Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #712: Theros Beyond Death

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

In this podcast, I talk about the design of Theros Beyond Death.

I'm leaving the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped my kids off at school today. Okay, so today we're talking about the design of Theros Beyond Death. Dun-dun-dun. Okay, so, um, so we, okay, okay, let me set up a little bit on original Theros and then I'll get into Theros Beyond Death. So, we knew for a long time that we wanted to do a mythological theme set world.

The one thing that actually held us back for a while was that so much of magic, so much of early magic that Richard had built, had been built a lot on, you know, Greek, had been built a lot on, you know, Greek mythology had been a big inspiration source that so much of the stuff that's in Greek mythology was already naturally in magic.

And the worry was, oh, there's not enough unique things. But eventually we realized is, just by focusing on those things and not having other things, kind of the absence of the non-Greek things and raising the volume of the Greek mythological things, really itself the absence of the non-Greek things and the raising the volume of the Greek mythological things really itself would have a feel to it. And so we eventually came around to doing it. Original Theros was a last minute change.

We were going to do, my idea was a world, this is back in the block days, where there was a prehistoric world. We flash forward thousands of years and now it's like, you know, Dark Ages world and flash forward as far as we could. And then it was like, whatever the most modern we'd be willing to do, which is probably, you know, like 1700s or something. But the idea was, it was a world in which you would see giant leaps in time. And we didn't, ironically, we did not have the resources of the creative team

to make three different worlds. And so the last minute we audibled and we decided to go to a Greek mythology world. And the idea was we'd wanted to do a Greek mythology world for a long time. We also wanted to do an enchantment based world. We had done one with Orza Saga

but no one remembered that. And so I think Brady had pitched the idea of what if we did those together. do an enchantment based world we had done one or as a saga but no one remembered that um and so i think brady had pitched the idea of what if we did those together and he didn't exactly know what that meant but he said oh it's two themes we know we've been wanting to do maybe we can find a way to to do them at the same time so i was given the assignment of okay how do you make greek mythology world and enchantment world and and how do you blend those together? I ended up deciding that the enchantments represented the gods. So the gods themselves were enchantments, enchantment creatures.

And in order to make enchantments work, so part of where they came together is, in order to make enchantments work, I needed enchantment creatures. In order to make a theme work, you have to have the as fan be as high as, you know, high enough that it matters. And that means it has to be on creatures. That, you know, in a sealed deck, for example, you tend to have 16 creatures and 7 non-creatures, roughly. And even if every single non-creature is your theme, it's kind of a little low. I mean, you just barely can get there.

So if you want to make a theme really work, you need to have it in your creatures. Artifacts is easy because we make artifact creatures. So, I realized at the time we had to do enchantment creatures in order to make the enchantment theme work. I mean, part of

what had happened in Ursa Saga, by the way, was while we had raised enchantments, it was hard to make enchantment matters as much, because we didn't have enchantment. We did, by the way, in Urza's Saga, play around with enchantments that turned into creatures and stuff like that.

But we straight up decided just to do enchantment creatures. And then the idea I liked was, also to make it feel like the gods, we came up with the idea of the pantheon represents the colors. So the major gods are the mono colors and the minor gods are the ten two color combinations. And then the enchantments represent the gods influence, so the gods themselves are enchantments and all the creatures and things generated by the gods are enchantments.

And then one of the big themes that I played around with in original Theros was the idea of adventure, that there was a lot of building up. So the model that I had built when I made original Theros was what I called gods, heroes, and monsters. So the gods were represented by the enchantments and represented by devotion, which was a redoing of a mechanic called chroma. I'll get to that in a second.

And the heroes had a mechanic called Heroic, where when you targeted them they got better. Often they would get bigger, plus one plus one counters. And there were a lot of auras because the gods, the auras represented the will of the gods, and you could put auras on things. Auras on heroic cards also worked really well. And then there were the monsters. Monsters had monstrous, and you could one time activate to upgrade the monster one time. It would put plus one, plus one counters on it,

and it's often granted extra abilities. So the idea was that you could build up your devotion toward your god, you could build up your hero to make it big with lots of things on it, or you could build up your monster. So there was a lot of adventure in building things up in Original Theros. Now, Original Theros had three sets. It had Theros, it had Born of the Gods, and it had Journey to Nyx.

