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Episode 149: The Reflection of a Mirror Breaker with Mab the Queen
205 Plays3 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today we return with a Goblin Profile! But for this Goblin we are doing things a little different. This Goblin is so amazing that they are going to be getting 2 parts! The Goblin? Kiki-Jiki, the Mirror-Breaker. For part one we are joined by the Queen (Mab the Queen that is) to discuss a community that has embraced Kiki-Jiki. This specifically grew out of the cEDH Community and the trans-femme community. Part 2 will be delving a little deeper into the lore (though will have many call backs to this episode, we don't want to give too much away, but we are really excited to feature this Goblin as part of Pride Month).
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!
This episode is sponsored by Zencastr. They provide a crystal clear sound and allows for recording separate audio and video tracks for the guests and the hosts. Plus, there is a secured cloud backup, so you never lose your interviews. It is super easy to use, and there is nothing to download. My guests just click on the link, and we start recording. Click here to get 30% off your first three months with a PRO account.
On another new note we continue our partnership with The Fireside Alliance. From their main page: "An independent media network and a progressive community of progressive communities". Please check them out!
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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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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Anniversary
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. This is Hobbs Q and we're going to be heading into the month of June. We have left Mental Health Awareness Month behind us where we were a lot more explicit about just mental health topics for three out of the four weeks. Ironically, our episode on stress will be coming later because Alex and I, it was about how to combat stress and not let it kind of dictate your life and positive amounts of stress versus not. And Alex and I,
00:00:58
Speaker
ended up on the wrong side of that bell curve as we were going into the end of May. So we did not get the final episode recorded, which is kind of fitting. But Mental Health Awareness Month is beyond us. We are now entering kind of the month of June, which is the fourth anniversary of the podcast.
00:01:15
Speaker
And it also is kind of just another opportunity for us to be looking at some important elements to this community with it being kind of the LGBTQIA plus awareness month or just month. I mean, I don't pride month, I guess. I don't know why I need to feel the need to spell out everything when the word I was searching for was pride. But with that, we kind of have some topics that are in line with that for this month, along with just our fourth anniversary, which is still kind of mind blowing.
00:01:45
Speaker
Before we get into that, we just have a couple of things we want to say. We want to say thank you to Zencaster. So Zencaster is the recording software that we are using right now to record this podcast. And if you go to their website and you use Goblin Lore Pod, you can get 30% off of a pro subscription. We really enjoy using the service because it allows us to just send a link to our guest.
00:02:11
Speaker
The guest signs on, it records on their end, our end. So there's no issues if internet drops. We don't lose a whole episode, which is something that has happened to us in the past. And it also auto balances. And as we've said on this numerous times, Alex and I are not editors. We are not audio people at all. And one of the things that's allowed us to keep going is using the software like Zencaster. So we just are very happy to always be kind of sponsored by and partnered with them.
Supporting Pride Month and Community Initiatives
00:02:36
Speaker
Second, we want to thank Grinding Coffee Company. So they are an LGBT and minority-ran coffee company. They will be having some products and stuff that are available for the Month of Pride that we'll kind of be linking to. But you can always use our code and our link there to get coffee, discounted coffee. And one of the things that we love is it really is a good marriage between us and them. They've been very willing to donate to our charity events to just partner with us. And so we're very thankful for them.
00:03:05
Speaker
And finally, we just want to give a final statement to the Fireside Alliance. And Alex, I've been talking long enough that I will pass this over to you to talk about the Fireside Alliance. Sure. So the Fireside Alliance is just to take the description right from their website, an independent media network in a progressive community of progressive communities.
00:03:27
Speaker
They've got a website and a Discord server and basically the goal, and this was started about a year ago now. In fact, they just started the second year. We joined up with them about six months ago or so.
00:03:40
Speaker
but their goal was to be kind of a bunch of content creators, mostly podcasts, but some other types of content as well. And they all have kind of their own split little communities in the internet and the internet can be, well, not a great place in a lot of ways. And so they wanted to try to build a more, another place for folks to meet together and to, you know,
00:04:03
Speaker
chat and to participate in to do stuff and so that was kind of their that's the mission that's the goal is to kind of bring to create a space like that so if you're interested just you know fireside alliance we have i believe we have a link in our show notes i don't know maybe i should have figured that one out before i say we do we do perfect yeah
00:04:23
Speaker
We're part of that now as well, so out on their Discord server if you'd like to join that. All the different content creators have their own channels, and then there's some shared channels just to talk about games and various types of geekdom. We are actually the only magic content creators that are part of it, but it's geeks and nerddoms and all sorts of fandoms of various stripes. It's a nice community and a nice place to be a part of.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah.
Personal Connections with Magic Characters
00:04:50
Speaker
And so what we're going to do is we're just going to get introductions out of the way before we get into our topic for today, because we have a guest with us today. So I'm going to, in typical Hobbs fashion, realize that I wrote this question and that did not really come up with an answer. So I'm going to pass it over to Alex.
00:05:10
Speaker
First, I'm going to ask the question of the day, Alex, what is a magic character from lore that you really identify with? And do you want to introduce yourself for anybody who may be new? Yeah, I'll go through my full introduction. So I'm Alex Newman found on Twitter, sometimes not as much right now, but at Mel underscore chronicler.
