Best Of Friends, Best Of Duelists, Part 1 720p Torrent
Chrystal Dueno
When Michael Ryan and I wrote the initial Weatherlight Saga story, we knew we needed a reason for Gerard leaving the Weatherlight. A key component of the story concerned the Weatherlight crew showing up and saying that they needed Gerrard's help in rescuing Sisay, but in order for him to return, he had to have left. And we felt it needed to be a serious reason, as the Weatherlight and the Legacy were his destiny.
After much discussion, we decided someone close to him had to have died. We had Gerrard and Mirri study under Multani as a means for them to become best friends. What if there was a third person that studied with them who also joined the ship? What if it was their death that made both Gerard and Mirri leave the boat? The big question was who was this character supposed to be?
When we had made the initial crew, I'd made a list of potential character types we might have wanted. One of the ones we didn't find a home for was a Llanowar elf. This ended up becoming Rofellos. Michael and I spent a lot of time writing about Rofellos, but it was mostly as backstory for Gerard and Mirri. I never expected Rofellos to get a card. He was dead before the story started.
But then, something happened I hadn't expected. Michael and I were removed from the story, and the new team decided we were going to go back in time to explain how Urza was connected to the story (the original story has a loose tie, but in the rewrite, it became a much bigger deal). Urza would, in fact, get a whole Saga (and Legacy and Destiny) about it.
When I ended up leading the design for Urza's Destiny, I realized I had an opportunity to actually make a card for Rofellos. Elves live longer than humans, so that meant he'd be alive during the time frame of Urza's Destiny. He was a Llanowar elf, so I decided to make a turbo-charged version of one. Instead of tapping for one green mana, he'd tap for a green mana for each Forest you controlled. Rofellos ended up being quite good (so much so, he's currently banned in Commander).
To the best of my knowledge, this is the earliest card I ever designed to see print in a Magic set. The very first deck I ever built was a mono-green deck. The first pack I opened had a Craw Wurm, and it drew me in. The second deck I built was mono-blue. I'm not sure why my early decks were all monocolor, but it just didn't occur to me that I could play more than one color.
Because in the early days there weren't organized events yet, and I didn't have any friends who played Magic, I used to play a lot against myself. I'd build two decks and then see how they'd play against one another. I tried as best I could to make decisions as if I didn't know what my opponent had in their hand. Anyway, of all the matchups I played, mono-green versus mono-blue was the one I did the most.
One of the things that annoyed me in the matchup was that blue had answers to green's threats, but green didn't really have answers to blue's threats. This inspired me to design a card, I believe one of my earliest designs. The card, named Greased Weasel, was a green creature with protection from blue. I'll admit I didn't fully understand how protection worked, but I knew blue couldn't mess with it. I assumed that blue couldn't counterspell it. Flash forward some number of months when I have a better handle on how protection works, and I realize that it actually doesn't stop a counterspell, so I add "can't be countered" to it.
A few years later, I'm leading my first design team, Tempest, and I put it in the set. Everyone seemed to like it, so it stayed. When we got to templating, the editor (my guess is it was Darla Willis, later Kennerud, but I'm not sure) wanted to use a longer template, something like "while this spell is on the stack, it can't be the target of an instant," and I just said, "can't we just use 'can't be countered'?" Scragnoth would go on to be a thorn in blue players' sides for many years.
One day during Visions development, Bill Rose pulled out a picture of the art for Triangle of War. With some dramatic license, here's what occurred (here, it's just Bill and me talking, but imagine the whole team chiming in):
Michelangelo used to say that the statue was always there in the block of marble. It was his job to chip away everything around it. In many ways, Urza's Factory feels more like a design we discovered than one we created. Here's how it came to be.
Antiquities was the second-ever Magic expansion and the first one with both a mechanical theme (artifacts) and a story (the Brothers' War). To represent places in the story, the design team made several lands named after each of the brothers. Urza got what is now called the Urzatron (Urza's Mine, Urza's Power Plant, and Urza's Tower). Mishra got Mishra's Factory and Mishra's Workshop. All five of these lands would go on to see a lot of Constructed play.
