Why Magic Works| Richard Garfield on Black Lotus, Design & Iconic Cards

All right and just like that we're back and I feel like we've just gotten started. I have a long list of topics in my head and we've just scratched the surface. I cannot wait to continue so let's get right to that. This relates to the idea of emergent gameplay and it's actually sort of a personal question. This question popped into my mind when I was thinking about formative things for you. The first deck that ever became a viral thing, a meme of sorts in the Magic community, but a meme in a good way, was the deck. It was and actually it propagated on the Usenet not as a consequence of me going and typing up long articles about it. I had a friend of mine in the Bay Area that posted an article on the Usenet I think in late 1994 declaring that it was basically the solution to Magic the Gathering. I was given the credit as being its designer but I play-tested it and developed it against you know a backdrop of dozens of different people and figured out exactly how to fine-tune it so that for example it had two Sarah Angels instead of three or one or four whatever, two motes etc, two disrupting scepters. I'm curious to know when that construction fell on your radar because it was an example of emergent gameplay in the system that you had developed and a coalescing, a consolidation of this idea that the dev team understood that card advantage was the principal strategy in Magic. I'm very curious to know when that design fell on your radar and how. I don't remember but I do remember people talking about it and playing it as being basically the sign that there was some very serious thinking and play going into the game because there was a lot of noise in the signal back in that day. Now one of the reasons it wouldn't have affected me much is because very early on I stepped back from Magic in order to work on other games and in particular put more flags in this new terrain of a trading card game. Magic was clearly going to be something which needed not to be bottlenecked by one designer and was going to be more work than I could do in any case and so I trained and empowered a lot of people to take up that mantle. Yeah there's so many layers to that obviously in terms of the expansions and the card design that came afterward and you know Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends etc. I wanted to circle back a little bit to some of the debunking stuff because we hadn't finished all of those off. The next one concerns the exclusion of one of the 10 canonical iconic dual lands from Alpha, the Volcanic Island and the rumor that I was told was that Volcanic Island was actually submitted by the artist Mark Poole as a bird in the foreground and an erupting volcano way off in the distance but with a giant bird in the center of the frame and that that required you as you mentioned before that you had to create out of thin air a card to match the picture. Ironically the best card in green for like the next decade or longer and still played to this day in a million formats where it's legal the bird of paradise of course but that Volcanic Island there wasn't enough time to commission a new art piece for Volcanic Island to get it into the set. Is that what actually happened or is it just an error? I can verify the part about the art. The art came to me and I said that is not this is one of the few cards which I said no that's not going to work. We can use the art but that can't be because that's not a picture of an island that's a picture of a bird and so I made on the spur of the moment bird's paradise and so yeah it did not get much play test and the part about the Volcanic Island not getting in there I don't know whether there was a clerical error or whether they didn't have the piece in time it could have been either seems like it'd be a coincidence for it to be in addition there was an error but I don't know. It is interesting because as you might recall the circle protection black is also missing from alpha yeah and it does not have an associated story related to a piece of art that was commissioned and then obviously wrong and appropriated to another card that you had to design so I'm tilting in the direction of potentially clerical error that volcanic island may have been painted by alpha and it was just left off alongside cop black yeah and these these could be related also and that back in the day uh the you know people there weren't that many people and they were overworked and uh and so it might have been that there was you know you've got these pieces of art already put in and this other one is just in a different pile and you know it gets forgotten so it could be related right like the reason why it was that one which had was substituted was uh was um just got the piles messed up right gotcha but uh but yeah uh the part about the bird of paradise that's true that is accurate yeah a lot of these stories kind of combine over time as we've noticed which is really interesting of all the cards to leave out to why volcanic island is so good it just sucks that there are no alpha volcanic islands so the population of those is just artificially small compared to all the other black border duels just so cool on the subject of emissions and changes and so on another rumor that i have heard relates to the fact that alpha's frames are different from all the other frames of magic that have ever been printed since that the corners are more rounded than every other magic card the rumor that i heard about that was that despite all of the care and preparation that and development in both the art and the mechanics that went into creating alpha that everybody kind of forgot about physical parameters of the cards themselves that when it was finally time to print the set up and to cut it into cards everyone's like wait a minute how big are they supposed to be are they are they supposed to be rectangular are they supposed to be rounded corners what are we are they supposed to be circles and at the time cartamundi's its main gig was producing casino cards for casinos in europe and stuff macau or whatever and so they just simply went with the cutting tools that they had to cut casino cards and that's why alpha has those proportions so i'm curious to know is that rumor true or was there some other decision in advance of what