Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1229: Tarkir: Dragonstorm Set Design with Adam Prosak

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with Tarkir: Dragonstorm Set Design Lead Adam Prosak to talk about the set's design.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. We might not know what that means. I'm actually at work today But it is my drive to work metaphorically speaking So today I have Adam Prozac with us who is the lead set designer of Tarkier Dragonstorm And we're going to talk about surprise surprise the set design of Tarkier Dragonstorm. Hey, Dan How's it going Mark? How are you? Okay, so when when last we left off I did a podcast on the vision design. We sort of said, okay, Eric Lauer had led the vision design. Eric had led many, many set designs, but this was his first premier, I think he had done

our core set, but his first non-core set, premier set vision design. And we were going back to a world we'd been to before. And I explained that sort of the best of both worlds, we wanted to capture the dragons, we wanted to capture the clans. And so we handed over a lot of stuff to you. So let's start there. So I want to explain to the audience a little bit what exactly vision does when it hands off. Yeah, so funny story before we start. So Eric Lauer was the vision design lead. He actually led the final design of the original Tarkir.

Yes, yes. And my first set that I worked on at Wizards was Tarkir. So I was so excited and so honored to be able to lead the set design. But I think Eric did a wonderful job with the division design. And so one of the things that I look for from a vision design is a bunch of ideas. So I want a bunch of ideas. Hey, here's possible executions. Here's something that could happen. And then like kind of a North Star. I also want a North Star. This is what the set is about. And for this set, that North Star, this is the best of the both worlds let's focus on both the three color clans and the

presence of dragons so that's like already that's great just having knowing that is is wonderful and then on top of that and we'll go through each when we go through each of the mechanics in the set We'll see like Eric and his team handed over a bunch of ideas for that. And it was up to me and my team, my set design team, do that. So both you and I were on the vision design team. So we were there part of it. And that was, I thought that was really positive.

So do you want to go through the clients? Or the- Let's start with the dragons. Let's go to the dragons. Okay, so one of the challenges of dragons. So we do polls from time to time where we poll the audience about creature types. And most of the time, the number one slot is dragons. Dragons usually wins those polls.

So we know dragons are popular, but the challenge of dragons is they're giant creatures. You know, we don't make a lot of cheap dragons or small dragons. And so making a set typally care about a really big, expensive thing has its challenges. Right. So this manifests itself in all different environments, commander and 60 card constructed, 40 card and up and down things like. You still have to have like a reasonable suite of creatures in your deck and dragons tend to be the

unreasonable high impact that you can only put a few of in your deck and so yeah like you said the big challenge is to find ways to kind of mitigate that one how do we encourage players to do the quote unquote wrong thing and put a bunch of six and seven mana dragons in their dragon? Because you might know on Tarkir, the dragon, there are no baby dragons. The dragons are fully formed.

They come out of the dragon storms. So we can't have like little, little baby one one dragons. They have to be, they're just size. And so we can do something, some tweaking of mana costs and like push them down. But what we really, really knew we needed was a mechanic that lets you have, we call them buyout clauses. So something you can do if you draw your dragon, if you draw too many dragons and you don't want them stuck in your hand. And so that's where Omen comes from. Yes. So Omen started,

and I talked about this in the vision design. Omen started, I think we called this Swoop was where it started. Yeah. What we handed over was more complex than what ended up in the final set. Right. The version we handed over, basically it was a dragon, it had an enter the battlefield effect.

Right. Then you had the option of had like an enter the battlefield effect. And then you had the option of just doing the enter the battlefield effect, you had the option of doing the dragon without the enter battlefield effect, or you could do both. And so there's like three modes to the cards. Yep, and what we found it to be quite fun.

Also found it just like kind of difficult because you have to get three different cards with only two different costs. So you have the base costs of your dragon and your spell cost of the dragon. And so like say one cost two, one cost five, you don't get to change that both of them together cost seven. Yes.

