Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1108: Erik Lauer

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In this podcast, I pay tribute to longtime Magic designer Erik Lauer who recently retired.

So I'm pulling away from the curb. I dropped my son off at college. So we all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, one of the podcasts I've talked about wanting to do for a long time is the 10 most influential people in magic. And the reason I haven't done that podcast yet is it's tough. I mean, probably thousands of people have worked on magic. You know, over a hundred have worked on the design and it's not an easy thing to narrow it down that so many people have worked on magic. But I have thought about it. And one of the people that's a slam dunk entry is a person named Eric Lauer. So Eric Lauer just retired in December, and so I decided that Eric Lauer was worthy of his own podcast, just talking all about the influence he's had on the game. So today I'm going to talk about sort of Eric,

my interactions with Eric, and a lot of the stuff that Eric has done, and a lot of the things he did for the game. So today is all about Eric Lauer. Okay, so the first time I think I ever heard Eric Lauer's name, so when the Pro Tour started for the first eight years, I worked on the Pro Tour. I was at every Pro Tour, and I was in charge of doing the feature matches, I did the production on the final day, you know, overseeing the commentators, and I would do a lot of the interviews. When players won, I would oversee the interviews. Now, in the early days, a lot of times, I would do the interviews. So Randy Bueller wins Chicago.

I think it might have even been the first Chicago, PT Chicago. But anyway, first or second, Randy Bueller wins, and I'm interviewing him, and I'm asking him all about his deck. And so his deck, he didn't make his deck. His deck was designed by a friend of his, someone they called the Mad Genius. It was Eric Lauer. The first time I ever heard of Eric Lauer. And Eric sort of got his, I mean

he was part of the what are they called? Carnegie Mellon University. It's a CMU, Team CMU I think they called themselves at one point. Anyway, Randy Bueller, Mike Turian, it was just the, that was a crowd. And so early on, I just knew him as being this really good deck builder. That's my first sort of insight into

Eric. In fact, one of my earliest memories of interacting with Eric through Randy was Urza's Saga had just come out. And there was some concern about how sort of broken the set was. And so what happened was Eric had built a deck that Randy gave to me. And then I played it with R&D to demonstrate the problem. And the fact that I just kept winning, no matter what they played against me, because I was not known as being one of the stronger players in R&D. I never was.

So I was like, uh-oh, Mark keeps beating us. Something is wrong. Now, interestingly, I believe that Eric was in top eight at Rome, PT Rome, which used Urza Saga. So that's how I first got to know Eric. Eric was a Pro Tour player. Probably was best known as being a deck builder, but he also was a good player. Like I said, he had a Pro Tour top eight. And I would see him from time to time.

He's somebody who I would see on the Pro Tour. Okay, flash forward a number of years. So Randy Buehler ends up, I help Randy get a job in R&D. Randy does very well. Eventually there's a point where Randy's my boss. And one of the things Randy does while he's in R&D is he gets both Eric Lauer and Mike Turian hired. And so Eric Lauer gets brought on. And I remember one of the things about interacting with Eric is Eric is very, very smart. You definitely sort of like, he just sees things

that other people do not see. And it's really interesting talking with him, working with him on sets, of just the way he has a holistic sense of sort of how sets work, understanding, like, where the power lies. Like, one of the reasons he's a really good deck builder

is he really has the idea to figure out what's the issue, like where are sort of the, I don't know if the weak points are, but where are the areas of vulnerability within a format? And he's very good at figuring out, you know, how to take advantage of that. And that's the kind of person you want doing magic design and development and play design and such. So what happened was Eric got brought on, I'm trying to remember the timing of it, in the early 2000s. So the first set that Eric led, I mean, Eric, so the way it works essentially when you're at Wizards is

first you're on a bunch of teams, and then eventually maybe you strong second in team and then at some point you get to lead your own team. So the first project or first set that Eric led, he might have done some smaller things but the first sort of premiere set he did was Magic 2010. That was Aaron Forsythe really wanted to reimagine what a core set was, really wanted to highlight resonance. And one of the things that Aaron, one of his ideas was if you want to make an amazing core set, you couldn't restrict yourself just to reprinting cards.

