Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #656: Modern Horizons

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

This podcast is all about the design of Modern Horizons.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is all about modern horizons. I will talk from the very modest beginnings to its printing. So this is an interesting product. Normally when we make a product, there's a gap. Usually from us coming up with a product to it getting printed is at least three years, sometimes longer. Unstable was seven years. I mean, it takes a while. This product, we came up with it and it seemed print one of the fastest I've

ever remembered. I mean, like a year and a half or something. It was relatively fast for a magic product. So let me talk about where it started. So every year we do what we call an innovation product. The Unsets are an example. Conspiracy is an example. Battlebond is an example. Plane Chase, Arch Enemy. The original Commander decks were an example. The original Modern Mafters, not Modern Mafters, well the original Mafters decks. Yeah, Modern Mafters, sorry, was an example. And the idea is us just trying different things, us experimenting, us pushing different formats and just trying to allow people to play magic in different ways. And so we like every year to do a different innovation product. So for 2019, we didn't know what to do.

We weren't quite sure. So Mark Globus came up with an interesting idea that we would have what we call a hackathon. And the idea of a hackathon is we take a week off. So instead of working on our normal stuff for a week, we take a week off and we work on a particular project. The first hackathon was coming up with new ideas for innovation products. And the idea being that one of these ideas would get used for the 2019 innovation products, but if other ideas were good, they could be used for other innovation products, or not even necessarily the innovation product, maybe other slots and other things if we came up

with cool ideas. So the way it worked is anybody could go to Mark and pitch him an idea for a product, something that was in theory innovative. And then he would pick the six he thought showed the most promise and there would be six hackathon teams made. So I went to him and my pitch to him was Future Sight 2. And what I said to him is there are a lot of players out there that really, like we know that time spiral hit with some of our audience in fact one of the interesting things about time spiral was normally when we make a set um up till that point organized play and sales tended to go like step for step if a set did well in organized play, it sold well. And Time Spiral was the first set that had this weird deviation where organized play was up, but sales were not.

And what we found was that the real and franchise players, the players most likely to play in organized play, loved Time Spiral. It was a love letter to Magic, and it had all these references to the past. And yeah, there were a lot of mechanics in the set, but you know what? They knew the mechanics, so it wasn't that big a deal. Meanwhile, the less experienced players didn't know all the mechanics, so instead of having a set with like three to five mechanics, there were 15 mechanics. You know, it was just as overwhelming. And they didn't get the references, and there was a lot of problems.

references. There was a lot of problems. But my pitch was hey, you know, the audience, I think there is room for a product that as a supplemental product that plays into that, that's more complex, that's more a deeper, richer sort of environment.

And the reason I pitched it as Future Sight 2 was I thought that I liked what Future Sight had done teasing the future a little bit. It was the most, of all the sets, it was the most crampacked full of mechanics. And so my vision was that we would do something kind of like that, where it was just full of mechanics, maybe a little nod toward the future. Meanwhile, Ethan Fleischer went to Mark and made the following pitch.

Time Spiral 2. And Ethan's idea was a little bit more geared toward the time spiral. But he and I had a very similar basic idea, which is, let's make a supplemental product aimed at the more enfranchised player. Yeah, it's not something we can make standard legal. We've learned that from Time Spiral. But there's an audience. It's fun to make. We can do a lot of cool stuff. And Mark heard he and I, the pitch from me and Ethan, and he said, you know what?

You guys, while you're slightly different, you're pretty much pitching the same product, which is a supplemental product aimed at enfranchised players with a high-level complexity. Why don't you two work together? And so Ethan and I got put on the same team. Ethan led the team. Allie Medwin also volunteered to be on the team. And then Nat Mose, who was an editor. Nat, the editing team wasn't allowed to just take the week off. They had too much work to do. So Nat joined our team whenever he had time. So full time was me and Ethan and Allie, and then part time was Nat.

