Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #547: Jumping-Off Points

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

For this podcast, I walk through every design team I've led or co-led and talk about what the jumping-off point was for the design to show the many different paths we start with when making a set.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about jumping off points. So what that means is, one of the things that I do, I mean I've designed a lot of magic sets, a lot of magic sets. And one of the things that I try to do is always start from a different place. I've talked a lot about how neurochemistry works, that your brain will go down the same pathways if it's solving the same problem, which most of the time is a fine thing to do. But with creativity, it's not that great because you tend to have repetition. So one of the things I always try to do is start every design from a totally different place, from a different jumping off point, if you will. So what I want to talk about today is go through every set that I led or co-led

and talk about what exactly I did to start with. Where was the starting point? Some of them are very obvious. Some of them are less obvious. Some of them aren't quite what you think they would be based on what they are. So I'm going to go chronologically through all the sets that I've led, which is a lot of sets, so we best get started. Okay, we start with Tempest, which was my very first set. So interestingly, my jumping off point for Tempest, there are a lot of things you might think were the jumping off point. For example, Michael Ryan and I put together the Weatherlight Saga, and the Tempest was very early in the Weatherlight Saga. You might think, oh, we were guided by the story.

We actually weren't. Design for Tempest started before we actually got sign-off on the story. We later went back and fit the story to it, and we figured out how to weave elements of the mechanics into the story, but that's not where we started. Tempest actually started from a very interesting place, which was, I put together my team. So it was me, Richard Garfield, Mike Elliott, and Charlie Coutinho. And Michael and I both had wanted to do design, but had never led a design. In fact, never been on a design team before. Charlie had been on Mirage and Visions, but that's the only set he'd ever been on. So he hadn't been on one in a while. Even though Mirage and Visions, but that's the only set he's ever been on. So he hadn't been on one in a while. Even though Mirage was right before Tempest,

it got made years earlier. And Richard's last set had been Arabian Nights. So everybody had not really made a magic set in a while, multiple years. And for some of us, Michael and I, never. And so really what I was interested in was, the first meeting was, let's just see everything we have. And so Tempest started from a weird place in that I didn't know where we were going. It was just like, let's see what we got. Everybody spilled everything out. And because there was so much built up material, because

no one had done anything in either ever or a while, we just had lots and lots and lots of ideas. In fact, one of the things about Tempest was I think when I handed it over from design to development, there were way, way, way too many mechanics in it. Like, both Echo and Cycling, which would be Urza Saga the following year,

both the major mechanics from that set were in Tempest originally. And in fact, Tempest had so much stuff in it, I think that for a period of time, there was like seven years in which every set had something borrowed, had a card borrowed from Tempest had so much stuff in it, I think that for a period of time, it was like seven years in which every set had something borrowed, had a card borrowed from Tempest. Anyway, so that was a jumping off point for Tempest, which is, let's see what we got and see what comes out of that.

So the next set I did was Urza's Destiny. So Urza's Destiny was, the quirky thing about that was, I was the design team. Other than, I think, Arabian Nights and Alpha and Arabian Nights, I think it was the only team designed by one person. So Richard Garfield and I are the two people that designed a set by ourselves. Everything else was done in teams. So the thing, the jumping off point for Earth is Destiny was it was the third set in the block. And the way we used to do things at the time was we didn't do a lot of block planning.

It's just like set one would come up with ideas and do with it. And set two would expand on those ideas in ways that the first set hadn't. And then set three would expand further on the ways that neither the first nor the second set had expanded on the ways. So a lot of Urza's Destiny was just Urza's Saga and Urza's

Legacy had done some things. Echo and cycling were mechanics. There was an enchantment theme. You know, like, for example, one of the themes that I put in the set was the idea of trying to care about what I called cycling from play,

although it wasn't labeled, but cards in which you could sacrifice them while they're on the battlefield to draw a card. You usually spent two mana and drew a card. It was like cycling, but rather from your hand, they're on the battlefield to draw a card. You usually spent two mana and drew a card. It was like cycling, but rather from your hand, it was on the battlefield. And I did that because I could make some cool cycling cards. I was playing around with death triggers. It just let me do a bunch of cool things that were kind of just expansions of what had gone on.

A lot of Urza's Destiny was, how can I take the components that we made Urza's Saga and Urza's Legacy with and just make some new things? Oh, there's growing enchantments? Well, I'll make growing auras. You know, I would just keep extrapolating and sort of take ideas that I'd seen and do different things with them. Okay, the next set I did was Unglued. So Unglued was the very first supplemental set, back before we knew what supplemental sets were.

So Unglued came from a very simple starting place, which was given to me, which was, this is going to have a silver border. Silver border means it can't be played in tournaments. And then what does that mean? And from that, I came out with the idea of, let's do things that we can't do in Black Border. Let's do comedy.

