Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #591: Guilds of Ravnica

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

In this podcast, I talk about the vision design of Guilds of Ravnica.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk Guilds of Ravnica. So I'm not going to talk about cards today. Today's just sort of a story of the design, of the vision design. And I'm going to talk all about how the set came to be. Okay, so first off, this set has an interesting origin. So when we were first making it, now we refer to it as the Bolas arc. That there were sort of three years that told this sort of larger story. I mean, Magic has an ongoing story, but there's sort of...

We had a storyline about Nicol Bolas in that it kind of started in Kaladesh, and then it made its way into Amonkhet, obviously, where they went to go stop him. Like, in Kaladesh, he was up to something, and then they went to go stop him in Amonkhet, got their butts kicked. Then we saw the repercussions in Ixalan, what happened to Jace,

and they all sort of got back together in Dominaria to get the things they needed to try to defeat him. And anyway, we wanted to set up the big finale. And so one of the things about the big finale is it needed to be somewhere, right? The finale had to happen. I don't want to get too much away because obviously you guys don't know it yet,

but there was an event, some big event that's going to happen. And we needed to know where it took place. And because wherever it took place, there was some jeopardy to that world, we wanted it to be a world that people knew. Like, putting a world you've never seen before in jeopardy is not particularly, it's not as exciting, right? You want the audience to be invested. it's exciting, right? You want the audience to be invested. And in order to be invested, you have to pick something

that is something they care about. So we were looking at worlds and Ravnica seemed like a really good choice. Ravnica is one of the most popular worlds we've made and it just seemed primed to do cool stuff with.

But we said, well, we can't just go to Ravnica and not be about the guilds because Ravnica's all about the guilds. And so we said, okay, here's what we'll do. First we'll go to Ravnica. We'll have a normal, it has to be two sets because you can't fit ten guilds in one

set, but we'll have a couple sets where you do Ravnica as you expect it, and then we'll do the big event. And that'll be all about the event, not about the world, but because we've sort of come and give you what you expected, then you're not upset when we go to the world and it's not about the world. And that was our plan.

So, at the time, so remember, let me set this a little bit. At the time, so remember, let me set this a little bit. At the time, vision design had started, but we still, the three-in-one model where we had three individual large sets and then a core set, we hadn't yet adopted that. That actually didn't get adopted until Dominaria. And even then, probably not until Dominaria was in set design. Because when I designed Dominaria... Well, let's try to think about this. So, right. So Dominaria was in set design before we made the call. And Guilds of Ravnica had already...

Yeah, so the entire time that Guilds of Ravnica was in Vision, we didn't... Well, the weird thing was, Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Legions were always going to be two large sets that were drafted separately. So, in some ways,

whether or not we went to the new world or the old world, those two sets were going to be that way. And I think when they made the call for Dominaria to be a single large set and Salad to just turn into the core set, I think I can't remember where we were, but I mean, essentially for all of design I was just designing them as a block. And all that meant, it didn't mean a lot, it was that I designed them together,

meaning the vision design team for Guilds of Ravnica was the same team that was also at the same time designing Ravnica Allegiance. So they were treated as, at the time, we hadn't yet sort of converted over to 3-in-1 completely, so they were considered the same block, and because they were the same block, they were done together. So Milk, which is the third, the set after Ravening Allegiance, was Milk and Cookies. And that was going to be a large set and a small set, be its own block. And in fact, when I worked on Milk, I think Cookie still existed. So anyway, the changeover,

I'm trying to remember the exact timing, but when I'm working on Ravnica, Guild of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance, we hadn't yet shifted over to the course that I don't believe. And as far as I knew, these were two independent sets drafted by themselves. But because of our schedule back then, the way vision design worked is I had two blocks a year. Each block got six months, but I was responsible for doing both the large and small set, the vision on both sets in it. Anyway, I bring all this up because the team that worked with me, we were doing all 10 sets at the same time. I mean, we were thinking about each individual set for some period of time,

but we were doing a lot of work on the 10 sets as a whole. I'll talk about Ravnica Allegiance when we get to Ravnica Allegiance. I'm just going to talk about the five guilds that ended up in Guilds of Ravnica. Oh, so first, let's talk about that. Why are these five? So one of the things that came up is that we have the four guilds that were originally in the original Ravnica, plus Izzet.

