Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1070: Wilds of Eldraine Play Design with Ben Weitz

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

In this podcast, I sit down with Play designer Benjamin Weitz to talk about the Play Design of Wilds of Eldraine.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition. So, for a while at Eldraine, we've talked vision design, we've talked set design, it's time for play design. So, I have Benjamin Weitz with me today, who is on the play design team. Hi, Ben. I'm good. How are you, Mark? I'm doing good. So, let's talk play design. So let's set the scene. So when do you guys start? When does play design start for a set? Like, let's take Walls of Eldraine as our example.

So play design starts after set design. It's, like, the final time where the text of the cards changes a lot. You know, there's, like, post-production stuff after that. But this is basically where design ends. Um, and we do all the like finals numbers changes. So like, oh, should this creature be a 3-3 or should it be a 3-2? You know, how much mana should this card cost? Are these cards working well together? Um, you know, make sure not too many cards cost the same amount of mana so that you get

a nice little curve when you build your deck. That sort of stuff. Okay, so I'm going to get very Wilds of Eldraine specific. So you're handed Wilds of Eldraine. What were the main issues that you had to solve? So when sets rotate into play design, there's usually like two different kinds of cards that are in the file um so some cards are like very prescriptive so they're play these cards with these other cards they form a package they form a deck um in wilds of eldraine um some examples are like the fairies package like there's a bunch of fairies cards, there's some spells like spell stutter and fairy fencing. That's a counter spell and a removal spell that sort of reward you for

playing fairies. Um, and there are also like other creature fairies that are like, oh, play me with more fairies. Um, so that's one type of card. There's also the sort of individually interesting or powerful cards. Um, so cards that aren't necessarily telling you, oh, you have to play me with these other cards, but they just do good stuff and they give you things that you want. And for Wilds of Eldraine, so for different sets,

they'll have different proportions of cards that fall into either category. For Wilds of Eldraine, they have a lot of cards of the latter category, so just a lot of cards that are like individually good stuff, because that's sort of where the adventure mechanic pushes you. The adventure mechanic is just, you know, ice cream on top of your cake. It's just a second, a whole second spell that you get to cast on top of your first spell. So those cards tend to just take the shape of, oh, wow, this card is powerful because it just does, it gives me a lot of resources.

You know, in the past we've seen that, like, with Lovestruck Beast or Bonecrusher Giant. So something that Ian had talked about that I want to go into a little detail is, so you have two different spells on a card. I know that Ian was talking about how they wanted more of the weight to be on the main spell and not the adventure. Can you talk a little bit about how you balance that? Yeah, so that is a really tricky thing to do. Adventures just in general are very tricky because they always are more powerful than they look. Because they are basically two cards um trying to make the creature half the more powerful one is challenging we did that a few times by making

the creature cost less mana than the adventure um so that you're somewhat incentivized to play the creature first uh a decent fraction of the time if you're playing on curve and then if you draw it later in the game you can get value out of both the creature and its adventure so for example a hardflame duelist is like a 2 mana 3-1 instant sorcery spells you control have lifelink and its adventure is a 3 mana red adventure that deals 3 damage to any target

so if you draw 2 hardflame duelists you can just play the first on turn 2 And its adventure is a three mana red adventure that deals three damage to any target. So, you know, if you drop two Heartflame Duelists, you can just play the first on turn two and then adventure the next one on turn three in order to take advantage of the ability of the first one. But a decent amount of the power in this card is just in the two mana version because you just want to play on curve uh another example okay good bramble familiar is uh another card where it has a really expensive adventure uh it has a seven mana adventure that like mills seven cards then you get to put a permanent from among those cards onto the battlefield but it's also just like a two mana mana creature so most of the time you'll just play the two mana mana creature because you're not going to have access to seven mana that's a ton uh but late in the game you draw your mana creature you have a bunch of mana already and

you're like oh i don't want another mana um that's when you get to use the adventure so play patterns like that are sort of what uh we look to include for for that sort of fun and we get to put a lot of the power level of the card into the front creature if the adventure is, like, a very expensive one, like seven mana, for example. Another important part of play design, just for the audience to understand, is you guys allocate where you think

the cards will be played, correct? Yeah, I mean, we have goals for each card. Like, we'll say, like, oh, based on the design of this card, we expect this card to be more popular in Standard or more popular in Pioneer or more popular in Commander. Just different cards, different shapes of cards appeal to different kinds of players. And we have a better guess at what certain cards

appeal to different kinds of players. So Adventure is pretty flexible, right? Yeah, Adventure is very flexible. Like I said, it's just one of those ice cream mechanics where it's just good stuff on top of your good stuff. It doesn't really need you to build around it in any way. It doesn't ask you to do anything. It doesn't really need you to build around it in any way.

