Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #341 - Urza's Saga Part 1

Episode Date: June 17, 2016

Mark talks about the design of Urza's Saga in part one of a four-part series.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the start of another design series. This time I'm going to talk about the design of Urza's Saga. So as always, what I'll do is this first batch of podcasts will be about Urza's Saga. And then the next batch I do, not immediately, but will be about Urza's Legacy. And the last batch will be about Urza's destiny. It's all about the Urza's block.

So, okay. Let's start with Urza's saga. So we're talking back to 1998. It came out on October 12th of 1998. So probably Urza's saga block is most famous historically for being broken. Or I'm sorry, to use a R&D term, bar-roken. You need the bar to really get the R&D term in there, bar-roken. Anyway, so let me flash back to the past and I'll explain sort of how this thing got put

together. Okay, so back in 1998, Magic R&D was five people. It was myself, Bill Rose, who's now the current VP of R&D, Mike Elliott, William Jockish, and Henry Stern. Everybody else, that was it. That was the five people that worked on Magic. And the idea was all the people that worked on Magic, we did all the development.

The design team, and we did some of the design. At this point, what had happened was when we first started, there were a bunch of external designs. Richard had gone out and, you know, the Ice Age designers and the Mirage designers. We got some external designs that we were working on. Mirage being the last real external design. I guess one could argue Special Chaos,

which we used a little bit when making Invasion. So anyway, after Mirage, I then pitched the idea of letting me do a set, which was Tempest. And I was told that I could pick my own design team. So obviously Richard Garfield was on my team because part of me convincing them to let me do it was having Richard on the team because they trusted Richard. And then the other two team members on my Tempest design team, one was Charlie Cattino and the other was Mike Elliott. Mike and I both bemoaned how we really wanted to design. And so this is an opportunity for us to show what we could do. Obviously Tempest did really well. And from that, Mike and I really sort of established ourselves as designers.

Mike and I really sort of established ourselves as designers. So Urza Saga, the design team, was me and Mike and Bill Rose. So we were the three of us that Bill had done Mirage. I had done Tempest. This was Mike's first, I'm not sure it was his first set, first large set for sure. He was on the Weatherlight design team, which was started after the Tempest design team due to the nature of large versus small sets. But this was the first time I think he led a design. And so also, by the way, Richard Garfield's credited being on the team because one of the mechanics was his mechanics. I'll get to how that happened, but he wasn't actually on the design team. We just credited him because we used some of his work.

Okay, so what happened was Mike was very interested. First off, the two mechanics that Mike wanted to use. So this is back in the day where we had two named mechanics every set. What were the two mechanics of the set? You know, Mirage had flanking and phasing. Tempest had shadow and buyback. So what was Urza Saga's two mechanics? So it was

Echo and cycling. So both those mechanics, interestingly, actually were in Tempest. They were in the design for Tempest. So Echo, what was Echo called? Mike Elliott, before he came to Wizards, had made his own set called Astral Ways.

He had his own set, and in the set had both Echo and had Slivers. And so when we were doing Tempest, he gave me both mechanics. We ended up using Slivers. I stuck Echo in, but when I turned Tempest design he gave me both mechanics. We ended up using slivers. I stuck Echo in, but when I turned Tempest's design in, there was just too much there. And I had both Echo and cycling were in it, but in small doses.

And the idea was, ah, these are interesting mechanics. They're worthy of being in their own sets. They didn't need to be here, so we took them out. And Mike remembered that. So Echo had come from Mike remembered that. So Echo had come from Mike's set. So Echo, for those who don't remember, is

they're cards that are cheaper than normal, but you pay their cost twice. You pay them when you play it, and then at the beginning of the next upkeep, you pay it as well. And the idea was you could get things you normally couldn't get. It essentially allowed you to spread your costing over two turns to get things that

were a little bit cheaper. Echo did not tend to do that well. It was thought as more of a downside mechanic. I mean, technically you get a cheaper creature, but people aren't particularly good at gauging spells. And a lot of people, what you paid for the creature over the course of two turns was actually usually more than you would pay, so it wasn't like you were paying what you would normally pay. You were paying more than you normally pay, but you've got to spread it over two turns, so you've got to pay less per turn. What was that? I'm trying to remember the name of it.

