Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1109: Murders at Karlov Manor Set Design with Andrew Brown

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Andrew Brown, co-lead set designer on Murders at Karlov Manor, to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So, often when I'm at home, I like to do interviews. So today I have Andrew Brown, the co-set design lead of Murders at Carlove Manor. Hey, Andrew. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Going well. Okay, so in this set, the way it worked was I co-led the vision design with Mark Gottlieb, and then you co-led the set design with Mark Gottlieb. So Mark was kind of in the middle. I sort of did the very beginning, Mark kind of did the middle, and you kind of did the end.

So we're going to pick up the story sort of when you first come to the set. So when did you first come to the set? When was your first part, you know, when did you join set design? So when did you first come to the set? When was your first part, you know, when did you join set design? Right at the start. I took a lot of looks at the set during, like, vision design. And then, but I actually fully got onto it once kind of, like, set design started.

And Mark Golley was the lead of the team. That's when I first started. Okay, so what are your earliest memories of Murders of Carlisle Banner? The first thing I remember is trying to figure out how to make collect evidence work a lot better. I think when we, oh, first was collect evidence. And then we talked a lot about what should be on the morphs or you know what we were talking about with um face downs because for a long time we we didn't want to do morph again because uh just especially in the new play booster world a three minute two two is just a little bit too weak so we uh futzed around with like a lot of different setups with like i think we tried three two at one point we

tried we tried two three yeah yeah we just tried a lot of different things for the morphs and i think that was the first that's the first memory is uh figuring out what to do with the morphs and i believe vision design actually handed off uh the two mana two war two that was handed off from vision design yeah yeah that's true and then um we did that for a while and we liked it. And then while we still had some time, we're like, let's try out 3-2 for a couple drafts. And then we learned that wasn't right. So then we went back to the 2-2 with Ward 2. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, just a little heads up for the audience,

Khans of Tarkir, when it brought Morph back, actually spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure out if there was something else. And in the end, we ended up sticking with Morph. But like these conversations happened last time we were looking at doing Morph. Like everybody likes Morph, but it was made many, many years ago in which the curve of creatures,

the power level of creatures has just gotten better. So Three-Man-a-Tutu might've been made sense back in whatever, when Onslaught came out, which was long ago. Yeah, my favorite part about the War 2 on the morph or on the disguises is that to me it makes the most fun part of morph happen more, which is the unflipping because they're just a little bit more resilient to removal. So I think it's a lot better when more of the games have just more of these morphs flipping up. So that's my favorite thing about it. Yeah, it's interesting.

I actually played in the, we had our employee pre-release yesterday, and it mattered so much that they weren't due. I kept trying to kill them, and I couldn't kill them, and I'm like, you know, yeah, you're correct, that it just sort of helps them survive, and that one of the things I always talk about is you want the gameplay, you want the correct way to play to be the fun way, and, yeah, turning them

up is, that's the fun part about it, you know, the face down tutu is not the most fun part about it, it's the, haha, it's this thing, so. Okay, so, Disguise was there, also, the thing that Forever Will Throw Me is we called it Cloak Forever, and then they changed it to Disguise was there. Also, the thing that Forever will throw me is we called it Cloak Forever. And then they changed it to Disguise. And the manifest version got called Cloak.

So if I call it Cloak during this thing, guys, I mean Disguise. This is what we called it forever. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Collect Evidence. My memory when we handed off the file from vision to set design was it was a locked number i believe i think it was six right right yeah um so the locked number was six um i kept that true throughout all of common but at higher rarities um some of the collect evidence numbers can get lower or higher so there are a couple rares with like collect evidence eight and there are some uncommons with like collect evidence three. I thought it was pretty crucial to keep it at a

set number for common so that pilliards can like develop a heuristic around what they should play around or what they should expect. But at higher rarities, it goes kind of more up and down. Yeah, that's one of the things we always look at whenever we make something is do we lock the number in or do we put a number on it, meaning is there some flexibility? These days we tend to err a little more towards having the knob, having the number. But if we really, really think we're never going to use anything but a number, we try not to use a number. We try to just lock it in. So here's an interesting question. So collect evidence.

