Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #418: Designing Rares

Episode Date: March 17, 2017

This is another in my series on designing different rarities. In this podcast, I talk about designing rares and mythic rares. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I did a series a while back called Designing Commons. And then relatively recently I made a series called Designing Uncommons. You'll never guess where today is going. So today is Designing Rares and Mythic Rares. I decided to lump them together because there's a lot of similarities between Rares and Mythic Rares. There's some differences. I'll get to that today.
Starting point is 00:00:27 But I'm going to talk all about what it takes to design rare cards, Rares and Mythic Rares. Okay. So one of the things you'll find if you listen to the previous thing, talk about commons and uncommons, is that each rarity has a role it fills.
Starting point is 00:00:44 Each rarity is trying to do something. And rare has a couple different functions, but here's the biggest function of rare, is if you open up an average booster, you will get one land, 10 commons, three uncommons, and one rare. And then roughly one out of every eight packs in the rare slot, you'll get a mythic rare. And so one of rare's biggest jobs really is it's the splashiest thing in the booster. It's the thing that gets the most attention in the booster. Then when people open a booster, you get a rare or a mythic rare, and that gets a lot of focus. So a lot of designs of rare's mythic rares are about of focus. So a lot of designs of rares, mythic rares, are about that focus. That,
Starting point is 00:01:26 you know, the idea that you are the thing that people will focus on when they open it up. So first and foremost, the role of a rare is to be what I will call splashy. Now, let me explain. There are a bunch of different ways to be splashy. Splashy just means that someone looks at you and gets excited, and there's something about you that gets people ramped up. Now, there are a bunch of different things that could be. It could have to do with the effect of the card. You're doing something that feels awesome. It could be the power level of the card.
Starting point is 00:02:04 It does it really efficiently. It could be the power level of the card. It does it really efficiently. It could be the flavor of the card. There's a lot of different ways, and I'm going to get into that today, a lot of different ways to be splashy. But first and foremost is the rare is there as sort of the focal point of the opening of the pack. Now, clearly, if you don't have the commons or don't have the uncommons, those are exciting. But because they're lower in rarity, you're much more likely to have them already, and so they're less exciting. And so the thing that sort of drives excitement long-term is the rare slash mythic rare. Okay, another role that it plays in the pack,
Starting point is 00:02:44 and this, if you listen to me talk about commons and uncommons, one of the things that commons do, and uncommons to a lesser extent, is provide the limited experience. By that I mean there's a whole bunch of ways to play magic where I show up, I get booster packs, and I do something with them. I crack them open and play sealed. I draft them in some form to make a draft format. You know, I'm playing with cards that I've just opened. And because of that, because limited is a big part of Magic play. I don't know. I don't have percentages off the top of my head, but it is a pretty big portion. I think constructed is over half, but I think limited is, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:03:28 I guess it's 35, 40% is my guess. That's me guessing, but... So limited is a big portion. So one of the things is common is all about helping define... Well, not just limited, by the way. Common is about defining the booster pack, meaning that common, you know, because it shows up in a certain regularity, that if you put things in it, I talk a lot about as-fan, which stands for as-fanned, which is how often something shows up. Well, if you want to
Starting point is 00:03:57 raise the as-fan, that's all about common to a lesser extent uncommon. If you want to lower the as-fan, that's about rare. What do I mean by that? Why would you want to lower the As fan? Well, sometimes you have things that aren't good for limited. Either they're bombs in limited, so they really affect limited, or they are things that just don't mean anything in limited. Sometimes we make cards that don't. I'll get to that in a second. I'll get to that in a second. So a big role of rare and mythic rare sometimes is to not be something, which is to, if you want to do something, like for example,