00:05:30
Speaker
My pronouns are he him. And for the answer to this question, I was planning to spend more time today to come up with something else and I didn't. So I'm going to go with Nissa as a quicker something that I have a little more at hand, because I want to talk about sort of her storyline with at the Dominaria sort of after some of the gate watch stuff was going on and not going so well. And so she had kind of a storyline where
00:05:58
Speaker
Nissa left the Gatewatch. I think there was a lot going on. We actually talked about that probably three years ago. Oh, man, it was three years ago, I think. Anyway, kind of along the topic of burnout. So I definitely feel some resonance there for me right now on the topic of burnout, just of a lot going on, too many things going on, and just the need to kind of step back, take some time to
00:06:27
Speaker
work through what you need to deal with and then get back out to deal with all of the other nonsense that's going on. So Hobbs, did that give you enough time to come up with an answer? Heck no, it didn't. So I'm going to introduce our guest Mab. Mab, welcome. We're really glad to have you on the show. We'll kind of be talking a little bit more about what the topic is and why you're here, but I didn't know if you would just want to do kind of an introduction and maybe if you have an answer for this and if not, I feel bad for putting you on the spot too.
00:06:55
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, I'm Mab the Queen. People can find me on Twitter or Twitch or my Discord, mapsqueendom. I make the queerest and kindest EDH content on the internet. Please prove me wrong. I like that as a challenge. This is a good challenge for the month of June. Prove that Mab can't make the queerest and friendliest and most welcoming
00:07:23
Speaker
content in CEDH or EDH. Just prove us wrong. Just just do better than me. Yeah, great. I would love it. I would love if everybody at least tried to be more queer and more kind. If not then me then at least of where their baseline is. Right. At the very least it will move the needle even if they don't hit your level at least they made the effort. Yeah.
00:07:47
Speaker
I want them to try. Yeah. And I want them to do or do not. There is no try, which is a very long running joke on this cast. Yes. Yes. But you asked me what a character from in lore gathering lore I related to and my answer would be Baron Sender. And the reason for that is that Baron Sender was a traumatized little kid that
00:08:15
Speaker
created his basically created his own world in his own safe little environment and happened to Capture his tormentors and torture them. Hopefully I'm doing something a little more kind than that And I'm doing it in a healthier way than Baron Sender, but that whole thing kind of resonates with me pretty strongly of taking a rough upbringing and turning
00:08:44
Speaker
a space that once had bad things around you into a space that you have control over and you're doing what's good for you. Awesome. Well, I have had time to think. I am HobbsQ. I can be found on Twitter at HobbsQ. Most places on the internet as HobbsQ is that it's been my screen name since 1998. So if other people have it,
00:09:11
Speaker
I generally feel like they are trying to, it's an imposter of some sort, or maybe a reflection that's called foreshadowing kids. A character in magic lore that I identify with, I think this is one of those ones that's, it's hard for me because we've covered so many of the ones that I strongly identify with, I think on the show. So I am gonna just simply go back to my buddy Squee.
00:09:37
Speaker
I just think that there's something about squee and being underestimated. I kind of did my profile with Andy's up key and I talked a lot about this idea of failure and failing up. And, you know, I actually was thinking about this Alex when I kind of did that interview and I kind of.
00:09:54
Speaker
was telling Andy, I really wanted it to highlight just the ideas that I've the amount of failure experiences I've had as somebody who was a quote unquote professional who has a PhD and got told that he never would do any of this stuff. It kind of is one of those things that I kind of think of we've talked about squeeze superpower being underestimated, but I also think he just fails up. Yeah, he fails, but then ends up in a good spot or ends up where he needs to be. So yeah, so I went with that one, because
00:10:23
Speaker
I ran out of time, which also kind of feels squee-like, so I think that that's totally fine. But yeah, my pronouns are he, him, and I really just want to kind of start us off. It's been a while since our last goblin profile. Alex and I, the last goblin profiles that we did were our decks, you talking about Zada and me talking about Grenzo and artist's proofs. So it's been a while since we've talked about any goblins.
00:10:50
Speaker
This was a topic that we always want to return to. There still are quite a few legendaries that we don't even necessarily have full, long lore or really strong lore tie-ins. And we've talked about this. If you go look at any of the Gamepedias or the Fandoms, you'll see that some of our favorite goblins and the legendaries even themselves have very little backstory. And we're going to go with somebody today that actually
00:11:15
Speaker
has a little bit of backstory and and it's Kiki Jiki so like we'll just start there it's Kiki Jiki. Kiki Jiki is a very very interesting topic I think because um Kiki Jiki really is it has this mirror reflection to it and he was brought back in kind of even like a saga when we came back to Kamigawa like he's legendary at this point like
00:11:41
Speaker
in the sense of like there's legends about him. We're going to be going, we're doing two episodes on Kiki Chiki because of this reflection piece. This idea that there's the mirror images that go on with Kiki and Alex is going to give a little brief, just lower overview. We're going to dig a little deeper into the story of Kiki Chiki with another guest coming later this month. But for now, we just want to do kind of a brief overview. So Alex,
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I got this pulled up. I'm going to mostly read out of the wiki. As Hob said, there isn't a ton of story out here. I think he said there's a little more elsewhere, but it's just an unfortunate thing. It's the case in this game. There's lots and lots of characters, lots and lots of legends. So there's a lot of goblins that just don't have a ton of story, but I'm glad we have some really... Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Kiki-Jiki's Journey and Community Impact
00:12:29
Speaker
I'm really looking forward to this episode digging into other aspects of Kiki-Jiki.
