Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #685: Things Not Going According to Plan

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

In game design, as in any creation—and life really—things don't always go according to plan. In this podcast, I talk about numerous times Magic design ended up having to go in a different direction.

I'm pulling up at driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I just got back from vacation and I have a story to tell you. So this podcast I've themed, Things That Didn't Go According to Plan. So I'm going to share with you the story of my vacation and then interspersed with that, I'm going to talk about different things that I've done where designs didn't go according to plan. As you can get the hint that my vacation did not go according to plan. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell my story about my vacation, but interspersed it with stories from other sets. So we start with my vacation.

Okay, so let me start with the preamble to my vacation. So, my oldest daughter, Rachel, is in college. And so my wife, Laura, was planning our next family vacation. And so it seemed like the summer was the best time to do it because Rachel was off school and the kids were off school. And the kids, Rachel's schedule and Adam and Sarah's schedule don't always line up based on when they're on or off school. So the plan was that Rachel was working all summer long, but she had a little bit of time before her job started.

And it turned out that the kids' school ended a week before Rachel's job started. So the idea originally was we were going to go on a vacation in June. So the kids' school, Adam and Sarah's school would end and there was a week before Rachel's job started and that we could do our vacation. Okay, so the magic story I'll tell now is Tempest. So Tempest was the first set I ever did. And I was very excited to do it. For those who don't know, the quick version of the story was

I got hired as a developer, but I really wanted to be a designer. And so I learned that Richard Garfield had not worked on any magic design since Arabian Nights, and that he is eager to work on something again. And so I went to the powers that be and said, hey, Richard is interested in working on a set. I would love to lead a set. And Richard said he'd work with me. What if I did a set with Richard?

And they're like, well, Richard will be on the set. I go, yeah. They go, okay. And they let me pick the rest of my team. I picked Mike Elliott, and I picked Charlie Cattino, as well as me and Richard. Anyway, we were a bunch of people that had a lot of ideas. Mike and I were both very interested in being designers that we hadn't yet sort of had a chance to prove ourselves.

Richard hadn't worked on anything since Arabian Nights and Charlie had been on the Mirage team but hadn't really been on a team since the Mirage team, a design team. So we had a lot of ideas, a lot of ideas. So much so that when I turned in the original version, it just was overrunning the stuff, overrunning. And then I was told, you have too much stuff. You have to take stuff out.

There's too much stuff here. And so interestingly, the next year set, which is Urza Saga, both Echo and Cycling were both things that were originally in Tempest. Tempest also had a Poison theme. It was chock full of stuff. And so all the stuff that Tempest ended up being was in Tempest. So it wasn't that we didn't make, we made Shadow, we made Buyback, you know, all the things that ended up being there. But we just, I was just so excited and I had a team that had so many ideas that when I turned it in originally, it was overrunning. Okay, back to my vacation story. Okay, so we were all set to go on vacation

in the beginning of summer. Except in the winter, in, I think it was like February, we had what they referred to here as Snowmageddon. We had a giant snowstorm. And the kids were out of school for a whole week. In fact, it started on a Friday. The kids got out of school early on Friday.

And we had to drive down to pick them up because it wasn't their normal bus stop. It was like at the bottom of the hill. We live on a hill. And we wanted to get them. And while we were picking them up, snow started falling. And we almost didn't make it back up the hill. Snow was falling at such a fast rate. But anyway, we made it up the hill.

We were stranded in the house for a while. The kids didn't have school. So the reason that matters is the way Seattle doesn't handle snow all that well. There's not a lot of snow in Seattle. It happens infrequently. So the infrastructure to deal with snow just isn't there. And so once snow fell, I mean, the first snowfall we had, the beginning of it, probably would have shut a lot of schools.

It was a pretty hefty snowstorm. But the fact that it took about a week, I mean, there was still more snow, but it took about a week to clean everything up and be able to get access to people. And because of the infrastructure in Seattle, it's not really made for snow. Like Cleveland would have cleaned it up in a day because we got a lot of snow in Cleveland. Anyway, it meant that we were out for a week. The reason that matters is the way they set up the school is that there's so many days built in and the kids have to go to school so many days. And there's a couple days like, you know,

it's a teacher's day, but if they need to, they can make it a school day. But anyway, they had so many school days, so many snow days, that school got pushed back a week. And so we lost our window to go on vacation. But luckily, luckily, Rachel's job ended one week before she had to be at school. And so we figured out, we found this cruise that was going to the Eastern Caribbean that left. And what it meant was, we would go on the cruise, we would come back,

the day, we would leave on a Sunday, we'd get back on a Sunday, and the day we'd get back, we'd have to fly directly to Chicago so that we could drop Rachel off. Rachel's school started on Tuesday. So we would get there on Sunday. We would try to move her in on Monday. And then Tuesday, school was going to start. So we said, okay. And the good news was Laura has been doing, she loves watching a lot of different like home buying type shows. And there's a whole series about buying homes in the Caribbean. And so she'd watch a lot of those shows and just she got to know the different islands.

And so we were going to, I think, St. Martin and St. Thomas. So she studied them and learned all about them and did a lot of research so that when we went there, we could sort of see all these cool things that the islands had to offer. Okay, my next story.

