Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #625: Lessons Learned – GRN & RNA

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

This is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about the lessons I've picked up from sets I've led or co-led. In this podcast, I talk about Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance (as the vision design for them was done together).

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And it's Valentine's Day when I recorded this, so I had to get some sweets for my sweets. Anyway, today is another in my Lessons Learned podcast, where I talk about a set that I led or co-led, and talk about the things that I learned from it. So, I decided I'm going to do a combined podcast on Guilds of Ravnica and on Ravnica Allegiance. It had one shared vision team, so even though it ended up being two sets, kind of, I worked on it all at once, so it didn't really seem to make a lot of sense to have two different podcasts about it. So I thought I would just combine it into one. So first off, let me talk a little bit about the first thing I learned about this was we

were doing something a little bigger at the time, which was we had this three-year story arc, the Bolas arc that we had planned, where it started in Kaladesh, and then it was going to end in War of the Spark. And so we knew that for the finale of the story we wanted this giant planeswalker war. And so the question was where to put it. And we knew what we wanted, we wanted it to be someplace the audience knew and loved

because part of having a giant war is you want there to be jeopardy. And so obviously the characters were in jeopardy, and we wanted a world to be in jeopardy. So we wanted a world the players cared about. It just made it, you know, the big finale being someplace the audience already knew just gave it a little extra something. So we looked at the different worlds and decided that the clear choice should be Ravnica. Ravnica is a very, very popular world, and it just made a lot of sense.

There's a lot of storylines that weave through there. It's where Jace now lives. There's a lot of reasons where it just made a lot of sense to be where it would be. The problem was, we didn't think that we could go have this giant war in Ravnica and just not, like, there was not space to have the giant war and do a guild set. And so we said, okay, well maybe what we need to do is first go to Ravnica, get it out of our system, do the guild

thing, because the players would be excited to see it, you know, if we're going to go back to Ravnica, players want the Ravnica they know and love, which are the guild sets. So maybe what we do is go there, do the guild sets, kind of get it out of our system, and then we would be able to do the last set, which was the War of the Spark, on Ravnica. So we went and we pitched it. So for those that don't know the timeline,

when we first pitched this idea, we were still in the world of blocks, of doing blocks. We weren't doing three-set blocks. We were doing two-set blocks. And the idea was, okay, what we're going to do is the first two sets will be a guild set. It's like raf, as you know it. You know, five and five.

And the second two sets would be the war, what we'd call at the time so Ravnica and the two Ravnica sets were spaghetti and meatballs. And the two war sets were called milk and cookies.

Now this is before everything changed over, before core sets existed, before we were doing single sets. And what happened was, while we were working on Dominaria, we kind of made the decision to pull the trigger to make the shift over. And in some ways,

spaghetti and meatballs were already kind of, like, they already were large sets being drafted by themselves. Yeah, they were thematically connected, but they were still large sets being drafted by themselves. And under the new sort of model, look, we could stay in the same world for multiple times, but there would be large sets, and they'd be drafted by themselves. So, like, oh, well, if we change over Dominaria,

okay, the milk and spaghetti meatballs, you know, Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance were essentially already there. And then we just turned War of the Spark into a single set and then turned, you know, cookies. So, like, Dominaria was originally two sets, soup and salad, and War of the Spark was milk and cookies.

So, salad and cookies went away, became a core set. So it just became milk and became, it was soup and milk. Less exciting. I know we got rid of salad and cookies. So anyway, when we started this, we did not quite know where we were, like, we eventually, like,

Spaghetti and Meatballs, or Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance, eventually ended up in this new model, but they weren't kind of created under that model. They just were kind of a happy accident that they were close enough that we could just start with Dominaria and comp them. I know it's quirky that kind of we get rid of the three-set blocks, and then, hey, look, here's three sets all in the same place. Yes, I recognize the fact that from a messaging standpoint, blocks are gone, but wait, we're here for the year. Definitely was an odd pairing of a message. But each of the sets were drafted alone.

