Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #297 - Creature Types

Episode Date: January 15, 2016

Mark talks about the design and creative work behind creature types.

I'm pulling the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I want to talk about one tiny piece of a Magic card. And a piece that is an interesting piece, the creature type. So, obviously on a card, so one of the things is Magic has seven different types of cards. Originally it had seven and it still has seven, but it's changed a little bit. So, obviously, it has instants and sorceries. It has enchantments and artifacts. It has land. It has planeswalkers. But the one of which there's more than anything else is creatures. And one of the things that Richard started from the very beginning of the game was the idea of creature types,

which meant that creatures had a grouping, had a subtyping to them. And so if you cared, it just gave some extra flavor. And even in Alpha, he actually used it mechanically. So for example, Alpha had three what we call lords, which are creatures that usually grant plus one, plus one, and some ability. Lords don't always have to grant plus one, plus one, but traditionally people think of them doing that. So the three ones in Alpha were Goblin King, Lord of Atlantis,

and what was the zombie called? There's a zombie one. What was the zombie one called? Zombie something. I'm blanking on it anyway there were three that cared about a creature type

so Goblin King cared about goblins interestingly enough by the way the original three lords themselves weren't the creature type that they cared about the Lord of Atlantis himself

wasn't a merfolk the Goblin King wasn't a goblin the zombie whatever wasn't a zombie we later would change that and have them be the thing but not affect themselves. We sort of pseudo-eroded them. But anyway,

and the idea was, in Alpha, there was one merfolk. It was a, for a single blue mana, was a 1-1 creature. That was it. Merfolk of the Pearl Trident. Same with goblins. Goblins, there was one, I think there were two goblins. There was

red for a 1-1, one red mana for a 1-1, Mons the Goblin Raider, named after Mons Johnson, who still to this day works in R&D, a friend of Richard's. And there was Goblin Balloon Brigade, which was a red 1-1 that could also activate for one red to give flying. Not something red does a lot

these days, but did back in the day. And then the Goblin King and the Lord of Atlantis cared. Zombies, I think there was one zombie, which was two and a black, was, what's it called, scathed zombies, which are two and a black for a 2-2. So three mana, one of which is black, for a 2-2 vanilla creature. So if you look at the original alpha, the creature types that mattered,

meaning there was a card that cared about them, were mostly vanilla. I mean, it was a vanilla 1-1, a vanilla 1, a 1-1 with an activated flying, and a 2-2. And one of the things that Richard did was he said, okay, well, if you want to, you could fill up your deck with these things. And then here's something that make them matter.

Why would I want to play with the 1-1 Murfolk of the Portal Trident? Well, because this card makes them all bigger, makes them a 2-2 and gives them Island Walk, I believe. So early on, I think, so for those who don't remember, early Magic, or weren't around long ago, when Magic began, the creature type line was actually a little different. Instead of saying creature hyphen the creature type, it said summon and named the creature type. So if you were a goblin, it would say

summon goblin. We later decided that we liked having all the card types on the card type line, because you just had to know that a summon goblin was a creature, and if you destroy target creature, you can destroy it, even though nowhere in the card did it say creature. So we decided that it was easier when we had cards that referred to card types, that we

should label what the card types were. So we got rid of the summon and just made it creature dash whatever. But if you look really, really early on, it was used as more of a flavor than anything else, but Richard used the marker for mechanical reasons even in the very beginning. The other thing you'll notice in

very early magic was things had a singular creature type. That, you know, if you were something, you were, if you were a soldier, you would be summoned soldier. We eventually got to race class. I'll get to that in a second.

But back in the day, you were one thing. Whenever you were, you were one thing. So let me talk a little bit about why the creature type's in a very interesting position from an R&D standpoint. So the creative team, which is the creative team is broken into two teams, which is the story team and the art team. The art team is in charge of the visuals

and the story team is in charge of all the text and the story and the creation stuff. So the story team is responsible for the names and flavor text and they're responsible for the creature type. But, and here's where the creature type is the unique part of the card, sometimes R&D cares about it because we're in charge of the mechanics.

