Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #499: Lessons Learned: Kaladesh

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

This is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about a design I led (or in this case co-led) and walk through all the lessons I learned from doing it.

I'm pulling on the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is another of my lessons learned podcast series. So the idea here is I talk about sets that I led the design for, co-led the design for in this case, and I talk about all the lessons I learned from making the set. So today it's about Kaladesh. So let me first stress that I co-led Kaladesh. I did not lead it by myself. This was the set where I did the first half of it

and handed over the reins to Sean Main for the second half of it. So Sean and I were both on the team for the full year. I just led it for the first six months and Sean led it for the second six months. And this was the first... I take that back. I co-led a set,

I co-led Gatewatch with Mark Gottlieb, which was the first time I had done this. So this was the second time, actually, I had done this. But I do a series, Kaladesh, Amonkhet, Ixalan,

I did this with. It kind of was the precursor to the changeover to Vision Design. This was sort of the first of that bunch. So anyway, let me talk about the mini lessons from Kaladesh. So just to refresh some memories of, I think I did a podcast on

Kaladesh's design. So I'll rehash a little bit here just so I can explain the lessons. Okay, so the way it worked was, originally, we were going to do Amonkhet first and Kaladesh second. originally we were going to do Amonkhet first and Kaladesh second. So in exploratory design, we were midway into doing Amonkhet when we made the decision that for story reasons and other reasons, that we wanted to flop them, and so that Kaladesh was going to come first. Which meant that Kaladesh got a shortened amount of exploratory design time. Now, ironically, we have since cut back how much exploratory design time we do. So it was supposed to get six months, it only got three months how much exploratory design time we do. So it was supposed to get six months.

It only got three months. Now exploratory design is three months. So although it was shorter than normal, it still got, by modern standards, a decent amount of time. So the interesting thing about Kaladesh is the very first thing I wanted to do in exploratory design was explore energy. Energy seemed like a perfect fit for Kaladesh super early on. And mostly what we did in exploratory design was trying to figure out the best execution of energy. So here's the first lesson I learned.

Interestingly, what I did was, I had, for those who don't know, in Mirrodin, original Mirrodin, I had put energy in the set. And then when I handed it off to development, there was too much there. And so Bill Rose made the call to pull out energy from the set. It made sense. It was the thing that could be extracted easiest. I mean, I understand why everything Bill had said at the time made sense.

There was too much going on. It was the thing that was least synergistic with everything else at the time. But I really did like it. And when we came to this world, this seemed to be an interesting place to do it. So what I did was, I had learned a bunch of lessons. I had actually done energy all the way to the point where I

handed it off to development. So I had spent a lot of time with energy. What I wanted to do was, I didn't want to taint the exploratory design team with lessons I had learned because maybe they had learned different lessons. I didn't know. So what we did in exploratory design was I let them sort of, I talked about all the different possibilities with them. So I did introduce to them the possibilities. I didn't talk about which way was correct. I just said, here are different ways it can be done.

And I also opened up saying, plus, if you can think of any other ways it can be done, you know, please explore them all, and then come back with me, you know, show the different things, and let's walk through what we think is the best way to do it. Interestingly, or I don't know, I guess it's interesting, but also just sort of as I expected, they came up with the same

solution that I had come up and mirrored. And the same execution that I had done is how they wanted to do it. And energy was solved pretty early. So it was interesting in that there was a lot of development to happen. There was a lot of how do you balance it? And one could argue that one of the big lessons of Kaladesh is, so I tried with energy. I understood that energy

is inherently parasitic. It's a resource that you only, that you can use with other cards, meaning the resource is shared, but it only comes from these cards. So if you wanted to have energy, there wasn't a lot in magic that interacted with energy. I mean, there was proliferate, there was wanted to have energy, there wasn't a lot in Magic that interacted with energy. I mean, there was proliferate.

