Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1003: Phyrexia with Adam Prosak

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

I sit down with Set Lead Designer Adam Prosak to talk about the design of Phyrexia: All Will Be One.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition. So I like to use my time at home to interview people. So today I have Adam Prozac, the lead set designer for Phyrexia. All will be one. Hey, Adam. Hey, Mike. How's it going? Okay, so here's where our story is going to start. I'm going to talk about what I handed over. So this set was codenamed La Crosse was the codename. So here's what I handed over. And we should explain, Eric Lauer led this set for two, three months, maybe?

Yeah, about two months. Yeah, and he handed it over to you. So I'm going to talk about what I handed over, and then you can talk about what Eric and you together did, okay? So when we handed the set over, there was poisonous, corrupted oil counters, and then you can talk about what Eric and you together did, okay? So when we handed the set over, there was poisonous, corrupted oil counters, including a mechanic called Oiled.

Take Up Arms was the name of the mechanic, which you guys know is for Mirrodin. We had Phyrexia Mana in activation cost, not in mana cost, I think we handed it over. And we had a mechanic called Relentless, which we can talk about. And then we had Proliferate. That's, I think we handed over. And we had mechanical relentless, which we can talk about. And then we had proliferate. That's all the stuff we handed over to you.

So let's talk about what happened to that list of things along the way. Yeah, so typically a vision design team is going to, what I call, overstuff the set. It's going to have more stuff than a final set will want. You know, when you have mechanics, one of the jobs of set design is to figure out, like, how big of a footprint should this mechanic have in the set, including not at all. So typically, as you see the final set, there are a lot of these mechanics still present in the set. And I think all the set design team did was cut mechanics and rework mechanics to things. So like vision design team handed us over all the tools and some additional ones to make a really cool set. So I guess we can start at the top.

I think the first one you said was poisonous. Yes, poisonous is the first one you said was Poisonous. Yes, Poisonous is the first one I said. Okay, Poisonous is a mechanic that appears on exactly two cards in exactly Future Sight. Yep. Both future shifted. Right. They're both from the future, which apparently is now. Almost now. Right, right.

There's just a slight change which required us to rename the mechanic. Poisonous in Future Sight is a triggered ability. So it's like you deal your regular damage and then a trigger goes on the stack. And then they get an extra thing. Felt the extra trigger on the stack is much cleaner play if it just doesn't. If it works, you know, like Lifelink. You know, when you damage your opponent with a creature with Lifelink, you both deal the damage

and gain the life at the same time. Poisonous can work the same way. You deal the damage and they get the poison counters at the same time. And so we just slightly changed the ability so that it would work more intuitively.

So basically the same mechanic. So, but what did you have to do to make it work i mean from a i mean we gave you a mechanic but we didn't balance it or anything what what what did you have to do to balance uh toxic um toxic is a pretty straightforward like toxic has what i'll call a lot of knobs. So, Infect is an example of original, oh, not original. Skarsamiridin. Skarsamiridin. That doesn't have a knob. So, like, if you increase a creature with Infect's power, you also increase how many poison counters it deals out. you also increase how much uh how many poison counters it deals out and then you also have to uh worry about like what happens when you giant growth um a creature with with in fact with toxic

you can it's very easy to regulate how many poison counters you just put the number that you want to on the card so it's like very straightforward um we had we had some rules um we developed some rules and i don't know if when they when they came about but i uh really liked white creatures for example they had a lot of toxic creatures uh including tons of the might tokens um but they all have toxic one right and so but other colors had ways to you know like your green even has a toxic six creature, but they have tons of toxic two and three and four and, you know, stuff like that. And so it's a very easy mechanic to execute on because you have the ability to choose, you know, which toxic number they're not beholden to. Like they have the same power as their toxicxic number. Yeah, I think with Toxic, what happens in Vision Design is

we will often pick colors for things, knowing that said design might redistribute colors if need be. I think in Toxic, the three colors we picked stayed the three colors, because white, green, and black were what we handed over. Yeah, as we'll get to with the other mechanics um the colors chosen for the uh like hey what if this leans this way what if this is spread out among all five colors that sort of thing um that was i thought really well thought out and work ended up working out really well um So our first guess was actually what we thought ended up thinking was the correct guess.

So basically, with toxic, green has the biggest toxic numbers, then black, and then white has a lot of toxic creatures, but they're often toxic. They're all toxic ones,

but they kind of, we'll say, go wide. You make a lot of little tokens with toxic. Blue has just a little splash of it to help out its other themes, and then red has almost none. I think it has zero?