alpha would look like there was definitely i there was not as far as i know there was no decision uh that it would have that the corner sizes would change um i know that that i would have said i want rounded corners right we were not going to have square corners that was that that wouldn't have been considered um but uh but i wasn't sophisticated enough to know the difference between the corners i was never asked i never gave it any thought um i actually was told at some point something which i i imagine must not be true uh which was that uh the reason why they were different is because uh the plates wear away over time and this was close to the end of the wear so that strikes me as being ridiculous that seems ridiculous but at the time i didn't give much thought and uh and and uh believed it um and uh uh so yeah i don't know short answer is i don't i don't know why we ended up with those with those with the corner differentiation all right i'm the the rumor that i relayed to you came from peter atkinson so probably pretty accurate he actually was what he said to me was that it was only at cartamundi where they figured out wait a minute if they're going to be shuffling these cards a lot they are going to need to have rounded corners you obviously can't shuffle cards that have square corners they just break and snap and stuff so that they figured it out at cartamundi but the fact that you knew that in advance makes perfect sense you have tons of experience shuffling decks of cards together over the years yeah i i would be surprised if i didn't say i wanted rounded corners but if nobody ever asked me maybe maybe i didn't um i know that that uh i was sent lots of card stock and was testing it and a lot of the times you know the the people that wizards were saying oh this card stock's really good and i said no that's too thick and uh i gave them what i'm what we call the the bend test i said you have to be able to pick up the card bend it together and unflex it and not have a crease so they would do that to this card and there's a crease in the middle and so if it failed the bend test it was off the table that that blue core paper i learned so much about in a recent interview with a a guy named spencer who is producing his own card game they actually developed their own core called orange core to try to differentiate from the fact that because blue core paper has become so established in the entire global card production ecosystem you don't know what kind you're getting and there's a lot of lower quality versions of it so you might be getting the blue core paper but you're not actually really getting the stuff that magic cards were are made out of i see which is pretty interesting um on the subject of sort of just craftsmanship another rumor was that right before arabian knights was going to press the plan was to make the backs of the cards pink instead of brown and that the game was going to be called magic colon arabian knights instead of magic the gathering that the expansion would actually be indicated on the back of the card and that the pink back is uh matches the pink foil color of the arabian knights booster packs that that was the original intention and it took a late night panicked call from a group of players in texas i think out to belgium to try to talk them out of this madness at the last minute is that true i don't know about the late night panic call certainly would be possible um the and i would describe it as purple rather than pink but i guess it is more purple yeah it's true but uh uh the the big picture is yes 100 percent and i was the uh the bad guy there i wanted different card backs um and but my heart was my heart was in the right place uh so so what's the what was the reason why why were you so well first of all we had tested we had tested magic for two years and even uh and when when it was published the people who had been testing it for two years were still playing it and the cards came out and they switched to that and they started playing it so i knew that magic was robust um arabian knights had comparatively not been play tested at all i mean it had had some play testing but but it was very little so i didn't know whether it was going to stand up the way that magic did i did not uh want people to feel obligated to buy it i felt like you have magic and now if you make them the same card back suddenly you've got this whole other thing your collection is incomplete unless you get this but if we make it a different product then you can um shuffle it in and play it and basically your opponent would know oh you're playing with the expansion and they could say i don't want to play with the expansion that was intentional right where people pointed that out they said that oh that's a bug right that's an obvious problem because if the card backs are different i can just look at your hand and be like well that's an arabian knight card or his whole card is arabian knights and i know that counterspell doesn't exist in arabian knights so i have free reign to play this thing so people view that as a bug but you're like no this is a feature of it this is this is my my main my the main thing i was after was making it uh so that people didn't feel like they had to get the expansion um and i felt like if you made it so there's the same card back they will feel obligated to incorporate that into the play environment that will become the de facto play environment and it's untested hasn't had this length of testing and uh i didn't like what that said to the players as i don't want them to feel like they're on a treadmill that we put out cards and that we make a mistake and we suddenly the entire game's bad but by giving it a different card back um we sort of insulate that we could make it we could have it so people had this authority to say i don't want to play with those or i do want to play with those and that the cost as far as players being able to see what cards are coming up i didn't like that but it was worth it collateral damage yeah and and peter peter didn't agree with me but uh he was going to go with me and i felt pretty strongly about that but it was uh last basically last minute might have been these panic calls i don't know but i reversed myself and decided to go with the same card back and uh it was clearly the right move even though my worries i think uh