Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #50 - Scars of Mirrodin - Part 3

Episode Date: September 7, 2013

Mark continues talking about Scars of Mirrodin with part three.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so the last two weeks I've been talking about the design for Scars of Mirrodin. So today I wanted to talk about some cards, and I thought I'd... I like what I started doing with these things is I start telling the general stories, and then at some point I get to the cards, and I feel like while I explain stories to the cards, other stories come out. And any set in which I was in charge of, I have lots of stories, so I'm just going to start talking about stuff, and we'll go from there. Let's see. So I have a list of cards. Bloodshot Trainee. So one of the things that we always do is whenever we're

doing a set, we always ask ourselves, is there a future shifted card that could make sense here? Because one of the funs of Future Sight was kind of like glimpsing the future. And so we always take a look. You know, sometimes, not every set makes sense, but every once in a while we were in something, oh, oh, that could work. And the interesting thing, the bloodshot training would not at first blush, see like, this is the set it would be in.

But what we learned is, because of infect, and because of power mattering so much, we just had more effects that raised your power than normal. Plus, we were in mirrored, which meant we that raised your power than normal. Plus, we were in Mirrodin, which meant we had more artifact equipment than normal. And so, it just was a world in which, like, you could make Bloodshot

trainee work more often. And so it ended up being a good fit. It's kind of funny, because it's not... If I said, go look through FutureSight and find the, you know, Scars of Mirrodin card, I'm not sure that would be the obvious answer. But sometimes it's fun to find things that aren't the obvious answer

if they work well. And Bloodshot Trainee does. Okay. Clone Shell. So Clone Shell was so what had happened was we had done imprint during Mirrodin Block. so in by the time we got to fifth dawn,

there was a lot of thought of like we had done so much imprint, maybe we should not do any imprint in fifth dawn. And I was like, oh, no, no, no. People will expect imprint. We have to have imprint. And then the compromise was, okay, we'll do one imprint card. So say to the imprint crowd a little bit without, because we were running out of stuff at the time,

or there's just a lot going on. And so Aaron Forsythe made a card. So Aaron Forsythe's first team was Fifth Dawn. That was Aaron's first team. In fact, when Aaron was hired to run the website, and he was on the 5th Dawn team because we were going to let him write an article. It would be real cool to give an inside view of what it's like.

Anyway, Aaron worked it out real well, and when I get to the 5th Dawn, I'll explain all that. Anyway, he made a card. I think it was called Summoner's Egg. And what was unique about Summoner's Egg was it imprinted a card, but your opponent didn't know what the card was right away. And so it created some interesting gameplay.

So Clone Show was me taking that exact same technology from Summoner's Egg and just, you know, shifting a little bit. But the idea essentially was, I have a creature. When it dies, it might become a creature. Well, you know, if I was lucky enough to get a creature, it'll I have a creature, when it dies, it might become a creature. Well, you know, if I was lucky enough to get a creature, it'll definitely become a creature. But maybe I didn't, or

maybe it's not that good a creature, you know. And so there's this neat thing of, how dangerous is it? You don't know. It could turn into this giant monster, it could be a wimpy thing, it could be nothing. And I like that gameplay a lot, and so Clone Shell came from one of the reasons we were imprint back, I was very gung-ho

on finding, you know, trying to do some stuff that we had done less of last time with Imprint, and obviously we had done one card in Mirrodin Block with unknown information, and so I was excited to play around with that a little more. Okay,

Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine. So, originally, back when Proliferate was pushed much more toward common, Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine so originally back when Proliferate was pushed much more toward common there was a vertical cycle and Clasp was the common originally and it had an ETB, an enter the battlefield effect

and it didn't, it wasn't repeatable like I think the uncommon one was repeatable but anyway oh no, I know what it did, it had an ETB effect and you could sack it, so it did it twice, you did it once when it came

into play and then you could sack it a second time, was the original version, and then when proliferate the development sort of pulled it out of common or lessened it greatly to common they ended up moving combining the uncommon and the common together, because the uncommon had a repeatable class. Anyway, so that cycle turned into a two-card cycle

rather than a three-card cycle. I don't know if we have a fancy name for a two-card cycle, but we do those from time to time, where there's one non-rare, one rare, and the rare is the bigger version of the non-rare. Usually that's uncommon and rare, although I guess we've done-rare. Usually that's uncommon and rare. Although I guess we've done... Yeah, I guess it's usually uncommon and rare.

