Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1204: Apocalypse

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of Apocalypse, another set from the Invasion block.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means It's time for their drive to work Okay, so I recently did a podcast about plane shift Because I realized somebody pointed out my blog that I had done a podcast on invasion Because I had Bill Rose on who was the lead designer of Invasion and we had talked all about it but I had not done the two sets that came after it in the block Plane Shift and Apocalypse and one of my goals is I would like to have a podcast for every single set made or expansion and I've done a lot of them but I've not yet done all of them so I'm slowly getting through to do all of them. So as a companion, a podcast to Plane Shift,

I'm doing one today on Apocalypse. So Apocalypse has a pretty important place in my heart. So let's go back a little bit and talk about the making of Invasion and how we got to Apocalypse. So for those that don't know, Invasion, so Bill Rose becomes head designer during the previous block, but the first block that he had sort of full control over is Invasion. And Bill's idea is that he wants to start adding themes into blocks.

The blocks, like before that, the blocks were about two mechanics. And now it's like, okay, what if the blocks were about something? I mean, we realize Magic is far enough into his life here. Invasion came out in 2000, so we're talking seven years into Magic. Magic came out originally in 93. And so the idea is, okay, let's have blocks mean something. And Bill decided that the best theme to start with was multicolor. Multicolor had been introduced in Legends and had shown up in different amounts since then. So Bill's idea was let's not do multicolor for a little while, build up some demand for it, and then just blow it out in a set.

So the original idea when we were first doing Invasion was it would do all the colors. Now, as I explained in my previous, the Plane Ship podcast, back in the day, we did not treat the colors equally. That we treated ally colors better than we treated enemy colors. We made more cards that were ally colors, and in general the ally colors were made stronger than the enemy colors. Just in this idea that the way we like one of the ideas is how we show allies is it's

stronger the connections between allies that are stronger than the connections between enemies. We later came to realize that that was that was not great like magic should have as much flexibility as possible why why penalize people for playing enemy colors. And so we moved away from that. But really, that was not until Ravnica. Not until, so Ravnica was the first set after I became head designer. And that was the beginning of sort of block planning.

But, interesting, invasion block really was the first kind of block planning. But we kind of backed into it, and that's the interesting story. So we're working on invasion and the idea I think we had originally was the set would be like three quarters ally and one quarter enemy. So the idea was there'd be less enemy, it'd be more keeping in line with how we thought of ally and enemy. But the idea was invasion would have enemy things. And then it dawned on me,

and interestingly it dawned on Henry Stern. So Henry Stern and I each went to Bill and pitched the exact same idea. What I said to Bill is, hey, the way that blocks used to work is the first set would just do stuff and make two main mechanics, two named mechanics, and the first set would just do stuff and make two main mechanics, two named mechanics, and the future sets would just expand upon those and do their

own versions of stuff. But I was sort of like, well, what if, look, we have a lot of cool enemy things, what if we just save the enemy stuff? What if the last set, and basically a large set back in the day was about twice the size of a small set So if we did a large set of ally a small set of ally and then an enemy set That's a small set of enemy. It was about one-fourth of the block, which is what we were planning to do anyway And so I pitched this idea Henry also independent to me pitch the idea and Bill said okay, that's not that sounds cool The interesting thing about it was at the time one of the challenge of blocks that

blocks always had is what we call the third set problem. So we do the first set, yay first set, new theme, people are very excited. We do the first small set, people are a little less excited but we're doing twists on it and doing something. And normally it was the third set that people just had grown tired of the theme by the third set and they're like, hell, you know, and so we were always trying to find ways to like, how do we make the third set a little more exciting? And so apocalypse was the first set that said, well, what if we just save something? What if we do, it's not more of the same. What if we just have something missing and we deliver on it in the third set?

And the success of apocalypse, apocalypse was one of the few sets where the third set sold better than the second set. That had never happened. I believe that's my knowledge. I mean, I'm trying to remember early days, but I don't think that it happened. I think the way it would work is we do a main set.

