Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1024: March of the Machine Design

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

In this podcast, I tell the design story of March of the Machine.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's Penn Center. Drive to work. Okay, so today, two things. One, I'm going to tell you the story of March of the Machine. And two, I have a special guest who's not actually going to talk, but author Gavin Edwards is following me around today. So at some point in the future, hopefully there will be a book coming out, and I'll blow magic. But he's following me around today, so he's literally in the car. So if you hear him laughing or talking, that is Gavin. Hello. Okay, so let's tell the story of March of the Machine.

Okay, so it all begins, so we did War of the Spark, right? War of the Spark was, it was the ending of a story. We were talking about the Polis Arc, and there was a big conclusion, what I dubbed an event set. It was a set that was all about top-down of the story. We were telling the story, the finale of the Bolas Ark. And if you remember, War of the Spark was almost every planeswalker that ever existed all came to Ravnica to have a giant war. And I talked about how that was just crazy. Every planeswalker I only get like two to three planeswalkers.

So I felt like Doug Byer, who is in charge of the creative stuff, Doug and Jenna and the whole creative team, I thought they were trying to one-up it. You know, a whole bunch of planeswalkers? That's nothing. How about

the Phyrexians attack every plane of the multiverse? Like, can we get a little bit bigger? And so originally I said, well, okay, yeah, they're attacking everything, but how many planes are we actually going to show? And they're like, all of them? Like, you know, so we went through, early on we talked about maybe we'll just show 10 and then we'll hint at others. And eventually what we realized was that the fun part of this was showing everywhere.

So coming out of exploratory, sort of the guiding vision I had for the set was, I wanted planes to be, to march with the machine, what planeswalkers had been to War of the Spark. That, you know, much like planeswalkers in War of the Spark was like, who's your favorite planeswalker? And you got to see all these planeswalkers. It was kind of that, but instead it's worlds, right? There's all these different planes. Magic has been to a lot of different places over the years.

And so here's a chance to see all your favorites from all different places. And so it was a very, I mean, I'll start by saying it was a really really daunting exercise of we're going to show something of a scope that we've never done before. We barely, barely, barely do sets that aren't just on

one world. And this was on basically every world we've ever been to. And by the way, we did talk about should we be on worlds we haven't been to? Should we tease future worlds? We ended up not doing that just because there was so much going on and there's so many worlds we already have done that we decided not to do that. But we did talk about it because we work ahead, obviously.

Okay, so the main thing of doing the Phyrexian War was two parts. One is I needed to show you the Phyrexians, right? We needed to show you, okay, you have to feel like it you the Phyrexians, right? We needed to show you, okay, like, you have to feel like it's a Phyrexian war. The Phyrexians aren't there. It's not a Phyrexian war. So you have to have the threat of the Phyrexians. But the challenge of that is the last set, Phyrexia all will be

one, was all Phyrexians or 80% Phyrexians. So we had just done a set all about the Phyrexians. So how do I show you the Phyrexians in a way that's exciting and dynamic and feels like a threat, but isn't just repeating the last set? How do I not just make Phyrexia a second time? The other part of it is the denizens of the multiverse, right? Like the most exciting, I mean, the Phyrexians are exciting. They're a big part

of the villain, but also we want to show the world coming out. We wanted to show all the worlds. You know, saving the day. We wanted to show you the worlds that you know and love fighting for their survival. And we wanted to show that as well. So the set had to set up both the Phyrexian threat and the denizens protecting the world. Now,

because we had just done Phyrexian All We Want, like 80% Phyrexian, I knew the Phyrexians didn't need to be as big a portion of the set. I needed enough of them to feel like a threat, but not so much that I couldn't show off all the planes. Like I said, the lens of this design is I wanted to see it through the planes.

