Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1020: Structural Support

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

I recently wrote a new "Nuts & Bolts" column where I talked about the elements a set needs to work well in Limited play. This podcast goes over all the details from that article. If you're interested in building your own set or cube, this is worth a listen. If not, it's still a good insight into the process.

I'm pulling in the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so recently, every year, I write what's called a nuts and bolts column, where I talk about, I give advice to people making their own sets. And so I get into a lot of the nitty gritty of building sets. So this year, I talked about what I called set structure. And what that means, or structural support, I think is what I called it. What that means is, what are things you have to do to make your set work, especially in limited? And so there's a bunch of things that you need.

And so I went through them. And I thought that one of the things I like to do sometimes is take my article topics, do podcasts on them, because I just have a lot more time to talk than I do in my, you know, I only have 3,000 words in my article. I get a lot more than 3,000 words on my drive to work. So we're going to talk about that today. Okay, so first up, you're putting together your set. First thing you have to figure out is your mechanical themes. And there were three things I listed there. One was, what are your named mechanics? And when I say named mechanics, I mean both keywords and ability words. You know, what are the things that you're doing that are going to be, like, you know,

what are your set-specific mechanics? Things that are called out in this set. Now, also, not only are there named mechanics, but usually there's some unnamed mechanics. Usually there are themes. Sometimes these play out through the archetypes. Sometimes it's a theme that's thematic, but doesn't really need a name. Like sometimes we have a theme that's just simple enough that we don't need to name it. Normally if something's large enough in volume, we do name it just so people can sort of talk about it. But there are a lot of mechanics that sort of like there are when you make a set, there are major and minor mechanics.

And the major ones usually are named, but there are a number of minor ones. Like I said, the most common place that we use them is making draft archetypes. Oh, we want to draft a certain way. So, you know, we'll throw some effect in three to six times, enough that it can influence how you draft. Finally, you want to figure out what I call blank matters, which is usually there's some mechanical element in your set that matters that doesn't normally matter. Maybe it's a creature type.

Maybe it's a card type. Maybe it's playing land or casting your second spell or, you know, normally there's something that goes on in the set where you care about something that you, it matters in a way that doesn't normally matter. And so, when you're putting together your set, you just want to understand

what your mechanical themes are. Now, I'm sort of giving you a long list of things today, and once again, there's the article up on the website. If you want to go, anything I'm saying, you can go look at the article. I explain everything. And it's not that what I'm telling you needs to be done in the order I'm telling you. I'm more saying all the things that have to be done at some point as you're putting your set together.

You know, you do want to figure out early on what you think your mechanics are because you'll start warping your designs around what your mechanics are. So you do want your mechanics relatively early. But sometimes you're building a set and you realize you have a gap in something. And so sometimes mechanics get made later in the process because you're like, you're realizing you're missing something or you're trying to make an archetype work or something. Okay, next up, card type percentages. So one of the things

that's important is how often are each of the card types supposed to show up? So creatures are the most important and show up in the largest volume. So let me just give you the percentages we use. These are our default percentages. So white is 62% creatures, blue is 50% creatures. Black is 56% creatures. Red is 53% creatures. And green is 59% creatures. The easiest way to remember that is the colors from most creatures to least are white, green, black, red, blue.

You can remember that as white and green are more focused on creatures and red and blue are more focused on spells. Black sits in the middle. And so what happens is the one at the bottom end, which is blue, the one that's the least amount is 50%. Because even in the color that is the least amount of creatures, we still want it to have 50%. Then, if you just go up to the next color in row from least creatures to most creatures,

so now you go up to red, right? Red's next. Red, you add 3%. So red is 53. Then you go to black, that's 56. Then you go to green, that's 59. Then you go to white, that's 62. So that is how, if you want to remember off the top of your head, that's how you remember it. Creatures are very key to how decks work, especially how limited works. So you need to have enough creatures to make sure that you have the, you need to have

a certain amount of volume to make it work. Set to set, you know, things can tweak a little bit. These percentages are default percentages, so if we made a deck that's a little more creature centric than most, hey, it probably is a little higher than normal. If we made a set like, you know, Strix a deck that's a little more creature-centric than most, hey, it probably is a little higher than normal.

