Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #151 - Unhinged, Part 4
Episode Date: August 22, 2014Mark continues with part 4 of his five-part series on the design of Unhinged. ...
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I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what this means. It's time for another drive to work.
Okay, so today is part four of my series on the expansion Unhinged.
So what I'm doing is I'm explaining about this expansion by going through every single card in the set.
And the reason I chose to do that is there's just lots and lots of stories.
It's a set I worked very close on, And anyway, there's just lots of jokes.
So I decided I'm going to talk about every single card.
But I'm trying to do it quickly so that I can get this done in not too many podcasts.
Okay, next we're up to N, Name Dropping.
So Name Dropping is an enchantment for one and a green.
And what it says is, all cards gain the following ability.
Gotcha for their name.
So if your opponent ever names a card in your graveyard, you can say gotcha and get that card back.
It basically grants a gotcha ability to all your cards.
And the gotcha ability is them saying the name of the card.
Now, probably the highest profile gotcha cycle, which is a common cycle,
are all two-word names in which if you name one of those two words, you get it back.
So this essentially is grafting kind of that flavor onto all your cards.
Next, Necro Impudence.
Black, black, black.
It's an enchantment.
You skip your untap step.
And at the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay X life.
And if you do, you can untap X permanence. And then, for every half life you pay, you can draw a card. So basically,
this card is a parody of a very, very famous card called Necropotence. We even had the
same artist, Mark Tudine, draw the picture. One of the things I like to do in unsets is parodies, and I like to parody existing magic cards.
So this card makes use
of the
fractions, because you're paying half a life, which you can't
normally do. But because you're paying
half a life, we gave you a little more severe
restriction, which is instead of skipping your
draw step, which Necropotence does, you skip your
untap step, which is even
more problematic.
But you get to draw cards
at half the rate you draw them on Necropotence.
Anyway, this card's
not quite as good as Necropotence, I'm pretty sure.
But it is fun, and it definitely
is something you can build a deck around.
Next, Now I Know My ABCs.
It's an enchantment for one blue and blue.
And it says that at the beginning of your upkeep,
if you control permanents that contain
in their titles every letter of the English alphabet, all 26 letters, you win the game.
So one of the things I like to do in each of my sets is, each of the unsets, is, I did
unglute, I didn't unhinge, was to have a alt win. Pretty much, by the way, on any set I
make, whether it's un or not, I like having alternate
win conditions, but I made a choice in the Unsets to always do it.
Well, both times.
I also did one on Glue 2, the set you guys never saw.
Okay, so the idea of this one is we look at permanence in order to get in order to get the you have to have all 26
letters. The rules of this
one is because in the
Silver Border world, you always look
at cards as they are.
This means that you may use
cards of other languages and that that
will count. I believe there's
a way to do this with just three
cards is my belief. So anyway,
and the fun of this card is trying to figure out, it's a little puzzle. The Unglued had,
what's it called, the Cheese Stands Alone, which would later be made into a Black Border
card called Baron Glory. This one is a little more silver. Obviously, the Cheese Stands
Alone ended up, we were able to later make
them the Black Border.
This card, uh, breaks a fundamental rule, which is, uh, looking at names specifically.
Um, because the, once again, all versions of cards, no matter what the language, are
considered to be the same for tournament purposes.
But for Silver Border purposes, if the card is in English, it's different than the French
version, because the French version has different letters, for example, for this card.
Okay, next, Number Crunch.
Two blue, two and a blue.
For an instant, it's an unsummon, or it's not an unsummon, it's a boomerang.
Return target permanent to its owner's hand.
And then the gotcha is, whenever your opponent says a number,
you can say gotcha and get it back.
So by the way, I happen to be undefeated in Unglued Unhinged Booster Draft.
And one of the reasons is my understanding and use of this card.
This card is very powerful if you know how to use it.
The reason is that it is tricky to get people to say things,
but numbers are just a little bit easier than normal.
There's so many numbers in Magic that just getting people to talk about game state and things
is something, you know, if you have Number Crunch in your hand, you can do very innocent things like ask someone's
life total, or, you know, ask them a question that's a number answer, because people are
so used to answering that, that they, their filter, it's hard to remember, oh, I'm not
supposed to mention numbers now.
