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Episode 108: Who put their school into my guild?
102 Plays5 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today Hobbes and Alex had set out to talk about the Schools of Strixhaven. The intention was to have a very clear discussion about how use of short hands (in this case the Guild Names) for two color pairs could be facing a paradigm shift. We've discussed on the show previously about how Izzet does not equal UR. Now with the introduction of named Schools that appear very different than their Ravnica Counterparts we could see a reframe of how to talk about color pairs. Also there's a fun thread to check out on this.
That had been the full intention. But prior to the episode coming out some more "story" came out about students from the schools. In particular the story of Killian Lu was alluded to and as you can see in these two threads there were a lot of thoughts about this (here and here) especially as it leans into harmful stereotypes. While this is a larger topic (spoiler alert, we're planning to address it in a whole episode) we did start out today's episode by acknowledging it.
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
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!
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. 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: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- 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
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePod
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Backgrounds
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today, we're here to talk to you about new magic set, oddly enough. It's not a thing that we've covered a lot of these, but there's actually something here for us to talk about, and I'm really excited about that. But first, why don't I introduce myself? And I'm Alex Newman, found on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler.
00:00:52
Speaker
my pronouns are he him and seen as we're going to be talking about this school of magic and there's five different schools will just make the opening question simple and say what school we think represents us and I definitely lower hold we're going to get into this some more but this white red school
00:01:10
Speaker
Really kind of fits I think my color of high identity is is more white red and Boros was never really a good fit for me So I'm really excited to have a new representation of white red, but that's something we're gonna dig into later Right now. Let's have Hobbs introduce himself and
00:01:27
Speaker
to move on. So I'm Hobbs Q. I can be found on Twitter at Hobbs Q pronouns are he him. And what's interesting is I did the quiz, there was a quiz on this past week, and I did it and it put me in lore hold. So yay, Alex, which I thought was kind of
00:01:44
Speaker
Cool. I mean, it's got the scholar piece that is really about like the artifacts. It made me like the joke was when I asked what that was, somebody told me like Indiana Jones, basically, which is cool. I was interested because the quiz was very straightforward. Like it felt like you could very easily place yourself. And so I tried to avoid doing that, which whenever you're doing something like that with an intentionality, then well, am I intentionally choosing what I don't want? I don't know. It was weird because I really do actually think the prismari
00:02:14
Speaker
And like you said, we're going to get into this when it comes to like the coloring pairs, because this is red, blue, which is kind of where I've identified. They're actually the theater kids. And I actually do think that that was a better fit for me. I was a little surprised I didn't end up there. And I think it was because I was trying to avoid certain things with elementals. But because I actually did a lot of
00:02:37
Speaker
You know, like improv in a lot of like theater type stuff when I was in high school. So it actually, I was assuming that that's where I would be. Uh, so yeah, I'm going to still put myself in the Prismari. Well, before we get into that, I think there was one thing we wanted to talk about Hobbs. Do you want to lead
Magic's New Color Pairs Exploration
00:02:55
Speaker
us through that? Yeah. So you know, the, the colleges were released and that's really our main topic today. We want to talk about the fact that these colleges are our first kind of.
00:03:06
Speaker
something that we've talked about on the show a lot that we shorthand color pairs. I mean, it makes it easier to talk about and we've done, you know, this is what people do when discussing magic. And we've talked before about how that's
00:03:21
Speaker
That is difficult when it comes to the fact that, like, red-white is not the same as Boros necessarily. So you can have red-white in a lot of other sets we have, and they're not the soldiers, they're not the military, but it gets short-handed to Boros because we have a name for it.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, and and often we haven't had a lot of representation of those color pairs as as entities. And Ravnica is about it. And we've been back there a lot. Yeah, I get you know, we kind of had the Dragons of Tarkir clans, I guess, but there wasn't. Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel like there was as nearly as much identity built into them as there was with Ravnica. And maybe it's just because we've had nine sets in Ravnica.
00:04:03
Speaker
Well, I think it's also because the two color pairs were kind of this alternate type of thing versus the three color versions of them. So the three color is better defined. Yes. But now that we're on district saving or we're going to district saving, we actually have identity pairs and they do not map on, and that's what this episode is going to be about. They do not necessarily map onto
00:04:31
Speaker
the Ravnica pairs and it does bring up this idea if you're using is it a shorthand? What do you actually mean? You know, because there's do you mean is it and do you are you talking about the guild? Or are you talking about blue red? So that's what we were prepared to talk about. Yeah. And for that topic, we're specifically looking at an article posted in the middle of February before anything else from Strixhaven was coming out just kind of looking at this will post it in the show notes.
Tropes and Representation Concerns
00:05:01
Speaker
Yes. And so what ended up happening was in between kind of crafting this episode, stuff came out. The joke about we're constantly in spoiler season and we got spoiled basically
00:05:18
Speaker
kind of like the head boy or head girl of different, it's a student that we were introduced to. Yeah, sort of the face of the five different schools. And one of these is Killian Liu. And when the art was released, this is something that I know a lot of friends of mine who are Asian, were actually really excited to see.
00:05:39
Speaker
happening right like this is this is some representation um of of you know asian culture is the hope and we've had kind of very little of that in magic and it hasn't always worked and so this is kind of one of those things that we were you know alex and i before we started the show today were talking about like could this set be it's going to be magical schools there's some tropes there that we're dealing with
00:06:05
Speaker
You know, but is this going to be maybe a twist on Hogwarts where we have a non-turfy kind of approach or we have a better representation approach to the schools? Because Harry Potter still is important for a lot of people and it's okay that, you know, like for me, it still is something that's important. I probably will read them to my daughter. It's also to recognize that there are some limitations and there's some problems with the creator.
00:06:31
Speaker
There was some hope that this might be able to twist some of that. Well, Killian Liu came out and the first thing that we get is that his dad is the Dean of the Silver Quill, which is the house that he belongs to. And he's described specifically as, you know, a stern man who drives his son to graduate at the top of his class, rigid discipline, an ever watchful eye, all of his mistakes.
00:06:55
Speaker
He's quick to remind him of his lineage of Ink Masters that compromised the Lew ancestry, and his failures are his father's failures and the family by extension. And then he trains in secret to address his shortcomings, a detached professionalism, and the question is whether it's due to his father's constant vigil or his own desire to master. He vows to only ever make a mistake once if only he didn't find the light so difficult to embrace.
