Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1079: WHO Commander Decks with Gavin Verhey

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

In this episode, I sit down with Designer Gavin Verhey to talk about the design of Magic: The Gathering® – Doctor Who™.

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 today we have Gavin Verhey to talk about his, I think his favorite thing to talk about, which is Doctor Who design. Yeah, this is so exciting. Oh my gosh, Mark. I couldn't even let you finish. I was so excited to be here to talk about Doctor Who. I mean, this is such a passion project for me and a set I care so much about. And I'm just thrilled that it's finally about to come out or just has come out, depending on when the podcast hits, and that you'll all get to play it and see all the cards. And yeah, I'm going to talk about it with you all today.

It's going to be a blast. Okay, so the goal of today is to get knee-deep in design. This is a design podcast. So we're going to really get in there and go. I mean, if people have heard you talk about the places, we're going to to go deeper than that get more in to sort of the actual nuts and bolts so let's start from the beginning which is um where did you start what did you know when you started the design like where did the design start from right so at the beginning we're gonna make four commander decks all right straightforward enough we had the Warhammer decks we'd done previously as kind of like a

template or kind of like a direction to go in. And something that I pitched for before design even started, and this kind of is like the very early design, like pre-design, the moment I learned I was doing this, I was like thinking about it already, was Planes, right? I was like, we should do Plane Chase.

It's a perfect fit for Doctor Who. It's like a perfect creative fit because, you know, in the show you go all around space and time, you know, in the show, you go all around space and time. And while on planes, you also go all around space and time, right? And so I remember I pitched that to the architecture team here at Wizards. And I was really worried because, you know, we were doing March of the Machine with planes and those commander decks. But there was no resistance everyone was like yeah that sounds perfect for doctor so i got that on board so i knew we were doing that at the beginning of design and what the thing that was most interesting to me and i kept in my mind

is i asked my architect who is max mccall and if you're not familiar with architecture they're kind of people that like help make sure that all the different lines of the set come together right they work with all the different teams including design and i asked him how many new cards should my decks have and i was expecting him to give me a number and he was like however many you want you figure it out what you think the right number is just like the coolest commander it actually possibly can now all 100 cards are gonna get new artwork right everything's gonna get new artwork it's all in um all in the doctor who universe but he's like make however many new cards you want and so um you know we just kept adding more and more as it turns out doctor who has 60 years of history so there's a lot to pull from and we ended up with 50 new cards in every deck

which as i don't think where we're going to start uh what we thought when we started but um it's like for contrast for the audience a normal commander deck has how many new cards in it yeah well it depends on what year you're asking me but normally it's a it's 10 new cards right we do we do 10 new cards per deck is kind of what we've been aiming for in a normal commander deck in the brother's war or something like that you know yeah and so the idea of new art just so the audience understands that the fact that we had to do new art i mean it had to be you know it had to be doctor who so we're doing doctor who that had some freedom to it because the biggest cost to doing a new card is the art.

So once the art is sunk, that means that you have more freedom to do more stuff. Right, right. The hours of my life, as quickly as they drained away, you know, another cost, but delightful. I made so many great cards that were a blast. The thing about that, I mean, you bring up a great point there, Mark. One thing that's very interesting about Universe Beyond Design is, okay, when you make a commander deck normally, you can use more or less whatever reprints you want. You're like, magic plane doesn't matter. You want to put a Lorwyn card in an Eldraine deck, go for it, right?

That just makes sense. But when you do an IP set like Doctor Who, well, Boros Signet, you can't use that anymore, right? Doctor Who, well, Boros Signet, you can't use that anymore, right? If you want to use Shivan Reef, that's off the table because those have magic proper world names in them. And we haven't broken the seal on doing the like Godzilla name bar treatment yet in Commander X, although maybe we'll do that someday. And so as a result, there's a lot of things that are like, OK, you can't use these things. So you have to find other solutions you'll find for example that talismans get used a lot in these universes beyond pre-cons instead of signets because talismans don't have any magic world words in their name and and signets do so there's like a very uh careful selection thing that has to happen there and that that you know as you you might say

