Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #579: Designing Kaladesh

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

On a rare "Drive from Work," I talk with carpooler Scott Van Essen about what it was like to design Kaladesh together.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. You all know what that means. It's time. Well, actually, you might not know what it means, because it's time for Drive From Work. I don't do a lot of Drive From Works, but normally when I have a guest, the guest comes with me, so in the evening we go home and I don't have a lot of opportunity to have guests. So, Scott, say hi. Hello. So, Scott Van Essen was in the last podcast all about the Transformers TCG. So we're doing another podcast, this time about...

What is it about? It's about Kaladesh. Yeah, so what I decided was Scott normally works on Duel Mafters, but one of the cool things about working at Wizards is occasionally you get to work on magic, if you don't work on magic all the time. And Scott was on the team for Kaladesh. So I thought it'd be interesting to hear about... I've talked about Kaladesh, but I thought it'd be neat to hear from Kaladesh from a different perspective.

So, Scott, talk about how you ended up on the Kaladesh team. Sure. Well, as you mentioned, I began working here on the Duel Masters team, and I'd been there for a while. And people had told me that it takes a while before you get on a magic team because they sort of plan these things out fairly far in advance. But as I understand it, there was some personnel switching and a spot opened up early and so I was asked if I wanted to join and I thought for about three milliseconds and then said absolutely yes.

Yeah, I mean what happened behind the scenes on my side is there was an opening and I thought for about three milliseconds and then said absolutely yes. Yeah, I mean what happened behind the scenes on my side is there was an opening and I said hey how about Scott? Because obviously I knew you from Grid Designer Search and I was interested in having you on the design team so I thought, and I knew that we were doing, Kaladesh had an inventor's vibe I knew about and anyway I thought you'd be well suited for it. Well I had a great time being on the team and I'm looking forward to talking all about that. Okay so what is your memory, what's your earliest memory of the Kaladesh design team? One of the earliest things I, we knew coming in or at least we had a very strong feeling coming in that energy was going to be one of the main primary mechanics of this.

And so I guess you'd come out of, not vision, exploratory design, knowing that energy was a good mechanic. So one of the very first things we did was we said, how can we do energy? And we talked about different ways that we could do energy. we do energy and we talked about different ways that we could do energy um so one of the ways we explored was what you've seen here where we have energy as a counter on a player um we explored a couple of other versions uh one of them was uh sort of a charge countery version which is where energy ended up initially uh but these were just sort of counters on creatures. Well, the way that one worked is they were...

The cards that generated the energy had counters on them, and then you would use the counters off them. So instead of being on a player, it was kind of banked on different things. But if your opponent ever got rid of those things, you'd lost the energy that were on those things. But any card that used energy could grab it from anywhere.

Right. And we initially liked the idea of exploring that because it gave some more interaction, but we also felt that it really took away from the modularity of energy. And in the trade-offs, we decided that it was better to just have energy be something that was a little more protected, a little safer from your opponent's interaction. I also, one of my very first pitches was a really weird energy thing, which was that it was some sort of virtual token, it was like a token that became attached to a creature,

so it was like some sort of token aura or token attachment. And it was consumed the same way, but it could be interacted with. And you could just stick it anywhere. And I had proposed ideas of, oh, here's a creature that is an ordinary creature, but when it is energized, it powers up in some ways. And so it's very... And one of the real problems with that is it became very parasitic and, like, it was an AB mechanic

where this thing only worked in the context of Kaladesh. So that was one of, I'm sure, several reasons why we ended up not going with that version of the mechanic. Yeah, so what had happened was, in exploratory design, we actually explored a couple different ways to do energy. And I was pretty sure, coming out of exploratory, how actually explored a couple different ways to do energy um and i was pretty sure coming out of exploratory how i wanted to do it but i wanted the team to sort of try and experiment a couple different things and essentially the team came to the same conclusion the exploratory

design team did which was the one that everyone obviously has played with yes um the next thing that i remember uh spending a lot of time on was vehicles. Which also came out of exploratory design. Right. And we had... But they weren't... Vision figured out how... I'm sorry. Normal design figured out how to do them.

