Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #768: Ikoria, Part 1

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

In this podcast, I begin telling the in-depth story of Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths's design.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive-to-work coronavirus edition. Okay, guys. So I am going to talk today about the design of Ikoria. So I think this will probably be multiple podcasts, but we shall see. Okay. So at the beginning of our story, we must go far back. Back to I don't know, many, many years ago. So the original plan for the 19, not 19,

sorry, the 2019-2020 magic year, if you will. So the, and I'm using northern hemisphere seasons here. Fall set, winter set, spring set are how we've normally had a magic year. Normally there's a core set in the summer.

Anyway, the original plan was we were going to go to Eldraine for two. So the code name for this year was Archery Baseball Cricket. That's important so I'll talk about them. When I talk about them, what I mean is think of them as being the positioned. Archery is the fall set, baseball is the winter set, and cricket is the spring set.

Okay, so the plans originally was, archery and baseball were going to be, we're visiting Eldraine, the first set was going to be kind of in the light of day, we see the courts, we're out in the sunshine, and the second set, baseball, was going to be, we in the light of day. We see the courts. We're out in the sunshine. And the second set, baseball, was going to be going into the deep, dark woods. So the story had the twins having to go into the woods as part of the story. I think that actually still is in the story. But we differentiated. We sort of went around and saw the courts, and then they had to go into the deep, dark woods.

And the second set was in the deep, dark woods. We actually divvied up all the fairy tales and stuff and the Camelot stuff and like, oh, here's the more sunny side of things. Oh, and here's the in the woods things. And there's a surprising number of fairy tales that take place in the woods, by the way. Anyway, so that was the original plan. We were going to do light Eldraine, dark Eldraine, and then Cricket was going to be returned to Theros. So we were in the middle of early vision when the decision was reached that Eldraine was an

unknown quantity. For those who know, heard me talk about it, I mean, I had great faith in it and I believed in it, but it was, it was an unknown new thing. And the decision was decided to, let's not go to Eldraine for two sets. Let's just do one set. Look at the players where I like it. We can go back,

you know, you know, there's stuff on the table. We'll, we'll do that later. Let's just stay there for one set. And that left a hole for baseball. So the idea was uh um i think

aaron came to me uh aaron forsyth my boss uh and aaron said do i have any suggestions for baseball so i said to him okay aaron we're it's late we're already in vision we're making this audible in the middle of vision um i think what we want to do is instead of trying to find a brand new set, what if we pull forward Theros? We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. It was a return to a known world. We knew we wanted to do the

underworld. Well, not everything had been figured out. We had a pretty good grasp on it. And that was way more versus a whole of no definition, right? So, like, okay, why don't we move that forward? That'll buy us a little bit of time, and then we could find something for cricket, a cricket spot.

So, Theros moved from the cricket spot to the baseball spot and became baseball, and so now we have a hole at the end of the year. So, Aaron said to me, okay, I think he gave me, I don't know, a month or a couple weeks or a month, somewhere around there. He said, make a proposal. What should this missing set be? We've now made a hole. What should it be? So we worked far ahead.

So we had recently done a thing where we had sort of plotted out three years in the future. where we had sort of plotted out three years in the future. And so he's... Oh, the other thing about this set was we had moved Return to Theros to Baseball, and we knew that Diving, the next fall set, was going to be Return to Zendikar, Zendikar Rising. So we kind of knew that we didn't want to do Return. We didn't want to do Return, Return, Return.

We're like, okay, we probably want something new. So I went and looked at the three years we had mapped out. Some of them were returns, but a bunch of them were new. So I looked there and said, what makes the most sense? What do we think we can pull forward? And so what happened was, I looked at them all, and the one that caught my eye, I think we had dubbed Monster Island. I mean, the idea was, I think the source material that we were playing off of, like Monster Island played into this trope. So the idea essentially was it was a world of monsters was sort of the premise. And the thing that I liked about it was, let me dig in deep to a little game design here.

