Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1361: Rivals of Ixalan

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

This episode is another in my series where I talk about every Magic expansion. Today, I talk about Rivals of Ixalan, the second set in the Ixalan block.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to rather drive to work. Okay, one of my ongoing quests is to record a podcast on every episode. I continue that today with Rivals of Xelon. Okay, so in order to set this up, let me talk a little bit about Xelon, in order to set up Rivals of Xelon. So, Exelon was during a portion where we did blocks for two sets, a large and a small set. In fact, this would be the very last set, and we'll get to that, of this model.

So, Ixelon, the place got inspired because Jenna Helland, who was on the creative team, came up with a cool idea for a world where it had kind of a, I don't know how to say it, like a mexo-American sort of flavor to it, And the idea was, it was a world where the natives dealt with the outsiders, but the outsiders from the new world were vampires. And so Jenna pitched this idea of, it's kind of this conflict between the natives of the world and the outsiders who were vampires that came from, you know, quote, about the new world. And so that is where it started. That was the initial pitch. The creative team really liked the world.

We hadn't done much with this. We liked to sort of take influences from different parts of the world. We hadn't done much. Even not, we haven't done a lot with South America and Mexico and stuff. So it was something that really was I think the only thing we had done before that

was the Naya Shard of Alara had some influence. But so we were interested in doing that. They came to me and they said, what do you think? And I said, well, we had done a lot of two-sided conflicts recently. Could we add in a third side? Could we make it a three-sided conflict?

And at the time, the thing I was really interested in is, so Richard Garfield made a game called Vampire the Eternal Struggle. Richard called Jihad. And in it, he had a mechanic called The... edge. And the way the edge worked was the edge was the special thing that was in the game. Whoever had it had an advantage, but players could fight to take it away from each other, meaning it was a singular thing that people fought over. And I thought the edge was really cool. I thought the edge was a really neat mechanic. And so I liked the idea of like, well, what if

look, they're fighting over resources? What if this is the resource they're fighting over? And then I asked, could we, instead of doing a two-sided conflict, we had done a bunch of two-sided conflicts, could we do a three-sided conflict? And so they said, sure. And so they came up, I think, with pirates was the idea. We have the natives. We'd have the vampires, then we'd have the pirates. And we had done pirates a little bit, like early magic had dipped. I think there were some pirates in recadian masks.

but we really haven't done much with it for something that has a lot of evociveness to it we haven't done a lot with pirates and so that seemed cool and it fits in nature of the time we were going for and there was a trip's space to plan that we thought was really cool and so that was the plan. The plan was we're going to do

a three-sided conflict and we were going to use an edge-inspired mechanic. But then Sean Maine was working on Oh, remember, by the way, oh, no, no, sorry. Yeah, Sean Main was working on the second conspiracy.

Sean had created the first conspiracy. It had gone well. So we decided to make a second conspiracy called Conspiracy Take the Crown. And so Sean was playing around with multiplayer mechanics. And one of the ideas that he was interested in was playing around with the edge, having a resource that players could fight over. So he came to me and he said, do you mind, I know you were planning to use the edge in Ixelon, do you mind if I experimented with it in conspiracy?

And what I said to him is, sure, I go, look, we don't even know if it'll make sense in two-player play. I understand why it could be exciting in multiplayer play. Here's what we should do. Why don't you test your mechanic, and I'll start an exploratory team early. I'll do a little mini team to do some work on a two-sided edge mechanic. Meaning, it's an edge.

Like, Vampire the Eternal Struggle was a multiplayer game. So many people were fighting over the edge. So obviously, it made sense in a multiplayer segment. I go, let me do a little bit of testing in a two-player. So what I said to Sean was test that, test some other things. And I said to him, look, if both sets really need it, I'm going to give it to the premiere set. the standard legal set. It's just a bigger set than more people will play with. But I'm willing to, like, you investigate, see how it plays for you. I'll investigate,

see how it plays for us. And, you know, maybe it won't work out for us and it'll be great for you. Or maybe you'll play and it won't work for you and work for us. You know, let's both experiment with it. So Sean went off and made the Monarch mechanic. Maybe maybe see where the story's going. And I went off and I did a team where we explored with a two-sided mechanic. And what I found was, actually, I thought we made some interesting shapes. I really thought there was some potential there. So I went back to Sean and I said, oh, because I had taught Sean, yeah, experiment with the edge, but also, you know, like maybe you can't have it, so explore other things.