Okay, next, Old Foggy, costs green and a green, It's got Phasing, Cune of Upkeep 1,
Echo,
Fading 3,
Bands with Other Dinosaurs,
Protection from Homorrids,
Snow-Covered Planeswalk,
Flanking,
and Rampage 2.
And it's a 7-7 for two mana,
two green mana.
This was another card
made by Mark Gottlieb,
this in Blast from the Past,
and it's in an old card frame.
And once again,
just like Blast from the Past, in the background, you old card frame. And once again, just like Blast from the Past,
in the background you can see the goblin in the time machine there.
And anyway, so this, both of the cards were just Gottlieb
putting as many old keywords as he could.
Blast from the Past was a little more straightforward,
where Old Foggy's a little more jokey.
A lot of the things going on in Old Foggy
are mechanics that are not particularly good.
Like, Blast from the Past has basically
really good stealth mechanics,
and Old Foggy has a lot of silly things
that we've put onto permanents in the past.
For example,
Bands with Others.
There's some stuff on here
that's more jokey
than practical.
The card, by the way,
actually is decent.
It's not too bad.
But it is phasing.
It has a bunch of abilities.
Like, Blast from the Past
is just all upside.
It's like, I have a kill spell,
you know, a direct damage spell
that I can get
extra utility out of.
Where this spell's like,
okay, I'm a 2-2,
I'm a 2-7-7, but I have a bunch of things you've got to deal with.
But anyway, it's still worth playing.
It's actually still pretty good, especially in limited.
Okay, Orcish Paratroopers.
Two in a red for 4-4.
When it comes into play, you flip it.
If it flips face up, so you can see the card, it stays.
If it flips face down, well, it didn't survive the fall and it goes to your graveyard.
Anyway, this is another card.
One of the things that Richard had done in the original set is he made Chaos Orb,
which was a physical card.
Physical manipulation of the card mattered.
And we later decided that's something we weren't going to do in Black Border Magic.
That's something we weren't going to do in Black Border Magic.
In fact, the card is banned in Vintage because of its... It's one of the few cards that's banned not for power level, but for...
We don't do that anymore.
And so...
Silver Border gets to pick up the physical cards, and this is one of them.
I enjoyed this card quite a bit.
This card's definitely fine.
It's overpowered, so 2R for a 4-4
is good, but you only get it
half the time.
But it is fun trying to... Somehow, when you flip it,
it's like... There is some skill.
I mean, it's not truly 50-50.
If you have some ability to flip cards,
you can get this to land face-up more often
than not.
So, anyway.
And also, the Flamet flavor text is an IOU.
And the IOU for parachute.
I think that's funny.
Okay.
Next is our market research shows
that players like really long card names.
So we made this card have the longest card name ever,
Elemental.
One green green.
And it's got Art Rampage 2.
When one of this becomes blocked,
it gets plus two plus two
for each creature in the art beyond the first one.
So,
this card has lots of jokes packed into it.
So first off, this card is,
so I talked before about
how we wanted the longest name, like,
Unglued had, at the time, the shortest and longest names ever in the game. So I talked before about how we wanted the longest name. Unglued had, at the time, the shortest and longest names ever in the game.
So I talked before about Owl being the shortest name.
Well, the longest name was a card called Burning Cinder Fury of Crimson Chaos Fire
that was done sideways. It was an enchantment.
And it's such a long name that we had to put it sideways to fit it.
And it had two rows on the line.
So anyway, that's the longest name.
So I figured out, let's do a longer name.
So I came up with this name,
and then we came up with the idea of,
what if we ran it all the way along the edge?
And so I made it long,
and I had to add some words actually to it,
so it would fit all the way along the edge.
Some people have asked us if this is true.
Does our market research say people like really long names?
Not exactly.
That part is fictional to make a funny name.
