Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1031: March of the Machine Casual Play Design with Ellie Rice

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

In today's podcast, I sit down with Ellie Rice from the Casual Play Design team to talk about their process for March of the Machine.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have another fun interview. I have Elizabeth Rice from a casual playgroup. So Ellie's going to explain what exactly is the casual playgroup. And then we're going to talk about how the casual playgroup worked with March of the Machine. So hello, Ellie. Hello. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. It's my first time. I used to be a listener and now I'm here. I know. It's wild. Okay. So first up, let's explain what the Casual Play Group is because it's a new, relatively new thing. I mean,

it's been a couple of years. I mean, at this point, it's been there for like two years, but still that's relatively new in the 30 years of magic so yeah yeah so uh casual play team what we started in um november of uh of 2021 officially that's when i started at least and um our goals primarily as a team is to essentially give um our wizards us an opportunity into the the casual world so people that play commander who play tabletop you know with their friends that aren't necessarily going to tournaments all the time or um you know whereas we have a ffl that's designed to um take care of like constructed and standard play we're here to take care of and guide what we find is the healthiest for these other very popular formats,

like primarily Commander, but other things within them. Okay, so it's your job to make sure, like, the way I like to think of it is that the people that are doing play design, the competitive play designers, are trying to make sure that the competitive tournament formats are as fun as possible,

that we're delivering what those people want. You guys are doing the same stuff, but just with more casual players and making sure that, hey, is Magic as fun as it can be? Exactly. And I think Magic has been making Commander decks for quite a while, for example,

but it's not necessarily that there's a big difference with designing cards. There's a big difference between designing cards and then developing cards with the health of that format in mind. And sometimes it definitely just takes a different sort of set of skills and it's really good to have both. sort of set of skills, and it's really good to have both. So we get to make commander decks, and hopefully our intent, for example, is to take these products that we've been designing sort of before and get a healthier spin now that we have better ideas of what we want,

like the format to be for everybody. Okay, so I think the best way to explain this is we're just going to talk about making March of the Machine. And so I find using actual examples is what really helps people understand. Yeah, for sure. So let's go back. So what's the first exposure your team had to March of the Machine? When you guys first look at something.

So we looked at it. So we got onto March of the Chains around a little after the competitive play design team got ahold of it. So it's mostly the sets filled out. It's in like the tweaking phases, so to speak. So we got onto it. Yeah,

a little relatively late. That's what you mean. Or do you mean more of like. For the audience to understand. I think that the last two months of set design, the competitive play design team,

that's when they start. Yes. And there's an overlap. So like set design ends and they continue on for a little while longer after pencils are down. We start later than that,

like a little bit later than that so that it makes sense basically so that different teams get to focus on what they need to. Did you guys start before pencils are down on set design? Like, can you make changes to the actual set

when you're starting to do stuff, or are you more effective as commander? No, we can definitely still make, we definitely still are on, get onto it at a stage where we can change it, so pencils aren't down. Okay. Yeah.

Okay, so let's take mom so what what first impressions you remember first impressions of march of the machine oh yeah i do actually i really remember how exciting it was because there was a lot of new stuff so there was a whole new permanent type we were working with which i remember that stuff when we were on the what a battle for was going to do was kind of fluctuating. So that was both really exciting and really challenging. And I also remember seeing a lot of these cool characters teaming up, and we get to revisit a lot of those characters.

So for me, my first impressions was just this big explosive set with a lot of new stuff and also like revisiting characters that i really liked so there was a lot of new stuff and a lot of excitement okay so let's pick one of those to start about which aspect you want to start talking about first oh goodness i feel like we should talk about the battles okay we spent a lot of time there yeah so go ahead sorry well i'm saying so i mean so the thing that's important is um when we show the battles to the competitive play designers the notes they're giving are about how they'll play in tournaments what what notes are you giving so first time you see them and people are saying what do you think of them what was the first response for us we were thinking we're not really sure if this is going to be um intuitive in a multiplayer format um we're not really sure

if especially with how way the battles work where you're giving them to opponents your opponents have to defend um at the time that was kind of still in flux and we weren't really sure if that was really um gonna make sense to a lot of commander players and be fun um so that was mostly what we were focused on tuning and and getting into a good spot is uh because normally i think you that your opponent doesn't really want to defend like i don't want to care about your opponents all that much i don't want to really defend um you know something but so there had to be like a really good reason um for at least our thought was that the front side had to be um valuable enough and exciting enough that players would want to obviously put them in their decks, knowing that it might be hard to transform them. And at the same time, we wanted the backside to be cool enough and exciting enough that it was worth the challenge of overcoming, you know,

