Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1176: The History of Magic Design, Part 1

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

This episode is part one of an eight-part series where I go through the entire history of Magic design to talk about design evolution over the years.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for Dr. Drive to Work. Okay, so today's topic is I kind of want to talk about the history and evolution of magic design. I don't know, my gut is this is going to be more than one podcast only because I got 30 years and 30 minutes. So I think it's going to be longer than a minute per year. But the idea behind this topic is I want to talk about how the making of magic has changed. So this really gets it. I'm not going to talk so much about the making of the set, meaning how did the particular set get made, but the larger structure of like, how did we make magic sets at the time? So this is more about the behind the scenes of making it than what it was

Okay, so we'll go back all the way to beginning alpha so Real quickly the story a lot of people have heard but Richard Garfield and his friend Mike Davis come to Wizards of the coast in Seattle, Washington, or rent in Washington technically, to pitch their game RoboRally. Peter says, we're a small company. That's too many pieces.

We can't make that game. Richard says, what can you make? And Peter says, we can make a card game. We have access to a printer and artists. That inspires Richard to come up with the concept of the trading card game. Richard, I just learned this out. The first game, so Richard decided to take games he already owned. So rather than make a game from scratch, he adapted a game he already had.

And Richard invents a lot of games. So turns out the very first game he tried adapting wasn't Magic, it was a different game. But soon thereafter, he adapted a game that I think he called Five Magics that he had made that wasn't a trading card game, but adapted into a trading card game. So what happened was Richard made the game, then showed it to Peter. Peter loved it, said, let's make it. And then Richard worked with, so Richard at the time was at the University of Pennsylvania,

getting his doctorate I think. Anyway, he made friends with people that he knew from different places who became his playtefters. So he met a bunch of people at University of Pennsylvania. That is like Scaffolius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. Those are what we know as the East Coast Play Thefters. He met a group in his bridge club, Bill Rowe, Charlie Catino, Joel Mick, Elliot Siegel, Don Felice, Howard Kallenberg.

Those people would go on. That's the bridge club group. We'll talk about that in a sec. And then also he met Barry Reich, who I think, I don't know if Barry was also at the University of Pennsylvania, he lived near Barry, they lived in the building near each other, I believe. Anyway, he had a bunch of people that were playtefters,

and probably there are more than that, those are the ones that I know. So he was playtesting magic. So Alpha was made, the first take on Magic. I think it took a couple of years that he put it all together and did play testing and got everything together. So Magic comes out in 1993, that's Alpha.

They made a few mistakes in Alpha. That's why Beta, the second printing, they left some cards off. They left off Circle Protection Black and Volcanic Island. They also added one more of each basic land so they could save us over 300 cards. But mostly Elf and Beta were the same thing. So what happened is the game comes out massive success.

They print what they think is six months supply, sell that out in a couple of weeks. Then they make what, Beta is what they consider to be more, six months supply, sell that out in a couple of weeks. Then they make what they, beta is what they consider to be more, six months supply, sell out in a week. So it becomes apparent pretty fast that they have a, they have a hit on their hands. So Arabian Nights, they go to Richard and they say, we need to make another set. And so Richard quickly makes Arabian Nights. I think he's inspired by a Sandman comic.

And so he ends up making a comic, I'm sorry, a set based on the book, 1001 Arabian Nights. The book's in public domain, but he's sort of inspired by that. It's not a very big set. I think it's like 98 cards. But Richard, by himself, does it very quickly. And flavor text was done like by Beverly

who was the lead editor, most of the editor at the time, like a few days before it left the building. She's like going through a thousand one nights and finding excerpts of quote. And like they almost changed the card back, but don't change the card. They decided in the last minute not to change the card back. And the first expansion is made. Once they realize that they need to put on

content, while Richard is working on Arabian Nights, so what happened was Richard knew at some point they needed more magic sets. He didn't have any idea of the time frame. So many of his playtefters were off building their own sets. East Coast Playtefters built Ice Age, the Bridge Group built Mirage, and Barry Reich made a set called Spectral Chaos, which all those we will come to hear about. Okay, but since they were in a rush, like they, you know, they realized they need to make more stuff They went back to the East Coast play judges said okay Richards making Arabian Nights. Can you make a small set? They decide to make a set built around artifacts called antiquities

And they had this idea that wouldn't be cool If like it's a set all about digging up, you know artifacts of the past What if there's like you piece together a story about the past and so they make The early version of the Brothers War now if you look at that if you look at the the flavor text from antiquities It doesn't so much tell the story as a hint at the story Like you have a general you learn little bits and pieces of things But it's more like hey, I'm digging things up and I'm learning, you know, and so you have the rough outline of the Brothers War.

