Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #602: Magic Evolution, Part 7

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

This is another in my "Magic Evolution" series that goes through sets and explains the innovations of each expansion. This podcast is about the original Ravnica block.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my series, Magic Evolution. This is part seven, I believe. So what I'm doing with this series is I started from the beginning of Magic and I'm going through Magic, talking about different sets and explaining sort of what they did that was new for Magic. One of the things I often talk about is design and Magic design is about iteration. That we do something, we try it, we experiment with it, we get feedback, we make tweaks based on the feedback, and then we try new things. And in some ways, you can think of Magic as just being constantly iterated on. We keep making Magic sets, we learn from them, and we, you know, improve the

process. So one of the things that's interesting is, we're constantly evolving and coming up with new things. So, as I look back, it's kind of cool to say, oh, well, what did this set, or this block, I'm now at the point where I'm looking at blocks, what did this block do? So,

last time, I talked about Champions of Kamigawa block, which means we're up to Ravnica block, original Ravnica block. Ravnica, Guild Pack, and Descension. So this was a pretty influential block. So a little context to start with. First off, in December of 2003, I became the head designer of Magic. That happened happened I think we were in the middle of Betrayers of Kamigawa we were in the middle of Kamigawa block and Kamigawa block was a train that had left the station

there wasn't a I did some fine tuning on it but there wasn't a lot I could do structurally to change it it was sort of set in motion so really the first block that I had any control over from the beginning, sort of a full vision of, was Ravnica. And one of the things that I really wanted to do, and if you know anything, I've talked about the ages of magic design. Ravnica is actually the start of, what is it,

the fourth age? The first age was Alpha, the second age was Mirage, the third age was Invasion. So, yeah, the fourth age was Ravnica. And the big change of Ravnica was the idea of treating how we design blocks a little differently. So what had happened was, if you go back in time, in the early days, when we started making blocks, it was very much about, hey, the false set had two mechanics and those mechanics got evolved as the block went along. The way I would describe it

is, use an analogy from my TV writing days. If you were writing an episodic drama, meaning you're writing something where there's an ongoing story, there's two ways to do that. One is, method number one is sort of the total plotting method, where you figure out everything that's going to happen, and then you plot it all out, so that, you know, in season five, you know something's going to happen, then in season one, you can make a hint at something, and in season five, when they see it at something and in season five when they see it

they're like oh they knew all along there's that thing um the other thing is um what i call uh the sort of the breadcrumbs approach or the open threads where you just leave a lot of you create things you don't know the answer to that need to be solved and make enough of those that later on you can figure out answers to what some of those open threads are. It's not that you know exactly where you're going, but you leave enough open opportunities that you can later pick up on those. The advantage of the first way is it's more thorough and allows you to tell a story where when people

go back and look at it all, it holds together a little more cohesively because things you did early on matter. The second one, the advantage of that is it's a little easier to do, it's less time intensive. A lot of times in the way television shows are made, you don't know if you have later seasons. So, you know, a lot of times it's like, just make the most awesome season we can. We'll throw in some, you know,

we'll leave some threads open if we get picked for season two. We'll figure out what to do then. And I feel like when we started making Magic, we were kind of doing it the second way, the open thread way, which is we'd make a set and then it's like, oh, I'm not sure what the other sets will do, but we'll just leave some stuff, and they'll pick up something. And then the second set was kind of left

to fend for itself with a little bit of, you know, a few throw-forwards by the large set, but really, the large set didn't know what the small set was doing. And then the second small set, like, oh, whatever they got left over from the first two sets is something they could do. And then, in Invasion,

Henry Stern and I came up with an interesting idea. We were making a multicolor set and we said, you know what? Maybe we can hold off on the enemy stuff and just not do that until the end of the block. So the first two sets will be ally. So Invasion and Planeship were ally and then Apocalypse would be the enemy set.

