Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #387 - Urza's Destiny, Part 1

Episode Date: November 25, 2016

Part one (of four) of Mark's series on the design of Urza's Destiny.

I'm pulling up a driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another design talk where I talk about designing a set. So I've been doing the Urza Saga block, and I talked all about the design of Urza Saga. I talked about all the design of Urza's Legacy. So today I'm going to talk about the design of Urza's Destiny, the third and final set in the Urza Saga block. Okay, so it was codenamed Chimichanga. This is back in the day when the codenames weren't connected, per se.

I think that Urza's legacy was guacamole, but I don't remember. Urza Saga had nothing to do with Mexican food. So, anyway, I just liked the sound of Chimichanga. It's just a word that was entertaining to me. So, I named it. I just liked the name. I just liked the sound of chimichanga. It's just a word that was entertaining to me. So, I don't know.

I named it. I gave it the name. So, it came out on June 7th of 1999. And one of the famous things about the set was when Magic first hit it big, Richard Garfield realized that they needed to make an expansion. Or Peter realized they needed to make an expansion or Peter realized they needed to make an expansion and came to Richard and Richard quickly made

Arabian Nights other than Arabian Nights which was designed really really fast Urza's Destiny is the only design led by a single person and that single person was me I was the design team for Urza's Destiny so

it was something where what happened at the time was there weren't a lot of people in magic design and we were just starting to do more things we had picked up more projects we started doing Portal and a couple different things and because of that

we just had less people to do on different projects and so I said to I think Joel Mick at the time who was the head designer that i could do it by let it do let me do it by myself i could do by myself and i i guess we were shorthand just like sure so um anyway i have a lot to say about this just because i i like i said that there was not a lot of every card in the set at least the ones that were turned from design i did because i did all the design. The development team, by the way, was led by Mike Elliott, and included most of the people who were in Magic R&D,

and a few that weren't at the time. So William Jockish, Charlie Cattino, Paul Peterson, Bill Rose, and Henry Stern. So William, Bill, and Henry were, and Mike, were basically the normal people that were doing Magic. Charlie and Paul both were in R&D. Magic wasn't the main thing they did, but they would chip in from time to time. Charlie, for those who don't know, Charlie Coutinho,

what happened was Charlie's name was misspelled in Alpha, I think, because he was one of the original playtafters. And as a running joke throughout all of Magic history, his last name was always misspelled in a different way. And so it's a running... If you ever look through all the different Magic products, anything that Charlie's in has Charlie's name, but it's always wrong. It's a running joke throughout Magic.

Okay, so one of the things that happened here was this is a point in time where small sets didn't really do new keywords. You were just evolving the keywords that existed. And although the Urza's Destiny definitely did have, I would say, some new mechanics per se, there was no new keyword or anything. So what we used to do was we would introduce two mechanics in the large set,

and the second and third set would just evolve those mechanics. So the two mechanics, the named mechanics, were Echo and Cycling. As I talked about in the Urza Saga podcast, both of those actually first showed up in Tempest. Echo was made by Mike Elliott and Cycling was made by Richard Garfield. Both of those showed up during Tempest that they were both on. We had too much, so we didn't use them. And when Mike Elliott made Urza Saga, he made use of both those mechanics from Tempest. use them and when Mike Elliott made Urza's Saga he made use of both those mechanics from Tempest. So one of the things that I was trying to figure out was how could I evolve it?

What could I do with Echo and cycling? So one of the things that I had done in Urza's Legacy was I had really pushed for the idea of things, Echo creatures that maybe you didn't necessarily want to upkeep. And so I played around there with enter the battlefield effects. The idea being that a lot of the value of the creature was the spell sort of stapled to it when you enter the battlefield. So the body wasn't quite as meaningful to you. So sometimes if you just wanted the spell, you could sort of play it, get the spell out of it

and then let the creature go in the second turn. If you wanted the creature, you could sort of play it, get the spell out of it, and then let the creature go in the second turn. If you wanted the creature, you could pay the Echo cost, but it made it, you know, Urza's Saga, the way the Echo tended to work is, well, you were paying for the creature and you had to pay over two turns, and you always pretty much paid the second time. And Urza's Legacy started goofing around with, like, well, maybe we'll make some spells where you don't necessarily want to pay the Echo cost. You can, you're always able to, but maybe you don't. And I was interested in that space.

