Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1128: Outlaws of Thunder Junction Play Design with Jadine Klomparens

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Outlaws of Thunder Junction Lead Play Designer Jadine Klomparens to talk about the play design of the set.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I'm here today with Jaydeen, Clown Parents, to talk all about play design of Outlaws of Thunder Junction. I've had Jaydeen on before, but we're back. We have another set to talk about. So, hey Jaydeen. Hey Mark, how's it going? Okay, so we're going to talk all about the challenges of doing play design for this set. So I think the thing we want to start with is committing crimes. That's the most kind of out there thing that we, you know, normal Magic Sets don't care about that normally. So usually I know the thing that we don't normally care about is the one that usually Play Design has to look at the hardest. Yeah. So the biggest challenge for us with crimes comes from limited where crimes are

super awesome. Everybody we talk to love them. And, you know, there's just something that happens in a game of magic removing stuff. So on some level, we are really excited about crimes, wanted it to be a big presence in the set, but that means there's a lot of power points and interaction, which can be really challenging for us. What removal spells we make, where they are on the curve, how much of them they exist in the format is something Play Design spends a lot of energy on. And making a set where crimes are something that gets rewarded is something that can be pretty challenging for us. How much did you guys have to worry about Asfan of crimes? Was that something you needed to worry about or was that mostly okay? It was mostly okay, especially because of the bonus sheet, given that we're doing like one extra crime pack and it's pretty powerful.

We didn't really have any troubles with enough ways to commit crimes. The biggest challenge for us and this kind of will paint the story of how we set out to handle the whole limited format for this was just committing crimes as a game mechanic is going to be most powerfully accomplished with removal spells, something that is already going to be a very strong thing to do in games of magic. So we had to put a lot of energy into figuring out how crimes could feel satisfying without just feeling like the game is snowballing. If you are getting your crime triggers, how is the game continuing in a satisfying way that isn't just you beating up on your opponent? How do we build in comebacks and stuff like that? So one of the first places

we went to was, okay, what are some non removal crimes that we can get people to play with put in their deck and feel strong? The desert lands was one of our best thoughts for that getting targeting on your land slot as a way to enable your crime without actually removing a creature. Yeah, we had those in very early, but we were... I was very dubious when we made them whether they'd stick around or not. There was a big question of whether they were okay. So I was happy to see that they made it. Yeah, they're very novel. There was some stuff going on with like, do we really like that in the game of limited? You're kind of starting at 18 life with players have this stuff But we enjoyed it for the most part and think it's a pretty novel

limited experience Okay, so I'm gonna move on to the next mechanic and one of the things we'll talk about as we talk about new mechanics Obviously they start interconnecting So let's talk a little about spree Right sprees some of the time you most spree cards I think can commit a crime. I don't know if 100% can, but most of them can. Yeah, most of them certainly can. So they play well with crimes in that way. Another of the things that spring from crimes is that you're bored in Outlaws of Thunder Junction is kind of less stable than it maybe is in

other sets because your opponents are going to be playing lots of ways to target your stuff, which can mean satisfying big turns or like doing cool things can be harder to set up because you can't get your stuff to stick around. So a lot of what Spree is adding to the set is something that allows you to make really big plays and really big turns without having to set up too hard for it on the battlefield. You just have to get a lot of mana ready to cast your Spree spell for a lot. So that ended kind of some of that aspirational gameplay or just kind of really big comeback turns when your opponent's been ahead. That was really nice for the set.

Yeah also Spree does something that I know you guys appreciated. It's one of the knobbier things we've ever made, you know, that every single ability has its own mana cost. So you guys have a lot of ability to adjust things you don't normally get adjusted to this fine-tunedness. Oh yeah, Spree is a Play Design bread and butter. Like we're just really having a great time messing with the numbers. Like, is this card better as one base, two, three, four? Is it better at two base, one, two, three?

I think those were some of the most fun discussions we had with how much mana do we pull up to the front to make all of the modes cheaper versus how much is on each mode. And it just varied a lot card from card, but just very granular discussion of knobs could take us through an entire meeting of stuff. The other thing that's cool about Spree is I think we try to make sure that at least one of the modes was a crime, but not all of the modes are necessarily crimes. So you sort of sometimes can opt into crimes if you need crimes or not. Yep, you can get some crimes in there. A lot of especially the lower rarity stuff, the default case will be you're committing a crime, you're getting your triggers, life is good. Some of the higher rarity stuff gets more complicated in some ways.

