Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #698: Reusing Things

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Part of Magic design is reusing things you've used before. This podcast talks all about when and how we reuse things in design.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is all about reusing things. So in Magic, we do a lot to innovate and come up with brand new things. But sometimes we use things we already have. So today, I'm going to go from the micro level up to the macro level and talk about reusing things. So let's start by talking about cards, what we call reprinting. So the idea is we make lots and lots of cards, but sometimes, sometimes in a set, we won't make a new card, we'll bring back an old card. Okay, so there's a bunch of reasons why we reprint cards. Let me walk through those. So number one is just basic functionality. For example, every set has a giant walk variant, a giant site, giant growth variant. You know, we're going to have a common green spell that

makes things bigger. Now, a lot of the time it's a riff on the newest mechanic or something that just ties into the theme of the set. But every once in riff on the newest mechanic or something that just ties into the theme of the set but every once in a while you know what we just want giant growth um and so you know there are times where just we want certain functionality and our general rule is we don't invent cards just to invent cards if an existing card will fulfill the role we do that and so um we try to shake it up we We try to make, you know, we don't want every set to have giant growth exactly, but some can. And there's definitely certain staple magic effects that we do all the time, and those get reprinted. Another thing that we'll do is

we will do reprints based on what I'll call nostalgia, which is, you know, we're going to a world, and one of the things we always look for is, is there something from the past that we think might be fun to be here? Sometimes it's because it's just very flavorful, you know, like we're on Theros and like, oh, tragic poet, or we're on Innistrad and like Blazing Torch. You know, we're somewhere where there's a card that seems like it was made for the new world we're on, but we didn't make it for the new world, but it's kind of cool.

Like one of the things we're always looking for when we come to new worlds is to find things that are thematic and play into the new world, but are old cards. Something that people recognize, assuming they're old time players. And so it's fun kind of to bring back old things.

That make sense in a new context flavorfully. It's also fun to bring back cards. That make new sense mechanically. So for example. I made a card called Harrow. In original Tempest. Which you sacrifice a land. To go get two lands.

Then years later, I was making Zendikar. And Zendikar has a mechanic called Landfall. And so it cared about lands entering the battlefield. Well, here was a spell that lets you get two lands at once. And it was fun to reprint it. Not because, I mean, A, it's a good spell and people liked it and it was fun to see it come back.

But it just had a different context. That's one of the things that is fun, is to bring back a card that means something slightly different when you see it again. Another example of this is when I made Original Mirrodin. So Mirrodin was an artifact plant that had a lot of artifact creatures. So I brought back two spells, Terror and Shatter. And the reason I brought those back was Terror is destroy target non-black, non-artifact creature from Alpha.

And Shatter is Destroy Target artifact. Normally, in almost any environment you'd ever played, Terror was light years better than Shatter. But I liked the idea that in this environment, that it wasn't. That Shatter might even be the better pick than Terror. Terror wasn't horrible. You still got to kill all the non-artifact creatures. Non-black artifacts and non-artifact creatures. But there was a lot less things that worked on than normal.

Where Shatter was a lot more effective. Artifacts mattered a lot. People were main decking artifacts. So all of a sudden it made you kind of rethink things. Because the nature of how they functioned to each other was different. we like doing that with reprints we like sort of bringing them back but in a context that shows something different um another thing we'll do sometimes is we'll try to bring back things tied to a world um you know we come back to Ravnica hey it's the shock lands the shock lands are from Ravnica you know. We sometimes are doing reprints just because

they're sort of memorable and being connected to something. You know, in general, the reason for doing reprints and the reason for sort of bringing cards back, I mean, there's a couple reasons. One is there's just saving on design space in general that

you know, one of the things that I really sort of hammer home as a designer is whenever we can take things and use things that that are already a proven thing and they work we should make use of those. Every time we make a card we're making a tool for our toolbox well we should look in our toolbox that one of the things about making new car i mean making new cards or sorry you reusing old cards rather than making new cards um does a lot of good things it could simplify things it gets the simplest version of things sometimes in it has some nostalgia that people can remember seeing old cards that they remember from back when um it allows us to sort of

reuse and remember when we bring back a card well we're allowed to use the same art again in most cases assuming the art makes sense in the world and stuff. Usually it'll get new art meaning that we can recontext it so if we bring back a card it allows us

I mean we can't change the name. I'll get to that later about near reprints and stuff. But it allows us to sort of give it new art in a way that'll give it new meaning and stuff and help it fit into the world. So anyway, we like bringing back cards. Reprinting cards is a pretty big part of Iniset. And it's a tool that we need to use. I mean, it's a tool available to

us that we should be using in every set. There's no quota per se. I mean, it's not like we say there must be so many reprints in every set, but we try to have them. We try to make sure that we are bringing back stuff that people are excited by, but also bringing back stuff that just thematically makes sense. There's kind of a whole mix of things in that category, in that sort of area. But I do like reprinting cards, and it is something we consciously try to do. Okay, what else do we bring back? Mechanics. Now, here's an interesting thing.