So Sean comes, Sean and I come back after a couple months and Sean says, well, we made the monarche mechanic. It's really good. It's really good. It's really fun. And I said, well, we did some experimenting as well for Ixelon and it's also fun. funtherly neat shapes for two-player. It's a little different than what he was doing for multiplayer. And I said to try and go, oh, well, okay, we might want to use this for X-Line.

Like, what do you come up? What backups did you come up with? And he's like, yeah, we didn't get any backups. He's like, Monarch was by far our best thing, and nothing's close. And so, in the end, Monarch went to conspiracy. So what it meant was. Because the idea at the time was conspiracy had started before Exelon. I hadn't started yet.

And so I was scheduled to run Xelon, to lead Xelon design. This is slightly before vision. Vision design was just on the cusp of starting. But this is before vision design happened. And I'll get to that in a second. And so this was, or the, the, The idea was that we hadn't started Xcelon yet. Ixelon could figure out something.

Like, this really made sense for, it was a really good mechanic. It really worked in conspiracy. Take the crown. And it fit thematically in what they wanted the story to be about, which was about people fighting over the crown because the king gets murdered. So anyway, we ended up, so Ixelon started with the plans that I, all the stuff I had planned wasn't, like went out of the ones. window. So we had audible very early. So when we started Ixelon, I really looked at what we had

and they had built out the three different factions the creative team had. And one of the things I noticed is that the natives of the world rode dinosaurs. Because dinosaurs fit a lot in the, a lot of the tropes-based dinosaurs made a lot of sense, like the lost world tropes. kind of stuff. It made sense there. And so, um, so I looked around, I said, oh, well, there's dinosaurs. Um, I mean, we could do dinosaur. Dinosaurus are in the set and there's pirates in the set. And I said, you know what? Both dinosaurs and pirates are really cool things that

magic has had in the past, but we really haven't focused on. In fact, dinosaurs had been somewhat early magic, like Pigby Alsores and stuff. Even a few early cards had been labeled dinosaur. But we ended up. up moving away from that and we said, well, what if we bring dinosaur back in a big way? What if we make a creature type out of it? And pirates, while we had done pirates, we hadn't really, like, what if we made this a typel set? You know, and I thought we could anchor it on pirates and dinosaurs. Pirates and dinosaurs seemed really exciting.

And we had vampires already. But once I realized we wanted to make it typel, I realized that we needed at least one more creature type. And so I reached out to grade to me and said, okay, well, let's make this a fast. world where we have creature types. And after much discussion, we went around a little, but we ended up with murfolk. And then, so the interesting thing was we had four factions. Now, four factions don't easily fit into five colors. But it turns out, because I knew that two of the factions, I wanted to be a little bit bigger

than the other two, nothing wrong with Murfolk or Vampire. I know people would like Murphoken Vampire, but we had done plenty of Murphoken Vampire. That wasn't new. Dinosaurus and Pirates were pretty new, even though we'd done a little bit of it. I mean, dinosaurs, we were bringing back the dinosaur mechanic and pirates, like that, other than a little bit in Mercantian math, we hadn't done a lot with pirates. So I knew we could blow out dinosaurs and pirates. So when I had led Contra Tarkir, early on in Conterarkir, we had four factions, not five. The creative team came up with Soltai very late, or months into design.

