Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #452: Amonkhet, Part 1

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

I asked for feedback about my podcast, and one of the most common replies I got was that people would like me to occasionally mix in more recent design stories. So, this is part one of a two-part series on the design of Amonkhet.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today, normally when I do an episode on an expansion, I talk all about it and I talk all about the cards. And it's a lot of work. It's a lot of prep to do the card part. But I decided today that I wanted to talk about Amonkhet before I got too far away. So I'm going to do the Amonkhet podcast today talking about the making of Amonkhet. And then at a later time, I will do Amonkhet cards. I'm not going to do that this time. So this is going to be a one-shot podcast on Amonkhet talking about the making of Amonkhet. And then I promise at a later time, I will do the cards of Amonkhet. I will

get to that. I'm still actually in the middle of, I think do the cards of Amonkhet. I will get to that. I'm still actually in the middle of, I think, Ravniga block. So anyway. But anyway, I realized that one of the notes I got, a while back, I asked for some feedback. And one of the notes I got was that I tend to do things from way back. And people said, hey, how about more podcasts about stuff going on right now? So I said, okay, okay. So I'm going to talk about Amonkhet.

Amonkhet's still on sale. I'm going to talk about the making of Amonkhet. And like I said, I will get to the cards later. Okay. So let's go back to the very beginning. So the story, I told the story in my column, but back when we were trying to figure out Champions of Kamigawa. So Bill Rose had this idea that Champions of Kamigawa was going to be a top-down set. We're going to do the flavor first and mechanic second. And we were trying to narrow down to figure out what we wanted to do. And the two things we narrowed down to were Egyptian world and Japanese world. You know, Japanese-inspired or Egyptian-inspired. And Japanese won out.

world, Japanese inspired or Egyptian inspired. And Japanese won out. But I bring that story up because the idea of doing an Egyptian inspired world has been around for a long time. And really one of the things that we were trying to figure out is, okay, how do we make it magic? Like one of the big things about doing Top Down in general is it's not our goal to just do somebody else's thing. It's we want to sort of take that influence and do our thing,

do a magic thing, but that has that spin to it. And so the big question was, how do you do a magic version of Egypt? How do you do an Egypt-inspired magic world? And I'm not sure who came up with this. Someone on the creative team, I'm almost positive. But somebody came up with this. I'm someone on the creative team. I'm almost positive. But somebody came up with the idea of what if this was a world crafted by Bolas. You know, a world that had Bolas' hand on it.

Now, for those that have a little history, Bolas is actually, I think, from Dominaria. He's not from Amonkhet. The story is unfolding. As I record this, I record about six weeks early. So that six weeks from now, hours of our devastation is out. You know the basics of our devastation.

The story won't be finished yet. So I'll be a little careful here. Certain things I know you know because I wrote the preview article. So I know the stuff that you know right up front, which you'll know by the time I do this podcast or you hear this podcast. So anyway, so we liked the idea of sort of Egyptian world plus Bolas, that felt to have a really

nice overlap, that Bolas always sort of had his horns and a little egg, and Bolas always had a little bit of an Egyptian sensibility to him, And so we realized this overlap, it just seemed like a perfect overlap. Now, here's another important thing that you need to know. Is originally, Egypt was planned for the fall, last fall, fall of 2016. So where Kaladesh ended up, originally Egypt was going to be there. So the plan was we were going to do Egyptian world, do Amonkhet, and then go to Kaladesh. In fact, we were in the middle of exploratory design for Amonkhet, for Egypt, when we realized that from a story standpoint, it made sense to reverse them. Rather than Bolas be what leads the

Gatewatch to Kaladesh, we'd like the Kaladesh is what led the Gatewatch to Bolas. And it just, it worked better in the story. And so we swapped them. And relatively late, I mean, it was exploratory design. So it was before, I mean, I was the only person sort of caught in the middle. Everybody else, it was downstream of them. You know, it was before I got to them. But anyway, it means that Kaladesh had kind of a shortened design space. And it meant that in the end, Amonkhet had a little bit longer than normal.

So I have done a couple top-down designs now. I did Innishrod, which was gothic horror. I did Theros, which was Greek-inspired. And we've done a lot of sets that have, like, cons had certain influences. And, you know, I've done sets that had smaller influences. Probably Theros and Innishrod were the two, like, what I call top-down.

Like, I'm starting with this. I'm matching this thing. That's what I'm going to be doing. And so, oh, the other big factor is that played into this was we had just, we had started doing the two-block model where we had large, small, large, small.

