Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1073: Lessons Learned – Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

This is another podcast in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about sets I led or co-led and explain the many lessons I learned working on them. This podcast is about the design of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.

I'm not pulling on the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive-to-work at-home edition. Okay, so today is another in my series I call Lessons Learned. So this is where I take a set that I led or co-led, and I walk through sort of all the lessons I learned while making it. So today, we are up to Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. Okay, so let me give some context before we get into talking about the design. So I have a blog, Blogatog, that some of you, I assume, know of. But anyway, it's a place where people can write to me

every day. I answer questions. And there are definitely recurring themes that happen there. Like one of the things my blog does a good job of of just what are the things that people keep asking for. Now be aware, my blog's a little more what we call enfranchised players. If you're coming to a blog written by me,

the head designer, probably you have a little more knowledge than the average Magic player. So I temper this on my blog that, look, this is a more enfranchised players. But, you know, we want to do stuff for enfranchised players. You guys are longtime fans of the game, so we definitely want to do things for you. So one of the themes that had come through a lot was this desire to go to Kamigawa or go back to Kamigawa.

Now, Champions of Kamigawa came about because Bill Rose liked the idea of us doing a top-down block. At the time, when we started doing blocks, well, we started doing blocks with Mirage, but it was Invasion where we started adding themes to them. Invasion block was multicolor. Odyssey block was the graveyard. Onslaught block had a typo theme.

And I think Bill liked the idea. Bill was head designer was the graveyard. Onslaught block had a typo theme. And I think Bill liked the idea. Bill was head designer at the time. Now Bill's the vice president of Tabletop Magic. Anyway, so Bill liked the idea of doing a top-down set. Richard Garfield had done Arabian Nights way back, but we really hadn't done

a whole block that was top-down. We got down to two categories. It was either going to be Egyptian or Japanese. We ended up doing Japanese. So there was a lot of problems. I think the way the set was executed wasn't great. Bill had this idea that we would lock down the flavor first and then match it with the creative.

Sorry, match it with the mechanics. But the problem is creative is just way more flexible than mechanics. And so it ended up making things a bit ham-fisted. It was a very parasitic in design that a lot of the cards only worked with things in the set. Like you can splice on Arcane, but Arcane is only a thing that occurs in this set. Or we have, you know, Samurai Typho, but the only Samurais are in the set. And so for a bunch of reasons, also, I think when we made it originally, we leaned heavily into Japanese mythology. And the creative team, I think, did a really good job of understanding, exploring.

And I think it did a good job of realizing Japanese mythology. But it wasn't something that the majority of players knew well. And so it read as being a little more strange than resonant. So anyway, we make the set. A block, actually. There were three sets. So there's a Chimps of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, Saviors of Kamigawa. The sets did not do well.

In fact, not only did the sets do poorly, but in our... Since we started recording Worlds, you Worlds, it ranked the lowest. It was the lowest ranking set we've ever done at the point where we were – we had market research. So the idea of us going back to Kamigawa had always been kind of a long shot. It's not easy to go to my bosses and say, okay, I want to go back to the place that did horribly last time we went. So people have been asking us to go back to Kamigawa for a long time. But it was a hard ask.

So at some point, we were talking about just new worlds we could make. And one of the ideas that came up was making a world based around Japanese pop culture. And the idea being that Japanese mythology is not quite as well known, but Japanese pop culture is worldwide. There's a lot of, you know, between animes and manga and video games, and there's just a lot more awareness

of Japanese pop culture than necessarily Japanese mythology. So the idea came up that we could, you know, we thought we could do a cool sort of Japanese pop culture inspired world. Now, when I was informed that's what we were talking about doing, in the back of my head, I'm like, I knew that players had really, at least the franchise players, had expressed a desire to go back to Kamigawa. So when we started the design,

I said, okay, here's how I would like to start the design. Let's just make the most awesome version of a pop culture inspired world. And let's not worry yet about whether it's Kamigawa or not. Let's just design it in a vacuum and then figure out whether or not it would be a good place to be Kamigawa. Does Kamigawa

make sense? Now, in the back of my head, just knowing all the stuff that I interacted with the players, I knew that it being Kamigawa was cool. So, going into design, part of the idea was was there a way to make this Kamigawa? Was there a way where

the right answer was Kamigawa? And so what happened was, so here's the first lesson of this design, is I kind of had this internal goal, which is I wanted to be Kamigawa. I was not alone. There were other people in R&D and Studio X that wanted it to be Kamigawa.

