Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #365 - Urza's Legacy Part 2

Episode Date: September 9, 2016

Mark's second of a two-part series on the design of Urza's Legacy.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. You all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking about the design of Urza's Legacy. And I'm not done. So I got up through G. I think we left off on Giant Cockroach. So we'll continue on with G.

So next is Goblin Welder. Goblin Welder costs two and a red for a 1-1 Goblin Artificer. Tap, choose an artifact on the battlefield, and one in the grave, controlled by the same player, and then you sack one and put the other one into play. So essentially you sort of swap them. I mean, technically it's not an exchange from a rules standpoint, but you sack one and get another one. And so the idea essentially is it allows you to... The flavor is they're breaking apart one artifact

to make another artifact. That's kind of the flavor. Goblins like to make use of whatever they have available to make new stuff. So they're breaking apart whatever they have to make new things because they're crazy welders. So this is a very popular card. This card ended up seeing a lot of play.

It's actually a pretty powerful card. Just because it allows you to circumvent costs, as a lot of the broken cards, the cards let you do that. But it's a very fun card. I mean, I made this card... Red's always had a weird relationship with artifacts. Blue is the color

that most loves artifacts, but red is kind of second. I mean, white will do a little bit with artifacts, especially with equipment. But red has this sort of like strange kind of wild inventor feel where you rip things apart and slap things together. In some way, Izzet definitely takes the wild side of red and the passionate wild side of red and the cool intellectual side of blue and matches them together. But red definitely has this sort of madcap sort of scientist feel to it.

And that card, this card was trying to capture that. Something we sort of moved away from a while and we're slowly drifting back towards letting artifact, letting red have a little bit more play with artifacts. Obviously in artifact sets, although, once again, this wasn't technically an artifact set, but it felt like it, because all the powerful cards interacted with artifacts. Anyway, I think this was...

There's a card... What was the card called? There's a card that allowed you to sacrifice a creature and get a creature back from your graveyard. What was it called? Hell's Caretaker was originally in Legends. And then I made a whole bunch of variants of that card because I love that card. I believe this card was meant to be

an artifact version, essentially, of that card. Sort of an artifact Hell's Caretaker. I think that's what inspired this card. Just the idea is like, okay, now you can trade artifacts for artifacts in your graveyard. Just like you can trade creatures for creatures in your graveyard. And like I said, it ended up being, especially because there's no cost, it's just tap. It's a very powerful effect. Okay, next, Grim Monolith. So an artifact that costs two, it doesn't untap. You can tap it to add

three colorless mana to your mana pool, and for four, you can untap it. So the idea is, for two mana, you get three, so it ups you one, at bare minimum. The turn you use it, it gets you a free mana. And then, it allows you to sort of, every other turn, I mean, you've got to pay to untap it. So the turns you're untapping it, you're kind of using extra mana,

but then the turns you have it, oh, well, you have three whole mana that you can spend on things. And so, plus, there's a card called Votaic Key, which was in Urza Saga, which lets you untap artifacts. And Voltaic Key worked really well with Grim Monolith, because Grim Monolith didn't untap. That was its negative. And Voltaic Key, all it did was untap artifacts. So it worked really well with it.

I've talked about this when I did the Urza Saga podcast, but real quickly, one of the big problems we had during this whole block was what I call the tripod of brokenness. There's three things that Urza Saga did and did in large volume that caused problems. One is access to a lot of mana. Grimmano being a good example.

It's just really easy to get access to mana. Second was we made card drawing much easier than it should be. It was very easy to draw cards. And the third is we made a lot of engine cards. When engine cards are cards that allow you to turn one resource into another resource. And those three things, when left unchecked, create combo badness. They're sort of the tripod of combo enabling.

And Urza Saga did them all in large numbers. So Grim Monolith being one of the good examples of just a card that generates a lot of mana. Especially when you have something like Voltaic Key that allows you to easily overcome its downside. Okay, Lava Axe. Four and a red for a sorcery. Deal five damage to target player. I always get a big kick out of, when I go back and look at old sets, to find cards that, like, this is when we introduced it.