We knew we wanted vehicles coming out of exploratory design, but they weren't... Like, energy came out of exploratory really close to how we did energy. Vehicles went through a bunch of changes. That's right. I think, you know, in exploratory design and even sort of talking about the block just around R&D before this, it was a slam dunk that we wanted to do vehicles. We just, we went through a lot of different iterations. Some of the ones that I recall us going through, we went for through one that was really like

reverse equipment almost. It was was you had to pay mana to sort of put the creature into the vehicle and then i believe you may have even had to pay mana to get the creature out of the vehicle um it ended up being very slow and also feeling just too much like equipment and one of the things we wanted to do was make sure that this felt significantly different from how equipment worked yeah i mean, the idea that the equipment, I'm sorry, the equipment, the idea that the vehicle became a creature happened later.

That wasn't one of our early incarnations of it. And even then, when we handed off vehicles to development, crew N meant tap N creatures, not N power of creatures. That's right. And that was one of those cases you've talked about how when design is... The difference between sort of design and what play design brings to looking at a mechanic

where sort of design plays it in the most fun way and play design says, yes, that's nice, but here's how it will actually be played. And competitive. And competitive levels yes and one of the things they said to us just from the start they're like look anything with crew of greater than one will just never be played it's too much of a cost at top level

competitive levels and we were very sad about that we wanted to have points where you said hey I, I put two creatures as a really big vehicle, I want to put two or three creatures into it. So fortunately, we were able to steal that the power-based version from

was it Ixalan that we stole? Yeah, you stole from Ixalan. The real quick version of this is we were trying to come up with a way to explore lands. we were playing with the double-faced lands um and one of our earlier versions was you had to sort of conquer the land or not conquer but you had to stick claim on the land and the way you did that is by tapping creatures but to separate it from equipment we made it uh total number power rather than total

number creatures to make it different and then then when development was struggling, I went to them and said, hey guys, here's something we messed around with in Ixalan that maybe you want to think about. And that's what they ended up going with. There's another thing that we spent a lot of time going back and forth on was, were vehicles creatures all the time that just couldn't attack or block until you activated them? Oh, right, yeah. Or were they artifacts that turned into creatures? And there were a number of rules, interactions, and confusions,

but there were several reasons we went with the way we did. One of which was we wanted these things to survive, be a little safer from removal, and survive board wipes. And we also really didn't like the oh, I've got a vehicle that's empty and nobody's driving it, but because it's a creature it could crew another vehicle. That was very weird and it would have required us

to say non-vehicle crew by non-vehicle. We actually talked about we still had the problem with not problem, we still had the situation with the current implementation, which is that, oh, a crewed vehicle can crew another vehicle. But we decided that that was more net coolness. Like, it's a little weird in some ways, but it's also really cool

when you get into your helicopter and then your helicopter gets into a tank. Yeah, I mean, it didn't happen very often, too. The problem with the other version was, when they were always creatures, we had to specify because it was just too easy to use your unequipped vehicle and crew a vehicle with it. Right. Okay, so one of the things that I know we did is we came up with originally five mechanics for the set. By the time the dust settled, there were only three mechanics in

the set. But do you want to talk about the two mechanics that didn't make it? Sure. So one of the mechanics was called Reverse Engineer. And the sort of shorthand version of this was you heat shimmer an artifact. You get an artifact. It has haste if it's a creature until it's returned. Well, you made a token. You copied a token. Yeah, you made a token copy of the artifact. You gave it haste, and then you could attack with it if it was a creature.

