Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1083: The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Vision Design

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

In this podcast, I talk about the vision design for The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Things don't always work out, so this podcast looks into a very different take on an underground world.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, today we are talking the vision design of Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Okay, so before I get into my story, I just want to sort of set the scene and explain a few things. So when we do a vision design, we hand off to set design. Usually there's one of three things that can happen. And interestingly, I led the design of three sets in 2023 and each set had a different thing happen. So first off, sometimes vision design designs something and pretty much

what goes to print is what vision design designed. For Exit, All Will Be One is a good example of that. All the main mechanics, the main structure, all that was built in when we did the vision design for For Exit, All Will Be One. So sometimes you make a design and hey, pretty much what you envision is what ends up being on the cards. Okay, sometimes you get part of the way there. I'll use Martian Machine as this example. A lot of Martian Machine was there.

The mechanics were there. A lot of the way we were sort of breaking things up, how we represented the Phyrexians. But there was one component, which was the battles, which one would argue is the splashiest thing about it. You know, vision design had sort of carved out a space. We wanted to represent all the planes. We said, you know, it's probably a double-faced card.

It might even be a new card type. We sort of mapped out what we wanted, but we didn't actually make it. And set design actually made battles. Battles were made in set design. So sometimes vision gets part of the way there, but, you know, set design has to sort of finish something that vision design, you know, sort of set up. Vision design, like, went in the right direction, but set design has to actually find the mechanic, for example. And then there's the third type, which Laska and Ixalan is a good example of, where vision design does something and it doesn't

quite work out. And mostly what the final set is, is not what vision design did. I mean, there are elements, you'll see, there's elements of it. It's not, um, uh, and so the reason I think it's important is, look, vision does a lot of work, uh, and that work carries over. Um, how much of it carries over can, can vary depending on, you know, different that work carries over. How much of it carries over can vary, depending on different designs and different things. Lost Camps at Ixalan is a good example

where something major changed very late in the process that had a big influence on what the set was, it being on Ixalan. So let me get into that real quickly. So during all of exploratory and vision design, the set was a brand new set.

It was an underground world, but it was a brand new world. And then shortly after the set got handed over to set design, within the first, I think, month of set design, the creative team asked if it could be Ixalan. They wanted to make it Ixalan. I will get into that and what that means and we'll talk about that. But that was a... Normally, like we've definitely had sets where things have changed. We've had sets where we've changed the world.

We have sets where we've changed the mechanical focus. But a lot of times when there's a creative switch, that tends to happen usually during exploratory or vision design. Early in the process of when it happens. This was a little bit later than normal for this kind of change to happen. Usually because vision has to incorporate what the change is. So normally it happens a bit earlier. This was abnormally a little later than normal. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the history of the underground world. So my earliest memory of it being pitched was Tyler Bielman and I.

Tyler Bielman was in charge of the creative team for a while. He and I were the ones that originally pitched Mirrodin. And I think as part of our Mirrodin pitch, we had a three-year pitch. I don't remember all the details. Basically, there were two different worlds in which there were people that were gathering together, sort of an army or a collection of people, and then they were going to fight in the third set. And Mirrodin was one of those sets.

Another set was an underground prison. So that's the first time I remember pitching an underground world. Obviously, Mirror didn't end up just being one set. But the idea of underground, so one of the things that when you're looking for worlds to do, when we're trying to get worlds, one of the things that's really important is you want to get something that just has both a lot of, like,

tropes to build on, meaning a lot of cool things to design around, but also the art team, the world building team, usually wants some visuals that are unique to that world. And they'll make what's called a mood board, which is they'll go find actual pictures of actual places, or sometimes they're illustrations. I guess they're not always, but they like to get a pictures of actual places, or sometimes they're illustrations. I guess they're not always. But they like to get a lot of photographs of things that actually exist as inspiration. And the one thing about Underground is, I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of Underground,

