Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1211: Fresh Out of Design – Aetherdrift

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

I recorded this podcast two years ago when I handed off the Aetherdrift vision design to the Set Design team. Hear my thoughts on Magic's latest set as it came fresh out of design.

I'm pulling away driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, guys, I'm going to try something that people have been asking me to do on my blog So what I'm going to do is I'm going to record a podcast about the set. I just turned in talking completely fully everything about it and I don't know, for example, so the set in question is tennis. I don't even know the name of the set yet. It doesn't have a real name yet.

I just know it as tennis. I handed off tennis a couple weeks ago to set design. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk through the set, not with, like normal when I tell the story of a set I know the ending of the story I know where things end up but I don't right now I don't know where it's gonna end up so what I'm gonna try doing is recording a podcast about the set in present day as I know about it I just handed it off and this will give you a chance to sort of see it unvarnished See me talking about the set without knowledge of the future of just hearing in the moment

What is going on and I think since I just handed 10 is over on that was a good thing It's the most recent thing that I just finished So I'm gonna talk all about this that and then two years from now. Well, assuming you're hearing this This could be experiments that never that no one ever hears But if you're hearing it now, that means that the experiment worked and you are hearing it And so here's a chance to hear me from two years ago Talking all about a set and talking about it in a way that maybe is illuminating to some things about how we made the set that maybe in the finished product,

I don't know, I wouldn't talk about it, I'm not sure. But anyway, people wanted me to have sort of unvarnished, an unvarnished podcast and to do that, I have to do it and then save it for the future once everything about the set is known. So that is today. Today is the story of tennis, the unvarnished version. Okay, so tennis began as the idea of,

well, how did it start? I think the idea was we wanted to do, I think we originally called it death race, was the idea of imagine just people racing, you know, with, like there's a lot of tropes in movies and stuff of racing. And there's this sub-category, what I'll call the death race, but really what it means is the racing of farther distance, no holds barred, anything goes.

And, you know, there's a lot on the line, but you know, there there there is sort of combat kind of built into it the idea being that the first person who finishes wins but you know hey if I stop someone else along the way maybe that helps me win you know so it is both a race but it also has a combat aspect to it which felt good for a game about combat and I think death race is one of those things that had gotten pitched a bunch of different times And then what happened was with marathon? We changed the cosmology of the multiverse so the Phyrexian invasion

Opened up what we're called Omen paths and Omen paths now allow any person, not just a planeswalker, any person to move between planes. Now a planeswalker can kind of choose where they go. A normal person can only go where there's an open gate and Omen paths are fickle so like if you go through one maybe you can't come back. So it's a much much bigger deal for a non-planeswalker to go through an Omen path than a planeswalker who can planeswalk somewhere and planeswalk back. But anyway, what it meant was we had changed the cosmology of the multiverse. And one of the things I wanted to do was every year I wanted to make one set that we couldn't have made before without the change, right?

Take advantage of the change. So quilting, which again, I don't know the name of that. Quilting already came out, if tennis already came out. Quilting played around with the idea of having a singular theme, which was villains. Villains on a Wild West world, I hope all that's still true. And we could go up the multiverse and grab all the villains we wanted

from around the multiverse. So it allowed us to take a theme and then get sort of a multiverse play of that theme. The sets about villains, you get to meet villains from around the multiverse that have all come to this world, this villainous world. So the idea of tennis was, I called it a travel log. Well, another way to take advantage of the multiverse and Omen pass is what if a set travels between them as part of the set?

So we sort of married the idea of a travel log with a death race. Okay, well what if the race was across different planes? And so the idea was we would, we talked about whether it wanted to be three or four planes and then we decided that three planes was enough we didn't need four planes I think originally we're talking four planes and then like ah three planes um when we first pitched it I mean we knew it was going to be Kaladesh just because vehicles and um you know energy we thought energy would be cool as fuel um that it felt like Kaladesh would be the home of the race. But the idea was what were the other worlds?

