Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1033: March of the Machine Play Design with Jadine Klomparens

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In this podcast, I sit down with the Jadine Klomparens, lead play designer of March of the Machine, to talk about the play design process for the set.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have Jadine Klumperens, who is the lead, I believe, of the play design team for March of the Machine. Hey, Jadine. Hey, how's it going? Okay, so we're going to talk all about what it takes to, you know, do play design for a set. And we're going to use March of the Machine as our example. So, okay, talk about, like, when you first saw March of the Machine, what stage was it at?

When did you see it? So I was actually on the set team for more or less the long haul. I think I started very early. So I saw it right after the Vision handoff and got to start thinking about all the play design headaches that would be caused from the very beginning. Okay, so what worried you most? What was the thing you were most concerned

when you first saw it? I mean, the big one with Marching the Machine was just a brand new card type and not just a brand new card type, but one that we wanted to do at an as-fan of one per pack. Every single one of these packs you were going to get a brand new card type. You know when we introduced Planeswalkers in Lorwyn we started with five. That was a much easier to execute

beginning of a brand new card type. Here we made on the order of 30 brand new designs at the end of the day. 36. 36, yeah. And just a whole lot of very careful thought and planning had to go into how to introduce this many of a total unknown into the game without introducing huge balance problems and making sure they played okay. Okay, so what did you have to do with battles? What was play design's role in getting battles where they needed to be? So I would say the meat of the play design work on battles after the set design handoff was on Limited. They were a very challenging mechanic for Limited. They kind of threatened to snowball the game just because they put so much emphasis

on being able to attack them down. And if you are in the lead in the game, you can easily attack down your battle and therefore you can get even further ahead in the game. So they kind of have that runaway effect on games. So figuring out how to cost them the right number of defense counters that should be on them to alleviate these problems as much as possible was just a huge factor in play design work. I think we did more internal drafts of Mom than any other set trying to figure out how to get all this stuff to play pretty well. I mean, was it mostly just numbers or was there like certain kinds of designs that you guys pushed towards yeah so i guess as both some of both for sure haven't with a brand new thing there's a lot of numbers work and then there's also a lot of what's actually fun here what kind of stuff plays well what doesn't play very well as a easy example we learned very early on

that battles that help you flip them by having some kind of uh board presence attached uh the five mana green uncommon i believe invasion of miraganda that puts a plus one plus one counter on something you control and then has it fight something else was i think our poster child of this effect early on where you both got to clear a blocker out of the way make your creature stronger and just really set up for an attack so we had to figure out that these kind of battles just had to be costed uh at a worse rate than other kinds because they were so strong in practice and do they tend to have a high defense? Yeah, a high defense as well,

depending on where on the curve they go. Generally, we tried to cost battles so that it was challenging to flip them in the same turn you played them. We found that they were more fun if they played out over the course of two or three turns rather than being, I play this right now and then immediately flip it. So higher defense counters on the ones that were easy to set up for the one turn flips

now when when the set design gives you stuff how often do you say like this card as is just can't function like you have to change what the card does um pretty rarely generally we can find the cost that kind of makes it work and then play with that and then maybe from there we go okay we found the cost that makes this card work it's not really fun we don't think it's going to be attractive to players it's not really gonna make any decks at this rate or is just that's one end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum way too strong at the rates that make this function we should just do something else i would say most of the time we can make something work uh maybe 20 of the time we're like let's try

a new design here i think that happened less with battles on the whole just because there are so many knobs on those cards we can both change the cost we can change the number of defense counters we can scale the strength of the reward on the back up or down to make it pretty easy i don't think we any ended up rejecting any battle designs out right yeah so battles are uh one of the terms we use at r d is a knobby meaning that there's just lots of knobs on them. So the more knobs, the easier play design has because there's just more numbers that you can change to adjust. Absolutely.

So were you, I mean, all said and done, you know, from first seeing... Because when we handed off battles, they weren't even in the state that, like, set design changed them significantly. They weren't... The players noticed battles wasn't what vision design handed off. Are you happy with where they ended up?

I mean, what do you think of the final... Yeah, I'm really happy with where they ended up. I mean, it's still early. We'll see how everything shakes out in constructed formats yet, but the limited gameplay has looked to dodge most of the pitfalls that we were worried about when we were working on them. And yeah, so far so good, I would say.

