Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #675: Bolas Arc

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about us putting together the themes of three years' worth of sets that cover what we call the "Bolas Arc" (Kaladesh through War of the Spark).

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And I dropped my daughter off at camp. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the Bolas Ark. What we called Handlebar internally. Handlebar, I think, because Bolas is the villain and kind of the smart villain that would, you know, I don't know, handle his handlebar mustache. I think that's why it's called Handlebar. Anyway, I want to talk about the creation of the smart villain that would, you know, handle his handlebar mustache. I think that's why it's called handlebar. Anyway, I want to talk about the creation of the whole arc and how it came about and how we decided what sets we're going to do

and sort of how they change over time as we adapt it. Okay, so when we started, we knew that we were going to... We had already started the Gatewatch, so we had Magic Origins, we introduced the Gatewatch members, and then we had Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. We had Shadows over Innishrod. We had Eldritch Moon. So we had a chance to sort of get the team together

and then give them their first big sort of adventure. The idea was that then we were going to put them on a big scale story, and we had decided Doug Byer on the creative team had sort of been piecing the story together, and his big idea was we were going to go up against Nicole Bolas. That was going to be our villain.

He had been one of the major villains of Magic over the years, and we decided it was time to finally have a major Nicole Bolas story. We've had other stuff, but Nicole Bolas was always in the background, sort of doing things. But we wanted to sort of have him come more to the foreground and play a major role. And the idea that I think Doug had early on, we didn't know the details, but Doug knew the basic beats. And the basic beats was, in Act 1, the heroes think they're going to save the day, just like they saved the day on Zendikar, and they saved the day on Innistrad, and they get their butt kicked by Bolas. And then, it was going to end with a

giant war on Ravnica. So that was kind of Doug's vision of, that there was going to go up against Bolas, Bolas was going to defeat them, and it's going to require, you know, the largest collection of planeswalkers we've ever seen to stop Bolas. And it's going to be on Ravnica, because that felt like a place of great jeopardy. Like, you want to have a war on a place where you, the audience, are, you care about the place, so it means something.

And Ravnica is one of our most popular planes, if not the most popular plane we have. So we went into this knowing that it was going to be three years long, that it had to involve bolus, and that it ended with a giant planeswalker war on Ravnica. I think that's what we knew going in. So we didn't know a lot. I'm sorry, we knew some, but I mean, there was a lot still left open there. The idea was that we

would sort of figure out what made the best sets, and then Doug, working with the creator team, would figure out like, okay, how do we make that story make sense? How do we, you know, how do we build that story into the larger thing? And the other thing to remember is that there's always two stories to any one set. There is the Planeswalker story, which is the larger overarching story, in this case, the Gatewatch versus Bolas. And then there's a smaller story. What's the story about that world? And so what we needed to do was make sure we had worlds that both fit into the big story, had their own little story,

and also mechanically, my job was to make sure that it was about something that we thought players would enjoy. Okay, so with that in mind, like I said, we knew something, but not everything. We had a meeting in which, let's see, the meeting was me, Aaron Forsythe, a bunch of the representatives from the creative team. Doug was there. Jenna was there. So Doug Byer, Jen Helland. Might have been one more person from the creative team.

I'm trying to remember who else. Eric Lauer was there, sort of representing the development at the time. Now it's more set design-ish. Anyway, so we all got together. There were a few other people there as well. There were a bunch of people there. The idea was we wanted to present all the different possible worlds

that we could go to that we thought would be exciting for Magic. And then we would pick the ones we thought that would go together to sort of make the structure of this story. So one of the things we started with is we looked at returns. We said, where do we want to go back to? Okay, well, let's start with the one we knew.

We knew that the big final battle was going to be on Ravnica. So one of the things I said is, I think we could do a set all about a giant planeswalker war I wasn't quite sure how to make it work but I'm like okay I'll figure out how to make that work but I said the one thing I don't think I can do is

I don't think we both can do a set all about a giant war and have the normal guild set that we associate with Ravnica and so my pitch was I think what we need to do if we're going to have the final set piece on Ravnica, we need to go to

Ravnica first, get the guild stuff out of the way, and then have the last set be on Ravnica, but not so much be about Ravnica. That it would be this is the pitch I had of an event set. It's about something. That the set's not about where you are, it's about what's happening. And so the very first things we talked about is, okay,

what if the last, remember the time we were doing this, we were in the world of the large, small, large, small, two blocks a year. So we built this with large, small, large, small. That's how we built it. So the idea was, okay, the final year would be two blocks. One of the blocks would be two large sets. No, this was not, we hadn't got to the three-in-one model yet. So every set wasn't a large set yet. So we, the idea would be we'd have two blocks.

