Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1186: The History of Magic Design, Part 6

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

This episode is part six 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 a drive to work. Okay, so I've been doing this series where I've been talking about the totality of magic design. I'm going from beginning to end. I'm talking more about the changes in process not about individual sets per se more how they play into the big picture. And last we left we were up to cons of tarq here. But I believe before I can talk about cons of tarq here, there's something I didn't bring up last time.

So one of the things I talked about earlier in this series was we started hiring people off the pro tour. One of the first people that we hired was Randy Bueller, who would go on to be my boss at some point. Anyway, one of the people that we hired was Randy Bueller, who would go on to be my boss at some point. Anyway, one of the people that Randy hired was a guy named Eric Lauer, who was, Randy and him were on a team together in their Pro Tour days. Eric Lauer was known as, what's his name? The Mad Genius, I think was his nickname. He was a really

good deck builder and he really had a good sense of seeing and understanding how cards came together. Anyway we hire Eric. Eric would go on become lead developer. I think the first set that I handed off to him I believe was Innistrad and like I said I think Innistrad is I handed off to him, I believe was Innistrad. And like I said, I think Innistrad is one of the best sets I ever did. Partly, I think it's the work of my design team, but partly is Eric and his development team

did an amazing job. And Eric really did a lot to refine how development worked, how like the later part of design worked. There's a lot of tools he built about how we grade things and figure things out. And there's a lot of just process stuff. One of the things I like to say is that the early part of design is more art than science.

And the later part of design is more science than art. And Eric has a very analytical mind and really sort of advanced the science of the later part of the process, the later part of design. The reason I bring that up is when you ask Eric Lauer what his favorite set that he did is he will say concept art here. And concept art here did a lot of things that really cemented a lot of things. I mean, and all across the board, like one, for example, I, so concept Tarkier,

the idea of concept Tarkier was we were experimenting with more block structures. And so I had an idea that I was really interested in. This year was tagged to be a large, small large year. So I said, what if this year the small set that's in the middle drafts with both large sets, but the large sets don't draft together? And the question was, why? How does that work?

So we had done the second great designer search. So actually I mentioned in the last podcast about Journey Into Nix, Ethan Fleischer, who was the winner of the second great designer search, he ended up leading Journey Into Nix. But so Ethan came in first, Sean came in second. I wanted to work with the two of them, and so I did something special, which is we started design early. Before we started normal design, we did a pre-design,

and the task that I gave them was we needed to figure out why large, small, large, what was that about? And we came up with all sorts of different ideas, and in the end, the one we liked best was time travel. That we go to a world, somebody goes back in time, and because the second set is the past of that world, they change something fundamental, and the second set is the new timeline.

And that's why the past works with either timeline, but it doesn't work, the two timelines don't work together. Um, part of doing that was we wanted something that ran through all three sets. Uh, we ended up that being morph. Uh, and so we ended up being more from the first set. We did, um, uh, manifest in the second set and the third set we didn't really innovate as much, I mean, my, I was trying to, we had a thing called BORF, or not BORF, what was it?

The idea was instead of paying three mana for a face down two two, you paid four mana for a face down two two with a plus one plus one counter. We ended up doing a simplified version of that, which we ended up calling mega morph. I was not, the reason we did that was we wanted all the Morph things to work together. And if you put a pulse on pulse on the counter, you know it's from a different subset. But anyway, that's what I wanted. That wasn't my set. Anyway, we ended up with Mega Morph. Mega Morph, I think, rated

historically low in our thing. I think that was bad PR. I don't think mechanics are bad mechanic. I just think that we had introduced Morph, manifest is a really interesting take on Morph, and then Megamorf is not a really interesting take on Morph. It is a pretty boring take on Morph. And so, yeah, the alternate timeline, like Morph didn't change much was, I think, underexciting, and the name Megamorf sucks.