That was the hackathon team. And the goals of the hackathon team was we had a whole week, the entire week. We didn't have to go to any other meetings. A whole week to design our product. And at the end of it, we had to do a play test with the judges, which would be Mark Globus and several other higher level people. And then once it was judged, they would pick a winner for who would be the 2019 innovation product. I don't want to give anything away, but we did well.

So what happened was we decided, like a lot of people who were doing something to sample, were doing pre-constructed decks. Like, well, let's build some decks that might be a sample of the kind of thing you play so you can get experience of the environment we're talking about.

The problem we had is the problem with making just a singular deck was a deck would be very focused. And so you would end up making things that were very much talking about this, like, because it would be a singular deck, it would be very oh, it's just talking about these colors

or this strategy. And you would miss the breadth of what we could do. So we decided instead of pre-constructed decks, we wanted to do sealed. But in order to do sealed, you know, each sealed is 84 cards that we needed to make sure we wanted everybody to have different cards and stuff. So we decided to build an entire large set in one week. So Ethan and I and Allie all have the

firehose capability of pumping out cards. So we just turned it on and we were just making cards like nobody's business. And, as the one person who had previously worked on Time Spiral and Planar Chaos, and I led Future Sight, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun

dipping into the magic's past and sort of playing around in you know, just, so we called the nickname for our product, we called Decadence, as in like a rich chocolate dessert. You know, like normally when you eat, you try to be good, you don't want to have too much of anything that's too rich, but every once in a while you're like, oh, I'm going to have this cake and it's just this giant chocolate cake and it is super rich and super, you know,

it is decadent. And that was kind of what this was, was we wanted the idea that this was something that was just so rich. Like, you kind of knew this couldn't be normal magic play, but oh, just once,

it was fun to have the chocolate, the decadent chocolate cake. That was the idea. So we called it decadence. So anyway, we worked for a whole week. We spit out tons of cards. We filled up an entire large set. And then the playtest we had was sealed. It went over well. They looked at all the cards cards it brought smiles to their faces there was nostalgia the gameplay was fun

it was complex but fun oh so one of the guidelines by the way that we had on complexity this was the guideline was if you assumed that the mechanic was in the set so let's imagine we were making a normal set and there were your normal number of mechanics

a common card had to look like a card that we would make it common. Now, what made this different from most sets is we didn't limit ourselves to the number of mechanics. So all those common cards that reference a mechanic, we would never, like in a normal set, at common, maybe you'd reference three mechanics, maybe, you know. And here, sky's the limit. As you see when we get to it, we did not hold back on our mechanics. Not at all. Okay, so the guideline when we made it, by the way, these were our goals in the hackathon. Number one,

we were free to use any mechanic. Number two, we weren't worried about new world order, complexity. We needed to match, like I said, we needed to match so that commons sort of felt common, assuming that you were doing mechanic. But we did not have the normal complexity issues that we did with New World Order. We wanted to tap into nostalgia, and we wanted to bring smiles. We wanted people, when they played, to just smile. To be very fun. And have that decadent sense. Anyway, we were successful, obviously. We were chosen to be the 2019

Innovation Product. Okay, that's not a big surprise since we are the 2019 Innovation Product, but it was exciting for us at the time because we didn't know it when we made it. Although, we were really, really happy with what we made. We were very proud and we thought going into it we had a good chance just because what we had made we thought was just knocked down really cool. Interesting, by the way, I think 15 cards that were in the original hackathon made it to print. I mean, they were tweaked along the way, but I think 15 cards from the original hackathon actually made it, which is amazing.

We're not even talking, like, we're talking, like, pre-anything, us just trying to prove the concept. The fact that 15 of those cards made it all the way through is kind of cool. Okay, so what happened was we got greenlit. And once we got greenlit, there was no pausing. We had to get going. Like I said, this is the fastest product I've ever worked on. So maybe two weeks after they officially signed on and this was going to be the product, it was time to make the Vision Design Team. they officially signed on, this was going to be the product, it was time to make the Vision Design Team.

