Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1152: Fallen Empires

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the Fallen Empires expansion.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to let her drive to work. Okay, so one of the things, one of my meta plans with my podcast is I want to do a podcast about every magic expansion ever. I've done a lot of them, but from time to time I want to do one of the ones I haven't done. So today I'm going to talk all about Fallen Empires. So Fallen Empires came out in November of 1994. So this is one of the few sets that's before I was at Wizards. I started in Wizards in October of 95. And the first set that I worked on when I got to Wizards was Alliances.

So anything before Alliances, with the one exceptionelands, I had a team that did external play testing. But so when you get before Homelands, I was not remotely involved with that in any way, which includes Fallen Empire. So to understand Fallen Empire, I need to give you a little history lesson and just sort of get you in the state of mind of November 1994. Okay, so Magic the Gathering comes out in August of 1993, first showing up at Gen Con. Wizards of the Coast produces what they think is like

six months worth of cards, it sells out in three weeks. They then rush to put together another thing which becomes Beta, alpha was the original. In beta, once again, they think they have like six months, even more, now this time they're assured it's six months and it sells out in like a week. So it was clear from very, very early on that they had a hit on their hands.

So much so that in August, when everything sells out, the original plan had been, Richard thought that they'd sell Magic for a while, and then maybe a year in, two years in, three years in, they'd put out a new version of it. Ice Age was the original planned one. So instead of being called Magic the Gathering, it would be Magic Ice Age.

And the idea was, it would have some new cards, and you know, so Richard did have some of his playtefters work on upcoming sets, and we'll get to that in a second. But none of that was at the speed, none of that was planned such that it could be ready quickly. So I think Peter came to Richard and said, we need an expansion. So Richard very quickly, like he found out about this in August and it was done and printed

and in stores. Arabian Nights, I think was in stores, got into some stores late 1993 in December and some in early 1994. But basically a very, very, very fast turn. Richard must have made it in 30 days. Now given the sets only 98 cards, it's not a giant set, but still anyway, super fast. Even when we did small sets, we did them in way more time than a month or so. So Richard quickly made Arabian Nights. And then he tapped on one of his play test groups,

who I often call the East Coast play tufters. Those people are Scaffolius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty and Chris Page. So let me go a little bit real quickly into the, because these are the people that made Fallen Empire so it's important. Richard Garfield at the time that he was sort of first working on Magic was getting, I think his doctorate degree at the time that he was sort of first working on Magic, was getting, I think his doctorate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. And it was there that he met some other students, I believe they're all math students, who were gamers.

And that group became one of his play test groups. And became some of the early designers for Magic. The other big group that he met was through Bridge. That is Bill Rose, Joel Mick, John Licatino. It's the group that would go on to make Mirage and Visions. Also he met, I'm not sure if it was a neighbor of his, but a guy named Barry Reich that he was friends with. And Barry would go on to make a set called spectral chaos that we took parts of it when we made invasion like the the Barry

Mechanics made by Barry the domain is made by Barry Okay, so When they realized they had to make things quickly not only did Richard make something quickly But also the East Coast play testers made something quickly Their set would be antiquities Richard makes something quickly, but also the East Coast play testers made something quickly. Their set would be antiquities. So Arabian Nights comes out in December, January. I believe antiquities comes out like March, March or April.

They're just rushing to get things out. Now meanwhile, Peter Ackerson also went to other people in the company. Legends gets designed by Steve Conard and Robin Herbert who were friends of Peter's. Steve Conard helped found Wizards. And they made a set based on their role playing, their D&D role playing game. Then Jesper Mirfors, who was the original art director, made The Dark, which was a very moody set really based on tone. The first mattress was based on tone. Then in the fifth slot, the East Coast Playfesters quickly made Antiquities, but then they went back and made another set. And the set they made was Fallen Empires. Okay, now, as I said, when Alpha came out, it sold out right away.

