Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1106: Murders at Karlov Manor Design

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

In this podcast, I tell the design story of Murders at Karlov Manor.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is all about the design of murders at Karlov Manor. Okay, so this was codenamed Polo was the name of the set. And from the very beginning, from when we first put it on the schedule, we had this idea of blending some sort of mystery in it. We had talked about doing a murder mystery forever. We like doing top-down genres, and murder mystery has a lot of fun trope space in it. And a murder mystery could be put in multiple places.

The original plan, by the way, was we were going to do a brand new world. A murder mystery world. A world that optimized murder mysteries. Where people were dying left and right and they were always solving crimes. And we liked the idea of baking in some puzzles into it. It was very cool. Way back when Michael and I were pitching the original Weatherlight Saga, in it, in the second block that we had pitched, which was Mercadia, a lot, lot changed, but Stark was killed by

Volrath, and we had a murder mystery planned for our set. We had to figure out who killed Stark. In our version, it was Tomgarth, but Tomgarth was secretly actually Volrath, and you had to figure all that out. In our version, you didn't know Volrath had snuck aboard. Part of the murder mystery was figuring out that Volrath was there. Anyway, so we knew that we wanted to involve this in some way with the murder mystery. It turns out we have someone on staff who is a master puzzle builder, Mark Gottlieb, who has led many a set. So the idea for this set was he and I co-led the vision, and then he, along with Andrew Brown, co-led the set design.

So Mark's sort of specialty is the middle part of the process. So I helped him a little bit with the beginning and Andrew helped him a little bit with the end. But anyway, the reason we had Mark from the very beginning, Gottlieb from the very beginning, was we knew we wanted to involve puzzles in some way into this. We wanted to make something challenging. And so we got Mark involved.

Anyway, I will do a podcast on the murder mystery itself on the puzzles itself, that's not the focus of this podcast this podcast is more about the design, I will have a podcast on that okay, so we knew from the beginning, top down murder mystery so one of the things that was a shoo-in was just, one of the things we tend to do in early design especially on top down sets, is like, okay, what One of the things we tend to do in early design, especially on top-down sets,

is like, okay, what are all the things that we've done before that make a lot of sense in a murder mystery? And the slam dunk, obviously you have to do it, was investigate and clues. Now, I should point out, we did once before kind of do a little bit of a mystery. The beginning, Shadows Over Innistrad, is our second visit to Innistrad.

We decided for that block to shift from Gothic horror, which is the normal set, to cosmic horror. And in cosmic horror, the beginning part of cosmic horror usually is a mystery. And so we put Jace in a trench coat, and we had wanted to capture the sense of mystery. And so we came up with the investigate mechanic. And investigate, for those that somehow don't know it, when you investigate, you make a clue. A clue is an artifact token that you spend... What do you spend on it?

I think you spend two and sacrifice to draw a card, I believe. And anyway, so clues were our first sort of, let's make a non-creature artifact token that we make a whole bunch of. The clues were the first one. We later would do it with food and with treasure and we would do it on other places. But clue was sort of our first down there. And the reason we, so the reason Investigate came out was we liked the idea that investigation led to you drawing cards.

It's like, oh, you have Clues, and then you learn things and you draw cards. But just straight up drawing cards was too much card advantage. So Clues came about because we were trying to figure out a way to do sort of how do you draw half a card was basically the idea and so drawing a token that with mana you could trade in for a card was basically like half a card and we we just could put that on a lot more cards if you straight up draw a card we just couldn't do as many cards as possible but by making it sort of

half a card we could put investigate into more cards. Anyway, the other side note is we later learned that we didn't need to tie the token to a word like treasure and food. It's not like you have to cook something to make food. And so later on, we learned that we could just make the token. But investigate in a murder mystery world. I mean, you know. Anyway, so we knew from day one we were doing investigating clues. I mean, it's so evocative of murder mysteries that how could we not do it? So that was included from day one.

Another thing we knew we wanted from very early on. Excuse me. Was we wanted some of us. We wanted you, the player, to have to figure something out. Right? That important part of the murder mystery was there's information in which you don't have all the information, and you, the detective, have to figure something out. And so, we looked at all the mechanics that have hidden information, um, some of which live in your hand and that didn't quite have the feeling we like, like for example,

traps live in your hand. Um, the problem is in some level, the hand is always hidden information. Um, kind of what we wanted was something in which your opponent knew they didn't know something and then had to figure out not, you know, you know something they don't know because it's in your hand. So the low-hanging fruit for that was the morph mechanic. So real quick history of the morph mechanic. Many years ago, the rules team was trying to solve, there's two cards that Richard made in alpha, illusionary mask and camouflage, both of which asked you to turn a card face down. But there really weren't rules for it. What did it mean to turn a card face down?