Now, this product was a complex product. And a lot of the company didn't quite understand it. It was one of those things that we sort of pitched, and R&D got it. But it was definitely something that other people were like, well, what exactly? I'm confused. what exactly is this? So Globus decided that he would shepherd the product from the beginning all the way through.

So what he did is, he was the co-vision designer along with Ethan, and the co-set designer along with Adam Prozek. And his job was to sort of line things up and get it through the system, because it was an oddball product. Okay, made more oddball by the following decision. And by the way, the story I wrote in my article turns out to be not quite true. Ethan had originally pitched to Globus during the hackathon

that this product could be straight to modern. And because we had talked for years about what if we made a product that just went straight into modern, rather than going straight into legacy as most, or into internal formats, as most sort of supplemental sets do. And at the time of the hackathon, Globus was like, there's a lot that goes with that. There's a lot of baggage there. Don't worry about that. Don't do that. When it was time to actually make the product, I think Ethan brought it back up, and I think Bill decided that he really liked the idea.

And what that meant was, if we wanted to make it modern legal, straight to modern, the reason I think Bill really liked that was we were trying to give an identity to the product and the idea of it's complex, and like Time Spiral, while we knew that the

enfranchised players would get it it was a hard message to communicate where straight to modern was a very clean message and and it was something innovative we've never done before so it really sort of hammered home this is an innovative product um but it meant that we needed to do play testing because we didn't want to add cards to modern without sort of understanding what they did to Modern. And so that required Play Design to start to launch up a little sub-team to do Modern play that thing. So what happened was this guy named Mike Majors. Mike was on the Vision Design team, and I assume the Set Design team. And he was the liaison, basically, between Play Design and the design teams.

And his job was to understand what exactly Modern did and did not need. And so we used him as a guideline that A, we sometimes make things and he'd say whether or not he thought that was something we wanted to push in Modern. And B, sometimes he came to us and said, here's a deck that's fringe in Modern with a few cards. Maybe this could be a player and we think it's a fun deck. And so we would go both ways. Both, we would show our stuff to Mike and get feedback and sometimes Mike would give

us feedback, which would encourage design. Okay. So what happened then was Mike got added to the team. We hired some contractors. A few of the play design people had some of their time allotted to doing Modern. And there was playtesting set up. And so there was a decent amount of playtesting specifically on Modern so that we can A, understand Modern where it was, and then figure out where we could add in things. Like, what did Modern need? If we're going to make a product straight to

Modern, we want to make sure that we're making things that would help Modern and make Modern better and be fun additions to Modern so as far as the rest of the team so it was Ethan and Globus, the Vision team we brought on Mike to do the Play Design Liaison and then they asked Allie

because Allie had done a lot of work in the hackathon, she was very excited and they asked me, I also had done a lot of work in the hackathon. She was very excited. And they asked me. I also had done a lot of work. I don't work on that many supplemental sets. I mean, obviously, I'll do any unset that comes my way. But normally, I haven't traditionally done a lot of work on supplemental sets. But I had worked on Time Spiral. I knew how much fun Modern Horizons was.

So I signed up. This was definitely, you know, Ethan and my baby. I wanted to make sure that it was done, done well. Um, and, and I knew it'd be fun. I knew it'd be fun to be involved. So I signed up, uh, and we started. Um, so first off, one of the, there's some guidelines we set down. Remember I told you that the hackathon guys, they got refined a little bit.

