Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #636: Rise & Fall of the Blocks

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

This podcast is about the history of the block, how they came about and why they went away.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the rise and fall of the blocks. So I'm going to talk all about where blocks came from and where blocks went. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of Magic. So back to 1993, so Magic comes out. Then in the end of 1993, 1994, we start putting out expansions. The early expansions were really just individual expansions that did individual things. There was no really cohesiveness to them per se.

They were just kind of bouncing around doing different things. So then we put out Ice Age in the summer of 1995. Ice Age was very popular. People liked Ice Age. Then we put out Ice Age in the summer of 1995. Ice Age was very popular. People liked Ice Age. Then we put out Homeland. People did not like Homeland. Homelands did not go very well. And then there was a gap of time before we put out Alliances.

And there was a lot of pressure riding on Alliances. I've had podcasts all about Alliances. There was a lot of pressure. And so one of've had podcasts all about alliances. There was a lot of pressure. And so one of the things they were trying to do is figure out, okay, how can we maximize our chance that alliances will be popular? That was a big concern. Because they had seen that Ice Age was popular and that Homelands wasn't. And that the team that was designing alliances was what we call the East Coast Placeholders.

Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. And they were the same people that had done Ice Age. So they were trying to connect, like one of the things they were trying to do with Alliances is like, okay, how can we make Alliance, how can we say to people, Alliances is like Ice Age, it's not like Homelands. And the idea they came up with is, well, what if we just

said it was set in the same world? It was a continuation. Now, given when they designed alliances, that wasn't really something they did. All the connections, the through lines, creatively, the reference to

snow, all of that was added in after the fact. When the East Coast Playchefters designed alliances, they were just making another set. They weren't trying to make a second Ice Age. That wasn't their intent. But Wizards, in order to try to give alliances the best chance possible, really pushed hard to make this connection. Hold on one second, I gotta get out of the way.

Sorry, safety first. So, alliances was put out as kind of more Ice Age. And like I said, we added, like, for example, any reference whatsoever to snow-coveredness, and there's not a lot of them, we added that in development. The creative kind of gelling it together, that was done after the fact.

And so it came out, and it sort of gave the year a little bit of a feel. Like, one of the problems early on that Magic was facing was that we were realizing that there were resource issues, you know, as we were trying to sort of explore new things.

Like, what happened was, okay, so we put out alliances, it's connected to Ice Age. So, then we get to Mirage. So, Mirage had been designed by a different group of playtefters, what I call the bridge group of playtefters, which Richard had met through a

bridge club. So we're talking about Bill Rose, Charlie Cattino, Joel Mick, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard Kallenberg, the people who made Mirage. So it was originally called Menagerie,

but they had made enough that they actually had enough not just for a large set, but also for a small set. So they had designed enough for both Mirage and Visions. And so the idea was, well, what if we kind of do what we did with Ice Age, but just do that, like, usually the idea was

we'd put out a large set in the fall and then there would be two small sets that followed. We started to create a pattern that we wanted, which was one large set, two small sets. And then to give it some cohesiveness, like, okay, well what if we just said these are all the same world?

You know, that we're going to Jamora, okay, what if all three sets, what if Mirage and Visions and Weatherlight all took place in Jamora? Now, Mirage and Visions already, like, that were going to Jamora, okay, what if all three sets, what if Mirage and Visions and Weatherlight all took place in Jamora? Now, Mirage and Visions already, like, they were designed to be, I mean, they basically made a set so big it had to be chopped up to fit. So, Mirage and Visions were already there. And the idea was, well, what if we just set Weatherlight in the same place? Now, Weatherlight was designed by a different group. It had a different theme.

