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Episode 5: Legen- Wait for It...
126 Plays7 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our fifth episode, Joe Redemann and Hobbes Q. dive headfirst into the history of Magic's legendary rules, how they affect both gameplay and flavor, and how they've changed over the years. Thanks to A.E. Marling of Gathering Magic for an awesome breakdown of these changes! They also compare legends in the game to their own real-life role models, celebrity culture, and hero worship in the real world.
ALSO! The guys will be at GP Minneapolis, doing giveaways and recording community people for future episodes. Come say hi!
Finally, the winners of the first 100 followers' giveaway are announced! At 200 followers on Twitter, we'll do our second giveaway, so keep the word of mouth going!
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 to Legendary Creatures
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This is episode 5 where we talk about legendary creatures.
Significance of Legendary Creatures
00:00:14
Speaker
Legendary rules are a subject of a lot of disagreement in the Magic community, but we make our case about why legendary matters not only from a flavor standpoint, but also from a common sense and gameplay standpoint.
Legendary Role Models
00:00:29
Speaker
We talk about how legends give us a chance to have role models in the game, something to aspire to, characters that we want to root for, and we talk about how that plays into celebrity culture, hero worship, and role models in general in our own lives. Unfortunately, simply due to the timing of the recording, we weren't able to get Alex on this show, but he will be back for the next episode. Without any further ado, here's the episode.
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to episode... I think this is gonna be six? This might be six. We're not exactly sure when this is gonna come out. It's gonna come out in the month of July 2018 at some point, so you'll be listening to us in the not-too-distant future. On your host, Joe Redemann, you can find me on Twitter, at FinHorn. That's F-Y-N-D, Horn. And...
00:01:21
Speaker
Today we're having the discussion about Legendary. Legendary is a specific part of Magic the Gathering and we're going to dig into what that means for Vorthos, the flavor of Legendary. We're going to be talking about the implications for
00:01:39
Speaker
gameplay and how you can understand that as a Vorthos player. We're going to be talking about how that relates to the real world in terms of, you know, hero worship, celebrity culture, you know, our own role models as well.
Personal Role Models Discussion
00:01:53
Speaker
And so now I'm going to throw the proverbial car keys over to you, my co-host, and ask you who was your first role model. Hi, everybody. This is Hobbs. You can find me at HobbsQL on Twitter. For my role model, my first role model,
00:02:06
Speaker
It's kind of one of those, you know, it's going to sound cheesy, but it's my dad because I know. So my father is the ultimate blue collar worker. He dropped out of high school to work full time in the oil fields at age 16. He never finished high school. He never went to college. He worked
00:02:25
Speaker
80 plus hours a week at times when the oil fields were booming with this idea of kind of he wanted me to not have a part of that life. He did not want me ever to be in the oil fields or be in that type of world. He wanted me to go into school. He wanted me to get an education. And he instilled in me some of those blue collar kind of attributes of the working hard, being willing to do what you need to do in order to get your goals. And so that's just always been my easy answer.
00:02:55
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, and I there are a couple of key points of that that I want to come back to when we get more into the discussion about Role models and what they mean for me I actually go a little bit to the other The other place that people think about when they go to role models for a lot of us our first role models our parents for me it was
00:03:16
Speaker
Athlete it was it was you know a sports player. I'm a huge sports nerd as well as a games nerd But I grew up a Milwaukee Brewers fan. I still am a Milwaukee Brewers fan and as I was growing up the player that had dominated Milwaukee Brewers culture for a long time was Robin Yount and
00:03:38
Speaker
And so Robin Yount, the kid, you know, was the hero of the team when they made it to the World Series, the baseball championship. He, you know, was a home, you know, grown. They picked him in the draft themselves.
00:03:52
Speaker
You know, and so he stayed with the team his entire career. So it was that sort of like the things I learned about, you know, from him were sort of that dedication, loyalty.
History of the Legendary Rule
00:04:03
Speaker
So the first thing that we want to talk about is sort of the history of the legend rule, because legendary has changed in what it's meant, how it's functioned in the game for, you know, over the course of the entirety of magic. It's changed, I believe four times is what we counted. I think we had three times in the fourth is kind of the future.
00:04:22
Speaker
Okay. So we have three of three changes. Well, we have the initial legend rule. Uh, the first change, which we're using kind of, we used a E Marlene's article that is on gathering magic is kind of our jumping off point here at a E Marlene on Twitter. Yep. And we use his article as jumping off to kind of look at the history. It's an interesting topic to come from, from both a gameplay standpoint and also from a lore standpoint.
00:04:48
Speaker
And on top of that, it's actually interesting because a lot of what happened, I think, with the legend rule and even changing of the legend rule really ties into the kind of the birth and the rise of EDH slash commander as a format.
