Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1045: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ Design

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm telling the story of the Lord of the Rings Tales of Middle Earth, the design. So I'm going to talk about how we made it and talk through all the mechanics and just explain the ins and outs of the making of Lord of the Rings. Okay, so first let me start with the beginning.

So this was the very first set that we worked on after the pandemic had started. Now, normally a set will be in vision for four months, and then it'll be in set design for like 16 months, and then play design for a couple months. About two years. About two years. We spent a little bit longer on this. Lord of the Rings was the very first sort of large Universes Beyond set we were going to do.

In fact, when Aaron Forsythe first pitched Universes Beyond, in his document, he said that the first large set we did should be something like Lord of the Rings because it should be something very adjacent to what magic is. Something that, you know, it's another IP, but it's close in spirit to what magic is. And so when we got time to make it, we're like, well, you know what's really like Lord of the Rings?

Lord of the Rings! And so we were so happy when we got time to make it, we're like, well, you know what's really like Lord of the Rings? Lord of the Rings! And so we were so happy when we got permission to do Lord of the Rings. So we put the team together. I was on the vision design team. Ben Hayes led the team. I did not lead the team. And the very first thing we did is we made what we called the knowledge pyramid. is we made what we called the knowledge pyramid.

So what a knowledge pyramid is, is the team members had a mix of experience with Lord of the Rings. So for example, in my youth, I'd read some of the books, I'd seen the films. I was aware of Lord of the Rings and I knew some of Lord of the Rings, but I wasn't a diehard fan.

And so we made sure to have two of those on the design team. So Lucas and James were our sort of, you know, our experts of Lord of the Rings. And so they're the ones that made the Knowledge Pyramid. So what the Knowledge Pyramid did is it took things like characters, events, objects, places, and it put them on this, it was a pyramid, it was like a triangle. So the bottom of the pyramid was sort of the most familiar. So like if you know Lord of the Rings, you're going to know Gandalf, you're going to know

Frodo, you'll know the One Ring, like, you know, there's things that if you're at all familiar with it, these are things so iconic to what it is. You're probably going to know that. So the second tier, the middle tier, was, okay, these are things that are a little beyond maybe the casual fan. For people that are a little more invested in it, people that have probably read the books, in addition to seeing the movies.

And so that was like the middle ground. Stuff that was not quite as easily known as the movies. And so that was like the middle ground. Stuff that was not quite as easily known as the bottom. And then the top pyramid was for the diehard Lord of the Rings fans. They've read the books many, many times. They go deep into it. The Bill the Ponies of the world.

Look, one of the things we learned early on was that when you're going to do top down, like for example, we did a set based on Greek mythology called Theros. And so what we learned is you want at common to be things that people are familiar with. So, you know, at common we did Minotaurs and Gorgons and Pegasus and things that you just might know from Greek mythology. But at rare, like we did like a hundred-handed one, which is something from Greek mythology,

but it's a deep cut. Same is true with Lord of the Rings, right? Okay, obviously people are going to know, there's things that a lot of people are going to know. We want that at a lower rarity, and the deep cuts that the true fans are going to love, we want them there. The deep cuts are great, but we want them at a little higher rarity. So we made this knowledge pyramid

to sort of talk about, okay, what exists. The next thing we did is we made a knowledge pyramid to sort of talk about, okay, what exists. The next thing we did is we made a list, a comprehensive list of everything. What is everything that, like, what are all the named characters? Who is referenced in the book at all? Let's list every named character. Let's list every place. Let's list every creature.

Let's list, you know, Let's get a definitive list. And the reason for that is, normally when we make a magic set, it's based on a world that we've designed, and that we've designed specifically to be a magic world. For example, there's a thing called the creature grid. What the creature grid is, it's a grid that's so small, medium, and large, and then flying and not flying. And it shows it for all five colors. And the idea is, hey, for most magic sets, you have to cover all these bases. There's a few, like, large green flyers most sets don't have to have. But we have to make sure it's there. And so when we're building a world, we make out the chart. And then if we're missing something, we add that thing to the world.