Then Beta came out, sold out right away. And for early Magic, they could not print enough cards. Like, I was around for early Magic, and I was a player, I didn't work at Wizards yet. So I learned very quickly, if I wanted to get Magic cards, I had to be there when they came into the store I had to find out when they were coming and then I had I would wait in line that morning to get cards So when the store opened on the day it could sell I would be there because magic cards would sell out very quickly and

so basically the way it happened was Wizards could not produce enough cards to meet demand. So what that meant was the market started being started getting warping around the fact that Wizards couldn't supply the amount of cards ordered. And so what started happening is let's say you wanted to get 20 boxes. You don't ask for 20 boxes because when things get allocated you only get eight boxes So if you really want 20 boxes, maybe you ask for a hundred boxes and when you only get 20 boxes Oh, well, that's kind of what you wanted, right? So people started over ordering

That was very common and And Wizards was aware of this. I mean, Wizards realized they talked to the distributors, they talked to stores. So real quickly, for those who don't know, most of the magic we sell, we don't sell directly to the stores, we sell to distributors and the distributor sells to stores. There are some exceptions, especially later in magic's life, but very early on, we sold the distributors. So anyway, Peter makes it a big task to start solving the printing problem. We were printing at a place called Cartamundi, which is in Europe, and they keep, every time

they make it, make they print more So finally their own phone empires is like, okay what we're going to do is we're going to go out and ask people and Then we're going to print to demand. We're going to keep printing to we meet the amount that people say they want We're going to do so and so Peter and the sales team to go out and say, okay guys, we've solved the problem. We can print to demand. Whatever you order, we will deliver what you order. We will deliver for you, deliver what you order. But people just didn't believe Peter.

So they kept ordering like they always have. Meaning they wanted 20 boxes, but they'd order 100. And then then because Peter and Cardamondi had figured it out they would deliver a hundred boxes which wasn't what they wanted so I'll get back to this but there was a glut in the market Fawn Empire's had a huge problem of just too many cards being out there okay so let's talk a little bit about the set itself. So the set was, as far as unique cards, unique mechanical effects, there's 102 cards,

35 commons, 31 uncommons, and 36 rares. Now, if you, one of the things that they tried in Fallen Empires was having each common on the common sheet have its own piece of art. So on the common sheet, some commons were what we call C3s, meaning there are three copies on the sheet, and some were C4s, there were four copies. C4s are slightly more common than C3s,

they show up a little bit more. But for every card you had on the sheet, you had an original piece of art. So there were 121 commons if you count uniqueness of art. But only 35 if you count just how many mechanically unique cards there are. Also remember in the early days most of the expansions were not large expansions, they were small. Arabian Nights, very small, 98 cards.

Antiquities was just over 100 I believe. Legends was a large set that was closer to a normal like Alpha. And then the Dark was small and Fallen Empire was small. Small sets at the time came in eight card packs. You would get six commons and two uncommons. Or to be more accurate, six cards off the common sheet and two cards off the uncommon sheet. While I say there are rares, on the common sheet, that's not the common sheet, on the uncommon sheet,

there were, I believe, U1s and U2s. U1s mean you appear just once on the sheet. U2s mean you appear twice on the sheet. And the idea was a U2 was considered an uncommon by modern circumstances, and a U1 was a rare. Once again, as time goes on and we started figuring things out the ratio to rarities would change a little bit but anyway when you talk about rares from Fawn Empire doesn't mean the U1s. So when you open a pack you

got six six cards from the common sheet two cards to the uncommon sheet. Now remember this is before rarity was on cards you might get uncommons, you might get a rare and an uncommon. I'm not sure if it was possible to get two rares. I mean, it was conceivable could happen. You could get one card from one sheet, one card from the next sheet, but I think it was hard to get two rares. Anyway, the art director was Sandra Everingham, the East Coast Playchasters designed it. And so what they were experimenting with, the thing about the East Coast Playchefters is all of the early design teams, they were the most sort of forward thinking. Antiquities, for example, was the first time a set was really built around a mechanical

