Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1049: Mapping

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

In this podcast, I talk about the concept of "mapping" and how we use it to design Magic sets.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about an effect we call mapping. And what that means is people ask all the time, okay, you're going to make a new set. How do you decide what goes in the set? How do you decide what order you add things to the set? You know, what is the process of making a set? And so there's a technique called mapping that I want to talk about and explain sort of how we use it and the general philosophy behind it. So essentially the idea of any set is you want to get a theme, some mechanics,

you know, you want some cycles, you want, you know, you just want to get a variety of different components that's going to add up together to make a full set. But one of the big questions is, well, like, you can't add it all at once, right? The nature of building a set is not, I independently get all the pieces and then I put them all at once. What happens is I have to figure out sort of, there's an order by which we put a set together, by which we sort of look at, we look at the set. And we call it mapping because the idea is, let's say I'm making a map of the sets. I have to sort of like, I have to draw something first.

I have to put something, something has to go on the map first. And then depending on what you put on the map, other things will get built around it. And that is, the basic idea is that we have to sort of think out what we're doing. That we have to think out what wants to be in the set. So here is, in general, the way it works. Different sets will work differently. You know, bottom-up and top-down sets definitely have a little different avenue to them of how you want to map them. So let me talk a little bit about how you map a bottom-up set and then how you map a

top-down set. They're similar. There's a lot of overarching things, but where you start can be slightly different. So the idea on a bottom-up set is there's some mechanical element that I'm drawn to. Ravnica is a good example of a bottom-up set where the set was like, we want to make a gold set, or at the time, a gold block. We want a multicolor block. And I was trying hard not to be invasion.

So the goal was, the goal of the set that I started out with was make a multicolor set slash block that is different than the previous one we made, which was invasion. And so I started with this sort of goal that was very mechanical in nature. How do I make that happen? And, you know, I figured out that, okay, I'm going to care about two color because the last goal had been about five colors. So I started with the premise of let's figure out how to care about two color. What does that mean? You know, I made the decision to do all 10 two color pairs. So when you start with bottom up, really what you're starting with is

what is the mechanical core? And this is a big, important idea of mapping is you want to understand your core. What is the set about? You know, that whenever you start designing a set, it needs to be about something, right? We don't just start trying to say, what's it going to be? I don't know. We always want to start with some vantage point. You know, this is going to be a set about blah.

Now, blah can shift, it can change, but when you first start setting, there has to be something that the set is. And so there always is a focal point. With a mechanical bottom-up set, so there always is a focal point. With a mechanical bottom-up set, usually there's a mechanical focal point. Okay, I want to care about two-color gold cards. That's Ravnica.

And so you sort of say, okay, I want to care about this thing. Now, on a top-down set, usually the starting-off point is you're trying to capture the flavor of something. Oh, it's a gothic horror world. It's Greek world. It's fairytale world. And in a top down, usually you want to figure out sort of your core is I want to make mechanics that together create the sense of what this is. Like a bottom-up set is like,

I'm going to get mechanics that reinforce this mechanical theme. Top-down, I'm going to get mechanics that reinforce this flavor theme. But the mechanics put together should feel like that. Yeah, and one of the things you want to do early on when mapping is you want to figure out your mechanics. So I will use Innistrad as my example here. So Innistrad, we knew we were doing gothic horror. So when we start mapping out the set, it's like, okay, what does it mean?

What does the horror genre mean? What will you expect to see? And that's when we got the idea of, well, there has to be monsters. And it has to be scary. And death has to matter in some way. You know, the graveyard has to matter in some way. You know, the graveyard has to matter in some way. So basically, when we were doing top-down, the component pieces, the mechanics you're getting,

are things that are tied together. So like in Innistrad, monsters and fear and graveyard and death. Those are like themes we were playing with. Okay, what does that mean? What exactly does monsters mean? What does fear mean? What does graveyard mean? Although graveyard at least has a more mechanical element to it.

What does death mean? And so early on, so in exploratory, we figure our basic themes and we start figuring out what that means. So, for example, when I say monsters, I'm like, well, okay, if I tell you that the deck has monsters in it, what is that going to mean? Like, oh, that's probably creature types. You know, you're going to put together, you know, if you're making a zombie deck, well, you're going to want to have a lot of zombies in your deck. If you're making a vampire deck, you want a lot of vampires in your deck. So we realized that there was a typo component, that monsters meant a typo component. You know, caring about death, we're like, okay, well, you know, death in the game is dying. What if we cared about dying? What if death matters?

