Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #489: Unstable, Part 2

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

This podcast is part 2 of 3 of the story of Unstable's design.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I get to continue telling the story of unstable design. Okay so when last we left off, when last we left off, I talked about how I wanted to have factions because I wanted to kind of do a modern, I wanted to apply modern creative to an unset. And I liked the idea in Mad Science's world that there were different factions that all used, you know, Mad Science in different ways.

And we started with trying to figure out where the goblins were, because Steamflugger Boss was going to be in the set, and obviously we were trying to bring to life Steamflugger Boss. Like, okay, well, clearly one of the factions had to be goblins. Goblins like to fiddle with things. They were the perfect fit for the set. They're silly. Everything about them was right.

So when trying to figure out where to put the goblins, I ended up realizing that red-green, because I wanted to do two colors, that red-green was the right place to put them. That I didn't want to make mono-white or mono-blue goblins. That didn't feel right, and mono black made him feel a little too mean. That really wasn't, black goblins tend to get into Tolkien goblin type territory. Okay, so once I had red green, I decided that, okay, I guess that means

we're going down a path of ally colors. It's funny, later on in Kansatar Kier and then later in Ixalan I started playing around with cycles that weren't that weren't asymmetric cycles or things that weren't you know

there's the idea that if I do a cycle it has to be ally or enemy I sort of started breaking through that later on but remember I started this a long time ago, so a lot of that work happened after I had already started this set. So once I had red, green, I just had a mindset of, oh, that means ally. I don't think now I would necessarily assume that,

but at the time I did. So what that meant was, okay, so I have four other factions. I have white, blue, I have blue, black, I have black-red, and I have green-white. And I wanted each faction to mess with science in a different way. That was kind of my, the thing that was, okay, how are they doing that? So the first one, after we got the goblins sort of locked in, the next one was, I thought back to Esper. So for those who don't know the story, Shards of Alara basically was a world in which the world is split into

five shards, five pieces. And each was its own world, essentially. And what happened was two of the colors of mana were absent. So the idea in the shards was there were three consecutive colors on the color wheel, and it was kind of the world,

the dream world of the center color because its enemies were gone. So Esper was white, blue, and black, but it was kind of the blue world because its enemies were gone, you know, that didn't have red or green. And so I really like this idea of a world where you're trying to meet your absolute perfection. Oh, and what happened was we broke into mini teams for it, and I was in charge of the Esper team. In fact, the Esper team, I talk about how Unstable owes itself to the Council of Marks. Esper owns itself to the Council of Marks as well, but a slightly different council.

Me and Globus, which both had to do with Unstable, and Mark Gottlieb were the three people that made that faction. And we came to this interesting idea of they were creatures that were constantly improving themselves. And we had a theme where they were all artifact creatures because they were constantly fiddling with themselves. And I liked a lot the idea of, well, what if the white-blue were kind of like cyborgs? You know, what if they were constantly trying to improve themselves? And I knew that we were going to have an artifact theme in the set because we were doing steampunk and invention and stuff. And I like the idea that one of the

factions, not only do they care about artifacts, because of the nature of this, all of them would care in some way. But I like the idea that they themselves were artifacts, that I'm sort of going down that Esper route. And because we're playing with comedy, I knew that we could sort of push it to the nth degree. Well, the idea is, okay, you're improving yourselves. Well, the difference between Esper, where, you know, it's more of a serious take on how do you improve yourself through other means. In this world, I like the idea that they ended up becoming what we call the order of the sprocket.

And the idea is that they kind of improved themselves, but kind of at a silly level. The way I would describe it is they're basically... They have sort of steam technology. And the idea is, you know, if I could probably make toast faster if my left hand were a toaster, or if I replaced my left hand with a toaster.

