Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1005: Blue with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

This is another in my series where I sit down with representatives of the colors from the Council of Colors. In this podcast, I talk with Ethan Fleischer about blue.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition. So I've been interviewing the representatives of all the different colors. So today we have blue with Ethan Fleischer. Hey, Ethan. Hi, Mark. So we're going to talk all about blue. So you have the record of being the member with the longest, representing the same color for the longest amount of time. That's right. I've been the Blue Color Pie Counselor for as long as the Color Pie Council has existed.

Yes. Everybody else, every other caller has had multiple people, but you are the, you've been Blue's, you know, watcher the whole time. So I think as we talk blue, hopefully you've thought a lot about blue. It's true. Okay. So first up, let's talk about where, what do you think of the state of blue right now? Let's start there.

I think that blue is in a really good spot right now. I think that we've identified some challenges for blue in the last few years that we've overcome. But in general, it feels like when I work with the lead designers of various sets, they have a really clear understanding of what blue is supposed to do and what blue is not supposed to do. So it is a relatively quiet color. And we've only identified a small number of structural issues that need to be solved with blue. Okay, so A, I want to talk about the challenges we just talked about, and B, we'll talk about the continuing structural challenges.

So let's talk, what were the challenges in the last couple of years with blue? The big challenge of the last few years with blue has been how our limited environments evolve. We found that the most fun types of limited environments are ones with strong threats, but also strong answers so that you can meet those threats. And the most fun type of threats that we found that players like to play with is creatures. And so finding ways for blue to be able to answer creature threats in a way that feels blue, but also doesn't adversely affect non-limited formats has been sort of the biggest challenge I think that we've struggled with on and off over the last few years. Okay.

And how have we solved that? What's our answer has been? Yeah. So we experimented with a lot of different things and, uh, sort of things have gone on and off the list of acceptable things for blue to do over the years as we sort of tried to find our feet and figure out which were the types of things that were fine and which were things that caused unforeseen problems elsewhere. So a couple of examples of that. There's an effect that, like on an instant, that can turn a creature into a 1-1 or a 0-1 until end of turn. And that was something that we used to do, and then we said, no, let's not do that. It feels too much, it's too much of a strong answer.

It's sort of, as long as that creature is being blocked or is blocking, that creature's going to die because it's a 11 or a 01. And that felt a little too strong for blue for us for a while. But as we continued to look at different options we decided that sort of effect was appropriate uh and back on the table an example of sort of the other type of example is uh effects like pongify or raven, which exile a creature and replace it with a token. Now, these types of effects were fine and limited because a token is relevant and limited.

A 3-3 ape token is not bad. That's a respectable creature and limited. But even in Constructed, these effects tended to be fine. They were things that people would use, but they weren't the go-to removal spells in Constructed formats. Because even in Standard Constructed, a 3-3 is respectable. Obviously, you don't want to put a Hill Giant in your deck you know it's still relevant on the battlefield but um in commander with the higher life totals and the uh larger number of players a card like pongify becomes one of the best removal uh spells in the format and that's true of raven form as well and that was a problem right at that, the color's identity is diluted

because blue is supposed to be the worst at removing creatures, and instead, it had one of the best creature-removable spells. And so power is so contextual, and different formats have different power levels. So eventually, we decided no more Pongify-style effects. Eventually, we decided no more Pongify style effects. I believe the last one was in Dominaria United on the saga that was the phasing of Jalfir. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about Commander,

we talk a lot about how we spent time on white and red, about how we had to improve them because the natural qualities of Commander really harm Red and White in that it really plays against some of their strengths. Right. Blue's in the opposite camp, right? Blue and Green, I would say. And that Commander plays to Blue's strengths, and so Blue is kind of naturally stronger. Some of what we had to do in Blue was pull back on some stuff because things get even stronger in that format. Yeah. we had to do in blue was pull back on some stuff because things get even stronger in that format yeah another example of the types of spells that are have very different power levels in different contexts are counter spells uh it's pretty hard to make a counter spell that's playable in limited you have to to really make something pretty strong for you to want to play that in limited. But almost always, if something is strong enough to be played in limited, if a counterspell