were not groundless how different is the game if that decision reverses i wonder i really wonder how different magic evolves and and and whether or not it kills it it might have killed it i don't think so i think i think at worst it would have made the uh the uh card sleeve industry bigger yeah i i had a question about the sleeve thing when did you first see your your first sleeve magic card you're like oh my god they're people are putting them in sleeves what does that mean it was very early uh um so the other thing is this this tied into uh we viewed at the beginning that we were not going to we were going to print these cards and then we were going to print ice age was at one point the next expansion so it was so it was going to go magic the gathering then magic colon ice age then magic colon mirage and then you know that was so a new chapter was going to be a new environment of 300 cards and and those were going to have different card backs um and they were going to be standalone i mean that would make more sense but then the first expansion was in fact arabian knights when did when did you guys pivot away from the idea of making just standalone blocks standalone block right at that point yeah there were lots of lots of expansions before ice age came out a whole bunch no um seven or something eight is basically uh uh retailers and and players and and uh and wizards really were desperate to put out more cards and and desperate to have more cards in the environment and that's where arabian knights came from and he you know peter really had to twist my arm uh would you do this for us and i was all these reasons why i was hesitant made me hesitant made made me resistant but uh the lure of designing new cards and sort of having more fun with this and being able to explore the magic palette in a different way uh with arabian knights was too great for me and so and so i jumped in and had a great time doing it really enjoyed uh the process of designing uh arabian knights and and and the decision to make them the same card back was sort of the last uh step on the way to what we ended up with which was small expansions punctuated by big big expansions that were all meant to be compatible and that was putting like there were some real problems with that as well uh which became which we anticipated and i you know i was really worried about um which was that uh which was the more cards if you come out with ice age and have it standalone it's going to be as good as magic it's going to be better because we've had more time to we can balance it to the sort of games people like and so forth but you take uh and we can you know we're better at making cards and so forth but you take it and you mix it with magic now suddenly all the cards which you're designing have to compete with all the old magic cards right it obviously was there's tons of things immediately right and and so there was a and and and this this is where of course eventually type 2 came in um where you could only play for cards for the last couple years right and that was that was a hard sell uh um standard that was a hard sell that was something we had to but it was super it was really necessary and one of the reasons you know one of the one of the uh you know even though this was forefront in my mind when you know even as far back as uh arabian knights um this was really driven home that we were really in this world when ice age came out and one of the earliest things i read about it was there's one card in ice age worth anything everything else is trash right and it's like this environment of ice age had entered you know it's like had had as much play test as magic more because it had been play tested all the time and the conclusion to this one player was that sort through it all this is the card this one might have a little bit of merit and you can't use like this is unsustainable you can't make a 300 card expansion and have people sorting through because there's one card which is going to affect their deck it has to stand on its own and so that's why i wanted different card backs and once we got rid of those that's what led us on this road to standard to standard it's so interesting yeah it makes perfect sense how that idea would lead to the standard format once all the card backs are the same you need that division it's so ironic too right you talked about how you have years of game development experience that would make the cards from ice age naturally more powerful and dynamic and in fact compared to alpha ice age is like a limited set right you know it's like everything is so much weaker on average yeah one card right there's there's one card in there that's a bit of an outlier but yeah i forget i forget what it was but but yeah and and it's natural because we uh you know this goes back to the point is like we knew that the stuff in uh um the original set was balanced for uh people who didn't know what they were doing and who weren't going to get many many cards ice age was balanced differently it was balanced for people who were going to get a lot of cards and with were more sophisticated and that makes you know that means that uh that if you're going to mix them well if you want to win you're going to play mostly with the old cards yeah undoubtedly it's i i had a couple of questions about your uh just sort of reflecting on those years of game design those first few years if you're if there are any cards that kind of came to the surface that you regret that you made cards that you designed that didn't either didn't turn out the way that you wanted didn't comport with your vision or wound up being too format working too abusive too strong do you have a little subset of anything that you worked on that you wish you could take back some examples could probably come up um when people ask me that question usually they're thinking about the black lotuses and the moxes which are as we've already established absolutely not in that category i'm not thinking of that usually the cards i want to change are the ones that were too complicated for what they did like uh like um you like in the original set like things like illusionary mask and uh and raging river when you when they start getting down into micro font and it's not even really worth the effect that it comes out those those are my biggest regrets right the ones where people