Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1066: Wilds of Eldraine Design
Episode Date: September 1, 2023In this podcast, I talk about the influence of Throne of Eldraine on the design of Wilds of Eldraine. ...
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I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition.
Okay, so I'm going to talk today about the design of Wilds of Eldraine.
Now, I've interviewed both Chris Mooney, who was the vision lead for the set, and Ian Duke, who was the set design lead for the set.
So listen to both of those interviews.
Duke, who was the set design lead for the set.
So listen to both of those interviews.
I'm going to talk a little bit more.
I'm going to give some more contextual in my storytelling today.
I want to talk a little bit about the making of Throne of Eldraine
and how it influenced
the making of Wilds of Eldraine.
So I'm going to try to give you a little more history
to some stuff.
Just to talk about some aspects that maybe
when I interview Chris or interview Ian doesn't come up. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the making of Throne of Eldraine
because it very much informs the making of Wild of Eldraine. So basically the story is
when Innistrad came out and was very successful, I realized the power of what I'll call
sort of top-down genre,
where your top-down design is based on a genre,
meaning a kind of story,
horror being, you know, Innistrad.
And the thing I realized was
that when you're doing genre top-down,
you're really playing into pop culture,
into movies, into books,
into, like like TV, all
sorts of different things that people are very familiar with.
And usually it's pretty meaty, you know.
It is allowing you to do something that the audience probably has a decent amount of familiarity
with.
One of the things we've learned about doing like mythology and stuff is, some
people have a lot of knowledge of
mythology, but other times
it's like, oh, there's not as much
the resonance
isn't quite as high. Now it depends
on where you're using and sometimes
certain elements have folded
into pop culture, so something like
Greek mythology has more recognizable things
than say like Egyptian mythology.
But the nice thing about doing genres
is there's just a lot
of recognize, the resonance is very
high. So after
Innistrad, I said, okay, what
other,
what are the, like, what's a genre
cluster that is just very,
that's very fantasy adjacent?
Obviously, we've gotten, you know, we've definitely, with time, have experimented pushing farther out.
But after Indusrub, I'm like, okay, what else can I do that is just something people know that is just square set in fantasy?
And fairy tales came up pretty quick.
So, and the fairy tales,
I'm talking about fairy tales.
I'm talking about sort of
Central European fairy tales,
like the Brothers Grimm.
Mostly, there's a lot of fairy tales
that come out of Germany and France and Italy.
And the idea was that,
like I remember I saw a stat at one point that said the average,
I believe it was an American, the average American, when they die, will have seen 10 movies with the plot of Cinderella.
That just 10 movies that are basically, I mean, a redress Cinderella, but Cinderella
essentially.
And so I was really excited by the idea of doing fairy tales.
So I kept pitching, let's do top-down fairy tales,
and I just couldn't get people on board.
I just couldn't get people.
I think there's this worry that fairy tales are more juvenile,
even though I really expressed
that the source material was not at all,
like, the source material was a little bit
on the creepier side.
If you go back and read actual Grimm,
you know, like, you know, in Cinderella,
like, the sifters, the step-sifters
are, like, cutting off pieces of their foot
to fit into the shoe,
and I believe after Cinderella gets found by the prince like the evil
stepmother was put in a barrel of nails and rolled down a hill like the the source material is very
adult it uh i think a lot of it has been redone in ways that are more kid friendly but it's not
as if the source material can't go more adult if we want or can't go more um the house how
juvenile the material is
is not based on the materials based on how you want to treat it anyway for years i tried uh to
do a fairy tale set did not have a lot of luck so um we every once in a while we'll do this thing
where different people in r&d can pitch set ideas. And in this particular one,
Sean Main pitched an idea for a Camelot-inspired,
Arthurian Legend-inspired world.
Everybody seemed really excited,
and it actually got onto the schedule, right?