So the rules team had to come up with rules for it. And the idea is what they realized is they could define what a face down card is. And in making sort of the rules they needed, they realized that they could make a mechanic out of it. Uh, they called morph or I don't know if they called it morph, but, um, uh, and then when they, so I think they had pitched it to a couple of people and nobody in R&D was particularly excited by it, but they kept pitching it cause they were excited by it. And they pitched it to me.

Um, I think when they first pitched it, it was two mana for face down one, one. I suggested they make it a three down 2-2. But they said, OK, we could do that. And so I then made it my mission. At the time, I was assigned by Bill Rose to kind of fix Onslaught. Onslaught had been handed over and it just needed, it was missing something. It was missing something. It was missing something. So part of me finding something to go there

was trying to convince people that Morph could go there. And so I built a bunch of decks with Morph. The other thing that I came up with was the idea that when you turn it face up, that it could have trigger conditions on it. I put some of those on. Anyway, I played with R&D, got them on board, got Morph into Onslaught. And Morph went on to be a pretty popular mechanic. We did it in Onslaught.

It came back in Time Spiral. It came back again in Khans of Tarkir. Now, in Khans of Tarkir, one of the challenges was, over the years, we've made creatures better. Alpha did a lot of things awesomely. But power level is a little off on some power level. Some spells were too powerful. Spells and artifacts were too powerful. But creatures generally were a little low-powered. So over the years, we've raised the power level of creatures.

And what that meant is the three-mana tutu that once was fine was a little bit below the bar. So in kinds of Tarkir, we experimented. We tried something we called Borf, which was like bear morph, which was two mana for two, two. We also tried something we called Smorf. I don't know where that name came from, other than it sounds fun. In which you pay four mana for a two, two with a plus one, plus one counter on it. That would morph into Megamorph.

supposed to encounter on it. That would morph into Megamorph. We also ended up in Fate Reforged making Manifest where you take a card off the top of the library and it's a 2-2 face-down creature, but then if it's a creature you can turn it face-up. We'll get to that in a second.

But anyway, we never quite found a fix. So we ended up just using Morph as it originally was designed. But this time we're like, okay, maybe we want to bring back Morph, but let's figure out can we make it a little bit better? So the first version we tried was three mana for a 3-2 rather than a 2-2. It was a little bit more aggressive than we wanted, and the biggest problem is you tended, it was more valuable to use it as a defensive

creature than it was to flip it up. And part of the fun of morph is you want to flip up the morph cards. You want to turn them face up and, you know, there's a lot of great, oh, no, it's secretly this. So the next thing we tried was, okay, what if we just somehow protect it so that it's hard to kill it while it's face down, giving you more time to turn it face up. So that's when we tried 2-2 Ward 2. That is the second thing we tried.

That is what stuck. We, in fact, got to Ward 2 during vision design. We tried 3-2 for a while. Then like midway through, we changed to 2-2 Ward 2. That worked and we kept it. We did also, or sorry, set design, not vision design. Set design would later sort of bring back manifest as well. So in the set, we originally had called the new version of Morph Cloak in design, but

they ended up using Cloak for the manifest version. And the actual mechanic now is called Disguise. So Disguise is morph except instead of just being a vanilla tutu it's a tutu with Ward 2. And then Cloak is like manifest except instead of making a face-down tutu you make a face-down tutu with Ward 2. But the idea is that if it turn, if it's a creature,

you can pay its cost to turn it face up. Okay, so that is the stuff that, like, with old things that we liked, that we wanted to adapt. So investigating clues, disguise, cloak. Okay, we brought that back. Now, another big

thing, so this is one of the things where you learn something in another field and you apply it. Back in the day, before I was a game designer, I used to write for television. And my dream when I was a television writer was I wanted to create my own TV series. And so I wrote a bunch of pilots. TV series. And so I wrote a bunch of pilots. So for those that don't know, a pilot is the first episode of a TV show that introduces the concept, the characters, the setting, that sort of gives you an example of what the series could be. And the way you sell a TV series partly is through pilots. So I wrote some pilots. The one I was proudest of was called Tech Court.

is through pilots. So I wrote some pilots. The one I was proudest of was called Tech Court. It was a science fiction courtroom drama. I'm still very proud of it. Anyway, as I was writing it, because it was science fiction, it was set in the future, I read a bunch of books about writing for science fiction. And one of the things that really hit me was this concept of early on in technology, you're trying to do whatever you need to to capture the technology. Like, you know, however it has to look, however it has to function. Look, you're doing new technology, so the technology, it looks like what it has to look like.

