Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1126: Outlaws of Thunder Junction Set Design with Dave Humpherys

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Dave Humpherys, set design lead for Outlaws of Thunder Junction, to talk about the set design of the latest expansion.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have Dave Humphries with me, who is the lead set designer of Outlaws of Thunder Junction. So hey, Dave. Howdy. Okay, so I already did a podcast where I talked through the vision design, which you should go listen to if you haven't yet. This is going to assume you've already heard that. Okay, so what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about where we handed things off from vision to set, and then talk about the challenges of

making that in set design, okay? Yep. Okay, so let's start with committing crimes. So let me tell the audience where we started, what we handed off. So what we handed off to you was whenever you target, deal damage, or destroy one of your opponent or one of their things, that's committing a crime. And obviously the printed version

just does targeting. It doesn't do damage or destruction. We want to talk a little bit, I talked a little bit about why we didn't do destruction in my Vision podcast, but what were the challenges of trying to make a broader version of crimes? Yeah, I think a lot of it came down to rules stuff.

I'm fuzzy on some of the details, but for example, like caring about destroying stuff, I think there's some murkiness on whether like you destroy things or like kind of the rules of magic clean up and destroy things and it gets it was murky in enough cases that um we were looking for something simpler um again like i i'm sympathetic to like oh why you know why aren't sweepers like crimes they really feel like crimes um but yeah it just like we kept finding exceptions to the rules and things that were kind of murky and targeting was like the thing that i felt like we could really

felt like a crime and it was something we could pretty clearly and cleanly distinguish right you find your cards with the word target i guess one notable exception is like auras don't have the word target but like if you put pacifism on your opponent's creature there's a hidden targeting going on but for the most part like if your card says target and you do it on your opponent's stuff no matter where it is um like asterix if you target something in exile that's not a crime but that's really like almost no cards even do that um so yeah in general you have a card with target it targets your opponent's stuff. You've committed a crime. One thing I didn't bring up, but I did some research before today. I was looking back at the handoff document.

So that was one of the problems with the destroy. Here's the core problem with damage. Let's say I have a lightning bolt, and I bolt my opponent's creature. How many crimes have I committed? Right, yeah. There's also, yeah, because you're targeting it and you're damaging it. So like, there are actually multiple instances of a crime going on and yeah, that,

that rings a bell and was also a thing. I like also, I just felt like, right. A lot of this is about a lot of times when we make a new mechanic, it's just kind of exciting to like, you know, you can go into your search engine and like search for a word cards with the word target. Like even right. Frankly, we'll get to it. But like the bonus sheet for, of exciting to like, you know, you can go into your search engine and like search for cards with the word target.

Like even, frankly, we'll get to it. But like the bonus sheet for this was like kind of part of my fun. I built pretty much the whole bonus sheet, I think. And yeah, it was just fun to look through like, yeah, what cards target, what cards don't. And it's just a new way to like reevaluate cards based on some new characteristic. Well, since we're there, let's just jump into that real quick. So the bonus sheet, we have one per pack. All the cards are crimes.

Like, I know we always look for a theme for bonus sheets, and you seem very into the idea of, well, what if they're all crimes? That seemed very cool. Yeah, people were quickly latching on to crimes. Crimes really captures the vibe of, like, a lot of what we're going for here. Right. Like we want, we want villains to be cool.

We want to be pointed up. We want to encourage you to kind of get into the spirit and like committing a crime is just a catchy phrase that people latched onto. And it felt like right. Bonus sheets. A lot of times we're like, Oh, it's all legends or it's all enchantments or it's all lands or what?

Like it was really fun to do this is it like i think a first one where it was like tied into something like that wasn't just like a card type or something right that it was right we're going to take this as a very flavorful element of the set and look for cards that do that and and taking it to another level i will like one thing that probably isn't obvious in anything that i've talked about with other people is just like internally a lot of people know this, but like it was really important to choose words that sounded like they could be villainous or whatnot. Like it's not first. First of all, I wanted like almost everything on the crime sheet to like be that the main use of the card was to target your opponent stuff, right? Like I didn't want to have like giant growth on the crime sheet. Giant growth can be a crime, but that's not the main use of the card was to target your opponent's stuff, right? Like I didn't want to have like giant growth on the crime sheet.

