Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1088: Vision Design

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

In this podcast, I take an in-depth look at the current vision design process.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so recently I did a podcast all about exploratory design. I had done a podcast way back when. Anyway, I decided to do another one on vision design. The vision design one's a little more recent, but mostly the vision design podcast I did before was a little more about explaining the process of what vision design was, because we were changing over from design development to vision design, set design, play design.

So today I'm going to talk a little more about what we do in vision design and give a sort of, the same way I was talking about exploratory design, just go through what vision design does. Okay, so just to recap for those who maybe didn't listen to my exploratory design does. Okay, so just a recap for those who maybe didn't listen to my exploratory design podcast. So exploratory design is making a map of all the things, doing all the research.

In my house building metaphor I like to use, it's just figuring out what kind of houses you can build and where can you build it and what kind of materials available and are there new building ideas? And anyway, the idea is exploratory has done a lot of prep work sort of figuring out what the space is, figuring out what the possibilities are, what the problems are, what potential solutions are. But exploratory is just doing research. Exploratory is just helping understand what is available,

what could be done. Vision design, so the key to vision design, the way to think about this is, each part of design, exploratory design, vision design, set design, play design, is trying to set up the next design, the part that follows them. So vision design is trying to sort of set up, set design for success. So there's a couple things that vision design is trying to do. So I want to sort of go in order of the most important thing and then talk about other things.

But we'll start with the most important. And this might not be much of a shock because it's called vision design. But the number one goal of vision design is to set a vision. Meaning, one of the things about working on magic is a communal design experience. Many people are working on it. It is not just one person. In my past life, you know, I was a writer. And a lot of times writing is like, you're the writer, you're alone

writing. And, you know, it's all up to you to figure things out. Now, in any media, there is collaboration. You know, I used to write for TV. Well, you write for TV, but there's actors and director and there's a lot of people involved and usually the writing staff but the essentially the key to trying to make the best magic set is you want everybody working on the set going in the same direction that you want everybody trying to solve the same problems one of the things that can happen with any collaborative effort is if there's not a clear vision for what you're doing, people can be working at odds with each other. Like you can keep, let's say two people have a different idea what the set's going to be. They can keep, it can be changing back and forth. Or maybe you're trying to make something, but people don't understand what you're trying to

make. So they're making things that don't make sense to it. So a really important part of the early aspect of vision design is to say, what are we doing? So I like to refer to it as creating the bullseye, meaning that everybody's focused on the same target, that everybody's trying to do the same thing. And so you use exploratory as a means to understand the space. And that one of the things that I like to do when designing something is I want to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the set I'm making. Where is the strong part of it? Where is the weak part of it?

And what that usually means is when I talk about the strength of the design, it's a couple things. One is, I want the audience to be excited by it, right? Are we doing something that people want to see? Are we making something that's exciting? Now, not everybody likes every theme, you know, so it's okay to do something that some of the audience is really excited about, and some of the audience is like, eh. The nature of sort of creating passion out of people, that's how emotions work. You know, if I, for example, I use Innistrad.

I use Innistrad in my exploratory design talk. So Innistrad said, okay, we're going to take horror, the genre of horror, and apply it. Now, not everybody likes horror. I mean, to be honest, as a movie watcher, I'm not a big horror fan, per se. I mean, I've seen, it's not that I haven't seen any, I've seen some. But if I could choose for myself what genre of movie I'm going to watch,

horror's not really where I go to. It's not my comfort food, if you will. But there are people who horror is, they love it. I mean, it's a very popular genre. So when you are making something, you are trying, the goal is you want to make the people that are going to love it absolutely adore it.

The goal is not to make the people that aren't that enthralled in the first. I want to make sure, for example, let's take Innistrad, that I want all Magic players to love something about Innistrad. Not everybody's going to love the flavor. Not everybody's going to love the world.