And that paid off really well, and people really liked it, and it really stuck with me. So when I started, you know, doing, you know, being charged, I'm like, okay, I want to holistically think about these blocks. You know, one of my goals was, if I randomly picked a pack and opened it up, you know, and didn't see, couldn't see the wrapper, could I tell what set it was? I wanted each set to have a unique enough identity that I could look at the pack and go, oh, I know what set this is. So, that really, one of the things that Ravnica started doing is

just thinking about how we did multi-sets in a different way. One of the evolutions in Magic in general is, in Alpha, you know, Richard was very focused on the cards. Like, a decision was made to maximize each card. And in fact, one of the things we found as Magic went along is that, you know, each card was maximized and was as flavorful as that card could be, but it started creating inconsistencies between the cards.

Templates, two cards that kind of worked similarly wouldn't actually work the same because their templates were a little bit different. And so what happened was as Magic has sort of aged, we start we keep pulling back on sort of how big a scope we're looking at. Early on, it was just like

card by card. And then it was like, well, let's look at the cards within the rarities. Oh, let's look at the cards within the colors. Let's look at the cards within a set. And really, Ravnica was the start of saying, let's look at the whole block all at once. You know, let's look at multiple sets all at once. So, Invasion, so the thing about Invasion was, all I was given when I started was, we wanted to do another multicolor set. We had done Invasion.

Invasion was the start of the Third Age. That was the start of themed blocks. And it was a multicolor set, and people loved it. Invasion was very popular. So we're like, okay, you know, it's time, you know, enough time's elapsed. We're going to do another multicolor set. you know, it's time, you know, enough time's elapsed, we're going to do another multicolor set. And the one thing that was driving me as a person doing it was,

I really wanted it to not be Invasion. I wanted to see if we could do a multicolor theme that just went in a different direction. And the main theme of Invasion really was play lots of colors. And stuff like Domain, and just, it had a lot of cards that just say, play as many colors as you can. So I was like, okay, what's the exact opposite of that? So the exact opposite was, okay, play as few colors as possible, but we wanted it to be a multicolor set, so that meant, okay, play two colors. One color wouldn't be multicolor. So I'm like, okay, what if it's a set all about two colors? And then

the other big move I made, it's interesting, when I look back to Ravnica, there's a lot of things that sort of, Ravnica was the turning point, or the starting point for a lot of things. Part of it was that I took over, part of it was just that Ravnica was really successful, and so success breeds repetition.

So when you do something successful, we're like, oh, what lessons can we learn from this, and can we do that again? And so Ravnica really became a template for a lot of the way future magic would function. Anyway, so I knew I wanted two color, and I made the decision early in magic, we treated allied colors and enemy colors different.

Allied colors were just more... You would see it more often, it was more accessible, it was friendlier, and enemy colors usually were made to be not quite as good as ally colors. And what we learned is that that strategy, while flavorful

to the color play, I guess, was limiting to gameplay. That if we say to you, oh, just play ally, your enemy won't be as easy to play, then people, you just cut down the number of options people had. And what we realized was magic was at its best

if people had as many options open to them as possible for what to play. So I made the call of saying, I want to have the 10 tool car repairs, and we're going to treat them equally. They're not, the allies aren't better than the enemies. We're just treating them equally. So I went to the creative team.

Now remember, when I took over as head designer, I got put in charge of the creative team. So for a couple years, I ran the creative team. And that was during this time period. So I went to the creative team and I said to them, look, I want to, you know, we had definitely, like Nirdin, for example, there was definitely some give and take

between design and creative. But I wanted to go to the next level. And my goal was, I wanted to have a relationship with creative where design and creative are sort of passing the baton back and forth, and each one working with what the other one had done and sort of next leveling it and then passing it back. And so I started by saying to the creative team, okay, I want a multicolor world focusing on the ten two-color pairs.

We're going to treat them equally. And so the team went away. So Brady Donovan had this neat idea of what if we embody those ten pairs within the cosmology of the world? What if those ten pairs represented groups, factions, if you will? And I loved the idea. Because Brady and I were both big fans of color pie philosophy, and we really got into the idea of, oh, well, what would blue-black be like? What would green-white be like? What would white-red be like?

