mana's not there to support it. And what ended up happening is you kind of had to just stretch and hope you got lucky,

and so there's a lot of mana hosing that happened, more so than normal. I mean, there's a certain amount inherent in the game, but we don't want to make it extra. We don't want to encourage you to stretch and not support your ability to do that. Like, one of the things you want your game to do is you want to tell your player what to do

and then give them the tools to support that style of play. A wedge set says play wedge. So we want to make sure you can do that. Eric Lauer's solution, by the way, which is very funny, is he looked at Alara, which was the last wedge, and he said, you know what? What we need to do is take the amount of mana fixing Alara did, and I think he said that was acceptable because we had a lot less gold cards than Alara did. Alara was more, like I said,

this was not meant to be a multicolor block. It ended up having a wedge component. But it wasn't just full blown out multicolor, which is what Alara was. Alara had a lot more two color spells, for example. And so he ended up matching the mana fixing for Alara, knowing that there was just a lower, I think half the as-fan of gold,

I believe, if I remember correctly. And the idea was, some of it was land, and some of it was going to be an artifact. Originally, these just tapped for mana. I think at two, they were too powerful. At three, they were too weak. And so Eric came up with the idea

of putting on the cantrip onto them. So the idea is, well, it helps with your mana, and then later in the game, when you no longer need it, you can trade it in for another card, and it'll net you card advantage later in the game. We fiddle with those quite a bit. That's one of the things that's kind of a boring story, but I mean, the truth is, a lot of things like that

where it's like, oh, what does it cost, and does it come play tapped, and does it have a second ability, and like, we do a lot of fiddling with that's like, oh, what does it cost? And does it come and play tapped? And does it have a second ability? And like, we do a lot of fiddling with that and trying around. And what happens is usually development tells us what they want to play with. We'll play with it in design,

give them notes, and then make changes. So a lot of the mana fixing, not all of it got solidified before it got to development, but a lot of it didn't. And I think the banners did. I think we were playing

with banners in design. Okay, Abzan Battlepriest. Three white for a 3-2 human cleric. It has Outlast white and then each creature you control with a plus one counter on it gets a lifelink. Okay, so let's talk about the Outlast and the Abzan. Okay, so when we had turned over the file,

you could choose not to attack and if you... I think choose not to attack or block, and if you did, then you would get a plus one, plus one counter. Like if I stay out of combat for a turn, I get a counter. Eric decided that it was just cleaner just to have it tap. The way we did it had a little more flavor to it. If I, you know, if I, instead of instead of fighting, I meditate and train or whatever I'm doing to outlast, you know, make myself better. I can stay out of the fighting and improve myself.

Eric finally just made more sense. It just tapped. So we ended up turning into a tap. The other thing that Eric was a little dismayed was the outlast mechanic, when we had turned it over, didn't really make you play a lot of Outlast creatures. In fact, they kind of fought each other

because they required mana to use their Outlast ability. It was kind of like, well, play a couple Outlast creatures, but not too many. And Eric wanted to encourage you to play them in the same deck. So Eric's idea was, at higher rarities, not a common, at uncommon and up, we make some Outlast cards that not only Outlast, but give you a bonus for having a plus one, plus one counter.

Now, in a vacuum, this creature by itself, so this creature, if you just played it by itself, could give itself lifelink. So, it's a 3-2, you can activate it for W, you can make it a 4-3, and then, now it is lifelink, and you keep making it bigger,

but once you've outlasted it once, you've given it lifelink. But, now combined with other Outlast creatures, then, this can give them lifelink, and you keep making it bigger, but once you've outlasted it once, you've given it lifelink. But now combined with other outlast creatures, then this can give them lifelink, and other ones can give first strike or flying as such. And it made it a little more cohesive. So I talk a lot that one of the roles of development is figuring out the goal of design, the vision of design,

and then helping execute on that. And a good example was we wanted the obzon to sort of have this defensive quality and play together, but the way we had made the mechanic didn't encourage you to play multiples as much as we kind of wanted you to. And so Eric found a way to tweak it to make you want to do that. That's a good example of what development does well, is they were staying true to what we wanted, which is what the obzon was, but we didn't execute in the best possible way to get people to play it. And so they

would tweak things to make them better. That's a very that is a lot of what development is all about, is optimization of the vision. Okay, next. Obzon charm. White, black, green, instant. You choose one. You can exile a target creature

with power three or greater. You can draw two and lose two life. Draw two cards and lose two life. Or you can distribute two plus one, plus one counters. Okay, so first thing you'll notice with the charm is there's three abilities. The first ability is a white ability. The second ability is a black ability.