Yeah. So so here's an interesting question. So collect evidence. One of the things about collect evidence is there's synergy with I want to walk through the synergies, but there's synergy with disguise. So let's so let's talk a little bit about that, about one of the things we liked about it was disguise lets you get way bigger numbers than you normally would get into your graveyard yeah like one of the most common designs on a uh disguised creature is just like a six mana creature with bigger stats maybe flying and disguise right so normally when you're playing in limited both of you will play a disguise on turn three and then they might trade when they trade trade, you just get a six-cost creature into your graveyard, which enables Collect Evidence 6 super easily. And I think that's one of the hidden gems with how these mechanics kind of interplay and interlock.

It's really nice. So while we're talking Collect Evidence synergies, I want to talk about the addition of the split cards. Because for the audience, split cards, when they're in any zone other than on the stack, are the combined mana values that you count both of them. So that's very helpful for collect evidence. Yeah, one of the rules we set for the split cards, there are five split cards in the set, is that one version of each side of the split card is

always six mana, so that players aren't confused when they see collective and in six, they'll always know, yes, I can do this because this card is always six mana. So all of the split cards have one side that's always six mana. And they're hybrid. Why are they done in hybrid? Why are the split cards all hybrid? The split cards are in hybrid so that they can just kind of go into more decks. And I think they add a lot of depth with playing like a three-color deck. If you can have access to all of them, it could work. and I also like the fact that, you know, because you can play the early side,

you can also then use it for Collect Evidence 6 too. So the split cards do a ton of work in this set. Yeah, and that's something to always be aware of is when you do something like Collect Evidence, we want to make, I mean, the natural game will get you there. You know, you'll cast cards, creatures will die. But it's nice when you're doing a graveyard resource mechanic to have some means by which to get stuff in the graveyard, or

in this case, make things a little bit bigger. Oh, so let's talk a little bit about collect evidence as a, just from a theoretical standpoint. We've done a lot of graveyard resource before, but usually it's one for one. Remove so many cards from the graveyard. And this does something a little different where it cares about mana value.

So can you talk a little bit about the play design, like what that offers play design, the fact that you, it's looking for something a little bit different. Yeah, it's an interesting problem. It's one that we don't really come across very often. We talked a lot about the collect evidence economy in play design basically um which basically just means that like you know more the more you add mana or the more you subtract mana affects a larger swath of cards than normal um so it was an interesting problem kind of like figuring out when adding a mana when taking off a mana is the correct uh solution um it's also funny enough to like um

we really liked um cost reduction on collect evidence because that meant you could put more collect evidence cards in your deck so like for example there's a three mana uh sorry there's a four mana bite card i think it's called take a bite out of crime something like that um it's a common mark uh take a bite out of crime yeah let's see i do not see call Take a Bite Out of Crime, something like that. It's a common mark. Take a Bite Out of Crime? Yeah. Let's see. I do not see it called Take a Bite Out of Crime. It's a blue common?

Green common. Green common. It's a fight spell. Oh, okay. It was called that for a long time. Hold on. One of the things that's hard for us, just for the audience to remember, is what we know the cards as is usually not what they're printed as.

And so we'll play something for months and months and months. Okay, hold on. You talk about this and I will find the card while you talk about it. So go ahead. Talk about the card. Okay, sure. So, yeah, so it's a collect evidence card where you can cost reduce it by collecting evidence. So a way that's great with, you know, putting more of those cards in your deck is that it artificially has a higher mana cost,

but it's actually a lot cheaper when you actually factor in the fact you can collect evidence. So it's effectively pushing down your curve while also maintaining higher numbers for collect evidence. Okay, I found it. It's called Bite Down on Crime. Oh, so close, so close, so close. So it's three and a green sorcery. As an additional cost to cast the spell, you may collect evidence six. This spell costs two less to cast

if evidence was collected. Target creature you control gets plus two plus one until end of turn. It deals damage equal to its power to target creature you don't control. Yep, so normally you play for two mana, but when it goes to your graveyard, it costs four mana, which makes your future evidence a lot easier to collect. Okay, so let's talk about some other parts of the set.

