Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #606: Lessons Learned – Dominaria

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

This is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about sets I led (or co-led) and explore the many lessons I learned while doing the design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And today is another in my lessons learned series, where I talk about sets that I led or co-led, and talk about the lessons I learned from doing them. I talk about all the time that magic's an iterative process, that game design is an iterative process, and that you learn, you do things, you get feedback on them, you make changes, and you improve. And that I like to think that magic design is iterative, ongoing. You know, magic's 25 years old, and it keeps getting better because we keep learning from what we've done before. Anyway, today we're going to talk about Dominaria.

So Dominaria was one of the more daunting designs I had to do. Um, and then here's the real reason is early Magic, we spent a lot of time in Dominaria. I'm not quite sure why. For a game all about Euro Planeswalker and there's all these, there's a multiverse of planes, we spent a lot of time on Dominaria early on. In fact, I forget the exact number, but 30-some sets, I think, were set on Dominaria. And really, you know, early Magic was kind of like we kept moving around continents on the same plane. We just kept visiting new parts of Dominaria.

Like, you know, in a modern sensibility, continents on the same plane. We just kept visiting new parts of Dominaria. In a modern sensibility, the Ice Age plane and the Mirage plane and these different places wouldn't all be the same place. That one plane would be the snowy ice world and one would be the hot jungle world and one would be the post-apocalyptic world.

The idea that so many of our worlds were all the same world is... One of the things in general we've learned is we like our worlds of identity. We like our worlds to sort of mean something. And so one of the intimidating things about Dominaria was that we knew if we were going to go back, we needed to find a way to sort of bring it up to line

with how we do worlds. That we wanted to have a universal identity. That this identity couldn't be, it's everything. Everything isn't an identity. If you're everything on some level, you're nothing. And so one of the big challenges was, how do we go back to Dominaria? Now, the reason we wanted to go to Dominaria

was, you know, the nostalgia of it. I mean, I've been playing Magic since it began. I have fond memories of Dominaria. I've made many sets that were set on Dominaria. And so we understood the draw. Like, there's a lot of just history, right? In some ways, Dominaria is more history than any world we've ever made just because we've been there so many times.

And the big challenge was, how do we encapsulate that in a way that we could, we really wanted to bring it up into the sort of the modern era of magic, and we wanted it to have a plane that had a definition. And what that means is, that if I take a piece of art, and I wanted it to have a plane that had a definition. And what that means is that if I take a piece of art and I show it to you in a vacuum and say, oh, what world is this?

That you can go, oh, that's Innistrad. Oh, that's Ravnica. Oh, that's Zendikar. That you would have a sense of where the world is. That it would mechanically have a definition. It would creatively have a definition. And that we really have moved past sort of where we used to be, where like, oh, whatever, it's just everything. And so that was the challenge. The challenge was, how do we take

something that means so many different things to so many different people and stamp it with an identity that means something. So that was the challenge we had from exploratory design onward is how do we take so much and boil it down to its essence? What was its essence? What is the essence of Dominaria? And we really struggled with that during exploratory design. In fact, well, here's the things we figured out. Mostly what we do when we get stuck is we figure out what it is we want

so we can start figuring out what we need to do. Number one, last time we'd been on Dominaria was Time Spiral Block, which was kind of this post-apocalyptic thing. Like, it was kind of this post-apocalyptic thing. It was kind of dreary. And one of the things we found is, well, players liked Time Spiral Block, established players liked Time Spiral Block. Beginners were quite confused by it.

But the older players enjoyed it just because of the nostalgia. But the post-apocalyptic thing we did of sort of everybody's suffering because it's horrible is not much fun. It's not that we don't mind having worlds in peril. We have worlds in peril. But the thing we knew was that,

you know, we knew one of the things going for it was nostalgia. And we knew that people would be happy to see Dominaria. Like, I knew that when we, and we knew that people would be happy to see Dominaria. Like, I knew that when we'd say Dominaria, people would be excited. Like, oh, I remember Dominaria.

