Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1161: Bloomburrow Play Design with Jadine Klomparens

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

I sit down with Play Designer Jadine Klomparens to talk about the play design of Bloomburrow.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home edition. So today we're going to talk Bloomberg Play Design, and I have Jaydeen Klompern with me to talk all about it. Hey, Jaydeen. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Okay, so I think we're going to do is start with the mechanics that cover all the animals, and then we'll talk about the individual animals. How does that sound? Sounds great. Okay, so let's start with offspring. How challenging from a play design standpoint is offspring? You know, not really that hard. It's mostly a kicker variant. It's got lots of knobs, so it's pretty easy to get the right cost on it. The most challenging part about it from our perspective is that it's just

fundamentally getting two of the same things, which can be a lot more powerful than having one of it and in a lot of ways a lot less fun, just kind of repetitive etc. But there's some really cool dreams to fulfill having access to your effect kind of even if you lose one of your creatures is really cool. So we have a lot to work with. Pretty easy mechanic for us. Okay, let's talk gift. How hard now gets to something a little bit newer, right? Yeah, gift is pretty new. It's novel. It's super sweet. The hardest part for it for us is that in competitive 60 card magic, you often do not want to help your opponent. So getting the cost just right and like figuring out what we need to bribe you with so that you will give your opponent something and make the choice come up is not the easiest thing.

Some gifts are the gifts are not all equal. Like you very rarely want to give your opponent a card that's worth a lot. But we can kind of sometimes say a 1-1 is not worth all that much. We can find ways for you to want to give your opponent that. It was a pretty fun mechanic to work on, just kind of interesting puzzles. Every time in a meeting we're like, well, this card is a little bit too weak with a gifting a full card. If we switch it to a fish, how's that? And kind of working with art to have flexibility on what gift is given on some of the cards so that we can figure out and

testing. Just a lot of cool knobs and spaces we hadn't played in much before. Yeah, and so basically there were three options. I guess there's one gift of treasure, but so having the three options helped you be able to sort of use as a knob? Yeah. On most of the concepts, some of them were like pretty specific and we weren't going to change what gift was being given because it was important, but being able to switch back and forth did help us in a few cards. Okay. Next, uh, classes are the talents, I guess, as they're called in this set.

Yeah. So, um, classes came out of something. I think it's pretty interesting Bloomberg, where the key promise of Bloomberg is pretty clear, really cool typal gameplay, killing to a ton of players everybody kind of is interested in putting much of mice in some deck or ton of squirrels in one deck. Cool. But not everybody is interested in that. Some people kind of bounce off the typal gameplay a little bit and we wanted to make sure that that had something for everybody. So classes were kind of like born out of if you're not really into this super creature-centric gameplay that is all about creature types,

what might you be interested in that makes sense for the Bloomberg creative? And we came to classes as a non-creature exciting thing that makes sense for the world and is something that you might be interested in if you're not that into the core gameplay of Bloomberg. So we kind of executed them in that fashion just kind of like what is what can these be for for the player who isn't as interested in the other stuff and you know it's stuff we've worked on before, starting with the forgotten realms. And we worked plenty with classes, pretty easy, lots of knobs fun to work on cool stuff. Okay, the last one general one I'll ask about, we don't have a

name for it. I'll call it the paw mechanic. But there's a cycle of rares that use a resource represented by little paw. How from a balance standpoint, how hard were those to make? Um, kind of more challenging than we thought. There's so many combinatorics, uh, in terms of what you can do with it and trying to get the right spread of this is a really exciting, big paw print mode. And then you can only choose once the biggest effect on the card, but everything else is still there and still interesting and you kind of feel like you might

cast it in a variety of different ways. There were a lot of options at the beginning of design in terms of how these would go, how many paw prints we would give you, what the modes would cost. We tried a ton of different schemes to kind of figure out what was the most fun, what led made you feel like you had the most agency, but you weren't overwhelmed by the number of decisions on the card. And yeah, it just took a lot of iteration, but it's the kind of stuff Play Design is really good at and it was fun to watch those cards get better and better. Okay, so we need to take those four main things, which is offspring, gifts, classes, and the paw mechanic, and you had to rank them from the hardest to balance to the easiest. What was the hardest and then to the easiest?