One of the things that I was a little bit worried about was
Arthurian Legend is, while there's a lot to work with, schedule right um one of the things that i was a little bit worried about was um arthurian legend
is while there's a lot to work with uh the recognizability it doesn't go super deep like
if i list everything from arthurian legend and went out and see what people knew um you
you can get like 20 cards or something but it it, it, as far as recognizable things, it starts,
you, you, there's a point at which is, you know, you can do a lot of generic things, but like the,
the environment was cool and fine, but as far as resonance, it was low. So I saw an opportunity.
So I went to Aaron and I said, look, I just don't think there's enough, just, you know,
the resonance of Arthurian legend is only so
deep we can get but you know what would fit really well through Arthurian legend fairy tales like
fairy tales want a medieval setting they want castles and princes and princes and they want um
uh I just felt like a lot of ways that Arthurian legend kind of was English fairy tales. And I thought it was a good fit.
Aaron signed off on it,
and so I started making it.
Now, understand that
the set was sold on Arthurian Legend.
It was not sold on fairy tales.
And the fairy tales was the part
that I really wanted to be there.
But if you look at the original sort of Throne of Eldraine,
the fairy tales were actually a pretty small portion proportionally.
Like 75% of the set was mostly the Arthurian legend stuff.
Like we spent a lot of time on the courts and a lot of time on the knights.
And, you know, there was a lot going on that was very,
And a lot of time on the knights.
And, you know, there was a lot going on that was very, the world itself was much more built around Arthurian legend than it was fairy tales.
Now, I saw the opportunity for fairy tales.
I very much pushed to try to get as much fairy tale stuff in as we could. But a lot of the fairy tales was purely just me trying really hard to get fairy tales in.
But what started happening is
when we went to play tests,
there was an interesting phenomenon that would happen,
which was
the classic story.
I've told the story, but I will tell it one more time
because if you do not like hearing me tell
stories again, why are you listening to my podcast?
So we had a play
test, and we were having some people that had never played the set before.
And so someone – I don't remember actually who the person was, but they weren't on the team.
But they came to me.
They showed me their deck.
So they had drafted a knight-type deck, right, caring about knights, as smack dab in the center of our throne as you get.
And so they said to me – I said, what did you think of the set?
And they go, oh, the fairy tale stuff was so awesome.
I really enjoyed it all.
It was really neat.
And so I said to them, well, what did you think of the Arthurian stuff?
And they're like, what are you talking about?
And I'm like, well, you know, the Arthurian legends, the Camelot.
And they're like, yeah, I didn't notice that.
And then their deck, they were playing a knight's typo deck.
They were playing the most Arthurian theme that they could have possibly drafted.
And what I realized was that magic from the very beginning, from Alpha,
White Knight, Black Knight, like a lot of the tropes that come
with sort of what, what Arthurian
legend plays into,
which is a certain style of
high fantasy,
magic has done since the very beginning.
You know, the shard
of Alara,
not shard of Alara, the shard of Bant on Alara
was very much played into this.
Dominaria played into this.
There were just different worlds
where the idea of high fantasy
with courts and knights,
we had done.
So it wasn't that people didn't appreciate that.
And there were a lot of cool things.
The world was really cool.
The problem was it didn't read as something new.
It just read as magic as you know magic.
And so what happened was
when I was getting comments from the playtesters,
the fairy tales really much stood out
and the
Arthurian
legend was fine,
but it didn't stand out. It felt like, well,
it felt like normal magic.
So I remember going to talk to the head
of marketing
and saying to them,
look, my experience from the set is that the fairy
tales are what stand out.
You know, there's a lot, a lot of Arthurian stuff, but that is not the thing that's going
to draw people's attention.
Not because it's not cool.
It's just not new.
And so they went away and they took to heart what I said and they made the trailer with the gingerbread people, with Sir Ginger and stuff.
And at the time, there was a little bit of worry because the set had been sold on Arthurian Legend, right?
That was what the set was sold on.
That's what everybody said, yeah, let's do it.
And the trailer that we were doing for the set had gingerbread people in it.
Not exactly, you know.
