Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #536: Lessons Learned – Amonkhet

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

This podcast is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about the lessons I learned on sets for which I led or co-led the design. In this podcast, I talk about co-leading Amonkhet.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And once again, I still have my cold, so I apologize ahead of time for a little bit of coughing. But nothing stops the podcast. Okay, so today is another in my series, Lessons Learned. So this is a series where I look back at sets that I led or co-led and talk about things I learned from making the set. So we are up to Amonkhet. So Amonkhet was a set that I co-led with Ethan Fleischer. So this is back in the era of old school design.

So we had a year's worth of design. Six months I led and then six months Ethan led. We both were there the whole time. We just sort of passed over the reins. while Ethan was leading Omnicat I went on to do Ixalan. I co-led Ixalan with with Kannego which will probably be the next lessons learned. But anyway so let's talk about what all we learned. What all we learned? Well, there were... First and foremost, here's the meta thing I learned about doing Amonkhet.

I think I really thought about sets being top-down or bottom-up. And when I thought about top-down sets, usually the reason something's top-down is there's a lot of what we call trope space around it, a lot of resonance around it. And I used to sort of feel like top down sets were similar. Now, I had done Ixalan, not Ixalan, I had done Innistrad, and then I had done Theros, and they were each a little bit different. But Amiket proved to be even more difficult, and let me sort of walk through why.

proved to be even more difficult, and let me sort of walk through why. I realized that there was two different kinds of tropes, or separate trope space. One was what I will call genre tropes, and one is what I will call cultural tropes. So genre tropes tend to be more based on pop culture. If you look at Innistrad, for example, the horror genre, movies and TVs and books and stuff, like the idea of what a zombie is. You didn't study zombies in school. There aren't zombies, but you sort of got a sense of what zombies are from

pop culture. What happened with Theros was Greek is sort of a crossover between the two. There definitely is a lot of cultural stuff that you learn, and some of that made its way into the set. But also there's a lot of sort of stories that are told.

Greek mythology is pretty well known, at least in Western civilization, and so there are a lot of individual stories and stuff that we could tell. So when we wanted to get resonant, we really could go and lean on stories as a means to get that resonance. But when we were doing Amenkhet, what we found was the audience didn't really know a lot, there wasn't a lot of stories and things that were known. Not that there aren't stories, there's as many

Egyptian mythological stories as there are Greek, but the audience was less familiar with them so we couldn't lean on them. One of the tricks about resonance is, the reason resonance works is because it ties into pre-existing knowledge that the audience has. So for Amonkhet, much like I had done for Theros, so for Theros, I had Ethan do a little bit of research into Greek mythology and write up sort of, here are all the different interesting things for us to explore. Here's stuff magic has done. Here's stuff magic hasn't done.

And really map out what our space might be for working on Greek mythology. So it turns out that Sean Main had actually spent part of his life growing up in Egypt. And so he was very familiar, much more than the average person, with Egyptian mythology. So he was very excited to work on this. But what happened when he put together sort of his research is what we found is, while there's plenty of source material, it didn't really, it wasn't resonant because most people didn't know it. Kind of like some of the problems we had with Kamigawa, which is we did lean heavily on actual Japanese mythology.

It just was mythology that the average person didn't know, so it wasn't quite as resonant. And what we found with Amonkhet was there was a lot of cultural resonance and a lot of sort of things you would recognize, meaning if you look at the set, there's a lot of things in the set that people had anticipation for. There would be mummies, there would be pyramids, there would be scarabs, and deserts, and the Nile, and you know, there were things that we could work around. But the interesting thing was, they were more larger objects and groups than they were individual things. Like, when we were trying to do top-down designs, meaning this card represents that thing that you know, we spent many weeks and ended up with, like, maybe a dozen

that we thought had some resonance. And then, you know, between stuff that worked for the creative team and stuff, it got whittled down. And even then, the ones that we did end up doing, you know, Cleopatra, King Tut, The Nile, you know, were not nearly as resonant as, like, you know, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Fly. Things we had done in Indusrod, just because what we learned is that cultural tropes don't have quite the bang that genre tropes do. The genre tropes just are a little bit better understood and there's a more of emotional connection to them because when you're watching entertainment,

