Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1065: Wilds of Eldraine Set Design with Ian Duke

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

In this podcast, I discuss Wilds of Eldraine set design with Ian Duke, the set's lead set designer.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition. So today I have Ian Duke here. He was the set lead for Wilds of Eldraine, and we're going to talk all about Wilds of Eldraine. Hey, Ian. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so last week I talked with Chris Mooney all about the vision design. So we're going to pick up our story at the beginning of set design. Okay, so let me talk about, I'm going to just bring components, and then we're going to talk about how you adapted those components.

How does that sound? Sounds great. Okay, so let's start with what I consider the heart of the design, roles. So when roles were handed over, they were tokens. They were Aura tokens. But we handed over, I think, 10 plus. There were a lot of them, more so than ended up in the set. So how did you handle tokens?

Roll tokens. Yeah, so we knew we wanted rolls to be a major part of the set. We knew that having enchantment aura tokens was a new thing to Magic, largely speaking, especially having this many in the same set. And we knew they were kind of a new thing to magic, largely speaking, especially having this many in the same set. And we knew they were kind of a central quality to the set. They interacted with a lot of the different mechanics and different limited archetypes. So we knew they would be a core thing, but there were a couple big open questions. And some of those questions included how many roles should there be? What should those roles be? What are they representing?

And then sort of how powerful should they be? What sorts of things should they be doing? How disparate should the power level of the different roles be? And these were all known questions in the sense that, you know, when Mark and Chris handed off to me, we kind of knew that all these things would be in flux throughout the process. So it was the job of myself and my team to figure out, you know, these questions, how many roles should there be? What should they do? All that sort of thing. Okay, so let's start by tackling the power level issue you talked about. So there's two ways to do roles, one of which is they're all different power levels, meaning if you cast the role, like, by itself, it would cost a different amount of mana,

or they're all the same, and basically there's a thin band of power so that they're all in the same band how did you figure out which of those two paths to take uh mostly through trial and error i think the big question is that um there's a certain amount of inherent power in creating a role because you are creating a permanent you're having something enter the battlefield and then you can use that role for other purposes like sacrificing it, like getting credit for an enchantment entering the battlefield and things like that. So there's kind of this base power level even before you get into what the role does of just creating the role is already doing something for you and then on top of that you know how powerful the role itself is

can kind of scale up and down. So early on we experimented with some that were much more powerful than others. I can't think of any exact examples off the top of my head. But as we iterated on it, we found that if we wanted to tune things around that sort of basic power level of the role being an enchantment permanent itself, you know, something that you could use as sacrifice fodder or get credit for enchantment triggers, we decided over time that we wanted them to be more in that sort of narrower band of power that you were describing. And that way we could tune everything around each of the roles kind of behaving similarly as it interacts with all the different set mechanics. So what we decided to do

was figure out how we could have a variety in what the different roles were doing in different ways, but have them all be relatively similar in power level. And so one example of that is several of the roles that appear frequently at the common level for limited play. Each give a creature plus one, plus one, and then a little bonus on top of that, like scry one when you attack or ward one, or also giving trample, things like that. So it's easy to see that those three examples are all in a similar power level to each other. That's not to say that they're all identical in power level, but we wanted to kind of narrow down the gap a little bit compared to how things handed off in Vision. Yeah, another thing that was a big deal for us in Vision that I know you guys had to care about was

we wanted the auras to go on different creatures, right? We didn't want all of them to want to go on the same creature. We wanted, like, different auras were better when used in different ways how did you guys handle that yeah a couple things there so we we wanted to divide up the the roles into kind of almost a little bit of a color pie um in the sense that uh you know like for example white and green are good at making the royal role the sorcerer role appears more in blue and so on we want to make sure that each color had representation among the roles that it could create and also that the roles kind of felt flavorfully embedded in the color pie and locked into kind of what that color wanted to do.