Starting point is 00:04:38 sometimes what we want to do is we want to have a theme show up in a certain number of cards, but we want to be careful how high the as-fan is. So what rare is really good at doing is allowing you to put a bunch of cards in, but without really affecting either limited or necessarily overall pack perception. That while there's a lot of focal point on the Rare, people are excited to see the Rare, the Rares don't do the job of communicating theme quite like the role of common and uncommon. So what happens is, if you have a card that's doing something you don't want to do, if you have an effect that you don't want at common or uncommon because of the impact it has either on limited or just on the
Starting point is 00:05:15 impact of, you know, the perception of the set, that's a place to put things at rare or mythic rare. Usually we put it at mythic rare, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons things are in mythic rare, but usually if we stick it in rare, that's just to make it minimize and limited. And we stick it at mythic rare, that's to make it really almost non-existent, you know, very, very infrequent. Because a particular rare will show up one eighth the time of a mythic rare. And so, you know, depending on how much you don't want something to happen now i will say this limited bombs are an important part of limited so what's a limited bomb a limited bomb is a card that in limited has a strong dramatic effect on the game and can often
Starting point is 00:06:00 swing the game can often help determine what's going to happen in the game. And we like to have some of them. We don't want them too low in rarity because we don't want them to warp limited too much. But one of the things that happens is, and I talk about this a lot, variance is really important in that what we want to have happen, it is important that any player feels like they have a chance to win. We want the more skilled player to win more of the time, but one of the things that makes Magic a strong game, I think, is in any one game, in any one moment, no matter who you're playing, you could be playing John Finkel. You could be playing one of the top pro players in the
Starting point is 00:06:41 world, if not the best pro player ever in the history of the game, and you have a chance to win. Now, you know, John Fickle's probably going to beat you a lot more than you're going to beat him, but there's always a chance that, you know, because of the combinations of the deck and how things come up, you could just have the perfect combination of cards. John doesn't quite get what he needs, and it's slowed down a little bit, and you have an advantage. get what he needs and is slowed down a little bit, and you have an advantage. So part of that is we want to make sure that, you know, limited bombs are good because they do help people sort of swing games that normally would be problematic for them. The reason we stick it at rare is we want it showing up in a smaller number overall,
Starting point is 00:07:23 and let's say your deck has one or two limited bombs. That means you're not going to draw it every game. You only draw a certain portion of your deck, so if we stick it at rare, what that means is, okay, you're only getting a couple, and then you might not necessarily every game get it. So you'll occasionally get it, and it'll matter, but you won't get it every game.
Starting point is 00:07:46 Okay, another big thing that we use Rare for is flavor. So, we make planeswalkers. Planeswalkers we put in Mythic Rare. And we make legendary creature, legendary things, legendary creatures being the biggest part. Legendary creatures are the characters in the story, other than the planeswalkers. And then we also make legendary items, legendary artifacts, or legendary enchantments. You know, there's other things that are
Starting point is 00:08:11 important. Usually, without extenuating circumstances, normally legendary is a rare or mythic rare thing. The flavor of it is, it's a specific thing. It's a man or a woman or a creature.
Starting point is 00:08:31 Something like it's not just, there's not a lot of them, there's one of them. And so you don't want it showing up too much. The game also has a rule that says, you know, if you have more than one copy of the same legendary permanent play, one of them goes away. So, like, if you have more than one copy of the same legendary permanent play, one of them goes away. So, like, if I have a certain legendary character, I don't want too many of them because I don't, you know, when I draw the second one, I can't play
Starting point is 00:08:53 the second one until the first one goes away. I mean, there's some shenanigans you might do, but pretty much, you know, if I have whatever, Madam X in play, until I if I draw a second Madam X, I can't play her as long as one's in play. I have to sort of hold on to her.