00:12:33
Speaker
So for his story, he was born the fourth child of his family. His siblings and parents, like most Aki families, were abusive. So this is Kamigawa, the goblins there are the Aki. His constant antics got him in trouble until one day, fed up with his escapades, Paku Paku, the tribe elder, drove him out of the tribe. And so then Kiki Kiki looking for food. Oh, did you have
00:13:01
Speaker
I just had to say, too, that this is one of those interesting things that we kind of think about with legendary goblins now that I'm kind of noticing, you know, we're almost we have more than one example of like the forced out of their tribe out of the exile. And even though we talk about goblins and community and that that's one of the elements that we love, right? You know, it's goblins are only dangerous and
00:13:24
Speaker
Numbers, we talk about the war ends, we talk about the communal aspects. Two of our legends now, the other being Slobad, who we've talked about multiple times, were kind of cast outs or forced out of their groups, which I just think is something that occurred to me as you were talking.
00:13:46
Speaker
Now on his own, Kiki-Chiki is looking for food and hears the murmur of an underground river. After digging, the ground collapses beneath him and he passes out. Wakes up in a cave. After being swept there by the river, he can't escape until he ends up falling into Kaiga's lair. Kaiga is one of the legendary dragons from the original Kamigawa block.
00:14:07
Speaker
And the dragon takes a liking to Kiki-Jiki, recognizing his magic potential, brings him to Oboro.
00:14:17
Speaker
to steal an ancient pearl from a Sora Tame. During this quest, Kiki-Jiki encounters one of the Sora Tames enchanted mirrors, discovers that his reflection was moving independently, so he shatters the mirror and his reflection escapes. The two Kiki-Jiki split up. The reflection was captured, but Kiki-Jiki escaped. And then after training with Kaiga, he began to hone his magical talent. It says here, as one of the greatest duplication sorcerers in Kamigawa.
00:14:45
Speaker
So that is all we have sort of in summary here on page. There's some actual written story as well that is more fleshed out than this sort of bullet point thing.
00:15:04
Speaker
That's what we have for the history. We said that this episode is not going to be about that as much. We just wanted to bring that story in because we're talking about him for the first time in this profile. That story will be fleshed out more later than another episode.
00:15:24
Speaker
talk about Kiki. So I've had some conversations with really people kind of in the CEH community in particular. So Mab, whose username actually says Mab Kiki Queen. Mab, you, what a choice for a name. I had seen over maybe the last six months to a year, a lot more discussion about Kiki Kiki, really within kind of the trans community and particularly the trans femme community.
00:15:54
Speaker
You are one of the first people that I really saw talking kind of about the story and running with it. And when I reached out to you, we kind of had a discussion about, you know, I was interested in knowing more of the origins behind it because I came in because I'm not really part of the CDH community. I was not really part of that discussion. I had seen somebody like Hermit Druid post about it, kind of a lot of jokes about, you know, Kiki and eggs and stuff like that. And so I knew that there was this
00:16:21
Speaker
discussion, right? And I knew that as an outsider, it was kind of cropping up more and more, which to me, as I was watching was like, wow, this is great to see as a goblin person, but I didn't know the history or know kind of where this maybe even grew out of. So I reached out to you because you were obviously at the forefront of this. And yeah, so I was hoping you might be able to just start us off a little bit, Mab, which is kind of some of why Kiki or, you know, what, what is it about Kiki? Where did this come from?
00:16:50
Speaker
So there's a few reasons that Kiki-Jiki is central to the trans community, especially starting with the trans femme CEDH community. And a big thing was is that
00:17:14
Speaker
Bunch of trans femmes were all playing decks that ran kiki-jiki as a wincon that Just all of us were like yeah, of course we can have all of these super strong powerful things But damn to goblins feel good as a wincon No disagreement with from us whatsoever on this but
00:17:43
Speaker
So there was just a notice that like a bunch of us and like the majority maybe even all of us at some point or another were doing some sort of crazy goblin combo and a lot of it centered around Kiki Jiki. So people don't know do you want to run through kind of what the line is of the combo if people are interested in that just why Kiki is so central?
00:18:09
Speaker
So Kiki-Jiki is part of a number of AB combos. An AB combo is card A plus card B equals win the game. Kiki-Jiki plus
00:18:27
Speaker
Pestromite or Pestromite coercive recruiters are coercive recruiters my favorite because it's mono red and what it does is Kiki jiki taps to make a copy of coercive recruiter coercive recruiter enters the battlefield and untaps Kiki jiki and Because there's already another coercive recruiter and
00:18:54
Speaker
because Geeky made a copy, with each copy you will steal at least one creature. So eventually you steal the entire creature board on top of having infinite creatures. So even if someone had some way to create infinite creatures as well, you can go over the top of them and steal all their stuff.
00:19:19
Speaker
Wow. And I like the mono red piece because that, you know, because I'm thinking of zealous conscripts as the other direction I've seen zealous conscripts is the classic. And then and then for us or for me, the conspicuous snoop lines. So this has been the newer edition. Yeah. And that's that's been the more recent, more compact win con with Kiki Chiki that you don't actually have to have Kiki on the field for that. You have to have Kiki on top of your library.
00:19:47
Speaker
It's funny. As a person who is not really a competitive player, I'm not familiar with the CD, CDH stuff very much. And be honest, I haven't played a whole lot of magic in the last few years. Anyway, I'm looking at course of recruiter. I'm like, Oh, that's an org. That's really sweet. I'm glad to see org showing up in magic and actually doing things. Cause for a long time, like early orcs in the very beginning of magic were just terrible. And then they stopped doing, stop printing orcs for a long time. And so that's where my head is set right now.
00:20:15
Speaker
Well, in Coercive Recruiter is not only an orc, it's a pirate. And it triggers off of pirates entering the battlefield. So even without making copies of Coercive Recruiter, you can make copies of something like Dockside Extortionist, which also triggers Coercive Recruiter to untap Kiki Jutsu to make you not only infinite creatures, but infinite mana.
