Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #396 - R&D Vocabulary, Part 3

Episode Date: December 30, 2016

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

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, the last two podcasts have been all about R&D vocabulary, the terminology that we use in R&D. And I was sharing with all of you. And I got through a lot of it, but not all of it. So we're going to pick up where I left off today. And I think we're going to finish today. That's the plan. We're going to finish today. Okay, so I left off at Parasitic. So we're up to R. Ravenloft. So Ravenloft, or it's not Ravenloft.

Rivendale. Sorry, Rivendale. I wrote down the wrong thing. Rivendale is a meeting room near R&D. It is named after D&D. D&D named it. The funny thing about Rivendale, which is the story I want to tell, is

so what happened was when we made the meeting rooms originally, we named them, and then the artists went and got different images and stuff to put up on the wall so like we had Wayne Manor which had Batman imagery and we had Graceland which had Elvis imagery but Ravenloft

I'm sorry Rivendell Rivendell I think the people who did the decorations just didn't know what it was. It's a D&D reference. But anyway, it has like a map of Puerto Rico on it with like these cut out doll figures. Like I don't even know what it represents. But it clearly does not represent anything to do with its source material.

And every time I'm in that room I always look at the wall and I'm trying to figure out like what were they thinking? What were they trying to do with its source material. And every time I'm in that room, I always look at the wall, and I'm trying to figure out, like, what were they thinking? What were they trying to do? But anyway, anyway, that's my Rivendell story. Okay, next!

Reanimation. That is what R&D refers to as taking a creature out of a graveyard and putting it in play. So, we don think, like, raise dead, things that get it from your graveyard, your hand, we don't refer to as reanimation. Reanimation means it's dead and now it's alive. It's alive.

That's reanimation. Okay, next, rummaging. So rummaging is, I don't know, a couple years ago we decided that we wanted to add looting to red. Remember, looting, I referred to this last time, is the ability in blue to draw some number of cards and then discard some number of cards. We refer to that as looting. So we decided to give it a red, but we wanted to change it up a little bit and make it have a little more of a red flavor. So what we did is red first discards, then draws. It's a little more reckless in how it does it.

It has a little less choice in it, where blue is a little more thoughtful, you know, blue being the color of careful selection. So red will, you know, where blue will draw a card and discard a card, red will discard a card and draw a card. And we refer to that as rummaging. We called it red looting for a while, and eventually we ended up calling it rummaging. I'm not sure why. It's one of those things where

I don't know why we changed from red looting to rummaging, but I guess rummaging was a fancier word. I don't know. Shards. So shards are, also known as arcs, are the three colors that are all consecutive on the color wheel. So, for example, that would be green, white, blue, or white, blue, black,

or blue, black, red, or black, red, green, or red, green, white. We originally used to call those arcs, because if you sort of took a line and traced them, it looks like an arc. But then we made Shards of Alara, and in Shards of Alara, the shards were three-colored worlds,

or, you know, portions. The world of Alara had been fractured into five shards. And then also the shards got named. People now refer to the shards as they were in that set. So, green, white, blue is Bant. White, blue,

black is Esper. Blue, black, red is Grixis. Red, green, white is Jund. And green, white, blue is Naya. So, is that right? Did I say that right? Green, white, white is Jund. And green, white, blue is Naya. So, is that right? Did I say that right? I'm sorry.

Green, white, blue is Bant. Oh, did I? I think I got them off. Green, white, blue is Bant. The white-centered one is Bant. Blue-centered one is Esper. Black-centered one is Grixis. Red-centered one is Jund.

Green-centered one is Naya. So, I guess Naya is the red, green, white. Anyway, so. But anyway, we refer to those as shards. So we talk about having a set with shards in it. Or like I said, arcs or shards. Next, Skulking. So Skulking is a mechanic.

First appeared on Skulking Ghost, which says, if I'm ever the target of a spell or ability, sacrifice me. Originally, Skulking Ghost was in Mirage, I think. And the flavor was that it's just a ghost. It's wispy. If you happen to

pay attention to it, it's so wispy it will go away. You'll frighten the ghost away. We later moved the ability in blue as an illusion flavor, which is, oh, this thing. Oh, it's scary and daunting. But if you ever really try to challenge it, it poof! It's just an illusion flavor, which is, oh, this thing, oh, it's scary and daunting. But if you ever really try to challenge it, it poof, it's just an illusion. And so the ability has moved over to illusion.

We still, sometimes we call it the illusion ability now, although skulking is sort of stuck in. Just a lot of nicknames in Arnie are literally just the first creature that did the ability if we do the ability a lot. First creature was skulking ghost, we call it skulking. Okay, next. Soft Counter. So I talked about Hard Counter last time. So a Soft Counter

is a counter spell in which you're not guaranteed to get any spell. There's a couple reasons for this. One might be it only counters a subset of spells. You know, Counter Target Instant or Counter Target Creature. It could be something in which your opponent could do something.

