Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #803: Kaldheim, Part 2

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

This is part two of a two-part series on the design of Kaldheim.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Anyway, one day, guys, I will actually drive to work. I don't think it'll be very soon, but I promise one day I'll actually be in a car. But last time, I talked about the designer call time. And I had a lot of fun things to say, but I ran out of time. So today is the second part. I think this is going to be a two-parter. We'll see.

Okay, so last time I talked about how we knew we were going to do top-down Norse world. What did that mean? We wrote stuff on the board. You had to have all the creature types. You had to have combat. You had to have omens and runes and talking about all that. So let's get into talking about – oh, and gods. Let's talk about the gods. That was another early thing that happened is if you're doing – one of the things we learned when we did – we did Theros and we introduced the gods.

I mean there were – Kamigawa had gods, although we didn't have the god creature type yet. But in Theros, we sort of introduced the gods. They went over very, very well. And so one of the challenges was we came up with a very cool way to do gods in Theros. We had devotion and the idea of these are – and enchantments. We had tied gods are enchantments. We had tied gods to enchantments, so the fact that gods were enchantment creatures and the idea that they were enchantments that turned

into creatures was devotion. It was the perfect mirroring of all these things that was really cool. But it wasn't something we could do every time there was a place with gods. Every world with gods, we're not going to have enchantments and not going to have devotion. It just wasn't a clean answer. So the second time we kind of did a world with gods was Amonkhet.

We were doing Egyptian mythology, and that too had gods. We tried some different things. The one carryover we did between the two gods was some sense of indestructibility, that they're gods and they're hard to kill. It turns out that play design, that you just can only make so many unkillable things, that it's just not good gameplay, that there's not answers to kill. It turns out that play design, that you just can only make so many unkillable things. That it's just not, it is not good

gameplay, that there's not answers to things. And so, making gods that just were really, really hard to kill ended up being problematic. Now, in Theros, because you had to sort of turn them on and make them into creatures, there were some answers to at least keep them from being the creature part of it.

But anyway, we had realized that we had kind of got ourselves in a corner that indestructible, as a definition for gods, is very hard to design around. But we knew we could, like, you can't do Norse mythology and not do gods. I mean, it is... I mean, it is... Of the things you expect to see in Norse mythology, gods are just so high. So one of the things that we knew going in was, okay, we wanted to do gods, but we really had to do them different.

We could not do, we couldn't do them the way we did in Theros, and we didn't want them to be indestructible. Although, the one thing that got brought up very early on is the gods in Norse mythology can die. Like in Greek mythology, they're kind of, they can't die. You know, you can't kill them. They're kind of, you know, invulnerable or whatever, immortal. They're immortal. So you kind of can't kill a god. In Greek mythology, you really can't kill a god.

In Norse mythology, gods die. That's something that happens. The gods in Norse mythology are treated more like royalty. They're famous and they have powers that are more powerful than the average person. But it's not something there's a different dynamic

between how the Norse gods got done. But anyway, so okay. They didn't need indestructible. Gods can die. How do we make gods? We wanted to make sure they were doing something really cool with the gods. So meanwhile, one of the funny things

is I keep telling the story again and again and so each time I tell it, I'm trying to tell it from the perspective of that set. So what happened was when we get to Strixhaven, one of the impetuses for doing Strixhaven originally was I wanted to do MDFCs, modal double-faced cards. It is something that when literally we made

Innistrad, I knew I wanted to do them. I was holding them in my back pocket. And I was asked when we were putting together the worldview, were there mechanics that I wanted to build a world around? And I said, yes, I would like to have a set that had MDFCs in it. And one of the things that there was, it was controversial. Ironically, even though they are a combination of double-faced cards and of split cards, both of which the audience has really adored. There was nervousness that combining them might be taking two things people love, but somehow when you combine them, they don't love them anymore. I mean, that can happen, I guess. So I had to put together a team early to do some proof of concept just to give Aaron some,

I mean, Aaron was on my side, but he just wanted me to make some concrete designs so he could show people. And in the process of doing that, I realized that there were a lot of different executions. So originally, when I divvied things up, the slot that I had given to, the slot that I had given to Call Time was permanence on both sides. That's the permanence on both sides in which one side isn't a land. We had done land. I think the way I had done it was Zendikar Rising always had a land on one side. And I think this set, when I originally pitched it, I think it always had a creature on one side.

