Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1159: Batching

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the design technique of making a new theme by combining numerous mechanical themes.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking about batching. So I'm going to talk about the history of batching, why we do batching, what the value of batching is, what batching is, if you don't know what batching is. So let me start with that. What is batching?

So batching is the tool where we list a bunch of different things together, but then make a vocabulary word that goes in the rule text that says, oh, do thing X. And then in the reminder text, we define what it is. And batching, by definition, means that there's usually two to five items that we're connecting together. So, let me walk through the history of batching, and then I'll get into why batching is an important tool for us. Okay, so the story goes back to Dominaria.

So we were returning to the place that started it all. So when Magic first began, the main setting was Dominaria, and in the first 10 years of Magic, the vast majority of sets took place in Dominaria. Not everyone, but most of them did. Even though we had a multiverse to explore, we didn't do a lot of multiverse exploring early on. So anyway, after Time Spiral where we had the mending, we basically had messed up Dominaria quite a bit. It was a little post-apocalyptic. We ended up going off and starting really building a multiverse of just spending years going to other worlds.

So by the time we decided to go back to Dominaria, 13 years magic-wise had happened. I think a lot more than that in story. And so at this point we had more gotten in the habit of making worlds have a certain feel to them, a certain mechanical definition. That part of the fun of a multiverse is that each world really felt distinct from the other. And Dominaria was a bit weird because we had so many sets, like 40 sets of Dominaria, that it didn't feel like one thing. It felt like lots of different things. And we wanted to sort of have a cohesive, like when we visit Dominaria, what is it about? We didn't want to just be random. We wanted to be about something. So we spent a lot of time in exploratory design and eventually came up with the idea of

history. The neat thing about Dominaria is in the world of Dominaria a lot of important story things happen there. The Brothers War happened there, the Frexian invasion happened there, the Mending happened there, a lot of like big story moments happened there. So it was definitely a world where a lot of famous things happen and from a, in a narrative game sense, like the players experienced all that cause they were sets. So there's a history within, within the game, within the story of the game. And there's a history of the game itself. And so the flavor of Dominaria being about history, the line we use was a world that's present is defined by its past, what sort of the line we used. And a lot of the way we designed it is there were a lot of

the like, there were ships from the Frex invasion that has crashed and then the world had built around them. And so a lot of how we saw the world had to do with things from the past. Okay, but if the world's about history, we wanted to mechanically represent history. And that was a challenge. One of the biggest problems is the low-hanging fruit of history is the graveyard. It represents spells of the past, right? But we had done Amonkhet not long before and Amonkhet had really done a lot with the graveyard. And before Amonkhet, we had done a lot of stuff

with the graveyard in that time period. So we didn't wanna use the graveyard. We wanna do something different. So we made a list of things we felt like what could represent history. So one of the ideas we liked was artifacts. Artifacts, even the name artifacts, they're objects of the past,

usually of some historical importance, magical items mostly. We also liked the idea that there were characters, some of which might still be alive just cause it's a fantasy and so, you know, we might have a tree folk that's thousand, or dragon or somebody that's thousands of years old, that could happen in fantasy. And we also wanted to do a lot of like ancestors like this famous person is no longer

alive but their ancestor you know Gerard is dead but his ancestor lives on and so we liked the idea of that legendary creatures were a tie to the past. Finally, we had invented something new for Dominaria. We wanted to represent stories. And so we ended up using some early designs we had done for planeswalkers that had felt a little too predictive. We wanted planeswalkers of agency. And we came up with this mechanic where the planeswalkers did things in a certain order.

And it just felt like the planeswalkers were dumb. For example, one of the very first ones we made was Garrick and it was like on turn one he makes a wolf or not wolf a beast he makes a 3-3 beast. On turn two he for every beast he has he makes another beast he duplicates all his beasts and then on turn three all beasts get plus three and trample but the problem is turn one I make a beast and then your opponent like bolts it or something. Turn two he does does nothing, there's nothing to copy. Turn three, well he gives all beasts plus three plus three but there's no beast so he doesn't