There was a few things. But there wasn't a lot that interacted with energy. So one of the problems inherent about energy is it's synergistic with itself. So it kind of encourages you to play with other energy cards. But energy cards only come from here. The other thing that we had done at the time, this is probably a mistake,

was in general, when we're trying to make a new resource work, we want to be careful how negative we are on the resource. So we purposely did not make cards that disrupted energy, and that has proven to be a problem. I think the thing that we need to do is to what you need to do is put the disruption at a lower level so that it is not one of our fears with having disruption is that it would keep it from even being viable but i think the correct answer is put it in put it at a lower level where it's only viable if energy is strong and then people will board it in but that it it's not the kind of thing that would keep, like,

as long as the card is only reactive in nature, then it only comes in if energy is a problem. And that if energy isn't a problem, it's not like, one of the things you want to be careful of is you don't want things that sort of stop your resource to be something people can easily just put in their deck anyway. You don't want to make a really efficient creature that just happens to also hose energy, because people might play the efficient creature, and then just energy never gets done,

because there's this thing sort of hosing it that's just in the environment for whatever reason, because it's a strong card. But I think, in retrospect, probably what we wanted to do is put in a few things that were release valves that weren't good enough to play unless it was good. So that was clearly a lesson.

The other thing was, I tried so hard to make it as non-parasitic as I could. The big way we tried to do that was make more cards that generated energy conditionally. Things that said, oh, whenever thing X happens, you get an energy. Well, build an X where thing X

can happen. We tried to make some of those energy engines, if you will. But nothing was quite as, nothing worked quite as cleanly as just making energy. So the energy X tend to have a lot of energy cards. So it, one of the things that's interesting is there are problems that are design problems and problems that are development problems. Okay, now that I've introduced

the terminology, there are problems that are vision problems, problems that are set design problems. Vision design has certain problems, set design has certain problems, and play design has certain problems. One of the things to be careful of in vision is not to set up rules that later cause play design problems. And I think we were trying to not disrupt, you know, make sure that people could play energy, but in sort of, we made some rules that kept us from making answers to energy, which we should have had. And so that is something we need to be careful about. In general, I like energy. I think

energy is fun. I think energy is fun. I think energy is definitely a flavorful mechanic. And I like us messing around with different resources. I think one of the things to be careful of is you don't want magic to have too many resources to it. And so you don't want to mess around with too many different resources. And usually our rule is, in a game of magic, you have mana and you have one other resource. We try not to give you multiple resources

in any one environment, just so you can stay focused and it doesn't get a little too crazy. But I like the idea that there's just a different vector to think about. The idea that these cards can share and that if I have so much energy, how do I want to spend it? I think that is

really interesting. I did like how energy played out. Energy ended up a played out. I mean, energy ended up a bit strong. And I mean, I think there's some lessons there about sort of power level, but that's not really something that vision would care about. Vision design would care about. You know, I don't think energy is inherently too strong. I do think it's a matter of pricing and stuff. I think it's synergistic and I think there are some parasitic issues.

Although, interestingly, the more we do something, the less parasitic it is. Case in point, the first time we made slivers, well, it was parasitic. Slivers needed to go with slivers and these were the only slivers.

But then slivers came back and now slivers weren't quite, you know, there was some backward compatibility because there were slivers needed to go with slivers, and these were the only slivers. But then slivers came back, and now slivers weren't quite, you know, there was some backward compatibility because there were slivers that existed. And then we brought slivers back again. You know, and every time we bring back slivers, they become less and less a parasitic thing, and more and more, at least in the big picture of magic. I mean, usually they're parasitic and, like, standard,

because we don't tend to bring them back all that close to each other. But they're not necessarily modern, clearly not legacy. So that's one of the things to sort of keep in mind is I'm not anti-parasitism. I do think that there's some fun mechanics that are parasitic in nature. And I'm not even anti-energy. I like energy. I mean, did we learn some lessons from energy? We did. Energy was something where we have to be careful, sort of, like the economy of energy. Whenever you mess around with something that you've never messed around with before, it's hard.

It's tricky. One of the things, like, let's say we're making a normal creature using mana. We understand that resource. We've made a lot of creatures. So when we sort of design something, we can measure it against things we've done before. We have a pretty good, even if it's a brand new creature, if it's kind of messing in basic space,

you know what I'm saying, using power toughness and has some keyword abilities, like we have a general sense of what that means. And we can make ones we've never made before, but we can have a general sense of where that is. The problem when you're messing around with something new is you don't know the vantage point. And so one of the things we have to be careful when we do that is

we have to be careful about how we make use of that. And so energy was sort of a cautionary tale in that, like I say, I'm not upset we used energy. I think energy led to fun gameplay. I think energy made an interesting limited environment. I actually think there's some cool stuff going on in Standard with energy. There's some deck dominance issues, but that's not whether or not the mechanic is fun to play or interesting to play. In general, I do think it is fun.