Giant growth can be a crime, but that's not the main use of the card. So I wanted the cards to mostly, the main purpose of the card is usually targeting your opponent or other stuff. So that was a criteria, but I also wanted words that were evocative of villains and whatnot. Like I know like Aaron Forsythe also pushed on this a lot where like, right? Like we included murder on the bonus bonus sheet just because like you know like what are some words you'd expect here the most like murder is like kind of the like perfect like yeah a perfect example of like what you'd expect to be on that and so i shied away from cards that were

like targeted your opponent's stuff but didn't have like kind of a villainous name. So that was a major filter by which I was doing things. Yeah, and it's nice. I mean, one of the challenges of bonus sheets has always been finding a clean theme. And we were doing all the low-hanging fruit. It's kind of nice to try something a little bit different. This plays into the theme of the set and a mechanic of the set.

So I liked how that worked. And there were fun ones like Crime and Punishment was like the other really fun one. Like I know like Aaron Forsythe, again, fought a lot for that one in terms of like that was a pretty big ask for, right? Like in terms of the frame needs and the like, yeah, doing special frames

for like kind of just one card like that. But he went to that there. And then there's some other goofy ones. Like my, like one of my pet ones like that um but he went to about there and then there's some other goofy ones like my like one of my pet ones is what outlaws merriment i think if i have the name right or it just seems so goofy like it technically rarely commits a crime but like you can get a rogue which is conveniently an outlaw and then that can ping them and that's a crime and but the name of outlaws merriment was too charming to to pass up on you so let's talk a little bit about the challenges of we have crimes okay once we decide it's just targeting um what are the challenges of putting this at what are the what what do you have

to build around to make that work yeah there's a lot potentially to unpack here I mean there's some stuff like just analyzing like we have some cards historically in Magic that are potentially problematic just cards with like we've almost all of them have actually been errated to be worded this way in Oracle but like zero colon target

something whatever there are a few cards in Magic's past that do that we knew that that could be an obstacle it's hard to guess exactly how much those would have mattered in like eternal formats which is mostly where they existed um at some point like i kept gravitating more and more towards like like mostly we want you to commit a crime once a turn i don't really we didn't really want to incentivize you to like all right i'm going to try to do three crimes in a turn and then have to all the balance all the cards with weaker outputs because like

you could do that so we we mostly settled on we're gonna like only reward you once a turn i mean that could be on my turn and you know player b's turn and player c's turn and multiplayer or whatever so like you can get them multiple times per cycle but only kind of like rewards for once a turn for doing stuff and then we could give you bigger rewards for doing the crimes rather than worrying about multiple crimes um so that was one thing the other thing is just in terms of right like so i mean crime one thing i love about crimes is they're asking for interactive gameplay um a lot of gameplay can be interactive a lot of formats are interactive a lot of formats though like we'll certainly hear from players that like it's two two ships passing in the night or whatever

that like people are just doing their own thing and ignoring their opponent and that's often seen as a negative thing um right whereas right sort of in many ways by its nature targeting your opponent and their stuff means you're playing more interactive games. I've also seen lots of plenty of jokes about commander. You know, encouraging more stuff that people may be like, it would be with the game would be more fun if they do that more. So like encouraging interaction sounds great. Like that's a,

that's a great starting point I think for being excited about the mechanic as a designer. Right. Then beyond that, there is, there is some trickiness in like limited i was a little bit worried because and limited a lot of the non-creature let's say a lot of the non-creature cards you play like are removal cards and those already like target and like i don't need to

reward you for playing your creature kill right like that's that is not if anything i'd probably rather reward people for playing combat tricks and auras and weird build arounds and that might not have the word target so my biggest concern was probably unlimited where we'd maybe be rewarding you too much for things that already are over rewarded for doing um and having that in mind as i worked through the set like every play test feedback i asked like you know were you playing cards that like didn't like target your opponent's stuff and like did that feel good and are those strong enough and were those fun yeah the other thing i know is um being a little more conscious about like things on creatures activated abilities triggered abilities when you attack and stuff so that yeah we yeah yeah so yeah we have a lot of creatures that like

yeah how much how easy was it for you to do like repetitive crimes um we we allowed for some fair amount of that like there's like a common one r one three that it's one tap to do you know pin your opponent which is creating a crime, which I think it is, it does highlight it kind of where we ended up, where, like, I didn't, I think that card at some point maybe let you just tap and do it without a mana requirement. I think it is, I think it's important that you don't just, like, completely get to do it for free every turn,

