Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1205: Innistrad Remastered with JC Tao

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with JC Tao, the lead designer of Innistrad Remastered, to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition. So today we're going to talk all about the design of the Innistrad Remastered. So I went and got the lead designer, JC Tao. Hey JC. Hey Mark, how's it going? Okay, so I want to start by sort of explaining the parameters of what was given to you as a challenge. Like what, what, okay, so here's what I believe that the parameters were and correct me if I'm missing something. You were allowed to go to any set, not just any set, sorry, any card that represented Indus Drodd that took place on Indus Drodd.

So obviously you had access to Indus Drodd, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, Shadows of Indistrad, Eldritch Moon, Indistrad Midnight Hunt, Indistrad Crimson Vow, and any set where like, you know, a core set or modern mafters or anything that just literally took place on Indistrad, right? That was the parameters. That's correct. Okay. And basically, you had to do two things. Let me get the easy one out of the way. And then we're gonna spend most of the time talking about the hard thing. The easy thing is, hey, we wanted to reprint cards we knew people wanted and we want cards that were good for constructed.

And I know you guys made a list and you talked to all the constructed people and you know, you made sure the cards that people wanted were in the product. That's not a very complicated thing. So you did do that. The product has a lot of fun reprints. Yes. The more challenging thing is you had to make a limited environment

and a limited environment which is, here's the cards you got, that's it. You can't make new cards, you can't invent new things. You have to make it out of what exists. So I wanna really delve into that, because that to me, as a designer, that's the major challenge. Like I make sets all the time,

but I get to make up cards, that's a lot easier. So okay, JC. Yeah, I know. That's definitely the case for remastered products like this. On one hand, for Innisfree Remastered, we have some extra leeway in, we're pulling from seven sets plus a number of cards

outside of those sets. But on the other hand, like you said, we can't just make any new cards. So we sort of work in parallel. If I recall, it was mostly me working with a couple of team members who were sort of on loan for me. Like we didn't have standing meetings and we just had a certain period of time

to turn in the product. So on one hand, right, we consulted the format experts on what constructed cars to pull in. Luckily, they were mostly on higher rarity, so that didn't impact limited as much, right? Like, we can do that while figuring out what the limited archetypes would be. And on the other hand, we sort of start delving into which could

this color pairing do, how would that affect other color pairings. One of the unique things about Innistrad is the creature types elements. Every time we went back to Innistrad, it was always very dominantly clear that the playing is about werewolves and vampires and spirits and humans and zombies. So that part was easy right? We already had five of the ten archetypes lined up for us and it came down to what we want to do with other five as well as whether we wanted to put any twists on the existing creature alliances. Well, so just for the audience to be clear, in original Indus Rod, the structure we set up was there were five ally color pairings, white, blue with spirits,

blue, black was zombies, black, red was vampires, red, green was werewolves, and green white was humans. And so every Innistrad set is to a good extent follow that. We definitely bled in some sets later, we add a third color to some of those. So, but that's the structure you're talking about. Right. And you know, every time we return to Innistrad there will be a small twist right like in the late mostly this version the vampire tribe cared a lot about the blood counters and that wasn't introduced until that set so it was a matter of all we're doing vampires for sure but how much do we want to emphasize the blood counters versus the original Innistrad which was about I believe dealing damage to your

opponent. That would put plus one plus one counters on a number of your vampires. Right. Each time we visited, we would take a new take on it. Although we always tried to make them, like we knew that if you're playing a vampire deck, you were going to want to play old vampires. So let's start with vampires. How did you give an identity to the vampires? Well, with modern design sensibilities, we took a look at what we've done with vampires, and I just decided that doing damage and putting counters was not the way we wanted to approach with this time around. It led to often a snowball situation where if you're ahead,

you sort of kept getting ahead. And some of the more modern vampire designs were just led to better game play. So I believe we ended up seeing more of the, if you're discarding cards, the madness payoff cards were a lot more prominent this time around, I think. Sorry, I'll remind