So that meant that I wanted to show off as many things as I could from as many different places as I could. The other interesting thing was, could I show the Phyrexians through the lens of all the planes, right? If the set's all about all the worlds have to offer, all the multiverse has to offer, how do I do that through the Phyrexians? And so we came up with an idea really early on that we latched onto and we never left. The idea was, what if we show you iconic creatures from around the multiverse

and then they transform into the Phyrexian versions of them? Because the whole idea of Phyrexians, what makes Phyrexia scary is they're the horror trope that they take you over, that you become them. And so as they're invading the multiverse, the cool thing

about it is we wanted to show the Phyrexians Phyrexianizing famous things from across the multiverse. And the other thing was, we wanted to do something that we couldn't have done in Phyrexia All Will Be One. Well, double-faced cards were a great thing, because we didn't do those in Phyrexia All Will Be One. We could do them

in March of the Machine. And, I mean the transformation was great. I show you the creature as you know it, from the world you know it, and then we see it transform. And we can do that not just with normal creatures, we can do it with legendary creatures. And so it would carry a lot of weight. Like, when you saw things you loved becoming Phyrexian,

that really, like, shows the, it shows the danger of the Phyrexians. Oh, look, it's something I love from a world I love. Oh, no, it's becoming Phyrexian. Or here's a character that I really care about. It's becoming Phyrexian. That carries a lot of weight. And so early on, we decided to have double-faced cards. Now, once you have double-faced cards, you have double-faced cards.

So once you have the resource, it's a resource you have. And as you will see, like you use the resource you have. And as I already said, we were trying to be different from Frexia All-in-One. Double-faced cards were completely different. So we definitely leaned into that a bit. Okay. So first off we did transforming double-faced cards. The next thing we did is I I love the idea of we've done tokens in the past. Treasure, food, clues, and

we like the idea of you make a token and that token can become something. So with the Phyrexians, we're like, okay, what could the Phyrexians become? Like, what could the Phyrexians make? And the answer was, more Phyrexians. Like, what if we made something that allowed you to just like propagate more phyrexians that's kind of the big threat and the idea we loved was imagine having an artifact that itself isn't a creature but allows

you to spend mana to make it into a creature and the reason from a developmental that's so important sort of play design wise is if we give you a full flesh creature, we have to pay for that effect on the spell that makes it. If we give you something that you can later turn into a creature, we get, that's cheaper essentially, right? Because we're making you pay for it later, it allows us to do more of it and do it at a lower rate. And that's important. That's why most of our tokens, not all of them, but most of them have some amount of mana you put into them. There's a reason that food includes, you have to put mana into them. And so the other thing is we had double-faced cards. So we said, could we do a

double-faced token? And at first the rules manager said, well, the rules don't really support a double-faced token. And then I said, could it? And they're like, yeah, yeah, it could. Now, it's important to stress, I talk about the rules manager a lot. There are two types of rules. There are rules in which there are trouble for the rules. The rules like actively kind of work against it. And there are rules in which the rules don't support it,

but it's not because the rules are against it. It's just no one's ever bothered or written the rules to do it. This was that. It wasn't that it was hard to do. It was just the rules had never, like we rules are against it. It's just no one's ever bothered or written the rules to do it. This was that. It wasn't that it was hard to do. It was just the rules had never, like we'd never made it. So the rules didn't have a rule for it.

And so we had to add that rule. That got done in set design. But anyway, the idea we ended up with that we liked a lot was we wanted the idea of variable creatures, but we didn't want the token to work differently. Meaning we didn't want the cost to work differently. Meaning we didn't want the cost to turn into the creature to be different because the memory, like one of the advantages

of having a token where you make all the same token is that it's easier to manage mentally. And so what we came up with was a pretty clever solution. You make, we called it cocoon in design, but it's called incubate in the final product so when you make an incubate token on the first side it's an artifact it's not a creature and it says incubate n and being a number and then you put that many plus one plus one counters on it and then you always pay two no matter how many counters on it you pay two to turn it to flip it over and on the back side you know it is the back face is a zero zero artifact Phyrexian creature. And so however, how many counters on it, that's how big the creature is. So if I,