Early in Magic's life, the philosophy of R&D way, way back when was that mechanics were disposable. You'd make a mechanic, you'd flesh it out, you did everything you could with it, and then that's it. You're done. And then what happened was I'd been assigned from Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time. from Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time, he wanted me to take a look at Onslaught, because Onslaught had been turned in, and it needed a little bit of tweaking, and I don't know if Bill was training me to be head designer, but Bill decided that he wanted me to sort of do a pass on it to help clean it up a little bit, and one of the things that I realized the set needed was it was missing a cycling-like mechanic. And so I spent a little time looking for cycling-like mechanics until I just sort of said,

you know what's a really good cycling-like mechanic? Cycling. And I said, why can't we just do cycling again? What in our rules says we can't do it? So I brought it back. I mean, I did a few different things with it. We had cycling triggers and, you know, we did a few things that we hadn't done before. But I brought it back. And that was really, that was the first time we brought back a named mechanic, which is kind of interesting. That's pretty, I mean, well, it's still early, I guess, in the big picture.

It's still, you know, we're talking onslaught. So that was a little ways into magic's life. But anyway, we've quickly realized that mechanics, like cards, are a resource that we should be able to use. And that if, you know, if we can use an old mechanic, if an old mechanic will function, it will do the job, then we should use it. if an old mechanic will function, it will do the job, then we should use it. And what happens is certain mechanics have proven to be, I'm not sure what the term to call for them, but like really go-to mechanics that really have proven to be very robust and very flexible in how we use them. The big three that I always talk about are flashback, cycling, and kicker.

Those are just super general. There's a lot of things you can do with them. There's a lot of space in them. We've brought each of those back numerous times. And so the idea is that now, it's not every set, but I sort of like every design team to at least consider bringing back a mechanic or two. You know, it really has to do with what your set is trying to do. Now, there's a bunch of reasons we bring back mechanics, so let's walk through those. The most common reason we bring back mechanic is as we've started tying sets to worlds in a more cohesive way,

our worlds have come on with identities. And so what that means is that there's certain, like when you go to Zendikar, there's some kind of expectation of seeing Landfall. When you go to Innistrad, there's an expectation of seeing Transform and the double-faced cards. You know, when you go to Ravnica,

you know, there's some expectation of seeing Hybrid and Split cards. There's just some things that you expect to Ravnica, you know, there's some expectation of seeing hybrid and split cards, and there's just some things that you expect to see. And so one of the reasons to bring back mechanics is just to help re-establish things and go, oh, this is the world as you know it. Now, when we revisit a world, we don't want it to be all reprints, and so we always are looking for trying to find new things as well. But especially returns we like some amount of hey remember this this was here another way we use mechanics is one of the metaphors that I like to use now is it once upon a time if you look an early sort of third age industry

I'm not interested um invasion time. We started doing this thing with blocks where themes, the mechanics were like sort of a broad theme. It's an artifact block. It's a tribal block. It's a graveyard block. And early on, we tended to use, I'm getting into themes.

Sorry, I'm jumping ahead. My next thing is themes. We'll get to themes in a second. The, well, more mechanics. Sorry, I'm combining my two things. But what happens is that as we have evolved, we definitely sort of think of, well, I'm sorry, I'm jumping ahead to themes. Let me finish on mechanics and I promise

I will get to themes. These ideas are a little interconnected in my head. The reason we bring back mechanics, A, same world. B, we're doing something where it's just a clean fit into what we're doing. The example there is we're doing Innistrad.

It's a gothic horror set. We want to care about the graveyard. Flashback is probably our best graveyard mechanic we've ever made. You know, it made us go, oh, do we want to use flashback? That seems very synergistic. So sometimes we bring back mechanics just because it's something that will thematically fit.