Okay, next. Oh, the mana meter! So one of the things that we goofed around with was how do you do our mana... One of the things we knew was access to colored mana in artifact form was important because we were making a lot more definitions of color this time rather than the last time we did Mirrodin,

where there's a lot more of, oh, we want to use this. This requires access to color. And as I'll get to, there's definitely a lot of cards where we were like, well, it's usable, but it's maximized if you have the right color. And so originally in the slot, we did not have the mirror. We had what we called the MOX. And I have to spell that for you because it's not a visual pun, not an audio pun.

M-O-C-K-S. And what it was was we were doing like MOX, like, you know, mocks, jet and stuff, but they were more expensive. I can't remember what we cost them at, but they were, they were, oh, I'm sorry, they were, so they were, how did they work? They were, they were like mocks. I think they were zero-cost artifacts that tapped for color, but there was some quirk about them because obviously they weren't straight-up mocks. And we were trying an alternate version of them. Maybe they cost mana. They were straight-up mocks, but they cost mana.

I don't remember now. But anyway, what happened was, I'm not sure why this happened, late design, early development. We were trying to make sure we got more repeat cards in, and we realized that having the mana mirror,

being creatures, had a bunch of nice things that it helped with. And so, it was two birds, one stone. It got more mirroring cards, repeats in, and it just, it was two birds, you know, one stone. It got more, you know, Mirrodin cards, repeats in, and it just, it ended up playing, they played very well with the environment. You know, they definitely

allowed you to throw equipment on them, and they had some value beyond just providing mana. Darksteel Axe. Okay, so one of the things that we were trying to do was we liked the idea of presenting Mirrodin, but create this feeling like Mirrodin has continued to evolve. And so Darksteel, so originally in the file, we'd actually repeated Bone Splitter. So what we had done was the design team early on sat down and said, okay, what cards do we want to see repeated from the Mirrodin block?

And we made a long list of cards. And Bone Splitter was one of them, but we started playing with it, and basically, like, Bone Splitter just was a little bit too good. When we made equipment before in Mirrodin, we didn't quite realize, like, we didn't realize how good it was. I think that it's, if you look at Mirrodin, it's clear that we didn't quite truly understand how powerful equipment was. And most of it, or some of it was very under-costed. You know, I mean, bone splitter being one of them. So what happened was, is we wanted to have bone splitter, but we couldn't have the actual bone splitter.

And so we said, oh, was there a way to sort of evolve bone splitter? And then we came up with the idea of, well, you know, dark steel was a big part of Mirrodin, the idea of this indestructible thing. It's like, oh, what if we cost more and make it indestructible? And that way it'll feel tougher and it has a feel of evolution, like, now the bone splitter's indestructible. But it allowed us to get numbers to it that actually made it

from a play value a little bit weaker than bone splitter so that we could print it. But I always liked that you sort of came back and that it felt like Mirrodin wasn't sitting still. It evolved while you weren't there. Okay, Drosshopper and Ferevor and Furnace Celebration.

So let me... So there's a theme I talked about a little bit last week or the week before, which was we had a theme in black of sacrificing creatures, and all those were tagged with a Phyrexian watermark. Phyrexians love sacrificing creatures. Red had a theme of sacrificing artifacts, and that was a Mirrodin thing that Mirrodin had done back in the first Mirrodin, that Red liked sacrificing artifacts. And that was a Mirrodin thing that Mirrodin had done back in the first Mirrodin, the red light sacrificing artifacts.

And so what we did was we had this theme of black sacrificing creatures and red sacrificing artifacts, and then we put a bunch of cards in that liked sacrificing things so that there was a black-red deck that you could draft.

Furnace Elbration is one of the few remnants of that. Because Furnace Elbration is like whenever something few remnants of that. Because Furnace Elbration is like, whenever something got sacked, you could pay two to shock something. And originally we had more, I mean, the red-black Sacrifice deck had more going on. One of the things that

in general happens is, in design, we try to put a lot of different layers of things in. And during development, sometimes usually something has to go. And that was the theme that went. I'm a little sad. One of my personal frustrations with Scars of Mirrors, I like Scars of Mirrors a lot, but one of my frustrations was it segmented you a little too much on the sides.

