Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1213: Aetherdrift Set Design with Yoni Skolnik

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with Yoni Skolnik, the lead set designer for Aetherdrift, to talk about the design after it was handed off for set design.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time brother drive to work at home edition So today we have a guest Yanni Skolnick the lead set designer for a the drift and we're gonna talk all about the set design of a the drift. Hey, Yanni Hello Okay, so let me set the scene Basically, you were on the vision design team And you like that you like to be there so you can sort of see where the vision is going.

So when we handed off the set, let's walk through where we're at. Vehicles obviously were a huge part of the set we handed over and we had talked through the philosophy of vehicles. So when we get into vehicles, we'll walk through the philosophies. A race mechanic, what would become or what would be starting your races or starting your engines, an early version of that existed. The version we handed off was a little bit different and we'll talk about that. And then we had cycling and exhaust did not exist yet. And then we had a few other mechanics that we pitched as maybe things like speed and things. So let's pick one of those and we'll dive in deep.

So what do you want to start with? What... Yeah, let's start with vehicles. Okay, so when we handed over the three things that are in the handoff document that we said was important for vehicles, one was that we didn't want to make a vehicle deck, that we wanted to spread them across different things. Two was we felt that most vehicles had to have an alternate something, as a secondary purpose. And the third was we wanted a lot of vehicles that had an alternative

to crewing because we felt that inspired build arounds because it said, hey, if you do this with your deck, you can make this into a vehicle. Yeah. So for the most part, that all ended up true. We did end up with somewhat of a vehicle deck. There's a red-white package of cards that you can play to go deeper on vehicles and constructed, and a green-white package that combines mounts and vehicles. But that is a smaller element of a set, and it wasn't something we wanted to hinge the set's success on, or vehicle's success on. It was much more important to have individual ones that worked out well, or yeah, that contributed to a variety of different strategies.

In the past, when we had been making vehicles, I remember working on them all the way back in the original Kaladesh set, and we had a good deal of restrictions on them. Like, we didn't want too many of them entered and made a token, because that made them too similar to other car types. They were all colorless in original Kaladesh. So as we made more and more vehicles throughout the year,

we relaxed some of those restrictions. But here, I was very happy to have all the tools on the table. And for basically every vehicle in the set, I wanted it to be true that there was something to do other than crewing it normally. Which could be an enters the battlefield ability, an alternative way to crew it, or I remember taking the first month of set design and thinking a lot about how am I going to convince everyone else that vehicles can be a major part of the theme and be exciting. A lot of that was just having some talking points

about everything we've said so far. The other big thing that stuck around was having a lot of vehicles inspired by older cards. Maybe the first one we made of these was what was Mull Drifter, Mull Spaced Rifter that ended up being called Hull Drifter. And I really appreciated that even players who were very hesitant about putting vehicles in their decks because they've had bad experiences with the card type before could see a card like Hull Drifter

and immediately see, oh, I see why this is strong, I see what its purpose is, I'm now excited to put this in my deck. So that ended up going further with a vehicle that's inspired by Deaf Shadow and a vehicle that's inspired by C.Dryno, and I think is a very helpful tool to help people see the potential of vehicles right away.

So one of the big questions we had, sort of when we handed off what we said was, we didn't know what the upper bound of vehicles was, like how many vehicles can a set have? But the thing we said is, well, we want the set to be on the upper bound, we just didn't know what the upper bound was. How did you figure that out? How did you figure out what the upper bound was? Yeah, I remember coming in with a guess I was pretty confident in that basically stayed the answer the whole way through, which was 40-ish.

That was thinking with about 10 at common, which I still remember the first real vision design meeting where we made roughly 10 common vehicles and many of those, including hull drifter, stuck through. And then roughly 15 uncommons with each color pair getting its own gold vehicle and some scattered around in monocolor. And then in my head it was 10 rares and 5 mythics. And that in my mind was about the upper bound. I thought that using all the tools for vehicles being exciting, we could make those reliable fun commons for limited

and a variety of exciting rares and mythics that would each have their own reason for existing and for being for a different strategy. And then the uncommons could all serve a variety of roles for making, you know, limited build build arounds and archetype support. Okay, so I know we handed off a lot of tools. Is there anything you ended up not using? You said, you know, we don't like,

like there's any vehicles that you, vehicle components you chose not to use? No, for the most part, I was all about, let's use all the different tools, let's use them in different places. Let's use them in different places I guess we were using energy in the set and one of the things I liked with energy is that it worked as an alternative Vehicle brewing so we had two mana blue vehicle enters get don't remember if it was one or two energy But then you pay an energy to crew it

So that was my favorite design that we didn't end up getting to use to crew it. So that was my favorite design that we didn't end up getting to use. It ended up becoming the two mana three three vehicle that is a creature on your opponent's turn, which is another card I love. Okay, so you brought up energy. That actually was something I forgot to mention. When we handed over the set, there was energy in the set. So let's talk a little bit about the evolution of energy because energy did turn into a mechanic in the set. It just wasn't energy. So let's talk a little bit about the evolution of energy because energy did turn into a mechanic in the set, it just wasn't energy. So let's talk about the evolution of energy during set design. Yeah, so I was also around for the development of energy originally in original Kaladesh.