Oh, we need a red flyer. Okay, well, let's add a red flyer. But when you're working with somebody else's, you know, this is, Middle Earth exists. We didn't make Middle Earth. It is what it is. And we're trying to capture Middle Earth as written, right? So we can't just make things up. So one of the reasons we were so exhaustive in what existed is we needed to know, the knowledge pyramid was about what are the things we want to do because people will want to see it. The other list was just what is everything? We're not necessarily going to make every character ever referenced in the book into a card,

but we want to know what those things are. And the reason for that is perfectly, the grid's a great reason. So we make our grid. One of the things we realize we're shy on is flying creatures. Now, in magic, flying's important. It's a key invasion, you know, most used invasion. A magic set will have 20 to 30 flyers in it. You know, there's a lot of flyers. Flying's pretty important.

So much so that there's like a whole mechanic reach that it's just about interacting with that mechanic. There's no other mechanic like flying that has a second mechanic that's just about interacting with that mechanic. That's how important flying is to the game. So one of the problems we ran into is there are flying things in Lord of the Rings.

I'm not saying nothing flies, but there are lots and lots of flying things, which is what magic, a magic set wants a lot of flying things. And so one of the challenges was figuring out, okay, how do we deal with this? Now, at one point, we even explored, you know, using something other than flying. We explored, the idea of the mechanic was, it was a new named mechanic. I don't remember exactly what it was called. I'll call it Evade. I don't remember exactly what it was called. But'll call it evade. I don't remember exactly what it was called. But the idea was it could be blocked only by things with this keyword or flying.

So it was kind of like horsemanship from Portal, except horsemanship could only be blocked by other horsemanship. So it became unblockable outside that environment. So we tried to make a mechanic where it could be blocked by this thing and by flying creatures. And the idea originally was, oh, we'll have a few flying creatures because there are some flying things. And then we'll use this mechanic. But eventually we realized that there were just enough flying things if we stretched a little bit. Not every flying thing is at the bottom of the pyramid.

But we were able to find things that were natural, were from Middle Earth, that did fly. And we were able to get to what we needed to get to. So we didn't need to add in whatever the evade keyword was. The other thing we noticed that was, normally when we make a world, we balance to the colors, meaning we want all five colors to show up equally. Well, when somebody else makes a world, and that's not what they're thinking about, it doesn't necessarily balance. So one of the things we learned with Lord of the Rings is,

about, it doesn't necessarily balance. So one of the things we've learned with Lord of the Rings is there are a lot of white and green things. The hobbits and the elves and the humans and there's plenty that made sense in white and green. And black and red, the orcs and the goblins, there's a lot in black and red. Blue was kind of our problem child.

There are a few magic users. There's Gandalf, there's Tormund. There's some people that use magic and magic made sense in blue. And there were some sneaky fellas and, you know, we could put some of the duplicitous people could be in blue maybe.

But it was kind of tricky. So what we ended up deciding was that the way the elves are presented in the books, philosophically made some sense in blue. So we ended up making green, elves in green and blue, so that made some sense in blue. So we ended up making green, L's in green and blue, so that it helped fill out blue. But

finding flyers and finding blue cards were definitely in adapting to make it fit to what it was. That's why we had to go deep, because you know, there are things that we used because we knew people wanted to see them, and there are things we used because magic needed them, and we wanted to find an appropriate Lord of

the Rings thing that could fill that mechanical space. Okay, the next thing we did in vision, once we sort of mapped out all the things we were looking for, was okay, what are the mechanics of the set? So we decided to look at three components of the story that we thought might lend itself to mechanics. So the three things were the ring, fellowship, and the army, the enemy army.

Okay, so for the ring, we ended up looking, so Dominaria came out. So Dominaria was codenamed Soup. So originally, that block was going to be a large set and a small set, Soup and Salad. Salad ended up becoming Core Set 2019. But for a while it was going to be that.