00:20:39
Speaker
I agree. It's funny because you said this and you said the pirate part. I was like, yes, we're going to get a reference to Dockside. This is the best show ever. Yeah, like this is what makes me excited. We don't it's funny. We don't actually it's perfectly appropriate. I'd love we're doing it. But like we don't talk about cards a lot on our show because it's mostly more community focused topics. We talk lower stuff. And so it's always fun when we actually dig into actual cards. Yeah. And it's interesting that I mean, all of this started based off of people actually playing the cards.
Creating Inclusive Spaces for Trans Community
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, and like, it's kind of for what you're saying almost like an organic thing is what it sounds like it wasn't like, oh, some group of people were all hanging out and started deck building together like this was almost independent. Yeah, no, it all just happened to be that, you know, I think it was hermit druid that noticed, hey,
00:21:32
Speaker
a bunch of my trans femme friends are all playing this, and then made a post being like, Kiki Jiki is trans culture and made a little meme of Kiki Jiki delivering estrogen pills, photojopped on top of a Kiki's delivery service, movie poster. It's fantastic.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's my favorite meme. It's one of the only ones that I have saved in my phone But because of that I was like
00:22:12
Speaker
you know what the world needs? The world needs every trans person to have their own kiki jiki. And so I was like, Kiki's delivery service, I'm going to I bought a bunch of envelopes and a bunch of stamps. And I was like, if anybody wants to donate kiki jikis to me, I'm going to start donating
00:22:36
Speaker
Kiki-Jikis that I'm going to alter to any trans person on Twitter that plays magic that asks me for a Kiki-Jiki. And eventually I started getting some. There have been a few people that have donated them. And I bought a bunch myself and fairly recently I got an NPC order and I had a bunch of empty slots and I was just like,
00:23:05
Speaker
heck with it, I'm going to put the last 26 slots as Kiki-Jikis. So I have 26 proxy Kiki-Jikis to put paint on and eventually mail out to people. And I've seen some of your altars like they're I really love the artwork. So are you using just
00:23:27
Speaker
acrylics or you I mean, you're basically you're painting right directly. Yeah, I have I have a jar of gesso and I have a bunch of acrylic paints and I just paint on top of them and you know, just talk with friends and do some painting while I'm
00:23:48
Speaker
in the mood for it and let people watch me paint while I'm in my Discord. Just hang out with people and talk with my trans friends as we get ready to mail stuff out. It was just last month I sent an order of eight of them out. It was great.
00:24:06
Speaker
So, I mean, it sounds like there has been an interest, right? Like you actually have had people contact and want this. It's not like you started this and they're like, wow, zero of my other trans friends actually see this or like think this is a cool idea. Like there was a pretty good response to it.
00:24:21
Speaker
No, there are hundreds of people that have asked me for it. Wow. Like I think when I made the first post, it was I eventually had to mute it because it was too overwhelming. I was like, I'm getting notifications every 45 seconds for the entire day. I had likes and retweets and
00:24:51
Speaker
comments over and over and over again and I was like oh boy I'm getting overwhelmed I need to turn this off and just stick to DMS where I get people's addresses yep
00:25:04
Speaker
just go through times and I'm just gonna be at that point I was like I'm going to do batches and I'm going to accept addresses from people once I have a batch up first come first serve no repeats but I'm one person who's doing all this yeah the trans community deserves it
00:25:27
Speaker
I mean, that's what I think is awesome is that, as you said, there was like, there was this overwhelming response to this. I'm curious about that. Did it kind of surprise you? I mean, I know obviously the CDH community and the EH community at large is pretty tight knit, the trans community is, but were you expecting kind of this level of response to something that was basically started as kind of a just, huh,
00:25:53
Speaker
estrogen pills on a movie poster because all of my trans femme friends play. I did not expect for it to be as popular but also it's
00:26:06
Speaker
It's A, free cards for people and B, it's something nice for the trans community, which honestly, the trans community doesn't get enough nice things if we're, you know, being out there. Politics in the US have been beating the ever loving crap out of us. And so having something really nice to look forward to or nice to be surprised with has been just
00:26:34
Speaker
I don't know, it keeps me going sometimes when I just have something nice to do for the community. That's good. I think that community aspect to it is one of the things that, you know, this is why I reached out to you because to us, the community is the important piece and, you know,
00:26:52
Speaker
As you said, like everybody this month, make queer content, make kind content.
Fostering Diverse and Safe Communities
00:26:58
Speaker
That's something that, more than just this month. Okay. It's an ongoing challenge. It's like our mental health discussions, right? Alex? Like we usually, like this month we're going to highlight, but at the same time, right? Like this has been something that we've wanted to continue our discussions with, you know, we've done things. So I don't know, Mav, if you know, we've talked about like the aetherborn, we've talked about, um,
00:27:22
Speaker
Oh, what other discussions do we have with this? We've talked about Elesha. Nico. Oh, Nico. Yep. And queerness and just that. So I mean, like, these are things that we don't always feel that we have the best. I don't know. Um, just way to introduce to our, to our community, right? To get this out there, because this is an important issue. And it's something that, as you said, like having something that's nice about it is the community piece.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, which as a side, thank you for coming on and having this conversation with I know we're still going, it's still gonna happen. But we can't really bring these conversations to our community without folks who are kind of part of these communities willing to come have these conversations, willing to come onto our show and have them. So thank you for that. I mean, absolutely, if we're not building bridges, if we're not reaching out to people,
00:28:18
Speaker
Where are we? If the trans community is not going to do well without y'all knowing what we're going through. The queer community in general comes from the not queer community. That's what we're born into. That's what we're born from.
