Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1182: The History of Magic Design, Part 4

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

This episode is part four 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 my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so this is a continuation of my series talking about the history of magic design Focusing on sort of how we design and how that changed over time Last time we left off we had finished talking about time spiral block, which makes us up to Loro in block Okay Okay so in a previous podcast I talked about how we did cold snap as like a last-minute thing and I said to Bill look next time we want to do four blocks in a single magic year let me know I'll make it organic. Cold snap felt very non-organic, I can make it organic.

So Bill came to me before Laura and said, okay, we're doing four sets. So the idea I came up with was, what if we have a world that goes through some radical change and that we have two mini blocks, that each block is one large and one small rather than large small small So you have two mini blocks, but the two mini blocks are reflections of the same world meaning all four sets are on the same world But some fundamental shift happens, which is why the mechanics are all different

And then another sort of tied into that was the idea that each of the themes of the set would be something that the parallel set could interact with. It wouldn't be the theme of that. Each mini block would have its own theme, but the themes interconnect. Now we had already tagged Lorwin to be a typal set. We had done typal in onslaught. It had gone really well. And I felt it was one of those themes that we could come back to. And I also felt like onslaught was the first time we had done it, but like I, I thought we could, we could, we could do it more than we did. So the idea was the first mini block will have a typal theme. And then the second mini block. have a typal theme. And then the second mini block. So when I was making Ravnica, I came up with hybrid mana and I thought hybrid. So normally when you make a mechanic, you have what's called the splash of the mechanic and the utility of the mechanic. And normally

when you, the first time you introduce it, you want to play up the splash. Here's this new thing you've never seen before. But then when you bring it first time you introduce it, you want to play up a splash. Here's this new thing you've never seen before. But then when you bring it back, you're just more about what's the workhorse part of it. And so I was really intrigued by the idea of a set where color was what mattered and that hybrid played a huge role. I wanted to basically do as much hybrid

as we could with the idea. And I felt like the nice thing about typal and color is the second set could share a lot of creature types of the first set So even though the second set didn't have typal themes in our cards that went into them and the first set would obviously have colors So if you care about colors the first set wouldn't qualify there So I got them got the thumbs up Erin Forsythe who I talked about last time, who had gotten introduced, we brought him on for FutureSight to do a set.

We liked his work so much, we brought him into R&D. So Aaron ended up, Lorwin was gonna be his first opportunity to lead, I mean, he had done a small set in dissension, but his first time to lead a large set. And then I led Shadowmore. I was very intrigued by the idea of, I was very interested in what we could do with hybrid and how, I was kind of, I wanted to experiment how much hybrid we could have.

How much could we do? We ended up trying to do about 50%, which in retrospect probably was a little bit too much. But we were pushing boundaries and trying things. We ended up trying to do about 50% which in retrospect probably was a little bit too much, but we were pushing boundaries and trying things. So the most interesting thing from a large, so a couple important things from this block. Number one from a design standpoint is I did something that I didn't even understand the importance of the time, which is when I decided to do the two mini blocks, I made a large, small, large, small. But what I did was, for the first time ever, we made a large set that wasn't a fall set,

wasn't the beginning of the Magic Gear. And what we discovered was, hey, maybe we can make more, you know, maybe we can make more than one large set. That was sort of what we cemented in there, was oh, we could make, there doesn't have to be just one large set in the Magic Gear, we can have more than one large set. And the interesting things about Shadowmore was, one of the general problems of blocks,

just real quickly from a financial standpoint is, the way blocks worked is, we would sell the first block, the large set, usually in, when I say fall, I'm talking North American seasons. It would be in September, October. And let's say that set sold at 100%, whatever it sold, that's the line. Then each of the small sets,

usually the first small set would sell something like 80% and the second was something like 60%. Meaning it was just a down, like whatever we did in the first set it just was downhill from there and the thing that we had done with Shadowmore was I don't know if Shadowmore sold as well as Lorwyn but it sold way way better than Morning Tide meaning it's just sort of open your eyes of that the audience actually could handle more than one large set in a year

Um, and anyway, I the funny thing was I wasn't making a second large set to make a second large set per se I was trying to make an interesting dynamic and too many blocks seemed very interesting to me. Um That are really important part of uh, laurwin block, uh actually happened at the employee pre-release for morning tide. So it went Loroan large set, morning tight, small set, then Shadowmore big set, even tight, small set. So what happened was, so I made a decision. This was not, even though Aaron led the large set, this decision was my decision. The idea was what if in the first set

we care about eight different creature types that are the species, goblins and elves and stuff. And then in the second small set, we care about five classes, like soldier, wizard and stuff like that. And the idea that I was trying to was that I wanted to set up different themes And so there's a different focus and the cool part was you know Most creature types have a species and have a class so it's kind of cool that

