Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1084: The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Set Design with Jules Robins

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

I interview Co-Set Design Lead Jules Robins to talk about how the underground set moved to Ixalan.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at Home Edition. So I like to have guests on when I'm at home. And so today I have Jules Robbins, the lead set designer or co-lead set designer for the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Hey, Jules. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I already did a podcast where I talked about the vision design. So let's set up where we're at. so I already did a podcast where I talked about the vision design. So let's set up where we're at. So,

um, we're building a set for a brand new world underground. Um, I, I had this idea of having this color theme. And so it was like part underground tropes, part color matters. Um, and anyway,

so it's come time to turn it over. I hand this out over. So the way it worked was Eric Lauer had the set for a little bit, right? He left the set for a month or two. And then he handed it over to you. So we're going to sort of pick up when the set gets to you, since obviously that's the part you were more familiar

with. But, although you were there for the Eric part, right? You were there during the Eric version. Yeah, I was on the TV. Okay, so we hand over the file, and shortly after we hand over the file, it shortly after we hand over the file, it was like a couple weeks, we learned that the set's going to be on Ixalan, not on Brand New World.

That combined with the fact that I think we made a very complex system we were trying to make work, which was, I think, too complex and a little too intertwined, combined with the fact that we had to rip stuff out to make Ixalan even though it wasn't

returned to Ixalan meaning it wasn't like Ixalan Part 2 we weren't doing a factions set it wasn't high and typal it was, we had to make it feel like Ixalan so that took up some space making it feel like Ixalan took some space so I want to talk about where

like, start at the very beginning, you can talk about the Eric portion, I guess. The very handoff, the set is handed off, you and Eric are talking, okay, what are you going to do? Where did the set go from there? So the set hands off, and before we even know where

Ixalan, the first order of business, we're trying to figure out the execution on this marquee crafting mechanic that Vision was working with, which I'm trying to remember which version was exactly a time of handoff. I'll tell you which version because I just did the document. The audience will, at some point, I'm putting up the document that shows my handoff document. So the audience will, at some point, I'm putting up the document that shows my hand-off document. So the version we had

had mechanical mine. It allowed you to exile cards from your graveyard. And then you got a counter of the appropriate color. And there were five counters. See if people can feel where we got this one from.

You could have a pearl or a sapphire or a jet or a ruby or an emerald. And then there were costs, or a sapphire, or a jet, or a ruby, or an emerald. And then there were costs, kind of like monstrosity, there were costs, but you had to pay the certain costs.

So, a red card might be ruby, ruby, whatever, and you had to have two rubies to pay for it. That's the version we handed off. I also think the version we handed off had a token at higher rarities called the crafting table, that could allow you to manipulate some stuff. And all the artifacts at handoff were two-brid.

So anyway, that's where we started. That's where you picked up. here and pretty early on we want to run this by play designers and try to figure out, you know, this is a complex system are there things that are going to go wrong when we start getting to trying to build environments and as they're building things out we pretty quickly find the like five different gem types tracking is just getting really difficult once people are incentivized to do the cool thing in the set which

is mine your hybrid cards and uh get off color gems and then track a bunch of different kinds at once. And the tracking's just not looking tenable. So we go, first order of business, we need to figure out how to tweak the crafting mechanic to be more trackable. Right, the way Play Design put it is, you've made five energies. That's how they put it. Right. So we start brainstorming a ton of different iterations. We pretty quickly get to like, well, what if we don't have these one associated per color,

but have a smaller number of different materials that we break up some other way. So at some point we're looking at like one you generate from colorless cards and one from mono colored cards and one from multi-colored cards and we're still finding the tracking there to be a lot and we're also finding some difficulties in how to set up mining the different ways we're letting creatures mine are either snowballing too much if they just care when they become tapped but then when you get stymied by blockers it's hard to mine anything and you can't turn on your weight game effects either we try them needing mana and tapping to mine and then get a lot of people trying to stall out games and just mine stuff over and over again.