So first off, repeated mechanics. So we decided, A, not to make any new mechanics. Although we could tweak old mechanics. That was allowed. So for example, we had Splice onto Instant Sorcery, which is, obviously, the previous Splice was onto

Arcane. So that is a tweak of an old mechanic in a new fashion, but not a brand new mechanic. It's a tweak of an old mechanic in a new fashion, but not a brand new mechanic. It's a tweak of an old mechanic that we were allowed. So we were told that we could do as many mechanics as we wanted within the following constraints. Number one, Globus did not want to add any mechanics to Modern. So we only could do mechanics already in modern. And we decided to save some space that if Modern Horizons was very popular, we wanted the ability to do a second Modern Horizons. So we stopped at

Dragons of Tarkir. So the rule was it could be any mechanic that's in modern up to Dragons of Tarkir. Nothing later than that. Now it up to Dragons of Tarkir. Nothing later than that. Now, it turns out because of Time Spiral and the Time Shifted Sheets and the Future Shifted Sheets, Future Shifted Cards, that there were a lot of mechanics that were pre-Modern,

that were in Modern, because, oh, there was one Threshold card on the Bonus Sheet of Time Spiral. So Thresholds, oh, there was one threshold card on the bonus sheet of Time Spiral. So, thresholds, like, there were a lot of things that we had access to. Like, once we said legal and modern, because of Time Spiral blocks, especially Future Sight, all the mix and match stuff, we had access to a lot of mechanics that we might not normally have had. So, with that caveat, we really had, I mean, there's only a handful of,

except for the newer mechanics, or the older mechanics, there's only a handful of mechanics that were kind of off limits, like phasing and a few things that, there wasn't a lot that we wanted. I mean, the mechanics that obviously were the strongest mechanics we had brought back. So we had access to, you know, most mechanics that we wanted. Not 100%, but 95%. We were not beholden to New World Order, but we had the thing I was explaining before, where we had to stay true to the rarity. We didn't have the conglomeration problem, meaning we weren't worrying about,

as long as each card in a vacuum in the appropriate set could be common, we were fine. Even if all of them together were more complex, we were accepting that as something we were doing in this product, right? So we could have 10 different commons, each have ten different mechanics on them, all different. But as long as each one was the kind of card we'd make it common, if that mechanic were in the set, then we were fine. We also wanted to tap into nostalgia, but we sort of added the caveat that we had when we did Dominaria, which had the same issues, which was we wanted to make sure that things in a vacuum, well, two things. One is, so when we made Time Spiral,

there's a famous talk that Aaron gave, there's a magic cruise that Aaron went on, and he gave this talk. And it was about Time Spiral. And what he said was, he gave some examples where we got a little too into the weeds. And his classic example was, he gave some examples where we got a little too into the weeds. And his classic example was he showed a card, and he says, this is a card referencing old magic cards. What two cards is it referencing? And it turned out it was a card like, it was a combination of two obscure magic cards.

So it's like, you know what, who's getting this? I mean, not that nobody got it, but like, here's this card that's not even a famous magic card, and another not even famous magic card, and we cross them together. That's going pretty deep. So the rules this time was, A, we try to play reference more famous cards rather than obscure cards, and two, we wanted to make sure that things in a vacuum made sense. Meaning if you didn't get the reference, it still was a cool thing.

That it was something that was weird that only if you got the reference did it make sense. It's like, oh, this is a cool thing. And then if you happen to get the reference, it's added value. Now note, we went to town. I mean, the creative team was all in.

Obviously, the design team was all in. Every aspect of the card, the name, The art. The creature line. The rules text. The flavor text. Any place we could put Easter eggs in, we did. There's a lot of referencing of old stuff.

Like, one of the things we wanted about this set was and one of the things that makes it a decadence is normally we build a world, we have to build a world somewhere. Like, oh, it's set on this world or something. This set said, we're going hog wild. Whatever reference we want to make, we're going to make. We're going to be all over the multiverse.