theme. Arabian Nights was a top-down flavor theme based on 1001 Arabian Nights. But Antiquities was the first set that said, hey, we're an artifact set. Every single card, except for lands, that all tap for colorless, except for the lands, which mostly tap for colorless, I should say, every card in the set had the word artifact either on its type line or in its rules text. And a lot of the lands also had it, but not all of them. And so it was a very artifact focus set. So when they got to Fallen Empires, they were playing around with something else. They were really interested in the idea of factioning

and the idea of counters and tokens. There have been light factioning in magic, but nothing like this is the first set that really commits to any kinds of factions in a larger way. And there were definitely, if you look at like antiquities is that they did, they're Ashnod and Ashnod, I say Urza and Mishra had sides,

there was a war and some stuff for urges stuff and some are Misha stuff So in a loose sense, maybe there's some loose factioning there But this that was very much built around the idea that each each mono color each single color had two Warring factions in it. So let's run through those So the white had the order of Leaper who was a bunch of soldiers. They were humans all the white had the Order of Leaper, who was a bunch of soldiers. They were humans. All the white characters were human. Oh, by the way, for those who don't know, the reason they named it the Order of Lightbur

was that the creatures from Lightbur were Lightbrights. It's a toy. A lot of people have never seen a Lightbright, but a Lightbright from when I was a kid is a toy where you got these little plastic beads and you would put it in this board that had electricity running through it and had a light kind of behind it. So when you put the beads in, they would light up and you could make patterns and stuff. Anyway, the Order of Leaper were soldiers and then there was a religious sect that broke away from them known as the Pharaolites.

And so there was, it was a human-unhuman conflict between the Order from them known as the Pharaolites. And so there was, it was a human-on-human conflict between the Order of Leper and the Pharaolites. In blue, we had the Valdalian, which were merfolk, and we had the Homerids, which were crab people. And so that was an underwater conflict between the merfolk and the crab people. Black had the Order of the Ebon Han, which was sort of a mirror of the Order of the Leaper. These were sort of the, again, an order of soldiers, but up to not quite as high-minded in their goals as the Order of the Leaper.

The Order of the Ebon Han made, sort of, grew creatures to be, to work for them, known as the Thralls. And the Thralls rebelled, so the conflict in black was the order they have in hand versus the Thralls. Red had dwarves, and then had a combined group that were goblins and orcs, and they fought. And finally, green had the elves, and the elves had this food source that was this artificial plant creature that gained sentience and became the phallids and so is the elves versus the phallids Each of these factions had some mechanical identity

We're not at a point yet where small sets had keywords So none of them had named keywords, but they definitely had mechanical identities that But they definitely had mechanical identities that played into who they were and if you played just that faction they played in a certain way, so it definitely was a faction in the sense of That if you just played that now you had this I mean you had a lot of it was sort of typo You had to look at the creature type but if you want to make an elf deck or a thalad deck or a Valdalian merfolk deck or a thrall deck, like all of those were options you could do. The other thing that they were really big on was the idea of, so alpha had counters,

alpha had tokens. The hive made wasp tokens. Fungusaur had a plus one plus one token. There were tokens and things. And I think they recognized the value of tokens The tokens were this really cool tool and they were the first set that went all out They're like we're really going to dive deep and what can you do with counters? What can you do with tokens? Obviously for long-term? magic fans

That you can see that tokens and counters have become very a big big tool in making magic sets. But at the time we didn't yet have token cards. Token cards didn't exist until unglued in 98. I was unglued had this quality of here's weird things you've never seen before and I like the idea of token cards. So we made token cards and unglued. They would end up becoming a staple and now they show up in normal packs. There's a token, well, there's a extra card slot that's adds and tokens and stuff. But anyway, it shows up there.

