Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1207: Lessons Learned – The Lost Caverns of Ixalan

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

This is another in my "Lessons Learned" podcasts where I talk about sets I led or co-led the design for. I walk through the various lessons I learned in leading the design of the set. This episode is about The Lost Caverns of Ixalan.

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 the drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my, what is it? Another day in my lessons learned series. So lessons learned are a podcast where I take a set that I led or co-led and I talk about the lessons I learned from leaving it. I've done a whole bunch of these.

Last time we talked, I did March of the Machine. So the next set chronologically that got released was the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Okay, lots of lessons with this one, but let me start first with the major lesson. When vision design does something, we are handing off the set to Set Design. The metaphor I use in my house building metaphor

is that we are making, we are the architects making the blueprints. And then from those blueprints, the Set Design team will build the house. And there's always some variance between the blueprints and the house. Sometimes you make the blueprints and the house is really close to what you make. In fact a lot of times most sets when they finish you can really see what the vision was in the final product. But sometimes

major things happen. You go to build a house and there's big changes that happen. So the big change, by the way, one of the big changes, probably the biggest change is we made the decision to make this world, make, we knew we were doing underground world. So underground world was something we'd wanted to do for a long time. It had been'd wanted to do for a long time. It had been on our short list for a long time. In fact, the great designer search too, we had

the eight finalists each designed their own world and not one but two John Lux and Scott Van Essen both made underground worlds. So it was something that we knew we'd wanted to do for a long time. And so when we started to make the set, it was just brand new set with Underground Worlds. In fact, why brand new world? Well, the reason was, if you go back, the set before it was Wilds of Eldraine, a return. The set before that was March of the Machine, won't argue many returns, it's in every place. Before that was Phrexia, all will be won, a return. Before that was Brothers War, a return. Before that was Dominary United, a return.

What was before Dominary United? Dominary United was, oh, I'm sorry, before that was our last new set, which was Shrieks of New Competent. So it had been a while. The reason we originally said this should be a new world is, hey, we did a lot of returns in a row. Said, okay, let's do a brand new world.

What happened was during world building, so while we're doing exploratory design and vision design, they're doing world building. And what they, they really were trying to do, like we had actually talked in the very beginning, we're like, look, there's two places we can go. We can make a brand new world you've never seen before and go underground,

or we could go underground of a world we've already been to. We're exploring new unexplored space on an existing world. And when we talked about it, we actually did the work of like, okay, well, what world makes the most sense? And Ixalan was very high on our list. Probably because the tropes that Ixalan is playing with, the idea of an underground world is pretty compelling. Anyway, so we actually said, if we were going to do an underground

world of an existing world, I think our top choice was Ixalan. But we've done a lot of returns like, okay, let's do a brand new world. But while world building was building the world, they kept finding themselves like, they would make a decision and go, that's cool. Oh, but wait, wait, wait, wait. This is an excellent. We shouldn't do that. And they kept sort of veering away from things they wanted to do because they were trying not to feel too excellent. And eventually they decided, why are we fighting this man?

This world wants to be excellent. Why not let it be excellent? Um, the, the tricky thing was that decision was made after vision design was done. So for the duration of vision design, for the entire blueprint making period, we were making a brand new world. And so a lot of the trick of this world was, a lot of what we were doing,

like once we knew it was X1, that's a very different design. And I'll get to that. So one of the big lessons, I mean the first big lesson is that things can change. Like one of the natures of doing magic design is there's a lot of different pieces, a lot of different teams,

and that sometimes some team figures out something crucial later than they probably should. But hey, before the set gets made, I mean, later than they push it, all I'm saying is like, obviously it's best if we understand, envision, design all the ramifications of where we are, what world we're on. But it also didn't make sense to not to make the change just because it was late in the process. And it wasn't that late, set design was just beginning. But anyway, the lesson here is

when you design something, especially early on, when you design something in visual design, there's a lot of variance of what can happen. And sometimes your set is, you know, for example, all will be one. The final version Frixi all will be one was really, really close to what we handed over. Lost Caverns of Ixalan, not remotely close. So real quickly, so Lost Caverns of Ixalan, let's review what was in Lost Caverns of Ixalan. So set at 291 cards, 108 commons, 92 un-commons,

64 rares, 22 mythic rares, and five basic lands. Codenamed off-roading. Okay, so it had traditional double-faced cards with lands on the back. There were two types. One type was lands on the back, very Ixalan. The other type were artifacts that you crafted into other artifacts. That was very underground world. Dinosaur typal, very Ixalan.

