Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 163: Top 5 of our Top 10s
487 Plays2 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today Hobbes and Alex say congrats to Hipsters of the Coast on reaching 10 years of producing content... This celebration happened awhile ago... But us being us... we're a little late. Also the idea was to do a top 10 (which Alex and Hobbes did not tell each other anything about their lists) and of course we talked for almost two hours so this is ummmm half of our lists... we think...
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
We also finally have a Linktree with all of our discounts/resources
____________________________________________
As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
____________________________________________
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Mental Health Awareness
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. This is Hobbs Q here, pronouns he him. And before we jump into today's episode, I just wanted to kind of say a couple of things, make a couple of announcements. So we are just leaving the month of September. You know, this episode will be posted the first week of October, hopefully, assuming life does not throw curveballs, which is one of the things that has been happening lately.
00:00:59
Speaker
So September was suicide prevention suicide awareness month and those resources we keep those in our show notes all year long and those are things that are always in our show notes mental health resources and just a lot of the stuff for both nami and for crisis lines and mental health warm lines so
00:01:19
Speaker
wanting to remind people that, you know, just because we are leaving the month of September doesn't mean that that isn't a topic that is still, you know, that I always say I like having the months to help us focus mental health month and suicide prevention month and, you know, LGBT and whatever. And, you know, it's nice to have these months as they've been designated. But these are also just not topics that we think are, you know, relegated to any specific month. We just may add a little bit more focus to them during that time.
Community and Partnerships
00:01:48
Speaker
We also want to say thank you to Grinding Coffee Company. We wanted to give a shout out to them. I did not on the last episode as I realized as I was posting it. So that was a bummer because we always want to just give them a shout out. We really appreciate their support ongoing, just everything that they've been willing to do for us. Take us on as partners. The mission that they have is a black owned and LGBT ran coffee company.
00:02:15
Speaker
So yes, and you know, we're going to talk about what today's episode is in a moment and kind of just what life's been throwing at us.
Fireside Alliance and Magic's Role
00:02:22
Speaker
But Alex, I thought I would let you introduce yourself over at this point and talk about the fireside alliance. Yeah. So I'm Alex Newman found on Twitter a little more recently than I have been. I've been taking a big break, but recently I've been poking in there a little bit.
00:02:35
Speaker
Anyway, at Mel underscore chronicler, my pronouns are he him. And yet the fireside Alliance organization that we're a part of, we try to jump them out every so often and let people let folks know that they're out there. It is a group of content creators kind of on the internet.
00:02:53
Speaker
who decided to come together and try to create a good space, a good shared space on the internet. They all sort of have their own little social places and Discord servers and such and so forth in their communities, but they decided to try to create something together. And so there is a Fireside Alliance Discord at their website lists, kind of all the content creators. We have joined that. The Goblin Lore podcast is actually the only
00:03:20
Speaker
magic content creators there. It is a group of great folks though, a nice progressive community of progressive communities is one of the ways they like to describe it.
00:03:30
Speaker
And hopefully at some point we'll be doing some collaborations with some folks out there.
Anniversary Celebration and Timeliness
00:03:36
Speaker
I'll say there's something I have recorded and not yet edited that I wanted to edit myself that we will be getting out at some point, but there's- Not magic related. Not magic related. It is not magic related, but it was something that- It will be here. It'll be here. Yeah. There was one of the folks in the fireside
00:03:55
Speaker
Discord, kind of the chat between all the partners through something out. He wanted to collaborate about something that was not magic related and had nothing to do with his podcast. But I just said, you know what, this sounds fun. I want to do it. So Godland Laurel hosted and actually somebody else jumped in. So we've got people from three different fireside podcasts represented in that episode. And that'll be fun whenever I get around to finishing the edit on that.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, so that is the fireside alliance. Just I think we have a note or in our show notes, there's a link if you want to check it out. Some great folks there. Yep, we you can find them through our through us though. Yeah, so this episode is actually a delayed episode in some ways. And by delayed, I don't mean that we recorded it and didn't release it. I mean, recently, it was hipsters of the coast
00:04:45
Speaker
10th anniversary and its people know we talk about the end of our episode every week in our outro hipsters has helped us with hosting and supplies and you know being given us a place to be able to have our episodes posted where they will also link them every week and
00:05:03
Speaker
they sent out a call for people to celebrate their 10th anniversary and you could do articles or you could look at top 10 lists or you can do there was a whole variety of things all around celebrating 10 years of doing magic content and
00:05:19
Speaker
I'm going to throw out a quote since I've been in the middle of a doing a reread of Lord of the Rings that a wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.
Top 10 List Creation Styles
00:05:28
Speaker
So apparently goblins and wizards are basically the same, but maybe for different reasons, because we
00:05:36
Speaker
Had the best intentions for getting this out in time for the their 10th anniversary Kind of celebration which was a couple of weeks ago, and we didn't like we just we didn't one of the things that we're gonna highlight in this episode because that is what we're doing today is gonna be top tens of tens of tens top 10 10 unspecified
00:06:00
Speaker
unspecified top 10 extravaganza, um, which also highlights, uh, some differences in a way between Alex and I. Um, uh, so I had kind of pitched to Alex that like, Hey, maybe we should do a top 10. And I think you got back to me like a couple hours later and we're like, Hey, well, yeah. And I asked who is like,
00:06:24
Speaker
Because my brand had already started working at that point. But even without context, because I was like, so do you want to do a top 10 of a specific thing? Or are we just going to go pure chaos and say top 10 of anything or everything?
