Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1224: Why We Do Themes

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

In this episode, I explain the value of themes by going through the various teams that work on a Magic set.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast is all about themes. Why do we do themes? What what is the value of doing themes? So the way I thought I'd approach this today is I'm gonna walk through the different steps of making a magic set and talk about why each step along the way, why it appreciates themes, why themes are important. So we will begin with exploratory design. Go to the very beginning.

So the value of having a theme, like one of the things to remember is we make a lot of magic sets. And we want the magic sets to be different from one another. Like one of the things that I often talk about is I think most magic sets are 80 to maybe 90% the same thing. That you know magic sets are magic sets are something that are the core of it. Like you ever seen a design skeleton? I talked about making for those that have read my nuts and bolts columns is each slot has an allocation. Oh this is a green giant growth like effect. This is a counter spell. This is a kill spell. This is a small creature a

medium creature. This one costs one to two mana. This cost three to four mana. That there's a lot of different slots that break down and so one of the a medium creature, this one costs one to two mana, this costs three to four mana, that there's a lot of different slots that break down. And so one of the things that we're, one of the things you understand as you make magic sets is a lot of magic sets, the core element of the set is the same. So one of the first important reasons for themes is it just separates things. It just gives sets its own identity. That one of the things that's really important is, hey, we're making the 150th, 80th, 200th,

I don't even know. We're making another magic set. We made a lot of magic sets. Why is this magic set different from all other magic sets? And from an exploratory design standpoint, like the whole point of exploratory design is exploring, right? Is testing the space. When ordered to test space, you need space to test.

Usually the way we start exploratory design is, oh, this is why this set is different from all other sets. We don't focus on the similarity, we focus on the differences. And the idea is, okay, well, this 10 to 20% that's different, that is what, you know, that is where the focus is going to be on the set. And one of the really cool things about sort of magic design is it doesn't take a lot to make design feel different. That is why when I say the sets are 89% the same, it's not a bad thing.

Like there's just certain structure you need to be a magic set and play a magic game, but that 10 to 20% difference really, really can matter. So in exploratory, the way we want to start exploratory is, hey, we're doing a set about thing x. Here is our theme. And that really, early on, allows us to figure out where to look.

Because the idea essentially is, whatever it is that we're doing different, whatever it is, is that something that we, you know, for example, I will use Zendikar as my example here. We knew going into Zendikar that my idea was I wanted to have a set focused on land. And what did that mean? I didn't know exactly what it meant. I looked back and realized that we had had individual cards that cared about lands

But we never had a set that that was kind of the theme that we had cared about You know lots of other card types we cared about artifacts and enchantments and creatures but we never we had never really cared about land in a way that we'd cared about other things at the level and that was kind of the the through line for Zendikar in fact For those that have heard the story of Zendikar, there wasn't a lot of faith in the idea of a land-based set. Most people poohed it. And in fact, Bill Rose was skeptical enough of the idea that he said to me, he goes, look, I'll give you guys, I forget, like two, three months, maybe three months, I'll give you three months to work on this,

but then you got to show it to me. And if I'm not convinced it makes sense, we're gonna do something else. And so I had three months to sort of prove to Bill that it was viable, which Bill didn't often do. So it was clearly like there was some skepticism that land could be a focus. But that first, the beginning of the Zendikar Pre-Date's

actual exploratory design, but the beginning part of Zendikar, which was sort of what we do in exploratory design, those first three months was like, okay, what are land mechanics? What can we do with land? And we spent a lot of time looking at, okay, you know, is the land drop a resource we can play with? Do we care about land? Can lands mimic other things? You know, can lands have costs? What can lands do? What are the limitations of lands? And that was a lot. So that's the key. So for exploratory, we want to figure out in any one area, what is the potential in that area? And so themes give us direction.

Themes give us a place to look. And so themes from exploratory design standpoint are very important because they really give us the idea of what exactly it is we're working on. What about this magic set is different than every other magic set? Okay, next, so at the same time that we're doing exploratory design, exploratory world

building is going on. So obviously themes are most important in a brand new world because the idea essentially is well what is it? Like for example, I'll use Mirden, original Mirden for this one is we knew we wanted to do an artifact set. And so the idea for the world building was, is there a way to imbue artifacts? At the time we were talking about metal, is there a way to imbue it into the world in a way like we wanted a lot of artifact creatures? Why is that the case?

