Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1029: March of the Machine Commander Decks with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

I sit down with the lead designer of the March of the Machine Commander decks to talk about their design.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I have Ethan Fleischer with me. We're going to talk all about March of the Machine Commander Decks. Hey, Ethan. Hi, Mark. How's it going? Going well. So you made some Commander Decks. Yeah, that's right. For March of the Machines, this was our big event set, and we made a big Commander product. Kind of the biggest Commander product ever, when you think about it, unless you count those booster products like Commander Legends. Okay, well, let's talk about, like, where did it start?

When someone came to you and said, hey, Ethan, I want you to make Commander decks, where did it start? Well, so I knew that the big story moment here was FireX did invade the multiverse, that they were going to invade lots of different planes. And my mind immediately went to Plane Chase, which is a game variant that we came out with back in 2009 that had these oversized cards representing different important locations in Magic's multiverse. that had these oversized cards representing different important locations in Magic's Multiverse. And players have been using those planes to spice up games of Commander ever since Commander was a format. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be really cool to come up with some new plane cards,

which I've really wanted to do for years now and have been sort of looking for the right opportunity to to do that and uh combine that with commander package the uh the planes with the commander decks and give people this experience that we already know people enjoy because they're doing it out in the wild now what what did it mean to add plane chase? There's some interesting ramifications of having to do this. Right. So there were a lot of minor obstacles, I'd say. Obviously, we have to design these new cards. They have to be illustrated.

The illustrations normally wouldn't be a big problem. But because we only have so many art directors and so many artists to go around, it was a bit of a squeeze to get all those extra art pieces into this product. So we found that we had to have half of the planes be reprints and half of them could be new cards. So we found our favorite planes that were the most fun and used those as our reprints and then designed new cards for the other 15 or 25 planes. The other thing of course was packaging right? These are bigger than normal magic cards. There was some

concern oh are we gonna have to design an entire new package just for this product that sounds like kind of a hassle but luckily we found that the existing um like die line box design for the universes beyond commander decks was just fine and a great size for uh fitting these plane cards in there so that was very lucky so how did you decide what planes what were the new planes how did you decide that oh well so i'm a i'm a big vorthos and i've done lots of reading of old magic novels and i i try to keep up to date on the story. So I was excited to... And also, you know, I've been working on Magic basically since just before the last Plane Chase product came out.

So I knew that the top priority was to get the planes that we had invented since the last Plane Chase product, especially the big important ones that were like the settings of entire sets or even block. So places like Theros and Tarkir needed to get in there. So we made a list of all those. We made a list of planes that had been just dealt with in sort of smaller scale, in sort of smaller scale, places like various planeswalkers' home planes, for example, like Teo Verrata's home plane is a plane here, things like that. And then, of course, there were some deep cut planes that appeared in various places

that hadn't gotten plane cards in the first two plane chase products. So I dug into those and found some that had appealing angles and got those. And then the last category were planes that had gone through a significant world-building refresh. So like Dominaria and Kamigawa are good examples of those, where these existed before, they had plane cards before, but we've done a significant amount of world building work since 2012, the last plane chase product. And I kind of want to show off some of that world building work on these cards. There's a fourth category that you forgot. There's a fourth category that I forgot. Well, I forgot what it was. What was it?

Where sometimes we had shown a lot of things, but we had left something out because we didn't get to everything. Right. Alara being a perfect example. We did four of the five showers of Alara. That's right. The last one, the last category

was Cycle Completion for the Shards of Alara, which yes, we've done four of them, and saved the fifth and most difficult one for last. Okay, so let's talk about the making of these.