00:28:47
Speaker
You know, like I said, I'm not trying to be ham-fisted or anything about this, but that was the reason that it stuck out with me is we're looking at this as just kind of a – what it's grown into and kind of the trans femme in particular communities associated with Kiki Chiki. The fact that we are dealing with goblins that have been kicked out of their community
00:29:07
Speaker
is something that I think is important to me. Like I know that that's not necessarily what drew you to Tiki, right? Like we talked about this, like the lore is not really the historical, or it's not really the tie-in that you have to magic in general. I mean, it's not like, lore isn't like your main thing that you're interested in. It is gameplay, it is competitive gameplay. And just as Alex was reading that, it just struck me as kind of that idea that Tiki is yet another member of like a group that was kicked out for not basically fitting into the community.
00:29:37
Speaker
And this may be something that's gonna come up a lot more when we have our second guest on, but it just, I don't know, it just struck me. I don't have other words for it.
00:29:48
Speaker
Well, and even the name Kiki is part of queer culture. And I know I mentioned this a little bit to you when we were talking about being on this show. But a Kiki is literally a term that came from the specifically the black part of the LGBTQ community.
00:30:10
Speaker
But it's literally just a chat between like-minded people and friends just to gossip and chit-chat. I mean, at some point, the Scissors Sisters made a song based on it and it became wildly popular. And I don't know how intentional the name Kiki was in this.
00:30:39
Speaker
how intentional the iconography of smashing a mirror was, which is huge if you're talking specifically about the trans community. But a lot of these small choices came together and
00:31:02
Speaker
fuck. Sorry. No, we picked up on it. And like, I've sort of grabbed onto it. And I've been like making my own art lately. Just we have it up as your PFP right now on Twitter.
00:31:19
Speaker
Yeah, my PFP right now, it's up on Twitter. I've been working with my friend, Drew, Beyond the Machina to eventually have that into a proxy for a Kiki-Jiki that's like explicitly trans. But just if it wasn't intentionally queer,
00:31:45
Speaker
It's definitely checking a lot of boxes, and it's a lot of coincidence. And maybe at some point, I'll chat with somebody who developed Kiki-Jiki in the game design and the art direction. And maybe I'll get a chance to ask them about it. Maybe y'all will get a chance to ask about it. I literally was just thinking, trying to figure out who do we have that we could reach out to. I mean, that's kind of, as soon as you started talking about especially that
00:32:15
Speaker
the term already being something within the queer community, I now feel like we got to find out somehow. Yeah, I mean, in one way or another, like it would be incredible to find out but one way or another, like this is one of the things that's really important and really incredible about art and creation is that there's obviously going to be creator intent when they go through and sometimes that is
00:32:38
Speaker
can create really good compelling things. But sometimes it's about what the community finds and what the people who are reacting to this art, the community that they build around kind of what they've found in this art, what they've gotten out of this stuff. And I just think this is incredible. I'm so glad you're here to talk about this. This is so cool.
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's anybody out there that is as obsessed with Kiki Jiki as I have become, and the only reason I'm as obsessed with Kiki Jiki
00:33:17
Speaker
is because of what it means to me as giving back to the community that I'm in. And I mean, it's not just the trans community, it's the magic community. Like, a Kiki-jiki is not going to mean anything to a non-trans magic player.
00:33:40
Speaker
or a trans non-magic player. Okay, okay. I was like a non-trans magic player. Wait a second, Matt. What are you saying? I'm saying that Kiki-jiki means nothing to you. Get off of your podcast. You don't like goblins as much as me. Basically, this is like when we have when we first had Chase on the show and they basically took over our show and said it was now theirs. So I mean, I guess that's this isn't the first time this has happened to Alex and I.
00:34:10
Speaker
I'm not gonna take over your show. I do not have the people skills. Thanks. Anyways, though But as you're saying like this is a very like unique thing within like a community within a community um
00:34:27
Speaker
And I think of that to be with kind of like magic and I don't know this to be true. I think of seeing the rise of trans femme and just trans communities within magic over the last 10 years that I have been a part of it. It does also seem like there's been more CEDH and I don't know if that is just CEDH representation when it comes to this. I don't know if that's an outsider trying to make patterns from the outside or yeah, sorry.
00:34:55
Speaker
No, CEDH is more popular than it has ever been, and there is a sizable contingent of trans femmes in CEDH. The first openly trans content creator that I ever saw out of any magic was Rebel, who is this big time CEDH player. So, like,
00:35:26
Speaker
don't think that's a small part of it. I think that some of them are there for the play style, but I think a lot of them are there because that's where representation is. Yeah, I would think that's what I was thinking of was thinking of creators and content creators in particular. And that's a sphere that I've seen a lot more of kind of the trans community represented.
Community Growth During the Pandemic
00:35:48
Speaker
Now, we obviously have trans content creators across the sphere of magic. It does seem concentrated to me as an outsider.
00:35:56
Speaker
I mean, there are some up and coming, at least in my sphere of influence, there are some up and coming big names in the casual trans femme EDH world. Yeah, but they all play Kiki. No. Oh, okay. Sorry. No, no, no. That was me being just flipping. Sorry. Yeah. Well, no, it's interesting because
00:36:26
Speaker
Kiki, while looking like a casual card, it's a 2-2 for 5 mana that just makes a copy of a creature. It sounds awfully casual. You know, dies to removal. Just about every removal, yeah.
00:36:45
Speaker
You know, you can shock it to death. It doesn't survive much. The interesting thing is, is that the competitive scene gives it a space to really thrive because, whoa, there is less removal in competitive spheres. And Kiki-Jiki comes out late enough where most people have used up most of their removal. Interesting.