This is the set that, like, a lot of axes come on to be such a staple magic card. And, like, it just didn't exist until this set. Urza's Legacy made it. It's kind of funny. In the early days, direct damage was really tended to be creature or player. And one of the things we realized along the way is if we wanted to sort of divvy up what red could do, we needed to sort of not always have direct damage be directed at either creature or player. So we started making more things where some of them just hit players

and some just hit creatures, that not all of them hit either. That having them all hit either just lessened our design space. And so, okay, well, let's if I can hit my opponent, what can I do? And the idea was, okay, you can do a bit more because it's just to the opponent. And Love Axe was born. So, it's very easy, by the way. One of the things that happened

is the game first came out, Richard made cards, and it was very easy to sort of follow exactly what Richard had done for a while. And then eventually, you kind of stand back and say, oh, wait a minute. We need to find the hairs to split. We need to find different ways to make designs.

And direct damage is a lot there. And we wanted to make sure that not every direct damage card did everything. And then by divvying it up a little bit, it allows you just to make more cards. It allows things to shake up a little bit, to make things play a little differently. Lava Axe is a very interesting card, but it's very different than, say, Lightning Bolt or Shock. The idea that it can't hit creatures means it has a different utility and is played differently.

It's a very popular card, though. It's not the strongest of cards, I admit, but it's a very popular card. Beginners really love Lava Axe, just because it's very immediate, and doing five damage to the player is just very cool. Okay, next, Memory Jar. Memory Jar is an artifact that costs five. So each player exiles all cards in their hand when it enters the battlefield, face down.

So they exile your hand face down, and then you draw seven new cards. And at the end of turn, basically you discard your hand and get back your hand. So the idea of Memory Jar is everybody sort of puts their hand aside for the turn. They get seven cards to do whatever with. And then end of turn, it goes away. This was probably the most broken card in this set.

This is the card that we needed to emergency ban. We don't do a lot of emergency bans. This is one of the few in the history of Magic, emergency bans. We're like, oh, this is such a problem. And essentially, once again, I talked about the tripod of terror. This is just

really strong card drawing. It's like, okay, well for a turn I'm not given, I have to spend the cards on my turn when they go away. But still, I get a fresh hand of seven cards in which to play stuff with. And especially in this environment where, once again, you had access to huge amounts of mana. One of the things about Urza Saga standard or extended, whatever you were playing with at the time, it had just, it gave you crazy access to mana.

Mana was never a problem. So, okay, now I can draw seven new cards and i man is not a problem well guess what i'm playing a lot of cards and probably those cards um there are other their engine cards and things that are going to manipulate things so just crazy crazy things happened during when urza saga was in the environment. Like I said, the most broken Pro Tour we ever had was Extended. Extended. Not even, you know, it's like Extended is five to eight years worth of cards.

Extended Urza Saga was just busted. It was busted. I mean, people were winning on the first turn often. That's a problem. That's a problem environment. So Memory Jar, what happened was we figured out kind of too late to not print it, but early

enough that it hadn't come out yet. And so I think at the time I was friends with Randy Buehler from the Pro Tour, and Randy was good friends with Eric Lauer, who obviously I know now, but at the time I knew tangentially and Eric

realized it was problematic and made some decks with it and sent it to me and I played the decks with R&D. The funny thing is whenever Randy would get Eric to make decks and send them to me to prove something was broken I would play and then do really well because it was broken and then R&D would go Mark's winning. Something's wrong. Something's

horribly wrong. Why does Mark keep winning? So, anyway, we had a banned memory jar. It is... The funny thing is, when I made memory jar, it actually, when I made it, it was meant to be a... I made it like Winds of Change, where you got a hand equal to the size hand you had,

not seven cards. But they decided seven cards, I don't know, was more exciting, which it is, I guess, technically. But anyway, that is how we ended up with Memory Jar. Okay, Might of Oaks, three and a green, so four mana, one of which is green, instant. Target creature gets plus seven, plus seven until end of turn. So this was giant, giant growth, plus seven, plus seven. So the reason I picked this card, actually, has nothing to do with the card, although it's a fun card,

is I got to do the card concepting, remember? And one of my pet peeves with giant growth is they always made art in which you saw a creature, but there was no context for the creature. It's like, oh, look, it's an insect, or it's a bear, or it's something, but they didn't give any context. Well, how do I know it's a giant or something, but they didn't give any context. Well, how do I know it's a giant thing? You know, it's like, oh, look, I remember Ice Age had like an insect.

