Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #86 - Theros, Part 6

Episode Date: January 10, 2014

Mark continues discussing Theros in part 6.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, well first thing as I pull out, I realize that it is raining, which for those people who know probably means a slightly extra long podcast. Although I need to point out that Ryan Spain, current R&D member, former limited information host, podcast host, pointed out to me after I mentioned that people in Seattle can't drive in the rain, he pointed out a good point. His hypothesis is that people in Seattle can drive

in the rain, and that is why people are so slow, because when it's raining, the correct thing to do is drive slow. Anyway, a possible thought for the day? Okay, so last we left, I've been talking about card-by-card stories in Theros. Last we left, we were on C. Two podcasts I've gotten to C.

But hopefully you guys like this podcast. If not, there's a few podcasts for you. I hope you like it. In general, you guys seem to like the, what I call the down and dirty in the design stuff where I'm talking about actual designs. And anyway, it's a test. We shall see. So we got up to Colossus of Akros.

So one of the things that's interesting, and I'll use this as my example, is one of the things that we've started to do, if you look at Champions of Kamigawa, for example, that was us trying to do worlds inspired by Japanese mythology. And it was not particularly popular. It has gained some popularity

over the years. I think the commander format, especially because the set is overrunning with legendary creatures, has brought some current fondness for it. At the time, it using any metric we have, it did not do well.

But, both Innistrad and Theros have done much, much better. And I have a hypothesis I'd like to run by you. I think what is going on is what we've learned about Top Down is that a lot of the joy of Top Down comes from familiarity.

I mean, any of you who listen to me talk at all about communication theory and stuff, a lot of connecting with an audience is making them feel comfortable with the source material. And, you know, yes, yes, there should be surprises and such. But the base of it needs to be very understandable.

And the problem we had in Champions of Kamigawa is we explored a lot of things that, while being kind of true to the source material, were not very known by the vast majority of our audience. And thus, I just don't think it resonated as clearly with them. And what we did with both Innistrad and Theros is we said, okay, let's make sure that the baseline stays very close to the source material, and that if you like horror or you like Greek mythology,

that a lot of the things you expect are there. And what we've also done is made sure that the things that are better known are lower in commonalities. So yeah, we have a hundred-handed one, but it's not a common card, it's a rarer card. So the people that want the little more obscure stuff we have, but that's not what we're basing our set around. It's not like it's a set all around, hey, the hundred-handed one, and there's a whole bunch of hundred-handed ones,

because the average person doesn't know that from Greek mythology, even though it actually is in Greek mythology. And so the idea is, you want your lower rarities to be the more approachable, more known stuff, and your higher rarities can be a little more experimental. Also, in general, we have chosen to sort of... We want to meet a lot of expectations,

so we definitely have hit more of what we'll call low-hanging fruit. One of the big arguments is, when you do inspirations, is how much of low-hanging fruit you hit. In Shemskama Gawa, the idea was, well, let's not do all the low-hanging fruit. Let's be a little more eclectic. And the problem there was, people like low-hanging fruit. You know what people eat when they get to the tree?

They eat the low-hanging fruit. And I don't think you should besmirch it. Do not besmirch the low-hanging fruit. It is tasty. And I don't think you should besmirch it. Do not besmirch the low-hanging fruit. It is tasty. And it is reachable. So we are definitely trying to mix things up, and we're trying to add some new elements that are our own, and we're trying to do our take on things.

And our gods are not the Greek gods, but they're definitely inspired by the Greek gods and have a lot of the Greek godness to them. But anyway, the reason I bring this up is Colossus of Arachros was inspired by dun dun dun a movie called

Jason and the Argonauts so there was a series of movies I think they were made in the 70s that had at the time well maybe at the time

it was bad bad special effects I don't know maybe they're awesome special effects it's very hard to tell in modern day looking back at old special effects whether they were cutting edge. Maybe they're awesome special effects. It's very hard to tell in modern day

looking back at old special effects whether they were cutting edge for the time or not. Maybe they were. But anyway, there's a sequence where there's a giant statue, I think of an Argonaut, and they get attacked by it. And anyway, this was inspired by that,

by the giant statue coming to life and attacking you. And so one of the things we definitely tried to do is we're very cognizant of pop culture. I know in Innistrad, for example, one of the things we talked about when we were doing Innistrad is how should the zombies be? And the reality is there weren't a lot, the source material we were borrowing from,

there weren't a lot of zombies. There were like Frankenstein with the zombies, I guess. The zombies were more along the line of Frankenstein. And less along the line of Dawn of the Dead. But we're like, look, people expect Dawn of the Dead. I don't care if Dawn of the Dead necessarily lines up with the source material. It's what people expect from it.