And so the thing we went through was what are worlds that we'd like to visit that, hey, maybe it wouldn't be super easy to do a whole set based on that world, but we can, you know, doing a third of a set is a lot easier. And it's also something where the race is the focus. So we don't have to worry about the story of the world

as much as the environment of the world, the visuals of the world. And so we went through, so we ended up picking two other worlds that we thought were a cool place to drive through. And that was Amonkhet and Ikoria. And then, I don't know, midway through vision or early in vision we just why we decided instead of I Coria to make it more Aganda so more Aganda is

this prehistoric plane that we've referenced in magic we've had cards set there we definitely have I mean there's numerous cards that talk about more Aganda so the audience knows of its existence but we had never been there and I think we decided it might be cool if one of these worlds was, when I say new, it's not that people hadn't heard of Muruganda, but we hadn't, we haven't really been there in any larger way. I mean, we've been there on maybe a handful of cards. So anyway, so we decided that the race would be Kaladesh, Amonkhet, Muruganda. And the big idea of the set was that we really wanted to play up racing. We talked a lot about how much we wanted to reflect the worlds versus reflect racing.

And early on we did talk about, because Kaladesh has vehicles, has energy, there are a bunch of things that were very Kalhian, if you will. And so early on we looked back when the set was Amiket and Ikoria. There's one point where we talked about maybe we'll have exerts from Ikoria because, you know, exerting makes a lot of sense in racing that you're pushing your car to do things that maybe you shouldn't, but then it stalls out. And we talked about maybe doing keyword counters from I Coria but as the more we got into it the more we realized that the cool thing about it was kind of

the racing tropes itself and especially when we got to Muruganda that I mean I understand vanilla matters was something we put there but it's very very hard to do vanilla matters in a world where we almost never make vanilla creatures so and that just didn't make any sense. My assumption is it'll be one or two cards at high rarities if you want to do vanilla matters in casual constructed but it's just not a theme we can build in as a limited theme remotely. So in the end we decided to play up racing more so than play up the individual worlds.

The worlds were more the backdrop and you know you will see the creatures from the worlds and characters from the worlds and places from the worlds were more the backdrop and you know, you will see the creatures from the worlds and characters from the worlds and places from the worlds. We're visiting the worlds and we'll be there, but it's through the lens of this race. And the race was the thing we wanted to play out. So there were three pillars during vision design. One of the pillars was vehicles. Basically the idea was, okay, there's going to be a spectrum of the

set with the most vehicles ever to the set with the least vehicles ever so the set with the least vehicles ever what our sets with zero vehicles we make those and the idea was I didn't know what the top end of vehicles were I didn't know what I didn't know what what how many vehicles the most, set with most vehicles should have, but I did know if we're doing a set about racing, this set should be the set with the most vehicles. So I know we spent a lot of time early on

talking through about what do we need to do to have a lot of vehicles? Like what are the things that get in your way with having too many vehicles? Part of that was making sure they had other purposes so that the vehicles did something until you use them as a vehicle or the vehicles hadn't entered the battlefield effect that kind of mimicked a spell or The vehicles could like oh some of the vehicles had means to turn on other than tapping creatures

So there are other decks that could run them The goal that we had when we made the set was, at least in vision design, was that it's not that we wanted one set to have lots of vehicles, we wanted most sets to have some vehicles. So the idea was vehicles were a tool that in this standard environment

is something that most people might think of using. So we had a lot of vehicles with a lot of different strategies and a lot of different varieties. So once again, we weren't really trying to make an all vehicle deck. That's very hard to do and that wasn't our goal. But we were trying to make it such that no matter what you're playing, there might be a vehicle that makes sense for you to play.

That was sort of our goal. That vehicles were something that everybody considered. Not that every deck had them, but something that at least every deck could think about. And so we also made a bunch of vehicles that had alternate ways for you to turn them sort of into creatures. So a lot of the current vehicles require a certain amount of creatures, right, because you have to crew them. And so we tried a bunch of different things. Anyway, we had a whole bunch of vehicles when we turned in the set, it had the highest percentage of vehicles we ever had. I don't know what the finished product will look like, but it was definitely more vehicles

than we'd ever done in a previous set. Not a crazy number, but a good number. My guess is that, and that's funny, I don't know whether Set Design will pull it down some. I don't think they'll make it more. I think we turn it in a little on the high side. So we'll see. The second pillar was it is a race.

