Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1231: Tarkir: Dragonstorm Creative with Lauren Bond

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with the creative lead for Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Lauren Bond, to talk about the worldbuilding and creative execution of the set.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition. So I like to do interviews when I'm at home. So today I have Lauren Bond, the creative lead for Tarkir Dragonstorm. So we're gonna talk about the creative of Tarkir Dragonstorm. Hello. Hello. Okay, so this was an interesting set. It's a return. So we had a bad habit in days of old of setting up really interesting worlds and then completely changing them so they're different. And this one was a little different in that we did at least set ourselves up to do what we did now. So let's talk about it. So we were going back to to Tarpeter it once was a world without dragons

They changed the time now. There's dragons the dragons were supreme the clans went away And so we came to you and we said okay, but we wanted clans and dragons. How do we make that happen? Yeah, so a lot of the early conversations were okay, how do we fill in the gap? Like what's happened in the meantime? How did we get from A to B? We got from a world of dragons to a world in which there are clans and dragons, and what does that look like? So we did a lot of ideation from, are the clans and dragons aligned? Are they allied with each other?

Or do they still hate each other? Is there, like, where's kind of the source of conflict? And there's always that balance, right, when you're looking at a faction set because inherently the conflict is Between factions that's sort of the way the sets are designed You want to pick a team you want to join your team and you want to play it? So we didn't want to play up too much of the humans first or the humanoids. I should say there there's dog folk here um, and the the humanoid versus the dragons, but that was

such an important part of the previous set. So it was a lot of looking for what is the kind of middle ground space in which the clans make sense to still exist, but they also have conflict with dragons. And that's really how we ended up in the space of these new wild dragons that were spawning, something that was different that we hadn't seen the exact same version of on Tarkir, where dragons had really previously been kind of assigned to a specific brood. They were sort of related to Silumgar or a Tarka at least visually. And so this was a chance to say, okay, these

dragons are beholden to no one but except you because you can behold them. Yeah, the one question I get a lot is, hey, why wasn't this set all about the clans fighting the dragon, the existing dragons? And I mean, mechanically, there's all sorts of problems because we're trying to do a web set. But talk a little bit creatively, like why didn't we want to do that? Yeah, and I think the biggest piece is we're making a game. I'm creative.

I have, as much as I can get really excited about the depth of the lore, everything that I do wants to be in service of making the best game experience. I want players to be able to play that three-color faction set. And so trying to exist in a space where the factions don't have a strong identity or they're trying to figure it out for themselves would have made for a pretty unsatisfying factionalized setting. And so we really needed to lean into those strong identities. And that kind of meant we needed to do some short cutting to not see it within the set, but acknowledge that it still happened with the world.

So I loved that we did still find places to kind of work those elements into the set itself. That was kind of where the impetus for the cycle of sagas came from, really asking for like, can we showcase just a little tidbit, little bits of information to suggest that there has been events that have happened in between. And who knows, maybe there will be a chance in the future to showcase more of that immediate conflict. Maybe it's in sets like Foundations where we can be atemporal and take little tidbits from different times and place in Magic's history and kind of blow out some of those proportions and really see it. But this way we could still deliver on what was that like clear faction set that people were going to pick their side and was going to have a nice strong solid identity that

they could kind of really glom onto that also aligned with the mechanics. Okay, so one of the interesting things about this is we want to bring the clans back and by the way for those that read the stories in the stories of dragons of Tarkir, the clans were like the clans existed in the past and the people were sort of finding the clan. We kind of understood one day we might have to come here. So we did, unlike some previous sets where we just blow everything up, we did give ourselves a little leeway.

But the interesting thing here is we didn't undo time. We're not returning to the clans as they were pre, you know, time shenanigans. This is, I mean, Jeskai is Jeskai, and there's elements of Jeskai that's the same and goes for all the clans, but let's talk a little bit about, sort of, they have a little bit of a new identity,

which is not completely divorced from their old identity, but not 100% what their old identity was. Yeah, so the piece that we really thought about, Forrest and myself, because a lot of the changes you also will see are visual, like updated outfits that they're wearing, the way that they dress and look is different than it was before.