00:37:13
Speaker
I mean, it's a win con. It's the actual right. Yeah, which is just kind of how you topped the topic with it. It's a win con. It's a win con or or or it's a value piece. Hmm. OK.
00:37:28
Speaker
Let me just say that the funniest time I ever won with a Kiki-Jiki was with Kiki-Jiki Intruder Alarm in Thos's Oracle because everybody's expecting a Thos's Oracle win in CEDH but they're not expecting it from having a Devotion to Blue equal 5 million because you just made 5 million Thos's Oracles. Intruder Alarm is such a fun magic card.
00:37:52
Speaker
I don't play your average CEDH. Yeah. Which is, I mean, my discord amongst CEDH players is sort of known as the Wild West of CEDH because there's so much weird ideas going on because we want to push the boundaries on what's playable, what's good, what can we do in a meta where so many people think it's already solved.
00:38:20
Speaker
and Kiki thrives there except for when my friends are playing talks real don't even. This just it makes me laugh because I think that the fact so I recently got to play my first CDH games and the very first one that I ever played went an hour and a half almost two hours. Yes, not a fast meta. No. Because everybody was playing highly interactive decks. And
00:38:50
Speaker
Right so everybody was trying to find an opportunity and to even be able to go for it without failing and then just setting up the next person in line. So it was just such a fascinating thing to come into.
00:39:04
Speaker
let's be real most of the reputation that CEDH has is from by gone eras it has its reputation from the Meta before flash was banned or it has its reputation from Right about a year ago where it was the turbonauts meta before People were like
00:39:32
Speaker
Oh, it's a turbo-nause meta. Now we have to play stacks. And now we're on a mid-range meta where everybody's playing things that can be adaptable. No one's playing super hard and fast and no one's playing super slow. We're getting all of this flexible stuff. It's looking a lot more like non-competitive EDH. What I like to hear about it too is I think that a lot of from this is one of those things as me being somebody who's
00:40:02
Speaker
become more friends with a lot of people in the CDH community. And part of it was a purposeful decision because what I started seeing while engaging with that was the biases that I may have had as somebody who's been playing EDH since
00:40:18
Speaker
2010 was of a pub stomper, right? You know, and I think that that's what happens is that there is still kind of this misperception that your people who play CDH just want to come to a table with a bunch of weaker decks and just play decks that will win on turn two or turn three consistently play the best cards.
00:40:38
Speaker
where everybody I've ever talked to, CEDH people want to play against CEDH. I want to play at stronger decks. I want to be at the table. And I think that's something that I'm hoping there might be some barriers being broken about or there's gonna be better conversations to have just that was one of the first things I found. It was like, okay, I was somebody who was like, Oh, yeah, that you know, that must be what CEDH is. And it's like, no, no, CEDH is something
00:41:07
Speaker
very specific. It's not a pub stopper. Like those people are going to exist no matter what. Doesn't matter what you ban. Yeah. And those and those people are going to be out there playing decks that would hang in a CDH pod, but they are not accepted by the community. And I think people are learning that. Yeah, I hope.
00:41:30
Speaker
people that are willing to learn that and have not been hurt by people who were coming in and pubstomping, you know, people, if your only exposure to people is a negative exposure, it's hard to overcome that bias. We see this problem
00:41:55
Speaker
across the board, no matter what the no matter what it is, you have a lot of people that are bigoted who use that as their excuse, they ran into one person had a really negative experience with them. Therefore, all people of whatever that is, are bad people. Because that's their only exposure.
00:42:24
Speaker
so CEDH has that problem because people come in with decks that look very much like the decks you see on CEDH content creation and oh no I saw this deck come into my pod of sitting in chairs tribal and they came in and ruined my time and sat there
00:42:54
Speaker
you know, playing with themselves for 20 minutes, won the game and left. Like, that's gonna leave a bad taste in your mouth. Especially if that person identified themselves as CEDH, right? Which there are people that do that. Yeah, I mean, you could, Hobbs, you could tell people that your trans go in and punch somebody and walk out and people are gonna assume that trans people are bad. Right. They have no other exposure.
00:43:24
Speaker
And they might not have a guidepost of what is or isn't this thing. And just because someone claims to be something doesn't necessarily mean that they're not if they don't have the actual information to say whether or not that's true.
00:43:44
Speaker
And that's why conversations like this can be really important because communities are not monoliths. Not every person is one thing, but if that's the only experience you have, some people will make those judgments. So by having these conversations, by talking both, you know, talking about folks like the LGBTQ community, but also the CDEDH community, which is
00:44:09
Speaker
Again, it's something we don't get to talk about on this cast a lot, but I'm really glad we're having that conversation here to talk about that community and represent them from.
00:44:16
Speaker
a potentially different way than people have seen them in the past. Because again, for myself, at least, I've had no real exposure with CEDH. Hell, in the last couple of years, I haven't had much exposure with any EDH. I just... Yeah, I just want you to know, Matt, that this morning that Alex just pub stomped me. Yeah. We were playing 1v1 and Alex just pulled out a duct that he knew was just going to beat my casual
00:44:44
Speaker
Casual Shatter Games, Hob Brothers, Hob's doesn't have a casual that that's a whole other conversation. But yeah, I yeah, we played a game this morning. But like, other than, okay, so I think I've actually played magic a few times in the last month. But previous to that, I hadn't played magic until pre the pandemic.
00:45:03
Speaker
So I have not had a lot of exposure to a lot of various communities within the greater magic community. So it's a great conversation that I'm really glad that we're having. It's some of these are communities that really flourish during the pandemic. It's also worth reminding people that
00:45:25
Speaker
If you can't find a community that is healthy where you're at or with the people that you've been playing with, if that becomes toxic, you can always make your own community if you can find connections with a couple of people that want to do what you want to do.