It had a different name when Mike turned it in. Cycling, which actually Richard called cycling, Richard came up with it during Tempest Design he liked the idea of having spells that allowed you the option of sort of trading them in if you needed to, and the idea in this set was cycling was always two, I think we knew that you could cycle for different costs, but decided that we didn't need to so in this set, it's spelled out, it's always cycling two

but for the entire block decided that we didn't need to. So in this set, it's spelled out. It's always cycling two. But for the entire block, we use the same cycle. I think we... Did we mess with later? I think cycling two the entire block. We would later bring it back in OnSlide and then start messing around with costs and stuff. But I believe in this block, it's cycling two all the way through. Okay, so those are the two named mechanics.

There are a couple other mechanics in the set that were not named. One was, so the set had an enchantment theme. There's something that most people are unaware of. This set actually had a pretty strong enchantment theme, and when people talk about, why don't you ever make enchantment sets? I used to always say,

hey, you know, Urza Saga was an enchantment block. And it was from a pure, like, a limited standpoint. If you actually look and see the number of enchantments in the block, it's a lot higher than normal. And there were a couple different themes that ran through with enchantments. Although notice that neither of the keyword mechanics was inherently an enchantment thing.

So the two things that Mike put in that were mechanics but not named is we had growing enchantments and that was the idea of something where you would play it and then every turn it would get a counter and then that counter, the effect would grow over the turns how much you could do. The way that growing enchantments worked is you could sacrifice them.

So the idea is I play it and then it gets more and more powerful and I can cash it in whenever I want. And the longer I wait, the more powerful it is. I think this mechanic was based off a card that Mike had made in Tempest that he liked. It was a blue card. I'm blanking on the name. But he liked it.

It was a card that basically lets you draw cards. And so the longer you waited, the more cards you got to draw. And Mike really liked that card, and so he wanted to make a whole mechanic based on that card. Then there were the sleeping enchantments, and the sleeping enchantments were enchantments that when you first played them,

they were just enchantments, but under certain conditions, they would turn into creatures. So the idea was they were kind of creatures that you could cast cheaper than normal, but they weren't creatures until a certain condition was met. They were enchantments. And we called them sleeping enchantments.

They had different names, like, the white ones, I think, were opal, and the blue ones were veiled. Black ones were lurking. And the green ones were hidden. For some reason, red didn't have any sleeping enchantments. The one other mechanic that set my contribution to this ad, my broken contribution,

is what we call the free mechanic. So what happened was, Ice Age had introduced cantrips. The idea that you could, spells that were small enough that you can get an extra card. And then we experimented with them. In Ice Age, cantrips, you would always get the card the next turn.

And then we realized that we could do it so you got the card right away. And I think Tempest Block had cantrips in it. But the problem was that Bill really felt that, like, it wasn't something we should have all the time, that it was something like people would, I don't know, in Bill's mind, he was like, rather than being a basic utility tool that we would use all the time, he felt like, oh, maybe this is something we should be saving,

and so every once in a while it comes back. So we were told we couldn't have any cantrips in this block. So I was trying to come up with something that was in a similar space. So I was messing around with the idea that, well, what if instead of you got a like, the idea of cantrips is you don't lose the card. Like, you pay the spell and you have the spell, but you get the card back, so you're not having any card disadvantage. So I said, well, what if you did it so you lost the card, but you didn't lose the mana?

So the idea of a free spell is that, okay, you have to cast it, but you get to untap up to the number of lands you would need to cast it. So the idea essentially was, assuming you have enough mana to pay for it, it's free. That's why it's called the free mechanic. As I will talk about in a little bit, things got kind of out of hand. One of them getting out of hand had to do with the free mechanic. So we'll talk about it in a bit.

