Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #453: Amonkhet, Part 2

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

This is second part of my two-part series on the design of Amonkhet.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so yesterday, or sorry, last podcast, I was talking about the design of Amonkhet, and I didn't finish. So once again, I'm going to do these two podcasts about the design of Amonkhet. I will come back later to do card stories. I'm not doing that this time. But I want to get Amonkhet stories to you, or Amonkhet designs, the Amonkhet design story to you. So I decided to do that. You guys have asked me to be a little more topical,

and so I'm trying to do a little bit of more topical podcast stuff. Okay, so last we left, oh yes, last we left there were three trials. What? What? Okay, so this is what's going on. When the creative team initially applied the color wheel to Amonkhet,

they decided that they wanted to capture the whole range of the transition to the zombie army. So what happened originally was there were three different trials, and then in the third trial you died, or well, you died along the way, but if you didn't die by the third trial, you died in the third trial. Then the blue,

so it was white, green, and red. I think it was white, green, red in that order. And then blue is where you were treated with the lazatep, where you were sort of the embalming process. And then black was the trip, you went into this barge, and you went across the sea through the gate of, whatever the gate was called, I think it's a card. And then you were never to be seen again, you know, you were not, you've been sent off into the afterlife. And so the idea was, they wanted to capture the full process.

And so they had saved some of the colors for later steps in the process that the trials were just the beginning of the process and so we've started design there were three trials and then two preparations if you will and one of the things we realized really quickly when trying to design stuff is that it really felt uneven it felt odd to say so we're gonna test you, you know, your white qualities, your green qualities, and your red qualities, and then, eh, the blue and black stuff doesn't matter until later.

It just sort of felt a little off. That one of the things that magic tends to do well is when we apply the color pie, and that you want some sort of equity to the color pie. Like, you want to feel that the colors are kind of treated equally, that when we weight the colors, people seem to be unhappy by that. And so I came back and I said, you know, is there a way instead of having three trials that we could have five trials? And Kimberly was, so Kimberly was our design rep, sorry, our creative rep. And Kimberly and I talked a lot about this. And then Kimberly spent a lot of time talking

to the creative team. And I think they slowly came around and realized that, yeah, it's kind of cool that the trials walk you through all five qualities of the colors. And that the preparation, that stuff happens, but it's not quite as focused as it was in the original draft. And one of the neat things that's really cool that you guys don't see too much because you see the finished product. Like when we present something, we're like, and here it is. One of the things that's neat is along the way, I talk a lot about how the design adapts along the way. But the creative also adapts along the way. The creative is not locked in. It's not like day one, everything's a certain way, and by the end of design, it's all the same.

No, no, no, no. As we make changes, as we do things, as we create things, it definitely sort of affects, you know, the creative is as, you know, responds to design just as much as design responds to the creative. And so, for example, when we had made three trials, one, you know, a white, a red, and a green trial, there was just a clear clue that it just felt like this cycle that wasn't complete. And that when we came back and we gave some of those notes, they were very receptive to the notes. And one of the cool things is that part of our process of sort of interworking together

means that different sections will find something, bring it back, and that the process tends to improve through the interaction. And that, like I said, there's many, many ways that we improve our design because of choices from creative and decisions. And we'll do something, they'll come back to us and go,

hey, could you do this instead of that? That would be more resonant for the creative. And then we'll make the change and it's a better change. I don't talk as much about things going the other way. This is an example of the other way

where they did something kind of, when you laid it out in cards, it just didn't work really well. And when I came back and sort of said, could we try this a little differently? And Kim and I spent a lot of time talking, and she spent a lot of time talking with them, and, you know, we really sort of, when I came to, I thought, was in the end

a better sort of system. So, anyway, that is how the trial started as three trials and ended as five trials. For those that don't know, by the way, the trials actually don't go in Woburg order. The reason for that is they wanted the red trial to be the final trial. That was the fight to the death, the trial of zeal. So they decided to go in some order that made sense for the tests. So the tests go in the following order. First is the white test, which is