Let's say it sold 100%. We then do the first small set, it would sell pretty close to 80% of the large set. And then we do a second small set, it would sell about 60% of the first set. There just was a decline that, and when we did Apocalypse, is the first time that the third set

didn't decline from the second set. In fact, I think it went up slightly And we learned a couple things one is we learned the idea that if you save something you could you can build something in the third set although that proved to be The third set prop didn't actually go away with this helps with the third set didn't make the problem go away completely The other issue is I think what we realized was, there was a pent up demand for enemy color things. Why?

Because we just hadn't made a lot. Hey, Legends came out and Legends had no enemy color stuff in it. The two color were ally. The three color were arc slash shard, meaning it was a color and it's two allies The dark which was the next set did have a couple of enemy cards in like two I think So we occasionally did enemy it wasn't that they didn't exist it but they were there weren't a lot of them

I mean there were a very small number of them So the idea of doing all enemy we really were doing something that there was a huge void to be filled There were not a lot of enemy color cards. A really small number. And me seeing how that played out really inspired me. When I sort of took over as head designer and I started doing block planning it was very much influenced by that, by what had happened with invasion. I'm like I like what happened, what if what happened to invasion happened all the time? What if that was the default? So anyway, apocalypse was pretty important in that regard

in that it really was the precursor of block planning. Okay, so apocalypse was codenamed Shanghai. As I pointed out all the cars in this set had names that were Asian cities. Interestingly now, many years later, we are doing in our Elphavet naming system, we're doing cities of the world. So we are kind of coming back around. We did cities early on.

The set had 143 cards, 55 commons, 44 uncommons, 44 rares. Mythic Rare was not a thing yet. That 143 was the size of small sets for quite a while. So the design team was led by Paul Peterson, who has gone off and done a lot of other game design. You might see him in the store. He is a prolific game designer. So the design team was him, Randy Bueller,

Charlie Catino, Taywin Woodruff, and me. And then the development team was him, Randy Bueller, Charlie Coutinho, Taewyn Woodruff, and me. And then the development team was led by Mike Elliott, was Randy and Charlie, Mike Donay, and Robert Cucera. So all people of, nobody of the me, nobody that is still here. I understand I have to say that back. Charlie doesn't work on magic anymore. Charlie Coutinho oversees our duel master's game.

Okay, so as I explained in my Plainship podcast, the way the small sets tended to work is the first set would introduce mechanics, and then the small set would do rifts on those mechanics. So there were a couple things introduced. The two big mechanics in Invasion wereer and domain although domain went unnamed Kicker was paying extra cost and kickers insidious now. Hopefully you've heard a kicker One of the reasons so this is the first invasion was the first that kicker appeared in

It's something that Bill Rose came up with One of the reasons we liked it is you could do off color kicker, which worked well in making multicolor cards. And then Domain was an unnamed mechanic that scaled based on how many different basic land types you had. So this set, oh, and the one other thing, oh, one other thing I introduced. So Invasion introduced split cards. I've told this story infinite times, but whenever I do a podcast, I don't want to not tell a story just because I've told it before.

So I will do an abbreviate. I did a whole podcast on split cards. The short version of this is I made Unglued. We did market research. The number one card or cards, whatever you want to say, of Unglued was a card called BFM, left side and right side. They were two cards.

It was so big, a 99.99 creature, that you needed to have both cards in your hand and cast them at the same time. They cost 15 black mana for a 99.99, the largest magic creature we've ever seen, even today, the largest creature. BFM was the most popular card. And it came from us really messing

around with printing, right? A card so big it was on two cards. So I said, okay, well if a card so big it was on two cards, people would like, how about a card so small that two cards fit on a single card? So the inspiration for Split Cards was what if one card had two cards on it? And if you turn a Magic card sideways, you can fit two that look pretty similar to a Magic card, they're slightly wider, but um and so the idea was what if we did that so I made a cycle of ally color cards So they were gold they were gold cards. I mean they were split cards in that they were two separate spells, but they were an ally colors and Unglue I made them for unglued to that set got put in the hey, hey, that's never to get made