One block would be made up of two large sets. It would be special. That's the only block of the ones we were doing that would be like that. And the only reason we did two large sets is we needed to do five and five, mimicking how Return to Ravnica did the guilds. We could do five guilds and five guilds

if both were large sets. If they're small sets, we did 4-3-3 in original Ravnica. That's called large set, small set, small set. So we said, okay, in order to get it done in two sets, okay, the second set will have to be large, that's abnormal, we don't do that, haha, but that block will be two large sets, 5-5, just like Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash, just without a dragon's maze at the end. And the idea was the other set, which would also be set on Ravnica,

would be not about Ravnica but about the war, and that would be a large set and a small set. So one of the things we did when we named these... Oh, actually, I guess we named the second half. I think we had already named...

Anyway, the codenames. The codenames for the second and third year, so for... If you want to name the blocks Anyway, the codenames. The codenames for the second and third year. So if you want to name the blocks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So 1, 2 are the first year and the first act, if you will. Second year was 3 and 4, and that would be a second act. And then last year was 5 and 6. So I'm talking about 5 and 6 right now.

That 5 would be return to Ravnica, meaning a guild block. And then six would be the war. I think for three, four, five, and six, the codenames I gave them were all two-word codenames that were food. I don't remember that. So that was bacon and eggs. Or not bacon and eggs, ham and eggs, because bacon had already been used before as a codename. Soup and salad, spaghetti and meatballs, and milk and cookies.

So it was like breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack. I'm trying to remember what the... What we called Kaladesh and Amiket. I'm blinking right now. They had another name. Anyway, so the first thing we figured out was five and six, the last year. And we knew we wanted to go to Ravnica.

We knew that we wanted the big finale to be, like, going in, it's the one thing we kind of knew we wanted from a location was that we wanted the big dramatic finale to be on Ravnica. Now, there's a little bit of, when we first put this plan together, the idea of staying on Ravnica for a full year was a little, it met some resistance.

We had never done an event set before, so like the idea of well it's not about the place, it's about the thing, we had never done that before. And so there was a little bit of hesitance on, is that going to work and stuff. We managed to come back and sort of, as we pieced it all together, we eventually convinced the powers that be that it made sense.

But it did require some convincing on our part. Okay, the other return that we talked about, because we usually, when we talk, we block out stuff, we tend to talk returns first, because those are easier to understand. You know, when you're doing a brand new thing, it's like, oh, how's this going to work? But when you're doing

a return, you know what it is. You're doing a return. The one nice thing about doing returns is they have an identity. You know what they are. Interestingly, the one other return we wanted to talk about, which was Dominaria, we didn't know. It wasn't as clean and easy. Like, if we're going to go back to which was Dominaria, we didn't know. It wasn't as clean and easy.

Like, if we're going to go back to Ravnica, well, we've got the guilds, and it's multicolored. They're just things we understand that represent what Ravnica is. The problem with Dominaria was that Dominaria, it had been on like 30 sets. The first 10 years of Magic, all but a handful of sets were on Dominaria. So, it didn't have a singular identity. We like our planes to have a singular identity. Innistrad is the gothic horror plane. Ravnica is the guilds, city of guilds. You know, Theros is inspired by Greek mythology. Each of the worlds had a flavor to it. And Dominaria,

because it had been so many different things, like, it had been the Ice Age, so it was snowy. Or it had been the jungle. It had been Mirage. Or it had been post-apocalyptic. It had been so many different things that it was hard for it to have an identity. But we knew that the 25th anniversary was coming up, and that 4, Block 4, landed, overlapped with the 25th anniversary was coming up, and that four, block four, landed, overlapped with the 25th anniversary. So we're like, okay, this seems like a golden opportunity. We talked about going back to Dominaria.

We knew we had to solve the problem, but we're like, okay, we've got to solve the problem, but we've got to solve it eventually. We're not never going back to Dominaria. And so we tagged it as to be block four. And we said, okay, you know, the task of this is to figure, like, every block had some task. Five was go back to Ravnica and be Ravnica. I mean, we wanted to fit it into the story. And so the challenge of that was kind of how to make it totally different. The challenge of block six was what is an event set? We're having a planeswalker war. How do you have a planeswalker war? What does that mean?

The challenge of four was we're going back to Dominaria. We wanted to reinvent Dominaria like a modern-day plane. How do we do that? What is Dominaria about? If it's about everything, then it's about nothing. So we had that on our plate to figure out what exactly Dominaria represented and what it was. Okay, so now we had done 4, 5, and 6. And 4, 5, and 6 were all returns. They were all unknown existing planes. And one of the things we try to do in general is be about 50-50 between new planes and old planes.

