Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #595: Selesnya

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

This podcast is part of my guild series where I walk through the history of the guild through all three visits to Ravnica. In this podcast, I talk all about the green-white guild.

I'm pulling up a driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking about guilds. So I began with Dimir. So today we moved on to Selesnya. So today all about the green-white guild. Okay, so we go back to Gravnica. We're forming the guilds. So when we're first making them, one of the things we wanted to do is we wanted to figure out what is sort of the philosophical center of the guild and what is the mechanical center of the guild. So let's start with philosophical. Okay, we look at white. What does white represent? Well, white is all about wanting peace. Peace through order, as I like to say. White believes firmly that

there's enough resources to take care of everybody in the world. Everybody in the world can be happy. But in order to do that, you need to take steps to think in terms of the group as a whole. That, you know, if everybody is selfish

and individual, then there might not be the resources you need. But if people are willing to be thoughtful and make decisions based upon what is best for everybody, then, you know, there is the resources to do that. So white is very much about the good of the group. It's very much about sort of thinking big picture. And a lot of what white does is create rules and structure to sort of ensure that people act in the interest of the group because people have reasons to sort of act selfishly, if not without any guidance. And that's why white makes laws. That's why white makes, you know, sort of moral rules. That's why white makes, you know, sort of moral rules.

And so that is a key element of white. Green, green is very much about growth through acceptance. Green believes that the world is awesome the way it is, that nature is the best system, and that one of the things that's important is that people understand and accept that and don't try to change the world but accept the world as it is now a big part of that is green believes in interdependence green believes that there is a web that that every living thing on earth is connected to everything else and that when you affect one thing you're not just affecting that one thing. Like, if you go and start hunting and killing creatures, well, maybe those creatures are the food for another creature,

or maybe they're the predator that keeps some other creature in check, and that you create an unbalance, that when you start messing with things, you throw things off kilter, and that it really, that this sense of interdependence is a very important part of green. Okay, so I bring that up because one of the ways, whenever you have two colors that are allied colors, one of the ways to understand what they have in common is to look at their shared enemy and they kind of represent the essence that's the opposite of the shared enemy. So green and white have an enemy of black. Black is all about selfishness, all about sort of thinking about

yourself and not caring about the consequences of your actions toward others. But green and white, they're about community. At their heart, they're very much about community. So when we were building green and white, we said, okay, we want this to be a guild that is very much about community. That's very much about caring about each individual member. about community. That's very much about caring about each individual member. And so to do that, we said, okay, what exactly can this group do? And the idea we liked is we wanted to have a role for everybody in society. And so we thought that since it was very nature-based and it was very organization-based

that them being the farmers made a lot of sense. That somebody's got to provide all the food. So one of the things that the Selesnya does is Selesnya is responsible for producing a lot of the food that everybody gets to eat. And one of the things that's nice

is the society, the way they work is very, you know, it is the one group where everybody has a voice. That it's a collective, you know. That it's something where it is not any one person makes a decision. The group as a whole makes a decision. And that is, you know, one of the things that sets Selesny apart from the other guilds is all the other guilds have a very strict sort of leadership where somebody runs the guild. I mean, there's a few like Gruul, I guess, that's a little off the beat from that.

But in general, there's a hierarchy for most of the other guilds. And there's not much hierarchy to Selesnya. You know, everybody has a vote. Now, there is a leader, but only in the sense that there's somebody who sort of helps be a figurehead to run things. And even then, we had a lot of trouble. Like, we went through this big idea of, should Selesny even have a leader? You know, is that antithetical to what Selesny is? So in the end, we decided that we would go with a triad.

Sorry. Let me take a sip of water. a triad. Sorry. Let me take a sip of water. We would go with a triad, which is three dryads. And the idea being that they're not even run by one creature. They're the one that's run by

a group, that a group runs it because they're so group-oriented. And mechanically, mechanically it was even simpler. So white and green are the two colors that are considered the creature colors. So let's walk through why that is. So white has the most creatures. White tends to have lots and lots of little creatures. And so when you look at a set, is it 62%?

White has the highest percentage of creatures, of its cards. If you look at all white's cards, the number of creature cards versus non-creature cards, white has the highest percentage of creature cards. White is very much about building the army and about the strength in numbers. Green, now green's number two in volume

as far as how many creatures there are. But green has the biggest creature. If you look at common, for example, green is the color that just has the largest creatures. As you get to higher rarities, other colors will get bigger creatures. But green has a higher as fan of large creatures. As you get to higher rarities, other colors will get bigger creatures. But green has a higher as-fan of large creatures. They show up at lower rarities.

They show up in greater volume. There's just a larger amount of big green creatures. Also, green has the best creature curve. What that means is every creature has a cost to play creatures, and green has the most aggressive cost. That if you want to play a certain size creature, green... White is the most efficient, actually. You get to really small creatures, white's the most efficient.

But as soon as you get to medium to large creatures, green is the most efficient as far as how much mana for, how much you get in power and toughness and other elements. Also, green and white, partially based on the fact that they have the most creature cards, also the two colors that have the most creature abilities.

So green and white are clearly like one of the things we were making the guilds that we had to do is we wanted to look and say, okay, what are the what game attributes, mechanical attributes do these two share? And sometimes it's about having a certain zone, like Ogari cares about the graveyard. Sometimes it's about, um, the different things.

