Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #684: Throne of Eldraine

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about the design of Throne of Eldraine.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. I drop my kids off at school. Okay, so today is all about Throne of Eldraine. So today I'm going to tell the story of the design. So this story actually starts many years ago. We have to go all the way back 10 years, or a little more than 10 years since we were in the act of designing, I think it came out 10 years ago, we were making the set of Lorwyn.

So, Lorwyn came about because I was trying to do, we were trying to do a fourth set, and I came up with the idea of doing two mini blocks. So doing large, small, large, small. And the idea we liked is that they had some contrast with each other. And so the idea we came up with was one was kind of a light version of the world. And one was the dark version of the world. And with the creative team we came up with this concept that the world itself was in flux. That the whole world changed.

And that everything on the world changed when the world itself was in flux, that the whole world changed, and that everything on the world changed when the world changed. And the idea was the first sort of mini block would be Lorwyn, which was the bright side, and the second one would be Shadowmoor, which was the dark side. That was the idea. And so for Lorwyn,

Brady Donovan, who was the lead of the creative team at the time, decided to borrow heavily on Celtic mythology. Or, sorry, Celtic mythology. And, you know, one of the things that we had done when we were making it is we sat down ahead of time and talked through what kind of creature types. Because Lorwyn had a tribal component. And we knew we wanted goblins and elves and merfolk. component. And we knew we wanted goblins and elves and merfolk. And then after talking with Brady and the team, the creative team, we decided we wanted to do tree folk and fairies

and giants and sort of, we ended up getting this sort of, the thing of Lorwyn was we wanted to have a little lighter feel than normal. It wasn't kind of as dark as a normal magic set, knowing that Shattermorph would be a little darker than normal. To be a little lighter than normal to a little darker than normal to have the contrast. But while we were making Lorwyn, I realized that we had a little bit of the trapping of fairy tales. We had fairies. We had giants. But because it was influenced more by Celtic. It wasn't quite, most fairy tales, as far as like, I guess, Western audiences,

think a lot about sort of Central Europe. That's where a lot of the Disney stuff came from. And a lot of the people, you think there's fairy tale books and stuff. That's the stuff people know.

That's where, you know, you're getting Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid. That's all coming from sort of different parts of Dwarfs and Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid. That's all coming from sort of different parts of Europe.

Italy and France and Germany. That's where a lot of the stuff comes from. And so we thought it would be cool. I liked the idea of fairy tales as... Like, Lorwyn made me realize that there was a cool thing we could do that Lorwyn wasn't quite doing. I know that Lorwyn had...

A lot of people think of Lorwyn as being the fairy tale set in the sense that it was the closest we'd ever gotten. But it really was not that close in a lot of ways. Yeah, it had a little bit of trappings. It had the giants and the fairies and stuff.

But, A, it had no humans. And an important part of fairy tales... Humans are a very, very important part of fairy tales. So not having humans really missed out on a lot of the tropes that you needed to do. And part of it is you needed a kind of structured

society. You really needed to have kings and queens, so you got to have princes and princesses and castles, and there's a lot of structure that wasn't quite in Lorwyn. So Lorwyn made me realize that fairy tales were something kind of cool. And I put in the back of my brain, okay, let's figure out

a time and place to do that. A few years later, we would do Innistrad, and Innistrad was us doing top-down gothic horror. And that was really the first time that I, I mean, Magic had done top-down before, Arabian Nights was top-down, obviously Champs-Élysées was

our attempt at top-down. Arabian Nights was super literal, and Champs Kamigawa had a lot of issues in how the design actually played out. So Innistrad was kind of my first attempt at doing a top-down set, and I really, I was very excited about how Innistrad came out. It had a lot of cards that were very reminiscent of things, and there's a lot, one of the things about playing in sort of what I call genre space is you get to play into pop culture. You get to play into things that the audience knows and is emotionally invested in.

And you really get to do something that's a little bit different. And I feel like once we had done Innistrad, and Innistrad was very successful, I was like, okay, I want to do more stuff with genre clifters, and we're fantasy, so fairy tales was really attractive to me because fairy tales are, they are in fantasy. I mean, the elements you have in fairy tales are very fantasy-oriented, like fairies, like giants, like elves, like goblins, like dragons, witches.