If we made a set like Strixhaven that's a little more spell-based, maybe it's a little bit lower. The one thing to remember when you're doing creatures, this is how R&D treats it, is if you are a wall or something that can't attack, if you are a card, you're a creature that can't do any attacking, or you have zero power and you can never get more than zero power naturally from the card. We tend to count you as not a creature.

Usually those cards have other functions. And then if you have a spell that creates a creature, you know, raise the alarm that makes two one ones, we count that as a creature. So for purposes of these percentages, creatures mean things capable of attacking that can do some amount of damage and anything that generates tokens falls in that bucket. As far as other card types,

we like to make sure that all of them show up well sorry not planeswalker planeswalkers barring war of the spark or something usually are at rare or mythic rare defaults at mythic rare every once in a while they'll show up at rare but at lower rarities

you know at common for example you're going to want artifacts and enchantments and instants and sorceries we do want all of them to show up. So usually these days, every color will have usually at least one of them. Artifacts depends what we're doing with artifacts in the set. If we're pushing more toward generic artifacts for some reason, maybe they sit in generic rather than color. But usually we do want all the card types showing up at each rarity with the caveat of planeswalkers show up at higher rarities. You don't want, for example, all sorceries or all instants.

You want a mix. It's fine if certain colors lean in certain directions. You know, white, for example, has a little more combat-oriented stuff, so maybe there's more instants than sorceries. Not that, you know, but you should make, has a little more combat-oriented stuff, so maybe there's more interest in sorceries. Not that, you know, but you should make sure you want a mix of things. And so when you're looking at card types, you just want to make sure you have a mix. Okay, next up, mana curves. So what mana curves are is you want to make sure,

and this is especially important with creatures, although we also look at spells, you want to make sure that every mana value up to a certain point has cards that can be cast. Because when you're making your deck, you want to have a stretch of mana values, right? If you put nothing but one drops in your deck, well, yeah, I'll have something to play every turn, but I won't have the bigger things I need later in the game. Whereas if I play four and five drops, well, I have nothing to do in the early game and I'll get in trouble in the early game. You want to have, you know, some number one drops and two drops and three drops, we'll have nothing to do in the early game and I'll get in trouble in the early game. You want to have some number of one drops and two drops and three drops. In order to

do that and make that possible, when making our file, we want to make sure in each color that there's a mana curve. So for example, with creatures, usually there's a one drop. Certain colors like white or red sometimes have a second one drop. There's a number of two drops, a number of three

drops, four drops. And then as you start getting in color, certain a number of two drops, a number of three drops, four drops. And then as you start getting them in color, certain colors start getting five drops, six drops, seven drops, depending on what color they are and what rarity. I did an article two years ago, a Nuts and Bolts column, where I gave the default design skeleton that we use. So what it does is it shows you at each rarity what, like, for CW01, which is common white slot one, it'll say one drop. And then, you know, CW02, one drop or two drop.

It'll give you an actual list of what our defined skeleton is. So if you're making your set for the first time, just follow the default for the first time. Once again, I should stress, defaults mean this is where we start. Things can change. There's reasons why numbers can be different. But that is our starting standpoint. And if you're building something for the first time, using sets as defaults, using our default skeleton, probably is for the best. You'll have the most luck.

A lot of the reasons to change things get more complicated. And so if you're building your set for the first time I would just stick to the default it'll make it much easier on you so in general the key to mana curves and this is true for creatures and non-creatures but more important for creatures and the lower the rarity

you want to have a really tight mana curve at common you want a decent mana curve at uncommon rare,, mythic rare, you want some, but it's not as crucial. I mean, you don't want everything at the same mana value at rare, but you have a little bit more flexibility. Also, what tends to happen is you go up, you can have larger spells. At common, usually we cap with one or two exceptions. Usually there's not much more than five mana value at common. Certain colors like green, sometimes blue, might have a six or a seven.