Was it always five? Was it five from the very beginning? Yeah, it was always going to be five decks. And then the number of new planes versus reprinted planes was basically determined by our art budget, which, as I said, is much more about bandwidth than it is about cash flow or whatever. But yeah, we did the math and it was like, okay, we need about five new planes per deck

and five decks. Okay, so you can pick any deck you like. Let's talk about the themes of the decks. All right. Let's start with the Phyrexian deck. So it's a white-black deck that has Phyrexians and artifact creatures in it, commanded by a completed Brimaaz, the former king of Oreskos from Theros. This one was something we knew fans would want to be able to build around. We had, you know, relatively recently updated the Oracle

text of a whole bunch of old Magic cards to include the Phyrexian creature type, and then we'd come out with Phyrexia All Will Be One, which had tons of new Phyrexians in it, and then for March of the Machine, there was support for Phyrexian themed decks, cards that rewarded you for filling your deck with Phyrexians. And we knew that the Commander product should get in on some of that action and design the coolest Phyrexian commanders we could think of, and also reprint a bunch of those old Phyrexian creatures that had never been printed with the Phyrexian creature type on them. Also, white-black was the theme. The archetype, the white-black archetype in Draft

was the Phyrexian Matters archetype. So that's, I believe most of the cards were in white and black, right? That's why it's a white-black deck. Yeah, that's why we chose white-black for our deck also, so that you could take cards from the booster product and incorporate them into your commander deck as you wanted to upgrade your your pre-constructed deck okay so what does the

phyrexian deck do how does it win how do you win with the phyrexian deck so it is about casting big phyrexian spells or big artifact creature spells and uh those will allow you to incubate because your commander incubates x where x is the mana value of that spell that you cast so incubate creates these uh double-faced artifact tokens that you can pay to to transform into a creature that is whatever number power toughness equal to the incubate value. And then a lot of the, a lot of the Pyrexians that are powerful have some kind of sacrifice ability we noticed.

So we gave, we put a little extra reward there for players who wanted to sacrifice things. Okay. What's next? What's the next deck? Let's talk about the Knight deck. Knights are another one of the limited themes. They're a white-blue

theme. And thematically, a lot of the knights are from Jalthir, which is Teferi's homeland. So we had done a knight pre-constructed deck. It was actually a brawl deck back when we were making brawl decks, and that was in Mardu colors. So we knew we wanted to make this one in different colors. We knew it wanted to be white and blue and really the the main night color is white and sort of the second most popular night color is probably black. So we decided that Esper was the right color combination for this deck in order to sort of encompass what the main set was doing in Limited,

but also give it an additional color to give it access to some of those powerful Knight rewards. This one was pretty tricky to execute on, actually. Knights tend to be pretty small and pretty much on the ground, much on the ground and uh so it was it was challenging to give the the knights enough uh strength to win games in the end we resorted to a mechanic that is uh pretty controversial which is the eminence mechanic that operates from the command zone or the graveyard or sorry command zone or the battlefield uh for the face commander there. And that was just to give the knights a leg up. They needed a little power boost

and one way to do that is to give them a narrowly targeted eminence ability. For the face commander, I had gone through and kind of looked at all of the different characters from jamura and figured out which ones might have been phased out with jalfir uh there were only one or two that

were like confirmed we know this person's phased out but there were a whole bunch of very likely candidates and one of those was uh sidar javari uh who is a general during the Mirage War. So we brought him out of retirement. We figured, okay, his homeland is being phased back in, and the people there are ready to fight the Phyrexians. So we found a Hush-Al-Firin knight legend from Mirage Block and made an updated card design for him. We should point out that in the story of March of the Machine, long

ago, Teferi, to save Zulfir, faced it out, and it's been stuck in limbo forever. And so as part of this story, Teferi finally gets Zulfir out, just in time to attack Phyrexia. Yeah, it was a very

satisfying conclusion to this extremely long-standing plot thread from the original Invasion block in, what was that, 2000, I think? That one took a long time to resolve. Okay, what's next?