But that was my... Cycling was made by Richard in Tempest. Echo was made by Mike in his set, which we brought into Tempest and then ended up being put here. Growing enchantments were based on some stuff that Mike and I had done in Tempest. And sleeping enchantments were Mike's.

And the free mechanic, that was mine. Yes, my big contribution to the set was one of the most broken things in the set. Okay, so this set, by the way, codenamed Armadillo, was 350 cards. So for those that might not understand, modern sets are not quite

as big as they once were. So once upon a time we used to use 110 common sheets. I'm sorry, 110, the sheets could hold 110 cards. So the commons had 110, the uncommons had 110, the rares had 110, and there were 20 lands. So that hold 110 cards. So the commons had 110, the uncommons had 110, the rares had 110, and there were 20 lands.

So that's 350 cards. For example, nowadays, we have 249 cards plus land. So it ends up being, or it's 249 with the land. I think 249 is with the land. Although we upped the uncommons. Anyway, I guess we're at 269.

Anyway, we're in the mid-200s where this is 350. So this is, you know, almost 100, or I think 100 cards more. Okay, so the thing that we, when we made the set, the idea was we were really into the idea of playing around with looking at what enchantments can do. And there were a lot of cycles in the set. Interesting, there's a bunch of cycling cycles. So there were cycling lands. Those were basic lands.

I mean, they weren't basic, but tapped for the five colors, you know, five different ones. And there was one that tapped for colors. And you could cycle them for two. So the idea was, hey, these are lands if you need them, but later in the game when you don't need them, you can cycle them away. There were embraces, which were enchantments, playing to the aura theme.

In the design, we called them the make-me-all-blank. So, make-me-a-Sara. So, you know, you got plus two, plus two, flying, and vigilance, although it wasn't called vigilance at the time. And so we had a series of five of those, which were meant... Once again, we were really trying to make enchantments

matters, we were trying to make some really powerful auras for example that you would play we had legendary lands, Telerian Academy being the most famous of those, but Gaea's Cradle Serra Sanctum Shiv and Gorge and Phyrexian Tower were lesser known, I'll talk about those when I get to the card by cards

there were perpetual auras. So once again, playing into our enchantment theme, we had auras that when they went to the graveyard from anywhere, you would get them back. And so the idea was you wouldn't lose card advantage by playing them. If I put them on my creature and the creature dies, I get them back.

We had runes of protection, which were like circles of protection, but you could cycle them. So the idea was it's just like circles of protection, but you didn't always need a circle of protection, which were like circles of protection, but you could cycle them. So the idea was it's just like circles of protection, but you didn't always need a circle of protection. It's a good card to have if you needed it, but often you'd have to sideboard them. So this will let you play things main deck.

There were an uncommon cycle of growing enchantments. Like I'm talking about the growing theme where you would play it out and then you put a counter on it every turn. I think they were reverse counters. They were played like they were songs that were sung. theme where you would play it out and then you put a counter on every turn. I think they were reverse counters. They were played like they were songs that were sung. And then you would cash it in.

So the more turns you waited, the bigger the effect would be. There also was a mega cycle. Not a mega mega cycle, but a mega cycle, which meant that there was a five-card cycle that ran through the whole block. And what that was were cards that targeted two different things. And there were two in the set and two in the... Two, I think, and then... One in Legacy and two in Destiny, I think is what we did.

Okay, so let's talk about the history of Urza's Saga. Okay, so... We wanted to make an enchantment set. That was our goal. But meanwhile... I haven't gone too much into this, but during Tempest, I and a gone too much into this, but during Tempest, I and a guy named Mike Ryan had pitched

the Weatherlight Saga. Everyone was on board. We got this whole creative team to come on board to help us do all the visuals and build the world. And then during the Tempest Saga, or during the Tempest block, the story got wrested away from me and Mike, and it ended up going

in a different direction, one that Mike and I had not intended or planned. And part of that was the idea to incorporate more of Magic's past. And so in our version of the Wet Light Saga, Urza was not involved. But it was decided that, no, no, no, this was clearly all about Urza. And so they decided to then have a block where we went back in time and showed how Urza was involved even though you didn't see Urza in the Tempest block turns out Urza was really involved

and so what happened was the whole block which once again a whole storyline that was not ever intended when we originally made the Weatherlight Saga was there to tie Urza into it and so this whole block was basically to say hey Urza was involved let's explain how Urza into it. And so this whole block was basically to say, hey,

