Tarmogoyf

In the first individual card spotlight on 180 MTG, Ryan Overturf talks about how Tarmogoyf forever altered the landscape of Magic, ruminating on how that impact has been felt and how it can be applied to Cube design. 

Scryfall search for every future-shifted card from Future Sight for those interested. 

Transcript

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180 MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm talking about Tarmagoyf. He's talking a bit about the individual cards. Something I've wanted to do on the podcast here is kind of highlight individual cars and what they can mean for a cube, but I'm not talking about how to design a cube around Tarmagoyf. Tarmagoif is a car that is in several of my cubes. I do have insights on that. I'm sure I will touch on that today. But more when I do these individual card spotlights, I've kind of wanna talk about the shape of the card, what it does, similar cards, and what cards like this mean for cube. And Tarmagoyf is just one of Magic's most iconic and impactful cards, the design of which would have cascading effects on the future design of all of Magic leading up until today. I'm not just talking about referential cards, the other Lurges, your Pyrogoyfs, your Barogoyfs. I'm talking about just how this creature that was so good at attacking and blocking that was printed basically on accident completely reshaped the way that the game was played, designed, and the way that we think about Magic the Gathering today. Tarmagoyf is a card that both directly and indirectly impacts basically all of my cube designs. It's just so pervasive in all of magic, what Parmagoyf has done to the game and the way that it really did change the landscape. So today I'm gonna talk a bit about the history of Tarmagoyf, the visible ways it immediately made a huge impact on magic. Then I'm gonna get a little bit into the legacy of Tarmagoyf, maybe the less perceptible aspects of how Tarmagoyf has really changed magic, and how it has shaped a lot of my thoughts about magic and more indirectly influences my thoughts on cube design. So some weird space today. Join me on this journey and let's talk about Tarmagoyf. So let's start with what the card does. Tarmagoyf is a creature of one in a green with power equal to the number of card types among cards in all graveyards, and toughness equal to that number plus one. So it's a 0-1 as a baseline if you just cast it, but then it gets plus one plus one for every card type in all players' graveyards. Referential to the card Lurgoyf from Ice Age, that's the creature type here. There was also a cycle of Lurgoyfs and Odyssey block. Some of these cards are very beloved. Magnum War, probably the standout from the Odyssey cycle, the red entry that has power and toughness equal to the number of sorcery cards in your graveyard. So Tarmagoyf is a referential backwards in that way, though Tarmagoyf would go on to be much better known than any of those cards. And while Tarmagoyf is in ways referential back to the history of magic, it also is a card that was clearly looking to the future, first printed in Future Sight and one of the cards using the future shifted frame. So if you're unfamiliar with that, Future Sight came out in 2007. This was my senior year in high school. I was really into magic at this point in time. Future Sight was part of Time Spiral block, so Time Spiral did a lot of reprints from the history of the game, looking at the past of the game. Planar Chaos, the second set, did a lot of color shifting, looking at alternate present realities. And then Future Sight, of course, was looking at the future. So if you haven't looked at the Future Sight bonus sheet, it's kind of a cool set to look through. Future Sight did something really unique in a way that I don't know if we'll ever see a set quite like Future Sight. We kind of do in some regards. Really Modern Horizons, in a lot of ways, does things similar to what Future Sight did. But Future Sight did some stuff where there's a lot of one-off cards with weird mechanics. Some we would see in the future. The intention was that these were cards that were going to appear in future magic sets, but also that was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Some of the cards are just weird. There's a number of one-off mechanics that were never visited again, some that became major parts of future sets, and some that we've gotten one or two cards peppered here and there in sets like Modern Horizons or in Commander Precons. So some really weird stuff on the future site, future shifted frame. I think it's really fun to go back and look at those. And if you've never seen it, it's certainly a trip to go down and check those out. And Tarmagoyf is a card that is referential to Magic's past, but it doesn't use flavor text in that way. You're just kind of already supposed to be in on the joke when you see the word Lurgoyf, the card Lurgoyf having one of Magic's most iconic pieces of flavor text, Ak Hans Run, it's the Lurgoif. But Tarmagoyf isn't really doing anything in that flavorful space beyond being this reference to older Lurgoif cards. Instead, the reason that Tarmagoyf was part of the future shifted sheet and what the card