Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #482: Ixalan, Part 2

Episode Date: October 27, 2017

This is part two of a three-part series about the design of Ixalan.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And I dropped my son off at camp. Okay, so last we talked, I started talking, telling the story of Ixalan's design. And I didn't finish because there's lots of the story. Now, when last I left off, we had just gotten to the point where the set had four factions and dinosaurs have been added but as an extra bonus they weren't in any faction originally okay but before I get to that story I realize I forgot an important story from earlier something that I didn't even put in my article because I forgot about it but this is a good story so let me mention this so one of the early things we messed around with when we were trying to figure out how to do locations and double-faced lands is

we had this idea early on of that you had lands that you would lay claim to and then it would upgrade to a better version of the land. That's one of the really early versions of the double-faced lands. And so we liked the idea that you made use of your creatures, but at the time, vehicles was in Kaladesh, and vehicles, when you crewed something,

you had a number, and then you crewed that many creatures. So if it said crew four, it meant you needed to have four creatures. So we were trying to make it unlike crew. So we tried this thing where the number wasn't the number of creatures, but rather the combined power of the creatures. And so the idea was, you know, crew four wouldn't mean four creatures. It would mean a combination of creatures whose power adds up to four. So we were playing with it. It was playing well. We liked it. But meanwhile,

I was watching that Kaladesh was struggling with the vehicles. And I realized that in trying to sort of do something different from the vehicles, we actually came up with something that might have worked for the vehicles. So I went to Ian and Eric, who were the co-leads or the co-lead developers of Calidash, because it was in development at that point. And I said to them, look, I'm experimenting with something in Ixalan, but maybe this might be your answer for vehicles. And so I told them, and I think Ian was a bit skeptical, but he said, okay, let's try it. And then it worked out, and vehicles ended up changing its crew number to mean from number of creatures to combined power of creatures. And that actually came originally from Ixalan.

Now, once that happened, then Ixalan had a change of what we were doing. And I think that's what made us move away from land on both sides to the front side was something that got you to the land. We more played into the exploring space, I think. And the treasure map that led to the place where the treasure was. But anyway, I had forgotten about that. That was how Ixalan had a number of mechanics that ended up helping other people, other sets. So this was how we helped Kaladesh. Okay, so moving on to the story where I left it off. Okay, so what I explained was, I had asked the creative team if we could move from three factions to four factions,

and we figured out where each of the factions were going to go, we were going to have a black, blue, red pirate faction, a white, black vampire conquistador faction, a red, white, green sun empire, sort of Aztec warrior faction, and then a green, blue faction that they needed to come up with something for. I think the original version were these elementalists, these druids, that used elemental magic and that protected, sort of,

were protectors of the forest. And then, because they realized that there was some, like, this was the set that was the least clear. Like, a lot of other sets we do, it's like, oh, we're doing Egyptian. We're doing steampunk. And we were doing things in which it was more grokkable what it was.

And this set was a weird set. It had a lot of different combinations, and we were still trying to figure it out. So the creative team wanted to put a little extra oomph in it, and they came up with the idea of dinosaurs. So one of the reasons they got to dinosaurs is a lot of the trope space we were playing in was we were playing with Mesoamerican, so South African, sorry, South American sort of stuff. And there's a thing called the Lost World, which sort of stems from this area.

The idea of, it's kind of where the trope of the Golden City comes from. You know, the road to El Dorado and stuff like that. But anyway, as we played around the space, the Lost World sometimes is intersected with dinosaurs. Sometimes the Lost World is like it's a place that time forgot. And so the trope sometimes messes around with dinosaurs. We're like, oh, okay,

we can sort of combine that. And so the idea originally was that dinosaurs were just going to be this added thing, that there's four factions, and then just like as peppering, there'll be dinosaurs. The problem, what I realized was, is if we're going to have dinosaurs, I'm like, we should call them dinosaurs. Like, there was an argument early on about whether they'd be creature type lizard or creature type bird or something else. And I was like, no, no, no, no. The reason you do a creature type is does the word have enough, you know,

