Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #583: Lessons Learned – Ixalan

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

This is another in my series "Lessons Learned," where I examine sets I led or co-led and talk about what I learned from doing the design. In this podcast, I talk about the design of Ixalan.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. I dropped my son off at camp. Okay, so today is another in my series, Lessons Learned. So these are podcasts where I talk about a set that I either led or co-led, and talk about all the lessons I learned from designing the set. So we are up to Ixalan. So Ixalan is one of the sets I co-led. I co-led it with Ken Nagel.

So this is back under the old design paradigm where we worked on it for a year. So for the first six months, I led the design. And the second six months, Ken led the design. We were both on the team, or Ken was on the team the whole time. I was on the team most of the time. Right near the very end, I got pulled away because we were switching over how we were doing things. And we had to start Dominaria Vision. Anyway, so let me, Ixalan, a lot was learned from Ixalan.

So for starters, just a little setup on how Ixalan, this is the key part of the story, is we plan ahead. We work ahead to figure out what we're doing. And that when we work ahead, we plot out a whole bunch of years. And then basically what I'm responsible for is getting the general sense of where we're going. So the creative has a good working idea of what they think the world is like, and I have a sense of what the mechanical identity of the set is. This is before we sort of worked it all out, but it's just sort of carving out space to make sure we have an idea of what we want. So the Exelon started because Jenna Helen, one of the people on the creative team,

came up with an interesting world idea. And the world idea was, what if there was a world that kind of had a new world and an old world, and that the old world sent conquistadors, but vampire conquistadors. And then there was sort of a relationship between the old world and the new world. And so they had, early on, they hadn't fleshed a lot out. They knew Vampiric Conquistadors. They knew a Mesoamerican feel. This was prior to pirates or dinosaurs knew that actually being true yet.

And so they came to me and they said, okay, Mesoamerican, Vampiric Conquistadors. And they asked me, what could I do with this? And so I said what I was interested in we had done a bunch of two-sided conflicts and I was actually interested in a multi-sided conflict. So I said

how about a three-sided conflict? And the mechanic I was interested in playing around with is Richard Garfield, after he made Magic the Gathering made a game called Vampire the Eternal Struggle. It was originally called Jihad, but later got renamed to Vampire the Eternal Struggle. And in

it, there was a mechanic called the Edge. And the way the Edge worked was only one person could ever have the Edge. And you got it by attacking the person that had the Edge. And the idea was the Edge granted you special abilities. And so there was a reason to want it,

but also having it made other people want to attack you to get it from you. And I thought that was a neat dynamic and Magic had never really done anything like that. So I said, okay, instead of a two-sided conflict, which is what was originally pitched, could we make it a three-sided conflict

and then we could use the edge mechanic? And everybody said, okay, that sounds fine. That sounds interesting. That's like a political thing. Then what happened was Conspiracy 2 was trying to figure out what to do, and Sean Main, who is the lead designer of Conspiracy 2, came to me and said that from the flavor of what they wanted to do, one of the mechanics they were looking at was very similar to the edge. And he knew that that was something that I was planning to do for Ixalan.

And so he had said to me, can we experiment with this to see if it works? And I said, okay, well, here's the thing to know. We need to do some work on it to figure out whether or not Ixalan wants it, but why don't you do some work on it, I'll do some advanced exploratory design work on it, and then we'll come back and talk. But I said to him, if Ixalan needs it, Ixalan has the rights over, like a main set would have the rights over a supplemental set, that main set needs it. So I started up exploratory design a little early,

so we could test the edge mechanic in a two-player game. Meanwhile, Sean and his team, the Conspiracy 2 team, were working in there. So after, I don't know, a couple months, Sean comes back and goes, it's working perfectly. And I said, well, we also did some work on it to see if it worked in a two-player game. And it did. It worked pretty worked in a two-player game. And it did. It worked pretty well in a two-player game. I'm sorry, Sean. I think I'm going to need to keep this for Ixalan.

But Sean had experimented. I had said to him, because I said, look, maybe you can't use it. You need to experiment with other things because maybe you won't be able to use it. And Sean said that they had tried a bunch of other things and none of them panned out. And they were coming to the end of their design. So Aaron ended up making the call of Conspiracy 2.