You had to have the ability to make new cards where you needed it. So Magic 2010 was the first core set to have new cards built into it. Now most of the cards, they weren't necessarily complex. They were more top-down, flavorful, just cards that really showed off certain aspects of the game. Now the first non-core set that Eric led was Mirrored and Besieged. So Mirrored and Besieged was a set where the whole premise of the set was we come back to Mirrodin. We had been in Mirrodin many years before. We come back to Mirrodin and notice that there's a threat. That the Phyrexians it turns out have been there the whole time. We hinted at that in the book.

In the original Mirrodin book. And when you come to the first set, I think the Phyrexians maybe take up 10% of the set. They have a watermark. And then the middle set, Mirrodin Siege, there's a war. And half the set is Phyrexian, and half the set is Mirren. And they have a great war. And then the third set, we didn't tell you. We said either it's going to be Mirrodin Pure, if Mirrodin wins, or it's going to be

New Phyrexia, if Phyrexia wins. Ended up being New Phyrexia. Spoilers. But Eric was in charge of Mirrodin Besieged. And one of the challenges of Mirrodin Besieged was we had this idea that at the pre-release, you would choose whether you wanted to play for the Mirrens or for the Phyrexians. And so what Eric did is he had to divide the set in half. So half the set was, you know, 50% of the set was Mirren, 50% of the set was Phyrexian. And in order to do that, we really wanted the two sets to sort of be paired well against one another.

And so that was a very big ask for his first non-corset lead, which of course he did a great job. So the next thing he did, so Eric quickly went through the ranks. So this is at the time where there was design and development. We now have sportswear design, vision design, set design, play design. At that time when there was design and development, Eric quickly became...

I was the head designer. I was in charge of the design portion. Eric became head developer. He was in charge of the development portion. And he rose to the ranks pretty quickly. I mean, it was just so apparent. I was just interacting with Eric and dealing with Eric. Like, he's

he really, like, the thing that I really appreciated about Eric is he would analyze something and then he would just say something and you're like, how in the world did we not already do this? The one that springs to mind, I don't remember exactly when this happened was, but he and I were having a conversation and I was talking about one of the challenging things about

doing three set blocks, because at the time we were doing blocks, is it was so hard to do a theme that mattered in the third set. That we had to be so loud so by the time you got there, you had to know it was coming, prepare for it, and then be paid off in enough volume that it was worth you taking the risk of working toward it. And I remember Eric said,

well, why can't you just go in reverse order? And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, well, why do we have to draft the sets in the order that came out? Why can't we draft the sets in reverse order? Why not draft the set that most recently came out? And that way, if you draft the third set or second set, whichever one's out first, well, then that's going to guide your draft. You don't need your themes.

Like, the third set theme doesn't have to be quite as loud as we were making it, because we, you know, when you, when you drafted three sets, and the third pack was the third set, and you drafted a third, oh my goodness, you had to be so loud, but Eric's like, well, if you just draft the third set first, you can be a lot less loud, just because it'll be the first pack, and I remember, like, going, yeah, that, that's right, like, Eric, Eric would make, Eric would observe something, and he'd go, I remember Eric saying, well, why don't we, why don't,

what's the reason we don't draft the third pack first? And I'm like, Eric, we never thought of it. We just didn't, it didn't come up. And that is a lot of, I think a lot of the innovations of Eric were just doing things that no one had ever thought of and just saying, how about this?

And it was so obvious and so clearly the right thing that we just would change to it. But we're sort of like, how did we not think of this before? Okay, let's get to the next set. So the next set was the first time that Eric and I, I mean, I had worked with Eric, but the first time in which I led the set and handed it off to Eric. So this is the point at which I was head designer and Eric was head developer. So the set is Innistrad. So Innistrad was a very interesting set.