00:06:39
Speaker
And being goblins, we went pure chaos. And I actually had a preliminary top 10 list that day. I will say it has changed since then. I have tweaked it as some things come to mind or as I run across something and I go, oh yeah, that made me think of this and that should go on the list.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right away, you had at least some initial thoughts, even with me giving you a prompt of basically open world, we'll say, right? Like, open a prompt as you could. Top 10? Question mark? Yeah, I got three or four right now. Yeah. On the other hand,
00:07:19
Speaker
So Hobbes being not only goblin, but somebody who does not do well without structure for being productive or lots of things is currently formulating his top 10 in his brain with the qualifiers that these are not going to be in any order. They are going to be 10 things. And I gave myself a category.
00:07:46
Speaker
earlier today to kind of framework. So Alex, like just like ran. Oh, yeah. And yeah, and I've got some context for mine. Mine's a little arbitrary. I'll explain that later. It puts it into a little bit more understanding, but it's still gonna be mostly chaos. It's arbitrary, but there's a, you know, you obviously gave this
00:08:10
Speaker
Yes, proper thought and attention. And there is, and you say, you know, you kind of struggle with structure. And I think I have a similar thing, but I like I started to put structures to it pretty quickly. It wasn't for a full 10, but it was like, Okay, so then we'll do this, and then I'll do some of this. And then this might and then it kind of evolved from there, the way I ended up building it kind of evolved from the first few pillars I came up with, and I kind of built it around that.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, you started actually like kind of, you know, branching this I don't know, like you started scaffolding of some sort, you started actually like kind of building a framework around it. That's a term I you use it a lot because it's a great term for how to do that. And for some reason, my brain doesn't generally hold on to that.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. It's like I so whatever you whatever it comes up on the cast you or somebody else mentions that are like like Chase will say it a lot because you a lot of their trading and stuff was like, okay, scaffold, I got to say it two or three times. Maybe I'll remember it the next time I want to use that term.
Creativity and Innovation in Rules
00:09:10
Speaker
So without further ado, Alex, we're gonna do we're gonna do some top 10, some top 10 of top 10. Do you have 10? Do you want me to start with my number 10?
00:09:37
Speaker
I want you to start
00:09:45
Speaker
Alex is known as bending rules and bending, even when he's the one who imposes some structure, will then just cheat. Yeah, I'll come up with an opening question and then I will not answer that opening question. I will use that as a prompt to lead me to a different question that I wanted to answer.
00:10:04
Speaker
Well, the rest of the guests and me are all expected to, except that's also not whatever happens. But yeah, it gives us something gives us a place to work from. That's the point. It gives us some scaffolding to build off of.
00:10:21
Speaker
You've got to know what the rules are to properly break them. Isn't that what they say about writing and learning anything? In order to break rules, rules are established for a reason in a lot of things. And just breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules, if you want to be successful at something, is not actually a good strategy. You need to understand the why. So you need to have something there to begin with.
00:10:43
Speaker
Exactly. And so now, now, without any further ado, my number 10 is actually a two-way tie that was all preemptive.
Exploring Fundamental Forces in Universe
00:10:55
Speaker
My first cheat, because I'll just let you know it's my first cheat. Right. The only one. But it is a two-way tie between the strong and weak nuclear forces.
00:11:08
Speaker
So I wanted to start this list with gravity because I felt gravity was really important. I mean, that's why I'm sitting in this chair right now. It's super important. But gravity is flashy in the world of physics and thermodynamics and forces and all of this. But the strong and weak nuclear forces kind of get missed a lot, I think.
00:11:32
Speaker
And so this is, I'm not gonna go deep, but like the strong nuclear force is basically the force that keeps an atom together. Cause if you know, if you remember like magnets, you know, positive and negative things will like repel each other.
00:11:47
Speaker
Like magnetism has things that have charges will repel each other and do funky things. Well, the strong nuclear force is how you keep all the positives in together and then it's sorry it's not positive made that repels it's positives that repel each other anyway keeps all the keeps all the positive together and the.
00:12:04
Speaker
core of the nucleus, you know, and keeps that cell together. That's the strong nuclear force. And the weak nuclear force is responsible for radioactive decay of certain nuclei. It's a whole other thing, but they're both fundamental forces that kind of keep everything together.
00:12:23
Speaker
There's a whole thing with, you know, obviously without these things and, you know, matter. We wouldn't have a podcast if, if, if I didn't have the matter to have a microphone in front of me. And so this is kind of a, kind of a general shout out of that stuff that allows us to do this and allows all of the other things that are higher on the list to also exist.
00:12:45
Speaker
So that's where I'm starting my top 10 hubs, strong and weak nuclear forces.
Magic's Storm Mechanic Appreciation
00:12:50
Speaker
So mine, hilariously, I am starting something that cares about the number 10 and also for multiple reasons, actually. So I'm going with 10 things I love about Magic the Gathering. So this is a pretty wide open thing. But I think it is because there is a tendency with social media to focus on kind of hype and outrage.