You know, there's a lot of stuff that's sort of core that essentially fairy tales are set in what's essentially a fantasy setting. It's not using science fiction tropes or something. It's using fantasy tropes. So it was within fantasy's realm, and I had read a statistic at one point that really hit home,

which said that the average American, when they die, will have seen, on average, 10 different movies that have the plot of Cinderella, that are Cinderella-inspired movies. Anyway, I went and counted. There's a site that counts up all the Cinderella movies, and I've seen 14. And I got some years left to live. I've seen the Cinderella story in movie form 14 different times. That's not counting TV and whatever. In movie form, 14 different times. And what I realized was it was something very endemic that, like,

if we're trying to do genres that people get, fairy tales is very ingrained into our culture. So it's something people knew. So I was very excited because I was trying to figure out how to do the next Innistrad. fairy tales is very ingrained into our culture. So it's something people knew. So I was very excited, because I was trying to figure out how to do the next Innistrad. Like, Lorwyn was me saying fairy tales are cool. Innistrad was me saying, oh, we get to do it as a top-down genre build. We get a... And so I was very excited.

In my mind, it was like, oh, this is the follow-up to Innistrad. Not meaning the very next one, but like, oh, the next time we do a really top-down set, we can do that. But when I went to sort of pitch fairy tales, I just never got a good reaction. Usually when I would say, here's a great idea, fairy tales, they'd go, okay, what else you got? And when I sort of dug a little deeper, I think the concern was that fairy tales are associated a lot with a lot of more juvenile stuff. And the point I try to make is there are a lot of

adult takes on fairy tales. You know, the idea that fairy tales are something that only, I mean, yes, yes, there are a lot of kids things that have fairy tales, but they're so ingrained that, you know, a lot of the stories you're seeing, like when I talk about seeing all the movies, they were all kids' movies, you know. A lot of the iconography and a lot of the archetypes are just built into more adult stuff, you know. I guarantee people have seen, and I kept using Grimm's fairy tales. Like, if you go back to, I mean, Grimm's isn't the original source of all the tales. I mean, a lot of them were collecting tales that pre-existed. But it's a pretty well-known collection

of them. And in the Grimm's fairy tale version, it is dark. It is dark. Like, I think like in Cinderella, after the end of the story, so in the versions most people know, the more frequent versions, it's like, oh, Cinderella meets Prince Charming, they get married, and, you know in the versions most people know the more frequent versions

it's like oh Cinderella meets Prince Charming they get married and you know she shows some grace and forgives her stepmother and

stepsifters as you usually you know and then they have to they have to live with the fact that now she's the princess you know

one day the queen but in the original tale the Grimm's fairy tale I think she puts the I think she puts the, I think she puts the, her stepmother in a barrel of nails and rolls her down a hill. And I think the sister's eyes are picked out by birds. Anyway, it's a lot more gruesome. So I'm like, Bill, fairy tales can go from, Bill Rose is the our VP, he's the one I was trying

to sell to, and saying okay look, you know, on one end you have the very, you know Disney and a lot of sort of kids versions of the tales, but on the other end there's some really dark versions fairy tales can go from really light and fun and frothy to very

dark and creepy, fairy tales can clearly make that realm. There are plenty of adult versions of things. There are horror films that use fairy tale archetypes and stuff. It is definitely... I used to watch a TV show called Grimm that obviously was playing in the space. Grimm definitely took a very darker turn.

There's multiple TV shows that have played in this space. And movies as well. Anyway, even though I made these arguments, even though I kept coming back, I just, I never really could sway things. So, flash forward a bunch of years. We were trying to figure out what to make. we were trying to figure out what to make we're trying to make the next batch of worlds for a stretch that's going on now

and so the way it worked was we had some meetings, anybody was allowed I think you could give a 10 minute presentation, you had to make a little slideshow and you could pitch any world you wanted to pitch. Out of that pitch, I think Ixalan came out of that pitch. Anyway, some worlds you haven't seen yet have come out of that pitch. But anyway, I said, okay.

So I put together all my stuff for my fairytale world, and I pitched it. And I said, you know, this is the, we're playing up, Indus Drive was very popular. We've done a lot of top-down designs that are more culturally based, stuff like Theros or Amonkhet.