00:07:22
Speaker
A friend of the cast, somebody who's been very supportive of us, BarbariansRiddle or at BarbariansRid1 on Twitter, pointed out the fact that the very beginning of this is an overbearing Asian dad, which really hits kind of a lot of the tropes.
00:07:38
Speaker
when not just tropes and this is a this is a thing we could get into probably into another episode entirely but this is a place where tropes and cliches and stereotypes kind of meet and it's like tropes are storytelling techniques devices that have been used and are often good shorthand to help people sort of learn you know kind of get into build into stories but then there's the cliches which are overused tropes and stereotypes which are
00:08:07
Speaker
used an offensive to these communities, kind of reducing communities of people to just this stereotype, to just these struggles. And we even end up having – since this has happened, we've had his father, the dean card, was revealed. And what's funny is basically,
00:08:28
Speaker
He gets he basically gets bonuses or his ability is to basically like hurt his students, right? So like the card itself basically deals damage and then like It deals damage to then build up a student, right? So like it's it's very much like it even plays into like this idea and so
00:08:50
Speaker
So, Barbarians Riddle kind of put out this tweet and really also tagged in somebody that we knew would be carrying a lot about this, Michelle, at Kiln Veen Potter, who's been on the show more than once. We've talked toxic masculinity. We've talked just art and the color pie. And she's somebody who was very excited about the set.
00:09:12
Speaker
at the face of this, there's a ton of like owl art, she is very into that her pottery work is beautiful. And a lot of times she has done stuff with owls, and it really plays into that magical piece. And that's been a big part of this. This was something that she was very excited by. And
00:09:28
Speaker
And she also then followed up with a pretty good thread, and we'll link the threads. We did talk to both of them to make sure that it was something that they were kind of uncomfortable about, or comfortable with us discussing, sorry. And she said, whenever a marginalized group is represented in magic, the first thing I ask is, what purpose do they serve and what impression will they give?
00:09:51
Speaker
This is something that we've been having a lot of discussions about here on our show in Magic Community at Large is better representation of marginalized groups. We talked a little bit about this with Nico and queerness and kind of hoping that that was an improvement and seeing some of the direction that Kaldheim took, especially to almost like throw themselves in the face of the Aryan stereotype that people that want to embrace Norse culture for
00:10:20
Speaker
white supremacy. So like, we had been pretty excited. That's why we talked about it. We had this long discussion when we returned from our hiatus about what is this going to be and how the story is going to be less of a role because of these things, except for when we think that Wizards might be making improvements, we want to discuss it. And that was our plan here, right? Yeah, yeah, that's what we were hoping. Like, I mean, and we're still going to get to that topic, talking about the color pie, the
00:10:49
Speaker
color pairs, getting greater representation of things. And so there's still some of that to talk about, but unfortunately we're here again talking about problems in the story. And this just to me smacks of, I think Michelle talks about this a little bit too in her thread, but this just smacks of not having people in your room looking at this. This is why it's so important to have diverse folk looking at these stories or
00:11:17
Speaker
is I know in the writing community a lot because you know one person writes a book on their own they can only represent their own standpoints that's why there is a profession like within that community called sensitivity readers who are people who will read things to you know looking for this stuff specifically to make sure that this will read well to
00:11:40
Speaker
given communities. And we won't know. I don't know who was in the room who was writing this set, who was making this within Wizards. And we know that there has been announcements about hiring for these roles and that these roles are coming.
00:11:58
Speaker
This just seems like something that there just wasn't enough people or the right people or them trying to cover their bases because this is a thing. It took how long for the community to catch this and say, yeah, this doesn't look good. Like 10 minutes? Yeah, it's a clear stereotype. And when you're looking to try to represent communities, using stereotypes is the opposite of what you're trying to do.
00:12:26
Speaker
You're just, you are continuing to put that community into a specific box and not giving them the ability to be like fully fleshed humans. Well, and I think that that's, so the Michelle's thread kind of goes on to say, you know, like Killian looks badass. Like he, and that was the thing when the art was spoiled, it was just like, this is cool. And the question becomes, why give him a tiger parent? Like you, sure.
00:12:50
Speaker
You want Killian to have the type A drive, and that's what she talks about. That he needs to succeed in the competitive college. The black and white we're going to get into is probably the ones that are going to be very competitive. That's the type of attitude and personality he would need to have, but it's like he's being driven by
00:13:12
Speaker
She talks about maybe he's being driven by the stereotypical motivation of family pride, and the big word is honor. And we talked about that. Your failures are the family's failures, and this is very much a stereotype. There's still ways to give people a type A.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah. And there's other ways to build these motivations, but you have to know that you're trying to not do these stereotypes and just align from Michelle's thread to kind of underline what I've been saying here. She says, being Asian, I already struggled to find dynamic, multifaceted representation in my hobbies. I don't need more stereotypes thrown in my face. And that's what this is, unfortunately. Yeah. And she basically...
00:14:00
Speaker
Michelle says she was looking to be, she was excited about the set. And, you know, just like this, you know, it's got the whole, you know, she kind of talks about this idea of the Kuman Center, which I kind of was something that I had to look up, which is kind of this idea that it's like a very much an educational, it's got this method that is really, I think, more a little bit more kind of, it's like a Japanese educator that started it, and it's very much considered
00:14:30
Speaker
you know, like a method of learning that is, I think, a stereotype. Well, it's very much aimed towards math. It was very much aimed towards kind of, you know, there's been a lot of criticism because of just how it's used. And she made a joke about, like, it's the secret learning. And so she made a land, this is his Kuman Center.
00:14:53
Speaker
People even shiv them and stuff was like, wow, that hits pretty close, right? And so it is that idea that you have people that were excited for the set to see.
00:15:06
Speaker
themselves, right? This is what we want. We want people to be excited because they're getting to see themselves. And we have two people that have been very vocal. Barbarians Riddle has been very vocal about this representation piece and it being a big deal for him and his embracing of kind of his Korean culture. And then Michelle has always been talking about this piece of her Asian heritage and
00:15:32
Speaker
even her work with Asian represent, which is a podcast and they're just the disappointment was so sad to see. I mean, it was just like the very first thing that we get after we've had this article that we're going to discuss today, which we had been excited about was what this might look like in the card form and we were smacked in the face.