And we actually had designed a mechanic that we had pushed off to Salad. We had made it in Soup, realized we didn't need it for Dominaria, pushed it off to Salad. And then we never used it just because we never made Salad. So the mechanic was called Leader. So what Leader is, is you pick a, the card will enter and say, choose made salad. So the mechanic was called leader. So what leader is, is you pick a, the card will enter and say choose a leader. So you choose a leader and then it says your leader gets plus one plus one

or some ability. So I play this card, I choose my leader I could choose itself, I could choose another creature let's say I choose another creature. Okay, now that creature now gets plus one plus one. Now I draw a second card with leader. I play that card. This card says to leader, your leader gets vigilance. Now when I play the

second card I can choose a new leader. I can choose the same leader. I can just keep it the same. But I have the opportunity to change the leader if I want. And this is important because let's say they killed my leader or I just have a better choice for a leader. It allows me to change it. Then the new leader, the one I choose, has both the plus and plus one bonus from the first creature and the vigilance bonus from the second creature. So we have done things before, Soulbound jumps to mind, where you have mechanics that give an ability to another card. What we found though is if you have too many cards

giving ability to like one other card, it gets hard to track. So the idea with leader was, okay we just have one thing you're tracking, all the abilities go to that one thing, and it's easier to track. We liked it. We thought Leader was a fun mechanic. It just didn't have a slot. So it goes where mechanics go when we don't have a slot for them, into sort of a slush pile. Part of my job as head designer is keeping track of all of them.

So in early in design for Lord of the Rings, I said, okay, we were looking, we knew we wanted, there had to be one ring, right? It's the one ring. So there had to be one ring. So I said, well, what if we took the leader mechanic and changed it to a ring bearer mechanic? What if you pick your ring bearer

and then your ring bearer got bonuses? So we tried that. And the idea was, you know, the next time you played one, you could change who had the ring because the ring could change hands and we tried that. And the idea was, you know, the next time you played one you could change who had the ring because the ring could change hands and stuff like that. Eventually though, I think that the idea was it might be more flavorful if the ring was an actual equipment. So we made a version where when you played the ring bear mechanic it made the one ring, if it didn't already

exist, and then it equipped it to somebody. So that allowed you to create it if it didn't exist, and then either you could put it on somebody new, or you could leave it where it was if someone was already there. I think we went through a bunch of different abilities. The ones that we handed off, I think, were you had Ward 2, and you had... What's it called?

The ability where you can only be blacked by creatures of a power... You can't be blacked by creatures of a power higher than you. Skulk. The Skulk ability. It had some other abilities. We tried other different things. We did try having a negative ability with it, by the way. We did try saying, oh, well, you have these positive abilities, but there's one negative ability.

But the problem we found in playtest was, even if there was lots of positive things, as soon as we put one negative thing on it, people just focused on the negative thing and just wouldn't play the mechanic. And so we ended up saying, okay, having this mechanic and putting it on a creature, you know, definitely makes the creature have a lot of focus. Your opponent kind of wants to get rid of the creature.

Things about the ring will make you attack. So it puts itself in jeopardy. And so we finally decided, like, okay, look, the ring tempts you with power. It lets you do things. But it comes at a danger. You become a focus of other people, and your life is more in danger. We thought, you know what? That flavor seems good.

And, I mean, we need the gameplay to work. So, you know, having a negative ability that was a negative ability so it was more flavorful, but people not playing it, wasn't a solution that worked. And so, like I said, we did try it. So we handed off the version that was the equipment. In set design, so set design was led by Glenn, Glenn Jones. And Glenn and his team decided that it worked better as a status than as an equipment.