Impact of EDH/Commander Format
00:05:01
Speaker
Wizards started printing a lot more legends. There started being a lot more support for legendary and it was around, really around like the EDH said. I mean, 2004 was kind of pretty early on and really people starting to play commander and it's starting.
00:05:17
Speaker
And you had awkward situations with the original role, which we'll get to in just a minute. Yeah. And so I believe if I just have to check this to make sure, but I don't believe there were any legends prior to the expansion set legend. No, that was the first one. Yeah. And so they, you know, legends was the first iteration of this where we start seeing these
00:05:44
Speaker
you know, for lack of a better term, these hero creatures coming into the game, you know, named people that you can identify with as cards. We've seen on previous sets, flavor text mentioned characters, you know, we had references to Urza and Mishra and Freya Leis and Jaya and Caleb and Krug and all of these people that, you know, if you know the stories, the early stories, you know, they
00:06:12
Speaker
feature heavily in the flavor text of those stories and that's really where magic story started being communicated was in flavor text but we never got really anyone to identify with as a person until the legends expansion and so
00:06:29
Speaker
Hobbs, do you want to go through that first iteration, I guess, of the Legend Rule and what it did for the
Evolution of the Legend Rule
00:06:36
Speaker
game? So I actually started learning under the original Legend Rule, which I will say as a new player was not very intuitive. So A. E. Marling talks about the fact that it made sense actually from a flavor standpoint. Basically, you were bringing in this creature or this entity that was a legend in their own right. And because of that,
00:06:59
Speaker
nobody else could play one so if you were the first one to land it nobody else could play that legend you you controlled it because you had brought it out so if somebody else tried if they played one all that would happen was that one would be buried or destroyed i guess so
00:07:14
Speaker
that was the world that I learned under and as a new magic player not really as interested at the flavor point at that point it was weird because I'm trying to learn all these rules and then oh by the way here's a subset of creatures that you there could only be one out at a time and if I played mine you can't play yours
00:07:32
Speaker
So as a new player it really was very confusing and it seems to like when you have something that says Legendary as a super type or back in those days. It was a creature type legend
00:07:47
Speaker
it feels like it should be a very powerful card that hits the battlefield and does something great but i think too with that point in magic design the legends were a lot more underpowered they weren't they weren't highly you know pushed cost as a lot of them are today yeah and so you have this this feel of okay well i should be able to you know have a big impact on this game well i mean with legends what we got was these weird
00:08:15
Speaker
situations where you had these really highly costed, basically vanilla creatures that had the type with them. Right. And the idea was that they were trying to give us a story and that was the purpose of the set. But you had just things that did kind of nothing that had it. Then you had creatures that really did hit the battlefield and could make huge differences. So that's where we get the Elder Dragon. That's where we get Angus Mackenzie, which for that point was a banned creature that could fog every turn. Yeah.
00:08:40
Speaker
Um, which is huge. I mean, at that point in magic removal was not as good. I mean, he probably was easy to be killed, but still, if you don't kill that, you have to answer just being able to fog every single term. So we had this weird spectrum of cards, right? Um, and from a game point standpoint, a Marlene brings up some very classic examples of, I think the most being the famous, a chroma situation in 2003, which he kind of talks about as the impetus for the rule change on, but he gives an example of a pro tour where.
00:09:07
Speaker
Basically one person had played Akroma even though it was not on the board the way it used to be you couldn't reprint I mean you couldn't play out one later in the game And so a player died basically with multiple copies of a very strong legend in their hand Right and that's sort of what I mean too about that whole you should have you should be able to have impact and yet it was more like Multiple copies of this thing in your deck are clogging it up
00:09:30
Speaker
So yeah, running four of a legendary was a weird thing because multiples of it were really bad. Yeah. So that is, again, we're going to sort of use AE's article here as our reference point. That's what AE calls the rule of singularity. Only one of these creatures can be on the battlefield and basically just luck of the draw locks your legends out of the game. You know, specifically like if you have an Akroma, one of the most powerful creatures in Constructed at that time.
00:09:59
Speaker
Done. You know, you don't get to play your Akroma. Then Rules for Legends changed around 2004, and that became what we now call the rule of removal, what AE calls the rule of removal. And that means that when a second version of the card comes into play, both die.
00:10:21
Speaker
So yeah, this is the rule that I remember the best right and I and I believe that I Keep thinking that I started playing earlier and I know I know I played closer to 2000, but I don't think I ever Knew the rule of singularity. I don't think I ever played Sanctioned events back then and so I I don't think I ever knew that one but we'll get into my play groups experiences in a bit but the rule of removal essentially said
00:10:46
Speaker
It essentially flavored it as another creature that's exactly the same coming into play is almost like a time paradox. It's almost like you going back in time, you seeing yourself meeting yourself, changing something, and then all of a sudden both copies wink out of existence and the whole time space continuum is ruptured and so it fixes itself.
