Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #442: New vs. Returning Worlds

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the difference of designing a set for a new world and designing for a return.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, so one of the things that we do in making magic sets is every block is set in a different world. And so half the time we've decided we're going to visit brand new worlds, and half the time we're going to revisit worlds that we've previously visited. So today it's going to talk about the difference between new worlds and returning worlds and the challenges that it makes for design. So first off let me explain that when magic began, so for the first I don't know 10 plus 10 or so years of Magic's life, uh, it didn't

leave the plane. It mostly stayed on the same plane. It's called Dominaria, obviously. Um, and I'm not sure why. I mean, in retrospect, I, on some level, we treated the sets much like they were different worlds. Just for some reason, we kept putting them on the same world. Like Ice World? Yeah, that's the same world. Uh, Jungle reason we kept putting them on the same world.

Like ice world? Yeah, that's the same world. Jungle world? Yeah, that's the same world. You know, we kept sort of putting in the same place. And eventually we're like, you know what? You know what makes magic magic? Is you are a planeswalker.

You can walk between the planes. Perhaps we should go visit different planes rather than making making them all, quote-unquote, set on the same place. And so, starting, I mean, Magic actually visited other planes all the way back as early as Arabian Nights, which was its first expansion. So it's not like it didn't visit planes

in the early years. But it, the interesting thing is the first, like, ten years or so, it only left the plane a couple times. Arabian Nights was set on a separate plane. Homelands was set on a separate plane. And it wasn't really until Tempest where we said, you know what? Let's make the story go to other worlds. And we actively left Dominaria.

But what today is, is when we sit down now, we decided a while back that, you know, what made magic exciting was we really needed to have new worlds. And starting around Mirrodin, we did what we now refer to as world building, meaning we figured out what the world looked like. Like early on, you know, the Ice Age, for example, was like, oh, it's icy. But there wasn't any cohesive look. There wasn't. And starting with Mirrodin, what we did is we started to make a world guide where we actually showed the artists,

no, no, no, here's what the world looks like. So when you draw things, there's things to go off of. And so what that does, it makes everybody drawn. Because remember, all our artists are freelance artists. We have hundreds of artists who do all our cards. They don't they all work in their own place. They're freelance. We have to give them something so that they can all draw together

in a cohesively seem like one world. So starting with Mirrodin, we started doing a world design. And then what we started realizing was we built some really cool worlds. It made sense for us to go back to them from time to time.

Like, if we did something and people liked it, well, why... You know, we don't have to constantly be reinventing worlds. We want to be moving, and we want to always be going to different places. But we made that assumption, or came to the conclusion, that, you know, players like going back to things that they enjoyed.

Now, one of the big things, by the way, is not every place people enjoyed. And one of the common things, if you read my blog, is there are a lot of fans, for example, of Kamigawa, which was a Japanese-inspired plane. That set didn't do well. It didn't test well. And so there were fans like,

we need to go back to Kamigawa. And I'm like, well, the problem is the first time around, it just didn't do well. It didn't test well. And so there were fans like, we need to go back to Kamigawa. And I'm like, well, the problem is the first time around it just didn't do well. You know, people didn't like it either in, you know, expressed through their sales. They didn't buy the product. And when we looked at marketing research, they didn't like the product. So, you know, not every world someplace that we necessarily are going to go back. I'm not saying we'll never go back. We might. But the idea is there's enough worlds that we've done

that people really show they're really excited for the world that we can return. And we decided that 50-50 is about the right amount. When I say every other, I don't literally mean every other. Sometimes we do two in a row of one and two in a row of the other. every other. I don't literally mean every other. Sometimes we do two in a row of one and two in a row of the other. Like recently, for example, Amonkhet and Aladesh were new worlds, where

Indushrad and Zendikar were old worlds. So like, you know, we will mix it up in the order we do things. But roughly, roughly, we come in around 50-50. And, okay, so the point of today is, I want to talk about the difference between the two. That's kind of my topic du jour. Okay, so let's first talk about returning worlds.

So the challenge with the returning world is that it already has an identity, and not just an identity creatively, but identity mechanically. For example, we'll take Zendikar. Zendikar came about from having a land center, a land mechanic center. And so I think people really equate Zendikar with having a land focus. So when we went back to Zendikar, some of that had to be there.