Um, and so they have a lot of these sort of weird, you know, that they're constantly trying to prove themselves, but in a way that was, um, you know, in a way that was kind of silly. I mean, all these others. The key to comedy, by the way, is to take an idea that's a good, serious idea and then just take it to its silly extreme. So I love the idea of taking what we had done with Esper in Shardulara and saying, okay, that was a more serious take on it. Let's have fun. Well, if I can

improve myself in any way by changing things, what would I do? And then we started getting these creatures that just sort of have weird upgrades for the sake of weird upgrades. Now, we'll eventually get to, we actually did a world building. We actually got artists in and had them sort of riff off these different factions.

But we haven't got to that part of the story yet. So anyway, so cyborgs was sort of where I started. It's like, okay, they're cyborgs. They make themselves better. They're artifact creatures. I kind of mechanically had an idea of what I wanted to do with them. So that was the next faction that I figured out. Okay, then we got to Blue Black. I think when I started with

Blue Black, my original idea was they were all ninjas, and that their weapons were all, that they were sort of weapon-based was the idea. They were, you know, ninjas using cool ninja technology. That's where I started. And at the time, the project went on so long that I went through multiple creative reps. In the end, the one who did the most work, or the one that ended up doing the names and the flavor text was Kelly Diggs. But for a long time leading up to that, Doug Byer was my creative rep. But for a long time leading up to that, Doug Beyer was my creative rep. And so when I first was starting to put the factions together, I went to Doug with the idea of ninjas. And Doug said, ah, that's a little restrictive.

He's like, there could be ninjas in it, but could we step back a little bit? And so the idea we sort of, okay, ninjas specifically, we pull back a little bit to spies. Because ninjas on some levels are like spies, you know. And one of the cool things about spies was there are all these spy tropes we could play around with and the idea of you equate spies with gadgets. And so the idea I loved is, okay, these are spies and the spies have crazy gadgets that they use. And the spies have crazy gadgets that they use. And the idea, or the comment we found in this group was,

imagine spies that weren't particularly good spies. They got really caught up in the spy, that they love the technology, and they love the gadgets, and they love all the... But they take it a little overboard. And so these are the Asians of the sneak. S-W-N-W-E-W-A-W-K-W and a lot of people ask what does SNEAK stand for? and one of the running jokes is

that not everybody agrees with what it stands for that its true meaning has been lost to time but everybody has their belief what they think it stands for. But anyway, I like the idea that they were spies. And that they were actually good with the technology part. That they were really, really good with the technology part.

They made great gadgets. They just were horrible spies. And not all of them. I guess some of them are decent spies. But they're kind of comically silly spies that, A, we push the spy sort of tropes to the nth degree and then made them a little bit clueless. Like, they're sort of like, you know,

I will do something in a 20-step complicated way and rather in a two-step simple way. Because I am a spy and we never do things the simple way. You know, sort of that attitude. And it was fun just, you know, making up, like, let's say, playing with spy tropes and doing all the sort of spy things. And it had a nice blue-black feel to me. Like, the cyborgs in White Blue had a lot to do with sort of structure

and improving yourselves. And like I said, obviously Esper was white-blue-black, but it felt like it made sense in White Blue. So in Blue-Black, we went a little more devious. I mean, one of the things about blue, black, as you've seen it in other places, is it's an underhanded color. So I felt like, oh, well, spies, who's more underhanded and secretive than spies? So that blue, black made a lot of sense for the spies. and the other thing that I was trying to play around with is

there were different components in the set well, I'll get to the components in a second, but there were different components and as I was playing around with them I liked the idea that different factions played with the components in a different way, we'll get there but anyway, so the Dimir were spies that different factions played with the components in a different way. We'll get there. But anyway, so the Dimir were spies. Next was Red Black. I went through a bunch of different versions of Red Black.