Let's have some parody. Let's make fun of ourselves. But all of that came out of the jumping off point of, you have a border that can't be played in tournaments. Which kind of implied, meant you could do things you couldn't normally do. But what exactly that meant, or how you would do it, that came later. But the jumping off point was the silver border. The definition that it couldn't be played in tournaments. That was the jumping off point.

Okay. So next, we have Odyssey. So Odyssey, the set before Odyssey, let's see, we had done Urza's Saga, and then we had done Rikadian Masks block, and then we had done Urza's Saga,

and then we had done Rikadian Masks block, and then we had done Invasion block. And I was involved in those, but I didn't lead any of them. So the next that I led was Odyssey. And Invasion had started up this new idea of, there's a theme. We have a theme. Interesting, though, you would think that the jumping off point for Odyssey was

we're going to make a graveyard set, but it wasn't. Um, we, the actual jumping off point, believe it or not, um, was I was intrigued with the idea. One of the things that I really liked early on, uh, and this might show my, my growth as a designer is I liked the idea of taking a given and turning it on its head. I liked the idea of taking a given and turning it on its head. I liked the idea of that one of the things I found fascinating about Magic as a game player was that the strategy kept changing. And things that were true, like, you know, you always knew you could depend upon the opponent

not being able to do something when they were tapped out. Oh, until pitch cards existed. Now that wasn't true. And I loved the idea of trying to turn things on their head. So the idea that I was fascinated with was turning card advantage on its head. That was a jumping off point of Odyssey. That's a horrible jumping off point, by the way. That was not a great, the idea of, I mean, not that I don't mind going against sort of, you know, having the game change its strategy. that's awesome. But just sort of this concept, I want to

make not true, is a weird jumping off point. One of my biggest problems with Odyssey, if you've heard me talk about Odyssey, is it was a very, very spiky set. It was very much about I'm going to make you do things you don't want to do. And if you understand those are good for you, you'll find it fun.

But if you don't, yeah, it was a set where discarding your hand was the right call. But that doesn't mean people wanted to discard their hand. That was part of the problem. But anyway, my jumping off point for Odyssey was me messing around with the fundamental of the game. Now, partway into the design, I figured out

that we were a graveyard set, and then we leaned into that. So it wasn't that design didn't get handed off as a graveyard set. It just didn't start as a graveyard set. That's one of my themes of today's podcast is where things end up and where things start are not the same thing. That, you know, Odyssey, when you think about it, it's like, oh, it was the graveyard set or the first graveyard block. I mean, Weatherlight had been a graveyard set before that. But it wasn't where it started i i always find stuff like that kind of fascinating personally

okay so we uh rest of the odyssey block with the onslaught block um then we get to mirrodin that was my next set so mirrodin um we were now the point where okay sets are about things there's themes the sets of themes it was the multi-color block it was the graveyard block it was the tribal block and i wanted to do an artifact block. I'm a big fan of art. If you actually watch my history of design, I like artifact blocks. I like artifact as a theme. I know I know they're dangerous developmentally, but I do like them and the audience likes them too.

Okay. So, what that meant was I wanted to figure out how to get as many artifacts in the set as possible. That was my jumping off point. I wanted to do an artifact set. So it meant a couple things. One is it meant I needed to get to a new world so we can sort of make sense of all the artifact creatures.

And so I had a lot to do with making a mirrored in what we called metal world for a long time. the making of Mirrodin, what we called Metal World for a long time. The idea of an artificial metal plane, something that we had, I mean, it changed a lot over our creation of it, but that was a big part of it. And I really was trying to figure out how to make, when I say artifacts matter, I mean thematically having a lot of artifacts. Why would you want to do that? You know, what's going on? thematically having a lot of artifacts.

Why would you want to do that? You know, what's going on? Interestingly, I actually had a lot of color weaved into the artifacts, and that got yanked out. Bill made me yank that out before I, when design got turned in. But it wasn't that I wanted artifacts without color. I just wanted a lot of artifacts.

I wanted a huge ass fan of artifacts, which we had. But that was the impetus. That was the jumping off point for Mirrodin, was I wanted an huge ass fan of artifacts, which we had. But that was the impetus. That was the jumping off point for Mirrodin was I wanted an artifact block and I wanted a set that could justify mechanically and creatively just having a lot of artifact creatures. That is where we started from. Okay, so the next set that I led was Fifth Dawn.