And we ended up auditing to the wedge. We went to wedges. But originally, when we had four factions, I'd come up with the system. where two of the factions were three color and two of the factions were two color. And after a little bit of adjustment, I think originally, we had a shift some stuff around, but in the end, the idea was, okay, we'll make dinosaurs and pirates the threes because more people will want to draft those, and we'll make vampires and murfolk the two color.

So we kind of knew we wanted vampires in white black. Sort of the whole pitch from Jenna was this religious order of vampires. Like white black was perfect for them. So we went and we looked and we said, okay, for pirates, we wanted blue, black and red just made the most sense for pirates. Pirates weren't particularly white or green. So blue, black and red made the most sense. And for dinosaurs, the best three were green, red. and blue. The problem was we couldn't overlap the two, three colors with more than one color.

And the pirates were already blue-red. So the dinosaurs couldn't be blue and red. So we're like, okay, well, clearly the dinosaurs want to be green, which is fine because green isn't in. And they kind of had to be white because that's the other color that wasn't there. And so we looked at green-white blue. We looked at green-right-red. Green-right-red worked out a little better for us. And then if we went green and white-red, it allowed the murpholks to be, green blue. And that green blue murfokes we thought was kind of cool, like, of the nature.

Like, so we ended up making them green blue. So anyway, we ended up deciding to go typel, like the four main things. The one thing that didn't happen that I, in rare respect, was that we didn't really put any typel glue. We had talked to the creative team about crossing. Like, could you have a murfook that's a pirate? Could you have, you know,

maybe there's a murphook that the pirates got a hold. I don't know. Was there any sort of cross? And they said no. Creatively, they're very different factions. They didn't want to have a pirate. They didn't want to have like a Murphoke pirate or a, they just didn't want that. So in retrospect, I wish we'd found some secondary way to sort across them.

It's a typel set that just doesn't. It has too much definition. You knew what we call typel glue. But anyway, this is a long precursor to get us to run. Rival of Exelon. So Rival of Ixelon is a small set, is a small set, 196 cars, which is, to be fair, more medium-sized and small. And the idea was, this would be the continuation of Rizal of Ixelan.

And it was leaning a lot into the Lost City. In the trope space we were playing, the idea of a Lost City is very big. And so the idea of what if they found a lost city? That was the idea of sort of the rivals of X-Lon. So the set was run... So the set kind of had one team that did the whole thing, designed development altogether. Ben Hayes led it.

It had Melissa Datorra, Mark Gottlieb, Alexis Jansen, Glenn Jones, Sean Main, Eli Schiffin, who was the rule manager of the time, and Yanni Skolnik. My gut is not all of them were there all the time. But what happened was this is around the time we decided we wanted to change. from the two things.

We were changing from a two block system to what we called three and one at the time, which was just three individual sets and a core set. That in each individual set was its own set. And the idea at the time was we can stay in the same plane if we want to, but each set is a large set drafted by itself, and that whether or not we stay in the same world or not

is dictated by the needs of the story in the sets. And then at the same time, time we were shifting over from the design and development sort of model to design to the exploratory vision set play design model and so anyway we were shifting over so the big shift was we were kind of I was in the middle I was leading so we decided when we started doing guilds of Ravnika and Ravnika allegiance I was designing them as one big giant vision design team. In the end, they ended up becoming two separately drafted sets. I think they're always going to be simply drafted sets. That's just the way that we think Ravniker works the best.

So the first set that kind of was doing the thing different was going to be Dominaria. Dominaria was originally going to be a large set and a small set. We audible the small set into the core set. The core set was brought back. And so anyway, we were in the process of making this big changeover. And so Rizal-Ixelan was in a weird place. where we did the large set before we did the small set, and the small set was like, well, we're not doing this like we did normal sets. We're about to change over. And so it kind of got caught in the middle.

