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Episode 1: Don't Bolas Over
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Hello, Podwalkers, and Welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our first episode, we discuss our favorite bits of nonsense in the Magic: the Gathering multiverse, as well as the big reveal of the first story in the Core 2019: Chronicles of Bolas cycle, "The Twins". We also introduce the MTG psychographic profiles – Timmy/Tammy, Johnny/Jenny, Spike, Mel, and Vorthos – and explain how we interact with the game and story of Magic: the Gathering, as well as why we believe this podcast is a necessary addition to the discussion around the game we love.
You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm.
Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by JDR.
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Transcript
Introduction and Future Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and thanks for listening to the Goblin Lore podcast. Just a brief note before we get to this show, we got a lot of great questions from Twitter that we just didn't have time to address in this episode, so we'll be doing so in a future episode. And some of those topics actually are things we've been brainstorming to actually devote full episodes to
Focus on Magic Lore and New Story Release
00:00:22
Speaker
in the future.
00:00:22
Speaker
In this episode we're going to talk mostly about our favorite pieces of magic, trash. Sort of the ridiculous, the nonsensical, the whimsical, or the downright stupid parts of magic lore. We're going to talk about our connections to magic, how we are involved in the community, and how we got involved in magic in the first place. And of course we have to talk about the brand new story that dropped this past week on
00:00:51
Speaker
magic.wizards.com, the Chronicle of Bolas, the first chapter of the Core 19 story, The Twins. So without any further ado, let's jump right in.
Podcast Introduction and Purpose
00:01:07
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to Episode 1 of the Goblin Lore Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Retteman. You can find me on Twitter, at Findhorn, like the forest, or the brownie, or the elves. And this is just a little bit of an introduction of what we're planning to do with this show.
00:01:25
Speaker
We want to look at story, look at lore in the Magic Universe, and not just for the sake of looking at lore, not just to understand Magic's story in and of itself, but to find connections between the story of the game that we all love and our own lives.
00:01:44
Speaker
We'll talk more about this later, but story can mean so much more than just being an entertainment thing. Story is a representation. Story is a way that we process the world around us. And so we want to take those tidbits, those nitty gritty details of Magic's multiverse and find out what they mean on a deeper level for us all.
00:02:11
Speaker
For those of you looking for a show that's going to be a recap of story, this isn't exactly what that is going to be. This is going to be digging into lore. We'll recap the relevant points of stories and break down what needs to be said, but we're not going to just do a book report. We're not just going to
00:02:32
Speaker
re-talk about the history of stories. We're going to talk about the concepts and ideas that are important to these stories. So mostly every week we'll be doing this podcast on a different topic from the real world as it relates to Magic the Gathering. It might be something like where do planes walk or sparks come from or how do they function. It might be the metaphysics of the blind eternities and
00:02:55
Speaker
It might be the morality of somebody like Urza the Planeswalker, but we're going to be looking at all these different concepts and figuring out how they function in both the story and world of the game and our own lives.
Co-hosts' Perspectives on Magic
00:03:09
Speaker
Every episode will have that main theme. We'll also do sort of a quick hit. We'll often have guest co-hosts, although I and one of my regular co-hosts will always be there.
00:03:22
Speaker
and we'll just sort of bring in different experts. We are by no means experts in every part of Magic the Gathering or Vorthos in specific even.
00:03:31
Speaker
We believe that not only is this an opportunity for you the listeners to learn and grow and think, this is an opportunity for us to challenge our own beliefs, our own thoughts, and have other people begin those conversations that are important to us through that lens of Magic the Gathering. And so I'm really lucky to be joined today by my two co-hosts here for episode one. And I'll actually, I'll throw the ball over to you guys and let you introduce yourselves.
00:04:00
Speaker
Hello, everybody. I am HobbsQ. I can be found on Twitter at HobbsQ. I'm kind of bringing a perspective of this of one of the things Joe and I have talked about is how does magic represent psychology? I am not as versed in some of the storylines. This is going to be kind of my time to learn some of the stuff that I
00:04:25
Speaker
have always been interested in but don't have the knowledge base for, but I do bring kind of information from a different perspective. And I've already, I mean, the reason I was interested in joining this was I've had some of these discussions online with Twitter people, whether it's the representation of trauma in Gideon, for instance, and even talking about maybe his resiliency versus some other people who have experienced trauma. And so this just seemed like a great opportunity and I'm really looking forward to kind of bringing
00:04:55
Speaker
the psychology to the vorthos.
