Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #638: War of the Spark

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

This podcast talks about the vision design of War of the Spark.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today we're going to talk about War of the Spark. Okay, so let's go back. So, Nicole Bolas had a three-year story arc that Doug Byer codenamed Handlebar. Partly because, kind of like a handlebar mustache that the villain would twirl maliciously. Or also, if you have a puppet, the bar that controls the puppet is called a handlebar. So the idea was, it was a villain puppet master.

Anyway, so it's called Handlebar. So it was three years. So Act 1 was Kaladesh and Amonkhet. We sort of, they first learn about Bolas, and then they go to confront him, but they're defeated by him. And then they scramble, and Jace gets off to Ixalan, and then Act 2 was Ixalan and Dominaria. And then Act 3 was Unravnica, with the finale, the climax of the story happening in War of the Spark. And all of this had been planned ahead of time. So all of this had been carefully mapped out.

And if you follow the storyline, there's all these different pieces that were coming together. Like a lot of the idea behind War of the Spark was you would realize that Boll was up to something, but not quite understand the full extent of his plan. And that come War of the Spark, we would have this giant battle on Ravnica. Giant planeswalker war on Ravnica. So there were a couple things.

So I've explained before that when we decided that we were going to have the big finale on Ravnica, we said, oh, well, first thing we have to do is have our guild sets to sort of give the Ravnica, we said oh, well first thing we have to do is have a guild have our guild sets to sort of give the Ravnica you expect. And then we'll do originally it was a block. Originally War of the Spark was not a single set, but it was milk and cookies. So a large set and a small set. And the idea we had is, okay, we're going to make

an event block. And we ended up making an event set. And the idea behind an event set is most sets are focused on where they are. They're all about the environment of where they are. And an event set says, okay, it happens to be someplace. That's not what's important.

Some major event is happening and we're going to build it around this event. So there was a war of planeswalkers and the idea was we wanted most planeswalkers you knew. There's reasons why not everybody could be there. But pretty and the idea was we wanted most planeswalkers you knew. There's reasons why not everybody could be there, but pretty much the idea was, what if all the planeswalkers were all together

in a giant war? And from a creative standpoint, it was really cool. Now, I should point this out, because people have mentioned this. We blocked this all out long before we knew what Avengers Infinity War even was. This was years before

that was even announced. And so, we just liked the idea of a giant culmination with all the characters coming together. And so, that is a cool story. It is a neat idea for a story. And there's a lot of, I mean, there's a

lot of reasons to really like it, and we thought the players would like it. But as the guy who had to design it, I was like, okay, here's the problem. Planeswalkers are mythic rare cards. We get in a block, you know, back then it was a block, wasn't even a single set. We get, okay,

maybe five in a block. We get three in the large set and two in the small set, and I'm like, how, you know, will we be able to convey this. And I was very worried early on because I was worried that we wouldn't convey the essence of what the story was all about, which was this giant planeswalker war. So when we started the design, I was very focused on sort of it's a planeswalker war. I want to convey war. How do you convey that?

So the first thing we did is we made a mechanic that was called the skirmish mechanic. And the idea of the skirmish mechanic was we wanted to do something that's a little out there that was event related. So the idea of skirmish was certain cards would make you go get the skirmish was, um, certain cards would make you go get the, the skirmish card, the skirmish mechanic required you to go get a skirmish card, which was external to the game. It was a game piece. It wasn't in your deck per se. Um, and we did, we did a bunch of different ways to make skirmish work, but basically the idea was when you got a skirmish card, um, you marked, uh, there was like sort of, you could push in both directions. And it started in the center.

And then every time you dealt combat damage to the opponent, you would advance it. And there were a couple different ways to advance it. I think that you could, if you did combat damage to your opponent, it advanced. I think if you... I don't remember the details of it. There are a couple of different ways you could advance. And the idea was you would do things that were helping you win the war and that you would move back and forth.

And it was kind of like this giant tug-of-war going on where you were trying to sort of... Or maybe the opposite of tug-of-war since you're pushing and not pulling. But you are trying to advance to the end. And if you got your side to win, then there's a reward for that. And there's a lot of various... We messed around with skirmish for quite a bit. And there's a lot of different things.