It was kind of similar to what had happened with the spies in that I think I proposed a bunch of different ideas and this was the one where Doug was like, nah, nah. And then I think I proposed a bunch of things, and I think Doug was the one that said, okay, what if we went broader and just made it supervillains? Now, Doug was speaking my language, because I am a comic fan, for those that somehow don't know that. Supervillains sounded a lot of fun,

and supervillains also use artifacts. They also make inventions. Now, they make, you know, death rays and weather machines and doomsday clocks and things. You know, I love the idea that this faction was also using, you know, they were also mad scientists. But mad scientists in a truly sort of fun way. And the other thing is when you're trying to get comedy, supervillains are just fun. There's a lot of trope space to play in there.

And I love the idea of just mad maniacal, you know, mad maniacal things. Oh, I'll get to second, there's a structure. Okay. I have lots of things to say. Oh, I'll get to second. There's a structure. Okay. I have lots of things to say.

But anyway, so supervillains. And once I realized I had supervillains, it was a lot of fun, sort of. I played around with a lot of trope space. And then I sort of did magic's twist on it. So a lot of cards, like, started as inspired by a character. And then, okay, we did our tweak on it that made it very different from where it started. Okay. So the one that actually caused us the most problems was green-white. I was trying to figure out what exactly, you know, because green is the one that least

cares about technology. Green is the one that least would make actual, you know, green cares least about artifacts. It's the least that likes artifice in general. So I was trying to figure out what green thing could I do that felt very green. And then I came into the idea of what if this was the scientists that weren't about objects, that were about biology? Because green very much is about biology. And now the tricky thing was,

you know, whenever you're trying, every world has its center, right? Every world leans toward a certain color. When we were making Innistrad, everything wanted to be black because it was sort of a dark, destructive world. When we were making Theros, it leaned toward green. When we were making Kanzatarkir, it leaned toward red. Certain worlds lean in certain directions.

And this world was leading blue because it was all about science. It was all about making things. And yes, it was silly science, but blue really is the color that most embodies science. And green's the least. So that meant whenever I made something, you know, I needed color balance. So it's not like I can make five factions, all of which have blue, or four factions, all blue in them. But I like the idea of messing with physiology, but not, what I wanted was something different than just,

I wasn't looking into what the Simic do, which is kind of weird experimentation. I like the idea of going a different route with it. So we make a lot of humanoids in Magic. A lot of animal humanoids. Like the Loxodon are elephant people. And the Leonin are cat people. And we keep making different sort of animal-human hybrids. We do that all the time.

And I like the idea of playing around and making fun of that a little bit. And I liked the idea of playing around and making fun of that a little bit. And so I liked the idea of animal people that... Imagine you were the science to be any animal part you wanted. That that was just a given. The science just existed to do that. And then I liked the idea of this sort of society where the way they found peace, the way they sort of, you know, that was that it was everybody embraced their inner animal. And if you wanted to have the legs of a jaguar and the torso of a giraffe and the arms of an anteater, you could do that.

You could do whatever you wanted. And so the idea that we played around with was it was kind of like a commune. Like green and white gets you a little into the hippie space. But it was one in which it was all about sort of connecting to what you do. Connecting to what you are. And I love the idea of weird animal hybrids. Now be aware, it was the one that was the fuzziest because everything else was like, okay, what is the white-blue faction?

They are cyborgs. Blue-black are spies. Black-red are supervillains. Red-green are goblins. Green-white are like, well, these kind of animal hybrids. So it was the one when I would describe it to people that I'd get the most stares off. People are like, oh, okay. I'm like, well, you'll see. It's like, you know,

and it's the kind of thing where you try to describe it, you know, well, it's, uh, this one is part dinosaur and part chicken. It's, it's really hard to grasp, you know, what, what you're trying to do. Um, but I, I had a sense and I thought that I knew that we were going to get some artists to work on. I'm like, okay, I think they could have some fun with it. Okay, so the next step was we were trying to figure out, I wanted to have factions. I wanted them to care about artifacts. I knew that I wanted contraptions to be a thing. And I was trying to figure out what else I could play around with. Now, the other thing that, so there's a mechanic that we've been trying to do forever that we call link. And the idea was, imagine having sort of a left side and a right side,