Why you know? And then we came up with this whole artificial world that was built, you know, it ends up by Karn. But the idea was it was a metal world because we were trying to do an artifact set, we built a metal world and that, you know, a lot of how world building functions is, okay, we're building a world, well, what are we building to? What are we trying to make? And oftentimes it's the theme that sort of drives the attention. Okay, we're trying to make a set about this thing. And that theme now, sometimes the starting point is a creative starting point and they're

creative is a lot more leg up because that's the inherent starting point. Something like Ixalan, the very first idea, the pitch to start the idea was like Conquistador vampires. Like, like we started with a world. So in that particular case, we started with the world. But like I said, with Mirrodin, we didn't start with the world. We started with a theme. So then the car was similar in that we started with this mechanical theme of lands. And then from that, the creative team said, oh, we like this idea of what if we make this adventure world where the land itself is dangerous? You know that allowed us to make dynamic land because there was a set that wanted a lot of land And we wanted the land to look cool. And so a lot of that is trying to figure out

You know what one of the things creative has to do in doing their world in building is hey We have to think of this world visually. How is this world going to look? And that theme really helps drive home. Another good example was the reason we first came up with Indistrad, the design was we had made the set Odyssey, which was a graveyard set. And when I was talking over with Brittany Donovan, who at the time wasn't in Charge Creative, this was before he was in Charge Creative, and we sort of said that we missed an opportunity

that the graveyard seemed like a wonderful opportunity to do Gothic horror. And that was the original inspiration that would later lead us to do Innistrad, was the idea of, oh, this mechanical theme lends itself to this kind of world. And so themes do a really good job for world building of sort of giving direction and giving,

like world building like design has to coalesce around something. And so if the beginning concept isn't inherently, it's a mechanical concept, then they can start thinking about how the world is shaped by that mechanical concept. Okay, next we get to vision design. So vision design, once again, for those that do not know my metaphor, I use it all the time.

But real quickly, we're building a house. There's four parts to design. Exploratory design, vision design, set design, and play design. Exploratory design is doing the research. Oh, where could we build the house? What style of house we want to build? Are there new building materials? Are there new means to construct? You know, exploratory is doing the research on building the house, figuring out all the learning about what you want and what you could do. Then the idea of vision design is making the blueprints. Vision design is about making the structure of the set, the mechanics of the set and the mechanics of the set, and the themes of the set. But from my metaphor here is making the blueprints for building the house.

Set design are the builders that actually have to build the house. And oftentimes things that seem to work in the blueprint might not work when you get to actual life. I know they want a wall here, but there is this stone that we can't dig through, whatever, they have to figure out how to adapt what they're doing to the environment they're building in.

And then play design, I started to like interior design. They're doing all the finishing touches. They're doing the balancing and the polish and just making everything as perfect as it can be, much like how you're trying to make your home the best version of it. Okay, wait, there's my metaphor.

Okay, so in vision design, vision design is all about having a vision, bringing something to light. And themes are super important there because they definitely sort of give a, something to build the vision on. It is not, for example, when we made, Zendikar seems my go-to today, when we made Zendikar, excuse my go-to today, when we made Zendikar

it's not as if the vision was land matters in a vacuum. We sort of figured out why land matters, how land matters. And the idea for example is once we got onto landfall, so landfall really ended up being the thrust of the design. And here's why. Remember when I said design is like 89% the same? Well, something is different. Sometimes it can be more than one thing, but ideally design is best when there's one major

difference. Basically, the idea is, oh, it's magic as you know it, but in this set, we care about when you play your land. And landfall does something that's really interesting is every set you know every deck has landed or almost every deck has landed it and you I mean the normal experience of playing magic is interacting with your land, but you know Zendikar says oh wait wait wait we're you interact a slightly differently. You're normally when you play land, it's just like, you know, that the most of the time, if I have a land, and I can play it, I will. I mean, the only reason

you don't play land in normal magic is that maybe it's the last card in my hand, I'm trying to bluff that I have something. I mean, sometimes you hold back land, just because you're trying to bluff information. But other than that, you mostly play land when you get it. But all of a sudden, here comes landfall, because they're in the car with landfall, and it says, hey, playing a land is a resource and that thing's happened. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, I want to be more careful when I play my land because I want to maximize this resource that landfall gives me.