Fifth Dawn. So this was one of the ones where the way sets used to work is we'd make up the first set, we'd leave ourselves a little room to play with mechanics, but we sort of, we didn't block out the whole set like we would later do. We later would design blocks as whole blocks.

This is back in the day where we made a set, made another set, made another set made another set so fifth dawn was the third set in the mirrored in block but what happened was we mirrored and kind of broke and we between mirrored and dark steel we did a bunch of things that we like we figured out by fifth on that we, that affinity was going a little off the rails. And so when I was starting fifth on design, I was told, okay, we did a bunch of things in Mirrodin, and we did more of it in Darksteel. We can't do those things. The major themes of the set, affinity, you know, maybe you can have one or two affinity cards, but

nothing major, nothing that's going to further break things and the whole Artifact Matters theme that was so integral to what the set was yeah, we've got to kind of pull back on that and so we started the set with, okay, you have to make a third set in the Mirrodin block but try not to do anything, all the themes that Mirrodin was about yeah, none of those, all of those are off limits and so that was quite the challenge it was kind of like

we had to feel like we were part of the Mirrodin block but in a way that wasn't pushing in where all the broken stuff was happening and so that's what ended us down the path of Sunburst of the idea of well what if we made a turn this was one of the first sort of sharp idea of, well, what if we made a turn?

This was one of the first sort of sharp turns of a third set, where we said, okay, you've been playing artifact sets, and one of the things about artifact sets is you have a little more freedom with your colors. Well, what if the last set really cares about you playing colors, and in fact, wants you playing as many colors as you can? Now, the way you can tell that we did not plan this ahead of time is, had we done a block planning, we would have been able to sort of seed the things we needed to make this work. You'll notice there's a few things in Darksteel,

but there's nothing in Mirrodin. I mean, you can tell by the design in Mirrodin that Mirrodin had no idea this was going to happen because we literally didn't know it was going to happen. But we found some ways to do things, and we ended up having this little theme book caring about small artifacts, which we called COGS,

which are artifacts that cost one or less. And so we found some ways to play in themes that matched the tone of Mirrodin, but in places that were a little safer and not quite as problematic. And so, fifth on, really, we had to reinvent sort of how it could be a Mirrodin set in a way that was still an artifact set, but not in a way that was going to cause problems

with the other stuff. Okay. Back to my vacation story. Okay. So we booked this vacation, um, on, um, the last week, the last week of last week of the summer. And like I said, we literally were flying to Chicago because it was so a butting up to the very last week that Rachel, we were getting into

we were going in and out of Florida. Port Canaveral, I think is our actual port. And we were going to have to go from Orlando to Chicago on Sunday. And like I said, Rachel's school is starting Tuesday. So we'd have a day to move her in. So very little room for error. Okay, so we get on the ship. And the ship has an app.

You know, the ship has an app. So it's something that tells you about what's going on, what the schedules are. And one of the functions is it'll also tell you what days you're at sea and what days you're at port. So the very first thing when we get on the ship, we look on and we see a listing of the ports and it lists different

ports. Like we were supposed to go so the first place we were going to go is the place which was the island that the ship had. The big thing now for those that don't cruise is in the Caribbean, all the major cruise lines have kind of bought a tiny island and made it their own island. And that one of the stops is you go to their island. So we were going to stop there.

And that was still going to happen. But we were supposed to go to St. Thomas and St. Martin. And instead, it said Cozumel, which is in Mexico. Costa Maya, I think it was, which is also in Mexico. And someplace in Honduras, I think. I forget the name of the place. But anyway, the Western Caribbean. Not the Eastern Caribbean, the Western Caribbean. And we're like, what is going on? And that's when we saw somebody

we'd been standing in line next to a guy named Steve. And Steve walks by and Steve seemed to be in the know. And he goes, oh, here's what's going on. There's a hurricane, Hurricane Dorian. And the hurricane is scheduled to come hit the Eastern Caribbean, so we're going to go to the Western Caribbean. That's why the ship made a last minute, you know, in order. So, one of the things, real quickly, so for those who don't know much about hurricanes and cruise ships, hurricanes at their fastest can move maybe 14, 15 miles an hour.

The cruise ships can move about 22 miles an hour. So it's actually pretty safe to be on a cruise ship because they have all the systems to monitor weather and they have the ability to move faster than the weather can move. So they were well aware that there was this, I mean, at the time, I think it was a hurricane. I think it was a tropical storm. But it had the potential to become a hurricane. Obviously, it would become a hurricane. And so they're like, okay, this could be problems.

We literally want smooth sailing, so we're going to change our itinerary. And Laura was a bit bummed because she had done a lot of research on the places we were going to go. But like, okay, we want to stay safe. We don't want to go where there's bad weather. So, okay, I guess we got a new itinerary. Okay, next up is the story of Ravnica. So the idea I had with Ravnica was I was trying to be not invasion. Invasion was five-color magic. So I decided to be multi-color that was away from five-color as possible. I came up with the idea of two-color. So I said, okay, well, what if all 10 two color combinations show up?