00:11:07
Speaker
you know? Yeah. Versus the game just imploding. Right. Right. Because that would be really not fun. Yeah. And so that's not, that also was, it was less flavorful. There is a flavorful explanation for it, but it was I think even less flavorful than the rule of singularity in that functionally
00:11:27
Speaker
playing another creature, playing another Akroma for instance, became a free kill spell, you know? I mean, it became a very costly kill spell. Well, but the thing was, in some ways it didn't. And for me, this is where I kind of started with EDH, actually, was taking advantage of this rule.
00:11:47
Speaker
because when I started playing EDH my first ever commander was Marike and the point was everybody had better collections than I did and they played more expensive creatures and stuff. So what I would do was take advantage of this rule by playing clones. So I was getting four mana removal spells in blue. I believe that that was kind of the joke about the abuse of that rule was really that you could get rid of something in blue
00:12:12
Speaker
for really cheap. Right. And so not only do you have this weird, slightly less flavorful time paradox explanation for the rule, you also now have this breaking of the color pie. And for me, I think this period of the legend rule is the singularly most anti, not even un-vorthos, anti-vorthos. Like you shatter the color pie with this thing. Yeah, you do. I mean, it's hard for me to, cause I just use this so much to my advantage.
00:12:40
Speaker
Not that I'm a spike, but I just use this a lot to my advantage in the fact that, like, Blue could clone stuff, and I loved playing Blue. Yeah. But yeah, I mean... Well, and this rule came about around the same time that we also started getting Planeswalkers.
00:12:55
Speaker
This is a little bit of a tangent, but it does relate because planeswalkers come into the legendary rule later on. These planeswalkers then were sort of flavored as not random separate entities or not people that you're summoning, but sort of other planeswalkers that you've built allegiances with and you bring them in, which is why they function with loyalty counters.
Integration of Planeswalkers into the Rule
00:13:20
Speaker
You know, they're an ally right? They come in to help you in your fights in your duels You know and you tax them too much, you know, you know ask them for too much and they'll go away It does have that that interesting flavor where legendary changes over Planeswalkers come in and on top of that too, you know back in that time and I believe that had been I believe this had been the rule of
00:13:44
Speaker
For the entirety of planes walkers until recently you had planes walker and its type like planes walker Jace. Yes Jace Bellerin Planes walker Jace and you couldn't have only one planes walker with planes walker Jace on the battlefields They were functionally legendary even though they weren't considered legends by the creature type They still operated basically under that legend rule except we started getting different of the same planes walker pretty quickly right so we go straight from
00:14:14
Speaker
We go from Lorwyn we go from Lorwyn into Alara
00:14:20
Speaker
and then into Zendikar, and pretty soon now we have two versions of Jace. I mean, that's the most classic example. That's the one that A.E. Marlene mentions. We've now had multiples of pretty much, well, the big Planeswalkers we've had multiple copies of, but you could then use a three-man of Jace to get rid of a four-man of Jace, essentially. Right, and so again, you have this weird kill spell, and especially because at that time, Planeswalkers were a lot harder to remove. It just becomes this weird, like,
00:14:50
Speaker
It just goes so, so, so far away from Vorthos and good flavor, in my opinion. And I think, you know, AE's article does, you know, confirm some of that too. I don't know, do you agree that that just, if we're considering flavor and story, that just goes super sideways from it.
00:15:07
Speaker
It starts getting really weird. And then so we finally get the most recent update and the rule that we are operating under right now, which is this idea that, you know what, both players can have at least one of the same. I can have a nor in the wary under my play and you can have a nor in the wary under your play and they're going to be running away every time they look at each other.
00:15:29
Speaker
But they're going to come back in and they're not going to kill each other. They're not going to bomb just legend bomb, as I mean, it's basically what he used to call it. So they're not going to do that. We both can play that creature and both of us can have copies. Now we neither of us can have two of the same. So that still is in play, but on opposite sides of the board, we can.
00:15:47
Speaker
And then we also mix in now the new planeswalker variant where you can't have of the same name. Right. You can now have two planeswalker jaces, but you can't have two jace ballerins or two jace the mind sculptors. Right. And on opposite sides of the board, we can each have a jace the mind sculptor.
00:16:06
Speaker
for instance and this actually has been played on by Wizards which is an interesting way for us to get into because there was a Gideon basically that cared about carry if you controlled a Gideon planeswalker so an emblem for the most recent Gideon was you can't lose the game if you control a Gideon right so like now it really actually cares about
00:16:29
Speaker
You can have as many Gideon's as you want of different types on the board and it behooves you to do that. Right, right. So now we're at the opposite extreme of you don't get stuck with these in your hand as much. Yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it. It does make for much better gameplay, that's for sure. Yes. But as we get further and further along this timeline, the gameplay is becoming a lot more streamlined.