get them and their eyes glaze over before they finish reading it they can't really understand what's going on and as we became better card designers we realized that wasn't necessary to get a lot of play value as well um and uh and so yeah most of my regrets are are card effects that are too complicated and too too hard to understand makes sense yeah i remember a specific quote that you it was attributed to you that the card word of command was buggier than a high school fortran class i don't remember that but i'll take credit no it's certainly it it definitely tracks it would be cool to explore the opposite of this i was wondering if you have a top five favorite magic cards of all time and it can cut off wherever kind of your knowledge base ends wherever that terminates and i was thinking we could kind of do it as a bit of a lightning round where maybe you start and i have the advantage of foresight here but we go back and forth and it doesn't have to be in any particular order but i'd like five cards that either you design them or you just loved playing with them and really admired the design that someone else had come up with sure all right why don't you start go number one uh shaharazade tell me about the card yeah shaharazade is um arabian knights and uh it is not um it's not legal in any format as far as i know it is legal in one format there are variations of old school format where you can play with four copies of shaharazade so in shaharazade with shaharazade uh what i like about it is that it's very meta i like meta designs it makes it so that when when you play shaharazade you play a sub game of magic with the same decks and the uh loser of the sub game loses half their life in the over game i like this card because it it again is very meta and it also reflected uh the role of shaharazade in the arabian knights in a way i liked a lot yeah shaharazade she was um forestalling her death by telling the sultan stories which never ended and one of her techniques was to tell stories within stories within stories and so this really tickled me this idea of playing games within games within games um and uh and one one of the side notes to shaharazade is that uh is that you can actually make a killer shaharazade deck with all planes and shaharazades uh and the way it works you can throw in some mox uh pearls if you want it to move a little faster um what the way it works is when you play shaharazade you start a sub game right when you play shaharazade you start a sub game and when you play shaharazade you start a sub game and if they're playing with a 60 card deck you need a 65 card deck or whatever and then in like the fifth or sixth sub game that's when they run out of cards and you deck them you go to the over game now you play another game up you have to you deck them again you go to the over game you deck them again so after uh i forget what it is eight iterations of having your life uh you always round down uh that's when you lose the game right anyway when you when you figure when you when you uh do taught up all the math it's like you have to play something like 50,000 games before uh before this deck wins but as long as uh you're winning over half half your games by decking then then you're going to do fine yeah it seems like honestly in that situation you'd be much more likely to win via opponent just conceding oh yeah out of grief oh yeah you think so yeah i mean i've had shaharazade played against me in a tournament i'm like what do i even do it's weird right because fundamentally if you think about the card mechanically it's not good in the sense that playing with four copies of a card that takes you to a sub game where you are not by any measure favored there's nothing to guarantee that you're favored in the sub game but you've made your deck weaker by playing four copies of a card that involves playing a sub game no that's why that's why i'm not sure about whether you make can make a deck which makes this work with where you're limited to four but if you can play enough that your deck size becomes an issue then then you're going to get an advantage and it is the ultimate test of your opponent's patience eventually they wind up just taking a gargantuan amount of damage because they don't want to play the sub games which is often the correct response you're like okay fine i just concede i take 10 i don't care let's just play the regular game all right my my favorite card is something we were sort of quietly discussing in the background a few minutes ago the best card in ice age the best black card ever printed probably when measured against the entire arc of the game you could make an an argument for yawgmoth's will or demonic tutor there's a few other candidates for sure but necropotence just the embodiment of the card to me was just sort of skill incarnate this idea that you wager your life points with unknown information you have to set aside life in advance of seeing any of the cards you're drawing which means to really use the card to maximum effect you have to predict the future you have to predict the way that the board state is going to evolve over the next couple of turns how much life can i afford to waver wager because generally the correct response is not to just draw up to seven it's usually to draw 10 cards or 11 or 12 or 13 and so i love the fact that the card is just so powerful as a combo engine as a card advantage engine and even as an aggro engine this thing that works in so many different strategies and really allows a player to leverage their skill and experience in a game of magic all right your second part go i should say uh necropotence is a really uh that's a great answer and one that i should put on my uh queue of favorite cards uh also because just of the great stories in magic there's more about necropotence than probably any other card probably yeah i agree actually considering considering just how long it's been a factor for i mean the card was printed in 1995 famously according to i think it was inquest magazine said that it was the worst card in the set famously that's odd either way here we are 31 years later i have necropotence in almost every single commander deck that i built and it's it's a force of nature in every format where it's force of nature there's a good card oh yes um so uh my second is going to be a sleight of mind