Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1066: Wilds of Eldraine Design

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

In this podcast, I talk about the influence of Throne of Eldraine on the design of Wilds of Eldraine. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
Starting point is 00:00:30 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
Starting point is 00:00:56 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,
Starting point is 00:01:22 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
Starting point is 00:01:47 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
Starting point is 00:02:04 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
Starting point is 00:02:21 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
Starting point is 00:02:48 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
Starting point is 00:03:21 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,
Starting point is 00:03:47 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
Starting point is 00:04:06 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,
Starting point is 00:04:51 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,
Starting point is 00:05:25 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,
Starting point is 00:06:09 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.
Starting point is 00:06:33 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
Starting point is 00:07:08 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
Starting point is 00:07:24 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.
Starting point is 00:07:51 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,
Starting point is 00:08:18 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,
Starting point is 00:08:37 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.
Starting point is 00:08:53 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
Starting point is 00:09:09 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
Starting point is 00:09:29 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.
Starting point is 00:10:01 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.
Starting point is 00:10:33 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.
Starting point is 00:10:53 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.
Starting point is 00:11:11 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
Starting point is 00:11:27 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,
Starting point is 00:11:44 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
Starting point is 00:12:11 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.
Starting point is 00:12:29 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.
Starting point is 00:12:45 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
Starting point is 00:13:08 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.
Starting point is 00:13:24 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
Starting point is 00:14:06 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
Starting point is 00:14:21 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.
Starting point is 00:14:50 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.
Starting point is 00:15:11 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.
Starting point is 00:15:45 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.
Starting point is 00:16:47 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
Starting point is 00:17:08 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.
Starting point is 00:17:24 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
Starting point is 00:17:39 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
Starting point is 00:17:55 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.
Starting point is 00:18:18 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,
Starting point is 00:18:44 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
Starting point is 00:18:59 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
Starting point is 00:19:16 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.
Starting point is 00:19:36 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.
Starting point is 00:20:16 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,
Starting point is 00:20:36 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.
Starting point is 00:21:01 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
Starting point is 00:21:33 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,
Starting point is 00:21:51 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.
Starting point is 00:22:16 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
Starting point is 00:22:36 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,
Starting point is 00:22:52 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
Starting point is 00:23:10 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.
Starting point is 00:23:28 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.
Starting point is 00:23:44 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
Starting point is 00:24:00 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
Starting point is 00:24:16 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
Starting point is 00:24:45 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,
Starting point is 00:25:11 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.
Starting point is 00:25:32 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.
Starting point is 00:25:50 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.
Starting point is 00:26:06 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.
Starting point is 00:26:22 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.
Starting point is 00:26:49 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
Starting point is 00:27:28 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.
Starting point is 00:27:47 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.
Starting point is 00:28:05 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.
Starting point is 00:28:20 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.
Starting point is 00:28:58 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.
Starting point is 00:29:19 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.
Starting point is 00:29:45 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.
Starting point is 00:30:08 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
Starting point is 00:30:24 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
Starting point is 00:30:39 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,
Starting point is 00:30:52 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,
Starting point is 00:30:59 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.
Starting point is 00:31:16 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
Starting point is 00:31:27 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
Starting point is 00:31:43 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.
Starting point is 00:32:12 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
Starting point is 00:32:28 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
Starting point is 00:32:44 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,
Starting point is 00:33:04 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.
Starting point is 00:33:22 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.
Starting point is 00:33:33 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,
Starting point is 00:33:48 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.

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