Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1364: Ravnica Allegiance

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

This is another in my series where I attempt to give every Magic expansion an episode of my podcast. Today, I talk about Ravnica Allegiance, the second set of our third visit to Ravnica.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's another in my series where I'm trying to talk about every magic expansion ever. So I'm up to Ravnika Allegiance. So interestingly, I always assumed

when I got to the point where I started my podcast that I would have already talked about these episodes, but that is not true. So I have talked about Gilds of Ravnika, and I did do a lesson learned about both Gilds of Ravnika and Ravnika. Allegiance. The reason I did them together is the design was done together. But I've not talked about the Raven Allegiance as a set alone. So I decided that today I will. So Ravnik Allegiance,

code named Meatballs, Gilles of Ravniko was spaghetti. So spaghetti and meatballs. And it came out January 255, 2019, 111 commons, 80 Uncommons, 53 rairs, 15 Mythics. I led the vision design. The team was me, Jules Robbins, Jackie Lee, Ari Levitch, who did the creative team, Sam Stoddard, who I handed off to, and Brian Hawley. The development or the set design team was led by Sam Stoddard, Eric Lauer, Adam Prozac, Dave Humphreys, Michael Majors, Paul Chion, and Peter Lee. Okay, so I guess I should start by talking about where were we in Magic? So this was our third visit to Ravnika. The first Ravnika, the fact, the very first set, or first block I ever led as head designer, or I was in charge of his head designer.

I also led Ravnika block was original Ravnika, and that was a full block, large, small, small. I realized that I needed to give each of the guilds time to shine. So the real quick, dirty version of original Ravnika was we were going back to doing a multicolor block. it's the first time we'd repeat a theme in a block. The first one was Invasion. Invasion was about playing lots of colors. So I said, how do I make a multicol set that's as far away from invasions as possible, but still be multicolored?

The answer was two. Instead of playing lots of colors, play as few colors as you can, but you have to play two, otherwise you're not multicolor. I took that idea, the idea of let's do the 10, two-color pairs to the creative team. Brady-Darremouth came up for the idea of the guilds, and we ran with it. In original Rabnika, early playtesting showed that when I put all the guilds in the same set, it just was a little bit overwhelming. So I realized that I wanted to spread them out.

So because I had a large, small, small block, I put four in the first set and three in each of the other two sets. And that, I mean, obviously, Rabnika was a pretty definitional block. It defined a lot of things that came after it. It was really the start of sort of how we did factioning. It did a lot of things. But, so when we returned for Return to Ravnika, five years later we returned in Return to Ravnika, so as Return to Ravnika, Gate Crash, Dragon Maze. There, we decided to do things a little bit differently.

We realized that small sets, that big sets worked better. And so instead of doing 433, what if we just did 5 and 5? And in the final set, we'd have the all 10. So we'd revisit everything. So you get to draft five, then draft another five, they were disconnected. They weren't drafted together. Then you would draft 10, which I think they all were drafted together, to be a little different. And that general, I mean, I think the first two sets worked fine.

We didn't change a lot. One of the things that we were doing at the time is when we were revisiting things, sometimes we'd make bigger changes. You know, Indistrade went from being gothic horror to cosmic horror, or Zendikar, went to be about this war with the Aldrasi. Like, we'd make big, bigger sweeping changes. But the idea for Ravnika, I was told, no, don't, you know. So pretty much returned to Ravnika was just like we did Ravnika. The biggest change difference instead of 4333 was 5, 5.10.

So our third trip. So the interesting thing was we had planned to do the third trip. So for a long time, Magic's blocks were three sets. Usually a large, and I'm using Northern Her Hemisphere. seasons here. It would be a large fall set, small winter set, small spring set. Eventually, to try to jazz things up, we occasionally started doing large spring sets. Sometimes they were connected, sometimes they weren't mechanically. And then eventually realized that the solution to the third set problem, we always had,

the problem we did blocks is the first set would sell 100%, basically. Second set was sell 80% no matter what we did. And the third set would sell 60%. So whatever the first set established as the 100%, it'd go 80%. We couldn't seem to change that. If we made the set bigger, meaning if the third set was a large set, we'd increase it by some. We usually did not meet the original fall set,

but at least it would go up a little bit. The number of cards would make it go up. So eventually we realized the solution to the third set problem was to stop doing a third set. So instead of doing large, small, small, or large small, we did large small. So starting with Battle for Zendikar, it was two set blocks, and we do two, two set blocks a year.