Urza was involved. Let's explain how Urza was involved. This was Urza's story of how the story that Urza was not involved in at all turns out to all be part of Urza's master plot to stop the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians were the villains, by the way. If you actually look at Tempest, they talk about there was an invasion coming.

It was a Phyrexian invasion, so we did have the Phyrexians as being the villain, but we didn't have Urza involved at all. But anyway, so Urza's like going back to the past. So the thing that happened was, we had designed the set to be this enchantment set, but then they went back in the past and they made it all about Urza.

Now, as you know, Urza is a artificer. So we're like, is it a little weird? We made a set mechanically all about enchantments, and you went and focused it on a guy really well known for making artifacts. And they're like, oh, no, not a problem. And then they named the block. The previous block had been the Wrath Cycle,

because it took place on Wrath. So they decided to name this one, since they didn't want to name it after Dominaria. Also, the block bounced around. It wasn't all quite in Dominaria. So they called it the Artifact Cycle. So we had a block, and we were trying to sell it as a Bout Enchantment,

and it was named the Artifact Cycle. And then we kind of broke some things, and some of the broken things were artifacts. So we had a set with broken artifacts called the Artifact Cycle. Surprise, surprise, no one really perceived it as being an enchantment cycle. But if you ever go and gather and look at it, literally just look at how many enchantments are in it. There's a lot of themes that are tied into enchantments.

There's the growing enchantments. There is the sleeping enchantments. There's perpetual auras. There's the embraces. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of enchantment themed things. So anyway, the story kind of got hijacked and went in a direction that

we had not intended. Ended up sort of changing the focus on the set a little bit. This was back in the day where we didn't work really closely. Well, during Tempest, I was in charge or co-in charge of the story, so it was very interconnected

because I was trying to tell. So the mechanics and it's like, you know, the story explained like what the shadow creatures were or what the slivers were. Like it really sort of

explained everything. None of that was true here. Cycling, echo, all the enchantment themes, nothing. The story did nothing to explain any of that. It was really disconnected.

And this starts the period where there's a little bit more of a disconnect between design and the story. And so we would sort of make things and then story would try to then explain what was going on. But there wasn't the back and forth that we have nowadays, which makes a much more tighter, cohesive gameplay and experience overall. Okay, so now let's get into the other big aspect of Urza Saga. So the design team was me and Mike and

Bill, who were pretty much the three people doing the design at that point. The development team was the magic design, like the development team was the magic R&D people, which was me and Mike, William Jockish, Bill Rose, Henry Stern.

Okay, the interesting thing was, at the same time that this was going on, there were other projects happening. For example, I was working on Unglued. We were doing this wacky and weird set, and I was the one person in charge of it. I had no design team. I mean, I had people contributing stuff, so the people who are credited as being the design team are people who contributed enough things that I listed them, but I had no design team. I mean, I had people contributing stuff. So the people who are credited as being the design team are people who contributed enough things that I listed them. But I had no actual design team.

I was doing it myself. Henry was doing Portal 3 Kingdoms at this point. He was doing that all by himself. Bill, I think, was working on the 6th edition rules that were a major undertaking. Bill was doing that, not completely by himself, but the point was Henry and Bill and I, each had big projects we were working on

in which we were the only one doing the project. And so it sucked away some of our time. So what happened was Mike and Bill, oh, Mike, by the way, not only was Mike the lead designer, Mike was the lead developer, something we don't normally do. Normally we like to have two set of eyes. But during Mirage, Bill had been both the designer and the lead developer.

