Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #770: Ikoria, Part 2

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

In this podcast, I finish telling the in-depth story of Ikoria's design.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Arc Coronavirus Edition. Okay, guys, so last time I was talking about the history of the design of Ikoria. So this time I'm going to continue on. Okay, so last time I talked about mutate and keyword counters, both which were very, very early in the design. So next I want to talk about an element that was also in very early in the design, which was Wedge.

So when we were planning the world, one of the things that happened very early was we realized that there was an opportunity. One of the interesting things about third sets is they have the least amount of time before they rotate. And so it allows you to sort of play with themes that are usually either about to rotate or... I mean, you can sometimes work ahead, but in this case, we're talking about looking backwards.

So we knew that we had the Guilds of Ravnica a year, Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, and War of the Spark, all of which had gold elements into it. And so what we realized was we had the mana and we had the setup that we could do some three-color stuff. And we ended up deciding to do Wedge. So Wedge was something—so anyway, very early on, we decided that we wanted to have a Wedge component. Now, one of the things that from the very get-go that we were about was this was Monster World that had a little bit of a wedge theme and not Wedge World that had a monster theme. And what I mean by that is when you do a three-color-centric world, Concert Tarkir, Shards of Alara being previous examples, that's more of a faction thing, right?

That's more where you're taking each one of the three-color combinations and giving them a color identity, often giving them a mechanic, and really sort of building the set around that definition. If you look at Khan's Tarkir, for example, the design is really like, oh, there's these three or five clans based on three color combinations. And really the set is very defined by those. Charizard Lara is very similar. So, what we were doing here was we wanted Wedge to be a component for people for building their decks.

More for Constructed than Limited. It could show up in Limited, and we'd give you enough mana to let you be able to splash a third color. But the idea was the Wedge was more of a Constructed play thing, and wedge was more of a constructed play thing and a little bit of a limited thing. Not that we didn't want you to play in limited,

but I mean, it was at higher rarities. So it'd show up a little bit in limited, but it wouldn't be definitional. Like, if you look at Kahn's Retarik here, there's three card cards that common. That's not true here. So the wedge theme was something we thought would be fun. Now, given

the other thing to remember was one of the things I often try to do is pull themes throughout the course of the when I say year, I mean the magic year. The fall I'm using northern hemisphere seasons. Fall,

winter, spring, and then there's corsets. Trying to sort of take those three sets, the nine core sets, and make sure there's, not that they have to have necessarily the same mechanics, but at least things that overlap. So, for example, two of the themes that we've been playing around with during the course of the year,

one was monocolor, and the other was enchantments. So, we wanted to make sure, for example, that if you were having fun with a monocolor deck, if you put adamant together with devotion and you had made a fun monocolor deck, that we could let you make monsters and go up within a single color.

But we also wanted to play into that wedge thing, so we definitely sort of made sure that there was pass to go one color and pass that can go two to three color. And that was something, like I said, one of the key things about it is it was meant to be a smaller thing and a sort of like, we made a list in design of what could we do that were cool that we could do on three color. And so we actually made a list of things that were three color that hadn't, or they were wedge that we hadn't done before.

And so part of what you end up seeing us do was making some of that stuff. But I will say that the wedge theme, while it showed up very early, was not a very definitional theme in how it was structured. Like I said, it was sort of a flavoring and not a key component to how the set was built. And we did, like I said, wedge was sort of a flavoring and not a key component to how the set was built.

And like I said, Wedge was in there from day one, very early on. And we always used it as a way to try to add flavor to the set. And we loved the idea, for example, of you were building giant monsters and one of the paths was to these giant three-color monsters. You were building giant monsters, and one of the paths was to these giant three-color monsters. Oh, another thing that we did that ended up staying in the set but playing a different role. Originally what we did, if you remember back when Mutate cared about creature types, there was a period in time where – oh, did I mention this last time? I don't know if I did.

Early Companion – I don't know if I mentioned this, actually. Early Companion, oh, if I did, I apologize. But Early Companion, you had to match either the creature type or you had to match what are the inheritable keywords on it. I don't think I did talk about this. So in early design, if I wanted to mutate something, it either had to share a creature type with it or an inheritable keyword with it. So what that meant is, okay, let's say there was a mutate creature that was a cat nightmare that had lifelink. Okay, well that meant I can mutate a cat, I can mutate a nightmare, or I can mutate a creature with lifelink. Or combinations of there.

