Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1141: Modern Horizons 3 Vision Design with Erik Lauer

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

I sit down with Erik Lauer, Modern Horizons 3's lead vision designer, to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at Home Edition. Okay, so today we're talking all about Modern Horizons 3 and I have the lead vision designer, Eric Lauer, with me to talk all about it. Hey, Eric. Hi, Mark. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning. What's your earliest memory of working on Modern Horizons 3? My earliest memory of working on Modern Horizons 3 was... Wow! My earliest was actually Aaron trying to figure out how many Modern Horizons there would be. It's my first memory. But I wasn't working on it at that point. So my earliest memory was Aaron telling me I was going to lead Modern Horizons 3. And then I just started working on it that day. Okay.

So what is the very first thing you did in trying to approach Modern Horizons 3? The first thing was to try and figure out actually what is the set about? Are we doing nostalgia again? How much are we doing? Is it about supporting the modern constructed environment? How much of it is draftability? How much is supporting other things? Commander is more popular.

So that was the first thing. and then I went from there to making cards. My first task with making cards was actually to make one card, at least one card was each mechanic in Modern. Okay, do you remember how many mechanics roughly were in Modern? Oh wow, no I don't. I, my guess is like 100, 150. I'm not even sure how many are in modern. I think it was over 100. Yeah. Yeah, over 100. Okay. Okay. What was the easiest and what was the hardest?

Well, easiest is not a big question. What was the hardest one to make a card out of? The hardest one to make a card was, sorry, remember Devoid? Oh, Ripple. What would make a good Ripple card? So Ripple, just for the audience, Ripple is a mechanic from Cold Snap. When you play a Ripple card reveal, I think the top four cards of your library, and then if you hit another Ripple card, then you the top four cards of your library and then if you hit another ripple card Then you cast it, right? Yeah, and then it doesn't again, right and

Yeah um So the question is how do you do this? And not make it just oh you did it you win the game. Yeah And but make it so the first one, if you don't have the ripple effect, it's a card worth playing because if you think about it, imagine you're drafting, you have three of this in your deck. Uh, you're going to look at four cards. Uh, that's one 10th.

And hope to hit one of these Tuesday. Normally you're not going to hit, even if you've drafted three of these. So it has to be worth playing. And so what I came up with was something we the correct effect is to destroy a permanent and make a token. Yeah, that player, the controller of that permanent makes a token. Therefore, it's like, oh, I don't know if I want multiple now that I know have multiple, do I want to hit my

stuff or my opponent stuff? I what's the right thing? I do want know if I want multiple. Now that I know I have multiple, do I want to hit my stuff or my opponent's stuff? What's the right thing to do? I do want to stress to the audience, there is no Ripple card. Like Eric was trying to do all the mechanics. All the mechanics did not end up, many, many mechanics did, but not all the mechanics ended up in the set.

Not all the mechanics did because Ripple is so hard to make even one worthwhile card. It just didn't make the set at all. Yeah. Okay, so. The hardest ones to make are in some sense, the worst mechanics to try and make out of your set. They're just too hard to come up with anything useful.

So what did you learn making one card for every mechanic in modern? I mean, obviously you were doing that for a reason. So what did you learn from that experiment? Well, what I wanted to do was show them to Aaron and then show them to Michael Majors and see which ones did they like. What did they like about them and what did they not?

It's a way of generating feedback to me about what they like, how they see the set going. So I can focus on sort of a culling process. Okay, these ones just get all negative comments. These ones are like, oh, you know, I think that we wanna make this in standard. It's a nice card, but why don't we put in standard instead? And then find the stuff, which is delightful,

we can add to modern, and we wouldn't just have put in some other set anyway. Okay, so I know one of the things that you talked about is when you're making cards for modern it's not that you want to make the top tier decks even better, it's more about making the next layer decks possible, right? Right, so we collected a lot of, and what I was looking for was decks in the metagame that have under a 50% win rate. Because in very competitive environments, nothing can hold like a 60% win rate for long.