But what I knew was that wanted it to be Kamigawa. But what I knew was that it had to be Kamigawa because it intrinsically needed to be Kamigawa, not just because, well, why not make it Kamigawa? There had to be a reason. I knew that it had to be baked into the set. So one of the things that we're always looking

for is you want what's called a conflict engine, right? That there's something inherent to the world that causes're always looking for is you want what's called a conflict engine, right? That there's something inherent to the world that causes conflict. Why do you need that? Because Magic is a game about conflict. There's fighting involved. And, like, you want conflict baked into the world so that it's something that we can play up in the cards. So one of the questions that I asked very early on was, okay, we're in a Japanese-inspired world.

Is there anything that makes for a good conflict engine? And so one of the things we did is we looked at the pop culture. That was kind of our inspiration. And we realized really early on there was a theme that was very valuable. there was a theme that was very valuable. And that one of the things about Japan is Japan has this fascination with both kind of the future and the past. That the tradition is very big there

and there's a lot of things they do that are honoring ancestors and things that came before. But at the same time, it's a civilization that really enjoys technology and sort of the latest thing. And they always are really pushing toward trying to be on the cutting edge. Well, if you look at pop culture, Japanese pop culture, this is a cool theme. The idea of sort of tradition versus modernity, like here is a place that both really admires the past but really looks toward the future. There's a little bit of conflict there.

Those are sort of different things. And that theme has shown up a bit in Japanese pop culture. So the reason that I really liked that idea was that inherently a lot of the conflict about Kamigawa was what is Kamigawa? And the idea that we were pitching that the sort of the Japanese pop culture inspired Kamigawa was more about like it had a much more of a modern vibe to it. That it wanted mechs and it wanted – it just – there was things that it wanted that were a little more future-leaning. There was things that it wanted that were a little more future-leaning. But another thing about Kamigawa was how it had all – like the original Kamigawa, Champs Kamigawa, had a lot of sort of traditional things. And so the idea was – I mean one of the things that is important is when you're trying to find a theme or a conflict, you want to sort of think about mechanically how you're supporting it.

And so one of the challenges was I liked the idea of tradition versus modernity. But when you're making a set that is two sides fighting, the secret behind the scene thing is you want each set to have an identity. But you need the two sides to have mechanics that are actually synergistic. Why is that? Because when you play a game of Magic, you're going to get all sorts of different cards. You'll get cards from different sides. And if the different sides only work with themselves, it gets very siloed. Part of the problem, like, Scars of Mirrodin had. So the trick we've learned is you want to build in mechanical identities to conflicts,

but things that actually work together. But the interesting thing about the idea of modernity tradition is we said, okay, how do you represent modernity? That one was a little bit easier. We tend to use artifacts to represent technology, and modernity is very tied to technology. So like, okay, that makes sense that maybe we tie to artifacts. But then we realized, well, what if the past was tied to enchantments?

Enchantments definitely have the sense of being older and being, you know, more, like, more tied into, like, the magic of the world. A little more into the spiritualness of the world. But the cool thing that's about artifacts artifacts enchantments is while they feel opposite and that they're flavorfully very different mechanically, they're very similar. In fact, there's only a handful of things that we do with one that we don't do with the other.

And, and even then some of those things, you know, haven't fallen by the wayside. We do make colorless, you know, a generic cost enchantments. We do make colored artifacts.

So even the dividing line we had has slowly been falling. So enchantments and artifacts were interesting in that they were, they felt like opposites, but they're, in fact, a lot more mechanically similar. And we had made modified for Kaldheim, I believe. We made, I think, had made Modified for Kaldheim, I believe. We made I think an exploratory design for Kaldheim we came up with Modified. It ended up

not staying in Kaldheim, but I liked the idea, and it made a lot of sense here because enchantments and artifacts both attach to counters, and so it was a way to care about something that both enchantments and artifacts did. But anyway, so early on,

we definitely were trying to figure out a way that we could make the original part of Kamigawa a core element of what we were doing. And once we stumbled upon the tradition versus modernity conflict, that did a really good job of saying, hey, part of what the set wants is this old-fashioned thing that's existed for a long time. So instead of reinventing the wheel, you know,

like the cool thing about Kamigawa was not only is it in the distant past from, I mean, it's like over a thousand years in the past, but it also was in Magic's past. You know, like, we put the set out many years ago, and so players remembered it, but remembered it as

this thing of old. So it really had this nice sort of quality to it. You know, one of the things when you're designing that you want to do is you want the elements you're using to sort of quality to it. You know, one of the things when you're designing that you want to do is you want the elements you're using to sort of reinforce emotionally the points you're trying to hit. So the idea that

these concepts themselves have a history to them, not just in the story, but sort of in real life to the players, adds an extra layer that really makes things feel extra cool. And you're always looking for that kind of thing.

