Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1151: Blue Sky Design

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the early portion of design where the sky is the limit.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time brother drive to work. Okay so I like talking about design in my podcast. So I'm going to talk about a type of design that I haven't dedicated a whole podcast to. What we call blue sky design. Okay so the idea essentially the way to think of it is design is a long process. At the very beginning, it's very open-ended, you can do what you want. That's blue sky, we'll get to that in a second. But as the design progresses, it's more about figuring out what you're missing and filling in holes.

There's a lot of what we call prescriptive design, meaning that I'm designing to fit the needs of the set. But early on, in the early days, when nothing is yet designed. So what blue sky design means, and this isn't a term we invented, it's a design term, the idea that anything's possible. That's why it's blue sky.

That I, everything, you know, and so I wanna talk a bit today about blue sky. I'll give some examples of blue sky design. So one of the things as a designer, there are different skill sets that people have as a designer. Some designers are very good at like matching the needs of the set. Oh, we need a certain kind of mechanic.

Well, tell me the parameters and I'll make you the mechanic. Or we're trying to capture a certain flavor. I'll make cards that capture that flavor. and there's a lot of really important design that is Adapting to what you need. In fact, the majority of design is mostly in that camp Oh, we need a blue uncommon and these are the themes of our sets like a lot of design is crafting to what you need But today Today is the joyous thing. So the fun

thing about Blue Sky is the idea that really nothing is off limits. The tenets of Blue Sky design is let's push boundaries, let's try everything. And the idea essentially in Blue Sky is there you try to limit your rules There are a lot of things that down the road we have to worry about That when I make you know when I'm in vision design, and I'm making something hey Set design has to work with that play design has to balance it the rules have to make it work in the rules Editing has to make templating that work digital have to turn it work in the rules. Editing has to make templatings that work. Digital has to turn it into a digital form.

Organized play has to make tournaments out of it. That there's a lot of people down the road that you have to service to make sure that they're getting what they need. And so a lot of design is designing to parameters. That is a lot of design. But it is important that there comes a point in design, it normally comes very early, where you look, you don't feel restricted by what

you have to do. Instead, look at what you could do. Now let me explain a couple things about the premises of blue sky design. Number one is don't self edit. That it's very easy when you're doing something going well I know we can't do that or oh I know that will cause problems. The idea of blue sky design is no limits. Whatever you can think of try to do that and here's why. There's a couple reasons. One is sometimes there's things like the reason self editing is problematic is sometimes you self edit in a place you don't have to. Sometimes you have an idea that seems out there, but you know what?

It works. Or, and this is the other real big thing on blue sky design is what we call stepping stones. Sometimes I have an idea that is out there and fun, but it leads me to a path that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. That it leads me to a mechanic or something that sometimes the idea you come up with is unto itself doesn't work, but it is a stepping stone to ideas that do work. And so a lot of times the reason that blue sky is important is that if you didn't ask yourself the weird and wild questions, you might not get to places because some of the

there's some very cool design and magic I'll talk about today where, hey, we push boundaries and it turned out that pushing boundaries worked and people liked it. And that it is very easy when you design, especially when you're 30 years in to just go, well, we know what we can do. Let's stay within the realms of what we know we can do. And that's the exciting thing about Blue Sky. The exciting thing about Blue Sky is that it really lets you push in way.

And so let me give some examples. I guess me talking about it is not as good as giving examples. So I want to start with probably the most blue sky series we got, the unsets. And the reason for that is, you know, there's a lot of things that we have to follow that unsets, not so much. If it doesn't work in the rules exactly, that's okay. If it's not templateable, we can make up templates. Like there's a lot of things and unsets aren't played

in tournaments so there's not balance issues. Like it has some freedoms that a lot of other sets don't have and there is a mindset to making un cards that allow us to push in directions that make it a little bit freer. Now be aware blue sky can happen in any part of it doesn't just happen in unsets. I'm just gonna start with un, because I think un is the place where I first started pushing boundaries, and that then encouraged me to push boundaries in more other places.

