Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1170: Duskmourn: House of Horror Vision Design with Annie

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Annie Sardelis, the lead vision designer, to talk about the early design of Duskmourn: House of Horror. Annie also lead the design of the set's Commander decks, so we talk about those as well.

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 I like to use my time at home interviewing people, and today is Annie Cerdellis. We're going to talk about the vision design of Dusk Mourn, House of Horrors. Dun dun dun. Okay, Annie. So let's start from the very beginning. How did you find out that you were even doing the set? What was your first introduction to you? This was called swimming in. Oh yeah. Yeah, let's see. Um, well, it all, I guess the theme came about like, there's all these like genre spaces that we haven't yet explored yet, which is kind of like where you see this lineup of like

MKM with Mystery, OTJ with Villain Heist, and here we have Modern Horror, right? And I served as sort of like, I was on the vision team for MKM, and I served as a strong second on Outlaws. And that was all sort of just like to ramp up of, you know, possibly leading the vision design of Duskmore. And so I learned a lot from Mark along the way. So we throw you in the deep end. So normally the first time you do a premiere set, traditionally you normally do a return because returns are a little bit easier because we've been there before you have some guideline for what we've done. But this is a brand new world. We've never been and that's just a brand new world. But like we're pushing boundaries on this world, right? We we didn't quite know what people've done. But this is a brand new world. We've never been and that's just a brand new world. But like, we're pushing boundaries on this world, right? We we didn't quite know what

people would think. Yeah, it definitely had its pros and cons. Like the pro is it's like a blank slate, you can do anything you want. And also, like, I'm kind of a fan of horror, you know, like, I really like film and I really like horror. So yeah, but unlike return to is, you know, you know what the people want, you know what to give them. It's a little easier.

You have like this first couple bricks laid for you. But yeah, this is this is fresh, but it was definitely fun. Okay, so one of the things we talked about very early, I believe this is an exploratory design. So because Indistrad exists, Indistrad is a very popular world. It does gothic horror. And on some level, you could argue New Phyrexia also does, I call it alien horror,

but it does a different kind of horror. We were doing something that was brand new and not being Innistrad was kind of important. I know that very early on. We're like, okay, we wanna be horror, but we don't wanna just copy, we don't wanna be Innistrad part two. We wanna be something unique and different.

Yeah, in a strad is, you know, I hope dust more would be similarly beloved in a strad and that like, just absolutely nail the tropes, like, you know, the horrors of zombies, like here, you might see a zombie with haste, you know, like the zombies are do not mess around in modern horror, they are running at you. So, but yeah, it's like in order to differentiate from in a star, we really tried to focus on zones or or just mechanics that they didn't care about. Like Innistrad has a pretty strong type of like humans versus monsters gimmick and also use the graveyard a whole lot like all through vision design.

We honestly tried to make sure our marquee mechanics didn't touch the graveyard a whole lot. Like all through vision design, we honestly tried to make sure our marquee mechanics didn't touch the graveyard, which did leave a bit of a gap for set design to jump in and be like, all right, let's use it in this way, right? But we wanted to make sure our marquee new stuff didn't touch in the same space as in a strong mechanically. Yeah, so one of the things that happened, and I believe this happened in Exploratory, was we said, okay, what is the thing that modern horror has going for that's a little bit different

from sort of the classic gothic horror? And one of the things that was really interesting was we talked about how mood and tone are so important. A lot of times you don't even see the monster for a while, but just from moment one it's just creepy and that the suspense of not knowing when or where things are happening is part of what makes it scary. Yeah, I think that's so yes, speaking to mood and tone, we just started looking through like, well, what card types and magic like already do a pretty good job of that. And I think Mark, yeah, you propose like enchantments,

let's look at enchantments. And I was like, yeah, you propose like enchantments. Let's look at enchantments. And I was like, you know what, you're right. Like there's stuff like claustrophobia, crawling sensation, always watching. These are like game pieces that they stick around, they linger, they change the rules, like the nature of the game, right? Like, so they're, they really do a good job at capturing like, no, the mood has changed or something in the air, like something's going on. Okay, so pretty early on we said,

let's make Enchantments matter. I mean, industry had curses, so it wasn't like Enchantments didn't exist, but it wasn't a major theme. Okay, so I'm going to talk about the most fun we had in vision design, which we said, okay, I think we knew going in that we were going to be inside a house.