Obviously, you've read my article since then to know that we were shifting. But at the time I was doing this, it was large, small, large, small. Obviously, you've read my article since then to know that we were shifting. But at the time I was doing this, it was large, small, large, small. The problem was, under the old system, I had done the large set every year and then the small sets were done by other people. But the large set sort of,

I would, as part of doing the large set, I'd plan out what's going on and I'd figure out what the small sets were up to. I didn't figure everything out for the small sets. The lead designers of the small sets could figure that out. But I set it up. I had a plan. I figured out what was going on.

And then, usually, I would be on the small sets so I could sort of watch over them. I wasn't leading them, but I'd just be there so I could keep track of everything. Because a lot of magic design is sort of being aware of all the different components that are going on because you're not designing in a vacuum. If one set does something, it matters what the set before and after do. So I had to be conscious of all the things around it. And so what I realized when we moved to the two-block model was I didn't know necessarily, I mean, also,

both Sean Main and Ethan Fleischer had never led a large set before. I mean, Sean did Magic Origins, but never a normal, like, fall set. Um, so what I did is I ended up doing this thing where I would do the first half of the design for the first six months, then hand the reins, and, uh, the other person would do the second. So Sean and I led to get, uh, Kaladesh together. Ethan and I did Amonkhet.

And then Ken and I would later do Ixalan. So anyway, the, so the idea was we put together a team. So let me talk about a design team real quick. So my design team was me and Ethan. We were the co-leads. Sean main, Sean ended up leading the small set Hour of Devastation Sean, interesting

Sean was originally going to lead the large set because Sean, when growing up actually lived in Egypt for a while and Sean had a lot more knowledge of Egyptian mythology than the average person having actually lived in Egypt and a lot of the prep work, which I'll get to in a second I had Sean do

so Sean was going to lead Amiket When we made the swap, it turned out for scheduling, he had to sort of stay with the set that he was scheduled to. So he ended up doing Kaladesh. But we ended up giving Sean the small set because we really wanted him to have a chance to do an Egyptian set. So Sean was on this team so that he could prep for doing Hour of Devastation. He actually didn't join until about halfway through. Jackie Lee. Jackie is off the Pro Tour. Jackie's very interesting

that she has sort of a middle between a design and a development sensibility. I think this was the first set that Jackie was, first design team that Jackie was on, I believe.

Kimberly Krinus was our creative rep. James Hata normally works on dual mafters. So he, we like to have designers sort of, fresh designers Trinus was our creative rep. James Hata normally works on Duel Masters. So we like to have designers, sort of fresh designers, just having done magic stuff. I mean, he's done a few magic things.

He never worked on a set with me before. So this is the first design that I got to work with James on magic. And then our development representative was Sam Stoddard. Well, for a while. Then Sam had to leave. And then it was Ben Hayes. And then Ben had to leave. And then it was Yanni Skolnick. So the joke we had with Yanni was he was

the third development rep. And so Sam left and Ben left. So when he came, we jokingly for a while called him DR3 for development rep 3. Because we were saying that we were too emotionally, we didn't want to get emotionally connected anymore. Because the dev reps, they just left us and it was painful.

And so we eventually called him Yanni, but for a little while he was DR3. And I think he used to call Ethan LD2 because he was the second lead designer. Anyway, and then real quickly, the development team was led by Dave Humphries, Brian Hawley, Ian Duke, Eric Glauer, Jackie Lee, Ari Levitch, Kimberly Kranus, Tim Aiden, and Manjianth

and all helped out on the development. So I had a pretty large design team. I think at some point I had seven people. The largest team I've ever run actually was the Amonkhet design team. Now, I don't mind having larger teams. There are some people that like smaller teams. I actually have no problem with larger teams. I like having a lot of ideas bouncing around.

And I've done this long enough that I... One of the problems with having a larger team is you can drift off focus. But I know what I'm doing. And so I can keep us going the direction I want us to go. Okay. So, what happened in the very beginning... So, this is before we even knew we were changing, back when Amiket was the fall 2016 set. Um, I, when I had done, um, Theros, what I had done was I had asked Ethan, because Ethan was a big fan of Greek mythology, and I gave him a little sort of research assignment.