Ixalan hadn't really started yet. Conspiracy was near the end of its design. The mechanic felt more like it was a multiplayer mechanic than a two-player mechanic. And I made my case to Aaron saying that I thought it would actually work well. We had done some playtesting in two player, but okay, Conspiracy needed it. Ixalan had all this design to figure out what it was doing. But what that meant was when we started Ixalan, we were a little behind from a normal set, which is normally you come into Vision with a general sense of what you're doing.

And so we didn't quite have that. So Ixalan design was a little behind to sort of figure out. From that, what had happened was I had asked for a third faction. So before Vision, or not, it wasn't Vision, Design, before Design started, Ixalan was the last set that did traditional old school design. Rivals of Ixalan did sort of a hybrid, and then Dominaria would be the first set that uses Vision Design under the new way we do things. So what happened was

I had asked for the world if we could do three factions. And in trying to figure out a third faction, they came up with the idea of doing pirates. And so, like, okay, one faction will be vampires, the conquistadors, one faction will be pirates, and the third faction would be the people who, you know,

the natives of the world. We've got to figure out what exactly they were. But one of the things I realized early on is if two of our factions are vampires and pirates, that is pretty tribal. And so I said, oh, well, it sounds like if the factions that we seem to be leaning in toward are

tribal in nature, like pirates are tribal. And pirates are exciting because we haven't really done, I mean, we did them a little bit in Mercadian Masks, but not, you know, they're just a handful of pirates. We've never done them well. It's kind of like werewolves where, yeah, we've done a couple. I guess we've done more pirates than werewolves at the time we

made Innistrad, but we've made five, six pirates or whatever in the history of magic, none of which are memorable. I felt like there was a lot of space to do some cool stuff with pirates. And I thought the players like vampires, that was a cool version of vampires.

We had some ideas of how maybe we could push them in some different color combinations, like black-white, which would be a different way of white vampires were a new thing. And so we started on that path, and then eventually we got the idea of having dinosaurs be involved, and then we decided just to make dinosaurs their own faction, and have four factions. Anyway, actually, there were four factions before there were dinosaurs. But anyway, once we sort of resolved that. So looking back, the first big mistake I think we made is we were going heavy on tribal.

So I went to the creative team and I said, okay, one of the things that makes tribal work is crossbreed synergy. So can we have a vampire pirate or can we have things that are cross versions of them? And they said, oh, that's not really their vision. The pirates are the pirates and the vampires are the vampires. And that they really didn't want to cross them. So I said, okay. So I was trying to see if I could work around that.

In retrospect, like it's funny because Lorwyn, I was not the lead designer for Lorwyn, that was Aaron Forsythe, but I was on the team and one of my big contributions to Lorwyn was the addition of the changeling. And changeling are creatures that are all creature type and the reason the changeling was so important for Lorwyn was it really allowed

more flexibility. It allowed you, for example, to have two different creature types that you cared about and still make them work in one deck. That the changeling was kind of the glue that sort of pulled them together. One of the things in tribal that you kind of want is there's a thing we call going on rails, which means I start drafting and I make a decision early and that kind of forces my hand to be locked into a certain decision for the rest of the draft. And Lorwyn had this problem to a certain extent where like, oh, I'm going to draft

goblins and then once I'm in a pack or so on goblins, wow, it's hard to go somewhere else. It's hard to pick up. I mean, I can pick up mono-colored cards in my colors, but it's hard to pick up stuff that's too tribal with other tribal stuff. That I really get into the I'm drafting goblins. And one of the things changing things led us to was, oh, well, I'm drafting goblins. And one of the things changelings let us do was, oh, well, I'm drafting goblins, but I... Let's say, so goblins were, I think, red-black.

So let's say, for example, I'm picking up red and black cards and I pick up a elemental card in red that helps elementals. Oh, well, if I pick up enough changelings, those elemental matter cards, you know, might matter because between the few elementals I pick up and a bunch of changelings, I have enough that, okay, those cards aren you know, might matter because between the few elementals I pick up and a bunch of changelings,

I have enough that, okay, those cards aren't meaningless and maybe I want to take them. Now, obviously, I'm not taking as high as the elemental player, but I'm taking it high enough that, you know, maybe I'll actually put it in my deck. So the first big problem in Ixalan is