Sometimes it's something that we need something to help us. For example, in Zendikar, the nature of a land set made us have a lot of land on the battlefield. So we're like, oh, we need a way to use this. Mechanically, how can we use a lot of mana? And we brought back Kicker. Kicker did a good job of making use of extra mana. Um, you know, one of the things that we do when we're looking at what mechanics a set should have is thinking about does that set you know are the mechanics we already have that are of value to us

like one of the things we do now is when early on in the set we often especially with the new world we will go back and look at old mechanics to get a sense of what old mechanics make sense here not that we always use them, but we want to sort of walk through it and think about it. Like, for example, the last Ravnica we did, we sat down and said, okay, of all the existing mechanics, what mechanics would make sense for each guild?

Not necessarily what they had before, but what are the existing magic mechanics that make sense? And for example, you know, we didn't end up bringing back proliferate for Simic, but we looked at it. I mean, we brought back Convoke for Celestia, but you know, it's something where we're examining things like that.

Okay, another reason we like to bring back mechanics using proliferate as my example is just like I like bringing back cards that use it in a different context, I like bringing back mechanics that are able to be used in a different context. Proliferate's a good example.

So proliferate was originally designed in Scars of Mirrodin block. We were introducing or reintroducing the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians have this sort of disease metaphor, if you will. And so I was trying to play up a mechanic that showed the idea of spreading. And so proliferate came around because it was a set that had poison, it had minus one, minus one counters.

So the idea is I'm duplicating all the counters, and in that environment, it was more destructive in nature. Oh, I'm giving you more poison. I'm giving your creatures more minus one, minus one counters. So when we brought it back, it was very popular with players, we wanted to bring it back in a different context.

So instead of being destructive, we said, let's bring it back in an environment where it's constructive. So for example, in War of the Spark, oh, well, we had a planeswalker theme.

Well, one of the things about Proliferate is it builds up planeswalkers. And because the uncommon planeswalkers didn't have any plus abilities, it really gave us a way for you to sort of increase your uncommon Planeswalkers with doing something that they didn't naturally do themselves. We also had the Amass mechanic, and it played nicely with that. You had your little army, and when you Proliferate, it makes your army a little bit bigger.

It definitely... Proliferate played with the other mechanics and themes of the set, but in a way that built them up, which is just very different. And so it is fun to sort of say, you know, just like I like bringing back cards that have different contexts, I like bringing back different mechanics that show different contexts because that really sort of lets people see something in a new and different way. Another thing we'll do with mechanics is sometimes we will sort of reboot them, if you will.

I don't know if this falls into the, well, okay, that, I realize that's for later on my podcast, so we do like rebooting them I will get I will get to that um the final thing that we all we'd sometimes do with mechanics is uh

that there's a lot of nostalgia with mechanics and sometimes it's fun to if we're doing something new bringing back

something old just might make people feel comfortable that when we bring back a mechanic oh this mechanic like the whole worry that we had early on that we didn't want to bring back mechanics because it

just would be disappointing. Like, you've already seen this. And what we found is, assuming we give it a little bit of time, that players are fond of mechanics. Like, oh, I'm so excited. I like that mechanic. I'm glad it's back. I want to play with it again. And so it is cool to

do that. The one thing, by the way, the repeating mechanics lets us do to tie into cards is sometime we reprint mechanics, it allows us to reprint cards that we can't normally reprint because it requires the mechanic. So just like one of the things we do

when we repeat mechanics is we always ask ourselves, are there cards with this mechanic we want to reprint? So sometimes we'll also do that as well. Okay, so cards, mechanics. Next. I gave this one away.

Themes. So one of the things is there are, one of the reasons we repeat themes are there's not infinite themes to Magic. And there are just very popular themes. Players like multicolor, two-color, three-color. Players like factions. Players like multicolor, two-color, three-color, players like factions, players like graveyard, tribal. There's a lot of things we do that the players enjoy. And so one of the things

we do is we like to figure out ways to bring themes back. Now, sorry, this is the conversation I had earlier and I realized I jumped ahead of myself. When we first introduced themes to the game in a larger way was during the third age of design, starting with Invasion, where we gave blocks, like, back in the early days, like, a set would have two mechanics that didn't necessarily have much to do with each other. Starting with Invasion, we really started saying, okay, our blocks are about something. They're themed. Invasion was the multicolored block. Odyssey was the graveyard block. Onslaught was the tribal block.

