Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1180: The History of Magic Design, Part 3

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

This episode is part three of an eight-part series where I go through the entire history of Magic design to talk about design evolution over the years.

I'm pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to let the drive to work. Okay so today is another in my series on the history of magic design where I'm going through from the very beginning of magic to modern day to talk about the ways in which magic has changed in how we design. So I'm sort of going step by step and I'm not talking about the designs necessarily of the individual sets, but more of a larger structure of what we're doing. Last I left, we had talked Odyssey block,

which means we are up to onslaught block. So onslaught block, so as I said, we're in the period of time where most of the designs were done by Bill Rose, Mike Elliott or myself. Starting with Invasion, Bill became head designer and we Bill instituted the idea of themes that blocks had themes but Bill really didn't he sort of said okay you know he would pick somebody to do this at to do the block and then they would make the theme. Bill, Bill, early on didn't really dictate what the theme was.

Bill had done invasion himself and he said it's going to be multicolor, but Bill loved that. I then did Odyssey and I decided to do Graveyard. Bill was on board of that. So on slot was Mike Elliott's turn, except Mike Elliott really wasn't wasn't as invested in this new idea of a block theme and so when he first started working on on he was very old-school he had two mechanics and designed around the two mechanics but like I said so when he he handed off the file to Bill, Bill sort of

came to me and said, okay, this doesn't really have a theme. And he asked for my help to sort of give it a theme, like it was missing a theme. And so a lot of the work I did on it, the major thing I did was Mike had like a Little tiny theme in it. He had creatures that could change their creature type But and he had a few at Rarer I think he had a few ways to care about creature type, but I really had believed at the time that Typal was just a very strong theme I had noticed that one of the things that I always notice

is when players want to do something that is weak but they still want to do it, that's a sign there's something really compelling there. And so I sort of got Bill on board of what if our theme was typal? What if our theme was about, you know, what was all about creature types? And so anyway we the

set went through a lot of overhauls the rules the rules team at the time had come up with they were trying to solve how illusionary mask and camouflage works so they came up with a mechanic called morph we added that to the set we really imbued it okay so but the important thing of this, it's not even onslaught, actually is legions. So legions is, we came up with this idea of, what if we made a set that was all creatures? This is kind of, we had seen the idea of,

everything was enemy color, really went over well. And so the idea is hey maybe we want to give more identity individual identities to sets yeah yeah yeah legions was in the onslaught block it would fight you know I would use the mechanics and it had a typal theme but sort of what they said is or we I was there what we said was okay is there a way to give it more of an identity one of the things we were realizing is that blocks the small blocks sorry the small sets in a block didn't have as much identity as the

large sets yeah we were giving the theme to the block but we still wanted the small sets to stand out and so the idea was what if we did a set that was all creatures? We now refer to it as a gimmick set, right? Oh look, it's, you know, and so we made a set that was all creatures. The set actually did, for a while it was the best selling small set. I think the idea, what we learned from Legions was, it it's interesting the gimmick itself is not important to people The idea that we didn't have not creatures in the set really didn't move a lot of needles But what did excite people was the idea that they there's some expectancy. Oh

If I open this pack, I know I'm getting creatures. I'm gonna get a lot of creatures I'm gonna get a deck full of creatures. And that it wasn't so much they cared that we had nothing but creatures, but that there was a certainty that they got something. And that was really important. It would take us a while to understand that it wasn't the gimmick, but the certainties that what people liked. But anyway, we did legions

and then legions was followed by scourge. So, OK, let's talk about Brian Tinsman. We did Legions and then Legions was followed by Scourge. So, okay, let's talk about Brian Tinsman. So one of the things we've done, Brian Tinsman had originally joined Wizards. He worked for Market Research. He had actually was at the time, I think going to business school.

And I think he was brought into R&D because Bill decided it'd be good to have like a business major in R and D that was sort of like making calls about larger business things. Interestingly, Brian ended up doing a lot of design and became one of our big designers. And so Scourge was his, well I mean, he had worked on, when we had, the Odyssey block,

when we had done Odyssey, Torment, and Judgment. For Judgment, it was me and Bill and Richard and Brian. And I was very busy and Bill was very busy and Richard was very busy. So, Brian was put in charge of Judgment. So he was the lead although there's a lot of help from the other three of us because Brian had never let a Magic set before but that was technically Brian's first lead so

Scourge was the first time he was leading where there was less sort of support and so one of the things that Brian did was he said, well, what if the set just had its own theme? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a, it's in the onslaught block. There's a typo theme. But Scourge ended up having this like dragon theme. It wasn't as loud as it should be. Like one of the lessons of Scourge was when you tell people you're doing something

and there's a theme, there's some expectations. And it wasn't that there was zero dragon things, but that it wasn't as much as there should have been in retrospect. I think the thing that Brian was really excited by was, I don't know, Brian was just trying to, I mean, the key here was our third sets were having issues. Apocalypse had been popular.