And car type is one of them. Um, creatures are a big important part of the game. Green and white are the two big creature colors. So the idea of being this collective where numbers matter and being creature-centric was important. Now, one of the things we had to differentiate is if you look at all three of the red, white, and or green guilds, meaning Boros, Gruul, and Selesnya, all of them are very creature-centric. And we wanted to make sure that each

one of them had an identity that was sort of uniquely their own. So Boros, we ended up making the more aggressive guild, that they attack with creatures, but it's to quickly beat you. And they back up their aggressive creatures with direct damage and stuff, so there's ways to beat you

or to damage you beyond just the creatures. Then Gruul is more of a mid-range ramping deck, where it is being aggressive with its creatures, but it's ramping into larger creatures. Boros is never getting that big, where Gruul does get into much bigger creatures. Then, the Selesnya part, we made Selesnya a little more control-ish in that

the way Selesnya works is it's going to overrun you with creatures. It has the most creatures. It's going to play the most creatures. It both has go-wide strategies and go-tall strategies. What I mean by that is go-wide is playing a lot of unique different creatures. And then I attack and you can't block all my creatures because I have more creatures than you. And going tall is just making a creature that's so big that your creatures can't deal with

my big creature. I have a giant trampler. How are you going to deal with that? So either I'm going around you by having so many creatures or going through you by having big creatures usually with trample or some sort of evasion making it hard to block it. And so Celestia, we decided was, okay, you're going to be

creature-centric, you're going to be the number one guild about caring about creatures, and you're going to overrun me, or overrun your opponent with creatures. That is how you're going to win. And it was a pretty clean and simple, like, some guilds, it took us a little while to sort of figure out mechanically exactly what we wanted,

but Celestia was not one of the problem guilds. It was very clear what it wanted to be. We knew it wanted to be a creature guild. We knew we wanted to overwhelm. So the big question was, okay, we need a mechanic that plays into that. We need a mechanic that says, okay, creatures matter. So interestingly, Richard Garfield first came up with Convoke and pitched it as a Boros mechanic. His idea was, oh, Boros is the army, and this represents the army working together. Creature as resource is something the army has available to it.

But when I saw it, I really liked the mechanic, but I said to Richard, I go, I just think green and white is more creature-centric than Boros. Boros is about winning quickly, and sort of taking off the turn to play the larger creature isn't quite as Boros. Boros wants to constantly be attacking. But Selesnya is slower, it's building up. Actually, it plays exactly into what Selesnya wants to be doing because it wants to sort of stall and stall until it has the advantage of creatures.

And Convoke is perfect in that if I'm leaving my creatures back, if I'm trying to sort of be defensive with them, until it has the advantage in creatures. And Convoke is perfect in that, you know, if I'm leaving my creatures back, if I'm trying to sort of be defensive with them, I can use them as a resource to try to get out bigger creatures that I can use to be defensive. And then eventually those bigger creatures will help me be offensive.

So Convoke was one of the earliest mechanics that we came up with. In fact, it might be the very first mechanic that we came up with. That or Transmute, I think, was the earliest one. Anyway, so we figured that out. And then the other big thing that we realized when we were building original Ravnica is

when you draft Ravnica, you tend to draft any of the guilds that are in the set. Well, I mean, when you draft Ravnica, it's not the second or third set in. That's sort of a shame. But in Ravnica itself, the original Ravnica, you were either going to draft one of the guilds, and there were four guilds in the original Ravnica.

There was Dimir. It's actually very similar to guilds. It's all the ones in guilds in Ravnica, minus Izzet. So it is Dimir, Selesnya, Golgari, and Boros. And then there were extra red and blue cards so we had a color balance. So you could draft blue-red. It wasn't exactly Izzet, but it was a blue-red strategy.

Then the other thing that you tended to do is you could draft two guilds that overlapped in a color. And so what that meant for Selesnya is we had to be aware that Selesnya could be drafted with Golgari if you went white, green, black, or it could be drafted with Boros if you went white, green, red. And so one of the things I did in all the Mono colors is made sure that there was a theme in each Mono color that played into what the overlapping guilds did. So, for example, Mono Green in original Ravnica had a token-producing theme.

Why? Well, when you pair them in Selesnya, the token theme lets you go wide, lets you build up your creatures, and lets you do stuff like Convoke, lets you use your creatures as a resource. When you mix it with Golgari, Golgari has a lot of... The way it interacts with the graveyard is it puts things in the graveyard and takes things out of the graveyard.

But one of the ways to put things in the graveyard is sacrifice. So Golgari had a lot of sacrifice effects. Uh-oh, well, tokens work pretty well for sacrifice effects. They're usually pretty small, and they're a good resource. Once again, they're a resource you can use, and you can use them to sacrifice. So that's what we did in Mono Green. Mono White, we ended up putting a lot of... One of White's themes is boosting the team.

Like plus one, plus one to the team. Or putting a plus one, plus one counter on. Or there's things that White can do to boost the team. And Selesnya was all about building up a giant army and then attacking. That liked to be boosted. Boris was about being aggressive and constantly attacking with all your creatures. And that liked boosting. So sort of boosting the team and thinking team-oriented was very good for both the white guild.