Also, the idea I liked
a lot was having this long name and then ending it
with elemental. Making fun of the fact
of we have elemental, like early on
in Magic, it's like you were elementals made
of actual elements. You were fire elemental
or earth elemental. And then we just
kind of kept going until we got to the point of just
like time elemental
or just started getting sillier and sillier.
I'm not even sure that's an element that you can be a part of.
So anyway, this card is making fun of that.
Art Rampage is caring about art.
It's referencing a mechanic called Rampage, which you got a bonus.
So Rampage N means you got a plus N plus N bonus for every creature blocking you beyond the first.
So this card is for every creature in the arc beyond the first
is the idea. So it's a shtick on
Rampage.
These two abilities really
have nothing to do with each other.
It's sort of like we had a card with a long name
and that was a joke, and then we just needed something else
to go on it. If you'll notice
by the way, the element is made out of books.
The creature is made all out of
books, so it's kind of a book elemental
since it's added with long names.
But anyway, this is definitely one of those moshposhy
cards that we get away with on Hinge, where we just
cram a lot of different jokes on one card.
Like, I needed an Art Rampage card,
and I liked the idea of a creature made out of
books, and I liked a really long name,
and I liked an elemental making fun of things
that we don't make elements out of, so
this card was definitely a hodgepodge.
But it actually ended up being very, very popular.
Also, it combos with some other...
Well, we'll talk about that.
But the fact that it has a long name
actually combos with some other stuff in the set.
Next, Persecute Artist.
One BB Sorcery.
Choose an artist other than Rebecca Gay.
Target players reveal his or her hand
and discard all nine land cards with that
artist. Okay, so there's a bunch of jokes
going here. So, for starters, this card
is illustrated by Rebecca Gay.
But why do I specifically
pull out Rebecca Gay? The reason
is, there was a period of time where, for some
reason, people were picking on Rebecca Gay.
She has a very
particular art style. I like
her art style a lot. I think she's a really amazing artist
and there was a time where
her art
we have a lot of more
hard edge art
which her art is a little softer
and so there was a time
where there was some group of people
that were saying
we should never use Rebecca Gay
we said no
and a lot of her fans
came out defending her
saying no she's awesome
and we're like look
we like her
we're going to use her
if we're able to she's know, she's a good artist.
So anyway, this card, I was needing to pick an artist to do an Artist Matter card, so
I thought it might be funny of picking one artist, and then I said, oh, well, let's make
a joke about Rebecca Gay, because that had happened, and I said, well, we'll have Rebecca
Gay do the art, and then the card, you know, persecutes any artist except for the artist
that did this card.
Next, Phyrexian Librarian.
So Phyrexian Librarian is 3B for 3-3, Flying Trample.
At the beginning of your upkeep, you have to remove the top card of your library,
and you have to balance it on your body.
So this is cumulative upkeep.
What it means is, first you have to balance one card, then two cards,
then three cards, then four cards.
And so the idea is, essentially you're not going to be able to do this,
and it's going to die.
So 3B for 3-3 Flying Trampler is pretty good.
And the question is, how long do you keep this alive?
Now, I've talked before that black is the color in Unhinged,
or mostly Black Green does a little, that has physical stuff,
especially physical on yourself.
That's black's thing.
We're like, I'm willing to take a physical restriction
to get some power out of it.
Because black will get power at any cost, including doing physical things.
I also was really happy with this.
So the idea was, from time to time we like to do concepts that are just on the silly side.
So I was trying to think, what would the weirdest Phyrexian be?
It's a Phyrexian.
Well, it wants to care about, I think you're going to care about words because you're messing with cars. So I was like, what about a Phyrexian. Well, it wants to care about, I think you care about words
because you're messing with cards.
So I was like,
what about a Phyrexian librarian?
And then Kev Walker did the art,
which is awesome.
It's just like horrific,
you know, Phyrexian creatures
in the background
carrying books around.
So anyway,
I was very happy
with how this came out.
Next is planes.
John Avon doing
beautiful, beautiful planes.
I've already told the story
of planes,
or sorry,
the story of the full art land. These lands are really, beautiful planes. I've already told the story of planes. Sorry, the story of the full art land.
These lands are really, really popular.