And it originally had a graveyard theme. What if we just did that and then we could call the year kind of a cohesiveness? It'd be the Mirage block. And the Mirage block was the first block that was kind of planned, like, sort of sold as a block. Ice Age was kind of after the

fact. Like, when Ice Age came out, no one knew that Alliance was going to be sold as from Ice Age. From Terrasier. That wasn't what was the plan. That's the place Ice Age came out, no one knew that Alliance was going to be sold as from Ice Age. From Terrasier. That wasn't what was the plan. That's the place. Ice Age place. And so, Mirage was the first step. Like, okay, we're going to sell this and we're going to

it's going to be a thing we're going to do. So then, what was happening behind the scenes was, at the same time this was going on, Mike Ryan and I were pitching to the brand team this idea that magic should have a continuing story. That magic really, up to that point, the stories were all self-contained. And we're like, what if we made a story that, you know, we had a regular cast of characters that went, that continued over time. And so we pitched the Weatherlight Saga. they liked the idea and they were so excited in fact

that the last set in the Mirage block ended up becoming Weatherlight and the idea was they wanted to get started with the story right away so Michael and I came up with a way to do sort of a pre-log and the idea there was we always knew the story was going to start with

Sisay being kidnapped like oh what if we see Sisay being kidnapped? And Weatherlight's about them going to find Gerard and gathering together the crew. And the Weatherlight story really is them traveling around, not just Jamora, but larger Dominaria. And so, and one of the things that Michael and I felt really strong about, especially me, I mean, Michael agreed with me, but one of the things I was really pushing is, I just liked the fact that magic was about planeswalkers,

that you could go to all these new worlds, and we always stayed on the same world. So I'm like, okay, you know, we're in charge of the story, we're going somewhere else, and we invented the plane of wrath. It's like, okay, we're going to wrath. So then Tempest Block, the idea was, we were going to tell the story, and then the idea was not only would the block be on a singular plane, which would be Wrath,

but it also would tell a story that sort of fell within the context. So the idea we liked is the block would be a self-contained story, but the story would get continued. This is the story of the Weatherlight crew on Tempest. They'd have some problems and overcome some things on Wrath, and then at the end of the story, it would continue on to another place.

Originally, it was supposed to go to Mercadia, and each block would be its own connected story, same group of characters, but its own story, and that there'd be different antagonists and stuff as we do different blocks. So we made the Tempest block. Then, one day I'll tell this story, but the story got taken away from us

in the middle of Tempest block. So Urza Saga block, originally when we had pitched it, we had pitched a three-year arc. The first block was supposed to be Wrath. Second block was supposed to be Mercadia. Second block was supposed to be Mercadia. Third block was back in Dominaria, the way we did it. But, when the story got taken away

from us, they decided that they wanted to connect it to the earlier magic story more than we had. Our version had the Phraxians in it, so ours was somewhat connected, but they wanted to tie Urza into it and company. That was not part of the original plan. So, Urza's Saga became. That was not part of the original plan. So Urza's Saga

became this prequel where we went back in time. And Urza's Saga didn't follow the single plane rule quite as well as some other blocks have. It bounced around a bit. The majority of it took place on Dominaria, so you can think Urza's Saga

is mostly being Dominaria. But there are Sera's Realm and a littleiga is mostly being Dominaria. But they're Sera's Realm and a little bit of Phyrexia. There are some other places visited there. And so, okay, so then we get to Mercadian Masks. Even more

so, Mercadian Masks, like, there's no, there's not a great cohesiveness to Mercadian Masks. The Mercadian Mask set was on Mercadia. Nemesis was on Wrath. And then Prophecy was on Dominaria, just jumping around. So when we got to Invasion, Invasion, one of the things,

so Bill Rose had become the head designer. And Bill really liked the idea of doing a multicolor theme. Barry Reich, who was the first person to ever play Magic with Richard, who was one of the early playdefters, had made a set called Spectral Chaos, that its theme had been multicolor. And while Bill wanted to go to some different directions than Spectral Chaos did, he did like that theme. And then the idea that we really played up with is

what if the block not only was set in one locale and had one story it was telling, but it had one mechanical through line. And so Invasion was our first sort of block that wasn't just set in one world, wasn't just set with one story, wasn't just set with one story, but it really had a singular theme, which was multicolor. And the other thing that happened on that block is, originally the plan was to have all 10 color combinations in Invasion,

and Henry Stern and I went to Bill and said, look, here's a cool idea. What if we don't do the enemy color stuff up front? What if we hold back on it, do ally stuff in the first set, ally stuff in the second set, so invasion and plane shift. And then in the third set, apocalypse, then we do enemy colors. Then we sort of save it.