00:13:14
Speaker
Hype and toxic positivity is something that we could talk about. But we also, we've talked about this before, the concept of potentially doing an episode on toxic positivity, like positive for the sake of being positive in a way that's almost like Pollyanna-ish, like things are better than they need to be.
00:13:33
Speaker
But a lot of being online is about focusing on the hype and the outrage and what things people don't like. And I think I talk a lot about intentionality. And one of the things about like the three good things that I've talked about on here on the show before, like doing three good things at night is not to just like try to fake like everything is good or even, you know, pretend that things are great. It's to recognize that there's something
00:13:59
Speaker
that you enjoy or there's something about the day that made it worth it. And that is recognizing that most of us tend to focus on the negative. So I am going with 10 things I love about Magic the Gathering. And these are not in order because I don't even have 10 of them yet. And the first one, though,
00:14:19
Speaker
is the Storm Mechanic. I love the Storm Mechanic, and this is one that is funny because it led to the creation of the Storm Scale, which is mechanics get ranked on one being very unlikely to 10, sorry, one being very likely, 10 being very unlikely. And this is how likely we are to see a mechanic reprinted. And it's named after Storm, so. It's typically in a standard set.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In supplemental sets and like, yeah, like storm has come back.
00:14:55
Speaker
We've seen it in like modern modern masters and there's been some other places, but yeah, this isn't Showing up modern horizons. Thank you. Modern horizons. This is showing up in a standard legal set and Mark Rosewater actually named this scale on his blog blog a dog that he owns and he you know, it was kind of storm was the like
00:15:19
Speaker
That was the framework for it because it is a mechanic that is just so busted. He describes it as the most broken mechanic ever printed. And I, I mean, I really liked that. I liked a mechanic that's based around trying to play magic in a different way. Right. And part of it is the joke of like storm count. And ideally.
00:15:40
Speaker
Storm count ten was kind of the gold standard because the point when the storm decks were storm decks the big payoff for them was tendrils of agony, which is a storm spell that costs for that says so stormy people don't know is a mechanic that copies.
00:15:56
Speaker
a spell for every time you've cast this for every spell that you've cast before that in the turn and so The spell itself deals two damage to an opponent or opponent loses two life and you gain two life so the idea was it's storm count of 10 led to this idea of like what's the storm count at because 10 copies of you know, you cast 10 cards you cast this and
00:16:18
Speaker
or nine cards and you cast this, then you would have 10 copies of 10 drills of agony, which would deal 20 damage to an opponent, you would gain 20 life. And so we get the 10, is it being my number 10? It is led to a scale that is rated from one to 10 and 10 copies of it was kind of the gold standard.
00:16:37
Speaker
So boom storm hit lots of 10s in there. That was the goal there. This, this theme is likely not going to continue past this. That's, that's totally fair. I can continue part of mine.
Mass Effect Trilogy's Storytelling
00:16:54
Speaker
from 10 to 9. 9 is also kind of another cheat, but this one is slightly less of a cheat. See 10, 2 fitting into 10 kind of fits is an almost not cheat though because if you have a list of a hundred things and two of them tie at 10, you'd go 10.
00:17:12
Speaker
it won't be 10 and then the next one would be 12. That's I was actually just thinking from a physics perspective like the two concepts are so length that that's fair that like I don't think that's a cheat that's that's fair well this one let's see what you think of this my number nine is the Mass Effect trilogy specifically the games one two and three not Andromeda I don't mind it but it's not good the Mass Effect one two it's Mass Effect one in particular
00:17:40
Speaker
is really without question my favorite video game, the vision of the future that that provided. The game in general I just enjoy.
00:17:50
Speaker
mechanics of it, it's Bioware at my favorite version of them, good RPG, a little bit of clunky shooting mechanics because they hadn't quite gotten it down, but I totally forgave that because I loved their RPG style. But then, like I was saying, the vision of the future that it provided is so, despite the fact that you are dealing with this threat that is literally threatening all life in the galaxy, that's the scale of the threat that is dealt with in this trilogy.
00:18:17
Speaker
It's still providing this hopeful vision of the future of humanity in the stars living and working alongside of a whole host of alien species all together cooperating in wildly different life forms cooperating together and that vision of the future was one that
00:18:39
Speaker
just always makes me feel better. I know we talked about that a little, I've talked about it a little bit on the cast. I know with when we recorded with Reinhard, we talked about magic and sci-fi. We kind of talk about something we liked in sci-fi. And for me, that's generally, I like fantasy stories, fantasy tropes, fantasy storytelling is generally where I live with my hobbies. But one,
00:19:04
Speaker
thing that sci-fi can do that fantasy can't is when it can provide a specifically humans from Earth somehow survive all of the shit we're doing and dealing with right now. And then in the future are now somehow thriving and cooperating and living in
00:19:24
Speaker
in a bright future. So, you know, even if there's challenges and difficulties and dark things that we have succeeded in making it to the future. I have to admit that that's that once again, I don't think that's a cheat at all taking a trilogy or a series because
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah. And this one, because the story does run between the three. Yeah. And also, like they did just re last year, they released a remastered version of all three as a single game, single $60 package, if you are interested in those games, if you tried the first one, and it's really clunky mechanics, push you out.