The next deck is... Oh, we had a long time to resolve. Okay, what's next? The next deck is... Oh, we had a Convoke deck. So this was in Jeskai colors. Yeah, in the limited format, this was a blue-red strategy. It was the blue-red archetype. We hadn't really made much in the way of Convoke cards in either of those colors,

so there was a lot of design space for novel effects involving Convoke. Originally, Convoke was designed for the Celestia Guild in Ravnica, and so most of those cards were... Originally, it was designed for the Boros, but I moved to the Celestia. Oh, okay. Well... Richard Garfield made it for Boros, and I thought it was a better fit for Celestia, but I moved to Dysleusnia. Oh, okay. Richard Garfield made it for Boros, and I thought it was a better fit for Dysleusnia, so I moved to Dysleusnia.

I agree. You made the right call there. So, yeah. So I would say it was a little less of an ideal fit in Izzet than it was in Dysleusnia, but, yeah. There at least were lots of novel designs there that we hadn't seen yet before in green and white. It seemed like white was the best color.

It had the strongest existing Convoke cards for the most part and had the best support for Convoke. You really want a lot of small creatures, ideally token creatures, to help power out your Convoke cards. So once we've sort of taken the two limited colors, we decide that white would be that third color. Yeah, so this was a lot of fun because there was so much novel design space for those red and blue cards. There were lots of cool reprints from the main set just commons and uncommons that uh you know a counter spell is you know maybe not that exciting in commander but once you put convoke on it it uh it looks pretty spicy i guess cancel is what i should say counter spill always looks spicy in commander but cancel is like i don't really need

to put cancel in my commander deck but but Cancel with Convoke is pretty exciting. So who's the face of the Convoke deck? The Convoke deck's face is Kosla, the Broken Halo. This is a new character from Zendikar. Now, just

we're curious, when do you guys decide sort of existing characters versus new characters? Is there any sort of determiner of when you go one way versus another way um usually the process is we design the card bottom up and then um once we're in the top lining phase when we're figuring out what the initial concept is for the cards we'll see if there are characters who are a good fit. And for this particular product, things were a little more complicated because all of the secondary commanders for the decks were team-up legends. So what we did for those was we did bottom-up designs,

and then we kind of looked and said, okay, who could these characters be in these color combinations with these mechanics what does that imply and then we kind of locked them down we're like all right this is shalai and halar from dominaria or whoever and then we started to sort of bend the mechanics a little bit to better fit those characters um for the face cards of these decks i think sidar jabari was the only one where i just decided in advance this has got to be sidar jabari because i think he was the only legendary jalfiran knight from mirage block um i could be wrong about that but i believe that's true so uh so he's like he's a shoo-in.

It's got to be him. Fortunately, his original mechanics were not particularly noteworthy, so we had plenty of flexibility as far as where to go with that design. Did he have flanking? Yeah, he was a flanking guy. Yeah, I think everybody on a horse in Mirage, if you're on a horse, you had flanking. And if you had flanking, you were either on a horse or you were a centaur, I think.

Yeah, I think centaurs could have flanking also. Yeah. Yeah, so that's three of the decks. Okay, what's the fourth deck? The fourth deck. Oh, right, I mentioned Shalai and Halar, but let's also talk about the deck that they're in, which was a backup deck.

Backup is a new mechanic invented for March of the Machine that gives, it's a backup with a number, and when a creature enters the battlefield it puts that many plus one plus one counters on target creature if that's another creature it gains the following abilities until end of turn and then

just whatever the rest of the rules text of the card with backup gets grafted onto the targeted creature until end of turn so obviously without any old reprints to draw is gets grafted onto the targeted creature until end of turn. So obviously without any old reprints to draw upon, we couldn't just make a backup deck, but we were able to design a bunch of commander-facing cards,

big splashy backup cards with exciting cards that are relevant for Commander and put those on the new cards. And then fill out the rest of the deck with a bunch of cards that care about plus one, plus one counters and enters the battlefield triggers and things like that. What colors is this deck? That's in Naya colors. So red, green, and white. And our Commander here is a character, again,