I'm big on resonance, right? little game design here. I'm big on resonance, right? I'm big on the idea that, look, the key to making a good game is you want to create an emotional bond with your player. Well, how do you do that? Well, I mean, you can, you can, out of cloth, make something and have them bond to it, and sometimes we do that, but the easier way to do it is to find something that they already have some emotional attachment to, and then sort of connect your thing to that. So Magic is very good at going, we'll do our version. I mean, as a perfect example, Thor and Eldraine was our version of sort of Camelot and fairy tales, right? And one of the reasons that the set, I think, did really well is people go, oh, I know that.

And it's fun to, you know, see the gingerbread man but in a magic version what's magic's gingerbread man you know i'm saying um and so you can see ginger brood so i mean like the one of the real cool things about resonance is that it allows you to take your set and make it easier for your audience to come and bond and bond emotionally bound with the set so i was excited by the idea of monsters. One of the things I always look for is I always like to look for what I call trope space, which is, okay, if you look at movies,

at TV shows, at books, at games, the internet, take any kind of entertainment or pop culture and what kind of stories have been told? What space are you playing with? So monsters are interesting. There are a bunch of different spaces you can go with monsters.

And what I decided was Innistrad had done what I would say is humans become monsters, right? If you look at Innistrad, a lot of the monster stories are the human becomes the monster that's true of werewolves that's true of vampires that is true of zombies that's true of ghosts like all the monsters that we had in Innistrad essentially follow the

line of the human becomes the monster but there's a whole bunch of things that are where the human has a relationship with the monster but But there's a whole bunch of things that are where the monster, the human has a relationship with the monster, but it's external to the monster. And so one of the things I found when you looked into this is there's a whole bunch of

monster tropes. Monster stories. When I say tropes, what I mean is elements that people would recognize from stories. Usually a trope is a component piece, not a whole story. But the idea is,

where are you playing and where the audience would be familiar? And what we found with monsters was, once you get out, once it's monsters and humans are separate, so the human becomes a monster, we had done, that's Innistrad, we were staying away from that.

Once you get human and monster, there's basically two types of stories. There's human gets along with monster and there's human fights with monster. Human doesn't like monster. And both of those stories are interesting stories and one of the things I realized is we could do all of that here.

Now when you subdivide you know, hero fighting monster like hero befriending monster there's a a lot of subtropes that fall in hero befriending monster. There's hero sort of makes monster. There's hero befriends monster. There's hero, you know, like has some sort of link with monster. There's a lot of different places that play there. And then on the Monster vs. Human, there's a lot of, like,

in some places, the humans, like, the Monster is the one that's the underdog. Sometimes the humans are the underdog, and it sort of depends the different kind of stories you want to tell. But the thing I was excited by was there's lots of space. There's lots of space in the Monster thing.

So I went to Aaron, and I said, okay, I'd like to do, you know, Monster World. And Aaron said, okay. And then I think we started exploratory design almost immediately because we were, that's how close it was. So what happened, by the way, real quickly on, for those that wonder, is we did allot a full vision time to baseball. Ethan ran that. It just, because I was running cricket and he was running baseball, we overlapped some. So we gave him more time and there was some give in, sometimes there's some cushion in some of our schedules. So anyway, for those

that care, Theros got its full vision time. Okay, so we were going to make cricket. So one of the things you do when you make a new set is you want to go back and look at old sets to see what lessons you get from old sets. So one of the things that came to mind is there's a set we made called Rise of the Eldrazi. So Rise of the Eldrazi was the third set in the original Zendikar block. The first two sets in the block hinted that the Odrazi existed. But finally, they escape and they rise. And that set was, the lead designer of that set was Brian Tinsman. And Brian really went all in on the idea of giant monsters fighting.

Like what he called battle cruiser magic. And the idea was like stall, stall, stall, build, build, build, build and then when you have giant creatures start battling each other. I think it was based on I think it was Brian but

there's somebody in R&D, I think it was Brian, who played a format where the idea was nobody was allowed to attack for the first, like, ten turns. The idea is everyone's just building up their board and then, okay, now we can attack. And I think Battlecruiser Magic was kind of mimicking that. And so what happened was, a little lesson behind the scenes of Rise of Andrazi. The set didn't do well. I will give one caveat. The enfranchised drafters loved it.

