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#Grave old fashion love movie
Years later I would fix this problem by making the same card again except the way I intended (much the way that John Hughes remade Pretty in Pink with the movie Some Kind of Wonderful, with swapped genders, ending it the way he wanted and not what the studios made him do-poor Duckie.) This revamped card also turned out to be pretty good. They liked how it played as was so they didn't change it. Once I saw how the other R&D members were playing it, I explained to them that my intent was for it to be three different cards. But wait, couldn't you just get three of the same card? Yeah, interesting story: I didn't think of that when I made it. I just liked the idea of a cheap instant tutor that you couldn't control what you got.
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I didn't even think I was making a graveyard-enabling card when I made it. Intuition is proof that it wasn't my intent to make so many graveyard cards. And in that roundabout fashion I designed my very first ETB creature. My simple solution was to just have the card have its effect happen when it entered the battlefield rather than when it was drawn. But it did force me to rejigger the card when the draw triggers got removed from the file. Yes, we never were able to make draw triggers work. One of the spells was an expensive 2/2 that allowed you to return a creature card from your graveyard when you drew it.
#Grave old fashion love free
The idea was that the cost of the spell balanced the free spell effect you got upon drawing it (more expensive for a positive effect and cheaper for a negative one). During the design I came up with the idea of cards that did something when you drew them. Gravedigger came along because we were trying to do something much trickier: draw triggers. (It was created- Mirage and Visions had been started before Magic even came out-I just hadn't seen it yet.) When we (Richard Garfield, Mike Elliott, Charlie Catino, and myself) began working on Tempest design, we were working on Mirage development, meaning I had not yet seen the Visions file, which put ETB creatures on the map with cards like Man-o'-War, Nekrataal, and Uktabi Orangutan. The road to a simple design, though, is never that simple.įor starters, ETB effects on creatures weren't a thing back then. We wanted an "enters the battlefield" effect (what R&D calls an ETB effect) on a creature, so we used the effect of a common black card from Alpha, Raise Dead. This card's design would seem like a pretty straightforward story. One only needs go back to the very first set I designed to discover that my love of the graveyard started early. (Also note that I'm not hitting every graveyard card I did, just the ones that were most defining.) I wasn't sure what order to go with, so I decided to go chronologically. Today and next week I'll be walking you through many of those designs for a firsthand account of how the cards were designed.
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In fact, it turns out that I'm such a fan of the graveyard that over the years I have made a lot of graveyard cards, mechanics, and even sets. This week we'll be talking about one of my all-time favorite zones: the graveyard.
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