Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #676: Lessons Learned – War of the Spark

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

This is another podcast in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about lessons from sets that I led or co-led the design for. This time, I talk about what I learned leading the design for War of the Spark.

I'm pulling away from the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped my daughter off at camp. Okay, so today is another in my Lessons Learned series. So this is where I talk about a set that I led or co-led the design for and I talk about all the lessons I learned from making it. So we are talking today about War of the Spark. So that was quite the learning lesson. So I recently did a podcast all about the Bolas arc, and so I talked a little bit about this, but we'll

go a little more in depth on War of the Spark. So, okay, we started because Doug Byer had made the outline for the story. And the ending of the story was a grandiose giant planeswalker war where the Gatewatch and many allies were taking on Nicole Bullis. And when Doug first pitched this idea, when we first pitched it, I remember saying to him as a writer, wow, that's exciting. That's an exciting ending to the story. That is a capper. It was a three-year story in the making, and we wanted a big, glorious ending. And I said, that really sounds cool. But as a designer,

as the guy who has to design this, I don't know how to do it. Normally in a set we have, you know, a normal, um, non-core set, we'll have three Mythic Rare Planeswalkers. And I'm like, I'm not sure how exactly, uh, you get Planeswalker War when I only get three Planeswalkers. Um, but I said, okay, we'll, we'll figure, we'll figure it out. Um, so when we first started making it, the thing I really latched onto was we talked about how it was an event set. Meaning, normally we focus on where we are. But this set, okay, the previous block, or the previous two sets, were basically going to be us doing normal Guild Ravnica. We've done Ravnica as you experience Ravnica. The fact that we're still here,

and remember when I started making this, this was going to be milk and cookies. It was going to be a large set and a small set. It ended up being just a large set. But when I started, it was both. And so I had a block worth of stuff to do, and I'm like, okay, well, what if it being an event meant that there was some game component that really

sort of overlaid onto the game? You know, something, I'd experimented with game components in Silver Border, and I'd messed with it in a few other sets, but we'd never made one. I'm like, okay, maybe here's a place to introduce this. It's a pretty radical concept. So the idea essentially is that you would, I think we called it skirmish. And so the way skirmish worked is you would start a skirmish. You brought up this card that told you how to have a skirmish. And then essentially there was, you started in the middle and you could go either direction depending on

the way a skirmish worked, it worked a couple different ways, but basically you would advance your skirmish whenever you dealt damage to the opponent, but only once per turn, so at the end of the turn, I think there was three things, is did I deal damage to my opponent? Did one of my opponent's creatures die? And was one of these spells played? Was a spell that started a skirmish played?

And for each of those, if the answer was yes, you advanced one space in that direction. And I think in order to win, you had to advance four spaces. But the idea was there was this tug-of-war. As you would try to advance on your opponent, they would try to advance on you. And there was this back and forth. And we messed around a lot with sort of different components of what it would be. But I really like the idea that, you know, you were having this game

that's kind of, there's this metagame going on within the game of you're fighting this battle. And that what you're doing in the game has, you know, matters. Now, we tried a bunch of different things with the skirmish cards. One of the ideas we tried was that there were different levels of the skirmish. So the idea, like, let's say there were four battles, because there are a certain number of battles in the story. So the idea is you start with the first battle, and that the winner of the battle would get something,

and then each battle, the stakes went higher, was the idea. So if you got through the first battle, someone got something, but that meant you started the second battle. So the idea is you battled as long as you could until the game ended, but each battle as you won, each skirmish as you won it, would reward the winner. Now, one of the problems we ran into is whenever you put something in your deck, but it could result in your opponent getting something, that's a hard thing to ask people to put in their deck.

Like, oh, I'll play this, but maybe it'll benefit my opponent more than me. And so we did a bunch of things. One of the reasons we triggered off you playing a skirmish was it meant at bare minimum when you brought it into play, you had an advantage that first turn. But it still was a challenge. There are a lot of different moving pieces to try to make it work. And so one of the lessons learned is, and this is something I don't talk too much about, is I learned a lot about this mechanic that we ended up not using. But magic's going to last a long time.

I'm going to make a lot of sets. Even though I learned lessons about this thing we didn't end up making, I learned lessons about it. You know, one of the lessons learned to this set was, here's another space that we can play in. We're not playing in it right now, but we could play in it. And that one of the things that's, you know, that's very important is to be aware that when you're working on a set, it's not just the current set you're working on. I mean, yeah, yeah, you're working on a set, it's not just the current set you're working on. I mean, yeah, yeah, you're working on the current set, but we discover things, and that those things later can come back.