Mirrodin was an artifact block. That we really started sort of bringing more cohesive things. Now, with time, so the way I describe it now, my metaphor is a recipe. That I think that our themes are kind of like ingredients. So for example, let's say I take a spice. Cinnamon. Or even, maybe cinnamon is a little stronger, but like taking something like flour,

or eggs, or, you know, sugar, that there's things that you can put in, in your, like, sugar, I guess, is a good thing. There's things you can put in your green, like sugar, that, okay, sugar really impacts something. You can tell if there's sugar in something, but there's a lot of different recipes that use sugar, that the way we think about themes now is that they are something to help, like, because we're past a point in time where all you had to do is just be one thing, now we're a little more advanced. So, for example, we're trying to do Innistrad. Innistrad is a gothic horror set. We're doing top-down gothic horror. Well, what components might you want to see? Oh, maybe you want some tribal components so you can have monsters.

Maybe you want some graveyard components so you can sort of play in the idea, you know, that you sort of look at the kind of things you want and we pick and choose to blend them together. And the idea is if we take our themes and mix and match them, we can end up with things that feel unique even though we've used the themes before. with things that feel unique even though you you we've used the themes before um and the the nice thing about using themes and having some sort of repetition of our themes is it's something that we've done like for example we've done enough graveyard things that we have a general sense of the issues dealing with graveyard a graveyard theme for example we've we've spent time mapping out all the colors so if we have a graveyard theme do all the, we've spent time mapping out all the colors.

So if we have a graveyard theme, do all the colors have things they can do that interact with the graveyard? And some colors naturally do, but some colors have less. So we've definitely built in some stuff. So in a normal set, yeah, black and green and white to some extent

all deal with the graveyard. But red or blue don't have a lot of interaction with the graveyard in a normal set. But we've done some things so that we can do a little bit more with that when we get into a graveyard set so that red and blue can have a little more access to the graveyard in a set with a graveyard theme.

And the major reason we bring themes back, which I didn't really talk about with cards or mechanics, although somewhat true, is there's not an endless number of themes. I mean, we're constantly exploring to find new themes, but a lot of the tried and true tested themes are something that are just, we know they work, we know they play well,

we understand how the color pie gets prismed through them. And so, you know, there's certain things that are just lead to good gameplay. Like I said, that doesn't mean we don't explore new themes or do new things, but you know, relying on old themes is something that we, you know, like any one set, as a general rule of thumb,

you know, it's nice to have sets do new things, and we always want sets to do new things, but when you rely on some old things it gives you a leg up when you're working on the set you know for example let's say I'm doing a graveyard theme I have done sets before with the graveyard theme you know I have worked on Innistrad both Innistrad and Amonkhet and you know I I can look back on things that sort of interact with the graveyard and say, oh, I've learned a lot from them. When I'm trying to do a new set that interacts,

it gives me tools so that I can work and either I can redo things we've done before and understand it better, or it allows me to understand the new space I can explore because I know the theme really well. And so anyway, themes are definitely something that we are very conscious of and want to bring back. Much like cards and mechanics, themes also have popularity. You know what I'm saying? When people realize that there is a artifact component or an enchantment component or a graveyard component or, you know, that when people see that they go, oh, I like graveyard decks or whatever. It also is something that can sort of excite them. And the, one of the things about when you're building something new, having some component

that you understand that you're building on top of, like, for example, one of the neat things about doing a theme that we recognize is it allows us to do something that is new because like it's a lot easier to say here's a theme I've really played with. Now because I understand it so well, it's easier for me to riff on in a way we haven't before because I've played with it enough that I understand the nuance points and where there's room for exploration. So that is themed. Okay, next. We return to worlds. Magic is a game of planeswalkers.

Meaning you walk between the planes. We have a multiverse. And in some ways our planes have become a really big part of our game, a big identity of our game. And that, you know, one of the things that's fun is we build up worlds and we give them identities, a flavor identity, a mechanical identity, and it means something. And so it's fun to go back there. So, you know, we've gone back to Dominaria. We've gone back to Myrden. We've gone back to Ravnica.

We've gone back to Innistrad. We've gone back to Zendikar. We're very shortly going back to Theros. You know, there's a lot of fun sort of, and the future holds more returns. It's a lot of fun to go back to things that people know. And, you know, one of the things about returning things in general is some expectation and some... When I say to the audience, we're doing Thing X, if I say a card's coming back, or a mechanic's coming back,

or a theme's coming back, or a world is coming back, that means something to players, especially players who've been playing for a while. And that gets some anticipation on their part. So when I, like, for example, next year, in 2020, as I recorded this, we're going back to Theros, and we're going back to Zendikar. We've announced both those things. And the players, that mean something to them.