was an odd pairing of a message. But each of the sets were drafted alone. So going into this, so when we did exploratory design for, I'm just going to call them Spaghetti Meatballs just because it's shorter than saying Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. When we started the exploratory design for Spaghetti Meatballs,

I started with some grandiose ideas. If you look at Ravnica, the way we did Ravnica, the first time we did Ravnica, an original Ravnica Ravnica, Guiltback, Dissension was a really radical set like the idea that we're going to do multicolor but divide them up and

at the time was quite like I said, I had a lot of convincing to do at the time because it's a little out there if you've never ever done a multicolor set and just said, hey, we're just doing these four combinations. Two ally, two enemy.

Seems weird in a vacuum if you've never done it before. Return to Ravnica, we didn't change things too much. The real big change between Ravnica and Return to Ravnica is Ravnica was 4-3-3. Large, small, small. Four guilds, three guilds, three guilds. When we returned in Return to Ravnica was 4-3-3. Large, small, small. Four guilds, three guilds, three guilds.

When we returned in Return to Ravnica, we did large, large, small. Did 5-5-10. So we did, and each one was drafted by itself. Well, both Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash were drafted by themselves. And then the idea was when we brought in the third set, Dragon's Maze,

all would be drafted together. So there was some wacky stuff going on there. It's the first time we really did a large winter set that was drafted by itself. We had done Shadowmoor, I guess. So Shadowmoor was the first. But it was the first set, for example, that was kind of, it wasn't necessarily made, it was a little bit different from our normal model. And the shift from 4-4-3 to 5-5-10 was a little different, and definitely there was a little bit of novelty there,

and Dragon's Maze being a set with all 10 was different. So we changed the structure a little bit, but we hadn't really changed the basics, which is there are 10 guilds, designed by guild, each guild gets a keyword. Each guild gets a style of play. That sort of guild design didn't really change. So Return of Ravnica, and late in the Guild of Ravnica, in the Gatecrash, I worked on Gatecrash. Well, I was on the team for Return of Ravnica, and I co-led Gatecrash. I was somewhat into Gatecrash when I came up with an

idea for something to be a little bit different for a way to do Ravnica but it was a little bit too late in the process and also Gatecrash, even though it was somewhat early in Gatecrash, Return to Ravnica was pretty far along at the time, so I was like, oh, okay, we kind of missed our window so I said, okay, next time we go to Ravnica, I want to shake things up a little bit so in Exploratory Design, we started looking at ways we could shake things up. Because you know one of the things that is magic normally does is magic kind of evolves and grows and Return to Ravnica in a lot of ways you know is very much designed similarly to how we designed

it when we originally made Ravnica and that has just changed a lot since then. So it's a very sort of old-school design in the way it's done. I mean, in its day, it was pretty radical, but now, by modern standards, it looks quaint. And so in Exploratory Design, I really did explore doing some weird and wacky things. But when I had conversations, my boss is Aaron Forsythe. When I had a conversation my boss is Aaron Forsyth when I had my conversation with Aaron

and I explained sort of some ideas we had for shaking things up a little bit Aaron was sort of like well look the third set, War of the Spark is going to be a different set I'm not talking about War of the Spark today but when you all see War of the Spark it is a different set, it definitely is

not a normal magic set it is us trying something new and different. And Aaron was like, look, this year we have something, like, not every set is going to be reinventing the wheel. Not every set, you know. The idea that, the metaphor we tend to use is, you know, sometimes you go out for a meal and you want something new and different and exciting and I want to experience a restaurant I've never experienced before. But sometimes you kind of want to go to your favorite restaurant and just get the thing

you always get. And that Ravnica, Aaron was saying, was a lot like that. And he's like, especially being that we're staying on Ravnica and doing something different, look, I don't think this is the place to really do things different. He's like, you know what, let's just do Ravnica as we do it. Let's just make the old favorite hamburger and fries and not try to reinvent anything. And it made sense, and I understand the logic of it. So, you know, exploratory, we definitely were pushing the boundary a little bit and trying