The third ability is a green ability. So when we first knew we were doing Wedge, once we had the meeting with, okay, we are going to do Wedge, we said, okay, let's write up everything on the board that people would expect us to do. And then our goal was to try to meet as many of those as we could. Charms was, I think, the very first thing written up. Three color charms are quite easy. They have three abilities. There's three colors. They each get to do one. I think what they did is the one that's centered, so it's Abzan, so it's white centered. They made the strongest ability in the centered color.

So the white color, because this is Abzan and white is the center of Abzan, the white ability was the strongest on the charm. You know, it's creature removal. Well, one is card drawing and one is creature buffing. Neither of those is as powerful as creature removal. So the white ability on the white charm the white center charm so what happens was the way charms work and this is normal is

design did a pass on it, we made them and then development did a completely separate pass they kept some of the things we did but the key to doing charms is you have to do all five at once because you have to especially here because white's going to have three abilities, because white's going to show up three times

in a cycle of three-color cards. And you want to make sure that each time it shows up that it's doing something different, that it's not doing the same effect. So you kind of have to look them up and go, oh, well, this is doing that there. I think it was development that decided to make the center color stronger,

so when they revamped things, they pushed it. That helped a little bit also because the level of what you were looking at, the center color was a little stronger, so you weren't fighting for abilities between colors quite as bit. The two secondary ones had to be careful not to fight, but your stronger ability usually was on a different par than what the other charms were doing, the effects were doing, so that made it a little easier to not overlap.

Okay, next. Alpine Grizzly, 2G, 4-2. So one of the things that's very interesting is the vanilla creatures. Every set has vanilla creatures. Usually every color at common has one, usually. One of the things that we try to do is make use of the vanilla creatures. We want to have them. The game is better if there's just some breathing room you get

where you just have a creature that's simple and does something. But this is a good example of us saying, okay, we need to use vanilla creatures in ways that are useful. Just because you have a vanilla creature doesn't mean it can't do something. And this is a perfect example. So Abzan had the ferocious mechanic. It cared about creatures being power four.

So, what, the, uh, the design, I'm not sure whether, uh, well,

we might have made it, in fact, in fact, what I think happened was, in design, ferocious was three. So, we made a vanilla that was

three powered, and then got changed to four powered. Um, I think we might have had like a 3G33 in design, or maybe we had a 2G32, I'm not sure.

But anyway, or, well, anyway, I32, I'm not sure. But anyway, or, well anyway, I don't remember what design that is. Creator, I mean, Development, ended up making a 2G42 once they moved it up to 4. And this is a good example of a green card at the lowest mana possible, pretty much. A 3 mana allows you to get to the ferocious. Another thing we did, and this was Creative's doing, not Development doing, was we decided to make bears a little tougher. I'll be honest, if you ever look at Alpha, 2-2 grizzly bears. Not even grizzly bear.

I believe it's bears, plural. Like, if you look in the arts, there's multiple bears. Now, I don't know how many of you have fought a grizzly bear. Not that I have. But I've read a lot about grizzly bears, and 2-2 is an insult to grizzly bears. So let me speak up for grizzly bears, and 2-2 is an insult to grizzly bears. So let me speak up for grizzly bears everywhere. 2-2, what?

They are not a 2-2. So we decided where bears were important in Teemer, you know, obviously sort of smacked a bear. We saw that. We decided that bears would be a little tougher. So in this world, bears aren't 2-2. Most of them, they're power 4. Most of them, I think, are 4-4.

The bear tokens were 4-4. This is only 4-2 in that we really wanted to get a vanilla creature. So Creative ended up making a bear. They figured 4 power was good enough. But the bears in this world are a little more powerful, as grizzly bears should be, as bears should be. I speak up for the insult to all bears with a tutu bear.

The funny thing is the audience really, because magic is very, there's a lot of patterns in magic, like a bear has been a tutu, it's even slang for a tutu. When we made bears

that weren't tutu, even though flavor-wise it makes perfect sense, the audience were like, what are you doing? 4-4 bear or 4-2 bear? That's unnatural. That's not the way bears were made.

What are you doing to my bears? And I'm like, no, no, bears are more powerful. Anyway, there's something to say for tradition. When you deviate from it, you will hear from it. Okay, next. Altar of the Brood. It's an artifact that costs one.

Whenever a permanent enters the battlefield under your control, you get to mill each opponent one. So one of the things we're always looking to do is that artifacts... I haven't done a podcast yet on artifacts as far as like... One of the things we've definitely done is carved a little bit

of space out for artifacts. It's not that colorless has a color pie, but it's kind of like, well, what are the things artifacts more often does? And one of the things we've given artifacts is it has repeatable milling. It's one of the things artifacts does. And we're always trying to come up with

a different way to mill. It's just something that's a little off the beaten track. And so this is a good example. This is a card that says, okay, it's a milling deck, but it needs a lot of permanence. That's not something milling decks always necessarily do. But this deck says, no, no, no, no. You're going to mill them out, and the means by which you do it is having a lot of things.

