Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1001: Red with Jules Robins

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

This is the second in my series of interviews with color representatives from the Council of Colors. In this podcast, I interview Jules Robins about red.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So, I like to do interviews at home, and today is Jules Robbins, the representative of red on the Council of Colors, in an ongoing series, interviewing all the different representatives. So, welcome, Jules. Thanks for having me on, Mark. Jules. Thanks for having me on, Mark. Okay, so I think you are the second longest on any color. I think Ethan has the, he's Ethan's number one on blue, but you've been on red, I think, longer than anybody else other than Ethan on blue. So let's talk all about red. All right. Okay, so first let me ask, I'll begin with this question. I've asked the same questions I asked Megan.

What do you think, like what has Red added in the last couple years that you think is key, that is important that Red is now doing, where it might not have been doing it before? Yeah, I think this is kind of across a few different effects, Yeah, I think this is kind of across a few different effects, but the big project on Red Oblate has been trying to figure out how to translate the core of the color to something that plays well in formats like Commander, where play a bunch of small aggressive creatures and back it up with a few burn spells to the face is not as good a strategy. So really trying to figure out, right, what's the essence here? We've represented it through speed and aggression through a lot of magic, but really that's just like one side of Red being about passionate emotion and living in the moment. So I guess the first real foray into this was the impulsive draw mechanic where you exile cards and can play them for that turn from the top of your library. And

that's been around quite a while now, but we keep making little tweaks and innovations to there. We've recently had a lot more cards that let you spend a fair amount of mana to exile your cards and then play them on the next turn instead of needing to get it all done right now. And we've even been exploring a little bit of space like Robber of the Rich, who lets you cast the exiled cards on any turn in which you attack with a rogue. So, you know, you're limited. You have to play them when they're available.

You're not just drawing cards, but a little more flexibility in how we do this. Yeah, this is an interesting space, I know. The idea of we don't want red to have, like, we want red to be a little more spontaneous, right? We don't want red to plan ahead too much. But I know we've been trying to expand, okay, well, how can I draw, and maybe I can use it on future turns. This is a space I'm very excited by.

Yeah, I think this has really been one of the big success stories in giving Red a way to go into the late game and not run out of steam, but that still just plays in an extremely red fashion okay okay what else i think i think the other biggest piece has probably been uh the treasure mechanic red's had rituals for a long time this sort of like burst of mana use it and then you're done as a counterpoint to green's you know mana acceleration that sticks around is a much redder pattern but you know classic rituals like pyretic ritual one r instant

add three red to your mana pool just uh tend to go off and make you know broken storm combo decks and whatnot you're ahead on mana the turn you use them uh treasure sticking around and letting you sacrifice for mana later still do this sort of like big burst of going in on something gameplay but in a way that's much more plausible to you know make reasonable cards out of so you know we've had our fair share of struggles right at the beginning of the mechanic, like we often do with big new space. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting is the idea that when we first start out, like, one of the things we added to Red is discard and draw, right? That's something we added. And I think we were trying to figure out, like, what's the right way to let red have access to stuff? How do you do more card flow in red? And originally we just did draw and discard, right?

That was the original version. And they're like, well, well, that's not so red, you know? And the idea, like, we came up with is, well, red discarding first means, like, blue's a little more plotting things out, and red's sort of like, well, don't need this. What can I get? Exactly. Yeah, and I think that's a really key point. a little more plotting things out and red's sort of like well don't need this what can i get exactly

yeah and i think that's a really key point like there are a lot of gameplay elements in magic that one color is the best at say card filtering in blue but a lot of the most core elements we really need across a lot of colors so there's we have a lot of effort trying to figure out how to differentiate them and make each color's version really feel most at home in that color. And it's trial and error. I mean, I use rummaging as my example because we were trying to figure out how to do it in red,

and early on we didn't quite do it the way we ended up doing it, but quickly figured out, oh, that doesn't quite feel red enough. And that's... One of the interesting things for me about red specifically is that red has a real good feel to it. So a lot of times when we're trying to add mechanics, it's like, okay, how do we get the red... How do we do this in the red way?

