Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #1 - Tempest

Episode Date: October 1, 2012

In his very first podcast, Maro talks about leading his very first design, Tempest.

Hello, everyone. So every morning I have to drive to work. It takes about half an hour. And I'm like, oh, that's the perfect amount of time for a podcast. And I'm just driving to work anyway. Why don't I use this time to do a podcast? So anyway, I'm experimenting. This is a brand new idea. I've never done this before. But anyway, I'm going to call this Drive to Work. That's the name of my podcast.

And I thought each time what I would do is I would examine a different set that I worked on and just talk about, I don't know, how it came together, how the design happened, sort of behind the scenes. So I decided I will start with Tempest since that is the first set I did. So I've explained this in my article a little bit, but let me talk about the setup of how I ended up getting Tempest. So when I first got hired, Mike Davis was the head of R&D. He and I had a talk. And I said to him, I said, Mike, I think I'm a designer. I don't think I'm a developer.

I think that's where my skills lie. And he said, well, we have Richard Garfield. We don't need a designer. What we need is developers. So I'm like, okay, sign me up. So I started at Wizards as a developer. But in my back of my head, you know, what I really wanted to do was design. So after Mirage Block was done, they didn't have anyone set to do the next large set.

So I convinced Richard to be on the set with me. Richard hadn't done a set since Arabian Nights. And then I went to Joel Mick, who was in charge of magic design at the time, and I said, hey, I would like to do the next large set, and Richard Garfield will be on the team with me. And that was enough. I guess they obviously had a lot of faith in Richard,

and Richard said he wanted to do it with me, that they said, okay, Mark, go ahead. And they let me pick my team, and so along with Richard, I picked Mike Elliott, who was someone who at the time hadn't done a lot of design either, but he was like me. And he and I had shared a lot that we wanted to do design. So I had Mike on the team. And then Charlie Catino was someone who won the original Playtester. He'd been on the Mirage team. And I thought Charlie would be a good mix. Someone who had a little

more experience and done a little more development. So anyway, I put together the team. I somehow got the okay for it. Most designers don't start with a large set, but this was way back when before things were well-defined. So what happened was the four of us went down to Portland. Richard's parents live in Portland, and so we stayed at their house. And the idea was we just for a week sort of did nothing but work on the design. So the way it worked was both Mike and I, because it was our first design, and both of us were designer wannabes, had actually designed a lot of cards.

Mike had actually designed an entire set. I forgot the name of it, but it had the flavor of fighting with the afterworld, if I remember correctly. But anyway, when Mike had gotten hired, Wizards had purchased his set as part of the hiring, and so Mike had all these cards that he had from this set.

I, mind the way, I hadn't made a set, but I just made a lot of individual cards, because I had always been excited by magic, and so I just designed my own spare time, designed a lot of cards. Richard also. Richard hadn't really designed any magic cards since Raven Knight. So Richard had a lot of ideas that were up in his head. Like I said, Charlie was brought along more because I wanted a development force.

I didn't expect Charlie to design a lot of cards. He made some, but not the volume of the three of us because one of the things about that team was it was all these people who really wanted a design that either hadn't designed or hadn't designed in a long time. And so we were just, it was explosive. We made a crazy amount of cards.

In fact, what you'll find out is a lot of mechanics. So next year, the year that followed the 7-Pence was Urza Saga, where Urza Saga's major two mechanics were cycling and echo. And both of those actually came from the design of Tempest. So we made some mechanics that we made the next year's mechanics as well. So what happened was, let's run through the mechanics.

Okay, so buyback was an idea of Richard's. What had happened was I had this idea for draw triggers that I love the idea of having cards that when you drew them would do something. So the idea was imagine a direct damage battle that was a little more efficient, but it did damage to you whenever you drew it. And the idea is, well, how many they used to put in your deck. And there's all these neat scenarios scenarios where these cards have this effect. But what we found out was it's hard to have a negative effect in a game in which it's hidden information. Because how do you know that you drew it? And it's disadvantageous for me to have it.