A lot of this was modeled after sort of how we did original Lorwin block. Anyway, at some point, we started to realize that while we no longer had a third set problem, we now were getting a second set problem. And ultimately, the solution to the second set problem was to stop having second sets. Just make every set the first set. That was the solution. And originally, so we went from large small, large, small, large, small, to large, large, large, and then the final set of the year was a core set.

That was our plan. So the interesting thing about Ravnikov, Allegiance and Gilles of Ravnika was we had made the decision to change just as we were coming to this set. The weird thing about it was we had planned for it to be two large sets that were drafted apart, meaning before we got to the decision to change. all of magic to that. We were planning to change Guilds of Ravnikah and Ravnik Aledegians to that. So when the last two-set block

was Ixelon block, we kind of said, well, this one set was going there anyway. So on some level, Dominaria was the first where we really changed it. Dominaria was going to be a large and small set. And we got rid of the small set.

So on some level, technically we changed it with Guils of Ravnika of Ravnagin Allegiance. I mean, we list them as having vision design because we made that change around there but it really it's in a weird place

it was kind of the middle ground where we were already planning to do the thing that we were shifting to do the other thing that we did which was a little bit different is I led the vision design for Gilles of Ravnik and Ravnik allegiance all together the idea at the time was

look we're going to do like faction sets need to interweave with each other and we wanted to make sure that everything's playing nicely with everything else. And so we worked on both sets at the same time. I think we had a little extra longer time for vision than we normally did, if I remember correctly. So anyway, we spent a lot of time working on it. And then I believe Eric Lauer ran Guilds of Ravnika, Sam Stoddard, Ron ran Rabnika Allegiance.

and if I remember correctly, most of the mechanics we came up with, I think Sam changed most of them in set design. So we're going to walk through any of them? I think Sam changed all five of them. I don't remember all of what they were

in one or two of them I remember, but, so anyway, so once again, the idea of a Ravnik cassette is there are five two-color gilds. Every color must be represented by two colors. Usually we do it so there's a mix of enemy and ally, only because most sets are either ally or enemy, and this gives us a chance to mix them, so we do mix them.

So for Rabnick Allegiance, we had five guilds. Azoresis, white, blue, ractos, black, red, gruel, red green, orjov, white, black, and cinc green blue. So we had three ally, two enemy. Obviously, the other five were in the original set. Oh, how did we decide what was in what set? That's a fine question. Like I said, the rules we had is we needed every color represented twice.

We needed, we wanted Allen and me to be mixed. And in this time, in previous sets, we wanted to lead with some of the more popular. Because the fall set dictated so much, we tended to lead with some of the more popular guilds. This time we did things a little bit differently. So the storyline was the next set after Ravennaic Allegiance was War of the Spark. Oh, I'm sorry.

I had things backwards. Dominaria happened before. Okay, our change in the new system happened in Dominaria, which was before we got to Gilda of Ravenna and Rabin Allegiance. So the actual change happened before. The weird thing is that we were already planning

to change these two sets. So Domini did drop to one large set and we turned the other set into the core set. So anyway, my timing was lit up there. But anyway, the set that followed Ravennaec Legion's was War of the Spark. That was the big, our first kind of event capstone set where we had the giant Nicole Bolusark that started in Kaladesh and ended in War of the Spark.

And it was a big finale. We really wanted to have the finale on Ravenica, but our worry at the time was if we went to Ravenica but didn't give you a guild set, people were like, where's my guild set? So the idea was we would first visit Ravnika in two sets, and then the third set would still be on Ravnika, but not be about the guilds at all. I mean, the guilds showed up, I guess, but would be about this giant event,

which is the Plainswalker War, the war between Nicole Bolus and his eternal zombie army and most of the Plainswalkers that you know. That was our big finale. And so the idea here was, we were trying to lead into that. So the thing that happened was Nicole Bolus comes and starts infiltrating the guilds. And so the idea was we wanted the first set to be the guilds that were falling quickest to Nicole Bolus.