do anything. So he was sitting around twiddling his thumbs and it felt like he didn't have agency, he just felt dumb. But when we were trying to come up with stories we realized that having a set pattern, hey that's what a story is. Hey, chapter one happens in chapter two than chapter three. So that same mechanic that didn't feel right for planeswalkers felt right for stories. We came up with a new way to lay them out. They were vertical images. Anyway, we built a lot into them and we decided that we'd also include side-cuts

on our list. So the idea originally was, okay, I think Aaron's one suggested this first. What if we just took, like, early think Aaron's the one that suggested this first. What if we just took, like, early on in the file we just cared about those three things. Some things cared about artifacts, some things cared about legendary things, some things cared about side-its, but it was a little mishy-mashy. So I think Aaron was the one that said, well, what if we just put them together? And so, okay, when this creature enters the battlefield, you can return an artifact or a legendary card or a saga from the graveyard to your hand or whenever you cast an artifact or a legendary card or a saga from your hand this trigger happens.

It was just wordy and the other problem was that people weren't getting it, right? We're like, well, we chose these three things because they represent history, but it wasn't quite coming across. I think we, so anyway, what happened was, so Bill Rose is the VP of R&D. Bill Rose from time to time, this is a ways back, he's less involved day-to-day, but he would look at stats that just sort of give a sign off on them and he didn't understand the history part he didn't understand the three connective things and so he like I don't I don't get this like why are these together and I'm like well it represents history and so we did a little bit of testing and Bill's gut

was sort of true the majority of people we tested with like didn't get why it came together. And Bill was like, yeah, it's not coming through. We should just pull it from the set. So I was like, no, no, no, Bill, it's important to the set. I think it's the glue that holds everything together. Let me see if I can convey it better. Maybe there's better ways to convey what we're doing. And Bill said, okay. And I think he gave me a month or two months ago. He gave me a deadline, said,

well, look, I'll give you this long, but if you don't figure it out by then, we really got to change it up. It's not working for the set. And so I said, okay. So I put together a little strike team. Kelly Diggs was the creative representative, and I forget who the art director was. But me and Kelly and the art director, like, so what I did was I would try something and then I would test it around the building and see, do you understand what's going on? And I would test with different people because a lot of it was first impressions. So I would test with different people. So we tried a bunch of different things. First thing we tried ability words where I'm like, is history colon, whenever an artifact,

you know. But what I found was people really got hung up on the objects and like we were having a lot of trouble. And like every time we did something, we would increment it a little bit. We spent some time like being more exacting in the flavor. We're like, what are the tropes you want to hit? Oh, this is a adventurous, adventurous archaeologist and they care about the past. We would find things that sort of were more resonant.

We started playing with technology, how we worded it. But no matter what I did, I did increment it up. I was making it like more people got it, but not enough people people got it and I think we were down to like a week left and so I said okay let me try something bolder so what I did is I said okay I'm not going to reference the three things in the in the rule text I'm just gonna put a flavorful word there so we use historic so it says when this enters the battlefield, put a historic card from your graveyard into your hand or whenever you cast a historic card trigger, right? We just, I just took them out. I'm like, I'm just going to put

a flavorful word in the rule of text. I'm not, and I'm not in the rule of text. I'm not going to worry about what it means. I'm just going to use a flavorful word. And then in reminder text, well, I have to tell you what that means. I'm just going to use a flavorful word. And then in reminder text, well I have to tell you what that means so I'll tell you reminder text. But the idea was it made it much lighter, it's shorter, pithier and it just made the flavor word like front and center. I get a historic card. That sounds great. Okay, what's a historic card? And then I would tell you what it was. And by offsetting the list outside of the rules text So that when you read the rules text like once you learned it you could just ignore the list

It just it it popped and it it solved the problem So like it often happens with magic Sometimes you invent something because you're trying to solve a problem and then then when you invent it, you're like, oh, this is pretty cool. So that was the first use of batching was historic in Dominaria. So let me talk a little bit about the value of batching. Once we did it once, I realized it was something very

valuable. Why is it valuable? Well, number one is one of the largest problems that we have right now is 10, don't know, 10, 15 years ago, Commander became pretty dominant. And along with it, Modern, like Magic used to live in Standard. Like Standard was like the heart of Magic. More Standard was played than any other constructed format.

