Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1067: Wilds of Eldraine Commander with Jeremy Geist

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

In this podcast, I have Jeremy Geist on the show to talk about the design of the Wilds of Eldraine Commander decks.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I like to use my time at home to do interviews. So today I have Jeremy Geist with me. Hey, Jeremy. Hello. Pleased to be here. You know, 10 years ago when I started listening to Drive to Work, I never really expected I would be on it. Well, hey, everyone's dream one day you too could be on Drive to Work. everyone's dream one day you too could be on drive to work so let's talk a little bit about how you got to wizards and then we'll talk about the command the theme of the day is the wilds of eldrian commander decks that you worked on so we will get to in a second but i just want to fill people in how did you get from someone listening to drive to work to somebody on to drive to work yeah absolutely so um as a lead up to the story, for Unstable, I wanted to go into the pre-release blind.

So I didn't read anything about Magic for like three or four weeks prior to the pre-release. So then I went and played in it. And then I was like, I'm going to catch up on all the Magic news. And then I looked and I saw that they had announced the Great Designer Search 3 several weeks ago. And that was the beginning. I entered the GDS 3, and I did extremely well, and I, yeah, after that, I was on Magic's radar. Yeah, so basically you came in second. Ari Nee won the Great Dinosaur's 3. And then what

happened was you did a lot of freelance projects for Raw. You did deck building and such, right? Yes, in fact, the contract work I did was the Brawl decks for the original Throne of Eldraine. So I thought it was extremely funny that I worked on the Alayla deck, and then I came to Wizards, and the first thing they asked me to work on was a multiplayer Alayla deck for an Eldraine set. Okay. So I believe this is the first work you did that is seeing... I mean, not the work you did before you came full-time at Wizards,

but from being full-time at Wizards, this is the first work you've done that's public? First work I've done that's public is the March of the Machine Jumpstart Packs, which I think are most notable for the cards Siroc and Goreclaw now. This is the first thing I did when I arrived at Wizards. Okay, so we're going to dive in deep and talk about, so there are two commander decks. So which one would you like to talk about first? Why don't we start with the green-white one, Virtue and Valor. Okay, so talk about how did this deck get made? What was the ideas behind it?

Yeah, absolutely. So I worked on this product with Corey Bowen as the lead. Corey is responsible for many other of the pre-made commander decks attached to sets. So the first thing he did was we looked at all of the two color pairs that were in Wilds of Eldraine and to see if any of those would make appealing commander decks. to see if any of those would make appealing commander decks. So what we eventually settled on was green-white rolls, because rolls were the big marquee mechanic in Wilds of Eldraine, and we thought it would be great blown out into a commander deck. And then blue-black fairies as well, because people love fairies,

and they don't have quite enough support to be an effective commander deck, so we thought that would be something that people would want and would really add to the format. Okay, so let's start with the green-white deck. Great. So when you want to build around a mechanic, what is the essence? Like, okay, you want to build around roles. What do you need to do to make that happen? Yeah, absolutely.

So one of it is just sheer numbers. Yeah, absolutely. So one of it is just sheer numbers. You know, a commander deck has somewhere in the range of like 55 to 59 individual cards that aren't lands. So you need to just make sure there it is large enough, I guess, that it's impactful enough to the table that it makes sense to run it in Commander. And that was something that was a little difficult about roles because most of the roles are plus one, plus one, and a minor bonus like Ward One or something like that. So we decided to go in the direction of this is a general Auras matter deck, and we have some cards that create roles,

but broadly speaking it is a enchant your creatures theme and not specifically a rules theme and i would note that this is usually true that any one set making a brand new mechanic it is hard to generate enough cards that you can solely build a commander deck around it yeah absolutely and absolutely. And a lot of pre-made commander decks that were built around a mechanic often care about other things than that specific mechanic so that you can

include cards that were previously made. Like there was a like in Zendikar Rising there was a, instead of a party deck, there was a rogues party deck there was a role a rogues deck and there were plenty of rogues in magic's history that um but there hadn't really been a deck built around them so that was a more um functional direction than having you know five or six cards that care about party yeah backward compatibility is pretty important so