00:16:51
Speaker
I guess my question for you then, Hobbs, is, is this more flavorful? Is this better flavor? Or have we gotten, as the gameplay has improved, has flavor declined? I mean, my initial gut instinct in some ways is yes. You know, there is kind of, we're almost kind of trying to rationalize and ad hoc bring in
00:17:16
Speaker
like we talked about recently, flavor is coming in and we're making flavor fit. So we can do it. It may take some mental gymnastics. We can kind of do this. I like this idea of maybe like, we know that the planeswalkers when they're helping us,
00:17:34
Speaker
Balerin is not the same person as Jace the mind sculptor. They're from different time points within their timeline So if we can if we're gonna go with this theory that we can have Jace the mind sculptor and Jace Balerin in our decks at the same time We're pulling Jace's from different points along his stream, right? Okay, so sure and
00:17:55
Speaker
That's weird. Right. I mean, we just talked about the legendary rule. Initially, we tried to talk about this time paradox. This is even worse. I mean, I literally I remember when this rule first started, my mindset was going to Doc Brown doing like a chalkboard, drawing lines and like everything going horribly wrong because we're creating really bad. I mean, by any.
00:18:18
Speaker
version of time travel that I am aware of. Meeting yourself is considered to be a very bad thing. And yet here we are. We're almost kind of I guess we could pull a Dr. Who rule here. We've had it where all the doctors have interacted.
00:18:31
Speaker
And so for those of you who don't know, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi show that features an alien, a Gallifreyan time lord who, his ability, his species' ability is that they can regenerate a certain amount of times, I believe it's 13, 12 times they can regenerate so they can have 13 lives.
00:18:54
Speaker
We have the time paradox, the wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey rule, or the explanation, I guess. I think that is the official name on Blizzard site now. Is it really good? Excellent. And so you have that sort of fitting explanation for this. AE also affords another one, which I think is another interesting one, especially to explain
00:19:18
Speaker
legendary creatures, but not necessarily planeswalkers. Planeswalkers, I think we can sort of mentally do the gymnastics of they are powerful enough to bend time and space and all that, even though they're not these days. The other idea specifically for legendary creatures is that a card
00:19:38
Speaker
different cards are different facets of their ability sets. And so, specifically, AE gives the example of Thalia, Heretic Cathar, and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, both of which are about limiting opponents and playing into the taxes or stacks strategies. It limits what your opponent's creatures can do or what spells they can play.
00:20:01
Speaker
And so I think that's a cool explanation of, yeah, she's a more complicated person than just the abilities on one card. I think that makes some element of sense. You know, I think too about when we've had creatures that have had color shifts over the course of a block.
00:20:19
Speaker
So what you're kind of saying is like Thalia is still Thalia.
Character Representation in Cards
00:20:23
Speaker
Multiple versions of her on the board at the same time are not multiple different Thalia's on the board. There are multiple aspects of her persona. Right. So from a psychological standpoint here, we have the different facets of her personality. She's a 3d character. She's not a single aspect. I mean, she's not just one characteristic. She is a whole person. Right. And
00:20:42
Speaker
So we're getting it once again. I feel like we're we're forcing we're having to back just yeah Yeah, we're having to go back and justify and I and I do I don't think that makes it necessarily less valid no, but I do think it is it does put the
00:20:57
Speaker
the onus on us it puts the responsibility on us as the players or the vorthos you know people to figure out how it fits right and fortunately there are some of those pathways to that magic and wizards have left it open enough for us to get there yeah but not considering vorthos needs as much as the players i actually think in some ways their gameplay changes are trying in some ways
00:21:24
Speaker
to allow for this so let's go back to edh because that is the format that we know hinges commander edh hinges around a legendary creature right they didn't use to produce or print tons of legends we have seen a humongous rise in the amount of legendary creatures that you can play and they want people to be able to play them and they want you to still have that storyline of your edh deck is
00:21:51
Speaker
your commander deck has this commander or this general that you are sending out in kind of as your ally to deploy onto the field to protect. Their gameplay changes actually allows for you to make your own story better when it comes to EDH. So I'll talk here just briefly about our San Diego play group that used to be a part of. So we used to have a basic own multiverse for our EDH games. So
00:22:15
Speaker
We had a board where people had their decks written down and only one person in the playgroup was allowed to have a specific legend. So we took this even different from no two people can play the same deck at the same time. Theoretically, even if somebody wasn't there that night, I'm not sure that we allowed them to play. You could have a deck to play for against other people, but if you were in that playgroup,
00:22:36
Speaker
Legends were owned basically by somebody. It was interesting in some ways because it made each new set kind of fascinating to see people start to fight about who was going to get which legend or make a deal. I even saw people, I'll give up an old legend that I own for this new one to you if there were two people that wanted it.
00:22:55
Speaker
But it made games, in some ways, it had that flavor aspect to just what was a pretty spiky commander group, I'll be honest. I mean, this was a combo heavy seven, eight player games that would still end on turn four. I mean, this was a pretty intense play group that also wanted to bring flavor in and did it this way.