For a while, there were different elements of the skirmish. And part of the reason we liked skirmish was these different cards got to represent different parts of the battle and you got to see different characters and it really was sort of saying, oh, well the battle is coming to you, the game. And all of a sudden there's this overlay on the game that had this thing that mattered because it could impact, you know, it could help you get things and do things and so it was kind of this overlay on the game where you were fighting this war while playing. And we tried a lot of different

versions, a lot of different versions of Skirmish. And there were some interesting things and there's some cool stuff. And it definitely really got the sense that there was a war going on. But something wasn't quite feeling right. Like, as much as we were messing around in Skirmish, I didn't quite, I wasn't quite getting what I wanted. And that's when I realized that our focus was a little off. That we had spent all this time trying to make a Phyrexian war. And, not a Phyrexian, sorry, trying to make a planeswalker war. And what I realized was that

wasn't the sexy thing about it. So, basically, the way I realized that something was off was I do something that's known as, in Hollywood, there's a thing called, you have to do a pitch in Hollywood, where you have to convince other people to Hollywood where you have to convince, you have to convince other people to buy your idea. And normally when I put together a pitch, I would make three versions of the pitch. What I call a long pitch, a short pitch, and an elevator pitch. The long pitch was like three to five minutes. The short pitch was one minute. And the elevator pitch was one sentence up to 10 words. And so normally when I get stuck on something I like to come up with the elevator pitch because it makes

you condense down. So my elevator pitch, if I remember this exactly, was imagine every planeswalker you know all on Ravnica fighting. And the idea was, I realized when I analyzed what I was saying

is kind of the sexy thing the thing that I spent like I only spent one word on There's a War which was fighting now it's my punch at the end to add a little you know a little a little sizzle but the part that really

like I spent a lot of words on because it was so important to me was every planeswalker you know like oh my god you know this this is not just oh we're going to a world and there's a couple planeswalkers this is like all the planeswalkers and then once again maybe not technically, oh, we're going to a world and there's a couple planeswalkers. This is like

all the planeswalkers. And then once again, maybe not technically all of them. We make a lot of them. But a lot, a lot of planeswalkers. Like way more than you'd ever seen before all in one place. Like the poster to me, I just wanted the poster to be all the planeswalkers. I just thought like, oh, that'd be exciting to see all the

planeswalkers. And then I realized that oh, we had been designing planeswalker war when really what was the sexy thing about it was planeswalker war, that I was focusing on the wrong part of planeswalker war. So I said, okay, if we want this to be a planeswalker war, focusing on the planeswalkers, how do I do that? So I said, okay, I need the planeswalkers there. So we said, okay, how do I get more planeswalkers in the set?

Now remember, when the set started out, it was a large and small set, milk and cookies. And then we went to the change to the three-in-one model where cookies became a core set. So we had one set. So normally in a large set, three planeswalkers is about what we put in a large set, sometimes two. So I went to the play design team and said, okay, if I wanted more planeswalkers, what could I do to add in more planeswalkers?

And they said, well, you know, we can stretch a little bit. I think, what was it, Shadows of Innistrad, we added a fourth planeswalker with Tamiyo, but we made her three colors, so it was very narrow, so it wouldn't go on a lot of decks. And they're like, okay, so here's what we could do. We could maybe add a couple

extra that are a little narrower. Maybe we shave a planeswalker from the set before and the set after. I'm like, okay, well we do all this stuff. In the end, instead of having three planeswalkers, I could have seven or eight planeswalkers. And I'm like, oh, okay. Okay, I guess I'll... I could have the gatewatch and bolus.

Oh, okay. But then I realized that wasn't the exciting part. The exciting part was all the planeswalkers. And I said, okay, is there a way for me to get all the planeswalkers in the set? Now, at the time, I was thinking about 30. That was my, okay, imagine 30 planeswalkers. And there's only 15 Mythic Rare slots. So, like, by definition,

you know, there's no way to make them all mythic rare. We did explore the idea of a bonus sheet. There was a bonus sheet of Planeswalkers. And the concern there was we wanted Limited to be as much about it as Constructed. And we ended up doing one per pack. We'll get to that in a second. But the separate sheet just didn't feel, I don't know, it just didn't feel like we,

I wanted it imbued in the set. And so what I realized is I wanted to have them lower than Mythic Rare. And so the idea at first was, okay, maybe it'll be Mythic Rare and Rare. But I remembered another thing that happened. When we first started making Planeswalker packs, we knew that we were going to make Planeswalkers

for the Planeswalker packs. And there was discussion about how we would make them. What would they be? Because it's an entry-level product. It's for beginners to play. And planeswalkers are complex. So the idea I had pitched was, what if we just simplified it? What if, for example, they just had a global ability on them? And they were a planeswalker that you could attack them to get rid of them, but it was just really simple. Just had a static ability and you attacked them.

