Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #467: Multicolor Blocks

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the many different multicolor blocks we've made and how we went about making them.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. I took my son to camp again. Okay, so today, on my blog, we've been talking a lot about designing for multicolor sets. So I thought today I would combine sort of discussing how we design multicolor cards, or sorry, multicolor sets, with a history lesson on multicolor sets. So what I want to do today is sort of walk through, actually when multicolor sets, with a history lesson on multicolor sets. So what I want to do today is sort of walk through, actually, when I say sets, I really mean blocks with one exception.

So we're going to walk through and talk about, well, what happens when we design a block? What are the lessons we learned? And I'm going to sort of walk through the evolution of multicolor block design. Okay, so I start with legends, which is my only set. All the rest I'm going to talk about today are blocks. The reason I start with Legends, on some level, it's not really a multicolor set, but it introduced the concept of gold cards, of multicolor cards. So what Legends did is they introduced both legendary creatures and multicolor cards. And then they combined them one for one. So in Legends, all legendary creatures are multicolored and only multicolored cards, or sorry,

all multicolored cards are legendary creatures. So it definitely introduced it in the beginning and it was splashy in its day, although you go back and look at them, the Legends from legends are, legendary creatures from legends are mostly not so legendary. There's a few that stand out over time,

but, you know, look at stuff like Lady in the Mountain and just cringe a little bit. But anyway, so legends introduced the idea. That's when it sort of, but the first set that said, okay, we're going to make a theme out of this. This is going to be something that we build the block around was Invasion. So Invasion was inspired.

So Barry Reich was a friend of Richard Garfield's. When Richard wanted to playtest Magic for the very first time, Barry's the one he played against. And after Magic sort of, the ball first time, Barry's the one he played against. And after magic sort of like the ball started rolling, he asked various people to design sets. The East Coast play tefters, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, and Chris Page designed Ice Age. The people that Richard had met through the Bridge Club. So Bill Rose, Charlie Coutinho, Joel Mick, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard Kolenberg.

They designed Mirage, codenamed Menagerie at the time. Mirage and Visions, essentially. And then Barry created a set he called Spectral Chaos, which was him messing around with gold cards. So many years later, we decided that we wanted to do a gold set. So we used Barry's set as kind of inspiration. We did a lot of jumping off.

The domain mechanic, aka Barry's mechanic, was from Spectral Chaos. But that was the biggest piece that got left over. A lot of what we took as the spirit of what he was trying to do is having a set dedicated all about multicolor cards. And definitely Invasion did that. So the idea in Invasion we really played with is we pushed you toward playing as many colors as you could. You know, the domain mechanic rewards you. So domain is a mechanic that says it's a scalable effect and the effect is based on the number of basic lands, the different basic lands you have.

So if I get to do end damage, well, I do one to five damage depending on how many basic lands I had. So I really encourage you to have as many different basic lands as possible, meaning, look, play as many different colors as possible. So a lot of what Invasion was about was sort of giving you lots of tools and pushing people toward playing more colors. Our thought at the time was, well, multicolor is about combining colors.

Let's give you a lot of fun things you can do and then sort of encourage you to play as many colors as you could. And it was, Invasion was a very popular set in its day. We had real faith in multicolor. Now, what happened was Legends came out. It was very controlled in Legends. And then over the next couple years, there occasionally were

multicolor stuff in sets. So after Ice Age, there was Mirage. Mirage had some multicolor cards. There was Tempest. Tempest had multicolor cards. After Tempest was Urza's Saga. Around that time, we decided that we

wanted to sort of save multicolor and started pulling back on doing multicolor. I don't know if there's any multicolor in Urza's Saga. There's not any multicolor in Mercadian Masks. But we sort of started pulling it back so that we could blow it out in Invasion, which we did. But, so the big problem it out in Invasion, which we did. But, so the

big problem we had with Invasion was the reason Richard made the color pie in the first place was he wanted to have separation. He wanted to sort of have different things that you could do. And the idea is

