Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1293: Avatar: The Last Airbender with Chris Mooney

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with Lead Set Designer Chris Mooney to talk about the design of Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™.

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 normally I'm at home, I like to do interviews. So today I have Chris Mooney to talk about Avatar Velas Airbender. Hey, Chris. Hello. I'm excited to be here. Okay. So let's start from the... First off, let's talk a little bit about your... I know you are a fan of Avatar. So how did you end up be running the set? Well, so this is my first, like, set that I led as the primary designer, really through all parts of the process, which in and of itself isn't that common. Normally, I work on the early parts of sets, like exploratory and vision design, but this time they said, hey, we want you to stick around and lead set design as well. So, you know, I've done vision design for other sets. I've done commander products, but this is my first. first main set that I got to lead. And the way that happened was, you know, it was just a really lucky, you know, timing of everything, where it was getting to be around the time when I was at the

point in my career where it made sense for me to lead a main set. And this one was coming up. I had talked to great extent with many people of how much I loved Avatar long before I knew that we were, you know, going to partner with. That's just. you know, one of my favorite shows of all time, something that I love talking about and about how much I love it. So when this came up, I was on, you know, the top of the list and a couple other people told me that, you know, they were asked, they were like, hey, you know, we've got the set coming up. Do you have any interest in leading it? And they were like, you should have Chris lead the set. So I'm very thankful to all those people. And yeah, it really was a dream come true.

I've been telling people when talking about the set that when I was younger, I would make my own custom magic sets, and a set based around Avatar was one of the ones that I made when I was a kid. So it was honestly one of my least favorite ones. I did not do a very good job, I think, compared to some of my other sets I designed on my own. But thankfully, I got a chance to do it for real, using an actual design team with, you know, so much more time and effort and attention. And so it really is a sort of full circle mode for me of like, wow, this thing that I loved so much that I did it just for fun as a kid. Now I actually got to do that as my real job. Okay, so I'm going to start with the question that every time Avatar comes up, this is the first question I get,

which is how do you design for a set that has a magic system of four in a game that has five, you know, a faction of five? yeah so i mean it's obviously the thing that we started with because it's so clear but i mean i think anyone approaching the problem has to start there because it it is so fundamental to the world of avatar and so fundamental to the to the game of magic and honestly what it was is it did not take very long for us to figure out that the during the time period of the show I mean, it's called the last airbender. And there aren't very many air benders left. And that felt, you know, really important to us.

Like when we were coming up with mechanics for the four bendings, we were just like, well, we can't make that many creatures that have air bending. And yeah, we can put it on a lot of spells. But at some point it just started to feel like it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right to have so much. much air bending when a whole important element of the core of the show is that the air bending is rare now. And so really what that led us to was saying, okay, like, even though there are four elements and we're going to have a mechanic for all four, they're not going to have the same

weight in the set. We need the mechanics to play the roles that really capture the vibe and the feeling of the original show. And so that really directed us a lot in terms of our thinking, of being like, okay, we're not just trying to recreate the universe of Avatar in magic, but we're trying to recreate the specific show that everybody, you know, knows and loves. And so that really helped direct us a lot. And that kind of is what led us to the structure of the final set, which is that, you know, water, earth, and firebending are, you know, quite common. And they're primarily focused in the colors you would associate with them, you know,

blue, green, and red. But white and black take on a... They're not as focused on the elements. Multiple different elements show up in white and black. And, you know, airbending is certainly, you know, focused in white. I think in the main set, it might be almost entirely on white cards. But white and black then became more about telling the story of the rest of the show. In this case, with white being a lot about the allies and the very...

different nations of the world that kind of need to work together in order to try to, you know, fight back against the Fire Nation. And with Black representing a lot of the villains that we see throughout the show, obviously the Fire Nation makes it the majority of the villains, but there's one of the things that is so great about the show and so memorable about the show is that there are, you know, villainous characters from everywhere, from all different backgrounds and from all different places of the world. And so really not wanting to pigeonhole any color into being only one particular thing.