Yeah, I think red has zero. Yeah. And then the mites were something that we had turned over. You guys didn't change the mites, right? I think red has zero. Yeah. And then the mites were something that we had turned over. You guys didn't change the mites, right? I think we turned them over. Yeah. Did you change how they got executed? I remember when I got it from Eric.

Yeah. The toxic one and can't block. Yeah. And I think both of those were present when, yeah, it was handed over. Did you find, like, were there any tricks of making mites? That's a new counter. Like, what do you do when you, how do you handle figuring out how to use a new counter? Because that's something you had never, you know,

this wasn't something we'd ever done before. Yeah, um, so I thought can't block was a really elegant solve for your tokens, you get creatures, you get actual creatures, and they, you know,

we want to give you enough of them so that you can kind of swarm your opponent, swarm past your opponent. But if they could block, a lot of the power would just be you make a bunch of things and it's really hard for your opponent to attack you. So this way

you can, you know, attack with a bunch of might tokens, and that's mostly hard for your opponent to attack you. So this way you can attack with a bunch of might tokens, and that's mostly what they do. They don't have a lot of blocking. So we felt like we could be more aggressive on the rate of creatures, or the rate at which you get might tokens, if they can't block. or the rate at which you get might tokens if they can't block. And that was, I think, an essential part to making the white toxic poison economy work. Yeah, if you'll notice, it's something we've been, this is actually we've been ramping up over the last couple of years,

is one of the issues in general with token making is it's more defensive than offensive and so we've been going we've been doing a lot of tokens that can't block that's been a a common theme and i think we knew that going in that we these were meant to be aggressive right the whole point of them is to make you want to attack and so we just took away the defensive options um but wasn't wasn't i mean this something we've been doing for a while so it was the obvious tool to use to do that so the thing that white also wants to do is

so it's main token can't block so we want to make sure there's enough other defensive stuff so you can block all the might tokens right you need some can't have a whole color full of can't blocking so white has a lot of defensive tools that aren't uh that aren't its tokens okay so since we're talking uh poison maybe we can segue into corrupted because i think that corrupted and poison go hand in hand like the poison economy

is very defined by corrupted so let's talk a little bit so yeah um i mentioned in my my when i did i did a podcast on the design of one of the big problems the scars of mirrodin was what we call the silo problem which is if you played poison you had to go all in on poison because the way in fact weren't like you couldn't you couldn't split damage and poison it just wouldn't work so either you were doing damage or you were doing poison. And so let's talk a little bit about trying to fix that problem. Yeah, so I think both of these mechanics, I think toxic really does more than corrupted to fix the problem.

So toxic, so in fact, doesn't deal regular damage. And I thought that was a huge drawback on so many creatures in Scars of Mirrodin. So I was very excited to work with Poisonous slash Toxic. Because that means your damage profiles, all of your creatures dealt regular damage. And I thought that was really important. And then the second piece of the puzzle and probably the mechanic i was most excited about when um when you hand it off was corrupted um which is your cards get stronger when you have three or more poison counters

um it was also the probably the hardest uh to find the right space for it. So initially, we had a ton of corrupted designs. It's like, oh, get three poison counters, and then this will help deal regular damage too, because regular damage is an output that, theoretically, you don't have to get to 10 poison counters, and your corrupted rewards will help you finish off thing with regular damage but what we kind of found is once you could deal three a lot of times you could deal six poison counters or 10 poison kind of so a lot of them got you know

just regular stat bonuses or like increase the value of the spell not necessarily trying to take you in a different direction once you got in a couple hits. Not very many of the cards will deal direct damage with life loss or anything like that. They'll actually just be regular stat bonuses.

And then a lot of corrupted cards don't have toxic. So there's like, oh, you have some toxic creatures and some corrupted creatures. And that's a cohesive strategy. Even though a lot of the times you end up winning with poison counters

even when you have corrupted. So just curious, when you have an alt win condition like poison, do you guys set some like, how often did you think it was like it was going to win do you have some idea like how often like poison should be winning um in terms of the entire set like a percentage no there's not a hard you know hard percentage

like not zero not close to zero and not a hundred or not close to a hundred that's the thing but like some get somewhere in the middle some games end in with poison some games end with regular damage um but what we kind of did is we kind of had the colors um have more distinct ways like so green for example it's going to win with poison counters a lot. It has the biggest poisonous numbers. It has some proliferate to help finish it off. Green is the most likely color, and then black, and then white, and then blue, and then red. So we had kind of a scale from most poisonous with green at the top

to least poisonous with red at the bottom. Okay, so you brought up proliferate. So let's, I mean, proliferate has a couple things, but let's start with the dealing with poison part of proliferate, and we'll get to the other part in a second. So how, I think now proliferate, we handed over in colors that were not the colors that proliferate ended up in. My memory is we handed them over in blue, green, and red, I think is what we handed over.