00:20:01
Speaker
There is a better version of it in the Legendary Edition. If you can find it somewhere, I think it's on Game Pass. So if you have Xbox Game Pass, it's free. I really like those games. Remember, it's good to know you can kind of skip to 2. From a gameplay perspective, 2 and 3 are so much better than 1.
00:20:19
Speaker
I love the story of the three and two tells a little bit more of a contained
Magic's Character Development: Squee
00:20:25
Speaker
story. And three is now we're at the end game. Like we're dealing with these, these aliens. Three is very much a war story, sort of apocalypse on a galactic scale. So one is really the one that has that where you get to see that, that hopeful future kind of
00:20:44
Speaker
in its in its place before all of the stuff hits the fan for the next couple of games. I like it. Okay. Yeah, that's what I got. Awesome. Number nine. This encompasses something that we call the recency bias. Oh, squee.
00:21:03
Speaker
with my favorite biases. Yes. The recency bias that people don't know is just your ability to more like to take things that happened more recently and you don't take a bias towards them. This effect even can happen with how people memorize lists.
00:21:19
Speaker
So if you're given a list of words, a lot of people, you actually have a bias on both ends where you remember kind of the first words and the last words, depending on kind of what strategy you use to remember words. Because the first words you rehearse in your head. So while you're waiting for the others, you're rehearsing. Then the recency is you just, you have had less chance for those to fall off. So.
00:21:41
Speaker
Recency is going to tell me that Squee is one of my favorite things that I love about Magic the Gathering. But to be fair, while this is a recency bias for me to think of it, it's not a recency bias for me to love it. It's just the recency is we got story.
00:21:58
Speaker
Recently, you got some good story, but you have been talking about squee for years, years on the podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And talking about getting, you know, better story for sure, better representation. So I, I, my love of squee is not what's recent. The fact that I'm concluding it on my list right now, at number nine, is because I remembered recording an episode and I was like, damn, it's got squee has to be in there.
00:22:24
Speaker
And I will say, you know, I guess there could be some reasons to be biased to it, but I think that even without that, you might have had Squee in the top. Squee possibly would have, because Squee embodies
00:22:35
Speaker
just so much, and I'm talking around this one, Alex, only because you don't know. And by choice, by choice. This is a sign that if you haven't listened to our Squee episode, you can go back to, I did at least allude to Alex not following story, but if people don't know, Alex is not following story during the Phyrexian return, especially once we had a timeline that it was ramping up and going to be quicker.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I can factor that in a second, too, if you want to finish talking about Squeak a little bit before I transition to my next one. Sure. Well, I mean, it's just good to say that Squeak, I think my key phrase is Squeak was done dirty. And Squeak is not at this point. Squeak as a card was a little underwhelming. And I did talk with that. I did talk about it a little bit out on the show. It was a little underwhelming for what I wanted for a Squeak card.
00:23:31
Speaker
The story was not in any way, shape or form. The story made nods to even like the fact that Squeak had been left out of story in some ways, like saying that like he elevated himself. I think I sent you that one quote that was like telling about himself to another goblin and the other goblins like, yeah, you know, you know, King, like when you did this, this and this. And he's like, yeah, when I did all of that,
00:23:55
Speaker
Because he's like, basically like, may have elevated some of his role in things. But then he like it says, because of having been left out of many of the legends that are around about the weather light and the phyrexians or the yet just like the weather light and all of that saga. So squee gets my nod at number nine. Nice. And so just I don't want to spend too much time on it. But I know I've talked
00:24:17
Speaker
a little bit, but also it's been a while since we've recorded a normal episode where we're just
Emotional Impact of Magic's Story
00:24:22
Speaker
sitting and talking. So it may have been a while since I've talked about this and some folks have heard about this, but I am trying to not pay attention to the story. There's just the way, and it's not even the frexy engine in general, I'm not as big a fan of, but the way the story worked, sort of the story type and the story beat of what happened to
00:24:46
Speaker
is not, there's something about that story type that is very difficult for me. Like I just have a visceral revulsion to it. And it's hard for me to, I'm still trying to work out kind of where that is, but at the same time, it's like, so I just, I can't really engage with this story right now.
00:25:08
Speaker
You've intentionally chosen not to. I've intentionally stepped back. I've intentionally stepped back. I've spoken with you about it. I've spoken with Reinhardt about it who has been on the show a bunch. He's a good friend of mine. He and I just grabbed lunch the other day a couple weeks ago.
00:25:26
Speaker
That's just where I'm at. I'm so someday would if you do return a story once the that part is moved on. We will we will have a conversation about squeeze. Yes, and and I will definitely at some point I will catch up on the story to like if I've sitting in kind of reading through some things I just
00:25:45
Speaker
the sort of, sort of damocleseness of it just hanging over my head as the story is continuing to slowly unfold is just stress that I can't, I shouldn't say can't. It is stress that I am choosing. You're choosing and not an avoidance strategy. And like, this is an intentional decision. So yes, that magic story is something that I am generally interested in. I think it's a cool thing. But in this case,
00:26:15
Speaker
It's something that I don't need to. It's not going to hurt the rest of my life to avoid this. I'm going to just step away from it. And it's not a permanent. I have a plan for when I'm coming back and, you know, what will happen there. And so that's... So let's move on. So we'll move on. Number eight. And so to lighten the mood, number eight is jokes specifically about things crashing into other things to avenge the dinosaurs.