magical hack which i will uh bundle together um these are cards which uh one of them changes the the color word on a card uh the other the land type the other the land type yeah and uh um this this gets into my thing with uh liking meta cards this is changing the text on another card they never really did as much as i wanted them to do but they promised a lot and gave us something to aspire for because they have this sort of when they work they have this sort of aha you can get something that you didn't realize you could get by changing the nature of the cards your opponent was playing or that you're playing yeah it leads to some crazy counterplay essentially too particularly because alpha contains all of these land hoses these mass land hoses like flash fires and tsunami and stuff your opponent playing mono green is like i'm gonna tsunami you destroy eight of your islands you pay one blue mana destroy all their forests instead pretty pretty pretty sick interactions i'm not surprised you love you love the card my my second favorite is quite a bit more straightforward by the way i think you can use necropotence as one of your five you're more than welcome to okay my second favorite card is the card mana drain printed in legends i'm i would actually love to know assuming you know about and had a role in creating that card how the hell did mana drain come to be i did not have a role in it so so uh so i won't i won't say uh so i can't say uh i don't know whether that was done by the legends guys uh or whether that was done by uh r and d because r and d did a lot of editing to the set um and there's a good chance that it was done by both like they had this card mana drain that didn't quite work and r and d uh tinkered with it but um there was uh uh there you know there were a lot of interesting creative ways to counter spells back in the day and it was a fun area to explore i remember opening up legends for the first time i was in santa cruz when legends came out and i don't know how much how many cases of legends this store got in santa cruz but they were being rationed you got two packs or something and fortunately for me the store happened to receive boxes of legends that contained mana drain because half of the legends boxes famously did not have mana drain there were two different uncommon cycles basically which i'm sure was inadvertent so the store had mana drain i remember seeing someone showed it to me out of a pack i did not get one even though it was uncommon and i looked at it and i went how can this be a real card this is so insane this counter spell was already a decent tool and control i had already been playing controlled x with counter spell for a while and i'm looking at this card like wait a minute this just means i can just mana drain their three mana thing or their urn option and just play a tome for zero or mind twist them or do whatever the card was so unbelievably nuts and it marked this this real demarcation control was already the best archetype by far and it went from being s tier to like s plus plus plus plus tier it's just your whatever what is your opponent even supposed to do against two untapped blue mana given all of the different things that a control deck can do to you if you just feed them three or four colorless men on their turn the card was so bananas and it's restricted in all the modern old school formats you're only allowed to play with one so even though you're allowed to play with that old card set every single modern old school format restricts mana drain and every time it comes up just a single copy it's incredibly impactful on top of that in commander format mana drain is galactic in power level as well you can often just win a game by casting mystical tutor which allows you to take an instant and put it on top of your library and you reveal it so you show your opponent hey i have manager in my hand now what are you going to do from that point onward they can't do anything they just pass over and over discarding cards instead of playing because they're so afraid of this so i've been leveraging and using mana drain for more than 30 years now it is definitely my second favorite part all right number three do you want to say necro no uh i i was actually had a counterspell on my list and it is not there it is not there for power um and this is this is probably the only one i'm putting up which i didn't design uh which is not because i don't like other people's designs but because i just know them better but memory lapse that was a counter spell i think it cost one and a blue and it puts the spell on top of the other person's deck from homelands right a real sleeper in that set it is from homelands and uh and i i just love that card and and it was because again it's not power had a lot of complaints about it but just uh it it to me it showed some of the danger of the power creep like that you get such really interesting uh play out of a card like this where where it's not only counterspell because you're countering it this turn but it's something where you uh you know what you know what their draw is next time right and there's so many ways to leverage that by milling the top of their deck or by just getting yourself in a better situation like there are things which are good to memory lapse and it's kind of uh offensive that that of course you'll counterspell it rather than memory lapse it but memory lapse has such interesting play and also it was so simple right it was just uh it wasn't it was exactly the opposite of uh these raging rivers and words of commands where where you you read it you didn't know what was going on here it was simple to read and had some really interesting consequences yeah it's one of those things actually where it's it's particularly punishing against good players a lot of time good players will play bait spells and so they're in a bad situation they play a card as a bait spell trying to get a counterspell out of your hand or whatever and you memory lapse it back on top of their library now they have to draw the bad card again and so they're further away from their potential solution by nature of the fact that they thought that they were going to get a counterspell out of your hand i would uh just to sort of add to the conversation although it came a little bit later but i love for very much the same reasons the card