restrictions breed creativity though because that that restricts us but also it gives us ideas like oh my gosh let's one of the first things we did is we looked through reprints it would be so perfect for this ip right like out of time was a card we determined early on would be like what a perfect fit that's like a name that is a perfect for doctor who right uh so you know it kind of cuts both ways there but definitely there are some restrictions that are levied on you from the beginning and yeah as you say all the cards have new art so you have the freedom to make a new card if a old card won't fit provided it's not going to blow up legacy or something like that okay so i know one of the big challenges for you was figuring out what the decks were supposed to be like well the audience doesn't realize this yeah we know it's doctor who like we know the ip but how do you capture like that that's a

how do you condense down 60 years of television into four decks yeah that is really hard i mean so you know normally what we do when we start commander design is we try and figure out neat ways to categorize things especially with the universe of beyond right it's like okay let's find different categories and make the four decks around that you know it's like okay here's some mechanical themes with a main set you'll be like here's some mechanical themes we can grab but well there is no main set for doctor who so we couldn't do that and then a lot of the times it's what faction do we have what's something about the world that it's tied to so the really natural place to start was divvying it up by like a faction or like a people that all hang out together right like we had a daleks deck

and a cyberman deck and we had a doctor's deck and a companion's deck and we tried a bunch of stuff like that but the problem quickly became that just like it what the slicing just wasn't working it was weird that all the doctors were in one deck it was weird that the companions weren't with the doctors it was weird that you know all these other villains were siloed and there just weren't enough like if you make a whole deck based around the master well okay you get four masters or you know five masters whatever their numbers and it's probably more like eight or nine actually there's a lot of masters anyway, you only get so many Masters. But then what is the deck mechanically doing

along with that as well? So one day, this is a big part of the early part of design. We spent like months trying to crack this nut. And one day I'm like, we just have to figure this out. I cannot proceed until we figure this out. So I grabbed Chris Mooney, who was also on the design team and a huge Doctor Who fan. And basically I just locked them and I in a room

for an hour and a half, two hours, writing stuff on the whiteboard until eventually we cracked something kind of orthogonal to how we normally do commander deck design, right? We've never really done something like this. We've never done a series of pre-cons where we divvied it up by eras of something in this fashion. But we did it here for Doctor Who

and it worked out really nice because we really stumbled upon the big question everyone always asks if you're a Doctor Who fan is, who's your Doctor, right? And, well, why not – if that's how people factionalize in Doctor Who, let's not let them factionalize that way by the era they started watching. And then, of course, we have a villains deck because it's fun to put all the villains in one deck. And, you know, it's a little tropey at this point. We did it with The Lord of the Rings, too, but it works well. you know, it's a little tropey at this point we did with The Lord of the Rings 2, but it works well.

Yeah, the other thing that is interesting about different universes beyond is how much source material is there, you know? Right. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, like, Doctor Who is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Hey, there's a lot. I don't know how many shows out there. 800 or something?

There's lots of episodes. You've got tons to pull from. No problem. Remember in my article that I wrote, there are more episodes of Doctor Who than cards made for the Doctor Who deck. For the Doctor Who decks. Oh, yeah. By far. Yeah. By far.

So, like, you can't even do everything, right? So, how do you – so, the main question is, okay, so you understand that, like, you're doing a buy, you know, eras. But how do you figure out what exactly goes in each deck? by, you know, eras, but how do you figure out what exactly goes in each deck? I mean, not that you don't know which deck something would go in, but how do you decide what goes in, you know, from the thousands and

thousands of things, how do you figure out what goes in any one era deck? Yeah, well, the great news is my team is full of super fans, right? Like, I was a huge fan, I am a huge fan, Chris Mooney, huge fan, Ellie Rice, like, you know, Trick Jarrett, like, all these people, huge Doctor Who fans. We had a huge base to go from.

Although I went back and watched a lot of the classic episodes because that was a gap in our knowledge. So fortunately, we were able to kind of identify what fans liked and knew that kind of off the bat. Then I kind of adopted a philosophy of like, okay, I think that for the most part, in general, although I have exceptions to get to in a second, but in general, it's better to hit something for the first time than to hit two things once um because like if i

do one if i reference one episode on one card and i reference the episode again on another card okay well that person gets two cards but if someone's favorite episode of doctor whoever is you know is out there somewhere i'd love the chance to try and hit that episode right because everyone's got a favorite episode and you know i know, I wanted to be able to hit as many different episodes as I possibly could. So what we did is for some of the really iconic episodes for the Doctors, like Blink is a great example of an episode features the Weeping Angels. Like, yes, we went a little deeper. We made a handful of cards that show off that. But for most other things, we tried to be like, hey, this card shows off one episode. It's the only taste you get from