It's like, how do I, so it's an insect. Well, if it was a big insect, if I knew that, okay, that would be exciting, but I didn't know that. So I decided I wanted to show a small creature really big. And because I love squirrels, I decided to use squirrels. And I said, what if you had a squirrel so big it loomed over the forest? I said, that would tell you it's a big squirrel. Squirrels aren't usually bigger than the forest. And so the outfit, the card concept is basically this giant squirrel that like it's bigger than the trees. Because I felt that conveyed,

this made it really, really big. So anyway, I like the card concept. It's one of my favorite card concepts. Might of Oaks. Okay, next, Molten Hydra. One and a red for a 1-1 Hydra. For one red-red, so three mana, two which is red,

you've got to put a plus one, plus one counter on the card and then tap, remove all the plus one, plus one counters to deal damage equal to the counters to target creature or player. So the idea is I play it on turn two. So turn three, I can put a counter on it. So instead of a one, one, now it's a two, two. Whenever I have a chance, I can put more counters on it. And then I can always trade the counters in for damage.

So essentially what I'm paying for is for three mana, I sort of beef it up and I can attack with it. It's bigger. But when I really need to, I can sort of expend the counters to be able to destroy something or damage something. And as creature or player, so I also could do it to the to my opponent. So this was a pretty good card, especially Limited is a really good card. Okay, next, Mother of Runes. One white mana for a 1-1 Human Cleric. Target creature you control gains protection from color, for protection from the color of your choice.

So for those that might not know protection, we've sort of slowly been, it's no longer an evergreen mechanic. So protection does four things. You get protection from a color. So things of that color can't target the creature. Damage from anything of that color gets reduced to zero. You can't enchant or equip something with that color, and you can't be blocked by things of that color gets reduced to zero, you can't enchant or equip something with that color, and you can't be blocked by things of that color.

Those are the four things that protection does. Now this card, the reason it only affects your creatures is we didn't want you knocking off your opponent's auras and things, which you can do with protection. If I give a creature protection that has an aura on it, and I give protection from the color of the aura, the aura will fall off. But we didn't want...

The point of this wasn't messing with your opponent's stuff. The point of this card was helping your stuff. So Mother of Ruins is very, very useful. You can use it to protect your creatures because if they try to destroy your creatures, you can get protection from the spell they're trying to destroy it with. If they have blockers,

the blockers are all the same color, you can basically make it unblockable. You know, you can, it really allows you to protect your creatures and also makes them not only harder to kill but obviously you can't block if there's a singular color blocking you. So Mother Runes is

a very, very powerful one drop. I made fun of this card in Unhinged with Mother of Goons, which makes you insult people because I'm making fun of this card in Unhinged with Mother of Goons, which makes you insult people because making fun of Mother Runes. But anyway, yeah, this is, this card ended up being a very powerful card. I found it home in White Weenie, it found it home in a bunch of control decks. It was just very useful, very flexible, a very powerful card. Multani, Morrow Sorcerer, four green green for a legendary elemental.