And while I enjoy a lot of the cultural stuff, it's trickier to get stuff people know. Like when we were making Amonkhet, what we found is, there's lots of iconography. There's a lot of visuals that you connect with Egypt. They're easy and recognizable. But when I go to make one of Top Down Cards,

we ended up in spaces of like, it's King Tut or it's Queen Cleopatra. They were almost like history things and not pop culture things. There was less pop culture to play off of. And when I was...

There was one point where I was trying to... Oh, I think I was working on this presentation. So I went to TV Tropes, which is one place I like to go. Oh, no, this is pre-TV Tropes. I was trying to list things to make examples of cards. So I went through fairy tales and said, okay, I started with Cinderella.

I'm like, oh, well, what could she have? There's the glass slipper, and there's the magic carriage, and there's her dress, and there's the fairy godmother. There are all these different things that you can do. There's a lot of different, there's objects and magical spells. I mean, the nice thing about fairy tales also is magic is woven into it. There's magic in fairy tales,

so you get to play in that space. But anyway, I started listing things, and I got to like 100 things in like 20 minutes, and I stopped. I mean, I just wanted some proof of concept. But like, I remember working on Amonkhet, and we were trying to get individual top cards, and we spent like a month, and we were trying to get individual top crowns, and we spent, like, a month,

and we ended up coming up with, like, 20. And, like, half of them we couldn't use for various reasons. And here I was, like, in 20 minutes, I spit out 100. And I knew that if I could do 120 minutes, there were hundreds more that I had not touched yet. And so I was really excited. So I put together this pitch I pitched it kind of like

it's what we could recapture kind of what Innistrad did but with a different you know a cluster of genres and I pitch it and I put all

images and all this I put it together and the response basically was like crickets you know it's like I finish and like there's crickets

there's nothing no one's saying anything and then it's like okay finish and like there's crickets there's nothing no one's saying anything and then it's like okay thanks Mark I just nobody seems stirred nobody was at all I was like I have a slam dunk this is an awesome idea and nothing but in that same pitch Sean Main pitched basically it was sort of an Arthurian inspired world

the idea was let's take a lot of the trappings of King Arthur and build a world around it. And a lot of people were more responsive to that. They're like, oh, yeah, King Arthur's cool and high fantasy and we can do knights. And we had toyed around during Dominaria with doing some of that, but due to space. Because originally, we were going to have two sets. Dominaria with doing some of that. But due to space, because originally we were going to have two sets.

Dominaria was going to be two sets. And the small set was all about this giant war. But it had a lot of knights and things. And so we were going to have a play in that space a little bit. Dominaria definitely has a little bit of the high fantasy to it. But we ended up not doing that. But anyway, people seemed excited, or more excited, I guess, by Sean's pitch. And so Sean's world got onto the shortlist of worlds we were considering.

So at one point, Aaron Forsythe is talking to me about the various ideas, like what was on the short list and what I thought of the various things. And we came up on Sean's World. And I said to Aaron, I go, here's my problem with Sean's World. I think there's a lot of cool stuff there. I think high fantasy is fun. Night Tribal could be cool.

But it's not enough. Like, there's nothing that's going to really grab people because we've done high fantasy movies before. You know, it's not... And I said, the problem with Arthurian is, it's kind of similar, I thought, to some of the Amiket problems, which is if I made a list of everything people expected from Arthurian legend,

like I make a list, and I go around and collect that list, I go, it's not that long a list. Yes, there's a few awesome things. You know, you get 10 to 20 awesome things. And then the list will die down pretty fast. I mean, you get Excalibur, Sword of the Stone. You get the Round Table.

I mean, there's things that you get. You get some knights and stuff. You get Merlin. You get Morgan of Fame. There's things you can get. But you run out fast. And my good example there is, if you know anything about Arthurian legend,

the Green Knight, for example, is pretty big in Arthurian legend. But I don't think the average person has any idea who the Green Knight is. The Black Knight they might know because of Monty Python. But, you know, there's not tons of... Even, like I said,

the Green Knight's pretty big in Arthurian Legend. And I, I don't think everyone even knows who the Green Knight is. So, it just, it drops off pretty fast. And so what I said to Aaron is, um, I think we're a little light on sort of recognizable trope stuff we can play with. But, I have the perfect solution. Um, I've been pitching this fairy tale thing. It doesn't seem to get any traction. But you know what? Fairy tales work