So we're like, okay, kind of what we're missing is identity. And a lot of this time period is not only sort of crafting blocks and giving them identity, but also trying to figure out how to give small sets identity. And the idea of a third small set kind of deviating and going a slightly different direction started happening. Okay, so after onslaught was Mirrodin. So Mirrodin was my set and I've been pitching for Bill for a while that, okay, we're doing themes, you know, for the blocks.

We got to do an artifact theme. Artifacts are really popular. And so I convinced him to let me do an artifact theme. And not only that, the creative team, so there was a period of time where there was a lot of tension with the creative team. Eventually the creative team got brought under bail and then a bunch of people left

and we sort of remade the creative team. And this is around the time that we got Bradie Dahmermyth, we got Jeremy Cranford Who was the art director? So we Mirrodin is kind of the restart of world building So what had happened was during the period kind of that in-between period we actually like whether I side I actually left We actually left Dominaria and then after the dust of that sort of we sort of retreated back the creative team said like onslaught Odyssey and onslaught were

both instead of being their own worlds were just hey a new corner of Dominaria and so one of the things I wanted with mirrored is like can we just like why are we sticking in the same place you know not that I dislikeinaria, but like we have a multiverse and I said, okay, this is going to be an artifact block. Let's make a set that really reflects that. And so I worked really closely with the creative team. I think Tyler Bielman was in charge at this point. And Tao and I worked really closely together.

And Tyler, I think was on the design team, I believe for Mirrodin. Anyway, we made an artifact set, and not just an artifact set, we made an artifact world. We made something where the world itself was reflective. And so this was the first time really, I mean, Tempest had brought in people

for the Weatherlight saga. So there was building of wrath, for example. But since then, this was the first time that we kind of said, hey, we need the world to reflect the mechanical identity. And Mirrodin was really the first place where there was this back and forth of creative and mechanics in a way where they were reflecting each other. That we're like, hey, we want a mechanical world. And the creative team started sort of imagining

what that was. And so there was a lot of back and forth. Okay, so Mirrodin, Mirrodin Darksteel, and Mirrodin Darksteel and Fifth Dawn. So we ran into a problem in Mirrodon. There was a big, basically Mirrodon kind of like Urza Saga, kind of broke. It had affinity, it had, it just, there was a bunch of things

and it caused us a bunch of problems. And that only doubled down on us getting even more resources. I think that's when we brought Brian Schneider in. Anyway, we brought more resources in to better work on development and play balance and just making the set not broken. The fact that it got broken caused us a bunch of problems. So we made Myrden and Darksteel and then then when we were making Fifth Dawn, we realized what had happened. And like Fifth Dawn wasn't allowed, I mean, not that we did zero, but we really, we weren't

allowed to do much of the main mechanics. We really dialed them all down. And so Fifth Dawn, once again, kind of had to go, hey, okay. And we were introducing brand new things like Sunburst, which was a fun mechanic. Sunburst cared about how many colors you used to cast the spell and then did something based on how many colors. But the set was not really built to do that.

It was an artifact set, so it was a little bit easier to play more colors than normal, but it wasn't designed to do that. Another really important thing, structure that happened during that, during Fifth Dawn, was that happened during that, during 5th on, was Aaron Forsythe, a few years earlier, had been brought in to run the new website. So I had been tasked with making a website for Magic.

I did. We needed an editor in chief. I was a big fan of Aaron. Aaron had done some work on other websites. We ended up bringing Aaron in. He was the the initial editor in chief of what we now call Daily MTG. I love it. Had a name back then. And anyway, we brought him on to Fifth Dawn as we thought it'd be cool to have someone on the design team that could then write about it. Right. So the idea was he was on there to sort of create content for the website

But it turned out he was really good and we ended up from that. We ended up bringing Aaron over design That's when Aaron got brought over to design And that Aaron would rise quickly in design Okay, so after Mirrodin was Champions of Kamagawa. So this was where Bill was Champions of Kamagawa. So this was where Bill, like I said, a lot of times Bill let the lead of the block sort of determine the theme. Bill said no, Bill had a theme.