For example, the wicked role, you know, causing loss of life is something that works really well in the black-red deck. So in that sense, they kind of each have their own identity within the colors and within what's going on in the different strategiesred deck. So in that sense, they kind of each have their own identity within the colors and within what's going on in the different strategies throughout the set. Now, how did you figure out the number? I mean, like I said, we handed over, I think there were 10 in the handoff document, which I posted online, by the way,

for people who wanted to see. Part one went up this week, and part two should go up next week. So anyway. The number of rolls was also something we iterated on. Like you said, we started a little bit high, knowing that we might want to come down over time. And we did find that we did want to come down a little bit over time.

Part of the reason for coming down in the number a little bit of it was that sort of standardizing the power level of them a little bit or bringing them more into that kind of narrower power level band. But the other big thing was just the complexity and sort of the mental load that they took on. We knew that roles were going to be, you know, one of the central mechanics of the set, but also a place where we were sort of spending more of our complexity points, if you will, in the sense that there's a little bit more to learn with roles than there are with the other mechanics. So we knew it would take some time to learn what each of the different roles do and if we had too many then that that sort of ramp up period of learning what's going on in the set would take a little bit too long um so we found

that six uh six roles in the main set and i think there's one or maybe two more in the in the commander set was about the right number where you felt like there was variety you felt like the roles were representing different characters and doing different things but also it wasn't too many to learn all at once it wasn't too overall mentally taxing so we kind of hit the sweet spot there yeah another thing we did envision is i think we stretched a little more and tried more different things for example i think we handed over some roles that had tap ability you know that granted tap abilities and i think one of our roles went on artifacts you know turned them into a creature. And I think one of our roles went on artifacts, you know, turned them into a creature.

And you guys definitely, like, you simplified a little bit and sort of cut off some of the more extraneous stuff. Yeah, we felt that the roles that sort of enhanced the basic function, the basic power level of what the creature is already doing were the most fun ones. You know, kind of the flavor of transforming that creature into this character. And also it made for kind of more dynamic gameplay as well in keeping the creature doing what it was doing rather than transforming it into something that's doing something else

entirely, but always doing that same thing. Okay, so once the roles existed, the next thing is roles allowed us to do something that we don't normally get to do, which is enchantment matters is a really tough theme to do, especially with auras, just because of the card disadvantage. But now that you are making rolls, so there's no card disadvantage,

right? When you lose the aura, you're not losing the card that generates it necessarily. So we decided that we wanted to create a mechanic that allowed you to make use of, as you said, the auras as an object. So let's talk a little bit about Bargain. And when we turned over Bargain,

you could sacrifice an artifact or enchantment. That's what we turned over. Yeah, and that was one of the actual early changes we made to Bargain was expanding it a little bit so you could sacrifice any token. One of the designers on my team, James Rose, just had the suggestion after an early playtest saying like, hey, you know, most of our artifacts and enchantments in the set are tokens anyway. Can we just expand this and make it work with all tokens? That just kind of makes it a little bit easier to remember, you know,

one token works the same as a roll, works the same as a treasure token or a food token. And we really liked that idea, so we tried it out, and it did make the mechanic play better and was also a little bit easier for folks to learn. But overall, Bargain's a relatively straightforward one. It's sort of like a kicker-like mechanic, except the kicker is always the same thing of, you know, sacrificing artifact enchantment or token. And it's very flavorful, you know, making aful, making a deal with the wicked goblin in the woods or the wicked witch or what have you. Fits in very well with the storytelling theme of the set.

And obviously works really, really well with roles and other set themes like food that I mentioned earlier. Was there anything, from a set design standpoint, what were the challenges of making Bargain? Bargain was actually probably one of the easier ones. I don't think it changed beyond the expanding it to work with any token. I don't think it changed too much over the course of the set development process. I guess one of the major tasks was integrating it into what the colored pair themes were doing in Unlimited. So, for example, the white-black theme is the one that uses bargain the most. And so we wanted to figure out, okay, how can we make you care about the fact that you're doing bargains?