is strong enough to be played in limited, it will be playable in constructed and may very well be too strong for constructed to the point where it makes the format really unfun. So that's another example of the types of effects where we really have to tow a very careful power level line in order to sort of hit that narrow band where like, okay, you would consider this unlimited, but it's not too strong for constructed. So what are the challenges? You said there's still some challenges upcoming. What are the upcoming challenges to deal with? I don't think there are upcoming challenges okay that i that are on my radar i

really feel like we've the the main challenge just going forward is keep identifying um ways for blue to interact with creatures unlimited so there are a lot of different strategies that we can use for that. One of the ones I really like is an aura that transforms a creature into some other kind of creature. You know, it turns it into a wall or something. Because that feels blue, you can sort of render this creature irrelevant, but it's removable. If somebody casts Disenchant on that aura, their creature is back to normal.

So it captures the same sort of transformation flavor that something like Pongify does, but in a way that is less permanent and doesn't impact Commander adversely, and just is healthier overall for the game. So there's something else we added to blue. This was more for limited, I believe, than for anything else. But there's a creature ability that we added to blue. Do you want to talk about how vigilance... Oh, that's true.

How did vigilance become a blue thing? Yeah, we added vigilance to blue recently. I'm trying to remember all of the context of how that decision took place. Because for our players, it feels very recent, right? It was just in the last couple of sets. But for us, it was like two years ago or something. I have my memory of what happened. Do you want to be...

All right. Your memory is a little better than mine. I think Adam Prozac, who's one of our set designers, was trying to sell something in one of his sets, and he pitched the... In the past, in the distant past, Blues dabbled a little bit in Vigilance, and in fact,

when we were going to move Vigilance to a second color, our choices were blue or green at the time, and we ended up going to green rather than blue, because green just had more... The things you would put Vigils on in green were more different than the things you would

put it on in blue. The blue Vigils copied white a bit more. But I think we've recently or not, in the last couple years, we've sort of come to the groups of that abilities could be in three colors rather than two colors between primary and secondary. So we've been more willing to add another color to stuff.

And Adam, I think, made the pitch. He brought it to the console colors and said, hey, we think, you know, set design, play design thinks that vigilance would be a real big help if we could add that in. And so they came to us to talk about it and talk about, okay, what do we say? and so they came to us to talk about it and talk about okay what what do we say right well it really allows blue to be more proactive to have threats that uh can advance the game state while also sort of uh continuing blue's strategy of being the most defensive color right vigilance allows you to both attack and defend uh yeah we we looked at the the

situation we we were looking at like how do uh white cards and blue cards how should they uh differ um we did come up with some you know we kind of thought oh maybe blue should be a little more toughness statted than than power statted though ultimately i don't think we came up with a very strong definition for how to separate blue and white vigilance cards from each other. No, we haven't. It's a work in progress. We're still trying to figure it out. Like, green clearly has very different vigilance because it does big beefy things that neither white or blue tend to do. Right, because green's big challenge is that oftentimes when it's playing against a go-wide deck with lots of creatures, it can play a 7-7 or something,

and the enemy army can just attack straight into it, sacrificing one of their small creatures and keep hitting green. So Vigilance offers a tool for green to advance the game state and still be able to block those little creatures. Yeah, the other thing to bring up, so Blue always had the ability to untap itself. Right, like Vigilant Drake from, what was that? Versus Legacy.

So, I mean, it's one of those things where it's not like Blue couldn't, like Vigilant wasn't really pushing Blue in some area that Blue couldn't do. We just sort of said, you know, so that was another big thing. It's not that blue can't attack and then somehow be in a state where it can block. Right. We do tend to, when we're evaluating cards and mechanics for colors, we do tend to think about whether a card or mechanic is problematic on a sort of aesthetic level where like, okay, this looks like another card.

It has words that resemble the words on another card, which in the case of blue and vigilance is that's, that was the issue there. Like these blue cards look like white cards. And then we all, but then the sort of more serious uh concern is the uh strategic concern where like this is allowing the card the the color to do something strategically that it was unable to do with the tools at its disposal and that's much more of a red flag where if if something has if a new strategy has opened up for a color, that's significant, that's important, and it needs to be done mindfully and with purpose.