Joe's Connection to Magic's Narrative
00:05:15
Speaker
using the game as a creative element. So I have a lot of forth OC. Yes, I enjoy some of the creative elements of the game, but also from a Mel perspective, which is more looking at the mechanics and enjoying how the mechanics work together. And it's a little hard to explain. So I love to use this card as an example to explain sort of the Mel side. It's card for future site called Ikorslick. Tuna Black for a sorcery.
00:05:43
Speaker
target creature gets minus three minus three into line of turn. I love this card. It's not a great card, but I love it because the rest of the card is cycling for two colorless and madness for three and a black. So those two mechanics interact in really interesting ways and create different lines of play where you can play it for two and a black, you can cycle it for two, or you can cycle it and because you're discarding it, cast it for its madness cost.
00:06:10
Speaker
And that's sort of the Mel thing. I love how these mechanics interact from a crunchy rules standpoint.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, and we'll get into a little bit more of that Vorthos and Mel discussion, because those are kind of the two aesthetic ways of understanding magic that we'll dig into a bit. And Hobbs, you've got something on the idea of the psychographic profiles, too, that we'll get to in a second. But yeah, and like I said before, I'm Joe Redman. I'm the host of the show.
00:06:44
Speaker
Specifically, I come at Magic from a story standpoint. I have always been fascinated with the flavor text of Magic cards. That's kind of that first bit of a glimpse into the story of Magic when you first open a pack of cards. That's how you start knowing, oh, these are people. These are worlds that we're going to. These are different places that we're trying to discover. And so I'm actually looking above me right now on my desk and I have
00:07:14
Speaker
Gosh, I think 35 or so of the paperback magic novels from the 90s and early 2000s. And that's, I mean, I'm a theater artist, I'm a teacher. For me, it is all about story. It's all about that narrative and finding our way of writing our own narratives. For me, even a game of magic is, you're retelling the story in a different way.
00:07:41
Speaker
So that's where I come at it from and that's why we're doing this show is because we all bring something different to the Vorthos table. But all of that is a different access point into figuring out why this story means something, why these games mean something to us on a deeper level.
Understanding Magic Player Psychographics
00:08:01
Speaker
So maybe we can talk about the psychographic profiles here first then, Hobbs. Since you're a resident psychologist, what's a psychographic profile and why is it important for magic players and vorthoses to know what this is?
00:08:18
Speaker
Yeah. So I mean, you know, along, I mean, where it started was, was, you know, Mark Rosewater kind of came up with these gamer profiles. It was kind of a way to almost define people's personalities, kind of related to how they see the game and then play the game. And so in particular, he introduced us to Timmy, Johnny,
00:08:41
Speaker
And my mind is going blank this morning. Spike. Spike. That all came with the game in different ways. Spike, I think, came to my mind last because I'm not a spiky player, even though most of the play group would disagree with that.
00:08:57
Speaker
But these are kind of ways that people could approach the game. And what's very fun about this is in the unworld, our silver-bordered world, all of these psychographics have been given cards. So you know you have Johnny, who's the combo player, and all he cares about is how can he interact with the cards, how can he come up with
00:09:15
Speaker
a ridiculous combo that takes three or four cards to pull off but is really satisfying when you do. It's really about kind of how those things interact and then we have we got Timmy who just likes to do big things. I kind of liken it to that amazing kind of
00:09:33
Speaker
One of those memes that shows kind of like the different styles of play and it shows like legacy is a chess match and it shows, I don't even remember, standard is basically Candyland. And the last one for EDH just basically shows dinosaurs with like laser beams. And I kind of think of that as Timmy.
00:09:51
Speaker
Just want to throw things at people's faces and be big. He loves the big cards that come out, like the green monsters and dragons and anything huge. And then you have Spike. And Spike will play the same cards as Timmy and Johnny, but Spike cares about winning. He's going to care more about what the cards kind of do.
