Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #103 - Maro

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

Mark talks about the card with his namesake. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. I thought for today I would do something a little different. I thought it might be neat, because I often talk about things in big picture, and I want to get down to the nitty gritty. I thought it'd be neat to take one card, just one magic card, and talk about all that went into that single magic card. And I decided to choose one of my, well, maybe my all-time favorite card, which for personal reasons you will understand quickly. I'm going to talk today about the card Morrow. Okay.
Starting point is 00:00:42 So, let's go back in the Wayback Machine to 1996. Or actually, it might be 1995. So, I guess it's early 96 probably when we started. I love when I try to figure out dates. Anyway, 95, 96. Here's how you can tell I'm doing this live. I'm trying to think it up as I drive. Anyway, very shortly after I first got to Wizards, the very, very first team I worked on was Alliances. That was the first development team I worked on, but that was a whole bunch of people, and I was in there
Starting point is 00:01:19 at the tail end of it, and, you know, probably my biggest influence was changing the name of Force of Will to Force the will um so i uh the first set that i feel like i the first development team that i had a much much bigger influence on was mirage um what had happened was uh bill rose and william jokish and i had just recently been hired and then mike elliott got hired shortly after that and the four of us were the development team. We were the magic R&D guys, and thus we were the development team for the set.
Starting point is 00:01:51 So, what happened was we delved right in, and we started doing development on the set. So, at some point along the way, there was a hole created. So, one of the things that happens in development is, so
Starting point is 00:02:05 design carefully crafts a set, they make commons, they make uncommons, they make rares, now they make mythic rares, back then we didn't have them, but, and they playtest and they iterate and they finally get a file they're very happy with and they hand it over to development.
Starting point is 00:02:22 Now development is a new set of eyes, and what development does is it just says, okay, we assume nothing, and they look at the set on its own merits. And without a lot of the preconceptions that the other team had, the design team had, that you get attached to things. When you're a designer and you design things, you just get emotionally attached. And most of the time, a lot of the things you're emotionally attached to are the correct calls.
Starting point is 00:02:49 But sometimes you get blind to things just because you really have an affection for something. And for example, one of the things they teach you in writing classes is the importance of, they call it killing your babies, which is a little graphic. But the idea is you might write something and that thing is the most awesome thing in the world, but if it doesn't serve a larger story, you've got to be able to get rid of it. Like, in my film writing classes, the teacher would say, you have a scene, and it's a brilliant scene. It might be the funniest scene
Starting point is 00:03:16 you've ever written, but does it advance the plot? Does it define characters? Does it do something that the story needs? If a film can take out the scene and be just fine or maybe even better, then it's got to go, no matter how good it is. And so the same is true in card design, which is sometimes you make a card and it's the most awesome card,
Starting point is 00:03:37 the most awesome card. But that doesn't mean that just because in a vacuum it's a super awesome card that, you know, that's something you're supposed to be, it's not supposed to stay in the set just because it's awesome in isolation. You know, it's something that you have to, it's something that you have to, it has to serve the set. That's the important thing. It has to serve the set. the set. That's the important thing. It has to serve the set. And so, and to be fair, this is a hard concept, I know, for beginning designers, which is, you finally, you finally got on a set, and you are so excited, you are so excited to make cards, and you make
Starting point is 00:04:17 a card, and it's the best card you ever made. It's an awesome card. It's a thing of beauty. When people see it, tears will come to their eyes. It's so awesome. And then your lead designer goes, yeah, it doesn't work. And they're like, why? It's so awesome. And it's like, oh yeah, it's a great card. But it's not serving the set. And the thing you get with experience
Starting point is 00:04:37 doing design is magic's a hungry beast. If you have awesome cards, they will find a home. And that doesn't mean right away. There are some cards that it took me 10 years to find a hungry beast. If you have awesome cards, they will find a home. And that doesn't mean right away. They also have cards that it took me 10 years to find a home for, but they eventually did find a home. That if you have something awesome, it'll... I mean, you need someone there sort of championing it,
Starting point is 00:04:57 but it eventually will get in. And you kind of learn that the sets are more important. One of the things in general, this is true of writing, this is true of any creative art in general, I guess, is, so the saying, this is from writing, but you can extrapolate, which is, the paragraph is more important than the,
Starting point is 00:05:18 or sorry, the sentence is more important than the word. The paragraph is more important than the sentence. The page is more important than the word. The paragraph is more important than the sentence. The page is more important than the paragraph. The chapter is more important than the page. The book is more important than the chapter. And just driving home that everything needs to be served the thing above it. And that if you're trying to make an awesome book or an awesome card set, you know, that you have to be willing to serve the thing you need. Anyway, that's my long-storied way of saying that there's a green card that wasn't holding its weight, that wasn't doing what it needed to do.