I think a lot of the ways the mode ordering can matter gets pretty cool. There's a green rare that adds cards to your hand and then puts them into play. I think just kind of the cool stories that Spree modes get to tell, pretty fun. It's fun to work on. Yeah, I mean, Spree is something, I mean, obviously there's some new elements to Spree,

but Spree is a kicker-ish mechanic, so you guys have a lot of experience with additional costs. Yep, we've done a lot. The big difference is being able to do all the modes instead of just some. Most of the time tons of different modes is choices for us, but we've worked with stuff like this before. It's not too challenging for us. Okay, so let's get to the next mechanic, plot, which is a very subtle mechanic. I'm sort of curious how hard was plot for you guys to balance? Plot was, I think, the hardest mechanic of the step for us. A lot of the other ones, like crimes, we know where the challenges are and what we have to solve.

And it's a lot of work, but we know what we have to do. Plot is the much harder thing for us, which is just unexplored territory. We first have to figure out what the problems are or what issues are going to come up in gameplay, and then we have to solve for them. So plot in the set is kind of working sort of like spree to counteract some of the snowballing of crimes. It's letting you set up for later, deny your opponent the opportunity to interact with your board and kind of double or triple spell later and say, you don't have enough mana to use removal spells on all this stuff in one turn.

This is how I'm going to beat your tons of removal spell crime deck, which is really cool, but it's deceptively powerful. So the hardest thing we ran into was that the, getting the right rates on the plot cards often led them to read pretty unexciting, but the cards were at the correct power level. So trying to figure out the right designs that would not lean too hard into plot strength so that they still got to be cool and play fun and not just be a pile of denying your opponent the ability to do things was pretty challenging, but the cards were a ton of fun to work on and I think it's one of my favorite mechanics we've done in a while.

Yeah, Clowns was my favorite mechanic. The interesting thing from interacting with the public about it is it has a lot on the surface that looks like Fortel, but boy oh boy, it plays very differently than Fortel. Yep, it does play pretty differently from Fortel. We did learn one lesson from Fortel. We included a card in the set that can interact with the plot zone. That was something we kind of wish we had made and foretell the ability to deal with a card that had been foretold. We made it for plot, so that's pretty cool. But yeah, just in general, plot is, there's so many possibilities.

You can use the cards in so many different ways. We experimented with really plot-heavy decks. We experimented with plots just kind just as standalone pieces of other decks. That's where we ended up thinking they were the most fun and constructed. But just in general, a really cool mechanic. How in general, you bring up an interesting question, which is how do you figure out whether a mechanic is something you build around, or whether it's more of support mechanic that just you play some of,

but the deck isn't built around it. Yeah, ultimately play design position here is like we try most things like anything that can be a cool deck we want to be a cool deck so we spend a lot of energy like hey would this be cool if you play 30 of these cards together? And we see what the gameplay is like. And if it's something we like, something that we think could be fun at high levels of standard, we will try and make that happen. If it kind of becomes pretty clear the deck is too one-note, not that fun to play again,

very challenging to balance, we'll dial it back and say, OK, this isn't something we're going to make a package for Constructed. OK, next up, the next mechanic we'll dial it back and say, okay, this isn't something we're going to make a package for Constructed. Okay, next up, the next mechanic we'll talk about is Saddle. How hard was Saddle? So Saddle was, I think, deceptively hard for us. We didn't think it was going to be that hard. The biggest challenge for us was in getting the gameplay correct for

limited. It was kind of awkward alongside crimes where Saddle requires a bit of a base to set up, feel good about tapping multiple creatures to get an attack in if you're going to use the Saddle ability. And it can be challenging to set that up in the face of removal spells. Just kind of the, I want to attack with my saddle creature, I want to saddle it up, but I have to tap another creature, pay my saddle cost, and then my opponent can remove my creature was just something that happened a lot in the set and was pretty unfortunate for saddle. So trying to maneuver the cards around that and make sure that they could still be fun to play with despite the number of removal spells in the set was their biggest challenge.

Do you think Saddle being similar to vehicles ended up being a plus or minus for you guys? Oh, I think it's a positive. It certainly was easier to think about how much of a cost it is to pay the saddle cost crews a pretty good analog. We have a good idea of what kinds of creatures, how much the difference between saddle two and saddle one was. But it still had enough differences that it wasn't completely free. Saddling only being on your turn and attack triggers is certainly somewhat different.