Like I said, there's if and when we bring energy back, there's some things we've learned. There's some power level issues we've learned. There's some environmental things we've learned. There's some power level issues we've learned. There's some environmental issues we've learned. In general, there needs to be more answers at a lower level. There needs to be, you know, maybe energy is the kind of thing where we have it show up in a couple places over a period of time. I'm not quite sure. I haven't really, I haven't thought through how to do energy next time.

Like I said, if and when we do energy again. But I do think that I liked the technique we used to try to figure out how energy got used. And I do think we came up with some very interesting ways

to use energy as a resource. Okay, the other mechanic that we played during exploratory design was vehicles. Now, we didn't really figure out vehicles. In fact, the final version of vehicles, as you guys know them, didn't even happen until mid-development. mid-development. But the lesson of vehicles was one of I'm really happy that we took something that people had wanted for a long time and we found a way to do it in a way that is interactive. Like, how exactly do you make a vehicle in a way that feels like a vehicle

yet is dynamic to the game? And I like the solution that we found. I really do. I mean, vehicles have gone to become deciduous, right? Which means we can use them whenever we want to use them. They won't be in every set, but sets that really can use them, we can make use of them. And, I mean, that's a really good sign. Usually when you, you know, I mean, I think it was a flavor home run. You know, I think that it's something players have been talking about forever. It's like, oh, how do you do that? How exactly do you represent that?

And I think we came up with a pretty good answer. Now, lessons learned. As is the case, I mean, one of the things that we learned in general, and once again, I'm not sure how much of this is design versus development or play design. Making colorless things is dangerous. Like, one of the problems with vehicles is because they were artifacts and they were colorless artifacts, you know, we...

When something breaks, when you make something... So vehicles had two issues. One was we were trying to do something we've never done before, which means we're more professional when we're trying to, you know, we want people to play it, right? We're trying to make something we think is new and exciting and we want people to play it. We have a tendency to be a little bit more aggressive. So it was something we'd never done before,

so we were playing in a little bit of an unknown space. And it was colorless, or generic mana, meaning anybody could play it. Well, a slowly overpowered card that anybody can play can cause some problems. So, a couple of lessons coming out of this. One is, I think that we have to be careful when and how we push things.

I mean, one of the things in general that one of the big philosophy shifts that have come out of sort of the Kaladash Amiket era is, or also Shadows over Indusrod, is the idea that what you push, it used to be that what we pushed is what are the new things?

Let's push the new things and get people excited about the new things in the set. And what we've since realized is just make the set, make it fun, and then push the fun things. If the fun things aren't the new things, that's okay. You know, I mean, the set, you want some new things because there are certain players who are like, oh, I want the new and different thing. But the idea is let's make the set, put all the things you need to be in the set, and then for the power level,

instead of pushing the new thing, push the fun thing. That was a big lesson here. In some ways, this is as much set and play design as it is vision design, but figure out what's fun and push that. The other big thing is, I think we realize that we need to be more willing to dip into color for artifacts. It's something that we do from time to time. I think Esper was the first one who did color artifacts where we made a

shard in which the people were improving themselves so they were all artifact creatures. Theros had a little bit of colored stuff in the the artifacts of the gods um new phyrexia had some colored stuff and the things that had been tainted that phyrexian mana um you know uh we had the cycle of gearhawks in kaladesh um i think in retrospect i wish we had actually put a little bit more color. I think one of the futures of artifact sets is, well, future of artifacts in general is, I think we need to be more willing to put color into artifacts.