It had Shroud, and its power and toughness were equal to the number of cards in all players' hands. So essentially, this was... So Moltani is the person who trained Gerard. Gerard and Mirri and Rofelos, the Llanowar elf, were all trained together under a Marrow sorcerer named Multani and Talal became friends. All of them ended up joining the Weatherlight together. Rofellos' death is the reason that Mirri and Gerard left the Weatherlight. That's why we had to go back and get him in the story. So Multani, I was making the story at the time, and Maro was

named after me, and I thought he'd be cool to have a character that was a Maro. So I made Multani a Maro. He's a Maro sorcerer. And so that means he's an elemental. So he's like a super Maro, in that normal Maro has the power to have to be equal to the cards in your hand. Multani

has the power and toughness of cards to all hands, so especially multiplayer can be very powerful. He also has the Shroud ability. Shroud is kind of like Hexproof, except nobody can target it. Hexproof prevents your opponents from targeting it, but you can still target it. Shroud, we originally did Shroud before we did Hexproof, and Shroud said that nobody could target it, including you. But what happened was people got confused, and a lot of people thought Shroud worked like Hexproof. So we eventually changed to Hexproof because enough people got confused by it

that we made the mechanic work the way people thought it worked. People just didn't seem to sense that you would play something that didn't allow you to target it. But anyway, Multani is Shroud. He is definitely, for a while, he was a very popular reanimation target, especially in multiplayer games, because he was really big and you can't target him. So I could get him out of the graveyard and then

start attacking people and there wasn't a lot of easy answers to him because he was so big and you couldn't kill him with spells. Or at least with targeted spells. Okay, No Mercy, two black black enchantment. Whenever a creature deals damage to you, destroy it.

So, this card, it was a cool card. I like this card a lot. It's kind of like, if you damage me, you die. In the card concepting, by the way, one of the pieces of the story is that the Phyrexians, who are about to invade, get caught in a time bubble. But the

idea is the time bubbles move at different speeds, time-wise. And so they're caught in a fast time bubble. So what's going on is they are progressing very fast. And when the Talarians realize what happens, they see they're trapped inside the bubble, they go to try to fight them. But the problem is, to the Phyrexians, the outside world's moving in slow motion, so they're always ready for anything

that comes their way. And the fast bubble allows the Phyrexians to evolve really quickly over time and cause problems. The Phyrexians are always causing problems. I don't know whether or not the Phyrexians' invasion was tied to the accident. I don't know about that. I don't know whether or not the Phyrexian's invasion was tied to the accident.

I don't know about that. I don't know whether it was inherently an accident or whether the Phyrexians were somehow involved in the accident happening. I do not know. Opportunity, four blue blue for an instant. Target player draws four cards. A nice, clean, simple thing. This is back in the day when all the draw was targeted.

Now draw often defaults to just being drawn for you and not drawing up anybody. I wrote a whole article about it. I disagree with that, but I'm on the losing side of that battle for now, at least. Ostracize. It's a sorcerer that costs a single black. Target an opponent, reveals a hand, you choose a creature card from it, and they discard it. So Urza

Saga had a card called Distress? Is that right? Duress. Sorry. Had a card called Distress. Is that right? Duress. Duress. Sorry. It had a card called Duress. And Duress, most people know it came back in Theros. Duress is a very powerful card.

Ostracize is the companion. So Duress looks at your hand and takes any non-land, non-creature. And Ostracize takes any creature. So they're kind of the opposite. Neither take land. But basically, assuming you can't take land, one takes everything but creatures, and everything takes creatures. Ostracize is...

It actually isn't a bad card. It's just not quite as good as duress. Okay, Palancron. Palancron costs five blue blue for a 4-5 illusion. It is flying. When it enters the battlefield, you untap 7 lands because it's a free mechanic. And for 2 blue blue, 4 mana, 2 which is blue, you can return it to your hand. So the idea is this is a free creature, so it untaps lots of lands. It is a flyer. It's a 4 or 5 flyer. And you have the ability to bounce it back to your hand.

So this card was very useful because, remember, a lot of the reason of the free mechanic is to generate lots of mana for you. And so the idea with this spell is you could, if you were able to actually generate enough mana, you could play it, bounce it. actually generate enough mana, you could play it, bounce it. You know, for example, in untapping seven lands, if you generated more than 11 mana, you could basically infinite mana.