I mean, like the classic example is Energy, for example, got made for Original Mirrodin. It ended up getting kicked out of Original Mirrodin. But we learned a lot about it, and it came back. You know, we tried it in a couple different places, and finally, we found a place to do it, which was Cowardish. So when you're working on something, you are learning things. Whether those things get applied right away, or whether they get applied later,

you know, there's a lot to be learned. The other thing that was really interesting is I approach the set very differently than I do most sets most sets is about an environment it's like oh okay we're at a place what is the place and how does it represent it and what are the features of the place and what about the place makes it different

where this set I really focused on the idea that we're telling a story like one of the things that was always in the front of my mind when we were designing War of the Spark was, there's a war. It's called War of the Spark. There's a war. There's a giant planeswalker war. How do we capture the idea that this grandiose thing is going on? And like I said, the interesting thing is when you start the process, you don't always know where you're going to end up.

And this, this is very, this is a very good example. Like one of the things I say to my, my designers, um, and it's a common mistake I see with young designers when they, when they start doing vision design is that they're afraid to commit. They sort of want to keep all avenues open. So they have like, there's three possible ways the set could go. Well, I'll straddle all three. And the correct answer is pick one. You got to pick one.

You got to commit. Now, sometimes you pick, you commit, and by going down that path, you realize it's the wrong path. That's exactly what happened with War of the Spark. I picked a path, I went down the path. I spent a lot of time on that path. We spent probably three months on that path. But in the end, I'm like, oh, this isn't doing what we want.

And that one of the traps is, the more time you spend on something, the more you feel like, well, I have to do it now. I've committed so much resources to it. And then it's really hard, like, when you try something and it doesn't work right off the bat, you're like, well, I have to do it now. I've committed so much resources to it. And then it's really hard, like, when you try something and it doesn't work right off the bat, you're like, ah, whatever, we tried it. But when you try something and it kind of works, and you adapt it and you really work on it, and it's something you spend a lot of time on, you're like, wow, I'm kind of committed now I've spent so much time on it. But the reality is, you have to figure out when it's working and when it's not. When you think it's working, you continue. When you realize it's not working, you got to move on to something

else. And the funny thing is the epiphany for me of War of the Spark was I always knew I had to have a certain amount of planeswalkerness to it. So one of the things that I had been while I was trying to do the main thing in the background, while I was trying to make skirmish work, I was also trying to figure out how to just get planeswalkers to show up in more volume. Um, so the first thing I did is I went and I talked to play design and said, okay, how many planeswalkers, you know, assuming we shave things around us, if the sets around us have two planeswalkers instead of three planeswalkers, if, you know, we push this one a little bit and just a little bit more, you know, the other idea I played around with is maybe all the planeswalkers in the set would represent planeswalkers teaming up, that there's no one single planeswalker. So,. So the idea was, well, what if we normally do three,

but if we scratch and push a little bit, maybe we can get up to like eight, and then maybe if all eight of them represent a team of planeswalkers rather than a single planeswalkers, then I get to represent 16 different planeswalkers. I was looking to figure out ways how, within the context of what we normally did, I could get across the idea of a lot of different planeswalkers.

The other idea that we had early on was what I end up calling the signature spells. The idea that just every planeswalker that's in the battle gets a spell that represents them. That's a spell they would cast. And the idea I liked about signature spells was it was another way to get planeswalkers in the set without having planeswalkers. So while all the skirmish stuff was going on, you need to figure out all that.

And there were other stuff going on as well. I mean, another challenge we had to figure out was how do we get the army? So there's an eternal army, right? That Bolas is bringing his zombie army from Amonkhet. So originally when we made Hour of Devastation, we made a mechanic for the eternals. Or what do we call it?

If you blocked it, they lost life if you blocked it. I'm licking on the name of it. But it would have a number. And then if you blocked it, they lost life. So the idea was, no matter what I'm getting through for some amount, you can decide whether you want to block me or not, but even if you block me, you're still losing a certain thing. And it portrayed a little bit of the ruthlessness of the Eternal Army and sort of their unstoppable. But the players didn't really take to it. It wasn't something, like, it was

functional, but it wasn't really splashy, and when we were talking about what to do with the army and War of the Sparks, like, ah, I mean, we tried this, and the intent was to carry it over and have it be the eternal thing. But it just wasn't that exciting, and I just didn't think it would be the kind of thing that people would be excited to see come back. So, I opted out of bringing it back. So, I mean, I guess there were two things

in our adaptation. There's Eternal Eyes, which was an embalmed variant, but we're not going to do an embalmed variant. And then there was the one with the do damage when it's blocked. Like what it was called. Anyway, so like while this all, I was also trying to figure out how to make the army work.