Okay, so next up, let's talk about suspected. So you suspect a creature, and then a creature is suspected, and when it's suspected, it gets menace and can't block. And then a creature is suspected, and when it's suspected, it gets menace and can't block. So how, I mean, I know we made suspected in vision design, and the reason we made it was we wanted to say things got suspected, and you had suspects and stuff like that. But from a balance standpoint, what were the challenges of balancing suspect and suspected creatures? From a balance standpoint, what were the challenges of balancing suspect and suspected creatures? Yeah, so suspected is really hard to balance because it does create that game state where it's like you turn one game piece into only offense, essentially, right? So normally creatures can attack and block.

This makes the creatures better at attacking and worse at blocking. So it goes very far into one direction. and worse at blocking. So it goes very far into one direction. Obviously, that can make balancing things really hard because you have to, you know, essentially take out an entire functionality, the entire functionality of blocking. So we had to definitely slow things down while also speeding things up because, you know, Suspected really accelerates the game um and one thing that we learned in play design originally there were a lot of cards that suspected your opponent's things um we definitely lowered that number a lot i think there's only a couple cards that do that now um just because it was creating too many game states where it was like kind of two ships passing

in the night because when like you suspect their stuff and your stuff is suspected blocking is just super super hard so um we definitely toned down the numbers of uh you being able to suspect your opponent's creature we still wanted to be around but we just wanted to reduce the numbers um so when when it just sort of curious. When something like Suspect happens, so Suspect is a value that sticks around. Mm-hmm. There's not a lot... We're very careful when we do something that lasts, like, for the rest of the game. Most of what we do is until the end of turn.

Yeah. So is there something special you have to do with stuff that lasts longer? Do we have to handle that differently? Yeah, definitely. I think step one is always figuring out how you're going to represent it. So in Murders of Call of Manner,

we have the punch-out tokens that have the suspected word on them. So that makes it a lot easier to represent it. In Game States, just put the little uh bead on it i guess or cut out on it and then it's suspected and then you know that yeah yeah yeah um but no um so secondarily it also puts a lot of stress on you know just like tracking and maintaining the board state um so like i was saying earlier we kind of reduce the overall ass fan of suspected so that only a few things can be suspected at once because it's more fun when half of your board is

suspected rather than your entire board because then it makes that game state of like where oh i'm only attacking and i'm not defending and it just doesn't get as interesting okay next up um so we did a lot of stuff that was very flavorful. I collect evidence we did, suspected we did. Another one was cases. We liked the idea that we wanted to call cards case of the blah, blah, blah, and that you had something you had to solve. So these were super challenging. So let's talk about the evolution of cases. Yeah. So I'm going to throw out a bold statement, Mark. Are you ready for it? Okay.

All right. Over the years, I've been here for seven and a half years now, we've tried so many different variations of quest cards or like, you know, you got to get the MacGuffin. You got to go through all these hoops to get this cool thing and then people are going to love it. And then it was always just too hard, not rewarding enough. You know, the balance there is so difficult, but I think cases are the first time where I'm like really

happy with like top to bottom. You know, you can put in your deck and be happy even if you don't solve it. The quest it puts you on is pretty fun and the reward feels rewarding. So it's kind of like hitting all three of those difficult things that you have to get right into the right position so um my bold statement cases are the best quest cards quest style cards we've ever made yeah real quick i'd sort of fill the audience in a little bit of history of this so an original zendikar so a while ago um we made the original version of quest and the quest we were trying to do at the time was you had three things you had to do,

and once you did those three things, then you got this reward. And we never made them work. It just was too much. And then when Zendikar Rising happened, we tried to bring them back and said, can we do them this time? It didn't work.

We didn't do them. And then Streets of New Capenna, we had a version we called Crimes, but they were basically, you know, quests themed toward demon mobster world. And those didn't work. In fact, those were in until very late in the process

and got pulled. Those were in for a while. They were in for, let's just say longer than they should have been. But anyway, I think that the secret sauce, I think, of how we got these to work was, one, we just had to do one thing. Just do one thing.