So Fifth Dawn was another in the third sets. I did a bunch of third sets. It's funny, I didn't do a lot of second sets in my day, and now I won't have a lot of chance to. I did a few, and I only ever did one second set in a three-set block. I'll get to that eventually. Anyway, sorry, we're in Fifth Dawn. So Fifth Dawn, the jumping off

point of Fifth Dawn was an interesting one. I was a third set, much like I was with Thursday's Destiny, but we had learned, we had made some mistakes. We had chosen to do stuff and we didn't figure it out before Mirrodin went out. We didn't even figure it out really before Darksteel went out. But we had figured

it out before Fifth Dawn happened. And so Fifth Dawn's design was very much, okay, you need to make sense in the world that we are. You're on Mirrodin. But hey, a lot of the, like, affinity is problematic. Yeah, don't make any good affinity

cards. You know, like we had realized we had made kind of a broken environment. So Fifth Dawn had like the don't do what the sets before it did, but feel like you belong. That was the point for Fifth Dawn. That was a tricky one. And if you ever

wondered why we went to Sunburst, all of a sudden we're playing, play five colors and the sets before it don't really help you play five colors, that's how you tell it wasn't planned ahead of time. Like if it was a block plan, both mirrored in Darksteel, I mean, we did fit a few things in Darksteel, because we were at the tail end of Darksteel, but both Mirrodin and Darksteel would have had a lot of things that you retroactively could have used to play five color.

So maybe you didn't realize it at the time, but once the third set came out, we had helped you. But this was before the age of block planning or was... I guess it was before. Block planning didn't really start until I took over as the head designer. That didn't happen to Ravnica. So we really weren't doing block planning just yet. And so...

In fact, it was Fifth Dawn that made me realize we needed to do block planning. Because I realized we had to paint ourselves in a corner. And if we had thought about it... Now, another thing about Fifth Dawn was I didn't know when we were making Mirrodin that Mirrodin would break, so like, it wasn't like, part of the problem 5th Dawn got into wasn't something we necessarily knew when Mirrodin was happening. But anyway, that was the jumping off point for 5th Dawn, which is, make it fit, but don't, you know, but don't use any of these things that are broken.

So that was challenging. Okay, so after 5th Dawn, after Mirrodin, we had Unhinged. So Unhinged was the second Silver Border set. So the jumping point off for Unhinged was I wanted to do another Silver Border set, but the first one had been very what I call hodgepodge-y, which was there had been a few cycles and things, and there's some dice rolling, there were a few themes, but there wasn't really a mechanic. It didn't feel as much like a normal set, in that the first set was more like just lots of different things,

and it didn't have as much of a cohesive feel to it. And so I wanted to have some thematic things that tied things together. I wanted to have at least one mechanic. I wanted to have some themes. I wanted to have a little bit of creative element to it. I mean, not what I would later get with Unstable. We'll get there eventually. But anyway, I just wanted to be a little more cohesive.

I wanted it to, I mean, every time I do a Silver Border set, it's kind of like, what are the new technologies that I didn't have last time I made a Silver Border set? And Unhinged was six years after Unstable, so we really started getting into a different form of how we made sets, and I was trying to mirror that. And so,

even though I made some mistakes with the mechanic, gotcha was a mistake, but I, the idea of wanting a mechanic made a lot of sense and having some mechanical identity more so than Unglute had had. So that is what Unhinged wanted to do. Hold on a second. Sorry, I'm on the tail end of my cold,

but I still have to drink a lot of water because as I talk, it dries up my throat. Okay. Okay. After Unhinge, Mercanty Mass Block, we then get to Ravnica.

So Ravnica was actually a very, the jumping off point of Ravnica was crystal clear. So we had done Invasion as a multicolored theme, and we decided we would come back and do another multicolored theme set. Players really like multicolored. So my goal, my jumping off point was, I wanted to do a multicolored

block that wasn't invasion. That was my jumping off point, that just was not invasion. And invasion was all about playing lots of colors, play four and five colors. So I decided that I would go to the opposite end of the spectrum, which is play as few colors as you can, but in multicolor that means two,

since playing one isn't multicolor. So I got very fascinated. Okay, let's play two. And then that led me to the idea of the two-color pairings, and then I made the decision of have them all be equal. The idea of guilds took a couple months to get to. Like, I knew early on that I was going to do all the color pairs, and I knew that they were going to be of equal weight with each other,

which was, at the time, kind of a radical idea. But the idea of the guilds and the guild identities and all that, that was something that Brady Donovan came up with, and then I ran with it. Like, once he sort of had that idea of a way to match the creative, I realized that we could use it as the thrust of the set. And then the guilds became, then we got the 433 and all that to make that work.