You know, for Graveyard, it's like, okay, well, what if, you know, let's look at all the mechanics we've done in the Graveyard. Flashback was one that we really liked that was a really good Graveyard thing. And then Fear, Fear was like, is there some style of play in which the opponent, like, sees something coming, but it hasn't happened yet. And we got down that path into double-faced cards.

I mean, we got there originally exploring how to do werewolves, but essentially we realized that there's something fun of, I'm this more innocent thing, I'm a scary thing, and that your opponent worrying about the scary thing coming was one of the things that could definitely make fear happen. We also realized, like, with Morbid, which was our death mechanic, that it made death scarier. So, like, there's a lot of little things we could do to sort of bring up fear. With the bottom-up thing, it's a little more of saying, okay, I want to do, you know,

the mechanics I'm figuring out is, what am I doing? How am I making this matter? I'm figuring out is, what am I doing? How am I making this matter? And that's a good example where in trying to understand how to make two color matter, I mean, that's the point where we came up with hybrid. It's where we liked the idea of the mega cycles of like cycles running through all ten color pairs. And that's when Brady Daubermuth came up with the idea of the guilds. And so we latched onto that pretty early. And once we latched onto that pretty early.

And once we latched onto that, that sort of gave a structure of, well, what if each guild had a mechanic? What if we had a mechanic? And then we started figuring out the flavor of the guilds, which then dictated sort of where we went. So anyway, let me back up a little bit. Okay, so mapping, you figure out your core idea. You know, if it's bottom-up, it's usually a mechanical core idea. If it's top down, it's usually a flavor core idea.

And say, okay, this is the thing I'm doing. I'm doing this kind of set. I'm making a two-color gold set. I'm making a top-down gothic horror set. You know, you figure out, you get your angle. And then, once you understand the core, the core leads you to the mechanics that you want. As I was explaining like with Innistrad and Ravnica. Okay, but you can't do all your mechanics at once.

You can spend a little bit of time playing with mechanics, exploring mechanics, trying different things. But at some point, you have to pick a mechanic to go first. So that's an important part of mapping. You don't map all at once. You map in order. You map one at a time. And the reason for that is when you're building a set, each thing you put in the set

is going to ask things of the structure of the set. So for example, I'll just use Innistrad here. Let's say I say, okay, I want monsters to matter, which means I want monster typal. That now says to me, okay, well in order for typal to work, you're going to have to have a certain as-fan of that creature type. And when I say monsters, it's not a singular thing. It's a whole bunch of monsters. You know, we want vampires and werewolves and zombies and ghosts or spirits.

That's going to start taking some shape. So, for example, that was one of the very first things we did in Innistrad, was understand the monsters. And then once we realized the monsters were a typo that then dictates the things about it. And that's why you pick something to go first. The thing you pick is going to have influence on what you're doing.

So with Innistrad, monster typo, I realized that I wanted the monsters to be in multiple colors because what we've learned from the past is when typo is only in one color it gets a little too focused the asphine so high that that's really all the color can be but if you spread it over two colors you give yourself a little more shapes of what people can can build

with it and in constructed they can build mono color of either of the two colors or they can build multi-color of the two colors combined And so we realized that we wanted to have, you know, if we're going to make a typo theme, we wanted to be in two colors. Now, originally when we first built them, there weren't four monsters. There were three monsters. There were vampires, werewolves, and zombies. And the first thing we realized is we start to, so, okay, so I'm mapping the set. I say I want monster typo.

That's important. So you put your first thing in the set and then you figure out what that means. How does that influence things? How does that shape the set? What does the structure have to do to be able to have that component? So, for example, okay, I want monster typo. The first thing I think about is, okay, where do the monsters go? And in a vacuum, the monsters want to be black. They lean towards black. Just the essence of what black magic is, leans

like, in a set in which you just had a tiny component that was this. You know, your vampires and your werewolves and your zombies would show up in black. Vampires and zombies, for example, are both characteristic races that are black. At the time, we hadn't done a lot of werewolves, but the three we had done were all black. But you realize early on, like, okay, I just can't make a set where everything's black. I need to be able to spread things out. So the question I asked is, okay, if each one of these could be another color, what would the second color be? if each one of these could be another color, what would the second color be?