And so I think he took over Isit, right? He took over Isid from, because Isit was so used to following a dragon that he managed to get rid of Nivvv, I mean, didn't kill Nivizet. Did he kill Zivizit? He might have killed Zivizet and Nivis came back. But anyway, he got rid of Nivisit and took over

control the Isit. And then he slowly had influence on other things. But the idea was the five, the ones he started having influence on, you saw that in the first set, I think is how we worked it. But anyway, we divvied them up. We tried to change them so they were a little bit different. The funny thing is as it sort of worked its way out, we ended up making guilds of Ravnika,

the four guilds that had been an original Ravnika, plus is it? and is it, by the way, for those that don't remember original Ravenica, while there are only four guilds in original Ravenica, we had extra blue and red cards because you need to balance the colors. And so there was loosely

this fifth blue-red. So essentially, we kind of repeat... I don't think we meant to do that. I think we just picked who had fallen to... who had fallen to Boros, and anyway, apparently Boris went after

the original Ravennaga guilds. That were original Ravenica plus, is it? Okay. So for each one of them, The key to a faction set is you want to do something that's very flavorful for the faction, but you want to make sure that there's overlap between factions. In a two-color faction world, you're looking at the other factions that share your color. Okay, we start with Azores.

So Zorius had a mechanic called addendum. So addendum goes on spells, instances of sorceries. I believe it's instant sorceries. I think it's instance of sorcerers. Or, well, actually, sorry, it goes on instance. And the reason for that is if you cast the spells during the main phase, meaning if you essentially cast them as sorceries, I mean, there's still technical instance,

but if you cast them when you can cast a sorcery, you get a bonus effect. I think this was influenced in original invasion. We had done a cycle of cards like this, where they did something. There was no keyword to it. They weren't labeled, but if you cast them during your main phase,

they had a bonus effect. So this addendum is kind of borrowing from that, but putting a name to it. It was an ability word. The idea in general is we like Azoresis to be a little more of a controlling guild. And so having them care about spells or non-creatures in particular was helpful. The thing that we had tried for Azoresa that I really liked, but ended up being two, the rules people were like, Originally, the way it worked was they had this ability.

Well, originally the ability was when this creature comes into play, its enterability is any enterability on a creature you have in play. So the idea is when I enter, and I think they had an enterability. I think they had an effect. But instead of doing your effect,

you can do the effect of any other creature with an enter's effect. Previously, it entered the battlefield effect before that come-in-play effect. And so the idea is, let's say I had a creature that said, when you enter, draw a card. When I played my creature, maybe it was when I enter tap target creature, but it was, or you could choose to do what's somebody else's thing. That caused a bunch of rule problems. Then we tried a version where it only worked on itself, meaning I can only activate an entrance ability with this mechanic.

So every card with this mechanic did something, but you could swine. the entrance abilities. That got a little bit too parasitic and it didn't blend well with the other... So that's why we didn't do it, but it was kind of cool. Okay, next, we get a Ractos, black red. Ractors had spectacle.

Spectacle was an alternate cost, and if any opponent had taken damage to this turn, you may cast your spectacle creature for its spectacle cost. So the idea is it just wants to be more aggressive in being doing damage to the opponent. Very Ractos. It was, we have messed around other spaces where you do other things when you damage the opponent.

But this particular thing was cost reduction. And I believe the way Spectacle worked, it could go in any card type. It just, the car gets cheaper. I mean, you'd go to any car type out to the land. It had to have a manacross. But it could go in any non-land card type. And it did a nice job. One of the things you like about guild mechanics is when the mechanic makes you the player play

in the style that, and just being pretty aggressive and damaging the opponent, it felt pretty Ractos. Okay, next up is Gruel. So, Gruel is red-green. Gruel had riot. So Riot was, it's a mechanic that goes on creatures. It says when this creature enters, you can choose one of two things. You may put a plus one plus one counter on the creature, or you may grant the creature haste.

So the idea is it depends how aggressive you're trying to be. You're trying to build up, go more mid-range. You're trying to be aggressive, go more attacking. And the point is you can choose with each creature that you want to do. It was a pretty firm mechanic. One of the things that I like a lot about Riot is, I like mechanics that make you make a choice, but the choice is a pretty simple choice,

meaning in the moment, I mean, I like it and it's a cool choice. There's times you have to think it through. most of the times you have a sense what you want to do. The key to ride is, if I can't get through, there's no reason to have haste, so I'll get the counter. Usually I get haste if I'm just trying to, like, I'm using haste to my advantage because I'm trying to beat them down. Sometimes you'll grant haste because they left you open and like you can just get in now. And maybe sometimes you do that. But I do like the simplicity of it.

