Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1379: Fresh Out of Design – Reality Fracture

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Back in December of 2023, I handed off the vision design for Reality Fracture. I recorded this for you to hear my thoughts at the time of handoff.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. So today is December 5th, 2023. At the end of November, I handed over the Vision Design file for ziplining. And yesterday, I finished writing my Vision Design handoff. So it means today I'm doing something that...

This is something I'm trying. I don't even know if it's successful yet. Although, if you're hearing this, it was successful. So the new thing I'm trying is when I hand over a vision design document for a Premiere set, I am recording a podcast about the set at the state it was when I handed it off. So the idea is if you're hearing this, you're hearing this years in the future because you're hearing this when the set is coming out. And there's like a two-year gap or something between me handing off a set and the public playing with the set. But the idea of this podcast is I'm going to explain where ziplining was at when I handed it off.

And obviously, it will have changed. Set design changes things. But it's a chance for you to sort of see in the progress, in the process, after the process. Like I literally, I just handed it off. So I'm going to talk about what I did and where the process. the file is at. And I'll make some predictions of where I think things are going. So hopefully that will be enjoyable. Anyway, let's get started. Okay, so zip lining is what I refer to as a capstone event set, which means we are telling a multi-year story and we are completing it in

this dramatic set finale. War the Spark was our first one. March, The First of the machines was our second one. I led both those sets. So I chose to leave this set. It's just very complicated. There's a lot of moving pieces. It's really trying to swing for the fences in a big way. Now, one of the things about making one of these

is because it's the third one, we did look back at the first two to learn a lot from it. So the premise of the story, at least as it currently stands, is during the Phrexian War, J. Scott Frexonized. He got defrexianized, but it had a big impact on him, really affected him. And he sort of decided that he needs to do something on a grander scale to protect the universe from dangers like the phrexians. And what he ends up doing in his twisted mind is he's able to make a duplicate, or not duplicate, an alternate multiverse. Behind the scenes, we're calling multiverse j.

And he basically has convinced himself that the version he made is the better version because he's changed things such that things he thinks are horrible in the main multiverse don't happen. And he has decided to, he has to get a spell, I think, from Strick-Saven. And that he can use this spell to overwrite reality such that his alternate reality becomes the main reality. wiping out the current multiverse in the process. So a whole bunch of heroes have to stop this. Now early on... So the idea here is it's a bunch of heroes going to stop Jace from doing what he's going to do.

I knew very early on that... So we did a set called Plainer Chaos many years ago that played around with alternate reality. Now it was messing with the color pie and doing some things we shouldn't have done. But it also did a little bit of messing with, hey, what if this story had gone differently? One of the main things we did is it took the Weatherlight saga

and it took Miri and Krovax and said, hey, what if their stories that had gone a little bit differently? And it showed what if versions of them. And we've always in, between that and just players asking for stuff, we've been wanting to do a what if set forever. What if is a fun theme?

If you look at pop culture, the idea of alternate realities and clones and evil twins and there's a lot of fun stuff with the idea of alternate versions of things and so we definitely wanted to play in that space and this seemed like the perfect

opportunity, like Chase made an alternate version, there are alternate versions of characters. So I was all in very early on to do what if. So the idea was there's a what if theme the story obviously a capstone event set has a top-down story component.

Okay, how do we make this a what-if set. That was the idea. Aaron's big concern was that a lot of what makes what if fun is the, a term we call inside baseball, which means that it really is like you have to know a lot of information to make it relevant. An example we would use is we're talking about having a blue Chandra. So Chandra is a fire mage. Well, what if she was an ice mage or a water mage? Like, what if she was the opposite of what we know Shandra now?

And the idea is a blue Shandra is pretty cool, but only if you know that Red Chandra exists. Only if you're aware. Now, Shandra's a high-profile character. Probably play Magic, there's a decent chance you know who Shandra is. But as soon as we start doing characters, like, well, this character appeared in this one set,

like, it's very easy that when you start doing what-if, that if it becomes too narrow, like, get it? It's this. How do we know? I'll just use Blue Chandra as an example. And by the way, Shandra is one of the most well-known characters. So if we have this problem with Blue Chandra,

it's just that much worse with any other character. But the idea is you open up Blue Chandra and your booster pack. That is only exciting to you, that is only interesting to you, if you know your Red Chandra exists. In a vacuum, Blue Chandra's like, okay, there's a Plainswater that uses Ice Magic or whatever.