And the sort of impetus that we had was saying, what is it that people loved about the versions of the clans from the past that we can preserve and bring forward? And what is it that can showcase that they have changed, that time has passed, that they don't just sort of a hundred percent revert to what they were previously or ironically become a thing that technically has never existed in this timeline. Like the the Mardu that we saw is a Mardu that in the first time

is a Mardu that never existed and then the one from Fate is the one that existed. It's very complicated. A lot of early world building work was like learning the timeline. And I still still make mistakes on it. Yeah, so what is it that people love that we can bring forward? What is it that we can update? And that's really where we took the kind of direction from game design. Y'all were really working around wanting the central color, at least from a mechanical perspective, to be the returning color. And that gave us such a great place to start from. So the Saltai, I think, is a really good example. Previously, their core was in blacks. They were very scheming, they were very kind of evil and this sort of place of

really not being like a super pleasant place to live. And so this time we can still preserve those blue and black elements. They still have their scheming, their spies, they're still all about knowledge and necromancy. But really bringing that green element of their returning color to the forefront that says, okay, well, now they also care more so about the environment in ways that are more evident that we can see. We see that with like the zombies and their grass hair and flowers, and we see that in the animals that they keep as pets that are beautiful, but still this sort of more living a little bit closer to their environment and a little less on top of it, which is kind of how they

were before. So that game design choice was such a beautiful like inspiration point for us to just kind of expand everything out and answer that question. Let me quickly just for the audience who might not know what you're talking about, just explain. So in the original when we in Conjur Tarkir there was a there were wedge clans and then they we went to the path and then in the alternate set they were ally color clans and we wanted to have continuity throughout the whole block. So normally when you do a wedge set you would think you would center it in the enemy color like in when we did shards we centered them in the ally color but we couldn't do that because that's the

color that dropped out in Dragons of Tarkir. And so each of the clans was kind of one of the side colors, not the enemy color. So when we came back, this is an opportunity to say, oh, let's kind of put them where we wanted them to be originally, but we couldn't. Let's put them in the enemy color. And like you said with the salt eye, hey, green is their enemy, it's their central color, not black. But in black is what we centered on before. So it's sort of fun. We'll walk through each of them. We'll talk about how the new central color sort of changed

a little bit of who they are. Yeah. Yeah, that was a really big starting place for us on the narrative side, just because it was so fundamental to like how the gameplay was going to shake out as well. And some of it's even just the practicality piece. There's going to be more mono green cards than of it's even just the practicality piece there's going to be more mono green cards than mono black or mono blue in the salt tie so i need to be able to showcase that more

effectively across multiple cards so making sure we have enough world building to support all of those cards okay so pick pick your clan what clan you want to talk about next uh let's go mardu mardu okay. So previously Mardu was centered in red, but now they're centered in white. Yes, the big one for the Mardu was really playing up the military aspect of the clan. That's why we kind of ended with Mobilize and Game Design was already kind of riffing off of the idea of like, go wide and tokens. And I'm like, perfect, military, go wide.

These two things make so much sense together. And that also allowed us to kind of align closely to the Mongolian Empire inspiration because that was their thing. They were incredibly organized military in order to expand at the rate and the way that they did. So we could bring in those elements to really say like, okay, under a colagon? Yes. Sometimes the dragon, I get a colagon and a Tarkus name confused sometimes because they have overlapping letters. So colagon really said, you're going to, I don't care about any of you as an individual. That was a lot of her shtick was saying, you're going to follow me or you're going to die. Literally in terms of speed. I'm going fast and either you keep up with me or you

stay behind and you get eaten by a dragon. And so instead in the Mardu says, well, that's generally not great for an army to leave a bunch of people behind and go too fast. So even in the pace in which they are nomadic people that are traveling across the plane, they are still going to do that as a collective and that is going to make them a more powerful, more efficient army. They have the strongest army on Tarkir in terms of military might and organization, although the Abzan may disagree with that. I guess I get to technically say, but I guess I get to technically say, but those two clans definitely would argue over who has the bigger army. That was a really fun piece to showcase. Then to still find the places in red and black that are familiar for us with their lightning

magic and their aggression and their military, through that lens of military prowess, like they are still, they do want to spread their territory and their domain. I love in the, I think it was the Nomad Outpost art, we show them having taken over an Abzan citadel, like that was the whole concept and came from our consultants. They're like, yeah, they wouldn't get rid of it. They would just put their stuff on top of it. And so like, you know, we have, we show this old Abzon location, like covered in Mardu flags and really getting to kind of emphasize that aspect of their, of their clan nature. Okay. Who's next? Oh, gosh. Now this is also secretly a test. Can I name all the clans? I know them. I can help you. I know you know them too, but

I do know them, but there's always that point where you write four of them and then you sit there for like 30 seconds and think I'm missing one. Which one is it? I will do Timur next. Timur was when I I think I have a fondness for it because in the card set I ended up writing the art descriptions that go out to our artists for most of those cards. So it's like near and dear to me just because I worked really closely on it through the whole process. But for them, the returning color was blue. Do you want to? It was green. It was green and then it became blue. Yeah. So, you know, originally was very, they retained that kind of focus on nature.