So the key to sort of making it work in original Ravnica was being very centric in what the guild was doing, playing up the creatures, giving a lot of resources, and then making sure that each of the colors had stuff that went to the side and overlapped for drafting purposes. As you will see, how we do Ravnica sets evolves over time as we get more

as we learn more and more about how to do sets. Okay. So, we had Convoke. It went over very well. In fact, I think of the whole block, I think it was the second most popular mechanic, the first one I believe was Dredge, only because really powerful mechanics tend to be,

people rate high very powerful mechanics, and Dredge was, to use an R&D term, barroken. But anyway, we'll get to Gilgaria. It's one of our upcoming podcasts, and we'll talk all about Dredge. Okay, so... Selesnya, first time out at the gate, was pretty well. It was pretty well received. People liked it. People liked the theme. It was a very popular guild.

Okay, now we get to Return to Ravnica. So in Return to Ravnica, Selesnya is back. So Selesnya was in the very first set, along with Azorius and Golgari, which are the two that matter, I guess, and also Izzet and

the fifth guild. What was it? That's a good question. The reason Azorius and Golgari matter is because in green-white, the overlap in white was with Azorius' time, and the overlap with black was again with Golgari. Who was the fifth one? I'm blanking here. It wasn't Boros. It wasn't Orzhov. It wasn't Simic.

It wasn't... Was it Dimir? No, Dimir was in Gatecrash. I'm blanking. Was it Gruul? No, Dimir was in Gatecrash. Blinkin', was it Gruul? No, Gruul was in Gatecrash. That's the other one, so... Okay, sorry, I wrote a quick figure of that. So it had Zorius and Selesnya, that's the white. And the other green was Golgari. And the other black was Raktos. Raktos was in.

Okay, so Raktos was the fifth girl. Sorry about that. and the other black was... Raktos. Raktos was in. Okay, so Raktos was the fifth guild. Sorry about that. Okay, so we were trying to figure out what to do with Selesnya. I mean, once again, the first time we were doing the original Ravnica,

it was like, what exactly do the guilds represent? When we came back for the second time, it was like, okay, we had to find the guilds. One or two of the guilds, like both Azorius and Simic, we tweaked a little bit for some reason. There's some things that when we did original Ravnica for

different reasons, we had to push them in certain directions that we decided that were a little bit from where we wanted them to be. But Selesnya, that wasn't the case. We liked Selesnya, we liked how Selesnya was. Really, all we needed to do in Return of Ravnica was find another mechanic. You know, find another, like, we liked the general gameplay of Selesnya, so we needed a new mechanic. So the idea that I had was,

and we had tried a whole bunch of different, like, creature-centric things. Really, what we wanted is either a mechanic that went on creatures and really interacted with creatures, or something that just cared about creatures. It didn't necessarily have to go on creatures. So the idea I was really interested in was in Scars of Mirrodin, we'd made a mechanic called proliferate. So proliferate is a mechanic that says whenever I proliferate, it's a keyword action, I take every player and or permanent that has a counter on it,

and I can add one more counter for each thing. I can pick and choose. So I might want to give negative counters, like poison counters, to my opponent. I might want to give positive counters, like energy, to myself. I might want to give negative counters to my opponent's creatures, like minus one, minus one, or not give, but give more of, like minus one, minus one. Or maybe I want to give more positive counters, like charge counters to me,

that whatever is proliferated is something that allows you to sort of interact with counters. So the idea that I was really intrigued by was I know that last time when we played with... with... with Selesnya, sorry. Last time we played with Selesnya, I knew that we had made a bunch of tokens.

And so I was intrigued by the idea of, could we interact with tokens? And so I came up with the idea of Populate. And the original idea of Populate was, literally, it was like proliferate for tokens. That's what it came up with. So the first version I of populate was, literally, it was like proliferate for tokens. That's what it came up with. So the first version I think I made was, for every unique token in play, you may copy it. And I think the earlier version, it just affected everybody.

Like, I mean, you chose whether it got copied, but you looked at everything in play and said, okay, all the tokens in play, do I want to copy that? Do I want to copy this? Do I want to copy that? And first off, it turned out that copying, the reason I copied everybody is because I was trying to be like proliferate, but there's a lot more negative counters out there that you would care. Not often I wanted to give my opponent another token creature. Now, in multiplayer play, yeah, I get maybe you'd want to copy something somebody else's. But anyway, so the first thing

we do is said, okay, how about just your tokens? And then it was like, oh, you know, the idea I liked is it made you want to diversify in tokens. It had a lot of different kinds of tokens. But it ended up being just too powerful. That if I can have, you know, even just like three different tokens out and I can populate, and now I get three new creatures, it just was really hard to come back from that. So we ended up doing what we said, okay, instead of getting all the creatures,

what if you choose one? And that way, if you had multiple, the reason that it still encouraged some variety is, let's say, for example, I have a 3-3 in play and a 1-1 flying token in play. So like a green 3-3 creature and a white 1-1 flying token. So now I populate. Okay, which one do I want?

If I think I'm winning the ground game and it's more about me aggressive attacking, I want the 3-3. But if, oh, we're kind of a log jam and I'm kind of stuck, well, maybe I want the evasive creature. I want the 1-1. And the idea that you had a choice was kind of cool. And it did make you want to have some sense of variety. was kind of cool, and it did make you want to have some sense of variety. So the one thing, the tricky thing about

Populate is, so mechanics tend to fall in two categories. So, for those Harry Met Sally fans out there, I will use a Harry Met Sally quote for this, which is, there's two types of mechanics.