The problem with making an equipment was the set, for other reasons, had a lot of sacrifice outlets. And you kept sacrificing it. And the flavor wasn't quite right. It was kind of stepping on the toes of stuff we would do with a mass orcs, which I'll get to in a second. So they decided to make it a status. And they were very influenced. There's a mechanic called Venture into the Dungeon. And the way Venture into the Dungeon works is that you go into a dungeon, and that is a separate card. And then each time you venture, you get to go to a new room in the dungeon and you get another thing happens.

Another ability goes off. So the idea that came up with is what if the ring was a status but instead of you getting an effect happening, what if you, the ring bearer, it gets upgraded? That you get another ability. And so they ended up choosing to do four abilities. So sort of four stages. And the idea is that the abilities go with the ring. So if you, if the ring corrupts you, is what we end up calling it, and you move it to a new creature, the

ability levels stay. Now a new creature will get those abilities, but you don't have to go back to one again. So the first level is you become legendary and you have Skulk. Skulk, we like the idea that you're invisible, your heart does. See, the ward didn't end up

playing quite as well as we wanted, so the ward got removed. But they did add legendary. The idea is the people that have the ring become famous. It's famous to be a ringholder,

a ringbearer. And the set has some legendary stuff. We played nicely with the legendary stuff. The second thing is whenever you attack, you draw a card and discard a card. So it encourages you to attack but helps you get more cards. The third ability is when blocked at the end

of combat, sacrifice any creature that blocked you so you become dangerous to interact with. And the fourth ability is whenever you deal combat damage to an opponent, they lose three life. And so it was nice, it gets you more abilities, but it encouraged you to be more aggressive, so you would attack, so you put yourself in jeopardy. And it's something that evolved over time. Like I said, we changed the name.

It went through a bunch of different names. In the end, it was the Ring Temps you, because it's trying to get you, you're lured in by its power, and you make it more powerful. And it also says that you can just play it once and have the legendary skulk, but hey, the more you play it, the more you put it in your deck, the more powerful the ring is. The deeper you get, the more invested you get, the more powerful the ring becomes. Okay, next thing is the fellowship. So we looked at the fellowship.

The fellowship is the nine characters that join together to go on the mission to get rid of the ring, the one ring. And so the idea was maybe you can make a fellowship, and you join something, and things join your fellowship. But in the end, it ended up playing a little bit too much like the ring mechanic, and so we ended up not doing the fellowship mechanic. The third thing was the enemy army. So we liked the idea.

So we actually had something similar in the previous set. So we did a set called War of the Spark, in which the bad guy was Nicol Bolas, who was a giant dragon, and he had an army of zombies. And we needed, one of the ways, in the past that we had made, like when you make an army, we just made a lot of token creatures. But the problem with having a board full of 1-1s is it makes it more defensive than offensive. It becomes much better to scare off your opponent from attacking than attack. That really, until you can swarm your opponent and do enough damage to kill them, it's not really worth attacking with the small 1-1s. And so it ends up making it, like, ends up being more defensive than offensive. We wanted the

army to be offensive. So we came up with the idea of a mechanic called amass. So the way amass works is amass in a number. It's a keyword, a keyword action. So when you amass in, if you don't have an army token, you make a zombie army, and then you put that many plus one plus counters on it. So if I amass two and I don't have a zombie army, I make a zombie army. Now it's a two two. But let's say I amassed three now. Well, I don't have to make one, I have an army, I just put the three plus one counters on that army. So the idea of amassing your army is, the army gets bigger and bigger. So the idea, the reason you want a lot of amassed cards is not to make, not to go wide, but go tall. And once you have a creature that's big enough, it starts becoming worth attacking. And so you sort of build up to the point where my creature is big enough that I can attack for gain,

and my opponent starts having to chump the giant creature. So when we were talking about the Orc and Goblin army, we realized, oh, a mass works pretty well. A mass actually captures the flavor we want exactly. And one of the things with Universes Beyond is we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. If there's a mechanic that does the job of what we want, let's use that. You know, sometimes we might rename things if need be.