But normally at common, normally five is about the most we tend to have with a few exceptions. At higher rarities, though, you can go much bigger. You know what I'm saying? Rare, mythic rare, can have spells that cost 8, 9, 10. Once again, with very few exceptions, wouldn't do it common. Okay, next up is mana fixing. So one of the big questions you have to ask yourself is how many colors do I think people are going to play? So if you don't do any mana

fixing, magic will let you play two colors, but what I will call a priority two colors. I think in the article I called this a splash, which is a little bit incorrect. What I meant to say was that if you're going to play two colors with no mana fixing, you can play one dominant color and one, you know, whatever, supporting color. The supporting color, you have to be careful about, for example, double mana pips at low mana values. You know, you want to make careful about, for example, double mana pips at low mana values. You know, you want to make sure that you're not having too many low drop cards.

Because normally, if you don't have any mana fixing, you want one color to be your stronger color. Now, if you have some mana fixing, then you could have two colors play equally. If you have more mana fixing, you can have two colors splash a third. Even more mana fixing, sometimes you can have three. But mana fixing really says, how am I allowing my players to be able to play the number of colors I want them to play? Now, the danger with mana fixing is you need to know your cap in the sense of, let's say I'm trying to make them play two-collar. I don't want to make it too easy to play three-collar.

If I'm trying to get them to play three-collar, I don't want to make it too easy to play four-collar. So one of the things about mana fixing is not only do you have to make sure you have enough, but you have to be careful what kind of mana fixing you're using. What I would say is, depending on the kind of set you want to do, find a magic set. This is just a general rule when you're building a set. Go find the magic set that's the closest to what you want your set to be. And look at the numbers of that set. Also, look at the mana fixing of that set. You want to make a three-color set?

Go look at our three. The more recent, the better. Go look at our three-color sets. Go look at how we did mana fixing for our three-color sets and use that as a mirror for how to do it for yours. There's a lot of really subtle things on how to make mana work. And so it has to do with what colors you have access to and when things are tapped and untapped and when things are basic land types.

Anyway, it's a complex... It is something that play design and set design spend a lot of time on. It is not a simple, easy thing. So I would mirror a set that's similar to what you're trying to do. Okay, next up is mana sinks. So in mana sinks, the way magic works is I have lands, I play lands, and I want to build up so that I can cast larger things. But what's going to happen is I'm going to play things out at a faster rate than I'm drawing new cards.

I'm going to slowly, my hand is going to go down. And there will come a point where I don't have a lot of cards in my hand. In fact, some games, if they go long enough, I'll have no cards in my hand. So what you want to make sure is that mid to late late game when you're when the players don't have anything else to do with their mana there are things that they can do with their mana that's we call mana sinks that they can sink their mana into it and the reason for that is you want to make sure that there is things to do at every turn and you know if you don't provide any mana sinks just just a lot, there's less interaction.

You give less tools to your players to make dynamic things happen later in the game. You want to make sure that early game, you have so many cards in your hand and you're so limited with your mana, there's going to be dramatic moments and things are going to happen. But mid to late game, if you don't create other tools, they'll run out of steam and there won't be things to do. And that's just less dynamic and less fun. Okay, so for mana sinks, there are a bunch of things you can do. You can have activations. We have something we do from time to time called invokers, which are common creatures that have a large activation cost.

Usually six, seven, eight. Often generic, but not always. And the idea is, here's a creature that's usually statted as a lower cost creature, a two drop, a three drop, but late in the game it has the ability to do something that will impact the game in a larger way. Maybe the creature gets bigger, maybe it starts flying, maybe you know maybe it's putting plus one plus one counters on things, maybe it's drawing you cards. It's doing things that are going to advance and finish the game. And it's allowing you later in the game to click in.