We had woven a lot of things in the design to say oh well here's why black plays with red or why blue plays with white or why you know like we had done more to sort of crisscross things and some of that for different reasons uh got lessened and i feel that the finished product uh it was harder to take elements of mirrored and mix it with elements of um fraxious and i wish that had been a little... that theme that we had put in the design had stuck a little more. Okay, next. The Spellbomb Cycle.

Oh, okay, so I was talking about this not too long ago. So the Spellbomb Cycle was part of... So here's one of the goals that we have for artifacts in general, which is I like the fact that artifacts can be used by anybody. But, I also felt

it was important, and one of the things I think Mirrodin sort of had issues with, is you need to make sure that there's color in your artifacts, meaning that I want to make sure that the color pie is used as a tool to safeguard the set, just like it always is.

And so part of that is to say, okay, there's good artifacts, but you have to have some dedication to color to play some of them. Now, what I don't like is, I mean, we've done this a few times, like, you could make an artifact that just requires blue to tap, you know?

But then it's like, my problem with that is, well, then it kind of violates the essence of artifacts going anywhere, and it says, well, no, it's just a blue card. We do that every once in a while. I'm not 100% against it if there's a good value for it. But I'm not a huge fan of it because I feel like it violates kind of the essence of an artifact. And the essence of an artifact is, hey, I am useful to everybody.

And so the Spellbomb cycle was, cycle was we said okay we have a little thing a trinket you can do whatever it does something it's useful but to maximize it to really get the full value out of it

you need to have the right color because if you have the right color then you get to draw an extra card and so it's like well the you know if you're drafting you might take this card

and you might play it if you're not in red. But, oh, if you're in red, wow, you're much more inclined to want to take it. So it definitely allowed people dedicated to certain colors to be able to play, to get some artifacts later in the draft. So here are the police.

That is not for me. So you'll be happy to know I'm sitting in traffic. When I go to work, there's two freeways I take, and this is the first freeway. And for some reason, the police just went by, which does not look like good things for me. But traffic for me is always good for you. Yes, I'm the one podcast where traffic means extra content.

Okay, so the spell bombs, I liked, we tried a lot of different ways to sort of get the value across. And in the end, I liked adding the card advantage came through the color that did a nice thing of making certain colors like certain artifacts matter in more colors

and I, anyway, I was very happy with how that worked. Next is death. So it's funny. When we first mapped out the watermarks for the Phyrexians, we made a list. See if I can remember this because I talked about it the other week. So if you had a Phyrexian ability, if you had proliferate or infect, you got it. If you used minus one, minus one counters, you got it. If you had a death trigger, you got it. If you use minus one, minus one counters, you got it. If you had a death trigger, you got it.

If you sacrificed creatures, you got it. Those are all Phyrexian things. And so the funny thing is we made this map out and one of the editors came to me because we had outlaid what gets you a Frexian symbol. And so, geth didn't match anything we had laid out. And they came to me and said, oh, we're not sure what to do.

You know, he doesn't have proliferate. He doesn't have infect. He doesn't have, he doesn't use minus one, minus one counters. He doesn't sacrifice creatures. He doesn't have a death trigger. You know, he doesn't do anything that signifies he's supposed to get a Phyrexian watermark

and so I said oh I forgot one there's one more rule and they said yeah they go he gets a Phyrexian watermark IF HE'S PHYREXIAN I was like he's Phyrexian he gets a Phyrexian watermark

that's number six I apologize when I yell. I know poor people listen to me. My voice is loud as is, so I know. I get excited sometimes. See, the people ask me, am I performing, you know,

when I'm on camera, am I trying to be, like, more energetic than normal? The answer is no. So if you ask people who actually know me, this is actually how I am. I'm, uh, like I remember for example when I, my big pitch

to Roseanne that got me on the show, they asked me when I first entered if I wanted coffee, and at the end of it they're like, we see why you didn't take coffee, you didn't need it. So anyway, I have an energetic personality. That is who I am. Next, the liver point stag.

