Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1138: Lessons Learned – Phyrexia: All Will Be One

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

This podcast is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about design lessons from sets I led or co-led. This episode is about the design of Phyrexia: All Will Be One.

I'm pulling up my driveways. We all know what that means. It's time for a drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my series of what I call Lessons Learned. What I do is I take sets that I led or co-led the design for, and I talk about what I learned from leading them.

I've been doing this for quite a while. So last time we talked, I believe I talked Unfinity. So the next set I led chronologically would have been Phyrexia, all will be one. Code name was LaCrosse. Okay, so we were doing this giant Phyrexian arc. Basically that was going to lead up to March of the Machine, the giant Phyrexian War. Now one of the challenges of doing the Phyrexians as villains is they're kind of creepy and what we've learned is we didn't want to do them in large doses except for the really for the end. So most of the time in this storyline when you see the Phyrexians you see them in smaller doses. They keep showing up in a little more number.rexians, you see them in smaller doses. They keep showing up in a little more number.

Like the first time you saw them in Call of Time there was one. And then when you see them in Kamoganyo Dynasty there's a couple. And then Dominaria United there's like a faction. So the idea in Phyrexia all will be one was we knew at some point for the Phyrexian fans we had to deliver on Phyrexia. We're not going to do a Phyrexian arc and not have One set that's like wall-to-wall Phyrexia. We want to make sure that if you are Phyrexian fan there is the Phyrexian set And so the idea we liked a lot was to go back to new Phyrexia

formerly Mirrodin and have a set there so Basically the idea was in the story and have a set there. So basically the idea was in the story, the good guys are coming to save the day, going to Phyrexia to stop the threat, and they do not stop the threat. In fact, it is the villainous turn where the villains Phrexinize a bunch of the planeswalkers

and things do not go well. The idea originally was this would lead then into the giant Phrexian War. I think with a lot of feedback, looking at sort of how the Phrexian War, Merchant Machine, everything came across, I think in retrospect, I think we wanted to treat, for actually all will be one, I think we wanted to show more of the war in it. Mostly we didn't show the word all the war, the kind of it ended with, and the war starts in retrospect. I think that there was too much going on in the war to have the war.

Just be a single sat. I think, I think we needed, um, I think we needed to have, for actually all will be one start the war and have some of the war begin in Phyrexia all will be one. I'm not sure whether this is a lesson of Phyrexia all be one or Phyrexia of March of the Machines or some combination thereof. But one of the things we definitely learned is we I think we needed you needed to have a period of time where the Frexians were winning, and oh no, the Frexians are winning, and then have a period of time where the good guys get to come back.

And I think Merchant's Machine was supposed to be, things are looking horrible, it's the last ditch effort, but they saved the day. Meaning, we needed a period of time where the Frexians are just dominating. And now, frankly, all we want had a lot of that Frexian dominating feeling, the good guys come to save the day and get Frexians are just dominating. And now, Frexia all we want had a lot of that Frexian dominating feeling. The good guys come to save the day and get Frexianized.

I think we've got to condense that down a little bit. The good guys come save the day, get Frexianized, and then the war begins. And I think we could have had a little bit more of the war in the first set. Now, I haven't thought through all of that. I think the mechanical representation of the war probably was a little bit more on March of the Machine, but I do think we can show

maybe some of the dominance of the Frexians early on. Okay, so let's talk about the big challenges of the set. On some level, the issue I'm talking about is as much a March of the Machine issue as it is a Frexian all will be one issue. So at some point I'll do lessons learned of March of the Machine because I also love that, and we can talk about that more there. Okay, so the big challenge of this set was we're doing the Phyrexian set. What do we think the players will expect of a Phyrexian set? So we made, as we love to do, we made a list on a whiteboard. So there are three things that we felt players most expected. Like if this doesn't show up, players would go, oh, the Phyrexians, how does the Phyrexians

not have this? Number one was Poison. So Poison had existed in early Magic, got introduced in Legends, and then it showed up on a card here, there. It was never very good. Poison was always kind of a throwaway.away poison decks never had much strength or anything and then we decided To tie Phyrexia to poison and a lot of scarves of myridin block was about the Phyrexians overrunning myridin and

We wanted to have some mechanics that were very Phyrexian mechanics So one of the things we did, we had Infect. And Infect was all damage to players is done in the form of minus one minus one counters, kind of like wither. All damage to players is done in the form of poison counters. Now wither was, that wither, Infect was very polarizing. There were people that loved, that loved Infect and people that hated Infect.