Well, maybe I don't want to tell you I drew it. And so we toyed with the idea of having different color backs. Remember, at this time, sleeves really weren't popular yet. That you would just see, oh, you must have one of those. But a lot of people didn't like that idea. We toyed with the idea of making them opt-in things where you could choose when you reveal it. And that didn't quite play out. I mean, we tried a whole bunch of different things.

None of it really worked out. Obviously, modern day, those would, you know, miracles are kind of the end state where we finally found a way to do that. So Richard had a different idea. He had an idea for a card that you could reuse if you were willing to pay extra for it. And I'm not quite sure.

It came out of the discussion of the draw trigger reveal. I don't remember exactly where it came from, but he had this idea, and somehow as we were talking about having cards as you play them did something, Richard said, well, I've always had this idea, you know, how you pay extra mana. And at first, one of the things we did in design was I just put any good idea in the set. So, like, the early version of Tempest Design probably had, like, 15 mechanics in it. Like, if it was interesting, I put it on a card, and Richard

made a couple, and so the set just had a couple cards with this mechanic in it. I mean, I didn't even name the mechanics at the time. I mean, some of them might have had names, but I just was putting anything interesting in the set. So Richard had a couple of these, we put them in. I really thought nothing of it. I was like, oh, here's a few cards, this might be cool.

So also we had Shadow. Shadow, I think, was from Mike Elliot. I think Shadow would come from his set, the Astral set. And, because it was all about these creatures from this other place, and I think the shadow was representing that. So we had the idea that we would do Shadow as sort of this different form of evasion. And also,

from the same set, Mike had the slivers. And the flavor in the set, if I remember correctly, was that there was some mighty being and that person somehow fell to earth

and broke into pieces. And so all these things were part of this original being. And the reason they all worked together was, you know, instead of being slivers,

it was like eye of whatever his name was, or, you know, leg of whatever his name. And the idea is that they all sort of joined together. The idea I liked a lot was of a race. For people that don't know, slivers ended up being, they are essentially shape-changing creatures, but they have a telepathic link so the flavor of it was

they had the ability to change shape but since they share a telepathic bond if one of them learned how to make a wing and it was near enough to the other one well it now knew how to make a wing and if you knew how to make a wing you could fly that was the flavor of it so I liked Shadow and I liked Slivers

and both of those, I kind of knew we put in large amounts. Buyback was put in smaller amounts. I mean, Richard had come up with Cycling. We put a few of those in. Mike had Echo. I think that might have been slightly larger early on. A lot of Mike's stuff was Mike had made it from this other set. It's interesting. I really have no mechanics in Tempest. I mean, I have a few things, like the Kindle. I made Kindle as a card, and once again, I didn't make a whole mechanic out of it. I just said, oh, here's a neat card, and Kindle, we would go on later, I mean, cumulative knowledge, and then I made a Kindle mechanic in Odyssey. So I had a lot of individual cards that had some mechanic potential. Oh, the one mechanic

I did make in Tempest was the spikes, which ended up not really showing up until Stronghold. I had, we ended up putting one spike drone as a little teaser when on the set. And my idea of the spikes was I love the idea of these creatures that sort of could boost other things, but the spikes worked nicely with the spikes. The thing that was neat about that was the realization that spikes would work better with spikes because only spikes could remove the counters. So if you put a spike with other creatures,

it could boost them, but only through spikes you could keep moving them. And that way it had a linear quality to it, but yet it could stand alone. So anyway, we threw the Hodgepodge. Tempest was just three strong designers

I mean if you look at the history of Magic I mean Richard and Mike and I you know are probably three of the five top designers as far as just output of cards and we were all like literally in a set in which Mike and I's first set Richard hadn't done Magic design in a couple years

I mean we were just bursting with ideas, and we just, we made a crazy amount of cards. Oh, the other thing that was funny is, for some reason, there's the four of us down there, we decided that for the week, we weren't going to shave. Like, somehow that would give us creative energy.