The other thing I was interested in was trying to figure out how to play around with cycling and was there something different I could do with cycling. Oh, by the way, real quick. The set had 143 cards, 55 commons, 44 uncommons, 44 rares.

This is back in the day, long before mythic rare existed. The expansion symbol was an Erlenmeyer flask, representing the experimentation that Urza was doing. The story, for those that don't know, is we were on the Weatherlight Saga. We learned that Gerard and crew were trying to save the day, and they eventually you know, eventually would stop the Phyrexians, but we had a prequel year, and we went back and we learned that Urza was behind it all.

For those, once again, one day I'll tell the story of the White Light Saga. When Michael and I created it, Urza was not behind it all, but that sort of got retro fit in, and so in the story, now you find that the White Light Saga secretly was all part of Urza. Urza was behind everything.

And so Urza Saga was a prequel where we went back. And so this part of the story is the final piece of all the shenanigans Urza pulled to set things up such as the Weatherlight Saga. When we get to the card-by-cards, there's a few pieces that tie in the Weatherlight Saga that I will talk about. There's a few pieces that tie in the Woodlight Saga that I will talk about. But anyway, so the set, I was trying to figure out how to get new takes on cycling and echo. And one of the things of cycling was, I was trying to figure out a way to evolve cycling, do cycling a little bit different.

And so what I ended up doing was, I came up with this idea of cycling from play. So if you think of traditional cycling, the way cycling works is if a card's in your hand, and in Urza Saga, the cost to cycle was always two. We would later bring cycling back and play around with other costs, but at the time, in Urza Saga, it was always two. So my idea was in cycling, I pay two, I discard a card from my hand, the cycling card, and then I can draw a card. So my idea was, what if we had cycling from play? The idea being, there was a card in play, I could pay two, I could sacrifice it, and then I draw a card.

So the idea was, rather than discarding a card from my hand to draw a card, I could sacrifice it for the battlefield to draw a card. That was the idea. And once I played around with that idea, I said, okay, well, if we could have cycling from play, one of the mistakes, by the way, from cycling from play was, I never labeled it.

So it never, even though I would later say, get it, it's cycling, but from play, most people did not get that. It's the kind of thing that, it became a running joke in R&D that I would always explain that, and people were like, oh yeah, I didn not get that. It's the kind of thing that it became a running joke in R&D that I would always explain that. People are like, oh yeah, I didn't get that. In retrospect, I wish I had keyworded it

or did something to sort of like give you the sense. Partially to make sure people saw it and partially because we would later have cycling triggers and it would have been nice if these were considered cycling triggers. But anyway, so now I was cycling from play. So I was letting you sacrifice permanents to draw a card. And Echo, we were playing around a lot with the idea that maybe there was Echo costs you

didn't always want to pay. And the way I played around with that in Urza's Legacy was having enter the battlefield effects on it. But when I was looking at what I was doing, I said, you know what, there's an overlap between cycling from play and from Echo. What if we played around with death triggers? And the idea being is, what if instead of entering the battlefield gave you something, what if it dying gave you something?

So now, you know, the reason to not pay the Echo cost is even more blunt. In Ursa's Legacy, it's like, well, I've got most of the value of the card. Maybe I don't want to spend the rest of the money. I have something better to do with my mana. I have something better to do with my mana. I have something better to do with my mana. But in Earth's Destiny, because the Echo creatures would have a death trigger, you know, it wasn't, like, not paying was the thing that would get you what you want and get you the trigger.