There is, what was the last quote? It was, there's high maintenance and low maintenance. And what a high maintenance, what low maintenance mechanic means is you put it in the set and it just,

it does the thing it needs to do. There's no work you need to do to make it work in the set. It just, it's just, it needs to do. There's no work you need to do to make it work in the set. It just, it's just, it cares about things that the game naturally does. And so it just works just fine. So if I, Convoke's a good example of a pretty low maintenance. Like, okay, I need creatures. Well, I'm going to have creatures.

It's a game of magic. You know, especially in limited, even in constructed. It's not hard to get a deck full of creatures. In limited, you're almost required to get creatures. So that's pretty low maintenance. Like, well, you need creatures, but why wouldn't your deck have creatures? So it's pretty easy to meet that requirement. Populate is a high-maintenance mechanic.

And what I mean by that is it needs a lot of help to work. That if you, for example, had a set that had no token creatures, Populate doesn help to work. That if you, for example, had a set that had no token creatures, populate doesn't even work. And what I was saying is we wanted to have some variety of tokens. We have choices. That was more interesting. So we wanted to go our way to say,

oh, there's a 3-3 and a 2-2 and a 1-1 flyer and maybe a 5-5 and an 8-8 and just having different sizes and things to encourage you to want to play populate. Also, one of the tricks we did with populate, which is the same trick we did with proliferate, is we would make some of, I make a token and then populate. So, well, at bare minimum, I'm making two of the token, but if I have other things in

play that are better, then I have the option to do that. So we had to make sure that we had more token-making cards than normal. We wanted a little bit more variety of normal we had to sort of make sure that some of the popular cards themselves had token making on them to make them more sort of not need to have extra cards to play with

and finally it also required us like for example there's I don't remember the name but in the set in the original Ravnica there was Watchwolf which was green and a white for 3-3. So we made a card in Return of Ravnica that was green and a white to make

a 3-3, I think it was a Centaur token. And it really is kind of like a Watchwolf. It's a little bit different in that it's a token and normally we would just make it a creature. Like, we wouldn't normally in a vacuum make that a token because, well, why?

Look, you have a card represented as a singular creature. You know, sometimes you use tokens because I'm going to make multiple creatures. Well, one card can't represent that. But it's not often we make a spell that makes a token, the spell just goes away. You could just make it a creature. There are reasons, though, occasionally to do it, and Populate is one of

them. Also, I will point out that being a token makes it a little bit different. If you unsummon it, it's gone. A token does have a little bit difference from a normal creature, but Populate did require us to do some extra stuff to make that work.

Okay, so let's look at the guilds on each side. Okay, so Celest look at the guilds on each side. Okay, so Selesnya overlaps in white with Azorius. So Azorius is very controlling, very much about rule setting, and sort of, it is the slowest control deck of all the color combinations. So we knew that Selesnya had the ability

to be a little controller. Sometimes, like in some ways, there's a couple ways to win Selesnya. One way is build up, build up, build up, build up, build up, until I can just defeat you in one giant sweep. Um, you know, I have so many creatures that either you can't block them all, or they're big enough with Tramp or something that you can't, you know. That I, I, I have 20 plus, or, plus, or whatever damage level you're at. I, in one swing, can do all the damage I need to beat you. And, you know, if you're pairing that with Azorius, it is a way to sort of play a control game and then use that.

And so, Detain, which was the mechanic in Azorius, did a good job of stalling. And since Selesnya has some needs to stall, there was some synergy between the Detain mechanic and Populate. The other thing about it in general is we made sure to give the white Detain cards, we made sure that you could use them defensively in Selesnya,, the white to tank cards, we made sure that you could use them defensively in Slesnia, and the white populate

cards, we made sure played into a blue-white control deck. You know, having tokens for example, sometimes, you know, having an instant token maker is good because blue can sort of hold up its mana and then end of turn, if you can't play something, and then can do it at a time when

you can't react to it easily. Or you get evasive bishop, or sometimes blue-white will win the evasion, in a way, as such. When green interacted with black, the Golgari mechanic this time around was scavenge, where you were taking creature cards out of the graveyard, and that you were being able to build up with them.

And so the white scavenge cards we made, no, sorry, the green scavenge cards, we made sure that also played into what Celestia wanted to do, which was building up creatures. So, you know, Golgari is all about sort of getting things in the graveyard and using the graveyard as a resource. Scavenge did that. And then Populate was a little trickier

for Golgari. It played nicely in the sacrifice effect, which it normally does. But as far as, I mean, the thing is, you could scavenge creatures and make the token creatures bigger. Just the token creatures themselves don't go to the graveyard. But the interaction of

having a lot of creatures and then all your non-token creatures get to go to the graveyard, and then you get to build up the creatures that are in play. Some of which could be the token creatures, um, played synergistically. Um, so that is sort of how we did Return to Ravnica. Um, we didn't really, Selesnya, like I said, there's certain guilds, and when I, when I get to the guilds that we tweaked, I'll talk a little bit about how some of the guilds did go through some through some tweaking.

Selesnya didn't. Selesnya really knew what it was doing. And Populate, again, very popular. Selesnya probably is the guild that, over the years of all the different visits to Ravnica, has the highest, like, if you took all its mechanics and

rated them and then averaged them, I believe Selesnya has the highest overall. And part of that I think is making creatures matter is a pretty broad theme. There's a lot of ways to do that and there's a lot of fun interactions with that. Where some of the other guilds are a much smaller target. Like I talked about Dimir last time.