the white of solidarity. Then there's the blue test, the test of knowledge. Then the green test, the test of strength. Then the black test, the test of ambition. And the red test, the test of zeal. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the trials, because we actually spent a bunch of time on the trials. So our original version of the trials were very quest-like, and that's like, okay, it's a trial. You have to pass the trial. And so we spent a lot of time trying to create enchantments that really had the sense of here's an objective, fulfill this objective, and to fulfill the objective, you get a reward. That's how the trials worked originally. And this is a good example of how we work with

development, because conceptually, like anuament made more sense for them, but they didn't particularly play well. They ended up making very narrow circumstances, and so unless you built your deck around them, you just would never play the trials. And we knew the trials were going to play a major role in the story, and we, like, we wanted the trials to be something people played, not something that, like, the design we were going toward led itself to a very casual, constructed sort of thing. It's like, here's a weird thing. Can you build around this weird thing? But it meant that in Limited, it just really seldomly got played. And so in development,

they decided to go a different path, which is what if, you know, we made the trial something that you want to just play, that they're, you know, they have value. And then we interacted. So one of the things in the story, and this came in development, this was not in design, that when you complete a trial, you get a cartouche, which is kind of like an ornamental sort of, I don't know how to describe it, but a cartouche is kind of a symbol

and it sort of represents something. A lot of what we try to do when we do top-down stuff is find elements of the source material. Even sometimes some people are not completely aware of it. A cartouche is something that's not as probably well-known. But we worked them in all the white mummies of cartouches, which kind of is used to define what they do. And then there's the cartouches that, as you win the thing...

And I think the idea is the cartouches you win for doing the different things are part of the programming that happens when you become an Eternal, I think. I'm not 100% on that. But anyway, so we made them and we put them in the order that made sense. And then development decided it'd be kind of cool if somehow there was a relationship between the trials and the cartouches. And they tried a whole bunch of different things. And in the end, what they did was that cartouches will bounce the trials, let you replay the trials. The flavor is not 100% there, but the gameplay was really strong. And so sometimes you bend a little bit, like, sometimes you bend toward gameplay.

I mean, it is a game. And so sometimes you're like, well, we... And this is a good example where we made the best trials that played the best and not the best trials that read the best in a vacuum. Because it's a game and we want people to play it and we want people to sort of interact in play with things that are relevant to the story we made the choice to push toward um play value over 100 sort of flavor accuracy of flavor like one of the things about doing design in general is usually if you want to be flavorful it requires adding a lot of specifics on which makes the card less generally useful

and we've learned over the years that we want to be careful, like only put on the flavor when it enhances the card or what we call trinket tax. It doesn't have too much play, but the flavor value is worth the extra words. And you've got to be careful when and where you do that because it's very easy on something that's top-down to just get crazy wordy because you're just trying to be as flavorful as possible. But then you make something that doesn't play

as well. Okay, next, let's talk about fighting to the death. Okay, so one of the big things about this was that there's an element of combat that comes into this. Like, for example, the pinnacle of the trials

is the trial of zeal, in which you literally fight to the death. You know, that's pretty intense. And we wanted to sort of somehow capture that. Plus, the idea of fighting to your death, like I talked about how we wanted top-down Egypt. We wanted a little bit of top-down Bolus. And there definitely was this feel of, you know,

I talked about the dissonance last time, of how we wanted to create a happy world. But you kind of know that's not quite that. So one of the ways we created this dissonance last time of how we wanted to create a happy world but you kind of know that's not quite that so one of the ways we created this dissonance also was that what the people consider is kind of fights what just general humans think so like the idea that I want to earn the right to fight to my death

most people go yeah I don't think that's such a great thing you know I'm not sure I want maybe I'll pass on the right to earn myself to fight to the death. You know. And we wanted to sort of figure out a way to work that in because it felt really endemic of the world. So originally

actually, the first thing we did is I put Exalted in the file. Because Exalted was a good combat mechanic. What we found, though, was it was a little out of flavor in that Exalted really has a teamwork quality to it, like you're working together and the Trials really are people working together. In fact, in some levels, it's kind of the opposite.