Because let's say, for example, you could generate 12 mana. Let's say you had a Talarian Academy or something that tapped for a whole bunch of mana, and you could play Palancron and untapped 12 mana, or 12 amount of mana. Then you could spend 4 of the 5 to return this to your hand, I mean 4 of it, then spend 7 to replay it,

and each time you do that you go up 1 mana. And so you can do that an infinite number of times, and you basically can create an infinite amount of mana. So if you could produce enough mana with Palancron, it allowed you to get to infinite mana. And what could you do with infinite mana in Urza Saga? All sorts of dangerous things. Okay, next we've got the Phyrexian, Denouncer, Debaser,

Defiler, Plaguerlord. So Denouncer is a 1-1, Debaser is a 2-2, Defiler is a 3-3, Plaguerlord is a 4-4. So the 1-1 costs 1-B, the 2-2 costs 3-B, the 3-3 costs 2-B-B, and the 4-4 costs 3-B-B. B is black. So 1 in the black, 3 in the black, 2 in 2B the 3-3 costs 2BB and the 4-4 costs 3BB B is black

so 1 in a black 3 in a black 2 in 2 blacks 3 in 2 blacks the idea is you could tap and sacrifice the creature to give target creature minus N minus N

or minus X minus X where X is the power of the creature so denounce it did minus 1 minus 1 defile it minus 2 minus 2 defile it minus 3 minus 3 plague lord minus 4 minus 4

plague lord also had the ability you could sac a creature to give target creature minus 1 minus 1 Denouncer did minus one, minus one. Debaser, minus two, minus two. Defiler, minus three, minus three. Plaguer, minus four, minus four. Plaguer also had the ability, you could sac a creature and give a target creature minus one, minus one. It essentially turned all creatures into denouncers, essentially. Anyway, this was a vertical cycle, so the denouncer, the debaser,

and the filer technically were a cycle. Plaguer was kind of connected. It was a 4-4, but it had one extra ability that the other ones did not have. Probably under modern day, it would have been a Mythic Rare. We would have had a true vertical cycle where you have common, uncommon, rare, and Mythic Rare. Okay, Phyrexian Reclamation.

It's an enchantment for one black. For one B and pay two life, put a creature card in your graveyard into your hand. So this is just a repeatable Raise Dead that you play it. And a Raise Dead is a single one-shot enchantment that costs a black. This costs one and a black, but you have to pay two life. But, once again, there are a bunch of ways to gain life in this environment. So if you had the ability to gain life and you had access to the mana, it allows you to keep getting out large creatures.

Planar Collapse. Planar Collapse costs one and white. So two mana one of which is white it's an enchantment at the beginning of your upkeep if you are four more creatures on the battlefield

you may sack it and destroy all creatures and they cannot regenerate so this was I talked about this in my last podcast about how there was a cycle so the cycle was

let's see what were they it was planar Collapse in white, Second Chance in blue, Brink of Madness in black, Impending Disaster in red, and Defense of the Heart in green. And the idea was, if you met a certain condition, you could sack the beginning of your

upkeep to do a big effect. This is a wrath of God, essentially. So that's a pretty big effect. It represented, by the way, I talked about Urza had a collapsed Sarah's Realm, and this is him collapsing. That's what the flavor of this card is. Okay, also Rack and Ruin. Rack and Ruin cost 2R for an instant. Destroy two target artifacts. So there are a bunch of cards in the set. It wasn't a cycle, but there were, let's see, there was Peace and Quiet in white

and Hope and Glory in white. There was Sick and Tired in black and Rack and Ruin in red. And all of them were spells that targeted two things. So, for example, this thing allows you to destroy two artifacts, but they must have two artifacts. You can't destroy one artifact. It's not up to two artifacts. It's two artifacts. And so the idea was you always had to destroy two, which limited it a little bit. It allowed us to make the spell

and that at times could be, especially for artifacts, could be a drawback. So normally, shatter was the default at the time. So for two mana, you destroy one artifact. Well, for three, you could destroy two. Next, Radiant Archangel. Three white white

for a 3-3 Legendary Angel has flying and vigilance, although vigilance I think was written out at the time because I don't think vigilance existed yet as a keyword. And it got plus 1 plus 1 for each other creature with flying on the battlefield. So not just your flying creatures, all flying creatures. This is back in the day where

global effects of that kind of looked at everything. So the idea here is she's a 3-3 flyer, and hey, if you play with other flyers, she keeps getting bigger and bigger. So Radiant was the leader of the angels, so this card was designed to kind of be really good in an angel deck. Well, guess what? Angels all fly.