And what that was is, go research Greek mythology, and what I want is, tell me everything that magic has already done in this area. Like, look at all the things that are Greek mythology, and then tell me the following. What has magic done, but we could do again? What has magic not done, but fits in magic? Like, we haven't done it, but wow, this just slides perfectly into magic. And what is interesting but is more of a challenge? Maybe we can fit it in, but it's more of a challenge. So, like, I want to understand like, you know, what have

we done? What haven't we done? What could we do? Where's the potential for neat things? And I just kind of want to understand the scope of what we have available to us. So, I gave Ethan that assignment. It turned out to be very valuable for Theros. So, I was doing top-down again. I said, okay, I'm going to do that again. It turned out to be very valuable for Theros. So I was doing top down again. I said, okay, I'm gonna do that again. So I gave Sean the same assignment except for Egypt. So Sean sort of went in, studied stuff, and Sean came back. And one of the things that was important for this was

I actually, as a kid, was really into Greek and Roman mythology. So while it was great to have Ethan do research, and there's stuff he brought up that I didn't know, I was really familiar with it. I knew the source material pretty well. Egyptian mythology, no. I know very little. I mean, I had deities and demigods back when I played D&D, and so I knew the gods from that. And I knew a little bit. I knew a little bit of the mythology, but I mean very, very little bit. Not enough that I could of the mythology, but I mean very, very little bit. Not enough that I could easily design off of it, so I needed to know a little

more. The other big thing was that Jeremy, so Jeremy Jarvis is Magic's art director. I mean, he's since moved up, but at the time, he was art director. He's gotten higher than just being art director.

But anyway, he had a vision for what he wanted it to look like. And I remember at one point, he was trying to describe it. He goes, you know, he's like, we're like, what does it look like? Sand and pyramids? He goes, I don't even know if there's pyramids. We're like, you don't know if there's pyramids? How are there not pyramids? Are we going to Egypt?

There have to be pyramids. And then he's like, well, I'm not saying there's not pyramids. I'm just saying, I don't know if there's pyramids. How are there not pyramids? Are we going to Egypt? There have to be pyramids. And then he's like, well, I'm not saying there's not pyramids. I'm just saying, I don't know if there's pyramids. And like, he freaked everybody out for a little while because in the end, he was fine with pyramids.

There are pyramids and it's that. But his vision wasn't sort of focused on the pyramids. And so when he said, I don't know if there's pyramids, it freaked everybody out. But in the end, but anyway, Jeremy had a very clear vision for the visual look of it.

Like one thing to remember when we do a world is there's two different components that are coming together. There is a design component, like what is the game? What's the gameplay? And then there is a creative component. Okay, what's the iconography? What's it look like? What's the feel of the world? And what we want to do is we want to match those together. We want, I want when you play the game to sort of, it feel like the world that you're seeing through all the creative. Now, as you will see, we actually did something a little different with this where we made a mismatch, but on purpose. Okay, so Jeremy had a very clean idea of what he wanted.

The problem was a lot of the design work, or half the design work, happened before that all the work I did, when I handed off the reins to, halfway, I handed the reins off to Ethan. By the way, Ethan was there the whole time, I was there the whole time. It just was a matter of, I was kind of

running things in the first half, and Ethan was running things in the second half. And once I handed the reins off to Ethan, then I went to Ixalan and started doing Ixalan. That's the, what was going on was I was continually leading something, but I kept handing off the reins because there were more things.

Back in a world where there was one large set a year, I could do the one large set a year and I could work all year on it. But in the new system, I couldn't do that. Anyway, so one of the things that is going on was I had to start working on the set before I really had a sense of all the visuals. Because the world building, the big thing where we get artists in and they design the world, happens midway through design. And so I talked a lot with Jeremy and the different story people. And Kimberly, who was our creative

rep was well versed in what was going on so the idea that when we started was like one of the things we always like to do is sort of figure out what do we need to be what has to be there and then what's magic's take on it

and so the thing we knew coming in was we wanted a desert sensibility. Oh, and one of the things that was really important to Jeremy is it turns out that there's two different ways, there's two different sort of clusters of tropes on Egypt. One is what I'll call sunny living Egypt. When you, the prince of Egypt, or some sort in which you're seeing Egypt as a living, breathing, live civilization. The other is what I'll call dead and dusty Egypt, sort of tomb raider Egypt,

where it's like Egypt's dead, we're discovering it after the fact. We're sort of seeing Egypt where, you know, the mummy or whatever. And Jeremy is like, no, no, we're doing sunny Egypt, not dead and dusty Egypt. You know, sunny, living Egypt. Which meant that certain tropes, like some of the tropes that we went for when we were figuring out what to do with Egypt, not dead and dusty Egypt. You know, sunny, living Egypt. Which meant that certain tropes, like some of the tropes that we went for when we were