You know we could make cards in the first set that wouldn't matter differently in the second set that was the thought process so anyway, we get to the pre-release and the employee pre-release, and I'm not sure who it was. Maybe it was Aaron. Somebody realized that a lot of people were playing one round and then dropping. That people weren't playing a second round

or a third round. And so R&D started to notice, so we started to talk to people, and it turned out that it was just, it was too much for people. Like it's, having a type set where you're tracking one thing per car, it's doable. But when you start having two things per car, people were just missing things that were just, like there would be things on the board that people just would miss.

Like you'd lose the game because they just didn't notice that you could do something. And that the, the combinatorics, the trying to understand all the interactions that happen was just too much. Oh, it was Matt Place. Matt Place was the person who discovered this. And Matt Place and I got into real big discussions about what is going on. And we looked at a lot like I last time I talked about the data from time spiral that

people were the franchise players really loved the complexity, but it was turning off a lot of the the invisible, the less than franchise players. And we said, like I said, we're noticing this at the employee preview release, by the way, everybody at Wizards can come to the employee pre-release. So there's a lot of people at Wizards. I mean, R&D are, you know, hardcore magic fans. We've been playing forever. Kind of to make magic. You have to have that kind of history of the game, but there's a lot of people at Wizards who, hey, casually play magic. And so that's what we were observing. So Matt Place and I had this big discussion and we came up with a thing we called New World Order. And the idea was that we have to be careful about how complicated the set was for a lot of the audience. A lot

of the audience is less enfranchised and it can be overwhelming for them. So the theory behind New World Order was, hey, if we really clamp down on commons, if we made sure that commons were a bit simpler, the overall As fan would be simpler. And the idea is if you're a beginning player, you're not buying as many packs as a franchise player. So the beginning player player your commons make up the lion's share of what you have As you get in franchise and you buy more things you start getting more packs Even though you might have to have a totality more commons Your focus starts to go on the uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares But to a beginner that just opens up a few packs, the commons really make up a line share

what's going on. And the idea behind New World Order was, look, if we really ratchet down complexity at common, we can control sort of the overall complexity. And that was the idea of New World Order. And that came out of what had been happening in Morning Tide. Now, all this, once again, the Morning Tide pre-release happened later than the design of Morning Tide. So it wouldn't be until Zendikar that some of these ideas come out,

which I'll get to in a sec. But anyway, so we made Lorwin in Morning Tide and Shadowmore and Eventide. There were, like I said, the interesting, I look back on that, there's decisions. I made a bunch of decisions during this block that I regret. I mean, once again, when I say I regret it, it's not as if I think we should try things and experiment with things and that sometimes things don't work out. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have experimented with them. I think Torment taught us, for example, how having unbalanced colors is a problem. But hey, until we tried that, I don't think we would

have figured out how important that was. And so, but the idea of doing species typal into class typal was a mistake. I made the decision between Lorwin and Shadamore to shift colors of the types. So the idea is, oh, well in Lorwin, the Kifken are white and green. But when you go to Shadamore, I think they're white and blue, the idea I had at the time was, hey, you're playing typal decks, I want to shake things up so I will introduce a third color so now you have a third color you can add to your typal deck.

That was the thought process behind it. Excuse me, I was going'm hiding to myself. But what ended up happening was players kind of wanted to build in what they had already had. They were less interested in shifting. And so shifting colors proved a problem. We also made a decision in Shadowmore and Eventide. Because we had such a high percentage of hybrid, we ended up shifting to ally,

we were, I'm sorry, in a, Shattimore was ally, went to enemy. That economy caused all sorts of problems from a drafting standpoint. I don't know, I'm not sure, I mean, there were a lot of problems that stemmed from that and the hybrid was a little too high. The one thing I did enjoy about Shattimore, by the way, was, and one of the reasons I really, really enjoy drafting Shadamore,

Shadamore, Shadamore is it really is a draft environment where you can and often are encouraged to draft monocolor. That is a hard thing to do. There are not many, I mean, there are sets we make that you can draft monocolor, but in those sets you kind of like the people around you have to be cooperating for you to do that. In this set you didn't need people cooperating you could pretty much do it. Hybrid was a great enabler for monocolor. Anyway, okay so we made the two sets introduced two large sets in a year so let's get us to the the following set. So after Lorwin So let's get us to the following set. So after Lorwyn, we get into Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara, so Bill Rose had not run a set in a while

and he wanted to run a set. So Bill ran Shards of Alara. The idea behind Shards of Alara was we're gonna do another gold block. We had done Invasion, it's play all the colors. We had done Ravnica, it's play two colors. So the idea we played around was what if we could do play three colors?

