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Episode 25: Goblin Games – Swords to Plowshares vs. U.S.S. Milwaukee
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our twenty-fifth episode, Alex and Joe riff on a card from Magic: the Gathering's original set – Alpha – and draw parallels between it and something completely unrelated. Can the boys survive an Iron Chef-like secret ingredient showdown... with themselves?
This episode, we decided to talk about Swords to Plowshares and how it relates to a U.S. Civil War battleship, the U.S.S. Milwaukee. Alex introduces the card and how it came to be, while Joe dredges up some river-related history to go with this card.
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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.
Goblin Lore is proud to be a member of the Geek Therapy Network (on Twitter at @GeekTherapy).
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by Joe Redemann.
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Transcript
Introduction and Concept
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Games. This episode we are talking about a specific card and mashing it up with a seemingly unrelated topic that was procured from a game of Wikipedia Roulette. We hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Promotion
00:00:25
Speaker
If you do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon account, which you can find at patreon.com slash goblin lore pod.
00:00:34
Speaker
If any contribution helps, we are just trying to make this a cost neutral podcast so we can keep giving you all the fun, goofy, weird, but, you know, important content that connects the Magic the Gathering world to your day to day life. So without any further ado, let's get to the show.
Episode Tone and Structure
00:01:02
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This episode we are featuring another goofy goblin games. And I tried to think of more Gs to put in there to alliterate and it didn't work. But that's kind of the tone and tenor that we go for with the Goblin Games episodes. This is gonna be a fast, I guess not fast necessarily, but a
00:01:27
Speaker
a bit more abbreviated, quick-hitting, condensed, more nonsensical, probably, episode than usual. And I am joined, as always, by one of my co-hosts.
Co-hosts and Banter
00:01:40
Speaker
Hello, I'm Alex. Vote on Twitter at Alexander Newham. Yeah, happy to be here. You kicked off the inaugural Goblin Games. I'm happy to be part of the sequel, I guess. Goblin Games to Electric Boogaloo.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's better than Goblin Games 2 First Blood Part 3 or something. I don't know how those numbers work for that series. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to focus on one particular card and then a story from
Swords to Plowshares Card
00:02:12
Speaker
history. And I think because I kind of am going to talk about the card. And I think that's probably the better way to open this. So I'll start. So we're going to talk about the card Swords to Plowshires. It's a card from Alpha.
00:02:27
Speaker
For people who don't play legacy or commander or weren't playing in 1994 or three when Alpha came out, Swords to Plowshares is a white instant. It removes a creature from the game and then that creature's controller gains life equal to its power. Now that is some old terminology and there's a reason I used it. Today it would say exile target creature.
00:02:51
Speaker
Back then, Exile Zone didn't exist. Literally, this card made that creature no longer part of the game. It is gone, which really fits the flavor of what's going on here. This name, Swords to Plowshares, goes back to a verse from the Bible, from the Book of Isaiah and
00:03:17
Speaker
fairly early. Apparently chapter two verse four said, and he shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. And so the Alpha really was about Richard Garfield trying to capture the flavor of a thing into a single card.
00:03:42
Speaker
He didn't build a, there was a few little like two-card pairs or things, but he didn't build a whole set this way like we do these, like Wizards does these days. But what he was doing is trying to take a single card and capture the essence of a thing. And so taking the essence of this concept of swords to plow shears, of soldiers turned into farmers, of people who are no longer making war but are at peace times.
Art and Theme of Transformation
00:04:05
Speaker
So like literally in the art, we see just a farmer.
00:04:08
Speaker
And I love the flavor of this card because I think it really captures that. Like literally, this creature is removed from the battlefield. He is no longer at war. But now that this creature is farming, this creature's power generates food, generates life for the creature's controller. So it is still creating some value in that sense in a mechanical way.
00:04:31
Speaker
But I just I really especially I started playing in 1994 with revised and so this was a card that the flavor of it always really caught me.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, it is really cool. It's one of those cards we've talked in the past on the show about how, especially in older magic, there are a lot of references in flavor text to like the Bible and certain books of the Bible specifically. But this is a card that is, you know, the whole concept is pulled from the Bible. And that's really interesting to me. But yeah, like you said, it does completely encapsulate that flavor.
00:05:10
Speaker
And, um, I love, I love the art too. The original art is pretty cool. Uh, actually don't have it up in front of me right now, but, um, who is the artist on that one? Uh, Jeff Mingus. Jeff Mingus. And a funny thing too, like, like you're saying a lot of, uh, Bible verses or old philosophers or historians and things would be real world, uh, what sources would be quoted for flavor text.
00:05:38
Speaker
In this case, even though the name specifically evokes one of those sources, they didn't actually have room on the cards. There is no flavor text. I realized I was reading a fifth edition version of their fourth edition version of the card. The alpha version is, I think, even better because it has some extra explanation because back in the day, people didn't understand the rules as much. The cards kind of over explain things.
00:06:06
Speaker
Target creatures removed from game entirely. Return to owner's deck only when the game is over. Creature's controller gains life points equal to the creature's power. But I love that they had to specify that it goes back to the deck when the game is over. That is pretty incredible. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I'm just clicking through a bunch of these.