your opponent's board state to get to them and that your opponents understood, right, this backside is serious enough that I do need to um defend it and for a while it wasn't very intuitive and it was a little bit confusing um and hard to balance right because it's like two cards in one and it's we're doing a thing that we don't normally do how do we approach that and we just had to do it by playing a lot of games so here's something that gets brought up a lot when i talk to people online is there's this. So anybody can attack another than the person defending it. Anybody can attack it.

Now, only the person who controls it gets the reward. But did you guys talk a little bit about the politics of what it means that somebody else can attack your thing? Did that come up much? Yeah, we did. That was one of the things that we also that at first was kind of unsatisfying to us where, right, we didn't see a reason for other players to want to attack our battles as well. Like to like go after our battles

so we could all get the bonus. And so trying to find, that was another thing we had to think about was, okay, are the backs of this exciting enough? Is there room for some designs to be a little bit more incentivizing for other players to go after them? And we did find in some of our games, we're right, we would talk it out where it's like, okay, if you can help me do this, I'll like help you do this. do this i'll like help you do this um but we do have to keep in mind and i think this is something that people forget that while commander for example is a really social is a social game a lot of people struggle with social politics like for me for example i really don't like politics that

well so i tend to avoid um game pieces that force me to do politics. I would rather just like to operate under very clear set of rules. And I, you know, I'm not alone in that. So battles was, that was one of the challenge, right? Where it's like,

Oh, we might, there are going to be a subsection of players that aren't really going to like doing this or, or know why they want to do this. So can you give me an example of a suggested change that you guys made on one of the battles? Like what,

what's the kind of note that you would give on a battle that your team would get? Right. Let me think here. I mean, I can give some examples and see if you can come up with... Did you guys suggest the changing the back of something so that the reward would be different? Or changing the effect

when you played it? Did you... What I want the audience to understand is like when you guys are suggesting something you're trying to make a better social game i'd give an example of what something like that would be yeah so for example it would be um like um i don't have anything concrete off the top of my head because there were a lot of battles in that set. That's fine. Just give me an idea and we can work from there. Right. So, for example, like, if what we would do, we would play with it and we would say something to the effect of, okay, the backside, if this transforms, the side is punishing enough for the rest of the group that nobody wants to help me flip it and so if we would maybe suggest is there a way we can tweak

this to either kind of bring that down a little bit so that the paul there's like an option where people are like oh well i'll be fine with helping you or not or we would do something like um yeah we would suggest on the like on the front end if so on some of them we did just have to accept look like this is a design enough to where that one person is going to have to do the work to flip it and does this help them do that or not and So that it's a satisfying experience. We would do things like that. Sort of take the shape as it were. Important to realize, and in some ways, if you think about the competitive play team,

it's not your job to make every single card necessarily maximized. It's to make sure that you find the places, like you guys want to look for what are the best casual cards, and then make sure that those are in the best form they can be. Because just like with competitive play, they don't those are in the best form they can be because just like with competitive play they don't make every card as good as they can for competitive play they pick and choose what they focus on yeah we definitely pick and choose as well and we pick we have to decide um a lot of the times we use terms like net fun, like what's the most net fun for the table for what,

for that to happen. And we kind of work from that. So can you describe net fun? That's a really cool concept. Can you explain what that means to the audience? So net fun is like what's happened in the game. Obviously we know that players like to win and that's fun for them, but in a game like commander,

where you're more of a a you're more of like telling a story together um something that has low net fun or high net net fun is more of just how much fun is the entire table having not just the person casting the spells or taking the game actions for so for an example we kind of know that strategies where one person is monopolizing the flock, where they're taking a lot of actions, where other people aren't really interacting, they're just sort of sitting there watching. Those tend to be a little bit lower because there's less participation and people tend to check out. Or there's also very punishing effects that are very clearly not fun for a table like a grave pack for example that's super low net fun like that just means everybody is suffering and that's not always that fun yeah the way i heard for some people but not for everybody the way i heard described that really

hammered home to me was so you could like you know uh attach things to people so you can you know read all that you know their heartbeat and everything so imagine you hooked up you know four people playing in a Commander game, and there's a little meter you can measure how happy they are. And the idea of NetFun is just like, it's all their scores combined, right? How much does everybody have?

