Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #258 - Khans of Tarkir, Part 4

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

Mark continues with part 4 of his seven-part series on the design of Khans of Tarkir.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. So the last three podcasts, I've begun talking about the design of Khans of Tarkir. And last time I started talking about the card-by-card stories, and I got all the way through A. So I don't want to have 26 of these, so we're going to have to pick up the pace a little bit. So we start with B today. We begin with Bear's Companion. So two green, blue, red. So five mana, green, blue, red. This is a teamer.

For a 2-2 human warrior, when it enters the battlefield, you get a 4-4 bear token. And I think the bear token... I think it's green. I didn't write what color it was. But... So this card originally, by the way,

made a 4-4 that came with a 4-4. Actually, enough said. Originally, it made a 3-3 that came with a 3-3 because at the time of design, Ferocious cared about power 3. So we're like, okay, what would a Ferocious deck want? How about 2-3-3?

Just to really cement home that you can't do it so when it got changed from 3 to 4 in development making 244s they thought was a bit much so they said okay well what if we make a small guy that comes with the token the reason they made it a 4-4 sorry a 2-2 they made a 4-4 token rather than the 4-4 they made a 2-2 token

was twofold one, in this world bears are 4-4 that made a 2-2 token, was twofold. One, in this world, bears are 4-4. Bears are at least 4 power. We set that up. Bears are bigger, as they should be. Second is, there's more shenanigans that you could do if the enter the battlefield is the bigger effect. So it's just a more splashy, cool card

if it makes a bigger token. So we had it make the 4-4. But anyway, it's definitely... For some reason, when we did Teemer, it's funny. some reason when we did Teamer it's funny, if you had asked me before the set came out what clan would get the most love from the audience, I wouldn't have said Teamer that wouldn't have been my guess

but then I hadn't yet seen the bear punching card and anyway I didn't quite know all that Teamer had to offer and one of the things was bears one of the most frequent requests I get on my blog and in social media in general, when people ask for legendary

creatures that we've never done, is a legendary bear. And had I known, had I realized how much bear-ness there would be in Timur, I didn't really understand until the art was in, at which point I'd passed the point where I could do this. If I'd realized how much bear quality, bear-ness there was, I would have pushed for a legendary point where I could do this. If I'd realized how much bear quality,

bear-ness there was, I would have pushed for a legendary bear. I would have made a legendary bear. That would have been our opportunity. In fact, the bear that Surak punched could have been a legendary bear. So anyway, I feel bad. I apologize to all the legendary bear wanters out there that really wanted a legendary bear. I let you down. When I see future opportunity, I will try to make a Legendary Bear. Okay, next, Become Immense.

It's an instant that costs five in green, so six mana. It's a Delve card. Target creature gets plus six, plus six until end of turn. So Delve, for those who don't remember, was in Future Sight. It's a mechanic that says,

for every card I remove from my graveyard, I make my spell one cheaper. Delve originally was in black and blue in Future Sight. It was on two black cards and one blue card. And so it felt neat to put it in soul tie, since soul tie was black and blue and green. So we got to make green delve cards for the first time. So one of the things that's fun is trying, one of the tricks to delve is you need

expensive cards. It's not a lot of fun making super cheap delve spells since the neat part about it is you have the ability to really change it if you have enough cards in your graveyard. So the idea here was let's make a giant growth but a little bigger because giant growth isn't that expensive. So instead of plus three plus three, let's

do plus six plus plus six, double Giant Growth. And then, the way Delve tends to work is you add a certain amount of mana because it has Delve. So, this spell probably would be, I don't know, two G, three G, two in green, three in green,

somewhere around that. So, that is up to five green, but you have the potential for it to be as low as green. That you have the potential for it to be as low as green. You have the potential for a giant growth, that costs giant growth costs, but double the giant growth. So that's exciting. Okay, next. Bellowing Saddlebrute. It's a black card.

Three and a black for a four, five orc warrior. And it has raid. And if you've raided, meaning if you've attacked this turn, then you don't lose four life when it comes into play. So this is a little quirky. A couple things. First off, it's an orc.

Magic, in the early days, we had lots of orcs. And we really have sort of not done tons of orcs recently. And so Khans managed to bring the orcs back. The orcs showed up in Mardu. So, I don't think we made any white orcs, but there were red and black orcs. Traditionally, orcs have been a red thing. But here you get some black orcs, finally. Orcs can be a little mean and selfish, and they also make sense in black.

