Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1261: Edge of Eternities Set Design with Andrew Brown

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with Andrew Brown, the set lead designer of Edge of Eternities, to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition So I tend to use my home ones to do interviews and today I have Andrew Brown The lead set designer for edge of eternities because we're gonna talk edge of eternities today. Hey Andrew Hey Mark, how's it going? Okay, so you led the set design note. So so the audience understands you were also on the vision design. You were there for the whole time. Yep. But we're going to pick up, there's another podcast with Ethan talking about the vision

design. So we're going to talk about the set design. So sounds good. Okay, so mostly when the set was handed off, all the things that you know in the set with one big exception, but Void and Warp and Landers were in the set in some form. All of them would change along the way. And then let's start with the biggest change, because when the set was handed off, Station wasn't in the set. We had what we called Cosmic Cards, which were the way I described them is imagine a melded card, but it's one card rather than two cards

That was what we handed off from vision the idea of giant cards It was modeled after what we had done in transformers Where the transformer boosters literally are larger than normal and come with one big card and other normal sized cards So I believe the way the story works is we propose the idea, our architect said, yeah, I think we could do that. And then some way in the middle of set design goes, no, we can't, we cannot do this. So let's talk about what happened after you were told, no, we can't have cosmic cards. Yeah, so after that, there was, you know know, obviously when the biggest thing, the biggest cool new thing out of the set is ripped out, you have to really scramble and figure out what to do.

So the next thing we tried to do were instead of, since the big cards were like kind of fold out cards, they had two sides. So we're like, okay, cool. let's try maybe DFCs right so we put in a smattering of DFCs we even added some battles to the set for a little bit and then after a few play tests people were giving us feedback about how it wasn't novel enough it wasn't cool enough it was just kind of reusing a bunch of other stuff. And I'm like, Yeah, you're right. This is a this is a bandaid for a gushing wound. So after that, we kind of went deep into the lab in terms of just like, hey, we need to come up with a marquee mechanic that works well with

these other mechanics that we have. And I like took five people in a room tried to come up with something and I would like rotate, rotate the cast or whatever. So like I had three different groups kind of like trying to come up with a marquee mechanic independently of each other. And came up with a bunch of ideas and the thing that actually spawned Station was we tried this mechanic that involved like adjacency so like we called it entering the station and leaving the station so like you could have a creature enter the station and you'd put the card on top of the card

and then the creature could leave the station when it attacked. So it was kind of like roughly adjacency based, kind of hit the flavor of like, oh you're in space or whatever. But there are a ton of issues with anything adjacency related in Magic Cards, so we didn't do that. But the thing we actually liked was how we had to tap the creature to put it into the station. And we thought that that worked. It was very flavorful, you know, as you know with vehicles or you know you'd kind of jump in the car you tap the creature. And we thought about like how do we translate that to spaceships? Well tapping creatures can build your

spaceship and that's kind of where the idea of station spawn where it's like kind of like crew but it's the longer game because these spaceships are so big, you have to build them up, right? So after that play test, we kind of came up with the bones for station and then we play tested it a couple of times and then we're like, all right, let's see if we can make a whole set around it.

And then we basically did. And that's the station story. The station story. Okay, well let's move on to another mechanic. Let's start with warp. So I will read, this is what we handed off. This is the text for what we handed off for warp. It says, you may cast this spell from your hand for its warp cost during your pre-combat

main phase. If you do, exile to the end of combat, you may cast the card for as long as it remains exiled. So we were close, we were off a little bit. Very close, yeah very close. Yeah I remember, this is actually really funny, I had just come back from an international trip and I was very sleep deprived and I couldn't go to sleep. I remember one night I was just laying up in bed trying to think of mechanics for EOE and then that version of Warp kind of like came to my head while I was, you know, it was 4am and I hadn't slept in 30 hours or something. you know, it was 4 a.m. and I hadn't slept in 30 hours or something. And then, yeah,