You could use its abilities if it was a non-creature, and then you lost it in the turn. And we felt that that was very flavorful for the world we were trying to create, and it just gave us lots of opportunities for combining different different artifacts. Being very Johnny with Johnny or Jenny with the set. It was a fun mechanic. It was a complicated mechanic and it definitely it was like we I think we couldn't put it a common just because you don't do we

don't do copying in common and so it was i think the reason it ended up getting removed was we didn't want five mechanics and while there's some cool fun things that happen with it uh i think we ended up putting it on um on um haley right one of her abilities was that one of her abilities the other mechanic, I don't think we've ever talked about. That's right. This was another one where the dream of the mechanic was wonderful, but it got bogged down a little bit in the realities. This mechanic was initially called Gadgeteer,

but then we changed it to Invent because that felt more exciting and more appropriate to the world. Okay, so how did Invent work? I'm glad you asked that, Mark. because that felt more exciting and more appropriate to the world. Okay, so how did invent work? I'm glad you asked that, Mark. Invent work was a keyword action that would go on a creature, and it might be when this creature enters the battlefield, invent. Not just creatures. Or it could be pay some mana to invent, or it could be a writer on a spell.

It could be draw two cards, then invent. some mana to invent, or it could be a writer on a spell. It could be draw two cards, then invent. And what invent said was, get a gadget or an invention from your sideboard or from outside of the game and put it into your hand. And so what these were was they were cards that you couldn't put in your deck. And that they did, most of it, it's smaller things. most of it it's smaller things and the idea was that the flavor of this was that I could sort of on the fly invent things and so whatever I needed in the moment I could go get and the idea was there were a bunch of these inventions and that you whenever you invented you go got the invention that you needed but they were all kind of small and itchy sort of effects that's right it and it was the idea was that you would you would get what you needed, but they were all kind of small, niche-y sort of effects. That's right, and the idea was that you would get what you needed in the moment, you would

say, man, I really wish I had some esoteric effect, and lo and behold, you were smart enough to draft it, or you added it to your sideboard when you were building your constructed deck, and it was there to save you when you needed it. But the idea was they were never super powerful effects. They were just the right trinketing effect in the moment. So why isn't it in the set? There are a couple reasons. One of the biggest problems we had with it was

when development started looking at it, it's essentially a tutoring mechanic. And while they were small effects, the problem was if you don't balance it correctly, then people keep getting the same one. Then instead of being, oh, what effects you want, then people tend to gravitate towards certain effects. And in order to balance it, it's really hard. So we were trying to make niche-y things that like, well, this might not be useful a lot of the time, but in the right situation at the right time, it might be very useful. The other problem was there was a lot of complexity that went into sort of balancing it.

Essentially what happened was they came back to us and they said, look, energy is going to take a lot of work to balance. Invent is going to take a lot of work to balance. Which do you care more about? Because we can't do both. And we picked, I mean, it was an easy pick. Energy was so basic to what the set was. We picked Energy.

Yeah, and I suppose there's always hope that something similar to Invent will be put into a future set. But it was fun to draft. And it was fun to make those decisions about how you had drafted it. But in the end, it was, to draft, and it was fun to make those decisions about how you had drafted it. But in the end, the biggest problem I had is I always had to try to make it fun. It wasn't fun on its own as much as it was I really wanted it to be fun,

and I was always looking for opportunities to make it what I wanted it to be, which is a very dangerous place to be as a designer. You have to give yourself a what I wanted it to be, which is a very dangerous place to be as a designer. You have to give yourself a little bit of distance to say, you know, is this fun when you're not trying to make it fun? And that's one of the tricks. Yeah, and for the people that want, the closest we've done is, they're not exactly, but contraptions in Unstable has a little bit of the, like you had to draft the contraptions in order to play the contraptions. And whether or not, like one of the things you can do in Unstable is I can draft one contraption.