because of the mana system in the color pie, you don't have access to everything. The mana system pushes you toward playing less colors, and the color pie pushes you toward playing more colors, but you are limited somewhat in what you can play. And because of that, there's a lot more variety. Well, in order to let people play many colors, we had to start giving them some tools to play mini colors. And then what starts to happen is once people can just play whatever colors they want, well, a lot of the advantage of the color pipe starts drifting away. People end up making what we call good stuff decks, which is just take all the best cards in every

color and just play those. And the problem with good stuff decks is if it becomes too prominent, it's the same deck. Everybody's playing the same cards. And that what we found was when you make kind of a color pie soup, it's really hard to have any definition. And it's just like,

the thing the color pie is supposed to do is keep the deck separate from each other. That, oh, I want to use this really good red card. the thing the color pie is supposed to do is keep the decks separate from each other. That, oh, I want to use this really good red card. Well, then maybe I can't use the really good blue card and the really good green card. I have to pick and choose. But once you sort of have access to lots of different colors, then it starts blending together. So the next time we did multicolor was in Ravnica, which happened a couple years later.

So my goal of Ravnica was two parts. One is I wanted to be different. I didn't want Ravnica to feel like just the same thing that Invasion was. And because I knew of the super problem, I decided to go the opposite direction. I said, okay, if Invasion lets you play as many colors as possible, Ravnica will let you play as few colors as possible. Now, it's a multicolor set, so that meant one didn't work. One's not a multicolor set.

So, okay, let's do two. The other decision I made at the time was, normally, what was normal at the time was we separated ally from enemy. And ally was much easier to do than enemy. In fact we would make like lands in which the ally land just worked better than the enemy lands and we would make many more cards that were allied than enemy and we really sort of made this this system to reflect the color pie sort of philosophies. The problem is if you make it much harder to make the enemy color decks you just kind of lessen the

number of decks people play so what i decided within ravnica is i said okay i'm not only going to do two color i'm going to treat them all the same i'm not going to give pretense to the um to the ally color i'm going i'm going to treat them all all 10 pairs equally uh and when i gave those parameters to brady downer myth who was in charge of the creative team, he came back with the idea of the guilds. So this is the first set really where we did factioning, where we used colors to faction. And the success of Ravnica would really push us along

the idea of that factioning is a very powerful thing to do in multicolor. And the reason is you already naturally in a multicolor set are... So one of the things about building sets in general is cycles, which is how much structure do cycles have? It turns out in multicolor, because color balance is important to us, basically the rule is at common and uncommon, we always balance colors exactly, meaning it's the same number.

At rare, we try to come as close as we can. And at mythic, we're willing to have a little bit more wiggle room, although we want to make sure all the colors show up at mythic, but it doesn't have to be perfectly equal at mythic. And the idea being, because of asfan, if common and uncommon are exactly equal and rare is close to equal, pretty much you get an equal distribution when you open packs, which is what we want.

And so we... The nature of making a multicolor set is even if the cycles are super loose, even if it's just, okay, we're going gonna have three cycles of creatures and three cycles of not creatures you know you have to make you have to build the sets in cycles because the nature of multicolor now they can be very loose cycles it could be like these are creatures and then each creature is completely different from other

creatures but the nature of doing multicolor design is somewhat structured. So the advantage of factioning is it starts to give yourself some definition. To say, okay, well if you play these two colors, here's what these two colors are about. And the idea of factioning is it helps give color identity to color pairs, or color trios, as we'll get to. Now, Ravnica was really interesting. Like, one of the things we did in Ravnica, and once again, I'm talking about the whole block,

is we made a conscious effort to use the guild model as the driving factor for how we created the set. So, the original Ravnica had four guilds in the first set, three in the second, and three in the third. Remember, the first set was a large set, and the second and third set were smaller sets, although we increased both of them a little bit to fit the three guilds in.

And Invasion was very popular. I would say it was a very successful set, but it was nothing like Ravnica. Ravnica just blew the doors off the hinges. In fact, if you talk about all-time popularity, the only set that seems to rival Ravnica in all-time popularity is Innistrad, and those two sets tend to fight each other. Anyway, we learned a lot from original Ravnica.