you that it's been a while since I've looked at the file. We've also utilized some blood counters as well. Madness and blood counters both show up in a decent amount and those are both vampire things. That's another challenge i think of having seven sets is there's a lot of mechanics and i think you chose to highlight certain mechanics and then there's some cameo ones that show up in small amounts yeah exactly um moving on the humans are still like you want to go wide with a lot of humans they are pretty resilient and resourceful so when you try to emphasize hey a lot of those humans have values when resilient and resourceful. So when you try to emphasize, hey, a lot of those humans have values

when they enter the battlefield or when they die. So try to play into the Sacrifice theme. A little bit dark, but you know, either thing is drawn. Okay, so it's a lot about making tokens and casting creatures and just making a wide board presence. One of the themes I know we did in early Indistrad is the humans have some synergy with equipment. Did you play around with that at all? making a wide board presence. One of the things I know we did in early in this drive is the humans have some synergy with equipment.

Did you play around with that at all? Yes, yes, we definitely had a number of equipments that show up and some of them do reference humans, right? If you are in the humans tribe, your equipments are gonna be a little bit stronger. There is, yeah, it looks like we brought back Butchers Cleaver. Not one of the most fun guards during this time

alongside Invisible Stalker, but let me see if we have Invisible Stalker in here. I don't. Yeah, well, that's another interesting thing is you could go back and look at all the limited, like how limited played out in each of these different sets to see, oh, how did it play out? Do we like it?

What did we like? And right, you can like a combination. It looks like we removed the invisible stalker so Flutters Kleeber can have his fun moments in the sun. Okay, next, let's get into one of the ones that I think is probably the one people will talk most about, which is werewolves. Because werewolves have some big challenges to them. Yes, that, okay, yeah, now he's coming back to me. Werewolves was the, what we spent the most time on for the crafting of Innisfree remastered. Just because the current werewolf rules, day and night werewolves, did not work with the original werewolves. Or they didn't work well.

Well, yeah, so real quickly so the audience understands, one of the biggest things is with day-night, day-bound, night-bound, if it's night and you play a werewolf, it comes in on the side of the werewolf in day-night. But if you play a werewolf that's not from, that doesn't have day-night, it doesn't. It comes on the normal side because it comes with the front face. And regular listeners at this podcast know it's a pain in my side. I really, really tried to get the werewolves like to errata the old werewolves and everything. And anyway, that didn't happen. But right, there's a real challenge of, hey, these different components don't quite work together. Yeah, in fact, one of the first things that we had a conversation about as soon as I started reading the set was, hey, do we want to use this

opportunity to align the werewolf together mechanically so that we can reprint the product and get players to play with the werewolves the way all of them all at once. That involved a number of people. Ultimately, we decided that that is not the right change for the moment and we end up cutting one of the werewolf groups from the set. And I think we ended up with reprinting the older classic ones just because I think that had both more of a cachet and it brings back the nostalgia of, hey, this is the original Instra, those are the werewolves that you guys haven't seen in the longest time. It also was the lion's share of the werewolves that Midnight Hunt and Crypt of Val had the daybound nightbound werewolves but all the others that's had

the old werewolf. Yeah we had more to pick from that's true. The transforming werewolves from shadows and Eldritch Moon at least worked pretty well with the original OG Instruct werewolves Yeah, the Eldritch Moon werewolves start on the werewolf side and go, I'm not sure how many that you have, but those are also a little bit different, so. Yeah, it was quite tricky. So what is the general strategy of werewolves

from a limited perspective? Well, you could play the regular werewolves. These little flip as soon as a player has passed with no action. And you actually want to play in combination with some of the Outrage Moon werewolves, which when you sync extra excess mana into them, they flip. So if you play the first one and then you play the second one on your next chart, all you do is activate and you flip your second werewolf, the first one will also flip. So in that sense they work pretty well, it doesn't require your

opponent to do anything, you just get to have the best version of both of the werewolves. Right, in general werewolves like having a lot of things to do with their mana so that they get turns they skip and not cast a spell and turn them on to werewolves. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, werewolves have always been kind of mid-rangey just because they sort of, you play them cheaper than they become in bigger things. Yep. Okay, next up we have spirits, white, blue. What's the, how do spirits play out?