So let's say I have an invoker that has a seven mana generic cost. Well, I'm not going to use that early. So early on it's just in some ways a vanilla creature or a French vanilla creature. So a vanilla creature means it has no other text on it. French vanilla means it just has keywords on it. And so it sort of turns, it gains extra utility. Another thing we do is spells that have extra cost. Kicker being sort of the poster child here, where oh, I can play this as a smaller creature earlier in the game, but later

in the game, I can upgrade it and I can make it if I have it in my hand, I can cast it and I can make it... If I have it in my hand, I can cast it as a bigger spell. Like Kabu Titan was sort of a classic from way back when. For one and a green, I can play a two-two, like a grizzly bear. But if I have five mana, three green green, instead I get a five-five

trampling creature. So it adjusts for when you play it. Also, a lot of times, if we have stuff like kicker, we might give you wasted of creatures back to your hand so you can play them early as small things and later they can upgrade them to large things. There are things that are kind of in the middle between activations and extra spell costs,

stuff like Monstrosity, where there are activations you can spend later to upgrade the creature. Repeatable spells. So this is stuff like Flashback, where there are spells that you can cast more than once. Usually when we do that, the second casting is costed a bit higher.

Like flashback cost, usually the first cost is close to what a normal spell would be. Maybe you're paying a little bit for having flashback. But then the second effect is a lot more because you're getting a second free spell. So that usually is designed for you to play later in the game. Also, we have what we call mana gates. So mana gates tend to be triggered effects, meaning whenever something happens, you can get an effect if you pay mana

to do it. And the reason we put mana gates on things is it allows us to balance them a little better. We can give you more excitement on a card because there's still mana to pay. Mana gates normally are a little lower. They don't tend to be quite as expensive as activations. So it's like, whenever this happens, you can spend one or spend two. Sometimes, I'm not saying there's never more expensive mana gates, but usually mana gates are a little cheaper. But it's a means

by which to add late game play that's a triggered rather than activated or something. Mana sinks are pretty important. Every set needs to have mana sinks. The stuff I'm talking about today, every set's supposed to have these things. Now, some sets have more mana sinks than others. It depends the faster you are, the less mana sinks you need because mana sinks are about later play.

So if I have a pretty aggressive environment where things are ending a little bit earlier, I need some mana sinks, but not as many as if I'm playing a slower environment where things are going to last multiple turns longer. Next, deck smoothing. Okay, so the way magic works is that there is a randomized system. You have to shuffle your deck.

You don't know the order you're drawing your cards. And there is a mana system that isn't perfect on purpose. The idea that I don't know how much mana I'm going to have on each turn is key to making magic work. I've done whole podcasts on the mana system.

The idea that some games I can drop my third drop on turn three and sometimes it's on turn four. Or sometimes I can't get to seven mana until the ninth turn or the eleventh turn. The fact that there's a variance there when things happen is important.

But, while that makes the game play well, we do want a little bit of smoothing, what we call deck smoothing, to sort of increase the chance that you draw the things you need to draw. And there's a couple different ways we do deck smoothing. There's scry and surveil. So that is something, those are both every green now.

So that's just an ability that says, oh, I can look at my deck and I can see if I need the cards or not. And if I don't like them with scry, I put them in the bottom of the library. I don't like them with Surveil, I put them in the graveyard. But still, the cards I want go back to the top of the library. Meaning, I'm just sort of deck thinning to a certain extent. I'm making the cards I need to get, I can draw them earlier. There also is what we call impulsing or tutoring. Impulsing is when you look at the top N cards of your library and you get to pick something. Sometimes you can pick anything.

Sometimes there's limitations. Get a land, get a land or creature. It depends on the color. And then tutoring is when you go straight into your deck and do whatever you want. We do less tutoring these days. Tutoring has two problems. One is there's shuffling, which we try to minimize. And the second is when you have to tutor for something that's in your deck, you're kind of encouraged to

always get the same thing. And so games play out the same. And you don't need a lot of them in your deck. Impulsing, in contrast, there's variance. You don't know what you're going to get. Games play out differently. And in order for you to be able to get the thing you need, you need to have your deck dedicated to that theme. You can't just throw one card in. You have to have some dedication to it. So impulse effects definitely push toward encouraging players to play in a way that I think makes it a more fun game. Next there's looting and rummaging. Looting usually is in blue. You draw and discard.