but there are amazing, amazing things. I mean, truly unbelievable sort of things Underground that people have gone and photographed. And it has had a lot of inspiration. Plus, underground just has tropes with it. You know, there's just things built in where there's a lot of stories told where people go under the ground. And so the idea for an underground world has been floating around for a long time. There's certain settings that we joke

that just keep coming up again and again. I think the issue with Underground World was we knew it was a cool idea in a vacuum, but we're never quite sure what to do with it. Like, okay, well, okay, it's underground, but what does that mean? There were also some art challenges and things like,

if it's underground, where does light come from? What are your light sources? And, you know, we don't want it to be too dark because normally underground is dark. Although one of the tropes of underground is the underground world where there's sky but underground. Sort of a lost city sort of feel. Anyway, so we knew we wanted to do underground in the sense that it was a cool idea. But it always got knocked down. Just other ideas came up that were better than it or more fleshed out, probably a better answer.

But anyway, eventually we were, you know, magic is a hungry monster, as I like to say. We do a lot of stuff. So at some point, you know, it just kept coming up. And finally, we're like, you know what? We should just do it. Now, interestingly, in the meantime, we did, for the second great designer search, we did this thing where we had each of them build their own world and then all the challenges were making things for their world.

And the only world that was duplicated is two of the eight people. So John Lauchs and Scott Van Essen both had an underground world. Excuse me. It's a good height to meet. So we had had some ideas. Both of them had done some interesting things. And one of the ideas that John Lopes had played around with, uh, was the idea of, uh, using

light and dark as themes in an underground world. That really stuck with me. Um, so one of the things, we've moved to a world, once upon a time, magic used to be blocks, you know, three-step blocks, large, small, small, you know, large set introduces a mechanical theme, the two small sets just continue it. And then we move to a world, I mean, well, we've made a bunch of changes, but now we're in a world where most sets sort of stand on their own. They have their own mechanical identity.

So that just means we go through themes a lot faster. That once upon a time, you know, let's say we did an artifact themed block once every four to five years. Okay, well, there's like a five-year gap between artifacts, not artifacts, graveyard as a theme. But now we're doing so many sets that a lot of our popular themes just show up more than they used to. So I'm always on the lookout to find themes that just have gotten a little less use. One of them is color matters. We used to do more back in the day. Part of it is, when Richard first made the game, I think there were more mechanics that revolved around color. Protection was a larger thing.

There was more sort of color hating. There was just color mattering was a little higher in the early game of Magic. And through a bunch of things, sort of whatever mechanics we used and stuff, it became less so. The last set, I think, to use color as a major theme was Shadowmoor Block, which was like super high in hybrid. Hybrid lends itself toward color mattering. Anyway, I had a bee in my

bonnet, as they said. I had this idea that I wanted to do a color matter thing, and the more I thought about Underground of being light versus darkness, I really liked the idea of what if light, what if color represents light? And so I started getting this idea

of what if our Underground world was a chance for us to revisit the theme of color? And so when normally, for example, when things come up, like when underground comes up, we didn't necessarily have an idea of how to execute it. But this time I said, OK, I sort of have an idea. What if we do underground and we do a color matters? We haven't done color matters in years. That might be fun. And this time they said, hey, why not?

So we got stuck on the schedule. Now, okay, so we start off on our exploratory design. So the first thing you do when you're doing, when you're exploring an area, you want to understand the top downness of it. You want to understand what trope space are you playing in. It's not necessarily that the design was going to be top down. I mean, it's more of whenever you're building your world, you want to understand what elements are top down or in it. What are things that will inspire what you do?

So the first thing we do when we're doing that is we want to explore the source material and say, okay, we want to do underground world. Well, what are all the places that use underground? What are the movies and TV shows and books? Where is underground as a theme used? Okay, so our research showed us that there is a fork in the path. There are two very distinct ways that underground gets used. So number one is what I would call action venture, your journey to the center of the

earth. The idea is that underground is this exotic new place and people venture down below. And not that it can't be dangerous, not that there's not, you know, challenges, but on some level it's a wondrous place. And maybe a dangerous wondrous place, but a wondrous place. And in the end, our heroes come to learn how exciting it is. But it's an action event. So that kind of story is more of an action adventure.

