Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1157: Bloomburrow Set Design with Ian Duke

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with Set Design Lead Ian Duke to talk about the later design of Bloomburrow.

I'm not pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work at home edition So today we're talking Bloomberg set design so who better to do that than Ian Duke the lead set designer. Hey Ian Hello everyone. Thanks for having me on mark. Okay, so I did a podcast where I talked to Doug Byer all about vision design So at some point the set got handed off from vision design to setier all about vision design. So at some point the set got handed off from vision design to set design. You led set design. So let's get your first impressions. What did you think of the set when it was handed off to you?

I loved it. I mean, from a creative and story standpoint, the set is just a slam dunk in my mind. I love that it's sort of more light-hearted and just fun in a way that's kind of refreshing compared to some sets that we've done recently. So I was just really excited to kind of tackle the project. And the first thing that came to mind for me is that this was definitely going to be a set that is very much about creature types and how can we execute on that in sort of a modern magic way that has learned from all the lessons of pass sets that we've done that have involved creature types being a heavy theme. So let's talk a little bit about that.

So magic did its first strong type of theme in onslaught, then did another one in Lorwin, did another strong one in Ixalan. It had a few sets like Innistrad that kind of did that at a lower frequency. One of the behind the scenes things that we know in R&D is they're really hard to do. Players love them, but they're very hard to do.

So let's talk a little bit about why. Why are typal themes so hard? Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges, especially when you're supporting multiple different typal themes within one set, is making sure that they each play in a different way. If you think back to very, very early Magic, the very first typo cards were things like Goblin King and Lord of Atlantis for merfolk, right? And all they did is give plus one plus one to all of your other goblins or all of your

other merfolk. And so those decks were pretty much just about get as many copies of one type of creature onto the battlefield at once and then pump them all up and attack with them, right? So fundamentally they didn't play very differently from each other. And as magic went on, we wanted to figure out ways where we can support creature types in those ways

because players really love those types of decks, right? They love collecting lots of creatures of one type and building a theme deck around them. But we wanted to make sure that they played in different ways rather than just like have lots of that creature type. So over time, you know, we've explored different things like that. Onslaught did a little bit, you know, goblins were sort of disposable and could sacrifice themselves, and elves were about producing lots of mana and clerics were about preventing damage. So over time, we kind of developed these tools in our toolbox of making the different creature types

play a little bit differently. And I knew with Bloomberg that we wanted to figure out a unique mechanical identity for each of the 10 heavily supported creature types. So at handoff, you were given the 10 animals that are the 10 two-car types was handed off to you. That was a known thing. Right, I think we maybe changed things around a little bit.

Like at one point, red, green was maybe going to be badgers, but then we settled on raccoons. So there were a couple of things that changed around a little bit, but more or less they were all solidified by the vision design team. That's right. Right, but the actual handoff document, red, green was raccoons, black, red was lizards. We explore other stuff earlier, but I believe at the handoff document, red, green was raccoons, black, red was lizards. We explore other stuff earlier, but I believe at the handoff,

like I don't think you changed the 10 that we handed off. Right, that's right. Okay, so the first question was, I think what we handed off was a little more typal, if you will. It was like we had the fellowship mechanic, which was something got removed, but there was a little more like trying to make strong typal work. And, and you guys eventually got to the point of really lowering how

much typal that it was. Can we talk about how we got to, how you got there? Yeah. So, um, that's a good way to think of it. There's kind of like two types of typal, right? There's like the onslaught strong typal, as you said, where it's like, you know, if you're building the goblin deck, you want every single creature in your deck to be a goblin, and you're really doing the goblin thing, right? Then there's a separate category

that we can call it weak typal. I like to think of it as innistrad typal, where we're not really rewarding you in innistrad for having lots of vampires necessarily, or lots of werewolves in your deck, but all of the vampires have a coherent mechanical identity. So if you draft a lot of vampires, you put all the vampires you see into your deck, your deck will do something. So even though the card like there aren't that many cards that say vampire on them,