And we realized that zombies can be made, kind of like Frankenstein, and that leaned toward science, and that leaned toward blue. We realized that vampires, you know, they're out to suck your blood, and there definitely is a wild side to vampires. And we realized we could push toward red. And then with werewolves, we realized that there is sort of a you know, a sickling nature that felt very green. So

we had black, blue, black, red, black, green. But as we looked at it, we realized that having the monster center in black, we want the whole world to feel like monsters. We want the whole world to feel like, you know.

We did realize we needed some humans. One of the things we realized early on is the monsters we wanted to do shared the trait that they are all once human. Werewolves and vampires and zombies all started as human before they became the monster that they are. And so we knew we needed humans. And then once we did that, and, you know, magic has five colors, so four does not work really great, where five works wonderfully. So once we started realizing what we were doing, we said,

okay, let's figure out, we probably need a fifth thing. And so we said, okay, one of these has to not be black. We decided that werewolves flavorfully can make sense in red. There's a lot about losing, you know, that the werewolf is you losing your ambition. I'm sorry, losing, like, not ambitions, losing your restraint. They become a werewolf. You just act on your, you know, your wildest impulses and stuff. And so we said, okay, we think we can make a werewolf red.

So we made werewolves red-green, vampires black-red, and zombies black-blue. Then we said, okay, we want to do humans. Humans should be base white. We want humans to be white-green or white-blue. We then looked for the fourth monster that made sense. We ended up with ghosts or spirits.

And white-blue made more sense for spirits because spirits wanted to fly. And white and blue are king of flying. We're white and green. So we made white-green human. But anyway, my point of this, since we're talking about mapping today, is we took one component of the set

and then figured that out. In Ravnica, what happened was I made some tools like hybrid and we were figuring out, we had a play test where it had all 10 two-color pairs and hybrid and just overwhelmed everybody. So I realized that I needed to solve, the core thing was we have all the colors and I realized we needed to solve that. When Brady came up with the idea of the guilds, it inspired me to say, okay, let's build around these guilds, meaning let's give each two-color pair a mechanical identity. And then I came up with the idea

of what I call the pie method, which is, what if we divvied this up? It was large, small, small with the blocks. So what if we did four, then three, then three? So kind of inspired by the idea of what if each color pair had its own mechanical identity? That really is what drove me.

It's what got us to guilds. And then once guilds happened, I just further embraced that. And so the idea was, how do we bring to life each one of these two color pairs? And then once we did that, like, the structure of the whole block actually fell out. We did the pie method, we divvied them up, and also that's when we realized, oh, well, if I want each color

pair to have an identity, what if our mechanical, our mechanics are run through the color pair? And if I really want you to say, oh, well, so the first set had red-white, which is Boros, had black-green, which is Golgari. It had, let's see, what else did it have? It had Golgari and Arachnos. It had the Dimir, blue-black, and it had Selesnya, white-green.

So first off, there was some balancing to do. When you have four, the colors don't match up. Red and blue each were shy something. So, in order to make the structure, we had to add extra red and blue. But also, the point is, we mapped out the idea of identities, that each color paired its own identity, its own flavorful identity and its own mechanical identity. And in order to have its own mechanical identity, that meant that it had to have a keyword. We wanted each, well, I mean, didn't have to, but that's the way we structured it, is each guild, each color combination would

have its own mechanic. So in each of these cases, we started by, we had a theme, we had a focus, but then we say, okay, what is this about? And then we have to pick a mechanical execution to go first. Because once we pick that one thing, it's going to shape the set. And that means that the future things will be informed by that, right? Okay, so we put the typo in the set. And once we had the typo in the set, kind of like we did when we had the guilds in the set, I said, okay, I want to bring each of them to life. I want zombies to feel like zombies and vampires to feel like vampires and werewolves to feel like werewolves.

Zombies and vampires were a little bit easier. They were somewhat shaped by bit easier they were somewhat shaped by the colors they were in like if I'm, it's not just zombies it's black blue zombies, I have to bring black blue zombies, I have to bring red black vampires to life it wasn't, we decided

to start with the werewolves so here's another sort of key element to mapping, when you're exploring something you want to explore the thing that needs the most space and usually is the newest. Meaning,

when you're trying to fit in something you've done before, where you have experience on it, you have a lot more knowledge of how to fit it in. For example, in Indusrod, we decided we wanted to bring back flashback.

Well, flashback had come pretty late in the process. We've, you know, we had sets that had done flashback. And so we had a lot of knowledge of flashback. So when I'm, you know, playing in the theme that we have experience with, that I understand, and which is a pretty flexible theme, that just doesn't need to come early and in some ways you want to leave your more flexible things for later because what happens is as you start mapping out your set you start taking up space because certain things need certain structural needs so example, in Innistrad,

after we mapped out monster typo and we made the ally color pairs, we then went to figure out what each of the typo, each creature type, meant. What do humans mean? What do spirits mean?