You know, that we went to all the color combinations and really said, oh, well, if this color and that color got together, what would it mean? And so Brady came back to me and said, he had this idea for guilds. What if we tangibly made them, we took these two color pairs and we defined them in a way that made sense within what the world was. And I adored this. I thought it was a great idea. So much so that I said,

okay, what I'm going to do, that's such a cool idea, I'm going to build my set around the guilds. I'm going to use the guilds as the center point of what I'm going to do. And for example, one of the things, so early testing when we had done, is we had all 10 two-color pairs.

And I was messing around with hybrid and all sorts of stuff. And it was just mind-numbingly difficult. So I was trying to figure out, okay, how do I make it less difficult? And once I committed to the guilds, I said, okay, well, what if not all the, what if each set just has some of the guilds? What if, you know, I'm using, if I want to think like a block plan, kind of like how we did with Apocalypse? What if I use the whole block to show off all the guilds? I didn't show off all the guilds in one set. Because if the first set was all the guilds, what's the second set?

All the guilds again? So I said, okay, there's a large set, a small set, a small set. Back then, fall set was large, winter set was small, spring set was small. I said, okay, so let's divvy up the colors. I have ten guilds. We'll go 4-3-3. And that way, you know, each guild will have space to breathe and have a time to focus. Now, be aware, at the time I was doing this, it was a really radical idea.

Now, we had clearly clearly with Invasion done allied colors and enemy colors because those are a color pair we had, I mean, within the game are very clearly connected. But I was like, no, no, no, we're going to take four color pairs, in fact two allies and two enemies is what I believe I said. Take two allies, two enemies. So obviously we had the allies were Dimir and Selesnya and the enemies were Boros and Gordari. I said we're gonna take two allies, two enemies. So obviously we had the allies were Dimir and Selesnya, and the enemies were Boros and Godari. I said, we're going to take two allies and two enemies, and then

the second set, I think, had two enemies and one ally, and the third set had two allies and one enemy. We're going to just divvy it up. And at the time, that was really considered crazy. I mean, a lot of people were like, what are you talking about? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. If we're going to live true to the guilds,

that's what we got to do. And this is an example of what I'm talking about back and forth is I give some ideas to the creative team. They bounce back with ideas that could be reflected in the creative. And then I bounce back saying, okay, I'm going to take those ideas, I'm going to weave them in to the mechanics. And so, you know, it was... Ravnica was interesting in that it made a lot of bold commitments. And now, like, let's talk about factions a little bit. The idea of factions being something you're building around. So what a fact,

I just did a whole podcast on factions. Factions I defined as something that has a meaning both creatively and mechanically, you know, and that when you come to the set, it defines, it's a way to chop up the set.

And prior to Ravnica, we had had factions. When I go through my podcast and my article, where I go through all the different factions, you see things earlier on. But it was a different... We sort of... Ravnica introduced factions in a little bit of a larger, bolder way. Factions prior to that either had been something

where it was a story-driven thing, but it wasn't particularly reflected in the mechanics. Like Mirage is a perfect example where there were three different empires, you know, but there's no mechanical connection to that at all. You know what I'm saying? It's like it was there, and if you looked for it, you could see the names. But there was nothing about the play of the set reinforced that. And then there were some sets that were mechanically separated, like maybe Onslaught that had tribes, but it wasn't, I mean, it was like, yeah, these tribes exist, but they didn't

really have an identity. The world wasn't built around the identity of the tribes. In fact, Mor morph played a bigger role in Onslaught as far as story purposes than the tribal component. The tribal component was kind of like it was. These are just creatures that are in the world. But there was no cohesiveness to them. And that what Ravnica said is, okay, we are going to make something that branches, that connects the two,

creative and mechanics, and makes, like, and is a defining quality of what the block is. So, for example, and everybody went all in on this. It wasn't just us. I mean, once creative and mechanics did it,

and design did it, I mean, we sort of committed other people to doing it, too. But if you remember the, if you guys have been playing long enough to remember Ravnica, the original ad campaign for Ravnica was, which guild are you? And the idea being

is, hey, here's an interesting system, we'll give you a test you can take, and we'll explain the guilds, and like, hey, who can you bond with? And what ended up we found from Ravnica is factions were super powerful. Like, one of the things, I guess if you just look at like sports are a good example where there's the power of factioning.