Now that's not true. Now, at least in Tabletop, Commander's the most played format. Now that's not true. Now, at least in tabletop, Commander's the most played format. I think Modern is second. So a lot of people are playing with a lot more older cards. So one of the problem is a lot of making magic is we make brand new things. But if that brand new things requires you to have enough

cards to play, it becomes problematic, especially in Commander. So outside of Commander, most of the formats are four of 60 card formats, not unlimited formats. So you have 60 cards, and you've got four of each one. So in order to have a theme work, you only need eight to 10 cards, maybe. Those cards, when you have four of them, that's enough to make it work.

I mean maybe even a little less than 8 can make it work, but like 6 to 10. You can make it work. But in Commander, it's not 4 of, it's 1 of, it's not 60 cards, it's 100 cards. So the math is something like you need 6 and a half times as many cards to make a theme work. It's a lot harder if you want to build around a new theme to just make enough. Even when we're making blocks we weren't making enough cards. And so that's one of the problems is a lot of times we introduce something and it's brand new. I'll use energy as a perfect example. We introduce energy. Energy is fun. There are plenty of energy cards to make an energy deck in four of 60 card formats.

But in commander, there just weren't enough cards, let alone the problem that you have color identity and sometimes, you know, a deck can't even play all the colors. So even if we make a lot of cards because of color identity, you can only play one in your color identity. It just, and we're just, the volume you need is so high now hey energy we start up doing more energy eventually again in the Fallout decks and in Modern Rises 3 and we're starting to get the point where there's maybe enough energy that you can build you know you can build a commander deck out of it but that was like many years later

with multiple sets and so we know so what we refer to sort of a parasitic mechanic what a parasitic mechanic is is you kind of need stuff from that set to play it and You know the The one thing that we were very conscious of was We can make some parasitic things that magic can do that But the problem you run into is if all your sets are that it just becomes hard to play with new themes we want the audience to like embrace the new set and play in the new

themes but if the new set is too narrow in its volume and its number it's hard to play that in larger format especially in commander so one of the things we're looking for is how do we make new themes that use old components? How do we make a new theme that has enough cards that you can build around? And the nice thing about batching is, I'll take Historic as my example, Magic has had artifacts since the very beginning of the game. Magic has had legendary things since early in the game. I mean not the first thing, but Legends the third set has has had legendary things since early in the game. I mean, not the first thing, but Legends, the third set, has had it. So since early in the game, you could do that. So the

large, the biggest question is, and then Sagas were new, but that also shows that Batching can mix old and new. And ironically, Sagas have gone on to become deciduous. So Sagas aren't quite as hard to do as they once were. There's a lot more of them. Anyway, so that's one big thing batching does. It allows you to do new themes with old components. And it allows you, like one of the things that we're constantly doing is, look, every time you make new sets, we're adding new qualities.

And when you get into eternal formats, there's a lot going on, so when we can reuse existing things, that's just very valuable. And we've done a lot of, hey, it's an enchantment set. Hey, it's an artifact set. Hey, like we can do those themes, but like the low hanging fruit singular themes we have done, you know, there's not a lot of things that every magic set has that we haven't make a set that cared about those things. There just isn't that many of those things. And we make a lot of magic sets. So set has that we have to make a set that cared about those things. There just isn't that many of those things. And we make a lot of magic sets. So the other thing that batching did, it kind of

broadened up what we could care about. In a way, that was useful. OK, so what happened is we put batching in Dominaria. I was excited by it right away. I mean, I definitely saw the value of it. So I was working on Zendikar Rising. So that set came out a number of years later. And one of the things about Zendikar is that Zendikar is

an adventure world. And we borrowed one of the big influences on adventure world was Dungeon Dragons. For a lot of players, a lot of game players, it is a place that they've interacted with as the most of Adventure World's deal. So when we made Originals Endercar, we made the big things in D&D is you have adventure parties where, and there are different classes in D&D. The four original classes, originally they were fighter, wizard, rogue, and, or sorry, thief, and cleric.

More classes than Addison's, but those were kind of the original four And so when we made original Zendikar we made allies We made different kinds of allies and that we made them wizard with rogue because our our thieves are rogue and thieves not called rogue War fighters became warriors and then cleared for clerics wizard and clerk officer to game warriors and then wizard and cleric ops. And so we kind of cared. Wizard tended to cast spells that were scalable, things counting allies that were positive for you. Rogues tended to do scaling things that affected your opponent.