perfectly with an Arthurian thing. Here's why. Fairy tales require a structure. Look, you need kings and queens and princes and princesses. And they're all over fairy tales. And you want castles. Like, you want a lot of that structure that the Arthurian is going

to bring to the table. And I'm like, they actually fit really well together. And the thing that fairy tales brings to the table is, like, infinite trope space. Like, look, you know, maybe people will run out, you know, after 10 to 20 items on Excalibur. We can literally list hundreds and hundreds of items that people will know from fairy tales. You know, any one fairy tale. Like, one of the things that's interesting is if you take just one fairy tale and something like Cinderella and just start digging deep, you know what I'm saying?

Like, there's a lot of different things you can riff off of. For example, I think in Throne of Eldraine, we ended up getting, like, maybe six cards that were Cinderella-related. But we could have gotten more. I mean, we only stopped because we were just trying to do a lot of different fairy tales. but we could have got more I mean we only stopped because we were just trying to do a lot of fairy tales so anyway I convinced Aaron

that the marriage of the two of them would really compliment each other and with that what I said to Aaron is if we do that we can do top down I had a little bit of ideas

of some monocolor stuff to Aaron is if we do that, we can do top-down. I had a little bit of ideas of some monocolor stuff. But anyway, I said, I think that would be really cool. And Aaron signed off on it. Bill signed off. We signed off on it and said, okay, we're making the set.

Now, once again, going into this, everybody was like, we're doing Arthurian World, and okay, Mark wants to do a few fairy tales. That was kind of where it started, was, it's Arthurian World, you know, and like, the fairy tales were like, they were humoring me. But I understood, like, and I explained it some other times, but let me, this podcast about Throne of Eldraine.

One of the things that I really, really needed to hammer home is that every set needs to have something new and different, and then you get to have a lot of known and familiar. And it's not that the players don't like high fantasy. We've done high fantasy in Alpha. We did high fantasy on Shards of Alara in Bant. We did high fantasy in Dominaria. Players like high fantasy. It is fun.

It's a cool part of, it's a good trope within fantasy. We started with Lara in Bant. We did High Fantasy and Dominaria. Players like High Fantasy. It is fun. It's a cool part of, it's a good trope within fantasy. The only issue is, it's not something that players are necessarily, like, it doesn't feel like a new and different thing. It just feels like magic. And my story that I tell, I'm not sure if I've told the story yet, but it's a good story, and I'm telling the history of designing Terminal Dream, is I had a playtest, and after the playtest, I had somebody who had never played before. We like to have new people in playtests so we can get a sense of, you know,

first impressions and stuff. And I said to him, what do you think of that? He goes, oh, my God, the fairytale stuff is amazing. And I said to him, well, what do you think of all the Camelot stuff? He goes, what are you talking about? So I look at his deck. He's playing, I think he was playing like red-white knights. Like he was playing a knight deck, a knight tribal deck.

And he had multiple like legendary knights in his deck. And I think he even might have had the Excalibur. He had the tropes in his deck. He was playing essentially a Camelot deck. The problem was it just was kind of invisible in the sense that, oh, yeah, well, magic has those things. I didn't notice it because magic has those things. Why would I notice it? It's like putting goblins in a set. Oh, we have goblins. Well, yeah, you always have goblins, or most of the time you have goblins. And like I said, the fairy tale stuff really stuck out. So one of the things that, as we came together, I really pushed the fairy tales and really tried

to get people to see that the fairy tales were kind of where, I mean, last podcast I used my cake metaphor, where if Thurman Eldrin is a cake, that the icing is the fairy tales, because it's sexy and exciting and grabs your attention, but that our Thurman stuff's the cake. Like, the fairy tales are more one-ofs, but the cake allows you to build a structure and a society. You know, it really gives you the underpinning. And together, they make an awesome cake. They actually, the two of them pair really nice together. That the strength of one is the weakness of the other. And so, I thought that was cool. Anyway, okay, so I get signed off from Aaron. We're making Throne of Eldraine. It's going to be a combination

of fairy tales and Arthurian legends. So the first thing I do is try to figure out, I go to the creative team. They love the idea of there being a court. And I'm not sure one of the things that came up, and I'm not sure whether this happened during I'm not sure when

this happened, but early on, the idea of having courts broken up by the color pie, meaning there's five courts. Like, one of the things we always do, one of the questions we ask early on is, how does the color pie, how are we expressing the color pie through this world?

