Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #394 - R&D Vocabulary, Part 1

Episode Date: December 23, 2016

Mark goes over some slang used by R&D in part 1 of this 3 part series.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is all about words. In fact, slang. R&D slang is what we're talking about today. So, I wrote an article many, many years ago called A Few Words from R&D, where I talked all about slang in Magic R&D. And then recently, I've recorded this before you guys have seen it, but you guys should have already read the article before this comes out, if I have timed this correctly. I did a few more words with R&D. So today I'm going to go over the vocabulary of the new article,

and a little bit, a lot of the old article's vocabulary is no longer true, so I'm not going to go over that vocabulary. So I'll cover the vocabulary from the first article that is still relevant today. And then I'm going to cover the new article. And I will take as many podcasts as it takes to get through. I have a lot of words. So we'll see how long it takes. Okay, so let's go back.

First thing I'm going to do is go over some vocabulary from the first article that is still relevant today. So the FFL, we talk about this all the time. So the FFL stands we talk about this all the time. So the FFL stands for the Future Future League. So why do we call something the Future Future League? And what is the Future Future League? So the Future Future League is what development does to play test. It's like standard, but I think about a year ahead of time to allow them to understand what they think the environment will be like. They play magic as it will be so they can figure out which cards are good and which

ones aren't. Okay, why the future Future League? Well, once upon a time we had a Future League that was six months in advance. And what we found was it was early enough for us to learn about things that would happen, but too late that we could change things. And we realized we needed to go further into the future. And since the first one had been called the Future League, they called the second one, tongue-in-cheek, the Future Future League. That got shortened to FFL, and that is not what we

refer to it. I think we don't often ever call it the Future Future League, just the FFL. I think it sounds like the NFL. I don't know. But that is the name of the stock. So let's talk about the FFL. That's playtesting for the future so that we can figure out what cards are good. Incrementals. So one of the things we do is we need to build decks. You know, we need to playtest things. And so one of the ways to do that is for every set, we get X number of copies. I don't know how many.

100 copies, 200 copies of just every card in the set. It's what's called incrementals, in that what they basically do is the printer prints up sheets and just chops up sheets and sends us whole sheets. Normally, when you guys get it, it's like in a booster, and it's like, okay, well, we get so many from this sheet and so many from that sheet. We're just like, give us 100, I don't know how many incrementals we get, but give us n number of incrementals, that many sheets of each rarity. Wait a second.

Sorry. Gives no height to myself. Okay, so let's go incrementals. We're talking about incrementals. If you need to go get the incrementals so you can build your deck. Okay, looting or a looter. That is the ability where you draw a card and discard a card. I think that Slaying comes from one of the earliest cards that did this ability.

It was called Merfolk Looter. And somehow that name kind of stuck for the ability. So if we talk about Looting or a Looter, that's what we're talking about. It's Draw and Discard. As you will see today, that really gets produced. It's the Blues version where you first draw and then you discard. We have a separate name for Red reds version we'll get to that rain strike so rain strike is an ability usually in white and not not used too

much anymore but the ability to deal damage to attackers or blockers so sometimes white I like deal one damage to target attacking or blocking creature usually the idea is play out the flavor is like it's a bowman or some sort of archer, something that can stand back and then fire at people in combat. We call that, I mean, the nickname for it is Rainstrike. Rootwalla ability. Rootwalla ability is based on the card Rootwalla from Tempest, I believe. The little story of Rootwalla is originally when Mike Elliott made the card, he called it Chuckwalla, which is an actual lizard. So the card was called Chuckwalla is originally, when Mike Elliott made the card, he called it Chuckwalla, which is an actual lizard.

So the card was called Chuckwalla. But the artist didn't realize that Chuckwalla was an actual thing. He thought we had made up a word. So he sort of drew this lizard-like thing and was like, well, it's not really a Chuckwalla. And we made up the name Rootwalla for it. So, well, it's a Rootwalla. The Rootwalla ability, which was on Rootwalla, is the ability to kind of a giant growth in which it's a one-time thing. I spend some mana, the creature gets bigger,

but I can only do it once per turn. So the idea is kind of a built-in giant growth, but a one-shot, one-time giant growth. I mean, it can be used each turn, obviously. Next is the Scepter ability. So this is based after Hypnotic's... I'm sorry, the Spectre. I worked on Scepter ability. So this is based after hypnotic... I'm sorry, the Specter... I worked on Scepter ability,

but we actually call it the Specter ability. Although there is a Scepter that also makes you discard. But normally we say the Specter ability. What we mean is that the hypnotic Specter, when it hits you, it makes you discard a card.

