Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #978: Unfinity Design, Part 4

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

This is part four of a four-part series on the design of Unfinity. ...

Transcript
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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 the last couple times I've been talking all about the design of um Unfinity. So this is the fourth and I think final in this series talking about the design. So I've spent a lot of time talking about how stickers got made, how attractions got made. So today is talking about sort of everything else, how attractions got made. So today is talking about sort of everything else, all the other themes. There are a lot of themes woven into the set. So today is sort of the final catch-all where I talk about many different aspects. So we're
Starting point is 00:00:35 going to start with art matters. So one of the things that we knew when we wanted to do stickers was one of the cool things about stickers is that we could change elements of the card. One of those elements is art. And something that, so in normal magic, we are not allowed to reference art in any way. The reason for that is cards have to be, you treat cards mechanically all the same regardless of printing or language. So anything that can vary between printings can't mechanically matter. On top of that, art is just super subjective. Even, I'll talk today about hats and stuff. Even that which was less subjective is still somewhat subjective.
Starting point is 00:01:21 And so just not well suited for tournament play. still somewhat subjective and so just not well suited for tournament play but if we're trying to just do like one of the things that unsets really enjoy is making you care about something that you don't normally care about and so it's fun just sort of like for example hats matter just all of a sudden i'm do my creatures have hats i i prioritize creatures with hats and creatures without hat it's just a different vector to care about. And so one of the things we knew we wanted in the set was to care about art. So early on, we tried a lot of different things. And what we learned was there's a lot of subjectivity.
Starting point is 00:02:01 The example I'll use is we had a card that cared about if you had, I think, something blue in the art. And we had a card and I was like, well, I think that's purple. And they're like, well, I think it blue in the art. And we had a card, and I was like, well, I think that's purple. And they were like, well, I think it's blue. And, you know, it's a perfect example that even colors, just what you identify as a color, what you see and go, oh, this is that color, that's not a constant from person to person. Yeah, there's overlaps and such, but, like, even something like color just isn't universally accepted. What exactly, what shade is what color?
Starting point is 00:02:26 And so the reason we ended up doing hats matter at low rarities was it was something that we could generally agree on. And what we decided was we were going to do one major theme at low rarities. And I'm going to get into the archetypes later. But one of the archetypes is hat matters. So at low rarities, hats is the only thing we tend to care about. There's a few, like a bar entry cares about how tall the creature is.
Starting point is 00:02:50 There's a few things. But mostly it's higher rarities that we care about other things. Common or uncommon, we care about hats. Rare or mythic rare, we can care about whether a creature has four legs or whether something
Starting point is 00:03:05 hot is in the picture, or whether, like Ignacio, he's the legendary creature that you can pick one of nine or ten items, and oh, are there books? Are there swords? Are there water? You know, and you pick different things. So we did a lot of that, and then we also thought about how else, like I talked about bar entry a moment ago, bar entry cares about where the head of the creature is positioned in the frame. And once again, that's a very different thing to care about. So, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:37 source says, oh, well, now I have to care about sort of how it's pictured. Is the creature high in the frame, low in the frame? You've never cared about that before, but we could care about that in an unset. We also, for example, because we had stickers that had art on them, we played around a lot with how do we care about art stickers mechanically.
Starting point is 00:03:58 Chris Mooney wrote an article where he posted some pictures of cards we didn't end up using. We didn't end up using two of the cards. JuggleBot cares about having small things because he's trying to juggle as many art stickers as possible. And AshtAquarium cares about
Starting point is 00:04:13 big stickers because you're trying to cover crack. So the bigger the sticker, the more crack it can cover. But anyway, so we had, there's a theme of art matters in the set. And like I say, there's hat matters is the connecting archetypal theme, but there's a theme of art matters in the set. And like I say, hat matters is the connecting archetypal theme. But there's a lot of one of caring about art in ways that are fun. Next, name matters.