My example, in unglued, the nature of unglued was boundary pushing. I wanted to do things that we had never done before. And so part of doing that was asking questions about, okay, what can we do? So I remember at one point, I was really interested in the idea of from a printing standpoint,

from a graphic design standpoint, what was possible? So I had a meeting with the graphic designers. Normally I, the designer, do not meet with graphic designers unless we're very far in, like we're trying to solve a problem and we have to solve the problem. But normally I don't talk to them, especially the people that do the printing. That's a ways down the road. But I was really interested in what can we do? Like what does Magic not do but we can do from a printing standpoint? So one of the things they explained to me was cards appear together on a sheet and you actually could have things crisscross between cards. For example, you could have things be on one card and then bleed to a different card.

The example there is unglued. We had a card where there was a card called free for all where there was pink elephants and leprechauns fighting. And one of the leprechauns gets knocked off the card. So you see the bottom half of his body in free for all. But then he's knocked into another card which is a card called once more with feeling and and so if you ever saw once more feeling there's like there's a leprechaun in it. He's been knocked off his other card and what the printing showed me was that if two cards are next to each other they can overlap in their art. The bigger

one the bigger thing that got me to was we made a card called BFM. And the idea of BFM that was so big, it was 99.99, that it took up two cards. And that it had a left side and a right side. In order to cast it, you'd have both versions in your hand. And only then, it cost 15 black black mana only then could you cast it?

BfM was the number one In our guidebooks or in our surveys our market research Was the number one let's say card, but it's two cards cards in the set And the idea was there was something really compelling about the idea of a card so big it was two cards and the only reason I got there was because I was just trying to push boundaries and BFM would actually have a lot of input. When I did unglued to the set that didn't get made I did the reverse of BFM. I said well, what if it's fun if it's fun to have one card on you know One card spread between two cards. What if you had two little cards on one card?

It was the creation of split cards and I was just trying once again Split cards came about because I was trying to sort of push boundaries and I was pushing boundaries in the visuals. So the interesting thing is, Unglued 2 doesn't happen, but we're making Invasion and I really like Split Cards. I thought they looked really cool. So I go to Bill, who's the lead of Invasion, I go, look Bill, I know this is a little weird, but it's because what we had done on split cards was we've made them two different colors

So it's red and green or it's white and blue and the idea was in at the time in gold cards If you did a multi-color card you were doing both colors I'll get the hybrid in a second, but this is pre-hybrid So the idea of or it wasn't a thing at all. And one of the neat things about the split cards was if I was playing red, I could play my red green split card. If I was playing green, I could play my red green split card. But if I was playing red and green, wow, you know, and it allows me to have more functioning.

Anyway, I convinced Bill to put it in. And there's a long story. I've done a whole podcast and split cards And it was not Like I remember when we started development Henry Stern was the lead developer of invasion He wanted to kill them day one before we'd even played with them and kind of what I said was hey Henry There's a lot of ways we can lay this out I knew the right way was the way I did it.

But there's a lot of ways we can make this look like a more normal Magic card if we need to. Let's just play with them. Let's just see, you know, and so that's one of the big tenets of Blue Sky is make ideas, but then experience the ideas, play with the ideas. It's so easy to sort of kill something because it feels like magic in some level chooses to do things. And then at some point it feels like that's a rule. Well, this is how magic cards look.

Magic cards have to look like this. And the answer is, well, this is how they've looked up to now. And the thing that BFM and unglued in a lot of ways did is said, you know what? We have a lot more freedom in how cards get laid out. We're less limited. And that BFM, like I said, led to split cards. And I think split cards, when split cards got made an invasion, it was this really bold

statement that we can make things look different. Hey, it's a magic card. It works like a magic card. it works like a magic card, it actually was a very fun magic card, split cards are quite fun, choices are fun, but it really made people rethink. And every time, this is the awesomeness of blue sky. Once you realize you can do something,

it just opens up avenues, right? For example, BFM being made and the other sort of things that I'm glued changed our thought process of how frames could look and that led to split cards BFM also was a precursor to meld you know that once you have in your like the cool thing about blue sky is once you break a paradigm once you say, hey, this isn't the way we have to do it, it opens up floodgates. So my next example will be an invasion, an Innishrad.