cachet to it that it excites people? You know, if you open up a card and see creature type that word, does that excite people? And there's a line, like, for example, I had this fight with a werewolf. To me, werewolf clearly crosses the line. It's exciting. It's a werewolf. N I had this fight with a werewolf to me werewolf clearly crosses the line

exciting it's a werewolf naga a little more of a fight I think we had chosen to make naga its own type but there's a lot

of pushback a lot of people would rather naga be snake so there's there's an interesting thing dinosaur to me was not close to the line

like dinosaurs are awesome you know hey there's dinosaurs but they're lizards whatever birds whatever you make them. And so it was clear

that we wanted to call them dinosaurs. Okay, well, we already knew that we were leaning toward doing a tribal set. And I'm like, look, magic hasn't really done dinosaurs. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like pirates,

there have been a few individual dinosaurs. And even in the early days, there were a couple cards that actually literally has the word dinosaur written on them. But we've moved away.

I think dinosaurs stopped getting supported as a creature type because we didn't use it a lot. I think it went to lizard. And, you know, I knew that, you know, while we had done

a handful of them, once again, if something we hadn't done right, I knew people would be excited. And I'm like, how in the world do you do a tribal set and not have dinosaur tribal when dinosaurs are in it? So I went back and I said, OK, here's our problem.

If dinosaurs are a tribe, which they're going to be, there's no way for us to do dinosaurs, introduce dinosaurs. There's a world with dinosaurs. Hey, it's a tribal set and go, well, but no, no tribal dinosaurs. Um, I go, that just wouldn't work. So I said, can we figure out some way to have the dinosaurs be, be part of one of the factions, you know? Um, and so the first pass on it was we made it part of the green blue faction. And I think they shifted from being elementalists to being beastmasters. That they were sort of masters of the forest and of the animals and that one of the tools

that they used is they had these wild dinosaurs that they I'm sure control is the right word, but worked with them. So for a while, dinosaurs were in blue-green. Okay, so one of the things that I was trying to do is looking at, like, Amonkhet Black, for example. We had a lot of mechanics, and I was trying to cut down the number of mechanics.

There was some deciduous stuff that was going to show up. We knew vehicles were going to be there. We knew Transform was going to be there. But I decided for, like, outside of the deciduous stuff, I only wanted three mechanics. And maybe less than three, maybe two mechanics. So I came up with an idea how to do four factions with two mechanics. And the idea was that we decided that we would take the factions and divide them into two groups. One group was more the outsiders, the people sort of on ships,

which would be the vampires and the pirates. And the other would be the more natives, the ones that live on the land, which would be the Sun Empire and the Beastmasters at this point. And so the idea was we would give each one... We would have the outsider share mechanic with a tweak and have the sort of native share mechanic but with a tweak. And the idea being that there would only be two mechanics, but that how the mechanics get used could vary between the factions.

So the two things we came up with was plunder and enlist. So plunder was a variant of bloodthirst. So what plunder said basically is it's a spell, and if you cast a spell and this turn a creature has dealt combat damage to an opponent, you got a rider. Kind of like how with Morbid, if

something has died this turn you get a rider. Or like bloodthirst, obviously, are creatures that come in with plus and plus encounters if your opponent had done something in particular. So what we did is that was the plunder mechanic. The idea was we wanted the pirates to do something different than how the vampires would do it.

So the idea we came up with is the pirates would loot. You know, looting is in blue and red, and we figured, you know, black. We could leave it a little bit in black. And then the pirates, I'm sorry, the vampires would drain. Once again, black drains all the time. White usually, I mean, white's capable of doing damage and gaining life, but usually it doesn't do it together.