But with blue, like we associate blue with magic and spell casting and knowledge and things like card draw and counter spells, which we just haven't seen a lot of before on the teamer. So we really worked and I worked really well with forest to kind of codify what their magic was going to look like. That was something we knew we were going to need a lot on a bunch of cards. What does teamer magic look like? Who are teamer spellcasters? What does that mean in their culture and their society if you are someone who's proficient in using magic? But also at the same time, they're still green and they're still red. So that was where I love the harmonized mechanic because it really is all about they work with

their animal companions to do magic. That's kind of the whole cycle of the story that it's telling there. And so also got to put a lot of very friendly looking animals in their art, which is some of my favorite. But we really even leaned into the elements of, they treat them as members of the clan. So they have the same sort of outfitting that they have. Their barding looks as meticulously designed. And I find it adorable, but also it kind of ties all of them together. You could tell the difference between a wild animal and a teamer animal companion and one that's going to live and work alongside the clan, even if there's nothing else in the card art that's going to show that.

So I really loved bringing those two things together. And then that also meant, you know, we could think about like, what are their celebrations look like? What are the other times that they're going to use their magic, both in and out of combat, to really kind of see the full range of their skill. Real quickly, before we move on to the next one, you keep mentioning Forest and I realize we should point out who is Forest. Forest is the art director for the set, that's what you're talking about. Yeah, not the land. Actually, so my fun fact about the set is I worked with Forest Shell, the lead art director for the set. He's a wonderful creative partner on it and his name is spelled with two R's and I struggle with spelling so I had to relearn

how to spell it and now every time I type Forrest as in the land I spell it wrong and have to autocorrect. It became a habit so there's my fun fact. But Forrest was the lead art director. He's been on a couple of other panels and stuff so you can see his talking about the set as well. Okay we've done Timamer. I think I've covered Sultai. Mardu. All right, Abzan. Abzan, yes. I want to talk to you about having the largest army. So the Abzan were previously their central color was white,

and then the returning color is black. And theirs was in some ways one of the easiest things to sort of draw the direct line from because Dramoka, the dragon lord who basically forced them to give up their necromancy, which was their black mana. They were no longer allowed to summon spirits of their ancestors. That was like outlawed. And then we had these like beautiful little hints in the story through Anna Fenza's story. Yes, before she was exiled and killed. But then she became a spirit. We have these hints in the story like that the ancestors didn't just go away, now they're just angry.

And so this ability to just to rediscover that as part of the the Abzan history. And the plus side is is when you can like literally talk to your ancestors, they can give you a lot of really useful information. And so we could kind of position the OBSON in a space of both reconnecting with their ancestry, but then also that kind of accelerating their sort of familial bonds and these ties to each other and play up some of the elements that we didn't get to see a ton of before, which is like, Black Men is very good at scheming, very good at arguing with people, very good at seeking power and authority. And so we

can kind of showcase those elements within the Almson as well that says like, yeah, these are houses that like they struggle with each other internally. So while their white side might project that sort of united front, their black is like, aiming behind the scenes to say, who's gonna really be in charge here? And that was a really fun piece, but also led to the redesigns of the Echin Trees,

because when you wanna show a lot of necromancy, it's cool to have a cool shiny tree to be able to showcase that on a lot of cards and be able to show our spirits as well. And so that was forests work around developing forest and the trees, developing the trees for kind of what that new look was going to look like, what the spirits were going to look like. And then tying that ancestry into the visual of their armor as well to really kind of create that whole package. Okay, we saved my favorite for last.

This seems to be a trend among many in game design. Because Adam, the lead game set designer, was also a favorite of JetSky. Yes, JetSky is my favorite. Since original cons. Back when I led the early part of original cons uh back when i i i led original i mean i led the the early part of original cons and uh just guy was my favorite back then so still my favorite i haven't i haven't changed but uh okay the just so the just guy started were blue last time but now they're in red yeah so the just guy were kind of an interesting one because again, similar to the OBSON, we

had these like story hints and clues for sort of how they would get this information, which was, I mean, through Narset as our sort of POV character for the set as well. She discovers like ancient archives that it's like, hey, the dragons have been lying to you this whole time, which is her sort of spark moment where she's like, Oh my gosh, oh, Jedi has been lying to me. This person who I was dragging, who I respected and looked up to has actually been not telling me the truth. And that led to her sparking. But that implies that there are more archives, there's more information that was potentially available for the just guy to find. So we kind of used that as the direction for why the Jeskai kind of gained this information

about how the previous clan was formed and what it looked like. Shen Yu as well, I think I probably just said the name wrong, but the leader from the previous one, the whole story in Konfal is him hiding the archives and hoping to preserve it. So we could kind of really lead into that.

