Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #541: Dominaria, Part 2

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

This is the second part of a three-part series on the vision design of Dominaria.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time we met, I was talking about the design of Dominaria, but I didn't finish because there's much to the story. Okay, so last we, I was talking, we talked about how the theme of history, that we were trying, that one of the big challenges of Dominaria was it took place in so many different sets and so many different themes, and we wanted to have one unified sort of feel to the world. So we came up with the idea that it was a world of history, a world where the present is defined by its past. And the idea is that you see all these remnants of their past, but that there is a vibrant renewal as it sort of is growing and coming

out of the past. We liked the idea of an optimistic world that, despite all the many tragedies of the world that always came out, it always survived, it always kept on going. So one of the things that we were definitely interested in was obviously figuring out how to play into the elements of history, and we were interested in sort of tapping into the sense of vibrant renewal. So one of the things, and last time I talked about how we came up with the first version of historic, which was an ability word that said whenever you cast an artifact or a legendary thing, whenever you cast an artifact or a legendary thing that you, um, generate an ability. It's kind of like, like Constellation is for enchantments. Whenever you play one of

these things, it triggers and something happens. Um, okay. Meanwhile, another thing that I wanted was, I knew we wanted something old and something new. What I meant by that is we tend to have a returning mechanic normally. That's something we tend to do in sets. But going back to Dominaria, we need to have a Dominarian mechanic. I really felt like not only should we reprint something, but we should print something that originally came from Dominaria. I felt pretty important about that.

I felt that was an important thing to do. Also, I wanted there to be something that was brand new. Like, this was the 25th anniversary. We were returning to our roots. And I kind of wanted to also have the theme of, look, Magic is going to keep discovering new things. That, you know, yes, we're returning home. Yes, there's nostalgia. But you know what?

There's still innovations to be had. So one of my goals was, and so I knew that we had either three or four mechanics. My goal these days is to try to aim toward three, knowing that if we have, you know, we usually say there's three and a half mechanics for a set these days. And that means there's three bigger mechanics or if two of them are smaller, maybe two. But the other thing that I knew, because we were doing historic, the character artifacts, legendary things,

that there would be some artifact matters, there'd be some legendary matters, that there'd be a little bit of things playing up, especially the legendary matters. You know, one of the challenges that we had, I mean, I'll get into this a little later, is we were trying to sort of capture some of the stuff that Kamigawa had done in caring about legendaries in a way that didn of capture some of the stuff that Kamigawa had

done in caring about legendaries in a way that didn't make some of the mistakes that Kamigawa did. For those who don't remember, Kamigawa, all its rare creatures were legendary. And we made some uncommon legendaries. It's something we don't normally do, but we did during Kamigawa. We did during Dominaria. And one of the reasons for that was that we were just trying to make it matter enough, but the as-fan just wasn't high enough in Kamigawa. Like, if you just knew nothing about the set and opened packs,

it would take you ten packs, maybe more, before you get the inkling that maybe Legendaries is a theme that is there. And so, you know, if you can't, in just a handful of pushbacks, get the theme, your theme is kind of not, that's not your theme. The line I've always said is, if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme.

That's the simplistic way of saying it. Really, the idea is, if your theme is not instantly available, if you can't get it quickly in a small number of packs. And normally the way to do that is common. As you'll see, we found some other ways to sort of reinforce the theme. Part of it is making the theme a little broader. Part of it is doing some technology we've done recently. But I'll get there. I'm trying to go in order. Okay, so we needed an old mechanic. So what we did is we wrote down every mechanic that first appeared on a set that either was on Dominaria or was on Wrath,

because Wrath got overlaid with Dominaria. So we treated the Wrath sets like, well, Dominaria is where all the Wrath sets ended up. So I think that's like 33 sets. So it's like, okay, so we made a list. Um, and what we found was, uh, that the list, I originally like, oh, we have 33 different expansions. We're in good shape. We'll have no problem. This will be easy. Uh, did find a few problems. The number one is in the early days of which we're talking about, because that's when Dominaria was used the most, we were much

stingier about what got a keyword. Magic, for example, in the early days, the way blocks used to work is you got two keywords for the whole block. You know, that like Tempest had

buyback and Shadow. And Urza Saga had Cycling and Echo. You know, Mirage had Flinking and Phasing. These were just, like, there were not, you know, you would evolve them over the course of the year. But some of the early years, like, the whole year would have two mechanics. Like, right now, a whole block can have as much as, you know, eight, nine, ten. Sometimes we've had ones with up to like 12. Like there's a lot of mechanics per year.