if I, if I incubate for two, then I'm making a two two. If I incubate for three, I'm making a three three and allowed us a lot to have a lot of variety. That's one of the things, by the way, that's really important when you're designing mechanics, is you want enough flexibility that you give the people downstream, set design, play design, enough flexibility to design the cards they need to make, but not so much that you're weighing people mentally, right? You want to make sure that whatever you're doing, people can easily process it. And so there's always a balance. And a big part, once again, I mean, I talk a lot about vision design. Our job in vision design is to make the, you know, I talk about the house metaphor. We're making the blueprints. Somebody else has to build the house. We have to think about the

people who build the house. We have to think about the people that are going to, you know, make the house all nice and neat. And we got to make sure that we're giving them tools so they can do that. And so like Incubate, we wanted to set it up so that they had some variety, but they also had something that they knew they could balance. So anyway, that's how Incubate ended up. The other thing where we made a double-faced technology for the Phyrexians was the Praetors. So when we were doing the Phyrexian arc, we wanted to slowly introduce them. So kind of the introduction of letting you know something's going on

was in Kaldheim, Vorinclex shows up. Now we didn't talk much about Vorinclex. Like really, he wasn't a major part of the story. He just showed up. And for the people that knew, for the Vorthorses out there, like when Vorinclex shows up on a world that's not new Phyrexia, because the whole, Phyrexians

can't travel across the multiverse. They can't planeswalk, and the portals have been shut down. So the fact that they were trapped in New Phyrexia was like the glaring weakness of the Phyrexians. They're really good at spreading themselves, but they were trapped. So when you see a Phyrexian for the first time, not

on New Phyrexia, if you knew anything, you knew that was a problem. But we slow rolled it. So what we did is Vorinclex showed up in Kaldheim, and then a year later in Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, Jinkotaxis shows up. Then Urbath shows up in New Compena. Then Shieldridge shows up in Dominar United.

And then finally in Phyrexia, we see Elish Norn. So we had shown you all five of the Praetors. And originally there was talk of maybe there just wouldn't be, like maybe that was how we saw the Praetors. But we're like, we're not going to do a giant Phyrexian war and not show you the Praetors. So we knew we wanted to do a cycle of Praetors. And we wanted to do something exciting.

The first cycle that was originally in New Phyrexia was very popular. The new cycle we did was very popular. So we knew there was a high bar. But since we had double-faced cards, we kind of knew, you know, we could do something with prayers we've never done before. So what happened was, in vision design, we actually turned over, we brainstormed like 20 ideas.

I think we picked our top five, and I put it in the document for the handover meaning we said to them we think you should do phyrexians we want a cycle of phyrexians we believe they probably should use double states car technology uh but we're giving you a bunch of ideas figure out what you're doing the set you know like the it's just a cycle so figure out the other elements of the set and then once you get to it here's different options of how you can do it. One of the ideas we gave them was a praetor on the front and it turns into a saga on the back.

We thought that was pretty cool. And the idea that they sort of, there's a tale that they tell. Mostly set design chose that one. The one change they made was in our version, you played the creature and it turned into the saga, and then when the saga went away, it was gone forever. You were done.

And playtesting showed them that people felt sort of sad, so they made it so when the saga's done, it just goes back to being the Phyrexian again. So it sort of never goes away, just back and forth between being the Praetor and being the saga. And they turned out really well.

I mean, Sagas are a fan favorite. Praetors are a fan favorite. Fan favorite plus fan favorite usually means the audience is going to like it. Okay, so that is the Phyrexians. We had the Transformer Double-Faced cards, the Incubate cards, the Praetors. That was mostly the Phyrexian. And there still is a lot of one-of Phyrexians. There's a lot of cards in which we took something you knew and Phyrexianized it.