But, you know, if we have mechanics at work, why not use mechanics? We don't have to reinvent mechanics. The only problem with Amass was Amass made a black zombie army. Black wasn't a problem. But the zombie was a problem. The army are orcs and goblins. And so we went

and talked to the rules manager, and we said, does it have to be a zombie? And he says, well, if you spell it out, you know, if instead of being amassed zombies, it's amassed orcs, you know, yeah, so you say amassed orcs, you can then say, okay, it makes orcs. And the way it works, by the way, is, so amass, the old amass is now amass zombies. So if, let's

say I have an empty board and I play amass zombies 2. I make up my zombie army and I put two plus one counters on it. Now let's say I amass orcs 3. I don't make an orc army. I put three plus one counters on my zombie army and make it an orc in addition to a zombie. So now it's a zombie-orc army. That's how a mass... So a mass does work together, but in a vacuum, the only difference is a mass zombie makes a zombie army, a mass orcs makes an orc army.

If you mix and match them, you'll get both. The other thing... Oh, and the reason we made it orcs real quickly is so in the books, they don't differentiate a lot between orcs and goblins but we needed to and magic has a long history of goblins being in red so we ended up making

our goblins at least in the main set the minor red goblins the minor red creatures in the army are goblins the minor black are orcs and then the black red I think are mostly orcs I think commander decks has one minor red orc but mostly the orcs are black the goblins are red and then black red I think, are mostly orcs. I think Commander Dex has one minor red orc, but mostly the orcs are black, the goblins are red. And then black-red, I think we lean toward orcs.

So because the creature token had to be black, we didn't want to say amass black orcs. We thought that it was enough adding an orc. So we're like, okay, this army can be black. So because it was a black color army and orcs were the black creature types. The other reason we liked it is goblins have a lot more sort of typo synergies

of cards that interact with goblin, where orcs have a lot less. And if we made a goblin, we have to think about in larger formats, okay, what can you do with goblins? And we might have to weaken a little bit for its interaction with goblin effects. And we're like, oh, we don't want to do that. We'll make it sort of as good as we can make it within this biosphere. And by making it work, we can

make it stronger. Okay, the other thing that we did envision is we made use of food. The hobbits were in the story, obviously. The hobbits love food. So I think when we handed the file over, we had some individual hobbit designs that used food, but set design decided that it could be a little bit larger of a theme, and they ended up making hobbits and food thematically tied together. When I get to archetypes,

hobbits and food go together, you'll see. The one lesson we learned from Throne of Eldraine, which was the first set that had food in it, is in a vacuum, if you have a lot of food, it'll slow the game down because food gains you life and life slows the game down. But if you give alternate ways to use the food and those alternate ways are aggressive,

it can lead toward food actually causing the game to be faster rather than slower. So when we get to sort of the hobbits and the food, you'll notice that a lot of the hobbits that interact with food or different cards that interact with food tend to give you aggressive abilities, things that make you want to attack.

So food became a bigger thing. Okay, let's talk about legends. So one of the things about doing Universes Beyond is you're doing a story or an IP that is beloved by people. And one of the things that's a lot, a lot of fun is playing with the characters from the story. You know, that getting to cast Gandalf is a lot of fun.

And so we knew we wanted to have them. So Envision, our first pass, was to make one copy of every legendary creature. So we had one Gandalf and one Aragorn and one Frodo and such. And what we found was the notes we got after playtest was, originally I think we made them rare

in Mythic Rare because they were the exciting characters. But then in Limited, they just never showed up. You're like, okay, I'm seeing characters, but where's Legolas? Where's Gimli? Where's the characters I know? And so what we realized was we needed to have of the popular characters, we needed

to have a minimum of two. One so they could go at uncommon to be something that shows up in limited so that they could be draft rounds and exciting cards in limited. And then one at rare, mythic rare, so we could make fun build-arounds. So if you want to make it your commander, do something fun in a constructed format, we could build

that too. A handful of them, we made three, a couple of them. The other thing we decided was because we were making multiple versions of them, we set them at different times in the story. Obviously, you know, the Lord of the Rings is a long story and there's a lot going on.