00:15:56
Speaker
just immediately with, as you said, not even tropes. Yeah, stereotypes. Yeah, and tropes, by and large, aren't bad. Now, they're not a great place to stop. One of the points of tropes is generally, you know, humans kind of tell in lots of ways the same stories over and over again, and that isn't necessarily bad. But it's you want to find ways to use those. I mean,
00:16:22
Speaker
one of my favorite shows of all time, Community, they literally go to TV, they would go to TV tropes to write their, start writing their episodes. But what they were doing, and one of the reasons I love the show is because they'd say, okay, this is the starting point. This is how the story has been told before. How are we going to use these? How are we going to break these? And that's, that's where they would start. Yeah, and you know, money is so
00:16:51
Speaker
Another clear example of this, because I think community is one of the places that's done it the best. I actually really love there's this idea of in horror, the movie Scream, I think of as being one of the first times that I really saw this, kind of this is me dating myself and aging myself.
Tropes vs Stereotypes: A Deeper Dive
00:17:11
Speaker
Now, I do think that it was done a little bit earlier in horror with Wes Craven has always kind of had this like acknowledgement of
00:17:18
Speaker
like the story Scream is amazing because scream Everybody in the movie is like horror buffs who was aware of the tropes
00:17:29
Speaker
And yet the movie follows the same formula and like to the point of where we have like Nav Campbell joking about like, Oh, the, the hero always runs upstairs instead of out the front door. And then like two scenes later, that's what she's doing. Um, and I think it's that self-awareness piece, which the community had that did it just to like level 10. Yeah. I mean, they would literally have episodes where they would just say, this is going to be our mafia episode. And then they do a mafia episode.
00:17:55
Speaker
But anyway, tropes can be played on, and there's a difference between them and stereotypes. And that's, again, where this having people looking at things is so important. Having people from different groups, particularly when you're dealing with marginalized groups, you're dealing with minority groups, it is very important to have folk who can speak to that experience.
00:18:22
Speaker
looking at what you're doing because otherwise you just do this. It's so easy for someone who doesn't have that experience to just stumble into the stereotypes that you've heard and internalized and don't understand that are there because that's just all the experience you've had because that's how
00:18:41
Speaker
Unfortunately, that's how mass media often works. There are improvements over time, but that doesn't mean that things are in a good place. Yeah, I'm sorry. I think that's a good...
00:18:57
Speaker
I mean, this is, you know, like, it's just so frustrating. I'm sorry to cut you off now. It's just so frustrating to me that like, it felt like they were doing really good. And I mean, now we have this stumble. So we'll see, I guess we'll see what else comes out from Wizards. Cause as you mentioned earlier, Hobbs, you know, we decided to take sort of a hiatus from story. We took a step back from talking about magic story because we didn't like where it was going. Then this, this year or.
00:19:27
Speaker
But it's March. Goodness, time is weird. In the last year, it felt like they were improving and they were recognizing these things. We had the announcement from Wizards saying, hey, we're going to just write the characters we want to write, even if certain regions decide that they don't like characters like this. We're just going to create
00:19:47
Speaker
the stories that we want to tell and they post that out and then we get Nico, you know, and it's like, okay, cool. They're going to have these, you know, queer characters and representation and they're just going to do it. This is great. And now again, we get here and there's, there's this big misstep that feels like it should have been so easy to not have that if, if, if, okay, I'm sorry. I think I'm, I've said all I need to say here.
00:20:17
Speaker
At least for me. I mean, I think that this is, you know, when I, I kind of wrote to you just, I think yesterday, maybe when I sent you and said, Hey, like, I really think that we need to make sure that we're addressing this art. And I'm not surprised that.
00:20:39
Speaker
We're at 20 minutes and we're still talking about it because I think that this is something that we wanted to give a lot of weight to, given that this is something that you and I are being more aware of. I didn't use the word try because
00:20:59
Speaker
Uh, as everybody on this show that listens regularly probably knows I don't like that word very much. Um, because we either are doing it or we're not, and we may not be doing it. Well, that's another question altogether. That's not something that we can answer, but we are doing it and we may be missing the mark and we're happy to discuss about if we are, um,
00:21:22
Speaker
But this is something that we've been intentional about wanting to do. And, you know, as we said, we we're able to just have community episodes where we talk about the elements that are important to us, whether it be well, you know, we have our color pie episodes. Those are important to us. We have
00:21:39
Speaker
Guest on to talk about cosplay like we had Ellie of the veil to talk about cosplay and getting into it And there was some story stuff, but it's not the lore piece that we had been doing very early on And we recognized when Joe Left that we would like we we had less knowledge of the lore and at the same time
00:22:02
Speaker
That's the reason Joe left was for a reason. And, um, you know, and, and this week the announcement also came out that the other, one of the other big podcasts, Lorgwaifs, I mean, that's Michelle, it's Taya. It's people that we know, um, people that have been supportive of us and people that have been on the cast. I mean, uh, they're taking a.
00:22:26
Speaker
A kind of a hiatus that's indefinite. It's not, you know, they announced it basically. And they've admitted like there's been some like light stuff and blah, blah, blah. Indeterminate, I guess. Yeah. They're taking a hiatus with the intention of recharging it.
00:22:44
Speaker
coming back? Hopefully, but also maybe coming back different and yeah, like re-evaluate. And I didn't mean to say blah, blah, blah, because it is because there's been, you know, they admitted to personal issues and that's the only reason I didn't really want to get into a ton of it. Oh yeah, yeah. I just want to say like indefinite hiatus sometimes sounds like they're planning to never come back, but I think they're
00:23:10
Speaker
They're taking a break with no determined end date, which is kind of the same thing, but sometimes. It's basically to say who are we and what is our role now? I tweeted yesterday that- That's something that we had to deal with ourselves. To make that decision of if we were going to continue and then when we came back to say what it was going to be.
00:23:36
Speaker
This is a long roundabout way to say that we want to talk about these schools. The topic in particular that's interesting to us is the fact that we're getting color pairs that are not just the Ravnica ones that have a definition. So let's talk about it. We are still going to address it. And this issue with Killian in particular is something that we may be coming back to as more comes out. Yeah.
00:24:07
Speaker
As I say, I was excited to have a story thing that I was excited about. There have been improvements in the story because we had that with Nico as well, things that we could talk about and this whole thing with Killian. Well, it's something we definitely want to talk about, but it also means if this is the trend, it may mean that we go back to not talking about story much again, but we don't know. The future will kind of determine that. But in the interim right now, today while we're recording, yeah, let's get back to what we were
00:24:37
Speaker
intending to record. So yeah, this article, so like I said, we're going to go to all really outside of that. We wanted to address that and make sure that that was talked about because it's important, unfortunately. We wanted to make sure that it was talked about for the first 25 minutes because as we got into this, it became deeper and deeper.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah. I talked to you about before the cast. There are several potential tangents that are probably their own episodes or at least portions of episodes that we could have gone into. We didn't really go into too far with those, which is good. Let's get back to this article from February.