But we're like, okay, a little bit of, you know, a little bit of maybe, you know, we, whenever you're doing factions, there's a little bit of bleeding to try to sort of match the overall flavor. And the vampires clearly, draining made sense for the vampires, or vampires. So the idea is, vampires that plunder into draining,

I think we drained two, is that what we did? And then the pirates would loot. And I think they would draw, then discard, just because that was slightly better, rather than rummaging, which red does, which is discard then draw.

Okay. The next thing we did is... That was Plunder. So then I was Enlist. So Enlist was kind of like a kicker where you got a creature token. So the idea was it went on spells and if you paid extra... So the Sun Empire

would get you a 1-1 Warrior, because we were playing up Warriors at the time. And the Beastmasters would get you a 3-3 Dinosaur that couldn't block. The reason we couldn't block was we wanted it big enough to feel like a dinosaur, but we wanted it to be aggressive. We didn't want it just to get giant dinosaurs and then nobody can attack you. So we made it a 3-3 that couldn't block. And so the idea was, oh, and then we separated, we said, okay, we'll take two of them. We

took the pirates and the Sun Empire and we said, this mechanic is going to go on creatures. and the Sun Empire, and we said, this mechanic is going to go on creatures. And then for the vampires and the beastmasters, we made it go on spells, on instants and sorceries. So the idea was that, yes, vampires and pirates have plunder, but there's two divides between them. One is the effect is different between the two, and the second is what kind of cards it goes on is different between the two. So that way, and the same with Enlist and the Beastmasters and the Sun Empire. So the idea essentially was that there were four factions,

each which had a unique mechanic, but the mechanics overlapped, so we weren't introducing four mechanics, just two mechanics. And then the idea is, we knew locations would be there, and that would be the added thing, that there were two color combinations that didn't overlap between factions, and that was white-blue and black-green. And so we decided that white-blue could be the location matter and color at the time. So we had this little grid.

I think in my column, I think we made the little grid. I showed you the grid off. And anyway, it was a very complicated thing. It was kind of, from a male perspective, very elegant and is really cool. And it didn't quite work. It didn't... It was a little too limiting in how it sort't quite work. It didn't... It was a little too limiting in how it sort of functioned. So anyway, we were playing around with it.

The other thing that happened around that time is I realized that we had made a mistake, that the factions weren't equal. There were two three-color factions and two two-color factions. And so the two-color factions, there was one way to play them. You want to play vampires? Well, draft white and black. And the problem was the dinosaurs at the time, which a lot of people wanted to play,

were only in blue and green. And what we found was the drafts were getting unbalanced because too many people were trying to draft blue and green. And what that said to me is, people want to play dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are exciting. And so I said, okay, you know, pirates are already three-color. That's exciting. Let's shift.

Let's get the dinosaurs into a three-color tribe. Because what I said is, look, the exciting things are the pirates and the dinosaurs. You know, if you're in a three-color faction, you have not just one color combination, one two-color combination, you have three just one color combination, one two color combination, you have three two color combinations. So example, the pirates could be blue black, could be blue red, could be red black, that there's an option for how you made them. There was a choice of, you know, what combination you did. And so I went back to the creative team and here's the theme you will see is we did a lot of trying to figure things out and there's a lot of requests made by the creative team.

And so a quick minute for hats off. We went to them and said, not two factions, three factions. Then not three factions, four factions. And then, okay, could the dinosaurs be in a faction? And then, well, not that faction. Could the dinosaurs be in a different faction? We went through the ringer with them. And they were awesome.

They were awesome. And, I mean, at every level, part of a collaborative process is realizing you're doing things to make things better. They understood that. But there was a lot of asks from the creative team. And so I just want to sort of say thank you for them doing that. Okay. Okay. So the big conversation was, how do you get the dinosaurs in?

Um, and so there's a big talk about what colors would dinosaurs be. Um, and so we said, okay, if dinosaurs could be any color, what color would they be? Well, number one, they'd be green. Everyone agrees with that. They're big, giant creatures. Green is the big creature color. Number two, um, it was either red or blue is what people decided. Red also has big, kind of aggressive creatures.