But the biggest difference is just that these are fully functional creatures without saddling them and you don't want to saddle them necessarily as often as crewing. So it's kind of like a softer version of crew for us and it was close enough that we got to copy some of the works. Yeah, I mean, one of crew's biggest issues is it's just hard to get a lot of vehicles in your deck, you know, that because they need creatures but the saddle is nice in that it's a creature so if you just get the creature by itself you still can play it where you it's not true with the vehicle. Right, you can play an all saddle deck if you want to and your saddle things will work just fine. All vehicle decks are less good at that. Okay, next up, let's talk outlaws, our batch of the set.

Yeah, so this one's pretty straightforward for us. Just essentially a typal mechanic. It's referenced on some cards. Reasonable limited theme, not a ton to say I think we put some energy into getting some outlaw stuff to hit in, construct it, or at least be a plausible deck you could build, but not terribly different than other type of strategies we've seen in the past, other than some of the tie-ins to crime, but most of that just comes with how crime worked. The mercenary tokens were I think the most interesting part of Outlaw's in this set, at least from the perspective of Play Design's work on it, where that tap plus

one plus O ability in limited mattered a lot more than people necessarily thought it did at first. And it really enabled like attacks on boards that otherwise would kind of be clogged and were something that we just kept thinking were stronger and stronger as we continued to develop the set. It's interesting that's the very first thing we tried we liked it we didn't change it and it's I'm always amazed when the first thing we tried makes it a print that always I'm always impressed when that happens because it doesn't happen a lot. Oh so here's another thing I want to talk about. A lot of times when we talk about what Play Design does,

it's very within the set. Like you're thinking about limited, or you're thinking about the set sort of in a vacuum. Typal things do something very interesting. One of the things that I know Play Design does is we have to come to you early and say, hey, here are typal themes coming up. Can you make sure sets before that have some things in it so that there's some stuff that gets added to it that are just in that set?

Yep, definitely. So I think with Outlaws, it was easier than most. Just kind of we had had some of these types coming up. LCI had some pirates running around for outlaws that kind of made it a bit easier and just in general these are types that we use a lot in Magic so it wasn't too hard to find them but I do think we picked a couple of the types from previous sets that were like all right let's make sure this is there for outlaw stuff coming up. Yeah just to give the audience a sense of contrast. Um, like we've already said, for example, that we've been seeding some stuff for Bloomberg, that's a lot harder. A lot of those animals don't necessarily show up so easily.

Whereas Rogues and Warlocks, like we do those every set almost. So it's the, the typal demands really depend on what you have to support. Yeah. And, uh, something like Outlaw, which is a bunch of job titles and can show up across like a variety of creative elements is generally a lot easier for us than getting specific animal types on cards. Okay next up deserts and deserts matter. Right so I think the single best thing the deserts did for the set was just to add that bit of climbing kind of for free and in ways that matter less than removing a full creature to help the crime

triggers happen. We talked about that a little bit earlier. Land scenes in constructed are pretty hard for play design. We don't like giving out a lot of interaction for lands. Land destruction is not very fun, so we don't push it at a high rate. But so when we make a deck where a lot of the power is going to be concentrated in things that we kind of don't really let you interact with very profitably, we have to be very careful.

And we had just done another land theme in LCI. So we ended up making deserts, not like a huge shot. There's some stuff there. I'm excited to see what people do with it, but it is not something we took a ton of time on in FSO. How about limited? Yeah, limited definitely matters. Again, just kind of how contested the deserts are for the, uh, sorry, the

dual land deserts for the ability to commit a crime means that you can't dependently count on a lot of them. Um, but there's some fun build around on comments more than there is like an actual deck occasionally your green deck will pick up one of the desert matters cards and care a lot more about deserts, than you'll like set out and draft a really dedicated deserts deck. Okay next up the set has a little more legendary creatures than normal is that challenging for you guys or not really? It's somewhat challenging in that it impacts kind of what we can use for standard decks.

