Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1148: Assassin's Creed with Corey Bowen

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Lead Designer Corey Bowen to talk about the design of Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin's Creed®.

I'm not pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition. So today we're talking Assassin's Creed and I had the lead designer Cory Lowen with us to talk all about it. Hey Cory. Hey Mark, how's it going? Okay so let's go back to the very beginning. You were told you were going to lead the design for Assassin's Creed. What is the first thing you did? Oh, man, Assassin's Creed, the first thing I did was look up how many games came out since I had last played in my childhood, essentially. I had last played around Assassin's Creed Brotherhood,

which I believe was near the original trilogy. And then since then, so many games have came out and there was so much more content to like devour and learn and absorb. So did you play a lot of Assassin's Creed in preparation? I did. I got like four to six, I forgot how many. I got a bunch of different titles from different eras

to play a little bit of. I think the games are they're so expansive and so big that I didn't finish all of them. I'm more like I started each of them to explore what was new, what was fresh, the core of the mechanics were essentially play them for a few hours each and then started doing other research as well after I felt like I could take away what I thought the main feel of the games were.

Okay, so when you and I have talked about this and you broke down the design into three qualities that you thought were the essential qualities of Assassin's Creed. So the three things you said that Assassin's Creed are about assassins, about history, and about movement or parkour. So we're going to talk about each of the three of them today. So let's start with assassins because other than Creed, what is Assassin's Creed about? Yeah, I mean, Assassin's Creed at its core is you play as assassins throughout moments in time, and you're doing a lot of stealth action gameplay.

You're taking people out in a stealthy way or in a front way, whatever style you want. But in every game, you're playing as a different character who is part of this secret order of assassins against a different secret order often. So, hey, the game's about assassinations. We have assassins in Magic, so we know what we think they do in Magic, typically destroying creatures. Yeah, I guess that's where we're headed. magic so we know what we think they do in magic typically destroying creatures.

Yeah I guess that's where we're where we're headed. Okay so you knew you wanted to capture assassins so right the first thing you looked at was assassin typal so how did you approach assassin typal? Yeah I mean it's tricky so when I got the file handed to me there was a little bit of like a pre-vision work where there was a small team that worked on a small sprint to explore what colors things could be and if it could match up to a set well and it was so interesting they said okay this is Assassin's Creed the assassins are red black protagonists and the and the antagonists will be the Templars, which are like a blue and white antagonist. And so the first thing that I sat down with

is looking at all these assassins and thinking about assassin title and thinking about what colors they would go into and trying to figure out where the different spread of protagonists and main characters would go towards and would they funnel in red, black or not. I think I ended up mostly like, some your like Assassin's Assassins your assassins that really care about assassins will will be in the Mardu colors. I do have a red black card that does very straightforward like give your

assassins plus two plus so. So there is a you know yes black, that's the Assassin's Assassin. There's also blue, black cards that care for Assassin's Matter. There's a whole mechanic that cares a little bit about Assassin's. There's a Mardi legend that cares about Assassin's Matter. But more than that, there are legends in all colors and a bunch of multicolor legends that are Assassin's. So not everything is Assassin's Matter, but certainly the red, black stuff leans that way a lot.

Okay, so... I mean, the one thing... whenever you're playing in Type 1, you have to look at historically what it is, and... Assassin's are pretty heavy black, right? There's not a lot of Assassin's historically that are outside of black. Oh, no. There's very, very few Assassin's in Magic the Gathering that aren't black and the ones like there's some red ones there really are but they're like means almost or they're just very goofy card with loose mechanical relevance. Even that the black assassins are like royal assassin which is a card that taps to destroy a tapped creature. There's just a bunch of assassins that are disconnected destroying stuff they don't have synergy with each other in current Magic. So this is more fabricating an assassin strategy for a larger format like commander almost

for the cards that we do happen to care about assassins. And there was also a point where I was quite happy to see Outlaws of Thunder Junction, one of the sets in the same year, create their mechanic, the Outlaw mechanic, which is a batching of several types, including assassins. So they would generate some Assassin's Matter cards as a collateral and make some assassins along the way. And in addition to that, when Murders of Markov Manor, hold on. Is it Karloff? Sorry. murders of Karloff manner was set on a rabbinica. And there was a bunch of detectives and killings going on. So I knew they would

have a little of assassin and actually towards the end of that design team towards the end of that design sprints, I had put in some notes to try to get some of their cards turned into assassins because I wanted a little bit more back support for Assassin's Creed. Oh, and another thing that happened is the disguise and cloak mechanic showed up in, and then you put that on a couple of assassins.