So on most cards, the creature type is flavor. It's not mechanical. But it can be mechanical. So what happens is whenever R&D or whatever design development care about a certain creature type because we're doing a mechanical thing in which the creature type matters, we put an exclamation point after it in our database.

And so when someone sees that from the creative team, like if we have zombie exclamation point, what we're saying is this needs to be a zombie. It matters that it's a zombie. We're mechanically going to care that it's a zombie. Now, sometimes when we do tribal sets, what we'll do is it's not that on a card by card basis necessarily we always dictate. We'll dictate, okay, this matters, a certain portion, a certain as fan of the cards need to be this race. And so we'll say to the creative team is you need to meet this as fan, but you have some give and take on what to do. Also, sometimes we'll do what we call the negative,

where let's say we've made some tribal sets and one of them is really strong. Goblins is a good example from the past. There's been points where the goblin deck's been really, really strong, and we'll make a card that's good in red. And if it's a goblin, it would be too good. So what we'll do there is we make a note to say not goblin. This can be anything you want it to be. It just can't be a goblin. And so... But anyway, the creature development is interesting.

It's in the space in which it's the only thing really that the creative team and design development both care about and there's an interesting tension because sometimes one of the things that'll happen is the creative team will come up with definitions for what something's supposed to be a classic example will be in pharaohs for example we had a minotaur tribal the problem was that the creative team wanted minotaurs to be of a certain size to make sense as minotaurs they didn't like the idea team wanted minotaurs to be of a certain size to make sense as minotaurs. They didn't like the idea of tiny

minotaurs. But we were trying to make a tribal deck out of them, and so we ran this problem where the creative team didn't want to make small things minotaurs, but we wanted to make sure you could curve out your minotaurs. And so we definitely had to sort of negotiate to figure out how to do that

so that it both stayed true to what the flavor of a Minotaur was but allowed us to make the cards we needed to make. Now, another thing that'll happen with the creature type is... Okay, so let me talk about the big innovation of our creature type, which happened during Mirrodin, which is funny because right before Mirrodin was Onslaught,

and Onslaught was a tribal set, and interestingly, we made this change to add what we call race class right after the set that had tribal. So let me talk about what race class is. So, one of the things that Dungeon Dragons does, and other games, I assume, I know from Dungeon Dragons,

is what they call race class, which says, okay, you're of a certain race. Are you human? Are you goblin? Are you elf? Are you goblin? Are you elf? Are you an orc? What are you? What race are you? But then you also have a class, which means you have a job. Are you a fighter? Are you a thief? Are you a wizard? Are you a cleric? What are you?

And so in Dungeons & Dragons, you often say, oh, I have an orc fighter. I have a halfling thief. I have an elf wizard. Elf wizards are not, no, elves are more. Anyway, you can have an elf wizard, I assume. Sure. Anyway, yeah, they're elf wizards.

Why am I being anti-elf wizards? They're elf wizards. So one of the things we realized was that creature types were pretty valuable. And one of the things that happened was, um, like I said, normally in magic, creature types always were one per card. Um, and not only that, artifacts didn't even have creature types. Artifact creatures were just, um, artifact creature and, and they didn't have a type. But as we started playing around, well, actually, I'm getting ahead of myself.

It goes back to Odyssey. So I was in charge of Odyssey, and I had always been very fascinated by the creature types. So in Odyssey, I made an interesting decision. I said, you know what? Let's mess around with the creature. We always do the same creature types. Red's always goblin, and green's always elf. Let's shake it up a little bit.

