Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #767: Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with designer Ethan Fleischer about all the premier sets he's led or co-led the design for.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been doing some fun interviews and I have yet another fun guest. So, Ethan Fleischer, say hello. Hello. So Ethan actually, by the way, is my first guest in this sort of interview that was actually in my car at one point, back when I did interviews with people sitting next to me. That's right. Me and Matt Cavallada and a few other people got to ride in your car with you.

Yes, the old school, old school car interviews when they would actually carpool. So we, if you want to, Ethan and I talked all about the Great Designer Search, which is how Ethan got into this. And so we're not gonna talk a lot about the Great Designer Search today, just because we did a whole podcast on that. But if you want to hear about Ethan and the Great Designer Search, and there's 30 plus minutes of that, of him writing with me. So anyway, so Ethan, we're going to start with a question I've been asking everybody, which is how did you get into magic? Oh, my friend in high school went to Gen Con and brought back a bunch of alpha magic cards. And he was very excited about it.

He's like, we've got to try this. And our whole gaming group tried out playing with the magic cards and we loved it. And then we were like, we've got to buy this. And we couldn't because there weren't any and we had to wait until uh i think arabian nights came out and unlimited came out before we could actually buy the cards but uh we were hooked right from the beginning as soon as the game came out okay so did you play continuously from first learning about magic up till you you enter Great Designer Search, or was there off times in between? No, I took breaks here and there. You know, whenever I moved, I would, you know, lose my old gaming group, and it would take time to hook people on Magic again.

But yeah, by the time I entered the Great Designer Search, I was working in a bookstore and I had introduced magic to a bunch of the people there. And we had a league going at the store. And actually, we started selling magic cards at the bookstore also. So I did my part to spread the love. Okay, so I don't know if it's on a whim, but you decided to try out for the Great Designer Search. It was a whim. What? Was it a whim? It was a whim. So obviously you won the second Great Designer Search, and we brought you on to Wizards.

So once again, we have a whole podcast about the Great Designer Search. Go listen to it. But we're going to jump ahead to your days at Wizards. So in fact, I want to jump ahead. Well, first off, what's it like? You've been an outsider and all of a sudden you're working at Wizards. What was that like? It was a little bit crazy and a little bit almost alienating, I guess, because a lot of the people who worked in the department had been like pro tour people or like we were

all on the same team together in Pittsburgh or whatever. And I felt very much like an outsider for some time until, you know, I had gotten some reps under my belt and felt like I knew what I was doing. Also, I'd never done a professional game design before working at working at wizards though i did a bunch of uh amateur game design for my own amusement well same for me so this was my first uh actual uh game design job okay so uh let's talk about some of your reps getting your rep so the very first set that you led um the design for this is back in the old school design development days, was journeying to Nix. So let's talk a little bit about that.

Right. So that's back when we did a large set followed by two small sets all together in a block. And this was a challenging way to do sets, I think. And I think as we've continued to change our process, it's become more and more clear that maybe that just wasn't the best way to do things for the first 20 years of magic. Okay, so. and Greek mythology. And we had the sequel to that set, Born of the Gods, which was about all these enchantment creatures coming to life. And then for Journey into Nyx,

I wanted to have a war between the mortals and the gods. I don't think that really came through as loudly as I would have wanted it to. But as far as the mechanics of the set, I wanted to introduce a set for the more mechanic for the mortals and a mechanic for the gods. So we had Constellation, which turned out to be quite successful. People really liked it, and that was a thing that triggers whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield under your control.

an enchantment enters the battlefield under your control. There was a Constellation deck in Standard. Everyone recalls it fondly. And then the other mechanic was Strive, which nobody remembers because it's not that exciting of a mechanic. What did Strive do? You were able to pay extra mana to add more targets to a spell. So it was like you could just cast the spell normally and then um you could pay it as sort of kicker costs a multi kicker cost kind of to add targets

and this was to interact with the heroic mechanics you could target a bunch of your heroic cards and trigger them all at once but uh it wasn't particularly noteworthy, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those mechanics that played just fine. It just isn't very memorable, I think. Yeah. I don't think I designed that mechanic. I think that was Eric Lauer designed that during the development team. So I had some other mortal mechanic that was just totally out of control.