But Ravnica jumping off really was, don't be invasion. Like I said, one of the ongoing themes is, what is the set known for? Guilds! What did it start off be? Don't be invasion. Now that eventually got us to

guilds, but it wasn't like we didn't start with the idea of here's a neat idea. It's a city world with guilds. Like when we started, it wasn't a city world and there weren't guilds. Okay, so I did Ravnica and then we got into Future Sight block. Okay, so I did

Future Sight. I said we get into Time Throw block. I did Future Sight. So Future Sight, we had come up with the idea, or I had come up with the idea, of doing past, present, and future. I really liked the idea of using that as a thematic thing because there were three parts. It was a three-part thing.

So I really started with the idea that, and the design started with, you represent the future. Now it also was a third set. So I had a file on the trails of Time Spiral and Planner Chaos. They both had time shifted sheets so I knew I would have a time shifted sheet.

I also knew that it had to be a time shifted sheet from the future. So the idea of individual cards from Magic's future was pretty early in the process. But I also knew that I needed to, like, one of the things about Time Spiral Block was there was a theme of time. So not only did I have to care about future, like the time shifted sheet cared about Magic's future, but in the normal part of the set, I also cared a lot about the game, the future of the game itself.

Like the packs, for example, were cycle cards that you could play now but had to pay for next turn. And I had a bunch of cards where you had to worry about how they played out in the future, that you had to plan ahead. I had suspend to play around with, and so we

messed around with things that sort of cycled, that sort of happened, and then went back in suspension, so they went off every amount of turns, so that you knew when they were going to happen, so there was a sort of planning ahead. But a lot of the jumping off point, really, and the simple jumping off point for Future Sight was, it's the third set, and it's the future. How do I capture the elements that the first two sets did?

How do I have a future theme? And so that was just sort of connecting the dots of how do those two things work together. As it turns out, for those who know, I did a whole podcast on Future Sight. In fact, I did a podcast on a lot of the sets I'm talking about today. I like how the set came out a lot,

but it was complex. It was a complex set. Okay, so after Future Sight was Shards of Alara Block, which I was not, didn't leave any of those. And then we get to Zendikar, of which I led. So Zendikar started with a really simple jumping off point, which is I realized that there's a lot of design space on land, either land mechanics, meaning, well, land mechanics means one of

two things. Either mechanics that go on land or mechanics that care about lands. And I realized that it was a space that we'd not played around with. We'd messed around with artifacts and we'd messed around a little bit with enchantments and we clearly messed around with creatures. But we had never really sort of... Land had not been something which had been the focus. The funny thing at the time was when I first talked about it, I called it the Lands Matter set.

And Matt Place, who was the developer at the time, used to joke with me. He goes, oh, that's what we need, a Lands Matter set. Whew! I'm glad lands finally matter! And that was... If you ever listen to my podcast on Zendikar, that was a set where I really had a vision and I had an idea, and people just couldn't quite get what I was going after. For a while, I used to call it Landsapalooza, just to try to play out that it's the land set. And then Bill came to me at one point, he goes,

look, nobody's excited by the land set. I believe in you. I believe, like, I understand what you're trying to do. We just need to give it a different name. And so we started calling it the money set. And then Brian said, oh, that sounds good. The money set, that sounds good. Anyway, oh, so the interesting thing about Zendikar, by the way,

is Adventure World, you know, the traps, the maps, the chaps, which are the allies, all that stuff came later. We spent the first couple months just trying to figure out what space there was playing around with lands. And we tried a whole mess of mechanics, probably 40, 50 mechanics, and, you know,

we eventually got to Landfall. Landfall was the first mechanic that we sort of settled on. We had Landfall, and we had the lands that entered the sort of settled on. We had Landfall and we had the lands that entered the battlefield and did something. We messed around. In the end, they ended up doing small things. We had experimented with a bunch of different versions. But anyway, the jumping off point for

Zendikar was not Adventure World, was not the Eldrazi, was not, you know, adventure parties, or, you know, it was lands. That was the jumping off point. Now, that's a jumping off point that stayed in the set, meaning it's not like some of the jumping off points where the set ended up and where it started with are not quite the same thing. This is one in which it still is the land set.

It's just there's a lot of other elements woven around it. That's one of the things that people slowly start to understand is what I think is the driver of the set doesn't mean in the end that's how the audience is going to perceive it necessarily. I mean we did clearly have a land theme in the set but we didn't sell it as the land set as much as we sold it as Adventure World that had a land element to it.

