Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1173: Duskmourn Set Design with Jules Robins

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Jules Robins, lead set designer of Duskmourn: House of Horror, to talk about the design of the set.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition Well, I use my a lot of time at home. I interview people and today We have Jules Robbins the lead set designer for Dusk Mourn to talk all about Dusk Mourn Hey, hey, thanks for having me Mark. Okay, so I already talked with Annie and so we talked about all the stuff we did in Vision. So I want to start our story at what we call the Vision Design Summit. So for those out there that might not know what that is,

near the end of Vision, we have a meeting where lots of people from R&D come. We play with the set. And we just get lots of notes from lots of different people downstream about where the set is at. And when we did that for this set, we got a bunch of notes that this like the the enchantment theme was there, some early version of rooms was there, but we definitely got some notes that we needed to do some fiddling with the set. So you and I think Brian Hawley, a few people joined the design team for the month before the handoff. And for example, during that month is when we

made, I keep calling it Dread Evil, but it's Manifest Evil, but it's Manifest Dread. That's when we made Manifest Dread. Okay, so basically when the set gets handed off to you as the set designer, there is an early version of rooms in the set. The enchantment theme is very much in the set. There's an early version of Eerie called Afraid in the set. Manifest Red was in the set. So let's talk about when you first got the set, your thought on where to go next. Yeah, so I think our big problem we were tackling at that point was like, the vision team had been working on all of these enchantment themes

and the feedback at the summit was very much like, reading all these cards telling me I'm caring about my enchantments didn't evoke the feelings of modern horror we were going for. The enchantments themselves were doing a great job of being these like thematic set pieces and setting ambiance and atmosphere but how we were connecting to them wasn't carrying through. So our early versions of Geary we were trying a lot to figure out how to tie the enchantments in with something else that would easily make them feel like part of the horror aesthetic. And so we had a lot of versions that were backing, like,

we had a lot of versions that were bashing, like for example, Historic, caring about multiple things with enchantments being one of them. Just for the audience, what we handed off was called Afraid, and Afraid was a batch as well, and it cared about whenever an enchantment, a nightmare, or a horror either entered the battlefield or attack. That's what we got handed off. Yeah. So we went through a ton of iterations on that space before getting to Yuri. We had that first one that was carrying about nightmares and horrors, and then as world building progressed and we talked with the creative team, we realized those creature types we were already going to put all on enchantment creatures, so that didn't actually mean anything anymore.

And so then we tried to tie it into the face down creatures coming from manifest dread and kept ending up in awkward spots as we progressed iterating on the room mechanic where unlocking the second door of a room really felt like you were getting a new enchantment, but didn't figure the thing. And so at some point we had this huge collaboration of like, when an enchantment you control enters or enchantment or fits down from you control enters or unlocks or turns face up. And it was just way too many things and pulling in a lot of directions. So at the same time, we're doing all this exploration trying to figure out how to get this to work. We're re-examining some of where we're sitting is

world buildings going on. Right, very early on, we were cognizant of trying to make sure that the set felt really distinct from Innistrad. I think that was some of your inspiration for the Enchantment focus to begin with. But we were still hammering on trying to really get the baseline feeling of horror to come through in the gameplay. And the element that play testers kept calling out as weirdly missing was the graveyard.

That just felt so thematically cult and sinister and deadly that it felt weird to people. We weren't doing anything with it in the set. Yeah, and once again, just to stress, the reason we didn't do the graveyard is we were, because Innistrad was so graveyard focused, and we were trying not to be Innistrad,

we were trying to see if we could get away without it. But I think sort of what happened eventually was we were far enough away that I think you guys felt comfortable going back to the graveyard. Right, so we first started on like, okay, well, how can we do the graveyard, but not like Innistrad, how can we do the graveyard, but not like Innistrad, but as we kept talking through approaches we would want to take, we were