So, like, counter-target spell unless they pay three. Well, they could pay three. It could be something... Basically, the idea of a soft counter is you're not guaranteed of getting necessarily every spell. Like, a hard counter is, if I have a hard counter in my hand and my opponent wants to cast a spell,

it doesn't matter what it is. I can stop anything. It can stop any spell. A soft counter is like, well, you know, it can stop certain subsets or maybe it can stop anything conditionally, but a soft counter means it's not a guarantee that you'll stop the spell. Okay, stalking. So stalking is another one like skul King. So this comes from Stalking Tiger, which I think was also in Mirage. Stalking Tiger was a 3-3 that can only be blocked by one creature.

And it's an ability we use often enough that we nicknamed it. Usually it goes in green. It basically goes on larger creatures, and it says, hey, hey, hey, I can't be blocked by more than one thing. So, like, for example, on a 3-3, it's like, oh, well, you can't just block with a couple 1-1s or a 2-2 and a 1-1 or something.

You actually have to have a singular creature with three power in order to block and kill this. I mean, you can chump it, obviously. So, but anyway, people ask a lot of times whether we'd ever make stalking into a keyword. We've talked about it. It's the kind of thing that we don't quite use just enough to make into a keyword.

But I could imagine I could imagine a time where we did. I don't know. It's one of those things that we've done for a long time. Like enough that it has a nickname. But that it, no, it never quite it's never quite got into like,

one of the things about keywords is you need to reach a certain level in order for the keyword to make sense to do. And it's never quite got to that level. I can imagine one day it being there, but it's not quite there yet. Okay. Storm scale. Okay. So the storm scale, one day on my blog, blog talk, my blog, somebody scale. Okay, so the storm scale. One day on my blog, blog-a-tog, my blog,

somebody asked me about what's the likelihood of storm, the mechanic storm, coming back into a standard legal set. And what I said is, I said, well, I go, let's put it this way. Let's say there was a scale, and one on the scale was, oh, it's definitely coming back. And ten on the scale was, oh, it's definitely coming back. And 10 on the scale is, I'm really, really, really skeptical it's ever coming back. On that scale, storm would be a 10. And then someone wrote and said, oh, well, how about such and such?

How would that do on the storm scale? And before you knew it, we invented a thing. So I used to, I do the Storm Scale on my blog all the time. And then I started writing articles on, I started writing articles on the website where I started doing Storm Scale articles. And what I'll do is I'll go back and look at old mechanics and talk about what's the chances of them being reprinted in the standard legal set. But anyway, that is what the Storm Scale is. T. Here's a simple one.

People seem to like when we have terminology, letter terminology. So T we use for tap. Probably, in fact, if you know the tap symbol, original alpha just said, spelled it out. It wasn't a symbol. Then for a while we had a T in a circle, a slightly turned T in a circle. But then as we got into other languages, the T wasn't applicable, so we changed it to the card with the little arrow. And then now it just is the arrow. So the tap symbol's gone through a bunch of different changes. But anyway, when we type stuff out or write it on the board or whatever, T is just, T is the tap symbol. Last time I talked about how W was the white mana symbol and blue was the blue mana symbol and black was the black mana symbol and R was the red mana symbol and G was the green mana symbol.

And C was the colorless mana symbol. T is the tap symbol. Basically, whenever we have a symbol, we'll always assign a letter to it. Like energy, for example, we used E to represent energy, which had a symbol and stuff like that. Next, threshold one. A lot of people think this might have to do with the mechanic threshold, which interestingly, so there's a certain style of mechanics we call threshold mechanics. And what a threshold mechanic, which threshold is a threshold mechanic, is a mechanic in which if you meet a certain condition, the card turns on.

The card says, hey, if such and such is true, I get a bonus. I'm better in some way. I'm bigger. I'm stronger. I have an extra ability. Something about me gets better if a certain condition is met. I'm not sure whether we named threshold

after the threshold mechanic or just that's the word to describe it and the same word made sense for threshold. I don't actually remember where it came about. So threshold mechanic is any mechanic in which you get turned on if a certain condition is met. Threshold one says,

okay, I'm looking for something to turn me on, but I need only one thing to do it. I don't need a lot of things, just a singular thing. So for example, imagine a car that says that says hey if you have a bird i have flying so it's not looking for a lot of birds it's just looking for a singular bird the reason threshold one is important is normally at lower rarities um we don't want to make stuff that requires too much like in limited you know we might want you to build um tribal stuff but we want to make stuff that requires too much. Like in Limited, we might want you to build tribal stuff,

but we want to make sure in Limited that it has some use. If I made a Limited card that's like plus one, plus one for every goblin, then it's like, oh, I need a whole bunch of goblins to make this good. Where if I just say, hey, if I have one goblin, I now have haste or something. Okay, I can build my deck in which goblins matter, but they matter at a much smaller scale than what we call scaling abilities. I didn't write that vocabulary down. Scaling means that you count something.