whenever you guys are building commander stuff you want to make sure that you go broader than just whatever the main theme is. Yeah, absolutely. Both because that's the actual way to make a functional pre-con deck, but also to give people tools to put into decks that they already own. Okay, so let's start by talking about the commander. Who is the commander of this deck? So the commander is Elvier of the Wildcourt. It is two green-white for a legendary human knight. Whenever Elvier enters the battlefield or attacks, you create a Virtuous roll token attached to another target creature you control. Virtuous is

plus one, plus one for each enchantment you control. And then, whatever an enchanted creature you control deals combat damage to a player draw a card. This is a brand new roll, just to make sure people understand this, but you say a virtuous, it was made for the commander decks. Yeah, absolutely.

And that was one thing we really wanted out of this commander, was the first thing we did when we sat down to work on this deck was let's make a commander-only roll that's bigger in size and impact than the ones in the main set. So we shuffled around which one we wanted.

A normal roll in the main set is worth maybe like half a mana or a quarter of a mana so we wanted this one to be worth around one mana um we tried curiosity i think we tried a couple of other things but um this is essentially like ethereal armor we were calling it um and this played pretty well because like i feel like the goal of an aura's deck is just to have enormous creatures crashing into your opponents. And so just having the ability to make really big Auras built into your commander is the most natural way to make it appealing. Okay, so what else did you... How many cards do you get when you make a commander deck, at least these commander decks?

How many new cards did you get? We get 10 new cards. I believe that is counting the... Yeah, 10 new cards counting the commander and the backup commander. Okay. Let's see. Do you want to talk about the backup commander? Yeah, absolutely.

The backup commander is Gilwayne, casting director. When Gilwayne or another non-token creature enters the battlefield under your control, you choose one. You create a royal roll token attached to that creature, a sorcerer roll token attached to that creature, or a monster roll token attached to that creature. All three of those tokens grant plus one, plus one to the creature they enchant. And then they all grant different abilities so royal is ward one sorcerer is when you attack you scry one and monster is trample um cory and i were both theater kids in high school we did shakespeare so i pitched a casting director who just hands out a bunch of roles to your other creatures and we were both really enamored with the idea and it made it all the way through the design process and ended up in print.

So this also displays the other way to take a mechanic that might not be impactful enough for a commander and make it appropriate, which is you just make a ton of tokens. And I've been seeing people having fun with what's essentially an enchantress commander that you don't actually have to run that many enchantments. You can just run creatures that care about enchantments or being enchanted, and Gilwayne will just give you a bunch of free auras. So I'm just curious, just so the audience understands, so there always is a main commander and a backup commander. Is the philosophy different between those two? Yeah, usually the backup commander's goal is to give you a sideways way to play the deck, so you can swap them in. It won't be necessarily interchangeable depending on the deck.

In some of them, the Backup Commander will not be as suitable for the deck, but the goal is for both of them to be, you can have a fun time, and they both do similar things. Okay, so you have 10 cards. Obviously, you do the Main Commander, you do the Backup Commander. What do you tend to use the other new cards to do? Yeah, so this is Corey's process. I don't know how other commander leads do this, but the first thing we did was we built decks pretending we didn't get any new cards besides the commander. Then we playtested them, and then we said, what holes in these deck lists are missing that we don't have existing cards for and that we can create new cards for um so in green white you know anyone who's played a deck with auras know that auras are card disadvantage if your

creature with an aura on it is removed then you've basically lost two cards so one of our goals is just to have a lot of recursion lots of ways to get your auras back from the graveyard um and this is incidentally also why elvier lets you draw cards when your enchanted creatures deal combat damage to your opponent just to make sure you always have something to do during the game okay are there any of the cards you made you want to talk about of the new cards yeah absolutely one i'd really like to talk about is liberated livestock um this is five and a white for a four six cat bird oxbird-ox. When it dies, you create a 1-1 cat with lifelink, a 1-1 bird with flying, and a 2-4 ox. And then for each of