00:45:49
Speaker
That is a big thing, and I'm sorry if I'm talking over you, but a big thing in gaming communities in general, whatever community you're in, if it's not fitting for you, you can try to find others or build your own.
Finding Your Community
00:46:02
Speaker
And sometimes it can even be good friends, like as a completely random example outside of magic.
00:46:08
Speaker
I play Pathfinder, which is like Dungeons and Dragons. But I have a Pathfinder group I've been part of for three, going on four years now. And when we originally started, we had someone in our group who, great guy, I love hanging out with him. He wasn't a good fit for how we wanted to play.
00:46:25
Speaker
And so there was some difficult sessions for a little while. And then we had a conversation and he decided to step out of the group, still see him still great guy, a great person to hang out with. Well, we just don't do that thing because his style and our style just didn't fit. And yeah, but
00:46:45
Speaker
I mean, that's why I made my Discord was just to get games in with people of any walk of life, anybody who wants to try to play the kind of games that I want to play. And I try to be very clear about how I want to play, and it's people first.
00:47:08
Speaker
what level of play, what kind of games we get in. None of that is nearly as important to me as the kind of people that I'm playing with, and the kind of interpersonal skills that we have when playing together. I was thinking of your like you made you, you, you set up your own discord, right? You were saying that that is a community that you've made
00:47:34
Speaker
your place where people could even just come and watch you paint and talk. How long have you been kind of running with that? And did it grow kind of out of some of your content creation? Or was that kind of predating some of that? So gosh, I originally
00:47:53
Speaker
I originally put my Discord together as like a place to just play, to just have a space for whatever I was doing that I didn't have to share with anybody else. I didn't have to fit into the confines that anybody else was doing. I had a bunch of, I think I had four people in there
00:48:21
Speaker
before last June.
00:48:25
Speaker
um it may have been like it was single digits i think and then i was like whatever i'm gonna have my birthday coming up uh i'm starting to be involved with the magic people uh on twitter uh making a name for myself little bit by little bit by appearing on shows and i was like i'm gonna host a cdh tournament for my birthday and i'm gonna have the stipulation that no blue
00:48:53
Speaker
No blue cards are allowed in the entire tournament. I really enjoy playing with the construct of how the game is played.
00:49:11
Speaker
I play a lot of stacks, which allows me to do that within the confines of the game. But when I'm hosting events or I'm doing my own content creation, I can play with things. I can say like, OK, everybody, we're going on this stream and we're going to have a pod with maybe one, two, three games. And throughout this, no one's allowed to mulligan.
00:49:38
Speaker
or you start with an opening zero or the fun one where we had three people on three people off and it would rotate and ahead of time everybody had to pick one out of nine of my emblems everybody who was
00:49:59
Speaker
off the pod and they were just spectating, got to read off what the emblem they picked did and affected the game, and the people who were in the pod playing had to deal with whatever those rule changes were. Yep.
00:50:18
Speaker
But, you know, messing with how people play the game has been a fun part for me. And again, that's sort of why I enjoy Kiki-Jiki in competitive EDH, because it's an underutilized thing that lets me really play with how people think the game should be won, how it should be played.
00:50:45
Speaker
And what can be done and what can be competitive and honestly Sometimes just making a second Drannith magistrate in case someone's trying to block one of mine Or destroy one of mine is just enough to Get me where I need to go
00:51:08
Speaker
a five mana utility creature is still better to me than an ad nauseam. And if you put that in this, let everybody know that my DMs are open and you're welcome to try to explain to me why ad nauseam is better than Kiki-Jiki, I disagree. As somebody who plays ad nauseam, I still disagree, so it's fine.
00:51:36
Speaker
So it has been playing it in legacy prior to play magic that I'd be playing to play in CDH. The reason I picked it up for CDH was I at least knew the lines. I still need to learn the rest. And I think that that's been to me, one of the fun elements is just like when I played legacy, I need to know what deck way more ins and outs than I do.
00:51:55
Speaker
with most of my EDH decks. I don't know half the stuff that's in my regular EDH decks just because it's not important to me because I will find interactions I don't like or know. Trying to sit down and do that in a CDH game is just not gonna be something that's gonna be enjoyable for me. I want to go in prepared and so I adopted the deck that I knew was the closest and then now my plan is to see what can I do with Geeky Geeky, honestly, just because that seems like a great direction for me to go.
00:52:23
Speaker
Hobbs, you need to pick up my cast queer culture list. Okay, send it to me. I'll see if I can get it together even before Richmond this weekend. Yeah, I mean, it's a Kiki combo deck that runs a bunch of Kiki combos. I actually, on Moxfield, I am, if you search for packages, I run the Kiki combo package, which is just every card that combos with Kiki Tiki. That's amazing.
00:52:52
Speaker
I will check it out and see like, I mean, that, that is something that is enjoyable to me. You're talking about playing my Grixx's colors with my favorite tribe. So like, yeah, but please, please win more. And again, I told you, be more kind, be more queer. How do you get more queer than running a deck? That's literally called queer culture. Come on, come on. This is true. And I've never won a game of CDH. So this would be, you know, like maybe that's the problem.
00:53:20
Speaker
You're going to catch people off guard by making 500 Thassa's Oracles. Which sounds beautiful. And you'll win before you have to go to combat. I'd also like to say that this is a perfect transition into the actionable advice part of the show. If you want to take on this challenge and make more queer content, here you go. There's a good place to start.