So there are so many, so many counters and tokens that we in fact made a punch out sheet that went in the duelists. So duelists was our magazine. So if you bought the duelists that went with fallen empires, there was a punch out sheet inside that had all the different counters. So just to give you an idea of the number of counters that were in this, I will name all the counters. There were javelin counters,

credit counters, tide counters, net counters, time counters, spore counters, cube counters, and storage counters. But wait, spore counters, cube counters, and storage counters. But wait, I'm not done. And then as far as power toughness adjusting, there is plus 0 plus 1, plus 1 plus 0, minus 2 minus 2, plus 2 plus 2, plus 1 plus 2, minus 1 minus 1. So there are six different power and toughness alterating tokens, none of which are plus 1 plus one,

which I always find super funny. But the idea there is like, let's say you saw a creature with counters on it, how big was it? Who knows? Who knows? And so stuff like this definitely would, we would learn from this, the idea that especially on power and toughness changing things, you have to be very careful that you need the players to look at the board and have a sense of what's going on. There also were a lot of new creature types introduced. Fungust, Homarid, Org, Soldier, Thrall, Townsfolk, Camarid, Citizen, and Saperling. Saperling, which only showed up on tokens. Homarid made Camarid, I think, but it might have still been,

I don't know, maybe they were camera tokens. No, they were camera tokens, I said camera. So some of these were just on, like, the Homers made Camrids, the Ebonhan made Thralls, the Elves made Saperling. So there are a decent number of tokens. Not all the colors use tokens as well as others, decent number of tokens not not all the colors used tokens as

well as others but tokens did show up in all the colors and there was a lot going on with tokens the other thing that's really interesting looking at fauna part so when i said i think that the east coast play chapters was literally one of them well i believe they were the most forward looking them and richard were the most forward looking designers of earthly magic. But that is not without, you know, people have blind spots and stuff. So I think the weakness I found with these Coast Play Frefters is they were just not big fans of evasion, especially flying. I'm not quite sure why, but it's interesting to note that in Fallen Empires, there is not one creature that naturally has flying, meaning

it just has flying and every turn it has flying. There are none. None. Zero. There is, I think it was Valdelian Knights that could activate to fly Meaning you could make them fly but they only fly it until end of turn and you had to pay mana to do it And there's a card called goblin kites It was an enchantment and you can give a creature flying till end of turn But you basically were putting them in a goblin kite which was going to crash so you you lost the creature So they went up in the air and they would hit you for one turn But then the balloon would pop because the goblins weren't great at making balloons and it would die

So two creature two cards in the entire set thinking so now the interesting thing is Limited play at the time was mostly sealed The idea of drafts really don't start wizard startsards starts putting drafts when the Pro Tour starts. The second Pro Tour in Los Angeles in the spring of 1996 is when Wizards starts really pushing draft as a format or a little before that. Up until that point, most of the limited play was sealed. Meaning you just opened cars and played with them.

So I played sealed with a lot of sets. Fallen Empires was the first set, I mean, it had its issues, it was a bit sloggy. The lack of evasion was noticeable. But it was the first set that I remember playing in sealed that really like had a feel in sealed. Like it was a fun thing to play in sealed. I enjoyed playing it. And probably by modern standards,

it doesn't meet our modern standards at all. But at the time, it was pretty innovative in that you could play limited with it. It was something you could do. There are other sets when you try to play sealed. Like I play sealed with Legends, oh my goodness. That was a painful experience. Anyway, so the set, it wasn't made for limited, not to Mirage, we start sort of designing

for limited, but it turns out that it actually sort of played well, like I said, other than it could be a little floggy, it was lots of fun. Okay, so let me talk about a little bit of high profile cards from the set. I've chosen four to talk about. First is Goblin Grenade. Goblin Grenade was a sorcery, cost one red mana. You had to sack a goblin as an additional cost, but then you did five damage.

For one mana, you do five damage. That card has seen a lot of play in a lot of formats. Early in Magic, there's what was called a Sly Deck, which was a mono red deck. And the idea was it was a lot of just cheap creatures, none of which were particularly good at the time, but with lots of damage. And a bunch of those were goblins. And so having something that really allowed you to get rid of bigger things with just one mana were very valuable.

And so Goblin Grenade saw a lot of play. High Tide. High Tide's an instant, costs one blue mana. All islands tap for an extra blue. Now this is a good example when I talk about early days that the color pie was sometimes more flavor than mechanics. This is a good example. Blue's not supposed to be doing this.