Okay, so, the other interesting thing about this card is that as a rate effect, that doesn't give you a bonus, it takes away a negative. Which is a positive thing. So the idea is, if you play this card, it's a 4-5 creature for 4 mana. If you haven't attacked this turn, well then it costs you 4 life when you play it. So it's 4

mana and 4 life for a 4-5 creature. Not the best of bargains. I mean, not horrible, but nothing great, nothing special. But the idea is, oh, well, if you've attacked, if you have raid, then guess what? You can avoid paying the four to life. So it's a little bit different. We do that from

time to time. We do mechanics. It's always difficult to do it only because it gets complicated. The idea that if you've done this, then the bonus you get is a lack of a negative. So it's like the way it's worded. I mean, it still says rate on it, rate's an ability word. The fact that it's an ability word allows us to word things.

The way ability words work, for those that don't know, keywords mean this represents something. It specifically means this exact text. So you can't, you know, if something is keyworded, it means that thing. You can't twist it too much. An ability word means, well, I could not have this word here. The card tells you what it does. I'm just kind of reminding you that this is similar to other cards.

And so ability words, we can be a little more loose. Because this card's text does not read exactly the same as most raid cards. Because it says, this doesn't happen if you didn't attack. Or this does happen if you didn't attack. But the idea is it's like raid. It rewards you for attacking. There's a gain for not attacking, which is a removal of a negative.

So we were allowed to put raid on it, even though the text is slightly different. And the reason we can do that is because it's an ability word. I know from time to time I bring up ability word versus key word. That's the kind of thing in design that's important because they are different. For example, one of the biggest things is you can't reference an ability word. Let's say I wanted to make a card that cared about when raid happened, when raid triggered. I couldn't. Raid is not a keyword. I can't reference it. I can't reference ability words. The best way to

think of ability words because they're in italics and they're before it, is it's kind of invisible. It's just, it's kind of reminder text in some ways. It's telling you something and helping you, but that text doesn't need to be there. It's not supporting anything. And because of that, we can't reference it. Anyway, probably more than you need to know about ability words. Next, blood-filled caves. It's a land. Enters a battlefield tapped, and when it enters a battlefield, you gain one life, and it taps for black or red. So this was a cycle from Zendikar. The idea was when we knew we were doing a tri-color wedge set, we wanted to make sure we had enough mana for you. We knew at higher rarities we were doing the fetch

lands, but at lower rarities, what were we doing? And we decided this was pretty good. It was from Zendikar. It does a nice job of being an enter-the-battlefield-tap land, but having enough of a bonus that people like them. Zendikar definitely messed around with

having more lands with ETB abilities. And so anyway, this is one of them. And so we decided to add this in. This is an allied cycle because we knew we were giving you... The fetches were allied. One of the things I think that we did a lot of is the reason we gave a lot of allied cycles here

was that they specifically went with one clan. That if you did enemy cycles, they branched over two clans, and it was tricky to know where they went creatively. So when you have allied stuff like this does, it's like, well, black-red, well, it's Mardu. Flavored as Mardu. It has to be Mardu. Mardu's the only wedge that has black and red in it.

Okay, next, Bloodfire Mentor. Two and a red for 0-5. I did not know what the creature type was. This is from JustGuy, so it's probably a monk, is my guess. So two blue and tap, draw a card, and discard a card. Okay, so this was a controversial card for me. One of my pet peeves is this card was stuck in because they wanted to make sure that,

I believe this is an uncommon, that there were cards that supported enemy color pairings. And the reason is that we wanted you to draft enemy color first, and then you had options to go into one of two different wedge colors. So one of the things to encourage you to draft correctly is we made sure to put in cards that sort of encourage enemy color. There's very little ally encouragement. There's a little bit of land, but there's no spells that encourage ally stuff. We encourage you to do enemy, and then you can branch in and do wedge. The problem with this card, it's a subtle design thing, is

one of my pet peeves as a designer is when you do an off-color activation, meaning when a color has another color to activate, what you want to do is give that color access to something that that off-color color has access to that you don't. And there were two cards. When I went through the file, one of the things I do once it's in development

is I'll occasionally go through the file and make notes. This was one of my big notes. It ended up not getting changed. I think only because I caught this a little later than I should have. But anyway, this card does looting in blue. And red can do looting. So I wasn't super fond. It's like, hey, red can go to blue to do something it can do in red. Now given blue looting is slightly better in red. Now given blue looting

is slightly better than red looting, blue looting you discard then draw, where red looting, I'm sorry, blue looting you draw then discard, where red looting you discard then draw. So this is blue looting which is slightly better than red looting. That's in the end why I said, okay, I guess, because technically it's doing something red

can't quite do, which is blue looting, but it annoyed me a little bit, and just like, there's all sorts of things blue can do that red can't do. Let red do something with the blue activations that red can't do that blue can do. So this one irks me a little. So there's one that comes,

