Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #425: Lessons Learned: Battle for Zendikar

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

This podcast is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about sets I led the design for and the lessons I learned from leading it. In this podcast, I discuss what I learned from leading the design for Battle for Zendikar.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my series, Lessons Learned. So what Lessons Learned is, is where I talk about a set that I led the design for, and then talk about what did I learn, what were the lessons, what were the takeaways from that. So I've done every set I've led so far I've taught, I've led so far up to, uh, today is Battle for Zendikar. Um, and let's just say Battle for Zendikar has lots of opportunity for lessons. Um, I am, in retrospect, I'm, I feel like I've made a lot of mistakes on Battle for

Zendikar. So, um, today will be chock full of lessons because I, anyway, let's, let's, let's go back to the very first. The interesting thing about Battle for Zendikar is I believe I made a mistake at the earliest, earliest point, which led me astray. So let's talk about the very first mistake I made. Okay, so what happened was we went to Zendikar. The original Zendikar started out because I had an idea for a set that revolved around land as a mechanical space. And to match up to that, the creative team ended up making an adventure world.

And so the combination of the land mechanics and adventure world, really popular. The original Zen in the Car was very, very popular. But then we wanted to do a large set, a small set. And then in the spring, we wanted to have a large, we wanted to do a large set, a small set. And then in the spring, we wanted to have another large set. But the original plan was we weren't even going to stay on Zendikar. We were going to go to a different world. But the creative team, knowing that building another world would be hard, came up with a way to stay on the world and have a fundamental change.

We knew that if we were going to stay in the world, something big had to happen to justify a reset of mechanics and things. And so what they proposed was the idea that the Eldrazi were trapped on the plane, these ancient beings, ancient colorist beings were trapped on the plane, trapped in the plane, and that they finally escaped, rise of the Eldrazi. And so the idea was the third set really deviated from what the first set was about, which is the adventure world, sort of a dangerous world where people are struggling to get by, but a world rich with treasure and stuff. I mean, the manor was super rich, and it sort of was a prime place for adventurers to adventure.

Um, and so what happened was we kind of left on a cliffhanger, which was the Odrazi are out and seen, you know, like you saw them fight them, but we weren't really clear what happened to them. So I felt like when we came back, I'm like, okay, we kind of ended on a cliffhanger. I felt like, oh, I guess we have to pick up on that. I think that was a mistake, by the way. I think what made people love Zendikar... So, we have data. We know that people really liked Zendikar. They liked Worldwake. Not quite as much as Zendikar, but they liked Zendikar and they liked Worldwake.

And Rise of Drazi is known for being a very fun, limited environment for more advanced players. It was definitely something that really... It was a limited environment unlike any other limited environment. And if you understood it, it was fun. I mean, there's a lot of cool things you could do. But it required you really rethinking limited, because it just functioned really different. Now, while it was popular among the sort of advanced drafting crowd, that's it.

That's who liked it. The set did not do particularly well. It did not sell particularly well. And a lot of our market research showed that a lot of people were very mixed on it. So when we went back to Zendikar, I, in retrospect, like, I did very little to capture the adventure world. Only because there's only so much you can show. And I sort of said, okay, well, okay, the Eldrazi are there. That's the cliffhanger.

Well, let's deal with the Eldrazi. In retrospect, I wish I'd figured out a way to continue the story that wasn't so Eldrazi-focused. Here's one of the lessons I learned. The Eldrazi are interesting story characters, but they're interesting in small doses. Like the Eldrazi are a great threat. Like kind of what you want is a story where if the heroes don't solve the day, the threat is the Eldrazi, but the Eldrazi aren't the problems to solve. They're, we talk a lot about resonance, about sort of doing things that people can recognize and kind of the whole shtick of the Eldrazi is

they're alien and different and, you know, they're kind of weird on purpose. Like, I'll get there, but I mean, I spend a lot of time and energy making them feel weird and then surprise, surprise, people are like, well, I don't like them as much. The whole environment makes me feel weird. You're like,, surprise, people are like, well, I don't like them as much. The whole environment makes me feel weird.