and that any left side could go with any right side. And the idea that we played around with is that, let's say the left side is a 2-2 flyer, and the right side is a 1-1 first striker, that if you put them together, it'd be a 3-3 flying first striker. And we'd messed around with the mechanic, we did a bunch of places. New Frex is the closest that actually, I mean, didn't end up making it, but it was the one that came closest to you know it made it for far less in design um and i liked a lot the idea i mean obviously unstable i'm sorry not unstable unglued had done bfm big frame monster where you had a left side and the right side of a card now those were locked it wasn't't you couldn't mix

and match them. But I liked the idea that the cards came together and the I mean obviously BFM kind of went down the path of MELD but I was more interested in interchangeable pieces.

And so one of the things that we get to do when we're in Silver Border World is we can play with stuff like this. I knew I can play with frames and do fun stuff. And so I came up with the idea, and I'm not sure. This is something that I've been wanting to do, and I brought it to the team, and the team sort of played around with it. And the idea we had was, part of what makes fun science is the idea of mixing things together. And so we started with the idea of, could we do link where it's like half this and half that. You could stick things together.

And we started down the path. We kind of started doing Link, the way Link had been done in New Phyrexia. And it wasn't quite working. There were just so many rules to it. It really wasn't quite doing what we wanted. So, we came up with this idea of what I call the dotted line. It's, what if there was a creature, We came up with this idea of what I call the Dalit line.

Is what if there was a creature, and instead of you playing both creatures at the same time, what if you first play the creature, and then you could sort of add on and change the creature with additive spells. And so the idea was, we liked the idea that, you know, you'd have a card and it would show a creature and then you could play a second card and it would sort of change part of the creature into a different creature. That was the idea. And I think what happened was, I really had this, I was obsessed with the idea of this dotted line. Didn't end up being a dotted line on the card, but the idea that

you would have a card that had a dotted line on it, and then you'd have these other cards that would, if you lined it up to the dotted line, it would overlap on the creature.

I thought that was a cool visual. And Dan, we were playing around with this in a meeting, and Dan went and designed one. I've got to find it. I have it at my desk somewhere, but being at my desk and me finding it are not the same thing.

And it was part ninja, part shark. It was, so ninja shark was what we called it. So the idea was, the individual card, I think it was called card shark, and then you laid ninja on top of it and turned it into Ninja Shark. Now it turns out that Shark ended up being a left side and not a body, so you can't make Ninja Shark. You can make Ninja things and Shark things, but you can't make Ninja Shark. Sorry for all the Ninja Shark fans out there.

There's a lot of other cool combinations you could do. So we played around with the idea. So I think, what did we originally call them? They went through a whole bunch of names. In the end, they're called host and suture. I think they were called stitch for why you stitch them on. But we really liked the idea of that you had an animal, and then you could stitch on this other half an animal,

and you can make these hybrids. We thought that was kind of cool. And there's a lot of us trying to figure out how it would work because for a long time we were defining it by the traits combined. That's where Link started. And eventually I realized was we needed to find a different way to care. And then everybody says, okay, well, what if the bodies all work similarly and that the stitch-on did something? And that's when we came across the idea of triggers. So what if all the hosts, so the main bodies, just hadn't entered the battlefield trigger? That meant I have a card, I play it, it does something. And then when you're grafting on the half body to it, what if what you're grafting on mechanically is a different trigger? So

the idea is every one of the hosts has an enter the battlefield trigger, but when you stick over the card... so the idea we were always playing around with is that would cover half the card. And that anything you covered, it would add on its new things to it. So it would get to add on part of the name and part of the creature type. And it would add on text. And so the idea we came up with

is the idea of, okay, what if, what if, what if it was the trigger? So as I added on something, I was kind of making a card that did something. So the host would provide the effect and the suture would provide the trigger. And then all hosts would have a built-in. The big thing I wanted to make sure happened was