I think it doubled the counters on everything, every turn. And you really liked it, but for some reason the developers weren't so hot on it. Sounds like my, my, my kind of mechanic. Um,

okay. So, so what was the last, so you were on, I remember this, uh, you were on all three design teams. So you actually were through the whole block.

Um, right. We were trying to set you teams, so you actually were through the whole block. Right. We were trying to set you up for your first lead. Yeah, so I was on all three design teams, and I felt like I had a lot of input, even that early on in my career there, into some of the themes and what was going on. So that was really exciting. I felt very invested in Theros as a world, as a setting.

I'm always very interested in the creative and world building end of things, though I focus on game design. The idea that we're sort of collaboratively creating worlds, both within the company and with the players. Like the players participate in the stories that happen in this world. And so feeling like I had contributed toward creating this whole new world in this fantasy IP was very exciting for me. Yeah, one of the things, for a little behind the scenes for the audience,

you are kind of known for all the designers for being the most, having the greatest knowledge of story and of worlds. And so one of your passions, obviously, is you're very invested. And like when you do a set, you make sure you know all the backstory of all the things, whatever the world is.

And then you spend a lot of time on that. I know something that you have a lot of passion for. Yeah, for Theros, I had a decent background in Greek mythology. But, you know, I read Homer's Odyssey and Iliad in preparation just to, like, get into the mode. preparation just to like get into the get into the mode and of course uh so almost infamously for dominaria i went completely nuts and read like every single book that uh was set in dominaria uh during the the whole dominaria uh world building and design process which is like 90 something books yeah it's a lot of books. Okay, so let's move on to your next one.

So the next set you led was Oath of the Gatewatch. So we went back to Zendikar, had a little war. So talk about that set. Right. So the idea there was that we were going to have a giant war between the Eldrath, was that we were going to have a giant war between the Eldrath, or these huge beast monsters, and the people of Zendikar. And it was going to be kind of a Pacific Rim kind of thing. Unfortunately, I think we kind of tacked a little bit

too toward the weird, and it ended up being a little less like Pacific Rim and a little more like a David Cronenberg film or something. But we wanted to have the first set, Battle for Zendikar, be focused on Ulamog, who is this destructive titan. And then Oath of the Gatewatch was going to be focused on Kozilek, who was like the weird transmuter one. focused on Kozilek, who was like the weird transmuter one.

And then we were going to have the third Eldrazi Titan, Emrakul, show up in Eldritch Moon a couple of sets later, and on the Innistrad plane. The thing that I was really excited about to do for Oath of the Gatewatch was to introduce this colorless mana mechanic, where it introduce this colorless mana mechanic where it was uh had a colorless mana cost as opposed to a generic mana cost so you had to use colorless mana to cast the spells or activate the abilities with the little uh diamond shape mana cost uh this was an idea that I um saw John Lauchs pitch during the designer search,

and I was like, this is an intriguing idea, and we just need the right place for it. And it really felt like that was a cool twist to do for Battle for Zendikar block. I kind of wish we'd ended up doing it throughout the whole block, but yeah. So that mechanic was interesting to me because it was backward compatible with you know cards from the first magic set even like soul ring

can be used to pay for your colorless mana costs uh so we were able to make some pretty efficient cards and uh there were powerful uh cards that made colorless mana so they actually uh had made a big splash in every format that they were legal in and even were too strong in modern we ended up having to ban a card because uh the the colorless mana cards were too strong in the context of uh uh what is it um eye of ugin and eldrazi Temple or something. So it was a little too strong there, but it was very exciting. And it broke Magic Online, if I recall correctly.

It took them months to program it. So since then, we've changed our process so that we try not to break magic online with new mechanics. It's funny. It's one of the things I get asked about all the time. I think people, a lot of players don't realize that we can't just throw one in. There's a lot of support you need to make it work in a set. Yeah, making it work in Limited was really tricky. We had a whole bunch of different lands that could produce colorless mana,

and we even introduced basic lands that tap for colorless mana called Wastes, which I think that might be my favorite card in the set is Wastes, just because it's so weird. It's like, how many people get to put a new basic land in the set? You've never done that, have you? I've never done that. That doesn't happen a lot. So, one other thing real quickly that

might be interesting for people to know about behind the scenes is midway through your design, we got a request from I think Brand saying that they really wanted to play up the story. We were all in on, like, it's Coastal, like, whatever.