And especially black, we wanted to make sure that, hey, like, there's all of these different characters from all sorts, different parts of the story that are here. So that was really what led us to the direction. We still have the four elements, and they're still super important. But, you know, air bending shows up a lot less than the other three. Okay, so which was the first bending of the,

for elemental bending, which did you get first? So when we came, you know, when we started exploratory, we were basically like, all right, let's, you know, we got to figure out the bending mechanics. That's the number one goal. And we started where I think a lot of people who, you know, I've been seeing there, you know, early on when we said we were doing Avatar, people would say like, oh, I think bending might do this or I might do that.

And we started with a lot of those same things with the idea of, hey, bending is kind of this universal thing that it has four different elements, but bending is kind of one thing? Is there one mechanic we can come up with that sort of can be used in every different color in four different ways, you know, to represent that? And what we found was, I mean, you know, we tried a lot of things and some of them were fun. But ultimately, the challenge was, you know, if you only have one mechanic and it represents all of these different varied fighting styles and characters, then your set gets to be really boring. It's just a lot of the same types of designs over and over. So we started out trying to see, hey, could we get all

these two light up with each other? And where we ended was, no, we need them to feel different because that is what it feels like in this world, is that the bendings have totally different styles and philosophies and moves that they are good and bad at, you know, strengths and weaknesses. So then we started branching out and exploring different mechanics for each of the different bending that were totally unconnected from each other. And throughout all of our exploring, I'm going to say that firebending, I think, was the one that we really locked in on first, which was a lot of our early firebending. One of the keys, I think, to making this set was that we started out being a little too literal.

and it was very limiting in our in our design so like for firebending it's like okay well what do firebenders do they shoot fire you know in magic that is you know you're dealing damage that's like what almost all like literally they're called burn spells you know um but all the one all the things that we've made that were that dealt damage or cared about damage it just didn't feel right it felt like it was a little bit too samey it was difficult to make lots of cards and also um you know part of the show you know not to get too deep into the show, you know, philosophy or whatever. But, like, part of the show is like, hey, fire isn't just destructive. That's kind of the villain's point of view. But, you know, if you really look at it, there's, you know, fire is, you know, energy and life. And there's

also, you know, different ways of looking at fire to be more constructive. Or at very least, you know, not as like this pure damaging thing. So that's where the red mana came from. So for the audience real quickly. So fire bending says fire bending N, and being a number, whenever this creature attacks add that much red mana, this manna lasts until end of comment. Just to feel on how much firebending is. Right. So what we loved about firebending right away was, first of all, the red mana symbol is a fireball. So it's awesome just to, like, visually, it's like I get all this red mana. It feels like creating fire, which is something that's different about firebending from the other, you know, the other elements, they kind of have to move around the element that's present.

But firebenders, they just make fire out of nothing. So it felt very, very resonant. But also, we just loved the ways that it played. You know, it encouraged attacking and being aggressive, which is something that's very iconic to firebending in the show. But you could use it for so many different things. You could use the mana to activate abilities and cast instance. And, you know, to crack your clue tokens, which was a mechanic that we added to the set that played really well with firebending.

So, and we really loved that it was like still aggressive. It still had that feeling of, you know, you're attacking. But the output wasn't just more damage. It was something that could be very versatile and flexible. And really, as we went on, the idea of flexibility became a key part of really all of the designs of these. Because one of the things that people love about the show and the magic system of the show is that the bending arts feel like they can be used in so many different ways. And as you watch the show, you're constantly being, you know, excited by, oh, I never thought about, like, oh, it's really cool. They can use it this way.

They can use it that way. And so, you know, with firebending, we really loved that you could use mana in a bunch of different ways. And that sort of inspired us on the other bending mechanics as well. Okay, so firebending came first. So what came second? So I think earthbending definitely came second. You can, you know, describe a little bit of what earthbending is. Okay, so earthbending N, and being a number, target land you control becomes a zero-zero creature with haste that still land, put N plus one plus one counters on it.