That whenever you return to a world just like Innistrad is really connected to the gothic horror genre or Ravnica is connected to the guilds or I mean Dominaria is tricky because Dominaria or Mirrodin is connected to artifacts that's probably a better sense

it's hard to go back to Mirrodin and not have any artifact focus it's hard to go back to Ravnica and not have any artifact focus. It's hard to go back to Ravnica and not have the guilds matter, not have multicolor matter. So when you're going back to a world, I mean, each of these has pros and cons. The pro of returning to a world is usually there's some structure that's set up that we can use to some extent. Sometimes it's very exacting, like Ravnica. Like, there will be ten guilds and you will reference the ten guilds. Sometimes

like Zendikar, it's a little looser. There's a certain flavor we're trying to capture and it's got a little bit of a land theme so we're some obligation to do that. But we have a little bit more flexibility. So first thing for us is the thing we always do when we're turning

to a world is we figure out the mechanical identity of the world. Meaning, what, what, if you ask people what the world, what are the key identifiers? Mirrodin is another good example, which is, artifact is a pretty key identifier. There's a lot of artifact creatures and things. It's not necessarily, like one of the things we'll do when we return to a world world is we will write everything that took place in that world, every mechanical element of that world. And then we will discuss, okay, all of these mechanical elements, they fall into the three categories. Either we think people will expect them to return, we think people are unsure, maybe they will, maybe they won't, or we think people don't expect them to return.

Usually the first category are the things that are super iconic to the world. When we went back to Zendikar, we really felt like landfall was the big hit first time around, that there would be expectation of landfall. When we returned to Mirrodin, you know, it was the artifact focus that we assumed people would expect. That the set just has a high percentage of artifacts. When we went back to Ravnica, the guilds, we expected people expected the guilds in multicolor. And when we went back to Indusrod, you know, we decided that double-faced cards, mechanically, was something people would expect.

You know, we decided that double-faced cards, mechanically, was something people would expect. And a certain amount of, you know, monster tribal. Tribal for vampires and werewolves and zombies and spirits and humans. That, you know, that people would expect the double-faced cards and the tribal-ness to it. Now, when you go back to a world... Oh, so one thing is there's a mechanical connection. The second thing is there a flavor connection. The best example here would probably be Zendikar.

We left Zendikar like, oh, the Eldrazi had just been released and seen. You know, we really felt like, okay, well, there's some, we have to at some point resolve what happened there. It ended, a lot of times we, the magic has proven it's really good about starting things and ending things in the way that trading card games work. And so we're really good at going, okay, we're in this world, environmentally, look at this. But it's a little bit harder to get closure and plot just in the nature of trading card games. So sometimes we visit a world and we sort of open things up. Often in the third set, there's a twist. And then it's a matter of, okay, how do we incorporate that? Or do we incorporate that?

Because one of the inherent challenges of returning to a world is the following problem, which is you want to sort of capture what made people love the world in the first place, but also you want to make sure that it's something new and fresh. That every time we do a set, we want new mechanics, we want new possibilities for things. So the key to a returning world is to figure out sort of what the identity of the world is, what people expect about the world, what you need to deliver on, and then figure out a way to do something that's new and different.

So, for example, we'll just walk through the... I'm not going to do Dominaria. I understand we did return to Dominaria many times in the first 10, 15 years of Magic, but that was a little bit of a different animal. We never left for long. Like, you know, most of the time we've left Dominaria, it was like for a year or two before we came back. So there wasn't, there wasn't ever a, it's very different than now.

We've come back to a world now. Normally we wait at least six or seven years. Channelmore ended up a little faster than that due to us condensing things down. But normally we wait a little bit before we go back to worlds.

So I'm going to talk about the four worlds that we've returned to so far. And sort of talk about the challenges of each of those worlds as far as what it meant to return to those worlds. Okay, so the first world we returned to was Mirrodin. So Mirrodin, like I said, was the first world we had built. So we had created a style guide and there was a cohesive look to the world. And then we came back with Scars of Mirrodin.

So the thing about Mirrodin was, what was unique there is, we had planted a story that we had meant to follow up on, but we'd been very subtle about it. It had always been our plan that Mirrodin was going to be the home of the return of the Phyrexians. In fact, we knew that Mirrodins were going to turn Mirrodin into new Phyrexia. And the big question about returning to the world was figuring out how to sort of get there. The end state we wanted was Mirrodin gets taken over by the Phyrexians. We wanted to reintroduce the Phyrexians as a villain. We wanted to reintroduce the Phyrexians as a villain.