Rummaging in red, you discard and draw. And the idea is it's a means by which to just see more cards, to filter your deck a little better. And then there's just straight-up drawing. You know, cantrips, for example, are usually spell effects that as a little rider you get to draw a card. And we do those in creatures as well. It's just a means to sort of get you extra cards.

The card, cards themselves have value and just getting more cards in your hand increases that. So the, I didn't really get into land fixing. When I talk about mana fixing, mana fixing has a lot to do with not just giving you, providing like dual ends and things, but also giving you means by which to go out and get mana or ways to what we call wash mana, where you can spend generic or some color to get another color. The one thing when you do land fetching, it has a side effect of deck smoothing. And the reason

for that is every time I take a land out of my deck, that's one less land that I can draw. My ratio of drawable spells that will do something go up the more lands I pull out of my deck. So landfetching also has a little bit of deck smoothing to it. Okay, next up, the thing you have to care about, evasion. So one of the things about having a lot of creatures is you can get board stalemates, where I have creatures, you have creatures, and it's just not advantageous for either one of us to attack. So the way to break through that is you want to have enough invasion in your deck so that there are means by which, even though there's a stalemate, I can still attack. So there's a bunch of ways to do this. The two biggest ways to do it, probably number

one is flying. Um, flying is an ability primary in white and blue, secondary in black and red, tertiary in green. Um, green tends to have other tools like reach and stuff to deal with flyers. But most of the colors use flying as a means to sort of get things through. Uh, that when I am flying, only, I only care about your other flyers. So it really reduces the amount of means by which to care about whether I can attack or not. The other thing we use a lot is unblockable or can't be blocked. I think that's how we word it these days. We used to say unblockable, but people thought it was a keyword.

It's not a keyword. We couldn't keyword it. We tried. So now we say can't be blocked. Can't be blocked is nice just because we tend to put it on smaller things. Usually it only has one or two mana naturally, so that it's not hitting you for too much. And sometimes the can't be blocked is conditional. Like if you do a certain thing, then it can't be blocked. Flying can't be blocked are our two biggest tools, but there's some others. So first strike and double strike. That discourages people from blocking you. So that's

good. Death touch likewise discourages people from blocking you. Menace is nice. Menace is evasion where the opponent has means by which to answer it but a lot of times, especially in the early to mid game, them not accounting for menace or not realizing menace is going to happen, or them choosing to be aggressive on their own leaves you open to be able to attack with menace creatures.

So menace, we've tried a bunch of things over the years, fear, intimidate, and what we found was menace was nice in that it is conditional unblockability, but something where the opponent has a way to interact with it. The problem with Land Walk and Intimidate and stuff like that was sometimes if you're just in the wrong colors, there's nothing you can do about it. It's just like, well, you can't block me.

And we like when there's answers built into the gameplay. Next up is Trample. Trample is kind of invasion for large creatures. Kind of what it says is, well, you can block me, but you can't block all of me. It's particularly important for green. Green doesn't have flying, but green does have bigger creatures on average than other players. So Trample is a very important green, secondary, and red. Haste is another thing.

The nice thing about Haste is when people are sort of doing the math on what they can and can't block haste lets you surprise them and flash to some extent also lets you surprise them I can flash some things at the end of the turn after they've already attacked and they don't know to take that into account

indestructible sometimes in the sense that I feel less worried about attacking with it so indestructible can make the sense that I feel less worried about attacking with it so indestructible can make me feel empowered to attack because I usually won't lose the creature Vigilant sometimes lets me attack

if I'm worried about being open for blocking it lets me attack and still have that ability to be open and then sometimes there's set specific keywords. You know, we have skulk or something that is part of the set. And so anyway, you want to make sure that every color has some amount of evasion. There's a mechanical color pie article that you can go look up that talks about each of these things.

I can run through real quick. So flying, primary white, blue. Secondary black, red. Tertiary in green. First strike and double strike, primary in white and red. Secondary in black. Usually on knights. Death touch is primary in black and green.