And we convinced Bill to do this. And then apocalypse, people really liked apocalypse. And it really made us think a little bit of maybe we can... The problem we had started running into was the third set problem, where the third set, like, by the time you got to the third set, it wasn't quite as exciting. The other thing that had started happening in the way we built sets was

we weren't really planning them out yet quite as much. Apocalypse was the first time we did any real planning. Mostly it was, we'd have two mechanics. So, for example, in Mirage, it was flanking and phasing. In Tempest, it was shadow and buyback. In Urza's Saga, it was echo and cycling. Arcadian Mass didn't really have named mechanics. I mean, it was Spellshapers,

and it was Rebels and Mercenaries, but neither were labeled, so people weren't really aware of that. Anyway, the way we tended to make Black Speck then is we'd make the first set, and usually we'd leave a little bit of evolution of the main mechanics to let them play around with. Oh, we'll do flashback, but we'll just do normal mana cost.

You guys can mess around with other stuff. And then as the block went along, they would evolve it. But really all we did is we designed stuff and then just said, well, make things we didn't make. And then each set would kind of build off what came before, but there was no really planning of it per se. Apocalypse was the first time

where we even withheld something. Like, the third set's going to be this thing. So hold back on it. So next came Odyssey. And now we were in the world of themed blocks, mechanically themed blocks. So Odyssey was the graveyard block. And so we had two mechanics, Flashback and Threshold, that were two mechanics, but they were flavored to the theme of the set. That they weren't just two mechanics that were, you know,

if you look at the early mechanics, what does flanking and phasing have to do with each other? Nothing. You know, and now it's like, okay, it's a graveyard set. These are graveyard mechanics. And so there was a theme that came through that connected it. And that was, you know, we were starting to get in that rhythm of, okay, the block has this strong cohesiveness to it. Then after Odyssey came Onslaught. And Onslaught ended up being a tribal set. It didn't quite start that way, but by the time we actually finished it, it was a tribal set really pushing a tribal theme. Now, the third set in that block, Scourge, so it was Onslaught, Legion, Scourge. Legions did this quirky thing where it had all creatures, and then Scourge did this sort of deviate a little bit and did this dragon theme that, okay, it was a tribal theme,

but none of the previous two sets had really done much with this dragon theme that, okay, it was a tribal theme, but none of the previous two sets had really done much with dragons per se. I mean, there was a few dragons, but... And we started to see this thing where the third set started to sort of just deviate a little bit from what had gone on before. So after Onslaught, we get to Mirrodin.

So Mirrodin, artifact theme. It's an artifact theme block. But one of the problems we got into with Mirrodin was we kind of developmentally made some mistakes. And by the time we got to the third set, we couldn't do what we had done in the first two sets. Or not, I mean, we did have a little bit of infinity. We had a little bit of mechanics, but we really toned them down.

And then we ended up having to do like a stark turn in the third set which fifth dawn had this multi-colored theme that really had not been showing up before and the fact you can tell that we hadn't planned it from the first set was we didn't have the color fix we did put the color fixing in the second set because we realized it early enough to be able to do that but we didn't like the original mirrodin would add more color fixing if we knew where we were going with Fifth Dawn which we didn't at the time okay after Mirrodin was Champs of Kamigawa so this is Bill coming up with an idea he says okay we've done mechanical themes multicolor graveyard tribal artifacts okay let's do something a little bit different let's do a themed let's do something a little bit different. Let's do a themed, let's do, instead of the theme being mechanical,

what if it was flavor? And so it became the first top-down block. And the idea was, okay, we're going to do a Japanese-themed block. And the idea at the time was, Bill let the creative do all this work building the world, and the idea was we would match the creative to the world. Now, as we learned, I mean, anytime you do something for the first time, in order to make mechanics and flavor work there's a lot of back and forth that has to happen. The problem with letting creative do most of the work

up front and then trying to do mechanics is mechanics just aren't as flexible as flavor and so you get, if you look at champions, it was very ham-fisted. Like all the samurais have this ability. All the snake folk have this ability. All the moon folk have this ability. It's very kind of ham-fisted. And it ended up making,

we ended up with a very parasitic set. And I think part of that was the nature of trying to match to the world. was the nature of trying to match to the world. Again, you'll notice that Saviors of Kamigawa, so it was Champs of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, yes, Saviors of Kamigawa. Saviors, once again, had a theme where it went a little sideways from the normal theme.