So the Specter ability is the ability to make you discard when it hits you. Splashy. So splashy talks about how much pop something will have. When people see it for the first time, how excited are they

going to get? That you want your set to have a certain amount of splash. So we might go, oh, this is important because this is splashy. And it talks about kind of large first impressions. Splashy doesn't necessarily mean powerful. It might feel powerful to people. Things can be splashy because on the surface it appears powerful. But usually things are splashy just because it's exciting for some reason. It's brand new or doing something we haven't done before.

Often when we talk about splashy, we mean something that's just out of the ordinary, like double-faced cards or split cards or something that's sort of like... People are going to just notice because it's just kind of different. It's a talking point. We refer to that as splashy. The Tim ability.

Another ability we don't use too much. So that is tap to do one damage to target creature or player. It was originally on Prodigal Sorcerer, whose nickname was Tim, based off the sorcerer from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who basically had the ability

and some call me Tim. Anyway, so this nickname is from a nickname from Slang. So, Slang for a Prodigal Sorcerer and then that ability. Once again, we don't use this ability. Now it's no longer in blue. It started in blue. It's now in red. But we

don't use it tons. Because of New World Order, we don't use it to comment. New World Order is Slang. I'll get to eventually. Tweak. I'm not sure if this is actually Slang or just English, but when we talk about something that is an effect we've done before, usually an effect we do all the time, but slightly

different version. So, like, if I say we need a tweak for giant growth, whether it means, if we're not going to do giant growth, we're not going to do one green instant, one mana green instant that does plus three plus three to end of turn. Oh, we're going to do something that has a similar role that essentially is a giant growth for the set, but it's a little bit different in some way. Often tweaks are adding in the mechanic of the set. You know, if the mechanic of the set can work well with the giant growth, maybe it's giant growth with the new mechanic. But usually a tweak, when we talk about a tweak,

is it's something in which it's a minor change. It's not a big thing. A lot of times, I mean, a tweak might be even like, instead of green for plus three, plus three, it's one and a green for plus four, plus four. It can be very minor changes. Vanilla creature. So this is slang for a creature that has no rules text. It can have flavor text. And technically, we allow it to have reminder text. It can have flavor text. And technically

we allow it to have reminder text if you want to get the strict R&D definition. Basically what it means is there's no rules text on the card. Sometimes,

like every once in a while we'll have a creature where something about it we have to remind you so we put reminder text on it. But a vanilla creature has no italicized, you know,

italicized text doesn't count. So reminder text, flavor text doesn't count. But it doesn't have any actual rules text. Wooburg. So Wooburg is written out W-U-B-R-G. So if you happen to know your magic terminology, those are the five letters we use to represent the five mana. White, blue, black, red, green.

I'm sorry. W is white. U is blue. B is black. R is red. G is green. I've answered this before, but I'll answer it now

in case I make you listen to all the other podcasts. The reason U is blue, although the rest are obviously the first letter, is both blue and black started with a B, so only one of them could be B. The second letter in black is L, which we use for land. Actually, the second letter of both letters, blue and black, is L. L we use for land. Be aware that the letters we use in card codes actually represent frames, not necessarily colors, although colors are frames.

And L is for land, the land frame. Then we had A and we had U. A we used for artifact. So we ended up getting down to C for black or U for blue. We ended up doing U for blue. That's what Richard chose. We later learned, as people like to tell me, in printing, the way they do it is K is for black. Black is K rather than blue being U. But we've done this a long time. We kind of just get used to it.

It's the way we do things. And when we refer to all five colors, we refer to it as Wooburg. For a little while, there was a little puppet named Wooburg that did some of our, I don't know, we did some promotional stuff with. Timmy or Tammy, Johnny or Jenny, and Spike. These are the psychographics. So I've done podcasts on them, so if you don't know them, you can go listen to my podcast. But basically the idea is the psychographics talk about why people play.