I understand why we made the decision not sort of to cross, but I think that mechanically causes a lot of problems. I think the fact that you got siloed and you were on rails and that it was really hard. And the other thing was I made the conscious decision

so one of the other challenges coming into this set was we knew the return to Ravnica was happening a year later Return to Return to Ravnica, Guilds of Ravnica we knew that was happening so one of the challenges was I knew I wanted to do factions because we were going to do

I mean, the world won factions but we were a year away from heavily factioned world. And so one of the challenges was, okay, try to make sure it doesn't feel too much like just a subset of Ravnica. So like two-color, just nothing but two-color factions felt wrong. I didn't think I had enough support to do all three-color factions. That requires a lot of support that we didn't have. So there's an idea that I'd made for Constant Archer with four

factions that were 3-3-2-2. That way, between the four you balance, you had all five colors. And the reason I liked it for Ixalan was that I knew the pirates and the dinosaurs there's going to be more interest in them. Not that people don't like vampires,

not that people don't like merfolk, but we've done vampires many, many times. We've done merfolk many, many times. And the new thing, the splashy thing, was the two new tribes, was pirates and dinosaurs. So we wanted to give them a little bit more space. And by giving them the three color tribes,

it just gave you more options of how to play them. But what that meant was that it made the two colors narrower. Like, you had much less option if you were going to play vampires or play merfolk. Just what you had a choice to do. Where if you were playing pirates or playing dinosaurs, and you wanted to stick to two colors, you had three options, plus you had a three-color option.

So, for example, say I'm playing pirates. I could be black-red, I could be red-blue, I could be black-blue, or I could be black-red-blue. Probably splashing the third color since this wasn't really a three-color environment. But anyway, that just gave you more options.

And so there was some wonkiness in sort of how we sort of, we made it tough. And the fact that you couldn't cross over, like if you went into, if you went into merfolk or vampires, you just were so dangerous. You had such a narrow band of what you were doing. And if you went into pirates or dinosaurs, you had a little bit more flexibility. You know, you had a third color you could consider. Um, you just had a little bit more room, um, in the set. Um, so, you know, we'll get to that in a second. Um, but I, the lack of

cross-energy just made it so hard to move that I think that was the first big mistake. That we just, you need, I mean, in general, in general, my takeaway, now having done Onslaught and Lorwyn and Ixalan, which are three sort of what I'll call tribal first blocks, where, like, the main theme was tribal.

We've had other blocks like Ixalan, like Innistrad, where tribal was a component, but it wasn't, like, Innistrad is the kind of set where, like, you could care tribal was a component, but it wasn't... Like, Innistrad's the kind of set where you could care about a creature type, but you don't have to. Like, yeah, yeah, you could draft a monster deck, but it wasn't something you were ever forced to do. Where in Ixalan, there's a lot of pressure to be drafting tribally.

Not that you had to, but there was a lot of pressure there. So one of the lessons in general is I think our... Especially from Lorwyn and from Ixalan, that I think we have to be careful how high the volume we turn up on tribal is. And that tribal I think is fun, and I think at a certain level it really adds a lot to the set and people enjoy it. Tribal is definitely something players enjoy. But it's one of those things you can't turn the volume up too much. Tribal is definitely something players enjoy.

But it's one of those things you can't turn the volume up too much. Not without having other, like... I think Tribal has to be something you can opt into, but aren't forced into. I think Tribal is fun when you want to do Tribal, and Tribal is not so fun when you feel you have to do Tribal. That's kind of one of the big takeaways of Ixalan. And I feel we'll do Tribal stuff. In fact, every set has some tribal stuff.

But I think we want to be careful. And then I think the next time we do a larger tribal set, there'll be other themes woven in where tribal is a component you can do, but it's not a component you are forced to do. And I think Ixalan is going to be more the model of future, stuff like that. I mean, maybe with an Aspen, a little better than Ixalan

as far as tribal stuff, but not quite as pushed as either Lorwyn or Ixalan is my guess. And I think we're going to have the need of glue, the need of changeling-ish things. Oh, the other thing we did in Lorwyn was we did crossover cards.

And what that meant was cards that cared about two different things. It was a card that cared about elves and merfolk that was in a color that both elves and merfolk were in. Did that overlap there? I guess merfolk were in...