So what I did was I changed it so none of the creature types were stuff we normally did. Then red, instead of being goblins, were dwarves. And green were centaurs and also these insects called the Nentuko. And, you know And instead of having sapling tokens, I had squirrel tokens and blue had cephalids instead of merfolk. So I was trying to shake things up and do

things a little differently. While I was doing that, I started experimenting with the idea of having things that had more than one creature type. So there were the aven, which were these bird, humanoid bird type. So there were the Aven, which were these humanoid bird things. So I made the Aven. They were all or mostly bird soldiers.

I guess there were a few bird wizards. And then the Nantuko, instead of just being insect, I think I made insect, either insect clerics or insect druids. I think they were insect druids. I think either druid or cleric. So I started sort of having multiple types on one thing. And once I did that, I found that I could, just interesting things that could happen.

Because I can make a card that cares about birds, and I can make a card that cares about soldiers, and all of a sudden, the Aven, both cards apply to it. So I went to the creative team and i said look it it seems like we are restricting ourselves a little bit flavor wise here and it would allow us some more you know more room to play around with with mechanics so i pitched to brady domermith who's the creative director at the time um the idea of, I guess I pitched it to the whole creative team, the idea of, what if we adopted a race class system?

Now, it was a little controversial, interestingly. You'd think that's a pretty straightforward request. One thing was, up until that time, we had never done human as a creature type. Human had always been, wherever you were, if you were a soldier, well, you'd just be soldier.

The humans were always their class. The problem we ran into with only one Purit was humans always were a class, so humans did things, but goblins, oh, well, goblins were a race, so even though they did things,

they didn't reference it. So one of the things I did to try to convince people is we clearly, for example, would have a goblin that was doing though they did things, they didn't reference it. So one of the things I did to try to convince people is, we clearly, for example, would have a goblin that was doing wizard-like things. In fact, it might even be called Goblin Wizard, and it wasn't a wizard, and that was weird. What if we wanted cards that cared about wizards? You know, we had wizards, so did cards that cared about wizards only care about human wizards, since those are the only cards that said wizard on them?

And so eventually I convinced them that there was this viability, like, it's weird that we were sometimes race and sometimes class when races existed and class existed. But the problem was a lot of people were nervous to put human on a card. And I said, look, that's the race, they're humans, that's what they are. Why do goblins get to be goblins and elves get to be elves? Why can't humans be humans? Why do goblins get to be goblins and elves get to be elves? Why can't humans be humans?

And so, interestingly at the time, the compromise was, well, we'll make humans, but let's not care about them tribally. And I said, sure, knowing that one day we'll get comfortable with humans there, and then one day we're going to say, you know what? Hey, why don't we make humans matter? And we did. I saw that coming. But at the time, I said, okay, right now, we will not make humans matter.

But anyway, so Ray's class got a... So the thing is, I figured out during Odyssey, so it was Odyssey, Onslaught, Mirrodin. So I figured out during Odyssey, or I was experimenting during Odyssey, and it took me the range of Onslaught to convince them. And I think the thing that convinced everybody was, so Onslaught was the first

time we really did a tribal set in which the major theme was creature types. And so by doing that, I think I started to get people, like, you've got to remember, when I first pitched the idea of Onslaop having a strong tribal theme, for those that haven't listened to my Onflop podcast, Mike Elliott was the lead designer of the set, and he had put in a little teeny tiny, he had made, what are they called? He made this series of blue creatures that could change their own creature type. What was that called?

They were... My memory when I'm driving. It was from Onslaught, and I'm blinking on it. But they were creatures. They were all blue. They had the ability to change their own creature type. And then Mike

at Rare put a few cards that cared about creature type. He had a few lords, things. And when I said, the set needed something. The mechanics he had picked weren't quite working out. And Bill had me look at the set. And this was sort of my precursor to becoming head designer.