00:23:14
Speaker
I love that idea too because that gives you the chance as a player to want to identify with a with a legendary creature or you know or a planeswalker I'm not sure how you guys handled those but you know you do have that that drive to you know whether even if it wasn't like oh I see some aspect of myself in this character
00:23:35
Speaker
You like it for some reason you want to play that character So it gives you you know, it's it's almost like a fantasy sports team where where when you roster a player on your fantasy team I'm more often than not I find myself wanting to watch those players games or you know rooting for that player if I am watching that players game and so a little bit you're rooting for
00:23:56
Speaker
you know, uh, squee in the story if you have squee as your commander. Or, you know, you are rooting for Sisay to come into a later set, you know, because then maybe you'll get another chance to play with a new Sisay. Two, I just want to touch on, on my original playgroup, uh, really quick before we move on.
00:24:14
Speaker
Um, because I started playing around 2000. Um, so this would have been the rule of singularity time But I like I said, I never played in sanctioned events I
House Rules for Legendary Cards
00:24:23
Speaker
we just played as a bunch of 10 year olds, you know thrown cards at each other basically but in this play group we just And when it came to legendaries, we went with what felt right and so for us it wasn't it was already this um this sense of
00:24:42
Speaker
You can't play more than one. We didn't know. I don't think we knew about the legendary rule, but we knew it didn't make sense to have two Elidamris out on the battlefield at the same time. Because why would you do that? Why would there be two Elidamris? And so we went, we did sort of fit into that.
00:24:59
Speaker
into the rule of singularity. I think we naturally went with the rule of singularity where, no, if I play an Eladamri, you can't play an Eladamri until he's gone. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to do it. And frankly, magic can be a casual format. And if you guys decide you don't like the legendary rule the way it is right now,
00:25:17
Speaker
Do it how you want play singularity You know, I have a friend who still refuses actually the friend that I gave away a box of cards to you when I went to college He still refuses to play with sixth edition rules with the sixth edition changes He still plays with mana burn because of the flavor because it makes sense if you use too much energy It'll overload your circuits. I'm still salty about mana burn too and man I don't ever get me into the tuck rule
00:25:41
Speaker
Oh gosh. Who comes to EDH? Sheldon. I still feel this way. You know, it's interesting. It's an interesting way, and it came into the game originally because of flavor. Wow, are we still talking about legends? We are... We're talking about magic, so that's at least good. At least we're on that. So you talked about your playgroup and their own rules, and what I liked is you mentioned do whatever you want. You know, like if you have a playgroup, and that's how I feel about a lot of things. However,
00:26:07
Speaker
The risk of that is what we've seen people kind of asking about or questioning recently when it comes to the legendary role. In particular, I think Saffron Olive started a discussion on Twitter about what if we just got rid of the legendary role? We are now moving as far away from, in some ways, flavor as would be possible. I think that we would get to the point where I'm not sure what our mental gymnastics are going to be if we were to do this from a flavor standpoint.
00:26:36
Speaker
And also from a gameplay standpoint, I don't really get it because it causes problems for certain formats. I can think of the top off my head, death and taxes becomes a ridiculously good and better deck in legacy. Because if I can have multiple Thalia's out,
00:26:59
Speaker
that are taxing each of your spells with an additional one to cast, you are shutting down most combo decks to the point of they almost become unplayable. That's the biggest example that I saw in that thread when it came out, but there are a lot more like that.
00:27:19
Speaker
double chase the mind sculptor in miracles or the version of it that's still around.
Hypothetical Removal of the Rule
00:27:24
Speaker
We have kind of these situations where if you allow this for basically everything, you're going to be
00:27:32
Speaker
the gameplay is going to change and from a flavor perspective I don't know where we go.
00:27:52
Speaker
you know sort of the the baggage rules baggage and so again i understand that they're trying to do it for clarity but like you said hops it just it does take away it does take away from that that flavor part you know it does it makes even less sense then that you have two aspects anything about thalia you have two aspects
00:28:12
Speaker
Thalia that are the same out. Well, it's not like she got super great at one of them You know what? I mean that you could justify it maybe but it it doesn't make a lot of sense to me like I don't know She's just been in the gym doing bench presses like and so she's got really great pecs now. That's it Yeah, you know, but you know like whatever she's been ignoring like she does she's been skipping like day or something I mean we all skip we all skip like day who doesn't
00:28:38
Speaker
I mean what's interesting is do we actually have Mark Rosewater responded when it came to this tweet about the fact that he's been actively trying to make this change for years and he is in the minority within R&D.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah and I think that's a good thing that R&D as a whole doesn't really support it because to me that element of singular legend being a thing is good. It is good to have a little more open gameplay because that's what we do.
