Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #427: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

There was a lot of discussion online about what exactly "top-down" and "bottom-up" designs were, so I dedicate a podcast to talk all about what the terms mean. I then walk through the history of Magic talking about whether or not the first set of each block was a top-down or bottom-up design.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today, um, okay, so I obviously record in the future, or at least you don't hear this for many weeks after I do it. So in my timeline, um, we, I just announced on my blog that Amonkhet is going to be at Tower Was, a top-down design. And watching people respond to that, I really realized that there's still a lot of confusion what exactly top-down means from bottom-up. So today, I'm going to try explaining it in a little different way, and then I'm going to go through all the sets in history, or the large sets at least, and then talk about sort of what they did and how they did it.

And I'll talk a little bit of the evolution of sort of how we created, how we make sets. Okay, so to start with, I'm going to use a metaphor. So let's say you are an artist and you want to figure out what you want to do. There are two different ways that you can approach it. So approach number one way is you can have a subject matter. You can say, okay, I want to do this piece of art. What am I going to do it on? I want to do a piece of art on Nelson Mandela.

Wow, how could I capture Nelson Mandela? I really would like to capture his face. Oh, maybe I wanted some sort of three-dimensionality to it. Oh, you know what? Maybe I'll make a clay bust of Nelson Mandela. The second way is a tool-based thing. Where you say, I'm going to make something. Hmm, you know, I feel like clay.

I'm going to make something out of clay. What can I make out of clay? Oh, maybe I'll make a bust of Nelson Mandela. The reason I bring that up, because my Nelson Mandela example is, in the end you can end up in a very similar place that both both starting with the subject matter or starting with the tools doesn't mean you can't end up in the same place and I think that's what's confused to people is the term top down and bottom up is a design term. You know one of the things I try to

do is I try to share with you guys sort of our process. Because I believe firmly that you understanding the process for some players makes it more enjoyable. Some of you like seeing how it comes together. And so when I use these terms,

they are very much insider design terms because it has to do with how I'm making something. And there's a big difference between subject matter driving it versus your tools driving it. For example, this is by Nelson Mandela, that if I say it's a subject matter,

I'm like, okay, I want to capture this. I have any access to any medium. What medium best does this? How best can I capture this? Maybe I want to do a painting. Maybe I want to do a sculpture. I figure out, well, how do I I capture this? Maybe I want to do a painting. Maybe I want to do a sculpture. I figure out, well, how do I want to capture the thing I want to do? And my design process is driven by maximizing my subject matter.

I really want to get to my subject. I want to figure out my subject matter. How can I best do something that lets me make my subject matter shine? Now, the tool approach is different. It's like I want to use this tool. Okay, what creation could I make would maximize the use of the tool? You know, clay, for example, is very physical. It has a three-dimensionality to it, you know, that, oh, if I want to do something, I want it to have some sort of depth or something. And there's just things that clay doesn't do well. And so, you know, I have like, clay usually isn't too much about color,

you know, so if I wanted to do a project about the sunset, maybe clay is not the best job for that, you know. And that when I start with using my tools as a jumping off point, I'm thinking about how to maximize my tools. And fundamentally, that is the difference between top up, top down, and bottom up, is that top down is subject matter based. I want to capture the subject matter. Bottom up is mechanical based, is that there's some tool I want to make use of. How can I best make use of that tool? So the two classic examples here, just to talk about sets we've done, the classic top-down set would be Innistrad. That we started from a place of saying,

oh, we want to capture the tropes of the genre of gothic horror. We want zombies and vampires and werewolves, and I wanted to scare you. It's all about sort of building a design that maximizes that. Meanwhile, Zendikar started with me going, you know what? We have a dearth of land mechanics. I want to make use of land mechanics. Ooh, what kind of set can I make with land mechanics? And if you see, you know, Innistrad was me going, ooh, let's start with a subject matter. And Zendikar was me going, hmm, let's start with the materials at hand,

the tools that I get to use. Now, be aware, the first day I walked in my design team, I had a very similar meeting the first day of my first meeting for both sets. For Innistrad, I said, okay, guys, let's write down every trope of Gothic horror that we expect to see. And that's when we wrote down werewolves and black cat and, you know, Jar of Iba and all that. We wrote down all sorts of things we thought we might want to see. Many of which we were able to bring, you know, between Indestructible Dark Ascension,

we were able to bring to fruition. With Zendikar, I started by saying, okay, let's come up with every can we can think of for land what can we do with land so in each case we had a creative process which is a similar process but we started from a different place because we were looking at a different kind of thing now there was a point in Innishrod where we needed to make things work and so we started sort of looking at off-color activations and And we made decisions that were mechanical decisions. There's nothing about off-color activations that says Gothic Horror. Likewise, when we were making Zendikar, at some point, the creative team had to say, okay, how do we make a world that plays up all these land things?