that episode, but at least a bit you love about the show is represented. And if you're looking for the one card from Vincent and the Doctor, it's there. If you were a big fan of some of the first or second Doctor episodes, they're there. In fact, one cool thing we did is a fun fact about Doctor Who some of you might not know is that a lot of the second Doctor episodes are lost, right? Doctor Who was made so long ago and it was made with, you know, the materials they had at the time that actually those episodes got re-recorded over

and are just permanently lost. Like the records don't exist anymore. They have the scripts, but they don't have the episodes. So the BBC has actually animated them and you can watch them in animated versions online. But we thought it'd be cool to actually do a couple things from that that we could actually draw on a magic card because you know it helps

bring them to life that way so i think there's a land or two that are references to those stories which is which is pretty fun so uh you know it was we wanted to make sure that a very wide variety of things were hit and then the one opposition we did make just because there's so much to cover already is dr who was a show with 60 years it also has a ton of spinoffs right there are books there are audio dramas all this stuff and we're like that we you know we have to go with what from a design perspective what people are most likely to know and that stuff while cool is just it's not part of the mainline who for a lot of people although it is canon in many places so okay so let's get to the themes i mean mechanical themes obviously you had your flavor themes but okay how do you figure out what each deck does mechanically okay so we we figured some of them

out faster than others so two that came to us pretty quickly were historic and time counters historic came fast for a couple reasons first of all we realized we were just going to want a lot of sagas, a lot of legendaries, and a lot of artifacts, right? There's lots of legendary creatures, and once we figured out the saga thing, actually, the saga thing came later, I guess, but it was a nice little bonus once we figured out the saga thing as episodes. But legendaries and artifacts, we knew we were going to want a ton of.

And with the classic deck, since it's like old Doctor Who, and a lot of these episodes are time-traveling back into history, Historic seemed like a great fit. I knew kind of early on, I kind of determined early on, I wanted each deck to have like a mechanic it was focused around. I think it's really nice to, if you can't factionalize by like a type, it's nice to be able to factionalize that way by like, oh, it's got this mechanic. And I wanted one of them to be returning, and Historic was just such a slam-dunk fit.

It seemed really great for the product. So that one fell into place pretty quickly for the classic deck. Time counters, early on we did a pass on card names, but also mechanics we thought would be a good fit for the set and time counters were just like immediately it's got time in the name you know it's perfect um the actual time travel mechanic came later and i've got a couple fun stories about that maybe i'll tell in a second because it used to be a little bit different. But yeah, with time counters, we're like suspend, vanishing, all that stuff, manipulating the flow of time.

It made a lot of sense. We wanted to try and go into that. We were curious if it was going to work, but one of the great things about these Universe of Beyond decks is we have more cards we get to make so we can actually create enough cards to have enough cards with these mechanics to function

where if we were just using reprints, we probably wouldn't have been able to. The Villains deck, you know, one thing we'd spent a long time trying to figure out what the theme was going to be um we came up with the villainous choice mechanic really early on actually and we found it was super fun like making someone make a choice between two bad decisions but it wasn't really clear if that could be like the theme of the deck right it's not really a mechanic that lends itself to a theme but what we realized is actually it actually came from play testingesting whoever was playing the villain's deck every time would always want to act like the villain i've never seen this happen in a magic playtest before right if you're playing

the villain's deck you want to cackle you want to yell exterminate as you blow up their creatures you want to do all this stuff right and so what we realized as they were kind of playing the villain is okay what if they actually were the villain and they were trying to hit everybody else so we kind of came up with this group slug idea where you're trying to hit all of your opponents with abilities like myriad and things like that um we also had an artifact theme in there for a while um that we scaled down a little bit ultimately but the daleks and cybermen weeping angels and so on are all artifact creatures so you know there's still some of that in there as like a little sub theme and then the deck that was the trickiest was actually the 12th and 13th doctor deck we tried a lot of different

themes for this one um we wanted something that really felt like the doctor it felt like you were being a little creative and we tried incident sorcery spell the theme something more really straightforward like that and eventually chris mooney had the idea of okay what if we did casting not from your hand and we tried it out it was novel um as it was novel but not like something we had never touched before right like we did a red green deck that people really loved in balder's gate where um you cast cards from exile so it's kind of like a related to that in some sense and it was fun to kind of figure out all the tricky ways you could do that so that's how those four four things all kind of came together okay do you want to hear a story about the time travel