How do we do that? And so we definitely had sort of a focal point that we wanted that was creatively driven. Now, the interesting thing about this one was we're the ones that drove that. We're the ones that said, like, if you go back and look at Mirrodin, there's subtle things going on. In the novel, there's a few references to the Phyrexian oil. You know, some of the stuff with black. There's definitely a lot of little teases that the Phyrexians are there, but nothing blunt, meaning most

of the audience, the vast, vast, vast majority of the audience didn't necessarily expect the Phyrexians to be there. What we really did is we layered in, so when we said it was there and we went back and looked, you're like, oh, why didn't I see that? That's the kind of way we set it up. So in returning, we knew our new element for Scars of Mirrodin, that the Phyrexians were there.

The Phyrexians had been part of original Mirrodin. So that world, that return was kind of interesting in that we knew right away that we wanted to create the, you know, well, it took us a little while to figure out we were building to a war. Like I said, for those who don't know me talking about this, originally when we came back, it was going to be New Phyrexia. That was the original plan. But like Scars and Mirrodin, the fall set, was just going to be called New Phyrexia. And then what we realized was, we were skipping over the cool part of the story, is watching

Mirrodin fall to New Phyrexia. And that's when we came up with the idea of what if the audience didn't know the outcome and we had two names for the last set. That's the whole gimmick. So Mirrodin had a very clear design focus. I mean, it took us a while to get

there because we didn't know we were going to go through the war originally. But like I say, every return set has new and old. Well, the new clearly was the Phyrexians. We had to figure out what the Phyrexians represented and that would lead us down the path that got us to infect and proliferate. At the same time, we returned to the world, we want something to come back. So the things we chose to return with was A, we had an artifact focus, it had a high percentage of artifacts um we brought

back imprint which is one of the mechanics for the first time around and we brought back metal craft or not brought back we used metal craft which was hitting a similar flavor to what affinity had done um we actually had talked about bringing back affinity for artifacts i tried to bring back affinity for artifacts i actually made a whole bunch of cards. I actually had a cool thing where I did another kind of affinity. So part of the set did affinity for artifacts and part of the set did affinity for a different thing. But development was rightfully nervous in that we had really, really messed up before. And while they felt confident that they could design affinity for artifacts, there's always a chance of it breaking. And it was decided that it wasn't worth the PR.

Like, bringing back affinity for artifacts and having it break again just looks really, really bad. And then it puts us in a bad spot. Like, we could guarantee it's not a tournament thing by not pushing it, but then it's one of the major focuses of our set. And do you want to have mechanics that you feel you can't push because maybe you'll miss um so we did instead is we ended up making uh another mechanic a metal craft that was similar space you know metal crash filled a lot of the void that affinity for artifacts would have filled um in fact i think i just stripped out

affinity for artifacts and put in metalcraft, so it literally filled a very similar void. Okay, so that was Scars of Iridin. It's like, okay, it's got a metal focus, you know, imprint with the fun mechanic we brought back, metalcraft was kind of stepping in for affinity for artifacts.

And then we had the Frexian stuff, good to go. Okay, so next return to Worlds would be Zendikar. No, no, no. Sorry. Not Zendikar. Return to Ravnica. Ravnica. So Return to Ravnica was interesting, meaning it was a lot tighter. The structure we

set up for Ravnica is a very tight structure. It's like, okay, we're going to have ten guilds. It's a multi-car set with ten guilds. It's a multi-car set with 10 guilds. And the nature of the guild meant that we had a lot of tight cycles, and that what we're doing is we're showing these 10 guilds and then contrasting them through cycles.

So cycles tend to be mostly 10-card. There are a few cycles that live within sets. The biggest challenge of bringing back Return to Ravnica was the original set had been four guilds, three guilds, three guilds. And we

wanted to mix things up a little bit. And I think it was, it was Brian Tinsman who first pitched the idea of what if the final set was all ten guilds. And look, he who first pitched the idea of what if the final set was all ten guilds. And look, he had first pitched, because at the time it was a large, small, small block. So he had pitched ten, six, I'm sorry, six, four, ten is what he had pitched. And I said that we just didn't have the space, that we couldn't

pull off six in a large set, and we'd have trouble pulling off four in a small set. So I made the suggestion that instead of doing ten, six, four, we make the second one a large set and go five, five, ten. And I need to get buy-off because just turning a small set into a large set is something that I need to get permission to. There's a lot of ramifications of that. But I did get permission, and so we turned it there. So the structure was a little bit different,

but really, Return to Ravnica was the closest we've done to a mechanical straight-up return. There was not a lot of innovation. At the time I talked about it, I had some ideas how to innovate, but people felt that they liked the structure. Ravnica had been... I mean, either Ravnica or Indus Ravnica is the most popular set of all time, depending on what metrics you look, both can lay claim to it.