So that said to us, okay, well, since three of our planes are returns, let's make the other three new. So we decided to make one, two, and three new planes. That was the plan. Now, one of the planes we've kind of signed ourselves up for, in Magic Origins, one of the things we decided to do was show the plane of origin for each of the Gatewatch, the five, at least the initial five. I know Liliana joined, four of them

started in Oath of the Gatewatch and Liliana joined very soon thereafter. Those were the basic five that we had previewed in Magic Origins. Liliana was from Dominaria. Obviously we'd be visiting Dominaria. Jace was from Vryn. Nissa was from Zinaria. Obviously we'd be visiting Dominaria. Jace was from Vryn. Nissa was from Zendikar. Gideon was from Theros. And we introduced a brand new plan. I mean, Vryn wasn't... We hadn't

seen much of Vryn. Vryn had showed up on a plane chase card, I believe. So the name Vryn was known. But for Chandra, we had a very distinct idea based on her name and her costume and sort of the kind of world she came from. So we had to make it up. It wasn't a known thing yet. So we decided, we'd always talked about doing a steampunk world, and I think Jeremy had this idea for kind of, normal steampunk is dark and dirty

and Victorian. So we decided to go a different route to make it sort of bright and instead of being sort of more Victorian, have a little more of an Indian feel. I mean, Shondra's name and stuff sort of hinted at this. So the idea was, our joke about it was, it was steampunk. No steam, no punk. Yeah, steampunk without the steam, without the punk. So the idea was

it was a little more upbeat. It was something that was going to be an artifact theme, but a little bit more constructive. A little bit more about a happy world. And we knew we were doing a lot of stuff. We were coming off of Innistrad.

And Innistrad we knew was going to be pretty dark, and so we liked the idea of having some brighter worlds happening. So we didn't know quite when and where we were going to Kaladesh, but we knew we wanted to go to Kaladesh. So that was one of the planes we had kind of signed up for. We really liked, and in Magic Origins, we had spent a little bit of extra time on Kaladesh because we really kind of, when we, a lot of the initial work we did on it, we really liked the look of it. And so we decided we were going to go to Kaladesh. So Kaladesh, going to that meeting, we kind of knew we were going to go to Kaladesh. We had done

some work up front working on Magic Origins. And so we kind of had audible that we were going to go to Kaladesh. So that was the one new world we kind of knew. The other two, we really didn't know at the time. I mean, so we had to go through a bunch of ideas. So basically what happened is we put up a whole bunch of ideas up on the wall. Some of them were inspired by creative decisions. Some were inspired by design decisions. Just what is the inspiration for a world? So one of the ideas that was up on the wall was a top-down Egyptian world.

It had been something we had talked about for a long time. For example, Kamigawa. We, when we first were making it, Bill wanted to do a top-down world. So, I mean, Arabian Nights was top-down, but the first top-down block was Champions of Kamigawa. It made some mistakes, but I mean, that was the intent of it. And one of the big decisions early on was what to do top-down, and Bill had narrowed it down to two choices, and it was Japan, Japanese-inspired, or Egyptian-inspired.

And we ended up going with Japanese. But Egyptian was runner-up. We'd always known we wanted to do an Egyptian-inspired plane. There's a lot of neat iconography, and so we knew we wanted to go there. The trick really was, how do we do it in a way that could bring it to magic? One of the questions we always have in any set is, how do we tie it to magic in some way that makes it inherently what magic's about? and he said is, how do we tie it to magic in some way that makes it inherently what magic's about? So one of the ideas was, since we knew that Bolas was going to be the main villain,

we wanted to introduce Bolas. I mean, not that the audience didn't know him, but not everybody knew him, and he hadn't been around for a little while, so we wanted to kind of reintroduce him. And so one of the things we were looking for was a world that really could introduce Bolas to the audience. And the idea we got early on was the idea of what if we mixed top-down Egyptian with sort of top-down Bolas. That we felt like Bolas wanted to have this hint of cruelty and of manipulation. And it just felt like it matched kind of a lot of stuff we wanted for Top Down Egypt. There was a harshness to Egypt. I mean we were

trying to capture Egypt in the height of like not, one of the things that Jeremy was the art director at the time, Jeremy Jarvis was that we didn't want to do a dead Egypt. We didn't want to do like the civilization's dead and we're like going through tombs and seeing

a civilization that once was. We wanted to be during the heightened civilization. It's alive and bright and vibrant and living Egypt is how I think Jeremy called it. But the idea of mixing and matching that with Bola seemed very cool. So we liked the idea

of that. And then our final one is something that Jenna had come up with. So Jenna, we had done a thing where people had pitched different world ideas. And so Jenna had been inspired by this idea of conquistador vampires. That what if there are these vampires from the old world that travel to a new world and that they were trying to, they were looking for new blood, quite literally.