So, for example, if a creature said, I get plus one, plus one for every force you have in play, that's a scaling card. And we put scaling cards in, but we tend not to put them in common. We're more likely to put threshold one cards in a common. It's raining, by the way, so you know what raining means? Rain means more content for you, because for those that don't know, I tell this all the time, but Seattle drivers, for some reason, even though it rains all the time, drive very, very slow in the rain.

I don't know what it is. It starts raining at everybody. And not even like real hard rain. I understand why you would slow down in really hard rain. But like the wispiest of rains. Today is kind of the middle. But anyway, I think I will have a longer drive. And you notice I'm getting to the end of the alphabet.

Dun, dun, dun. But I have a backup plan. so we're okay. Okay. Tuesday magic meeting. So every Tuesday at 1230, we have a meeting. And it's a meeting for anybody who wants

to come who is, I mean, anybody at Wizards, who has an interest in magic. All of our D comes, but we'll have other people from other sections of the company that are interested in magic. Brand people will come, digital people will come, just people from around that are just interested in different, and we always have different topics we talk about, so I think we post the topics ahead of time.

So like today, we're going to talk about such and such. It's a meeting where other sections will come in to talk about things that are going on. But anyway, it is... Every once in a while, people abbreviate it to TMM, which took me forever to figure out what TMM meant until I realized it was Tuesday Magic Meeting. But anyway, we've had this meeting on Tuesdays for a long time. In fact, it predates our current building, which we've been in

for 11 years. So it goes back to the old building. So it is one of the older traditions. In fact, I think the Tuesday Magic Meeting is older than almost all of the members in R&D. I think I predate the Tuesday Magic Meeting, but not a lot of people in R&D predate the Tuesday Magic Meeting.

Next, UEOT-O-T. See if you can figure out what that is. We'll write this all the time on the board when we're writing up cards. U-E-O-T stands for until end of turn. So whenever you do an effect that has a duration that only lasts for the turn, usually it's until end of turn. And so we usually just write U-E-O-T because it's usually it's until end of turn um and so we usually just write ueot because it's not worth writing the whole thing out okay virtual vanilla okay so i

talked about a vanilla card with a creature that had no rules text you know it could have uh flavor text and minor text but no rules text then i talked about french vanilla and that's a creature that could have creature keywords but no rules text other than creature keywords. Now we get to virtual vanilla. So what a virtual vanilla is, it says, after the first turn in play, it is essentially a vanilla creature. So, for example, let's say I had a 2-2 in white that's like, 2-W-2-2, when it enters the battlefield, gain 2 life. Okay, well the turn

I play it, I gain 2 life. That does something. But then after that, it's just a 2-2. Just a bear. So the idea of virtual vanilla wadis are important is it allows you to do things that have meaning and shake up the game a little bit but when the dust settles, after the turn you're playing them, hey, they're just vanilla creatures that are a lot easier to track and understand what they do. We also have virtual French vanillas, which is, after the first turn, essentially, they're just a French vanilla creature. You know, it enters the battlefield and does something, but it's flying or whatever. That's a virtual French vanilla. Be aware that I consider haste to be a virtual vanilla.

So if a creature only has haste, if you're a 2-2 with haste, I consider you a virtual vanilla. Be aware, and this brings this up, it's not that haste doesn't ever matter. If, for example, somebody steals a haste creature, they can attack with a haste creature the turn they steal it. But, once again, most things that steal grant haste, or at least the instance of grants haste.

It's a pretty corner case that haste actually matters on a creature. When I say virtual vanilla, I mean, basically it's vanilla. If it's a tiny corner case that doesn't come up very much, I will still count that as virtual vanilla. The two keywords that are virtual vanilla keywords,

essentially, are haste and flash. Neither one of those really means things after the first turn you play them. Okay, Vorthos. So I talked about Melvin, or Mel, last time. So Vorthos is the other aesthetic profile. Talks about what people like in the game, sort of aesthetically.

Vorthos is all about the flavor of the game. You know, they care very much about what do the cards represent, and the card concepting, and the art, and the name, about the flavor of the game. You know, they care very much about what do the cards represent and the card concepting and the art and the name and the flavor text. That they want cards dripping with flavor. So Mel is very much about cards, you know, dripping with mechanical identity.

Vorthos really, really gets into the flavor of it. And so if you make cards that are just really good representations of something, even if the card is a little messy in its mechanics, but it's just super flavorful, the Vorthos love that. The Vorthos also tend to be people that are really into story. A lot of times when I'll... One second.

Talking about Vorthos, it's sort of talking about the people that are... Like, when we design magic, we design magic for all different types of players. And so the aesthetic profiles, that's another thing we keep in mind. You know, we want to make sure the cards are as flavorful as they can be and mechanically as tight as they can be.

But sometimes you lean one way or the other, and there's definitely cards that are more formal that, like, oh, it's a really neat mechanical card, but, ah, the flavor's nothing special. Or there's cards that's super flavorful but a little wonky on the mechanical side. So an example of each is, I'm blanking on the name, but there's a card in, we've done cards, for example, like I know we did a buyback Scry card in Future Sight. All it has on it is buyback and scry um from a mechanical

standpoint that's really neat it just has two keywords literally there's two words on it i mean minus reminder text there's two words on it um but it's a really neat card that does neat things and interplay you know like you're getting a lot out of that um but the thing is that card doesn't mean anything from a flavor standpoint both buyback and scribe scry means something the buyback doesn't mean anything from a flavor standpoint. Both buyback and scry mean something, but buyback doesn't really mean much. It really isn't the most flavorful of cards. Meanwhile, take what's it called?