those tokens, you can put an aura from your hand or graveyard onto the battlefield attached to it. Liberated Livestock is a top-down design based on the Town Musicians of Bremen, Um, it is a top-down design based on the Town Musicians of Bremen, uh, which is a grim fairy tale about a bunch of farm animals that, um, sort of, like, stand on each other's shoulders in a tower and then go around, um, stopping robbers and, uh, saving the day. Uh, I thought it was a very charming story. Uh, it is not as well-known in the U.S. as a lot of other fairy tales um uh i did know i did know for example so it's not an unknown yeah it's not unknown but it's less well known than like snow white or um sleeping beauty or something like that sure yeah so um but the reason i felt confident putting

this into the pre-con is because even if you don't know the story it's a very cute top-down design of like three animals and when it quote unquote dies they just split up and you have to like deal with all three of them now um and that's you know you talk about lenticular design a lot which is um to someone who doesn't have a trained eye for it it's one thing and for someone like who knows a lot more it's another thing and i think you can do that with flavor as well um my great example is Hundredhanded One in Original Theros. If you don't know the mythology, it's still a very funny design that can block a hundred creatures. And if you

do know enough about Greek mythology to know about the Hundredhanded Ones, you really appreciate that they did such a deep cut. Okay, any other cards from this deck? Yeah, let me look. Okay, any other cards from this deck? Yeah, let me look.

Yeah, I also wanted to talk about Ox Drover. I'm focusing on Ox cards today, I suppose. This is three and a white for a human peasant. With Vigilance, it can't be blocked by Oxen, and when it enters the battlefield or attacks, target opponent creates a 2-4 white Ox, and you draw a card. One thing we like to do with commander precons is reuse tokens um both tokens that existed in prior products and just having a lot of cards that make

the same token because we're limited in the number we can have in the deck uh so liberated livestock was an early include in the deck and then um the thing that's so clever about Oxrover, it's a very charming top-down design. This is a Corey Bowen design that reuses tools that we already had access to. Like, we didn't need to do anything more because we already had an Ox token in the deck. But it uses the token in a completely different way. It's one of my favorite

cards in the deck. Okay. Any other cards, or do we want to move on to the other deck all right i think that is about it for the green white deck okay so let's talk about the origin of the blue black deck all right well um i think it's an interesting quirk of history that fairies which is in popular perception a very like whimsical like childlike creature uh that you know appeals appeals more to like small children became the face of like highly competitive spiky control players um and you know since their original release in lorwyn

fairies have just become very popular among the magic community um but because a lot of these fairies are small and tempo oriented um they making a commander deck around them has historically been difficult. So one thing we aim to do with this deck is to make a deck that not only filled out the number of fairies that you just had in general, but also had commander-sized ones that would impact the board in a meaningful way. In fact, nine out of the ten new cards either are fairies or make fairy tokens. The only one that doesn't is Misleading Signpost, which I'll talk about after we go over the commanders. Okay, so who is the main commander? The main commander is Tegwil, Duke of Splendor.

This is one blue-black for a fairy noble with Flying and Death Touch. Other fairies you control get plus one, plus one. And whenever another fairy you control dies, you draw a card and you lose one life. I'd actually like to talk about Tegwil in context with the backup commander who is alela cunning conqueror uh two blue black for a two four fairy warlock with flying whenever you cast your first spell during each opponent's turn create a one one black fairy rogue creature token with flying and whenever one or more fairies you control deal combat damage to a player go target creature that player controls. So Alayla was originally going to be the face commander for a long time.