once we handed off to Set Design, after playtesting we revealed that the design space for Warp was just so much bigger if we gave you more opportunities to have the creature around during the turn. So not gating it behind the first main phase and having the creature leave at end of turn just really opens up more designs and more ways for the mechanic to be interesting. And my favorite thing about warp is how it really works well with station. So you can warp a creature, you can tap it to add a bunch of counters to your station,

and then it'll warp out at end of turn. So it's like a really awesome, cheap way to get a lot of counters on your spaceships. Yeah, I also want to point out that warp, I believe, was the name the whole time, right? When you came up with it, you called it warp. Yeah. Yeah, it was warp the whole time. So the reason, I think the main reason behind that name is like, there are so many expressions of space travel between so many different properties that we wanted to kind of like have the most generic one that kind

of like fit whichever version of space you like best. So luckily enough, warp just seemed to be the word and didn't change the entire time. Yeah, there's an exercise we tend to do early on whenever we're playing in new genre space. We write all the words on the board like on a whiteboard. What are the cool words we don't get to use because they're so unique to this thing? And I know warp was one of the ones that we circled of, can I do something cool? It's a cool word. What do we do with it? Yeah. that we circled of, can I do something cool? It's a cool word. What do we do with it? So, yeah.

Okay, Void. So, Void, what we handed off for Void was if an artifact or creature was put into a graveyard or exile from the battlefield this turn, a fact. Right. So, what I'm thinking about the Edge of Eternity mechanics, like Void is always the one that kind of went through the most change because it changed a lot with the other mechanics. So currently Void says if a permanent left the battlefield or was warped this turn. Which, given the change that I talked about with warp, how it works, how the creature gets exiled at end of turn, that wouldn't have worked with a lot of our void cards because a lot of them are end of turn triggers. So we changed void's timing and,

so we changed, with the warp timing change, we had to change Void to work with it better. So now it says or if you warped a creature this or if you warped a permanent this turn because it doesn't exile end of combat and exiles at end of turn and if both of them trigger at end of turn then you wouldn't get certain Void effects. So that was the main reason we changed that. Yeah, the other thing that I remember early on when we played with this,

we liked the idea of morbid space, but morbid wasn't quite, it was too narrow. Yeah. Opening up morbid to just more things was basically the entire concept. Because we know that Space wanted to have a lot of artifacts, so we added, if you remember, we added artifact to the mechanic during vision design. Yes, I remember that. Okay, so the next mechanic, this one, I think of all the mechanics might have been through the most change, which is Lander tokens.

Yes. So, okay, here's what we handed off, because this is not what the finished product. Create a Lander token. It's an artifact with two tap, transform this artifact. It transforms into a settlement artifact, land token with tap, add one man of any type that a land you control could produce so the kind of reflecting pool and Originally was a double-sided token. It was be like um What's cocoons actual name March of the Machine has mechanic incubate incubate?

And so we were playing with similar space that you would make this token and then it would turn into a unified Token because it all the tokens on the back were the same Right. Yeah, this was um, definitely big when we had a lot of DFCs in the set, so having the double face token made a lot of sense. But one of the main reasons we changed it, there were some digital issues with creating a bunch of reflecting pool tokens, and also when we changed void to artifact, having landers not work with void was kind of unsatisfying. So when we know we wanted to take out DFCs,

it was a pretty easy step to say like, okay, they should sacrifice themselves so that they trigger void. And now they do the rampant growth thing instead of the reflecting pool thing, which I also think opens up a lot of possibilities. So it can basically fix your mana unlike reflecting pool, which can kind of stick you into the same mana situation. So overall, I think there is a pretty easy curve of what should these be next based on how the mechanics changed. And yeah, I think it worked out.