And so, that's it. The interesting lesson of the first lesson is that a lot of sometimes finding answers is to understand parameters of what you're looking for. Because we went into it saying,

I want to see pop culture Japan. I want to see original Champs of Kamigawa Japan. How do those two things work with each other? How do those things coexist? And that, I think it was through, it was like through setting up the, like a lot of design is understanding the parameters that you want to meet. Basically, we've made a lot of magic sets, right?

And we're always trying to make different magic sets. And so when you're designing a magic set, really what you want is you just want a vantage point in something that is new and different, a vantage point that you haven't used before. And that once you have that through line, you start building around it. And so the interesting thing with this set was the problem we started with was here are these two disparate things that kind of want to coexist in the set. How can they coexist in the set? And in this particular, I mean, I do feel that the way to get to innovative design is figure out what is the most interesting, interesting thing you're trying to solve and then walk through your solutions.

Um, and as long as the problem you're trying to solve is a new and fresh problem, that's how you get very innovative solutions and try to find new things. Like on some level, I don't think Neon Dynasty would exist if there wasn't some tension behind the scenes of trying to hit these two disparate things. And that it was the conflict between those two things that sort of led itself to searching for a conflict within the set. The other thing that was interesting

about this set, for me, was I'm not ignorant of Japanese pop culture, but I'm not an expert in Japanese pop culture. So one of the things we do, and this is very evident in Universes Beyond, is whenever we're working on something, it's nice if the lead is familiar with – when you're doing top-down, It's nice if a lead is very familiar with top-down. But what we did in this particular case is I had people on my team, two people, that were very knowledgeable.

Two people on the team, there's some people who could advise off the team that I could lean on to make sure that we were hitting those things. Another interesting lesson is when you are designing a set, it's a team. You're seeing a team. And part of running a team is understanding sort of the strengths of every member

and the weaknesses, I guess, but understanding the strengths of your team members. And you want to build your team in such a way that you have the component things you need and that you lean on those people. Like one of the things I've learned from just doing infinite designs is you want to put the people in place that you need and then trust that those people are good at what they do and let them do their job. So, for example, with Kamigawa, I was not – I mean, once again, I wasn't unfamiliar, but I wasn't as familiar. I was not, I mean, once again, I wasn't unfamiliar, but I wasn't as familiar. I didn't cut quite as deep on the Japanese pop culture stuff so that I could listen to other people. And one of the things we did very early on was we made giant lists.

Like, what do you consider to be, you know, what were the things that people would get most excited by? And we generated giant lists and said, what are the animes? What are the mangas? What are the video games? What are the TV shows, movies? Like, what are the animes, what are the mangas, what are the video games, what are the TV shows, movies, like, what might people have seen? And some of it also, interestingly, is sometimes Japanese pop culture would do something

and then somebody else would do their version of it, which might even be more famous outside of Japan than the original version, but we're also looking at things that sort of were influenced by Japanese pop culture. Anyway, so it's important. Definitely I learned a lot about leaning on people and understanding people's strengths and making sure that we were doing all we could to make it as evocative as possible.

And that just comes from trusting the people you're working with. That's another thing real quickly about magic is it is not a sole endeavor. It's not one – my background is in writing where a lot of the time in writing is like I'm in a room, it's me, I'm writing it. It's just a solid solo endeavor. But magic is not that. It is a solo endeavor. But magic is not that. It is a group endeavor. And so part of embracing that

is embracing the strengths of groups, which is that people have different specialties and that you can lean on different people to do different things and do things that you are better than you would do them. Okay, other things about the set. So we actually got Kamigawa signed off better than you would do them. Okay. Other things about the set. So, we actually got Kamigawa signed off

before it left Vision. The good news, I think, just behind the scenes, is a lot of people wanted to be Kamigawa. I mean, it wasn't just me. I was one of the people that wanted to be Kamigawa, but there was a whole bunch of people that wanted to be Kamigawa.

And I think, really, what I needed to give those people was a solid justification to make the argument that it should be kamigawa and once we came up with with uh the theme and the conflict it just so made sense that it was very easy for all the people that fundamentally wanted to be kamigawa to go argue with the people that it needed to make it Kamigawa. Now, the other interesting thing in doing it was, and this is true of doing a two-sided conflict, you want to build each side such that it has an interesting theme,

and then you want to build something that mixes and matches the theme. So the way we did it in Neon Dynasty is we decided that certain colors were pushed in certain directions. And so what we did is we made the conflict and then we put one color on each side of the conflict and then two colors leaning toward that side and then one in the center. So the idea was modernity, blue. So the conflict of modernity versus tradition... So the conflict of modern Jewish tradition is fundamentally a blue-green conflict. Blue is all about looking forward

and tabula rasa and making new things and trying to build the ultimate newest thing. It's about technology. Where green is all about history and the past and honoring what it was. So this was a blue-green conflict. So obviously blue was the main color for modernity,

green main color for tradition. We then needed a supporting color. Because we were playing in artifacts and enchantments, it made sense to make red the secondary color for modernity, and white the secondary color for tradition. And that put

black in the middle. So when designing the set, it allowed us to have some artifact themes, have some enchantment themes, but then have some... In fact, one of the things that black was the main color of is, hey, I get rewarded for having some of both.