Strixhaven Schools and New Identities
00:25:20
Speaker
That was our very first look at these schools. This is what really got me excited about this.
00:25:27
Speaker
So there were the five colleges, which again, I just just today looking at this article notice that said that they were all founded by elder dragons, which is just really cool and exciting.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, I was surprised. I was surprised. Like, I had caught on that herb, obviously, because I'm like, you know me. And to be honest, I think part of it was I was so distracted because I was excited about A, the potential of non-trophy Hogwarts, because that is a property that I can't comfortably do anything with myself right now.
00:26:00
Speaker
And then be that little blurb about the colleges is right above lower hold which which is my school that I'm really excited about so my very first exposure district save and I'm going to tangent because this is what we do was, I believe it was.
00:26:15
Speaker
Keswili, I think, was a just random magic person I follow. I think he's the one who posted this though. Posted, before I even knew that this article was out and that they were talking about Strixhaven, posted just a quick little like banner for all five schools. And I didn't even know it was a magic thing. It was just like, so which one are you? Like it's all it was was school name and their motto. And I looked at those and I was like, Lorehold, leave no stone unturned. Yeah, that probably sounds like me. And then I learned very quickly. I'm like, this looks like magic font. And then I,
00:26:44
Speaker
looked that up and found that it was an effect. And it was the white-red skull, which as I mentioned at the top, and I've mentioned a few times in the past, like that's, I feel that's where my color identity really is, except I'm not Boros. I'm definitively not Boros. So I've never really felt, it's weird to say I've never felt, you know, like my color identity represented in magic, but that's kind of the thing that
00:27:11
Speaker
each color, and we talk about this when we talk about color identity, there's a lot to them. And each given person might only represent some portion of that color because that's the piece of it that fits them. And that's kind of we've
00:27:26
Speaker
as we said we've never really had we had Ravnica was it was a great representation of a world built around these color pairs and that was great but it's not the entirety of what these colors can represent and what fits with them and so I was really excited to see this in white red and like this fits
00:27:45
Speaker
you know, diligent researchers, daring adventures, I don't know how much of a daring adventure I am, but passionate scholars obsessed with history, like that, that's me in a lot of way. I mean, there's some other things that I enjoy, but I do very much have, I like to, it's, I like to explain my pack radicalism is archival instincts. And so like, I have,
00:28:10
Speaker
That's just what I do with things where I have the space for it. My Google Drive is an archive of all the, you know, I have a folder full of all the things I've written in every iteration of all these little things.
00:28:22
Speaker
I love this representation of white red. Me too. Yeah, like this to me is, you know, like the joke is like, this is the Indiana Jones, if you're looking at it. And I just, I just like when I was looking at this, it just had the complete this belongs in a museum. Yep. And both sides of it too, is part of the cool thing. It's both the adventures out in the field, which is a little more ready, and the sitting home and researching it.
00:28:47
Speaker
With the boring professor that they make fun of you know in front of the class like him teaching right this is this is literally both elements of Indiana Jones and I it just and the cool thing about Kess's thread and I'll see if I can also find that I'm a link a ton of this is
00:29:06
Speaker
Him posting like other people like who would be this in pop culture which usually matches very well the pop culture to magic that's kind of one of the things that he does and I thought that this was a great way to see.
00:29:21
Speaker
these ideas of like where I might belong because it really has this thing and this is so far from the Boros. Yeah, so far from the Boros and but also you can I can really see those colors represented in this we are looking at especially like the preservation of history.
00:29:41
Speaker
is something that's, you know, white has a lot of strong structure and societal things, which is why they fit the burros, because that's maintaining order and things. And using the red as more militant in that color, the white can be kind of militant in the upholding order and structure. But you look at preserving history, and then the red is, you know, I think is a little more the adventure color in this pair.
00:30:08
Speaker
But I just I love seeing those colors definitely represented doing something very different. Right, like we've talked a lot about
00:30:21
Speaker
The representation of military and how that is usually where red-white is. I mean, so they made the commander decks for each of these sets. And the red-white is… Gavin Verhe even said the goal was they didn't just want another red-white equipment matters attack.
00:30:43
Speaker
Kind of commander like this specifically we're looking for something that is so and the commander like basically lets you sacrifice Artifacts or you know to do that and then to copy artifacts out of your graveyard Go get them and make copies of them get them out there. It's is really cool Another way to play red white and I mean you think that as commander players I think you and I both that's probably where we most identify with and
00:31:10
Speaker
you know, having options of other archetypes to play within a coloring pair is really cool. I mean, and that's, yeah, that's a place that red, white has been artifacts is something that both colors care about. There's been a little bit of just general artifact matters in those colors, but usually it's equipment, as Gavin says, it's usually that takes the form of equipment.
00:31:34
Speaker
Um, or sort of attack. Yeah. So it's really nice to kind of see them doing, doing that in a different way. Mechanically as, as well as story wise though, because I'm a little more excited about the story right now. Cause I haven't played magic in over a year and I probably won't play it for a little while still. So, okay. When you move, like I'm going to buy you a webcam if need be, or I'm going to come over and physically set up something so that we can play magic Alex. Like this is bothering me now.
00:32:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm so magic deprived. I started playing Hearthstone the other night. Of course. Hey, that's dangerous. Let's just at least get you an arena on your phone now. Is it a really weird aside because that's what we do because we're goblins. Hearthstone did release a classic version of the classic format. So you can only play cards that were in the original set, which is when I played Hearthstone a lot because I got in on the beta.
00:32:30
Speaker
So I played a tone in the beta and then just kind of burned myself out on the game before the first expansion even came out. And that's when I stopped. So that's more of just a nostalgia hit than anything else. Anything, but yeah, but the lore hold, we got kind of the commands. So this was kind of cool that like the way that they introduced them was like, the face student got like art and then we got commands and the return of commands is always fun.