It had a hand-sized matter theme that really hadn't been in the rest of the block. And part of this was recognizing that we needed to jazz up the third set a little bit, that people were getting a little tired by the third set, and that's a problem we've been trying to solve. Okay, so after Champions of Kamigawa was Ravnica. So an important thing happened during Champions of Kamigawa. So Bill Rose had been the head designer, starting with Inv. Well, starting with Raven and Kablack, basically,

I became the head designer. And so one of my big initiatives was I wanted to be doing block planning. I wanted us up front, you know, really inspired by kind of what had gone on during Invasion. What I said is, look, we should know when building the set for the fall, what the other two sets are doing, what I said is, look, we should know when building the set for the fall, what the other two sets are doing, what identity they have, and map it all out. And part of what I wanted to do by doing block planning is, I wanted each set to have its own identity.

So they all, part of what block planning allowed us was to make each set have its own identity, yet feel like it fit in the larger context. So for example, we came up with the idea of doing the guilds. We wanted to do a multi-color, not be invasion. We wanted to do two-color. And when I said to Brady that I wanted 10 two-color pairs, Brady came back with the idea of the guilds. I then embraced the guilds and came up the idea of the guilds. I then embraced the guilds and came up with the idea of the block plan was, okay, we're going to do four guilds, three guilds, three guilds. Now that, I mean, to show sort of block plan, it's like

once you do the first set, the second and the third set are kind of carved in stone what they're going to be. You can't do four of the ten guilds and then not do the other guilds. And so we really sort of started down this path of, okay, the, and then not do the other guilds. And so we really sort of started down this path of, okay, the blocks, not only do the blocks,

okay, they're in a singular place, they tell a singular story that's part of a larger story, they have a mechanical theme, and they now have a structure where each set will have its own identity. So I called Ravnica the pie method, meaning that you had a pie that you cut up. And so the idea was you just didn't get all of it until you got through all three sets.

That the sets were delineated because each had a part of the whole. Then for Time Spiral, I experimented with a different way, and that was a thematic connection. So it was a time-based block, and then the idea, time and nostalgia-based block, and the idea was that we would do past, present, and future. And so

the first set was a past, and each set we had this time-shifted sheet, so it was cards repeated from the past in the old frame. Then we had the present, which we did this alternate reality present and we messed with the color pie, which looking back, might have been a mistake, but we, it was really this, like, what if magic was,

had been done differently and had this alternate present sort of feel? And then Future Sight was the future, where we were peeking into the future. And, oh, the bonus sheet of Planar Chaos was, here are cards in alternate reality that are classic cards you know, but in a different color.

Wrath of God, but it's black. It's damnation. And then Future Sight, we saw cards from the future in which things we had never done before that one day we would do. And many of those cards you have seen in the future. Okay, so we did that. Then after Time Spiral was Lorwyn. So what happened in Lorwyn was, during Ravnica Block,

we had ended up making a set during the summer called Cold Snap, which ended up being the missing set from the Ice Age Block was the theme of it. But it was kind of disconnected from everything. It didn't sell as well as we'd hoped. And so I said to Bill, I said, Bill, if we want to do a fourth set, talk to me.

I'll incorporate it. I'll make it feel like it's part of, Cold Steps are very disconnected from everything. I go, give me a chance. I will make it feel integrated. So Bill came to me and said, okay, we're doing a fourth set. Make it integrated. So I came back with the idea of okay, we're doing a four set. Make it integrated. So I came back with the idea

of what if we went to a world that fundamentally changed and that the four sets we chopped up into two mini blocks, that there'd be a large and small set, then the second large and small set. And the reason I did that was I wanted to use the four sets in a way that it felt mirrored. And so that required us to make a large set in the spring, which we had never done before. The large sets had always been, I mean, barring the early years where they were in the summer, the large sets had always been in the fall, especially once we had blocks, they'd always been in the fall. And so I was pitching a very different block idea. Really, the lore one was like, okay, it's us kind of experimenting with blocks and thinking

well, why don't we build blocks a little bit differently? Instead of large, small, small, we went large, small, large, small. And the idea was that Lorwyn had a theme, Lorwyn block had a theme, which was tribal. Shadamore block, mini block had a theme, which was hybrid.