Okay, so one of the tricky things about, is we wanted there to be answers to infect in different ways. So one of the things about infect is, you block the creatures, and they slowly nibble down your creatures. And so one of the things we wanted to do is figure out some ways to help

heal the infected creatures in a way. And so, one of the ways we came up with... It's no secret. I am a giant fan of flickering. I love flickering. Love, love, love, love flickering. And one of the reasons

I like it is I consider it to be like a Swiss Army knife. Like, there's so many things you can do with flickering. There's just so many. It's just one of those things that, I mean, I'm a Johnny, right? So there's so many, like, just having a flicker in your hand, you're like, oh, so many possibilities. You know, it's just that kind of card that, like, you know, whenever I draw a flicker effect, I'm like, oh, okay, what can I do? Like, I just start getting excited because there's so many different possibilities.

And then there's so many neat tricks you can do. But anyway, the reason we use it here was, beyond the normal tricks, you still could redo ETB effects and this and that, but I felt like it did this neat thing where it helped with

Mirrodin. Like, it was a, it ended up being this neat Mirrodin helper that was very subtly a Mirrodin helper, and here's how. For starters, if your creatures had been infected and had minus one minus counters, it cleared them off it. If my 4-4 is now 1-1, I flicker and it now becomes a 4-4 again.

Also, it helps with ETB effects, Enter the Battlefield effects, but Enter the Battlefield effects were defined as Mirrodin things, because death triggers were defined as Phyrexian. So it worked really well with Mirrodin, and because death triggers were defined as Phyrexian. So it worked really well with Mirrodin, and it didn't work as well with Phyrexian. So it's one of those things that just, I realized that the flicker effect, like, not that the, also, it also reset charge counters, because what happened was, Mirrodin and all these artifacts,

that, like, you would use up their counters. Well, flickering allowed you to reset them. And the other thing we did, by the way, is we didn't have things that had would use up their counters while flickering allowed you to reset them. And the other thing we did, by the way, is we didn't have things that had a use at charge counters, we didn't sacrifice them when you had no counters left. Because we know because of metalcraft and sacrificing artifacts

and different things, that there was value in having the shell left. So that also allowed this card to have some fun and sort of reset things that had gotten down to their nub and you can get them back. And there's a big fight about that because usually when you use something up, we want to make it go away

because we want to clear off the battlefield. Like, if it's not doing any function. But we felt like there was enough function here that we should keep it around. Okay. Glimmer of Post. So one of the things that's fun is most of the time when we think about magic,

our main focus is standard. That is where... I mean, but we do also think about larger formats. And so one thing that's fun sometimes is to say, okay, like we knew... I mean, at the time, I don't think modern existed yet, but I think extended existed that I knew there would be a format

where you could play the original Mirrodin and Scar's Mirrodin together and I was just very excited with the idea of having another Locus that we had done let's see which one we called see this is where my inability to get names off the top of my head causes problems.

There was a card in... You're all yelling at your... Loud right now. There was a card in Mirrodin that you could tap, and you got the amount of mana equal to the number of loci you had. And it had post in it. Okay, I'm not going to remember it. It'll come maybe later on.

Oh, it's a Sun Tso. Anyway, we wanted to have another loci so that you could play together. This one was made to be a little weaker because the other one was like defining large environments with lots of cards. But we'd like to have another loci and I thought it'd be kind of fun. We knew it wasn't

going to be a standard issue. It would just be an issue for larger formats. Okay, more police. Something's going on up here. And I'm sitting in traffic, so... Luckily, I have a long list of cards to talk about. Okay, next. Golem Foundry.

Golem Foundry. Golem Foundry. Golem Foundry. That's hard to say. So that card in playtest was called Robot Factory. And the reason I made it was that we were trying to make artifacts have a range of how many artifacts you wanted to play.

And that I wanted to make sure that every artifact matter card didn't make you play lots of artifacts. But I wanted a few cards that really said, hey, you really kind of want to have some artifacts, and you wanted some decks that were like, hey, this deck really wants you playing a lot of artifacts. And so, Columns Foundry was made for that purpose of saying,

okay, hey, you know, we... One of the strategies could be drafting a lot of artifacts, and then you had a card that really kind of rewarded you if you had enough artifacts. But I was trying not to make that a requirement. What happened in Mirrodin, original Mirrodin, was we pushed that a little

too hard. It was kind of like, you know, if you committed to artifacts, well, you really had to commit to artifacts, and we wanted to make sure that you didn't always have to do that. But I wanted a little of that. There were people that go, I'm going to draft every artifact I see, and I want a deck full of artifacts, and I wanted to have a few cards to help them, and Gallant Fondu was one of those.