One of the things I had done at the time, because I was trying to make the third set, we had a—one of the reasons we don't do blocks anymore is we had a lot of trouble, especially with the third set. Second set had its issues, too. But the third set of trying to keep things fresh, that we're in the same world for the whole year. And so one of the things I did was I pulled back on enchantment matters. So there were enchantments in the set,

and there was definitely a threshold of enchantments. But I waited until the end of the block to really have all the things that cared specifically about enchantments. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We'll get to that. But in Journey into Nyx, we had a mechanic called Constellation where whenever you played

an enchantment, it was like landfall for enchantments. Whenever you play an enchantment, something happens. And in Journey into Nyx, we put them on enchantments. Constellation only showed up on enchantment, something happens. And in Journey into Nyx, we put them on enchantments. Constellation only showed up on enchantments. It always cared about enchantments. Anyway, what happened was Theros did very, very well.

Born of the God didn't do quite as well as Theros. And Journey didn't do... I think it went down. One of the things, the reason we moved away from the blocks was we had this pattern where the false set would do great and then Jesse would do worse and worse as you went along because people were sort of grow tired of the thing that you're doing. And so we moved to the new world where we change up things more.

You know, we go to new worlds and stuff. And so anyway, while we were there, we decided the story we wanted to tell was a very Greek story. And so our hero was Elspeth. She's a knight. She seemed like a virtuous adventurer. Uh, and she gets put on a mission by Heliod, who's the, you know, um, I don't know if he's

the king of the gods, but he's definitely, uh, the one that's more modeled after Zeus. king of the gods, but he's definitely the one that's more modeled after Zeus. And anyway, Heliod has her kill Xenagos, who's an observer, who became a god, but shouldn't have been a god. And then in the end, because she had killed

a god and that can't stand, even though he sent her to do it, Heliod kills Elspeth. But he does make sure, although he stabs her in Nyx, he makes sure that Ajani gets her back out of Nyx

onto Theros. And the reason for that is if you die on Nyx, you're dead. But if you die on Theros, you go to the underworld of Theros. And so by getting her back to Theros, Elsbeth died, but unlike most places where you die

there's an underworld on Theros so she went to the underworld and so for the audience we clearly established because Elspeth's a very popular character we clearly established we were doing the story there's a tragic ending

but the nod was that she was in the underworld so to the audience like well she's dead but not dead dead she's in the underworld and so everyone knew that, like, well, she's dead, but not dead dead. She's in the underworld. And so everyone knew that one day we'd come back and we would pick up on the Elspeth story. That was a...

So one of the things that we try to do now when we do new worlds is we try to be conscious of if we come back. Now, we don't always return to worlds, but if the world's popular and we want to come back, we try to set ourselves up so that we have something to come back to. Well, Theros, we set ourselves up big, right? We took one of the most popular characters and said, she's trapped in the underworld. The other thing that we did, because we knew that we were trapped in the underworld, we knew that when we came back the underworld would play a role so we didn't do a lot with the underworld in our original Theros block

we had like rescue from the underworld we had nods to it we did enough so you knew there was an underworld you know the reason we did rescue

from the underworld we wanted you to be aware there was an underworld because when she died we wanted you to know that she went to the underworld but we didn't really visit the underworld

we had a few nods toward the. But we didn't really visit the underworld. We had a few nods toward the underworld, but we didn't go there. And so we knew, so when we said, okay, we're going back to Theros, we knew a couple things. Number one, we knew that we were, I mean, it's a return. So we had to capture the elements of what made people like Theros in the first place. Second, we knew that we were going to have the Underworld play a larger role than it had originally. We had sort of saved that as something that we get to explore. And third is we knew Elsbeth was going to be the main character, right?

We knew we needed to see Elsbeth get out of the Underworld. And we had talked a bunch about, you know, should people come and rescue from the Underworld? But we said, you know, it's Elspeth. We want Elspeth to escape from the underworld. Not, you know, we want Elspeth to be, um, we didn't want it to be like a rescue story where Elspeth had to be rescued. We wanted it to be the Elspeth finds her way out of the underworld. Um,

so that's what we knew going in. We know kind of those three things. Um, the third thing is more of a story thing. The first two is more of a story thing. The first two was a little more design thing. I mean, sorry. The Underworld had a lot to do with the creative, but from a design standpoint,