I don't know if those overlapped. Imagine I named two that actually overlapped. And the idea was that, you know, if you were playing... Let's say it was treefolk and elves because they were both in green. And the idea was that, you know, if you were playing, let's say it was a Treefolk and Elves, because they were both in green, we could make cards that are like,

oh, it helps Elves and Treefolk, and now you could put that in your Treefolk deck or your Elf deck, and once you put it in, it kind of encouraged you to consider playing the second tribe, too. They didn't force you to, because it worked with the tribe you had, but it definitely said, oh,

as they started to get more of these, maybe I'm like, oh, maybe I'm a tree folk elf deck. It allows you to do stuff like that. So we need to have the glue. We need to be careful with the volume of the tribalness. Okay, next, let's talk about the factioning. In general, tribal is a faction.

When you do tribal, you're doing faction. That's sort of the nature of how tribal works. But the 3-3-2-2, I would not say it was a total failure. I think there's a lot of interesting things about it. I like the idea that allowed our factions that, like, the factions were not all equal.

Like, going into this, two of the factions were tribes we've done forever, and two of the factions were tribes we've mostly never done. I mean, at least tribally have never done, not in of the factions were tribes we've mostly never done. I mean, not, at least tribally, have never done. Not in the way we were doing here. So, like, of course more attention was going to go to the pirates and dinosaurs. It was the new thing.

And making factions where they got a little, like, one of our early problems, like, originally, we had dinosaurs in a two-color faction, not a three-color faction. And the problem we were having was so many people wanted to play dinosaurs, it was warping the draft because they were just taking the dinosaur

colors. And part of us answering that was to put them in three-color, just broaden out what people could do. But it clearly sort of communicated to us, oh, dinosaurs, people haven't had a chance to make a dinosaur deck. That's the hot new thing. People want to do the hot new thing. And so,

I do like what the uneven factions did for some of that. I don't... I'm about to criticize some elements of this. And this is not because I consider it a total failure.

And it's not because I don't think we'd ever do miss, you know, factions that aren't all the same size, per se. Or, you know, are that aren't all the same size per se, or, or, you know, are not all the same color volume. Um, but I do think we underestimated the amount of impact it had, especially on sort of the development. Um, I mean, well, there's two things going on. One was the uneven sizes just cause a bunch of challenges.

One was that when you see a three-color guild, there's some messaging to draft three-color. And really our goal was for you to draft two-color or splash a third-color. Now we did some stuff to try to steer you away from doing heavy three-color. Now, we did some stuff to try to steer you away from doing heavy three-color. Like, unlike cons, where we made cards that wanted to be what we call M&O, which means first-color, second-color, third-color. Like, you know, things that were three or four mana that had all three-color manas in it,

which requires you to have a mana base that really is pretty even. Where, if you make three-color cards that are more expensive, well, if the third color is your splash, by the time you get to the more expensive spell, there's a better chance you've gotten to that third color. And I think the problem with three-color factions is it communicates to some number of the audience that they're supposed to play three-color,

and the set wasn't really well i mean we have to keep that in mind when we have a three color faction um the other thing that the three colors did was um that it it just made i mean i liked the focus pulling of it um but it just, when trying to balance things and trying to do your color balance, it just made it a lot harder. And what ended up happening was the way the color bands worked out,

it ended up making the two-color tribes I think a little bit stronger. The correct answer, I believe, in a lot of these was the stronger deck was the two-color tribes. And I believe that merfolk and vampires actually got drafted by the people.

The other ones got drafted more because people wanted to play pirates and dinosaurs. But if you look at sort of the people that knew what they were doing, I believe the nature of... We wanted all the factions to be viable, but we were cramming more into the smaller ones, which meant that the overall

sort of, um, the percentage of it was just a little bit higher. Um, and so it turned out to be, those are slightly stronger. I think that's how it turned out in Limited. Um, anyway, there definitely is some perception issues with having mismatched things and there were some, uh, developmental how we sort of balanced things. The other thing having four factions did is Magic is set up to do five factions really well. Magic loves doing cycles. Cycles are naturally five. We had to do a bunch of cycles in the set that were a little weird to people

because when you do a cycle of four, especially if they're each in their own color, it feels like somehow you're missing something. It feels incomplete because you're so used to cycles being five colors, that being four colors. And we had a lot of issues of trying to aesthetically balance that. So that was another challenge of having not factions that fall into five. Note, by the way, we do something like Ravnica where we're chopping them up,