So when we were making invasion I went to bill and I said hey I think this is a really cool mechanic it fits into our multicolor theme we should make it bill liked it put it in the set the team the design team member was me Bill and Mike Elliott Mike did not like them I thought they were dumb and Mike said we should not put them in the set but I liked them Bill liked them and that was two-thirds of the design team plus Bill was leading the design team so we put him in. When the set went to development I think Richard Garfield who liked who wasn't designing magic at the time he was off making other card games and other games for Wizards he thought they were cool

but other than Richard, nobody liked them. Brand team didn't like them, the rest of R&D didn't like them, customer service, nobody liked them. I mean there was a point literally in the building where it was me, Bill, and Richard, the three people that liked them. And the very first meeting of development, Henry Stern, who led the development team said, okay, can we just kill these? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, Henry, we gotta let these play with them before we get rid of them. You know, maybe they're really fun. I knew they were.

So, Henry agreed we would play with them. And then as we played with them, they were fun. It's fun to have a choice between two card effects. It was something that we really didn't do. Most of the time when you had a choice, it was something like charms where the cost is always the same, but you choose what effect. But split cards had two different costs, so you could do two different effects and you could make the effect match whatever size you wanted because you had a mana cost for it. So anyway, we put them in

invasion and they were, they ended up being a major hit. Bill and I managed to keep them in the set. We even managed to keep them in the way that I had designed them, which is they're two little mini cards. There are other ways you could have done that weren't quite as pretty. But anyway, split cards came out. So when it was time for Apocalypse, we were like, of course, we need to do enemy color split cards, right? We did the ally ones. We only did five of them in Invasion, we only did five of them in Apocalypse, but they were... Oh, the other story that was really funny about invasion was one of the test sheets, someone took a picture at the printing plant or something.

One of the sheets, there was a picture online. And they literally, the uncommon sheet had the split cards on it. And people could see the split cards, but they didn't believe we were printing that. So they're like, oh, this isn't a final sheet. That slot's gonna be one of two cards, and they weren't sure yet, so they put that there to represent. It's one of two cards So anyway people think when they saw it with their own eyes They didn't believe what it was so it did come out people really liked them so we did more so we did some enemy color ones

And I think the most powerful split card from invasion block was actually in Apocalypse it was the red and blue one called fire and ice So the way it worked was the two names had an implied and so one was called fire One was called ice fire cost one in a red and it did you could divide your damage any way you wanted? And then ice cost one in a blue and then you can tap target permanent and draw a card And that was a very powerful car that car saw a lot of play Okay Now we get into kicker

So the way kicker worked, I mean we didn't we did normal kicker Plane-shift mess around with alternate cost kicker. So the one thing I was interested in, so Mike and I had the same idea, slightly different. So the idea was could you have a card, a creature that's in one color and then you could kick it, it had two different kick costs. Instead of one kicker cost it had two kicker costs and you could pay one of the kicker costs or both of the kicker costs. And you could pay one of the kicker costs or both of the kicker costs. It was up to you.

So Mike made what he called the Battle Mages, and they were in Plane Shift. And the Battle Mages basically had two, enter the battlefield effects sort of, you can think of them as kind of like spells, which is, oh, when I cast this creature, I can have these additional spells come with the creature. I had a different take on it, what we ended up calling the volvers.

So the idea of the vulver for me was I didn't want to generate effects I wanted to change what the creature was. The idea was what if if you paid the cost the creature got bigger you put plus one plus one counters on the creature and it would gain abilities. So the idea is, so let me use Necrovolver as my example. So I would have a black creature and then you could cast it, you could have a green kicker and a white kicker, black's enemies. And then if you did that, it would get bigger and depending on whether you play green or

white you get a different ability. So the challenge of this was how how do I know what I cast? So the idea for all of the Volvers and the Battle Mages is they cost two generic mana and one colored mana, and they were two two creatures. And the idea was, well I get bigger if I cast green mana and I get bigger if I cast white mana. So the way it works is, if you cast the green kicker You would get trample and if you cast the white one you would get an early version of lifelink it lifelink didn't exist yet