I think it was something, one of the things that Brian really did is, he went all, Brian and his designs, you know, ball to the wall. Everything is going to go, you know, balls to the wall everything is going to go you know, full throttle and you know, whenever he's going to do it's going to really he's going to do whatever he's going to do to the X event, that's Brian

and so it was a, they were giant I mean, it's like stall, stall, stall, stall and giant monsters are happening and huge Eldrazi are swinging. So it really was—Brian had brought that vision to life. But one of the things we had learned outside of the enfranchised draft community, the set did not do well. The casual players did not like it. And one of the reasons was that the set kind of forced you down this path of doing this one thing.

And if you try to do sort of normal magic, you got punished pretty bad for it. Like, a 2-2, you're playing a 2-2, haha, fool. And so, learning the lessons of Battle for Zendikar, not Battle for Zendikar, that's a different set of lessons,

learning the lessons for Rise of the Adrazi, I decided that I didn't want to just, I didn't want to do Battlecruiser magic, which is one route to go with giant monsters. So what I really wanted to do was I wanted to make, not that there couldn't be giant monsters, of course there would be, it's a monster set, and hey, if people wanted to ramp into giant monsters,

that would be a strategy available, people could do that. I just didn't want to make it everything. You know what I'm saying? I wanted to make it an option, something people could do that. I just didn't want to make it everything. You know what I'm saying? I wanted to make it an option, something people could do, but not something people were forced to do or sort of had to do. And so one of the things I was looking at is I was looking at all the monster tropes and I'm like, okay, where's the best place to play? Where's the fun place to play in here. And the idea I kind of landed on, well, first off, well, okay,

the idea I landed on, I guess, was mutation. I love the idea of mutation. If you look at the source material, there's a lot of stories where it's like a person, usually a man, because this era started back in the 50s, but a person has a pet or something, and then radiation happens or a weird meteor or something happens, and that small pet grows, grows, grows,

and becomes a giant monster. But that person has a bond with that giant monster because back when it wasn't a giant monster, it was their, you know, dog or gorilla or whatever. And so, that intrigued me. So, when I think mutation, so another trope of monsters is the idea of evolution, right? Where you have a creature, and then it changes into a specific other creature,

and then depending on, you know, sometimes it changes multiple times. But the idea is, and this is something that you see in a lot of other games, and it's sort of. But the idea is, and this is something that you see in a lot of other games, and it's sort of fun to go, oh, will my wee creature turn into the bigger creature, and the bigger creature turn into that bigger creature.

It's a sequential line. The one thing about Magic is we're always looking for opportunities. One of the cool things about a trading card game is we want combinatorics. We want, it's cool when this game went that way, but this game went that way. And so we had tried to do this type of mechanic,

I mean, not tried, we did do this mechanic once before on a mechanic called Champion that was in Lorwyn. And so Champion was us trying to capture this flavor. So what we had done was we made a card. It was a creature. It would enter the battlefield.

In order to give it a little bit of flavor, instead of just mutating from any creature, it was tied to a certain creature type. So champion for goblins or whatever meant, oh, it had to be a goblin that you used it on. And then what you would do is you would exile the goblin and make this new creature because the goblin turned into this creature.

But if something ever happened to this creature, the goblin came back. So the idea was the goblin has turned into this thing, but if something happens to this thing, then the goblin comes back as the goblin. So you get the goblin back. One of the issues, real quickly, that we have to deal with this kind of thing is there's a thing called card disadvantage, for those that don't know your magic theory. What card disadvantage says is

it is bad for you when you lose more cards than your opponent. And so when you play like an aura, so let's say I have a creature and I play an aura on it. If my opponent uses a single card to destroy it, they have now destroyed two of my cards, the creature and the aura. Well, they've only spent one card to destroy it. they have now destroyed two of my cards, the creature and the aura. Well, they've only spent one card to destroy it. So they're sort of up cards.