even though there's only four in the set, but because there's ten in the block, we feel like we can address all of them over the course of the block, even though they're not all addressed in that set. So anyway, that also proved to be an issue. Four is definitely a challenge. I mean, it's not that I don't want to do unmatched factions again

or not do, you know, four factions again. They're just things I learned in that they were definitely challenging. The other thing that I did, so one of the things that happened, like I said, I ran the first half of design, which was a year long, and then the end of the range that came to the second half. I was really, the idea, which was a year long, and then handed the reins to Ken for the second half. I was really, the idea that I was really caught on was I wanted there to be two mechanics and have each faction share a mechanic,

but then have the execution of the mechanic be slightly different. So, for example, that won't give away the exact mechanics, so we didn't end up using them, but one of them had like a kicker-like mechanic and I, the outputs while related between the two factions were different outputs. So they felt connected. The mechanic felt connected, but they did something slightly different. Um, and then the other one, uh, was kind of a raid variant. We ended up just going with raid. But what happened when you hit your opponent

varied between the two. So each one of them was, each one of them wanted to attack and I guess it wasn't as much a raid variant I guess as it was a, what's the one where you hit your opponent and you get to, your future creatures are cheaper. You guys know what it is. It was a variant there. The idea was if I hit my opponent, something happened,

and what happened varied between the factions. So the idea was that there were only two mechanics, and the idea that there would be a third mechanic ended up becoming Explorer. I guess it was Explorer by the end of design, not during my portion, though. Anyway, the idea originally was that there would be two mechanics that were shared over the four factions. So it also would feel a little bit different from the way...

There wasn't a fact a guild in Ravnica every guild has its own mechanic and I was trying to do something a little different than every faction has its own mechanic in the end what ended up happening was only the two big ones, only dinosaurs and pirates

ended up getting a named mechanic and then merfolk and vampires got a themed play pattern but not a named mechanic. And then Merfolk and Vampire's got a themed play pattern, but not a named mechanic. And I like what I was trying to do. I'm kind of sad that it didn't quite pan out, just because one of the things I'm always doing whenever we do factions is I'm trying to find new tools to use with factions.

Obviously, Ravnica is very popular, One of the things I'm always doing whenever we do factions is I'm trying to find new tools to use with factions. Obviously, Ravnica is very popular, and some of the time we should do things like Ravnica. But I want to sort of open up, because I think factions are popular enough that we could do them more often. But that means we need to find more nuance of how to do factions. Because a lot of what Ixalan was trying to do was trying to find some new ways to do things. And one of the big lessons learned is some of the things I tried didn't quite work out as well as I had hoped. And really the lesson,

sort of the meta lesson, if I will, is we have found some good ways to do factions. I'm trying to find more ways to do factions. It's not as easy to carve out new space. Not impossible, and there's elements that we did learn that were successful. But it is tricky, and a lot of the cleanest way to do the factions gets taken up already. And so trying to find new and interesting ways to do factions is a challenge moving forward. And it's one of my biggest takeaways from Ixalan, because Ixalan had a lot of issues.

And the biggest one was we were trying to do things a little bit differently, and it didn't work quite as well. So that says, oh, well, maybe that's not exactly how we need to do it. But it was, in some ways, the lowest hanging fruit we had. So that means that I've got to dig a little deeper to figure out how to solve this problem. And maybe one of the things I've also learned in the past is not every problem is completely solvable. Maybe we have the best way to do factions

and the other way is just aren't quite as good. I don't know. I'm not giving up hope. I believe there's other ways to do some factions that we can try. And you'll see us try some new things along the way. I haven't given up experimentation yet. But one of the big lessons of Ixalan was that it

really didn't a lot of the new innovations for factions didn't quite pan out as well as I did. Okay, another big lesson was I always talk about magic being a pendulum that we push in different directions. A pendulum like a thing swinging on a chain over a sandpit.