And so the nice thing was, if I put death triggers onto Cycling from Play, well, now you have an extra bonus if you cycle them. And if I put it on echo creatures, you have extra reason to want to not necessarily always upkeep them. You know, pay the echo cost. So anyway, I added death triggers. The other thing that I was messing around with that I enjoyed was the idea of using,

having certain things in your hand as a tool. enjoyed was the idea of using, having certain things in your hand as a tool. So I did what we called the reveal spells. There was a cycle of creatures and a cycle of spells that required you to show any number of cards from your hand that were a certain color. And then they cared how much of that color

you had. So it pushed a little monocolor theme and it really was playing around with the costs we'd never played around with, which is, hey, do I just have these in my hand? You know, it was me playing in kind of new space. So this set, what else can I tell you about the set? So the set was... Okay, so other themes. Here's the cycles I played around with. There was a...

Michael... Mike Elliott. One of the things that... The block, by the way, had an enchantment theme. I've talked about this all the time. We didn't really... If you actually look at the set, it has an enchantment theme. But it didn't end up in constructive and sort of high-level play.

It ended up not being as focused as necessary. I think people think of Urza's Aga blocks more about their artifact-themed enchantment theme, but it didn't end up in constructed and sort of high-level play. It ended up not being as focused as necessary. I think people think of Urza Saga blocks more about their artifact-themed enchantments. But there was a cycle, there was growing enchantments that Michael had made in Urza Saga based on there's a card called what's it called?

Treasure Trove, I think, from Tempest that Mike Elliott had made where you put a counter on every turn and then somehow you can trade in the thing for an effect that was growing over time. You drew cards in Treasure Trove. So the idea was I slowly get value over time, and then I can trade it in, and the longer I wait, the better I get. So Mike had put some general enchantments that were growing,

that you could put counters on over time and create an effect. So in this set, I made a cycle of growing auras, which were enchant creature spells that the creature got better over time. I'll get to those eventually. I had a cycle called lobotomy spells. I had made a card in Tempest called Lobotomy, where I made you discard a card, and then I went and got every copy of the card I made

you discard. I went in your brain and I removed the ability to cast a spell was sort of the theme. So I made spells, a cycle of spells where you destroy something and then now you destroy that thing you destroy all traces of it so all of it gets to go away.

And then I made a cycle of scents and seers. Those were the reveal mechanic. The scents were ones in which they were spells, usually incense, I think. And then as an additional cost to play them, you revealed some number of colored cards from your hand. And then it affected how big the effect was based on that. And then the seers did the same thing, but they were creatures that you would tap to use. And then I did one vertical cycle, which was an enchantment bonus cycle,

where the idea was it was a common, uncommon, and rare blue creature, and then also an artifact, that if enchanted, it gained an ability. Interestingly, when I originally built the design, I put a vertical cycle on every color. All the cycles had vertical cycles. And development ended up knocking them all out. Only the blue one remained.

So I'll talk about some of them when I get there, card by card. So other little tiny trivia about this set. First off, this was the first set that we moved from Summon to Creature. I think what happened was, in between the second and third set, 6th edition came out is I think what happened. And 6th edition, we changed over the card frame so that it was no longer, it was no longer summon,

like let's say you had a goblin, it would say summon goblin. And then 6th edition, we changed it so it was creature dash goblin. And then in 6th edition, we changed it so it was creature-goblin. We liked the idea that the card type was on the card. So if I said destroy target creature, and I was the beginner, I'd go, oh, what's a creature?

Like, well, the card says creature on it, rather than summon. Like before, you destroy target creature, you're just trying to know that that was a creature, even though the word creature never appeared on the card. So this was the first set post-6th edition. 6th edition came out in between Urza's Legacy and Urza's Destiny, I'm pretty sure. And so this is the first set that basically functioned under 6th edition rules, which

meant that 6th edition templates happened. And so we got creature for the first time. Also, I believe this is the first set where Gollum as a creature type was introduced. So the first ever Gollum was in the set. Also, I believe this is the first set where Gollum as a creature type was introduced. So the first ever Gollum was in the set. I think it played into... Well, we always knew that Karn was a Gollum. He was a silver Gollum.

Didn't we? But there was... Maybe we didn't... Maybe at the time we didn't use... Oh, here's what's probably going on is... I think that we didn't use creature types... Early on, we didn't use creature types in Artifact Creatures. Artifact Creatures just were Artifact Creature.