What is the expression of the color pie? Like, for example, in Theros, the gods are seen through the lens. The gods are dictated by the color. So a lot of the philosophy of the world is dict Like, for example, in Theros, the gods are seen through the lens. The gods are dictated by the color. So a lot of the philosophy of the world is dictated by the gods.

In Innistrad, the monsters were sort of seen through the colors. The different monsters were different allied color combinations. In Ravnica, obviously the guilds,

you know, and that having a sense of where the colors do and what the colors do is important. And so the idea of we want to do courts, obviously the guilds, you know, and that having a sense of where the colors do and what the colors do is important. And so the idea of we want to do courts, courts are really important. Having five courts and having each court express sort of what that color means was a neat way to sort of show the philosophy in this world. While the white court, they, you know, loyalty is the most important thing to the white court. And the blue court, they, knowledge, that's what they care about.

And black, it's all about, black was persistence. And red was courage. And green was strength. And so each one of those gave us something where we really could build something that played into the philosophy of the colors, but gave it a slant that made this world have its take on the color pie. The other thing I really liked about that was we were coming off a year of multicolor. And so I liked the idea of starting to play into monocolor.

We liked to swing the pendulum. I really wanted to go in the opposite direction. So my desire to do monocolor, it was a happy medium of... It was a very easy sell to get everybody on board to do five monocolored courts. Everybody sort of wanted to go in that direction. The cool thing was the creative and the design were both...

Sometimes you meet early on and the two teams kind of want different things. You've got to figure out where to find the compromise. Both teams wanted the same thing. We got to monocolored courts almost immediately. In fact, I think we got to them during Exploratory Design. Like, we walked into Vision knowing that's what we were doing. And so, one of the things that I wanted to do was,

I felt like the fairy tales, and then some of the Arthurians, I knew we wanted a lot of top-down. I knew it was going to be a top-down design. I knew that we really were, what is the world? What do you expect? let's deliver on that

and let that guide what our things are. Now the courts really pushed a monochrome theme, which I liked. So one of the things we came up with very early on was the idea of an alternative mana cost. And the idea was that literally in the mana cost, it would say one cost or a second cost. And we ended up doing three different things with that. One is we did things that got color concentrated. So it's two and a blue or it's blue, blue, blue. Or it's, you know, four and a white or two, white, white, white. And the idea was, if you ended up spending the more colorful one,

it gave you something extra. It sort of gave you a bonus. So this would end up eventually becoming adamant. This is sort of the precursor to adamant. We then had... We knew we wanted to have a bunch of artifact creatures, and we knew, because of the

offshoots of Kaladesh, we wanted a more colored artifact creature. I'm sorry. We knew we wanted a lot of artifacts because fairy tales and Arthurian have a lot of things. There is Excalibur. There's the round table. There is the silver slipper, the glass slipper. There's just infinite things. There's infinite things.

There's lots of objects. When you're playing in story space, there's just a lot of objects, a lot of more magical objects to boot. So we knew we needed more artifacts than normal, and we knew that

in order to do that, because of Kaladesh, we made a constant choice to just have more colored artifacts in general. So the idea we originally played with, because we were playing

with multiple costs, is having artifacts that had a colored version and had a colorless version. So it's like, oh, it costs four, or it costs one So it's like, oh, it costs four or it costs one U. So like, oh, it's cheaper if you're playing blue mana. You know, like it's Pinocchio, let's say, or whatever.

And so we did that. And then the third one we did was we did things that cost different colors. So it is red for one cost or green for another cost. So like, for example, I think we had, I think we had like naturalized where it was 1G or 2W or something like that.

The reason we didn't do the exact same cost, by the way, is that's hybrid. Like if it was the exact same ability and exact same cost just swapping out colored, then you're making hybrid. Like, well, we're trying

not to make hybrid. In the end, the alternate costs, well, I like them. The multicolored cards didn't quite fit the monocolored theme. It was hard designing them where they did the same effects but they cost differently. It was kind of like hybrid but more difficult to design. differently. It was kind of like hybrid, but more difficult to design.