that there's some decision and cost involved. But we were pretty liberal with letting you have some ways to do it for free every turn that there's some some decision and cost involved but we were pretty liberal with letting you have some ways to do it relatively easily um and this includes even like one of the one of the fun parts i think about this is that the deserts also do it like the deserts are the dual land not all the deserts but the the dual land deserts like all um yeah ping ping ping and committed crime which is, but something people really responded to well. The other thing I know was an issue is, and this is true for a lot of mechanics, but it's very true for crime. The color pie, it doesn't break very evenly.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, the green does not commit many crimes on cards you're used to playing. It was even hard on the bonus sheet because there are not a lot of examples, especially with like current color pie. Like there are some bends and stuff, but greens mostly, yeah, more about making your own stuff cooler and better. And yeah, like again, giant gross and rampant gross and lands and yeah like it's green doesn't commit a lot of crimes so that i mean that also ends up how we like divided up the color pairs and what they're all about right like they're like we we have plenty of green cards that want you to commit crimes and reward you for that but like right the the crime the main crime color

pair is in blue black probably the secondary one would be like red, black. And again, again, like red, blue also works. But yeah, like green and white. I mean, white at least has like pacifisms and like kind of exiling creatures and artifacts. But yeah, green, green, a lot of their stuff is like unless it's a naturalized. It's hard to find some of the examples. Their fight fight cards were another pretty easy one. Yeah. Black is the opposite. is like unless it's a naturalized it's hard to find some of the examples they're they're fight fight cards were another pretty easy one yeah and black is the opposite black like black is

dripping with crime it's not hard to do crimes right right even even they're like yeah mind rots and yeah there's there's lots of secondary stuff okay so let's move on to another mechanic um this is a mechanic that you and I both publicly said might be our favorite mechanic in the set. Plot. So just to remind the audience, plot are the spells.

You can pay the plot cost, you exile it, and then you get to play it for free, but at sorcery speed on a future turn. So plot I know was, I mean,

what we handed over basically was that, but there was a lot of, the nuance of making it work is very challenging. Yeah. It's, it's like one of the tricky things about plot is kind of getting people to understand why they're excited about it, which like, again, I can, I can do now hopefully, but yeah, like it's, it's, it's pretty subtle.

It's, it's very, again, Johnny Jenny or even spiky in some ways. It's not, not so much Timmy Tammy. Um, but yeah, it's just really cool it was really cool to design cards for it's just like it lets you spend your mana efficiently in many ways right like i just i can run through examples right like you you have an aura for a creature but you haven't drawn a creature you know your opponents killed all your creatures you can spend mana on your aura and then it's you've just been more mana efficient and can play it later you can right there are cards like we each draw some cards um like people shy away from those cards sometimes because your opponent gets to use them first but if like we let you cast it for free then

you can use the cards for sure there there are just a ton of subtle things like that and then just more like kind of it's just an easy straightforward tool like right if if you cast this creature you know if it was plotted put two counters on it if you when you plot this creature do two damage to something like so like just it had so many possibilities and it was like a lot of fun to work with and i haven't even talked about like the main excitement thing i think which is just like right that we're letting you set up big turns right like you know this is this is not like full-blown storm or whatever certainly can feed into some storm like stuff but it's like right you you can it's not like combo in the sense of like i assemble pieces and get an infinite combo but you can combo pieces parts

together more easily like you can right even with the ore example you can like play it and quickly get an ore on it before your opponent untaps or whatever or you know they're just you can right even with the or example you can like play it and quickly get an or on it before your opponent untaps or whatever or you know they're just you can string together effects more easily like you if you have a card that rewards you for doing stuff um i guess terror of the peaks is another notable reprint in the set right it's like right you play you could play terror of the peaks and have a whole bunch of cards plotted and then play all those cards and like get huge bonuses off of it where otherwise that would be hard because you might play the Terror of Peaks

and your opponent just kills it. It's really easy to string together sequences of things. Let me just tell the audience what Terror of the Peaks is because not everyone knows. Terror of the Peaks, 3 red red, 5-4 dragon as a creature, flying, spells your opponent, casts that target