Things are looking pretty good. We did a lot of early work in set design, guided by a bunch of play design philosophy, to try and make these as interactable as possible at every stage with a brand new card type, making sure that the actual rewards you got were permanent types you could interact with, just kind of like a general fear that if you put this new thing out there, players won't have the tools to be able to answer them. So being able to give the rewards as card types that already exist, you could always interact with them, I think helped a lot in making this work out.

And I believe, if I remember correctly, I think you were the one that suggested the reward being a different card on the back, right? I think so. It's a little hard to keep track of what you suggested, etc. But I remember battles just kind of came out of thin air, I think, from Ari coming up with, okay, a bunch of people said a bunch of different things. Here's how we pull all this together into a single product. That was really cool. Okay, let's move on to another mechanic. Sure.

Talk about incubate. So our first double-sided token. So talk about balancing tokens you... Balancing tokens. What were the challenges of Incubate? So Play Design mostly thought of Incubate as like creature clue is how we talked about it. But, you know, we've done a lot of these artifacts that you can sacrifice when paying some mana cost

to get an effect. And this is just like a clue, except you get a token. You get a creature out of it that's how we made it by the way that's what we thought like we're yeah i mean the creature clue is exactly how we when we made it so it ends up being mostly like a creature i think in a lot of ways especially in limited play which is pretty easy uh for us and a lot less challenging in a lot of ways, especially in limited play, which is pretty easy for us and a lot less

challenging in a lot of ways than something like clue or blood or food, which is kind of so weak on its face that we need to build in a lot of additional synergy in the set and give you like all of Eldraine's food rewards or things that care about blood tokens. We just don't have to do that with creatures because creatures are so inherently powerful. So that made this easier for us than a bunch of other things. I think the most interesting thing that happened with Incubate was the decision to let players transform them at instant speed. We went back and forth a lot working on the set. Dave Humphries, the lead of the the set was always very concerned that the set was playing too much at sorcery speed there's just a lot of things in the effect going in that

direction between battles which are all sorcery speed effects at the first time and take up a bunch of the instant sorcery real estate uh because their front effect needs to be some kind of spell effect so those all happen at sorcery speed the flip phrexian cards need to be at sorcery speed because they're really complicated if they can flip into whatever backside they're on your opponent's turn the backup mechanic leans very sorcery speed and it's just a bunch of stuff happening so a lot of things in the set happening at sorcery speed so any opportunity to make something that could happen at instant speed and let give you reasons to leave up mana was really appreciated

and we ended up balancing incubate around being able to be used at instant speed um the other interesting thing with incubate was you had number once again it's a little knobbier but you had the numbers to pick so like i assume that was useful, because you could sort of choose how big you wanted it to be, right? Yeah, definitely. That helped a lot. I think we went with mostly all Incubate 2+, if memory serves. There's exactly one Incubate 1 in the entire set, which mostly came with spending 2 mana on a 1-1,

not feeling strong enough to most players, so needed to kind of have a higher floor. Okay, well, let's move on. Another mechanic you just mentioned was backup. How hard was backup to balance? Backup was not that hard and was one of the most fun mechanics to work on. It just has all this kind of cool space of like, oh, what's an interesting

way to combine these abilities? What would be a cool thing to give? So it was really fun to work on. I think the biggest challenge with backup is that it's just so suspectable to things that are very strong in constructed magic, like removal spells, and you kind of set up for this big play, and then, you know your opponent has a doom blade doesn't get to happen so trying to figure out the different ways to be able to protect this see some of this stuff actually happening um there was also a really cool dynamic with backup where it is really hard to say on a lot of designs if a 2-2 with backup 2 or a 3-3 with backup 1 is stronger like would you rather give more counters and have a smaller body behind or would you rather have a bigger body

and give less counters and it ended up being very variable based on the effect and uh if you look through the the change log there's a whole bunch of all right we went three three back up two to four four back up one two weeks later all right we went back to uh the other way and just kept flip-flopping them um but yeah i think we ended up with a bunch of cool cards and the mechanic plays really well super fun the other thing i know you guys did is i think when we handed it over there were more higher numbers on backup and i believe the finish set is mostly ones and twos yeah i think there might be one or two threes mostly at higher rarity but yeah mostly left it at you want to have some guaranteed value here uh and less risk is a lot of what it comes down to when you have uh like a huge backup number you're just putting a lot of eggs in one basket whatever you target is easy to remove and just becomes the focal point but if you leave smaller backup numbers means