was doing in the file is it has this reminder text that lists the different card types that could be in graveyards to give it plus one plus one, teasing planeswalkers and tribal, now known as kindred, two card types that did not exist at the time. Planeswalkers would not be printed until the next set Lorwin, so this was kind of the teaser for the big reveal of the new card type there. And there was one tribal card in the future site set on the future shifted sheet bound in silence, just in aura that is kindred, so it can have rebel as a creature type, which is kind of funky because you can use it with rebel searchers. So what Parmagoyf was doing on the Future Shifted Sheet was teasing that planeswalkers are coming. Nothing about the card Tarmagoyf, though, suggested that this card couldn't just be printed, so it was kind of this goofy kind of advertisement for what's to come. And while there's way more ambitious designs on the future shifted sheet using this future shifted frame, Tarmagoyf turned out to be the card that most shaped the future of magic on the entire sheet, kind of inadvertently. I believe that in design and development, Tarmagoyf was mostly in the file here to tease planeswalkers and kindred spells, and during previous season, Tarmagoyf got basically zero buzz. It just wasn't a card that it made a lot of sense to talk about, given that there were no planeswalkers in the file, there was one Kindred spell, it was also just an aura that stayed in play, so there was nothing really to build around there. So this card kind of looked like a build around, and to an extent, Tarmagoyev can be a build around. There's ways to make your deck more or less optimal for it, but it wasn't what was jumping off of the page during previous season, especially if you go and look at the future shifted sheet. There's cards like Bridge from Below, a card with a restrictive casting cost that does nothing on the battlefield. There was so much to chew on when it came to Future Sight. It was such a weird set, such a novel set, so many one-of-mechanics, that a creature that just attacks and blocks was not anything that anybody was looking at too closely. Until the set got into players' hands, people started casting Tarmagoyf and going, whoa, the rate on this card is off the charts. This is just the strongest two-mana creature for attacking and blocking yet printed. Tarmagoy's pre-ordered for like a couple three bucks, very cheap under the radar initially, and then when people started playing with them, the demand started spiking. People wanted them for their standard decks, their extended decks, their legacy decks, their vintage decks, just every constructed format needed Tarmagoyf. And this was a time before Commander, so that was like all of the demand for a magic card. It does kitchen table appeal, of course, it still mattered, but the louder aspect, certainly at the time for me, what you could easily access going online back in the day, was that Parmagoyf was the four of tournament staple breakout car from the set. Parmagoyf would very quickly jump to$20 and then would increase in price over time as we got further and further away from the release of Future Sight as the card continued to see heavy play in every constructed format. I cast a lot of Tarmagoyfs and extended back then, probably a lot more in Legacy. I've cast a ton of Tarmagoifs in Legacy in my time. And what's kind of interesting there, looking back at the decks that I used to play Parmagoyf in in Legacy, talking about Teamer Delver, just a three-colored deck, really low to the ground, a lot of one and two mana spells, some zero mana effects, but the deck only played four card types. You had lands, creatures, instance, and sorceries, maybe a Tormaz Clip out of the sideboard. But the idea in construction back then was Tarmagoyf was an aspirational four-five. It would get bigger in games in practice. Your opponent would sometimes introduce another card type or two, but you were playing it to get it up to a 4-5, and that was just larger than anything else you could do for two mana. And this was really groundbreaking in terms of creatures that attack and block. It incentivized you to play a creature and get aggressive with it in a way that was never really previously incentivized on an individual card level. Like Tarmagoyf wasn't the first aggressive creature, it wasn't the first overstatted creature to see play in Legacy. For example, Phyrexian Dreadnought plus Stifle was a thing in Legacy before Tarmagoyf. So there was like reasons to play creatures and even stretch your deck a little bit to do it, but Tarmagoyf just allowed you to put a creature in your deck without any kind of deck building parameters. And kind of the loudest thing that I think about, when I think about how groundbreaking Tarmagoyf was at the time, is Merfolk was a deck in Legacy before Tarmagoyf, just a deck full of Merfolk Lord Sword of Atlantis, you're trying to pump all of your Merfolkes, just a bunch of creatures that mostly attack, can block. They pitched to Force of Will, is one of the most important things that Merfolk creatures do. But then the Merfolk decks in Legacy also just played Parmagoyf. Not universally, but there were successful