So personally, I think Ojitae is actually one of the most evil of the Dragon Lords because his whole thing was gaslighting everyone who was in his brood that when they died, they would return as a dragon. And that's not true. He was just telling them that so that they would do what he said. Whereas at least like Silamgarh was like, you were going to die, but he was upfront about it. So this is my, my personal opinion.

And so I think that the adding back in and the red mana leads more into like, rather than being as cerebral as Ojutai was, like we're here to think and meditate and learn. Like this is a version of the Just Guy that actually know we're going to be, take an active role in our playing. We're going to try and unify Tarkir. We're gonna unify ourselves and really kind of taking that impetus for doing

that I think comes from Red Mana, where blue and white can kind of think and sit back a lot. I say this is someone who likes to play white mana a lot, you kind of sit there you pillow for you, you know, but red, red wants to go and attack. And so what does that look like when you put it in a monastic order? And that is leaning into kind of those elements of like, yeah, they they want to spread that belief that like there can be peace on Tarkir. It's just that the way that they would go about doing

it is sort of at the expense of other people's cultures. And they kind of get a little bit of that tension of how would a clan that like wants Tarkir to be a unified place, like what is how's it going to get into conflict with the other clans who really want their independence, want their sort of, their sense of self. So yeah, that was the, the Jeskai was a really interesting one

to kind of work with. I think they, in some ways are the least changed, but in other ways are the most changed, which is a conflicting oxymoron in itself. And we did want to play with the notion that there's just guys monks, but also there are other people that are part of the just guy. So we do get to see some places where, like, who are the farmers? Who are the people that support all of these monks as they're kind of taking on these tasks? And what does that relationship look like? Okay, so we've talked about the five clans, but that's only part of the set. There are also some dragons.

It truly is. So let's talk a little bit about, let's start with the Spirit Dragons and then just talk about getting dragons into the set as a whole. So we'll start with the Spirit Dragons. Who are the Spirit Dragons? Where did they come from? Yeah, so the Spirit Dragons were one of the... was a little bit of a mixture of a thing that we wanted on the narrative side and that game design was like, yeah, that sounds cool. Which is what... we should probably have three color Mythic Dragons. That seems correct in a set that's about clans, like three color factions and dragons. And so, played with a lot ofans, like three color factions and dragons. And so played with a lot

of ideas like who they are. I think one of the early ones was like, did the dragon lords get a third color? Which did seem fairly antithetical to who they are as characters. So, but you know, in a brainstorm, you got to throw all the spaghetti at the wall. And so the idea of the spirit dragons came about and sort of inspired by Ugin himself, right? He is, you know, he dies, he comes back as a spirit. He's sort of this manifestation of draconic energy. That's a lot of what we associate with the plane. So the thought was the Spirit Dragon sort of coalesced as this sort of embodiment of both the physical and the spiritual as the representation of the plane itself, but like also the sort of will and ideals of each of these clans. Like they are summoned and then given form by the clan leaders. And so in my mind,

they represent a lot of like what the clan leader felt like they needed in that moment. So like Narset as someone who struggles with being decisive, it's like, I need someone who is decisive. And she goes like, I'm here for you, let's go and make decisions. I love doing that. So they could kind of play off of each other as characters as well. And yeah, the visual design of them was, I was again forced working really closely with some really amazing concept artists.

And one of my favorite things about the set is that the original concept artists ended up doing the final pieces for their main set art. So there's just this really wonderful continuity of those characters. And I love them all. Very emotionally attached to every single one of those cards. I don't think I can build that many commander decks. So that's unfortunate for me. So another important part of the set, obviously it's in the name, is the Dragon Storms. So let's talk, can we talk a little bit about the Dragon Storms and what was the role they played? Yeah, the Storms is interesting because they always existed on Tarkir. So this was really kind of blowing them up and just making them

until they went away. But yeah, yes. Okay, well, so they have always existed on Tarkir in this timeline. Yes, yes. It's the other timeline when they disappeared. And so they're tied in with Ugin's magic. So Forest definitely brought in a lot of those visual elements of Ugin's magic into the storms. And I remember like early on it was sort of, I think there was even at one point where there was like a dragon storm enchantment that was something that would like give you discount on your dragon. So they were kind of this through line of something that we knew was had a

presence because it also allows us to like physically reshape the plane. Like these are, these are massive like plane landscape altering storms that are changing the environment. So, you know, flooding regions and in the salt high jungles and causing like sinkholes to appear in the Omson desert. So that led to some of the kind of visual updates that we could do with the clan, add in some new types of environments

