Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #476: Hour of Devastation

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of Hour of Devastation.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I took my daughter to the orthodontist. Okay, so today, one of the things I did some, I got some feedback from the audience a while ago, and people were asking for more recent, podcasts about more recent sets. So what I've decided to do is, I'm going to not do the full card run-through, but I'm going to do individual sort of podcasts about making of the sets that I do shortly after the set comes out.

Not exactly, you know, a little tiny bit. So I did Amonkhet already. So today I'm going to talk about Hour of Devastation. Hour of Devastation. Anyway, so we're going to talk all about how it got made. Okay, so let's begin with a little caveat, which is we changed over from the old system of three sets a year and a core set to the two block system, which was large, small, large, small. So two blocks a year. So there was one small

problem that it gave me is under the old system i only actually managed um the three sets the course that was somebody else would do i mean i would peek my head in but i usually the course that was not something i was very concerned with other people were doing that um but when we changed to the new model now we had four you, you know, four relevant new sets. So I had to pay attention to them. Now, obviously, this change would lead to the three-in-one change. I'll get to it another time. But anyway, the thing I was trying at the time was that I was spending full time on the large sets and half time on the small sets.

So for Hour of Devastation, they would meet twice a week. I would show up for one of the two meetings. So I was sort of keeping my toe in, and I was involved, but I wasn't as involved as I was on most sets. The fact that I was only there half time. So I was there, so I obviously can talk about the design, but a lot of stuff was done when I wasn't there, because half the time I wasn't there. So as I walk through today, some of this I'm filling in from what I know. Hopefully there's a few gaps I have

where something was done when I wasn't there, but I'll try to piece this all together for you. Okay, so the design team was led by Sean Main. Sean came in second in the second great designer search. He created Conspiracy, did Conspiracy 2. He led Magic Origins. He and I together led Kaladesh. Well, this was... So what happened was is Sean originally was going to lead... Kaladesh originally was going to be Amonkhet.

We swapped them. It was in the middle of exploratory design when we swapped them, but the plan originally was first Amonkhet, first Egypt world, then steampunk world. And then for a bunch of reasons, story reasons, various reasons, we switched them.

The reason Sean really, really had wanted to do Amonkhet was Sean actually had grown up, or spent some of his time growing up living in Egypt. So he was very knowledgeable about Egyptian mythology. In fact, when I had somebody do the research, just like I had Ethan do the research on Greek mythology for Theros, I had Sean do the research for Amonkhet. Anyway, it turned out when we swapped them, Sean was already committed to that time slot because of scheduling.

But we really wanted Sean to have the opportunity to do an Egyptian set. So we gave him the small set. We gave him Hour of Devastation. So his team was Ken Nagel, Jackie Lee, Jules Robbins, Sam Stoddard, Mel Lee, and me. Halftime. So Sam Stoddard was sort of the balance person, the developer, if you will. Mel Lee was the creative person doing all the connection to the creative stuff. And the rest of us were just making lots of cards. Also, the fact that this list is long, I think there were some people that were swapping in and out.

Plus, we decided not to count me since I was only there half-time. I helped where I could, but we made the team assuming I wasn't helping at all, even though I helped a little bit. But because I was there half-time, I didn't want to count me as a full-time person. And then the set got handed off to Dave Humphreys, who led it. So Dave Humphreys, Ian Duke, Eric Lauer, Jackie Lee, Ari Levitch, Kimberly Kranis, Tim Aiden, and Mons Johnson all did development work. Anyway, so the set came out on July 14, 2017.

So it had 199 cards in it, 70 commons, 60 uncommons, 42 rares, and 12 mythic rares. It also had 10 cards that showed up only in the two player packs. There was a Nissa Planeswalker deck, and there was a Nicole Bolas Planeswalker deck. I think each one had five new cards. There was a Planeswalker for each, and then supporting cards and such. Okay, so the basic idea of our devastation really, really came from the story. What we wanted to do was, for the longest time,

Nicole Bolas had kind of been a villain behind the scenes. Like, a lot of things would happen, and the last minute, Nicole Bolas would, like, you know, ha-ha, I was behind it the whole time. Okay, once again, I do a horrible Nicole Bolas impression. So, we always sort of, like, he's always there and he's present, but he just, he wasn't in the forefront most of the time. And that he was kind of this villain that was like, oh, he's up to something.