So in Innishrad, very early on in exploratory, I'm sorry, notatory, because exploratory did exist, early vision. Exploratory wasn't a thing yet. We had decided very early on that monsters were important to the horror genre. The whole idea of Innistrad was we're doing the horror genre. And like I said, as with any design, we start by, we can do do anything What do we want to do and so once we got to monsters? We really settled on four monsters made mainly which was vampires zombies ghosts or spirits and

Werewolves and the cool thing about that and the reason if it got the core really well is all four of those were once human about that and the reason it got the core really well is all four of those were once human. They were monsters that began as a human and became a monster. And there's this cool theme that we found of that the humans in some level are fighting monsters of their own, you know, like the people that are fighting were once themselves, were once human. So anyway, we had made a lot of vampires, we made a lot of zombies, we made a lot of spirits, but we hadn't made a lot of werewolves.

In fact, at the time of Innistrad, there were of zombies, we made a lot of spirits, but we hadn't made a lot of werewolves. In fact, at the time of Innistrad, there were three werewolves in the existence of magic and all of them sucked. None of them were remotely interesting. They were just, I mean, they were weak. Anyway, they had not really captured a werewolf. So I said to my team, okay, we can do anything. Blue sky, I want wanna capture werewolves.

And the only thing I said is, you know, the only parameter, sometimes blue skies, you want a little bit of parameter, you don't want too much parameter. I said they're werewolves and the essence of a werewolf is it's a human that turns into a werewolf. We wanna capture that somehow, cause that's the essence of a werewolf.

Okay, we can do anything we want. And the neat thing there is, people went to very different places. One person, Tom Lappili, said, okay, well, I'm working on a whole other game. I'm working on a game, Duel Masters, that we make for Japan. Duel Masters did something that Magic's never done. But Duel Masters did it. Okay, could Magic do it?

And that idea was double-faced cards. Cards that had, like, up until then, you that had like up until then you had a magic front face And you had magic back face and that's just the way things had been But the the joy of blue sky is saying well, okay And the once again, we weren't worried about should we it was more could we and? So and we tried a bunch of different things that wasn't the only thing we tried. We tried other stuff. But the double Fizz cards were so compelling. So much so that you know, before design was even done, this is in the days of design development,

I went to whoever my boss was. It was Randy or Aaron, I'm not sure at the time who it was. And I said to them, this is awesome. I know it is radical. I know it is the kind of thing. And one of the things about when you push paradigms, when you try to do something, there is resistance. And the reason for that is, hey, a lot of people take that as a rule. And that's why you do blue sky because, I mean, double face cards are a great example

where there was a lot of internal pushback against doing double face cards. But, I think it was Aaron, Aaron was like, hey, we're in, this is cool. You know, I had really gone and pitched and I said, this is awesome. This is awesome. You know, it is going to be something players will love we got to do it and I got buy-in and and even when it came out it was controversial when it came out there's probably players still today like I don't like those double face cards but it did something it really pushed boundaries in a cool way so much so that double-faced cards

have become a major tool. We don't use them every set, but there are a lot of sets that use double-faced cards because the idea that I have two different faces, that I have two different pieces of art, that I have two different names, that I can do transitional things, I can do modal things, you know.

And when we did double-faced cards, we did them in one execution was transforming but we said hey there's more than that we did modal double face cards like that it really was something where once people got used to the idea of it existing yeah at first it was a little you had to push past that it was just something exciting and it's double face cards have been a very very very deep pull for us. It's been something that's been very valuable to us. And that's another thing about Blue Sky is we mess with frames and learn that we can change frames.

Hey, that's something we now can do. And the more we do it, the more willing the audience is to accept it, because the more it just is part of the game. You know, we do double-face and it's something that at the time we hadn't done, but it becomes this tool and becomes a valuable tool that we can do new things we can never do before. Another example, I will use original Ravnica, which was, I was very, one of the things about Blue Sky is it's really good to question ideas. And so when we were, when I was, I was in like early, early rap, because it was before, before official design started, exploratory wasn't a thing yet. So I was kind of doing my own little mini exploratory.