Oh, how about an adventure world? And once they knew there was an adventure world, then we started doing, we did allies and quests and traps and stuff. venture world, then we started doing, we did allies and quests and traps and stuff. So the idea is, when I talk about top-down or bottom-up, really what I'm trying to say is it's how we make it. It's how, it's where we start from. It's where the structure gets built around. Not necessarily, like, the end product, you know, can, it's not always the case that you're going to understand from the end product.

I'll explain today ways to tell, but, you know, we, every product, at least now, we really try to get the flavor of it and the mechanics of it intertwined. So no matter where we start, at some point, you know, if we start from a flavor base, at some point we're going to do mechanics. If we start from mechanics, at some point we're going to do flavor. That just, we intertwine that stuff now. Now that wasn't always the case, and I'll get to that when I walk through sort of the history of top-down versus bottom-up. But I just want you to understand that a lot of how we do things has to do with where we start and where the process starts. And that's

really what the two mean. That is the difference between top-down and bottom-up. Okay, so how can you tell if something is top-down or bottom-up? Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it's hard. But here's the basic trick I will tell you. And this doesn't always work 100%, but it will help you much of the time. Remove all of the creative from a set. Take away the art, take away the names, take away the flavor text. And look at the card. Look at the card without any flavor. And say, do these things kind of hook together?

Or, wow, once you take away the flavor, this seems a little more random. If it all hooks together, that means it's mechanically based. It's a bottom-up set. Because the thing we used to tie things together were the mechanics. And so when you take away the flavor, you can still see the structure because it's still there.

With top-down, what we use to organize the flavor is the feel of the creative. So when you take away the creative, it feels a little bit more just, you know, discombobulated, not quite as organized. And here's another basic thing to think about, which is if I'm doing a mechanical design, what that means is I'm going to generally balance things using sort of normal aesthetics. I will have symmetry. I will, you know, the pattern completion, balance.

It will, for example, you're more likely in a mechanical set to have things sort of have a nice symmetry to them. Because it's mechanical, I'm trying to sort of have a nice symmetry to them because I'm, because it's mechanical, I'm trying to sort of make it work. But when I go to top down and I'm using something else to define it, I no longer have this need to sort of do some of the aesthetic and the balance stuff because the creative itself will give it a feel. the creative itself will give it a feel. So for example, in Innishrod, I had five tribes.

And the five tribes I had were the four monster tribes and the human tribe. So the issue was that they weren't the same. That in some ways, the story was about the human tribe being surrounded by the monster tribes all trying to get them. And so I treated the monster tribes differently than the human tribe. Now, if I was doing a normal mechanical set and I had five factions, I would treat the factions all the same. You know, if you go to Ravnica, which is another, for example, bottom-up set, I had ten guilds.

Well, all the guilds get treated the same. Because in a mechanical sense, I want to give each thing its due, and I want it to feel balanced. But in a top-down, because I have flavor on my side, and it'll feel right because the flavor is going to define it, I can do things that aren't there, you know, not quite symmetrical, asymmetrical, or things in which there's a pattern that is a little different. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I want to go back to early magic.