It doesn't ask you to do anything. So adventure cards, we could be pretty liberal with where we're going with them. They tend to be most popular in standard, I believe, just because they have sort of like incremental effects instead of splashy effects. But they can carry over to other formats pretty well. In fact, I think for this set, we tried to aim more of the adventure cards towards Commander. So again, to use Bramble Familiar as an example,

that card is a very splashy adventure, like a very powerful one, because you get to put a permanent onto the battlefield from your top seven cards, regardless of its mana value. Okay, so I'll just sort of give some contrast. So Adventure is a little bit more flexible. It's the kind of thing that can stand by itself.

So let's talk something like Bargain. Bargain's a little more conditional, right? Yeah, Bargain is definitely something that you have to build around. It really asks a lot of you. So for a lot of play design, the work on bargain cards is just making sure that there's support for them and that their support cards work well with them. So luckily, bargain is flexible enough, it isn't pigeonholed into just one kind of deck. Like a lot of decks will make tokens, whether they be artifact tokens or creature tokens or what have you. So those bargain cards are easier to support in wider decks,

but we still have to make sure that we provide the cards for you to do that. So one example is Charming Scoundrel. It's a 2-mana 1-1 haste. And when it enters the battlefield, you get to choose one of three different choices. You can either discard a card and draw a card. You can create a treasure token or you can create a wicked roll. You can create a treasure token or you can create a wicked roll. And note that two of those choices result, like the treasure token and the wicked roll, result in some material for you to bargain with.

So this is one of those cards where we made it. It's a pretty generic card. It's got different modes that are hopefully useful in different places and at different times. You're like, okay, well, this is a card that people can use to bargain that material away because it's kind of generic and could go in most different kinds of decks if different decks were interested in bargaining. So how hard was bargain from a balance standpoint? How hard is bargain from a balance standpoint? How hard is bargain as a mechanic? It was somewhat tricky. Not that tricky, I would say. Mostly we just had to pin down exactly how hard it was to bargain and how hard we wanted it to be to bargain

in order for the spells to be fun and cool. So, you know, it was maybe a little too hard, too difficult to get the bargain in the beginning because we hadn't made those enablers like Charming Scoundrel yet. But once those cards clicked into place, we, you know, decided like, oh, this is like approximately the amount of upgrade you should get for bargaining

because bargaining is approximately this difficult. Or it has to warp your deck in this way. And once we pin that down, we have a lot easier job balancing those cards. So Torch the Tower, as another example, it's a red mana for a spell that deals two damage, but you can bargain it to upgrade it to three damage. It does some other stuff too, but that's the important part. You know, at one point during play design, that card dealt four damage and it could target players and stuff like that.

And by playing more with the cards, we decided like, oh, that's too big of a reward to give you for bargaining. We have to tone that down a little bit. And so, you know, four damage became three damage and stuff like that. Yeah, one of the things that I think is a lot of times when people think about play design, I think about you guys just changing numbers. But there's a lot more that you guys change. I mean, you do change numbers, but you will do a lot more to make cards work and do what they need to do. But you will do a lot more to make cards work and do what they need to do. Yeah, the actual numbers we have to change in Magic are a very coarse graining of power.

So changing a mana is like a huge nerf or a huge buff, depending on which way you're going. And we really need to be more fine-grained than that. So when we change mana costs, we'll often change the actual text on the card also to make it more powerful or less powerful uh and then i think a really important thing play design does is just making sure that the cards play well together so not even just the individual numbers on card a like maybe that card is balanced already but the problem is it doesn't play very well with card b even though we're telling you you're supposed to play them together maybe they're at the same mana cost and your deck has too many three drops or maybe you know one of them is like an end step trigger when it needs to be a combat trigger in order to work with the other card so play design will explore