And it just makes you play differently than you normally do. And the beauty of it is landfall is one thing. It only just says, hey, when you play land, pay attention to that. But the idea is it only takes the focus of one thing to really give the set an identity. That 10 to 20 percent is very impactful. And normally what we do, and this is sort of vision's job, is hey we don't want it, everything can't be different. Really one thing needs to be different. And a lot of what we want to do is we're going to be more than one

mechanic, but we want those mechanics to be cohesive. We want those mechanics not to feel like they're just going in all different places. We don't want those mechanics saying, hey, we're all going in the same direction. I've talked a lot about vision and one of the main goals of vision is you're setting direction for the rest of the design. Cause if everybody's going in the same direction, you get a lot more work done. And if everybody's working at odds with one another, you sort of can spin work done. That if everybody's working at odds with one another you sort of can spin your wheels. But if everybody understands this is what we're doing and everybody's moving in the same direction that's how you get really good collaborative design.

And so that is the number one job of vision is to get everybody moving in the same design. How do we do that? Theme. Theme is the great director. Oh this set is about the graveyard, about Gothic Horror, whatever it's about, whatever the thing is that is its focus, it sort of says hey this is the thing that is different from normal, this is the thing that's gonna, this is the connective tissue to make all the things go together. And so

theme really does a great job in vision of providing direction, of getting everybody on the same page in the same. And it also says, Hey, it's the linking thing that takes the disparate elements of your set and makes it feel unique and the whole. Then a lot of the key of design is you want your set to feel like it's a singular thing. Like magic sets, there's a lot of moving pieces in a magic set. But if we're doing our job correctly,

we want people, we want it to feel like all the stuff comes together, that there's a goal to what you're doing, that there's a feel to what you're doing. You either have to use a recent set, we're like, okay, we had this racing theme, but really, our, I mean, the racing theme was sort of a larger theme. And then our mechanical theme was very much about vehicles, which was an extension of the racing theme. And the idea is that your theme really allows you to say, hey, there's different ways to

approach this theme, but the theme itself gives connective tissue. So that's the big part in vision is that theme gives connective tissue. Okay, then we get to set design. So set design has to actually build the set. Their job is to make the cards. And the theme there is really one of the big things when you're trying to make a magic set is there's a lot of different things you can do, but if you understand the direction, you know, once you have vision,

the idea of set design is we're not just building a house. We're building this particular house. We're building a Tudor house or whatever, whatever style of house you're building. And that means that it helps make decisions. So one of the things that's really important when you are making a set is you need to prioritize what matters. Something has to be the most important. Something can be secondary, second, tertiary. But the idea is when two different demands of the set

meets and fights, somebody's got to win that. And that's a big part of set design is understanding priorities, is understanding what matters most. Because whatever is your main priority, you have to focus on that. And when things sort of fight for that, that is what wins out. Now, a lot of that, like the reason that's important is vision sets its vision and the set design has to understand its priorities to help match that vision. And the big idea of the priorities is just knowing by which order you have to focus on

things because things will come in conflict with one another. And when they do come in conflict, you have to know what wins out. That a lot of making set design happen is you have different forces. Like for example, you'll have different mechanics going on. you have different forces like for example you'll have different mechanics going on you have different themes of archetypes like you're trying to sort of make a lot of things gel together and so one of the the guiding principles of set design is understanding what your priorities are so you know where like because one of the most common things in set design is different forces fight with each other. Oh, I like this mechanic and that mechanic, but which which mechanic takes priority?