Spirits were very straightforward in the original instrument. You know, all you do is play flyers, they all happen to be spirits and then you sort of just fly over your opponent. I think the newer rebates to Innistrad added a lot more interesting twists and complexities to it. So we decided to pull in some of the spirits that were double-sided they can see if I recall them the disturb mechanic right so that you could play more of an interactive game where you are allowed to block and then try to get value you don't have to always be in this racing situation okay and then last we have the zombies in blue black what do you do with the zombies?

Oh, the zombies were very easy if I recall. Most of the time they cared about just having lots and lots of zombies. From that sense, you just really wanted to play with all of them and even once they make additional zombie tokens. I think after humans, zombies were the ones that leaned the most into having tokens. Yeah, the interesting thing about zombies, just from a little tidbit as the original Innistrad, was I was really intrigued by the idea of capturing werewolves as they appear on film and the danger of werewolves, not werewolves, the danger of zombies in movies and stuff, it's not that anyone's zombie is dangerous.

It's not. Most humans can deal with a zombie. It's like, oh, there's waves and waves and waves of zombies, and what makes zombies scary is there's an endless sea of zombies, and so we tried really hard to figure out how to capture that, and in some ways the way Blue Block tends to play out and zombies tend to play out is it's a control deck on some level, and like, yeah, yeah, your win condition is I hit you with a million zombies but it's because I've gained control of the game and then you know my win condition is I can just you know I will build up to zombies over time and then I can just win by having this in lots of zombies attack. On the on the subject of zombies one of the one of the really awesome opportunities I got to do was pull in a future card back into Innistrad Remastered.

Okay. This is the Invasion of Innistrad. It is the battle card that if you manage to flip it, you start creating hordes and hordes of zombies. So that is the card not from Innistrad playing, but we managed to get in here anyways. It helps out if you happen to be playing with any Pet the DeLarion cards. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. Yeah, the other interesting thing about the battle is it's not easy to reprint battles because battles, at least the machine, they were sieges and so they're doubles-faced. And luckily, Innistrad is kind of known for the double-facedness. Wearables are double-faced and there's a lot of other famous.

So you actually had a product that had double-faced. Oh, yeah, it was perfect. One of the things I was excited about was to look at all of the double-faced cards throughout the entire history of Innistrad and figure out which ones made most sense to put into the set. So not only do we have the original Werewolves double-faced cards, where we got to point all the new disturbed cards, the battle and the small as well as a number of other cards. Real quickly

for those uh so invasion industry for those that might not know the card, two black black battle siege flash when this battle enters target creature and opponent controls gets minus 13 minus 13 until end of turn. Once you win the battle, you give it to your opponent, you have to attack it. It has a five, you have to do five damage to it. Then Delusia the Dead is an enchantment. This is what you get when you defeat the battle. When this enchantment enters,

create two two two black zombie creature tokens, two and a black XL tiger card from a graveyard. If it was a creature card, create a two two black zombie creature token. So it makes lots and lots of zombies. Yeah, once you have it flipped, it's just gonna be unstoppable. Okay, so we talked about the five creature types.

So that's the ally, mostly the ally strategies. So let's get into the enemy strategies. Where do you want to start with the enemy? Do you want to just go over it? Yeah, those were a lot trickier, just because sometimes the themes have been consistent throughout the sets and sometimes they have veered sharply from one another. So I'll go with the easy ones first. Red White has always been classically about aggression. So you are

playing a mixture of creatures and all you're trying to do is defeat your opponent before they have a chance to stabilize. And that's sort of been the case on every opportunity of those Innistrad sets. So that one is, we just put in a lot of aggressive cards into those colors and had to be a pretty sort of entry-level feel. What others ones were easy? I think blue-red is another easy one. Innistrad was one of the most prominent spells matters sets that I can recall. All the way back to the maybe famous or infamous Burning Vengeance archetype for limited.