Dimir's a lot smaller target. It's a lot trickier to sort of make something that plays well, that really feels Dimir, that fits in that space, and it's just a lot harder. Okay, so let's move on to Guilds of Ravnica. Okay, so... We walked in pretty optimistic into Guilds of Ravnica for Selesnya just because, like I said, Selesnya had

the best track record. Another thing that we did different in Guilds of Ravnica is both original Ravnica and Return to Ravnica, we had made the decision not to reprint any mechanics. That every Guild mechanic would be a brand new mechanic. But now we are moving in a world where

we now try to do reprint mechanics in every set. We had been to Ravnica numerous times. And we also were in a world where we didn't tend to do five mechanics per set anymore. We tend to average three and a half.

And so, for different reasons, we're like, you know what? Okay. We're going to change the rule it's not off limits to bring back a mechanic now we didn't necessarily mean a guild mechanic not that we couldn't bring back a guild mechanic but the idea was you could bring back any mechanic any mechanic was fair game

so one of the first things we did, so remember Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance had a shared vision it had a six month vision because at the time we were still in the block model and they were considered to be one block. Now, we were always going to have them be large sets. They were always going to be drafted apart. In some ways, they were us moving toward the new system but still

thinking in terms of the old system. But anyway, it meant that we didn't work together. So one of the first system. But anyway, it meant that we did them together. So one of the first exercises I did is I asked the team, I said, okay, let's make a list of every mechanic we've ever done that would be appropriate in each of the guilds. Obviously, we had their old guild mechanic, which all were appropriate. And we listed a lot more things,

a lot more things that made sense. And Selesnya is the kind of thing where, hey, do you have things that care about creatures? You know, like Conspire allows you to tap creatures to copy the spell. That's very creature centric. We had stuff like Rally or

Support or, you know, there's a bunch of different mechanics that are very reinforced or things that are just very creature centric. I go, okay, well, anything that's a bunch of different mechanics that are very reinforced, or things that are just very creature-centric. Okay, well, anything that's creature-centric, that cares about creatures, works for Celestia. And so we made a long list of different things. The other thing to keep in mind, one of the rules we did on Return to Ravnica that we brought back for Guilds of Ravnica was, if you took all the cards with the guild symbol,

the guild watermark, and mixed them together, meaning whatever set you brought them from, and mixed them together and played them, we wanted it to feel cohesive. We wanted the canvas to go together. We want the deck... Like, the guild has a singular feel to it. And part of the way to do that is

if you played old guild cards with the new guild cards, even if the new guild cards do some new things, it's all synergistic with what the guild does. And so we're always sort of thinking, okay, this is what Celestia... Now, Celestia is not a giant deal. I think Celestia is one

of the easier guilds, if not the easiest guild to design for on some level. So anyway, what happened was... So there's a mechanic that we've been playing. So in Zendikar, we made landfall. So landfall says, whenever you play a land, it's a trigger, and then something happens. Landfall went over very well, very popular. We would later do constellation, which is an enchantment fall.

So one of the ideas we had is, at some point, we should do a creature fall. It's very straightforward. It's one of those mechanics had is at some point, we should do a creature fall. It's very straightforward. It's like one of those it's one of those mechanics where like, okay, one day we should do this. It's just an obvious mechanic. We know it plays well. It's pretty deep. Anyway, we know we should do it. So, it came up, okay, we keep talking about doing creature fall.

Who better to do creature fall than Selesnya, the guild that cares about creatures. It's a mechanic that can go on creatures, that can care about creatures. It just seemed to slam dunk for Selesnya, the guild that cares about creatures. It's a mechanic that can go on creatures, that can care about creatures. It just seemed to slam dunk for Selesnya. So we playtested it. It played really well. It was fun. So okay, in the bag, we got a Selesnya mechanic. Now you'll notice that we did not print this mechanic.

So here's what happened. I turned it over to Eric. Eric Lauer ran the set design team. Let me talk about the Naya problem. Naya was the shard in Shards of Lara. It was the green-centered shard that its allies, white and red. So green, white, red. The problem we have is green, white, and red are very synergistic with one another. Like I said before, that the three

sort of creature-centric guilds are in white, green, and red. And whenever any two of them are in the same draft experience, remember, now that we're drafting, now we've moved out of, original Ravnica had four guilds, now we're in the era of five guilds. So, Return to Ravnica,

Gatecrash all had five guilds, Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Legions all had five guilds. Now we're in the era of five guilds. So Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash all had five guilds. Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica of Allegiance all had five guilds. In that structure, basically there's five two-color strategies, the five guilds you're drafting, and then five three-color strategies, which is every overlap of the guilds.

There's just the five combinations you can make by overlapping the guilds. And so the idea is you want to make sure that each two-color combination works and each three-color combination works. The Naya problem is that green, white, and white, red, in this particular case, or whatever the combination is. We've had different combinations in the past. But right now, for this set, green-white and red-white,

so Boros and Celestia, were so synergistic that if you were playing red-white and you wanted to go to third color, you just almost all the time went to green. And if you were playing Celestia and wanted to go to another color, you almost all the time went to red.

And the problem is, Celestia needs half the time to go to black to play Golgari, and Boros half the time wants to go to Izzet, to do Jeskai with red and blue. And that wasn't happening, and that was warping the draft environment. So what Eric realized was,

is there was too much synergy. The problem with Creature Fall is it played too well not just with Selesnya, but with Boros. Boros also is pretty creature-centric. It likes having boosts. It's constantly playing its creatures. It just was a little bit too synergistic.