00:10:13
Speaker
So a long time, there's been this discussion about that. And later on, we got more of some of the aesthetics pieces. What this cast is about is kind of that fourth dose. And I'm going to say we're probably going to hit tip into that Melvin piece. They came along later.
00:10:28
Speaker
Well, the problem with how they're set up right now is that a lot of them are kind of talked about as if they're categorical. Like, people are asked, like, well, what type of magic player are you? Are you a spike? Well, are you a Timmy? And I will say, too, that one of the things that has come out over the years, which I think is great, is that they did try to more come up with non-gendered terms, or at least kind of, you know, like, I don't remember all of them, but it's like Timmy and Tammy. Johnny and Jenny.
00:10:57
Speaker
and I don't know what the spike one is. Spike was just the neutral, yeah. Spike is neutral, which is great because the idea was that every player can kind of be defined by one of these categories.
Players' Psychographic Spectrum
00:11:09
Speaker
Well, that's not really how life works, and especially as we're going to be talking a lot here about more of the aesthetic pieces, I just want to highlight that idea that
00:11:21
Speaker
None of us are going to be one or the other. In psychology, we talk about this a lot. Things are not really, truly just categorical. Things tend to be on dimensions. It doesn't even need to be that Melvin and Vortos are on the same line. They're their own separate lines and you can be zero to 50 on one and zero to 50 on the other.
00:11:43
Speaker
And it might be, okay, I'm really, really high on Fortos. I'm pretty low on the Melvin. But you're going to have some interaction. And the same comes with Timmy, Spike, Johnny. I mean, you're going to have basically, you're going to run along those dimensions.
Hosts' Play Styles and Deck Preferences
00:12:00
Speaker
And I think it's important for us to keep in mind when we're talking about magic.
00:12:04
Speaker
So if you were to categorize yourself, and I don't mean categorize yourself as put yourself in one bucket, but give us some percentages, Alex. What's your play style? And I know you said you're at least 50-50 Vorthos and Mel. Are you more Mel than Vorthos? I think from a play style, I probably am more Mel.
00:12:24
Speaker
From what's interesting outside of play, talking and conversing, that's more on the vorthal side. And that kind of goes a little bit to what Hobbes is saying too, is you're not always one thing the same thing all the time. You can kind of shift a little bit. Like I have more spiky decks sometimes. I have my more Johnny decks.
00:12:45
Speaker
But from looking at the vorthos mill spectrum, I think playing I'm more from a mill. I really like to find the mechanics that interact. I like to find the two or three things that seem a little disparate, but I can put them in the same deck and they interact in a way that you might not notice. You wouldn't notice from looking at different angles. But then from a conversation standpoint, I think the vorthos stuff is just a lot more interesting to talk about.
00:13:12
Speaker
And I think that, you know, we've talked about this before, the three of us, you know, one of the decks that I love to play, it, it some ways intersects in that Melvin and forthos, at least in my opinion, because, you know, one of my favorite current decks and has been one of my favorite decks for a long time is Norrin the Wary Soul Sisters. And we get a character card here that it's a legendary, I mean, Norrin,
00:13:35
Speaker
Comes into that time spiral block and basically is sir Robin from Monty Python. I mean he runs away everything I mean, he runs away if something enters he runs away if his something attacks he doesn't care he runs away and it was always just so Fascinating to me because here's this story card and like I'm like, wow, it's kind of funny to introduce that I like that yet the Melvin side is then well like well that
00:14:00
Speaker
That's a mechanic that I can play with. That's something that I, what can I do with this? And not even in a spiky, let's break it. It's just, this is interesting to me. What can I do? What are the ways that I can do it? Well, I can do it to gain life. I can do it to come in and deal damage. And it just, when I play that deck, that is what's in my mind is really like, I have this storyline, this narrative about Norrin.
00:14:25
Speaker
But he's just hanging out with his soul sisters. He's just helping him out. Right, right. So, Hobbs, then we've categorically determined that you are not a spike whatsoever. Not in your debt building, not in the way that you play, nothing like that, right? Wink, wink, wink, wink. What would you call yourself if you did have to sort of give yourself percentages?