It's not until there was a book made later, the more details were made, that the set didn't have enough content. It sort of let you know some things, but there's a lot, a lot left out. Modern sort of storytelling that we hit more the key plot points than we then they did in but it was the first time magic had a story which is and the brothers were even to this day stances like I mean they did a pretty good job for the first time out of doing a magic story. Okay so next up okay so they realize that they are they need to pump out content so

not only did Richard ask a lot of his play testers to make sets, Peter Ackeson starts asking people he knows to make sets. So the legends comes from Steve Conard and Robin, Steven Robin, I'm blanking on Robin's last name. They were, Steve was one of the people that founded Wizards with, five people founded Wizards, one of which was Peter Atkinson, but another was Steve Conard. And they were role playing buddies. They played Dungeons and Dragons together. And so the Legends was basically, they just took all the characters from their role-playing games and brought them to life

He made cards out of them And then I mean obviously they came up with the legend. I mean there's things they did because of that but basically idea was hey we're just gonna bring our our role-playing games to life. Now the people, Steve and Robin, they didn't know magic well. There actually is a handoff that I've seen, the handoff of legends, which is a lot of like,

they weren't, it wasn't like even rules tax. It just would say stuff like, this creature enters and fights everybody. And this is before fight was like a word. I was like, what does that mean? It fights everybody. And so the East Coast Playfifters did a lot of work to sort of turn that from rough ideas into an actual set.

I mean, the pure ideas were all Steven and Robin, you know, the characters, all that, but actually like converting it into actual magic mechanics. You know, the Skaffen company spent a lot of time figuring out how to do it. Not a lot of time. They adapted it over. Then the Dark, which was the next set. So Jesper Mirfors, who was the the art director, the original art director for Magic, he designed, he along with Chris Rush helped design the back of the

cards and did the frames with Chris Rush and he was the first art director and he had the idea. So he made a set and his set was a lot more about mood and tone. I mean the dark was really about, let's see the dark underbelly of all the five colors, you know Yeah, black black can get pretty dark obviously, but white could get dark and blue can get dark And so it's a lot more mood and tone. It wasn't particularly mechanic like there was no mechanics per se in it There were individual car designs, but it was a lot more about capturing this mood and tone. And there's a little bit of a sense of,

you start seeing a little more story. The dark is the first set that's kind of like, not that it has a specific, I mean, obviously antiquities had somewhat of a story. This is a little more about creating a mood and tone there, consistent mood and tone. So the set felt a certain way. Then after the dark was Fallen Empires. So this is again the East Coast Plague幼e's making another small set.

This time Fallen Empires really sort of builds a world that says, okay, I mean, it's on Dominaria, but Serpedia is where it goes to. And Serpedia, there are five groups, or there's five sets of conflicts. Each conflict is within a color. And so, you know, white has the soldiers that are fighting against the, um, the religious group that splittered off and, um, you know, the elves are fighting the saplings. They were growing, you know, for food. And, um, there's all this sort of inner tension. And, um, really the idea was, uh,

fun empires is the first set. Um, well, I mean, I guess antiquities had a theme, but it was about artifacts. And then Fallen Empires was kind of like, well, we're gonna be, we have a flavor to it, and we're going to sort of give an identity. And it's the first kind of faction set that like, oh, the elves are gonna do this thing

and have this mechanic and work a certain way. And the saprolings, the phthal this mechanic and work a certain way. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the saplings or the phthalids will work in a certain way. And that they're more folk. And it started to give identity, like factions with identity. That's the first time we did that. So you like, you start, but once again, this is still all out of house.

This is still at the time of like fallen empires, the team that is making it doesn't work at wizards. They would soon thereafter, or maybe members of, so the East Coast Playchasters, three of the four of them, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, and Dave Petty, all come to work for wizards. I don't quite know the timeline. I think they designed fallen empires before,

but they might've been at wizards when they were developing fallen empires before but they might have been at they might have been at wizards when they were developing Fallen Empires I'm not quite sure But at this point by the way Early on what's happening is an outside group is making the set and then an inside group is sort of looking at it We start getting the early version of design and development design is sort of making it out of house development is development. Design is sort of making it out of house. Development is, you know, cleaning it up and making sure it's the best of what it can be. Now for something

like Fallen Empires, the design team and development team overlap by quite a bit. Okay, after Fallen Empires, we get to Ice Age. So Ice Age was the main set that the East Coast Playoff Trashesters had originally planned to make. When I think they first made it, the Richards' early plans was Magic would exist for a year or two, maybe two years. And then they would refresh Magic, and now instead of Magic the Gathering, it's Magic Ice Age. And it would have a different back, and it would be a related game and with the Cars would mechanically work with each other, but it would kind of be a new version of it And that's Richard's original idea was hey every two years we refresh it