But anyway, I knew we wanted to use MDFCs in some way in this set. And meanwhile, we wanted to have gods and have gods be distinctive. And as I think I explained, I'm not sure whether this predates my article coming out. I think my article will be out before you hear this podcast. I call this a Reese's peanut butter moment. In the commercials a long time ago, Reese's peanut butter cups, which is, for those that don't know, it's an American candy. It has chocolate and peanut butter in it. And the way they would do the commercials was there'd be some person that would be like

eating peanut butter out of a jar and some person that'd be like eating a chocolate bar and they were like not paying attention and then they'd run into each other. And then the chocolate bar got into the peanut butter and like the one guy goes, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter. He goes, you got your peanut butter on my chocolate.

And then they would taste it like, oh, you know. It was one of those moments where we sort of like we had to figure out mdfc's we had to figure out gods and just we were in this meeting where and and i think i explained this uh because it was literally thor and thor's hammer like we had written what do you expect thor what our version of thor what do you expect thor's hammer and um when we were trying to figure out what to do with the MDFCs, in my head, I kind of said,

well, we want a creature on one side. You know, that was not... When I first laid it out, I was just trying to make them feel separate from one another. So the idea that this one had a creature on one side just was what my shorthand. But anyway, I just... The idea that it could be Thor and

Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, the idea of that on one card just felt like such a cool package for two reasons. One is it was just different. There's no god, you know, we wanted to do the gods do something really cool and different and using this technology is something

we'd never ever done before and we said, you know, if we just did them on the gods and only did them on the gods it really set the gods apart and give the gods that specific feel on the set the other thing we realized as we sort of explored the mythology was there's a lot of associations like you know um odin had his raven um and uh um hemdall had the rainbow bridge he also had a sword um he ended up being tied, Hemdall had the rainbow bridge. He also had a sword. Um, he ended up being tied to a sword and not to the rainbow bridge. But, um, but anyway, we, we realized that, you know, Freya had her chariot and there were a lot of things that we realized were connections and things that we can make.

And so one of the ideas that sort of happened and said, okay, well, what if, um, what if our MDFCs were our gods? We knew I guess we were doing the pathways so there were going to be four pathways in the set to finish out the cycle. But other than the pathways it'd be cool if one of the gods like one for one, like the gods in the set

were the MDFCs and the MDFCs in the set were the gods. And what we found was our goal when we made them was we said, okay, let's not repeat ourselves, right? Let's try to do unique things. I think we ended up doing

two god and their weapon just because we ended up giving Hemdall his sword and gave Thor his hammer. Our version of them, obviously. But we were trying to come up with lots of cool and different things we could do. And so we wrote – what we did is we looked at the source material and said, okay, what's a god that's tied to a creature?

Oh, Odin is raven. What's a god that's tied to an equipment? What's a god that's tied to a vehicle? What's a god tied to an enchantment? a god that's tied to a vehicle? What's a god tied to an enchantment? And what we found was, as we sort of went down those paths, there just was a lot of cool and really neat, interesting

things that happened. And then, you know, one of the things that the story had I think brought to us was the idea that Tybalt was going to

fill in for the Loki character. So we wanted a trickster god. That's a big part of Norse mythology. Loki's pretty big. But wouldn't it be cool if the trickster god turned out to be secretly Tybalt? And the neat thing there was we could use our double-faced technology to do that.

So one side was the god of mischief and the other side was Tybalt. So anyway, there was definitely a lot of cool stuff that went on there and it was... Like I said, we decided to do the MDFCs early on and the second we designed them in that meeting it was instantly clear that that was what we were doing.