So the idea is, the perfect world is everybody's having fun. Everybody's at the pinnacle of their fun. But, right, if you do things that are beneficial for you, they could be not fun for other people and right that that that's where that fun comes from right exactly so when we are looking at cards we know that we have a ton of different types of um players of magic a lot of different who like different there's a lot of different strategies and so for us for casual

play it's not that we want to remove anything that's low net fun we just want to get it into the most fun that that thing could be for the the collective um and so sometimes that does mean tweaking you know pushing cards in one direction or the other okay so let's move on from battles yeah to legendary team ups you talked about that to legendary team-ups. You talked about that. Oh, legendary team-ups are so fun. Okay. So now the interesting thing about legendary team-ups is we get into legendary creatures, which holds a special place, I know, for your team.

So let's talk a little bit about the making of legendary creatures. Yes. So the making of legendary creatures, super fun. You know, at the time of Mom, we were still very nascent as a team but what was exciting to us is that we are revisiting characters and in the design what we're trying to do is find something that's both um that has like a mechanical hook in terms of gets players excited to build around it but at the same time feels like the characters it's showing and that part was really fun to play around with um so that it kind of feels like a good mix of the two different characters like Zimone and Dina coming together what does that look like um Baral and Kari Zev like what does those twos look like I think um Jacob Mooney who's also on a casual play

design he did lots of like he was very excited to pitch um like redesigns that may have come up or just things like that because the characters are really cool it's i think it's almost easier sometimes especially when you're newer to design at least that's for me how it feels to design um cards and develop cards with characters that you're really excited about um at least yeah that's that's what it was for me. So for mom, that's how it was. So let's talk a little bit about the hook. So you're saying when you make a legendary creature, you need a hook. I know this.

Yeah, I agree. One of the biggest lessons I know from making, from wizards making legendary cards over time is early on we made the error of they were just generally good. They weren't specific. So let's get into why is a hook so important and what what what makes a good hook yeah so i think a hook is very important because we know that things that are people will play things that are generically

strong um but that's not necessarily the most fun or the most like the best way for them to express themselves in commander so if you look at commander at least from the from the perspective of i'm a person who wants to express myself with my deck and my strategy having a character a legendary creature that specifically gives them something to do and gets to kind of say hey this is what i'm about this is what's exciting it's not just you know you look at the and you kind of have expectations if it's just kind of generically good well it doesn't really say all that much it's just strong so to speak people can't see me but i'm doing air quotes around

generic and strong and stuff but yeah so i think so something like an important deck building hook is like, for example, if you look at a card that just says whenever you play a spell. So actually Jyn Cataxis is a good one to talk about because I think it used to say something like whenever you cast. Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to. I'm just going to go with it. Like it could say something really broad like whenever you cast a spell draw or whenever you cast an artifact spell draw a card at first that might seem like a decent hook because it tells you to play artifacts but when you think about it um there's a lot of cheap artifacts there's a lot of zero cost artifacts and that because it's worded so vaguely and not like a little bit more like in a guiding way um

it or even if it just said whenever you cast a spell draw a card it doesn't really tell you anything but then if you do something like right whenever you cast like something i think what it says now is like non-creature spell three or greater now that's pushing you in this like direction a deck building direction that's maybe more exciting and appealing than just what the generically strong thing would be doing that i think is what makes a good hook yeah what so one of my favorite expressions i use all the time is restrictions breed creativity yes uh and i i think that the idea is if i give you something that's just too broad it's not exciting and that it's it's kind of having

limitations now you can we can there's the reverse where it's too many limitations where there's just not enough cards that you can make a deck out of you don't want to get too narrow but there's a sweet spot where there there's enough cards for you to think about but not so many that it's it doesn't really guide your building right and for us that's definitely that is definitely the case um and we also feel you know at the same time when there are so many legendary creatures like right now there's so many legends and we make a lot of legendary creatures and players like them and they're exciting but i think it does put like a certain kind of pressure for them to like stand out more it's like they

are you're not just it's not just legendary creatures being compared to vanilla it's like you're now having to compete with all these other legendary creatures so what is it that makes this one stand out is kind of like another way that i like to look at them or approach them so if i kind of feel like something's too either too generic or something like that where it's not like a hook i just i think is this going to get lost in the sea of all the other cards that we make if i feel like it is and i'm like maybe there's something we can buff it so players get more excited about it or there's something interesting for players to follow and do you think the team

helped with that i think in some ways they did um they were definitely serving um different different ones were serving different goals um but yeah I think we did a really good job on some of them, like getting them into good spots. Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. It's red, white. It's Hazoret.