People really liked Ravnica. They really liked the guilds. We wanted to continue the guilds. So I had some ideas how to be a little more radical with it, but people really didn't want us to be more radical. So there wasn't a lot of change between the two. It was a lot more straightforward. So we really

sort of did rather... We did a few small things. There were some cycles we did differently. We took things like we'd never done charms before. We hadn't done two-color charms, so we let all the guilds do charms. We brought back split cards, so we added Fuse.

So the split cards work a little differently than they had before. I mean, we did some smaller changes. Like, we changed up the structure, but it really was a redressing. It wasn't quite, you know, of sets as far as how much we changed it. We didn't change it that much. Zendikar, I kind of feel like half the set, I'm saying Mirrodin, half the set was Mirrodin, half the set was a new quality. Ravnica, most of it was Ravnica,

but just a little tiny bit of set dressing. But most of it was as you knew it. The next world we returned to was Zendikar. So Zendikar, the challenge of Zendikar was that we had sort of left on a cliffhanger, and so we felt obligated to finish the cliffhanger. Like, okay, the El Drazi are free, what does it mean the El Drazi are free? And so we ended up structuring the return as a war.

A war between the Frexians, I keep saying Frexians, between the El Drazi and the Zendikari. So in some ways there was a structure a little bit similar to the way we did Mirrodin. There were two forces, but the only difference is the Eldrazi side had shown up before. So we had two sides, but both sides were showing off elements that we had seen before. So the difference on this one was what we wanted to was we wanted to bring back some stuff from the Zendikari

side, but do some new stuff, and do some stuff from the Eldrazi side, but do some new stuff. So from the Zendikari side, we decided we would bring back Landfall because Landfall really was sort of the key mechanic and was one of the most beloved mechanics, not just of the set. If you look at our rankings

of lifetime mechanic rankings, landfall ends up really high. We also knew we wanted to do a little bit of a land theme. We brought back the full art lands. And we wanted to make sure that we hit the allies. The allies were popular the previous time. We kind of tweaked the allies. The mechanic we used on them was similar to what they had done last time

with just a little bit of a tweak to make them play better instead of them only affecting allies that affected all your creatures. So it was very similar to what you played before. It would play nice with your ally. If you just pulled your ally deck out from Zandakar, these cards would go into it just fine. And then on the Eldrazi side we chose to match the colorlessness of it, the large size

of it and we captured the general sort of weirdness, the alienness of it but we actually did quite an amount of new mechanical work you know the processors along with what was it called I'm thinking of a name

when you attack you mill cards. You exile cards from the top of the library. We had Devoid, which made things colorless. We had... You know, there's just a bunch... So each side had a bunch of old with a little bit of new. I guess there was Converge for the Zenakari side. So the idea was a lot of old, a little bit of new.

A little more new with the Eldrazi than with the Zendikari. Okay, then we get to Innistrad. So Innistrad, we decided that the Dark Transformation was important. And Transformation was important because you'll notice, other than Ravnica, what we've done for each of the sets is we bring in a new quality that wasn't there before. That part of what has us defining the newness to the world is bringing in a new quality. So that new quality for Innishrad was the world has gone mad, something strange is happening with the payoff of the Eldrazi. So we were doing cosmic horror.

We had a gothic horror world. We wanted to sort of bring in a different style of horror. And there's a real big overlap between gothic horror and cosmic horror. That a lot of what made cosmic horror cosmic horror is playing off of gothic horror. So we decided that for this block, we would shake it up and we'd add this other element. What that meant is for the first design, we had added this element of insanity and what that meant. And for the second design, we had the influence of the Eldrazi and things sort of mutating, sort of a mutation theme. So for that set, once again, it's like we wanted enough baseline to feel like it was Innistrad. We did the double-faced cards.

