Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #274 - Fate Reforged, Part 2

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Mark continues with part 2 of his five-part series on the design of Fate Reforged.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, or this, today's a continuation of my Fate Reforged podcast. I started last time, and I talked a lot about sort of how it came together. So today I'm going to get to the cards. I have more story to tell, but I usually like to tell that story while going through the cards. So we're going to start today with Abzan Beastmaster. We always start with A. I always have a lot of A's because usually I have lots to say in the beginning

and I have a whole podcast of A's half the time and then I start zooming through the alphabet a little bit faster. Okay, Abzan Beastmaster is a green card. It costs two and a green. It's a 2-1 Hound Shaman because there are Enochs, I think. They're dog people. By the way, at the beginning

of upkeep, you draw a card if you control the creature with the highest toughness. So one of the themes that was going on in green is caring about toughness. And so this is a good example of a card that does that. One of the things that we try to do when we make sets is we map out the archetypes. Usually the two color archetypes, but when there's a wedge set, then there's also the three color archetypes. So in this set, we wanted to make sure that you're either

playing a wedge color, three color, or playing a two color. Wedge being the priority. But the idea was we wanted to make sure that different color combinations had different facets to focus on, so even if you were playing the same wedge, that there was some variance within the wedge. One of the things to realize is

when people draft a set, not everybody drafts a set. Some people do, but the people that do draft it draft it a lot. A dedicated drafter could draft a set 30, 40 times. And so one of the things we do to make sure a set's fun for the drafters is make sure there's enough depth, that there's a lot of options that you can do, that when you're drafting, there's different ways to go. And so part of that was, okay, we're doing a wedge set. Let's make sure every wedge has different facets

to it. So, you know, there's clearly a theme. Each of the wedges definitely had a certain style of play it pushed toward, but we wanted to make sure there's little a theme. Each of the wedges definitely had a certain style of play it pushed toward. But we wanted to make sure there's little things going on. Also, we wanted to make sure that you could draft two color if need be. The two color we pushed in Concentrate to Archaea, so Concentrate to Archaea and Fate for Forge had it, was pushing enemy two color. Because the idea when you're drafting wedges,

start by drafting enemy, and then you have two options to go into. It's the same reason that we moved Dragon's Dirt Dark here from being Enemy to Ally, is we wanted to make you just draft completely differently. And so, there is an Enemy focus that goes on here. Like I said last time, there was one cycle

of Enemy cards. They don't really fit when you draft it. So, there are cards that make a lot more sense when you draft it with this set than the next set. We didn't do a lot of them, just a little bit, and we stayed away from three-color cards altogether. You can, when you're playing Dreadsark here, it is possible to

play a two-color enemy deck, but it is very hard. And so we didn't do too much of it here. But anyway, this is a good example of a theme, caring about toughness. It's something that kind of was an Abzan thing, and centered a little bit in green. But one of the things that's neat is Abzan had a way

of building itself up. Outlast, which is a mechanic that was in cons, put plus one, plus one counters on it. Bolster, which is a mechanic that shows up in Fate Reforged, and Dragons put plus one counters on it. So this plan is all about building up, and so Caring About Toughness is one way to do that.

Okay, next. Abzan Kingard. Three and a green, so a green creature, four mana, three, three, human warrior. It has lifelink if you control a black or white permanent. Okay, so this is another Abzan card. Starting with AB.

So this is a good example. I talked about this an example of a card that does this, where, okay, the card feels Abzan in that it's green, and on the card it says white, and it says black. All three of the Abzan colors are referenced on this card. Wow, it feels very Abzan, but the secret is you don't really need to have white and black cards. This card really, on some level, I mean, it's not hybrid exactly, but it has a similar quality hybrid, which it says, oh, I need a white or black card.