Back then, we just, we didn't name as many things with keywords. And we were, the nature of how we did it was just a little different. Also, our hit rate early on was just not as good as it's gotten. We've gotten better at understanding mechanics. We've gotten better at knowing what will work. As with anything, the more you do it, the more efficient you get at it. We're much better. Not that our hit rate is perfect these days,

but we have a higher hit rate with mechanics than we once did. So we go back and look at early stuff. I was just naming some of them. Like phasing. Okay, phasing is complex. It's kind of confusing people. It has some rules built into it that are not necessarily... In some ways, flickering became sort of a new phasing.

So we revamped how we did it. And if we were going to do phasing now, we'd use flickering technology, not old school phasing technology. And if we were going to do phasing now, we'd use flickering technology, not old school phasing technology. Flanking is an ability where it has a bonus, but it's self-referential to other things that have the bonus. Because the flavor-wise, they were on horseback, I think. And so the idea is, and it confused people. People didn't realize that my flankers only worked against non-flankers. So if we were going to do that mechanic again, we would just have it do its thing to anybody that blocked it,

not just non-flankers. Echo is a drawback mechanic. Echo is a drawback mechanic that you have to work around, that it literally is a drawback. Now, there's some clever things we did with it, especially during Time Spiral, but it is still inherently a drawback mechanic. So, you know, that's not the kind of thing we tend to do. Anyway, as you go through the mechanics, what you find is, A, there's not as many mechanics

as you think there would be based on just the lower volume of keyword mechanics. B, a lot of them aren't necessarily something we wanted to bring back. There's a lot of early mechanics that are like, well, with tweaks and a new name. Now, normally, in a normal set, I'm fine with tweaking something and bringing it back and giving it a new name. When we talk about return mechanics, I consider devotion a returning mechanic in Theros, even though, okay, it's a little bit different from Chroma, but it really was us re-skinning and re-refining an existing mechanic. I'm fine doing that. The problem was, this was Dominaria, we were returning to our

roots, that I really wanted a returning mechanic that was the mechanic from the past. I didn't want a new version of an old mechanic. And so, you know, there was that problem, that I didn't want to redo it. And also, the other issue was, so we boiled down to that there were three mechanics that I thought were like just strong, classic mechanics from the early days of Magic, things that we would want to revisit. And that was cycling, flashback, and kicker. Cycling first showed up in Urza Saga, although it got designed in Tempest, but we didn't use it in Tempest. So it first showed up in Urza Saga. Flashback first showed up in Odyssey.

And kicker first showed up in Invasion. So all of these were from Dominarian sets. The problem was Amonkhet. Amonkhet had used cycling, straight up used cycling,

and had made Aftermath, which was essentially flashback. I mean, it wasn't actually Flashback from the name, but it was a Flashback variant. And I talked about earlier how Flashback would have been a perfect matchup. Like, it's the history set. How about Flashback? What's in history more than Flashback? But because of Amonkhet, we couldn't use cycling and we couldn't use Flashback. Which meant, hello, kicker!

So we decided we'd use kicker. I mean, kicker does some nice things. It's super flexible. It uses your mana. You know, kicker is a solid mechanic. For those long-time listeners, know that my biggest issue with kicker is I would have not made kicker from the first place

because it's so broad that it makes other mechanics feel like just Kicker. But we've readjusted Kicker a little bit. It's more reined in. Kicker now is, the way we use Kicker is, you can spend more to make the spell better. We tend to avoid extraneous second abilities. It's more like it has to tie into the card as a whole.

You can make the card stronger if you spend the right, you know, if you spend mana, you can make the card stronger. So we had Kicker in. Now we wanted something new. So one of the things that became really clear early on was the idea of representing stories. That this was a world of history. It was a world of stories.