And so we found it a little bit difficult. And then the other reason why we changed it to the simple where you only pay the two mana spell or the five mana dragon, for example, was just complexity. As we'll go through, we have a lot of mechanics in the set. And I think the more mechanic, more different mechanics you have in the set,

the simpler each one of them should be. So we already knew like each clan wanted its own mechanic. That's five. Yeah. We're looking at six and then we had another. Yeah. Another dragon mechanic. Another dragon mechanic. And so that's just seven right off that.

That's way more. Yeah, that's a lot of mechanics. That's way more than average. And so with that, and we do this in a lot of factionalized set where each of the factions will have its mechanic. In this case, each clan has a mechanic. And so we just do a classic, these are simple mechanics. We're not selling you the set based on how cool these mechanics are.

We're selling you the set based on how cool the clans are. And the dragons, the whole of the set. Right, right, right. And so like, now like, oh wow, here's Omen, here's this side thing. He's like, no, here's a dragon. It uses Omen. And that's, you know, the dragon is the cool part, not the mechanically, mechanical, new mechanical. So this is a very common question I get. So let's answer this question. Why were they adventures? Why make them omens? That's a wonderful question. This is something Eric pushed pretty early on not wanting to do adventures. So imagine they're adventures. You cast the adventure part, and then you have this big giant dragon looming over the battlefield.

And you kind of know how the game is going to end. As early as you cast your first adventure, there's not a lot of dynamism to having a dragon on adventure. So if you look at Eldraine, for example, which has a lot of adventure and does it really well, there's not a lot of just huge creatures with adventure. There's a lot. Most of the adventures are on small creatures with big adventure or just like medium sized creatures. These aren't the finishers. There's not a lot of like, hey, here's how I'm gonna, you know, close the game or here's, here's my final

end state. Whereas here we wanted the dragons to be kind of like the final end state. This is how you're going to win a game. So that's one reason. And I think the more important of the two reasons. a game. So that's one reason and I think the more important of the two reasons. The other reason I think is quite quite important still actually is from a balanced perspective if you have a two spells at one each of those spells has to be weaker. If you have oh in this case Omen we could make the dragon as big and as exciting as we wanted as a dragon part because the alternative is you give up your dragon at least temporary, you shuffle it in

and you can draw it again, but you're not always getting that dragon if you use the Omen part. With adventures, you're always getting the dragon so it necessarily has to be a wiki card. Right, or if we give you the bigger dragon, that'd be way more expensive than it normally would be. Mini games might go by where you have, but you never even get to it.

Right, and so we wanted to get the dragons on the battlefield as much as possible. That was our kind of overarching goal, and I think Omen does that much better than Adventure. And one other important thing just to bring up, the reason it's shuffled into your library rather than like discarded is it was important. I know Eric was like, the dream that, like the dragon could come back. I could draw the dragon.

Yeah. It was pretty powerful. Right. We don't want, yeah, you don't want to be like, oh, I'm giving up my dragon forever. Yeah. We, I mean, we tried it without shuffling in. We just went to your graveyard and found it just to be less satisfying, less fun.

Yeah, there's we certainly had some, you know, extra shuffling is not ideal. There's also some things where we had to avoid certain designs because you could just like empty your library and loop them over and over. That wasn't that satisfying. So generally the Omen spells are weaker at least at the common and uncommon level and not something you'll want to play over and over and over again. You'll want to play the dragon eventually. Okay that was our goal. So let's move on to the next dragon mechanic, the other named dragon mechanic. So Behold has an interesting story because we've we've messed in this space before.

This is not like completely new space. These cards are not new, that is correct, yeah. So how, because Behold, of all the things we're talking about today, that's the one mechanic that I don't think we had to envision. No. I think that was, set design did that. Yeah, so Behold is on a,

basically we wanted some, the removal spells, the premier removal spells in common in the set. Have Behold. So Behold, real quickly, just so the audience doesn't know, means it's asking you to have a dragon, either you have a dragon on the battlefield or you have a dragon in your hand which you have to reveal. Right, and so this is very similar to Dragons of Tarkir

had a cycle of cards like Selengar Scorn and what's the dragon there's a Drakonic Roar was the red one and there was a cycle of them and they were very popular very cool and they played really well. We like we want to do that again and at some point came the idea like hey this is something we do a lot and there are a lot of words. Yeah. You spend almost the entire regional text box explaining how to cast the card. Yeah. And so we was like, hey, can we do something short in this? It's like you said, it's something we've done in the past or whatever, and we've kind of been adverse

to it because of how long it is to explain. So I'm just like, hey, let's shorten it up. And I think it's on the five common cards and like two or three other cards. It's not on a ton of cards, but we did like it. It is really fun on the cards that exist. So just a real technical thing for you guys behind the scenes here.