Starting point is 00:05:56 And often in development, you remove things before you know what's going to go in their place. And that, essentially what happens is, you're like, oh, I mean, sometimes you have something you want to get in their place. And that, essentially what happens is, you're like, oh, I mean, sometimes you have something you want to get in the set, and then you have to
Starting point is 00:06:10 remove something to make room for the new thing. That happens. And sometimes, you just realize that something that is there is not fulfilling the role it needs to be,
Starting point is 00:06:18 and you remove it. In R&D slang, we call it a CQI, which stands for Continued Quality Improvement. It comes from somewhere else. a CQI, which stands for Continued Quality Improvement. It comes from somewhere else. But CQI in a file on a card means, oh, this card needs to be better. Usually what we'll do is we'll keep the card in the file, put CQI after the name,
Starting point is 00:06:35 and that means, well, it's here for now, but we think we can do better. So anyway, we made a green hole. It's development. We made a green hole. Now, let's flashback even further, back to my days before I was in R&D as a carefree Magic player. So what happened was, I started playing the game in Alpha,
Starting point is 00:06:55 and I started freelancing in 94, early 94, and then I got my full-time employment in late 95. So there were almost two years where I was not in R&D. And there was almost a year, not quite a year, but a good six, seven months where I wasn't even related. I had nothing to do with Wizards. And so I tried my card at making some cards. And there were two cards in particular I was very proud of.
Starting point is 00:07:25 One, I'm sorry, there were in particular I was very proud of. One, I'm sorry, there were three cards I was very proud of. One was Scragnoth, which was the creature that couldn't be countered, their protection from blue. Scragnoth would later find its way in Tempest. So, the two cards that, the three cards that I
Starting point is 00:07:39 made that I was very proud of, you'll notice the other two that I don't mention, that aren't Morrow, ended up in, ended up in... ended up in... Oh, sorry. I spilled my water. Ended up in Tempest.
Starting point is 00:07:54 A little accident there as I'm driving. So, the other one was, let's see, it was Kragnoth. That was a 2-2 protection from blue,
Starting point is 00:08:04 can't be countered. The reason I made the card was to hose blue at the time. Blue was, for those who don't know their history, early magic. Oh, maybe late history. Blue, much like now, is kind of crazy. Blue, in the early days, it was insane. Blue was just, it was light years better than everything around it. It was actually kind of nutty how good it was. Um, but, uh, I decided to make a creature
Starting point is 00:08:32 that blue had trouble handling. And so it couldn't be countered. So blue couldn't counter it and had protecting blue. So blue had a hard time dealing with it. Um, and when Scrybeth actually first came out, blue decks, mono blue decks had a real hard time with it. Um, And when Scrybeth actually first came out, Monoblue decks had a real hard time with it. Now, the other card that I made was a card called Duplicity. So Duplicity is also in Tempest. Basically, the idea of Duplicity was that I got this alternate hand, and then I could turn my hand in for this alternate hand.
Starting point is 00:09:00 It ended up being real weak in Tempest. I think I... Well, the concept was neat. My ability to judge power level was not. And so I was very excited when it came out in Tempest. It ended up being very weak and so no one played it. But I liked the concept. I'm sure one of these days I will revisit it. Actually, I haven't, I've made a few cards that kind of pseudo-revisits it.