like, well, we don't want to do something that's a manasync out of the graveyard, like flashback or, sorry, my brain's not delivering the words,balm because we already have that sort of gameplay off of rooms that you're sort of casting a spell by unlocking one side and then you have mana available later. And we didn't want a lot of repeated triggers coming off things going to the graveyard because we already were using a lot of that effect based on all the various versions of Eerie that we were trying out. So what we really wanted was a threshold mechanic. And we talked about doing literal threshold that Bloomberg had right before us, but it felt like such a big missed opportunity not to use delirium gear when the set naturally was going to be full of tons of artifact creatures

and enchantment creatures just based off of the creative elements of the set. And as more and more world building exploration was coming in, we became pretty confident the set was really going to feel like its own thing. And so even though delirium had appeared in Astrod previously, we were not worried about having the own identity, having its own identity and so went for the better gameplay there. Okay so that is how Delirium entered. So let's talk a little bit about Manifest Red. So we did hand over Manifest Red from Vision Design, but there are a few big changes. One was we had you look at three cards, not two

cards, and we had you put the cards on the bottom of your library. So let's talk about the changes that you guys made with Manifest Dread. Yeah. So the putting cards into Graveyard was actually the last change we made. So I'm going to talk about the, these two, I guess, together in part. When we were building set, we thought it was very cool that Manifest Dread was sort of a very subtle graveyard enabler, even when it was putting cards on the bottom of your library. Because you would put it on lots of effects that might otherwise generate a token, but instead of the token just vanishing from the game when your creature died, if you didn't

turn it face up, it would die and end up in your graveyard. And it might be any card type for Illyrium. But consistently, playtesters were not really feeling that connection. It was too many degrees away from reading the cards. And so the color pairs in green weren't meshing very well, because people weren't taking manifest cards to enable their delirium cards. And that color was kind of bifurcating into cards that were not getting

played together. And so we asked ourselves, well, could we put the manifest cards into the graveyard, both to be a stronger enabler here and more obvious that there's synergy between these two things. But when we tried to look at that with three cards, it was just way too much graveyard enabling. You would play one sorcery that manifested dread and suddenly that card on its own might turn on Delirium by itself and

If that's happening all the time then a lot of the fun gameplay of delirium I'm like trying to figure out how you can create off your cards and find that missing card type disappears So we ended up making both of these changes kind of in concert. We had originally in vision had three cards on manifest dread. We were trying really hard to avoid the problem manifest had in its first incarnation, which was it promised all this cool stuff

about turning your awesome features face up and surprising your opponent. And it just didn't happen most of the time. Even when your limited deck is really creature focused, generally less than half creatures. And, you know, some of those are going to be random two drops that are basically a two, two anyway, and there just weren't enough opportunities to do the thing the mechanic promised you. So we wanted to make sure you could see more

cards and have that really come up. But the more we playtested, the more we realized the odds were really cranked up a lot by even seeing two cards, independent of all the delirium stuff. We had some number of playtesters noting it was just too difficult to play against manifest dread because it almost always was something that was going to blow you out and attacking into open mana and the manifest dread just felt too intimidating for them to do. So these things happily lined up so that we could get manifest dread into a spot where you think it'll probably be fine but often your opponent with a manifest dread card is going to be able to flip some things, carry up and get you. And at the same time, it can enable delirium pretty well, but not take away all of the fun of trying to piece the elements

together. Yeah, I saw someone online who did the math. And I think like, in sealed, for example, you have like a 67% of hitting a creature or something. So it isn't a sweet spot where you kind of wanted to hit a lot of the time, but not all the time. Like you, it's important that occasionally you miss, you know, so I think it got to a good place. Yeah. And there's a lot of new ones there too on like how good a creature you're hitting. A lot of the problem with looking at three cards was like, well, often you'll hit two

creatures and so it's very frequently something hyper impactful. But it's a lot more fun when your opponent has this little mini game on thinking, well, if I outsized the manifest by a lot, it'll probably be fine. If I block this with my five, five, you know, maybe they got three, three creature, but I'm going to be okay. And it allows for more opportunities for the awesome moments of flipping up your 5-6 to actually occur if your opponent thinks that you're not

going to be able to do so. Yeah, one of my favorite things to do with Manifest Dread is discard a scary creature. So my opponent goes, what did they keep? Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. OK. Yeah, I enjoy that a lot, too.