But certainly vigilance, as you say, like blue can already untap its creatures. If it wanted to attack and then block on the next turn, it had the tools to do that. It just didn't have a simple keyword that allowed it to do that. Okay, so I want to examine what has been added to Bloom the last couple years and what has been taken away from Bloom the last couple years. Obviously, we've talked about a few things that have been added, like vigilance. Anything else that's been added to Bloom that's sort of a new thing Bloom has? Nothing's jumping to my mind, but I'm seeing maybe you can think of something. nothing's jumping in my mind, but I'm seeing maybe you can think of something.

I think it's more that we have identified a suite of removal options for blue and written it all down and delivered it to the set designers. Like, here are a whole bunch of tools in your toolbox. Does blue in your set, is it having trouble? Does it need a removal spell? Does it need a way to deal with enemy creatures? Here are a bunch of options. And that to me is the big innovation. And then yeah, taking away is,

we've taken away Blue's ability to exile permanents. Like this is just something that we're not in the market for anymore. So something else we took away from Blue. Let's talk about this. Once upon a time, Blue was king of getting artifacts out of the graveyard. It is no longer that. So let's talk about why is Blue no longer that.

Right. We had a meeting where we sat down and talked about how all the different colors should interact with the graveyard and we found large areas of overlap and there were colors that had a very large portfolio of things that they could uh get back from the graveyard and blue was one of those colors where i could get artifacts back it could get instance back they could get back from the graveyard. And blue was one of those colors where you could get artifacts back, it could get instants back, it could get sorceries back. And ultimately, and white was hurting for things to do, right? We were at this, this was sort of related to the we need to fix white situation.

So we looked at blue and we also looked at red because red has historically been able to sacrifice artifacts to bring other artifacts back, the sort of classic goblin welder effect. And yeah, we decided that blue and red should be more about instances of sorceries and white can be more about artifacts and enchantments, and green can remain able to get anything back.

So, yeah, in a sort of effort to give white a more distinctive identity and sort of concentrate that juice into a color that needed it more. We decided that things like Academy Ruins and such were something we didn't want to do in blue anymore. Another thing that we changed, this is a couple years ago, but just things that we changed. Blue has given away some of its polymorphic. Want to talk about that?

Well, I don't know if I would characterize it quite that way. It's more that blue is not a bunch of polymorph effects, which allows you to get rid of a creature and replace it with a creature from the library. A random creature,

essentially. And I think blue is still allowed to do that, but we've found that like that type of effect is something that red just needs more like red red wants these sort of exciting high variance plays and and polymorph um when it's not super optimized where you have like a bunch of token generators and an ultrarazi in your deck. The sort of ideal form of polymorph where you really don't know what you're going to get feels very red and is the sort of exciting splashy effect that doesn't involve the word damage that we're always looking for for red.

I think the line we drew was if you're making a transformation and you mostly know what you're turning into, that's more blue. But if you're making a transformation and who knows what you could turn into, that that's supposed to be a little bit more red. Obviously, there's some gray middle area between that, but... Yeah.

Okay, so here's what we're going to do now. I'm going to go through the colors and I want to talk about what are the challenges between blue and that color. Like, where are you fighting for things? Okay? Sure. So we'll start with white. What do blue and white fight over?

Blue and white fight over flyers. They are sort of both primary in flying, and in general, we say that blue is the best at flying. Blue is at the top. But in practice, it's pretty hard to make a strong differentiation there. Very often for blue, we will make the sort of strongest common. We like to have one common in each color that is like a really strong one. And for blue this is more often than not a flying creature. So you're gonna see some some very powerful blue flyers over the

next few years at common that may look a little out of place like wow I haven't seen one like this before um so that's sort of the tool that we're we've been using to help to to make sure that that blue and white feel a little bit different also just in general we try to make it so that uh blues large flyers are a little stronger and white small flyers are a little bit stronger. This plays into white's sort of go-wide army flavor and blue's more of a control-type color, so the control finisher can be the stronger card. Though, obviously in practice,

we like to make sweet angel cards that our players want to have, so it's hard to stick to that line, right? So here's another thing that blue and white fight over, that we've done the opposite. We've said white's supposed to stick to that line, right? So here's another thing that Blue and White fight over, that we've done the opposite. We've said White's supposed to do better than Blue, and Blue had been doing a little bit better than White, which is flickering slash blinking, so that you're removing something and bringing it back.