Humor in Scientific Contexts
00:26:42
Speaker
So I don't know if you've seen it lately. What? I am nothing. I am nothing. So you know, maybe this is just me, but three or four times in the last five years. So the most recent one is very recently NASA slammed
00:26:58
Speaker
some object, I think it was a satellite, something, into a meteor, I believe. Yeah, they pulled, like, trying to do, like, an Armageddon, except they flung something instead of, like, drilled it, but yes. Yeah, the point was, what they were trying to do is hit it with an object so that they can science it to see if that changed its trajectory enough that they could use that technique in the future to push objects on a collision course of Earth away from that collision course.
00:27:26
Speaker
So it's all science-y things that they're doing for science. But that provided an excuse for the wonderful folks on the internet to once again make jokes about us avenging the previous dominant life form on the planet in the dinosaurs who were, as other people who are pedantic, reminded us all, killed by a comet. However, basically every time, just about every time we slam something into something else out in space, people make this joke.
00:27:55
Speaker
The best one was, I believe there was a point where there was a satellite that was set up, I think this was like four or five years ago, to crash into Saturn. I believe it was Saturn.
00:28:09
Speaker
At first, I was thinking it was Jupiter, and I was talking to my friend Alexander, who knows more about space stuff than me. He's like, no, I don't think it was Jupiter. Anyway, so I think it was Saturn. Because part of the point is, if you leave stuff in space, it doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there and becomes space trash. So that crashing it into Saturn was part of our plan to be better space neighbors, I guess, to not leave our garbage all sitting around where it can crash into things and people.
00:28:34
Speaker
But somebody decided to just take that a whole sort of way and made this big, long thing about how Saturn might have destabilized the orbit of the comet that crashed into Earth and killed the dinosaurs. And so despite the fact that it was basically us cleaning up our litter, this person decided to make the joke that us slamming this into Saturn was us getting revenge for the dinosaurs because Saturn might have been the one that killed them.
00:29:03
Speaker
It could have been Saturn's fault that the comet passed the direction that it did because it's a very massive object. I've seen this joke at least four or five separate occasions. I don't know what it is. There are other jokes that I find more funny in particular, but this particular genre of joke is probably the only one that I find hilarious every single time I encounter it.
00:29:31
Speaker
I like it. OK, that is my number eight. My number eight is the plane of Ravnica, not necessarily the story.
Magic's Ravnica Plane
00:29:40
Speaker
And actually, a lot of the story, except for the story that doesn't happen, it never did because it just it stopped before it was supposed to. We had a giant war that never happened. But the plane of Ravnica is actually a very good framework.
00:29:57
Speaker
There's a reason that the guild structure is useful in terms of discussing magic and discussing everything from magic design.
00:30:06
Speaker
the look to be able to have 10 distinct guilds, but still be a city plane that has wilderness around it. But I mean, it is a very well done and designed plane. Very strong milfels too. Yes. Very like you say, it's it's not just good, like mechanics and story, but it's good
00:30:29
Speaker
way to put mechanics into story into mechanics and sort of. Yeah, right. Like even like it times when it's failed in some areas, you know, like something like dragons maze, like at least it's it's trying to do something and it still is fitting within a proper
00:30:46
Speaker
Like you said, a melt those fit for that world. It didn't work necessarily from a set design for play or for, you know, like there's a reason those boxes are cheap. There's not a lot of staples out of there. It does. It, it wasn't the best for limited. Um, it, but it, it still was the end of an arc and it did that. Like the mechanics within it are mechanics that fit. And so to me.
00:31:12
Speaker
There's a reason we've returned there. There's a reason that we like there. There's a reason that you will find we've had a lot of episodes that revolved around Ravnica prior to the war of the spark. Um, there's a reason that it's a framework and the, and, and, and I think that as much as like, like, I don't want to just keep going back to the same planes. I understand why. And, and I don't think that it's shocking that we've spent as much time there as we have.
00:31:37
Speaker
No, I agree. That's a good call. I mean, and there's a reason that, particularly for folks who've been playing Magic a little more recently, Ravnica kind of feels like home. Ravnica sort of feels like the capital. For folks who started playing back in the Dark Ages, like you and I, it's Dominaria, because that's where story happened for the first, what, eight years of the game or something like that.
00:32:01
Speaker
But since then, since Magic first left Dominaria, Ravnica really has kind of been that center point now. And I'd say, you know, like when we talked with Spice, there was the whole idea that like even the way that we left off.
00:32:15
Speaker
is we left a world that you want to return to to find out what the, what the aftermath is. Yes. Even if we don't like it, we still want to know what happened on the plane because it is a city state that is set up to be an analog for how a guild structure works and how we have this concept of, you know, like guilds versus not and everything else. And there is day to day life on Ravnica. And I think that's something that we've talked about on this show and explored. It's one of the most
00:32:44
Speaker
one of the best and most fleshed out worlds. Yes. That's my I actually love Ravnica. So there we go. Number eight. Number eight. All right. So my number seven, I'm gonna go with nebulas, mostly the astrological feature, but also shout out to the awards.