We had tried to do top-down, I mean, we'd done top-down with Champions of Kamigawa, but it didn't really go well. And when we had made Odyssey, I had done Odyssey, Brady Donovan had talked about how the creator for Odyssey really wanted to be gothic horror to line up with the graveyard theme

and I loved the idea of could we do top down in which the genre we are sort of playing with was the horror genre gothic horror specifically because we're doing fantasy and anyway so I did the set and handed it off to Eric.

And it was a really eye-opening experience. Innistrad, so a bunch of things. One of the big innovations that happened in Innistrad, once again, all Eric, was the idea of gold signposts. One of the

things Eric said is, look, if we're trying to educate people on draft, if we're trying to make it easier for people to draft, hey, why don't we have the set tell them very loudly what's going on? And so the idea was, if we just make cards that are two color and put it at uncommon where you see them, but you know, not uncommon is where you want to put build arounds. You know, you put a clean build-around for each of the color pairs, two pair of color pairs, such that it just communicates what's going on

and it helps players understand. And if they pick that early, it guides them. And not that you don't build in other strategies or other things to do. And Eric, by the way, also, another thing he did in Innistrad was the idea of really hammering home the alternate build around.

Spider spawning, for example, was Innistrad. And Eric very carefully put it there saying, hey, in drafting, I want to educate people. Well, the gold signpost will tell you what to do. But then I want other things there so that the drafters who are experimenting, you know, once you've drafted a set a bunch of times, you want people to be able to experiment and try other things. And spider spawning is one of the best examples of this kind of design where there's something there, it's off the beaten path, but it really is a fun reward. And it gives you enough of reward that if you want to dedicate to it, you can do it and really have a fun draft experience. The other interesting thing about Innistrad was there just was a lot of learning

from Eric. And one of the things I really liked about Eric as a partner to work with is, you know, a lot of vision design or at the time design is setting up your bullseyes. It's saying, this is what we're trying to do. So, for example, in Innistrad, I set up, there were five ally color pairs, four monsters and humans. And, for example, one of the ones I set up

was red and black were vampires. And I really wanted the vampires to be our aggressive deck. And one of the things Eric said is, okay, there's some challenges there. One of the challenges is because red and black are the best at killing creatures, that the default sort of strategy for black and red is a little bit slower.

It's sort of like, I control the game by killing everything and then beat you with whatever I have. And so Eric really threw himself into the puzzle saying, okay, Mark wants the vampires to be the aggressive deck. How do we do that in black and red? And he spent a lot of time and figured out how to, you know, there's a reward for, you know, getting to a certain life total. And then he just did some things that really made you want to be aggressive with it.

And that's the thing that one of the things that really as someone who has made a lot of magic sets working with Eric was always so amazing because he would take what you wanted he would take the essence of what you wanted but then find the best way to execute on it. And Innistrad turned out great. Innistrad, I mean, I made a lot of sets.

But Innistrad is one of the sets I'm proudest of. And just in the purity of what it was and how it turned out and, you know, a lot of that was Eric really finding the way to execute on the different things and just upgrading it. Like, I didn't come in talking about two-color pairs, but, like, while he was taking the essence of my set and making it awesome, he also did things like, hey, how about we just do these things that Arnie will go, yeah, for all sets now we will do this.