It's why Ben ended up sort of running the set for the whole time. And the interesting thing is it is one of the few sets. I mean, when I first took over as a head designer, I was not on every set. But I soon realized that it was easier for me to be on sets and just keep an eye on what's going on than it was. to not be there and kind of constantly check in to understand what was happening, which is it was way more time efficient to be on the teams. Now eventually as we started expanding, I am on all of the, what I call them, the multiverse, in multiverse teams, you know, the magic

the team's in the magic multiverse and then I'm on some teams for universes beyond. So normally I am on all of the in multiverse and some of the universes beyond. There's just, but there's too many sets for me to be on every set. And then I got Ethan to help me. Ethan sort of oversees a lot of the Universe's Beyond, and he and I check in, and I'm still on some of the teams, but Ethan sort of oversees the University Beyond stuff,

and he and I have regular meetings. So anyway, this is the one set. After a couple years, I decided I just wanted to be on all the sets to monitor them. This is the one set, in a long run of sets, I've been on every in multiverse set for a long time. This was the one I was not on. Just because I was running,

because I was running Ravnik, Gills of Ravnik and Ravina legions together as a giant team, there was a lot of moving parts going on. And we were starting to prep for Dominaria, which had a lot of challenges. Anyway, I was not on this team. I mean, Ben did a great job. I just wasn't on this team. So the idea of Rivals of Ixelon was,

that we wanted to uh we wanted to continue on what we were doing it's a small set um and one of the things we decided was the small set needed to add something to the mix early magic we would do a mechanic and just or two mechanics usually and then just keep those mechanics all the way through the

block we wouldn't add anything we just would evolve the mechanics we had um so one of the things that we decided uh as we advanced was every new set wanted something new. You wanted to sell the set and get people excited for something new. And so we did carryover of things. So rival of Exelon was Ixelon. Like I said, it kept the factions. So the pirates and the dinosaurs and the vampires and the murfolk were all there. They were all in the same colors. With the one exception is we did do a cycle of elder dinosaurs. That was a full cycle. Only because we recognize how much people love dinosaurs. So we did do a full

cycle of dinosaurs. But other than that, dinosaurs were red, green, and white, pirates were in blue, black, and red, vampires were white, black, and murfoke were green and blue. So let's talk about the brand new mechanic. Oh, so the set was 196 cards, 70 common, 60 uncommon, 48 rairs, 13 mythics and five basic lands. A set came on January 2018. So the brand new mechanic was a mechanic called Ascend. So the way Ascend works is Ascend says, if you can 10 or more permanence, you get the city's blessing for the rest of the game. So this is what we call a threshold mechanic. What we mean by a threshold mechanic is basically your things turn on if you meet a certain

criteria. The original threshold mechanic was Threshold, made by Richard Garfield, and Threshold said, if you have seven or more cards in your graveyard, these cards turn on, their threshold ability turns on. So we had talked about wanting to do a threshold on the battlefield. And so this was, Ben and Company did that. Because you're counting land, which is kind of free, you don't play land. They ended up choosing to do 10 permanence.

I think the reason they chose 10, kind of similar to why Richard chose 7 for threshold, is you're going to get there most likely. The game will get to 10 permanent. But it happens, it's the kind of thing that you could speed up some. So, like, it's not going to happen early game. It's going to most likely happen by the late game. And how fast you get there has a lot,

like, you have the ability to shape how fast you get there. The other thing they did that was really important. Originally, when they did it, it was just this on-off thing, which is when you get to 10, you have the city's blessing and when you're not. And so it created this weird incentive where you wanted to get to 10, but then you didn't want to do anything

because you didn't want to lose the city's blessing. Right? It's like, oh, I finally got 10. Well, I better not attack. If I attack, they'll block and kill my creatures, then I'll be below 10. So they decided to do something that... We have since done since this.

This is the first set that did this, is let's do a threshold where the idea is once you reap the threshold, it turns on, and it doesn't turn off. And that was... That was at the time a pretty interesting idea that we hadn't done at the time. So the city's blessing says, okay, I need you to get a 10. But once you get to 10, you get the city's blessing, which was sort of a state, I guess, that you're in.