And then every time I assemble, I know for sure what I'm going to get. I only have one contraption. Or I can draft a bunch of them and then have a little bit of variety. Now, contraptions you don't control the order because it's random, where you control the order in invention. But it's the closest we've done that something in that space, I think. Right, and I think also contraptions are a great way to say, here is how you can take a similar mechanic, but force the fun by making it a little more random. Right, right. little more random right right and the fact that for example when you're building your contraption it only happens every so often and you're sort of putting together different things together

definitely i mean it there's a little bit i mean we made uh even though unstable came out after kaladesh a lot of unstable was designed before kaladesh in fact originally it was supposed to come out right before kaladesh um well actually, it was supposed to come out right before Kaladesh. Well, actually, originally, it was going to come out a year before that. But at one point, it was going to come out right before Kaladesh, and we decided not to have two steampunk sets right by each other. And so we ended up pushing it back again. Yeah.

Since we're talking about mechanics, I have a fun little anecdote to share about another of the mechanics. Okay. Which is Fabricate. Okay. Now, this is, I thought it was very cool and was very impressive to me, but Mark, you actually designed Fabricate in about 30 seconds. We were talking, we had a problem, we had been pulling mechanics out because we were trying to

bring the complexity down, we're fairly late in design, and we needed a mechanic that was simple and that worked well with what the set was doing. And you sort of, I watched you talk through, well, what's the set doing? Well, we've got, we need something that works well with plus one, plus one counters, because we had a little bit of plus one, plus one tribal, and we're just doing some stuff, a little more stuff than a regular set does with plus one, plus one counters. And we need to care about artifacts.

We want something that's getting a few more artifacts there because we have a lot of artifacts going on. We had some cards that had artifacts mattering in one way or another. And you just talked through that all, and you said, all right, what if you could get either an artifact or a plus one plus one counter? Boom, done, we're good to go. Well, the basic idea came fast. We spent a lot of time in execution.

Yes, and I would have to say, of all the cards in the set, those are some of the most fun cards to design because, generally speaking, on average, a 1-1-1 counter is not quite as strong as a 1-1 token creature. In fact, early on, I think the first pass, they were 1-1 flying creatures, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think they were. And development said, those are way too strong.

Right. You'll always think they were. And development said, those are way too strong. Right. You'll always choose the creature. Right. And then, so we, one of the challenges, what you had to do when you built Fabricate cards is you had to make, usually you gave them some ability that, oh, if they were a little bit bigger, it'd be better if they were bigger. They sort of encourage you a little bit to do that. Right. So like

if you look at all of the non-common Fabricate cards, you'll see they have an ability like Lifelink that scales with their size, or they have, you know, just something that's asking you to check their power. Marionette Master was one of my favorites of that, where it says, oh I want to really get, I really want both of these, how do I do that? I think we had, I don't know if it ended up in the set, but we had a card for a while that said when you would fabricate, choose both modes.

Yeah, we did have that, but... Yeah, there's a card at one point... So one of the things about Innistrad... Innistrad, sorry. Kaladesh, sorry. One of the things about Kaladesh was it was Inventor World, so we were trying to make a lot of cool, weird, crazy artifacts and stuff. And I think we had one at one point

which just let you do all modes whenever you had modes. If you would ever choose a mode, you'd choose all modes. Yeah, I think development said it was broken. But anyway... I wouldn't be surprised if the rules manager had something to say to you as well about that. I think it worked in the rules.

It just was... I think it worked in the rules. It just was, I think development, if I remember correctly, development kill did not rule. Sure, I believe that. Yes. Okay, so what else

do you remember? What are the memories you have from making Calendar? So one of my memories, early on we had proliferated in the set for a while.

Oh, we did, yeah, we did. We said, hey, we've got some plus one, plus one counters, we've got energy, proliferate is great. And. But he said, hey, we've got some plus one, plus one counters, and we've got energy. Proliferate is great.

And it was very good, but it had the problem of being too good with the plus one, plus one counters compared to how good it was with the energy. And so you build these proliferate decks that were just ridiculously, you know, scaling creatures up like you wouldn't believe. And you're like, oh, I got an energy too. That's nice.