So it allowed us to start, okay, well, this is this character at this moment in the story. And that allowed us to have different abilities and focus on different colors. And it just allowed us to start, okay, well, this is this character at this moment in the story. And that allowed us to have different abilities and focus on different colors. And it just allowed us to make cards that, like, allows you to see more of the character you love, but could show different aspects of the character, which was a lot of fun. So, yeah, there's multiple Gandalfs, but, you know, this one's Gandalf the gray. This one's Gandalf the white.

You could do, you could show different versions of things, which was really cool. Now, once we realized how many legendary creatures we wanted, white. You could show different versions of things, which was really cool. Now, once we realized how many legendary creatures we wanted, because one of the things is, and this is true of Universes Beyond in general, is look, it's fun to play with characters you know, and so we wanted a lot of them. And so it just

meant there were a lot of legendary creatures that ended up in the file. So set design decided to play into that and they made Legendary Matters one of the themes. It's in one of the archetypes and it shows up in a lot of the colors that it's like, I work well with a named character.

And so it's fun. You want to then play with named characters and named characters become more important. And then once again, trying to use things that exist, Glenn and team realized there's a mechanic that already existed called Historic that batched together legendary things and artifacts and sagas. And, you know, there's a lot of backstory to Middle-Earth. We wanted to show that off.

Sagas are a great opportunity to tell some of those stories. So sagas were in the set. Obviously, there are a lot of legendary creatures and legendary objects and stuff in the set. And there were a lot of artifacts. There were a lot of objects in the story. So Historic made a lot of sense. So there's three cards, I think, one uncommon and two rare, in the main set that have Historic. So that also got used.

So anyway, those ended up being the main mechanics. The Ring Corrupts You, amass orcs, food, legendary matters, and historic. Okay, so now let me talk a little bit about the draft archetypes. So, the idea of doing Lord of the Rings was we had two audiences.

One was magic players. We wanted to make a real fun magic set, and even if you don't know Lord of the Rings, look, it's a fun magic set, and, you know, just like any of our worlds, you get to explore the world. Middle-earth is an awesome world, and even if you don't know Lord of the Rings, look, it's a fun magic set, and, you know, like, just like any of our worlds, you get to explore the world, and Middle-earth is an awesome world, and you get to explore Middle-earth, and so even if you don't know Lord of the Rings, and you're just a magic

player, we knew this could be a very fun set for you, because it is a rich world, you know what I'm saying? It is, you know, a famous world, a chance for audience who aren't familiar with it to experience it. Actually, I'm sorry, there's three audiences. The first audience is Magic players that aren't Lord of the Rings fans. Second audience is Lord of the Rings fans that aren't Magic players.

So we're like, okay, there's a lot of people that maybe never, you know, maybe they heard of Magic, but they never decided to play, that this is the thing, because they love Lord of the Rings, that maybe pulls them in and goes, ooh, I love Lord of the Rings, let me try this. And so we wanted to make sure that we made the set, so the set was balanced in such a way

that it was on the lighter, of how complicated we could make a premiere set, from least complicated to most complicated. It was in the first half, you know. I mean, the ring tempts you is the complicated mechanic of the set. The rest of them are pretty simple. We used up all our complexity points on the ring tempts you.

And so we wanted to make sure that things were clean. So when we did draft archetypes, we stuck to the normal draft archetypes, which is the 10-2 colors. The third category, by the way, that I forgot was magic fans and Lord of the Rings fans. There are those as well. And a lot of making that group happy is execution in making really awesome magic card equivalents of flavorful things from the story, right? And, I mean, we spent a lot of time doing that. So there's a lot of deep cuts and a lot of really fun designs where we take things and just did, like, it's neat to translate something that you know into a magic card, right?