Form of the Dragon, which is you, the player, become a dragon! It has all these different abilities, but one of them is kind of a moat ability, which really is out of place in red. It's super flavorful. You're a dragon. Of course, people that aren't flying can't attack you. You're a dragon that flies. But it's

a little disconnecting, and we sort of push things and the Mells of the world are like, this isn't an awesome card, but the Vorthos is like, this is awesome! So, you know, the Mell of Vorthos is just looking for different things. Okay, Wedge. So Wedge is a, let's talk about Shards or Arcs. Wedge is based on having

a color and it's two enemies. And so we did, Kahn's Atark here was our first Wedge set. So Wedge is, so white's enemies are black and Red, and that's Mardu. Blue's enemies are Black and Green, and that's Sultai. Oh, I'm sorry. Blue's enemies are White and Red. That's Jeskai. Black's enemies are Blue and Green. That's Sultai.

Red's enemies are blue and green. That's Timur. And green's enemies are... Oh, I'm sorry. I messed it up. Black's enemies are white and green. And that's Abzan. Green's enemies are blue and black.

And that's Sultai. So wedges are just... That's the other... So there's ten three-color combinations, the shards and the wedges. That's only three. So either it's a color and their two allies or a color and their two enemies.

Some people say, well, what about, how about a color and one of its allies and an enemy? And the answers are, the wedges actually are that if you reconfigure. That like, if you think about white and its two enemies, that's white, black, and red. But also, if you take from the center of black, well black's ally, red, plus its enemy, white. So the wedges actually, besides being a color and its two enemies, are also a color of one ally and one enemy. So that's why there's not

another combination beside those ten. Okay, next. Wizards. Okay, next. Wizards. So, for a long time, or not a long time, when I first got to Wizards, the nickname that Wizards had for itself was WOTC. W-O-T-C, WOTC. And for a while, that's what we

referred to ourselves. Eventually, we decided that was kind of confusing, and I don't know, it didn't, referred to ourselves. Eventually we decided that was kind of confusing and I don't know it didn't it wasn't something that was clear to people if we wrote WOTC people didn't know how to pronounce it so if we then said WOTC

people didn't know what we were talking about so we later decided to shorten to Wizards so now when I talk about Wizards of the Coast but I don't want to use the whole name I'll say Wizards I don't say WOT don't want to use the whole name, I'll say Wizards. I don't say WOTC anymore. But if you ever heard someone refer to it as WOTC, that's W-O-T-C, WOTC. That's where WOTC comes from.

Next, worldcrafting. So worldcrafting is a meeting. I talked about cardcrafting, I think, two podcasts ago. Cardcrafting is a meeting every week where we talk about the crunchy details of design development. World crafting is the same thing, but for the creative stuff, for the creative team. It's about issues about names

and flavor texts and story and card concepting and flavor of any kind. And so that meets once a week. I actually go to world crafting every week just because a lot of what design is doing needs to really stay up on what's going on with the flavor. So I attend CardCrafting and WorldCrafting. There are a few people that attend both,

but actually it's not, the overlap between CardCrafting and WorldCrafting is not super high. Okay, that is the final thing I had. And so this whole podcast today was based on the article A Few More Words with R&D, which recently came out

from your perspective. It hasn't come out from my perspective yet. I mean, I've written it. But I knew that I didn't have a, I was in a weird place yesterday

where I didn't have enough time to get through the list, but I didn't have enough time to leave enough of, I didn't have enough of a list left that I knew would last the whole time. So what I said is, I need a backup. So what I did is I went back to the previous thing called few words with R&D, which is

the first one I wrote. Last time I went over the vocabulary from that first article that we still use. But there's a bunch of vocabulary from that that either we use a little bit or we don't use but there's funny stories. So I'm going to go back to the old list. So we're going to continue on to finish out today with using some old vocabulary, some of which we use a little bit. So this first group are things old timers might use. I might occasionally use this slang.

It's not something that most of R&D uses and so I didn't include it. In my mind it's not something that most of R&D uses, and so I didn't include it. In my mind, it's not really modern slang, but it is slang that occasionally can come up, although the most new people in R&D would not know this. Okay, first, Bahroken, spelled B-A-H hyphen R-O-K-E-N. So this slang came about, so when I first got to Wizards, basically the magic team was four people. Magic R&D was me, Bill Rose, who's our current VP of R&D, Mike Elliott, and a guy named William Jockish. So William was probably the most developer-y of the four of us. And so he would do a lot of testing and things. And one day we were talking about some card and William had tested it.