Green and maybe secondary red are the colors that produce extra mana. This is more of a green effect than anything else. But they're like, oh, it's flooding. Get it? It's high tide. The tide is rising. There's more blue. And so flavorfully I get it.

It's not mechanically what it's supposed to do. But in the early days, cars definitely saw print because they were flavorful. The idea of the color pie restricting things took a little while to sort of come to fruition. But anyway, High Tide was part of a number of combo decks. It just allows you in blue to get a lot of mana and blue, especially in the early days, blue has a lot of things it can do. Blue was the most dominant color in competitive magic and early magic just because it had like the power 9s used to

call it. Three of them were blue cards and it just had a lot of very strong blue cards. Okay next up the Order of the Ebon Han. It costs black and black for a 2-2 creature of a cleric knight. It had protection from white and it had black, black, plus one, plus two, end of turn. And for black, first track to end of turn. There was a parallel white version of this called Order of Leaper. Order of the Ebonhads saw more play than Order of the Leaper, but they both saw play. I think Order of the Ebonhads saw a lot of play because Necropotence, which would come on Ice Age the following summer. It was what we call the Black Summer, where a lot of people were playing black because Necropotence was so good. And the order of

the ebon hand worked very well on that deck. Ironically, some people played the order of the Leaper as answers to the order of the ebon hand. Oh, sorry, it was not a good answer because it got protected from white. But that was not a good answer. Oh, I think what they played actually was, what were they called? From antiquities, they're the one for artifact creatures. Anyway, okay. The final card in what I consider to be the strongest card slash the largest mistake in a set is a card called Himduturok. So Himduturok is a sorcery, cause black, black and target player

randomly discards two cards. The reason that is powerful is they don't control what they discard. The most potent thing about it is it could hit land and a lot of early magic. There was strip mine, strip mine was in antiquities, there was sync hole, which was stone rain but for two mana for black black so mono black really had means to just keep and mono black

had discard so between making you discard things and destroying things especially land you just had nothing like it would just decimate your it would decimate your hand and your land and just couldn't do anything and then Black would beat you with its small creatures Its sort of weenie creatures And once again, it wasn't that Black's weenie creatures were particularly good, although it had a few things Like Juzem Jin was actually at a time powerful But in a way Hindertorak would later get banned I'm not even sure how many formats it's even legal in. It is a very, very unfun card.

In fact, it's the card that taught us to stop doing randomized discard at anything close to a low, I believe now if we do like four less mana, we don't do random discard anymore. That we make the opponent choose what to pick. Or if we do random, we'll say non-land. So if it hits a land, you don't have to lose the land.

Although we don't do a lot of random discard anymore Anyway, so let me talk a little bit. Let me get back into the story of faun empires Okay, so oh so another flaw faun empires is Of the cards I just named the most powerful cards goblin grenade him to tarak order the even hand and order the even hand Those are all comments high tide I think was an uncommon, but those are all comments a lot of the best cards in the set were common

Like a lot of the tournament staples were common. So what happened was The people over ordered there just was too much there and so And so essentially, you know, supplying demand, right? So magic for up until Fallen Empires, if you wanted to buy magic, if you weren't there, it'd just be gone. And so magic players were kind of trained like, you know, I went the first day that Fallen Empires came out, I was at the store that morning

and I bought Fallen Empires and I went home. And then I came back the next day and it was still there. And then a week later it was still there. And a month later it was still there. So what started happening was there was a glut on the market. That is just there was too much. They finally overshot demand. And so what happened was Fawn Empires became the first magic set that got discounted.

That people at some point started lowering the price on it, because they had so much. And for many years in early magic, if you were a beginning player, one of the things you tended to buy was Fawn Empire packs. There were two reasons for that. One is they were cheaper than everything else.