And so for the first time ever, we have a three color theme. The idea of Shards of Alara is this world, Alara, is broken into five bits and each bit only has three colors of mana, a color and its two allies. So the idea is what is a world like where a color is absent as enemies? And we made, let's see if I can remember this all off the top of my head, the white center was Bant, the blue center was Esper, the black center was Grixis, red center was

Jun, and green center was Naya. And we did something really interesting for this design. We made many design teams. I was on three of them. I led the Esper design team and I was on the Bant and Naya design team. And the idea was something we tried a little bit differently like the creative, this is also where we start pushing creative a little more than we had. Essentially the five shards are five unique worlds. That create, I mean, each world was not as deep as we would make a normal magic world,

but each one had a very different aesthetic to it, a look to it. It was a creative team definitely doing more work, making more worlds than they normally had. You can see a hint of things to come. Now the mini design team, while I think there's a, I mean, my biggest, sort of looking at Shards of Allura after the fact, our biggest flaw in it

was that we designed too much in a vacuum for each of the teams and that there wasn't the synergy between, you know, one of the things you want in a faction set is that the factions that share a color mechanically work well with each other. And while that was true on some elements here, it wasn't true on others. And so there were some draft issues where certain shards or we call arcs, but then people started calling them shards because shards are a lot of arcs. What I mean by that is three colors where it's a color and it's two allies.

We learned a lot. I mean, one of the things we learned in general, by the way, is it's really, really hard to do more More than to color when you do three color or more It is hard to not just evolve into color color pie soup right that once you give you the tools to be able to play Three color it's tricky not to have people play four color and five color We've learned there are some tools we've learned not that we knew them in shards shards of Lara ended up being very soupy The other thing that we tried is I talked about how we did legions and legions was a gimmick set We tried another gimmick set

So what happened was I say it went shards of Lara Conflux a Lara reborn and the idea was a Lara born Bill came up the idea of what if a Lara born was 100% gold? Every single card in it was gold. And so we set up the whole block to get there. So the first set was a very faction three color set. The second set kind of played into five color a little bit. And then the third set was more two color. Now three color into five card to two colors kind of a gobbledygook. That didn't end up practically working the way I think we thought it and making a Lara be a only gold set not like a primarily gold set not a mostly gold set a completely gold set really

tighter hands in ways. So it was kind of the big lesson of we had tried a bunch of different things messing around with gimmick sets and when I say my gimmick sets like oh the whole set is So it was kind of the big lesson of we had tried a bunch of different things, messing around with gimmick sets. Um, and when I say my gimmick sets, like, Oh, the whole set is blank. Um, and what a lot of reborn taught us was the fact that everything was gold. Didn't really like, interestingly, um, shadow more half the pack was hybrid. Half the pack was hybrid, half the pack was hybrid.

Half the pack was hybrid, seemed to get more moving the needle out of people than all the set was gold. And what we realized was, it's really, really hard to do gimmick sets. They limit our ability. Like we just cut ourselves off from tools we need. And that it just wasn't, when we do market research and we ask the audience like,

okay, what'd you think of the all gold set? It just didn't excite people that much. Nowhere near as much as one would hope for how hard, like we made the set infinitely harder for us and the response from the players was like, okay, cool. Like no one, I mean, it's not that no one cared at all, I guess, they cared a little tiny bit. It just wasn't that big a deal.

And it really, really caused lots of problems for us. So Shards of Alara also, like I said, we like to experiment. The mini team experiment was interesting. It proved to be a little bit disconnected. We would make, so mini teams did become something we would make use of, but the place where mini teams ended up being the best tool for us was not kind of late in design, but really, really early in design.