I think that had been, when the set got green lit, I think we knew modern horror and we knew all that's inside a house. I think those are the two things we knew walking in. So we were very fascinated by the idea of rooms. So let's talk a little bit about the craziness that was the exploration of how to do rooms. Yeah, so with the plane essentially being one big giant house, like that really does lead us with like, all right, how do we really express that as we looked at other games that do similar things. Betrayal at House on the Hill is a really great board game that gets across like this house that sort of like builds itself

as you move around and you never know what's behind any door, right? So I wanted to capture that similar feeling, which led us down some really wild paths. I think one of the really early ones is there was sort of like a side deck that was like the house and you would play cards that say like explore the mansion and you would reveal cards that say like explore the mansion and you would like reveal cards in that deck and you have like out like a max of three

rooms or something like that and you would represent which one you're standing in with like a literal people like a little piece of a dude and you would put it on that room so you'd be like all right I'm gonna explore the mansion ooh I revealed the infinite hallway now all my creatures have haste, you know? And so we like mapped these flavorful effects to the different rooms. We had like 20 or 30 of them. Yeah, it was crazy.

So I think the earliest version was, you just flipped up three and then all the effects happen and that was just too much. So that's when we added the meatball. We're like, oh, okay. And we talked about wanting movement. That's something we were trying to get. Like, oh, I'm in the kitchen, but now I'm in the library.

Like you would move from place to place. And then it took two, like we liked the movement, but it took too long with three cards. It just took too long before you, you had to have two things out, but we even moved from one thing to the other thing. So I think the next version, we had multiple rooms per card.

I think it was four when we started. Remember this? There were like four rooms per card. Yeah, like individual cards like held all the rooms on them. There were like four rooms. It kind of looked like a dungeon. Yeah, it's kind of like a dungeon, yeah. And then you would place them

and then you can move between rooms, either vertically within one card or horizontally between different cards. Yeah, like you can touch the cards to each other and move like across them, which, you know, is again, like very board gamey. Yeah, and then I think we let you move so many spaces, so sometimes you like you cross through rooms

and other rooms. And then for a while we had like a footstep thing where you put footstep markers where you went. Yeah, I mean, the footsteps they were to be like, it turned out the best thing to do was just like to jump between your two favorite rooms. And I'm like, well, if you're stuck in a haunted house, like that, that doesn't really feel like you're running for your life. It feels like you're trying to get the

most out of the experience. So we're like, okay, well, you can't go backwards. So if you leave behind this counter, that means you can't go back to that. You gotta keep going forward, yes. Yeah. And then I think four rooms per card became three rooms per card, which became two rooms per card.

And then we had a period where they were kind of like dominoes where you could put any room next to any room. And so you start like staggering them so that you could sort of line things up. And then eventually we're like, okay, we can't like, we like, we took away the deck, we took away the meeple. But how do we get to the rooms that are there? So like, we sort of, you can see the essence, the essence we're talking about. Yeah, we so we did end up with two rooms per card, It just didn't feel right to only have one room there.

It doesn't really feel like you're moving. It's just sort of like, could just be any old enchantment at that point, right? So we kept like the idea of having two different sides to unlock and we use terminology like unlock a, I don't know. Unlock a room, it says, yeah. Yeah, unlock a room.

So, oh, a locked door yes so so we did keep a lot of the terminology so that when you're playing the game it sounds a lot more flavorful like yes these two rooms are sort of like on different halves of an enchantment but the terminology you're using and like the effects of like when i unlock this door, something is gonna happen. What's gonna happen? I don't know, another mechanic from the set probably. But yeah, and they're all very flavorful and really wacky. Yeah, well, it's funny. A lot of the names of the finished product

weren't that far from our like mansion room name. So like we knew we wanted like the kitchen or like things that were very evocative of a house. Yes. Although we also had like amusement parks. The house could be anything, so we really tried to hit every trope we could hit. Oh, it's true.

Yeah, like, The Cabin in the Woods is like a movie that I think really captures like the swath of all of like the craziness, like shoved into this one house. You want to make sure we're hitting all of of our bases okay so once we had rooms we had sort of an enchantment theme so I want to talk to but two things we did with enchantments first up um so when we handed off the file in vision design we

had a mechanic called afraid so the wayayed worked was whenever an enchantment, whore, or nightmare entered the battlefield or attacked, trigger. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I guess that's an example of like, you know, bashing a couple of things in your set together to sort of like create this glue that ties everything together.

And it was sort of like under the conceit of like, I am making my opponent afraid, like a nightmare is coming at them or whatever. At the end of the day, that did become eerie, which is the new word for it, which is just whenever Enchanting Control enters or you fully unlock a room. So we did want to batch in rooms.