What do we do to make an army? Because one of the things that we were trying to solve is, an army has to feel like there's numbers, but also we want gameplay to be good. So one of the problems you normally have when you make tokens is, if you get too many tokens, it just kind of gums everything up. And so the idea we played with for a long time was they were one-one zombie soldiers, but if one attacked, they all attacked. If one blocked, they all blocked. The idea was they had to sort of function together.

So if you attacked with one of them, you had to attack of function together. So if you attacked with one of them, you had to attack with all of them. If you blocked with one of them, you had to block with all of them. And so it just made the tokens function a little bit differently. So my example is, let's say you have three 1-1s,

and your opponent has a 4-4. Normally, if I have a token deck, that means for three turns, I can chump block them, right? Every turn they attack with a 4-4, I block with a 1-1, and I solve them for three turns I can chump block them, right? Every turn they attack with a 4-4, I block with a 1-1. And I solve them for three turns. But now, under this system,

if they attack with a 4-4, I can block them once. Because if I block with one of them, I have to block with all of them. And then, okay, my 3-1-1s block your 4-4 and they all die. And your guy doesn't die, but I'm chump blocking. And it just, it really changed sort of

how they functioned. I liked it, I thought they were kind of cool, and I liked the idea of making tokens that had a relationship with one another. But in the end, Dave Humphries, who was the set lead, he felt that it was still causing problems, and so he asked us to

change. And then we got to a mass because we're like, okay, can we take a lot of the things we liked about the previous version of having it feel like they're working as a single unit and try to capture that flavor? And that's when we got the idea of, what if the internals, instead of being represented by a token, was represented by a plus-on-plus encounter? That the token represented the entirety of the army, and the army would grow and shrink based on sort of what you were doing.

And the idea there was, as you're amassing your army, your army is individually getting bigger, but it's one army. It's one sort of unit, and they have to function together. Amass was really sort of, we call it the conscript in design, was really trying to take what we had done before and adapt it a little bit so it worked better for play. And it ended up working really well. And I know I got some feedback on the idea of the army stacking vertical rather than going wide. I think people, the way we train them in general, think of armies as they go wide

with tokens. And so going tall, there's a little bit of expectations. Sometimes you have to sort of invent something new because you need it for the gameplay. And this is a good example. I think once people played it, I got a lot of feedback on the play. People like how it played. There's a little feedback on the expectation. But one of the things I've learned is that, you know, just because you do something one way doesn't mean you never do it another way. That part of branching out and doing

new mechanics and new things is, is expressing things in different ways. And so I know it was a little different than how we normally do it, but, um, part of finding good gameplay is pushing another direction. So, uh, end of the lesson. Um, anyway, so what I was trying to say is while it's not as if when we were trying to figure out how to make skirmish work that we weren't working on other things. We were trying to solve the zombie army problem. We were trying to solve the planeswalker problem. We were trying to make sure that we, oh, the other big thing that we wanted to hit was we were in a very unique situation, which was we were set on Ravnica, but we weren't beholden to Ravnica

in a larger sense. It wasn't a guild set. And what that meant was, one of the problems with guild sets is you have to kind of... everything has to be balanced. That you want an even number of each guild, and whenever you balance your gold cards and you balance like it is hard. Let's say for example you came up with a really cool vehicle for one of the guilds. It's very hard to just do one vehicle. The system sort of says oh well okay this is the vehicle for that guild. Show me the nine vehicles for the other

nine guilds. It really begets sort of cycles and things. And the nice thing about War of the Spark was, look, we're here, we're on Ravnica, we can reference Ravnica, but we're not a guild set. We don't have to worry so much about being in sync and stuff. And that was very freeing and allowed us to do, like, one of the things is legendary creatures, we've told a lot of stories in Ravnica.

There's a lot of characters that have never gotten a card that players want to get a card. Um, but normally when we structure things, we use the legends as a means to show off sort of the leaders and champions of the guilds. Well, let's say you have a character that's not a leader or a champion. Maybe not even necessarily in a guild. How do you show that? And War of the Spark gave us that opportunity. So,

one of the things we were constantly looking at is how to show off Ravnica in a way that made it feel like you're on Ravnica without having the limitations of being in a guild set. And that allowed us to make a whole bunch, we got to make a bunch of vehicles that we had talked about in the story, a bunch of characters we talked about in the story.

Oh, the other thing that we got to do, which is something we don't normally do in a guild thing, is the idea was Bolas and his army is destroying Ravnica. So you know who's working together to stop it? The guilds of Ravnica. So we had to have a chance to sort of show off the guilds in a way where you could see them working together. And that was one of my big goals is I wanted to find things that a Ravnica set traditionally can't show you. That was one of the things I said to my team.