What's the red way to get cards or stuff like that? Right. So what do you have your eye on? What isn't Red doing right now that as the representative for Red, you're like, maybe Red should be doing this. Yeah, there are a few spaces here. A lot, like, trying to just,

like you were saying, capture that core feeling that we've done on, like, a card or two, but I think have potential to do a lot more. So I guess the first big one for me is this sort of uncertain value and upside space. We've done Cascade before and reprised it in the Warhammer 40k Commander decks, but I think there's a lot of good gameplay in this space as long as we can

you know steer clear of uh modern combo deck angles on it and um right it just feels very red to go like all right i'm gonna get something good i don't know what it is. Yeah, it's interesting. A couple years back, maybe five years at this point, we decided that anything that goes and gets something from your library, but you just don't know, like, it's unknown what you're getting. We started putting, like, polymorph, for example. Polymorph used to be a solely blue effect. So polymorph is sack a creature, go get another creature, right? You turn this creature into another creature.

We said blue, like if blue knows what it's turning into, great. Blue can turn anything into anything. But when it's like, this becomes, who knows what it becomes, that we want that in red and not in blue. Yeah. Right. So there's a bunch of space here.

The challenges with these cards are mostly like, well it takes a lot of words to talk through all the tiny steps of flipping cards one by one off the top of your library, and then you have to do something with the rest of the cards, so it keeps us from flooding sets with tons of these, but I think there's a lot of promise in this space. Another piece that I think we've really underexplored for Red is, I guess, what I'll call the volcano space, where you have effects that are sort of like slowly building up pressure over time, and then they have a big explosion moment.

So the one I can think of in recent memory is Stencia Uprising from I think Zhao, right? Which every turn makes it a four mana red enchantment. Every turn it makes a

1-1, and then if you have exactly 13 permanents, you can sacrifice it to deal 7 damage anywhere. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's... One of the big challenges of recent time is Commander was not a...

Like, when Magic was originally made, Richard really balanced it around two-player play. And Commander, like, adding in the multiplayer element and 40 life, like, it does all these things Commander, like, adding in the multiplayer element and 40 life, like, it does all these things that, like, take things that, you know, like, it's not

balanced from a color pie perspective. At least when it was made, it wasn't balanced. Like, certain colors were just better. Like, it played into every strength Green had, and it really played into the weaknesses of Red and White in a way that was, like, troublesome. And I know we've spent a lot of time... Because the answer

is not making red and white just not red and white. It's like, how do you take red and keep it red? And I love Impulsive Draw as a great answer for, look, red needs more card advantage, but we don't want red just drawing cards upright. That's not quite what red is.

Yeah. Yeah. To that point, a lot of this has been trying to figure out what plays especially well in the multiplayer environment that's at home in Red and maybe didn't get enough focus when Magic Design was so

focused on two-player play. I think Goad is a really great example of this uh this is a mechanic that shows up in a lot of commander sets and forces creatures to attack and attack someone other than you if they can and so red's done a tiny bit of this like forcing creatures to attack space for a long time but it's really hard to get into a satisfying spot for two-player play because it often either does nothing if your opponent just wanted to attack anyway or is completely killing

their creatures if you've got a five five to run their stuff into yeah so the very ability is just huge but in four player play like you're gonna go attack someone else it's a lot easier to get this into fun space where you can be pretty confident your cards're going to go attack someone else, it's a lot easier to get this into a fun space where you can be pretty confident your cards are going to do something helpful for you, but the opponent has some choice and isn't just forced to throw away all their creatures all the time. So is Goad primary in red? How is Goad treated in...

Yeah, Goad's definitely strongly primary in red and secondary in blue in commander design these days. Okay, so what is something red does that maybe red's not supposed to do? Is there anything you think red is sort of encroaching area that it kind of shouldn't be? Yeah, one that's been on my mind a lot is, I guess, going back to Stentia Uprising, Red's been doing a lot of really wide token making of late, which I think is stepping on White's toes a fair bit.