And we came around and decided, I was the big one who helped push this, that we should have creature types in all, I mean, minus, you know, one or two cutesy things like Nameless Race. We should have creature types in all creatures. All creatures should have creature types. So I think even though Golems preexisted the set, meaning creatively we'd had golems before, this was the first set where the creature type golem actually showed up

because we started doing creature subtypes. So this was the first time the golem actually showed up on the card. Okay. Well, let's get into the card by card because there's plenty of fun card trivia to talk about. So let's start with Academy Rector. So Academy Rector costs three and a white. It's a one-two human cleric.

And when it dies, you exile it. And then you get a tutor for an enchantment. So you go through your library and find any enchantment card, and you put it on the battlefield. This was a loose cycle of cards I made, although they ended up not quite playing all the same. I think when I designed them, they all worked the same. In the development, they changed some of them, but not all of them.

So this card, one of the things about Urza Saiga block I've talked about was the block itself was pretty broken. It was an overpowered block by quite a bit. In fact, I will go on a limb and say the most overpowered block we ever made, block at least. I mean, Alpha had some overpowered stuff, but that wasn't part of a bit. In fact, I will go on a limb and say the most overpowered block we ever made. Block, at least. I mean, Alpha had some overpowered stuff, but that wasn't part of a block. Mirrodin's number two, but I actually believe Urza Saga is more broken than Mirrodin, which was also quite broken. I bring this up because the Academy of Rectors are good. Like, one of my jokes is, I made cards in design

that, my joke was, I would One of my jokes is I made cards in design that... My joke was I would have spent a little bit more time on costing if I knew that development, in a lot of cases, would just leave it be. This is a card where this is... When I designed the card, this is what I costed it at. And it is too cheap. It is too efficient. This is a really powerful card.

In fact, it's funny. Back in the day, I used to play in the FFL, and I made a mono white deck that had four Yawgmoth's Bargains in it. I'll get to Yawgmoth's Bargain eventually. So Yawgmoth's Bargain is probably the most broken card in the set. There's a lot of broken cards in the set, so that's something. Although I should point out, by the way, that Eric Lauer points out to me that Urza's Destiny was the least broken

of the three sets in Urza's Saiga block. Low bar, but... But anyway, I made a mono-white... When I say mono-white, I mean nothing but planes. I had four Yawgmoth's Bargains. And the only way for me to get Yawgmoth's Bargain onto the battlefield was either with a Catering Rector or another spell that I'll talk about later called Replenish.

And so I had no way to cast the spell. I didn't have black mana in my deck. But yet I would get out Yawgmoth's Bargain and do horrible things with it, or fun things for me. But anyway, Academy Rector is very powerful just because it allows you to circumvent costs one of the big problems we had

especially in Urza Saiga block is it's a lot of circumventing of costs it's like I spend four mana to get it out and then I can go

whatever like I said in the deck I was playing FFL which I was doing really well with I was getting out

a spell that cost black black black sorry four black black is what it cost. Six mana, two of which were black. I didn't even have swamps in my deck.

No problem. But anyway, this, as thematically talking about, this ties into my death theme. I had death triggers. That was a major theme in this block. And so this definitely was, okay, hey, it dies and it does something pretty powerful.

Next, archery training. It's an enchantment for white. It's an aura, enchant creature. So every upkeep, you put an arrow counter on it. And then enchant a creature has tap, deal X damage to target attacking or blocking creature

where X is the number of arrow counters on it. So there's an ability we used to do a lot more in white, what we used to refer to as range strike. And the idea was, it usually is flavored by, like, someone with a crossbow or something. And the idea was I could do damage to attack or blocking creatures. White's kind of, you know, white has this high moral, sense of morals.

So white doesn't like to kill things. It doesn't have to kill things. But the idea is, well, once you get in a fight with white, okay, now you're fair game. And so white's like, well, I just can't damage anything. But, okay, I can damage attacking or blocking creatures. This is still in white's part of the pie. It's not that this isn't something white can do. It just proved to be pretty powerful and limited.