you know, it more sort of affects you than when you're culturally like in school studying something. And so what we found working on Amonkhet was that not that there's not material to be gained from cultural tropes, but it's different. And the audience responds to it differently. Now, one of the interesting things about Amiket was it had a lot of visual iconography that was very popular and very well known. You know, a lot of people sort of recognize sort of the look. You know, there's a lot of sort of visuals that go along with it. And I think the creative team did an amazing job of making a world that was

flavored, that felt magic, but still had a lot of Egyptian feel to it. They made very good use of the iconography. Another thing that we had done with this world, which I think looking back was a smart idea, was we had two elements to the world building. One was the Egyptian feel, and the other was the Bolas feel. Nicole Bolas was the enemy.

One of the points of this particular set was we were trying to reintroduce and reestablish Nicole Bolas as being a villain. He's been around for a long, long time. I think he's the second oldest villain in Magic, only younger than the Phyrexians, and only by a set.

But a lot of the times in the story, he's been kind of behind the scenes. You know, he sort of steps out at the end and like, wah-ha. But you didn't really get a sense of truly how dangerous and how scary he was, and that we wanted the set to really establish that. That he was really a force to be reckoned with. And we had given the... The Gatewatch had a few wins. You know, a couple wins, especially the win in Zendikar,

where they kind of overcame a lot of obstacles to win. And we wanted to set them up sort of like, okay, they're feeling a little cocky. Like, okay, they can handle anything. And that this was,

we were telling a story and this was sort of the first act that we wanted our heroes to sort of be a little bit overconfident and, you know, the villain needs to win

in the first act, for those that know their story structure, that you want your hero to sort of come up against the villain and lose. Or heroes, in this case. So that there's some room to build in the story. So anyway, it was important that this world had a very Nicole Bullis feel to it. And so there's a lot of things we did to try to capture that.

So, for example, we used minus one, minus one counters. We used the exert mechanic. You know, we did some things. One of the things that we did with this set was we... Normally, there's a... What the mechanics are telling you, what the creators are telling you, align with one another.

That if Innistrad, if the world says, I'm a scary place, well the mechanics go, I'm a scary place. And there's a unified, but we were trying to do something a little different with the set, which I liked it, but it was one of those things that didn't quite play 100%

the way we had imagined. So we were trying to get a sense of dissonance. And what that meant was, our heroes, the Gatewatch, come to this world thinking they're here to save the world. They're here to save the people of the world from the evil, horrible Nicol Bolas. And they get there, and the people are happy. Now, the world is a harsh world, and, you know, from an outside eye that understands that, they see how harsh a world it is. But to the people who, that's all they know, hey see how harsh a world it is.

But to the people who, that's all they know, hey, it's the world they know. And that, of course you fight to your death. For honor, why wouldn't you do that? That is just the thing to do. And that they have no scope to see sort of the evils of their world. So to them, they don't see that it's anything wrong. They're actually happy with their world.

Nicole Bowles is their god pharaoh, you know what I'm saying? They see nothing wrong with them. And so there was this dissonance between the Gatewatch, sort of the world as they saw it, and the world as the people saw it. And we wanted to do the same thing for you, the players, which is, we wanted the

gameplay to really reinforce this dangerous world, but we wanted the visuals and creativity to say, hey, it's a happy place. And that the disconnect between what you were hearing and what you were feeling weren't the same. I mean, we did do that. I'm not sure we accomplished it quite as cleanly as I was hoping. I think we bit off a bit, and it was a tricky thing to pull off.

The minus one, minus one counters, I liked the minus one, minus one counters. I wish they were a little bit more ingrained. I kind of feel like we sort of put them in and then some elements that we did in got sort of backtracked. We originally, for example, had Wither in the set.

And when we handed over, Wither was something that was going to be there, and it ended up getting pulled. I'm not sure that Wither needed to be in the set, but I do think the minus one, minus one counters didn't end up quite having as much impact as I hope. Oh, here's another major lesson of this set is I think we overstuffed the set a little bit.

I think there were too many moving pieces going on and that we could have taken a few, one or two of the things that were here and just, I mean, for sure, for sure, Hour of Devastation added stuff we didn't need and added some twists that probably we didn't need. But even as we go through the mechanics, it's quite possible that one of the mechanics could have just been saved.