But they were designed so that each one played nicely with the other. And Shadamore did very well, especially for a spring set, partially because it was a large set, and really introduced the idea that, you know what, we aren't tied necessarily to sets, like sets could be big. Sets that normally were small maybe could be big. Sets could be big. Sets that normally were small maybe could be big.

So then after Lorwyn was Shards of Alara. So that's us going back to Lar Small Small. That whole block was defined by, Bill had come up with an idea that he wanted the first set to be three color. And he wanted the last set to be all gold. So we ended up getting this 3-5-2 sort of theme. And there was a sort of mechanical connection. So each set had its own identity, once again. Part of block planning was,

it was a gold year, but there was a progression to what was going on. After Shards of Alara was Zendikar. So with Zendikar, we played around the idea of what if it goes large, small, and the last set is large? And the idea we played with that year is let's just make a large set its complete own thing. We had originally talked about it being a completely different plane, but the creative team didn't have the resources to do that.

So they came up with a reason why we'd stay on the same plane, but something fundamental would happen to the world so that it made sense that the mechanics would change. And that was the release of the Eldrazi. So Rise of the Eldrazi was its own set that had its own play pattern, its own mechanics. It was

while it took place on Innistrad it had mechanically nothing to do or very, very little to do with Innistrad. Some of the creature types and stuff stayed. Some of the creative backdrop stayed. But the mechanics completely changed. And the lesson we had learned from that was that it was a little bit too disconnected. Okay, so the next year after was Scars of Mirrodin.

So that block, we tried something a little different. I was really into the idea of using the blocks not just to have a mechanical theme but a tonal theme and Skarsgård and Myrden was a reintroduction of the Phyrexians. I really wanted the Phyrexians to be something that scared people like we were reintroducing them and I wanted like they were one of the big bads in fact the first big bad of magic and I really wanted to reintroduce them in a really powerful, scary way. And we came up with this idea of using the block structure itself as a gimmick to make

the set do something different. And what had happened was, we're back on Mirrodin, the Phyrexians are here, there's a giant war in the middle set, Mirrodin Siege, and then the third set, we didn't know the outcome. In fact, it could be one of two different sets. It could be Mirrodin Pure, that Mirrodin wins, or New Phyrexia, if Phyrexia wins.

And the audience didn't know what it was going to be. We actually advertised both sets. You didn't know. It ended up being New Phyrexia, obviously. And the New Phyrexia, we ended up making a little bit bigger than a normal set. It wasn't as large as the spring large sets had been, but it was kind of a medium-sized set, something different than we'd introduced. Okay, so after that we get to Innistrad. So Innistrad was another experiment we wanted to do large, small, large. And the

idea again was this large will be in a completely different place, a different plane. In fact, originally large, Large Small Large, the last large set was going to be Innistraden. We ended up moving it up and ended up giving Innistraden Dark Ascension. And then we did the same thing because of resources. Okay, we had a major event happen, which was the breaking up of the Hellvault. And then the last

set, it was connected to the world, but the release of the Angels and Avacyn, you know, instead of being a dark world, it got to be a brighter world. And that time we had a little bit of overlap on dying carried through. There's some more tribal

stuff to carry through. It was its own large set. It had its own mechanics. It was drafted by itself, but there was a little bit more connectivity between them. Okay, after that, we then get to return to Ravnica. And return to Ravnica, we realized that the 4-3-3 model wasn't what we wanted. And so we decided to do something a little different, to do a 5-5-10 model, which meant five guilds, five guilds, then 10 guilds.