Not everything was transforming. So there are some Phyrexian things of things you recognize that are already Phyrexianized. Just because we can only make so many transforming cards. So there are a bunch of Phyrexians that are just single-faced Phyrexians. But once again, the lens of the multiverse is what we were looking for. So the Phyrexians usually aren't generically Phyrexians. But once again, the lens of the multiverse is what we were looking for. So the Phyrexians usually aren't generically Phyrexian. They are Phyrexianized versions of things you'll recognize from around the multiverse. Things that you probably haven't seen yet. You know, we've done a

bunch of Phyrexianizing things, especially on Mirrodin. So we wanted to show you things you haven't seen yet. And it also plays up, oh, they're Phyrexianizing the entire multiverse. Okay, that was just the Phyrexians. Now we have to show you the denizens of the world gathering together, right? So we did a couple things there. One is we said, is there any mechanic that exists from the past that we think does a really good job of conveying teamwork, you know, of conveying people working together. And we made a long list and then we voted on which one we thought was the best choice. And the plan was we'd play mechanic one, then we'd play mechanic two, then we'd play mechanic

three. So the first thing we chose, the one that we chose, that everybody voted up in vision design, was Convoke. So Convoke was a mechanic made by Richard Garfield, originally for the Boros in original Ravnica. I changed it to Selesnya just because it felt more Selesnyan than Borosian. But anyway, it went there. It was very popular. We brought it back in, it was in Future Sight. We brought it back in one of the core sets. It was in Modern Horizons. Anyway, it's a really fun mechanic.

We know people like it. We felt it does a good job. So Convoke, for those who don't know it, is spells that can be cheaper because you can tap creatures to basically add mana of that color to pay for that spell. And so it allows you to use your creatures to make your spells cheaper. Now those spells could be other creatures, they could be artifacts,

enchantments, they could be instant sorceries, they could be whatever you need it to be. But the idea was we really like the idea of things coming together. So the funny thing is we had our first playtest with Convoke and we loved it so much we didn't even try any other mechanic for like, this is so good, what are we doing? We got it. So Convoke was there early on. What they did in set design was they decided to push it in some colors that

hadn't had Convoke before. So Blue had never had Convoke, although it had one spell that granted Convoke to your artifacts. And then I think Red had two Convoke spells. But originally Convoke had been the Celestia, so it had been white and green. In fact, Convoke got brought back when we went back to Ravnica for the third time.

So mostly Convoke's been in white green. When we put it in the core set, we did a bunch in black. So blue and red are where we hadn't done it. So we decided since we're bringing it back, hey, let's do some stuff with it we haven't done before. So the blue red draft archetype is Convoke. So

we had to add some extra token makers and stuff. But anyway, when you draft the set, blue and red have is Convoke. So we had to add some extra token makers and stuff. But anyway, when you draft this app, blue and red have a Convoke theme. So it shows up, I think, in all the colors, but much, much heavier in blue and red. Okay. We also wanted to do something new. So we did something old, something new.

And the mechanic, what did we call it? We called it Boost in Design. It's called Backup in the actual product. Ari Me, the winner of the Third Great call it? We called it boost in design. It's called backup in the actual product. Ari Nee, the winner of the Third Grade Designer Search, actually made it. So the idea of boost is, it says boost N, N being a number. So when you enter the battlefield, you can choose to put N plus one plus one counters on target creature. It could be the creature with boost. It could be another creature.

on target creature. It could be the creature with boost. It could be another creature. And whatever creature you put the plus and plus counters on, if it's not the creature with boost, they get any ability that's on the boost creature that's listed below it. And so the idea is you're sort of sharing your abilities with other creatures. This was another thing we tried. We tried a whole bunch of different mechanics. We tried this one early and we really liked it. It played well. The one thing they had to do in set design is in the original design what we did was it copied everything on the card and what we found was with things that could graph abilities and cloning that it started doing weird things that could break. So we had to change it. So now it lists the things it copies and you can't kind of add to that. Our general rule is we tend to make cards to allow shenanigans

early on. And then if shenanigans causes problems, we'll change it to the non-shenanigan version. This is an example of that. We tried the shenanigan version. The shenanigans actually cause problems. So we change it to the non-shenanigan version. But anyway, it played out really nice, and it's another mechanic we put in the set. The third thing we did to show the teamwork up, so one of the things that we knew was important is we wanted to show a lot of characters. Like, it takes place in the entire multiverse. Normally when we do a set, the only characters we have access to are planeswalkers or characters native to that world.