one of the problems with BFM type cards or Link in general is what we call the AB problem, which is, and here it's real literal. The left side is A and the right side is B. Well, unless you get a left side and a right side, nothing can happen. So the idea of moving to having host was, let's have our A be something that's useful in a vacuum,

that we can make more of it. And the idea was we can do host at lower rarity. And so once we had the idea of the enter battlefield effect, we're like, look, you'll play. Here's a body that doesn't spell when you play it. People play that all the time. Now, it is true that in a vacuum

that isn't particularly un-ish. But as a part of a larger thing it is. But it let us... Another problem that I was trying to solve was one of my rules is I can't do anything that they would do in Black Border or we would do in Black Border

and so one of my problems in general is I tend to get more complicated cards because the simpler ways to do things is how Black Border would do it and so one of the challenges I had in making the set was making sure that I found ways to do relatively simple things, but in a way that truly fit into the set. And one of the things that I liked about the host cards was it allowed me to make some very simple cards. They were virtual vanillas, right? They were cards that mostly they didn't even have an ability. Mostly, I mean, there

were a few flying creatures, but mostly they were vanilla creatures. But they didn't enter the battlefield effect. So let's say, for example, I open no suture cards. Well, I can still play these. They're still useful to me. They still have value. So I can play them even if I don't have the suture cards, which meant that, and this is often a way to solve the A-B problem, is if A is usable by itself the key to making A-B work is just make A more plentiful make A have a higher ad span put A at a lower rarity

just have A show up more so if you have a B, the chance of you having A is much, much higher that that is true and so for Host and Susha that's how it worked out so once we figured that out then it was a matter of figuring out okay what are good triggers and what are good effects and then we had a lot of fun trying to figure out what are cool things that you can mix together and a lot of the ways we did that is we first figured out

the mechanical, what made good mechanical stuff and then we did concepting. So Kelly was a creative person for all the concepting. He would set up meetings and we would sit there and go, okay, this card does that thing. What is something that feels like it matches that flavor, but it is just fun? Because part of what we knew was fun with, you know, and Ninja Sharkatard is this, is just having fun evocative cards, evocative halves made fun things happen. You know, that I was half this and half that. And so we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. But the core idea, which I like a

lot, is how we built around was the idea of we're doing something that you want to join mechanically. There's a left side and a right side. The left side is a trigger, and the right side is an effect. And the idea that you can mix and match. Like, one of the cool things about Host and Suture is that when you put them in your deck, you don't necessarily always know what's going to go with what. And if you draft it, like, Host Suture is the kind of thing that you can play a little bit of it, you can play a lot of it.

And if you play a lot of it, let's say you draft into Host Suture is the kind of thing that you can play a little bit of it, you can play a lot of it. And if you play a lot of it, let's say you draft into host suture, well there's just going to be a lot of hosts and a lot of suture, and you have a lot of opportunity for weird and fun things to happen. One of the guidelines for the set in general was, in the spectrum of fun to serious, we're trying to be as far on the fun side as magic allows. One of the ways to do that is you want a little bit higher variance. Let me talk variance real quickly. So variance has to do with how

much things play out the same. And one of the things I knew in this set was, look, you were drafting with only a small set. That is tricky to do. And one of the ways to make it sort of have longer legs, if you will, is to make things to have more randomness go on, that have less predictability of what's going to happen. It makes the game a little swingier, but once again, on the serious side of the spectrum, it's all about skill testing and proving what you can do.

On the fun side, it's like, oh, crazy fun things happen, and so having a higher variance both keeps the replays more different, and it just makes it more exciting. It just makes it, you know, what's going to happen? I don't know. And so I liked that Host and Suture really sort of allowed you to have this variance in a way that was fun. And you could build around it, and you could do cool things, and you could build your deck around certain combos if you wanted to. That was fine. But you could also sort of throw caution to the wind and just put a lot in your deck and see what happens.