Is it Hazoret and Geru? Geru and Hazoret. Here, let me tell the audience what the card does. Two red, red, white, five,

four, legendary creature, human god. As long as you have one or fewer cards in hand, Juru and Hazorette has vigilance and haste. Whenever Juru and Hazorette attacks, look at the top six cards of your library. You may exile a legendary creature from among them, put the breast on the bottom of your library in random order. Until end of turn, you may cast the exiled card without paying its mana cost. So let's talk about that card. that that was one i think that was um that was changed quite a bit and we liked we like this direction of okay you're playing red white legends um it felt like because of the the abilities it felt like these two characters and it just we came to this we're like okay if you're a person who really likes playing legends

and you like attacking and going you can do this thing um and this would be exciting to you and um there were other ones as well so like um i think errant in giada which is one white blue two three that has flash of flying that lets you look at the top card library and you can cast spells with flash or spells with flying um this was like an interesting one where it's like right there's 10 of two ways that you could go or maybe you can find like a sweet plot of the two um i also really like that where that one ended up probably my most favorite one though i think actually people were talking about this like when the set was um coming out or a bit like being released of croxa and kunaros that one was so much fun um it is the three red white black um stick fix that has vigilance menace lifelink because i'm a big

keyword fan and it has this graveyard synergy so enters the battlefield or attacks you can exile five cards from your graveyard and then when you do you can turn target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield so it's like this cool mardu reanimator thing so yeah i think just the there's a lot of them that we worked on um i think i built simone and dina in my head the moment she was solidified as well um there's a lot of the team ups that i think came together in this way that was like telling this these stories of what these characters would look like and were not too restrictive but like gave you something to do like it gave you a way um to do that that was really

cool um so yeah i I think they turned out pretty well. Okay, so let's segue to a different group of legendary creatures. The Praetors. So these are double-faced cards. So they were a Praetor on front, they were a Saida on back. It goes back and forth between those two states.

Is that good? From a casual standpoint, is that a cycle that you're excited by? Is that a cycle that you're excited by? Is that a cycle that leads to fun, casual play? We were a little worried about it because having the going back and forth between Legendary Creature and then Saga and then it coming back as the Legendary Creature,

we were really nervous in terms of um like balance and the minute like the value you were getting if it was too much um and the bigger challenge with them is that a lot of these were at least um at least trying to be preserved as much as possible for constructed like non-commando play and so we were this this is where we were having to really work for the first time with the competitive play design team on how to get them in the right spot to where they're not too low net fun for Commander, but still exciting to play for both parties. And I was mostly excited about Urbrask. That was my favorite one. And Urbrask was also one of the scarier ones.

So here, Urbrask. Let's read him so the audience will know. Oh, yeah, go ahead. So two red red, four four, legendary creature, Phyrexian Praetor. First strike, whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, Urbrask deals one damage to target opponent, add red. And then for red colon, exile Urbask, then return

to the battlefield, transform under its owner's control, activate only as a sorcery, and only cast three or more instants or sorceries this turn. Then on the back side is the Great Work. Chapter 1, the Great Work deals three damage to target opponent, each creature they control. Chapter 2 is create three treasure tokens,

and Chapter 3 is until end of turn, you may cast instants and sorcery spells from any graveyard. If a spell casts this way, would be put into a graveyard, exile instead. Exile the great work, then return to the battlefield. So it turns back into Urbrask.

Yeah. So this one was one of my favorites. And I think it's also a good example of what we were talking about before about net fun. So for, I looked at Urbrask and I was like, oh, this card is almost certainly statted for standard and statted.