Merfolk decks that were just playing Tarmagoyf in the Merfolk shell. It didn't pitch to Force of Will the way your other Merfolk did, but it was just larger as an individual card. It played less into a sweeper. You could cast it and have an established battlefield just on the back of one creature, which is so different than so many historical magic decks. At least if you were going to build your deck around having one creature in play, there's standouts like Sarah Angel, later Exalted Angel, there's strong creatures that you could kind of have as your control finager, but none of them cost two mana as an individual card. And Parmagoyf was just played as an individual card. It's a really important part of the texture here. These days, if you're putting Tarmagoyf in your legacy or your modern deck, there are some deck building restrictions, just because two mana, three, four, four, five, it's not really strong enough to cut it anymore. And a lot of that does have to do with the cascading effects of Tarmagoyf's presence, which I'll get into a little bit later. The longer Tarmagoyf existed, the more its presence caused designs to kind of shape around playing magic in the era of Parmagoyf. But back then, you know, talking about Teamer Delver playing Tarmagoyf with the aspiration of it being a four-five, the Merfolk decks weren't even good at getting their own Tarmagoyfs up to 4-5 with their own cards. They relied on the fact that you were gonna cast some spells and through them force of willing it or whatever, your cards were going to go into the graveyard just as readily as theirs, so they would get a 4-5 Tarmagoif just kind of by playing magic. And that's such a stark departure from historical creature decks before Tarmagoyf. If you go back to the old white aggro decks, so much of that was you would put White Knight and Savannah Alliance in your deck, not just because Savannah Lions was going to cold your opponent. The spells were so much more powerful, removal was pretty easily accessible, Savannah Lions takes some time to close. Savannah Lions was just the card that made the most sense to put in your armored geton deck, similar to the Necropoten decks of old that played those old pump knights, two mana two ones that you could filter some mana in to grow. It wasn't that those pump knights were going to be especially strong against most of the field. Yeah, they had protection from white, they were good against white decks, but they were just the cards that made the most sense that fit the most naturally into your Necropotence deck. Tarmagoyf was a card that went into decks trying to play games. It's just so different from the creatures that attack and block that came before it. And by costing two and only having one green pip, it was so easy to fit into a wide range of decks as well. You know, Legacy, that Merfolk deck playing Tarmagoyf is a loud example, but it gets even more intense when you look at Extended at the time. Extended had so many different decks playing Parmagoyf. And there would be decks that had their own creature suites. You'd play Tarmagoyf in kind of aggressive shells, you had other creatures, and then this was a card that would kind of threaten your opponent on its own and kind of force a sweeper where you could sandbag your other weaker creatures. But then there's also decks that just played Tarmagoyf alongside like Vidalcon Shackles. So you could have this kind of controlling role, and then Tarmagoyf would close your game if your opponent tried to engage you on the battlefield, all while you set up with your own removal spells, counter spells, and some other forms of interaction, the shackles being a tool to steal your opponent's creatures and also majorly win the Tarmagoif mirror. And the reason that Vidalkin Shackles comes to mind for me is that Parmagoyf really did just show up in a lot of blue decks, decks that were overwhelmingly blue and then had this one green card, just because Parmagoyf was so good at what it did. Attacking and blocking is not historically appealing for a control deck. If it's the best thing, it's the best way to close the game, if it's a card that makes the most sense in the context of your other cards, you play it, and Tarmagoyf just happened to be the card that made the most sense in the context of playing other magic cards. In formats with fetch lands, it was so easy to get Tarmagoif up to 4-5, and 4-5 for two was just groundbreaking. There was just nothing like it at the time. It's also worth noting that a lot of the spell-based combos, many of the most powerful non-creature spells, uh, Magic had learned a lot of lessons. We're no longer at the point where they're reprinting Stone Rain and Dark Ritual in every set. So there's a lot more going on in terms of ABC magic, and Parmagoyf is a card that really broke the mold and just was too efficient to deny in the realm of playing ABC Magic in the 2000s, in the early 2010s. And Parmagoyf would later go on to get more of an identity as kind of a junt card, and as we saw more sets, more stuff playing in the space, Delirium becomes very closely associated with Parmagoyf, so it plays in decks that are really trying to play into this get a bunch of card types in your graveyard. But