That if you have a bunch of zombies, you're expecting, especially in black, Dawn of the Dead zombies. And so we made sure to deliver that, even though that wasn't 100% to follow the sort of, the era we were coming from in looking at our source material. And that pop culture has shaped perceptions of

things, and that one of the big things is, so I'll use my example here. There's a game that we made long ago called, What Were You Thinking? Richard Garfield made it. It's called Hive Mind in Design. And the idea of the game is, you get asked a question, and then everybody is supposed

to write down the answers that they think everybody else is going to write. And the idea is, you're trying to get the answer that's the most popular answer. So, one day, it's like, name some number of insects. And one of the best answers was spider.

And someone then said, what do you mean spider? Spider's not even an insect. And the answer was, it didn't matter. The point was to write down the most popular answers, not to write down the right answers. Yes, spider's a pretty poor answer for what's the most popular insect in the fact that it's not an insect. But in a game where you're trying to write down what other people are writing down, maybe spider is the right thing. In fact, it was because it was in the top. You got a lot of points writing Spider down because a lot of people wrote it down.

And the funny thing was, a lot of the people who wrote it down knew it wasn't an insect, but they thought enough other people would write it down that they wrote it down. Anyway, that's important. And I do believe when we talk about how we do top-down stuff, I think it's very, very important to understand that the influence of pop culture is important

because when people... Here's an important thing also to remember. People don't know where they get their information from. This is a very important thing I've learned in the way humans process information. The information that you learn and where you learn the information from are actually not stored in the same place in the brain.

In fact, one of them goes into long-term information and one goes into more short-term information because your brain says, oh, I need the information. Oh, I need to know that. So it puts it into long-term. But where I got it from is not a super crucial thing. So that goes into shorter-term memory.

So what happens is with time, you remember what you learned, but you don't always remember where you learned it. And the reason I learned this in school is, when you study the effects of communications, one of the things about television and movies, for example, is it will teach people things, and the people will learn that as facts, and forget that they saw it in a movie. Because if you ask the average person, how realistic is TV, they're like, oh, you know, TV's not that realistic. You know, TV shows and such. But they'll learn something, and if they don't know any better,

they'll put it in their head, and then they forget they learned it from television. And so one of the real powerful things about television is it fills in people's knowledge gaps, but it's not necessarily true. And so it is very... TV has a great ability to sort of subconsciously almost teach people things

because they will learn things, kind of know they're not true, then forget when they learned them and then assume they're true because they know them. Anyway, little communications for you. Okay, next, Curse of the Swine. So in The Odyssey,

I talked about the Iliad last time, which was the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the second book in which Odysseus, our hero, tries to get home. He has pissed off Poseidon, and he's in a ship trying to get home, so Poseidon messes with him for like, I don't know, eight, ten years.

One of the places he ends up is on an island where there's a sorceress named Circe, and Circe turns all his men into pigs. It's a pretty famous story. Anyway, we wanted to capture that, and so Curse of the Swine is us doing a little turn men into pigs, you know, the Odysseus men into pigs.

Originally, by the way, the card was a devotion card that it turned a certain number of creatures based on your devotion. But it ended up being, it made more sense just to turn all creatures rather than necessarily just some creatures. And they ended up making Master of Waves

the devotion card in Mythic Blue, other than Pasa. So, anyway, Curse of the Swine, definitely, I mean, we wanted to hit a trope. Development tweaked it a little bit, but, I mean, it stayed mostly as we Swine definitely I mean we wanted to hit the trope development tweaked it a little bit but I mean

it stayed mostly as we made it I mean minus the devotion obviously okay Cutthroat Maneuver oh okay this is a bestow card

so this card gives plus two plus two in lifelink the reason I'm bringing this up was I talked about this in a previous podcast I just wanted to sort of point it out

that when we were making bestow cards, especially when we were making common and uncommon, that we wanted to make sure that they were easy to process. And so the way we did that was we lined them up. We made cycles. And instead of doing vanilla stuff with different numbers, which is harder actually to process,

we made them all the same so that they'd have the same bonus. So the cycle that cutthroat maneuver is in, they're all plus two, plus two, and a binnability, but lifelike and black. Anyway, one of the things to remember, and I'll stress this again, is that when you were designing,

by the way, it's called Mindspace. I think I called it Mindshare on a podcast a couple times ago. It's always important's called Mindspace I think I called it Mindshare on a podcast a couple times ago it's always important to remember Mindspace is that your audience

only has so much they can absorb and whenever you can use things to consolidate information so that they can have fun because one of the things to remember is

that every card does not need to be different that does not make the game more fun if every card is radically different from every card there's a point at which it's just overwhelming. We want to make sure

that the audience grasps and understands what's going on. Also, because we have a whole block to do, we want to make sure that we give ourselves room to grow. So there's really, really no reason when you're introducing a new mechanic in the first set in the fall set of a block, not to try to do the simplest version that's the easiest to rock onto. You want your audience to have

the simplest thing to jump on and learn, and you want to give yourself some room to grow so as the block goes along, you can evolve and do things. Okay, dark betrayal. So I'm going to talk about this cycle. This cycle is the color hurts itself cycle. And dark betrayal is black killing a black creature.