I mean, part of them trying to sort of simplify things was lessening the minus one, minus one counters. I do like the minus one, minus one counters. I do think it added a lot of the cruelty to the world. And I like where we can find places to use minus one, minus one counters. There's neat designs there. And it's not something we can do often. So I did like that we used minus one, minus one counters. I wish we had not loaded the setup quite as much to maybe allow us to take things like minus one, minus one counters and give them a little bit more

space. So let's walk through the mechanics that were here. So there was Embalm. So Embalm was the mechanic where you had creatures and they died, and then you could make a copy token of them. You could exile the card from your graveyard, make a copy token of them. And I enjoyed the... One of the things we were trying to do is we liked the idea that creatures die and then you bring them back. But we didn't want you then constantly bringing them back. And so the token counter was a clean way mechanically to do that.

And we ended up using the punch-out counters. Oh, by the way, real quick, the punch-out counters. I think those were a success. I liked the punch-out counters. I think those were a success. I liked the punch-out counters. I guess I'm a little sad that we had a set complicated enough that we felt we needed them as a tool. But I do feel like they were interesting. And one of the things as the head designer is

I'm always looking at tools that we use that we can come back to. And the punch-out counters were really exciting to me because there's a lot of potential things that they could be used for. And so I was happy that we sort of tried something that we had never done before. And that part of it, I think, was a success. And so I'm, you know, where and how and what we do with them, that's still up in the air.

But I feel like there's potential there. The punch-out technology was interesting. As we're expanding and looking for new design space, it opens up potential and possibilities. So I was excited with the punch-out stuff. Like I said, I wasn't excited that we needed the punch-out for memory aid purposes. But I was excited that the technology worked and that it gave us spaces in the future to look at. Okay, back to embalm. If I could do embalm in a vacuum, like one of the problems in general that we learn about designing sets is that sometimes there's things

that make sense for the set, but they don't make sense for magic as a whole contextually. So for example, Embalm would have been cleaner as a double-faced card. I have a creature, it dies, it comes back as the flip side, and the flip side is, you know, white and a mummy and has the extra text about how it doesn't go to the graveyard, gets exiled when it dies. And it would have been just a cleaner version of Embalm. Now, this came up during design. Mark Gottlieb brought up the fact that both this and Aftermath could have easily used

double-faced technology. And double-faced technology would have probably made a cleaner execution. have probably made a cleaner execution. The problem, well, there's a couple problems, but the bigger problem was that we want to make sure we don't overuse double-face card technology, and we were planning to use it for Ixalan, and we already had signed off on double-face in Ixalan,

which was the next set. And so one of the reasons we didn't do double-face here was because we were using double- which was the next set. And so one of the reasons we didn't do Doubleface here was because we're using Doubleface in the next set. And Doubleface has extra costs that come with it and, you know, we have to be careful how often we use it. But also we were trying to sort of, you know, make it special for Ixalan, so we chose not to put it into Amonkhet. I think in a vacuum, without that, I mean, the tricky thing about lessons you learn is sometimes you make decisions because you need to, and the set has to take a hit from a larger

game as a whole. And I think that's true here. I do think that Aftermath and Embalm having double-faced technology probably would have made them easier to use for sure embalm um I'll get to the aftermath in a second um in general I liked embalm

I think embalm played nicely I think it had um a good feel for the world I feel that one of the things when you get to um we did a little research and sort of what would people expect. Mummies were pretty pretty big. I am

happy with how mummies played out in the set. I liked the white and black mummies. One of the things that I become more and more fond of is usually when we do tribal in the set, and we try to do a little bit of tribal in all sets and then more tribal in some sets. Whenever we care about tribal, I like to push it to at least two colors.

So just there's some options of how you can build your deck. You can do two monocolor decks or one two-color deck. And one of the things I like when we go to worlds is finding places to take things that we've done before but pushing them in new directions from a creative standpoint. I really

liked white mummies. I thought it was cool, for example, that we went to Innistrad and that we used black and blue for mummies and that the blue mummies in Innistrad represented Frankenstein-type monsters, that these are science-made creatures, that you're taking dead parts

and sewing them together and bringing life to them, and that those zombies were made in a laboratory rather than necromancy. I thought that was kind of cool, and it made it make sense that it was a blue zombie. Well, here we had servant zombies, and that made a lot of sense. That these are sort of benign mummies that serve you.