In the end, like there's one of the stories on the cards about, it shows up over like I think three cards about these two friends that start off as really friends, but in the end one kills the other in the trial of zeal, right? And like, wow, that's a pretty, you know, that's a weird world to live in where, you know, eventually you have to kill your friends. And it really played into, it gave us that sort of bullsy quality we wanted to it. But Exalted, too teamworky. So we tried a bunch of different things, and we went through a whole bunch of different iterations on this. teamwork-y. So we tried a bunch of different things, and we went through a whole bunch of different iterations

on this. We tried a bunch of Exalt variants where it wasn't just power pumping, still too teamwork-y. And then we liked the idea, so I had a mechanic that I made, I don't know, a couple years ago,

where you could upgrade a creature, but then it died at the end of the turn. I called it the Berserk mechanic, based on berserk from Alpha. So the idea is I could increase my creature, make it much more powerful, but at the cost of the creature dying. And the problem was, while it was thematic to this set, this set's all about do your thing and die, the reason we didn't use it last time was it's a little too harsh.

It was a little too much of a penalty. And so we were looking for a penalty that wasn't quite as harsh as, and your creature dies. And we tried a bunch of different things. And then Jackie Lee, Jackie came up with this idea of, okay, well, what if instead of the creature dying, what if it just doesn't untap? You know, like what if you kind of lose the use of the creature for a turn? That's relevant, still means something,

but it's not quite as painful. And it seemed like we had tried a lot of different things, and it seemed like a cool idea. I will say this, by the way. Exert is one of those mechanics that plays better than it looks on paper. I remember when you first see it, you're like, oh, okay, I guess. But I was worried it was going to be a little bit clunky. I was worried that the cost wouldn't quite match up thematically.

But I really ended up having this cool idea of if I push myself a little bit, I can sort of do more things, but I tire myself out. So if I exert myself, oh, well, now I got to rest. And it ended up having a little bit of a, it added a neat flavor to it, and the gameplay is really good. So I'm, I was quite excited that we got to exert. And like I said, it does two different things. One is, it captures the idea of these people pushing themselves to their limits,

which is what the world is all about. And it has a little bit of the, the little bit of, because you're sort of choosing to do it, there's a little bit

of manipulation there that has a little bit of a ballsy feel that I liked. But anyway, so that was exert. So the other interesting thing was,

during development, there was a big question of exert was correct. And like I said, exert so the other interesting thing was during development there was a big question of exert was correct and like I said I could serve on the surface it's not quite as splashy as other things it seems a little businessy but what happened was you know the development teams said oh it's just something better we can do and looked around and tried different things and in the end they came around to you know no no no exert's doing really good work we should leave exert and you know um one of the jobs of development by the way is what i call kicking the tires which is no matter how good design does no matter how good the development's supposed to just question everything that is their job okay is this mechanic good

enough should we replace the mechanic or something better And that part of what they need to do is really try to see if they can make the set better by doing something. And that, yes, question every mechanic. Question every card. Is there a better version of it? Is there a better mechanic? Is there a better card? Is there something that you can do that is, you know, something that you can do that's a little

incremental improvement? And that a lot of what development does is figure out okay this is good but we make it better you know and I have no qualms with it like I like the fact that they said okay can we can we beat exert and they tried it in the end goes no no this does the best job let's leave exert okay next cycling okay so um originally in the, I had made a mechanic called hieroglyphics. And what hieroglyphics were is they were kind of what I would call cycling from the graveyard.

They were cards that, in your graveyard, you could spend two mana and exile them to draw a card. So the idea was, it was kind of like this built-in cantrip, but it was delayed. You could spend it whenever you wanted to. Long ago, we kind of figured out that the difference between a card and a card that draws you a card, aka a cantrip Cantrip, by the way, comes from Ice Age. So cantrips in Magic are little, like, little flavorful tiny spells and in Ice Age they decided to have this mechanic that spells that instead of drawing a card immediately, they drew your card at the beginning of next turn

because they thought it was too dangerous to draw it right away. It turns out it's not. But anyway, they called them cantrips. It's a nickname. It was never on the card. But anyway, we've long ago made them evergreen. It's just a costing mechanic. But anyway, so I was trying to make...

The idea of hieroglyphics is that, oh, you write down the history of the world, and you can learn from the history of the world. So there were a couple of strikes against hieroglyphics. Number one, in between the time I'd made it, they ended up changing how clues investigate worked in Shadows of Innistrad, and they ended up making the clue version where you, when you investigated, you made a Clue. And then you spent the Clue. And Clues cost two to spend.