You're like, well, okay, a little, you know, succeeded too much in doing something I probably shouldn't have done. So, in looking back, I wonder if there was a way to play up the Odrazi story

where the, I'm sorry, play up the Zendikar story with the adventure rules of Zendikar in a way that Odrazi could have played a role, but a smaller role. Because mechanically speaking, here's another problem. So the Odrazi are giant, hungry, alien monster things. And so in order to make them work, you have to make them huge,

which is not easy to do. You have to find some way that gets a sense of hunger, which is really hard. And they need the sense of colorlessness that, like, at least it's the one defining traits for them. But it just, it makes it tricky. It makes it hard for you to function

because, you know, you can't have too much color or other things forms together. You can't have too many big things because otherwise it just, you know, it's like, there's color. This sort of thing forms together. You can't have too many big things. Because otherwise it just, you know, there's all these sort of problems the Odrazi bring. Especially when you do the Odrazi in large numbers. Like, so what happened was, I said, okay.

You know, the cliffhanger was the Odrazi. What's going to happen? I'm like, okay, I got to come back. And I have to address that. And I made the decision to address it in a way that there's a conflict between the Eldrazi and the Zendikari. And like I said, I talked about this when I talked about the design of this. There were three paths at the time I thought I can go down.

Path number one was the Zendikari are winning the war. Path number two is it's kind of an evenly split war. Number three is the Eldrazi are winning the war. And I kind of an evenly split war. Number three is the Eldrazi are winning the war. And I kind of decided, the way you do the Zendikar are winning the war, it's kind of like, aha, they've won. They've been defeated.

The Eldrazi are gone. We were victorious. And then during the Carson story, you're like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe they're not really gone. And that had a lot of sort of scars of Mirrodin feel to it, where you start and the enemy, oh, wait a minute, maybe they're not really gone. And that had a lot of sort of Scars of Mirrodin feel to it, where, like, you start and, like, the enemy's there, but, like, the people don't quite realize the threat.

And so it felt too much like something we had done relatively recently to that. If you make it kind of even, then it's just kind of a world where there's conflict going on. Constants Archaea, which was right before it, really had kind of, like, the constant conflict thing. So we often go the one last route, which is the idea of what I call the empire versus rebels sort of motif, you know, where the idea is one side has basically won and you see the other side who's in a losing position scrambling the best they can to try to win an impossible thing.

You know, the rebel motif, I mean, Star Wars is probably the biggest one. We're like, okay, the Empire's established, and the rebels are at a huge disadvantage, but somehow the rebels come back to win. That's kind of the feel. But, in order for that to work, in order to have dominance, in order to be like, oh my god,

how are the rebels ever going to win? The Eldrazi have firmly established themselves. You just need a lot of Eldrazi. Like, it doesn themselves. You just need a lot of Eldrazi. Like, it doesn't work unless you have a lot of Eldrazi. And so I think sort of making that choice, I mean, I don't know. I mean, not that I, once again, when I say I'm learning lessons,

it's not that I know the correct thing to have done. I just think I made the wrong choice. And essentially the thing that's going to keep biting me again and again and again is trying to make the Eldrazi work in large numbers just cause all sorts of problems. Now, add on to that the following problems. The way we had showed they were hungry in the first set was Annihilator, which was not particularly popular.

It was powerful, but was not particularly popular. It was powerful, but was not particularly popular. And really the problem with it is what we call snowball mechanic. Like once you attack once with an annihilator creature, you know, unless your opponent like also has out an annihilator creature, pretty much it's game over. It's one of those mechanics where like it's really really hard to come back from. Not impossible, but hard. And just, it gets harder and harder and harder. Every time you attack with them, you know, like, I don't know the statistics of it, but

like, the first time you attack with a creature with Annihilator and you're able to trigger the Annihilator, like, your chances of winning just go up by a decent percent. And like, the second time, they shoot up even more. And by the third time, I think you've almost for sure won the game. It's that much, you know, it is so powerful in effect and it has such a game-changing switch that it's just really hard to come back from. And in particular, what it tends to do is usually you end up sacrificing lands because you don't want to lose your board position and then you kind of give away your ability to

ever catch up by casting your own big things. And then also, in order... So that was the hunger problem. We had to capture the hunger problem, but we didn't want to use the mechanic before that was the hunger. And we didn't want to do something too similar to it because it was not fun for gameplay. Then we had the giant problem, which is the Eldrazi are huge! And it's like, okay, well how many big Eldrazi can we make? is the Eldrazi are huge. And it's like, okay, well, how many big Eldrazi can we make?