Starting point is 00:09:10 So for flavor purposes, both in these things don't exist in, you know, they are a rare thing to see, and because of gameplay purposes, we like to put the flavor stuff at high rarities. So let me really quickly get into, I'm talking about mythic rares and rares. Let me explain real quickly the key difference
Starting point is 00:09:29 between the rares and mythic rares. Rares are meant to excite. Rares are meant to be something that people go, ooh, that's cool. Mythic rares are that turned up. Mythic rares, the way I always describe mythic rares is they are supposed to have a potential for awesomeness. So what that means is, so there's a term in the magic, sort of slang term used by the magic community
Starting point is 00:09:51 called Magical Christmas Land. And what Magical Christmas Land is, is when you look at a card, if you imagine the best case scenario, what would happen to this card if everything goes my way? They call that Magical Christmas Land. And it's a way to sort of evaluate cards to say, okay, what's the upper end potential of this card? What good could it do? And one of the things about Mythic Rares is
Starting point is 00:10:15 Mythic Rares are all supposed to be exciting in Magical Christmas Land. That, you know, they all have the potential that if everything's going their way, they can just be doing crazy awesome things. Now be aware, there is all rarities. There's some gray area between rarities. There are cards that could be common or uncommon. There are cards that could be uncommon or rare. There are cards that could be rare or mythic rare.
Starting point is 00:10:43 It's not a hard and fast line. There's sort of a gray area, and different things for different reasons will be in different rarities. You know, it's quite possible that something in one set might be one rarity, but be in a different rarity in another set. And that has a lot to do with all sorts of things, you know. A lot of
Starting point is 00:10:59 times, for example, when we have certain themes, we'll bring down certain rarities that play into that theme. You know, in an artifact set, we tend to have more common artifacts than traditionally we normally do. That whatever our theme is, we tend to raise up the as fan of that thing showing up, we tend to pull down in the rarity. So what that means is that a lot of what I'm talking about, our guidelines here, you know, have to do with what makes sense and where. A lot of what I'm talking about, our guidelines here, have to do with what makes sense and where. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Another thing that we use for rare is complexity. So we do new world order at common. We actually have a tight line of how much complexity we do at common. We allow more complexity at uncommon than at common, obviously. And we allow even more at rare. Actually, one of the things, by the way, that's interesting is, is on average our rares are more complex than our mythic rares why is that um because as i'll get to we definitely do some things that rare like we don't we want to be careful how many complex cards we do um but rare is a spot for like the most complex like every set you know we're allowed
Starting point is 00:12:04 to have a couple like, okay, what does this do? You know, this is a weird card that's complex and like you got to figure it out. But once you figure it out, it does something neat. Rare is where you stick that. We tend not to do it in Mythic Rare because if you get too complex,
Starting point is 00:12:16 it's hard to get super splashy if you're too complex. So Rare is sort of the home for what I'll call the complex cards, which are just cards that you have to read more than once to understand what the card does. We don't make a lot of them, but look, Magic is a game, and we want to have an opportunity and have a place to do things that are a little more, you know, like, not every Magic card is supposed to be, what?
Starting point is 00:12:40 What's this do? But a few get to be, and Rare is where we stick that. In general, the other thing that differentiates rare from some of the lower rarities is sort of the amount of complexity. There are certain combinations of effects that we tend to avoid at low rarities. Like a good example is trample and death touch are a little complicated. So, you know, if ever we did those together in one card, they would show up at rare, for example. You know, anything where we think there's going to
Starting point is 00:13:11 either be rules interactions that might be confusing or just processing the card might be confusing, all that stuff gets moved up to rare. And one of the things that happens quite a lot is we will make something and as we play with it We will realize either it's narrow than we think we'll get to that in a second or it is more complex than we think We start moving it up Okay. Another thing that we will do at high rarity is Scale of effect pretty much at common one of the things about New World Order in general is we usually only have cards interact with one other card at Common.