Bill really wanted us to explore top down. And by that what he meant is, okay, I want flavor to dictate what's going on here. So we spent a bunch of time and we looked at a bunch of things. in the end I think it was between Egyptian and Chinese, we ended up choosing Chinese. And so he put Brian Tinsman, led the set, but the idea was we're gonna let the creative team

do their work first. The creative team are gonna build a world and then we are gonna mechanically make that world come to life, that was the idea of Champs of Kamagawa. And Brady Dominus and the creative team did a great job making a very flavorful world. The problem we learned was that mechanics are just not as robust and flexible as creative.

So a lot of you look at what happened in Champs ofamigawa was that there's a it's a very ham-fisted very parasitic sack. It's sort of like okay we need to represent the samurai okay we'll give them a chance to the samurai they Bushido and the moon folk okay they bounce things and the snakes lock things down you know they when they attack, they lock down for a turn. It was very done sort of case by case. We did sort of push some boundaries.

We made flip cards. We were cards that had two, not two, I mean, one face, but two orientations that made them different. We tried splice, splice onto arcane. We definitely got experimental, but the set in the end, when the dust settled, while it was bold and loud and things that it was trying, it was not a great execution of what Bill had imagined,

which was this harmony of creative and mechanics that letting creative dictate too much cause problems. So the interesting thing during this block is it was in the middle of the block. So what happened, Bill had become VP. Jim Lynn had got promoted, I think. So Bill Rose became the VP, the vice president of R&D. He, for a couple years, kept on the role of head designer.

And finally, Randy Bueller, so the person that I had gotten back when he wanted people off the Pro Tour, one of the people I got him was Randy Bueller. Randy had worked his way up, became head developer, and eventually became, eventually took Bill's old role of overseeing R&D. So Bill had had two roles. He sort of oversaw R&D and he was head designer. When he became vice president he got

Randy to oversee R&D but he kept on the head designer role and I think Randy finally figured out that it was too much. Bill couldn't... the head designer magic is a full-time job. So Randy offered the job to me in the middle of Chambs of Kamagawa. And one of the things that happened was, Bill said that I could have the role if I also took on the role of the head of the creative team. I think Bill had realized,

looking at what happened with Chambs of Kamagawa, that there needed to be more integration between the creative team and design. And so Bill's idea at the time was, well, I'm gonna take the head designer and put them in charge of the creative team. Now, so, so, so I would say the rest of, of Champs Kamigawa block, I think Mike did betrayers and Brian did saviors.

Brian again did the same thing where he brought a whole new theme. There was like a, what I think he called the wisdom, which is hand size matters. But I noticed, so one of the things when I became head designer, so Ravnica was my first time being head designer. So I looked at a lot of the things that I was seeing

and I realized a couple of things. One was we needed better integration, which is why Bill had put me in charge of the creative team. We needed more set identification. I mean, I kind of looked at what we'd been doing and I saw a lot of the pain points. And so when I took over, the big thing that I wanted was I wanted more forethought put into the block, meaning the block plan was more elaborate than just what's the theme.

It was about, okay, what does each set in this block doing? Like there had to be a plan for the whole block. Not in the sense that the block's about something, but that each set in the block had a specific role. And I really wanted to work with the creative team. So when I took over the creative team, we had weekly meetings and I would explain to them what was going on and we would go back and forth. And the perfect example of I think that the new age of creative and mechanics and design was Ravnica. Basically what happened was it was my first setback. Bill and I had talked and Bill and I had talked and Bill,

Bill and I agreed that at some point we wanted to go back to multicolor. The evasion had been hugely successful and we knew that that was a theme that we could revisit. And so the idea was that Ravna could be the first revisit to the theme, to the multicolor theme. I've told this story millions of times. Basically, I wanted to be not evasion, evasion was play all the colors.

I said, play as few colors as possible, but it's multicolors, so play two colors. And then when I sat down the creative team, I was like, okay, I'm gonna give you guys, I'm gonna start by telling you what's my given from a design standpoint. And the given was 10 two-color pairs, Allen and me give an equal weight.

I wanted to make a set about that. So then, Brady Domronus then went away and like, you know, he was exercising one day and came up with the idea of a city of guilds. That each of the color pairs would be represented by a faction in the story. And that there were the city, and it would be a city, which makes the guilds made sense in the story and that there were the city and it would be a city which makes the guilds made sense in the city so what happened there was I leaned into that I said okay this is a really cool concept and then use that concept to adapt what we were designing and that's when we came up the idea of the 433

plan okay what we're going to do do is we're gonna chop up this guild so that the whole block was gonna show up all 10 guilds, but not one set. So we tried one set of just too much, so we spread it out over time. And what it did is all of a sudden, well, the first set had an identity was these four guild members.