And so start wondering, well, what if somehow the path to acquire your materials is inherent to the materials themselves? I think the next execution was some sort of hierarchy with the materials having an inherent upgrade scheme where you could exile parts from your graveyard with an activated ability of the token itself to turn it into a higher level material. Yeah, so you would get the first material, that material could turn itself into the second material, that material could turn itself into the third material.

That was sort of how it worked. Right. And then we had costs and we're like you can use a material as any lesser material um but we you know tried this with a bunch of people and got to we're really losing the thread of the flavor here like this is no longer feeling like I'm gathering a bunch of stuff and crafting. This is like what's this awesome self-awakening golem or something. I think at some point

we even had the fourth stage. I'm like, well, you spend all this time upgrading the material and don't draw another card to use it after your card gets killed. Maybe it should inherently turn into something. The other thing to point out from a time step is, you guys are trying to figure out the system, and then

in the middle of this, oh my god, we're in Ixalan, we're not any... And I think you and I have talked about this, one of the things I think when we were doing it in a new world, like the set could hold two components, which is underground tropes and color matters. As soon as we went to Ixalan,

it's like, well, Ixalan have to fit and underground, like the underground, that was the whole thing. So we can't get rid of underground. And I think color matters. Just there wasn't enough space.

I think that's kind of what happened. Yeah. Right. Right. We tried to figure out how to integrate ixalan stuff in with this existing framework and we're like okay well maybe we can use explore and that'll do a little bit of graveyard filling and artifact matter stuff on the pirates and then as we started building out more and more it was clear just yeah this was taking up all the real estate that was going to Color Matters cards.

And there was just too much to cram in. Okay, so crafting. So let's talk about, I mean, the first thing is when we were making crafting, we did it like monstrosity. We were doing a single face card because, A, we try to do things single-faced when we can, and B, when we had counters, we needed a punch-out cheat. A little behind the scenes, but

the same, like, if you want to do double-faced cards, you need the cards that people can put in their decks if they don't have sleeves. And that goes in the same slot that the tokens would go. Plus, they go in the same budget. There's like a budget for extra. Right. Right. legendary lands um it made sense it made obvious sense that you wanted to combine those um right okay so how talk about like so how'd you got to the crafting you ended up with yeah so at the point where we realized well we don't really have room for color matters

and we need to overhaul crafting we said let's take a step back and do like a basically micro exploratory design again on just like we have a bunch of new parameters for this set let's re-examine how we're capturing the important trope spaces here and see where that gets us for what crafting wants to be so we identified the big pieces as feeling like you're underground, feeling like it's Ixalan capturing this crafting component and some sense of like exploration and discovery. And so we tried a lot of different stuff on the crafting front in this exploratory phase because we knew that that had been tripping us up a lot and deserved a lot of focus. from your graveyard as components and went well if the color matters and two braid is taking up too much space what can we do that's more inherent to the magic cards that are already in your deck what if card types are different materials and we come up with little symbols that are

exiling creatures from your graveyard or artifacts from your graveyard and do the same sort of single-faced cards that upgrade things. Or if tracking five different individual tokens for crafting things is too much, maybe we can sort of subdivide

this by color without two-braid and just have each color make one kind of crafting token, but instead of you spanning out across all five colors, you'll have three different options for what you end up making, and instead of them, like your white-blue deck can make the white token

or the blue token or a special one if you use a white card and a blue card. And those will be the outputs instead of the materials will be like I crafted a spyglass or something to that effect. And all of these still felt overly complicated. Like we were really struggling to convey the flavor and right as you were talking about we were at the same time looking at what's Ixalan and when we should definitely return double-faced cards that turn into lands so we asked what's the DFC approach it's clearly showing some sort of components on the front and what you craft on the back.