you get to leave a bigger creature behind and diversify your threats more which helps us balance the mechanic in a world where creatures don't live very long okay so let's move on we have one one more named mechanic, although this was a repeat mechanic. So usually, usually repeat mechanics are easy for you guys. Let's talk Convoke. So what were the challenges of Convoke? So the challenge of Convoke here was that we didn't do it in green light. Instead, we did it in blue red. And like you said, returning mechanics are usually easy for us. It turns out in this case that Convoke and Blue-Red is just so different than how it plays in Green-White. Green-White both has access to a lot of creatures, so it's pretty good at convoking,

and then really lends itself to wanting Convoke on creatures. So it's more about building up a board and doing stuff like that. Blue-Red, especially in this set, really wanted Convoke designs on instants and sorceries. So we both needed to make Convoke work, which ended up being a lot of token making in the set. We did Rouse Reinforcements as a kind of dragon fodder effect and we did uh the blue three drop that makes a one one when it comes into play i forget the name at the moment but just extra attention to token making and red and blue and then a whole bunch of spell effects that had uh convoke on it which ended up being surprisingly powerful largely because a lot of them were instants and it can just be very strong

to kind of have your cake and eat it too to leave up blockers but then also be able to cast your convoke spell so the simple change of moving what colors it is uh made it a much harder returning mechanic than normal and it wasn't incredibly hard for us and we certainly got to get through it but there was a lot of cool things to learn about how it played in new colors. Yeah, so one of the things, my favorite thing is when we bring things back is just putting them in a space they weren't before so that the way you think of it is just different. That's always a lot of fun for me. Yeah, I think it's super cool when we just get to go, oh, in this new context, this plays very differently.

Isn't that super sweet to realize? Okay, so let's move on. We also have some unnamed mechanics. Mechanics that didn't have a name per se. So you mentioned this earlier. So the double-faced cards that turn into Phyrexian. So on the front face is an iconic creature from some plane you know, and the back side is the Phyrexian version. All of them

have a Phyrexian mana activation that's in another color, and then the back side is... I mean, it's both colors, but it's kind of like in hybrid space usually, so that it's... Because you don't have to have the second color because you can pay life.

Right. I know Phyrexian mana... I'm talking about returning mechanics that are a problem. I know Phyrexian mana had a lot of issues in the past, and when I... In one, I put a bunch of Phyrexian mana

in Phyrexian all will will be one and it got whittled down quite a bit from what i handed over uh just because frexian man is really difficult so let's talk about the challenges of frexian mana and how we how you use them on the double-faced uh frexians yeah so frexian mana is a challenge uh i think when you don't respect it or when you treat it like mana uh play design these days has learned enough to say actually we need to treat this like it's a life cost and not mana which is just very different so then the challenge becomes making the cards look cool enough even when they are costed correctly, more or less, and have enough mana attached to the Phyrexian mana. So using it all on activated abilities on the Phyrexian DFCs helped a lot.

We could still give you real mana costs that you had to pay actual mana with, do it at sorcery speed so you can be very interacted with and just kind of have the Phyrexian mana there as a light nod to play with some more colors, pay a little less life, and a nod to the flavor of what's going on here that was super cool. I think the hardest thing for us on these cards was kind of the color pie stuff you were alluding to earlier, where because it was an off-color Phyrexian mana. The backside kind of wanted to feel a little subversive to the color. A white card transforming into a blue card wanted to feel a little blue

because of that Frexian blue. But at the end of the day, it was still a white card, so it couldn't really break color pie rules. So kind of finding that right blend of playing in hybrid space in a way that just feels a little off in Phyrexian while still really being true to the color pie was the toughest part. Yeah, no, they came out really well. I think that was definitely one of the...

So when we hand it over from Vision, I don't think they went to a second color. I think Set Design added the second color, which it plays really well. Although in all my limited games, i think i paid the color once so yeah i i think you mostly do not pay the color uh unless you happen to be there you certainly do not pick the cards thinking you need to have the color uh sometimes you do and that's cool i i also i want to give a special mention to the the rare legends that transform into in a lot of, cards that are supposed to be like homages to famous Phyrexian cards. Those are super sweet and were fun to work on and are just so cool to think about.