So we made sure to put stock plenty of spells into the set, although unfortunately Burning Vengeance couldn't make it in. We just didn't have enough space for a flashback as its only unique mechanic. So those two were pretty easy. The rest took a little bit of time to sort of figure out where they wanted to land. Black Green had a couple options that were both exciting between Morbid and Illarion and as well as other elements of South Mill. We ended up going with morbid again it was sort of with the original classic and the strut it

worked really well with a lot of the other cards that we had in the set such as white black human sacrifice. So morbid cares about when things die. It's from original. Yes morbid cares about when things die. It's from original. Yes. Sorry Morbid cares about when things die that played well into blacks tendency to sacrifice those things and the Greens tendency to just have large creatures. So you're when you're attacking your opponent sort of have to block They can't just keep on taking the damage Green I believe black, white, once we figure out we want to do more black, white, solidify itself as well. If you have an adjacent color

that's caring about creatures dying, this color combination, this adjacent, should care about allowing you to have ways to sacrifice your creatures for value. And the last one was green blue, which was the trickiest. Green blue is always the trickiest. In any set we've ever made, green blue is the trickiest. It's the hardest of the 10 color combinations. Yeah, it was really hard. You investigate matters was one of the set themes. Unfortunately, it came in sort of at a smaller density than we liked.

There wasn't quite enough support. But luckily, you investigate and clues were so popular that we knew we wanted to include some of them as anyways, the standalones. I believe we ended up going with self-mail for blue-green. That sort of showed up as a main theme of as one of the sets, but also just every set had a very strong number suite of self-mail cards in green-blue.

So it was not hard to actually pull enough enablers and support to reinforce the payoffs from that particular set. Yeah real quickly and this shows off a really interesting thing about trying to remaster sets. So we made investigate in Shadows Over Indistrad because we were doing cosmic horror and a big part of cosmic horror is oh something creepy is going on and we you investigate and there's a mystery. So really once we got to Eldritch Moon, we were doing the horror part of it. So we like investigate really was in one Innistrad set. I mean, there is a smattering of it, I think in Midnight Hunt and Crimson Fowl, but there really wasn't like mostly we're talking

about one of the seven sets had it as a major mechanic and the other six didn't. And so, yeah, it gets hard when you're trying to make a room after set and like, it's very easy if all the sets do the same thing, then that's easy to do. But when like, oh, one set did it, you know, do you have enough cards and can you make it work? Yeah, no, it was a beloved mechanic. We just didn't have enough cards for it. Yeah. And a lot of we've made a lot of other investigate cards, but they're not on Indistrad and you were you were limited to what was on Indistrad. What was on Indistrad? Art creative cards that fit on Indistrad. One of the cards I

was really happy to pull you in another card I was really happy to pull you in was Crusader of Aldrich, right? Clearly, if you hear the name is clearly a card from Innistrad, but it had actually never been printed into any of the Innistrad plays. And it just happened to work really well with the limited set themes. Crusader of Odric is two and a white creature, human soldier, star star. Crusader of Odric's power and toughness are equal to the number of creatures you control. So it plays great in a go wide deck. Yeah, it is fun because in core sets and stuff like modern

master sets that we do like to show lots of different planes. Obviously, you pulled some stuff in from March of the Machine that had a bunch of industry stuff in it, so that's pretty cool. OK, so I'm going to go through. I have a list of all the mechanics that appear in the set at some level or another. Oh, geez. So I'm going to go through, I have a list of all the mechanics that appear in the set at some level or another. So I'm going to go through and hit some ones that you haven't talked about yet, so we will

talk about them. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Escalate. That appeared only in Eldritch Moon. I think you're right. I think you only appeared in the Handhold of cars even within Eldritch Moon. But it was a really fun mechanic. It was a spell, so it allowed you to play really well with all the spell matter scenes that we have going on. And I believe some of the cars were also constructed favorites for his time, maybe even today. So we made sure to put some of those in.