And so the very first play test, I come up with hybrid. And so we did a play test that had all 10 two color pairs, including hybrid for all the 10 two color pairs. And it was mind melting. Like, for example, the number of piles you had to make. You had to make piles for each of the monocolors. You had to make piles for each of the multicolors. You had to make piles for each of the hybridcolors. You had piles for artifacts and lands, maybe. So, bare minimum, you were making like 26, 27 piles.

It was just... I remember Henry Stern had said to me that he goes, you know, R&D, I mean, R&D is a bunch of former pros, right? Good magic players. And R&D...

One second. Let me have some water. Henry said it was the most mind-melting deck build he'd ever done. And that, I knew if R&D was having problems building their deck, like, R&D, I mean, we

play this with crazy stuff all the time. Like, we're fine-tuned to deal with the weird and the different. We couldn't handle it. And so my plan was thrown in a rye, like the idea of doing 10 two-color sets and doing a hybrid is just too much.

And so we had to come up with a plan, and one second, I apologize. While on the ship, I think I caught a small cold. Okay. So we had to come up with a way to do things differently, and while I had come up with the two-color pair idea and passed it along to Brady Dominick, who was the creative director, the lead of the creative team,

he came back with this idea of the guilds, of what if we represented each group as, like there were factions in the world, and there were ten factions. And then once I realized that idea, I then pitched the idea of, here's how we solve the problem. Let's not do all ten two-color pairs at once. It's too much. What if we broke them up?

And this was beginning, Ravnik was the first block that I led as head head designer and I was really into the idea of block planning. That I wanted to think about how all the sets would work together. So I came up with what I call the pie method is, what if we make something and break it up and divvy it along the whole year? So instead of having all ten two-color pairs, we would do four, then three, then three. The pit set would have four. Two small sets would each have three. And the time was considered

kind of crazy. I remember there's a lot of talk within development at the time about, was that possible? Was that draftable? How would players handle the idea? Like, oh, look, I love playing black-green. Oh, good, the first set has black-green

in it, but the second and the third set don't have any of it, none of it, you know, or I love, you know, white-blue. Well, the first set has none of it, the second set has none of it, and only the third set do I get anything, and that was pretty radical, but I said, trust me, let's see if we can make this work. I think we can make this work. Obviously, we did. Okay, so we now learned that we are not going to the ports we thought we were going to. But, okay, we're going to make the best of our vacation. Lauren and I interestingly had brought a book all about the Eastern Caribbean. And then we were going to the Western Caribbean. So we went, we talked to Steve a little bit.

Steve had actually been to some of these islands. So we got a little bit of some expertise. We got to talk to someone who knew the islands. But anyway, we're going to make the best of our vacation. Okay, so I don't know. So we ended up going to their island. We had a lot of fun.

There definitely was there were some storms off in the horizon. We actually, my girls were going to do, um, uh, zip lining and they got delayed for an hour because of, there was lightning. So you could see a little, little hintling of there's some storms in the distance. Um, but we had a great time. Um, they had, they, they had like a water park there and we went down the tallest water slide in North America, at least the girls and I did.

My, Adam and my wife would have nothing to do with that North America, at least the girls and I did. Adam and my wife would have nothing to do with that. Anyway, we had a good time. So that was the one stop we had planned. And sometime, maybe the next day or day after that, there was talk about that Dorian, not only was Dorian going to hit the East Coast, the eastern Caribbean, but at some point it was looking like it was going to hit Florida. And so there were some rumors starting to go around that we might not be able to... Originally our thought was, oh, the hurricane,

it looks like it's going to hit... We were watching the weather, and like, oh, well, they think it's going to hit like Sunday night. Okay, well, good, we'll get in Sunday morning, get off watching the weather, and like, oh, well, they think it's going to hit like Sunday night. Okay, well, good. We'll get in Sunday morning, get off the thing, the other people, they'll get out of the way. And we thought like, oh, you know, we're watching the storm, like, okay, it seems like it's delayed enough that we can get in and get out. But it turns out that when a hurricane, so Dorian had upgraded, it was no longer a tropical

storm. At one point, it was a, So, there's five levels to hurricanes. People don't know hurricanes. One being the mildest, five being the most severe. And over the course of a couple days, it went from one to two to three to four to five. And, you know, we would turn on the news on the ship. That's right. We'd watch news on TV. And, like, Dorian the news on the ship. That's right, we'd watch news on TV. And like, Dorian was one of the main stories.

There was a major hurricane coming. And we were watching because we wanted to make sure that we could get back. Because we had to get back. We had to get to Chicago to get Rachel to school. And we were watching it. And it sounded like it might be slow enough that maybe we could dock before it hit. But that's not how they work.

It's not like there's a hurricane tonight. Well, we'll shut down the port, you know, like a few hours before the hurricane hits. No. There was a hurricane coming. They locked down the port. So we first heard some rumors. Basically, the ship said, we're not sure what's going on. We'll get back to you. And they were very vague. Very vague. So at one of the shows while we were waiting for the show to start, we were talking to this woman who travels all the time. And she was saying that through her contacts

she had heard that the ship wasn't going to be able to dock on Sunday. And that her sister was in fact on a different cruise ship and they were told that they would be multiple days. And so that's the first time we got any inkling that we weren't going to be able to dock when we thought we were going to dock, which was problematic because our window to get to Rachel's school was super thin. So we were just waiting to hear, but that's the first time we sort of heard, oh, odds are we're not docking on Sunday. Okay, next.