But okay, anyway, so so morph was part of the set part of the block and that's the set where um Eir came up with the idea of the rule of five about how morphs will eat each other you know and morphs will self destroy like neither one I guess when you say eat something neither neither of the morphs, before you get to five mana, had the capability of blocking a morph and surviving, like killing the morph that it blocks and survive. That is not until five mana that that can happen. So it really, he took something

that was an interesting process, but made it better. And there's a lot of things he did, figuring out how to use morph to help with multicolor, how to better use, how to better create multicolor? We had done shards of a Lara with the arcs Or shards, but we hadn't quite figured out how to make it work. It had a lot of man issues I think Eric did it correctly in concert. Okay, so much so the concert. Okay has been the model for a lot of for all our Whenever we've done a three color set, we looked to the cons as the model. Anyway, a lot of what I want to say is there's a lot of structure that got set up as Eric

got in charge of the later part of design of what we call development of time. He put a lot of processes in place and there's a lot of, even though Eric has not, Eric has left Wizards, he retired, there's a lot of the stuff that he introduced that is really ingrained into how the game is made. And so it's a big part of how the game is structured. The other important thing is that that pre-design thing that I did with Ethan and Sean, I dubbed it exploratory design.

That before we start in design, we're going to sort of look and see. And it was so valuable, it was so useful, we just made it part of the process. That exploratory design, that's where exploratory design came from. Me trying to give the two of them, Ethan and Sean, some training and I wanted to work in a space

where we weren't rushed. So we were doing it before the design even began, but the exploration that we did was so valuable that it just became part of the process. Also, the big thing by the way of Khazat-Tarqir, we visit Tarqir, which is Sarkin Vol's's home plane Sarc an Vol loves dragons, but it turns out on his world the dragons had died off and the story core of it was there was a giant fight between Ugin and Nicol Bolas in the past Nicol Bolas kills Ugin and Ugin's death is what sort of dooms the dragons on Tarkir So Sarc an Vol goes back in fate reforged and ends up saving Ugin. In such a way that even Nicobles doesn't realize he didn't kill him. And it takes a while for him

to heal, like thousands of years to heal. But because he's not dead, the dragon storms continue exist and the dragons exist. And then the idea was cons, we ended up making it a wedge set. The first time we had done a three color wedge, meaning a color and it's two enemies. So we had done an arc slash shard set, but we had never done a wedge set. And so that was the first time we did that.

And then originally the plan was for the last set to be an enemy color set, the dragons are here, where the dragons are the leaders, not the cons, but the dragons. But Eric rightly pointed out that when you draft wedge, the correct way to draft wedge is draft enemy because you're open to two options. And so if we had the last that be drafting enemy it would be too similar to the first set so we Hold it. Let me take it right So we change it to ally although one of the ongoing things is we have a lot more ally sets than enemy set so

But we needed it to work in this context. So anyway we needed it to work in this context. So anyway, Concentrate here's a good example of, I think we were getting very inventive in how we were doing our structures. But the one core problem, which never went away, the problem I explained in a previous podcast is, we would make a fall set that would usually be a large set. We make a winter set that would usually be a small set.

And then we make a spring set that sometimes would be a small set and sometimes would be a large set. And the third set, when it was a large set, we would redo, we'd change over the mechanics, right? Dragons of Tarkir had no overlapping mechanics other than Lorf, I guess, with Khans of Tarkir had no overlapping mechanics other than Morph I guess with Kahn's of Tarkir although we did an interesting thing where half the mechanics overlap with Fate Reforged and then half of Dragon, we introduced some of the mechanics that would show up in Dragon's

of Tarkir in Fate Reforged which by the way design wise proved to be very challenging but we did solve it but it was a very challenging set. Ken Nagel handed it off to Dave Humphries. And we used hybrid in interesting ways. Anyway, the thing that ended up playing out there was that the audience liked the cons version better than the dragons version. We finally made a dragon set with Dragon in the name. There's about Dragons that actually paid off on Dragons.