Starting point is 00:09:18 Anyway, the last card that I made that I loved, I mean, now known as Morrow. So it was a creature, it was a green creature that's power and toughness were equal to your hand size. And, you know, 3G for a star, star creature. 3G or 2GG? My memory is so
Starting point is 00:09:42 bad. That's what you learn listening to me do my podcast is how horrible my memory is. It's 4 mana. I don't remember if it's 2GG or 3GG. Would you think my card I would remember? Anyway, it's one of those two. So, let me explain why I made the card in green.
Starting point is 00:10:02 Shouldn't this be in blue? So, the Mario ability ended up both in blue and green. Let me explain why I made the card in green. Shouldn't this be in blue? So the Mara ability ended up both in blue and green. Let me explain why I put it in green. So one of green's big things is green is the color of growth. And so green is the king of the star, star creature, which is I'm a creature, and with time I can grow and get bigger. Card drawing also, you notice, is in both blue and green. I mean, more blue than green.
Starting point is 00:10:27 The reason I liked it in green was green had the larger creatures. It had the variable static creatures. And blue was a color, especially, especially at the time, where you just didn't empty your hand. I mean, all the card drawing was instant. And there was so much permission that, like, the blue decks at the time just always had a head of seven cards. And so, like, what was the great, you know, there was no great challenge
Starting point is 00:10:51 in making your hand size larger. Blue already had a large hand size. And so, um, it didn't seem much like a challenge. With green, it would be a challenge. It would be something you have to think about. So that's why I put Morrow in green. Anyway, so a hole came up.
Starting point is 00:11:10 We were making development. We had a hole. And what happens is, sometimes during development, if you have something you know can fit there, these days, design sometimes hands in extra cards. Sometimes there's something from a previous set
Starting point is 00:11:24 in the same block that you liked but had to be killed. Or sometimes it's just a card you've been thinking about. So sometimes right then and there in the development meeting, you'll say, hey, I got a card. More often than not, what we do nowadays in development is they'll just tag the hole, and there's a hole-filling team, and they'll send out saying, here's what we need, and they'll send out the requirements they need for the holes, and the external hole-filling will do it. Let me put in hole-filling for a second, because this is also important.
Starting point is 00:11:53 So when development needs to get the card made, what they do is they come back, and there's a person who right now is Mark Gottlieb, who, besides being the design manager, one of his responsibilities is also overseeing the hole filling. So hole filling is done the design team that designed the set is on the hook for helping fill holes, and we have
Starting point is 00:12:16 two external groups, or two groups. One group is within R&D, or one group is an experienced group that has experience filling holes. And the second is a larger group from wizards, people at wizards, who have an interest in filling holes. And so there's three sort of concentric circles, if you will. There's the design team, there's the experienced people, most of which are in R&D, and then there's the at-large,
Starting point is 00:12:41 wizards at-large pool. Depending how much time you have, usually if we have enough time, all three circles get it, but sometimes it's a rush just the immediate circle gets it, which is the designers of the set. Sometimes it goes to the middle circle if you have a little bit more time. And so
Starting point is 00:12:59 essentially what happens is the more detail it is, the more you go to the design team, and the more detail it is, the more you go to the design team, and the more broad it is, the more you can branch it out. So for example, let's say it's, oh, so like in FutureSight, when we needed a new future-shifted card, Mike Turin, who was the lead developer, would come to me. In fact, I didn't even bother my team. I tended to make them because future-shifted cards were really, really, really hard.
Starting point is 00:13:23 It's like, make something that magic has never done, but could do, but none of the other 45 things we've done in this set. You know, it was a very niche-y, weird thing. So I literally did most of the whole filling for that set. But, let's say the whole is like, make a dragon.
Starting point is 00:13:40 Well, you know what? Average person has a lot of familiarity, they know what they need to do. They can make a dragon. So anyway, in this particular case, I had a card in mind. And I said, oh, Bilbo, I got a card. And so I gave him Morrow. And even though I can't remember the casting cost, as I submitted it, it stayed in the file.