And anyway, the idea was we had never really done a set that had any South American flavor at all. And so I think she had sort of a Mesoamerican flavor and she had the idea of these vampires. And originally what she pitched, it was a two-sided conflict. It was the vampires versus the natives, essentially, was how it originally got pitched. There weren't, yes, pirates. There weren't dinosaurs.

Those would come later. And so she really liked the looks of this and the team was very excited by the visuals of it. So they turned to me, you know, Aaron turned to me and goes, okay, Mark, can this work? Is this mechanically something? So I said to Aaron, I go, okay, well, here's an idea. First off, instead of doing a two-sided conflict, because we had done Oath of the Gatewatch, we had done Battle for Zendikar, and that, and Oath of the Gatewatch,

and that had been a two-sided conflict. I'm like, we had just kind of done a two-sided conflict. Could we do a three-sided conflict? And Jen's like, okay, probably we could come up with a third faction. And I said, if we do a three-sided conflict, and if we can make the flavor about fighting for resources, something

I've been wanting to try for a long time is in Vampire the Eternal Struggle, the trading card game, Richard had made a mechanic called the Edge. And the idea of the Edge was that you were fighting for resources. It was something that would move from person to person. There's only one Edge, and people would fight

over it, and if you had the Edge, it gamed you, you had an ability in the game, gave you a tactical advantage in the game. And so the idea was, I thought the Edge could be an interesting mechanic to space. What if there was something where you, the players, gave you a tactical advantage in the game. And so the idea was, I thought the edge could be an interesting mechanic to space. What if there was something where you, the players, were fighting over a resource? And it's like, oh, well,

if the flavor of the creative is there are people fighting over a resource, and you know, I thought that could match up. And so we signed off on it. Okay, now the question is the order of things. We've kind of locked the first... Four, five, and six were kind of locked

because four needed to be when our 20th anniversary was. So it was in that spot. And the Ravnica sets needed to be next to each other and they needed to be the end because it was the end of the story. So four, five, and six were kind of locked. So we had Ixalan and Amonkhet and Kaladesh. I think the idea is we decided to start with Amonkhet

because we wanted to introduce Bolas. We're like, okay, so we'll come, we'll meet Bolas, then we decided we would go to Kaladesh and that the loss at the hands of Bolas was going to happen on Kaladesh originally. Uh, and then, um, um, they were going to end up in, um, Ixalan. Um, and one of the original ideas, I think in the early part of the story, was somehow they ended up, I forget the story

conceit, but somehow they ended up on Amonkhet. It was made in Bolas's image, but Bolas wasn't there. But they sort of stumble upon he has something about a

plan that they're trying to piece together. And the one thing that Chandra recognizes is there's something from Kaladesh. She realizes that he's doing something on Kaladesh. And so that leads them to Kaladesh. And then on Kaladesh, Bolas defeats them. And then out of that defeat comes, Jace gets injured and ends up on Ixalan. But then we realized that it made more sense that Bolas' sort of,

that the end of the first act, I mean, where Bolas is triumphant, should be on Egypt rather than on Kaladesh. So the idea is we swapped it, where they go to Kaladesh for the reasons, whatever. I mean, we needed to come up with the reasons. We ended up coming up with the reasons. But they go to Kaladesh, the reasons, whatever. I mean, we needed to come up with the reasons. We ended up coming up with the reasons.

But they go to Kaladesh. And then on Kaladesh, they learn about Bolas and Amonkhet. And then the idea was, that we liked a lot, was we had just done a year where, you know, we see the Gatewatch. They get together, they stop the two Eldrazi on Kaladesh, not Kaladesh, on Zandakar, and they travel to Indusrod, and they stop for the last, or they thought they stopped for the last

Eldrazi, and it felt like, ah, they were victorious. And so we're like, oh, well, this year they'll go to Kaladesh. Oh, no, Bolas is there. And it'll feel like, oh, now we've got to go and defeat Bolas. And we thought people would think of it as being a one-year thing because we weren't going to tell you that we were making a three-year story. We were just going to make a three-year story. We weren't advertising it was a three-year story. And so the idea was we thought that people were like, oh, well,

last year they sort of wrapped everything up in a year. so this year they'll wrap everything up in a year. And the idea is, we thought the audience would think, oh, and they go and they'll defeat Bolas. And then Bolas defeats them. We're like, what? We thought that was nice. So the way it worked was, we were actually about halfway through Exploratory. This is back when Exploratory was like six months long. We were halfway through Exploratory on This is back when Exploratory was like six months long. We were halfway through Exploratory on Amonkhet when we decided to audible and swap Kaladesh on Amonkhet. And so Kaladesh got a limited, only got, I mean, it's funny, now we do three months of Exploratory. By the time, it only got half a normal allotment. Although in that time, we managed to sort of figure out what

we wanted to do with energy. We started on the path of doing vehicles. We got a lot done in the Exploratory for Kaladesh. So anyway, the challenge of Kaladesh was trying to do an artifact set that just felt different from other artifact sets. The challenge of Amonkhet was going to be, how do we make something feel Egyptian but also feel Boaz? And the challenge of Ixalan was how do we work the edge mechanic and how do we make three-sided conflict over resources. The challenge of