And so, I don't know if you have pictures of it, but like, so for the week, we just didn't shave. And every day we made jokes about how much beard people had. And if I remember correctly, Charlie was the one who bearded up the fastest. But everybody by the end of the week, actually, all the Tempest team all had beard potential. So anyway, so what happened was we spent this week, we generated a crazy amount of cards. And so the next big step was playtesting.

And so it was very quickly like we would figure out whether something had potential. And a lot of things that people don't realize is you don't understand what potential your cards have when you make them. Because, I mean, you're just enthralled by something you think is cool, but you don't necessarily know, you know, you don't really understand what it is until you play with it. And, I mean, I make this, I constantly say to people, if you're going to make a set, you have to play with your set. There's only so far you can get, like, thinking things through.

You know, and then when you play with it, what you'll start finding is things have a certain feel to them. I'm a really big believer in when you design of your set wants to have a certain feel to it. That when your audience plays, their response,

people have an emotional response. And whether you're happy or sad, whether something's fun or not, is not intellectual. You don't intellectually decide that you like something or that something's fun. You're kind of on a gut level. And so if you're trying to evoke that out of your audience, then you, the designer, have to make sure that's imbued in what you're doing.

And I've always believed this. Now, I think in the more recent years, I've been much more conscious about it. Like now when I design a set and I pass it along to development, I'll say like, here's the mood I'm going for. You know, Innistrad was trying to create a sense of dread, you know. But back then, I just kind of knew certain things felt right. And so I pushed the things that had a good feel. So what happened was we play tested and we figured out that there was just too much going on, that we had lots of good ideas, but we had too many good ideas. And I think what happened actually is

a lot of this didn't even happen until development. When I turned Tempest in, it was over brimming with things, and I think development pulled a bunch of stuff out. I think Cycling Echo were there in small numbers, and I think Bill, or actually the lead developer was Henry, Henry Stern.

I think Henry's the one that said, okay, you have really good ideas, but it's too much, and we pulled back a little bit. I do know that buyback, we played with it, and it was instantly apparent to me from playtesting

that we had something. Buyback really was something just phenomenal. And like I said, it's funny. We've done polls, and I know that both Buyback and Flashback tend to do really well in polls, which makes me believe that mechanics with back in their name. No. I think that people like doing things multiple times. It's fun to get extra utility out of your things, and there's kind of nothing funner than doing something and then getting to do it again. And Buyback was really the first time we had done something like that.

And it was clear to me that it was a cool mechanic, and so I upped it in design. It went from being kind of on a couple cards to being one of the major things. And then I realized that, I ended up realizing that Shadow and Buyback had this interesting dynamic that I really enjoyed, which was that Shadow was all about sort of making this fast, aggressive, beat-em-down game, and Buyback was about this slow, controlling game. And they actually had this neat diversity, which is Buyback was very powerful if you got to the point

where they really started kicking in. And Shadow was neat in that, you know, it was good up front, but it ran out of steam. And so it had this nice, I mean, a lot of people think, like, that Shadow and buyback sound like just two random mechanics, like they don't have anything to do with each other. Nowadays, like, our mechanics are themed,

and they carefully have a connection to each other. But I did, in my mind, very much pick those as the two major mechanics, because they had this sort of opposition to them. So meanwhile, let me explain what's going on. So now there was this going on, but at the same time, Mike Ryan, who was an editor and a friend of mine, we had pitched to the powers that be that Magic should have a story. And we sold them on

the Weatherlight Saga. Now that's its own story. Mike and I ended up getting kicked off the project, but Tempest, very much, we were involved. And so what I did was, I was working as we would come up with mechanics

to figure out how it made sense in the story. And we knew that we were doing a very by-the-books, the epic, the hero's journey, for those that know Joseph Campbell. We were following literally by the letter, kind of what

Lucas did with Star Wars. And so we knew we were going to a dark plane. We knew that we were sort of, that the main hero was going to face his darker reflection. But anyway, so we liked the idea of the plane of Wrath.