Oh, well, that's, you know, a lot of mill strategies are a little more control-ish, and you don't tend to have a lot of things. Well, this is a little different in that we really like making cards that say, hey, this is fun, and it does something you've done before, but requires kind of different things, just requires you to build a different kind of deck. You know, there's a lot of Johnnies out there who just, or even some Spikes,

who are like, okay, can I make this work? Can I do it? How do I make this work? There's just different parameters. Now let's talk about how restrictions breed creativity. That's the same for cards. One of the things we want to do is, okay, this card can win you the game. It's a million card, but it requires a different combination

of things than you normally think of with this kind of card. We love doing that sort of stuff. The other thing you can tell on this card is that we're getting a little more conscious of multiplayer play. It says each opponent, not an opponent or target player, which says, okay, if you can figure out how to do this, you can try to do this in a multiplayer game.

Because it'll mill not just one person, but everybody. And I know in multiplayer we're trying to be careful. Sometimes we go to each opponent, it can get a little too powerful. Mill is a little more all-in, so it's a little tougher. So it feels like the danger of this kind of multiplayer is since you're affecting everybody but slowly, well, everyone knows you're doing it, and if you start getting close,

they're all going to team up and probably do something. So we felt there was a balance in multiplayer where you could use it, but also there's some danger, and then because you're affecting everybody, everybody might want to start going after you. So there was some balance we wanted to do there. Okay. Next.

Anathenza, the foremost. White, black, green. Okay. She's a 4-4 legendary human soldier. Whenever she attacks, put a plus and plus on counter on tap creature you control. If a creature card is put into your opponent's graveyard from anywhere, exile it. So, the first ability was we wanted her to support her ability.

She's an Abzan. Abzan has Outlast. That's what they do. So, we definitely wanted to make sure that she was supporting it. But also, her flavor is she's a warrior. She fights, that she goes into battle with her people. And so we didn't want her just sitting back. And so we said, okay, what if she had an attack trigger, but something that could reward you either for attacking, meaning the nice thing is attacking creatures tap other than vigilance creatures.

Attacking creatures tap, so she can boost a fellow attacking creature, or, in fact, she can boost herself, or she can also boost a creature that is outlasted, so she can do either thing. The second ability came from Eric Lauer reading the write-up about her and talked about how whenever she defeated an opponent,

she ground their bones to dust. And the idea was that she knew there were people that made use of the dead, especially the Sultai, and she didn't want that happening. So, out of flavor, it got to a second ability that ended up being quite interesting, especially against Sultai, because it was Delve and stuff. They used the Graveyard in an interesting

way. But anyway, that was second more for flavor, but ended up having some interesting mechanical use. AnkleShanker. Two red, white, black for a two-two Goblin Berserker. It has haste, and whenever you attack, a creature you control gets first strike and death touch. So it's a red, white, black creature.

Haste is red and black. First strike is white and red, and Death Touch is black. So it mixes up the abilities. A red creature could have haste and First Strike, but couldn't have Death Touch. And a white creature could have First Strike, but no haste or Death Touch.

And a black creature could have haste and Death Touch, but no First Strike. So it mixes things up so that it's a different combination. Oh, let me answer this question, by the way. Notice red, white, black. In previous incarnations we had written the mana in different orders let me explain that

Eric felt very strongly that he wanted to make sure that people understood the combination of where colors were centered and the idea of the importance of the enemy combinations and so he mixed up the mana to help remind you A where it was centered was centered. This is, for example, red, white, black means, okay, red comes

first, it's centered in red, Mardu's a red thing, but then it goes red, white, which are opposites and white, black. It shows you paired in opposites rather than in some other combination to stress that when drafting, you want to go for opposites. In retrospect, I think this might have been a mistake.

I think consistency is real important. It drove players crazy that the way we'd ridden mana in one previous incarnation was not the same as here. Um, I'm not, I'm not sure the future of this. I agree that consistency is important. So we got to figure out what we're doing and make it the way we're doing it. Um, but that is why it changed. As far as Ankle Shanker, this card was very popular, maybe for its name, uh, and peoplelins, but it was definitely a fun little, a fun little card, and it did some neat things, and it definitely made a very, this is in Mardu, so it wants to be very aggressive, you know, and we wanted

to make a card that you would put in an aggressive deck, and one of the problems with a three-color card is, by definition, it's not going to be that cheap. It's got to have at least three colors in it. This one has five, but it wanted to be something that, well, it's a good finisher in an aggressive deck. That First Strike and Death Touch work really well together. And so if you stick this in, you know, and remember,

Ankle Shaker can always target itself. So it can give itself First Strike and Death Touch. And it gets attacked right away. Okay, next. Archer's Parapet. So this is a wall in green. One in green for a wall. Zero, five wall. It's got Defender.