Dominaria is how do we make Dominaria feel like a modern day setting. The challenge of the first Ravnica was how do you imbue the story into Ravnica while doing a guild set? And the challenge of the final block was how do you do an event block? How do we make a Planeswalker war? How do we do that? So what happened was...

So once we started cementing it into place, Doug then went back and sort of started piecing together a larger story. Why would, what would Bolas need, like, he really wanted something from each world that Bolas needed, was kind of the way he played it out. So Kaladesh would end up having the Planar Bridge, and then from Amonkhet there would be the Eternal, the zombie army, and then from Amonkhet, there would be the Eternal, the zombie army. And then from

Ixalan, it would be the Eternal Sonic, it's called. And then from Dominaria, it would be Liliana herself. And then he shows up in Ravnica, and then we have the payoff. So the idea was, each set would have been built with small stories.

So the idea for Kaladesh we liked a lot was in the story when Chandra sparked she sparked on her home world some great traumatic event was happening and then she went away, she sparked and she hadn't gone back since

now she was under the belief that her parents were both killed and so now we behind the scenes, knew that her mother had not died. And so part of the story was a chance. At some point, we had sort of been saving, oh, there's a, you know, Shana gets reunited with her mother. And so what we did is we set the story in motion. And got them to... Sorry, to... Yeah, sorry, Kaladesh. Kaladesh, sorry.

And then we had a story there all about Chandra coming home for the first time and realizing her mom's there. And then we created a conflict within the world of Kaladesh. There was an internal conflict, which was sort of the government versus the people and sort of... One of the things that I latched on very early, something that Doug had created, was the idea of a fair. There was an

inventor's fair. So I really liked the idea. Something that I had been pushing when we started in exploratory design was, I liked the idea that it was an artifact set, but rather than be sort of an artifact matter set, it was more about a combo-ish set. Sort of a Johnny Jenny-ish set. And the idea I liked is feel like an inventor.

Yeah, we're going to take artifacts and do one of the things artifacts do well, which is make weird and quirky things to build around. I like the idea of making a set that just leaned a little more toward the Johnnies and Jennies of the world and just make,

you know, one of the things artifacts can do really well is just make cool and weird artifacts and what can I do with this? And the idea was it was an inventor's fair

and all those people inventing weird and strange things and so that was kind of the impetus behind what we wanted to do with Cowlidish. We wanted to obviously

introduce Chandra's world and there was a lot of components we wanted to bring up. And like I said, we'd done some work in Magic Origins to sort of set the world up, but we did a lot more once we knew we were going there. So that was Kalash's task. Kalash's task was sort of, you know, present Chandra's home world,

make a set that's all about invention, and just make an artifact set that's a little bit more about building weird and fun decks and a little less about just play every artifact you can. Okay. Amonkhet then began this challenge of, what does it mean to be topped on Egypt? What does it mean to be topped on Bolas? And what we did is we made this little chart where he said, what's everything that you expect to be that is Egypt? What's everything you expect to be

that is Bolas? And where's the overlap? We're doing a little Venn diagram where oh, well, the harshness of the desert matched kind of the harshness of Bolas. Oh, maybe there's something. And so we mapped it all out. We figured out that we wanted the place to be something that the plane watch, the gate watch, the plane watch, the gate watch saw at, like the gate watch realized that there was something wrong, but nobody who lived there did. So we compared it to, there's a movie called The Stepford Wives about this

couple that moves to this town. And the idea is there's just something wrong about the town. And the idea is, there's just something wrong about the town in that the outsider perspective is, oh, people aren't just, aren't quite acting right. There's something a little off. We like that idea that the gate crash comes. And remember, they come to save the day. They think they're coming to save

the people of Amonkhet. And people of Amonkhet are like, we don't need to be saved. We're happy. And then they realize that, you know, and we love the idea that there's a lot of, a lot of the key of Egypt is the idea of gods and worshiping gods and stuff. And they go, what if the lead god was Bolas? Bolas had set himself up as the head, the lord of the gods.