some stuff and really saying, how can we change up the Ravnica experience, if you will? In the end, what we decided was, okay, we don't need to change up the Ravnica experience. And one of the things that, like I said, is a good lesson to me is just remembering that innovation is good and can be fun. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons why you want to change things up from time to time. And I do think that if magic never tried new things or, you know, if I never did a set where I had to explain people what I was doing, you know, if I never had to defend what I was doing,

I'm probably not pushing the boundary enough. But one of the big things that really got hammered home here is that, you know, part of what you're trying to do is make the audience happy. I mean, that's a big part of my job. And making the audience happy isn't always just about doing the new and different thing. That some of what makes people happy is comfort, is recognition, is familiarity. And that some of what we have to deliver is not sort of shocking people. Some of that's okay.

But we also want to sort of comfort people. And if you guys ever listen to my podcast, I did a podcast on communication theory. And so they talk about comfort, surprise, and completion. That's in the three. So, you know, surprise is important, but so is comfort. You know, you want people to sort of, you want things to be familiar, you want people

to sort of, some amount of magic has to be, ah, yes, I know that. And I think it's a good case where this particular set just kind of was in a better space to just be what it normally was. Assuming Ravnica survives World of the Spark, you know, there are times that we can experiment more.

But this was not the time or the place to do sort of crazy experimenting. That said, that gets into my next lesson, which is, so one of the things I did is I really dug deep with my team to try to come up with mechanics that

solved issues that we had not solved yet. You know, we, Demir had numerous mechanics that kind of didn't end up having the design space needed. And Orzhov had been a little tricky trying to get the right flavor. And Izzet had never really captured the creativity of Izzet.

So I definitely spent some time and energy trying to get the most flavorful thing that I could. And one of the mistakes I think I made, so looking back, is I think I valued flavor and sort of really solving some issues with complexity. And I ended up making too many of the mechanics that I turned over were complex. Like, normally when you make a design, usually the rule of thumb is one of your mechanics can be kind of complex and difficult. And, like, play design can tackle one new crazy thing. If you get too many crazy things, it just gets too, like one of the things about doing a new thing is you have no basis for understanding how it works.

You really have to play it a lot. You really have to sort of, like when you're using mechanics that we've done before, we have a basis for what we're doing and how we're doing it. So you kind of understand like, okay, I got it. I need to, you know, oh, this is like that. We've done that. Like, and, you know, immediately you get understanding of how to make it work. But when you're playing in new space, when you're playing in stuff where we haven't done it before, it's very disorienting. You don't really know. I mean,

you can kind of gauge it off things that happened before, but if it's truly different enough, it gets very hard to sort of understand that. And what we discovered is play design can handle about one new thing in a set that really they have to sort of... Now, that doesn't mean that every set has to have something that play design has never experienced before. One is the max, not the minimum. But I think what happened when I turned over is I bit off a little bit more. Like, for example, the Dimir mechanic was a variant of ninjutsu,

but it was a complicated variant. The way it worked was it allowed you to exchange the creature who was attacking for the creature in your hand, but you exchanged it, meaning any tokens, any enchantment, any equipment that was on the creature stayed on the creature in your hand, but you exchanged it, meaning any tokens, any enchantment, any equipment that was on the creature stayed on the creature. The flavor was, I'm attacking, ha ha, you thought I was this, I'm secretly that. And it was cool, and it was flavorful, and it really did feel demure, but there was a lot of complexity going on there.