This card is just as powerful in a green-white deck as it is a green-white-black deck. In fact, maybe slightly, well, depends how many white and black cards you play. But if you played an equal number of white and black cards or white cards, it doesn't matter. It's the same thing. Notice, by the way, that the ability it grants

is an ability only granted by the shared color. Green normally does not get lifelink, but black does and white does. So this is one of the things from time to time people will point out cards that I'll say green doesn't have lifelink. They'll go,

but what about Abzan Kingard? And my answer there is, whenever you see lifelink on a non-white or black creature, what you will notice is either it requires a colored activation or it requires you to have a particular color. Meaning that it's not an inherent green thing. Now, I would admit if lifelink was going to go on a third color, not that I want to put it on a third color, green is probably where i would stick it green has a green is a another color that cares about life gaining after white and so um it being in green is probably where you want to stick it if it's the third color but anyway um there's a good example where this is not proof that green

is supposed to get lifelink this is a proof that white or black of lifelink and you need to have white or black in your deck to be able to access it. I did like how these cards were nice in that they were pretty simple. They had a flavor of the three colors, but we could put them in a place where you could make them for limited, and that was pretty cool. Okay, next.

Abzan Rune Maker. Let's get through some Abzan cards. So Abzan Rune Maker is white. It costs two and a white. It's an enchantment. Sorry, Abzan Rune Mark. I read that wrong. Abzan Rune Mark. white. It costs two and a white. It's an enchantment. Oh, that's right. Abzan Rune Mark. I read that wrong. Abzan Rune Mark. There's a cycle of Rune Marks. So, it's two and a white for an enchantment. It's an aura. The enchanted creature gets plus two,

plus two, and then you get vigilance if you have a black or a green creature. So, here's something that's interesting here. This one, the Rune Marks were done slightly differently. So the creature said, I get you access to something you don't have

if you have the right color. What the rune mark does is it says, okay, you get plus two, plus two, and then I grant you an ability that's in color if you have one of your allies. So the interesting thing is, while green has vigilance, black doesn't have vigilance. black doesn't have vigilance.

Black doesn't get vigilance. But white gets vigilance. So it's a white runemark. So the runemarks all grant a plus two, plus two, and then an incolorability if you have one of the wedge colors with you. So this is white. So it's obz and looking for black and green.

Okay. So you might ask, why are the two cycles different? Why does the runemark have an incolor ability and the creature cycle have an offcolor ability? The answer is, well, if we wanted to make both, for example, let's say we said, okay, it had to be an incolor ability. said, okay, it had to be an incolorability. One of the things that you would have to do is be careful not to repeat. And it's tricky.

Getting ten abilities that are, like, for example, I probably, I don't know if the two cycles ever repeat. It's the kind of thing where they could if you shifted them off colors. But anyway, it's just one of the things when you're making cycles that have a similarity to them, you need

to do something to change them up a little bit. Obviously one's an aura cycle, one's a creature cycle, but both of them are granting abilities when they're the correct colors there, and so we just needed to play them up a little bit differently. I'm not sure what... I don't quite

know how it ended up... I think the creatures got made first is my memory, and then we made the runemarks later. But one of the things that was important was the idea of just having enough things that sort of... We wanted there to be a flavor of the clan. This is the proto-clans, but the clans are there. The clans exist.

Then when you go back to the time of Sarkhan's Choice, the clans are there and the dragons are there, and the idea is only one is going to stay. Are the clans going to stay or are the dragons going to stay? Are the clans... The clans in the sense of the

Khan-run clans. I guess the dragons take over the clans, as the clans say. Either the Khans or the dragons. We mean, I guess the dragons take over the clans, as the clans say. But either the cons or the dragons. You know, we'll get to the cards where you actually literally choose cons or dragons. But that's kind of the point right here. Okay, next. Abzan Skycaptain.

We're not done with Abzan just yet. Because three and a white, so four mana for a 2-2 bird soldier, because it's an Abzan. It's an Aven. And it is flying. And when it dies, you bolster too. So let's talk about bolster.

So bolster is an ability that says whenever... A bolster says... It's a keyword action. So a keyword action means it's a verb that says to do something. And so we make keyword actions from time to time that just say, okay, this is a shortcut to say something happens. So bolster was an ability. But what bolster says is, when you bolster,

put bolster N, put N plus one plus one counters on the creature you control with the least amount of toughness. If there's a tie, you as active player who's casting the spell get to choose where it goes. And the idea here is a couple things. We wanted

to make a mechanic that played nicely without last. And what we figured is the easiest way to do that was to a mechanic that played nicely with Outlast. And what we figured is the easiest way to do that was to mess around with plus one, plus one counters. And the reason is Outlast puts plus one, plus one counters on, but a whole bunch of the Outlast cards

and other cards in the guild care about having a plus one, plus one counter. So the idea was if we make a mechanic that generates plus one, plus one counters, well then it'll work nicely with the Outlast strategy because Outlast rewards you for generates plus one, plus one counters, well, then it'll work nicely with the Outlast strategy because Outlast rewards you for having plus one, plus one counters.