Like I got my team. I root for my team. My team takes on other teams, but I root for my team and I wear my team's colors and I own maybe my team pendant. I own maybe my team pendant. You know, I'm part of this group, and I collect in this group, and I wear things that say I'm part of this group, and I bond with other people that are part of the group, and I really, there's this connectivity to it.

And we embraced it. I mean, Ravnik goes to the set, we said, okay, well, this is a cool idea, let's run with it. And it wasn't necessarily that we're like, this is a brand new thing that Magic will do for all time. It was like, here's a cool idea. Let's run with it. And it wasn't necessarily that they were like, this is a brand new thing that magic will do for all time. It was like, here's a cool thing. Let's try this thing. And one, like I talk about iteration. One of the things about iteration is

whenever we try something new, it's not that our attitude is like, here's a new thing we'll forever use. It's, here's a new thing. Do people like this? If people like it, eh, we'll probably do it again. If people don't like it, eh, we probably won't do it again. You know, that it's not,

a lot of evolution is trying new things, and some of them will succeed. Ravnica succeeded wonderfully, you know, beyond expectations. It was a huge hit. And it really sort of said, like it said to us, factioning is a real potent tool. That is not something, that is something that Ravnica taught us.

That is not something, you know, it's not, like I said, it's not that we didn't have any faction before, but not in the capital F faction kind of way. And if you notice, since then, we use factioning all the time. It is a major tool in our arsenal. You know, or it's a quiver in our, arrow in our quiver, I don't know the metaphor I'm going for. But it is definitely something that really we make great use of because we understand the dynamics of it. We understand how it speaks to the players.

And it's not just that. So there's a couple things we did that obviously you can see. So one of the first things is watermarks. I believe Ravnica is the first set with watermarks as a main component in a set. I think some promo cards had watermarks. Like we'd watermarked the DCI logo and stuff. But the idea was, part of what we said with factions is, we want you to identify.

And part of that is symbology. We said, okay, not only are we going to make tribes, we're going to name them. We're going to give them a symbol. You know, we're going to do, we realized early on the connection to sports teams. We said, okay, let's act like sports teams. What do you want to do?

Well, we need a name, and we need a symbol, and we need an identity. And we, like I said, we did color tests and we we you know, made t-shirts and we did a lot of things to sort of identify and the interesting thing is when we later came back and returned to Ravnica, we doubled down even harder.

You know, returned to Ravnica had stickers and buttons and you know like we really sort of tapped into something that I, this is a good example where you experiment with things, and then when you find great successes,

you build them. And the watermarks was an experiment. Like, the funny thing is we used watermarks here, and then we didn't use watermarks for a little while, and finally, like, oh, we really need to use watermarks more. We started being more aggressive with water marks. But this is the place where we first tried out the water mark. The other thing, so, I mean, factioning is a big part.

Block planning was a big part. And the creative interaction was a big part. Like I said, that there was a lot of things here that were very different. Another thing that we did... Let me talk a little bit about the 433. Because that is... One of the things that we had always done with sets in the past was we tended to rely on the mechanics to sort of be the main thrust of what we were selling. Usually our ad campaigns in the early

days were, here's the mechanics, here's the two new mechanics, or here's the one mechanic or whatever. We would sell it off the novelty of the new. And new mechanics. So the interesting thing about this set was once we got into the idea of doing a faction-based set, we were doing a guild set, I went to the next logical place. Like, one of the things you do when you're playing a new space is you go for the low-hanging fruit.

And I said, okay, I want to mechanically identify each of these groups, each of the guilds. How do I do that? Okay, what if I give each one their own keyword? Like, how can I be the mechanically loudest I can be? And the idea of using mechanics as a signifier, we had definitely used mechanics before like we had tied it creatively to groups like Champs Kamigawa clearly like all the samurai had Bushido

you know you could see us making creative connections but we hadn't really used mechanics as a means to create identity. Like, really, Ravnica was the one that invented that. And the other thing about it, which was interesting, is the mechanics needed in Ravnica, the way we did them...