OK, let's move on to rooms. So in vision design, and Anne and I talked about this in our podcast, we went through infinite things with rooms and tried a lot of pretty crazy things. I think when we handed them off, we had gotten them down to the point where there were multiple things going on, I think two things per card. But they were not in the state that, you know, the locks that happened during set design. So let's talk about the evolution of rooms from when you got them. Yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly where they were at handoff

because I was on the tail end of the vision team too, but a lot of the... Yeah, go ahead. My memory was... So originally they started outside... There was a mansion deck. They had their own thing. And then we had like a little meeple and you would like... They represented different rooms and you would move around from room to room. And first there was one room per card. But then we added the meeple. So only where the meeple was was effective. And then we made multiple rooms per card. So there was more ability per card and but then we added the meeples so only where the meeples was was effective and then we made multiple rooms per card so there's more ability to move around between rooms. I think what we did during that month after the vision design is we got it back into the deck so the rooms were not in the deck and I think the idea of multiple rooms was still being played around with but we didn but we didn't quite

have the right, how exactly do you access them? I think when we got handed off, I think you guys did the lot unlock thing. I think that happened in Set Design. Yeah. Okay. So maybe we were at the step with the three rooms per card and moving the Meeple across cards. Yeah, I think, right, when we handed it off, the Meeple might have still been there. I'm not 100%, but I think the Meeple might have still been there.

Well, I'll talk about this vague time period anyway, whether or not it was exactly at the start of set design. But right, we moved from the previous incarnations of rooms that had a room deck or rooms that were a single room on a double-faced card and turned into the scary monster inside afterwards or a lot of things in that vein. We decided we really needed to figure out how to get multiple rooms per card because it just didn't feel like you were exploring a house when you had like two rooms on the battlefield. But games of limited magic just don't really work if you're trying to play four different non-creature permanents because you just don't have enough room in your deck for all of those cards to

don't have enough room in your deck for all of those cards to take up slots that are not like creatures or removal spells or pump spells or the sorts of bread and butter of limited. But if we're trying to eat up all your spell slots with these rooms on top of having a bunch of creatures, then the battlefield just gets too crowded to track reasonably, instead, every card you play is sticking on the board. So we said, well, if you can draw fewer total cards that are rooms, but still get enough rooms on the battlefield to feel like a house, that's how we can really capture the emotion we're going for and still have the gameplay worked out. And yeah, so we I remember trying a lot of different things on having

players literally step between rooms and there was a lot of cool movement element there. But we just found it too complicated on top of the already fairly complicated manifest thread. And we're looking for ways to simplify it. And at some point we took a step back and went, okay, well, let's just start with what is the simplest way we can have multiple permanents on the same card, and then we'll figure out what we need to add from there. And I guess with the caveat,

we didn't wanna use double-faced cards because that along with manifest turning face up is a very weird dichotomy. And so we looked to split cards as the simplest version of this for non-permanence and asked, well, can we just be it's room A or room B, but that still didn't feel like enough of them were really on the board as separate spaces to hit that threshold of four different rooms feeling like a house. And we still had this problem of needing to indicate

which one was actually active on the battlefield. So that got us to this sort of unlocking space that you see on the final rooms where we went, okay, well, we'll have some sort of marker, a closed door, a lock or something to cover up the room that you don't have active. But once we have that, we can let you remove it and just have both of them active. And that way, having even two room cards you draw can build you up to something that feels like a house. And just for the audience to understand, while this is the simplest form of what you guys explored, it is by far the most rules complicated thing in the set.