Planeswalkers and Future Sight. So the original plan when I was working on Future Sight, one of the people on my team was Mac Avada. And Mac Avada had made a pitch for the idea that he thought magic should have planeswalker cards. That the planeswalker characters were the most important things in the stories, but they weren't a key part of the game. Like, yeah, every once in a while, we'd reference them on cards. Like, you know, it's Urza's glasses.

Oh, Urza's a planeswalker. And every once in a while, maybe we'd see them on a card. But they weren't really part of the game in an organic way. And Matt's pitch is, part of the to make Planeswalkers really mean something is to make Planeswalkers actual cards. So we had committed to making Planeswalker cards. In fact, the story of Time Spiral Block was a big reset where we were kind of depowering the Planeswalkers so that we could tell stories with, because the planeswalkers

in early magic were like gods. They could create worlds and they could kind of do anything they wanted. And it just, it's hard telling stories where your main characters are gods. You know, omnipotent gods. So the idea of the whole time spiral story was that there was a break in the multiverse and in order to sort of fix it people had to sort of give up their sparks. And so it was a way for us to reset and sort of, we were going to make new planeswalkers and

tell a whole set of story with just sort of depowered planeswalkers that were, yeah they could walk between worlds and they had new magic, but not quite at the level. They weren't, you know, godlike. So the plan had been, Future Sight, was we were hinting at the future, right? The time trial block had cards from the past, and this bonus sheet were cards from the past, and then we had cards in Plane of Chaos from an alternate present, and then we had cards from the past on this bonus sheet were cards from the past, and then we had cards in Planes of Chaos from an alternate present, and then we had cards from potential futures

was the idea. So we decided we were going to make Planeswalker cards and put them into Future Sight. So the original plan was we were going to have three of them in Future Sight. We were going to have a black, a green, and a blue. And so we made them, and what happened was the earliest version of the Planeswalkers,

Richard had made these things for Ravnica called structures, that the idea, they represent, like, buildings. We didn't end up using, there's too much going on in Ravnica, but I liked what structures were, I liked the idea of structures. And the idea was, they sat there,

and you could attack them with creatures, and you didn't have damage, you could destroy them. But they sort of just had an effect. And so, I liked that idea, and you didn't have damage, you could destroy them. But they sort of just had an effect. And so I liked that idea, and I thought I brought that idea over to Planeswalkers. And then we wanted the Planeswalkers to have some agency to do something. So the original version we made of them, they did three things. Turn one, they would do the first thing. Turn two, they would do the second thing.

Turn three, they would do the third thing. So for example, the green one, which would later become Garruk, turn one, it would do the second thing. Turn three, they do the third thing. So, for example, the green one, which would later become Garruk, turn one, it would make a wolf. And then turn two, it would double all wolves. And turn three, it would give all wolves plus three, plus three.

And trample, I think. But the problem was, let's say you made a wolf and your opponent destroyed the wolf. Turn one, I make a wolf. Okay, and your opponent destroyed the wolf. Turn one, I make a wolf. Okay, and my opponent, you know, destroys the wolf. Turn two, I double all wolves, but I don't have any wolves, so it doesn't really do anything. Turn three, all my wolves get really big, but I have no wolves, so it doesn't do anything. It made them feel kind of dumb. It's kind of like robots, like, okay, well, that didn't go according to plan, but my plan's in motion.

What can I do to stop my plan now? that didn't go according to plan but my plan's in motion what can I do to stop my plan now and we ended up shifting them to a thing in which you could choose what to do with them as the person who controls them but there was loyalty that was being gained and lost such that you had to kind of build up to do the big thing, the ultimate and so instead of the planeswalkers kind of naturally building up

we gave you options, but you had this plan to sort of build up to something that you could build up to. Anyway, we did not finish the planeswalkers in time. We did not think where they were at was right yet, because they were still in the robot form.

And so we made the calls to drop them and not do them in Future Sight, and like, work on them and make sure we get them right before we premiere them. And so we made the calls to drop them and not do them in Future Sight and work on them and make sure we get them right before we premiere them. And so they ended up premiering in Lorwyn, so the next set. We did on Tarmogoyf. Tarmogoyf cares about the different types of permanents you have in your graveyard. We did reference both Tribal and Planeswalker, which were things that we knew were coming in Lorwyn.

So we did hint at Planeswalker as a card type, but we didn't actually have any Planeswalker, which were things that we knew were coming in Lorwyn. So we did hint at Planeswalker as a card type, but we didn't actually have any Planeswalker. So we had a sort of... We made the conscious decision of, this is going to be important. We want to do it right. Let's spend the time to get it right. And we did. By the way, the robotic Planeswalkers would be the foundation of where we ended

up doing Saga. Saga is a lot of the idea came from the thing we liked about that. The problem we had with Planeswalkers was it made the Planeswalkers not of agency, but a story. There's just a story. There's an order to the story. So if the story goes awry, well that's the story. That's how the story goes. Although we were a little more careful on Saga to try to make sure that

if something gets derailed that it still meant something but anyway, that was Planeswalkers Future Sight okay, so we heard rumors that we maybe weren't docked, they were very vague early on because they didn't want to tell us until they knew and then eventually they came back and they said okay, we're not going to be able to dock on Sunday we know that we're not going to be able to dock on Sunday. We know that we're not going to be able to dock on Sunday. So for sure, for sure, for sure, we're not going back on Sunday.