So we tried a whole bunch of things to put in plus one, plus one counters. In the end, the problem we were running into was it's what we call a win more mechanic, where it's like, oh, well, you just tended to put it on the biggest creature, and so just the creature that was already a problem just got more a problem. And that's when we said, oh, well, you just tended to put it on the biggest creature, and so just the creature that was already a problem just got more a problem.

And that's when we said, oh, well, by the... So one of the things in design that's very interesting is taking away complete control from the player. Now, there is this idea that, no, what the player wants is to have complete control. That's just better for the player if they can choose everything. And the answer is, I talk about this

when I talk about just game design in general, is the role of good game design is not to give the player everything they want. It is not to make things easy for the player. What you want to do is make the player have to make decisions and make choices, and that where the fun of gameplay comes from is

not that you can always do what you want, it's that you have to adapt with what you're able to do. And so one of the tricks about making game design is, making mechanics and such, is there's a lot of fun game design where the player is forced to do certain things and then has to manipulate how they act to do that. So, for example, we found that bullshit was kind of cool. We wanted to put it on one of the smallest things.

Now, I think we toyed around with both power and toughness. That's why it's, that last podcast, it's hard to remember which was power and toughness because we had tried both. I think in the end we had done toughness because Abden was all about having high toughness and so, and there was some fun gameplay where, so

my point is you have to manipulate what you have with toughness. You have to be conscious of it. Now sometimes you bolster and just the thing that gets bolstered gets bolstered. But other times you can plan ahead. You can go, oh, wait a minute. If I do this and then don't cast that yet and do that, you know, that you can help set up some of the things, that you have some control. But the key is you don't have total control, and that's really important.

That a bolstered end would just put end counter to a target creature, it's not particularly an interesting mechanic. It's like, okay, what's the biggest thing that's getting, or the thing that's getting through, I'll just make it bigger. But now, now you have to consider, now, you know,

I've definitely seen players, like, sacrifice something so they can get something, get the counters on another creature they really want, or they go, okay, when we get the creature

on this thing, you know, they coordinate, like this, you have a bolster one and a bolster three. Well, you bolster one on the thing

you care less about so it gets out of the range, so the thing you care more about becomes tied for the lowest toughness. Stuff like that. But anyway, as I said, I talked about this last time, we made the mechanics, the new mechanics in Dragon's Snarkir design. So, Fate Reforged

was given manifest from Exploratory Design, and all the other new mechanics, which ended up being Dash and Bolster, weren't made by the Fate Reforged design team. They had Execute and make cards that used it. And one of the challenges of both Dash and Bolster was we knew that they were going to show up in the next set, so we wanted to kind of do the basic version of it.

The goal wasn't to sort of do the most complicated version. It's like introduce it, do the simplest stuff. And remember that we were trying to play up the idea of this is the path in which things are a little simpler and we see them evolve.

So in all the mechanics, we wanted the path to be slightly less evolved than the present day. Okay, next. Enoch Guide. One in a green for a one-one hound scout.

So the Eynachs are our dog people that get introduced here. Okay, so when you enter the battlefield, you choose one. Do you want a plus one, plus one counter?

Or do you want to search your library for a basic land and put it on top of your library? So an interesting decision. I have one and a green. I can have a two-two creature,

which often is very good. We've learned that the grizzly bears often can be a fine creature. Or, instead, you can use it to guarantee that your next draw is a basic land. So it's like it's a 1-G-1-1 that can fix your mana, or if you don't need to fix your mana, it can just be

a 2-2 creature. So, we made a cycle of these. We were trying to get across, like I talked about this last time, we were trying to get across a choice theme, and one of the ideas we liked a lot is, are you beefing it up

and making it stronger? So, you always can choose a plus one, plus one counter, or a general effect that early in the game you might want to have, or not even early in the game, an effect you might want to have.