remand which is mechanically similar to memory lapse they're both kind of more they're cheap they cost one blue in a generic and they are very tempo oriented counter spells memory lapse doesn't get rid of the problem unless you have a secondary way to to do it but that's not why you play the card it's all about tempo and remand returns the card to their hand and it's a cantrip draw card off so you can not only just make crazy tempo plays that disrupt your opponent and cycle your own deck but you can do crazy things with the stack where you play a spell your opponent responds by trying to memory lapse it and you remand your own spell and so you bypass their counter you draw a card you get card advantage and you still have the thing that they were trying to counter in the first marvelous i don't know remand yeah it's such it's such an amazing card and it does totally unbelievably insane things in formats with storm where you have a card that adds a million copies of itself to the stack and so you add all the copies and then you remand the original and play it again and it storms the second time so it's nuts but i did not put remand in my in my top five pantheon my third favorite card is another card from alpha actually the hypnotic specter a card that every time i put it into play and it's it's so good i've literally played it in commander formats before measured against the best cards ever made all the way up to the present that 2-2 flying creature for three mana with random discard is such an outlier it's such a powerhouse did was hypnotic specter just did it loom large over the battlefield during your testing or did it seem like there were enough ways to deal with it that you didn't you didn't think it was that great no we we liked it uh i don't know if uh it it was uh in the explosive top area we were mostly in playtesting playing limited of course which makes it so that the information is much noisier but uh but we liked it there was there was a lot of uh disagreement among my playtesters about as to how much discard and how much um mana destruction should be a part of the game right and so this is one of the represented features i was firmly in the camp that i wanted both those things in the game because uh exactly because some people hated them i wanted mechanics people loved and hated rather than ones that everybody uh i i didn't want to make the game one where everybody won with a creature deck with a little bit of spells as a spice i wanted just spell decks i wanted land destruction i wanted discard all to be you know big parts of the game yeah i mean it's i think honestly a brilliant decision i'm in full agreement about that again give the spikes what they want give the spikes what they want to play an abusive crazy deck with sinkhole and ice storm inspectors and and whatever else right another card that sort of came to mind as we were talking about that that i'm sure you got endless complaints about both in development and later is the card black bites and i'm sure you had a lot of long conversations about black but it's not in my top five but i actually would like to bring it up a little bit yeah that was one of my favorites i really liked it i like the i like the art i liked the effect and uh and uh yeah it uh and it was pretty common in the early days like you would you would see it in a lot of decks that were pretty good yeah definitely i mean it just seemed like unbelievably oppressive particularly in a format or as people are learning the game and nobody even knows how much land to put in a deck as you said there are people that thought of basic land was better than alpha black lotus right and so you put out a black vice and seven turns later the guy's just dead just discarded a bunch of times he's like i'm stuck on two land i can't do anything one man a deal 21 seems like a pretty good deal and yet i mean it was restricted for a while but and yet you know the card is clearly once you really understand the game on a high level it's very balanced it actually turns out to be fair it's such just there's so much brilliant how did you guys pull this off richard are you some kind of alien honestly i've got to know like there's magic it's just this incomparable stroke of genius it's one thing to kind of iterate and and take other people's ideas and copy them and perfect them and so on you know through a long protracted development process but being first at anything is really hard and being at first it's something this unbelievably unique and transformational it really defies belief it's it's really really unbelievably incredible just beyond inspired so well thank you no it's a lot of been a lot of fun uh to get uh you know that uh all these exciting things about games were able to come together into this uh into this package and that i found an audience that loves it so i'd like an i'd like another card name do you have a number four part on your list number four uh goblin sharpshooter uh i that was one of my later designs um and i mean i've been in design groups since then but i remember getting just really being excited by it was originally goblin gatling gunner but they didn't want to have any guns in the game uh although the picture still is a gatling he does i wanted the name gatling gunner but uh i see yeah so so goblin gatling gunner uh goblin sharpshooter was uh i think it was a 1-1 and uh you tap it to do a point of damage but you untap it whenever any creature dies right and so you can go mow down lines of level one people and when you had a combat you could you know finish off ones that were close and it just it just had a really good feel it was one of these things where it wasn't too complicated you didn't have to go to micro print but reflected very well this uh sort of effect i was after yeah the puzzle solving in the middle of combat right is the thing i'm reminded when you were talking about it a card popped into my head from a different game that you have certainly played the card that game hearthstone and i'm sure in your time playing hearthstone you probably either played with or played against the card defile it's been a while uh how does defile go it's very very similar to goblin sharpshooter actually or goblin gatling gunner uh two mana in warlock basically it's a warlock card and it says defile deals one point of damage to everything in play and