Okay, so after Zendikar, the next set I worked on or I led was Scars of Mirrodin. So Scars of Mirrodin, so this is a good example where the jumping off point was really different from where we ended up. So the jumping off point originally was it was going to be New Phyrexia. We were going to New Phyrexia. Now, we had planned ahead. In our first trip to Mirrodin, we had planted the seeds that the Mirrodins were there, but very subtly. And so the plan for Scars of Mirrodin block was,

hey, let's visit a new plane. It's New Phyrexia. Wow, look at New Phyrexia. And then at the very end go, like, make you realize that, oh my God, it was Mirrodin. Mirrodin had become New Phyrexia. And then while making the set,

we realized that we were kind of skiffing over this cool part, this cool story, that the whole, hey, how did Mirrodin fall to New Phyrexia was kind of cool, and we got the idea of what if New Phyrexia was the end of the block, and you didn't know it was going there, and there's a big mystery, and there's a war, and the middle set was a war, and what happened,

and we advertised two different sets, and depending on who won, it would be a different set. But all that came later. Really, the jumping off point was the Phyrexians. Like, it's off point was the Phyrexians like it's going to be a new Phyrexia and I was really excited about the idea of bringing the Phyrexians to life

now obviously that all came, like that part didn't happen but it just became part of a larger tableau if you will but when I started the real the jumping off point for Scars of Mirrodin was okay how do we make the Phyrexians this imposing,, how do we make the Phyrexians this imposing... How do we bring the Phyrexians to life?

My argument at the time had been, yeah, we'd seen the Phyrexians before. They obviously are Magic's oldest villain. But they were kind of just like... The Phyrexians had a look about them. But it was more about their look than it was about their identity mechanically. And I was really interested in giving them a mechanical identity.

And I was really intrigued by the idea of capturing the feel. Scars of Mirrodin was the first set where I really got into, I think that's the start of Fifth Age design, where I was really into emotional resonance and figuring out how the gameplay can make the player feel the way we wanted the set to make them feel. So I was really, really into the idea of capturing the essence of what Phyrexians were

and trying to make the gameplay match the Phyrexians. Now later, once it was a war, I then figured out how to make it feel like Mirrodin, although we'd done Mirrodin before, that was a little easier. But the jumping off point, once again, was New Phyrexia. And we ended up not being New Phyrexia until the third set, but that was a little easier. But the jumping off point, once again, was New Phyrexia. And it ended up not being New Phyrexia until the third set. But that was the jumping off point.

Okay, after Scars and Mirrodin was Innistrad. So Innistrad had a very interesting starting point. When we were making Odyssey, Brady Diamond was the night. Brady was the creative director. Actually, at the time, he wasn't the creative director. I think he might still have been an editor at the time. He was talking to me about how he thought that Odyssey was a total miss

from a creative standpoint in that the creative of the world had nothing to do with the mechanics. Early Magic, there was a lot more disconnect. Like, R&D would make a set and the creative team then called Continuity would make a world, but they were not, then called Continuity, would make a world,

but they were not... Now, I work really hard to make sure the mechanics reinforce the world, but at the time, I didn't even know the world when I was making the mechanics. The world would get made after the fact, usually. Usually, we'd finish making the mechanics, and then they would make a world out of it.

But the problem was... Brady's big issue was, we had this graveyard theme, and the set, like, remember Odyssey was about, like, Oteria and the Cabal and Kamala. I mean, none of the story necessarily was

a bad story. It just didn't have a lot to do with what the set was. And he said that one of the things he thought would be interesting was that he thought it would be neat to do a graveyard-oriented set with a gothic horror theme.

And when he said that, I was really entranced by the idea of the genre of horror. That there's a lot of tropes in the genre, and that there's a lot of overlap between fantasy and horror. There's a lot of overlap between fantasy and horror. There's a lot of overlap there. And I thought there was a rich spot that we could make a set out of

where we did a top-down design. So what had happened was... One would argue Arabian Nights is the first top-down design. But the first time internally we tried to do it was Champs of Kamigawa. And I wasn't on the team that did it, but watching from the side, I really felt that it wasn't done the right way. What they did is they kind of nailed down all the flavor and then tried to match the mechanics to it.

But mechanics are just as flexible as flavor and cause all sorts of problems. So I was really interested in trying to do a top-down set. I liked the idea of, you know, the horror genre as the jumping-off point, and so I had gone to Bill, or this might have been Randy at this point, it probably was Randy, and I had put it on the thing saying, I wanted to do this. It got pushed back a lot, by the way. This was one of the sets that kept getting pushed back, and then finally

after a bunch of shenanigans, I mean, finally finally, after a bunch of shenanigans, I mean, finally, I mean, there's the amount of shenanigans that went through. They finally decided they would let me do it as a third set, a large set by itself at the end of the year.

Like what ended up being, what ended up being Evason Restored. And then they're like, oh, but it's a horror set. Maybe around Halloween, like, you know, maybe coming out in October is the right oh, but it's a horror set. Maybe around Halloween, maybe coming out in October is the right thing, because we're right about Halloween.

And then they said, well, but if we do that, we need a second set. Mark, can you make a second set? Yeah, I can make a second set. So it got moved. But anyway, after a lot, but the jumping off point for IndieStrive was very straightforward. It's top-down, top-down world, gothic horror world that captured the genre of horror.