Okay, yeah, I believe that is true. Okay, so what happened? They changed a little bit, so explain. So yeah, the colors are blue, green, and black. And that was mostly to make just different air strategies work in um in draft um i we we quickly found that every color with proliferate wanted um wanted some amount of uh poisonous counter giving so this was a um i think you handed off no blue or very little blue poison yeah we added just just a smidge or whatever i distinctly remember uh making a card that just like gave your opponent a poison counter and draws you a card like just a very simple card um and that really helped get the add value to the proliferate cards in blue.

And blue has the most proliferate. But it wanted just a little bit of poison. Yeah, the one interesting thing, I mean, obviously we did proliferate and poison before in Scars of Mirrodin, is proliferate does this interesting thing that adds a little bit of control to a poison deck. Like, poison decks by their nature, because you have to hit with creatures, tend to be a little more aggro-y, you know, a little more mid-range aggro-y, because you're attacking with creatures. But the thing that's interesting

about proliferate is, it allows you, like, once you get a poison in, you can actually sort of play defensively, and, you know, sort of proliferate them to death. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. Yeah. Naturally, any creature with poisonous that has with Poisonous, it doesn't have an ability unless it hits your opponent. So it's definitely an aggressive leaning mechanic.

One of the big struggles we had was trying to find the right lever of aggression. So we wanted it to be all attacking all the time. You know, like, imagine if no creatures could block. That's probably not that fun of a limited environment. So we try to add, you know, blue is kind of a defensive deck with just a little bit of poison. It has a couple different ways to slightly poison your opponent. And then you, proliferate can do a lot of job

or you can like kind of get in a little bit more poison with an evasive creature like a flyer or something like that. And so it's definitely you can build slower poison decks which I think is cool. And the other

thing I really like about it is say you get one poison counter you proliferate it twice and now your corrupted cards are all on and that's another way to like a lot of the corrupted bonuses are like strong defensively like there's a black removal spell that goes from killing a small thing to killing anything if you're corrupted like that's that's the type of card that is really powerful in any poison deck, but particularly powerful in a deck that wants strong removal spells. So what are the...

Polyphorate's a weird mechanic in that it's very far-reaching in what it does. What do you have to do to make sure you can balance Polyphorate in this set? One of my favorite mechanics in all of Magic is not present in this set and that is plus one plus one counters um so plus one plus one counters and proliferate is the type of thing you want to build an entire environment around like war of the spark did this with plus one plus one counters and so the value of a proliferate is really high when it just you can add a bunch of plus one plus one counters to your

creatures um and poison is like if you want to think of it in a certain way it's like dealing two damage uh to your opponent only if you proliferate a poison counter and that's generally weaker than a plus one plus one counter so like if you have both plus one plus one counters and poison counters um which was true about the set for a decent amount of time of set design uh the plus one plus one counters are just way more impactful and you kind of reduce the uh the potency of proliferating a poison counter all right okay you said something i didn't know. So we handed over the set with oil counters. We didn't have plus one, plus one counters.

So did you guys add plus one, plus one counters for a while? Yeah, I liked plus one, plus one counters so much that I added and I did experiments trying to add plus one, plus one counters to the set. But those experiments did not go well because of the reasons I explained. I think it was correct not to have the plus one plus one counters because that helps the proliferating poison counters shine a little bit more. And so I guess we could segue into oil counters.

But oil counters was a really good way so we can make oil counters but oil counters was a really good way so we can we can make oil counters and uh make them so that proliferating oil counter is about the same we can do different things with oil counting we can do whatever we want with them including some of them just get plus one plus one so uh so they kind of work like plus uh plus one plus one counters um But we found that was a good way to, if we get all the oil counters, to be about, to work better with proliferating poison. And so you get to choose if you want to proliferate mostly poison counters or mostly oil counters. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about oil counters, so oil counters are interesting. They're what we call an open-ended mechanic. Oil doesn't mean anything,

so each card gets to define what oil means. And so what we did when we handed off the file is we just listed here, I think we listed like eight ways to use them. Like, here's lots of ways. You can choose whatever you want. And the idea wasn't that you guys would use all of them. It's just like, here's different ways you could use them we designed we designed a lot of different

oil cards so um how did you guys figure out which versions like how did you figure out what utility of oil counters you wanted yeah um so i i believe the oil counter stuff changed the most from vision design to uh set during set design um and i think this is probably a little bit crude way to say it but we just took the simplest version of the mechanic because putting all your dice on your cards and like taking up you know rolling up your dice found that to be like all the complexity like there's a lot of complexity baked into that and so putting additional layers of um here's how you get them here you know here's how they work um i think if you want to talk about um the oily oil mechanic the oil mechanic yeah it is so oh oh you had oiled and eric i believe, tried Oily.