Very powerful and limited. We don't do it a lot anymore just for that. It kind of shuts down combat quite a bit. Even if you just have one ranged-strike creature that can do one damage to attack or block a creature, A, it makes the math a lot harder,

and B, it really makes blocking significantly harder to do. So this cycle, we're all... Like I said, my take on the enchantments, when Mike made them in Urza's Saga, they were all global enchantments. They got bigger. I think you sacked them to make use of them.

My version of them, they were enchant creatures, and you never sacked them. They just made the creature more and more powerful over time. But the issue was that they were auras. And so auras have a lot of downside. The biggest being, if you ever get rid of the creature, you get rid of the aura.

We felt that we could make auras that could grow over time. There's a lot of answers, especially in limited, for creatures. And constructed, obviously. So we felt like okay, we weren't particularly worried it was going to be overpowered. Okay, next.

Bloodshot Cyclops. Okay, so Bloodshot Cyclops costs five and a red, so six mana, one of which is red. It's a 4-4 Cyclops giant. You tap, you sac a creature, and then you deal damage equal to the power of the sacrificed creature to

target a creature or player. So this was what I would call an enabler. So one of the things is, in general, when you make a set, what you want to do is you want to figure out what you're trying to do with the set, and then you build cards around it that enable that activity. So, for example, I had a set that had a lot to do with death triggers. Okay. Things dying meant something.

Well, how do I interact with that? Well, I make cards that help you control when things die. Now, yes, you can send things in combat, and that gives you some amount of knowledge of when things are going to die. But because of giant grossness and that, you don't completely know. But sacrificing creatures is nice and clean. Like, you know when you sacrifice a creature, it's going to die. There's nothing your opponent can do to stop you from sacrificing a creature.

So it's a nice, clean way to set off the death trigger. And this one also, it's sort of... I had made, I think, Fling. Was Fling in Tempest? We had made Fling, which was a one-shot version of this, where you sacrifice a creature and then do damage, but it's a singular spell. And Bloodshot Cyclops was made as a repeatable version of this.

A little more expensive, obviously. But anyway, it was flavorful, it played another theme, and it ended up being a card we would put in some core sets. Okay, next, Body Snatcher. Two black black for a 2-2 minion. When it enters the battlefield, you exile it unless you discard a creature spell. And then when it dies, you get to reanimate or take a creature card from any graveyard and put it onto the battlefield.

So this was definitely, once again, we had, there's a death trigger here. So the idea was, the creature's death trigger was reanimate a creature. Well, that's a pretty powerful effect. So we needed to offset that to make sure that... Otherwise, this fellow would be really expensive to cast. So what we did was... we made part of the cost of discarding a card. But it had a cutesy quality to it that

what you could do, for example, is discard a card that was too expensive for you to cast, and then put this creature out, and then when this creature dies, you can reanimate the very card you discarded to be able to put the thing in play. So one of the things, I talk about this a bit, but it's a good example.

When you're designing cards, one of the things you want to do is if you ever have more than one ability, you want to make sure that those abilities feel holistically connected. And there's a bunch of different ways to do that. Sometimes you can do it with Slaver. Sometimes you can do it with slaver. Sometimes you can do it because mechanically

they're relevant to each other. This is a good example of one where the two abilities, like, by making clever possibilities with them, like, really what it was is we want to have a cost to offset the card, we want an ability for the card, and we found a way to pick a cost that could, but doesn't always have to, interconnect with it. So the

idea is when you look at the card, basically what you want to do is people are going to map, when you look at something new, people sort of make a story in their heads. Well, here's what's going to happen. And so the story we were able to sort of give them was, okay, I have this creature. I have this creature in my hand that's too expensive. I can't cast it yet because it's turned four, let's say, because it's cost four mana. Okay, well, I can discard this way bigger creature than I can normally cast. Now, not a big deal. I couldn't cast it anyway.

I play out this creature. At some point, whenever this creature dies, that big thing that I couldn't cast, I now get for free. creature dies, that big thing that I couldn't cast, I now get for free. So, in some ways, it was a lot like saying, hey, exile a creature card from your hand, and when this dies, return it from the battlefield. That's kind of how it read, but it didn't actually require you to do that. You know, you weren't required to discard a creature. Sometimes you require other things.