I go, look, if this is something we can make in our fourth trip to Ravnica, I'll do it there. If this is something that's cool and Ravnican and something we've wanted to do, but it can't, it doesn't easily fit in a guild set, let's do it here. And so I really embraced the idea of doing Ravnica, but things you have trouble doing in a normal Ravnican set. And so that was an interesting lesson of sort of seizing opportunities. Like one of the big things about when you're making a set is what cards can you make that this is it. This is the set you can make those cards. And I always prioritize those cards because, look, my job is to save magic design space. Well, if there are cards that can be made in this set that can't be made in any other set, hey, hey, let's make them in this set.

Those are cards that would essentially never be used otherwise. And I'm not saying that you use all those cards, but I am saying that you want to focus on them and make sure you make space for them. And if I make a card that's a cool card, but you could put it in any set, well, then if you need to, I will cut those. I will cut a really neat universal card for a very specific makes sense in this set card, because that universal card, I will have lots of sets to make it. This very narrow, specific card, I don't.

And once again, I mean, there's a mix of things. I mean, you want to make sure you don't have too many things that are narrow and stuff, so it's not as if the general card doesn't sometimes win the day. But I really do look out for that specific thing. So I was very eager to find Ravnikan but not Guild Ravnica cards. We had a bunch of those. And like teaming up cards. That was unique to the story that you're not going to see probably in most Ravnikan guilds and stuff.

going to see probably in most Ravik and Gilk and stuff. So here's the big lesson is I was working on solving a lot of different problems. When I say I, I mean my team was working on it. But the biggest problem I was running into was I wasn't quite capturing what I wanted. I wasn't quite, like, one of the things I wanted was... We're having a giant war, and what I wanted was the player to go, oh my god, it feels like we're in a giant planeswalker war. And the skirmish said war,

and it did feel like you're in a war, but I just couldn't communicate the planeswalkers. It just wasn't really... And that's when I realized that I was making planeswalker war. And what players would expect is planeswalker war. So then I said... I just remember one night, I just was thinking about this. I came to the next day and Peter was my strong second.

I said to Peter, I go, Peter, we got to have planeswalkers. We just got to figure out how to make it happen. Because I said, if I told you there was a war of planeswalkers, there's almost every planeswalker you know fighting a giant war, what would you expect to be in the set? And the answer was, planeswalkers. So the answer became, okay, I want to have a lot of planeswalkers. What do I need to do to make that happen?

That was the big leap. Was once I accepted, like early on, I was trying to figure out how to get planeswalkers in the context of how we normally make a set. And finally, I'm like, okay, what makes this set not a normal set is it's a giant board of planeswalkers. So how do we get planeswalkers in the set?

So it meant a couple things. One is the As fan. I needed more than 15 planeswalkers in the set? So it meant a couple things. One is, the Az fan, I needed more than 15 Planeswalkers. There were 15 Rare cards. Sorry, Mythic Rare cards. They couldn't all be Mythic Rare. And once I realized that not only did I want it to show up in the constructed play,

hey, I wanted limited play to be about Planeswalkers, that's when I realized that I not only needed Rare Planeswalkers, we needed uncommon Planeswalkers. That's when I realized that I not only needed rare Planeswalkers, we needed uncommon Planeswalkers. We had to solve that problem. How do you make uncommon Planeswalkers and rare? I was less worried about rare. I really felt you could take a mythic rare Planeswalker,

make it a little bit simpler, move it to rare, and no one would bat an eye. But uncommon was a lot bigger ask and a lot harder. But uncommon was a lot bigger ask and a lot harder. So, interestingly, one of the solutions came from, I've been asked to solve a problem, I solved the problem, and then my solution was not selected. And that was, we started making Planeswalker packs. And Mark Globus, who was in charge of them, really wanted Planeswalker cards in the Planeswalker packs. And Mark Globus, who was in charge of them, really wanted Planeswalker cards in the Planeswalker packs. Because it's like, oh, this is a Chandra deck. I need a Chandra. And so they came to us and they asked, what would you do? And so my pitch was, I said,

I would simplify them. I would make them much simpler. And my original suggestion was, what if they were just static abilities? What if just, you know, you had Nissa, and while Nissa was out, you had Mana Flare. And if your opponent didn't want you to have Mana Flare, well, they could attack Nissa. And when, you know, and the idea, so when Richard first pitched, back in original

Ravnica, Richard pitched this idea of structures. And structures were kind of a... I mean, I don't know whether they... I think they were artifacts, technically. But the idea was that they were a thing that had a value

on them, and that the way you could get rid of them was by attacking them. And every time you did damage, the damage was permanent. It would go away. So if they had a... Oh, no, I think Richard's earliest version might have been they have a toughness like any creature, and you have to do enough damage in one turn to defeat them. I think that's where Richard first pitched it.