One in black, tap. Each opponent loses one life. So one of the things that was really important, I talked about this before in a previous podcast, that Eric wanted people to get the idea of draft enemy color first, and then you can pick your third color. Because if you go with enemy color,

you have two options. For example, you start black green, well, you can get blue, and all of a sudden you're saltai, or you can get white, and all of a sudden you're obzon. You have choices. So what he did was, he put a cycle in of off-color activations, this obviously was green with the black, and so it went in that

same rotation at uncommon. So, like, the green goes to black, which means the black one would then go to its enemy, which would be white. So you'd have a cycle. And the idea is, if you take this, what this was trying to do was bridge the gap between the two strategies it could go into.

Well, it's a wall, and so you can use it defensively in Abzan. Oh, but it also drains the opponent, so you could use that in... It had a leader aspect, which played in a similar way Saltai played. So it was a card that could work in Abzan or could work in Saltai. Either could use it. And so that card was made so you would take it, and then it gave you options to go either way. And it also kind of reinforced the draft enemy. Okay, next. Arrowstorm.

Okay, Arrowstorm is three red, red sorcery. So five mana sorcery with two red. Deal four to target creature or player. But with raid, you deal five instead, and it can't be prevented. So raid, one of the things we wanted to do with raid is raid the idea of raid is you have a spell

you get to upgrade the spell we wanted to make sure in the upgrades that the upgrade wasn't so big that you felt it was useless if you hadn't attacked deal 4 damage to a creature

can kill a lot of creatures plenty of times you'll use this and you won't have to be attacking but little extra bonus 4 to 5 can matter you know

sometimes you need to kill something that 4 won't do or five will. Can't be prevented against certain decks. So it had a little extra value, but you still wanted to play the card. We wanted to make sure that your raid cards weren't useless if you didn't attack. Otherwise, it would warp them a little bit

and can cause some problems. So we made them such that they're better if you attack, and there's times you want to attack, but there's plenty of times you could just use it. And Arrowstorms are really good. You're going to take Arrowstorm. Even if you don't have an aggressive deck, you'll take Arrowstorm.

It's better than an aggressive deck. Marduk might take it a smidgen earlier. But you know what? Other decks that have heavy red will still consider playing it, because it is creature kill. Okay. I can see I've now gotten to 30 minutes.

I got here a little early because I left not from my house. But I have a meeting to go to, so I've now gotten to 30 minutes. I got here a little early because I left my house. But! I have a meeting to go to, so I gotta get going. But anyway, I want to make sure you get your 30 minutes of content. So I've gotten all the way up to A. I didn't even finish A. I'm going to finish A. We'll do one last card in A.

Ash Cloud Phoenix was my last A. Two red red, 4-1 Phoenix has flying. When it dies, it returns to the battlefield face down. Morph, four red red, six mana phoenix has flying, when it dies it returns to the battlefield face down morph 4 red red, 6 mana when turned face up, you deal 2 damage to each player, so this was us messing around with morph

the different kind of things you can do with morph the cool thing about this creature is, you can morph it like normal, but it dies into a morph, so when it dies it gets to come back, it's a way to do a phoenix in a different way, Phoenixes get reborn. And then it just added a different feature. We knew we wanted to mess with morph. We weren't going to

change how morph worked. And we were going to mess with that in later sets. But we wanted a little bit of tweaking. Hey, we wanted a few things you hadn't seen before. But we wanted to be morph as you know it, but just adding a few different things. And we really liked the idea of something that died into a face-down creature. And we wanted to have a phoenix in the set, and then

hey, it all matched up. It all made sense. And what we did is we ended up putting the damage... Phoenix tend to do damage to things, like pyroclasm effects are very phoenix-y, so we put it into the un-morphing rather than into the dying. You have to make it a little bit different, and just change the play.

Like, one of the things when you do cards a lot of times is you want to make sure that you have the feel so they feel right, but you mix up a little how you use them so that this isn't just

like the Phoenix like every Phoenix you've ever seen. Okay, I finished with A. So next time, I'll start with B. But anyway, I do have to go.

I hope you guys are enjoying my talk about Concerts Arc here. We got through A and explained a whole bunch of stuff today. But I'm in my parking space. We know what that means.

Me and this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time for more Kanzatarkir.