And they said, okay, we admit to that. We're not going back on Sunday. And so we'll let you know when we think we can dock. So we had access to Wi-Fi. One of the things that I had purchased for my family, knowing my family, was I got us Wi-Fi. For those that don't have teenage children, they cannot live without Wi-Fi. And I knew I wanted to do stuff like get on Blogatog, even though I was on vacation. There's a lot of waiting around.

We did a lot of trivia and there were shows and there's a lot of activities in fact our days were full of activities but usually like go to the place sit around you know get a seat

sit around for 20 minutes and then do the activity and so I had a lot of downtime so I knew that I would look at the internet so I could do stuff like answer my blog

and stuff also the previews for Throne of Eldraine I had gone down had I done did I do a podcast on that? Also, the previews for Throne of Eldraine. I had gone down... Had I done... Did I do a podcast on that?

I don't think I did. Oh, something I will have to do a podcast on. Actually, I don't know whether or not... I don't know whether or not you have heard it before you heard this one or after this one. But we went down and shot a video. Actually, I don't think I've yet recorded it, but in the

power of me changing the order of things, you might have already heard this podcast. I don't know. But I had to go down to do... I did a video down in L.A. for Throne of Eldraine. I went

and it was Jimmy Wong and Cynthia Shepard. Anyway, there's a whole other podcast all about it that you might have already listened to. And that thing was going... I was supposed to get back on Tuesday night, so my first day back at work was going to be Wednesday, which was, by the way, the first day for my kids' school. That we were going to go. Rachel's going to start her first day on Tuesday. We were leaving on Tuesday after we got moved in, and then on Wednesday we'd be back, the kids would start their school, and I would have my first day at work.

And that was previews for Thorn of Eldraine, the beginning of the previews, the video that we shot. Anyway, I really wanted to see a response to Thorn of Eldraine. I'm obviously very happy with Thorn of Eldraine, the beginning of the previews, the video that we shot. Anyway, I really wanted to see a response to Throne of Eldraine. I'm obviously very happy with Throne of Eldraine. It's very exciting to see players first get to see stuff. I like to read that. Anyway, I wanted Wi-Fi. The kids wanted Wi-Fi. We had Wi-Fi. So we had to start making some plans. The problem was we couldn't call anybody. We had Wi-Fi, which meant I could email people and I could text people if I had their phone number.

Although the weird thing is because I was on, not, the text didn't even work with everybody. I think I had to text people that had iPhones. But anyway, we were limited in who we could contact and how we could contact them. And so, like, our plans had to change. Obviously, we had a flight leaving Seattle going to Chicago. And we were on a flight leaving Chicago coming back on Tuesday night. So anyway, we weren't sure what was going on. So the first disarray was we sort of had to make backup plans, but we didn't quite know.

Like, if Rachel was going to be late to school, she had to tell her teachers. But we didn't know if she'd be late to school. And if the kids were late to school, we had to tell their teachers. Anyway, so a chaos of brewing. Okay, the next set where things didn't go according to plan was Scars of Mirrodin. So, uh, the

original plan for Scars of Mirrodin was it was going to be new Phyrexia, and it was all about coming to this world where the Phyrexians had taken over, and only at the end of the block, in sort of a Planet of the Apes style moment, did you realize that it's Mirrodin! Oh no, it's Mirrodin!

That was the plan. I had a lot of problems. There was a lot, like, I was trying to bring the Frexians to life and I did a lot of cool things, but I didn't understand where the block was going. Like, I felt like we were beginning at the end of the story and like, where do you go? And I was and I was trying to do the block planning and I

really was having trouble. In fact, so much so that I, I mean, I've done a whole podcast on this, but I had a meeting with Bill where Bill was like, if things don't shape up, I'm going to replace you as the lead of the set. Things just aren't working. And, but Bill gave me this pep talk. He goes, but I know you can do it. You're the best we got. You can do this. And so that's when I went off and I said, hey, I think we're doing the wrong story.

I said, I think we had this really interesting story where a world the players know changes to the bad guys come and take over the world. That seems really cool. Why are we starting after all the cool stuff? Like, why are we starting with it all over? Let's come to Mirrodin. Because when we had been in original Mirrodin, we'd actually planted the seeds that the Phyrexians were there. We had planned for this to become New Phyrexia. But I said, you know what's the cool part? Let's go back to Mirrodin and see the Phyrexians take over Mirrodin. And I pitched

this to Bill. Bill came up with the idea of, well, what if we don't know? What if there's a war? We get back to Mirrodin. We realize the Phyrexians are there. The middle set's a war. I pitched the idea that we watch it fall. And Bill was like, well, what if the third set we didn't know the outcome? And we

said, it's one of two different things. And so the way Scars of Mirrodin worked was, there's Scars of Mirrodin, then Mirrodin of the Siege, there was a war, and then either it was going to be New Phyrexian, because Phyrexian's won, or it was going to be Mirrodin Pure, because Mirrodin won. And we didn't tell anybody. We actually advertised.