Obviously it got so popular They made a lot more content than that and then when they didn't change the back in Arabian Nights They sort of said oh, I guess maybe we guess maybe we want to keep making things that add to the same system. And so they kept the back the same. So Ice Age was their first time trying to do a set that really was a standalone set. I mean, Legends was a large set, but it wasn't built, like Ice Age was built to replace Magic the Gathering, to be a new basic game. So it had all the component pieces. Now, we haven't got to limited yet.

Limited really isn't a thing. So they're not thinking about limited. Not that people don't play, I play limited with Ice Age, but it's not nothing right home about. But anyway, once again, so that is, that is the East Coast Play Thefters designing it and then putting it in house. Now in house at that point um Scaff and Jim and uh Dave are working there uh Charlie Cattino doesn't come to 95 so anyway there's a few other people like Glenn Elliott there's a few other

people that are Wizards starts hiring some people and so there are some people that are other people that are working on sets. Okay, after Ice Age is Homelands. Homelands is another set where a team that Peter had gotten, which was Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungford. Kyle led the, service group and Scott was part of what was at the time called continuity, what we might now think of as being the creative team that did names and flavor check and stuff like that. So they were very inspired. A lot of the way Homeland came about is they took things that were popular in alpha, Singer Vampire, Sarah Angel, Herlund Minotaur, and sort of used that as inspiration to make a world. Homeland is, I mean, technically, Arabian Nights was Arabia, or, you know, or Uruguay,

sorry, it was Uruguay. And we sort of later said, oh, this is its own world, but it really was just taking an existing thing. Homelands is the first time somebody kind of built a world, you know, a growth is the world. And like, like I said, it's very, you know, a growthized the world and like, like I said, it's very, very influenced by a lot of alpha elements. They took a lot of things that people liked in alpha and sort of spun off them. Okay.

People like singer vampire, let's make a whole singer vampire clan. People like hurl and Minotaur, let's make a whole Minotaur group. People like Sarah Angel, let's tell Sarah, Sarah Angel. And anyway, so, um, so the set was designed by externally. And at this point, there's a more established internal R&D group. And so now the interesting thing about Homelands is that the internal R&D at the time, so R&D by this point is set up. R&D, not a big fan of Homelands, just mechanically.

They just don't, they don't think the design is all that strong. And so they recommend to Peter that Peter not print it. But Peter was like, I made a promise, we're gonna make it. And so kind of against their will, they worked on Homelands. After Homelands is Alliances. Alliances was also made by the East Coast Play of Traffters. Oh, so the way, by the way, even though three

of the members at the time were working at Wizards, it's still done external to Wizards. It's not part of their job. They're paid for it separately. It's done as a freelance thing. And so, alliances, so alliances is done by the team and then it's brought in-house. And this is my, the first that I work on with alliances. I was, for Homelands, I had a play test team that they sent us the set and gave notes and sent it back. So I was a play test team, I guess, for Homelands.

But the first that I worked on, like on the design team or on the development team was alliances. And alliances, there was a lot riding on alliances. Real quick context is Fawn Empires was the first time we could print to demand. No one believed us. We overprinted it. Then there was a giant gap.

Or no, I'm sorry. Oh yeah, that's right. The Fawn Empires. Then we did Ice Age, which went okay. And then after ice age was homelands, which people didn't really like, it didn't do great. So there was two out of the last three sets were kind of had a sour, didn't go great. And so, and there was, there was like a seven month gap between homelands and alliances. So there's a lot riding on alliances.

It's sort of like, you know, the thought process is this could be the downturn of magic. We really got to turn it around. So the development team for alliances was everybody in R&D at the time, which I think it was 13 people. Bill and I were on it as new people. Anyway, and the decision was made not by the people who designed it, but by people at Wizards after the fact that it was going to be set in the same world as Ice Age.