And then they're like, oh, by the way, it's going to be called Oath on the Gatewatch. And you had to sort of, like, mid, right? It came early enough. Yeah. Yeah, it came early enough that it was possible to, like, add design elements to the set to support the idea of this team of planeswalkers

coming together. And so we added these... Gosh, what was it? The O's. Well, there was the two-headed giant-facing mechanic, right? Yeah, the teammate mechanic. What was that called?

What was that called? We'll come to us. Well, we had the teammate mechanic. If you or your What was that called? What was that called? We'll come to us. Oh, anyway. We have a team mechanic. If you or your teammate had cast a spell this turn, you could cast it for its alternate cost. Right. And there was actually also another one that the support mechanic,

which we've actually used a couple of times since, the support mechanic put plus one, plus one counters on things. And actually in my original design, it could also put loyalty counters on planeswalkers. That changed last minute, by the way. That changed last minute. That did. Yeah, that changed after the slideshow

because we looked after the slideshow um because like we looked at the slideshow and it was just like this set is too complicated and it's too weird and this one thing seems like we could change it without unbalancing everything let's change it so uh so we ended up changing support so it only worked on creatures which which, like, at the time I was kind of disappointed. Like, oh, it was about planeswalkers teaming up. That's too bad. But then later we used support in, like, I think at least two other sets. So it was like, this is a solid mechanic that is fun to play with.

So I can't feel too bad about that. Okay, so let's move on to your next set that you led. Actually, this one you co-led with a dashing young co-lead, Amonkhet. Right, so we teamed up on this one. This was when you were training me and Sean Main up to lead large sets. And so, and I remember the plan originally was to have Amonkhet and Kaladesh switched in the schedule

from where they were. And I was very excited to lead this sci-fi steampunk set. And Sean had grown up in Egypt and was ready to lead Amonkhet. And then we moved them in the schedule. I was like, oh, actually.

So we're going to do it this way. We had to swap them. We swapped them late, too. It was during exploratory or something we swapped them, I think. Yeah, I remember Amonkhet had a little bit of exploratory design under Sean. And then later I picked up and restarted the exploratory design yeah uh yeah so that one was based on ancient egypt uh like mostly on the historical ancient egypt rather than ancient egyptian mythology though there was a little bit of mythological stuff in

there uh in general and the reason for that the reason for that real quickly for the audience is um the audience what we found was the average person just didn't know a lot about egyptian mythology so it was hard for us to go too deep because no one recognized it so right the thing with greek mythology is that it um has remained in continuous currency ever since it was written. People have been telling it and retelling it over the years for millennia now. Whereas Egyptian mythology was just lost for a long time. It just disappeared. Nobody knew how to read Egyptian writing anymore. And so almost all of those stories were just

lost to the collective consciousness of humanity. And then they only discovered how to read Egyptian writing again like 100 years ago. And by that point, the amount of impact that those stories could have on the culture was pretty minimal. Okay, so what was Amiket design like what was your uh um amiket design was a breeze as i recall it was really fun we came up with some sweet mechanics that made like mummies come back to life and we had uh these monuments that we built up. A lot of the people on the team had played a lot of Civilization over the years, which is this very popular video game series where you kind of usher a civilization from the Stone Age

all the way up to modern times. And one of the things that you always do in Civilization is you build these monuments and it takes time to build them and you have to invest a a lot into into building a monument but once you have it it's like oh i've got this awesome monument so we made some sweet monument building cards uh and then but ultimately like egypt wasn't enough to kind of fill out a set or two sets as it were um these we were down to two set blocks by this point and uh we incorporated sort of nickel bolas uh who's the the villain of the storyline at that point uh nickel bolas's personality into the set uh so the place became this sort of evil corrupt um um dystopian world and we incorporated a sort of

stepford wives creepiness into the um the design in the world building and like uh creative text to make it look like everything this is a perfect society on the outside, but like clearly there's some horrible lie underneath and, uh, you know, these people are deeply messed up. Yeah. The,

the dissonance was pretty cool. That's one of my favorite things about the set of how, like on the surface, it looks like everything was okay, but the mechanics really said, no, it wasn't i thought that was pretty cool yeah i i do like uh how it hung together in that regard i don't

feel like the um i feel like focusing so much on the kind of emotional down point of the story at that point may have, uh, alienating some of the audience that wasn't like along for the ride for the whole story. It's like, it's like the, the low point of the story is during almond ket block. Yeah.