And the idea that those would be white mummies was pretty cool. And I liked the idea that the wild mummies were black, and sort of the controlled mummies were white. And I thought that was really neat. In general, I also liked the idea something we had tried with this set was we branched over creature types between within standard

so that Innistrad, two sets away, had black and blue mummies. We had black and white mummies. We made sure that there was enough stuff in black so that you could run a mono black zombie deck or splash blue or splash white or splash blue and white. And that did happen. I think mono-black zombies got played

and I think black-white zombies got played. So I think there was neat things there. I was happy. I like doing tribal. Obviously, I like, you know, me, I like zombies. And I thought we branched out in a way that introduced white zombies in a way that was kind of cool. I like that. Embalm was a

little on the complicated side. Like I said, maybe double-faced technology or something would have helped a little bit. The one thing we did learn about tokens is usually when we do tokens

at common or even at uncommon, there's not that many tokens so that if we give you tokens in packs, there's a good chance you'll stumble across a token you need.

While the technology of the tokens for Embalm is cool, I love that every creature had its Embalm token. I like that technology. In Limited, it proved that it was hard to sort of get it. I mean, I liked using the Embalm token so that you can reuse the card and use the token as a thing. I thought that solution was pretty good. But anyway, I don't think Embalm needed to do internalize in Hour of Devastation. I mean, I understand what we were trying to do there, and I understand the flavor thing we were trying to do, but I don't know if we needed

the extra complication. A lot of my issues in general about this block is it got a little bit excessively complicated from a tracking standpoint of just knowing what's going on, understanding the state of things. I do think that... I do think that we sort of pushed that a little bit. And then in Hour of Devastation,

there was multiple things that sort of shifted how they worked, you know, that embalm became internalized and stuff like that. That it just, I understand we were trying to do something new because of the small set, but it just, and I understand that the Amonkhet Hour

limited environment for advanced players was a lot of fun. And that's great. And I mean, one of the things that we've been trying to figure out is the balance of how much complexity is supposed to be in common and then just in limited in general. It's more of an Ixalan thing. We'll get to that when I get to lessons learned from Ixalan. But I mean, I do think the set had a little too many moving pieces that weren't necessarily there.

So let's get to cycling, which is probably, I like the cycling mechanic. I think in general, you can put cycling anywhere in the sense that it's pretty flavor neutral and it's pretty universal and has a wide space. So cycling fit in this set and it can fit in the set. It can fit in any set. I do believe if you look at all the pieces, the one that had the least sort of flavor-bearing weight was cycling. Now, once again, cycling does some cool stuff and allows you to have mana sinks and stuff. Cycling does good work. I think when I look at the set and I look at all the pieces there,

most of them are doing something very specific, where cycling is kind of there. Cycling is definitely something where it wasn't that it didn't make use of it and the reason i think we were cycling in the first place was we were trying to create some synergy with um delirium in shadows of innistrad and standard uh and we liked the idea that cards that you could sort of replace but help fill your graveyard out to make it easier to get to Delirium. And that synergy worked, and there definitely were Delirium decks played. Our meta experiment of trying to make overlapping

themes that were two blocks apart had some mixed results there. But, in general, there's a lot going on, and when I look at the set and I look at the design, cycling is the thing where everything else at least is doing something in the set. Now, I understand when I talk about complexity, cycling is not really what's adding the complexity.

So part of the question here is other places you can shave some stuff down. But anyway, like I said, cycling is one of those things where it's never a bad fit just because it's such a universal mechanic. But maybe it's possible here if we're trying to shave a few things out. It is one of those mechanics that's in the set that doesn't serve the Egyptian part and it doesn't serve the Bolas part. It really is just there for larger functionality. Okay, let's get to Exert. So Exert was an interesting case where we kind of backed into a mechanic and ended up with something that I really, really liked. Of all the mechanics that were new to the set, Exert is the mechanic that I most feel has potential to just be something we use again and again.