It's not what makes it exciting. What makes the what if is this understanding of what is. And so Aaron's concern was how do we do a what-of-set that is sort of mass appealing, that anybody who plays magic can enjoy it even if they don't know the particulars of magic. And that was a tall order. That was a pretty, that was the big challenge that we started off with. was how do we convey this idea of what if in a way that everybody could get? And we talked about a lot of things.

We talked about some unique frame or watermark. And I'm sure that, I mean, we haven't even got to the point of frames yet. So I don't definitively know that there's a special frame for multiverse J or a watermark. We've talked about there being a frame or a watermark. Something will happen. I assume there'll be some indicator that something's different. But understanding that an indicator, even what it means, can be complicated, right? So the idea we came up with very early on was, well, what if when you open up blue Chandra,

you also opened up Red Chandra? What if we took the pairings and we gave them to you together? What if, like, and one of the things to just be clear that we've been moving more and more toward is what I'm trying to do with theme I want to make sure the theme is clear in a single booster pack I buy a booster pack

of a new set man in one pack I got the theme there's a quote I made long ago during Champs Kamagawa which is if your theme is not at common

it's not your theme and what that meant was we need to convey what's going on that if you can open up a whole bunch of bootchapacks and still not understand what the sets about

that's a problem and one of the ways to solve that is consistency in the booster pack. I'm a big fan of, I like the fact that merchant machine had every battle, there's a battle in every pack,

or Inestrade had a double-faced card in every pack. I really like something that's very consistent, where there's some message that you, it doesn't, you don't be a sleuth to figure it out, the pack communicates it. And so I really liked this idea of a pairing

shows of the pack. That the way you know that there's alternate realities of things is in the very pack, in every pack, in every pack, you get a normal version and the alternate version. And, okay, so the challenge of that is, so now we start talking about collation. So collation means we have to print packs, right? The way we make magic cards is we print them on sheets.

Usually they're 11 by 11, sometimes 11 by 10. Anyway, there's different sizes. But we print cards on a giant sheet, we chop them up, We put them in a hopper, and then we drop them in different slots. And normally slots are based on rarity. There's a land slot, some number of common slots, some number of uncommon slots, a rare mystic slot. So the idea of getting two cards that are connected to each other in the booster pack is a challenge.

We've done it once before. There's a set called Battle Bond. And that had a theme. It was our two-ed-a-d giant set. That did a thing where two cards that were connected each other that had partner with each other showed up in the same booster pack. And the way you drafted Battlebond is you drafted two cards. Now, the only way to do that, we have one printer that was able to say, okay, we can put two

cards on the sheet and guarantee that you get those two cards. But that was a supplemental set. So it was small enough that one printer could print it. normal Premier Magic site is so big that we can't limit it to one printer. We just make too many cards. So that means is we have to have technology that many printers could use. So we don't have the technology to print exactly two cards. But that was important.

So how do we do that? So the solution we came up with was a very, what I call an old school solution. So if you think of a, you have a sheet of cards. So on the cards, in order, there's cards that appear on the sheet that didn't get cut out. But when they cut them out, they keep them in order. They can do that. So imagine on the sheet there was a character, then an alternate version of the character. So character A, alternate version of character A, character B, also version of character B, C, D, etc.

So let's say, for example, I cut them out so they're in order. and then we have them drop in the sheet. So one of three things can happen. They can drop... So I'm going to refer to the multiverse j as prime. So we can drop A and A prime. We could drop A prime and B, or we can drop B and B prime. Meaning if you took those, the order by which those were appearing as you chopped them,

that's the order they could drop. And the problem is A-A-A-A-P-A-P prime is great. B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B is not... Like, we can't prompt, like, we want that experience in every booster pack. Well, our normal system of doing it, only two out of three booster packs would get them together. And actually, it's not even two out of three, because after you drop B, B prime, you get B prime C. So actually, half the time. Half the time, you don't drop a pair.

Well, 50% is not a good enough for us. I don't want you to get a theme like every other pack. I want you to get the theme every pack. So the solution we had to this problem was, Instead of dropping two cards from the sheet, what if we drop three cards from the sheet? So, for example, either you'll get A, A, A, Prime, B, or you'll get A, A, Prime, B, Prime. But the idea is that there's two cards together, that by dropping three cards, we guarantee there's two cards together. Now, maybe this is kind of, I mean, I might be talking past you.