Beauty of Nebulas and Science Fiction
00:33:00
Speaker
So the like, like that, the awards, there's, there's,
00:33:06
Speaker
And I was so this is a legitimate cheat. This is a legitimate cheat. What they're both called nebulas. So I figured nebulas number seven and I get to I guess also character nebula from the Marvel universe. Why not? qualifies as one as nebulas. Yeah. So the the Nebula Awards are a science fiction fantasy award. They're one of the big three. And I can't remember what was gonna write that down. And I didn't.
00:33:32
Speaker
Hugo is the one that was recently that's Yeah, Hugo is the I was like Hugo's the one that I know Hugo and nebula are the two I'm thinking of cuz I know cuz like Ender's game and a third big one, but maybe I'm I know like the the Hugo's are the one that Shawna McGuire was actually Nominated for a huge magic story or magic story. She did not wait, but she won some other awards
00:33:57
Speaker
which are great. I'm really glad to hear she won some other hugos. But those are not the nebulas and mostly the shadow for the award, but it's mostly the astrological feature. They are so cool. The horsehead nebula, I think, looks amazing. There was a recent giant
00:34:14
Speaker
telescope, whose name I won't say because apparently the person they named him after was kind of a scumbag. But this telescope has taken some fantastically amazing pictures of some nebulas that look just gorgeous. They're like big giant dust clouds of space, but they're so good. So cool looking. And so yeah, that's that's my number seven. It is kind of funny because my number seven
00:34:44
Speaker
there could seem like there is a line but I actually had this one planned like two or three ago um like it could work because there are so so number seven for me things I love in Magic the Gathering are full art lands ah and you know there were like kind of the the nebula looking ones the theros constellation ones had kind of a nebula look to them uh for so you know
00:35:08
Speaker
There could be, however, that is not where I got this.
Aesthetic Appeal of Full Art Lands
00:35:11
Speaker
I actually had this on, this was another one that I definitely had from the moment I started thinking of this list because I love Full Art Lands. I always have. And I know people are talking about like, well, you know, like now it's like they're all the time. And I'm like, I still don't care. Like I still love them. And different sets are good for other, for different people. I love the Kamagawa ones. They are my favorite Full Art Lands since
00:35:37
Speaker
The original full arts, if we want to call them that from unglued with, you know, unglued wins out from a slight nostalgia and an annoying tap symbol because I love me a tap symbol. But if you think that was the first time Wizards had gone, you know, like.
00:35:55
Speaker
It had been a place to experiment, right? Like, Unsets were not. Like, everything was silver-bordered except for the basics, because the basics were still the basics, and they could be used. And I love them, you know? Like, and then we went for a long gap until we hit unglued. We got a new set of them, and those were, like, truly full art. Like, they take up the whole card.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, those still have a very tiny frame. Yeah. Yeah. But still, it's a thing where they were definitely experimenting with how much frame do we put in? Put in, yeah. And they put that in the silver border because that's where they did it. Well, you could. So then we finally get the Zendikar ones, which are the ones that I think that were the blueprint for where we've gone with, well, to have them be a more regular thing. That's where we really started seeing this. Yep.
00:36:47
Speaker
But just a normal standard set. Yep. And I think, yeah, we're, you know, like I, it was funny. It's like, I remember drafting where I straight up just started drafting them. Like I would like, I love that draft set and like Zen Zen world wake and, you know, like that, that was, man, that was, that was some drafting for me. And.
00:37:05
Speaker
There were some archetypes that I felt very comfortable in to the point where I just started drafting full art basics because my store kept them in the back and I'm like, what? Like these go in every EDH deck or commander deck ever. But they've been just like coming out now, but there's just so many cool different versions of them. Like the Theros ones are beautiful, but you know, like I.
00:37:24
Speaker
really, really loved. It's like just seeing the different ways you can do it, making them personal to the world that they're on, doing the wood block style. I think that's how I'm thinking of it. I know they have another name that they use for the Kamagawa ones. But those lands and that frame are easily just a different kind of just approach.
00:37:52
Speaker
Actually having kind of the symbol be in Japanese, you know, like, I mean, it's just, it's, I like those lands a lot. So, uh, but full art lands in general is my number seven. All right. So that brings me to number six. My number six is stranger than fiction.
Unique Storytelling in Film
00:38:14
Speaker
So this is a movie. It is hands down without question my favorite movie of all time, which is kind of a weird one, but that's fine because that's where I'm at. It's a Will Ferrell movie.
00:38:29
Speaker
He is a very strong flavor for himself normally, but this movie is very different. Yeah, just like when you kind of see some of those really big comedic stars take like a very different direction and it works. And that's part of why I like it so much. He is very much the straight man character.
00:38:49
Speaker
I don't want to say he's not where the jokes come from, because he has a few sort of dry jokes that he delivers straight that are just hilarious to me. But he very much is like a serious straight main character for this storyline. That ridiculous things are happening to. And that's kind of where the comedy is. It's a romantic comedy where his character is, he works as an IRS auditor.