I believe the five lands are the most popular cards in the set,
given our God Book study.
Not a big surprise that they're the most useful.
Next, Pointy Finger of Doom.
It costs four, and it says three and tap.
You spin it, and then whoever has to rotate completely,
I guess at least once,
and then destroy the closest permanent to it.
So it's kind of take on, it's a, I talk about Chaos Orb,
kind of take on Chaos Orb.
It randomly destroys a card,
but you have to do something to manipulate it.
And then the flavor tax says, I would
have made a sly spin the bell,
spin the bottle joke
if I only thought enough of the audience
had ever played it. I thought anyone
reading this had ever played it, so I was making fun of
a little
bit of the
player base.
We take lots and lots of jokes in Magic, so there's a few
little tiny jokes in the player base. So this card essentially is, I mean, the equivalent
of Spin the Bottle, a combination between Chaos Orb and Spin the Bottle. Next, Punctuate.
Three are punctuate deals damage to target creature equal to half the number of punctuation marks
in that card's text box.
And then its reminder text lists all the punctuation
marks. And in the art,
there's a guy who's hurting Phage
by throwing punctuation marks at her.
It's a magical beam, but all the magic
is punctuation marks.
And this is another example where
I was just trying to do something where
you're referencing something we wouldn't reference in Blackboard or Magic.
The fact that it gets to reference punctuation marks, okay, that's card by card.
It's looking at a specific card.
It's also interesting that I like having direct damage that kind of hurts wordier things and non-wordier things.
It's another mini-theme here.
And that one of Red's restrictions, there's an artist matter theme, so there's also kind of a
word theme going on, and the flavor is
being wordier is kind of,
is often will help you, but
sometimes, in this case, can hurt you.
But anyway, there definitely is
a series running through this of caring about sort of
cartex in general.
Pygmy Giant.
One red and a red, for
a 0-2 creature.
So for our tap, you can sac a creature, and then this card deals X damage to target creature, where X is the number
of, uh...
Oh, it's a number in the sacrilege creature's text box. So the idea is
I sacrilege creature, and then I get a look through their text box,
and I get to get any number. So notice, by the way,
it's not their power toughness box, because we
do that in normal magic. It's their text
box. So the idea is, you can stack a creature,
and then if there's any number reference,
you can do that much damage. And then,
to make sure this card was useful,
so there was, we,
when doing the flavor text, we came
up with this character that was named
Bucky, flavor text writer, that just wrote flavor text.
They made comments about flavor text.
So the flavor text on this card is
487, you're welcome.
The idea being that this card
basically can kill any creature.
Because it can do 487 damage.
And anyway,
Bucky shows up a bunch.
I just talked about Bucky on Pointy
Finger of Doom. Bucky just, we
sort of like this idea, this guy who was a flavor text writer.
I'm not sure why he ended up being called Bucky.
Whoever wrote the first version we like called him Bucky.
But anyway, he's just a character that shows up.
Next, question elemental.
Two blue blue flying,
and that it says, in a questiony way,
that if you do not ask a question,
oh, sorry,
whenever you don't ask a question,
if you control it,
and you ever say something that's not a question,
you give control of the question elemental
to your opponent, or an opponent.
And then now, they have it,
and if they ever make a non-question comment,
then it goes to a different opponent. Two player game will go back to you.
So this is another card making
fun of elementals that don't make
any sense. So this card, originally
I did this card in Ungaloo 2
and it was called Jeopardy. And it showed
three members of, I think it was like
Karn and Tongarth and Squee
playing the game Jeopardy.
And Squee was doing really badly.
I remember, by the way, so Ungaloo 2,
we were going to translate it into Japanese,
and so I had to give the file to our Japanese translator,
at the time a guy named Ron,
and Ron gave me a whole bunch of notes,
and one of the notes I learned was that the game Jeopardy,
the game show, is not in Japan.
Anyway, we changed it, we redid it.
You'll notice, by the way, that
the creature, the question elemental, is
made up of question marks.
This is also, by the way, if you've ever seen me do a San Diego
Comic Con panel, this is the art
I always show at the end when I do questions.
It's the question elemental.