And we thought that was interesting and compelling. And so we did a lot of stuff to try to build around that. And, I mean, there was a bunch of different things. Part of it was us just doing a lot of tropes. There's zombie tribal. There's embalming. There's deserts. There's you're building pyramids.

You know, we tried to figure out all the tropes you would expect from an Egyptian set. Then, we also wanted to make sure that we got a sense of the Bolas part of it, which is, we had exert, and we had, you know, there's some harshness. There's trials, and they're, you know, like, the world that Bolas has set up is a very harsh world. And the, even though the people of the world have kind of bought in on it, because that's their world, to an outsider perspective, it's like, what is going on here? Like, people are fighting in these challenges. And then the reward if they win is they honorably die. Like, what? What's going on? We also knew we wanted to have gods because we were doing Egypt and Egypt's mythology are tied to gods. And so we wanted to have gods because we were doing Egypt, and Egypt's mythology very tied to gods,

and so we wanted to make up our own gods. Anyway, so we spent a lot of energy sort of carving that out, and we also, like I said, we knew some of the story notes. We knew that the Gatewatch was going to get defeated, so we made a cycle of defeat cards, and we mapped all that out. Ixalan ended up being one of, I don't know, there are a bunch of sets here that definitely were challenges. The problem we had with Ixalan was I had set it up to be a three-faction set

all about the edge mechanic, fighting over resources. Well, before we started doing Ixalan, Sean Main had started working on Conspiracy Take the Crown, which was the second conspiracy set. And so he came to me and said, you know, we have an idea for a mechanic,

a monarch, that sounds very similar to what you want to do for Ixalan. Is it okay if we explore this? So I said to him, okay, well, here's what we're going to do. I'll start up Explorer for our design. We'll test the mechanic and see how well it plays in two-player. You test and see how well it plays in multiplayer,

and then we'll regroup. But I said, make sure you have a backup, because if it works really well for two-player, we're probably going to use it for two player. We sell a lot more cards in the big sets than we do the supplemental sets. So Sean said okay. So what happened is

we go off do exploratory design. It works pretty well. I'm really happy with it. Sean comes back and he says oh it works amazingly well in Conspiracy 2. And I go, well, it worked really well in Exploratory. I think we're going to need it for Ixalan. And he's like, no, no, no, no. I tried other things. I tried to get backups and nothing else

was working. Like, this is the thing that worked. And nothing else worked nearly as well. In the end, Aaron felt pretty strongly that Ixalan had time. Conspiracy didn't have time. Let Conspiracy use the resource. The thought was it lent itself so well to multiplayer play. Just let Conspiracy use it and we would, you know, he's like, you have the whole vision design, or it wasn't even vision design yet. You have all the design.

You'll figure it out. So I started, so remember when I said there were two factions, there needed to be a third faction? So I said to the creative team there needs to be a third faction. They ended up choosing to make the third faction pirates, a pirate faction. And in working on trying to flesh out the natives, they ended up giving them dinosaurs. And so I realized at some point that we had two tribes

that people were being very excited about that we had never done before. Or hadn't done in large volume. I guess we had done dinosaurs and pirates. but never tribal. Never in a way that you could build the dinosaur deck or that pirate deck. And then I made the pitch of, instead of having three, one of the things I had

done for concept arc here is we'd made a structure that was three color, three color, two color, two color. That was four factions, and between them hit all five colors. And I realized we had two factions that people were going to be extra excited about, so we ended up making a four-faction set and made dinosaurs and pirates

the bigger, the three-color parts of the factions. Anyway, once I realized that, it made me realize that we wanted to go tribal. That we were going to make a tribal set. Now, one of the dangers of coming up so late with tribal is, tribal works best when everything around it is working in harmony

with it, but part of what we were doing was introducing two tribes we'd never used before, or very, very frequently, which was pirates and dinosaurs. We knew it'd be hard to sneak too many in ahead of time, since we didn't want to advertise what we were doing. We ended up, the other two were vampires and merfolks, so we were able to sneak a little bit, but because we had come to the decision late, like a lot of world building had been

done around us, there just weren't vampires and merfolk necessarily around. And we had a, I think we had a fight to get some vampires in Kaladesh, but one of the issues of it being tribally focused was we didn't end up getting quite the support because it was later in the process.

It's much better early on to know when you're doing tribal just because you can build it into the worlds around it. But anyway, we figured out what we wanted to do with Ixalan. Like I said, it went through a lot of changes and what the factions were. Like, for example, early on the native faction was so early on there was the pirates, there was the vampires, the native faction was... So early on, there was the pirates,

there was the vampires, and there was sort of the native faction. And then we gave the native faction dinosaurs. It was like, okay, well, there's dinosaurs, and there's vampires, and there's pirates. But we realized the color balance was wrong. I just couldn't do it with three, so I convinced them to let me go to four.