Menace is primary in black. Secondary in red. Shows up a little bit in some other colors. Trample is primary green, secondary red. Haste is primary red, secondary green and black. Indestructible is primary white and green. Vigilance is primary white, secondary green, and secondary blue. And then set specific depends on the set.

Next up, things you need. Threats and answers. So you want to make sure at every rarity that there are means by which to deal with all the different card types. Creatures is the most important. And every color has means to deal with creatures. Some, like green, are a little bit more restrictive where it has like fight spells and things.

So you have to use your creatures to deal with their creatures. But there are means to deal with creatures. And so you want to make sure that those threats are put accordingly. Artifacts destruction is primary in green and white, secondary in red. Enchantment destruction is primary in white and green, secondary in black.

Creature destruction is primary in black and red, although green and white do have answers. And blue has its own answers, although blue doesn't do Destruction. It can steal and counter and stuff. And then for lands, red is primary, black and green are secondary.

We don't do a lot of land Destruction. And then Planeswalkers is primary in black, but red damage is a good way to deal with Planeswalkers, so red is secondary. Anyway, you want to make sure that you have answers for your threats. Normally, our answers are one for one, meaning I spend a whole card to deal with your whole threat. Sort of something like a Shatter or a naturalize or something in which I'm using my whole spell to destroy your whole spell. Normally the two for ones, meaning I'm up a card and I destroy your card.

So creatures with enter the battlefield effects or a spell that destroys more than one thing or a spell that's repeatable to destroy something. Those tend to be an uncommon or higher. Common are usually, and common are a little bit more expensive they're usually priced for limited so like a creature kill spell tends to be more 3, 4, 5 mana and less like 2 mana

uncommon can make cards priced for constructed as can rare and mythic rare so those can get a little bit cheaper usually uncommon can do mass removal at a small amount, like doing one or two damage to everything, but anything larger than that, like Wrath of God or, you know, minus N minus N to everything that's above minus two minus two tends to be at rare Mythic Rare. Board Sweepers usually

are at rare, although there's some splashy ones that sometimes are mythic rare. The key to this is you want to make sure that to whatever, like, you want to make exciting rares and mythic rares that do big, powerful things, what we call bombs. You want those bombs, but you want to make sure that there are answers in your colors to deal with those bombs. It's not fun if my opponent plays something, and I have no hope of ever drawing anything that can help me. So you want to make sure that there are direct answers for those bombs. It's not fun if my opponent plays something and I have no hope of ever drawing anything that can help me. So you want to make sure that there are direct answers for those things.

So one of the things I would do is take a look at your rare and mythic rare and make sure at, ideally a common, sometimes an uncommon, but ideally a common, that there's some answer. That if I play this card, what can my opponent draw that might be able to deal with it? And ideally, you want those answers in as many colors as

possible that have answers to that kind of thing. But anyway, you want to make sure when you're building it, you want to think about your threats and think about your answers. Next, what I call crossover cards. Usually these are generic. Most commonly artifacts. Sometimes we are generic, most commonly artifacts. Sometimes we make generic spells that are colorless spells that, like in Shrixhaven, had color spells representing first-year students and first-year lessons. The reason for crossover spells is to make sure that people have enough cards for their deck.

So sometimes we'll put creatures that are just generic. So, like, if I need to fill out my deck, here's some colorless creatures that maybe aren't the best thing. Maybe they're the last thing up on my deck, but they're something I can run my deck. We also do mana fixing and land fetching there. Not as efficient. None of these are as efficient as the colors that are good at them. So an artifact creature, usually a generic artifact creature, usually is something that is not something that is not as good as you would get in, you know, green or white that are the best of creatures. But it could be something that, like, a blue deck would be happy to play.