When we, there is a difference between what we have to write on the card when it's sort of real rules text versus what we have to write on the card when it's reminder text. Reminder text is allowed to be a lot more casual and less technical. And so a lot of times one of the reasons

we'll keyword something, make it into a word, is that the reminder text can be much shorter because it doesn't have to capture all the technical stuff, which has to be a lot longer. Right, right. Reminder text is really good at explaining what the card does in English or, you know, whatever the language the card is printed in. Whereas rules text has to like follow a very like magic protocol. Yeah, very computerish. Yeah and so Behold is more or less our technology to be like hey, let's casually describe. Yeah, we we've been we've been like Internally we kind of like point to a dragon. Yeah, that's what bold is like promise. You have a bunch of dragons in your deck

and yes is like, promise you have a bunch of dragons in your deck. And yes, yeah, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. But yeah, that was something we kind of played around with. I think it was a handful of designs that were written out similar to the dragons of Tarkir's side. Because those are really, really fun cards. Road, I mean, like I said, also, as we'll get to when we get to just guys, sometimes we just label things that we do. Right, right, yep. Okay, so the one last thing is, this wasn just sky, sometimes we just label things that we do. Right, right. Yep.

Okay. So one last thing is this wasn't a name mechanic, but it was a dragon thing. So Dragon Storms. So I explained this in the vision design. What we handed over was enchantment tokens called Dragon Storm tokens that made dragons one less to cast. Yep. So what happened to the Dragon Storm tokens? So yeah, and you could get a bunch of them. And sometimes like there are just some decks that were like, hey, I'm going to try and create three or four of these and just have a parade of dragons.

And it let you do like the swoop idea. Like because you were discarding your dragon, you can get the dragon and the spell and everything all together. Right. And they were especially problematic when you had the version of Omen where you could cast both halves. So it was like cost-reducing and you're just getting a lot of value.

And eventually we found them to be really hard to work with. But we knew we wanted Dragonstorms. They were just central to the story. So we wanted Dragonstorms. It's in the name. It's literally in the name of the set. But it is very central. So we wanted something

that showed you the art of a dragon storm on the card as its primary thing. And so we ended up with a cycle of what's the right incentive to get you to play dragons. So we came up with these enchantments, they have ETB spell effects, they would normally just be sorceries, but you get to return them to your hand when a dragon enters. And so we found that was like a really nice reward of, if you do this once, it feels really nice. If you get to return this once, it feels really nice. And that's all you often have with dragons.

You don't just have a game where you cast like five dragons or whatever, like usually like, where the first four not good enough to, you know, that sort of thing. So for the most part, we wanted something that was impactful to do in small amounts and these like self-bouncing things, very inspired by the Cartesian trials from Omicron.

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of times when we have a a problem but the answer is did we previously have this problem? Right, just look at other sets for inspiration and see we contextualize you know like there's a lot of fun stuff we do in Magic that we often don't get to revisit every all the time. Yeah. This was a really good example of something that we did in Path, it was really fun, and solved our design problem. Okay, let's get into the clans. So, in Concerter Cair, each of the clans had a keyword mechanic, often in factions, that's not always, but often in factions, each faction gets its own mechanic. And then, the clans evolved sort of over the course of the block, because they went from three-color clans to two-color clans, ally clans.

But we were more, though, focused in kind of the beginning of the, because that's when they were the three-color. And one of the rules I know when we do returns is, hey, if you play faction cards from the first visit with faction cards from the second visit, hey, they should feel like they go together. Not that the new one shouldn't do new things or, you know, we want to give you new keywords, but we do want synergy between them.