We did the tribal for the five tribes. But beyond sort of that, and the tribes had a similar feel to them. The zombies still were slow-plotting zombies and the vampires were a little more aggressive vampires and such. But we layered in this other stuff. And so that return, you know, had some amount of familiarity,

but it was a little bit heavier in the return. So the funny thing is, if you look back, I feel like Mirrodin was about 50-50. Ravnica was about 90-10, leaning toward bringing back stuff. New Zendikar, Battle for Zendikar was probably

60-40, but that's because we were bringing back both sides. And then Innistrad was probably 40-60, that we had enough for a baseline, but we did a lot, we did a little bit more new stuff because we're bringing in a theme. Okay, so that's returning worlds. Returning world is you got to capture some of what you want, you need a new element, and you need to figure out how to mix the new element into the old element. That's the key of returning to a world. So a brand new world, the pros of a brand new world is the world is your oyster. You can do whatever you want.

The downside is you need to figure out what the identity is for the world. One of the things that, it's funny that when you do a return world, it's kind of refreshing to go, okay, I basically know the world we're going to. And you go to a new world, you're like, okay, I basically know the world we're going to. And you go to a new world, you're like, okay, what is this world? I've got to figure it out. Now, I enjoy the Blink page. I enjoy exploring the brand new thing. One of the things I think is fun that we do is we go to new worlds and see new stuff. And that I really enjoyed Kaladesh and Amonkhet and, you know, Ixalan that you guys haven't seen yet. But, I mean, these are all new worlds that we've done, you know, relatively recently.

And it's kind of neat to figure out what's the identity. What does the world stand for? Now, when you're doing a new world, the big difference of is, do you have a mechanical starting point or do you have a creative starting point? A lot of what I refer to as bottoms up for stop down. And so the new world really depends on where the vantage point is coming from, what you feel you need for it. If, for example, you're doing a top down world,

then it's just figuring out what things you care about. You know, Amiket, for example, was, I told you, was a combination of top down Egypt with top down Bolas. So that means, okay, let's figure out all the Egyptian things we want to do, which ones make sense, which don't make sense, and sort of walk through that. And then also figure out, okay, there's top-down bolus, what does that mean, what's the feel? So with the new world, really what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out does it have an identity or does it not have an identity?

Meaning, are the mechanics trying to fulfill the known identity or are the mechanics trying to carve an identity? And that's one of the big differences between top-down and bottom-up. So with top-down, I'm using my mechanics to give life to whatever the world theme is. And the idea is that we're going to sell you on the world based upon the theme. on the world based upon the theme. That when we show you pictures of Amonkhet or of Pharos or of Innistrad, there's not a lot of heavy lifting on our side for you to understand what the world is because those sets are heavily influenced sets. Oh, oh, oh, it's gothic horror.

It's inspired by Greek mythology. It's inspired by Egyptian mythology. Each one of those are heavy on resonance, that you, the audience, have a really good idea of what it is. So our job there is to meet expectations. So, you know, new world, new resonant world is about figuring out what those expectations are.

Now, one of the tricky things about that is if I say Egypt world, there's different things you might think of. Like one of the tricky things about that is, if I say Egypt world, there's different things you might think of. Like, one of the things we realized while working on Amonkhet is the tropes of Egypt fall into two very different buckets. One is what we will call sunny, living Egypt, and it's what we call is dusty, dead Egypt. So when you see Egypt in pop culture, sometimes you're seeing it where it's the dominant culture. You're in Egypt and it's live and sunny and they're building the pyramids. It's a living Egypt.

But another thing is like the mummy and stuff where people are archaeologists or tomb raiders or whatever. And you're seeing Egypt but through a dead culture. And yes, maybe the mummies come to life or whatever, but it's still a different animal. And so we had to figure out what trope space we were doing, which happened first. We were doing Sun Egypt. So we sort of carved that stuff out and then made sure that we were delivering the world such that it was the right world we wanted people

to get. And from a mechanical standpoint, the real question there is figuring out the essence of what the world is. I figured out, for example, that Innistrad was about dark transformation. You know, it's about watching things, it's about watching innocence fall into darkness. For Theros, it was very much about sort of accomplishment. It's the idea of, you know, Greek stories are about heroes going on quests

and, you know, or people going on quests and becoming heroes and about overcoming monsters and obstacles. And so I wanted to get that sense of accomplishment. You know, the Sir Arnegant, for example, we were really mixing it with the story. So we were trying to, we really wanted a sense of dissonance.

The idea that the world is not the way, that the world, how the world feels is not the way the world looks. So with that, what I wanted to do was I used the mechanics so the mechanics would convey one thing to contrast with the creative. That I wanted the play to feel really mean and I wanted the world to look very bright and sunny.