Terror of the Peaks, costs an additional 3 life to cast. Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under casts that target terror of the peaks costs an additional three life to cast whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control terror of the peaks deals damage equal to that creature's power to any target right so yeah you get like a lot of our plot cards are on creatures so you can have like even in limited i have done this where i like plotted three creatures and my opponent's wondering why i haven't played all these cards and right like so right again that's that's this thing that's hard to latch on to it's like well why don't like especially if you like a really aggro deck or something that's like don't i just want the creatures on the battlefield where i can attack and block and like yeah and in some cases that's

true and we we have like i said design cards where like right oh you get a you know they get bigger if you plotted them and things like that to appeal more to that sort of audience. But yeah, just like you can, yeah, you can sequence things together. You can spend your mana efficiently. It lets us make some, you know, another really simple effect is like our red rummaging card, like discard a card to draw two cards. Well, like a lot of times you don't have a card you want to pitch. So you can, you can just set it up. I'm going to spend two mana.

And then like when I actually have like, oh, now I'm mana flooded or now I have like a card do you want to pitch so you can you can just set it up i'm going to spend two mana and then like when i actually have like oh now i'm mana flooded or now i have like a dead whatever card i can you know i draw draw my one drop late it's it's just there and ready to use um so yeah i yeah i i just think it's been a ton of fun i feel like i'm still like not even covering all like the kind of the cool fun cases um i guess the other thing is just cards are free right i've sort of implied that in what i'm talking about but just having your cards be free later on is like super powerful um and leads to some of the flexibility i'm talking about and then i guess yeah just quickly the the one thing i think we mainly changed is that we said like i think plot exists only on cards that you'd normally

play it like sorcery speed creatures and sorceries um could be wrong on that but we we we latched onto it more on like let's explore other ways we can still keep using plot like like cards like flibble thip that lets you plot other cards it's like a combination of future sight and plotting those cards and as we made more cards that let you plot cards that didn't naturally have plot we wanted to make sure that people weren't like plotting counter spells and holding up free counter spells all game or something like that so that's you know it's pretty subtle right like if you have the understanding that all the cards were originally at sorcery speed saying you have to do them all at sorcery

speed maybe doesn't seem like a feel bad it was just more like that was kind of a safety measure for us that like free free frustrating cards didn't linger around and and which reminds me that like the other thing with plot is we just we had to be a little bit sparing on removal right you don't you don't want to like have a faceup Wrath of God or a face-up Terror sitting around all game. So we needed to design in ways that it wouldn't be frustrating to just stare at a removal card or something where it's like, what am I supposed to do?

Yeah, the other thing that I let you guys do is because the plot exists, it allowed you to build some themes into the set. There are definitely themes built into archetypes that plot enables. Like, for example, you have some second card stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. So Blue Red's Killer Pear theme is about casting two spells in a turn, which, yeah, this definitely helps set up, right?

Yeah, you plot on one turn, and then the next turn you cast two spells, and it's, again, a quick little combo. Like, yeah, if you've, right, there's, like, a blue common that when it enters, if you've cast two spells this turn, you draw a card. So, yeah, like, and quick little combo. Like, yeah, if you've, right, there's like a blue common that when it enters, if you've cast two spells this turn, you draw a card. So, yeah, like, and it has plot. So, yeah, that is a theme that, like, we don't do a ton, but, like, I think, I guess, yeah, I've done it in the past with some sort of vaguely similar mechanics where, yeah,

this is really to be one of the easiest ones where, yeah, like, it's pretty easy to cast two spells if one of them's free. And related, I should touch on, then on then white blue is also in the space where white blue killer pair is uh getting rewards if you haven't cast a spell from your hand on your turn so yeah if you plot the card you haven't cast a spell from your hand if you have plotted the card when you cast it later you haven't cast a spell from your hand and then it lets us all all we also then tied into like doing a little bit more flash like flash creatures and instance and um it's potentially a little bit risky mechanic but trying to like do stuff off turn more um but yeah between plot and flash and instance you can kind of like yeah you can you can still easily accomplish like i didn't cast a spell on my turn.

Okay, let's move on to our next mechanic. A few more mechanics to discuss. So the next villain mechanic is called Spree. I think we called it Mission in Vision Design. So the idea of this set is it's a modal mechanic, but you get to pay for each mode. Or you have to pay for each mode, me where you have to pay for each mode um which lets us do modes of different power level which is a let's talk a little bit about why from a set design that's so important or flexible yeah it's yeah it's it's it does make the mechanic a

lot different i like certainly a lot of people i think will look at and it's like how is this really different than like split cards or how is this different from entwine um right so you touched on the one like an entwine like right you're in a spot where like both of the effects kind of need to be at the same power level um whereas on this yeah we can we can have like wildly different power levels because we can give each of them a specific cost which again is more like split cards except right we we have a lot of cards now that have three modes. And, yeah, it's just a fun mixing and matching. And the fact that we, but we're putting a shared cost in, right? There's a shared cost in the upper right corner.