Oh, okay. So when I handed over... Well, let's walk the audience one hand. I handed over Oiled. Oiled meant... Oiled N meant it entered the battlefield with M counters on it. And then we also had a rider, which is if you proliferate and it is zero, it still gets a counter. That's what Oiled did.

Right. And then I think Eric used oil as a form of vanishing or fading. Yeah. Where it would enter with some and it would take down definitely the vanishing part. It went away at the end once you, even with the last cover.

Neither of these mechanics are present in the set. Just because we felt like parts worked well just without any sort of, like, through line to them. So, like, a lot of cards just enter with oil counters. Some cards build them up, like, whenever you cast an incident or sorcery spell. Or whenever you cast a non-preacher spell. Because there are a lot of artifacts in the set.

non-creature spell because there are a lot of artifacts um in the set and so just having the basic simple like the simplest ways was plenty of um plenty of stuff to give us all the tools that we needed to uh make the mechanic work and they didn't need to have any inherent meeting um and felt that just felt it it was more complex than necessary. And so we just simplified it as much as we could, and it's still pretty fiddly and pretty complex, but it is really fun. Many of my favorite things to play in the set are the oil counter stuff.

I really enjoy proliferating, like, oil counters among all my permanents so that's really fun yeah it's interesting that proliferate's been in three different environments and each environment had a different dominant uh counter so that that's been interesting yeah and and proliferate is actually one of my favorite mechanics to work with because you have to figure out all of all of the environmental stuff it is a very high impact mechanic and it really dictates a lot of uh what you can do and you have to figure out what that thing is you can't just like throw every single type of counter uh and it also gets too messy okay so let's move on to next phyrerexian Mana. So when I handed over the design, I called them the three Ps,

which is the three things I thought audience would expect from a Phyrexian set, which was poison, proliferate, and Phyrexian Mana. So Phyrexian Mana, from a play design standpoint, is fraught with danger. So let's talk about how you handled Phyrexian Mana. play design standpoint is fraught with danger so let's talk about how you handled phyrexian mana yeah um so phyrexian mana is uh i will say too strong uh on balance so the thing about phyrexian mana is that two life and a mana don't have the same value so like you look at some of the cards from new phyrexia like i'll take dismember as a famous example is like it is just so much more powerful on average not not 100 of the time

to pay one mana and four life than it is to pay three mana like that's what a lot of the strength of the card is in paying one mana and four life and is we just found it just very difficult to actually put on cards where is an interesting choice and you you know did some like so there's lots of nods to nods to phyrexian mana in the set there's a lot of if you pay life you often pay two life as a nod to phyrexian. Yeah. There are some cards with activated abilities. There's a Mythic Rare Cycle of creatures that have... The Dominus. The Dominus Cycle.

Yeah. So there's, like, very little about it, but, like, I just felt like it was too challenging to make cards where it was, was like an actually interesting interesting choice and then the other thing um is rnd kind of has this thing of like a guideline of be careful of how many problematic not problematic is the wrong word? Challenging. How many challenging mechanics to put in one set. I felt that getting Poison to work

would be challenging. We've done it, but changing how it works requires a lot of design work and a lot of design efforts to make it work. I wanted to sign up. I thought Poison was the super important one and Phyrexia mana was

not nearly as important to uh making the set feel like phyrexia yeah and i tried to get a little bit of knobs you know a little bit of here and there but in terms of like a large footprint in the set i didn't feel like phyrexia mana was correct yeah and phyrexia mana i mean it shows up on five planeswalkers in their mana cost which with the completed mechanic so you're paying an extra thing other than just you're paying loyalty in addition to life right right that's a really really important like i love the completed planeswalkers um we actually did a lot of work for this set when we made um tamio yeah so when we made Tamiyo, we actually designed a bunch of

cards that were like, oh, here are the planes. Let's try it out. Let's try it out on more than just Tamiyo. Let's see if we can actually make five of these, because we knew we wanted to do it in Berserk. So we actually worked on some, and funny story is, the

Luka that we playt tested all the way back in neon dynasty ended up relatively close like the the play design team when they play tested it was like oh this luca design is really really good this is like does ever checks off everything we want to do like you play it at both things it's got got, you know, interesting context. It's a fun card. So, like, Phyrexian Luke was actually made during, well before, like, well before you worked on the set, even. So it was made a year before.