Yeah. And it's not like a huge priority. Yeah. But it's definitely nice to have. And I think the reason I believe that the there's some synergy, but also like for flavor, we're trying to capture the same flavor. Yeah. For each of the, you know, each of the clans.

So like mechanically they should do similar things over time, if not the same thing. Like I know like in Ravenous, because we've just done Convoke twice or whatever. Just wasn't enough. But there are no returning, I guess there are some prowess for JustGuy. But for the most part there are five there five new

I mean we get a just guy with new Okay, so let's start with the obzon. Um, so obzon is white green black And it is very much about endurance It cares about the endurance of the dragon and the scale is its symbol And it's the most offensive of the colors. And then in cons, we definitely messed around with plus one plus one counters. Yes.

So, and I believe this was the one at the vision summit, we had something, everyone said, eh, and we came up with something else before we handed it off. Yeah, this was, so going into set design, this was the clan I knew needed the most work I don't even I think there was something to do with Absent also used keyword counters, right? capacity the thing that we the thing we had that went to the vision summit was

We were very fascinated by fabricate We were inspired by fabricate for the ala nash and the idea either you get like Fabricate was you get plus and plus encounters or you make tokens. Yeah. And so we were playing around that space. And so for a while, instead of getting just plus and plus encounters, you could get other things like, oh, I can make a token or get a flying counter. And so you could get different abilities that didn't go over really well.

It is definitely, definitely the one we needed the most. And also the one that kind of was the least load bearing in the clan's identity. So like you said, the Obzon are all about kind of toughness. Resiliency is what I use a lot. You know, it has the toughness based things. It has like the, you know, enduring creatures. It's like, it plays for the long game, they're kind of hard to kill, hard to, you know, defeat.

So that was the kind of mechanical center of the plan. So there's some, you know, toughness matters things. But the mechanic kind of gives you like the flexibility to adapt to what your opponent is doing, adapt to what you need. Right. So this one is this one is a slight variant on Fabricate where instead of getting multiple 1-1s you get one however big your Endure number is. So like Endure 3 is I get a 3-3 or I get 3 plus 1 plus 1 counters instead of 3 1 three one ones or whatever.

And that did a nice thing for helping balance the choice a lot better. In general, making three one ones is just so much more powerful than three plus one plus one counters on most creatures. But the three three helps balance that decision out a lot better. Well, just to explain so the audience understands this, the problem with 3-1-1s is that each

creature has value as a creature. You can block with it, you can sacrifice it, and so 3-1-1 has sort of more total value than a 3-3, especially for like one card worth. Yeah, yeah, if you're using one card to make 3-1-1s, that is generally stronger than using one card to make a single 3-3. Yeah. Especially with a lot of, we'll get to Mardu, a lot of, as an overlapping thing, is like there's a lot of value in having a bunch of extra things. Yeah. But yeah, in general, I think the set uses

both plus one plus one counters and an extra token quite well. Like you said, there's lots of sacrifice stuff to help use, especially when you have endure one. And then there's also lots of cards that care if you have plus one plus one counters on your creatures that help you make the other decision and I think that when I play the clan especially like in draft or sealed I find the clan to be very

flexible and very interesting from game to game like not I'll play the same deck and I'll have two very different games. Well modal choices are always nice just because if we build them correctly, you have different reasons to do different things. Yeah, and also, just also like in-game, where there's like a lot of incentive to do a lot of different things. You find that, I find that the Endure cards

are all quite good, and something I want to put a lot of in my deck. And then the other thing that's nice is, making cards that care about plus and plus encounters just plays into a theme from last time we were there, it's the last time put plus one plus one counters on. So we made a bunch of cards that you know. Yeah. Yeah.

So the first time outlast a lot of the creatures had creatures with plus one plus one counters game keywords. Yeah. Yeah. All that. We knew we wanted something that could put plus one plus one counters on your creatures. Right. Okay, let's move on to Jeskai.