So it ended up being very similar to Clue. And too similar to be in the same stand environment together. So we had to get rid of it. The other big issue was we were trying to sort of push more toward living Egypt and away from dusty Egypt and kind of the flavor of I go and I study and I learn and I learn about the past. It's a little more dusty Egypt, you know, dark and dusty Egypt, the Tomb Raider stuff that we were sort of staying away from. So anyway, I had to pull that. Meanwhile, Eric Lauer

was trying to figure out sort of just some larger synergy stuff and came to the realization that cycling would interact really nicely with delirium. So we talked about it. We had talked about cycling in Kaladesh, but it really didn't fit Kaladesh at all. Kaladesh was really, you

know, thing-based. It was a steampunk set. It was about invention and it really wanted to be more about, you know, like having things that sort of matter in your hand just felt wrong for Kaladesh. That Kaladesh was a little more about you're making things, inventing things, and so we talked about for Kaladesh it wasn't a good fit. So I think when Eric heard about hieroglyphs going out, he came and, or maybe he, it happened around the time hieroglyphs got taken out.

Maybe he, I'm not sure if Eric knew hieroglyphs got taken out. But he came and pitched us cycling. And he, there was a cycle of dual lands he wanted to do, cycling dual lands. And he really felt like this would be a good spot. And remember, at the time, sets were standard with 18 months. So if we wanted to get something to go in the same standard environment as Shadows of Innistrad, this was our last chance. Amakia was going to be the last block before Shadows rotated out.

So he came and pitched to us and we were like, okay. You know, we we had been looking for one of the things we'd wanted with the bolus is bolus, we had made a list of five qualities of bolus, one of which was intelligent. And we were

definitely trying to find a way to make sure the environment had a little bit of sort of smarts to it um and cycling kind of played in that space and we had a lot of pieces that you needed to get together to work because um there's a lot of flavor-based stuff we were doing and cycling just does a good job of sort of getting you to the things you need to draw um and anyway so eric talked us into it we put cycling in um We talked a bit about trying to find a way to make cycling a little more connected to the other mechanics in the set. We actually tried, I forget what we call it, super cycling. We tried a variant of cycling.

Not that we wouldn't have normal cycling, but we tried a variant in which you discarded that card and another card to draw two cards. in which you discarded that card and another card to draw two cards. The idea being we had a graveyard flavor with, you know, Embalm and Aftermath, and that cycling doesn't do a good job of getting those cards into your graveyard, because we had a lot of cards that wanted to be in your graveyard. So the idea of super cycling is, oh, I can trade this card and another card to get two cards, so I can, essentially I can cycle two cards plus a card of my choice so I can get embalmed creatures or aftermath cards or whatever, something that had value in my graveyard that I could both discard and could value out of my graveyard.

It ended up being not, well we played with it, it just was one of those things that kind of sounds good on paper and then ended up not quite being as good in play so we didn't do it but we did try it. ended up not quite being as good in play, so we didn't do it. But we did try it. Okay, next, Aftermath. Aftermath is one of those mechanics that started from a place that has really nothing to do with what it ended up being about. But sometimes you're brainstorming. I often talk about in brainstorming how you kind of want to let people go wherever

because sometimes you get to places you would just not normally get. So we were talking about split cards. Oh, no, we were talking about delirium. And we, I think this was even before cycling, honestly, that we were saying, oh, you know, we're going, there was a theory at the time that when we were trying out the three-block model, I'm sorry, the two-block model, two blocks a year, there was a thought of we wanted the first and third set.

This is when Standard was 18 months. We wanted the first and third set to have some synergy so that the third set comes out, the first set helps the third set, it's doing cool things, but then the first set rotates out and now the focus can be on the next set. It's something we had done when the standard was two years long, and it didn't quite work out the way we wanted, but this is the thought process we were at the time. So we were trying to find ways to make Amon get more synergistic with Shadows of Innistrad.