Yeah, the funny thing is I had the assignment way back in Neon Dynasty to do the initial work on the Planeswalkers, on the Phyrexian Planeswalkers. And my first stab at it, I don't know if you remember this, my first stab at it was Phyrexian loyalty.

Do you remember this? Yes, I do remember Phyrexian loyalty. It was super flavorful, but broken. Yeah, Phyrexian loyalty is you pay life instead of loyalty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was very cool and a couple of the stuff,

but yeah, that was a good example of, oh, this reads cool and plays cool, but I don't think we can make very many cards. Yeah, yeah, it was a little broken. weren't there. But when we found Phyrexian completed, put it in the cost, we felt the knobs were there because, like, two life and two loyalty is a lot more interesting of a choice than just two life. Okay, the last mechanic to talk about is, we called it Take Up Arms. It got

turned into Formiridon! So, I think this one mechanic, when we handed it over, it made a 2-2 Red Rebel. That's what it made when we handed it over it made a 2-2 Red Rebel that's what it made when we handed it over and it still makes a 2-2 Red Rebel we thought it was a

really cool kind of evolution of the germ mechanic living weapon from that that was a cool way to show off the the mirans um kind of the creative of the mirans is like they had all these like equipment and stuff

like they uh they needed like armor and shelter to bend off the phyrexians yeah and and it also played really well into kind of where the mirrodins would fit into the set structure. Red and white is where you're going to find most of the take-up arms card, or the four Mirrodin cards, as it ended up being called. Was there any challenges to balancing them? Like, you know, I mean, I know Living Weapon was quirky in that you had all the power toughness had to be in the equipment, otherwise the creature had no substance. I found it easier to make four Mirrodin cards. The hardest one was getting them on cheap enough cards, but that wasn't that big of an issue. There aren't very many two- cards with the mechanic they're mostly

at three eight four and five mana um but other than that i actually found it uh to be easier to make the living weapons because you didn't have to have like the stat bonus and the size of the initial creature yeah um we're more we're more kind of balanced like i think the um living weapon things like your basic common was like plus two plus four and that's just such a big stat bonus yeah um to get a two four but uh with with four mirrodin it could just be plus oh plus two which is a much more reasonable stat increase for common yeah So I found it to be very easy to make cards for. And then we had to do some work to... The biggest issue was for the limited strategy

or for even constructed strategy, we had to get the curve to be right. At one point, I was just like, oh, all the cards cost three because that's the natural first card you want to. But I think we did a pretty good job of varying the cost. I really like... There's a red for Mirrodin equipment that gives plus one, minus one.

And so that's a cool way to make a two-mana, three-one creature with a little bit of texture. I really like that card. Okay. So I'm, I'm almost, almost to my desk here. So, um,

any final thoughts, like, uh, you know, what, what are your looking back at the making of Phyrexia all will be one? What, what,

what, uh, what are your final thoughts about it? Uh, Phyrexia all will be one is probably one of the more sets that i'm most proud of working on during my time was i just think it's really cool i think the the world is really cool i think our you know execution like everything looks awesome um and i'm just really proud of the a lot of the individual designs like i think there's a lot for a lot of different players um i had a lot of fun working

on it uh and i think a lot of it was to how how well the the vision handle like the process was really smooth like uh as we talked about we kept a lot of things from vision design which is you know not always the case like but i thought it was really uh really nice for me as a set designer to have all the stuff that we needed present in the vision design. There's also extra stuff, but that's how I use Forex Day as a really good example of how the design process should work. You know, vision design comes up with a bunch of cool things and then set design kind of picks from them and pieces them together and and i think when we do that correctly it's we make awesome sets and i think for actually all we want is one of them yeah i'm really happy with how it came out you know it's it's uh it's a lot i mean one of the things that's interesting for me is we get a general idea of the set that we hand it over and

you know we're making the blueprints. But someone's building the building and, you know, it doesn't always turn exactly the way the blueprints were. So I was really happy to see how the set came out. So, well, thank you

for all your hard work and you and your team. But I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. So thank you, Adam, for being with us today. Thank you for having me. And all of you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.