Why? How did that come to be? So here's what happened is, one of the ideas when we decided that we were going to go to Ravnica before we had the event on Ravnica, to go to Ravnica before, we had the event on Ravnica, was this idea of what if we get to watch Bolas sort of try to influence the guilds. And that, you know, every time we go to Ravnica, we want some sort of theme to it. And we like the idea of this was a world in which there was some sort of intrigue going on. Sort of a Cold War vibe is what we called it. And the idea was, within each of the guilds, there's this

Bolas is trying to gain influence and in every guild, there are people that are sort of leaning toward Bolas' side and those that aren't. And five of the guilds actually end up sort of siding with Bolas. And for each of those guilds, he puts kind of in charge a

planeswalker. Then there's five guilds that are the resistance guilds, and those are the ones that are sort of leading the route to try to fight him. And that was the idea. So when we first figured out that there were five, I think the first versions of the... So here's the things we needed. We wanted five and five. We were matching Return of Ravnica and Gatecrash structurally. We wanted all the colors represented

evenly within set. So that meant is, we had to pick five guilds in which each color is represented twice. There's a bunch of ways to do that. We also don't like to do ally and enemy separations in Ravnica, only because we can do those many other places,

and Ravnica is one of the few sets that we really can do weird combination of colors and no one bats an eye about it. Also, there were some story things that were important. I think is it needed to be in the first one? I think Azorius needed to be in the second one. There's some story points that were important that I don't remember exactly,

but there were certain like, oh, to tell the story you want to tell, certain guilds had to be in certain places for story purposes. So the original version of it was a little bit different than what we ended up with, but my big problem was, the way it shook out was, the first set had three bolus-aligned gills

and the second had two. And what it said was, we're trying to create a story that things are getting worse on Ravnica. The bolus is getting a tighter influence on Ravnica. If you do three, and then do two, it sounds like, oh, they're shaking off bolus. Like, things are getting better. If you do two, and then you do three and then do two, it sounds like, oh, they're shaking off Bolas.

Like, things are getting better. If you do two and then you do three, you're like, oh, Bolas is getting more of a hold. It's getting worse. So what I said is, oh, we really need to do two and three. And so we've moved it around. And with all the constraints of having the guilds we need for story and doing two and then doing three and having the color balance and stuff,

there ended up being one way that worked, which is the way we did. We did recognize at the time that it was essentially original Ravnica plus Izzet, but there were just too many of the factors we had to care about, and we were like, well, probably if, you know, we were trying, whenever we do Ravnica,

we try to make the mix-up different than we've done before. I mean, this one has Izzet, so, probably if, you know, we were trying, whenever we do Ravnica, we try to make the mix up different than we've done before. I mean, this one has is it, so it's a little bit different. But there were just other factors that were more important. That's why we ended up with this combination. Okay, so let me walk through the guilds and talk about sort of what our thought process. Oh, so before, in the very beginning, during exploratory design, one of the things I brought up is a lot of the way we designed Ravnica. Like back in original Ravnica, I came with a structure on how to build it. When we went back to return to Ravnica, we shifted from 4-3-3 to 5-5,

but we didn't fundamentally change how we did the guilds. The guilds are very much designed kind of in a silo, that each guild is sort of maximized. And then there's mechanical synergies between overlapping guilds, but there's not a lot of mechanical relationship between the guilds in the sense of Izzet feels more Izzety, and Dimir feels Dimiry, and we want to make sure that Dimir and Izzet feels more Izzety, and, uh, Dimir feels Dimire-y, uh, and we want to make sure that Dimir and Izzet will play with each other, but the, the designs

have a real silo sort of feel of how they're designed. You, you design them each independently, and then you start mixing them together to make sure there's overlap. Um, I had some ideas how to do things a little differently. Um, I mean, in a lot of ways, Ravnica is the world where when we revisit it, we stay the closest to how we did it the first time we were there. Now, partly because it was popular. People really liked it.

But I was kind of interested in shaking it up. And we talked about it for number two. But during Return to Ravnica, because I didn't lead Return to Ravnica. I led Gatecrash. And during Gatecrash, I had some ideas, but because Return to Ravnica was well underway, I wasn't quite able to do the things I wanted, because it required all the guilds to function a little bit differently. So this time out, I'm like, okay, I have some ideas how we can do this a little differently. What I was told was, look, we're doing something, the third set's

already going to be very different, and, you know, part of the reason we chose to do these sets first was give people the Ravnica that they expect. And so, like, you know, maybe we shouldn't change things too much this time. You know, you know, if, if, if we come back again, you know, you have carte blanche to try something new, but how about this time, let's just sort of do more status quo. So I had some more radical ideas on how to change things up. And then, you know, after talking with various people, it was decided, okay, now is not the time to sort of reinvent Ravnica. Okay, So that meant

that we were going to stick with our current structure. Our current structure is every guild gets a guild mechanic. That is, you know, every guild has a set identity, a set theme, and they need to have a guild mechanic. So first thing we kind of set out to do is figure out, like, the one thing about