The problem was, we couldn't do five guilds and five guilds if the second set was a small set. So I went and pitched a bill. I said, what if the first two sets were both large? You know, we've done large, small, large before. What if we went large, large, small? And we tried that. It was a giant success. Gatecrash was the best-selling winner set we'd ever done. And so it really introduced the idea of we really can mix up in how we play around with our sets we then went to Theros, Theros went back to the traditional large, small, small we had struggling, the third set once again was really

suffering from the third set problem of just the audience getting tired by the third set and it's hard in Theros I I saved, I had a whole theme, this enchantment theme, that I didn't do in the first two sets. So the third set kind of a theme, I know the players really wanted. And the response from the players even then was, you should have just given this earlier.

Why did you make us wait for it? So the next set was Khan's of Tarkir. Khan's of Tarkir, once again, we were doing large, small, large, and I was experimenting again. I wanted to try something different. So we built the set around a weird drafting thing where the first set was drafted by itself,

then with the small set, the middle set, then the middle set was drafted with the large set, the second large set, but not the first one. And we came up with this whole time travel theme. It's an alternate timeline. That's why the middle set, which is the past, works with either of the timelines, but not both. And really, we sort of cemented the idea that we could do different kinds of things. And then after Concepts Archer, we came to the conclusion that the third set was just

causing us too many problems. And we had sort of beefed up our creative team. What if instead of making one world a year, what if we did two? What if we did two blocks a year? And so then we shifted the blocks from being quite as long. So instead of one long block in a year, we had two shorter blocks. In order to make this fit, we got rid of the core set. And so we had large, small, large, small. Really, we used Shadowmoor as kind of the template. Lorwyn Shadowmoor block is the template. I mean, those two worlds have been connected. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor are the same world.

But the idea is we could just go to different worlds. And so we went to Zendikar for Battle of Zendikar. We went to Innistrad for Shadows Over Innistrad. We went to Kaladesh. We went to Amonkhet. We went to Ixalan. And so we Innistrad. We went to Kaladesh. We went to Amonkhet. We went to Ixalan. And so we went around and we tried a lot of this.

And, you know, we tried very hard to make sure the second set had a unique theme to it. The Battle for Zendikar, there was a war. It's the gathering of the Gatewatch in the small set. In Shadowmoor, I mean, in Shadows Over Innistrad, you know, we see this mystery set. In Shadowmoor, I mean, in Shadows of Innistrad, you know, we see this mystery set, and then we had this sort of, you learn about Emrakul in the second set. Kaladesh, we sort of come and see Shondas Hope Town, and it's this

weird, you know, sort of advanced technology, sort of steampunky Indian kind of world. And the second set was a revolution, as there's this big fight. And then Amonkhet, we come and meet this strange place that Bolas had kind of world. And the second set was a revolution as there's this big fight. And then Amonkhet, we come and meet this strange place that Bolas had kind of built.

And then everything falls apart in the second set. We kept trying to have the second set be a shift that added something. And finally, we came to the realization that the second set's, like,

we had gotten rid of the third set because we thought we had a third set problem we're like you know what maybe the issue is just small sets altogether you know we did some research and found that what players like best was drafting all of the same large set so we sort of asked ourselves okay maybe the idea of having like we had built up the creative team such that we weren't, like, a lot of the early limitations of some of the block was, look, we have only so many creative resources, let's stay in the same place so we can reuse those resources. We had built up the team, we were able to do two worlds a year, we actually asked the

question, could we do three worlds a year? And the idea that we came up with was, well, what if we, like, small sets were causing all sorts of problems. And we're like, okay, what if we did away with small sets? The problem was doing four large sets was just too many sets. But that's when we realized that maybe we had taken away the core set. And the core um has issues uh there are definitely things it went away for reasons but we realized when we tried to replace the core set that nothing we were using to replace it did as good a job as the core set of kind of being this introductory thing that helped people get into into the tabletop version of the game um and so we decided that we needed to bring

the core set back and said okay well we want the core set back in needed to bring the core set back and said, okay, we want the core set back. In order to make the core set, that meant that we could do three large sets because three large sets plus a core set was the right number of cards that we could do a year because the core set had a lot of reprints. And so we signed up for that. And so starting with Dominaria,

we just did single large sets that were drafted alone. Now, the interesting thing about that was that we had already planned... So the original plan was Dominaria was going to have a large set and a small set, just like Ixalan has done before it. And then we were going to do two large sets. Well, I'm sorry. We wanted to go back to Ravnica

because we had this big finale to our story we wanted to tell in War of the Spark. And we realized that we felt like we couldn't go back to Ravnica and not have guilds. In order to tell our final story, to do an event block is what we wanted to refer to it as at the time, we wanted to have the resources to be able to not be, like, we didn't want to have to worry about the guilds

and feeling all the needs of the guilds. So, like, okay, what if first we go back and see the guilds, do a traditional guild block, and then when we're done, we go and we tell the story. So the idea was Dominaria would be large and small. Soup and Salad would play their names. And then