And the second set were these three. The third set were these three. And that each one had its own, much like what Apocalypse had done, it really, it made each set shine. And one of the things, and one of the things we monitor is how sets do versus the set before them.

Be aware we understand small sets are smaller, like even if it was as popular. But when we're looking at sales, we're looking at percentage, right? You know, based on the number of cards there is, how does it do? And Ravnica, there was a trend in magic where we were trending down.

And the one uptrend, the one, so we were, was Ravnica. That there's something about Ravnica that just was, people adored it and they adored all of it. And so it really was something that reinvented things. And so, so I, I led Ravnica, just because that was the first time, like, it was my first time out.

I, I decided I wanted to lead the set that led things off Michael Elliott led the Guildpacks and then Air Forsyth for the first time led that Guildpacks would be Mike was off doing other things and his focus really wasn't on magic So that was magic. It was Mike's last magic lead And then Mike would not too after, ended up leaving Wizards. Aaron became, kind of we were trying to find new fresh blood. Aaron became one of our designers, lead designers. And then, so the next set after that was Time Spiral Block.

Brian Tinsman led that. I think Bill did. Yeah, Bill led the middle set of plan or chaos and I led future site. Again, really kind of getting the idea of that. He says has that identity and the thing for future site was the idea of past, present and future. No, let me, let me get into... so I will say one of the things with Time Spiral that we started looking at was not only were we trying to get the sets definitely like... we were trying to get the sets and blocks more in structure, but there's other things going on. For example, I really... one of the ideas I started getting, this was me looking at Legions, was I liked the idea of that whatever you're doing permeates the set that you're in.

And so one of the ideas we had come up with that I'd pitched early on was we want the past. What if every once in a while a card from the past has showed up in your pack? You just opened your pack and there was an old card because we had the new frame with eighth edition and mirrored and we had a new frame. What if an old card in an old frame just showed up?

And then as we sort of played around with it, it became, well, what if not just it showed up every once in a while, what if every single pack had one? And it really was this idea of hey, not only do you want a theme we want to make sure that theme is so Concentrated and loud that it takes just one pack to understand the theme one of the problems we'd run into with champions of Kamigawa was We the idea one of the ideas we had come with is a legendary theme. So we made all rare cards legendary. And we made a few uncommon.

But one of the problems was, you could open up a whole bunch of packs of Champs and Kamigawa, even if you opened up some rares that were legendary. Like it took a lot before you figured out there was a legendary theme. And that was a big lesson to heart. It was one of my maxisms, which was,

if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme. Really what I later realized that I meant was, what I meant was, I mean, that was the maximum I used, which is true, but the larger sort of theme that I got was the idea that one booster pack had to explain what you were up to. That people had to look at one booster pack and get what it is you're trying to do.

Part of that is as fan mechanics. Part of that is certainly having a slot dedicated to something. We don't do it every step, but it's been a very valuable tool. Also we introduced the idea of a bonus sheet. What if we had something like, you know, we've learned with collation that we could have extra sheets and they could do things and have themes and um but it really was us like you could see time spiral um I'm really experimenting like a lot of what's happening is we're trying to figure out how to give identities to sets in a way that makes

individual individual sets stand out then we realize that if blocks are too monotonous you know if it's too much the the same thing, A, people get bored and it's easy to check out, yeah, yeah, I've seen the big set, I got it, yeah, I'm going to skip the small sets. So we really wanted to give them identity. So Planar Chaos was me going, like, Times Square was me pushing boundaries as much as I could. You know, we introduced a bonus sheet and we ended up, the bonus sheet was so cool,

we put it in all three sets. Planner chaos messed with the color pie. Like what if color, because one of the problems we ran into with past, present, and future is, past is very mean something. Future means that what is the present? Everything's the present, what does that mean?

So I came up with the idea of the alternate reality present, the idea of we take the color pie, what if the color pie were different, different abilities were in different colors. And that's when I learned a really important lesson, which is, and then we kind of learned this in Torment 2, there's some things that are pretty sacrosanct that you're not supposed to,

that there's some constants in magic that are important to be constants in magic. And the thing we learned about messing with the color pie is once you make a card that does something different, to the end of time, here's this card that did something different. Even to this day, I'll say a color doesn't do something and they'll pull out a planar chaos card.

Like, well, that literally was that we were messing with what if things were not normal, but it's hard. Like, it is very hard to introduce something and say, well, this isn't what magic normally does when you do it. And planar chaos was interesting. And people, I mean, I think people liked it for the wrong reasons, in the sense that, hey, there's something very exciting, but doing things we're not supposed to do. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to do them. That was a big lesson of planar chaos, which is, and torment to me is less of a mistake in that, hey, we're trying something that really could have worked.