I'm going to walk through from the very beginning and talk about sort of the evolution of bottom up and top down. Because Magic's been through a bunch of different phases. I'm going to talk about that today. So here's my plan. I'm going to go through every large set. There's a lot of small sets, but I'm going to skip over the small sets just because there's a lot of sets to talk about. So I'm going to just talk about large sets. I might hit one or two small sets that are relevant, but I'm mostly to skip over the small sets just because there's a lot of sets to talk about. So I'm going to just talk about large sets. I might hit one or two small sets that are relevant, but I'm mostly going to talk about

large sets. So let's start with the first large set, Alpha, Beta, Limited slash Unlimited. So when Richard made Magic, the very first incarnation of Magic was completely top-down. I mean, in fact, what a lot of people don't realize is there's mechanics in magic that was based upon Richard trying to capture the feel of something. I think protection came about because he was making the White and Black Knights and he wanted them to have this feel

that the White and Black Knights had this relationship to each other. I think first strike came about because he was trying to make some sort of soldier or something. A lot of the mechanics really mirrored sort of capturing the flavor of the thing. And if you look at Alpha, a lot of what Richard did was said, okay, I want to make evocative things. Let me figure out those evocative things and I'll just design mechanics around what those are. So Alpha started very top-down. That's where the game began.

And if you look, by the way, real quickly at the small expansions, just for historical purposes, the first expansion Richard also did was the Raby Knights, completely top-down. I'm going to take this existing thing and I'm going to make cards to match the feel and flavor. Now the next set, Antiquities, was by the East Coast Playtafters. That was really the first set that had a real bottom-up feel to it. That set was very much driven by we want to play around with artifacts. Now, they made a story that really much reinforced that,

but the thing that drove the design in the first place was not the story, but was this artifact theme. Like, if you look at Antiquities, Save the Land, I think every single card either is an artifact or in its rules text, reference artifacts.

And so that's a good example where, like, that's the first bottom-up set. I'm going to go into the large sets now, but I need to bring up antiquities because that's the first one. Okay, so the next large set is Legends. So Legends, Steve Conard was the lead designer, and he and his friends completely top-down. What they did is Steve Connard was in the same role-playing group as Peter Atkinson, one of the founders and original CEO of Wizards. And so what he did is he based the set on characters and places and things

from their role-playing campaign. And it was very, very much top-down. Like, oh, we got to have Dak in Blackblade. So, okay, well, in the role-playing game, he did this. Okay, how do we capture that in cards? So it was completely, completely top-down. Now, the next large set after Legends would be Ice Age.

Now, interestingly, Ice Age was built by the same team, the East Coast Playtester. So, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, that made Antiquities. And so, Ice Age is the first top-down large set. It very much, they were exploring mechanics. Now, what happened in the early days was the flavor was made by the people that made the set.

The early Magic sets, the people who did the mechanical also did a decent amount of the creative work. For example, I mean, not that Alpha has a story per se, but the creative that was there was Richards. In Antiquities, I talk about the that Alpha has a story per se, but the creative that was there was Richards. In Antiquities, I talk about the first bottom-up set, that was, the Brothers War was made by the East Coast Playtectors. That was their doing.

And when you get to Legends, obviously whatever stories in Legends, you know, that was Steve Connard and his group. You get to Ice Age, once again, we're still in the area where they are making the story. But at that point, there was a continuity team. So I think the Ice Age team had some idea and then it got taken over by the continuity team.

But the important part is they made the mechanics first. And then when they were done with the mechanics, they then layered story on it. And that would happen for a while where, you know, there was definitely a period where the mechanics were all done before the creative work got done. Okay. After Ice Age is Mirage. Okay. So Mirage, another bottom-up set. But the one thing is, the team that made this.

So the team that made Mirage was another team that were original playtesters. Bill Rose and Joel Mick were Coley designers. John Coutinho was in it. It's a group that Richard had met through the Bridge Club that he played in. Anyway, so what they did with Mirage was they came up with mechanics they liked. But the first thing they did is they made flanking and phasing. And then, once they had flanking and phasing, they started figuring out what story they wanted to tell.

So they did make a story, and once again, they designed some cards to match the story, but it really started from, let's make the mechanics work, let's figure out the mechanics. And if you can tell, the story incorporated flanking and phasing, but it wasn't, neither one was, if you look at sort of modern design, we use the mechanics to sort of reinforce and tell the story. And back then, it's a little more after the fact layering. Okay, the next big set after Mirage was Tempest. My baby. So Tempest was interesting. It was completely bottom-up.

We did it mechanically. In fact, the set was well along its way. Now, I, at the time, I worked with Mike Ryan. We did the Wedlight Saga, at least we did back then. He and I worked to incorporate all the mechanics into the story. So the slivers show up in the story. worked to incorporate all the mechanics into the story. So the slivers show up in the story. We definitely made elements that were in the gameplay relevant to the story, but it was done after the fact.