After Enishrod was returned to Ravnica, that was actually Ken Nagel that returned to Ravnica, handed off to Eric and one of the things that Eric Return to Ravnica was the start of him spending a lot of time and energy understanding how to optimize structure faction sets are really

tricky because the way a faction set works is one of the things Eric taught me about drafting is that it's really important that when you build a draft that almost every card needs to have multiple audiences. If multiple people don't want a card, then what happens is the same drafter gets that card every draft. And then it just gets

on autoplay, and it's not fun because, oh, I'm drafting, whatever, white-blue, well, I always get the same deck because nobody but me wants the cards that go on my deck. And what Eric said is, look, to make a really dynamic draft environment, most cards,

100% sometimes it's a little tough but the vast majority of cards you want people to fight over them. You want it such that multiple people

want that card. And a lot of building a faction set is not just a matter of figuring out how to get the factions to work but doing so

in such a way that it makes for that dynamic draft environment. Now, one of the things about Ravnica, original Ravnica, there's a lot going on. It was an amazing set. But probably one of the weaknesses of original Ravnica was the draft. And Eric and I worked, I worked a lot with Eric to figure out how do we make an optimized draft?

How do we make something that is going to make for a fun draft? And Eric was one of the people that I talked with. One of the big changes we made for Return to Ravnica was changing... The original Ravnica had a 4-3-3 model, and we changed to a 5-5-10 model. And part of that was...

And each large set was drafted by itself. And the idea there was we wanted every guild to have its moment to shine. And by having a draft that was five different guilds that you drafted by itself, you had the opportunity to draft a guild by itself. The problem you got into with original Ravnica was you really were playing three-color decks. Because every set had its own combination of colors, in order to make it work, you couldn't... I mean, the very first set you could play two-color

when you're drafting it by itself. But once you added other things, you were really playing three-color decks. And part of what makes Ravnica Ravnica is the beauty of the two-color decks. And Eric really figured out how to make that work. Next up was Theros. Theros is

another set. So now we're at the point there's a whole bunch of sets where I design the set and hand off to Eric because we're in the heart of the black model. The black model with large set in the fall, small set in the winter, and large or small set in the spring would vary.

So anyway, we hand off Theros. Theros is very interesting. I had a very grandiose idea for Theros. I wanted it to be about adventure, and I wanted you, the player, as the game progressed, to grow in different ways. And there, you know, you could put in champions. There was bestow.

The gods could upgrade through devotion. The request to go on. There's all these different ways. We talked about gods, heroes, and monsters. The gods, the heroes, and the monsters. Monsters have metrocity. There was ways to upgrade all of them along the game. The game, as it moved along,

you sort of got better and things grew with time. And Eric really, he really sort of figured out how to make that happen. That was a lot of fun. Okay, Khans of Tarkir. So Khans of Tarkir, another set I handed off to Eric. We started because I really, I was trying to shake up the block structure at the time. Bill had asked for us to have a large set every other year.

This was sort of a business decision. And so I was trying to figure out, the idea was that you would have a large set, then there's a small set, Fate Reforged, and you would draft a large set with a small set. And then, normally, the third set would be a large set and you'd play it by itself. But I said, well, here's what I want to do. I would like to have the small set drafted with both the large set. How do we make that happen?

And this is when we started doing exploratory design. Ethan Fleischer and Sean Main had just came in first and second in the second grade designer search. And we came up with this idea of a time travel story where we go to Tarkir, which is Sarkhan's home, and the dragons had all died, so he goes back in the past and he saves the dragons, saves Ugin,

and he comes back to the present. And now there's a new timeline and the dragons have survived. And it ended up becoming a three-color set, a wedge set. It didn't start as being a wedge set, but we realized that we had never done a wedge set, and Eric was the one. By the way, originally, Conjuring Dark here was going to be a three-color set,

a wedge set going into an enemy set, not an enemy set, yeah, an enemy set in the third set, and Eric was like, you can't do that. The way you want to set up a three-color draft wedge, for example, is you want people to draft the thing that overlaps it. And so with the wedge, you draft enemy colors. And then you could stay in enemy colors or you can choose which way to go.