In Time Spiral design, we were trying to make new designs that were throwbacks to old designs. The Urza and Mishra lands were very iconic, so we looked to see if we could do a tweak on one of them. One of the early questions we asked was, could we swap Urza's and Mishra's name on any of them? It was clear that we couldn't do Mishra's Mine, Mishra's Power Plant, or Mishra's Tower without doing all three together. It was Mishratron or nothing, and at the time, we decided we didn't have the space in the set for that. That left either Urza's Factory or Urza's Workshop. Both seemed cool.
The next thing that dawned on us was that it would be cool if the Urza land had an activation for seven generic mana as that's what the Urzatron produces (the reason we didn't consider seven colorless mana was because colorless costs weren't a thing yet). What exactly was fair game for seven mana? This led us to the realization that it could produce a 2/2 colorless token. And guess what, there was a 2/2 colorless token associated with Urza and Mishra, Assembly-Worker. Once we made it that, Urza's Factory seemed the right choice as Mishra's Factory was the first card to reference the 2/2 Assembly-Worker (you could spend mana to turn it into it). It also tapped for a colorless mana because all our lands either tap for mana or, these days, are fetch lands that can (with a few very rare exceptions).
Back in the late '90s (I think it was 1998, but I could be off by a year or two), we made a series of Magic commercials set in an R&D lab. The premise was that R&D was a giant science department testing all the things that would end up on cards. One of the commercials was called "Fluffy Bunny." You can see it below.
The agency that wrote the ad just looked through Magic cards and picked the one they thought worked best for the commercial. We really liked the series of commercials and were eager to use them to help drive new players to the game, but there was a concern that Kezzerdrix was not new-player friendly, so we were asked to make a new monstrous rabbit creature for the latest beginner product, which at the time was Starter 1999. The two decks were mono-red and mono-blue, and the mono-red deck had an Orgg in it that was featured in the other commercial (they came out in twos), so we decided to put the monstrous rabbit in the blue deck. That is how Vizzerdrix came to be. It's just a 6/6 because we were trying to keep it simple for the gameplay. Poodleboy (and Bob from Accounting) would show up in Unglued 2, never to see the light of day. (Click here to see both cards.)
One of the joys of being an early Magic designer is having the ability to redesign a broken card, miss, and make a slightly weaker yet still broken card. Wasteland is a perfect example of this occurring. Antiquities included a card called Strip Mine.
For the cost of a land drop, you got a land destruction effect for free. It didn't take long for everyone to realize that this was hugely problematic. In fact, I think Strip Mine was the first land ever to be banned.
Anyway, when designing Tempest, I got it into my head that I needed to make a "fixed" Strip Mine. I decided that the problem with Strip Mine was that it could destroy basic lands, so I made my new card only capable of destroying nonbasic lands. It turns out, in larger formats, not a lot of basic lands get played, so basically, I'd just made a new Strip Mine for those formats.
Wasteland taught me a valuable lesson, that when you're trying to fix something broken, you usually have to make it significantly weaker than you might think at first blush. Or maybe the even better lesson is, you don't have to make fixed versions of things that aren't fun.
The goal when I was designing X was that I wanted to make a master spy. What would a master spy do? Well, in a normal set, I could mess with the opponent's stuff in many ways, but the one that's always been problematic to do has been casting spells out of their hand. We've tried numerous times, but it's never been a huge success. But this was an Un- card, so I decided to try something a little unorthodox. What if X was able to go into the opponent's hand and then cast spells out of it? The biggest problem with cards that can cast the opponent's cards is that it happens at a single point in time and the opponent can usually respond by casting the spell you'd want to cast. But if X were in the hand, he could find opportunities where the opponent couldn't do that.
What follows is the evolution of the design. The card's abilities didn't change much. This is a chance to show you the challenges in capturing a difficult card in templating. Here was the first stab at the design:
You can see the basic concept was there from the very beginning. X could sneak into the opponent's hand and cast cards from it. To explain how to use X when it was in your opponent's hand, we started by saying that you control it in all zones.
The next version shrank him from a 4UB 4/4 to a UB 2/2. It also put him directly in the opponent's hand rather than making him go through the library first. As X's mana cost and power/toughness never changed after this, I'm just going to show you the rules text as we try to figure out how to actually word the abilities.
7fc3f7cf58