I worked on some things that I was very proud of how they turned out, but also there were a lot of problems with how it turned out. And so we wanted to make sure that coming into this, especially with the challenges presented by having a lot of vehicles and the ambitious mechanic that ended up becoming starter engines. So we needed a version of energy that was easier to execute on and easier to place bounds on. The one I think we had at handoff was where it was kind of two-bred mana with energy.

So you could pay an energy or pay two mana. This was making it so you weren't as reliant as being an all-in energy deck. And the power level of the abilities had some more natural grounding than just whatever the energy economy was. I think at the time of the handoff, we ended up deciding that was still a little too challenging,

given it still had the, you know, manaless component of energy when you actually had it. And so early on in Set Design, we set off on exploring some alternatives. Eventually we decided that having... The biggest point against energy was just having two different outside the game things to track between the start your engines mechanic and energy, and that led to us removing it and replacing it with exhaust.

But I'd be happy to go through some of the steps we were in between and how it ended up being actually a pretty natural change from energy to exhaust. Yeah, I'd like to go through that. One thing I want to mention real quick, because it's just for the audience, you guys might enjoy this. At one point you made a little helper card when both things were in it. And the speedometer was the race and the fuel gauge was energy. I thought that was very cute. Yeah, I was very excited to bring back energy. So I tried really hard to find a number of different angles. I'm still excited with the space we found, and I hope one day we get to do energy

in a standard set again. But also I was very happy with how the commander deck turned out, which ended up being all about energy. And part of the reason why I was okay with letting it go was that I knew that energy fans would get their team or commander deck with exciting stuff. Okay, so let's walk through how we got from energy into exhaust because it's kind of a cool transition. Yeah.

So my first main attempt at salvaging energy was actually to make it more of a small sideways build around component. When I say sideways build around, I say something that's not one of the main themes of the set or one of the main 10 color pair archetypes, but something else you can get into. And I had designs that were somewhat like the Kamigawa shrines where every color had one uncommon. And as you had more of these uncommons in play, it let your energy economy build up. I like that. We like that somewhat.

It had some success, but it was always meant to be a very small part of the success. And we found that with energy not being a larger mechanic, we were a little shy on what our color pair archetypes were doing. We had thought probably that red-green or blue-red or green-blue, some combination of those, would be doing energy strategies. You know, we had fought probably that red-green or blue-red or green-blue. Some combination of those would be doing energy strategies.

And so we explored also other things for them to be doing, but didn't find anything that was a knockout of the park. And so I decided I wanted to explore using energy, another form of energy that we might be more happy with as a color pair archetype. That led to the next evolution where it was more based on spending mana and essentially very similar to the exhaust cards. For example, we ended up with a green one mana creature. That's a one, one where you can pay four mana to put a counter on it and make a

three, three elephant token. In energy world, that was just a green 1-1. When it enters, you get one energy, and then you can spend four mana and one energy to make the elephant token. So if it died off early, you'd have the energy left over for another activation. But if you had other energy creators,

then you could channel them into this. And essentially, the thought was every card would come with one energy and the mana activation. And so it felt like we just had individual one time activations, which with the mana component makes them a lot easier to balance and design so that we're confident with the game plan without needing to have a ton of effort that we was very challenging, was a very challenging environment with the original Kaladesh set. And so we, for a good deal of time, had that version of energy where it was about expensive mana abilities that are essentially a one time use, but with a

little bit of modularity. And then we decided that even with my lovely dashboard where you have your speedometer showing speed and your fuel tank showing energy, the tracking burden was a little too high. And I had been saying, hey, I know how to turn this energy mechanic into a more monstrous-like mechanic if we decide we need to lower the complexity. So that's the route we ended up going down. Okay, you've mentioned the race mechanic, so let's get into that. So, I think we originally called this like start the race or something, and so the version that we handed off, there were three legs of the race, leg one, two and three, representing three worlds.