the vampires themselves will do something right there about getting through damage on your opponent and getting bloodthirst and you know, things like that, right. So at the time of vision handoff, there was a lot more strong typo in the set, right? You if you were drafting the rabbit deck, you really wanted every single creature to be a rabbit as much as possible in your deck. And we wanted to kind of relax that a little bit and find a middle ground between the two ends of the spectrum there where we you know, we had cards that called out the creature type and

rewarded you everything to the creature type. But also we wanted the creatures to be a little bit more about their mechanical identity rather than just having lots of that creature in one deck. It's still good to have lots of that creature in your deck but it's good because they work together in a mechanical way rather than there are lots of cards that have that word on them and are explicitly rewarding you for having that creature type. So the other reason we wanted to dial that back a little bit as well is to make sure that there was sort of more dynamic gameplay and dynamic choices, especially in booster draft, where different decks would, instead of just kind of compartmentalizing all the cards

and you know, I'll get all the rabbits and you'll get all of the otters or whatever in your deck, we wanted to have a little bit of blending and competition over the different cards. So having more cards that kind of went in between and could go either in deck A or deck B, just to make that sort of draft a little bit more dynamic and have scarcity and competition over the cards as well.

So that we're kind of going for a little bit of a middle ground on that front. Okay, so I want to dive in and talk about the 10 archetypes and then talk a little bit about how they found, like how we figured out where they ended up. So I'm just going to go in Wuber Gartner. So let's start with birds. What was the challenge with birds?

So the biggest challenge with birds is that they all fly. Technically there are some birds in other magic sets that are non- birds, but we knew in bloom borough that all of our birds were going to fly. And it can be challenging to make a limited archetype, or even a constructed deck that's all about flyers, because you know, flyers have evasion, they're hard to interact with if they're attacking you. But also they're not very good at blocking because they have smaller stats because they're evasive creatures. So we knew that if we

really put a lot of eggs into the basket, no pun intended, of like having all birds and all flyers in your deck that that would be a pretty non-interactive strategy, especially alongside bats which we'll get to later, which is also another creature type that's all about flyers. We knew we didn't want to have two decks that were just like put all flyers in your deck and have no non-flying creatures. So for birds what we chose to do, and this was partially mechanically driven as I just outlined but also partially story driven, in the story in the world of Bloomborough, the birds are very good at, they like to help out the other creatures. So what we did with birds is we wanted you to combine birds with some of the other creature types and the birds would help your other creature types.

So you'll see a lot of text on the birds that are along the lines of helping other non-flying creatures or a bird that enters and gives another creature flying, which is obviously better on a creature that didn't already have flying, right? So the bird deck is probably somewhere around half or two thirds birds, and then the remainingthird or one-half of your deck is other creature types that you're mixing in. And one of the cool combinations that I like to do a lot in our internal drafts was combining birds with mice, because the birds are really good at triggering the mice' valiant ability and helping the mice get through and be aggressive as well. So we'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about mice. We will. Okay. Next up, Blue Black, the rats. So rats are sort of the most controlling archetype or creature type in the set,

as Blue Black is often a controlling color pair. So they're about holding off the opponent in the early game. They have lots of good early defensive creatures and lots of good removal spells and ways to control the game, like blue bounce spells and tapping and stunning creatures and meanwhile while you're doing this you want to fill up your graveyard because a lot of the rats have the threshold mechanic which is returning mechanic from back in Odyssey that says as long as you have seven or more cards in your

graveyard you get bonuses turned on so a typical rat creature might be an early defensive creature like a two mana one three that later on in the game when you achieve threshold it gets to upgrade in some way either give you some card advantage or become a better attacker that can now help you finish the game now that you've you know developed control over the game and lived into the late game. Yeah and threshold can add you guys added that in set design. That's right, yep. Okay, so next up is black red, the lizards.