That ended up being too restrictive and Dave rightfully loosened a lot of that stuff to make it easier to mutate. But early on we were trying to sort of I think we were trying to sort of match creative a little bit. Like we wanted things to mutate in a way that felt natural for the mutation. That ended up being a little too restrictive for

gameplay so we pulled back on that. Anyway, one of the things we did do was each color had a creature type that wove through the color, and there was a primary and there was a secondary for each of the five. Let's see if I remember this correctly.

The white one was cat, the blue one was illusion, the black one was nightmare, the red one was dinosaur, and the green one was Beast. And you could see the – and then what happened was when they started weaving together in multicolors, you started blending those together. So if – you might see a cat Nightmare, for example. I think they're – because we're doing Wedge.

Anyway. So anyway, we definitely wove in that flavor and threw lines in the color to what the creature types were. That had a mechanical reasoning early on. It ended up staying more for flavor reasons. It was kind of cool that the white cards were cats. So they had white into them. A lot of times they were cats. I don't remember off the top of were cats. They had white into them. A lot of times they were cats.

I don't remember off the top of my head. Each of those things had a secondary. Cats were primary white, but they were secondary in another color. I don't remember. I remember the primaries off the top of my head. I don't remember the secondaries. But anyway, we definitely thought of Wedge early on. We definitely made lists of things that would be

cool that Wedge could do that it hadn't done before. We definitely wove in the Wedge themes into the mutation. Well, we made, we definitely made paths that got you to the three colors. So that was done very early on. Okay. Next, let's get into cycling. So next, let's get into cycling. No, no, no.

I'm sorry. I think companion came next before cycling. Let's talk about companion. So companion is another one. Remember I talked about the hackathon last time. Companion is another thing that I think had gotten – the earlier work was before the hackathon but gotten worked on in the hackathon. And the idea was imagine if I gave you a deck-building restriction and if I gave you a deck-building restriction, then there was some payoff. I think when they were messing around with it in hackathon, there were different kinds of payoffs.

I think, for example, the idea that they ended up with is you got this extra card. So if you went through these hoops, you got this extra card. So you started with an eighth card, essentially. And not just any eighth card, but this eighth card. When we brought it into Ikoria, so one of the themes that we were playing with, so the mutation theme very much plays into the idea of building a monster, right?

Monsters growing and stuff. And in the trope space we were playing in, there's a lot of making monsters that goes on as well where people are experimenting and it goes horribly wrong. Or things in which it's not necessarily on purpose. It's a mutation or an asteroid or something. But there's a lot of stories of things starting one way and growing into sort of a monster. A whole different realm of stories was the idea of bonding with monsters. Some of these tropes overlap, obviously. And so there's this trope space of I'm interacting with

a giant monster, but rather than be afraid of the giant monster or have that giant monster harm me, I bond with the giant monster. And we really like that there's a lot of fun like in the trope space, there's a lot of fun bonding with monsters. One of the things we did is we said

okay, how can we represent bonding with monsters. So one of the things we did is we said, okay, how can we represent bonding with monsters? Now we had made a cycle, like an uncommon cycle using keyword counters that like granted a keyword counter and then worked with that keyword, things that had that keyword counter or that ability. So we had tried a few other ways to represent bonding, but we really wanted one sort of big way. And what we realized early on was Companion really did a nice job of selling bonding. It's sort of like, well, if I do the thing the monster likes, the monster will be friends with me and I can play with the monster. So early on, what we said was, okay, these are all going to be creatures, monsters, not

just creatures, they're all going to be monsters. okay, these are all going to be creatures, monsters, not just creatures. They're all going to be monsters. And the idea was that companion would be kind of the mechanical execution of bonding. And then we had a few other ways to do it too, but that was the main way to do it. So I think early on, the rules for companion when we first started was meet this requirement, start with this card. And I think early on, you could meet multiple requirements. You weren't...