initially, this was just a card that made sense to play in a lot of decks, and it was ubiquitous. Everybody was playing Tarmagoyf in everything, and that brings me to a really important point and something that is really informative about the impact Parmagoyf had on Magic. It was played in every format, it was played in so many different decks, but despite that, there was never a serious conversation about banning Tarmagoyf everywhere, because the impact it had on the game was overwhelmingly positive. There were negative aspects. The card got prohibitively expensive, that is certainly a problem. The card was in a ton of different decks, even if the play patterns are healthy. Oftentimes, if a card is just showing up everywhere, then you start to think, well, maybe maybe the format will be better. It could be more diverse if there was less of this going on. But in those conversations, a lot of the nuance is what is the thing that's happening? And with Tarmagoyf, the thing was creatures attacking and blocking. I think a big aspect of what made Tarmagoyf Tarmagoyf is that one additional toughness over the power. That additional point of toughnes it so both players can control a pharmagoyf and they can attack into each other. You can attack a pharmagoyf into a pharmagoyf, and your opponent can block, and if nobody does anything, they both just hang out. So you get to make attacks, you get to make blocks. There's kind of a bluffing aspect there. That's not the important thing of what's happening. What's importantly happening with this power outlier at the time, this card that everybody was playing that was so strong, is the things that it was good at were attacking and blocking. And it would persist if this was the only card involved. The game continued, the game continued to allow players attacking and blocking, and that is all that Parmagoyf does. And the reason that that matters, and the reason I relate this to there never being a discussion realistically about banning Tarmagoyf, is that what Tarmagoyf does, games about creatures, games about attacking and blocking are peak magic. They're fun as hell. Parmagoyf is fun. Attacking and blocking is fun. And that always has been kind of at the forefront a lot of what draws a lot of people to retail limited. There's controlling decks, you know, it's always been power outliers. There's been messed up stuff like pestilence or whatever, Rolling Thunder, different fireball effects, where, yeah, that's a fun part of Limited too, but that stuff was always the really loud part of Constructed. And if you were a creature deck in Constructed, oftentimes you were relying on those non-creature power outliers or minimally significant deck construction parameters where you have to play all of a bunch of specific cards to be a deck that's about attacking and blocking. Tarmagoyf allowed constructed magic to translate just the inherently fun, basic nature of attacking and blocking just because that's what the cards, the right points, the right power level on the cards incentivized you to do. You were supposed to play Parmagoyf because Tarmagoyf was strong, but you continued enjoying playing with Tarmagoyf because Tarmagoyf is fun. Creatures attacking and blocking is fun, and Parmagoyf shined light on that in constructed magic in a way that no card before it ever did. And Parmagoyf continued to be a notable power outlier for a few years after its first printing. It's still a card that can show up today. It does show up today in a context that is a little bit more reliant on pushing the delirium aspect. You're basically never going to see a Tarmagoyf in a deck without Mishra's baubles these days, because you gotta at least get up to a 5-6. That fifth point of power, it's a big deal. It turns a 5-turn clock into a four-turn clock, and you'll often see a kindred spell, maybe an enchantment. I'm a big fan of Seal of Fire, Deadweight. Those are cards that certainly are an aspect of making Tarmagoyf hang in cubes in the year 2026 and making kind of a fun build-around there. And I think it's worth talking about or mentioning that Tarmagoyev is clearly just kind of one-to-one. You can easily draw the line with Tarmagoyev being inspirational for some of the graveyard mechanics they've done since Tarmagoyf, minimally delirium caring about having four card types. Well, where'd you get that idea? Where have you seen that before? Tarmagoyev clearly gives us cards like Grim Flare and expands the space in that way. So Tarmagoyf is influential with regard to some of the ways we explore graveyard synergies and magic today, but that's not the impact of Parmagoyf that I see as most significant. The impact that I see as most significant is just Parmagoyf demonstrating creatures attacking and blocking is one of the most fun things and magic. We can make that thing powerful and we can make constructed more about that thing. And Parmagoyf taught us that lesson by just being undeniable. You had to play Tarmagoyf because Tarmagoyf was the strongest thing, and by it being the strongest thing, it instructed us that it's also one of the most fun things. And in that regard, it's less easy to track the impact of Tarmagoyf directly. I think if you're in the know, if