I have good memories about Dominaria. And they would be happy. And so what we wanted to do was make a world that was happy. We didn't want to make a world that was, like, depressing. Like, one of the things I always talk about is you want the emotional state of the gameplay and of your players to match the feel of the world. And the thing about Dominaria, I knew when I said to players,

okay, after 13 years, I think it was 13 years, after a long, long time, we're going back. We're going back to Dominaria. That the player's responsibility would be a sense of happiness. And so we knew that the world had to be a generally happy world. We didn't want to do a depressing world. And so what that meant was Dominaria was going to have to sort of rebound from the mini tragedies. So one of the ideas we liked a lot is we decided that we wanted to get some identities

of what the world was. because we needed the world. The world just couldn't be an infinite number of things. So one of the things we talked about is being vibrant regrowth, that this is a world that's been through a lot, but it keeps bouncing back. We really liked the idea that we were coming back to Dominaria for so much time,

and it's not like, oh, wow, things got even worse. It's like, oh, things are getting better. And we really liked the theme of the Dominaria has been through so much but you can't keep a good plane down. The Dominaria always comes through. And we liked that sense of it bouncing back. But we also liked the sense that

what happened on Dominaria happened. We weren't trying to ignore what happened on Dominaria happened. We weren't trying to ignore what happened on Dominaria. We wanted to acknowledge that, hey, the things that happened, happened. But through that, you know, it rebounded from that. And so another thing we talked about in the world was that you would see remnants of what was. And the reason that was important was, once again, there's a lot of nostalgia. You know, we didn't want to say, hey, look at this happy world,

and then go, oh, by the way, guess what? It's Dominaria. Like, we wanted to say, oh, no, this is a world that you recognize because it's the things that happened happened, but it's bounding back from that. because it's the things that happened happened, but it's bounding back from that. And from that, we got the idea of seeing elements of the past, like the idea of here's Phyrexian warships that crashed many, many years ago,

and they didn't disappear. They're not part of a landscape, but the world has sort of grown with them. You know, they've become part of a landscape. And we really like the idea that Dominaria sort of incorporates its past. That stuff is still there. And so, okay, so we want a world that's rebounding and vibrant. We want a world that kind of acknowledges what happened to it, but sort of lives on from it.

And we started to get a theme, and that theme was the idea of the past, of it's a world that keeps, you know, very much rebound, that bad things happen, but it rebounds from them. And that the world kind of knows that it's a resilient world. And what if they celebrated that? What if they looked to their own past and it was a driver for them? And we like the idea that it was a world shaped, you know, it's a world whose present is shaped by its past. And that's when we start getting the idea of history world. That it's a world in which, how do we define this?

Well, it has sort of an archaeological quality to it. And that many things have happened here. Those things are still part of the world. Players, you know, people live there and the players interact with it. And the idea that it had sort of a living sense of history. Now one of the challenges of that was okay, it's a world defined by its history. Now we knew what that meant creatively. Creatively we could

show landscapes, and you could see the Frexian worship that collapsed. Or we could show people celebrating their own past. One of the ideas we really latched onto is the idea of their art, that these are people who worship their past. So we would see in the present signs of them worshiping their past, whether it be statues or art or whatever, So we would see in the present signs of them worshiping their past. Whether it be statues or art or whatever,

that you would get the sense that these are people that really care. The other thing that we realized was that because we wanted to make a lot of nods to the past, we wanted to have a lot of characters that either existed in the past, because some of our magic characters are magical, so they can still be alive. And some of them could be descendants, or maybe they hold the same mantle, or they're using the same weapon.

We knew that we could make characters that really were compelling versions of what things had been. And that was the big challenge is, how do we show you history? And so we made a list of all the things that history could be. Now, historically,

the way we tend to show the past in magic is the graveyard. That, you know, for example, the mechanic flashback. I mean, literally, it's like an appreciation of the past. And originally, by the way, we were planning to do Flashback. One of the goals in the set was we wanted to use a mechanic that had started in Dominaria.

And that sounded like a really easy task. There's been 30-some sets in Dominaria. But when we wrote on every single mechanic that premiered in Dominaria, what we discovered was some of them just weren't good mechanics. I mean, once again, we're pulling from early Magic. Second, we just did less mechanics per set back then. Back in the early days, we'd have a block, and there'd be two keyword mechanics that

would run through the whole block. So even though we had a lot of sets that took place from Dominaria, there were just less, there were less keywords than you would have thought for that, you know. Oh, 30 sets and, you know, we make a list. It's like, oh, there's like 14 keywords. It's not as much as you would think. And then some of the keywords sucked. Some of the keywords just weren't things we wanted to bring back or mechanically didn't make sense. So we ended up with three mechanics that were good choices, which was flashback, cycling, and kicker, which are three of our staple that we've repeated many times.