Yeah, so one interesting behind the scenes story that I was part of is we had a lot of discussions on the council of colors. Yes, yes. Because not all colors go and get land quite as easily as others. And I know there's a lot of back and forth about, okay, clearly green can do whatever it wants. Green is king of getting land, but like, you know, blue or white or, you know, not quite as good at it. Yeah, so there are landers in all colors, but they're all very tailored to effects that that color would get for catching up on mana. So like there's a white card that only makes a lander if you're behind on mana. There's a red card

that makes a lander but you have to use it you have to use it immediately or else it'll get sacrificed. There's a blue card where that gives you a choice of hey do you want this thing or can I have a Lander? So ultimately there are a lot of different ways to get Landers, but I think ultimately it's like, they're all very within color pie and feel deeply like those colors. Okay, the one other mechanical thing that changed

in set design is the return mechanic that we turned over from vision was modified. And you guys ended up using landfall. So how do you get from modified to landfall? So modified made a ton of flavorful sense in a space set where you have, you know, all this futuristic stuff. You have people putting contraptions on their bodies. That totally made sense. Once we added station to the set, we wanted to pull back away from the plus one plus one counters theme because it's like you have so many different counters on all of your permanents. We just wanted to make, if there was a counter on a permanent, it mostly should be a station. And, you know, station is the

big new marquee mechanics. We need as much room for that to shine as possible. We got to landfall, also kind of flavor forward, where it's like when you think of touching down on a new planet, you might even think of the word landfall. And given the new way that the landers worked, which is putting a land on the battlefield instead of transforming into one, that also just made a ton of gameplay sense at the same time. Okay, so the next thing I want to do is, I have all the cards in front of me. So I want to walk through what are some of your favorite cards. So tell me the card. I'll read it for the audience. And then

we'll walk through the story of that card. My favorite card. That's okay. It's got to be a nutrient block, I think. Okay, let me read nutrient block costs one. It's an artifact food. It's indestructible. Two taps. Sacrifice artifact. You gain three life. When this artifact is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, draw a card. So talk about the history of Nutrient Block.

So Nutrient Block is one of my favorite top-down designs where it's trying to get across the it's astronaut food trope where you know, I mean growing up as a kid I was always watched these space films and they would always say though this food lasts for forever and When translating that into a magic set I'm like, oh it's got to be indestructible food, right? That's just astronaut food, right? So yeah, I mean that's where the card came from it's definitely one of my favorites in the set just because I find it so funny yeah this set has a lot of top-down designs because whenever you play a new genre space there's all sorts of oh we could do this we could do that okay what's what's another card that you you you like or has a good design story. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

One second, let me find it. I think it was designed by Jeremy Geist. It is the weapons manufacturing. Oh, this is, I believe this is my preview card of my article. Okay, weapons manufacturing. Well, this comes out after my article, so we're fine. Weapons manufacturing, one in a red, enchantment.

Whenever a non-token artifact you control enters, create a callous artifact token named Munitions with, quote, when this token leaves the battlefield, it deals 2 damage to any target. Yeah. So when I remember reading a rare homework, Jeremy named this dynamite factory and what just with the name alone I was totally sold and there are so many cool combos you can do with this card in the set. Like normally a card like this kind of looks really hard to hard to make it work but really the set infrastructure with artifacts and sacrificing makes this card

super easy to use and it's also like so funny to think about where you're just like making a bunch of dynamite and throwing it at your opponent. It's really awesome. Okay, next. Next card. Let's do Terminal Velocity. I really like this one. Okay, Terminal Velocity, 4 red red, source 3. You may put an Artifact or Creature card from your hand onto the battlefield. That permanent gains Haste. When this permanent leaves the battlefield, it deals damage equal to its mana value to each creature, and at the beginning of your end step, sacrifice this permanent. So this card is top down, crash land onto Earth, onto a planet. So it falls out of the sky, it gains haste, it attacks, and then it hits the ground and blows up and deals a ton of damage to everything on the battlefield.

And I just really like that concept. It's very satisfying to me. I also love cards like Through the Breach and kind of like thought like, hey, how do we make Through the Breach and then it blows up and then that's where we got this card. Yeah, the set has lots and lots of super flavorful things. It's super fun. So let me ask you a question, something that came up. How much, I know one of the things the set tried to do is we want to make sure there's a lot of magic in it yes we're doing science fiction um

how do you remember how early stuff like kavu and like you know how early a lot of the sort of magic specific references showed up yeah i mean pretty early on um i remember talking with Doug Byer about like, Hey, what are the actual creature types? Do we want to use here? Like, do we want to use the word alien? Do we want to use you know, what other magic thing works? And I'm pretty sure like, the creative team asked us to use Kagu pretty early on. And then as we went on, I think we asked for more interesting things like Slivers and Eldrazi. So you'll see a couple of those cards in the set as well.