But written out um and so the idea was you could get either, but let's say I only kicked it once How would I know? Whether I did the green one or the white one? And so the solution was we had different numbers of plus one plus one counters. So for example the way it worked is neck revolver was two and a black for a two two creature, but then if you see if you cast one in a green it got two plus one plus one counters and trample and if you cast just a single white kick, it got two plus one plus one counters and trample. And if you cast just a single white kicker, it got one plus one plus one counter. I'm going to say lifelink, just be

aware it was written out lifelink. So very close to lifelink. I'm just going to say lifelink from now on. Okay. So the cool thing about this is I had a couple of different options. If I spent two in the black, I got a two, two vanilla creature. If I spent two block and a white, so four mana, but one of which is white, I now have a three, three creature if I spent two black and a white so four mana But one of which is white. I now have a 3 3 creature with lifelink if I cast 3 black green I now have a 4 4 creature with trample or If I cast 3 black green white I now have a 6 6 creature 6 6 5

sorry a 5 5 creature with trample and lifelink. And so that, the idea was because you got a different number of plus 1 plus 1 counters, you could look at the creature and say, oh, well, a 3-3 creature has lifelink, a 4-4 creature has trample, a 5-5 creature has trample and lifelink. So we ended up putting these, I think we called the, yeah we put these in the final set. And we ended up calling them Volvers. So this was sort of, once again, we evolved Kicker. A lot of what we did in Apocalypse

was mirrored what we did in Plane Shift. So Plane Shift was about ally creatures, but then started tapping into three color, casting arc slash shards a colorant to allies. So what we did in Apocalypse is the same thing but went to wedge. So the idea is you can cast creatures. There were some spells for example that were in three colors and in when you drafted you had the opportunity to draft there.

Now I will say the way you drafted was you drafted Invasion, then Plane Shift, then Apocalypse. So a lot of what happened was you had the ability to play into three colors and you could draft such that you could pick up the enemy color stuff in the third pack. So it had an interesting draft environment. Complex but interesting. And then so we did more kicker I think we did a little bit of domain we didn't do a lot with domain if I remember correctly. The one thing we did do though in the set is we did five vertical cycles. So a vertical cycle is something that appears that common uncommon and now rare mythic rare at the time rare because mythic rare wasn't a thing. So what we did is we put

an ability in each of the five colors and then made a vertical cycle out of it. White had what we call flag bearers which was a creature type. Flag bearers had a special ability that if you had to target a creature and there was a flag bearer on the battlefield on your opponent's side, you must target the flag bearer. It took all, anything that targeted one thing must target it Then we had the whirlpool All these by the way were not actually named mechanics. These were nicknames

Some of them had them in the name So whirlpool were creatures that when they enter the battlefield you could choose them number of cards and shuffle them into your library And then draw that many cards. Black had an ability called Siphon where when enter the battlefield you would pay some amount of life and draw some amount of cards. I think it went one, two, four is what it did but the idea is the common entered and you paid one life and drew one card. This was an enter the battlefield effect or an enters effect now. Red has something called Bloodfire which allowed you to pay a red mana and sack the creature to deal some amount of damage.

And the damage got bigger as it went up in rarity. And then in green, we had penumbra creatures. Penumbra creatures, when they died, you created a token, a black token, these one on green cards, that was the same size as the creature that died. So you have a 3-3 that dies into a black token 3-3. So the idea is whitehead flag bearers, bluehead whirlpool, blackhead siphon, redhead bloodfire, and greenhead penumbra. We also had the envoys.

So the envoys was a cycle. They cost three generic mana and a colored mana. And when they entered, you revealed cards from the top of your library. You revealed four cards. And then every card that shared a creature type with what the envoy was, you would put in your hand and the rest went to the bottom of your library. The set, by the way, did have a lot of enemy stuff. Something else we had done in Invasion.