And the theory of card advantage is that the player who has more cards will eventually win. They'll just have more tools at their disposal, and they're just in a better position, and they will more often in the time win. Anyway, the reason Champion did that was he was trying to offset card disadvantage. That's something we're always, as I get

into Mutate, offsetting card disadvantage is something we always have to think about in design. Okay, so, um, Champion didn't go over all that well. It wasn't hated or anything. It just kind of wasn't loved.

I think if you ask people about Champion, the response you get is, yeah, it was okay. And that's, I mean, once again, it's not a horrible thing to hear, but it's not what you're hoping to hear. And so we were looking, I mean, we did look at Champion and we actually considered, like, could we do Champion or could we, like, reskin champion or tweak champion? In the end, I was really enamored by the idea of what if we take the idea of mutation and, like, top-down it? Like, what would mutation be? What does it mean to mutate? And so the idea that I liked is, okay,

well, what if this creature mutates into the creature, like you have a creature in your hand that you can make something mutate into the creature in your hand? Okay, but what does it mean to mutate? Like I, one of the things that I wanted, I really wanted the sense that the creature you change was the same creature. So the first thing we said is, okay, well, if you mutate it, it is the same creature. It's not a different creature. So if that creature has counters on it, if that creature has ores on it, has equipment on it, if there's anything that's sort of on that creature, when it becomes a new creature,

well, that new creature hasn't changed. And the idea we got was, what if you just put the card on top of it? Like, you know, it represents this card. Now, there are card disadvantages. I'll get to that in a second. But the idea is, what if you just put it on that card? Now, another important thing, which is, let me start a different story, but it'll come back. So Magic does this thing called the Magic Hackathon.

So what a hackathon is, is we stop doing our normal designs for a week and we turn our attention to some problem to solve. So the first hackathon we did was we needed to find a supplemental product. And out of that hackathon came both Modern Horizons and Jumpstart, both came out of that. And there's some other things,

but those are the two ones you know. Anyway, it was a good hackathon. So we do these, I don't know, once a year maybe. Anyway, so we did this, and one of the hackathons I asked to run was I wanted a hackathon that explored future design space for Magic. I'm like, we're constantly churning through stuff. Hey, let's take a week and really sort of dig up stuff and see what we can make to create new things um and

one of the teams um actually this is the sub team i led uh one of the teams was looking at uh using um things beyond the cards. Like, okay, we have the cards of magic, but what if you use other things besides your deck? What if you use other things? And one of the things that we had done in Amonkhet is we made these punch-out cards that were minus one, minus one counters. There were some reminders from mechanics.

There were specific counters like brick counters anyway, we realized that having counters would be a good aid in our gameplay and it worked, we had the technology we could print them, we could get them in the booster pack so when we were looking at future things one of the things we looked at one of the subsections was outside components

and so we looked at things like punch-out cards and an idea that had come wasn't generated on the team it had come from external to the team um but someone had experimented with the idea of how do you grant keywords permanently you know i can yeah i can give flying until end of turn but what if i give flying until end of game what if i just permanently gave something flying well one of our rules is whenever something happens beyond one turn, we like a marker for it

so that you know that this is true. And so the idea came about of what if we had a counter? What if we had a flying counter? But the problem there was, if you had a set that had a whole bunch of different counters and it just said put a flying counter on, how do you know that that's a whole bunch of different counters and it just said put a flying counter on, how do you know that that's

a flying counter versus a trample counter or whatever? It makes the board harder to read. But, once we had punch out technology, well, we could actually print and literally, well, the flying token could have a wing on it and say flying and such. So what happened was

we, I had done a big write-up of my team, and one of the things we talked about was keyboard counters. We were very excited by them. So just so happens, that hackathon happened shortly before vision design started for Cricut. So it was fresh on my mind.

And since we were talking about the idea, like I was really into the idea of mutating creatures and stuff, I thought it was kind of cool to have, like, because one of the neat things might be, like, grafted wings. Put a flying counter on it. You know, the idea of mutating, the keyword counters felt like it fit into that.

