Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1227: Tarkir: Dragonstorm Vision Design

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

In this episode, I walk through the vision design for Tarkir: Dragonstorm and talk about the evolution of the Dragon subtype and clan mechanics.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, guys, today is all about Tarqir Dragonstorm vision design. So I'm going to talk about the early making of Tarqir Dragonstorm. So our story actually begins before Dragonstorm. We go back to the original cons of Cherokee Air Blocks. So let me just set up what we did before so it has a lot to do with our return.

So once upon a time we used to do blocks. Blocks were three sets every year. There was a fall set that was large, a winter set that is usually small, and then a spring set that was either small or large. In the early days it was large, small, small. Eventually we started messing around with large, small, large. And then we started experimenting with what if a large set had new mechanics? What if we sort of started over in the third set, so try to make something new?

We had what we call the third set problem, which people were getting tired of things in the third set. So try to make something new. We had what we call the third set problem, which people were getting tired of things by the third set. So we had this idea of what if we reinvent the third set? So we had done that a couple times and we were scheduled again to do large, small, large where the third set reinvented itself. It's gonna be on the same world because the creative team wasn't large enough

to make two different worlds at the time. But anyway, I was trying to do something just a little bit different. And so the idea that I started with is, what if we did the following? What if when the large the first set came out, you drafted it, you know, large, large, large, or AAA, when the second set of come out B, you drafted A, AB or BAA, trying to change the order. But the idea was when the third set come out, you would draft the third set with the middle small set, but not with the first large set.

So the idea is the first large set was drafted by itself, AAA, the second set was drafted with the small set and the third set was drafted with itself and the small set. So the small set got drafted with both big sets, but the two big sets did not get drafted together and there was no overlapping mechanics or mostly no overlap mechanics between the two large sets. But the question was, what is that? What are we doing? It was a cool idea. So we had just done the second great designer search. Ethan Fleischer and Sean Main had gotten internships, six month internships, which would later

both get turned into full time. But anyway, I was trying, I really wanted to sort of test their skills. The second grade designer search had done a lot more world building than we had in the first grade designer search, during each of them had built their own world. So anyway, I wanted to explore this. There was also a designer named Dan Emmons, who also was a young designer. So I took the four of us and I said, okay,

next year we are doing, we're gonna start design next year on this set, but I don't know what it means. I want to do, I explained the parameters that it's large, small, large. The middle set gets drafted with both the largest set. Why? What can we do that makes sense? And so we came up with a whole bunch of different things.

Oh, you're traveling from the first set to the third set. And those are the locations. And the second set is the vehicle, the boat that you're traveling in. Or maybe it's a war and the first set is the place of the first war. And the second set is the two planes fighting. And the third set was the third, you know, the other plane.

We tried different things, but the idea that we liked the most ended up being a time travel story. For those who don't know, I love time travel. The core of the time travel story was we go to a world, that world, there's something about it, somebody on the world goes back in time to change the world, he changes it, and then the last set is the alternate timeline. So it's original timeline, the past, alternate timeline.

That seemed like a really cool structure. We ended up deciding that we wanted the last set to be a dragon set. Originally it was gonna be an enemy dragon set, two-color enemy dragon set. And the idea was we wanted to get to a, how do we get to a dragon set? So I worked with Brady Darmoth,

who was in charge of the creator team. And the idea that we came up with was, okay, what if we went to Sarkin Vaal's homeworld? He loves dragons, but what if we learned that his homeworld, the dragons had been killed off? So he goes back in time and he saves the dragons. And so once we knew a Sarkin Vaal, had been a world in plane chase called Mung Seng, I think was the name. And we were looking at that as maybe the one that ended up not being exactly that, but that was our original idea. We modeled it after a bunch of different Asian cultures.