If you could satisfy multiple things in all of those, you get to use all those cards. Play testing, especially constructed play testing, showed that was kind of broken, so we had to be careful about that. But... Oh, so the, the, the tricky thing, the tricky thing about making companions was that we needed to make A, interesting deck building restrictions and B, um, there ended up being this component of how do I know that my opponent's doing the thing that they're saying? of how do I know that my opponent's doing the thing that they're saying?

I think in Vision, we were much more concerned with A than we were with B. B became – I mean, set design cared more about that than we did. I think early on, one of the things we were trying with Companion was just make fun companions. Like, what is a weird, interesting thing to build around? And so a lot of what we did in Vision was just trying to make weird, quirky things. Now, one of the things that I'm well-versed of because of working on Unsets is there are certain things that you're allowed to care about and certain things you aren't allowed to care about. And so some of the stuff we made was kind of cool, but like, oh, I'm not sure we can care about that. Some of the stuff we made was kind of cool, but like, oh, I'm not sure we can care about that.

For example, when you're going through something, what can you care about? Let's say, for example, it might be fun if you had to build with the same artist. That might be fun. That's a weird restriction. And one of the things that we liked about the companion mechanic was that it just made you build your deck in an interesting way that was just a little bit different. Like, one of the things that we like to do from set to set is, you know, you're going to be building decks all the time, and we want each new set to just make you maybe build a deck you've never built before.

Now, we can do that with a new mechanic. There's a bunch of different ways we can do that. But one of the things that's nice about a mechanic like Companion is it just kind of forces your hand a little bit. It says, there's going to be this weird thing. You've got to do this weird thing. And so we really went to town making weird things. A bunch of them fell into what I would call silver border space.

I'll give an artist as a good example. Yeah, it sounds fun to build around an artist. That sounds a lot of fun. Here's the problem. There is a rule that says that any version of a card needs to be the same on any version of the card with that name. They go by the English name. But so whatever that English name is, so all the cards that have that name specifically and any card that's translated that goes to that name, all those cards with the same name, same English name, have to work the same.

So what that means is things that can change between printings of cards, you can't care about them. For example, let's take the rarity symbol. Well, it's possible we have a common we reprint as an uncommon, or an uncommon we reprint as a common. That means there now exist versions of that card at common and versions at uncommon. So now that means we, if the cards can't be identical

if there's a quality between them that we care about that is fundamentally different. So what that means is, whenever there's a quality that two different cards with the same name have, we can't care about that quality. That is why we can't care about expansion symbol, why we can't care about artists, why we can't care about rarity, like anything that can differ. And that comes up from time to time. Anyway, we made a lot of weird and quirky things.

What we found was it was harder to build restrictions that were interesting than you thought. And the second thing we had to do is not only do you have to come up with a restriction that's interesting, you then want to build a card that goes into that deck in a way that is fun but not, you know, because a companion

is guaranteed in your hand, we need to be careful. We don't want to have too much repetition to play. We don't want every game to play out the same. So we need to design those creatures in a way that reinforces into what sort of is going on with the theme,

but not in a way that gets sort of overbearing. Okay, so in design, in visual design, we made a whole bunch of companions. Like I said, we flavored them as bonding monsters. And then I think we handed off to Dave, mostly companions we handed off to Dave, mostly companions we handed off to Dave, I believe that you could play with multiple of them, and I believe it was just meet the requirement you get the card in your opening hand.

So in set design, the big issue they ran into was some of the things were just not provable. Like, for example, let's say I make one that says at least 20 cards in your deck must be the same creature type. Now, if I made one that said all your creatures must be the same creature type, okay, well that, if I ever play a creature that's not, it's my dwarf deck.

The second I play a non-dwarf, you're like, oh, you broke the rules of that. But if I say I have to have at least 20, well, I could play a bunch of cards that aren't that, and you don't really know. It's very, very hard to get to the point where you're aware of what's going on. And so we wanted to be careful about that.

That we wanted to make sure that whatever it was they were doing, that there was a general heuristic that you could watch and go, oh, wait a minute, you know, it's all supposed to be thing A, you didn't do thing A. Okay, obviously your deck's not right. And it's not, the funny thing is, the reason

we did that was a level of comfort. Like, one of the things that's really interesting is we want to make sure that when we build something, that it can be played well in a tournament environment. Not everybody plays in tournament environments. A lot of people play in casual

environments. And in casual environments, there's a lot of things that people kind of, you know, there's a lot of more like, hey, I'm playing with people I know. You know, I'm not going to take the effort usually to like double check them. I'm not going to do debt checks or something. But hey, I'm playing with people I know. And if it comes out that they're doing something they shouldn't do, hey, maybe I don't play with them anymore.