I'll be talking, I don't know if I'll get into it today or in a later podcast, but there were two cars that did this. This one, I was like, okay, at least it's blue looting. It's slightly better. The other one really bugged me. I wasn't able to change the other one. I one, I was like, okay, at least it's blue looting. It's slightly better. The other one really bugged me. I wasn't able to change the other one.

I tried, but I wasn't able to. But we'll get to that one. And this is, by the way, one of the things. There's a lot of aesthetics to design. There's a lot of little things that matter. And when I look at a file to give notes, a lot of things I care is, I'm not worried about balance. I'm not worried about a lot of developmental issues. Developmental

I'm not worried about those issues. Those aren't my issues. My issue is there's just a lot of nice aesthetics to design. One of which is like if I'm going to another color, give me access to something I don't already have. It's like I don't want a red card. It's for white men. I can gain first strike. You know, I don't want a

black card that's green. I can regenerate. You know, I don't need to go to another color to get the thing I already have in this color. Anyway, so that's a little insight into kind of some design-ish type of things. Okay, next, Bloodsoaked Champion. Black for a 2-1 human warrior. Can't block.

And for raid, so if you attack with a creature this turn, you can have, there's an activated ability for one and a black and you can return it from the graveyard to play so this is a creature that keeps coming back but it only comes back if you've attacked for the turn and the neat thing about it is, the reason it says can't block is a lot of times we have things that keep coming back from the graveyard if we want to use offensive, we have to do something to make it offensive

and not defensive, well if it can something to make it offensive and not defensive. Well, if it can't block, it can't be defensive. So guess what? Attack with this. The neat thing about this card is it also enables itself, which means if I have two of these, I can attack with one. If you kill it, the next turn I can attack with the other,

and when that one attacks, I can bring back the first one. And so once I have two in play, I can sort of keep them coming out, because even if you block and kill them, they can attack and trigger the other one to come back. And this was definitely one of those... One of the neat things when you're trying to do a mechanic like raid is try to find, at higher rarities, kind of cooler things you can do.

And the idea of... Rather than enter the battlefield effect, which most of them do, is this is a triggered ability. Not triggered, this is an activated ability. That's not something we did at Common, but it was a neat way to use Raid, and just somebody to up it a little bit. Okay, next, Briber's Purse.

An artifact, cost X. So this is called Bag of Gold in design. So when it enters the battlefield, you get X gem counters. X is the cost of the card. You pay X. And then one, remove a gem counter. Target creature can attack or block this turn.

So this was completely top-down. We were in Warlord World, and we wanted the clans to definitely have this quality of it's a rough world. So we made a card, it was called Bag of Gold in Design, and the idea was, I can just bribe people. If I get in trouble, I don't want you to attack, I don't want you to block,

here, don't attack or block me, will ya? Anyway, it was very flavorful. It went from, other than the name change, we originally had gold counters, got changed to gem counters. But other than a little bit of creative changes, it pretty much stayed as is. It cost X

in the thing. I'm not sure. For a while, it might have been just tap and remove. I think maybe, I forget whether we added the one in design or development. We might have added it in design. But anyway, this card, pretty much as we designed it, showed up in print, so that's pretty cool.

Okay, next, Butcher of the Horde. One red, white, black, so four mana, red, white, black, so it's Mardu, for a 5-4 Demon with Flying. Sacrifice another creature. You can gain Vigilance, Lifelink, or Haste until end of turn. So one of the cool things is it's giving you abilities. It almost did it perfectly.