And red's more on the feral side of things. Blue had stuff like serpents and sometimes had the big, giant monsters of the water. And there's a lot of water dinosaurs. And so the idea was we could do red or we could do blue. So the idea was in a vacuum, if we wanted to do dinosaurs, the colors that dinosaurs wanted to be, they would be green, red, blue. But here was the problem. We liked the pirates in blue, red, black.

We really felt like green pirates didn't make any sense, white pirates didn't make any sense. and we wanted them in three colors. So what that meant was you were only allowed to overlap the three color tribes by one color. So that meant either both of them could have red or both of them could have blue. The other thing we had to look at is what was the remaining tribe. We really liked the pirates being white black. Okay, so there were two options. If we made the one faction green, white, red, which is what we had previously had, it meant the other faction was green, blue.

If we changed it so it was red, green, white, blue, that meant the other one was red, green. And so we sort of went to the creator team and said, okay, we need to figure out what goes in the missing faction because if we move the dinosaurs

they're kind of missing some oomph and what exactly is the faction for the dinosaurs in the end we realized that part of making white work because we kind of had to have white the pirates were black, blue, red, and the dinosaurs were in the faction,

the three-collar faction that wasn't pirates, it had to have green and white. We had a choice between red and blue, but we had to have green and white. And one of the reasons that white made a little bit of sense is if the dinosaurs had a little bit of domestication to them. And so we said, okay, what if we took the Sun Empire and kept them as the red, white, green, but instead of making them a warrior tribal, what if they had dinosaurs?

What if they rode dinosaurs, and then they got to be the dinosaur tribal? And it explained sort of, we liked the idea of the Sun Empire in green, white, red. It also didn't require a lot. I mean, there was reworking and figuring out how the dinosaurs were mounted and stuff, but it wasn't a significant amount of rework for the Sun Empire. Remember, every time we asked for a change,

it came along with reconfiguring things and figuring out who the factions were. And every change is work. And so they're like, okay, can we please, if we move the dinosaurs into the Sun Empire, we don't need to... I mean, there's some work, but it's not a change is work. And so they're like, okay, can we please, if we move the dinosaurs into the Sun Empire, we don't need to, I mean, there's some work, but it's not a lot, a lot of work. And then that left green-blue. We needed sort of green-blue to have something.

And that's when they came back with us with an interesting idea. What if we sort of went back to the idea of sort of magical druid-type people that were casting sort of elemental-ish magic, but we made them merfolk. And we were like, ooh, that sounds cool, merfolk. That's like, you know, we're talking about doing a tribal set. Like, we knew people liked vampires, just because vampires have always been a fan favorite.

We had faith, obviously, in pirates and dinosaurs. Oh, merfolk felt like a pretty cool thing that people like. They already built tribal decks out of it. Oh, that seems pretty cool. And just as we were adding white vampires, we'd be adding green merfolk. Now, we knew it was a little bit different, you know, but we decided if we played them as of the forest

and, you know, they're more of the streams of the forest, that we could get a green aspect to them. And like I said, while I'm much more cautious to be bleeding mechanics, when we find good flavor, like I like the idea that Amonkhet found a place to make white mummies. It made

sense as white mummies. And that we in Ixalan had found a place to make white vampires make sense. Just like we found a way to make green merfolk make sense. I like when we can sort of twist things up. And by adding green merfolk to the mix, we've now allowed way to make green merfolk mix-ins. I like when we can sort of twist things up. And by adding green merfolks to the mix, we've now allowed you to make some merfolk decks

you could never, ever make before, because there would never be merfolk before. And so this allowed you to sort of just add a new element to your merfolk deck. And there's a lot of merfolks in Magic. One of the things about a tribal thing in general is backward compatibility is nice for tribal because it allows you to sort of mix with history.

