I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to other drive to work.

Coronavirus edition. Okay, so today's podcast was inspired by some talk online, a term I use in magic design called parasitism.

So it has a very specific meaning when I talk about it, and I think a lot of people have been misusing it, and there's been a lot of discussion on my blog and other places about what exactly it means.

So I thought I would do a whole podcast explaining what it means, and then I'm going to go through a lot of mechanics in standard to sort of talk about are they or aren't they parasitic and why.

Okay, so first let me define parasitism.

So paracetism is basically the opposite of backward compatibility.

Basically, it says, how much does the things in this set need other things in this set?

Like, how much can this be played with existing magic versus only played with itself?

Sort of the classic parasitic mechanic was from Champions of Kamagawa,

splice onto arcane.

So the idea was they were cards that had a cost that you can cast them normally,

but if you use the splice into

if you cast a spell that had the subtype arcane, you could pay this cost to sort of staple

it onto the spell. The effect would go off, but the card would stay in your hand. Now the problem

with splice into arcane was you could only splice onto a spell that was a subtype arcane.

But the only subtype arcane cards that existed were in Kamagawa as well.

Champions of Kamagawa, the block.

So the idea there is, if I have a, if I open up a single splice onto a arcane spell,

and I have no other cards from the set, I can't, I can't maximize the utility of the spell. Part of paracitism says you can't play the card and maximize its functionality without having other cards from the same set.

Now, I do want to stress that parasitism is a scale in the sense that, or it's a spectrum, you know, that it's, it's not as if something

is either parasitic or not. Things can be kind of parasitic or very parasitic or not

parasitic. So part of me walking through standard A is going to talk about that. The reason I use

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