those um those interactions and try to make sure that the cards are satisfying to play with each other uh which i think is really difficult actually and like one of the most important things we do uh as compared to just looking at an individual card and making it the right power level right that you're changing the environment not like in some ways you're editing environments not editing cards yeah yeah we are yeah there's different granularities we work at the card level the environment level the deck level all these sorts of things um you know sometimes we're like oh the environment is missing a magma spray so we need to put a magma spray into some set so that decks can have tools to uh to you know exile cards mag Spray being a red burn spell

that exiles the creature that it kills, which is an important tool for there to be counterplay against recursive creatures and stuff like that. Okay, I want to jump into another mechanic, one that I think was probably a little more complicated from a play design standpoint. Let's talk about roles. Yeah, roles are very complex in the sense that they are token game pieces,

and there's a lot of different ones, and they are a big part of the limited environment. So some of what Play Design was trying to do was manage the complexity of roles because while they were very complicated complicated we also thought that they were extremely fun um like dynamic changing creature sizing is a pretty uh makes for very fun limited games and the roles tell very cute stories so we were pretty invested in making in keeping the roles but we wanted to manage their complexity a little bit. I think at one point, like, for example, the Wicked roll, which currently is Enchanted Creature gets plus one, plus one,

and when the Wicked roll dies, your opponents lose one life. I think originally it didn't have a stat bonus and it made them lose two life instead, but we wanted to change it to line it up more with the other rolls. The rolls primarily give plus one, plus one. Yeah. And. You already did a vision design, by the way?

No, I don't actually. You got plus one, plus one for every creature that died. Okay. It's very different. It changed a lot, but. That's tough on a token for sure. It's very hard to remember that. And then also the count on thing. So yeah, a lot but that's tough on a token for sure it's very hard to remember that and then also the counting so yeah a lot of a lot of what we were doing for rules in limited was trying to manage

their complexity um and making sure that there was the right density of them because if there are too many roles going on then the board state just starts to look ridiculous like there's just pieces of paper attached to other pieces of paper and it gets very complicated. You know, arena playing on arena, it's smooth as butter because the computer does it all for you, but playing without a digital plate can be challenging.

And, you know, every set has some amount of complexity points to spend. You know, some sets will will sets want to be somewhat complicated being too simple is a turnoff to a lot of players um so we identified that a lot of the other stuff going on in the set was very simple adventures are relatively simple bargain is is like a kicker. It's relatively simple. So we were happy to spend

the complexity points on rolls because we thought they were really fun. As far as constructed goes, we wanted to... So rolls are like a mechanic where the permanent or spell will generate another permanent. And those sorts of things are always powerful

just because magic is a very old game. We've made a lot of cards. There are a lot of cards that just care about counting the number of permanents you have in play for one way or another. You know, like Verduran Enchantress back in the days, whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield, you draw a card.

And so roll tokens are very strong with Verduran Enchantress because they're a very cheap way to put enchantments into play. So we always have to price cards that make multiple permanents carefully, like in a particular way. So roll tokens were somewhat, you know, we had to be careful with them on that axis. But it's also a problem that we're like very used to by now. You know, clues and bloods and food and just there's tons and tons of stuff that makes multiple permanents. So it's something we're just kind of used to and we were pretty good at it for this set. I think one of the cooler things about rolls is they get auras into constructed play. Auras are typically a very weak card type because they just open you up to getting two for one by your opponent very easily.

But I'm hoping that some of the more aggressive roll shots in the set can get some of that fun aura gameplay. Because I personally find auras pretty fun. Like, they can be a little high variance, but it's cool to buff your creatures, you know, and make them stronger. So, I'm hoping that some of those can get some of that type of experience into Standard. Yeah, auras are interesting in that I think they

might have the highest differential between how much casual players enjoy them and how much they are played in competitive play. So it was fun. The thing about roles that I enjoy is that, right, it gets auras in competitive play. I mean, auras that help your own creature are, I mean, not that they've never happened,

but you have to have a high bar to get into Constructed. Yeah, it takes some really powerful build-arounds usually. But these cards are a little more value and a little less build-around, which is a very unique angle for Auras. So I'm excited to see what sort of stuff they do. Something you talked about I just want to hit a little more on is you talked about a limited mechanic. Can you talk about when we

have mechanics and sets what the the concept of limited versus constructed how do you figure out what's what yeah so like you alluded to some mechanics are just more appropriate for limited than they are for constructed and sometimes we just choose not to push on them for constructed either we think it will be extremely difficult to do or uh the it won't be very fun if there's a bunch of cards running around that do this that are very strong um let's see if i can think of an example i guess i would say the party mechanic from zendikar is a very difficult so that mechanic wants you to control a cleric, a rogue, a warrior, and a wizard I think is the fourth one.