Once we went down that path, there was – I often tell a story about how we were brainstorming for Unglued, how to make the pre-release exciting. And people were pitching things, and I say, I'll dress up like a chicken. And they're like, okay, that's what we're doing. It was kind of those moments. We're brainstorming. What can we do with the gods? We said double-faced cards, did a little work on it. I'm like, okay, that's what we're doing. It was kind of those moments. Like, we're brainstorming. What can we do with the gods? We said double-faced cards, did a little work on it. Like, okay, that's what we're doing. We just stopped. That is what's

happening. We're doing this. So, that happened right away. Okay. The next thing is, let's talk about Fortel. Okay. So, omens are a big part of Norse mythology. They're a big part of Norse mythology. They're a big part of a lot of mythologies.

Stories of things that were destined to happen just makes good storytelling, I guess. So what happened was Ethan had made a mechanic during Amonkhet called plot that was, we were trying to represent if you remember, Amonkhet was a combination of Egyptian

mythology with Bolas. And so we were trying to make a mechanic that felt Bolas-y and so the idea of making things I don't remember exactly how Plot worked, but you made things and they later came to fruition and but anyway, I think Ethan liked the idea of

doing something with omens. And so he had pitched some tweak on plot, I believe. And I said, oh, Ethan, that reminds me of a mechanic called layaway. So let me talk about layaway real quick.

So back in, I don't know, like 20 years ago, Hasbro got the rights to Star Wars. George Lucas sold Hasbro the licensing rights to Hasbro. Hasbro acquired the licensing rights. So one of the side effects of that was Wizard of the Coast was

asked to make a Star Wars trading card game. So they went to Richard Garfield and they said, Richard, we want you to make a Star Wars trading card game. And so I got assigned to the design team. So Richard was designing the game, and then I was assigned

to lead the design of the first set. So essentially, in magic terms, Richard was designing magic, and then I was in charge of putting Alpha together. Now, given in magic, Richard did all of that. So anyway, very quick version of

this is in the Star Wars trading card game there are three different fields. There's space, there's ground and there's personal I think it's called. So the idea is, if you've ever seen a Star Wars movie, the big fight at the end goes on on multiple levels.

There's people on the ground fighting, there's people up in space fighting, and then there's a lightsaber duel between whoever the main characters are. And so in it, Richard, the way the resource that Richard came up with was you had points you could spend. And so you could spend, and so you could allocate points to trying to play things. But in order to have some bigger things, we... not everything got... Your points... Things didn't get onto the battlefield or onto the play area

until you finished building it. So there was an area called the build zone, and then every turn you could put points toward it until you finish building it. So there was an area called the build zone, and then every turn you could put points toward it until you finished building it. Anyway, that inspired me to make a mechanic called layaway. And the way layaway worked was you could put a card face down,

any layaway card you could put face down, for every one mana you spent, you put a counter on it, and then you could, at any time you wanted to, well, I mean, you could cast the face-down card as if it were in your hand. So, I mean, you could cast it when it was legal to cast that card. And then the card costs one color less for every counter on it. So you always had to pay the colored version of it.

But let's say, for example, it costs six generic and one red. Oh, well, I could pay off all the generic and then just for one red play it. You were allowed to overpay, so people didn't necessarily know what it was from how many counters were on it. Anyway, I made LayAway. I don't even remember the set I made it for, but it was after it was around the time after

Star Wars came out. And anyway, it didn't quite work. Well, not that it didn't work. It worked fine. There's just a lot of moving anyway, it didn't quite work. Well, not that it didn't work. It worked fine. There's just a lot of moving pieces and it didn't quite fit the set I was in. So I put it in mothballs. And then it was one of those mechanics

that every once in a while we'd pull out again. If you remember from the story of Kaladesh, like energy was another one of those things. They're like, oh, we made it, didn't have a use for it and kept putting it away. And then we'd pull it out every once in a while. So layaway is one of the things that we'd pull out. So I think what happened was when Ethan was talking about this,