them to get rid of them, but it was just really simple. Just had a static ability, and you attacked them. And that was ruled not planeswalkery enough, because they wanted them to look like the normal planeswalkers. So then I said, okay, what if it just had one ability? And anyway, we ended up not going that direction. But it reminded me, it said, you know, there are ways to do planeswalkers that aren't quite the same as full planeswalkers. Also, one of the things that I'm in charge of is making sure we slow roll planeswalker advancement.

Because planeswalkers are very popular, but it has the smallest amount of design space. So one of the things that we've been wanting to do forever is static abilities on Planeswalkers. And while we've done them a little bit, like, I think Garruk had a static ability which caused him to flip, caused him to transform, and the commander Planeswalkers

can be your commander. But barring a few weird, you know, making the commander planeswalkers can be your commander. But barring a few weird making the cards work sort of thing, we hadn't really done static abilities, so I'd held off on them. And we were doing Hour of Devastation, and we were trying to figure out what to do with Bolas. And so someone pitched

Bolas with a static ability. And I said, you know, how about this? We knew we needed a Bolas in War of the Spark. Why don't we do a four loyalty Bolas in Hour of Diffusion? Never done that before. And then we'll have Bolas in Spark be an introduction of static ability Planeswalkers. We've never done that before. And that we would do that for the first time.

So we'd already planned to introduce that on Bolas. And so I had it in my head, like, okay, what if static abilities were just something we introduced in the set and that's something Planeswalkers could do? And what if we had fewer abilities? So we played around with making uncommon Planeswalkers that did one of three things. They only did one thing.

Either they had a static ability, they had a plus loyalty ability, or they had a minus loyalty ability. And we played around with them. So the plus loyalty abilities did not work particularly well. You were sort of doing a lot of bookkeeping. And if your opponent wasn't trying to attack them,

it never mattered. And it got to a point when you had enough counters that you felt obligated to keep putting them on because you didn't want them to die, but it's like, oh, it's got enough. Isn't that enough? I guess I should keep putting them on just in case.

And it just became a pain to track without any real repercussion of what it meant. Now, the static ones worked okay. They definitely felt like there was something going on, and they had a reason, like the loyalty mattered,

because your opponent, the way to shut them down was doing damage to them. So, you know, it definitely, it wasn't just an enchantment. It kind of felt like a little bit different than an enchantment. And then the negative loyalty planeswalkers were awesome. Because what they ended up being is, essentially, is, oh, I have a certain number of uses.

Okay, I do this thing, and you can use me a certain number of times. And if my opponent attacks me and does damage to the planeswalker, oh, you're limiting how many times I can do that effect. And that was kind of cool. So we really liked the negative ones. So what we did is we then chopped out the positive, limiting how many times I can do that effect. And that was kind of cool. So it really liked the negative ones. So what we did is we then chopped out the positive, the just plus loyalty ones,

and we made minus loyalty abilities and static abilities. And then at rare, I think at rare what we did is they had a static ability, one positive, one negative. And then at mythic rare, they had a static ability, and then the normal, you know, two positives and a negative. Gideon ended up having two static abilities, but anyway, the idea essentially was the Mythics would have sort of four abilities, one of which was static, the Rares would have three, one of which was static, and the Uncommons would either have one static or have a minus. Eventually, I think we turned it over that way,

and set design decided that they didn't quite feel planeswalking enough, and so they decided uncommon was going to be, they'll have one static ability and one minus ability. So the idea was the uncommons have two abilities, one static. The rares have three abilities, one static. And the mythics have four abilities, one static. And that's how we ended up building them. one static and the mythics have four abilities one static and that's how we ended up building them um the next problem we ran into was a color balancing problem because if you look at all

the planeswalkers most our planeswalkers are not one color but two color um we only have so many minor color planeswalkers and a lot of our planeswalkers hit multiple colors um but if we made every planeswalker both colors that you associated with the planeswalker um it just became hard you know it became hard to play all the things it really sort of pushed you to play a lot of extra colors which wasn't necessarily the goal um so what we decided was for the uncommons we would split into two camps one is we would make creatures monocolor, or planeswalkers monocolor that made some sense as monocolor. Like, a lot of planeswalkers are

more one color, and they're like one central color, and then they're a secondary color. On those we felt okay to say, okay, they're just their main color. But some of them are really evenly balanced. You know what I'm saying? Something like Vraska is not base green or base black.