It's the kind of mechanic where I could set up a very specific combination or I could set up a lot of variety. And I liked the fact that it would do that. And I knew in Limited that it would specifically do that. So what we did is we put a lot more hosts at lower rarities. I think the suture, I don't know, there might be a little bit of suture common. I think most of the sutures, or maybe all the sutures,

uncommon or higher, that it's meant to sort of, we want you to have a host a little bit of suture common. I think most of the sutures, or maybe all the sutures, uncommon or higher. That it's meant to sort of, we want you to have a host before you get a suture. And so we definitely put hosts at a higher level. But the hosts are also ETB creatures. Like I said, the other neat thing about them is, they are something that in a vacuum we wouldn't do in a Silver Border set.

Like, you know, I have, there's a bunch of cards that without all the thing around it, look, without the silliness and everything, would just be something we'd put in a normal set. But because it ties into a larger ecosystem, like, okay, in order to make this work, we have to do these cards. And yeah, it's fine that these cards by themselves might make it in a set,

but they're part of a larger package that justifies them being in a silver border set. So it allowed me to get some simplicity into my set and allowed me to do some stuff that kept from having tons and tons of words on it. And, like I said, it really played into the mad scientist theme because, you know, stitching together one half with another half felt super mad scientist. Okay. Now we get... Oh, before we get back to contraptions, let's talk another theme in the set.

Dice rolling. So here's a question I know people will ask is we did dice rolling in unglued and we did a lot of market research and dice didn't do particularly well in unglued. Uh, so we didn't do them in unhinged. So people are like, wait, wait, wait, what's going on? You said, uh, but what I think, so this is my contention. We will see if it is true. I believe that what happened was that Unglued was a period of time where we, Magic was pretty serious

at that time, and that Unglued was this very weird product, and that people weren't really, that the audience at the time didn't want the higher variance that Dice brought with it. But one of the things I found with the rise of a lot of casual formats, of Commander, and there's a lot more casual formats out there,

and there's a lot more formats that promote having a little bit higher variance to them, I said, you know what? I think the audience has changed. I think we could bring dice. I liked dice. I liked rolling dice. I think there's a lot of fun designs.

I think cool things could happen. And like I said earlier, I was trying to create a higher variance. I wanted different things to happen. And dice rolling are both exciting and high variance. And I know that when I did Unglued, that that wasn't necessarily what people wanted. But I took a risk. I took a

risk that the audience had changed and that it could be something that would add an element to it. We did Dice in such a way that if you really dislike Dice, it's a component you don't necessarily need to play with. I did a lot of this where I did a lot of compartmentalizing where

I put certain themes in certain places that, if that's not your theme, you could steer away from it. One of the things I really wanted to do with dice was, I wanted to make a lot of fun dice cards, and then I wanted cards that interact with dice. And so you'll see when I got there is, one of the fun things was, I took all the factions and figured out, with with my themes which factions could play with which themes. But anyway, I brought DICE back because it fit what I needed to do, that it was fun and high variance, and that I felt that it would complement with all the other stuff I was doing. I took a gamble.

I have some research from an unset from long ago that said that they weren't that popular. And this was me taking a risk. This was me saying I think the audience has shifted over the years and that we can make that work. The plan was always to use six-sided dice.

There's one card that uses 20-sided dice, which is Sword of Dungeons and Dragons. That came from I think we originally put a 20-sided dice, which is Sword of Dungeons & Dragons. That came from... I think we originally put a 20-sided die in it because the 20-sided die is iconic to Dungeons & Dragons, and we felt like it just made Sword of Dungeons & Dragons feel more Dungeons & Dragons-y. So, now... Oh, no, I take that back, I take that back, I take that back. I take that back.

The earliest version of Sword of the Dungeon Dragons, you actually rolled multiple, I think you rolled three six-sided dice. And the reason we did that is, for any of those that play D&D, when you're rolling up your character, the characters are based out of, it's three to 18, and you roll three-sided dice to figure out the, there's six attributes in your character. Strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma.

