Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #776: Zendikar Rising

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

I tell the story of Zendikar Rising's design.

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 guys, so today we're going to talk about the design of Zendikar Rising. So I have a lot of story to tell. We'll see if we can fit it in one podcast. It might be two podcasts, but we'll see. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning. And the very beginning is we're about to return to Zendikar. So basically what happened, I'll do a quick version of Zendikar prior to our third trip. I had an idea for a long time of doing a land-focused set. I think I called itSapalooza. And it took me quite a while

to convince anybody to let me make it. And eventually I did, and it proved to be very popular. So much so that we came back in Battle for Zendikar. But for those who ever listened to my podcast before, Battle for Zendikar is not my proudest moment. I was not super happy with it. In retrospect, I kind of wish, not that the Eldrazi

couldn't have played a role, but I think they played too big a role. That one of the fun things about Zendikar is kind of the adventure world tropes it plays in. And that kind of got over shadowed by the war with the Eldrazi. So anyway, it was our third visit, and I really, I felt bad about, I mean, this is interesting. I led the design for Zendikar, I led the design for Battle for Zendikar, and I'm leading the vision design for Zendikar Rising. So I had done every version of Zendikar, and I felt bad about Battle for Zendikar, and I really wanted to kind of recapture what I thought was the cool thing of Zendikar, and I felt bad about Battle for Zendikar, and I really wanted to kind of recapture what I thought was the cool thing of Zendikar, which is

original Zendikar, Adventure World Zendikar. So, from the get-go, the idea was, let's go back and, look, the Eldrazi are gone. Not that the Eldrazi, they were there. Parts of the world were definitely impacted by them, but Zendikar's moving on.

The Eldrazi are gone, and we're going to start a brand new, you know, we're going to continue on without them, and hopefully things will get a little better for us. But it's still Zendikar, things are still crazy wild, and you know, it was always a rough place, even without the Eldrazi around. So anyway, we started with the vantage point of we want to figure out how to really play up what makes this exciting. You know, what makes Zendikar Zendikar? Okay, so the two main things that make Zendikar Zendikar is Zendikar has a mechanical kind of land identity to it.

It mechanically leans on land in a way that most other sets don't. And it has adventure world tropes. It's, you know, think Dungeons and Dragons or Raiders of a Lost Ark or pick your favorite adventure world trope, just adventure stories. And so we wanted to kind of recapture that. And so that was the two things. We wanted to, we had to have a chewy land center and it had to have, play into the land tropes

and the adventure world tropes that we wanted to do. Okay, so I think the first thing we did is we talked about what were the tropes that we wanted. What were the things that we wanted really to play into? And one of the things that we got on really early on was the idea of the adventure party. That one of the things that just, what says adventure world? Well, an adventure party. that just, what says adventure world?

Well, an adventure party. And if you go back to sort of Dungeon Dragons, which is a lot of the, a lot of the trope space that people know, that's one of the biggies, at least in gaming, it's one of the biggies. And the thing about an adventure party was you kind of had, we're known for having four basic,

in Dungeon Dragons, they have what they call classes. And so there is you got, let's see, you got the wizard, you got the rogue, or thief when I was a kid, but I think now they call it rogue.

You got the cleric, and you got the fighter. And three of the four of those were actual creature types in Magic. Wizard, rogue, and Cleric are creature types. We didn't have a fighter. We actually kind of split up the fighting into a bunch of different things. And so there were a lot of options of what we wanted the fighter to be.

It could be Soldier. It could be Knight. It could be Warrior. And then we had ninja, and there's a bunch of sort of individual fighting things. In the end, it became clear that warrior was kind of the best, like, if we were going to make something

that was a fighter in the, you know, your average sort of adventure party, that the warrior was the closest to that. We talked about soldier, but soldier implies you're part of a larger army or something, and that really isn't, that's not what the fighters tend to be. I mean, they're part of the group, but Soldier implies you're part of a larger army or something, and that really isn't what the fighters tend to be. I mean, they're part of the group, but they're not beholden to some larger group. But anyway, we had talked a while back.

Like, the idea that magic had within it, the creature types that represented the adventure party, was something we had talked about before. This wasn't the first that we had discussed that. But we had never quite thought of a... The innovative thing this time for us was the idea of... We know tribal themes are really popular.

We've been doing them forever, and people really love the mechanical definition because creature types are very flavorful. It's a nice mechanical way to do something that's kind of flavorful. But something we hadn't done and this idea came up pretty early on was the idea of

what if the way we played the adventure party is it didn't scale on one creature type but rather it scaled on the party. What that meant is, okay, well, what if to be successful, it's not that you need a lot of one thing, it's you want one of everything of the four classes that we were caring about. So the idea is, okay, well, you want adventure party, well, you need to have your wizard,

you need to have your rogue, and you need to have your cleric, and you need to have your warrior. And so that idea, it happened pretty early on. It was within the first month for sure, maybe even the first couple weeks. Now, one of the things I will say about party is that magic tends to love five. We have five colors, and because we have to sort of chop things into colors, it really, really leans you toward wanting to have five. So we realized that you could line up all the creature types with a color. line up all the creature types with a color.

Wizards, you know, you thought of as being blue, and rogues are black, and clerics are white, and warriors are red. That left green as sort of the odd color out. So we're like, well, okay, what's another thing that you might find in Adventure Party? And Druid was the thing we came up.

You know. But, a couple things. One is, Druid didn't feel quite on par with the other four and um what we found was when you try to do the scaling things um four sort of felt right were five it was a little harder to balance them um because basically the idea is you had to make effects that could go from one to four or if if you have 5 things, 1 to 5. And balancing 1 to 5 was a lot trickier than balancing 1 to 4.

So we decided that what the set wanted was it wanted 4. But the tricky thing about that is okay, well how do you do 4 and divvy it up into 5? Like how do you split 4 things into 5 categories? And we explored a bunch of different things,

but the thing that we finally came to was don't split four among four, split, I'm sorry, don't split four, don't split four among five, split four among four. So what we did is we said, okay, we're going to take one of the colors out of the mix, green, because that was the color

that like didn't connect in the first place. Like every color had, and so what we did is we said, okay, we're going to take each color and give it a primary class, a secondary class, a tertiary class, and then an absent class, meaning in each color

something would be the thing that's most important, of second importance, of third importance, and then wouldn't be there. And that also meant that for each of the four classes, they would be primary in one color, secondary in one color, tertiary in one color,

and absent in one color. And since you have four colors and four categories, that fits perfectly in. So what we did was white was primary cleric, secondary warrior, tertiary wizard, and it was absent in rogues. Blue was primary wizard, secondary rogues, tert found was the primary was pretty easy. Mostly, for example, when you take Wizard,

Wizard shows up first in blue and second in red, I think. So, we put it as first in blue. Cleric showed up in white and black, but primary in white, so we put that in white. Rogues show up in black and blue, but primary in black, so we put that there. And Warriors show up in red and white, or I'm sorry, red and green the most.

Although, as we've done more warriors, they've started showing up more in white. Early on, the reason warriors didn't show up in white is soldiers tend to be in white, but more and more warriors have gotten their way into white. So anyway, what we said is, okay, let's take the primary, which would be the color that does it the most,

and the secondary would be the color that you second associate with it, right? So warriors have been showing up more in white, so we second in white. Rogues make sense in blue because black and blue are rogues. Clerics make sense in black because black and white are clerics. And then wizards make sense in red because blue and red are wizards. And then the tertiary was – what we next did is we figured out the absent one, meaning if you had to not have something, what made sense?

And then we figured out the absences, and then the tertiary is kind of filled in. It's not like, for example, red's not particularly known about rogues, it being tertiary and rogue. It's like, well, it's not known for clerics, easy, but it's like a rogue made more sense in red than a cleric made in red. And then what we did with green was we made green primary and secondary none of them, but tertiary

in all of them. Meaning green is the only color where all of them showed up. But none of them showed up in large number. So one of the things we had to do is in order to make the Azphan work is we needed to have enough of the primary creature show up in the color i think

when we turned it over we had three commons and two uncommons and then whatever rares mythic rares made sense and i think when the dust settled i think there's four commons and three uncommons although i think red is four uncommons of their primary um basically what happened was it just turned out that the as fan you needed overall on the set was a little bit higher than we realized. And so, um, we did that. Um, now we explored a bunch of things with party. There are a bunch of different ways to access party. Um, like the easiest was sort of scaling stuff.

So we knew that we wanted to do scaling. Um, we knew that we wanted to do scaling... We knew that we wanted to do scaling both creatures and spells. The nice thing about scaling creatures was the creature could be one of the four. So at bare minimum, if you did an enter the battlefield

effect, what always at least was one. Because it got to count itself. Where spells sort of could be zero, and so we wanted to be careful not to make too many of those, just because they're dead in your hand if you don't have creatures on the board, the right creatures on the board.

And so, but we made creatures, we made spells, and we messed around a little bit. We have cards that get cheaper if you have a certain party, for your party members. We did a little bit of threshold whole like full party which meant that you got an extra bonus if you had all four um oh i should mention by the way when we first started playtesting party originally

it didn't scale originally it was either it was on or off and it was on if you had a full party and off if you didn't and what we found was that was just unattainable i mean not that it never happened but it was very hard to do so that's when we came up with the idea of scaling so like well there's a reward but as you get more of them and then uh and we mostly did this at rare there's the full party ones where like they really upgrade when you get them to full so there's exciting reason to give you a real challenge to try to make that happen. What else about Party? The, Party, like I said,

Party was in pretty early and didn't change all that much. The biggest change probably for Party was we did not

in vision design do a lot of tribal, we didn't, for example, we had Party which cared about one of each, but we didn't do a lot with the individual classes.

That's something set design really played up. The idea that, oh, there's a cleric deck. Oh, there's a rogue deck. Oh, there's a wizard deck. Oh, there's a warrior deck. That was something that got played up more in set design. I mean, we had the components there, but set design really decided it was something they wanted to do and

pushed archetypes. For example, if you draft, say, blue-black, oh, well, probably what you're drafting is a rogue archetype and then you're more trying to want to pick up rogues and stuff. And then other combinations, you might want to play more party and then that's changing up how you draft. Now, we did talk about, when we were making Party, the idea of did you want to have things

that were more than one class type? So, for example, do you want to have a warrior wizard or a rogue cleric or whatever? There's some flavor ways you can crisscross them. We ended up choosing not to do that, although set design – so we tried the two ones in vision design. They didn't end up really working well. Well, sorry.

They made it too easy to ramp. And then what happened was we had to cost the party things assuming you had those. And then if you didn't have it, party got really weak. And so we took those out. The full party stuff, oh, sorry, in set design, they made the ones that have all four. There's three cards, a common artifact, an uncommon green creature, and a rare green creature that beyond whatever they are, they have all four class types. So the idea is they will help you sort of get to your full party.

And the common one is an artifact that also fixes your mana because party makes you want to play more colors. Okay, so that, my friends, is party. Okay, so let's now talk about modal double-faced cards. So this is a very interesting story. In fact, how much time do I have? Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to save this story for the next time

because modal double-faced cards are the longest story. So instead, I'm going to talk about Landfall and Kicker. And then I will save... I'm seeing that I don't have enough time, I think, to do both of these. And I think modal is truly the longer story. So let's talk about landfall. Okay. So when we made original Zendikar, one of the things – so the story of original Zendikar was Bill Rose, who's our VP, who was the VP at the time we made Zendikar.

He wasn't sure about the LAN theme. So what he said to me is, okay, Mark, I'll give you, I think he gave me three months. This was back when design was a year long. I'll give you three months. At the end of three months, if you haven't proven to me that this, you know, if you haven't sort of made something that I think is exciting,

we're going to Audible and do something else. We're not going to do the land world. And so I spent, I and my team spent those three months just looking at every land mechanic. I mean, everything. We did every possible thing. And the result that came out of it was Landfall, which we really liked. And Landfall has this really funness of just saying,

hey, I reward you for playing land, which is something you do anyway, but it's just, it's kind of a cool thing. And it makes playing Land, one of the things I love about Landfall is normally in Magic, when you draw a Land late game, you kind of, you know, curse under your breath. Like, oh, Land, I don't need a Land. But in Zendikar, with Landfall, it's like, oh, I drew a Land. I remember there was a game, it's like, oh, I drew a land. Ooh.

I remember there was a game, it was a playtest, where I was wanting to find a land. It was late game. I'm like, oh, if only I can get a land. I'm like, how often late game am I praying for a land? How often does that happen? And then we realized we were on something good. So anyway, we did Landfall. Landfall was in original Zendikar.

And then we brought it back in Battle for Zendikar, though we weakened it a little bit. I'll get to that in a second. And so when we were talking about what to do, I think some worlds have a mechanical connection that are just so tight that the expectation of it being there is just super high. And I think Landfall

and Zendikar is just that. That it's all about land. Landfall is just the most. And I think Landfall and Zendikar is just that. That it's all about lands. Landfall is just the most awesome land mechanic. You know, I remember when we did Battle for Zendikar, we talked about trying to do a new land mechanic, and we're like, why? This is such an awesome mechanic. Landfall is

such a really clean, simple, elegant, fun mechanic. So, it was pretty clear that we wanted to bring Landfall back. It's so iconic and so connected to Zendikar. And then I had a long chat with Eric. So Eric Lauer was the lead set designer. I was handing off the file to Eric.

And Eric said that since we weren't going to have fetch lands, which is one of the things that really, really powered up Landfall in original Zendikar, that we probably could be more aggressive than we had been in Battle for Zendikar with our Landfall card. So if you notice that one of the things that we definitely did is we were a little bit more aggressive. The Landfall card should feel a little bit more like original Zendikar Landfall rather than Battle for Zendikar Landfall. So I was happy to have that back.

Okay, so... The last mechanic after... So we had Party, we had Landfall, we had modal double-faced cards, which I said I'll get to next time. And the last mechanic we had was Titan. Oh, I'm sorry, actually, we had two other mechanics. Neither of which ended up in the set.

We had Titan. So a Titan was basically a kicker variant, except it, well, not quite a kicker variant, close to a kicker. What it was is Titan spells had a cost that was all colorless, seven men or more, and if you paid the Titan cost. It allows you to cast the spell.

And then it sort of had a bigger effect on it. So A. It meant that you no longer needed to pay the colored man. You just had to pay seven or eight or whatever it was. And then you kind of got like a kick spell. Which did a bigger effect. And the flavor that I liked about Titan. Was.

I liked that it made a little bit of a nod to the Odrazi in a way that sort of said, okay, well, now it's the Odrazi once we're here, but aren't here anymore. I liked the idea of... We weren't going to have creatures that were Odrazi in this app, but I liked having something that sort of nodded a little bit toward the Odrazi.

But what happened was when this got into set design, Eric was like, well, original Zendikar had Kicker in it. Kicker's just a little bit more flexible than Titan. And so he ended up deciding to put Titan in, to take Titan out and put Kicker in. Um, and so, um, Titan was never to be. Um, if by the way, uh, I, uh, there's an article that... Oh, has it gone up yet? There's an article...

Actually, it's funny. I think I write my articles farther ahead than I record my podcast. So there's an article coming up. I don't think it's out yet when you guys will hear this. Where I...

When we hand off vision into set design, we produce a document. And in a document, we'll have sample cards, and there's some Titan cards in there if you want to see them. If you want to sort of see what we're up to. Okay, so the other mechanic that we had made for the set was Monstrosity. So Monstrosity originally appeared in Theros.

And the idea is it's a mechanic where you can pay mana to upgrade a creature. It's got Monstrosity originally appeared in Theros. And the idea is it's a mechanic where you can pay mana to upgrade a creature. It's got Monstrosity N. And then you upgrade a creature by giving it N plus one plus one counters. But you can only do that once. Once it's monstrous, you can no longer upgrade it. So it just can upgrade once. And Eric and Jenna, who's the creative person for the set, wanted to, were interested in the idea

of that monstrosity might make sense with the world. And so Eric had suggested that. So what we had done was we spent some time on the Vision Design team trying to think of ways to just evolve monstrosity a little bit. So we ended up coming with two ways. One was that we had monstrous cards or monstrosity a little bit. So we ended up coming with two ways. One was that we had monstrous

cards, or monstrosity cards with two different monstrosity costs. So the idea was there's a smaller monstrosity cost and a bigger one. So for example, the example I gave in my file was

Cave Lion. So it's a 2-2 for one white mana. And it says 2-W Monstrosity 2, 5-W, 2 and a white Monstrosity 2, 5 and a white Monstrosity 4. And then when card name becomes Monstrous, you may destroy target artifact or enchantment.

So the idea is that if you want to spend... For a one white mana you get a 2-2. For two and a white you can upgrade it, put two plus six to make it a 4-4. Or if you wait until you have six mana you can turn into a 6-6. But you can't

you have to choose the path you go down. We also made some spells that cared if you were monstrous. So the idea was they were boosted if you were targeting a monstrous creature. Anyway, we put those in the set. Eric ended up deciding. Once Titan became Kicker, a lot of the value that Monstrous had,

it was kind of filling in the gap between some lower stuff and your higher Titan costs. But when Titan went away, it wasn't really needed anymore. So they brought that back out. So Monstrosity got removed. What else? So do I have time to tell the modal double-faced cards? Okay, maybe I do. Maybe I

do. Maybe we'll get this all into one podcast. Although, but it's a really good story. Can I do it justice well okay I will try to tell the story I will not go into a grandiose version but maybe I didn't have maybe it's not a 30 minute story to begin with okay so the story of modal double faced cards

is in Innistrad we were trying to figure out how to do werewolves Tom Lapilli one of my team members suggested something they had done in Duel Mafters where the cards were double-faced and the idea was, oh, one side's the human and one side's the werewolf and it changes back and forth.

So while we were making the transforming double-faced cards, we stumbled upon the idea of the modal double-faced card. So a modal double-faced card is a double-faced card. Now, a transforming card, you play side A and then on the battlefield you can turn into side B sometimes back into side A. A modal double-faced card. Now, a transforming card, you play side A, and then on the battlefield, you can turn into side B, sometimes back into side A.

A modal double-faced card is one in which you can cast either side. It doesn't change between the sides. Once it's on the battlefield, that's what it is. Once you choose it, there's no changing it. Although, I mean, you could bounce it or something. But the card itself does not transform in any way. So terminology-wise, modal double-faced cards we call MDFCs. Transforming double-faced cards we call TDFCs.

And if you just want to talk about all of them as a group, there's DFCs. Double-faced cards means both the subsections, but if you mean a specific subsection of it, you refer to them as transforming or modal, appropriately enough. So original Innistrad, we made this mechanic

and it was just sitting in my back pocket, just waiting for a place to use it. And so eventually I was in a meeting where we were planning the future and I said, okay,

because Aaron had asked me if there was a mechanic that I'd like to build a world around. And I said, yes, yes, there is. The modal double-faced cards. And so the set that I was given was Strixhaven. So Strixhaven was the, I won't get too much in now because Strixhaven. So Strixhaven was the... I won't get too much into it now because Strixhaven is in the future,

but the original, a lot of the stuff we had done in Strixhaven was designed to take advantage of modal double-faced cards. But there was some worry. Even though double-faced cards were a big hit and split cards were a big hit, and this was kind of a cross between the two, there was concerns that, well, just because people like those individually doesn't mean that together there's something exciting.

And there's some fiddliness to it, obviously, with double-faced cards. So Aaron Forsythe, my boss, had asked if I would put together a exploratory group to design some of the modal double-faced cards so that we could show them off. Because there was some... Normally what happens is people in the pit get sort of worried, and then it kind of trickles up, and then the upper management gets, oh, we're hearing concerns, you know. And so Aaron wanted to nip that in the bud, and so like, okay, go make some cards. So I and my team went and made some cards.

And then once we did that and once people saw them, it definitely sort of calmed people down some. But while I was doing that, I didn't really realize the amount of design space in modal double-faced cards. So I started designing them. So the rules for modal double-faced cards is that they're not split cards so split cards are instants and sorceries so the rules for mortal double-faced cards at least one side needs to be a permanent the other side can be a spell

but doesn't have to be, both sides can be permanents and the idea was that you make a decision and then you play it either direction, that was how mortal double-faced cards were made oh, originally by the way, the plan was to make them and then you play it either direction. That was how modal double-faced cards were made. Oh, originally, by the way, the plan was to make them like split cards where in every zone other than battlefield and the stack,

they were both things, much how split cards work, that ended up being too much of a rules headache and caused programming issues and anyway, had all sorts of problems. So we ended up treating them like double-faced cards, like transforming double-faced cards, meaning that when it's not on the battlefield or in the stack, it is just its A side. It's its front side.

And you'll notice the upper left-hand corner, there's a little triangle for the A side and two triangles for the B side, so you know which side it is. And then we put information at the bottom to tell you what's on the opposite side so you have some information without having to flip the card over. Anyway, so when I was making the cards, I realized that there's a lot of really cool things

we could do. And one of the things that I... Well, there's a lot of good things that have come from the block system going away to the 3-in-one system we use now. But the years don't quite have the connectivity they once did. Because once upon a time, it's like, oh, we're on this world, and we'll use these mechanics. And, like, it just, the year was more connected.

Now, people got bored of it quicker, obviously, and there's reasons we changed it. But it did help make a cohesiveness. So one of the things I've been looking for was trying to find ways to connect the three sets, the three non-core sets in sort of the magic year, the fall using northern hemispheres here, the fall, the winter, the spring, those three sets, linking them together. And so I realized that there's something, like, once I realized that we could do maybe double-faced cards, like, they broke into a bunch of different categories, and one of the categories was land on the back. And I'm like, wow, that's perfect for Zendikar. And we likewise figured stuff out for the other

sets. I'm not going to talk about that right now, but for those who didn't know, there are modal double-faced cards in Zendikar Rising and Kaldheim and Strixhaven. Each one of them does them differently and plays into the themes of that set, but there's cool stuff coming. But anyway, for Zendikar Rising, what I realized

was there's something really cool on a spell that could be a land. And the idea is, oh, here's a spell, and in a pinch, if you need land, it's a land. So you can play it. They're not... It's funny. There's a big question of how much land you count it as versus not land.

Because on some level, yes, they're lands. If you need them, they're lands, but they're also spells. And so you got to be careful not to cast it as a spell and then not have the land drops you need. So you don't want to count them as a full land, but you can count them as a decent portion of land. But anyway, so we decided that we wanted to have land. So the rule we set for ourselves was the backside would tap for one color,

and at lower rarities it would come and play tapped, and then at higher rarities there would be and play tapped, and then at higher rarities there'd be options to come and play untapped. Oh, one of the things that happened when I did that team that Aaron asked me to do is we sort of solidified the double-faced cards. Way, way back when we had first

made in Innistrad, when we first started making the modal double-faced cards, the dual land seemed very clear. Like, it's kind of like, kind of what a fetch land was meant to be, in that, oh, it's a dual land, but you've got to choose a color, and then it's only that color, which is kind of, like, ironically, fetch lands went and fetched the land out of your library,

not because it was trying to do that, as much as, how else can we get you one-color land? Well, go fetch it out of your deck was the solution at the time. But anyway, these were quite exciting and those came in untapped. And then there's a mythic rare cycle that Set Design created that we didn't make that you can pay three life to have come untapped that they designed.

The other thing that happened was when we made modal double-faced cards, we did have some in common. In set design, they decided that they wanted to have a bunch of them, but not in common. So they ended up moving the commons ones up to uncommon. So there's a bunch in uncommon. But they really did

play into, like, land on one side, instant on the other side. Land on one side, sorcery. Land on one side, creature. Land on one side, land on the other side. So we played around in most of the spaces. I guess there's a few things we didn't do that in theory one day we could do. But anyway, so I know we did some playtests ahead of time and the Mortal Kombat cards were very popular

in the playtests. And so it ended up becoming a thing. Like I said, it didn't start in Zendikar, but it ended up in Z playtests. It ended up becoming a thing. Like I said, it didn't start in Zendikar, but it ended up in Zendikar. One of the nice things about them is Zendikar is this world where sometimes late game you actually want to land. So not only can you play them as lands early,

but late game it's sometimes like, oh, where I really need to land, you can play them as land. So it does kind of interesting double duty at both ends of the spectrum as far as early and late game, it's sometimes like, oh, where I really need a land, you can play them as land. So it does kind of interesting double duty at both ends of the spectrum as far as early and late game. But anyway, that's Double Face Card. So I'm quite excited for people to play with this set. There's a lot going on. I really like the mix of all the different components to it. It definitely is something that, like I said, when we set out to make Zendikar,

return to Zendikar, like we ended up bringing two mechanics that were from Zendikar, so Landfall and Kicker, that were originally in Zendikar. And I feel that, oh, let me explain something real quick about Party. So when I made Party,

when we made Party in Vision Design, the original plan was every wizard, every warrior, every rogue, every cleric would be an ally. And every ally in the set was either a wizard, a warrior, a rogue, or a cleric. The idea was one for one, because I know allies are very popular, and I wanted to make sure that we could make the set backward compatible

with all the allied decks that were out there. The problem we ran into was, you know, they overlap. The reason they had to be on the same card was they overlap. Like the adventure party theme is the thing that we use to, that's what the allies were, right? The trope parties play into is the same thing allies were. So anyway, what we did was we put allies on them. But editing ended up coming to me. And the problem was,

let's say you had a legendary creature. So it's legendary. It's a creature. Let's just say it's human. It's a human wizard ally. It didn't fit. Ally was just a little bit too much to fit on the line. So I was like, oh, well, we can't put ally on the legendary

creatures. And I'm like, okay, well, could we just put them on the non-legendary creatures? And I'm like, it's kind of weird. Clearly the ones that are legendary, if the other ones are allies, these would be allies. And the problem was the set didn't care about allies. There was no ally tribal in it because we were playing with

party, and party was our tribal in it because we were playing with party, and party was our tribal mechanic. So we ended up having to cut the allies on the timeline. Tazri does reference allies, but we had to end up cutting ally on the timeline. It made me sad. I don't make some of you sad. It was my intent to have the party be allies, and I hoped we could squeeze them in and just have some extra text,

but it didn't end up working out. But anyway, that, my friends, are all the highlights of how we designed Zendikar Rising. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun making the set. I hope you guys have a lot of fun playing the set. So anyway, I am not my desk, though.

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 I hope you guys enjoyed the story of Zendikar Rising. And I'll see you all next time.