And Flashback was our choice, because it's a world about its past. What makes more sense in a world about its past than Flashback? The problem, though, was that Amonkhet was both doing Cycling and doing a Flashback variant. So we ended up doing Kicker, because the other two were literally in Standard at the same time. And so a lot of what we

were trying to understand is how to get the history feel. This is how we ended up with... we decided that the things that mattered were people from the past, objects from the past, and stories of the past. That's kind of how we ended up. And we ended up showing people of the past through legendary characters. We ended up showing objects of the past through artifacts.

And we ended up showing stories of the past. Well, we decided... Originally we were talking about maybe just doing enchantments. Maybe we could just use enchantments and have enchantments represent the history. And then maybe we thematically tied them together. We ended up coming up with Saigas, which is a way to do it. And Saigas, really what Saigas were, it's us saying, how do we tell a story in cards? And one of the reasons I was interested in doing that was, I knew this was going to be,

hey, we're back on Dominaria. It's the 25th anniversary of Magic. And I liked the idea that we had a mechanic from the past that said, we admire our past. We care about our past. Hey, this set's about the past. But I also wanted something looking forward. I also wanted something that said, hey, you know, magic might be 25 years old, but we're still exploring and discovering new things. I really wanted to make something that said, you know, that sort of put a stake in the ground that said, hey, even though we're 25 years old, we haven't stopped innovating and doing cool new things. And I know we needed to represent stories and so the idea of Saga was let's do something bold and cool and different

that would play up the idea of stories. And I was willing, we talked, maybe it would be a new car type, everything was up in the air. And so the idea I brought to the team was how do we represent a story? So the thing that ended up happening was, I'm talking about things from the past coming back. When we made Planeswalkers during Future Sight, the earliest version of the Planeswalker had this version where you had three turns. On turn one, something would happen.

On turn two, something would happen. On turn three, something would happen. And then you'd go back. On turn four, one would go off again. It would just get rotating through them. And the reason we didn't like it for the Planeswalkers was it ended up feeling too prescriptive. It felt like the Planeswalkworkers would just do dumb things.

The classic example is Garak at the time was make a 2-2, I think it was a wolf, make a wolf. Step two was copy, for every wolf you have, make a copy. And three was all wolves get like plus two, plus two. And the problem was turn one, make a wolf. My opponent bolts the wolf. Turn two, well, I don't have any wolves, so copy the wolves doesn't do anything. Turn three, all wolves get bigger, I don't have any wolves, so it doesn't do anything. And you just felt like, wow, this Garruk's an idiot.

What is he doing? And it made them feel kind of robotic, and like they didn't have a, it kept them from having agency. And we later decided, obviously, was, well, what if we give you options and we give you things that could build towards something so you have the opportunity to have a plan to try to build toward it, but if that doesn't work out, you have other options. The planeswalker doesn't just do dumb stuff. But we were trying to figure out stories.

The idea of being prescriptive and in order was kind of cool. And so we ended up making a bunch of different choices. We ended up having the effect happen at end of turn, so it happened the turn you played it. Well, actually, sorry, it ended up, not at end of turn,

it happened when you played it, and then at the beginning of turns, it ended up not at any turn, it happened that when you played it and then at the beginning of every at the beginning of turns it would happen again but anyway the saga was us trying to because I was really interested in

making sure something was kind of new and different that was me and my team pushing in that space I really, really like how sagas came out kind of new and different. That was me and my team pushing in that space. I really, really like how Sagas came out. I like how the frame came out. James, who does our frames, one of the ideas when we first pitched it to him was the idea of it looking kind of like a game board

where there was a track that kind of just ran through the art and the art was created in such a way that there was a track that kind of just ran through the art and the art was created in such a way that there was space for it um but james was the one that came up the idea of the vertical slice and that we could um we could sort of uh one of the things that we wanted to do was originally the idea was we'd have icons so it would look kind of like a game board, and then there would be squares that you moved along, and there would be an icon in certain squares, and you'd look below, and the icon would tell you what it did. text by having the same effect happen on multiple turns. And then James figured out that if we sort of make it vertical, we could put chapters on. So we could write something and tell you what chapters happen when. And use the chapters to make it feel

more like you're telling a story. And then the vertical art, the creative team, we had talked about a lot early on about the idea of showing Dominaria through its art. That had been a theme had talked about a lot early on about the idea of showing Dominaria through its art. That had been a theme we talked about. And the creative team took that and used it for the sagas and said, okay, the sagas are vertical, they're going to represent different kinds of art.