In set design for this product after I had left, Tegwul was created as a much more straightforward, like play whichever fairies you want in the deck. This is just a generally good card. You don't have to do a lot of difficult sequencing or playing you can just you know have fun with fairies uh which i think is generally more appropriate to be a face commander because this product is often used as onboarding for new players um i would describe this decision as similar to the neo kamigawa white blue vehicles pre-con where um the face commander was very

straightforward you know your vehicles are cheaper to crew so you can just put big ones in the deck and then the backup commander was a vehicle that could be your commander it had a very open-ended play style so that was more appealing to enfranchised players and i think it was a great choice as a backup um a backup commander but the face was something that would be very easy to pilot, so to speak. Now, when you're making a commander, I know we've learned a lot over the years. Yeah. What do you think makes for a good commander?

Different people will have different philosophies. Some people like commanders that are very open-ended and that they can do whatever they want with. Some people like things that are very open-ended and that they can do whatever they want with. Some people like things that are more directional. I would say a good commander incentivizes you to build a deck that you wouldn't build without it existing. It's something where you look at your cards and recontextualize them and say, oh, I've never had a reason to use this specific card before or this specific theme before, and now I can build around it and have a fun time. time yeah one of the things i know we've learned over the years

because we've been doing commander decks for a while now is i think we lean more toward niche designs you know uh yeah a niche design in that right this is not just a good stuff where you just you know it's just the best version of and everybody will just play that one it's like it does something specific and if you want to do that specific thing it's really good, it's just the best version of it. Everybody will just play that one. It's like, it does something specific. And if you want to do that specific thing, it's really good, but it's making you build a very particular deck, not just a generally good card. Yeah, absolutely.

And sometimes it can be fun to unite themes as well. Like fairies and flash are a very common combination in the history of magic. So Alayla, you could build a deck with a lot of fairies in it, or you could build a deck with a lot of instants in it and fewer fairies. But it incentivizes two things that don't 100% go together all the time. And so I think that makes for a unique deck as well.

Okay, so you said you wanted to talk about some of the cards in the deck. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll start with the one I mentioned previously, Misleading Signpost. This is two and a blue for an artifact with flash. When it enters the battlefield during the Declare Attacker step, you can reselect which player or permanent attacking creature is attacking, and it taps for blue. So Misleading Signpost is one of my favorite kinds of cards to design, which is the three-mana rock with a color on it.

Previous examples of this include Midnight Clock, Cursed Mirror, Crowded Crypt, things like that. Because three mana for something that taps for one mana is a little bit under-costed, it means you can have a powerful effect on it, and you can make them really unique. For Misleading Signpost, as I mentioned, Alayla was intended to be the face commander for a while, so we wanted to include a mana rock that had flash so i was talking with cory and i asked what's an effect that is really fun but is too low impact for people that usually put into their deck and cory is a big fan of the card portal mage which is a creature that also does the thing misleading signpost does um and that's the nice thing about mana rocks as well is that you can justify putting them

into your deck because they provide you with more mana so um we were able to add this effect which is fun but if you just have it on a you know otherwise vanilla tutu it might not feel worth putting into your deck um and now you can have fun with this and sort of eat your vegetables at the same time so to speak because you're still um adding ramp to your deck so this uh question i'm curious this card clearly like is meant for multiplayer play um how much when you're designing cards are you leaning into multiplayer play and how much are you trying to design cards that you know could have functioned beyond just multiplayer play yeah um we focus primarily on multiplayer for this product. We don't go into this intending to make cards that are very effective in one versus one. Obviously, like in any Commander game, you will be down to two players eventually.

So we try not to make cards that are only 100% effective when there's four people on the board, but we don't particularly feel like it's a problem if the card is better in the early game when there's more than two players. Okay. Any other cards in this deck you want to chat about? Yeah, I'd love to talk about Shadow Puppeteers.

This is six and a blue for a four four fairy wizard with flying and ward two uh when shadow puppeteers enters the battlefield create two one one black fairy rogue creature tokens with flying and whenever a creature you control the flying attacks you may have it become a red dragon with base power and toughness four four in addition to its other colors and types until end of turn uh so there's a lot of stuff that's interesting about this card. The most obvious thing is that, as I mentioned before, part of the goal of this deck was to make commander-sized fairies.