And so we were playing around that space. And then I think when we went to the Dungeon Dragons team to do it, they asked us if we could put a 20-sided die in. I think that's what happened. We had made a Dungeon Dragon-y by having three six-sided dice, and they said, would you mind putting a 20-sided die in. I think that's what will happen. We had made a Dungeon Dragon-y by having three six-sided dice, and they said, would you mind putting a 20-sided dice? We said, sure.

But anyway, okay, so let's get to contraptions. Oh, wait, wait, wait. There's one other theme. There's a bunch of things. Let me do contraptions, and then I'll get to other themes. I can tell as I talk about this,

this is a mini-podcast talk because there's so many things to talk about. So I'll just keep talking and we'll do as many podcasts as I have things to talk about. I'm excited. The one thing I know about this set, by the way, is the window that I have to talk about it on my column is very narrow. I have two, three weeks maybe to talk about it. It's right before our break. And then when I come back, we're previewing the next thing. So I'm planning to use this podcast to do more talking about it because I have a lot of fun stories about it. And I just don't have the time in my column.

I mean, I'll be able to write a little bit about it, but I won't be able to go in depth like I can in my podcast. Okay, so now we get to contraptions. So last we left contraptions, we were playing around with a mechanic that was based on a robot building game that I had made before I came to Wizards. And one of the things we were playing around with was the idea of space, of spatial matters. And so the idea is that every piece did not fit on

every segment. So for example, the way it worked was, oh, so one of the things, by the way, that we had done in this was we had accepted the idea that your contraptions were their own deck. That was one of the conceits. And since we were in Silver Border World, one of the reasons that I got really convinced to go to Silver Border World for contraptions was once I realized that I wanted to build a contraption, it became harder and harder to do that while being in a normal magic deck. But I knew that if I could make pieces that you put together to build something and be in their own deck, it gave me a lot more freedom to do that. Now the cards didn't have to explain what they were. Them being what they are sort of could explain what they were. That there could be rules with the contraptions, and they were just contraption cards.

Anyway, I love the idea of the own deck. And so the original version of it was that you had a... You started with a center core. I don't remember if you had to draw the core. I think you started with... I think we played around with you had to draw up, and then you'd have things you couldn't... Like, you couldn't start if you had to draw the core I think you started with I think we played around with you had to draw up and then you'd have things you couldn't start until you hit it and so you just weren't building the contraption fast enough

so we started with the idea that you had your deck but the top card in the deck was the core card that you put in right away that you automatically got first or maybe you didn't even draw it I think it was just it was there if you had a contraption you started with your core there the core didn't do anything by itself so it just being you didn't even draw it I think it was just it was there if you had a contraption you started with your core there

the core didn't do anything by itself so it just being there didn't matter and then when you assembled the contraption you drew a card off your contraption deck

so the way the original version worked was there was an up a down a left and a right was the original version and that there were

sort of sockets that connected to it so you could connect it to the left to the right up or down and the idea was as you would connect it to the left or to the right or up or down. And the idea was as you would connect it, some of them would have connections.

So you were kind of building your contraption and it went in different directions. And there were some cool things there but one of the problems we went into is you would miss a lot of the time. And that missing felt so bad when it's like, oh, I've got to build my contraption. Wah, wah, wah.

You know, you didn't get... And trying to build it such that you always had places that you could put things proved to be very difficult. And I think if you were making a game that the only thing you were doing was building your contraption, I think you can miss from time to time.

I think that's okay. But in Magic, where it's like you have to play a creature that was building your contraption, I think you can miss from time to time. I think that's okay. But in Magic where it's like, you have to play a creature that assembles a contraption, it just wasn't necessarily happening all the time. And the fact that you were missing some of the time really was an unsatisfactory experience. So we decided to move to a system where you couldn't miss.