Starting point is 00:13:48 Meaning, if I have a spell that does something, usually, and there's a few exceptions, but usually it just does it to one thing. I'm going to destroy one creature. I'm going to bounce or return it to its owner's hand one creature. I'm going to tap one creature. I'm going to affect a singular thing at a time. And you get up to uncommon. Uncommon starts letting you hit more than one thing. And when you get up to rare, rare starts, you know, that's when you hit lots of things or do lots of stuff. That's where we have like wrath of God style effects,
Starting point is 00:14:20 so mass destruction type effects, where you might be killing all the creatures in play. Rare is where you get to sort of pull out your scope and really do things big. In fact, one of the things when you're making your rare that I recommend is rare is the place where you get to push yourself. That one of the fun exercises we do when making rares is we take an effect and we say, how much can we push the effect? How big can we make the effect? So the example I'll give is I was designing a card in Odyssey. And at the time, you know, most effects that milled a card or took cards from the top of a library and put it into the graveyard,
Starting point is 00:14:57 we had stuff like millstone that, you know, might mill two cards. So, you know, you'd mill one or two cards. You didn't tend to mill a lot of cards. And so I wanted to make a card, end up called Traumatize, that milled a lot. And at first I was like, okay, well, why don't I just pick a bigger number? You know, one instead of two, it's four or five or six. And eventually I said to myself, no, no, no, we're going to push it. I want to push. So what can you do? So obviously I went to the extreme. I mill your library. Well, you instantly lose the next turn.
Starting point is 00:15:25 That's a little strong. Okay, can I do something that has kind of the oomph, but not quite as you lose next turn? And that's where we got to mill half the library. Because that's pretty potent. Previously we only milled a handful of cards, and now I'm like, I'm milling half your library. It also was nice in the sense that
Starting point is 00:15:43 because it's always half, you know, it gets less potent as you do more effects. So it reads really strong, but it's not necessary, you know, that's one of the key things on your rares is you really want to push the boundaries on perception. Once again, always remember that rares are about splash, and so you want to sort of take what you're doing and see where you can push it. And where you can push it in a way that just makes it read more exciting. A lot of rares is about presentation. It's about figuring out how to do effects and do them in a way that really
Starting point is 00:16:15 sort of pulls people in. And some of that is scale. Some of that is just sort of being novelty. But anyway, that you definitely want to think about it. And a big part of doing rares is finding ways to do different scale. So whenever you have an effect and you're trying to make a rare version effect, one of the things that's fun to do is take a common effect
Starting point is 00:16:36 and say, okay, now let's stretch this effect. You know? And a lot of cards in Magic, I think, came about because we just said, oh, well, this common does one creature. What if we do all creatures? What if we do it, but we do it much, much bigger?
Starting point is 00:16:53 You know, Giant Growth is plus three, plus three. What if we make it plus eight, plus eight? You know, what if we just raise the stakes? And that's how you get a lot of fun Rare cards. Okay, another thing that we do at Rare is what I call the niche effects. Things that are narrower. Things that have a functionality, but oftentimes they don't work in limited. You know, it requires you to sort of have a collection of cards that the ASFAN's not right.
Starting point is 00:17:22 Or it's doing something that is just, you know, something that people can stop and collect and try to build. But, you know, really as you go along, that when you start at common, you have to have very broad effects. That you need to make sure the common effects are playable in most decks. And as you get up in rarity, you can start making cards that go very well in one particular deck, but don't necessarily go in all decks.
Starting point is 00:17:46 And that's another thing for rare. Rare gets to be a little more fine-tuned, a little more, you know, I do something that is very exacting. And the thing that rare often can do is you can be very powerful. The narrower you are, the more powerful you can be in what you're doing. So the idea being, the more general you are, the weaker you have to be because the more decks that can play you. But the more specifically powerful you are, the more like,
Starting point is 00:18:14 oh, I'm good, but only in this one circumstance is the more you get to push things. And so another thing to make sure is when you're making your set, you always want to make sure that you just have some, you know, we want a lot of different kind of rare cards. But one of the things you also want to do in your rares is make sure that you're making some rares that sort of push you in different directions and that do things that are not the kind of things you would see on a common card. So related to that is what I would call constructed build-arounds. So related to that is what I would call constructed build-arounds. So one of the things we do at Uncommon is we do cards you draft that then encourage you to do something cool and unique in your draft. That Uncommon cards can say, oh, I'm going to care about Thing X.