So lizards are one of the most aggressive creature types and black red is the most aggressive color pair. And what it cares about is dealing damage to the opponent. So you wanna get through by attacking, but lizards also have lots of other ways to ensure that they can connect with the opponent and deal damage, like on death triggers that deal damage, or just simply like, you know, attacking and dealing damage directly to the opponent or spells that do damage directly to the opponent. And then the listeners themselves often have rewards for having dealt damage to the opponent. We sort of nicknamed this thirst or

generalized blood thirst. Blood thirst is an old mechanic from previous sets where creatures would enter with plus one plus one counters if you dealt damage to your opponent this turn. But here we're using that same condition of having dealt damage to the opponent, but the rewards are more varied. So it's not just that your creature

is entering with counters, you're getting other types of rewards as well. So just curious, because sometimes we put names on things and sometimes we don't. Why doesn't Thirst get a name? We looked over it, we did consider it, but the rules and the templating are varied enough. Some, for example, when they enter the battlefield, they check if the opponent has been dealt damage

this turn. Other ones check at a certain time during the turn, like in your end step. Other ones have more continuous effects that just turn on if you've dealt damage to the opponent. So it's really hard from a rules and templating standpoint to unify all of those things. We probably could have, but it just didn't flow naturally enough that we thought it deserved its own keyword. Okay, next up is red, green, the raccoons. So the raccoons are the biggest creatures in Bloomberg.

And we wanted to reflect that. Of the animal folk, of the animal folk. Of the animals animals that's right yeah of the 10 supported color pairs there are other bigger creatures i'm sure we'll talk about later on but yeah of the 10 of the raccoons the biggest so we wanted to make sure their mechanic reflected that so we gave them rewards for spending a lot of mana in one turn this is the expend mechanic and at lower rarities is usually expend for and what that means is when you've spent when you spend your fourth mana in a single turn

Casting spells which could be either be on one spell that costs four or more mana or it could be on multiple spells that add up To four or more mana Once you spend that fourth mana you get bonuses for all your raccoons and usually they're getting bigger Raccoons are good at attacking but not in a sort of blitz aggressive way They're more about like mid casting cost big creatures, you know, three, four and five mana creatures that are sort of the biggest and they're good at attacking because they're just simply bigger

than your opponent's creatures. Okay, next up, green, white, the rabbits. I know these are one of your favorites. I like rabbits, rabbits are my favorite draft archetypes. Yes. That's right. So rabbits are sort of the most classic typal mechanically in the sense that you just want to have lots of them, right? They're about making tokens and going wide and having lots and lots and lots of rabbits. And so lots of the rabbits themselves, you know, enter with tokens, lots of

the rewards for rabbits, count the number of creatures you control, or enhance your whole team in some way. So all of them kind of playing into this theme of just having lots of rabbits on the battlefield, going wide, and then eventually trying to make a big attack where you kind of swarm around your opponent. Yes, rabbits are fun. Okay, next up, white, black was bats

that we had referenced earlier. Yeah, so these are one of the cool ones. So this is the second creature type that all the bats fly. And so we wanted to make sure that the deck was a little bit deeper than just attacking with flying creatures, for all the reasons that I mentioned earlier, right? They're hard to interact with, they're not good blockers themselves. So we wanted to layer on something that was a little bit more complex and interesting mechanically. And so for bats, what we went with was gaining and losing life yourself during your own turn. So if you have ways of gaining life during your turn,

that triggers your bats. If you have ways of losing or paying life yourself, that triggers your bats, but it doesn't count your opponent attacking you. It's only on your own turn when you lose life. So it might be things like, you know, a black card draw spell where you draw some cards and lose some life, for example, or life payment for costs. And whenever you do that, all your bats get triggers and either get a little bit better at attacking or give you other bonuses. That's just sort of a mid range deck, they can play a little bit more of a controlling game where you're kind of slowly bleeding your opponent out, nickel and diming them for points of life while gaining life yourself so you can stay alive longer.

Or you can play it, lead into the evasion of the bats and play a little bit more aggressive and try to attack with flyers and then finish your opponent with ways of making them lose life or drain life from them. Okay, next up, blue, red, the otters. Another fan favorite, these are one of my favorite creature types in the set.