And if it worked, maybe we could do more things. Planar chaos, I was trying to solve an individual problem. And I didn't plan or cast was a mistake. Like torment, I think we needed to learn that lesson. I think we needed to make torment. Planar chaos, we could have figured that out without making the mistake, anyway. And then FutureSight, FutureSight was the idea of,

what if we teased the future? What if we, the whole future shifted sheet was, what if we sort of, and a whole bunch of stuff happened in FutureSight. I wanted to introduce more keyword mechanics, just name more evergreen keyword mechanics. So we named death touch and lifelink and reach. Also the precursor to hex proof was there.

But the problem we learned with, here's what we learned. The time spiral block really taught us something very, very important. So normally we follow a lot of metrics. One of the metrics we follow is tournament play. How many people are playing in tournaments? And another metric we follow is sales. How are sales doing? And up until time spiral, health of environment, meaning how organized play was doing, was like a lock step in with how well the set did. And so we're like, okay, hey, if people are playing magic, that's a good sign. It means magic is doing good.

Time Spiral came along, play was good. The franchise players really enjoy Time Spiral. There's a lot going on, but they were the diehard. They enjoyed it. And what we learned was, so what happened was, play was up, sales were down. Like, wait, wait, wait, when play is good, sales are up. That's what we've learned, what is going on.

And so that was this big realization of what we ended up calling the invisibles, which is there's a group that we can track, mostly the enfranchised players. They're the players that are very invested and loud and playing in things, and they're the people we can see. But they're the most diehard Magic players.

There are a lot of people that play Magic that play it less in franchise. For a franchise Magic player, it's their game, it's their lifestyle. It's something they identify themselves as. There are a lot of people that play Magic that Magic is just a game of games they play. Hey, maybe once a month they play this game.

You know, it was not everybody's as invested in the game as the most invested people. And what happened with them with Time Spiral was it was just too complicated. They did not understand, and so they checked out. So, Time Spiral with Lorwin, which I will get to next time,

really started introducing some ideas of, oh, there's some complexity issues we have to watch for. And so, Time Spiral was really influential in that, you can see that we're starting to figure out how to make sets more, have more weight. Oh, another important thing happened that I forgot in Ravnick, I should mention real quickly before I wrap up for today.

We made a set called Cold Snap. What had happened was the way magic worked at the time was we made three sets a year, they were all standard legal sets, and then every other year we made a core set. And then the Magic brand team at the time, which wasn't part of R&D, were like, hey, you know what, maybe we should be making an extra Magic set, and the years were not making the core set. Like, one of the things from a business standpoint is you want to balance year over year.

You want to sort of, you want each year to be equivalent to the year before. And so we make four sets one year and three sets the next year. It's hard to do that. And that's business wise very important. So we had, our need to actually ask them if they wanted another set. They said no. And then like months later, like six months later, they said, no ask them if they wanted another set. They said no. And then like months later, like six months later, they said, no, no, no, we do. So we had to make it very fast.

Cold snap. The flavor we had was if the ice age was kind of the first block, but there were only two sets in it. So we had we had a set that the whole idea was it was the missing. It was the missing third set found in a file cabinet. It was meant to be a joke. People took it way more seriously than we thought. Randy had made the announcement and I guess Randy was not, tongue-in-cheek was not Randy's strong suit. Anyway, the set had very short design, like it had like two and a half months of design. It had a normal

amount of development, but, we did make that. It taught us, and this will be very influential coming up, the idea that R&D had to start thinking about four sets a year. That if there wasn't a core set, we had to make a set. And so that's going to come up in the next section. But anyway, as we leave here at TimeSpiral, the thing going on is a lot more idea of identity of sets, a lot more of trying to push boundaries, more idea of what we can do. One of the things we did with the time shifted sheets is we started changing the frame. The first set had the old frame, so we were bringing back a frame. Plane Shift and FutureSight, we made up a brand new frame.

And so the idea that frames could be elements, I mean obviously Invasion had done split cards, which is like, hey we can do frames that aren't normal. We started seeing, there's a lot more experimentation going on in Timesparrow Block, and that's going to have a big influence on design. Anyway guys, well I'm at work, so I hope you're enjoying the series. Apparently I did all a lot. When I first started making this thing I thought it was gonna be oh you know two three episodes and now that I'm three episodes in I'm like oh this is many episodes. So anyway guys I hope you're enjoying the series. It's a lot of

fun for me to do and I hope you guys are having fun hearing it. But anyway guys I'm at work so we all know that means it's 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.