We'll talk about the interconnectivity between stuff in a second. Next is Orjav. Orjav was Afterlife. So afterlife went on creatures, and it said whenever this creature dies, create a 1-1 white-and-black spirit-token creature with flying. So it makes a little 1-1 flyer. So the creature's... The idea essentially for Orjav, for those that don't know, Orjav has a lot of ghost effects

run by the Ghost Council. If you pledge yourself to Orjav, You are not off the hook when you die. Oh, no, no, no. Ghosts exist on Ravenica. You come back as a spirit, and you've got to work off. You've got to work your debt off as a spirit. And so the idea that they die into little spirits was pretty cool

because the flavor of the afterlife and spirits is pretty big in Orjav specifically. Now, the mechanic for this one was my favorite mechanic in vision. We called it debt. The way debt worked, if I remember exactly, is you would, get debt counters. I think you could give debt counters to the opponent or sometimes you would take on debt counters. The way debt worked is, I think it was at the end of the turn. At the end of the turn, you could pay, I think it was two for every deck counter. It was one or two. And then if you had any deck counters left, you would take two damage, I believe it was. So the idea was, I would pick up

deck counters. At the end of the turn, I could remove debt counters by paying two per deck counter. But if I had any debt counters, I lose two life. And the interesting thing about debt was early in the game, it's like, oh, whatever, I'll just take that, you know, you kind of like, don't worry about it because you have enough life. But at some point, you're like, oh, I'm watching the clock. Uh-oh, two a turn here. This is going to kill me in some amount of time. I better spend some energy in getting out of debt. Or, or it's like, well, I'm going to die in six turns no matter what. I better get aggron and I better race my debt. It was very cool. I like the mechanic a lot. I do keep looking for other places to put it. I actually really do like

the mechanic. But it's it's I admit there's some fiddling this to it. And the reason it wasn't here is it wasn't the best of guild mechanic. I mean it was very flavorable for the orjov. It was hard to you want to cross the themes and it's tricky to do that. And so that's why um, It is why afterlife ended up replacing debt. The final mechanic is Simic, green blue, adapt. So adapt was essentially monstrosity from original Theros. Monstrosity was an ability where you pay mana, you get some number of plus one plus one counters,

and then once you become monstrous, you gain an ability or some of the abilities. Now, the way monstrosity worked is monstrosity just tracked whether or not you were monstrous. It did put counters on you as an aid to help remember that you activated it. But if somehow the counters got removed from the creature, the creature was still monstrous.

So when they were putting together, in set design for the set, I think they were looking for a new Cymic mechanic, and they realized the monstrosity was close to being a good thing. The word monstrosity wasn't great. I don't think Cimic considers its experimentation as monstrous to them. And they liked the idea that there was, because there was already some plus one plus one counter synergy going on,

the thing they liked is that the moving of counters could let you redo it. So adapt is monstrous with one major change. The way Adapt works is I can spend my Adapt cost. As long as I don't have counters, I can spend my Adapt cost and get the Adapt. And then the Adapt would give me counters. and I think it gave me an ability while I have my counters is how it worked.

So you somehow lost the counters, you lost the ability. So it's very similar to monstrous, but with a key difference in that the counters itself is what grants the ability. So the losing of counters would make you lose the ability. But let's say you move the counter somewhere else,

you then can activate it again. That's one of the upsides is, yes, you lose the ability to lose the counters, but you do have the ability to activate it multiple times if you can move the counters. Okay, so the thing here was, like I said, the key is looking at overlap between things. So Azores, so I said, let's look at the five cowards. So White overlapped in Azores and Orsjav.

