Mining the Past

Zzzyxas's Abyss

This one was pretty easy because one, I told you last week and two, well, it's just pretty easy. The driving influence in Drop of Honey was the distinctive way that it slowly destroys everything. It doesn't eliminate things willy-nilly. It has a method to its madness. It's destroying things systematically. I found the flavor of it and the mechanical “build around me” possibilities intriguing.

Flash forward to Unhinged design. I'm trying to find new ways to make card titles matter. At some point I stumble upon alphabetization. What if I made a card that cared whether or not something came first alphabetically? After running through all the possibilities, I realized that destruction seemed the most potent. And that is when I realized that I had subconsciously recreated Drop of Honey replacing “lowest mana cost” with “alphabetically last”.

But I wasn't done. Something was wrong. And then it hit me. All my life I was raised hearing how alphabetizing was a means of keeping things fair. A way to keep things random. But what the teachers never seemed to understand was that it wasn't random and it wasn't fair. The same people always got to go first. And those of us with names starting with R always went near the end. Every time.

Then it hit me, that I was in charge here. Who said the card had to start destroying things at the end of the alphabet? That's when I came up with the wizard Zzzyxas. You see, he had it worse than me. He was always last. But what if one day he had had enough? What if one day he just snapped? How does Arnie Albertson feel now, huh? I mean, the wizard Aaaagar.

When I flavored the card, I decided to mimic the Abyss because I didn't think all that many players would recognize a somewhat obscure Arabian Nights rare.

Orcish Paratroopers & Pointy Finger of Doom

I'll bet no one guessed this one completely correctly. Yes, two different Unhinged cards were inspired by Chaos Orb (which I like to think of as Alpha's Un card). Interestingly however, these two cards were inspired by two different aspects of the original card.

Orcish Paratroopers

This card owes its existence to the fact that it's fun flipping cards. I remember back in the day when Chaos Orbs were legal in tournaments and people would spend much of their down time practicing flipping Chaos Orbs. At first I assumed it was to get better. Eventually I realized that skill improvement was only about five percent of the reason. The other ninety-five? It's fun!

So, I knew I wanted to have a card that players could flip. But “flip to destroy” was a bit overdone, so I had to find another reason to flip a card. I started brainstorming about why one would flip a card. I thought about all of the mechanical ramifications, and I got nowhere. So, I decided to take an Unglued approach and think about what could be represented. Very quickly I hit upon skydiver. It was jumping out of a plane. So what did it care about the flip? Aha! For survival. If it flipped correctly, it survived. So who was jumping out of a plane? I wanted it to be a 4/4 so goblins were out. It had to be a humanoid that fit in red and made sense as a 4/4. Oh yeah, and was dumb as bricks (no one in their right mind jumps out of airplanes with a fifty percent success rate). And thus my answer was obvious, orcs.

Pointy Finger of Doom

The Finger (isn't it cool to have a card I can casually call the finger – “My friend said he didn't own any Unhinged rares so I gave him The Finger”) came about because I was trying to recreate the other half of Chaos Orb, the random destruction. And like Chaos Orb, I knew I needed some physical component. So if I couldn't toss the card what could I do to it? The best answer was obviously to spin it. After a little playtesting we found that it was very hard to control. Much harder than Chaos Orb (Back in the day I had a number of friends that had an accuracy rate with Orbs that words cannot do justice.)

And that is how one little Alpha card inspired two Unhinged cards.

Curse Of The Fire Penguin

While a little clunky, Takklemaggot was a revolutionary enchant creature card. It transcended simple enchantmenthood and became a card that represented something bigger. When you played a Takklemaggot, you weren't just affecting a single creature, you were affecting the entire play experience. As a designer, I always found this very cool.

Flash forward to Unhinged design. I was determined to find new ways to layout the card. And then I stumbled on the idea of a creature enchantment that overlayed the creature it enchanted. This overlay would allow me to change almost everything on the card (barring name, mana cost, color, and illustration – which I should point out is different than illustrator). My biggest problem was that it still had the vulnerability of all creature enchantments in that its fate was tied to the creature it enchanted.

And then it hit me. What if Curse of the Fire Penguin was not a singular transformation but a larger event – like Takklemaggot? It could be some kind of curse that turns creatures into something silly (the fire penguin part was added in later). So why didn't I include the final part of Takklemaggot that turns it into a global enchantment if there are no creatures in play? Who says I didn't? Consumes and confuses? Just kidding. No global enchantment effect.

S.N.O.T.