Because if we don't, it really, really limits what we can do with artifacts. It really ties our hands. And that one of the things that I think we need to do moving forward is just be more willing to dip into colors when we need to. There are plenty of artifacts that clearly clearly are flavored towards certain colors. It's not like artifacts don't already lean in certain directions. I understand the kind of novelty of any deck can play any artifact, but what I realized is if all artifacts have to have a limitation that anybody can play them,

it'll make a world in which we never push artifacts. The artifacts are very hard to make aggressive. And if you notice, historically, every time we've made an artifact set with generic artifacts, and we push them, bad things happen. It's funny that some of the most broken environments we made always revolve around having an artifact set. Cowardice caused problems. Mirroding caused problems. You know, there's been a lot of times when we sort of pushed something,

but we were pushing artifacts, and it came back to bite us. And I think the solution to that is not to have artifacts. Artifacts are flavor hits. They're really cool. Objects are cool. Magical objects are cool. I just think the answer is that we need to be more willing to dip into color, and especially in a world in which artifacts matter, where artifacts are a thing. I think we need to be willing to use color where it makes sense and where color,

you know, I don't think we can do an artifact block in the future in which everything's just generic cost. I mean, I'm not saying, by the way, that we can't an artifact block in the future in which everything is just generic costs. I'm not saying, by the way, that we can't still make generic artifacts. We can, we should, we will. I'm just saying that those are more utility things and less push things. It's hard to push them. And so whenever we want to make something where they're the focal point or we really want to make something that's exciting, I think we need to consider having more color and stuff into them.

As far as vehicles go, like I said, I like the execution of vehicles. I think the mistake of vehicles was we are a little bit aggressive. And we sort of, we have to be careful about pushing in generic cost things. And we have to be careful about sort of how we use artifacts in general. So those are both lessons of Kaladesh. So another lesson of Kaladesh is something that... So there was a mechanic that was in Kaladesh and was handed off.

In fact, Fabricate was designed by design, but Fabricate had been removed before we handed off to development. So when we handed off to development, it had three things in it. It had vehicles, it had energy, and it had a third mechanic. The reason I'm not telling you the mechanic is I do think it had energy, and had third mechanic. The

reason I'm not telling you the mechanic is I do think it's something we one day will do. But I will say this, it was a somewhat complicated mechanic and so the big mistake we made was we handed over three things, all three of which were relatively complicated. Vehicles not as complicated, but energy and this other mechanic were equally complicated mechanics. When I say complicated, but energy and this other mechanic were equally complicated mechanics. When I say complicated, once again, I'm not talking necessarily about the audience knowing how to use them from a simple, like, energy isn't complex from what is energy. The idea is relatively simple, but how to use it, the execution to use it, the logistics

of using it can get more complicated. And this other mechanic, and it's not just can get more complicated. And it's not just complicated for the players, there's also complicated for the people making the set. Like, energy requires a lot of work to balance. And like I said, we need to get it 100% right, you know what I'm saying? It's a tricky

thing to do. We knew that was going to take a lot of time. And so what happened was we ended up dropping this other mechanic because A, we thought the set was a little too complex, which I'll get to in a second, and B, developers have to develop it or set design and play design have to make it work. And if you give them too many things that are too complex in execution, it becomes really hard for them to do it. So that was another mistake for us is that we didn't,

you have to, one of the things I talk about all the time is what makes a good design and now, you know, a good vision design is that you are making something that your partner that you're handing off to can work with. You know, it's no, it's my job. I'm part of a collaborative process. I'm trying to make something that the next person in the process will be able to do something wonderful with. I'm not making something in a vacuum and then, you know, I'm making something that I mean to hand off.

And so one of the problems with Kaladesh was we'd handed off something that was going to be too hard for them to do. Now, as it turns out, early on in development, we figured out that problem. We had made extra mechanics in design, including Fabricate. And so one of the nice things was when they said, we need to take this out, in fact, what happened was they came to me and Sean. So Eric Lauer and Ian Duke co-developed the set

they came to me and Sean Colette Design and said look energy and this mechanic are too much together and we said look the set's about energy that's the heart of the set take the other one out and then we said how about you bring in Fabricate Fabricate was a nice simple mechanic we had made it during design.