Also, sometimes we do equipment, especially at low rarities. And there are set themes. Oh, you know, we're doing a set about toxic. Well, maybe we want a way to get Toxic that's on a colorless creature. We're doing, you know, whatever your set theme is, it's nice to have a few things show up in colorless as it just increases the chance. Like when you're doing your Asfan numbers,

like, oh, I want to make sure this deck archetype works. I want to make sure that people have access to this thing. When you make it colorless, you know, or sorry, generic mana, when you make it something that any deck can play, every deck gets to count that for Asfan purposes, and it just raises your Asfan. So it's one of the ways in which, if I'm trying to make certain themes work, generic mana stuff is very important as a way to guarantee, especially when you have a theme that's crossing over multiple colors.

Multiple archetypes. Like, let's say I have a theme that's showing up in three or four colors. Sometimes I want to do the colorless things, the generic things, generic cost of things, to make sure that all the decks have some extra access. So there's this extra bonus thing they can get if they need. Okay, next up, draft archetypes. If this is the first time you're building a set, the default for draft archetypes is the 10 two-color pairs.

That's a great place to start. It's what most of our sets do. So if you're making your first set, that's where I would begin. We do make sets with three-color archetypes, with one-color archetypes. We do that, but it's hard. And so the majority of our sets do two-color, so that's where I would start. The idea is for each of the two-color pairs, you want to have some theme that plays through. The number one place we look for themes are mechanics.

Usually the first thing we do is we figure out, oh, what can we do with our mechanics? The way I tend to think of it is, for our ten archetypes, usually you want two of them to be novel. Like, wow, I haven't seen this before. This is pretty cool. You want four of them to be what I call things people recognize but with a little twist. Meaning, okay, I'm doing something and I can lean into something that's normal, but a little bit different. Oh, black and red's going to do a sacrifice deck, which is something black and red normally do, but there's some element of the design that, oh, I have a mechanic that sacrifices things, or something in which I'm playing in some space that I don't normally get to do.

And then four of the archetypes are probably meat and potatoes, what you normally do. They'll be flavored by the fact that there's new cards and there's things to this set. But one of the things, one of the pressures I know from first-time deck builders is they want to just change everything. Ooh, wouldn't it be cool if everything's all different? And the answer is part of what makes Magic magic is there's some amount of familiarity. When you sit down to play, you don't want everything changed. We can change everything.

Magic mechanics would allow us to just radically change everything, but it would be very disconcerting, and in some ways it wouldn't feel like magic. You want people to be able to take the things they already know and be able to apply some of them. It's fine that things change it's fine that in this set there's this theme or you have to care about this thing you know it's great that sets have some amount of change to them but the reality is we change 10 to 20 percent like 80 percent of every set is basically the same from set to set i mean what's the same varies. Meaning, you know, usually there's a giant growth.

Maybe the giant growth plays a little bit into the set theme. Maybe it doesn't, you know. But every set has a giant growth that we can comment. So there's a certain amount of familiarity there. So a lot of making magic sets is making sure that people recognize a lot of the core and what they're doing. So when you're making draft archetypes, what it means is, hey, you can change things up some. You can do some things we don't normally do. You can tweak things in a way we don't normally tweak them. But you want to be careful how much you're doing

that. Anyway, for each of the archetypes, figure out what your archetype is, and then you want to look at your pairs and make sure that in common, you have some spells that allow you to play that archetype. Now, and this is a little advanced deck building, ideally, you don't want any card to only be for one archetype. Normally, what you are at common, at least. Normally, at common, what you want is every card has at least value in two different archetypes. Sometimes three, sometimes four. Normally with one color, you've up to four archetypes if there's two color pairs. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't, a card does not need to be relevant for all four

archetypes. Every once in a while it is. There's certain basic effects like, you know, a kill spell. You know, if you make a murder or something, most black decks will consider playing that. But normally what you want to think about is if you're making something that's more niche, make sure that it's niche for multiple decks. The reason you don't want it to be for just one deck in common is if only one

archetype wants to play it, that person will always pick it up, they always have it, and it makes their games play out too similarly. And it also allows them to pick it up late because no one else is prioritizing it, and it can make that one archetype a little stronger than it's supposed to be. Okay, finally, oh, sorry, when you're talking about archetypes, I forgot, there's a few things you want to think about.