A lot of the decks that we make, we don't want to play a ton of legends because when you have like your creature base is five or six different legends that you wanna play a lot of copies of, that's not the most fun experience. So we try and make sure the legends are aimed at a variety of different places rather than kind of all pointing towards the same deck, which is

kind of just challenging on our real estate when we want to create a certain deck or a certain play pattern and have to make sure we get enough non legendary slots to create it. But it's mostly just an administrative challenge in terms of getting the planning correct more than it is really difficult for us to work with. We pretty well understand the legend type and how we should rate those cards at this point. Okay, next up, and you mentioned this before, but we'll go a little more in depth, the bonus sheet. What are the challenges of. The bonus sheet.

What are the challenges of adding a bonus sheet to a set, especially in play design world where, you know, play booster world where the cards are played limited? So the most challenging part for play design is just that the cards are less flexible. Like, kind of as we're working on limited limited a bonus sheet is inherently going to be just a ton of reprints Which means that we do not have as much control over their power level as we do on every other card and that is Just something we have to work around OTA specifically the challenge was that the bonus sheet was just a bunch of pretty strong limited cards cards that can make crime strong spells and removal

spells in particular make up a lot of the bonus sheet and it was just quite powerful. So trying to work the rest of the set around the bonus sheet being a source of powerful cards was the biggest challenge, making sure that all the crime rewards felt reasonable. We did really appreciate the diversity of removal spells or just effects in general, ways to commit crimes that the bonus sheet allowed, kind of varied up the patterns a lot, just because there's such a higher depth of cards, how different cards can we be able to achieve

with just the main set here, and kind of helped us make sure games didn't feel too samey. So one thing I'm curious, a lot of times like pass bonus sheets tended to be a lot more like all enchantments or all artifacts where this one, the crime theme allowed a little more variety. Was that helpful or problematic just because it's had so much removal? In general, I think it is helpful. More flexibility kind of gives us more control over what the final product is going to be like. The particular theme of a lot of removal was especially challenging, but not too bad. And I think there are some cards that aren't

true removal spells that we were able to find for the bonus sheets. So in general, I think it was a little bit easier than some of the more prescribed bonus sheets. Okay, so we've hit all the mechanics. So now I'm interested in, like what are some general things, when working on the set, what was the challenges that weren't necessarily mechanic based,

but what were the big challenges of the set just as a larger sort of piece in the puzzle of standard and other formats? Yeah, one of the really interesting things for standard, like we've talked about this at a couple points, but so much of the mechanics of the set are really backwards facing work with magic. There's tons of cards in magic that commit crime. There's tons of outlaws kind of in Magic. So one of the first things we had to do was go through, you know, the entirety of legal cards in FFL and make a post that was like, all right, here is a bunch of cards that are going to be legal and standard that might are really strong with the OTJ themes.

Here's some cards you should think about when deck building. And that's not something we always have to do with sets. It really depends on what they are. But OTJ in particular was just so backwards facing we needed to be pretty comprehensive in trying to find the cards that were going to work well with them. Yeah, just for the audience,

one of the things that's interesting from my end of things is we are trying to find more backwards compatible themes because they play better in larger formats in things like Commander and Modern and stuff like that. And so OTJ is kind of a peak in the future, that we're trying to find things that are brand new themes, but things that you can use lots of old cards in. And so this is us really sort of digging into that because that's an ongoing problem on my end of the things is

how do you make brand new things that make brand new decks, but that you can now build a commander deck right out of the box. That's tricky to do. Okay, my next question for you, Jaydeen, is one of the things that people have been asking a lot about is speed of limited formats. How did you figure out what speed this format wanted to be? So a lot of stuff like that for this format were just really centered around how important crimes are and how much removal is in the format. So I would say in general, one of the biggest challenges of this format was snowballing and trying to make sure there was enough opportunity for players to catch up when they fell behind. When that's not true, that's a pretty characteristic of a fast format,

a format that's faster than many players enjoy. It's like as soon as you stumble on turn two or three, you feel like you can never catch up. So that was an inherent problem in this format, just kind of the nature of crimes and being like, all right, here's my crime card. You play something, I kill it, I get a benefit, I keep putting you further and further behind as we play turns. So most of our journey with this set was trying to slow it down, make sure expensive permanents could matter in games. I think you'll see if you look through the set a lot of like five and six mana creatures at common and uncommon that are somewhat good in some way against a removal spell,

trying to make sure players have the tools to stabilize and get something really impactful on the board if they manage to make it to turn five or turn six and hopefully make sure the format is not end up too fast. So here's a question. I have to know the answer to this, but I'm sure I'd like the audience would like to know which is there's two ways to solve problems when you have a lot of