And that gives us a lot more flexibility than on rates. Like, you know, like, I don't know, coming up with this example on the spots maybe a little bit hard but right like if you if you have like three lightning bolts like the cost of that's not necessarily just like rrr right like that's not do nine like it just having that cost separated out lets us more kind of refine and give you like a reasonable cost for all parts of the card um and the sum of the cards, we just, yeah, play design and the designers themselves have just more flexibility on making any of the possibilities a more appealing cost.

And one of the things that I know is nice is play design is always very conscious of what we call knobs, right? Which is how many things do they have to adjust? And I, it's possible Spree has more knobs than any other thing we've ever made in the history. It's just super, super knobby.

Yeah, it's pretty fun. Again, with the caveat that we're also of mind that we're getting wordy on cards and some of our cards are complex and it's probably easy to poke fun at us on these cards. These cards, again, were a lot of fun to design, like combining effects, right?

Like the first and third mode together, the second and third mode, the first and second mode together. These were pretty much a treat to design. I love designing these cards, like just mixing and matching things, and magic's very fun, even to the extent, right?

I worked on the you know introduction of sagas there's there's some similarities there of just like combining things on cards right these are combined in much different ways but i felt a lot of the similar fun in designing these cards um and yeah i'm excited to you know it's the kicker of kickers as i said in one of the yeah it's like we, we know you like kicker. This is, we're not hiding this one. We have more kicker for you. Okay, let's continue on. The one last sort of villain thing

is we batched some creature types in Outlaw. So we handed over to you, I think they had four of the five. So we handed over assassin and rogue and mercenary and warlock is what we handed over. So we'll talk a little bit about adding pirate and then just what Outlaws did for the set. Yeah. I mean, well, you know, pirate, I mean, pirate,

in some ways this almost speaks to persistence of certain individuals in the building, but like, I feel like somebody kept like, come on, you got to have pirates. Pirates are like the quintessential like outlaw or whatever like how can pirates not be here and i brushed it off a couple times and it's like well you know i mean like you have a point especially like and we're coming off of lost caverns of ixalan they're gonna be a lot of pirates there like i talked with like the world building lead at the time i think grace um fong and like it's like we're not really planning to do a lot of pirates here but we can do a couple

of them um and yeah it just it just felt like a really good fit i mean more generally speaking i wanted to make sure that we were covering colors and covering right like i liked warlocks i mean like i didn't add warlocks but i liked warlocks because it's sort of like oh it's giving you kind of the spellcaster space and right just that we're getting coverage's sort of like oh it's giving you kind of the spellcaster space and right just that we're getting coverage of kind of like classes of characters and colors of characters and pirates did help round that out some um but yeah i think a lot of it was just um i i didn't get many other like nobody else was like come on you gotta like include this other group um so it seemed like people were pretty

happy with that list of five in the handoff document which i'll i'll it'll go up eventually online uh i list all the backups like when we hand it over though here's the ones we considered and pirate was in that list of like here are other ones you could consider right like i think warlock i mean warlock has a kind of a bit of an association i think with strict saving and like again there was something like uh like well warlocks yeah do they really need to be there but yeah i mean it seemed like the best spellcaster kind of choice um yeah and then in terms of the set right it's uh i don't know like i mean a lot of the batching is more for right constructed i guess or whatever and being backwards compatible and you can like make a deck full of all these disparate creatures and see what fun you can have there i mean and limited and limited it was pretty cool

just in terms of right like it's it's something to care about you don't have to care about a ton of different things like i've and on a lot of the sets i've worked on i've kind of had like one main typal thing to care about like even mentioned dominaria again right it was wizards was really like it was kind of wizards was the thing you care about you didn't have to care about like even mentioned dominaria again right it was wizards was really like it was kind of wizards was the thing you care about you didn't have to care about a lot of stuff like in many ways this gets more complicated because you're like you need to you need to internalize what these five types are and memorize them at some point but like it's still only kind of one thing you need to care about like it's like oh it's an outlaw or it's not um and that that's sort of a fun thing like oh yeah like you're definitely

going to get into draft situations where it's like oh i really yeah i really want to take an outlaw because i have like there's a you know there's a card that effectively has affinity for outlaws and there are a bunch of like higher rarity cards that are like yeah really reward you heavily for outlaws well we're speaking outlaws one real quick thing um we added a new token in this set called the Mercenary Token, which is a 1-1 that taps to do plus 1, plus 0 as a sorcery. And can they block? I'm not sure.