So Vigilance is in white, Lifelink is in white or black, and Haste is in red or black. I think when we first made this card, instead of Vigilance, it was First Strike. The reason I believe that is, First Strike overlaps red and white, Lifelink

overlaps white and black,elink overlaps white and black Haste overlaps red and black I believe it got changed to Vigilance because First Strike was too good Vigilance overlaps green and white so it's not quite, like once again you tell the little designer aesthetic in me it's like oh it was so perfect

but one of the things I've learned is aesthetics are great but if gameplay is bad gameplay will trump aesthetics. So that original card was a little cuter and a little neater design, but I'm sure if development took out First Strike, it was because First Strike was causing problems, and I can imagine that. One of the problems with First Strike is the threat of First Strike

is usually very potent. If you know I have a 5-4 creature, I never even have to sacrifice a creature. You just know I can have First Strike, so you tend not to block. So it just kind of makes them unblockable. The other story about Butcher the Horde that's interesting is we were trying to bring back a delve card. So one of the delve cards we wanted to bring back was the demon.

And at first, we were told by creative we couldn't bring it back because there wasn't demons here. Because at the time, there weren't demons. Then, later on, there was a note that happened during development that they felt we were kind of low on iconics. So, dragons, sphinx,

angel, angel, sphinx, demon, dragon, hydra are the five iconics. And we were just kind of low on them. We had hydras. There were no dragons because the dragons

were all dead. I think there weren't any angels. There weren't demons originally. And I don't think there were sphinxes because we didn't want

big flying things. So hydra was the only creature, the only iconic there. I'm like, wow, we're low on iconic. Could we get

something else in? I'm like, oh, well, demons don't have to fly. We're trying to avoid having big giant flyers because we're trying

to make the feel of dragons being gone. Oh, this actually does fly. But anyway, they decided that, okay, I guess we could have demons, and they later added demons in. But we forgot to sort of mention back that the reason we didn't do the delve card was because there were no demons, but then that decision changed.

So no one sort of circled back around and said, oh, wait a minute, if there are demons, then we could have that card. So I apologize for those that wanted a returning Delve card. In retrospect, if we had figured it out, we could have done the demon. Tombstalker demon, I think. Because the other question

is, are there tombs? Yeah, there's... We see tombs of the dragons. So, anyway. That is the story. Okay, next. Up to C. Oh my my God, up to C. Chief of the Edge. White, black for a 3-2. Human warrior.

Other warriors you control get plus 1, plus 0. Then there's Chief of the Scale. White, black. 2-3 human warrior. Other warrior creatures you get plus 0, plus 1. So, note, it's essentially a base 2-2. It has the ability to pre-apply to it, and then it says other. We do that a lot.

So 1 is a 3-2 because all warriors get plus 1. The other is a 2-3 because all other warriors get plus 0 or plus 1. These were a pair made together. One of the things we try to do is we do not do heavy tribal in all sets, but we try to do at least a little bit of tribal in all sets. And one of the things that... Players like tribal stuff. It's fun. It's easy to figure out,

oh, care about this word, this creature type. And we normally will do, in a block, we normally will do one tribal if it's not a major thing. We don't always do it, but usually we do one. This time we ended up being warrior.

We were trying to play up all the different clans. We were trying to find a creature type that would cross over clans. Warrior worked pretty well. One of the weird things that happened, so those that are wondering why it ended up in white and black,

because traditionally the way it works in normal magic is white and blue have soldiers, red and green have warriors, and black will go between the two depending on more of the flavor of the set. So white traditionally doesn't have warriors, it has soldiers.

So why is warriors a white and black thing? And the answer had to do with they were trying, development, design had tagged warriors as being a thing. And then when development was trying to fix the set, they were having trouble finding a white-black theme. For those that don't know, certain colors tend to lean in certain directions, and so it's very clear what they're doing. White-black is one of the trouble childs.

If you look at white-black, white-black bounces around a lot. It doesn't quite have the clean archetype that's like red-white, for example, is going to be aggressive. Small, weeny, aggro. It's pretty much what red-white does. So whatever set you stick it in, red-white's going to be doing that. White-black, it's not fast, it's not slow. It has a little bit less of an identity, and white black

really needed an identity, so the idea was there was going to be warrior tribal could we use that? and the idea was, well in this world, sure everybody can be a warrior, it's pretty wild there's not a lot of soldiers there's more a plane of warriors than a plane of soldiers so the idea

of making warriors matter was we had moved everybody to warrior anyway for flavor purposes. And they're like, well, the whites are warriors, why don't we just make the warrior a white-black thing? Which is fine in the draft. The problem it caused outside of draft is most of