that people hadn't seen before and just make some like really sick art. Also just like a really good background piece. You're like, how do I make this cooler? What if there was a storm in it? It's like, yeah, no, that's true. It is cooler now. Yeah, one of the things I liked a lot about when we did the

original cons and dragons is that it was a different timeline and we're trying to show the different timeline. And like one of my absolute favorite is there's this Yeti who is in cons and darts here. And in the exact same card, the exact same ability, we changed nothing about it. Just there are now dragons in the back of his heart. That's all like he's the same. Nothing really changed for him. But now there's dragons in the sky behind him. Sadly, I think that yeti probably got eaten by those dragons. But don't worry, a new yeti

took his place. And we got one in the dragon storm. There was definitely like, we couldn't do quite quite the same one to one, but both design and narrative, like we couldn't do quite the same one-to-one, but both design and narrative, like we were looking for like those places and those angles that we could always kind of reference or call back to something that we've seen before. I did it with a lot of the legends, like I wanted a balance of new characters so we could kind of see new elements of the play,

but also like we see Tygon again, we see Sarkin again, we see these characters that we're familiar with, that we know when we associate with Tar'kyr. Now, was there any challenges with, there's a lot of dragons in the set. For example, we have the whole Omen mechanic where there's lots of dragons that have spells attached to them.

Was making those dragons, I mean, there's a lot of dragons to make. How do you guys, or just, it's a world flushed with dragons. I mean, that was a really big part of the concept push, which is that kind of window of time that we're getting a ton of concept art in. And that was one of the big things that Forrest worked in. Like he brought in folks who were like specialists at designing creatures and dragons. His rule that he established was, we had some discussions like what defines a dragon. His rule was minimum four limbs and two wings. Because then otherwise you're like, is it a wyvern? Is it a worm? Is it a Drake?

There was a chart, I think, at one point. And so we got a ton of designs. And I think we actually got almost enough designs for one-to-one in the card set. There were a few kind of where we asked the artist to like take something and riff off of it, but it really helped a ton with just going wide with all of those wild dragons. And we knew kind of early on roughly how many games I was going to want. So we could kind of target and knew we were going to need them in every color, which meant they needed to be different shapes and different sizes. And that kind of gave us just this huge range to be able to work with to sort of look at our pool of concept art and look at the card and kind of match

whichever felt like the best the best match up. Okay, so we did clans, we did dragons, we have a little bit of time left. Were there any other elements to the set that you guys had to deal with? I think probably the biggest challenge really was just keeping track of the timelines. And that is because there was a lot of information that wasn't always consistent between them. So really just kind of trying to find those places that we could reference what we'd done in the past, but still kind of provide them something new and interesting. But we really were very focused on dragons and clans.

I don't think there was a ton outside of those two things that we got to explore. Maybe that's something that a future Tarkir can dive into. Yeah, the one thing that's really interesting is most of the time we do returns, it's like, well, everything from last time we were here was fair game. And this is the time we do returns, it's like, well, everything from last time we heard was fair game. And this is the set we're like, well, this one set didn't quite happen. And then anything is not that you can't reference things, because obviously things that existed there could exist in the alternate, you know, the current timeline. But you try to not contradict things. I know that was a challenge. Yeah, definitely. I think there were a few times where I had to say no, I was like, technically that character is not alive in this timeline or technically that doesn't exist. And bless J and Ellie, who's our lore master who works with us, definitely saved me a few times.

He's like, that's not correct. I'm like, okay, thank you. So anyway, we're almost done here. So any final thoughts about Tarkir Dragonstorm now that everyone's it's coming out and everyone's seen it? I am so happy that people are enjoying it. I never played the original Tarkir, but I feel just by like watching the joy that people are having, I'm getting a little bit of that experience. So yeah, I love that. Please keep bringing that joy and I will take it in and absorb all of it.

Yeah, it's funny. Obviously I was very involved in the original concert dark here. So it's fun. It's fun both seeing people who were fans and played back then and there's a whole new group of people like yourself. Like, hey, I wasn't there, but it's fun to sort of explore and visit this world and get to learn what it is. It comes up so much in a lot of the eternal formats,

like just random cards from it. And so you feel almost connected to it. And I love that now, this is a new place for people to get into the plane. Well, I'm happy we were able to come back. This one took a little while to get back to. Yeah. But thank you so much and it was I think the world is very cool and exciting and the clans are great and dragons and so thanks for you and your team doing all the great work. Thank you so much for having me.

So do you guys I'm at my desk I guess so we all know what that means this is my end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.