Starting point is 00:04:34 So another thing, like I said before, well, the reason names, so in normal magic, normal magic can care about if a card is a certain name. So, you know, Muscle Burst can look for a diligent farmhand in the graveyard. Or a certain, you know, Keeper of Cookies can look for Cookies and stuff like that. Or I say Cookies can look for Keeper of Cookies. So you can care about whether a particular card is there. And there's things like Pithing Need needle where you can name a card and that has an effect on that name.
Starting point is 00:05:07 But in normal magic it is just really a matter of is it that name or is it that name. You can look for the name as a whole. The thing that normal magic can't do is care about qualities of a name. How many words is a name? What does it start with? What letters are
Starting point is 00:05:23 in it? And that is prime un-territory. So something we've taken advantage of in the past. Cards like Doubleheader, which bounces two word cards and such like that. And there was Wordmail that cares about how many words in the creature that is enchanting, stuff like that. So we wanted name matters to matter. Name stickers were a thing. Just like art stickers could affect art, name stickers could affect name. So name mattering cards.
Starting point is 00:05:50 Uh, so we did a bunch of different things. Uh, we cared about whether or not it had a, started with a letter, whether certain letters were in it. Um, we, we did an ability called alpha strike, which is basically first strike. As long as you're alphabetically ahead of the creature you're fighting. We had a card that cared about alliteration or, as we were able to define it on the card, it cares about having two words
Starting point is 00:06:12 start, two words start with the same letter, which I know in real world alliteration has to be the sounds match, and this is more of the letters match, but the sounds matching was a lot more subjective and letters matching was not. We also do some matching, like whether or not multiple words start with the same letter
Starting point is 00:06:29 or multiple words have a certain letter in them. We did some stuff with unique vowels. How many unique vowels are in it? You know, is there an A and an E and an I? You know, how many unique vowels are in it? So we really sort of try to push boundaries and find new and fun ways to make cards that cared about names. One of the things, by the way, that is just generally true is magic has certain qualities it's allowed to care about. So, for example, we can care about creature types or we can care about card type.
Starting point is 00:06:56 And so we endlessly make cards that care about those qualities. So the nice thing about doing art matters or name matters is we've done it before because we've made other unsets, but we haven't done lots of it And so there's a lot of space left. So we got to play around with that Okay, next up die rolling. So unglued introduced die rolling I And then unhinged did not have die wrong stupidly, but we brought it back at unstable and then unsanctioned the box that had it So we knew we want not have die rolling, stupidly. But we brought it back in Unstable. And then Unsanctioned, the box set, had it. So we knew we wanted to do die rolling. Now, interestingly, when we started doing this set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms hadn't started yet.
Starting point is 00:07:35 And later on, they decided they would end up using die rolling, 20-sided dies, because it was D&D themed. And that brought die rolling into Black Border. So one of the things that we definitely tried to do in this set. D&D themed. And that brought die rolling into Black Border. So one of the things that we definitely try to do in this set. So the big difference between us doing die rolling and, let's say, Adventures of the Forgotten Realms is, I mean, AB six-sided
Starting point is 00:07:55 dice. But the bigger thing is one of my ongoing themes, as you listen to this podcast about this series, is the importance of variance. Variance is very fun. It's fun to have wild, giant swings of things and ooh, what can happen? There's a lot of fun moments.
Starting point is 00:08:11 And variance, the reason we cap variance in sort of traditional magic is because of tournament play. In tournament play, we want skill to matter. We want to make sure that the better player is winning the vast majority of the time. And so you kind of want, you don't want your variance too wide.
Starting point is 00:08:28 You know, a little bit. But in the unset particularly, like variance is a lot of fun. So if you're playing for social purposes, if the idea is just to have a good time and it's not about consistency of your deck or something, variance is lots of fun. So unsets lean into variance. You know, I mean, attractions are a perfect example where like, oh, well, when you open an attraction, it's random. And when you get a visit, it's random. There's a lot of things in there that really make it very, very different. That if I'm playing attractions, just game to game, they're wildly different. Anyway, what that means for dice
Starting point is 00:09:00 rolling is it allows us to really push boundaries of what we can do with dice. There's a lot of things we can make that traditionally a normal, not unset, might have trouble making some of those cards. Okay, so things you can do with die rolling. You can re-roll the die. You can roll an additional die. You can adjust the die. Usually it goes up or down by one. You can trigger when you roll any die. You can trigger when you roll a certain number of dies. You can trigger when you roll any die. You can trigger when you roll a certain number of dies. You can trigger when you roll a certain result on a die.