And that was my jumping off point. Clean and simple. Pure top-down. Here's my source material. I'm going to make a set that evokes that, but while still being, you know, having a fantasy core to it. The next set after that was Dark Ascension.

So Dark Ascension, interestingly, oh, did I? I did skip over stuff. Ah! One of the things that's funny is you run through things. I did, I did, I did, I did. Okay, so I'm going to come back to Dark Ascension in a second. I skipped over two sets that I made.

So let's go back. So after I had done, where was I? I had done Future Sight. Then the next set was not... Sorry. The next set was not Shards of Alara. The next set was Lorwyn. And it was Lorwyn and Morning Tide,

of which I didn't run neither of those. But then Shadowmoor and Even Tide. I ran both of those. Okay, sorry. Let me... So Shadowmoor, the jumping off point was hybrid, hybrid, hybrid.

I made hybrid during Ravnica. I was enamored with the mechanic. And we had used it as a splashy, like sometimes when you do something for the first time, the way you want to use it is just in small amounts in a splashy way, just to make people go, ooh, that's cool. And really, Ravnica needed something splashy, but not something large in volume, and so we ended up using hybrid. In fact, I made hybrid, it got

kicked out for a little while, and then it got put back in. In fact, hybrid was going to be in Time Spiral for a little while, for those that don't know it. It almost premiered in Time Spiral. The weirdness of the world of the temporal stuff is messing up mana. But anyway, that didn't happen. So I was really enamored with the idea of a design

that just saw how much hybrid we could do. Let's use hybrid as the core of the set and not a splashing mechanic, but a workhorse mechanic. And really, it just started for me going, I'm going to turn it up to 11. I'm going to turn up the dial. How high can I go? In the end, we decided to do about 50%.

It ended up being close to 50%. I mean, in retrospect, we probably ended up being a little higher than we needed to be, but that was the impetus. That was the point for that. And then Eventide, because we did such a high level

in Shadowmoor that we'd gone so high, it ended up meaning that in Eventide, I ended up going so high. It ended up meaning that in Eventide, I ended up going to the enemy, so I had used up all the ally space, so I went to enemy. The jumping off point was, okay, now we're going to do enemy.

That really was the jumping off point. I think there's some flaws. When I look back at the whole block, well, I actually am proud of a lot of elements of Shadowmoor. Eventide, I consider to be maybe my worst design. And of that was I kind of packed myself into a corner. Like, being that we were drafting Shadowmoor, Shadowmoor, third set, what we were trying to do with Even Tide was almost an impossibility. It's funny, Eric Lauer would later start and we'd change to the system where we would go backwards and play more of a... like if we

had done Shadow... sorry, if we had done Eventide, Eventide, Shadow more, wow, we could have made that work anyway. But the jumping off point for Eventide was pretty straightforward. We're doing enemy version of Shadow. It's hybrid, but enemy hybrid. Okay, back to Dark Ascension. So Dark Ascension...

So Eventide was the first time I'd done a second set, although it was a second set in a block that was only two blocks long. Dark Ascension was the first time I did a second set in a three-block set, although in some ways, Absinthe Restore was kind of its own thing, but they all were in the same world. So I did technically want to do a second set in a three-world block, in a three-set block.

Dark Ascension really was, the impetus was twofold. One, it was a second set, so it wanted to follow up on the first set. But the theme that I jumped off with, my jumping off point was, the monsters are winning. The idea that I thought was really cool was that, you know, we're telling a horror story, and there's a beat in the horror story where it looks like all hope is lost. Where you think, oh my god, they're never going to survive.

And that was that moment. This was the dark moment of the soul. The one where like, oh, things are looking... The humans are about to face extinction. The monsters reign supreme. And so I really wanted to play that up and figure out how to really make it feel

so the humans were at last legs and the monsters felt unbeatable. So we played up a bunch of tribal themes to play up the monsters. We introduced undying, but anyway, all of that came from the idea of the impetus of you know, it's

the darkest moment for humanity. The monsters are on the brink of winning. Okay, so the next set after Innistrad is Return to Ravnica, which I co-led Gatecrash with Mark Gottlieb.

A lot of Gatecrash Return to Ravnica was... This was the first return we were doing. We had gone back to Dominaria many, many times. We'd gone back to Mirrodin, although we really had changed what was going on in Mirrodin. Scars in Mirrodin was a very different block

than Mirrodin. Ravnica was like, we're going back, and you know what? We're going to give you the world that you know and love. We're not going to try to change a lot. And so a lot of Return of Ravnica Gatecrash was, the jumping off point was, how do we go back to a world we've been for two

before deliver the same basic element but but do some make it feel sort of new while going back and so we change it over from four three three to five five ten and we really worked really hard and trying to get stronger one of the things that I thought in the first time through Ravnica, like a lot of Return of Ravnica Gatecrash was fixing what I thought the mistakes of Ravnica were. Now, Ravnica was a great set. People loved it.