mechanic i do please i'm shocked i'm shocked you you and mark you and the audience would i feel together. Okay, do you want to hear a story about the time travel mechanic? I do. Please come. I'm shocked. I'm shocked you and Mark, you and the audience would. I feel like I had to ask the question instead of just going into it. But so time travel, it was my idea. We're looking at the time counter deck. I was thinking about a mechanic and I was like, what about things that could manipulate your counters? And my first idea was time travel impacted not only time counters, And my first idea was time travel impacted not only time counters, but also age counters and lore counters. So when you time traveled, you could keep your cumulative upkeep cards around longer. And I was like, oh, we could have some cumulative upkeep cards.

And then you can manipulate your sagas to adjust the flow of time. You can keep your sagas around for longer, which makes a lot of sense with time travel. What we found pretty quickly is that, well, one, there weren't many cumulative upkeep cards we wanted to make, as you might imagine. But second is that manipulating the time, the lower counters on sagas was really complicated, like keeping sagas around for a long time, just, you know, they kind of have a natural flow of going away, keeping them around for a long time was really complex, and meant that your sagas never left, which was kind of weird. And so eventually, while I cut the saga apart, then we're like, well, we probably shouldn't do this thing just for age counters like people with upkeep. So we cut that. But we did try some other stuff. Although I will say that in the deck,

there is a reprint of clock spinning, which you can use on your sagas to good effect. It's a good old time spiral card. So you can manipulate your saga still a little bit that way. But that's a bit about a fun fact about the time travel mechanic. Okay, so you very briefly mentioned sagas, but let's dig into that. So, okay, how did you decide? So in the set, each doctor has a saga that represents a popular episode featuring that doctor. How did you get

to that? How did you get there get there yeah it's really interesting how it happened actually so it had a homework assignment like we often do where people turn in their card designs and chris mooney turned in a card that i really liked it was called it was um basically it was a saga and it was depicting the episode death in heaven it was called something different but the idea was it was the card the episode death in heaven and i saw that and i fell in love with it and i was like we played it and it played awesome. And everyone was like, oh, that was really cool. And something I find as a designer is when you play something and it's early on in design,

everyone's like, oh, that's really neat. For me, anyway, I'm like, okay, well, can we do that more places, right? And some things are important to keep special. But this is one we thought we could blow out. So I was like, okay, what if we did more of these? And we tried building some more out for different episodes. And by the way, the one that Chris submitted for Death in Heaven is almost exactly as it originally was in vision design, in the very beginning of design, which is really impressive that it stayed all the way through. But we tried making more of those.

And everyone loved them, right? And when I showed them off in large R&D meetings, everyone loved them. When I showed them off to people in playtests, everyone loved them. So I knew we were going to do a bunch of them. It went from one saga to four sagas to eight sagas and so on. And eventually I was like, okay, I need a rhyme or reason for how these are going to be in the set. What is like...

I have to cut myself off somewhere because naming them after episodes was such a smart way to recognize episode titles because people all have their favorite episode. I could make a million of these though. I have to cut it off somewhere and so doing one for each of the doctors and then a handful of ones for the villains is what we decided there are 19 total in the set i will say it was very ambitious because sagas are very hard to design and making 19 ones that all fit commander decks

was really challenging one design trick we used is some of them not all of them but some of them are very much like for the doctor who experience, right, where they'll reference doctors specifically, which helps narrow down like the design space you need to mine for them. But a lot of them are just, you know, cool generic cards. And so, you know, it's kind of a mix of them you find there. But I'm really happy to have those turned out. And in my head the whole time I was like, I think the art for these is going to be sick. I really think the art for these is going to be sick. I really hope it's sick. And the art came back and I was like, this think the art for these is going to be sick. I really think the art for these is going to be sick. I really hope it's sick.

And then the art came back and I was like, this is sick. It turned out really good. I want wall scrolls of all these art pieces. So super happy with them. Even though they were by far the hardest part of the set to make, it took so long to get all these sagas made. Okay, so you bring up something that's an interesting question about Universes Beyond. And this is true of all magic sets, but a little more.