And originally there were four factions, and then eventually we decided to do five factions. And once the choice was to do five factions and once the choice was to do five factions we had never done a wedge set before which is a color and it's two enemies so we decided that it was finally time to do a wedge set so the first set had the clans the clans were the wedges and then and we had we did morph and then we had a through line of the evolution of morph so we had morph and we had manifest and then we had a through line of the evolution of morphs. So we had morph and we had manifest and then we had megamorph, although megamorph not the success one would hope. And then we ended up making the third set not enemy but ally because it turns out when

you draft wedge you want to draft enemy and we wanted the third set to draft differently. So in the end we set it up. So the clans exist in the first set. You go back in time, you see the proto-clans. You go to the alternate timeline, the dragons have taken over and the clans have been subsued by the dragons. Now, we understood when we were making the original story that when we came back, maybe we'd want to see the clans again. We thought Wedge could be popular. So we worked into the story that the people within the, when the dragons were, dragon lords were running everything,

they had learned about the clans of the past because the clans existed in the past. And that they were, there's this desire to learn more about the clans. So anyway, when we started the design, one of the things that like, I believe this was from exploratory design, the idea of best

of both worlds was our mantra. So what happened when the Root of the Set came out is, not the dragons in Tarkir, there were people that really liked dragons in Tarkir, but it was not nearly as popular as Khans in Tarkir. People really, really liked the clans. And so we knew we needed to rediscover the clans. We wanted to have wedge gameplay. But hey, the dragons are here.

We still wanted to have dragons. The dragons were popular. So like, OK, best of both worlds means we're going to do clans and we're going to do dragons. So let's walk through. I'm going to start with the dragon part of it. So the vision design was led by Eric Lauer. So Eric Lauer has led a lot of development teams

slash set design teams. But he had never done, well, that's not true. He had done a vision design once for a core set, I believe. But he wanted to do vision design on a normal set, a premier set that wasn't a core set. And he, original Tarkir, I had done the original design, handed it off to Eric who did the development. And a lot of the innovations of how we put together, T Turkair was done by Eric, a combination of me and Eric and

anyway so he knew the world really well he was excited by it and so it felt like a good place for Eric to sort of experiment with vision design. It was a well-understood world. It was a world he knew well. So anyway Eric led the Adam Prozac would lead the set design. Okay, so the idea of the dragons is one of the challenges of doing dragons and making dragons matter is dragons tend to be big and expensive. Well, it's a hard type of theme to do when things are big and expensive.

So one of the ideas we knew from early on was we liked the idea that the dragons had a secondary use because you're not gonna put a lot of giant creatures in your deck if all they do are giant creatures like maybe you know if you're talking like six mana plus you put one in your deck maybe two in your deck it's hard to put a lot in your deck in sealed and constructed you can get a little bit more so the idea we came up with originally the mechanical was called swoop and the way swooop worked was the dragon had sort of a... basically you could... there was a spell associated with the dragon. I think we like,

flavored it like the breath weapon originally. And the idea is you can cast just the spell, you could cast the dragon... oh I see, the way it worked originally was the dragon entered the battlefield and had an effect. And so essentially what you could do is you could, I think the earliest version is you played the dragon and if you paid the swoop cost, he just came in, did his enter the battlefield effect and you shuffled it into your library. You could play it without the swoop cost, which just was the dragon, or you could play the dragon and the swoop cost in which you got both the dragon and the enter the battlefield effect the entrance effect

So essentially you had three different formats you could cast the spell you cast the dragon you can cast the dragon and the spell Now also at the time We and that we were messing around Dragonstorms and the way we tried dragons for a while was their enchantments that made all your Dragon spells cost one less. I think we also played around for a while that your activations cost one less. But anyway, the idea essentially was if I get enough Dragon Storms out, I might be able to play these bigger Dragons and pay their swoop costs all at once.

So even though it was hard to play them all together, that was the idea. In the end, what ended up happening was the third, the, the time you got both the dragon and the spell just didn't happen all that often. And in, in design and set design, they decided it was easier to just let you cast the spell. If you cast it, they were kind of like adventures. We called them omens. The way an omen works is you can cast the omen out of your hand, just like you cast an adventure, but where adventures get exiled, omens shuffle back into your deck. So the idea is you have a dragon. Hey,

the reason you're putting your deck is it has a cheaper, useful spell. You'll play that spell if you can't play the dragon. And then maybe later on you'll draw the dragon when you can play the dragon as a dragon. And we ended up, the cards look a lot like adventure. There's a little spell on the left hand side because you cast it first. But like I said, omens are different in that you don't exile and later cast a dragon, you shuffle it in.