Coalition is something that I'm very familiar with. I try and do my best to explain it. Anyway, the good news is we figured out how to put paired cards in the pack, or at least we thought we did. But it required dropping three cards. The way we can do sheets, the paired cards would need to be in the same rarity, but we could mix rarities on sheets that we could do. But anyway, so the idea, we really like this idea. I then went to Mike Turin's our architect, and I said, okay, this is key to what we want to do,

but it's asking something of the printing. We need to talk to our printers. Just because I thought we could do it, just because I was going old school, like I was doing something that I knew 10 years ago we could do. But printers changed their technology. Maybe something that under the old system worked wouldn't work under the new system.

I don't know. I'm not privy to the actual technical, you know, like things have changed. So they went to all the printers that we use and said to them, I mean, Mike talked to our printer, people, they talked to the printer people and said, okay, here's what we want to do. Can you do this? And all of our printers said hypothetically we can. You know, we believe that it uses technology

we have. We then, in fact, there's a test being done that I don't think it's even been done yet. So that's the first thing. We are building our set around a technology that I have confidence we can do and the preliminary looking into it says that we can do. but there's an actual chance that when we actually do the test that there might be extra restrictions that we don't know. We were told so far

and I handed off a file that said yes, you can do this, no problem. If the set has come out and that's not true, there aren't paired characters in it, well, that's a sign that the thing we tried to do technically couldn't work

in a way that we didn't understand when we handed off the file. we have done some testing. So I have confidence we can do it. Obviously, I would hand over something that I think we'd do. Like, not just to I have confidence. The printing people have talked to the printers, and they have confidence. But there still is extra testing to be done.

So if somehow the set doesn't have that, and it's important, it's kind of the core to the set. So, but that's the kind of thing that is, I just want to, the reason I'm doing these podcasts is, hey, I have a great idea. I built my whole set around the idea. I'm being assured that technically we can do something. But for example, there's another set. I don't get into the details of it, but there's another set that we thought we had

a really cool gimmick to it. And in the middle of set design, we find out it's not doable and we had to change it. We had an audible mid-set design, which is not ideal. Anyway, so once we got the paired sheet, or it might be sheets, we decided to build around it because it was so important, we so loved that opening experience, we so thought it communicated what we wanted, we built around it. So what that means is we went to our coalition people and had them figure out the right collation. As the, I'll try to remember off the time of my head, I believe.

As of the handoff, there were five common pairs, I think 20 uncommon pairs, and how many pairs that rare? Rare had 10? I think 10. I think it was 5, 20, 10. Once again, those numbers, lots and lots could change. But what we did was for every card we made, we took one off of the base sheet. So, for example, since we had five pairs, 10 cards and common should normally be 80 cards, I think we dropped common back to 70 cards.

Now, again, more coalition could come. Maybe that changes. Oh, what we said by way for the pairs was that we wanted there to be different colors. In the handoff, they're all monolored, but the note we made in handoff is we can do multicolored. I assume the finished product will have some multicolored paired cards. The rule we set down is it must be different in color. Now if it's multicolored, it could anchor over a color, meaning, you know, normally it's a red-white character, but now it's a blue-white character.

We could do that. The idea, though, is we want to be very loud about the differences. And so I know creative, on their creative elements and mechanically, we want you to feel like these are connected characters like, this is blue Chandra and red Chandra, and they're the same person on some level. It's still Chandra, but there's something fundamentally different about Chandra. That it's not just a matter that she uses ice or water, but that just her demeanor is a blue demeanor.

You know, Chandra is very typically a red demeanor, very emotional and very, you know, I assume the blue Chandra is calmer and cooler and more intellectual and less emotional. playing into the aspect of what blue is. And then we tried where we could to, you know, do different, have mechanically be subtly connected, but sometimes we did mirrors,

sometimes they're just playing in different space, sometimes they're top-down of the difference between them. And what we did in vision design was none of the characters we made were definitively final characters. That list hadn't been picked. yet. But we tried to demonstrate the kinds of differences we could do. We had ally pairings, enemy pairings. And a lot of what we tried to play it up was just like, for example, I don't know if this made it to the final thing. We had tiny bones and megabones. So we took a very popular