So we were just brainstorming, making up weird ideas. So one of my ideas was a split card that had instant and sorcery, that instant one side and sorcery on the other. Remember, split cards can only be instant or sorcery because they can't be permanent. But I like the idea of, hey, here's a card that counts as both an instant and a sorcery for purposes of delirium. And so we were brainstorming things to help shadows. I said that. And so

we were trying things out. And we made something. I forget what it was. And I think it's Ethan who came to this idea of, um, that he saw the split cards. He said, oh, I'm not sure how much this feels like Amonkhet. And then he said, but one of the cool things about Amonkhet is this graveyard focus. What if you could only cast one part out of your graveyard? What if it, what if like, um, essentially it's kind of like flashback, except it's flashback to do a different thing. And the idea was that we would, the first spell would be what you want to cast in your hand,

and the second spell you would cast under your graveyard. So it was kind of across, for a while we were calling them, what did we call them, splitback cards. Because they're kind of like split cards, but they're kind of like flashback cards. And so we started going down that path. And then I know that the naming people said, okay, we need a new naming convention for this. And we ended up with this idea of blank to blank,

which was pretty cool. Because the normal split cards have always been blank and blank. So we played around with it a bit, and eventually we decided that we really liked it. So the big question was, how do we present it? Well, the first idea was, oh, just present it as a split card, and the second card says you can't cast it. We're like, well, the problem is people are used to split cards. Split cards work a certain way.

This isn't how split cards work. used to split cards. Split cards work a certain way. This isn't how split cards work. If we make them look like split cards, people just won't read it and, you know, will just act like they're split cards. Okay, so we try to figure out how to do that. And the other thing is, one of the things that's annoying with split cards, although I love split cards, is they're hard to read within your hand. So we said, okay, is there a way for the one that's in your hand to be easy to read, and the way the one not in your hand, you know, maybe be different so you kind of know that that's not the card spell you can do. So we ended up with a version you guys saw where the one part is face up, the other part

is face down. It allowed us to do this neat thing with the art where A, we got two pieces of art, and they were more what we call landscape, that they were longer than they are tall, which is something we don't get to do a lot in magic art. And we don't get to tell two-sided stories. I mean, we have double-faced cards, but we don't often get to tell stories in two parts. And so we ended up going with that.

I admit, from an aesthetic standpoint, it's a little bit jarring. I think it's super functional. I think it does a really good job of sort of helping you understand how the card works. And I think we leaned a little more of the time toward the functional end of it, of having the card frame help you and teach you what you're trying to be doing. You know, there was a little bit of sacrifice of aesthetics for gameplay in this case. But I think it's a fun mechanic,

and I really think it does neat things. And there's a lot of cool designs. The way that we made aftermath cards was they always did two things, and if you did the two things on the same turn, there was synergy between doing the two things. So the idea is I could always do one spell one turn, the other spell the other turn,

but if I could do them in one turn, you know, it kind of, the synergy made it a bit stronger. That ended up proving to be challenging, but obviously we made a bunch of cycles of them. And there was a lot of talk of sort of what cycles we wanted. I know development, there was a lot of changes made in development to figure out sort of exactly what cycles we wanted. I mean, the Aftermath a lot of changes made in development to figure out sort of exactly what cycles we wanted. I mean, the astromechanical cards were made in design,

but the individual choices and which cycle got mostly done in development. Okay, other things that we cared about. So one of the things I talked about in the early meetings,

we wrote down all the things that were top-down. So another thing that came out that was pretty big was monuments. When you think of, like, sunny Egypt, you know, Prince of Egypt or whatever, pick your

ancient Egypt but a living civilization, you always see them kind of building it because one of the big remnants of ancient Egypt is the monuments, the pyramids or the sphinx and stuff like that. So people really

acquaint sort of ancient Egypt with being the making of those things. So we said, okay, we kind of can't do Egypt and not sort of hit the monument trope. So we tried to figure out how to do that. We talked about, should they just be artifacts and do cool things? What I realized was part of the trope was not just

that they were monuments, but that they were being built. Another thing, by the way, that was a tricky thing that I thought Creative came up with, a very clever thing was, we wanted the monuments being built, but a lot, if you go to the source material, it's, you know, like slaves building the pyramids and things like that. That's, you know, and we didn't, we wanted to sort of get that vibe without actually, we didn't want slaves, didn't want human slaves. That was not something we would do. And when we came across the idea of the mummies kind of serving as the workforce, it became cool that we could get the iconography of the workers and working on building the pyramids, but

without any of the slave, we didn't want any of that. So we were able to sort of have an Egyptian feel, but remove some of the stuff that, you know, we didn't want in a more, you know, obviously a modern sensibility game. Anyway, so the monuments, we were going to build them. And so we came across the idea of, okay, what if they were things that literally got built? What if, you know, so we ended up with brick counters. And the idea was, I think we ended up with three because three felt like enough of a procedure that you had to do it, but not so much that you wouldn't get it done.