And so one of my suggestions was, I said, you know, you have a little nugget of a theme of Tribal. I think we can blow Tribal out. I think Tribal could be a really theme you could build a set around, block around. And so one of my suggestions was, I said, you know, you have a little nugget of a theme of tribal. I think we can blow tribal out. I think tribal could be a really, a theme you could build a set around, block around. And people were a little skeptical, but, you know, they said, okay, let's try. And when the set came out, like, it's very funny that I think R&D thought, like, we were making a morph set with a tribal element. And I was like, no, no, no, we're making a tribal set with a tribal element. And I was like, no, no, no, we're making a tribal set with a morph element. And it came out, and I remember actually Randy,

Randy Bueller came back from the pre-release. He's like, wow, all people talk about is the tribal stuff. He goes, a few people talk about morph, but everyone's tribe this, tribe that. I'm like, I've been saying this for months, Randy. But anyway, once people saw that onslaught, how much we could play with tribes and really make them mechanically relevant, I think

they were very receptive to the idea of doing something that would allow us to hook more on them. There was a little bit of arguments over human and stuff. It wasn't a slam dunk, but I think Onslaught helped people understand the value of creature types and what they can do for us. And so, it was quirky to change them right

after the block that cared about them. And Mirrodin was an odd place. Oh, so let's talk about artifact creatures. I have to talk about Mirrodin. So another thing that I managed to accomplish, you can tell in these stories, I've always been a huge creature type fan. In fact, if I had magic start over again,

I think I've done this podcast, I don't think magic has, magic could have more hooks to hang things on. I might consider doing some flavorful supertypes, maybe, and, you know, Ice or Fire, but... Anyway. So, Artifact Creatures used to just be Artifact Creature. They didn't have a subtype.

And once we started doing tribal stuff, we started doing things in which you could pick a tribe. Like Tempest, for example, I did this, Once we started doing tribal stuff, we started doing things in which you could pick a tribe. Tempest, for example, I did this where I made a card where you could pick a tribe. And then we started doing other choose-me kind of tribal stuff where it's like, oh, well, choose it, and then you could affect the thing you choose. And what it allowed us to do was to make cards that people could pick their own tribe, that it didn't have to be a tribe that we've even made support for. That the choose me allowed you to say, okay, well I'm going to put all these tribes together and use this card, and I'm going to choose this tribe

that you guys have never made a card out of for tribal reasons. But the problem was, when you had the choose me's, it got very confusing when it was going with artifact creatures, because they didn't have a creature type. And sometimes we started adding one when it was, like, loud.

Like, it's a mechanical dragon. Well, I guess it's a dragon. But what we do is we sometimes... So originally none of them had it. Then some of them had it. And I convinced the powers that be that it should just be a rule that all artifact creatures have creature types. And so I think we made a few stuff up, like construct, things that are good defaults. The constructs are, if you don't know what it is, well, somebody built it.

It's an artifact. So we made a few fallbacks so we always could call it something if we needed to. So one of the things that's become very interesting now is now that once tribal was on the map so once we we made creature types i mean once again i should stress from alpha richard made creature types matter um and what we always we always would put lords and stuff instead we always would like once we realized that people like them in fact the argument by the way the argument i made to get uh tribal as a thing in onslaught was how much people played the decks like in alpha people played merfolk decks merfolk decks which required lord of atlantis's and merfolk of the purple trident that's all you had and people would play that and i remember when like

the dark came out there finally were a couple more merfolk, and people were like, finally, my merfolk deck could be nothing but merfolk! You know, and Lord Atlantis, because that wasn't a merfolk. You know, and as we started making more, people were playing these decks that were not good decks, but they were having fun with them. Like, oh, it's my goblin deck.

Oh, you know, and people were even playing tribal decks in which there was nothing tribally that mattered. There was no card that cared, but they still were doing it. And I'm like, look, if people are going to do this and it's not particularly good, imagine us making it good. Imagine us making it something you want to do, you know, that if players already want to do it and it's horrible, imagine them enjoying it if it's good. And then I can manage to convince Bill at the time to try tribalal out but now the interesting thing is now Tribal has gone from kind of a

you know we make a card difference in a while to you know what Tribal is an important thing so in fact one of the things you'll notice is most blocks nowadays have some Tribal component some blocks have a lot so if you look at something like Innistrad, okay, Innistrad had a tribal theme, right?