okay, matching original Theros mattered. Making the Underworld matter mattered. Elsbeth being there, yeah, well, we'd make an Elsbeth card, but I mean, it didn't. That part is more story-related than it was set-related. Although, as you'll see, that was an important part. We knew that was the main thrust of the story. So, as you will, it does

mechanically become relevant. Okay, so the first thing we have to do whenever we do a return is we have to say, and this is the thing we always do, is we write up everything that was part of the original visit. So, when we're talking about Theros, see if I can remember everything here, in original Theros, there was Bestow, which was enchantment creatures that you could turn, you could choose to be auras when you cast them, rather than creatures,

and then if the creature they're on ever dies, they fall off and just become creatures. There was devotion. Devotion, like I said, in Future Sight we teased a mechanic called Chroma, which Aaron Forsythe had made. Chroma just counted mana symbols anywhere and then made things happen. It wasn't super flavorful and it was a little undirected.

We decided when we returned to Theros that we would kind of revamp it. We turned it into devotion. Devotion only looks on the battlefield. And it had a little more flavor to it. And the idea was that you now could have devotion to a color. So the idea is like, you know, Heliod, the white god, has devotion

to white. Is there enough white followers out there to bring him, you know, to bring form to him? And devotion was a big hit, which is interesting. A good lesson, by the way, of how sometimes you could have a good idea executed poorly and then not really

be a hit. And the idea is the reason it wasn't successful wasn't that it wasn't at its core a good idea, but maybe the execution wasn't ideal. And I always remember Chroma and Devotion. It was an idea that I liked, that I had a lot of belief in that we didn't execute well on, but I realized there was something there, so we came back to it. Anyway, also there was a mechanic called Monstrous came back to it. Anyway, okay, also there was a mechanic called Monstrous

or Monstrosity, I think. Monstrosity? I think it was Monstrosity. Anyway, I think you were Monstrous once you used Monstrosity. Monstrosity was a one-time usage where you would put some, it was Monstrosity N, N being a number, and then you would put that many plus one, plus one counters on the

creature, and it would often also gain a bonus if it had the counters on it. But the idea was you could only use it once per game. You could only upgrade it once. But it ended, most of the time, requiring mana to upgrade. Oh, by the way, Bestow showed up, I think, in all three sets. Devotion showed up in all three sets, although not a lot in Journey to Nyx. It was on the gods in Journey to Nyx, but not a lot in Journey to Nyx other than the gods.

Monstrosity showed up in the first and third set. So in Theros and in Journey to Nyx, we stopped doing the middle set, realized the mistake, and we brought it back. And then the other mechanic in the first set was heroic. Heroic went through all three sets. Heroic was a mechanic that said, if this creature is targeted, it generates an effect. That effect could be a plus one, plus one counter.

You could gain life. The creature could gain an ability. There's lots of different things that it did. And like I said, the heroic ability was played on our heroes. Then in the middle set, Born of the Gods, we had a mechanic called Inspired. Inspired was, it triggered when it got untapped. So there were usually creatures that when it got untapped, it would do something. So you had to get it tapped, like a lot of times by attacking or something.

There is Tribute, which for creatures when you played them, your opponent had a choice about what they wanted to do. And I think it's either they could let you get an effect or they could let the creature be bigger. I think that's how it worked. I think those were the two new

mechanics. And then the new mechanic in Journey to Nyx was Constellation, which was whenever you played an enchantment an effect happened. And in Journey to Nyx was Constellation, which was whenever you played an enchantment, an effect happened. And in Journey to Nyx, Constellation always showed up on enchantments. I think those were all the mechanics. Am I blanking on anything? Oh,

Journey to Nyx had... It had one more. Like, Strive, I think? Is that right? It had one more minor mechanic. Which, I don't... I think it was Strive, I think. Is that right? It had one more minor mechanic, which I don't, I think it was Strive. I don't remember.

I'm blanking on it. It had a minor mechanic that we didn't end up going back to. Anyway, when we looked at them, there were three things that were clear that we had to do. Three things we

had to do. One was we had to have gods. We didn't think we could fit all 15 gods in. In fact, play design, development at the time, but not play design, was concerned that 15 gods had been too many, or at least having 15 indestructible things was a bit much.