And one of the cool things was every card determined a different kind of art. Each one was a different civilization and a different style of art. Oh, it's the Benelish. Well, the Benelish, they would have stained glass windows. Oh, it's the Frexians.

They would have blood scripture. Each of the ones, they went and found how that group, what kind of history that group would do. And all the sagas ended up looking really different. And I was really happy. I think sagas ended up looking really different. And I was really happy. I think sagas really

demonstrated how when you have a clean and clear idea, like, one of the things that I think is important, one of the things that vision design is kind of responsible for is it's not that I look, other teams are going to

come and tweak and finalize. The version of sagas we handed over were not the finalized versions of sagas. For example, our versions let you pay mana to advance the story beyond just being timed. And that ended up feeling unnecessary, it got taken out. But the thing we do do is convey what it represents. We are telling a story. It represents a story. And that really carried through

that everybody from the creative team to James doing the frames to us doing the mechanics was, okay, there's a singular vision. These cards represent the telling of a story. And one of the things that I mean, it just

it was one of the things that I really appreciate and like I said, one of the lessons of Dominaria is how important the cleanliness of the concept is. Because one of the big successes of of Saga in my mind was

because what we wanted from them was so laser focused it allowed everybody to really maximize what they were doing to make something

that ended up just being super clean and that one of the cool things is like Saigas were so popular that it's just something like now it's like it's not a matter of

would Saigas come back of course they'll come back it's where when and the, now it's like, it's not a matter of would sagas come back. Of course they'll come back. It's where. When. And the idea of stories is actually quite interesting. Because, well, Dominaria probably has the most stories. There's other worlds that have stories, and especially because we've revisited, you know, we revisit worlds. Like, one of the things that's really cool about what we were able to do with the sagas is... And this is one of the things that I liked about the history theme in general for Dominaria was

that a lot of the history that Dominaria had wasn't just the plane. It was the game itself. That when I say Dominaria's history, I also mean within the game. Like, hey, I remember playing Alpha, Antiquities, Ice Age, The Dark, Fallen Empires, you know, Mirage. It just goes on and on. I remember, I remember playing these worlds. I remember being there. And so when you tell me a story, I'm like, oh, oh yeah, yeah, I remember that story. It's not like you're making up a brand new story. You're tell me a story I'm like oh, oh yeah, yeah I remember that story it's not like you're making up a brand new story you're telling me a story that I in some way participated in

oh yeah, yeah, yeah I remember when that happened I remember when I lived through that story and so the other thing that I like so much is that it really sort of the story element was so potent because the stories we got to tell were within game stories to a certain extent.

Some of them were external, and a few of them were from stuff like books and things, but a lot of them came from the sets themselves, like, oh yeah, oh, this reference is that. Uh, and, and, and that is definitely cool and it's sort of a neat thing of, um, I like the idea that the past shaped the world, but the past kind of shapes the game too. Um, and I knew that we were going to have a lot of Easter eggs and stuff in the set that one of the things the set really lent itself to do was, look, there's lots of things that we can reference because we've been there so many times.

And, you know, just, like, history made a lot of sense because not only would the world be peppered with history, the game pieces would be peppered with history. And I think that was definitely, you know, whenever the act of playing and the act of living in the world have some sort of correlation, um, that was very cool to me. And that was something that we executed well, that I was very happy with. Um, the, uh, the legendary theme I was quite excited by. I liked how we pushed it.

I liked how we made conscious choices to push it down to uncommon. And I know that Dave definitely ramped up some of the complexity of uncommon to make the legendary creatures feel like legendary creatures. We experimented with simplifying them a little bit. And Dave sort of notched them back up a little bit to make them feel legendary and that taught us by the way like one of the things we've learned from Dominaria is going forward is I think in our quest

of New World Order and simplifying things that the whole idea of New World Order was we were trying to simplify common because we wanted to make sure that the majority of cards new players play with is accessible. But I think

what happened over time was a little bit of that rubbed off on other rarities. And that we ended up making uncommon a little simpler than we needed to. And that part of what Dominar reminded us is the proper deployment of complexity is important.