Yeah, Magic has this very interesting distinction between, I guess, like rockability in the complexity sense, and then all the nitty gritty details. There's right, a large section of the player base that is not familiar with all of the intricacies of the comprehensive rules and just reads their cards plays them as they make sense. And we try pretty hard to make sure that that usually lines up with how the rules actually work. And so a lot of our focus goes into trying to make sure that that basic idea of the functionality

is pretty grockable to a huge section of the audience. And sometimes that doesn't line up with something that cleanly fits inside the exacting rules of Magic the Gathering. And so a lot of interactions and corner cases can still end up pretty weird. I think maybe the poster child for all of this came in I corIA with mutate. You can describe basically what it does to someone in one sentence, but trying to figure out all the details and how that interacts with magic rules is a long endeavor

and rooms aren't quite that far, but we definitely spent a lot of time in set design ironing out all of the details of how these should actually interact if you flicker them or reanimate them or copy them. Yeah, being lower than mutating complications is an easy bar to clear. But yeah, for example, we're not getting into the rules a lot, but like here's a simple example of some complexity is if you flicker a room when it comes back both sides are locked for example I don't know how intuitive that is

Yeah, we tried convincing a lot of people and got pretty split opinions on whether people thought you would get to choose which side was unlocked or both would be unlocked or just one would be and we decided if there was not an intuitive enough answer to people to Get a big win by matching player intuition here and we should instead go for what was going to result in Gameplay that turned out best. And if we let you choose which room unlocked or unlock both of them, it was just going to make it way, way, way more powerful to try to flicker your rooms and get the very high mana cost sides of the rooms then do

anything else with the cards, which would leave us either having to make them very weak or not get to do any cool big rooms because that interaction would be so much stronger than the base use case of play. So we decided to weaken that interaction so that the rooms themselves had a lot more room to do strong and exciting things. Okay, we move on to the next mechanic. So, so far we've been talking about sort of the house, right? There's all these horrors of the house and all these creepy things, but there was another important aspect to the house, which was the survivors! What's the

haunted horror story without the people the haunted house is acting against? So, let's talk a little bit about survival. How did survival come about? Exactly, yeah. So, right, we knew we wanted to let players play as the survivors, but for people who are not as big a fan of the imagery of the horror genre

and would like a lot more of their cards to look less intimidating to them them and for people who just love the fantasy of scrapping out an existence against all odds and as we thought about what we should do for them became pretty obvious that their core tenant here was not going to be any of the cool technology they made or secret signs they put up to illustrate safety. It was just the desperate struggle to stay alive. So we started trying to think through what mechanical executions could capture that.

We looked at ideas like surviving your opponents targeting them or surviving being dealt damage like ley line phantasm. I think you've been has reminder text that tells you it only triggers if it survives. This is a card from all the way back in, I want to say, a crash that returned to your hand if it was dealt damage. And so we tried some stuff in those spaces but found that a lot of the most straightforward ways to check for survival required your opponent trying to kill the creature and they just weren't going to opt in to doing that if you were going to get strong effects out of it when you had built your deck to make them fail at killing the creature. So we were looking for a way you could proactively get your creature into danger in order to have it survive. And the obvious time that happens by default

in magic gameplay is in combat. When you attack with your creature, very often your opponent tries to block and kill it. And it also gives a great way to tie enabling survival into the sorts of magic cards that are going to be useful in your deck even when you don't draw a creature that has survival on things like combat tricks that they'll pump. So we looked at that space and it felt appropriate but kind of one note to have just I'm going to try to attack with my

creatures and have them make it through combat. And writing the literal word attack in the rules text led a lot of people to say like, this doesn't feel like they're outclassed and scrappy enough. It feels like the survivors are on the front foot. And so we've found a solution to both of these approaches at once in checking for the creature being tapped after you finish combat, both helping it feel like the creatures in a precarious situation instead of on the front foot and also enabling lots of sneaky ways to attack your creatures so they can survive not just by killing the monsters but

hiding out somehow. Yeah I like how survival plays and it definitely it's pretty interesting that we could like one of the things that you want to do whenever we make a mechanic is do something that the creative team can then flavor in fun and interesting ways. And it definitely, like, it could show someone being good at combat, but it also could show somebody hiding. And the fact that that one mechanic can be represented by that all, I thought was really cool.

Yeah, I'm really happy with how that one turned out. Okay, there's one last named mechanic that we've not talked about yet. It's only on five cards. That's something we do a lot. So let's talk impending. So impending is a mechanic on five mythic rares? Or rares? I forget. Yeah, mythic rares. And so it is kind of a tweak on suspend, kind of.