What do vampires mean? And it was very clear that of those, that werewolf was the most complicated. Okay, we need to convey, well, what makes werewolves werewolves? Well, they're humans, and they turn into werewolves, and they turn back into humans. How do we do that? Now, we had done transformational designs before, but it definitely was an ask that was a little bit bigger. And so when mapping out the set, I did it early. And so what happened was we tried a bunch of crazy things,

and one of them, double-faced cards, ended up being the right answer. Double-faced cards, we had done them in a different game called Duel Masters. So we knew we could print them. But still, even that said, it was a lot. Just because

another game does double-faced cards doesn't mean we can do double-faced cards necessarily. Maybe there's something about the nature of that other thing that we don't do. Or maybe that was a small enough game it could be printed at one plant and one printed plant can do it but magic's big enough it can't be, it has to be done at multiple plants

so just because you've done something before doesn't mean you can do it again but what it meant was it was something big that we had to understand and so we spent a lot of time saying, okay, let's say we want to do double-faced werewolves, that means we now have the tool for the rest of the set, and it got us into our dark transformation theme. Okay, what if we take things and the things can change? Now, some of the transformation, not all of it was innocent into monster. A lot of it was. But some of it also was like, oh,

looking for other transformations that were, hit the trope space. You know, oh, it's a vampire that turns into a bat. That's very tropey. And so what we did is we did a lot of things to sort of figure out, okay, we have this mechanic. What do we need to do with it? And also, for example, early on, the idea was, okay, what if you have a card in your deck you cast?

And when you cast this card, you go get the double-faced card that isn't in your deck. And we had to talk to the printers and stuff, and eventually the printers said, oh, we don't have the technology where card A and card B can always be in the same pack together. I think they said we can do it like 90% of the time, but that wasn't good enough. And so we had to figure out how to do them. We ended up making them things that went in your deck, and we had to come up with to do them. We ended up making them things that went in your deck. We had to come up with a checklist card and stuff like that.

But the idea when you're mapping out your set is you want to pick, each time you're mapping out the next component, you want to pick the thing that A, you think is most like, I'll give you the factors. You want to pick the thing that is very important to the set as far as it's going to create a key identity.

You want to pick things that are complicated, that need the freedom of not being locked in. And you want to pick the things that are going to impact the structure the most. Being complicated, impacting the structure, usually interconnect, not always, but they often do. And so the idea is figuring out sort of where you're going from there. Now, Ravnica was interesting.

Ravnica, because it was very, each component went in its own place. The challenge of Ravnica was that we needed to figure out what the flavor was of each of our four guilds that were in Ravnica. But the other thing was they needed to play nicely together. And what that meant was green, white, and black all overlapped. That if I pick up a green card, ooh, I could be playing Selesnya, or I could be playing Golgari. And that meant we had to

make sure that whatever our themes were, there was connections in between. Nowadays, when we do Ravnicassettes, we do five things rather than four. Five is always easier than four. And in five, that means every color has an overlap between two factions.

And so part of figuring out what the factions do is understanding that between them, that there needs to be mechanical cohesion between them. The easiest way to do that is to have your mechanics connect where they can or be synergistic where you can. But when you're doing five, it's tricky, right? Because if I pick mechanic one, okay, I can pick the next two mechanics that map to it. And then the next two mechanics,

they're going to map to the existing mechanic, but then they're going to meet a mechanic that we don't know yet. And that the last, you know, so I pick mechanic A. I can pick B and C, and I can understand how they connect to A. But D and E are going to connect to each other and have to connect to B and C.

And so it gets more complicated. And this is one of the reasons when mapping, you figure out what matters most. And this is sort of a key element to doing mapping, is you have to prioritize the importance. In the set, which is more important, A or B? And if A is more important, you map A first. Because mapping A first is going to shape what B can be. Because A is going to have demands and needs. It's going to have to do things. And that is going to change the structure. Now, sometimes, Now, sometimes, and this is oftentimes, I guess I should say, kind of what you want to do is map out what's important.

And then what the hole that remains kind of can influence you of what your later mechanics might be. You don't always figure all your mechanics first. Usually what you do is you figure out your most important mechanic and really figure out what role that takes. What space is that going to take? For example, once we figured out that we liked double-faced cards for Innistrad, we wanted to make sure that it both required the most space and it was the newest and the most misunderstood, but not understood because we hadn't done it.