But now we're doing the entire multiverse. We have access to all the characters. Well, that's a lot of characters. Plus, we wanted to show that they were teaming up. So one of the things we realized is every once in a while, we'll make a legendary creature where there's more than one creature on it. Like Chandra's parents were on a card. Or Geese and Gaurav were on a card. Helena and Helena were on a card. So, occasionally we do a legendary creature where there are multiple people

on the same card. We're like, oh, can we use that technology to show teamwork? Normally when we do it, they're married or they're people that have some association with each other. They're people that care about each other. Or like Ethan Garoff on Brother Shift. They like to pick on each other.

I think down deep they care about each other. But anyway, so we thought it'd be neat to show characters that might not cooperate having to cooperate. That how do we show things have gotten desperate? Well, here are two people that would never ever cooperate cooperating. Why?

Because there's a greater evil. That there's something so big that it's more important than any personal grudges they have between them. Now, originally, the plan was that 11 creatures from different worlds join up together. And so we thought it'd be very fun to take, oh, a famous cyclops from this world and a famous cyclops from that world. The creative team came and said, well, that's not how this works. The Phyrexians are going through, you know, the Realm Breaker or whatever to visit each individual. So it's each world against the Phyrexians.

The worlds aren't sharing. Like, if you're on one world, you're on that world. So we ended up making it so all the team-up cards are people from the same plane. But even then, there are definitely characters that would never normally work together. So we had a lot of fun. I think they ended up making, in the main set, there are 10 two-color rares, one of each two-color pair. And then I think there are five wedge cards, I believe, at Mythic Rare. And then I think the Commander decks also. It was so much I think the Commander Decks also.

It was so much fun, the Commander Decks did more of it because it's lots of fun. But anyway, it showed teamwork. It let us double the number of creatures we showed you. And it was splashy. It was something that definitely, even though we've done them a little tiny bit in the past, this really sort of did it in a way that was very loud.

Okay. Oh, wait, there's one more thing we did. Because there were so many characters we wanted to do, we actually came, there's one more thing we did. Because there were so many characters we wanted to do, we actually came up with even one more way to show more cool characters, which was a bonus sheet. So the first time we did a bonus sheet was in Time Spiral, when we were showing you the Paths of Magic. And this is kind of doing something similar, which is we're showing you all these people from across the multiverse fighting to save their personal world.

And so we thought it would be neat to do a bonus sheet of all legendary creatures. So the rules were they had to all be living, meaning they had to be actively fighting in this war. So they couldn't be someone that died. They couldn't be someone that from too long ago they wouldn't still be alive. But we managed to pick a bunch of characters and just made made a bonus sheet so when you're fighting this war in your packs like guest stars show up from all across magic's history uh that they can fight along with you so that was another way just to show you like the breadth of what's going on um

okay now finally i left the most exciting thing for last. So one of the things that I knew very early on is I said I wanted the planes to be our lens. Well, I had this idea that I wanted, much like when we did planeswalkers in War of the Spark, we got to make a lot of planeswalker cards. So I really wanted to make plane cards, and I didn't know quite what that meant. So there is a product where we make a product where you planeswalk and you go from plane to plane, but the giant plane cards actually represent not the entirety of the plane, but places on the plane. So you might travel to, you know, Jund, for example, on Alara. They're individual places, but what I wanted was a card

that represented the totality. It wasn't just a piece of Alara, it was all of Alara. There are individual places, but what I wanted was a card that represented the totality. It wasn't just a piece of Alara, it was all of Alara. It was all of Innistrad. It was all of Ravnica. It was all of Amonkhet. That it was all the planes. I really wanted, much like when you opened up a War of the Spark booster, every booster had a

planeswalker. Well, I liked the idea that every Martian machine had a plane in it, that you got to see a plane. And so we set out to make a plane card. Now, I'll be honest, I didn't know whether it'd be a brand new card type, whether it'd be a new subtype. I didn't know quite what it would be. And I did know that planes as a large card type existed. We used the word plane. We knew at some point we'd have to deal with that. We ended up dealing with it actually in a different way, but we were aware that