It's pretty black green. So the solution to that problem was hybrid. Now hybrid did a couple things for us. One is it allowed us to represent both colors of a creature without you actually having to have both colors. So Vraska, for example,

can be played in a black deck or a green deck. But I like the fact that it was something that, you know, gave you the flexibility. But she clearly was black and was green. That was cool. The other thing we had done was we were trying to find places for innovation with Planeswalkers,

because Planeswalkers were obviously becoming a big theme. Well, static abilities, we had never really done that. That was a brand new thing. Uncommon and, to some extent, rare Planeswalkers are obviously becoming a big theme. Well, static abilities, we had never really done that. That was a brand new thing. Uncommon and, to some extent, rare planeswalkers, not something we normally do, so that was a thing. And people have been asking forever for hybrid planeswalkers, and they're hard to do. It's very hard.

Normal planeswalkers are hard to design. So having to design your three abilities, your plus and your... I mean, normally there's a plus, there's a plus, a minus, and a big minus, which is the ultimate normally. And it is hard to design that and make it cool and fun and then just be something that both colors would do equally. It is very, very hard to design a hybrid planeswalker. And so the nice thing here is because the uncountable planeswalkers had less going on, one of which was a static ability, which is easier to overlap in hybrid, it just became something that we could do. And so we ended up making 10 hybrid Planeswalkers at Uncommon, 10 monocolored at Uncommon.

And we then, I think, had 13 rares, some monocolor, some multicolor, and then we had three mythics. And the three mythics were the protagonists of the story which is Luliana and Gideon and the antagonist of the story which was of course Nicole Boas and that was definitely it was challenging getting there

and the funny thing is the first time people would play with the set it was challenging getting there. And the funny thing is, the first time people would play with the set, it was a little daunting in that, you know, you're just not used to that number of planeswalkers. And, like, one of the things in vision design is I always have to check in with play design. Usually we check in at about two

months and three months of the four months and just check in and say, okay, how are you feeling about where we're at and making sure that we're not doing anything that is problematic. And what I've learned is there's two types of vision designs. There are the ones that are basically mixing and matching what we've done or taking themes that we've done and combining them in new ways, but nothing that we're doing is something we haven't done and understand.

And those sets are not that hard from a play design standpoint. I mean, there's, yeah, you've got to balance and push certain cards and whatever, but very doable. The one that's trickier is when I'm adding some element, either because it's a new element,

or it's an element we normally have, but at a volume or in a way that we don't normally do it, like planeswalkers. And those are tricky, because there's a lot, in order to make 36 planeswalkers, there's a lot of, okay, well, what does it mean,

and how do you deal with it? There's a lot of ramifications of that. It means something unlimited. It means something constructed. And so, oh, the other thing we had to do with play design is what I talked about a little bit earlier is we were much more careful about being niche in how we made our planeswalkers.

We definitely were much more willing to say, you know what, this isn't a universal planeswalker that necessarily will go anywhere. This is very specific, especially the rare ones. The uncommon planeswalkers were kind of optimized for limited, not that some of them won't be viable and constructed, but the uncommon ones were more like, we want to make a really good limited environment. Let's pick decisions and choices and execution them so that they're optimized for limited. And then some of them might work in constructed and those are the ones, you know,

be careful how we cost them. And then at rare, we got a little bit more niche in how we did the rares in that. Like, oh, this is cool, but you know what? This would really go in a very specific deck. Not just any deck's going to play this. And that allowed us to spread them out.

But there was a lot of work by play design making all the Planeswalkers fit in. We had to do some different things than we normally did. And that was a challenge. The other thing that happened was... So for Dominaria, we had done this thing where we put one legendary creature in every pack. And one of the things that I've become a big fan of is part of messaging is making sure the audience can understand what's going on.

And the way I always think about it is, if you open three booster packs, can you tell what the theme is? So if you ever heard my mantra, if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme. Where that comes from is back in the early days, we needed to make sure that what we were doing was at a volume that you could read. And in the early days, the only way to do that was to make sure that your theme was loud enough at common so it would have the as-fen it needed.