So Jeskai, the interesting thing about Jeskai was, we had tried one or two things early, but we, other than when we get to mobilize, mobilize I think was the first mechanic we came up that ended up in the set. But the second one was flurry. So flurry is an ability word that triggers when you play your second card for the turn.

Yes. So the interesting thing about this is this is not new. This is a theme we've done numerous times. It's a very popular archetypal theme. So I just want to talk a little bit about what is it like sort of finally naming something that we've done before? Yeah, and so that's part of the,

when you have a lot of mechanics, you want some of them to be simple, you want a lot of them to be simple, including stuff that like you didn't think was worth naming before, now is naming, but gives the clan just like an identity. So like, yes, could we have gone, just guy doesn't have a keyword

and it just has these cards. Yeah, but it wouldn't felt like, you know, had as strong of clan identity. So, you know, we give it a new keyword helps unify kind of what the things like when you're like, you know, drafting a play sealed, you find a bunch of these and you can put them all in your deck together. And they work well when you have multiples like this is one word again, where you have, once you have one card with Flurry, you want to have another card with Flurry and then then you'll have a bunch of ways to because when you cast your second spell it triggers all of your things with Flurry

so a lot of times you'll have these really exciting moments in your games where you just like okay here's my second spell this happens this happens that happens you know and you just go down and what is you know pretty exciting turns. But yeah, this is probably the one that I think works the least well with the original mechanic, Flurry and Prowess, because Flurry doesn't care if your spell is a non-creature spell or not. Sure. And then Prowess wants you to cast a whole bunch of non-creature spells. So once it gets you mostly... There is intersection between them, but yeah.

They're both lots of spells, but they both have a very similar flavor. But we liked a little bit of Prowess in this set. There is some returning Prowess. It's a situate, so we can bring back. Yes, Prowess is a mechanic that we do in sets quite frequently. And obviously, just guy was

the original place. Yeah. For prowess. So we wanted to put a little bit but like it's a little bit awkward. So we don't want to do overdo it. But yeah, I think that just guy is my favorite clan in general. Like I like it. It's really funny story about just guys like Get to a point where like we wanted the clients overlap I was like actually really skeptical of flurry because of how Awkward it was next to prowess and I was like, alright should we cut this in like every single person? I was the only person that didn't like it. Every other design, I know you liked it. People on the set design, people on the vision,

all the play testers were just like, no, this is really fun. We know this is fun. You should keep it. And so it's here. Okay, let's move on to Soul Tie. So Soul Tie is black, green, blue. So Soul Tie, so I've heard about Just Guy. Abzon's about defense and resiliency and stuff.

Jessica is about being clever and cunning and being smarter than everybody else. So, Saltai is kind of about ruthlessness, about sort of doing what it needs to get to get things done. Yeah. And it taps into forces other people won't tap into like death and stuff like that. Yeah. And so, one of the kind of creative shifts we did here is like less about like the pure ruthlessness but more about using everything at the disposal.

The cycle of life and death is... There is a card named cycle of life and death that shows this off perfectly. But that's one of the phrases we used often to kind of describe what are the Sultai like this time around. So you'll notice a lot, they still have the zombies, but they're also zombie druids, whatever to help. They work with the land.

I think they changed the most, really, and we wanted something to, a mechanic to help. And I don't want to get too deep into this, but we did have creative consultants, because each of these factions are based on a real world section of Asia and there's five different ones. So we had different consultants for actually different factions because they're tapping into different things. And a lot of that has to do with some of the changes we made.

It'd be respectful to wear from the source material. And also kind of to tell the stories like, oh, the Sultai lost their green mana when they were taken over by the dragons. But now their green mana is back and we wanted to emphasize what is green about the Sultai. Oh, something I didn't bring up. One of the things we did when we sort of came back

is we reshifted the center. So in original concertcentrate Arc here, normally in a wedge thing, you would think you would center it in the enemy color. Much like when you do arcs, we center it in the ally color. But because we were losing a color in the last set, and that color was the enemy color, we didn't want to center it there

because we wanted a through line for the clans. And so they were on the side colors. But when we came back, we did recenter them. And so if you read the story and stuff, we definitely, there's a focus of sort of re centering to the enemy color. Right. And so in this case, the Sultai is more green than it was in the first time we're on Tarkir. So Renu has a good job with that.