I think there's three disguise cards and one cloak card, I think. Oh yeah, totally. Like, MK was using, you know, this pseudo-morph mechanic. And at the time it was called cloak and bug cloak instead of disguise and cloak. But in general, it felt really resonant with what you're doing a lot in the game, because

the game isn't just about not being in or not being seen, but a lot of the way that you maneuver through crowds is like you're walking amongst the crowd and you're hiding in plain sight and then maybe you suddenly reveal yourself and kill a guy. So there was a little bit of a labor synergy and borrowing disguise for Assassin's Creed to make a little bit of the Assassin's feel more resonant in that way. Oh, another thing for the audience, just so they understand,

we have to make sets that are other people's properties, like UB sets. We have a larger time to make them because we have to loop in our partner and stuff. So even though Assassin's Creed is coming out after Murderous Carl of Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction, I believe you designed it actually before both of those were even, like, you finished,

pseudo finished, before they, you know, you were ahead of them, essentially. Yeah, whenever we do universes beyond our pipelines are different mostly because the art is very different just that whole behind the scenes process is very different. I don't remember exactly but I do remember being fairly furnished up on ACR when I was looking at MKM and saying hey you know what know what? This could be an assassin. You should make this one an assassin, please. It would help me out. Okay, so we talked assassins. Let's go to part two. History. So one of the core things of the game is, well, talk about why history is so important.

Yeah, so in every game, kind of the conceit of the game is that you're using some sort of mod, like you are actually playing as a character in the modern day Who is using a piece of technology to revisit the memories of assassins? So when you're playing as assassin you're actually playing as a character who is reliving the memories of assassin and kind of touring That old historical world and every game has a different historical setting, whether it be Renaissance Italy or colonial America or like a Greco-Roman and Greece kind of adventure or an Egyptian adventure. They all kind of tour these different historical areas. And what you'll find is a lot of the Assassin's Creed fan base, even if you don't like the assassins or don't like the through

line narrative throughout the games, there's so much love and focus on this enjoyment of playing in these historically recreated areas. It's like I'm using Greece as a playground. Renaissance Italy is my playground. I'm running around it. I'm hiding among it. I'm within the people. This is the architecture I want to see that reminds me of that kind of historical era. So history is such a huge theme in the narrative, but also if you don't care about the narrative at all, it is such a draw to so many players. I believe there are some games that even have certain modes or DLC that just lets you explore

the area. There's no combat, no fights or whatever. It's almost like a museum mode. I believe that is true. I could be wrong. So please don't hurt me, internet. But regardless, history is huge. History is a huge, huge factor in this game for so many reasons. And Ubisoft really tries hard to make sure

they approach history respectfully from their end and get it correct, even, they're gonna interpret stuff differently It's not like these assassins really existed But I'm talking to them. They do try Yeah, the interesting thing to me is that uh Trying to solve the problem you hit about something we had to solve in a different problem when we made Dominaria something we had to solve in a different problem. When we made Dominaria, one of our challenges of doing Dominaria, the set Dominaria, was magic. Dominaria did the setting for Magic

for like 10 years, so there were like 40 sets or something that were set on Dominaria. But in the new era, we like planes that have a feel, like it's about something. And so we were trying to figure out what is Dominary about, and we decided it was about history, just because so much stuff had happened there, both within the world and in magic. So it's interesting that I thought you made use of some of our tools of following history. Yeah, what's actually kind of interesting about using the Historic Mechan mechanic and borrowing from Dominaria is that when I joined as an intern in the summer of 2017, like my first project was working on the Dominaria planeswalker decks which are like our intro new player starter decks. So almost my first taste of even working within Magic was

designing new players using the historic mechanic and the blue and white to fairy deck, which wanted a little historic emphasis. There's this kind of a fun idea of like, oh, borrow from, you know, my first experience ever working on magic, I'll take that, I'll bring historic in. So, remember that historic also works really well for this kind of universe is beyond product, and this universe specifically, where I'm going to make a bunch of, you know, assassin protagonists, they're going to be legendary creatures, I'm going to make a bunch of tools and weapons and, and mythical artifacts that you're hunting for in the games. And those

are going to be artifacts. I'm going to make a cycle of sagas that represent story moments from this rich universe. Those, you know, they're stories, they're sagas. So very naturally, we're gonna have a lot of stuff within the historic batch already. So it was felt really, really lucky to say, Hey, this is the perfect word for this universe, historic, that feeling of history. And it's such a so happens to be that like 80% of the set is historic.