In fact, Wrath was, the name we came up with as our playtest name was Wrath, and then it ended up sticking. And yes, by the way, two seconds after Wrath was a name, I made a card called Apes of Wrath so

we ended up saying that we liked the idea of shadows so we got this concept of this world that was trapped within the world and that these creatures existed but they were not quite all there and then the slivers we ended up putting in the flame pits like the idea that Volrath liked to experiment on things,

and he found this native race of these mesomorphs that could change their shape, and that he was fascinated by them. In fact, metallic sliver was him experimenting and making something, making sort of a spy, if you will, to sneak in. Notice, metallic sliver is the only sliver that doesn't grant anything. It just takes, because it's artificial and it's not really a sliver. Anyway, by the way, that was supposed to be called silver sliver, and we got the art back, and it didn't look silver, and we're

like, oh! So anyway, that was supposed to be silver sliver. Okay, so buyback, we never really gave a great one of the things about spell mechanics is sometimes there's Okay, so buyback, we never really gave a great... One of the things about spell mechanics is sometimes there's a flavor that makes a lot of sense, and sometimes it's like, well, it doesn't have a lot of strong flavor.

We ended up not giving a lot of flavor. But both Shadow and Slivers, we very much worked into the story. The other big thing about the design was not only were we doing mechanics but we were just making one of cards left and right and like I said ours was chock full of stuff so there's all sorts of interesting things for us to pick from

like one of the hard times I had was we just had lots of neat cards and so I kind of just went through I liked, I'm a big believer of a set should not only have a strong theme but just have a lot of cards that you want to build around or cards that kind of inspire you and so a lot of the rares I was trying to make cards

I'm like, what are you going to do with this? I don't know, living death or recycle or things in which, well I think you can do cool things but I didn't know what they were the other thing that's very interesting by the way recycle or, you know, things in which, well, I think you can do cool things, but I didn't know what they were. The other thing that's very interesting, by the way, is how, what we call parallel design, how you will make a card and somebody else at the same time makes the exact same card. Like, Recycle is a perfect example where Mike and I independently almost made the exact same card, and then I just sort of blended them together.

I don't remember. I think one of them was sort of blended them together. I don't remember. I think one of them was black and one was green. I don't think both of them were green. But anyway, I blended them together, and like, you know, because a lot of people always love to ask who made card X or who made card Y, and it's not always so clean cut. I mean, sometimes one person made it. It's clearly their card.

But other times, like this, it's parallel design, where both people kind of made their version, or sometimes someone makes it and someone else tweaks it, and a bunch of people can have their hands in a design. It's not always so clear cut. Now, Tempest was interesting because

we had such a reservoir of cards that a lot of people had turned in whole set ideas. Sometimes in design now, I do meetings where like, okay, you know, in Innistrad, it's like we're going to design

to Evil Twin and then make the card. Tempest, we had nothing like that because we had so much stuff that had been saved up over time. So anyway, we play test, I started weeding out a little bit.

Like I said, I didn't weed out everything, but I started figuring out what mechanics had the most say. I was definitely trying to get a feel for Tempest. And so I take it, and I play up the cards that I think are valuable. And I spend a lot of time... One of the things about your first set that... It's funny, because I'm working on my, I don't know, 18th set, something like that,

is the first time you do it, you are super nervous because you've never done it before. You have no instincts to guide you. And so I talk about making a set skeleton. Tempest is where I sort of came up with the set skeleton. I said I need a structure. And so I sort of laid everything out. And then I figured out, well, what do I need? And then once I sort of laid it all out, I started figuring out where things could go.