There's a design aesthetic in making a cool magic card that also feels like this thing. And we spent a lot of time doing that. That was a lot of fun. Okay, let's talk through the archetypes. Okay, white-blue was a little more control-y. It had a draw-second-card theme. There's a bunch of cards that reward you when you draw your second card.

And so, there's a bunch of things in white and blue that can help you draw the cards and drawing cards leans itself toward a little slower play so white blue has a little more of control blue black and black red are the two archetypes that play into a mass orcs blue black is the more controlling version black red is the more aggro version

so what we found with a mass is a mass does two different things one is if you play aass as one big creature, you can sort of stall until the creature gets so big that the creature can win you the game. It's a little more of a control version where I'm trying to get to the point where my creature is big enough that I can win the game with it, but I have to control the game for that to happen. The other thing is I can be very aggressive with attacking, you know, and if it dies, well,

next time I play it, I get the creature, you know, I attack my 2-2 army, and then you block and kill it, and then, well, I amass again, and I make it again. And the other nice thing is every time, if you don't have the token, you can make the token. So if you want to play it with sac effects, you can sac

your army, and then next time you amass, you'll make a brand new army that you can sac again. So amass also is very good at making tokens. So the blue-black deck is slower, it's building up, it's trying to make a giant army it's going to beat you with. The black-red is more just

you're constantly attacking with your army, it's going to die a lot of times, maybe you're sacking it to sack effects, but you keep bringing it back and keep attacking with it. It allows you to have a more aggressive strategy. Okay, red-green is a ramp deck. Red and green are the two colors that are best at producing

mana, and it plays as a power matters theme where you want to have larger creatures. That's a common red-green theme. This environment has some larger creatures. The Ents, which are the tree folk are very big and are in green

so the idea of this one is you're ramping up, you're playing big creatures and then you're going to win with the big creatures Green White is the Hobbit food deck that I talked about earlier so the idea of this is it's Hobbits Hobbits have a lot of food

Hobbits are a little on the smaller side because they're Hobbits, they're smaller but the food gives them ways to boost themselves and make them stronger in combat. And so the idea is, it is sort of an aggro deck. It's funny, red, white, and white, green swapped a little bit. White, green is a little more aggro than normal, and red, white is more go-wide than normal. I'll get to red, white in a second.

But the idea is, you're playing lots of hobbits and supporting characters, you know, some humans and some elves, and then you are using your food mostly to be more aggressive in your attack, to make a more, to attack better. Next up is white-black. White-black is the legendary matters archetype. So I talked about how we wanted to have a bunch of legendary matters in it. White-black is nice because you got a bunch of the good guys

and a bunch of the bad guys. You can mix and match them, and it's just fun. It is definitely more of a slower deck, but it takes advantage of a lot of the synergies you have with your different legendary creatures. And the legendary creatures do a lot of cool things. Next up is blue-red. Blue-red is a Tempo Spells Matter deck.

This is very common for Blue-Red. It plays into the magic. Lord of the Rings has some magic users that cast spells and stuff, and it plays into that theme. And so it's just making use of the spells in a tempo. Once again, a lot of these archetypes play into

strengths of the colors normally have. Blue-Red spells tempo is a pretty good Blue-Red deck, a very normal Blue-Red deck, and we found themes to play into strengths of the colors normally have. Blue-Red Spells Tempo is a pretty good blue-red deck, a very normal blue-red deck, and we found themes to play into it to do that. Black-Green is a graveyard recursion deck. It basically helps you get back things from the graveyard. It's another common black-green thing.

It's the other archetype that makes use of food. It has a bunch of sac effects, especially in black, and so it allows you to sac things and bring them back and reuse them. And it's a sort of attrition-based deck. Once again, playing into the... A lot of this was introducing things to new players, because some Lord of the Rings fans. And so we definitely stuck to a lot of classics in some of the archetypes.