And the other thing that came up that caused design, I'm not design, caused creative some challenges was one of the ways that we figured out to do cool and new things with mechanics was a lot of times when we do a mechanic we isolate what colors that mechanic is in maybe it's in a faction set so it's tied to the faction maybe it's a certain archetype for drafting so we mostly do in that archetype so that allowed us to take old mechanics so for example we would take Ravnica guild mechanics and just make cards in

colors that weren't part of that guild. So it's like, oh, well, I can take Convoke, well, Convoke's not a good example because we put that in the course, but I can take some mechanics that we haven't repeated yet and put it in a color that it wasn't before because it's out of that guild. And then it's like, oh, well, how do we

creatively show something that clearly is a guild mechanic but not in that guild? So anyway, a lot of challenges for the creative team, but they stepped up and they did cool stuff. Okay, so let's talk about the themes in the set. We had a lot of mechanical themes. So the first theme was Changeling. So on Lorwyn, so flashback to Lorwyn, Lorwyn was a tribal set. Onslaught had been the first tribal set. Lorwyn was kind of our second big tribal set.

We had eight tribes, eight races. And we were a good way into it when I realized that the math wasn't working. That there just wasn't enough of the different creatures to make sure that you can guarantee that you could draft what you needed to draft. And we were trying to figure out what we needed to do. The obvious answer could be go down the number

of races. Like I said, having eight have six or something. But we really liked the races we had. There was a lot of cool stuff we were doing. They were balancing colors and stuff. So the solution I came up with was going back even further.

A lot of magic is going back to the past. So I, in Modern Horizons, had to go back to Lorwyn, which itself was me going back to Champions of Kamigawa. So in Champions of Kamigawa, we had the Moonfolk. The Moonfolk, you could spend one mana

to change their creature type. Then I made a legendary called Mistform Ultimis, because the Mistforms were the Moonfolk. I think the Mistforms... Sorry, the Moonfolk and the Mistforms were the Moonfolk. I think the Mistforms... Sorry, the Moonfolk and the Mistforms were different things. They're not the same thing. The Mistforms were the ones that could change their

creature type. The Moonfolk were the rabbits, and they bounced lands. Anyway, the Mistforms could change. So Mistform Ultimis was like the legendary, and instead of having to pay mana to change it, it just was everything. It just was all creature types.

And the card had been very popular so I realized that there's potential there to be a mechanic and that it could be the glue that would hold Lorwyn together. We ended up doing that. We ended up, Brady was, Brady Dalramith, who was the creative director of Lorwyn at the time,

during Lorwyn, was worried that if we had real shapeshifters, that it would warp the story. That once in the story you know that people could look like anybody, you question every, like, is that really that person? So he made them look kind of like, we joke, like jello molds. Meaning that they mimicked and copied things, but no one was confused that they were the actual thing. But when we redid this, we ended up, and copied things, but no one was confused that they were the actual thing. But,

when we redid this, we ended up, they now have a little bit different of a look than they did in Lorwyn. Anyway, sorry, long story short here is I put them in the set for the same reason that I put them in Lorwyn, which was, it was glue. And the reason it was glue for this set was, one of the things we did

when we started making the set is I have a long list of things players have been asking for I'm on social media, I have my blog and my Twitter and all sorts of stuff and people ask me things all the time, I write it down I like such and such, I write it down so normally it's hard to get too many of them just because, oh, I want an ooze lord. Okay, well

I have to find a set where oozes play enough of a role that it makes sense that there's a lord. You know, I have to find a place for something. And, I mean, anytime we do something, I always can find something. I mean, I have enough requests. But normally I'm only finding a few requests just because they're very specific on what they want. But now

we're in a set not confined by the creative. Like, we can do whatever we wanted. So I realized it was a set where I could answer a lot more requests than normal. And a lot of the requests were tribal-related. People wanted a card that referred to a certain tribe. And what I realized was it was hard to make a lot of those without sort of trapping people. Because when you see a card that says, I like cats, you assume, oh, there must be a cat

theme. I could draft a lot of cats. And so if you put things at any sort of lower rarity, even sometimes at higher rarity, it can throw people. You have to be careful. But I realized if we put changelings in and use changelings as a lot of our basic, you know, vanilla and French vanilla creatures, that would allow us to make some simple things and fill in and allow us to have

tribal themes. So changeling got put in. I think changeling ended up being focused in white and black, although I think it shows up in some other colors. But for limited, I think white and black are where you can make a chang like that. Okay, so speaking of tribes we wanted, next is Slivers. So Slivers originally showed up in Tempest, created by Mike Elliott. He had made a set before he came to Wizards called Afterways. And in it was this creature fallen from the heavens and split into the Slivers. The Slivers were Slivers of this person.