And we tried a few iterations of this, but our leading contender for a while was basically a reflavoring of the melt mechanic that had been used in Eldritch Moon and the Brothers War. So we would have two materials as front side cart, maybe a piece of glass and a glow worm, and then they would

meld into the lantern that you build out of the two of them. Okay, but you obviously didn't do that, so what got you from meld to the current incarnation well mark that's where you come in oh i come okay yeah i don't know if you remember we were talking about all of the pieces we were building out and he said yeah a lot of this stuff looks cool, but the part of crafting we're missing is the creative element.

These are good crafting stories, but they're not capturing the feel of what people are trying to do crafting. They're just sticking two things together. I want to make my own things while crafting. What if instead of these cards melding with a specific card and they were looking, that's on the battlefield or the graveyard, you could pick a broader subset that made flavorful sense and just have the back of one card be what you were crafting into.

So that got us down a rabbit hole on something pretty close to the current mechanic trying to figure out where should you craft from what should you craft with we were like should the crafting cards be in your graveyard and return themselves by using something else from your graveyard or sacrificing something else and you know the graveyard felt sort of like these are scrap raw materials rather than uh the glow worm itself when we were using a lot of creatures for front sides um and we asked, what's thematic to craft with? Are we supposed to be using the basic lands

so you can make a cake with a honeybee and the grain from your planes? But eventually decided the most thematic stuff was largely going to be things made with metal or glass or wood or how you build something out of the raw material. We wanted a lot of cards to craft with an artifact

as something that felt like it could be the bulk of what you're building, and then we could tie the specific thing you were building into the special component that the front would be. Yeah, most of the backs are artifacts. Some are artifact creatures, and then there's a few that I believe are just creatures, but that's the minority of them.

And the lands are not crafted. The lands are transformational stuff, so you still had... You can make lands, but that's not part of the crafting. Right. The lands work very much like in the original X1 block.

Okay. So that's how you took crafting. I mean, like I said, you can see a lot of seeds of ideas that you guys involved. The other one that let's talk about is, one of the things we discussed very early on is part of like digging and exploring is like, well, what in magic can you dig and explore? And there are two things.

Basically, there's two things you can dig and explore, the graveyard and the library. Those are the two things in which it felt like you were looking through them. And the library had the added value. If you don't know, like, a lot of the idea of digging is I don't know what I'm going to find. And the graveyard, you can dig in the graveyard, but you know it's there. It's the graveyard. But the library had this sense. So we had handed over a mechanic called Dig, I believe, when we handed off the file.

And Dig was kind of a cross between cycling and surveil, where you could discard cards to sort of surveil. You drew a card and surveilled. It was like a cycling variant, but it got cars into your graveyard.

So the interesting thing is the idea of a library being a place to sort of investigate and dig things. But the problem with dig was it's very much like Explore. And so what you guys... Explore is the obvious thing. I mean, you want to talk about why Explore came back, maybe?

Yeah, so when we were looking at what to return from the original Ixalan block to feel like it, we were pretty sure that we didn't want this to be a super heavily typal draft environment. Not only is that hard to execute in general, but it takes up a lot of infrastructure and if we made all of the original four Ixalan types heavily typal like they were then there would not be room in all the creature slots to show off the awesome stuff that's underground that was why we wanted to do

an underground world in the first place the giant trilobites buried in the caves and underground civilizations of you know cat warriors and ancestors cool stuff cousins the old you know Sun Empire in the old tech uh so it just was not a viable route and so we had to look at the smaller pieces of original Ixalan, which we talked about the double-faced cards that turn into lands are awesome. But the component that we pretty much unanimously agreed had the best gameplay for limited and standard had been the explore mechanic. And it still fit really thematically well with what was going on here. So we walked on to wanting to do that pretty much immediately okay so explore explore is now part of the set okay but we want to dig in the library how does that happen exactly how do you make

digging the library work right so we have explore and we're like, how do we differentiate dig? We really want this to feel like this sense of, you know, unknown discovery. And we realized the big differentiation point there is to focus instead of on the act of digging, that's going to overlap explore a lot more on the moment of discovery and having the dig be the process you're going through to get there. And so we start ideating on how to do that

and the cascade mechanic really feels a lot like this. You just start plowing through your library looking for something of interest and then bam, suddenly an awesome discovery and it immediately impacts the game which is great only cascade had a lot of developmental problems the first time around so we started exploring how can we tweak this mechanic that is you know, really fun, can be really thematic here, but into something that's going to dodge the issues we had the first time around. I just want to make sure the audience understands.