the third time in Ravnica is we have a feel for the guilds. We know what the guilds are like. And one of our rules when designing cards for the guild is if you took all the cards with the watermark with the guild on it from the first two blocks and shuffled in with the cards with the watermark at this time, would they all feel like they're from the same guild? That was kind of our, you know, you want to stay true to the essence of what they were. Okay, so let's start with Izzet. So Izzet, I've always believed that Izzet is the one that has the largest disconnect

between kind of the philosophical sort of underpinnings of the guild and the mechanical execution of the guild. Like, Izzet are the crazy inventors, but because we don't have a lot of space, it is hard to do a lot of artifacts. Like, Izzet seems like they'd like to be the one that has a lot of interaction with artifacts, but it's kind of hard to do

when you just don't have a lot of space for artifacts because it's a multicolor set that just takes up a lot of space to do all the things you need to do. There's a lot of cycles and there's just not a lot of excess space. So it's hard to do that. And the guild, while mechanically or flavorfully they're inventors, mechanically they've always, Red and Blue's always really cared about instants and sorceries. And so there's just a disconnect really cared about instants and sorceries. And so there's just a disconnect between caring about instants

and sorceries and feeling, like, creative. And one of my goals was to try to solve this this time. And I'll admit the mechanic that we came up to try to solve this was inventive, but a little offbeat,

and it ended up being... I really want to salvage the mechanic, so I'm trying not to give this mechanic away. Oh, sorry. Before we even got to that, before we got to that, the first thing we tried in Izzet was we tried Splice onto Instant and Sorcery. I think we tried Instant and Sorcery, then we tried Instant. The idea being is, I always thought splice was an interesting mechanic, but it was, you know, because you had to splice onto arcane, it was, you know,

it really, it was parasitic, you know, it didn't let you sort of expand. So we always, I always, late into Kamigawa, late in development, I come up with the idea of being, well, couldn't it just be splice on instant or splice on a sorcery.

And it was just too late in the process to make that change. So we started by looking into that. It turned out we weren't able to make the cards and make them look remotely good. It's one of those mechanics that really has to cost a lot to be fair. And it just never...

We were never able to make cards that really looked good. I mean, the ones that played okay just looked miserable. And sometimes you have mechanics that, like, in order to make something that's viable, it just is so unattractive looking that you have to call into question whether it's something you want to do. And the gameplay was okay, but it, I don't know, it never quite, it never quite got where we wanted. I mean, we did play with it for a while.

Then the idea was, you know, let's do something more inventory. And so we came up with a mechanic the shorthand of it was it had to do with sort of mixing and matching different instances and sorceries

and combining them in different ways it was a little adventuresome to be clear like one of the problems is right now when we make sets

we tend to put what I say is three and a half mechanics per set we tend to put what I say is three and a half mechanics per set we tend to do three or four mechanics five already is a little above our average these days what that meant was it just means we had to make sure that our mechanics are a little on the simpler side I mean Ravnica has never really been about the mechanics that's not where we innovate that's not Ravnica is about the relationship between the guilds and the feel of the guilds and

interconnectivity and, you know, there's a lot of cool things that go on in Ravnica, but the mechanics have always kind of been, okay, this is just really flavorful for the guild it's in. Not that the innovations came from the mechanics themselves. I'm not saying we never did any innovation, but... So because of the... Because it was Ravnica, because there was five five mechanics we were trying to simplify things a little bit the Is It Mechanics we turned over

was a little more complex and like I said it had a bunch of problems it's one of those things where sometimes when we make mechanics and you do what I call play them honestly meaning you play the mechanic as like what's the point of the mechanic we'll play it so you do what I call play them honestly, I mean, you play the mechanic as,

like, what's the point of the mechanic? Well, play it so you do that. The mechanic was fun, but when you sort of optimized it, when you sort of min-maxed it, when you were playing it not to play what was fun about it, but just get, you know, squeeze the most juice out of it, it wasn't fun, and it was causing problems. And Eric and his team worked to try to fix that. What happened is, I handed this over to Eric for set design and then at some point, Eric

I think gave it to Dave? Is that right? Anyway, I think Eric did the most work on it. No, I guess this wasn't... I guess Dave did milk. Dave didn't do guilds. So this was Eric's set.

So anyway, Eric, the set design team ended up scrapping the mechanic. And one of the things that's really, really tricky about doing Ravnikan sets is, so you have five colors, every, they're all guilds, five color combinations, every faction overlaps with two other factions because there's two of every color. So for example, let's take Izzet. Izzet's blue-red. Well, in this set, blue overlaps with Dimir, blue-black, and red overlaps with Boros, red-white. So one of the things that you have to sort of be conscious of is making mechanics that play nicely with those around it. And so on one side, Boros, I'll get to that in a second,

had a mentor, a combat mechanic. And the other side, you had Dimir, that ended up having a mechanic that cared about... allowed you to get things into the graveyard, because he was playing with Golgari anyway. So what Eric eventually realized was that he wanted a way to cast Instants and Sorceries, get more Instants and Sorceries... Because the... Izzet has an Instants and Sorceries, get more Instants and Sorceries, because Izzet has an Instants and Sorceries and Matters element to it. Okay, you want to get more Instants and Matters cast, so how do you do that?