Spaghetti and Meatballs, which was Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Legions, was going to be two large sets because we needed two large sets to make the guild structure work. And we'd make it just like we did Return of Ravnica Gatecrash, just no Dragon's Maze. And then we were going to do a large small set telling just like we did Return of the Ravenna, gatecrash, just no dragon's maze. And then we were going to do a large small set telling the final story. War of the Spark was going to be

milk and cookies. A large set then a small set. And what we realized was when we were looking at Dominaria, we realized that essentially Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance, while technically being put in a block, was a lot like what we were talking about

of the new system, is let's just make large sets, let's go to worlds where we want to go to worlds, if we want to stay in a world, we can stay in a world, you know, it's up to us, that we're no longer, how long we stay in a world

is not defined by how long the block is, it's just how many sets in a row do you want to stay in the world, if there's a reason to stay in there for more than one, we do. If there's not, you can just be there once. And once we realized that Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance essentially were their own large set you drafted by themselves, that's when we realized that we could just start with Dominaria and not do the small set in Dominaria. That also meant that War of the Spark, which originally was a large set and a small set got sucked into being a single large set

and the small set turned into the core set and one of the things that's really interesting is it's funny that, okay, we're going to move away where we spend the whole year in the same place and the very first thing we do is spend the whole year in the same place

and I know a lot of people really wanted to go isn't this just the third Ravnica block? We're on Ravnica, then we're still on Ravnica, and then we're still on Ravnica. It is in some way, I admit, it is in some ways. I mean, obviously there's a sustained storyline,

although the sustained storyline's been going on for years, so the original Ravnica has its own story, and the Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance has their own story, and Warsprout obviously has its own story. But they are, there's a connective tissue there, they are all in the same place.

Mechanically, they're completely different. What is going, each set has mechanics that do not show up in the other, in the other things. I mean, the one thing about doing guild sets is there is a tie between Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Legions. There are cycles that run between them and the nature of how we do Ravnica sets. So those sets, in a lot of ways,

are more of a block than War of the Spark is. As you will see with War of the Spark, War of the Spark is really... It's its own thing. It's built as its own set. It is not, I mean, it is on Ravnica and there's some influences of Ravnica on it.

There's definitely some flavor there, but it's not in any way mechanically built as if it's Ravnica, you know, part three in any way. It's not a third guild set. It's not a guild set at all. Doesn't mean the guilds don't show up and it doesn't mean that it takes place on Ravnica and the Ravnica guilds are part of the story. But it's not a guild set at all. It doesn't mean the guilds don't show up and it doesn't mean that it takes place on Ravnica and the Ravnican guilds are part of the story.

But it's not in any way a traditional Ravnican set. One of the things that we're playing around with is the idea that it's not... Most of our sets are sort of meant to show off an environment and this is meant to

show off a story. Not that there weren't stories in our environments, but that wasn't the focus of the design. With this design, it wasn't the world that we built around, it was the story we built around, in a way that we really have. When we get to War of the Spark, I promise I'll get there. So the interesting thing as you look at this whole story is, Magic started in a place where every world was kind of different. And then we sort of gravitated toward more consistency.

And then over time, it's funny, in some ways we've come full circle in that we're back to a world where sets are more stand-apart-ish than they once were. I mean, obviously the story ties together and there are...