Likewise, for Orzhov, we were trying this debt mechanic where you made the opponent accumulate debt and they had to sort of buy off the debt or they started making them lose life. And it was super flavorful, super flavorful, but it had a lot of balancing issues and it was the kind of thing where

when you first hear it, you're like, oh, how hard could that be? It was a lot more complex than you thought. And it was definitely something that was tricky. Or, for example, the Azorius mechanic that we played around with, Precedence, I think it was called. Basically, there were creatures that had an enter the battlefield effect, but when they entered the battlefield, they instead, instead of having their own enter the battlefield effect,

could copy any other enter the battlefield effect from other creatures you have. Now, once again, that's one of those ideas that in concept it's not that hard to grok the idea but actually writing in and actually making the rules it was just complex um and i think what happened there was that i was so because i wasn't doing anything new and different with the structure i think like okay well maybe I can jazz it up a little bit in the mechanic execution. And I just overset my bounds a little bit and made things a little bit too complex. That's the reason, I mean, if you look at all the five sets, I think three of the ten mechanics that were turned over

at vision design ended up in either of the two sets. And that's not a knock, by the way. Like I said, I think I was really... Because we were not sort of doing anything different on a big scale, I was just trying to sort of really make as flavorful mechanics as I could. And I just... The other thing to remember is we've kind of moved away from,

we don't often do five mechanics in a set. These days we tend to do what I call three and a half, which is like three to four. So five already was pushing things a little bit and the other big thing is that there's a lot of synergy issues that go on in a Ravnica set, in a guild set, that you have to make things overlap. That, you know, if two guilds overlap in a

color, there has to be some synergy between the cards so that you want to draft the cards together. And what that also means is once you change one mechanic, it's just a domino effect, that it really hits other things. And so one of the things that's interesting for me is trying to watch what's going on when you make the changes. Like, if I give you a mechanic that isn't that good because it's too complex and you have to change it, odds are you have to change other things around it, because part of what

we had done was we had built a system where they all leaned on each other and were synergistic. Anyway, another lesson learned. Another interesting thing was one of the challenges, like so, Dominaria we returned to many times but Dominaria never really had at least until the recent version of Dominaria a cohesive theme

to it but on some level Dominaria was a lot like we're going to a new world we're just going to say it's still on Dominaria

it's Ice World it's Jungle World it's Mutant World it's Post-Hexapocalyptic World like all these different places in Dominaria were Dominaria, but really, had we sort of had our wits, they wouldn't, like, there's no reason that Ice Age and Mirage are the same world, they're just radically

different worlds, you know what I'm saying, and that part of having a system of planes that each have their own identity is, oh, well, we should have Ice World, and we should have Jungle, you know, those are supposed to be things that are their own identity is, oh, well, we should have ice world and we should have jungle, you know. Those are supposed to be things that are their own identities and not some... While I understand real worlds have lots of different, you know, climates and things on them,

one of the things that makes identifiable worlds for our purposes is that each world has a very telltale quality to it. Anyway, what that means is, going back to Dominaria didn't have this problem because there was nothing to maintain. So Ravnica, this is the first time, barring Dominaria,

that we've returned to the same place for the third time. And so the next big lesson was trying to get the balance between sort of matching expectations of the world and sort of finding places to sort of do things that fit the world but that were different or that were something you hadn't seen before. Like one of the challenges of returning worlds altogether is you did things in that world. Now you're returning to the world, which means the world was popular

because we don't tend to return to worlds that aren't popular. Okay, that meant that there were things on that world that people liked and associated with it. So if you're going back to that world, you can't have none of those things. You know, part of going back to a popular world is going, oh, well, you liked the world because of thing X. Well, we need to have thing X. That's why you liked

the world. But, on the flip side, magic reinvents itself and does new things and you know if you go to a world people want something new and people want something now some of it is we get to make new cards and you know part of anything new is just the individual execution of the cards is new um but one of the challenges is what components do you bring along and what don't you? So as a good example, I'll use cycles. There are a lot of cycles in a Ravnica set.