you were there for all of this, you can understand it and unpack it. It's very loud, the way that Parmagoyf clearly inspires delirium. But just more generally, in the years that followed Parmagoyf, you know, there's been some ebb and flow. Uh shortly following Tarmagoyf, there was, of course, an era of planeswalkers being very powerful, you think like Chase the Mind Sculptor. But then over time, the design of planeswalkers has become a lot more about being able to navigate games involving planeswalkers with creatures that attack and block, or at least the highest impact ones. You start seeing more stuff that costs like six mana and is big controlling haymakers and less stuff in the space of four mana. The game is about this thing now. The designs clearly became more about attacking and blocking in creatures on the battlefield over time, which is not something you could directly tie to Tarmagoyf, but it's not unrelated. More generally, though, creatures just got a lot stronger after Tarmagoy, and that I do think can be tied back to Tarmagoy. Once the genie was out of the bottle, it just demonstrated that creatures could be more powerful, and when it comes to just Tarmagoyf leading to creatures being stronger, that might not be a clear line you can draw. And the reason for that is that Tarmagoyf is ostensibly a vanilla creature. It has power toughness that scales, it has a build-around aspect caring about card types and graveyards, but it is just a creature with stats. It attacks and blocks, it has no static ability other than modifying its power and toughness, and that's a very limited design space. What do you want to do if you want to iterate on Tarmagoyf? If all you think about is it's just a creature with stats, you can make the stats bigger, you can make it cost more or less and change the numbers. There's not a ton you can do in that space. If Tarmagoyf is going to be directly influential in terms of Creatures are good at attacking and blocking. Yeah, you could just make a 2 mana 5-5, but where do you even go from there? It's a really boring design, and even if there is room to play with a little bit in the vanilla creature that attacks and blocks space, it runs out very quickly. There's only so much you can do in the number go up space, and there's some creative designs that we have seen that have shown up and constructed kinda in this vanilla creature attacking and blocking space. I think of Death Shadow, I think a lot of that is because Parmagoyf and Death's Shadow were in the same modern deck for a time. I do think that Death Shadow is more of a Phyrexian dreadnought callback than a Tarmagoyf deck. It is also clearly much less of a card that you can just put in decks, but it does ultimately lead to a lot of the gameplay that Parmagoyf was about. You turn on this creature that attacks and blocks with interesting texture, large size for a low mana value, Cosmogoyf, and some other stuff that is more clearly referencing back to Parmagoyf. It's funny that Tarmagoyf is itself a reference to Lurgoif, and now you see the Pyrogoyfs, and these are just more clearly looking at Parmagoyf and saying, let's make a card that does some of what Parmagoyf does and plays in similar space there. And to be clear, Barogoyf, Pyrogoyf, they do riff on Tarmagoyf, they do have Tarmagoyf in their DNA, but then they enter this space where they're really strong in terms of enters abilities, in terms of damage dealing abilities, adding some static keywords onto that, the lifelink on Barogoyf being really strong in some contexts. And some of that is an aspect of once you want to play in the Parmagoyf space, you have to do things that aren't just vanilla creatures. There's only so many vanilla creatures, creatures that only attack and block that you can design. You kind of have to do more different things. But then those are an example of Tarmagoyf said we can print more powerful creatures. We did that more and more over time. And then Baragoyf, Pyrogoyf, those ones being printed directly into non-rotating formats, they do kind of have to do more. Again, if you want to make something that's better in legacy, you can either just make larger numbers or you have to make the card do different things. So there's not room for a bunch of Tarmagoyves to get into Legacy. And truthfully, there's not room for a bunch of Parmagoyfs to get into standard, but I do see Tarmagoyf in the DNA of cards that look less like Tarmagoyf. I see Tarmagoyf and Monastery Swift Spear, a creature with more toughness than power, that is largely about making the game about combat, but then can incentivize some ways that you play decks. Monastery Swift Spear is stronger if you're triggering prowess a lot. Tarmagoyf is stronger if you can more easily put more card types in your graveyard, but it is just a card that kind of gets there on stats and says, hey, maybe you should play more creatures in your red deck. This creature is pretty good. I see Tarmagoyf in Slick Shot Show Off. It's a creature that hits like a truck, costs two mana, gets stronger as you kind of build around it, doesn't require a ton of work to be pretty effective, and it interacts in the way, you know, it has the evasive mechanic, flying on Slick