And it just so happens to be that 80% of the set is historic. Yeah, that works out well. So is there anything you did that was any tweaks on historic? Did you do anything that was sort of new? I don't know if we went very new in terms of tweaking historic. I think it's a little hard to tweak a bashing mechanic yeah you could like make a mechanic that refers to historic stuff but then you can get like reminder text within a reminder text issues like to avoid I thought the most important thing to me about historic was getting history represented on cards in a very straightforward way. So using the historic word made me really happy. And I think there's a lot of really cool cards that

reference historic. So I'm quite happy. So let's talk about one of the most controversial things that you did in design is you made card of actual historical figures. Let's talk about that. Yes. Oh, that's a great point, Mark. Yeah, it was so interesting. At the time, Dr. Who Commander was being worked on and Fallout Commander was being worked on

and ACR Assassin's Creed was asking this question of hey, Leonardo da Vinci is quite a big character in the trilogy, the original SES trilogy. Oh, hey, you know, like, in Black Flag, you're playing with all of these pirates in Origins, the Egyptian one, you're meeting Cleopatra, should we make these cards? Is that ethical? Is that weird for magic? Do we make cards that reference

real world historic characters? And me and my creative lead, Lauren Bond, we were working on this and she kind of took the charge of, on the creative side, discussing should we do this? Is there a safe way to do this? Is there pitfalls? Is there problems? You know, do we want to be depicting historical figures that we don't think were so well regarded in history, for example, or maybe have, you know, committed actions that we

don't really want to represent on a magic card. So we ended up choosing a few characters we really enjoy. We have Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, basically, I mentioned a bunch of them. Leonardo da Vinci, it's really cool. It's a great character. We have a Cleopatra card, it's a great card. We have a Socrates card, the Greek philosopher Socrates.

That one's quite cool. And then there's, for the pirates, we have a combo card of Mary Reed and Anne Bonny, which were two real-life woman pirates who appear in Black Black May appear as a duo in one card here. And then we have a serialized version of these cards where they're in their native tongue. So Leonardo da Vinci is in Italian, Socrates is in Greek. Margarita and bunny are still in English, but it's still serialized. And then Cleopatra, which would think is an Egyptian. But if you know

Cleopatra, you know that it is in Greek her native tongue. And the flavor text is Egyptian hieroglyphics to reference her rule of the Potomac Empire, which I just love. The hieroglyphics make me laugh so much. I thought that we would just not be able to do them at all and getting them on the flavor text made me so excited. Yeah, one of the things that I find interesting behind the scenes is,

I mean, I think of all the things for the set, this is the one that probably caused the most discussion within R&D. Yeah, it was curious. And I referenced Doctor Who and Fallout because I think those are franchises that play a little with history as well. So it was all relevant to everyone

on what kind of things we're showing. But I think once we pulled the trigger at the ACR, we ended up being really happy with their execution. Yeah, Doctor Who shows historical figures on cards but doesn't make historical figures creature. There's no legendary Doctor Who shows historical figures on cards but doesn't make historical figures creatures. There's no legendary creatures that are historical figures. I was a fan of it. I mean, I think we drew some lines. I think all these characters are in the ancient past and right mostly characters that people generally like, you know. So anyway, okay, that is history. Now

let's get to the third component that we just don't talk about enough in Magic, parkour, or flash movement. So why is that important? Yeah, I mean, and this goes towards why I think playing, refreshing, at least refreshing my memory on playing these games was so important. Like, I can read a million wiki pages on the lore of these characters, but when you sit down and you play a lot of these games, especially in the earlier games, you'll notice how much of the core experience of this self-action adventure RPG is moving around,

parkouring off of walls, up ceilings, past roofs, between alleys, evading guards, you know, just hiring mercenaries to distract. There's so much movement and evasion and exploration, especially within these games. And that, I believe is like, you know, a huge reason why the franchise took off to begin with. And I knew it was really important to capture that. It's such a difference in making a video game based University of Beyond set where you really have to step back and think about what is the core gameplay of the game and how are we expressing that. So I knew I needed something that felt like you were moving or

kind of represented movement in a sense that was apart from just like, oh, hey, every card of the set has an evasive ability. Like is that, is that gonna cut it or should we try something else? And I also really needed a good flavorful kind of thing to do on instance and sorceries. What were the instance of sorcery in the set representing? Are they all going to be murdering, or what are we representing? So we came up with a free running mechanic, which is borrowing a little bit of technology

from Prowl back in kind of the Lorwin Shadowmore-ish block. I don't remember which one. If you want, I'm on it. I made Prowl, so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. I did do Prowl. So we can talk about the design of Prowl, and then we can segue into design of free running. Please.