Then we had the colorless problem, which the defining quality of them was their colorlessness. Now, there were some that were colored, but people didn't remember them. When you actually ask people, I did some survey stuff online and stuff, the people, like, in their mind, they just were colorless creatures because all the iconic ones are colorless. Anyway, so we had all these different factors I was trying to do, and I felt like so many of them, the path that had been taken before, like one of the things that had happened was when Brian Tinsman, he's the lead designer of Bryce Valdrazi, New World Order was a really new thing. In fact, Zendikar was the first time we had done New World Order.

And Brian had never worked under New World Order. So when he was making the set, he did a lot of... And I wasn't on the design team. This was before I decided to be on most design teams, just to watch over them. And he really sort of did not embrace New World Order, and

the set is not New World Order friendly. We tried during development to change some stuff. We tried to take out the level-up New World Order friendly. We tried during development to change some stuff. Like we tried to take out the level up creatures that come in. There's a bunch of stuff we tried in development and really got shot down of saying, well, that wasn't following the vision of what the set was. But, so on top of everything else, I was trying to do New World Order. I was trying to say, okay, I'm going to do the Eldrazi, but I'm not going to cheat. I'm not going to do things that we're not supposed to do.

I mean, not too much. I mean, we always cheat a little bit in the direction of the set. Anyway, so that is the first big mistake. The first big mistake is I should have just realized, well, part of it was the Eldrazi was not the most exciting thing about the environment. So committing so much to the Eldrazi was a problem. Second, to the Eldrazi was a problem. Second, making the Eldrazi mechanically work was super problematic. And third

was, I think what people really loved about original Zendikar was the adventure world feel. And by committing to a war where kind of most of it was taken up by the Eldrazi dominating everything, I lost the space to really show adventure world. You know, like in retrospect,

I'm not 100% sure this is the right way to go, but like imagine if the story was about a quest, but our heroes had to go on a quest because half the planet had been taken over by Eldrazi, but we're not focused on the half taken over by Eldrazi. We're focused on the half that's not, and they're going on a quest of sort of old-school Zendikar to find some magical item that's going to save the day.

Because, like, a quest, that's an adventure story. Now, you know, now we can sort of tell, and, like, maybe there's pieces of them going through Eldrazi territories. You know, it's something where we get to see a little bit of the Eldrazi, but not that the focus is all about, oh, my gosh, giant war against the Eldrazi territories. You know, something where we get to see a little bit of the Odrazi, but not that the focus is all about, oh my gosh,

giant war against the Odrazi. You know, like I said, not only did I commit to Odrazi to cause problems, but I moved away from Adventure World. Or, well,

by committing to Odrazi, I wasn't able to do Adventure World. And so, like I said, the big thing essentially is people loved Zendikar, were a little cooler on Rise of the Eldrazi,

and Return to Zendikar was more Return to Rise of the Eldrazi than Return to Zendikar. I think that was a big problem. Also, I made a decision. Once we decided we were going to have the Eldrazi be a focus, we had three sets. This was before we changed to a two-set block. This was still a three-set block. I said, okay, there's three titans.

There's three sets. Okay, if it's going to be Eldrazi focus, we'll just divide them. And that will each set, we'll have a Ulamog set, we'll have a Kozilek set, and we'll have a Emrakul set. Then, in the middle of the process,

actually, maybe a quarter in, I think, we made the decision to not do third sets anymore. And then what happened was there was this idea of how we could use Emrakul on Innistrad, and so they're like, okay, here's what we'll do. You know, you still can have your two sets with two titans, and the third titan won't be there, but we have something to do with them shortly thereafter.