We liked it. Now, the lesson of Fabricate is an interesting one. Fabricate is, one of the things that you learn a lot is you make something, and you're like, wow, this is really cute and elegant, and in design, you're not, we're not power balancing. You know, we're trying to get into the ballpark. So Fabricate, the interesting thing about Fabricate was

that once Fabricate actually got to, at the time development would now be set in Play Design, it proved to be a mechanic that was a lot narrower in its usable space. The kind of mechanics you can make. Because one of the choices, I mean, the thing about Fabricate is, you need to make cards that are creatures that

you kind of want to put the plus one plus one counter on. Because in a vacuum, if it's just a vanilla creature, usually making the tokens is just more powerful than making the creature bigger. So what we tended to do in the design is we wanted to encourage you. There's something about the creature that, hey, making it

bigger would be advantageous. It has some ability. It has evasion or lifelink or first strike or something in which being bigger matters. Power matters. And so you now have an interesting choice. The way we had to make the choice is we had to sort of build more into the creature.

But what this ended up meaning was that the number of options The way we had to make the choice is we had to sort of build more into the creature. But what this ended up meaning was that the number of options you had that made sense, that sort of had the right fit between, you know, mana cost and having an interesting decision was actually pretty hard. So Fabricate ended up being something that we only put in the first set because, not that we didn't like it, not that it didn't play well, but it had a limited space of how much design you can make. And that's the kind of mechanic sometimes you don't realize up front

the limitations of the design. It's something you guys don't think much about, but I think about all the time is how much design space is in mechanic. And one of the things that you have to learn is, you know, when the rubber hits the road, when you actually try to make the cards, sometimes what you realize is what seems to be open-ended and very elegant and lots of opportunities isn't. And Fabricade is one of those things where we were able to make some really cool cards, and it is definitely a mechanic that made sense and I'm happy we used it but it wasn't nearly as big as we thought it was it was a lot more limited it's why

Aether Revolt did not use it um it just was a lot more limiting than we thought and it's interesting to me um as someone who sort of sets up the next part is I can't always tell necessarily how deep something is when it's a power level concern. I can look at it from a design, and even from my thing, the fact that you had to bribe them on the creature, meaning the creature couldn't just be vanilla. It had something about it had to make you care about the power. Now, luckily you can do French Chanel there. There's a lot of keywords that care. But it still told me right out of the gate that this was somewhat limited. What I found out after it got handed off was the ratio between the counters and the mana cost was so tight that to get an interesting choice, there wasn't a lot of options.

And that's something which I'm still trying to figure out how to learn that information. How do I know going in that I'm handing off a mechanic that is limited like that? I can look at the design portion of it, and that part I can figure out, but some of the power level is a little trickier. Now with vision design, where set design starts earlier, the answer is,

it's a little less my worry than it used to be. Back when we were doing design, and it was a year long, it was a big deal to undo mechanics late in development. It's a much bigger deal. Now, set design is like I'm proposing things, but if it's a problem, they have the time to replace it. So it's not quite as big of a problem as it was when I made Kaladesh,

but it's something to be aware of. Something to make me realize is I'm always trying to figure out, engage design space. And the idea of power level design space is something that I'm trying to get better at of saying, oh, well, yes, there's a lot of things you could do, but there's only a few that would be practical, especially on modal things. That's the other thing is a modal spell is a spell in which you make a choice most modal spells

you have two choices but we have charms and things you make three choices and every once in a while like commands where you have four choices

and it's just something to be aware of other lessons of Kaladesh I mean obviously one of the big lessons is realizing kind of what

goddess division part of I think what Kaladesh and Amaket and Ixalan made me realize I mean, obviously one of the big lessons is realizing kind of what got us to vision. Part of, I think, what Kaladesh and Amaket and Ixalan made me realize was that design really broke into two parts. And that it made me realize that the area that I sort of contributed the most information is the early part, the vision part. And so when we shifted over to the two-block system and now to the three-in-one system, it made me realize the biggest value I have is just making sure that vision is correct. And so one of the other big lessons of Kaladesh, I mean, I didn't realize it right off the bat, but one of the lessons I would eventually realize, and Kaladesh was part of it,

is the big decision the goddess to vision, set, and play design. So that was another big thing that came out of Kaladesh. The other thing that's interesting is I really do enjoy a lot of the collaboration. I like working with other designers. It was fun working with Sean. You know, one of the things that I'm always working on as

sort of head designer is training new designers. One of the other reasons we had done it this way was Sean had led some core sets. He had led I think Magic 2015, 2014, 2015, 2015 I think.

