#1393: Books, Part 1

So today, recently, when we were talking about the upcoming Marvel's Darkhold Destiny, we talked about the Darkhold, which is a book.

And we revealed that this was a new card type, a new artifact type, that we started last year.

and we went back and we turned all the books into books that were books, and we mentioned that Dark Old Destiny is going to be the first set that mechanically cares about books.

So anyway, there are currently 49 books in Magic, and I thought I would spend a podcast or two talking about the design of all those books.

So today is everything you ever wanted to know about various books.

So I'm going chronologically.

So the very first book was in alpha, JMD Tome, or JMD Tome, I guess, technically.

So it costs four generic mana.

Basically, it's four and tap, you can draw a card.

Interestingly, when it was printed in alpha, tap symbols, artifacts didn't have tap symbols.

It was called a monoartifact, and it said four colon, you may draw an extra card.

But the monoartifact means you can only activate it once, so it's kind of like it tapped.

But anyway, JMD Tome, if you're wondering what that tome is named after, it is named after a man named James Michael Davis, probably commonly known as Mike Davis.

Okay.

Who is Mike Davis? So if you know the story of Richard going to try to sell RoboRally at Wizards of the Coast, there's another person in the story beside Richard and Peter, and that is Mike Davis.

So Mike Davis was a good friend of Richard's.

He really liked RoboRally, and he thought it would make a great game.

So Richard said to him, well, if you could sell to somebody, I'll split the profits with you 50-50.

So Mike Davis was the one that got the interview set up with Peter that drag and not drag, but brought Richard with them to interview with Peter.

It was that conversation.

Turns out Roborelli was too expensive to make, you know, too many pieces.

And so Peter, Richard says to Peter, okay, what can you make? What kind of game can you make? And Peter says, well, we have access to a printer so we can do cards.

We have a relationship with some artists so we can do pictures.

So we can do pictures on cards.

And that later inspired the idea of a trading card game and magic and everything.