We were doing some cool new tribals with pirate dinosaurs, so we knew that it would be nice if the two other tribes had a lot of backward compatibility. Vampire obviously did, and merfolk does. So we really felt that was nice. Okay, so around this time was the six-month period. So what happened was I had led the first six months with Ken Nagel on the team, and then Ken ran the second six months with me most of the time on the team.

At the very, very end, I got pulled off to do more Dominaria stuff. But anyway, we were coming up to the point where the crossover happens, where I hand the reins to Ken. And so basically before I left, I solidified that it was four factions. I solidified that the dinosaurs and the vampires, not the vampires, the dinosaurs and the pirates were the three color factions. And when factions. And when I left Ken, I left him with Enlist and Plunder as the two mechanics that crisscrossed the square thing. As I said, it didn't work out, but really it was during Ken's reign that we figured out that it wasn't working out. So the next thing Ken tried is, he said, okay, what if we take Enlist and spread Enlist over all four colors? What if each of the factions had the ability to summon a creature of its faction,

and then maybe we put a mechanic somewhere else. And so what happened was, what Ken tried was, for each of the factions, so dinosaurs, so I mean, not with the Sun Empire, but dinosaurs were still three, three creatures that couldn't block.

Oh, one of the things we had figured out was we had centered at the time, this would, Sam would later change this, but at the time we made for each faction a priority color, meaning the color that the, the color that was most responsible for doing the tribal stuff. Because one of the ideas we had at the time was maybe what we want to do is focus the tribal rewards in one color so when you're drafting, it's not that every pirate deck is full-out tribal, it's that, you know, there's different pirates

and that certain decks would push more of the tribalness of the pirates while other ones might play up flavor aspects of the pirates or of the dinosaurs. So what we had done was pirates were in black, vampires were in white, dinosaurs were in green, and merfolk were in blue. We realized that the vampires in white was quirky, but the way it played out, and then red, the reason red didn't have one is red was the overlap color between the two threes. And so red had this theme of pick a color where so the idea was dinosaur tribal was centered in green uh pirate tribal centered in black vampire tribal for the set was centered in white and merfolk tribal

centered in blue um yeah yeah the the vampire was a little quirky um but it allowed us to get dinosaurs in green and merfolk in blue. And then red had a choose-me theme because red overlapped the two three-collar, so it had a little mini-theme of, hey, choose a creature type, and then it applied whatever you chose to give you some flexibility.

So what happened was Ken enlisted him to make creatures of that color. So the Sun Empire made three three dinosaurs that couldn't block. He used the same token, but moved So the Sun Empire made three dinosaurs that couldn't block. He used the same token but moved to the Sun Empire. The pirates made two black menace creatures. The vampires made

one-one lifeling creatures. And the merfolk made I think one-one hexproof. I think it was hexproof creatures. And then the idea that Ken had is what if each one of them not only got a

different token, but paid for it a different way? So the vampires paid for it in life, because they had a life theme and they were gaining life. The pirates discarded a card just to kind of play into that looting thing we had had.

I think the dinosaurs, the Sun Empire was mana, and then the merfolk was. I think the dinosaurs, the Sun Empire was mana, and then the merfolk was bouncing, I think, land to your hand? Or bouncing something, maybe a permanent to your hand. So what Ken does is, he was trying to use one mechanic

and then just sort of spread it out. But what he found was, he actually made it infinitely more confusing. Because when you saw the word enlist, you didn't know what you had to do to make the enlist, you didn't know what you got, and it just became this really complicated thing. It wasn't simplifying things, it was complicating things.

And so Ken realized that, okay, that was a mistake. And once again, we experimented. This went through a lot of iteration, and so there were different times trying that out, but the enlist experiment didn't work. And so Ken decided that maybe it was time

to stop trying to overlap mechanics. And so Ken said, okay, what if we just had two mechanics, one for the dinosaurs, one for the pirates, and that the merfolk and the vampires could have mechanical themes. It wasn't that they wouldn't have a mechanical theme, but just we wouldn't have a keyword associated with it.