Yeah, one of the problems is, so when proliferate we did it the first time, it was in a set with minus one, minus one counters. So when you tended to use it, you tended to put it on your opponent's creatures to shrink them. And it's harder, it's not that easy to put minus one, minus one counters on your opponent's creatures without them dying, usually. And so there wasn't that many. So when you're proliferating, the fact that you were getting more

counters wasn't that big a deal. But plus one, plus one counters, that was a major theme of the set, because we were all about invention, and we liked the idea that you were enhancing things, and plus one, plus one counters just flavorfully really worked well on the sense of invention.

So we had a lot of them in the set. And so proliferate was just too good. Yeah. It just was too good. Yeah. I actually, I just remembered another mechanic. Okay. Do you remember Inherit?

Remind me what Inherit was. Inherit was, it was like modular. Okay. But it was a more limited modular. Oh, it didn't just go on artifact creatures, right? It went on any creatures, and it was like a creature that had a normal size, but then would come with maybe one plus one plus one counter, and it

said, when I die, you move the plus one plus one counter onto somebody else. Right, so, real quickly, modular only went on artifact creatures. Modular N, they were always zero, zero creatures that got N plus one plus one counters, and when they when they died, you put them on an artifact creature, a target artifact creature. So the idea of inherit was

let's strip out the artifactness of it. It was a creature that could go on any creature. And then instead of being 0-0 with full counters, we tended to put fewer number of counters. So it's like a 3-3 that comes with one counter. So when the 4- 3-3 that comes with one counter. So when the 4-4 creature dies, well, one counter gets to go somewhere else, but not all four of them would go. Yeah, and that actually ended up being on one card that remained in the set.

We just didn't keyword it. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else you remember mechanic-wise? I remember we had a stronger plus-one, plus plus one tribal than we ended up having i think we were too close to what cons uh cons block had done with plus one plus one tribal but we had the uh oh i have i have some notes here um but i can't find it doesn't matter

there was a uh a four mana card that uh had you draw a card for each of your creatures with plus one, plus one counters. Yeah, we had a stronger theme, and then it turned out, I think the feedback I got was, there already is a reward for having a plus one, plus one counter. You're plus one, plus one. So what we found was we could do a little bit of rewards, but it already is an upgrade, and so you can't give too many rewards because it's already something that's beneficial. Like one of the things I know about Kaladesh is we early on had energy, we early on had vehicles,

and then we spent a lot of time experimenting with a lot of different things. And then you're right, Fabricate was relatively late in the process. Yeah, it was right at the end. Fabricate was relatively late in the process. Yeah, it was right at the end. But it was, I think, maybe a month from designing that to hand-off, and we got most of the way there. It's a wonderful mechanic. It does a lot.

It gives you a nice, simple choice. There was a point in time where it was more modular. It was like you could just sort of... If you had Fabricate 3, you could make 3 plus... Any combination, right? I think early on you couldn't choose, and then we tried for a while one where 3 match, you got 3 combinations of between

counters and tokens, and you could mix and match. But that ended up being a little more complicated than necessary. That was one of the problems in general, is we ended up making 5 mechanics, and then we're like then like okay there's too much going on we realized we were just making too many things we're like okay let's dial it back a little bit um and i think when we handed over development we actually had taken out fabricate and we turned it over with um we got turned over to development it had energy it had vehicles and it had energy, it had vehicles, and it had invent in it. And then they said

we can't do invent and energy. And we said, okay. And then we suggested, well, why don't you swap with Fabricate? I remember that. Yeah. Because one of the things we had done is we, design always will give development, whatever, anything we've done, we'll give them, like, hey,

this inspires you, we want to use it, here's extra stuff we've made we'll give them like, hey, this inspires you, we want to use it, here's extra stuff we've made. And so we definitely hand it over with some other stuff. I remember talking with Eric and making the suggestion of, okay, let's take invention out and put Fabricate in. Yeah, that's, I think, pushed it to a nice, more simplicity and let us focus on the coolest part, which was the energy. Okay, so any other memories of Kaladesh?