Like, it's funny, because, like, Ikoria, which is the other non-core set, standard legal non-core set next year, is a brand new world. I mean, we tease a little bit so that some players have a little idea what it is, but if I just say we're going to Ikoria, you have no idea what that means. But I say we're going to Theros, you're like, oh, we're going to Theros. Or we're going to Zendikar, oh, we're going to Zendikar.

Like, you know what that means, and it has a definition to it. And so one of the things that we tried to do, one of the ongoing debates is how often we do returns and how often we do new sets. Roughly, one of the ongoing debates is how often we do returns and how often we do new sets roughly we try to do about 50-50 that's where we are right now

if anything the future might lean a little bit more toward new but there's a lot of fun returns and stuff to do so and the other exciting thing is

every year every time we do a new thing now we've invented a new place we can return to it's fun the other exciting thing is every year, every time we do a new thing, now we've invented a new place we can return to. Um, it's funny. The other day I was looking at all our planes and like, you know, there's a period in time where we just didn't leave Dominaria very much. And there just, there weren't all that many planes that we really discovered. Um, but under the current model where we go to new planes all the time, we have made a

lot of worlds. There are a lot of worlds out there and there's a lot going on. And it is funny. You know, one of the things that the franchise team makes is when we work with partners, there's like a brand guide that they give them. That's something for our partners to use. And in it, they just list a lot of our planes. And like you're going through like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. There's a lot of planes. um that is definitely kind of exciting it is neat to sort of see

all the different places we've created and as uh from a design standpoint hey how do we not make use of that how would we not go back to worlds um and the funny thing is i i know talking with the players that there's a real desire for a mix. Players do really much going back to worlds they enjoy and they like going to brand new worlds so we try to mix those up. The other thing that returning to worlds does from a vision design standpoint is there's a lot of work that goes into defining a world. A lot of my job when we go to a new world is defining that world. What does it mean? What does it mechanically mean?

And one of the nice things about going back to a world is there's a little bit less stress on us to solve that. I mean, when we go back to a world, we want to solve what's returning, but also what's new and how do we sort of, you know, what about the world can we offer up in a slightly different context than the last time we were there. But from a larger thing, it's a no, you know, it's a solved world. Not that we don't have to re-envision things, not that there's not work to be done, but it is in a time where we're just visiting a lot more stuff in the three-in-one model where there's a lot more new worlds we're going to,

there's a little bit of breather in old worlds in that it is something that we have some, we sort of understand already, to a certain extent, the essence of the world. And for my job, I mean, like I said, I think the players really enjoy going back to things,

but also there is a little bit of, like, for example, we have to map out the future now. And once upon a time, when I had to map out the future, when I made a seven-year plan back under the old model, the block model, the original block model, a seven-year plan was seven ideas. Here are seven worlds, and these are the seven worlds we're going over the next seven years. Well, now, you know, we could go up to three worlds a year.

So when I map, you know, like, for example, if we're talking about making seven worlds, now that is just slightly over two years, given we might stay in the same world for multiple years and stuff, something we didn't do back in the old model. But even then, it's just, we're hitting things at a much faster pace. And so from a vision design standpoint, there is something comfortable about returning in that

we have something that's more understood and not a brand new puzzle we have to solve. I mean, there's smaller things to solve, but not the big thing. So anyway, that is something I appreciate. In general, by the way, you'll notice one of my themes for all these, cards, mechanics, themes, worlds, planes,

I'll get to planes and walkers in a second, is that one of the things that I have to monitor as the head designer is design resources. While Magic is a very robust game, and there's a lot of design space to explore, it is not infinite, it is not endless, and one of the things that's always the most troublesome as you keep evolving a game and go into new space is that you tend to use up the most cleanest, simplest space first.

And so as we explore new space, there's a lot of space left to explore, but most of it isn't super simple. Most of it, like the low-hanging fruit stuff we've done. And so one of the reasons we like to revisit things is so that we are able to make sure we have some simpler themes built into what we're doing. And, you know, like I said, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. And, you know, like I said, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. If we've done something and we've done it well, okay, we don't need to, you know, we can make use of things. There's things we've used that have proven successful. Let's look upon those as tools we've designed and reuse those tools.

Okay, I just gave away our next one. So the next thing we'd like to revisit are planeswalkers and characters. When I say characters, I mean mostly legendary creatures, because those are our characters. So let me start with the characters. So the non-planeswalkers have a big restriction to them, which is they are not capable of walking between planes, meaning that they are located on a particular plane. So if we take a character like Niv-Mizzet, who, okay, Niv-Mizzet lives on Ravnica.