This particular effect is better earlier in the game, but there are reasons later in the game sometimes you'll do it. Sometimes you're just dex dating. I'm low enough that I want to just get my land so I'm drawing my better cards. Okay, next. Alicia who smiles at death. So Alicia who smiles at death is a red creature. Costs two and a red. She's a legendary creature, human warrior. She's a 3-2 creature with first strike

and when she attacks you can pay two hybrid mana, white black hybrid mana so white or black, white or black and if you do you return a creature with power two or less to the battlefield attacking so from the graveyard

so the idea is she is in, Alicia is in Mardu colors. She's base red, but white and black. And Mardu is about attacking with lots of small things. The idea here is every time she attacks, if you spend white or black mana, you can attack with a small creature. And so the idea is if if she goes in a deck with lots of small creatures, she can every turn bring up more small creatures. And it doesn't matter if your opponent kills some of the small creatures, she gets to keep bringing them out.

And she has first strike. She's 3-2 first strike, so she's a little harder to block herself. Not impossible, but a little harder to block. So this is a good example of, we made a legendary cycle that had the hybrid. The idea is, these things are supposed to guide you. That says, what are your strategy, what are you doing, and this is just reinforcing that. Now the tricky part of this is you wanted to do something that in the hybrid that either color could do.

So it's a red card, creature with first strike, that's fine. The ability to animate something and attack with it, the two colors that do the most animation out of the graveyard are white and black. But white usually has restriction that it gets back small things. So the idea of the fact that only does small things, okay, white does small things, black does all of it, so small is an acceptable subset,

okay, it makes a cool card. And once again, this card works if you're putting it in a Mardu deck that has access to red, white, and black, or it equally works in a red-black deck. So when you get to dragons, if you're putting it in a Mardu deck that has access to red, white, and black or it equally works in a red-black deck so when you get to dragons, if you're playing red-black you can easily put this in your deck okay, now the coolest

part about this card has to do with the story one of the things that happened was that the creative team realized that there was a good opportunity to tell a story they wanted to tell about a trans character. And so we

wrote a story, so Uncharted Realms is the short story. So we've been starting to tell our stories through Uncharted Realms. Novels had not been real effective and so we found is short, free short form stories have proven to be the best. That people didn't want to buy didn't want to buy and didn't want to read long novels,

so now we're telling the story in smaller bursts. It allows us to make it easier to read, we can change perspective a lot more, we can jump around and tell a lot more stories. And this is, for example, the kind of story we could tell that a novel would never be able to tell. So the cool thing was, one of the members of the creative team, named James, So the cool thing was one of the members of the creative team named James has a daughter who's trans. And so had very first was able to write a story, a very personal story where he was able to get a lot of firsthand sort of understanding. And anyway, we wrote this story. So in the history of Under the Intermediate Realms currently, as of this recording, this was the most read story we've ever run.

It got a lot of press, there was a lot of attention about it, just not a lot of fantasy games have even a trans character. I understand this is not a giant character, but it was something that we couldn't center a story around, and we saw an opportunity to tell a story

that was organic. And that's another important thing, is one of the things I know the creative team has been working a lot on is making sure that people who play the game see people who are them within the game. That is really, really powerful. And so it's something that all of Wizards has done. I mean, the creative team is the crux of the possibilities on them. But we want people to be able to see themselves in the game.

And we've been working really hard. There's more room to grow. We're continually doing this. I like to feel every year we're getting better at it. But Alicia's a great story of an attempt to do that. The response was so positive. It was insanely positive. The amount of mail

that everybody got, that I got, it was really nice. I'm a firm believer, and this is something that Wizards has bought into, and it's important to us, is we want people to be able to see themselves in the game. It is really powerful when you can play and you can see someone that is you. And so in every level of that, there's so many, that means so many different things.

But we are trying really hard to be able to do that and do more of that. Okay, next. Alicia's Vanguard. Three and a black for a 3-3 creature. It's an Orc Warrior with Dash 2B. So let's talk Dash. So Dash was the other mechanic that we made in Dragon's Recon here that got pulled back into Fate Reforged.