But we knew, we knew we needed to deliver on poison. Would it be Infect, would it not be Infect? That's something we had to figure out. But it felt like, okay, we needed to deliver on poison. Number two was Phyrexian Mana. That had been a really popular mechanic in New Phyrexia and literally has the word Phyrexia in its name. Okay, how do we not do Phyrexian Mana?

And then the third one was, I talked about having mechanics that were Phyrexian mechanics. One of them was in fact, the other big one was Polyphorate. And Polyphorate was a hugely popular mechanic. We brought it back in War of the Spark using it very differently but we'd brought it back. So we kind of knew we needed some kind of poison, we needed some kind of Phryxian mana, and we needed proliferate. Each one of those things came with a bunch of problems. And so a lot of the set was solving those problems. The poison problem is that how do we, what's the proper way to do poison?

One of the challenges of a poison in general is we want poison to feel different from life gain or different from life in general. So the big thing that we've done with poison, and I think it's worked very effectively, is this idea that you don't get rid of poison. That if you get poisoned, you know, every time you're poisoned, you're a step closer to death. That there's no unlike life where you can, you know, if my opponent does damage to me, I can gain life and I can stop it.

Poison has a sense of inevitability and it makes it a little scarier. It gives it a very different feel. I know I've gotten people the feedback I get is, but in life there are antidotes to poison. I get that. One of the things that's important though is when you have certain mechanics, you want them to have a definition and a feel to it. And that in order for poison to feel scary and feel like, the idea is in order to be poisoned I have to be, poisoned I have to be usually I

have to be damaged by creatures there's a few spells that do one poison and obviously proliferate can proliferate poison so once your poison proliferate can do that but we want a certain feel to it and the the fact that you can't un-poison yourself really gives it a scary fact that even when you get poisoned once even when I have one poison, I'm nine away, there's still something about that that's intimidating in a way that damage never is. Just because life gain exists.

And I felt that was important. Like poison definitely did a good job early on of doing what we want, which is it made people talk. Now there are people that disliked in fact, and you know, poison, the complaint about poison is a lot of players feel like I've just lowered my, instead of starting with 20 life, I just get to start with 10 life.

Now, the thing that they're sort of missing is there's a cost to playing poison. If you're playing poison, you're not playing other things, you're playing poison. And poison doesn't mean a lot to you until you're playing poison, you're not playing other things. You're playing poison and poison doesn't mean a lot to you until you're dead. And that was one of the big issues we had to solve is there was a sort of a siloish problem

where either I'm playing poison or I'm not. It was very hard to mix poison and not poison because either I do 10 poison to them they die or I do zero poison to them, it doesn't matter. But doing three poison or four poison or five poison didn't mean anything. Poisoning my opponent a little had very little consequence. So part of the challenge of Frexololv1

is trying to figure out how to make poison irrelevant in a way that it had more dynamism to it and it wasn't all or nothing. So a lot of the mechanics that we came up with for the set, for example, we chose not to do weather. The reason we chose not to do weather was a play design was not a big fan of the minus one minus one counters. And there was it, it led to a certain style of play where you ground things down and we wanted a little less of that. So we decided, look, let's see if we can do poison and just do it a little bit differently.

And so there's a couple things we needed to do. One was we decided that instead of making poison replace damage, like it did with in fact, what if it was in addition to damage? What if just when I do damage to you, I'm doing the damage and I'm doing the poison, so I'm advancing along both tracks. That if, you know, if for example, I stopped drawing my poison creatures,

well, I have done damage to you, maybe I can just beat you with damage., I stopped drawing my poison creatures, well, I have done damage to you, maybe I can just beat you with damage. Or if I draw my poison creatures, like I'm along the way of poisoning you to death. So originally we looked back at poisonous. So poisonous was in future site in the future shifter sheet, we wanted to hint that poison was coming back. What happened was, I think the last poison card had been in visions, visions, mirage or visions, and then we decided to stop doing poison. I