But one of the things they said is, as technology improves, you're stopped confined by what you have to do and you more of the freedom to make it look the way you want to make it look and what they said is advanced technology is very aesthetic it matches to the need so it doesn't need to look like science or looking like like a lot of if you sort of watch the evolution of any technology, the early technology is a little bit clunky because it's just,

it's doing the thing it needs to do to be the technology. But as technology advances, you know, it gets smaller and easier. And then how it looks is more about the aesthetics and less about the technology that you want to make it feel natural. And so anyway, I thought a lot about that when I was writing my tech court. And anyway, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about

is I'm always thinking about how to advance design. You know, how do you make design get to the next level? So one of the things I've been thinking a lot, we do a lot of resonance. I'm a big believer that part of making people happy, part of making people engaged, part of getting people to tap into emotions that they're excited by is doing things in magic card form that people already like. That's why we do top-down things. That's why we do universes beyond. There's something very powerful of take things you already have passionate feelings for and put it in a magic card form. One of the reasons we're doing murder mystery, that people like murder mysteries,

and it's fun to take the essence of a murder mystery and put that into cards. But sort of applying this idea is, okay, well, at some point, you get better with the technology, aka design technology, and that the next level is the aesthetics of it. So one of the things I've been very focused on is not only making the name and the art and the flavor text as resonant as possible, I want to make the rules text itself as resonant as possible. And one of the ideas that I really have been focusing on, and Polo got into this, and so I co-led with Mark Gottlieb.

He's also a word person. He was very into this. What if we figured out what we wanted the cards to say? Like, what are the evocative things? And then as we craft our mechanics, craft mechanics so they use the words and the concepts and the verbiage that we wanted. So a lot of the remaining mechanics came out of us wanting to say certain things. So one of the things we did early on is we wrote the verbiage down. What are the words? What are the words you hear? For example, the main character of a

murder mystery is a detective. So how do we use detective in the game? Now, that one was pretty easy. Detective is a thing. It's a job. Something you do. Well, magic has a place. It does jobs. In creature types, we have classes. I'm a warrior. I'm a wizard. That's my job. Okay, detective could be a creature type. It could be a class. So we started doing that. So we introduced detective as a creature type. We did typo effects that care about detectives so that now you can have detectives and things that care about

detectives. And then we looked at words and tried to figure out the words that we liked. And then we looked at words and tried to figure out the words that we liked. And there were three words that ended up being concepts or phrases that we were most excited by. One was suspects. That we look at a murder mystery, somebody gets murdered, they're the victim. Somebody did it, they're the culprit, but you don't know who did it. And so everybody who maybe did it is a suspect. And there are a lot of suspects. And we looked at, could you have a culprit, but there's only one culprit and they're dead. We looked at, I'm sorry, there's only one victim and they're dead, or usually there's one victim. And with culprits,

once again, there's one culprit, you figure out who the culprit is. We looked at that, but we really liked the idea of suspects, right? That anybody could be a suspect. What does that mean? Now, we tried all sorts of things. I think early on, we tried, like, being a suspect meant that you couldn't attack or block or use activated abilities. You were arrested, basically. But you could do something to get out of it.

We tried a version where you had to give the opponent a clue, and then we tried one where you had to discard a card or pay life. And then we tried a version that was kind of like the Monarch, where there was just one suspect. It was an aura, basically, that moved around. But in the end, it felt kind of wrong. That suspect, well, it didn't feel wrong that it was a negative because obviously being a suspect is a bad thing but um what we learned is if it's just a negative

thing it's hard to get people to use it um and so what we wanted to do like from a gameplay standpoint is it'd be kind of cool if there could be multiple suspects and being a suspect had good and bad. That maybe you wanted to make your creature suspect, but maybe you want to make your opponent creature suspect. So the idea we came across pretty early on in this exploring having a positive with a negative is, well, what positive would you have? Like, well, people are intimidated by you.

If you're a suspect, maybe you killed somebody. So we like the idea of giving you menace. If you're a suspect, people clear out of your way. They're a little nervous about you. But also, combined mechanically, well, but also you can't block. So okay, you have menace, it's easier to attack, but you can't block.

Mechanically, the reason that's so great is not only is it flavorful, but it encourages aggression. If I have menace, but I can't block. Mechanically, the reason that's so great is not only is it flavorful, but it encourages aggression. If I have menace but I can't block, well, I can't block with the creatures, I might as well attack. And I have menace, so I have a reason to attack. And in general, mechanics that make the game end are good. Mechanics that make the game stall and not end, not good. So we tried this version. We really liked it. The verbiage changed a little bit.