That it was going to be sort of continued. And we spent some time in development, so we added in a little bit of snow cover. We added a few things in just to make it feel a little more connected. It was not designed to be a second part of Ice Age. It was decided, you can start to see the precursor of the idea of we want to build worlds and blocks and that's starting at this point. But it's sort of done, it's sort of retrofitted rather than done from the get go. Meanwhile, just behind the scenes, around that time, most of the people that had been

working on Magic, Richard, Scaff, Jim, Dave, Wizards is getting bigger and there's a lot more games going on. Richard's designing other trading card games. He designs Vampire the Eternal Struggle. He does net runner. And so the idea is a lot of people that were working on magic want to go work on other things. So they decided to hire people

whose full-time job will be to do magic, to do magic development is what we were hired for. So I get hired, Bill Rose gets hired, William Jockish gets hired, Mike Elliott gets hired, the main four of us. And so there's a period of time where we were the development team. Now, so the next set that comes out after, where am I? I talked about Ice Age alliances.

So after alliances, we get to Mirage. So Mirage once again was designed out of house by the bridge group by Joel Mick and Charlie Coutinho and Bill Rose, Howard Kallenberg, Elliot Siegel, Don Felice and it is called, Menagerie was the name of it. And actually it ended up being, it was two sets. It was both Mirage and Vision. It was so big they chopped it out into a large set and a small set. At this point now Bill and me, Bill and I and William and Mike are the development teams. So starting with Mirage, the four of us are the development team.

Bill had led the design for Menagerie, but also ends up leaving the development for it as well. So Bill sort of sees it across the way. And so now we're starting to get, okay, external people are designing it. There's an internal group that after the external people does it, does a full pass on it. We start getting into, I think alliances might've been the first sort of full development and it was kind of, it was a little awkward awkward there's a lot of people working on it Mirage in some ways got to the okay we have people hired this is what they do Mirage was the first set where we decided we wanted to make limited a thing it was the side that

we're gonna start doing blocks there and so so Mirage like I said external group designing it, internal group developing it, little bit of overlap in that Bill Rose was the lead designer of the set. Joel Mick at the time was the head designer and both of them had worked on the set. Charlie was in the office by that point,

but I don't know if Charlie worked on, I don't think Charlie worked on Mirage development. Okay, so which then gets us to Weatherlight. So Weatherlight and Tempest. Actually, let me talk Tempest because even though Weatherlight came out first, Tempest happened, the design of Tempest happened first. They hire us, me and Bill and William and Mike. I think when they hired us, the thought process was, okay, we're just going to keep getting external people to make designs and then internally we'll develop them. So what happened is I was hired as a developer, not as a designer, but I see an opportunity.

And so I say to Joel Mick, who was head designer at the time, oh, because Richard Garfield, I became friendly with Richard and Richard had mentioned that, oh, he would like to work on a magic set again. He hadn't done that since Arabian Nights. I go to Joel Mick and I say, hey, I would love to design a magic set. You know, Richard Garfield said he would be on the team. Can I do it? And I think what they decided at that point was it just made more sense to have the people

internal design it. And so they, they, they gave me the chance. So Tempest was the first set internally designed all the people on it. So the design team was me, Richard, Mike Elliott, and Charlie Catino, and all of us were in R&D. It wasn't an external group anymore, it was an internal group. Now, be aware that when it was an external group, that external group got paid and there were residuals and all sorts of things. We were doing it, you know, as part of our job. We weren't being paid extra, but I mean, that's what we did for our job. Um, now weather light, which is the set before tempest also ended up being

done internally, but because large sets take longer, we started on tempest before they started on weather light. Um, but whether light and tempest are the beginning of, okay, we're going to start designing in house. We're not going to go out of house. We're going to design in house. Um, now I still should point out that at this point in design, each team, there wasn't a lot of vetting about what you're designing. It wasn't like, Oh, this is the theme of what we're designing. It was more like you're the team that's going to design it, design something. So like when we, so for Tempest we went down to Portland, Richard's parents at the time lived in Portland, so we drove down to Portland and we stayed

there for a week and did our initial week of design. And the way we did it really was I just said okay turn in every awesome design you have, all the cards you have, just turn them all in and we had pages and pages and pages of designs. Some of which were mechanics, some of which were individual cards. Some were individual cards that we thought could be mechanics. But again, I was stressing the early days,

so let's look back at Mirage. Mirage had two mechanics. It had a mechanic called flanking and a mechanic called phasing. And the idea was, well, okay, that's kind of how block is gonna work. The first set, the large set that comes out in the September, October time, that is going to introduce two mechanics.