And by statted, I mean it's the it's cost, it's power toughness, what it was doing. It's shaped looked like it was something that the standard player might want to do. And so we were having to keep that in mind. But what we know is this kind of card encourages a storm style of play. So a deck that's casting a lot of spells and is trying to sort of combo kill you uh with a with storm and we know that while player there are some players who really do like that like me um it's not always that fun for the whole table to have to go to do that so what we were trying to do is what are the restrictions we can kind of put that would

still uh what are the things we can do that would still get it in a good place for both people so for us that was like making sure the hoop of turning it from its face to a wrath was you know reasonable enough and then also um it was very important so this only targeted an opponent rather than do something like each opponent or something like that. So these small tweaks were just things that we would do. And ultimately, it's still a card that I think I'm very excited to play. So yeah, that's what we had to basically do with all of them had their own different challenges because Praetors in general are designed to be menacing and fierce and so getting them all into spots where

you know commander players could reasonably play this and build around it and still have fun was the challenge but I think we might be too soon but I think we got there I think we got there hopefully I'm sweating a little bit so we don't have a lot of time left so what I want

to do is go quickly through the mechanics and tell me what, like, I would like your impression from a casual play standpoint, what did you think of the mechanic? Yeah. Okay? Yeah. First up, backup.

Backup. Backup was cool. Yeah, I'm going to give it out of five stars, I'm going to give it three out of'm getting it out of five stars. I'm going to give it three out of five. Three out of five. I think it's kind of cool. Temporarily granting abilities, stuff like that. I think sometimes it would be nice if it was a little bit more impactful,

but that was mostly, I think, for like limited reasons. Okay. Next up, Convoke. Ooh, Convoke. Really cool. Hard to cost appropriately appropriately but pretty exciting like i think the the enchantment that lets you triple damage civity on fire it's five red red red convoke um and then triples damage that very exciting i love convoke for those kinds of reasons that

lets you make big expensive but really cool stuff so So where is it on the LE five-star rating? Convoke is like a four out of five. Four out of five, okay. Four out of five. My five rating is all problematic. I don't know if you want me to say a five. Okay, so next up, Incubate. What do you think of Incubate for casual play?

Ooh, Incubate, I would also say it was about a three. I think it was about a three. Like, still good, solid. Tokens are cool. There's some really interesting synergies that end up being a little bit more complex than I prefer, and I think maybe other players prefer,

but it can be really cool when it all builds together. Okay, how about Phyrexianian the creature type phyrexian matter and what do you think of that as a oh i love phyrexian matters i like typal stuff in general i just think that is a super cool thing to build around is to have a deck that's very unified it's like easy to understand and also the phyrerexians are just really cool to me. So I was very excited by it. Yeah, also there was Knights Mattered as well. Those are the two creature types that mattered.

Yeah, Knights. Oh, yeah, that's right. We didn't even get to talk about the Eminence one. That was something. But yes, Knights Mattering was cool too. So as a general rule, when you're sort of an Eye of Commander, does there have to be a certain number of them? Like, like Phyrexia, at least we recently,

or a year or two ago, like we took a lot of creatures and made them Phyrexian. So there's a lot of Phyrexian creatures out there. And knights obviously, you know, been around forever. Yeah, I think for me, there does need to be, I prefer there to be a certain quantity in a type so that players don't have to rely as heavily on changelings. But I think that's a little bit unsatisfying for game reasons and flavor reasons. So I like there to be a certain quantity.

So I think it's good that we went back and made other creatures for X and to kind of make this all work together. Okay, so I'm almost to my desk here. So final thoughts on sort of March of the Machine, you know, now that you can have been through it all and it came out, what's your sort of final thoughts on it? Oh, I think that set is so cool.

We, especially for where we are in terms of CPD development, I think that set was, is so cool. It is really exciting. There's a lot there to play and dig into that I could play that set for a while. And I would say as a person who has now worked on

multiple tentpole sets, multiple standard sets, and lots of different products, that is still one of my favorites as having very exciting characters a lot of stuff for casual players it's just like still one of my favorites so and just for the audience for the timeline i believe brothers war was the first set that uh you guys worked on the first set that we worked on was it was too late for brothers war the main set but we were able to work on Brothers War Commander decks, and then Phyrexia, all we won, was our first main set.

Okay, okay. Yeah. So we're early. We work ahead. Oh, yeah. While the team's existed for a little while, we're just now starting to see the products you guys worked on. Yeah, we were fresh little children, but we got it done.

We were just... We got it done. It was great. Yeah, there's very exciting... I mean, we can't talk about it yet, but there's very exciting things in the pipeline coming their way, so we kept you guys busy. So I want to thank you for being with us today, Allie. It was a lot of fun having you here.

Thank you, thank you. And to everybody else, guys, I am now at my desk. 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 thanks, Ellie. Thank you. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.