But what was he up to? We decided it was time to bring him to the forefront. We really wanted to demonstrate how dangerous a villain he is. He's one of our big baddies, right? We wanted you to understand why should people be afraid of Nicole Bollins? And so the plan was, the previous year, we had done Eldrazi's story,

where they meet Eldrazi, they defeat Ulamog and Kozilek, then they end up going to Innistrad, they realize Emrakul's there, and they're able to stop Emrakul, or Emrakul stops herself, but whatever. In the end, they solve the problem. It was a year long, they solved the problem.

So we thought we'd present something similar where it's like, okay, well, you know, they learn of Nicol Bolas. You know, Tezzeret's up to something. They learn Nicol Bolas in Kaladesh. They say, okay, we're going to go stop him. They go to Amonkhet and, oh, they're not prepared for what happens. And then rather than being the end of the story, and they're done, they finish Nicol Bolas,

it just starts a larger story, which is, oh my God, what is Bolas up to? So a lot of our devastation, the way I described it when I was talking about Amonkhet, was that Amonkhet was mostly top-down Egypt with a little bit of top-down Bolas. And our devastation is some top-down Egypt, but mostly top-down Egypt, with a little bit of top-down Bolas. And our devastation is some top-down Egypt, but mostly top-down Bolas. We're telling a story of Bolas' comeuppance of everything, of the Gatewatch, of Amonkhet, of the people, that we want to say, this is someone to be afraid of. This is a dragon not to mess with.

And so a lot of what we were trying to do was we were playing into this sort of destruction theme. this is something to be afraid of. This is a dragon not to mess with. And so a lot of what we were trying to do was we were playing into this sort of destruction theme that, you know, Nicole Bowles comes along and just knocks everything down. He had set up a series of gods and people and he just comes and we don't quite know what he's up to. Like when we come to Amonkhet, we know that things are, something's wrong.

We created this, we purposely, in the design, created the sense of, we wanted things to feel a little off. Just like the gate watch is like, okay, everybody seems happy, but this is just weird. What's going on? And so we wanted a big reveal. And the idea was, we had set all the pieces in motion, so the big reveal, like, was we had set all the pieces in motion so the big reveal like

what is Bolas up to and now we learn that the trials, all the stuff he had set up, the whole civilization was really just a zombie a zombie army making system. That all he wanted to do was get really trained fit soldiers and

turn them into his mindless zombie army. That all this grandiosity and the gods and all the trappings was really just to make a zombie army factory. So he comes and what we learn is, you know, we knew there were three missing gods

because they talked about the eight gods. He's warped the three missing gods. They come, they kill, well, all the hazard survives, but they kill the gods and, you know, it's utter destruction. And we clearly are playing a little bit into the trope space of sort of Egypt

has some sort of, you know, you get into the biblical stuff, there's plagues and things. We weren't trying to do too much of a biblical story, but just tapping a little bit into the idea of disaster and Egypt has a little bit that you get from that. And so the idea was, okay, let's show Bolas just devastating the world. And there's a couple factors to that.

One is, so first of all, he brings in three gods. So there's the Locust God, there's the Scorpion God, and there is the, who am I forgetting, the Scarab God. So each god has a purpose. So the Scorpion God comes and kills the gods. Now, Hazard gets away, but he kills the gods. That's his job. The Locust God brings all these locusts that eat through the Hekma, which is the protective barrier that protects the city. And then the Scarab God raises the zombie army.

So, a bunch of things. First off, he kills their gods, so that's pretty scary. Then he lowers the barrier protecting them from the outside, and we've already shown that outside the city is very dangerous. And then he raises a zombie army, and they moat through the city. So it's bad times for the denizens of Amonkhet. I mean, it's bad times. So what we wanted to do mechanically was we wanted to sort of show off this destruction, and we wanted to sort of ramp up some of the stuff we were doing.

So first off, we have the zombie army. So one of the things we had done in Am first off, we have the zombie army. So one of the things we had done in Amonkhet is we introduced the concept of zombies. So we showed two things to set ourselves up. One was we demonstrated that there's some force in Amonkhet that is raising the dead. You see it outside the city of all the black zombies. These are just wild zombies. We also show that through cartouches they have a means to control the zombies so that they're docile, essentially. At least they'll follow instructions. That's the white zombies, the white mummies.

So we sort of showed that there's this wild force that makes things turn into mummies and there's a means by which to control them. Okay, so now imagine you took the fittest, the best fighters you had, imagine you had a system to fine-tune and train people, and force them to, you know, like already you had a civilization where people were trying to be their absolute best physically, mentally, and then they fight each other, you know, and it's a system by which just to find the most fit candidates possible. And then turn them into zombies.