There's a social contract there. Internment play, you don't know that. You're playing with, you know, often playing with people you don't know. And so it is careful to us when we make things, we want to make sure that they are applicable to constructed play. And one of those things is making sure you have some ability to monitor what's going on. Like, a good example was

when we made the morph mechanic. It was very important that, okay, you're playing this face-down card, they have no idea what it is, you know, how do they know that it's a morph card? How do they know I just didn't play a land in my hand as a morph creature? Well, we made a rule that said at the end of the game, if you have a face-on card when the game ends,

you must reveal it to your opponent in a tournament play. And so we always look out for that. There's a nice balance between trying to make things fun, but making sure that in a more competitive environment, that's taken care of. Anyway, so we turned over a companion. Dave changed the restriction through playtesting.

They learned that they had to only let you have one. And then, he also worked hard to try to find things that was more easy to track and understand if someone was playing it correctly.

The other thing that Dave did that we didn't do, Dave did this in set design, I believe, is he ended up making them hybrid creatures. I don't think we made them hybrid creatures. I think in our version, I think in our version they were monocolored in the version we turned in.

Oh, by the way, when Vision turned in Companions, we had, how many did we have? We had a bunch of uncommons and we had a bunch of rares, and then we had a bunch of mythic rares. We had more companions than ended up in the set. The set ended up having 10 companions. I think we had 15. I think we had

I think there were five cycles of monocolor cycles at uncommon, rare, and mythic rare. And the idea was the uncommon ones were meant for limited, although you could play them outside of limited, but they were designed so they would play well in limited. The rares were designed so they

could work. The uncommons were, look, if you get this, you really could draft around it. The rares were like, ah, you know, not that it won't work, but I mean, it might take you in a direction you're not normally going to play. And the mythics were like, well, it's not really about limited. Let's just make a really cool constructor card and not worry so much about limited.

In the end, what Dave ended up doing was he chopped it down from 15 to 10. I think he put them all at rare. And then he made them hybrid. So he made a 10-card hybrid cycle. And that was to maximize how many people could play with them. So just to maximize the kind of decks you could build. One of the things we found is when they were monocolored, it just, there was a deck you could build,

but it was a little more restrictive. By making them sort of two colors, now, let's say it's, you know, red-green, you can make a mono-red deck, a mono-green deck, or a red-green deck. It just gave you some options of how you wanted to build it. Oh, also, if you made them hybrid, it just allowed you to have more cross splash and stuff. So Dave made that change.

And then he moved them out of uncommon because what he found was even with the 10 rares, they showed up a lot in limited. And in uncommon, it was just a little nutty, especially when you can play multiples together. And I think you – can you still play, I'm not sure in limited whether when they were playtesting in limited, you could play multiples at the same time, and I know they were stacking and causing problems. Okay. Anyway, that is Companion.

At some point, this is not really the right venue for me to talk about the later story of Companion. I can talk about that another time, just because I'm trying to tell the design story, and that's post-design. Do I wish we had done stuff a little bit different with Companion? Yes, yes. We made some mistakes. I'll leave that for now.

At some point, I'd love to talk in more depth. It's an interesting topic, but I want to get to the design of Ikoria. Okay. Next is cycling. So, we had Mutate. We had Keyword Counters.

We had Companion. All of those were pretty, I mean, like two of them had come from the hackathon. So both the Keyword Counters and the Companion came from the hackathon. Mutate had come from the team, but it was a weird mechanic. It only would get weirder as it evolved. And so the set had a lot going on. I mean, Mutate plus companion plus keyboard counters was a lot. Oh, I should mention this.

One of the experiments that we wanted to try when we made the set is it was the third set in the year, in the Magic Year, meaning it's going to rotate out the quickest. We had been experimenting. One of the things we're always figuring out is how much complexity is the right amount of complexity. And so we spent a few years where we dipped a little low, like in Ixalan,

and we wanted to experiment a little more. I liked the mutant mechanic. I liked the Mutate mechanic. I liked the Companion mechanic. And so we talked a little bit about whether we wanted to have both. I actually designed the set so we could strip our Companion if we needed to. And Mutate was pretty baked into how the set was made.