And so it really gets into the mind space of, okay, what exactly about, you know, what do people want? And Timmy wants to experience, Timmy and Tammy want to experience something. Johnny and Jenny want to express something. Spike wants to prove something. So each of them have their thing. I've done a whole podcast on them, so you can go listen to that. It would take up a lot of my time to get into them today. But they're what we call the psychic graphics, and those are the five.

When I did the original article, Tammy and Jenny were not there. I've since given female names. Spike, I've known four Spikes in my life, three of which were women, so I decided Spike was just a gender-neutral name, so I didn't give it a female version. Finally, the pit. That is where R&D sits.

We have basically all our cubicles are together. There's low walls. There's tables in between for us to playtest at. And it's just very open, pretty loud. And that is where all the design and development and editing and digital. Anyway, most of our, the creative actually has their own section. But the rest of Magic R&D all sits in the pitch. Okay, that was all vocabulary from the first article that was still relevant.

There was much other slang in it, but a lot of it was not particularly relevant anymore. There's a few things that I'll bring up now where the slang has changed, and I'll talk about that when I get to it. Okay, first vocabulary word, accessible. So this is a vocabulary we use to mean that we think the card is approachable to a more beginning player, less enfranchised player, someone who... A lot of times we make products where we want to make sure we have cards, planeswalker packs or things in which we want cards that are a little simpler. And we want to make sure we have enough cards in the set that we can do that because one of the things is you know we'll build sample decks for example out of our decks and we want to make sure we have enough cards that are kind of players who are newer to the game, it's something that won't be problematic for them.

It's accessible to them. For a long time this terminology we called it M10able. M10able. M10 stood for Magic 2010, which was the first set where we revamped the core set, where we made new cards, but it was a core set. And the philosophy of Magic 2010 was we wanted to make sure to have enough cards that were accessible to new players. So for a while we called this M10able. It was not the greatest slang word. It was one of those things that we kind of knew what we meant by it. And especially as we shifted away from even having a core set, we decided to change the vocabulary up to something that was a little more... We like where other people have some sense to understand our keyboards

without having to know all the slang. That's not always true, but anyway. So we changed it to accessible from M-tenable. I guess M-tenable was untenable. Okay, next, all hands. So one of the things we do every other month, every third month is R&D will have a meeting. Maybe we have about four times a year.

Not R&D, sorry. Wizards will have a meeting in which every single member of Wizards, all the employees, somewhere between five and six hundred employees, all get in one room, and we have a big meeting. Often our CEO,

Chris Cox is our CEO now, he'll talk to us. Sometimes we get talked to by some of, sometimes there's presentations. Once a year, we reward's presentations once a year. We reward people having anniversaries. Anyway, there's a bunch of different things that happen in all hands, but it's something that we do so we get everybody in a room so we can talk sort of company-wide things.

Next, allied colors. So allied colors refers to, if you look at the back of a magic card, there's the color wheel, which is the five colors. They have a relationship to each other. When we talk about allied colors, we mean a color and the two colors that are next to it. So white, for example, is next to green and blue. Blue is next to white and black. Black is next to blue and red.

Red is next to black and green. Green is next to red and white. So the allied colors are the colors that line up. So there's five allied colors. There's white and blue, blue and black, black and red, red and green, green and white. Those are the five allied colors. So we talk about a set, for example, might have allied colors. For example, Dragons of Tarkir was a set where the cycle of dragons were allied colors. That's what we mean by allied colors. Okay, next. Asfan.

Probably the most defined thing I've ever taught. I talk about Asfan on the podcast all the time. But since I'll be complete, Asfan is short for Asfan. It's terminology we use to talk about how often something shows up in a booster pack. If we're doing a multicolor set, we might say multicolor has an as-fan of 3.4, which means if you open up the average booster from the set, you would have, on average, 3.4 gold cards. We use that terminology all the time.

Backwards compatible. That talks about when we do something new in a set, whether or not that thing has relevance for things that have come before. The idea is, let's say I make a card that says, all goblins gain haste and menace. That card is backwards compatible because magic has made many goblins before that you can play you know, we talk about whether new things are usable by players that don't have a lot of the new cards.