And not just the stories we made up for this world. Stories that pre... I mean, we didn't make them up way back when. But stories that preexisted in this world. There have been novels about them. There have been, in some cases,

computer games and different things. You know, comic books. We've done a lot of world building over the years. And a lot of world building over the years. And a lot of it, especially in the early days, was on Dominaria. So we made use of all those early references to sort of, we wanted to have something that called back to those stories. So I was really enamored with the idea of somehow having stories mean something. Early on, we were messing around with a bunch of different things.

And then we hit upon the idea, so back when we made Planeswalkers, so in Future Sight, Matt Cavada came up with the idea that if Planeswalkers matter in the story, they needed to matter in the game. That players connected with cards, and these were the things that we said mattered most but they didn't exist on cards.

And so we decided that we were going to make them and for fun we said, well, what if we introduce them in Future Sight as a future thing and then, you know, the next set, there's some there. So we originally were planning to do them in Future Sight. In fact, we were going to do three of them

as future shifter cards. We were going to do black, blue, and green. So the proto versions of Jace, Liliana, and Garrick were in the set originally. We ended up not doing them in Future Sight because we hadn't quite...

We haven't quite figured out what we... We knew when we did it we weren't at quite the right version yet. So let me talk about the version we didn't do. So one of the earliest things we did, I knew early on, Richard Garfield had created something

for Ravnica that we did not use called structures. And the idea was we were in a city world and structures were buildings or, you know, like actual structures that had an effect. And the way you got rid of them was they had a toughness, basically. Sorry, they had not like a creature toughness. I mean, kind of like a creature toughness. But they had something that if you attacked it, you can knock them down. That they had sort of an amount of damage you needed to do to them

with creatures to get rid of them. So we were coming up with planeswalkers. I really liked that. So I borrowed that from structures. We then loved the idea that there was a sequence of things that were happening, that you were trying to build up to do something. We loved the idea that the planeswalkers sort of worked their way up to something grandiose. So the early version we tried was they had three abilities.

And the idea was turn one, they would do the first ability. Turn two, they would do the second ability. Turn three, they would do the third ability. So for example, this was Garak. So Garak was ability one, make a wolf. Make a 2-2 wolf. Ability number two was double the number of wolves you have. For every wolf you have, make another wolf.

And ability three was all wolves get plus two, plus two, and trample. So the idea was turn one, he makes a wolf. Turn two, he makes a second wolf. Turn three, he boosts his wolf, which, you know, are powerful, but, you know, not game winning or anything. Then turn four, you go back to the first ability. Now I make another wolf. Turn five, now I'm doubling the wolves. But this time,

instead of doubling, I now have three wolves, so now I have six wolves. And then on the sixth turn, when I do plus two plus two and trample, wow, six wolves, plus two and trample. And let's say somehow they survive through that, then I'm making another wolf on the seventh turn and doubling them

again on the eighth turn and then attacking with a boost again on the ninth turn. So the idea was, you know, Garruk is attuned with the wild animals, he keeps calling wolves, getting more and more wolves, and eventually you get overrun by wolves. So that sounded cool. That sounded like a neat card. But then,

so the very first game I'm playing with Garruk, or I'm not sure somebody's playing with Garruk, or I'm not sure, somebody's playing with Garrick, they cast the wolf. And their opponent shocks the wolf. They kill the wolf. So in their second turn, double all wolves, but there's no wolves, so doubling all wolves doesn't mean anything, so basically nothing happens.

Then the third turn is all the wolves get plus two, plus two, and trample, but there's no wolves, so that doesn't mean anything. So again, nothing happens. And the note we got was, why is Garak such an idiot? Like, okay, he made me a wolf, great, and then the wolf got killed, and then he just does things that don't make any sense.

And the comment we got was they felt a little too much like robots, that they were pre-programmed, meaning they would just do dumb things for no reason other than that's what they were told to do. And it was said they didn't have enough agency. So what we later moved toward was a system where you had basically three abilities. Obviously, we've made ones with more than three.