It's not just like getting more bargain cards in your deck, but also rewarding you for that. So we built in sort of various things like triggers when enchantments go to the graveyard from the battlefield. So you can either have an aura on your creature and your creature dies, and that will count for it. Or you could sacrifice a rule to bargaining, and that will count for it. So White-Black is sort of about bargaining and about things going to the graveyard and maybe coming back from the graveyard. And that kind of all ties in together.

Okay, so the next mechanic we'll talk about you just brought up, which is food. It's interesting. My memory of what we handed off, because I just did Chris's handoff document. So we actually did hand off food as being an archetype. I had not remembered that. So what are the challenges of food? Food obviously was in Throne of Eldraine, and I know it caused some limited concerns in Throne of Eldraine. So I know it caused some limited concerns in Throne of Eldraine.

So what were the challenges of set design of that? So food's a lot of fun. You know, everybody loves gaining life, and it's very flavorful making these food tokens and ties in, you know, with various fairytale themes and stuff like that. So we knew we wanted a presence of food in the set. But you have to be careful with food because it is a life-game mechanic, and when you have too much life-game going in a format it can prolong the games it could also create situations where the aggressive decks either need to win early or they can't win at all because the other deck will just kind of pull out of range uh with the additional life gain that they're getting from all the food

so we wanted to have enough food to feel like it had a presence in the set but not too much that it would have a warping effect on the limited environment. And the Vision team was actually pretty conservative on that front. Chris was very hesitant to hand off food being a major theme for any of the color pairs and for really good reason there. But as I took a look at the set structure a little bit more and we thought about it a little bit more, we felt that we could add a little bit more of a food presence than Vision handed off, as long as we were careful to make sure that not all of the food was being sacrificed to gain life so our big innovation there was to make sure we had enough other cards that are giving you other things to do with your food rather than just the natural sacrificing it to gain life so bargain played into the role there

uh and also just uh numerous individual cards that are giving you other things to do with your food, you know, sacrificing food to pump up your creatures, tapping your food for mana, various things like that we experimented with. And after putting those sort of systems into place, we were able to slightly ramp up the amount of food that we have and bake it into what some of the limited archetypes are doing a little bit more. In particular, the green-black archetype is sort of a mid-range food deck, but it's using the food for other things beyond just gaining life.

Okay, so the next mechanic I want to talk about is a returning mechanic, like food. So Adventures, I think we knew, I mean, from like day one of Vision Design that Adventures were going to come back. They were the highest rated mechanic from our first visit there. So there's two things we handed over from Vision Design to come back. They were the highest rated mechanic from our first visit there. So there's two things we handed over from Vision Design to you guys. One was the idea of off-color adventures. And the other thing was the idea

of adventures on enchantments because there was an enchantment theme. So let's talk a little bit about making adventures. What were the challenges of that? Just like you said, Mark. So yeah, we do want to bring back adventures. They were a lot of fun from the first Eldraine. Some of the adventures in the first Eldraine were a little bit on the powerful side too. So we were keeping that in mind as well. I think this time around we have

a better handle on the power level adventures. Sorry, I got an ice cream truck in the background here. You can hear that, but it just passed by. So yeah, so we were a little bit more cognizant of the exact power level of the adventures this time around. And also we knew we wanted to put a spin on it that was a little bit different this time. So as you said, we have the what we call off-color adventures where the color of the spell is different from the color of the creature. And also we wanted to put adventure on enchantments, which ended up turning into the mythic cycle of the virtues as well. So, yeah, mostly adventure went pretty smoothly throughout the process. One of the things that we did do with the off-color adventures that I thought was interesting is we made sure that a lot of the power was in the creature portion.