Shot show off, so blocking it's a little bit tougher, but it's still vulnerable to a lot of creature removal. It makes the games more about attacking, potentially blocking, and it opens up creature removal as just something that can be a huge part of the games. And that's that's a quiet aspect of why Tarmagoyphin games being about creatures is appealing to a broader range of players. There's that thing where new players don't have as much fun with counter spells as they do with Doomblades. They would rather have you destroy their creature, and the more the game becomes about creatures, the less you need counter spells to police the kind of combo-y stuff. When you get into even creature-based combos, at least your removal spells will still play. So making the game more about creatures that allows the interaction of creature removal to play in broader contexts. So I see strong creatures that incentivized playing creature removal. Yeah, I think about Tarmagoyf. That is really the card that got us here. When I look at prepared as a mechanic in Secrets of Strixhaven, you see all these cards that have references. They're literally casting iconic spells from the history of the game. But in order to get access to them, you have to put these creatures in your deck. These creatures will cast the spells. These cards are saying, hey, you can cast Ancestral Recall. But you know, even though I don't personally like that card as much, it's at least staple to a creature and saying, if you want it, you gotta play this creature. And that's gonna make your games at least a little bit more about attacking and blocking. You're playing with creatures, you have to play with creatures to play prepared cards. And yeah, prepared creatures are more like Moldrifter than they are like Tarmagoyf, but they are a mechanic that is trying to give you access to powerful spells, but are rooted in creatures, and in my mind, you cannot remove the impact of Tarmagoyf and the way that Tarmagoyf just made constructed competitive magic way more about creatures from the fact that you see more powerful creatures. And then this does relate to what I want to say about Tarmagoyf and how the card then goes on to influence my personal cube designs. And Emeritus of Ideation is actually a great jumping off point for that, because the whole thing about Cube is it's customizable. You can make magic into whatever game you want it to be through your own designs. Emeritus of Ideation is a card that I don't like because it's a little bit too much about the ancestor recall, not enough about the five mana five-five, entering prepared, just the rate here, having ward 2 so it's difficult to interact with. It's not necessarily capturing the magic of Tarmagoyf, even if I am making the claim that I see Tarmagoyf and its DNA. When it comes to my designs, this card is not doing enough to make the game about creatures. I like the other prepared design more, where they are more about controlling the creature. You have access to the spell, but the game is going to sensibly still be way more about combat, about attacking and blocking. And Parmagoyf highlighted for really the broad world of competitive constructed magic that attacking and blocking is just a really fun aspect of magic. And when it comes to my personal cube designs, I try to stay away from these creatures that are so much just about card advantage. I like a little bit of a peppering of them. You know, when you're paying five and six mana, some value is pretty important, otherwise, you're really trading down on the one and two mana removal spells. You gotta have some Doom Blades, maybe some source of plowshears. If you're going to have Tarmagoyf in your environment, you wanna have some ways to answer it outside of just having creatures, because again, there's just the one Tarmagoyf. There's some other creatures that have pretty good stats, but not everything is fully balanced in that regard. You gotta get some spells in the spread. But then when I look at creatures going up the curve, I still want there to be some semblance of the texture of combat mattering. I'm a huge fan of Grave Titan. That's a card that I just love having in the original recipe tubert, because it does generate value, but that value is just creatures on the battlefield. When Grave Titan enters or attacks, you make two two zombies. So that's about attacking and blocking. It's a lot of stats. If it gets to make an attack and it doesn't die, then you just have these four extra zombies. You're doing really well in terms of card advantage, but the game is still about creatures. You can still get reset by a Wrath of God. There's something very similar to what is happening with Parmagoyf there. Grave Titan may look way more like a classic control finisher than Parmagoyf, but it still has to care about creatures that can block it, it still has to care about interaction for creatures, it has to care about the fun stuff, the combat and the creatures mattering. And I'm not trying to say that creatures are the only way to play fun games of magic. I like combo stuff. I like playing control decks pretty well. Sometimes you want to play creatures as control, the games can be less dynamic in that space, and I think