The other thing we had to come up with is something we had done in the first concept arc here was some of the ways we made you care about dragon was showing that you had a dragon in your hand. Like one of the things we like to do is what we call threshold one, which is as long as you control one of these, you get an upgrade or bonus or the spell gets kicked or you know, you get some extra something. And the idea was we said, well, what if we took the threshold one that we normally do add in the reveal from your hand and we ended up making what we call the

hold and the hold says is okay, look, I have to have a dragon in play or show you I have a dragon in my hand. I just got to have a dragon in play in my hand somewhere. I got to have a dragon. And so the idea of a hold by the way is I think it's a deciduous thing where we can behold other things. The first time we did it is dragon, but behold allows you to do other things. Just the set goes dragon. So we ended up with the omen spells. Oh, and then the dragon storms ended up not being tokens.

Instead there's a cycle of dragon storms. They're enchantments. They enter and do an effect. And then whenever a dragon enters the battlefield they return to your hand They were loosely based on a Cycle of cards we did in their original Theros Okay, so that is the dragons. That's what we're doing the dragons, but there were five Clans, so let's walk through the clans. We'll start with abs on abs on is white

black green We'll start with Obzan. Obzan is white, black, green. Obzan is all about endurance. They have the scale of the dragon. And the idea of the Obzan is, we will win if we last the longest. The person who wins the fight is the person who's standing at the end. So one of the things we did with the clans, as said, and this is true just of any factions that we do,

which is when we return to a world that is factions, we want to make sure that if you play faction cards from the first visit with faction cards from the second visit, they play together. We want to do something new. We wanted new mechanics. You know, each clan has its own mechanic. That's how we did it last time. We wanted to repeat that. But we want to do something new. So we wanted to be conscious of what they did before. So last time they played around with plus one plus one counters, both the mechanics for the clan used plus one plus one counters. And so the idea that we wanted something where you could strengthen up over time.

The first thing we tried was a mechanic called resupply. And the way resupply worked is whenever another creature entered the battlefield, I think, sorry, whenever this creature or another creature entered the battlefield, you were allowed to pick two. And if you did, you put a plus one plus one counter on the creature. So the idea essentially is A, it had a little tiny kicker that if you had extra mana, you could buff itself. But then if you played other creatures, you could you had the extra mana you could buff this creature got more powerful over time

That I mean played well a little bit narrow the next thing we tried was something called ancestry and the way ancestry worked is That you had a choice when you played with the creature that you had a choice when you played with the creature. It had a keyword counter listed on it after the ancestry. And you either, you get the keyword counter or a plus one plus one counter. So like it might say flying and then, oh, do you rather be bigger or have flying?

Would you rather be bigger or have menace or have reach or have haste? You know, the idea essentially is there's a secondary thing that you can get. In the end, we ended up going with something we called Endur. So, ancestry, the inspiration for ancestry was there's mechanical fabricate in the set Kaladesh, where you had a choice between making the, giving the creature a plus one plus one counter or some number of plus one plus one counters or making that many one one tokens.

And we are inspired by Fabricate. We like the idea to use this choice. And we like obviously that one of the choices was the creature can get plus one plus one counters that plays into the OBS on theme. But we wanted to give you some choice of something else. And so what we did is we ended up doing sort of a riff on Fabricate. Instead of getting N11 counters, which is how Fabricate works, you get an NN creature. Meaning that if I choose, let's say it's Endure 2, instead of getting 211s I'd get a 2-2. And the reason for that is lots of little creatures just kind of gum up the board and

just combining them together allows you to make bigger creatures that just can have more impact and can be more aggressive and less defensive. And then we made endure into a keyword action, meaning you can endure whenever, you know, when I enter endure, when this dies endure, like you, once there's a keyword action, there's lots of different like when you attack endure, you could do it in different times. And like I said, being keyword action, it's like, okay,

here's when you do this thing. And endure always has a number and it's like, oh, do I want to get bigger? And when you endure, you have the creature endures because you have to dictate who exactly gets the counters and the counters are chosen. Okay, so that was Abzan. Next is Jeskai. So Jeskai is blue, red, white. They admire the cunning of the dragon. Their symbol is the eye of the dragon. And their whole idea is the person who wins the fight is the smarter fighter.