And what that does is since there's 10 different color pairs, 10 different two-color combinations, and there's only eight drafters at a typical draft pod, that means that at least two of the color pairs are going to go undrafted in any given draft. So what we wanted to do is make sure that there weren't these multicolored adventure creatures just floating around endlessly because no one was in that color pair. So what we did was we made the basic creature just about on rate to the point where, you know, even if there's no green blue drafter, if there's a green creature just about on rate to the point where uh you know even if there's no green blue drafter if there's a green creature with a blue adventure and it's going around you know 10th or 11th pick somebody will just pick it up just to play the creature portion of it

and do adventure i mean whenever you have two spells in one spell i mean what what are the the challenges of that from a balance standpoint yeah so the biggest thing is just that it's it's inherently a card advantage mechanic um and you can run into trouble if there's too much card flow you know if players are never running out of things to do or you know just always having an endless stream of you know spells and creatures to cast um so we want to be just a little bit careful of that so one of the things we did with adventures in this set is we tried to make the adventure effects in general a little bit on the smaller side not to say that they're weak but just that oftentimes they're not worth a full card of value and what that let us do is have the adventures have effects that we you know typically don't put on you know whole magic cards because

the effect is maybe not worth an entire card or it's a little bit too weak or a little bit too narrow. But by putting them on adventure creatures, you still always have the creature you can cast if the effect isn't useful, or you can just get that little tiny effect and then transition that into the creature afterwards and you're not down a card in the process.

So it kind of expanded the range of spell-like effects that we could use in the set, which was really cool. Another thing I know you guys did is, Throne of Eldraine did a bunch of cards that kind of rewarded you for just playing lots and lots of adventures, and you guys kind of shied away from that. Yeah, we found that adventures were kind of more fun when every deck is using a few of them, rather than they're all concentrated in the same deck that's getting lots of rewards for them because adventures are kind of already rewards

in and of themselves, right? Because you're getting this additional spell, plus you're getting the creature, you're up, if not a full card, a portion of a card in the process. So we felt like we didn't really need to reward you that much for using adventures specifically. However, there are plenty of adventures

that do tie into the various set themes and the various different limited archetypes for example our blue red archetype cares about casting instance and sorceries so by having adventure creatures in your deck you're you're quietly upping the count the density of the instance and sorceries in your deck without lowering the density of creatures in your deck too much so things like that worked out really well and um obviously you know um like white-black caring about things dying or whatever is kind of good with adventure creatures because, you know, if your adventure creature dies

after you've already gotten some value from the adventure, you're a little bit more okay with that. So various ways like that where the adventure creatures kind of hook into the different archetypes themselves. Okay, so we have one more named mechanic, Celebration. So Vision did

hand off this theme. We didn't name it, and the biggest difference, I think, is what we handed off to you was, and it was only on red and white cards, it just said, every time a non-land, it was a non-land permanent, every time a

non-land permanent enters the battlefield, it would trigger. So, it was trigger. So it was rather than what you guys, we'll talk about how you changed it, but the version we did was a little more like it would trigger a bunch rather than trigger once. Yeah, it was what I thought of in my mind as like non-land

fall. But yeah, so the idea of it was cool because it definitely works well with rolls, it works well with rolls. It works well with kind of adventure creatures upping the permanent count because they're kind of both spells and creatures at the same time. So it definitely made sense in the set. The reason we made the change over from the original one was scaling with each non-land that entered in the turn. So you could get multiple triggers in the same turn.

So, for example, if you played a creature that also made a roll, you would get two triggers. And we found that the scaling was just a little bit too hard to balance, because some turns you were getting zero or one trigger, other turns you were getting two or three triggers. So there aren't too many effects where you could get three times as much of it in one turn, and it's still a reasonable thing to give you. So we decided to go with a threshold of two. So if you're able to get two non-lands onto the battlefield in the same turn, that you get the full effect. And that let us make the effects, you know, a little bit more exciting and a little bit more balanced because we knew exactly what you were going to be getting rather than having this scaling thing. Okay, the last thing of mechanics, this is not a named one one. I guess it's named, but we did sagas.