And my back pocket had the four color structure that I originally used for cons. Straight behind that, I mentioned this, but Khazatarkir, when I first started, had four factions. So there were two threes and two twos. Then the creative team came back and said, oh, we have a really cool idea for a fifth faction. I'm like, well, we have a really cool idea for a fifth faction. I'm like, well, we're going to do five factions. Now you're getting into color wheel territory. It's hard to do five factions and not tie to the color wheel.

And we had never done a wedge set. I'm like, okay, I guess we'll do a wedge set. We went down that path and made a wedge set. So, Ixalan took a while, but we figured that out. Dominaria was also challenging. One of the things we were trying to spend a lot of time on in Exploratory was what has Dominaria represented before. And one of the things we played into that we really liked was the idea that Ravnica,

that it was very much obsessed with its own past. And that we liked the idea that you're seeing remnants of things that happened there, that there were events that happened that were big and grandiose, and as an offshoot of that, there were just things that became incorporated into what Dominaria was. And we liked the idea a lot that Dominaria was a little bit obsessed with its past, or a lot obsessed with its past. And a lot had happened on Dominaria because we had been there so many times and so many stories happened. Like the Ice Age happened and there was a war that led to the post-apocalyptic and there was

the invasion of the Phyrexians, and a lot had happened. And so after messing around with it, we came to the idea of, well, one of the things that's really interesting is the history, that they care about their history, because the setting has a lot of history,

so we felt that matched, and it allowed us to do a lot of nostalgia, where the audience could look back at the past of Dominaria just like the inhabitants would look back. So we fleshed that out. Now, it wasn't until Vision, sagas and historic kicker, all that got done during Vision. But we managed to figure out, coming out of exploratory, kind of this nugget of, what if history matters. And then we spent a lot of time

in vision figuring out how to make history matter. One of the troubles we ran into was the thing, the lowest hanging fruit was carrying with the graveyard, but Amonkhet had carried with the graveyard right before it, or I mean, Amonkhet was a year earlier, but it was still in standard. And then also right before that we had done we went back to Innistrad and then also had a Graveyard component. So we're like, well, we don't, there's only so much Graveyard components we can have

consecutively or near each other. But anyway, we figured that out. We ended up, you ended up using batching as a tool, figuring out how to make sagas to bring stories to life. We did a bunch of stuff to really bring out that, and that obviously ended up being successful. For the two Ravnica, the Guild of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance, once we understood the story, once the Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. Once we understood the story, once, you know, we realized that it was all about

Bolas, oh, real quickly, story-wise, Doug had figured out that there's an object that the Eternal Sun, that Bolas needed, and that Jace being there injured and not having his memory as an offshoot of what had happened in the end of the first act

where he defeated them. But then also it would be a place where Jace would learn stuff that would be important in defeating Bolas. Then we go to Dominaria where we see people gathering and trying to learn more information about Bolas. And it just leads into

he needed... Bolas needed Liliana and so we had to play out that story. Now, you didn't realize that Liliana and his demons played into the story, but it did. And so the end of that story, then now Bolas comes up. Turns out that when she kills her last demon, Bolas, the writer of the contract, now has control of her. And if she doesn't go with him, she will die. So he sort of has control of her because she fears death. So, you know, he needs her to control the zombie army.

She's a necromancer, so that'll peace that. We knew with Ravnica, the guild sets, that we wanted this backdrop. We loved the idea that Bolas is slowly taking over Ravnica, but he's doing it politically because he's a mastermind. He's a puppet master. And so the idea is some guilds were falling to him, some weren't. Doug had come up with this idea that there were five planeswalkers representing the five guilds. And when I say Doug, it might have been other people on the creative team, but Doug oversaw the story.

The idea that there would be five planeswalkers representing the guilds that Bullets was over to take control over, and that each one had a planeswalker on it. We had to do a lot was over to take control over, and that each one had a planeswalker on it. We had to do a lot of stuff to set that up to figure out who the blue-white one was going to be, so we placed Dovin in Kaladesh. Who the black-white was going to be, we placed Kaia

in Conspiracy 2. Both Brawl and Domri were already on Ravnica. And who was the last one? Oh, and Vraska. Vraska was also on Ravnica and who was the last one? Oh, and Vraska. Vraska was also on Ravnica, so we used three of the native Ravnican