We have addendum where you're trying to get extra value out of your spells, and we have afterlife where your creatures die into spirits. both of which allowed you to play white likes to play a little bit can be a little bit more a long game both white blue and white black white blue likes to control white black likes what we call a bleeder deck

meaning it's much slower play so we gave white slower mechanics both addendum and afterlife allow you like the nice thing is that creatures are good for a control deck flying creatures are a nice wind condition

and for a bleeder deck, they're a good way to slowly plinket your opponent. So if we wanted White to sort of play this long game, the two mechanics let White do that. The Blue Mechanics are Azoresa's addendum and Cynics Adapt. These are both things, once again, that both of these games are playing a little bit longer. Blue traditionally plays the longest game, although White Black, Orjov also plays a very long game. So anyway, mostly this is a long game.

So anyway, mostly this is about building up. This is about getting things over time. Help me get advantage. Your creatures get to build up over time. So a lot of the ways you win with Simic is that you're slowly building up. Usually you're ramping and making bigger things and getting the mana so that you can make larger creatures. Black was spectacle and Orsjav. So the idea there was Arctos tends to be.

have more of a sacrifice strategy. And a lot of times, it can sacrifice things to damage the opponent, which is a way to trigger a spectacle. And the nice thing about having afterlife is if you sacrifice, you could sacrifice twice. So afterlife was nice. If you're planning to play more control,

it can plink away at the opponent. But if you're trying to play a little more of a sacrifice deck, it just gives you two things to sacrifice for every creature. So that is valuable. And we also made a bunch of sacrifice things that help you do damage to the opponent so you can trigger spectacle.

Also, if you were playing a more... I mean, if you're getting more aggressive with your Ractose and sacrificing things, that mean that you could get the spectacle stuff to hit. Okay, we get to red. Red is Spectacle and... What's the other? And Gruel.

So, once again, spectacle... Well, the nice thing about Gruel is Gruel had riot, riot at haste. A lot of time, haste is a good thing to get in there. One of the ways you might trigger spectacle is my opponent doesn't, you know, they don't leave back a blocker because I have no attackers, and then out of the blue, I hit them with haste, and now all of a sudden, I'm able to do spectacle. This is the sort of later turns, obviously, that you have to cast both the haste creature and the spectacle. Though we had a bunch of cheaper haste creatures to help you do that. And then green was riot and adapt.

Ractos and Simic, both of those, notice, have a plus one plus one counter theme. Right? Let's you put a plus one plus counter on your creatures. Adapt puts plus one counter to creatures. So we were a lot in green. Green could care about counters. So we get about a counter theme. And in general, that's one of the ideas is when you do these sets,

you want to sort of make sure that because the key in a two-color faction set is, let's say, for example, I am playing, most likely I'm playing, one of the faction. So I'm playing, let's say I'm playing gruel. I'm playing red-green. So really what I do is I've access to three different guilds. I've access to gruel because I'm playing red and green, so I've access to riot. But then I've access to spectacle because ractos, half a ractress is red, so I can play the red-rack-or-rack-st things here. And I've access to adapt because I have green cards and half of Simic is green. And so you can see, how, oh, look, there's a little through line that I can get, and that things help me, like,

you want, that's why you want mechanics to all play sweetly together. And it's one of the reasons that faction sets are so hard to do, because you have to, every ally, every shard sort of, of mechanics. So every mechanic and its two allies, those three mechanics can be played together. And the other thing that can happen is, um, sometimes, you know, you can splash an additional color, So anyway, you can get a lot of factions in. One of the challenges, by the way, back then, and something that it's taking us a lot of time. In fact, we're still learning it, is how to give people access

to play more than one color, but not play more than two. And one of the things that is very true in playing Ravnikas sets is, and we do build it in. We do build in how you could build three. So we do make combination saying, oh, well, if you're playing Ractos and Gruel together, you're playing black, red, green. And so we do build three trying to do that.

We try to be careful not to let you get too easily into the fourth and fifth color. We do let you sort of get into the third color. But that's one of the ongoing challenges of multicolored. Anyway, Ravnika, I think Gild's of Ravennaq and Ravenna Allegiance, players generally like the players like Raffnika sets, they like guild sets. So they went over fine.

And I think we did a good job of setting up War of the Spark, where by the time we got to War the Spark, We had satisfied all the guild desires so that we can sort of focus on telling the story of War of the Spark. But anyway, guys, that, in a nutshell, in a drive, in a car drive, in a podcast, is Ravnica Allegiance.

And so I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. But I'm not at work, so we all know what that means. It means at 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.