And in retrospect, once it became clear that that model wasn't working, like I should have backed away from the Eldrazi as the focal point. Like it's an Emrakul set with Emrakul mechanics. Or not Emrakul, sorry. It was an Ulamog set with Ulamog mechanics. I think that drove us into place.

Because one of the biggest problems was Ulamog was like the world eater. Like, okay, we're not doing Annihilator. Okay, how do I represent eating things in a way that feels like eating things, but doesn't, you know, make problematic for gameplay? And that was a real struggle. I mean, the

solution with sort of eating exile cards, like And that was a real struggle. I mean, the solution with sort of eating exile cards, like, that was a compromise to try to find something, you know. And I'm not a big fan of using exile as a resource. It at least didn't bring things back, which is my biggest issue with it. So I sort of came to terms with it doing what it needed to do. But I, it was messy.

It was unclear. It required an A-B mechanic to make it work because you had to have processors and, what are they called? The ones that put the, the things that exiled cards.

I'm blanking on them. Anyway, I sort of, basically what happened was, and this is a big lesson, which is sometimes what you do is you say, okay, here's a problem to solve. Let's solve this problem. And you do the best to solve the problem and you realize, oh, there's no great solution to this problem. The best solution I got is not above the bar of what's acceptable. That it's not okay to say, I have a problem to solve. Well, the best solution I can find isn't quite above the bar I would want. And then go, okay, I get, like, you can't, the mistake

I made is I said, well, this is the best I can do in the parameters I created. And the real answer to that is, but you created the parameters. If you can't find a solution within your parameters, it is okay to change the parameters. I think I delivered something that I wasn't as happy with because I was like, well, it's the best I could do

to solve the problem that I was trying to solve. And that, I believe, was a mistake. There's a certain line of quality, a certain line that you want to solve. And that, I believe, was a mistake. If you can't, there's a certain line of quality, a certain line that you want to deliver. Now, be aware, I delivered something and Eric and his team bent over backwards to work on in development. And I think they did a lot to advance it. And so I do think the developers tried their damnedest to really make this. I mean, if you like the environment, it's a lot of the work the development did

to sort of make this work. But in retrospect, the problem, which lies completely on my feet, this is a design problem, it's not a development issue, is I fundamentally made a choice. I made a couple of choices very early on that led me down a path

that I could not find a good answer to. And what I needed to do is when you set up a problem, you search for the answers and your best answer doesn't work. At some point, you got to go, OK, I got to change the parameters. You know, while I do like to believe this, I'm very optimistic. There's a solution for every problem. There are problems in which there's not a solution that's as good as you want it to be.

I mean, there are solutions. We found a solution. It wasn't like the set didn't have a solution. I just don't think it was a good enough solution. Another problem we had in the set was because it wasn't quite functioning. One of the things in general happens is it's my job as a designer to try to create a vision that is clean and simple that allows to execute it in a way that isn't complicated. When the vision gets messed up, and once again, the problems with Oath, not Oath, the problems with Battle for Zendikar are on my shoulders. They were design problems. They weren't development problems. They were mostly design problems.

And development worked really hard to try to... In fact, development spent a lot of time doing designery things and probably less on developer-y things because they were trying to fix some problems that were inherent in the system that I had handed over. That's another general lesson, by the way.

If you want to get better, if you want to improve, you have to understand when there are your mistakes and own up to them. If you always believe that somebody else is at fault for things not working, you will never grow as a person or as a designer. I say this as a player. One of the ways to become a better Magic player, own up that you've made mistakes that made you lose. Once you realize there's things that you did that made you lose, you now can change things and improve things and get better because you're recognizing that you have an involvement in your loss.

But if you always blame man a screw or bad matchup or whatever you want to blame, you're not going to get better because you're never going to take into account that it is you that have to do things to improve. Same is true for game design. It's true for anything, really. But one of the things is I had to look back and say, okay, I made some mistakes.

This was a set with a lot of mistakes on my part. Now, like I said, there were a lot of things that happened that were not normal. For example, in the middle of design, we changed from a three-set block to a two-set block. Near the very end of design, we changed from a two-year block to a two-set block. Near the very end of design, we changed from a two-year standard to an 18-month standard.