The otters love casting spells, instants and sorceries, and other non-creature spells. So you'll see a lot of things like prowess on otters or interacting with instants or sorceries, bringing back instants and sorceries from your graveyard, things along those lines. The otters themselves at baseline aren't the best combat creatures. As we know, red and blue don't necessarily get the best combat creatures. But when you pair them up with tricky spells, removal spells to remove your opponent's blockers or triggering the prowess on your otters,

they do become good attackers. And again, you can build the otter deck in sort of two different ways. You can really lean into the control angle and play a lot of removal spells and bounce spells and tricky types of things, counter spells, and sort of get a long, long advantage by doing that. Or you can really lean into the sort of prowess angle of the deck and be very aggressive and try to clear

out your opponent's blockers with your removal and then get in there with your honor attackers. Okay, next up, another one of my favorites, black green squirrels. Okay, next up, another one of my favorites, black green squirrels. Black green is sort of a traditional mid-range deck that uses the graveyard. And one of the things the squirrels can do with the graveyard is forage. Forage is a new keyword action.

So you won't see a squirrel with forage on it. You will see a squirrel that asks you to forage in order to do something. So forage appears in costs or you pay it when certain things trigger and to forage, you can either sacrifice a food or you can exile three cards from your graveyard. So there's two ways to play the squirrel deck where you can lead into producing lots of food and using that to pay your forage costs. Or you can

fill up your graveyard and then use that to pay your forage costs and use you can fill up your graveyard and then use that to pay your forage costs and use other interactions that involve your graveyard like raised dead type effects to bring your creatures back and so on. We wanted to make sure in building the squirrel deck that we knew we wanted food in the set just because it's such a great flavor fit for Bloomberg, but we didn't want to have a lot of food that you're just sacrificing to gain life because that would inflate life totals, make the games go really long, and generally it's not like super fun

when there's a ton of just life gain, lots of raw life gain going on. That's why we wanted to give you something else to do with your food, and that's how we came to Forage as a Mechanics so that you're producing the food, it's flavorful, you've got lots of food on the battlefield, but it's not all going into your life total.

Instead, you're sacrificing it to do other things. So this is the second animal you talked about how there's multiple different ways you can play it. Was that true for all of them or some more than others? Some more than others, I think. You know, for example, let's say the lizards, you know, are very much about the opponent losing life, right. So that that very clearly tells you want to be aggressive with some of the other creatures and their mechanical identities. There's, you know, kind of more in the mid range space and more ways you can do with it. We did try to do that on purpose for as many of the creature types as possible. Just in the sense that we do inherently coming in with a very creature type will set that we didn't want the format to be too shallow,

right? Where it's all about just getting lots of copies of the same creature type. We wanted instead for you to be able to kind of choose your own path and choose how you're going to use those creatures, whether you want to be a more controlling deck or an aggressive deck or combine multiple different creature types together. So blending the archetypes as much as possible is something that we strove to do. Okay. So blending the archetypes as much as possible is something that we strive to do. Okay, next up is Red White, the mice. Right, so the mice have a new ability word called Valiant, which means the first time each turn that you target a mouse with Valiant with a spell or an ability, you get a bonus.

So it's kind of in the heroic space, except it also works with abilities, for example, triggered abilities or equipping an equipment, something along those lines, but you only get the effect once per turn. And that's to make sure that, you know, it's not too easy to do if you have, say, a cheap low cost equipment or an ability that can, you know, use repeatedly over and over again,

that you can't simply, you know, trigger the same valued ability over and over and over again. The mice want to be fairly aggressive, so they play well with combat tricks, which can help them get through in combat, but also trigger your valiant. Equipment, I mentioned, is great in the mouse deck as well,

and generally a lot of the valiant triggers are sort of aggressive or combat-focused in nature. So by making sure you can trigger your valiant reliably, you can make sure that your mice can attack reliably. Okay, and finally we get probably one of the quirkiest of the archetypes, frogs. Yeah, I love the frog archetype. They're very, very charming. And this is, I think, one of the cleverest things that the vision design handed off is that frogs, you know, we know frogs love to hop and bounce around and such. So that's reflected mechanically and that the frogs sort of hop on and off the battlefield, either by returning to your