the larger planes existed. So we tried a lot of things. We tried stuff where you had a separate deck, a la like contraptions. We tried ones where they were kind of enchantment-y and you had a little meeple that represented you and you moved it from plane

to plane and whatever plane you're on did something. We tried a version where you played a bunch and they went in a stack. Like, when you played them, you put them in a stack and then you changed what the top of the stack was. They were face-off. You changed what the top of the stack was, and that would influence things. So the version

we ended up handing off to set design were lands that on the front tapped they came, the entrance to the battlefield tapped they tapped for one color mana a few of them tapped for two colors of mana and then you had to pay a cost to transform it and then

when you transformed it there was an effect that happened when you transformed it and then on the back it had a plane as a subtype on the back and then it represented that world and then the front would be like like portal to whatever the portal to Innistrad and the back would be Innistrad and there would be land subtype plane and then it would have an ability that was evocative of the plane so it's essentially it had

a like an ECB but when you transformed it, it would do something. And then it had a static or triggered or activated ability that was endemic of the plane. So that's what we turned over. So what ended up happening was, while there were some cool things about that, oh, the other thing that it did, I should mention this, is your opponent could

attack it. The way they got rid of it is it had a toughness. So Richard Garfield made something called Structures many years ago when we were making original Ravnica. Actually, the same time he made Convoke, interestingly enough. We ended up not using it. They were representing buildings. What it was was a new card type where you had to attack

it to get rid of it. We kind of used an element of that when we made Planeswalkers. And so the idea was, let's use that Structures thing here so you want to attack it to get rid of it that was what we handed over um Dave and the set design team decided that it was problematic using lands really limited how strong the cards could be it required you using land destruction and

constructed as an answer which is dangerous and it just it had a lot of like it was a meeting concept but it just had enough problems that they said, okay, let's figure out how to do this. So they did a whole bunch of brainstorming. The things that they wanted partly carried over some of my themes that were important to me. They wanted one card per plane. So each plane would get one card and only one card, and the card would represent the totality of the plane. Second, we wanted it to be something exciting and novel. It didn't necessarily have to be a new card type that was on the table.

It could be a new subtype or something. And so the idea they came up with is they really liked the idea that it could be a tact. And so instead of you having it and defending it against your opponent, you put it on your opponent's side, and then in order to get your reward, you had to attack it. And that had a really fun play pattern.

And then they realized, because we had double-faced technology, the reward could be the card on the back. So the idea is, you get the battle, and then you put it on your opponent's side, or, you know, multiplayer, you choose your opponent, and then, if you attack it and do enough damage to it,

and it works a lot like Planeswalkers, in that it has, in fact, I don't even remember what it's called, defense, I think, defense counters. Every time you hit it, you remove that many defense counters. When there's no defense counters left, it returns to your control, or, I don't, actually, I don't even know technically it's under your control, under your opponent, but your opponent has it. I don't know that. But it flips over and then you have it. And the backside, what happens is you exile it and

cast it. So it can be any permanent, it could be a spell. And what it allowed us to do is made the backside represent something endemic to the world that also could be part of the story. Like, what was the thing that saved this world? We could show you that. And so they worked with a creative team. So the front represented the invasion. So we always called it the invasion of plain name. So invasion of Shadowmoor.