Historical Example: USS Milwaukee
00:06:31
Speaker
There are a couple of different versions of the art, too, as I'm looking at it.
00:06:35
Speaker
There's some gorgeous art, there's some Foglio art. There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There's some Foglio art, there's some There
00:07:04
Speaker
Well, and so art might be one of the best ways for me to sort of transition into the real world topic that we're mashing with this and So quite honestly this idea came to me because I was listening to another podcast shout out to the dilettante ball podcast with Johnny O'Mara and Spencer I don't remember his last name now, but really good podcast. It's really fun. They they literally
00:07:33
Speaker
go on to Wikipedia, click random article, and then they'll talk about that random article. And one of the recent episodes that I was listening to, the Wikipedia article they found was for the USS Milwaukee in 1864, a battleship, essentially,
00:07:51
Speaker
that was built during the Civil War. And it caught my attention, first of all, because I am from Milwaukee. So I was like, yeah, that's interesting, that's kind of cool. But as they were talking about it and reading through this, the Milwaukee was sunk in 1865, it was destroyed. And then in 1868, the wreck was raised and broken up for scrap that was used for the construction of the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis.
Modern Weapons Transformations
00:08:21
Speaker
And I thought that was super fascinating and that's sort of how we tie this into sorts to plowshares is you have this this weapon of war that's what a battleship is, you know, a construct used for killing. And when the war was done, everything was over.
00:08:41
Speaker
they took it and repurposed that metal for you know a civil work for something more peaceful and and you know literally in this in this instance instead of something destroying something like a battleship or an armament an armament wood this is a bridge reaching across a body of water to connect the the sides and i think that's a really cool and poetic idea and image and
00:09:07
Speaker
In addition to that, there are plenty of other examples where small firearms and other sorts of things have been melted down to slag in the past and used for art pieces. One of the biggest
00:09:23
Speaker
Examples of this is in Australia in the past decade when they collected a lot of weapons a lot of firearms Maybe it was longer than a decade ago I don't remember but and a lot of them were melted down and turned into a civil works art piece I believe in
00:09:43
Speaker
downtown Melbourne or Sydney, one of the major cities over there. There's another example that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in 2014 collected a bunch of knives, guns, rifles, pistols, revolvers, melted them down and turned them into steel rebar that then was given to the Highway Trust Fund and other government departments so that they could use these weapons, essentially,
00:10:12
Speaker
as something constructive and peaceful and, you know, again, something to better the community rather than to destroy it. And so that's sort of what we have in Source Supply Shares as well, is this conversion from violence to benefit. I think that's a really beautiful concept that we can actually see reflected in the world around us at large. Yeah, I love that relation. That's a really cool way to kind of
00:10:43
Speaker
use a real world examples to bring some of that flavor to the real world. And it's a thing like I never heard of that. There's so many just little stories and small things that exist that you just don't hear about because there's so many, but it's fun to get those. And I'm glad you brought that to share.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I just want to make a note of a couple more things here.
Artist Spotlight: Gonzalo Mabunda
00:11:08
Speaker
Um, and quite honestly, these come from somewhat cursory Google searches. I'm sure that our listeners, you know, if you want to dig deep into this, there is a wealth of stuff out there, but, um, there's an article that I found from the guardian.com, uh, where they talk about melting arms into, into quote weapons of mass attraction. And, um,
00:11:32
Speaker
Sculptor Gonzalo Mabunda recycles weapons from Mozambique's 16 years civil war. Mozambique is in Africa. He twists and melts AK-47s, rocket launchers, and pistols into anthropomorphic humanoid-ish forms.
00:11:53
Speaker
you know creates almost like lawn ornaments out of these out of these former you know weapons he completely repurposes them um he'll make chairs out of the pieces of these of these guns he's made a guitar out of them i mean like
00:12:09
Speaker
taking all this stuff shovels like taking all these and and repurposing them literally into into a plow you know a shovel essentially you know is another farming sort of tool like this is just cool stuff to me um you can see on there too in this article uh he has made musical instruments like the guitar he's made violins for people he has made uh
00:12:37
Speaker
of this.
00:12:54
Speaker
Again, it's just that very cool thing to me of taking something that can be violent and turning it into beauty. Bloodshed into beauty is, ah, that's what we try to do verbally, but man, people are out there doing it in real life. That wasn't hokey. Don't you giggle at me. We verbally turned violent bloodshed into beauty.
00:13:24
Speaker
like it. There's also some good alliteration going on in there. I am, after all, an avid ally of alliteration.
Conclusion and Closing Remarks
00:13:47
Speaker
That's our show! You can find the podcast on Twitter at goblinlorepod, or you can email us any questions, comments, or concerns at goblinlorepodcast.gmail.com. This episode was written, produced, by Joe Redman. You can find on Twitter at FinDorn. That's F-Y-N-D-Horn. It was also written and produced by Alex Newman, who you can find on Twitter at AlexanderNewM.
00:14:14
Speaker
Music comes to us courtesy of an original composition by Wintergaten, who you can find at wintergaten.com. That's wintergaten.com. Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.