00:32:56
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And it's always nice to fill in cycles too, because, you know, magic players, we crave like completion of humans in general, crave completion of patterns. And so it's nice to have, and that's, you know, we had the two color commands, like I said, in dragons that had the
00:33:15
Speaker
ally color pairs. Oh, and we are going to say something about this too. It was very quick while I'm thinking about it. I also really like that when they decided to do this magic school and this, you know, derivation of doing different versions of these color pairs. I love that they went with the enemy colors. We don't see the enemy colors as often because in the early days of magic, that was part of the
00:33:36
Speaker
That was part of the flavor of it, that the enemy colors don't partner as well or as often. And which, I mean, if you go back and look at like even the design of dual lands, you go to like Ice Age. I think Ice Age had this. I know some sets had this where the enemy colored lands weren't as good as the allied color lands.
00:33:58
Speaker
Tempest Block, I think, had enemy-colored lands that were worse than allied-colored lands. I might be wrong on that, but I know historically they just didn't give you dual lands as often, and when you got them, they just weren't as good. Because, flavorfully, that kind of fits, but then they realized that gameplay-wise, that kind of sucks.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so and that's the development or the I would say the evolution of the color pie is to say, well, what does that look like? And and so that's a thing where just because of that, and wow, we could get into a weird analogy about that representation and minority groups, but we're not going to because we've anyway, the whole thing is, is that because of that early building,
00:34:42
Speaker
away from making enemy colors happen less often and happen worse. It means that those don't have as many options for things while building. So you have fewer dual lands.
00:34:57
Speaker
Not the dual dual lands, but you have fewer lands you can use while you're building your decks. You have... Two-colored lands, let's call them. Two-colored lands. Dual lands is a really confusing concept. Exactly. Sorry, I just... We called them for a long time, and then they had to start to name the cycles, and it's stuck in my head.
00:35:16
Speaker
So yeah, you have fewer two-color lands. You have fewer other things. Like for a long time, you just didn't have nearly as many legends. I mean, that's why the first commander set of pre-cons were... They were wedges in charge. Because before those decks, if you go back and look, each of those colors have... Some of them have only one option, and that's the dragon from Time Spiral Block.
00:35:41
Speaker
Or there was another set of dragons. Well, there have been some sets of dragons, but I don't think there were complete cycles outside of that Time Spiral one.
00:35:55
Speaker
But so just you have a lot fewer options for things like that. Maybe I'm wrong with that, but I just know there's the wedges and the enemy colored pairs just have a lot fewer options in some places. And over time that's starting to be erased a little bit just from volume, but you still have fewer total. And so it's nice to see them kind of emphasize this. I mean, and these commands now fill in with the allied color commands from dragons.
00:36:22
Speaker
Dragons of Tarkir. Yeah, so this is interesting from kind of, I think you and I are always, we like to know what the enemy pairs look like and it's an interesting design space.
Exploring Prismari and Quandrix
00:36:36
Speaker
So the next one that we have is the Prismari. To me, this was the fascinating one I talked about at the top of the show because this is your theater kids. It's kind of the joke, right? I mean, like they did this as if they were. They're the theater kids. Magic is how they express themselves. So in this way, magic is really about expression.
00:36:54
Speaker
So you have the red passion, the blue knowledge. And so you basically it's how you are able to tell your own story. They use it. It's like art is informed by mind or emotion and.
00:37:09
Speaker
Their motto is, express yourself with the elements. And this is where we get into their ideas. It's elemental magic. They care a lot more about spells. The big part here is that that is what they're doing. They are casting spells, and it's a way to express themselves.
00:37:27
Speaker
I would say this is such a difference for me than the is it, which is, you know, I have my is it shirt. It's like sitting right over here. I think I'm going to wear it today. I love my is it shirt. It says, boom, across it. Right. Like, and we've talked a lot about this. Like, is it, is to me, I think, is it, I don't know.
00:37:49
Speaker
is the best pairing for goblins to be outside the norm. They are the artificers, but it doesn't mean the artificing is going to go well. They have the knowledge, they do have the interest, but they also are still building things to blow up. That's what they're doing. They're building inventions that they don't know what's going to happen when they turn them on.
00:38:15
Speaker
I really identify just with that. It's completely me. So like, is it really has that identity? It's a lot more caring about artifacts. It's caring about artificing. It is caring about building. Lightning is like, you know, like we're building electricity, we're using it. The Prismari is very different. And for me,
00:38:41
Speaker
I was – like I said, I did improv. I did a lot of theater sports. And I think that that's funny because if people don't – theater sports is kind of the idea of like whose line is it anyway where you have games that you're playing within. So you have a structured game that you're playing that you improv within it with a group. And so – and then like there's jokes, you know, you make up points and you score it.
00:39:04
Speaker
I was a sport, I was a runner, right? Like this was a big part of me was being a sporty kid, but I was also this really, my artistic expression was more to do with
00:39:15
Speaker
theater than it would have been with drawing or artwork or anything else. And I liked to perform. I mean, that was who I was known as. We've talked about this on the show that I was seen as an extrovert. And part of that was it was exhausting for me to do because I'm really like that borderline extrovert introvert. But that is who I was. I was big. I was very much like an express yourself.
00:39:41
Speaker
And I was also the student who got A's and, you know, like had that knowledge piece, the sport piece to it, the competition. So it's cool to me, both representations of red, blue, and this is where we get into it. The two color pairs still have some things that are going to overlap, even though we're talking about different versions of them.
00:40:07
Speaker
And it is going to be interesting to see, I think, and I guess I would love to hear from you, Alex, too, if you did, if, you know, the difference between maybe what you identified with if you did with a guild versus here, because for me, I kind of see myself in this as I did the Izzet for very different reasons. I love this idea of
00:40:32
Speaker
The whole world's a stage that we get the quote unquote theater kids, which are the people that I really liked. Now there should have been goblins still. There still should have been goblins.
00:40:42
Speaker
Wizards broke their promise to us that I don't think actually ever existed, that there would be goblins on every plane from now on. They're promised to us that existed only in our own heads. Yeah, we made it up, but it still is a promise. Exactly. So yeah, Alex, I'm sorry. I talk a lot because this was the class that
00:41:02
Speaker
And that's exactly what you should have done. That's the one that really hit you, and that's where you should be talking the most. Yeah, and one of the things that I really like about that school, like I said for lower hold as well, you can see the color pairs in there. You can really still see where each color is influencing kind of how this color pair works.
00:41:28
Speaker
And, as you mentioned too, that there's still those threads to the is it, even though they're a very different representation. You can still see that, you know, incident and sorcery matters sort of thing. I think both of them share that.