And so Eric came up with a variant on Flashback. Sort of a cross between Flashback and Retrace, to be honest. And the idea is, what it does is, you cast the spell, and then it says, essentially, that you could turn a spell in your hand into that spell, but then if you cast it, it's exiled. So it's sort of like you could flash it back if you paid the cost of discarding a card, or you can retrace it if the spell gets exiled when you cast it. So it was an interesting cross between the two.

And the idea essentially was that the discarding the card let you cast the spell for its cost. When you do flashback, you have to give it a higher flashback cost usually just because you're getting a second card out of it. And the nice thing about the discard was it interacted with what Dimir was up to, um, because Dimir's surveil could get cards in the graveyard. Well, if you get a jumpstart card in the graveyard, you can still cast it out of the graveyard. Um, and so anyway, um,

this was something that was crafted, like, it is one, one of the things that's very interesting is, um, this is a good example of a mechanic that is very functional, plays very well, you know, has a lot of nice synergies, but it's not particularly splashy. I know a lot of people have commented on the name Jumpstart. We were trying to give an is-it feel from a flavor standpoint. Did it end up, it doesn't quite have the, I'll admit, it doesn't quite have the creativity feel I was going for. That is a hard thing to do with the complexity limits we have.

It does it a little, but it doesn't quite do as much as I was hoping. The other question is, you can see how Surveil and Jumpstart interact because they both have a graveyard component. Mentor is a little harder to seeveil and Jumpstart interact, because they both have a graveyard component. Mentor's a little harder to see. Probably the Jumpstart-Mentor overlap is the trickiest, because inherently into the mechanics, there's not a key overlap. What we ended up doing there was being careful with the red Mentor spells. I'm sorry, the red Jumpstart spells, and making sure the red Jumpstart spells were things that were advantageous in an aggressive deck. So that a Boros deck might be encouraged to play some of the red jumpstart spells.

Okay, that brings us to Boros. So for Boros, we actually came up with a mechanic that I thought was a very fun mechanic. And this is two of the mechanics I handed over from Vision Design ended up in the set. And like I said, the major reason was once Eric had to change the isn't mechanic, it required, you know, like once you start changing one thing, you start changing other things so the synergies are there.

And I'll get to the other things in a second. But that is kind of what was happening is like once you have to change one thing in a ravnikan set you also have to change other mechanics just because um the the what is special about the mechanics is more their synergy with each other um allowing the because when you the way the um drafting works is uh you have 10 draft pairs which is you have the two the drafting works is you have ten draft pairs, which is you have the two, the five two-color combinations that are the guilds, and then

they click together to make five three-color combinations. And so you want to sort of build those together, so you want to make those synergies. Okay, so Boros, we knew it was going to be aggro. Boros is always has the cheapest stuff and attacks and is the fastest of the ten guilds.

So what we wanted was some kind of mechanic that was a combat related mechanic. So well, Izzet before, by the way, had done overload and done replicate.

Replicate, copy spells, and overload makes them hit more by the way, had done Overload and done Replicate. Replicate copies spells and Overload makes them hit more targets. Boros had done what's it called? The Reflection one. I'm blanking on it because I don't remember it. And it had Battalion. What's it called? The one in

original Ravnica was when you targeted something, you targeted everything else that shared a color with it. Radiance, Radiance it was called. And it's definitely one of those, not that it, not that it didn't have some play in the way that Boros played. It did fit the play style, but flavor-wise, it wasn't a great fit. And the fact that it sometimes hit you and your opponent, anyway, it was, it wasn't the

greatest fit for the guild. I mean, I don't dislike the mechanic, but it wasn't the greatest Boros mechanic. I thought Battalion was a really good Boros mechanic because it really said, hey, we're about attacking with a lot of creatures. So I liked the idea of a combat mechanic that you were attacking with multiple creatures,

and I don't know who came up with Mentor. Someone on the Vision Design team. So the idea of Ment mentor was, okay, well, if I have mentor, I can mentor those around me. And what that means is, if I attack with somebody else who has less power than me, I can put a plus one, plus one counter on them. And one of the cool things was

that creatures that have mentor could be mentored by other creatures. And if they're mentored by other creatures, then they can mentor more creatures that are of higher power. And it had a really fun play, and it definitely was one of the mechanics, one of my favorites of the Guild of Ravnica mechanics, in that it just, it was something that, like,

clearly hit all the things we needed to. It was a combat mechanic, it made you want to tackle multiple things. All things that Boros wanted to do, but just it had a little bit different of a flavor. And I like... Boros have sort of a sense of honor to them. I mean, they're the police, essentially, of Ravnica.