And then I had a lot of fun also because our team had so much creativity of like, oh, well, where can we do this, you know? Like Kindle, let me talk about Kindle for a second because I'm very proud of Kindle. So Kindle came about because I loved the card Plague Rats. I mean, Richard had made it. And I really loved the idea of a card that sort of went up in value when there was more of them.

And so, I think the card was called Plague Bolt, which doesn't sound right, but I was trying to make a nod to Plague Rats. And I was trying to figure out how to have a spell that grows with time. And eventually I figured out, oh, the graveyard was the answer, because you had to put

the card in the graveyard. And that way, when you cast the first time, we'll do two. Second time, it gets to count it, now it's three, and it goes up with time. It's funny that Kindle ended up being very defining in the limited environment and in the Tempest block-constructed environment,

because that ended up being the main bolt, and it being the main bolt, and it was an adjustable bolt, so, like, you know, it required your gameplay to sort of figure out how best to use it, and it definitely... I know, for example, in the L.A., that was a Tempest-only, the one Dave Price won, the Pro Tour,

that, like, understanding when to catch your Kindle was, like, super important. Anyway, other cards. I mean, like, Living Death was turned like, super important. Anyway, other cards. I mean, like, Living Death was turned in by Mike Elliott. I loved Living Death. In fact, I think it might be my favorite card that Mike designed in the set. Only because it was this neat card that has huge flavor. It sort of traded life and death.

And then just, I'm a Johnny, right? I love building decks. And so it's just like, oh, my God, what do you do with this? And it turned out to be a very powerful card. But I think my fascination wasn't the power level. Anyway, so I get the set. We playtested a lot. I mean, we had the week away to sort of make the germ of what was going on.

But we playtested a lot. I did a lot of tweaking. I spent more time with that file than probably any file ever. I mean, I was, I mean, I really wanted to prove myself because this was my, essentially my audition to be a designer. I mean, obviously a pretty big audition since it was actually a large set, but I really wanted to, you know, to do the best I could. really wanted to, you know, to do the best I could. And what ended up happening was I did all the story stuff because I was also doing part of the story.

And I spent a lot of time working with Henry. Because I was also, I'm pretty sure I was on the development team. I wasn't the lead. But I was on the team because at the time everybody was on the development team. So I was not only on the design team, I was on the development team. And that meant I was around to explain things and defend things and sort of make sure the design team, or sorry, the development team

understood what I was up to. But everything, I don't know, it all clicked together. Everything sort of really worked. It was Henry's first lead development. It's funny because Tempest really ended up being a very watershed sort of set. And it's funny because Tempest really ended up being a very watershed sort of set. And it's funny that both Henry and I, it was our first time

doing it. But it worked out well. I mean, I think that it went over very, very well with the audience. Obviously, the story really connected. And the... I mean, I think it was just a set that really was kind of different than the sets before it.

I mean, all the other sets, Mirage and Ice Age, had been made when Richard originally, when Magic was doing well, and Richard realized he was going to need some other sets. And so those had been worked on for many years. And this was the first set that said, okay, we're designing a set, give X amount of time, you know, and make it. finding a set, give X amount of time, you know, and make it. You know, and in retrospect, I overstuffed it because I was just trying so hard to impress that I did what often people do when they are trying to impress, is I just put everything in the sun under it.

And the big lesson of that, I mean, one of the things that to me is important is when you walk away from a design and say, okay, I'm done, what did I learn from it? And one of the things Tempest taught me was, A, the importance of flavor and interconnecting. I think a lot of having a story made Tempest kind of more interesting. And I learned that figure out what your best thing is. That overstuffing something, putting, you know, you're not going to make the best cupcake in the world by putting 8,000 things in it, you know. Figure out, get one thing or two things, you know.