was planning to do poison in Tempest, it got pulled from there. I tried to bring it back and unglued too, that said never happen. And so the idea was we wanted to bring poison back. So in Future Sight, we hinted that poison returned. We kind of knew that we wanted poison to come back. So Future Sight, remember poison? So we made a mechanic called Poisonous, where it was poisonous N, and when I do damage to you,

when I do combat damage to a player, I then give them that many poison counters. We ended up chasing poisonous to toxic. So this is another lesson here is a lot of times in magic when we make mechanics we make mechanics based on the knowledge we have at the time and then magic evolves or changes. So in this particular case, when we made FutureSight, I think Magic Online existed. Magic Arena wasn't a thing yet. And one of the things with digital magic playing a larger role, there's more people playing digital magic than ever before, is there are certain types of effects that work better than others. And the idea is when you do damage,

there's two types of effect. There's a triggered ability and there's a, what do we call it? Where the damage itself just comes with a side effect. So let's take lifelink for example. When I hit you with a lifelink creature, I don't put the life gain on the stack, I just gain the life.

It just automatically happens. And the way poisonous was written was it went on the stack. And it's not when we can, because of digital concerns, we try not to put things on the stack if we can help it. If we need to, we do, it's not that we can't. But the idea there was, I'm gonna hit you, you're gonna get poison. Does it matter it's on the stack? Are you going to respond to getting poison? You're not going to stop the poison. It's sort of like, why do you need to respond

to the poison? And so we changed to toxic. Toxic is essentially poisonous, except it's more like lifelink and that it just happens. It's not a triggered ability, it just happens. And that just makes for a better digital experience. We only had three cards with poisonous on them. So it's not like we had a giant, it's not like poisonous was this giant mechanic we'd done before. We had hinted at it in the future.

We had got really close. We missed a little tiny bit. We decided, look, let's just do the right thing. You know, we shouldn't continue something that's not the right thing because we did it three times once when we were guessing the future. And that's another big thing about future site in general is whenever you are guessing the future,

it is hard to guess exactly. There are a lot of things that will change along the way. And there are even mechanics where we did mechanics and you know what? We learn along the way there's a better way to do it. And that there's some nostalgia and sometimes we repeat things because there's some fun ways that this is how it was. But as a general rule, if we can find a way to upgrade a mechanic to make it better, it's why we did disguise off morph.

It's why we did discover off cascade. Sometimes we make a mechanic and there's room for improvement and we have to be willing to improve that and that's something that We're very conscious nowadays of trying to find So anyway, we put in toxic the other big thing we did or what we do with a couple things the other Mechanical thing we did is we made it a mechanic called corrupted So what corrupted was it's a threshold mechanic and basically said, hey, if my opponent has three or more poison, I have some upgrade. There's some bonus to my poison, my partner, my type, sorry.

There's a bonus to my opponent being slightly poisoned. And what that meant is it, there's some reasons to put poison creatures in your deck, even if the goal of your deck is not to poison your opponent out and the reason why that is nice is let's say i'm planning to beat them with damage but i put a little bit of poison in my deck so that i can get to corrupted the cool thing is there are situations that pop up every once in a while where i can poison them out or vice versa let's say my deck is more trying to poison them out, hey, there are times when I can beat them with damage. And so a combination of toxic still doing damage and corrupted,

sort of giving you a reason to want to poison them a little bit, really started giving you reasons to mix and match poison with non-poison. And that was something, like once again, we do things, like scars of myriden, there's a lot of good things about scars and mirrodin. I think for example, it was the first time we really built a design to capture the feel of something. That we wanted you to feel what the Frexsians feel like.

You play the Frexsians and I really think that the disease, the Frexsians have disease motif really came through. And it allowed us to design cool things like proliferate and infect and such. And so a lot of what we were trying to do when we come back is how do we capture that feel again? But look, not everything we did was perfect. How we executed on poison was the best we had done

at the time, but there was room for improvement. And that's always the thing. When you're coming back, when you're revisiting something, and this is true, I mean, it's true of any theme you revisit, but it's especially true when you go back to world. Like we were going back to new Phyrexia. You know, it's sort of keep the good and evolve the bad.