Starting point is 00:09:30 We can do gating where you can't do things unless you've rolled some number of dice. You can have die banking. That's like Vidalcan Squirrel Whacker where you roll two dice for power and toughness and then if you later on you can swap one of the die rolls for that for one of the things you rolled.
Starting point is 00:09:53 There also is Centaur of Attention, which is sort of you bank dice on it and then you're trying to match the dice. But die banking means you can roll dice and then leave them on the card. And that has some mechanical meaning of somehow. Uh, dice thresholds. In fact, I'll get into it, but one of the archetypes, uh, triggers, wants you to roll a lot of dice. So there's a bunch of cards that say, hey, if you've ever rolled three or more dice, something happens.
Starting point is 00:10:17 Um, there's different outcomes. So there's cards that care about, um, you know, when you roll a die, there's cards that care about, like sometimes there's effects that happen when you roll dice and there's some effects that stop happening when you roll a die. Like, Drop Tower, you're flying until somebody rolls a one during your turn. So you can also, we can do, there's some cards where you roll a die
Starting point is 00:10:45 and only certain numbers will trigger. Like Sprawling cares about scrying if you roll one through three. Or Disappointed, is it Disappointed Vampire? A Disappointed Customer. You roll and you can it depends what you roll, how much life you lose. Or there's like
Starting point is 00:11:01 the non-human cannibal that does damage you when it dies. But you roll a die and maybe if you roll high enough it won't, you know, because it only does I think one to four so there's that kind of die rolling where a limited number of dies do something and the rest don't do something but anyway, like one of the things that we definitely wanted to do was we really wanted to sort of
Starting point is 00:11:19 map the space and play around and another fun thing is because we ended up making cards eternal almost all, not all, but almost all the dice rolling cards are eternal and play around. And another fun thing is because we ended up making cards eternal, almost all, not all, but almost all of the dice rolling cards are eternal.
Starting point is 00:11:28 So if you enjoy the die rolling shenanigans from Adventure of the Forgotten Realm or Commander Legends, Baldur's Gate, there's more stuff. There's a lot more card interaction.
Starting point is 00:11:41 If you enjoy messing around with dice, there's a lot of dice interaction going on. Next, what i'll call environmental influence uh what that means by it is i'd like the idea like one of the things we're looking for is ways to create variants so one of the neat ways to make variants so in the past we've made cards that care about um is it day or night or what time of day is it Or just factors external to the game itself. And so there's a cycle of cards in the set
Starting point is 00:12:08 where you look to see if you find certain things. Can you see a mirror? Can you see a door? Can you see a fire extinguisher? Can you see a trash can? That there's, it's like where you play will vary what the effect is. So if you play at home
Starting point is 00:12:22 and then go play at your local store, their cards don't just work differently. That the locale itself, that the environment can change the nature of how the card works. And that was quite exciting. Okay, next up, outside assistance. Okay, so continuing on with our theme of variance mattering and finding different ways to do variance, one of the things we tried in Unstable was getting outside people to influence things. And the reason that came about
Starting point is 00:12:52 was I was trying to figure out ways that created variance that gave you some ability to interact with it, but that was something that was sort of fun. So one of the things that I've talked, I did a whole article on this, a concept I call narrative equity.
Starting point is 00:13:08 So what narrative equity says is when people do activities, one of the things they value is those activities producing stories, meaning things they can then share later in their life. And there's a lot of value of making a good story, that people really, like if something happens and then they're going to tell that story many times in their life. And there's a lot of value of making a good story. That people really, like if something happens and then they're going to tell that story many times in their life, they've gained something.