And while, you know, they're red-white, they definitely sort of have... They'll do what they need to do to get the job done sort of feel to them. They definitely have a lot of passion in what they do. And I love the idea that they really are eager to teach one another and that they're mentors to one another. I thought it was a pretty cool Boros feel. Okay, so Boros interacts with Izzet, which is Jumpstart. So, like I said, the red Jumpstart cards are making sure

interact well in a combat situation. The other side is Boros is red-white, so we get to Selesnya. Selesnya is white-green. So, Selesnya was...

We ended up going with Convoke. I'll get to that in a second. The thing about Convoke is Convoke likes having lots of small creatures. Boris, by their nature, wants to go wide attack deck, so it tends to have a lot of creatures. So there was natural synergy there. That seemed fine. Okay, so let's talk Selesnya. So we actually experimented.

So Selesnya, so far, has had a pretty good, when you go back and look at previous mechanics, both his previous mechanics were very strong mechanics. The first time was Convoke in original Ravnica, and then in Return to Ravnica, it got Populate, which allowed you to copy tokens. And both of those both played well, were very popular with the fans.

And we had said to ourselves when we came back that returning mechanics were not off limits. The first two times we did it, we said, okay, only new guild mechanics. But because I already knew that we were a bit over on complexity and we had just been there two times already, I said, okay, if we need to do a mechanic, we can reprint a mechanic.

And what I did envision is we came up with five new mechanics, but with the idea that if we had to change one, we could change it. And so we ended up having a... Eric ended up looking for a Convoke-like mechanic and eventually settled on, you know what's a Convoke-like mechanic? Convoke. And ended up with Convoke. Now, he definitely tried to play around a little bit,

made a few cards that care about Convoke in a slightly different manner. There are definitely some cards, for example, that care about being tapped, that interact really nicely with Convoke. And so Convoke, obviously, Celestia overlaps with Boros, because that's the white guild, the other white guild, and with Boros, because that's the white guild, the other white guild, and Golgari, because that's the other green guild.

Golgari being green-black, obviously. And so one of the tricks about Selesnya was sort of playing nice with Golgari. And... So Golgari ends up with a mechanical undergrowth, I'll get to in a second, but undergrowth cares about creature cards in graveyard. Oh, well, Celestia has a creature-focused mechanic. It wants lots of creatures in its deck, more than normal.

And so, look, if you have a creature, you know, if you have a lot of creatures, and you're aggressive with your creatures, I mean, Celelesnya's less aggressive than Boros. But anyway, you'll end up with creatures in your graveyard. If you have a creature-themed deck, and you have a lot of creatures, well, creatures will die and you'll get creatures in your deck. So, there's some natural synergy there. The nice thing with Mentor is

that Mentor really wants multiple creatures attacking. Well, you know, Selesnya, like Boros, has a creature-oriented go-wide strategy. Boros, has a creature oriented go wide strategy. Boros is a little bit more about an aggressive go wide where Selesnya is a little more about building up the board and

sort of overwhelming the opponent. But more like building up, building up, building up and then a big sort of attack where you overwhelm them. Sometimes Selesnya will go, what we call vertical, where it'll like help set up one giant creature that's going to win the game for you. Sometimes Celestia will go what we call vertical, where it'll help set up one giant creature that's going to win the game for you. Sometimes you overrun them with so many creatures,

but usually they're not quite as small as with Boros. They're a little bit bigger. And I know there was a lot of discussion. Oh, so the thing that we tried in Divine, not Divine, the thing we tried in Vision Design is

ever since we did Landfall, and then we did Constellation, which was essentially Enchantment Fall, we've been talking about doing Creature Fall. And Creature Fall, I mean, this is something we've done on cards, just naming it and making the theme within a set. Which is, okay, every time you play a creature, something happens. It ended up feeling a little bit like the Allies did, because the Allies had a bunch of enter the battlefield that cared about Allies.

This was a little more focused. The problem Eric ended up having, the reason Eric actually took out, I forget what we called it, but the creature fall, was it was too synergetic with Boros. So there's a thing we call the Naya problem, which is that the natural state of what Boros wants to do

and what Selesnya wants to do is probably the closest of any two guilds. They're both creature-centric, and they both have sort of a go-wide strategy to them. I mean, Boros is a little bit more aggressive, but there's a lot of similarities, and one of the problems is we want to make sure that all the

three-color pairings, the five three-color pairings that you could do, are all equally viable. And the synergy was just too high. And so, Eric ended up taking out the mechanic, not because it didn't work, but it just worked too effectively with Boros.