You know, you might require something that was a spell or something that you needed to do, And sometimes the thing you want to reanimate, A, well, it could be in your opponent's graveyard. It could be something that you somehow got there some other time. Maybe a powerful creature you got out that got killed that you wanted to bring back. So we made sort of them connect so that they can do something in which they're connected, but they're not forced to. So they tell the story. They make sense to you, the audience, because they have a relationship with each other, but we leave them open-ended enough that you can do other fun things. You don't have to do the prescriptive thing, but the prescriptive

thing explains why the two things are on the card. Okay next, Brass Secretary. So Brass Secretary is an artifact creature. It costs three. It's a 2-1 construct. And it has to sacrifice draw a card. So this is a good example of a very simplistic version of Cycling from Play. In fact, it's the bare-bones version that any deck could play. It was an artifact creature, so any deck can run it. And really what it says is, okay, what value do I get? I can turn this into a spell. And the idea is,

why would you want to do this? Well, it's cheap. It costs three mana for 2-1. So, you know, I have something. Maybe I can hit you once or twice if I get it out before you can block it. And then, later in the game, when, you know, if I get stalled out, or I draw this late enough that it doesn't matter, or even I get situations like where I want to, you know, if I get stalled out or I draw this late enough that doesn't matter,

or even I get situations like where I want to, you know, block your creature, I then have the opportunity to sac it and draw a card off it. Be aware, by the way, when Urza's Destiny came out, we had just started 6th edition rules. So it turns out that Cycling from Play was really good under 6th edition rules. And the reason was damage on the stack. So for those that don't know this, from 6th edition up through Magic 2010, there was an ability called Damage on the Stack. What that did is damage acted much like Spells act,

where you assigned the damage from the creature, and then once that was on the stack, if something happened to your creature, it didn't matter. The effect was already there. So what you could do with cycling from play is, let's say your opponent attacks with a 3-2 creature. Okay, you have a 2-1 creature. You can block it, and with 6-edition rules, you can block it, put damage on the stack,

meaning you'd be doing 2 damage to the creature. Then, after damage is on the stack, you spend your 2 mana, stack, and draw a card. So you both are able to destroy the creature that was attacking and get your card out of it. Since Magic 2010, what we've said is damage no longer goes on the stack. So if they attack with a 3-2, you have a decision now. You could block with your 2-1 and kill the 3-2, or you could block, sacrifice it to draw the card, but then you wouldn't deal any damage to the attacking creature.

So it's sort of like, make a decision. What do you want to do? Do you want to kill my creature, or do you want to sort of prevent the damage for the turn and draw a card? Which is a much more

interesting decision, by the way. One of the problems with damage on the stack was it was always the correct move to, I mean, assuming you had the mana, it was always the correct move to put damage on the assuming you had the mana, it was always the correct move to, you know, put damage on the stack, kill the creature, and then use the ability. Where now, it's like, okay, what do I care more about?

Do I care more about my creature as a body killing your creature, or do I care more about the fact that I want an extra card out of it? The, one of the things that was important in the set was I really wanted these themes to sort of be something that played across the spectrum of different decks. And so having an artifact creature did a good job of sort of being there to sort of give you the baseline of what you can expect. Because the idea was anybody could put this in their deck.

And once you realize the value of this creature, it then encouraged you to maybe play other creatures that have death triggers. Oh, I'm sorry, not death triggers. Other psychic from clay creatures. Okay, next. Brine Seer. So it costs three and a blue for a 1-1 human wizard for two blue and taps, so three mana, one of which is blue.

You could tap it. So the idea was when you activated the ability, you would reveal some number of blue cards from your hand, and then you would counter a spell of your opponent unless they paid X, or X was the number of blue cards in your hand. So the idea was my opponent casts a spell, I tap it, I then reveal, let's say, two blue

cards. Okay, now you have to pay two or the spell is countered. All the seers were creatures. I think they were all pretty small creatures. I don't know if they're all 1-1s, but they're all pretty small creatures. And the idea was they were fragile, but they had this repeatable use of this effect.