We're going to journey, and we're going to go underground and see what we find. The other sort of fork in the path was horror. There are a bunch of stories where people sort of go underground, and, you know,

underground is dark and can have a creepy sense to it. And in that, you know, it can be done as a horror thing. The descent or, you know, the idea where I'm going underground and, oh, scary things are underground, and then I've got to escape the underground. The underground is this horrible place that I've got to get away from. So we realized early on that did we want to do action-adventure

or want to do horror? The, not only, just as a side note, not only mechanically would it lead us to different places, but it also would artistically. The, when you do the underground as action adventure, it tends to be a lot brighter. That's where the, the trope of the underground world, like you go underground underground but there's a world that has sort of a pseudo sky that underground there's a world that looks something like up above. And or even when there's not sort of that there's a lot more inherent light to it.

When you go horror though it tends to be dark and creepy and the fact that you can't quite see well, we lean into that in horror. Um, so, we looked at that. Now, it turns out that the year before, or not too long before this, that we had, um, Midnight Hunt, uh, you know, Innistrad, Midnight Hunt, Innistrad, Crimson Vow. We had Phyrexian, All Will Be One. Uh, we have Duskborn coming up next year. So we had done a bunch of different horror things. And we felt like, okay, there's enough horror.

Also, I think the bright, the kind of visuals we get with the action adventure was more kind of what we wanted underground. Like, the horror just depends on a lot of darkness. And, like, it's just more creepy vibe. And we wanted more wondrous and adventurous. We wanted more like, oh, my gosh, look at these amazing things under here. And so we decided to go with action-adventure. Now, the next fork in the path is an interesting one.

So one of the things we do is we do a lot of market research. And the reason we do that, well, many reasons, but one of the reasons we do that is we want to understand who is playing Magic. On some levels, who isn't playing Magic. And what we'll do when we do that is we will find groups that we think are the biggest areas for, like, where does new players come from? So one of the areas we found that had a lot of potential for new players was what they call Generation Z. I think if you're born between 1997 and 2008, I think.

Anyway, there's a decade or so that they call Generation Z. Happen to be my kids are Generation Z. I'm Generation X. And we realized that Generation Z loves game playing. They have a high percentage of game playing. But we had less Generation Z players, you know, proportionally

than we had some other ages. This would be a good audience to go at. So one of the things that we definitely do is we want to think about, like, what are we aiming for? So anyway, the reason I explain that is the next path was a generational path. Underground is actually pretty popular for gaming. There have been a bunch of big games

that take place underground. So one of the big sort of schisms from a gaming standpoint, as far as influence,, if you go to Generation X, my generation, um, we tend to associate underground more with like adventure parties. Um, you know, and the idea that you're, you know, there's a dungeon carved out underground and you're going around and exploring things. But a younger generation, my kids' generation, is more about I dig through earth and I find materials that I can craft into other materials. You know, that there's... As far as the source material,

it's just very, very different. You know, for example, the set has diamond pickaxe in it. That is something that my son responds to in a way that I don't respond to. And that whenever we're looking at source material, one of the things that's really important to understand is any particular genre or source, like, will be revisited over time. That, you know, that when we look at something, you want to sort of think through the ages and sort of, like, will be revisited over time. That, you know,

that when we look at something, you want to sort of think through the ages and sort of think like, okay, different ages, the thing they think about when they think of this will be different. And so that was the fork. We could do an Underground that was a little more Gen X-y in its execution, or we could do Underground that was a little more Gen Z in its execution.

And we're like, look, we've had some data saying we thought there's a lot of potential to get more, I mean, plenty of Gen Z play magic, but more could play magic. And so we decided that was a little more fruitful. And so we decided to do Underground sort of playing into what we call resource acquisition. That I'm digging Underground, I'm finding things, And I'm crafting new objects and stuff like that. So we knew we wanted crafting as a theme to be important. And there's just a lot of... It sort of begets some of the trope space.