white's cards that would want to go in a warrior deck aren't warriors, they're soldiers. Usually white is soldiers. So we made something that worked within block, but was troublesome looking backwards, and a lot of people were frustrated because, like, historically, red and green are a lot more of the warrior colors. But the reason it was chosen this way had to do with

limited archetype and trying to build something within the set that was advancing other agendas, so that's why it ended up being white-black. I get the frustration in a big meta way, but that's why it went here. Okay, next. Clever Impersonator. Two blue

blue for a 0-0 shapeshifter. It enters the battlefield as a copy of any non-land permanent. So this card is weird because it copies not just creatures. We do that all the time. It can copy a planeswalker. Not completely weird. At least that's kind of a creature

it can copy an enchantment, that's weird it can copy an artifact, even a non-creature, that's weird so it does, it's very clever this impersonator it's a lamp I don't know, I'm not quite sure let's believe he's using magic

he or she is using magic and the reason you can't tell is it's an illusion or something. But, uh, very clever impersonator. Um, this is one of those cards, by the way, that when you make it you expect the creator to come back and go, okay, what is this thing? He comes in

and he's, look, he's a ring! He's a boot! He's, I don't know. I like the card, mechanically. This is one of those cards where the Melvin in me goes, oh, that's an awesome card. There's so many cool things you can do with that card. And the Vorthos in me goes, come on, what? What?

So, sometimes Melvin gets to win. We make cards that are just really awesome to play with, and creatively he's got to go, okay, he's using magic. Okay, D, D, D, D. Death Frenzy. Death Frenzy is three black, green sorceries.

So it's five mana, one black, one green. All creatures get minus two, minus two until end of turn. And you gain one life for each creature that dies this turn. So the idea is I kill a lot of things, and then I gain life off the things that die. This is definitely set up so that you can have combat first, and then after everybody's done their combat math, you go, ha-ha, messed up your combat math,

and then kill a lot of things, and then you gain life off them. It does gain life off your things dying, because the idea is, hey, sometimes I've got to sacrifice some of my own things to gain things. So it does cut your creatures, especially because a lot of times when things die, especially in combat, well, yours are does cut your creatures. Especially because a lot of times when things die, especially in combat, well, yours are going to die too.

But at least in this way, you can kill a lot of things off and then get some benefit for the things dying. Deflecting Palm. Red, white, instant. The next time a source of your choice would deal damage, prevent it, then deal that much damage to the source's

controller. So one of the things that we were messing around with in Jeskai was they were the Shaolin monks, right? They were the, they studied and they know martial arts and, you know. So one of the things we wanted to do is, we definitely

wanted to capture a couple of the tropes. Well, one of the ideas, you know, the what's it called? Aikido? Where you turn your enemy's strength against themselves. Where they do something and you take their own strength

and you put it back in. So it's like, you've thrown a punch at me. Aha! But I've deflected that to you. It's a deflecting palm. So this definitely has sort of a kung fu sort of feeling to it.

Is Aikido right? If I had that wrong, I'm sure I'm messing up the word. But those who know what I'm talking about hopefully know what I mean. Okay, next. Despise. So Despise is a sorcery for black. Target player reveals his or her hand, and you get to choose a creature or planeswalker from it.

So you might recognize this card as Ostracize, which did the same thing, except it was just a creature. And now that Planeswalkers are in the game, we decided, I talked about this in another podcast, that black was going to be one of the creatures that had answers for Planeswalkers. So we're like, okay, not only can it destroy Planeswalkers, but okay, how about

it also can force discards in it? So we decided to upgrade Ostracize to make it a little more tournament playable. Being able to go after Planeswalkers definitely did that. And so Ostracize to make it a little more tournament playable. Being able to go after Planeswalkers definitely did that. And so Ostracize became Despise. You can see the creative team kept the name similar. Okay, next. Dig Through

Time. Okay. So, uh, every set has a few cards that people go, what? What were you thinking? Um, so this card turned out to be, well, I mean, to be fair to development, I don't think this card was a problem in standard. It just was a problem

in older formats. And one of the things is we can't cost things to match older formats. We need to cost them for the current format and if they cause problems in older formats then we'll deal with them in older formats. I always like to say we don't want to hold the present hostage to the past. That if cards of the past or environments of the past do things, well then, you know,

we'll deal with them in that format. Like, if this card causes a problem in an older format, let the older format deal with it. I mean, if it causes a problem in standard, okay, it's a problem. Cost it correctly. But Dink for Time, by the way, is an instant for six blue blue, eight mana with delve. Look at the top seven cards of your library, put two in your hand, and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order. So essentially it's draw two, but draw two with some choices.