Somebody also pointed out that three bricks is the smallest you need to make a pyramid. I thought that was cool. And I claimed I'm going to save it now, and that's why we did it. But anyway, so we designed them such that we ended up making a vertical cycle which means we made one in each rarity. I think there's three of them. I think there's a common, uncommon, rare, I think. I don't think there's a mythic rare.

I don't think. Anyway, and the way they worked is that you... Oh, hold on one second. I gotta... Okay. Safety first. Hold on one second, guys. I, okay. Safety first. Hold on one second, guys. I got to cut over here. I want to make sure I do it safely.

Okay, I safely cut over. So we wanted to build up the monuments and make sure that they, that completing them meant something. So what we ended up with is they do something, and when they do that thing, they add a brick counter, and when you have enough brick counters, now they do an upgraded version of it. They do a better version.

Like, the monument does its thing, but once it's completed, it's even better. And I like how the monuments came out. Next, deserts. So another big thing that we said early on was, you know, when you think of Egypt, you think of it surrounded by a desert. You think of pyramids in the desert. So what we did was first off, we went back to there's a card in Arabian Nights, very first expansion, called Desert.

And it's a land that taps your coalesce, and then you can tap it to do one damage to attacking creatures. Super flavorful, it's a desert, it doesn't reduce color mana for you, tap it to do one damage to attacking creatures. Super flavorful. It's a desert. You know, it doesn't reduce color mana for you, but it can help sort of, you know, stop invading forces, right? Because it's, you know, sand, right? The problem was, when we played with it, is it's a little bit strong,

and it's the kind of card that very much warps an environment. That if you have deserts in the environment, traditional deserts, deserts from Raven Knights, it really makes it hard to have small creatures. That, you know, you get out one desert, all of a sudden you can't attack with one toughness creature.

You get two out, you can't attack with two toughness creatures. It really, really slowed down the game. And in my article I said it was too powerful. That's not quite correct. It's not that the standard couldn't have it. It's that we didn't want it in standard. It wasn't making for a fun standard.

It wasn't that it was so overpowered that it warped everything. But it did warp things enough that it was pushing in a direction that we didn't like. So what we decided was the original desert had a desert subtype. We could use the desert subtype. So we decided to make our own deserts. One of the things we're also trying to figure out is how much deserts are going to be in Amaket and how much deserts were going to be in Hour of Devastation. In the end we decided that, once we understood the story, that the Hekma, the protective barrier, comes down and like

the ravages of the desert come into Nakmatu that it made more sense to have the second set have more of a desert theme. Originally we had a little bit more of a desert theme in Amonkhet and during development they said that, you know what, maybe we should save more of that for like, it was in a weird spot. There was enough of it you thought you could draft it, and you couldn't quite. So we lowered a little bit so you weren't tricked into feeling like you could draft a desert deck. And then made sure that in Hours of Devastation you could, but we gave enough deserts that once that's a theme,

once you have two packs of that, okay, there are some deserts you could draft. So the third pack could help you with your desert deck, but not necessarily encourage you by itself to make a desert deck. And then we did a lot of individual designs. When I get to our desert station, more of the designs there. But we definitely knew we wanted to have deserts sort of have a feel. The other big thing that we wanted to do was, we were doing a top-down set, we wanted to have some top-down cards. Hey, it's Thing X, right?

Hey, it's Jekyll and Hyde. Hey, it's, you know, it's, Innistrad did a really good thing of sort of, I know that thing, or even Theros. Oh, it's Icarus, you know, stuff where you recognize it. What we found with Egyptian mythology was people knew the base material way better than the specifics. That whenever I would take a story from Egyptian mythology was people knew the base material way better than the specifics. That whenever I would take a story from Egyptian mythology and go around, you know, the office and say, hey, have you ever heard of this story?