And so Mike decided he wanted to do that. I had no illusions that I was supposed to be a developer. So I led my design. I did not leave my development for Tempest, for example. But one thing that's important is you want that second set of eyes. Now, not that Bill should have led the development of Mirage, probably, but Bill at least had the vantage point of having time. They had made Mirage, known as Menagerie, years earlier.

So Bill had some distance from it because they had made it a long time ago by the time it finally got to Wizards. It was over a year old. Where Mike was designing something and immediately sort of handing it off to himself. So for starters, Mike did not have the perspective that one would hope to have because he was the designer.

And because we were so busy, really the only person who was available for Mike was William. The other thing to remember at the time was that none of us were picked, like, nowadays developers tend to come from the pro tour. Like, people who have proven their chops

with their ability to sort of dissect, you know, cards, be able to build strong decks and understand what made the game tick. Really, when it got down to it, Bill and I and Mike really were designers more than we were developers. Henry actually came from the Pro Tour and probably had the most development eye, but because he was off doing Portal 3 Kingdoms, Henry was mostly absent. And Bill, who probably was the other person that had the best development sense,

was busy redoing the 6th edition rules that were going to happen. 6th edition rules came in the middle of this coming out. Actually, was Henry working on... Maybe Henry wasn't working on... I'm not sure. Anyway, Henry was busy, and maybe, now that I think about it, I think the new rules might have... Anyway, I'm not sure. Henry was Henry was busy. I mean, maybe, now that I think about it, I think the new rules might have... Anyway, I'm not sure. Henry was busy working

on his side project. I know it came down to Mike and William to do the majority of this. Okay, so a couple problems. One was Mike and William were having issues with each other. In fact, they were in the middle of a big fight. So much so that Mike and William weren't

talking. So imagine having a development team in which really only have two people that are working on the development, you know, full time, and they're not talking to each other. On top of that, Mike was the lead designer as an additional lead developer. And so Mike definitely sort of, you know, it's hard to call your baby ugly. And so Mike was definitely had, you know, really much was defending all the things he had done. William, for those who don't know, was probably at the time of the original four of us,

not counting Henry, me, Mike, and Bill. You know, we all started back in 95. Henry came a year later. Of the four of us, he was clearly the most development oriented. He was very quirky. I've told some development-oriented. He was very quirky. I've told some stories about William. He was very quirky in this development thing. But anyway, basically, the two of them were fighting,

and let's just say Urza Saga did not get the development love it needed. So, to give you a little sense of how crazy things got, let's go to the Pro Tour in Rome, where Urza's Saga premiered. So it wasn't, I think it was an extended tournament, not a standard tournament. But here's how people describe the gameplay at Pro Tour Rome. There was the early game. That was when you rolled the die and discovered who went first. And you shuffled,

and then you rolled the die and discovered who got to go first. Then there was the mid-game. That's when you made mulligans, if you needed to mulligan and needed to reshuffle something. And then there was the end game, which was known as turn one. And pro tour Rome,

many, many games would end on the first turn. It was one of the most broken environments, maybe the most broken Pro Tour environment we've ever had. What happened was what I call a trifecta, the trifecta of power all came together. There's three things that are very dangerous that we have to watch out for, and we put all three of them in spades into this set.

So first off, you have to be careful with what we call mana. Meaning, spells cost things. And so it's really important that you make sure that... You make sure it's not too easy to cast spells. You don't want to circumvent the mana cost. And you can circumvent the mana cost either by making it too easy to get mana or by allowing people just to not pay the cost of mana,

not pay the cost of spells. We did both of those in Urza Saiga. We made it very easy. In fact, there's a, I'll get to it, but there's a card called Tolarian Academy, for example, that allowed you very early to be able to get huge amounts of mana on the first turn.

And then we had spells like the Free Mechanics that let you untap the Tolarian Academy, so you can get even more mana all on the same turn. The second leg of the tripod was card drawing.