You know, Olivia Voldaren lives on Innistrad. You know, that you can pick characters and they are tied to a certain place. So what that means is when you visit a place, revisit a place, there's a lot of desire to sort of revisit the characters that we know. Players really grow fond of the characters. And so one of the big things

about returning to worlds is returning to characters. Not that we don't introduce new characters, but there's a lot of desire to go, oh, I played that character. I really like that character. I'm a big fan of that character. Ooh, let's see another card. Let's see, has the character changed at all? Or is there another way to take the same character and just execute slightly differently? It's kind

of fun to see other ways that the character can be done as a card. So one of the things that we do when we return to worlds is we're very conscious about who is there. Now, another thing we get to do, and this is in supplemental sets, or core sets, is some sets aren't tied to a particular world. So we have the ability to bring back characters, whatever character we want, from whatever world. And the other thing that can happen, and I had a whole podcast on this, when we invent a world, a lot of characters get made through the course, through the story, through the flavor text, sometimes through names, and we

don't always know all the characters when we're making the set. And the result of that is that, you know, you don't always, we're not always able to get characters in, even though the character gets referenced in the story or in the flavor text, because, hey, we just didn't know. A geese and girl from Innistrad class example. We used them in flavor text. They were a lot of fun. You know, it was a necromancer and stitcher, and they sort of fought about what the best way to make zombies was, and they were fun characters.

But when we had made original Innistrad, they didn't exist. They didn't exist until the flavor text portion. And so, but later on, we were able to make them, you know, and we, because there are lots of characters that get created and people want things,

we keep lists of characters people are looking for, and then we look for opportunities to make those characters. Now, I guess technically today is about reusing things. So, on some level, I guess making a card of a character that existed as a character but didn't have a card, kind of is reusing the character, I guess.

We also do, very specifically, one of the things you'll see us doing a lot more now is taking characters that people like, especially characters from back in the story, like the Weatherlight Saga, for example, and the latest Commander product. We did a new Grevin and a new Tungarth and a new... What else do we do? Do we do Ballwrath?

Anyway, we went back and were able to take old characters that had cards, but things that we could really reinvest and maybe put more colors to them, or maybe use current design technology to make kind of a splashier car than maybe we were capable back in the day. So reusing characters, there's a lot of fun stuff that you can do when you reuse characters. Planeswalkers. So Planeswalkers are sort of the bread and butter of our IP.

I mean, the game's all about walking between worlds. So our characters that walk between worlds are pretty important to us. They're also very popular as characters. So one of the things that we definitely like to do is we like to bring planeswalkers back. And planeswalkers, unlike normal characters, can walk between planes. So we are not restricted.

Any planeswalker can, in theory, come back to any plane. There's a bunch of reasons we'll tend to reuse planeswalkers. One is once again, they're tied to a plane thematically. That could be either they're from the plane, you know, like we're going to Innistrad. Well, Sorin and Arlen are from Innistrad. Or it could be that they thematically make sense to the plane. Oh, we're

going to Kaladesh, so let's bring Tezzeret. He's one of our artifact-themed planeswalkers. So we bring, and sometimes we bring them back just because they're in the story. Now, sometimes they're in the story because they thematically make sense. Like the fact that Tezzeret was on Kaladesh made sense for the story

and made sense thematically for the set. That wasn't a happenstance. Like we understood that Tezzeret's one of our artifact planeswalkers. We were going to artifact world. It made sense to bring him there. So sometimes the goals will interlink with one another. bring him there. So sometimes the goals will interlink with one another. And so anyway, between story, between world, and between theme, those are the major reasons that we'll bring back a Planeswalker. Sometimes, you know, I mean, it is fun to bring things back.

Players have become associated with our characters. They're very fond of them. Oh, the other thing that's fun to bring them back is that we can put them in a new context. It's fun to say, oh, Jace is on Innistrad and it's mystery. You know, we're going to play up the mystery aspects. So Jace is wearing a trench coat and solving mysteries. Or we're going to Greek mythology world. So we're going to dress up Elspeth like a Greek warrior, you know, have her kill Hydra, you know. So it is fun to also take the characters and sort of adapt them to their environments. That's also something fun we do.

Okay, another thing that we bring back is structures. So this one's a little more of a subtle thing, but an important thing. So one of the things is when I have to design a set, or anybody, but I do a lot of it, when I have to sort of, oh, we're going to a brand new world. What's this world about? There are different structures that I can use to make it work.