But, uh, it is funny, by the way. Golem Fondue was one of those. It is funny, by the way, that Golem Fondue is one of those where sometimes I get used to a name just because it tickles my fancy. Robot Factory was fun for me. It's one of those things. Whenever someone says Golem Fondue, I'm like, oh, Robot Factory. My brain is just kind of like

Chainsaw, Trepanation Blade, and Innistrad, where it was chainsaw for all design. Well, actually, we changed it in design to try to get a name that would stick. It couldn't be called chainsaw. Anyway, that's an Innistrad thing. Although I already had my Innistrad podcast. I'm sure I talked about it in my Innistrad podcast. Okay, next, Grind Clock.

So Grind Clock is an interesting card. So one of the things we knew once we knew that Proliferate was going to be a major part of the set I was very gung-ho of playing around a lot with the charge counters and so one of the things that I always have fun

with is trying to figure out how to make things function a little differently and so the charge counter issue was, I liked the idea that I had a card in which I had to figure out the value of the charge counters. So grind clock, for those who don't remember, is you could tap to put a charge counter on it,

or you could tap it to mill your opponent equal to the number of charge counters on it. And so the thing that I thought was a lot of fun is, like, well, what's the right strategy here? You know, how many turns do I take to build it up versus how many turns do I use it? You know, and the more I build it up, the better it is once I use it.

And there's a nice... It's one of the cards that I call a math card, which means that you say to a player... Because there are different kinds of magic players, and some players really, really enjoy having a card, and just like, so min-maxing is a term that we talk about, I think it comes from role-playing. The idea is trying to take every advantage you have

and get the most benefit out of it. So, for example, when we're talking about min-maxing role-playing, it's like building your character such that you are getting the most out of what you have available to you. And then in gaming, we use a term to mean somebody who just tries to squeeze all the advantage they can out of the things they have. And spikes, in general, are min-maxers because part of sort of proving dominance and showing what you're capable of doing is figuring out how to take a card and getting the most you can out of it.

Okay, I've now passed the accident, so now I'm traveling again. So, grind clock, to me, is a math card. It's a min-max card, which is like, it's an interesting decision. And, like, I like to make some of these cards. Every player, all these different kinds of players exist. You want to make sure each kind of these players get a card.

And this is a fun min-max card because it's, and the interesting thing is, it's not always what the correct call is varies based on different factors. For example, how many cards your opponent has in their library is very important. So if you get this out early game versus getting out late game, the actual decision is a different decision. It's not always the same thing you need to do. Plus, because there's mana involved, I mean, there's other factors. But I kind of like the decision-making that it made it have.

So Grasp of Darkness. So this card originally started as as I think it was called Black Lightning and it was B it originally was B instant target creature gets minus 3, minus 3 until end of turn and the idea was

it was kind of like a lightning bolt I mean it couldn't hit players so it was strictly worse than lightning bolt but, well not strictly worse because it's minus 1, minus 1 and then what happened was it just ended up being too good and so in

development, it got toned down so that it had value. I think what they wanted was, they didn't mind the heavy, dedicated black deck having it, but it was a little too splashable, a little too easy to use, and I mean, a little too powerful. But anyway, I always liked Black Lightning.

Which, by the way, for those who don't know, is also a superhero in the DC Universe. A little trivia for you listening to my show. Next is Icarats. Okay, so Icarats was interesting. So the thing about Icarats was we were trying to... So I knew I wanted most of poison to be damaged. You had to have

creatures and they damage you. But I liked the idea that there was one way, and one way, I did not want to make this something easy to do, but there was one way to be able to get the first point without hitting your opponent. Just because I knew proliferate

existed and I thought it might be neat to have a deck that's just a little tiny bit different, where I can get that first point, and then I can sort of proliferate it out. And so, Inker Rats had a lot of flavor, the idea of kind of like they spread disease, and so the mere presence kind of poisoned you a little bit. It's interesting.