Ooh, okay. I think gift is the hardest. Giving your opponent stuff just kind of fundamentally fights against play design instincts. So there's just a lot to think about and making that choice interesting. Took a lot of iteration. Although paw print next, the paw print mechanic was very novel. It wasn't on very many cards, which kind of held back the overall amount of difficulty for my team, just not that much stuff to work on, but it did for one cycle took a good deal of effort.

But it always felt like we were moving forward and could see where all the cards would land at the end of the day. We weren't worried about any of them not working. So that kind of helps. Then I think classes and offspring are pretty similar at being among the easier stuff we work on. So I'll just put them joint tied and pretty easy. Okay, so let's start

talking animals. So the big question here is I'm curious I'm like how easy or hard was it to balance each of these ten archetypes? So I'm gonna go in a Wuburg order starting with the birds the white blue. How tough were birds? Limited, pretty challenging. Just flying the all flying deck has a lot of fun challenges. It's not really not that fun when all your creatures fly and your opponent kind of dies without having much resistance. So birds naturally are going to have flying kind of hard to dodge. So we created this, they care about creatures without flying thing, which was a little bit challenging to work on.

Yeah, constructed birds pretty hard, not a lot of birds previously in the environment to work on. So just pretty difficult to create something from nothing there. Okay, so birds are a tricky one. Although, of animals that have passed, like there's more birds than a lot of other animals of the creature types.

Yeah, definitely. Especially I think Commander got to use a lot of birds and do some cool stuff, but there wasn't a ton in standard. And they didn't have much of a cohesive hook that we're all kind of pointing in different directions. Okay, so it's tricky in standard, but in larger formats, a little bit easier because there's more birds.

Yeah. Okay, next up larger formats, a little bit easier because there's more birds. Yeah. OK, next up, blue, black, rats. So rats was interesting. We kind of moved it towards threshold. We had some really strong potential old rat cards at the outskirts of standards. We kind of discovered caramonics from one. Just enter, put all the rats in your top five or six cards into your hand.

That we found very powerful at various points in time. So balancing around the existing rats was, I won't say hard, but it was something we had to be aware of. But it was one of the creatures types that we executed on in one of the least kind of core type of way. You definitely feel like you're playing a Rats deck, but you have a few less creatures. You care a little bit more about non-creatures, which makes it a little bit easier for us overall. And in general, they have thresholds. How easy or hard is threshold for you guys? It's easy.

It just takes some work. We have to make sure the tools are in the environment, that you can reliably mill yourself and just kind of make sure you have what you need. But Space Magic has played in a lot. It is not overall too hard. We know what it takes to get this stuff to work. Okay, next up, BlackRed, the lizards. So lizards were one of the more fun decks to work on, frankly.

Just very core aggressive bloodthirst. The most challenging part for us was trying to find the fun ways to reliably have bloodthirst turned on. You'll see like cast triggers on the black red legend that hits your opponent for one, the landfall one drop getting your opponent for one, just kind of the fun different ways to get your bloodthirst turned on reliably so that we can give you a constructed deck here.

And how is it in limited? Just a pretty, I'll say on the easier side, aggressive deck cares about attacking stuff we've done before, tore challenges in trying to make sure it kind of has a range of gameplay and isn't too polar. Kind of easy for those decks to end up as either win when they get really ahead, lose when they get even a little bit behind, so trying to find the middle ground of that experience. But not easier for Black and Red as a color pair than others because you'll

have access to ample removal. Okay, next up is red green, the raccoons. Yeah, raccoons were I think on the harder side for Limited. The expend mechanic is just a little bit challenging for us to work with with the raccoon. We actually explored a few different versions of it, finding what the right number of threshold was going to be. So it took a lot of iterating to be like, what are we supposed to give you when you manage to do the thing? How high is the floor supposed to be when you can't? That took some tinkering. Constructed, we mostly concentrated on like one of cool designs rather than trying to feed an entire raccoon deck into standard.

And those designs worked out pretty well for the most part. Expend is a little bit easier for us in constructed than limited because you have more control over what you're gonna put in your deck. How hard mechanic is expand in general to balance? Pretty easy for constructed, kind of challenging for limited, middle of the pack. Okay, next up is green-white, the rabbits. Yeah, the rabbits are the most core type of gameplay in Bloomberg, and in that case kind of the easiest, hardest to work work with where we're very clear what we're going for.