Mindless, fighting zombies. Okay, so now we call them the Eternals. So first thing the set had to do is we had to show off the Eternals. So we ended up doing it in two different ways. One is we took Embalm. So Embalm was a mechanic in Amonkhet where you could take

creatures that died, then you can spend mana while they're in a graveyard, and bring back a white zombie version of them. Much akin to the idea of, you know, you were embalming them in the city. You were becoming a servant. Well now, let's tweak that. Instead of becoming a servant for the city,

becoming a white mummy, you're becoming an eternal. But the eternals are a lot scarier than the normal mummies. So instead of just being whatever they are, they get bigger. They become a 4-4. So you're a 1-1 and die? Come back a 4-4. 2-2? 4-4. Whatever you are, you come back as a 4-4.

We didn't make things bigger than 4-4, by the way. We didn't talk about it. And the idea we liked about that was it tied into something the players already knew. It was a way to sort of add a new thing without re-educating everybody. It's like, okay, you know the embalm mechanic? Just change two things. It's not a white zombie, it's a black zombie, and whatever the stats are, now it's 4-4.

And so it allows us to piggyback on a lot of pre-existing knowledge to do something cool to sort of show off the Eternals. The other thing we did is we created a mechanic called Afflict. So the idea of Afflict is we wanted to create sort of this damned if you do, damned if you don't feel, which is how do you stop a zombie army, a mindless zombie army? It's kind of hard to stop them.

And the idea is whether you block them or not block them, it doesn't matter. They're sort of kind of going to get you anyway. You don't block them, they're going to hit you. You block them, well, they have Afflict. They're sort of kind of going to get you anyway. You don't block them, they're going to hit you. You block them, well, they have a flick. They're going to cause you to lose damage anyway. So it created this sort of sense of no win, which we wanted. We wanted the...

I mean, we wanted the zombie army to feel really imposing. Because we have no idea what Bolas is going to do with a zombie army. But, if you're smart, you know something not good. Because Bolas never does things, you go, well, I'm glad he did that, that was good.

So you know he's up to something nefarious, because that is what he does. He's a puppet master, so clearly he's thought eight steps ahead to try to figure out what he needs to do. Okay, also, the new mechanics were revolving around the Eternals, but we also brought back a bunch of other mechanics that we tweaked a little bit. So exert in Amonkhet was tied to the trials,

that it was a combat thing, that when you combat it, you can exert the creature to gain a bonus. Well, here we started playing around with a couple other things. The big thing is we said, okay, you can exert for different reasons. For example, if you want to activate an ability,

you can exert to activate an ability. Don't be in combat at all. You know, normally you tap to do something, but you can sort of super tap, if you will, meaning you won't untap next turn. So it's funny, we definitely played around with this mechanic, essentially, in Time Spiral Black with double tapping. And this is a cleaner way of doing it, but in many ways it is double tapping. It's just a cleaner way of doing it, but in many ways, it is double tapping. It's just a cleaner way of doing double tapping.

The other thing we played around with with Exert is you, the player, sort of being able to exert. So we made a cycle of rare spells where the idea is you can cast it really cheap, but you're essentially exerting yourself, and the way we showed that is your lands don't untap. So I can kill all the creatures for three mana for one BB, one black black, but then I don't untap next turn. And so we like the idea of playing with... Now, those cards don't actually say exert

on them. We tried to make them say exert and the templating didn't work out. So we sort of said, well, you'll get it. This deals like exert. We brought back cycling. We brought back aftermath. We tweaked them a little tiny, but not too big a tweak on those mechanics. deals like Xert. We brought back cycling. We brought back Aftermath. We tweaked them a little tiny, but not too big of tweaks on those mechanics.

Another big thing we did is we knew we wanted to interact with the desert. We actually, we knew in the story that the desert was going to be invading the city, that once the Hekma goes down, the outside desert comes in. So we wanted deserts to matter, in. So we wanted deserts to matter

and we knew we wanted deserts to matter more in Auer than we wanted to matter in Amonkhet. We spent a lot of time actually messing around with them in Amonkhet trying to get a sense of what we wanted the deserts to do and then once we kind of figured out what we liked we pulled way back and shipped it off to Auer of Devastation. Now, Hour of Devastation did a couple things with deserts that are interesting. One is the original desert, the one from Arabian Nights. Tap for Cullis, and then you can tap and do one damage to any attacking creature. We did try bringing that back. We played with it a little harsh.