Which which architect, you know, as you're sort of figuring out things, you have to understand what functionality each thing has. And a lot of vision is theoretical, set design is practical. of you know vision is theoretical set design is practical I'm not like a lot of vision is thinking sort of big picture right it's in some levels hypothetical I mean we're building a set to sort of do proof of concept but once again it's a proof of concept it's an idea you're building an idea set design isn't building an idea set set design is building a set. And you know, when the rubber hits the road, one of the challenges of building a set is things don't always work exactly as you think they will.

Things that, you know, on paper seem great, on the blueprint seem great, don't actually work sometimes. And then you have to figure out where, you know, how to make that happen. Anyway, so priorities is the key. You have to figure out your priorities. Themes do a great job of understanding priorities. Okay, next, we get to names and flavor. So creative does a lot of different things. Creative did the world building early on.

They have to do what's called card concepting, meaning the artists have to get descriptions of what's going on. What do the cards represent creatively? And so there's somebody who's in charge of that and they work with the art director. And so the idea is every card has to represent something. Well, how do we figure out what they represent?

Theme. That theme pulls through. Just as like there's a mechanical theme, there needs to be a visual theme. For example, I will use like War of the Spark. So War of the Spark was an event set, right? It was a capstone event set about this giant war between Nicole Bolas and his zombie eternal army and most of the planeswalkers. And so we needed some way to sort of show progression. So they use time of day to represent that. That there were three different sort of acts of the story.

There's the morning, there's the afternoon, there's the evening. And so the idea is, as you sort of figure out what's going on, I know for example, leading up to War of the Spark, the two sets, we had two Ravnica sets, and there was sort of a Cold War feel that we were trying to get. And so the idea is the art people need to figure out the mood and tone of the art. What are the, what visual things are pulling through? And so essentially the idea is that, you know, there are, just as there are mechanical themes, there are visual themes. And that is really, really important to making the set. It's important to the art. And then one of the big things is that people don't think a lot about is once we know our theme, the art director picks the artist to maximize the theme.

Let's say we're doing fairy tales. We're doing Thorn of Eldraine or Wilds of Eldraine. Okay. There's certain artists that just capture the sense of a fairy tale well. And so we have a lot of different artists. I mean, there is some overlap from set to set, obviously, but the art director wants to go to his toolbox of artists and say, oh, I need to portray this concept in this way. What artists do I have that excel in doing that particular thing?

And so just the very choice of artists itself is dictated by the visual theme and the larger sort of thematic sense of the set. So theme doesn't just determine mechanics, it determines art. It determines artists. And then in doing sort of the other creative elements, the names, the flavor text, the theme drives that as well. Oh, we're doing fairy tale world, okay. Well, we want to feel like a fairy tale. We want to feel like Gothic horror. We want to feel like Greek myth. That whatever it is that's driving the essence of what the set is,

the theme permeates all the creative elements. And much like it dictates the mechanical elements, it dictates the creative elements. And it does a lot to sort of determine, you know, how the set looks, what are the overall and another good example is Dusk Mourn. Very early on, they came up with a motif. Motif is, is there some sort of visual quality that shows up?

And for the motif in Dusk Mourn was moss. So one of the ideas that they said to the artists, hey, we're pulling through this idea of moss and then the world building, when they sort of did all the development of the ideas is they said to the artists, hey, we're pulling through this idea of moss. And in the world building, when they sort of did all the development of the worlds, they pulled that moss theme through. And that moss motif shows up a lot in the set. So anyway, the whole idea is just while the same idea of the themes are giving direction to the mechanics, it's giving direction to the creative in a way that is very powerful and very potent

and makes the set feel uniquely its own thing. And then in the names and the flavor text, there's a similar quality, which is, okay, what is our inspiration? For example, for names, there's phonemes or letters or, you know, one of the things is normally we're inspired by some part of the world like we're doing Ravnica it had a sort of an Eastern European feel we're doing Ixalan it has a lot of Mexico and a little bit of Central America like there there are elements you are pulling from different places and understanding where your themes itself create your influences and the influence dictate things.

They dictate the kind of words you use, they dictate the kind of flavor you use and flavor text. The other big thing is what kind of story are we telling and that will dictate how we tell the story. So the story isn't like the theme impacts the art, the artist, the story, the names, the words, you know, all the different elements get the theme permeates all those things. Okay, then we get to play design. So one of the advantages of the theme for play design is play design has to figure out balance, right? Play design's about, hey, we need to do something.