One of the things that's happened since then is technology like one booster card per pack and things in which we can sort of alter the as-fan by using other means other than common have allowed us to loosen that a little bit. Now, the one thing I did do was, look, the Planeswalkers were uncommon,

rare, and mythic rare. Now, we were getting one in every booster pack. We used the technology that Dominaria did with the templating. I'm not templating. Sorry, collation. And the idea was, I think it shows up in the rarity of where it was taken from. So if you get an Uncommon Planeswalkers in your Uncommon slot, you get a Rare Planeswalker or a Mythic Rare Planeswalker,

it's in your Mythic Rare Rare slot. But the other thing I wanted to do was, I wanted something that sort of showed all the Planeswalker, it's in your Mythic Rare slot. But the other thing I wanted to do was I wanted something that sort of showed all the Planeswalkers but helped increase the as-fan of who are the Planeswalkers. So what we did is we made what we call the Signature Card. What a Signature Card was

was a spell that was representative of what this Planeswalker would cast. And the idea was everybody got a signature spell, and the signature spell would be common or uncommon. I think there's a few characters that got more than one, and sometimes the extra one might be higher rarities. But the idea was, oh, and this is what it meant to be a signature card.

Your name appears in the card. It's blanks whatever. Your art appears on the card, casting the spell, so you get to see them. So one of the ways to know who the Planeswalkers are, not only do we have Planeswalker cards, but you also, every Planeswalker gets a signature card that is at lower rarities. So when you open your booster pack, you're guaranteed to get one Planeswalker. And then, thanks to the Azfan, you're just to get one Planeswalker. And then, thanks to the Azfan, you're just going to see

the names of the Planeswalkers. The other thing we were also doing is it's an event set. There's a story. You know, normally in a magic set, there's like, you know, four or five story event cards. This thing is just chock full story event cards. The whole thing is a story. So there's

lots and lots and lots of things happening. You're seeing planeswalkers and all, you know, the planeswalkers showing a lot of different pieces of art. So as you're looking through the set, looking through the names and the art and the flavor text and then the cards themselves, the planeswalkers are just showing up a lot. That if you open up three booster packs,

you know there's a war of planeswalkers. You're not going to miss that. It is very loud. And that is something we wanted to make sure that you got. So I know when people ask about the theme, the planeswalker theme, we did a lot to weave it so that it was something you saw in the high-ass fan. And like I said, there's no planeswalker cards in common, but there are planeswalker signature spells. Quite a number of them in common.

There are planeswalkers in the art, you know, in the names in the art and the slay protects all throughout common. So you are not playing the set and not get a sense of, oh, there's a whole bunch of Planeswalkers fighting. You are not going to miss that. That is very loud in the set. Okay. So now we get to the mechanics. So actually, because

Planeswalker was a big thing, I mean, while not technically a mechanic, we counted it. You know, Usually sets will have about three mechanics. Between all the stuff we were doing with planeswalkers, the volume of planeswalkers, the static ability of planeswalkers, the hybrid planeswalkers, we were doing a lot with planeswalkers. It was a big mechanical element of the set. So that was one. So the next thing is let's talk about I'm blanking on the name of the mechanic. The mechanic we introduced

in Scarves of Polyphorate. So, Polyphorate first started in Scarves of Mirrodin. So, we were trying to show off the Phyrexians and the Phyrexians were, what were the four words? They were toxic, they were viral, they were relentless, and they were adaptive. And the idea was that they were kind, they were relentless and they were adaptive and the idea was that they were kind of like this living disease we liked the disease metaphor so at some point

we had made infect already and infect gave poison counters to the player it gave minus one counters to the creatures so I made a card I don't remember what I called it but something like the disease rages on or something. And what it did was it took, if your opponent had any poison counters,

they got one more poison counter. And if your opponent's creatures had any minus one, minus one counters, they got one more minus one, minus one counter. And the idea being, oh, well, it's like a disease and you're spreading the disease. But they have to first, you know, they have to be affected for you to be able to spread it, was the idea being, oh, well, it's like a disease, and you're spreading the disease. But they have to first, you know, they have to be effective for you to be able to spread it, was the idea. And I really liked the card, and we played with it,

and it was fun. So I think I made a vertical cycle out of it. That means I made a common, an uncommon, and a rare. And then at some point, I realized that it was just really neat. And so I said, what if we make a mechanic out of this? So I pitched this to my team. And Mark Globus's response is, well, why are you restricting it to just minus one mind counter and poison counters? Because the set, for example, had charge counters and there were other counters in magic. And I was like, oh, that's a good idea. And I think what

happened was once we made that decision and then like, okay, well if we're going to increase counters, well I'll let you increase whatever counter, so maybe it's a positive counter, but I'll let you pick and choose, so I won't force you to put a positive counter on your opponent's thing or a negative counter on your own thing, or on you

you get to choose, but the idea was when I proliferate, anything that gets a counter, players and permanents, can get an extra counter. And, you know, once Mark made that suggestion, I changed it immediately. And so we made it in the set.