That instead of missing, it was more of, oh. So another thing we did when we, the way it worked was, there was, you could attach things, they went up, down, right, left. So we had this thing in the center where you would move it around. And so every turn, you would advance it clockwise, and then that branch would go off. So imagine there was a right branch, a bottom branch,

a left branch, and an up branch. And the idea is, you was a right branch, a bottom branch, a left branch, and an up branch. And the idea is, you know, first the top branch goes off, and then everything connected goes off, and then right branch. I liked that dynamic of how not everything went off all the time, and that you wanted to link things together because they would do creative things with each other. In fact, that was the other thing that was frustrating me was I wanted card A and card B to go together, but card A only had a two-prong on the left side and card B didn't have the two-prong. Like, too much of the time I wanted cool things to happen, but I just, it was too hard to make the connectors

in which you've got to connect what you wanted. So we toyed around with the idea of what if anything could connect to anything. And then I realized that once it didn't matter, the directionality didn't matter, that I was making it more complicated than I needed. Like, originally we did that because the connectors mattered, but once the connectors didn't matter, we were like, okay, what if we just... And I also was tied to four things, because when I was doing the card, well, like, the card had four sides.

But we realized that going off every fourth turn was a little bit too slow. So we said, okay, what if we change it from four to three? And then instead of sort of going up, down, right, left, what if we just had three columns that went beneath the card? That the card would have little arrows that pointed, and then it would just shift between column A, column B, column C. The column A would go off in turn one, column B would go off in turn two, column C would go off in turn three, then in turn four you go back to column A was the idea.

And then the thing I liked also was that any contraption could just go anywhere. There was no rule about where things had to go and that way one of the things I found most fun about when we played with contraption was I liked the idea that you could set things up so cool things would happen. That you could do really neat things. Part of what I wanted the contraption to be, so go back to our themes of the day, I wanted high variance. like I wanted you to not always have your contraptions do the same thing that if you played the same deck with the same contraptions

I wanted some variance I also liked the idea that you were making a contraption and that part of making it was that you were seeking out synergies and when we get to the part of figuring out what they do we were very high in trying to maximize how to we wanted them to be super modular.

That there's reasons why you would want to do, you know, card one and card two in the same row, if you will, same column. And so once we made this move over from the sort of spin around it to below it with three things, it started working much cleaner. And the idea that anything could go anywhere really allowed a neat sense of freedom. Now, one of the things that I knew we wanted with the contraptions was they had already been defined as artifacts, and I wanted them to be, I wanted you to interact with them like they were artifacts. Because the set already had an artifact theme, I wanted you to be able

to destroy them. Like, if they were artifacts, then I could use artifact destruction to get rid of a contraption. Now be aware, you can't get rid of the whole contraption, you get rid of a piece of the contraption. My robot game had a similar thing that I liked where it wasn't that you took down the whole robot. It's like I blew his arm off or something that you could deal with a part of the robot, but not necessarily the whole robot. Contraptions are the same thing

where each contraption is its own artifact from a game sense. So if you want to destroy it, you destroy a piece of it, but it's hard to destroy the whole thing. I mean, magic has, I mean, there's no artifact. There's no card in Unstable that destroys all of it. But Magic has cards that destroy all the artifacts.

So if you're mixing yourself with other cards, obviously, it is possible. Okay, so I'm coming up to Rachel's school. So the next big part, which I'll talk about next time, is I started to get my themes. There's a few more themes for me to talk about. But the next question was how to weave the themes with the factions. Because part of doing factions is making different factions care about your themes

in different ways. So I will get there my next time. Like I said, I hope one of the fun things for me is most designs don't take six and a half years, you know, that there was a lot of different processes we went through. In fact, one of the things I haven't really got into was when last I left,

I was trying to make advanced printing techniques, and somehow I got down the path to making contraptions and things. I'll connect those dots, too. I sort of jumped a little bit. But anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying the unstable talk. I had such fun making the set, and so I'm going to have fun. I'm having

fun talking about it. So, hope you guys are enjoying hearing about unstable. But we just got to Rachel's school. So 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. Bye-bye.