It wasn't that, when I say fixing mistakes, I mean do the things we did right last time, do those again, but try to improve the thing. Return, do the same thing, and improve upon it. So the things that worked, we did again.

But one of the big things that I had issues with is I felt all the guilds, the mechanic wasn't always as identified to the guilds as it could be. Like Radiance, not that it didn't make sense in the way that Boros played, but wow, it didn't feel like a Boros mechanic. So I really wanted

to make sure that we were more encapsulating the guild. So it's kind of like guild plus. It's like, let's take what we did last time, but just, you know, do it better, essentially. You know, enrich it more. And so that was Gatecrash. After Gatecrash with Khans of Tarkir. So Khans of Tarkir

is jumping off point with an interesting one, which was, we had large, small, large, and I was really fascinated with the idea that the small set would be drafted with the first large set and then with the second large set but the two large sets would never be drafted together. That was the jumping off point. From that, Ethan Fleischer and Sean Main

had just come in first and second in the second grade designer search and they had just begun working the company on their internships and I put them to the task of what does it mean? Because the GDS2 is very much about vision, of trying to find more people good at vision, and so I was sort of testing them,

or having them work through it and see, like, okay, what do you do with this? Here's the premise. How do you make it work? They came up with a bunch of ideas. The one we liked most was time travel, and that is where we started. The idea of the wedges, the idea of the clans, all that came later.

It being Sarkhan's home world, all that came later. All that came after we had the idea of its time travel world. So that's a good idea where the jumping off point, while that was still there, it sort of got overtaken by other elements. I think the wedge and clans clearly were the focus when the day was

done, but that's not where we were when we made it. Okay. So after Khans of Tarkir is Battle for Zendikar is my next set. The jumping off point was we had a cliffhanger. Pick up from the cliffhanger. In retrospect, I think that might have been a mistake, or at least

how he picked up the cliffhanger. I think having a lot of Eldrazi does not make wonderful magic. A few Eldrazi is awesome, but a lot of Eldrazi is not. But anyway, that's the jumping off point for Battle for Zendikar was the Eldrazi had just escaped and seen. When we came back, well, I guess we're having a war between

or it wasn't as much a war as it was. The Eldrazi had kind of taken over and the Zendikari were rebels trying to, you know, a very Star Wars sort of feel. Like, you know, could the rebels save the day sort of feel. Then the

next set I did after that was I think Zendikar. So Zendikar I co-led with Sean Main. That really, we had made it in Origins and it was sort of us trying to figure out where Chandra came from.

And so it was kind of backward design from Chandra and ended up being kind of the steampunk inventor world with an Indian vibe to it. So my jumping off point was Magic Origins. It's like, we made a world, you need to make a set that is this world. So that was kind of cool. I sort of, I don't normally have a world, you need to make a set that is this world. So that was kind of cool. I sort of, I don't normally have a world built

that I then make mechanics to match the world. We'll go back to worlds, but I don't, this was an odd case in which we had, I mean, I had worked with Sean. Sean had done Magic Origins. So Sean and I had worked together to make sure that we were sort of setting ourselves up. We knew it was going to be an artifact theme.

It had the inventor thing to it. So a big impetus for me when I started was match the creator from Magic Origins and its inventor world. Make inventor world make sense. That was my jumping off point for Cowagist, is make inventor world make sense. Next is Amonkhet.

So Amonkhet, now we're starting to get into the Gatewatch, the main thrust of the story. We knew that it was going to be an Egypt world, and we knew it was going to be a Bolas world. We knew this was the place where Bolas was going to get his comeuppance with the Gatewatch. We also knew that while we... Bolas had always been sort of the man,

or the dragon behind the scenes, that, you know, something bad would happen, and then you see him twirling his proverbial mustache, going, blah, you know, rubbing his hands together, whatever proverbial you do to show you're a villain. And, but it's always like, like he was responsible for a lot of stuff, but we didn't know why,

and like we wanted to see him and understand and watch him do something evil and get why and how it was evil. So we love the idea that this world was going to be a plan where you got to see one of his plans in action and then realize,

oh my goodness, he is A, very smart, B, very powerful, and C, very evil. That you really want to understand that this was somebody to be afraid of. This is somebody

who truly was a mastermind, was planning ahead, was eight steps ahead of everybody, and, you know, plus, we thought that was a mastermind, was planning ahead, was eight steps ahead of everybody, and, you know, plus, we thought that was a neat mirror to Egypt and the harshness of Egypt. So anyway, that was the parallel between those.