One of the things in general was Boros already... You know, the thing Creaturefall wanted was a lot of tokens and a lot of small creatures, and Boros already is going that direction. Like, it wants it anyway. It played well with Mentor anyway. And so we ended up sort of pulling back a bit and trying something that was synergistic, but not quite so synergistic. So that's how we ended up with Convoke. Okay, next, Golgari.

So Golgari, first time around we did Dredge, which is you could choose to draw the card out of your graveyard instead of your draw, but you had to mill some cards, put cards on top of your library into your graveyard to do that. Dredge is probably the most broken guild mechanic we've made. Second time we did Scavenge, which was a mechanic that let you, creatures once they died,

could be exiled to grant plus one, plus one counters to existing creatures. So the idea essentially is once they die, you get to use their component parts to make your creatures better. A very Golgari feel. So we knew from, I mean Golgari

is very centered on the graveyard. Black and green are the graveyard colors and Golgari's whole thing is about sort of the cycle of life and, you know, making use of things that are dead and bringing them back. So we knew we wanted a graveyard-centric mechanic. We tried a bunch of different things.

I mean, nothing really gelled. And then Eric, while we were in vision design, Eric actually made a suggestion. He and I talked a bit about some of the problems with Golgari. And so he printed a mechanic. I think we were calling it Necrobloom at the time. It's now called Undergrowth. And what it is,

is it sort of took what I would call a Lurgoyf mechanic, which is a Lurgoyf counts up the number of creature cards in your graveyard. Although Lurgoyf

might count all graveyards, but this one counts your graveyard. And says, okay, the more creature cards in your graveyard, the stronger the spell gets to be.

But the one thing that Eric felt strongly about was he didn't like when you have to your graveyard, the stronger the spell gets to be. But the one thing that Eric felt strongly about was he didn't like when you have to constantly monitor. Like, oh, this is star, you know, star, whatever. How big is it? And you're constantly checking. And it's just, it's a lot of busy work checking. And so the idea he liked is, okay, we'll cast spells.

You will check at the time that you cast the spell or if it's a creature, it enters the battlefield but around the same time. And then you will get a number, that number will matter, and then you're done. The number matters. And so the nice thing about Galgari is

the undergrowth mechanic was it allowed you to make effects that would grow as the game goes along because the natural state of the game is your graveyard gets filled up um and it allowed us to mess around a little bit and do some cool interactional stuff with the graveyard demir normally has a mill theme and they overlap in blue so one of the ways to make milling mean something is make sure that it can hit you and then if you're playing you know if you're playing blue black green maybe you're using the milling stuff

to feed your own graveyard so that you can do cool stuff. And so we, it was one of those mechanics that, like one of the things about guild mechanics in general is you don't, you don't need a lot of space.

Like you're going to make eight to 12 cars with the mechanic. And so the guild mechanics in general is you don't you don't need a lot of space like you're going to make 8 to 12 cars with the mechanic um and so the guild mechanics are really good for mechanics that are kind of cool but have a limited amount of space to them and undergrowth is a good example where it's a scalable effect it's got to be in green or black there's not an endless number of scalable effects there's some enough that i knew we could build this um but not an endless number of scalable facts. There's some. Enough that I knew we could build this. But not an endless number. And so one of the things that were that why I think this was a good mechanic for Golgari is it's super flavorful. It really plays

into the themes that Golgari wants to play into. And it is just not the mechanic you can make infinite cards out of. It really is kind of limited in what you can do. So it's well suited to be a guild mechanic. So undergrowth, Kogari plays with Selesnya,

as I said, because Selesnya just is creature-centric, has a lot of creatures that are going to die naturally, and then you can use that. So if you're playing black, green, white,

it's a strategy where you're going to build up, build up, and use a graveyard as a resource because you have a lot of creatures. With Dimir, A, Dimir has a milling theme,

so there was an interaction with that. And the other thing was, we liked the idea that the Dimir mechanic could help feed the graveyard in general. And I'll get to Surveil in a second, but Surveil allows you to get cards into your graveyard, and some of those cards can be creature cards. So that can help you in fueling your undergrowth spells.

Okay, so now we get to Dimir. So Dimir has probably had the hardest time. So the first time we did Transmute. And the second time we did Cipher. Transmute was an interesting mechanic. Black and blue definitely are sort of the most library centric of the guilds The problem is R&D really started shying away

from tutoring mechanics They just lead to a real repetitive game state When I can go get what I want out of my deck instead of randomly drawing it I go get what I want and so I more often and more reliably get the same card,

and so just the gameplay plays out the same. So not that we don't want tutors, although we are definitely looking at more, looking at top of the deck for stuff. You know, look at the top end cards to find, you know, O thing. Because that allows you to build your deck around it without leading you toward... One of the problems with tutoring also is that it makes you sort of just put single versions of things you want in your deck.