00:14:48
Speaker
One of our other play group members has commented often that my decks are built to kind of dictate how the game is played, whether I win or not. So I play Zosu the Punisher. That's just trying to speed up the game if I want the game to go quicker. I play Rorik Thar because I just want people to not play spells. And I mean, so I really do try to play something that I can play the deck in such a way that it dictates how the game is played.
00:15:16
Speaker
So that's that's a little bit Timmy ish actually is that what I'd say because you're going for a different feel a different, you know Yes, I just want to be in charge I mean what what psychographic that is, but But what's interesting is my favorite deck the deck that has changed the league is my most fourth most deck it's bolus it's almost clones and stealing and I
00:15:42
Speaker
We're going to get into bolas today. I think it's kind of some of the meat and potatoes of what we're talking about. And this could be the jumping off point because at the end of the day, my deck is really about, okay, you're serving bolas. You don't want to, but you are. Right. Right.
00:15:57
Speaker
What do you want to know what I'm
New Magic Story: Bolas and Ugin
00:15:58
Speaker
talking about? I was just going to say, that is a perfect jumping off point, because this week we had the first Core 19 story drop, and it was a doozy of revelations. So just to recap a little bit of story, we're not going to do this often where we dig super deep into recapping stories or talking about, I don't know, we'll have some speculation and all that, but that's not the core of what we're going to do.
00:16:25
Speaker
But this end of the Dominaria story arc...
00:16:31
Speaker
we saw that Liliana broke her pact with the demons, finally got free of them, but all of her pact lines, her pact tattoos were still there. And it was revealed that the pact was defaulted then to Nicol Bolas who had brokered it, and so she now is essentially a slave to Bolas. And so now we move into Core 19, and the first thing that we see is
00:17:01
Speaker
Essentially the birth of bolus and and as our as our resident bolus Historian and scholar hobs. Do you want to break down the biggest reveal of this story? It was revealed. Okay, we've had this we've have bolus and ugin I mean they're kind of have been set up now finally in a great way to be juxtaposed as kind of the yin and yang the fight between us and
00:17:27
Speaker
People are going to say it's the fight between good and evil, and they're right. They just don't have the sight, correct? And what we learned is that Ugin and Bolas are twins.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I thought even the most interesting part of this too is that you see in this story, you see Bolas is focused very much on his current, present, physical realm, the existential dangers around him.
00:17:57
Speaker
We've got to save our sister, this sort of stuff. We got to get revenge for our sister. Whereas Ugin is looking at the world through this lens of like hazy discovery, of this dreaming almost. So you have revenge on one hand, you have dreaming and possibility on the other. And that again, like you said, yin and yang seems like a really great way to represent this. It's very two opposite ends of what a dragon's ideal could be.
00:18:27
Speaker
And something interesting that kind of dovetail what you're saying, Joe, you see Bolas be a lot more immediate right now. We need to deal with what's right now, except we look in the future, in our present time in the magic storyline, he is a very plot, long timeline oriented. So it's like, is this a skill he picked up from Ugin? Is this something he picked up somewhere along the lines? So hopefully as the stories go forward, they start to fill in some of that background. We get to learn when Bolas started to become the plotter.
00:18:57
Speaker
and the schemer that he is today.
00:19:00
Speaker
I personally think it started right after the fact that Ugin stole the right to name himself. I mean, you don't take that from a dragon. This should be a podcast in and of itself. This is a connected and really intricately woven universe. And I think Magic Story Team is super aware of that. They're really tying this stuff together and creating sort of a unified mythology for us
00:19:30
Speaker
dig into and find and figure out what it is that means something to us. I want to come back a little bit to what we... Being as we are our first podcast and how these things work, we had technical difficulties and lost our first whole story because we've recorded this the day basically that we learned about the twins thing.