And from a storytelling standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. But from a, like is every set as cool and exciting as it could be? Maybe that wasn't the right decision to make in retrospect. Like everything should be cool and awesome and aspirational. And this one was kind of like a little bit miserable yeah i mean it was a little dark it's definitely a little bit darker i mean uh i think sets can have different tones to them

and hey it was not nearly as dark as our devastation yeah that's true um yeah our devastation was was very bleak yeah that was pretty bleak um okay let's move on to modern horizons another set you and i definitely worked on together um so we'll talk about what happened how did modern horizons come to be so uh just for context my favorite magic set when i at least when i came into wizards was time spiral like this was a a set that was was all about referring to the game of Magic's history in a really fun way. It also kind of marked a serious downturn

in Magic's sales because it was like, this is the only way to experience Magic the Gathering right now is to play with this set. And the set was very much aimed at a very specific audience. But during my time at Wizards, we started making more and more ancillary products that were aimed at specific audiences. And I thought, oh, this would be a really good idea to make an ancillary product that's like Time Spiral. to make an ancillary product that's like Time Spiral.

So, and I know you were thinking along similar lines. Your idea was a little bit different. I don't remember exactly. I think I pitched mine as another future site, but I mean, you and I had the same basic idea of let's do something that's for a more enfranchised crowd that's deeper and more complex that really plays in the nostalgia of magic

so when we put together a little mini team for the for we do like a game jam that we call the hackathon every couple of years so it was I think it was you and me and allison medwin and nat mose yeah that was we just like built a large set in like four days yes we did

drafted and yeah we built a draftable large set in four days and then demoed it on the fifth day because it was a five-day hackathon with an actual draft yeah and uh which that was pretty crazy uh but it really you know uh set us up for for success because it was super fun it was high complexity and there were all of it had just every every keyword mechanic that was legal and modern I think we decided to put in it. Up to a certain point. We cut off at a – you can only go up to a certain point I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. There were some later mechanics that we didn't use.

Yeah. But, yeah. So, yeah, everybody was really excited about it and we decided to make it very quickly. There was like very little time between the hackathon presentation and like launching the the vision design team. So so I co-led the vision team with Mark Globus. I kind of handled the the standard design problems. the standard design problems and he was sort of the point person for some of the special challenges associated with the set because uh we decided to make it legal and modern which normally sets have to be legal and standard before they can uh enter modern and we we thought

that modern was big enough at this point that um it would be a good idea to to do that and we were planning to launch pioneer pretty soon so it seemed like this was a pretty good time to try something like this and uh it was so much fun we got to just design crazy crazy cards it was fun mix and match mechanics on the same card and we didn't do as many of the old legendary characters as I wanted because we needed to save a lot of that for Commander Legends, which is still upcoming. So that's the reason why there's only a few new legends in Modern Horizons. But it's really just a Melvin's dream, this set.

And I really like that about it. Yeah, it was fun. I mean, I obviously designed original Time Spiral, and that was a blast to do as well. But yeah, yeah, it's, do you remember the code name? Oh, what was the code name? Decadent. Decadent, right, decadent.

I wanted the booster packs to look like a like a fancy uh chocolate bar wrapper or something with just like you know tiny gold letters with the logo on like a velvet black background or whatever but we ended up doing something else we we kind of tacked heavily into the the modern legality as far as the marketing of the set so um but yeah it we got to just be totally self-indulgent there which as a game designer we rarely have the luxury of doing like ultimately we're trying to design these things for an audience that isn't us. And for Modern Horizons, we very much got to make a set for ourselves,

and that was really fun. Okay, next up is Theros Beyond Death. Theros Beyond Death. So as the person who'd been on all three Theros design teams, well, I guess you were on all three. I was on all three as well, I guess, but yeah. As a person who was on all three Theros design teams, it, yeah, I got the chance to go back to this world

that I'd helped make years earlier and tried to figure out what is the best way best way we've we kind of struggled a little bit i think figuring out exactly how to return to different worlds like returning to returning to ravnica and returning to innistrad and returning to dominaria and returning to theros all kind of feel like they have different challenges to solve. And so figuring out what's the essence of Theros and what's the new thing that we want to incorporate here. Obviously, Theros is about Greek mythology, but I also think Theros is about enchantments.