So let's talk about the Sliver card. Frumming Hivepool, 6 generic mana, it's an artifact. It has affinity for Slivers. Slivers you control have double Shrek and Haste. At the beginning of your upkeep, create two 1-1 colorless sliver creature tokens. So, I'm curious, I have a story for this too, but I'm curious what your story is on this card. So this is actually a reference from one of my favorite games of all time. I'm not going to say it, but it is a six. It costs six and it makes two hasty little bugs at the beginning of your turn.

So that's a very, very specific reference. But even, but beyond that, if you look at the card, it just also just makes sense within a lot of sliver decks as well. So it hits the best of both worlds where it's like, if you look at the card, it just also just makes sense within a lot of sliver decks as well. So it hits the best of both worlds where it's like, if you get the reference, it's awesome. But also it's a totally fine game piece on its own. So my story of this is when we originally back on art planning is before you were not on our planning was before you were on the art planning team. We were talking through space and we did this exercise where we chopped up all the genres

because there's a lot of science fiction space genres. And one of the ideas was we wanted to save stuff so that if we want to go back to space later, this is popular, we want to do more of the edge we can. So one of the things we talked about was one of the common tropes is space whore. That's a very common space trope. And so we had spelled things out and that one of the things we thought might be fun is just teasing things that come not from this set, but like from there from another genre. And we thought slivers were like, you know, they definitely hit that space alien archetype

in a very cool way. So this set definitely is doing little tiny teasers. If people like space and we do more space sets, we were trying to give you a little teasing of things. Okay, now let's talk Eldrazi. So there's one creature that's an Eldrazi, Anti-causal Vestige. It's cost six generic mana. Creature Eldrazi. When this creature leaves the battlefield, draw a card, then you may put a permanent card with mana value

less than or equal to the number of lands you control from your hand onto the battlefield tapped. Warp four. And it's a seven five creature. Yeah. You know, when we were asked to put Eldrazi in the set, you know, I want to try to make sure that everything can be, like, specific to this set. So, like, I didn't want to make something, like, with Annihilator or something classic Eldrazi like that.

I wanted to kind of lean into the set and we decided to give it warp so that it would like feel like the Edge of Eternity's Eldrazi and not just another Eldrazi for your collection or whatever. Yeah, one of the things that is fun is because the Edge of Eternity is literally on the edge of the Blind Eternities and the Eldrazi are from the Blind Eternities. Anyway, there's a lot of fun teasing we get to do okay i have a card i'm curious i'll read the card and then you tell me i know this card went through a lot uh tesoret cruel captain uh three generic mana legendary planeswalker

tesoret whenever an artifact you control enters put a loyalty counter on tesoret zero untapped target artifact or. If it's an artifact creature, put a plus one plus one counter on it. Minus three, loyalty, search your library for an artifact card with mana value one or less. Reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle. Minus seven, loyalty,

you get an emblem with at the beginning of combat on your turn, put three plus one plus one counters on target artifact you control. If it's not a creature, it becomes a zero zero robot artifact creature. Yes, so Tezret went through a ton, a ton of iteration. So I guess I'll say it here, but we originally intended for Tezret to be an artifact planeswalker. Walker that ultimately did not happen because of a ton of feedback from a lot of the designers

and questions about do we really want to push the boundaries on a card like this and really redefine the Plainswalker type. So ultimately we didn't do it. A lot of the thinking behind it was that, putting a planeswalker in your artifact deck is a really big cost, because it itself is not an artifact. So we came in with a thought process that if we made Tezra an artifact,

he would much easily go in a lot more artifact decks. So that was our starting point. And then after a lot of the feedback, we ultimately changed that to kind of what you see today. It was pretty much virtually the same design. I think the ultimate was different, but yeah, that was the kind of process Tezret went through.