Nothing in my design, in the core of the design, was about capturing anything about the story. It was done, I had the mechanics done, and then I worked cleverly to try to make the thing make sense, but still, the creative didn't drive my design or that of my team. Okay, so the next one after Tempest is, what's after Tempest? Urza's Saga. So Urza's Saga is probably the epitome of the mechanics and the creative not working together at all.

Because, and I've talked about this before, we made an enchantment block. We made a set where enchantments matter, where there were more enchantments, you know, like the percentage of enchantments was higher than ever, and more things that cared about enchantments. And we made a very enchantment-centric block. And then, the story they wanted to tell laid on top of that.

They decided to do a prequel, and they wanted to go back in time and tell the story of Urza. Well, Urza is an artificer. And so, in fact, the block was called the artifact cycle. So we mechanically made it to be about enchantments and creatively it was about artifacts.

So that's a completely, like literally people misunderstood mechanics because the creative so pointed in a different direction. So that's an example where they didn't even line up. I mean, the set was built mechanic. It was built bottom-up. It wasn't... But that's a good example

where there's probably one of the most disconnects. Because the goal of flavor usually is to reinforce the mechanics. And the goal of mechanics should be to reinforce the flavor. But that's just a perfect example where there's just no connection whatsoever. Okay, after Urza Saga,

the next big set was Invasion. So Invasion was bottom up. It was, we started, it was me, Bill Rose, and Mike Elliott. We started with like, we're going to do a multicolor block. That was the beginning of us kind of doing thematic blocks, mechanically thematic blocks.

So that was completely bottom up. I mean, we knew the story existed, but really, we didn't do much. It wasn't like it was all about the invasion. Let's put in invasion mechanics. Let's capture the sense of invasion. you notice for example that story is kind of this giant battle

between the coalition and the Phyrexians and like there's nothing in the set about conflict I mean other than magically about conflict but there's no like now for example we do a two-sided thing like each side gets to have a mechanic

and we represent the sides fighting not done at all you know invasion completely bottom up and you'll see by the way there's a trend as we're getting here and that the very very early days when it just started and we represent the sides fighting. Not done at all. You know, invasion completely bottomed up. And you'll see, by the way, there's a trend as we're getting here in that the very, very early days when it just started was very much top-down.

And then we kind of got in the habit of being very mechanically based. And there was a lot more disconnect. The creative team was not part of R&D at the time. I mean, they eventually would become part of R&D. But if you go back in the early days, they were a separate section, so like, there wasn't even...

And there was, to be honest, in some earlier days in Magic, there was some animosity where what the creative team wanted and what the you know, R&D being the mechanical side wanted didn't quite line up. Right now, we go into it with much more linked goals.

Okay, so the set after Invasion is Mercadian Masks. So Mercadian Masks was, once again, designed completely from mechanics. It was bottom-up. I don't know. That's the same time period

where, like, I don't even know when we made this set if we knew what the story was going to be. I mean, they ended up taking some idea we had from oh wait, wait, did I go to our border? I did, I did, I did. Sorry. Mercadian Mass was after Urza Saga

and then Invasion. Because I'm thinking about like, oh, it's in the middle of the Wedlight Saga, Invasion is the end of the Wedlight Saga. So this whole time period, Urza Saga, Mercadian Masks, Invasion, really there was a huge disconnect between the creative team and R&D.

And so we were just making sets and they were putting flavor on them. There was not a lot of work to try to marry the two. And so that's true of Mercadian Masks. So Mercadian Masks, then Invasion, sorry. And then after Invasion was Odyssey. Odyssey, we started making more demand. I mean, we started messing around a little more in things,

but still, Odyssey, once again, has a huge disconnect. Odyssey was a graveyard set, and nothing about the creative played into graveyard. In fact, for those people that know the story of Innistrad, it was the disconnect between the flavor of Innistrad,

like the mechanics and the flavor that made me and Brady talk about how, wow, we, you know, what this wanted to be was a gothic horror set

and we said, oh, a gothic horror set with graveyard themes? You know, that sounded really cool and so that later would become Innistrad.

You get to Onslaught and once again, this is all the bottom-up era. Big disconnect. Creative is layering things after the fact we're done. Onslaught had a tribal theme. There's nothing particularly tribal about the story at all.