Yes, we want to make sure our commons are clean and simple, but you know what? Our uncommons, hey, you know, when we can be flavorful, when we can really be evocative, that that has power. That part of what makes the game attractive is

that there are things that are really representative and really ooze flavor, and legendary creatures are one of those things, and that it really sort of said to us, you know, we can have, A, a little bit more complexity at Uncommon, and we can have more things that play, like, legendary creatures, obviously with Commander, there's a lot of desire for Legendary Creatures. And so we tried something in Dominaria that was really intended to be a Dominarian thing because we were playing into the theme of Dominaria.

But it actually ended up being something that going forward, it really is affecting how we're doing things. Like the idea of Legendary Creatures is just on the table. I'm not saying that every set will use legendary on Commons, but we can. It's now thought of as a tool that we have access to, not something that's a rarity that you only do on rare occasions. It's something that we have access to. And that was a big lesson of Dominaria.

So Historic was, in a lot of ways, the most challenging of the mechanics that I did. If you listen to my podcast on the making of Dominaria, or I wrote an article about this, I had to fight tooth and nail for historic. And historic was me trying to find a way to make things matter. And the big lesson in historic is this, is... lesson in Storick is this, is during Battle for Zendikar, we made

Devoid. Now, Devoid wasn't intended to be a keyboard mechanic, and there's mechanical reasons it ended up, but one of the very disappointing things about Devoid, I think for players, was it was a word, and like okay, it's a word. It's a mechanic. What does it do?

And the answer was oh, it doesn't do anything. It just is. It's a state. It's just telling you that these cards have a quality to them. And then other cards care. There's a lot of cards that care about this quality. So it's important they have this quality. But these cards don't specifically do anything.

And that was not well received. for them to have this quality, but these cars don't specifically do anything. And, um, that was not well received. And what I found was, like, one of our problems that we're dealing with in general, because Magic is 25 years old, is anything

that is in the Magic set that you could care about, pretty much we've cared about. Like, oh, well, cards are different colors. Yeah, we've cared about colors. Cards are different card types. Yeah, we've cared about all the different card types. Cards are, you know, creatively can represent different things. Different creature types. Yeah, we've cared about creature types. You know, and you start to get to the spot where either there are things we can't care about in Black Border. I can't either there are things we can't care about in Blackboarder.

I can't care about names. I can't care about watermarks. I can't care about expansion symbols. There's some stuff I'm not allowed to care about. But the things I can care about, mostly I've cared about them. We've done that. And so one of the problems we're running into is, like, I experimented, or, well, one of the things I wanted to experiment with was the idea of, could we have markers? Could we have things that just say, hey, I'm a new thing to care about?

You know, like, one of the things that we first talked about with historic is, well, what if I just say things are historic? You know, it's just, like, like, hey, some things represent history, and we're just going to mark things to represent history. Um, we got into two problems. One was the marker problem of, well, I don't get it, why is this here? And, like, what we're going to refer to it, is it enough for people? And the second is, any marker we do in a world, like, it was the tribal problem that we ran into a little bit, which was, oh, well, once we say that any non-creature that has a flavor of a creature type

needs to be the creature type, it just starts going all over the place. And if it didn't matter enough, it just was adding a lot of words for not a lot of meaning. And so when the problem of saying, well, this is historic in the sense that it's a card that represents history. Well, every set has cards that represent history.

Why aren't those cards historic? And so we were getting in trouble. And I'm like, okay, how is it that we can, how do we care? How do we make history a theme, but not in a way that feels like it's an artificial thing. So, we talked a bit about, well, what are historic things? And once again, we got to the people, places, and stories, right? I mean, the people aside, the people, the things in the stories, the objects, the people, objects, and stories. And we liked the idea that they represented, you know, there were legendary creatures, there were artifacts,

some of which were legendary, and there were the stories, which ended up being the sagas. And I think Aaron was the one that suggested, well, what if we just care about those things? And at first I was like, oh, okay. Okay, well, what if we just say, okay, I care about artifacts. Originally it was artifacts and legendary things,

because Saigas were legendary originally. And the problem we ran into was that every time we tried to do it, people were like, why these two things? And we would put, we were like, I don't, why these two things? And we would put a, we were using an ability

word, but what we found was people were glossing over the ability word. That if I put historic up front, I go historic, and then I mention artifacts and legendary, that people just somehow, why these things? I don't know why these things go together.