I think we called it Harmony. I don't think it had a... I don't think it had an ability word in the release product, but we called it Harmony. And then Black was trying to have Harmony and try to be in balance between the two sides. The other thing that was fun about the set was trying to figure out, like, what exactly we wanted to bring each side forward. So, for example, with Blue, we knew we wanted some artifact thing,

really played into artifacts. And so what we ended up with was we realized that we knew that we had equipment. And so we had this cool idea of, we were inspired by Lissids. Lissids are something made by Mike Elliott, uh, in Tempest.

Um, and the idea was they were auras that could jump off and become creatures. In fact, it's funny, Mike and I both made different versions of it. We ended up using Mike's version, which was the more complicated version. Um, my version, the original Lysids that I made, was you could choose to make it a creature or an aura, but then it stayed whatever you chose. It didn't go back and forth. Mike's version went back and forth. And so what we decided was we tried Mike's version first

because it was a more complicated version because we knew we could scale back to my version if it didn't work. And it worked. And so it kind of worked. The rules had issues with it for many years. But anyway, we made Reconfigure, which was essentially an equipment version of that.

So the idea that I both can be your equipment, but I can turn into a creature and went back and forth really reinforced that. Oh, another interesting thing we did, another lesson, is we like to have typal themes in our sets. But one of the problems I ran into is really the two types I wanted was samurais and ninjas. Those are kind of like – I remember when we did the market research on original Champs Kamigawa, it was the two things that got the highest marks. People liked the creature types. They didn't necessarily like the execution of samurais back then, but ninjutsu was a little more popular, which is why we brought it back. back then, but ninjutsu was a little more popular, which is why we brought it back.

So I wanted to care about ninjas and samurai, but I had the problem, like, original Champions of Kamigawa just was so parasitic, so I was very conscious of not being parasitic, and so we needed to have an answer to that problem, and so we started doing what I've been doing more these days, is batching. And I said, okay, well, what if ninjas just, we tied it to the creature type that ninjas would be if they weren't ninjas, which was rogues, and the creature type that samurais would be if they weren't samurais, which was warriors.

And so we made those as connective tissues. So that allowed us to make something that you could build off of, and if you wanted to just put ninjas in your deck, you could, but, hey, if there's not enough ninjas and for stuff like Commander where you just need a lot of cards to make a theme work, it allowed you to supplement. And warriors we've done in great number. And same with rogues, although I guess more warriors than rogues. Another thing that we tried to do was trying to figure out – so we had made the – we liked the idea of sagas that became creatures.

So that they're a saga, saga, saga, and the final form was a creature. I think when we originally made them, they were one – single-faced cards. We toyed with them making a token. single-faced cards. We toyed with them making a token. We toyed with them just having a frame that at the end they just turn into the creature, but that's built into the frame. The interesting thing here was that

Dave and Set Design decided they were just cooler as double-faced cards, and so made them double-faced cards. I was trying hard not to make them double-faced cards just because we had done a lot of double-faced cards at the time, and I was trying hard not to make them double face cards just because we had done a lot of double face cards at the time and I was trying to like do less double face cards. But I do admit one of the hard things from a design standpoint with double face cards is everything looks better double face.

It just does concepts much cleaner and much better. You get two pieces of art. You have more space for words. It just does a better job of conveying that. So Dave wasn't wrong. Dave Humphries who It just does a better job of conveying that. Dave wasn't wrong. Dave Humphries, who led the set design, wasn't wrong for doing that. I was just trying so hard not to use DFCs.

Also, let's talk about ninjutsu a little bit. I originally didn't put ninjutsu into the set in Vision Design. It wasn't in the set. The idea was that we were going to have a ninja commander deck, and that the ninja commander deck would have some new ninjutsu cards in it. In fact, one of the challenges of making

the set was we went back and looked at original Kamigawa to look at all the mechanics in it, and it did not have a great suite of mechanics. It did not have a lot of mechanics like, ooh, I want to bring that back. We did experiment a little bit with Splice on the Instant. Splice on Arcane wasn't original. It didn't end up playing as well as we hoped.