Invasion of, maybe it's Lorwyn Shadowmoor. Invasion of Innistrad. Invasion of Kaladesh. We would show you that it's an invasion on the front. And then it represents... These are battles, subtype siege. What that means, by the way, real quickly, is a

siege is a thing that makes it go to your opponent's side, and that you have to attack it on your opponent's side. In the future, we couldn't make battles that have that same quality, where they come with so much defense, and then your opponent can destroy them by attacking them, the siege part is what gives it to the opponent. The battle

part doesn't inherently have to do that. So if we make future battles, we don't necessarily have to make future sieges. We could. Sieges are cool. But we made something a bit bigger, because we're making a new card type. So we made something that had multiple uses. Not all of the uses have to be used now, because we have a lot more magic to make. So

the siege is the part that does that. Anyway, the front is a battle. I mean, the front represents the invasion. And then the back side represents something that's core to the world that if the story cares, not every single world shows up in the story in the large amount. So, the ones in which there was a character or a spell or something that showed up and played a vital role, they

try to make that the thing you want when you want it. They did a lot of playing with these. We do not make a new card type lightly. It is not something we do. In fact, the only new card type we've really made is Planeswalkers. I mean, there's quirky things like do. In fact, the only new card type we've really made is Planeswalkers. I mean, there's quirky things like mana.

Early on with the rules, we messed around with a few things. But as far as really making a brand new card type, Planeswalkers and now Battles are really it. We don't do that lightly. But we thought we had made something that really was cool, was new, had future use, which is important in making a new car type, and more than anything else, really communicated what is going on here. There is a war stretching us across the multiverse. Well, what if we show you that on every plane? So the cool thing we did was we wrote down, so what we did is we made a list, we made a list of planes. There were three

categories. Category number one is we absolutely positively have to go there. Like, usually there's been a set there. It's something that people know well. In order to get in the first category, you had to have what's called a style guide, meaning you were important enough that we bothered to, you know, make a whole style guide about you. That allows us to send stuff to artists. So the first category were things that had style guides and mostly were things that were, look, we've been there enough that people really know them. The second grouping were things people are familiar with that aren't quite, don't reach the level of the first one, but are important. And then the third one was like everything else, like every time we've ever mentioned something ever. So the third list was

really long. We've mentioned, in passing, we've mentioned a lot of planes. So what ended up happening is we did all the planes in the first category, we did all the planes in the second category, and then we did some planes in the third category. Not all of them because there's infinite planes in the third category. But one of the fun things is if you've been playing Magic for any length of time, every plane that you probably could name, barring if you're a super vorthos. If you're a super vorthos, yes, you can name planes that aren't there. But if you've been playing Magic and have a general sense of what the planes are,

look, we hit those planes. And I guarantee some of the invasions are on planes that unless you're a super vorthos, you do not know because they were meant in passing in a novel or the comics or something. But anyway, I think that the battles do a really good job of not representing necessarily any one side as much as representing the conflict itself.

And I thought that was really important. Not only does March on the Sheen want to tell you... We want to tell you the story of what's going on, but we also want to represent the event as a whole. Like I said, I call it an event set. Like, we're trying to represent something grandiose, giant in scope, and I'm really happy with how the battles

and the whole set as a whole carry that off. Like, the first time I sort of said we have to do this, I was a little taken aback, I'll be honest. The scope of this set is so big, it was a little bit off putting it first. But look, I've been doing this a long time. I get excited by challenges. Like when more of the spark happened and I'm like, I don't know how to do this, we figured out a way to do it. I knew we were going to figure out a way to do it here. And so, and we did. So I'm really, really proud proud of this set there's a lot of fun

moving pieces and if you like Easter eggs if you're somebody who pays attention to magic and this

this is as Easter egg as a magic set gets we are referencing so many things and so many worlds and so many characters in fact

this was in some ways normally when you do Easter eggs, you're kind of limited, right? Because you can only talk about the thing you're talking about. Well, nothing was off limits.

The scope of the set was everything we've ever done. So anyway, I don't think you need to, for the Vorthorses out there, there's lots of Easter eggs and lots of fun things to discover. For the people that might not know Magic's Pass as much, you don't need to.

Like, you will get the Thread of the Phyrexians by seeing the cards in this set the gameplay is fun Dave and his team did an amazing job building just an awesome set, it's super fun so anyway, I hope you guys enjoy it it was a lot of fun to design

I think you guys will find it a lot of fun to play but anyway, that is the story of the design of Martian Machines. But anyway, guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that 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 Gavin, thanks for being here today.

Thank you. And everybody else, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.