It took us three times to do that, but we finally did. And there definitely was a really casual audience that liked the Dragon deck. My son has a friend who loves Dragons. That's like his favorite set of all time. So there was an audience for Dragon's Dark here, but it wasn't as big. And so, um,

so one of the challenges we were coming at is the, the small sets not only didn't sell equally to what the larger set did proportionally. I understand they have less cards in them, but if you equal them, how many cards, um, it just was always a downward trend that each set in the block would do worse than the one before. And we, we had a time dubbed it a third block problem, meaning we had lots and lots of problems with what to do with the third set in a block. So what we tried, the next batch is we moved from, oh, another thing we decided to do is we

decided to get rid of the core set. Oh, the one thing I didn't mention, I should mention this, around Zendikar, I guess this is important, I I should mention this around Zendikar, I guess this important I didn't mention around Zendikar, Aaron came up with the idea of Magic 2020, which was a core set leaning in on resonance and having new content. So the core set for the first time had brand new cards and we would bring a mechanic into it. So we were doing different things with the core set. The problem we ran into is that when we first did it, we brought us some interest in the Core Set, but over time it petered out. Core Sets are a tricky thing. We want an intro product for the beginners, but we need a product that will sell because it needs

to stay on the shelves. And so Core Sets sort of, they'd sell out of the gate but then they wouldn't sell well past that and then they wouldn't stick around anyway it was corsets have been a challenge so we've been back and forth on trying to figure out how to make corsets work but corsets went away and we moved to what we call the 2 in 2 model which is kind of mimicking what I had done in Shadowmore which is what if every year was four sets what and each set was one large one small exactly what we did in Shadowmore the idea was that Shadowmore was this big thing where we had done Lorwin and then Shadowmore sold pretty close to Lorwin I don't

remember the exact numbers but the idea of introducing a brand new letter set with a new theme did a lot to compel people. Even though Shadowmore technically didn't leave the plane, the plane got so overridden that it felt like it was a new place. So anyway, we get to Shadow's, not Shadow's, sorry, first was Battle for Zendikar. So Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch, and then we have Shadows over Innestrad and Eldritchmoon. Okay, so another thing that was going on, a lot of moving pieces, was we were trying to restructure the story a little bit and we really, ever since the Weatherlight saga,

our stories have been a lot of chopped up. Not that there weren't continuing elements to them, but mostly they were like year by year stories with, We'd leave threads that would continue, but we decided what if we did another, what if we did another something like Weatherlight where there's a story that truly lasted for many years. And so we began what we called, I don't know what we call it, I mean it was the introduction of the Gatewatch. The idea of the Gatewatch was what if we had a bunch of planeswalkers that said, hey, you know what, we have a responsibility that being a planeswalker is more than just running around.

We are the people that can watch out for the universe, for the multiverse. We had right before we did Battle for Zendmikar we did a set called Magic Origins which was the last of our core sets and in it we did legendary creatures of the of the five planeswalkers that would the initial members of the Gatewatch that would then turn into the it showed their spark and then they would become planeswalkers. I'm very, very popular. So it was Jace, let's see, Jace, or sorry, Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nissa. Those were our initial people. So, battle for Zendikar was we went back to Zendikar.

We had ended on a cliffhanger, the Waisel of Eldrazi, the Eldrazi are there, so we went back and made it this big, between the Eldrazi and all the spawn of the audrazi and the natives of of them um basically the audrazi are kind of winning uh the gatewatch show up uh and lilyana doesn't show up till shadows of indertron but the other four um they each are there for different reasons they band together and by banding together they're able to stop the Eldrazi threat in the second, in the small set called oath of the gate watch in which we introduced the gate watch.

And then they traveled to shadows over in their stride because it turns out one of the Eldrazi is missing. Although that's not, I guess they don't know that when they go. Anyway, I forget it. Jace ends up going there solving a mystery. He pulls the rest of the team there. Liliana joins them. So both Battle for Zendikar and Shadows of Innistrad

was us returning to worlds we've been to before. But the philosophy at the time was, okay, let's shake things up. We're going back to a world you know, but let's do something fundamentally different. So we go back to Zendikar and they're fighting a giant battle with the audrazi. We go back to Innistrad There's a mystery and something so we did What's called cosmic horror where there's things that are weird stuff going on. There's ancient evils and things are mutating and

It turns out Emrakul that one of the audrazi ended up going there. It was interesting by the way when we planned it turns out Emmerkull, one of the Eldrazi ended up going there. It was interesting by the way, when we planned it all out, each of those was going to be their own year, a full year block, three sets. And when we condensed it down, I think the story, I think of Eldrazi, the Eldrazi seemed like it came a little too fast. I think the idea was you would be done with the Eldrazi, you'd have two sets and it's not to the third set that you realize that it's emirical would have been a little bit more time than it ended up being.