Universes Beyond is a little stronger, which is, there's what we call the Biosphere. And the Biosphere is, hey, when you're just playing with, usually limited is what we talk about. You're just playing with cards from this set. And then there's, outside the Biosphere, you mix them with sort of normal magic. How do you balance, when you're doing Universes Beyond,

how much is meant for the biosphere versus that's meant at large yeah that's a great question so one thing we've learned although we didn't know at the beginning of design because we started designing these long before warhammer came out but once warhammer came out we certainly learned from this is universe beyond commander x have this very unusual thing about them where a lot of commander x people buy they play a little bit then they modify they strip it for pieces, whatever. Universe of Beyond Commander Decks, people treat a lot more like a board game, where yes, of course, some people strip them out, they strip apart the cards or whatever, but a lot of people just buy

the pre-cons and they're like, here is my complete Warhammer 40,000 experience. Here is my complete the Lord of the Rings experience, right? I've got these four Commander Decks. And so we know that now, we kind of learned that during the I've got these four commander decks. And so we know that now. We kind of learned that during the process of designing these after Warhammer came out and watching behavior. So the Biodome or Biosphere is more important here than in a normal commander product because a lot of people are going to keep these things together. And I think it makes sense because, look, if you love Doctor Who or you are interested in playing the Doctor Who decks, it's its own little environment. It's its own little bubble where only Doctor Who cards exist. And it really makes a lot of sense and is a great way to play these.

When designing for these, we kept in mind a lot of people would keep them together. Ultimately, though, wider magic does have to win out at the very end in most cases. We can't make a card that's going to be busted in a normal commander. We had to consider Doctor's Companion is a great example.

Doctor's Companion, you get to have one if you have a Time Lord Doctor as your commander. And we had to make the ruling that it has to be exactly a Time Lord Doctor, so it can't partner with any Changeling commander, for example, because we don't want all Changelings for the end of time to be able to partner with any Doctor's Companion. So we had to make some things like that for the greater world of Magic. But outside of things that were in, break formats you know i want to make appealing cards for magic players but my number one priority was always flavorful awesome doctor who experience whether you you know whether you um love doctor who and don't know magic very well or already

love magic and love doctor who you can come in and you're gonna have an amazing experience and hopefully if you don't know doctor who but you magic, you can try these decks and get a little interested about the IP as well. Okay, so what was, what do you think was the biggest challenge of designing Doctor Who cards? So there's a few. I'm going to list a few different challenges. One I already mentioned, which is the sagas, right? We thought those were awesome, but they took a lot of work. The second biggest challenge though were the characters some characters um we're you know we came with designs that were like very clear that this this is this person right but a challenge with doctor who in particular is twofold for the doctors themselves doctors have

such a wide range of personalities and a wide range of possible color identities they could be like the doctor in different episodes could be different colors. And with Companions, we had kind of the opposite problem where a lot of them are just like a totally normal person that follows along the Doctor. And then they're there, they're the audience surrogate for the adventure, but like, you know, it's like, oh, you're an American tourist

or you worked on an airplane or, you know, you worked in a fish and chips shop. Like there's, you know, these aren't fish and chips shop like there's there's uh you know these aren't things that lend themselves super strongly to uh to card designs so we i guess you can make food tokens for a fish and chips shop although i think i think if rose made food you'd all be disappointed so um instead what we did is they're focusing on like the character in the aggregate what we generally did was focus on the character in a specific moment so we're like okay this is adric in this one moment right we're like okay this is adric in this

one moment right and this is the moment where adric sacrifices himself let's make a card about that or hey we're gonna make a card about rose and we're gonna focus on the bad wolf right she's so well known as that we're gonna do that and this uh for david tennant's 10th doctor he's blue red in this scene you know he's trying to save river song he's he's using his knowledge and his emotional impulse and he's trying to you know keep river. He's using his knowledge and his emotional impulse, and he's trying to, you know, keep River's memory alive for a little bit longer. And that's how we kind of went about tackling these cards because, you know, a lot of them could be different colors

at different points in time. And one of the things we decided early, I guess we haven't even talked about Doctor's Companion and Doctor yet. We tried a lot of things for that because I wanted you to be able to play with both of them. And we learned early on we wanted to do Doctor and Doctor's Companion, and then we kind of play with both of them. And we learned early on we wanted to do Doctor and Doctor's Companion.