Like take the things that didn't work or worked okay and improve upon that. And a lot of our working on poison in French and all we won is trying to say, Hey, is there a way to make poison as a way to improve upon poison? I think we did poison the better than we'd done before. And I think corrupted was part of that. I think toxic was part of that. So another component piece of this, cause it all ties together is we wanted to bring back proliferate.

Originally, in the very first play test, we had infect and proliferate. We're like, okay, let's run them back. And we kind of realized that infect wasn't what we wanted. We didn't want minus one, minus one counters. But one of the things that we did know is, okay, we kind of wanted to proliferate. Proliferate and plus one one plus one counters can cause issues.

You have to be careful with your plus one plus one counters. Obviously when we did War of the Spark there were some plus one plus one counters. Although I will admit that the main mechanic that used plus one plus one counters on mass only ever had one creature. So when you proliferated with a mass you were making your army better but it wasn't a sweeping change like if all your creatures had plus one plus one counters on them, that is a really big upgrade for proliferate. So it is tricky to do a set with proliferate with plus one plus one counters.

Not impossible. Obviously, we didn't award the spark. But then we came up with the idea of what if we had a different kind of counter? So that's when we came up with the idea of oil counters and oil counters really got to be very open ended. What we said is we're not going to put up the idea of oil counters. And oil counters really got to be very open-ended. What we said is, we're not going to put an inherent meaning to oil counters. We're going to let different cards do different things.

And the way we designed it, in vision design, is we came up with a lot of different ways to use oil counters. I think we came up with like 12 different ways. You can do this. And that it wasn't that we expected set design to use all 12 ways. We're just like and that it wasn't that we expected Set Design to use all 12 ways, we're just like hey here's a tool, here's a lot of different

ways to use the tool, figure out what is best. Now looking back there's pros and cons. I like a lot of what Frexan Oil did and that it created a very different environment. That proliferating might mean your creature stayed around longer, or it could mean your creature had extra use. It wasn't just your creatures got bigger, which is what happens with plus one plus one counters, and that there was a lot of cool interplay there.

Now, the thing we did learn is plus one plus one counters are kind of baked into the psyche of magic, and that there's a lot of stuff when you is plus one plus one counters are kind of baked into the psyche of magic and that there's a lot of stuff when you use plus one plus one counters that kind of come for free. That players when they see a creature and they see counters on it they go, yeah, yeah, plus one plus one counters. Like there's a lot of short handing that comes. So plus one plus one counters being the default counter really allow us to, they limit complexity a bit, because A, they work the same,

and B, they work in a way that you're used to and that you've sort of integrated, and so you can shorthand it when you play. When you change the counters to something else, now, oil counters on top of everything else were kind of open-ended. They didn't mean a specific thing, like plus one plus one and minus one minus one

mean a specific thing. Once you understand one and minus one minus one mean a specific thing once you understand what they do I know that automatically oil counters I gotta go okay it's I know it's oil counters but that's only counters in limited but what does this one do oh this one's counting down because it goes away oh this one has an extra use like you have to figure out the means by which how it's getting. And so it's just more complexity. I think the big lesson of it is poison as a system is a complex system, only because once again, players have short hands.

Damage, when you attack and damage somebody, you know what that means. You don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it because if you played magic for any length of time, you've gotten used to sort of the rhythm of damage. Whenever you replace something that you're used to with something you're not used to, it adds complexity. Normally, our normal rule is we try to add one thing.

Now, I think at the time I was like, well, there's just one intricate system that involves poison and oil and prolific. I thought of it as a singular system sort of, because they all intermingle together. But the realization looking back is there are actually two different things going on. One was the poison economy, if you will, how poison works, how easy it is to get poison, what you can do to poison someone out. And then this idea that at three, I turn on corrupted things. So just understanding poison and the new way we were doing poison, you know, we were using

toxic which, well, like poisonous, there are only three poisonous cards in future site. It was the third set. I mean, you never put a limited environment where there's lots of poisonous. Maybe you happen to get all three cards maybe in future site. But even then it just wasn't a, it was a small part was going on. It wasn't the major part. So even though we had done poisonous before and toxic and poisonous played, especially in tabletop played pretty similarly. So the idea though is there was that, there was the poison economy you had to figure out. And there's a lot of moving pieces to it.