And so, we wanted a mechanic that was about racing. So we came up with a mechanic called the race. And what the race was is, cards can enter the race. When you enter the race, you and only you enter the race. So the other people, when they enter the race, can also enter the race when you enter the race you and only you enter the race So the other people when they enter the race can also enter the race The race there's a little Card a little outside object you get that shows the three legs of the race Leg one was in Kaladesh leg two is an Amonkhet leg three was in Maragonda

And the idea is you you go on the start and then each turn in order to get to that leg You must do that much damage to the opponent. There's damage not combat damage damage. So if I do one damage on the first turn I can go to the first leg and then it takes two damage to go to the second leg and it takes three damage to go to the third leg. The third leg also is the finish line. Once you have finished every car that lets you start the race gives you some bonus for having finished the race, which I think we called victory lap. I think it's what we called it in vision. Um, some of the cards, for example, let you flash them back. Like the spells that for example, might start a race, might let you flash them back. Some of the creatures could get upgraded when you

know. So the idea is the things that started the race then got rewarded if you finished the race. Also, the first person to finish the race in the game got a treasure for themselves and every other person who has or anybody finishes gets a treasure for themselves and every other person that hasn't finished. So in a two person game, if you win and if you get if you finish first, you get two treasure. If your opponent later finishes, they'll get one treasure. In a multiplayer game, you can get more treasure. If your opponent later finishes they'll get one treasure. In a multiplayer game you can get more treasure obviously. Anyway we did that so that was the second leg sort of that representing racing and then the third

leg was energy representing fuel. Now the way we played around energy in what we handed off was energy was an alternate source. So, all of our energy or most of our energy costs also let you pay something else. Mana was the most common thing. And when we turned it off, we made a two-brid energy symbol where you could spend a certain amount of mana, usually two, or energy. So to pay this cost, spend an energy or spend two mana. I think we toyed around with colored mana or energy and like three mana energy. So to pay this cost spend an energy or spend two mana. I think we

toyed around with colored mana or energy and like three mana energy. I think we handed off two with energy. So two mana or energy but there might have been some color stuff we handed off too. Anyway the idea was that there's some addition, like if you don't have the energy you can pay for it some other way. And what that allows us to do is it lets you, energy becomes more of a way to make things cheaper rather than just its own resource system, if you will. That it's, like if you, one of the problems we had last time we did in Kaladesh was,

it was really all or nothing, and it got a little more parasitic. So either you were all in on energy or you weren't but it was hard to mix and match energy cards These cards because you can pay mana like hey Maybe you're not playing energy at all But you still can pay the mana or maybe you're playing a little bit of energy and the plan is if I can use energy I will but in a pinch. I don't have to We also turned over Cards with kicker that had energy at two grid for kick two grid

energy for kicker. So you can pay mana to kick it or you can make energy to kick it. But obviously it's much more mana efficient if you have energy. And the idea that we had done with our energy in this set as handed off in vision was that we were being a little bit stingier with getting energy, but we were giving you a lot of fun ways to spend your energy. So the idea is formally, the last time we did energy, we had made it a little bit too easy to get energy. So in standard, we'd be a little bit stingier, it's a little bit harder, we have a little

more control of how strong energy is, but in larger formats like modern that has access to cowardash, well you'd have access to a lot, you know, energy would flow freer so you'd be able to do a lot more things. And so we could control the power level of how strong the cards were based on, you know, do you need other energy things and in larger formats you'd have those means to get energy. But we would do cool things. So when you combine with ways to get energy, here's cool new things you can do get energy. But we would do cool things. So when you combine with ways to get energy, here's cool new things you can do with energy. That was the plan. Now even in vision

design, we knew that that we were being invented venturesome. When we we have a thing called the vision summit, where we show off where the vision design is to play design, to Aaron Forsyth, my boss, and just multiple people to sort of talk about what they think about the design. The response we got from the vision summit was we were biting off a lot, meaning there was a lot going on. The idea was that vehicles are tricky to get to work. The race was a brand new thing that really,

playing in space we'd never played before, so just understanding would take a lot. And energy has an economy to it that's hard. So the note we had gotten is all three of those things might be too much. So what we did in visual design is we designed some backups. So one of the backups was called Encourage. Encourage was a variant on Exalted,

and the idea of it was that it's like Exalted, but instead of granting plus one plus one, it can grant more things. And the flavor was the idea of teaming up. The set has this flavor of, there's 10 teams and the 10 two-color pairs that represent different sort of trop tropes for playing into you know There's mad max there's Monaco racing. There's you know robots