If you're a regular reader of my column, you'll know that Plague Rats have inspired more cards than any other card in Magic. Inspiration for Slivers? Plague Rats. The Kindle mechanic? Plague Rats. Zzzyxas's Abyss? Drop of Honey. Aren't you paying attention?

Some of these cards might be subtle homages. Not S.N.O.T. You have one in play, it deals 1 damage. Two deal 4. Three deal 9. Four deal 16. See the connection? The only difference is that the S.N.O.T.s glom together to form one singular big creature rather than a bunch of small ones making it harder to kill with direct damage but easier to off with non-damage-based creature destruction.

Stay tuned to this column for more Plague Rats inspired cards.

Urza's Hot Tub

A common design trick when you're trying to find new areas of design is to take an interesting card and change one variable about it to get a new card. Urza's Hot Tub owes its existence to me doing this exercise with the Exodus card Survival of the Fittest. I liked the idea of one card being discarded to get another of its kind out of the library. But what attribute could I use?

As this was an Un set, I was determined to find a more offbeat attribute to play off of. Color, converted mana cost, and card type all existed in normal Magic so I went looking for something new. And that something that had to connect had to be something that interconnected a variety of cards. I believe I stumbled upon the answer during a “word pass” where I was trying to find more cards that cared about the value of their words.

And that, my friends, is how the hot tub found its heat.

Wordmail

I know the majority of my readers haven't been playing since Legends came out, so let me fill you in on the initial reaction to Rabid Wombat. Players loved it! In an over-the-top-kinda-creepy kind of way. The card was never that good, but it had a certain quality that excited everyone. It took me years to crack it but I finally think I understand the mystery behind the Wombat.

First, flavorwise the card is just odd enough to be endearing but not so odd that it alienates. Second, and most importantly, it does something very cool – it gets better while you're busy doing things you already want to do. So what do players want to do in Un sets that we could capitalize on?

Often in design when you can't figure something out, you mentally table it so that your unconscious can work on it for a while. Then one day while looking at the Unglued godbook, I saw what it was that the hard data said our audience wanted to do – play with cards with really long names. And thus, Wordmail was born.

Yet Another Aether Vortex

These are starting to get a bit harder. You see, sometimes the influenced card travels far from the tree of the influencing card. Yet Another Aether Vortex is one such card. It all began years ago when I made Sneak Attack (called Blitzkreig in design) for Urza's Saga. I really liked the card and was always looking out for ways to create tweaks of it.

One day I decided to sit down and see what card I could create inspired by Sneak Attack. I liked the one-shotness of Sneak Attack. So I started by creating a spell that put all the creature cards in your hand for one turn. Too swingy. I thought about an enchantment that created the effect once per turn. Still a little swingy. What if the choice was random? Hard to execute. What if it was the top card of your library? Something about that seemed cool.

Would the enchantment just take the top card of the library each turn and put it into play? That's when I came up with the idea of the card on top of your library just being in play in addition to being the top card of the library. But this brainstorming was during a normal Magic set and I knew I was drifting far away from a “tournament playable” card.

Then Unhinged was announced internally and I knew I had a home for Sneak Attack #2: Electric Boogaloo.

Staying Power

If you got this one, I'm impressed. This is an example where I liked one aspect of the original card and then crafted a completely different card with a completely different mechanic. So what do Humility and Staying Power have in common? They are both global enchantments that say, “I know you think Card X does blah, but it doesn't. Not anymore”

Humility has caused all kinds of rules problems, yet it is still a very influential card design-wise. (Don't tell Magic Rules Manager John Carter I said that.) Overwriting cards such that they have an altered functionality is mighty cool. (And to be fair to John, mighty dangerous.)

Staying Power started out as the following card:

Extended Warranty

Enchantment
Replace “Until end of turn” on all cards with “Until the end of next turn.”

The idea behind the card was that it just made “until end of turn” effects last a little longer. I submitted it to a set and it was kicked out for rules concerns. So I submitted it again. Rejected by the rules. And again. (Don't laugh, I've gotten a lot of cards into Magic with this time-tested method.) And it was removed again. I tried it one more time. It burned to the ground and then sunk in the swamp. But then came news of Unhinged. And I knew the card had a chance. Because in Silver-bordered land we get to ignore phrases like “do you have any idea of the chaos that card would cause” and “are you mad?”

I submitted the card as an identical version but I white as color pie shifting had moved rules changing global cards into white. During Unhinged design, the team (Randy Buehler, Brady Dommermuth, Brandon Bozzi and myself) decided to juice the card up (but at no time thought of rejecting it – I love the Un sets) by making the effect permanent rather than merely extending it one turn.

And thus we end up with a fifty foot Wild Mongrel.