Just go wide, get you with tokens. We know how this works. And putting it at the right power level for constructed and limited can be a bit of a challenge. Making sure there's enough counterplay, but the experience is at the right level of polarity. But overall, stuff we've done before, not too bad. So just curious, the fact that the rabbits make a lot of tokens, does that make it easier to construct it because you have to rely less on other cards being rabbits? Yep, a little bit. We know that you'll reliably be able to get many rabbits in play even if

there aren't all that many rabbits in the environment altogether. Okay, next up is white block, the bats. So the bats were among the harder for both limited and constructed just because their theme is pretty specific. The whole life loss, life gain thing is kind of hard to wrap your head around. You need really specific pieces in deck building trying to get the right blend of life gain, life loss, etc. In Constructed, we struggled a lot trying to figure out how much do we care about the bats being both life gain and life loss? How much of a fail case is it if they're mostly about life gain or mostly about life loss. We're bouncing around

the pain lands from DMU year which are a very easy source of life loss and just trying to get all of those pieces together. And you know there are a few bats here and there and previously in standard but none of them really care about this theme so we were mostly working with bloom burrow cards and a few very specific things that we put in the environment to work with them. So we were mostly working with bloom burrow cards and a few very specific things that we put in the environment to work with them. So pretty high difficulty overall. Okay next up is blue red, the otters. So the otters I think kind of like rats on the easier side because we lean so much into less of a core typal gameplay here and we're're more about prowess, attack spells kind of stuff with a lot of otters as your creatures on the battlefield.

Pretty easy stuff. We've done a lot stuff that a lot of play designers think is really fun. Kind of that prowess aggro gameplay. So yeah, I think for both movement and instructed on the easier side. Okay. Next up is black green green the squirrels. Squirrels were pretty interesting we used the forage mechanic which was like a little bit like the rats care about filling your graveyard a little bit like nothing else maybe I guess

eldritch stuff caring about food and sacrificing that on On the higher end of difficulty, just because the inputs were pretty specific in trying to figure out how much is food supposed to matter, how much is filling your graveyard supposed to matter. But at the end of the day, it was stuff that you could achieve classically in Magic just by playing the game. And that makes it not that hard. Constructed, I think was a bit more challenging

where we tried to lean into food a little bit more where possible and trying to get those elements together was a bit tricky. Okay, next up is red, white, the mice. The mice, I think this was overall the hardest at least for Constructed. Trying to get valiant correct is a very challenging thing. It's just a very, you need very specific deck building and you're aimed at this pretty aggressive

plan so you don't have a lot of time to correct for it. Some A plus B decks that are trying to assemble their things on a later turn can have a little bit of an easier time than stuff like Heroic that really wants to be firing out all cylinders very early in the game. Going to Valiant and caring about abilities helped us a little bit with this. We played around with some equipment stuff. Mabel, the red white legendary, gets you an equipment that kind of helps you get your triggers, your Valiant triggers turn over turn in a pretty fun way. Really happy with how that deck and the mice turned out in general with a lot of work, but really cool.

Okay, the final one, green blue, is frogs. So frogs are, we're pretty challenging. Not a lot of frogs to work with and their theme is challenging, not a lot of frogs to work with and their theme is stuff that leads to board stalls and not the most fun gameplay of just accruing value for a very very long time. So trying to get that at the right power level is always a little bit challenging and again it has the you need stuff that has powerful entrance to battlefield triggers to blink, You need stuff that lets you blink. So there's kind of that blending element to it. So pretty challenging. Okay.

So of all the 10 animals, if you had to pick, let's say three that were the hardest and three that are easiest. What three do you think were the hardest? What three were the easiest? Uh, hardest I'm going to go with bats, mice, and frogs. Easiest, I will go lizards, rabbits, and I'll say otters. That's pretty close between otters and rats. So let's talk a little bit about balancing Typal, because that's a big part of the set.