In fact, Odyssey and Onslaught are two parts of the same story, and mechanically, the blocks have nothing to do with each other. There's no... In fact, Odyssey fights on Slott. That's one of the crazy things was, one of our problems is we made this conscious choice not to have

some basic creature types like goblins and elves, and then we had a set in which we brought back goblins and elves, and the story takes place on the same continent. And the creator's like, oh, let's explain why there were goblins here and not here. And they had to, like, come up with some... I mean, that's clearly not the flavor trying to...

That's an after-the-fact justification. Okay, so then we get to Mirrodin. Okay, Mirrodin is the start. Mirrodin was still a bottom-up set. We started with the idea of wanting to do an artifact set with the highest percentage of artifacts ever. I really wanted to do the artifact to see artifact block.

You know, I mean, we had done, antiquities had started, and I really wanted to say, okay, I like the theme of artifacts. What can we do with that? And I really wanted to bring it to not just, I didn't just want a generic artifact. I wanted a lot of artifact creatures, and I wanted the tone of the world. So what happened was, while I was making it,

I and Tyler, who was also my design team, started to come up with the idea of a metal world. And while we definitely were guided by mechanics, while making it, we very much thought about it. And so Mirrodin is kind of the beginning of the modern era of sort of world building. It's the first world that was kind of like, like if you think of how we build worlds, it's the first world that was kind of built under how we currently do it. And we've fine-tuned it a lot.

So, I mean, it's the early, early, early days. But it's the first set where like we worked with a creative team and they built a world and, you know, we responded to that world and had some mechanical elements of it. So once again, bottom up, I mean it completely started as an artifact set but it

was the first time there was a little bit of integration. And by integration I mean we talked with them before the design was completely done to adapt a few things. Not a lot. It was more mechanical minded. So after Mirrodin with Champions of Kamigawa.

So Champions of Kamigawa was an experiment. Bill Rose, the VP of R&D, said that he wanted to try something different. He wanted to see what would happen if we built the world first and then did mechanics. So what Bill did, though, is he just inverted it

rather than intertwine them. And like I said, Mirrodin just had the earliest of intertwining on world building, not so much, there wasn't quite the intertwining that you see later on the process of creating the world. But there definitely was a little more back and forth. Kamigawa, while there was a little bit of back and forth of us talking, the way it was done is the creative was done first. It was the first top-down set done since Legends.

And they made all the creative first. All the decisions of the creative were made in a vacuum, away from mechanics. And then after they were done, mechanics were made to sort of fit it. And the problem was that flavor is just so much more robust than mechanics are. And you can create things with flavor, but they're just not easy answers in mechanics.

The mechanics can't do everything flavor did. And because we were using a source material, there are a lot of quirky things that show up in Japanese mythology that, like, it was really hard. And so it became very, very... It was an interesting experiment, I guess, but in the end, it caused problems because trying to sort of fit mechanics in after the fact ended up making them very ham-fisted.

You know, they're like, oh, I guess you're a samurai. Well, all samurai must have this mechanic. Oh, you're this. You're an. Well, all samurai must have this mechanic. Oh, you're this. You're an Orochi. You must have this mechanic. You're a moon folk. You must have this mechanic.

In order to sort of make the tie, it became really like, you know, you're this. Well, then you have that, you know, and it was not a very elegant design. Okay, so after Champions of Kamigawa was ravnica and ravnica probably i think mirrodin mirrodin was the proto version rather because it was the first set really there was back and forth um interestingly why was that the case because during the middle of champions of kamigawa i two things happened i became head designer and I was overseeing the creative team. The reason when I became head designer that I was put in charge of the creative team was that they wanted integration. They realized from Champions of Kamigawa that it wasn't working.

And so Ravnica was really the first sort of back and forth in the design process. So, for example, I wanted to do 10 two-color pairs. I was trying, you know, Invasion, the previous multicolor block, it all about playing lots of colors. So I wanted to play the fewest colors possible. But in multicolor, that plays two because you want to be multicolor. I went to Brady. I said, I want 10 two-color pairs of equal weight.

He came back with the idea of the guilds. I love the guilds. And then I built the structure around the guilds. So, like, the idea of how the guilds and what the guilds. I love the guilds. And then I built the structure around the guilds. So, like, the idea of how the guilds and what the guilds were inspired me, for example, to make the 4-3-3 model for the block. The four guilds, the first set, three in the second, three in the third.