When stores bought the set, we're like, well, either it's this or that. We're not telling you which it is. And stores bought it not knowing which set it was. Now given, it's a magic set and stores buy all the magic sets. It wasn't a crazy ask. But anyway,

we made a major switch in what we were doing because I realized that just the path we were going down wasn't the right path. And I came back with a completely different path.

And it ended up being a really cool path and made for like, Mirrodin Receives was one of our first pre-releases that had this whole gimmick to it where you picked a side

and there were different boosters and it really allowed us to reinvent and Scars of Mirrodin is the start of the fifth age of design where we really started thinking about how I started imbuing emotional stuff. Anyway, it really changed how we did magic design. Okay, back to the ship.

So, they said not Sunday. And not Sunday eventually became we, well, so what happened was the hurricane came and it got to the Bahamas and it sat there.

And I think they originally said not Sunday. Then they were like probably a few days and then finally they said Wednesday. We're not going back till Wednesday. Now the good news was we didn't

have to pay anything extra. They just were going to, I think we docked off in Mexico. We went back to Cozumel for a couple days. My family actually looked into flying out of Cozumel. The problem was there were so many ships that were there that it was very hard to get booking. And I have a family of five, so getting five tickets was tricky. And then the price was through the roof.

So we ended up staying on the ship. So we knew that the earliest we were going to go back was Wednesday. That meant Rachel was going to miss some of her school. She had to write to her teachers. That meant Adam and Sarah were going to miss her school. We had to figure out a way to let their school know. I was going to miss work. Laura was going to miss work.

Like, all sorts of stuff were going on. And, now, the good news was we were safe. We were far away from the hurricane. They knew exactly where it was. We were not where it was. We were in the calm waters of Cozumel, Mexico. But there was a lot of stress and not quite knowing where things were. And we had packed for 10 days. We didn't pack for longer than 10 days. So we ended up having to do some laundry.

And the kids, like Adam has some medication and there is, I had medication. in fact, numerous of them had medication that we had only brought a certain number of days worth of medication and trying to figure out what we do with that and luckily for Adam I had brought a little bit extra, but I had brought extra of mine anyway, there was a lot to solve next is Dark Ascension. So I had actually not done the first and second set in...

I have not done a lot of second sets in Magic. I've done a bunch of first sets. I've done a bunch of third sets. I think Dark Ascension, and depending on how you want to think of it, even tied to the two second sets I've done. But traditional second sets, meaning the winter set, I think Dark Ascension is the only one I've ever done so the idea was, I wanted to do the year after

Innistrad was going to be what was it? Return to Ravnica Ken Nagel was going to lead Return to Ravnica so it allowed me to do back-to-back sets so Dark Ascension I was really into the story of the humans falling prey to the monsters,

because that was, like, things were, it started in a way, things were bad. The monsters were attacking the humans, the humans were in trouble. And Dark Ascension had to be, the humans were on the brink of extinction. So I spent a lot of time and energy sort of making mechanics that played up how dire it was for the humans. And at one point, my lead developer, Tom Lovilli, came to me and said, look, I get that you're playing up this idea of the humans and I know they're the main characters from a story standpoint

but the set wants to be about something not not about something you know and the selling point of the set can't be humans are in trouble and he made me realize that I wasn't thinking about I was trying to match the story and the tone of the story but humans are in trouble. And he made me realize that I wasn't thinking about,

I was trying to match the story and the tone of the story, but I said, oh, you know, it's right. What's the selling point of the set? What makes you excited for the set? And so what I realized was, well, if humans are in trouble, that meant who's in power? The monsters. So Dark Ascension, I switched and said,

oh, monsters are awesome. Look how powerful the monsters are. That's when I came up with Undying. So it really meant to switch on how to think about the set, rather than the set just being, oh, humans are in trouble, to the idea of monsters rule. And yes, that meant the humans were in trouble, but it really made a focus of, let's make some cool monsters. Why do I want to buy this set? Because there's awesome, powerful monsters. Now the humans, if you like humans, humans are in trouble, but guess what?

There's a set coming later called Absinthe Destroyer where the humans gotta win the day. If you like humans, we'll get you there. Okay, so back to the ship. So, we had to scramble a lot, and also we had to sort of tell people that we were late, and the other thing we used to tell people,

we're trapped by the hurricane, people seem to think you're in the hurricane. Like, you know, like our ship was, like, trapped in the middle of the hurricane. Never were. We're nowhere near the hurricane. They're very smart. They know where the hurricane is. They stay away from the hurricane. You know, the ships...

There's a lot... I mean, the people who are... The captain and everybody, like, they spend a lot of time understanding the weather patterns. That's a very important part of their job. In fact, they stay away even where, like, it's rainy somewhere if they can. You know, they like to stay in clear, open skies and not rough seas and stuff. So anyway, we start hearing, like, we were watching, every day we were watching the news, and Hurricane Dorian is just not moving. I remember there was, like, one or two days where it was going under one mile an hour.