So the classic example would be a faction structure. So, for example, let's say we're going to a brand new world that has color-coded factions. Two-color, three-color, something that we've done before. One of the things I can do is I can go back and look at a set that I've done before and say, you know what? Like, for example, we went to Alara. It's the first time we had done a three-color faction world. We sort of spent a lot of time understanding it. Well, guess what? When we go back to or I'm

sorry when we went to Tarkir um that was another I mean we didn't know up front we weren't aware that it was going to be five color we realized eventually it would be five color we made sure it was wedge but once we knew it was wedge I borrowed a lot from Alara I went back and looked at Alara and said oh there's structural things that Alara's doing that I could use. And so one of the things, as we have more worlds we've built, one of the things we go back and look at is kind of substructure. It's figuring out what

the world is built around. Not from a creative narrative sense, but from a mechanical sense. So for example, if I'm doing a faction world, one of the things that I'm going to ask myself is, is there a structure from a previous faction world I want to use? Now, maybe the answer is no. Maybe I want to go a little different. Maybe I want to try something we haven't done before. Just because we're repeating a theme doesn't mean necessarily I'm repeating a structure,

but it's something open to me and something I can look at. And it's something that is very valuable, especially, by the way, now that we have a lot of worlds to do and I'm, you know, once upon a time, back in the world of one block a year, I could do the fall set, I could define the world, I could do all the world mapping, and then the rest of my team could lead other smaller sets that, you know, each set had to be built, but I built the framework for the world.

Well, as we get to the three-in-one model where, you know, a lot more worlds are getting made, it's helpful if I have other people that haven't sort of made a world yet to have some templates to work with is very helpful to sort of have things to go, okay, what kind of world am I building? Let me look at some previous worlds we've built. And having a lot of templates to work from really is valuable to understand and how to put something together. That doesn't mean that it's built exactly the same way. For example,

when we made Amiket, we looked at Theros, not that they were constructed exactly the same way, but understanding how a world with a similar ask, what tools it could use, allowed us to sort of build this world. So we do reuse structures, and that's something

that's a little bit more invisible. I mean, I think if you listen to my podcast and enjoy digging deep on things, you'll recognize the idea that you might go, Oh, yeah, Tarkir, when you look at it, had a lot of similarities from how Alara was built. Or dragons of Tarkir definitely borrowed a bunch of things from Rathmica, for example. There are things where we can take a look at the structure. And even something like Amaket did borrow some stuff from Theros. It's a little more disconnect than some of my other examples.

But there are definitely elements of the structure that were borrowed that we made use of. Okay, so cards, mechanics, themes, worlds, characters, planeswalkers, structures. There is so much we reuse. But there's one big exception that I need to talk about. Because when we reuse something, mostly what I've been talking about is straight up reusing it. We're bringing back a card. It's that card. We're bringing back a mechanic. It's that mechanic.

We're bringing back a theme. It's that theme. Sometimes what we want to do is we want to take something that's a known thing and we want to sort of redress it to give it a new creative treatment and sometimes a new mechanical treatment. So let me walk through. So sometimes, I'll use my example from Throne of Eldraine. We were trying to do fairy tales. Well, one of the tropes of fairy tales is you put a spell on somebody and they fall into a deep sleep. And later someone has to kiss them and wake them up. Okay, we wanted to do a spell that represented a deep sleep. Well, we looked and realized that claustrophobia mechanically

did a great job. You tap a creature and they stay tapped until something gets rid of the spell, right? The enchantment. But the word claustrophobia didn't make any sense. Yeah, we can do new art, but there's no way to call it claustrophobia and get the sense that it's a spell that puts someone to sleep. So what we did is we took claustrophobia, we redid the creative, we renamed it, we reconcepted it, and now it's charmed sleep. That is us taking essentially a repeat, but because we can redress it creatively, it allows us to sort of put new use to it. The charmed sleep has some nuance and some novelty

that claustrophobia doesn't have, even though it is mechanically the card claustrophobia. With mechanics, the best example of this might be the mechanic Chroma from Eventide. We made a mechanic, we actually teased it in Future Sight, we made it in Eventide, and we didn't quite execute it really well. The flavor was kind of poor, like chroma is a very neutral flavor. We were very broad in our execution. It kind of could look anywhere. It just didn't do a good job of really building up the equity in it.