You know, I remember it was a ton of fun designing with energy. One of my favorite things to do was to take very staple magic effects and just figure out how to put an energy twist on it. Ether Hub as a Tendo Icebridge variant was a ton of fun. Lathnud Hellion was one of my favorite cards, which is just, it's your classic red, you know, creature, red aggressive creature that you sacrifice at the end of the turn. And we were able to say, hey, we can build in a bit of a clock here, so

in this version, oh, sorry, Haste Creature, so Lathnuhelion is a 3-mana 4-4 that comes with 2 energy, and at the end of the turn, you have to either sacrifice it or spend 2 energy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a cool card. And so, you know, it was, oh, it's fun. It's like, here's something that can attack twice

on its own, and then you're done with it. Right, it was a ball lightning variant, I think was the idea. Right, right. But the energy lets you say, hey, maybe I can have something feed into this and keep it going until the board state says it's no longer a thing to keep around. Or maybe you say, oh, well I'm not going to be able to attack next turn because you have something too big. I'm just going to throw it away and keep the energy for later. It was a ton of fun having that flexibility. We turned in a bunch of designs that were classic Magic cards with just a twist of energy.

And I think that's one of my favorite parts is just to say, how can I give an homage to something that we've seen forever but do the new version? So what was your favorite Energy card you designed that didn't make it? That did not make it? Well, that was the, I had an early version of the Bristling Hydra. So Bristling Hydra is a four mana, four four, I believe. It's a Hydra, and it comes with three energy. And then you can spend energy, you can spend three energy to give it plus one, plus one

and hexproof. That's what the final card was. My pitch for that card initially was something completely different that I thought was really fun, but development had a number of problems with it. It was a XG Hydra, so your classic Hydra, it's a 0-0 that comes with X plus 1, plus 1 counters, and X energy, because we're in an energy set. And then I threw on a fun ability that made sense, which was pay four energy, this creature fights anything.

And it's possible that development could have fixed it, but they ended up going a different way. That's what happens. You make several hundred cards, you get a couple dozen that you're really happy with, and make it into the set. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that, I mean, and not with vision and set design even more so, a lot of design is about sort of getting the concepts down.

And you make cards because you want to execute and show proof of concept. But, you know, some cards make it through the process, but a lot don't. And so along the way is you make cards that are kind of cool ideas, and sometimes they inspire other cards, sometimes, for whatever whatever reason they don't work and they get changed yeah i have i have a folder at my desk that's all of the cards that i've made that have made it to print and the reality is as you said you know i've touched hundreds of cards yeah but the number of cards that have a recognizable you have enough of your dna in it where you can say like yeah that's my card, are very small.

You have a couple that you make that you fall in love with. Every now and then you get a brain to print. A brain to print is a card where you design the card and it just works and everything ends up being printed exactly as what you designed initially. Yeah, those are hard. You don't get those that often. Don't get those often. I was very happy.

I did get one in this set. The Kaladesh. Okay, what's your favorite Kaladesh card that you made? My favorite Kaladesh card I made, oh my goodness, there's a lot.

I'm going to cheat and choose two. Okay. One was Rashmi Eternity Scrafter. Okay. Which was a top-down design for the idea of Rashmi

was that she had sort of She was an inventor, right idea of Rashmi was that she had sort of she was an inventor and she had sort of like seen how to sort of break through time and space she had sort of like to develop the technology that would lead to the planar bridge yeah and so my design for that was basically it ended up being like a cascade variant. It was very close to the final card which is whenever you cast a spell look at the top card of your deck if it costs less than the spell you cast play it otherwise put it in your hand. And then the other one I really loved was