And one of the neat things about the reveal spells in general was it was using a resource in a very different context, which is, normally you don't care about cards in your hand. They don't particularly have value. We had done a few cards in Early Magic where you cared about how many cards were in your hand,

either because it gave you a benefit, or if you didn't, there would be a penalty for it. Stuff like the Black Vice and the Rack. But we definitely had discarding card as a cost, but this was something different. It's different I now care what's in my hand unspent in my hand and so it definitely led to some very interesting stuff and this theme

pushed toward monocolor anyway this is the first time I mess around with this kind of revealing as a cost and I liked it later magic would go on to do more of it. Okay, next. Bubbling Beebles. Four blue

for a 3-3 Beeble. It can't be blocked if an opponent controls any enchantments. So the Beebles, Jeff Mirancola, we had asked him to draw a Duelist cover. So Duelist was a magazine originally on Magic. And we asked to draw a cover with Squee. So Duelist was a magazine originally on Magic. And we asked to draw

a cover with Squee on it. So Squee was from the Weblight Saga. He was a goblin and he was sort of comic relief. So Jeff drew Squee being attacked by these little pink creatures.

And I'm not sure what inspired Jeff to make them, but they were really cute. And so I asked him when I concepted Urs's Legacy, remember I did the concept of Urs's Legacy, uh, and I, I basically said, I want this to be those little things. And I, I think I named them, I think I named them Beeples, that I wanted them to be, I wanted to make a card that had them and asked the art director to give it to Jeff Maricola.

And then for Urza's Destiny, we made another one. So the one in Urza's Saga, I'm blanking on the name, but it has to do with your point as an artifact that can't be blocked. Well, this one was the companion one. If your point has enchantment, it can't be blocked. The

Beebles, sadly, would end up creative as dubbed them a little too silly for normal magic. So, they have since showed up in, they should have been unhinged on cards like Saute. So, there are definitely

Beebles have been relegated to supplemental products. I'm not sure if any... I don't know if a non-unset... Beyond once Beebles went out of the normal game, if we've ever made Beebles in a non-unset. I don't remember. But Beebles got relegated pretty quickly to being not a normal magic thing,

which makes me sad because I like Beebles. I think Beebles are very cute. But you can't always have the beevils. Okay. Next, Carnival of Souls. So this was an enchantment that costs one and a black. So two total, one of which is black. Whenever a creature enters the battlefield,

and this is not just your creatures, but any creature, remember back during this time period, we tended to make, whenever we had effects, they tended to be global to affect you and your opponent. We've since defaulted to being, not that we don't make, whenever we have effects they tend to be global to affect you and your opponent. We've since defaulted to being not that we don't make global effects, but the default is not global. This is the kind of card that if it's done nowadays

it would say whenever a creature enters the battlefield under your control. But anyway, at the time it said any creature enters the battlefield. Whenever a creature enters the battlefield, you lose one life and add a black mana to your mana pool um and the idea here is okay i'm trading resources i'm you know every creature that gets played um i get mana at the cost of paying a life um and the idea was when i made this it's like okay it's dangerous it felt like a really good

black spell like okay getting extra mana, that's powerful. You can do cool things with that. And getting enough creatures showing up, okay, that's interesting. The problem was because I lost a life, like, okay, well, can I do enough with it without losing the game?

That it had a lot of the black qualities of kind of making a deal with the devil. Like, there's power there, but there's also... there's danger. And I made this card... When I designed this card, I really designed it to be like a Johnny...

Like, who knows? What are you going to do with this card? And this is one of those cards that if you asked me when I made the card whether it was going to be completely broken or totally useless, I would have said, I don't know. Because it's the kind of card that, like, in the right time and the right deck, it could be broken. It produces mana. But it ended up not getting broken, or at least so far it's not gotten broken. So this card has caused me, of all the cards I've designed, this is probably in the top five of cards that have caused me grief.