Like, let's say we realized we had a problem. For example, in return, one of the Ravnega sets, we were having trouble with the Orzhov. So we made a little Mini Team just to attack the orzhov problem and do some brainstorming. That kind of thing where we're trying to solve a problem and it's pulling the main group off focus, having little mini teams works great for that. Doing factions, not quite as much because you want the interconnectivity of the factions, so that wasn't as ideal. But interestingly, we learned a cool tool that we've used a lot since then. We just figured out the best way to use the tool and that the initial incarnation

was not the best way to use the tool. Okay. After shards of a Lara, we get to Zendikar. Um, now, now let me bring back the conversation that, um, I had with Matt place, Morning Tide. We worked two years ahead. So when Morning Tide came out, we were working on Zendikar. And so, and we were somewhat into Zendikar. So Matt and I came up with an idea of New World Order. The first set we applied it to was Zendikar.

It was a retrofit to Zendikar. We were, Zendikar was well underway. But anyway, so Zendikar is an interesting case study here. So what happened with Zendikar was, so for a period of time, so I talked about in a previous podcast how I convinced Bill to hire people off the Pro Tour.

The very first person I convinced him to hire, other than Henry Stern, which was years earlier, was Randy Bueller. Randy would ended up climbing pretty quickly. He became head developer for a while and then he became, he was my boss. And so nowadays we have what we call arc planning where there's a whole team and we do market research. But once upon a time, the job of figuring out what sets we were doing was mine. And I would come and I would pitch ideas to Randy.

And then I would sort of make what we call a five-year plan. Sometimes it was six years, sometimes it was seven years. I think my initial five year plan to Randy ended up becoming a seven year plan. But anyway, I would pitch ideas like, it's a top-down Gothic horror set. It's, you know, I would pitch ideas. And one of my ideas that I was very enamored by

was the idea that what if we had a block that was really focused on land mechanics? I felt it was an area we hadn't explored much with that I thought had potential and Randy Nobody the only person I ever pitches to that even seems somewhat interested was Mike Turing. He's like, oh that seems cool Matt place would mock me. He goes, okay, so it's the set where land matters,

you know, because land just doesn't matter in enough sets. But anyway, I was very excited for it. So Randy said, okay, we'll put, like, Randy felt that every once in a while we needed to do an experimental block, something that was just pushing boundaries. And so, but he pushed it back to like the seventh year. And so anyway, eventually, eventually we got,

in fact, by the time we got to, I don't think Randy was my, Randy might have still been my boss, I'm trying to remember the timeline. But anyway, we get to, we get to, actually Randy was still my boss, I think. Anyway, we get to, we get to the set, to the land set. And Bill Rose, who at the time was the VP of R&D,

I was head designer at this point, Bill was skeptical. So what Bill said to me was, here's what we're gonna do. I will give you two months. At the end of two months, let's see what you got. If you haven't convinced me that it's a good idea, we're going to do something else. And so I put together my team and we spent two months trying to come up with land mechanics and we made like 40 mechanics. In the end, we made landfall. I showed Bill landfall. Bill's like, okay, I love it. Go make. Oh, so for

the funny thing is I needed to give a name a code name for it. So for a while I was calling it lands a Palooza. Um, but Bill, Bill was also getting a lot of, um, resistance. Just the idea of a land set. No one seemed excited about the idea of a land set at the time. And the Magic brand team was a separate part back then. Now Studio X is all incorporated. But back then it was a separate team. And so Bill, he renamed it. He gave it the code name, The Money Set.

And so anyway, so Zendikar was, oh, so Zendikar, Bill, having watched what happened in with Shadowmore, Bill said, okay, every other year we're going to have a fourth set because every other year we have the core set. So whenever there's not a core set, we're going to have a fourth magic set because the core set was the fourth set in the year to the core set. And for a period of time, the core set was every other year. Eventually it would come every year. We haven't got there yet.

So Bill said, here's what I want to do. Let's make the last set in the block, let's make it a, we're going to go large, small, large, but the last set, not only is it large, it's brand new mechanics. We're starting all over. And so the original idea was we were going to be, we're going to do my land set for two sets. And then the third set was going to be something completely different.

Brand new world was going to go someplace completely different. Which by the way, the fact that shows the confidence in the land idea since like, well, we'll just make the land idea too sad. Anyway, the creative team at the time was not staffed up. I think having done Shards of Alar where they made so many worlds, they just realized they didn't have the resources. And so Brady Darmouth,

who was the creative director at the time said, okay, what if we create some sort of story that some event happens that's so major to the planet that it justifies completely changing what the set's about? That the first two sets are on this world and then huge event happens and the last set is on this world. And Bill said, fine.