The opposite of backward compatible is parasitic. I will get to that eventually. That's a very misunderstood word. But we'll get there when we get to peas. Next, bear. So bear means a two manamana, two-two, usually vanilla creature. Although I guess it doesn't always necessarily mean vanilla because sometimes we'll say a bear with something.

Oh, it's a bear with trample or something. But a bear means two-mana, two-two. It comes from grizzly bears, which was an alpha, which was, I don't know, the first two- 2-2. It's just terminology. A lot of our terminology comes from early days in Magic where we did something, and if you want to refer to it, just referring to something. The reason is a lot of times in Magic, you often want to design the two mana 2-2.

In fact, we've gotten to the point now where I think every color but blue essentially has gotten at least a vanilla two-mana 2-2. And a number of the colors actually get better than that now. So anyway, we make a lot of bears. The Bridge. So the Bridge is a meeting room right off a lobby on the fourth floor. It is like the muckety-muck meeting room. It is the highest profile meeting room there is.

When there are big, important meetings, that is where they happen. Other people get to use the bridge. R&D often will use the bridge just because it's a nice, big... It's a really nice meeting place. It's big. It's got good chairs and things.

The bridge is obviously named after Star Trek. All our meeting rooms... The way meeting rooms work is that... Well, originally how they worked is each section was allowed to name the meeting rooms in their own section. And meeting rooms have very geeky names. A little bit over time, we've been shifting them over to have wizard's names. So we have less sort of general geeky names. The bridge, which I believe there was a bridge in the old building,

and so that name kind of carried over its tradition. The bridge has not changed. There are a few rooms that kind of have some traditional standing to them, so we haven't changed them over to wizard things, the bridge being one. But anyway, if you're invited to a meeting in the bridge, usually it's, well, it doesn't have to be important, but it's a big meeting, And important meetings are on the bridge.

C, the letter C. So C used to mean, this is one of the ones where I talked about it meaning something in the first article in vocabulary and then had to say, nope, now it means something different. So now what it means is C represents Cullus Mana. So in Oath of the Gatewatch, we introduced Cullus Mana. C represents colorless mana. So in Oath of the Gatewatch, we introduced colorless mana. Well, I mean, Magic had already had colorless mana,

but we never cared about the differentiating generic mana from colorless mana. And finally, because of Oath of the Gatewatch, we started caring. For a long time, you had a number in a circle, a mana circle, meant either generic mana or colorless mana. Generic mana is in a cost. For example, if it costs three in a green, the three in a circle means you may spend three in anything. It can be colored, it can be not colored, I don't care. Spend anything you want. That's generic mana. Colorless is like what gets produced,

like Sol Ring makes two colorless mana. Well, that means it's mana that doesn't have any color. So you can use colorless mana to pay for generic costs, but it is colorless costs. Also, the gauge watch, for the very first time, made colorless requirements for some costs. So some costs require colorless mana. So all of a sudden, we couldn't use the same terminology because in costs, we, let's say I require you to have one colorless. I can't put one in a circle and put it in costs because that already means something in costs. So we had to make a new symbol, a little diamond symbol, which most of you should know by now, which means a colorless mana. So originally, C actually meant something different.

But once we had colorless mana, we needed to represent that. And C now means colorless mana. So if I have a land that taps for C, that means it produces a colorless mana. Originally, we used C to represent one mana of any color. And how that would get used is, let's say we were making a cycle and design, and we were designing the cycle abstractly. So we might say, okay, well, this is going to be, you know, all the creatures are going to be three and a colored mana,

and they're a 3-3 creature. So we would say they're all 3C. C representing the fact that it could be filled in by whatever color mattered. So 3C meant, oh, well, the white would be three and a white, and the blue would be three and a blue, and the black would be three and a black, et cetera. That terminology has now changed to M.

We use M to mean that now. Although the funny thing is, development, like, design uses that terminology a lot more, because a lot more often we're talking in terms of structure. So there's a lot more times we have to refer to, okay, one of everyone has to be a certain

color. Development doesn't do it very often. So they've kind of continued using C to realize that, even though C means different things in different contexts, they don't use it enough that it matters. But because it comes up in design all the time, we have changed over.