Another thing that's been dangerous, you make it too easy to draw cards. Well, guess what this set did? It made it really easy to draw cards. In fact, we had a card called Time Spiral that lets you just draw seven brand new cards. And it got you more mana because it untapped your lands. So anyway, and the third thing are engines. An engine is anything that lets you turn one resource into another. I think the game can handle any one of those,

maybe if the rest of the set was worked around it. But you definitely don't want to have two legs on the tripod. And this set had three legs on the tripod. The tripod of terror was standing firm. had three legs of the tripod. The tripod of terror was standing firm. We let you circumvent costs with easy mana and just

allowed you to skip over costs. We gave you access to lots of cards. We gave you engines to turn resources into other resources. So, it was a very, very broken environment. And we ended up having to ban a huge number of cards.

This is what they call combo winter for those that know their history. That we gave you all these pieces to make just really devastating combo decks. Because we gave you access to cards and we gave you access to mana and we gave you access to engines

and there just were so many numerous ways to do really dangerous things and And they can be done really quickly, too. And so, I mean, I talked about extended as a pro tour, but even standard was horribly broken. And in order to solve this, we ended up having to ban a whole bunch of cards. Usually that's a sign that we've done stuff horribly wrong. We had a whole bunch of cards that had to get banned. Not one, a whole bunch. And in fact, we banned a bunch if it wasn't enough. banned. Not one, a whole bunch. And in fact, we banned a bunch if it wasn't enough.

We had to come back and ban more anyway. So Combo Winters. So when people ask me what was the biggest developmental problems in Magic history, the two blocks that I will list is... In fact, the number one block, the block with the most amount of developmental problems is Urza Saiga, with Mirrodin being a number two. I'm fairly close to number two. That also made some big mistakes.

But I think Urza Saiga was more developmental mistakes. In fact, Urza Saiga. So what happened was, it's the one time in my history, 20 years of working at Wizards, coming up in 21, that R&D got called to the CEO's office at the time, Peter Atkinson at the time, and chewed out. We were yelled at. We were yelled at for how badly we had messed up the environment. Even married, we didn't get yelled at like we did.

We got, Peter was mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, and he just screamed at us. And Peter, by the way, was a jovial guy, for those who don't know. Peter was a very friendly guy. I mean, not that I never I saw him get mad. It wasn't like the only time he ever got mad, but it's the only time he ever got mad at me. And he was really upset. He was very angry. Anyway, we not the high point for us.

Like I said, Urza Sida, and also, like I said, the story was going off and, you know, sort of deviating. So basically the idea, for those that don't know, is Tempest, we see the Weatherlight crew. So Sisay gets kidnapped, forcing Gerard to come back to the Weatherlight,

even though he had chosen he never was going to be there. He takes command, and then he rounds up some other members of his crew, and they go to wrath to save Cisse. Meanwhile, we take a year off. They ended up going, when the story ended,

they'd gone through the portal. They stranded Erte behind, and it's like, okay, they're in the portal. They've gone to a new world we'll get back to that in a year in the year later, Mercadia masks you discover Mercadia where they ended up but for a year we did a flashback

it's time to do the prequel to explain, hey, how did this all happen? and it turns out it was all Urza's doing the weather light, hey, all these characters yeah, yeah, yeah, how did this all happen? And it turns out it was all Urza's doing. The Weatherlight, hey, all these characters, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Urza. So we spend a year going back in time, and there were some characters,

in building the story for the Weatherlight, we had definitely had a few tie-in to early magic. Beren, for example, was Hannah's father. That was built in. So it wasn't as if our story ignored the path of magic, but we didn't tie Urza into it. And when the story got wrested from us, it became about Urza. And so this block was the story of Urza. Interestingly, by the way, the name we actually wanted to call the set

was Urza's Odyssey. And for some reason, we were told we couldn't. Which is funny, because we would later, a couple years later, call a set Odyssey. So, that was the original name of Urza's Odyssey. It ended up becoming Urza's Saga. And then Urza's Legacy and Urza's Destiny.