So it, Scars of Mirrodin, actually was at a much higher volume. It was a big part of the limited play early on. One of the things that helps you sort of cross between colors was that proliferate allowed you to play either an infect strategy or play a charge counter strategy, which crossed between the two sides, and did a lot to sort of make some viable archetypes that crossed over colors.

In development, they were worried that it was too complex a mechanic for common and they ended up pulling it mostly out of common. There might have been

one or two left of common. So it ended up being knocked down a bit. So it ended up, it was in all the Scars of Mirrodin block, in Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged,

and in New Phyrexia. It was mostly in Blue Scars of Mirrodin block. In Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, and in New Phyrexia. It was mostly in blue and artifact. I think there were two black cards, one green card, one red card. The green card was the only card that lets you repeat for the fray that wasn't a blue or artifact card.

And it kind of felt home. Green and blue were kind of where it felt home. Mechanically, the colors that kind of felt home. Green and blue were kind of where it felt home. Mechanically, the colors that kind of duplicate things. You know, we had doubling season stuff in green, and blue definitely did some counter manipulation.

Black usually just removed counters, not adding them, so it felt more blue and green. But anyway, we put it out in Scars of Mirroredd and it was very successful. And so there was a lot of pressure to bring it back because people really liked it. And so in Kaladesh, Kaladesh was like, oh, we have energy counters and we have lots of plus one plus one counters. And we have artifacts with a little bit of charge counters.

I'm like, okay, this is the place to bring it back. a little bit of charge counters. I'm like, okay, this is the place to bring it back. And the thing I liked about it was in Scars of Mirrodin, it was very much an aggressive, hurt-the-opponent mechanic. And here it was more of a

help-yourself mechanic, and I liked that it was so different. But plus one, plus one counters played such a major theme, and plus one, plus one counters were so much better than energy counters that we couldn't quite balance it. And we tried, and it didn't work.

So we had to take it out. So in Aether Revolt, we tried again. We're like, oh, it's such a good fit. Let's see if we can make it work. And we tried some new stuff, and it still didn't fit. And we had to pull it out. So then we were going back to Ravnica. And like, okay, we decided early on that we would allow

returning mechanics for guilds. And so when we, the first meeting we had is we wrote up all the possibilities for guilds of returning mechanics. And for Simic, we put proliferate. It just, it fit Simic perfectly. Simic already has a plus one, plus one counter theme. It seemed like there's the

perfect Simic mechanic. And it ended up being a little too good for Simic. It was very synergistic with the Pulse and Pulse of Encounters. One of the things we found with proliferate was we had to have some ability to control the Pulse and Pulse of Encounters. The fact that not only did Simic make them, but like to spread them caused some issues. And the other problem is you need to balance stuff with the other

with the other guilds around you and we had done that in vision design like for example the Azorius mechanic at handoff in visions was precedence that allowed you to turn your ETB effects into other ETB effects of creatures you control. Well, most

of the proliferate were ETB effects so for example there was crossover there. But, when they had a change in set design, it was just too hard to balance, and in the end, proliferate had to go. So we had tried it once in Kaladesh,

twice in Aether Revolt, three times in Ravaging Allegiance, and we had failed miserably. But, we were making a Planeswalker set and one of the things the Planeswalker set really wanted was ways to add counters to Planeswalkers. And so one of the things that I... So Dave was the set lead designer

and he was on the design team because Dave... Well, now it's kind of standard practice, but Dave always likes to be on the vision design teams anyway, of anything he's leading the set design for. And so I said to him, I said, do you think a proliferator could work if we were just more careful with what plus and minus counters we had? So we talked to play design, and they were like,

okay, proliferate and planeswalkers isn't super bad. You're only getting one counter, and that. One of the things about planeswalkers is, if I have a planeswalker with two loyalty, and I have a minus one ability, or I have a planeswalker with four loyalty and a minus two ability, in a vacuum, those play really similarly, but they're very different how they interact with proliferate.