00:29:11
Speaker
the game, you know, for those of us that like to play Magic, we play a game and that's why it's enjoyable. But I think that if you do do away with it entirely, if you do away with Legend Rule entirely, that starts making the flavor convoluted, it starts stealing from Peter to PayPal, in a way. We're already messy and this just is making it messier. You mentioned getting started more to do with liking the heroes and being tied to the storyline and so for you, that's not gonna make any sense.
00:29:38
Speaker
right you know when you think about this i i'm gonna sound like an old person and i haven't reached 30 yet um but there is a big uh culture especially in america but it seems like it's worldwide uh of this obsession with celebrity or hero worship or um sort of this this infatuation with power or wealth or you know anybody who's who's held up on a pedestal
00:30:03
Speaker
We, you know, it's hard to tell is it, you know, chicken or the
Legendary Creatures and Celebrity Culture
00:30:07
Speaker
egg. Are they up on a pedestal because they have power wealth or do they have power and wealth because we put them on a pedestal? And sometimes it's different ways. I think about, you know, for instance, the Kardashians, you know, they
00:30:20
Speaker
are wealthy because we're interested in them. I believe the father of the Kardashian sisters was a high profile celebrity lawyer. He was O.J. Simpson's lawyer. That's right. And so he made a lot of money through that. And so it's not like they weren't well off already. They amassed wealth prior and then they became famous for being wealthy. Right.
00:30:45
Speaker
Then they became even more wealthy because they had the show the Kardashians keeping up with the Kardashians So if we're tying this into magic, they're basically the gate watch a little bit. Yeah a little bit and and we have that we saw that recently where There was a lot of pushback to Wizards that people kept saying like this is fine and all You know that we're getting a lot of stories about the gate watch
00:31:10
Speaker
But we want to see what other planeswalkers are doing. We're getting fatigued. We need to know what Paris and Nicole are up to. We need to move on to a different celebrity to worship. But I actually don't think that that is far off.
00:31:26
Speaker
I mean, I totally know what's going on with all these people who I've probably have only seen one episode or two of their shows ever, but I still kind of have an idea of who they are and what's going on with them. Right. And even athletes, you know, where my other job is, aside from teaching, I write about football for a living. You know, I know way more about these guys' personal lives than I do about some of my friends. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say that
00:31:51
Speaker
you know within magic there is room kind of for that that i mean that was kind of the idea of the avengers i mean the gate watch was that we wanted to have a through line of stories of characters that we cared about um the characters that we could either identify with and that's why we had aspects of them within you know across
00:32:09
Speaker
the board so we had our original five that we kind of did and the idea was that maybe people would identify with them with something about them whether it's already in the color of their color pie something about their personality their playability but that people would identify with them and look up to them and kind of that celebrity of culture that culture of celebrity and then what we find is you do get fatigued you do get kind of burned out on that
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting too that you, as we've come back this set to Dominaria, the plane where magic all started, this is the history set. So we're seeing a lot of the effects of
00:32:47
Speaker
cultures remembering icons. You know, you have, you know, we mentioned OJ Simpson. OJ Simpson is a burned into American culture, American psyche, not for being one of the greatest running backs in football history, but for being a murderer.
Urza's Moral Legacy Discussion
00:33:03
Speaker
And, you know, we see, you know, not exactly a parallel, but in Dominaria, there is a card, I believe it's called Memorial to Folly, where it's a statue of Urza,
00:33:15
Speaker
that's sunken in a swamp. And it's this reflection not of Urza, the Planeswalker, who, yeah, despite all of his flaws, did save Dominaria his home plane. Even though it took blowing up a whole continent to get there, even though it took, you know, ruining an entire, you know, group of people's lives, even though it took, like, sacrificing many more innocent civilians, yeah,
00:33:39
Speaker
Ursa's not great. We have an episode planned to talk about whether Ursa was moral or not. Yeah, that literally isn't what we... That is the one that we've been planning. Tying this back in then to hero worship and celebrity culture, whereas the Gatewatch sort of is our celebrity culture, our VH1s of today and magic,
00:34:04
Speaker
We see the statues of the Weatherlight crew and these bits of old story of the Weatherlight saga, of the Wrath saga, all of that on Dominaria, these relics. They are Homer's The Odyssey or the Iliad, where it's these pieces of, you know, it's not like celebrity culture or hero worship is new. It's not like this is a strictly American, you know, phenomenon. Like most things, we do it bigger.
00:34:32
Speaker
Right, we do a bigger and better, yep. And we stick a cowboy hat on it and slather it in barbecue sauce. And then elected president. Right, absolutely. Too soon? All right. But yeah, no, so we go back, you know, in Dominaria, it's thousands of years that they go back to hero worship.