And he made me realize that we had to make the last set ally color, not enemy color. And that, once again, this is the perfect example of sort of Eric at his best is sort of seeing how things will play out and walking through and I don't know, that was always so

refreshing to me. When I asked Eric, so we took Eric out to dinner, sort of when he retired. R&D gave him a farewell. And one of the things we talked about, I said that my favorite set that he and I had done together

was Innistrad. But his favorite set, the one that he was really, I think, the proudest of, was Khans of Tarkir. In Khans of Tarkir, there were a whole bunch of challenges in Khans of Tarkir there were a whole bunch of challenges in Khans of Tarkir

one of which is the way I'd set up the set I'd wanted morph in it because morph went into manifest and ended up being megamorph but anyway there was an evolution to show the different time parts I wanted mechanics that got adapted

along the way and so Eric had said, really, do we need morph in it? And I said, yes. And then Eric said, okay. So when he handed off the set, there was more morph than I had handed off. And I'm like, Eric, I handed off the set. I put morph in it. You came to me and said, does morph have to be in it? Can I take morph out? And I said, no, please leave the morph in. And then there's more Morph. And he goes, well, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. And what he had figured out was one of the challenges of three color is a lot of times you can get lost in the colors. That I just, I don't draw the right lands to go with the spells I have in my hand.

And what he realized was Morph did this really nice thing where it gave you something to do if you happen to be color screwed if you didn't have the colors you needed and so he really leaned into that and morph was the other challenging thing about morph was we introduced morph in onslaught and um morph was a really cool mechanic it's face down you don't know what it is but it had a lot of challenges. One of the biggest was, for example, in red, we had made two different cards. One of which really punished you if you didn't block

it, and one really punished you if you did block it. And there was no way to tell the difference. I think they were both even common. And what Eric said is, you know what? Morph is fun, but let's make some guidelines and sort of figure out how do you maximize morph play so that it is the most fun. And part of it was you need to build some insurances so early game you don't get blown out by morphs.

So Eric came up with the five rule. And what the five rule is, is if I block your morph with my morph, and then you turn your morph up, until you get to five mana, the following will not happen. You will defeat my creature, and I will not defeat yours. It is possible that we trade. It is possible that we bounce,

meaning neither dies. It is possible that your creature dies to my creature. Maybe there's a really good, you know, reveal effect or something. But your creature will dies to my creature. Maybe there's a really good, you know, reveal effect or something. But I will not, your creature will not swallow my creature just because you turn it face up until you have five mana.

So what that meant is it allowed some interaction and it just allowed some gameplay with the morph in a way that made dynamic things happen. What Eric realized was when you didn't know it was going to happen, when you had the danger of just losing your creature for no purpose, like, you you didn't know what was going to happen, when you had the danger of just losing your creature

for no purpose, like, you just didn't attack. Like, you just, the correct way to play was not the fun way. And I talk a lot about how, I mean, if you listen to any of my talks, like my GDC talk or whatever, I'm a big proponent of, you have to build the fun in such that the way

people play, like the correct way to play is the fun way to play. And Eric was a master of that. And Battle for Zendikar, it turned out so well that it, like, for example, when we did Streets of New Compendia, we literally

just mapped, like, Streets of New Compendia is the blueprints, I mean, it's an ally color set, but obviously it's the blueprints of concept art here set upueprints, I mean, it's an ally color set, but obviously it's the blueprints of Concepts for Career set up by Eric. I mean, small adaptions, but basically that was the blueprints we followed. After that, so then there was a period of time where, and this was true on both ends, we were training people. So I would do a lot of vision designs where I would work with somebody and I would co-lead with them. And then Eric

would do the same one in development. So for example, Kaladesh, I co-led the design with Sean Main and Eric co-led the development with Ian. And so this is a period where we're doing a lot of training. Kaladesh, he co-s with Ian. Ixalan, he co-s with Sam Stoddard. Dominaria, he co-leads with Dave Humphreys. So the way it works, by the way, when he co-s, what that really means for Eric, or same with me, is he would do the beginning part, sort of set things up, and then hand over the reins. Kind of what I, do with the design is sort of, hey, this person's going to do the finish work on this, but we're going to help them get it set up. And normally the way it would work is when either I or Eric with the co-lead designs,

that person was there the whole time and they were helping. Usually for me, they do the strong second. And then we just sort of midway through, we'd hand over the reins and we'd still be there to watch. Although Eric sometimes, just because he was doing a lot of stuff he would move off on other things but Eric would do a lot of sort of taking and building next