So, once we had keyword counters, one of the things that I was trying to do with mutate was I wanted it to carry something over of the creature it mutated from. Meaning if you're just putting it on top, it can be any creature. What does it matter? But if the creature underneath mattered in some way, then it was cool

like what you mutate matter, and that meant that each new creature would be a unique thing because it's a combination of what you mutated on versus the mutation creature itself. Oh, real quickly. The other thing we figured out about mutate,

and this was from very early on, was to help prevent the card disadvantage, well, not even card disadvantage. One of the problems with having something that has to go on a creature is sometimes you don't have a creature. So what we did is we gave them a casting cost. So these were just castable creatures. If you didn't want to mutate it, just cast cast it it had a cheaper mutate cost most of the time

so mutating it was cheaper to do um once again because uh mutating on the card you have that you have the card disadvantage issue um so what we did is we said okay what if you um if you can you could hardcast it or you could mutate it onto another creature. Anyway, so, I don't know if it was my proposal. Someone made the proposal. I was the one that took it up and said, okay, let's do this. The idea was, well, what if the creature you're mutating has any of the keywords that we have keyword counters for? Why don't we use those keyword counters?

Well, first off, if the creature itself had a flying counter, the new creature would already have the flying counter because it gets all the counters. But let's say the creature below just had flying. Oh, well, is there a way for us to say, hey, if any of the creatures have those keywords that we can mark with a counter, let's just say the mutate does that.

So if you mutate a creature that does flying, you would just put a flying counter on it. It absorbs those abilities. And I think we called them inheritable traits, I think is what we called them. Anyway, so the idea, so in vision

design, the way it worked was you had a mutate creature, you could hard cast it, or you could mutate it. If you mutated it, it would go on top of the creature, you didn't have a choice in Envision, it would go on top of the creature, you would get any counters or enchantments or

equipment, and if it had any of the inheritable keywords, which meant any of the abilities that we had the tokens for, you would gain that as well. And what that meant was it mattered what I mutated on.

That was kind of what I wanted. Anyway, oh, the one other thing that we did is to help offset the card disadvantage, we had all of our mutate cards have a mutate trigger. So the idea was you could cast it normally, but if you mutate it, you got a bonus effect.

In our version at common, I think all the commons gave you a plus one, plus one counter, which was... So part of it was I wanted them to kind of grow. The one thing that happened later is a lot of changes happened. In early InVision, we had more plus one, plus one counters as triggers, so they tend to get a little bit

bigger for various reasons that didn't. Some of that happened, but not quite as much. Anyway, so that was what went on in Envision. So in Envision, it was, you mutate a creature, you put it on top, and then you got, I mean, you replaced it, so you got all the stuff

it had, and then if that creature had any inheritable keywords, you got counters for those keywords. When I handed off the set to Dave Humphreys, who was the set lead, like a week later, like very quickly, he said, okay, what do you think if we just let you have all the abilities, not just the inheritable abilities, just you get all of them? So if you mutate something, it has all the abilities of the creature card and all the abilities. Not just the inheritable abilities, just you get all of them. So if you mutate something,

it has all the abilities of the creature card and all the creatures of the other card. And I said, the Johnny in me was quite excited. I said, that sounds more complex than what I gave you, but that sounds exciting. So it's not often, by the way,

that I hand things in and somebody makes them more complex. It's happened, but usually it goes the other way. Usually I'm handing them a more complex thing and they go, oh, let's make that simpler. The other change that they made is instead of the card going on top automatically,

it now goes top or bottom. So if you'd rather have the creature stats of what's there, because the way it works real quick in the rules is when you mutate something, it gets all the abilities from the creature, but whoever's on top determines power toughness, determines creature

type. Any statistic outside of the abilities it gained is determined by the top card. So it might matter what you put. Dave made that change. That seemed like a good change. In general, by the way, one of the things that's always important is Vision is grafting an idea,

making the blueprint, and then set design is going to build it. And so a lot of times, as they're actually building and practically playing with it, they come up with good ways to improve upon it. So like I said, I think Mutate got a little more complicated

than my version, but I do think it's the funner version. I mean, it's a little crazier, but I really do appreciate how Mutate... For those that have played the set, Mutate is a very fun mechanic, and it does... Like I said, it does what I originally wanted

it to do, which is... It just allows you to grow things and make new things, and you're always kind of making a new monster, and that's part of the fun of it is that games just play out differently because even though you're playing the same deck, just each turn you might be mutating into different monsters so it plays very differently.