And this is kind of hard, because, you know, there's a lot of classic Red gameplay and swarms of goblins and whatnot, but Differentiation Point I've been thinking about a lot and we tried on uh gut crew soul zealot is she makes like four one skeleton tokens with menace which are maybe

a little big for 1v1 player because that card seems specifically a commander but this sort of power statted token space as opposed to swarming out with as many 1-1s, I think gives Red more room to still do some token making and have that gameplay, but not go as wide as White and steal all of its army build-up goodness. Yeah, one of the things that whenever we run into this, like, there are things Red does

with tokens that make it feel super Red. Like, for example, the temporary tokens where they come into play for one turn, they have haste and they go away. That feels super Red. And then also, Red seems to be king of, like, the 3-1. The 3-1 tokens. No one else is making 3-1s like Red is.

Yeah. And the other space, I guess, we've already moved away from but had rubbed me the wrong way in red for a long time was the uh trash for treasure space where red was reanimating artifacts just by sacrificing some other artifact. And this sounds like a very red thing. You're like, I'm going to disassemble this for parts and build something brand new, but that's not really how it played. It was always like, I've got the plan to cheat this one huge artifact out.

I just need to discard a card. This is pretty much the black reanimation space, but for artifacts. And we've pretty recently decided that makes a lot more sense in white, where you are trying to, you know, generate lots of little permanents, and white really plays into reanimating artifacts and enchantments in general. So this makes sense as just another version of that baseline effect. Yeah. We recently had a, I mean, recently, a few months ago, we had interesting conversation about graveyards and like we,

we had gotten a little, we let everybody do a little too much in the graveyard and we were sort of like trying to concentrate and that black, green and white all sort of have more like we decided that red and blue were supposed to do less in the graveyard I mean there's a little bit they get to do but we sort of toned back a lot of what red and blue were doing in the graveyard

and we did talk about ways still to do things like I think Unearthed is a very red take on how to use artifacts from the graveyard sort of in the same space as it's temporary token making or the impulsive draw. Sort of like, use it right now. You get one shot out of this artifact. Yeah, that's so, it's interesting. There are two things that we've used a lot to say, well, we can do this, but in red.

One is the idea of temporariness. Like, I can do it, but I just get it right now and for this turn. And like, it's not a long-term thing. It's a temporary thing. And then the other we just talked about was like, there's a random element, right? I just don't know what's going to happen. And both of those have been, have allowed us to dip in a lot of areas that aren't normally red,

but in a way that we get to do red stuff in. Like one of my favorite things to do in red, by the way, is heat shimmer. So heat shimmers, you copy something, but only for the turn. And I,

I don't know, that stuff, I'm a huge fan of heat shimmers. Yeah, me too. It takes a lot of self-restraint to try to only put one in every set I read. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about a controversial topic. There's much, this is a topic that has much debate,

and we've been arguing about this since the beginning of the Console Colors. So what is your stance on Wheel of Fortune effects? Yeah, these are a tough one. So on the one hand, I think the incentives and play pattern are very red. They're like, look, I'm not going to sit here and try to find the perfect time for all my spells. I just want to do my stuff, get my hand empty, and then keep going. The problem being that it's tough to put this

into a space that's not overshadowing colors that are supposed to be a lot better at drawing cards once you're doing the thing. If we're asking you to discard your whole hand the upside needs to be pretty big nobody wants to play divination but you have to discard your hand first but then if you follow through and do that and play out all your one mana creatures and burn spells at your opponent's face, suddenly the wheels are drawing cards way more efficiently than the blue cards can. And it's really tough to find balance points

where we get to take the fun red incentive and not end up screwing up the ordering of color strengths. Yeah, and one of the tricky things, Wheel of Fortune is a really good example of this. screwing up the ordering of colored strengths. Yeah, and one of the tricky things, Wheel of Fortune is a really good example of this. So, magic will introduce an effect. Someone does the effect. Wheel of Fortune was an alpha.

And then, it's kind of a cool effect. We want somebody to do the effect, but like, who exactly is supposed to? It's not really blue, you know, like, throwing your hand is not particularly blue. And so, it's really weird. Who exactly is supposed to be doing this? We often default, so we grandfather

things in. We're like, well, this is the card that has done it. I know we've messed around a lot with winds of change, which is discard your hand and then draw what you discarded. So you're not going up cards, you're just sort of changing cards. I think we've decided red can do that without a problem.