And one of the things I did is I asked myself the question, what could multicolor do that is not doing? That if we were going to do multicolor set, what haven't we done with multicolor yet? And it was the idea of the exploration of multicolor of just saying, what haven't we done? We're doing multicolor again. Ravnica was the second block that was themed multicolor because Invasion was the first. And I really, I just, I just, the reason I was doing it, my little blue sky design was I just wanted to ask myself a larger question, which is

what haven't we done? What could we do? Like what multicolor meant something, but I wanted to push the boundaries of multicolor. What else could multicolor be? And so that's where hybrid came from. And once again, I've done podcasts on this. Really the idea was, I was fascinated by, is that multicolor meant that you had more than one color. But it didn't mean you had to have both colors.

That is just the truth, that's how we had done it. And so I really got into the idea of or, then and. Now it's interesting now that I tell this, I don't know how much split cards have gotten in my psyche. Split cards were an interesting example of or very early on. And maybe when I made hybrid, I was not thinking split cards. It's not that split cards led me, but one of the fun things about doing podcasts like this

is I can start connecting things. And I think there's something in my brain that split cards probably did that I hadn't quite but the, that was the first introduction of or, um, in multicolor. And the interesting thing about hybrid was, uh, it's a little bit different. So we did double face cards for the first time. There was like, you can't do this. This is your breaking things that shouldn't be broken. But when I did a hybrid the first time,

the response I got was more of like, yeah, I guess you could do that. I don't know why. I don't know why you'd want to. They're very lackadaisical about it and that it was sort of like, okay. And like one of the things that I'm good at, the reason I'm head designer is I'm good at potential,

I'm good at seeing potential. And I was so excited because even though I didn't understand all of the ramifications of what hybrid meant, I knew that it was a push in a different direction. And what it turned out was hybrid turned about to be a very valuable tool. And the biggest place that the valuable tool is, there are times, um,

limited or, uh, here's a classic example. We had to solve was, um, Oh, okay. Okay. I'll have this. I will tell about a different blue sky design and I will come back to hybrid in the story of blue sky. I'm going to talk about the blue sky design, which was the very first ever exploratory design. We invented exploratory design to do this blue sky research, which was Tarkir block. So I knew one thing going into Tarkir block. So Bill had said that he wanted every other year for with starting off with new mechanics. So like in Rise of the Odrazi, it was completely separate from Zendikar, brand new mechanics, no overlap.

It was still on Zendikar and followed some of the story of Zendikar, but it was sort of brand new mechanics. And then in Anishinbe we did, we did Avacyn restored where we carried over on dying and the monster typo was there. Like we carried over some stuff, but it had a bunch of new mechanics. So on Tarkir, so, and then we had done, returned to Ravnica, we did five, five, ten, which it was a shake up from the four, four, three. We'd done the first time we'd done Ravnica. But anyway, we got to tons of content arc here. So all that was told to me is we were doing the large set, small set, large set.

Large set would have different mechanics from the first large set. So I had an idea. Just because we were trying different things, part of blocks is exploring. I said, here's what I would like to, I would like to try the following dynamic. What if you drafted the large set, when the small set came out, you drafted the small

set, that's how things normally work. But then when the third large set came out, you didn't draft the first set, but you did draft the second set. So the sets were A, B, C. It'd be A, A, A, A, B, C, C, B. So that you would draft that small set with both sets. So the reason, so and what happened, we had just done the Great Design of Search 2 and we had, so both Ian, not Ian, sorry, Ethan, Ethan Fleischer and Sean Main were both in their internship, you win an internship.

So both of them were internships. Both will later get hired full time. But anyway, I, and part of the greatest under charge too was world building. So both of them had shown some chops at world building. So I said, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start early, and I just want to brainstorm what this can be.

How do we do large, small, large, where the small drafts with both sets? And I wanted flavor that made sense. I wanted flavor like, wow, this makes sense. And so we started and essentially what it became was the first exploratory design. And it was very blue sky. I said to them, look, nothing is off the table. We can do anything. And we came up with a whole bunch of ideas. Maybe there's a war between two different worlds. Maybe you're traveling from one place to another place. We spitballed a lot of different ideas.

But in the end, the idea that sort of landed, anybody knows me, knows my love of time travel. The idea is what if there's a world in which the world is somehow, there's something about the world that is wrong, at least to the main character, that main character goes back in time, changes something, and then the present day is the last set, and it's something is fundamentally shifted about it. At the time, once again, it was blue sky, we didn't even worry about what the world was or what had changed. Just the idea that it's the present, it's the past, it's the alternate present.