hand and coming back again, or flickering into exile and then coming back to the battlefield again. And why do you want to do that? The reason is because lots of the frogs have entered the battlefield triggers. And so by flickering or bouncing your frogs and replaying them over and over again, you're re-triggering those under the battlefield triggers, lots of which give you card advantage or slow your opponent down in some way. So over time you kind of build up this value engine of flickering and bouncing where you're drawing lots of cards and sort of getting more and more stuff onto the board and eventually winning in a long game. So it's sort of like a, you know,

traditional blue green ramp deck, except you're not ramping into big stuff so much as like building up this engine where you're doing lots of stuff every turn. Okay, so now that we've talked about all the individual animals, I just want to talk about some of the mechanics that are overarching mechanics. So something that all the animals get is offspring. So what were the challenges of making offspring. Right, so offspring is the kicker-like mechanic where you can get a second copy of the same creature except it's a one-one. One of the challenges is we just wanted to manage how many tokens were being produced in the environment.

Normally when you're just building a set from scratch and you decide you wanna have a token theme, one of the natural things that tokens do is they're really good at blocking, right? They just kind of come up the board. You get lots of material in play. It makes it harder for your opponent to attack. You just set up lots of blocks or you chump block their big creature,

which can be kind of frustrating and slow games down. So we wanted to make sure that the offspring tokens weren't doing that, and that we're more about having cool interactions and cool synergies and doing more proactive things. So you'll see a lot of the creatures that have offspring on them are sort of self synergistic in the sense that if you make a second copy, they're interacting in some way. That's really cool and helping you do something neat with your deck.

The other thing we wanted to do was make sure that there were ways to get rid of all those extra tokens as well. So you'll see a lot of removal spells and little effects that can plunk away at a token for one damage or give something Minus one minus one or kill a big creature plus a token. So there's ways to handle the tokens as well In general did you find offspring to be hard to develop or is it not not so hard No, it was not so hard I mean tokens are fun and you know, even like most creatures are somewhat interesting with offspring just making a second copy you know if it has an ETB effect or something like that you

know for example I think there's a frog that enters and taps and stuns one creature and so if you play it for its offspring cost you get to tap and stun two creatures which often then lets you make a big attack so even though it's not anything like super you know mind-melting in terms of interaction it does you know dynamically change the gameplay. And I think there's plenty of good offspring designs. Yeah, offspring ended up really cool. I'm happy I turned out. Okay, next.

Animals like to give gifts to one another. So this offspring is kicker. We do it all the time. Gifts are a little bit different. This is not something we do a lot of. So what was the challenge of balancing gifts? We do it all the time. Gifts are a little bit different. This is not something we do a lot of. So what was the challenge of balancing gifts? Okay, gifts actually were challenging

and they were challenging on the individual card design level. I think there's only so many designs you can make that are interesting with gift because the gift designs have to be sort of interesting to play without gift and interesting to play with gift and finding the right balance of the amount of upgrade you're getting versus the gift you're giving was pretty challenging

on some of the cards. You also want to make sure that the upgrade version of the spell feels like a natural fit compared to the regular version of the spell, right? You're not adding something sort of perpendicular to what the spell is doing. You're adding something that's more in the same direction as what the initial spell was doing. So they were challenging come up with individual designs. But I think

through lots of iteration, we did come up with a lot of cool gift designs. And I'm particularly proud of like, by the end, I was seeing lots of interesting choices with gift, right? There were, you know, game states where you don't want to give the gift game states where you're happy to give the gift game states where it's a tough decision either way. And sometimes you'll give it sometimes you won't. So I think we ended up in a good spot with that. And then the other thing with gift is it's

it's interesting in multiplayer in a way that it's it's different from single player, right? Because in a multiplayer game, you know, you could give maybe you give the gift to your weakest opponent in order to enhance your spell to do a better job combating your most powerful opponent, right? Or you make a temporary alliance with someone by giving them an extra card as a gift or something along those lines.