And he came back and he said, guys, we got to take this out of the set. And so somebody, let's say it was me, I go, why? He goes, I tested it. And so I said to him, oh, is it broken? And he goes, no, it's bar-roken. Trying to imply it wasn't just a little bit broken. It was really broken. So, baroken stands for, like, what in the world is this doing in the file? You know, this is over the top crazy. This would just bend the environment in half. And so, we use it when we're talking about things that are, like, usually something that's baroken is something that, like, we were experimenting in a new territory or didn't quite understand or something,

and somehow a card got in the file that's just crazy overpowered. Development's a lot better these days, so the reason we don't use vocabulary is it doesn't come up much. There's not many times that we actually make something because, A, we have a better handle on how to make things, and, B, we tend to catch them a lot earlier. So it's less often you have something in the playtest that's just like crazy overpowered. Okay, next.

A clever card. So this is a card that has two components to it that when they combine to do something, but they're all in the same card. So for example, I know we have a basilisk with threshold, we're going back to Odyssey, but I think this is where the term came from. So I wanted to make a card, a threshold card. So threshold was

if you have seven cards in your graveyard, it turns on. I tried to put threshold earlier today. So the idea was it was a basilisk. So it was a creature that destroyed anything blocking it. And when you got to threshold, it gained Lur. So for those that don't know, early Magic back in Alpha, there was a card called Thicket Basilisk. There was a Basilisk that any time it got blocked, it killed anything blocking it. And there was a separate card called Lur

that was a creature enchantment that said any creature, all creatures must block this creature. And so the combo of Basilisk and Lure killed all of your opponent's creatures that could block it. So I attack with it. Anything that can block must. Anything that does block it would die. That's how the combo worked. So I was trying to make a card that, I mean, it was a little different, but basically that combo it would kill things that it, I think it killed things that damaged rather than just blocked it, but whatever.

It killed things and Valor... It was a really good combo when it got set up. And I wanted to put it on the same card. And there was big fights, so like, no, no, no, what makes Magic awesome is that the two abilities are on the same card and you have to figure out how to put them together. And I go, no, that's great. Magic should definitely do that.

But I think it's okay sometimes to just have a card where like, okay, do the thing you need to do and this card will be its own two-card combo. And they eventually put it in. It actually made it into the set. But they mocked me for it. And so R&D for a while called these clever cards. Obviously it was done

I mean, the name is sarcastic. And the idea of a clever card is it's a two-card combo all in one card. That the card says, hey, if you jump through this hoop, I'll give you the combo. But it doesn't require you to have two different cards. It's all in one card. The reason this terminology is probably not used is not that we don't make them anymore. It's that it was used to mock something that I liked that I thought was good for the

game. And so I think the people that made it when they went away, I stopped, I never used the term because it was a mocking term. So I think R&D just doesn't know the term. Although now they'll listen to my podcast, they might relearn the term. That's the danger I have of bringing back old vocabulary. Okay, next, discriminator card. of bringing back old vocabulary.

Okay, next. Discriminator card. So once upon a time, I think R&D had a wider range of what we allowed in sets. Meaning, we allowed ourselves to make worse cards than we currently do. We don't tend to make...

Once upon a time, we had this belief that you want to make cards so bad that even the worst player would instantaneously realize this was a bad card. And we used to call those discriminator cards. And the idea was that at lower rarities you wanted cards that were bad, but bad at different levels, so as a new player got better, they could slowly learn what cards were the bad cards.

We've since found that we can accomplish a lot of that through more niche stuff where cards that have a purpose but most of the time they don't you know they're only good in a narrow base so that it's not that they're bad all the time but they're bad a lot of the time because they have a very specific purpose. So that's why that terminology is not used too much anymore. Hat trick. So a hat trick is, so there's three second graphics. There's Timmy or Tammy, Johnny or Jenny, and Spike. So what a hat trick is, is you make a card that appeals to Tammy and Jenny and Spike all at the same time. That's a hat trick. The reason

I don't think we use this terminology too much more, I was the only one that really used it, is I stopped, there was a period of time when we were more labeling who cards were for, and I think R&D got that, like that was early on when I was trying to get people to understand the psychic graphics. Now that people get it, like R&D really, it has been pretty ingrained.

I mean, the magic public understands it to a certain extent. So I don't really need to sort of use some of those external terminology anymore. So I don't really talk about hat tricks anymore. Promotable. So this came back in the day that the way the Core Set used to work was you first had to appear in a Magic Set before you could appear in a Core Set. And sometimes we had cards we wanted in the core set, but in order to be in the core set, we first had to find a place to put them in a normal set.

And we called those cards promotable cards, which meant basically what we're saying is, really what we're doing is we're making a set we want for the core set. We have to first put it in an expert expansion set because that was the rules of the time. But please name it and give the creative to it as if it were a core set card because ultimately it's going to be a core set card. So make sure you give it a clean and clear enough name and concept. The reason obviously is we don't even have core sets anymore.