I think that we knew we needed both of those things and um and then as far as story-wise we actually had a much clearer idea of what the story was going to be for theros beyond death than we did for any of the other sets around it um yeah we knew we're gonna elspeth is going to escape from the underworld she died at the end of the story last time she went to the underworld but that place leaks like a sieve

and we knew Elspeth was going to bust out of there it was going to be jailbreak from the underworld so I always thought of the working title in my mind was Elspeth in Hell we didn't obviously go for that but uh yeah so we tried a bunch of different enchantment mechanics and ultimately i decided

that we just got it right the first time constellation was the right mechanic that interacted with enchantments in a way that made sense and so we ended up keeping that uh there was another what were the other mechanics on that set i know it just came out to the audience i mean we brought that devotion right right we brought that constellation we kept devotion also because that was that was the sort of defining mechanic for the original block. That engendered these crazy decks that you almost never saw. Like, mono black control was back, and mono blue devotion, like mono blue decks, had not been a thing for many years.

And so the original Theros brought this devotion mechanic in that the players really embraced. And then the thing I tried that ultimately didn't work out for a variety of reasons was this river mechanic where you would put a cardboard river down the middle of the table. And your creatures could either be on the living side of the river or the dead side of the river. This represented the river Styx that went out of the river or the dead side of the river this was you know represent represented the river Styx um yeah that that went out of the underworld uh in Greek mythology uh we tried that and early in uh in set design ultimately like too many problems piled up with it and uh they had to cut it so we got the escape mechanic instead i think did mark gottlieb design that i think mark gottlieb made me i made the game

again yeah so the uh yeah the river didn't work out we thought it was going to be awesome uh in digital and not so great in paper and then it turned out it was going to be not so great in digital and not so great in paper. So it was a valuable lesson in making sure that there's lots of communication with the user interface and user experience designers on the digital teams, just because we had assumptions, and it turned out those assumptions were pretty far off base so uh we we we like to think that we're we're smart and can do everything but actually uh there are specialists who know how to how to design a user interface and we ain't them yeah one of the things that is interesting about design is we're the first people to do stuff. So there's all these people downstream

that have to make use of the stuff you're using. And a lot of, I guess, what you learn over time is getting better about communicating with those people to make sure that you understand what they want so that you're delivering something that each of those teams can use effectively. Yeah, and ultimately, I think that the escape mechanic, while not quite as crazy and radical as the river was, is a lot of fun and tells the story that we wanted i feel like it all turned out in the end and like we kind of got the greatest hits of theros mechanics of which there were many uh from the

original block because i think i think the the original set had like three mechanics and then each of the additional sets added two mechanics so like yeah a lot by the end. Yeah. And, uh, so yeah, we, we picked the best two and got the escape mechanic. And then as far as world building went, we got to do the world building for the, the whole underworld as well as,

um, the, like the Minotaur cities and stuff. So we got to expand our, our view of what, uh uh what's in theros and i imagine if we ever go back to theros again we'll we'll move the camera even farther back and we'll see some more of that world i do like that model where like the world is getting bigger and bigger as we uh as we go back there it's kind of what we did in Dominaria

when you think about it, only I felt like that was in a sort of a more ad hoc sort of way. Yeah, I mean, obviously in Returns, we're always showing you more aspects and more things and it's always a challenge. But anyway, I'm almost to work. So I want to point out that you've also done a lot of work on Commander stuff,

which will probably be a different podcast. Maybe at some point I'll have you back on, and we'll talk about all the Commander stuff you've done, because you've led a whole bunch of Commander teams. Yeah, I'm tied for the most Commander teams, tied with Glenn Jones, I believe. We've done a lot of Commander. So that'll be a different podcast.

So I want to thank you for having you on. So any final thoughts? Having now designed Magic for, how many years have you been here now? A lot. Like eight, I think. Yeah. Final thoughts.

Go for the opportunity when you see it because great opportunities don't always come up. And I hate to think about where I would be if I hadn't on a whim entered the great designer search because I'm very happy doing what I'm doing and very happy to have had the opportunity to do it. Well, don't let those pass you by, people. Well, it's been, I mean, obviously you and I have worked closely together now for many, many years so I'm glad you took the whim too. But

anyway, guys, I've arrived at my desk. 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. So thank you, Ethan, for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, guys, and I will see all of you next time.

Bye-bye.