So the reason this cycle came up was not a design thing. Design did not make the cycle. This got made in development. And I assume, usually when development makes a cycle, it's because they want something for constructed. That's usually why a cycle gets made.

Or especially a cycle like this. I mean, they might make a cycle that's using themes of the set. But this really is separate from the themes of the set. So I do not know for a fact why they made the cycle, but knowing development and knowing that it didn't tie directly into the themes of the set, I mean, it fits, but it wasn't using the mechanics of the set. It seems like it's something development wanted for Constructed. That's my guess.

And these cards are, they seem fairly, I mean, push enough that, I assume these are meant to be sideboard cards. Next, Elspeth, Sun Champion. Dun-dun-dun-dun. Okay, so let's talk about how Elspeth ended up in the set. Okay, so like I said, when I first started, when I first started, once again, my caveat is, when I make a story, it's not the story. It's just me trying to find an archetype.

Really, the story I was trying to tell was I wanted an evil planeswalker taking advantage of the Greek world and the gods to create... Originally, he was going to bring their dreams to life. But it shifted with time, and then the dreams ended up being more the realm of the gods.

So what happened was, in my original version of the story, which is a super early version, which is not a real version, it's more of me trying to make a hypothesis, but anyway, that caveat out of the way. Originally, I had Jace in it, because I thought, if you're going to have dark Jace, you need Jace, because it's much more exciting when

the person gets to meet their own dark mirror. You know, I mean, Batman could fight Bizarro, but not as exciting as Superman fighting Bizarro. So, originally when I pitched this, I suggested Jace. What they were really gung-ho is they were trying to get a real Greek feel. And so the story they want to tell, and the correct story for a Greek block, is the story that had a little more of a Greek feel to it. And so they were interested in telling the story of a reluctant hero. That's another trope of Greek drama,

is the idea of the hero that is destined to be a hero, but he doesn't want it. And the idea of the reluctant hero is, I mean the the trope is that the hero is trying to get away. They don't want the responsibility. That they've suffered responsibility in the past and things have gone poorly. In fact, for those that are fans of the Weatherlight Saga, the beginning of the Weatherlight Saga, Gerard is a reluctant hero. He had a bad experience with the Weatherlight. He didn't want to go back.

Now, he gets drawn back. And that's the way the reluctant hero trope works, is something makes them have to go back. In the Weatherlight saga, Sisse, his mentor, got kidnapped, and he had to go rescue her. In this story, Elisabeth comes to Theros because she feels like in a world with gods,

how is she going to be needed? She won't be so special in a world with gods and no one will expect anything of her. And ironically, the gods need her. Heliod needs her and is the one that calls her up. And the true thing

about a reluctant hero is even though they don't want to be a hero, when the time comes, they do step up and they become the hero they need to be. And usually by becoming the hero, they learn important things, which she will. So the key about Elisabeth is one of the things they liked about Elisabeth was they wanted to take one of our planeswalkers and be able to dress them up in sort of Greek gear

and have a neat look to it. And they thought that Elisabeth worked really well. One of the flavors we've been trying to do with the Planeswalkers, in fact, Dan Emmons, who's one of my designers on the design team, has a little side project where he's been documenting every Planeswalker and what they do and trying to make sure that when we do Planeswalkers that we are not being inconsistent. We made a Liliana that really didn't fit the other Lilianas

and people were complaining. We're like, okay, you're right. We have to be more consistent with the Planeswalkers. So Dan is now monitoring that. So Elisabeth has her army. She summons her creatures. And one of the telltale signs of her is she makes token creatures, soldiers.

And so we want to repeat that. And in general, by the way, her basic thing is she's like, I make soldiers, I help my soldiers, and then usually, you know, she's also a fighter. And so the middle thing, so basically what we did is she beats her soldiers,

she kills things, big things, because she kills monsters. And one of the big things I'll get to is one of the big parts of the story is we wanted this big scene of her fighting a Hydra because we wanted it on the packaging. We felt like we were trying to look for the iconic monster, and a Hydra was impressive looking, and it felt

very Greek mythology, so we decided to do a Hydra. Anyway, so her first ability is to make soldiers, second ability is to kill big things, third ability is to help the soldiers. And Elisabeth, I think, has become a very, people are very fond of Elisabeth.

One of the things that's interesting is certain colors have really cemented around a planeswalkers that just becomes the one that people define the color with and other colors uh not quite as much i mean white is the color where i believe that a johnny and gideon and elspeth are all been sort of jockeying to be who is the who's the the key white person. And I think what happened was that Johnny early on was the one that got the least traction, the original Lorwyn Five.