Yeah, so for the audience, Escalade is a mechanic. Goes on spells. It allows you to spend extra mana. It has different modes, and you can spend extra mana to get additional modes, basically. Oh, can we jump ahead and talk about Meld? I don't know if that's on your list. Oh, it's on my list?

Let's talk about Meld. Wait, that is another mechanic that only appeared on a I believe three cards right in three mailed pairs in Eldritch Moon. Yes. Yeah. But and like you said, double face cards are very difficult to find places to reprint, especially mailed cards that have very like strange collation requirements. So when this opportunity came up, I was like, we got to do mailed. And in fact, we put we managed to put all three pairs of mailed cards into the set

with even one of them downshifted in rarity so that you'll have it more often from the people who are into mailing into giant monstrosities. Yeah, we have had mads in other sets but not Indus Drive sets, so there's only three meld pairs that appear on Indus Drive. Okay, here's another one that's interesting. Miracle. This is from Addison Restored. It's a mechanic where if you draw the card it's cheaper the turn you draw it. Ah, that is correct. I am trying to recall which miracle cards we end up putting in the set. Oh, I see at least one.

There's two miracle cards. There's Temporal Mastery and there is Reforge the Soul. Ah, yes. all. Yes, you know as much as people enjoy Miracle and as much as those really awesome moments when it does happen and you're like oh I really need this particular card off the top my deck and that's awesome, it was not the it wasn't always the most fun thing to do in Unlimited where you sort of slow down the game you're always having to remember to check the top of your library, even when you're drawing cards during an off-chart. So we wanted to pay homage to the Miracle Mechanic.

We wanted to put some of those in, but at the same time, we're like, okay, let's not put too much of that into limited at the common level. So that was the compromise we made. Okay, the next one I want to ask about is a mechanic that I know is very hard to balance. So you only put two of them in, is Undying. So it's on Young Wolf and it's on Butcher Ghoul. So Undying is a mechanic. We originally made a mechanic back in Shadowmore called Persist that a creature when it died,

it came back with a minus one, minus one counter. So as long as it didn't have a counter on it, it comes back for the minus one minus one counter and then in Dark Ascension, in fact there's a great story here. I was trying to solve this problem. I was trying to make a fun monster mechanic and I was talking with my wife Laura and I was like I want to do persist but I can't because there's not minus one minus one counters. We have plus one plus one counters and she's like, well, could you use plus one plus one counters like yes. Yes, I could You know dying is tricky they're hard to balance they are You know

As a matter of fact, we might not have put in those undying creatures had we ended up with a different theme for black green You know that we had young wolf and butcher girl one of them is green card one of them is black card they play really well with us with a theme of oh I have a creature I don't mind throwing away on my turn if I attack and the effect of butcher gold also does triple duty is a zombie for the zombie tribe is a if you have any ways to sacrifice it you can sacrifice now two times over for the black and white sacrifice matters that car type so those cars made a lot more sense once we figured out what the set themes were and they're both tiny they're both one one so right yeah the tricky

part was on dying unlimited is if you have a large creature and that scales much differently than if you just have a small creature right Like I'm dying, sort of. You get two large creatures for the value of one and that becomes part of balance. Okay, so here's a fun one. Here is a mechanic that's not from Innistrad. This mechanic never appeared in a set that was based on Innistrad, yet you have one card that has it. Splice onto Arcane.

So this is on Through the Breach, 4 and a red, instant Arcane. You may put a creature card from your hand onto the battlefield. That creature gains pace, sacrifices the creature at the beginning of the next end step, splice into Arcane, 2 red red. As you cast an Arcane spell, you may reveal this card from your hand and pay its splice cost. If you do, add this card's effect to that spell. This is a bizarre thing. How did this card end up in this set? I hope people will like it. It is not, you're right, it is not from Innistrad set.