character, tiny bones. And then like, what if, and this alter, what if instead of being tiny, which is like his number one quality, we went opposite. He's giant. And so we really sort of played around with that. And we experimented with a lot of things. The other thing that was important to us was part of the global what-if theme was we wanted a what-if setting. One of the lessons we got from March's Machine was it was a little too grandiose. We were in too many places. It made it hard to track what was going on. It made the story hard to tell. We thought we had sort of been enough a little more than we should have. And then the data from that says that it was so big in scope that people just, it felt wrong that the story, it was a single, single set. So we wanted to

sort of pull the scope down. So we decided we'd set this, this story, the big adventure happens on one world. And we knew we wanted it to be a what if, like this is on, it would be on Jase's multiverse and we wanted it to be a what if world. Originally we were talking about mirrored in. We were going to do a what if mirroden. But what we later decided was to understand what if mirroden, you hadn't been to original Mirren for a while. It was New Phrexia for the last two times we visited

it. And we also wanted to do a riff on it, we had to do something different. So like, here's the set we did 10 years ago, but here's why it's slightly different. It was too complicated. It was too inside baseball as use the term, but we used in an R&D. So, we said, okay, what is the loudest theme we could do. So the set

right before it, yachting, is set in Strick-Saven. Tricks-Saven is five enemy-collar schools. So one of the things that we've been asked when Strict-Saving came out is like, when are we getting the Allied schools? Now, it's hard to do that on actual Strict-Saving because we didn't like

save things for like some other school. We had mapped it all out. But when we're thinking of doing a what-if setting, you know, doing strict-saving but doing ally colors, when an enemy is exactly what if is about, right? The idea of like a really, a change that is simple and loud, but meaningful.

And so the idea we had was that instead of it being strict-saved in a sort of open-friendly college, it's a little more, it's a little darker. I think in Vision's not, we talked about it being maybe a military school. I don't, my gut is when the dust settles. I don't know if it'll be a military school, but we talked about that in Vision-design. But the idea that it's a darker, harsher place. And then the challenge of it was, we wanted to show enough of the alternate school

that you get the sense of the what-if, that we're in a different place. But we didn't want so much that it just felt like, oh, you just did yachting, you just finished Trick-Saving. Here's a second Strick-Savent set. And remember, the set isn't a faction set. That's what Strix Savon is a faction set.

It is a Capstone Event set. It's a top-stown event telling the story of the finale of the story. So the challenge there is we wanted enough of sort of Strick's Haven. In Vision Design, we called it Hexhaven. I don't know if that name stuck or not. And the idea was we wanted to show it off,

but not so loudly that players feel like it was supposed to be a second Strick's Haven. So what we did is we chose to reinforce the ally color pairs, the archetypes, and the schools to represent the ally archetypes. And then we would use the enemy archetypes rather than to talk about the environment, which is a school, to talk about the story. And then, so, Yanni, Yanni Skolnik is the lead set designer.

Yanni likes to be on vision design teams when he's going to lead this at. Dave Humphreys does as well. Not every lead set likes to do it, but many do. Yanni came up with a cool idea. He was looking at the story because what happens is early on, early on Roy, who's in charge of story, will do like rough outlines that are very rough, a lot of. lot of things haven't been figured out yet. There's the stuff that has to sort of figure out where the set's going to go.

They have to look at the world building. There's a whole world building push. So there's a lot of things that the story has to set kind of way down. But they want to do some light, sort of the general beats of what's going to happen. And in the story, Yanni realized that it had Chandra in it, it had Jansin it, it had Jase in it, it had Lillianna in it, and it had Garrick in it. So we're like, we go to the story people go, can we have a Johnny in it, please? because what we realized was

we wanted to show a cycle of characters that are opposite and we said you know those five characters are what we call the Lorwyn Five the first five plane brokers have come out they came out in Lorwyn it'd be really neat if we could use that for the contrast so the idea

I keep talking about red Chandra blue Shandra well that what if red and blue Chandra was the face of red and blue because there would be a red Chandra and a blue chandra. The white and black, so the black character is Liliana in Lorwyn. But the alternate version of Liliana

we've been talking about doing is a mono-white Liliana. I don't know whether White Lillianna. There's some talk white Lillianna could show up in yachting, she might not show up until zip lining. A lot of... The idea of how the story was being told what Strick Saves were doing

and what wrestling was doing, I think the settings were doing a little more heavy lifting and after the feedback we got from Merchant Machine we lightened sort of the role of the larger story on wrestling and on yachting. It's there, it's more subtle, but it's more about hey, let's see Lorowin, hey, let's see Shrix Haven and less about carrying the way to the story.