She likes flying, so if you just get a whole bunch of angels out, Radiant can get really big. Radiant was an interesting character in that she was kind of portrayed as the villain because she was trying to stop Urza, but Urza was up to no good. I mean, some way. I mean,

big picture wise, he was trying... His end goal was a good goal. He was trying to stop the Phyrexians, but along the way, he did lots of not-so-great things to do it. And I felt that Raiden was an interesting character in that. She was trying to stop Urza, but he was trying to destroy her world. I kind of think she had it right.

She was not the nicest person, and she was pretty mean to Urza. But, I don't know. When someone comes to destroy my world, maybe I'm not the nicest to them. Rancor costs one green mana. It's an Enchant Creature. Enchant Creature gets plus two, plus oh, and trample. And if Rancor ever goes to the graveyard, it gets returned to your hand.

So one of the cool things... From the battlefield. It gets returned from the battlefield. If it ever goes to the graveyard from the battlefield, one of the tricks was if you could fizzle the card, you could kill the creature as you were trying to target it. It's one way to actually get rid of this enchantment. So the niche story about this card was,

in development, we played around with the card and tried to figure out the right cost. This is part of a cycle of cards. So there were a cycle of auras. We call them recurring auras. So Cessation was in white. Slow Motion was in blue. Sleeping Guile was in black. Sluggishness was in red,

and Rancor was in green. And they were all aura's, creature aura's, enchant creatures, that when they went to the graveyard from the battlefield, they would turn to your hand. So they tried to offset the card disadvantage that a lot of times you have with creature aura's, enchant creatures. Anyway, as the story goes, in development we played around with this. We tried different costs.

I think we tried it at green one day but decided that the correct cost was one in the green. It should cost two mana. Somebody made a note, Bill or somebody, made a note in the thing and somehow it never got changed in the file. And this got printed. We didn't realize we'd printed it at the wrong cost

until it came out in packs. Like, oh, uh-oh. But we don't know how to cost and stuff. What we cost is what we cost it. So this ended up being a really good card because it really wasn't supposed to cost green. It was supposed to cost one green. But it ended up being a very powerful card.

And it's one of the few times I remember us just making a mistake and not printing at what we agreed to print it at. Next, Tinker, two and a blue for a sorcery. As an additional cost, sacrifice an artifact, search your library for an artifact, and put it onto the battlefield. So Tinker, one day

I was talking with the pit, and we were trying, the developers, and we were trying to figure out what was the most broken card I ever designed. And there's a bunch of cards I had a hand in that are pretty broken, but Development picked this card as my most broken card. Tinker.

It's restricted in Vintage and I believe banned in Legacy. It is very powerful because it's not that hard to get an artifact in play. And then you can just go get whatever artifact you want. So, you know, I get a cheap one-drop or zero-drop artifact and BAM! Turn three becomes some very scary, threatening thing.

I know there is a Blightsteel Colossus that has Infect, and it deals 10 damage, I believe, or 12 damage. So it's like, I hit you, and you're dead. And it's indestructible, so it's like, indestructible creature that when it hits you, you're dead. That's a pretty powerful thing to's indestructible, so it's like, indestructible creatures that when it hits you, you're dead. That's a pretty powerful thing to get for three mana and sacking like a zero cost or something. Okay, next. Treetop

Village. It's a land. It enters the battlefield tapped. You can tap it for a green, and for one and a green, it becomes a 3-3 ape with trample. So this is part of the cycle. I talked about Fairy Conclave. This was the most powerful of the five. Definitely the one that saw the most

play. Part of it was Mono Green was really good at this time. Stompy was the name of the deck. And it just fit really well in the Mono Green deck. You needed Valand anyway. I mean, it had a drawback. It entered the battlefield a tap, but the idea

that later on it could turn into a 3-3 creature with Trample was well worth the drawback of it coming to play Taff. So, anyway, Tree Top Village was a very,

very powerful card. I mean, it is a very powerful card, but back in the day, even back in the day, I mean, here's how you know it's powerful,

was it was good in Urza's Saga environment where things were crazy and it was good. So, okay, good in Urza's saga environment, where things were crazy, and it was good. So. Okay, next. Urza's Blueprints. So this is an artifact that costs six.