Like I like what Corrupta did, but it did add some more complexity. And then there was the oil counter economy, which meant what did oil counter mean? What did proliferating mean? And there's an inner link between those. Obviously, proliferate ties into the poison economy in that one of the ways of winning had to do with proliferating. So the two systems intermesh.

But one of the important lessons here is just because two different systems intermesh doesn't mean they're not two different systems. And so we really handed off a pretty complex system. Now I think it was fun, and once again, the more enfranchised as a player you are, the more you can embrace new systems. And the other thing that helped us quite a bit is,

poison has a very large splash value. Another big lesson we learned is, in the commander decks, we made a bunch of different decks. One of which was, I think we made two decks, I think, but one of which was a poison deck. The poison deck was by far far by far the most popular. There's something about poison that is much beloved. It is very, it's very disruptive in a cool way. It, I mean, it definitely is very loud. Hey, I'm doing this thing and I do enough of this thing, I beat you. It's an alternate wind condition,

which are popular. And poison is flavorful. There's a lot going for poison But the lesson I think we learned about poison is poison is its best in small doses that I think if everyone's like Poison is the kind of thing that we shouldn't do regularly but every once in a while if there was a poison set It's something that players can embrace and there's definitely there's an audience that adores poison There's an artist that doesn't like poison, but one of the things I talk about all the time is, hey, I'd much rather have things that are polarizing

that some players love and some players hate than have things where everybody's like, eh, it's okay. And so that's why you don't want poison around all the time. There's people that it definitely annoys, but there's people that really get excited by it. And so we do want to bring it back every once in a while. So I'm glad we had poison, but one of the big listens is understand the two systems. There was one more mechanic that the set had. Because the Mirrens were there, there was a small group of

Rebels. So we brought back the Rebel creature type and we wanted to give the rebels a mechanic. So we brought back, or not brought back, we made a mechanic called for Mirrodin. So what we had done was in original Scars of Mirrodin, in Mirrodin's Siege, the middle set in Scars of Mirrodin block, we introduced a mechanic. What was the mechanic called? It was called, I don't blink in the name of the mechanic. It was a mechanic where a living weapon, it's called living weapon, where they were artifacts or equipment that came on the battlefield and they made a zero, zero black germ token.

And then the equipment sort of animated, you know, because of the token, it sort of came as a creature. You could count it as a creature Now as with anything Like one of my lessons I talked earlier here is you always look at ways you can improve upon things and the idea of an equipment That came as a creature so that you count it as a creature You know you could go in your creature pile was very valuable did Did a lot of good. And the idea of having equipment that right away is usable, either it snaps on or it generates its own creature, very valuable. The one thing we had done and like sort of the room for improvement was the problem with

making a zero zero germ token is all the equipment had a buff the creature. They had at least give a plus zero plus one. Otherwise the germ just dies automatically, right? And equipment we realize is, having every piece of equipment buff is not what we want. That we wanna make equipment that is, hey, it just does this simple little thing. And that is kind of fun,

especially if the equipment comes with a creature, that when the creature dies, you sort of have this leftover equipment. So the equipment doesn't need to do a lot to be worthy, because it comes with a creature. And so, for Meriden said, okay, let's take the lessons of living weapon. And we liked the idea that there's something very cool to us about the people who survived had to take a weapon of the enemy and bring it to their own purpose.

That flavorfully felt really good. But the lesson was we didn't want zero zero. So we toyed around with one one, two two. I think we started with one one and eventually realized that two two was the sweet spot. And then it let us do very simple mechanics. It could be oh it is flying or it could just have a single ability on it. And the idea is, hey, I get a 2-2 flying creatures. When it dies, I now have a flying equipment.