I mean we had a lot and there are a lot of different things at the time I'm not sure when the dust settles But the idea was that a racing teams and that this could be recommended as flavoring is teaming up and helping You know helping your team and the idea that exalted or insulted like mechanic works So well is with vehicles where you are tapping out to play your one vehicle it's like well I tap up my creatures that might have this mechanic but then the vehicle which is attacking alone could get the bonus so I both could use my creatures to tap out and then you know lend something to the lone

attacking vehicle. Another thing we what else did we look into, we talked about, what else did we talk about, we pitched a couple of mechanics, I'm blanking on the other mechanic. We pitched a couple back, oh other things that were in the set by the way that we handed off, I should finish with that. We had a thing we called Speedy which was a batch and Speedy affected any all creatures that had a crew or a haste or flash and they represent things that were fast and so there's things that could help speedy things. Oh I forgot my when I talked to vehicles. We had come up with something brand new

at the time we made it, which was a variant of crew. We called it crew speed, not a great name I know, that represented instead of crewing vehicles of sort of riding animals, a mount mechanic. We had tried a different mount mechanic in original quilting, but what we did for this set, because it was all about vehicles, our variant for mounting basically worked just like crewing worked. And in fact, we put crew in the name so that things that cared

about things being crewed counted this. And the idea was they were animals. You didn't turn them on because obviously they're animals, but you gave them the ability, usually if they attacked, if they had been crude. And it ended up working out so well that we ended up putting it, I believe the plan right now is that we put it into quilting.

So the idea is this mechanic that we had made for this set, by the time you see it, it should be something you'd already seen in quilting, but originally got made in tennis. And then once we liked it, we swapped out the mounting mechanic that I actually, my team, I had done quilting, had made for quilting in this.

So there's a mechanic in the set that is new from a vision design standpoint, but in theory to you guys, should be old hat. You've already seen it. This is the second time it appears. Another mechanic that we handed over, it's one of the ones I'm more skeptical, was it cared about how many lands you had

on the battlefield of different names. And mostly there was a threshold of four different names, but we had some scaling effects that scaled on different names. One of the notes we got in the summit was it's a mechanic that's a little bit too easy to turn on and construct it and meaning that you kind of had to cost it as if it was it didn't mean anything to do. And so it really limited how many cards we could make. So anyway, I'm dubious that one sticks around, but I don't know.

We handed it over with it in it. What was that? There was one other, we handed over a bunch of alternate mechanics. I told you about encourage. Oh, tour. Tour was the name of the other mechanic we handed over. How did tour work?

Tour was, oh yeah, it was a keyword action. And what tour meant is you look at the top card of your library, you don't have to reveal it. And, well, sorry, you look at the top card of your library, you may choose to reveal it if you want to, if it's a land. If it's a land, sorry, if it's, look at the top card. If it's a land, you can choose to reveal it. If you do, you put the card

on the bottom of your library and do this action again. So essentially what this means is that if you, if this mechanic lets you draw a card, that's not a land, if you so desire, you can get a land if you need a land and you know, you don't have to show your opponent that it is a land. You can just keep it. Um, but the idea is that I get to keep going basically till I get a non-land. So I get a, we called it a cycling with gas in the sense that you get to, it's a keyword action that you, some of the cards we put it on as samples was you could discard it to do it. So that's like cycling. But it could just be a keyword action, like a cantrip or something like that. And we called it tour. Encouraging tour weren't in the set, but it could just be a keyword action, like a cantrip or something like that. Um, and we called it tour, um, encourage and tour weren't in the set, but we're

handed over as mechanics that the team could use if some of our more adventuresome mechanics, like one of the things about vision design is, um, we want to push things a little bit, right? We want to, um, stretch boundaries and we want to sort of try new things, but we want to respect the people downstream of us at Design Play Design and we don't want to make something that's too hard to make. So what we tend to do is we'll be a bit adventuresome but then make some backup things. So encourage the great example of it's like Exalted, we understand Exalted. It's a little bit different. It's doing things beyond plus one plus one,