00:53:47
Speaker
Wow, see, so we like to take people home with some sort of, you know, like, actionable advice, like, basically, what can the message be kind of, if you're thinking of what, what's the take home? And I really like what Alex just said. I'm curious, do you have any other kind of things that you've thought of that you would like for our audience or, you know, for people that are that are looking at this communal aspect and the trans community and just
00:54:14
Speaker
within EDH and within CDH and within Magic. Anything you want to send people home with? So look, in a vacuum.
00:54:21
Speaker
without having to interact with anybody else. If you find a list that's made by a queer person, you're already doing more and you want to play it, or you want to comment on it, or you want to do something with it. That's already doing a small thing for the queer community. Outside of a vacuum,
00:54:48
Speaker
Talk to somebody you know that's queer. If you make content and fight somebody on, try not to have whatever the content you're creating be primarily cis, hetero, and white. That would be such a
00:55:05
Speaker
big thing to do, but also do it because you care about what they're making, not just because they are a token minority and you'd like to up your numbers, but do it because you find value in what they bring to the community and the community at large, not just the communities that they live in as a separate piece of.
00:55:29
Speaker
Our big buzzword for 2022 so far in our episodes has been intentionality. That you're seeking things out with a purposeful reason, right? That there's a meaning to what you're doing. So we had talked to Amanda, so we had talked to her kind of a while back in her role as a diversity.
00:55:51
Speaker
as a diversity consultant. And the main message you gave us was like, if you want queer people on things, you have to invite queer people to the table. You can't just say, well, yeah, we don't know why we can't hire more queer people when you're not actually interviewing or even looking at anybody who's queer. So it's an intentionality. You have to seek these things out and not just let it be somebody else's job.
00:56:17
Speaker
which I think is something that Alex and I have really, I don't know, strove to achieve, striven, are any of these words. But intentionality, that's a word. That one is legit.
00:56:30
Speaker
But also show the work. Show that you're a place that is going to be safe for these people to come on. I mean, the only reason we're having this conversation now is because Hobbs, you and I have had a number of conversations and everything that I've seen from you has shown that you're a person that I can feel safe talking to and I can be open about this stuff about
00:56:54
Speaker
if there's any indication that you might not be, or even that you're not actively supportive.
00:57:10
Speaker
If you're just passively okay, people who are members of groups that may not feel safe around certain other people aren't going to take the risk. And y'all make it safe to be here on an open emotional level.
00:57:39
Speaker
So you've done the work. You have me on here and you have me on here because it's a safe place. End of story. Sorry, like my mic's literally muted as I just sent out a tweet about you making me cry. Um, but that's fine. You're not. Uh, we just, we just appreciate that you're willing to, you know, like I said, you and I were talking the other day about certain things. Um,
00:58:07
Speaker
and not wanting all the work to be placed on the people that we're asking. This is the hard part, right? Like we don't want to put the work on the people who have the best experiences because they shouldn't have to do all the work. And I just thank you so much for being willing to come on and talk about this because this is a topic that as soon as I saw it, it was just something that like felt so in line with us and our ideas behind the goblins and the goblin community, which is
00:58:40
Speaker
The legendary goblins, when they have done them well, they seem to resonate. And I think that there is something to be said about that from all the profiles we've done so far. I think they have been well received because the legends in particular have tended to resonate with different groups. Would you say that's true, Alex?
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, and you say, like you said previously, there's a strong sense of community in most of the goblins, or even, I suppose, even in maybe all of them, because like Kiki Jiki was kicked out of his community, but he found, you know, had found family in Kaiga and in others, possibly. Slow bad. Another story, super bad. Slow bad, we can say for sure, is what we've talked about in Dug Into More, has a similar thing where,
00:59:32
Speaker
He was kicked out of his community and then found friends, found a community, built a family himself, around himself. And so that's an important community topic too. It's a different type of community, but it is just as if not more important to talk about as well, in addition to some of the other things.
00:59:51
Speaker
As I've mentioned this in the past, some too, but it's funny, four years into this, I'll let everyone in on a secret that I guess sort of already talked about a little bit, but when we started Goblin Lore, like I wasn't huge on goblins. I didn't mind them, but that wasn't like, I wasn't all about goblins. But as we've kind of done that as the identity of the show, and especially because we started out in such a weird sort of fashion, which is like Goblin Lore fit as the name for our show,
01:00:16
Speaker
But I've found that a lot of resonance for myself at least with community topics in some of the goblin stories. Talk about my Zada deck. There is a lot of community in her storyline and the deck I built originally was part of a community deck project we were doing in Minneapolis here. We started a deck building challenge where every card in your deck had to be less than a dollar.
01:00:41
Speaker
And that was started by Alex Edo, who's a part of the Magic community in Minneapolis. And he was doing it just as a personal challenge and that a bunch of Magic people he plays with here in Minneapolis all did the same thing. We all built these 1dH decks. So that was a thing we did for a couple of years where we would build these decks.
01:00:59
Speaker
At that, with that deck building constraint, we did a couple events where we would do secret Sanas where everybody would bring a 1DH deck, we'd throw them in a pile, and then you just, everybody grabbed one at random, and now you have a brand new deck to bring home. And like, it was just a big part of the community. And the more goblins were profiling, the more I'm seeing that that is a reoccurring topic. Different communities, different types of communities for some of these different characters, but every one of them so far we've talked about.
01:01:29
Speaker
That's been a strong element in their story.
01:01:51
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood goblin, the task can be found at patreon.com slash goblin web pod. Opening and closing music by Vindergarten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergarten, or online at vindergarten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on twitter at steve raffled.
01:02:14
Speaker
Goblin 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 hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.