The set had a lot of that. I know behind the scenes that Typal is very popular with the players, but it is a very difficult theme for us to balance. Can we talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So typo gameplay, kind of, I spoke a little to this earlier, can get very polar. Either you get all your stuff on board and crush your opponent pretty quickly, or your opponent has an answer to what you're doing, some kind of sweeper effect, and you are left Get all your stuff on board and crush your opponent pretty quickly, or your opponent

has an answer to what you're doing, some kind of sweeper effect, and you're left at zero. So getting like core classic aggressive type of right is kind of a mix of how far ahead are we supposed to let you get when you curve out on your opponent and are crushing them versus how much resiliency do we bake in so that you have some game left after they find an answer to all your creatures? Without kind of over correcting for the weakness of Typal and making the deck so strong that nobody can beat it. Like if we say you are so good against sweepers that you kind of don't care about them, this deck is going to be really strong because it has no weaknesses anymore. So trying to give players tools to fight the core issues of

the strategy while also not leaving the strategy too strong is pretty challenging for us. And that is on top of the fact that Typo cares so much about creative elements of the card, the creature type of it, that there are some things that will get to a point in the process where we can't fix it anymore. If we realize a little bit too late that we're a rabbit short in the environment for this deck to really work,

or we're kind of missing the otter that we need and we don't have a slot for it, it's really hard for us to fix that because we already have the art, the cards are locked in. Whereas some other themes, we can repurpose stuff, we can kind of move things around because it's less creatively locked in a way that typal is really means we have to plan ahead of time and be ready for it. Yeah, there's not a lot of themes that get as locked in by art as typal does.

No, no, flying matters might be the other one. Yeah, that's not a thing of two, flying. Flying is another problem one, but yes. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about big picture about Bloomberg in general. So obviously there was a focus on a lot of the animal themes, but what else were you trying to balance? Like what else were you guys sort of working with

when making Bloomberg at large? So one of the big things we were aiming for kind of timed with this. Bloomberg we knew was going to be our first standard rotation after switching to three year standard. So one of the things we really wanted to accomplish was giving players a lot of decks that they could build kind of out of the box with the new set. Standard rotations here, here is some new cool decks that you can go out and play with.

The stars kind of aligned that the set that that was happening with was Bloomberg, which is just an absolutely perfect set for giving players a lot of different themes that we can try and execute on. So more than any other set for Bloomberg, Play Design was really focused on what are the Bloomberg decks? How do we get them to work? How do we figure out these packages? Kind of less so than individual cards, which is a lot of

our attention in a lot of other sets. Here we were really worried about are the mice working in constructed? Are the bats working in constructed? Trying to feed that jigsaw a little bit, try and get all of those pieces correct. Yeah, and another thing that's important, sort of behind the scenes thing is not all themes in a set are equal, meaning you guys spend a lot of time figuring out which ones have more potential for different formats and then pushing them towards certain formats. Yep, definitely. We kind of look at everything and go, okay, what would it take for this thing to work in standard?

What would it take for this thing to work in commander? What are the what's kind of easier here? What'll be more fun kind of that stuff? We look at we looked at all of the ten types and kind of went through that populace Like what would this look like in standard when players enjoy that? How can we make it happen and what format should we aim it for? In general, so I'm sort of curious, other than typo, what do you think were the biggest challenges of Bloomberg? Doing something else, I think, would be what I would call the biggest other challenge. So, Bloomberg was doing something that I believe we've never done before, which is trying to

be a typal set that cares about 10 different creature types. That's so many. We did a lot of really clever stuff in the set to make it work and make it feel like it is typal and make it feel like you can care about all this other stuff, or sorry, about all of the creature types in the set and that nothing got left behind of our 10 core animal types. But that takes a lot of real estate in the set. So trying to do other things besides typal

became kind of a challenge because we don't want the set to be too one note. We want to make sure there's something for everyone. So trying to figure out what we can do in the vein of classes, in the vein of the seasons, the paw print mechanic to give you something else besides just this typal stuff. Yeah, it's funny. The, uh, you look back at the free wrist typal sets, um, usually we focus on five.

I mean, Loro and technically had eight onslaught technically had 10, but both of them focused on five. I mean, Loro and technically had eight, onslaught technically had 10, but both of them focused on five. And so focusing on 10 really was, I mean, we had taught in early vision, we type of just having five, but it felt like the world, it wasn't showing off the world enough to only have five. That's how we ended up at 10.