00:19:52
Speaker
What we were discussing on that day too was this fascinating piece of like us kind of wanting to know how bolus basically became bolus. I mean it touches on what Alex was just talking about that he's this discovery point and we've not known how bolus sparked.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, we don't know how he came to be this interplaner consortium guy, you know, like, we don't know anything. He's one of the biggest movers and shakers behind the scenes. And we don't know anything about his backstory until this until this core 19 storyline. And so
00:20:33
Speaker
we were talking a little bit last time about kind of what we know about Bolas. Now I've told you guys my theory completely is that this is all a Twilight Zone based theme. What was not involved with some killing of people, I don't know how, it probably wasn't his fault, but what he wanted to do was sit around and read in his library and his glasses probably broke his heart.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'm gonna let you take that one, Alex. What are your thoughts on Hobbs' take here? I think that until we have a better theory, our resident bolus ambassador probably is the most reliable source that we have. I'm sorry, did you say bolus apologist? Oh, that works too.
00:21:27
Speaker
I never understand that term. I mean, what am I apologizing for being right? I mean, I like... Well yes, because Bolas is so humble that he's always right, but you know, he'll let you learn that on your own. Right! What we know about Bolas today, let's just stick with the art, okay?
00:21:45
Speaker
We've had wizards try to kind of change history by giving him these, even from the vault dragons, an actual dragon looking art. But what we know is that Bolas was just a chill old dragon in a big library. That's all we know about him. He's sitting around books around him everywhere. Glasses on, chilling.
00:22:08
Speaker
And my question is, how do you go from chilling, reading your favorite copy of Withering Heights to literally withering an entire plane of children, warrior fighters on Amonkhet? I want to know what that arc is. His glasses broke. I mean, this is that simple.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, it is interesting, though, to see what they're doing with this Core 19 story and that we are going to get a lot of that, a lot of the questions, I think, answered about who Bolas is. But I don't know. Do you think revealing all that stuff is going to lose some of the mystique of Magic's Big Bad? Or do you think that'll flesh out some of that stuff? Do you want to take this, Alex?
00:22:53
Speaker
I think there's a little risk of that sometimes, and it depends on how they wanna frame him and how they wanna use him. You see a lot of monster movies, they hide the monster for a while because the thing that you imagine is more terrifying than the thing that they can show you. But on the flip side, I think what they're trying to do with Bolas is make him a fully-fledged character, in which case, the more you know about where he came from, the more you know about his motivations and his goals,
00:23:22
Speaker
To some extent, you can't know all the details though, as it ruins the fun. But the more you understand about him as a person, the easier, the better character it is. The more compelling the conflict is.
Character Depth Through Backstories
00:23:35
Speaker
Because now you have real people on both sides, conflicting.
00:23:39
Speaker
I agree with that. I think something interesting too, just to sort of cross fandom streams here, is I was recently listening to a podcast about Star Wars, and they recently, maybe like a year ago, wrote, released a novel about Captain Phasma, one of the new characters from the new trilogy, you know, that she's a, she's like the lead stormtrooper
00:24:08
Speaker
person, Gwendolyn Christie plays her, you know, super interesting character to me in the theory, but they haven't really fleshed her out in the movies. But in this book, we get her backstory. And the people on this podcast were saying, oh, well, we were expecting them to sort of make her a sympathetic character. But what you find out through this story is that even from like the earliest time that Captain Phasma was involved, you know, was doing things,
00:24:35
Speaker
she was sociopathic like she was just murdering everybody and so I'm curious to find out like already we see those tendencies in Bolas in this first story and is that you know I wonder if that if we are gonna get a sympathetic view of him or if we're going to get some of that
00:24:57
Speaker
You know, some of that more like, nope, he's just kind of always been. And I'm going to stop you right there. I think it also comes down to what I can see with Bolas's. It's not going to necessarily be that we're going to, at the end of the day, be sympathetic or that we're going to think that he's a good person. He is. But I mean, not everybody else is going to believe this.
00:25:19
Speaker
But what we may get is at least an explanation for why he's doing what he's doing, and he may have a reason that we don't agree with. Even at the end of the day, we may not end up agreeing with it, but there may be a reason. You know, when we were talking before, I kind of likened him to Thanos. And this is a full spoiler alert for anybody that hasn't seen Infinity War yet or read the comics, but
00:25:43
Speaker
Thanos in some ways, I mean, he's been behind the scenes. We introduce him very early in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He's in the background, right?