At the time, there were only, usually creatures had one creature type. And I was really trying to expand. I thought magic would be better if creatures had more creature types. I really liked creature types. I was very into typal and things like that. So I convinced Bill in Invasion,

we did a cycle of creatures that cost two mana that were multicolored, and then they had one creature type from each color. So the idea was you could be a goblin and a zombie, I think. Anyway, we did another cycle of those here. So like, once again, we did parallels we could where we had done some invasion, we did the enemy color version of it

Also we had something called the apprentices in plane shift Which was a creature that had an activated cost for one colored mana of each of its two Allies in plane shift enemies here in apocalypse and so you can cast it So we had disciples that were the apocalypse version of what Plane Shift had done with the apprentices. We had enchantments called sanctuaries. The idea of a sanctuary was it was in one color. If you had one of the enemy colors, you would get an ability every turn. And if you had both, the ability would get an ability every turn and if you had both the ability would get larger We had the volvers that they talked about We did do wedge spells and like I said there were not a lot of um in fact

This might be this might be We might have done one or two, but like I this is the first time we did a cycle of wedge spells And maybe maybe the first time we did wedge spells This is the first time we did a cycle of wedge spells, and maybe, maybe the first time we did wedge spells. We had not done a lot of three-color magic, and when we did, we tended to do the shards slash arcs. So anyway, Apocalypse had a lot going in it. So I just wanted to talk about a few of the cards from Apocalypse.

There were some memorable things. Oh, before I get to, well, let's start with a cycle. So in Invasion, we introduced the Tap Lands, which were multicolored cards, dual lands that just entered the play tapped. For this set, once again, we still weren't out of the mindset, like once again, we made three quarters ally cards,

one quarter enemy cards in the block. We still weren't treating enemy at the same way. So the dual lands we made were pain lands. The original pain lands had been in Ice Age and we had never made the enemy pain lands. And so we finally made the enemy pain lands here. And the pain lands were at the time were popular cards. But we liked the idea also that they had pain to them.

So it felt like an enemy. Okay so let's talk about some of the cards in the set. There's some fun stories about a few of the cards. First is Spiritmonger. So Spiritmonger was a three black green 6-6. When it hits your opponent it's got a saboteur ability. When it does comment damage to an opponent you put a plus one plus one counter on it. And then it has two abilities. one for black mana It can regenerate and then for green mana it can change its color In color changing you see me a little bit more. This is back in the day We're like our kill spells didn't actually kill black things and stuff like that Okay, so the story of spirit bonger is we did a contest where we asked the players to come up with a card concept where we asked the players to come up with a card concept.

This was before You Make the Card. You Make the Card didn't happen until the website started in 2002. And the idea here was it was kind of You Make the Card concept. And so people sent in ideas for a card. We picked one of them and used that as an art description to make the card. And so it was an early, I mean, I think we had later in once the website starts up, do

you make the card where we let players pick all the component pieces? What color should it be? What car type should it be? What are the abilities and stuff? But this is sort of a precursor to it. Pernicious Deed, one black green for an enchantment x and sac and destroy all artifacts creatures enchantments that cost x or less. This is probably the card that saw the most tournament play out of the set. One of the things is no single color can destroy everything. I mean white

white comes the closest and I guess artifacts creatures enchantments white can destroy But we were trying to make something that at the time That sort of mixed the power like black is really good at killing Creatures and green is good at killing artifacts enchantments. So get them together and now you can kill a whole bunch of stuff Another real popular card was called for XCNian Arena. Oh, so Premonition's Deed, real quickly, was we were kind of playing around in what can we do that's kind of efficient that we wouldn't make as a mono-caller spell. And so we really were looking for

what's a cool thing we could do. And we didn't want to do a card like this in mono-white, so it ended up being a cool black and green card. Phyrexian Arena costs one black black as an enchantment. At the beginning of each life, sorry, at each turn of each upkeep, of your upkeeps, you would lose a life and draw a card. So we had that theme ran a little bit through the set. Like I said, there was a vertical cycle, the idea of paying life for card drawings. It's something black had done a little bit before. We were just leaning into it a little bit as a little mini this that uh oh vindicate talk about cards talk about any color cards that we couldn't do in monocolor

so vindicate is cost one a white black it's a sorcery and it says destroy target permanent so magic had one time before it made the text destroy target permanent it was on a green card in arabian nights that cost six mana um called desert twister the problem is green is not supposed to kill creatures. I mean, you can fight them and stuff. You can use your creatures to destroy their creatures, but you can't just, without any creatures in play, destroy creatures. Green can't do that.