Arndy used to remember the order by remembering that L was lunch and D was dinner. That was the little mnemonic remembered at the time. Okay, so now that I've talked about it, let's get to the cards. Okay, so we're going to begin with Arc Lightning. So Arc Lightning is a sorcery that costs two inner reds, three mana, one of which is red.

You do three damage any way you want, divided between players and creatures. So one of the things that started happening was we were very much designing with limited in mind. So Mirage, which was the first set. I mean, when I got there, Alliances was kind of changing on the guard. All the old Magic R&D people and all the new Magic R&D people worked together on it. And then after Alliances, it was sort of like, okay, we're going on to do other things.

Because at the time, Wizards was doing lots of other products. In fact, we were doing a lot of other training card games. We had a time called Jihad, then later changed to Vampire, the Internal Struggle. We had Netrunner. And we were doing board games,

Robo Rally and other things. So, Wizards was, you know, R&D was producing lots of different games. And so the people who had been working on Magic were like, we'd rather work on some other stuff. And they hired new people to work on Magic. New people being me and Bill Rose and William Jockish and Mike Elliott, and then a year later, Henry Stern.

And so, Mirage was kind of the second wave, the new one of us. We were in charge. And so, starting with Mirage, kind of the second wave the new one of us we were in charge and so starting with Mirage we were working on that and we were very conscious of limited so Mirage was the first set we took limited in mind and so Arc Lightning really is us

sort of exploring different ways to make use of direct damage and so I think Alliance has had a card called Pyrotechnics which was a free card a pitch card a card that you can

instead of paying it's casting cost you could discard another card of the same color from your hand and it allowed you for damage

you could spread the damage and I think we liked the idea of spreading damage that was kind of cool I mean Fireball in original alpha obviously you could pay extra to split it

but we liked the idea of just a spell like, this was our kind of, it was kind of a Lightning Bolt variant. And the idea was, it costs a little more, but you could spread it out, and we thought that was pretty cool. Okay, next, Arcane Laboratory.

Two and a blue, it's a Chapman, costs three, one of which is blue. So I made this card. So players are limited to one spell per turn. Interestingly, little did I know that we were going to make a combo environment. But I just liked answers. I thought Magic is Good when it has answers. And I thought this was a neat answer to say, hey, hey, you know, what if I slow you down?

I could let you cast one spell per turn. Ended up actually being important because a lot of times in combos you want to catch multiple spells, and so it was one of the tools to slow them down. We have since realized that this should be a white thing, because white's the rule-setting color, so this became rule of law years later. But this was the first version of it called Arcane Laboratory.

Next, Argosian Enchantress. So that was cost one in the green, two mana, one of which is green, zero, one Enchantress. So that costs one in the green, two mana, one of which is green, zero one Enchantress. It had essentially Shroud. Shroud was written out at the time. It didn't exist as a keyword yet.

And then whenever you cast an enchantment, draw a card. So Richard had made the original Enchantress. And I was just trying to make a new version of it. But the one thing that Enchantress decks always had is people used to always target the Enchantress and kill it. Because obviously that was where you did the card drawing. So I said, hey, what if I gave the Enchantress that they couldn't just bolt? You know, that was harder for them to get rid of.

So basically, Shroud, once again, it wasn't keyworded yet, but Homelands, I think, oh, well Legends introduced the not clean version, and Homelands had the cleaner version of Shroud. And so it was like, okay, let's make a card that you can't target, and then you can use that in your deck. You know, this could be the centerpiece of your deck, and it's a little harder for your opponent to get rid of. Okay, next, Baron Master Wizard. One blue, blue, so three mana, two to get rid of. Okay, next. Baron, Master, Wizard. One blue, blue. So three mana, two which is blue. It's a one, one.

I think it was a legendary wizard when it was printed. Later became a legendary human wizard. Actually, when it was printed, it was probably... Oh, when it was printed, it was a creature or sight. It was summon? Yeah, because it was for succession. It was a summon legend, because legends were creature types at the time.