00:34:50
Speaker
In the real world, it's thousands of years we go back to hero worship. Odysseus was the, he was Gerard. He led this crew against all sorts of disasters and dangers to come back and save his homeland in Greece and take back his land and all this sort of stuff. He was a similar character to Gerard in that way. And so we do see a lot of that
00:35:16
Speaker
a lot of those elements reflected. On top of that, what's nice about this from a flavor perspective here is we have characters meeting their legends in some way, or at least meeting people that would be important. So we bring back the members of the Weatherlight crew.
00:35:36
Speaker
I mean, I'm just thinking kind of that coming back and seeing people that may have been heroes. I guess Squee is still around. I mean, our favorite little goblin is still around and this dude is seeing history. I mean, he's been there and he's still around. And I love too that you have, you know, we talked about role models at the top of the episode and
00:35:54
Speaker
how we learned lessons from our role models. For you, you know, you took a lot of work ethic from your dad, from watching your dad work and seeing how he, you know, shaped his life and helped provide for his family. You took that into yourself and learned lessons for how you operate in the world. For me, I saw a lot of things to emulate from Robin Yount and, you know, wanted to be
00:36:18
Speaker
a lot like him and had that desire to just continually work and grind and be loyal and all that sort of stuff to people. And in the story, we see that with Gideon and Taferi. And I think that is one of the coolest things. We've talked a lot, not we, but in the community, we've talked a lot about Chandra and Jaya. Chandra learns control from Jaya about how to control their firepower and
00:36:44
Speaker
you know, how to be focused, you know, still use the rage, still use the passion, but focus it. Whereas Gideon, I think, has one of the most interesting parts of this because he talks it to Faerie, who also caused a lot of pain to people that he cares the most about.
00:37:01
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's a cool thing too, is that learning from history. And Gideon I don't think knows about Teferi until he gets to Dominaria, but he starts to then see elements of himself, elements of what he can take and become, you know, how Teferi can be a role model for him. You know, you talked about that restorative moments in, you know, for people who suffered trauma.
00:37:23
Speaker
talking to Teferi and seeing how he's come to cope with his past is a really great moment for Gideon. He learns that and Teferi becomes that hero, but in a very personal way. Or maybe just a psychologist. Or maybe, yeah. I'm basically Teferi is what I just heard in that whole conversation.
00:37:43
Speaker
Taking it back out into magic, a lot of times we see a split, or we hear about a split at least, between old players and new players. Things were better back in the day. Things were, you know, when we had Mana Burn, it was better. When we had the Rule of Singularity, it was better. You kids and your newfangled creatures that matter in combat, it was better back when they didn't.
00:38:07
Speaker
But this sort of gives us that, you know, a little bit of that modeling of behavior. We talk about that a lot in education, you know, is modeling behaviors and modeling lessons for students so they can see what it looks like. So they have something to cling on to as they do it because it's a different experience.
Balancing Tradition and Innovation
00:38:25
Speaker
It can be fearful for them. We see maybe how
00:38:31
Speaker
Older players can be not gatekeepers, but guardians of a past, of a lore, and stores of knowledge to bring new players in and say, this is what it used to be like, and now it's different. Not better, not worse. Just different. Different. Right. I mean, the game has evolved, and we can evolve with it or not. We have that choice. Yeah. I'm choosing to evolve with it.
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah. Personally. Ditto. Yeah. And that's, you know, and you can have, I think that's again, one of the beautiful things about magic play groups, about casual play groups is you can define the rules and
00:39:09
Speaker
As a player, if your play group decides something, you can play with them or you don't have to. Right. You know, a store that you like going to all of a sudden stops putting on the event you like going to, you don't have to go to that store and play the new events anymore. Go find your event or stay and play the new ones and adapt. It's up to you.
00:39:28
Speaker
And so I like that aspect of the change, the adaptability, and how we see the history, but how we move forward with the history. So I thought I was promised that this cast was basically going to become grumpy old men, and now I'm really disappointed. So kind of tying this up as we're coming towards the end of our cast, I think that this has been a great discussion today. So I want to leave with kind of your favorite legend, or just give me a legend from Magic that is important to you and a little reason why.
00:39:58
Speaker
I talked about it at the top of the show, and that's why I'm kind of coming back to it, which is Angus McKenzie. Part of this is if you've never played with Angus McKenzie, I wouldn't blame you. It's really easy to play with on MTGO, because it's like 10 cents. But it's from Legend, so in cardboard magic that means it's probably worth like $500 and I don't even know it.
00:40:19
Speaker
But the artwork on that card literally looks like Tim the Enchanter from Money Python and The Holy Grail. I had the opportunity at GP Vegas. I met Brian Wackwitz who did the original art for that.