Starting point is 00:18:56 Something that shows up in enough ad stand that you could draft it. But we put it at Uncommon because it's something you have to think about and then make the effort to try to draft that. We like to do that at uncommon. What rare is, is sometimes you have buildarounds that you're never going to do in limited. They don't have, whatever supports them that doesn't have a high enough as fan. Or it's something that's weird enough that it doesn't quite play into how limited works. But the idea is we love to make cards that you see the card and go, I'm building a deck. Okay, what do I want to care about? This thing? Okay,
Starting point is 00:19:32 I'm going to do that. And so another big important part of Rare is making some cards that sort of are what we call directional. That sort of you see them and they encourage you to go do something. And like I said, you can have some directional stuff in Uncommon if they're broad enough. But as you get a little bit narrower, that's when you move into Rare. In general, by the way, when I'm talking about what goes on at Rare, Mythic Rare, I'm going to go through all these at the end and talk about what Mythic Rare wants. So Mythic Rare doesn't want all the things that Rare wants.
Starting point is 00:20:04 Okay, next, another big one is exploring new design space. So one of the things is sometimes you have a neat idea and you kind of want to see what the audience will think about it, but you don't want to dedicate lots of resources to it. And maybe it's kind of risky. Maybe it's doing something that will blow up in your face. Rare is a very good experimental space where you can try brand new effects. And that's another thing we often do at Rare is if we create an effect we've never done before, that's splashy, that's exciting. Oftentimes we'll put it at Rare for its first time out. Even if down the road, if we end up liking the mechanic and fleshing it out,
Starting point is 00:20:41 hey, maybe it'll drop with rarity over time. But the first time we ever do it, it definitely, you know, one of the things that makes things splashy is novelty, and novelty from, oh wow, I've never done this before. And by putting it rare, it also lets us play with it in a way that it can't blow up in your face quite as much as most things. It won't affect limited particularly, and, you know, it is, a lot of times there's things that get explosive because of the amount of them. So just doing one at rare lets us play around with it and figure out without necessarily endangering standard or things with it. And like I said, new effects are a really good thing to stick at rare because when you're trying to be splashy,
Starting point is 00:21:27 you have to sort of use all the tools available and novelty is a pretty important tool. Okay, I talked about flavor. Here's a subset of flavor. One of the things that we have to do are what we call the story spotlight cards. So thelight cards are, we take a moment of the story and we convert it into a card. Now sometimes there's nice, simple, easy things to do. You know, Chandra's throwing a fireball. Okay, well we can make a spell that's Chandra throwing a fireball. You know, we make fireballs all the time. That's really easy to do. But sometimes it is something that's a little more complex. And so a lot of of our story spotlight cards end up at rare just because you have more tools
Starting point is 00:22:08 at a higher rarity to fine tune things that when you're trying to match flavor an important part of matching flavor is having the ability to make trinket text trinket text is sort of small text that's flavorful that usually doesn't have too much game impact you know you have the ability you have. You know, you have the ability,
Starting point is 00:22:25 you have access to more complexity, you have access to more abilities. And that's another thing, by the way, to be aware of, is that one of the things we do is that certain abilities show up at certain rarities. So usually things that are rare are things that we think are problematic and limited, or are things that are super splashy. For example, take an extra turn. That is in Rare or Mythic Rare. Having
Starting point is 00:22:49 extra combat. That's at Rare or Mythic Rare. Stealing things used to be lower, but we found it impacts limited a little too strongly, so we moved it up. So there's certain effects that show up and only show up at Rare or Mythic Rare. And as I always talk about, there's some stuff like Legendary or Planeswalkers or, you know, there's just some things that we do that we sort of stick at a certain rarity to keep them special, you know. I mean, rarity represents two things. One is it represents how often something sort of flavorfully appears, one of the reasons
Starting point is 00:23:23 like legends tend to be pretty rare. And the other thing is, from a gameplay standpoint, of just how often you interact with them in the game, how special they can be from that standpoint. Okay. So another thing about rare that a lot of people don't know is that rare is actually the most open of the rarities. So why is that?