Yeah, this is an effect that is often problematic and also somewhat unintuitive for newer players, so I tend not to think about it very often because it's not a tool that I use very much anymore. Yeah, the thing for enfranchised, it has so much, it interacts with so many things

it has a lot of combo potential, so the enfranchised players tend to like it, but it is something you have to be careful with because it's, yeah, a little unintuitive. Yeah to be careful with because it's a little unintuitive. Yeah, it's a tool that I... It's more of a, you know, one card in a set kind of thing for me these days. So I don't have to worry too much about differentiating between the colors as much. Okay, next, black.

What do blue and black fight over? Okay, next, Black. What do Blue and Black fight over? Blue and Black fight over milling and using opponents' stuff. There's sort of a very fun, some people describe as a roguelike play pattern, where you are playing with your opponent's cards in one way or another and your deck is built to do that and blue and black are both good at that we don't have a very strong differentiation between especially which color can play cards from the opponent's library the sort of gaunt effect as as as we frequently call it uh both of them can do it it's fun to make that deck uh but i do think that uh it may be worth trying to differentiate those two colors

a little bit and sort of how they do that but uh yeah we don't do it that much that it's a lot harder to differentiate when you do it every once in a while versus when you do it all the time. It's much easier. It's the type of effect that tends to appear on rare cards. But we are building up a critical mass of these cards, which as someone who designs for Commander a lot, when we start to get enough of a thing,

then it becomes a deck archetype that people can build around. And then it starts to... That's the advantage of the eternal card pool of Commander, is that you have access to all these cards. And so there are deck archetypes that would just be very specialized, are deck archetypes that would just be, you know, very specialized and just up to the point of absurdity in a smaller constructed format like Standard, right? But, you know, all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, there's like 30 different cards that do this effect. I guess there's a deck now, but that's a cool thing we could do. Yeah, also I should point out for Blue-Black,

Blue-Black has kind of the opposite problem of what we're talking about here, that blue-black, I think of all the color pairs, has the least amount of overlap. And so, whenever we're trying to overlap them, you know, hybrid or something, it's blue and black are the problem child, just because they're the most individual. They don't overlap all that much.

And we've added milling to black to try to get more overlap between them, so that's kind of funny. Okay, next up, Red. What do Blue and Red fight over? Blue and Red fight over instants and sorceries. That is their mutual interest. And mostly the rewards that they can offer are very different from each other. So it's usually a harmonious partnership. But we do give them both the ability to recur instance of sorceries from the graveyard.

And so those Archaomancer-style effects are equally appropriate in each of those colors. And that seems fine. Also, prowess style effects are things that are fun in both blue and red. In general, the powerful prowess creature that also has flying is a way to make it feel nice and blue. and um but sort of the the sort of normal prowess creature with no other ability the the fun ideal shape of that creature is usually a little toughness statted so that tends to push um push us to make our red prowess creatures look kind of more like blue prowess creatures like a one three with prowess can be a really fun shape for a card whereas a three one with prowess creatures. A 1-3 with prowess can be a really fun shape for a card, whereas a 3-1 with prowess is often not actually very fun in practice just because it trades off in combat too easily.

So another overlap between blue and red is what I'll call sort of the tricky area. Like blue and red overlap in spell copying and spell redirection you know like the you can also argue that some of like the polymorphish stuff's in the space that blue and red are both the tricky colors that sort of mess with the opponent in different

ways yeah and I found that as we design sets it's just usually usually red just wants those things more than blue does i think that blue just has more design space for instance and sorceries um and so i found that more often than not those sorts of metaic cards that copy spells or redirect cards tend to end up in red just because red doesn't have quite as many cool things to do as blue does. Okay, the final color, green.