But anyway, so we started getting the air of the two into the two small set, the two sets, the large small set. I don't know, there's, there's things. I mean, obviously I think it was better than the three set structure. And at least each of the mini blocks kind of was a starting over. And the large sets kind of functioned. Like what we found was Shadow of Inderstrad functioned a lot like a fall large set would rather than, you know. And the fact that it was brand new place and like it was the start of its own

block really made it feel a bit different. Now there's some flaws in that year. The Battle for Zemmikar, I'm not really happy with the finished product and a lot of that is on me. It's on the design. I think the philosophy at the time was we were trying to really do something different so that the return didn't feel like Just the same thing from the first time you were there

I think we later would regret that that like part of what returning is is giving people a good amount of what they expect and Battle for Zendikar was really not Zendikar I mean a little bit landfall is There was, you know, we did have some land mechanics. Ally showed up and it wasn't that we ignored it being Zendikar, but I don't know. The Eldrazi are a good example, by the way, of we made this villain that are really cool story villains and I think the giant Eldrazi are awesome. And Raizo Eldrazi, I think was fine.

The Eldrazi and Riso Drozzi. The problem was when we had to space it out and make like a whole, the Drozzi did not really lend themselves well to making a whole army. And we made a lot of mistakes, like Devoid's a good example where we made them colorless because it was one of the defining qualities,

but then they ended up making a mechanic. We just thought it'd be colorless. like we didn't think it would be named but then once you named it was weird as a mechanic they didn't kind of do anything and Like in retrospect I wish to avoid had been if we needed to name it made it like a super type rather than a mechanic Anyway, uh, so both of us. I mean, I think we were really sort of revamping. Oh, real quickly for content arc here. I live constant arc here handing off to Eric. Like I said, favorite forge was Ken Nagel handing off to Dave Humphreys and then And then, um, Dragons of Turk here was Mark Gottlieb. Who did Mark Gottlieb hand off to?

Um, I'm blanking who he handed off to. Was it... I'm not sure. I apologize. Um, I'm in charge of the beginning half of the thing, so that's stuff I have hard cold in my head, but uh, who the handoffs were. It wasn't my handoff too. Um, was it Adam Prozac? I'm trying to think who did it? Um anyway, I apologize um

And then when we got into battle for Zendikar battle for Zendikar was another one where I handed off to Eric Once again the finished product. I have a lot of issues with not Eric's fault I think Eric did a good job of Was a really hard thing to try to do trying to take a villain that's like good job of what was a really hard thing to try to do. Trying to take a villain that's like we're inscrutable and hard to understand and just making sort of a flushing out a whole set with that is tricky. And then oath of the Gatewatch was Ethan Fleischer. Here's my problem. I don't know when I hand off a set. I know who I handed off to but when somebody else handing off a set. Eric started I know that Eric during this time period during the period where we were doing two sets a year what Eric and I would

do was I would often co-lead the design with somebody, because we were introducing a lot of new people, and then Eric would co-lead the development with people, meaning we would do the start thing and then handle the reins like half the way through. Okay, so then we get into Kaladesh. So, okay, so once again, we were trying to tell a story. So we began what we call the bolus arc. We introduced the gate watch.

Basically they deal with the Eldrazi threat, two of which are on Zendikar, one of which is on Inishrod. Oh, and then, yeah, and then we start up a larger story. The idea was, this is, Doug Beyer came up with this idea of let's build to this giant war between Bolas and all the, or almost all the planeswalkers, a giant planeswalker war, which he had dubbed War of the Spark, which ended up being the name. And so a lot of what we need to do is figure out, okay, what worlds do we want to go to and sort of work toward that. So the things leading into the arc is we go to, basically it was a three year arc.

First year we go to Kaladesh and Amonkhet, which I'll talk about those in a second. Then the second year we go to Ixalan and Dominaria. And the third year we're on Ravnica the whole year, doing guild sets and then ending up with the giant war on Ravnica. We decided that Ravnica was really, that Ravnica was like, we needed a place of consequence.