Meanwhile, Selesnya already had the problem of Boros and Mentor, which is when you attack, put a plus and plus on a creature that's also attacking with power less than yours. Now, Mentor worked better in Boros because Boros is an attack-based

guild. The way Selesnya works is I like to say that the way we structure the guilds is usually there's a plan A and a plan B. Usually the plan A is the more aggressive plan and a plan B. Usually the plan A is the more aggressive plan, and the plan B is the backup plan.

So Selesnya's plan A is, I just attack with creatures, my creatures keep getting bigger, because I'm ramping into bigger creatures, and I try, you know, it can play kind of the mid-range game. But, it's plan B, which is the one that it often does

is it goes okay ground stall things have built up I have a little bit of evasion but the other route other than sort of winning through evasion is just build up my creatures get more creatures, get bigger creatures and eventually I will overwhelm you in number I attack you with more creatures you can block

or I attack you with big things big enough that I'm going to slowly trick your creature you I mean, you're going to chump block until I can then just attack for the win. Or maybe I have a giant trample creature that just by itself can get through for enough damage. That you want to have sort of the various plans. And so when it's on the aggressive plan, a mentor can work with it. Now, one of the things we were careful with is because white is just generally a smaller color,

that we made sure that some of the bigger Mentor things were in red, not in white, so that white's Mentor was a little bit smaller. So it could work with Celestia, but not quite as efficiently. In fact, like I said, this is kind of funny. Normally, we're trying to increase to make it more synergistic.

But, you know, making a token creature and attacking with it is really strong with Mentor. So we had to be careful as to how we built that. So anyway, it turned out that Creature Fall was just too good. As a secondary issue, one of the things about making guild mechanics is guilds...

Usually you make about 8 to 12 cards with a guild mechanic on it. It can go a little higher sometimes, but... And the idea is, usually the best guild mechanics are ones in which, look, the mechanic isn't that much bigger than what you're building, so you're sort of making a mechanic out of something that you would have trouble making a larger mechanic out of. Those are some of the best field mechanics. It's like, you're kind of,

oh, you have to make a smaller mechanic, and so you're making something that fits the role of a smaller mechanic. Now, we occasionally do things, I mean, Convoke's a perfect example of, look, it can support a lot more cards. We put it in a thing. We later brought it back.

Convoke was in, I forget which core set. Like, core 2013. One of the earlier core sets. After we started bringing back mechanics. In the core set.

Anyway, we brought it back. Obviously, there's more space there. So, I mean, it's not that we can't introduce something and then later have more space. But Creaturefall is pretty exciting. We really could do a set where we could blow it out a little bit more. This is one of the things that we're just going to do one day. I mean, it's not reinventing the wheel. Once you see Landfall, you can get to other falls. It's not particularly tricky to do. But, trying to find a place and a space that it just makes a lot of sense.

Okay. So Eric, so one of the things that Eric, so what Eric did is we handed over the file Mentor and Undergrowth, which were the Golgari and Boris mechanics, didn't get changed. Eric needed to, Eric felt he needed new mechanics for Dimir and Izzet and Celestia. So one of the things that Eric likes to do is he likes to go and figure out what tools exist in magic to solve the problem so that he can sort of get a scope of how to solve it.

And what that means is he usually goes and says, okay, what's the closest in existing magic? What's the closest we have so that I can understand how to make it work. And so for Izzet and Dimir and Selesnya, he went and figured, like, okay, using existing technology, how would I solve this problem? And so the thing he came up with for Selesnya was Convoke. Convoke kind of did what he wanted.

Convoke is nice in that it's not useless to Boros. Boros can make use of it. And, by the way, Convoke has two different styles of cards. One is the ramping card, in which it's a larger card. Because of creatures, I get to play it earlier than I would normally. It's a giant worm that I can, by tapping creatures, get it out many turns faster than I normally would or it could be

smaller spells that by having creatures as a resource I can cast them like there was a giant growth that was in original Ravnica where it allowed you to be tapped out but as long as you had a green creature untapped you had the ability to giant growth but still you had the ability to make something bigger that the like plus two plus two, I think. But still, you had the ability to make something bigger

that the opponent might not realize. It allowed you to do some tricks and things. And it made you, when you had creatures up, you could threaten that you had an answer because your creatures could, you know, you had extra mana, essentially. But Convoke was the kind of thing where it definitely

had some synergy with Boros, especially the second kind. But the giant ramp-up creature is not really Boros' style. Boros is not taking off a turn to put a bigger creature in most of the time. There are exceptions, but most of the time. So Convoke did this thing where it worked with Boros. It wasn't non-synergistic, but it was kind of the right level synergistic and not too synergistic because of the Nigh issue.

So one of the things that Eric will do is if he's going to make new mechanics, sometimes he'll fill in old mechanics so that he can try out a new mechanic so he can sort of, you know, like the nice thing about Convoke is he understood Convoke. And so if we were trying a new Demir mechanic or a new Izzet mechanic, he could try that, let Selesnya have something that he understands, and it would fill the role, and he could sort of sense how the new mechanic is working. So eventually, he realized that Convoke was doing a good job, and so he said to his team,

okay, let's find a Convoke-like mechanic. And so the team spent a lot of time trying to come up with things that, you know, played in a similar space, that used creatures as resource, maybe that could allow ramping in some way. And in the end, what Eric realized was that Convoke really did a great job

of playing in the space that Selesnya wanted to be. And so there was a little debate. When we had originally talked about bringing back a mechanic, not that we had a little debate, you know, um, when we had originally talked about bringing back a mechanic, um, not that we had guild mechanics off limits, but we really, I think the thing we were thinking about was, oh, well, here's a mechanic. Like when we get to Izzet, I'll talk a little bit about how we try to do splice, for example, we'll try to bring splice back, um, and make it is a mechanic. Um, and one of the things we thought was it was kind of fun to take a mechanic people

already knew and bring it back and go, ha-ha, here's a mechanic you know, but not through the lens of being a guild mechanic. And Convoke wasn't quite that. Convoke was more like, hey, you know this, hey, remember this guild? They did this, well, they're doing it again. But it really, one of the things that's so hard in building Ravnica sets is the balance you need behind each guild working in conjunction, working by itself and then working in conjunction with the guilds on each side of it.

