![tower of trample latest tower of trample latest](https://attachments.f95zone.to/2020/03/607763_my-image.png)
Me: We've been talking about wanting to make Arena (a book promo card) into a one-shot artifact. Me: It doesn't have enough action to be an instant or sorcery.īill: I guess either an artifact or an enchantment.īill: What if it promotes something aggressive? They did ask us to make a card for it.īill: I don't think it can be a creature. They commissioned it, and it's going on the box. Me: Why is that the image on the booster box?īill: I don't know. Me: I mean, why do we have to make a card for it?īill: It's going to be on the booster box. With some dramatic license, here's what occurred (here, it's just Bill and me talking, but imagine the whole team chiming in):īill: See this picture? We need to make a card for it. One day during Visions development, Bill Rose pulled out a picture of the art for Triangle of War. When we got to templating, the editor (my guess is it was Darla Willis, later Kennerud, but I'm not sure) wanted to use a longer template, something like "while this spell is on the stack, it can't be the target of an instant," and I just said, "can't we just use 'can't be countered'?" Scragnoth would go on to be a thorn in blue players' sides for many years. Everyone seemed to like it, so it stayed. Flash forward some number of months when I have a better handle on how protection works, and I realize that it actually doesn't stop a counterspell, so I add "can't be countered" to it.Ī few years later, I'm leading my first design team, Tempest, and I put it in the set. I assumed that blue couldn't counterspell it. I'll admit I didn't fully understand how protection worked, but I knew blue couldn't mess with it. The card, named Greased Weasel, was a green creature with protection from blue. This inspired me to design a card, I believe one of my earliest designs. One of the things that annoyed me in the matchup was that blue had answers to green's threats, but green didn't really have answers to blue's threats. Anyway, of all the matchups I played, mono-green versus mono-blue was the one I did the most. I tried as best I could to make decisions as if I didn't know what my opponent had in their hand. I'd build two decks and then see how they'd play against one another. I'm not sure why my early decks were all monocolor, but it just didn't occur to me that I could play more than one color.īecause in the early days there weren't organized events yet, and I didn't have any friends who played Magic, I used to play a lot against myself. The first pack I opened had a Craw Wurm, and it drew me in. The very first deck I ever built was a mono-green deck. To the best of my knowledge, this is the earliest card I ever designed to see print in a Magic set. Rofellos ended up being quite good (so much so, he's currently banned in Commander). Instead of tapping for one green mana, he'd tap for a green mana for each Forest you controlled. He was a Llanowar elf, so I decided to make a turbo-charged version of one. Elves live longer than humans, so that meant he'd be alive during the time frame of Urza's Destiny. When I ended up leading the design for Urza's Destiny, I realized I had an opportunity to actually make a card for Rofellos. Urza would, in fact, get a whole Saga (and Legacy and Destiny) about it. Michael and I were removed from the story, and the new team decided we were going to go back in time to explain how Urza was connected to the story (the original story has a loose tie, but in the rewrite, it became a much bigger deal). He was dead before the story started.īut then, something happened I hadn't expected. Michael and I spent a lot of time writing about Rofellos, but it was mostly as backstory for Gerard and Mirri. One of the ones we didn't find a home for was a Llanowar elf. When we had made the initial crew, I'd made a list of potential character types we might have wanted. What if there was a third person that studied with them who also joined the ship? What if it was their death that made both Gerard and Mirri leave the boat? The big question was who was this character supposed to be? We had Gerrard and Mirri study under Multani as a means for them to become best friends.
![tower of trample latest tower of trample latest](https://attachments.f95zone.to/2020/04/632484_12.png)
And we felt it needed to be a serious reason, as the Weatherlight and the Legacy were his destiny.Īfter much discussion, we decided someone close to him had to have died. A key component of the story concerned the Weatherlight crew showing up and saying that they needed Gerrard's help in rescuing Sisay, but in order for him to return, he had to have left. When Michael Ryan and I wrote the initial Weatherlight Saga story, we knew we needed a reason for Gerard leaving the Weatherlight.