But Companion was designed in such a way that it could be stripped if we needed to strip it. I recognized and envisioned that there was a lot going on. So I said, if we have too much complication, we could strip out Companion. Um, but anyway, we sort of knew that we wanted to do the experiment of just raising up a little more

complexity, see how the audience would receive it. So there was an experiment that we were doing on purpose here. But anyway, we had a lot going on. So I'm like, okay. And we had no returning mechanics at this point. So I'm like, you know what I want? I want a nice, simple returning mechanic that won't confuse anybody that plays into monster tribal. And so we looked at a bunch of different things.

We talked about monstrosity, for example. But there was a monstrosity variant in Ravnica Legions, I think, in Simic. So that felt kind of off the table. It wasn't standard with it. We talked about a bunch of different things. The one I ended up, I mean, the team ended up on was Cycling. Because one of the things that Cycling lets you

do is just have a little bit more large creatures, and then it makes it easier to play them in your deck, because if you can't use them, then we just cycle them away. But in late game, if you draw them, then you do get the big monster. So I like the fact that cycling would sort of play into our monster theme. If you notice, all our mechanics, mutate and companion and keyword counters and cycling,

all played into sort of getting that monster feel. And that was a big and important part of wanting to get the world is, you always want all your mechanics working in the same direction to create an overall sense of what's going on. And monsters clearly were the focus for us. So we, Vision, whenever we bring a mechanic back, we'll mess around a little bit and just sort of say, oh, what can we do with a mechanic we haven't done before?

We've done cycling a lot. I think cycling is a mechanic we've brought back the most times. That's not an every-win mechanic. I think cycling gets that award. So anyway, we've done a lot of variants of cycling. So we didn't... Also, there was so much going on, we're like,

okay, we don't need to really... Maybe this is a set where we needed a little more oomph. Maybe cycling gets a new variant or something on. We're like, okay, we don't need to really... Maybe this is a set where we needed a little more oomph. Maybe cycling gets a new variant or something. But we're like, okay, we got Mutate, we got Companion, we got plenty going on. Okay, we'll just do straight-up cycling. In set design, Dave did... They definitely...

One of the things they wove in is used... When you're making your deck archetypes, you tend to take the themes that you have in the set and build them into archetypes. So one of the archetypes they built was a cycling archetype, where, like, cycling rewards and stuff. And that deck, for those that haven't played Icori Limited, is quite good.

So they might have pushed maybe a little stronger than they needed to be, but they definitely took that. So that was... We sort of envisioned just to sort of add cycling. We didn't do a lot with it. We put it on large creatures and a few other spells. But set design, definitely to make it fit in the archetype, played around with it a little bit more.

And then, so some of the cycling matter stuff, more of that got done in set design. Okay. The other thing that popped up was human tribal. So one of the things that we were trying to do was we wanted to separate out the monsters from the humans because

one of the things that's important is in almost all of the trope stuff we're talking about with monsters, there's a big separation between monsters and humans. And like I said, maybe the humans are bonding with the monsters or fighting the monsters or fighting the monsters or making the monsters or whatever they're doing.

We wanted the monsters, like we made a conscious decision early on that we didn't want to mutate humans. Like early on, you had to mutate off the creature keyword, as I explained. But even when it got to set design, Dave changed it.

Like he still kept the non-human. I think there was like a little tiny period of time where you could mutate anything, but mutating the humans just felt kind of weird. One of the things, and I've talked about this before, I think I might have talked about this last time, we really want to, we like the Innistrad is monsters come from humans,

and then Ikoria is monsters come from elsewhere. And that was a big dividing line we made between the two. So if you're going to do the stories of a person becomes a monster, well, that's an Innistrad story. If you're going to do a person befriends a monster or bonds with a monster or makes a monster, I guess a few of them making the monsters do show up in Innistrad. But at least making a monster in which the monster doesn't start as a human is Ikoria. But anyway, so once we did that, once we started giving the monster some identity

and we decided that non-human was the easiest way to sort of, in this set, look, if you're not a human, you're mostly a monster on Monster World. So it made a lot of sense. The other thing that we liked was, once again, we were trying to find ways to get themes that we could draw into the year.