What do blue and green fight over? Blue and green fight over very little, actually. They have very little in common these days. Some types of effects, a lot of the things having to do with card draw are the places where we've had to really take a hard look at what green is doing and what blue is doing and what they ought to be doing. We've been taking away a lot of card draw effects from green or trying to really specialize them in a way that uh that feels particular to green strengths you know for quite recently we would have cards that like whenever a creature enters the battlefield under control draw a card and we decided we didn't like

that in green like that almost feels more like something white ought to be doing. Not saying we would print that in white either, but it encourages a white style of play pattern where you're playing lots of small creatures so you can keep drawing more cards to play more small creatures. Green should be about a smaller number of big creatures. So rewarding you for large creatures with drawing cards seems fine in green. We've had curiosity-style effects where if the creature hits an opponent, you draw a card.

Those have been in both green and blue. I imagine those would still stay in both of those colors. But in general, there's not a lot of strategic overlap between these two colors, which is actually kind of a challenge. I think that the overlap is less than I would want it to be, because it's always hard to find limited archetypes for green-blue to do. Yeah, it's the hardest. It is the hardest. It is the problem child of draft archetypes.

It really is. It is the problem child of draft archetypes. It really is. Just because both of these colors, they're the two worst colors at removing creatures. In Limited, you need to be able to remove creatures. We've given them both some tools to help them fight against enemy creatures, but they're still the weakest, and by design.

But the sort of natural play pattern, if you were just playing with with sort of generic core set cards low synergy uh environment uh for green blue is a sort of slow ramp deck where you are drawing extra cards with your blue cards and searching for lands with your green cards and trying to build up to some big game ending threats before you get run over by your opponent which it's fine that's that's what the colors naturally want to do but we don't want we we want each limited environment to feel distinctive and so uh we're always on the hunt for what's the cool distinctive archetype this time? Is there something different we can do for green-blue?

Because there are only a few sort of natural archetypes that they tend to fall into. So if we have a set theme or a mechanic that can give us something different, we're always really hungry for that sort of thing. Okay, so we only have a few minutes left here because I can see my desk. My question for you is, I want to pontificate a little bit on the future of Blue. So if you could peer out to the future, where do you think Blue might be headed? What's the interesting space that blue might be exploring i feel like it's it's it's a bit of a dodge but i feel like blue is lacking in fun splashy big effects uh i don't know what those are supposed

to look like yet but i would uh sort of want to to, if I was going to put together like a strike team or whatever to like chart the course of blue, I would try to find some new novel effects that we think are fun for blue to do that are nevertheless not going to upset the apple cart. going to you know upset the apple cart because i do feel like we really struggle to make cool exciting rare cards for blue uh just because so much of the the power of blue is in very well understood spaces you know drawing cards countering spells playing big flying creatures and uh it feels like we have trouble both with blue and with red in sort of finding these splashy novel effects. Yeah, I know we've spent,

I mean, one of the things we've spent some time on is trying to carve new space. It's hard, you know, 25,000 cards in to go, let's find some new space we haven't done yet. But it's something we're always looking at yeah i i think that is uh that is the struggle for blue is to make sure that make sure that the new cards you know look splashy and exciting and let you do new things uh rather than sort of here's a refresh of this card you've seen 15 times or whatever. Yeah, it's one of the jokes in, I know, Invision Design is

we always hand over too many card drawing effects. That's our note from set design. Just that... Right, they can design those card drawing effects themselves. Like, they don't need us to do that. Well, and not only that, we tend to, like, what's, like, here's a neat thing

to do with blue. What's the output? Oh, how about we draw cards you know yeah um and drawing cards is fun but you know i love drawing cards as an output and like i'm sure that i'm more guilty than average of that actually because ultimately drawing a card is one of the funnest things you could do in magic right drawing a card is it's a random card you don't know what it's going to be. It opens up a new opportunity for something to do. And whatever your deck theme is, that card is

going to be part of it. I'm all about drawing a few cards here and there. It's very true that when you're designing rares and stuff, that there's the go-to effects you do because drawing cards is fun

you know copying things is fun but then you you quickly run out of the and here's the fun things blue does but there's there's just only so many

of those effects that are fun to do and I agree with you that's why it's tricky so anyway I want to thank you Ethan for being with us

and talking blue thanks for having me yeah it's a lot of fun. I'm enjoying all these talks with all the color people. So anyway, guys, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. That means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

Thank you, Ethan, for being with us. Thank you. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.