Normally, by the way, before Ravnica, we would always look for a mechanic that had as much space as possible. Because the way we used mechanics was, first Ravnica, we would always look for a mechanic that has as much space as possible. Because the way we used mechanics was, first set introduces it, second set tweaks it, third set tweaks it again. And that was the model about how we made magic. But the idea was, okay, so instead of having, you know, a couple mechanics that run through the block, I'm going to have one mechanic per guild, which meant 10 mechanics, which at the time was

a lot of mechanics to put in a block. We didn't normally do that back then, but that also meant that I had to go a little bit smaller. Like, the other innovation of Ravnica in some ways is kind of the idea of the smaller mechanic. So if you look at original Ravnica, I think most of the guild mechanics were like 8 to 12 cards. Maybe there's a few that got a smidgen over 12,

but it was a small number of cards. Small enough, in fact, that it opened up a whole new swath of things we could do. Because one of the issues about mechanics is not every mechanic is robust. Not every mechanic can support 60 to 80 cards over three sets. And we were looking and going sort of really fine-tuned up, okay, it's the Golgari, they care about the graveyard and recycling,

and how do we get that? Or the Boros, they're all about attacking and they're militaristic. As we were sort of identifying them and trying to create mechanics to capture their essence, the smaller keyword space really let us look at a different brand of keywords. And in two ways. One is, because we were selling the set on the guilds, the mechanics weren't the focus.

And I didn't need to worry about things that were as big or as splashy. And if you look at the mechanics of original Ravnica, they're flavorful. They fit the guilds, mostly. But not that many of them were super splashy.

Maybe Delve. There's a few that are a little splashy. But a lot of them were more just like, it really is more flavor than anything. It's something that really defines, you know, helps define how the guild feels and how the guild plays. And that was a new concept. The idea, you know, of both using a mechanic as a means to represent the faction and then the space that that took it was definitely less than

it was less than we were used to as far as how much we allocated and the other interesting thing is, um, you know, hanging the set on something that was a little bit different, that was a hybrid of, uh, or hybrid, is it with hybrid, that was a, you know, combination of mechanics and flavor really allowed, allowed us to treat it differently, and it, it made the the set sort of just the way it came out was very different. One of the things that was really dynamic is most sets prior to Ravnica

didn't really ask you to, I mean, magic makes you choose because there's colors and there's strategies, there's archetypes. But the sets never kind of made you choose, really. I mean, sometimes, there were some choices. In a tribal set, you could choose what tribe to play. There were some choices. But the factions kind of it wasn't a mechanical choice as much as it was almost a philosophical choice. I mean, it had to do with how you like to play, and one of the

things that we did a lot of time and energy on, and this is something that you can see how we model factions after, is we tried to figure out who liked each faction, why they liked each faction, and then made sure that faction played the way the group that would like it wanted it. And that's another very different way. Like, one of the things is, you know, I made the psychographics, Timmy, Tammy, Johnny, Jenny, Spike, many years ago. And a lot of that was to just get people to think in the mindset of, am I making all the different, psychologically, am I making all the psychologically am I making all the

players happy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm making this player happy, but am I making that player happy? And I think the factions, like if I sort of, you say to me, what is my contribution to Magic Design? What is the biggest thing that I did as

a designer? One of the things that I was very big in doing is kind of bringing psychology into things. In Ravnica, you can see this very much. Like, one of the things that Brady and I, and the whole creative team. So the, by the way, the creative team at the time was

Brady Darvimuth, Jeremy Cranford, Jeremy Jarvis, Mac, McIvada and Brandon Bozzi. That was a creative team. Um, and then, uh, Doug would swap in for, but that was, for Ravnica, that was the team. Doug Byer would swap in for McIvada, but that would happen later. Um, and one of the things that we spent a lot of time on was the psychology of the guilds. Who were they? What did they want? You know, okay, this was a combination of this color and that color.