Starting point is 00:13:30 There's a thing they got. And so narrative equity says that when you're making a game, if you can do things that really generate stories and become this part of someone's life in a way that they'll share later on, very valuable. And all magic tries to do that. Nerve equity is something we want to do in all magic. But unsets have a leg up. And that we can ask you to do some pretty crazy stuff. And so there's a lot of things that are going on in the set that do that. And I will get to some of them later on.
Starting point is 00:13:59 But right now, let's talk about outside assistance. So we liked the idea that you went and talked to somebody. And the neat thing about talking to somebody is it's not completely variable like a die roll. I mean, we have cards that affect die rolling. But because the interesting thing is, let's say, you know, there's a card in unstable. Do you like squirrels? Well, pick someone you think would like squirrels. You know, like you can try to pick someone you think would like squirrels. You can try to pick someone that might give you the answer you wanted. So we decided to take it to the next level in this thing. So we played with some more outside assistants.
Starting point is 00:14:36 And mostly the ones in unstable was a simple question, either like yes or no or pick a card. And then at high rarity, we had like, there was a variant on where you take over the turn. What would we call it? Mind Slaver, as we call it, the Kind Slaver. And there was a two-headed giant game where you pulled somebody outside
Starting point is 00:15:00 from the end of your game. So there was a lot of stuff at low rarity, it was very simple. High rarity is a little more complex. So we liked the idea of asking game. So there was a lot of stuff at low ratings that was very simple. High ratings was a little more complex. So we liked the idea of asking things, but we liked getting more into subjectivity, like rock stars asking them which card they think most sounds like a rock star. And superlatorium is like
Starting point is 00:15:18 you're picking a creature that has a quality and seeing what they think has that quality, and you're trying to predict what they're going to say. There's a lot of fun ways to do things. We have a card where people can judge the quality of the sticker on the art. There's a card where you can ask people for autographs. There's a whole subset where we make games, where you're playing a little sub-game.
Starting point is 00:15:40 And the evolution of that is, early on, we tried having your opponent be the person you're playing against. But what we found was a lot of games were not competitive but cooperative. And your opponent being your partner, when you win you get a prize is not great because they're not incentivized to help you. But the outside assistant person is or is willing to help you. And so there's a lot of fun cooperative things we do. So there's a bunch of mini games we do. We even had one. There is Gobsmacked,
Starting point is 00:16:07 is a card which you pick somebody you can see, but you don't even talk to them. They don't even know they're helping you. Just can you see them? And so we really sort of stretched boundaries to figure out what we could do with outside assistance. Next, physical dexterity. One of the things that we had a lot of fun in previous sets
Starting point is 00:16:23 is it's fun to do things with magic cards. And it could be throwing cards or dropping cards or holding cards up. Or, you know, there's a lot of sort of physicalness that can be fun. One of the things we want to be careful is, you know, on any one of these themes, some people really like it, some don't. Some really, really enjoy the physicality. In fact, the number one card, I did a thing on social media, which was, what was the most referenced unstable card on social media? And it was Skull Saucer,
Starting point is 00:16:48 the card that you put your head on the table. And so there are people that really enjoy that, the people that don't, so we want to make sure that it's not too much and it's something
Starting point is 00:16:55 that you can opt into. But it's a fun way, and one of the neat things about Magic in general is, I mean, or the unsets, I should say, is that we let you explore more different kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:17:06 And I mean, Magic is a fun game and there's a lot of cool things about it. But Magic has the ability to go a little bit broader. And one of the things that people really love about Unsets is that you get to do things you don't normally get to do. And it's fun to have those extra experiences and things like that. Next up, technology. that. Next up, technology. So we decided that we wanted to sort of incorporate the fact that there's things that exist in the world that might not have existed before. People carry phones in them that are capable of all sorts of things. And so it was neat to say, like, we have phone a friend where you can call somebody and we have mobile clone where you take a picture and you use that.