But you had three abilities. You could choose to do whatever ability you wanted, but some abilities, we invented the idea of there's a cost and there's a loyalty. And some abilities gain you in loyalty and some lower in loyalty.

And the third ability usually had what we call an ultimate. It required you building to get there, but then you could do something grandiose. So it had the flavor

that we liked of you get to do things every turn and there's a larger plan so that the character feels like they're building towards something, but it didn't have the lack of agency that the system works locked in. But one of the things we realized when we were talking about story is, well, how story

is different from people is, well, if I'm telling a story, well, chapter one is going to come first, and then chapter two is a story, well, chapter one is going to come first. And then chapter two is going to happen. Then chapter three is going to happen. It's going to go in a locked order. And so I liked the idea that maybe we could use the original Planeswalker template as a means by

which we could represent stories. And the idea that I liked a lot was that you, the players in the game, were kind of living through the story. The stories would represent things. Now, we always knew that we would eventually, once we were, like, I often talk about it,

vision design is sort of making the tools that set design is going to use to build. And so what I wanted to do was figure out how sagas needed to work, and then let set design we knew when we were building stuff that we were more sampling what we were doing and that part of actually making

them when they were done is figuring out the real stories we wanted to tell we wanted to tell the story of the antiquities war, we wanted to tell the story of the ice age we wanted to tell the story of the Frexian invasion and Bolas resurrecting there's actual stories we'd want to tell the story of the Phyrexian invasion and Bolas resurrecting. There's actual stories we'd want to tell from Dominaria.

But right now, we were just kind of trying to prove it. So one of the things I did is I said to the team members, okay, here's the basic gist of what we want. There are some number of turns, and you can pick whatever you want. And things happen, and, you know, we want to tell a story. The goal of this is to tell a story. So Richard went home, and Richard obviously has a lot of prototyping stuff that he uses to make his games. So Richard came back, and if you've seen the...

We shot... Actually, we shot one video that turned into two videos. The first video is me and Richard talking about the sagas and we show some of Richard's sagas. And then the second one, I think we're actually...

I think we showed them in the first one, in passing. And the second one, the second video, we're walking through some of the ones he made. So Richard really took this, was really, loved this idea. And he came back and really sort of designed some interesting,

flavorful. So the technology that Richard introduced was the idea that one of our concerns was space. How exactly do all these things happen, but you still have room to explain it on the card, and room for art, because we knew we needed art. So what happened was, Richard came up with the idea of using icons. So the idea was, so to take the wolf, you know, you would have an icon that showed a wolf, and down below it would say, make a wolf. And then another icon that showed a wolf, make a wolf. And then there's an icon that showed two wolves, make two wolves, it showed wolf, wolf. And that means make a wolf. And then another icon that showed a wolf, make a wolf. And then there's an icon that showed two wolves,

make two wolves, it showed wolf, wolf. And that means make two wolves. And then in the end there's like, I think you sacrifice all the wolves at the end. So like, wolf, wolf, wolf, make a wolf, make a wolf, and then all the wolves go away. And it was like the hunter hunting the wolves or something. And the idea of the little icons meant that,

oh, maybe, and then once we had icons that really communicated the idea of maybe one of the ways to save spaces, there could be some duplication of effects on the cards and originally when we were designing, so and Richard came up with a lot

of also like different kinds of ways we could explore the approach that Richard took was really thinking of it like a board game, that you're advancing on a board game and the different spaces told you what to do. And so in Vision, we ended up coming up with two, we ended up doing four and six were the two we did. I think in the end we handed over just fours with the note of maybe if you want something that's more grandiose and longer, you could do six. Obviously, set design ended up changing it

over to three because four was a little bit too much. The one other thing we did envision that ended up going away in set design is in our version, at the beginning of every turn or whenever you paid, I forget what it was, three, I think, meaning you could advance the story with mana rather than just time. And the reason we did that is, A, we had longer ones. They were four. And we wanted to make sure if you played a later game, you can make them happen.