00:41:43
Speaker
But at the same time, they're going about their influence in a different way. They're going about it flavorfully in a very different way. And that's why I was so excited about this set when we got this article in the middle of February, because it looked like they were really putting a lot of effort into giving us different representations of these color pairs and really fleshing them out.
00:42:07
Speaker
Um, I can say this particular color pairs with it doesn't speak to me at all. Though in Ravnica, I would say is it is one of the ones that I'm more, uh, I've probably followed to a little closer. So it's, it's interesting for me that, you know, you and I have similar things where we both probably look at, is it on Ravnica? And then I'm really not Prismari at all. Yeah.
00:42:35
Speaker
So quandrix was a cool one because I think that people initially had a very strong reaction. I think it makes sense because I think this is where we're seeing that.
00:42:47
Speaker
difference between the simic and the quandrix. Yep, this is one of the starkest. I mean, outside of Lorehold is also a pretty strong one too, but I love this representation of blue-green as mathematicians.
00:43:06
Speaker
Like, math is magic. They are going to hit us over the head with this. This is what they're about. No, blue-green is not the biologists of this world because that is precisely how Simic works. Simic are the biologists of Ravnica. And so I love this representation of blue-green as math and studying patterns and fractals and
00:43:35
Speaker
Rubik's cubes. Literally. I mean, like, you could make fractals, right? Like, that is actually part of their abilities. And it fits too, because I'm sorry to cut you off here, but talking about it, blue is often the knowledge side. And that fits. Green is often about sort of the natural world and things that exist, which is why, you know, the biologists were the good first effort when Wizards was like, okay, we're going to Ravnica and we're going to give
00:44:05
Speaker
very strong structured identities to each of these two color pairs that really fit but you think about what's something that is fundamental in the structure of the world and math like actually really fits that so it's a great and you talk about you know kind of representing green green gets represented as nature a lot which it is that is a big part of it but they're also about
00:44:33
Speaker
You look at Mark Rosewater, some of the things he says, like green is often about representing things kind of as they are and all of these different forces and understanding underlying math makes sense actually. That actually makes a lot of sense for green in that context, particularly when you add the scholarship of blue to them.
00:44:57
Speaker
And I would say that this is one of those things that like, yes, we, I think that biologists would make sense in terms of, like, you know, that's what we would have thought coming over from Ravnica because they are the mutators. They're the ones that want to just like stitch things together. I love the fact that they basically get represented in the unsets from doing this. Like we had a whole new version of it with the, you know, and then, but green is more than that. It is community. It is order.
00:45:26
Speaker
I would say that you know like this is the understanding of nature and that's what we're getting here because math edits you know when we talk about the sciences a lot of times math is the base it is the way that things are put together is the way that things are.
00:45:44
Speaker
The patterns and we talk about with humans always seeking out patterns. That's what this is. This is why does nature work the way that it does? This is this is to me, I was like, these are the physicists in some ways because they're the ones who are explaining why. And I loved this to be.
00:46:03
Speaker
I like the they can recite every number of pie backwards but you know like I this is kind of the cool. The fractal pieces something that is beautiful to me and just the symmetry and I do think that symmetry is so much green but it's not what I would have expected.
00:46:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's part of why I was so excited for this keep go back to this. But that's, yeah, like, they really looked like they were really putting, they did, they put a lot of effort into this particular aspect. And that was a thing that we've been kind of hoping for talking about. Yeah, yeah, like, the whole idea of being able to see schools of magic,
00:46:49
Speaker
Basically, and that's kind of a just an easy way to say kind of It is it's just I just consistently I'm looking at this article and it's the world building that we wanted in the sense that like there is thought into Defining two color pairs, but also not just doing what we've done before, you know
00:47:11
Speaker
Finding them all in new ways. I think the last one we'll get to the last on the list, I think, is the one that's the closest to its previous incarnations, but even that is a stretching of how it's normally identified.
Silverquill and Witherbloom's Unique Takes
00:47:24
Speaker
Let's do Silver Quill because we talked about Killian at the start. This is the Black Light, and I think that the part that why I think this is exciting and then what maybe led to a ton of disappointment was
00:47:40
Speaker
This is black-white that is not Orzov. I mean, we've talked about Orzov a ton on here. Like, Orzov, your debt's never paid. You can talk and your debt's not paid. Maybe, oddly, outside of is it, Orzov is the color. I don't know that I identified the most with, but I think I've always liked black-white as a color pair. And so that was the guild that I was kind of always
00:48:09
Speaker
the that i liked sort of the most but yeah this is so not ours up there is no religiousness to it because again i think that is
00:48:20
Speaker
easy, I don't want to say easy, because that sounds bad. But when they were when they went to represent the colors for the first time in this very structured way, they kind of went for the low hanging fruit. And the thing is, is that's fine. Like we talked about it like that's a bad thing sometimes. But like that actually worked really well for Ravnica because it makes color pairs. Yep. Super resonant with people.
00:48:43
Speaker
Well, the time that we'd had black-white even before Ravnica, when we didn't have it as a defined named group, the way that I generally think of it when they have gone together was as clerics. And it was trying to show the extreme versions in some ways of religious devotion. Yes. Yeah. And so like, this is really not that.
00:49:05
Speaker
And this I really like too because from just from a writing standpoint, I really like this representation of them as battle poets. Like just saying that sounds just puts a smile on my face. Like that's just awesome.
00:49:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it really is like, this is where we get the idea of like, yeah, sharp, sharp style, sharper, wet, like, and that's why we that's why it was that cool thing about Killian is like, the art just looks so badass. He's got this like, swirl of black oil. Ha ha. It's by Rexian. Sorry. It's got a grill on his shoulder pad. And it's definitely ink. That's okay.
00:49:52
Speaker
You know me, I want the Phyrexians back. But anyway, yeah, they have charisma, and it can be used for good or ill. I mean, the part of the story that Barbarians Rivel posted, the piece to it that would have been interesting, or is interesting is
00:50:10
Speaker
he's kind of trying to find the light and the dark. You know, like in some ways, okay, this could be our Jedi, except like the version that we're looking for where they're trying to find balance. Yeah. Well, and
00:50:26
Speaker
Sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry, I had to go there because it is. Yeah, it's fine. Well, it is talking about the light in the dark, you know, like, this is that's true. That's an aspect I hadn't thought but it just, I'm still on the battle poet thing. Sorry. It's just as somebody who, you know, a person with social anxiety, who often, I love sort of the bardic, you know, they talk to,
00:50:50
Speaker
Eric about in a previous episode, kind of talking about bards and things in RPGs, like that's an archetype I've always found attractive, but haven't always been able to really play because of my own social things. And so this is these are the bards of
00:51:07
Speaker
in a lot of ways. I should say not necessarily the bard but they fit sort of the the a piece of that sort of storytelling part. Obviously you have like theater in the prismari can also fit some some bardic tropes as well but just from the sort of storytelling part that's part of why I like I think silver quill is so cool to me.