Anyway, when we were making Planeswalkers, I remembered that, and I incorporated some of what Structures was into Planeswalkers. And we liked the idea that they had this total that's kind of like a life total, it was a loyalty total, but you could attack them and whittle down what they had. And anyway, so one of the things that we had talked about for a while was

Planeswalkers have this problem where they are the most sought after card. They represent our main characters, but there's the least amount of design space in them. There's not infinite design space in Planeswalkers. There's a lot of requirements and there's a lot of things you need to do. They just can't do everything. And one of the things that kept coming up is people kept making static abilities for them. And I kept going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

You know, we need to slow roll our innovations on Planeswalkers. That'd be very easy to innovate very fast, but then leave a lot on the table that we haven't done. And so I held back from, you know, people kept designing static abilities on Planeswalkers. I kept saying, not yet. And finally, we decided, when we were actually making Bolas for Amonkhet,

I think they had made a static ability for me. I said, okay, hold on. Here's what I think we're going to do. For the final finale, the final Bolas in War of the Spark, we will make a four-ability Planeswalker, which one of the abilities will be a static ability. It'll be the introduction of static abilities. Now, I will note, there's the commander Planeswalkers that technically have a static ability that says play your commander, although those are about deck building and not in play. Both of the double-faced Planeswalkers, I think

had some static ability. Or no, Arlen didn't, but Garrick did, I think, had a static ability that told you when he turned. But we really hadn't done a traditional simple static ability. So the plan was we were going to do it on Bolas. Anyway, I'm making my suggestion for the Planeswalker pack. And I'm like, oh, well, what if we just made Planeswalkers that just had a static ability and that the idea was they were kind of like enchantments, but they were something you could attack, and they represented a character, and

it felt very flavorful to me to say, oh, it's Nissa, and while she's in play, you have Mana Flare. Or, I guess that's the red card, but what's the green one called? Every time you tap a land, you get an additional mana of that color. I thought that was a nice, simple way to do planeswalkers, and I

thought the planeswalker packs wanted simpler planeswalkers. I got outvoted. They ended up making them a little simpler, but looking like normal planeswalkers. But when I remembered that, I'm like, okay, well, there's definitely ways to make simpler planeswalkers. So the idea we first started with was that uncommon planeswalkers would have one ability, rares would have two abilities, and mythic rares would have three abilities is how we started. So the idea was that you could either have a static ability, you could have a plus loyalty ability, or a minus loyalty ability. And we played with those, and the static ones were very interesting, and the minus ones were very interesting, and the plus ones were very interesting, and the plus ones were...

It just kind of made you track... Like, you had to track it, because your opponent could attack it. So, like, let's say I had a plus one something. You know, it starts with three loyalty or whatever. So the idea is I needed to get my loyalty because my opponent could attack it. So if I was going to plus one, I needed to keep track of that. But at some point, it's like, oh, I have 17. Are you going to attack 17?

It required you to do bookkeeping that sometimes mattered but often didn't matter. It just felt very open-ended. Where the minus ones felt like, okay, they get to do something. They get to do it a certain number of times and then they're gone. Like, okay. I think Arlen originally, or I think Arlen still made wolves. But Arlen made wolves. Originally, she just made wolves.

There was no second ability. It's like, okay, Arlen comes and play. You know, she can make a wolf. I think she can make three wolves. So she comes, every turn she can make a wolf. So three turns in, she'll make three wolves, and then she'll go away. That's what Arlen does. And if you don't want them to have three wolves,

we'll attack Arlen before Arlen is able to make the wolves. You know, and every time you attack Arlen, even if he only did two damage, well, that's a wolf. Two loyalty was a wolf. So every two damage, you've taken away a wolf. So we didn't like the pluses. So we got rid of the pluses.

So we had minus ones and static ones. That's how we turned it over. Dave in set design later realized that he liked it better. He wanted the Planeswalkers to be a little more complex than a normal uncommon card. One of the things about our themes is we tend to push the complexity of our themes down a little bit so that you can play them up. If it's about legendary, we'll make uncommon legendary creatures that sometimes would be rare, but we'll push them down a little bit.

And the idea was, this was the Planeswalker set, so you push it down a little bit. So we ended up making the uncommons have two abilities, the rares have three abilities, and the mythic rares have four abilities. And then everybody got a static ability. That just became an introduction to this. The other thing we had to solve was

we had an Azphan problem, which was we wanted there to be enough planeswalkers that no matter what color you're playing you had access to planeswalkers um but the numbers weren't quite working out and that's where we realized we could use we could do hybrid planeswalkers that are uncommon so um and the nice thing about the hybrid was they just went in multiple decks. And so, originally, for example, we had 20 uncommons. So if we divide up colors evenly, there would be four of each mono color.