And so the idea was you could sort of hurry the story along by spending mana. In set design, they decided the four was too much. They knocked down the three. spending mana. In set design, they decided the four was too much. They knocked down the three, and they decided not to do the mana to advance it. They felt it made it a little busy,

and it just wasn't happening enough. None of the people were spending mana to advance it. One of the things set design did is they moved it from beginning of turn until after your draw. Dave Humphries, who's the set set lead designer really felt that it was important that you got knowledge of what was happening this turn before you committed to what was going on

he liked the fact that you drew your cards so you could sort of plan your turn out and that planning that turn included this happening rather than it happening just before anything goes on. The other big thing that happened in set design was we sort of handed over this idea with a lot of loose, like,

some of the ideas we had early on based on some of Richard's stuff was like the art was underneath the whole card and there was like sort of a trail on top of the card that represented stuff with icons and bottom to bottom and it had a legend that explained the icons. In the end, they decided

that that was better of duplicating the efforts and the reason instead of an icon, you just would have these chapter icons that were 1, 2, and 3 and so if you did the same thing more than one turn, the box would change so that it would just say one and two were the same box.

So you, oh, do this, then do this. So James, our graphic designer, spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out a lot of different ways to do this. Meanwhile, there's an idea that came up during Vision that the art design, the art team really latched onto, which was the idea of showing the history of the world through the art of the world itself.

And so one of the things about Sagas is once we knew we wanted Sagas to look different, the treatment we really liked was that, you know, if we're going to tell the history of Benalia, well, how would Benalia tell its own history? Oh, well, maybe in stained glass,

because there's a lot of religion there, and the churches are a big deal. So maybe it would tell its story through stained glass. But maybe somebody else is telling its story through a painting, or through, you know, we found different ways in which this is the story of the world, but told through the in-world art of Dominaria, which we thought was a really cool idea, and it ended up being very neat.

Also, in the way the cards ended up getting laid out, we did this vertical layout, so that the sagas had just a very distinctive look in the way that they happened. Art in general is more long than it is wide. I mean, it can be wide, but it just presented itself well to sort of making really impressive looking art stuff. Um, so, so that is how we got to sagas.

Um, and like I said, I, the set design did a lot of wonderful sort of evolutionary stuff with it. Um, but I was really happy that the basic essence of what we were doing is something that Vision came up with and just followed through the whole process. Okay, but wait, we were not done yet. So we had sagas. The interesting thing about sagas, by the way, for as different as they are, never had any people worry about sagas. There were never any complaints about sagas. There was always talk about how to do it, and there was a lot of tweaking,

and there was a lot of work spent into making them the best thing they could be and finding the right stories and stuff. But nowhere in the process was anyone like, we should get rid of sagas. Everybody liked sagas. The problem child ended up being historic. So kicker is fine, no end to problem kicker. Saga is fine, no end to problem sagas. Historic, okay, historic had a couple problems.

Number one was, because it was a cash trigger, really what it wanted you to do was play a lot of cheap of this thing. And it turns out that legends aren't that cheap and artifacts can be very cheap. So instead of making you play a very legendary rich deck, it was making you play a cheap artifact deck. And like, well, I mean, not that we don't mind you, we want you to have some artifacts, but, you know, oh. So one of the ideas that got pitched forward was, well, maybe we just take artifacts out. Maybe historic is just legendary. So now we get to the Kamigawa problem.

So one of the things about Kamigawa is that there are just some inherent problems with Legendary as a theme. One is, it skews higher in rarity. We don't want to make common Legendary cards. It fights the nature of what Legendary means. It means they're unique, and they're different, and they're one of a kind. Well, if they're common, they don't... I mean, we stretch

them a little bit to get them uncommon, and even then, we're kind of making rare-feeling cards uncommon. So you have Asph know, so it's, you have Asphalt problems. Number two is you have a Converter Manacost problem. Legendaries tend to be more expensive. They tend to be bigger. And so if you build a deck of nothing but legendary things,

your early drops, you don't have what you need to make it work. Also, when you play legendary things, they tend to push in colors. You tend to need to go toward more colors. And legendary things don't tend to be good at helping you get toward more colors. Also there was just the... I mean there is...

Most of what we found out from Kamigawa is that Legendary is a theme in a vacuum by itself just has a lot of gaping holes because of the nature of what they are. And the nice thing about Artifacts, one of the reasons I really liked Artifacts was it did a great job of filling in the things where Legendaries fall down. Legendaries can't be common. Artifacts can.