The two small sets that follow it will be in the same world and just expand on those mechanics. And that as far as named mechanics, there'll be two named mechanics. So Tempest followed that pattern that had been set by Mirage. So we had buyback and shadow,

and there were smaller themes. There were lissids and slivers. I mean, there were other mechanical elements. There were only two named keywords. Like slivers was a creature type and lissids was a creature type and Listens was a creature type, but they had mechanical identity. But at that point, what's going on is we designed it,

and then the development team was the same development team. I didn't lead the development team, but I was on the development team. And by the time, did Tempest, no, no, no, Tempest, Henry Stern would join somewhere around this point. But anyway, the five of us really were the development team and so we developed Mirage, we developed Visions, we developed Weatherlight, we developed Tempest,

we developed Stronghold. We start, the same group of people are developing things. But, and like I said, I had carte blanche. Now, it turns out out something important that goes on during this time period is I become friends with Michael Ryan. Michael Ryan is one of the editors on Magic. And he and I bemoan that Magic doesn't have a larger story.

We're like, hey, you're like, we're doing all these sets. Like it's sad that Magic doesn't have a bigger story. So we decide to make one. So we go to the Magic brand team and we pitch the Weatherlight saga. They love it and they said we're doing it. And so the other thing that happens around Weatherlight is they start moving toward this idea of we're going to do this brand new story. So Michael and I, so Weatherlight was kind of retrofit.

Weatherlight wasn't designed to be the beginning of the story of the Weatherlight. In development, we had to sort of fit that in. And Michael and I spent some time like, sort of figuring out what existed in the set. And we were able to commission some art. So, we knew early enough that we didn't, we couldn't really change what the set was,

but we had some ability to, Michael and I had ability to change names and add flavor text. And we had some of our art. So there are story points that you actually see in the art of Weatherlight. So we were, we did find out early enough that we had some ability to affect it,

but not really the mechanics. Because that was a graveyard set. We didn't really affect what the mechanics of the set were. But as we are doing Tempest, I'm designing Tempest from a design standpoint, but I'm also working with Michael to figure out how to translate that into story. Now, we more took what we were doing mechanically and made a story out of it, versus making mechanics

of what the story was, if that makes sense. Like, oh, we made Slivers. So okay, how do Slivers fit into the story? We would figure that out. It wasn't like Slivers exists in the story, so we made a mechanical identity for them. But anyway, so another important part that's going on at this point is we now make it so,

there was, like I said, there was a team called continuity of sort of the creative team the creative team at the time was the art director who was Really, I guess Pete ventures back then or I love Pete was the art right Pete Pete did continuity I'm not sure if he actually I don't think Pete was the art director. He was an artist You know, I know Pete ventures for doing art, but he was in charge of overseeing a lot of the names and flavor texts for doing art. But he was in charge of overseeing a lot of the names and flavor texts. For the Weatherlight Saga and for Tempest,

they built a team that actually built the world. The first time we created a world internally where we built a world was for Tempest. Tempest was an artificial plane, and we had artists in house, including Mark Taddeen and Anson Maddox, and we really sort of, for the first time ever, did world building in the sort of sense that we think about it now. Before that, a lot was, I mean, the individual artists had a lot of say.

And I mean, there were influences and we're like, oh, Mirage is the African set. So you want to, you know, we made sure to do things that had the right flavor to it, but we didn't have the style guide. Like Tempest was the first set where we had a style guide where we sent the artists, this is what the world looks like. So anyway, just to get a sense of, in a lot of ways, Tempest and Weather Delight were the beginning of a lot. Everything got brought in in house

We're doing the design in house. We are doing the world building in house So it's the first time really and all that was to build around to try to you know, blow out the Weatherlight saga That is its own story. I did a whole podcast on Weatherlight saga So if you want to hear about that, it didn't go so well for me and Michael, but it did get made. We did make the Weatherlight Saga. But anyway, I think this is a natural stopping point for my story of design. So we will end with, for the first time, we start bringing things in house and we start sort

of making magic. Now, like I said, it is still, there's not, I mean, the Weatherlight Saga is the first ever sense of a larger structure, right? Where most of the time you design a set, it's like, ah, make whatever you want. And for the first time ever, it's not that the well-designed really dictated mechanically what we were doing, but at least we started to say, oh, well, you know, Michael and I had plotted out a three act structure

and the first act took place on wrath. The second act took place on Mercadia and the third act took place in Dominaria. That would change. But the idea that we sort of roughly have an idea of where we're going set by the story. Now the story is merely giving locations. We know that Tempest is an artificial plane.

We know that Mercadia is like a mercantile plane in Dominaria we already knew. But it's the first time there's any set of structure. So we're gonna wrap up today here with, we're just on the very beginning cusp of saying, maybe there are things that are gonna guide what we are designing versus just, hey, make what you want, just make two mechanics.

And I will get to that next time. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the beginning of the jaunt through the history of magic design. But I'm now at work. So we all know that means, 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 next time. Bye. Bye.