Starting point is 00:23:44 So we make 101 in large sets. We make 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, and 15 mythic rares. So one of the things that is interesting is common gets full up trying to do a lot of function stuff. That you're trying to create your as fans and you're trying to sort of make sure your set has enough of the things it needs to define itself. That tends fill up common and uncommon is trying to fill the things that you want and limited the things that don't fit in in common sometimes because a new world order
Starting point is 00:24:14 sometimes for other reasons that uncommon also gets very very pinched and so in the end it's interesting that rare mythic we're only having 15 cards gets pinched that way so the one that tends to be the most open the one that i usually have the most space if i want to make a card um so for example here's another thing that will happen is when um the creative team is making a world we have what's called world building we bring some artists in for a couple days i've shot a couple weeks and you know three four weeks and then they build the world the world. They sort of do a lot of different sort of brainstorming and make things. And every once in a while, some artist just sort of is inspired to draw something that the team really likes. And then that thing goes into the style guide. And what often happens is at some point, they'll come to us and say,
Starting point is 00:25:01 you know what, we haven't found a home for this creature or this thing that they really liked from the style guide. And they'll come to us and say, could you make that? We really like the visuals of this. We think it adds to the world. Nothing that's been made so far seems to be a natural fit for it. Could you make us this? And those things will often end up in Rare
Starting point is 00:25:24 because, like I said, just like Story Spotlights, Rare has the space to be able to do effects and have a little more room to do things. So, that definitely is something we also try to do at Rare, is fit in things that help define the world.
Starting point is 00:25:40 Now, as I talked about, if you listened to either my GDC speech or, I mentioned this before. One of the things about Rare is Rares get the most scrutiny. We actually have a thing called a Rare Poll, where we take people in the company who are Magic fans, and what we do is we send out lists of all our Rares and Mythic Rares from a set and have them grade them on a scale of 1 to 10.
Starting point is 00:26:02 And then we use that data to figure out how exciting they are. Like I said, a big role of your rares and mythic rares is splash. And so one of the things we do is we actually test for splash. We actually make sure that the thing we're making is exciting. And so if you're making your own cards, rares, you do need to do a little bit of testing on splashiness on rares to figure out whether or not that's something that really, you know, are the cards standing out? Do they excite people? That's a lot of the role of rares, and so you need to test that.
Starting point is 00:26:34 Okay, so now let's run over everything and take a look at Mythic Rare through the same spectrum. Okay, so reduced and limited. Yes, Mythic Rare very much. If you have something that's just disastrous and limited, that you don't like how it plays in limited, Mythic Rare is where you stick that card. Splash. Mythic Rare, very much, just like Rare. In fact, even more so.
Starting point is 00:26:54 I would say that Mythic Rare have to be even splashier than Rares have to be. Flavor. Mythic Rare has carried a lot of the flavor. Pretty much what we tend to do is all the Planeswalkers and usually the higher profile of the legendary creatures tend to show up at Rare. I tend to show up at Mythic Rare. And then Rare will show some of them just because they don't all fit Mythic Rare. But Mythic Rare will take some of that flavor. Complexity. Mythic Rare really doesn't suck up the heavy complexity cards.
Starting point is 00:27:23 That's a Rare thing. We want the Mythic Rares to be as splashy as possible, and there's a point at which if you're too complex, it just decreases your splashiness. Now we do do some of those at Rare, even though Rare cares about splashiness, because we want a home for some complex cards, and Rare is the place where it makes the most sense. Larger effects, very much so. In fact, Mythic Rare sometimes will take effects and even go to 11. They'll notch it up one more time just to make it even bigger than we've done before. Narrow niche cards, no, we tend not to do that in Mythic Rare.