But when this color's philosophy and that color's philosophy come together, what does it mean? What does it mean when red and white work together? What does it mean when white and blue work together? What does it mean? What do you expect? What are the archetypes you expect? And, you know, one of the things that we spent a lot of time on was trying to understand sort of building components to match the expectation of the audience. And while that's something

Magic had done before, this was kind of the audience. And while that's something Magic had done before, this was kind of next level. I mean, Ravnica really sort of brought things up. The other challenge, by the way, once I introduced the 4-3-3 model, it really made us rethink a little bit about how drafting was going to work. Because just as I, for design wise started to say i'm going to chop this up and

spread this over you know i made the whole block have a definition um i kind of forced the hands of the developers at the time that it really made them start to think about okay we have to take into account that when um when Guild Pack comes out, the first packs are going to be these color combinations, and the second packs are going to be this color combination. It made them really have to think ahead and say, okay, we got to plan this out ahead of time. You know, one of the things about block planning is,

block planning isn't just for design, but also, or, you know, at the time it was design development. So often when I talk in the past, I use how it was devised at the time. There was a lot of need for development to think about the sets a different way. That when I talked about designing it as a whole entity, it was developed as a whole entity. You know, you knew that the second set was going to have a different set of color combinations, and you had to figure out what that meant

and what did it mean for the first set. You know, what did Ravnica have to do to allow Guildpack and later Descension to be fun when you drafted with them? You know, they had to think ahead. And that's a big part of Ravnica, is really... It's a set part of Ravnica is really um it's a set where I sort of threw the gauntlet down I said you know what we're we're going

broader we're thinking more we're we're going to reach into we're going to think about the second and third sets and we're going to I'm going to tell you enough information that you have something you know going into it like uh one of the first things we did is we picked the color combinations. And just so we knew, okay, people building this set, this is what's happening in the second set, this is what's happening in the third set. Think accordingly. Plan accordingly. And Brian Schneider was the lead developer at the time. And I know he spent a lot of time thinking about, okay, how do I do this?

And this is the combination. These are when the cards come in. These are what each set does. How do we maximize that? He spent a lot of time on that. That was another thing, by the way, when it was first proposed that there were people like,

oh, it can't be done. You can't make a draft that works where it's different, you know, each set has different color combinations in it. And the one thing, by the way, that that did, just for fans of Dominaria, or not Dominaria, Ravnica, is it really made us realize

that there was a three-color component. That doing a two-color set really also meant that there's a lot of three-color play that you enable. And the reason for that is you set people up to draft, but if people end up sort of going between two guilds that overlap in a color,

you end up with three-color combinations. And so when Brian was building the set, he was aware that, you know, the first set you could draft two color but once you started playing the second and third sets you kind of had to go three color you just didn't have the base you needed to play two color and we also one of the big discoveries of Invasion

was we had not given enough mana fixing and one of the goals discoveries of Invasion was we had not given enough mana fixing. And one of the goals of Ravnica was to try to do a gold set where we really enabled you to be able to play the gold cards. The funny thing is, I think in retrospect, like, we ramped it up for Ravnica.

We later decided that Ravnica wasn't high enough that we could ramp it up more. So, like, Shards of Alara, which was the next multicolors, that, you know, had even more fixing, a higher as-fantafixing than we had in Ravnica. How are we doing on time? Okay, well I'm hitting some traffic so we get some extra, extra Ravnica goodness. Next.

Let's talk a little bit about how we handled cycles. Something else that Ravnica did that there's a little bit of precedence for this, but was the idea of doing larger cycles that ran through multiple sets. Odyssey had done an alt-win cycle where red and blue were in the first set, black was in the second set and white and green were in the third set Battlewits is from that cycle now that's a little bit of a looser cycle, I mean

they were connected by alt-wins, their names were kind of cutesy they're all about fighting and then there was like the culture equipment from Myrden where and their names were kind of cutesy. They were all about fighting. And then there was, like, the Caldra equipment from Myrden where there were three different equipment. If you got together the Sword of Caldra, the Shield of Caldra, and the Helm of Caldra, and you got them all in play at once,

then it made a token that was Caldra, and then you could equip all the stuff to them. But each of those cases, those were a little more gimmicky, and like, for example, the alt wind condition in Odyssey, just something that entertained me, that I liked, it didn't,

wasn't organic really, to what Odyssey was doing, and the sword, the shield, and the helm, okay, I mean, it was an artifact, they were equipment,