We learned the powers of factioning. We learned the key to structuring and how you kind of want your multicolor sets to be a little bit tighter in construction. There is a kind of multicolor set that we haven't done yet, by the way, which is something that we might one day do, which is what I'll call the top down multicolor set, where it's like, okay, we're going to reflect some real world thing and it is too hard to do in monocolor systems. So we will allow ourselves access to multicolor. The problem with that system, the reason we haven't done it yet is it's very hard to match flavor and have a structure to it. So, because what will tend to happen is,

and we realized this when we were doing Kamigawa, that Kamigawa was trying to reflect Japanese mythology, and there's some things in Japanese mythology that really just don't fall neatly into one category. Like, there's these birds made a fighter. And, you know, red is not particularly strong at flying, especially not at small flyers. And, you know, the birds were sneaky, I think, and sort of clever. And, like, they kind of wanted to be blue-red, but Kamigawa didn't have multicolors.

So, like, it didn't allow us to do that. So one day, that's an area that... The tricky part about it is you would have to do some amount of matching existing mythology and then creating some of your own mythology to fill in the gaps. Because no existing mythology is going to neatly tie up all the multicolor ends you need.

Okay, so after Ravnica, it's funny, the next planned multi-color block really was Shards of Alara, but I'm going to argue that Shadowmoor ended up being a multi-color set. So Shadowmoor, I'm talking the block once again. When I say Ravnica, I mean

Ravnica, Guildpack, and Ascension. Invasion, Planeshift, and Apocalypse. Oh, Invasion, by the way, real quick, I forgot to mention this. Invasion did do something very interesting in which we actually saved something for the end. We purposely didn't put any enemy color cards into either Invasion or Planeshift, and then Apocalypse was nothing but enemy color cards. That allowed us to sort of have less overall enemy cards at the time that was a thing

but also have a very concentrated sort of final set which really was the precursor to block planning so anyway okay so Shadowmoor was us doing a hybrid set and the idea was we wanted to see how high we could push hybrid we ended up pushing it to about 50% of the set. And then because one of the qualities of hybrid that's so unique to hybrid is their multicoloredness that even though I spent black to cast the card, it also was red,

allowed us to do a lot of shenanigans with color mattering. So that's another place that you can mess around with. It's an ongoing theme. Invasion had a bunch of color mattering. R that's another play that you can mess around with. It's an ongoing theme. Invasion had a bunch of color mattering. Ravnica had a little bit of color mattering. Shadowmore had a lot of color mattering. The funny thing at the time was Shadowmore was right before Shards of Alara and traditionally

we had stayed away from multicolor right before the big multicolor set. And Shadowmore I'm like, well, it's more about monocolor play than multicolor play, but because of all the color mattering stuff and a lot of, it really had a lot of multicolor feel to it,

especially in some of the interactions. Like, you could do shenanigans like I play a monoblock deck with swamps, but I, in my swamp,

you know, I play cards that are other colors because they're hybrid, even though I'm spending black mana to cast them. And there's different cards that care about colors because they're hybrid, even though I'm spending black mana to cast them. And there's different cards that care about having certain colors in play. And so even though I don't have a red card, I've never cast, I have no mountains,

I could have things that get benefits off a red card being in play, even though I've never used red mana. Okay, so then we got to Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara was Bill Rose's baby. So he had two things driving his design. One was that he

was trying to not be Invasion, trying not to be Ravnica, so he settled upon doing three color, focusing on three colors. And he also really loved the idea of ending on a small set that was all multicolor cards. And so a lot of the design of the block was to set up this. So what happened here, which is interesting, is he went to the creative team and said, okay, we're doing three color, only arcs, only, if you look on the color wheel, an arc is, or shard, I guess now, is three colors that are all next to each other.

So white, blue, black is an arc or shard. Blue, black, red. Black, red, green. Red, green, white. Green, white, blue. So those were the four, I'm sorry, five, white. Green, white, blue. So those were the five shards. So what happened was the creator team got tasked with making these things matter. So they came up with an idea of a world in which it is split in five.