Now, sagas are deciduous. So, I mean, lots of sets these days do sagas. I think what we handed over is 10 sagas. I forget whether they were rare or uncommon.

I think they were rare. That represented each of the 10 fairy tales that we were tying to our archetypes. And I believe nine of those didn't make it to print. Yeah, we ended up

with one leftover, which was the blue-red one that's associated with our sort of instant and sorcery archetype. Yeah, so there were ten sagas cycled out. I'm not sure if the cycle was totally complete at handoff, but the idea of the cycle

was there, and I think there were at least placeholders complete at handoff, but like the idea of the cycle was there. And I think there were at least placeholders for them in the file. And the idea was that the 10 of those would tell the story, the same story that the that archetype, that color pair was doing in the set. And it was sort of through collaboration with our art and creative team and also just kind of working with the set design team, we kind of figured out that we didn't need those individual cards to tell those stories and that the stories were better told on the collection of cards that were meant for that archetype. So one of the things that we did early on is we partnered with our creative team and figured out, okay, what are the 10 stories that we want to tell? There's going to be one for each of the two color pairs. And then what we did uniquely through this process is early on we identified the cards that

were sort of meant for that color pair or leaning a little bit more toward that color pairs play and limited and we identified them early for our very first art wave and then we commissioned art you know and it gave them a creative treatment to be associated with that story so from the very early portions of set design we knew sort of which cards were going to be associated with with which stories and sort of a little bit about how the creative treatment would turn out, which is a unique thing. Oftentimes that doesn't get settled till much later on in the process. So once we had that in terms of the set structure and we knew that each color pair was telling a story through a variety of different cards, we decided that we didn't need an individual card also telling that same story.

So we decided to kind of free up the room at the higher rarities from that cycle. And I think what we might have done with that is created space to have a cycle of multicolored adventure creatures kind of in those slots as well. However, we did end up really liking the play pattern of the blue, red one as an individual card. So that one ended up sticking throughout the process. Okay, so let's get to the archetypes, the fairy tale archetypes. That was one of the big sort of structures handed off. The idea that, one of the things that we've done in the past is creative has definitely flavored different archetypes. That's something that we've done. But this was a little tighter than normal.

And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of, I just want to walk through the archetypes and talk about the making of the archetypes. So I'm just going to go in color pie order. So let's start with white-blue, which was the Snow Queen. What were the challenges of making the Snow Queen work as an archetype?

Yeah, this is probably the most unique one out of all of them. Vision handed off a theme of getting rewarded for tapping the opponent's creatures, which is something that we really haven't done anything like that as far as a supported limited theme. Obviously, every set has, you know, a couple cards here and there that tap a creature or tap and stun a creature, things like that, but we've never really supported it as a theme. So it was kind of up in the air of like, you know, how fun is this going to be? You know, how should we make this work?

How do we want the rest of the deck to play out beyond just getting the rewards for tapping things? So we decided pretty early on that we didn't want it to be a slow and controlling deck because that's pretty miserable if, you know, one deck is just sitting there tapping down the opponent's creatures, the other deck can't attack. So we wanted it to be more of a tempo deck where maybe you're holding down the fort with, you know, ground creatures and tapping the opponent's creatures, and then you're attacking them back with flyers. So we went a little bit more toward that tempo angle where the game will actually end if the blue-white deck is doing its thing.

Okay, next up, blue-black is Sleeping Beauty. Yeah, so this was what we knew we wanted to be our sort of fairy-typal deck, where, you know, you get some rewards for having fairy creature types. But we were a little bit skittish about the idea of having a creature-typal deck where all of the creatures fly, because all the fairies fly on Eldraine. So in order to kind of facilitate that, we wanted to layer in another strategy on top of, you know, it's not just you're having a bunch of fairies, you're going wide and attacking in the air. That wouldn't play very well. It's kind of like two ships passing in a night, right? One player is attacking with a bunch of flyers, the other player can't block and they have no choice but to attack back.