And I think Renu is just exactly handed over from Vision. Yeah, we went through the early Vision was us like making a much narrower. Like, oh you specifically get a zombie or you specifically like and then finally like let's just make it broader. You just you just get effects you use up and has an effect in the big area. This was one of the things where me personally being on the Vision team really helped set design out a lot. Yeah, I got to see the whole process. I'm like, hey, we tried a bunch of different things. And there was just a clear and obvious winner, which was the one you see in the set. So this one was, you know, settled on we kind of just iterated on. We

found that most of the cards were fun if they gave plus one plus one counters. There are a couple of cards that don't. Yeah. But most of them give plus one plus one counters and fewer of them give keyword counters than handoff. We did a lot of creative things with this. Think that we give out a stun counter on your opposing creatures. And I thought that was cool.

There's one, there's a card that like puts Decade counters. So we had a lot of fun with it. But yeah, the base gameplay is you put some plus one plus one counters on your thing from your graveyard. Sultai uses its graveyard really well. This was a positive way to do it, which I thought was really good for the new vibe of Silt Tide.

And I think it's really fun, like there's a lot of my favorite, like kind of limited cards are just the straightforward, renewed cards. And then, like I said, there's a lot of fun stuff we were able to do at higher rarities that make for really, really interesting cards with this mechanic. That's cool. Okay, let's move on to Mardu. So Mardu is white, black, red. It is the fat, it admires the speed of the dragon and the wing is its symbol. And it's,

it is the fastest of the five archetypes. For sure. I mean it's still three colors though. I mean it's as fast as we get with three colors. Right. And so one of the things about three color environments is we tend to want to make them slower because otherwise it's just all about like you need time to fix your mana. Like you know drawing three colors of mana requires either luck or time or both. And so we wanted the gameplay to be consistent which means we couldn't make it blisteringly fast.

So Mardu is the fastest of the things but it's also pretty good at winning through combat even in the later game. So Mobilize does this well, whereas a lot of the Mobilize... So, Mobilize is Mobilize N number, and then you make that many one-one creatures, warriors, I believe, that must attack along with the creature. Yeah, they attack, and then they'll go away at the end of the turn. I remember Eric pitching the mechanic,

and they did it go away at the end of the turn. I'm like, Eric, this is, we can't do the but, but do this. And we have a really fun mechanic that I wouldn't have thought of. Yes, we did try the first version of it. They stuck around. It took one play test.

Yeah, it was like completely unreasonable. But once again, I want to stress that this was super early. Oh yeah. Like it was the, of all the mechanics in the stat, it was the earliest mechanic. And we, you spent a lot of time fiddling on it like the one we handed off to you guys I believe that Menace right. Yeah the tokens had Menace um felt like that was kind of its way to get punched through in the later game they were really hard to block we we knew we wanted mostly mobilize one I even thought at some point that mobilize would just be,

all of them would be one and we'd cut the number. So you just make a single one, one. Just because mobilize two with menace is just like really hard to have enough creatures to block. And so, and we played around a bunch and like, I think the development of mobilize was the most challenging. There's lots of things so we wanted a slower environment. Right. But we wanted the murder to be fast they want to be attack oriented, I think so how do you get that while still

letting people play their dragons. Yeah. And yeah, I think it was the most developmentally challenging aspect of the environment to get right. And I'm happy with what we did, I think it was the most developmentally challenging aspect of the environment to get right. And I'm happy with what we did. Like I think removing menace really helped a lot on, okay, you have a bunch of extra creatures temporarily, find ways to use them, sacrifice them, pump your whole team, count the number of creatures. There's a handful of cards that really get stronger if you have

a ton of creatures. So a lot of times, we just like, you'll build up, you'll build up, make one big attack with a whole bunch of mobilized tokens, and you have 10 creatures, and then you do whatever you need to to win from there. And I find that that kind of aggressive gameplay that's still good in later game situations to be really fun. I really enjoyed it. I really liked how the Mardu turned out. One of the challenges in general with aggro strategies is they don't have a late game. Especially in this slow environment that we didn't want Mardu like, if you just don't win right away, then you can't win.