removal meaning you could adjust the removal so it it's not good against certain things or you can adjust the creatures so there's more answers of the creatures which you tend to prefer and trying to fix that the problem is on the spell side on the removal side or on the creature side? So it's just really really hard in general. Kind of if you adjust it on the spell side you run into the problem where rare and mythic cards are too impactful and limited and players feel like their deck doesn't matter too much and it's just all about what rares or mythics you end up with. So you kind of need to make sure the removal spells are strong enough to answer whatever

your opponent might have so you feel like you have agency to deal with these bombs. And on the other hand, if you overcorrect on the creature side, you end up with players feeling like uncommons are as strong as raars of Mythics can be kind of too many single cards overrunning games, and not making for the most fun experience. So it's honestly, there's no good answer to this question. We just have to kind of thread the needle perfectly and do some of both trying to get that right balance of players feel like they can answer everything

that matters but also feel like some cards can survive and you're not just priced into playing all the cheapest stuff because it interacts the best with the removal spells. Now another thing that's really interesting about play design is you guys work in a vacuum in the sense that you're making guesses of what the players will do long before the players have access to the cards and then when the set comes you're making guesses of what the players will do long before the players have access to the cards. And then when the set comes out, you get to watch what the players do. Now the set's not out yet, so obviously you don't quite know what's going to happen, but what are you watching? What do you want to see about this set? Yeah, I mean this might not be the most satisfying answer, but I am really curious

to see how fast this format ends up. Our process is very probabilistic. We don't always know to a great degree of certainty how things are going to go. So I am curious to see how this plays out. I would say other than that, mostly just how plot kind of plays or what players do with plot is the thing I'm the most excited to see there's a lot of cool stuff you can do and I'm curious to see how it shakes out. I Know one of the tensions always is we make really cool things. They're like, please let the cool things work. Please let the cool things work Definitely. Um Yeah, it's always it's always frustrating when there's something happens in the meta game and like, oh, this cool thing doesn't happen because whatever random, I don't know,

that's always frustrating. Any final thoughts? Like looking back on sort of the play design of the set, anything we haven't talked about yet that are interesting? Like something this set made you think about that you don't normally think about? my only other real big thing was just this was one of our first play booster set and trying to figure out how that limited environment worked with another puzzle piece for OTJ. Just really trying to get a handle on how the changes in the booster affected limited and that was something we spent a lot of time on here. Yeah, I wrote an article earlier this year

talking about sort of looking at all the changes and it is neat. It's an ever evolving thing. And one of the things I say this all the time when I have play designers on, but I find your job so, so, so hard that I have great respect for trying, you know, millions of players will try something you're trying to predict and, you know, that's a very challenging job.

So I'm always amazed by how well you guys do. Our inside joke is that our job is impossible. We just gotta, you know, do the most of what we can. Yeah, yeah, it is. Like I said, someone who's just done this forever, like, it is so daunting seeing the inside and seeing the outside as far as like trying to predict what's going on. The thing the audience also doesn't know is you just miss a few things. You don't have to miss much for the metagame to be very different than you think it is. And it just is like one card you didn't think about, the combos with this other card you didn't think about, and all of a sudden, the environment's just

very different than you anticipated. And anyways, you have my utmost respect. Appreciate it. Anyway, well, we are almost out of time here. What here, I'll leave with this. If you were to give one piece of advice for people playing limited in this format, what is your piece of advice? Who has a good question?

I'm going to go with try all the stuff, see what clicks for you. And the plot cards are probably a little stronger than you think they are. Yeah, the other thing from playtesting is the spree cards, most of the time when you play mode cards, you're used to using the same mode a lot. And spree does not play like that at all because how much mana you have will dictate what you can do. And so be very open-ended on what the spree cards can do for you. Don't get locked in like, my spree card must do this thing

because spree cards play really differently than most mode cards because of the flexibility of what you can do. That's my pit. But yeah, plot's all sort of like that. Oh, yeah, definitely. Okay, well, thank you so much, Jeanine, for being with us. It's always fun to have you on and talk play design. And so I'm sure I'll have you on when the next step comes along. But once again, thanks so much. This was great.

Definitely. So to everybody else, I'm at my desk. So we all know that means. It means that I ended my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.