Either the format's broken, or everyone plays the decks that gang up on it. So what are the ones that are below 50% but people like to play anyway? They just enjoy the decks. This is what they want to do. It's not really a competitive thing, but maybe be fine if it were a competitive thing. So that was the sweet spot.

Decks people like to play, even though they aren't the ones that are going to win. Because if you give more to the winning decks, they become that 60% deck that warps the whole meta game. Okay, so you found a couple of things. Let's walk through some of the things you found. We'll start with energy. So energy was a mechanic that I introduced in Kaladesh Block, but really we had made a lot of other energy cards. All you had was stuff in the two sets, the two sets that were in the Kaladesh Block.

Right. And so that was definitely one which is like, okay, this is a pretty interesting mechanic. We're not even if we have it in standard, we're not going to get enough strength to get it up to modern necessarily. So we want to add some energy cards, make this a thing people can play modern, make it try and figure out what is the spot where it's like, oh, this is interesting and not just a one shot wonder where you cast this

one card and win the game. And then the other things to think about is what went wrong, energy kind of did not play correctly in standard in some important ways. And so what is it that we're trying to accomplish differently? And how is this different from ramp? And where does it belong? And we one of the elements we came up with was there should be a tempo element is very important to energy. That's what makes a different mana. Mana you produce each turn, it goes away at the end of the turn. And energy, it's not really fun when you hoard it for the big one turn kill, but it's fun when you spend it in little increments, which we knew the first time, but we got to see how it played in the real world and get a second shot at it, really.

things for the audience to understand is whenever you make a new resource that we have no experience with it's really hard understanding how to balance it just because Mano we have 30 years of experience to understand how Mano works and so it is challenging when you make a new resource. Yeah and if it's too weak and no one plays it you know that a dud. And if you go just a little bit too far, it can be, wow, this is just too strong. We need to ban cards. So yes, the seeing what people play with in the real world is very important. So did you guys envision decide what colors you wanted energy in or did that get more decided in set design? Oh no that was very early on talking with Michael Majors and Aaron Forsythe and we both agreed on the same colors or all three of

us agreed on uh Jessica was the fun spot for energy. So let's talk through I mean obviously energy historically has always had a lot of red and blue, but the choice of white versus green, I know that's something that the audience is talking about. Why white? Well, it has to do with the other deck that people really wanted, that showed up that people liked was more in the green ramp space. And energy and ramp both have this building resources feel and putting those both in green would make the set much harder to make work in limited it

would just be green too much about building up the resources so we decided to spread it out make white white, make it more about tempo. And yes, that is the major shift is green to white. And the other thing we talked about tempo. Like one of the things is the style of gameplay, the length of gameplay, you know, tempo just plays very differently than ramp. And so white, white is just a better tempo color than green is. Absolutely. Yeah. White says, look, I have this burst of time and I need to keep putting pressure on you

or win the game. Cause if we just sit around, big green is going to have more things that are higher on the mana curve. And once we reach the state of the game where green can cast all those things, it's just going to be a slow win. White can't top deck cards as powerful as that. Okay, well this seems like a good segue. So the other big theme that you discovered that was sort of a little bit below top tier was colorless mana.

Colorless mana, yeah. As a cost. Colorless mana as a cost. Right. So yeah. So talk about why, what excited you that and what did you want to do with it? So it's an exciting thing. People like playing with colorless mana.

It wasn't a great fit for standard when it wasn't standard. We want to put it somewhere. So that definitely makes it here because people both were playing it more than it was strong in modern and isn't working there and actually the first cards I put in were lands that you could stack to get a basic or you could tap it for colorless. We had that originally in Shards of Alara although they were a little weaker but that was oh why in Sh the Lores, why do you have a land that taps for colorless in the three color set? So I decided, aha, that's where this land belongs,

this set where you do want to tap it for colorless or sometimes get a basic. So those are actually the first things we put in to enable the whole colorless and how to blend it with other decks, which is important. You don't want a set where everyone's in their own lane and gets all their own cards. You want people to interact in the draft pool. So that was the first thing I put in. Okay, so what colors did you do the Audrazi theme in? Green and blue, well colorless of course,