So when I, this was the Weatherlight Saga, so I was doing the story at the time. So we turned them into these shape-shifting hive mind creatures. And the idea was that if a sliver saw something, it could, with practice, copy a body part. So let's say a sliver went out and saw a bird and watched the bird and studied the bird. You know, it would take a while, but at some point it would figure out how to make a wing. And once it knew how to make wings, well, now it could fly. It had wings. So when it got with the other hive mind, you know, close enough,

their hive mind was based on physical proximity. Once it was in the hive mind, well, now everybody in the hive mind knew how to grow wings. And so now they all know how to fly. But only as long as the one that knew how to make the wings was within close proximity to them. Which I guess is a dangerous thing when you give people wings. Anyway, we had done slivers in

Tempest block. We had done them again in Onslaught block. We did them again in Time Spiral block. And we did them again in the Core set. I want to say 2014, I think 2014, 2015, I think. Anyway, slivers are very popular. Players ask for them all the time. They're just hard to do.

A, you need a lot of them, and B, they require a certain number of mechanics to use, and we've done enough times that there's just not a lot we haven't done yet of the evergreen mechanics. But, the same reason we did them in time spiral made a lot of sense to do them here oh well if you have access to okay most of the mechanics maybe

not all but most mechanics uh you can make some slivers because there are a lot of mechanics that just didn't line up with slivers so we could do and we had a lot of fun really pushing the boundaries of what if they had exalted what if they had cascadealted? What if they had Cascade? You know, just making up crazy stuff and then having someone go, okay, like, really? So that was fun. Next up, Ninjas. So Ninjas first showed up in Betrayers of Kamigawa. We specifically did not put them in Champions

so that they could be the thing of Betrayers. Although even though they were the thing of Betrayers, I think of the whole rest of the block, we made nine, I think? We didn't make a lot of them. And then we made a commander deck years later. We made a couple more, and Unstable had a couple ninjas, so I think there were 14

ninjas going into this set, which has at least that many ninjas. So we're at least doubling the number of ninjas. Ninjas are blue and black. We brought back ninjutsu. Not all of them have ninjutsu. Some of the lower-rated ones do ninja-like

things like unblockability or flash that are simple and feel like ninjas without actually having a ninjutsu ability. But for the higher-rated ones, we did bring back ninjutsu because we could. Next is goblins. Goblins, I think Mike had told us that

Goblins needed a little bit of help, and we thought Goblins would be a fun drafting theme, so we ended up putting them in black and red. I mean, red is an obvious choice, but I think when we looked in Modern, black was number two for Goblins because Lorwyn had had black Goblins, and we've done

Goblins black in a few other places. So anyway, we made black red goblins. once again, like I said, slivers, ninjas, goblins all play into tribe. So if you notice that each one of them is in black or white. So like slivers are in white. Ninjas and goblins

are in black. So it allows you when you make the changeling deck that you can take a lot of cards that care about different things and play them all in the same deck together. Next was... So we were trying to figure out what to do with our lands. We wanted to do something fun with the basic lands.

And I'm not sure who suggested this, but the idea of the Snowlands came up. So Snow was a mechanic that first showed up in Ice Age, the original Ice Age. There were the basic lands. Some of them were snow-covered lands. And there were certain cards that cared about how many snow-covered lands you had. Then in Alliances, although the designers did not intend it to be returned to Ice Age,

we made it that. In Development, we added in a little bit of Ice Age stuff, a little bit of snow. And then we made a set called Cold Snap, which was the joke of it was, it was the missing set. It was the lost set from the Ice Age block, because there were only two cards in the Ice Age block. So we went back. Turned out

there wasn't a lot of mechanics we could play off of. The ones that had been successful had become evergreen, and a lot of the other ones had not really aged well. So we ended up playing around with snow. We made snow a supertype, so not just lands had snow, but other things had snow. Creatures could have snow. Any permanent could have snow.