You have one goal. Just do one thing. And the second thing I think is that the enter the battlefield effect is strong enough that, like, it makes sense, especially in limited, it makes sense to put the card in your deck. So that, like, right, even if you don't solve it, it's not worth, like, the early quests, like, didn't even do anything, you know. Here's a nothing card, and then you have to do three things and then, yeah, it was a big reward, but you just never got there, so, like, it

wasn't worth putting in your deck. Yeah. Also, I remember in Eldraine Vision Design, there were some quests as well. Oh, yes, great. Remember those? Yes, I remember those as well. Yeah, your knights went up one yeah they were all one mana you scryed two when they all entered the battlefield and then you just had to like try and do this super uber hard quest that you would never do and this reward was like ridiculous or whatever right so it was like again the cases kind of balance each thing

out into a nice little bucket where all of them feel kind of flat where it's like the the base card is fine the quest that sets you on is doable and the reward feels like you got a reward for achieving the quest right so it's hit it all those pretty well. A lot of those other implementations have like wildly different kind of scales for each of those. So what are the challenges with balancing quests? Not quests, with cases. What is the challenge? Like, what do you have to do when you're

trying to make sure the cases work properly? Like, what's the balance issue? Yeah, so I think generally with quest cards, the first thing that I always like, or just generally that play design likes to look at, is we start with the reward. Because that's the cool thing about a quest card, right? Like, I'm not playing quest cards for ETB cantrip or whatever, right? That's not super exciting.

So it's generally good to start with what is the cool thing first and then kind of work in reverse towards the entire card. Right. So like pick a case, Mark. We can we can talk about a case. OK, how about the case? Let's see. Do you want to do a common case or an uncommon case? There are no common cases. Oh, OK. We'll do an uncommon case. So we have the...

Let's see. How about the case of the Pilfered Proof? Case of the Pilfered Proof. That is... Let me read it so the audience knows. One in the white. Whenever a detective enters the battlefield under your control and whenever a detective you control is turned face-up, put a plus one plus one counter on it.

To solve, you control three or more detectives, and then when solved if one or more tokens would be created under your control those tokens create those tokens plus a clue token or those tokens plus a clue token are created instead yeah um right so we started with we want a detective case because that's really flavorful case it would be a miss to not have one of those. And then we started with like, what are cool white uncommon things that we can put on an uncommon that seem kind of rare? Because generally when you're making an uncommon case, you want the reward to look pretty rare.

So we eventually landed at, you know, every time you do a thing, you create an extra clue. Feels pretty detective-y, right? So then we kind of worked backwards from there being like, okay, so how do we want to solve this? Really solve, if you know what I mean. So we were like, okay, we want people to play detectives. So, you know, having a threshold for detectives makes a lot of sense and then we worked all the way to the front where it's like okay so we know that we want you to control detectives we know that the reward is going to be more clues how do we want to do that so because the reward is more card advantage we don't want to give you

card advantage and because the condition is have more detectives we wanted something that let your detectives live longer which is more plus one plus one counters so when you look at it all of it kind of like congeals together into something that helps you you know solve the case and be happy when you actually have solved it and this is a good example of what we call a build around so at uncommon we like to make cards that if you open this up in your first pack and you see it and you take it, it gives you a quest to go on. A quest to hunt. It gives you the thing that when you're drafting,

to sort of think and draft around. And this particular card only rewards you for detectives, but everything about the card says you have to be playing detective. So you wouldn't play the card if you don't have enough detectives in your deck. Yeah, and the blue-white theme in this set is Detective Typel. Oh, and another thing that I'll point out is one of the themes because of Detective Typel is one of the tokens that you make in this set that's a frequent token is there's a white and blue 2-2 Detective. And so this plays nicely in the Detective deck because the reward is you get clues for making tokens.

But hey, this set makes lots and lots of tokens. And so that helps. And so when you investigate, you get a second token. When you make a detective, you get a clue token. So it's all synergy. One thing I realized, we talked about disguise, but we glossed over some. So I'm going to go back to disguise. Sure, sure.

So not only did we do disguise, we also did cloak. And so that is, of all the things in the set, we did not hand over cloak. We handed over disguise. But Vision did not put cloak in the set. So let's talk a little bit about the adding of cloak. Yeah, so it's really only on, I think, two or three cards. I believe it's on five cards. Five cards.