It definitely is one of the things where... I'll show them something straight. Because I know whenever I talk poison, it's interesting it definitely is one of the things where it's us showing someone straight because I know whenever I talk poison there's a lot of players like oh just give me a spell give my opponent poison I'm like well no I want the interactivity I definitely want the thing I like about most poison being on creatures is

there's interactivity to it that I just had to cast spells and poison you well I stall until I get the spells and I hit you it's not nearly as interactive. And having the creatures requires, like, one of the things about, in fact, being on creatures is your opponent always has some answers

because they have creatures. And we purposely made the poison creatures, I'm with one or two exceptions, to be fragile, meaning that most of the time when you got in a fight with a Phyrexian creature, it might do damage to you,

but there's a good chance you could kill it. I mean, the uncommon ones could be a little larger, but like the common ones usually, usually, there's exceptions, had one toughness, meaning if you could fight this thing, odds are you could kill it. Now, it'll probably kill you, or if it doesn't kill you, at least it permanently damages you.

But, you know, by making infect-beam creatures, then you had answers. Ikarat was my one. I'm like, well, we'll play around a little bit, you know. And I wanted there to be a black-blue proliferate deck where you sort of just, you know, taint them a little bit and then get them.

And Ikarat was kind of fulfilling that role. Liquid metal coating. So there's a couple things in the set that I would go back and change. I know there's people that hardly disagree with me on this one, but I don't like the fact that this turns enchantments into artifacts. I understand the Melvin quality of

it's neat to have all the ways to turn things into other things. But the... I guess the Vorthos wins out on this one, which is, why am I turning this intangible thing into a tangible thing? Like, I get... I get taking land or taking creatures.

I get turning those into artifacts. I can see that. But I don't... One, I don't see the flavor of enchantments becoming artifacts. I can see that. But I don't... One, I don't see the flavor of enchantments becoming artifacts. I don't get that. And the second thing is that it gave Red this really easy way to destroy enchantments that

really wasn't the goal of the card and kind of really was not what... I mean, like, obviously players will take the cards and use them in ways that are beneficial. And I don't begrudge the players that. I kind of begrudge us not seeing this ahead of time, because it was not supposed to say,

oh, you know, Red has Artifact Destruction, so having a card that turns into Artifacts and having Artifact Destruction, that's a fine combo for Red to have, even if Enchantments don't show up. And the fact that now Red has this much easier-than-normal answer for enchantments, eh, does not make me happy. So, like I said, on a couple levels, I was not super happy with that card. I mean, it was very popular, but... So next is Lex Cannon.

So Lex Cannon, I believe, I think his playtest name was Killing Machine. And the idea was, you just could build up and you could destroy anything. was Killing Machine. And the idea was, you just could build up and you could destroy anything. In general, Creative, I thought, did an awesome, awesome, awesome job. And so, what I'm about to say really is, I'm not trying to dig at Creative

other than I, this is the one card where I wanted this over-the-top name like Killing Machine and Lux Cannon was a little underwhelming. Like I said, Creative knocked this thing out of the box, so I'm really picking

on a one tiny little thing that I just... I was hoping for a little more badass name than Lux Cannon. For something that just kills anything. But once again, you know, just as Trevenation Blade is Chainsaw, this card will always be Killing Machine to me.

Mem Knight. Okay, so we figured out that we could do a 0-1-1, which is one of those things that seems more dangerous than it really is. I know that a lot of players are like, whenever you get something for nothing, you know, in fact, I'll tell you a funny story. So Richard Garfield was talking to someone that we were thinking of making a game for,

and they made the comment about how, well, just don't break it like you broke magic. And Richard was like, oh, like moxies or something? And the guy's like, you know, like ornithopter. That was an example of how Richard broke magic. And like, ornithopter? Ornithopter? And you notice in Alliances, there's a 03. And the flavor text for it is making fun of this. It's something about how, you know,

you can't stop the horrible things. It'll destroy us all. And it's like a 003. And we figured out that you can do a 003, you can do a 011. And we'd kind of known this. We said, okay, Artifact's it. That's the place to do this.