figuring out what to do with Egypt fell into that second category and we had to be careful. And so we were trying to find the delicate balance between what sort of made sense. Now, we dipped our toe a little bit into the second part. I mean, there's a little bit of curses and stuff. But we really sort of pulled back because we were trying to capture living Egypt. Okay. a little bit of curses and stuff. But we really sort of pulled back because we were trying to capture living Egypt. Okay, the other thing that we were trying to do is, there's a story point here. That one of the things about,

so let me talk about Nicole Bolas real quickly. So Steve Conard, back in 1994, led the design of a set called Legends. And Legends was based on a lot of, so Steve was friends with Peter Atkinson who was the president of Wizards original president and they had done a lot of roleplaying together

Peter Atkinson was a huge roleplaying fan in fact Wizards of the Coast was started as a roleplaying game company and Peter loved roleplaying and so Steve made a magic set kind of based on a lot of the lore of their role-playing sessions. So a lot of the legendary characters in the set were from their role-playing

sessions. Now, I don't know where the Elder Dragons came from. I don't know whether that was written for one of their things or whether it was a new thing for this. But they came up with the idea of five Elder Dragons. Now, remember, Legends was the very first set to ever have multicolor. Multicolor didn't exist before Legends. That was the first set to introduce it. And so they liked the idea of having these dragons that were these ancient dragons that had three different colors in their costs.

And they're all allied. They're all arcs. They're all three connected colors. So he made five dragons. He and his designers made five dragons. One of the five was Nicol Bolas. In fact, it's funny. Like his picture, have you ever seen the Legends card?

It's like sitting in a chair reading a book. Nicol Bolas, by the way, that book, knowing the size of Nicol Bolas, that book, knowing the size of Nicole Bowles, that book is larger than my house. It's a giant book. But anyway, for some reason, Nicole Bowles became the character that people liked. I'm not sure why.

I mean, maybe his card was... He was blue, black, red. And he had a card that, if it dealt damage to you, it did seven damage, and you discarded your hand, and did all sorts of crazy stuff. So it became very popular just because it was a very it wasn't a strong card in the sense that it was

expensive to cast, but if you got it into play, it was very powerful. And this is back in the day where like reanimation was cheap. There's a lot of ways to cheat it into play. So anyway, people really liked Nicole Bolas, and we found opportunities over the years to tell stories about Nicole Bolas.

Maybe one of these days I'll do a whole podcast on Bolas. That's not today. But anyway, one of the things we discovered over the years was Bolas is what we call a puppet master. That's kind of the archetype he is. He's always behind the scenes pulling strings, and who knows what he's up to, because he's always up to something.

And we tended to use Bolas more behind the scenes than in front of the scenes. There were a lot of stories in which, and Bolas was behind it. But not a lot of stuff where you've got to see Bolas doing things. And we decided that we wanted to sort of reintroduce Bolas as a badass.

As somebody who you really should be afraid of. This is a dangerous, dangerous dragon. And so the story we set up was, we wanted our heroes to come to the world, and so the idea was, they would learn in Kaladesh that Bolus was up to something

because of Tezzeret, and we liked the idea that the Gatewatch, they had a couple wins under their belt. You know, they somehow beat the Eldrazi. They definitely got lucky there. They got Emrakul trapped in the moon,

although Emrakul actually probably was more responsible for that than they did. They managed to, you know, in Kaladesh, at least stop some of what was going on. Tezzeret still, you know, got away. But the idea was they've relatively been successful. They hadn't had any big losses. And we really felt it was time for them to sort of meet someone bigger than them. Someone that would cause them problems.

And so we loved the idea of, okay, well, we're going to go to Amiket and we're going to stop Nicole Bolas. And really when you think about it, man, it is a bit naive on their part. Like, Nicol Bolas is someone who you should really be afraid of. And they were not afraid of him. And we wanted to sort of teach the audience here's why you should be afraid of him.

And so we knew what we wanted to do was in the end was this is going to be this story was going to be about the defeat of the Gatewatch at Bolas' hand. That Bolas was going to beat the Gatewatch. So what we wanted to do was, we wanted to set up a world. So the idea was, we wanted Bolas to defeat the Gatewatch. But that's the second part of the story.