00:40:33
Speaker
And it turns out he had been watching Holy Grail when he had gotten the commission from Wizards to do this Angus Mackenzie, to do this creature. So it really was actually modeled off of Tim the Enchanter. And I took that to make a Tim the Enchantress or Tim the Enchanter EDH deck that's
00:40:52
Speaker
enchantments and enchantresses being led by Tim. Tim the Enchantress is a really good name. But it's really funny Joe in some ways because if you say Tim and magic people think of prodigal sorcerer and it's tapping ability to do one damage and I've always struggled with that. Yeah so I've got I've got two that I'm really interested in because I mean part of it was the were the sets that came out right when I started playing but they
00:41:18
Speaker
They're fascinating creatures to me because of the story. And again, because I'm a story person, I love the arc that these characters take or don't take. The first one is Kamal, who's the hero of the Odyssey block and the Onslaught block, because Kamal starts off as a monorhead barbarian.
00:41:38
Speaker
And over the course of the Odyssey and Onslaught blocks, we see how he transforms when he's confronted with power that he doesn't understand, when he's confronted with the Marari and all of these things that he doesn't know how to handle. He changes, he adapts, and he becomes a druid and a protector of the crows and forests. The thing is is that, you know, he adapts and he does things differently as a result of that. And so I thought his character arc was
00:42:05
Speaker
Fantastic. That was one of the coolest things ever to see a mono red character become mono green and a druid. That was super cool. But another character to me that was fascinating because he didn't, because he chose, this is, I love characters that interact with the story, basically, that not just interact with the story that's happening around them, but interact with story on a higher level. It's almost like they're very aware that the fourth wall is there and they negotiate with it.
00:42:33
Speaker
Chainer in the same Odyssey block is one is my other favorite character and he's a black mage who uses essentially other people's horrors and nightmares and his own fears and horrors and nightmares as The beasts that he summons. He's basically a reflection of you the player He summons beasts into play and uses those and turns them into nightmares and turns them into nightmare horrors. Yes, I
00:42:59
Speaker
and and so it's basically it's it's nightmares come to life is his ability yeah and and I find it fascinating because a little bit it was tragic because that those creatures lived inside of his psyche those creatures lived inside of his mind he was that you know sort of tortured of a soul and you know eventually that's what undid him when he had the power of the marari literally his mind
00:43:24
Speaker
flayed itself. But what I thought was the most fascinating is he could have rejected the power. He could have walked away from it. He could have done the same thing because he was very good friends with Kamal and Kamal was, you know, trying to convince him, leave this, let's go, you know, or let me take it and let's let's get out of here. And he essentially he did the look at it, look at Kamal and go, no, I think this is what I have to do. I think this is where the story is taking me. Yeah, that's I think that's a good place to wrap it up.
00:43:57
Speaker
That's our show. Thank you all for listening to this episode. You can find Joe on Twitter at Findhorn. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. You can find HobbsQ on Twitter at HobbsQ. You can find Alex on Twitter at AlexanderNewM. You can find the show at GoblinLorePod on Twitter. Or you can email us any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com.
00:44:24
Speaker
If you're listening on iTunes or Google Play, please consider giving us a rating and a review that helps us get the word out to other people that the show is even happening. The more people we can reach, the more people can join this community that we're hoping to begin and hoping to foster. In addition, the guys will be at GP Minneapolis at the end of July, July 27th through 29th.
00:44:50
Speaker
There will be events going on all over the place, so follow the Twitter accounts and they'll let you know where things are happening. Finally, at the end of this episode, we have a brief giveaway notice. So stay tuned here after this break and we'll get right back into it. Good evening. We had the mindset of we were kind of.
00:45:13
Speaker
closing in on Friday to almost 100 followers, which I am just really impressed by the response we've had. And so I decided that we should give something away. And we've decided as a cast that we're going to continue to give stuff away, at least up until the first thousand listeners or the first thousand followers on Twitter. Every hundred we will be doing a drawing for something. We don't know what everything's going to be yet.
00:45:39
Speaker
Now, this is the Ensnaring Bridge with the amazing Titus Luntner art, which, if you haven't seen, was in the 25th anniversary set. It is beautiful and it's a great card. And the winner is... Oh, man, it's Ryan Sainio from Minneapolis. He's from Hipsters MTG. Actually, he writes for Hipsters of the Coast. And our second winner is...
00:46:11
Speaker
rackgosgoblins at rackgosgoblins.com, which I guess is a very appropriate one to win the second card. So what we will do at this point is we will give Ryan Sainio first pick at which of the ones he wants, and then we will pass on the other card to rackgosgoblins. So both of you, if you could DM us and just let us know your contact information and whether or not you would like your card signed.
00:46:34
Speaker
Thank you guys and we will be moving on soon to our second giveaway as we are already closing in on 200 followers. And again, if you want another chance to win something, start telling your friends about us. Word of mouth is the best way to pass around the knowledge that we exist. So go out there, retweet episodes, forcibly grab your friend's podcast apps and subscribe them to our show.
00:46:57
Speaker
and the more and more people that you get to follow us on Twitter, the more and more giveaways there are gonna be. Thanks for listening, Podwalkers. We'll talk to you again soon.