00:39:15
Speaker
in Chicago and all of a sudden one day he just starts hearing a voice narrating his life and then he's trying to figure out what's going on with this and then the narrator you know says something along the lines of you know and this you know seemingly minor act will lead to his imminent death and now he starts to freak out because he thinks he's going to die because this voice that has been right about other things suddenly says that he's going to die and how it's it's
00:39:45
Speaker
Like I said, very straight character in the comedic sense where he is serious and doesn't joke. He's just this dry, very serious person dealing with a completely ridiculous situation as he goes in and starts to talk to people and starts to figure out what he's trying to do.
00:40:06
Speaker
It is my favorite, both because of all of that, but also just from a storytelling standpoint, I really enjoy how the story is told in a very different way. Yeah, it's easily my favorite movie. Number six for me.
00:40:23
Speaker
flavor text, just the pure existence of flavor text.
Humor and Depth in Magic's Flavor Text
00:40:30
Speaker
Because, you know, like, flavor text is just a bit of something on a card. And there's, once again, in early magic, we learned about characters and story
00:40:42
Speaker
often times through flavor text. Oh, almost entirely because almost exclusively you need books who didn't play in the early years. Legends didn't come in until a couple years. Yeah, about a year and a couple sets in. So the first few sets did not have legendary characters that no exist.
00:40:58
Speaker
No. So we just had story and ideas of story, the hints of it, you know, whether we take something like Mons goblin Raiders, you know, like we'd look at names there, but like, who's Mons? We don't know. There's illusions, but flavor text was the same way flavor text would oftentimes be between, you know, like, to me, it's we're looking at a text box and you get a name, art,
00:41:23
Speaker
Ability and then a flavor text and it's in a way you have those to be able to tell story But they're also just magics place to have fun. We've been through this a lot. This brings us back to goblins because goblins are often come comedy relief or comedic relief and One of the areas that they really get to do that in is in flavor text I mean to the point where people I remember there was like a either a
00:41:49
Speaker
either a tumblr or one of those sites where people had collected like funny magic flavor text because there's a there aren't just goblin ones but there are you know like you got like Kamal saying like what's so bad about a double edged sword it's a sword with two edges you know we get you know you get things like even though it is squee flavor text you get the card timewarp which has
00:42:13
Speaker
Let's do it again. So it's a reference to the real world in Rocky Horror Picture Show. Um, you get my favorite, which is, um, floodgate, which is for me is, is just the perfect encapsulation of, of Milthos and every, in every way. It is not my favorite card in any metric, but every metric combined together. It's probably my favorite card because it is.
00:42:37
Speaker
It is literally a wall of timbers holding back water, and so it's a blue wall, mechanically, as a card. You give it flying, it dies and floods the board for doing damage to every non-flyer equal to half the number of islands you have.
00:42:55
Speaker
But it has like in the art, it has a couple of goblins running away from this wall that they clearly have just broken themselves because they're goblins. And the flavor text has and I didn't pull it up. So I can't remember the quote who quoted it. But it had one of the goblins just saying to the other one, Hey, quick, teach me how to swim, which is funny on its own. But then the attribution for the quote is goblins name, comma, goblin casualty.
00:43:20
Speaker
yeah which is just like yeah and and i will say that like we even like goblins
00:43:29
Speaker
There's a couple of really, really good lists of the best flavor text of all times. Goblins are by far overrepresented. I was even just pulling up, not even just on goblin cards, but as you're saying, on things like floodgate, on things like, you know, like it's like goblins are, this is when we talked with spice, right? Goblins are there. They are the place to be funny in some ways. Like that's something that is one of the elements.
00:43:55
Speaker
And as you say, I hadn't put this together. I hadn't really thought about this, but in Magic in general, Silver Border, because it doesn't follow the rules, also doesn't have to follow the flavor rules, and so Silver Border cards can tend to be more goofy on the cards themselves. You can have cards that make you balance stuff.
00:44:12
Speaker
was a form of rise. But goblins like in not just goblins, but in normal magic, you can't do that as much, except for the flavor text. And I will contend that this is a reason that goblins are also highly represented in Unsense.
00:44:31
Speaker
They are the builders of contraptions like, you know, especially the last onset before infinity, which is getting ready to release where they are still a very large presence because they do a lot of the types of things that goblins want to do. There's a goblin family that is literally like,
00:44:48
Speaker
two parents and two kids, um, which feels kind of funny cause that's me. Um, but like they're overrepresented and I think it's because it fits in with that goofiness in a way that like pulls the silver bordered and the black border together. Um, even though we can't really say silver bordered anymore, that's a rant and that's not where I'm going. Um, so, cause I'm doing things I love and, uh, goblins and flavor tech. So flavor text in general.
00:45:17
Speaker
Nice. I like it. Flavoredex, that's a good one. So that was number six. It brings me to number five.
Anime Appreciation: Fullmetal Alchemist
00:45:22
Speaker
I'm going to go with Full Metal Alchemist. There's two anime for it. Brotherhood is the better the two anime. And then there is the manga series. And part of the reason that Brotherhood is the better anime is because it follows the manga closer. But the first one was good too.