And years later when we were making Theros, we realized that we kind of wanted chroma, but maybe there's a chance to sort of redress chroma. A, the flavor didn't make any sense, so let's give it a flavor that could make sense in Theros. And it allowed us a chance to sort of redress some of the mechanics a little bit.

So it became Devotion, obviously. And Devotion became a big hit. We recognized that there's something about chroma that really was a cool mechanic, but that was just executed non-porally. And by sort of coming back and bringing it back, but tweaking it a little bit, redressing it, giving it a creative sort of sheen, a new creative take on it

and filling a little bit with mechanics. Not even that much. Devotion is really not that far from Chroma. I mean, the big difference is Chroma looked anywhere and Devotion only looks on the battlefield. It looks on permanence on the battlefield. And, you know, because we did that

and we had devotion, we did, if you have so much devotion, we did some things with it. Although, really, it was just chroma with a little bit tiny of paint on it.

Another classic example is we had a mechanic called fading. And we realized when we executed it on the first time that we had made a choice that. And we realized when we executed it on the first time that we had made a choice that was non-intuitive. The way it works is it comes with so many counters.

And when you can't take a counter off it, it went away. But everybody assumed it's when you take the last counter off it, it went away. So we redid it as vanishing. And we just said, you know what, it's just fading, but done the way that people intuitively thought it worked. In some ways, Hexproof was that. We made Shroud and everybody played it,

or not everybody, but a lot of people played it as if it were Shroud. So we changed Hexproof, I'm sorry, we changed Shroud to Hexproof. A lot of time with themes, you'll notice where

we'll take a theme and we'll rejigger it a little bit. You know, where we'll take something that, what's a good example of that? Where we might, for example, playing with maybe some themes from Theros and the idea of playing into, we had gods and heroes and monsters.

So we knew that Amiket wanted gods. So there's a certain theme when we play into the god theme. There's certain things that we say, okay, there's certain through lines, but we also get to change it up a little bit. And we wanted the gods to feel a little bit different on Amiket. So the gods don't function exactly the same way as they do in Theros, but there's a through line that they do feel like gods and stuff like that. feel like gods and stuff like that.

We, characters, sometimes the reskinning of characters is more like archetypes or something. Sometimes we'll try something and try an archetype and we don't quite execute it right. So when we come back, we'll try sort of remaking a character.

We haven't really done that with planeswalkers. I guess planeswalkers aren't, there's not enough of them that we really had to need to do that yet. And same thing on some level with structures. Sometimes we tweak the structure. The Theros Amiket is a good thing where we took something, started, but then really put our own twist on it so structures can get redone.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is when we talk about reusing things sometimes it's straight up reusing things sometimes it's like it's the thing you know it's the thing you recognize and sometimes it's about taking the essence of what it was

of taking the elements that were successful but then doing a little work on it and so I consider the last category to be just a riff on, you know, Charm. I don't think like Charm Sleep was us reinventing the wheel. It was us going, oh, here's a spell that we know works that has been in many magic sets, you know. But, okay, it just takes a little bit of something, you know, in this case, a creative sort of remastering, if you will.

In this case, a creative sort of remastering, if you will. But anyway, I hope today... I'm almost at work. I hope today shows that R&D really, really thinks about, you know, that the game has 26 years of history. And those 26 years aren't for naught. history and those 26 years aren't for naught uh there's a lot of things we've done in those 26 years that are stuff that not only can we build on but that we can reuse that we can take and sometimes repurpose sometimes not even repurpose just use it up very similarly but um you know one of the one of the advantages of a game as old as Magic that's constantly reinventing itself is we have the ability to dip into our own path.

We have the ability to go back. And what we found is players enjoy, I mean, if we do it judiciously and in the right place, players really do enjoy seeing things they know before. That one of the comments I get all the time from players, like one of the common things for Magic players is they'll play for a while.

Something about life changes, you know, and they'll move away from the game. Not because they just like the game, but just like, oh, I graduated or I got married

or I started a new job or I moved or some life thing just changes and things are different and you're not able to play the game for some period of time. But then life changes again or whatever, you rediscover the game. And one of the

nice things about rediscovering the game is that you can recognize things, that there's something really potent about, oh, I've played with that before. I know that. And so, you know, not only is it a good tool for us, but also it is a very, it is a piece of nostalgia we get to use to help tie people to the game. And that's another really important part, I think, of reusing elements. So it helps us from a design standpoint. It allows us to make the game better. It really adds a lot of nostalgia and can make players happy. So reusing things does a lot of good for the game and so hopefully today's podcast sort of communicates that to you

so anyway I'm not 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