They can block, yeah. Okay. I think we'll talk about them not blocking, but... Yeah, I think, let me pull it up. I think a lot of this comes, I think this actually was my idea in terms of, like of the exact mechanical implementation. It comes actually from Traveling Minister in Crimson Vow. I don't know.

I really enjoy Traveling Minister in Crimson Vow. It did the same thing, except that that card gave you life, which wasn't a good match for kind of a minion-lucky whatever person. Yeah, we wanted minions. That's where they came from. Right. Like, yeah, a lot of this is right, like the lower level person that's maybe kind of disposable

to your plans, but that's helping you out and can further your plans and help you along. So yeah, I felt like that card I enjoyed, that card felt like a really good match for the vibe we were going for for these tokens. They help progress the game, right? Like if like, right, in general, it's just a pretty good like, I don't have any good attacks.

We kind of just sit here like having cards that help progress the game or just in general, pretty good fun games. So it felt like a nice, simple yet effective token. Certainly we, right, it is, again again in terms of making sure you know that we've heard certain things like yeah we've had some like concerns about some of our formats being faster play draw dependent um right there there's some danger in the like the power of much of the power of this token is in being able to attack and it's can come out potentially quickish on some of the cards but yeah like certainly we were all taking that into consideration and like we did dial back on these somewhat although they're some of that was

dialing back on the rates that we gave you at and moving them up in the curve more than like there's still like a lot of cards that make these and they're very very fun tokens okay so two last things to talk about now we get into the the western flavored stuff all that was sort of the the villain stuff that the villain theme was much larger structurally, mechanically. But we did do two things that tied into Western. So one was something we'd been talking about doing forever, and just it seemed like the set to do it, which is mount slash saddle.

Now this is... This was the mechanic that went through the most changes. What ended up in the set that went through the most changes. Like, what ended up in the set is not what we handed off. And the tricky thing about this is it involves a future set that we haven't talked about, but what I can say is there's a future set that was playing in a similar space and then eventually realized that we should just make them the same

rather than have them work differently. The one we handed off... Me just saying this will tell the problem of it. We were playing in mutate space where you put your rider on top of the mount that you were riding and then you got the abilities of the creature you were on top of basically as the way it worked. Remember correctly? Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. This went through a ton of iteration of iteration again my team worked on this a ton the the team you

were alluding to was also working on it i feel like in terms of the main reasons where we ended up where we did is we wanted it to work a lot like vehicles just um just conceptually like that made sense like it also helped i think players could appreciate what the how these cards worked and sort of what the expectations were there um right that like in some ways these are like vehicles that are creatures to begin with so right like it's they don't even have some of the like high ceiling low floor problems of vehicles where your worst case scenario is you have like probably a vanilla creature um until you get another creature um whereas vehicles can sit around and potentially

do nothing and be frustrating and then because of that we have to make them more powerful um once they're once they're going so i don't know it it it felt like people would be able to kind of learn it easily that it would play like those that we could have similar right like we can make there's not a ton of these but they're like whenever this creature becomes tapped you get a bonus and then that's meant to be like in the role of being a writer or like you know in previous sets like a pilot or whatever where we could still make similar types of cards that would work well with both vehicles and mounts um yeah i i think it's fine just to have something that's like a pretty close analog to something you know vehicles have been largely well received doing kind of a slight spin on that for mounts felt appropriate um though the other i guess the other

main change we made that people may not understand is we said that you can only saddle as a sorcery um it's tricky to go into all the details there that the main like you're like i thought you said you wanted this to be like crew and that's not like crew like the main thing is like pretty much at least within this set almost all the rewards come from like you attacking after you've settled um there aren't a lot of reasons to be saddling on your opponent's turn. And a lot of the templates just ended up being a lot, lot simpler. Once we switched to that, like we didn't have to sit like it or it's a combination of templates and