The way that gods work is they were enchantment creatures. They were enchantments that had devotion to their color, a combination of colors, and then when they met a certain threshold, there was one threshold for mono-colored and a different threshold, I think, for the two-colored, they became creatures. But they had an enchantment effect. They did it every turn, or sometimes they were activated. And then they had, when they were

a creature, they had abilities when they were a creature. So you had to sort of have the right devotion to turn into a creature. In order to get them to become real, you had to have enough sort of followers, if you will. So we knew get them to become real, you had to have enough sort of followers, if you will. So we knew we wanted to bring gods back. We kind of knew we needed to bring devotion. I mean, bringing gods back

kind of meant you needed to bring back devotion. But we were pretty sure we needed devotion. And we knew we needed enchantments. Not doing enchantment matters out of the gate,

waiting to journey had been a mistake. And I'm like, look, this is the one world that's really defined by enchantments matter. I mean, we're not really going back to Urza's Saga, and even then some of the execution could have been better. So this really is our world that's

known for being about enchantments, and I wanted to really play that up. So I wanted enchantment matters to be a thing. So we're like, okay, gods have to matter, devotion needs to be here, and we need to make enchantments matter. Part of making enchantments matter, by the way, is having enchantment creatures. So enchantment creatures

are also kind of a given that's kind of tied into the gods and enchantment matters. Okay, so we looked at our mechanics and we said what mechanics do we want to bring back? So devotion, yes, we want to bring back so devotion yes we wanted to bring back okay bestow was a maybe although bestow has a lot of baggage

and it's wordy heroic was a maybe monstrosity was a maybe all those mechanics were pretty solid mechanics tribute and inspired and strive were no and consolation was a maybe we knew we wanted an enchantment matters mechanic Tribute and Inspired and Strive were no, and Constellation was a maybe. We knew we wanted an Enchantment Matters mechanic.

Constellation was our fallback. The Constellation decks had a little bit of developmental issues because they fueled themselves so well. So we looked for other mechanics to be the Enchantment Matters mechanic. The problem is there's a lot more elements to creatures that you can care about. Creatures attack and they tend to die. Enchantments don't often go to the graveyard.

They have power. They have toughness. There's a lot more you can care about creatures. And we found with enchantments was Constellation really was the cleanest thing we could do. So the one change we made was we decided that

we would do Constellation, but it wouldn't I think we decided in Vision that it wouldn't always be on enchantments. That it would often be on non-enchantments. It's possible to finish none of them are on enchantments. Maybe a few ended up on enchantments. I know in Vision we decided that they would

like in Journey to the Next they all were enchantments okay that's no longer true one of the reasons it helps us putting them on non-enchantments is you have to start making choices like I can only when Constellation was on enchantments we'll throw as many Constellation cards in your deck as you can

because they all fuel each other but if it's on non-enchantments I have to pick and choose constellation cards in your deck as you can because they all fuel each other. But if it's on non-enchantments, I have to pick and choose what constellation I want and it doesn't get quite so crazy linear and constructed. So we did bring

constellation back. We did bring devotion back. We talked about... Bestow ended up having enough baggage that we decided not to bring Bestow back. And we did talk about monstrosity and heroic.

Monstrosity... We had just done something that was monstrosity-like for the Simic in Ravnica Allegiances. So we said, okay, we'd just done something that was kind of like that. And for Heroic, we decided we would do some case-by-case Heroic. In fact, there are five cards in the set that essentially have Heroic

where they all grant your creatures, all your creatures plus one plus zero. So all five of them do the exact same effect. So we put Hero in their name, but we didn't actually use the Heroic mechanic by name. We didn't't actually use the heroic mechanic by name. We didn't name it on the cards. Okay, and so that meant that we had space for one more mechanic, we thought.

And we wanted something new and something that said the underworld. So the mechanic we came up with was what we called it Stygian. So the way Stygian, well, Stygian went through a whole bunch of different versions. But the idea of Stygian is you would bring the river Styx or whatever our version of the river Styx is. I don't know what our, but you would bring the river Styx to the battlefield. And the idea was we would give you a river in your, like, where the token, some of the tokens would be a river token.

And the idea was you could stack a couple in a row and actually make a river. And it kind of was, there's an alpha card called Raging River, where you sort of make a river, and then you have to put your creatures on one side or the other. So with Stygian, there was the living side and the death side.