Maps, which made use of Explore, which came back. Explore was a mechanic from Ixalan. Craft, which were double-faced cards, transforming double-faced cards, where the front was an artifact and that you could use resources to turn into what's on the back. That was very underground world.

Descend, which flavorfully is very underground world, but didn't come out of vision. Discover, which was a tweak on Cascade, was also done in exploratory. Not exploratory, in set design. So, first big lesson, a lot can change, and that, I mean, one of the goals in general of making a magic set, and this is not just magic set,

any creative endeavor in which there's a team involved. Like one of the things about a lot of art is the social, like, you know, I used to be a writer, and like, at least the writing portion was very solo. Like I would sit down with a blank piece of paper and I would write something. Or, you know, an artist or a dancer. I mean, there's a lot of people that do individual things

and like you have a lot of say, you're the artist, you control what you're doing. But in something that is a group thing, I mean, it means there's a lot of give and take between a lot of different people. And that part of the cool thing about doing a group piece of art is that you have the ability

to let everybody have an influence on it and that it becomes something bigger than any individual member. No one person could have made it and that's pretty cool. So anyway, first big lesson, things can change. It did change. Ixalan, I mean, I've designed a lot of sets and Ixalan might be the set that I handed off

that changed the most between the handoff and vision. Okay, so let's get into what we didn't do because we did a whole bunch of stuff. All that Ixalan stuff, we did not do that. It was not Ixalan. So let's talk a little bit about what we did do. So when we were doing Underground World, we were going from the beginning,

it was very top down of what does Underground World wanna be? One of the ideas that I liked actually came from, I think Jonathan Laux version does Underground World want to be? One of the ideas that I liked actually came from, I think Jonathan Lowe's version of Underground World was the idea of light as a resource, which I thought was really interesting. He really, in his thing, had light and dark. And the idea that I liked a lot from his

is I liked light as a resource, and I liked the idea, I thought maybe we could play with color. One of the things we need to make a lot from his is I like the light as a resource and I like the idea I thought maybe we could play with color one of the things we need to make a lot of magic sets and and you know as we moved away from the blocks it used to be once upon a time a whole year had one major theme so if we did a theme we were doing it all year long so it took a while to repeat major themes you know if we did an artifact theme it might be years before we do an artifact theme. But now, in the nature we do things, two things have changed. One, we don't do singular themes anymore. We do composite themes. And we don't do blocks anymore. We do individual sets. So,

it just means we return to themes faster than we used to. And so one of the things I'm always on the lookout is, hey, are there themes that I like that we haven't done for a while? And one of those is color matters. In the early days of magic, a lot more color was imbued into magic. Protection from color was an evergreen ability. Fear and later intimidate was an evergreen ability that prevented who could block you based on color. And what we eventually found with time was the problem with and it also was land

walk, which was, I mean, it's not basic land types, but color ish. And what we found was when you had things that referred to whether or not your opponent is playing a certain color, it was very, the variance was high. Oh, if you're playing black, you're in trouble. If you're not playing black, oh, think, you know, wow, things are really good for you, you know, and that it is, it is really sort of this thing where the variance between matchups was just too high. And there's not a lot of effects we do that change color.