So it turned out when they were doing the world building for Zendikar, I think it was Mark Taddeen, which just drew these hedrons everywhere, like these floating hedrons. And then they came up with the storyline of, well, so the world we come up with, because it was a land set, Doug Beier came up with the idea of what was an adventure world. It's this wild world where the nature itself is sort of, you know, like it's kind of man

versus nature. It's a wild world. And then they sort of came up with the idea of, well, one of the reasons the world is the way it is, is it's reacting to something. And one of those floating hedrons are part of a prison. And then the idea of these ancient beings trapped inside the world, the Eldrazi, obviously. And anyway, so that turned into that. The idea was we would do two sets of

normal Zendikar, you know, land matters Zendikar, and then one set of giant Eldrazi. And Brian Tinsman did the rise of the Eldrazi. And Brian Tinsman did the rise of the Eldrazi. And Brian is a giant fan of stuff like Cthulhu. So he was very excited by the idea of these giant unfathomable ancient beings. And he builds what he called, what did he call it? The idea of what if we made a magic set where you sort of slow everything down and that way big giant things can come out

Oh Battle battle cruiser magic is what he called it and so we tried something with Rizzo Adrazi where Just is a radical departure. There was no early game. It just, you know, everything was stacked. It really make you play a big, giant, big-finella game. And the interesting thing there was the really enfranchised players loved it. Hey, we're turning drafting on his ear.

Everything you think you know is not true and don't play two drops or, you know, don't try to make an aggro deck. It just won't work. But what we found with the less enfranchised players was it was beyond them. Much like what happened with Time Spiral, Razi Al-Drazi, at least in limited, we pushed things a little too far and the non-enfranchised players bounced hard off it. The enfranchised players liked it, or at least the drafting enfranchised players bounced hard off it. The enfranchised players liked it, or at least the drafting enfranchised players. If you really understood what was going on it was a very fascinating limited environment, but if you didn't

understand it was so much of a departure that it was problematic. So the big thing is in the Zendikar block is we it's the first set, I mean we retrofitted it a little bit, but that sort of introduces New world order we simplify a lot of things In the end the land themes play out really well people adored landfall We oh the other thing we did for the first time in world wake was We decided that we were going to take a mechanic and we were going to sort of tweak it but rather than give it a new name we extended the

name so kicker became multi kicker and the reason was multi kicker we want to understand like it's kicker you just can do it multiple times and the idea of sort of expanding an existing thing worked well. We might have done that. We had messed a little bit with it. I guess it wasn't the first time. We had done a little bit with cycling, but the idea of expanding upon taking mechanic and even to the point where, hey, it's not quite the same mechanic, but it's close enough that we can sort of name it similarly and that you can you can grok it because like, oh, it's that, but this, this difference. Um, but anyway, uh, Zendikar did really well for us. Um, in fact, one of the stories I love is, I'm, as you can tell, I went through such

rigmarole to get Zendikar made. Um, I remember the day that Bill's like, okay, we're going, we gotta go back to Zendikar and like back to Zendikar, Bill, uh, you know, I just, that feels really good when you're trying to make something and it goes so well than then, okay, it's something that we expected to return to. Um, but anyway, we will get to, we will get back to that. Um, so anyway, as we wrap up for today, uh, we're wrapping up, uh, Zendikar block. Um, we, oh, during something I hadn't mentioned, during Lorwyn, we introduced a brand new card type.

We introduced the Planeswalker. We made five of them in Lorwyn. There were no more in Lorwyn block. And then in Shards of Valara, we had a couple. I think we had three and then Conflux had one and the Laura of Borne, I don't know if Laura of Borne had any, and the idea was originally the idea with Planeswalkers, during Time Spiral Block we had sort of depowered them, earlier they had like godlike powers, now they're powerful but not quite pure godlike powers, and we started making them,

we decided that we wanted them to play a larger role in the story. They actually weren't in the Lorwin story, but they did become an important part of the shards of a Lara story. Like the thing that frees the Eldrazi are actions of planeswalkers, of Chandra and Jace and Tararkin Vaal. But anyway, we start to put Planeswalkers in packs. It quickly becomes clear that players really enjoy Planeswalkers and it went from being a sometimes thing to we now there's at least one in every booster. Not every booster, every product, every set. Every I guess Premier said not every set has a Planeswalker.

Anyway, so that's what we're gonna leave off for today. We are finishing up, we've finished up with Zendikar. So next time, we will start talking about Scars of Myrden. Anyway, guys, I hope you're enjoying the series, but I'm at work, so we all know what that means. It 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