It is, in fact, it has a mechanic that is completely useless in Innistrad. However, however, we do have a super awesome version of the card with art of Emerald. Yes, yes. It is depicting, we're using that art. That is clearly, if anyone were to see that card, they're clearly going to realize, hey, this is from Innistra. Emmercole is coming through and going to take over the world. And the card itself is just also very exciting to play with. I believe we were at one point, at one point,

sort of shopping for, oh, what awesome red rares can we put into the set and someone's like, oh, this is sort of a joke, what about through the breach with an emerald art? Yes, that sounds awesome, let's do it. Yeah, and that's one of the fun things, I mean, there's a little bit of, you guys got to do a little bit of, could we take an existing card, re-concept it on Indistrad, so you didn't do a lot of that, but a little, you did a little tiny bit of it, so that was fun.

Mm-hmm. So since we don't have too much time left, do you have any of your favorite stories, anything you remember like making this set that we haven't talked about yet? I guess one thing that a lot of people associate with Innistrad are the build-arounds and the combos. I think nowadays we do a lot of that, of course, and people enjoy them. But of people associate with Innistrad are the build arounds and the combos. I think nowadays we do a lot of that of course and people enjoy them.

But back when it was Innistrad that was the first time people were like, oh wow, I can play with Burning Vengeance and all those cards that literally did nothing like Mell Myself or Three that become really strong and Spider Spawning, Sp spawning tire archetype the infamous butchers cleaver the invisible stalker duel so for this time around for industry remastered I really try to put in as much of those build arounds as possible especially at uncommon slots some of them even aggressively down shifted so that players can get a lot more replayability every time they play the set. Yeah.

So, Spider Spawning by the way, real quickly. Four and a green, Sorcery, create a one, two green spider creature token with reach for each creature card in your graveyard. Flashback, six and black. One of the things Eric Lauer did in the original Innistrad was he made cards with flashbacks in enemy colors so that he could start making some of his enemy combinations.

And Spider Spawning has a special place I know in a lot of people's heart. It was, I think it was the card that really hammered home to R&D how much fun it is to make these special build around cards that people, like once you draft this out a lot of times, you can find these little gems that like, let you do a completely different thing.

And Spider's Bonding has become like the poster child of that. Yep. Yeah, I look forward to hearing stories about people getting those combos together. We managed to put both Tree of Perdition and Triscodephobia, I don't need to say that word, into the set. Triscodephobia. I don't even know how to say that word. Triscodephobia.

Yeah. I hope that when players play it, there's a lot more room for discovery, a lot more depth of replayability. Yeah. Real quickly, just because you mentioned this, the Tree of Perdition is, where is it? Tree of Perdition, three and a block, creature, plant, defender, tap, exchange target opponent's life total with this creature's toughness, and it's a zero thirteen.

And then Trisca, Deck of Phobia is, at the beginning of your upkeep, choose one. Each player with exactly thirteen life loses the game, and then each player gains one life. Each player with exactly thirteen life loses the game and then each player gains one life. Or each player with exactly 13 life loses the game, each player loses one, sorry, each player with exactly 13 life loses the game, then each player loses one life. And so you can give your opponent 13 life exactly and then get them. So that's sort of fun. Okay, well I want to thank you, JC, for joining us today. I'm always fascinated by room after sets. I have the luxury of every time I make a set, getting to make up new cards. So it's, in some ways, a lot of what a room after set is a lot like making a cube, right?

Because you only have existing cards to make it with. Yeah, definitely. It was a very unique challenge, but I've been doing Innistrad sets for a while, so it was kind of the right person for the job, I hope. Well, anyway, I just want to tell you out there, I get a chance to go play with Innistrad Remastered. It is a lot of fun.

It'll remind you of all, the interesting thing is a lot of Remastered. It is a lot of fun. It'll remind you of all the interesting thing is a lot of remastered sets have a much smaller pool and this is pretty cool. Seven sets plus random other cards is a pretty big pool. There's a lot of cool mechanics. It is amazing. So I think there's 22 mechanics slash mechanical components by name that are in the set. So there's lots of fun things. You can explore all sorts of cool stuff and you can get a lot of fun cards for your construction decks too.

So thanks again, JC, for being here. Thank you for having me, Mark. And everybody else, I can see my desk. 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 all next time.

Bye bye.