And the artifacts, we ended up deciding just to make them colored, so the all they cost ended up just becoming adamant. We knew we were going to do night tribal. We normally do tribal.

Every set has a little bit of tribal. We had planned to do night tribal in salad. Dominaria had been soup, soup and salad. Every set has a little bit of tribal. We had planned to do Night Tribal in Salad. Dominaria had been Soup, Soup and Salad. So the small set that was supposed to be the Dominaria small set was going to have a Night Tribal component. We ended up scrapping that when we got rid of Salad. A little tiny bit of it got into Dominaria, but just on a couple cards.

So we knew we had played in that space and we liked it, so we're going to have that here. so we knew we had played in that space and we liked it so we're going to have that here the other things that I was playing into was there were a lot of smaller themes that I liked we played around with trying to do a little bit of batching at one point of doing things that were mystical at one point it was like artifacts or enchantments or fairies

and eventually we realized that it just played fine as artifact or enchantments. We didn't really need to batch it per se. We also were trying to play around with magical creatures. We tried batching there where we listed a bunch of magical creatures. And eventually what we realized is what we wanted was everything that wasn't the humans.

So we just started saying non-humans. So we said, okay, let's do a tribal, our second tribal, normally we do one or two tribal things. Our second tribal thing would be anti-tribal, meaning that it helps everybody but one group. And humans get all the help all the time. So non-human we felt was cool. And it gave the opportunity

to have a little bit of crossover because we knew we were going to do some of the court stuff that wouldn't just be humans, that we'd have knights that were goblins or giants or other things. So we put in that. And the other big thing we did was we made a list of the fairy tale tropes, of all the things you expect in fairy tales,

and we just kept designing them. Normally in Vision, a lot of what we do in Vision is proof of concept. We're trying to demonstrate that something can be built. And we make cards, and maybe those cards will end up being in the set. But normally the cards are more trying to demonstrate the kind of thing we're doing. But with a top-down set,

we're really trying to show the execution of what we're trying to do. So we did a lot more actual card design. They're more so than normal. Throne of Eldraine has a lot of cards that their origin started in vision design. Some of them went through changes. Some of them actually stayed pretty close to what we did. And so it was very interesting

trying to sort of, trying to figure out how to do that. Very early on, like the first week, Peter Lee, who was my shrunk second, made Ginger Brute, the Gingerbread Man. And we loved the card.

We thought the design was really cool. But the issue at the time was, is that too silly? Like, we already had the issue of things being juvenile and worrying about that and make sure we had a serious tone. So we worked with the creative team, and we decided we were going to try to figure out a line,

meaning what was on the right side and what was on the wrong side, you know, what was we were willing to do. So at one point, we realized early on we had made a push and boots card, and we decided that talking animals made it a little,

you know, made it a little sillier than we wanted. So we decided, so what we ended up with was that animals could have agency, meaning, if I,

the duck could fetch me the key. Like, I could talk to the duck, and the duck would understand me, and the duck could sort of, you know, be a little bit smarter than a real duck but the duck wasn't going to dress up in clothes or talk so puss in boots was off limits

the gingerbread golem as it was called for design, not ginger brute was always on the line we're like ah we're not sure clearly we make golems and artifact creatures that are made out of things.

But, you know, gingerbread man is a little on the silly side. And so we definitely were trying to figure out what to do. And it was... We joked that it was the line. Like, it was kind of right at the spot where maybe we would do it and maybe we wouldn't. And we didn't know which side it fell on.

But we decided that, like, if you were sillier than the gingerbread man, or, you know, we probably weren't going to do you. If you were more serious, we'd consider doing you. And in the end, the gingerbread man made it. Obviously, it had a big part in the trailer and stuff, so I was happy. I really, really liked Peter's design.