And that doesn't tend to necessarily make you always do what you want. Like, a lot of times we want you to care. We want your deck to be full of the thing. Not to say, oh, I'm just going to have one singular thing in my deck. Anyway, the mechanic we tried with Dimir was, it was a ninjutsu variant.

And the idea was, it was kind of reverse ninjutsu was the way it worked. Or not reverse ninjutsu, it was ninjutsu, but I guess it was just a very ninjutsu. The idea essentially was that if I have something attacking, I could swap the creature in my hand, I could exchange it with the creature that's attacking, if it's unblocked. The difference is that the thing that it's exchanging maintains all the qualities that it has. If it has equipment on it, if it has enchantments on it,

if it has counters on it, whatever state, that you're literally exchanging the things. The flavor is it's turning into that thing. the flavor is it's turning into that thing. That through magic it's turning into that thing. So another mechanic that I made that was kind of cool, but a little complex. And it ended up being a little bit too much just to make, to do what we wanted to do and the rules were a little bit wordy and a little hard to understand. One of the things that I tend to do,

especially when I'm handing off to Eric, is I like to make things super, super flavorful because Eric's great at fine-tuning things, but usually he likes me to give him a little out-of-the-box stuff that he might not necessarily think of himself. And so I was definitely a little more fanciful with the Guilds of Ravnica guilds.

And I think in the end, I made a few things that were a little bit too complicated. The Demir mechanic is a good example where it was a little bit too much, and we had to pull back. So Eric was trying to solve the problem of, I have Izzet on one side, I have Golgari on the other side. How do I care about that? And he liked the idea that the Dimir were about information and then they were about sort of manipulating information. That felt very flavorful for the guild.

And I think the big thing he realized was the jumpstart surveil combination of what if I make it such that the Dimir mechanic is playing in some space where we're getting stuff to the graveyard and both things on the side care that that is so. Jumpstart can recast instant sorceries because if you're going to cast instant sorceries, you need

them in the graveyard. It's the logical place to cast them a second time. And Golgari is the graveyard-centric one. You need to do something with the graveyard. So Eric started with the idea of something to do with information and we want to get cards in the graveyard.

And he tried a bunch of different things. In the end, what he realized is what he really wanted was basically scry with a tweak. Because scry, normally when you scry, you look at the top end cards of your library, you choose whether to leave them on top of the library in whatever order, or put them on the bottom of your library. And what Eric wanted really was that, except instead of bottom of the library, they went to the graveyard.

And like I said, one of the things that we were willing to do was, we said that not every mechanic necessarily had to be a new mechanic. That also meant that we were willing to sort of take old mechanics and tweak them a little bit. I mean, like I said,

jump starts a cross between two old mechanics, between retrace and flashback. And surveil is, look, it's a tweak on Scry. It's what it is. It's an important tweak. And in this particular set, it does a lot of good. And so one of the things that you definitely, I mean, when Eric first came up with this, the thing I think he liked so much about it was it just had the balance he needed.

And the cool thing about it is when you surveil, you're definitely getting the information you want and you're definitely doing something that feels very Dimir-y. But, you know, the reason it plays with Izzet is you're getting jumpstart cards into your graveyard. The reason it plays with

Golgari is you're getting creatures in your graveyard, so you're feeding undergrowth. Oh, the one thing I should mention about Golgari this time, which is a little bit different, is previous Golgari is you're getting creatures in your graveyard, so you're feeding undergrowth. Oh, the one thing I should mention about Golgari this time, this is a little bit different, is previous Golgari mechanics, they themselves worked in the graveyard. You know, Scavenge worked in the graveyard. Demir, not Demir, Dredge worked in the graveyard. And this is a little kind of different take, which is it's a mechanic that cares about the graveyard, but not a mechanic that works in the graveyard.

And it's just a little bit different. Sometimes when you get in a certain mindset, like Golgari is graveyard-oriented, but it doesn't have to be in the graveyard. It doesn't have to work in the graveyard. And I think that one of the things when Eric made this pitch for this mechanic, it really said to us, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

Like, Lurgoyf, that kind of stuff, is very graveyard-y, but it's not living and breathing in the graveyard, so I thought that was pretty cool. So, one of the things that we definitely did is because we treated this like it was a block,

there clearly is a relationship between the two sets. I mean, it's kind of funny that we moved away from the block just as this set was coming because in some ways, especially the first... Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance are very much aware of one another.