So the way we got to Exert was we were trying to do combat-oriented things. We liked the idea of sort of... You constantly make the effort to sort of push the creature. And the original version of it was something we had played with in another set, which was you got an ability, and then the creature died at end of turn. Kind of inspired by... There's a card in Alpha called Berserk that I played a lot of back in the day. And Berserk doubles

the power of your creature, but then at the end of turn you have to sacrifice it. Or it kills itself. I forget exactly technically what it does. Essentially, though, you double your creature

and then it dies at the end of turn. And I really like Berserk. And so I made a Berserk mechanic. I forget what set we tried it in. I want to say

Concert Tarkir, I think is what I tried. But anyway, I messed around with it in a couple sets. I think it almost went into Khans at one point. Anyway, it ended up being a little too harsh a payment that, I mean, Berserk was a pretty powerful effect, and as a one-shot, maybe that's

okay. But it's a tough call to say, hey, this creature is better, but you have to kill it. And so we were looking for a way to make it a little less severe. And Jackie, Jackie Lee, who was on the design team, suggested, well, what if it just doesn't untap? What if it's sort of, if I use it this turn, I can't use it next turn. And we thought that was pretty cool. It ended up being really interesting.

Like I said, the only negative to it, and we had the Contra series, you've got to remember that you've used it, and there's a little bit of memory of what you tap and not untap. But other than that, the mechanic just plays really well. It's a really interesting decision. And it definitely allows you to

sort of... One of the things we're interested in is we wanted to capture the flavor of the cruelty of the Trials and of Bullis' world, and we knew that we wanted to make sure we could sort of, one of the things we were interested in is we wanted to capture the flavor of the cruelty of the trials and of Bullis' world, and we knew that we wanted to make sure we could sort of get through in the ground. We wanted to make comment mechanics to help people get through. And Exert really did that. Exert did a

good job of sort of having the right feel we wanted, having interesting gameplay stuff. It allowed you to sort of, you know, you could sort of save up and exert things all at once if you needed to sort of push through or if you start playing a tempo game you could choose

when to exert that was kind of fun but anyway I thought exert was like I said a really good mechanic probably of all the new mechanics the one that I

like embalm was the kind of thing where okay maybe we come back to Omnicate maybe we do embalm again but I don't think embalm partly because it's

super flavor to Egypt and partly because it's not a mechanic you do tons and tons. I'll get to Aftermath in a second, but even Aftermath has a little more space than Balm does, but still, Exert really has a lot of space in it. It's very interesting. We word it in a way that's generic enough that I think a lot of worlds, you know, Exert would make sense in.

Anyway, I really like that mechanic. Aftermath. So the lesson of Aftermath is you can't underestimate the power of the frame and the look of the frame. Aftermath's a really good example of a mechanic that plays really well that... One second. Coffee. Coffee break. Example of a mechanic that plays well that was not well received for aesthetic reasons, not for play reasons. And I understand why we had them look the way they looked. I agree, I don't think aesthetically they're particularly pleasing I think they were functional

but we need to aim a little bit functional I do like having frames that do different things to help remind you of things and serve as a purpose I even could appreciate some of the functionality that was built into this frame. But frames have to look pretty. Frames have to sort of look... There is... I mean, one thing that's interesting

from an R&D standpoint is when we are playing with the cards, we don't have frames. I mean, more and more we're trying to build things in so we get more sense of seeing the frames. In fact, the modern printing does kind of build in a frame look to it. And when there's art,

it'll put art on it. Usually when I'm playing this with the cards, we're not far enough along that the art exists. So I never see art. But later on when play design's playing later stuff, there actually are sometimes sketches. But there is something there. And we do design it now so at least it more looks like

an actual magic frame. Now, when we do unique frames, it's not built into the system for our playtest cards. So, when we did sagas, we had to sort of fit in the normal frame and then sort of figure out how we wanted to represent them. Now, sagas

from Dominaria is an example to me of a much more aesthetic frame where we figured out a way to do it that helped what we were doing and added something that had an aesthetic appeal to it. I think with Aftermath, like I said, I like the mechanic. It's not that I wouldn't bring it back. I would contemplate how to do it. I mean, double-faced cards are one possible way to talk about it.

Another way would be maybe there's a better frame. Maybe there's a way to do it. You know, there's hits and misses on how you execute things. And I think all said and done, the frame was a miss. I think there's enough feedback from the audience that really it aesthetically got in people's ways a little bit too much. I do think the more people played it and the more functional they realized it was, the more forgiving they were of it, because the functionality of it was kind of nice.