So Magic 2010 Forward, we allowed ourselves to make our own cards. We no longer had to seed them in previous sets. So the idea of promotable went away. Pseudo-repeat. What a pseudo-repeat is, is a card that, for one of two reasons, either we print a card, but for flavor purposes, we have to change the name so that it's essentially the same

card, but just with a different name. Or, it's essentially the same creature, but we've just re-skinned its creature type. By the way, in order for the second to be true, the creature can't care about a creature type, or can't care about its own creature type. So obviously, if I have a card that says, you know, say I have a Viking card that said all

Vikings get plus one plus one and it is a Viking, although normally that's not how we do those cards, but let's say that I wouldn't count it there because the fact that it is the thing, if we change to a different creature type it would matter. The more common way we'll make a card that matters is like a card that'll say, sacrifice a goblin, and it will be a goblin. So it lets you sacrifice other things, but it also could sacrifice itself. Well, if we move that to make an elf, or a dwarf, or something that was in red, I guess, that would functionally change the card, so that's not a pseudo-repeat. Okay, sticker stock.

So one of the things we do is we get incrementals, So that's not a pseudo repeat. Okay, sticker stock. So one of the things we do is we get incrementals, which are, you know, so many copies of every card. But we also do a lot of testing in which we have to sticker cards. So eventually what happens is cards that don't get used end up becoming the cards we sticker cards onto. And so cards that we thought were weak enough for a while, we used to refer to as sticker stock, which meant, oh, this isn't going to be good enough that we're going to play with it, so later on when we make stickers, we'll end up using it for stickers.

So we refer to it as sticker stock. Once again, like I said, we've collapsed how sort of, we don't make cards quite as weak as we once did. The Wailuli ability. So this comes from Wailuli Wolf. So Wailuli Wolf is a card in Arabian Nights. And you could tap it to give target creature a plus one, plus one. We used to do this ability a lot. It's very strong.

The reason I put it here is we just don't use that ability all that much. I guess if we used it, maybe we'd refer to it. But it's used infrequently enough that sort of the slang has fallen away. Okay, next, a sleeper card. Oh, no, I'm sorry, not a sleeper card. A, oh, yeah, yeah, a sleeper card. A sleeper card, well, there's a sleeper card and a sucker card. I'll talk about this the other way.

A sleeper card is a card that people won't think is good when they first see it, but with time will prove to be good. And this comes from other fields where there's a... The idea is just people won't quite realize it's the good thing. I think they use it in sports. It as a sleeper team, I think. A sucker card is a card in which it seems really splashy and exciting, but it's not as good as it first seems. That terminology comes from magic, actually, the world of magic, Preston Institation.

I used to do magic as a kid. I did a podcast on that. There used to be something we called the sucker trick, where the audience thinks they're in on it. And so I sort of named that after those things, where like, a sucker trick in magic excites the players because they think they figured out,

I'm sorry, excites the audience because they think they figured out how you do it. But it turns out, wah, wah, wah, no you didn't. And a sucker card in Magic is like, oh wow, this is exciting. So we try not to make sucker cards really anymore. I'm not saying we don't inadvertently make some, but the goal really isn't to make cards that seem exciting but truly aren't. We do make sleeper cards still. We do make cards that are actually good cards but might not seem them on the

surface. So... Okay, now I have to dig back. Those are my terminology that we don't really use anymore. And now I'm going to... A few other things that are literally... I don't know, just random things. So, the Mad Farmer. So, the Mad Farmer.

We used to have somebody in R&D that was a prankster. And about, I don't know know a couple times a year They would do crazy things. So I one time I was going on a trip and Brian Tinsman was gonna drive me to the airport and we met him at work and he said oh before we leave I Had to run to my desk to get something. And I got there,

and my desk was covered in eggs. When I mean covered in eggs, I put a picture of this on it. If you go back to the original, a few words, the original column, I have a picture of it. Imagine every possible surface of my desk

covered with eggs. Like just eggs. And not only that, it was on the floor. Like, if you took my cubicle space, every inch of my cubicle, the floor, my chair, my desk, like, every space you could stick an egg had an egg on it. I never found out who the mad farmer was. I have some suspicions. But I never actually knew who the prankster was.

I think Tinsman knows. Maybe it's Tinsman. I'm not sure. But I never found out. The funny story, the little corollary story there is I used to sit near Worth, Woolport, who now does Magic Online. Blame Worth, that Worth. And he used to exercise all the time. He had a gym bag. And the gym bag was kind of smelly.

And so there was a smell in our, we were in the same sort of four cubicle space. And there was a smell that we all kind of assumed was Worth's gym bag. And then finally what I realized was when they had put eggs on my desk, bag and then finally what I realized was when they had put eggs on my desk they I had a blank card box that hold like cards that they'd stuck some eggs in that I didn't realize oh what happened was I had to go on vacation like I saw the eggs but then I had to leave to go to the airport so other people cleaned up the eggs so it turns out there was the eggs that were in this this um card box that I hadn't realized. And what we were smelling was, and this was months later, was these rotten eggs from the mad farmer.