That was a way to keep it simple. Now, interestingly, during this, Ken was messing around with what he called land trips. So the idea was there already was a little exploration flavor in the set.

And so he had some spells that when you cast it, you reveal the top card of your library, and if it was a creature, sorry, not creature, if it was a land, you got to put it in your hand. He was just trying to, with the enlisting, basically there's a need for extra mana. So he was trying to just get some land smoothing, get extra land in people's hands.

So I think he put it on Instants and Sorceries, and there was a little rider that said, oh, I can fog, and maybe I get a land, or I can counter a spell, and maybe get a land, or giant growth, or whatever. You know, basic effects that you would do on Instants and Sorceries. So Mark Gottlieb saw this. He liked it, but he said,

he said, you feel bad when you miss. So Mark had an idea. He goes, what if instead of being on spells, we put it on creatures, and then you look and try to find the land on top of your library. If it's a land, you get it. But if it's not a land,

you could put it back on top or bottom, kind of like Scry, and then you get a plus one, plus one counter. So the idea was, something good's going to happen. You know, maybe I get a land, and that's good. Or maybe my creature gets bigger, and that's cry. And then you get a plus one, plus one counter. So the idea was something good is going to happen. You know, maybe I get a land and that's good. Or maybe my creature gets bigger and that's good. And the idea was these things would be flavor as explorers.

That's why it was on creatures. These creatures were explorers. And so they played with that and it really was fun. And it played into the exploration theme. I don't think it got keyworded until development. It might have got keyworded during Divine, like the end of design. But the mechanic got made during design.

I just don't know whether or not it was keyworded during design. It might have been. Actually, I take that back. I think Gottlieb did keyword it. I think Gottlieb's idea was, let's consolidate and keyword it. So I think it did get keyworded.

So we're about to wrap up here from Kent's part. Design's about to end. And for those that don't realize, the way design works, obviously, for those that... I'm not sure when this comes out whether my new columns come out yet explaining the changeover to the new system. But this is the old system. Design

used to be for a year. There was a two-month overlap on large sets where design and development worked together called Divine, and then development took over the file for, I don't know, nine months or so. So we were coming up to development, and so Explore was in the set.

Might have even been called Explore, I'm not sure. Ken had played around with a bunch of pirate mechanics and dinosaur mechanics. I'm almost out of time, so we're going to bunch of pirate mechanics and dinosaur mechanics. I'm almost out of time, so we're going to get to the pirate and dinosaur mechanics tomorrow. But he had played with it. But really, when the handover happened to Sam,

Sam and Eric co-led the development, when it got handed over, Explorer was in the set, the transforming lands were in the set, or at least the flavor. There was a lot of individual car design that still went on during development. But the general idea of it's a treasure map on one side

and the land on the other side. That general flavor was already there. And we had vehicles. We knew we were going to do vehicles. I think Sam pulled back on how many vehicles and no common vehicles and stuff like that. We'll get to that. But anyway, at this point, it's the handoff.

So Ken hands off to Sam. The set was in a rougher than normal spot. I mean, we definitely knew it was about dinosaurs and pirates. We had focused on them. We had made sure. We knew it was a tribal set. We knew who our four tribes were. We had Explorer.

We had the double-faced cards. We had vehicles. But we didn double-faced cards. We had vehicles. But we didn't yet have the pirate mechanic. We didn't yet have the dinosaur mechanic. Both of those, we had inkling what we wanted, and next time I'm going to talk about sort of how we got those mechanics. But anyway, that's where things were

when the set got handed over from design to development. So anyway, guys, obviously, I'm not quite done yet, so I'll have one more podcast where I explain the final piece of how Ixalan came to be mechanically. But anyway, I'm now at work. So we all 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.