It had Echo, so it meant the turn after you play it, you had to pay six. But it had tap, draw, card. And so the idea behind it was, okay, it costs 12 mana over two turns, but essentially it's a personal Howling Mine. It lets you, and just you, draw an extra card every turn. The other thing that was nice about it was

that even if some reason you were stuck and you couldn't pay Echo, although you really, really wouldn't pay Echo on this thing, you did get one card out of the mix. Although paying six mana for one card is, you're in desperate times when that is true. But we were trying to show off Urza. And the fun thing, if you look at Urza's blueprints,

I believe it shows the Weatherlight. It might also show Karn. But the idea is, a lot of what's going on is, Urza, in the story, Urza was putting together all the components necessary to stop the Phyrexians, and part of that was building all the component pieces, the legacy, if you will, for the Weatherlight. And then the Weatherlight saga was, if you combine all these pieces, it kind of turned the Weatherlight into a weapon, which is what they ended up doing to defeat the Phyrexians. And you see, Urza had planned all this.

Once again, I should stress that when Michael and I first pitched the story, it had nothing to do with Urza. The whole Urza involvement was a retrofit after we left. Anyway. Next, Weatherseed Treefolk. So Weatherseed Treefolk is two green, green,

green, so five mana, three of which is green, for five, three Treefolk, and when it dies, instead of going to the graveyard, it returns to your hand. So this was a pretty cool card. The idea behind this card was you really couldn't get rid of it. You could slow it down.

You know, if I kill it, okay, well then I have to play it again, but once you play this card, it's really hard to get rid of it. I mean, you can exile it, you can pacify it. There's answers, but it was just very hard to deal with, and this was kind of a companion piece to Rancor and

Enchantments. Those were all enchantments that when they, I mean, enchantments don't die, but when they went to the graveyard from the battlefield, they went back to your hand, and Weatherlink Treefolk was us doing that. We didn't want to do a whole cycle of creatures. We felt a lot of creatures would be problematic. We liked the idea of this creature, and it's expensive, and it's really mana intensive.

But it just turns out that Stompy was a mono green deck that was very good here. And so, 5 mana, which all three are green, is not really good, except in a mono green deck, which was really good. So Weatherseed Treefolk also saw a bunch of play, just because it was a really good

5 drop. Stompy was a little faster, so they didn't always play Weatherseseat Treefolk also saw a bunch of play, just because it was a really good 5-drop. Stompy was a little faster, so they didn't always play Weatherseat Treefolk, but some did. One thing about Stompy was, there was a lot of 1-drops you could play in green, a lot of 1-drops and 2-drops. It was a very fast, aggressive deck. Urza Saga definitely added a lot of speed. Not only was it a combo enabler it also enabled speed and control, it enabled everything it was a very enabling block, it gave a lot of things okay

so my final card for today I'm going to wrap up this in two podcasts normally when I do my things I think there wasn't tons of the making of story, so I jumped in my cards pretty quick yesterday, so I got halfway through yesterday, I'm doing the other half today. When we get

to Urza's Destiny, I'll actually have, I know we'll have more than two podcasts because I did that design by myself, so I have a lot of stories from Urza's Destiny. I was on the design team of Urza's Legacy, so actually a bunch of the cards I'm talking about I did make. I didn't make a bunch of cards, but somehow there's more stories from Urza's Destiny

just because of the nature of how it was made. But anyway, the last card of the day is Wheel of Torture! So it's an artifact that costs three. At the beginning of an opponent's upkeep, it deals X damage to them equal to the number of cards in their hand

minus three. So essentially what this was is this was is this was a black vice, essentially, but a black vice that was... What is this pointing at your opponent? Is this... Oh, it's the number of cards in your hand.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. What you're trying to do is you're trying to do damage to your opponent by having a lot of cards in your hand. That's what Wheel of Torture does. So what it is essentially is this is a rack, but instead of hurting you, it hurts your opponent. What you want to do is you want to have a full hand and it does damage for every card. Except this is in some ways this is like the black vice in that it hurts the opponent.