And every world only had three of the five colors of mana. So what happens when your enemies go away? When you have control and the only people there are your allies. And so it made Bant and Esper. Bant's white-centered, Esper's blue-centered, Grixis is black-centered, Jund is red-centered, and Naya is green-centered. And the idea is that we were sort of exploring what worlds were like

without the influence of the enemy colors. So Shards of Alara was weird in that in order to accomplish Bill's task, the first set was more about three color, the second color pushed a little bit more toward five color, and the third set was more about two color. The block in the end was mostly about three color. And once you build your three color decks,

both Conflux and Alara Reborn gave you cards that you can play in your three-color deck. But the problem we ran into shards was a little bit of the problem we had with Invasion, which is in order to play three-color, we need to give you access to that. In fact, looking back, I think we didn't give enough access. I think we made the mana a little too hard in Shards of Alara. Because we were nervous about, we didn't want to enable soup. We didn't want color pie soup. And so there's a lot of discussion about how can you enable three color without enabling

four color or five color. And in the end, we sort of said, said you know what it's almost impossible to make the average person play three color and not let stronger players play four and five color so we sort of acknowledged that happened um but we did also make use of factioning in shards of alara to make sure that we had an identity for each of the color pairs um the reason factioning is important not only is it popular with the audience, but it also allows you to sort of focus some of your card designs,

that if the color combination has a particular mechanical focus, it allows you to sort of build some cards to push in that direction so that you can create some synergies and you can create stuff that sort of, each color combination has a different feel to it. Okay, the next multi-color set was Return to Ravnica. Because we were going back

to a world we'd already been at, we decided to mostly keep things the same. The big shake-up was a block structure shake-up, which was instead of going 4, 3, 3, we went 5, 5, 10. The idea being that each set would be a large set to be drafted by itself, and then at the end we'd have a small set that gave you a little more for everything, and that you would mix and match them then. So the idea was you just play Return to Ravnir

by itself, then you just play Gatecrash by itself, and then when Dragon Maze came out, you would play all three together. The first two parts worked out pretty well. The third part had a bunch of problems. But we're getting better. Development's getting better at sort of understanding mana requirements. Ravnica had done a decent job.

Shards had been a little short. Return to Ravnica definitely sort of made sure that was possible. little short. Return to Ravnica, I definitely sort of made sure that was possible. And then really we used the guild model, but we were trying to match the essence of the guilds to give them sort of new mechanics to play around with. Our guiding goal at the time was if you mix the guild, you know, the guild, we had watermarks on the guild cards, the ones that were the most concentrated. So if you took all the Selesnya cards with the Selesnya watermark on it, from both original Ravnica and Return to Ravnica, and you played them in the same deck, would they feel like they naturally went together? That was kind of our goal.

And what we found in general was, yes, we did that. But the other thing that we found when we came back is when you make factions, you sort of carve space out that does two things. One is it gives you definition to build around it, but it also starts creating some limitations. And so one of the

things I think you'll see in the future is that you will see us start to start to mess around with factions that you might because there's only so many colored factions right there's 5 mono color, 10 2 color, 10 3 color 5 4 color and 1 I'd say 5 4 color and 1 5 color

so that's not a lot of, of things. That's 31, I think, total combinations. Um, so one of the things that also I think helps us by sort of focusing on factions is when we do black green somewhere else or do white blue somewhere else, um, in fact, we just did white,blue. I'll get to that in a second. That you can give it a slightly different feel while not like... Kind of what we want is we want to make sure that every multi-character set has its own identity.

And so one of the challenges moving forward is how do you make use of factions we've made before but give them a different feel? We'll get to that problem in a second. So now we get to Khans of Tarkir. So that's Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged,

Dragons of Tarkir. So the challenge of Khans of Tarkir, for starters, was it didn't start as a multicolored set. So this is one of the few multicolored sets where we actually started somewhere else and ended up in multicolored. The block actually began its experiment

in having a unique draft structure where you would draft the first set, you know, AAA, and then when the second set came out you would draft BBA, and when the third set would come out you would draft CCB. Meaning that the middle set would get drafted with both the large sets, but the two large sets would never be drafted with one another. And then from that, we got our time travel story. And from that, we got morph. And then we ended up creating some factions more for creative identity.