Starting point is 00:14:03 The card I made versus the card that got printed was identical. And so what happened was I gave him my card. And so way back when, I mean, we have a phone system at work, but we had a different phone system back then. Or actually, it wasn't even the phone system. It was the email system. So the way the email system worked at the time, and we've been through multiple email systems,
Starting point is 00:14:26 was when you would type it in, the email system would try to predict what you were saying. Because it had a list of, you know, it knew what the people were. I mean, it knew who existed in the company. So if you would type in something, it would start filling it in. And so Bill would entertain himself by figuring out what was the smallest combination of letters that you could get that it would figure out who the person was. And so I think Bill's default was the first two letters of your first name and the first two letters of your last name. I think he figured out that that worked for everybody. That if you did that, it just worked.
Starting point is 00:15:06 And so for me, the first two letters of my first name were M-A, the first two letters of my last name were R-O. So what he did was he just would type in M-A-R-O for me. So when I made the card up, it didn't have a name or anything. And so Bill just called it M-A-R-O because I made the card. And so Bill just called it M-A-R-O as because I made the card. And in Bill's head, Bill knew that just meant, oh, Mark made the card. But we had no, oh, let me talk about card names for a second.
Starting point is 00:15:39 So one of the things that I'm very firm on is when you make a card, you, the designer, are responsible for naming the card. I don't care if the name is realistic. You don't need to give the name we'll actually use. If you want to make a shot at it, I don't mind designers trying to get a real name, and especially the more resonant the set is, the more important the name is. If your set is top-down and based on resonance, it's important that your names match what you're trying to do, because a lot of what you're trying to do is get the right feel, and so you need the names to help you do that in playtests. If you're more mechanically based, the names matter less.
Starting point is 00:16:13 The only rule that we have about names now is design names are public, meaning we often will tell all of you the design names. So the only rule we have is you can't do something that we couldn't tell the public a name. You can't put profanities in it. You can't, I mean, you have to put a name that we can make public. The name can be silly.
Starting point is 00:16:33 The name can, you know, we have a lot of cards that have very, very silly names. And different designers have different kind of fun design names. Like, Zach Hill, his shtick was he'd make giant long names, like, you know, the girl who you thought was cute that you always wanted to ask out in high school, you know. I tend to make a lot of puns and pop culture references. The default for a
Starting point is 00:17:01 lot of people is just say what the card does, So let's say you have a small First Striker. It's called small First Striker. That's also very common. Although what happens sometimes is when the cards get changed during the evolution of the file, sometimes the names don't get changed. And that's a problem actually when it says small flyer, but it doesn't fly. It's like, oh, well, it used to fly. but it doesn't fly.
Starting point is 00:17:22 It's like, oh, well, it used to fly. But anyway, names are whatever tickles the fancy of the person who puts it in the file. Sometimes that's the designer when they make the card, and then usually if the designer names it, I or whoever's managing the file will keep the designer's name when they put it in. But if there's no name to the card when it gets inputted, the person doing the inputting used to be me.
Starting point is 00:17:43 It's usually the lead designer. I used to do that, but now I have a strong second. I have a person that works with me. What I found was a very, very good way to train designers is have them be on a file, put them in charge of the file, and it makes them more conscious watching the file as they put it together. Mostly designers will not give up the file, but I've done
Starting point is 00:18:01 so many that it doesn't really faze me anymore. I mean, controlling the file is a really, really good way to wrap your head around what's going on. I've just done it long enough that I can do that without having to... Like, one of the things you find when you do a file is if you constantly stare at a file, it just ingrains what's where. And it's just good practice when you're originally working on making a set, just constantly looking at the same cards again and again and again and just drumming your head what's there and the combination. Handling a file is a very good way of learning a set.
Starting point is 00:18:34 And so I now make my strong seconds, who I'm training, do that. It also is less work for me. I'm busy. And so one of the things I've been trying to do is, in fact, it's funny. The reason I originally had someone put in the file was not because I thought it was a good teaching thing. It's because I was trying to offset this busy work that I had. And it turned out to be a really good teaching tool. So like, oh, two birds, one stone. Sounds good. Okay. So Bill writes Morrow in the line.