But what ended up happening was the set came out.
They loved the trailer.
You know, the fairytale stuff, sort of what I had been saying came true was the fairytale stuff drew attention.
But the thing to stress is the majority of the set wasn't fairytale, even though it was a lot more fairytale than it had ever done.
So, I mean, even with only a quarter of the set being fairytale, that's a lot of fairytale.
It's 25% more than any other set had ever done.
So it felt very fairytale-ish.
But if you actually went back and looked at it, if you go on to Gather or something, just look at Throne of Eldraine,
gather or something, just look at Throne of Eldraine,
the actual percentage of the set that is fairy tales
is a lot smaller
than you might perceptually
believe it to be.
So,
the set did really well.
Everyone really loved the set. It did great.
So when we were talking about going back,
one of the things that we realized was
that
we knew we wanted to lean into fairy tales.
Like, that had been the defining quality of the set.
That didn't mean that our fairy stuff wouldn't be there.
It didn't mean we didn't care about that stuff.
We did.
But the idea was, well, let's go back
and let's really lean into the fairy tales.
That was kind of the start of Wilds of Eldraine.
And, you know,
as the person who was
the biggest
advocate to get the fairy tale set done,
the idea that we're finally going back there,
and four years later, I'm now given,
I should stress, one of
the big differences between now and
the past, like, previously, when we
went back to Ravnica, I think we waited,
was it seven years? Or the first time we went back to Ravnica, I think we waited, uh, was it seven
years? Or the first time we went back might have been six years, but anyway, that was back in the
era of the blocks, right? So, the idea was, you were on a world, so if you returned six years later,
seven years later, it was six or seven environments later, you know, worlds later. Now, hey, most sets
are set in a different world. So, four years later,
hey, we could have been to,
you know, I'm not sure how many, but
ten different worlds. We've been
to more worlds in between
the visits than we were back in the block
model. So, the ability to return
also, because there isn't a block,
because the first time we were on Eldraine, we were
only there for one set,
we sort of, there was a lot more left on the table
that we could come back to.
And so the dynamic of not having blocks
and being in more different worlds
and that you spent less time there
when you were there originally.
Like when we went back to Ravnica,
the first time we were in Ravnica,
it was three sets, a full block.
So we needed to wait a little bit longer.
Anyway, so the idea was we,
I think where it came about was
we had finished up the storyline of Merch of the Machine
and much in the same way of when we finished up War of the Spark,
Eldraine is just nice in that it's just very approachable,
very resonant.
It is a little lighter in tone.
And so for the same reason it just made a lot of sense
after War of the Spark, it made a lot of sense
after Merchant Machine of just, okay, we have a lot
going on, a lot of big, heavy things.
We just had a whole year of the
Frexians, which are a little on the
more serious side. It might be nice
to do a little lighter tone, and so that's
how we got back to Elwood Reign.
Now, when we, one of the things I like to do a little lighter tone and so that's how we got back to Elwood Rain. Now when we one of the
things I like to do on returns is returns are a really good place to let people sort of get their
first design lead. Building a brand new world is very complex and there's a lot going on and that
when you do a return there's plenty to do.. It's not, there's not a lot of work, but just some things have been figured out for you.
Some things are known.
In the case of Eldraine, we had some mechanics we knew people liked, you know, and, and we
had just some direction that you understood.
So I tagged Chris, Chris Mooney, just cause I felt they they A, had an affinity for
Eldraine
as Chris explained
if you haven't listened to my interview with Chris, go listen to it
but Chris explained how they had
played it when they had come for the
Great Designer Search 3, the finals
after it was all done, we let them
play with, we surprised them
and they got to play with a set they had never seen before
which was in early design.
Anyway, so Chris seemed the perfect person to lead the set.
And being their first set, being a return of something they were very passionate about, this made total sense.
So we sort of walked in.
We sort of walked in... When we first pitched the world,
worlds will get a name
that sort of gives a little sense of where we're going.
That name doesn't always stay.