Starting point is 00:27:55 That's usually just something we do at Rare. We like our Mythic Rare cards to be exciting to as many players as possible, and narrow niche cards are really exciting to a much smaller audience, and so that's more something we do at Rare. Constructed Build-A-Rounds, that's also something we tend to do at Rare. Getting four of a particular Mythic Rare card is really difficult, and if we want to do
Starting point is 00:28:17 a Build-A-Round, we usually want people to be able to get all four. And at Rare, especially if it's something that's not turn-vi know that's attainable you can get that mythic rare is a bit harder so we tend not to do constructed builder runs at mythic um story spotlights we allow ourselves to do it we tend to avoid where we can just because not a lot of people see the mythic rare cards and we'd like people to see the story spotlights so we usually cap them at rare i'm not saying we've never done it in mythic rare we never could do it mythic rare um but it's something that we we in general try not to do um new effects uh mythic rare can do new effects especially if they're splat you know super splashy kind of new effects so we definitely do new effects there um it's kind of world building stuff sometimes although a lot of times if they make a cool thing kind of world building stuff. Sometimes, although a lot of times, if they make a
Starting point is 00:29:05 cool thing, kind of like, you know, they want to make sure that players can see the cool thing. So sometimes if there's a generic thing that's just kind of a neat monster or something, we tend not to do that in Mythic, but sometimes we do. The biggest difference in general about Mythics, like I said, is, you know, any sort of splash value that we have for rares is just, you know, ramped up for Mythic rare. So Mythic rare definitely wants to do things. In general, the idea is you open up a Mythic rare and read what it does, that you should just get very excited. And there's a bunch of different ways to get very excited, a bunch of different things to do. But we want you to do that.
Starting point is 00:29:47 But anyway, so as I went over, you know, these are all the things that you want your rare to be. I mean, first and foremost, I would say Splash is the most important. You want to make sure that your rares are something that people get excited when they open them. But as I spelled out, there's a lot of different roles for rares. There's a lot of different places that rares do. Some of it is negative space.
Starting point is 00:30:10 Like some of rares is we don't want to do this common and uncommon. And that's why you will see, you know, things that affect limited in a way that you don't want a lot of or things that are too complex or too narrow. You know, there's a lot of cards where, like, we can't have that at lower rarities. So it's not so much that, you know, they end up at rare because rare is the best place to put them in some ways. That rare really is a deposit for putting things that don't quite fit other places.
Starting point is 00:30:42 And so, you know, a lot of rare's identity is sort of filling in some gaps that need to get filled in that don't go other places. The other part of it is just making sure, you know, some of it is as fans, some of Rare is about we want this to show up and not too much. And then some of it is just, right, it's a place where we get to do crazy stuff and get to experiment and get to try to do things we haven't done before. So if you're making your own set, what I would say about your rares is, I would make a couple suggestions. One is push yourself. You know, rares really is a place where, rare is a place where you don't show constraint. You want to show a lot of constraint at common. Rare is a place, rare don't show constraint. You want to show a lot of constraint at common.
Starting point is 00:31:25 Rare is a place, rare and mythic rare, is where you get to sort of push the boundaries and try things. And what I'll say to you is, always try things more than you think is right when you're pushing things, because it is so easy to underestimate. You know, you think, oh, that's crazy, and you try and think, oh, it's not as crazy as I think.
Starting point is 00:31:43 So really try that. The second thing is, make sure that you are actually testing the splashiness of your rares. That one of the things you want to do is talk to other people and sort of gauge are they excited. Because a big, big role of the rares is to generate excitement. And you want to make sure to test that. We do our rare pull. You want to make sure that, you know, when you're doing your cards. to test that we do our rare pull you want to make sure that you know when you're doing your cards the other thing about rare by the way is when you're play testing rares don't show up in that
Starting point is 00:32:08 much um volume meaning it's a lot harder to get play testing out of rares so my final suggestion on rares is consider more constructed play testing when you're trying out your rares limited if you're correctly as fanning the rares don't show up as much and you might actually there'll be rares you never ever play unlimited just of the way the mix comes out even if you play a lot of limited games there's just ones that don't show up so my recommendation there is definitely do a bunch
Starting point is 00:32:36 of constructed playtesting with with rares so you have a chance to sort of see how they shine especially things that are build around me cards or things that are very narrow. You might want to build specifically to the cards to get a sense of how those cards play. That you do get to playtest rare cards,
Starting point is 00:32:52 but rares are more often playtested in a more of a constructed sort of playtest. But anyway, I hope that is everything you wanted to know about how to make rares in Mythic Rares. But I'm not driving up to Rachel's school. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.

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