Our hypothesis is because he's not human, and that is just a little bit harder to relate to a non-human. There's people who love a Johnny, so I'm not trying to smirch a Johnny. I like a Johnny. But anyway, the white's definitely the one that's been trying to, you know, settle down and, like, who's his key planeswalker?

Anything else about Elsbeth? I guess that's mostly. We'll talk about some other stuff as we go along. I'll talk about her Hydra fighting when we get to the card that she fights a Hydra on. Next is a Faraz Warden. Okay, so she is a tapper, but unlike most tappers, she only taps creatures with power three or less.

Okay, so this is a card I wanted to talk about another concept, which is the Biodome. Now, we sometimes use B biodome in a negative context, which means when things get too... So when you design a set,

you are creating two things. You're creating a world that's going to live by itself. That's what we call the biodome. Usually it's limited. And you're making a set that's going to interact with other sets in magic, that you use that's more constructed. And the idea is design is not well suited.

I mean, we clearly are aware of things in general, what's going on. We're aware of big pictures, what mechanically is happening. And we definitely make overlaps between mechanics, between blocks for synergy. But we are not up to date on where exactly the metagame is. That's what development does and not design. And so we have a little less say on how things are going to interact in the big picture. I mean, we definitely interact mechanics big picture. Like, oh, this mechanic and that mechanic will go well together.

But we're not fine-tuning things. Development's more fine-tuning. So design spends a little more time on the biodome, which is, okay, we're in a world in which this is all you have. And the attractiveness to a designer of the biodome, and the dangers, is that you have a lot more control. That, as far as Warden is an example of, we wanted to build an environment where you were crafting things and building up things and, you know, making giant heroes and monsters and really sort of evolving your creature over time. The problem was that a normal magic set has a lot of things that would easily negate that. Tapping being a good thing.

Well, if I spend three cards and lots of mana to make this giant creature, and you can spend one mana every turn just to tap it, oh, well, that really negates a lot of what I'm doing. And so what we decided was that we were going, I mean, there's answers, and we made sure there are answers. The answers are a little bit different than normal, and they definitely don't punish the play pattern we wanted as much as normal magic.

So as far as Warden's example of a card, we're like, okay, we still want you to have some control, but you know what? We're going to build in a weakness to the Tapper. The Tapper's going to be bad against big things. Meaning, so not only when you build a big thing aren't you punished, but also when you're looking at the set, it's one of the cards that encourages you to build big things. That we want the messaging that big things are better.

Not that that means a ton of messaging, because big things are better in a lot of ways. Although, building things up with lots of cards can be a problem. So anyway, as far as Warren is just an example of us

sort of saying, we need to craft the environment. You have to be aware of your biodome. You want to be careful not to go too crazy because sometimes you can make things work.

Rise of the Drysie had this problem a little bit where it was like super, super biodome-y. Like, in this world you can do this, but once you get outside this world, it was a lot harder to do. And you can get trapped in the world of like,

I'm going to make this work to such an extreme that things don't even, like, one of the problems, so Rise of the Drazi, for those that don't know, historically is an interesting set in which it split our audience. The casual players did not like it, did not play it much, did not buy it much. The advanced players loved it, especially in Limited. They loved it.

And so what we found was that when you get too Biodome-y, the people that just dig in and love Limited, they're fine with the B biodome because they're like okay, what crazy thing is going on now? What we found is the casual player, if you just push it too much it's just, they have nothing to hang their hat on, if you will. That part of being able to sort of

deal in a limited environment is having something that you know to be true and being able to work with that. And while we can shift some things Rise of Drive was shifted a little bit too much for the more casual, limited player. But on the flip side, the more advanced player really did enjoy that because it was just so different from what Magic normally is.

Also, in general, I think when you slow things down immensely, a lot of the limited players really enjoy that because it allows a lot more give and play and it allows a lot more... It play and it allows a lot more... It does make it easy for the better player to win because usually the longer the game goes, the more decisions get made, the better player will make more of the decisions correct

and so they will win. So long games tend to reward experienced players. That's why experienced players like control. Okay. Next, Erebus, God of the Dead. A couple things. Erebus. God of the Dead. A couple things about Erebus. First is the original ability of Erebus,

because he was always God of the Dead, was you can play creatures from your graveyard. That was his ability. And I think when they died, they got exiled. I think while he was in play, creatures died to exile, but he could play creatures out of the graveyard. I think that's how it worked.