00:25:52
Speaker
which is how we've known Bolas really as of for now. He's manipulating planeswalkers and he's manipulated multiple planeswalkers that do his bidding, but we don't know what the big plan is. And what we find in Infinity War, and I don't know where we're going with Bolas, but what we find is that Thanos' motivation, at least where he believes he's coming from, is that the universe is finite in its resources and it's got overcrowding and we need to deal with that.
00:26:16
Speaker
And it could be that Bolas, at the end of the day, believes that he's the only one that can kind of stop the multiverse from collapsing. Because we've talked about this. There was a time when the multiverse basically could have collapsed. And it was more just like it'd be really inconvenient for him to do that. He doesn't like to die.
00:26:33
Speaker
Right.
Speculating Bolas's Motivations
00:26:34
Speaker
Right. And that was, yeah, that was the whole Time Spiral block is where those time rifts had really racked Dominaria and so much so that the mana was literally seeping out of the plane. Like it would have, and as I believe that point in Magic History still, Dominaria was considered the Nexus. Is that right, Alex? Sort of the center of the multiverse? Yeah. If it went down, a lot of the multiverse was going to collapse with it.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, yeah, Bolas somewhat contributed to helping fix in Time Spiral because if there's no multiverse, there's no multiverse for him to rule. So I mean, it is that interesting push pull. I think there are a lot of interesting real world analogies that we can talk about with Bolas as, you know, might makes right as this sort of, you know, as this dictator. And there's a lot of
00:27:30
Speaker
real world stuff going on right now that we should discuss as it relates to that too, but we can get into that at a later date.
Favorite Whimsical Aspects of Magic
00:27:38
Speaker
I want to shift us a little bit here to something that might be just a little more whimsical. We're going to dig, we're going to
00:27:45
Speaker
do the the heavy stuff too but we always also like to have fun and one of my favorite things to you know sort of get to know somebody is find out like what their favorite parts of of trash is about something they love now I don't mean trash isn't like they think it's just terrible that can be one definition of trash but for me trash is also like
00:28:06
Speaker
I loved watching Jersey Shore back in college because it's such garbage. It's so fun because of how ridiculous it is. For me, there are some parts of magic history or magic gameplay or magic story that are just ridiculous and fun because they're nonsense.
00:28:26
Speaker
I wanna ask you guys to talk about either what's the thing that you love to hate in Magic Story and trash in that way, or maybe more so, what is your favorite trashy bit that you're like, ooh, that's just so goofy nonsense that I can't look away, it's so much fun.
00:28:46
Speaker
i don't know that it's it's my my favorite right now but it is one that's that's pretty recent and kind of relevant um kind of noticing that it seems like the homunculi in magic just don't have any vowels in their names like we started with with fibble sip and the card totally lost and
00:29:04
Speaker
Then he became a big deal. And why wouldn't he be? He's just amazingly cute and unfortunately lost. It's tragic. But then we run into Mikleford, who is the card jeering homunculus from Conspiracy Take the Crown. But in the flavor text, it has Mikleford actually a reference back to Totally Lost. And so at two, it was maybe a coincidence, but then we get to Kai Lem and we finally have Zinder Split, our first homunculus legend.
00:29:34
Speaker
And I think now once we get to three, this is definitely a pattern. So it seems like that might just be a thing in the world building. And this is three different worlds, too. We've got Fibboleth on Ravnica. We've got Miklethon on Fiora, and now Zindersplit on Kailan. Yeah, and Battlebond is the set, yeah.
00:29:54
Speaker
Yeah, and that's fascinating too because Homunculi haven't been a featured part of really much of these stories. And like you said, they weren't really a part of the story until really Battlebond made them an integral part of Kai Lem. They are the referees for the games that take place at Ballad's Reach.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, and so it's super cool to me that the story team or that continuity, whoever is sort of in charge of that, has that deep of a sort of world building thing about them, even down to the, that there's a naming convention. We mentioned J.R. Tolkien off air, and that seems very similar to what Tolkien did with the elves. He developed this whole language specifically for the characters in his books. That's wild to me.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I think that what's funny to me, too, is that what we're seeing here is that maybe it's like with the, I'm guessing, what it is, is that the homunculi are just Welsh. And they either have all vowels or no vowels in their name. So, Hobbs, why don't you let us know what's your favorite trash in the Magic Universe?