Legendaries tend to be more expensive. Artifacts can be cheaper. Legendaries tend to be lots of colors. Artifacts are great at fixing color. You know, there's a lot of synergy between the two. So we had to solve the problem of how do we make sure that you're not just playing cheap artifacts. So that was the mechanical

problem. And then we had the flavor problem. People weren't getting it. It was saying historic and italics, em dash, and then whenever you play an artifact or legendary thing, do blah blah blah. And people weren't getting it. Why artifact and legendary?

They weren't getting the flavor. And what we found was, this is when I did some research and talked to a lot of people, People tend to skip over ability words. I mean, they use them when they talk about the cards, but when you're first learning a card, you kind of learn to skip over things in italics. And that if you know anything about magic, the ability word is not really necessary to understand the card. So people tend to gloss over it. So what we found was people weren't getting the flavor because they were kind of glossing over it. So we kept tweaking things over time. We were

trying to find effects that made you want to play like one of the things we did is with the cast trigger version of Historic was trying to get more effects that you would want to use on legendary creatures. So like yeah you might want some cheap artifacts to trigger it, but you need some legendaries to make it relevant, to make it work. And so we try to tweak it that way. And I did a bunch of things of rejiggering and messing with words. But anyway, neither problem was quite getting solved. And so Bill, And so Bill, Bill's the VP, Bill Rose is the VP of R&D. Bill has a meeting, maybe, there are constant meetings,

but it would happen four times a year maybe that you would meet for any one set. So I had to present to Bill, and Bill was like, I hear a lot of problems with historic, let's get rid of it. And I'm like, no, no, no, Bill. Look, this is the glue that holds the things together. There's a lot of component pieces to it. We want history as a theme. History is tricky.

But this is the thing that's pulling all the elements together. Oh, by the way, at the time, sagas were also legendary at the time. That's important. I'll get to that in a second. So sagas were legendary. So when we said caring about artifacts and legendary things, it cared about sagas, sagas were legendary. So, when we said caring about artifacts and legendary things, it cared about sagas

because sagas were legendary because we wanted the stories to obviously be part of the history. So, Bill said, let's pull it from the set. And I made an impassioned plea. I'm like,

Bill, this is doing really important work. It is the bearing wall in my artifact, I'm sorry, in my architecture metaphor. Everything's the bearing wall in my artifact, sorry, in my architecture metaphor. Everything's built around this. I mean,

this is not the splashy part of the set. That's sagas. It's not the nostalgia part of the set, necessarily. That's more individual car designs and kicker. But it is the glue that is holding everything together. And so Bill said to me, okay, Mark, I will give you, I think he gave me six weeks, Mark, I will give you, I think he gave me

six weeks or something, I will give you six weeks to prove to me, you know, solve these problems or it's going out of the set. And so I worked, so Kelly Diggs

was doing the concept and the story part for Creative and Mark Winters was doing the art. So I worked with the two of them to try to prove the concept andters was doing the art. So I worked with the two of them to try to prove the concept and solve some of the problems.

One of the things I did was talk about, is it resonant? So I worked hard to make a bunch of cards that sort of said, here is how history is resonant as a theme. I found archetypes that were history mattered. I then spent a lot of time sort of making cards

and showing them to people and then taking notes and one of my big things was I was trying to figure out how to get people to get the flavor one of the things I did is I read something interesting a psychology thing

about how people treat batches of two differently than batches of three that if I say peanuts and almonds most most people are like, oh, okay, peanuts and almonds. But if I say peanuts, almonds, and cashews, most people go, oh, oh, nuts. For some reason, three is where the trigger response, where you think of it as a group, where two, you just think of it as like two things. So I was determined to have a third thing.