00:45:38
Speaker
The first one, basically the way it worked was the anime started before the manga was finished and then they kind of caught up and rather than making filler like some tend to do and spending sometimes years like not advancing the story, they're like, we're just gonna take what we have and we're basically gonna fan fiction our own ending. So Full Metal Alchemist was good. I think Brotherhood, I like the story of Brotherhood better.
00:46:08
Speaker
Brotherhood or the original manga, which I'm finishing now. I'm actually reading the manga for the first time this year. I've watched both anime multiple times. I watched them. I followed Alchemist shortly after it came out. I followed Brotherhood as it was releasing.
00:46:24
Speaker
I love this franchise, but the manga and brotherhood, the story that's followed there is a little more ensemble-y, if it makes sense. Alchemist focuses more on the two brothers who are the main characters, but there's a lot more characters who kind of become important and relevant. And I enjoy sort of the community of people who
00:46:47
Speaker
do the final stuff in the Brotherhood story. So that one is my favorite there. Okay. Number five. Yes. Solemn Simulacrum. Yup. Yeah. To make a bunch of them. I like Solemn Simulacrum.
Nostalgia and Strategy in Magic
00:47:04
Speaker
I've said this on the show and you know, this isn't a shock. I still will play Solemn even if you know, it to me is the epitome of why I started playing EDH. Outside of the like I played because
00:47:16
Speaker
I liked it because I had cards that I only had one of. But when I started playing where I wanted to be like, what are some cards I want to play in every single deck? A colorless 2-2 that gets you a land that can fix colors and draws you a card if they die.
00:47:31
Speaker
Like, I don't know. There's just simplicity in that to me. And it's solemn, I guess. It's sad. It's a robot. But I just like, I love the card. I love that that is, you know, to me, it's funny to think about the idea like, you know, this is one of the this was a player designed card. It was an invitational card. So people don't know back in the day, players won events, they got to design cards.
00:47:56
Speaker
Some of these have been quite famous, Snapcaster Mage. Shadow Mage Infiltrator was another designed one for Finkel. There are great cards out there. I mean, there's a lot of them. I mean, I'm just choosing some examples. But Solemn is just solid, right? It was a four for two.
00:48:18
Speaker
ramped and drew a card. And I, that's like, that's what I like doing. Like, yeah. And, and like, then, like you said, as you joked, like I can then clone it a bunch of times and like, just make you the fact that I have a deck that, that keeps solemn count because that's really what I enjoy doing. Yes. So it's sitting in the locker room, makes me happy. And, and, and that colorless is a, is a good thing, especially early on if, if you're just building a.
00:48:49
Speaker
a pool of cards or early on in the format when it was new and everyone was kind of discovering what they could do with it. Having some of those nice colorless staples was a good place to be because you could put together, like I did, a green-white crond of
00:49:07
Speaker
It's called Deck, which is this big guy. If it's enchanted, when it attacks, you exile a creature or something. I thought it was cool and played that deck for like one game. And it's like, but, you know, all of the mana rocks, all the colorless stuff, if I had a solemn for that, which I don't think I did when I built that, but it's like, um,
00:49:30
Speaker
those are useful, not just to buy them in bulk and put them in multiple decks, but then when you take that deck apart, it's a card you can keep using. Well, I think that's it. Like they were also in that list of like, this was before I mean, like you could get lots of copies of them. Like they weren't prohibitive. So like, it makes sense.
00:49:50
Speaker
And that's a card that didn't get a lot of, you know, wouldn't have gotten much standard play. Maybe it got a little bit, but it's like as, that's a card that wouldn't be expensive. And that was like the whole point, maybe not the point, but one of the great things about a format like Commander is that it lets you play cards that aren't really useful in other places.
00:50:10
Speaker
that you don't get to play in other places. And that's one of the things that I loved about the format when I started. I started playing standard when I came back to Magic. Then I went and played a bunch of draft. But one of the things I loved about drafting and playing Commander specifically, there's a stretch where I did a lot of both, was I got to use these cards that were wildly different to different circumstances. If you're playing standard, most of the cards out of the booster pack you don't care about. There's a handful.
00:50:39
Speaker
your draft, you care about every card that's in that booster pack. You may not take them, you may not play them all, but you flip through all 15 and you're really looking at all those commons and uncommons are really important to you. And then Commander offers a situation where you're doing something similar. It's like I talk a lot about my Zada, the Hedron Grinder deck, but because of the way the mechanics that Zada has, I care about very different cards than most people do in Commander.
00:51:07
Speaker
And I just, I love that. I'm passing it back over to you before you like still potentially other stuff or topics. And that's our show for today. You can find both of the hosts on Twitter. Hobbs can be found at Hobbs Q and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to goblin lore pod on Twitter or email us at goblin lore podcast at gmail.com.
00:51:35
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood gobslugs to our Linktree on our Twitter account and listed in our show notes. This has everything from our discounts for the Grinding Coffee Company to our Patreon. The music for today's show was by Vindergotten, who can be found at vindergotten at badcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at Steve Raffled on Twitter.
00:52:00
Speaker
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing forthos content. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmpg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.