We do want to be like, yeah, when you open the other side of that room, know this mechanic happens or when enchantment enters which enchantments do map to our nightmares So it was just sort of like a shorthand way of like saying like yeah a nightmare entered But you know, they're enchantments so we get to shorthand that there. Yeah, we did look at constellation But the word the word I mean the word just wasn't great. And by making a sort of a new term, we can connect it to other things. And I think them attacking, when you do triggers that happen every turn, they have to be a lot smaller.

But by going to just being one of the enter, you can make bigger effects. That's kind of what they took off all the attack stuff. Okay. Another thing that we did, we knew since we wanted enchantments to matter, we needed to up our ad spend on enchantments. Some of that was like doing enchantment creatures and things. But we also very early on had an enchantment creature token.

Do you remember the name of the enchantment creature token early on? Yeah, I think they were just called lights. Yeah, they were lights, yes. And yeah, they would, they're always meant to be like the thing the survivors use in order to like see their way around, like light is, light, and also the lights turning off is like such a big part of horror that it's like, oh, here's my little glimmer

in the darkness that can help me scry. They used to scry. Yeah, they used to have, when you attack scry one, that's, that's something. They were one one enchantment creature tokens. Yes, now they've settled into just a simple enchantment creature token. Because yeah, the as fan, it's like a good way. We can make a human, they don't need to be made out of enchantments. They can just be like a guy that comes with a light in order to help the mechanical glue come all together.

And the lights became glimmers for those that are obvious to them. in order to help the mechanical glue come all together. And the lights became glimmers, for those that's obvious. Oh yes, yeah, they did pick up a flairful name further down in world building. Glimmers, they're like the hope that the survivors have, and those sometimes manifest as not just tokens, but actual creatures. I think we've seen a bunch of those. They're sometimes cute animals. Yeah. Stuff like that. OK, so there was one other mechanic that we had in vision design that got handed over,

which was manifest dread. So what do you remember of manifest dread? Yeah, so we really wanted to capture suspense in the set. It's like, how do you give people fun little surprises or whatever? And honestly, Manifest is just pretty fun. When you hit a creature, it's pretty darn fun. So it's like, all right, let's see if there's anything we can do to sort of like, bring manifests into the modern era and like get you to hit those creatures more often. So I think

early on, it was called manifest evil. Yeah, yes. And it looked at you get to look at the top three cards of your library, and then pick one as a creature. But it's like a horror when you put it face down, or something like that, so that it would loop into the afraid mechanic. Yes they just ended up as Vanilla's now, but um They and it's two cards. Yeah Yes, yeah, it did evolve into just two cards where the other card ends up going into the graveyard

But again, it was just sort of like we need to find the right number of how many cards to look at, we need to figure out what to do with those cards. Putting two cards on the bottom of the library in any order was like another line of text. So going to just two and chucking one in the graveyard also allowed set design to leverage the graveyard later on. And then that's something, one of the other reasons that the scry went away was because we didn't use the graveyard, the scry was fine, but once the graveyard became relevant, you wanted to do surveil and not scry, but the lights were white mostly, and white is good at scrying but not good

at surveilling, so anyway, there's a lot of little reasons. Okay, now let's talk about two mechanics that were, well I guess, you were on the set design team, so we'll talk about were on the set design team. So we'll talk about these two that happen after vision. One was survival. So the beginning of your second main phase, if you are tapped, do something. So you have to either target or find some way to get it tapped.

Do you remember the origin of this? Yeah. Basically, it was near the end of Vision, so we never found anything, but there was like this big gap about like, all right, we know what the nightmares are doing, we know what the house is doing, we know what all these demons and monsters are doing,

but what are the people doing? They're so boring, like they need a mechanic, right? And so we sort of settled on survival as like this simple, like evocative like hey if you got into combat and you're tapped at the end of combat that means you lived good for you maybe you've got like chump-blocked or maybe you've gotten to a vehicle or something so it's just a simple way of like being like hey these guys on the board are doing their best and there's like the wandering what's

her name the wandering survivor yeah that her name? The wandering survivor. That's what he's called in this set. She has convoked, so it plays really great with it. There's like a lot of little tiny ways to get survival to turn on, but it just adds a bit of texture to the game. The final named mechanic that also got added to the design, but a return mechanic was Delirium.

Do you remember much about Delirium getting added? Mostly it just seemed, like we didn't add it right away, like I said, we didn't want to step toes on Anistrad, but with our enchantment theme, it just seemed like a slam dunk. Like it was very easy to add because we have all these dual card types,

you know, with enchantment creatures and such in the set, and manifest dread allowing you to dump, you know, maybe you can dump a land in your graveyard when you look at those top two. You know, our set teams have a lot of experience developing with it. It was fairly popular coming out of, I think like Modern Horizons 2 or whatever.