And that meant, okay, if I'm playing a two-color deck, I have access to eight out of the 20. But by making hybrid, now if I'm playing a color, I have access. So the way it works out is there's two cycles of 5 and there's one hybrid cycle of 10. Okay, now if I'm playing two color, so let's say I'm playing white and blue. I have access to the two white and the two blue of the two monocolor cycles. I have access to the two white and the two blue of the two monocolor cycles. I have access to four white guilds and four blue guilds, although one of them is Azorius of the Overlap. So that's seven guilds. So I have access to

eleven. Where before I would have access to eight. And that was just enough to get us, I mean, the funny thing about Aspen a lot of times is you don't need to get a lot to make something viable. And just getting that little extra juice of something allowed us to sort of make it. And the other thing is when you went up to three colors,

when you splash for a color, you know, all of a sudden, so let's say you're splashing for a third color, you know, I now can pick, so let's say you're splashing for a third color, um, you know, I now can pick up two of the mono color and, uh, there are two more of the, of the, the reason there's two more is there's four total, but one of each overlapped with the first, um, two colors you had. Um, but anyway, that's four more. So instead of 11, I have 15 if you play three.

So it, it really gives you options and makes things work. And the other thing I was looking for when we were doing Planeswalkers was I wanted to find innovations with Planeswalkers. Because if you're going to make Planeswalkers, the theme, like one of the things is if once you understand what your theme is, you need to commit and really have some fun and express something with that theme. So the thing I liked was, okay, we're doing Planeswalkers. We're going to do some things we've never done before. Number one, we're having 36 Planeswalkers in the booster pack, plus a 37th as a buy a box.

We're having different rarities of Planeswalkers. Planeswalkers are Mythic Rare. I mean, they were Rare before Mythic Rare existed, but they're basically Mythic Rare, and we're going to do them in Rare, and we're going to do them in Uncommon. And we've never done Hybrid Planeswalkers, something players have always asked about, but it's really hard to do a Hybrid Planeswalker're going to do them in uncommon. And we've never done hybrid Planeswalker, something players have always asked about, but it's really hard to do a hybrid Planeswalker.

But you do it in uncommon, we have less abilities, it's easier to do. And then the idea was, we didn't know how many we were going to do. When I handed it over, I basically said, I think we put 20 at Uncommon, and then we said Rare could have somewhere between... We thought we'd have... Our guess was somewhere between 30 and 50. I think 40 was what we turned over. I think we had 20 at Rare and Mythic Rare. I think we knew we were going to do three at Mythic Rare.

That Mythic Rare would be what we normally do, and then Rare would fill up the gaps. I think we turned in were going to do three at Mythic Rare. That Mythic Rare would be what we normally do. And then Rare would fill up the gaps. I think we turned in like 17. It ended up being 13, I believe. I said 17. But anyway, we didn't know. The other thing, by the way, is we didn't know at the time who the Planeswalker was going to be. We knew the Gatewatch was going to be there.

We knew that most, I mean, in the end it was like, most Planeswalkers that could be there would be there. It was just a matter of, okay, who's there? We knew that none of the dead Planeswalkers would be there. There's a few Planeswalkers that really were engrossed somewhere else, either because they were in an upcoming story. For example, you know, like Roan and Will, we knew that they were the major characters of War of the Spark. So we purposely didn't put them into the story. Just because we knew they were coming up later in the year.

And we only had so many slots. and we only had so many slots. Anyway, so there was a lot of... a lot of coordination and a lot of figuring out how to do that. We introduced the idea of the signature spells, so the idea that each planeswalker not only had a card to represent them, but had a spell to represent them,

and they would be in their spell and stuff like that, and that their name would be a possessive. But the interesting thing about this, a big lesson of all the planeswalker stuff was I think when we entered into it, I sort of eliminated the possibility of doing lots of planeswalkers because it was like, well, we don't do that. And the thing to be careful of in Vision in general, I have to be careful of in vision, in general, I have to be careful of is

I do want to follow our rules. I do want to make sure that we're making a magic set that sort of feels like a magic set. But in the same sense, I have to be willing to explore, like, I have to be willing to say, I know we don't normally do that, but... And sometimes I get caught up in the, well, we don't do that. And I need to go and say, I know we don't normally do that, but... And sometimes I get caught up in the, well, we don't do that.