This is the largest commander-sized fairy in the deck. It costs seven mana if you have a lot of 1-1 fairy tokens around. You can win the game with it when you play it. One thing I wanted to bring up was the um trinket text that is what we call you know text that usually doesn't matter but is there for flavor to be charming um of turning your fairies into a red dragon um i feel like one of the goals of magic design is to make cards that are not only like effective in game but emotionally impactful things that you can remember after the game is over so um although this card would have been a totally functional game piece without adding the color and type saying you know i use the shadow

puppeteers to make all of my fairies look like dragons and then i attacked is just a more exciting thing to talk about and that's something that I personally focus on very hard when I'm designing cards. No, it's very important. I don't think people realize the part of design, right, is the very functional, like make it work mechanically in the game. But part of it is, hey, I'm presenting a piece of art that I want to have a story and I want to have impact and I want to have impact in the game.

And that's, yeah, we spent a lot of time on that. Yeah. One of my favorite trinket texts that I often use as inspiration is Eye Gouge, which I believe was from Journey into Nyx, which is an instant that is minus one, minus one to a creature. But if it's a Cyclops, you destroy it. I just think that's the perfect, like, it's a cyclops you destroy it um i just think that's the perfect like it's obvious what this trinket text is about um it's extremely cute and makes you laugh when you read the card and it's on something that would otherwise be you know a role player and limited and then you would forget about it

okay are there any other cards here yeah um malleable imposter this is another quarry design this is three in a blue for a fairy shapeshifter uh with flash and flying and you can enter it have it enter the battlefield as a copy of a creature and opponent controls except it's a fairy shapeshifter in addition to its other types and as flying um i'm personally very fond of clone effects um in commander i feel like one of the goals of commander is to give you a unique game every time uh i mean magic is built around the concept that you have a unique game every time but um oftentimes in 60 card constructed you play you know several hundred games with the same deck and you start to fall into patterns. Because Commander is singleton and you're playing with four people,

it's easier to say every game is going to be different even if you have a couple of decks that you cycle through. And being able to interact with your opponent's cards through this or through effects like Gaunty Lord of Luxury, which steals cards from the top of your opponent's deck, I think makes the game a lot more interesting because it'll produce combinations that you wouldn't be able to produce with your deck alone. And I like the fact that it both copies something but yet still is a fairy for all your fairy shenanigans. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

That was something else that was important, which you don't want to have friction between I want a cool creature and I want a fairy. This can do both things for you, I want a cool creature and I want a fairy. This can do both things for you, and you can just have fun with it. Okay, any other cards? Yeah, Tegwil Scouring, four black, black for a sorcery. You can cast it as though it had flash by tapping three untapped creatures you control with flying in addition to paying its other costs. Destroy all creatures, create three one-one black fairy rogue creature tokens with flying.

So something I wanted to talk about with this is that fairies is a narrow typo theme. So in order to make the cards more appealing to people who don't like fairies, we had some cards that care about things that are more broad than fairies. Both Tegwil Scouring and Shadow Puppeteers previously only cared if the creature had flying or not. It doesn't necessarily care that they're fairies although fairies are very common one one flying token that you can make a lot of so yeah i would say those two cards are most effective with fairies um but we didn't want tangle scouring to be a specific fairies only card um this is something that you can put in other

decks that might happen to make tokens that have flying cards. A lot of like decks, a lot of like afterlife cards from Ravnica Allegiance, for instance, which made one, one flying spirits. So you, you would be able to find novel ways of including it into a deck. Okay.