Early on, it was like, make someone a suspect. And then it ended up becoming, I suspect somebody as a verb. So we made that into a keyword action. And then a suspected creature is someone who you've suspected. Next, we really liked the idea of collect evidence, that you're a detective. The way you solve the idea of collect evidence. That you're a detective, the way you solve the case is collect evidence. And so one of the things we looked into is, well, what can you collect? And there's a bunch of different things.

In your hand, you can collect cards. On the battlefield, you can collect permanents or counters. You, the player, collect counters. In the graveyard, you can collect cards, either like a barometer, meaning how many cards are in your graveyard of some type, or you could literally exile them from your graveyard. You could collect the cards themselves. And we tried a bunch of different things. The thing we really ended up liking the most was this idea of what if you took cards out of the graveyard? But rather than just be, like we experimented with just take so many cards

from your graveyard, but that just encouraged you to play a lot of little spells, like play a weenie deck where you just burn through your deck very fast. So we liked the idea of something that cared about the graveyard, but didn't discourage the larger spells. And so eventually we came up with the idea of, well, what if, I think the first version

of this was collect evidence meant remove cards that add up to a mana value of six from your graveyard. We later would realize that we didn't need to restrict it to six, that having different numbers really could play out differently in different ways. That some cards that were early maybe could have lower numbers so that you had a chance to collect evidence early. And some cards maybe want to do really grandiose things. Those could have large collect evidence numbers. And so one of the things whenever we make a mechanic, we've got to figure out whether to put a knob on it.

And what I mean by that is the mechanic could just mean something, or you could put a number with it and the mechanic could have variance to it. You want to be careful. You don't want to make everything variable. Some mechanics that are situational or environmental, like threshold, you don't want lots of numbers. It's very hard to say, well, some things turn on when there's seven cards and some things turn on when there's ten cards. So sometimes you want to lock things down for ease of understanding what's going on. But because collect evidence, it's a cost and you pay it when you cast the spell, usually. It's a keyword action, so it could be used at other times.

But it happens at a moment in time. And that moment in time, you can look and see what you have. And so we realized that the knob here made sense. And that's one of the things we're always looking for is when and how and where to add the knob. The other sort of word that we were fascinated by was cases and this was one of the things that we do usually in vision, sometimes exploratory

and we especially like to do this in top down sets is we will ask the creative team to make names that are good evocative cards and then in design we'll design to make names that are good evocative cards. And then in design, we'll design to those names. So, Seance, Evil Twin, there's famous cards from the past where we just started with a name and we designed a Jar of Eyeballs, where we designed a card to match a name.

And you can get very evocative, cool things. And one of the things that came up very early was that we just wanted cards that were case of the blank. One of the big tropes of murder mysteries is you have a detective and they solve, they have a case. Someone's been murdered, multiple people have been murdered, or not always murdered, but some mysteries happen, often murder. And then they have to figure it out. And that normally they call, you know, like for example,

maybe this is, if it's a book, maybe it's the whole book, maybe it's a chapter, if it's a TV show, maybe it's an episode, you know. And so the idea of the case of the something is very common. That there's a lot of murder mystery stories that the book or the chapter or whatever is case of the blank. We want to do case of the blank. The idea of having cases. So this tapped into something that we've been trying to do for a while. So way back in original Zendikar, we wanted to have quests.

We did end up making quests. we wanted to have quests. We did end up making quests. But the quest that we tried for a while was this quest where you were given three tasks. And if you did the three tasks, then you got a reward. And it was a cool idea. It was just very hard to design them.

It was very hard to make them tournament viable. So we ended up changing and we did a simpler version of quests in Zendikar. We went back to Zendikar. We tried it again. We went to Throat of Eldraine. We tried it in Streets of New Capenna. We tried something called Crimes that were similar. And we knew we played in the space. So what we said is, well, let's simplify things. In the past, it got...

So we realized there were three things that cases had to have. Number one is you, the detective, had to solve something. That's what a case is. You have to solve something. So we liked the idea that there's something you had to do. That there's some thing that you had to do in the game. But rather than like with quests and crimes, let's hone it down one thing.

You had to do one thing. There's one challenge that you have to do. The second thing is, in order to make you do something, we have to give you some reward for doing it. Because we don't, why would you do it? You know, the reason, we have to encourage you from a gameplay standpoint, we have to encourage you. Well, the way we encourage you is there's some effect you get.