but we generally understand the mechanics. So designing from the mechanic isn't a giant ask of play design where something like the race is a really, really big ask. So, you know, I could imagine, for example, if the race doesn't work out, okay, they swap out the race and put encouragement in place. That very much, you know, you guys may go,

that's exactly what happened. I have no idea. The one thing I do know is, so what happened was we had our vision summit. The note we had was the set was a little bit on the aggressive side. The mechanics had to push toward aggression and our main three pillar mechanics

were all medium to difficult to do. And that was too many medium to difficult mechanics. So what happened was Yanni, Yanni Skolnick who was the set design lead, he asked if he could take a month to try to demonstrate why these might not be as hard to do as they think and do some testing on that regards. So Yanni took all three things into set design. I don't know what, mean. We just handed off so My gut is all three of them sticking in the set is probably less likely than not Here I will predict I now put complaining anymore, you know it and I don't um

Vehicles will stay in the set vehicles matter will stay in the set. It was the number one, we also prioritized our three main pillars. Number one was vehicles. It's just hard with the straight face to do the death race set and not have vehicles. So I think it's possible that they lower the percentage of vehicles, that there's less of them in the set. I still think we'll have more vehicles in any of the set but what we turned into what they could do there's a lot there's a gap so my gut is they're probably going to make it a little lower percentage than we did but not by a lot and it's still be the highest we've ever done my guess. Second pillar was the race. The race was something like if we're going to do it it was so suited to this world.

You know, there's three legs and three worlds and like it was a fun mechanic that played well. It has a bunch of complication. It's really playing a new space. I could see them pulling it if they just realized that like there's just too much going on and like there's some, I'll get to pull it through the second which is energy there's some reasons that for larger meta reasons maybe to want energy energy is showing up in other places before the set comes out

so maybe this is desire to try to get energy up to a level in stuff like modern or older formats in general okay so the race was fun and was cool but definitely was the most out there new thing we had done which was also was a positive for it. You know, it really it was super flavorful. I think if the race stays the they might that there's a lot of ways to do the economy of how the race works and right now we put a lot of prizes in finishing the race. I could see more rewards along the way. So it's not about getting done, but like there's like we did it so you only got a reward at

the end. Our reward was a little bit of treasure, but really you upgrade the cards that start the race. I could see that giving more rewards from the race itself and less on the cards that allows you to make it a little less parasitic and maybe push individual cards a little more so there's a decent chance they're going to do that. Also we had the race the winning the race get you treasure it was the only treasure in the set when we made it we did it because it's a super flavorful I could

see them changing that so if race stays in I could see them changing the dynamics of how things work and the output and you know, the bunch of things they could change if it stays. Energy was our third pillar. Energy is the easiest of the three pillars to pull. I think energy does go to work. I like a lot of things we did with energy. I think Magic players want more energy cards. So like, I think there's a lot of good things on having energy in the set.

But if you're trying to make a racing set, well, the energy is fuel makes a lot of sense in the racing set. And the plans was to represent energy, not just on Kaladesh, but in all three worlds. And each world would have its own kind of energy. It is just the easiest thing to pull from the set from a structural standpoint.

So while I like energy and I'd like energy to stay stay and I kind of hope energy is in the set. I do recognize that it was the easiest of the three pillars to pull and we had ranked it as the third most important pillar. So, the other thing that might happen is they do a smattering of energy and it's not a major theme, but maybe it's just one archetype, blue, red, probably if that's, so I mean, energy could be anywhere from not in the set to being a small portion in the set to Being a big thing and they had removed other stuff or or Yanni figured out how to do it all in a way that play Design signed off on I don't know Speedy is something that I liked and enjoyed the concern was speedy is

Haste is a tricky thing to push. And the thing that was kind of cool to me was it took haste and flash, which were things that were normally virtual, and said, hey, you know, there's some more utility to them. Play design definitely didn't know what what it entailed and like there's so much else going on that Speedy is not even one of the three pillars. So I don't know if you guys will see Speedy. It was kind of fun. Speedy for us from a vision design standpoint, in limited was a lot more about crewing than

anything else. Yeah, there were a few haste and flash creatures, but it was much, much more about crewing. And the idea in constructed formats, it was more about haste and flash and it's possible caring about haste and flash Inconstructed because haste generally so good and constructed might not be you know might cause problems. I'm not sure so speedies per mass I While it's a lot of fun, and it's cool There also was some argument about like other things could other things be seen as speedy and stuff like that? Like first strike, isn't first strike speedy? It's like, well, we play first strike as being good

at combat and sometimes it's having a reach weapon. You know, there's a bunch of different ways we play it. We don't tend to play first strike as speed number one. Usually it's being a better fighter, having more reach, but sometimes it's speed. So there was talk about that. But, and then the four different lands, a different name lands. I'm I'm highly skeptical that one's gonna stick around but it may Anyway the I was pretty proud of my design team