But then I realized that there were some interesting things we could do with color. And then eventually I realized that we could get to, we could do a wedge set. So wedge set is two allied colors and their shared enemy. So white, blue, and black, blue, black, and green, black, red, and white, red, green, and blue, and green, white, and black. And we named them, let's see, the white one was Abzan, the blue one, centered one, obviously, was Jeskai. Is that right? Jeskai. Yeah, Jeskai. Am I saying this correctly? Yes, the blue-centered one was Jeskai, Am I saying this correctly? Yes.

The blue-centered one was Jeskai. The black-centered one was Soltai. The red-centered one was Mardu. And the green-centered one was... Oh, no. Green-centered one was... Did I mess this up? What did I forget here?

There was Abzan, which was green, white, black. And then there was... I'm messing this up. I love when I'm talking and then I blink in the middle of... What am I forgetting? There's Saltai. What am I forgetting? There's Mardu.

There's Abzan. There is Jeskai. And there is... I'm just Jeskai, and there is... I'm just blinking. Okay, you guys are... See, I do this so you guys can have the joy of screaming at the top of your lungs. The obvious, obvious... Okay, I'll come here in a second.

If I sit here trying to think of it, I will not. So let's move on, and I'll go, oh, of course, in a second. So the idea of Constant Arc here is we decided to end up doing a wedge set. We obviously went factions, because we learned that when you do color-based things, you need factions. Each of the factions had a strong creative identity that we then sort of built off of to

give it a strong through-line, both mechanically and flavorfully. And then the way we set it up was we wanted to run the guilds all the way through, not the guilds, the clans all the way through the block. And the idea was there are solidly three color in the first set, they are two color with a splash in the third set,

and they are two color in the third set. Now notice one of the things that we did was we offset the clans not in their enemy color, which is where you would think to put them, but because we knew we had to end up with an ally at the end, we wanted to make sure that the main color ran all the way through. So we had to go off.

Now what that does mean is one day maybe we can do a wedge set where the enemies are the wedge center. I do believe you will see us mess around with other things. But one of the problems that Khan's of Tarkir had was that you

we had a similar problem not really in Limited. In Limited we found ways to control it, but in Constructed where once you make it easy to play three colors, you start making it easier to play four and five colors. And the area around Concentrator here really had a very blended... And there's a lot...

There were just certain cards that got played in a lot of different decks because it wasn't that hard for decks to bend a little bit. And it was the norm for decks to be playing four colors sometimes they even play four colors in which you know three or four colors would have dual mana cards that your dual colored mana cards in them like normally imagine you can't play blue blue and red red and black black all in the same deck but you you could do that in this environment um so that one of the big challenges we have to figure out in three color is, or in general for multicolor is, if we want you to play two color, we can give you the tools to do that. And then probably you can play three color.

But it's hard to play four and five color. If we give you the tools to play three color, then it's not that hard to play four color. And sometimes you can get away with playing five color. So there's a trick of how do we enable and give you factions and things that feel like three color without creating the soup problem. That's an issue for us to solve. And one of the things in general when building multicolor sets, there's two different factions. One idea is trying to understand the identity of it, that you want each one to have a feel, that you want each one to feel like it's its own thing. But secondarily, you have to understand the parameters of what you need to

have in it. So first and foremost, you need to be able to enable the colors that you are doing. You need to make sure that people can play the colors. Whatever it is you're pushing people to do, you need to make sure you give them the tools to do that. Another thing with a multicolor set is you need to sort of understand your structuring. In order to color balance, you need to have basically cycles of colors, or sorry, cycles of multicolor cards.

And you got to figure out what they represent. And something with factioning, the reason we moved toward factioning is, factioning allows us to sort of mirror things, but then give them a strong separation. It's not that multicolor has to be factioned. The problem we've run into, well,

factioning does such a good job with multicolor, and players like it so much, that it has become tricky not to go to factioning multicolor now as we branch out and try different things i'm i believe we'll one day crack how to do multicolor in a way that's compelling and exciting that isn't faction based um but for right now factions are so popular and so much so well liked by the players that the the natural push of multi-color set does tend to push you into factioning.