the gameplay we wanted, right? Like if we had a card, like whenever, whenever this mount deals combat damage to a player, do something cool. If it was saddled and then your like opponent would be like well you'll just if i don't block it then you'll saddle it after i block it's like that's just

that's not fun that's not flavorful right it's like you wait to see if i block and then so i don't know to some extent the audience has to trust me that yeah it cleaned up a lot of the templates and a lot of the gameplay to make it sorcery speed only and digital will be so much smoother because of the like they're just right vehicles hold priority all the time and like you don't have to worry about that on if you're a big arena fan or whatnot okay the one last item and then we'll wrap up here uh the the desert subtype um we're Westerns often take place kind of in the desert, so we felt like it was apropos. And I think in my Vision Design podcast,

I talk a little bit about the lessons of Return to Ravnica, where we learn kind of the power of gates and how you can make subthemes out of land subtypes. So talk a little bit about how deserts got used. Yeah, I mean, well, well so yeah i think like again pretty early on we had those like little the crime deserts um which just felt like fun i like a lot of people associate me very heavily with like practically forcing in the like etb tapped game lands and all of our limited environments like um so i don't know it was you know fun to do a little bit of a twist here

uh i mean you've already hit on the creative reasons to do it um we we had enough going on in the set that this isn't like a major theme in the set it's it's something that i wanted to be there and um like there there there are some variety of variety of rewards from common to at least i forget if we have mythics but across most rarities are cards that care about deserts it's it's a fun little thing you can have in some of the decks it's not like a color pair theme or anything like that um but yeah we wanted to give we know that there are deserts fans out there we wanted to give those decks more deserts there are a lot more deserts and then like there are some some rewards for deserts um and some fun cards and some cards i

think have have constructed shots certainly for for having deserts in a variety of formats um but yeah it just felt like a fun thing here like i again i've compared it to call time right where called call time we were very loud and it was a major part of the set that we did snow lands and this just felt like all right well yeah we we gotta do deserts here deserts are just a creative like slam dunk for the land slot okay so that is all the mechanics so we are wrapping up here any other just general thoughts on on the making of uh outlaws of thunder junction uh we've covered a lot yeah again that's really fun again we haven't called out a lot of other people I think there are just a lot of fun names and words like

I know like holy cow and just things like that that we had to make sure we'd gone through our paces on like with our creative consultants and stuff in that example but just there are a lot of other fun names that I really enjoyed and I think a lot of that like Annie Sardellis was like the Vision Second and i think a lot of that like annie sardellas was like

the what the vision second um and i think she put in a ton of those and i just like kind of tried my best to make sure that like no really we should do like like claim jumper is another one of my favorites where it's like a rabbit that's a claim jumper get it like she she has uh had a lot of just kind of clever puns and stuff that I really enjoyed and allusions to other things. Yeah. So, yeah, it is. I hope. Right.

Like I feel like a lot of our job, too, is, you know, getting people to write. It is fun to say some of the words on the cards and say some of the names and like, right. You know, whether like yeah um yeah just lots of examples i thought of one thing i forgot so one last thing um yeah we didn't talk at all so one of the ideas of the set was uh i called it like a showcase set where uh the omen pass allowed us to pull things from around the multiverse to sort of take a theme which was villains obviously and show it off to talk talk a little bit, the vision design, like, knew there were going to be a lot of named villains,

but we didn't, that wasn't something we really worried about. That was really a set, you working with creative in set design. What was it like getting all the different villains in the set? Yeah, it was fun. I mean, yeah, there's always a trade-off. I feel like every time I'm working on these sets, it reminds me a little bit of March the Machine 2 but yeah like uh right like creative has like stories they want to tell like i have characters like oh this character seems really more popular with our

fans and the character you want to do but yeah like again creatives mostly driving the show there i did have some fun backs and forths with like again grace fong was the lead through much of that process that you're talking about um like miguel lopez eventually took over um when grace left us sadly but uh yeah it was fun like we again a lot of it was like trying to figure out like how big was the core of like oko's crew for doing this heist and playing into heist tropes and right like that a lot of like at least there was a core gang and those all have like the special like wanted poster frame treatments and but then there were sort of associated characters that they like might run into with like malcolm

and breeches or he's in grolf and people other people and just like right what role would they be in like if you were watching watching a heist movie is like, what is their role and what is their name? And like, that's why like, you know, it's like Rakdos, the muscle and like, you know,