There were monsters, there was vampires and werewolves and zombies and spirits. There were humans. You know, there was actually like, the set had built into it five, you know, sort of tribal factions.

It was done in a lower level, especially in Innistrad. Dark Ascension ramped it up a little bit. But the idea was, that was a set in which we wanted to be able to build the zombie deck, but we didn't want to force you in drafting. One of the things that is an issue on tribal is

so we originally did tribal in Onslaught, and then we brought it back in Lorwyn, and we ramped it up. We're like, oh, On onslaught, that's nothing. We can take this to 11 and we really and it got so ramped up that it's what we call on rails where you draft and you make a choice and

once you made a choice early on, once you took a powerful Merfolk card, then it's kind of like, oh, I'm playing Merfolk. Show me the Merfolk cards. And we had put a few things in the changelings, and a few cards that care about multiple things that maybe allow people to sort of cross and do

more than one creature type, but it really sort of limits you. So when we were doing Innistrad, I wanted to make sure that the guy who really wanted to draft a zombie deck had the ability to do it, but it didn't force people to do that. And that was something that was

important. But anyway, we definitely make blocks like Innistrad that have a tribal component in which it matters, and you can clearly, clearly, clearly build a bunch of different tribal decks. But, one of the things that we also try to do is we try to make sure that usually there's at least one

tribal thing going on. So for example, in Theros, Minotaurs. We want to be able to build a Minotaur deck. In Kanzatarkir, we want to be able to draft a Warrior's deck. In Battle for Zendikar, Allies. There's a major theme of Allies. We want to make sure

that people enjoy... One of the things historically is we know that a lot of players enjoy what I call linear themes. Here's another. I haven't done my... That's a podcast I should do at some point. It's talking between linear and modular. Linear means that

there are cards that get you to play certain cards. And tribal cards do exactly that. If I open up a card that says, all zombies get plus one, plus one, I go, I know what I'm doing. I'm getting some zombies. And that there's a lot of attractiveness to strong linear strategies. Tribal, I think, owes a lot of its popularity to that it just has a nice, loud, clean message. It's also flavorful, you know, that having a deck of goblins, it's my goblin deck, that's fun. But one of the things that we definitely try to do is we try to think about what tribes might people have fun with it.

I guess tribes fall into two camps. There are what I would call the major tribes, which are the tribes that, so for example, I always talk about the iconics of magic, right? The iconics are angel, sphinx, demon, dragon, hydra. White, blue, black, red, green, respectively. So I also talk about how there's a characteristic race. What that means is, iconics, there's one or two of them at rare, they're splashy. Characteristic is the default race for the color at common. They're small, you see a lot of them at common.

It's the kind of thing that you might build a deck around, tribally. And so, white is human, blue is merfolk, black is either zombies or vampires, we go back and forth on that one. Red is goblins and green is elves. Doesn't mean every world has those. In fact,

recently we've been a little stingy on our goblins and elves, something that hopefully long-term will fix. But there definitely is the characteristic races that people strongly identify with. And so we want to make sure that we have enough support for the major races that we know people really enjoy playing. And then what we also want to do is take some of the races that are a little less

supported and make sure from time to time that it gets a chance to shine. We haven't done... While we've made a lot of Warriors, we haven't done a lot of Warrior Matters cards. So we make some Warrior Matters cards and all of a sudden here's a deck that you're able

to make. Although Warriors is a quirky one because because Warriors traditionally had been more red-green, and we made it a white-black deck for Limited, but that's its own story. So one of the things we definitely do is, every set not only will it have tribal support for something that matters within that block, we also try to make sure that we make a few individual cards that help you build the deck for Casual Constructed that says,

okay, hey people, you really like this creature type. You know what? We've never made a lord for this creature type. Let's make one. And we're always kind of looking out to go, oh, is there

some fun kind of lord? You know, would people like to play this creature type? Maybe we can make an individual card because it really only takes one card to say, okay, here's a big bonus for doing this thing,

to get people to do that thing. The other thing about creature types is, one of the interesting things about it is that the creative team, so what happens is, we design the card. If we don't care about the creative team, so what happens is we design the card. If we don't care about the creature type, if it's not something that's dictated by the set, and like I said, there's a tribal component in every set.