HobbsQ on Foglio Art Style
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, mine is, and I get...
00:31:07
Speaker
I get made fun of a lot of on Twitter for different various correct viewpoints I have, whether it's white-bordered cards or Nicol Bolas. But one of the ones that I think people think that I'm joking about and I'm not is Foglio art.
00:31:22
Speaker
I actually love folklio art. I really do. It's very different. It's not necessarily what Wizards wants at this point, but it is that different 80s, 90s fantasy that I wouldn't mind even returning to a plane that for some reason is like an 80s, 90s era D&D cartoon that we have the folklios and some of those other artists. I mean, even
00:31:47
Speaker
are like Richard Kane Ferguson coming back with his watercolors, but it's just, it's a different style. And with the Foglio's to me, it's, you know, I think the piece that sticks out is Sulfurous Springs. We have Ice Age going on. We have the, you know, the first time we really show up with the kind of the allied pair pain lands and we get,
00:32:12
Speaker
a demon something chilling in a hot spring with his arms up around it like it's a spa. And I just love that. And what's interesting to me is like the folk videos get knocked a lot for that weird kind of quirky whimsical style. But we also then now have the people that are responsible for
00:32:29
Speaker
the Mishra's cards that are so integral, the factories and the workshops. We also get the factories that span the seasons and have that same look in different seasons in these treehouse. I just, I love that art and I really do appreciate it. And, you know, there's a lot of discussion, I guess, within the art portion of the Bortos community that it's not really high art, but to me, it's a part of like, it's,
00:32:56
Speaker
It's like the OC of magic for me, the Orange County. I mean, I just love it. Yeah, well they, I mean, Kaia Foglio did the OG Millstone too in the OG Energy Flux. I mean, like, I don't think... Kaja. Oh, is it Kaja?
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, she did those ones, and I think those are some of the most revered cards, not just for what they do, but because those arts are so iconic. It's not this grounded sort of thing, but it's fun.
00:33:32
Speaker
Stone, I love that you can see the expressions on characters' faces. Like in Stone Rain, you have this little goblin who looks like it's wearing almost like a fur, like a mink coat running away from these, like meteors coming down. It's great. Yeah, and as a person who started playing in revised, I'll tell you, the art on Sorcerer's Queen just makes me think of magic. Like, that's one of the few pieces of art that just brings me back to those days.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It has that element of the, I mean, it's 90s in its actual timeline, but it has that feeling of almost the stranger things, sort of 80s D&D, you know, high fantasy sort of stuff. You know what I mean? Well, I mean, which is where we came from. That's where our game came from. Right.
00:34:26
Speaker
It really, especially in those early days for me, it had helped to evoke this wider world like that could exist. And you had the art that was a little bit, you know, the different artists next to each other that invoked different versions of the world. And it was like, well, this is just this wide scape because I'm getting just these little glimpses of one, this art and this art of all these different places.
00:34:49
Speaker
And I wonder, too, if in a sort of thinking about this in-universe thing, you know, these are different representation, these are different artist representations, maybe in that world of what they're seeing. And so you maybe get a character, you know, I don't know, just like the Goblin King, for instance, like the Foglioz did a Goblin King that's this
00:35:10
Speaker
pudgy little, you know, sharp-toothed guy that's sunk into his chair and just looks like he's a kid on a stack of candy. And then you have somebody like Pete, I think Pete Venters did one too, and he's much more regal and much more like the ugly goblin that we know today.
00:35:27
Speaker
And I like that idea that it's separate artists representing the same thing, like we would see in the real world, where two Renaissance artists have completely different styles, but maybe they're painting a similar sort of thing, a castle one way and then a castle a completely different way.