I Thought that we made a very robust fun set You know and that like I said, the interesting, let me talk a little bit about something like giving you the behind the scenes thing here from two years ago is I know I handed over an adventuresome set. And one of the things that's going on was, and one of the things that often happens in R&D is we only have so many resources and other things can pop up. For example, at this time we were consolidating the draft booster and the set booster into

a consolidated booster. What had happened was we realized that magic set boosters for people that weren't drafting weren't as exciting to open, so we made the set booster to make it exciting for them. We made it a little too exciting in the sense that these people weren't buying draft boosters for any purpose other than drafting, and so it was creating this imbalance. And so we said, is okay, well let's take the fun of opening a set booster and make it playable like a draft booster and rather have two different boosters that were causing all sorts of headaches for everybody, us included, but also store owners and a lot of people. Let's just combine them and say, can we make a booster pack that's

exciting to open as a set design booster, but playable like a draft booster? And that work was going on right now, which is a huge amount of work. Meanwhile, just some of the sets around it, like there was a lot going on, meaning that Play Design had, because of external issues, there was a lot of responsibilities that they were under. And so, kind of what they wanted was an easy set. A set that wasn't that hard to do. Now, Tennis had been tagged, like when we make sets, we sort of gauge how hard the set's going to be. And we want to have a mix. Like when we make sets, we sort of gauge how

hard the sets going to be. And we want to have a mix of, Hey, we know what we're doing. This isn't really pushing any boundaries. And we have sets that are like, no, no, we're pushing boundaries. And this set had been a pushing boundary set by definition. We were supposed to be pushing boundaries. Sometimes if we have the sets, we're like, okay, like the audience is really going to enjoy this. We're going back to the world they love or something. And like, we just don't need to push boundaries as much. There's stuff inherent to the world that will get players excited.

This was a set that was really pushing things. Like I said, it was the first set ever. Well, I guess we'd been on multiple planes on one set before. But in a way, you know, using the Omen Pass and traveling through worlds and making, you know, making a theme that was multi-planar. We hadn't really quite done that quite in this way before. Racing as a theme was definitely something that was a little more out there. So anyway,

the task we had given ourselves from the very beginning was a more daunting task. And the issue at hand was not that we didn't do what was asked of us. We did exactly what was asked of us. It was just, oh, it's coming to a time where other factors are really pinching play design. So making a set that's sort of like a little more than play design can handle while in a normal time, maybe they could just grab a few extra resources and the point they're at right now, they don't have the extra resources.

So what I think is going to happen is Yanni is gonna do his best to sort of Demonstrate how to make things easier I think Yanni will have some success but probably not all the pillars as we talked about them will be as as Adventurous and probably as we pitched from vision and that I'm assuming the set that you guys are going to see will be Not quite as out there in some of the choices. I mean, I can see different paths. I honestly don't know where they'll go. I could see a path where the race stays

and they spend more time figuring out how to make it work. But in order to do that, they take out energy and maybe they bring down the vehicle percentages a little bit. Or I could see a world where the race goes, maybe encourage gets put in this place, so energy can stay. I mean, there's a world where energy gets consensed

to like blue, red. I mean, there's infinite worlds that it could be. And I don't know, I don't know where it's gonna be. And that maybe the inside of this whole thing for you guys is when I hand over something for vision design, I don't know the end state of where things are going to be. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this. Like I said, this is me experimenting with something.

Ironically, by the time you heard of this, this experiment was two years ago. So if you like it and want to do more, maybe it'll be a little while before you hear it. But anyway, guys, that is my podcast from the past. And I hope you guys enjoyed it. But anyway, I'm at work. So we all know what that means.

It means to end my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time.