So I think I put Planeswalker. I tried Planeswalker. It's artifacts. Legendary things are Planeswalkers. But then we changed the rules so Planeswalkers became legendary. Okay, so I didn't need to do that. And then I came up with the idea

of what if we referenced Saigus specifically? Because one of the things I always liked was it is, you know, the people, the things, and the stories

of the past. That's what history is. Meanwhile, Dave Humphries, because we were in set design at the time, was, there were some

of the, there were some of the Saigas that you wanted to actually be able to play multiples of and he's like when I mentioned the idea

that maybe I was thinking of putting sagas there he goes oh well if you do that I can make them not legendary that'd be good there's some issues with them being legendary

people are forgetting that they're legendary that even though the fact that they represented a story made sense and some people people were like well it's a story

but multiple people can tell the same story like it didn't wasn't ringing to people it was supposed to be legendary. So anyway, I changed it to make it three things. So it's artifacts, legendary things, and sagas. I messed with the words.

I did a lot of fiddling. And one of the things I eventually realized was, the problem I was running into was that people were skipping over the ability word. What I needed to do is have a vocabulary word they couldn't skip over. So I tried something a little new, which is, I just said, okay, what if, so Joy Rob was a card that said, whenever you cast an artifact or a legendary thing or now a saga, draw a card. So I said, okay, what if I just put the vocabulary word in people's faces? What if I said whenever you draw a historic card,

so whenever you cast a historic spell, draw a card. And then I would in reminder text after tell you what that means. But the idea is I would start by giving you the word so you had no choice but like, you couldn't process the sentence without trying to understand the flavor.

And what I found was, when I did this, people responded, like, what would happen is people would read the card, they go, okay, whenever we get a historic spell, and they go, what's a historic spell? Okay, I better keep reading, I want to learn what a historic spell. And then it would say, a historic spell is an artifact, a legendary thing, or a saga. And they'd go, oh! Okay, that makes sense. And so rather than people like before

when it was like, what are these two things that have in common, when I sort of got the word in front of them, I got the concept in front of them, and then explained it later, it worked. Now the problem was, this wasn't something we had ever done before. This was, so I, we ended up getting a term for this in R&D, what we call batching. And the idea is I'm gonna connect things you already know, but I'm

going to give it a name, a word, so that I can shorthand it in the rules thing and then in reminder text I just tell you what you need to know to know it. But once you learn what it is, you now can skip the reminder text and just go, oh, I get it. I understand what a historic card is. Now, the other big thing once we made this change is once we were using the word, we weren't tied down to the structure we had before. Originally, when it was an ability word, it had to work the same on every card. At least the input had to be the same, so we could ability word it. Usually, ability words, either all the input has to be the same,

all the output has to be the same, or both can be the same. Once I did that, I now could say, oh, well, go get a historic card out of your library, or tutor for a historic card, or I can now reference it. I now could, it now became a terminology that became vocabulary rather than sort of a lockability word. And that let me solve Dave's problem, the mechanical problem.

It's not really Dave's problem. Dave was the one that kept reminding me that we needed to be fixed. And so that allowed us to make a lot of different things. And so we, it, so anyway, historic, so it essentially, people were now understanding it.

Um, it was making it a little easier for people to get the flavor and, um, it was, um, mechanically gave us more flexibility. So it was solving some of the mechanical issues we had. And so I went to Bill and I explained all the stuff we had done. I had shown it around. I had really good feedback from around the offices. People were understanding it. They were enjoying it. They were liking it. It was flavorful. And Bill said no. He didn't think it was working.

And I was tasked with finding an alternate for historic. And the problem was that when you build around something, like when you take something and you put it at the center of your design and you build around it, like when it's the glue, when you take the glue out, it at the center of your design, and you build around to make it, like, when it's the glue,

when you take the glue out, it is such a weird thing you're trying to solve that trying to replace it is just near impossible. It's one of the reasons that I fought so hard to keep it, was it was doing really good work and filling in a lot of gaps, and it wasn't something where we can just fill in it. Like, if you just said, well, we'll just care about legendary things, and there's all these problems about caring about legendary things.

So, anyway, I'm at work, so we're going to stop here. So I go to Bill, I say, I've got it, I've cracked it, I've solved it, and Bill goes, no. We'll pick up next time. So, anyway, I hope you guys are

enjoying the podcast so far on Dominaria. But anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying the podcast so far on Dominaria. But 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 magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time.