So, I mean, the food part, we'll get to the food in a second. It wasn't food yet, but... Okay, so we hand off the set. We kind of know when we hand it off that we're shy one mechanic. We didn't... We had spent a lot of time and energy, and we mapped out the cords, and we had done a lot of work, but sometimes when you hand off, like, you know, sometimes you have everything you need,

and sometimes you're like, well, here's the space we haven't quite cracked yet. And we knew that we wanted something that was a little more board-centric, that mattered. A lot of the stuff we had put in the set was about when you're making your deck, when you're building, you have to think about these things. Like, Adamant is like, oh, well,

am I committing to this color? You have to think about when you built your deck. When you're building, you have to think about these things. Like, adamant is like, oh, well, am I committing to this color? You have to think about when you built your deck. We really knew we needed something that was more about being in play. So the idea that the set design team came up with, and this was not made by the vision team, was the idea of the adventures. And the idea was that you would go off on an adventure,

that it was a creature that had a spell stapled to it, and that you could cast the spell first. And if you did, the creature got exiled. It went off on an adventure. And then you could later cast the creature. This was playing in some space that we had messed with. Split cards didn't let us do permanents and non-permanents

because you had the card in play that had both, and you didn't understand what it was. So the idea of being a creature dominantly with a secondary spell being there worked within the rules. They realized it allowed you to tell two-step stories, which worked really well with all the

top-down stuff we were playing in. And so that got added. There also was, for a while, there was an ability they played around with called quest where the card would say you need to go do these things usually it was three things you would sort of mark them as you did them

and then you could trade the card in for a big effect when you did it I think at one point quest got you unique tokens that were essentially were cards so like for example the five legendary artifacts that were essentially were cards. So like, for example, the five legendary artifacts that were rare. Those originally,

you couldn't even put in your deck. You had to take the quest, go through the quest, and the quest would generate it and make it, and then you could use it. We realized that Adventures in Quest, they both weren't needed,

and Adventures were playing together, so quests went away. The other thing that came up was when we had made the set, we had made use of gold counters because there were a bunch of fairytale tropes of playing to gold, like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold and stuff like that.

And the goose that lays the golden egg, stuff like that. But while the set design team was working, they realized how often food was popping up that Little Red Riding Hood is taking food to her grandma and Hansel and Gretel are hungry and they're looking for food and they find a house made of food

and Jack trades his magic beans there's a lot of food that ended up being throughout that and so they decided to end up making a food token. And because food is equated so closely to health, you know, elf needs food badly, that it made a lot of sense that food would mean it would give you life. We've done a lot in the past when we talk about nourishment and stuff. We've usually tied that to life games.

So it seemed pretty straightforward. People really like stuff like clues and treasure. We're playing a little bit more in artifact token space. Life gain is relevant. There's not a game in which life doesn't matter. You know, because life's the win condition. So they ended on food. When they made the food, they took out the gold tokens.

They didn't want two different tokens. So they added food in, and then food became an artifact subtype because they were artifact tokens, and that allowed us to turn ginger brute into a food golem and stuff like that um and we added on the food ability so that he did what food could do um now the other thing that happened during this time was one of the big sort of fights that i was having was when i got the set I just put in as many fairy tale stuff as I could. I just said, I recognized it to be the icing that it was. And I said, look, I want to go

full throttle there. And I talked to a lot of people and said, I basically made the argument of, you know, I used my story about the person who couldn't see the set, that couldn't see the Arthurian Park set. And I said, look, it's not the Arthurian Park isn't cool. It's not that we can't do the Arthurian Park. It's not that we can't world build around it. It'll be really, really good for world building. We can make a lot of cool cards with it. It's just not going to be the thing that sells the set. It is very hard to say, for the fourth time in magic, we are going to do high fantasy. It's just not, that's not,

that's not the thing that's going to bring people in the door. Where fairy tales was something that was, you know, I knew the power of, one of the things about genre tropes is that you're going to make individual designs where the individual designs

are so just individually cool that you get people excited. They're like, oh, that's so cool. Oh, that's so cool. And like, as I'm doing this podcast right now, throwing Eldraine, the previews are going on right now, and just watching every day as we reveal some new cards,

we're like, oh, that's so cool. The thing that Top Down, especially genre-trope Top Down, can do is you get to make individual cards that are so full of flavor, that people just get so excited individually by the designs that it carries a lot of, when you're trying to sell a set, the message of the set.

Not that the mechanics don't matter, and people are enjoying adventure and food and, you know, different things. But it really is the thing that pulls people's eye. And so I spent a lot of time really getting everybody on board with the idea that fairy tales, like, we needed to go all in on fairy tales. And little by little, I won people over. I think the thing that really helped was we designed the cards and then got people to play in the play test.