So, yeah, it just felt natural. Okay, so I'm going to segue here. You actually had many hats on this project. Not only did you lead the vision design, that wasn't enough. No, you also led the commander design. So I just want to talk a little bit about the commander decks. Okay. How many commander decks were there? We have four. Okay, so You may talk in any order to talk about the four commander decks. Oh my gosh. Okay, let's Start it from the top. I got him here Well first up is like a Esper enchantments deck headed up by Aminato

So basically when we picked out the face characters for these, I wanted to pick characters from the main story. So that's why you get like Val Gavotte, the big bad, like as the face of the deck again, and you get these three survivors, Aminato being like a helper from outside the house, Winter, who's the nerd face of the deck, being sort of like the resident of Dusmourne, who is duplicitous.

And then we have Zimone who sort of like fills that nerd archetype of, you know, survivors in horror shows. But yeah, to start it off, I mean, Ato and Esper with enchantments. Enchantments, obviously, a giant part of Dusk Mourn. And we brought back the miracle mechanic just because it really feels fitting for her. It's like she is super

powerful and so is miracle. So you get to play all these really expensive powerful enchantments in your deck and hopefully top deck your way to victory with that one. And who did that deck? Who led the design of that deck? Oh Ellie Rice who also did Miss Bumbleflower. So she likes to make weird decks. But extremely cool decks. All right, next up we have a good old Golgari graveyard deck that's with winter at the face of it. And the marking mechanic for that one is Delirium. Very natural, it's a graveyard deck. So we're sort of leveraging Delirium to reanimate big creatures and do shenanigans with them.

And I led that deck. So, next up is Zimone. She uses the Manifest Dread mechanic. What color is the deck? Oh, uh, Simic, so green blue. Okay. And so yeah, she links manifest dread with landfall in this way where you have to like sequence your stuff all crazy. There's a lot of instance and tricky stuff, which is why the deck is kind of themed to jump scare scares,

because she does lead into that face down stuff. Which is why the deck is kind of themed to jump scare scares because she does lead into that face down stuff like she will pass the turn with all of her mana open you'll be like, Oh my gosh, Simone, give me a break. It was headed up by Michael Zang, who is one of our editors and rules people at the game. So he he really liked to make some tricky stuff. I hope that you enjoy the deck because my brain hurts when I try to play it. So the moment is quite smart. So yes,

that is the top down there. And then last up is good old Valgavoth, the Harrower of Souls, our elder demon leading up what is what kind of Oh, black, red, ractose. So that deck is a group slug deck, which is kind of the opposite of group hug. It just deals damage to everyone, makes them pay whenever they play lands or do anything. And they will sort of become the natural like arch enemy of the table.

Speaking of. So this was, I mean was, like I said, you were involved in the vision, you were on the set to see time for a while and then you did commander. So you were involved with this product from like day one to day whatever, whatever the last day was. It's true. It's been really fun though. Like I hadn't seen like a lot of the classic horror movies. So I got to let go and watch like the thing and like the original, you know, like the Shining and Folder Guys and stuff. And it was super fun. And I did watch them all during the day.

So I'm a little weak. So what is your, so I mean, what is your, what is your favorite part of the set? What are you proudest of as the vision lead of the set? What do you take away from, wow, this is a cool thing I really like? I think it's just how challenging the genre space was with how the set came out. Like the thing about horror or like being in a horror movie is like things aren't pleasant. Like they're not fun. Like that's kind of the point. And it's really hard to sort of adapt that to a game that is meant to be fun. Like we can't be just using Punisher sacrifice effects all over the place.

It's just you're just not gonna have fun when you sit down to play. So like, how do you reconcile those two things? And I think trying to make a suite of mechanics that are, you know, both like showcase the fun of horror as silly as that sounds, and like the world building just like really just goes super hard on these amazing visuals that are like unsettling pretty I don't know it's just I I'm just glad

that I think we got a set that at the end of the day is like the fun of horror which is which is really cool yeah it is it is funny that obviously we do horror one of the things we're trying to do is we're trying to evoke some amount of fear, right? And so, like, Innistrad had this, like, New Frexie had this, like, how do I do stuff that I sort of surprise my opponent or I, the player, like, I don't quite know what's going to happen, so there's a little bit of trepidation. And like, for example, I really like how Manifest Dread is like, who knows what it is? It could be really bad.

You have no idea. And that I enjoy how it really evokes some sense of, uh-oh, what's going to happen. Yeah. You really want people to, you know, play the game. You don't want them to be so scared. They don't want to make an attack or like, you know, so it was tough. But I think we kind of got there. So.