Just because it's... Now, some people should adore it. You know, like I said, in my talk, my GDC talk, one of my lessons was, if everybody likes it but nobody loves it, you will fail. talk, one of my lessons was if everybody likes it but nobody loves it, you will fail. And what that means is you're not trying to make compromises where everybody's like, well, nobody hates it. What you want to do is figure out how to make people love it, not everybody, how to make people love it and make sure you're delivering for the people that are going to love it that

they'll really, really love it. And magic keeps changing and doing different things. So the idea is, hey, if this isn't your cup of tea, there's another set coming along with a different theme that maybe will be exciting to you. And we definitely move between themes to help that. Okay, sorry. So,

I'm trying to get the bullseye. I'm trying to figure out what the set is about. Now, on the surface level, there is the theme we're playing around with. Innistrad was about, um, gothic horror. Um, but that alone, I mean, we tend to start our designs usually with some nugget. Like, when we started Innistrad, like, we knew it was about horror. Uh, even the fact that it ended up being sort of gothic horror.

I mean, we didn't know exactly where we were going. Um, I mean, gothic horror we ended up with because it's the most adjacent to fantasy. It's kind of fantasy horror. And back in the days, I think when we first were sort of stretching from magic, we wanted to stay as close to the core as you will. So we were finding things. It was still fantasy, but, and I think as we've been experimenting more, we've been more comfortable pushing farther away from the center. The audience

has been excited by that. So we found the audience to be definitely, it's something that they've enjoyed. Okay, so part of finding your bullseye is figuring out sort of what is your theme and what is what we call your mechanical heart. So what a mechanical heart is, I talked about this a little bit in exploratory. Mechanical heart means what is my set built around? Mechanically, what is it built around? If it's a bottom-up set, well, usually the mechanical heart is sort of core to what you're doing. You know, Ravnica was, sort of core to what you're doing. You know, Ravnica was, I'm going to build around two-color pairs. Zendikar was, I'm going to build around land mechanics.

So when you're doing a bottom-up set where, like, the essence of how you're designing is based on some mechanical thing, you start with your mechanical heart. But if you're doing something that's more top-down, like Innistrad, then it's a matter of figuring out, okay, well, what exactly am I doing? What is the essence of what I want? And the key to sort of getting a good mechanical heart is reinforcing the things that the set wants to be. And thematically, you want to have some theme that people can build cards around, people can build the set around.

And the thing that's interesting about magic, sort of, I went through this in the Exploratory Design podcast, each set is its own thing. Each set has different needs. And so what things, you know, how things want to function is going to vary from set to set. When we're making, you know, the vision design of every set is not identical. So what I want to do, figure out the mechanical heart. I want to figure out the core theme. And for the core theme, it's sort of like, what is the essence of what I'm doing? What is the, and the other thing is I have to work with a creative team.

Any world we do has a built-in conflict to it. And the reason is, we're a game about conflict. So there has to be some core conflict built into the world. Because there needs to be, like, who is fighting who? I mean, we're a combat game, so that has to kind of be built into the system. That there has to be some conflict engine, as we like to call it, built into the world. And so part of figuring out the theme is working with the creative team to understand what the conflict engine is. Now, like I said, there's a lot of different things that are going on last time I broke up in my exploratory design talk

I broke it up into talking about new worlds and returns so I will do that again here just because it's a clean break to understand some of the dynamics so let's say I'm, I'm, and let's start with, I'm doing a new world. Uh, and again, break it down to top down and bottom up. So top down. So Innistrad's my top down example. Okay. I know I'm doing horror, maybe gothic horror, but what does that mean? Um, exploratory gave Exploratory gave me a whole bunch of tools. I came out of exploratory going, ooh, monsters.

Ooh, death. Ooh, the graveyard. You know, I have ideas and things. But now, vision design has to take sort of the, like, exploratory is like monsters. That's a meaty thing, monsters. Now, vision design has to say, okay, how do I execute on monsters? What does it mean by monsters? How does the structure match to monsters?

And so the big part of getting your mechanical heart is understanding how, what are the mechanics you're doing and how do they interact? So let's take monsters as a good example. It was obvious in exploratory that monsters are a typal thing, right? That I can make, I have vampires and zombies and werewolves and spirits. But the next step from a vision design standpoint is I'm trying to build a structure out of it. One of the things that I always look at is I want to imbue the color pie in some way. So, you know, in Theros it was the lens through which the gods were formed.