You know, there were a lot of things that were thrown at me that did not make the process any easier. And I mean, I have some sympathy for myself in that I had a really hard problem to solve and then had a lot of other problems thrown at me. But in the end, whatever, I made the mistake. I have to own up and figure out why I made the mistake and how I made the mistake. And like I said, I think the biggest thing is I didn't... I was too much trying to follow what was set up for me by the previous block and less time going, okay, okay, we're going back to Zendikar.

What's the awesome thing about Zendikar? I promise you this. I'm pretty sure we'll go back to Zendikar again. And the Odrazi are gone. I mean, you'll see remnants of the Odrazi having been there because that's part of the world. But I want to tell an adventure story about adventure world and like, we're going

to go back to the roots of what makes Zendikar Zendikar next time we see Zendikar. It's not going to be about the Odrazi at all. It's going to be about adventure world and the cool things that Adventure World get to be. Okay. Other mistakes we made. So another mistake we made is I needed to get an identifier for the Eldrazi. Like I said, they're alien, they're giant, and they're hungry. Okay. The hungry part

was not something... I just couldn't put too much weight on their hungry. I needed to find a way to represent it, but I knew there wasn't a clean answer there. Okay, so they're alien and they're giant. Okay, giant. I can make a few commons that are bigger than normal. I can do a little bit to inch up the height a little more than normal,

but I just can't hang my hat on. Every Eldrazi can't be giant. I just can't. I can't make the number of Eldrazi I needed to make and make them all giant. So I leaned on Alien. So the one quality of the previous Eldrazi, when you ask people about them,

the one quality was cullessness. So I'm like, okay, okay, cullessness. At least it's something that people recognize as being a thing and I can make that happen. But one of the problems I realized early on is I couldn't make them all generic mana. And the problem there is, if we want the Eldrazi to be a thing,

we want some of them to be good, if we make them all Culless mana, we run into the artifact issue, which is, well, then every deck plays the good ones. into the artifact issue, which is, well, then every deck plays the good ones. So I decided that I wanted to play into Ghost,

what we call Ghostfire space. So Ghostfire was a card, it actually represented Urza, sorry, Ugin's magic, not the Eldrazi, but there's a lot of synergy between the fact that Ugin had Cullis magic

and the Eldrazi were Cullis. There's some synergy. One of the reasons that Ugin was one that was able to j Odrazi were Cullis. There's some synergy. One of the reasons that Ugin was one that was able to jail them is because there was some connection between them. Anyway, so I liked the idea of Cullisness, but I said, okay, we're going to use Ghostfire technology.

We're going to have things that are Cullisness for the sake of being Cullisness, and we can care about Cullisness as a thing, but they're going to have some color in their costs. What ended up becoming Devoid. Now, I thought at the time that the frame would carry the weight of, it costs mana, but they're colorless. Meaning, I didn't think there was any text to it. It just would be a conveyed frame thing. But, what we found was people got confused because normally

when a card costs red mana, it is red. And so we needed more than just, the frames wasn't enough. Like, one of the problems was we had a color indicator to play with, but the color indicator, like, if I want to tell you the card's red, let's say the card, you know, it costs colorless mana or generic mana,

but the card is red, I can make the frame red and give you a red color indicator. And you go, oh, I see the mana cost costs four, but it's a red card because I see the red frame and the red indicator. Okay, it's red. The problem is trying to convey to somebody that something is colorless with a colored bubble. What color is a colorless bubble?

How do I convey with color colorlessness? a colorless bubble? How do I convey with color colorlessness? And we tried, we're like, you know, brown or gray or, you know, like, but no matter what we tried, it didn't read as colorlessness. It read as something. It read as, oh, is it an artifact? Or is it like, it just didn't read as colorlessness because it's hard to convey the lack of something with something. You know, it's hard to say, you know, it's a hard thing to do. And so we ended up having to use the mechanic. So one of the things that, another big lesson is, one of the things that makes magic fun is making you care about a subset of the cards.