We ended up bringing Channel, which is basically a very... It's just an ability word that says you can discard this card for an effect. I'm not even sure Channel, per se, needs to be an ability word, but we brought it back because we were trying to bring back some things of old. And then Nijitsu Adventure got brought back because there were so few things we were actually bringing back. I mean, we brought back some cycles and a lot of card-by-card

references to the past. But I think they decided that Dave and the set design team decided that Nijitsu just, you know, enough people kind of wanted it that it just made sense to bring it back. The other challenging thing about the set was in the story, this is where Tamio gets completed.

And the idea was this was the first time you saw that the Phyrexians learned how to complete Planeswalkers. So we knew that we were going to show one here and then show, then Ajani would happen in Dominar United, and then five of them would happen in Frexy All Will Be One. And so we spent some time – I spent personally a lot of time trying to come up with cool things that we could do with Planeswalkers. here on this one is I really was trying to get out and be like I was trying to do something a little more

out of the box and the solution ended up being a little more in the box. Basically the solution was putting Phyrexian mana in the mana cost but then if you use the Phyrexian mana you got less loyalty so it was a way to sort of use Phyrexian mana with an additional cost to it because Phyrexian mana is a

little, one of the dangers of Phyrexian mana which was in New Phyrexian mana with an additional cost to it because Phyrexian mana is a little... One of the dangers of Phyrexian mana, which was in New Phyrexia, is it just so often is the correct call just to pave a life and not pay the mana because life is a resource you start the game with. And the ability to cast things faster is so important that that's kind of why the mechanic broke.

Oh, that's an interesting thing. We were... I spent some time trying to figure out how to show off the completed Planeswalkers. Anyway, sorry, I was deviating. And the actual result ended up being a lot simpler.

I had versions that used poison and I think Dave even made some ones that had proliferate and did different stuff with it but in the end sometimes the correct answer is a simpler answer okay so I'm almost out of time here so any other large thoughts

about lessons of Champions of Kamigawa I'm very happy with Champions of Kamigawa I think it turned out really well I like the core theme of it I like the general structure of it. I like the mechanics as a whole. It is one of the sets that I did that I'm

sort of happy. It came out... It's one of those things where we pitch the idea and, I mean, set design changed a few things. They added ninjutsu and stuff like that, but I think the basic structure sort of held together well. And it was a resounding success.

It was a wild, wild success. So, which real quickly, I'll bring this lesson up. So a lot of people took from that, oh, there's this old set we wanted to make you do. You did it and it went well. As if bringing back the old thing was the reason for its success. I think nostalgia played a little role in why people were excited, but I think the execution had a lot to do with it.

So the lesson from Kamigawa Neon Dynasty is not do old settings. It is, if you can find the right way to do it, they shouldn't be off limits. Like, the reason that Kamigawa ended up working so well is we find a right mix to make it work.

But it's not the fact that it did poorly in the past. That wasn't an aid. That was an impediment. But the good news is, I think post-Kamigawa Neian Dynasty, that if I go to pitch something and it has some stigma for not doing well in the past, it's like, for example, we have, Lorwyn is now on, now on the schedule. We're doing Lorwyn. I don't know if that would have happened without the success of Kamigawa. But I think that part of selling Lorwyn, for example, is getting people to see, hey, if you find the right combination and the right thing, Returns can have a lot of potency even if the original visit wasn't as strong. We're – in some ways, we're much better now at making magic sets than we were 20 years ago.

And so we're better at building worlds, we're better at building mechanics, so I think we were able to sort of take it and do something cool. That doesn't mean, by the way, that everything that was bad in the past is necessarily a slam dunk for the future. Not that

everything's off limits. In some ways, the lesson of Kamigawa to the larger Studio X is, hey, if someone has a good idea, this shouldn't be off limits. In some ways, the lesson of Kamigawa to the larger Studio X is, hey, you know, if someone has a good idea, this shouldn't be off limits. You should think through the idea. So, I'm happy that I do think Kamigawa helped get Lorwyn on the schedule.

Anyway, guys, I can see my desk from here, so we know what that means. Before I officially end, I did enjoy Kamigawa, and I was very proud and happy with how it turned out, and there was plenty to learn from it. But a lot of the lessons were good lessons.

Well, were lessons in which we did something right. There's plenty of lessons where you do something wrong, but Kamigawa was a little more of things we did right rather than things we did wrong. Anyway, guys, as I can see my desk, we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work, so instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. So I hope you guys enjoyed my

travel through Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, but it's now time for me to say bye-bye. I'll see you all next week. Bye.