In Throne of Eldraine, the courts. You know, you want to—the color pie is so organic and natural to what magic is. When you're making new world, you want to figure out how to show off the color pie in the world. So in Ishrad, we started down the path of how do we execute each of the things.

So the first thing we did was we figured out what would I expect of zombies in a gothic horror set? What would I expect of vampires? What would I expect of werewolves? And exploratory design had done some work designing like ideas for what each of those meant. What is a vampire deck like? What is a werewolf deck like? What is a zombie deck like? And one of the cool things was that I had a source for inspiration. It was a top-down set.

So, like, zombies are a really good example. We've made zombies before. Zombies is nothing new to magic. But what I was interested in in Innistrad was I wanted to figure out how do I make zombies act like the zombies you know from the source material. Okay, so when you think horror, you think like movies. There's zombie movies, zombie TV shows and stuff. Okay, is there any nature to how zombies function in those movies?

And the core identity that I realized was with zombies is any one zombie is not particularly dangerous. You see the heroes of zombie apocalypse, TV shows, movies, and such, they kill zombies all the time. It is not the idea that any one zombie is problematic. The problem is that there's endless zombies. There's hordes of zombies and that yeah I can kill a zombie can I kill five zombies can I kill 10 zombies can I kill 20s you know that I'm going to get overrun with zombies and that that is kind of the core danger of zombies something

like a vampire hey one vampire is a lot more dangerous. Where zombies, the real danger of the zombies isn't that any one zombie is particularly dangerous. Now, if that one zombie bites you, you're in trouble. You'll die, turn into a zombie. So, I mean, each zombie is dangerous, but the strength of zombies in the movies and such is their number. So, we're like, okay, we want to get that feeling. We want the zombies to build up and overrun you.

That's what the zombies do. So, a lot of trying to understand that was figuring out how to execute on that. We also liked the idea that the zombies, you're taking dead creatures to make zombies. Because, you know, Frankenstein and such. So, what if there's a mechanic, not necessarily

a named mechanic, but a mechanic where you're having to get dead creatures out of the graveyard. You know, we had certain creatures that, like, in order to play them,

you had to sacrifice or exile creature cards from your graveyard. So, we find different ways to play into that theme. Now, the key division, though, is we need

a larger structure. It's not just, yeah, we can figure out double-faced cards for werewolves and exiling creature cards for zombies, but the larger issue is, how do they play together? Now, using Innistrad as my example, one of the big challenges was that the source material was not evenly spaced among the colors. This is often true.

Other people's stories are not written to accommodate the color pie. Ours are, but other people are not. And so Innistrad had the problem of pushing black. What that means is, vampires, what color are they naturally in? Well, black. Zombies, what color are they naturally in?

Black. Werewolves, we'd only done two or three at the time, but what colors had they been in? Well, black. Zombies, what color are they naturally in? Black. Werewolves, we'd only done two or three at the time, but what colors have they been in? Black. Same with ghosts. Often ghosts will be in black. So, how do we... We can't build a set of all black things. And we'd experimented.

There's a set called Torment, where we tried having more black things than other colors. We had less white and green things. And unbalanced colors really caused all sorts of balance issues and building for limited became very hard. So, okay, that was off limits. I did suggest it for Inderstry that maybe we want to do it a little bit, but development at the time was like, no, we do not want to do that. We learned our lesson. Okay. So what that meant is the question I ask is, okay,

oh, the other thing was, we had done typel before. We had done typel in Onslaught, and we had done typel in Lorwyn, and one of the lessons we learned was that, well, one of the lessons we had learned in Onslaught, Onslaught had done its typo in one color. Goblins are red. Merfolk are actually... They didn't have merfolk. They didn't have merfolk. Elves are green. And the problem was that it really limited how you can build the decks