And some of the things you have to figure out is, okay, well, which cycles do I want to keep? You know, do I want to have guild mages? You know, are there certain lands I want? Are there, you know, we've done charms. We've done all sorts of different things. Where do I draw the line? And the point is, both sets, both Ravnica block and Return to Ravnica block, both blocks, did some things the same and some things different. And the third time you're somewhere, like once you do something three times you're really drawing

I mean I guess two dots makes a line but three dots really cements that line um so part of this looking back and saying okay well what have we done in the previous two sets and what do people like what would people expect us to do like what you know there's a certain amount of um trying to meet expectation and then there's also a certain part of what is there space to play in? Like sometimes you do something, you're like, we've tapped that out. Charms are a good example where

making 10 two-color charms used up a lot of space, a lot of design space. We didn't feel we could make another set of charms that were nearly as good because there's not as much space to work with. And if you just repeat what the previous charm did, then it just feels like the previous charm.

So it was one of those things where sometimes it's like, is there a design space there? Sometimes it's, oh, Nephilim are a good example. The Nephilim weren't particularly popular. That's why we didn't do them again. Other than the commander crowd that wants them to be legendary so they can play them as commanders, there's not a lot of love for the Nephilim. I'm not saying there's nobody who likes the Nephilim, but as a general rule, they were pretty disliked. So we didn't do

them again. And, you know, part of doing cycles is figuring out when things are liked by people and when they're not liked by people so that you can sort of bring back the things people like and not do the things people don't like um and that is a challenge the other thing that that's the probably the bigger challenge is there are more things that people like than will fit in in the set it's less a problem of finding things to bring back and more a problem of oh well people like all these things. We don't have space for all these things. And we have to figure out how and where to do that. And another big thing is just trying to find some novelty so that you can find things that

are organic to what you're doing. Like one of the challenges of a Ravnica set is, look, it's a two-color set. It's about two-color play. Anything we do, or most things we do, are going to wind into that, are going to be part of the guilds, and the guilds have a very particular feel, and there's a lot,

like making a new cycle has a lot of components to it, and we need to do it because we want to excite players and do new things, but it has a challenge, and a lot of the interesting lessons for me of, you know, spaghetti and meatballs was trying to get to the heart of what made Ravnica, what made it click.

And the thing that I finally realized, and I kind of knew this, but this making of the set really hammered it home is one of the things that you want to do when you are making cycles, for example, is you want to understand what is the cycle doing

for the set it's in. Cycles do a lot of good things, and I've done, I think I did a whole podcast on cycles. But part of any tool is understanding in the set you're working on,

how is the tool used? What is the tool doing? And cycles on Ravnica are about differences. Well, it's differences and similarities in the sense that you are always doing cycles based on the guilds. I mean, every once in a while we'll do some monochrome cycles but those are few and far between in Ravnir and his sets most cycles are multicolored based and so part of what you need to do is you need to figure out okay, what am I saying about the guilds

what is this so for example, like the guild mages the guild mages were saying look, the guildses were saying, look the guilds are very unique and each have their own identity but on some fundamental level there's some similarity

to the guilds. And the nice thing of the guild mage was it demonstrated the two-coloredness but also at the same time it showed like hey, these guilds aren't that different. You know, yeah, yeah, each guild mage really does different things,

but everyone has a guild mage and it's two mana for a 2-2. You know, there's some squaring of, the psychos do this interesting thing of contrasting the similarity with the differences in a way that marries it together that's sort of like,

wow, these guilds are different in some ways, but alike in others. And the psychos a way that marries it together, that's sort of like, wow, these girls are different in some ways, but alike in others. And the Psychos really hammer that home. I mean, I think the Psychos really are one of the things that sort of stress that. And so part of anything as we're building this is sort of seeing that and figuring that out. The other tricky thing, the other interesting thing about this particular set was... This whole arc, Doug Byer had worked on this arc.

He had sort of been the... He had... What's the word? He had created it and sort of oversaw the whole story arc. And so we came into the set knowing a lot more than we normally knew. Like, for example, I often, during all the vision design, don't know who, I don't even know who the planeswalkers are going to be. Sometimes, sometimes I know.