So there's not a lot of answers, you know, if I have that can only be blacked by black creatures, and you're not playing black Well, then my creatures are unblockable that have that ability and So over time we've kind of shifted away from that. We don't do land walk anymore. We do protection, but more frequently Fear and intimidate turned into menace, which is not color related I'm still an evasion but not color related And like menace is a good example or something you you do something you can work around Oh, I can keep that extra creature so I can block stuff like that

So anyway, we don't do color matters as much anymore. I mean, we can. The issue about color matters is it just requires more infrastructure. There's less evergreen stuff helping you and requires more infrastructure. But I was very fascinated by color matters, by light mattering. A little bit of light mattering, by the way, ended up in Deskmar on the little side note. Okay. So the other thing we do whenever we're doing a genre is we look at pop culture and say okay, well let's look at the movies and TV shows and books and what are all the underground stuff?

And there's two, there's a path you can take when you're looking at underground. Path number one is kind of action adventure, Like I go underground, I find this brand new world, but it's full of danger and adventure happens. Or it's horror. Oh, I go down deep where it's dark and creepy crawly things exist and man, it's not good to be there. The adventure is more about learning what is down there

and then triumphing underneath. Usually I find a kingdom and I, you know, I find myself and prove myself down below. Where whores like I gotta escape and the whole point is I gotta get back above surface. I'm gonna die if I stay below ground, I gotta get back above surface. So very different sort of tones.

So we looked recently, Phyrexia Albi one definitely has a whore vibe to it. I mean, just had left the Phyrex Frexians and the Frexians as a whole thing, have a lot of horror elements to them. Um, we knew that swimming was coming, a dusk morn was coming up. So we're like, okay, we're doing a lot of horror. Let's, let's, we haven't done as much action adventure. Let's do action adventure.

Um, and the other big, um, fork in the road we found for action adventure was gaming likes underground. There's a lot of fun underground tropes and things that go with gaming. One of them is, like if you were a generation X, my generation, probably the thing you most associate with underground is like Dungeon Dragons. Like I go underground, and I'm going through an underground dungeon, slogging through things.

And a lot of undergroundness has to do with that kind of feel. But the underground of like my son's generation is much more video games where you're like, you dig underground and you find resources, you turn those resources into things, you know. It's just a different sensibility and it's a different set of tropes. And so the idea was, okay, we're doing underground, which underground we're doing. And it's not that we can't do elements of both. But one of the things is we realized that we wanted to lean in one direction, we definitely could tap into all underground tropes, but we want to sort of lean in one direction, especially trying to figure out mechanics. And one of the things is we get a lot of demographic bio information, which is, hey, who's playing

magic? And one of the reasons we get that is to understand who is our target audience and where is the room for growth? So one of the room for growth information we got was, hey, we can get more Gen Z, we can get younger people. And so we're always on the lookout of, you know, what can we do that skews? Like I know Ethan Fletcher at one point made a good point that how you think of skeletons depends a lot

on what your source material is. And I remember he made like a skeleton archer because in video games, skeleton archers have become like a trope. But if you're a little bit older, like how you think of certain things varies a lot upon the pop culture you grew up with. And so there's just differences.

And so one of the ideas is, hey, we want to appeal a little younger. Let's think about when we're looking at trope space, let's think about that. What are they seeing? And so anyway, it just made more sense to go down that path. So I was very interested in resources

and the idea of I go underground, I find resources and then I can turn those resources into other things. So early on, so the idea of crafting, I mean the craft mechanic that ended up, that's something we play, that's the one mechanic that comes really from what Vision was doing. A lot of the other mechanics do not.

A few of them spiritually do, but a lot of the stuff is like Ixalan stuff, none of that, completely even knows Ixalan stuff, but none of that, because we didn't even know it was Ixalan. So the idea that we worked with early on was what if you could acquire resources and then those resources you could use to then build things. So the idea was imagine if we had cards that said hey if you get these extra resources you can use it and the early version of it was

we liked the idea of color gems one for each color And then the idea was that you could have additional costs that match that. Like maybe you could find, so we ended up using the five, the five jewels if you want from the moxes. So pearl, sapphire, jet, ruby and emerald. And now I know, I know pearls don't come from underground,

they come from the sea. We were aware of that. We said we would work with the creative to figure out some ways, you know, there's underground rivers in the, you know, we thought we'd figure that out. But the idea that we thought was really cool was, it'd be really neat if I had cards

that I could upgrade by using a resource. And so I think the early version was like, you would get rubies or emeralds and then there would be certain menu like there'd be recipes. Oh, to upgrade this creature I need a ruby and two emeralds. And I think for a while we even had a we had a six generic one, I forget what we called it, diamonds or something. So originally we had six different ones.