Ironically, that name was Wilds of Eldraine
for this particular set, which did stay.
Normally, the name doesn't stay.
The name is just trying to say,
hey, trying to give you a vibe of what we're doing.
And the vibe here was,
let's lean into fairy tales.
Like I said, it is a really interesting experience to go back and look at the original Throne of Eldraine, because perceptually, it seems much more dense in fairy tales than it in
reality is.
So the idea early on was, okay, it was the aftermath of the war.
And one of the things that is nice about the Phyrexian War from a making set standpoint is it allows us to create change.
Like this big event happened.
Things happened at it.
And so the idea of we wanted to let's focus on the courts.
We're like, okay, well, the courts were the ones that defended.
They took the brunt of the attack.
And so, you know, we're now moving out more into the wilds and less in the courts.
The idea of doing the fairy tales as the archetypes, one of the things that's been going on for a while is the creative team has been trying to do more – like it's not that the – not every set is a faction set per se, right?
But the creative team has more trying to say, look, can we take the archetypes in the set and lean them creatively towards something?
That they're – the attitude is there's a lot of things we do when we do a
faction set that are very valuable and the creative team has said can we use some of the
tools from factioning in non-faction sets can you know that part of what you want is you want some
cohesion and part of the way to get cohesion, like, factions just bring cohesion.
Anyway, so the idea early on was,
what if we tie the fairy tales,
the archetypes to fairy tales?
And so we made a list of fairy tales that we were interested in possibly, you know,
like, some of the fairy tales just slotted right in.
Like, Hansel and Gretel, kind of like,
Black Green's just what it wanted to be. You know,
it's set in the forest, there's the witch's
core to it, it's about the witch
wanting to eat the kid. Like, there's a lot of,
it had a lot of black and green that's just
kind of baked into it, in a way.
And so what we found was, some fairy tales
just, like, told you what it was. I have
to be this. Some fairy tales
were flexible.
Like, Cinderella, we found, tales were flexible. Like, Cinderella we found
was somewhat flexible.
You know, whereas
like, Hansel and Gretel
kind of wanted to be black-green. And then,
some of the things we found was we knew there were themes
we wanted. Like, red-blue we
struggled with a little bit because we wanted
to have a spell-oriented theme. And a lot
of things we could pick as blue-red didn't feel
very spell-oriented.
Like, the Sorcerer's Apprentice is interesting.
That's one of the more, I mean, it is technically,
I mean, it is a fairy tale, but
it is
something where
if you made a list of ten fairy tales, that probably would not
be on the top of your list.
But it was just a slam dunk for what
we wanted to do. And so,
there was an interesting thing of we made it.
So basically what we did is we made a list of all the fairy tales we could think of, all the ten color pairs, and then said, okay, well, what fairy tales make sense in each of the color pairs?
We made a list of, okay, well, these are the ones that could be white-blue.
These are the ones that could be blue-black and such.
And what we found was that pretty early on we – there were some – maybe half of them had like perfect sync ups, right?
And then we had a couple,
the two troubled children we had
was white green and blue green.
And we tried a bunch of different things.
Blue green for a while,
I think it was Little Mermaid.
Oh, and Little Red Riding Hood,
we moved around a bunch
I like where it ended up in red green
but we had tried
it in a couple different places
I think
it was always green
although it also could
have been black green but we like black green for
Hansel and Gretel
so we did a lot of time in moving around
and once we handed off the file, the
fairy tales didn't change. The fairy tales stayed
the same. But
we spent a lot of time early on trying to
figure out where to put them and
some of them lent
themselves to having archetypes
and some of them was a little more unclear.
We handed off Jack and the Beanstalk, not quite
understanding where it was going to go.
We also handed off Little Red Riding Hood not going.
Those are the two that we really didn't know.
Like, we knew, you know, some of them we knew.
Like, for example, we got the idea of the rats, the Pied Piper Hamlin for Black Red.
And, okay, it's a swarming rat deck.