but green and blue is where they are. Because green and blue is a really good red color pair. Yeah, it's a mold rifter variant. And, but it was just an uncommon mold rifter. It did not have, it was not an annihilator. And so, right, so little things like that get developed, of course, and it's like, oh, it's's cooler if it's actually a big Eldrazi with a Vogue, with Annihilator. So right, these things change, but there definitely were elements of the colorless and making your an enabler that made your spells cost less to drop your classic two minute two two. So, and the other thing we talked about a lot was which way do we wanna go, spawn or scions, which are more fun?

And so these were a lot of the initial discussions about Eldrazi. And where did you go in the Sawn versus Spion? Spawn. Okay, so... So, Sawns are interesting, being 1-1 units, so it's more interesting whether you sacrifice them or not, but they can make limited really dull where I just block, trade them off, and don't attack with them because they're too small but just

I trip my opponent by blocking and trading off creatures uh so we we decided to go with the spawn which are zero one which are zero one so you can chump block but you're not just going to say yeah i have so many of these things you can't attack with non-invasive creatures. I'll just trade tokens. Okay, so let's talk. Let's remove this year one. Yeah, okay. So let's talk. The third theme that you guys handed over, modal double-faced cards. So Modern Horizons 1 and 2 didn't have double-faced cards in them. We just didn't have them. So let's talk about how those got added in.

So double-faced cards have become an increasingly large part of Magic, so it made sense to put them in here. In fact, that's something which I was talking to Aaron about is, what do you think? We only want to do them so often is Modern Horizons. Is it on the table for that? And Modern Horizons 2 was a huge set, so he said everything's on the table. So I think there's a lot of untapped design space, and for cards which might be more decision intensive than we want in a standard set perhaps,

that this is for more modern horizons for more highly enfranchised players. So the added decisions of the modal card, which side he wants playing, almost two cards in one like the original split cards. That's why it also a way of reducing the amount of games where you either are mana flooded or too mana light to play a game to increase the play rate in limited. Which we always want a solution for, but in this set it's modal faced cards. Okay, so there are two ways you guys use the MDFCs. One is a cycle of legendary creatures

that turn into planeswalkers. I guess those are technically DFCs, not MDFCs. And then the other one are the land. So let's first talk about the planeswalkers. How did you decide to do the cycle of planeswalkers? That originally came from Aaron who really wanted to update some of the planeswalkers and he loved the planeswalkers and magic origins and so that was his suggestion that we should just do them here. That was actually his suggestion when I said I thought we should do modal faced cards even though of course these are not modal faced, they're double faced cards. Okay so and the other part of it is the land so I know you you were the lead for Zendikar Rising where they first showed up so why did you want those in the set? So it's interesting because

you're the one who handed... I don't know where... I did hand them off, yes. My team handed them off. ...the camera right... We did... my team made them and we handed them off, so yes. You did? Right, you handed them off to me. I did, I did. You're correct. But you're a big... I know you're a big fan. I know you're a big fan of them.

I'm a big fan of them. Uh, I remember working initially and I thought, oh, you know, you could put things here that I wouldn't normally play. That's really exciting. And so I like the fact that you're just limited just has too many games where you say, well, I kind of play 17 lands

because I just can't be banner short and get stuck at two for too long. But then in the late game, I just flood out. And so and to be mulligans. And so this is just a thing that I really love about them is it's pretty easy in the early game, you probably need lands. If you don't see a lot of other lands, just play this as a land in the late game. You draw it while you don't need more lands. Obviously, you play the other side and we keep interacting and having our game. So that's what I really like about them in the set as opposed to the individual designs. Which, right, that's another thing. Well, what

are you going to put on the other side? But then we talked about, are they more fun to be dual lens? More fun to be mono-colored lens? A lot of discussions there with Michael Matris about that. So what did you end up, what did you end up doing? I hated both. Okay. Okay, I'm gonna interview Michael. When I get to Michael, I guess I'll ask Michael those questions. Okay, so you got a lot of the big picture things.