And so we had to spend a lot of time understanding what that was. And not just InDesign. I had to go to, I mean, now I'd go to an architect. They didn't exist in Innistrad. But I need to go to people that can help me with, can we print this? Can we lay it out? Is there a different frame?

Is there weird rules? You have to go to the rules manager. And so normally you figure out the splashy thing first. I mean, sorry. Normally you figure out the complex, important thing first. That often is the splashy thing. It's not always. And then once you figure out that, once you figure out your first mechanic,

then you figure out your second mechanic. figure out that, once you figure out your first mechanic, then you figure out your second mechanic. So within Ashrod, we figured out werewolves first, because werewolves took up the most amount of space. And in figuring out werewolves, we got to double-face cards.

And double-face cards were so cool that it spread beyond just werewolves. Yeah, the core of it was werewolves, but it allowed us to do stuff in other colors to play up other elements. And it really reinforces dark transformation theme that we liked. Then what we realized was, we realized, like, we looked at the death in the graveyard. We realized early on that flashback made a lot of sense for graveyard. But what I knew was I had was I had worked with, I had done Odyssey where flashback premiered.

We'd done Odyssey in all three sets there. We'd done flashback in Time Spiral Block. We had done flashback in some places. I had worked with flashback. So I was very confident with flashback. I knew that flashback was a well-defined space. It was pretty flexible of a mechanic. So I didn't worry about flashback yet.

I said, okay, let me figure out, morbid is where we went next. Because the idea was, we want to care about death. How do we care about death? We got to the idea of, well, what if dying matters? We liked how that played into the fear theme.

We liked how that mechanically made a lot of sense. But what does morbid mean? Okay, I'm putting Morbid in my set. How does that impact things? Well, things dying are going to matter. That's going to change the nature of combat works. And I think this was

a good thing, but it's definitely going to encourage more attacking, where the only reason you're attacking is you want to die. Right? Often, in Magic, it's not often that you attack and you want your opponent to block and kill your creature. That doesn't happen a lot in normal magic. But in this thing, all of a sudden, there's a reason why

blocking your opponent's creature and killing it might be bad. Maybe they want me to do that. Maybe there's a morbid spell in their hand. The other thing that you always have to look at, by the way, is where the mechanics lie. One of the things when you're mapping out you have to keep in mind is, I need to have the mechanics run through all the set. If you get a mechanic that's very permanent-based, that might mean later on you need to do something that's more spell-based, or vice versa.

If it's spell-based, later on, you want to make sure that you have space for everything, and so you need to do something that's more spell based or vice versa spell based later on I mean you know you want to make sure that you have space for everything and so you need you need to spread things out so you really want to map and figure out not just what colors or what card types or what you like you want to figure out where things are sitting so that you understand what is left a lot of mapping is not just filling in the space you have, but understanding what you're creating and what holes you're making in the set. Another thing that's important, and this is key to mapping, is there are things every set needs. For example, you need something to do with your mana. Like, the nature of magic is, I'm going to be growing in mana over the game, and I'm going to be growing in mana over the game and I'm going to be casting my spells, but at some point I'm going to run out of cards. Like I have less and less cards that the game

goes on. So later on in the game, I'm going to have more mana than cards to spend them on. So I want some avenue for you to spend your mana. That's a mana sink is what we call it. So you want, the set needs some kind of mana sink. Maybe that is activated abilities. Maybe you have like monstrosity or something. You know, something that sits on the cards. Maybe it's like kicker where, you know, the spells get better

if you spend extra mana. You know, in Innistrad, flashback was our mana sink because, you know, late game, oh, well, if I have extra mana, I can flash things back. But you, and you want to, like, you need a mana sink, you want

card flow, you want to make sure there's some combat relevance. What about combat and, you know, how is combat different here? So you want to have elements. So as you're mapping out your things, you want to think about, like, part of making sets and committing to things is understanding the impact on the structure,

but also understanding what general components is it doing. And a normal element that'll happen late in design is as you start filling in your map, your set, with things that you know, it also shows what you're missing. It's very common, for example, to be late in the process and go, oh, we don't have our mana sink yet. Okay, we still need a third mechanic. Oh, and so here's another very common thing that'll happen when you're mapping. Okay, I put stuff in the set, and I'm like, okay, I like what I have in my set. What am I missing? Oh, I'm missing a instant and sorcery. I'm missing a mana sync. I'm missing maybe, for example,

certain colors. Like, oh, I don't have the archetype for red or green yet, you know, red and green yet. So, you know, you have all these things that the set has to be. And so as you start putting things in and committing to things and shaping the set around those things, not only do you commit what's there, but it says what's not there. And so part of mapping things late in design is figuring out what's missing, and that can inform you. Now, sometimes,