And then the fairies themselves aren't good at blocking. So we didn't want to promote that dynamic too much. So we decided to take blue-black a little bit more in a traditional control deck direction. So what we did is we made a lot of the fairies work well in a control deck. And then we put in, obviously, spells that help you control the game, like creature removal and card draw spells. So you'll play all those things together. And at the end of the day, you'll feel like, oh, I have a lot of fairies in my deck. And I have a couple rewards for having fairies.

But it's not about going wide with a bunch of flyers. It's more about sort of controlling the game. And then eventually you win with a couple flying fairies. Okay, next up, Black Red, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Yeah, this was a really fun one. So the vision's idea was to have 1-1 rat tokens that can't block, which actually solves a lot of the problems that we've had in the past with token strategies, where tokens had to come up the board, and one of the things that they're really good at is just chump blocking a big creature that's attacking which can prolong the game and kind of make board states bogged down but by having tokens that couldn't block it's very obvious what should you be doing with them you

should be attacking with them so we made the deck very aggressive uh you can go wide with tokens it gets benefits for having lots of creatures but but also benefits for your creatures dying, which means that even if your opponent has some blockers, you can kind of swarm around their blockers with this big, big, wide army full of rats and other efficient attacking creatures. And if you lose some creatures in combat, well, at least you got some damage through because you'd have more creatures in your opponent and they swarmed around the blockers. Then also you're getting some rewards for your creatures dying as well. So it all kind of comes together in this aggressive deck that kind of feels like rats swarming around, which is really cool. Okay, next up is Red Green, which is Little Red Riding Hood.

Yeah, Red Green, I think, didn't have a very strong theme coming out of Vision. It was a little bit up in the air, what we wanted it to do. And one of the things I noticed is that there was already a lot going on in the set. And, you know, we'll see as we get to the other archetypes as well. But all the other archetypes had pretty unique things going on. So I wanted to have one archetype that was just a little bit more straightforward for the Timmy Tammy player, or maybe a player who's newer, this is one of their first sets. So what we decided to do is just go with big creatures as the theme. So we have rewards for having creatures with power

four or greater, we've got some cards that help you ramp up into them, but red green's really meant to be sort of the straightforward deck that's just about having big stuff and attacking your opponent okay next up green white uh beauty and the beast right so in an enchantment themed set you know what better color pair to care about enchantments than green and white those are traditionally the colors that care the most about enchantments so that's what we did here so this is the deck that sort of uses colors that care the most about enchantments. So that's what we did here. So this is the deck that sort of uses the roles in the most straightforward way.

Just, you know, putting auras onto your creatures, having enchanted creatures, caring about enchantments, entering the battlefield. So again, pretty straightforward creature-based deck that just cares about getting enchantments into play and enchanting your creatures. Okay, next up is white-black, which is Snow White. Yeah, I talked a little bit about this one earlier, how White Black is the deck that likes Bargain the most, and in order to

hook into Bargain, we give you triggers that care about things going to the graveyard from the battlefield. So whether those are enchantments or your creatures, things like that, and then of course, since you're caring about things going to the graveyard, we also peppered a few cards that can bring things back from the graveyard. Unfortunately, rolls don't stay in the graveyard when they go to the graveyard. They will count as an enchantment going to the graveyard, but then they kind of disappear because they're a token. So we didn't give you a lot of bringing enchantments back from the graveyard

because so many of our enchantments in the set are rolls themselves. However, there's a little bit of that. There's also some recurring creatures as well. So it's mostly about things dying, things going to the graveyard, things coming back from the graveyard, and so on. Okay, next up is Blue Red, the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Yeah, so one of the other things we noticed coming out of Vision is that a lot of the set's themes focus on permanence, right? You've got roles are permanence, you're bargaining away permanence, your adventure creatures are spells that become permanents.