And then, like, that idea was very out there. And as in all the ideas, there was some resistance. The creative team was not, or parts of the creative team were not very fond of doing a time travel story. They'd rather start to stay in the present. But it was very compelling and we thought that it was a neat way to use story in a way that the set could reinforce. And there was a lot of different moving pieces there. The funny thing is when we started it wasn't a wedge set. It wasn't even, I think we knew it might be a gold set.

I think we didn't know that. But it was, well, we knew we would use some gold. We didn't know how heavy gold would be. And a lot of the structure once we made it wedge, like the idea of it being wedge came out during design. the idea of it being dragons, although dragons happened pretty early. I think what happened was we went to Brady Donneruth and said, okay, well we want to do time travel and we want something fundamental to change about the world. So the idea we came up with was one of the themes we'd want to do for a long time was

dragons. We had done Scourge, which kind of cheaty had a dragon theme. Like, let's really do a dragon theme or we're not lying to you about there's dragons. There's like seven dragons. There's actually this is a set full dragon. And then it came up that there's a character, Sarkinvul, who loved dragons, but his world, the dragons had died off. We're like, okay, well, what if Sarkinvvault goes to his world which was Tarkir and then it's overrun by the cons ran it

That and that's how we got to factions Was we decided to do dragons dragons led to Tarkir Tarkir led us to cons cons led us to factions factions let us start to to Wedge to do do the multicolor. So anyway, that's the other thing that's really important is that when you blue sky things, that it just takes you to places and you do things you wouldn't normally do. So now I'll finish my story, the hybrid story.

So we ran into an interesting problem we We had to solve in fate were forged That's the middle set which is favor force is drafted with concerted care Which is a three color wed set and drafted with dragon center care, which was an ally dragon set So both said at factions, but one was a three color faction and one was a two color faction so how exactly does fate reforge have cards that draft well with a three color faction and draft well with the two color faction? And the answer there was hybrid mana. And the idea was if we make hybrid mana such that the two ally color like one of the colors that is not hybrid

is one of the ally colors and the other two colors includes an ally color. The idea is, hey, if I'm playing a three-color deck, I can throw this in. And the fact that it's hybrid, it will be all three colors for things that care about that. But as long as I have the one main color and then one of the secondary colors I can cast the spell. It also turns out that we centered each faction in not the enemy color because of what we needed to do with dragon's shark here and so that main color was the one that wasn't

hybrid. But it's a good example where it was a really tough thing to solve and having the tool of hybrid really helped us solve that. And that is the other thing. The thing that Blue Sky to me is really exciting is that most, like a lot of the stuff I'm talking about today, Blue Sky found us alternate frames. Blue Sky found us double face cards. Blue Sky found us alternate frames. Blue sky found us double-face cards. Blue sky found us hybrid. Blue sky found us, you know, more untraditional structures and all that.

Like the cool thing about it, and this is one of the neat things about blue sky design in general is once you unlock an idea, once something like the the issue in general is human beings like structure at our core, we like structure. And so when you do enough things, as they say, enough dots make a line, right? So as you start doing something and you just are continuous about how you do it for a classic example was There are things that Richard had done an alpha that we carried on Just because well is how magic did it right for the classic example was for a while black couldn't kill black things Why because there's a card in alpha called terror that couldn't kill black things is the main kill spell in alpha

Alpha called terror that couldn't kill black things is the main kill spell in Alpha but the reason it couldn't kill black things wasn't because black has any problem with killing other black things black has no problem with that it was oh well this represents terror I'm going to scare you well black things are hard to scare they're used to scary things so the idea of terror wasn't that Richard was trying to make this general rule about black being unable to deal with black What he was really saying was oh this one card. I'm trying to flavor it But because of that it's very easy for things to get carried on and like for a while Black wasn't best at creature kill because it couldn't deal with black black things were like a problem for black

but that wasn't meant to be a problem. And so one of the things is as you do things, you build on things the way they are. Familiarity is very comforting, but that one of the things that you need to do as a designer is just because we've done something that way doesn't mean we have to. And when you're, especially a game like magic where you're making new cards all the time, one of the things that is crucial to design is you need to figure out where is there a new space? Where can we do something new? We wanna surprise you, like I did a podcast talking about