That people were not reading the ability word. It just wasn't, it wasn't going hey, it's this. It wasn't communicating the flavor. So we tried a bunch of things. One of the things I tried, and Dave Humphries was in charge of Dominaria. I think Eric did the beginning part and passed it over to Dave, but I was talking to Dave who was in charge, who was leading Vision. And one of the things that Dave had issues with was that I was interested in having a third thing. Because one of the things about psychology is I'm very interested in how people treat bits of information.

And it turns out that you treat three things differently than two things, that when you want something to feel like a group, three things feel like a group and two don't, and it's just the human brain. And so I had wanted to add a third thing. And I talked with Dave, and Dave said that he wouldn't mind Scythe not being legendary because it just was... People weren't thinking it was being legendary

and it was causing some problems. And from a gameplay standpoint, he said he'd rather him not be legendary. So I thought, okay, what if I make it the third thing to care about? And I tried that and it helped a little bit. But I'm still running to the same basic problem, was that people have kind of been trained, oh, ability word, it's in italic,

whatever, I can move on, and they would just get to the meat of the sentence and read it and just not get what these things have in common. So I said, okay, let me try something different. Because what was going on at the time was I was basically told by Bill that I had an amount of time to fix the problem or they were coming out. So I was under the wire to try to fix it. So the idea that I came across was, what if I use a word in the rules text? And then, at the end, I'll explain what that word means.

And historic was the word I wanted to use. And the idea was, instead of saying, whenever you cast a artifact, saga, or legendary permanent, I would just say, whenever you cast a historic spell. Now, you couldn't ignore that, because it was in the rules text. And it was, yeah, yeah, there was italics that came later but you had to read that sentence first

and what happened was when I gave people a word to read that was flavorful but they didn't know what it meant instead of going why are these things together the question I was now getting is, what's historic? And I would say, keep reading. And they would go back and they would read and they'd, oh, okay. And sometimes, in fact, they actually read the divine tricks. They would see a historic and they'd go, ooh, what's that? And they would keep reading and go, oh, you know.

And the response wasn't, why are these together? The response was, oh, that's cool. And what I realized was they were getting the flavor because I was, so it's what we call batching now. And what batching means is I just collect things together in the rules text and then tell you later, hey, these things that magic has always had, I'm associating them with something. And these things are associated in a way that are flavorful and then you just go, oh, that's this.

And the funny thing is, once again, it's solely how it's presented. And this is the important, I think the lesson here is the importance of presentation. That me making an ability word, saying historic and telling you these things, writing it out, versus me saying historic in the rules text and then in the reminder text telling you what that means is really not that different. I mean, mechanically, the important thing was

the way historic was working originally was, in order to keep it consistent, it always had to do when you were casting them. There's a cast trigger. But once we had the technology of the batching word, it opened us up to do more and different things. So batching also solved a different problem.

The funny thing is I was trying to solve one problem, and solving one problem, I solved the second problem. Because them all being cast triggers was causing problems. Because what you want to do when they're all cast triggers is play lots of cheap things. And legendary things aren't cheap. Legendary things tend to be expensive. Artifacts can be cheap.

So it was like this cheap artifact mechanic, not this fun legendary mechanic. And making the change allowed us to change the design. So like, the other lesson is sometimes when you go solve one problem, you can solve other problems. But Historic was a really good example where I believed in the thing I wanted, but the thing I wanted wasn't being properly done. Like, the reason Bill

didn't like the mechanic were real reasons. It wasn't like Bill just didn't see the reason, you know, is there were flaws in the mechanic. And the major flaws were people weren't getting the flavor and it was not playing the way it needed to play. And me going out and trying to find the solution, I ended up finding something that both made it easier to understand and communicated the flavor. Um, also made it a little, made it a little sexier and different because we hadn't done

batching before. And it allowed us the ability to make, um, more compelling mechanics, you know, allowed us to fix mechanical problems. And so the lesson of historic to me is that, you know, I like the process that we have. I know I tell stories all the time about how I wanted to do something and people fought me on it, and then I had a fight to keep it. But Historic really made me realize that the fight's important. If we had just gone out with Historic as presented from design, that would have been a mistake.