R&D Secret Lair.
This is a legendary land.
It taps for one color with mana.
And then it says, play cards as written.
Ignore all errata.
So this is a dangerous card that obviously we'd never do in Silver Border.
This is the kind of card, by the way, that as Silver Border rules manager,
I get asked all sorts of crazy questions that usually answer, yeah
I guess that's true.
There's some interpretation here because when you
go back to, you get rid of errata
and write as written, all sorts
of weird things happen because a lot of cards,
such as early cards, are written in a way
that's not really
matches how we do the game now, so you have
to have a little bit of creative license to figure out
exactly what's happening.
The flavor text, by the way, I don't know if you remember this correctly, it says, let them complain. As long as the addictive ink is working, we
can do anything we want. And this also has a, in the flavor text, has a little warning
sticker on it. Okay, next. Rare be gone.
Two black red.
Each player sacrifices all permanents.
Then reveals... Sacrifices all rare permanents.
Then reveals his or her hand and discards all rare cards.
So what this does is it destroys all rare cards in play.
It makes them sacrifice.
The opponent sacrifices them.
And all rare cards in hand.
So one of the questions I get about this card is,
does it affect mythic rares?
My answer is yes.
How do you know that?
Because the word rare is in the word mythic rare.
So it destroys all rares and all mythic rares.
Also, the intent is it destroys the expensive things.
The intent of the card, so yes, it destroys rares and mythic rares.
That's a very common question I get as Unruled Manager.
Okay, next card
is called Red Hot Hottie.
It's an elemental, 2-5
for 2-RR.
It's a little hard to read because
the idea is that
the elemental is so hot it's melting everything.
So everything is hard to read because
it's melting.
So whenever Red Hot Hottie deals damage to a creature,
you put a third-degree burn counter on the creature
and then what that third-degree burn counter does
is at every turn, they have to scream the top of their lungs.
So the idea is if you burn their creatures and don't destroy them
because it's a 2-5 it makes them scream
every turn
also this
you can
because it makes you
scream specifically
ah
you can with censorship
which is from unglued
make a censorship
name ah
and play this card
it's actually a good combo
next
remodel
instant for 2 green
if you control
2 or more green permanents
that share an artist,
you may play Remodel without paying its mana cost.
And then it exiles an artifact from the game.
So this is the...
We have a race in white and a race in green.
A race, not the... or just the legacy one.
And Remodel is the same version, but in green.
It can destroy an artifact, exiles an artifact,
but it's free if you have two artists that share a permanent.
It doesn't care about green cards, though.
The reason it cares about green cards is so you can't play this in a deck that doesn't have green mana.
Next is Richard Garfield, PhD.
Three blue and blue for 2-2.
Legendary creature, human designer.
And basically, it makes you play mental magic.
What that means is you can play any card in your hand
as any other card that has the exact same mana cost.
What that means is if a card in your hand is blue-blue,
you can play it as any other spell that's blue-blue.
Now, the important...
This is in the FAQ.
Richard Garfield, PhD, can only change it into cards
that are legal in the format you are playing.
So if you are playing this in a format
that's any card you want,
then it can be any magic card.
But if you're playing this in a more restrictive format,
then he only can play cards that are legal.
He doesn't allow you to play cards
that are legal in the format you are playing.
This card is, by the way,
the most powerful card in Unhinged by quite a bit.
It is a really, really powerful card.
But it is a powerful card
if you know how to maximize its use. So this card really, really powerful card, but it is a powerful card if
you know how to maximize its use. So this card, the reason we push the power level is,
well, to be really, really broken, you have to be super masterful at magic. And the idea
is, well, if you're really good at magic, okay, this is a really powerful card. He also
happens to be legendary, so you can do some fun shenanigans in EDH, although it's a mono blue deck, obviously.
Next card, Rocket
Powered Turbo Slug. Three and a red
for a three one with Super Haste.
What Super Haste means is you can play
the turn you have. You can play the turn you want
for free. You don't have to pay anything.
And it can attack right away because it has
Super Haste. But on the next
turn, if you
do not pay its upkeep,
you die.