So there's a little schism right now between design and development. I think eventually we'll get development over as inertia kicks in, because design uses it more than development uses it. So as more developers sit on design teams, I think we'll slowly win them over. But that hasn't happened yet. Next, Candle Keep. Candle Keep is a meeting room near Dungeon Dragons.

I believe it's a D&D reference. It just is a big meeting room, and so we use it all the time for design. It's right by the kitchen. Anyway, it's a meeting room. Card crafting. and anyway, it's a meeting room. Cardcrafting. So once a week,

we have a meeting where design development gets together to talk about really what I call crunchy issues. Might be about templating or rules or color pie. We used to have these meetings in the Tuesday Magic meetings. I'll get to that in a sec.

Or actually, might not be today because I have a long list. But eventually on this podcast series, I will get to it. But the idea is we were having some of these meetings, some of these discussions. And the Tuesday Magic meeting is a much broader meeting with a lot of people. And it was getting a little too technical. So we decided, Aaron decided that we'd have a meeting once a week that was kind of like a real technical meeting.

We'd bring up sort of issues that are very crunchy technical issues. And so that is what... We don't always have the meeting. It's set up once a week. Sometimes we cancel. There's no topics. But that's the kind of thing where like, oh, if we want to move something

from one color to the other color on the color pie, or if there's a new template we want to discuss, or if there's something we want to do with the rules to revamp things, card crafting is the kind of meeting we'd have all those discussions in.

Okay, characteristic. So characteristic is, we talk about iconic, which I will get to, and characteristic. Characteristic means, at common, it is a race that is something that's very symbolic of what the color will use and is the most kind of the most the poster child of the simple used at common creature type so the characteristic erase for white right now is human for blue is merfolk for black is either vampire or zombie black is to red is goblin green is elf characteristics the oppositeic talks about rare. I'll get to that when I get to iconic. Characteristic talks about common

and like, you know what, like the most common race that we use in that color in large amounts at common. Usually the characteristic race is small. It is just kind of the most symbolic race

of the color. We spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out a characteristic race for white. Humankind became the default just because white tends to have more humans than anybody else. But we keep trying other characteristic races for white, but nothing's really stuck. Obviously, we tried dwarves, for example, for Kaladesh. We'll see how that plays out. Black, meanwhile, just both vampires and zombies have stuck. And sometimes we use vampires and sometimes you use zombies.

It kind of depends upon the world. Curiosity. So Curiosity is a creature mechanic, a slang for whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, you draw a card. Like Thieving Magpie has Curiosity. It is named after the card Curiosity, which is an aura which grants this ability to a creature. People often ask why we don't keyword this ability, and the answer is, we use it just enough, we use it not quite enough that it's worth keywording, but enough that it comes up and we need a, I don't know, slang for it.

It's not the kind of thing we do every set, but it's the kind of thing we do probably every block, so it's on the cusp, but not quite. Danger Room. So Danger Room is a meeting room next to Bill's office, Bill Rose's office. Um, but the history of the Danger Room is back in the old buildings, the building we were across the street. Um, Richard Garfield, um, they wanted to give Richard an office because Richard was a big muckety-muck. And Richard really wanted to sit in the pit. He wasn't interested in an office,

but they gave him one. So what Richard did is he took his office and he turned it into a room that was off the grid, which means any room in Wizards can be, you can arrange to set up a meeting in it. You can schedule meetings. So Richard set up something that wasn't on the grid, meaning no one could schedule a meeting in it.

And the idea was it was a place for people to play games. If you were going to be a little bit loud or something, you could go and play in the danger room. Eventually, with time, the danger room also became a meeting that R&D would use if we really needed a meeting room because no one else could book it. When we moved across the street, we wanted to keep a live kind of tradition of the Danger Room.