it was introducing equipment, so I mean, it mechanically tied in. But it wasn't, the culture didn't play a role in the story. It wasn't, like, tied in on a deeper level. And so one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to make this whole block feel cohesive,

like a singular thing. I didn't want it to feel like, here's a set, here's more, here's more. And so one of the ways to do that, I talk about this being the pie method, where I have a pie, and I'm chopping it up in pieces, and okay, you get this piece, and you get that piece, you get this piece, but you recognize it all went together to make one total thing. So cycles were very important. You know, we had all magic, you know, Richard and Alpha had cycles. Cycles go back to the very beginning of the game. But the idea here was a little bit different.

Was I wanted to give definition to the whole and so what I did is each guild got its own representation of the cycles. And so the cycles, the way they worked is four were in the first set, three were in the second set, three were in the third set,

because every guild got its things. Now, some of them were super tight, like the Shocklands, where once you saw one, you knew what the rest were going to be. Some were a little looser, like the Guildmages, where, you know, the Guildmages are a good example

where, you know, they were all two hybrid mana for 2-2 there was a wizard and you knew that they activated for two different abilities one in each color, but I didn't know exactly what they were going to do until that one came out and then we got even looser, like there was a cycle of champions

there were leaders and champions I think the champions were the ones in which they had a color themed ability where if you had one color of the two colors it was good one or the other of the two colors was good but if you had both colors it was better and that was very very

loose I mean it tied into this rewarding you for having multicolor of the two color combinations but subtly the card is very different between them a lot of people don't even realize it's a cycle until I point it out. And so the idea was we'd have many different

ranges of cycles. Some super obvious, some somewhat obvious, some not so obvious, and we use those as anchor points to sort of spread between the sets. And the reason for doing that was normally you think of a set as a single entity and the cycles were complete within the set. Because I wanted

you to think for the first time, really, of these sets as being unified into a singular thing, by running a cycle through multiple sets I really sort of reinforced that, hey, this first set is just four tents. There's six more tents to go. You've not seen it all. And that ended up working really well. One of the things that it did

was it really gave the players some excitement to predict the future. And some of it was obvious. Some of it was, I know I'm getting a shock land. I want my Shockland. There's no mystery. Where some things like the Guildmages were like, okay, I kind of know what I'm getting.

I don't know the details exactly, but I want to see it. You know, I'm an Orzhov player. No, I want to see the Orzhov Guildmage. So we definitely, one of the things that we were playing around with is how do we give definition beyond the set into the larger scope of what we were doing in a way that resonated. And that was something, you know,

like one of the lessons in general that I found from Ravnica was if you get players to identify that there are a lot of things you can do to, like one of the things, if you ever listen to my I did three podcasts on communication theory and it talks about the three things that audiences want, which is comfort, surprise, and completion.

And I think that we had not played around with completion as much as we could. We had done a little bit with stuff like I'm talking about, like culture and things. But really, in part of designing sets is taking into mind that part of what you want to do is build some expectations, and then part of the second and third set is paying off known expectations. That it's not always about just zigging and zagging. Sometimes the way you make additional sets is you play into the idea of, hey, here's something new, I'm introducing it to you, and then you get an extrapolate, ooh, I want to see more of this thing.

And the later sets get you to deliver on that, which I think was very important. Ravnica also taught us the importance of, well, the other value that factions can give us is that if we can dole things out over time, it also helps with complication issues. Like I said, one of the big lessons from, you know, in general, Ravnica, not just the first Ravnica, all the Ravnica's I've taught is that, is multicolor sets do this weird thing. Players love them. Players love multicolor sets.

But they also confuse them. Like, one of the problems about multicolor sets is it just requires more work to play correctly. You have to understand your mana a little better. You have to, you know, know how many of a certain card you can play given the restraints of, you know, how much mana you have versus how many different color spells you have. And Ravnica really sort of played in the space

and introduced this concept to people in a way that sort of helped us think about how we make these kind of sets and how we dole out complexity and how we dole out sort of... One of the neat things about gaming in general is, and you see this in tutorials all the time, normally when you teach someone how to play a game, you don't teach them everything.