Cascade has always been highly ranked. People like Cascade. The problem with Cascade from a play design standpoint is it encourages you to build your deck in such a way that it's not remotely a surprise. And that's the problem from a construction standpoint is the fun of it is the randomness

and the correct way to play it is take all the randomness out. You see this a lot in modern these days with the free suspend spells that you can always cascade into if you don't play any cards that cost little enough. Okay, so Discover has a few different...

Let's talk real quickly. What did Discover do that's slightly different? Right, so Discover has a few variations. The biggest one for addressing the balance issues on Cascade is Discover is not one-to-one tied to the casting of the card that it's on. So Cascade is, you cast the spell, there's a trigger, you'll go find an on-land card that costs less. online card that costs less. Discover doesn't have to be when you cast it, so we can potentially make cheaper cards that have some bigger hoop to discover. So that card will be within its own discover number and make it extremely hard to put a bunch of them into your deck and then also hit a specific card instead of hitting something random. And because of this, Discover could be a keyword action,

which design-wise is a pretty big deal, because it means, oh, now it could be part of a trigger. There's a lot of things you can do with it that you can't do when it's tied one-for-one with entering the battlefield, or with casting, basically. Right, and maybe most excitingly to us, we could make cards that would turn after turn, discover multiple times, which, you know,

you'll run out of stuff if you try to build around exactly one card to search for, but it gives you a lot more incentive to find cool random things over time. Okay, so we got Discover. Okay, so another important... Sorry, go ahead. One more thing on Discover was, in addition to the

constructed problems, it had a pretty big limited hurdle where when you play Cascade cards, you really don't want situational cards like Combat Tricks and Counterspells because you'll play your cascade card hit one of those have nothing to do with it and just entirely lose the value of your cascade so we realized we could give you the option to

put the card you discover into your hand instead of casting it immediately which you know is less payoff than getting something good but at least makes it so that having a combat trick or counter spell in your limited deck alongside a couple of discover cards wasn't just going to blow you out of the game

okay that's good glad you mentioned that so another thing we wanted to do underground that's a big part of it so I know when you mentioned that. Okay, so another thing we wanted to do underground, and that's a big part of it. So I know when you guys went and looked at mechanics from the first time in Ixalan, so one of them was Ascend, which is ironic, right?

Because the whole idea is we're not going up, we're going down. I know the idea of depth and traveling downward like a lot of the story is about the you know the people are going farther into the earth so that was really important to capture let's talk how did you guys capture that yeah so we really wanted to get the sense of going deeper and deeper as the game progressed and we felt like the mechanical areas that captured that best were either having some number you were tracking that went up as the game went on or like hitting some threshold right yeah well so or scaling perhaps just like feel like i'm deeper and deeper as we're going on here or maybe a threshold number where you go like uh i've gone underground and reached the level where i see what's in the core or maybe something that's going alright, this turn I've gone even deeper

and turn after turn that builds up and so we started experimenting with all three of those directions just looking at cards in your graveyard we briefly considered having your number of how deep you are scale with

the greatest mana value among cards in your graveyard. I'm thinking well, as the game goes longer that'll get bigger and bigger over time, naturally. But once you wanted to add graveyard enablers to play with this, it led to a lot

of really swingy stuff where you put your six drop into your graveyard on turn two and then you no longer have the progression feeling as the game's going on. So we moved back towards the threshold angle of looking at the number of cards in your graveyard. And we really liked playing with the cards that are now checking if you descended this turn that look to see if something went into your graveyard every turn,

but it was just too easy with Instants and Sorceries. You just cast one, and it's in your graveyard, and it doesn't really feel like you are doing something abnormal to the game of magic. Just a weird spellcasting riff. So that independently got us to only looking at permanent cards in your graveyard. And it was only later that we went, wait, that's actually a mirror of the Ascend mechanic. It's looking at your permanents on the battlefield. That's actually a mirror of the Ascend mechanic.