That's the end of the story. The story ends with the Gatewatch getting defeated. Okay, so how are we going to set this up? So what we really wanted to do, and I talked about this when I wrote my article, is this set has two components to it. It has a top-down Egyptian component and a top-down Bolus component. Now, we feel there's a lot of overlap between the two. That's why we think it was a good fit. But we definitely wanted to make sure that we kind of wanted to start and do a little bit more Egypt. Like part of the way we've learned with Big Set, Small Set, is that Big Set kind of sets

things up. Like, okay, we're in Egypt. Let's see, let's see the world. And then, the second set, kind of something happens. So, the other thing that we, the creative team came up with, we thought was pretty cool, was the idea that

the Gatewatch have this impression of what they're, like, the Gatewatch come to Amonkhet believing they know everything, and then realizing that they know very little. They think they're just going to defeat Bolas. He's not even there. They think they've come to the world to save the world from Bolas. They're happy. You know, they come to a world where Bolas is their god. Their god pharaoh.

Like, as far as they're concerned, Bolas is awesome. And so the gate watch is like, we've come to save you. We don't want saving. We're fine. But we did want to create something that felt a little different. What we realized

as we worked on it is we love the idea at the time we were calling it Stepford Wives. So Stepford Wives is a story where a couple comes to this new neighborhood, and everything on the surface seems really nice, but there's just something

a little wrong about it. And so the story is all about sort of the characters finding out what is going on, but they kind of know from the very beginning that something is wrong. And there's a quality that that movie had where the characters, like, what they're seeing and what they're feeling don't match up.

They look around and it seems like idyllic and seems just beautiful and everyone's happy and like, wow, this is the nicest place in the world. But there's just something about it that's a little off. We wanted to get that sense. So we came up with this idea of dissonance. So what dissonance means is the way your body works is that you are recording things on a subconscious level. And so your body takes in a lot of information. But you're also watching things on a conscious level

so what dissonance is is When your subconscious messaging contradicts your conscious messaging you feel ill at ease That your body's like that something's not right like you even though consciously you can't see what's going on Your your subconscious can pick up on, and it creates an uneasiness. We wanted to create that sense. We wanted a sense of dissonance. And so we worked really hard to figure out how to do that. So what we realized was, normally when I make a world,

I want the play of the world and the feel of the world to be exactly the same. Innistrad is scary. Well, the play is scary. I'm afraid. You know, I'm like a dentist in Innistrad. I'm very afraid. Bad things could happen at any moment. Heaven forbid the moon come out, you know. And so one of the things that we normally do is we want this to be lockstep. We want, as you're playing, you go, wow, how I'm playing feels exactly like what I'm being told is there. For this step, we want to do something a little bit different. So what we wanted to do was we wanted the world to feel mean. This is a mean world.

This is not a nice world. This is Nicole Bolas' world. He's not a nice dragon. So we made a decision early on, like in the 4-Tro design, to use minus one, minus one counters. Now, normally the way it works is we've made a rule that says all the power toughness changing counters in a block, we only do one per block, just to keep it consistent.

So if I see a creature in play and it has a counter on it, I know how big it is. Oh, it's a 3-3 with a counter. Oh, in Kaladesh, oh, I know it's a 4-4. Well, in Amagat, oh yeah, I know it's a 2-2. And normally our default is a plus one, plus one counter. Plus one, plus one counters just have more design space to them, and they push you toward attacking and growth,

and they make the game move forward, where minus one, minus one sort of shrinks and kills things and kind of makes you less likely to attack and stuff. And so we don't do minus one minus one as much. But every once in a while we get to a world where we're like, oh, no, no, no. Like, we wanted the feel of a harsh world. Minus one minus one counters definitely feel very harsh. I told the story, but for those that haven't heard it. Originally in Lorwyn, we had a sort of nice, sunny

world, dark, you know, evil Shadowmoor, and I was trying to make Lorwyn feel nicer. So I messed around with minus one, minus one counters on the idea that instead of killing a creature, I'll merely injure it. You know, it's not dying, it's just injured. That's not nearly as mean.

And we tried minus one, minus one counters to get the idea that in this world, instead of killing things, you injure them. And oh my goodness, minus one, minus one counters felt so mean that we ended up pushing them to Shadowmoor. But there's just something about them, just the nature of them, the nature of things shrinking

and you putting things, it just really feels more harsh. I learned that in Scars of Mirrodin. I learned that in Lorewind. I learned that in Scars of Mirrodin. I learned that in Lore, when we used it in Scars of Mirrodin, obviously had minus one encounters. And Shadowmoor had minus one, minus one encounters. And then here, we had minus one, minus one encounters. So we've used them where it made sense,

where it was a natural fit to what was going on. So we knew we wanted sort of a rough, sort of cruel world. So we added minus minus oh minus one counters and then we talked to the creative they said okay here's what we want to do we're gonna make this feel mean we're gonna make mechanics that are mean we're gonna make you know we're gonna make this feel like this is kind of a harsh world and then with creative contradict that you know use words and titles and things that are like it it's happy, it's glad.