because it's like there was one choice and there's a ranking of usually what the better creatures of that creature type are. And what it meant is if two people built a goblin deck from Onslaught, the goblin decks looked a lot alike. And in Limited, it's hard to draft single colors. So, we said, okay, the technology we used in Lorwyn was

let's put these types in more than one color. Let's put them in two or more colors. That element of typo worked out well. So I knew that I wanted to be in at least two colors. So at bare minimum, everything couldn't be black because they needed a second color. So what I did is I said, okay, what color could these things be if they weren't black? And we liked the idea with zombies,

like that there's necromancy, like you can use magical spells and raise things from the dead. But also, in Gothic horror, you get stuff like Frankenstein, where science makes zombies. And so we liked the idea of zombies are created.

And that felt very blue. You know, Dr. Frankenstein felt very blue, or blue-black, but had a lot of blue in him. Werewolves had a very green, you know, there's a cyclical nature, and, you know, a wolf is kind of a wild animal, so it had a lot of green feel to it. And then vampires, we realized that

we could angle a sort of a bloodlust angle, you know, which made them a little more wild, which made them feel red. And so originally, like, okay, we have black, green, black, red, black, blue. And then we're like, oh, maybe we wanted something that's black, white. And that's, we realized we were shy, one type,

but we knew we wanted humans because humans are sort of the, not only the victims, but also the source material of all the monsters, that all the monsters at one point had been human before becoming a monster. And then we realized that we needed a fifth one just for balance purposes.

So spirits or ghosts felt like the next most natural. But once we realized that, like, well, all the monsters just can't be black. It just eats up too much space. So the question was, well, could we move some of them somewhere else? And we made the realization

that werewolves could be green and red. There's a wild, chaotic nature to them. One of the flavors of werewolves is the idea that when you become a werewolf, you lose all your inhibitions, and you just do the things you want to do. That felt very red-green. So we moved werewolves to red-green. We realized with spirits that we wanted them to fly. So instead of being white-black, they could be white-blue.

And we thought we could, you know, that maybe white was the more helpful spirits and blue maybe the more mischievous. Because spirits also have a mischievous quality. And so being blue made some sense there. And we had realized that humans made a lot of sense in white-green. So as we piece it all together, we're like, oh, we have white-blue is spirits, blue-black is zombies, black-red is vampires, red-green is werewolves, green-white is humans. Oh, look, we have a structure.

So that's an important part in vision is you're trying to figure out where is my structure. You know, we spend a lot of time, like the idea was, you know, the main theme obviously had a horror thing to it. But it was also like, another thing that I like to look at in vision design is I'm trying to evoke something from the players. What am I trying to evoke? So with every set, it's sort of like, well, what emotion am I trying to evoke? Now, with Innistrad, it was easy. I'm trying to evoke something from the players. What am I trying to evoke? So with every set, it's sort of like, well, what emotion am I trying to evoke? Now, with Innistrad, it was easy. I'm trying to evoke fear. Okay, well, how do I do that?

How do I, you know, so I want to have a mechanical heart. I want to have a core theme. I want to have some emotion that I'm evoking. I want to have some emotion that I'm evoking. So the idea there was, and I need some larger structure. Not only is there a mechanical heart, meaning what am I mechanically caring about, but also what is the structure? Like Innistrad, my whole point of my story was, it wasn't just a matter of, yeah, we have a theme. We're doing top-down horror.

But I needed a more crystallized theme than that. And I needed a structure that sort of said, how is this being put together? Now, a key with top-down stuff is you want to translate the top-down into mechanics. So the idea is I want to do monsters. Well, monsters become typal. I want to do the graveyard. Well, that just becomes the graveyard. I want to do death matters that end up becoming morbid. I can care about things dying. And the other thing I wanted is I wanted to create, like, I needed a sense of fear. Well, how do I do that? Well, the biggest thing that's scary in magic, well, there's two things.

One is the unknown, and the other is that I know something bad is going to happen, but I don't know when it's going to happen. So, for example, the werewolf mechanic that we built in, this idea that, look, you play them and they're human. But at some point, they're going to become werewolves. And werewolves are much scarier. They're much bigger. They're more dangerous.