There's the real world and the underworld, and you had to choose what side to go on. And the idea was when you play the creature that had Stygian, you would go get the Stygian card, or multiple cards, and make the river. Once the Stygian creature entered the battlefield, there is now the Stygian. The river now exists. And then, something determined where things were. Early on, the first

version of Stygian creatures would make a river and the Stygian creatures would go on the Stygian side. And that, it played a lot like Shadow. You know, like, well, Stygian can only block Stygian creatures, but they can't block other creatures. It played a lot like Shadow you know, like, well Stygian can only block Stygian creatures but they can't block other creatures so it played a lot of Shadow-like and then we started messing around with

are there ways to move between the sides? so we had a version where when you made the river everything on the living side stayed on the living side but now you could choose where to put the stitching creatures and, or sorry, now whenever a new creature enters the battlefield, you could choose what side it went on. So the

living creatures, like anything that was on the battlefield had to go on the living side, but from now on, whenever I cast a creature, I could choose whether it went on the living side or the underworld side. Then we did a version where creatures could change between sides.

And then we did a version where only Stygian creatures could change between sides, where the living things went on the living side and the Stygian creatures would come into play on the underground side, but the Stygian creatures had the ability to go back and forth between the sides. And we tried infinite number of different Stygian creatures had the ability to go back and forth between the sides. And we

tried infinite number of different Stygian variants. We really we were excited by Stygian. We thought it was bold. The idea of, you know, bring the rubber sticks to your board. We thought that would be dynamic and digital play.

And we were really excited. It seemed to be something that really seemed different and fun and we thought sort of captured the underworld in a way that was different. So when Vision Design handed off the file, we handed off

Devotion and Constellation and Stygian. I think we had a few nods toward Heroic. Those might have been there. And we had the gods. Obviously

the gods were back. We chose after some discussion by the way, we chose to have the five monocolored gods. Both Erebos and Heliod played a big role in the story. Heliod, because, you know, Elizabeth Beef is with Heliod. Erebos rules the underworld, and the story took place in the underworld.

So those are the five major gods. We thought it made sense to bring them back. We ended up bringing back two other gods. One was, there was a missing red-green god. we ended up bringing back two other gods one was there was a missing red green god when Xenagos took over the red green god slot

it's because there was a missing red green god well we're going to the underworld what if the missing god was in the underworld we thought that was kind of cool

so we thought we'd show off that new god and then Athreos is the the one who overwatches the he's the one that Erebos is in charge of the underworld but Athreos is the one who overwatches the... He's the one that...

Erebos is in charge of the underworld, but Athreos is in charge of the path to the underworld. He's the ferryman on the river, I think. So we made him the biobox because it felt like for having an underworld theme, it was weird not to have him there. But because we didn't want to have the full cycle, we made him the biobox.

Okay, so... cycle we made in the buy a box. Okay, so when Vision handed over, that's what we handed over. We handed over Gods were in the set, Devotion was in the set, Constellation was in the set,

and Stygian was in the set. So, Stygian ended up having a bunch of problems. Number one, we talked to Digital. So, Stygian ended up having a bunch of problems. Number one, we talked to digital. So, you know, we make sets and then both Magic Arena and Magic Online then turn them into real card sets that you play with. Arena came back to us. And Arena was...

It turned out that doing Stygian was not undoable, but was a lot more complicated and a lot harder to apply digitally than we thought. So the note from Arena was, not that we shouldn't do it, but just a

heads up that it was going to be a lot of extra work for them. Then Creative chimed in, and Creative was like, well, we like the River Styx, but it's kind of weird. You know, things going back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead. I mean, yeah, there's a few isolated stories, but it's not something that happens with any regularity. You know, and the River Styx itself is kind of cool,

but are you really grasping the underworld? And then play design said, oh, the play pattern in this really rewards aggression. Because really what it does is it just puts a lot more evasion in. Because now, not only do I have to block one side, I have to block both sides. And no matter what you do, I can just push toward the other side. And it makes it very, like, it made all-in aggro strategies really hard to stop. Because normally what you can do in all-in strategies is

you can try to stabilize and then, you know, stop. But you had to stabilize in two different places. And anyway, the combination of all the things ended up making us decide that Stygian just wasn't worth it. It was a cool idea. There was a lot of neat things to it. There was gameplay that was a lot of fun. But what that meant was

Stygian had to go. So what happened was the set design team had to come up with another answer then. We wanted an underworld mechanic. And so they ended up leaning into the story. So once again,

remember I said there's three knowns when we came in? Well, one of the knowns was Elspeth is escaping the underworld. And so they came up with the idea of the escape mechanic.