that I probably like Storm Combo more than most players. It's kind of one of the first decks in all of magic I ever became fascinated with. I saw an old Iggy pop combo list in a scry magazine, and I thought it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. But when it comes to sitting down with an opponent, you only have so much appetite for that kind of thing. Playing with a human being, the interaction, the back and forth that comes from creatures and creature combat, it's just something that's a lot more replayable. You can kind of do all day. The 10 situations that come up there are just more dynamic, more engaging for both players. That aspect of both players controlling Tarmagoyf, both players being able to make attacks and blocks, you're just way more playing the same game than you are with a lot of other game pieces that you can select in magic. So I've designed a lot of different cubes at this point in time. I currently maintain a lot of different cubes, and my focus overwhelmingly across so many different cube environments is I like grounding a lot of the gameplay in creatures for this reason, because of lessons that Parmagoyf taught myself and so many other magic players, because of the imprint of Tarmagoyf on magic's DNA today. And this is even an aspect of my designs for my old border cues, my pre-modern tubert. There are some colors that have way more spells than creatures, way more non-creature spells, that is, even in white, and some of that is just like I don't want a lot of crappy white creatures that aren't really playable. I do want the focus to be on the individually playable creatures. There were fewer of them back then, but that environment does highlight those that did exist in that space. Of course, Psychotog, kind of a standout in that regard, a card that feels kind of Tarmagoyfy, although it does play in a more specific range of decks. But then the life and times of Gerard Capuchin, to the extent that the creatures in that cube are much weaker, the emphasis on the creatures being what the games are about, that is informed by modern sensibilities. That is informed by many years of playing with Parmagoyf and cards that were inspired in the era of magic since Parmagoyf has existed. And the real beauty of Cube is that we get to build and play the environments that we want to build and play. We get to make magic our own. And maybe you don't see the appeal of creature combat that is so popular. You don't see the appeal of Tarmagoyf that I see. That's totally fine. There's a lot of different ways to make magic your own, there's a lot of different space to play that is not inspired in this way. But I really did want to take the opportunity on the podcast here to really kind of send the praise, give Tarmagoyf its flowers for a card that I see as so influential both to myself and just to magic more broadly, and talk about how I see Tarmagoyf as being so influential to all of my designs, how Tarmagoyf really allowed myself and so many other players to really appreciate that creatures are just really fun, and magic being more about creatures today than it ever has been, certainly than when the game first started. I give a lot of credit to Parmagoy for that development. And on that note, that is going to do it for my love letter to Tarmagoyf today. I know this is kind of a weird space to explore, so I appreciate everybody taking the time to listen today. My structure was maybe a little bit looser, a lot more stream of thought. I'm going to uh pull back the curtain a little bit for the purpose of today's podcast. I've literally just had the Scryfall page for Tarmagoyf open, and I've just been looking at the card Tarmagoyf and saying the things that come to mind. Granted, I have been thinking about Tarmagoy for a little while now. I knew I had the idea I wanted to do this show. I didn't just have the idea and then hit record. So I've been kind of thinking about what notes I wanted to hit, how I wanted to relay Tarmagoyf and how it impacts my designs and the broad world of Cube, the broader world of magic. But just for the purpose of the day, yeah, I've just been looking at Parmagoyf and singing its praises. So I hope that this individual card spotlight has been some combination of entertaining and informative. I know that this was something that I was really excited to record, so I hope that it came out well. And I do want to do more individual card spotlights in the future. There's only so many cards that can be as iconic and impactful as Tarmagoyf. So for other cards, the space is going to be a little bit different to explore. But kind of taking one card and talking about what it is, and then maybe talking about the shape of that card and how it matters more broadly is something that I do have, at least a short list of other cards that I do want to explore in this way. So hopefully people enjoyed this one. I'm gonna do more of these no matter what. So, you know, it'd be better if you enjoyed it. But anyway, that's gonna do it for me this week. So I appreciate you taking the time to listen for anything you do to support the podcast, liking, sharing, subscribing, reviewing, all that jazz. And I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.