00:35:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, like you said, I know that there's been a knock. I mean, the move has been towards uniformity. I know that there still is a lot of variations in the art. You know, Lineman points this out a lot that the art is very different and you could show how it is different. But it is still like they said, it's not like you don't get within the same set kind of disjointed looking things at the same time.
00:36:10
Speaker
That is the real world. We all see things, you know, let's go back to a, is it a yellow dress or is it a blue, green? Well, I don't even remember. But the point being that we have perspectives. And so what you're saying about the Goblin King is, yeah, whose perspective is that from? Is it from the other goblins? That may mean something very different than if you're having the Venter's version, which is somebody on the outside looking in. Right.
00:36:37
Speaker
No, I love that. Yeah, I love the Foglio art, even though it draws a little bit of ire. Maybe because it draws a little bit of ire.
00:36:45
Speaker
So what's yours, Joe? Mine, I'm going to bring it home with another artist, actually, sort of. It's a good leaping off point for me.
Joe's Fondness for the Beebles
00:36:52
Speaker
So fun fact, actually, I went to the same high school as magic artist, Jeff Miracola. And when he comes to the GP in Minneapolis this summer, I'm really hoping to have a vintage artist deck of his built so that he can play it.
00:37:08
Speaker
But Jeff Miracolo was the guy who invented the dumb little creatures that we know as beebles. And they're these tiny pink, sometimes grayish little balls. They look like squish down teddy bears almost. They're just like little ball bodies with like sort of bare ears. But then they have these long spindly arms and legs and like big buggy eyes.
00:37:38
Speaker
They're just so stupid. They're like Magic's version of, I don't know, like if Lemmings crossbred with the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter, like that's sort of what I envision this.
00:37:53
Speaker
They're just like, so the backstory of Beebles is that they were this essentially proto homunculus that the wizards on the Tolarian Academy created as lab rats essentially. They were supposed to be like dumb test subjects. And then they all of a sudden just started reproducing like crazy and started, you know, essentially just pouring out of the corner, you know, the cracks of the walls in the Academy.
00:38:19
Speaker
Okay, they also developed them as lab rats and then ate them. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about that, the card? I mean, saute, there's literally a beebl recipe and it's like talking about how great beebls are and how you want to choose the correct beebl for your... I mean, the card is called saute. That's all we need to know right there.
00:38:41
Speaker
And I believe it's a card, a different card actually too that says, gosh, I'm gonna blank on the name. I'll look it up while I'm saying this.
00:38:52
Speaker
Raine the Academy Chancellor, who is the wife of Baron, the wizard headmaster of Talaria. Oh, it's bubbling Beebles. Yeah, yeah. Here, I'll read this verbatim. Chancellor Raine canceled the annual Beeble roast. I should have married a crueler woman. Like, Baron actually is so mad that the annual feast of the Beebles, feasting on Beebles, was canceled. Like, that he's insulting his wife. Like, come on, man.
00:39:22
Speaker
Well, I mean, I basically think the way you describe them, Joe, is like you describe this Leming versus Snitch, but I also think you basically just called them the Ewoks of the Magic the Gathering world.
00:39:32
Speaker
Oh, 100%, they are adorable. It's the same sort of thing, though. Ewoks are small teddy bears that are, this is another Star Wars podcast, but they're tiny warrior people who just weaponize anything around them. Beebles just make stuff blow up on accident. Yeah, they're amazing.
00:39:56
Speaker
Well, and you told us last time that there is a Ewok jerky, which is like very uncomfortable to me. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of parallels. Well, we should dig it. We should do a Beebelcast. Oh. If we can get Miracola on for a Beebelcast, that would be amazing. I'm writing that idea down. I'll email him. Beebelcast.
Episode Conclusion and Listener Info
00:40:25
Speaker
That's our show. Thanks for listening, Podwalkers. Remember, you can find the podcast at goblinlurepod on Twitter. You can email us at goblinlurepodcast at gmail.com. Joe Redman can be found at Findhorn. That's F-Y-N-D horn on Twitter.
00:40:43
Speaker
Hobb's Q can be found at Hobb's Q on Twitter, and Alex Newman can be found at Alexander New M. Thank you all for listening, and remember, let sleeping elder dragons lie.