But, I mean, I'm not going to mince words. It was not the most pleasing looking of frames, and one of the lessons of this set was, you know, it is okay to mess with frames, but we have to find solutions that

really are themselves pretty and something people want to look at. And I think Aftermath missed the mark there. I do like... So one of the things we did with Embalm and Aftermath is really had a graveyard component to Amonkhet. As we had studied Egypt preparing for it, it became very, very clear that Egyptian mythology is obsessed, obsessed with death. And so I think that was kind of cool. I liked that that was woven

into the world. We also made the conscious decision to do a living, breathing Egypt and not a dead Egypt. A lot of times in pop culture, when you see Egypt, you see sort of what I call archaeology Egypt, where Tomb Raider or The Mummy or something, where you're seeing modern-day people sort of dig through ruins of it. And that has a similar aesthetic, but it's not quite what we were doing. And so we were doing bright, sunny, kind of living Egypt. And so I think that was the right call.

But it was definitely something that we had to be careful. It also limited—there's some tropes that are more dusty, dusty Egypt that we didn't use. And so, once again, we're trying to find trope space. Let's talk about the gods. So the gods, there were we chose just to do five gods here and then the three gods in the second set.

I was not a fan of the fact that the five gods in the first set and the three gods in the second set really function differently. I understand the story sort of gave some justification so at least there was some justification where they didn't work. I feel that gods are something one of my big lessons about gods

in general is that gods are difficult and trying to understand how, what the through line is for gods and how to design them is definitely something that I was hoping Amonkhet would solve for us and at some level really didn't solve for us um I hoping Amonkhet would solve for us and at some level really didn't solve for us.

It's something we're going to keep coming back to. We're going to keep doing worlds that have inspirations that feel like maybe gods want to be there. And we sort of said, okay, we're willing to do gods and magic. So I was really happy when we made the gods for Theros that we ended up with gods that really felt right.

We wanted to do these gods a little bit different. And one of the big challenges we learned from this is making your gods indestructible causes all sorts of problems. And maybe the answer is the through line for gods is not indestructibility. Maybe they're harder to kill. I mean, obviously the ones in our devastation is not indestructibility. Maybe they're harder to kill. I mean, obviously the ones in our devastation weren't indestructible.

But there were a bunch of lessons to be learned and definitely I liked having five gods in the first, I mean, well I guess we had five gods in the first set of Theros, but Theros ended up having 15 gods. That was too many gods. We kind of learned from that. So we try to make sure that we don't do, we lessen the number of gods. That was too many gods. We kind of learned from that. So we're trying to make sure that we don't do...

We lessen the number of gods. I do like having a cycle of gods and colors and really figuring out how to capture the essence of those gods with the essence of the magic color wheel. I think that's kind of neat. Like, the god of red in this world, what does that mean? What is the, you know, what is Theros god of red

versus what is Amun-Ket god of red? I think that's kind of neat. And there's some interesting contrast in culture you get to show. So I thought that was kind of cool. So the gods to me had a little bit of room for improvement. We brought back curses. I liked that. I think curses are a deciduous thing now that we can bring back when they make sense.

I think the flavor's pretty cool. I think that they're loose enough that there's a lot of design space. I mean, not that you want to do a lot of curses in any one set, but curses are the kind of thing where we can do a couple. I think we probably could have done a little bit more with curses than we did. I think we probably did the bare minimum,

and I think we could have pushed it a little bit. There are people out there that really enjoy curses, and I think we probably did the bare minimum, and I think we could have pushed it a little bit. There are people out there that really enjoy curses, and I think there's... They don't tend to always work all that well in Limited. You've got to be careful about Limited, but I do think there's some fun stuff there. And in retrospect, I wish we had maybe done one or two Curse Matters cars,

and maybe just a little bit more. Not a lot. There's a lot going on in the set, but I could have upped Curses maybe a little bit if we yanked one or two other things out of that, I could see curses. Like one of the things I'm thinking about is we did a lot at a little, a little bit where if we sort of gave ourselves a little more space, we could just, curses could get turned up a little bit. Minus one minus con is we'd turn up a little bit. You

know, maybe we don't have cycling. Um, the other thing I'm questioning is part of me says whether or not we wanted Aftermath. In retrospect, what I would have done, I think, is not do Aftermath and Amonkhet and do Aftermath and Hour of Devastation as maybe a new thing to get introduced and then don't tweak and bomb. Yeah, I think where I would be tempted to go

is sort of pull out some stuff from Auer, maybe pull out cycling from Amonkhet, and then push back Aftermath, is my guess. Like I said, I think there's some stuff that we did at low levels that I would just up the levels a little bit. I would rather have had a little bit more minus one, minus one counters, a little more curses, and just free some space up to pull that off. Also, the cartouches and the trials. I liked how the trials played with the cartouches. I was not the greatest fan of the trials being the trials.