Let me rack. Rack hurts the opponent for them having a lot of cards. Wheel of torture hurts the opponent for you having a lot of cards. So it's kind of a anyway, it's sort of a twisted rack where it pointed at them but based on your stuff.

The reason I included this actually was not that little story, but was the flavor text. I wrote the flavor text for this card, which is, I'd like to buy a bowel, because it's Wheel of Torture, which is a play on the Wheel of Fortune. And Vanna, I'd like to buy a bowel. So once upon a time, I did a lot of flavor text and I put in a lot of puns. I do not do a lot of flavor text anymore, so there's not a lot of puns.

I'm not sure whether the corollaries was less puns because I'm not doing flavor text or I'm not doing flavor text because there's not a lot of puns. We really have moved away from the pun-centric. Back in the day when I was doing flavor text, there was less overall... I don't know. There's more willingness

to do puns than there are currently today. We do some puns. I don't say we don't do puns, because we still do. But anyway, I'm pulling up to the office. So, Urza's Legacy was a... I think if you actually look at all three sets in the Urza's block, Urza's Legacy

had more... its highs weren't as high as Urza's Saiga the Urza's block, Urza's Legacy had more... its highs weren't as high as Urza's Saiga. Urza's Saiga had more broken cards, but Urza's Legacy had more... like, if you rank the power level of all the cards, the average power level of Urza's Legacy is the highest in the block. And that is because there's some very, very powerful stuff in Urza's Saiga, but there's a lot of chaff in Urza's Saiga. There's not tons of chaff in Urza's Legacy. Urza's Legacy, there's a lot... If you look at just cards that went on to mean something in tournaments, Urza's Legacy has a very high percentage.

In fact, it is possible, it's possible that this set has the highest percentage of cards that eventually saw a tournament play than any expansion ever. It might be second or third. I'm not 100% it's number one, but it's in contention for number one, and that alone is impressive. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed

my shorter, my two-part series on Urza's Legacy. Next up, I will obviously be doing, not right away, but next time I get to a design thing, I'll be talking about Urza's Destiny, the third in the Urza's block. But anyway, it was fun. Urza's S, the third in the Urza's block. But anyway, it was fun. Urza's Saga, like I said, was us kind of doing crazy things and made a crazy broken time.

It's kind of fun looking back. There's a lot of powerful things, but there's cool stuff, too. There's a lot of neat designs. I mean, I think, as I look back at Urza's Saga, I think we had neat designs and we had poor development. In fact, the outcome of Urza's saga, by the way, is we started designing, we started setting designing, we started hiring players off the Pro Tour.

Randy Bueller got hired because of this, Mike Donais got hired because of this. We started sort of saying, you know what, we need people that are more experts in how things are broken and this was the start of what I would call the modern day developer. Early developer was people like me who I had a general sense of how to make things fun.

I wasn't really good on power level. I don't think anybody other than maybe William was particularly good at power level. Oh, and to take it back, Henry was good at power level. Henry was our first Pro Tour hire, but we needed more than one person. And also while we were doing this, Henry was busy making I believe Portal 3 Kingdom

so his attention was elsewhere and he was the only person making it so one of the problems with Urza Saiga Black was R&D wasn't that big and a lot of us got pulled away like I think I was doing unglued while Urza Saiga Black was going on and I was the only person

doing it so like a lot of my attention went there and I designed a lot of cards for the set, obviously, but I didn't do as much development. Not that I was a particularly great developer. But anyway, that, my friends, is Urza's legacy. So I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I'll be back in not too long with Urza's destiny.

But anyway, I'm in my parking space, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.