Multiforme Wonder which was a Morphling variant but with energy and it was a shame that we'd already used the name Etherling for it, because it would have been perfect. Okay, so what is my favorite design I did for... What's that? Panharmonicon. Oh, Panharmonicon, which I believe was called either Thingamajig or Whatchamacallit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, but I did... So what happened was, so I did the first half of the design, handed the reins over to Sean May and then did the second half and we were both on the team the whole time

but we sort of were co-leading it and it was during Sean's part of it and Sean said, we're low on just weird artifacts. So I said,

okay, and then I named them all like Thing-a-jig and whatchamacallit and so on. So I don't, I don't remember what the original name was but I just like the idea of, I like doubling things.

So I'm like, let's double all ETB effects. So I thought that was fun. You know what my favorite playtest name was? Okay, what was your favorite playtest name? So on the card Etherflux Reservoir, which was whenever you cast a spell, gain one life for every spell you've cast this turn. And it says pay 50 life to deal 50 damage. Right. The playtest name of that was Storm Hospital.

Yeah, that's cute. Okay, so any other stories about individual cards you remember? individual cars you remember? So one of the things that we designed to support vehicles was we wanted to have cards that were good to crew vehicles. So we had a couple

of cards that said, hey, whenever I become tapped do a thing. I think we had a pinger and maybe a looter as well that were just cards that were Yeah, it ended up being a red-white thing, right? Yes, I believe that. We tied them to the dwarves and it ended up being a red-white thing. Right, but then the other one we did was we had a couple of pilots that were just really good at driving cars.

And my favorite was the Speedway Fanatic, which is just a 2-1 with haste. Whenever he drives a vehicle-1 with haste, that whenever he drives a vehicle, he gets haste. And I just loved the image we had from the beginning of that card concept of just this maniac who hops in a vehicle and runs away with it. Yeah, that's a cool card. Okay, so anything that people who, obviously people played with it, I mean, this set's been on quite a while. What might not people know, like behind the scenes,

what is the most surprising thing behind the scenes people wouldn't know about the making of the set? Oh my goodness, that is an excellent, excellent question. I'll start since I'm reading. So one of the things that was very interesting about it was the set in the end ended up being very artifact-centric. But for most of the design, we actually made a conscious decision early on to not focus so much on artifact matters

and just try to make really cool interactive stuff. And in the end, we ended up putting in a layer of Artifact Matters because it's an artifact set. But a lot of people think that's where we started, and really, we did not do the Artifact Matters stuff until way, way late in the process. We spent a lot more time trying to make cool interactive things because we were doing the Inventor feel.

And so a lot of people, when I talk about where we started, like, we started from a very different place than I think people think we do. You had a big mantra from the very beginning, which is that this artifacts here are technology and not biology. Yes, yes. And one of the ways that I feel like we, to me, the non-tribalness of artifacts, for lack of a better term, was part of the expression of that. These artifacts, we don't care about the artifacts because they're artifacts. The artifacts are the things that help us live our lives and help us do our thing.

Yeah, one of the things you'll notice, by the way, if you look through the art, something that the creative team did, is most of the spells have a technological origin rather than a pure magical origin. I mean, magic fuels, obviously fuels the items, but it's very much like people are using technology to sort of do the magic of this world. Right. I thought that was kind of cool. We had, here's a fun little story about the Gear Hulks. Okay.

Which were not in until development. They were in the development. I participated in the development team for a short portion of that as well, which was very exciting for me. But when we were doing the Gear Hulks, we knew that we wanted... Development had a request to have some artifacts that required colored mana because they need...