And that in order to advance, to get out of leg one, you had to do one damage to the opponent. For leg two, you had to do two damage to the opponent and leg three, you had to do three damage. And then the version we handed off, you got a treasure when you won. I think actually you got a treasure when you won plus a treasure for everybody else that hadn't finished yet in what we handed off. So they're like, you won the race. There was a little more about, by the way, there was a race and you won the race. Yes. And so obviously it changed a little more about speed. So let's talk about how, how did you get from that version to start your race, start your engines? Yeah, so I'll start with the starting the race versus starting your engines.

I know a big part of that was when we called it start the race, everyone felt like everyone should enter the race immediately. But basically any situation where an action you take could end up benefiting your opponent, even if it was down the line, players just didn't respond well to that. So we decided it was pretty important not to have it give something to your opponent and that it just wanted to be about your own individual speed, at which point it no longer felt like a race. And so we liked the Starker engines framing of that more.

The treasure aspect we were also somewhat souring on, where it added a lot to the burden of explaining the mechanic that there was this extra treasure. I enjoyed the idea that you would receive a treasure for each player who hadn't finished a race so that in a commander game you would get three treasure, but that made the tracking or the explanation burden even higher and I was wondering if there's if I was hoping that we would be able to get the mechanic to fit reasonably in reminder text. I think originally the plan was just not to have reminder text in a similar way to the claim the ring mechanic or the D&D dungeon mechanics where we just understand you have to go get this outside

tracker. So the last thing to go was the 1, 2, 3 damage. I found that I thought to keep that for a good while, thinking that it was necessary to give strategic depth to the mechanic and not just be about pingers or a one-man, a one-one flyer. But I ended up changing my mind on that when we did some constructed playtesting that showed no, with the way constructed plays out, it is still a burden to get this reliably. And just asking you to do it at any point in the game makes you play enough differently

that we think just being one damage for every stage makes sense. And we went to that. I will say I did really enjoy the flavor of the one, two, three, especially because to me it really enjoy the flavor of the 1, 2, 3, especially because to me it matched the difficulty level of the worlds where Avishkar, you're driving on roads, so that's the easy difficulty. In Amonkhet, you're driving over sands and rivers, so that's medium difficulty.

And then Muruganda is jungles and volcanoes and the hardest. And, you know, my thought was when it was a race with those three stages, you would have the one, two, three, overlaid on top of pictures of those planes. But when we went to being more about just your personal speed, the racetracker became something a bit more abstract. So let's talk a little bit about max speed. Yeah, we call it victory lap, I believe, in the handoff. So one of the things we realized very quickly is you need a payoff for what you're doing and that the easiest payoff was mostly the cards that would start this had a reward if you sort of finished it. So I just want to talk a

little bit about how you balanced that, like how did max speed work out. Yeah. So we decided that most of the rewards would be for being fully at max speed in order to keep it simpler than if the rewards change at every level. We did end up with some cards in the final set that reference your specific speed. After we had simplified enough elements in the set, we thought we could reintroduce that a little bit. Like I'm a big fan of the speed demon card, which at the end of your turn draws you a

card equal to your speed, so it goes from one to four. A number of cards equal to your speed goes from one to four. Another important thing for us to keep in mind with Start Your Engines was that it felt really bad when you would introduce the tracker and have to keep using it, but you wouldn't have any cards that remained relevant with the mechanic. Because of that, a lot of the rewards were on cards in your graveyard. This made it through to the final set where the five commons creatures with Start Your Engines have three mana, max speed, three mana, remove this from your graveyard to draw a card.

Which is very important to make it so that you continue to care about the race, even if your card would introduce the race, is no longer on the battlefield. That was very important for limited and constructed where you're more building around it and your deck probably either cares about the race or doesn't. That wasn't much of a concern. So a lot of the constructed rewards are shaped differently. Yeah. Yeah, another interesting thing about this is, this is inherently a slower mechanic, right? Like the payoff. So I want to talk a little bit about like why was this in the set? Because it fills a very important function. I'd like the audience to understand like what

function it's filling. Yeah, there was some interest in the sets about speed. Let's make it very aggressive and fast. But oftentimes sets with that gameplay are not extremely popular and limited. And also the flavor of the death race is that it takes place over multiple days. So there very much is an attrition element to it. I really appreciated the way that the mechanic gets you to care about combat in the early

game and makes the game feel driven by combat and dynamic in a way that felt very appropriate to the flavor of the set. But also it has to happen over three turns. So it does also promote longer games. We did at the end have the black-red color pair is more focused about being aggressive and using the speed rewards to end the game quickly, while the black-white color pair and other decks using it are more about using the speed rewards to win a longer game.