Because the solution of how to sort of create, how to make the archetypes, the pairs work together in a way that sort of has a feeling, it just pushes you down the path of doing factioning. Now there's a lot... Like I said, if you look through all the different sets I talked about today, different blocks, they each really push toward a different kind of flavor. Even the faction sets really were structured differently. For example, let's just take Shards of Alara and Cons of Tarkir.

Those are really different sets. While they're both tri-colored sets, and there's a few tools they have in common, they really, really play out quite differently in how we execute it on them. And like I said, I think looking back,

we keep improving our technology of how to do multicolored sets. It is one of those things that is very, very tricky, and I know development has spent a lot of time trying to figure out like what's the right amount of mana fixing what how much what's right around as van for for gold um you know as we start playing around with hybrids like one of the things like uh fate reforge i talk about concept dark here we had this problem of we had to have cards that were three-color for one draft environment and two-color

for another. That's why we made you use a hybrid. Hybrid is another tool in our arsenal. That's something we, along the way. Split cards are something that we introduced, but they don't inherently have to be multi-color. They work well in multi-color. We also found stuff like kicker with off-color kicker, off-color flashback.

You know, there's a few other tools we've done that having manas that have activations that you can use in a secondary color usually do a pretty good job of doing that. I'm trying to think. What else? Oh, Teemer! Teemer's the one I forgot. I was trying to think of a white one. The red-blue-green is Timur. The green-center one, that was green-center based. Was that green-center based?

Was that? Yes. Right? Timur? Yes. That was the green-centered one. Oh, I see. I got it.

The white-centered one was Abzan. The blue-centered one was Jeskai. The black-centered one was Soltai. The red-centered one was Mardu. And the green- center one was Abzan. The blue center one was, um, was Jeskai. The black center one was Soltai. The red center one was Mardu. And the green center one was Timur. I was thinking I was going to somehow down a white path. Anyway, it finally came to me. Um, so one of the big things I'm saying is there are a lot of moving pieces to making a multicolor set work. There's a lot of requirements you have. Um, enabling Enabling the color and keeping the colors balanced are probably the two biggest things that influence a multicolor set

that sort of define things you have to do. We have found tools to sort of answer some of those questions. And in some ways, the tools have been so successful that we keep going back to those tools. I'm sure one day I will back into a multicolor set in which I don't start with it as a multicolor set, and so I don't treat it like a multicolor set, and then I will back into it and I'll find some different things to do. I'm sure that will happen one day, but right now, anyway,

that is the sort of definition of how multicolor sets get put together, and sort of the different defining things that have put the blocks that we've made. Players love multi-color, and so one of the ongoing tensions we have is multi-color has proven to be hard to do. It's not just hard to design, because one of the things that I didn't get too much into is there's a limited amount of space for design,

especially in three-color. Two-color has a little bit more, but there's only so many cards you can make, and once you've been down a certain path, like, one of the problems with factioning is you push in certain directions, and then you tend to make the same kind of cards. That's one of the reasons I think you'll see

multi-color cards in the future that just push toward different factions. And when you get to three-color, just making cards that inherently feel like all three colors is super, super difficult. So another problem we had run into was one of the reasons that Khans of Tarkir block wasn't all wedge the whole block was, not only did we need a transition, but I knew we couldn't make enough cards to fill the whole block. So, but now that we moved to the three-in-one system where I only have to make one block worth of cards, I can handle

doing, I can do a wedge in a single set. But anyway, there's a lot of the parameters of what defines multicolor has to do with what you have to do when designing it. So design space is a big factor. Enabling the colors is a big factor.

The mana. The balance of trying to color balance and what that means for representation. All those have a huge play on how you build multicolor sets. But anyway, I'm now at work. So I hope you guys enjoyed today's talk. But I'm in my parking space or the parking space. So you know what that means? This is 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.