And the escape mechanic was kind of cool, which is, okay, what if there's a way to escape the underworld? What's the underworld? The underworld is a graveyard, right? Where do you go when you die? You go to the graveyard. And so the idea was that there was means to get out of there. And so what they did is they needed to have a resource, and they needed to have a resource that was something

that was a true resource. And they wanted it to be about the graveyard. So, okay, what if the graveyard is your resource? What if in order to escape, you have to exile other cards in your graveyard? So, you know, when something escapes, it can't continually escape. You know, because the resource is there, you have to sort of spend and work up toward it. And the why graveyard is resource is sort of nice is, one, you can cast spells, especially instance and sorceries. Those will go to the graveyard.

Your permanents, when they die or get destroyed, go to the graveyard. You can discard cards. You can sacrifice permanents. You know, there's a lot of ways by which to get things to the graveyard. You can discard cards. You can sacrifice permanents. You know, there's a lot of ways by which to get things to your graveyard. You can mill cards as well. There's a lot of ways you can get stuff to your graveyard. And so

the more they played around with it, the more they realized that... And not only could... It turns out that not only did escape work on permanents, it also worked on, from a gameplay standpoint, it worked on instants and sorcerers as well. There's a little concern early on that maybe it'd feel too flashback-like.

But the fact that, A, you had this other resource, and B, it's not limited to how many times you could use it, definitely separated it a bit from flashback. So, Escape got added into the set. The other big thing was, when we went to set design, they originally decided they didn't want to do Constellation. So, they went on a path to find something else to do. They wanted another Enchantment Matters mechanic.

Now, interestingly, in Exploratory and Vision, we had done the same search, right? And so, we, in the end, said, oh, Constellation. But Set Design said, okay, we're going to do our search. We're going to find, you know. And so they tried a whole bunch of different things. And when the dust settled, they said, oh, yeah, I guess Constellation's the best. So Set Design essentially went through the same exercise that Vision did.

And they explored some different, I mean, they knew what Vision had explored. So when they explored, you know, we gave them all our work and showed them the mechanics we had played with. So essentially what happened was they looked at what we had done, they tried some new things that we hadn't done, and in the end came to the same decision we had come to, which was, oh, Constellation is the cleanest example of this. People like Constellation.

It's clean, simple, it's not very texty. And the same solution that we had suggested is what they went with, which is a lot of them, if not all of them, can go on non-enchantments, which helps some of the problems last time that we've had with Constellation. And like I said, they did choose to put in five heroic creatures that didn't have the heroic mechanics. Well, didn't have a, wasn't named on the card, but essentially was heroic. Um, and they had them all have the same output and they had them have a hero on their name. Hero, I think is.

So it would help, help remind you those, those are what those were. Um, there was a lot of other little things that got done. Um, at some point I'll do card by card and I can talk through some of those on the card by card basis. The demigods, the idea of here are, we have the gods, but one of the big things that goes on in Greek mythology is

the demigods usually are children of the gods that usually not, if both of your parents are gods, you're a god. But if one of your parents is a god and one is a mortal, then you're a demigod. And so demigods are a big part. The gods loved messing around with mortals, apparently. So there was a lot of demigods. So we played into that.

We have two titans. So the titans are another thing that we hadn't done last time. One of the things to do when you go to a return a return of a top down is trying to figure out can you play into the source material so you could see us playing either we did different takes on stories we'd done before um like we had done icarus before but we did a kind of different take on it and other times us just doing stories we hadn't done before. Like we did Narcissus. We did Achilles. We were able to do stuff that either

we had tried last time and hadn't done or stuff we hadn't done last time. Going into the underworld also let us play around with some underworld stuff that we hadn't done last time. But one of the fun things about doing a return is trying to capture what made it fun the first time around.