But one of the things I've also learned is sometimes the nature of how we function is we go too far in one direction, so we push back, and then we overcompensate. And Ixalan's a really good example of that. If you go back and look at Kaladesh and Amonkhet we were getting a little on the complex side, I mean I know that the very enfranchised players

really really enjoyed Amonkhet Hour of Devastation limited, but part of that was because it was so complicated, there were a lot of things going on and one of the things that Ixalan did was trying to find some ways to simplify Common a little more than we had been. And I think we pushed a little too far

on that. I think we created some rules to follow that didn't need to be followed. Because a lot of times I'm talking about how we made things too complicated. I just think Ixalan is the reverse. We added a bunch of rules to follow to make it simpler, that I think

was too many rules to add. That I don't... There's a balance between being approachable and understandable by people that are trying to play the game that aren't as enfranchised versus having enough depth and enough excitement that people who have played

a lot, who are willing and want more, have enough of that. Now, a lot of that is us trying to do Lenticus of Design stuff where, like, we're hiding the complexity so the beginners don't see it. But Ixalan overshot. Ixalan, and we adjusted for it, you know. You see that a little bit in Dominaria. You see even more in Sets to Follow

that we recognize that Ixalan kind of went a little too far in that regard. And I think that the result of that is that there's a little less depth. I think what you saw was when we did Aether Revolt, we kind of adjusted that a little bit. I think the draft format with both Ixalan

and, not Aether Revolt, sorry, that goes to Kaladesh. Rivals of Ixalan, sorry, Rivals of Ixalan. The Rivals of Ixalan I think definitely dialed it back a little bit, and that there's a little bit more going on, and that the full block is a slightly better limited environment if you're an infighting

player than just the ex-lion. The other big lesson I learned, which is an interesting one, which is dinosaurs, like, so pirates and dinosaurs on the surface feel very similar because, oh,

they're a trope. I've seen millions, not millions, but I've seen many, I've seen numerous pirate movies and I've seen numerous dinosaur movies and I have a general sense of what to expect out of them. I have a general sense of what I would expect. But what we've found is that dinosaurs were harder to top down than pirates. And the reason for that is there's a lot of different kinds of pirates.

Pirates are a character type. You can have a swashbusting pirate. You can have sort of a greedy pirate. You can have, you know, a dead pirate. You can have a phantom pirate. You can have a scheming pirate. You can have kind of a clueless pirate. You know, there's a lot of different sort of

tropes. There's enough pirate films and stuff that there's been a bunch of different tropes made for pirates. So you have a bunch of different directions you can go, and that allows us to make cards that each have their own distinctive identity. The problem with dinosaurs is while you have a variety of kinds

of dinosaurs, you don't have a lot of motivational differences. Like, what does a dinosaur do? They attack things. They kill things. And some of the differences, like, oh, this is the gentle plant eater.

In a combat game, it's not particularly... Look, if you're bringing dinosaurs, we're fighting. And so, okay, my plant eater is going to fight, and he's still a dinosaur, so he's pretty big. And so we, while there was some, I guess I'll call it iconography, meaning, oh, it's a T-Rex, oh, it's a raptor, oh, you know, like, we had a little bit of getting to sort of play around with shapes. There wasn't as much top-down design potential,

because, like, okay, well, what does this dinosaur want to do? Pretty much what all the dinosaurs want to do. It wants to eat you. You know, it's a wild animal. And there were some subtle things. The pterodactyls fly, and I know it wasn't technically a dinosaur, but we called it a dinosaur, because I think the audience would be mad if we hadn't, by the way.

You know, and then, okay, the Velociraptors are smaller but smarter. I mean, there's a few little things you can do, but just did not nearly have the flexibility. And one thing to be careful about is when you're doing tribes, you have to be careful how much you do tribes. The more tropes you have built

into them, the more their character types, the more different designs you can do. I think Pirates just gave us so much more flexibility on... What I mean by that is having distinctly different designs that you can do, where dinosaurs kind of melded together a little bit. Looking at the mechanics real quick, I think Raid was a good thing to bring back. There's something really fun where you can bring something back that kind of just flavorfully is such a perfect match to what you need. Especially when you're doing top-down.

Like, well, what do pirates do? Well, one of the things pirates do is raid! It's a big pirate thing to do. So, Raid was kind of cool that we brought it back and it just sort of matched the essence of what we wanted. I felt in Rage... I think Enrage is an interesting mechanic. I feel it being tied to dinosaurs

worked okay. Sort of like, you know, don't mess with dinosaurs, it makes them mad. That flavor worked okay. Dinosaurs wanted to be what they are and the mechanic wanted to be what it is Enrage kind of wants to be on smaller things and dinosaurs kind of want to be a bit bigger

so there's a little bit of tension there between the mechanic and the sort of the archetype of of the creature that we were doing so it worked okay I think the mechanic could be brought back and used again in a slightly different manner.