And we went back and forth. For a while, we were talking about it being common and then they were worried that there was a draft strategy that could get a little degenerate and we didn't like in normal constructed you can only have four of them in your deck but

if they were common in fact somebody did this where everyone they saw they drafted constructed, you can only have four of them in your deck. But the... If they don't come in... In fact, somebody did this, where everyone they saw, they drafted. And in three packs, they were able to get, I don't know, 12, 13 of them, and they just mulliganed until they got a hand of four or five of them, and then just

attacked. And it's not even that that necessarily was... It won a great percentage of the time, but it won enough that it was just kind of annoying. And we decided that, okay, let's just make it uncommon. It's kind of a sexy uncommon anyway. People will be excited. You know, we don't often make a zero drop one one.

So we felt like it made sense. It made sense in uncommon. So we got moved up. Mimic that. We felt like it made sense and uncommon. So we got moved up. Minutemat. So one of the things we did, we looked at... I wonder how... So this gets transcribed. So Natasha transcribes this.

And so whenever I make sounds, I always wonder if she transcribes a sound. So like, okay, Natasha. By the way, I'm very, very thankful that Natasha transcribes the sound. So like, okay, Natasha. By the way, I'm very, very thankful that Natasha transcribes this podcast. One of the things that's hilarious to me is that this podcast is really, really made as an oral thing that I'm talking and I'm telling stories. And then when you listen to me, it makes a lot of sense. And it's funny because when it gets transcribed, she writes on everything. And so, which is a wonderful service. There's a lot of sense. And it's funny because when it gets transcribed, she writes on everything, which is a wonderful service. There's a lot of people either that can't hear

or that don't have the time to go listen to a podcast, and I'm very happy that she transcribes it. But it is just funny reading me talking, you know, because I talk and have sentences and I jump around. And when you listen to me, it kind of makes sense, but when you read it, I just think I come across a little crazier than I am. Not that I'm not crazy, but anyway. So, okay, back to Scar's Mirrored Inn. In fact, so, when we did Imprint in Mirrored Inn, we tried a bunch of different things.

And I'll be honest, I think some things were more successful than others. The big successes, I think, of Imprint was Clone Foundry and Isochron Scepter. was Clone Foundry and Isochron Scepter. And the one... There's one more that copied. The ones that copied things were very successful. And that... We definitely wanted to do some more copying. But one of the things I realized was

that it might be fun if you had a card that there was copying, but you had less control over the copy. And the idea was, okay, well, what if, you know, my idea was, what if I had some randomizer or somewhat randomizer that kept changing what it was? And then I came up with the idea of it dies. So every time it dies, whatever has died gets imprinted on it. And so if you want something to imprint, you could do that,

but then your opponent can kill something and then they could change it. And I thought it was neat because one of the things in general about imprint stuff was it is fun to imprint things, and I like that you have different choices, but I thought it was also neat to play around where when you imprint it, it wasn't always the same thing wasn't happening. That imprint cards could change value over time, and they would be doing different things. And something like that was me

goofing around in that area. Like I said, we didn't do tons of imprint. My guideline was, let's do enough imprint that it hits... Let's do the interesting imprints. We don't need to do tons of imprints. Let's just pick the cool stuff and do that.

And I like Mimic very a lot. I think it is one of those cards that just has lots of fun play value. And like I said, once again, it's very Johnny-ish in my mind. I mean, not that Spike can't enjoy it, and not that Simmy can't enjoy it, but it has a lot of this quality

of trying to figure out... One of the things about Johnny is I think people focus on Johnny in the deck building. Everyone thinks about Johnny in the deck building part. They go, oh, Johnny really enjoys making fun decks and making weird things happen. But another thing about Johnny's is that Johnny's enjoy being in the middle of the game and getting presented with options and then figuring out what to do on the fly. Like, it's fun to pre-plan things, but it's also fun to sort of,

you know, to have your improvisational Johnny moment where, like, making decisions on the go. Like, Johnnies like to be clever, not just in ahead of time, but also in the middle of the game. And, like, earlier I talked about how Johnnies tend to like flickering

because there's just so many things you can do with flickering. And I feel like that there's a lot of that having things that create variance in the game allow Johnny to kind of on the fly come up with fun things to do. And Mimic Vag is definitely one of those kind of cards

where the Johnny in me is just like oh, there's always neat things that can happen and things come up I never would have anticipated because I didn't prepare for it. There's definitely times where something dies and I'm like, oh, I never would have thought to want to copy that, but in this situation I do want to copy that. So anyway, Mimic Vag definitely excites my Johnny, if that doesn't sound bad. Stirs the Johnny within me. That might still sound bad. Anyway, I...