And then below it said it counts as a wizard. Because at the time, we didn't do multiple creature types on cards. So if you wanted to be a second creature type, it would be in your text to say it counts as. We later would say, okay, we don't have to say that. Just we'll have room and put it in the creature type. It is now a legendary creature human wizard. So Baron, first I'll explain the card then I'll talk about who Baron is.

So his card was two sac of permanent and he returned target creature to its owner's hand. You could unsummon a creature. So Baron, for those who don't know the story, was the right hand man of Urza. He also ended up being Hannah's dad. He was married to Rain.

And Baron had been talked about back in in antiquities. It's that we first, I mean, Urza's name, Urza and Mishra show up in Alpha. But the first, the time we really start learning about them was in

antiquities. And Rain actually gets a card. Did Rain get a card? No, no, Hercule. And Rain actually gets a card. Did Rain get a card? No, no, Hercule and Draftnair got a card. Rain would get a card later in this block. But anyway, Baron was mentioned, and we really liked playing around with Baron. We wanted a member of the Weatherlight crew

to have some connection, and so we ended up making Hannah Baron's daughter. And the reason she's sort of the artifact expert on the ship, and she's essentially the engineer on the ship, to use a Star Trek metaphor. And so the reason, the story, that they go to Teleria because they need a wizard is Hannah, her dad's there. And so the reason that Baron gives them Ertai partly is because of the bond that he has with Hannah,

being his daughter, obviously. So Baron, interestingly enough, we had made some Vanguard cards before the set came out. And the Vanguard cards, the first batch were the original Weatherlight crew, and the second batch were the prequel characters. And so I'm not sure which came first. I'm not sure whether this card came first,

and then we mirrored it on his Vanguard card, or the Vanguard card came first. I think this card came first. We like the idea that he was a wizard and that he could, that his magic is sort of, that he could that his magic is sort of that he can use his magic to protect things. And so we gave him an unsummon ability. But anyway,

one of the things that was fun about doing the flashback stuff was we could sort of take some characters you'd heard about. And so one of the things we did is we had made some characters that were background characters for Gerard. So there were a lot of legendary characters in the block, some of which were characters we had made but hadn't shown you, and some of which were previous characters you had heard about but hadn't yet seen. Interestingly, we never made an Urza character. We made

a card that represented him in disguise. I'll get to that when we get that card. That's not Urza's Saga. But I... We never actually made an Urza's card because he was a planeswalker. And at the time, we didn't make planeswalkers into cards. We later changed that, obviously, but...

Also, remember, this was a point where planeswalkers were very godlike. And we were like, how do you represent that on a card? And so we, at the time, weren't making planeswalkers on cards. But we were like, how do you represent that on a card? And so we, at the time, weren't making Planeswalkers on cards. But we were making characters, so Baron got it

remade. Okay, the final card we're going to talk about today is Blanchard Armor. So Blanchard Armor costs two and a green. It's an aura. We were trying to make some really strong auras, because it was an enchantment-themed set, even though no one knew that. And what it did is it gave you plus X plus X, where X was the number of force you had.

The idea was it's a pretty powerful thing. Three mana, you could get a really big aura. But it required you to play basically mono green. One of the themes you'll notice in the set is we really try to encourage some mono color strategies. Magic doesn't always do that but we thought in this step we wanted to push that in direction a little bit, so you'll see, there's some really

strong themes pushing you toward monologue card plays Blanchard Armor was one of them this ended up going to be a very popular card, we put it in a lot of core sets, so this card started here this is where Blanchard Armor began, that's Blanchwood is on Dominaria but this is the first time we ever saw the card, so

anyway, I'm pulling up my daughter's school I got all the way to B so there's a few more podcasts in our future but anyway I hope you guys are enjoying hearing all about Urza's Saga and the craziness that was one of the most broken sets we've ever made so anyway I'm now at my daughter's school so we all know what that means, it means it's the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic

I'll see you guys next time, bye bye