It's looking at your permanents on the battlefield. Yeah, so the interesting thing about Descend is, in some ways, there's three different ways you use it. Yeah. So let's talk through that. So first there's Descend 4 and Descend 8. So what exactly, what does that mean? Right, so these cards will have some effect that turns on once you've got four permanent cards in your graveyard or eight permanent cards in your graveyard as they call out. same time which is pretty fun but difficult to do in too high a density because then all of your

cards are on or off at the same time and so the games lose some of their dynamism because if you build the deck around this you're either way behind when none of your cards are working or way ahead when they all turn on simultaneously okay Okay, so the four and eight were the two places for a threshold, but then you have Fathomless Descent, which is sort of scaling effects, right? You're counting how many. Right, so that was our solution to everything turning on and off at the same time. Checking the exact number in your graveyard all the time can be a lot of tracking burden, so we don't want too many cards in that game. But we use this a lot more at Uncommon and Rare

so that you would have some of your powerful cards that were scaling up as the game went on but wouldn't have all of their strength hit at the same moment as most of the commons. And then... Sorry, Greg. I'm just pointing out the third way. I said there was three. And you talked about this earlier, in that you have things

that care if you've descended this turn that are sort of a trigger ability basing on, hey, has this happened? Right. So we found these to just be super fun with your lands that can sacrifice themselves or setting up your explorer to turn something over. They give another just really satisfying angle to all the little pieces of your game plan.

and we thought throughout most of set design well we've got this if you descended this turn angle and we've got this graveyard counting angle with descend four and descend eight and fathomless descent and we're gonna pick one of these two angles we just want to try them both we're gonna run play tests and see which one resonates more with people and but every play test it flipped back and forth someone's like i love this version so much and so we started scratching our heads and going well can we actually do all of this can we tie it all together enough to feel feel like a cohesive mechanic. And so, yeah, I spent a lot of time, especially with Matt Tabak and Bob Salison, trying to figure out how we could name this set of mechanics to make it all hang together.

And we separated them somewhat by color pairs. So you'll get lots of overlap as you play Limited, but, you know, Black, Green, and Blue, Black are caring more about counting up your graveyard, whereas Black, Red is caring more about putting something in there every turn. Okay, so we have a lot of time left, so I want to get a few more things to get through. We have a new land subtype. How did that come about? Cave is a new land subtype how did that come about okay cave is in the land subtype how did cave come about yeah uh so caves were also pretty early in our micro re-exploration uh we were just asking what does it mean to be underground and see how deep you are and the

other angle besides looking at your graveyard, we found promising, was feeling like there is more earth up above you. Is there some sort of land counting thing that made sense? And we read cards that just cared about lands. It's like, this is a little too far afield. You have to make too many connections to go, that's saying you're underground. But what if we could call out lands that inherently felt like you were underground?

And that's where we got to the cave subtype from. And then wanted to tie them in with all the other underground stuff in Descend. underground stuff in Descend, so made a lot of Caves and Cave Matters cards put themselves into the graveyard in various ways, or care about caves in your graveyard as well as those on the battlefield. Yeah, and also Caves, kind of what Gates do in that, by labeling land, you just have cards care about it, and it gives you other stuff you can do in different formats and things. other stuff you can do in different formats and things. Right.

So it's sort of an 11th sideways strategy in the limited format and a few, uh, yeah, considerations for way beyond limited too. Okay. I think we've had all the mechanics. There's this one last theme I want to hit. So you made a conscious choice. We're going back to Ixalan.