Diamond pickaxe and the like. Okay. So that is the path we went down. Now, if you remember, I was very excited by the idea of infusing color into this. And when we first started making the world, normally you get a few themes to sort of smash together. One of our themes was underground. Underground was going to do a lot of heavy lifting and push us toward tropes and stuff like that. But we needed a secondary and something that was a little more mechanically something that gave us a mechanical focus

and color felt like that could be it and I was excited by the idea of light and dark and light is color I was very interested in that so the idea that we latched on very early and I will say just a little side note on the creative process, sometimes you land on an idea that is so novel that it's really hard to pull away from it. That you so like the idea that it sort of sucks you in. And I think the idea that really sucked me in

is we like the idea that precious gems matter. That's really big into the underground sort of theme. You know, you find precious gems underground. And it turns out that magic has five precious gems that are iconic. A pearl, a sapphire, a jet, a ruby, and an emerald. For those that don't know what I'm talking about, in Alpha, there were the Moxes.

They were zero-cost artifacts that tapped for any one of... There were five of them. They tapped for one of each color. They were very powerful. Part of what we'd call the Power Nine. We stopped making them because they were so powerful, but they live on as definitely

sort of high-profile cards in Magic just because they were so powerful, especially early on. Anyway, I was tickled pink by the idea of what if the gems you're acquiring are the five gems from the boxes? It really appealed to me. I mean, it is exciting. The other thing that we were looking at originally was the idea that we were playing into was crafting as a recipe.

That's how crafting works. So in video games that do crafting sometimes, normally there's a recipe. You need so many of this object and so many of that object, and then you can make something out of them. So the idea in Magic that we really

liked was, well, what if you're crafting creatures and crafting objects? So what we leaned on was this mechanic called Monstrosity from Theros. And the idea there is normally with Monstrosity, one time in the game you can spend mana, and when you do, you upgrade the card. Now with Monstrosity, the upgrade normally was you get plus one, plus one counters.

Every once in a while, it'll gain a second ability, but normally, it just gets bigger. So the idea we liked was, what if we had a recipe, and I was very tickled by the recipe literally being little icons that represented the five moxes. You know, I need pearl, pearl. And the idea is you would spend the recipe to upgrade the creature. So I have a sword that I want, you know, I have a pickaxe

I want to make into a diamond pickaxe. Well, you know, I need certain things to be able to do that. And early on, I think early, we actually had more than five. I think we had the five that were five color, and we also had diamond as a, I think diamond was colorless, is what diamond was. Anyway, so the idea that we played around with is this idea that, well, we did a whole bunch of things.

I think for a while, there's a period of time where we made all the gems actual artifact tokens. Like you can make a pearl token or make a sapphire token. The idea there was they were like treasure, except they only tap for one mana. So a pearl, like treasure can tap for any mana.

Well, pearl just taps for white, just sacks for white, sapphire sacks for blue and such. It seemed very cute. The problem we ran into was that mana was a little too good that in order to have the number of counters, number of tokens we needed to do the recipes,

we were just giving you too much mana. The idea at the time was, well, if you don't need it for recipes, you can just use it as mana. And it was just too good as mana. No one was using it for recipes. It was just too good as mana. So we then moved to a version where we had counters, and the

design that got handed off from Vision used counters. We had a mechanic, I think, called Mine. And the way you would mine something is you would either exile a card on the battlefield, a permanent on the battlefield, non-land because lands aren't colors, or a card in your graveyard, and you would get the appropriate color. If the card was more than one color, you got one color, but you chose which. So the idea is, I could mine a red card on the battlefield, or a red card in my graveyard,

to produce a ruby, and then I would get a counter. And the thought process is, we'd have punch-out counters, and you'd have little cards that look like a ruby, just like a Mox Ruby. In retrospect, in hindsight, if I had to do this again, if we were going down this path, I think what we would have done is, and like I said, if

said design had ended up going this path, it didn't. I think what we would have ended up doing, instead of making counters, is just the recipe sitting on the card and at that moment you want to upgrade it, that's when you would pay the cost. So let's say something was, you know, ruby ruby. Okay, well I need a

exile two red cards, be it them from the battlefield or the graveyard. Here and now, oh, I paid it, now I can upgrade it. I think the counter, once again, I got very beloved into the idea of the counter. Like, the idea of the moxes is the thing.