So there's cool political things you can do with it in multiplayer, but in one-on-one, it's much more of a spiky mechanic, I guess, because it's a lot about decision-making and about determining when the amount of benefit you're getting from giving the gift outweighs the gift that you're giving to your opponent. Yeah, it is very interesting how the mechanic plays so differently in multiplayer than one-on-one, so that's cool. Okay, so we've talked a lot about

the animals, at least the animal folk, so I want to spend a little bit of time talking about what we call the predators, meaning that, hey, one of the cool things about this world is our little animal folk there are these giant animals especially to them that that roamed this world you know in a norm in a normal world a bear is a tutu but on this world when you know when a one one's a mouse that makes your bear a lot bigger so talk a little bit about making the predators yeah I mean basically we knew we wanted to have just like any magic set, you know, the main focus of Bloomberg is on the sort of the smaller creature types, the mice, the rats, the

rabbits, and so on. So we want we knew we wanted to have some big creatures as well, right, just from a mechanical standpoint, big creatures to ramp up into in the late game, you know, to finish off games, big bomb creatures, you know, cool rares and things like that. So what were those gonna be in Bloomberg? Like you said, they're sort of more of the larger creatures that you might see in the forest, the moose, the bear,

the owl, things like that. And from a creative standpoint, creative came up with a really good sort of solution and way of casting these creatures. So they're what they call the calamity beasts. And so these creatures sort of solution, a way of casting these creatures. So they're what they call the calamity beasts. And so these creatures sort of bring with them natural disasters, right? You might have the big fish that shows up

and brings with it a tidal wave, or the sort of huge bird that swoops down and night falls when it enters the battlefield or whatever. So that was really cool way of casting those. And it let us make some creatures with sort of more powerful high impact destructive like effects that would counterbalance the smaller denizens of Bloomberg that are more about community and working together and doing more sort of proactive things. So we use that both from a creative and mechanical

standpoint to have some cool variety in the creatures that we had on the upper end of the bandit curse. So what was your favorite part of the set? Like what do you, I mean as the leader of the set, what is the aspect that you're most proud of? Gosh, it's hard to pick just one thing. I think just sort of just the immersive flavor of the set and just I don't know it's very uplifting working on the set right here there's lots of cute animals

and thinking about oh what might this you know this mechanical design could be concepted into this really cool or cute or adorable way. Offspring was really fun to work with and think about you know in terms of you know a parent and a child deriving on the battlefield, a little mini miniature version of the creature, maybe a, you know, a student teacher, mentor type of relationship between the creatures that was cool thinking about as well. And I think just sort of the whole journey of working on a creature typal set and figuring out what does that mean in terms of modern magic and you know, how can we learn from the lessons of past sets that, you know know did creature typal to various degrees of success. And I'm really happy with where we ended up in Bloomberg in terms of striking a good balance between I think delivering hopefully on what players

want out of a creature typal set where you know the right thing to do is often just draft lots of creatures of the same type and get rewarded for it. But also delivering on an experience that is has more depth and sort of blending together different archetypes and you can still be creative and figure out your own things to do within the environment and not feel like super locked into, hey, I picked a squirrel so now I have to only draft squirrels or whatever. So I think we ended up a good spot there. So one of the challenging things about a typo set, let's have constructed a little bit, is that in limited you have a lot of control, you have a lot of

ability to say, oh just draft these cards or whatever, but in constructed, like especially this set, this set is animal typal. Not every set has the animals and some of the animals are relatively new, you know, speaking. How did you balance that in a larger, you know, like thinking of standard and thinking of larger formats? Right. That's a, that's a great point. So creature typal definitely comes together in very different ways, whether you're talking

about limited or whether you're talking about constructed and limited, we get to reward you for just having lots of that creature type because you you were making choices about what card you drafted, right? To use the earlier example, you know, if you're going after a squirrel deck, and you picked a few squirrels, now maybe you're willing to pick a weaker squirrel card over a bat, because you know, this you want to have things that reward you for having lots of squirrels,s. So you're actually making, you're paying opportunity costs, you're making decisions to get those cards into your deck. In Constructed, that's very different. You get to choose every single card that you put into your deck.