And then we kind of came up with the mechanic. And we settled on one of the things that's challenging about partner mechanics is when you get too many colors in your deck. Because adding colors to your commander deck is almost always just adding power to your commander deck. So instead of being like, oh, you could build a four or five color deck really easily, we limited all the doctors in these decks to two colors and all the companions to one color. And when you do that, you do narrow some of your color identities and there are some characters that you know we had to make really tough calls for what colors they were going to be like the companions if they could only be one color okay well this companion really is two colors but which one are

they going to be and we were trying to hone in on specific scenes or moments for them right um so that's uh that's a lot but that was definitely a huge part of trying to get the characters right um and that took a lot of time well you said three things what's the third thing oh the third thing the third thing is um the doctor's companion right so one thing about any companion mechanic we make or any partner mechanic we make rather is there's so many combinations right if you look at the number of different doctors plus no different, you can build so many different decks. And so the playtesting took a long time, too, to try and figure out what combinations would be reasonable and what things could partner up in really strong ways. And, you know, we tried to playtest as many as we could.

And ultimately, I'm super excited to see what you all do with them once we get them out there, too, in the world. But that took a really long time to work on. Yeah, so just a little behind-the-scenes stuff. So we refer to that as commutatorics, right? The idea that if you have something open-ended where you can mix and match them, the more of them you have, the more possibilities there are. And on some level, it's very exciting. It's very exciting to have lots of opportunities.

But from a playtesting standpoint, like, for example, right now, Magic has 25,000 cards. So when we make a new card, we can't test it with every card. There's no way. And so even with what you're talking about, I mean, the combinatorics, even with just the doctors and the companions, it's pretty big for, you know, for the product that you were talking about. Right, like, imagine, so there are 15 different doctors in the product, right? Because you've got the main 13 ones, plus War Doctor and Fugitive Doctor. I don't know the number of companions off the top of my

head, but I think it's probably around 20-ish, maybe a little higher. Let's say there's 20. If you have 20 different companions and 15 different doctors, for each doctor, that means there's 20 possible combinations. So that means 15 times 20 is how many different combinations there are, which is tons!

That's so many different combinations you can build, right? So there are a lot of combinations you can build, right? So there are a lot of decks you can build here. You know, we tried making as many as we can. We tried to identify the strongest combinations, but ultimately it's going to be fun for a lot of the players to take their best role at it and see what they can do. And you know, in the pre-cons, you can

play a lot of three-color combinations, but you can also build two-color combinations out on your own as well. So for the audience listening, 300, by the way. 300 combinations. So many combinations, which, 300, by the way. The 300 combinations. So many combinations. There are 20, which I think the number's a little off, but there's so many of them. English major, okay?

English major over here. The one cool thing we did, speaking of that, is I got feedback early on of, oh, is it weird that you can't ever put black in your doctor commander deck? And so I was like, oh, I wish we could find a way to make a couple black companions. But none of the Doctors were going to have black in their deck identity because that's really not what the Doctor is. And we kind of found a solution with both Clara Oswald, who you could pick what color she is, which is really fitting for the character. And also in the villain deck, there's this character, Vizsla Turlow, who's actually like a spy that the Doctor picks up at some point and goes around with him. And so it's a stray Doctor's companion in the villain

deck that has kind of a funny story around him where he's actually, you know, spying around with the Doctor, which is kind of fun. Okay, so we don't have too much time left. We talked about how you made the decks. We talked about the mechanics of the decks. So I want to give a moment to, like,

what are individual cards that are just like, like, obviously there's lots and lots of sweet cards, but what is it that's sort of the perfect designs for you? Okay, so I think my favorite card in the whole set is Ripper's Song, and River's got a really fun story around her. Let's see what River does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her main ability, she's got another ability, but her main ability is you draw from the bottom of your library instead of the top of your library okay and the story of this card is kind of interesting so i remember in modern horizons one they tried a card like this it's supposed to be like an anti lantern of insight card right where lantern manipulates the top part of your library and it was like oh if you drop the bottom instead but it didn't work for digital reasons it didn't work out and so um

in mystery booster in the first mystery booster i made it as a play test card so i was like well it's a wacky thing that we'll never be able to do and i'll just put it in here well i was working on doctor who which you know many years later and for river song i was like i had this idea i was like you know what's perfect like her whole story if you don't know the story basically she meets the doctor in reverse order right the first time she meets the doctor she dies and then the last time the doctor meets her is uh the first time that she's meeting the doctor so it's like this whole reverse chronology thing so i was like what if we could do the draw from the bottom of your library thing here and um you know i talked to the digital teams about it and everyone and everyone's like it's

a good fit and we figured out where this project was gonna go and ultimately we were just like this this is too cool. We got to do it here. And so I was shocked I got that onto a card where others had tried and failed. But it's such a great, perfect flavor fit. And you can build some very wacky decks with this card. So I look forward to you all doing it. One thing I tried to do with a lot of the legendaries was just figure out weird, like, they work fine in Precon or whatever.