Non-human had been a theme we had played with in Throne of Eldraine. So that was another theme that we could pull through. So whenever we can, we're trying to find threads of things we can connect. So we liked having the non-human stuff. But we also

wanted to give the humans some identity. The humans were there. Oh, and the other thing that was tricky was we liked making the monsters the things you wanted to sort of mutate onto. And so having the creature abilities really was really good for the

monsters. So it just put the humans in a slightly different space than they normally sit. And so the end result of that is doing some human tribal. I think the interesting thing about human tribal is that it's not something... Early on, when it was in Vision,

we were more messing around of, like, cat tribal, or not cat tribal, but, like, cat matters and beast matters. Like, we were more playing into the monster space. So we, at that time, weren't caring about the humans. But once they got consolidated into the non-human, then it made sense to sort of play up the humans a little bit. And Human Tribal did a good job of really sort of selling.

Like another part of the trope space is humans fighting monsters, right? Oh, there's a monster terrorizing. Well, I got to stop the monster. So another whole swath of stories is humans versus monsters. And normally in that kind of story, the humans are at a big disadvantage in the sense that the monster is usually way more powerful than they are individually.

But if they team up, you know, they might be able to stop it by, well, sometimes they climb into giant robot mechs. But other times, they as a group have to come together to try to stop the monsters. And so that was nice. I think that I was happy with where that ended up. And I thought the human tribal did a nice job of, A, it made, I think, black and white was the human archetype in Draft.

So it gave a little bit of definition. And it also helps separate them. And one of the things that is just a truism about design is if I don't have a mechanical way to explain some creative element, I can't mechanically care about it. So if I say I want to care about thing X, but thing X does not have a subset that there's a word or something that I can identify, a color, something I can identify,

then it becomes very hard to mechanically care about it. So one of the things that you'll notice is we're always looking for ways to have definitional qualities so that we can care about them. And in this case, for example, making humans something you can care about, or, I mean, humans is tribal, but it definitely made us, it helped us in that space. And so one of the things that, and usually this starts in vision, is trying to figure out what we can care about

and then figuring out where to play in that space and how to make that matter. And the interesting thing, for example, is both Throne of Eldraine and Ikoria, non-human, they meant very different things. You know what I'm saying? The non-human in Throne of Eldraine was sort of the fairy folk, right? The humans made up

most of the courts, and it was sort of the more of the wilds were represented by the non-humans. Where here, non-human meant monsters, right? So they're very different things. Like, what non-human meant between the two sets were very different. But, what makes magic so special is I say non-human, it doesn't matter as long as it's not a human. It doesn't matter whether it's a fairy or a beast.

They're both not human. And so you can mix and match the themes in a fun way, even though thematically they represent very different things in the sets. Okay, well, you're almost out of time. I hit all the major points of Ikoria. Okay, well, you're almost out of time. I hit all the major points of Ikoria. The thing that was really interesting about it was the monster theme was... We started with it, and it ended up being a very powerful,

very evocative, very resonant theme. There's lots of different kinds of stories with monsters, so there's a lot of different variety to play with. And it tended to play in trope space that makes sense as magic cards. Like, one of the nice things about monsters is, oh, we're doing monsters. Well, can magic make monsters?

Magic makes monsters all the time. So, I mean, there's a little bit of differentiating this between other sets, but, you know, the themes I really enjoy sometimes is when the theme just leans into what magic wants to be, and this was definitely one of those themes that did that. I also think the experimentation

with complexity, I mean, there's, well, that's probably, when I do lessons learned, when I do lessons learned for Ikoria, we'll talk about that. There's goods and bad about the complexity, but anyway, that, my friends, is the story in two podcasts of Ikoria's design.

So I hope you guys enjoyed that. But it looks like I'm at work. So it's time for me to go. We all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. So instead of making magic, it's time for me to be I'm really messing up my end today. Instead of talking about magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed our look at Ikoria designs. It was a fun set to build, and I'm glad so many people really had a lot of fun with it. But anyway, time for me to go. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.