and other decks using it are more about using the speed rewards to win a longer game. Another element that I really enjoyed is some of the commander cards, or especially the Vin Wixit card. It's a mono blue creature with zero power, and in your mono blue commander deck that's going to be particularly challenging to start your engines and get the speed for. But because of that natural weakness in the card, it means we really get to give you a powerful ability for doing the reward. So while some cards like that, people push back on them because it looks unnatural to give blue a 04

that's about drawing cards and it tells you to damage your opponents. I think those make for some of the most exciting designs because asking you to go out of your way to care about combat in a deck that normally wouldn't means we can really reward you for it. So one of the things I realized is we talked a lot about vehicles,

but I actually skipped a mechanic that is very tied to vehicles. I want to go back to talk about that. So an interesting story, by the way, for the audience that may not know this is mount,, oh, Saddle, which goes on, Mount, Saddle. Saddle first showed up for the audience in Aulas of Thunder Junction. But we actually designed it for this set and that Aulas of Thunder Junction designed a different mechanic for people riding creatures. And that once we got our mechanics to where we liked it, I know we talked with Dave who was in charge of the central design for Alasun Junction and Alas

changed it to saddle, but saddle actually, it wasn't there first, it was actually here first. So could you talk a little bit about the making of saddle? Yeah, it was useful for, very useful to have creatures that are naturally creatures, but felt like they fit in with vehicles. Even when we don't make a deck promoting fill your entire deck with vehicles, people still have somewhat of a natural inclination to do that. And so I like that combining mounts and vehicles as a type we can care about together gives people a more natural way to do that where they'll,

in their worst case scenario, those mounts will be able to the pinch of crewing their vehicles. It was also very nice for flavor reasons of getting more types of things that people can race with into the set. There were some challenges with templating. At one point, we considered having them be both crew abilities, and maybe it's called crew steed when you crew your mount. But since OTJ was developing the mechanic first, they ended up on it's called saddle and it happens at sorcery speed, and it's mostly about attack triggers. So we moved to using those same limitations, which made for some interesting challenges in the set of the sorcery speed saddling versus the instant speed vehicle crewing,

where it was really important to me to make sure there weren't effects that would increase a creature's power at the beginning of combat, because that meant it would be different for crewing vehicles versus saddling mounts, and I wanted that to be a smoother, you can chunk them as one in limited gameplay. Okay, is there anything, were there any unique challenges to doing mounts that were different from doing vehicles?

Mostly beyond the templating differences and making sure that they felt interchangeable and smooth, no. They're generally a lot easier to work with than vehicles. And we also knew that OTGA was making more of a big deal of mounts, so we were only planning to use them in so much as they helped us. It wasn't like we had an expectation to make tons of mounts even if they didn't fit. Okay, the last main mechanic which was in there at handoff was cycling.

Cycling, two things. One is cycling was in Amonkhet, so it was in one of the worlds we were visiting, and the jokes tend to write themselves of racing set having cycling in it. In exploratory design, I know we made some variants with like bicycling and motorcycling, and we had a lot of fun trying to play around with the word cycling. So what does cycling offer you for the set? What was the value of cycling? Yeah, I was a big proponent of having cycling in the set. For me, the big thing is just it helps smooth out your draws, which is very important in the vehicle set where when you're playing with vehicles, it's even more important than usual that you draw the right combination of types of cards.

So I liked both that cycling was a thing we could put on vehicles to answer the question, what does this do when you don't crew it normally? Oh, well, you can cycle it. And I also liked that we could put it on a variety of other card types because, you know, it's harder when you're worried about vehicles and want to make sure you have enough creatures, it's also harder to fit removal and disenchant effects into your deck.

So putting cycling on those cards also helped to make the equation of needing your vehicles and creatures to line up in the right amount easier. Yeah, one of the big things, the more your format cares about combinations, the more it cares about I need the right mix of things, card flow becomes super important because it just increases the fact that you get what you need when you need it. Okay, so one other thing we did, this is not, so early on we had made the decision in vision that we were more about racing than we were about

the worlds that we were visiting. Like very very early vision design, we were trying to pick a mechanic for every world and eventually we said, you know what, let's more focus on the racing part of it and that we can make individual cars, individual mechanical, individual cycles and stuff that care about the worlds. Um, so we're talking a little bit about how you represented the worlds and since the main mechanics really don't represent the worlds per se. So how did you do that? Um, yeah, at lower rarities, everything being about the race totally made sense, but it was really glad to have the worlds to draw on

to fill out the rares and mythics. For Avishkar, the Gear Hulks came from the original Kalada set, and I felt like they were a slam dunk. Their purpose in the original Kalada set was also to be a straightforward, powerful, exciting thing if you weren't excited by energy or vehicles. So bringing them back for the exact same purpose here made a lot of sense. And Avishkar also, a lot of its characters made sense participating in the race.