a new character called Bright Palm Soul Awakener this is a Fox Shaman from Kamigawa oh okay and then the sorry go ahead the fifth deck I'm just asking about the fifth deck yeah the final deck

was the weirdest one whenever we're doing a really big product with five decks, we always like to have one or two that are really accessible and easy for a new player to pick up, and then have one that's just something really weird that nobody's ever seen before. deck this is in teamer colors green blue and red and it's all about differently named artifact tokens so this deck cares about having a treasure and a food and a thopter and a construct you want to diversify your portfolio as much as possible and have as many different names of artifact tokens as possible. And the commander for that is Gimbal, Gremlin Prodigy. He is a gremlin from Kaladesh who has become sapient somehow, and presumably by eating really smart things. And so the deck is just, you're just trying to get a lot of different

tokens? Is that the... Yeah, a lot of different artifact tokens on the battlefield at once. Gimble makes XX artifact creature tokens where X's scales on the number of different names among your artifact tokens.

Yeah, you'll be investigating a lot, and you'll be eating a lot of food and you know all the like making token copies of different artifacts and things like that just to up your count yeah here's here's a little quirky thing so one of the things you got to care about when you make the decks is you have so many cards for tokens right you get you get some number of tokens you got to put in the product and i know this one we get 10 double-faced tokens and uh yeah this this one was was tricky because like the the deck building incentive was put as many as possible in and uh the physical constraints remained locked so we definitely uh we did have to cut one or two

cards that were making tokens just because there wasn't room on the token sheet for those tokens anymore uh so yeah but people people can collect their own tokens or uh you know get those dry erase tokens or something and add those cards back in if they want to get landmines or whatever in their deck. So what was the most challenging thing of the Marching Machine decks versus maybe other decks that you've done? The most challenging thing was playtesting, actually. We had, we were in COVID lockdown, so we were all working remotely we had five decks which

is much harder to play test than four decks sort of four is the the most natural and and uh harmonious size for a commander game uh we had additional complexity because of the planes and actually for the early stages of design we had even more complexity because we had planeswalker commanders as the the face cards that we were testing and yeah play testing remotely being via software is you know it's it's harder like you just have to concentrate more and sometimes you're struggling with technology or whatever. Uh, and then, you know, that, that combined with the five player game combined with the extra, the extra game mode of planes combined with planeswalker commanders was just too much. It was, it was frankly miserable and uh we fortunately we managed to uh to

realize in time to sort of change change these planeswalkers into more normal legendary creatures um because we knew that the players would perceive that excess complexity as well. And then we were able to arrange some safe ways to meet in person and run playtests in person, both in the office and at people's houses. So once we got to that point, the complexity was brought under control and we were having fun again and we knew that the players would be having fun again. So what was it like uh having i mean you haven't played this first time you've ever sort of adjusted plane chase what was it like trying to balance plane chase uh it was i mean it was a lot of fun uh i love it

i love plane chase and i love sort of representing these places the the big challenge with plane chase is that it inherently tends to add time to games, so it makes your games run longer. It adds a lot of variance to games. So we found that the plane designs that were more successful were ones that either helped people build up resources to, either helps people build up resources to, you know, to build to a win condition, or just allow aggressive strategies to get through and deal damage more easily. So the designs that were less successful were the ones that would be disruptive, slow the game down, make it harder for people to do things.

So we generally tended to focus on ones that were more constructive and sort of built things up to a crescendo. Do you have a favorite plane of all the new planes? I think my favorite is probably Norn's Seed Corps. So this is the one that's most connected to the story of march of the machines march of the machine excuse me uh so this is on new phyrexia and it's uh it represents the uh realm breaker the corrupted world tree that the phyrexians have made to connect new phyrexia to all the different planes that they're invading um so uh yeah so the rules text says when you planes walk to norton seed core chaos ensues and and then below that it says whenever chaos ensues reveal cards from the top of your planer deck

until you reveal a plane card planes walk to it except don't planes walk away from any plane put the rest of the revealed cards on the bottom of your planer deck in any order so translated into more simple english what this does is every time you roll planes the the chaos symbol on the planer die you pick the top card of the planer deck if If it's a plane, you add it to the planes that are already on the battlefield. So every time you roll chaos, you're adding another plane and you're sort of adding more and more planes together attached to Norn's seed core.