Meaning that... What I expect out of a trial is you have to accomplish something, and there's a reward if you do. And the trials were missing that, the ETB quality, enter the battlefield quality. I mean, I like that there's a synergy between cartouchers and trials. That gameplay I liked. I don't think the trials did a great job of feeling like trials.

Now, once again, I think that was a victim of some of the complexity going on, that Dave had to pull back. Dave Humphries and Brian Hawley were the co-leads. And they had to pull back a little bit because there was a lot going on. Once again, if you pull some more stuff out, maybe the trials could, you know, the...

I literally think this is concerning to me, that the trials had no flavor of trial to them, really. You know, casting them is kind of solving them. I mean, I guess you have to choose to put them in your deck. But that didn't really capture a sense of Trials to me. I liked the cartouches. I liked the idea that they were auras.

I liked the idea that they were something that got back. I don't even mind if the rewards from the Trials were cartouches, but the Trials didn't feel super Trial-y. The cartouches, but the trials didn't feel super trial-y. The cartouches I liked a lot, though. And I liked the idea that you played them, they had value, that you could get them back. I thought that was kind of cool. So I did like the cartouches.

The brick counters, so we had a bunch of monuments that you built. Once again, one of the hard things about this set is I talk about how there's a lot going on and then every time I look at things, I go, well, but I like that. I did like the brick counters.

I don't know. So the brick counters built up in the first set and then built down in the second set. There's a lot of stuff in our devastation that I think we could have, we didn't need the tweak of. We still could be building things even in a world where things were falling apart. Or maybe, Jeff, you build in the first set

and don't mess with brick counters in the second set, maybe. I do like, I mean, there was just a vertical cycle, I think, of the brick counters, and I think they weren't super complicated, and they definitely added a little bit of flavor to it. One of the things, if I had to do it again, I would look at everything we were doing and line them all up. And it's possible that maybe if we're trying to simplify things, brick counters go. Right now, without having actually done the work, I haven't. I know next time we visit Amonkhet, I assume, I mean, if we visit Amonkhet again,

I would look at all the things we did and sort of analyze them all. Usually on returns, what we do to figure out what worked and what didn't. And, you know, in a return, what I would use. And so, I haven't really done that. I just know it was a little bit over. Like, my lesson is we sort of put a little too much ingredients in our stew. What ingredients come out, I'm not 100% sure of. I mean, one of the other possibilities is maybe not having the minus one, minus one counters.

I think you lose some of the cruelness of the world and a little bit of the boldness of it. Maybe that's okay. There's not a lot of places that use minus one, minus one counters, though, so I don't know. I did like the graveyard theme. Like I said, we purposely overlapped the graveyard theme between Amonkhet

and Shadows Over Innistrad. I think in the end that caused us a bunch of problems. Like, one of the biggest problems it caused us was normally in Kaladesh, the set in between Shadows of Innistrad and Amonkhet, we would have probably done some anti-graveyard stuff

so that if things get out of hand in Shadows, there's an answer for it in Standard. The problem was because the next set had graveyard components, it really limited our ability to sort of hose the graveyard because we didn't want to, like, we because we didn't want to hose the upcoming set. And so having those near each other definitely caused some problems. It's interesting. There were overlaps that worked. There were Delirium decks that made use of cycling.