There's just no way me making the statement that somehow doesn't sound questionable. So let's just say that I like to make that. Okay, the next card. Mine. Slaver! Slaver of Minds. I will try to keep singing in my podcast at a minimum. So, what happened was, Mindslaver originally was going to be in Tempest.

In fact, Helm of Volrath was scheduled to be Mindslaver. But at the time, the rules people were nervous. And there was the Manaburn issue, although we ended up just saying whatever. And now it's gone, so it doesn't matter. But anyway, we didn't do it.

The rules team got nervous and didn't know how to let you take control of your opponent, so we pushed it off. And then when Mirrodin happened, I said, oh, this is an awesome card. I was looking for just out there artifacts that were cool and did some different things. I remembered Mind Slaver. I said, oh, Mind Slaver is awesome and did some different things. I remembered Mind Flavor. I said, oh, Mind Flavor is awesome. You know, I should do Mind Flavor. And this time the rules people said, yeah, we can do it.

So that was great. But one of the things about Mind Flavor is that the thing I love about Mind Flavor is it's what I call a story card. And what it means is when you play the card, you make stories. You know, that it's the kind of card, like, I'm sure if you could record every magic conversation that there's a good number of conversations to start with. So I played

Mind Flavor, you know, and, like, it just leaves some neat, interesting situations. In fact, it creates a lot of what I call puzzle moments, where you're like, okay, like one of my matches of puzzling. It's like, okay, what do I do? And taking over your opponent's turn and trying

to just sabotage him for a turn, it's fun. There's a lot of neat things that happen there. Now, the problem is that it's pretty violating. That, for the guy doing it, it is fun. But for the guy being done against it, it is fun the first couple times it happens,

because it's novel. But then eventually you're like, ugh, not again. And so Mind Slaver got in this weird place where it was what I call beloved and behated. Yes, I invented the word behated. So trademarked, behated. It is a card that evokes strong emotions out of people. So trademarked behated. It is a card that

evokes strong emotions out of people. Some people really like it. Some people really hate it. And so when we made a list of cards to

bring back, I put Mind Slaver on it. I said, look, Mind Slaver is like an iconic card. It's cool. It's fun. It makes stories.

And then other people were like, it's one of the most unfun cards of all time. And so we had this fight back and forth because it is this card

that, like, creates strong, strong feelings. It is loved by some and it's hated by others. And so we went back and forth. For a while, we were talking about doing

a variant of it that exiled itself, which would answer that problem. Because the most, the biggest problem with it is when it gets recursed. That's one thing that'll finally lose a turn. It's another thing we can lose every turn.

And so we were going to redo a version of it and change it a little bit, change the numbers, and add in the excite, you know, it removes itself so that it doesn't cause that problem. But we went back and forth. In the end, I guess it was decided that it was pretty nostalgic, and it felt very much like Mirrodin,

and the thought was we were a little bit low on repeat Mirrodin cards, and it was really high profile, and so we decided to bring it back. So, anyway, that's all mine. Flavor ended up in the set for those that beloved or hated. Anyway, I'm now at work,

and I look at my list. I am like halfway through the list I made. So you know what that means? Yes. Four-parter. So I will do, next week I will do

the fourth part. I've never done a four-parter. So you guys will be here for the very first four-parter. Well, I guess I've done my lessons learned. I've done mediseries

to get up to four parts, but I've never done a review of a set that's gotten up to four parts. But you know what? You guys seem to like the review of the set, so I'm done meta series to get up to four parts but I've never done a review of a set that's gotten up to four parts but you know what you guys seem to like the review of the set so I'm willing to

talk about this as long as I have material to talk about so anyway next week join me we'll talk more about card stories but now

ooh I'm late because my traffic so a little extra little extra podcast for today but anyway it's time for me to go because I gotta go

make the magic