That was the jumping off point, was that. Okay, the set after Amonkhet was Ixalan that I led. I co-led that with, oh, I co-led Amonkhet with Ethan Fleischer. I co-led Ixalan with Ken Nagel. So Ixalan, Ixalan was a weird jumping off point. We had started with, Creative had an idea

for a world which was a Mesoamerican world that had vampire conquistadors and I originally had pitched the idea of making use of a mechanic that Richard Garfield had used in Vampire the Eternal Struggle aka Jihad, called The Edge,

which was this thing that only one person could control it at a time, and it granted you some abilities. So what happened is Conspiracy 2 ended up making The Monarch, and it really worked well there, so we ended up putting it there. So when I started, my jumping-off point was Vampire Conquistador World, and make that somehow make sense. Like, I had to look at all the creative and kind of figure out how to make the creative. Where could we go when the place I planned to go wasn't what it ended up being?

And the funny thing was, what happened was once I started looking at the set and I realized that there were vampires and there were pirates. And at some point there were some dinosaurs. I realized it just were vampires and there were pirates and at some point there were some dinosaurs. I realized it just had a tribal vibe to it. So I ended up pushing more in a tribal direction. But it didn't start as a tribal set. Not at all. The jumping off point was not it's a tribal set.

The jumping off point was here's a world, make it make sense and sort of the thing I planned to do at the last minute, like I lost it. So I started the set in kind of a scramble mode of figuring out how do you make this make sense. Okay, the final set, at least the final one that I've worked on that you know of. I've worked on actually a lot of other sets, but in fact it's funny. I'm going to talk about Dominaria, but Dominaria is the start of Vision Design, and I've led almost all of Vision Designs, except for I didn't lead baseball. So I led spaghetti, meatballs, milk, archery, and cricket,

and I'm just starting next week. I start diving. So, like, oh, it's like a lot of stuff I've done that you guys don't know about. But anyway, Dominaria is the lesson. So the jumping off point for Dominaria was 25th anniversary. We're going back to Dominaria's a lesson. So the jumping off point for Dominaria was 25th anniversary, we're going back to Dominaria. And my big jumping point was I wanted to give an identity to...

I wanted to bring up Dominaria into a modern sensibility of how planes work. That right now, planes have a strong identity to them. And Dominaria had always been kind of this hodgepodge. Like, it's part ice world and part jungle world and part mutant world and part post-apocalyptic world. It was

everything. And if you're everything, you're kind of nothing. So, like, the jumping off point was, we were going back to the 20th anniversary. I knew there was a lot of nostalgia in it. I knew people would be happy to see it. And I knew that we had to find a way to sort of tie it all together and make it a cohesive, singular

world. So that was my jumping off point for Dominaria. The idea of history world ended up being our solution, but that took a long time getting there. That was not something we you know, the idea of

renewal, the idea of renewal, the idea of a world whose past, present is obsessed with its past. All those elements, eventually we got there. But that is not where we started. That is not the thing. The jumping off point really was making Dominaria make sense.

So I think I got all the sets today. Sorry, I skipped over Shadimor. So the one, I'm almost Shadowmore. So the one... I'm almost to work, but the one thing hopefully you'll see today is each set had its own unique vantage point. That no set was I ever started from the same place I'd started another set.

That's always important to me that I have something cool to do that I've never done before. I want my brains firing just in places that I and my team have not thought of, that we're doing something different. And that's what today was all about, is pointing out that every set had a jumping off point.

And the jumping off point is not necessarily where the set even ends up. There's a couple examples I gave today where I started in one place, and it really, even if the place I jumped off still existed, that's not necessarily what the set was about. You know, we did not sell Odyssey as a set that turns card advantage on its ear. You know, we did not sell Constant Tarkir as the time travel set.

There's a lot of things where we started at one place and ended up somewhere else. And so I hope today gives you a little idea of sort of where things, how things start, and then how they can change. And just, I don't know, I just, I like looking at magic sets from different vantage points. So today, today was the jumping off point. If you guys enjoy this, maybe I will look at other facets of design

and look at, like, it's interesting to me to look at all sorts of different designs, but just one tiny thing. Like one thing is when I took screenwriting, or not screenwriting, well, I took film,

studied film, they make you watch the first scene in films which really makes you want to watch the whole film and a lot of you have seen it already and then you study

the first scene so today is kind of like that. You're studying like, how did it start? So if you guys are interested in this, I can look at other aspects and look at designs I've done and look at different parts of it but anyway, that is all the time that. Studying like, how did it start? So if you guys are interested in this, I can look at other aspects and look at designs I've done

and look at different parts of it. But anyway, that is all the time we have today. And wow, that was a 43-minute trip. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. There was a lot of fun stuff today, but I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you guys next time.