The best designs are not, some people think that if you show all these great stuff that it's going to make the set better, but what ends up happening is you have no focus. And the thing that development did well, that Henry did well, is saying, hey, you know, let's get rid of these good but extraneous things and help make the set

more be about what I'd want the set to be about, you know, about's get rid of these good but extraneous things and help make the set more be about what I'd want the set to be about, you know, about shadow and about buyback and about a lot of the flavor that we were trying to get in. And, I mean, I learned from the set that the key, I think, to making a good set is really crystallizing on what you want and then making sure everything helps that move that along and that one of the hardest things i think for designers to understand is you might come up with the most awesome thing literally like this card is just awesome it's the best thing ever you know

but if if that individual card is not moving along the whole set if it's not advancing what you're doing you know you're actually hurting your set and it's not advancing what you're doing you know you're actually hurting your set and it's hard it's so hard to understand that this thing that in it's in a vacuum is so beautiful and such a wonderful thing is detrimental um but part of being a good designer a good set designer is putting the the set before anything else that the set is more important than any one component of it. And that, so what happened was, Tempest came out, and it was a huge success.

It was, I mean, I know walking in, I was very nervous because I wanted to prove I could design, and it just came together wonderfully. The set went over, really, I mean, gangbusters, and it really moved went over, really, I mean, gangbusters, and it, it, it really moved me that, like, before that set, I was just, you know, I was a developer, and after this, I was like, oh, Mark's a designer, and, I mean, it's opened the doors for me, like, moving forward, like, people thought of me as a designer, and that, you know, I sort of had a good audition, and it's funny,

I will always think of Tempest as being, I mean, people always ask me what my favorite set is, and, you know, you remember your first, as they say. I mean, Tempest always had such an important place in my heart. It was really me pouring out my heart and soul. It was really me emptying ideas I had for years. I mean, I'm big on story. It was the time where I really first

integrated story into mechanics. And, I mean, obviously that big on story it was the time where I really first integrated story into mechanics and obviously that would pay off much later but anyway, it went over well and it really sort of made me, put me on the map from a design standpoint

and it's funny, I look back and like here's a quick story I'm almost to work, back and like here's a quick story I'm almost to work so I'll tell you a quick story I believed at the time of a concept called the marquee card, the idea that every set should have a card that kind of anybody could play in their deck and just did something kind of out of the box you'd never seen before

I feel like Jester's Cap was a marquee card of Ice Age, and Green Totem was the one I made for Mirage. Anyway, Helm of Volrath was supposed to be the Marquis card for Tempest, and the idea of the card was you took over your opponent. For a turn, you took them over. Yes, Mindslaver was in Tempest. And I couldn't...

There was a problem with Mana Burn, because you just sort of kill your opponent by having the Mana Burn themselves, and I just never quite got a template that anyone was happy with. I mean, later on, we would be willing to do more flairful templates

that didn't quite explain everything, but in the day, back in Tempest, you had to explain everything. And just, it wouldn't fit on the card. And I tried, and I tried. And it was the thing I'm most sad is that Tempest wasn't able to do. And obviously, I put it in my back pocket and mirrored it many years later. I pulled it out. But that's the card that I most wanted to get in Tempest that I wasn't.

Anyway, I'm driving up to Wizards. So I'm curious what you guys think of this. Uh, if this is something that people like, I could do more of them. Like I said, uh, I got nothing better to do my driving work. So I'm more than happy to talk about magic and sort of how sets got made. Uh, I think I decided that I like this podcast to be about, uh, the making of things, you know, rather than talking modern day, because there's tons of things talking about modern day. I kind of have fun digging back in the past. Let's me tell some stories that maybe never got told. And to me, I guess podcasts are about storytelling. So I guess I enjoy most digging back. But anyway, please, I would love any feedback on this. If there's

something you guys would like to see more of, I'd like to know. I definitely had fun doing it, so hopefully there'll be more drives or works in the future. Anyway, I am now pulling up and parking in my space. It is time for me to go make some magic cards, so thank you very much for listening, and I guess it's time to go to work.