And so people cared about Ravnica, Ravnica is very popular. So the idea that that is, that that's where Bolas made his play. So it ended up, originally we were gonna do Amonkhet and then Kaladesh, and we ended up swapping those. So the way we did it is, for Kaladesh, I worked with Sean Main, we co-led that.

And then for Ametket, I co-led with Ethan. And then for Ixalan, I co-led with Ken. The reason that I did the co-lead with them is we were doing brand new worlds. New worlds are the trickiest thing. And I wanted to train each of them in doing new worlds. And then interestingly, those were the three, by the time we got to Dominaria, we changed over the system again. But we did have two years, so Zencar, Indistrad, or two and a half years, Caladash, Amonkhet, and Ixalan of the two and two model. Caladash, like I said, that we, one of the things that happened during this, oh, another

important point to this part is we were, we were trying a bunch of things. We were doing more magic and doing more large sets and like we were changing the way by which we were making things and that would lead Eric to make a pretty a bold proposal which was instead of having the design process be two things it was design and development he suggested we move to three two things, it was design and development. He suggested we move to three. Exploratory design was still there, so you can count it as four if you want to count exploratory design. But the idea was rather than design and development, we would have exploratory design, then vision design, set design, and play design. And the idea was that the early part of the vision would be shorter. And part of that was, well, okay, I'll get to that in a second.

Real quickly, let me just finish up before I, I'm getting to Dominaria. Before I get to Dominaria, the Kaladesh and Amonkhet and Ixalan, we were also experimenting with New World Order. We were trying to simplify things. I think, especially Ixalan suffered from us oversimplifying a little bit. We realized that we were, like Ixalan didn't do really well

and part of the reason is, we just made a lot of choices in the design that I think hamstring things down the road. So anyway, I think Kaladesh and Amonkent went fine and there was a lot of fun mechanics there. We introduced some cool things, but a lot of I believe those two years was us finding our footing and realizing

that what we really wanted was not large, small, large, small. And in Ixalan, I think we also made some missteps in sort of, we scaled back a little too much of complexity and so a lot of those lessons, so the really important part of these two year period of time is we made a giant switch, a giant switch in how we made magic. And the idea essentially was, like I said, we moved over

from design and development to vision design, set design, and play design. Part of it was because we were going to do a lot. So the idea was instead of doing large, small, large, small, what if we did large, large, large and brought the core set back? The idea is what if we stopped doing small sets? That a lot of the data we had was whenever we stayed on the same world and especially

whenever we did small sets, like it just, it was hard for us. Like we just did big, people were more excited when there were larger sets that were brand new, that were new places and new mechanics. And so we're like, okay, maybe the problem, like we kept trying to solve the block. And eventually what we said is, maybe the problem is the block.

And so we moved to a system where we did away with blocks. And we did this mid-Bolus arc too. We were in the middle of our large story, but Dominaria was originally supposed to have, Dominaria is with soup and salad. We were supposed to have a large set and then a small set. We ended up audible and we'd actually done some work on salad.

We even made a mechanic that would later morph into the ring and Lord of the Rings I called leader. Um but anyway, so We Dominarian Like we changed a whole bunch of things at once we change from large small large small to large large core we change from design development to Vision design set design and play design to vision design, set design, and play design.

Another important thing is, these all sort of came together. In order to make three sets a year where we were doing brand new things, I just needed a lot of focus. And the idea was, vision design is mostly the beginning part of design where we figure out what's going on, we figure out the mechanics, we figure out the structure. let's just make the vision design is mostly the beginning part of design where like we figure out what's going on,

we figure out the mechanics, we figure out the structure. And the idea was that let's concentrate and kind of what the side note of it was, I kept trying to train other people to do a lot of the early stuff and it just was hard to find a lot of people. And so we condensed down the amount of time to do a lot of the early stuff and it just was hard to find a lot of people and so we condensed down the amount of time and gave set design more time like

Really focus the idea of let's spend the time figuring out where the set is going make that part of the process And then how to build it like the idea was hey vision design make the blueprints Your plan is your job is not building the building. Your plan is, is the blueprint. What is it? The structure. And so anyway, we changed things around, part of which to match the people, part of which to match a process by which we think we could do it better. And so Dominaria was the beginning of, of that.