So those things don't seem, because I wanted you to feel like the gate watch, where the world is... Yeah, the people seem happy, but that doesn't... Something seems wrong. Okay. That's resonant worlds. So, worlds that don't come with resonant. Worlds like...

That's a good example of magic's past. I mean, for example, when we were building Zendikar, we ended up putting some, we ended up finding residents. We normally do find residents later on top of things. But for example, actually, it's funny, all four of the worlds

I talked about that later would be return worlds, at first were new worlds. You know, when we made Mirrodin, Mirrodin got inspired by the fact that we wanted to have a world in which artifacts was the theme. And I really sort of liked the idea of a metal world, and what did that mean? And I worked with the creative team to say, Mirrodin, Mirrodin got inspired by the fact that we wanted to have a world in which artifacts was the theme. And I really sort of liked the idea of a metal world and what did that mean? And I worked with the creative team to say, okay, what does it mean to have a world made of metal?

And Brady, for example, is the one that came up with the idea of, well, what if the creatures themselves were imbued with metal? What does that mean? And Brady and Jeremy Cranford, who was the art director at the time, really worked with some artists to figure out out what did that mean? How did you, also Jeremy Jarvis at the time was not in charge of art direction, but was working for Jeremy Cranford. So he also was involved in that. But anyway, trying to figure out how things were looking, what exactly that meant.

When we were doing Ravnica, it was really inspired by the fact that we wanted a gold world, and I wanted to do, I wanted a two-color world where all the two-color pairs showed up. And that inspired Brady to come up with the idea of guilds. And then I, once guilds were a thing, I then started building around the guilds and made the 4-3-3 model and stuff. You know, Zendikar started with a land theme. Zendikar started with the idea of, I want to make lands matter. I want to find mechanics where lands matter and that I felt that we

hadn't done much with it in a space we could explore. That led us to landfall and a bunch of other land related things. And then the creative team, you know, knowing the kind of things we wanted to show off came up with an adventure world that had sort of a thematic thing to it. And once I knew adventure world then I went back and added in traps and maps and chaps, chaps are allies, and those things. And maps were quests.

Or if I look at something like Indusrod, Indusrod was a top-down, so that doesn't count. Other worlds that we've done. You know, if you look at something like Khan's Tarkir, Khan to Tarkir really started from the idea of the draft structure. And so I was trying to figure out how to make it work.

We stumbled onto the idea of time travel. And then we looked for a world that we could radically change, choosing to come up with Tarkir. And then we got the idea of no dragons into dragons. But when you're doing a new world, you need to figure out something that you're using. And that's why if the world doesn't have a cohesive flavor connection, you're usually doing a mechanical connection.

And the mechanical connection can come from different places. But the real challenge, in fact, of all the things, I mean, return worlds have their trickiness to it. Resident top-down worlds have their trickiness to it. But when you're building a world, it's the worlds that have no identity, that you start from a mechanical place, that are weird in the sense that they have a mechanical identity. Like, that's one of the strange things is, one of the things,

like, I've been doing this for a long time, and one of the reasons I don't get bored is we don't start from the same place. We never start from the same place. And even today, I'm just explaining the kind of worlds we build. Every world has its own challenges to figure out. And when you start with a blank slate world, what I mean by that is you know nothing of the world. You're leaning a lot more on what do I want the set to be mechanically and what can come out of that. But the interesting thing is as we rely more and more on, you know, story as a jumping off point, we've been doing a lot more with trying to bring worlds

that we think mean something to people. You know, I mean, we do from time to time just come up with, like, oh, here's a crazy idea for a world. We do that from time to time. But something we do a lot more of is we want a world that will excite people and we want to make sure that we build something in that excites them.

And what that means is one of a few things. Either we want a hook, like, returning to a world has a hook, so that comes with it. Resident worlds have a hook because it's this thing. It's Egypt world. And in the new worlds, usually we try to put a mechanical hook in.