There is some elements of the story. I don't even know they haven't finished it, so I don't even know exactly what it is. But anyway, white Lillianna, so black and white could be Lillian. A blue and red would be Chandra. Next, it gets us to black and green. Garrick is famously known for being black and green.

I mean, right now the character is green, but there's a black portion. I mean, he got cursed and everything. And then we decided for Jace. Jase is the bad guy, obviously. We have a mechanic, which I'll get to momentarily, called Empower Jace. And we decided that Jace was trying to improve upon nature, right? He was trying to fix nature. And that felt very much like a blue-green thing to do.

Obviously, Jase's mono-blue originally. And so we liked the idea that this character was blue-green. So we gave him the blue-green conflict. That left one character, and we realized that Johnny is core white, and we could make an alternate version of Johnny that is red. Johnny has had red in his past. You know, early Johnny, actually, the second color of Johnny ever got was red. He was mono-white, then he was white-red,

because his brother had been killed. Anyway, so we thought that was really cool that we could show the Lorwyn-5 in their original colors and then do a pair of their alternate reality versions in the enemy color. The one exception, by the way, is Jace doesn't have an enemy version. He made everything. But as of right now, there's a character in the novel called Petra

that I don't know when the dust settles where Petra will end up, but Petra is Jace sort of, I don't know how the story is, but Petra is related to Jace in some way, and she is kind of his opposite. So she's going to be the mono green character for the pairing. So that there'll be a pairing for Jace. So let me get into Empower Jase. So one of the things that we wanted to do with the what-if set

was I like the idea of what-if mechanics. Now the problem with that is, as Yanni kept telling me, every set is what-if mechanics. We do riffs on mechanics all the time. This idea that, ooh, it's this mechanic for that. So it was a little tricky. But I wanted to sort of see if we could at least do one mechanic where it's like something you know,

but we really twisted it in a cool way. And I think, so Jeremy Geist was my strong second on the set. Jeremy came in second in the third great designer search. How great designer he is. And so he was my strong second on the set. He came up with a mass Jace, I believe. Or that's not a mess, in Power Jays. And once again, I don't know with the final version.

We called it a mass jace, then we call it Empower Jace for the Vision Summit. The idea is that it's like a mass mechanic, except instead of giving an army creature token, you get a Jace Plainswalker token. Now, in the handoff, the Jace Plainswalker token had minus one, surveil one, minus three draw a card. Once again, I don't know where it ended up. Could it have changed? Yes, very much.

This was the first thing we tried and it actually worked pretty well in Vision but we weren't doing larger balancing so it is quite possible what the Jace Plainswalker does the token Plainswalker could change. Minus 1 Surveil 1, minus 3 draw card.

If it's still that, if it came out still that, that is awesome. But I would not be surprised if that changes. So Empower Jase is one of the things that's tricky when you have a single villain Nicole Bullis, we have this problem,

is it's hard, like, when the villain is like the Forexians or the Aldrazi, where it's a whole bunch of things, Frexion's probably the best example, because there's lots and lots of Frexion. So we can make lots of phrexian cards. We can make as many as we want. But when there's one character, like, okay,

well, Jace will have a Plainswalker card. I think, in fact, right now there's plans for two Plainswalker cards, but, you know, there's only so much you're going to see if. Yeah, you can put them in names and art and stuff, But the thing we liked about on PowerJase is it just got Jace in a lot of games, right front and center. So we had two more mechanics.

Well, two more mechanics for the Vision Summit, one we just changed. So one mechanics that we had that is, I handed off, was called Make History. Because all the paired creatures, at least when we handed off, all the pair of creatures were legendary creatures. It is possible that will change. Maybe in the final version, not all the pair of creatures are legends. we thought the legendary played up the trope space we're playing in, which is sort of, you know, the alternate version.