And so it becomes more challenging. How can we reward you when, you know, you didn't have to go out of your way to collect, to build a deck with all of those mice in it, right? You just took all the mice you had and chose to put them into a deck, right? So we need to be a little bit more careful about how we're rewarding you. And like you said, it's a little bit tougher

to make it blend in with other sets as well. And typically we have a philosophy that we don't wanna make super, to use one of your terms, parasitic decks in Constructed, because then it's very sort of locked in what cards you're playing. We can't really add new cards to that deck with other sets that maybe don't have that creature type in them or what have you. And it just sort of makes for a less dynamic churn in the metagame. If you just take all the cards from one set, put them into a deck, that deck is really strong.

And then that deck never changes as, you know know as the format develops and new sets come out and things like that. So we want to be careful of that. And we looked for ways to first of all to get creatures of the Bloomberg creature types into previous sets. So we started putting some mice into wilds of Eldraine, for example. And obviously things like birds can go in lots of different sets. But some of the creature types were much more specific to Bloomberg. You know, things like rabbits or bats or whatever that don't necessarily appear in every single set or otters, for example. So we had to go out of our way to make sure that there were some in the other

sets surrounding and that you can combine them together with the Bloomberg cards. And then in general, we wanted to just make sure again that each creature type sort of had a mechanical identity so that even if you're not finding lots of other creatures of that type you're still finding other cards that play well with those creatures in the surrounding sets so we kind of try to do a mix of all those things and I think you know things turned out pretty well in that front. Another thing we don't talk too much about is we talk a lot about seeding things like okay we know we need these,

so we'll put them, something we don't talk as much about is, we have to figure out what we're gonna do with them in the set that cares, so that when we make them ahead of time, they fit the decks that we're gonna make. That's right, yeah, as much as possible when we're building our constructed formats,

and for the standard rotation in particular, we wanna make sure that all the sets are blending together and that you're combining cards with different sets so that as sets rotate out, that's taking some things away from some of the decks or changing how you build them. And you can just get a dynamic churn over time. Whereas, again, if decks are sort of all from one set, they just exist in that chunk and kind of flow through the format in that chunk until they finally all rotate out, right? So there's less dynamic deck building, less changing in the metagame over time if you go that route. And just so the audience, real quickly as a behind the scenes thing, like we had a lock in colors pretty early just so we could then go and say, because for example, Wilds of Eldraine is a full year before, or roughly a year before, um, uh, Bloomberg. So like we have to say, well, what kind of mice do you need? What color? Like we locked in colors pretty early so we could say, okay, our mice are red and

white. We need red and white mice. That's what we need. And so it's fun looking back because obviously we had to care about all that stuff. That's right. And the vision design team did a great job communicating that to the surrounding sets. Um, I was, I actually led wilds of Eldraine as well. So once I heard, you know, Bloomberg is coming up and they're going to need red, white mice and they could use some rats, which hey, we can put those in black and wilds of Eldraine, even though rats were technically red, black and wilds of Eldraine and they're blue, black here in Bloomberg. So let's put some black rats in. Let's put some red and white mice in things like that to make sure

that we have some stuff in advance and that we don't have the other. The other nice thing about seating is not only do you get a more dynamic rotation as the as new sets are added to the constructed formats, but also it relieves some of the pressure of needing to put all of the cards for that deck in bloomborough alone, right? When we knew we already had some constructed level mice in wilds of Eld? When we knew we already had some constructed level mice in Wilds of Eldritch, that meant we didn't need as many

in Bloomberg and we could use those slots for other cool things. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Ian. It is fascinating hearing about the making of Bloomberg. I was there for the vision part, but the set design wasn't. So I always loved hearing about the set design. Yeah, it's been great. Always a pleasure to be on the show, Mark.

And I'll be happy to come any time. And yeah, I could chat for hours about Bloomberg. It's a set I'm very, very excited about. And I hope by the time people are hearing this podcast that most of the cards are out and people are excited by them and having a good time playing with them. Well, so thank you so much for being with us. To everybody else, I'm at my desk.

So we all know 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. So goodbye for today. I hope you guys all enjoy Bloomburl, and I will see you next time. Bye bye.