Next up is red-white. Well, red-white goes a little bit different. Normally red-white is a little more aggro. Green-white plays that role in this set. Red-white is go wide. The reason for that is the orcs and the goblins, which, by the way, things that care about orcs tend to care about orcs and goblins. You know, when we do typo themes that care about the orcs, they care about the orcs and the goblins.

We sort of batch them together in the set. And the contrast to the orc army that goes tall, we decided that humans would go wide. So there's a lot of individual humans. There's a lot of small creatures. And there's some bigger creatures. And there's some token making. But the idea is if you're going to play red-white,

you're just going to make lots of humans and human allies. And then go wide and swarm with a wide deck. So green-white normally in default is the go-wide colors, and red-white is the aggro colors. We swapped them up a little bit just for flavor made sense. We also like the humans being in red and white. We tried to, for all the different

characters, put them in multiple. So elves were green and blue. Goblins, I'm sorry. Goblins were in red. Orcs were in black. We put hobbits in green and white So it was fun To find things That put them in different colors

So humans ended up In red and white And so That is that deck And then finally Green and blue Like I said Is the elf deck

The elves have a Scry matter theme And so there's a bunch Of scrying And interacting with scrying That sort of plays In some of the flavor Of the elves

Yeah and it's Once again A little bit of a slower deck scrying and interacting with scrying that sort of plays into the flavor of the elves. Yeah, and it's, once again, a little bit of a slower deck, as green-blue often is. So those were the archetypes. Like I said, one of the things that was really important for us in making the set was this was our first Universes Beyond that was going to be drafted. We wanted to make a fun draft environment that if you

love Lord of the Rings and you love drafting, now you get them together. You get a common... Like I said, we put a lot of Legend cards in uncommon so you'll get to see them. It's just a lot of fun seeing all the different component pieces. One of the things Magic does really well is you get to mix

and match things in fun and interesting ways. It's neat to take elements that you know and that are fun for you from Lord of the Rings and mix and match them together. So anyway, that, my friends, is the story of the design of Lord of the Rings. I want to say that it was a lot of fun to work on. You know, Lord of the Rings, just a little history here. Modern fantasy owes so much to Lord of the Rings. And, you know, magic as a, you know, part of that itself, magic owes a lot to Lord of the Rings. And so it was very fun sort of having a chance to go back and visit something that was so influential in what

magic was and so that was a lot of fun and so um if you are uh a magic fan that does not lord of the rings try it out um it is like we built a world but it's this amazing world that's really awesome and cool just we didn't build it but um if you enjoy seeing any new world, you get to come and you get to explore and see it. And Middle Earth is amazing. There's all sorts of cool things and our art team did an amazing job with all the visuals. And anyway, if you're a Magic player that doesn't know

Lord of the Rings, come try it out. It's an amazing world. If you're a Lord of the Rings fan that doesn't know Magic, A, I'm not quite sure how you got to this podcast, but thanks for joining me. But give it a try. Magic is an awesome, awesome game, and it really does

a great job of bringing Lord of the Rings. We spent so much time and energy making it, you know, oozing Lord of the Rings. And so if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, this definitely is something that I think you will enjoy. It's a game you'll enjoy. Magic is an awesome game. So for the Lord of the Rings. And so if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, this definitely is something that I think you will enjoy. It's a game you'll enjoy. Magic is an awesome game. So for the Lord

of the Rings and Magic fans, I don't think I have to sell you on this, but it's your two loves coming together. It's Magic and Lord of the Rings together. So that's really exciting. So anyway, I'm super happy with all the work we did. A lot of people spent a lot of time. Like I said, we spent a little longer on this than a normal set.

We really wanted to make sure we got it right. You know, we hold Lord of the Rings in a warm spot in our house, in our heart, and we wanted to do right by it, and I think we did. So anyway, guys, that is my story, and I'm now here in the parking lot. So as we all know, that is the end of my drive to work. But instead of talking magic and Lord of the Rings, it is time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.