The person who thinks things through, who plans ahead, the person who's able to think on their feet, that's who wins the fight. So last time, Jessica had done prowess, because the idea was we wanted them to care about instance sorceries. They're the color trio that most cares about instance sorceries. But we wanted it to also be combat centric. They're based on the Shaolin monks. They are good at fighting, but they're smart. They're smart fighters is the idea. So prowess was pretty cool in that it buffed creatures, but it rewarded you from playing spells. Now since then the prowess had become evergreen and then went back to being deciduous. But it was a tool we had access to.

We knew we'd use prowess, we liked it, but we wanted to have a newkeeper. That's not a deciduous thing. The first thing we looked at was a mechanic we called Focus, which was a redone version of, what is it, from Theros, Heroic. and the idea of heroic is if you target me something happens so what focus said is if you target any of my creature

something happens so the cool thing there is you could have multiple creatures with focus and one spell could trigger all of them. In the end, we ended up not quite liking how that played or it, once again, it wasn't that it was bad at gameplay, it just didn't quite have the just-guy feel that we wanted. So what we ended up doing is we took a mechanic or a theme, I should say, that we do all the time, which is rewarding you for playing your second spell. That's a theme we do in a lot of archetypes.

It just plays really nicely in a spell archetype. So we decided we would just name it. We made an ability we're to call it Flurry, which interesting it was the design, the name we use in design was actually Flurry. And so we ended up using that. And so the idea is it just sort of codifies using the second spell and caring about the second spell and

So that is what we did for the just guy Okay, next up is the salt eye. So the salt eye is black green blue so the salt eye really is about ruthlessness the ruthlessness of the dragon the idea of the You know who wins the fight? The person willing to do what it takes to win the fight. There's nothing's off limits. And one of the biggest things about the salt eye

is they make use of the dead. They make use of the zombies. And the idea is a lot of people like, oh, that's not okay, you can't mess with the dead. And they're like, hey, it's a resource, we'll use it. So one of the things that we wanted to, we knew we wanted to do with the dead and they're like, hey, it's a resource, we'll use it. So one of the things that we knew we wanted to do with the salti is we wanted to have a graveyard sort of focus for the salti. We had done last time Delve, a mechanic that was originally previewed or future shifted

in a future site called Delve, which you could use the graveyard as a resource to make spells cheaper. That ended up being a little of the broken side for those that know their history. So anyway, what we ended up doing is our first mechanic was called Exum. The way Exum worked was they were, it went on spells and, sorry, not just spells, it went on creatures and spells, any card. It literally could go on any card. All it meant was you can pay two mana and exile this from the graveyard to make a 2-2 zombie. So the idea was it just stapled zombies onto things.

So I could have a spell that drew me cards or it was a giant growth or maybe it was a creature. But once it got to the graveyard, it then had the utility that it got me zombies. And so it allowed us to make zombies. And ended up being a little, it just made every single salt egg that kind of go in the same direction, which is sort of a go wide strategy. So next we tried to harvest. Harvest went on creatures.

The way it worked was it would go on a creature that had an evergreen ability. And then in the graveyard, you could exile it for some mana a creature that had an evergreen ability, and then in the graveyard, you could exile it for some mana, but that mana was variable, to put some number of plus one plus one counters and a keyword counter that shared the ability that creature had onto your creature. Now, one of the rules was it had to create

less plus one plus one counters than its power and toughness, meaning if your opponent killed it, they just went down on what the threat was. Yeah, you gotta recoup some of it, but not all of it. Just because it's really hard when you're recouping all of your power and toughness. It's just hard to deal with.