Starting point is 00:17:45 There is Urza's Funhouse where you can go on the internet to see something. We had Devil K. Neville that it was kind of hard to explain what was going on, but it was easy if you could see it. So we made a video and showed you the video so that you could see what was going on. We also have
Starting point is 00:18:01 photo op. We're using social media. There's a lot of different things where we were trying to tap into it. Again, like I was saying earlier, we want to make those narrative moments. We want to make those stories. And so when in playtests we would do something and it really would ring true, like everyone would stop playing and they all focus on this thing, just those moments were really visceral and we try hard, set try hard to replicate that uh next up robots matter so one of the things that we like to do in most sets is have some sort
Starting point is 00:18:34 of creature type mattering um we were doing science fiction it felt like robots was a cool thing um interestingly uh in the set all our clowns are robots. And all but three of our robots are clowns. So early on, it was actually clown tribal, not robot tribal. I ended up changing to robot tribal for two reasons. One is there were three robots that weren't clowns. And everybody kept wanting to play the robots with the clown robots. And there was no mechanical reason to do it.
Starting point is 00:19:02 So I changed the clown to robots. It mattered. Pietra is the one clown that's not a robot because Pietra is the one who programs the robot. She's a legendary creature. But she has robot mattering in her rules text. So like you still want to play Pietra in a robot deck, even though that she herself is not a robot.
Starting point is 00:19:21 And so we ended up putting that, I'll get to archetypes in a second, but it's a red-white archetype. Anyway, we just wanted to care about it, and so we ended up making it the Go Wide deck. I'll talk more about robots in a second when I get to archetypes, but that was something that we cared about, we wanted to do, and there was a lot of other things. I talked about stickers being a thing, but we also, stickering mattering was the theme.
Starting point is 00:19:43 We wanted to care if you had something stickered, how many things were stickered on something, how many different things you had stickers on. There's a bunch of different things that you can care about about stickers. And then finally, we had a little theme of what you were wearing. Once again, it's a small thing, but there's three things that if you're trying to optimize the gameplay, you want to be wearing a hat, you want to be wearing a hat, you want to be wearing a shirt that has all five colors of magic, and you want to be wearing some amount of magic branded stuff. It could be your shirt, or it could be your hat, or whatever, or both. But anyway,
Starting point is 00:20:16 we definitely want, one of the things that's kind of fun is just some little things that sort of say like, I'm in the know, I know what I'm supposed to do. I mean, the nice thing about going like Big Top is the one that cares about the colors of your shirt. Look, if you don't plan ahead and you're just playing big top, your shirt's probably going to have some of the colors in it. You know what I'm saying? Blue, white, black, red, green are things that probably some of your shirts have on it, some colors you have. So anyway, it's something we like to add. And once again, it's a little bit of flavoring.
Starting point is 00:20:42 It was not something we wanted too strong, but there lightly. Okay. add. And once again, it was a little bit of flavoring. It was not something we wanted too strong, but there lightly. Okay, now that I've got through all the different themes, let me get to the draft archetypes. Okay, so there are five, sorry, ten draft archetypes based on the two color pairs. And there are gold outputs. There are legendary creatures at Uncommon that reinforce these themes. Okay, so first up, we wanted to do some themes with the stickering, because that was one of our themes. So we took four archetypes. Each archetype took a different kind of stickers. So white blue is name matters. Red blue is art matters. White green is ability matters. And
Starting point is 00:21:18 green blue is power toughness matters, meaning those stickers matters. So what we did in each of those categories was we made sure there were cards that just stickered those things, that referenced when you stickered those things, that triggered when you stickered those things, that could target things that had that sticker. So there's a bunch of cards that sort of focus on that. And then there's a whole bunch of generic just good with stickering cards. If something's stickered, you reward or, you know, affecting things that are stickered. So the idea is if I'm playing in white-blue, look, I can just play the sticker matter cards,
Starting point is 00:21:50 but I'm focused a little more on caring about names. And so each of those four archetypes, one more time, white-blue cares about names, blue-red cares about art, white-green cares about abilities, and blue-green cares about power topics. Okay, then, for
Starting point is 00:22:05 attractions, we want to do the same thing. We want to dedicate four archetypes for attractions. The main attraction color was black. You'll notice when I read stickers off, none of those had black. Blue was in three, white was in two,
Starting point is 00:22:24 green was in two, and red was in one. And so, the number one attraction color was black, number two was green. So black, green
Starting point is 00:22:33 is just play as many attractions as you can. It's just like attraction, attraction, attraction, just play lots of attractions. And it has rewards
Starting point is 00:22:40 for how many attractions you visit. So either, like if you visit three attractions, there's some threshold stuff, and there's some stuff that just says, when you visit an attraction, something happens. Then, when you get to red-green, red-green really leans into wanting to roll a lot of dice.