You know, if I kill you, it's a glorious release, or I don't know what I'm calling it. But the idea is that death in this world was something that wasn't feared. Okay, so that's the next thing is, we knew we wanted Bolas to be up to something, and then the Gatewatch did not understand what he was up to. And then, in hour, we get the big reveal. So, obviously, you guys know this now since Hour of Devastation is out, but the big reveal

was that he is building a zombie army. That the reason he's making people fight... So, what happened... Well, I'll work backward. The idea was, we loved the idea

that Boles was making a zombie army. And in order to do that, he created a world where people fought to the death, where there was a series of trials, and that during the trials, people die, and then in the end, you know, the final trial is a fight to the death, and then if you win, then the red god will kill you, and, you know, so the idea is, he was trying to weed out the weak and make a strong, talented army of zombie soldiers. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to telegraph this without necessarily giving it away.

The other thing we wanted to do was we were trying to do top-down, and we really wanted to convey certain key things of Egypt. One of which was mummies. Oh, how do you do Egypt and not do mummies? Now, we made a decision long ago that mummies are zombies, which worked out well because two blacks ago,

so in Standard together, we had Innistrad that had a zombie theme. Now, zombies in Innistrad are blue and black, but we really liked the idea of putting zombies in a slightly different color. And we were interested in putting them in white. And the idea was, we liked the idea that there were, because we had talked to the creative team,

and they had this idea that there were helper mummies. So the idea is, essentially, I want to die a glorious death and get to a wonderful afterlife. But if I can't die a glorious death and get to a wonderful afterlife. But if I can't die the glorious death, upon my death, I can serve time as a servant. And if I do that, then I can earn my way to the glorious rest.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm an undead servant for a while, but hey, that's, at least in the end, you know, I get my reward. If you, because the nature of Amonkhet was anything that dies comes back to life. So if you're on the wild of Amonkhet was anything that dies comes back to life. So if you're on the wilds, you come back as a zombie.

But with control, what they learned is by wrapping things and putting cartouches on them, they can kind of program the dead. And so that's how they're able to make sort of servant mummies. So what that lettuce do is make the servant mummies, the mummies inside the city, white,

and the wild ones outside the city, black. Now it's important for us to make black zombies because what we wanted to do was play it with Shadows of Anishrad. But we wanted to change it up a little bit, and blue zombies didn't make as much sense as white zombies, so we got to sign off on white zombies.

Now another important thing about this was we knew that he was making the zombie army eventually so really there was there was a third type of zombie the eternals um and again our devastation um a lot of what the eternals were we were setting up but we did want to set it up in an amonkhet so the idea that when you die you become a zombie we set up with the black zombies and the idea that you could program the zombies to make them do what you wanted to do we sort of established with the white zombies. So a bunch of the zombies was kind of setting up where we were going. We wanted, we knew we were going to Egypt, we knew we wanted to have mummies, we knew we wanted to be a thing, we knew we wanted to be a tribal thing. Normally every set has a little

bit of tribal and some sets are tribal. Normally every set has a little bit of tribal, and some sets are tribal, but every other set has a little bit of tribal. Mummies made a lot of sense here. So we worked up and we figured out the white and black. Now the next big thing was we wanted a mummy mechanic. And so the idea was, okay, well what are mummies? Mummies are about creatures coming back from the dead. So what if we had got creatures back from the dead? So we played around with a whole bunch of different things. We tried actually a lot of different versions of coming back from the dead. And the problem we tended to run into was...

So the idea was you die, you come back as a mummy. That's what we wanted. That's the flavor we were going for. So we talked about things like on Earth where you come back temporarily, but they didn't quite have the feel what we wanted. So the real question was like, okay, I die and then, well, what if I bring the creature back? Well, the reason you can do flashback with instance with sorceries is you can exile them when you use them. So the idea is, okay, I get it and I use it out of the graveyard and then I exile it when you use them. So the idea is, okay, I get it and I use it out of the graveyard and then exile it. Well, now it's gone. It's a two-use thing. The problem with permanents,