And then any permanent that had snow that produced mana, the mana was snow mana. And then we made a mana symbol for snow mana. And the idea is snow mana can be paid by any snow permanent that produces mana, that it has the quality of snow mana. It can pay snow costs. Now, it turns out that based on how Modern played out, Cold Snap is in Modern, and Cold Snap has snow-coverovered Lands and we had been aggressive with some of our Snow-Covered Lands cards or Snow-Covered cards

as far as things that cared about them and made them strong enough that in Modern, there are definitely decks that play Snow-Covered Lands. And the problem is the last time we made Snow-Covered Lands was Cold Snap,

which was many years ago. So there was a lot of requests for Snow-Covered Lands. And so we saw an opportunity here to make our basic lands snow-covered lands. We made them full art because we had never done that before. It would be sort of cool. And we put one in every booster. So barring shenanigans, there's one in every booster. We thought that would be kind of cool if some people wanted. And it could play into the theme. So I think we

centered the theme in green and blue, although it shows up in most, I don't think it shows up in red, but it shows up in Splash and Artifacts went black too. And so we made that something you could draft around as well as something you could build around. Obviously there's already snow stuck in the environment.

I think the reason we didn't put snow in red was all the strong snow cards are mostly in red, and we were trying to push you into a second color. I think the reason we didn't put snow in red was all the strong snow cards are mostly in red and we were trying to push you into a second color. I think that's what was going on. So the other theme that we played up, we made snow, we made a bunch of snow cover permanents, we made a bunch of snow mana. Oh, by the way, when you play,

I believe that you draft the lands because in order to get the snow covered lands, you have to draft them. You don't just get because in order to get the snow-covered lands, you have to draft them. You don't just get how many you want, I don't believe. I think you have to draft them. So anyway, it also added this little extra element to... We had something that was a fun, complex draft. This made it a little more complex. Hey, okay, this audience is signing up for complexity,

so we thought that was okay. The other thing we played around with was lands in graveyard. This is a red-green theme that we thought that was okay. The other thing we played around with was lands in graveyard. This is a red-green theme that we found that between a bunch of different mechanics that we had, that there's just a bunch of things that ended up getting stuff in your graveyard, especially lands, and so we ended up making this little theme. It's a weird theme. It's the kind of theme that only works because we're doing quirky stuff, and we have access to a lot of old mechanics.

So that was a theme we stuck in red-green. So there's a lot of... The other thing that we did do is the set is very high in synergy. Because of the nature of the way we made the set, the set has a lot more one-of build-arounds than normal just because

just having a higher complexity level let us sort of push more there. And so one of the things we did with this set is we wanted to make this a set that had a lot going on that you really could have fun drafting it, and so we embedded a lot of very open-ended cards and made sure it was high synergy.

So there's a lot of... This is the kind of set you can draft and you can I'm telling you themes, there's linear strong themes that you can play but also there's a lot of mixing and matching and doing cool things oh, speaking of mixing and matching

so something that I tried to do more of there ended up being three mix and match cards so mix and match cards are cards with two different keyword abilities that aren't evergreen. FutureSight did a whole bunch of them. I tried to do more of them. They're tricky to make, and they're very wordy and complex, and some of them are hard to fit on the card. We ended up making three of them, so there's a little bit of mix-and-match. Probably, like I said, I wasn't in charge. If I was in charge,

I would have up the mix-and charge I would have I made a lot I designed a lot of mix and match cards in fact one of my favorite that I did was I made a cycle where I mix and matched Ravnica, it was Ravnica and guilds and I mix and match two different guilds, the problem was

I wasn't allowed to use the newest ones because it was past Dragon's Tarkir and not all the old ones were so it didn't quite work out I think hopefully if we ever make another

set where I have access to newer stuff anyway it was a fun cycle like it was anyway we didn't end up making it

but it was a cute cycle mixing and matching guild mechanics I thought it was fun anyway I did make a lot of mixed and matched up but due to the nature of a whole bunch of different things, a few made it in a set.