And, you know, it's a rat tribal and, you know, like, that's definitely we could think about how that work came together.
And, you know, like, that's definitely we could think about how that work came together.
And then the big thing that we, that had happened in Throne that we wanted to play up more so,
one of the things that I'd figured out when we were making Throne of Eldraine was how archetypal fairy tales are.
I know I'm using archetype to mean two different things here. But in fairy tales,
the same characters show up in multiple places.
The Big Bad Wolf is in multiple stories.
Prince Charming is in multiple stories.
That there are sort of archetypal roles that just show up.
And that one of the fun things that we found
when we were doing Throne of Eldraine
was that there was this neat mix and
match quality that happened.
Okay, okay, I can make a pumpkin carriage
and I can make Cinderella,
but it's kind of funny if Pinocchio
drives the carriage.
It's fun when you...
It's neat that you can make the stories play out
as the stories play out, and it's also fun that you, it's neat that you can make the stories play out as the stories play out.
And it's also fun that you can mix and match.
And the team really leaned into that of, okay, how can we, can we mechanically care about archetypes in some way?
And then we came up, that roles came out of that.
Roles came out of like, well, you have the princess and you have the
beast and you have, you know, you have these things that are just archetypal that show up.
Can we represent that? And we tried a whole bunch of different ways of doing it. In the end, the,
kind of the cleanest way was just doing a token, an aura token. We had tried, you know,
it's a state, or it's a... I don't know.
We tried all sorts of things.
But in the end, it's like,
oh, it's just a thing you are
that felt very enchantment-y.
The other thing we liked
as we sort of played around in space was
magic is really over-indexed
a little bit on artifact worlds.
It's very easy to use artifacts as a theme.
Artifacts represent technology and objects,
and it's very easy when you're doing a theme to go,
ooh, I guess that's artifacts.
Enchantments are a little trickier, but I mean,
enchantments are as much, you know, as core to magic as artifacts are,
in some ways more so, you know.
And so I think when we talked about the fairy tales,
the word enchantment and enchanted just felt so fairy tale-ish.
Now, original Throne of Eldraine had a little theme
that cared about having artifacts and enchantments.
So there's a little tiny bit there.
But when we get back, we really want to lean into it.
And so, making them auras, making them enchantments,
really started playing into that theme.
And the other thing is
as we moved away from the courts,
the courts had really played into this monocolor
theme, which had ended up being
one of the least popular elements
of the set. Not unpopular, but
if you ranked things. And so
pushing into the
wilds meant we could push away from the courts,
which meant we could push away from the monochrome theme
that hadn't gone over quite as well.
And that let us sort of play up the enchantment theme,
which is something that's a little bit newer.
And like I said, other than Theros,
we really don't have a lot of enchantment worlds.
I mean, Theros being the one example, one exception.
But R&D is looking for more places
to do more with enchantments.
I mean, not that we won't do stuff with artifacts. We will.
We like artifacts. But we're just trying to find more
opportunities for enchantments to matter.
It's just a key part of the game
and so we're looking for that opportunity.
We knew adventures
were going to come back. They were the most popular
thing from before.
Mostly what we did, it's not that we didn't
know they were returning. We assumed they were returning.
It was more a matter of figuring out
is there anything new we wanted to do
with them.
And then once we decided we were leaning into enchantments,
like, okay, well,
Battle for Baldur's Gate had done
adventures on artifacts.
We're like, okay, we can do adventures on enchantments.
The other low-hanging fruit, which
obviously the set ended up using, was
Off Color. The idea that, oh, well, your
adventure is not the same color.
And it's neat as
if you listen to the interview with Ian,
he talks about how we made sure
that the main card was the majority
of it so that, you know, it's nice to have
the spell, but it's not required to have the spell
so that you still could play them
in decks just to give them a little more
utility.
And then food
we knew was coming back.
I think we were a little more nervous
about food because food had played
out a little weird in the
limited last time. It kind of slowed games
down.