he had pulled plot out of Amonkhet, something he had put away. I pulled out layaway, and sort of Fortel ended up being a marrying of a couple different mechanics sort of coming together. We ended up kind of modeling it like Morph, where you could spend a certain amount of mana in this case it's two morph is three but for foretell you can spend two mana you put it face down outside and then there's a secondary cost a foretell cost that you could cast it for um we tried a lot of what we were trying to do is simplify have less counters on it and so it's very nice in that

because it was a locked number you paid you didn't have have to track it. It's just it cost two to put a face down. And then having the two numbers, having the two plus whatever Fortel cost allowed us to have some flexibility and do some cool stuff. And then I think Fortel – I know we – early versions of Fortel for Tell was future turn you put it down we were also thinking of stuff like rebound and suspend there were a lot of mechanics like well what's an omen I want to tell you something that's going to happen

but we liked the idea that you put stuff face down so you knew the future kind of and maybe you could act on it but it may or may not come to pass when you think it's going to come to pass. But anyway, we played with it, and I think our first shot at trying to find the number to play it face down was two, and I don't think it ever changed. We talked about should it change, but I think we liked how two played, so we never actually

changed it. So that one never changed. Okay. Next. We knew we wanted changed. Okay. Next. We knew we wanted combat to be a thing and so we had a mechanic that was in the set that was named that had

you using your graveyard as a resource. Now that mechanic is kind of still in the set. There still is using graveyard as resource but it's not, when we had done it it was named and it's not it is not there in a named form anymore um and so what was it what was it called um i don't remember i remember um but anyway uh so we ended up putting that as being the combat thing

because the idea was oh we called it pyre it's being the combat thing because the idea was, oh we called it Pyre, it was called Pyre because the idea was you were honoring the dead, like the funerals and things are a big part of Norse and Viking culture and so, but that ended up, well it stayed a little bit it didn't keep a keyword, it went down a number so in its place, they ended up putting in a mechanic called Boast. And Boast is a mechanic that you can only activate if the creature – is it in combat or has been in combat?

I'm trying to remember. I think it's in combat. But anyway, the idea was we wanted something that you had to attack to be able to activate. And Boast is a pretty cool movie. I actually like how Boast turned out. It's flavorful. It kind of encourages combat. But it also allows you to, you know, there's an interesting thinking and process that goes on.

So anyway, I enjoyed how Boast came out. Next, sagas. So sagas first showed up in Dominaria. They came about because I was very interested in finding, you know, I wanted to, we decided that Dominaria was the world that cared about its past. It was the history world. And I felt that stories played a very important element in it. And so I wanted to find a way to capture the sense of a story. Anyway, it ended up

working out very well. We borrowed, we actually took some ideas that we'd had when we first tried to make planeswalkers. And at the time, when we first made planeswalkers, they had three abilities, and it would rotate between them. Do ability one, do ability two, do ability three.

Then it would rotate back to ability one. The problem when they were planeswalkers, it just felt they had no agency. Because sometimes you would do something that didn't make any sense. Like, oh, I make a creature, and then I buff that kind of creature. But if my opponent killed the creature,

buffing didn't do anything. And so it just wasn't a good fit for the planeswalkers. But when we were trying to do stories, it made a lot of sense because, well, there's an order to the story. That's we were trying to do stories, it made a lot of sense, because, well, a story has, like, there's an order to the story. That's what's going to happen. And so anyway, we made sagas. They were very popular.

And so we knew we wanted to find a place to bring them back. So the first place to bring them back ended up being in Theros Beyond Death. Greek mythology gave us a lot of stories, places we played off of. We had been to the world before, so there were actual stories from the world before we could tell.