We did make a helper card on one of the tokens was a helper card which said, oh, you know, you had the city's blessing. But basically it's a state. Once you reach, like once you jump through the hoop of having 10 permits, that's it. You have the city's blessing. And then no matter what happens, you've been granted. to the city's blessing. You just, the threshold's merely there to turn on, but then it doesn't turn off. That actually played much better.

And it raised a lot of the problem of not wanting to lose anything once you reach the threshold. Like, in the graveyard with the threshold in the graveyard, well, you're not, nothing you're doing, you know, with a few exceptions. Nothing's really changing the nature of that too much. I mean, there's a little bit of interaction in the graveyard, but it's a lot, lot less. In play, okay, if you have 10 things, I can kill your creature or whatever. Like, there's ways for me to interact with your permanence in a way. Now, one of the things that can happen is if I'm trying to get a 10 and you see them close to 10,

maybe you start killing my things and where you wouldn't normally, you know, you can interact that way, but that felt more, more upside. So the team did, in fact, mostly a lot of the mechanics carried over, or by some mechanics. There was, we did some double-faced cards. In X-Lon, we did double-face land. So the way it worked was, however you got the land over, the backside, if you transform the card, the backside was always a land. The reason for that is we really were playing into the exploration theme of X-Lahn, one of the tropes we liked a lot. In fact, the explorer mechanic came back.

So the explorer mechanic goes on creatures. A creature will explore. When it does, you look at the top card of your library. If the card is a land, you get to reveal it and put in your hand. If the card is not a land, I mean, you basically reveal it. I guess, and you put it in the discard pile, and then the creature gets a plus one plus one counter. So the idea is it's similar to connive, although actually it predates connive. I guess connive was influenced by explorer.

But the idea essentially is I either get a land or my creature gets bigger. I get something. You know, whenever my creature explores, one of two things happens. And that comes from one of the tropes place we were playing in with exploration. So we like a lot the idea that as you found things, that the backside of things were lands. Oftentimes the front were also lands, but sometimes it wasn't. And because you had to jump through hoop to get there, we were able to make some pretty exciting backs.

Like in Ixelon, one of the backs was like Gayus Cradle, basically. So we could do some pretty splashy things. So Transform continued. We had put Raid on the Pirates. Raid was a mechanic that first showed up in Khans of Tarkir, for the Mardu, I believe. And that just rewards you for having attacked. We liked the pirates being a little more aggro and aggressive, because they're pirates.

And so we had used Raid for the Pirates. That continued. And then for the dinosaurs, we had made a brand new mechanic called Enrage. And so Enrage was a mechanic that, when damaged, it triggered and did something. Kind of inspired. There's a card actually in Alpha. What's the name of the card in Alpha? I'm a picture in my head. What's the end of the card? It is

Fungosaur. So there was a card which was Fungaura Dinosaur, maybe. But Fungasaur was a card in Alpha where if it got damaged but didn't die, it got a plus one plus one counter. And so I think Enraged

was really Fungasor the mechanic. I mean, Fungaura, I even argue is sort of dinosaur-ish. I guess it's got sore in it, so I assume it's a dinosaur. So anyway, that got used as well. So most of the things, I mean, the main two mechanics that we had used was transform, explorer, explorer, raid, and enraged.

So all that stuff got carried over. I will say in general, one of the challenges of the Ixelon block was during Morning Tide, when Lorwyn came up, morning tide had a lot of complexity to it. Matt Place, who used to work in R&D and I, had gone to the employ Morning Tide pre-release. We were watching people drop out because it just was too hard to play. And he and I, out of that meeting, sort of put together what ended up to be called New World Order. And the idea was that we needed to make common simpler to allow, like, part of the barrier for entry issue was that common was just a little too complex. And so we did a lot of things to clean up common. And I think what happened was we went a little bit too far.