And then eventually someone will roll planeswalk and you'll planeswalk away from everything. But until you do, you're getting all of these different effects from all these different plane cards. And you roll chaos they all all of their chaos abilities trigger uh and this one was sort of the the most fun conceptually but also the most challenging to execute on the templating like it always worked the same way uh from you know the as soon as we put it into the file it did did the same thing, and it always did that. But we really struggled to find a template that both worked in the rules and made sense to anyone.

We went through lots of different templates. But, yeah, I worked with the editors and the rules managers and the play testers, and eventually we found what I think is quite a nice template. But yeah, I worked with the editors and the rules managers and the play testers. And eventually we found what I think is quite a nice template. Okay, my next question for you. So not counting any of the main commander, because you talked about them. What was your favorite legendary creature sort of deep cut you got to do? What was your favorite sort of, oh, I finally got to put this on a card? sort of deep cut you got to do?

Like, what was your favorite sort of, ooh, I finally got to put this on a card? Um, there weren't a lot of other legends besides the, besides the face cards and the secondary commanders for the decks. Um,

I guess I'm going to dodge your question and answer a slightly different question. Okay, fair game. We got to... There is a legendary thing that we made that I was pretty excited about, which was a

new living weapon based on a popular legendary artifact equipment that's's bitterthorn nissa's animus so uh sword of the animist represents the sword that nissa has sort of tucked away in her staff and uh it's a very popular commander card and so as we were thinking like oh this is the last chance to do anything with the phyrexians we should do another cool living weapon that's a sort of time spiral riff off of uh some popular piece of equipment so for a little while it was a phyrexian version of

the black blade but uh then we we decided that uh Sword of the Animist would be the more fun thing to do, so we made a living weapon version of Sword of the Animist. That's cool. So any other, I'm getting close to my desk here, so any other like final thoughts about cool things you were able to do? Yeah, we also wanted to really have some excitement with Planeswalkers. And even though we weren't able to execute on the Planeswalker commanders, we made a cycle of these talents that are auras that enchant a Planeswalker and give it a loyalty ability and a triggered ability and they're all based on

existing planeswalker cards so like elspeth's talent uh has like the activated ability from elspeth's son's champion for example and those were a lot of fun we know people like to play uh what they call super friends decks with lots of planeseswalkers in them. And ever since I led Oath of the Gatewatch, I've had a bit of a soft spot for Planeswalker matters designs. So it was fun to design these auras that could go on Planeswalkers. Yeah, it's something players have been asking for forever.

So we finally made them. Yeah. Any other final thoughts before we wrap up uh yeah just uh i had a super a huge blast designing these i really think if you haven't tried playing chase give them a try because uh it's definitely a fun thing to do every once in a while to spice up your Commander games and inject a little high-variance nonsense into them. And the cards are gorgeous. So, check them out.

Well, anyway, I want to thank Ethan for joining us. It's always fun to talk about Commander stuff. In fact, Ethan and I had a chance to play with him together. We did a Make-A-Wish, and we got to play them, and I played Brumaz and got my ass.

I didn't win. But it was a lot of fun. They were fun to play. Not often you and I can talk Commander decks, and I've actually played one of the Commander decks. It's true. It's true. I can probably count the number of Commander games that I've seen you play on one hand.

Yes. Anyway, thank you so on one hand. Yes, so... Anyway, thank you so much for joining us today, Ethan. But I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work, so instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you again for being with us. Thanks for having me, Mark. And to all you, I will see you next time.

Bye-bye.