So the shtick at the time, Lorwin was a typo set. Lorwin cared about like species and then Morin kind of cared about classes, right? And so we were trying to make mechanics out of classes and Prowl was my solution to what are rogues do. And so I'm like, well, they're sneaky. And so basically Prowl was my solution to what are rogues do and so I'm like well they're sneaky and so so basically Prowl says that you get I guess you get a reduction if you hit them with a rogue well the way Prowl worked is if the

creature that has this ability and so every creature that had it was a rogue but some of them were other creature types too so but anyway it it basically said I care about you hitting things because that's what rogues do. But that's where Prowl came from. So how do we adapt it? How does free running? Yeah, and for what it's worth, as a Magic fan,

I have always and do still love rogues. I've always loved rogue mechanics and synergies. So I've always been a fan of Prowl in that sense. And when we even made the Zenekar Rising Commander decks, I like made a new Prowl card, because I you know, I really enjoyed Prowl. I was like, I want to make Prowl stuff. That being said in Assassin's Creed, yeah, you know, Prowl to me felt like if my creature is going from my battlefield, and it is moving past all of your creatures, it is hitting you to

me that was the magic equivalent of movements and any you know, evasion of senses my creature is attacking and is getting to you and rewarding you for that feels like I am flourishing my movements by the prowl spell that's like backflip for example, or free running slash power spell I'm just using example of the type of mechanic. Like if I had a car that's like back flip for example or free running slash possible I'm just using example the type of mechanic like if I had a card that's like called back flip and it's like oh if I hit you it's cheaper because that means I'm in movement like

that kind of feels like maybe I'm jumping off and doing a backflip there's no card called backflip so sorry everyone I'm just joking but there is a bunch of free running spells that represent these actions you're doing in a movement you know you can while a coin moving around you can distract guards with that represent these actions you're doing in a movement. You can allow Parcoil to move around, you can distract guards with a certain spell, or you can evade suspicions, or you can do some petty theft.

Escape protection. Yeah, escape protection. There's all these little things that represent more game actions expressed through free-running, which is very interesting. And I like that a lot. There's also this one card. It's like viewpoint synchronization. It's a green free running card. And it captures this moment that you do in a lot of Assassin's Free games, where you climb a tall tower and you like, you interact with the Vista and it shows you this huge view of the surrounding area that's actually like the mechanism to

add that area to your mini map so as you explore you want to climb these Vistas and then do these huge viewings which I thought was a very unique thing that felt like a free running payoff made sense for. The other thing about free running is, I guess I didn't fully explain what it is. It's an alternate cost, a lot like Prowl, for instance, or for any spell, but it's mostly the sorcery of the set. So the alternate cost for spells where you can pay the free running cost to cast the spell if an assassin or your commander dealt combat damage to your opponent this turn. So if my assassin connects or my commander connects, I can cast this spell for an often cheaper

cost. And they're talking a lot about how assassins matter. We also mentioned earlier how there's not that many historical assassins or assassin synergies in Magic the Gathering, which is, you know, leans towards why we've added Or Commander there. Or Commander does two things. One, it broadens these cards' gameplay to not be so siloed within just assassin stuff matters. You know, we talked about what if it's legendary, what if it's this, what if it's that. But really we're interested in how to broaden this cards for larger formats like Commander. And we think designing a little bit more towards Commander was a positive thing. There's also this idea that incentivizing Commanders to get into combat more often

was a fun thing to do in Commander, which is often a slower or more dirtily game. So incentivizing combat in Commander is great. Also, we felt that commanders, in a sense, in that format, feel like your main character. In Assassin's Creed, you are, your main character is assassin and you're moving around, you're doing as a courier. And so in Commander, your main character is your commander. And so it felt cool to justify your main character, your commander doing acrobatic movements in a sense.

So that's free running. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Okay, so I wanna talk about something that you mentioned. I just wanna sort of get in a larger discussion this is. So there's different kinds of universes beyond sets. Some universes beyond sets are based on a more narrative thing, right? That it's a story. But when you base it on a game, especially a video game, that there is a lot of how you experience a video game is very different than how you experience a book or a movie or a TV show.