That was not the right way to do it. And by sort of pushing me and forcing me to solve problems, I ended up with a much more innovative solution that I think made, not just for a better set, but like now it's a tool that I think we can use again. I mean, note that we were sort of waiting to see what you guys thought of batching before we tried other batching in other places. So it's going to take a little bit of time to get you, But we now consider it a success. And now it's a tool.

Once again, just like Saigas became this interesting tool to us, so too did Historic. One final note. Actually, I just arrived at work. But I have one final lesson I want to talk about, which is Kickr. Because most of my lessons today are, that worked out well. That was a good thing. Kicker is my one...

I agree with my goals. I like the idea we brought a mechanic back. There really wasn't a lot of choices. I mean, it's not that I dislike Kicker coming back, but Kicker did not organically fit with what the rest of the set was doing. It's why... I mean, once again,

at the time that I was doing the set, I'm a kid of dumb, but I'm a kid of dumb. It wasn't me changing that. I don't know if I should have just done flashback. Like, part of me says, okay, maybe there just more flashback and standard together at the same time I look back and kicker

I mean not that kicker was bad and there's ways we use kicker like we mechanically made kicker matter and fit the set like kicker did some important sort of gave you things to do with your mana and stuff we like to have in sets it wasn't that Kicker wasn't functional on the set. I just, Kicker

was not organic thematically in the set, and that was the part that, like, looking back, I wonder if, I wonder if there was some way, like, I don't know whether we should have just, I should have fought for flashback, or if I should have found some way to make her mechanic more organic.

It's the one piece that I look back on and I'm like, I really, really like Dominaria. It is, you know what I'm saying, of sets that I've led, it's one of the ones that I'm proudest of. But the one lesson of, oh, was there a better place, you know, was there anything we could have done better? Kicker's the one thing where I'm like, I mean, it wasn't bad. It didn't detract from the set. I mean, there's mechanical reasons why it actually worked in the set.

But it's the one thing that thematically the set is so nice and so well-crafted and everything all pushes in the same direction. And while Kicker does that a little bit from a nostalgic from its mechanic from Dominaria's past, the fact that we had redone it in other places meant that people's association with it wasn't even just

Dominaria. We'd use Kicker in other places. You know what I'm saying? We'd use it on Zendikar, for example. And, like, I know why I felt like, okay, it was a nostalgia mechanic, and it mechanically fit, but it didn't organically fit. And that's my one,

as the artiste looking back. I'm like, I wish I could have found a way to either make Kicker fit a little bit more with some kind of tiny tweak, or maybe fought for flashback. Anyway, all in all, I liked Dominaria.

I thought Dominaria was a very good set. I'm very proud of Dominaria. Most of the lessons from Dominaria are things we are using moving forward of how to make magic even better. Some of my lessons are, oh, I did something wrong. Learn from that. Don't do that again.

And some of my lessons are, oh, we did something new we hadn't done before. That is a good, valuable lesson. Let's use that again. And Dominaria is much more that latter than the first. It's much more like, oh, this worked, this worked, this worked. Oh, okay, Saigas, maybe that's a tool we can use again. Batching, that's a tool we can use again. Legendary Uncommons and the way we use the legendary theme, that was something we can harness again.

You know, that most of what Dominaria was is me saying, oh, we did things right. We've learned from them. We have new tools in our arsenal we can use. And there weren't a lot of like, oh, we messed that up. Oh, the one other lesson real quickly, sorry, as I'm sitting here, is legendary instants and

sorceries, although I think we only had legendary sorceries. I'm not sure that was a success. I think one of my beliefs looking back now is'm not sure that was a success. I think one of my beliefs, looking back now, is I don't know if there's a way to do legendary instant sorceries that is consistent with how legendary works. Like, the nature of what legendary does and how

it works on permanents, you just can't directly apply that to instant sorceries. And I don't know if trying to do that, like, maybe that's a lost cause. I mean, the funny thing is we tried to do it in Vision, gave up on it. Dave tried it again. Dave had a better solution than we had in Vision, but I don't know in the end if that was the right call. Like, it just felt disconnected and kind of, like, I don't know whether we were supposed to give it a different name and not call it legendary and say it's something that's

connected but not exactly legendary because it didn't work like legendary things work. So anyway, the kicker and legendary spells were my two sort of there could have been ways to improve upon them. But most of all, I think Dominar is a huge success.

And so, lesson learned. Do things like that. So anyway, I am at work. So we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.