One of the things we do now that we didn't really do back then, nearly to the extent we do now, is we build synergies between our sets where we are aware of what we're doing and we weave in things so that set A and set B that are back-to-back, even though they might take place in separate worlds and be drafted independently of one another,

there are mechanical synergies woven in so that the sets next to each other will play nicely. And that is something that we do now. So, there is, while blocks as we know them are kind of gone, there still is a lot of the

synergy, like a lot of what we used to do in a block to tie the block together. There, we were tying together through the same mechanics. The early blocks, the way they were mechanically connected is they had the same mechanical theme, so clearly they're mechanically connected.

Nowadays, the way we connect our years are a little bit different. One of the things you'll be seeing, for example, and I'll have to be vague right now, but you'll see us playing around with using new tools to make connective tissues of the year's worth of sets. It is not, in some ways, the old block system was a little more blunt and some of our new tools are a little less blunt, but we are definitely doing some things to make sure there's some cohesiveness. So while blocks are sort of no longer thing per se, that doesn't mean that we are not thinking about our sets in larger context. And that very much, I do think about the fall and the winter

and the spring set in conjunction with each other as the guy who plans this stuff, it is carefully thought out. There's a lot of, we, and not, it's not just me working in it. We work with set design and play design. Like one of the things that we actually work on now is trying to make sure that what we're doing can be, you know, balanced well and develop well, and that we're making synergies that can, we can build up and pay off. And then we do a lot of work to make sure that what we are doing is setting ourselves up to give ourselves the right tools to then build really clean, balanced environments. And so while old school blocks are a thing of the past, a lot of what blocks represented

really aren't gone. A lot of the planning... A block being gone doesn't mean we don't plan anymore. In fact, we plan more than we ever did. It just means that we have the abilities and the capabilities to sort of do more and different stuff. And that one of the things we've found is that the players really enjoy... There's something really fun about

going off and exploring a brand new... I mean, when I say a new world, it could be Return. But it's fun sort of bouncing around the multiverse, if you will. And so, we are staying on Ravnica for a full year, but that is going to be the exception and not the rule. As you see moving forward,

we'll be bouncing around a bunch and revisiting old worlds and going to new worlds and doing all sorts of cool things. So for those, I can't tell you what's coming just yet, but exciting things are on their way. So anyway, on this little look back on the blocks, As somebody who was here when blocks started and was very involved in a lot of those early decisions and obviously was involved all the way through, you know, from adding in the story component to changing planes, to adding mechanical themes, to doing block planning, to adding tonal themes,

to experimenting with the structures, to shrinking mechanical themes, to doing block planning, to adding tonal themes, to experimenting with the structures, to shrinking the structure, to just abandoning the structure. I was there for all of that. So it's funny. And this is one of the ones where I look back. This is kind of like when my daughter graduated from high school that we sat around and started talking about all the stories of her growing up. And I feel in some ways this is like a block story as block grew up.

And it graduated and then didn't have to be a block necessarily anymore and went on to bigger and better things. So one of the things that I'm going to work on is we use the word block to mean some stuff. And that because some meaning of block has gone away, but others hasn't, it's weird, and that I would like to have a name, for example, of a year's worth of stuff,

but it's odd to call it a block in the sense that there's other connotations when you say block. So I really need to get some terminology of what kind of that unit of time is, because that is something we think about. So anyway, I am trying to, when I get the vocabulary, I will share it with all of you. But I do want to say that in some ways, while the blocks as we know them are gone, in many ways, blocks have just matured. They graduated. And they are, in some ways, the way we structure things, the block always represented how we structure things. We still structure things.

We still connect things. A lot of, the block in some ways isn't really gone as much as it's metamorphosed into something different. And that, you know, as we move forward, I will share that with you. And there's a lot of, one of the things, I mean, I live two years ahead. I'm very excited, you know, two years from now when we get to look back a little bit and talk about some of the early post-block years of sort of how we did things and how we designed things.

There's a lot of cool stuff coming. We're not quite there yet, so I can't talk about it yet. But I do sort of want to say as we, as I end the story of the blocks, this isn't, this isn't like a funeral or anything. The essence of the blocks isn't really gone. It's just kind of changed

into something a little bit different. So moving forward, I will have other podcasts where I talk about that when we get far enough that I can start discussing it. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the walk through the blocks today. From the creation of the blocks to sort of them sunsitting away. But I am now

at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's 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.