Right, I think that's just sort of an extreme far end of rummaging. Yeah. Rummage as much as you want. And it's hard. We like the effect. It's a fun effect. We want players to play with it. But it is...

We have to be careful because there are a lot of ways in which it plays not red, and that's the big danger. It's easy to say, oh, red's done this, it's a red thing. But just because early Magic did something doesn't inherently mean that it plays to the color of strings.

I do think there's really good inspiration there. We've been looking to, like, how can we get small doses on cards that make sense? But we've been looking at setting up some rummaging effects. So they're just like, discard a card, then draw a card. If you manage to empty your hand, congrats, you get to go up a card without discarding one. But not have the extreme swing that a Wheel of Fortune does. Oh, and here's another slightly controversial,

I mean, it's in the same vein, is we do things where you discard and draw, but depending on how we template them, do you have to discard the cards? Because you can template in such a way that in an empty hand, you can just draw cards. Where's your stance on that? I think it is pretty context dependent. Where's your stance on that? of reward to give you for the red play pattern of playing all your stuff out. If we have a card that

attacks to rummage every turn, suddenly this gets a lot weirder, where you're going all the way up to drawing two cards a turn every turn, and that might work out reasonably somewhere high up the curve on a red rare and sort of, right grafted skull cap space you have to use up your whole hand every turn but you get to draw two cards but you know we might make a common rummager and we can't do that there it's going to be a lot better at drawing cards than whatever commons we can give blue if you're following through yeah i mean the big takeaway i think there's a lot of nuance it's not like yes you can do it or no, you can't do it. It's how are you doing it?

I mean, that's why we have all our meetings to talk through, like, is this doing correctly? Is that doing correctly? There are a lot of aspects to balance against each other. Like, how do the cards read? What are the incentives in gameplay? What's the actual strength at the output of the effect you're ending up with? Okay. So my next question for you is I want to go through the colors and I want to talk about what the conflict is with this color as far as what are you

fighting over and who should be getting what are the things you're fighting over? So we're going to start with white. So what does red fight over with white? Yeah. We're going to start with white. So what does red fight over with white? Yeah, so we've already talked about token making and trash for treasure a little bit. I think a lot of the struggle on the other side is really aggressive one and two mana creatures for standard. Even despite all the changes we've made in 1v1 gameplay red still

definitely biases more so than any of the other colors towards being really aggressive decks and those often need support in standard to have strong fast starts so that they can put other decks on the back foot. But white's supposed to be the best color at little creatures, and we often run into issues where trying to get the red aggressive decks to work make it really hard to draw any distinction between the strength of white small creatures and reds. Okay. Any other things on Red Rider you want to move on? Okay, let's move on.

We'll move on to Blue. What did Red and Blue fight over? I think Red and Blue mostly managed to cooperate on these, but are constantly kind of battling over the huge amount more hybrid space that these colors have than most of the enemy color pairs, where we'll have spell copying and choosing new targets for things

and making copies of permanents that are usually temporary in red. Most of the time we don't want to fill sets with tons and tons of these effects, and red and blue both have a pretty small number of rare effects that are short to write on a magic card. A lot of their interesting effects take a lot of words, so when sets are trying to do a twist on a new mechanic that's also going to take up some space in the text box,

they're often at loggerheads about who's going to get to twin cast a spell or something like that. Okay, so who do you think is supposed to be better at copying spells, red or blue? Yeah, this I think is, again, a point of nuance. I think the baseline twin cast reverberate, whatever, copy a spell rate that's on the stack that either person played is actually more at home in Red. It's very improvisational gameplay when you're using your opponent's spells, and Red is very much like the setup for one big turn in space. The times we make, you know, a creature that taps to copy any spell you play or

a card that will copy the first spell you play every turn if you've met its condition. I think those sorts of repeated value on just make all my spells better spaces are more at home in blue. Okay, let's move on to black. Red and black. So red and black is one of the colors that have a lot of overlap. Yeah, after green and white, I think probably the color pair of it shares the most space.

Yeah, a lot of this contention, I think, comes down to gameplay and limited. We often end up in spots where all the strongest cards in both of these colors are removal spells, killing the opponent's creatures. And even when we try hard to differentiate them, we're like, we've got to make some creature you know, creature with a lot of strength in it getting into combat in these colors. They both often end up at menace. And there's just a lot of difficulty in getting the play patterns to diverge a lot and make them feel separate, especially in limited play. lot and make them feel separate, especially in limited play.