like creatures, is they go back. That once the creature dies, it goes back to the graveyard. Well, if it has an ability to get it out of the graveyard, it just forever gets out of the graveyard. And the flavor we wanted wasn't that zombies get to keep coming back. The idea was, if you die, you get zombified, you keep coming back the idea was if you die you get zombified you come back once but then if you die a second time well then you're gone your mummy's gone you don't come back and we really had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to make that work um because how do you know whether you're uh how do you know whether you're a mummy how do you know whether you're a living thing or mummy so we played around for a bit with the idea of marking it. Well, what if you come back and you're a mummy and the way we

know you're a mummy is we mark it. And we had minus one, minus one counter. It's like, okay, what if you come back and you had a minus one, minus one counter? Well, we kind of remade persist. Persist is a creature that comes back once with a minus one, minus one counter and then goes away. And we're like, oh, let's kind of persist. And, you know, we knew that I mean, we were like, oh, can we just make persist and call it mummify or balm or something? But we're like, ah, you know, persist

was very popular. So we finally came to the conclusion that it wouldn't quite work out. So we were figuring, okay, okay. So is there some way to, so then we said, well, what if there was a token? And we figuring, okay, okay. So is there some way to... So then we said, well, what if there was a token? And they said, ah, the problem was if we had a token, we don't put a lot on our tokens traditionally.

So we're like, ah, then it really limits what we can make. We want to make cool creatures that care about you bringing them back. And then eventually it was Sean Main who came up with the idea that, well, what if it's a clone copy? And what that meant was that you could sort of, for shorthand, use the card out of your graveyard as long as you marked that it was embalmed. Or Ethan loved the idea that, oh, maybe we can go, he went to the creative team and said, hey, there's this neat idea where these creatures come back and there's a token that represents them.

Would you mind for each creature making a unique token? And that meant for every creature that had embalmed, they ended up having the same artist do it. If you were assigned artwork for an embalmed creature, you did two pieces. You did the normal piece of the living creature and then you did the embalmed mummy version of the creature. And one of the things they worked really

hard with the artists is to get a lot of cool silhouettes so that the mummies just looked all really different when you mummified them. And that they had a very different looking mummy look to them. But anyway, once we did that, there was a little bit of complication because one of the problems about copies is it copies everything.

And what we learned is we really didn't need a couple things. We didn't need it to say embalm because your token can never get into the graveyard. So having embalm was essentially meaningless. And if we put a mana cost on a token, people believe they can cast the token. Then when people see a card that has a mana cost, they go, oh, I guess I can cast this. It has a mana cost on a token people believe they can cast the token that when people see a card that has a mana cost they're like oh I guess I can cast this it has a mana cost so we tweaked it a little bit

so it didn't I don't know if it technically has embalm we've chosen not to write embalm on it it doesn't really matter because there's no place where embalm can come up so the tokens don't have embalm and they don't have a mana cost on the mana cost we have to put into the rules,

or into the rules text. But anyway, once we did that, we realized that we had our mummies. And then we worked really hard with the mummies to make sure that the mummies had an identity. Because what I wanted was, look, you can play mono black zombies, you can play mono white zombies,

or you can play black white zombies. As I often talk about, I like when we're going to make a tribal component of something to push it to two colors because it just gives you more options on how to use it. Plus, in standard, because we knew that Shadows of Innistrad was there, and we had blue and black zombies,

we knew we now made an interesting combination of things. You can do mono black, you can do black blue, you can do black white of things. You can do mono black. You can do black blue. You can do black white. I mean, there you can do white blue. So anyway, we set all that up. And that was the mummies. The other thing that we knew we wanted to do was we wanted to sort of capture some of the staples

of sort of the feel of Egypt. So we made a long list of the things we wanted, and some of them were one-offs, you need scarabs and things like that, but some of them needed to be a little bit bigger. So one of the things going in that we knew we had to address was gods. So when we did Theros,

we made the decision to make magic gods, to take the Therosian gods and use magic's color wheel as the ethos. In general, what we've discovered was magic color wheel is a really cool thing. And when you're trying to imbue a magic sensibility into a world, taking the color wheel and finding a way to integrate the color wheel is usually a good way to sort of give it a magic feel. And so on Theros, we're like, okay, well, we need the series of gods that represent these beliefs, and we need magic's color wheel.

Well magic's color wheel are about a set of beliefs. What if we cross those together? And it worked really well. So we're like, okay, we don't reinvent the wheel. Let's make some gods. And we knew we wanted five gods in Amonkhet and Monocoward. They represent the epitome of things. So one of the goals for us was to figure out, like, we knew we were making gods again.