And he had led Magic Origins he had done Conspiracy but he had not really done a normal large set and it's kind of daunting the first time you do it and so that was another reason for us to sort of share

to split the lead so I could sort of help him with it there's a lot of moving pieces in magic design. So it was, I also like sort of, I mean, one of the things that I'm sort of trying to say here is that I'm constantly trying to learn how to better teach. One of my jobs as, you know, head designer, someone who's done this for a long time is I want to get more people capable of leading, at this point, vision design teams. And so I'm working with some people to make that happen. You know, and it is tricky.

One of the things that's tough I have found is a lot of the way I design is kind of by gut. And so it is hard to teach someone, you know, like I can say to them, it is tricky to teach people when a lot of your decisions, like, I'm very intuitive in my decision making, and so it is tricky when my decisions are made more based on, on feel than on sort of mental processing, it's harder to teach that, but I, I learned a lot, and I think that, you know, Kaladesh was a good learning experience. I think Sean actually learned a lot, and he's since gone on to make games elsewhere,

but I hope he carries that with him, and Sean's an awesome game designer, so it was a great honor to have a chance to work with Sean, especially co-lead Kaladesh. The other thing that I really enjoyed about Kaladesh is there's a lot of different kinds of design. This was a bottoms-up design. One of the things that I enjoy more and more is I love finding ways to take mechanics

and flavor and mix them in a way where the audience has no idea which came first. The two seem so intertwined together that you just don't know what came first. And I feel like a lot of the elements of Kaladesh, like, I was really, really happy with kind of the inventor feel that we went with. Now, be aware, this was something a little subtler. I mean, one of the things is you want to sort of have different selling features. And it wasn't kind of the visceralness of like you know Pirates and Dinosaurs of Ixalan which is a little

more you know tapping into the id a little more but I really did like sort of some of the cerebralness of it I like the the open just having a little bit more variance and a little more synergy in how you combine things so when you played I like the idea that you had the chance

to make things a little more than normal. I really enjoyed, like I, there was an overall feel that I liked from it and one of the things that, one of the things moving forward whenever I'm doing a design is I'm trying to figure out what am I trying to get out of the design? What am I trying to make the audience feel?

What am I trying to make the audience think? And I really do enjoy finding different ways to do that. And this was a very, Kaladesh was a different sort of approach. I definitely, for example, with Innistrad, tapped into more primal emotions. I'm making you afraid.

I think that's cool. But I can't always go for, there's not always a super raw emotion I get to go for. And this one was a little subtler, but I liked it. I really liked the idea of trying to capture a feel, but the feel was a little less, you know, a little less one word, if you will. And it's a little more nuanced. And like I said, you really want, we try to push the pendulum around. And I like some of the sets to be like Ixalan where like it's

super visceral. Like you don't, there's not a lot of thinking that needs to go on. It's like, I'm a dinosaur. That's fun. We want to have that. But I also like sometimes to make sets that are a little more cerebral. And this was definitely a cerebral set. And I enjoyed that. And I really, I liked how that played out. In general,

I'm really happy with Kaladesh. I mean, I, obviously there's some things that I would do a little bit different if I had to do it over again. I think the set is... I would try... There's a few things I would do to make it slightly less parasitic. I think it's a little more complicated

than it needed to be. I think we need to put some safety valves in that we didn't put in. There's some things that I would do a little bit differently. But in general, I'm really proud of Kaladesh. I really like Kaladesh. I mean, it's one of the best sets that I've ever done. I really, really enjoy it.

And there's a lot of nuance to it, and there's a lot of subtleness to it that I like. Every set doesn't need to do that, but I like the fact that some sets do. And I like, you know, there's some players that really enjoy sort of getting into the nuance

of some subtle things. And I like, you know, not every design's going to be that, but I like making some designs that kind of reward the player that likes the nuance, you know. And I think this was a set that had a lot more, like I said, a little more cerebral than some other sets, but I enjoyed that. So,

but anyway, like I said, I'm proud of this set. I think there's plenty to be learned from it, but also part of it was, yay! I was generally happy with how it came out. But anyway, guys, that is me talking all about Kaladesh. So that's the lessons learned of Kaladesh. Anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means.

This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking about magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.