It's most fun when they're named characters. So we turned it over with all legendary characters. Having a lot of legendary characters can cause issues. At common, we ended up giving half of them land cycling and half of them a channel like ability when you discard a card. I mean, you can discard them for an effect. But anyway, they were all legends,

and so we wanted to have a legend matter mechanic. So we kind of did a tweak on it's kind of like Raid and like Landfall Constellation Allegiance Alliance Alliance Basically carrying with something

entered the battlefield So the way it works At least at Handoff is it is an ability word that says If a legendary creature has entered the battlefield It's not a creature

If a legendary permanent has entered the battlefield this turn Or has attacked And then it it's a trigger and you get something. I'm not sure, once again,

I don't know whether the reason we did enter the battlefield was we wanted to apply to the Jace Plainswalker. It also applies to legendary lands and artifacts, some of which will exist in the set. It is possible in the dust settles. They just make it affect creatures and maybe it doesn't affect

permanence. I could see that happening. Or maybe they find it's too aggressive and maybe, I mean, I know that we want a legendary matters thing that encourages legend. We like not just being legendary, but being aggressive with the legendaries. And so that's what MakeHiftry is doing. It's an ability word. The set doesn't require it.

Like Empower Jase is playing a much more important role than MakeHiftry is. But MakeHifery is doing good work. So my gut is it stays, but we'll see. So there was a mechanic we had that we were moved after feedback from vision design. It was called Graduate. Graduate was, it was like monstrous, or monstrosity, where you had a one-time upgrade, except it required you part of, not only did you have to exile, I'm sorry, not only did you have to pay a cost, a man-a-cost,

but you had to exile instant resources from the graveyard. And so, and then the card cared about what you X-I. We called it the thesis. It was graduate, and that was your thesis. The note we got from Vision Design, there's a little bit too much going on, and so we pulled it off. So one of the things we did with the schools is we wanted to play up that instead of them being more personalized, there's a little bit more. That's why we're talking about the military vibe. It might not be a military school vibe, but at least will be a more dictatorial vibe.

So instead of them each making their own token, we had them make a single cadet token that was a two-two vanilla creature. Yanni might play around with giving them different tokens. I do like the cadet token. There's some chance that Yanni did some more experimentation with having unique tokens. We also, at Handoff,

there's a mechanic from Yadding called prepared spells where there's a... If you do a certain condition, there's a spell on your... It's kind of adventure-y-like, but there's a spell on your card, but you have to sort of prepare it first, and then you can cast it. But once you cast it, you could prepare it again if you can meet the conditions of preparing it. We carried that over from yachting, but what we did is for each school, we had just one prepared spell.

It was hybrid, and that it showed up multiple times. Much like the cadets, we were trying to reinforce that these schools are a little bit more rot in what they're doing, and they're trying to defend the school. That's a lot of the role they play. Oh, I didn't talk about this. So part of making the set, we were coming after yachting, meaning we wanted the schools to play nicely together, but obviously one is enemy and one is ally.

So what we decided to do was for each school, we would keep one color. So for the history school, we kept white. It used to be red, white, made it white blue. For the math school, we kept blue. It used to be blue-green. Now it's blue-black. for the What's the next one?

Blue black is black red For language we kept black and went from white black to black red For art we kept red And went from blue red to red green And science we kept green And went from green black

to green white So the idea is that If you have a deck from yachting That you really enjoy We will make some new cards in your color, or, if you want, you can go to three-color and play stuff from both schools, both versions of the school. The other note, so we did a lot of experimenting with different themes for different schools,

obviously made for that multicolor, that ally archetype. One of the notes we got in the Vision Summit was there was a little too much going on. It's why we pulled graduate out. So one of the things we did right before we handed off, I have no idea of this will stick. I think it's cool. but a lot of times when you make a tight structure, it's too tight. So I'll explain the structure we handed off. I'm not sure the structure stayed.

So what we did is we took an enemy plane walker, enemy archetype tied to a lower-and-five plainswalker and an ally type, and we overlap them mechanically. So for example, I'll start with the history school. So history is white and blue. We took Liliana that was white and black and overlapped the graveyard. Lillianna's all about wanting to reanimate things. She's a necromancer. The history school was all about using the graveyard as a resource

because we are in white and blue. So the idea is blue and black are good at filling up your graveyard. The white black deck will more take things out. The blue, white will more use it as a resource. I mean, white can take a little things out. But the idea is if you're playing in that arc, that shard, it has a theme, the graveyard, and it has the connective tissue. So that way, let's say I start by drafting white, white will let me go to white blue or white will let me go to white black.