But there's another way that we can do it sometimes. What we do is we take elements people like. Khan's Archer is a good example of this. Khan's Archer said we have things people like. Kahn's Archer is a good example of this. Kahn's Archer said, we have things we like, we don't think we could build a whole world out of them. But is there a way to take these components,

like for example, the Shaolin monks. There's something really cool in the Shaolin monks. The audience has a general sense of how they look and feel. Mechanically, there's something you can build around. But it's not, it wasn't a full set. And so Concepts of Archaea tried something actually that's a little bit different, which was, it was sort of the marriage of what we do when we do bottom up and top down, which

was a segmented world where we, the first thing we did is we get an identity and we got the idea of factions and then, um, three color factions too. Um, but then we sort of gave the creative team some ability to build some sort of top down, some flavor that we could then top down. So like we gave them the shell of the structure. Morph was in the set. The three colors, well, I guess they started building factions before three colors were cemented. But the idea there was,

that is when we're playing around where, Alara had the similar quality, too. So this is a world in which it's resonant, but it's not resonant because the whole thing is resonant. It's made up of component resonant things. Shard of Alara has really said, hey, let's have a prehistoric sort of jungle world. Let's have a world where people, you know, sort of high science world, where people are turning themselves, you know, are using the science on themselves.

themselves, you know, are using the science on themselves. Let's have a more, you know, a more high fantasy, you know, a little more structured world. Or let's have a world where everything is, you know, slowly sort of falling apart, you know, slowly sort of disintegrating. falling apart, you know, it's slowly sort of disintegrating. Or let's have a sort of a cruel, you know, a world where everybody's sort of fighting itself and, you know, add a little bit of a mechanic element to it. So, like, when we build worlds, some sets are kind of like we meet halfway. I mean, usually they start someplace, meaning

both Khans of Tarkir and Shards of Alara started from a mechanical mean. Shards of Alara started because we wanted to end with all color, nothing but multicolored third set. And Khans started from wanting to do a certain draft structure.

But in each case, partway through, we figured out a factioning we wanted to do. Interestingly, both of them were three-color factions in the end. And then there were worlds built to sort of fit them, to make sense of them. And like I said today, the part of what today's podcast is talking about is that it's not each each time we start a set we

figure out what we want that set to be how that's supposed to work and what we want to do with that set and then given those constraints you know there's always a challenge to figure out how to layer things in and you'll notice one of the things that we do now is I get design, I get development, not development, I do get development, but I get creative, creative is involved super early. In fact, creative will start doing their work usually before design does their work. There's an early phase where we worked all together, where we, you know, we sort of plot out worlds that we think have enough space for mechanic or potential for mechanics and potential for creative that we think have enough space for mechanic or potential for mechanics and potential for creative that we think we can do it. And then the creative team actually starts and they'll

build something and then I start jumping off of that when I start my design. So like one of the biggest differences now in the past is my blank page isn't quite as blank as it once was. That, My blank page isn't quite as blank as it once was. There's a period where I have a blank page, but I'm doing collaborative work early on to sort of figure that out. And a lot of that is us sort of saying, what are people asking for? What do people want?

And what is their interesting design space that we don't think we've tackled yet? So for example, right now we're planning out future sets that you guys know nothing about. And of the sets like I said some of them are return sets and we're like you know like one of the things we started to do now is when we go to worlds because we we understand that we return to worlds we build in places to go. Like all of the recent worlds we visited for the first time we figured out what would we do if we returned. And we planted seeds in.

So when we return, we've given ourselves a direction to go. Now maybe when we get back there, we're not guaranteeing that's the direction. But at least we've layered in a creative reason to have a place to go a certain direction that would give us that sort of a fresh new feel. go a certain direction that would give us that sort of a fresh new feel um you know and that the it's funny because as we make more and more worlds as we return to more and more worlds as we create more new worlds we keep improving our processes and so um you know if i give this talk 10 years from now probably it's going to be a bit different than what I said right now, because we keep improving on the technology of how to change things. And that's, as someone who does this for a living, it's kind of cool. I like the fact that, you know, there are, every set is unique.

And even when I go back to a world I've already been to, just trying to layer in that new element while maintaining the old element is always something that's its own thing. Like when I talked about all the worlds we return to, each one was not handled the same. Even the way we return or the way we do new sets, there's some variance in how we do that. So it's always exciting and fun. But anyway, I'm driving up to Rachel's school. So today, mostly I just want to sort of talk to you and explain that like there's so many different vantage points and so many different ways we

Tackle things in so many different ways We sort of look at worlds when we approach it that it is not There's not like a textbook and here's how you do a world. It depends on a lot of different factors But anyway, hopefully today give you a little more insight into into how we tackle things, you know new verse old worlds and such But anyway, I'm now driving into Rachel's school, so we all 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.