So we named the Danger Room as the most central, probably the closest meeting room to the pit. Not super big, but big enough to have a design or development meeting in. And it is now on the grid, so the Danger Room is on the grid. It's very funny. A lot of meeting rooms have art up on the walls. This one never did. I always wanted the X-Men

because the danger room is named after the workout room for the X-Men, for those that don't know. In order for the X-Men to get their skills better, they have a room where there's... I mean, I guess it uses advanced ailing technology, but it allows them sort of... It's like this holographic room

that allows them to sort of test in different environments where in reality they're in the safety of their room. Kind of like the holodeck. In fact, the danger room predates the holodeck, so there's some chance that the holodeck was influenced by the danger room. It's possible. Okay, next, Daunt. So Daunt is a relatively new ability

that we put on three cards in Kaladesh. So, it's the creature ability that says this creature cannot be blocked by creatures with power two or less. So, the idea is it's daunting, and little things are afraid of it and won't block it. So, one of the things we do now is when we think there's something with potential for maybe some word keywording it, we just write it out, put it on cards, and the idea is if something carries its own weight, we'll see over time.

Daunson, a new creature, like an ability we're trying, we're writing it out because like we don't know whether it's worthy of keywording. We'll try writing it out. If we like it, you know, it's the kind of thing we start doing more of. Down the road we can make that decision. But our new philosophy with picture keywords is just write them out, try them out as written. I mean, if something comes up as a mechanic that makes sense for a set, put it in a set.

But this is the other way to do it, not just putting stuff in sets, but hey, just write it out and try it. Deciduous. So deciduous is as opposed to evergreen, which I will get to maybe today. We'll see. I'm not too far from Richard's school. Deciduous means something that we use in magic that we don't use every set, because that's

evergreen, but something that we use enough, something that's available to every set, that it's a tool that is, any set that wants it can use it. Like some mechanics, a lot of mechanics that we use that are sort of block mechanics, if we use it in one set, we kind of want to wait and make sure people are excited before it comes back. So if we use, you know, flashback or cycling or, you know, whatever, we don't want to use it right away again. And so most mechanics will sit for a while before we reuse them. The idea of a deciduous mechanic is, look, it's just generally

useful. Hybrid is a good example. Even double-face in some level is a good example of things that, if a set needs them, the set has access to them. It's not that we want to do deciduous things all the time, but in a lot of ways, deciduous things are more tools that we can do interesting things with.

And that if it makes sense to use it, we will use it. Dominaria. So this is the biggest room in all of Wizards. So on the first floor, we have this giant meeting space. It is used like all hands. It's used for all hands. It is used for employee pre-releases when we have pre-releases. It is a place where you can have lunch during the day.

There's like ping pong tables there and people can relax. People can play games down there. There's a few meeting rooms within Dominaria. I know Ravnica and Zendikar are two of them. And then there's like two Mahors and another D&D one. But anyway, it is a big, big room, and sometimes we'll have meetings down there. There is a room called the Rainier Room,

which is a room that the building that we are in has that is not specifically a wizard's room, but something we can rent from the building. And we often use the Rainier room for R&D meetings, or like the Tuesday Magic meeting. And anyway, sometimes we have meetings in Dominaria when we can't get the Raniere room. The way we named Dominaria, by the way,

is when we got the new big room, everybody in the wizards could turn in a name, and then they picked their favorite names and six people submitted the name Dominaria, which I was one. And then the winners, when they picked the name, all the people who had submitted the name, we got some magic stuff. We got little prizes. So I won some prizes for naming Dominaria. Next, Drake. So for many, many years, the database that R&D used for Magic was called Multiverse. A couple years ago, we changed over.

The new one is called Drake. I don't know why it's called Drake. That's just the name of it. So it's the name of our current database. The old one, which I talked about in the other article, was called Multiverse. So originally, our first ever database didn't have a name to it. I think it was called like the Database or something.

And then we got a new database, and we called that one Multiverse. And then we got another new one many, many years later called Drink. Okay, enemy colors. I talked about ally colors. Enemy colors are the two colors that are opposite in the mana circle in the back of the card. So for example, white enemies are black and red. Enemy colors are the two colors that are opposite in the mana circle in the back of the card. So, for example, white's enemies are black and red. Blue's enemies are green and red. Black's enemies are white and green.