Innistrad was a good example where I figured out early on that we wanted flashback. I knew flashback was flexible, so I didn't have to design. Basically, I held back flashback, and then once we got to it i let flashback fill the space that i needed to um because i'd sort of been understanding the flashback was coming and knowing the flashback is super flexible oftentimes what happens though uh is you don't

know what your last mechanic is and you say okay, okay, I'm going to let the parameters of what the set is help me look at, like, I'm still searching for my last mechanic. Okay, what's missing? And that's another big thing to mapping. When you map out your set, you both know what you have, and you know what you don't have. And so a lot of times the later mechanics are a means by which to address the things you're missing.

And this is another point, restrictions free creativity, as I like to say. If I say make a mechanic, okay, that's pretty loosey-goosey. But if I say, okay, here's what I need. I need a mechanic that is on Instants and Sorceries, and it's a mana sink, and it's going to lean to being white and blue.

I start doing that stuff. So, for example, with Ravnica, I needed to figure out, I and my team, we needed to figure out what the mechanics were for each guild. And we needed those mechanics to be synergistic between each other. So we had to figure out, like, in Ravnica's case, what was the white, black, and green theme that tied their guilds together. But we also had to say, hey, between these, am I hitting the beats I have to hit?

Is one of my mechanics something that will do my mana sinking? Or, sometimes, does mana sinking, is it not answered by the mechanics, and I have to make more individual cards that solve that problem? You know, is mana flow something that's solved by mechanics? So mana flow is, or sorry, not mana flow, card flow. Card flow is making sure that you're getting to the cards you need to get to. And usually that is about having extra means and ways to do that. And so the cool thing about building a faction set is you can...

Kind of in the way we did the monsters. Like the way, what's the monsters that's most important to get right was werewolves. Mostly what we did in Ravnica is we made a whole bunch of mechanics for each guild. Okay, what could be the Golgari mechanic? What could be the Rakdos mechanic? What could be the Selesny mechanic? And what we found is we would find the mechanic that we had the most, like we thought did the best job of just really, really being what it wanted to be.

And the mechanic that we thought could hold the most weight. So, for example, that mechanic for Ravnica was Convoke. Convoke was a mechanic that we got early that we had the most confidence in. Richard, ironically, made it originally for Rakdos, but we realized it flavorfully made more sense in Selesnya since it was about all working together and stuff. And that started dictating sort of what else we needed.

Interestingly, like in Ravnica, the Troubled Child ended up being Golgari. But a lot of the challenge of Golgari was not just finding a mechanic that made sense as Golgari, but finding a mechanic that fit the larger themes that we were doing. And so what happens is as you map the set, early on, you have the flexibility.

So you can do whatever you want to do. But later on, you start losing the flexibility. You start being defined by sort of what the file needs, what the structure needs. And so the later stuff, on some level, it can be very freeing because you know what you need. But it also can be a challenge. And that's why we make a lot of mechanics that don't end up, like, good mechanics that don't end up getting in the set.

And the reason is, they're good in a vacuum, but they're not necessarily giving what the set needs. And that is a lot of how you build out your set, is when you're mapping it, you want to make sure that you're hitting the things the set needs with the later stuff. So early on, you pick the most important, hardest to do things. You start putting that in the set. It'll start shaping what the set is. You add in things that then reinforce the things you're building. And then you get to the point

where I have what I'm missing. And the final things you pick are reinforcing the things that you're missing. And that, my friends, is how you map. It's how you map out a set. And like I said, the premise to mapping at its core is figuring out what matters most, figuring out priorities, and figuring out what impact things have. So it's sort of prioritizing your things, and then exploring what it means when you use it, and then understanding the ramifications on what future things have to be. And then as you get more and more in your set, it's more about meeting the restraints and meeting the restrictions,

and complementing what's already there. In a way, I hope you guys enjoyed this. It was definitely something that I hope you guys enjoyed this. It was definitely something that I thought was a cool idea that I had not talked about. We've made this many podcasts, finding things that we haven't talked about are challenging.

But I realized today that I had not talked about mapping. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's talk. But I am now at Wizards. 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. I'll see you guys next time.