That one of the cool things is saying, hey, normally you don't care about this subset, but in this set you do. And what that means is it gives cards an added value they don't normally have. Like, for example, let's say I have a tribal set where I care about goblins. All of a sudden, a vanilla goblin that normally might just be overlooked. You know, let's say I make a 1R21 goblin. That's a nothing goblin. That's not a particularly strong card.

But in an environment where I care about goblins, where goblins get some, you know some are better because of cards I have I'm like oh, well I want that 1R21 goblin that normally I would never want but oh, the goblin-ness means something and so it's a way for us to take one of the cool things about magic is we want to take cards and make you care about them in a way that you don't normally care

so the easiest way is to care about things that are naturally already on a magic card card types, subtypes color only care. So the easiest way is to care about things that are naturally already on a magic card. Card types, subtypes, you know, color. I mean, there's a few things we can care about. But it's limited because there's only so many things natural to a card. So we've run through most of the things that are naturally on a card. Not all of them. There's a few we can do a little more with. But if I say care about thing X and thing X is something naturally on a card, look, you've seen that theme before. It's hard to do a new theme because like, oh, is there a card type we haven't made you care about? Not really. I mean, there's some that we've made you care about more than others. Um, but it's never

like we've never made you care about it because there's only so many card types and we made you care. I mean, maybe not planeswalker. That's's a hard one make you care about but um but anyway so one of the things that i want to do is try to find ways to make you care about a brand new subset in order to make you care about a brand new subset i have to somehow mark it because i have to how do you know what the subset is um and so one of the things that i've tried is, and this is the lesson of Devoid, Devoid was there to be a marker, really. I mean, it was there to be, hey, don't get confused. This is what it means. And mostly we wanted to be able to say, hey, we want to care about this quality. And Devoid allowed us to make a lot of cards have this quality. But the problem was Devoid

unto itself didn't do anything. All Devoid did was tell you, hey, this cart has this quality. And people have an association with keywords that they do something. So there was a lot of unhappiness with Devoid because Devoid didn't do anything. It's like, oh, it's a keyword. It's a keyword that does nothing. And the reality was it wasn't a traditional keyword. It was what I would call a marker. But the lesson there is, okay, I can't have keyword. Keywords come with an expectation of mechanical meaning. That if I put a keyword in the rules text of a card, then you're saying, okay, what does that mean? And it can't just mean, oh, it just signifies something. It has to

be mechanically relevant in some way. So for example, I do think I needed to have the colorless cards, but instead of Devoid, I think I might have actually, the correct answer might have been just to write out this card as colorless. Making the keyword created an expectation that I couldn't meet. And so the interesting lesson there is understanding that dynamic of how there's a language to magic. There is magic does certain things in certain ways. And when you mimic the things we've done before, if you don't mimic the process by what, like things have a certain

meaning based on the perception of how we do them so if I do something 10 times and you learn oh you know that means this I can't then break that you're going to have an expectation and so I had to understand I had to need to get a better understanding of sort of

where players have expectations and I have to design within expectations because otherwise I have to design within expectations because otherwise I'm fighting the expectations and players aren't happy. And that was a big lesson of DeVoid was that it's not that what I was trying to do was necessarily a bad thing.

Because I needed to do something to be able to, like, we had abandoned the tribal, the tribal card type. Had we not abandoned the tribal the tribal card type had had we not abandoned it one of the ways I could have joined the Eldrazi together was just make every card that was Eldrazi themed Eldrazi subtype but I need tribal to do that I didn't have the tool tribal anymore

and like tribal causes all sorts of problems it wasn't that I wanted to bring tribal back I was trying to find a way to connect them that's why I went to the colorlessness. And the idea was I now could have carriers that care about colorless things happening, and that represented the Eldrazi. And it was a neat way to take a

mechanical state that was inherent to the cards, colorlessness is something natural to the game, and make it matter. Another mistake that happened, by the way, is Ethan in Oath of the Gatewatch ended up making colorless mana a thing. Another big mistake is we needed to do the advance work and understand that earlier because I think we, halfway through the set, changing symbology halfway through the set I think was a big mistake.

And I feel like the fact that you could have cards drafted together, played together in Limited, and mean the same thing but have different symbols on them is just bad. I mean, I understand Standard's going to do that because at some point you make a change, but Limited, you at least draw the lines that Limited doesn't do that way.