I believe it's on five cards. Five cards. I believe it's on five cards. Five cards. Yes. So I think the main ones that come to my mind are the green rare. The green rare is called Hide in Plain Sight.

Three of the green, sorcery, look at the top five cards of your library, cloak two of them, and put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.

To cloak a card, put it on the battlefield face down as a 2-2 creature with ward two, turn it face up at any time for its mana cost. Yeah. So we really enjoyed kind of the build-arounds for cloaking a card. We have a, we tried to make a standard deck where this is kind of the marquee card where you can cloak some creatures uh it's funny enough uh we the internal nickname of this card was be cloaco after collected company which people normally called coco so we called it be cloaco good jokes good Anyways, anyways, right? So we tried to make a deck around this, and this is kind of like one of the marquee cards that lets

you kind of get more cloaks onto the battlefield. I think Zagana is the other card that we kind of shot for this strategy. I don't know if you can pull that one up. Yeah, I can. So let's see. Zagana is... Zagana or... Zagana. Vanifar is. So let's see. Zakana is... Zakana or... Zagana.

Vanifar is the one that cloaks. Vanifar! I'm thinking of the wrong guild leaders. Yeah, so Vanifar Evolved Enigma, two green blue, legendary creature, elf ooze wizard, 3-4. At the beginning of combat in your turn, choose one. Cloak a card from your hand or put a Puzzle of Puzzle

encounter on each colorless creature you control. Yep. And that's one of the other key cards for this deck that we're kind of positioning for Standard, or you can take to your FNM. Super fun. Yeah, so just for the audience, last time we brought that,

when we did Morph last time, was in Conjuring Tarkira block. The second set of Conjuring Tarkir block introduced Manifest, and Cloak is the disguised version of Manifest, which is... Normally when you manifest, you normally manifest top card of your library, although I guess maybe you can manifest

other places. And then it did exactly what Cloak does, except it doesn't have the War 2. So... I want to talk a little bit about something that I want to talk through in disguise. So Eric Lauer, when he made Khan's Attar Kyr,

Morph first showed up in Onslaught, and there was a fatal flaw in it. The classic example was, in Common, there were two red creatures, one of which you always wanted to block, and one of which you never wanted to block, and they both cost the same

to un-morph. So, like, you never knew, you had no idea what was going on, and you would get blown out in a lot of games. So, Eric created what he called the Rule of Five, I think, is that the official name for it, for the Five Rule? Five Manamorph Rule. Five Manamorph Rule.

So, the way this rule works is that if I attack with a morph creature, or a face-down creature, disguised in a set, and you block with your disguised creature, and I don't have five mana to cast, that you won't be able to turn your creature face up and eat my creature without me destroying your creature.

Now, you can trade, you can bounce, you could lose your little, your morphed-up creature could be lost to the big creature, maybe give a really good effect that makes it a 1-1, but a cool effect happens. But it won't eat your creature. Right. Can we talk a little bit about the importance,

this rule does a lot for gameplay, can we talk a little bit about the importance this rule does a lot for gameplay could we talk a little bit about this rule yeah this this rule is really important um for gameplay because of the kind of fail case you were talking about earlier with those two onslaught cards um and it also like we were talking about earlier it just makes the gameplay more about the morphs flipping up which is the most fun part about morph gameplay overall um so i'd say the big difference between cons of tark here and this implementation of morph is that there are more cheaper morph costs than in cons of tark here so in cons most of the common and uncommon morphs were just kind of like big doofusy vanilla creatures or whatever right but in murders there's a lot more cheaper flip

ups that let your creatures trade but kind of give you a little small advantage um so i think one of the good good examples is um if you could look up the hybrid blue-red common disguise creature. Okay, give me a second. No worries. Okay, the hybrid, let's see. Blue-red, you said. Blue-red, yeah.

Blue-red. Like Gadgeteer or something. Hold on, I'm looking. Sorry, I have the file in front of me, but I'm trying to find it. What's it? Gadgeteer, you think? There's

for a Gadgeteer, but that's a mono blue card, so that's not what you mean. Yeah, yeah. Let me find the name. Explain what the card does and I will find it while you talk about it. So the card is a four mana three two. When it enters or is flipped up,

you create a Thopter token and it has disguise and then you can undisguise it for blue red hybrid, blue red hybrid. So essentially- Oh, I found it. Gadget Technician is what it's called. Gadget Technician, yeah, that was close. That was close.