Sometimes I know, like, the main character, but I don't know the supporting ones. This set, I knew all five planeswalkers between the two sets before the set started, because the whole structure of Bolas taking over the guilds had been built in from the very beginning. And the idea that we're watching the guilds follow the Bolas and five of them have fallen to Bolas and five haven't fallen yet and the fallen

ones each have planeswalkers. Like that was all planned ahead. I explained on my blog, both Kaia and Dovin, the reason they exist as characters was for Ravnica. Like, we needed, we wanted the white-black

and the blue-white Azorius and Orzhov to fall to Bolas. Doug had spent a lot of time figuring out which guilds fell and which ones did and stuff. But the thing is, we didn't, white-black, we didn't really have a good white-black planeswalker that made sense, not one that made, not one that really made sense with Sorin, obviously,

is probably our most famous white-black planeswalker, and Sorin just didn't make a lot of sense to be running the Orzhov. There aren't even vampires in Orzhov. I don't think there's vampires in Orzhov. Vampires are in Dimir. Anyway, so we needed to make a new Planeswalker. I mean, if we're going to make one, we needed one that sort of fit the criteria.

So, oh, somebody that can kill ghosts. Well, who better to take control of the Orzhov? And likewise, with the Azorius, when Doug was making Kaladash, he purposely made a white-blue character to be someone that would make sense to run the Azorius. So a lot of planning went in. So one of the interesting things lesson-wise here is

this was a set where I was designing, knowing a lot more story than I know on average. Knowing a lot more of the structure stuff. And so it was neat trying to build that stuff in. Like one of the things we worked on was how do we show there's conflict within each guild and so we specifically built it so that the legendary characters and or planeswalker there were some there were some sort of opposition that

you could see within each guild people pushing in each direction so the idea was even on the guilds that bulls have taken over there are people that are not pro-Bolas in the guild. And even guilds that Bolas hasn't taken over, there are people that sort of lean toward Bolas within the guild. And that sort of internal tension... We also played very early on the idea of the noir, of the sort of... it's the sense of mystery and Cold War feel. And that really led a lot into us sort of choosing how to sort of piece things together. So this was another set.

The lesson is understanding sort of one of the things as a vision designer that I'm always trying to do because I'm trying to set the vision is I want to work closely with the creative team to understand what do they need to tell the story they're trying to tell and then work with them closely so that the feel of the play and the feel of the set.

So one of the goals is we wanted this kind of suspense, you know, Cold War spy thriller, sort of like you didn't quite know what was going to happen. Everybody's on edge and it's dark and shadowy. And that definitely influenced sort of how we started building things and how we thought about things. And, you know, it was interesting in that not every set has that from the beginning. And it was funny how having tone really early definitely affected sort of how we built things. And I thought that was very interesting.

But anyway, yeah, the big lessons of these sets was of i mean i look back now and i feel like um i mean the sets turned out really really well and the set designs did awesome jobs i feel like i could have set them up better i feel like i did lay some groundwork and i did um help i mean my team did help put some general direction and I did help I mean, my team did help put some general direction and lay down some tone, but I think I overreached a little bit and I think because of some of the

complexity choices I made, I actually made set design do more work than they're supposed to do. So looking back at this, sort of my note on the vision here is if I had to do it over again I would definitely make things a little simpler. I would go into it with a slightly different attitude. While I think flavor's important, you have to match flavor with sort of

the utility of the set, and I didn't quite do that. So this was a big learning lesson for me. This was definitely one of the sets where like, oh yeah, if I had to do it over, I would do it different. And there's a lot of sets where that's not true. Like, no, no, I'm pretty happy with how it played out. This is one of the sets where, like, oh, wow, if I had to do it again, yeah, I would play it out a bit differently. Anyway, guys, I am now at work, so 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. Bye-bye.