You had energy, you had colorless mana, you had double-faced cards. What else do you think was important in sort of the vision you put together for this set? Well, I thought that having having cards that played in the nostalgia space where oh do you remember these cards and if you don't it's just a card design. But if you do, if you played, I've seen some of the older cards that this would reminisce and be like, oh, wow, that's cool that triggering those fond memories.

So one was. Had this idea of combining Winter Orb and Blood Moon, which were both famous not fun cards from the past. Winter Moon only let you untap one land per turn. Blood Moon, all your non-basics are mountains instead of what they were before and okay let's instead punish just the non-basics but untap one per turn and then hand that up to Michael Maters and see what does he do with this card. So the card basically just to reach the audience, the card is Winter Moon, cost two mana, it's an artifact,

players can untap more than one non-basic land during their untap step. And I think it made it as you hinted it over, I don't think they changed anything about it. Right, another was, so we have red elemental blast and blue elemental blast in alpha. They go all the way back. And so I decided to put in four more, bump it up to six, and see what happens.

I see. So you made the black elemental blast, the white elemental blast, the green elemental blast and the colorless elemental blast. Yes. Okay, one of those made it to print. What? I said one of those made it to print. One of those made it to print, yes. I just thought, I don't know which of these makes it to print. If you do the white, you have to do the black. I don't know which of these makes the print. If you do the white, you have to do the black. I don't know if you can make those two.

And then there are the other ones, which you can do one or the other. And I wasn't sure, so I just handed all four off. I know that Consul colors talked about them. And some of them were not in Color Pie was basically the recommendation from the Color Pie Consul colors. Well, I'm not sure red elemental blasts. Neither blue or red elemental blasts is in colors. They each do something they're not supposed to do. Is blue just destroying any red permanent? I don't know about that.

No, blue cannot destroy any red permit. Red cannot counter blue spells. Richard Garfield, we made Alpha, had this thing about how the enemy could use the enemy's powers against themselves or something but not very color pie friendly. Oh is that what it is? Yeah that was the flavor that like the idea that I'm harnessing my enemy's powers against them I think was the flavor. Green could have had a control magic that takes a blue creature. Well, maybe in theory. Oh, it did in Mirage. Oh, yeah.

I'm thinking about it. Okay, so let's talk. Let me tell them about Null Elemental Blast and we'll talk about this design. So Null Elemental Blast costs one colorless mana. It's an instant. Choose one. Counter target multicolored spell or destroy target multicolored permanent. Now the good thing is when you're playing in colorless space, you have a lot more options. The color pie is less defined in what you can do.

Right. This is the one which was thought, the most likely to get through. And you were correct. Right, because for the exact reason that, well, we haven't made rules as to what a purely colorless spell can or can't do. Yes. And picking on multicolor, it sounds pretty reasonable. So as a general rule, how do you guys handle making spells with colorless costs as far as what they could or couldn't do?

We guessed. We talked to other designers. We talked to members of the Council of Colors. Okay, just sort of... I mean, the one thing is we chose to tieas to the Eldrazi because modern horizon sets are nostalgic as we talked about earlier and that's who did it in the past. I do think in the future we will do Kalas matter somewhere where it's not Eldrazi tied is my guess, but not in modern horizons that's all about like, you know, flavoring it as

the past. Well, that was one of the other initial discussions with Aaron was, do we make new mechanics? Do we make, as opposed to nostalgia, do we just make new mechanics and like, oh, this is a good mechanic. What could imagine mechanic that was rejected from a standard legal set? Cause we just thought it was too complicated for standard,

liked it otherwise. what if we put that in modern horizon? Right? That's possible, but that's not what we're doing with this set. And another one was, what if we just make a new tribe all together a new type of all together? And the decision was, no, this we're really going nostalgia. So nostalgia is not a brand new title. So those were the two things we decided on this issue. So that's why we definitely stayed in modern horizons