The funny thing was we really liked Raid. Raid had a lot more design space. We thought we were going to do Raid. We actually thought we were going to make a new mechanic for Red-Green. But two things. I mean, we knew we had for red green but two things we knew we had to do white green we knew we had to do obzon because there wasn't

enough design space in outlast it was cool but it just wasn't that deep we knew that we wanted to do more prowess and more delve which meant that either we did black red or we did red green at first we thought we were going to do red-green only because Ferocious, we knew would be the

least well-received of the five mechanics in cons. It has design space, but it's I don't know, it's just the one we're like, oh, maybe we'll replace that one. But one thing we realized was A, we made Dash. Dash was the very first mechanic that got made

in Dragon's Secure Design. And the funny story about it is that, A, we made that. Dash was the very first mechanic that I made in Dragon's Tarkir design. And the funny story about it is that, well, I guess I'll tell the story here. I'll probably retell it a little bit in Dragon's Tarkir. But we were given an assignment to make a red-black mechanic. And both I and Sam Stoddard independently, like, turned in the exact same mechanic at the same time for the same homework assignment, which was Dash. I think we called it, I called it Blitz, I believe. But anyway, we were looking for something, for Black-Red, we were looking for something that played well with an aggressive attacking strategy. Anyway, we made it, we loved it, and then we realized that if we if we had done green white and red green then green

would have no mechanics that it already knew that like every single green thing would be new like oh well if we did black red then black red and white green don't overlap and then fine blue wouldn't get anything new but four or five colors would and every color would get something old something would be repeated so we ended up going and we liked the dash mechanic a lot and knew it had a lot of design space in it. So let's talk about dash. The neat thing about dash is it does a couple different things.

So I was inspired directly, there's a card called Viachino Sandscout, which was a creature, I think I had the right name, from Mirage, Mirage Block at least, where it's a creature that just, you attack with it every turn and it went back to your hand. And the idea was, what if we made a creature where you could opt into that?

So the question is, why would you opt into that? Well, this card shows the first reason you'd opt into it. It's a 3-3 that costs 4 mana, but for 3 mana, so the idea is, if you use the dash cost, you get a, it gains haste, so it can attack right away, and it goes back to your hand. So the idea here was,

okay, well for 4 mana, I can permanently have a 3-3, or for 3 mana, I can have a 3-3 that can attack right now. So in turn 3, I have to make a decision. Do I want to, and let's say I have nothing else I have to cast, even if I'm planning to cast in turn four, if I have nothing else to cast turn three, hey, I get three damage in.

So that is where Dash started. Dash was like, okay, I have a creature that I can pay less to attack earlier. But then we discovered that Dash actually does a whole bunch of cool things. That there are reasons you might want to pay more for Dash. Why would you pay more for the Dash? And the answer is that there's times in which you want the creature back in your hand.

The easy example is an enter the battlefield effect. Where let's say I do something, I generate some effect. Well, the idea is if I use Dash, I get to do that again. So maybe I'm going to pay more because I want the returning back to my hand is not a negative, but a positive. And that is one of the neat things about Dash. We'll talk more about Dash. I'll get some other Dash cards as we go along. Okay, next.

Ambush Krotik. I think I pronounced it wrong. K-R-O-T-I-Q. Five in the green for a 5-5 insect with Trample. And when it enters a battlefield, you return another creature you control to your hand. So one of the things, blue gets to bounce anything, gets to take a creature and put it back in its owner's hand,

white gets to bounce its own stuff reactionary as a spell, and green gets to bounce its stuff as a cost. The fun thing about this is that it's neat in that for example, five and green for a 5-5 creature, it's not that, I mean, this ability is costed kind of neutrally. Maybe you don't get a 5-green 5-5 trample,

maybe you're saving a mana or two, but the cool part about this, much like I just talked about with dash, is sometimes the returning things, it's cool that you get to return them. For example, if you have a dash creature that you played without dash, you could bounce it back and now you can dash it if you need to. If you have a creature that enters the battlefield and bolsters, you can get that back. If you have, you know, there are a lot of ETB effects, enter the battlefield effects you might want to get back. It might be I made a choice because there's a lot of choiceB effects, Enter the Battlefield effects you might want to get back. It might be, I made a choice, because there's a lot of

choice decisions in this set, that I chose one thing, but now I want to choose a different thing. You know, previously I made my creature a little bit bigger, but now I want the spell effect. You can do stuff like that. And so this just played into the general theme that we wanted. And it was stuck