I had a big, big fight during fifth edition. They ended up putting Desert Twister in. I tried to save it. At the time, the color council was me, basically. I was the one that cared about it. And I was constantly fighting about not breaking color by and stuff It ended up going to 50-ish and probably because they didn't have a good other answer to put in But anyway when we got here said okay, you want to have destroyed target permanent great Not every effect can go in monocolor, but they can go in multicolor and so vindicate was a nice clean simple like okay

You want to strike target permanent fine, and it's half the cost of Desert Twister. So Desert Twister was, even though it shouldn't have done it because Green shouldn't have done it, was also overcosted. Another popular creature, Desolation Angel, costs three black black, so five mana, two of which was black, five, four flying creature, it's an angel. When it enters the battlefield, you destroy all land. It's got like Armageddon built into it. But if you pay white white, if you pay the kicker, your land is saved. It only destroys your opponent's land. There was also, this was a mirror, there was a Desolation Giant, it wasn't as popular. It did the same thing in red, except it was a giant rather than an angel.

Chromat. So Chromat was a five color creature. We did not have a lot of those back in the day. White, blue, black, red, green. So it has five mana, one of each color. It's a five, five creature. And then it had five abilities, each in a multi, each was an enemy activation. For white and red, or sorry, white and black, you can destroy any blocking creature, any creature that blocked it. So sort of death touchy. For blue and red, you can destroy any blocking creature, any creature that blocked it.

So sort of death touchy. For blue and red, it could fly. For black and green, it could regenerate. For red and white, you got plus one, plus one until end of turn. And for green and blue, you could put it on the top of your library. So you could sort of save it. If something's going to kill it, you could spend mana to, I mean, it would cost you a draw, but you could save it.

And Chromat was quite popular. Like I said, we just hadn't made a lot of multicolor. I mean, there was Sliver Queen, there was a few, but it wasn't, there weren't very many. It was pretty special. Nowadays, there's more multicolor, five-color, just because we made a lot of cards. Okay, two more cards and we'll be out of time.

Fervent Charge, one white, black, red, Fervent Enchantment, creatures you control when they attack get plus two, plus two. So good example of, look, this is a three color, it's a permanent, it costs three colors. I don't even know if that existed before this set. Definitely was, we really, like I said, one of the reasons that was so popular was there was pent up demand for enemy color and wedge stuff. Finally one of my favorite unnatural selection, an enchantment that costs one and a blue and for one mana you choose a creature type other than wall, explain that in a second, an entire

creature becomes that creature type. Why other than wall? Because at the time walls had rules text baggage on them. Walls by definition could not attack. So if you turned a creature into a wall, definitionally it could not attack. We later would take that away, we'd make the defender ability, granted all walls defender, but at the time legendary was for creatures was a creature type legend which carried the weight of the legendary super types, it was a creature

type, and then walls carried can attack. So when we messed around with changing Legend, which carried the weight of the Legendary Super Types. It was a creature type. And then Walls carried Cannon Attack. So when we messed around with changing Creature Type, we had to be careful about Legends and Walls. They actually had effects when you did that. Right now, when you change, it's a marker, so other things can be affected by it. Other effects could impact it.

But none of our Creature types anyway carry any rules weight anymore Anyway, Apocos was a really big hit and for a while it was the best-selling third set We'd ever had and it really like I said, it made us rethink a lot of things Inspired me the idea of block planning. It really made us We started doing more bigger swings in the third, like more movements in the third set where we make bigger changes. But anyway, it was a fun set. And like I said, a pretty popular set.

And I think it also taught us the importance of the enemy stuff. I think the reason when I did Ravnica that I made it even, that I did Alan enemy at even amounts, part of that was inspired by me seeing the impact of Apocalypse and how popular enemy stuff was? So apocalypse had a huge impact on me as head designer and it definitely influenced what I did

So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed The look at apocalypse. Um, like I said, I will continue my quest to do a podcast on every single Magic expansion ever. I'm getting close. But anyway, I hope you enjoy this, but I'm now at work. So we all know that means 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 all next time.

Bye bye.