in particular with altruism, the existing one. Yeah, one of the things, I mean, you and I had talked about that, I wrote an article, so we chatted before I wrote my article. And one thing you said to me that I thought was really interesting was you have to make a choice like you only get so much complexity we get more complexity than normal but you only get so much complexity and so either you get a smattering of all the old mechanics or

you get brand new complex new mechanics but you can't do both that's too much if you combine them together. Right right and so we are doing the smattering of old, which means we don't know maybe four, it'll be we're lower on that stuff. Let's make something new. Or we might go the other way and say, let's stick with this. But yes, we went with a smattering of old mechanics sticking with the idea that this is similar to, I mean they said time spiral, I really think future site is closer to the density than time spiral itself. Though it has an extra sheet, right, they're a reprint. So it's sort of time spiral, but really the complexity level is more akin to, right, to future site time spirals.

It's funny. So when Ethan and I, we did a hackathon where we were coming up with supplemental product ideas and Ethan and I both basically proposed what ended up being Modern Horizons, but Ethan pitched it as a new time spiral and I pitched it as a new future site. Oh very interesting whereas I had been in discussions with Ken Troup and Aaron about we had Modern Masters and the question was what about new cards and my thing was we need to get a new new format for cards to rotate into or to when they leave standard, you'll have a place to play them. Because as we add cards to modern, straight to modern, its power level will rise so much that that won't turn out as well. So we've been having discussions on the development side and the opposite end, which isn't what would the set be, but the idea of new to modern cards. Could we have that type of set?

Yeah, one of the things that I talk about, I did not work on Modern Horizons 3, but I did work on Modern Horizons 1. And one of the things, and I also worked on Time Spiral and FutureSight, that I call this design decadent design, just because a lot of times, we're very limited in what we can do. We only get access to so many mechanics and stuff. And that the Modern Horizons sets really,

you have access to so much stuff, more so than normal, that it's, from a designer standpoint, you feel like you're cheating because there's just so much stuff you can use. That's why the proper set to compare it to is FutureSight, which was the most decadent standard legal set of all time. It was too decadent for standards. Yeah, yeah.

That's the right answer, and the time-shroud people are a little off. Yeah, I remember, so FutureSight was my set. I remember at one point I realized that we almost had as many mechanics in FutureSight as had existed before FutureSight came out. We were only off by like a little bit. I think there were slightly more, but like that's a sign you have a lot of mechanics when you've just duplicated the number of mechanics in Magic.

Well, yeah, I think some of FutureSight, the individual cards were a little over the line. Although the one that I really thought was like, well, this is a bit much was actually Bridged From Below. Yeah, I made, I made, I made bridge from below at the last second. Like they were just finishing design and bridge from below and Aqua Meba I made like right before the set closed.

Oh my goodness. Yeah, literally it was like. Yeah, I used to have this question, which one of the answers was, Aqua was the thing was to order the three, magic had these three really strong one, you won one flyers at that point. Yeah. And I was like, uh, and at the time it was so cloud of fairies is the super free spell. Yeah. We was pretty free. Yeah. And the

the fairy and time spiral. The Spell Sprite is like a free counter. So yeah, those the funny thing to put in at the end. I guess that's how really crazy cards get through to get added at the last minute. Yeah, there's there's there's a lot of famous cards that broke things and they were just added too late. They missed the window where they would get checked. We were much more careful now. We don't tend to add things quite as last minute as we did once upon a time. Okay so Eric we're almost done here. I can see my desk. Any final thoughts on the making

of Modern Horizons 3? Well we put a lot into it, a lot changed afterwards, but a lot is still left. And I think this relates to your story of putting things in at the last minute, that we started off with way more cards that we handed over that could even make the set. So this is all the best of those plus all the things that came during play design and development and final design. So I think it's be great. Yeah, I'm very proud of it. Okay, well I want to thank you for being with us today Eric. It's always fun to talk with you. Great to talk with you too, Mark. And to everybody else, I'm now at my desk. So we know what that means. This is 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 all next time. Bye bye.