And that was an awesome ability, and it got to the dead, and it fit really well. And then what ended up happening was it was a little too good, and development had to kill it, which often happens sometimes with pretty cool abilities, is they're good because they're a little too good. So Eremis is very interesting. One of the things I enjoy quite a bit, so Brady

Downermith, who was the former creative director, he's no longer with us, but he was with Magic for a long, long time. If you liked Mirrodin, if you liked the Guilds of Ravnica, you know, there's a lot of stuff that Brady had his hand in big time. Anyway, the way

the gods worked was each member of the creative team, or five members of the creative team, took one of the gods and wrote up the god. And Brady took up Erebus. And one of the things Brady was trying to do, the reason he took Erebus is black is tricky. It's very easy

to fall in the habit of just doing hee hee. For example, if you do God of the Underworld, it's so easy to get to like Hades from the Hercules cartoon from Disney's Hercules where it's like a personified evil with a flaming head and that Brady

wanted a little more subtlety to it that he wanted a God of the Dead that was a little more remorseful and not so gleefully evil and that he sees it as a responsibility and something he needs to do, but that it's not, it's his duty. You know, it's something that he has to do.

And anyway, it's an interesting take on Black and I think that, I think Black, it's very easy for Black just to become, you know, sort of maniacal evil, stereotypical maniacal evil. And we try hard from time to time to just carve other shades into it. It's not that black can't be evil. Obviously it can.

It does it quite well. But it doesn't always have to be evil. And I really appreciate what lots of Brady did with Erebus to try to give him a little more feel. Okay, now that I'm talking about Erebus, I can talk about the gods! The design of the gods. Okay,

so, here's what happened. When I made the gods, I knew the gods would be very important. Aaron and I had a lot of talks about it. I said we're going to do something special. But there were a lot of other moving pieces, and when I actually handed off the file to Eric Lauer, who was the lead developer for the set,

I said to him, everything is done, except the gods. The gods aren't done. We've got to fix the gods. I said, give me some time, I'll put a team together, and we'll focus on the gods. I'd been focusing on so many other things. I knew the gods needed to get done, but the other thing to remember is

early development is about balance and a lot about limited. And so, like some Mythic Rare cards, we have a little bit of time that you can play just limited without some Mythic Rares we have a little bit of time that you can play that's limited without some mythic rares and really get a sense of environment and so plus another important thing is early in development is you have to concept cards, you have to choose

cards to get concepted, meaning we have to figure out what cards are so that they can do the illustrations well it turns out the gods they spent lots of time and energy they were going to put that in the first art wave and it was like, draw the gods that are from our style guide. So I knew that we had a little bit of time on the rules text because, you know, Eric

would be able to put them into the style guide, sorry, be able to put them into the first wave of card concepting and it wouldn't affect limit. So I knew I had a little bit of time. That's just me sort of knowing the process. And there was a lot going on. We thought I said a lot of moving parts. And so anyway, so what happened was once a week, my design team has a design team meeting. It's just a meeting for the designers.

So it is me, my design manager, Mark Gottlieb, who I explained this once before, but I oversee the technical part of it, and he oversees, I oversee the sort of the product, and he oversees the people. So he's the manager for the team. But I'm responsible for all their technical growth and sort of grooming them as designers. And then Mark's in charge of all the managerial stuff,

of managing their time and making sure that they are on enough projects and the right projects, and that he does all the management, the people management. So the design team is me, Mark Gottlieb, Ken Nagel, Ethan Fleischer, Sean Main, and Dan Emmons. And we meet once a week to talk about design issues, whatever is on our mind. And it's a place where we can talk super design-y. Sometimes we'll look at other designs from other areas, or we'll talk about things we're doing, or there's a lot of updating, so everyone's aware of what's going on in different designs

and different projects. But anyway, it's a chance where the designers can talk design. So I used one of our meetings to brainstorm on the gods. And so we came up with an interesting idea. So the idea we had is when you summon the gods, they didn't go into the battlefield. They went to a new zone, the Nyx zone. And the idea was the gods, while in Nyx, have an ability that affects you. They have an enchantment-like ability.

They have enchantment creatures. But if your devotion was strong enough, you could bring them to the battlefield, and then they could fight for you. But if they ever died in the battlefield, they went back to Nyx. That was our original version. And so when Eric got a hold of them,

I think he liked the general gist of what it was. You summon the god, he has sort of an enchantment effect, you need to have enough devotion, and then he's tangible and he can fight for you. And so the idea that development did a couple things. Another good example of how design and development work together. Design was trying really hard

to get the concept, the idea. It's a God, and he has this enchantment-like feel, and if you have enough devotion, you can bring him so he takes form, and now he can fight for you. All that came from design, but a lot of the execution, development changed

a lot of things about the execution. Number one, they said, okay, we don't need another zone, no Nick zone. We'll just put him on the battlefield. Number two, our version was it was hard to destroy them because when you destroyed them, they went back to Nick. There's no Nick. So fine, make them indestructible.