So one thing that he brings up that I'm curious, he mentions robots. And that was something very early on we said, I mean, obviously like Infinity did robots, but we haven't done and we've done some UB sets. We've done transformers and things that were robots. But what, talk a little bit about making robots matter, like what your thought process was. I mean, we definitely wanted like the creature token of the set and as something futuristic in outer space, like robots just kind of made sense. Like no matter what, you know, space IP is your favorite,

there are tons and tons of robots. And we didn't want to make them as insignificant as one ones, but we also didn't want to make them super high impact. So two, two robot kind of just made the most sense and you'll see them a ton in the set. Yeah, they're all over the set. Okay, do you have another card

that you would like to talk about? Another favorite card. Yeah, I mean, I guess we can talk about Sathera the Supervoid. Okay, so Sathera the Supervoid, two black black legendary enchantment. Whenever a creature you control dies each opponent chooses a creature they control and exiles it. At the beginning of your end step, if a player controls no creatures, sacrifice the Sathera,

then put a creature card exiled with it onto the battlefield under your control with 2 additional plus 1 plus 1 counters on it. Yeah, so the creative ask from this card was, you know, make the black hole of the set, which is a huge task. But when we were thinking about it, part of my goal was to kind of create a fixed grave pact. Very popular magic card, sees a ton of play in commander. And part of my goal, like long term with magic is like, Grave Pact is not a super fun card,

but I know that, you know, if we put enough time and effort into it, we can replace all of these like kind of staple effect cards with a lot more fun versions of them. And after a lot of testing with the commander team, so there really is that much more fun version of Grave Pact. And then secondarily my favorite space movie is Interstellar and the bod like the way the card works it's exactly like the finale of that movie where Matthew McConaughey is sucked into the black hole and then he comes out better and smarter. So it's doing a lot here. The art's super awesome. There's like super awesome treatments of it and I'm really happy with how the card came out ultimately.

Yeah, it's funny. I made Greypac many, many, many years ago. And I do I do acknowledge it's not the most fun of cards. It just needs to go away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I... It is interesting. One of the things that's really interesting of just working on magic for a long time is we learn so much and like, you know, we'll make something and then as you see people play with you, like, oh, oh, why did, you know, like, Mind Slaver, why did it exile itself? I don't like, you know Why? You know, it's so close to being correct. Yeah.

OK, we have a little bit of time left. So one or two more cards we can check. One more card, one more card. OK, can we go to Uroboroid? O U R O B O U R O B O R O I. OK, Ouroboroid, two green green creature plantworm. At the beginning of combat in your turn, put X plus one plus one counters on each creature you control, where X is this creature's power. Yeah, so one of the awesome things about space is obviously the size and when I think of big numbers I think of exponential numbers and Uroboroid is kind of that dream realized of let's

actually get an exponential number onto a card so this card will ramp up super fast super fast super fast and it will get to untold sizes. And I really liked the name too, where it's, um, or a boros is kind of a, a snake that's eating its own tail, um, kind of signifying the infinite expanse. So ultimately the name, the flavor, the mechanics, really, really big home run here. Okay. So we're just about to wrap up but I so this was the first set design that you led correct? No. Oh no, oh sorry. What was your first set? I mean it was Zendikar Rising when Mark Gottlieb took

over Theros Beyond Death, so like the final four months of set design, and then also murders at Carlisle Manor. Okay, so this is your third set, sorry. This is your third set you designed. So what is your thought, like sort of like looking back, what is your thoughts, like, because we obviously handed this off a while ago

because we work way ahead, but with a little bit of time looking back on it, what is your take on this design? Like personally or like as a set? I mean, as a set, you know. Sure. The thing I'm most happy with was our pivot away from the super large

carts like coming up with a marquee mechanic to work with all these other mechanics that you've also tested and vetted is extremely hard right it's like throwing a dart and like missing a bunch of you know obstructions in the way or whatever so I think that's the thing where I reflect on, where I'm like, damn, that really worked out. So yeah, station, I guess. Okay, well, I want to thank you for joining me and talking through the set. I'm sure the audience will have a great time playing it.

So thank you so much. All right, no problem. Okay, guys, I'm now, I can see my desk, as you will, so that we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. We'll see you guys all next time. Bye bye.