then if anything dies yeah it repeats and so you could create these situations and particularly because you can sculpt your damage in hearthstone by directing attacks at their creatures where you go that one's got one that's got two i'm going to deal three to this thing and then you go defile boom boom boom boom boom boom and it blows up everything in play for two mana and it's so satisfying that that is exactly uh um tapping into what i liked with the goblin gatling gunner yes so such a cool and unique effect it is played in tons of formats i was watching a very very popular kind of almost emergent format right now called pre-modern that a lot of people have been gravitating towards and pre-modern lands in this really interesting space i actually don't know the exact era but it's an era where fetchlands exist the fetchlands were i believe printed in the very early 2000s but there are no shock lands or revised dual lands available so it's after revised dual lands but pre-shock lands and so you have fetchlands that only get basic lands which is a really strange thing and sharpshooter is all over the place in that format it's a really really it's like a very very powerful silver bullet kind of toolbox effect that a lot of decks run particularly decks that have the ability to tutor for it usually via green enchantment called survival of the fittest uh fourth card for me a card that i actually was very much associated with back in the 1990s the card is disrupting scepter and to me disrupting scepter is it's one of those kind of light bulb cards where when initially when people start playing magic and i'm sure you encounter this a lot of the time a person would look at the card millstone and they would look at the card disrupting scepter and they would look at millstone and go wait this is two mana to cast and for just for just two mana you can make them take the two top cards off their library and put them in the graveyard two mana to do that's amazing disrupting scepter taps and the opponent chooses and discards a card from their hand and it costs three to cast and three to activate that's obviously way worse than millstone millstone's two cards for two mana disrupting scepter is just one oh and they get to choose the millstone's even random they might mill their shiv and dragon and yet once you begin to understand the game you use disrupting scepter or you get destroyed by it and you realize that there's this interesting thing going on something that you guys clearly picked up in your alpha testing is that cards extra cards drawn are in most cases interchangeable with extra cards destroyed and so the fact that you could leverage a disrupting scepter to create an invincible game state an invincible board state where your opponent was completely mathematically eliminated from the game in a way that you couldn't generally sculpt in any other situation really made me love the card and it also as a control player your ability to kind of do threat assessment moment by moment as a game of magic evolves is highly predicated on the variables mostly how many cards do they have in their hand and if you can reduce the number of cards in their hand from five six seven whatever all the way down to zero you have perfect information to evaluate everything and the fact that the disrupting sector sort of singularly allowed you to get into those board states allowed you to play a control deck at absolute pinnacle level of skill made it my well fourth favorite card of all time that's a good one what is the fifth one richard what's your fifth favorite well favorite card um i've got two fifth ones uh because one of them occurred to me while you were just talking and and it really would be nice to uh get another card that i didn't design and so millstone would be that one we made it uh it was in the ice age group uh so i don't know who in it did it but uh but i i loved millstone because uh in my original design there was a deck uh running out of cards was a thing right but it wasn't something that i explored in the strategy and to have this simple elegant thing which is again very simple uh and and just pushes you to think about that as part of your game strategy uh is i don't know it's just marvelous it felt really good playing with it um uh even though it didn't you know as if you did it casually it wasn't actually going to do anything for you right and it felt very flexible because sometimes you want things in your discard pile sometimes you want to try to deck the opponent but the one that i actually had for my fifth was the uh lord of the pit lord of the pit and and one of the reasons for that is because i uh in playtest i i ran lord of the pit in a lot of decks uh and again we were playing very limited so that was often not a choice of mine other than the fact that i had access to it uh at one point uh so lord of the pit huge creature uh but if you don't sacrifice a creature to it every turn it'll attack you scaff at one point was telling me that uh lord of the pit was terrible that i shouldn't play with it and i was saying no i've gotten a lot of good victories out of it and he said really name one and i said well just recently i said i was playing uh this game and the other person the lord of it was out there and he had to control magic and he had to control it and then it ended up killing him because you have any creatures and so scaff thought that was terrific he said so your justification for playing lord of the pit is because somebody might be stupid enough to take control of it from you also that's awesome that's such a good story also i love uh there's a variation of magic that i played which i uh like a lot which is called the backdraft where you try to draft the worst decks possible yeah and uh in the very first backdraft uh lord of the pit featured into that where i drafted uh the only creature in my deck was lord of the pit so that is such a troll from i i can't remember does it i know demonic hordes taps and you can't use it if you don't pay the black mana can lord of the pit could use you take seven during your upkeep but can you still attack with it i know you can with force of nature i don't remember if lord of the pit actually taps if you don't feed it a monster it would make sense that it probably does tap i i it would make sense that it taps i don't remember but i would imagine