in mono green so that you could put it in different clans. Different clans would use this ability differently. Okay, next! Archfiend of Depravity. So Archfiend of Depravity is three black black for a 5-4 demon. It is flying, and at the beginning of your opponent's end step, they have to choose two creatures they control and sacrifice the rest. So basically what this demon does is it only lets the opponent have two creatures in play at a time. I mean,

they get it for their turn. They can do dash and do haste things. But then at the end of their turn, they only get to keep two creatures. And the fun part about this card is demons have this nice flavor of making your opponent have to make tough decisions. And this is like a cool decision. Like, you can only have two creatures. Which ones do you want to keep? So it was very demon-y. I liked that. I think I talked about it in Kanta Tarkir that originally we weren't going to do demons.

The only demons were going to be the cat demons. And then eventually they decided they didn't have enough of the iconics in. And so demons came back to figure out a way to make Demons work. Okay. Atarka, World Render. Five red, green, seven mana for a Legendary Dragon. It's got Flying and Trample. And whenever a Dragon you control attacks, it gets Double Strike.

Okay, so one of the cool things here was trying to... This was a cycle. It was a rare cycle of legendary dragons. These were the dragons that were going to become the dragon warlords. So we met the Khans in Khans of Tarkir who ran the clans. Well, once Sarkhan goes back in time and changes things and the dragons aren't extinct, the dragons are going to run the clans. And so we want to introduce you to. So one of the tricky things was, I think the past is like 1,300 some years in the past. And so there's not a lot of creatures.

One of the things we had originally wanted to do was do a lot more direct, like, here's young version of the creature, here's old version of the creature. But the problem we ran into is, well, 1,300 years is a long time. There's not a lot of things that live 1,300 years. And basically, we came up with two things, or a few things. Like, the idea was, well, a dragon at least. Dragons live a long time. A dragon can live 1,300 years.

I mean, Nicol Bolas is like 25,000 years or something. Very old. And so we decided that we would do... And we knew that when we did them in Khansatark here, we wanted to blow them out a little more. So what we wanted to do here was introduce them, but make them less special than they appear in

Dragons of Tarkir. So first off, we made them rare, instead of mythic rare, because we knew we'd do them a little bit splashier in the big set. We also wanted to make them a little bigger, so we tried to make them a smidgeon smaller, so you get a little sense of growth. So, for example, a Tarka is... Where's the Tarka? What example, a Tarka is...

Where's a Tarka? Is... What size is a Tarka? I didn't write down the size. He was a little smaller, I think like a 4, 4, 5, 5, but he gets bigger. All the ones get bigger in their dragons

version. The other thing that we did was, I think all of them grant an ability to your dragons when they attack. So all of them kind of encourage your dragons to attack, and it does something that's in color for kind of both the clan it sits in and

well, both the con clan and the dragon clan. So the idea of double strike, I mean double strike, obviously green doesn't normally grant double strike, but the style of Double Strike, I mean, Double Strike, obviously, Green doesn't normally grant Double Strike, but the style of play that both the red-green blue deck played in Temur and the red-green deck when you got to the Atarka clan, if you will, made sense, that it's something that you'd want. And it encouraged you, it was something where we knew

as you got more dragons later on, as the dragon scene happened, that this card would go up in power, that it would be even better when there were more dragons. We also were trying to save a little bit of space. One of the problems we had was we knew that we had to make

a whole bunch of dragons in the next set. So we cycled these dragons out just to chew up less space. Because if we had made, each one had its own unique flavor, it would be harder down the road to make more unique dragons in the very next set. Okay, next. Aven Surveyor. So three blue blue for a 2-2 bird scout. It's an Aven. Flying. And when it enters the battlefield, you can choose. You can either put a plus one plus one counter on it or you can then summon a creature. So it's for five mana what do you want? A 3-3 flyer

or a 2-2 flyer that acts like a mana ward that bounces a creature. And those are both interesting effects. You know, sometimes you'd want one, sometimes you want the other. So it made a cool and interesting choice. The other thing that was fun is and there's a little bit of a bounce theme, I just talked about that in green

that sometimes in the set because of the choice making because of some of the things you occasionally bounce your own things not too often with this card but it was open-ended so that if you wanted to feel clever that you could

that there's opportunities for you to do that hey I finally get a B I'm not too far from work but the number of times I've done a podcast on a set and I don't even get past A, although I guess that's a large set this is a small set, so maybe with a small set I get all the way to B before I get to work

Okay, next is Battle of Brawler One and a Black for a 2-2 Orc Warrior and he gets plus one, plus oh, and first strike if you control a red or white permanent. Okay, so this is another example of the cycle of creatures that get better. So the idea is, this is a Mardu creature.