I really wanted symbols, too. I wanted not just to say, not to write it out like sacrifice two white, but just pearl, symbol, pearl, symbol. And that meant, in reminder text, you had to exile a white card or a white card in your graveyard. So in order to make color mattering work, the idea we played around with is, instead of making you play five colors, which is a lot, we decided to

tap into two-bride mana. So two-bride mana is a mana that we made in Shadowmoor block. There were six cards with it, I believe. So the idea of two-bride mana is it's a colored mana and or a two-colorless mana, two generic mana. And so the idea is if it's white two-bred, well, in order to pay that mana cost, I can pay either one white mana or two generic mana, meaning two mana of anything. While we've had one or two individual cards with two-bred mana,

two-bred mana as a larger mechanic hasn't been brought back. And so we were interested in doing it here. So the idea we did was all our artifacts were two-bred mana. Some were monocolor, some were multicolored. If it was multicolored, there was no more than one of each type. And the idea being that this would allow you to get stuff into your deck that wasn't the color, that didn't match the land that you were playing. So if I was, let's say I'm playing a blue-black deck, but I need, I have something that has a ruby in its recipe. I have a blue card that, you know, requires a ruby to upgrade.

Well, I can play some artifacts that are red. We also did some other stuff. We had cards, like whenever you made a token, you tended to make an off-color token. There are a bunch of little tricks we used to allow you to be playing blue, black. You have islands and swamps in your deck, but you had access to things of permanence and stuff that were being of other colors so that you can make use of that. The other thing we did once we sort of allowed you access to other permanence of different colors

is we had a mechanic, I think it was called illumination, where it cared about, it was kind of like domain, but for colors on the battlefield. So it was, they were scaling effects, but then what it counted was how many colors you controlled on the battlefield. Anyway,, we had a whole suite of stuff. So the idea essentially was, um, oh, let me talk about crafting real quick. So the way crafting worked in our set is you had that cost you had to pay. And, uh, we did them as single-faced cards, much like how monstrosity are single-faced cards. Um, the upgrades were something that we could explain on the card. Um, obviously double-faced was something we had thought about.

The issue is, in a booster pack, you have sort of one slot where you can do extra things. Well, actually, that's not right. In a booster pack, there are things beyond the normal budget of making a set. And there's a certain amount of budget to do extra things. But the idea we had with counters required us to have a punch-out sheet. And both the punch-out sheet and double-faced cards are playing in different... They both require a budget, and they come from the same place. So if you have punch-out cards, you often don't have double-faced cards.

And we were leaning toward punch-out, so we didn't do double-faced. Now, monstrosity isn't double-faced. Obviously, we get to set design. You know, crafting we didn't do double-faced. Now, monstrosity isn't double-faced. Obviously, we get to set design. You know, crafting ended up becoming a double-faced thing. Part of that was the Ixalan influence, but that's for another podcast. So anyway, so we had this very elaborate system. The idea being that the artifacts were two-brid. They allowed you to get other colors.

Oh, and the way that crafting worked for us was common cards only crafted their own color. So if I was a red card, at common, I only crafted for rubies. That's the only thing I needed was rubies. But at higher rarities, I started getting recipes that tapped into other colors.

And the idea there is, let's say I have an uncommon red card that has a sapphire activation. I need blue. Well, I have two options. A, I could play red and blue. I could play blue as my second color. I could splash a third color. We gave you a little ability

to splash colors. Or, hey, maybe I'm playing some blue trooper cards, so even though I'm not, I have no islands in my deck, I still have a means by which to get blue cards to play. Or maybe I'm playing, you know, a red card that makes a blue token. Or we also had some color changing effects.