Eric led guilds of Ravnica that was really Eric sort of trying to once again Eric really loved faction sets and really loved sort of optimizing faction sets. And I think Ravnica,

I think Eric felt that the last time he had done a bunch of stuff, but there was more he could optimize. Then was Throne of Eldraine. Eric, I think, really enjoyed coming back to sets and worlds that he led before and trying to figure out what's the next evolution.

Eric was constantly working to try to sort of, like, next level things. Then he did Zendikar Rising, Innistrad Midnight Hunt, Innistrad Crimson Vow. Once again, these were other ones where Eric was doing,

we had more and more people coming, so he was doing more and more sort of handoffs where he would start things, he would set it up and then hand it off and the next person would finish he co-led Dominar United, he co-led Frexian All Will Be One, he co-led Lost Caverns of Ixalan

I think really one of the big the other big push of the influence of Eric is there's a whole crew of set design leads that really Eric was the one that sort of taught them how to do it. I mean, it's hard, it's hard really to express how much Eric, like Eric added quick pointing, which is a way they figure out when like Eric came in to sort of the late end of the process

of making magic and just added all these tools, added all these philosophies, added all these like best practices and just the very you know the sort of like how we make magic sets and how we build magic sets

Eric's fingerprints are all over it in a way that sort of like how we make magic sets and how we build magic sets, Eric's fingerprints are all over it. In a way that, I mean, I spend a lot of time, just because my part of the job is the beginning part of it. So you hear a lot from me. And I've done a lot of setting things and how we start making magic sets.

I've obviously had a lot of influence there. Eric has had that same influence just on the other end of the process. You know, I and my teams are very much about setting up the structure and sort of the bullseye and like, okay, what does this set want to be? But there's a lot of execution issues.

There's a lot of, how do we actually make cards that will draft well, that will play well, that encourage people to do the things they need to do. And one of the things that's really interesting that Eric, I love talking with Eric about game design because Eric, he was very, very analytic. It's funny, one of the things I used to joke about was I approach magic very much from sort of a psychological avenue. You know, I'm very much about how this will feel to people. And Eric came at it from a really, very math-based, very sort of

like structure. And he really, a lot of what Eric cared about was how do you build things in such a way that it maximizes how people will use it? He was very into the utility of how things work and how do you make things such, you know, how do you build something that the right way to use it is the optimal way that you want people to use it? And, you know, it, like, one of the things for me that is really interesting is that I've been doing magic long enough that I've worked with a lot of people for a long time.

It's neat to see the other people I work with, all the different fingerprints that different people have on the set. Like I said, the reason I keep trying to do the 10 most influential people is there's so many people that have had a huge influence. But Eric is up there. Eric is, I haven't quite finished my list because it gets, the top five is a little easier for me to figure out. The bottom five is a little trickier and a little more subjective. But Eric, cleed, slam dunk, top five of all time.

And that's why I want to do a podcast about Eric. I mean, he, I mean, whether it's gold signposts or fast pointing or, I just, there's so many different things. At the dinner that we had for Eric, we ran around and talked about our favorite addition that he added to the game. And the fact that everybody had a different thing that just shows the amount of influence and so anyway I just wanted to do a podcast sort of just you know if you love magic if you love what magic is there are a lot of people that put so much time and energy in it

and a big one of those is Eric and so anyway hats off to Eric I will miss you Eric I hope you have a happy retirement. But it was always a pleasure making magic with you. And I really think I'm a much better magic designer for all your influence. So thanks, Eric. Everybody else, I'm at work. So we all know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. So thanks, guys, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.