You can't destroy them. And then he just said, okay, let's sit on the battlefield. They're an enchantment. Until you make them a creature, they're just an enchantment. I don't know if they have creature status. I'm not sure how that works. But the idea is they'll function like an enchantment until such a time that you have your devotion.

I think that is what turns them into creatures. I mean, I know devotion turns them into creatures, but I think they become creatures at that point. And so he also, I mean, the fact that they sat in play and had devotion meant now they helped themselves a little bit, and they balanced that. But most of what they did, which is a nice example of,

design has some pretty out there ideas to make something that was very different. And the development said, well, what's the special things about them? And we crafted them to make something that just would play a little better and function a little better. I think a lot of ways that is a perfect example, a little microcosm of design development.

The design's job is to kind of be out there and get very cool and neat things. The development's job is to ground it and make sure that it's done in a way that's playable and balanceable and such. Anyway, that is the gods. Okay, next. Felhide Minotaur.

Ah, the fate of the Minotaurs! So one of the things that happens sometimes is... I talk a lot about where design and development sometimes will butt up against things. Design and creativity will sometimes butt up. And the Minotaurs is a good example. So one of the things that happened early on was I really wanted Minotaurs to be in red and black and to have a little aggro play

and that one of the draft strategies in red and black was you could drop Minotaurs to be in red and black and to have a little aggro play, and that one of the draft strategies in red and black was you could drop Minotaurs. So one of the problems that happened, though, is that the creative team came to us and said, look, Minotaurs are decently big. You can't make a little team in Minotaurs. And so what they said to us is, okay, so for Theros, the guideline was and so what they said to us is, okay, so for Theros, the guideline was the power and toughness combined had to be at least five

for a creature to be a minotaur. That was big enough that two three or three two is big enough to be a minotaur. But one of the problems is if you're trying to make a more aggressive deck, it's problematic

if none of them are small. We're talking, that's like three mana at the lowest, and you might want one mana or two mana, so we weren't able to do that. The other problem we ran into

was that we wanted more minotaurs, like, Jenna was trying to fit all sorts of stuff in the set, and there's a world filled with Greek mythology. The reason we chose it was there's so many cool cool neat things to do. And so there wasn't as much room for as many Minotaurs as we wanted.

And the thing that we were torn between is there was a tribal component for Minotaurs, but it wasn't like this was a tribal block in which it was a major, major thing. It was more of a minor thing. And so we wanted enough minotaurs to make the tribal thing work, but creative needed enough space to be able to do all the cool things from Greek mythology. And so we kind of found on the middle ground that, I mean,

if design had its way and we had no creative concerns, and be aware, the creative concerns are important. Just because I'm saying design wants something doesn't mean that design should get everything it wants. The creative concerns are very important. I'm just sort of saying, you know, excluding the creative concerns, the design concerns probably wanted more minotaurs.

In fact, the design originally had more minotaurs. And it got scaled back a little bit because of trying to make sure that we can represent the different things we needed to. Now, the good news is, this is a whole block. There's more minotaurs coming. You know, we knew that we wanted represent the different things we needed to. Now, the good news is, this is a whole block. There's more Minotaurs coming. We knew that we wanted a little more Minotaurs, and the compromise was, okay, we'll have some this set,

but more Minotaurs are coming. So Felhide is funny in my mind in that it's... I feel like this set is all about thumbing its nose at Hurling Minotaur. And this is like a 2-3 in black. So black, I guess black, well, anyway, it's a 2-3 for 2B rather than 2C,

rather than 1CC. But anyway, the Hurling Minotaur has a much bigger thumbing coming up. Feral Invocation, plus 2, plus 2, and Flash. Oh, it's an aura that gives plus 2, plus two, and has Flash. So one of the things we did early on, and this is one of the remnants of that, is we said, okay, let's, today's brainstorm is,

let's come up with every card we can that you would normally see in the Magic set, but done as an aura. And so this card was Giant Growth done as an aura. Well, how do you do Giant Growth as an aura? Well, you do Power and Toughness boosting, and you make it Flash. And then, ha-ha, surprise, I Giant Growth done as an aura. Well, how do you do Giant Growth as an aura? Well, you do Power and Toughness boosting, and you make it flash. And then, ha-ha, surprise, I Giant Growth my guy.

Now, it's permanent, so it's a little bit different. That's why it's plus two plus two, and not plus two plus three. But this card came from that brainstorming session, which is, let's turn existing cards into auras, because we were trying to up our aura space a little bit. And part of that was to figure out things that we needed to do

because magic always does it, but try to move it into the aura space. And that's what this card was doing. Next, Fleet Feather Sandals. This was another card we made in design. We made a list of things we had to do, and one of the things we had to do was wing sandals. For those that aren't familiar, Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods, one of the gods, and he's the messenger, he runs around super fast, and one of the items he wears is winged sandals, which allow him to fly.