You got a couple of the deserts out, and just your opponent couldn't attack. So it became a little too daunting. And we didn't like the way it impacted both limited and constructed. But we brought back other deserts that did similar things. Now, for starters, we moved away from deserts just being colorless. And the idea of, you know, you could have things that represent colored components. We also did this cool thing where some of the effects require you to sacrifice a desert. Not themselves. So instead of saying sacrifice card name or sacrifice

this card, it says sacrifice a desert. Now this thing is a desert, so in a vacuum you can just sacrifice it, but if you're playing with some extra deserts you can get some utility out of those deserts. And we really like the idea of deserts being a resource or something you can get some utility out of those deserts. And we really like the idea of deserts being a resource, something you can play around with, something we can ratchet up an hour. We also messed around with a little bit, we actually did a bunch more with minus one, minus one counters, and then realized late in the process

that there was a lot going on in the set. It just was so full of so many different things that we decided to pull back a little bit. So there's still a little bit of a minus one, minus one counter, but not as much as existed for quite a while. Brick counters, we tried to sort of turn that on its ear. So the brick counters in Amiket were about building up. Were about, you know, I need one brick,

I need two brick, I need three brick. Aha, I finished my monument. Now I get more power out of it. So this one was a little reverse, where it's breaking down as you're using it, and you only have so much uses out of it. But I like this sort of the parallel. One of the things that's really different between Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation is we are telling very different stories. Sometimes, I mean, in general, we want some twist.

We want something about the small set to be, you know, something's happening. But oftentimes the twist is not quite as severe. This one was pretty severe. You're seeing the city in all its glory. And while it's a little creepy, it's a nice city. And in the second set, it's like, oh, now comes Nicole Bolton, knock down everyone's toys. It is just a real twist in the feel of things. The other thing was, I learned an important lesson during Dark Ascension. So in Dark Ascension, in the story, the humans were... They were already in trouble in Innistrad, but in

Dark Ascension, things go from bad to worse. And the humans are on the brink of extinction. So I spent a lot of time and energy trying to sort of capture the idea of the plight of the humans. When I realized, Tom Lapilli, who was the head developer for the set,

sort of said to me, he goes, I think the cool part about the set is not that the humans are losing, it's that the monsters are winning. And I realized that he was right, that I was so centric, I'm so focused on sort of the POV characters, if you will, that I forgot that part of the fun of magic isn't just cowering in fear, it's being the badass. And here we had a situation where there was lots of

badasses. There were monsters galore. There were, you know, vampires and werewolves and zombies and spirits and okay, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, the humans were in deep, deep trouble, but somebody was having fun and that was the monsters. And so I really revamped it to try to say, hey, you can play as the monsters. We did a similar thing here where, you know, we're watching Bolas destroy everything. It's like, do you want to be the people who everything's being destroyed around you? Or do you want to do the destruction? I'm like, you know what? Doing the destruction, that's a lot more fun.

So we sort of put you in the POV of Bolas and that the mechanics of the game make you feel very like Bolas. Summon the new god, just destroy things, you know, cause chaos that we really wanted you to sort of feel powerful. And the way to feel powerful in Arbent of Temptation is to sort of be on Bolas' side and get a sense of how the

gameplay matches Bolas. Now there were a lot of other little things we did in the set. Like one of the things in general is as much as I said the first set was more top-down Egypt, the second set was still top-down Egypt. We still were trying to get Egyptian influences. But the one thing we had saved was we sort of... Egypt has some, you know,

calm sunny height of the civilization tropes, and it has some sort of disastrous, things-go-wrong kind of tropes. So we sort of saved the disaster tropes, if you will, and we used them when we got there. Now, another important part of this story was we needed a comeuppance of the heroes. That the Gatewatch, like, we formed a team, and we wanted the team to have a couple of victories under the belt.

Because if you get a team and the very first time they get together, things go horribly wrong, they don't stay a team. So we needed enough victories that they sort of started, you know, getting a little bit of a team bond and sort of we wanted them happy with what they were doing. We wanted them to feel like we're doing good work. But then, once you get your characters feeling comfortable, once it's like, okay, I think this might work,

that's when you sort of change things up. That's when you bring in outside stuff. And we really felt it was important that we needed them to have a loss. We needed the Gatewatch to get a little overconfident, to be a little more insured of their ways. And the funny thing is, when you look back, like Oath of the Gatewatch to get a little overconfident, to be a little more insured of their ways. And the funny thing is, when you look back, like, Otha Gatewatch,

they managed to beat Ulamog and Kozilek. But, like, they have a little bit of luck on their side. You know, they managed to piece something together. They were able to defeat them. But they get a little bit lucky doing so. Then we go to Innistrad. And in the end, Emrakul... Emrakul probably was more responsible for Emrakul being in the moon

than the Gatewatch was. And then we get to Kaladesh, and like, okay, they kind of saved the day. They stopped the revolution. Or they, or start the revolution. But in the end, Tezzeret still gets away. They don't, you know, their victory is not quite as absolute.