Like, why did people like Theros? And the reason they liked it is, hey, Greek mythology is fun. It's fun to focus on the Greek mythological things. You get your Gorgons and your Minotaurs and your Hydras. The one thing I will point out is because we had taken Theros and Born of the Gods and Journey to Nyx and condensed it down into a single set that also had new elements we could not do everything like one of the things that people I know got frustrated by was my favorite thing was Minotaur Tribal my favorite thing was the Leonin my favorite and there's a lot of things we did do in the original one that some

people really did enjoy but one of the harsh things about coming back, especially going from a block to a single set, is you have to kind of concentrate. And we had to find the things that were the most popular. And yes, there were fans of Minotaur Tribal, just less fans of Minotaur Tribal than things like Enchantment Matters or Devotion and stuff. We definitely try to change things up a little bit. You know, we try to play with devotion, do a few things we hadn't done before.

We mess with enchantments in a way. You know, we repeated some stuff we had done, but we did some new things. You know, like I said, we had the gods come back, but we had the demigods, we had the titans. You know, we definitely were playing in spaces where we could find new things. And I'm really happy with how we ended up, like I said. It was definitely, the set design was a little more chaotic.

Because the funny thing is when they started, we said, here is Devotion and Constellation and Stygian. And they were like, oh, we can't do Stygian, and we're not going to do Consolation, and so they were scrambling for a lot of things. In the end, they came back closer to what, you know, like, I think they shifted farther away and then sort of came back on some of the stuff. But,

anyway, I liked how Xscape plays. Like I said, we, Xscape was set design, and I definitely enjoy having played with the set a bunch upon release. I really do like, I enjoy, Xscape was set design, and I definitely enjoy having played with the set a bunch upon release. I really do like, I enjoy how Xscape plays. I like how, you know, Devotion plays in the set. And anyway, there's a lot of fun stuff there. And, you know, it was, oh, one of the things that we, people had asked us about was

why we did one, just one time and not one set and not two sets. One of the things that's going on right now is we're going into a brand new world of the three-in-one. And it just turned out by just the nature of our story and that Dominaria was the beginning of our three-in-one

but it was followed by Guild of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiances, and War of the Spark. They were all in the same place, and two of the sets really much acted like a two-set block, even though they were drafted apart. That is how we had done

it in the past, and so we sort of changed over to this brand new thing where we could do three different worlds, and we just stayed on the same world. So we decided the year after that we really wanted to we just stayed on the same world. So we decided the year after that we really wanted to play up what made the world new. In fact, Eldraine was originally going to be two. Eldraine was going to be both archery and baseball.

And we decided, no, you know what? Let's just do one of each. And so we did archery, which was Eldraine, Thorn Eldraine. We did Theros Beyond Death, and we're doing, obviously, Ikoria, which was a brand new world. We'll get to that eventually. But anyway, like I said, it was

as somebody who, you know, the person who originally sort of did a lot of the original Theros work. Oh, the other thing I should mention mentioned is I did not lead, I should mention this up front, I did not lead the vision for Theros Beyond Death. When we changed over to the vision, the new process,

I led vision for a while to sort of fine-tune and figure out how the vision process was going to work. So the first set that had vision was Dominaria. And Dominaria, Guild of Ravnica, Rival Allegiances, War of the Spark, Throne of Eldraine, all those sets I led the vision. So I led the vision for a whole bunch of sets. But I knew long-term that was not the plan. Not that I wouldn't lead some visions. And so Ethan, my go-to guy

to Ethan was, um, the first person I tapped to lead a vision design that wasn't myself. Uh, Ethan did a great job. And so, uh, hope you guys are enjoying that. Uh, but hats off to Ethan. Um, and, uh, I think set design, uh, changed over. Uh, so, uh, part of it was done by Sam, uh, Sam Stoddard and part of it was done by Sam Sam Stoddard and part of it was done by Mark Cutley so anyway they led they led set design

so anyway hats off to everybody and to all their teams I really think Theros Beyond Death came out great from what I see of the sales numbers you guys are both you are playing it a lot

and you are buying it a lot so that's usually a good sign but anyway I will do another series of podcasts. Maybe not right away, but I will do a series where I talk about individual cards and designs of those. That's not today. Today was just about the design itself. But anyway, I hope

you guys enjoyed this and seeing behind the scenes of the making of the set. Oh, by the way, I should have mentioned, while I was not, I did not leave the Vision Design. I was on the Vision. I'm always on the Vision design. So I was there. So when I'm talking about what we did, I mean, I was there. But I didn't want to, it might have implied that I did decide.

That's why I want to make sure you know that Ethan did and not me. Okay, guys. Anyway, I am now at work. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.