We had each color and a colorless. And the idea was Cards of that color would produce it. I think a few ones sometimes like sometimes we produce other ones And so the idea was that you had little recipes on your card and like okay in order to do that I need to do the recipe and then I would get that thing And so the feedback we got from Play Design was we kind of invented super energy. It's energy, but instead of all the energy working together, it's six different types of energy,

or five, I mean, essentially six different types of energy. And we're like, okay, okay, fine note, that the things had to have a resource beyond that. So we tried a version where they were kind of like treasure. We went down to five from six. And the idea was a Ruby is an artifact token that you could stack to get red mana. But you could spend it like a lot of,

one of the things we find fun with artifact tokens in general is it's neat if they have a use, but then you also can use them secondarily. Hey, blood, you can discard a card to draw a card, but you can also feed it to your vampires. Or food lets you gain life, but you also can give it to cooks. There's ways to use those resources that have a secondary. The play value of that's really good. So we tried the version where we essentially made five kind of mini treasures and we thought it was pretty cool and you know Ruby makes red but Max Ruby makes red like we

thought that you know that the color of the thing would make very clear what you're getting because obviously when Richard made the boxes he tied them to the color of them of mana they were producing. The feedback we got from playing this down in that one is what slightly, I mean, there was still that there's a lot to track issue. That was still also true. The larger issue was mana is a very powerful resource. A lot of the gate in the game to control when you get things at the right time is mana

So when we give you extra mana it speeds you up unless you cast things sooner than you should So we just have to be careful. We can't we can't willy-nilly make treasure and there's a lot of restriction to that but If we wanted to make the goal for us making it was to have enough that you could have Reci recipes like a lot of what we wanted to do. We needed it in volume. Like it didn't make a lot of sense to go maybe once the game you get a Ruby.

Well then I'm never going to I'm never going to craft my things. And so the idea was we couldn't do that. I mean beyond the complexity of having five of them which was a real issue as well, we just couldn't make enough of them. Like, there's only so much extra mana you could make that they can balance the game. But in order for our system to work, we needed to have enough so that we can, you can use it as a resource. The reason we originally made it, it didn't do anything else was, hey, we can make as much as we want.

The only reason you make rubies is to use these activations. But once we made it have a secondary meaning, then treasure was too much. So anyway, we had to remove that. We then went to a version where we were using the graveyard as a resource and you cared about what colors thing were. So in that version, if it cost ruby, cost Ruby Emerald Emerald what it meant is exile a red card and two green cards from your graveyard. That was the one that showed the most promise and I think if Ixalan hadn't happened that is

the path that we probably would have followed. Okay but so let's another big lesson here. So sometimes when you have to change, one of the things about change is you have to understand, like every component you make in a set comes with demands. Some mechanics have very few demands. They're like, well, I need creatures. Something in which, yeah, you need something, but the game naturally wants to do that.

So what you're asking for just isn't, you don't have to change the game to make that happen. Other asks are a much bigger deal. They're like, oh, well, then you need a whole network, an ecosystem to make this work. And color matters was a good example of one of those. Color matters was like, hey, look, I don't matter unless you have enough cards that reference color, that mechanically care about color.