And, like, this isn't good. If I can walk faster than the hurricane, and it stayed on the Bahamas, for those who remember this story, it stayed on the Bahamas. So, like, the Bahamas were just getting pummeled by a Category 5 hurricane, and it just wasn't moving. So, for the sake of Bahamas, and the sake of us, we're like, come on, come on, hurricane, let's get going. But it was clear the hurricane was not going anywhere. And, like I said, they had picked up more food and stuff. Of places to be trapped during a hurricane, a luxury cruise is not a horrible place. I mean, there were a lot of logistical things

to figure out. We didn't have clean clothes and medicine and stuff like that. So there was things we had to figure out. But in general, we had gourmet meals and we had activities. And anyway, it was a lot of fun. I actually proposed some activities. They were running out of things to do because they had run through all their neural activities. And so I actually proposed a game or two that they actually did. So anyway.

Next is Theros. So the story of Theros is when I first made the seven-year plan, made the plan for that year, that year was not Theros. We were not doing Greek mythology. I'd actually pitched a world where we went to this prehistoric world

and the second set was the same world but thousands of years later and the third set was the same world but thousands of years later. And the idea is you'd watch the evolution of this world. Right before we were about to begin it, Brady came and said, look, we don't have the resources to do this

from the creative team. This is basically making three different worlds. When you advance thousands of years, it doesn't look the same. And while, yes, it's maybe not exactly three worlds, it's two and a half worlds, you know, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. We're not staffed up to do that. Ironically, we are now staffed up to be able to do three worlds. That was not the case at the time. So Brady said, look, what if we do, Brady actually was the one that said,

we've been talking forever about doing Greek mythology. What if we do Greek mythology? And Marx was saying, wanting to find a place to do enchantments, maybe there'd be some synergy between enchantments and Greek mythology. So Brady pitched, what if we did Greek enchantments and a Greek mythology-inspired world and enchantment, not enchantment matters, but an enchantment focus? And I said, okay. and I had to figure out what that meant. I did, obviously. Um, but that was, that was

a big deviation from, from where we started. Um, okay, so, the hurricane's not moving. Um, we're scrambling. And the other thing is, um, we, we made changes. We made all our changes with our flights and stuff. We moved it to Wednesday. other thing is, we made changes.

We made all our changes with our flights and stuff. We moved it to Wednesday. Because, okay, we're getting back on Wednesday. But now it sounds like we're not getting back on Wednesday. And we got the same thing again where at first it's like, we're going to be back on Wednesday. Maybe we'll be back on Wednesday. We're going to try to get back on Wednesday. And then they're like, yeah, we're not getting back on Wednesday. They eventually said, okay, we're now going to try to get back on Wednesday. And then they're like, yeah, we're not getting back on Wednesday. They eventually said, okay, we're now going to try to get back on Thursday.

But we had made flights for Wednesday. And we called up our travel agent. She's like, we didn't call her up, but we had to go through email. But we email her. And she's like, look, I changed it once and they didn't charge you. I don't know if I can change it again. And she goes, there's a storm. They're probably going to shut down the airport.

Probably means I can change it once, but I can't change it multiple times. So we sort of had to hold back and we didn't know. We had to kind of figure out what we're going to do. And once again, we didn't know when we're going to actually land because we're watching this hurricane and it's going crazy slow. So we didn't know. We didn't know when we were getting back. Next, Khans of Tarkir.

So Khans of Tarkir, I built a world with four clans. Like, we had come up with the idea of the time travel story, and you can go back in time, and this hurricane's going to save it. All that had gotten figured out. But I originally built it with four clans, and it was kind of what would later be the Ixalan model. Two two-collar clans and two three-collar clans. And then Brady came to me and said,

the creative team had come up with a fifth clan. Could we do a fifth? They really wanted to include this fifth clan. And that required completely redoing everything. And that's how we got a wedge set. It did not start as a wedge set. It started as more like this uneven faction set with two you know, two and three color factions that I was experimenting with. And that ended up becoming a wedge set when it was not a wedge set.

I'm speeding these along because I'm not super far from where I'm speeding along. The earlier stretch were a little bit longer. Okay, so they say Thursday. We talk to, we communicate with our, and there's a flight, there's the late flight Thursday at 3 o'clock. Oh, so the thing we had figured out was we still needed to get Rachel to college.

The backup move date, like we were going to move her in the weekend before, but for people that got there late, Saturday was going to be a move-in date. It's like, okay. So we rearrange everything, say, okay, we're going to move her in the weekend before but for people that got there late, Saturday was going to be a move-in date. It's like, okay. So we rearrange everything. We say, okay, we're going to, originally the plan was we're going to fly to Chicago on Wednesday. We'll stay there for the weekend. We'll come back Sunday so that the kids can be back

for their second week of school. We've already ridden off the first week of school for the kids. Sorry. I'm fine. There's a little water there. My car slid a little bit but I'm okay. That's why you heard for those that think I'm in a studio. I'm fine. There's a little water there. My car slid a little bit, but I'm okay. That's why you hear... For those that think I'm in a studio, I'm not.

Anyway, so we tentatively had a flight that we could do on Thursday, but we couldn't actually book it because they hadn't yet committed it to being Thursday. But we were planning to go to Chicago, and it just was a matter of when we got to the airport. The problem was that if we booked too late, we'd miss the window of getting the flight, because, oh, the airport had shut down because of the hurricane.