It was very important to us that all the characters that appeared in this set have a clear reason for being, worked for being involved with the race and for Abhiskar being full of inventors and drivers made total sense. Amonkhet, I liked the inclusion of cycling. We definitely wanted to have some gods. We were originally going to do five monocolor gods like the original Amonkhet, but in addition to the five mythic gear hulks, having five mythic gods felt like a big challenge and gods in design or general are so difficult to challenge

that we ended up going to just three with two new gold cards, black, white and green, blue, getting us up to all five colors along with Hazoret, the surviving god. Yeah, I also appreciated that Amonkhet was about zombies, which worked really well for the start your engines attrition side of the gameplay as the black white theme. And then with Muruganda, we at one point I was a little worried that Vanilla's and dinosaurs

and oozes wouldn't be enough to make exciting cards for the plane. But with everything else we wanted in the set, it actually turned out that we didn't really have that much room to fit in new Morriganada stuff. So it is mostly just represented by dinosaurs and ooze and vanillas. The set having a lot of complexity, even at lower rarities, meant doing five uncommon vanillas actually worked really well. Personally, I'm somewhat of a vanilla aficionado.

I love yargul. And so I was very excited to just get make more, just to get make more of those. And compared to a lot of our other mechanics that are on the wordier side, it was just a nice counterbalance. And then we have some exciting dinosaur rares and the mimeoplasm for the oo-oos representation.

So real quickly, to talk about vanilla matters, I actually had a whole podcast on this for people that want a longer explanation, but one of the challenges of vanilla matters is it's a hard theme to work with. Yeah. But you did find a way to get, obviously it's not a limited theme,

but you did make some cards and stuff, so if you want to, in Constructed, you want to play around with the theme you can. Yeah, it is more there to be a small thing in limited than constructed. The main reward is I think it's a four mana four three creature of reach that when it enters you search your library for a vanilla creature. And I like that as just being something that mostly a green deck will maybe benefit by having a few of these vanilla cards and this one card that fetches them out. Part of the reason why vanilla matters so hard, is so difficult to do, is you can't give your vanilla creatures trample, or you can't give them more text.

So the rewards for what you're giving for them is very challenging. So I really enjoyed the uncommon tutor that searches them up as just being, okay, in my deck, I know they have no abilities. Once they're on the battlefield, they might get trampled. So I don't like things like the original petroglyphs. And my other problem with petroglyphs is the best way to get many vanillas is just to make tokens. And I don't find vanilla matters to be at all charming when it's just about tokens and not about actually

playing the cards that don't have text on them. So I'm very happy with the one card that searches them out and one card that returns them from the graveyard. So that if you just want to get out your big creatures with no text, that's the thing you can do in draft. So we're almost done here. So any final thing, we mostly covered all the main mechanics, but any other facets of the set you wanted to sort of get a nod to? Something that was interesting in the design? Yeah, I think the only ever main or thing we had to work on that I didn't note was we had a few changes with the racing teams where we wanted to add the blue-red shark pirates.

So we had most of our iteration about archetypes after the handoff was about what these folks are doing. For a while, we considered going into pirate typo or pirate plus vehicle typo. There was one card that remained as a pirate plus vehicle payoff. At one point, they were the second artifact pair in addition to the robots and blue black were about cycling. But after some iteration,

it felt like the blue black archetype worked a lot better with the caring about artifacts. And I love that that led to all these cute and horrifying toys that are possessed. Whereas the pirates ended up about cycling, which to me feels very appropriate as they're just throwing things overboard and scrapping through the race. Just for the audience real quick, when we handed the file over, our blue red was originally the Aveskar team.

And we had the insects in green blue and so part of making the sharks was pushing out Avishkar out of green blue. They end up going to, or I'm sorry, Avishkar end up going to green blue, insect end up going to black green and then we originally had a moraganda team and then I think we decided that like it was so weird for them to have a team. That world was so unorganized as it was that it wasn't... It's the least civilized of the world. And so having a team felt weird.

And so we moved the insects into that slot. Well, I want to thank you for being with us today, Yanni. Yeah, glad to. Thanks for handing off such a cool set. And thanks to everyone I worked with it was really a pleasure. So anyway guys I can see my desk so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks for being with us Yanni and to everybody else I will see you next time bye bye. Bye.