Starting point is 00:22:57 Attractions have dice rolling built into them, and so what red and green say is, hey, I want to be rolling, and there's a bunch of threshold when you roll three or more dice things that goes on. But it's just red and green want you to have a lot of attractions and also want you to roll a lot of dice. Black-red also cares about dice, but instead of caring about rolling a lot of dice, black just wants you to roll high. Black and red, or black-red as the archetype, wants you to have high rolls, and so it gives you rewards for having high rolls happen.
Starting point is 00:23:26 Then blue-black is... Blue and black are the two colors that most manipulate dice. Blue can re-roll dice, can add dice once you pick one. Black can adjust dice up and one. And this is all unstable to this as well, and it actually unglued. Anyway, so blue-black is more about trying to pinpoint what you want. It has die rolling and it has attractions, but you're trying to justify and get exactly what you want.
Starting point is 00:23:50 You want to roll what you need to visit the attractions you want. You want to roll what you need to get the effects out of your cards that you want. And those cards, the blue and black, have more cards that care about rolling a specific number, for example. Okay, and that leaves us with two last things. So white and red, I mentioned briefly, white and red is our creature type mattering archetype, and that leaves us with two last things. So, white-red, I mentioned briefly, white-red is our creature type mattering archetype, and that is robots.
Starting point is 00:24:10 It's a go-wide robot deck. You want to play a lot of robots. Robots have a little bit of a die-rolling theme because they're attractions. There's a little bit of a traction theme. Not traction, sorry. They're artifacts, so there's a little bit of an artifact theme. And it's just, they are,
Starting point is 00:24:26 there's token making. There's a number of cards that make robot tokens. There's a bunch of cards that enhance, you know, there's a number of cards that make robots better. There's a bunch of cards that sort of trigger off some robot things. But basically, you're playing Red White,
Starting point is 00:24:38 you're playing robots. Get a lot of robots. Get Pietra if you can. She's the one that controls robots and gives them plus one, plus one. Or, sorry, she makes and programs the robots. Finally, white-black. So, we wanted to do one art matters theme.
Starting point is 00:24:56 And like I said earlier, we sort of centered on hats. We played around in hats for a while. And we ended up deciding to have a recursion theme with hats. So, one of the neat things, well well black and white overlap in recursion and one of the themes we played into with hats was a lot of the stickers are hats in fact i believe somewhere about two thirds of the stickers are hats i think if you open up three boosters, like if you're drafting, that on average you'll get about two hats. It might be a smidgen under two hats, but it's close
Starting point is 00:25:30 to two hats. And the idea is that some of your things can naturally have hats, and white and black have a little bit more hats than normal. In fact, one of the funny stories is I get, the set designer has a little bit of ability to talk to the art director, and when we see sketches
Starting point is 00:25:46 and saying, oh, can we tweak this or tweak that? That's not really set design's call, that's the art director's call. But every once in a while, if you want to change some, oh, I need this creature to fly, and the sketch came in, but could we change it so that it doesn't fly, or whatever. The set designer
Starting point is 00:26:02 had a little bit of leeway, not a lot, but a little bit of leeway to tweak a few cards. All my tweaking went to putting hats on white creatures. I saw initial art, black was fine, and I realized that white was a bit low, and the white-black is the theme. So I went back on a bunch of white creatures that weren't in yet, or they were in sketch stage, and said, or sorry, a couple of them were in, and we actually went back to the artist to say, could you add on a hat, or make it clear. There was one or two cards where it was ambiguous whether they had a hat, and I'm like, could we just make it less ambiguous if they have a hat?