Pelucranos transforming into Wormcoil Engine when he gets completed is just really cool. Yeah, that was cool. I liked that a lot. That was a fun... I like Easter eggs, so that was super fun. Okay, another thing we did with double-faced cards was the Praetors. So the Praetors, on the front, they're Praetors, and on the back, they turn into Sagas, and then when you finish the Saga,

they turn back into Praetors. So were those easy or hard to do? That's definitely something new. They were challenging. So our general approach from set design was, look, this is a legendary creature. We're going to put a kind of hard quest in most cases to transform it. You're probably not going to be able to do this in one turn.

So your opponent's going to have room to interact. And then we're going to have this saga on the back side which is going to take time to play out and we just want to be able to set up the quests and set up the cards so that the saga on the back side gets to be as cool as possible we largely treated the total of the saga as like a planeswalker ultimate in terms of strength most games if you flip this you should probably be able to win if your opponent lets you get through all three chapters of the saga um so cards like that are kind of challenging for play design because winning the game is very powerful it's kind of obvious when you say it like that but like

getting cards that feel satisfying to play with but are balanced around not successfully flipping more than like 10-15 percent of the time is a real challenge um just kind of figuring out the ways that the front side is useful but not incredible so it can still have this 10% win-the-game button. It's just a tough spot to make cool cards out of. So we spent a lot of time on them. A lot of them, for some of these reasons, are aimed more at Commander than at 60-card play, and we had to interface with the new casual play design team that was largely new at around this time. So a lot of interesting back and forths where they want a card to be cooler in Commander,

then we have to retest it in Standard and go, actually, that was too strong. We got to find a compromise solution here. There was a lot of that. We got to explore a lot of that for the first time. But yeah, I think they turned out really well. Quick plug, by the way. If you want to hear about that,

I interviewed Ellie in a previous podcast. So you can go listen to Ellie talk all about balancing for Commander and for casual format. So if you listen to both these podcasts, you'll hear that there are different things you guys care about. So it's fun to hear the contrast. Wow. Podcast cross synergy here between episodes. Exciting. Okay.

So now let's get into we talked we've talked a lot about limited so i want to get a little bit into constructed okay so you have a set you've marched the machine um what do you guys have to do to make sure that constructed formats are going to use this like what what do you do to make sure that this is this is a viable set and constructed so yeah march in the machine was uh is the eighth set in this standard rotation the biggest standard is going to be next set you know rotation all that stuff this is a large standard and we are making cards uh kind of with a bunch of competition. Our normal strategy here is more niche cards and more build around kind of stuff.

Just cards that don't make a ton of decks, but are really powerful in the few decks they make. And we try and make a bunch of those kinds of shots and see how it goes. March in the Machine, FFL, the future futurely, where we play a bunch of standard decks and see you kind of get a picture of how the cards play and what the format might look like. I did a lot of work on like blue, red, convoke strategies, green, white, counter strategies, a couple others that we tried to hit. others that we tried to hit but mostly we tried to make cool individual cards that kind of asked a lot of your deck building and really paid you off if you did all the work uh i think we spent

the most time all in all on battles we've already talked about battles but figuring those out and constructed was a bunch and then the team up legends trying to make those cards really fun to play with and powerful, was, I think, a lot of the work that we did on the set. So let's talk a little bit about, when you look at a set, obviously all the cards aren't meant for constructed. So how do you guys figure out which ones you want to make constructed shots? Yeah, so when we start with the set, we basically take as much as we can for Constructed as our guiding philosophy. We kind of start with the framework that everything that can be Constructed relevant should be Constructed relevant.