Actually, I don't even know if the winged sandals allow him to fly. He can't fly. I always assumed it was the winged sandals. Anyway, well, obviously the design assumes that makes it fly. So what we wanted to do is we wanted it to be fast, and we wanted it to allow you to fly, because that's what the winged sandals do. And so we gave it flying, and we gave it hexproof. We gave it hexproof, I think.

Is that correct? No, we gave it haste. We gave it haste. Oh, because hexproof is annoying. Yeah, evasion hexproof is annoying. So that's why we didn't give it hexproof. I think we talked about hexproof, but we gave it Haste. The thing about speed is there's a couple different ways

to portray speed. Haste is one way to portray speed. Hexproof is another way. First Break is another way. There's a couple different ways to do speed. But anyway, flying in Haste felt like a pretty cool thing. The two mechanics combo very nicely together. And we made that very early in design.

The numbers might have changed, but other than the numbers changing, I mean, it was pretty much as we designed it in the meeting. Next, Flesh Mad Steed. Okay, so I talked about this in my article a little bit. So the Mayors of Diomedes, if you ever read about Hercules and his labors, his 12 labors. So real quickly, Hercules is a demigod. His dad is Zeus. I forget who his mom is, but he's a demigod, so not a god.

And Hera does not like Hercules because it's her husband's kid, but not her kid. Although back in Greek mythology, Zeus had a lot of kids with a lot of different people. Anyway, I won't go there. This is a family-friendly podcast. So, Hercules was sent on 12 labors. One of the labors was he had to tame the mares of Diomedes.

And they were carnivorous. There were like three of them, I think. They were carnivorous. They were giant beasts, and they ate flesh, I think. Anyway, this was another thing that, you know, carnivorous horses was another thing that Ethan was trying to get in the file. A lot of people are like, but wait, these are supposed to be mighty creatures

and this is a little dinky guy. I do know that this one is not, for those true mythological buffs, this one did not hit the trope quite as dead on as some of the others. We won the cannibalistic horses, the flesh-eating horses. We got them. Yeah, yeah, probably in the story they're a little biggeristic horses, you know, the flesh-eating horses. We got them.

Yeah, yeah, probably in the story they're a little bigger. But, you know, dims the apples. This was an example of a card that we needed. We needed some simple cards, and Ethan actually made this card to be the mirrors, and it actually worked pretty well. And so, you know, sometimes you have super complex cards, sometimes you need simple cards, and we liked the simple card. Next, gift of immortality.

So one of the recurring themes of Greek mythology is mortals becoming gods, or at least becoming immortal. That apparently the gods had the means by which to give mortals immortality. And there are a bunch of different stories about how they get immortality. So we decided to make an aura that represented immortality. And there are a bunch of different stories about how they get immortality. So we decided to make an aura that represented immortality. We went through a lot of changes, only because the funny thing is, we knew what we wanted.

The idea is, you put this thing on and pretty much you can't die. You're immortal. But how to make that work, and the problem we were running into was there's a lot of ways to if you put something on that goes, I have protection from everything, there's a bunch of ways to still kill it. And it felt on and go, I have protection from everything, there's a bunch of ways to still kill it. And it felt bad to go, you know, I have the gift of immortality.

Well, the wrath of God. Well, I'm dead. Well, that didn't feel so good, and I did it, you know. And so, we finally found a thing that basically keeps it alive. It's pretty hard to kill something with the gift of immortality. And I'm happy that once we're all said and done, and the dust settled, that people really like it.

I think that's pretty cool. Okay, next. Grey Merchant of Asphodel. So let me talk a little bit about devotion. So I talked about how we got devotion in the first place. Let me talk a little bit about how we decided to put it on the set. So I mentioned this briefly last time that one of the things that we do is we decided to put it in the set. So I mentioned this briefly last time that one of the things that we do

is we decided to take each of the mechanics and even though the mechanics showed up in most of the colors, that's not true in every set, but in this set we wanted a lot of the things we represent, like devotion, for example. I didn't want just some colors

to be devoted to their gods. I wanted all the colors to be devoted to their gods. So I wanted to do a little devotion everywhere, but we mixed it up as far as how much we did and what rarity we did. So, I want to do a little devotion everywhere, but we mixed it up as far as how much we did and what rarity we did. So, for example, blue, ironically, has only two in mythic rare. Happen to be very good, and so, yeah, there's a deck

with them, but it doesn't have much role in limited. So, the reason we chose black and green is they're the two colors that naturally have the most mana symbols at common. Black, because black is just the color that pushes you toward using itself the most.

Black has, if you go to the history of magic, there's just more black mana symbols and things than other things. Early on, that had to do with dark ritual, but it's sort of like dark ritual went away, but that attribute carried on, so black still has a little bit more colored mana than most.