It was like 95% no. Like, okay. So what we found was it was hard to do specific stuff, specific things. Like we did more like mummies and scarabs and deserts and pyramids and things that had sort of a larger Egyptian feel to them. We did a few cases of trying to do individual ones. Like, for example, we did a Cleopatra card. We did a King Tut card. But even those in the end, it just wasn't, I mean, some people got it but it was it this set every time you do something it works a little bit differently and one

of the things about top-down is your your material top-down has a different relationship with the audience and so depending on how they interact with it like what we found with Egypt is Egypt has huge iconography meaning there's a lot of visual things that you associate with Egypt that you recognize. You know, if you go to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, there's a lot of, there's a look, there's an Egyptian, ancient Egyptian look

that's very distinctive and recognizable. But what we found was that the source material, mostly what people knew was not mythology. People actually didn't know much of the mythology, is they knew more historical stuff. King Tut and Cleopatra weren't mythological. They existed. They were both real people. Now, over time,

clearly, their persona might not quite match who they were originally. Certain aspects get highlighted. We played into the personas more than the reality. it was a very different animal. It was a lot harder. The top-down stuff, the specific top-down things were very hard.

It wasn't something that was quite as easy as Theros or nearly as easy as Innistrad, which was much easier. The other big thing that we wanted to do was there was a lot of one-of. You know, canoptic jars. We wanted to make sure we had that. And we wanted to make sure that we had scarabs. We really sort of went through our list. Like I said, the one big dividing point was we kind of steered clear of the dark and dusty Tomb Raider type stuff. We did a little bit of it, but not too much.

So we had some of that that got cleared out as we sort of moved through the file. But anyway, like I said, the interesting thing about the set was when we came into it, I kind of thought it would be very Theros-like, right? Oh, it's another set. It's a set that is mythology-inspired, it's got gods, you know, I really thought it was going to be very similar.

And what we found in the end was Theros ended up, at its core, being about building, about sort of becoming something, becoming a hero, or you know, like going on journeys, doing things, sort of bettering yourself, where Amonkhet ended up having this weird feel of kind of testing yourself, but in a, in a, in a, like, in a, like, Theros built you up,

that going through this hardship made you a better person, and that Amonkhet tends to tear you down, that we were trying to create this cruel world, this bolus-y Egyptian world. And so they ended up having really different sensibilities. And just the nature of, like, people were so much more aware of Greek mythology that we could do a lot more sort of direct references where here we had to go a different path.

And I've heard a lot of feedback. Like, people are like, oh, I kind of like that, you know, it's top down without being, hey, do you know this? Do you know this? Do you know this? And I'm not saying we want to top down until we do that. It's a matter of, you know, does the majority of our audience know the things we're referencing? And it's fun to reference a few things that, you know, hey, it's a snake cat or something that people

might not be aware of that really played in mythology. But you can't do tons of that because it doesn't resonate. Like, if I do something you don't know, well, then it's not going to resonate with you.

You know, if I said, hey, you didn't know this, but ancient Egypt had, you know, giant whalefish, well, whalefish don't really necessarily make you feel like Egypt because you don't know that.

They didn't. They made that up anyway. So anyway, I hope these two podcasts give you a little insight sort of into the design. I am happy. The mechanics all turned out really well. I think the flavor turned out well. I think the gameplay is interesting. I think the dissonance is came in a neat spot.

We clearly get sort of the Bolus influences and the Egyptian influence and it really feels like a world where it feels harsh in a neat spot. We clearly get sort of the Bolas influences and the Egyptian influence and it really feels like a world where it feels harsh in a way that's sort of reflective and fun gameplay. Like it's not easy to say, hey, this is a world that kind of is harsh and dangerous that makes you feel odd at ease

and you still want to play it. So we found a happy medium there and I think we did a great job. So hats off to everybody, to the design team, development team, the creative team. I think we did a great job. And so hats off to everybody, to the design team, development team, the creative team. I think we did some good work. So anyway, just to remind you, I'm not going to go into the cards. I will at a different time do the Amonkhet card series podcast. I'm just not doing that right now.

But anyway, I'm now at Rachel's school. So we all know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time to me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.