00:51:33
Speaker
And like I said, this is one that I do think that I saw a lot of people talk about how just how much Orzab did not fit them, even though the black-white elements of the color pie did. So the people that I've seen posting that saw more representation from themselves, that's what we want, right? And we're going to talk about the fact that, or just briefly hit on,
00:52:02
Speaker
I now don't remember because my brain doesn't work if this was you and I before show or not. We are only getting five aspects. We're getting the enemy aspects, but we're getting five aspects. I understand because we're doing single sets at a lot of places, so it would not have been unless they were really trying to take this back to the old format.
00:52:23
Speaker
It would have been hard to fit. It would have been hard. We can't fit in schools. It doesn't mean wondering what the call out like is. Even people to guild is the term for two-color pairs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's right. Now we can talk schools.
00:52:41
Speaker
seeing if this is a design space that moving forward gets to have a little bit more is something that we've been talking about for a long time, wanting to talk about the importance of names. Let's do the last school because I have a couple of thoughts. Yeah. And then we can kind of do some wrap-up thoughts. Yeah. The last school is Witherbloom, Black or Green. And these are the... I'm sorry, I just love it. They're the Goth Bio major. Goth Bio major, yeah.
00:53:07
Speaker
Which is which is great. And the thing is, like, black, green, and this is the one that is kind of adheres a little bit closer to previous incarnations, they definitely deal with, you know, the life and death sort of thing. But I think most of them like Golgari, you look at a lot of the other black, green representations, even though it's usually not organizations, just what they do, are represented, you know, with the whole cycle of life and death, but
00:53:31
Speaker
I mean, this is where we get dredge. We get dredge as a mechanic. Yeah, we get reanimation, even if it's not. Yeah, most of them look at sort of focus on the death side of life and death cycle. And we'll see, but kind of what they talk about here, it sounds like the weather bloom might be more focused on the life side. And that is a thing too, they talk about they literally call these the goth bio majors. Well, in, you know,
00:54:01
Speaker
Ravnican terms we would expect.
00:54:04
Speaker
blue-green to be the biologists, but because blue-green aren't the biologists here, that opens it up for black-green to be the biologists. Well, they gotta be goth biologists. Well, they gotta be goth biologists. They can't be the boring biologists. It would be interesting to see, and obviously this is a school setting as opposed to a guild setting, so there's some differences there, but it'll be different, interesting to see how black-green biologists differ from blue-green biologists.
00:54:34
Speaker
And that's a whole thing too, where it's like, we can have these guilds and we can have these schools and we can represent these colors in ways and say, well, you know, Boros, the red white, or the, you know, the military and things, but it's like, but, you know, in the real world, and even in some ways in the game world, real people have more to them than that. And so, you know, people who fill those roles are going to have different color identities that
00:55:01
Speaker
there's more to them than just simply, I'm in the military so I'm red and or white.
00:55:08
Speaker
there's more to it. And so it's interesting to get to see the colors obviously stretched in this way. But now we're actually getting to see a similar niche being filled by a different color pair. And so I think the biggest difference is just the music they listen to while doing their biology. That's it. That's fair. That's all it is. That's what we need. We need more music in sets anyway.
00:55:37
Speaker
I'm going to hit on one last piece before I go back to kind of the point I was making about the color pairs. But there's this really cool idea of the mystical archive. And these, if you haven't seen these, these are art that have very different styles that also it's important to look at the flavor text and what cards they are. There are cards that are kind of pulled from all of Magic's history. They are interesting because
00:56:07
Speaker
mystical archive idea is like this is spells that are like almost like you know like the forbidden spells or these are the that have like there is a book of these spells these spells are pulled from across the multiverse which means that somehow information Strixhaven is getting information from other planes now whether that's through planeswalkers and
00:56:33
Speaker
We can talk about this because they have like Liliana as a teacher, which is fantastic. And we wouldn't have caught it back in February, but they actually named drop her here. Yep.
00:56:45
Speaker
Professor Onyx happens to be sifting through several tomes right here with students Rowan and Will, which we would have known Rowan and Will, but Onyx is turned out to be Liliana without her normal headdress. Yeah, that's her older ego that, or not older ego, that's her. That's her possibly on the run. I mean, and that's, you know, but the,
00:57:12
Speaker
The Mystical Archive contains all of this information from across different planes that we've seen. And, you know, even to the point where it has like, talking about the Elder Spell, it's talking about Bolas versus Ugin on a card. So we are, this is an interesting idea. So just a cool piece to me that we're getting these
00:57:36
Speaker
different arts, whether they work or not all the time. And that's been a big discussion. And I'm going to use this two seconds to say, you could not like something. Let's just realize that just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it's bad, or it has no quality or to insult the author artist of it. Yeah, I'm just like saying this because it happened this week.
00:57:59
Speaker
Yeah, and it's bad. And that will happen occasionally here and there as well, just like, I don't like this, therefore it's bad. And it's like, that's just... Well, then it took no work. You insult the level, like, I could have done this in MS Paint when you couldn't, right? You can see skill in something and still not like it. Yeah.
00:58:25
Speaker
It's, it's fine. You can just not like a thing and just be like, Oh, this isn't for me. It's fine. I promise you'll be fine if you do that. Yeah. And, and I, I just wanted to point that out because I actually appreciate, I know at first it, it's been hard for me with all the different versions of things. Um, I've talked a lot about this. I'm actually getting more and more comfortable with it because I appreciate.
00:58:48
Speaker
pushing the boundaries a little bit more. What's hilarious is, I'm seeing all these complaints when the complaint previously was, and Mike Lineman, Vortos Mike, talks about this a lot. There has been variety in art. It has had more of a cohesive theme.
00:59:04
Speaker
There still is differences and people don't pay attention to them. They think that they make these comments that magic art is cookie cutter and it's all the same. And now we get things that are wildly different and it's like, this doesn't look like magic art. What do you want? And something too that I found really interesting, just from a gameplay and availability thing is a lot of these like alternate art and extra things have usually been
00:59:32
Speaker
fairly difficult to come by. There's the rare in boosters, unless you're buying collector boosters, which are really expensive. These are not that. You get one at every booster pack, every booster pack. So these are going to be super available, at least like the non-foils. I think the foils will probably still be. Yeah, foils, it's kind of like the Time Spiral remastered. The old-bordered foils are ridiculously expensive. The old-bordered cards are just not as much.