Um, you know, draw the best two of your top seven. Um, and this has proven to be a mighty, mighty fine card. Now one of the problems, by the way, is in older formats, um, for those that might not be aware of this, blue problems by the way is in older formats for those who might not be aware of this, blue is a little nutty in older formats. When Magic first came out, the colors from a power level were not remotely balanced. One only needs to look at the

power nine. The power nine is the Black Lotus, five moxes, and three blue cards the three broken non-artifact things and note that blue could play all the artifact things were blue cards

ancestral recall, time walk, time twister so blue started the game with a leg up and then there are some very powerful tools given to blue early beyond just the stuff given in alpha anyway, blue early on was definitely a powerhouse.

In older formats, especially in vintage, that's just still true. Blue just has a lot of things that we... Once we tried to fix the game and sort of took out the broken stuff, we didn't make more broken stuff in the other colors. I mean, not on purpose. So there's just a little more broken things in blue than there are in the other colors. So older

formats, especially in vintage, will skew toward blue. So when we make a really good card, also the older formats are able to cast more spells and get more things in the graveyard quicker, so delve is just naturally stronger in older formats. It's just easier to fill up your graveyard. It's just easier to get mana and cast spells and stuff. So anyway, Dix of Time ended up being mighty good.

It had to be dealt with in older formats. But a fun card. Okay, Dragon Throne of Tarkir. It's an artifact equipment that costs four. Equipped creature has Defender and two and tap. Other creatures you control get plus X plus X until end of turn and trample where X is

the creature of the equipped, the power of the equipped creature. So the idea is if you sit in the throne, the power of the equipped creature. So the idea is, if you sit in the throne, you power all those around you. So one of the things that we did early on, the creative team did early on, was when concepting the world,

they had the idea that one of the dragons, I forget which dragon it was. It's the black red dragon. Which one is the black red dragon? Ah! I forgot off the top of my head. Kologon? Whatever the black red dragon is Which one is the black red dragon? Ah! I forgot off the top of my head. Um... Kolagon? I know. Whatever the black red dragon

is. One of the dragons that his, um... skull would be a throne for the leader of one of the clans. And it ended up being, um... Um... See, this is my problem. I'm not good with names. I get in the car

and I have to remember names. Zergo, the orc clan leader. And he was in Mardu, and so we decided that we wanted to make one of the dragon skulls a throne, just to sort of like not only are the dragons dead, but

really hammer home. Because we wanted you to see the dragons in Khan's of Tarkir. It was very important that you got the essence of the dragons, and that the just really hammer home. Because we wanted you to see the dragons in Khan's Tarkir. It was very important that you got the essence of the dragons. And that the dragons were being dead, one of the great ways to do that is show the remains of the dragons in use. Well, one of the dragons, literally, their skull is an artifact in this set. How do I more confer the dragons are dead than the skull of the dragon is the throne of Zergo, right?

So, anyway. That was one of those cards where we had the image. We knew there was going to be a dragon throne. We knew it was the skull. It was just a matter of, okay, we have to make that. I think when they did the concept art for Zergo he was sitting in the throne, I believe. But anyway, that's what we knew we were going to make. Okay, Dragon

Scale Boon. Three and a green for an instant. Put two plus and plus counters on target creature and untap it. A couple things going on here. One is, plus and plus counters is something that green and white tend to do the most of. Any color can stick plus and plus counters on themselves. That's just a growth mechanic, and all colors can get bigger for things. Green and white are the two colors that most often put it on other creatures. I think green is

number one and white is number two. Usually when white does, it's in smaller amounts and green will put multiples on. Anyway, one of the themes in Abzan was plus and plus one counters. Obviously the outcast mechanic put plus and plus one counters on. And so one of the ideas

was there were, in order, like I said, one of the things that we had done was we wanted to make sure that there was some synergy for having plus one counters. We did a little of it in design, development way doubled down on it in development. And so putting plus one counters on creatures, A, is always good.