Biggest problems we called it in Rage because we're trying to give it dinosaur flavor. And I actually think that there's some ways the flavor would be a little better. Anyway, I'm not sure quite to do that. Explore. Explore is one of those things. Every once in a while we get a mechanic where I really like what the mechanic does. But holy moly, the amount of words required to communicate what it is, both in understanding what the mechanic does and just, there's a physical response players have to words that if you just have a certain number of words, like if you see a card and the first thing you see is the card has five lines of text, the first thing you kind of do it's the first time you've seen the card, you're just like, ugh. You're a little bit exasperated. It's kind of like

you go to do your workout and you're like, here's heavy, heavy barbells. I'm going to have to lift that. You just know it's a lot of work coming. I like what Explorer did. It's one of those mechanics that if I could find a way to communicate it in less words, I'd be more likely to do it again. But the baggage of the words and all that makes it sort of hard to use. Like, none of the mechanics in

and then we had Ascend. I do like, the thing Ascend did that I actually was most interested in, although there's some question whether Ascend wanted to do do or not. I like the idea of turning on and not turning off. My only issue there is there's not a lot of memory to tell you, although at least it's one thing and it matters.

But mostly the mechanics I feel in the block were, they were all fine workhorse mechanics that I think did good work. There was nothing splashy. That's the other big thing, is we leaned a little more on car by car and top down than we did on mechanical space. And the mechanics, while very functional and played well, weren't quite as, like, we were missing kind of a sexy mechanic. In retrospect, knowing everything that I know now, and knowing that dinosaurs ended up getting, like, when the dust settled, not that people disliked pirates, but dinosaurs got more

of a love than pirates did. In retrospect, I would have, and I know, I know, I know the team looked up and down, so my desire and the ability for us to have found that might not have ever really lined up, but I kind of wish, in retrospect, that we could have got a splashier dinosaur mechanic. I don't know what that is.

I know they looked a long time. So it's possible that Enraged was the best we were going to do. But looking back, I'm like, oh, if I had to do it again, if I was going to use dinosaurs again, I think dinosaurs are better used slightly smaller, but with maybe a tribe that helps them a little bit, is my guess. It's something we had messed around with early on of having

the soldiers that ride the dinosaurs. I mean, it is what we did, but we early on, there were some soldier tribal and some dinosaur tribal and they kind of intermingled and maybe in the future I would try to do like people and the dinosaurs that work together so that the dinosaurs get to be more of the bigger stuff and less trying to make the dinosaur deck have to work all on its

own um there are smaller dinosaurs I mean we were able to make cheaper dinosaurs but it didn't I don't know my takeaway from it is I feel we did a lot of like I feel we did a really good job of a lot of individual dinosaur cards but I felt we never quite got a dinosaur deck that quite lived up to the fan hype for the dinosaurs. I think Pirates did better. I think Vampire and Merfolk definitely did better. But the dinosaurs were the one... I mean, not that the dinosaurs were bad. I think there was so much hype, and I feel like we could have put a little more splash in that space.

Anyway, guys, my takeaway from Ixalan was we tried a lot of interesting things. We learned a lot from it. In some ways, it was a very valuable set because we learned some things in the future that will make us better at designing these kind of sets in the future. But it did mean that some things didn't work out quite as strongly as I'd hoped, and

it definitely was a set that, like, people were more excited learning about it than they were playing it, and that usually means that there's some we erred on our side and there's some things that we need to fix so anyway I hope you guys found that interesting like I said I think there's a lot of fun when I do lessons learned

I get uber critical so it sounds like I like nothing about it I think there are a lot of fun things in the set players really did embrace the dinosaurs and the pirates and the vampires and the merfolk I think the tribal stuff was fun. I think the mechanics, none of the mechanics were duds. I think all the mechanics had some really fun execution and gameplay. And there's a lot of fun stuff there.

I just, you know, when I analyze, I always try to figure out how to make it better. So this set had a lot of room for improvement and lessons we learned from it that I think will go to making future sets better. But anyway, I'm now parked, 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 guys next time.