Things that could change the colors of things. So there are a number of different ways to be playing a red deck, but then have access to blue or black or white or green. And then, like I said, because color was a theme, we had Illuminate, which was the whole mechanic that played in color. And so that was a big push of what we were trying to do.

So let me explain sort of what happened. And then I will have a podcast on set design, and we'll go more in depth of sort of how the changes got made. But here's what happened is the world building team was building a brand new world, building an underground world. And one of the things you do when just like the same reason

that we tap into things on the mechanical side, like oh what are the tropes we're playing with? What are the things we can do that play into things? The world building team is doing something similar. What are the fun tropes we're playing with? You know, we looked at what are the things we can do that, you know, play into things. The world building is doing something similar. You know, what are the fun tropes to play in visually, right? And what they found is, like, the more they sort of figured out the area they wanted to play in, the more they realized it kind of coincided with a lot of the feel of Ixalan.

a lot of the feel of Ixalan. So, for example, I talked earlier about there's a trope in the source material of the Lost World, Lost City. And one version of the Lost City is like hidden in the jungle. And Rivals of Ixalan played around with that. But there's another version of it

where you go underground. There's a Lost City underground. And they really liked the lost city idea. But anyway, I guess what ended up happening was they were making decisions to try to, like, avoid being Ixalan because this was a

brand new world. And eventually they're like, why are we fighting it? This world really would like to be Ixalan. And so they came to us and said, I mean, this was after the set design, vision design was done. Hey, we know this is late in the process. We know this is not when we normally do it. But, you know, we think we're sort of fighting the inevitable. We think really, you know, what the world wants to be is Ixalan. And so for those who don't know, Ixalan,

in market research, the world did really well. People really liked the world of Ixalan. And so for those who don't know, Ixalan in market research, the world did really well. People really liked the world of Ixalan. The mechanics didn't do so great. The set didn't sell that great because how well a set sells is usually based on what people think of mechanics more so than the world. Anyway, and so we had talked about at some point we'd like to go back to Ixalan,

but we didn't. We're not really interested in doing a return to Ixalan. We just repeat the mechanics. We don't think the mechanics ended up being executed quite what we wanted. So there's an idea that when we did War of the Spark, we really, really wanted War of the Spark to take place on Ravnica. Not because it was a Ravnican set thematically, mechanically, but it was where the story wanted to take place. So what we

ended up doing is we visited Ravnika for two sets, gave players all the guild goodness that they expect from Ravnika, and then the third set was there, but we'd given all this desire for the return to Ravnika so that we could just tell a story. It's what we call a backdrop set.

And what backdrop means is we're using a world because the world makes sense and it makes sense to the story we're telling but the set itself is not mechanically that thing our worlds are very entwined with our mechanical executions and so the idea

of a backdrop set, I mean War of the Spark there's more going on, there's a giant storyline but I really like the idea of a backdrop set we were trying to find what's the right place to do it. And when it came up that Ixalan Underground kind of wants to be Ixalan, we're like, okay, this is our opportunity

to do a backdrop set. We knew we didn't want to do Return to Ixalan. So one of the big challenges Set Design had to face, and like I said, when we do the podcast on Set Design, we'll talk about this. We wanted it to be Ixalan enough that it felt like Ixalan and how do you get the trappings of Ixalan, but it was underground world, it wasn't going to be sort of returned to Ixalan.

Also, we were going underground, so it wasn't even the actual space that we had occurred on Ixalan. So, how do we make that happen? Anyway, so that wraps up the vision design. So, like I said, there are elements we worked on, the crafting, sort of the adventure feel. There are definitely things we did in vision that carried through, just way, way, way less than a normal vision design. Probably, like I said, because the introduction of Ixalan had a lot to do with how the design ended up being done.

So anyway, I'll leave that for the podcast on set design. But anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So 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 be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.