When it dies or is exiled, return to the battlefield tapped. Yeah, so this mechanic, you know, earthbending, so firebending, it's very like ephemeral and fleeting and in the moment. So we like the idea of you get mana and it kind of goes away. Earthbending is the most sort of, you know, solid of the bending elements. And so we like the idea that it had more kind of a permanent effect on the battlefield. And, you know, earthbending is obviously inspired by a mechanic from Battle for Zendikar, which is Awaken, which turned your lands into creatures and the idea of earthbending playing with lands it felt so natural it felt really like where all of our minds to all of our minds went to that direction right off the bat

and that you see ideas are like oh you can create you know these you know uh land creatures that you can attack your opponent or hold them back to block like that felt really tactile felt very like the correct you know vibes for earthbending um the main kind of innovation here was awaken and just anything that turns your lands into creatures always has the the danger of oh well i turn my land into a creature and it dies and now i'm totally screwed because i not only did i lose my creature but i also lost my mana so and that's a really bad experience awaken kind of tried to solve this by making it kicker. It's like, oh, I'm only going to get my land creatures later on in the game. So the chances I'm going to get monoscruid, it's pretty low. But we knew if we were going to make this a central

mechanic of the set, we couldn't only put it on expensive cards. We wanted to have some cheaper cards, cheaper creatures that could do this. So we worked with rules to figure out some words to make it so that your lands could come back if they died. And the fun part of this mechanic is that, you know, It's a little bit like a mass where, you know, you can stack it all on one thing and get a larger and larger creature. But you can also spread it out. And so you have the flexibility of do I want one really tall creature or do I want to go wide? And what we really loved about playing with earthbending is that normally if you have the choice between getting more creatures or making one creature larger, you want to have more creatures. More creatures are more flexible.

You have like way more things you can do with having multiple creatures, you know, and they're good at attacking, good at blocking in different ways. but with this mechanic you don't always want to do that because every new creature you make is taking up another one of your lands and at some point it's like well I need to cast spells I need to use my mana so maybe it's actually better to have a 6-6

rather than three two-toes and so we really enjoyed how it played with the normal dynamic of making creatures in a different way okay so what was next so we came up with a water bending

mechanic that we settled on next. I kind of don't, the original sort of idea that we had for water bending, I don't necessarily want to spoil because I think we could use it again one day. It was a mechanic that we was very fun, but the issue was that it wasn't very fun when you put them all together in the same deck. And so, you know, in a different magic set, that could be great. You know, you can put it in a bunch of different colors and everyone can play a little bit of it. But for set, you know, water bending had to be blue. Blue had to be majorly waterbending. It would have felt so weird if that wasn't true. And so eventually we realized that that mechanic wasn't working out. And so kind of halfway through our process, we did a big pivot and came up with a new water

bending mechanic that ended up working out way better for us. And we were really happy with how it ended up. So you can... Okay, so water bend to end and being a number, while paying a water bend cost, You can tap your artifacts and creatures to help. Each one pays for one. So the tricky part of water bending was that we did this exercise. We went around the office and we asked everyone, what do you associate with water in the game of magic? And the list was really like every blue effect you could name. It's like, oh, well, there's water cards that tap and freeze.

There's water cards that shrink power. There's water cards that bounce. There's just all these different effects. And so we realized that there really was not a good existing connection for water vending to work with mechanically. And honestly, we tried out some mechanics that were about tapping your opponent's creatures and stuff like that. But they're really not fun. It's really hard to make a mechanic that is 100% about messing with your opponent's creatures. So what we then was we kind of took a step back and said, okay, in the show,

I know we've been talking about flexibility for all of these mechanics, but in the show, philosophically, they always talk about water is the element of flexibility. The element of change, it's the one that can take all such a different forms, and it has all such a different effects. And when you see water in the show, it has a lot of different things it can do, right? It can be water, it can be ice, it can be steam, it can heal, it, you know, so there are so many different, they bend the plants, they bend people's blood, there's so many different ways that they use water. So we liked the idea of a mechanic that could have a lot of