In the end, we decided that it was, once again, a little too narrow for what we wanted. So what we ended up doing was renew where you exile something from the end and it has an effect. So you spend mana, you exile. So they are all things in which the card has extra utility, much like Xoom had a zombie

and Harvest lets you enhance your creature. Same general philosophy. We just kind of backed up a little bit and gave you the opportunity to, or gave us the designers the opportunity to have more effects that we could use. And that ended up being pretty cool. Okay, next up is Mardu. So Mardu is red, white, black. So Mardu, they care about the speed of the dragon.

Their symbol is the wing. And the idea for the Mardu is, you know who wins the fight? The fastest wins the fight. If your opponent is, if you can defeat your opponent before they can set up any resources to stop you, well, you've won the fight.

So they're all about speed and they're the clan that's the most aggressive. Both in the sense that they have the lowest curve and that they're all about attacking every turn they I mean the most aggressive thing you can do magic usually just constantly be attacking with creatures so that is what Mardu is doing so the interesting thing about Mardu is the idea of what we wanted Mardu to do is we settled on very early Mardu originally did raid in the concentration camp, meaning they just rewarded you for attacking. That was sort of the general

gist of Mardu. We want to reward for attacking. So we knew we wanted something that rewarded attacking. So the idea we got early on was like, okay, we wanted an attack trigger. And then we came up with an ability that we had at a time called Horde. So the way Horde worked originally is Horde N, it was a number, when you attacked you just made that many 1-1 creatures that were attacking with you. They didn't die or anything, other than if your opponent might block them, but they were just, you just got creatures. And anything that survived the attack you now had, and in future attacks you could attack with anything you wanted to, but they weren't

retired, they weren't required to attack. We then realized that it was just too good. You were just making too many resources. So the next version we tried, we then said, OK, what if they went away at the end of turn, they're temporary creatures that only come when you attack? And then we ended up giving them menace. So they were one-on-one creatures that had menace. The idea we really liked about them was

here's this resource you can attack with them for starters and if they survive the attack, hey you know they're going with end of turn you can use them and so there's a lot of sacrifice built into Mardu and so you can sacrifice things like oh I can sacrifice a creature, destroy a creature, sacrifice something to draw cards or whatever and I can use that as a resource. It turned out in set design that we didn't need menace was better than we needed and so we took it off. So the final version which is called mobilize whenever this creature attacks create a tapped and attacking one one red warrior creature token sacrifice in the beginning of the next

end step. So once again we did mess around with them at one point of them sacrificing at the end of combat, but we realized we wanted more freedom to do spells that weren't necessarily instants or permanents that had activated abilities. Like the idea of doing a sorcery where you sacrifice a creature as an additional cost, felt cool. So we ended up doing them as we just moved it to the end of the turn. Okay, we get to the final clan.

Timur. So Timur is green, blue, red. Timur is all about the strength of the dragon. Oh, by the way, I didn't say before. The Sultai was the tooth of the dragon. Mardu was the wing. And then Timur is the claw of the dragon, Marty was the wing, and then Timur is the claw of the dragon. And the idea, they're much about the strength and the ferociousness of the dragon. And the

idea there is, who wins? The strongest wins. The biggest wins. And so Timur really has a strategy of going big. Their big mechanic in Concierge was ferocious, which cared about power four grader. We did the variant in dragons. We cared about a combination of eight or greater. So the idea essentially was we wanted big things. We wanted a mechanic that cared about big things. So we tried a couple different things. Another thing we were looking for is a lot of our mechanics ended up living on creatures. And so we were looking for a a lot of our mechanics ended up living on creatures. And so we were looking for a spell mechanic. So the first thing we came up with is so called erupt. And the way erupt work was it was flashback essentially, except you can only cast spells out of your graveyard on the turn that you played a land. So it's kind of a cross between landfall

and flashback. The card played well and I'm sure we'll do this mechanic one day, but the problem was it didn't really play into the the team or flavor of giant creatures. So the next thing we tried was we tried Rekindle, which was the same thing, meaning there were spells that you could cast from your graveyard, but instead of being a land you had to have a giant creature, a creature with mana value five or greater come into the battlefield And I think on that version we tried it where the spell was free when you did that Or at least much reduced in cost because you had to cast the creature Then that That didn't quite work out. So the next thing is we tried a mechanic called fierce