Not as many made it as I would like. And the last thing is we really pushed our nostalgia button hard. Design really went to town on it at every level.

Creative was on board. The artists were on board. The thing about the set that's a lot of fun is that it is, like I said, I'm a historian of magic. And I'm a historian of magic design. I'm a historian of magic cards. It is a blast to make a set like Time Spiral or like Modern Horizons because as somebody who really really loves magic and loves sort of the history of magic

it is fun to sort of dive into the mud and start making stuff and so this really was a I mean we make all our sets with lots of love. But so the story I'm going to tell is, so we do a slideshow. The slideshow, basically, we have meetings every week. And so every once in a while, we'll do a slideshow.

Slideshow happens near the end of the process. It's right before we're about to hand off. Editing's about to hand off to Caps to print it. And so we're, it's like a last chance for everybody to see the cards in their final form. So with real names, with real art, with real

flavor text, with templating. This is what we mean the card to look like. Now, we also take notes at this meeting. Sometimes last minute change will happen because of the meeting. But anyway, we watched that at the end of the slideshow, there was a standing ovation. Now, I've been in a lot of slideshows over a lot of years. It is the first time we've ever had a standing ovation at a slideshow.

Oh, and the other story is somebody, one of our new hires, that was the first day they were in the office. And so like the first day, the first thing they go and see is this slideshow of a product they had never played. In fact, I don't think they knew much about. Like, oh, we're going to see a slideshow. Here's a product you know nothing about, you haven't played with. And as we were walking out of that, he said to me, he said, how did you get that made? How was that product made?

How did you greenlight that product? Who, he was just amazed that we had made it. That it was so just quirky and offbeat that, you know, he was, I mean, happily, but like, wow, how did you get that made? And the answer was just funny because as someone who, you know, there's so many products that I've struggled to get made and took years and years and years.

You know, there's a long list of I wanted to do thing X and it took me N years to get it made. And this product was like, we had an idea. We whipped up a proof of concept. And then, bam, we're off to the races. So this was the opposite. So in some ways it's funny. How'd you get to make it? This was like the least resistant product I've ever made.

And I think the reason for it was at least R&D got the spirit of what we were doing. I mean, it did take us a while to sell it externally outside of R&D, but R&D right away got it because we are all fans of the game. Like we are all the perfect audience for this product. So I think whenever we pitched it, the people we pitched to go, oh, that sounds awesome. And so everybody in R&D was very excited. There's a little more convincing

other people what we were trying to do. And it definitely was one of those products that like the average person outside of R&D didn't quite understand it at first blush. But as we did a little more detail and explained it, everybody else got very excited as well. So anyway, Modern Horizons. So I just showed up at work. That is the story of Modern Horizons. It was definitely a fun set to make. It was a blast to make. I hope you guys are having a blast playing it. I assume you are. As I record this, it's beginning of previews week. So, so far you guys are really enjoying the previews, so I'm assuming you'll really enjoy the

finner set. But anyway, that is the tale of Modern Horizons. It was definitely a fun set to make. The hackathon was an interesting experience. We've done more hackathons. I've done a whole podcast on hackathons. You want to hear about hackathons specifically. But I am now at work. So we all know what that means.

It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Oh, one quick copy at the end. I will be doing some Modern Horizons card-by-card stuff. Not right away. I probably will do a few other podcasts first, but I will get to that. So people that are excited for that, I have many stories to tell you. So anyway, ta-ta for now.

See you next time.