So the one other thing before I end for today because I'm almost to work is let me talk a little bit about the evolution of the keyword counters. So we knew we wanted them. They were on the set very early, one of the first things on keyword counters. So we knew we wanted them. They were on the set very early, one of the first things on the set.

And I think my plan originally was I wanted to do 10 of them, and I wanted them to be, every one overlapped two colors. My dream was like you would have it, and then one side would be one color, and the other side would be the other color. But it would be the two colors that tend to have that ability. So I'm trying to remember.

So white-blue was flying. Blue-black was a problem child. I forget what we put in blue-black. Black-red was menace. Red-green was trample. Green-white was vigilance. White-black was lifelink. Blue-red was prowess.

Black-green was death touch. Red-white was Vigilance, white-black was Lifelink, blue-red was Prowess, black-green was Death Touch, red-white was First Strike, and green-blue was Hexproof. I forget what we did originally for black-blue. Eventually, we ended up making, I think Prowess ended up coming out because it was, Prowess was at a time already fighting whether it was going to be an evergreen keyword. It was the only one that stacked, meaning having two Prowess is different. Two flying doesn't matter. It's the same thing. Two Prowess does matter. It triggers twice. Prowess came out.

We ended up making two new abilities. I don't remember off the top of my head, but there were two new abilities. One was an evasion ability and one was a protection ability. Um, but anyway, I think when it got to set design, they, they realized that the dream of trying to do all the two color pairs were just, was too hard. And so they ended up, um, they kept most of the, um, counters we did. I think they added reach. We didn't have reach. They added reach. We did experiment, by the way, with having a haste counter.

It just didn't prove useful enough. Like, so much of the time, it was... And then we looked at all the evergreen keywords. I mean, defender didn't work because, I mean, you could grant your opponent defender, but there's not a lot of space with defender. Flash doesn't really mechanically make any sense. Haste didn't really because, I mean, you could grant your opponent a defender, but there's not a lot of space for the defender. Flash doesn't really mechanically make any sense. Haste didn't really make any sense.

We chose not to do Double Strike. It's interesting. Double Strike and Indestructible, I think, got done in the Commander decks. So that didn't exist in the main set, but it was in the Commander decks. Anyway, I'm happy

with both how Mutate came out and how the keyword counters came out. Both of them were a lot of fun. The interesting thing with the keyword counters, by the way, is we designed... One of the things we were looking for is how do we

use the keyword counters in ways that were just different? And one of the neat things was you could do a lot of things you would normally do, but just have the effect last forever. Like, you know, you could do a giant growth, the trample, and the trample could just stay, you know, and that was kind of neat. And a lot of things, like in normal magic, if we can make it permanent, maybe we would make it permanent. We just can't.

So here we could. We were able to use it as writers on spells. I know we had a cool cycle we did that I think made it to the final print where we were trying to represent bonding. Like the idea of a human and a monster bonding. And so there's humans that enter the battlefield and stick a keyword counter

on a creature. And then they could interact with things that have that counter on it. Or that ability, which counted that counter. So the idea is that you can start to meet a monster and sort of, you know, give it something and help it, and then now you and it have this bond, and now you can do things with it. And that cycle stayed.

Anyway, guys, I'm almost to work here. So that, I guess, today we talked about mutating keyword counters. So those were, I think, the two earliest mechanics in the set. So it makes sense that I talked about it. And they were linked for in the set. So it makes sense that I talked about and they were linked for a long time. So it makes sense that we talked about them first. But anyway I promise in future podcasts I will talk about things like companion

and cycling and the wedge. Having wedge not really factions but having wedge elements to the set. But anyway I am now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. Okay, guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.