Starting point is 00:19:05 And be aware, Bill understood that Morrow meant Mark Rosewater, and Bill was like, I don't know what to name it. I'll name it after Mark. He made the card. So anyway, the card goes... So at the time, the creative team was called Continuity. I think the reason was, when we first started making sets, the designers of the sets also came up with the story. So, for example, the Antiquities
Starting point is 00:19:30 Brother of the War story, the East Coast play chefs, or Scaffolice, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, they came up with the Brothers War. That was not done by the creative team. That was done by, I'm pretty sure, and same with Legends.
Starting point is 00:19:46 The designers just came up and the story was, the designers just came up with the story. And continuity meant their job was to make sure that everything was consistent and they did add a lot of,
Starting point is 00:19:54 it wasn't that they didn't do a lot of creative work, they added a lot to it. You know, they did a lot of the details, they had to oversee
Starting point is 00:20:01 the flavor text and the names and although in early, early designs, like the designs like Ice Age and Mirage, the designers of the sets even sometimes would write flavor text. But Continuity would rewrite flavor text,
Starting point is 00:20:13 they were in charge of the names, and that, even though the cards got named and there was flavor text sometimes, they still overlooked everything and changed things and made sure everything was consistent. They would figure out what the world was doing, and they were called Continuity because they wanted to make made sure everything was consistent. They would figure out what the world was doing. And they were called Continuity because they wanted to make sure that everything stayed consistent. Anyway, when Continuity got the cards, it just said Marrow on it.
Starting point is 00:20:37 And they assumed that the designers had made up the, oh, this creature is called a Marrow. Oh, that sounds cool. And at first, I don't think they even knew what the name meant. They just said, oh, that sounds cool. And then I think what happens along the way, they were informed where the name came from. And they decided that they liked the sound of it. And they're like, well, we liked the sound before we knew what it was.
Starting point is 00:21:01 Oh, let me talk about vanity cards for a second, because this is what is known as a vanity card. So a vanity card is a card in which some element, usually a creative element, is making a real-world reference. Often to, or I guess a vanity card, it is in fact making a reference to somebody involved that makes the game. Back in the day, we did a bunch of vanity cards. MSE Tome is MSE Tome for Michael Scott Elliott for Michael Elliott's name JLM Tome is JLM Tome
Starting point is 00:21:33 which is Joel L. Mick what's the original one? JMD Tome is JMD for J. Michael Davis who was one of the early it's the person with Richard who came to pitch RoboRally that led to Magic getting made, and he was the head of R&D for a long time. He's the one who hired me.
Starting point is 00:21:54 So anyway, there's cards we've made over time that reference people. Joven's Ferrets. Joven references the guy who made Homelands. Kyle Namvar. Rysarian Badger is a reference to Rias Hall. Uncle Isfahan is a reference, I think, to Steve Bishop. So there's just lots and lots.
Starting point is 00:22:19 In the early days, there's lots and lots of references that reference to people making the game. R&D, had made a decision at one point that vanity cards were not a good idea. I will be purely public. I disagree. I think as long as they don't take away from the creative, meaning, if someone who wasn't in the know couldn't tell,
Starting point is 00:22:38 meaning the creative element was not something that, like, I don't think you should make the card creatively any worse for vanity purposes. That's wrong. But I do believe that having stuff behind the scenes is kind of fun. We do do references. For example, in Innistrad, Creepy Doll was a reference to a song by Jonathan Colton. Jonathan Colton, and Grave Bramble, which was a plant with protection from zombies,
Starting point is 00:23:15 was a nod to the game Plants vs. Zombies by George Vann, who's a magic player, and I've met him. He visited Wizards one day. I gave him a tour. In fact, I wrote an article about piggybacking that came from George Vann visiting the office. Anyway, which I talked about. I had a podcast about that, so you already know that. So we do do reference cards. We don't do vanity cards anymore. At the time we did, the creative team, Flesh Continuity, thought it was cute,
Starting point is 00:23:39 thought that the name was a cute name that didn't take away anything, so it left. It stayed Morrow. Meanwhile, the art director at the time for Mirage was a woman named Sue Ann Harkey. Now, Sue Ann was very nice, and she was a very, very good artist. The only negative I can say about Sue Ann,
Starting point is 00:24:04 as a magic art director, was she was not very familiar with the game of magic. And so one of these days I'll do a podcast on famous art mishaps. A bunch of them happened during Mirage. And one of the problems that she had run into was she didn't... The reason it's very important that you understand magic, and Jeremy Jarvis, our current art director, understands magic, I mean, plays magic, understands magic well, is there's a lot of little subtle things that are important and that you have to know when you talk to artists what's important and what's not important. And sometimes, you know, she just wouldn't realize something because she wasn't familiar with the fantasy genre.
Starting point is 00:24:45 But I'm leaning with the negative, not the positive. The positive is she was an awesome art director. A lot of art, I believe Kev Walker was her find, Paula Parente. There was a stable of awesome, awesome artists that she was the one that found and brought to magic. And that, so anyway, Sue andynne Harkey is at an art show and sees a painting.
Starting point is 00:25:07 It's called The Green Man. And she really likes it. And so she goes to the artist, a guy named Stuart Griffin, I believe he's English, and says to him, oh my God, this is amazing, this would be great for the, I'm the art director of Magic the Gathering. I know you've already drawn this piece. Could I buy the rights to the image?
Starting point is 00:25:26 I would love to buy the rights. You know, I don't, you know, could I, I'd like to buy the rights to the image of this picture. And he said, sure. He still would do the rights to the image. And she brought it back, and she had this beautiful image, and she just said, okay, I've got to find the right place for it. So, meanwhile, the creative team decided that Maro was going to be a nature spirit.
Starting point is 00:25:45 Now, it since went on to change its creature type to be an elemental, because nature spirits are elementals. It never changed what it was. But they came up with this idea of a creature that embodied the spirit of a forest, and every forest would have a living embodiment of itself. And it was called a Maro. And so, this card represented that concept. And so when Tua and Harki saw the concept,
Starting point is 00:26:10 she's like, oh, I got the picture. So the wonderful thing about this is normally when people make magic art, for those who have never seen magic art, sometimes magic art is very big, depending on the artist, but oftentimes it might be as small as like three inches by four inches, whatever magic art is very big, uh, depending on the artist, but oftentimes it might be as small as like three inches by, you know, four inches, whatever that right thing is.
Starting point is 00:26:30 Sometimes they're very small because it doesn't, you know, the card is small. It doesn't need to be giant. Um, and so, but, uh, Morrow was an actual painting, like a painting, like he painted it and, you know, as to sell. So it's a big painting. In fact, um, the art that's on the card is cropped a little bit because he did not paint to match. Magic has a certain, I don't know off my head, but there's a certain size of it. And so when the artists draw, we tell them what the size is so they can map out so they know what their picture is going to look like.
Starting point is 00:26:59 We had to crop it because he did not draw it to be a magic card. So I, by the way, after, after it ended up being my card, I bought the picture of the art from Stuart Griffin. It's framed and in my, in my house. And, um, it is a beautiful, beautiful picture. I mean, I could not be more happy. Like one of my favorite pieces of magic art of all time happens to be on my favorite card, which always a vanity card for me. Um, and so I have that picture. It's my favorite card, which always, a vanity card for me. And so I have that picture. It's my favorite Magic. I mean, A, I have a lot of emotional attachment to it,
Starting point is 00:27:30 but B, I really, it's a beautifully beautiful picture. I remember Jeremy Jarvis at one point said to me that it might be one of the best pictures ever painted for Magic. That it's just a beautiful picture. I mean, Magic has lots and lots of beautiful pictures, so. He was just saying that he felt from, especially early Magic, it was one of the best paintings that had ever been done.
Starting point is 00:27:49 Anyway, one of these days, maybe one of these days on my blog, I will take a picture of the full thing so you guys can see it all. There's just stuff at the top and bottom. I mean, there's little details and berries and things, but it's kind of cool. So anyway, this picture ends up becoming on the card. Okay, so now we have a card that I, one of my favorite cards of all time that I made. One of the very first cards I ever made to make in the Magic set. I did, there were three cards that I made that made it into alliances.