And that one of the things the theme does is it makes a singular focus. And that when there's one thing to focus on, when the difference between this set and every other set is one thing, then it gives play design itself a focus as well. One of the challenges is if we go too broad and do too many different things we've never done before, it can put a lot of strain

on play design. The classic example there was with Companions and Mutate in Icoria, we just kind of we went a little too broad and had too much going on and we overwhelmed play design's ability to have time to play test at all So one of the things about theme that's very potent for play design is the more we pull together the more it's singular and what we're doing You know like we want to have one very strong mechanical theme so that there's one thing to focus on you know circling back to Zendikar, okay Landfall is different landfall impacts things and the veryikar, okay, landfall is different. Landfall impacts things.

And the very first time we ever used landfall, we had to understand that. Now the nice thing obviously is we redo themes, we go back to themes that we have some understanding of. But usually there's something new about what you're doing. Every set wants a newness and the theme tends to play into that newness. You tend to lean into the theme

to figure out what the newness is. That newness is what we have to balance. That's the thing we haven't experienced before and that's the challenging thing in play design. Okay next we get to editing. So editing's job is language of making sure that all the cards A, read in a way that you the player understand what they do and that they are consistent so that they match other magic cards and they match just stuff within it. And the theme like everybody. One of my goals of today's podcast is one of the reasons that themes are so important

is everybody has to get on the same page. And when I say everybody, I don't just mean the end users for you guys, the players, but the people making the game, we have to all understand what it is we're trying to do. My example here is, let me use the unsets. The unsets have a very specific tone to it. So when you're editing the unsets, it's a little different than editing a normal set. For example, one of our favorite things to do is we have more freedom in reminder text like we'll make jokes in reminder text. That's not something we do very often in normal

magic, but we do a bunch in unsets and also some of the templates get to be a little bit looser and on than they do normally because anything that is silver border slash acorn doesn't have to work in the official rules it doesn't have to be parsed by the computer for digital so like it allows us some leeway to do some things and one of the challenges in templating an unset is hey we want we still want the player to understand what's going on but because we have a little bit limitations, it allows us some freedom in what we're doing. And the reality is every set has its theme

and editing understands what that is and it very much dictates the kind of language that gets used. I mean, editing has to work with creative to name mechanics, but all that has to come together to be something cohesive. Okay, next we get to bonus fun and to frames. Those are slightly different. So the idea in any one set is, you know,

are we making something, are we doing something mechanically or creatively that really dictates a need for another frame? And at the same time, bonus fund is figuring out, hey, are there fun ways to execute this thing to make cards that really pop and stand out? And while those are technically different things, they have a lot of focus.

There's a lot of overlap between frames and bonus fund. And sometimes bonus fund makes their own frames. The main frames are more a functionality of, hey, we have a mechanic, we wanna make adventures, but how do we make adventures? How do we communicate to the audience that adventures work a certain way? And the frame helps with that.

And then Booster Fund can go, okay, now that we're doing frames, what if we made storybook frames and stuff like that? And very much so as we figure out how we make our frames, how we make our, our, our booster fun. That's completely like booster fun. For example, we will have meetings very early on where it's like, okay, what is the theme of the set?

What does that theme mean mechanically? Where are we pulling from? What real world sources do people associate with that theme? And the idea there is we can go back and say, oh, like I know in Unfinity we were doing a retro science fiction. Okay, well we borrowed there's a whole visual language that comes from that and so our the the bonus fun we did for that set was a very stylized, you know, it was from a certain time period and a certain style

of showing sort of the future, but a retro future. And so whatever our theme is very much dictates the kind of frames we'll make, the kind of booster fun, the imagery, you know, it just dictates all the different things we're playing around with it. And that also, by the way, gets to packaging it just dictates all the different things we're playing around with it. And that also, by the way, gets to packaging. That the people who make the packaging have to think about the themes.