Because like, oh, the Gatewatch, they get lucky, absolute win. Innistrad, they think they have a win. We know behind the scenes it's not quite as much a win as they think.

Kaladesh, okay, they have some victory, but there's a lot, a lot of goals that they don't want. And it's clear that the main bad guy of the story

gets away with the thing he wanted. So they don't quite stop the bad guy. But the idea is we wanted them to get sort of, you know, some victories, and then we wanted them to come in and wanted them to sort of get tested in a way that was going to really, you know, you really want your heroes to go through the gauntlet.

You want your heroes to go through the gauntlet. Your heroes need to have some losses. The part of growth for characters is having things not quite go your way. And when we knew that we wanted to deliver them a loss, it was pretty clear that Bolas was the right person to do it. We hadn't really seen Bolas have a giant victory, and so we wanted to do that. And so one of the big things also was trying to figure out sort of how to demonstrate that the gate watch get utterly,

and not just beat, by the way. The idea is that Bolas customizes how he beats each one. So he is maximizing beating them in the worst possible way for them. And, you know, the defeat cycle, I know Sean had really wanted a cycle representing their defeat and there's a lot of discussions about the defeat cycle it's a weird cycle it does some strange things it definitely is bending a little bit in the color pie

it's definitely it's a very bold sort of cycle but I liked it I liked what I was trying to do I really appreciated I like when we're trying to do an important story moment of really doing something that showcases it in a loud way because I didn't want anybody missing the fact that the Gatewatch is utterly defeated. That Bolas

is the victor here. That's an important part of the story. Now by the way I understand from some people that we kind of didn't let you know that this was a bigger story at the time. We definitely led you a little bit on the path to think like, oh, okay, I guess we'll wrap this up. We'll wrap up the Eldrazi story because we wanted a little bit of a surprise. Like, part of the comeuppance of the Gatewatch was we didn't want you knowing it was there. And so that required us sort of, I mean, allowing you to make assumptions so you would assume that we were doing something similar to how we'd done before

when we know we were doing things a little bit differently. Now, for those that are wondering, we are not going to let the Nicole Bola story linger. It is not like, and six years from now, maybe we'll get another clue. We are doing an ongoing story. We are doing something in which the pieces all are going to start clicking together. And, you know, you have not seen the last of Nicola Bolas. He's not going to disappear for six years or anything. Okay, almost to work.

So that, my friends, is the nuts and bolts of how we made our devastation. the nuts and bolts of how we made our devastation. You know, there was a lot of... We tried a bunch of different things. Oh, here's, real quick, a mechanic we didn't do, but it was an interesting mechanic. It didn't end up playing out right. So we made a mechanic that was the opposite of bolster. So bolster is a mechanic where you put it

on your lowest toughness creature, I think. And so the idea was a minus one, minus one mechanic that you put on your highest toughness creature. So the idea was

it was a mechanic that usually didn't kill things because it had to go on your biggest thing. That it kind of wounded your big thing rather than killed

your little things. It didn't quite play out as well as we'd hoped, but it was a mechanic that we had messed around with. Like I said, there's a little bit more we played around with minus one, minus one counters that actually ended up in the file. There were so many moving pieces going on here, because essentially, we took every

Amiket mechanic, some of them we evolved, but we took every Amiket mechanic, we added in a flick, so a brand new mechanic that wasn't an evolution of anything. We added in the desert, so a brand new mechanic that wasn't an evolution of anything. We added in the desert theme that was sort of there in Amiket but not very loud. We turned up the volume on that.

So we did a whole bunch of different things and we just were running out of space. So we had to pull back somewhere and we wanted to make sure we weren't overrunning the audience with too much going on. But anyway, my friends, I'm now at work.

So let's see how we're doing on time today. Oh, so I made good time so hopefully when the dust settles the settles or the sand I think

Art of Devastation was a fun set I mean it was a very flavorful set and like I said it was I'm not sure how often we make a set

where the point of the set is showing off a character in a grandiose way this was meant to be Nicole Bolas' set. We wanted to show you sort of why you should be afraid of Nicole Bolas and what he is capable of. And while we didn't tell you

the whole plan, we definitely hinted at there are things afoot. He has a zombie army, a pretty powerful zombie army. What's it going to do with that? Something. But anyway, stay tuned, and as the story unfolds,

you'll start to find out what exactly he's up to. But anyway, as I'm now at work, we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.