Planeswalkers and then we had to make up two more to sort of fit them in. Then we got to the final one, which in some ways I mean, each one had their own challenges. Ixalan had its challenges and they all had their challenges. Dominaria definitely at point was own challenges. Ixalan had its challenges, and they all had their challenges. Uh, Dominari definitely, at point, was very difficult. Um, I think that the, the War of the Spark was the one that I, it took me the longest to solve. Like, I felt

like I walked out of Exploratory having some sense of what Dominari was doing, and, uh, early vision, I figured out what Amaket was, not Amiket, what Ixalan was up to. It took me, I don't think we really stumbled upon the idea of all the planeswalkers about halfway through. And vision design for World of the Spark, based on, under the old system, was six months. Once we went to the three-in-one system, it changed to four months, so I could do four, four, four. By the time, there were two blocks, two mini blocks, so I would do six and six. Anyway, we tried a whole bunch of other things. I tried the idea

of games that got layered over. Sort of like an event set maybe played differently in that there was this game that was overlaid. And I liked the idea of a battle. And we tried a bunch of stuff. But in the end, I realized that Planeswalker War was less about the war and more about

the planeswalkers. So we, um, we, we adopt, we, we, then we, the problem we were solving, we figured out we wanted to solve was how do we have a lot of planeswalkers? Uh, and then we came up with uncommon planeswalkers and rare planeswalkers and the idea of using static abilities and how to use hybrid. And, um, you know, we, We had a lot to solve. So we really went all in on figuring out how to make the planeswalkers work. And obviously we did.

So the interesting thing about this is when we put together the whole arc, I mean, it's funny, when I look back to the day we had that big meeting where we started mapping everything out. Um, we, I mean, we did, I mean, we, while we swapped Amiket and Kaladesh, I mean, we did the, the six, the six blocks that we ended up doing, we, that we all picked that day. So that one offsite that we did, you know, we, we did map everything out and, um, there were things that changed. We changed the order of some stuff.

Obviously Ixalan's mechanical identity changed quite a bit. We had definitely thrown our, like, part of what we had done is, there's some big problems to solve. Eh, we'll solve it. How do you make Dominaria feel like a normal, like a normal modern magic plane? Eh, we'll figure it out. How do you have a planeswalker war when you only get three mythic rare planeswalkers? Eh, we'll figure it out. You know, there definitely was a lot. One of the things that when we had set that up was it wasn't that we solved everything. We just came up with what we thought was cool

and said, you know what? If we are aiming for cool stuff, you know, revisiting Dominaria on our anniversary, our 25th anniversary, sounds really cool. Let's just figure out how to make that work. You know, Chandra's home figure out how to make that work. Chandra's home plane seems like a really neat place. Let's really dive into that.

We've been wanting to do Egypt forever. People have been asking for Egypt forever. Let's finally figure out how to do Egypt and how to tie it to our story in a way that makes it a more iconic magic setting rather than just, it's just Egypt. You know, Ixalan was definitely one of, the creative team was inspired by a world that they, you know, what was this world going to be? What was it going to mechanically be? And we had to solve that. So like I said, there were a lot of,

we came up with things we knew people would like. We knew something that people would be excited by. And then we gave ourselves challenges to solve it. And that was the bull's arc. But like I said, we planned all three years of it. The basic outline of it was done on that one off-site. Yes, yes, lots and lots of work was done after that fact to understand how to make it work.

But it's interesting to say that literally like these three years, and these are the steps we're going to do. And these are the basic outlines of story and mechanics, um, that all got outlined in one day. So, um, and, uh, it's funny cause, um, the next batch of things wasn't quite as orderly when we get there. At some point, I'll tell the story of the next batch, but you, the audience,

haven't experienced it yet, so we'll... If you enjoy this one in a couple years, I'll get to tell the next story of the next batch of stuff that we've done. Also, it's funny, in my time, we're starting to actually

work on some stuff beyond that. Anyway, my goal of today is to make you see that there's a lot of structural work that happens and not all of it's figured out ahead of time. It is not as if we, the story was not like ironed down, and then, okay, what could this be? What could that be?

It was more like, we have a loose idea of the story we want to tell. Let's figure out the cool magic sets we want to make, and let's make us, you know, let's use those to reinforce our story, and then we kind of go back and forth until we get to a point where it seems supernatural. Like, well, how else could, you know,

I know, like, when you think about how can the first act end on anywhere else other than the Omnicat. Like, I was like, well, okay. We, you know, we made it sort of natural to what that was. If we had chosen to be different, the story would have worked differently. But there's a lot of nice back and forth between the mechanics and the creative. So that it all feels organic. And that's the stuff you want when the dust settles is it feels like, how else?

How else could you have done this? And that's a sign that we do something well when you feel like this had to be the way it is because it feels so perfect. That usually is a good sign that you've done some good work. Anyway, I am now at work. So I hope you guys enjoyed the jaunt through the bolus arc. A little insight in how we put that all together. But anyway, I'm now at work.

So you know what that means. We all know what that means. It's time to end my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.