You know, it's not just a matter of... It's not like every magic set's the same. Each magic set has to sit on the shelf and be different. And so the people who are making all, you know, that doing the layout, the people making the packaging and the graphic design, all are very much influenced by what the design is that is the theme of the set gives them a Follow-through and so, you know if you're doing gothic horror, okay there's a certain look and feel to that and

The world-building team is building that into the set and into the art and then the packaging team has to build that into the packaging Also when we talk about digital, digital for example they also have graphic components. They will make backgrounds, they will make you know they will make different things that play into the feel of the set and that feel has to come from that theme. So the theme very much dictates how everything will look. Packaging, booster fund, digital, all that. Okay then one of the last parts is we get to marketing and public relations. So the idea of marketing is it's time we have a set, we have to sell the set. Well we make a lot of magic sets right? Marketing is constantly marketing magic sets, because we make a lot of magic sets.

Well, how do they differentiate? Once again, you get the theme. Oh, well, you know, so my story here is we were making the original Throne of Eldraine. So I had to go to marketing and I said, okay, look, this set has two big components. One component is Camelot. We're really touching upon like Arthurian legend. And the second is fairy tales, which in my way, Arthurian legend is a lot of kind of English fairy tales. And we did a lot of fairy tales of the rest of Europe.

And the idea was that when I went to marketing and I said, look, Camelot, the Camelot part of the set is very cool, but it's a well Magic goes to all the time. You know, Magic at its core was about really high fantasy. And a lot of that is borrowing already from our third-year legend. You know, the idea of, oh, look at all these knights. Well, Magic does knights. We've done them on Dominaria.

We've done them on Alara. There's a lot of worlds that have a very, a very sort of Camelot feel to them. So what I said to them is that's not the thing that's going to excite people. Not that it's not cool, not that people won't like it, but if I said to you, hey, we're doing nights, you're like, don't you always do nights?

But the fairytale part, that was something new and different. That was the theme, that was kind of the innovative theme. We always want to do something innovative. That was what sort of set it apart from the norm. And so we really said to marketing, let's lean into the fairy tales. The fairy tales are the thing that are different. And so marketing is, the theme is super important

for marketing, but more so than anything else, it has to answer the question, why is this magic set different from all other magic sets? And then public relations is we interact with media that a lot of people report in us. And it's not just media, we also interact with influencers. A lot of public relations nowadays isn't just a matter of reporters talking to you,

but also influence getting influenced. So hey, we are trying to have our to, uh, have our influencers excited. So, you know, we want to play it up. There's a reason why when, you know, throwing an Eldrin and everybody got to wear Western gear or when you're doing, um, dusk more and there's, there's a, there's a dark eighties, you know, vibe to it. That whatever it is, the set is, whatever the theme is, whatever we're playing into that allows the influencers to go in a certain direction, and it allows when they're getting people to interview us.

For example, when we did Dusk Mourn, we got interviewed by some people that did horror, like magazines about horror, and they don't normally talk, especially about more modern horror. They don't necessarily talk to us about magic because they write about modern horror. They don't necessarily talk to us about magic because they write about modern horror What do we do?

But when we align when hey we're making a magic set about modern horror all of a sudden we're playing in there in Their space and they come and talk to us and say oh we're excited explain how your game captured the thing that we're excited about And so theming allows marketing have a focus it allows public relations to have a focus, it allows all the influencers to have a focus. Anyway, hopefully you could see, the whole point of today is the reason we have themes is it helps at every level of the process. It helps exploratory design figure out where to look,

it helps world building focus on what kind of world we're building, it allows vision design to get everybody on the same page and going in the same direction. It allows set design to set priorities to figure out what matters most. It lets art dictate who artists are and the visual look and the motifs. It allows names and flavor text to figure out what the influences are. It allowed us play design to sort of figure out what's the thing they most need to balance. It allows editing to figure out what's the thing they most need to balance.

It allows editing to figure out their language. It allows booster fun and frames and digital to figure out the look and feel. And it lets marketing and PR and all the influencers have a sense of how to help sell the set. So the theme, it does a lot of work. It helps along the way. So why do we do themes? Because of all this work. Because themes are a very very potent part of making each magic set distinctively its own. And that my friends,

is why we do themes. But anyway guys, I'm now at work so we all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.