the, like the veteran. And like, I think the kid didn't stick, but there was like the demolitionist, the right, like who are all the special, like kind of the charmer,

like Ariat's the charmer, like, you know, that right. But those, the heist genre has all of those characters of like you know you you kind of have like your ideal almost like role-playing group of like everyone has a specialized function and it was fun to pull those together and then beyond that there are just a lot of people that yeah

weren't tied to the heist that um right that i think we thought would be fun like who would it be fun to see here like now i'm spacing on but, like, the guy with the oxen or whatever. And, like, you know, even Flibble Thip, right? Like, who would just kind of be fun to show here? Not that Flibble Thip's a villain here. I don't even know. He's not a villain, I don't believe. One other thing we didn't touch on is Big Score.

I don't know if you wanted to get to that. We can talk about that. Sure. Let's talk Big Score before we wrap up for the day. we can try that. Sure. Let's talk big score before we wrap up for the day. Um,

so the behind the scenes is originally we were going to do, um, the, the equivalent to what aftermath was for March of the Machine. Um, epilogue, we call them epilogues, I think. Um,

and then the audience was very fond of, uh, aftermath. So we, we, we, we said, Oh,

let's not put it there. So talk a little bit about what became of the big score. Yeah. So, I mean, I will give credit here to like, so Adam Prozac did a lot of the, like, what, what effectively I would, I guess, call like vision design. Like he, he had a team, I was sitting in on the team, but like he, he was running that, like, again, part of it is, I think at that point we'd already, yeah, we'd sort of seen the response to epilogue i'm like well i i had like worked a lot on leading that design maybe like let's run this a little different let's have somebody else lead the epilogue and i you know adam was tagged to lead the vision for big score and try to try the process in a different

way um and then yeah ultimately that like yeah we we ended up as the story has been told elsewhere, but we ended up like just folding that into the set. Um, cut, cut some of the cards, but like we took like the best cards, our favorite cards from that and wrapped it into a 30 card set. Um, and those get dropped in what the, the list slot, um, and packs. And yeah, it's, it's, uh, and those were cool items in the vault, right? That's the flavor. Yeah. Right.

So yeah, it's, it's cool. Yeah. Like Yeah, right. So yeah, it's cool. Yeah, like these are, right, so there's like this ancient civilization of like Fomari had like hidden this vault, which was like kind of the whole point of like what the heist was. And so yeah, this was the payoff, right? This was supposed to be, right,

the like, again, post-credits scene of like perhaps like now we've opened the vault and what's behind the vaults and what's in the vault and and what's in the vault and what you know what was cool about the vault and so there are a lot of like a lot of the cards like have reference other powerful artifacts from the past um some more subtle than others but like right like the idea is we wanted a lot of them to be artifacts just like powerful inventions from this civilization and that that do powerful things and maybe look like, oh, maybe some of these other things you've encountered in magic also somehow had drawn upon some similar inspiration. And then, yeah, they're just like creatures and all sorts of stuff and like loot.

I hope it's called loot, the character. And yeah, so we, yeah, it was fun. It was, yeah, it's very different. I mean, again, it will, we had time to test it as part of the limited environment, although it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't there from the start, certainly as you could understand from how it rolled out. But yeah, it's fun.

It adds another layer of like goofy things that can come up in in drafts and it's like also yeah got a lot of got a lot of different theme stuff for constructed right like there there definitely are themes there especially like along the lines of artifacts and some other things um where that we were playing up that are different themes from the main set that all will have appeal to different groups of players and different decks. Well, I want to say, Dave, I'm at my desk here. So thank you so much for this look

at all the set design of the set. I'm super happy how it came out. You and I have a lot of sets we've worked on together since this was yet another in our long line of sets. So it was always fun to work with you. Yeah, I'm very excited. Again, stuff like plot and spree, plot and spree, I think very surprisingly deep mechanics

that I'm excited to see what our players do with. I think like the frontier western genre like yeah I'm also excited to see like yeah like what people what people think of what we've done here and yeah like it's yeah like I mean it's someone who grew up in like San Diego and is sort of from vaguely the southwest and stuff some even just kind of some of the flora and fauna are kind of fun for me. I've grown up in an irrigated desert. So anyway, thanks again, Dave.

And since I'm at my desk, we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks, everybody, for being with us today. And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.