Next up, we took Chandra, which was blue and red, and we took the math school, which was blue and black, and we took a Spell Matters theme and tied them all together. So the idea is we brought Magecraft over from yachting. We put Magecraft in just blue, black, and red, the colors that are more on spells matter. And the idea is blue-red is more traditional spells matter like we normally do in blue-red, like a tempo deck. And then blue-black is more of a control spell matters thing. And then what we did is each of the hybrid things that we did,

the hybrid spells, the prepared spells, we thematically tied it to them. Now, once again, this is early. The spells we made, probably not the spells that lasted. I don't even know prepared spells made it all the way through. I like it, but maybe... Because yachting had to do prepared spells, maybe zip-line. found there wasn't enough space letting Yadding do what it did, or maybe the spells weren't quite accomplishing what they needed to do, or maybe Yanni ended up making things a little less

distant or so it broke the connection. I'm not sure. I'm just telling you what we did, but I don't know what Yanni might have did. When you actually go to build the house sometimes, things that look great in the floor plans, they look great in the blueprints. They don't quite work, and you have to change things on the fly. So the idea was in the history school, it was a spell that allowed you to trade in Cargagia Graveyard. I think it was for a two-two cadet at the time.

I handed it off. And then the blue-black hybrid spell, prepared spell was a one-drop, cheap spell. At a time, it gave everything flying. Black is secondary flanks. I don't know if that'll say, but that's what it did.

Okay, the third thing was black-green is Garrick. And then we took, what do we take? We took, we pair with Garrick Did we pair Oh, we paired Red Black So Red Black is the

Language School It's more about propaganda And we They It's more about creature About creatures, larger creatures And so there's a theme we play up of wanting to have things That are a little bit bigger

and there's a little bit more aggression on it. It's a little more creature-based. This was the theme that was the lightest of the themes. Well, not lightest. The one we were most unsure of. The other themes I have more confidence in. This is the theme I have a least confidence in, so maybe it changed.

The hybrid black-red spell boosted a creature to make it bigger so that you can care about how big it was and be aggressive. Next up, red-white is a... Red-white is a Johnny. We tied that to Red Green, which is the art school. And so the idea is it's more about aggression, not aggression. It's more about ramping because we carried over the ramping.

Blue, red was ramping in Strixavon, so red green is ramping, and red green are the best ramp colors in the art school. So the idea is that it plays into a legendary theme. This is the legendary matters, make history shows up here. And we also did ramping because you want to have a bunch of big legendary creatures. A lot of the ones you know are, you know, they're not little dinky things, they're big heroes. So this is kind of like ramp into legends, was the theme.

And there's just more aggression. Red-white is the more agrodeck that makes use of some of the cheaper legends, and red-green ramps into some of the larger legends. And then finally, we had Jace, Jason's green-blue, and we tied that to the science school, which is green-white.

And the overlap there was caring about counters. Green and white had a counter theme with a little bit of a life-gain, element to it, and then blue-green really dips into Empower Js. But what ties them all together is they all care about counters. So there's a lot of counters matters things right now going on. So green-white is building up your creatures, but it's also caring about putting counters on them.

And then there's also a life game sub-themed to tie into the science, so the black-green science theme from Strick-Saven. We also, another idea we handed over to, I think it was a cycle or two, to show alternate reality. The idea was Jace changed the whole multiverse, not just this one world. So we wanted hints of the rest of the multiverse. So we have a saga tweak.

What do we call the saga tweak? I'm blinking the name. It is what was the name we handed off? It was like Turned Fortune or something. I'm blaking the name. Anyway, it was a saga in which one of the sagas, one of the chapters had an A version and a B version.

And the idea is when you get to that chapter, and it can be any chapter, it can be the first, the second, the third. It just gives you a choice at that point and it represents the difference between what the world was and what the world became. We also spend a lot of time talking about, so on a macro level, the paired sheets and the what-if setting of Hexhaven and this saga tweak, sort of on a large scale, talked about things being different. also wanted to play up, there's a lot of Easter egg deep cut what if stuff we could do at a card and a cycle level. So the idea is the broader we go, the larger it is, the less you need to know. And as you get to the cycle level and the card level, that's where we start doing some of the deeper cuts. Now, the rule was if you didn't know the cut, if you didn't

know what we're riffing on, it stills to be cool in a vacuum. Like if we took a character and did, or not character, that's on the parachute, but if we took something that we did very differently, a spell that we did very differently. So we looked at a lot of fun things like taking spells and doing what Plano Chaos did, except moving them to the correct color. Here's a famous spell that's kind of famously in the wrong colors. Let's put in the correct colors. Or here's a spell set on one world, but let's change it up because the world is different.