And then Dominaria, right after dominaria was core, I forget what, 2020 something, I don't remember that. But it was a core set. Core sets came back. And we experimented with sort of making them a little less basic and a little more like, a little bit more like a normal magic set, meaning we introduced some things, introduced mechanics. And make it a little bit more like a normal Magic set, meaning we introduce some things, introduce mechanics,

and make it a little bit more, a little less like the Core Sets of Old and a little more closer to a normal Magic expansion, a normal Premier set. Not exactly still Core Set, but it was a little, it had a little more complexity built into it. And then so Dominaria was the start of that. Dominaria itself was an interesting case as well, because we had decided when we were telling the Bolas story, Bolas is from Dominaria. That's where he's from originally. And we really thought it'd be like, we hadn't been back to Dominaria since Time Spiral. And we really wanted to sort of revisit our roots. I think it was on our anniversary.

I think it was our 20th anniversary. That just going back to Dominaria felt like a cool thing to do. The challenge was we had fundamentally changed how we treated planes since we'd been on Dominaria. Dominaria was sort of like, hey, we want to do this thing. We'll go to this part of the plane. We want to do this thing. We'll go to this part of the plane. Want to do this?

Like, so we kept visiting different continents. We were at Teresier. We were on Jamura. We were on Teria. Like, we were, we kept, Sarpedia. Like, we kept going to different places to tell different stories. But the world was very, one of the things we had learned after being in Dominaria was there's a lot

of value of having a world really defined by what its mechanical identity is. And Dominaria had been everything. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. Ended up coming up with history as a theme. And through that we introduced sagas. Dominaria did a lot of good work and really was a fun revisit and really brought Dominaria back into our toolbox of planes, which was cool. But anyway, I think today's, so cons through Dominaria, was a time of flux, a time of change.

I think we were constantly trying to sort of reinvent the wheel and a lot of them after mine between the structure Eric Lauer had a lot to do with it. I introduced him today. I think a lot of this time period was Eric. Eric was very, very good at introducing ideas that seemed obvious, but no one introduced them before. Eric is the one that, for example, said, hey, instead of drafting back in the block days where we had large, small, small,

the way we used to draft was, draft a large set, then draft a small set, and so it would be large, large, large, large, large, large, first small, and then large, first small, second small. And it made it so hard to develop the later sets because they happened so later in draft that the themes had to be so loud. And Eric was the one that said, could we just draft backwards? How about we, how about the

newest set is the first thing you draft. And that really made things a lot easier and helped really and it just met just Eric going, Hey, wouldn't this make sense? And that's going, yeah, that makes total sense. And so, um, a lot of, and this change wasn't Eric alone. There were a lot of people involved in the change, but Eric was definitely one of the biggest stakeholders in sort of making the change. And the cool thing about it was, it is very hard to abandon something that you've done for a long time.

Like magic from when I, I mean, I got a magic, we were doing alliances. So shortly after I got there we started doing Block block models properly, I guess alliances was sort of part ice age, but only after the fact So most of my time at Wizards had been making block models right making blocks And I was definitely one of the people that did lots and lots and lots of experimenting trying to coo We solve the block and the ultimate solution of the solution of the block is to stop doing the block was a hard one route I mean it once we did it and

executed on it and saw all the data like the data is so strong I know there are people out there they're like I love blocks return to blocks and the answer is man the data says players prefer not blocks the all the dynamics we had before where like the fall set just was always the best selling set of the year is not true anymore. Each set is sort of treated as its own thing and people get excited or not excited based on what that set is. And the data actually really shows that people like having lots of variety and different things going on.

And yes, when you get to a plane that you really love, you go, Oh, it would be nice if we were here a second time. But one of the things that's important is we don't know when and where like, it's very easy after the fact to go, how did you not know this would be successful? But it is, it is not that easy to know that we want every set to be exceptional and every set we think has potential. And then if we have flaws, it comes out, you know, when the audience sees them, we learn things and there's things we didn't necessarily know but anyway so today was a time of flux um uh so concept here through dominaria uh but anyway guys that is the story for today uh but i'm now at work so we all know that means uh instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic so i'll see you all next time bye bye