So getting flights was tricky, because everything was filling up. And so we didn't know, like, we didn't want to miss the flight on Thursday. But also, if we got delayed and didn't end up on Thursday, but if we also, if we got delayed and didn't end up on Thursday, then we would have to pay money to change our flight, and so we were figuring through that.

Okay, next, Ixalan. So Ixalan, I've told the story, but the quick version of it is, I was planning to use a mechanic that Richard had made, Richard made a mechanic in Vampire the Eternal Struggle called the Edge, which, it was something that only one person had and that you could take it from other

players then you had it and it gave you special abilities in the game. So we were planning to, I wanted to use the Edge mechanic when they first pitched Ixalan they pitched it as a two-sided faction. I said change it to a three-sided faction and let's fight over resources and I'll use an Edge mechanic.

But then Sean Mayne ended up making the monarch for Conspiracy take the crown. He didn't have a good backup, and even though I thought we could make it work, I'd done some pre-testing, and it worked well. I thought we could use it in Ixalan.

Aaron ended up making the call that we were going to do it in Conspiracy, so I started Ixalan Design with everything I had planned, everything I had done in Exploratory had been thrown out the window because Conspiracy, take the crown, was going to use Monarch Mechanic. I couldn't use the edge. And so in Ixalan, we ended up adding a fourth faction, and then I modeled it after the way I had originally done cons

with two two-color factions and two three-color factions. I realized that there were going to be dinosaurs and there were going to be pirates, which both were exciting things that were new. So I gave up the idea of doing something tribal. And so that set was completely made on the fly. Everything we had planned, a lot of it had gone out the window. And so we had to revamp a lot of things.

I had to move things early on. I think the dinosaurs weren't in the three-color faction. And so we had to move them because the two new— The idea of having factions of different size colors was, well, two of them were new and different, and two of them we had done before. So we moved the exciting—sort of the ones you'd never seen before into the three-color factions, giving you more options of how to play dinosaurs and how to play pirates.

But that was Ixalan. So anyway, finally, late, like, Wednesday, they commit to Thursday. And they didn't know whether we'd get in early on Thursday or late on Thursday. They said somewhere between 6 a.m. and noon.

So we booked the latest flight, which was 3 p.m., out of Orlando, saying, okay, we don't want to miss the flight because we don't have a lot of time. We've got to move, Rach, we've got to get there. So we booked the latest flight. It turns out we actually booked at like 7 a.m. We got to the airport super early.

In fact, we couldn't even sign in for our flight because you can only sign in four hours before your flight. And we got there like four hours and 20 minutes before our flight. So we actually had to wait like 20 minutes to even get our tickets. But we did that and we managed to actually, on Thursday, four days, we were supposed to get in on Sunday, we ended up getting in on Thursday. So our seven day cruise turned into an 11 day cruise. We had a great time.

It was a lot of fun, but there was a lot of stress there. But we finally got back. My final story is about War of the Spark. Originally we had planned, it was an event set. I had this idea of playing a game that got overlapped on top of what you're doing. It's called Skirmish. And the idea was kind of like this tug-of-war game

where there are certain things you could do to pull toward your direction. And if you ever got all the way to the end, then you would score the skirmish and get a reward. And anyway, we played with that. So the design for War of the Reckless was six months. This was back when it was milk and cookies. Anyway. And I think we were like three months in before I had Audible and say,

okay, while I think this might communicate war, it was not communicating planeswalkers. Because my whole talk was planeswalker war. I made planeswalker war. And what the audience was expecting was planeswalker war. And so we made the Audible to change it. And that's when we started figuring out how do we get lots of Planeswalkers in

so that was, midway through we completely changed it okay to wrap up my story because I'm almost to work here we went to Chicago we had a chance to eat a bunch of Deep Dish Pizza which my family loves we got Rachel moved in

we actually were able, luckily, to move her in on Friday and because we were the, to move her in on Friday. And because we were the only people moving her in, we had to put her stuff in storage. And there were four... They will loan you, the college will loan you these giant big boxes on wheelies. And four of us took four boxes, and we managed to move her all in one giant swoop,

which we never would have done on a normal moving day. But because nobody was moving, because it was after everybody was done, we were able to move her in and move her in actually pretty quickly. And we were able to spend Friday and Saturday sort of unpacking and getting her moved in, setting everything up, and there was a lot of stuff that had to get set up. So anyway, we had a good time in Chicago. We actually ended up having an extra day in Chicago because our original plans were getting in Sunday and leaving Tuesday, meaning we were only there for sort of two days, one and a half days.

And we ended up getting in on Thursday and leaving on Sunday. So we actually got an extra whole day in Chicago. We got to see, I have some relatives who live in Chicago, so I got to see some of my relatives. And anyway, it turned into a very long trip.

In fact, my daughter, Sarah, my younger daughter, when we were coming back, she goes, this is the longest vacation we've ever been on. And she's like, I enjoyed it, but it was a little long. And I go, well, yeah, it was a little long. It wasn't quite planned that way. So anyway, that is the story of my vacation to the Caribbean that ended up being not quite what I planned.

So I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. A little, a little, mixing a little magic with a little, a little of my own story. And we had enough traffic that I was able to get through the whole thing. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy it.

But instead of me talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So, uh, I'll, I'm forgetting my own ending. Uh, anyway, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.