So we wanted to add in a little bit more focus on things that are not permanent based. So this is our archetype that cares about instants and sorceries, which is often what blue and red do. So it's a similar archetype to what we've done in other sets in the past. You'll see a lot of familiar things there. But the thing that's probably unique about this time around is that you can use adventures to get an extra density of instants and sorceries into your deck while still having a decent number of creatures. Okay, next is Black Green, Hansel and Gretel. Yes, another one we talked about earlier, how we added in a little bit more of a food theme to Black and Green. But we wanted to make sure that you're using the food in different ways.

So you can bargain it away. There are cards that explicitly reward you for having food or for sacrificing food and things like that so you'll do a little bit of eating the food to gain life but a lot of it is just using it in other ways to gain an advantage and at the core of this beyond the food theme it's uh it's a black green mid-range deck so you'll you'll have the traditional you know big green creatures with black removal spells uh you can use black recursion spells to bring back your big creatures and keep hammering on your opponent and hopefully win the game a little bit later on. Okay, next up, red-white is Cinderella. Yep, this is at its core a red-white aggressive deck.

It's not about going super wide. It's not a tokens deck, and it's not necessarily a ton of small creatures, but it is about being aggressive early in the game. And the core mechanic here is celebration, which cares about multiple non-land permanents entering the battlefield, two non-land permanents entering the battlefield in the same turn. And so some different ways you can do that, of course, rolls are one of the best ways. If you play a creature that makes a roll, that's two permanents right there. Or some of the roles are pretty cheap to make, like on a cheap adventure. You can make a roll then play a different creature, a different permanent from your hand.

Also plays pretty well with equipment. So lots of various ways that we snuck into the set to kind of cheat the two permanents per turn thing and get those triggers pretty easily. And then what do you do when you get those triggers? You attack your opponent with your creatures that are temporarily enhanced. Okay, and finally, green-blue, Jack and the Beanstalk. This was another one that didn't have full definition

coming out of Vision, so we kind of figured out over time what we wanted this to be. And just looking at the other archetypes, aside from red-green, there wasn't too much about going tall in the set, having big stuff, so we wanted to do another sort of rampy archetype here.

And we decided that the key thing would be rewarding you for casting spells with mana value 5 or greater. So in addition to being the ramp archetype, this is also an archetype that really loves the adventure creatures, probably the most out of all of the archetypes. And the reason for that is the adventure creatures lets you get a higher density of high mana value creatures in your deck. Normally, it would be a really bad idea to put, you know, say six plus creatures that cost five mana into your deck because your deck will just be too top heavy,

you won't have enough action early in the game, and you'll just get run over. But by having adventure creatures, we get to put cheap adventures that help you survive the early game or progress your board in the early game or maybe even uh ramp your mana a little bit and then later on then you can cast those big creatures get something huge on the board get rewarded for every lots of mana and trigger all your rewards that care about mana value five or greater okay so we're almost uh i can see my desk from here so we're almost done any final thoughts

on on wild to eldrin stuff that we didn't talk about or any sort of larger thought about the making of it just in general this is one of the sets that i've worked on recently that i'm the most excited to see you know come out in in the real world and see how people interact with it i think the the fairy tale theme came through really really well we did that unique thing of making you know each of the different archetypes tell a story so So I'm curious how that translates to players' experiences with the set. And in general, it's just a really fun, lighthearted, whimsical set, which is kind of a nice break from some of the, you know, maybe darker, more, you know, terrifying themes that

we've had recently. So it'll be a nice breath of fresh air, and I'm really excited to see how people interact with it. Well, I just want to thank you for being with us, Ian. This was a lot of fun talking through the set design. Yeah, this was great, Mark. Thanks again for having me. I'm always happy to be here. I'll chat anytime. So guys, I'm at my desk.

So we all know that 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 Ian for being here and we'll see all of you guys next time. Bye-bye.