Um, anyway, this is the second time we brought him back. Um, a lot of people were asking, are Psyduck's deciduous? And I, they're getting really close to being deciduous. Um, I, I think they're on the cusp of just being deciduous. I mean, it's a mechanic the audience really likes, and they're super flavorful, and a lot of worlds just lend themselves to stories, so it definitely made a lot of sense,

and it felt pretty cool. But anyway, the idea for us for these sagas was we did multicolor sagas. Every time we were doing sagas, I mean, every time is the third time, but we wanted something where we can expand a little bit. I know we had done some four chapter ones in

Therese Bound Death. So this set, we did gold ones. We had never done gold sagas before. And it did a nice job of, we wanted some ten card cycles that sort of played up the realms. I think the sagas are mostly tied to the realms. It might not be I think the scientists are mostly tied to the realms. It might not be 100%, but they're mostly

tied to the realms. A few of them are tied to characters, so not everyone's tied to a realm, but it did give us... We like having some 10 card cycles to really hammer home 10, as that's the number that matters here. Like I said, I mentioned last time, Changeling, we had wanted to do something.

We needed some glue. I think we brought Changeling in just because it helped. And we thought it would be cool to have one of the worlds just be shapeshifters, which felt – I think that, once again, the reason I think that's our world was shapeshifters, I don't know. I mean, clearly Loki does shapeshifting. I mean, Loki pretends to be other people and other things. So shapeshifting exists within the world of Norse mythology. I don't know if natural shapeshifters were a thing

or something we just added that felt natural. But anyway, we brought Changeling back just because Changeling is kind of our catch-all to make that happen. We had done Changeling. I originally created Changeling in Lorwyn because we were making a tribal set and it was obvious we had

eight tribes that we just didn't have, our as fan was too low and I was trying to solve the as fan problem and then it dawned on me, well what if we do wild cards essentially was my thought process. Like what if you have cards that count for everything? And we came up with Changeling,

and then the creative team made them into that green-jello mold thing. But anyway, we used them there. We then used them again in Modern Horizons, just because Modern Horizons had a similar quality of, we wanted to care about a lot of different races,

and so we used it there. I think what happened is sort of, it was a happy convenience of, we kind of had a world of shapeshifters, and we kind of needed glue, and so I think it came about just because it was a natural fit, I think is how Changeling came about. Okay. Next.

Snow. Snow. So we did not put snow in the vision design. Obviously, one of the things we did write down on the board was the cold climate. When you think of the Vikings, you think of Scandinavia and it's cold. I mean, one of the things we always do when we're doing top down is we go and look at pop culture and say, okay, when people think of this, where do they go? Okay, maybe they know Thor from the Marvel movies.

Maybe they know How to Train Your Dragon. What is the pop culture that kind of makes people aware of it? And there is a very strong tie to coldness. Now, snow was originally designed by the East Coast playtesters back in

Ice Age. I think the reason they did it was they were really trying to... The set was called Ice Age. The flavor of the story was the world had frozen over. So I think they were trying to find a way to represent that concept

of how to represent the Ice Age. And the idea they came up with was they just had basic lands that had a quality to them, which they called snow-covered, and then there were cards that cared whether or not you had snow-covered basic lands or not. At the time, it definitely caused some issues in that

there was some confusion between understanding that a snow-covered island is not an island. It's very much like an island, but, like, once it rotates out of standard, you can't play a snow-covered island. It's no longer in standard, even though it's very similar to an island.

Anyway, we had not done snow in a long time. I think we, when we did Cold Snap, we said, well, we can't, it's kind of hard to avoid doing snow. Cold Snap was, like, the missing Ice Age set with the flavor of it because Ice Age only had two sets. And at the time, every other world had three sets. So we had a supplemental product for the summer. So we did this thing called Cold Snap.

Oh, we found it in the file cabinet. It's missing. So we brought snow back there. And then we introduced Snow Manor because we were trying to expand upon what snow was. So in Cold Snap, introduced snow mana and the idea was any permanent that is snow supertyped because snow was a supertype.

When snow first got created in ICH I'm not sure if it was a supertype at the time but we've since made it into a supertype. Anyway, any permanent that taps for snow and produces mana produces snow mana of whatever color it's making. And so snow mana allowed us

just to try to do something a little bit different. We really didn't do anything with snow. I mean, not that a lot of worlds had a strong cold component to it. But when we made Modern Horizons, we were trying to find something

sexy to do with the basic lands. And at the time, we had not made, since Cold Snap, we had not made snow-covered basic lands. And so, it was decided that we would put it into Modern Horizons since we'd have the lands, we'd make some cards that cared and stuff.