And probably cards that are multiple colors or change colors or, you know, you know, early on for example, we were looking at using hybrid because hybrid hybrid works really well with color matters because having cards that are more than one color allows you a lot of flexibility and so we were going down this path and in order to do what we wanted to do we really needed to take up a decent amount of space in the set. So once Ixalan came along Ixalan also required a certain amount of like, if we're going to like, this is the first time we were returning to Ixalan. And so we felt some responses. Ironically,

when we went to Murderous Accraal of Manor, we're like, well, we've been, we've been to Ravnica a lot. Maybe we can lessen how much Ravnica there is. But in Ixalan, we hadn't been, I mean, Ravnica was the 12th set in Ravnica or something like, Ixalan, it was the third set ever in Ixalan we hadn't been, I mean, Ravnica was the 12th set on Ravnica or something, like Ixalan, it was the third set ever on Ixalan. So we're like, okay, we really know we needed to do Ixalan. Ironically, we probably needed to do the Ravnica too, but that's a lesson for a different set. So there wasn't enough space. Eric tried this. So Eric Lauer, the way it worked is we handed off the file to Eric Lauer, and then Ericauer after a couple months handed off the set to Jules Robbins. I led vision design, Eric and Jules together led set design. And I think Eric tried really hard to

say can we fit Ixalan and Color Matters in the same set? And what ended up happening was no. That in order to let Ixine have the room to do what need to do it just required there wasn't enough space to do both they got it just was too tight and so that was another big lesson was and at some level this lesson wasn't even vision design this happened at that design which is look you got to let Ixalan to Ixalan you got to give Ixalan space to breathe and they wanted to do you know transform double-faced lands and dinosaur typal and explore with maps and you know and there just was a lot of things that you wanted to do and the other problem was the natural things you wanted to do weren't core to Ixalan

Ixalan was a typal set you you know, when we first went there. It didn't have a lot of color stuff. It is, like, if you went to a world that, you know, if you're returning to a world that has built into it, more components that care about color, maybe you could do a return and do color matter. Like, maybe you could go back and do color matters on a world that didn't do color matters before.

But Ixalan was not set up to be that way. And there's a lot of stuff that needed to be an Ixalan. So that was there. The other thing that was interesting, and this is one of the reasons we have the system set up where we do exploratory design, and we do exploratory design and we do vision design then we do set design then we do play design is making a magic set is complex there are a lot of moving pieces and it is a tough tricky thing to do. When things end up a little late it just means that things get pushed back so there were things that Jules was figuring out

later in set design that ideally you want figured out in vision designer or maybe at worst, early set design. And like I said, I think the finished product was really good. I think that it's a very fun set. Lost Caverns, Ixalan sold well, people really liked it. There's a lot of really cool stuff there. There's a lot of constructed cars,

a lot of neat things. But the one lesson, and once again, this is a lesson, this is not a lesson that I learned because I didn't do set design, but I think it's an interesting lesson, so I'm gonna bring it up. Because no one, it's my podcast, I can find the lessons where I want.

One of the things that I think happen is, the way the design works is, you come up originally with the version that makes the most sense, that's the most flavorful, and you play it. And usually what happens is, it's complex. That the, one of the things that happen over time is you find the simplest most elegant way to do something. And the first way you try

something is not the most elegant. And the reason is it takes time and energy to find elegance. That one of the things that's very true is that the best designs... so there's a thing in design called the paperclip theory, and the idea is that the paperclip is an example of a really good design, and the reason is it seems, it's so obvious and so simple and so clear that it feels like how else could you do it? How else could you make a paperclip? And the problem from the end user of a paperclip is it's so elegant that the thought process

is, well, that wasn't hard to do. How else would you do it? How else could you make a paperclip? And the reality is there's lots of ways to make a paperclip. There's not a lot of ways to make the best paperclip. And for those pure stuff, yes, are better paper clips than the original paper clip They people have improved the paper clip, but the core idea of the paper clip is pretty pretty good and the idea is that part of the reason we have a long process is