It's just very tricky to do and there's a lot of moving pieces. I always talk about the metaphor I use is building a house of cards. One of the things you have to do when building a Ravnica set is everybody has to kind of lean on everything else. And, you know, all it takes is for one thing to fall, for one thing not to work, and every, you know, just the domino effect of the synergy. It's such a high synergy environment

that, you know, just getting the synergies to be a bit off really causes significant problems in trying to make it work. So, I mean, there's a little bit of debate about whether or not to bring back. I don't want to say it was like, oh, it's Convoke, done. It was like,

okay, Convoke's doing a really good job. Is there something kind of like it? Nothing that's quite as good as Convoke. Okay, can we bring Convoke back? Oh, should we do that? And there's some debate. In the end, they decided, look, gameplay trumps all. You know, we knew there'd be a little bit like, why does Celestia get

a new mechanic? And obviously we got a little of that. But it really just does good things. So we decided that if we're going to bring Convoke back, what we needed to do was a couple things. One was make some more really cool Convoke spells. You know, just make sure that we're you know, we're One was make some more really cool Convoke spells, you know, just make sure that we're, you know, we're not just reprinting all the Convoke cards. So I think we were pretty, we made a conscious effort since Convoke was coming back not to reprint a lot of Convoke cards. We wanted to make a lot of new Convoke cards. So yes,

Selesnya has a mechanic you've seen before, but it's, you know, doing a lot of new design space. Second thing that Eric really cared about was making sure that there was some interaction with Convoke that was a little bit new. That you were doing some stuff with Convoke you hadn't done before. So one of the areas I know they played around with, like, there's a creature in the set, once again, horrible names,

where if you Convoke this creature, or every creature that Con convokes this creature into play gets a plus one, plus one counter. So that's a card that, like, not only do I want to, not only can I be convoked, I want to be convoked. That if you're going to cast me, you want to use every possible creature you can to get me into play.

That I'm not just, you know, that being convoked is a positive thing. The other thing that he did is he made a bunch of cards. I'll use Amara as my example. So Amara, the real quick story on Amara is, in Return to Ravnica, Doug Byer wrote the story, which was in a novella called The Secretist. And Amara played a pretty big role in the story.

I mean, the main character was Jace, but Amara played a big role. But due to, so basically, if you mean, the main character was Jace, but Amara played a big role. But due to... So basically, if you guys know the card Voice of Resurgence, that was supposed to be Amara. It was a mythic rare. And at the time, there were ten maze runners. Part of the story of Dragon's Maze was... Azor, the founder of Azorius, had made the Implicit Maze, I think it was called.

And in order... Like, the person who won this got to be the Living Guild Pact. Jace ends up winning it, for those who don't know. Spoilers. And anyway, each guild had a representative that was in the race. And so we... Dragon's Maze, which was the third set in the Return of Ravnica block, the idea was that we'd have a new legendary creature

for every guild, and then represent the guild runner, the maze runner. And originally we had five of them at Mythic Rare and five of them at Rare. And, I don't know, later in the process we realized that it was kind of weird that um, some of the legendary creatures were uncommon,

were rare, and some were mythic rare. It was flavorfully a cycle. I mean, I understand that mechanically they were very disconnected, but they were flavorfully a cycle. So we made the decision to move down the mythics, probably also because we like to have a lot of rare legends.

There's a lot of popularity with Commander and such. Anyway, we decided to move them down. But it was late enough that the cards that were constructed, mythic cards, we didn't want to move. So the behind the scenes is at every rarity,

we try to make sure there's cards that are going to be something we think have a shot at being a tournament. And so we had done enough work that we didn't want to move around rarities of cards that were positioned as positioned as tournament shots, I guess is what we would call them. So we ended up swapping... There was a green-white mythic rare creature

and a green-white rare creature. And so we ended up swapping, meaning we took the name Amara that was sitting on Voice of Resurgence and put it on the rare creature. Now, the rare creature, I mean, it wasn't a great Amara. She was too big to be Amara,

and it ended up being a card that just was... I mean, voice research went on to be a really big player, and so we originally hadn't lined it up, so major character in the story and major card we thought we'd see a lot of play were together. We tried to do that where we can. And so Amara ended up getting kind of a much weaker card, and we felt bad. a lot of play, we're together. We try to do that where we can. And so Amara ended up getting kind of a much weaker card. And we felt

bad. A lot of people loved Amara and her card was to be honest, not the greatest card. So we brought her back. We're like, okay, this time, let's show Amara some love. So one of the themes that Eric was playing around with is he loved the idea that one of the ways to sort of make, convoke matter is having creatures that, when tapped, did something. And the idea that one of the ways to sort of make convoke matter is having creatures