One of the challenges with an artifact set is that you lose a lot of your color pie safety and color pie pushing you to do different directions. And so we wanted to have a set of high profile artifacts. And when we were designing them in

development, we got really quickly to four of the five. Everybody but the red one, we said, we should do this. Yep, that sounds great. We did it. And the red one, we took a long time to get to the right one. And that was a situation, we had an ability that was powerful, but not particularly fun. And we ended up uh having a discussion about whether we should have that more powerful ability or the one which ended up on it the ability that's on there on it is uh at the when it enters the battlefield your opponent chooses to either let you draw three

cards or take damage equal to the total converted mana cost of the top three cards of your deck, which sometimes is a couple damage and sometimes is 12 or 15 damage. It could be very swingy, and it put your opponent in a really awkward position. And even though that card was less objectively powerful than the one that we were considering in its place, we fought really hard to make that one the one we kept because it was just so much fun to play, even if it wasn't necessarily the most powerful card. Yeah, well, one of the things that's important when you're designing is being fun is more important than being powerful.

I mean, not that we don't make powerful cards, because we do, but you want to make sure that there's good things you get to experience. And one of the things that I like a lot about Kaladesh is it is definitely one of those sets that has more weird cards in it. That part of us trying to capture the inventor's fair and that sort of feel was we did a lot of weirder cards and we pushed down in rarity. Like a lot of things that would be a normally be a rare artifact. We pushed down to uncommon to get sort of that quirky sense.

And Kaladesh has a lot of that quirkiness to it. One of the things I... I'm a big fan of Kaladesh, so I like playing Kaladesh. I had a great deal of fun, too. One of the other things that we had, a lot of just... We're trying to hit the tropes

of a very positive world. And so we had cards like Padim, the Consul of Adventures, which was just saying, like, hey, who's got the coolest thing? You get a prize. Yeah. And it was really fun to be like,

look, we've come from, I think we've just come from... Amink, Amink. No, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Kaladesh was... Oh, we've come from Innistrad. Yeah, we've come from Innistrad, and we're like,

we've been someplace really dark and scary, and right before that, we've been Battle for Zendikar so let's just have an upbeat set and it was fun to try to find ways in a game that's fundamentally about combat to say let's have some constructive and positive tropes that we're trying

to hit. And that was a nice way to sort of hit some fun top-down designs there. Yeah, so okay, so we're not too far from my house so thinking back on Kaladesh what is your favorite memory of working on Kaladesh? I, um, so it was actually after the

it was after we had finished the main part of design, we, we were having a sort of a, we do a thing called Play Days now, and we had done something like a large draft with a lot of people in it to sort of get ready for a handoff to development. And I just remember building the most Johnny deck possible. I had a Panharmonicon. I had a Panharmonicon, I had Infinite Energy, and just, you know, I've been playing this game for 20 years, and to be able to do unplanned things with cards that I designed, it's a little sappy, but it was just a moment I'll never forget that I, you know, drafting card after card design, I would actually, you know, be like, this card doesn't go on my deck at all.

But, you know, I'm going to splash blue because I need to get my Rashmi in this deck. So, you know, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have the job that I have and the opportunities that I do. to have the job that I have and the opportunities that I do. And I'm going to get all sappy here, but I just wanted to say thank you for allowing me to participate in the set. Thank you for running the Great Designer Search so I could get up here in the first place. Oh, you're welcome.

It was great having you on the set, and it was a lot of fun. I really had a great time making Kaladesh. Kaladesh was a real fun set to build, and it is still one of my favorite sets I've made, you know, that I've led, that I... It was a real fun set to build, and it's still one of my favorite sets I've made, you know, that I've led. It's a really fun set. But we are now arriving at my

home. So I just want to wrap up by thanking you, Scott. It was fun having you both for both podcasts. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. And just so people know, in order to be on this podcast, Scott drove to my house from far away just so he could be on the podcast.

And so, I've had a couple other people do that, but it's always a big honor when people go way out of their way just so they can be on the podcast. Well, it was a pleasure

to be here, and thank you very much. Well, thanks. It was fun talking Kaladesh, but we are home, so we all know what that means. I mean, it's time to stop talking magic

and start eating dinner. So, I gotta go. But anyway, guys, thanks for joining us, and I'll see you all next time.