01:00:02
Speaker
Because they're just, there's one in every pack, they're just more available, which is really cool. I think anyway, like that, that these things are just more available, because it's cool sometimes that they're doing all this cool stuff, but it's like, but then I just never get it get that. Yeah, yeah, yes. And you know, I think that's been in the past was the response to certain products and also to the availability piece, you know, and
01:00:31
Speaker
While I'm tangiting a little bit before we come back because for what I saw was a lot of complaints about like the Japanese versions of these mystical and then the specific ones like the demonic tutor that was released the Japanese art on it and
01:00:49
Speaker
There was so many complaints because, you know, like we had the Japanese planes walkers from war of the spark. They had the alternate, like, art from some very famous Japanese artists. And there was all these complaints about like, well, I can't get it here, blah, blah, blah. And at the same time.
01:01:06
Speaker
There's been so many products that are so US centric that they wouldn't even ship overseas. Yes. Is that American exceptionalism that is not a good trait? Because we have had so many products that are available to us that were very difficult for other countries to get their hands on. That now when we get some cool stuff maybe that is available for other regions, there's an automatic like, well, I can't get it. Yeah.
01:01:40
Speaker
Well, do we have any other closing thoughts we want to have on this?
01:01:46
Speaker
Well, yes, I do want to kind of close up with what I was alluding to, which is the idea just wrapping up of two color pairs. This shakes things up a lot. It brings into question. Humans like to have categories. We like to have patterns. We like to have categories. We talked about this with the gambler's fallacy a little bit. We've talked about this with like trying to find patterns where patterns don't exist. Well, here we do have
01:02:13
Speaker
combinations of things that exist in the world and exist within the multiverse, we want to name things because it helps us to shorthand. It does. I mean, this is the whole idea behind acronyms or jargon. It helps people within a field be able to talk. When we had Gregory Sablan on, when him and I talked, we joked about how we were trying to minimize the military speak slash acronyms or make sure that we're explaining them because
01:02:44
Speaker
Those are the things that help if I'm working with somebody that has the same language as me. Being able to shorthand makes conversation easier. It makes things that you don't have to, you know, you can shorten things and it makes things clearer and makes things easier to do. However, there has to be that recognition of talking outside.
01:03:03
Speaker
We, as a community, have been using the Ravnica guilds and we'll talk about shards and wedges, but we've been using these names more and more. Part of it was a way to have things kind of codified because, you know, like, you know, like red, white, blue was called America control. So like, you know, like, okay. So I knew that that was red, white, blue, but like, uh, we had jund and then we, because we wanted to switch one color in it, it became junk.
01:03:32
Speaker
Um, yeah, they, they, they still didn't help a ton because you didn't have a card reference or name. And, and they were still super contextual because the whole America thing is you have to think about, well, what does that mean? Well, it's alluding to the colors. It's alluding to the colors on the flag. And it's like, then there's always the joke about the fact that red, white, and blue. It's like almost flags. It's like most flags. It's a lot of flags. It's a lot of flags. Yeah. There's, there's a lot. There's a lot of them that are those colors. Yeah.
01:04:01
Speaker
So this, but like the guilds was kind of our easiest in some ways, like to just use it. It's very short. Yep. You know, is it rush or whatever. You just come up with the name to describe the deck, especially when you're trying to do coverage, especially when you're trying to communicate effectively what 75 cards somebody was using. You have to come up with a quick.
01:04:25
Speaker
You know, few syllable couple of word term for it to be able to facilitate that easy communication. And so it was just easy to say, oh, they're playing jund. They're playing, you know, whatever. And, you know, like, even if it had no, none of those cards.
01:04:41
Speaker
That were a quote-unquote jund based card and so now we have this interesting thing where you know you and I have talked about this definitely on the show before that we've had to be clear about when we were using is it to mean the guild versus we were using is it to talk about red blue yes.
01:05:01
Speaker
Now we have all new names and it's cool. It's cool because we're seeing different aspects. We're seeing how two color pairs are not the same that the color pie is actually pretty versatile and it's not just.
01:05:16
Speaker
One one representation for each particular yeah So what and I don't know where we go from here in the terms of you know for for naming conventions of things really mixes things up like That that's a good point to it. I think that is part of why it's taken wizards so long to kind of get to it I mean it also
01:05:36
Speaker
didn't help or a piece of it was is the fact that Ravnica is super popular. Yeah, they wanted to keep going back to Ravnica and that was a good way for them to keep doing two color pair sets. But I think and if you even look at like,
01:05:53
Speaker
follow Mark Rosewater and some of the stuff he's been talking about from a design standpoint, that multicolor sets are always popular. So they didn't want to overdo them and burn that out. So they didn't do them very often. I think they had like every however many sets ever, however many years or something. But I think in the recent years, they realized that there's more design there that they can do. And there's a lot of
01:06:17
Speaker
different ways to do it, and there's enough passion for that, that they can kind of do that more often, and I think that's part of why we're finally seeing this. We're like, we can do this more often now, so we can do these more multi-color sets, give new representation to these color pairs, and not, say, prevent us from ever going back to Ravnica, because that's a world that we're going back to again. We've been there three times, I guarantee you, we're going a fourth.
01:06:44
Speaker
we're going back enough with the community. Yeah, we're going back to it. But they now know they can do these things more often. And so there's room to fit returns to Ravnica in between other multicolored sets to allow them to explore and do different things. Yeah. And we're not only going back to it, we're going back to it because they're gonna give us better representation for Cranko and really do him better.
01:07:12
Speaker
And let him be the revolutionary that we know him love him to be Exactly. That's exactly what's going to happen. Yeah, that's the only reason I see to go back to Ravnica we now have a world that's been decimated for like the 12th time by The planes walkers in the guilds like the skilled structure is gonna it's gonna die Yeah with Cranko at the helm, of course
01:07:35
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HopsQ can be found at HopsQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel.com. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter, or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at email.com. If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the cast can be found at patreon.com.
01:08:01
Speaker
Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on Twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on Twitter at Steve Raffaeo. Babylon Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vorthos content, as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg, or online at hipstersofthecoast.com.
01:08:30
Speaker
Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.