There were Zombie decks. There were some overlaps. One of the tensions we've been trying to figure out in play designs working on this is, where do we have overlap and where don't we have overlap? I like overlap where there's continued themes that you can add to your deck. What I don't like is it restricts us because we're trying to sort of save space for something. And then it doesn't let us put answers in things. That causes us problems. But in general, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm mixed on some of the overlapping

themes. I obviously, I think, like, I think we should have done a graveyard component if we're going to go to Egyptian world. The real question is a positioning. It's not that Egyptian world shouldn't have a graveyard. It's, oh, should it overlap or not? And if it should, it's got to be closer. If not, it gets pushed farther away. One of the big things, like I say, that we deal with a lot that you guys don't necessarily deal with quite as much is trying to look at all the components around it to figure out what has to go in and not go in. And it can get very tricky of when to include things and not. And there's a lot of times things we do, so we're affecting standard as a whole,

and that the set will sort of make some nods to things that will help magic, even though in a vacuum it would do things a little bit different. My biggest takeaway, I think, from Amonkhet was um that I liked it I liked a lot of the gameplay in it I liked a lot of the feel from it um the dissonance didn't quite come as strong as I thought I think maybe maybe we're supposed to sort of hit that a little harder um I the the set had a lot less resonance or resonance is the wrong word a lot less top-down designs, individual designs, than I was hoping we would have.

I really thought there would be more there. It ended up being actually a big struggle. And in the end, there wasn't a lot of individual top-down resonant car designs that really came through. Even the ones we did, we sort of had to, oh, that's Cleopatra, and I don't know how many people got that. So that's not a sign of particularly successful top downs. And I think it was a world, now, it was a world that had a lot of sort of cool, hey, it's a mummy, hey, it's a scarab, hey, it's, you know, there were a lot of individual things that were cool there. So there was top down

in the sense of, it's a thing. There was a little bit less top-down in the card had meaning. You know, like a lot of the fun stuff we were able to do in Innistrad is we were playing into actual stories. Or even in Theros, we're playing into actual stories and like, oh, get it? It's this thing that you know and how the card plays sort of reinforces it. A lot more of the way Amonkhet worked was it's a thing that's known and we just have to match the general sense of awareness.

You know, I'm embalming, well what do you expect embalming to be? All the different pieces to it. I'm generally happy with Amonkhet, like I said. The nitpicker in me, we overstuffed

a little bit and we added complications to the places we didn't need. And in retrospect, there's some stuff where we sort of because of the complications, we whittled down some things that I think could have been built up a little more. So I guess my biggest takeaway is more of a larger, some

structural decisions that we sort of have to deal with. Not, like, I was happy. Individual mechanics I thought were good mechanics. Like I said, there's some choices and maybe how to execute them

a little differently. But Exert is an awesome mechanic, which I will use again. I think Aftermath, if we could find a better frame for it, has some potential to return. I mean, Embalm seems like it's mostly going to be, maybe come back to

Amulet, maybe see Embalm again, I'm not sure. It seems very tied. I don't think we Embalm in too many worlds. But all in all, success. A success with some lessons. It wasn't a knock out of the... you know, it's, I felt it was kind of like a double, to use my baseball analogy. It wasn't a home run.

It wasn't a single. I thought it was solid. I thought the limited gameplay worked pretty well. I know the audience, especially with Auer, really enjoyed the limited gameplay. And here's the other interesting thing I guess we'll get into this as I get to the Ixalan lessons learned is one of the things that we were spending a lot of time about is trying to

figure out how much complexity is supposed to go on Unlimited, how much complexity is supposed to be there and the success of Amonkhet really was one of the points that made me rethink some stuff, we'll get there. Sort of watching Ixalan and watching

Amonkhet and Kaladesh and Shadows. I definitely sort of come to a new decision on where I think things are supposed to be. And Amonkhet definitely played into that. The success of Amonkhet and watching how the experience players really enjoyed Amonkhet

helped me sort of shift some ideas. Anyway, that's a topic for another day, but we'll get there. So I'm now at work. I hope you enjoyed my cough-filled podcast. Like I said, it's always interesting looking back, and sometimes

you make a set and you look back and you go, oh, we knocked that out of the park. I'm really happy with Dominaria and stuff like that. But there's other sets you look back and you go, oh, wow, we made mistakes galore. This is in the middle. This is a set where, yeah, there's things we could have done better, but yeah, there's some things

I'm really proud of. This is kind of a solid in the middle set. I'm proud of what we did, Ethan and I did, and Dave and the whole team. But anyway, I'm now at work. So'm proud of what we did, Ethan and I did, and Dave and the whole team. But anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time. Bye-bye.