We do it normally. It just makes them bigger. But in this set, there's advantage to having plus and plus encounters. So this spell sort of tied things together and made, you know, help it like, it would go in any deck, but in an Abzan deck, even an extra value.

The other interesting thing is it untaps a creature. So for a long time, that was in white's part of the pie, that white would untap creatures and surprise them. Ha ha, you know it's blocking you and not blocking you. One of the things we do from time to time is when we're having trouble somewhere and we realize that a color needs something, we'll look at a color that maybe is overstuffed somewhere.

So green needed a little bit of help. Green needed some means to be a little bit more defensive. And I'm like, you know what? White has lots of ways to be defensive. It's got vigilance. I think it's green has vigilance too, but white has more vigilance. And it has lots of tricks and things it can do to stop... There's lots of spells it can do and things it can do if you have damage getting through that isn't blocked, for example.

Where green doesn't. And green tends to want to use its creatures. So we're like, well, what if we took untapping, like untap a single creature. I think white still has untap all creatures, but a singular combat trick to block. Let's put that in green. Let's make that a green thing instead of a white thing. We talked about it in card crafting, and the idea was, look, green could just use it more than white. White has

duplication. There's other ways for white to sort of fill in the gap here. Green doesn't have that, and green could really use it, and we like green to use as creatures to solve its problems wherever we can. So it just seemed like a perfect fit, so we did that. Okay, next. I'm almost done. I'm, uh, let me finish

up D, and then we'll end for the day. Dragon-style twins. Three red-red, three-three human monk, double-strike prowess. So one of the fun things about prowess was finding ways to combine with it. It was in red, blue, and white, so we liked to combine it with abilities that made sense where getting bigger

mattered. Double-st strike, very much so. And so, progress is sort of cool because in some level for double strike, it means for every non-creature spell I cast, I do two additional damage. Which is pretty cool. So, anyway. And then, the idea of twins. We didn't actually plan this. Did we?

I'm not sure whether we named this the Twins or not. But I like the idea also that one of the themes you see a lot in sort of the martial arts stuff is the idea of twins fighting together. So anyway, that played in here. And the double strike is because there's two of them. I thought that was cute. Finally, Dune Blast, the final card for today.

Four white, black, green. So seven mana. Abzan, white, black, green. Sor seven mana, Abzan, white, black, green, sorcery. Choose one creature, destroy the rest. So the way this card came about was Gavin was making From the Vault.

And From the Vault was like From the Vault Annihilation, I think it was called. It was just things that blew everything up. And one of his problems was he was trying hard to get representatives from all the colors. So he came to me and said, look, we're going to do a preview card. Can you,

I don't even know if the card ended up, I don't know if it ended up being a preview card, but at the time it was going to be a preview card. I don't know whether, maybe it made it in the set. But he came to me and said, we're going to do a preview card. I have no green cards that blow things up. Green doesn't blow things up. Could you, I know you are making, you know, I want to put in a preview card. I have no green cards that blow things up. Green doesn't blow things up. Could you, I know you are making, you know,

I want to put in a wedge card. Could you make a wedge card that's black, white, and green? Black and white do destroy creatures. Could you make a black, white, green card so you're,

or I think you just said, could you give us a green card that can destroy things? I don't care if there's other colors in it. Could you do that? And I said,

oh yeah, I can. I knew we were doing Wedge. I wanted to put a Wedge preview card in. And green with black and white was beautiful because black and white are the colors that do this. So the idea is, well, what if green kind of protects something? That's what green does. Green says, I'm going to save a creature.

And white and black do what white and black does, which is I'm going to destroy everything. And you put them together, you got a pretty cool card. I forget who my team made this. I want to say Gottlieb, but one of my team members, I said to them, guys, I want an Abzan creature kill card,

but I want it in Abzan. And I want it to feel black, white, and green. And somebody came back with this card, and like I said, I think it was Gottlieb. And it was perfect. Awesome. It went in the set. It was one of the earliest things we did, and it stayed all the way through. And it's just an, perfect. Like, awesome. It went in the set. It was one of the earliest things we did. And it stayed all the way through. And it's just an awesome card, so.

Okay, I made it all the way to D. So I did three letters today. Maybe if I'm on this pattern, I will finish before the end of time. But we are done for today, because I'm in my parking space. And what we all know that means, means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic so I'll see you next time for more cons of Tarkir