That is correct. And that mechanic is very difficult to push for high tier constructed or even mid tier constructed honestly because it really asks you to control four different creatures which is a large ask in like a 1v1 game of magic because your opponent

is usually killing your creatures or blocking or interacting with you in various ways and so that mechanic we might we might look at that mechanic and and say like oh it would be very difficult to make cards that are strong with this mechanic for constructed so like maybe we'll just keep it as a limited mechanic and those are like more the workhorse. You can put them on commons, and they can be very effective. And they can add a lot of interesting gameplay to the limited environment. Because in Zendikar, it's just so much harder for your... In general, in limited, it's a lot harder for your opponent to sweep your board or to kill multiple creatures. And so you're much more likely to actually achieve that.

creatures and so you're much more likely to actually achieve that um versus mechanics that are like constructed mechanics which are can be either highly linear mechanics where it's like all these cards work together and continue working together uh and and just play well like for example um like artifact matters or whatever there's a bunch of artifacts that care about artifacts they're very good to play together it's easy to make constructive cards um of of that shape uh or adventure is another easy one where it's just like the adventure cards don't ask anything of you you just put them in your deck and they're strong um and there's some adventure build arounds in the original eldraine that were very powerful and told you to play a lot of adventure cards and they were you know they they saw a ton of top tier constructed play because the adventure mechanic is so

so easy okay so i'm going to ask you about a mechanic in the set that started 100 as a limited mechanic so i'm sort of curious how you guys approached Celebration. Yeah, Celebration is interesting because it has the potential for something. It tells you to do something that you already want to be doing, basically. So it's like, I will reward you forents multiple non-line permanents in a turn um and that's often something you want to do in magic anyway because you the more stuff you get on the board the better uh so that's the kind of mechanic where we would be like oh yeah we can definitely make some cards for constructed for this uh it's not clear that we can make a ton of cards for constructed because the cards that

have celebration aren't going to play that well together because you probably can't fill your deck with cards that only say celebration because they are unlikely to enable themselves uh because we usually don't make those cards where it's just like, oh, the quest is trivial or whatever because this card just does it by itself. So the cards that have celebration are not going to give you two permanents probably, which means you can't put them all in the same deck, which means we're more likely to make a few rares that have celebration that we think have some chance to see competitive play. So one example here would be Godric.

Godric is a three mana, three, three haste. And then his celebration ability is as long as, as long as you've had two non-then permanents enter, he's a dragon with, he's a four, four dragon with flying and are plus one plus O. So that's the kind of card that we were like, Oh, like maybe you can play this in mono red aggro because mono red aggro is generally pretty good at putting two permanents into play

and you know you can play it alongside charm scoundrel which is that bargain enabler i was talking about before which also puts two permanents into play um and so that's the card that we kind of set up to hope for it to see constructed play. But I don't, and I think there's one other red one like Raging Battlemouse that has celebration. It's like a two mana, two one. Your second spell costs one less. And then celebration target creature gets plus almost one until end of turn. So those are like the two main celebration shots that we aimed for standard. But it's very often that this happens

where there's a mechanic where we feel like, okay, we can probably make like between three and five cards for constructed for this mechanic. Okay, so the last mechanic that I think we haven't talked about yet is food, food tokens. So something I want to talk about is Throne of Eldraine.