It's a black orc that requires red or white. But once again, it's a Kholaghan tribe when you get to dragons, and that's black-red. Okay, well, in general, what do you want? Well, the idea is, this is a Tutu creature. So by the way, it's so funny. In Ishrad, we had a fight tooth and nail. There's a giant fight of whether we can make a 1-B 2-2 zombie.

A vanilla zombie. And now, it's a 1-black 2-2 that, oh, by the way, could be a 3-2 first strike. So, the idea here is that black traditionally doesn't get First Strike. I guess it's tertiary in First Strike. Way back when Black Knight had First Strike.

And so there's just... A lot of people work on Magic or old-timers. And so there's just fond memories of Black with First Strike. It's not really supposed to get First Strike. Every once in a blue... Sort of it's grandfathered in. And every once in a blue moon. Usually it's Knight-themed. But anyway, normally it doesn't normally tend to get First Strike. Every once in a blue moon, sort of it's grandfathered in, and every once in a blue moon, usually it's night-themed.

But anyway, normally, it doesn't normally tend to get it. So here, if you have red or white, those are the colors that have First Strike. So it is peaking for you there. It is something to notice, like, while green doesn't have lifelink, I said that green is a color

that probably would most next get lifelink. First Strike's another example where black, it's number three for First Strike. So this cycle definitely sort of paid attention to what it was giving the color so that, like, it wasn't exactly in the color, but wasn't completely out. It was closer than other abilities.

Okay, next. Battlefront Cruis' Shock. Four and a green for three, four beasts. So Cruis' Shock is a beast. It can't be blocked by more than one creature. So it's five mana, four and a green for 3, 4 beasts so a crew shock is a beast it can't be blocked by more than one creature so it's 5 mana, 4 and a green and then creatures you control with a plus 1, plus 1 counter also can't be

blocked except by one creature so this is what I call the stalking ability it's the reverse of menace so menace says, unless, you know I'm so scary that you can't block me alone. The stalking ability is like, I'm sure the flavor here, it's just that I can only be blocked by one creature.

I'm sneaky enough and running through the forest or something that only one creature maybe is able to find me and block me. I don't know, is that the flavor? I don't know what the flavor of stalking is. It's a green ability. So this is another one that played nicely with both Bolster and Outlast. It's a theme we started in Cons that continues here in Fate of granting abilities to creatures you control with plus one plus one counters.

And the idea is I have a bunch of ways to get plus one counters on creatures, and then now they have an ability. And this ability is they get the stalking ability. Okay. Next. Blood Fire Enforcers. So three and a red for a 5-2 human monk.

So this is Jeskai, I got monks. It has first strike and trample as long as you have an instant and sorcery card in your graveyard. So this is kind of funny. There's a lot of creatures that gain abilities if certain things are true, but usually it's color in this set. But one of the things that we were

trying to do with the Jeskai is that they are the spell-based. They were the wedge clan that most cared about spells. They had prowess as their ability. Prowess cares about non-creature spells. And so this one cares more directly about instances and sorceries, but a lot of the non-creature spells that prowess cares about are instances andceries.

And so this thing is, okay, you want to be playing enough Incidents and Sorceries that you can get one of each in your graveyard. Well, if you're playing Prowess creatures, you kind of want to do that anyway. So it's just playing into the theme of trying to give you something that you can do to help make your creature better,

but using a way that's thematically tied. Okay, guys. I have arrived at work, and I'm late for a meeting, so I have to quickly wrap this up. Obviously, we got to be, which means that we, this will be continued, and I have more podcasts to do, probably multiple more

on all the different cards of Fate Reforged. But anyway, guys, I hope you are enjoying our walk through it. It is fun looking back at sets, and Fate Reforged in particular was a great set. So anyway, I'm now in my parking walk through it it is fun looking back at sets and Fate Reforged in particular was a great set so anyway I'm now in my

parking space so we all know what that means instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys soon