Starting point is 00:26:33 But anyway, a lot of creatures in white and black naturally have hats, but there are also hat stickers, and so another thing that you can do is you can sticker the hats, and the reanimation's nice because stickers don't leave the graveyard. So if I put a hat on something and then it dies, it still has a hat in the graveyard. So recursion could care about the graveyard and care about hats in the graveyard in a way that
Starting point is 00:26:55 stickers allow this extra level that was kind of cool. Anyway, so white-black is hats matter. So if you are drafting, hopefully, so as with Unstable, we built the set to be drafted more than we played in Sealed. It can be played in Sealed. It's just when you're dealing with sort of themes, especially themes that are a little bit parasitic. I mean, the nice thing about attractions and stickers is you can play a little bit of them.
Starting point is 00:27:26 You don't have to play a lot of them. But there's power as you play more of them. So there is a little bit of parasitism to them. And so draft allows you to sort of focus on your themes a little more and build around them. Where seals, you're a little bit at the mercy of sort of what you opened. So we recommend that you draft.
Starting point is 00:27:43 When you draft, you keep your stickers. You don't draft those, but you do draft attractions. There's two attractions per booster. What was I saying? And then, oh, okay. So then, and just to recap, so the 10 archetypes in order,
Starting point is 00:27:59 white-blue is name stickers matter. Blue-black is precision dice-rolling attractions. Black-red is roll-high attractions. Red-green is roll lots of dice attractions. Green-white is ability stickers matter.
Starting point is 00:28:20 White-black is hats matter. Blue-red is art stickers matter. Black-black is hats matter. Blue-red is art stickers matter. Black-green is attractions, attractions, attractions, play a lot of attractions. Red-white is robots. Robots matter. And then green-blue is power toughness matters. Another important thing to understand about the way the set was built is a lot of times when we do themes in normal sets,
Starting point is 00:28:44 we gate them by color to a certain extent. Like, oh, we'll do this ability and at the low rarities, only green and black and blue do this. And so red and white just don't do it at all. And so maybe there's one or two at high rarities for constructed, but mostly in limited, you're just not playing that theme. That's not the way I tend to build unsets. Unsets tend to go really big on a few wacky things. We want people to have access to those wacky things. So any color can play attractions. Any color can play stickers. I will say certain colors, like, you know, if you want to play attraction, black and green have more cards that interact with attractions. Black and green make
Starting point is 00:29:22 it a little easier to play attractions. But there are attraction mattering cards in all colors. There are attraction openers in all colors. So you can, no matter what colors you're playing, you can play some attractions, or you can play some stickers, or you can play a combination of both. So there definitely is, or same with die rolling. Die rolling, yeah, certain colors have more die rolling, but there's a little bit all around, so we definitely build on set so you can sample
Starting point is 00:29:49 kind of the extra fun stuff, and so that is there. Anyway, guys, I am almost to work, so I have not done a longer series in a little while, so it's fun to do a four-parter. My plan for Unfinity is I'm going to have a lot of guests on, some of which have probably already been on since this is part four. Um, so talking with people that I worked with on it and probably because this is something that I worked on all the way through, I will have some topics in which the topic is not about Infinity necessarily, but because I can use Infinity as a model, and because I can talk
Starting point is 00:30:25 very definitively about all the way through the process, I'm sure I will, Infinity will be the source material for some topics of other things. Anyway, guys, I'm now literally driving into the parking lot. I really do love talking about magic, but I especially love
Starting point is 00:30:42 talking about the Unsets, because they're my babies, and it is... this was a special set in that I really got a chance to see it all the way through. While I'm very, very, very familiar with early part of design and I... it's not that I have no experience with late part of design. I've been on a lot
Starting point is 00:30:58 of development teams. This was the first time I ran it all the way through and so there's a lot of things that you have to do. In fact, it's interesting. Maybe one of the things I'll do one of these days is I'll do a thing on set design where I talk about my lessons from set design. Maybe that'd be a cool thing to do. Anyway, guys, I am
Starting point is 00:31:14 parked at work. So, we all know what that means. That means it's the end of my drive to work. So, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed all the Infinity Talk, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

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