So Ravnica was the first set. I mean, make no mistake, Ravnica was a bottom-up set. It started from a place of mechanics. I divided among the mechanics. You know, it's a very structured set. The structure, you know, while I tried to capture the feel of the guilds that was after the fact, it was still very mechanically based so it was a bottom up set

so after Ravnica is Time Spiral so Time Spiral once again started from a mechanical place it was bottom-up. We started with this idea of wanting to have time themes. Tinsman had made the suspend mechanic in... maybe in Sabers of Kamigawa? He made it in a set that was a small set.

I'm like, this is way too big for this set. We need to save it for a large set. And then Split Second had gotten made by somebody else during... I want to say Coltsnet maybe. But anyway, we had this time theme. From the time theme, we ended up getting the past, present, future and stuff. And there was a lot of working with creative to make sure, because a lot of Time Spiral was, there was a lot of, oh, this card only makes sense because of this creative.

there's a lot of, oh, this card only makes sense because of this creative. So you can start to see, you know, there was just a lot more back and forth between things. But still, at its core, it still was a bottom-up design. Okay, so we go a year later, and now we get to Lorwyn and to Shadowmoor. Once again, bottom-up, the whole block was made to be two mini blocks interconnected. We chose to do tribal for Lorwyn. We chose to do hybrid for Shadowmoor. The idea was that creature types exist regardless if you care about them. So if we did the creature types in the first block, we could care about them in the second by just having them there.

Likewise, color. We made color matter a big part of the hybrid. So we'd like, Lorwyn had colors on cards, and so we can make it matter. But the whole structure of the Mega Block, the structure of Lorwyn, the structure of Shadowmoor, all those was designed with

the bottom-up sort of structure. But, and here's the big difference, we're starting to get a lot more input. Like, one of the things we did very early on with Lorwyn is we sat down super early and hammered out with creative what the creature types were going to be. And a lot of that was defining what the world would be.

So we started seeing us involved. I mean, really, Ravnica is the begin. I mean, Mirrodin was the first place where there was a team making a world in the way we make worlds now. And Ravnica was the first place I mean, Mirrodin was the first place where there was a team making a world in the way we make worlds now. And Ravnica was the first place where we started to have real integration between creative and design, meaning during design,

design started in creative, creators making decisions which influenced the design. Okay, so after Laura and Shadowmore, we get to Shadows... Shards of Alara. Shards of Alara was bottom-up. It was done.

Bill Rose did it. He wanted to do a gold set. He didn't want it to be five-color like Invasion. Didn't want it to be two-color like Ravnica. So he ended up going three-color. And then he had this idea of having the final set be all gold cards, that Alara Reborn be all gold cards.

So he built this entire block around that premise. The creative did build a world, and that world building was sort of, came out of the idea of what exactly are these three-color shards. And they came up with the idea of a world broken into shards, and a lot of the work they did in making the world, then when we were defining the shards, came back for us to work on them.

So there was more, like once again, you start seeing more give and take. So after Shards of Alara was Scars of Mirrodin. And Scars of Mirrodin is the first set where I would say was probably more top-down than bottom-up. I mean, obviously the earliest magic was, and we tried an experiment with Chimskamigawa that went horribly awry. But the thing that I was really focused on was I was telling a story. I wanted to see

the Phyrexians invade Mirrodin. Now, the weirdest thing was we were going back to a world and the world we were going back to was a bottom-up world. So there were bottom-up qualities to the set because we came from a place of matching a mechanical world. But if I have to think about what drove the design, the structure that I made, it was very much about trying to capture the sense of how do we show that there are... Who are the Phyrexians?

One of the first things I did early on was defining the Phyrexians. Giving the Phyrexians, there was four terms we came up. Kind of remember them. They were relentless, adaptive, toxic,

and, relentless, adaptive, toxic, and viral. And we used that sort of what are the, what are the,

the Phyrexians to really lead a lot of stuff to define how we did things. So in a lot of ways, that was the first sort of top-down set. But with the caveat of it was a top-down that was a little harder to see because there was a lot of back and forth in how we did that. So after Scars of Mirrored, the next set we would have would be Innistrad.