It's actually a fight I had at the time. I wish I'd won that fight. There were people that really wanted the new symbol to be part of the splash of Oath of the Gatewatch. The other thing, by the way, that Oath kind of corrected some that I wish we had corrected as a whole, which was

part of the point of Zendikar was his beginning of our new story. Origins had been kind of the prologue, and then we were starting our story. And while the story did involve the Gatewatch, I wish I had more thought about how to make the set a Gatewatch story rather than, like, it's sort of, I threw the Gatewatch in this environmental war story, and Oath of the Gatewatch did a much better job of saying,

hey, the Gatewatch is here, or the Gatewatch got formed. But I feel like Oath of the Gatewatch, I'm sorry, Battle for Zendikar did not do that nearly as well. And I feel like part of the point of that block was introducing the team. And while they did show up, we did have events happen and things. I wish the mechanics had done a little bit better job of sort of supporting that aspect of the story. We really went all in on the war.

The other thing that I think, mistake I made was there were just too many mechanics. I think when the dust settled, was there were just too many mechanics. I think when the dust settled, there was like seven things, and not all of them were mechanics per se. But when I did the, at PAX, I did the, I was with Will Whedon, and we did the, hey, let's tell you all about this, and I was running through all the things the set did. And there were a lot of things the set did. There were a lot of mechanics.

We actually gave the allies two different mechanics, and we reconfigured how the spawn worked, and, you know, we had an AB mechanic where it's like, you know, this mechanic got cards into exile, and this card's ate them out of exile, and then we... There was just a lot going on. It was a very,

very complicated set. And complicated... Sometimes we have complications because we sort of lean into something. Like, Ravnica's a good example. The structure of Ravnica... I mean, there's a lot going on in Ravnica. But the thing is, the structure is so clean. It's like, there are ten guilds.

What are the ten guilds? The ten two-color pairs. What do they represent? The combination of... It was something that was so easily understood that it sort of took the complication and made it a little less complicated. That the ease of the structure sort of simplified what was a set with a lot going on. I feel like Battle for Zendikar did the opposite, which was, it was a very complicated set with a complicated idea that what it wanted was less mechanics, not more mechanics. It wanted sort of to be much simpler because what was going on was complex. I mean, assuming I'm, I have a bunch of different lessons. Assuming I went down the path I did, I mean, first

was I took the wrong path in the beginning. Okay, next bunch of lessons is okay, I took that path, what else could I have done slightly differently? But I think I really realized that the more alien the structure is to the audience, the more that is less instantly grokkable, the simpler you have to have your mechanics be. And this was a complex set that wasn't particularly resonant with creatures that are hard to really comprehend. And we did the reverse of what we should have done, which is it should have been fewer mechanics, not more mechanics. Not like, like whatever the default average is,

it should have been slightly less than average instead of significantly more than average. That was a big mistake. This is just a set full of mistakes. I also think that we didn't, we ran into a problem. So here's another problem. This is a return problem, a lesson I learned, which is when you do something and the first time you kind of developmentally miss a little bit, like it's a little stronger than you mean for it to be, it is tricky to come back to it. Like both Landfall and the ally mechanic, which are both things we sort of return to,

were both a little stronger than we normally would want to do them. And when we brought them back, we were like, well, we're going to do them at the power level that makes sense right now in Standard. we're going to do them at the power level that makes sense right now and standard. But it caused some, like, it's kind of like, hey, remember Landfall that you loved and we brought it back? And like, but not as good as you remember it. Because the power level before, we had done some stuff that we didn't want to do. Especially Unlimited. Especially Unlimited. And so it just felt a little bit watered down.

Like, people were like, what happened? I remember this being a super powerful mechanic, and so I think one of the things that you've got to be more careful on is understanding what you can bring back in such a way that you can sort of deliver on expectations. I mean, that's a big theme today, is I really missed on a bunch of player expectations. I didn't return to the world that they loved.