Warriors were things that tended to affect you in combat. Anyway, we sort of use them very lightly. They existed there as creature types, but we were very light with it. When we went back to Zendikar, it was a battle for Zendikar. There was a whole big story about dealing with the Eldrazi that took up a lot of the return, introduced the Gatewatch and stuff. But anyway, the Eldrazi, by the end of that story, were dealt with. So on our third trip to Zendikar, we wanted to kind of return to the glory that was Zendikar.

And we wanted to really lean into the kind of D&D feel that we'd had in the first run. Within a year, we would make a D&D set for the first time, Dungeon Dragons, Adventures of the Forgotten Realm. We didn't know we were doing that when we started making Zendikar. So one of the ideas we were doing just to do something a little bit different

was this idea of making your party. So we made the ideas we were doing just to do something a little bit different was this idea of making your party. So we made the party mechanic and the party mechanic really wanted to use four things. Like I said, we wanted to have our version of fighters, wizards, thieves and clerics. So we made a mechanic and we could batch those four things. And the idea was, hey, I need to have these things and as long as I have one of each, I get to count it. And then mostly they were scalable. Some of them were threshold, meaning you only have a certain number.

Some of them upgraded a bit if you had all four. But anyway, we used the party mechanic, and it made use of the batching idea of, hey, you're making a party. And then we'll define in the definition what a party is. Now, the definition is super flavorful. Oh, so one of the rules we had made on batching is that the things you batch together

have to be very flavorful. The player has to be able to remember them. And we said, in order to remember them, let's just do two to five. But five is about the most you can remember. Three was the sweet spot. You'll notice that we did three with Historic. We ended up doing four with Party.

There were four members of the party, so that's what we were hitting. The next time we did it was when I was doing Zendikar Rising, Aaron asked me to, he wanted to say, I was pitching the idea that we do modal double face cards in all three sets in Zendikar Rising, in Call of Time, and in Strixhaven. And Aaron wanted to see what that would look like. So I mocked up decks.

I made pre-constructed decks for each of the three sets. Now, Zendikar Rising, we were doing design on, so I could actually borrow mechanics from it. We hadn't made anything yet for Call of Time or for Strixhaven, so I designed actually borrow mechanics from it. We hadn't made anything yet for call time or for strict saving, so I designed some stuff. I mean, I made up some double-phase cards, obviously, but I also, so the mechanic I made for call time, or one of them, was modified.

And the time modified just meant if you were enchanted or equipped. That's what it originally meant. And I put that in, so we ended up putting that into Call Time and ended up not making it to print, at least with a name. I think there were a few cards that referenced it, but it didn't have official name. And then when we were working on Kamigawa Nian Dynasty, so I led the vision design for that, Dave led the set design, and Dave was the person

who had done call time. And so anyway, it came up that we both knew Modified. So Dave is on the visions of teams that he's gonna lead the set design for. So it came up that when we came up with the modernity versus tradition of Neon Dynasty, we liked the idea that modernity was artifacts and tradition was enchantments.

And we were looking for overlaps between those. Like what's the middle ground, right? That what if you draft some of one side and some of the other? And one of the ideas we realized is we had equipment in auras. And so we liked the idea of, well, what if I just care about being, something's attached to you.

That's what I care about. So we remembered that mechanic, we brought it back. In set design, Dave would add counters to it, just because counters had the same feel, right? I'm boosting the creature and counters also boost the creature. So modified ended up being there. And modified says, oh, if I have an aura on me,

aura that I control, I believe, in equipment or a counter on me, I get a bonus, I'm modified and so that ended up that being there The fourth place we've done it at least as far as release material is In outlaws of Thunder Junction. We originally were trying an outlaw creature type The problem was it was just very parasitic like if I cared about the outlaw creature type then the only cards I could care about were in the set. And look, we kind of had words that referenced, you know,

like rogue was kind of similar to Outlaw. So we said, oh, what if he used batching technology? And the idea I liked is that we needed a rogue. Rogue had the backward compatibility. Assassin felt like, how do you not do assassins? And we were doing mercenaries in the set as a creature token. So I'm saying, okay, so we made a list of all the things that could be outlaws. I think there's like ten things. Maybe Berserker, maybe Ninja, maybe Pirates. We listed a