So there's a knob that they could use to sort of control with proliferate. And in general, they weren't worried about the Planeswalkers. There was concern that we had to be careful how much we did with plus one, plus one counters. Obviously, you want to do a little bit because you're playing with proliferate, but you want to make sure that you can balance that

because it was always plus one, plus one counter. The theme before, because in Kaladesh, Fabricate used them, and in Ravnic Allegiance, Simic used them in a bunch of different ways, and, oh, and it's mechanic. Adapt used them.

So, having mechanics that use them can be problematic. So, one of the things was, okay, we've got to be careful how we use plus one, plus one counters. But we got sign off and we were able to do proliferate in the set. Okay, which brings us to the final mechanic and Bolas's army of eternals. So originally, when we made the Eternals in Hour of Devastation,

I wanted to give them a mechanic that was going to come back. Because one of the big things about War of the Spark is, look, Bolas was making an army, and why did he need an army? Partly to fight the war. That's one of the things about the war was the Eternals. And we really wanted a way to represent the Eternals fighting. The original plan was we were going to bring back the mechanic that was the Eternal mechanic, which was Afflict.

A couple problems. One is Afflict just didn't go over well. The audience didn't really like Afflict. It wasn't as popular as we were hoping. And second, it just wasn't a very clean fit of what we were doing. Like, it just didn't kind of fit the rest of the set. And so we made the call

not to use Afflict. It was the original plan. It was, like, when we made Afflict in Outer Devastation that was the idea. But between kind of the unpopularity of it and other factors, it just proved to be not the best choice. So we needed to find a different mechanic.

And the trick was we wanted to build an army in a way that wasn't clogging up the board. That was the biggest challenge. So the early version of it is we made these counters. So you would make counters, and they were, I think we called them army counters or eternal counters. And the idea was that they had to attack or block together. If one attacked, they all had to attack. If one blocked, they all had to block. And the idea was we were trying to get the sense of they kind of functioned as a singular unit. And so if you wanted to get involved with them,

you had to get involved with them. And so you couldn't just, you couldn't, like one of the problems with making tokens is, oh, I make a lot of tokens, and then I just use them to chump block you. But if all of them had a block, if you attack with one creature, and let's say you attack with a 4-4,

and I have four 1-1s, now it's like, well, I can't just chump you for four turns with my 1-1s. It's either all in and block with all my creatures and we trade or not. And so we played with that for a while. We really liked that mechanic. It was cool.

But it was something late in vision design there were some play design issues. It just wasn't... It was causing some concern on how it played. And so Dave came to me and said, okay, can we change it? Can we do something different? So I liked the idea that it kind of acted like one creature, but you got a sense that it was multiple creatures coming together to be one creature.

And so we then took that and applied it in a little more direct state. Well, what if the individual creatures were plus one, plus one counters, and the whole of the monster was a singular creature? So the idea we came up with is what we call math, which I think we called conscript in design, which was, okay, I'm going to make an army, and the army is going to be a singular creature. And the idea is when I build on the army,

if the army doesn't exist, I make it. I make a 0, 0 army token. And then I put a certain number of plus and plus counters depending on the amassed number. So amassed three is either put three plus counters on a zero zero that previously wasn't there, or if it's already an army,

just add it to the army. So the idea is if I play amassed three, and I don't have an army, now I have a three three army. Well then I play amassed two. I don't get a second two two creature, my three three becomes a five five. I don't get a second 2-2 creature. My 3-3 becomes a 5-5. And so it had a lot of the gameplay that we had

liked out of the tokens in that they felt like a singular collective thing. I can't attack or block with them independently. And the idea was that you were building up your army and your army was getting bigger and scarier, but your army was a singular threat from a board standpoint. We liked how that played. The other thing it did

that I was really happy with was that it used plus one, plus one counters, but it used them in a way that wasn't problematic with proliferate. Because it was a singular creature, you didn't have a lot of creatures with plus one, plus one. You could only ever have one army creature and if you cast proliferate, it makes your army bigger, but by one. You know, one of the problems we had when there was a lot of plus one, plus one encounters is, oh, I proliferate, and all of a sudden, four of my creatures get bigger. And it really becomes a huge threat.