different uses. So water bending came from an idea of wanting to, you know, water bending is really just a monocost on a bunch of different, you know, some of them are kind of like kicker abilities, some of them are activated abilities, some of them are triggered abilities, all these different effects that felt like water in different ways. And you kind of get this flexibility of being able to pay the costs using not just your normal mana, but also using your creatures and your artifacts. And that sort of felt like the kind of, you know, the tapping and untapping motion of like turning your thing sideways really felt like the kind of like, you know, the moves the water benders would do. A lot of water bending does involve. You have to draw the water out of like a

nearby, you know, you know, like body of water or drying it out of, you know, the plants around you and stuff like that. And so we were. really wanted to lead into this feeling of flexibility, where these cards, they have all sorts of different outputs, and the inputs are also really flexibly. You can play with them in all sorts of different ways. So water bending, even though it took us a long time to get there, we were pretty happy with the way that we could utilize it in its final form. Okay. Well, let's get to air bending. And I know, so this one caused you some challenges. Yeah. I mean, air bend, so, excuse me.

air bending uh coming out of vision design we had settled on here's what firebending does here's what earth bending does here's what water bending does although later on we would change water bending um but we were struggling with air bending we didn't have the perfect solution so one of my favorite stories from working on the set is that at this time mark gotleave um was on our design team and mark got leave you know uh is uh you know older than me and he did not grow up with the show um and so he had no knowledge of the show whatsoever he was really there to just provide some good design insights but he didn't he wasn't an expert you know or even have basic knowledge and in our final vision design meeting we were sitting around and we were like you know

this air bending just doesn't feel right what we have to figure out something for air bend to do Gottlie was like, okay, I know we've been talking about this for a while, but could you just describe to me, like, exactly what airbending does? Like, how do people use it in the show? And so we told him, here's what air bending does. You know, it's kind of, you know, defensive and evasive. And, you know, like it, you know, you use it to kind of blow your opponent's way or to like, you know, you can fly out of the way and stuff. You know, it has a very philosophy of trying to, like, dodge and stuff. And he was like, okay, what if it was this? And his suggestion was so perfect that it, never changed. So Mark Gottlieb just on a brief description of air bending with no context at all gave us this kind of perfect mechanic that we love so much that, you know, we put it in the set and we used it ever since. Okay, so air bend, is you air bend, I think it's always, is it always a permanent? Can you air bend things other than a permanent? I believe we played around with some of that, but I think in the final set, you always air bend permanent. Okay, so you air bend a permanent or something, you know, a specific permanent, you exile it.

While it's exiled, its owner may cast it for two rather than it's mana cost. Right. So what we love about airbending, again, is that idea of you can use it in different ways. So if you air bend your own stuff, then it's kind of like, you know, blinking, although it's expensive. You're right, like, oh, if you exile your thing, you have to pay two to recast it. So you probably want to be exiling something that's pretty big. So that when you're recasting it, you're getting kind of like a really big, uh, you know, ETB effect.

Or maybe you're just using it to save your thing from removal spell. Excuse me. Save your thing from a removal spell. If you use it on your opponent's stuff, well, then it is, you know, pretty good at delaying kind of your opponent's small to medium things. But if you air bend a huge creature, it's going to, you know, it only costs two to be cast. So sometimes you might not even want to do that. Like they might have a really awesome ability when it shows back up.

So we liked that this mechanic could kind of play offense or defense, but it never could truly get rid of anything. It was very kind of like, you know, temporary, stalling and evading. And then we were able, because it had so much flexibility, we could use it in a couple of different ways. As I said, air bending is the one that shows up the least of the four, just because that's kind of what the story dictates. But we really enjoyed, again, kind of that it could play both sides. And that was something that with all the bending mechanics, we really tried to find different ways of use. it because that's what felt most true to the magic system in the show itself. Okay, so now that we got the four bendings out of the way, let's get to the Allies.