So every set is something like, oh, we really want this to be whatever, a merfolk, an elf, a goblin, a zombie, a human, whatever we care about. We want this to be that. But if we don't specify, the way it works is the card goes to the story team. They do the card concepting. And what that means is they figure out what the card represents.

What is it? If it's a spell, okay, well, this spell does damage, but how? Let's say you have a red spell that does three damage to a creature. Oh, okay. Is it fire? Are they throwing rocks at them? Is it some sonic attack? What kind of magic is it? And when it's a creature, one of the things they have to figure out is what kind of creature is it? So one of the things that the creative team does every set is they make what's called a creature grid.

that the creative team does every set is they make what's called a creature grid. So what a creature grid is, is they have small, medium, and large, and they have flying and not flying. And they have to make sure that for every grid, they fill it in, meaning, okay, if a creature is a small, non-flying blue creature, what could it be?

What are the choices available? And part of building out a world is they have to make sure that all those get filled in. Because they have to be answered, meaning we're going to make small blue creatures that don't fly. If you don't tell us what those are, you're going to have a problem down the road. So what they do is

they fill out the grid. There's a few exceptions, like for example large green flyer. We don't make large green flyers. And whenever there's a rare exception, like it's a dragon set, okay, it's clearly a dragon, so it's not a big deal.

So, what they do is, this happens usually during design, is they start to make the grid. And what will happen is, design will come talk to them and figure out whether or not there's a problem.

Usually, the more tribal the set is, the more we have to work with them. For example, like at Lorwyn, that was a tribal set. It was all about tribes. So we literally had a meeting where we sat down with the creative team and we kind of sort of negotiated. Like we said, okay, you know, they wanted to do this kind of Celtic world, a little, we realized we were going to do the sort of the bright, happy world into the dark world, so Lorwyn into Shadowmore. And so we were trying to have a little more of a light Celtic feel. And so we talked with them and we made the decision not to have humans. And, you know, and what

happens once you start saying, okay, well this, well what causes is that going to go to that starts filling in spaces? And so we start negotiating with them, you know, what creatures and where. So let me talk about bleeding of creature types.

So one of the things that we are very conscious of is that I talk, usually when I talk about bleeding, I talk about bleeding of mechanics. Like this is in

Red's color pie. And Red does something that's not quite in his color pie. But there also is bleeding of flavor. But that's a little different animal. So the idea is creature types, one of the things we tend to do is, one of the things I realized back when we did Onslaught was, Onslaught did this thing where the creature types mostly were in a singular color. Goblins were red. All the goblins were red.

Elves were green. All the elves were green. And so one of the problems we ran into was, you got very, like, if I wanted to make a goblin deck, well, I was making a minor red deck, and because I was in red, the cards that were the best cards tended to often be the same. And what I realized was it just didn't make a lot of depth. And what happened was clerics ended up being in, I think it was clerics, in black and white just because slavery made sense. Like, I think what happened was Onslaught mostly cared about races,

but we had a few classes. And what I found was the classes were so much easier because there was more than one color that had the class. And so what I realized is the next time we did a tribal set, which was Lorwyn, I said, you know what? New rule. If you're going to care

about the tribe, if the tribe matters, we have to have at least two colors of it. That's what we do now. If you're going to care about a creature type, if it's going to mechanically matter, there needs to be at least two colors. But one of the things we realized was a lot of creatures are set in one color.