And I need to... I mean, there are things I have to be careful with. I mean, Planar Chaos is a great example where I... What if we mess with a color pie? And then looking back, I'm like, that was probably a mistake. We shouldn't have done that. And so...

But I do, in general, what I realized is I need to be asking what if I need to be exploring things. Um, you know, and like I said, I, I think I always knew I wanted more planeswalkers, but I spent so much time not making more planeswalkers because I felt like there was a rule I had to follow that said I couldn't. Um, and once I broke out of that, once I said, okay, the big epiphany I kind of had was, okay, players are going to want this.

Well, let's explore that. That's another great lesson, by the way, which is if you're working on something and your gut just says, oh, man, this is the expectation of what I'm doing. If I told them we were doing this and one of my thought processes, I tell the audience we're doing the following thing. And then I imagine what they think we're going to do. If there's a very clear cut expectation, I have to think about that. That doesn't always mean I have to follow the expectation, but I should at least explore and understand if we're

not going to do it, why we're not going to do it. Because, you know, it is, you do want to lean into expectation to a certain extent in game design. You know, when I tell you what we're up to, like, one of the things that makes me happy is, so for example, I, at San Diego Comic Con, I introduced, you know, Thorn of Eldraine. I introduced everybody to what Thor and Eldraine was. And one of the things that's been going on is I'm just getting a lot of people going are you going to do blah? Are you going to do this? Are you going to do that? And the thing that makes me really happy is most of what people are suggesting we are doing.

Like we sort of said to them, this is the space we're playing in. And they're like oh, are you going to do this? and the idea that so many of the things that they're asking about is exactly what we're doing to me bodes really well that there's expectations and we're going to meet those expectations because when they're sort of making guesses that's their expectation

and we're not going to do everything like I said I feel like we're meeting a lot of expectations. I think there's some stuff we're doing that people aren't going to expect. You want some surprise. But I do think it's important to lean in. And like I said, the thing that got me to finally start working with planeswalkers is, like, well, what do players think is going to happen?

I'm like, I think there's going to be a lot of planeswalkers. And that's what got me to finally go down that path is, okay, why am I, like, why am I just ruling it out? You know, and the thing that's always important to me is I like changing from, I like asking the question, okay, what if I did that? What would that mean? What would I have to do? And there's a lot of fun, like a lot of the design for where the spark came from. I'm going, okay, okay, let's lean into what we're doing. Let's do what I think people would expect us to do and figure out how to do that. That a lot

of my pride of the design of where the spark is that there's many, many ways we could have done that where it wouldn't have worked, where it would have gone wrong. And I think we found a way where it really did work and really got people excited. And the other thing, by the way, is, and this is a big lesson, it's not the only place I've learned the lesson, but it really hammered it home for me, is, so, in Dominaria, we did this thing where we put a legend in every pack. And then in World of Spark, we put a planeswalker in every pack.

And I thought back to a lot of our successes. Innistrad had a double-faced card in every pack. Legions had 15 creatures in every pack. We've had a lot of successes where we give the audience some certainty of what they're going to get. I mean, not certainty in like, it's not that you know what Planeswalker you're going to get, but you know you're going to get a Planeswalker. You know you're going to get a Legendary Creature. You know you're going to get a Double-Faced Card. You don't know which one, because it's still random,

but there's some expectation of what you know you get. And so if we do something cool, like an unstable, like all the unsets, for example, put a full art land in it. You knew you were getting that. Unstable, for example, put in contraption. You knew you're getting two contraptions. Every booster pack had two contraptions. And that some of that consistency, I think, is super important because I think the audience, when they're thinking about buying the pack, they want to feel like, okay, I know I'm going to get something that I really want. And that by putting some certainty in there it just makes it easier. I think one of the successes of War of the Spark is

players like planeswalkers. Like, oh, I know I'm getting a planeswalker. Now maybe it's an uncommon planeswalker maybe it's a rare, maybe it's a mythic rare, you know, but I'm going to get that. It's a known certainty. And the power of the known certainty is something that, like I said, it's not the first time we've done it, but something about War of the Spark really hammered it home in a way that said, okay, we gotta think, like when I'm designing something I gotta be more conscious about where are there opportunities for us to sort of do something where players can expect something.