We talked about a lot of different ways to do fun things to take this theme and play with it. So we made a long laundry list of the kind of things we did, and we made samples in the file we handed off. to try to show like, hey, there are a lot of fun. Like, one of the great things we're doing what if is you can do a lot of fun really deep Easter egg, you know, deep cuts. But we wanted to make sure that that was at higher rarity and that the car didn't rely in you knowing what it was to get it. That, hey, this is a really cool thing.

Maybe I don't know it's a riff on an existing thing, but it doesn't matter. It's a really cool thing unto itself. I think we had a car called Meat Pie Merriment. which was sort of taking the Meat Hook massacres and saying, well, what if it went a little, what if it was a little nicer? It was more of a party than a massacre. And we did a lot of fun stuff like that.

When we handed over the file, all the deans of the colleges were famous dead characters. Like, I think we had Jaya running the Black Red School and Gideon running the White Blue School. So the idea was they can't show up on the parachute because there's not a parrot of them. There's no our universe version of them. But we thought it would be fun to see some dead characters in a what-if world.

And so, yeah, handoff at least we made them to dint. Once again, one of the things that distracts and one of the reason I'm talking about today is, I'm telling you where the file is as I hand it off. A lot of things are going to change. So that works. Let me quickly sum up. Let me talk about what I think will happen to the set. That's another fun part of this, since you guys know what happens.

I think the pear sheets will stay. the only reason there aren't pair sheets is there's some printing problem we just can't get past. It is the core of what we're doing. We built everything around it. If you guys don't have paired characters, something went very wrong,

and I'm sure you got into team did a great job of finding a new thing. I would be shocked if they're gone, but it relies on technology and technology sometimes can be stubborn. So it's not unimaginable to me that it didn't happen, but if it didn't happen,

that's because it was a technical thing we couldn't do. Barring that, I'd be shocked it's not there. Also, in Strixhaven, I think, is pretty locked in. I think the coloring of the schools is pretty locked in. How the schools are treated, how they're flavored. I think a lot of

that is up in the air. We were treating... We know that it's going to be a darker version of the schools. We were treating it more like he raised them as a means for this very fight that was coming, that he raised them to sort of protect himself. Maybe it's not quite as nefarious.

I'm not sure. or maybe it is, maybe it's darker, I have no idea. I do think that Hex-Aven, I don't know if we'll call it Hex-Avon will stay. Empower Jace is the mechanic. We've got nothing but really positive feedbacks on Empower Jase. It's the mechanic that internally we've gotten the best feedback on, the people really like that in the parachute. So I would be surprised that empower, I mean, might not be called Empower Jase.

I'd be very, very surprised if that doesn't stay. but could it be tweaked will the Plainswalker token do something different very much that could happen like I said we had minus one surveil one

minus three draw card that might stay it lasted for it was what we first tried and it lasted for all of vision design so maybe it stayed make history I think the set will have some

legendary matters thing. Maybe it's not a keyword. Maybe it's just a theme. I can see it staying. It played well. When we handed it over, it was very a light part of the file. So it could be removed. It's not a bearing wall or anything. And then magecraft and prepared spells being carried over from yachting. What yachting is up to, what space is available. Like either of those two things could get pulled just because, you know, it's possible that yachting needs to take up so much space to do what they're going to do, that there's not enough that it works for what zip lining needs. So I could see Magecraft and prepared spells.

One or both of them disappearing. I could see them staying. I think they actually work well. I like the overlap of Strix Haven mechanically. I try to do as much overlap as I can in sets, and I like that. The alternate version of sagas could stay or could go. I don't know. There's a lot of individual choices

that I'm not sure of. I think the base element, the thing that's most likely to change is we made this very tight. connective thing where we tied schools to plainswalkers. I know Yanni's going to sort of play around and try to give more identities to the schools and he's going to try a lot

of things. It is possible that the tight structure we made just won't let Yan do the things he needs to do. So that tight structure is the thing I'm most skeptical. I'd be happy to see it make it all the way. I'd be the most skeptical just because it really puts a lot restrictions on the set design team and

I can understand it if they can't. So anyway, that's my guess of where things will be. maybe nothing lasted and it's not even but what if anymore. That would shock me. But anyway, so I'm now at work. So that is me talking all about where ziplining was. I don't even know the final name of it because it hasn't been decided yet, where ziplining was at the time of handoff.

And hopefully you hear this because I think this was a fun podcast. So I hope you guys got a chance to hear this. Anyway, guys, now it works. We all know what this means. This is the end by drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.