So I think we were a little bit more nervous about
it. Although, looking at the handoff document, we did tag Blackery and Hansel and Gretel archetype
as having a food component. And a lot of that, I guess, was leaning in on, I mean, like,
Play Design and Set Design spent a lot of time saying, okay, well, the key to making this work is
let's just give you other ways to use food that are aggressive,
and so in the right deck,
I'm more likely to use food to be aggressive rather than defensive,
and so it doesn't necessarily have to slow down games.
Bargain came about because we were trying to figure...
Once we had rolls,
one of the biggest problems about auras
is the card disadvantage built into auras,
meaning that if I have an aura and I play it on my creature
and then you destroy my creature, I lose two cards.
I lose the card that's the creature
and I lose the card that's the spell.
So I'm kind of setting up myself to be two-on-one,
which is card disadvantage.
But rolls were nice because the auras are not their own card,
that you already have a card that's producing the aura.
And if producing auras in a higher sort of as-fan,
then, like, it'd be very, very hard to get people
to put a lot of auras in their deck.
It's just you can't play that many.
But having permanents that generate auras
just meant that we could just make a lot more of them.
Once we knew that, there were just some
themes that we could never ever do.
Rolls really did this neat thing that said,
hey, I now have more enchantments
than I would ever normally have.
And we did
talk a little bit about, did we want to have enchantment
creatures?
But what we decided was
we want to sort of differentiate our world.
I'm not saying we won't ever have enchantment creatures
on a world that's not Theros. I think we will.
But being this was our
sort of second enchantment
theme set, we really
wanted to sort of not just be what
Theros is. And
Auras let us do the things we needed.
It got our As fan up in a way that we didn't
need the enchant creatures.
And so that was very nice.
And then Bargain came about because one of the things you do when you have sort of a lot of excess permanents is,
hey, how can I use those permanents as a resource to sacrifice?
It's just very useful.
And so, and then we ended up making it artifacts and enchantments so that you could sacrifice food as well.
Because we were always trying to give you other ways to sacrifice food.
Set design would later add you could sack tokens, but that was in set design.
Celebration was there, but not named.
I mean, I think really the thing we were handing over was the idea of emphasis on fairy tales, emphasis on enchantments.
Roles were really the heart of the set.
And then, you know, make use of these roles and then figure out what the roles let you do.
And the roles really enabled some play that was not sort of typical play, which was fine.
We handed over ten roles, I think.
I believe it was 10 if you go look on my
I put up an article
a two part article which is
the vision design handoff document
that Chris Mooney wrote and then I
annotate it and talk about sort of what we did
as it's
normal in vision design
our goal is to give you more than the set design needs.
What we're trying to do is saying,
here's the structure we want,
and then here are different tools playing into that.
So we had auras that granted tap abilities.
We had auras that went on artifacts
and turned them into creatures.
We had a lot of things that did
sort of different kinds of things.
Also, we were playing around with
a more wide variety of strength of them.
When set design got their hands on them,
they ended up having to make them,
in order to work,
they needed to be of a similar power level.
And so that changed the nature
of sort of what they could be.
Also, to avoid complication,
they simplified them a bit
just so that it was easier
to track what was going on. I think the more you have, the more auras you have and the more
different each aura is, the harder it is to understand what's going on. So as normally the
case, vision design is going to go broad, trying to make a lot of tools, and then set design will fine-tune what tools are the most useful to them.
And anyway, I'm happy with how it all turned out.
Chris and Ian and all the teams, everyone did a great job.
I think it's fun.
The archetypes being the fairy tales worked out quite well.
I think the creative team really did a great job of sort of having that come through. Oh, another
important thing is we did some market
testing. So basically
before a set will go out,
we will do some testing to see
what people want, sort of get a gauge.
And so
one of the notes we got about Eldraine
was the audience was
happiest when we did Magic's take on the fairy tales, meaning they didn't want us to just repeat them as you know them.
Here's just the story.
They liked when they were sort of Magic's take on them.