Red's enemies are white and blue. And green's enemies are black and blue. So the enemy color pairs is basically it's white and black, blue and red, black and green, red and white, green and blue. So if I talk about enemy colors, like Apocalypse, the set was about enemy colors. That was the theme. For a long time, we treated allied and enemy colors differently the idea was because allied colors were friendly we made it a lot easier to have ally colors help

each other and because enemy colors were enemies we did a lot more hate cards with them we eventually moved away from that philosophy and that we like the idea we want people to be able to play whatever combination they want so we still do occasional hate cards and cards will hate their enemy more than they'll hate anything else and with one exception I think you know you don't ever really hate your ally sometimes you hate yourself there's some self-hate um but uh but anyway, so when we talk about enemy colors, that is what we're referring to. Okay, now we have ETB and ETBT. Um, so ETB stands for enter the battlefield. Um, so we have triggers of things that enter the battlefield.

So we talk all the time about ETB and ETB triggers. Uh, it used to be CIP triggers for comes into play, but with Magic 2010, we redefined it to call it the battlefield, rather than, before that, just like in play, which was confusing, because play means so many things in Magic. Once we had the battlefield, instead of comes into play became enters the battlefield,

we shortened enters the battlefield to ETB. And we often will talk a lot about triggers, like Penharmakan, for example, from Kaladesh, doubles all ETB triggers, essentially. ETBT, which sounds cute, because it sounds like itty bitty, ETBT means enters the battlefield tapped. That is a downside most often seen on lands, although we occasionally use it on creatures.

What that means is this thing is tapped, it enters the battlefield tapped, so you can't use it the turn you play it. If it's on a land, that means you can't tap it for mana. If it's on a creature, that means that creature can't block this turn. And so the reason we use ETB and ETBT is we have to write cards all the time. So when we're doing design and development and we're writing on a card, you can just write ETB as shorthand or ETBT as shorthand and don't have to write the whole thing out.

Some of R&D's slang is based upon actually just being able to write things easier. Evasion. So evasion is any means by which when there is a board stall, meaning when there's a lot of creatures, that helps you get through. Flying is evasion. Menace is evasion. Trample we consider evasion because trample allows you to get some damage through. Flying is evasion. Menace is evasion. Trample we consider evasion, because trample allows you to get some damage through, if not all the damage, but at least some damage.

Usually evasion is for some reason it can't be blocked, or it can only be blocked under certain circumstances, or there's a means by which to get the damage through, like Trampol. The reason we use the term evasion is a lot of times we talk about whether that quality is high enough in a set. So, for example, one of the notes you might get from somebody looking at your set is, oh, evasion seems a little low. I mean, usually evasion can be high, that's okay, but evasion being low is a problem. If you don't have enough evasion,

you get board stalls. There's no way to break the board stalls. Okay, evergreen. So evergreen, I talked about deciduous a second ago. Evergreen means it is something that we use basically every set. Every once in a while, something about the set we're doing

doesn't play well with a certain evergreen mechanic. So sometimes we'll leave out evergreen mechanics because of some synergy issue. But for all intents and purposes, with rare exceptions, an evergreen mechanic is something that appears all the time. Evergreen mechanics are flying,

first strike, trample, lifelink, or protection became deciduous, you know, death touch, those kind of things. And when we talk about evergreen, it just talks about things that we have access to. Once in a while,

we will move things to evergreen status. Like recently, scry and menace and scry, menace, and I'm forgetting one more, and prowess became evergreen. So sometimes things move

in or out of evergreen status. Protection for many, many years was evergreen. It moved to deciduous, for example. Okay, my final one of today, my final E of today, final one total, is Eye of Ugin, which is a meeting room that originally that room was a quiet room called Safe Haven. All the meeting rooms by R&D were named by R&D and were named after magic. Other rooms I'll get to that have magic names later became magic rooms, but R&D

started there. And when it stopped being a quiet room, we moved into Ayavugan. I find it funny that there's multiple meeting rooms of which things where people were trapped. The Ayavugans where the Eldrazi were trapped in Zendikar. So, I'm not sure why we name meeting rooms after places people were trapped,

but it's something we do. So, guys, obviously, I did not get all the way through. I only got up to E, so I will continue this in a future podcast or two. But anyway, I hope you loved hearing all about R&D slang. But, as I've got to Rachel's school, we all know what that means. It means this is 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. Bye-bye.