And so the idea that when I see the humans, I know the werewolves are coming. But I don't quite know when. quite no win. And I, as the way we set up the werewolf mechanic was, if no spells are cast on a turn by one player, they become werewolves. If two or more spells are cast in one turn, daylight comes back on, they go back to humans. And so there's this nice tension that happens where things happen, the player gets sort of worried about it. And likewise, morbid has this thing about creatures dying so most of the Morbid effects not all of them

but a lot of them are sitting in the hand meaning oh if I cast a spell and a creature's died my spell is better so when we get into combat and I attack with a creature especially if I attack with a creature that seems like it's not a good attack

you start like well should I block this? Well, it looks like I can kill it. Now, in a normal game of Magic, maybe I'm teasing a combat trick or something. But here, it's like, oh, maybe they want it to die. Maybe I'm not supposed to block it. Maybe if I block it, I'll be unhappy. Like, it creates this tension that every time you're blocking a creature to kill it, you're worried.

Or whenever, you know, that was a lot of the things we wanted to do is create things that just make you a bit nervous about what's happening. And that is the idea of playing to the emotion. The other thing that I liked a lot, and this is sort of your theme, is I liked the idea, you know, when we with the creative team really came up with the idea that this world is a world of humans and monsters made out of humans, we realized that it played in a thing we called dark transformation. The idea being that you're going to recognize these things, but these things are going to be scary and going to come at you. And that there is the idea that things are going to become darker things.

Devil Face cards became sort of the splashy focus. Dark Transformation really played into that. And we had a lot of things where cards could change. You know, obviously the werewolves changed. And even with some of the vampires and zombies, like zombies over time are going to build a horde. Yeah, there's a lot of things that sort of are scary with time. But once again, so we, and the mechanical heart was,

here are the core of our things, death and death matters in the graveyard and the monsters. We sort of created a core of mechanics to care about. We created an emotion to care about. We created an emotion to care about. We created a theme to care about. We created a structure that, you know. And those are the four core things. Mechanical heart, structure, emotional, like, core theme, and then the emotion you're trying to evoke.

Okay. the emotion you're trying to evoke. Okay. So, in a top-down set, the question is, what am I given? In a top-down set, I'm given theme. Sometimes I'm given emotion. And I've got to figure out

structure and mechanical heart. If I'm doing bottom-up, I start with mechanical heart. Sometimes I start with structure. Ravnica, for example, knowing that I had ten bottom-up, I start with mechanical heart. Sometimes I start with structure. Ravnica, for example, knowing that I had ten two-color pairs, really defined a lot of the structure. So sometimes with bottom-ups, I also have structure. But I don't know the emotion.

I don't know the theme. Knowing that we're doing two-color pairs, hey, we had to get to the guilds. We had to get to the city world. We had to give the the city world. We had to get to that the, we had to give the the color combinations an identity. That was a big part of the theming

we did with Ravnica. And the idea that color pairs are not, you know, in a normal game of magic they're just things you play. But in Ravnica, they take on a personality. And it really takes this aspect of magic that exists but gives it this extra oomph. And the idea there is, you know, the theme of Ravnica was what guild are you?

We want to give each combination an identity and make you associate with that identity. The idea of factioning, we had done small amount of factioning, but like emotional factioning where, hey, who do you bond with? We hadn't really done before. And that became a big theme and very core to what the set was and influenced, like we do a lot of faction sets now. They're very powerful. Okay. If I'm doing a return, some of this, the one thing about returns is a lot of this stuff has been figured out before. Meaning, okay, we figured out the structure.