And then I remember picking up the box and then trying to get to the garbage can. And, like, as I shifted the box, like, things were popping in the box. Anyway, it was very gross. Next, Mark's Donut. So there's a period in time that there's a place, actually in Issaquah, where I live, there was a barbecue, I don't even remember the name of the barbecue

place, I never went to it. There's a barbecue place that had a hot sauce called The Man, that was supposed to be like the hottest hot sauce in fact you come in they'll have a little toothpick and they'll give you a little tiny taste of the man and if you taste the man or put the man on your sandwich or whatever uh they'll give you a little button that's like i met the man and so r and d for a while would go out um to meet the man and out in issaquah and this was about half an hour away, because if you listen to my podcast, you know about how far away it is.

Half an hour away. So they would do a big lunch where they'd go out and meet the man. So it turns out at the time, Krispy Kremes, at the time there was one Krispy Kreme donuts in Seattle, which was in Issaquah. And I didn't live in Issaquah yet. I lived in Renton still. So I said to the people at the time, I said, if you guys ever go out to

if you ever go out to meet the man, and you're in Issaquah, I will pay for donuts for all of R&D. Two dozen donuts for all of R&D. If you guys pick them up, I'll pay for it.

So the rule was, if anybody went out to, if anybody went out to meet the man in Issaquah, they were supposed to bring back, and then the way it worked was, they would get a dozen plain donuts and a dozen mixed donuts.

Because there's a deal, you could get like two dozen, that dozen for, I don't know, a good price. So I had a standing deal that said I would pay for anybody. I go, but! I had one caveat. I go, my one caveat is that there's one donut

which is my favorite donut. Chocolate cream filled. Which is basically, it's like a Bavarian cream donut, but there's white cream inside instead of Bavarian cream. My favorite donut as a kid, there was a place that had that that I loved. And then when I came out and I found Krispy Kreme, I realized that Krispy Kreme had that exact donut. It is my favorite donut.

And so I said, here's the deal. If somebody goes out to Issaquah, I will buy two two dozen donuts but you have to leave me my donut and I go if anybody eats my donut then they're responsible for buying the donuts next time so as long as you leave me my donut as long as you leave me my donut then I will pay for the donuts but if anyone ever eats my donut then they'll have to pay for the donuts next time. So it's really simple. Basically, I just wanted my donut.

And it wasn't even that people couldn't eat my donut, there just was a consequence for eating my donut. And R&D liked the donuts, they have Krispy Kreme donuts, so it became a thing when they would drop off the donuts, usually somebody would take my donut, put it on a napkin, put it in front of my desk, because they wanted the donuts to keep coming. So they would give it. And on a few occasions, one time, a guy named Steve, Steve Warner, he was new to R&D. And he came, and he just didn't know.

And so he ate my donut. He didn't know. And all of R&D were like, oh my God, you ate Mark's donut. How could you eat Mark's donut? And he didn't understand that all it really meant was that he had to pick up the donuts next time. He thought somehow like he had, so he drove out to Krispy Kreme and got me a donut. It was very sweet. That wasn't, but anyway, there's Mark's donut. So there's a long tradition. I mean, the reason that that story is in the past is many years back,

I don't know, I had my yearly visit to my doctor, and I just gained a bunch of weight, and my doctor said, look, you know, I'll be honest with you, if you don't lose some weight, you're going to have a lot of health issues. You're getting older, and so I made, I actually said, okay, I changed how I function. I actually said, okay, I changed how I function. I actually lost like over 30 pounds. But one of the things I changed is I no longer eat sugar during the week. I eat sugar on the weekends, but I don't eat sugar during the week. And so I stopped buying the donuts only because I just didn't want, I didn't, well, two things.

They don't go out to the man anymore. So they don't even go out to Issaquah anymore. And I don't have sweets anymore. so I don't know. Between those two things, it sort of, over the years, slowly fell off and I don't know. It has gone on to be a thing of the past. We don't really do the donuts anymore. Okay. Nth edition.

That's terminology we used to use when talking about the basic set, the core set. Because for a long time it was like 4th edition, 5th edition, 6th edition. And whenever we were talking about it in the abstract, we called it Nth edition. But that terminology is long gone since, even though the core sets are gone, with Magic 2010 we changed how we named them. That after 10th edition we came to Magic 2010 because we felt like 11th edition,

it just felt like you missed so much of the game. So we went to just naming it after the year. Let's see. Wombo Combo. So there was a guy in the pit for a long time named Sean Carnes, who we used to refer to as Captain Volume. There was a period of time that I was the third loudest,

I think I said this before, I was the third loudest member of the pit. I'm not the period of time that I was the third loudest, I think I said this before, I was the third loudest member of the band. I'm not the loudest, but I was the third loudest at the time. A guy named Robert Cucero, and then Sean Carnes was the loudest. And he used to yell at the top of his lungs every once in a while. Sean was hilarious, by the way.

He has not worked at Wizards in years and years, but he was a great guy. He was really, really funny. And he used to go and rants. Like comical, like stand-up comedy kind of rants. And he was very funny. And he used to refer to cards that went together as wombo combos. And he loved combos.