The conversation is if your aggro decks are really good early on, win right away then you can't win. Right and the and the conversatory is like if they have if your aggro decks are really good early on and also still really good late is like well what what do the other decks do? Yeah and so you have to give some pull a pull and so we kind of pulled back on their early aggression a little bit you won't see a lot of like one and two mana creatures that can deal a ton of damage early on in the game. And so that's where we compensated. That's how you get the, how we're able to get the balance right. Kind of shifts, it's kind of weird, take some of the aggressive deck's power out of the early game and put it into the late game. And so that was the hard part, but I think we did a good job.

Okay, let's get to the last, the teamer. There's a blue, red, green. They care about strength. And they tend to be the ones that most go Paul. They care about power or toughness. Yeah, and then that is still true. That is what the original took it. And then the element we wanted to play up is kind of their spell casting or their mysticism. Yeah.

And so we knew we wanted a mechanic that had some sort of incident source, went on an incident sorceries. Yeah. And I think Harmonize is just an incredible mechanic for representing exactly what the team are all about. Yeah. They want to be creatures, but they want to be casting spells as well.

So like, Hey, what if you have a spell mechanic that works better with bigger creatures? Yeah. And so Harmonize is a flashback variant where you can tap your creature and cost reduce it by the creature's power. So you have a, say you have a flashback or a Harmonize cost of 5U and you tap a 4 power creature. Right. And now your thing just costs a single blue mana.

And so that's really nice. It's really fun. I'm the most proud of that mechanic, although I'm pretty sure we had that one, you know, I did not come up with that. Oh, no, no, that we didn't envision. So the interesting story on that one was that we, we tried different things, and then we kept coming to like, but it doesn't feel teamer. That was sort of hard. It was really hard to get something of both of the aspects we wanted to play with.

We kind of knew we wanted to have flashback variant, and we wanted to care about big creatures. And it took us a while to figure out how do you do that. Right. Because we were like, are they scaling effects? But there's just not that many scaling effects you can do. And so it ended up being a good... And the other cool thing about it is,

flashback costs tend to be large, just because it's very valuable to get a cast of spells second times. And normally, traditionally, flashback spells are big. So it just leaned right into what we wanted to do. Yeah. And I was a little worried that we would even find costs that looked reasonable. Because you want them to be large, but if they're cost reduced, they aren't that large. And we just found that tapping your creature was not for a cost, and we put them mostly at sorcery, so that it would be more of a cost.

Like we found that instant speed ones weren't much of a cost at all. You'd leave your creature back to block, and then, you know, after you block or whatever, you can just tap it to- Right, it wasn't a real cost. Right, right, so having them at sorcery, it wasn't a real cost. Right, right. So having them at Source, we made it more of a real cost. And made it so that we could make enough cards for the team.

So yeah, I'm really, really happy with how that turned out. I think the team are also really, really fun to play. Okay, so we're going to wrap up here. So any final thoughts on Tarkir Dragonstorm as a whole entity? I'm super excited for the set. It's definitely one I've been looking forward to. So we work, you know, I was done working on set design roughly about a year ago. That year has been really hard. I can't wait till the set comes out.

I've been chomping at the bit. I'm so excited that previous season is finally upon us and I just can't wait for everybody to get their hands on it. It's a set I loved making and yeah I just can't wait for everybody to get their hands on it. Yeah often it's a 10-year gap between us our first visit and the second visit so we don't on some level I think everybody's very eager to go back to Tarkirk. We haven't been there in so long. So I too have fond memories because I loved the vision for the original, for the original, the cons and I hand it off to Eric. So anyway, so thank you so much for joining us. It was fun talking it. So everybody else, I can see the table at work. I don't know what that means because I'm already here, but I do know to the end of my

metaphorical drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you for being with us today, Adam. Thank you. And to all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.