You lose the game.
You lose the game?
I think you lose the game.
So this is the card
that the packs in Future Sight
was based off of.
So what happened was
I made this card
and then during,
actually not during Future Sight,
but during Planar Chaos,
Paul,
a guy named Paul from R&D,
came up with,
he took Rocket Turbo Slug
and made it into
a whole cycle.
And I said,
I like it,
that's cool,
but we should save it
for Future Sight
because really this is about
I get to borrow
from the future
so it made more sense
in Future Sight.
So we pushed it
off to Future Sight.
The flavor text,
by the way,
is all scrambled letters
because at the bottom
there's a little snail,
a little Rocket Power
Turbo Slug
who's zooming
by, and he's messing up the
flavor text, which is scattered to the
all over the card. If you figure out,
if you get all the letters, and they're all there,
you can piece together the message.
And the message, you piece it all together,
I'm paraphrasing, it's something like,
did you really go through all the bother to figure out
this message? So, that's the kind of,
I love having jokes that the player has to work a little bit.
Because there are people who are like, oh, this is actually a piece of flavor text.
And when you figure it out, it does.
Next, Rod of Spanking.
Rod of Spanking is an artifact that costs one.
For two and tap, it does one damage to a target player.
And then you get to untap it unless they say, thank you, sir, may I have another?
This is a joke on, have you ever seen,
it's a fraternity thing.
I think in Animal House, the movie Animal House,
you see this where as part of pledging they paddle you
and then you have to say thank you sir, may I have another?
So anyway, Bride of Spanking is a little nod for that.
And the idea here is I get to do this
unless they make you say something. And obviously there are cards
that give, like censorship, or
you could also play it with
order of the sacred word.
Not order of the sacred word. The green card that gets
plus three, plus three whenever you say the word.
Anyway, there's things that care about
words, so you can combo that with that word
and make them say the word, or else
suffer the penalty.
Next is snot.
S period, N period, O period, T period.
It's green for
star, star, star squared,
star squared. And then when it comes
into play, you can attach it to other
snots and its
star is whatever number of
creatures it's attached to. So if you
play snot by itself, it's a 1-1
creature. If you have two of them attached
together, it's 4-4, 9-9,
16-16. If you start doing clones and things,
you can get even bigger.
And the art is done in such a way that it
bleeds to the edge that if you stick them next to each
other, it's continuous.
This card actually
inspired an entire mechanic in the
game Duel Master, by the way. So if you play
Duel Master, you like snot, Duel Master
we do this in Silver Border. They do this
in their main game. Duel Master's
a little sillier than Magic. I mean
it's Black Border version.
Another very common question
is what does snot stand
for? I've never said.
In my mind it does stand for something, but
I'm going to leave it to you to pick what you
want it to stand for. Next but I'm going to leave it to you to pick what you want it to stand for.
Next is Saute.
One red red.
It's an instant.
It deals three and a half damage to target player.
So one of the interesting things about this card, I'll say this.
We were going to do a card that made a joke referencing an internet meme.
a joke referencing an internet meme.
But we
got permission
and did art based on it.
And then the last minute, the people we'd asked
had a change of heart
and said they didn't want us to do it.
And so we had a completely new art.
And it ended up being sauté.
Which was, it's a
bunch of little beables in a sauté
pan.
Also, we have, this flavor text quotes the Underworld cookbook
and the super, super long name of the person who, the cook,
who I've since been told is female.
I did not know that until I made a joke on my blog.
Next is save life, instant for one W.
It's the part of the cycle. If you say save or life,
target player gains 2.5 life
or prevent the next 2.5 damage.
It's obviously takeoff on healing salve,
except that it is a gotcha.
So it's basically healing salve for slightly less,
2.5 rather than 3.
But if your opponent says save or life,
you get it back.
And life is a pretty easy one to get people to say.
On the card, by the way, that is...
Does anyone know who the lifeguard
on the card is?
It is Sisay,
for those that are unaware.
Yes, that is Sisay
as the lifeguard.
Okay, next,
Shoe Tree.
Shoe Tree is four
and a green
for a 3-3 creature.
Shoe Tree comes into play
with up to two
shoe counters.
Use your shoes
as counters.
And it gets plus one,
plus one
for every shoe counter.
So the idea here is when it comes into play, you're required to put your shoes on it, or
shoes you brought, and then it gets plus two plus two. So really it's a
5-5 creature. So one of the things that's funny about this card is
that if I have a second one, well, I need shoes for the second one.
So the idea is, unless I brought extra shoes, and well-versed unhinged players will bring extra shoes,
this restricts how many you can have and play at one time.
It also is the second unset to make you remove clothing,
although last time we inadvertently made you remove your pants,
this time shoes, so we're working our way a little better.
The Herloon Wrangler was a card that had denim walk and unglued,
and it was not my intention for people to move their pants, but apparently they did.
So this time I thought I'd go a little tamer.
Probably the lesson to me moving forward should be don't have people remove any errors of clothing.
Shoe removal did have its downside.
Okay, next is Side to Side.
This is part of the mini-cycle where you play a non-magic mini-game.
Side to Side is two and a green.
You and target player arm wrestle.
And if you win, you put a 3-3 ape token into play.
So this is interesting.
I'm not a big man.
I had never, ever won an arm wrestling.
I've lost every time I've ever played against me.
Somebody brought
a... I was gun
slinging. I was spell slinging at Worlds.
And so they
brought two decks.
They wanted me to play a deck that they had brought.
And that's very common. People will have me play a deck.
So I said, okay. And then this friend, by the way,
was playing next to me. And it turned out the whole
shtick of what they were doing was they were playing an ass-whooping deck to take me out. And then his friend, by the way, was playing next to me, and it turned out the whole shtick of what they were doing was they were playing
an ass-whooping deck to take me out.
And so his friend was
playing the person sitting next to me, the other R&D person,
and was just taking out all my cards
so that I was having trouble winning, because all my
cards were being destroyed by the person sitting next to me.
And at one point,
we had an arm wrestle over a staying power,
and I won, or side by side,
and I won! Which is, like, the only time I've ever won. In fact power, and I won, or side by side, and I won,
which is like the only time I've ever won.
In fact, I think I won that game.
So even though it was 2-1-1,
and they were ass-whooping all my stuff,
I believe I managed to pull that game out
because I won the side by side.
Flavor Text, by the way, is very funny
because this is a good example where
there's a lot going on.
So the art showed, I think it's Tongarth,
yeah, it's Tongarth in a gym with Squee,
like being the towel boy.
And so the Flavor Techs had to make fun
of all these weird things.
It's called side to side, there's arm wrestling,
there's a 3-3-8 token, what's going on?
So the Flavor Tech says,
so by the way, I just got to my parking lot,
so I'm going to quickly finish this up
because my goal is to make this last
no more than
five podcasts so I'm going to do a few more
and then we will call it a day
the flavor text is
his friends at the gym never
hold on
his friends at the gym
never knew
Garland's secret shame
for years he had tried to walk away from professional arm wrestling but hey, free monkeys His friends at the gym never knew Garland's secret shame.
For years he had tried to walk away from professional arm wrestling, but hey,
free monkeys.
Anyway, that entertained me of
trying to tie it all together about arm wrestling and
monkeys and...
Also, in Magic, all monkeys are apes.
Okay, next. 6C Beast.
3R
for Beast. As 6C Beast comes
into play,
you secretly put six or fewer plus or minus counters on it.
Then the opponent guesses
the number of counters.
If that player guesses right,
sacrifice 6C Beast.
So the idea is
that I can make this a 6-6,
a 5-5, a 4-4,
a 3-3, a 2-2, or a 1-1.
If I, whatever I choose,
if my opponent correctly guesses
what I do,
I lose the creature.
So this is a bluffing game. Like, do I want to get a 6-6? If I go for 6-6, will I get 6-6 and I lose it? what I do, I lose the creature. So this is a bluffing game. It's like, do I
want to get a 6-6? If I go for 6-6, will I get
6-6 and I lose it? Should I do a 5-5? Because
maybe they'll assume it's a 6-6. Or maybe they'll assume
I'm doing a 5-5. Maybe I'll do a 4-4.
Anyway, this card's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun mental games
and I've had a blast with this card.
I'm very, very good with this card. I get this
thing out a lot. Next,
Smartass. Two and a blue for a two and a half
one. Whenever Smartass attacks,
name a card. Defending player may reveal his or her
hand and show you that named card.
Show you that the named card isn't there.
If that player doesn't, Smartass is unblockable.
So essentially, if I can correctly name something
in your hand, I'm unblockable.
This being
Donkeyfolk and having half, you know, two and a half,
both those things keep it being silver
bordered, but the actual ability on the card could be black-bordered.
We're just trying to play into smart-ass.
Once again, this is part of the ass cycle
that I'll have names where I'm playing off puns with ass.
This is smart-ass.
So, like, there's dumb-ass and fat-ass
and cheap-ass and badass.
This is the final in the cycle.
And this also has the effect where the text box looks like you're looking through
a
telescope. So it looks like you're looking through
a telescope.
Okay.
How many do I have left here?
Okay, I'm going to
quickly finish
off a few more. I want to make sure the next time
that we have enough that I finish.
Next we have Spell Counter.
2 U U Instant counter target spell.
Gotcha! Oh, this is the blue version of the cycle.
We say Spell or Counter.
So let's see.
The white one was Save Life.
The blue one was Spell Counter.
The black one was Kill Destroy.
The red one was Deal Damage.
And the green one was Creature Guy.
So that's a full cycle. Those are all gotcha
if you save their name and you get them back.
Next, Standing Army.
Two white, white for two, four.
As long as you're standing, Standing Army has Vigilance.
So this is another card that
makes you sort of do something. The interesting
thing about this card is, in order for Vigilance
to matter, it only matters when you attack. So really
all you need to do is stand up before you declare
your attack. But some people
with Standing Army just continuously stand.
I like the name. This is one of those
names that really could be a Black Border name. It was such
a perfect name here. We used it.
I try normally to get names I
don't think we'll use in Black Border, but this is one that
was just too perfect, so I had to
keep it. Okay, two more
cards, then I'm going to end for today. How am I doing on time?
Oh, okay, not too bad.
Staying Power is an enchantment, two and a white.
As long as Staying Powers is in play until end of
turn and this turn effect don't end.
This is a card I tried to do in Black
Border. I was told it just did not
work in the rules. The idea is just
effects that would be temporary aren't.
This is a very popular card
from Unhinged and it does lots of
cool things. You can build neat decks around it.
Finally, Stonecone Basilisk.
Four and a green for two and a half, five.
When Stonecone Basilisk
blocks or becomes blocked by a creature
with fewer letters in its name, destroy that creature.
So it destroys anything with a smaller name
than it. Whenever an opponent
reads Stonecone Basilisk, that player
is turned to stone until
end of turn. Stone players cannot attack, block, or place spells.
So this is a card. The real shtick of this card, I mean, it has a basilisk-like ability.
The real fun of this card is when the turner reads it, they turn to stone and can't do anything.
And so there's fun ways to use this card.
The card is actually done so it's hard to read to make your opponent want to pick it up.
So across the table they can't quite see it and they've got to look at it.
There's lots of fun things also in the art.
One of my favorite things about the art, if you look at it,
is everybody in the art is turned to stone,
except the guy who's using the Stonecloak of Baskos.
Except, if you look in the background, there's two guys who are unaffected
because they're playing under a table,
because they're obviously doing Enter the Dungeon.
So I like doing that kind of in jokes.
And if you look in the art, there's a lot of little jokes that are
self-referencing other cards. So anyway,
I am now at work
and I'm parking. So let me,
I have one more podcast and I will finish.
I promise I will keep this to a five
podcast series. Hopefully, hopefully
I know the unsets are not for everybody, but
there's a lot of fun things there. So I hope you guys are enjoying
the
unhinged walkthrough.
Anyway, I am now parked.
I've been parked for a while, but I am parked.
So it's time for me to be making magic.
Talk to you guys next time.