it's parallel to force of nature so if force of nature doesn't tap probably it doesn't either all right i'm looking him up right here he is in my old school cube although he was a recent addition uh yeah you may still attack with lord of the pit yeah if you he just wants blood yeah and and more importantly he cannot be sacrificed to himself so exactly you and you take the seven damage before you get to attack which usually doesn't work out in your favor unless you're far ahead i think it's an excellent choice talk about flavor incarnate right regardless of the you don't care about the upkeep seven seven trampling for seven mana yeah yeah yeah amazing all right my my fifth and final card is a card that you are unlikely uh or that you're unlikely to be familiar with because it was printed kind of quietly a number of years ago the card is called liquid metal torque it's a two mana artifact so a mana rock tap for a generic mana but it has this secondary ability that is so subtle and yet so elegant and powerful particularly in the format where i play which is the commander format that it leads to all of these crazy wild interactions you can tap it to turn any permanent in play into an artifact so that's its other ability to make one generic mana tap to turn any card into an artifact think of the possibilities that i mean that's speaking my language that gets back to the magical hack and sleight of mind i love the meta effects that's a meta effect where where it's changing the nature of the cards and it's just like that opens up all this possibility totally you're you're you're playing i don't know blue red you have no ability to kill enchantments and your opponent plays some ridiculous enchantment against you and you draw liquid metal torque or you draw the card dak fadin and you already have liquid metal torque in play dak fadin allows you to steal an artifact as its planeswalker ability so you're just like all right i'm gonna make your eight mana enchantment into an artifact and take it with dak fadin now i own it in a blue red deck right it it constantly it gives mono green decks mono blue decks mono white decks all of this interaction that they normally would not have it's so awesome and so that's to me it's just it's like simplicity and elegance and power all combined for just two mana such an awesome card all right so on the subject of top five lists we hinted at this before i am curious to know what the favorites are the top it's not even top five favorites but the favorites among your favorites are among games and whether that's digital games board games card games etc when you think of the games that you have talked about to your friends over and over again that every time you go back and revisit them and go man i really do love this game i'm going to spend another month playing it what are your top what's in your top five richard garfield well that that's a really hard uh hard question um because putting putting these things into lists is just it's just so tough uh but among my top doesn't need to be ranked yeah just among my top five would be uh poker uh i i adore poker i've played endless amounts of poker i haven't played recently uh but uh but uh it's just such an l and i like it because it's a elegant uh not only an elegant game which really has mathematics and psychology but it's also uh it's a modular game it's easy to modify and uh open-ended it's just marvelous um i will use uh dungeons and dragons as a stand-in for all for role-playing uh i don't you know dungeons dragons is not actually my favorite role-playing game but uh but i don't want to call out anyone in particular that yeah i mean it was it was the first right yeah no no it's the og so uh so i'm gonna put that out there um totally fair uh cosmic encounter was uh formative for me and just showed me a lot of what was possible with emergent gameplay uh let's see go uh i hate to lean too heavily on uh on the uh non non-proprietary historical games but but go is just next level it's just uh so easy uh to learn the rules but so much going on yeah um and uh uh let's go uh let's go get one digital game in there quad radius um quad radius tell me about it oh well we should play it's amazing uh it's it's it's it's a game um it's like a web game the designer moved on from it but it's sort of it's on some sites now you can actually play it the basic structure of it is that you have some checkers on the board i have some checkers on the board and we have to capture all the other person's checkers and then power-ups appear when you land on a power-up you get this special power which your opponent doesn't know that's essentially it but but there as soon as you begin playing you begin to understand how much randomness strategy bluffing is all available and uh and and it's very accessible uh and and it's just i don't know it's just the crazy crazy situations come up it's a it's a really wonderful game when is it is it a relatively new thing no it's old uh i think late 90s maybe or maybe early aughts yeah um and uh and it disappeared for a long time but but yeah recently uh it's it's been up track it down you'll be doing your audience a favor if you found it definitely i you got me excited i have talked many many times in the past about games that were transformational to me recommended by you specifically dream quest and everything associated with that honestly this has been a again surreal conversation i it's been such an honor to reflect and talk about the nostalgia and just to listen to your unbelievable breadth of wisdom and experience exhilarating and somehow two hours and 15 minutes have flown by all good things must come to an end for now but i have a million more questions and topics i'd love to explore so if you'd be so kind i'd love for you to join me on the channel again at a later date and we can kind of pick up where we left off sure be happy to it's always fun talking games and beyond talking games with you in particular it has been yes i i share that sentiment completely it has been a profound pleasure thank you so much for joining me today richard and i will see you as soon as possible okay great thank you i would love your feedback on this series if you're enjoying the videos please give me a thumbs up if there's games you think i might have missed let me know and i will get to them see you for the next one