So, Allies was a thing long ago in Zendikar. So how did you get to Allies? What did you do with Allies? How did you make Allies work? Yeah, so I mean that came from Carmen Comparans, who was a big Avatar fan, and was on the Vision Design team. And we were just sitting around and we were like, okay, you know, it would be great if we had something to represent kind of all of the heroes from the different nations that were teaming up together. And we were like, it wants to be something that kind of

is in all colors, because that's kind of the whole point, is that people from all the nations, including the Fire Nation, are coming together to work together. And Carmen was like, what about allies uh and then it's just one of those ideas where we were like huh yeah what about allies and then the more we play with it the more that we liked it it felt like it was a really natural fit it allowed us to do some pretty cool things where um we could make cards that referred to allies and all of the main characters got to be allies so now all of a sudden all these cards could easily work with any of them um there's even some cool storytelling moments where you know like in it in a normal case it might be difficult to communicate when a character has switched sides or when a character, you know,

oh, this character is a firebender who normally are the bad guys, but they're actually helping, you know, they're on the good guys team. And so they get to have the type ally. So it was a pretty simple, easy way. And the other thing is it's nice when we can find mechanics that feel really at home in a universe is beyond set, but connect to existing things outside of universes beyond. In this case, the idea that, hey, we can make cards that will excite existing ally players because allies are not unique to this, but are something that already exists in magic. So we really enjoyed that element of allies as well. A lot of Avatar Zendakar team up.

Yeah. Like, during the set, we had a joke about, like, right, it's like the Zendikar allies and the Avatar allies, they both have to fight against lands with plus one plus one counters on them. Okay, so the next thing you also did, which was somewhat controversial. So let's talk about lessons.

How did lessons and not learn get into the set? Right. So that was something where, you know, early on in the process, we kind of sit down and we list out what are the key elements of, you know, the IP that we're working with. In this case, what are the key elements of the show,

avatar that to get the tone right like for example one of the things we talked about was humor so we you know the show is very funny and people remember a lot of key scenes and so when we were building the set we we wanted to make sure that those you know famous funny moments were being captured because you know if it was all really serious and only about fighting that just wouldn't ring true to the fans so similarly one of the key things we identified early on is that Avatar has a really big focus on kind of growing and learning and changing over time. The four bending elements have a lot of their philosophy taken from martial arts about like you have to train not just your body but also your mind and practice

and game mastery. You know, you don't, you have to work hard in order to become good. And similarly, there's a lot of moments in the show because it's a show that's aimed at, you know, younger audiences. that have life lessons not necessarily in the literal like you know here's the lesson of the week but just characters learn and grow and change and have important revelations um and so we wanted to capture that and we tried a couple of different mechanics to capture that but ultimately we really were charmed by the idea of just you know hey this it's a card called firebending lesson or water bending lesson and it is literally the part where ang learns about that element um and we just sat down we could list out so many moments that felt like good lesson concepts that we really wanted to we just thought that it was a great fit additionally there's a lot of like mentor characters and teacher characters and avatar and we wanted there to be something in the set that felt like it connected those together um and having the lesson type to put on cards and have those creatures care about those cards again really felt like it was adding a lot of flavor and doing something different that that a lot of sets didn't do.

You know, we haven't used a lot of incident sorcery subtypes. You know, we've done a few, but it was something that when we started using it, we said, you know, maybe we should start using this more because the playtesters and the audience really, really had positive reactions to, it's just cool that this card is labeled as a lesson. And flavorfully, I know that it is a lesson that the characters work. Okay, so obviously the question comes up, why no learn? Don't you learn lessons? Why didn't learn get put in this at? Right. So learn was, for one thing, it was, you know, very difficult to balance. And it, the play design teams were not super thrilled with the idea of having more learn lesson.

Because last time around, you know, it went okay. But it wasn't the most beloved or remembered of the mechanics. It also doesn't work in Commander, which is where, you know, we really like to make a lot of casually aimed cards for the Commander audience. And not having Learn work there is a little bit of a bummer. But also, one of the things we found was just that players really enjoyed the gameplay of lessons even without learn. You know, just having instances of sorceries that are like, hey, you know, it's like a typel deck, but for specific spells. That was enough for a lot of people. And in fact, in a lot of our testing, when we said, you know, hey, did you miss, you know, learn?