We have a number of cycles that are 10-card cycles that five of them are in the first set and five are in the second set. Milk is its own thing. I mean, milk is what I will call an event set, which is a new thing we're trying, where it's about something that happens more so than where it is.

Like, it's not environmental as much. Most sets it's kind of like all about, well, what world is it on? And it's very environmental to the world. And so, both Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance are much more old school in that sort of like, okay, they're about the place. We're in Ravnica and we're making choices about how to

maximize Ravnica. Milk is doing something very different. And, like I said, Milk really... When we get to milk and I explain milk like I I had a very out there ask and I had to get creative in figuring out how to do it so we did some pretty cool stuff uh in milk but um part of sort of us doing making milk a little different kind of set made me more willing to have these sets be a little more straight laced um when looking at Guilds of Ravnica, we definitely...

The Shocklands were originally going to be, actually, originally an Ixalan and Dominaria, and then I forget why we made that change. But it's a running joke in R&D that we named the Shocklands to be setting neutral.

So we can put them in any world, and then we always put them on Ravnica. One day, one, and then we always put them on Ravnica. One day, one day we'll have Shotglands not on Ravnica, just to justify the names. We also, oh, so the guild leaders,

we had to shake things up a little bit. Oh, the one big difference is between Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance, and the previous two Ravnica sets is we had something we did not have before, which is we have two fives, which is five of the guilds are leaning toward Bolas

and five of them are leaning toward resisting Bolas. And we treated those a little bit differently. And so some of our cycles are 10-card cycles in which all of them are treated the same. There's a shock land, everyone has a shock land. There's a gate, everyone has a gate. Things in which are all the same. And some in which they're a little bit different. For example, the leaders

of the guild, if you are a bolus-aligned guild, you get a planeswalker to be your leader. So for example, in Guilds of Ravnig the two guilds that we know fall in the bolus are Izzet and Golgari, because they have Rahl and Vraska leading them. So what we did is, if you're not with Bolas, you get a legendary creature that is your leader. And then everybody gets a legendary creature just because, you know, commander and brawler thing. And there's a lot of fun characters we want to revisit.

So there are two cycles, but one cycle is kind of five and five. It's a planeswalker and legendary creature guild leader cycle. And then there's just other creatures. Before we did a previous Ravnica blocks, we did a guild leader cycle and a guild champion cycle. The excess ones sort of vary from guild to guild. So the other legendary creature cycle is not quite as... It's kind of what the sets needed

and what characters we wanted to talk about and who made sense in the story. So it's not quite as tight as previous times. We did gates again, and there's gate matter cards, and we did the shock lands again. We did guild mages again. We did split cards. We did hybrid.

We did a lot of things that you would expect for us to do. Set design did come up a cool way to combine the split cards and the hybrid cards. That's something that was done in set design. Vision had both hybrid cards and had split cards, but not in the combination that they ended up in the final set. We also had guilds.

We went through a lot of different versions of guild mages. I think the one they ended up with is... We had tried, like, five different things, and one of them, the set design, I ended up going with. Although, I think we had turned over a slightly different version of Guild Mages, and they went back to one of the previous ones

we had tried. But anyway, that, my friends, I've now just parked. That is Guilds of Ravnica. So, this is definitely one of those sets where I tried a lot of stuff in vision design, and I was... I pushed things a little bit one of the things I find with

working with Eric, one of the roles of vision design is knowing your set designer and designing toward your set designer and Eric really likes me to push things a little bit and then he can pull back if he needs to that's just how Eric knows that I'm good at sort of doing the weirder things,

and Eric is really good at doing sort of the structural straight leg stuff, so he likes me to push a little bit. I think that's what happened here, is I was pushing the mechanics a little more. They ended up being a little bit more complex than we needed, and Eric made some changes in set design to clean those up. It does mean that these mechanics

are a little more functional and splashy. But like I said, the Ravnica mechanics really... Ravnica sets don't live and breathe on the splashiness of the mechanics. It's never really been true. And it's true this time. But they play really well

and they combine really well and they synergize really well, which is what you want out of your Ravnica mechanics. So I think they do a really good job of doing what, at their heart, they need to do. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I hope you're having fun. By the time you're hearing this, you're playing with Gills of Ravnica. It's a really fun set, so I hope you're enjoying it.

And, um, when we get to Ravnica Allegiance, I will talk all about Batsad, and I mean, there's some things that went on during that that went on during the same time period, but because you guys don't know that yet, I have to wait. And then at some point, I'll get to Milk. Milk has a fascinating vision design story. That is definitely something where I went a little more out of the limits, and we did it. So anyway, I gotta get going, because I'm at work.

So it's time for me to stop talking about magic. Sorry, yeah, start talking about magic and time to start making magic. I messed that up. But anyway, I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.