I mean, turned out great. I think we managed to do it, but it was definitely a hard target to hit. Let's talk a little bit about cameos real quick. There are a bunch of one of animals in the set and the calamity beast. Actually, these are two separate things. Let's first talk about calamity beasts first. What were the roles of the Calamity Beasts? So being something big, I guess, would be how I would phrase

what we use them for in play design, where a lot of what's going on in Bloomberg is the contrast between small animal types working together and these huge Calamity Beasts. So the set actually is kind of low on concepts that lend themselves to creatures with big power and toughness numbers. And for the Calamity Beast,

anything we wanted to accomplish for standard that required a big creature, we wanted to use the Calamity Beast for that slot. And I mean, the Calamity Beasts are also a little more one-off, right? Like you just need all Calamity Beasts and go in a duck. It doesn't, they're less thematic like the way the animals were.

Yep, definitely. Or it lets us do some sideways stuff on the ones that have a bit of a build around component, but it lets us zig a little bit when the rest of the set is going in one direction and kind of hit those different notes. So the other thing I was asking about was there are a lot of or not a lot there are some number of animals that are unique like there's one skunk and one weasel. Did those serve any role for you guys? Not particularly trying to make them feel cool and special and limited is the thing I remember the most but not a ton of stuff going on other than being, you know, a card

that is not for the rabbits before, not for any of the creature types think is to do something else. Okay. So, um, when you test typal sets and when you, when you're, is there, do you have to play test differently? Is there anything about the process that's different when you're trying to hit more? I don't know. It's like there's a lot more you were trying to hit this out than the average set thematically Yeah, we get to kind of divide and conquer a little bit more formally than we often do where a lot of

Playtesting and play design in the future future league is pretty self-guided We kind of set the play designers loose on the file and go, hey, explore everything that's going on, go to what interests you, et cetera. And we have kind of a large number of themes, like Bloomberg, that we're specifically trying to hit and make work. We get to kind of divide it up and be like,

all right, you two work on the mice, you two work on the squirrels, that kind of thing, and kind of get a little bit more separation and give everybody a pretty more specific task than we often do. So some of those you brought up that it's curious, I don't think the audience knows this. So it's a cool question, which is,

you talked about casual play. We have a separate casual play design team. How do you guys work with them to make sure that, like some of the animals might make more sense to push toward casual play versus competitive play? How do you work with them to figure that out? Um, so the process has evolved a lot since we created the casual play design team. Play design, my team, works on the set first for the most part. We Play Design, my team, works on the set first for the most part. We kind of work as we always did.

We work on the cards. We get the rates into closer shape, figure out what we want and where. And then at some point, Casual Play Design comes along. They do a pass to the file. They talk about what looks like it would be cool for Camp Commander and what looks like isn't really going to hit in Commander. And then we just kind of have a conversation where we go through all of the cards and are like, hey, where are we aiming this? Is this really cool in Commander? Is it really cool in Standard?

Who are we prioritizing on this specific design? And just kind of assign our goals and then go from there. We get into a lot of spots where commander wants to take a card one way, standard wants to take another card another way, and just an overall balancing act of whose concern is louder here, what were our goals for this slot, and what's overall going to make for a better product, and keeping in mind kind of where we're at with the total file, making sure there's enough for all kinds of players. So just give the idea about how many people do you think worked on Play Design of Bloomberg? I'll say around 10, maybe slightly more.

And how long do you guys have? Like what's the, to give you a sense of the time frame? So sets are in focus for us, meaning that they are the most recent set in the Future Future League and are getting the bulk of our attention for somewhere around 10 weeks, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depending on the set. And we don't stop working on the set after that time.

Another set enters and that receives the bulk of our attention. But the cards in Bloomberg, for instance, when Duskhorn entered FFL, Bloomberg took a back seat. We still played with the cards. We still changed the cards. It just wasn't the bulk of our attention. That kind of off-ramp lasts until we hand off the cards, the card set to the printers and we have about another 10, maybe 15 weeks. So overall we're playing with the cards for 20, 25 weeks. Okay. So, we're almost out of time here.

So I'm sort of curious, any final thoughts on the play design of Bloomberg? Anything we didn't hit? Um, no, I think we hit most of the notes. Just overall, it was like a pretty fun challenge getting to work on so many different kinds of creature gameplay in the same set and trying to get them all to hit. So I think the play designers enjoyed working on this one a good deal. Pretty fun. Well, I want to thank you for joining us. It was, uh, I like, I like looking at sets at all different vantage points. That's really cool to see the play design aspect of it.

So thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. But to everybody else, it looks like I've made it to my desk. So we all know what that means. And this means that my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.