But weird other decks you can build. So, like, one of the Masters has, it grants creatures Skulk, but it's also Skulk Matters. So you can go dust off all your favorite blue-black Skulk cards if you want to. There's a card called the Beast, which cares about creatures damaging their owner.

So you want to play maybe all your active treasons you can. And with some of the Doctors in the Classic deck, we're going to make eight different Doctors. So some of the doctors in the classic deck we were going to make 8 different doctors so some of them have kind of strange sub-themes too so I loved making those really interesting build-arounds and then finally

one thing I barely even touched on today is that there are all these planes, right? Every deck has 10 brand new plane chase cards and so we made some really unique and fun ones of those that are super honed into the flavor of what's going on. My favorite is there's one that – well, not my favorite in the whole thing. But, you know, we do things that magic doesn't normally do. Like there's one that is the North Pole.

And, well, what happens at the North Pole? But you give gifts to everybody else, right? It's a really cool flavor. So there's stuff like that that Universes Beyond unlocks the ability to do. We're like, well, you never normally make a North Pole plane. But sure, Doctor Who, it makes sense. And the other thing about the planes is there's a lot of cards a lot of things i couldn't get into the decks because

you know 60 new uh 100 100 cards per deck 50 new cards there's only so much we could show off but the plans were kind of an extra you know 10 cards per deck i gotta show things off and so if you're looking near the main set and you don't see your favorite episode make sure to look at the planes because there's some in there that i'm really happy we kind of snuck in there. Yeah, I'm impressed how much stuff you got in. You were talking about, like, I remember you telling me a story of, like, there were some characters that you couldn't get on cards, so you made sure to put them in art so people could see the characters, even if you couldn't make a card out of the character. Yeah, one thing that was really unique is, so Lauren Bond was my creative associate for this, and she's absolutely fantastic.

But I was treated in a lot of cases like the SME, the subject matter expert for this, because I know Doctor Who so well. Lauren knows Doctor Who too, but I'm just so deep in it. And so I was constantly giving notes like, okay, on this card, we should show this character because they don't get a card in the main set. For example, on the war games, you see Zoe, who we couldn't get in the main set but at least you see her on that card right so you know my goal was really if you've watched doctor who at any point if you've watched a couple episodes at some point in that 60 year span you can look at this card set and see something that you recognize and i can't guarantee that's going to be there for everybody but hopefully you'll find some stuff there so yeah the sagas and the spells have episodes and characters depicted in them that aren't necessarily in the cards we try to get a ton of legends in the set um and you know there's actually one little fun

design note is there's a number of cards in the set that like clone things because as it turns out there's a lot of cloning and copying happens with dr who um and uh we wrote not we ended up writing non-legendary on almost all of them or create a copy except for it's not legendary on almost all of them especially ones that can only copy your things because there's just so many legends in the product that we found too often you're like well i want to copy my thing but it'll blow itself up because of the legend rule and so um you know you'll see a lot more of those in this product than uh than in normal but it was really important for gameplay to make that happen we've been trying to do less of those actually uh because we want to make, you know,

legendary matter for, if it's going to matter, why not have it matter? But in this project, Universe of Beyond, there are so many legends we wanted you to be able to make it work with these cards. So that's a fun little trivia fact for you. Okay.

Well, I'm now at my desk. So we're going to have to wrap up. Any final thoughts about the making of the Doctor Who decks? You know, what I'll say is that one of the things that happened in our very first playtest

is we played and we were like, what happened in this game could have been an episode of Doctor Who. It was like Rose Tyler was about to get converted into a Cyberman and then the seventh Doctor with the dinosaur saved her. And I'm like, that is the most Doctor Who thing I have ever heard. And so we adopted this mantra of build build your own episode and i really hope as you all go out and play you

have fun not only playing the decks but you just think about the flavor a little bit of what's going on and be like i'm building my own little doctor who episode here i would happily watch this and have a zany time so go out enjoy the decks and as always you can hit me up on social media if you have any questions okay guys well since i Well, since I'm at my desk, we 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. So, Gavin, thanks again for being with us. Thank you so much for having me.

And all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.