Any other cards? That is about it from the fairy deck. So let me ask you a question. Something that has come up on my blog. So I will ask you as, as one of the people that made the deck. How much do you balance previous themes of something when you're making a new deck with that theme? The good example is, if you look at some of the old fairy decks,

being a rogue matters a bit, but not all the fairies are rogues. So how do you balance doing new things with balancing old mechanical elements? That's an interesting question. I would say I don't want to be beholden exactly to what Dex were doing in the past, especially if it was something that didn't produce fun gameplay. But nostalgia is a very important even nostalgia for sets from like two years ago is an important factor in making magic decks appealing uh and i think the more charming callbacks you can put into a commander pre-con

the more appealing it'll be to a larger group of people um in this case there were a lot of um i don't remember the name of the mechanic but there are a lot of... I don't remember the name of the mechanic, but there were a lot of cards from Morning Tide that cared about rogues specifically dealing damage to a player. Prowl, I believe, is the mechanic, right? Yeah, Prowl. And one of the most iconic fairy cards is Bitter Blossom, which produces fairy rogue tokens.

So since it wasn't really a burden to just choose, let's do the Fairy Rogue tokens from Bitterblossom over the Blue Fairy tokens from original Eldraine, and it'll be appealing to people who like to play with Bitterblossom, then it basically felt like a free include in that case. So here's a general question, not about these two specific decks, but just about building commander decks in general, which is, I mean, what might not the average person think about? Like when you make, when you're building a commander deck, what is something that's really important to the design that maybe makes the end product, makes them happier, but maybe they're not thinking about something that we have to do? product makes them happier, but maybe they're not thinking about something that we have to do. What are the behind-the-scenes things we have to think about that you don't think the players consciously really think about? We actually design Commander Precons with different requirements than what I think an average Commander deck looks like. One of the more obvious ones that I've seen people talk about before in design context is we don't include tutors, uh, for anything other than basic lands. Um, because a lot of the times these

decks are played by just taking them out of the box and shuffling them and starting a game. So by asking you to search your library that you've never seen before for cards that you don't know which one you want, um, that's frustrating for the player who's looking and it takes a large amount of time um something more subtle is i would say we generally have less removal um in these decks than might be in an average commander deck for someone who follows deck building guides from places like the command zone um just because having all of your creatures removed is again a very frustrating experience. So even if someone plays a threat and it goes unchecked, if you're using a pre-con, that will still produce a more entertaining game experience than if everyone is blowing up everyone else's permanence.

So how much... Go ahead, finish your thought. We also tend to include more lands than average just because we don't want non-games. We just want to, even if you occasionally draw more lands than you'd like, we just want you to be able to play your cards early game and get your commander out. How much playtesting goes on between the two decks?

Like, how much are they built to play each other? Yeah, pretty much 100% of the playtesting for these products is done against each other. In fact, we had tested a couple more themes by taking those themes and these two that you see here and building decks and putting them in what we call the biodome against each other and seeing which ones were the most fun. With two decks, usually what we would do is we would just have the face commander and the backup commander in the playtest. We pretty much always play with four people. So you would have a Tegwil deck and an Alela deck, which use the same decklist, and an Elvyr deck and a Gilwayn

deck, which also use the same decklist. And you would put those against each other. Casual play design will often take these commanders and test them in a broader environment without using the pre-cons in addition to using pre-con testing. And being able to do that has been really helpful. And I'm really grateful for the casual play design team for being able to make these commanders, being able to test them in wider contexts. Okay, so we are almost done here because I can see my desk. Any final thoughts about the making of these commander decks? I think these decks reflect a play pattern that I really enjoy in games where the sides are very different, asymmetric games,

where one side is very tricky and controlling and like tries to manipulate the whole battlefield subtly and the other one is just crashing into the first player like not thinking about it like full steam ahead no breaks i think those are two very different play styles that different people belong to and uh i'm really happy that these two decks are so, like, dramatically different in how you'd like to play. Well, I want to thank you for joining us today, Jeremy. It is fun talking about making the Commander decks. Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you so much.

And hopefully it lived up to your... to being on Drive to Work, so... Yeah, thanks. So anyway, guys... Go ahead, Jeremy. Oh,, guys, go ahead, Jeremy. Oh, no, that's it for me. I just want to say to everybody, I can see my desk, so we all

know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I want to thank Jeremy for being with us today. And I will see all of you guys

next time. Bye-bye.