Is there any effect that you think that red is supposed to be better than black? The areas where they overlap, we're like, red should be better than black at this. Right. So I think the one that we have a lot of trouble with, again, mostly balancing for standard, is removing small creatures. Like, black is the best color at killing creatures overall, but red's burn spells should be more efficient at dealing with specifically the small ones than blacks. The problem is we just don't have that many numbers to choose between, right? Like, you've got one, two, and three is the toughnesses the small creatures have, and there's not a lot of room to make clear differentiation

between the red spell doing two damage to a creature and the black one giving it minus two, minus two until end of turn, both for one mana. So we often run into spots where red's not actually the best at killing off the small creatures when it really ought to be. Okay. Moving on. Red and green. Where do these fight for space?

Well, I think more and more so, red has been encroaching on some of Green's enormous creature beatdown space. This has been, I think, a spot we've looked both to try to give Red some more late game play in 1v1 and in multiplayer. It's just make sure the big creatures can smash really hard and you know it also feels like a red thing but it's green's primary strength so we sometimes get into spots with you know the red creature that's an 8-6 trample not feeling that different from the green one that's a 7-7 trample and a challenge on figuring out where we can allocate a little more of the power strength for the red creatures outside of

just ability to smash in combat to keep them off each other we get some help out of dragons often being one of the big things and they get to fly where green's not likely to be doing that yeah one of the things i mean uh green is fly where green's not likely to be doing that. Yeah. One of the things, I mean, green is obviously number one at this, but I know we've been trying to like up giant growth a little bit in red, like letting red do a little bit more just because trying to make combat more interesting. And for a long time, like red just did power and not toughness and we're like, well, it's a little better gameplay if I'm improving toughness some, so.

Right, it's like we would have to cheat it and write first strike every time, which sort of effectively makes your creature survive more, even though it's not technically granting toughness. And we moved to a model with a lot more options for Red, either being able to give square stats, it's only pumping an attacking creature, or being able to give some toughness

as long as it's giving more power. Okay, so we're almost, I can see my desk from here. So what are your final thoughts? Like sort of the state of Red right now, what's your thought thinking on Red as Red's representative? Yeah, I think the biggest

focus for red right now is trying to figure out how to find it some more space that is short enough to fit on a lot of magic cards and give some more novel direction and incentive for how to build your decks for a lot of higher rarity stuff. Red's mostly got two kinds of effects, really long ones and really stable ones that we do all the time on red cards and i think that's you know the bright horizon to look for on where red's next big improvement is to be found yeah we had a meeting once again a couple months ago where we were like what can red do that red isn't currently doing like one of the things we got from the from play design is okay i have a hole in red it's's a high rarity card. I just want to do something different. And like, right,

red has the least amount of sort of flexibility of a variety of effects. And so we spent a lot of time brainstorming like, what's a cool thing red can do that feels super red? So some of that, hopefully you guys will be seeing because we're trying to do more of that. Yeah, damage is very flexible, but it doesn't read new

and exciting, even if it hits a slightly different subset of stuff and ends up playing differently. I know from building sets, you always get to the point where you're like, okay, enough direct damage. We have enough direct damage in red. What else can we do? Well, thank you, Jules,

for being with me. Like I said, I'm hoping the audience, I want them to get the nuance. We think really, really hard with me uh like I said it's uh I'm hoping the audience I want them to get the nuance like we think really really hard about the color pie and it's fun to I love talking to each individual member because like you're like there's all these nuance a little tiny things and yeah red should do this but in this way or red shouldn't shouldn't do this anyway so there's a lot of like we have lots and lots of meetings where we talk about this in minutia. So it's fun. I love discussing this stuff. Yeah, I really enjoy getting some extra opportunity to just go through a bunch of it outside of our meeting, too. So thanks for having me on.

Oh, well, thanks for having us. And everybody, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means instead of, it means it's the end of my drive to work. That's what it means. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks, Jules, for being with us. Thank you.

And I'll see all of you guys next time. Bye-bye.