And so usually that was a sign of two cards. If two cards in the set like really went well together uh whenever he saw it he'd go wombo combo anyway and that was for a long time a joke in r&d oh another thing he used to say all the time is if you said something that kind of was inappropriate it was called bad touch uh like sometimes he would say something or someone else would say something that was kind of like oh maybe, maybe I should have said that. You go, bad touch. That was the thing that Sean used to say. And the card Chub Toad from Legends?

Ice Age? Ice Age, I think. From Ice Age. Chub Toad is an anagram of bad touch. And I think the idea is that the person who's being eaten by the Chub Toad is Sean, I think was the rumor. There's like a hand hanging out of the... And the idea, I think, with the joke was that the chub toad ate Sean, and so

that was bad touch to eat Sean. Anyway, and then chub toad was an anagram of bad touch. There's a lot of little Easter egg type things. Okay, my final pizza, and luckily I'm almost, I'm almost to Rachel's school

and I've run to my very last piece of, what I did today because I knew it was raining and I had extra stuff. I gave myself a whole bunch of extra things, but I'm now coming to the end of it. But luckily I have one last one. So the last one is called Watsi time.

Notice I say Watsi because this comes back from when we referred to wizards as WOTC. So for a while, the way wizard meetings were working, this was all wizards, not just this is all wizards, is meetings would actually start at 10 after. And the idea is, so if you had an 11 o'clock meeting, what it really meant was it started at 1110. And the idea was that meetings would go all the way up to the hour, and then there was 10 minutes at the beginning of each hour

for people to get to the next meeting. But what ended up happening was that people kind of abused... Somehow, because of watching time, people felt like, well, the meeting starts at 10, but I can show up at 10.10. So it created this feeling that I could show up late. And we finally decided, how about we just, a 10 o'clock meeting, for example, starts at 10 o'clock and then we make sure to end, you know, five or ten minutes before so people can get to their next meeting. And so Wizards time,

Wizards time went on for quite a while, though. Wizards time and WOTC time. But we really haven't done it went on for quite a while though. Wizard Time and Watsi Time. But we really haven't done it probably since the new building. I don't think we've done it. In fact, the way it happened was somebody new, some new CEO came to the company.

I forget which CEO. What, Chuck maybe? Some new CEO came to the company and somebody explained Watsi Time to them. And they're're like that's just dumb why are we doing that and just said we're not doing that anymore and just cancelled it and changed it back to like

you know when a 10 o'clock meeting is at 10 o'clock so anyway that is all my vocabulary so I'm hoping so I did three podcasts on this that I just want to let you know that like one of the funds of R&D is that, I mean,

magic itself has a lot of slang vocabulary. Some amount of the Watsi slang vocabulary or the Wizard slang vocabulary, R&D slang vocabulary, is magic slang vocabulary. And also what happens is, a lot of time when I tell people what we use for slang, it will pick up, there's a bunch of slang that we use that is used by the public. And in fact, part of me writing this article and doing this series of podcasts is just introducing some new terminology to you.

So when you see a car that says, can't be blocked by creatures two or less, you know, maybe you'll call it daunt because that's what we call it. In fact, I mentioned that already once in my blog and people already are starting to... People tend to default a lot of times to the R&D terminology. So, anyway, I'd like to mix up the podcast and I'd like to do different kinds of things. Like I said, I'm big on language. Language

is really important to me. A lot of the slang... In fact, I've come up with a good chunk of the slang because it usually represents something where I want to be able to talk about it. I talked about this at the end of the podcast yesterday. But I am a believer in language, and so I'll say to all of you, it's fun with your friends if you have, it is neat to come up with your own terminology and have your own slang.

And I know a lot of times there's nicknames for cards and things. And some of those nicknames, I love when people share nicknames. Like, we just had a card, what's the real name? There's a card in Kaladesh that is a, like, a 1-1 creature for red that ends up becoming a 3,

or, sorry, it's a 1-2 creature that ends up getting plus 2, plus 1, I think. But it's reminiscent of the card Curdape. And this card is like Curdape, but Curdape required a forest, and this card requires an artifact. So they nicknamed it Nerd Ape, which is really cute. That's a really cute nickname. So I mean, we also sometimes, you know,

the audience will come up with nickname stuff, and sometimes that stuff gravitates to us. So it's a two-way street. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the audience will come up with nickname stuff and sometimes that stuff gravitates to us. So, it's a two-way street. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the vocabulary podcast. Like I said, when I started,

I didn't actually expect it to last as long as it did. But what I realized is, because of my article, I gave you the short explanation. I like in my podcast to give the longer versions so when I can tell stories

and do stuff like that, I like to do that. anyway, I hope you do that. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it and maybe if enough, we stockpile some more or I just come up with some more slang

that I forgot to do. Maybe I'll do another one of these one of these days. But anyway, I'm now driving up to Rachel's school. So I hope you guys enjoyed the podcast,

the series of podcasts. But as we all know, this means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the show, and I will talk to you all next time. Ciao for now. Bye-bye.