I think that Ixelon, the block, one of the side effects was it, is I think we pushed the idea of the simplicity a little harder than we should. And that and the sort of a lack of type of glue. Xelon is a really weird setting where the world actually scored well as a world, meaning people creatively like the world, but the mechanics did not do well. And it wasn't that. People did like dinosaurs and vampires and people liked the typal, but the typonness of it really didn't come through. It did a little bit in casual construction, I guess, less so. Like in limited, it is very on rails. The fact that we didn't have typel glue was problematic.

And so a lot of the problems of Ixelon just carried over to rivals of Ixelon. One of the big issues is if the large set has inherent problem, the small set kind of acquires them. And there's only so much you can do in a small set to adjust for the big set. If the big set really does something that's not right, it is hard for a little set to offset for that. And so Rivals definitely struggled a little bit from that,

meaning I thought Rivals was, there's a fun design. I like a said, as a mechanic, but I think it suffered a little bit from trying to foul in the footsteps of some of the floods. of X-Lyline. And I co-led X-Line. So, I mean, the vision for it or the design for it, I forget whether we had

changed over yet. I guess we hadn't. I co-led the design for it. And there were a lot of looking back on things I would improve. There are some structural things that I definitely had a lot to do with that I will take responsibility for. When I got on the creative team, they really didn't

want to mix and match the things. I needed to then find another solution. The solution was not put type of glue in. that was not. That was not the correct answer. The correct answer was, okay, we wanted to have a typel set. How do we do that?

And I need to be a little more responsible about that. Anyway, Rivals of Exelon, I think, like it reinforced, one of the things, like I said, is one of the fun things to do when we're playing around in sort of cultural tropes

is find things that people sort of like about it. And it was exciting to play into Velocity. That was fun. Like I said, I did like Ascend mechanic. And the Ascend mechanic actually was pretty influential because the idea of a threshold where you can cap and lock it and not fall below the threshold

was a really interesting idea, one that we would go back to and use again. And so I think Ascend really, it's one of those mechanics that advanced our technology in a way that was important. And, like I said, the world itself,

when we went back in Lost City's Explan, people really, really liked the world. I think Lost Cities did a better job of capturing, mechanically was a little better capture than here. I will say I really like Enrage. I thought Enrage played really well. I like Explorer, but Explorer is really wordy. And, I mean, I think at the time,

the set wasn't particularly wordy, so we were okay with Explorer because Explorer was the wordy thing. But explore is a lot of words. I wish there were some things we do in magic that it's very funny. When we're looking at vocabulary to sort of shorten things, drawing and messing with the top of the library takes a lot of words to do it, but it's something we do all the time. So that's one of the things that I keep.

It's what we call impulse, meaning I look at the top end cards of the library. I take one of them and the rest go on the bottom in random order. I'm just waiting for the day we keyworded that. We just used it so much, and it's a lot of words. But anyway, all, I think that Rob's Exelon was a nice set. I think that, like I said, it suffered some of the larger challenges that came from the block that it was in. It really was a fun world, and it's a world I assume we'll go back to.

And while the type of stuff is fun, and I do know that any world where we visit, But we're not going to visit Ixelon and not let you play with, you know, with dinosaurs and such. But I believe that, I don't know, it's one of those sets that I led that I'm like, I really wish I could have added a few elements to it. I think we ended up being a little overly simplistic for a bunch of reasons and little on rails. But anyway, so that, my friends, is Xelon and Rizelon. I

like I said the other weird thing for me about this particular set was I was not there for the entire design I never worked on the set I play tested I had a little bit I dipped my tone a little bit I mean I was still had designer

so I needed to have a little notch what was going on but it was very from outside and most of the time when I'm talking to you about designs I was there as it happened so I have a very good understanding of the evolution of how things happened so like I know a little bit of how a sense

advanced just because I was peeking into the thing. But a lot of the smaller things, I don't know. I assume stuff like, you know, the dinosaur cycle is just people love dinosaurs. We make elder dragons. Well, how about elder dinosaurs? What's the cool idea? So anyway, guys, that is everything I have to say about Rise of Exelon.

Luckily, I've just pulled into work, so that all works out. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you all next time. Bye-bye.