how some amount of design is giving you what you want, and some amount of design is giving you things you didn't even know you wanted. Well, part of not even knowing you wanted it is this blue sky space. And that a lot of the examples today was, hey, let's not be restricted by what we've done. Like I said, it is so easy,

it is so easy to sort of assume rules. Like, because people like parameters, it is so easy to sort of assume rules like because people like parameters, it is so easy to just assume parameters exist when they don't necessarily exist. And that a lot of great invention, a lot of great design is questioning things. And that is what Blue Sky does the best. Blue Sky really says, hey, let's let and that's why it's one of the tenants of it. So I'll give one more example. So the other thing about blue sky I should mention is I've been talking really big picture blue sky, right?

Meaning, hey, we do something and we just break paradigms and stuff. But there also is smaller blue sky. So my, one of my favorite of that comes from infinity. So we knew early on going into things that we wanted stickers. It was something that I'd seen in other games and I thought that just there was interesting play that could come from using stickers. So one of the things we did in exploratory is I said to the team I want

to use stickers. I don't care how you use the sticker. And so we were doing all sorts, I mean, the exploratory team really got into it. We were doing all sorts of nutty things. We were putting stickers on players. We were using stickers to attach things, so now they were attached together. And one of the things, so Andy Sardalis was one of the people on the exploratory team. So Annie had this cool idea of, well, what if you, one of her cards just made a token out of an everyday object? So what if you do an object that's not part of the game and you just put stickers on it and now it becomes essentially a token, right?

It becomes a creature. And there was something really compelling about that. I think the very first thing I ever did is I I turned a stapler into a creature because the room had a stapler in it. And there was something there was something, so one of the things that's really key in Blue Sky is there was something about attacking with a stapler

that just it hits something. That one of the big things about game design is there's emotional responses you want. And every once in a while we do something that just emotionally is so satisfying, that you're like, oh, we got to do this. And this is a good example where that card would become animate object. We didn't, while we experimented with a lot of different things, we, most of what we did with stickers ended up being, they went on cards. But that one idea was so good, and this is also Blue Sky. That Blue Sky could be a big thing,

it could be a little thing. It was just one card, right? But it was such an awesome idea that we made it. And I've heard so many fun stories from that. A similar thing, like another thing we did, also ended up on a card. Chris Mooney made a card called Phone a Friend. And the idea was it was a blue card,

it had four blue effects, you could time walk and stuff to recall. You can do big splashy blue things. But the idea was you called somebody and the person you called on the phone chose what happened. So the very first time it ever happened, I actually had it. I called my wife Laura and I put it on the speakerphone. Literally all the play testing stuff,

everybody gathered around so we could see what would happen. And that's a really telling thing. And that one of the fun things that can happen in blue sky is just wild moments can happen and that's those are things you really want to figure out and understand you really want like one of the things about blue sky is sometimes you tap into things that are so sort of primal and fun and cool and sometimes that can be a whole mechanic Sometimes that can be a brand new tool and sometimes it's a card

So blue sky it really varies on what you make with it and what you use it But even just that one card even just like the number of people that told me stories about Either animate object or phone or friend. I've seen people like talk about I've seen social media it just creates fun cool moments that people want to talk about and That is a lot of what blue sky is blue sky design really says Hey a lot of the time we have to follow the rules We're being prescriptive or designing within the framework of what we need to design and we have to be very conscious of all the teams

to design and we have to be very conscious of all the teams downstream of us. But there is a point and usually it's very early in design where you need no hold bars. You need the idea that anything is possible and you need the power to question paradigms, to question rules, to question yeah we've never not done that or we've always done that but do we have to? And like I said, just my example today, be it split cards, be it hybrid mana, be it double face cards, be it just different frames. These have become such core fundamental tools to how we design magic. And they came about because we were willing to question ourselves.

We were willing to push boundaries. And that is what blue sky is all about So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed my talk today in blue sky design. I like to do blue sky and design I like to talk about blue sky design, but guys I'm now at work So we all know that means means at 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