We didn't set up a structure that made it easy for them to understand. We created a war in which one side was just kind of undefinable and un-understandable. So, like, what does it mean? Like, are they fighting? Are they not fighting? Like, part of it was, I mean, and this was, like I said, some of the choices. Having a war

where you want to have a resonant war with creatures that are alien that are supposed to not read as normal, you just can't have a normal war. And so it just becomes, it becomes tricky. I mean, I... The other big lesson, I mean, in retrospect, is I think that changing things midstream causes some problems for us.

I don't know. I mean, I guess I agree with the decision. I don't know. Maybe that was just something that had to have happened. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I look back, and another thing is, even when you get down to nitty-gritty stuff, you know, like, one of the things is, when we were talking about the exile stuff and where to put it, originally the idea was it was going to go to sort of a new exile.

You know, like, it's an exile and it goes to super exile. And there's confusion of, okay, the tracking that was just complicated because now you get another pile you're tracking.

Let's just put it into the graveyard. It's just an easier place to do it. But there ended up being this big flavor disconnect. So players were like, so my Eldrazi eats it and my opponent gets it back because he do it. But there ended up being this big flavor disconnect. So players were like, so my Eldrazi eats it and my opponent gets it back because he ate it. Why does my opponent get it back?

He puts it in his graveyard, which he now can maybe get access to. There were a lot of weird flavor things that I didn't... I think I... I don't know. I think embracing the alien-ness of the Eldrazi might have been a mistake.

Like, maybe what we needed to do was sort of say, well, maybe the key was to make them a little bit more relatable so that we could do some stuff with them that was more archetypal that people would understand. I mean, here's one of the biggest lessons of this one is there was a lot that went wrong and I don't have easy answers. If you said to Myra, okay, you get to do it all over again, I don't know exactly what I would do. Some of the sets where I made a mistake, I look back and I go, oh, I know exactly what I did wrong. This is a set where I recognize things that went wrong, but I don't necessarily know what I was supposed to do.

And part of it is I think I made decisions that led me down a path that there wasn't a good answer to. I mean, that was one of the hardest things to understand is I think, I mean, I'm an optimistic guy. I seem like, okay, we'll figure it out. There's always a good solution. And I think I went down a path where, at least in the time allotted, I did not find a clean, elegant solution. You know, and it was,

the things I love best is when you look back and everything kind of clicks together and you're like, wow, this really is a cohesive whole. And Battle for Zendikar never quite got there. And like I said, I can't repeat this enough. Development worked really hard to clean up a lot of the stuff I did. And the set is as good as it is because a lot of developmental work. I feel like, and once again, I'm not even blaming my design team. This is me.

This is the guy who set the vision on this set. I just made some poor choices and I didn't recognize early enough that the poor choices just didn't have good answers and that I kind of set everybody up for some level of failure because I didn't create good answers. And so

the lesson for me I take away, in fact the biggest lesson for me is a vision lesson, which is one of my goals as the head designer is I'm setting a bullseye for everybody to aim at. And if I create the wrong bullseye, if I point people at the wrong target, it doesn't matter how much work they do. It doesn't matter how much energy they put into it. We're not going to get the thing we need. And so this was a good example where I messed up on the bullseye. Like sometimes I mess up good example where i messed up on the bullseye like

sometimes i mess up on details i messed up on the bullseye this was a vision problem i pointed us in the wrong direction and a lot of people spent a lot of time working really hard to try to get the vision to come true and when i look back fundamentally it was flawed at the vision level and that's not true of a lot of sets there's not a a lot of sets where I'm like, oh no. A lot of sets, there's execution issues or things I would do better, but they're not flawed from vision, from the very beginning, from the bullseye of where you're aiming. And that, I guess, is the biggest lesson is you've got to make sure that when you set up a target for everybody, that it's a target that can be hit. That's a target that we can do well enough that

it's not just enough to make a target. It's to make a target that can be hit. That's a target that we can do well enough that, you know, it's not just enough to make a target. It's to make a target that is the right target and an effective target. Okay, guys. Well, that is my lessons of the day. So I'm here at Rachel's school. So anyway, I hope you guys learned stuff. I learned a lot. And well, as we're at Rachel's school, we know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.