By Mark Rosewater

Welcome to Money Week! Finally, I get to write the column that I’ve been hinting at for months. How exactly did we come up with the idea to create the new “money” card type? I’m glad you asked.

It all began when Richard Garfield came up with the original design for Magic. At its core, the Magic game is about two things: wizards fighting, and printing money. The wizards-fighting idea is pretty easy to bring to the forefront, with players tapping territories for energy, casting spells and summoning creatures. The money-printing part, however, was seldom center stage.

This is why I was extremely pleased when Matt Cavotta came up with the idea to make a money card type. I immediately realised that he was correct. This was the right thing to do. It was strategically a very important move. It was going to be a creative challenge but an exciting one.

I started the design knowing we had a daunting task before us. Magic had never printed a new card type before. (Yes, yes, we had mana sources and tribal — I mean a new card type that did something the game had truly never done before.)

Because the design space was so wide open, I decided to follow my instincts and set a few limitations. First, I declared that money was going to be a permanent type. While instants and sorceries are nice, they’ve never been as iconic as the cards that sit in play. If we wanted to make money matter, I felt strongly that it meant it should influence everything about the game. Also, permanents are things. Money is stuff. It just felt right to insist on money being permanent. Wealth, after all, can neither be created nor destroyed.

Second, I stated that we were going to give cards money costs. The reason for this was a very practical one. If we were going to make money, it meant designing a lot of it over the long haul. Cash costs are a clean and simple way to make sure only the proper income class of player can play the card. If cards didn’t have a money cost, we’d have to work in other ways to make sure they stayed “in class.” While these other ways exist, they aren’t plentiful and thus only money costs would serve us for the long haul.

Third, we needed a way to make the money cards equivalent to real money. For this, we added a cash charge chip to the money cards. You can charge these at most large banks, and the charge is depleted every time you use the money to pay for a card.

More on the actual design process in part II!

I hope you all agree that the money cards turned out pretty neat!

Until then, may your dollar not run out of cents.

Mark Rosewater

- Nov. 15, 2007

Grammar lovers around the world were thrilled when Wizards of the Coast spokeswoman Tina Gaffney announced Sunday the invention of a new grammatical tense, the imperious perfect.

“We’re very proud of this linguistic development,” she said.

Gaffney demonstrated for reporters by tapping three forests and summoning a thin being with horns and pointed ears. “Please demonstrate the imperious perfect,” Gaffney said.

“We are not amused,” said the being, who then gracefully put a 1/1 green elf warrior into play.

“We will lead you to purge the ugly. Come, my follower!” the being added, giving the elf warrior token +1/+1.

“While the imperious perfect has been an unofficial favourite of royalty throughout history, most famously Her Royal Majesty Victoria, Queen of England and Empress of India, it is only now that our language technicians have been able to correctly isolate and name it,” Gaffney said.

Wizards of the Coast officials could not be reached for comment on the ensuing fracas.

The expert, a tiny fellow with pointy ears who introduces himself as Eepertwitter Spindlechirp, lives in a cozy burrow excavated from a hillside, called Windbrisk Heights. Inside, doilies, tassels and pictures of large-eyed kittens dominate every corner.

What follows is a transcript of his conversation with The Magic Lampoon. 

———- 

Spindlechirp: Ah, hello. You must be the articlewriter newsacquirer from the birdcagebottom dailypaper! Please, do come in.

You may hang your colddefence bodyprotectors here. Do sit down. Would you care for some hotwater herbinfusion? I’ve got the waterheater containerdevice heating up already.

Now, I expect you’re wondering how I got the position as creativemind namenamer for the great cardboardrectangle timewaster known as Sufficientlyadvanced: The togetherbringing.

To make a long story notlong, I wrote an informationquery wordseries to the famous “ask Shoreline Magicdoers” column about rule 502.49a, and soon received a reply from a “Matthew Cavotta” who was full of mouthslaver ejaculatingjoy about my writing style, and offered me a lifelong contract!

Needless to say I said “indeedyes affirmativeresponse,” and now people all around the lifebearer spacerock can enjoy my work.

———-

Mr. Spindlechirp nodded happily and served what he called ”houseproduced cake of the apple,” which was delicious and moist.

RENTON, Wash. — In a surprise announcement, Mark Rosewater announced Thursday that he would be quitting his current position at Wizards of the Coast to move to a new creative position at The Magic Lampoon.

Rosewater said he planned to shake things up at the Lampoon by assigning jokes to the color pie.

“Their main problem? Not enough constraints. Constraints breed creativity, people,” Rosewater told reporters Thursday. “The first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to make everyone adhere to the Joke Pie. See, you can divide all jokes according to this pie, and color-code them,” he said.

“See, you’ve got your five basic colours, and they all have specialties, right? Blue jokes, they’re all about being a smartass, making jokes that go over people’s heads, and getting punched in the face and having your lunch money stolen. But it’s OK because you’re still smarter,” Rosewater said.

“White is all about being conformist and boring and white. So you’ve got your knock-knock jokes, your elephant jokes and your racist jokes,” Rosewater said. 

“White jokes will often gain you life, or get you a promotion if you laugh at one made by your boss,” he said.

“Green, it’s all about animals and nature and being stupid. So there you’ve got your lolcats, loldogs, lolruses and so on,” he said.

“Red jokes, they’re all about being emotional and wacky and random, like goblins with buckets on their heads,” Rosewater said.

“Red hits you in the face with a pie, trips on a banana peel and falls into a leaf shredder,” he said.

“Black? Black will do anything to make you laugh,” Rosewater said, looking threatening.