So what? So this was, I think we kind of got there. So. So what? So this was, I guess, your first premiere set, for sure. And I know you were, you did this in Fallout roughly at the same time? Uh, yeah, Fallout was in like its final stages of design around the time I was working on Vision Design for Dustmourn. And I'll say, you know, they're very different products to work on. Commander versus like main set, it's just sort of like the suite of mechanics, you really got to make sure they all sort of like connect together in a way. Whereas in commander, you just sort of like take a deck and go

this is what this deck is about, this is what that deck is about. And they don't have to like connect at all. But with the main set, it was just really helpful to have that guiding light of like, okay, enchantments matter, how we make enchantments spooky. Like, what can we do with them? To like just set it apart from other sets that have enchantments matter and other spooky sets.

We just gotta find a way to make, you know, Dustmourne feel holistic and unique. And it was super fun. And yeah, learned a lot. Yeah, the other challenging thing. So we wanted to say off Innisrod. So we choose enchantments, then we need to say off Theros because Theros is kind of our previous enchantment world. And so there's an interesting thing of like, we've done a lot with artifacts and enchantments.

This is only the second world really. I mean, obviously, Wilds of Eldraine did a bunch of stuff with enchantments, you know, so that, and Kamagawa, I guess, had an enchantment component. So other worlds have had elements of enchantments. But this and Theros are like, look, it's about enchantments. Like it's to its core about it. What did we do to keep it off Theros? I think a lot of it was the creative heavy lifting to me, just like what an enchantment means on Theros

means something entirely different here. Just like how like a Phyrexian being an artifact is different than like, you know, a Kaladesh contraption being an artifact, right? So I think it was, yeah, a lot a lot of creative work, honestly. Another another big difference is, um, Theros was about building up Theros was about like, I'm going on an adventure and I'm turning from a nobody into a hero or whatever.

And so a lot of the enchantment work there was more focused on auras and on things that went on a creature. So that a lot of what happened in Theros is, my auras changed things over time. This set does not do a lot with auras, not aura specific. Here, the enchantments are more about, I create an environment and I do something,

and they're much more global in nature and less focused. And so that was another big difference is because we were capturing mood and tone, we played a lot more in the space. Even our creatures were a lot more like, I'm here, but also I'm freaky. So, you know, the environment is different because I'm here.

And I think that going from the sort of a local to global enchantment thing really gave this set like this set feels very enchantmenty but it does not even though on some level eerie and constellation aren't that far from each other. They feel very different even though you know like under the hood they're not that different but the tone and sort of the kind of enchantments we're using. The other big thing that we did in this set of enchantments is the idea of things lasting,

of like I'm an enchantment that become a creature or I'm a creature and when I die, I become an enchantment. There's a lot more transitional states than we did in Theros. Oh yeah, the one last mechanic was impending. Oh yes, impending, yes. Yeah, that's the spend riff, but yeah, that starts out as an enending. Oh, yes, impending. Yeah, that's suspend riff. But yeah, that starts out as an enchantment

as you remove the time counters. It becomes a big, scary, overlord monster guy. But yeah, that was definitely a riff on suspend because what else captures suspense other than time? And yeah, so another yep, another great way to leverage enchantments. Yeah, and painting also does a great thing, which is one of the scary things is,

I have something that you'll be afraid of and it's coming and you're aware it's coming. And I'm like, I better get, uh-oh, this is coming. I better make things happen before this shows up. Mm-hmm, but again, very tricky to design. Like you can't just really just have any old car sitting out there forever. It's got to be very intentional or else you will not have a good time. Well, also, it's a mythic rare cycle, so there's not.

The ass fan is low, as we say. Anyway, we are almost out of time here, so final thoughts. Having been through the whole process, seeing your first premiere set finally come out, final thoughts? I wanna do it again, it was really fun. I think there's something super fun about having like a blank slate of like a file to just jam stuff in and just try it, see what works, see what doesn't work.

And guess what? You have this whole file in front of you, you can make the changes. And I just think being empowered in that way is really super fun. And I encourage people to do it in their free time because honestly, you might be able to make a job out of it. I think, yeah, it was a great time. And just so the audience knows, Annie didn't get a second set. This time it was a return set. So your first was in return set, but your second was a return set. So Annie is the lead for Yachting, which is a return to Strixhaven.

So they know that. Yeah. Well, that's all they know. We can't tell me anything beyond that. They are going to go in a bit. Now they know you did it. I guess they didn't know that. But now we're telling them that you did it.

So anyway, something exciting down the road. So anyway, thank you for joining with us today, Annie. It was fun talking to Dusk Morn with you. But guys, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.