bunch of stuff. We decided that the absolutes for me were Assassin and Rogue and Mercenary. Mercenary mostly given the confines of the set, what we need to do in the set. We were using mercenaries a lot as our like, our minions. And so I needed to have that in the set. I then went to Doug who was in charge of the creative and Doug said, look, it's magic. We have a lot of spell casting, you know,

magic is core to this. We need to have a outlaw, something in the outlaw batch needs to care about casting spells. Because if we need it, if the design team said this is an outlaw, the creative team needed to make sure they can make it an outlaw. And just casting a spell, so Doug suggested Warlock. We added Warlock in during Thorn of Eldraineraine and it was kind of the dark spellcafter They're definitely the ones up to no good And so making warlock outlaws made sense and it gave the creative freedom to do what they needed

We handed over with those four Knowing that we could go to five because I like the upset design some flexibility if they needed to add something like I said There were other things we had listed that could possibly be there It turns out lost cameras Ixalan had added pirates to play in the Ixalan and so there were a bunch of pirates in standard and it just people felt like pirates felt like they made sense in the outlaw so they added pirates and so although I ended up being five like I said that's the upper limits so it was assassins and rogues and mercenaries and warlocks and pirates.

But so I will say this. I can't go into specifics. There's more batching coming in the future. Batching has proved very valuable. Once again, the key to batching is they need to make sense. They need to be flavorful. And they need to be something that we want. Once you label it, you then can mechanically care about it. So we have to want to mechanically care about it. The other nice thing about it is one of the challenges when we do typo themes is just

getting the volume of cards, getting enough cards that it matters. And the cool thing about batching, not that all our batching necessarily is creature type, but it does allow some freedom like without law. And it also allows us to take disconnected things and make new themes like what Historic does. Historic is taking different types of different card types or subtypes and combining them. So there's just neat things we can do with it. So that is something that we we will definitely look forward in the future. So like, I mean, I can't promise that anything that currently has batching in it will be printed with batching because they're not out yet.

But I can see how we're using it and I do believe more batches will make it. Since we have a little bit of time, I'm almost to work, I will talk about the megabatch, an experiment of something we tried in Bloomberg that did not work out. So I want to talk a little bit about the ideas behind the mega batch. So I've talked a lot about how the batching, we like to do two to five items because you got to remember them. But I was very intrigued by the idea of could we do something bigger? Could we do a batch that is more than five things? In fact, so big that we wouldn't write it on the card. There wouldn't be space to write it on the card.

But we could define it on the card in a way that people would get it. And while we were making Bloomberg, the main theme of Bloomberg was animals. And I was like, animals are pretty, that's a pretty universal thing. Like I felt if I show you a magic card and go, is this an animal?

Probably you'll get that right. Like, you know, people know what animals are. Um, and so we tried to make an animal mega batch, meaning we make cards that say something like animals are plus one plus one. And then anything that's an animal would get counted. And the idea was that people would know. And so, so we had a, there was some issues with doing this first off we went and talked to Jeff's I'm just dunks is the rules manager and I'm like can we do a mega batch and Jess said from a rule standpoint there needs to be a definitive list as long as there's definitive lists of the rules can say well here's the list it was fine whether or not that list fit on a card wasn't a rules issue there are things we

do in the rules where the card just says, hey, go with the rules. It's not all we can't fit it on the card. There are things we put in the rules. And the idea behind the Mega Batch was, hey, it's intuitive, that people can understand. They don't need to list it, that you would know it. So the first we ran into a couple of things we had to define. First off, are humans animals? We decided no. There's a lot of humans and really the fun of animals isn't humans. I get technically, you know, in flora and fauna, you know, I mean we're What are we fauna? Flora's plants or fauna's plants? No, fauna's plants. We're flora. Anyway,