Starting point is 00:28:19 But Mirage was, like I, you know, three cards is nothing. Anyway, it was a card I loved, not just a card. It wasn't even a card that I, like, the stuff in Alliances, I was making cards to fit needs, because it was so late in the process, like, art was done and stuff. But here was a card that, from scratch, I made, I loved, I brought to Wizards. It got made into
Starting point is 00:28:35 a card. It got named after me. It had one of my favorite arts of all time. So, I said to the creator, I go, please, I gotta write the flavor text. And they said, you know, I mean, they're like, okay, I creator please I gotta write the flavor text and they said you know I mean they're like okay you gotta write something that is good meaning it has to pass the qualities but you know
Starting point is 00:28:52 if you could write something that we think is good we'll put it on the card now be aware at the time I was doing flavor text I'm a writer my flavor text was all over Mirage I was a flavor text writer and I was also on the team that selected the flavor text was all over Mirage. So I was a flavor text writer. And I was also on the team that selected the flavor text.
Starting point is 00:29:07 So I was in the inn and I knew people, obviously. So I said, please, please, please, can I write the flavor text? And they're like, write something good enough, you can have flavor text.
Starting point is 00:29:16 So I wrote 300 pieces. I wrote so much flavor text. I wonder somewhere I have like a pad of paper. I might have saved it somewhere. But I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I wrote so much flavor text. I wonder if somewhere I have a pad of paper. I might have saved it somewhere. But I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I just wrote.
Starting point is 00:29:32 And then what I did is I condensed it down to what I thought was the 10 best. I wrote tons and tons. And so the one that ended up getting picked is No Two See the Same Morrow. And the idea that I really, really liked was,
Starting point is 00:29:45 this was supposed to be a nature thing. There's a quote that I love, which is, no two men can ever step in the same river. I'm paraphrasing. Maybe that's not exactly
Starting point is 00:29:55 the quote. But the idea is, you know, rivers are ever moving. And that if I step in a river, when the next person steps in, well, it's moved. It's moved on.
Starting point is 00:30:03 That I'm stepping in a new bunch of water. That it's an ever-changing thing. And the idea is that there are some things that are ever-changing. And so I like the idea that this creature embodied the forest. It was an elemental, but it wasn't like... I was trying to explain that this creature is different than a normal creature. Because it embodies the forest, each person that sees it,
Starting point is 00:30:26 one person might see it in trees. The creature makes its body out of whatever is nearby at the time it needs to deal with something. So every time it sort of forms a body, it's different. I was fascinated. That concept fascinated me. And so, anyway, I thought it was pithy. I don't know. I really liked it.
Starting point is 00:30:48 I thought it was cool and I think I showed it to the people at the time. Maybe I showed it to the team because I was on the team who was picking. And I think I said this was my favorite
Starting point is 00:30:59 but here's some others and the team goes, no, no, no, you're right. That's the best one. So, anyway, the thing I was very proud of was that my card, you know, the card that I
Starting point is 00:31:11 was that I managed to make, the design is mine, the flavor text is mine, it's named after me. I didn't name it, Bill named it, but it was named after me, and the art. So, the funny thing is, I would later go on, a little trivia is, I would later go on, a little trivia here,
Starting point is 00:31:28 I believe there are two cards in Magic in which one person named the card, created the card, or created the card, named the card, wrote the flavor text, drew the art. And I managed to do that on Look at Me on the DCI. Which I could only have done in a silver boarded set because I cannot draw here's a secret for those that haven't ever seen it
Starting point is 00:31:48 look at me on the DCI one day I'll talk about that card there's a fun story behind that card anyway so I'm at Wizards now so I hope you guys enjoyed today today was just kind of me showing how much that goes into just a single card by the way
Starting point is 00:32:04 I'm not going to do a very mega series where I take every card in Magic and do a podcast on it. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's thing. And while I love talking about Magic, what I love even more is making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.

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