And I think that there's something very visceral and exciting about that. And as we're making sets, you got to remember. Other lessons of War of the Spark. I mean, War of the Spark has done very, very well, by the way. I think it's the best-selling spring set of the Spark. I mean, War of the Spark has done very, very well, by the way. I think it's the best-selling spring set of all time. And... Oh, so the other thing. The Japanese Planeswalkers, that is something that was done

by the Japanese office. We didn't... I mean, I didn't learn about it until pretty late in the process. But it's another interesting thing of how... I mean, I didn't learn about it until pretty late in the process. But that's another interesting thing of how... I mean, I think that in some ways a lot of the Booster Fun... I mean, I think we had started down the Booster Fun path before those Planeswalkers. But once again, that really hammered home the idea of it's so exciting to open up something

where I get the option of getting an upgraded version of something that's very exciting. And the other thing that I really enjoyed, I mean, this is my first event set, is being able to really convey a larger set. The one thing that's really cool about playing War of the Spark is, not that I know the exact outcome of the story, it's not that

I play the game and I'm like, oh, here's exactly what happened in what order, but I do get the larger sense. Like, when I get you to play a magic set, you know, you're going to Innistrad, you're going to Amonkhet, you're going to Theros. I want you to get a sense of the world. That's something I spend a lot of time and energy on. Like, one of the big things that I always try to do is what is the emotional connection I'm making? Like, oh, I'm in this

place. What am I feeling about this place? This place is scary. This place is not what it seems. This place is, you know, encourages me to be adventurous. Whatever it does, it's doing something. And I wanted War of the Spark to make you feel like you were in the middle of something grandiose, that you were part of something big.

And the idea that you're playing and all these planeswalkers are there, it just, it feels different from normal magic in a way that feels like something special. And I think that's one of the big successes of War of the Spark. And one of the things I'm trying to do, or the lessons I learned in general about making an event set, because I want to do other event sets. We're going to have more story and, you. And I love the idea of it's an event and something grandiose is happening. And I want to make sure that we can recapture that

and we can do that again. So one of the big lessons here also is this is the first time we did something. How did we do? What did we do? In general, I liked a lot of what we did in the sense of when you were playing, it did not feel like normal magic. It felt like something special. And it felt like you did in the sense of when you were playing, it did not feel like normal magic.

It felt like something special, and it felt like you were in the middle of something. And I really enjoyed that. Now, there were also, I mean, some of the larger lessons weren't really vision design per se, but, like, our rares were a little bomb-y, especially the Eternal Gods. Our... The static abilities. We had too many

static abilities on Planeswalkers that were didn't matter most of the time, but when they mattered were pretty serious, and it was very easy to forget, because so much of the time it didn't matter. Narset being the classic example. Narset doesn't let you draw an extra card beyond the first card. And most

of the time you don't draw an extra card, but like all of a sudden I'm casting a cantrip and, ah, what, why don't I get my card? Um, I mean, so there, there were also lessons, but once again, a lot of those, um, were more like things that more set design and play design was dealing with. Cause like, I don't set power level things. So that's not something vision design really focuses on. I do think the static ability thing was something we had to be careful with, which was when you got as many Planeswalkers as we wanted and everyone had a static ability,

although once again, when I handed off the set, I didn't have a static ability on the Planeswalker, so that wasn't something I was concerned myself with at the time. So, I mean, some of these are overall larger lessons to keep in mind. They weren't lessons that I had from running the vision design because when I was running it, certain, certain things weren't true. So I couldn't have learned it at the time. I mean, I, one of the things I always do whenever a set comes out is, I mean, I do this all the time anyway, but I pay close attention to what the audience says I want to listen to what they like and don't like and it's important to sort of absorb that

anyway, all in all I was very happy with War of the Spark I've made a lot of sets but as I line up my sets, War of the Spark is in my top tier of sets where I'm very proud it's a set where I did something very different I'm going to say I, my whole team. I tend to say I, but I mean my team, not just me.

We managed to do something that was very different. We did the first event set ever. We found a way to include all these planeswalkers. We were making a magic set that was not your normal magic set. That really was a template for others of its kind to follow. And so that always makes me proud. And it was just fun. It was a fun set. I'm glad we were able to bring proliferate back. I didn't even really talk about proliferate. That was one of those things also about being patient is

we really wanted to bring proliferate back. But we needed to find the right place and right time. And it's a mechanic that is tricky. It's a mechanic that is easily abused in the wrong situations. And you have to find the right set. And that's something I've learned time and again is that not every magic thing is for every magic set. You have to find the right set. And that's something I've learned time and again, is that not every magic thing is for every magic set. You have to find the time and place for it. And that I love proliferate.

It really works in Scars of Mirrodin. I wanted to bring it back. But there's a lot of places we did it where it didn't work. And that having the willingness to find the right place for it to work is pretty important. And I'm happy we did. I think proliferate worked really well because of all the planeswalkers. I thought it was important,

especially with the minus planeswalkers. I thought it was important to find a way to do that. But anyway, those are all my lessons. I'm now at work. So I hope you guys enjoyed my jaunt through War of the Spark. But I'm here, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.