Humans are technically animals, but not in the sense that we were talking about. A lot of times you think of animals as being not human. So anyway, we said not human. We also said, look, it gets fuzzy when you get into fictional things. You know, is an elemental an animal? It's like when you start getting fictional things that aren't real, it's tricky because we've made them up. So we said, okay, real earth animals. Like I could go to a zoo on earth and I can see this animal. And so that meant not just not fantasy animals, but not even fantasy animals made up of real animals. There's a bunch of fantasy animals that like I'm part this and part of that. There's a lot of like Greek mythology stuff,

like a like a manticore that's like it's just it's different animal parts or chimeras or whatever but okay we're saying no that's fantasy you have to be an actual animal that existed then we get stuff like the dinosaurs kind of like okay dinosaurs weren't earth they weren't animal okay has existed on earth doesn't have to currently be alive um so just if you go to extinct that doesn't remove you from being an animal. And then we got a lot of other questions. Is a German animal? Is an Agen animal? Is a beast an animal? And we answered those questions but it definitely, and the tricky one, the one that I always bring up was, so in the game we use serpent, the creature type serpent, to mean sea monster.

If you're a serpent, if you're a normal snake, you're snake. But if you're a sea monster, you're a serpent. But the word serpent is synonymous with snake. Meaning if I say to somebody, is a serpent an animal? They would say yes, because on earth a serpent is an animal. That's not how we use the word but we felt like it was confusing to say to somebody hey is a serpent an animal because you go yeah serpents an animal. So we ended up putting animalists but my point is there was a lot of it was there's a lot of

fuzziness. 95% of it was crystal clear. Is a rabbit an animal? Yes it is. Is a wolverine an animal? Yes it is. You know is a is a mouse an animal? Yes it is. Is a wolverine an animal? Yes it is. You know, is a mouse an animal? Yes it is. So the idea was, I mean this is an example of us trying to push in other areas. Three things ended up killing the... Number one was the stuff I'm sort of explaining. It wasn't as clear. There was a lot of fuzziness. Yeah, most of it was clear, but as with any rules, the fuzziness matters. The germ, the egg, the serpent, all that matters.

And even if we came up with answers, they're just education. Part of the coolness of a mega, it's so intuitive that you don't need the list. But when the list gets confusing, you know, you kind of need the list. And so there's that problem. Problem number two was there was an upkeep problem. Normally when we make rules, okay, we've made the rules, we write them, we're done. The rules are done. Maybe we adapt the rules in the future if other rules run in the way. But this list said, hey, for now to the end of the game, there's a list that we have to update every time

we make a creature type. Every time we make a creature type, we have to go, is that an animal? And if so, we got to add it to the list. And the idea was we want to be careful not to make mechanics that just have forever going upkeep. One in a vacuum might seem okay, but once we say you can do that, we start getting in this world where we just make more and more upkeep and that can be problematic. The third problem was animals ended up being a pretty large subsection and the reaction from a lot of play design was it's not that hard to do that. It's not that hard to make an all animal deck and a lot of it to me was the charm oh it's an animal deck and I only use animals but it was a big enough

subset that it wasn't that much of a challenge so anyway for those three reasons we did not do the mega batch but I like the idea of the mega batch. The fact that animals didn't work and animals was like a prime category of something very intuitive. I don't know if a Mega Batch will work. I'm not saying I'm against the idea but a Mega Batch by definition will have upkeep cost. So I don't know whether we'll be able to make a Mega Batch work. A lot of the problems that came up with animal will come up again. So anyway just showing though the reason I bring up the mega

batch is batch is an interesting tool I like it in our toolbox I will keep exploring what it can do can we use batching in ways we haven't used before turns out the mega batch didn't work but the idea behind it was a cool idea um so anyway guys that is batching um like Like I said, one of the things about magical design is we have to keep making new things and so we keep having to find new tools to make new things. And so sometimes when you make something, not only do you make it by itself, but you realize that it's a tool that you can use. And batching is one of the more recent tools that we've created and a

really interesting one. I will say before I leave, we can overuse batching, we can do batching in a way that's not great, we can make batches that aren't intuitive. We have to be careful, we don't want endless batching. I do understand that batching puts some sort of load on memory when you start getting to larger formats. So we need to be careful when and where and how. We're trying to make sure that our batches

are very flavorful, and so that they, a lot of it is it is if I just said to you you didn't even read the reminder text What would it be we want to make things that are pretty clean? So that is something we're working on our bar to making batches has gotten pretty high Anyway guys, that is everything I have to say about batching and I'm at work So we all know that means you need 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.