So, for example, take vampires or zombies from Innistrad. They're black. Okay, but I wanted to have two colors. So that said to the design team, okay, and we need to work with the creative team, okay, well, we've got to figure out how to do vampires in a way that they're not just black.

And so what we did is we sort of figured out mechanically where it made sense for them, and then went to the creative team and said, okay, what do you think of black and red vampires? What if we have bloodthirsty, sort of, you know, a little more feral vampires that are like, and we worked with them and they came up with an idea of, okay, well, here's how the black vampires are different from the red vampires. Same with zombies.

We said, okay, well, we need a second color of zombies. What color could zombies be? And then we stumbled across the idea of Frankenstein's monster. We're doing gothic horror and like zombie, necromantic zombies are just a really different animal from sort of laboratory created zombies, but both of them

were flavorful. So we said, okay, well we'll make the blue, the lab, you know, the Frankensteins will be the blue zombies and the black will be the necromantic zombies. And then we made Geeseinger all just contrast, you know, the necromancers and the stitchers are different. But anyway, the same thing is sort of we had to work. So one of the things that we do tribal now is we want to make sure that there's some flexibility. And often that means allowing ourselves to push in some direction in which one of the neat things about adding a tribe in which the tribe has had less support there is you're just pushing the deck in a slightly new direction.

For example, Vampire decks before Innistrad came out were usually mono-black. They were mono-black Vampire decks. But all of a sudden we said, you know what, here's some red Vampires and here's some red cards that care about Vampires and's some black red cards that are pretty good that care about vampires. And all of a sudden, you can make a black red vampire deck. You can never make a black red vampire deck before. Same with zombies. I mean, I guess the drowned was a zombie, but pretty much if you're making a zombie deck, it was black.

And all of a sudden, you can make it blue. So one of the neat things is when we go to New World and we have some tribal component, we have the ability to push a little bit and stretch. And that is something that we definitely are trying. You'll see as we do things with tribal component, we definitely are trying to push that a little more. And one of the neat things about that is it allows us, like, tribal did this thing where,

I'm not sure whether it was the right call in retrospect, but I wanted there to be a shift between Lorwyn and Morning Tide not Morning Tide, between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor and so I said, okay, what if when the shift happens what if the colors of the creatures changed a little bit

and so what I did is I kept every color was in their base color. Elves are green. They're always green. So it wasn't going to lose green. But elves, I think, were... Did they go from green and white to green and blue? Or did they go from green and blue to green and white? Oh, no, they were black and green. I'm sorry.

Elves were black and green in Lorwyn, and they went to... Is that right? No, elves were black and green in Shadowmoor. Oh, I think they were white and green and they went to black and green. I think is what happened. But anyway, one of the things

is, we definitely have even played around with where we shift colors of them, and so like, you can your Merfolk, like for example, Merfolk decks almost always have blue in it. Just because most of the Merfolk cards, there's more Merfolk cards in blue than any color. Although, when we do a two-color tribe, you know, we stretch it,

we do allow you to play the second color, meaning, look, if you want to play a mono-blue zombie deck, you can. There's a way to do that. If you want to play a mono-red vampire deck, you can. But we also, what we realize now is, as we go to world to world, it's kind of neat that we can define

one world, like this world, vampires are black and red. But maybe if we go to a different world, maybe vampires are a different color other than red. Maybe they're black and blue. Maybe they're black and white. Maybe they're black and green. Maybe we'll find the right world in which one of those makes sense.

And then one of the makes sense. And then one of the things that's fun for me with creature types is because we have the ability to bleed them on a world-by-world basis, we can make some things we haven't made before. One thing that's neat is doing vampires in red meant I had access to red abilities that black did not have. It was very, very hard to make a trampling vampire. It was hard to do some things that red does all the time, like fire breathing. I guess black has shade pumping.