We figured out the mechanical heart. We figured out the core theme. We figured out the emotion we're trying to evoke. On a return, okay, once again, divide returns into traditional return and backdrop set. Traditional return, most of that gets to come back. You know, if I'm going back to Innistrad, I'm like, well, yeah,

it's still but gothic horror. The monster's still out of the structure. It still has, you know, death is going to matter. Like a lot of, a lot of a classic return, you don't need to reinvent a lot. Normally what happens on a classic return

is you're trying to find new ways to play up the existing theme. It's not that Innistrad is changing what Innistrad is. It's not. It's going to have a similar structure. It's going to have a similar mechanical heart. But, now, sometimes you just want to revisit. For example, with Innistrad, the second time we went back,

we decided to play with a different kind of horror. So the first one was gothic horror. The return, we did cosmic horror, which overlaps with gothic horror, but it's a little bit different. The source material is a little bit different. The kinds of things it does. We were playing into the Eldrazi

and part of the story of Emrakul coming and mutating things. And so it was still, it still had that horror feel, but it was playing around in different space. So, one of the things about Returns is, usually on a Return, some amount of things are the same, and something is

different. We went back to Zendikar, there was a war with the Eldrazi. We went back to Eldraine, the courts had been a war with the Eldrazi. We went back to Eldraine. The courts had been destroyed, or most destroyed by the Phraxians. A little more about the wilds. But, there's a lot of carryover. You know,

wilds of Eldraine had adventure, had food, obviously had a lot of top-down fairy tales and some Camelot, you know. That, the essence of the world, I mean, we shifted our focus a little bit, but the world was the world. And so on returns, it's a little bit easier. So I often talk about how when I have new designers, I tend to like to put new designers on traditional returns as their first set. Why? It's just a little bit easier.

More problems have been solved. There's more solutions built in. Now, a backdrop in some ways is a lot more like designing a new world, because there's a completely different theme. You know, Wilds of Eldraine is not just more Eldraine.

It's not a faction set. It's not a typo set. You know, it is doing something a bit different and so part of making that work is a lot like making a new set where sometimes there's some themes that overlap

and sometimes you use structural components but usually there's a new mechanical heart if you're not doing a normal return you're shifting what the mechanical heart is so for example in Lost Caverns of Ixalan, oh, there's an underground element. There's crafting. There's, you know, discovering. Like, the idea is you're exploring underground. Now, we had a, like, part of it is understanding how you overlap with the world. How do I feel, like, when I'm on Ixalan, you know, and so we carried over double-faced cards.

We carried over Explore. We carried over some dinosaur typo. So there's that. But like I said, really the core, the key to vision is making this bullseye, getting everybody on board. And it's those four things. It is what is your mechanical heart? What's the set about. It is, what is your mechanical heart? What's the set about?

Mechanically, what are you messing with? What is your structure? How are you building things in such a way that you interconnect your component pieces? What is your core theme? You know, what is it you're, what is it when I'm, the other thing I didn't get really into is, we have to market our sets, right?

We have to get players excited. So we have to make sure when we build the sets that they are marketable, that there's something about them that we can, like, part of having a core theme is so the set holds together, so the set has a feel, and so that when we tell the audience what the set's about, there's a clean and clear thing that the set's about. And then the last thing is that the emotion is when I'm getting you to play, I want you to feel something. And we want different sets to feel different things. You know, Theros wanted a sense of adventure,

that you were building something, and that you were going on this journey to become something better. You know, Throne of Eldraine and Wilds of Eldraine really had this idea of piecing together your own story, that I'm taking component pieces, and I'm making my own fairy tale in some way or my own, you know, Camelot adventure. Each different set does this in a different way. And so the core of vision design is figuring out how to sort of get all those in line

and in a way that's communicative. And then the reason we do the vision design handoff document is to really hammer home all those points. Hammer home what the set is, what we care about. And that each set has different things. And even though I named four things we have to do, certain sets will lean on certain things as far as... Some sets are more about structure. Some sets are more about the mechanical heart.

Some are more about the core theme. Some are more about the emotion. All those are always there, but sort of what the essence is, what you're pushing, can shake up a little bit in how we design sets. Sets are made a little bit differently. Anyway, guys, I hope that was fun for you. It is neat to talk through some of the basics. I mean, this is what I do every day, but it's neat to talk through some of them. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this. But I'm now at work. So I don't know what this means. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.