Video games are a really good example of this. The first thing I'm going to do is teach you one of the controllers. And normally that first test, that's all it is, is just learning that controller. and normally that first test is all it is is just learning that controller and then little by little add a little more on so you can start becoming more comfortable with all the tools at your disposal until finally when they think

you're ready they give you the more full blown game and that one of the things in Magic that I think that we the assumption was oh we can't do that we're not a video game and that one of the assumption was, oh, we can't do that. You know, we're not a video game.

And that one of the things we started learning was that you can spread things out over sets and use that as a means to help train people up. That you don't have to give people everything right out of the gate in the first set. And that part of another lesson of Ravnica was the idea of, you know, if I give you all ten mechanics at once, that's really complicated. So, okay, I'll give you four. And the way we structured it was no color had more than two guilds. And only three of the colors had two guilds. Red and blue didn't even have a second guild. So the idea is once you picked a color, okay,

it very clearly started defining some stuff for you. It said, okay, let's say I'm playing black. Okay, well, I'm Dimir Golgari if I'm playing original Ravnica. That means I don't need to worry about red cards or green

cards. I'm not going to be playing red with either of the two colors. I can stop looking at those. And it sort of gave you a step stone to help you sort of learn. And we've applied that. That's something that we've been very conscious of going, oh, that was a very valuable tool. And so one of the things we definitely do now

is being aware of how we can sort of introduce things and slowly bring people into it. That's another valuable resource. It's funny because I'm almost at work, but Ravnica, I mean, for example, I didn't even get to stuff like

hybrid. Hybrid mana happened for the first time in Ravnica. Before that, there was no hybrid mana. And as you'll know, hybrid's become a very popular tool for us, a very useful tool. And we've used hybrid in all sorts of different ways to allow us to sort of complete some tasks.

And like I said, hybrid, that is not even like the major thing. Like most of what I want to talk about today is process and larger structure. Because so much of what Ravnica did is change the way we made sets. Yet, here's a tool that got introduced that we use all the time, and, like,

it's in the last two minutes to be talking about just because I'm like, there's so many different things that Ravnica did that, hey, oh, yeah, it introduced hybrid, you know. That it is, it was a, as evolution sets go, I mean, obviously obviously Alpha is the king of evolution, since it's just the first one,

but as far, especially a set as far into magic's life as it was, as far as really being something that opened our eyes about a lot of things, about how we treat blocks, about how we interconnect things, about the use of factioning, of how psychology can be used, of how we can use keywords to structure. There's

endless things. Oh, and we made Hydration. And we made one of the most versatile tools that we have as far as deciduous tools go. So that is Ravnica. Ravnica definitely really did a lot of big picture stuff for us. And the block was super valuable. So it's funny because some of the later stuff we'll get into, I got to get down to the nitty gritty to talk about,

like the real innovations. But Ravnica is, its innovations were so grandiose and large that I don't even really need to get down to a lot of that minutia to talk about the most important stuff from the set. That it was really about us rethinking much bigger picture things. And in a lot of ways, I mean, as from a personal standpoint, you know, Ravnica was the first set that I was sort of putting my fingerprints on as head designer. And, you know, a lotnica was the first set that I was sort of putting my fingerprints on as head designer.

And, you know, a lot of this had to do with, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I thought magic could be made. And so when finally I was given the task of, okay, you're in charge of that part of it. You know, I really went to town. I'm very proud of Ravnica. I'm very, you know, I look back and you say to me what is the most influential set I made? And, you know, probably Ravnica as far as influence, as far as changing what came after it.

Probably Ravnica is the set that changed the most. I mean, there's a lot of sets I did that had impacts. But, I mean, it's really from an innovative standpoint as far sets I did that had impacts. But I mean, it's really, from an innovative standpoint, as far as I did something, and what happened after that thing, how we changed, like what set changed

how we did things the most of sets that I had made, I think Ravnica's the set that did the most. Like I said, I didn't even get on every little nuance of what it did different, that the big things were so big that I spent my car ride talking about those. But anyway, I am now at Wizards. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking

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