I'll say we had some missteps in play balance. Let's talk a little bit about, like, we're revisiting something in which we did it before and things didn't go quite the way we wanted to. How do we approach stuff like that? Like, last time food did some stuff we didn't quite to. How do we approach stuff like that? Like last time food did some stuff we didn't quite want. How do we approach doing food again? Yeah, I mean, mostly we just try to identify what went wrong

and then try to learn from that so as not to repeat it. So I think one of the primary things about food that went wrong in the original L-Drain was repeated food generation was given out too easily. So you look at the card Oko, Thief of Crowns, you know, there's a whole lot going on with Oko, and this is not the only problem with Oko. But like Oko's plus two to give a food gives you a food every single turn. Gilded Goose can activate to give you a food every single turn. Witch's Oven can give you a food at very efficient rates. The problem with giving out a ton of food is that it's just a ton of life gain,

and a ton of life gain makes the game a lot longer, and if the game goes really long, it just isn't that fun often. So I think in this set we really toned down the amount of cards that could give you multiple foods. There are plenty of cards that will give you one food. But we really didn't want to repeat the thing where a single card can keep generating food turn over turn easily. And that can lead to like really long and drawn out games so part of it was uh production of food did you also change how food got used um i think that was something that the original eldraine did pretty well actually um it had a lot of cards that converted food into other bonuses

in various ways um so like for example gilded goose turns food into mana um oko turns food into three threes um and as something that i think that the original ldrain did well i think that's something that we tried to replicate where the food had uses that were not just um sack me to gain three life right and like part of that is just the entire bargain mechanic right you can bargain your food away uh that's one of the the primary rules of food um part of it is for example there's like an uncommon in the set that makes your food tap for mana. Like that's a pretty cool card. It turns your food into lands and makes you kind of loathe to sack them.

I'm thinking, oh, the Goose Mother. The Goose Mother is an XGU 2-2 flying. It enters the battlefield with X plus almost one counters. It makes some food when it enters. But most importantly, when it attacks, you can sacrifice the food to draw a card. So that turns food into cards. Yeah, it's just a pretty common thing with food that we do because it's good when you can use your game piece in

like an unexpected and cool way so we are almost uh at our end of our podcast uh so i just want to ask any open-ended any other cool things about the the balancing of wilds of eldraine um that's a very open-ended question i'm didn't mean to be leaning on the spot here. I was very much leaning on mechanics. But, you know, a lot of play design is not just doing the mechanics. It's finding cool individual cards that, you know, I'm just sort of looking at, like, was there some card you had to balance? You guys are proud of just the balancing of that particular card. Yeah, I think, so I do think Wilds of aldrin has a ton of individually awesome cards

i think maybe blossoming tortoise is the one that comes to mind so blossoming tortoise is a four mana three three when it enters the battlefield or attacks mill three cards then return a land from the your graveyard to the battlefield tapped um activated abilities of lands you control cost one less to activate and land creatures you control get plus and plus one this card we played a ton of it it was pretty tricky to balance um but we ended up keeping the activated ability the the cost reduction on activated abilities and it's super cool like it makes your creature lands bigger and faster and easier to activate but also it opens up a lot of like weird stuff in older magic um where i think people have been posting like infinite combo decks with this card on twitter like it goes it goes really well

with lava claw reaches um it makes lava claw reaches into like an infinite power creature land and it's just a super cool card that's probably my favorite i actually got really sick of playing against it in constructed um i was just so over my opponents playing this card but but now that i have some distance and it's been like two years since i've play tested i think it's a super cool card yeah i mean it's the other thing that's really interesting to me about the play design process is there's so many different things being done all at once, and that you have to balance all these different cards you're trying to fix. I'm very daunted. I think play design is really hard, so I've always made you guys do it well. constantly. I mean, we are also the ones changing the cards, so it's kind of our own fault, but we have to change the cards constantly. There's a ton of cards to change. Trying to make, it's like, it's like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle where you get to like change the shapes of the puzzle pieces

every, you know, every time you place one. It's just really hard. But I, anyway, I think it turned out great. I mean, Wilds Eldraine, it's super fun to play and it's been, I just, I think it turned out great. I mean, while it's Eldraine, um, it's super fun to play and it's been, I just, I'm getting a lot of, a lot of people telling me how much they're enjoying it. So, uh,

kudos, kudos to you and your team. I think you guys made a, I mean, I think it's very, uh, thrown to Eldraine. And obviously I had a little bit of a history of not quite being the optimal

of balance. so it's nice to go back to Eldraine and, and little bit of a history of not quite being the optimal balance. So it's nice to go back to Eldraine and not equate Eldraine with necessarily things that aren't balanced correctly. Don't jinx it. Anyway, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Ben. I really enjoy the audience seeing all the different aspects of design. So thank you for showing us about play design. Thanks for having me. And to everybody else, I'm at my desk.

So we all know 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. Again, thanks to Ben. And we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.