Let me read it real quickly, and then we can discuss it. Gadget Technician, 2 Blue-Red, 3-2 Goblin Artificer. When Gadget Technician enters the battlefield and is turned face-up, create a 1-1 Colorless Thopter Artifact creature token with flying disguise, Hybrid Blue-Red, Hybrid Blue-Red. Okay, go ahead.

Right. Yeah, so I find these a lot more interesting. Obviously the cons gameplay was great for its time, but I think when you introduce more of these kind of cheaper pseudo value morphs, the game gets a lot more interesting. Like I can attack with my disguise on turn four and it's this creature and

if you block with your disguise i can spend some mana get a thopter token and then our creatures still trade so it adds a little bit of extra layer and depth in terms of like oh it's not just always going to be two twos bounce uh killing each other it's going to be kind of like this mini game of oh you could get a tiny bit of value something else could happen to me it adds more suspense to the whole uh equation of uh morphs fighting yeah another interesting thing that i want to talk about real quickly is so we decided we were going to set this on ravnica and so being on ravnica meant we had access to some ravnican things uh so the hybrid in disguise is really interesting and that's a new thing.

Talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah, so we wanted to be a Ravnica set, which means, obviously, you want to have a lot of multicolor commons. So to solve that, all of the common multicolor disguise creatures have two colors in their casting cost,

but they're all hybrid to flip up. So that means that more decks can have access to the unflipping ability, right? Because you can always play a disguise for three mana of any color, right? But you can play more of these in different styles of decks because of the hybrid cost to flip up. Yeah, hybrid is one of those mechanics that's very insidious and for just helping enable a lot of things.

They're a pain to design, but they're very useful in helping people be able to play more things. It was a neat... One of the things that's really cool is whenever we've used morph, or face downward disguise here, but whenever, whenever we've used morph, like more, or, or face downward disguise here, but whenever we use that kind of mechanic,

it sort of looks at what else is in the environment to take advantage of. Um, and what we learned on cons, which obviously took advantage here is that morph and gold actually inter, inter work very nicely because one of the biggest problems with gold cards is they get stuck in your hand. And with, with, uh, face down technology, they don't have to get stuck in your hand you can play them as face down until you have the means to get them up so i think that's really cool right so and then

uh right one more one more one more extra thought on that is um as always hybrid always makes things kind of smooth together a lot easier it It makes it easier for players to draft. You have more access to more cards. But I will say they are some of the hardest cards to design for. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, because you have to balance around the fact that they can be one of those colors. So you have to pick an effect that merges both of those colors together, which can be extremely difficult in the later stages.

Because like, obviously, you know, it's super easy to design a hybrid card randomly, right? I just choose one effect, choose the same color effect, voila, there it is. But when you have 200 other cards that you can't kind of replicate or whatever it's super hard to kind of like figure out the perfect thing to write on the card so hybrid cards yes super hard a useful tool but yes it comes at a cost um so we're almost out of time here so any last thoughts about just cool things from that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you're proud of from from uh from um murder of carl's manner uh i really i really love the surveil lands um so those are in the new wild card slot um where in some packs you will actually get a rare dual land that has when this land enters you surveil one they enter tapped and they also have

the basic land types so they'll be like a plains island right i'm super excited for these cards in all formats basically like i think you can play them in modern where you can use fetch lands they're good in standard because scry lands are good in standard and i'm super excited for them in commander as well because people also play scry lands there why not play surveil lands here so i'm really excited for all of them and uh yeah they're sweet and also surveil the reason surveil is extra nice here is because collect evidence and that getting stuff in your graveyard is extra valuable right and i just cannot wait to play one on turn one bin a grizzle brand play a play a lotus petal

and then play reanimate it's going to be great the dream well anyway Andrew I want to thank you for being with us it's a lot of fun talking through Murders of Carl of Manor yep thanks for having me Mark and everybody else I am at my desk so we all know that means this is my

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