What mechanics are you relying on? So you do want to divvy up your mechanics. And depending on what archetypes you use, what mechanics, that will determine what colors mechanics either are in or are prioritized in. Sometimes, for example, we want to make this the black-red archetype. So that a mechanic maybe just appears in red and black. Sometimes it can appear in more. How big mechanics are depends on what you're doing. Sometimes a mechanic maybe just appears in red and black. Sometimes it can appear in more. How big a mechanic, that depends on what you're doing. Sometimes a mechanic has enough going on,

you might want multiple archetypes. For example, if you put it in three colors, you get three different archetypes with it, right? If it's in white, blue, and black, you get white, blue, blue, black, and white, black. Okay, next, what is your archetype's route to victory? How are they going to win? You know, so you want to make sure you understand that.

And then make sure that you build into common and uncommon those things to make sure that it's going to victory. How are they going to win? You know, so you want to make sure you understand that and make sure that you build into common and uncommon those things to make sure that it's going to win. You want to know the speed. We normally think of them as fast, medium, and slow. Our general rule of thumb is you want three of each. Three fast, three medium, three slow. And then depending on what you're building,

your tenth one is a fourth of one of those three things. If you're making a faster environment, maybe it's fast. If you're making a faster environment, maybe it's fast. If you're making a slower environment, maybe it's slow. What is fast and what is slow and what is medium can vary a little bit from set to set. If your set's a little more aggro, maybe slow is not the same defined as if it's a slower environment.

But what that means is you want to make sure that there's a mix. Also, as a general rule of thumb, you want to make sure that any one color isn't all the same. You don't want all the white to be fast, right? You want to make sure that some of the white are a bit slower. So you want to mix it up and you want to mix it up within colors. Finally, you want to understand sort of what the default is of each of the archetypes. Make sure as you're building that you know, well, what does this normally do?

Well, red-white is normally an agro color. It's not that you have to make it an agro color, but you want to understand what the defaults are. Because some number of times, I would say at least four, you want to be really squarely in the default. Four of them can drift a little bit, you know, default plus something. And the two of them can be very experimental. But you want to sort of be grounded and understand what those defaults are. The final thing you want to think about is what we call sideboard cards. In a lot of formats, limited included, you play best of three.

So you can add in cards between. And you can add in cards that help you deal with what your opponent's up to. So we used to put sideboard cards at common. We tend to not put them at common as much anymore. We're more likely to put them at uncommon. If we do that at common, the more common way we make sideboard cards now is we make a modal, meaning, oh, it does a bunch of different things. You'll notice, for example, often these days we'll have a naturalized with a third mode. Oh, you can destroy an artifact or an enchantment or do this third thing. Destroy a flyer or get a car out of a graveyard. Usually the third thing plays into the theme of the set. Like, oh, what's a useful

tool that you might need in the set? So either we put the cyborg cards at common or we put enough modes on them or enough options on them that you might need in the set. So either we put the sideboard cards at common or we put enough modes on them or enough options on them that you can run the main deck and not have them be dead cards. But you want to think about that and think about what are your themes of your set and make sure there are release valves to those themes. Make sure that there are, if, oh, my opponent is doing thing X, I have an answer to that.

And earlier I talked about threats and answers. You want some generic answers that can just be main decked. You also can make a few more sideboarded answers where this is really effective against certain things, not all things, but if you run into those certain things, yeah, maybe you want to be able to put this in your deck.

So you do want to think about sideboarded cards. Anyway, guys, we've got a little extra content today. So near my house is an elementary school. And so if I leave at a certain time, I get stuck in traffic at elementary school. That's what you guys saw. If you want to say, how does primary education help my magic knowledge, that is how. But anyway, I am finally at work. I hope today gave you a little more deep dive

into sort of how we structure things and the different tools. Like I said, there's a nuts and bolts article on this very topic that if you want to go back and see all the things I said, it's all written down. I go into a little more detail for some of the reasoning here, but all the things is written down

there. But anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast, but I am now at work. So all that this means, it means the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.