You could get them very cheaply. And the second was that the themes, the faction themes, were very linear. They were very straightforward. And the key cards tended to be common. So if you wanted to build a Saperling deck or a Vidalian deck, if you wanted to build one of those decks, you could. And so Fallen Empires, in some ways ways did a good job of making it very easy to get cards that were relatively simple and straightforward You know, oh the other thing that this set did that I did not mention This is the first set that went all in on a typal theme Alpha had three cards that cared about

typal stuff and there were Occasional cards that cared legends had something there occasional cards that cared. Legends had something. There were cards that cared, but they were small in small doses. This is the first set that said, build a typal deck. Build a deck. You know, build a phallid deck. Build a Valdalian merfolk deck. Build it like it.

And it would care about what those creature types were. Now, I will also stress that human didn't exist yet as a creature type, so it cared more about stuff like clerics. But it was the first time that did that, and that was very popular. But, so just to give you a sense of larger magic, magic had been doing great. Everything had been sold out. It was the golden child, and it was doing wonderful. Then Fallen Empire came, first stumble. And people got stuck with product and they couldn't sell the product. That had never happened with Magic before.

The next thing that came out would be Ice Age, also made by East Coast Play Thefters. Ice Age did pretty well. And then after Ice Age was Homelands. Homelands, I mean for regular listeners of the show, it is my pick for the worst design set in Magic history. There's some competition. Prophecies not far behind, but and it just it wasn't that good a set. It wasn't that well made as far as Magic sets go and it just didn't do well. There wasn't a lot of cards for the tournament it wasn't a very strong set so two out of three sets in a row were

kind of flops and that is why if you ever talk to me talk about alliances is why the very first set I worked on there was a lot going on because there was a worry that if alliances was a flop that magic would be on a downward spiral That that's a talk for a whole separate set. Although I have done a live have done a lion's podcast on alliances So if you want to hear about all about alliances, you can go listen Anyway guys, that is fawn empires. Um The way I like to look at fawn empires is it was groundbreaking in a lot of ways The way I like to look at Fallen Empire is it was groundbreaking in a lot of ways. Like I said, it's the first faction set, it's the first typal set, and it's the first set

that really goes all in on counters and on tokens. All things, all those themes would go on, I mean, other sets would do them in different ways in larger. I mean, basically, Ravnica would kind of reinvent what it meant to be a faction set with faction keywords and stuff Onslaught would really sort of bring the idea of a typo to a whole block setting and Counters and tokens got used in lots of different ways in lots of different places. So one of the things about early magic sets is

like They were playing in very virgin fresh space. And so, you know, set like legends because it's introduced legendary things and multicolor cards. You know, you could do stuff like that and that there are a lot. I do think looking back at Fallen Empires that there's a lot of really interesting things that were the forerunners of a lot of important elements of magic design. Did they get everything right? No. The rarities weren't right. They needed

evasion. It was a little sloggy, although evasion is probably why it's a little sloggy. There are definitely things to be improved but for where they were for the second year in magic it really was doing a lot of neat things, investigating what could be done and really playing in a cool space that would inspire us to do other things. For example, I know that I was a huge fan of Thaladdex. I loved the Saperling decks. And that I think my love of Saperling decks really, I mean, when I

came to Wizards, I was the one that pushed typal themes. I was the one that got the strong typal theme in Onslaught block. I was the one that scheduled Lorwyn to have a typal theme. I was a huge advocate of counters and tokens and really pushed that. And a lot of that came from my love of things like the Thaladsids and I'm the guy that did Ravnica I really push faction so like in a lot of ways fallen emperor spoke to me as a designer really shaped who I was as a magic player and thus really shaped how I impacted as the head designer so it interesting. The two sets that most shaped me when I was, you know, not yet, I was a magic civilian if you were, was Antiquities and

Fallen Empires. The idea of mechanical themes, of artifacts, and all the stuff in Fallen Empires really shaped who I was as a player and I think had huge influence of who I've been as first a magic designer and then a magic head designer. And so, Fallen Empires was very, very influential in what would come. But anyway guys, I'm now at work, so we all 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. Hope you enjoyed the story of Fallen Empires and I'll see you next time.