And so, you know, they say a point makes a line. Two points make a line. Once we did something for the second time, we were going to start narrowing in on what a god meant. Like, right now, you know, okay, there's gods in Theros, but the gods in Amonkhet didn't have to be exactly the same. Like, for example, we didn't think we were going to have devotion. So, okay, it couldn't work exactly the same.

You know, the devotion mechanic was part of the Theros gods. We didn't have the devotion mechanic. Plus, the Therese gods were enchantments because that was a big part of their influence. One of the big differences as we studied the material is the way the Greeks lived with their gods and the way the Egyptians

lived with their gods were just different. The way we wanted the to the Greek gods, to the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, the gods were kind of like they were there and there were stories of how they would come down to the mortal world. You never actually saw the gods. That was never, you know, you didn't see a god. That's just, you have stories of the gods. But in Egyptian mythology, one of the things they

did is the pharaoh was often a god. Meaning the guy you could go see was often taught to you as one of the gods. And so the idea that you saw your god, like you literally saw your gods. It wasn't you heard of the stories of the gods. You actually, you didn't see all your gods, but you could see a god. And so just the relationship between the people and the gods were just very different, and we wanted to capture that. That's something that when Sean did his research, he brought back.

And so we worked with the creative team to try to figure out what the gods were, and the creative team came up with this cool idea. So the creative team knew that Bolas was making a zombie army. That was one of the things. Okay, how do we do that? And they came up with this idea of these trials that, well, what if you were promised this glorious afterlife if you went through these things and,

yeah, yeah, yeah, you're going to die, but because you're promised something even better, like, dying's not a big deal. And one of the things that Sean had brought back with us is the idea that in Egypt, death was a big, big deal to the Egyptians, ancient Egyptians.

That a lot of Greek mythology, not Greek mythology, a lot of Egyptian mythology revolves around death. There's gods that oversee death. There's a lot of talking about how you prepare for death. And there's a lot of sort of

death focus. And so we knew we wanted to have some of that in the set. Obviously, I'll, for example, we, I've talked about it in Balmer already, it's a graveyard mechanic, right? Well this is the set where things die, but wait, they're not really dead, they come back from the graveyard. So even us

just following the general status, we were starting to get sort of a graveyard feel. So we knew we were going to have a graveyard component to it. And so the idea was okay Bolas is making a zombie army so he came

and he's setting up his world to do what he wants so obviously he needs the people to kill themselves to make a zombie army because he wanted fresh young trained soldiers he's not looking for

old feeble zombies he wants prime zombies and with the technology they have in the world to program them, you know, they can teach them and they can fight. And they actually can have zombies that can fight because you can use the cartouches to program them. Much like they're programmed now to do, you know, whatever chores they do. The idea was, what if there was a whole cycle of how they existed that led to the point of how they ended up making what would become the zombie army. And so the idea was, the creative team said, okay, there will be a series of trials.

And the people will go through the trials. And at the end of the trials, the the final trial, is a trial to the death. And if you don't die, you know, only one person survives. Everybody else dies. And then if you survive, the Red God will kill you. So everybody dies. All your great warriors. And, you know, you'll wheel down to get to the best warriors.

And then, you know, those warriors, they'll get prepared and shipped off. those warriors, they'll get prepared and shipped off. And the idea originally was that how they got prepared was a big part of the Amonkhet part of the story. It ended up being part of our story. But how they prepared and the blue Velazatep ended up becoming important. But anyway, so when we first started design, there were the Trials of Amonkhet. there were the trials of Amonkhet.

The three trials of Amonkhet. The three trials. So what I'm realizing here is I'm almost at work. I thought this would be a single podcast, but no. There's a lot to talk about Amonkhet. So tomorrow, or next time, sorry, next podcast, I'm going to talk about how are there three trials? Wait a minute, aren't there five magic hours? What's going on here?

I will talk about how the three trials became the five trials and what exactly was going on. And this all happens during design, so I will tell you the story of how it shifted and why it shifted and where it was. But anyway, that is for tomorrow. So hopefully will tell you the story of how it shifted and why it shifted and where it was. But anyway, that is for tomorrow. So hopefully you guys are enjoying this. Like I said, I'm trying to do stuff that's a little more modern to magic. So I hope you guys are enjoying the tale of

Amonkhet. But like I said, I'm not done yet. So you'll join me next time for more Amonkhet. But anyway, I'm now parking my parking space. Rachel had an internship today, so I didn't have to drive her. So 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. See you next

time.