How did Impending come to be? Yeah, Impending was actually the last mechanic added to the set and pretty far along in set design too. We, in fact, I think already commissioned Art for the Overlords before we came up with the Impending mechanic. We'd known that we wanted some really big creatures in the set, not just these small cellar spawns scheduling everywhere. And we'd talked with the creative team and they'd come up with this idea of sort of beings in charge of the various sections of the house spawn from the Alkabach. And we were trying to come up with an awesome

through line for this mythic cycle. And as we were iterating, we felt like we had suspense in the set from Manifest Dread, not knowing if this creature was going to turn into something scary later. But what we were really missing as an emotion from the modern horror genre was this frequent sense of like, inevitable doom, this implacable killer just docking towards you and no matter what you do, they don't stop that sort of emotion. And so we thought maybe we can capture that on these are just creatures. And in our early exploration of how to do that, we went, Oh, well,

suspend is the magic mechanic that captures this really well, but it's really complicated. It has a lot of unintuitive pieces and it just takes up so much of the text box. We have a hard time writing anything mythic worthy on these. And so we sort of left that aside and iterated through a ton of other approaches to what this cycle could be, but just weren't able to satisfyingly hit that sort of note we were going for.

And eventually, as we were working through the set, and we had the rare cycle of glimmers like enduring curiosity that when they die returned as a non creature enchantment. Some playtester had noted, like, really loving that for the set and getting a great enchantment-y feel. And someone asked about the reverse and it just kind of clicked in my head. This was the way to make a simpler version of suspend and one that really tied into the set themes was using the enchantmentness. And so impending was born and yeah, had we come up with it earlier, maybe it would have had a larger footprint in the set, but it has well being simpler than suspend still a lot of tracking complexity and we just weren't confident that far along in the process

on wanting players to have multiple impending cards that they were tracking at the same time. So, five mythic rares all in different colors seemed like the right space to look at, at least for our first outing, so that players would very likely just have one sort of impending tracker at a time. And the fact you named it was kind of the implication that you think it had a lot of reuse potential. Yeah, we definitely were very excited about this

when coming up with it and wanted to make sure that places besides Dusk Mourn could use the mechanic. Yeah, well it's a very cool mechanic. It's a lot of fun. So, okay, so we're almost out of time here. I can see my desk. So we've talked through all the individual mechanics. Any larger thoughts about the set before we wrap up? Yeah, I think one of our, I guess, biggest focuses and thoughts of difficulty working on this set was just trying to balance all of the elements of evoking this genre.

Like the set has tons and tons and tons of individual top-down designs really trying to capture things that we thought were awesome in the set, or awesome in the genre, and it also has lots of parts trying to evoke the wider aesthetic and emotions of the genre beyond being individual references. And a lot of that stuff was lending the set a very dark tone, so trying to balance out how much we wanted the set to represent glimmers of hope and survivors and humor versus making sure we did have stuff that felt really gross and unsettling and sadistic with a really difficult ongoing push and pull as we made

the set. Some people absolutely love the horror genre and want nothing more than a set full of cards that freak them out. And some people say, if I see my very specific fear represented on a magic card, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to play with that set at all. And we did a ton of tuning on what scooter shouldn't chill up here and in what degree to really try to get a spot where there is a lot of horror and misery, but also a lot of levity and bite spots to hopefully make this a set everyone can enjoy if they can long on to the part that

most speaks to them. Well, I have to say, going into this year, this was the set I was most worried about because it had the most unknown factors to it. We were messing in modern space, we were trying to do a theme we'd done before, but we wanted to do it different. It was a brand new world, it was all inside. There's all sorts of things we were trying that were really different. And I have to say, I really, really liked how it came out. I think that you and your team did an amazing job and that the finished product is really, really cool.

Yeah, thank you. Well, definitely hats off to more departments than just my team. A lot of these shelves were great and came out of vision design and a lot of stuff from the world building team to it was really a group effort to I agree get all of these difficult constraints on what we were working with to turn into something I'm really happy with.

Well, I want to thank you for being here today. Jules, it was fun talking to us morning. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here. And everybody else, I'm at my desk. 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 be making magic.

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