You said, okay, uh, we'll have double-faced lands, you know, things that don't fit on the back. Okay. We're going back to Ixalan. You said, okay, we'll have double-faced lands, you know, things that double-face on the back. Okay, we'll do Explore. Explore's a pretty good mechanic. And I know that you, like you guys had said,

okay, there's four creature types that people associate with. We want to make sure they're here. I mean, if you love, if you want to have more cards for your pirate deck or your morpho deck or your vampire deck, okay, LeBron, Ixalan, those cards should exist but you decided

to take one archetype how did dinosaurs end up being the archetype you chose? yeah, so some of this was just they are the most emblematic and unique feeling to Ixalan.

While Ixalan has very different takes on merfolk and on vampires, those types exist a lot of places. Players that really love them are going to have more frequent other opportunities to care about them a lot whereas pirates and dinosaurs felt like the really emblematic to ixalan types and we thought you know they overlap in central colors we would expect them to be and we really couldn't have two types heavily themed and limited in one color without eating up all of the creature slots and the dinosaurs a felt a little more emblematic to us of what was going on here and b uh more wanted their own title element versus being easy to tie into the rest of what's going on. Pirates love treasure and getting artifacts of various sorts,

and we already wanted a heavy artifact theme around crafting, so it was much easier to make a lot of thematic pirate cards that tied into the other set mechanics, whereas for the dinosaurs to matter, they really were going to need something of their own. Maybe we could make our Power Matters theme or Enrage theme or something like that, but they just

felt like the best place to really call out dinosaurs are awesome. Get dinosaurs. Yeah, so dinosaurs are just a smidgen bigger, which lets you do a ramp deck and ramp into them and stuff, which is cool. Yeah. Any final, because we're almost out of time here,

any final elements that we haven't touched upon about the design of Lost Cavern 6 Salon? Great. Somewhat interesting thing still on the Titanical front was, we knew a ton of people were going to love this, so we were trying to figure out how to give cards to people who wanted to build typo decks even without getting huge focuses and we came up with schemes for uh some cards that can reward their type but could also target

themselves if you don't have another member and so that they wouldn't need as strong a type of focus, and a few rares to lead to occasionally drafting around them or making constructed decks. But the biggest innovation was theming the set of four commander pre-constructed decks around the original Ixalan types. They've got a lot more space for cards and just a clear home run for people who go, I love this type, I want to be all about it and get all your cards in one place

without needing to as intricately mesh with all the other underground themes to build a limited environment. Yeah, we've kind of learned that the Commander decks do a good job of sometimes things don't fit, but people want it. And we've definitely been looking at Commander decks to kind of sometimes fill expectation

when the set can't support it. So that's been a nice tool of the Commander decks. Yeah. So anyway, we're running out of time here. So I just want to say that this was a very challenging design. I commented in my article of, like,

when you hand over designs, like, sometimes almost nothing changes, and sometimes some things change, and sometimes a lot changes, and so this was the latter. So thank you for taking this and making it something cool. Much appreciated.

Well, likewise, and certainly have to give a lot of the credit to the worldbuilding team, especially Miguel Lopez and Ovidio Cartagena. When we decided we were moving to Ixalan, they immediately dove in to building a huge amount of worldbuilding material on all

of what's happening in the underground that was really important for giving us guidelines for where to aim on the shorter timeline, figuring out how to integrate all this stuff. And the other thing about the two of them is they have much more first-hand knowledge

of the source material in a way that could bring it forth. That's another very fun thing about this that we didn't even get into. This is a little more world knowledge of sort of the source material in a way that could bring it forth, you know. That's another very fun thing about the set we didn't even get into. This is a little more world building, but it really taps into a portion of the world in a way that's really cool, you know. Yeah, extremely resonant, even

if you're not familiar and a lot more depth for the people who are. It's really awesome. But anyway, I see my desk. So I want to thank you for joining us today, Jules. It was much fun. And like I said, there was a lot to discuss.

We went a little long today, but that's okay. But anyway, guys, so thank you very much, Jules, for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me on. And guys, since they can see my desk, we 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. So once again, thanks Jules. And I'll see all of you guys next time.

Bye-bye.