There's a lot of fine-tuning that happens that a lot of a set design is doing is not really inventing new things most the time It's just saying okay of the basic ideas that vision design of what set design is doing is not really inventing new things most of the time. It's just saying, okay, of the basic ideas that vision design, of the blueprints, what is the most optimized way to do this? And some of that is, hey, vision design had five ways to do it, we only need to do two. Or vision design tried this thing,

but we can shorten the template and if we make these two changes, we streamline it. So a lot of set design is just finding the optimal way to do something. I think one of the downsides of The fact that just things happen late and once again Hey, you shouldn't not make a change just because it's later in the process If you realize part way in that the set will just be better for doing something and like I said a video is one of the art the main art directors for the set will just be better for doing something. And like I said, um,

a video was one of the art, the main art directors for the set. Like he is from the region that this set is based on and he poured so much personal life experience. And that's one of the reasons you want to have a lot of diversity that people making the game is that, you know, you could feel that Nixle line. You could feel that it wasn't just you could feel that it's one wasn't just making something up as much as it was being inspired by really true sources in a way that's really compelling and so I I do think we made the right call and that is it but because it was late in the process

there are some things that the one that really stands out to me is descent So descend is the mechanic that cares about permanence going to your graveyard And the idea there was we definitely out of vision had the idea of the graveyard matter It was a big component of what we were doing and the idea that you want to go deeper in that you're going down You know the idea of using the graveyard to represent that and the idea is the game progresses having a threshold system makes a lot of sense and I think that what they found was Just normal threshold we just got all the cards was a little bit faster than they wanted. It didn't quite have the feel so they did permanence which which allows you it

Because you can have a lot of spells you have a little bit less control of how how Like if someone's playing a lot of spells they can still the graveyard after and they were trying to sort of make it happen a little More a little bit later. Um Anyway, they ended up the finished set has three different versions of descend. There's descend which says whenever a Permanent goes into your graveyard or if a permanent went to your graveyard this turn, sort of like a morbidish thing, there's descend n which is descend with a number that cares about hey, do I have that many? It's a threshold.

Descend four, descend eight. And then there's fathomless descent and that just says hey, just count all the things. I'm just a scaling thing. And I think what happened, this is a really good, to me, a sign of just, they just could use more time, is each one of those was interesting. I think putting all in the same set was a little more complex than we probably want to do. And that there's a lot going on, like in general, one of the cool things about mechanics is, hey, introduce a mechanic and then, you know, we'll bring it back later and we can tweak it.

Like I think part of the way we do mechanics is, look, just do the simplest version, usually upfront. And then, hey, if it's a good mechanic, we'll use it later. Magic, Hungry Monster, we'll use it later. I think they should have picked a path. And I believe the reason they did it was time. Was, they sort of ran out of time to optimize some stuff. And I do believe if they're just an extra month or two, they would have streamlined

that a little bit, it would have been a little bit cleaner. From a game design standpoint, it's the one thing that I can tell they could have used a little bit more time. And that is, it's the roughest element to me. So anyway. and that is it's the roughest element to me so anyway in general I I really like how the set came out I think the set is a lot of fun and another important point that sort of ties the first lesson I said the goal of magic design is to make a magic magic sets we want to make magic sets you all love and have fun playing

with if they change along the way, if they become something different, that's okay. That just because I and my team make something, doesn't mean that thing has to be what goes to you, the players. If there's better things, if there's better changes, if changing the world or changing the emphasis makes it a better gameplay, do that. And that the key to any group experience is not feeding your ego, is not seeing the thing you did in the final product, it is making sure that you make choices

that the best end all where it gets up is the product that makes the most sense and you guys, the players enjoy the most. And so this is definitely a set I did where, you know, in some level, my work and my team's work had a lot less. I mean, not zero influence. I can see influences of what we did. And Jules and I would talk from time to time and, you know, he'd ask advice.

And so, I mean, there clearly are things we did that influenced the final product, but less so than most sets. You know, there's a scale from it had a lot of impact, it had a little impact. This one's more on the had a little impact than a lot of impact. And that's okay. You know, I think one of the lessons here is different magic sets have different needs and there were different things going on this time

and that's fine. But anyway, that is my lessons learned for the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. This is 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.