I think what happens is this card is so tempting that it seems like it does something and so a lot of people have tried to do it and no one's made it work. Like this has been one of those cards, like I like making challenges, sort of Johnny challenges, like, here's a card, see if you can do something with this card. And this one, I mean, I know people have made decks with it that have had a lot of fun. It is a weird, quirky card. Nobody really broke it. There's no, I don't know of any decks that were, like, high-level constructed decks.

So a lot of people got frustrated because they were like, okay, this is a card that I'm going to do something with. And then they try and never quite make something that's never quite good enough. And I don't know, people feel like the card teases them. I don't know.

I got a lot of grief about this card. I think that... I like this card. From a designer standpoint, I think it's I like this card. From a designer standpoint, I think it's a very cool card. That you want cards in Magic where you make them and you make the person who's playing with them go,

okay, let me think about that. What do I do with that? I think that's cool. Okay. Next. Chime of Night. So this is enchantments in Aura. Enchant creature.

Costs one and a black, so two mana, one of which is black. And whenever enchanted creature is put into the graveyard from play, destroy target non-black creature. So really quickly, in Alpha, Richard made a card called Terror, which would destroy target non-black creature. The reason he put non-black on it was, in fact, the original terror was non-black,

non-artifact creature. And the reason was, he's like, oh, you're scaring something to death. Well, you know, it's hard to scare artifact creatures that don't really have emotions, and it's hard to scare black things. They've seen it all. How scared can they get?

And so Richard had done that originally as a flavor thing. But for a long time, for a long time, R&D was kind of like, oh, no, no, no, that's just a, you know, non-black. That's just a restriction built into black. Black's just bad at dealing with black things. And so for a long time, that, like, all the effects of black destroying things just had this rider that it couldn't destroy black things. And finally, we came to the conclusion of, why is that exactly? Why, like, philosophically, black will kill black things. I mean, it made sense

with terror, we're using, you're scaring somebody. Okay, maybe it's hard to scare another black mage, but you can kill another black, you know, it's not like the black mage has qualms with killing things. You know, there might be a cause, like, why? I don't want to kill my own kind. Black doesn't have a problem killing its own kind. You know, if black will gain cause like, why? I don't want to kill my own kind. Black doesn't have a problem killing its own kind.

You know, if black will gain an advantage from, black will kill anything. So we really phase that out. You don't really see non-black anymore on kill spells.

I mean, we do like the idea that not every kill spell is open-ended. We like the idea of occasionally having restrictions on kill spells because it just leads

to interesting play, especially in limited. But the non-black thing, um, but anyway, so here's the interesting thing. So this enchantment, it's an aura, gives a death trigger to a creature. And remember, it is your enchantment, so you get the death trigger, not the enchanted creature. When

a creature died, you got to do the effect, not the controller of the creature. It wasn't enchanted creature gains. It just was said, hey, when this thing dies, something happens. So one of the cool things you could do with this spell was if you had multiple ways to kill things, what you did is you put this on a creature, killed that creature, and then you got to kill a second creature.

So this essentially was a kill spell, assuming you had a second kill spell but it also could do neat things where you put it on a creature and then your opponent was really wary with it do you want to attack with that creature if it dies and one of your creatures is going to die so it was an interesting way to sort of make your opponent not want to use a creature, not want to attack or block with it. But anyway, I thought it was a neat thing. And it clearly shows in that I'm taking my Death Trigger theme

and trying to apply it everywhere I can. But I'm now coming up to my daughter's school, so I will continue on. So this is just part one. Like I said, I'm very proud of Versus Destiny just because, you know, there's a lot of cool things in it. I think it's a very inventive block

that had a lot of neat build-around-me cards, and, you know, it's... I'm always part of sets I do, even when I work with teams. Like, you know, part of making a set is usually working with a team, but it was kind of fun one time once of doing something in which I got to be the design team. And I got to actually design every single card in the set.

I mean, design-wise. There's cards that get made during development. So I didn't actually design every card. Although, development did not change tons of stuff. So a high, high percentage of the cards in the set were stuff that I made. But anyway, I'm now at Rachel's school. So we all know what that means. We know this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. So this is part one. Future parts will come soon. In fact, the next one you hear. But anyway, ciao for now. See you next time. Bye-bye.