Like a lot of the players were like, no, not really. Like, we just thought it was cool that they were called lessons. So we kind of decided early on that for complexity reasons, we weren't really interested in having it. It's very difficult to design, limited, and constructed using learn. And we said, let's just make some new lessons. and those lessons can kind of serve in, you know, in eternal formats where you have the old learn cards. These lessons kind of add on new options for you to, you know, fetch with your old learn cards. We did spend a lot of time having, like, one learn card in the set to kind of, like, you know,

add in a little bit of that old feeling. But it ended up just getting cut because it just wasn't as fun as the cards that we wanted to make. Okay, one final mechanical element. the set has clues and interestingly there's no investigate it's just clues what got clues in the set yeah so clues kind of came from

two parts it was kind of a marriage of a design gameplay elements and creative elements so one thing was we were looking for mechanics that played really nicely with what was going on in the set

and one of the things we love to have was something for you to spend your fire bending mana on. And a clue just was like the perfect spot of, you know, like if you don't have fire bending, then, you know, you just pack it like normal. It's just a normal clue. If you do have fire bending, you know, it can be a great way to spend that mana in case maybe you don't have an instant or you don't have enough mana to activate an ability or something like that. Also, it plays really well with water bending because it's an artifact and you can tap your clues in order to help pay your water bending costs. And so that also felt like a cool way

of using a clue in a different direction of, oh, maybe I don't. want to sack this right away. Maybe I don't want to keep it around and use it because I'm playing this heavy water mending deck. The creative part is that for a lot of the first and second seasons of the show, and also a little bit in the third, there are a lot of people that are tracking down the main characters. A huge part of the show is that the main characters are kind of on their journey, but the villains are trying to hunt them down and capture them. And so we really like the idea of clues playing into that flavor space of, you know, the villains keep finding clues that are leading them to where the heroes are. And, you know, they're constantly on the pursuit.

And this fit really nicely because we wanted a mechanic to kind of go more into black, which didn't have a major mechanic yet. So the clues in this set show up quite a lot in black on, you know, these villainous cards that are hunting down the heroes. And that kind of nicely, you know, plays well with water and play in blue and fire in red um so it's the kind of you know we call these workhorse mechanics where they're not super exciting um but they helped to facilitate the gameplay and in this case it was great that we could find something that also had a really natural flavor fit with the story that we wanted to tell okay so we got through all the mechanics um and we're almost out of almost almost to work here um any final thoughts on the making of avatar um um

I mean, I'm really happy with how it come out. I can't wait for people to be able to play with it. It is very much a kind of lifelong dream come true. And I also just want to say that for as much enthusiasm and love that I hope that I'm communicating, there are so many other people who worked on this set who have the same amount of love for the show and appreciation, and they all worked so hard to help bring this to life. this you know like many of our universe is beyond projects it really is bringing together all of the biggest fans of the thing that we have and and concentrating all of our effort into making something

that really lives up to the the our love for the property so you know avatar i've said for many many years and probably will continue to say for many years it is my number one favorite tv show of all time and i'm so happy that it is uh now in my favorite game of all time And so the one thing I want to say, I have the exact opposite experience from you, I mean, in a good way, which is I know Avatar, not at all. But it turns out that during the time that you guys were playtesting, I had free Wednesday morning. I don't know what it was. I playtested that set more than I playtests than anything. I think Mark was our number one playtester.

Yes. And anyway, so I got to experience Avatar as sort of, it's a magic set. I don't know the IP at all, but I know magic. And it was a really, it's a really fun magic set if you know nothing about Avatar. And I also want to express that Avatar fans, I think you will adore it, but non-Avatar fans, it is a really fun magic set. Forget Avatar,

and there's lots of Avatar in it, but it is a really fun environment, and one of the things that's really neat is you kind of get to learn about the environment if you don't know about the environment, and there's lots of very fun, quirky things. One of my all-time favorites is all the animals are hybrids of different animals together,

and anyway, so even if you're not an Avatar fan, this is a really fun set. So I would check it out If you're an avidair fan, for sure, check it out as Avatar, and if you're not, it's a super fun set. So, anyway, thank you so much for being with me today, Chris. Thanks for having me. And to everybody else, I'm, well, I'm home, but I'm at work, so we all know what that means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.