that when tapped did something and the idea is look you can attack with the creatures there's ways to tap them in the game but a safer way to tap them is with convoke because if i attack with them my opponent now can block and kill them but if i convoke with them i get the reward from it um without having any of the danger of having to be in combat. So basically what happened was we had come up with the idea of a Convoke card that made a token. And Amara, it was a really powerful card. And we're like, okay, we owe Amara. And Amara wanted to be a small creature. I forget the card in Dragon's Maze. It was like a 5-7 or something

that didn't make a lot of sense for Amara. So anyway, the idea of a smaller creature that when you tap it makes a token. Mechanically, it was very synergistic for Convoke because not only did you want to Convoke Amara, but now she's made a token which can now be used for Evoke. Not Evoke. Convoke. Sorry. Evoke is a different mechanic. Also a good mechanic, but a different mechanic.

So Convoke, it was a very synergistic Convoke, sorry. Evoke is a different mechanic. Also a good mechanic, but a different mechanic. Convoke, it was a very synergistic Convoke card, so Mara gotta be very playing into her guild and its theme. I'm trying to think of other things. Okay, this time the overlap. So

Selesnya overlapped white with Boros and overlapped black with Golgari oh, real quickly by the way just because this comes up, I'll address it here we were aware when we made Guilds of Ravnica that the four guilds in original Ravnica

plus Izzet were that there was an overlap, that original Ravnica and Guilds of Ravnica have basically the same four guilds in it. There was a whole bunch of criteria we were working under. There were different combinations we needed. Certain characters had to be in a certain place for the set. We wanted two bolus guilds leading into three bolus guilds.

This ended up being the only one that worked. And the downside was it was similar to original Ravnica. Izzet is there. Even though you could draft blue, red, and original Ravnica, you couldn't. Izzet is there, even though you could draft blue, red in original Ravnica, you couldn't draft Izzet, and Izzet as a themed guild is here makes it a little bit different.

Also, in the way we built the sets, we knew that you could draft three colors in Ravnica, but we really improved upon those themes and how we built them. Anyway, we decided that there was enough changes from original Ravnica that it would play out differently in that.

But anyway, we were aware of that. Okay, so I talked a bit about Boros. Boros was pretty synergistic. Celeste cares about creatures. Boros cares about creatures. Mentor and Convoke were both in a

nice place where the other guild can use it. It's not non-synergistic with the other guild. But it was something that was... It was something that was not too synergistic because of the Naya issue. So we definitely made it, you know, like... It's not hard to want to play them together. In fact, if anything, our plans were not to make you play them together, but make you not play them together too much.

Golgari was a little bit trickier. So Golgari had undergrowth. Undergrowth is all about caring about creatures in your graveyard. Now, normally, pretty synergistic in the sense that Selesnya is a creature-caller deck. Well, what happens to your creatures? At some point they die, where do they go? They go to the graveyard.

So there was definitely some synergy with the way that you know, with the way that we had built Golgari. There was one big exception, though, which was Undergrowth does not play particularly well with tokens.

In previous combinations, like an original Ravnica, one of the ways to make Selesnya play well with Golgari was specifically to make token creatures. This one, because Undergrowth, I mean, there still are sacrifices. It's not, once again, token creatures are not completely antithetical, but not as clean as you want. So one of the things we did is we lowered the amount of token

making, especially in green, the overlap with Golgari. There's some, but not as much. Obviously, Populate, for example, which was the last time we were there, you know, Golgari, I mean, Celestia was, tokens were a big part of its theme. So we had to temper that down a little bit. There's still some tokens that are more white

than green, or more green-white than mono-green. But we were a little more careful about how to mix and match those. See how we're doing. So we had some traffic here, so that's why we have some extra time. But anyway, I am almost to work. So I just want to wrap this up. So the... Oh, so,

it's hard for me to say as I'm recording this, the pre-release just happened, so for the other sets, I can talk about, oh, they graded mechanics and here's the thing with mechanics and there's a lot of ways to... There's a lot of ways to sort of get a sense of what people thought.

I don't have that data yet, so... But I have faith that people will get like Selesnya. Like I said, Selesnya is... Oh, the one thing I have to really quickly talk about is each of the guilds falls into a psychographic... Not that you have to get that psychographic to play, but like I talked about Dimir and that, if you sort of looked at all Dimir players

and said, okay, what Psychographic do the majority of them belong to? It was Spike. When you do Selesnya, the majority of them tend to belong to Timmy Tammy. That one of the things about Selesnya and about creatures in general is you definitely have the fun of,

you know, playing creatures is definitely, like, a lot of the visceral thrill of magic is being able to, you know, play big creatures and overrun lots of creatures, and there's a lot of kind of fun, exciting moments that tend to be creature-based. And so, Selesia plays in that space. We want to make sure when we build Selesia that we do that. So, one of the reasons I think Selesnya tends to be, make people pretty happy, is basically this idea that it's just playing in some fun, general happy magic playing space.

You know, playing big creatures and, anyway. So I have every belief to believe that Selesnya will be yet another popular guild. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my peek at Selesnya will be yet another popular guild. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my peek at Selesnya. It is definitely one of the... Like I said, it is a fun guild to build. It is one of the easier guilds to build as far as mechanically of the themes it plays.

But I hope you guys enjoyed our jaunt today through everything Selesnya. But I'm now guys enjoyed our jaunt today through everything Celestia. But I'm now at work so we all know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.