With a mass, proliferate matters for it. It helps it. You know, plus one, plus one, you know, your three threes, a four four, whatever. It makes it more powerful, but it's only ever that one plus one, plus one counter. And so the thing I liked about it was it tied into the other mechanic in a way

where, hey, you know, I want to amass before I proliferate, just because proliferate will help my amass, but it was not problematic in the way that, like, Fabricate or Adapt had been in that you could have multiple Adapt creatures or multiple Fabricate creatures. Look, you can have one army. By definition of how the mechanic works, you can never have more than one army. So we played with it and

one of the things we also started doing is the idea that certain creatures that amass also help the army. So the idea is, not only can this make the army bigger, but while this is in play, it can grant it abilities and stuff. And so we like the idea that that could really make the army

more challenging to deal with. And that, and like I said, amass came late in the process but anyway this is definitely one of those visions

where all the key components the planeswalkers and the different rarities the static abilities on planeswalkers the

hybrid planeswalkers proliferate Amass all that was in vision design. Now, set design spent a lot of time working on them. Like I said, they're the ones that made it so the uncommons had a static ability and a minus ability. There's a lot of tweaking. Having a set with so many planeswalkers really was something that was different,

and it was something that required a lot of nuance and effects um trying to get the right balance between the right number of plus one plus one counters so the proliferate mattered but not so much that it was problematic or unbalanced you know there was a dave did a lot of hard work dave and his team did a lot of hard work of um we had given them the tools to do something really neat, but we also had made, like I said, there's two types of vision designs. One that use known quantities

and you're mixing and matching, and ones that use unknown quantities. Or use known quantities and volumes you've never used before. And what that means is there's a lot of discovery that goes on. Vision gave set design all the tools, but balancing those tools and using those tools

and effectively making what we needed was super challenging. The one last piece that went on, which is something we did a little bit in Vision and in set design did a lot of work, was we were on Ravnica. And one of the things that we wanted the set to be was, look it's not a guild set, we're not playing at the guilds per se, but we definitely

did want to do some stuff that said, hey, this is Ravnica so one of the questions we asked early on was what do we always want to do in Ravnica, but the nature of the guild sets kept us from doing it and the idea was like do we want to do in Ravnica, but the nature of the guild sets kept us from doing it. And the idea was like, do we want to do a vehicle? Do we want to do certain kind of artifacts? Do we want to do

other certain legendary creatures that are on the planet of Ravnica but are tricky because they're not necessarily tied to the guilds, or if they are part of the guilds, they're not a leader, so they're not the kind of thing we make when we make the guild sets. And so the final piece, while War of the Spark is not about Ravnica, it takes place on Ravnica. And then the Ravnicans are part of the story. It's not just the Planeswalkers fighting for Ravnica. It's also the Ravnicans fighting, you know, all the guilds are fighting for Ravnica. So the set got a layer in a lot of things that you... we'd always wanted to get it in a set, but by the nature of how to do guild sets was hard to get in. So there's a lot of one-offs and things

that are not quite balanced, because a lot of times in guild sets you want to have balance of things. So there's a lot of neat sort of Ravnikan things that are a little tricky to get in. The other thing that's awesome in the set is this is a story, and there's a lot of moments of what's going on. if you think of a normal set as having five, let's say, story moments,

this was a set that had 30 story moments, you know. And so the other big thing was we had a lot of big climactic... I'm sorry. Some were climactic, some were minor. But there was a lot of things that happened that we wanted to capture on cards itself. So there was a lot of design that was done

to get individual moments to say, oh, here's a neat moment we want to capture. Let's make sure a card to capture that moment. And anyway, guys, that is the design of War of the Spark. I'm really proud of how the set came out. It definitely is, you know, what I call a wow set, where it's one of those sets where when you first hear about it, you're like, wow, what are, you know.

And it is fun. I mean, not every set needs to go, what are they doing? But you want to make some of those sets. And this was one of those. And it's fun to make a set where, like, I knew when we premiered and showed the plain glass in the promo

with all the planeswalkers, like, just realizing that that many planeswalkers in the set was amazing. You know what I'm saying? Normally in a large set, we make three. 36! That's three times, I'm sorry, that's 12 times as many that's a lot

that's the kind of effect I wanted that when you give so much more than normal you're like this isn't normal in a way that like six or eight or nine wouldn't quite have been that so anyway that my friends is the tale of War of the Spark I will have future

podcasts where I talk about cards and stuff. I'm going to hold off on that a little bit. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the tales of War of the Spark. 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.