But anyway, there's things that red could do that black couldn't, or the things that blue could do that black couldn't for zombies. And that allowed to have a little more flavor mixed into them. Anyway, mostly what I'm trying to say today, I guess my talk about creature types is it is definitely an area of the game that we've had the ability to really experiment a lot with and that I'm a big fan of markers in general. I think that markers do two really strong things that I'm a big fan of. in general. I think that markers do two really strong things

that I'm a big fan of. One is they're really flavorful. I think if all of magic had creatures and yeah, we showed you different creatures in art, but it just wasn't mechanically ever referenced. It's just like, oh, this is just a creature and that being a vampire never mattered. I think that'd be a loss to the game

just from a pure flavor standpoint. From a mechanical standpoint, having markers just means you have more things you can make cards out. The more markers you have, the more mechanical references you can make. And those mechanical references tend to be really flavorful mechanical references. Because

if I say all vampires do something, well, that's just... There's a lot of inherent flavor when I boost goblins or boost merfolk or boost vampires. I get to make somebody, you know... The Goblin King was a fun, flavorful card. And Richard could do that because he had made goblins.

And then goblins get a leader. And what's the goblin leader like? You know? And you got a picture of the Goblin King on his throne. You know? It is definitely... Markers do a great job you got a picture of the Goblin King on his throne. And, you know, that it is definitely, markers do a great job of adding flavor to the game. And the second thing is that having the mechanical hook, it just allows you to diversify a lot more easily.

Like one of the things about creature types is vanilla creatures, there's not a lot going on with a vanilla creature, right? That it's got no rules text. But, you know, something as simple as, when we're making a set, we need a certain number of vanilla creatures just to keep the set, you know, simple enough that people can play without having a problem.

And we don't want every card to be a mental download for the players playing. And so, hey, it's nice to have a breather. This is just a 4-4, you know. One of the neat things about markers, creature types in specific, is that card isn't just vanilla. I mean, it's vanilla in its rules text, but you can do something in which you make it matter. So one of the neat things is when we have sets in which tribal stuff

matter, that allows us to make vanilla creatures matter. There's a reason why when you're drafting, some decks will draft that vanilla creature, and some decks won't. Because there's this marker on it that certain decks care. You know, that if you have a deck that cares about warriors, that vanilla warrior

is just more attractive to you than somebody who doesn't. And so, it is a neat way to take something, like, I think that having, you know, let's say I'm making my merfolk of the pearl trident, and it's a 1-1 merfolk. That's flavorful. The word merfolk is doing

good work. It is doing flavor work. It is definitely adding something to the game. And the fact that the game can then go and reference it just means, oh, not only can it stand by its own and it's fine even if you didn't reference it, it just becomes this extra thing that you can now mechanically care about. And so one of the things that's

very attractive in general is when you're trying not to clutter up the cards, one of the things you want to do is find ways to take pre-existing things and care about them. For Fantasy Unset, you'll notice that I go to town with that and like, let's care about the artist. Let's care about

the collector number, you know. Let's care about how many words in the name or what letters are in the name or all sorts of crazy things. That's fun, you know. And that, in Blackboard, there's reasons that I can't care about certain factors like that. But it is neat.

I think creature types are a lot of fun in that it is the only thing that does so much work for both creative and design development. So like I said, it's the one part we fight over from time to time because we both care.

But it's great that we both care. I think that's really neat that there's a component of the card that we get to both care about. That the people that care about flavor and the people that care about mechanics get to both make reference to. Anyway, I'm now here at work. So I hope you enjoyed my little chat all about the creature types. Learned a few new things and maybe get a little more respect for creature types. I think they are one of the unsung parts of a card.

So, anyway, I will talk to you guys next time. But, uh... Oh, sorry. I'm now parked in my parking space. So, although that means that it's time for me to... What is it time for me to do? I always mess up my ending because, like,

in the beginning, if I mess up, I just start over. Okay, let's try this one more time. I need to find a space. We all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. Okay, I'll see you guys next time.