It could be like an instant or sorcery effect, or it could be like an enchantment. We kind of knew that cases wanted to be an enchantment subtype. The reason is a case is a thing, but it's a non-tangible thing. And tangible things are artifacts, non-tangible thing. And tangible things are artifacts. Non-tangible things are enchantments. So we kind of knew it wanted to be enchantment subtype. Quests and crimes, for example,

had also been enchantment subtypes. Okay, so you had to do something. You had to solve something. Then once you solved it, there was a reward for solving it. And then, and this is just more of a mechanical thing, we have to give you something for playing the spell in the first place.

Giving you a reward only if you jump through a hoop is not enough to get people to put it in their deck. You have to give them something that is a decent percentage of the cost of the card so that there's a reason to play it. If every time you played something you didn't get the payoff until later, it just isn't worth it and you're not going to play the cards. So that meant the case's head of three things. Usually it's an enter the battlefield effect.

So when I play this card, something happens. And that doesn't have to pay for all of the card, but a lot of the card. Enough that it's worth playing. Then there was a challenge. You had to do something. And because we're doing the verbiage, you had to solve something. So solve and it'll tell you what you had to solve. And then when solved, you reward. So that's how cases work.

They're enchantments, three parts. They have enter the battlefield effect. They have a solve thing that's challenging you to solve something. And then they have if solved. And because it's sitting on an enchantment, it could just be an effect that goes off, or it could be an enchantment-like effect that sits there and does something.

And so, normally, I think once you solve it, more often we did things that were more enchantment-y, but we have the ability to do either. Okay, another really important part of this story is, so we are in, I don't know, the middle of vision. And I have to go to Los Angeles. We were shooting a video about the upcoming year. Infinity was coming up, and I was doing that segment. If you remember this video, I was dressed like an astronaut.

So while I was down there, you know, there's a lot of pieces that get shot. So there's a lot of waiting around, waiting for your segment. I was talking with Jeff, who used to be in charge of the creative team. And we were talking a bit about the new world that is the murder mystery world. And we were talking about the challenges of the world and that there's certain things that the world needed. One is that it needed to have some structure to it. Like part of the genre of murder mysteries is that

there's a society. usually there's a city, and there's law enforcement, you know, that there is, there's structure there. And so they were looking to make sort of the new world have a city to it and have law enforcement. And one of the things that kept coming up is it's space we had played in before. In Ravnica, and the other big city is

we made a city in New Capenna. So some people ask, by the way, New Capenna, you know, the 20s is a time of noir. A lot of murder mysteries are done in noir. Why not do the murder mystery of Capenna? The reason we didn't do that, and we didn't talk about it, was that kind of the nature

of how we made New Capenna was that the law was very inefficient. And it was there, I guess, but it didn't have the strength that we needed. Like, in the end, when the law arrests you, they arrest you. And New Capenna was all about, like, you know, it was a mobster world where people were dying left and right. It didn't have the right vibe we needed.

There's a little too many people dying, and not enough sort of law enforcement in a way that we needed. But Ravnica had the city head structure, and the Boros were the law. There was a law structure. And Azorius ran the legal system. There was a system set up. And what happened basically was the world that they were building just sort of kept feeling like Ravnica. And we finally said to ourselves, why are we reinventing the wheel? If we need a city placed with law, like Ravnica is

that, why not just be Ravnica? And I remember Jess and I had this conversation. And then Jess brought it back to our team. And the team started talking about it. And they came to the realization that, yeah, basically they were building Ravnica. Like, what were we gaining by making a world that wasn't just Ravnica? And at the same time, we were having similar conversations about the underground world, that we made that Ixalan.

And we were sort of getting into this idea of, hey, we can have sets that are, you know, you can have a set that basically is the backdrop, right? We talk about backdrop sets. So we decided to make it Ravnica. drop, right? We talk about backdrop sets. So we decided to make it Ravnica. Anyway, that is the making of... I mean, there's a lot that went into it. I'm just talking about the major mechanics. Gottlieb and his team,

well, and Andrew Brown and lots of people went into this. But one of the things that was really fun, by the way, about this, and this is true of any top-down set, it's really, really fun figuring out all the tropes, making all the tropes, you know, that we can make a card called Red Herring or Private Eye or all the cool stuff that we could do that are just things that are just super evocative of what the environment is and what the set is. And so that was exciting. It's really fun. Doing top-down sets is lots and lots of fun.

And it's fun to lean into tropes. You know, murder mysteries is an age-old genre. There's a lot of stuff built into it. So that was a lot of fun. But anyway, that, my friends, is the making of Murders at Carloff Manor. So I hope you enjoy it. 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. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.