And the cards were just darling. They were so much fun to play. Oh, the other big realization I made is when I made Innistrad, I was doing a lot of different tropes. But one thing I realized was there wasn't a lot of crossovers of a lot of the, you know, if I make a fly-inspired card or make an exorcist-inspired card, there's no crossover there. I mean, there's a little bit of crossover in, okay, zombie films of zombies, and there's some zombie tropes made of crossover. But the thing about fairy tales that I realized when, I think

we were making the spinning wheel, and like, oh, we gotta make a spinning wheel, and then I realized, like, oh, wait a minute, are we making the Cinderella spinning wheel, meaning the thing that puts you to sleep, or are we making the Rumpelstiltskin spinning wheel, the thing that takes straw and turns it into gold? And then I'm like, oh, well, what if it's both?

You know, is the big bad wolf the big bad wolf that, you know, straw and turns it into gold. And then I'm like, oh, well, what if it's both? You know, is the big bad wolf the big bad wolf that, you know, tries to get Little Red Riding Hood? Or is it the one that blows down the houses of the Three Little Pigs? You know, Prince Charming. Which Prince Charming? Which dashing prince do we mean?

And what I realized was that fairy tales use a lot of archetypes that they mix and match between stuff. And so what I realized was that fairy tales use a lot of archetypes that they mix and match between stuff. And so what I realized was there's this neat thing where we could give you component pieces. Because, like, for example, we, like, oh, let's do the exorcist. Well, there's one thing to make. We made it. It's the little girl that turns into the demon.

There's not a lot of versions of that to make. But when I'm making Cinderella, there's all sorts of cards that I can make. And what we found was by making all the component pieces, you could play the fairy tale as known and have fun. It's like, oh, look, I'm putting the glass slipper on the princess. Or I'm using true love's kiss to wake up something from the sleeping spell. You had those moments where you were playing the fairy tale. But another great moment was that you could mix and match.

Like, okay, who am I going to put on my magical carriage to go to the to meet Prince Charming? I'm putting the cow that I'm going to trade for magic beans. You know, like, that you could sort of mix and match them, and there was a lot of fun there. And that was something that fairy tales got to do that some of our

other, like, Innistrad and Gothicore didn't do. And it was a really neat thing that sort of the mix and matchness of fairy tales really allowed us to make a lot of component pieces and then let the audience have fun putting them together, either in the way they normally are or in the way they are not normally are. And both

of those are fun to do. It's fun to wake up something, you know, wake up someone who's sleeping with two gloves kiss, but it's also fun to you know, put the glass slipper on the giant from the beanstalk. That is fun as well. And so when we handed off, really the thing that I was stressing was

the importance of the fairy tales, the flavor they had, the interconnectivity of them. And then we handed over a lot of themes. And then we had the one big gap, which set design filled with adventure. That we were missing the board-centric thing.

But anyway, I'm very happy with how Throne of Eldraine came out. Like I said, the it's funny that one of my jobs as the head designer is to push in new space and find places to go that I think the players will really like. Um, but whenever you push in new space, it's something you haven't done. There is a certain salesmanship that comes with it.

Like a lot of my job is convincing everybody else in R&D that no, no, no, this is a good idea. And so one of the things that's fulfilling for me, like one of the hard parts of my job is I often have to push the boulder up the hill. I often have to say, I know this will work. And there's a lot of convincing of people and a lot of energy that goes into doing it. And the good example here is I've been wanting to do fairytales for a long time this is not something new this is not like I came up the idea and then when it made it it was like I had the idea and I really had to spend a lot of time and

energy getting to the point where we can make it so seeing the audience react so positively to it like sort of seeing my vision come to life and seeing people respond the way I expected them to respond is very fulfilling. So this has definitely been... I mean, I enjoy all the stuff I work on. I think the sets that I... the ones that I struggle more on, the ones that like I had a fight to bring into existence, like Unstable is kind of similar. Like I had to work on it for seven years and it got delayed three times and like it's finally making it. There's some great satisfaction that comes there. And I think Throne Eldraine has some of that for me,

where maybe if I just said, here's an idea, we love it, and they made it, it wouldn't have quite the impact on me. But I fought so hard to get this made. I'm really, really happy

that people are embracing it so much. So, anyway, that, my friends, is the story of the design of Throne of Eldraine. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.