Like one of the real popular cards from Throne of Eldraine was the Goldilocks, where she was a bear hunter.
And the idea of, oh, that's a fun take on Goldilocks.
She hunts bears, right?
And so we spent a lot of time, the Crave team spent a lot of time really coming up with
sort of, hey, it's the essence of what you know, you know.
And the cool thing about fairy tales is that, like I said, the average American will see
Cinderella 10 times.
It's not exactly Cinderella.
It's not, all of them aren't set in, you know,
in a fantasy setting.
A lot of them are modern day,
or a lot of them, you know, like, one of the fun things about fairy
tales is they're very adaptable. Because they're
so well known, because the structure
is so familiar,
you really can stretch and bend
kind of
how Shakespearean plays. There's lots of ways to
do them, because, hey, people
know Romeo and Juliet, so you really can sort of stretch
on it. I think fairy tales
are very much like that. So we had a lot of fun.
You know,
the major story of the set really
was intertwined
with elements of different fairy tales, like
the Hidden Slumber,
not Hidden Slumber, the...
There's a spell that put everybody to sleep,
I'm blanking on the name,
and that's very much
based on the spell
from Sleeping Beauty,
and so,
anyway,
there are a lot of
fun components
where we took our version
and our spin
and our characters,
but made a lot of nods
to what people know,
and so,
I think that's a lot of fun.
Also,
just for all the
Arthurian fans out there,
we did go back and look for some spots.
It turns out that Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone
are not the same thing from a writing standpoint.
That's weird to me.
They're not the same thing, but they're not.
They're different.
So we had done Excalibur.
So this time we did our version of Sword in the Stone.
We finally got to do the Green Knight.
We tried to do the Green Knight last time
and ended up cutting him, but
the Arthurian fans were like,
where's the Green Knight? So we got the Green Knight this time.
And so,
you know, the set
does, like I said, we just inverted
the percentages. So
last time, 75% of the set,
let's say, was Arthurian. This time it's like
25%. It's still there. Less focus, and the courts are less of the, what the set is about.
So the, the monochrome theme that was very much in the courts is not there as much.
Um, but anyway, I'm, I'm very happy with how it came out.
There's a lot of cool things.
Um, and the other thing that's fun for me is I feel that
Throne of Eldraine was
more of an execution of what I'd wanted
than anything we'd done before.
But Wilds of Eldraine, like,
my idea of doing a fairytale set where the front
and center, it's a fairytale set,
Throne of Eldraine
was not quite that, actually, and Wilds is.
So, in some ways,
the set I always imagined, the set I pitched,
Wilds of Eldraine is more like that
than I think Throne of Eldraine was.
The fairy tales are more front and center,
and they're more structural
in what they, you know, like, the fairy tales
in Throne of Eldraine are more
the added flavor, you know,
the one of designs,
where in Wilds of Eldraine, the fairy tales
are core to the structural design of the set.
It's an enchantment set
because fairy tales make sense with enchantments.
And, you know, roles come out of the archetypes of fairy tales.
Like, the actual design of the set,
the core structure,
is let's bring fairy tales to life structurally,
where in Throne of Eldraine,
we brought the courts to life.
You know what I'm saying?
That was our Thorean structure with, you know,
so the way I used to describe it was,
the cake is our Thorean,
but the icing is the fairy tales.
And this time through,
I think much more the cake is fairy tales itself.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this.
I was trying to just give you a podcast
that sort of covers slightly different space.
If you've not listened,
I have an interview with Chris
talking about vision design.
I have an interview with Ian
talking about set design.
Listen to both of those.
Lots of good stuff.
So this was meant to supplement those
because I recorded this
after I recorded both of those.
So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed
hearing about this.
It's a lot of fun to see the set out,
and I hope you guys have a joy playing it.
But I can see my desk.
So we all know what that means.
That means it's the end of my drive to work.
So instead of talking magic,
it's time for me to be making magic.
I'll see you guys next time.
Bye-bye.