And Innistrad was probably, from the modern era, the first really, a top-down set and a traditional set, what people think about when they say top-down, which is sort of driven thematically. That we said we wanted to do the tropes and the genre of Gothic horror, and what do we want to be there. And the whole set was designed around making you have that feel of what that was. And that was very, very much a top-down design.

It went over, like, gangbusters, and it really opened our eyes at, like, wow, we can do this. We can make top-down work. And top-down in a way where the top-down is a feature. Like, I think Scars of Mirrodin, I mean, technically was top-down, but I don't think the audience really saw that.

Like, when I say a top-down set, it's funny. I think the audience perception of top-down has to do with the idea of you're taking some sort of trope-y thing and then building around it. That's not necessarily what top-down has to be, but when I say a top-down set, that's what people think of.

And for those wondering, Amonkhet is that, you know, we're building on some expectations. I can't talk too much about Amonkhet yet, because I don't think it's out yet when I do this, but I promise that someday I will talk Amonkhet. Okay, after Innistrad was returned to Ravnica, that was bottom-up. That very much was very mechanical.

We decided we wanted to do the guilds a little differently. We ended up doing 5-5-10 and had two large sets. And once again, we were trying to capture the flavor of the guild. So there was some top-down individual design within the set, but the structure of it was very much a bottom-up thing okay so then we get to Theros well Theros completely top down much like Innistrad um one of the things we realized was we were doing sort of a cultural top down as opposed to a trope top down ends up those are very different animals um one of the lessons of Amonkhet has to do with

the difference between those two but once again future material but anyway we very much took Greek mythology and what would you expect of Greek mythology we designed the set to sort of mirror the sense now we had a mechanical component I wanted enchantments to matter I ended up making enchantments sort of

or I wanted enchantments to play a role I guess it's better to say they don't really matter to the third set. And I ended up using that to represent the feel, the touch of the gods on the world. Anyway, so that was obviously a bottom, sorry, a top-down set. So then we have Khans of Tarkir. So Khans of Tarkir is a bottom-up set.

We started from the idea of large, small, large draft structure and make the small set draft the large sets and the large sets be separate. I really wanted to figure out how to make that work. But that led to the idea of a time travel story. And then, you know, really the structure, a lot of the structure came from sort of mapping out things to make it work. And that was mechanical in nature. I mean, there were top-down elements of the design, but the core structure, when I talk about top-down versus bottom-up,

it's like, what influenced the structure? What influenced the skeleton of the set, if you will? And for Contra Tarkir, it was very mechanical. Same with Dragons of Tarkir. Oh, I realized, I said every large set, and I skipped over real quickly. So the first large set that we did was with Zendikar which was Rise of the Odrazi um and that was that had a lot of bottom a lot of top-down

feel to it it was building on a bottom-up set but I know the Tinsons built it to match the Odrazi the feel of the Odrazi was very much where that came from and then Avacyn Restored, it was, I would say, more mechanically based than top-down. Although, that one's a hard one. We were trying to capture the idea of the angels coming back. And so there was some flavoring we wanted of the angels saving the day, but there really ended up being this good versus bad structure that was a little bit more mechanical than flavor that sort of defined things. So I would say that I think Av versus bad structure that was a little bit more mechanical than flavor to sort of define things. So I would say that I think Abyssinian Destroyer was a little more bottoms up.

Okay, get back to Dragon's Dark Hero. Dragon's Dark Hero was bottoms up. It was made to be, like, it was made as a puzzle. In fact, cons and dragons were built together, and they were very much mechanical interconnectivity. The idea that, like, you saw mechanics that were introduced in Fate for Forge, and certain ones showed up in dragons, certain ones showed up in Cons.

Anyway, very mechanical in its design. But we layered lots and lots of flavor out of it. And once we realized we were going to do the factions, the factions had a huge amount of flavor, and that factioning determined the mechanics that we used to represent them. So once again, it had a bottom-up structural design, but a lot of flavor. We intermixed and did a lot of flavor with it. So it's getting harder and harder to tell.