The reason green has more colored mana, I think this has to do that it's bigger. So one of the things is, if I have a two-cost card and I make it CC, so even colored mana, so let's say green, I make it green, green, that's hard to cast. You need to have two fours out, ideally on turn two, which means, well, how many fours are in my deck? I'm hoping to have two fours by my second turn. Now, if you have a six-mana card, which is, well, how many fourths are in my deck? I'm hoping to have two fourths by my second turn. Now, if you have a six mana card, which is four green green, which is four colors and two green,

well, you need green, yeah, but you have some time to get it. You don't need that much green to have a hope of playing it. And so the higher, more expensive stuff can have more green mana in them, and green just has larger creatures in common. So green's number two, mostly because it has

larger things and ends up having more mana. So we put devotion in limited into the two colors that most often will have extra colored mana at lower rarities. And the idea was, with devotion was, we knew that there were fun build-arounds.

The thing I like about devotion is it tells you what to do. It very much says, okay, you want to devote yourself to Devotion? Pick a color. I'll tell you what color. This color. And we had just finished off Return of Ravnica, which is

limited. It's almost impossible to play Mono-Colored in Return of Ravnica. And so I wanted to make sure in Theros that there were strategies that you could play Monocolored. And one thing that I like about Devotion is it really, really pushed you in that direction, right? It really allowed, it's one of the strategies that allows Monocolored play. Now, the goal of Theros was not that everybody played Monocolored play. In fact, there's lots and lots of stuff encouraging two-color play, and a little bit beyond that.

But we wanted to make sure there's some Monocolored play. We wanted to make sure that our pendulum,ocolor play. We wanted to make sure that our pendulum gets pushed in different directions. So I liked the fact that there was a new tool for constructed

where monocolor could matter. The fact that the previous block had some hybrid in it was nice because hybrid plays nicely with devotion even though ironically

normal multicolor does not play well. I guess normal multicolor has mana symbols in it so so it can, although it's hard to play mono-colored decks with, obviously, gold cards. Traditional gold cards.

But anyway, this has become sort of the poster child of Black Devotion Unlimited. It's very powerful. And it has a pretty huge swing. So I'm happy with it, and I'm glad we made it. And it was a card... It's one of the first cards we made with devotion we made early devotion stuff

I'm always happy when we make a card and people like it final story of the day is Hero's Downfall I told the story in my column but I will tell a little more in a little more detail

I'm coming up to work so I will finish the story before I finish. Okay, so basically the story is, Eric Lauer comes to me and says, we're having a problem, Mark. Black in general

is not seeing as much play in Constructed, and we need to help it. And so Eric says, well, there are, one of the problems is there's three card types that black really has trouble with. It has no artifact removal. It has no enchantment removal. And barring a few cards, none of which are currently in standard, it doesn't have a lot of answers to planeswalkers.

And so we need to provide answers to one of those three things. And so I said, I mean, the reason he was coming to me as the color pie guy, and so I said to him, oh, that is easy. While black destroying artifacts and enchantments is not great for black and has a lot of issues,

black killing planeswalkers is fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. Just from a color pie philosophy level, right? Black has no problem killing things. Death is one of, death is black's number one weapon, is death. Well, guess what? Planeswalkers can die. So if anybody's going to kill planeswalkers, black is the perfect person to kill planeswalkers. And so I said to Eric, you know, you want to make mono-black planeswalker destruction, that's okay. I mean, that is the color.

If you were to tell me one of the colors is going to kill planeswalkers, in a heartbeat I'd pick black. Black's the color that kills things. So I said, okay. And the only thing I asked of him is I said, look, I would just like you not to make it too low in rarity, because planeswalkers are a super special thing, and you

know what? It shouldn't be that easy to kill a planeswalker from a knowledge standpoint. It's not like, planeswalkers are a rare item, but it's a very common spell to learn to kill a planeswalker, you know. And so I said to him, I just didn't want it too low in rarity, that I wanted it to be something special. For constructive purposes, it being rare

didn't matter, but for limited it would. And I'm like, okay, I don't want it to be this limited bomb, or not limited bomb, but I don't want it to be this limited bomb, or not limited bomb, but I didn't want it to be something that is so easy to kill planeswalkers in black. And so I wanted it to be a tool, and since we're talking about constructed, I wanted it to be something that Eric could have for constructed.

So anyway, that is how Heroes Downfall came to be. So now I look and I am at work. And, as predicted, it took a little extra time because it was rain today. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed. I got through a whole bunch more cards. I got plenty left because I'm on H

obviously. So we'll continue until this is done. But anyway, I hope you guys were enjoying my trip through Theros today and all the different card stories. But it is time for me to stop telling stories and to start making magic. I'll talk to you guys next time. Ciao!