The idea of fierce was okay It's nothing you had a it's not that I had an enter because the problem is if you spent mana to enter It was harder than do things. So I said, okay, what if instead of you need to cast a giant creature? What if you just had a giant creature and so we use ferocious as a guideline said, okay, these are flashback spells. You can play them. And then you can flash them back for free. If you have a creature power for or greater. So we tried that that was broken. Okay, so we said we like the idea of a flashback your flashback variant spell. We like it on on on spell instance sorceries, but what could we do? Is there

something we could do that rewards you for having bigger creatures? So in the end, we got to what we called Harmonize. So Harmonize says you may cast this card from your graveyard for its Harmonize cost, and you may tap a creature you control to reduce that cost by X, because where X is the power of the creature. So the idea is harmonize our sort of flashback cost, but they're expensive, even a little more than normal flashback. But you can reduce them by tapping one of your creatures. And the bigger the creature, the more the reduction.

Now, honestly, the costs all have a colored mana, so you can't reduce the colored mana part. But anyway, we tried that and it ended up playing really well. It's kind of neat because it allows you to go tall and use your creatures, but some of the times you can use your creatures for big spells, big effects, and that was definitely fun. Because one of the challenges in general of playing a faction set is you want each faction to do different things.

You want each faction to play out differently. And so we like, we ended up liking how Harmonize played. So that was those were the things. So what happened was most of the stuff got turned in from Vision. Abzan, the very early Endurer was handed out. Like we actually went to we went to the Vision Summit, I think with Ancestry. The note we got was people didn't like it enough we then sort of evolved ancestry into Endurer and so the early version of Endurer was handed off but it was in a very rough state said design did a lot of work with it Flurry where you cast the ability where we have cast the second for rewards you for casting

second spell we got that relatively I think it was the second mechanic we nailed down um renew from soul tie uh we had i think we handed over stuff that was using the graveyard as a resource and we had spells you could you could remove it to cast spells i think we were a little narrower and they went broader in set design also i think we had instances they ended up just doing them on sorceries Mobilize we called it horde but mobilize was in the handoff. Although I think at handoff It still had the menace on them said design decided to take that off and then team are harmonize Yeah, we we had harmony we handed off harmonize in a in a form pretty close to where it ended up. So anyway That was how we made

Tarkir Dragonstorm. Like I said, there was a lot of iteration that went on. The basic structure of the set, by the way, mimicked what we had done in Conta Tarkir. It was actually the set that Eric was most proudest of having done, and he really liked the structure he had done and kept it mostly. Done and he really liked the structure he had done and kept it mostly And yeah, I said like it was it was fun. Oh Real quickly just to explain why isn't there more? Why isn't there a face down mechanic? It turns out that Doing five clan mechanics. There's just barely enough room to get morph in and even then it was a tight fit Once we had to add in the dragon mechanics, which was kind of our sixth thing, there was room for five clan mechanics and one other thing. That one other thing last time had been Morph,

this time was the dragons. And we felt that the best of both worlds really needed the dragons. So Morph had done some nice stuff, multicolor. It's nice to have things you can do with your multicolor cards before you can get all the colors to cast them and I do think morph did some good work in original cons of Turk here but we found some other tools we made use of

two-bred which is something that Eric was a big fan of that ended up so anyway there are a lot of cool things that ended up in the set like I said the drive the set feels both very dragon me and very clan And so I think all the elements are there. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy playing it It was a lot of fun to make Uh, and it was It was anyway, it was very exciting. It's fun to go back to worlds. We haven't been doing a while 10 years is a long time in magic So I hope you guys all enjoy revisiting or visiting for the first time if you weren't there before

So I hope you guys all enjoy revisiting or visiting for the first time if you weren't there before Tark here and seeing all all that took here has to offer but anyway guys I'm at work So although that means means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic It's time for me to make a magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye