Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #783: Jules Robins

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

In this podcast, I interview Jules Robins, an R&D designer who's worked on numerous products and is the lead set designer of both Commander Legends and Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (we only talk a little about his two set leads, as neither is out yet).

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So today my interview is Jules Robbins, a member of the R&D team. So Jules, welcome. Hi, glad to be here. Okay, so Jules, I'll ask you the question I ask everybody. How did you start playing magic so i guess i was about seven years old i'd been playing some other card games recently come out aimed at kids and walked onto the playground one day and some kids were playing with these cool looking cards there was this purple drake and a swirl on one of them, a classic wind drake. And I asked what they were playing, and they briefly tried to explain the rules to me,

and I was hooked. Demanded some cards for my birthday, which was a couple weeks later, and we were off to the races. Okay, so when was that? What was your first set? Like, roughly when was that? Yeah, so they were playing with 7th edition cards,

so right around the Odyssey 7th edition. Okay, okay. So how long were you just a player? At some point we'll get to Wizards, but how long were you just sort of a magic player? Yeah, so I guess that would have been... So I guess that would have been like 2000, so about 15 years before starting at Wizards. Was it continuous? Did you take breaks or did you play all the way through? It was continuous. The amount I played varied somewhat.

Sometimes it was like, I'll play a game every couple of months with my brother. And sometimes it was like like magic is my life, but I never stopped completely. So I want to get into one of the things that you did before you got to Wizards, because this actually plays into the story of you coming to Wizards, which is you got very involved in the, I don't know what to call it,

the homemade magic, like the magic design community that makes their own cards. I got really excited about working at Wizards from an early age. And one of the things I knew I needed to do was somehow actually be appealing for the job. So I wanted to figure out how to design magic cards. And when the Great Design Research 2 came around, you know, working in the United States, it had a legal requirement. You had to be 18 by the time the employment would start and i was only going to be 17 so i needed a different angle but but it's interesting because so people that don't know the

the history of the great designer search uh the greatest under search 2 was unique in that we had a group participation part of it which was was we had a wiki, and in fact, every design, the designers were required to use some cards that weren't their own designs, because we were trying to see how they worked with other people's designs. So you were part of that. Talk about that. Exactly.

Yeah, so definitely there was a lot of people soliciting ideas at all stages both like hey I've got this notion for a mechanic is that cool and then a lot of like trying to figure out cards that would resonantly express the worlds that they'd brought to this great designer search challenge but for me a lot of the real takeaway wasn't even trying to submit ideas. It was all this discussion going on in the forums, like everyone picking apart what was exciting and good and bad in designs that people were submitting. And you were submitting cards for a whole bunch of the designers, right?

Yeah, I definitely didn't lock into anyone. I, at that point, spent so much time reading through all the stuff, my designs were pretty scattershot, kind of. Okay, so you went from that, you participated in the Great Designer Search, and then there was a website. Let's talk about the website that you participated in. Yeah, so after the Great Designer Search 2, a bunch of the participants were like, well, this collaboration stuff was great. We don't want to stop it just because the contest is over.

We still love designing magic cards and started the Goblin Artisans blog. and so people would post you know little design tidbits and challenges and just try to come up with interesting topics to discuss and design towards and over time we started with a bunch of people from gds2 but more people found their way to the blog and built up a little community sort of a training center on magic design. Okay, so you spent some time designing cards there and being part of that community. Okay, so how did you get to Wizards eventually? How did that happen? Yeah, so towards the tail end of high school with all this Great Designer Search 2 stuff going on, I was pretty convinced this was the job I wanted and trying to figure out how to get it

since I couldn't participate in the Great Designer Search. And you wrote an article somewhere around that time talking about, you know, lots of people write to you saying they want to work at Wizards and how to actually be appealing to Wizards as opposed to just have Wizards be appealing to you. And the main takeaway I got there was be visible so i was you know reading a lot of magic articles at the time not just on the mothership and i read a commander column on Quiet Speculation, and the writer wasn't going to be writing anymore.

There was a little snippet at the bottom of the column, like, if you'd like to write for us, submit some samples. So I did. I got the gig and started writing weekly commander content, and I was definitely writing with an eye towards trying to work at Wizards I spent a lot more time delving into like what makes Commander gameplay fun for people and showing off really zany creative decks okay and then so how did that lead to a job Wizards yeah your job your plan paid off so how did it pay off exactly yeah so that successfully got me onto some people's radars,

I guess yours and Ethan's at least, I know. And so when I was in college, towards the tail end of that, I guess leading up to the summer of my junior year, I was like, all right, time to figure out how to actually get in here. I tracked down some contact information for someone in HR at Wizards and wrote in asking, do you have a summer internship program? I looked through all the job listings. I didn't see anything. And her name's Jenny replied, well, we'd been talking about spinning one up, but there's nothing really in the works yet.

Write back next year and we'll see if there's anything. And so I did, took some other internship doing software development that summer. And the next year I wrote back and Jenny said, well, we still haven't spun one up, but would you like to be a pilot program? Yeah, you were our first summer intern, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Okay, so you came on for the summer. And what happened? Well, first off, it was a whirlwind. There is nothing I'd ever done like working in Magic R&D. First, just the influx of cards and designs from trying to take in a year and a half's worth of magic all at once was dizzying. But I immediately hopped onto some teams. I immediately hopped onto some teams, I think exploratory design for Dominaria,

and might have been right away enemy Nicol Bolas, and just started trying to crank out as much design work as I could. We weren't sure there was going to be any headcount to have a job at the end of this thing, but I knew this was my shot and I had to make sure. Yeah, and did we convert it right away? I'm trying to remember. I don't remember the details. I'm sure you remember the details. I don't remember the details exactly. Yeah, so it was touch and go. There was a lot of negotiating from people up the chain trying to get headcount. I eventually got offered a contract position for a few months.

And then at the end of that, got hired on full time. Yeah, I remember pushing for you, but I don't like... On my end, it's just like, you should hire this person. And then, you know, there's a lot of behind the scenes, there's a lot of rigmarole hiring people and stuff, and so I always make recommendations, but then Bill or somebody has to, you know,

actually find the headcount, and so that can be tricky at times. Okay, so you come on, you're working at Wizard, so let's start. Your first thing you worked on was Arch Enemy Nicol Bolas, you were talking about. Yeah. What was that like? This was, I think, a really good introduction to Magic Design,

because rather than just jumping in on card design, I was immediately in a position to try to think structurally about how this gameplay was all going to work. We had done Arch Enemy one time, but all of the decks were built to come with their scheme deck and then play against whatever other magic decks. This time we were making a whole experience in a box. So the Arch Enemy's deck needed to be built to take on three players like the last one.

But then we had the Gatewatch decks all built to work together and take on the arch enemy. So I had a lot of fun trying to figure out what pieces of normal Magic gameplay were going to have a lot of extra play to them in this scenario where your auras that are normally hard to use out know, use out of nowhere. You can now have a teammate play a creature and then immediately aura it up.

So all sorts of haste-granting stuff has extra abilities. Basically, any targeted creature enhancement has all sorts of extra capabilities. And we found lots of weird little stuff like bloodthirst your teammates can help turn on. Yeah, and the interesting thing with stuff like Arch Enemy is you're designing an experience as much as individual cards. Exactly. And in fact, we had no new magic cards in there.

We designed new schemes, but the magic cards were all reprints. So it was all about recontextualizing the stuff we already knew. Real quickly, for those who don't know, Arch Enemy is a game in which one person takes on multiple other people and the schemes are the giant cards that the big person, the Arch Enemy, has. And then we had

realized that there was a great story moment in the story where the Gatewatch were fighting Bolas and so Arch Enemy we had done before, but we brought it back. Okay, so that, speaking of Bolas causing chaos, leads us into Hour of Devastation. So that was the first sort of premiere set you worked on. And you were on the design team. Yeah.

So this was my first chance getting to work with Sean Neen, which was really fun. And Sean led the set. Yes. Sean led the set for design at the time. Yeah. So for our, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to keep and what

to twist from Amonkhet. This was back in our old two-set block model, so we wanted to make sure everything was contiguous but evolved the story. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going to make the Eternals cool, these sort of zombie super soldiers that Bolas has set up this whole plane to generate, as well as finding little tweaks on how we could use the other mechanics in the set. For instance, Exert in Amonkhet, all the creatures have to attack, and then they can keep themselves

tapped for some sort of combat bonus. And in Our Devastation, we open that up with activated abilities that you could tap or tap and exert for a bigger effect. Yeah, the interesting thing about Our Devastationation was like, there was a big story point. It was sort of the end of the first act, if you will, of the Bolas saga. And it was all about like, and the Gatewatch lose, they get the butts kicked.

And so, I know it's a lot for the team to try to put together to get that flavor of, truly, the Hour of Devastation. Yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make cards that would sell the apocalypse feel without being miserable while you're losing. Yeah.

I was pretty happy where we ended up with the cycle of defeats for each of the Gatewatch members. I like the color hate spell that's extra good if it hits the planeswalker. Yeah, I liked that. That was very cool. It's funny, I was... This design team, based on some weird stuff that was going on, I was there for every other meeting. Like, they met twice a

week, and I was there once a week. And so... Anyway, I remember I was Dev Station, but I always would be catching up every week, trying to figure out what had gone on when I was not there. Okay, next up. Commander 2017. So this is your first Commander set. And you were on both, you did design and development. But at some point it becomes vision and set, we'll talk about it when we get there, but this is still back when it was design and development. Yeah, so I was really

excited to get to work on a Commander project. Commander had been sort of my bailiwick going into this um so commander 2017 i came in and basically all we knew was we wanted to try to make tribal themes for commander so we spent the first portion trying to figure out well what creature types should we even be picking we surveyed a bunch of people in the building, tried to figure out both what was popular and what was unduly popular relative to what cards we'd already printed. So we got some big mainstays like, we've already made a bunch of dragon cards, but people love dragons. But tons of people were also like, I love cats, despite there being very few cat tribal cards already. Alright, we've got to figure out how to make this work.

So we eventually ended up on those two, as well as Vampires and Wizards. What was the mechanic hook? I mean, I know it was tribal, but what was the new mechanics in Commander 2017? Yeah, so we had the Eminence mechanic, where your commander has an effect while it's in the command zone.

And this one got contentious. It's really hard to balance the mechanic where you don't have to cast your card before you can use it. But we figured if there's ever a place to make this work, it's going to be in the tribal set where you've got, you know, really narrow deck building restrictions. And we can make your ability only work with a certain subset of cards. Okay, next up, another supplemental set, Battlebond. And you did both. You did both design and development of Battlebond. Yeah, so this is becoming a running theme of Gavin and I wanting to get her on teams.

becoming a running theme of Gavin and I wanting to get her on team. He led our Gen Me, Nicol Bolas I was on, and then led one half of Commander 2017 and now Battle Bond. So we'd gotten into a pretty good rhythm, just bouncing ideas off each other and trying to figure out where to go. And so.

Do you remember where the idea for Battle Bond came from? Was that Gavin's idea? I think it was Sean's. Oh, it was Sean's idea. Okay. Yeah. Not 100% sure. Real quick, for those who don't know about Battlebond, it was a two-headed giant sort of format

where you would team up with somebody and the draft was made so you would draft with them. It was a very different kind of set. Yeah, I was really excited about this too. I was probably one of the few people before Battlebond came out who'd done a lot of two-headed giant drafts. I used to play in Pro Tour qualifiers down in L.A. and after the tournament was over,

we'd try to gather people and do two-headed giant drafts. And it's just a lot of the fun in Magic is gathering together with people and get to negotiate stuff with your teammate and strategize with them, as well as just picking two cards at a time that you get to try to find synergies between, all made for really fun play.

So BattleBond, we got to leverage a lot of the learnings actually from arch enemy nickel bolus about how to make cards teammates are going to use play together well and do all sorts of interesting stuff yeah it's interesting i don't think it's it's funny how you'll learn things on one set and then you'll then you start applying them later. I always find that very interesting how, oh, we did this here. We could use that, and then you'd carry it over. We do that all the time. Okay, so now we get to the... Vision design starts happening.

Vision set design, play design starts happening. So, okay, at the time, and this was in the middle of it happening, because at the time we started this design, Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance were designed in one vision design, because at the time, we

had two set blocks, and both sets of the block were designed together. But, in between us doing that and it coming out, it sort of evolved. So, it's quirky. But you were my strong second. So you were my strong second on the Guilds of Ravnica slash Ravnica Allegiance vision design. So what's your memory of that?

Definitely a lot of fun. We've got extra room to explore because we knew a lot of what Ravnica was. So early on, we not only were figuring out stuff like color distribution of guilds across the sects, but messed with a lot of stuff that we ended up pulling back to more minor notes, but with intrigue and spying and like, we know Bolas is infiltrating some of these guilds. What's this sort of Cold War vibe

we're gonna get get across, Raffica? So you know what mechanic I'm saddest didn't make into the finest product? Hmm. I'm going to guess Splice. Not Splice. So we did try Splice on Instant for Izzet, and that didn't pan out. No, the one was the Depth Mechanic. Remember the Depth Mechanic?

Oh, yeah. That was the one was the debt mechanic. Remember the debt mechanic? Oh, yeah. That was the Orzhov mechanic. And basically you would give your opponent debt counters and then if they had any debt counters, they took damage, but they could pay to get rid of them. And early on, they'd go, ah, whatever. They'd ignore it. And then later on,

oh, I gotta get out of debt. I'm in trouble. I enjoyed that mechanic. Yeah, I had quite a good time with it, too. It ended up being hard to get stuff out of for the constructed end, I guess, when they looked at it there.

Yeah, I mean, and one of the other things people don't realize about Ravnica sets is all the different pieces have to balance against each other. And so sometimes it's like, oh, in a vacuum,

this might be okay. But when this has to play nicely with this mechanic and that mechanic, there's a lot of weird balancing issues that go on in Ravnica sets. I'm still hopeful we'll figure out a way to make something in that vein

work eventually. Hey, I'm king of trying things again until we make them work. Okay, so the next thing we did, you did, I didn't do this one, it's Commander 2018, so another Commander set. So what was the gimmick of Commander 2018? Yeah, so Commander 2018,

we just came in knowing we wanted to do Planeswalker Commanders again. Felt like they were cool in Commander 2014, but mono-colored decks are a really big ask, so we wanted to figure out what we could do with multiple colors on your Planeswalker Commanders. And we messed around with a bunch of different themes. I think at some point we had a Naya Tokens thing, which we didn't end up

using, but made its way into a later commander product. But eventually we landed on, I guess, like sort of graveyard-y land theme for Lord Windgrace and auras and enchantments in general sort of thing for Estrid the Mask. for Estrid the Mask. And we had Saheeli the Gifted doing an artifact theme because people had been clamoring for blue-red artifacts forever

and we'd never had a chance. And the fourth deck was a lot harder to figure out. We went through a ton of things and eventually landed on a Minitoo the Fate Shaper doing a sort of top of your library matters theme

with a bunch of miracles and scrying and predicting your top card. Yeah, that was a weird deck. Yeah, it's also the other thing about Commander decks is how you need to get themes for them and the themes will change as you develop.

You know what I'm saying? Sometimes you start at one place, and then as you start doing them, they change over time. Yeah. Right. It's like part of this Gwainswalker thing was like a chicken and egg problem, too, where it's like, well, we'd love to use characters people know, but that'll inform the mechanical themes, or maybe the mechanical themes will need to inform

the character on this deck, because we need this environment to all play out well when the decks play against each other. Yeah, that's another theme of your stuff, because you do a lot of multiplayer stuff. Like, the things have to work well with each other, it's not just in a vacuum. Yeah.

Okay, next up. You were on set design for War of the Spark. So I led the vision for this. This was definitely a tall order. So Dave Humphries was the lead set designer. Hey Dave, here's 36 planeswalkers. Here you go.

Yeah, this was definitely a fascinating and difficult set. We were trying to figure out how to scheme these planeswalkers so you could actually have exciting limited games where they got to matter and be powerful but not take over the game. grappling with this snowball-y problem where, because you can attack your opponent's planeswalkers, if somebody was ahead on board, it was really easy for them to clear off the enemy planeswalkers. But once you got stalled out, then your opponent got more and more value over time. And we eventually landed on the solution of having no plus abilities on any of the uncommons, so they'd have a capped number of times that they could generate value if you weren't able to attack into them.

No. Vision actually handed off all minuses on the uncommons. I didn't even remember this. Yes. All right. And we gave you proliferate, so that's how you get more of them. Exactly.

Oh, yeah. This was a great structural handoff from Vision. There are always all sorts of things to work out, but these mechanics really hung together to solve all the issues. Okay, so next up, you were on the set design team for Modern Horizons. I mean, I didn't lead the Vision. Ethan led the Vision, but I was on the Vision design team. Ethan and I had come up with this for the hackathon.

And then it was a fun set. I loved designing. I loved my end of it. So I was making it on your end. This was one of my favorite set design teams, as I think we've covered. I'd been playing Magic for a long time. And I actually got my start playing Magic tournaments with Time Spiral. So it was near and dear to my heart.

I loved learning about all the weird bits of magic's past, even that I hadn't experienced firsthand. Do you remember the codename during the hackathon for Modern Horizons? I don't. We called it Decadent. One thing for those behind

the scenes a little bit, it it's like it is so much fun for someone like me and you who just we played Magic Forever it's just so fun to dive headlong into nostalgia

and like like Time Spiral obviously we did it and it was a little much for the average player but like okay this is for the more

experienced player and it was so much fun like I loved making Time Spiral Block this was also much fun making it, so that was a lot of fun. Yeah.

Okay, so now we segue into Zendikar Rising. You were on the set design team for Zendikar Rising. What was that like? This was a really cool big challenge. Vision had come up with the party mechanic, which is kind of unlike anything we've done before and i guess it's sort of structurally similar to domain but your deck building changes a ton when these are creatures you're trying to keep on the battlefield and so eric lauer who was

leading the set design team and i spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we could structure this set to let party really shine through because we knew we needed a ton of wizards and warriors and clerics and rogues and Vision had come up with this framework for which party types were going to appear more often in which colors and staring at that grid, Eric and I realized, well, they're going to end up with a ton of wizards if you're drafting blue and red. It's going to be really hard to get the full party together, but maybe we can sort of tie this branching tribal thing

in with the more linear ones that you expected and led to making a set with all these really cool paths you can take in draft, sort of shifting where your focus is and building all sorts of strange hybrid decks. Yeah, set design added in all, like, the Wizard Tribal and the Warrior Tribal and the Rogue Tribal and Cleric Tribal all got added in set design. We had given you party, but that was something that you guys

had figured out really, like, helped make the draft work, and so that was very cool. Any other interesting stories, remember, from Zendikar Rising? Yeah, there was definitely an interesting bit trying to figure out

exactly what to do with all the modal double-faced cards too we're like well you know you've got access to a land what sorts of spells are supposed to go on these and we tried a bunch of different stuff it's like creatures can end up being pretty hard because the spells on the front of the land need to be a little more expensive to balance out the option of being able to play a land but if you play your creature a little bit later than you normally would your opponent's probably got a bigger creature so those ones were extra hard to solve uh but we landed on a lot of this really fruitful space

for spells that can be really strong but one of their problems is they often don't have a good target to go up against. So, for instance, we have Bane Veil giving all your opponent's creatures minus two, minus oh, which might win a bunch of combats, but maybe the creature sizing just doesn't line up and it doesn't work out. Say you've got to in-game sort of determine, is this the sort of game where this spell is going to work, or is it time to use this as a land? Yeah, it's interesting. In design,

when we handed over, a lot of our spells were a lot more practical. Like, it's a counterspell, you know, stuff like that. And then Eric really felt strongly that they needed to be a little more niche, a little more, you know, a little, like, sometimes you would use it but sometimes you wouldn't. And I know the set definitely, during set design

leaned that way a lot. Yeah, we definitely still ended up with a few practical ones, but then when they were all strong practical spells, it was just really hard to figure out when you were supposed to use which side of the card and often disappointing when you haven't drawn enough lands

in your draft deck, but you've got your really strong murderer or whatever that you don't want to give up. So I'm almost to work here. But before we wrap up, so you, while you did, I know you led, your first lead was for Ultimate Masters. Your first sort of set, I mean, physical product is coming out next year.

So Dungeon Dragons Adventures in the Forgotten Realm is your baby. Yeah, you were the set design lead. Now we can't give away, it's too early to talk about the set, but I do want to ask you, what was it like having the chance to do it? Well, I mean,

more talk about the experience than the details since we can't talk about the details yet. Yeah. This was definitely a super exciting opportunity. It was, you know, again not like a magic set we've done before, so there was a lot of trying to figure out how exactly we're supposed to cross these two things over, and I've been playing D&D for years and years and years as well, and just figure out, you know, what elements are really going to come through?

What can we pull from D&D that magic players are going to know or love once they find out about it and vice versa? And I definitely learned a lot on this design lead, trying to figure out how to prioritize, you know, exploring space that might go off into some really exciting direction versus mechanics we know can make a solid center to build the rest of a set around. I was very impressed. I mean, I played some D&D in my youth. I was very impressed in how you found the sweet spot of magic, but Dungeon Dragons. And anyway, I think people are going to be really happy.

But before we wrap up, I realized one thing. There's another set that you did coming out that I completely jumped over. You had a set coming out this year. So you were the set lead for Commander Legends. Yeah. This was another really tall order trying to figure out how to mesh draft and commander my two favorite magic formats together.

Yeah, man. We gave you hard stuff for your first few leads. Well, you know, I've got to dive off the deep end. Yeah, but that was it. So Commander Legends is another product. Once again, we can't get into details yet because it's too early, but the scope of it, of the, right, I love Commander.

I love drafting. Let's just make those two things go together was, I mean, I know this was Gavin's pet project. And, I mean, it's one of those things that sounds great in concept. And, oh, my God, it's hard in execution, right? Yeah. great in concept and oh my god it's hard in execution right yeah and like even those of us working on it didn't realize quite how hard it was going to be going in we i think initially thought we were going to be able to finish design way earlier than we did on yeah behind the scenes for those that might not know this uh the set like took six years to get made only only unstable

at seven years took longer than... Although Unstable, it is getting pushed back. We were done a little earlier. You guys, I think one of the reasons it got pushed back was it wasn't very difficult. It's one of these things that we come up with ideas, and sometimes it's like, oh, we can make it work, and sometimes it's like, ooh, we really have to think it through.

And this was one of those... You guys came up with really awesome... You did solve the problem in really cool ways. And I think it's a very fun product that people will love. But it was getting from start to finish was one of the biggest challenges I've ever seen in R&D. Yeah. It's like, what with all the difficulty of matching up multiple partners and the thing we really didn't give enough thought to initially but finally thinking out is like well even all these rare weapons that we want

to have in the set you really need to be able to pick one of those and then draft a deck that's going to work around it like how do we mesh in 70 different themes at all to work out one draft environment. So anyway, I see my desk. So, uh, we, we all know that means, uh, this is,

uh, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic, but it was great talking with you, Jules. Thanks for coming and joining us. Likewise. Thanks for having me.

And anyway, guys, uh, I will see all of you next time. Bye-bye.