Battle for Zendikar, once again, it's kind of like Scars. It was built on a mechanical world, but we did it top-down. We were doing the war. We wanted the war between the Odrazi and the Zendikari, and a lot of how we built the structure was trying to play up the war and get a feel of the war. We wanted the war between the Odrazi and the Zendikari. And a lot of how we built the structure was trying to play up the war

and get a feel of the war. And that was a bit tricky because whenever you're building on something that was originally bottom-up, there's a lot of remnants of bottom-up that you have to follow. So in some ways, if ever there's a thing that's kind of a cross between the two, going back to worlds in which you change up how you're doing it, but you're trying to capture the feel of the world, there's definitely a mix between the two. Going back to worlds in which you change up how you're doing it, but you're trying to capture the feel of the world, there's definitely a mix between those two.

So next we get Shadows over Innistrad. That was top-down. We really were trying to do a different style of horror. You know, we really wanted to sort of, like, we knew we were coming back to the horror plane, but we wanted a twist on the horror. So we played in the themes of sort of like we knew we were coming back to the horror plane but we wanted a twist on the horror you know so we played in the themes of sort of you know um of madness and of mutation

and you know a lot of things that like were a little bit different from the kinds of horror we didn't interest rod but still like we made a design on the idea of the world is going mad how do we capture that and so that very much was a top-down so that brings us to Kaladesh so Kaladesh is interesting I bring it last as Kaladesh is tricky it was a bottom-up design it was very much made by the idea of feeling like an inventor but it but that very came out of some mechanical definition. And when I say do you feel like an inventor, I was trying to capture a certain Johnny-ish feel that was more mechanical-based.

It had an emotional element to it. And I will admit that one of the things we're getting better at is learning how no matter where we start, because we mix in the other so early, that it's becoming harder and harder to tell when something is exactly top-down or bottom-up. It's not quite as clean as it once was. Like, you look at Alpha and like, wow, that is crystal clearly a top-down design. something like, you know, like Tempest or, you know, Urza's Saga or something.

We're like, wow, Urza's Saga is a perfect example. We didn't even know the story. There's no way we were influenced by the story. In fact, the story contradicted what we were doing. So, like, the story did not influence one iota. But one of the things you'll see as I sort of talk about the history of top down versus bottom up is we started in one place the game really started as a very top up top down sort of design moved to bottom up became much more mechanical and then over time we started to sort of say you know what there's a lot of what Richard did early on there's a lot of joy from the top down stuff how do we

sort of bring some of that stuff back and now I I really like to sort of mix it up, meaning I like to start designing from different places and that there's a lot of fun. There's a lot of fun of starting with the subject matter and saying, okay, we're going to care about the trope of Gothic horror, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology. We're going to care about this and we're going to let that define what we're doing. We're going to care about this, and we're going to let that define what we're doing. We're going to let the feel of that define how we're making it.

Or sometimes it's cool to say, you know what? I just have a neat mechanical thing I want to play around with. Whether it's I have some cool thing to do with artifacts or lands, or I have a neat drafting structure. There's something in which I just have a neat idea, and that's my jumping off point. And that really is the difference. And once again, the real difference between them, it's a technical term, is talking about where you start from when you structure it.

And in the end, you can make a bust of Nelson Mandela made out of clay no matter which way you start. But when you're making it, like when I talk about the terms, the places you, how you started from, I'm going to make a piece of art to I made a bust of Nelson Mandela, when you start with, I'm going to make a piece of art

about Nelson Mandela, versus making a bust out of clay of Nelson Mandela, when you started with, I want to make something out of clay. Those processes are very, very different processes. How you do it,

how they evolve, decisions you make, how it came along, from a technical standpoint, very different processes. How you do it, how they evolve, decisions you make, how it came along, from a technical standpoint, are completely different. You know the end product's the same. The act of making them is different. So we, on our end, as a guy who talks about how we design things, care. Because when I say it was a bottom-up set versus a top-down set, we made it completely differently. That doesn't necessarily mean the end product is something that you can recognize one from the other. And sometimes if you do a good job, you might not necessarily know. But I like sharing with you. I like you guys seeing behind the scenes process.

I believe for a lot of people, sort of learning how the set gets made enhances the game for you. And so I want to be able to do that. But anyway, for those that are wondering, for those that never quite understood, that is the definition of top-down versus bottom-up. In a slightly different way, so that maybe you guys, for those that weren't quite grasping it, can understand it. Anyway, that is my talk and my little jaunt through history. Hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm now at Rachel's school. So we know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.