And it's a lot more like most of those you're more passive like it's happening and you're watching them. But in a video game you're not just watching like you're experiencing it. And so there's this interesting idea of how do we make it such that the playing of magic mirrors some aspect of the playing of the video game. And that's one thing that I found very fascinating in this is like how much you did it just sort of like make it. Yeah, you're playing a game of magic, but it it's reminiscent of playing a game of Assassin's Creed.

Yeah, and I think the sorry, do you want me to expand on that? I think the the free running stuff is the main way that they're doing that But you know when you're when you're casting free running cards there again, they're referencing kind of actions and text You'll see within the game. Oh, there's even a card. That's like Restart sequence. Let me look this card up actually. It's a black free running card that is a zombified I can read it restart sequence three in a black sorcery actually. It's a black free-running card that is a zombified. Yes, I can read it. Restart Sequence, three in a black, Sorcery, free-running one in a black, return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield.

Right, so this is a pretty straightforward reanimation spell, but this depicts the part of the game where if you die, you restart from a checkpoint. And in the narrative conceit of the game, where I said you're a modern character within a machine reliving the memories. It's kind of funny, it's almost like a video game within a video game. Within the game, this is like, oh, I'm restarting from my checkpoint. But actually, you know, it's the character game restarting from a certain memory points in time, but it feels very resonant towards video

games to restart from a check points and have that mean I'm back to life again, my characters back. So there's some of that of thinking of literal actions and visceral stuff. I like to compare it to Lord of the Rings set as an example of a set that's very focused on a story. It is a storyline, you want to reference the characters, want to reference the story beats, what's going on. And when. It is a storyline, you wanna reference the characters, wanna reference the story beats, what's going on.

And when we're doing Assassin's Creed, not only is it a bunch of different stories, so we have to kind of get the cream of the crop going on. But when I'm reading Lord of the Rings, I'm not performing visceral actions, I'm not dodging stuff. When I'm playing Assassin's Creed, you know, archers that are on rooftops don't matter for the story. But

as a player, those archers are pinging me a bunch and they're they have such a big impact on my gameplay and not like zero impact on the narrative, like rooftop archers, but they have such a huge impact in the game that we made a card called, like, Palazzo Archers or something like that, which is a green card. Yeah, Palazzo Archers, two in a green,

two, three, human archer, reach. Whenever a creature with flying attacks, you or a planeswalker you control, Palazzo Archers deals damage equal to its power to that creature. Right, and this is a card that, if you've played a lot of Assassin's Creed, you've been hit by these really annoying archers from afar, but again, they serve no purpose in that narrative

structure. If there were just some archers hanging out in LTR, maybe we'd have made them, maybe we wouldn't, it wasn't super important, but when we're borrowing from a video game gameplay, you can think more about what are the experiences of the player that aren't necessarily the experiences of the protagonist in a narrative. So did you make a list, like at some point early on, to say, here's all the game actions that I want to make sure that we reference? In my research, I did kind of make a list of stuff

that I thought would be important. It's tricky because it is such a large franchise that the gameplay and the systems and the game systems will differ slightly from game to game. So you want to make sure you're picking up stuff that are iconic, that you think people care about, maybe waiting towards the games that were more popular, which is generally the original trilogy

and some of the later games. So there's some give and take on trying to have your poll sign Hey, what game mechanics are really representative of the whole series and what game mechanics are kind of just in one sliver of a game. But we did make, you know, obviously, we took notes a lot of the card names for free running cards will reference stuff that happens in many of the games. And there are some cards throughout the set

that might also reference certain mechanics or narrative conceits. Okay, well we're almost out of time today. So any final thoughts on the making of Assassin's Creed now that your baby's finally gonna come out? My baby's finally gonna come out. My baby's finally gonna come out. I'll say that something we didn't reference, this is our first set that, maybe not the first,

this is a set that has no draftable game experience or no draft, it's kind of a standalone set. We approached the set with a big thought of, let's experiment with this. If we have a set that's not optimized for draft, how can we optimize it for opening a booster and having a lot of fun and telling a story being very evocative. So I hope that really translates well. It's a very interesting product. I'm really proud of a lot of the cards. So I hope people enjoy it.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Kari, and talking with us. Thank you so much, Mark, appreciate it. But to everybody else, I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.