That has value. Normally, if I were to make equipment that only gave flying, wow, there's a lot to make that worth even playing. But the idea that you built the body in. And so, again, one of the things that's really interesting to look at is finding ways of what worked before and what can make it better. And for Mirrodin, the technology of living weapon,

but using a sort of not a zero zero, of using creatures with a little more substance was very useful and definitely a tool we will use again. I was very happy with the way Formiridon played out. Okay, so let me look at make sure I hit everything. Oh, completed. So completed was a mechanic that we started. We did the first one of it in, we did the first one in Kamigawa Nian Dynasty. We knew the Phyrexians were gonna Phyrexinize planeswalkers.

They did one in Nian Dynasty, they did one in Dominary United, they did a Jani. And then we knew they were gonna do five planeswalkers. That was one of the big things of the set. So a lot of this mechanic had been figured out before we got here. We had to figure it out, like what we did with Tamiyo and Ajani, we just did again with the five new ones. And so we kind of, this was an interesting case where

we had, sometimes when you do something, you sort of do what we call throw forwards, meaning you're setting yourself up where we go. So a lot of the work for figuring out how the completed things worked was done back in the end dynasty. And I, I had done a lot of the work for figuring out how the completed things worked was done back in the end dynasty and I I had done a lot of work early on pitching a lot of different ways that it could be done. Interestingly I pitched like six or seven different ways and none of them were quite what we ended up using. I did like what we ended up which is I remember early on I talked we had the three things we had poison, we had proliferate and we had Phrexian mana had the three things we had poison we proliferated and we had frexian mana the three P's. Frexian mana was tricky how we ended up using

frexian mana is we'd use it on completed and then we ended up not using a lot of frexian mana in Frexia LB1 we did end up using it a bit more in March of the Machine as a means for how to transform creatures into the Phryxian version. When I get to my March of the Machine lessons learned, we'll talk about that. But I did like the fact that we got some Phryxian mana in. Another important lesson there is sometimes you do something and it's not that easy to go back to. Sometimes you make something and a lot of times if something is popular, it's popular because it's powerful and it being powerful sometimes can cause problems

Frexian mana caused a bunch of problems both in that trading manner for life Like people have life as a resource you already have and so it just makes your things cheaper You just almost always pay life and it also allowed some to do some stuff in color pie stuff that we shouldn't have done. So it was neat to have something that we set up but there wasn't a lot that we did there. We did a lot of other small things flashback and I guess affinity technically became deciduous. We include flashback affinity in this that. I guess affinity is deciduous. I keep going back and forth. I guess technically on my blog we keep arguing whether whether Affinity is a cameo or it's

Deciduous, I guess it's deciduous. We've used in a couple different places There's something very clean about it and you can use it with different resources I think we did cameo battle cry In the set and like I said, Frexy Man was on the complete occultures Final thoughts. I'm pretty happy with how Frexy all of the way one turned out. The set did really well.

It was pretty popular. I think we were a little bit higher on complexity than we needed to. I think we needed to understand sort of this, the fact that we were asking for two systems rather than one system. But I really thought we did a good job of delivering on Phyrexia in a way that felt Phyrexian.

Like I said, there's some larger how to do the storyline issues that I think Phyrexia all be one might have needed to absorb some stuff. So when I get to March on the Sheen, I can talk more about that. But yeah, yeah, yeah, like I said, I'm pretty proud of a lot of things we did. I think what Vision Design handed over, most of those mechanics were there. We handed over Toxic, we handed over Completed, we handed over Polyphorate. I mean, I obviously completed it, but that was a known thing. So yeah, yeah, I'm generally happy. I think there are some some lessons in that trying to understand what we were doing

But there are a lot of there are also a lot of understandings of love upgrades that we did that I think were important upgrades I look back and figure out like how we handled poison how we handle frexium mana how we handled proliferate how we handled like for me or handled like, there's a lot of things we did where we took things where I think that we did it before and we could do it better and we found a way to do it better. And I really think this was a set of a lot of, and this has to do, returns can do this a lot, there's a lot of trying to figure out how to improve upon what we had done. And I think mostly, mostly we did it in a smart way.

There's some interesting questions about oil counters and like maybe oil counters wanted to be more exacting what they did and less open-ended. Maybe if they had a singular use that was generally useful, maybe that would have made it a little easier to track. I mean, there's things like that that I think about. But in general, I liked it. I thought it was a very good set

and I'm very happy with it. Okay guys, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means 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.