And then we start playing with the cards and figure out what's fun. Another one of our guiding principles for the studio as a whole is every card should be for someone. So when we find a design that we do not think is particularly fun to be a strong standard card, we kind of ask ourselves, okay, who might be interested in this card? Is this card a cool commander card? Is this a cool card for kitchen table games? Like who is actually going to be happy with this and then kind of aim it towards that purpose rather than 60 card standard. Most of the cards that we end up aiming away from standard

are expensive, like seven mana cards that were kind of oversaturated on uh 60 card formats tend to not play too many expensive cards so we don't have a lot of room for them or they get out competed with other options really easily so we kind of have to find different places to go with those a lot of the time uh some really swingy effects are not the most fun to be played at like the highest tiers of play so we'll aim those slightly differently but for the most part we do whatever we can to make as much stuff uh relevant in the standard sandbox as we can so how much time is spent on pioneer modern you know legacy other format other constructed 60 card formats um you know do

is that something you guys think a lot about or is the energy most more on just on standard uh so our gameplay is almost all standard uh and we do spend a lot of like thought energy on older formats um mostly on an individual designer basis. We'll just have people read a card and be like, oh, I think this looks really strong and modern. And then we go, okay, cool. That's good to know. And then talk to our experts in modern, Michael Majors, Carmen Handy, Dan Musser, to name a few, and just be like, what do you think? How is this going to change the format? Should we do this? Should we change it?

And just go from there. So a lot of individual call-outs on cards that look powerful and modern. I think we catch a good deal of them. It's certainly a good reason to change a card, and we try and be really thoughtful about it without actually playing games in formats that are so large that it's very challenging for us to test for them effectively so something else you hit about earlier i'm going to go a little more depth on is talking about how often you want new things to come out of that where there's a brand new deck versus it's just stuff that goes in existing decks

it's just making things players already playing better what's the balance you want a mix of both for sure uh i would say most sets aim to create three or four maybe more decks but we really work in probabilities and there's just we play i mean like the common phrase is we play or no in the first day a set is released you know the public will have played a thousand times more than we were able to internally so we don't really get to know exactly what's going to happen so we take as many shots at new decks as we can justifiably take in the set and know and expect that not all of them are going to hit. That's just kind of how this goes. We take a bunch of shots, hope some of them hit.

And then we also think it's pretty important that players are able to upgrade their decks from set to set. If you are really, really excited about the standard deck you've been playing and you just want to keep playing it, we still want you to look at the new cards and say, oh, cool, that could fit in. That's something cool for me. We don't want your decks to just kind of sit there and not get any upgrades over time. So I think basically both. It's challenging to create new decks, so we do as much as we can, but then also make sure that cards are generically useful and can be added to decks.

And a lot of that is just keeping track of what decks are being played so you can think of what you might want to add into them. Yep. Also, should I just put it to the public, all of this is done ahead of time, meaning when they're predicting what's going to happen, like, for example, when a set comes out, what's the gap between you playing and the set actually being out, so the audience gets some sense of how much you're predicting ahead of time? Over a year, easily over a year uh it's a very long time uh to the point where you know doing this podcast a little challenging for me trying to remember all the specifics from when we were working on this uh i actually was cleaning out my desk uh earlier this uh month and threw out uh you know like 200 uh mom limited cards that we had been testing with that were at my desk because the collation

was really challenging so i just had a bunch of extras uh and just was like oh yeah here these are from forever ago to get rid of them now yeah Yeah, it's funny because to you, a year goes a long time. I'm like, I worked for my mom like two years ago, so it's kind of funny. Yeah, a long time. Only half as long as yours. Yes, we're almost out of time here. So, any last thoughts?

As you think about sort of play design for Marching Machine, what's your sort of overall thoughts of how it went uh I think it went really well it was like a really ambitious set I don't know that I can drive home enough just how challenging this brand new card type was to think about and just kind of how much careful thoughtful work went into trying to get this new, brand new thing to play as well as possible and to do it in the volume we did.

And, you know, everything looks great so far. Just, yeah, really, really happy with the set and how things are being played out right now. Also, I should stress, like, you guys monitor the – once things come out, you guys spend a lot of time monitoring to see right how things get played and what happens and what gets played so um yep i am right in the midst of mom retrospective season right now thinking about how things went and what we you know could do differently should do differently that kind of stuff a lot of my energy

you know rethinking that yeah so anyway I just wanted to say before we wrap up that I've heard nothing but raves on the limited play and the constructed play, so hats off to you and your team. I think you guys did a great job. Cool. I'm glad to hear it. Thank you. And anyway, I wanted to thank you for joining us today. So it's, I like

having different perspectives, and I don't get a lot of play designers. I've had a few, but I don't get a lot of play design on, so it's fun to have you come and talk about it. Yeah. Happy to be here. And to everybody else, guys, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank J.D. for being with us today. And I'll see you again. See you later. And I'll see all you guys next time. Bye bye.