So, Modern Horizons made use of snow. It just went over really well. And so I think what happened was, if I remember the timing of it, I think Modern Horizons came out after Vision Design had handed off. Like, we hadn't yet seen Snow. Like, the public had been talking about Snow,

but there's a lot of things that the public asked for. But when Modern Horizons came out, it just went over well. And so I think whenave humphries was the set lead um he decided to add snow it made a lot of sense i mean clearly clearly when you think north mythology you think cold and so dave added in a snow component um obviously the basic lands became snow-covered lands uh dave put in snow-covered dual lands. Originally, he was going to repeat the ones, at least the allied ones, from Coldsnap,

but he ended up making ones that had both land types, just made them a little more useful, and then made the whole cycle of those. The other problem was the original ones had a few of the names were very dominarian in their name, and so this allowed him just to make a brand new set of ten that didn't have any of those problems. The one last thing that I haven't mentioned yet is

the runes. I talked about the runes a little earlier. So runes are sort of language and that there's a lot we talked about the magic, was the idea of runes holding power. The idea of written language having power shows up in a lot, we talked about the magic, was the idea of runes holding power. The idea of written language having power shows up in a lot of mythologies.

But anyway, we wanted to do something with runes. We tried a whole bunch of different things with them, but in the end, the thing that we ended up going with was we made a cycle of auras. It ended up being an aura subtype, or yeah, well, an enchantment subtype that went on auras.

And the way runes work is you enchant a permanent, and then if it's enchanting a creature, it does one thing, and if it's enchanting a permanent, oh, I'm sorry, if it's enchanting an equipment, so, for example, like

the white one, Rune of Sustenance, if it's enchanting a creature, the creature has lifelink. If it's enchanting a creature, the creature has lifelink. If it's enchanting an equipment, the equipment grants lifelink. So the idea was you could sort of put the rune on the person to directly give them the ability, or you could put it on an equipment, and that equipment would grant the ability.

And then the fact that it's a subtype meant that we could care about it. Like, Runeforge Champion is a card that cares about runes. Like, whenuneforge Champion is a card that cares about runes. Like, when you enter your battlefield, you can go search your library for a rune.

The rule is we don't make subtypes unless they mechanically matter. Some reason we can make supertypes, but we don't make subtypes unless they mechanically matter. And so we made runes matter. But anyway, it was one of those things that we kept finding...

Like, runes kept showing up in a lot of different areas along the way. Like, we knew we wanted to do runes matter. But anyway, it was one of those things that we kept finding like runes kept showing up in a lot of different areas along the way. Like we knew we wanted to do runes. But anyway, this version where it had double utility. So it just enchanting equipment is just so narrow was the problem. We wanted to enchant equipment because that's where the flavor is. Like putting

runes on your sword and stuff. But then the idea was, oh, well what if we made it something that can go on creatures or can go on equipment. And that's where the runes on your sword and stuff. But then the idea was, oh, well, what if we made it something that can go on creatures or can go on equipment? And that's where the runes ended up coming from. Anyway, that, my friends. I was

very happy. I think Call of Time turned out really well. There were a lot of moving pieces here. Like I said, it shifted its slot. It had, you know, a lot of stuff went on with this set behind the scenes. But I think when the dust settled, it turned out really well. I think it's a really fun set. One of the things about having something that everybody wanted us to deliver forever is when you finally deliver it.

Especially after so many years. People have been asking this for 20 plus years. Like, okay, we're finally doing it. You know, I'm very happy we did it well because it's something where when you make people wait, when you finally deliver, you want to make sure you do it right. So anyway, that, my friends, is my story of call time design. I think I hit all the major things.

If I forgot something, as always, I apologize. I hit all the ones I remembered. But anyway, that, my friends, is the story. And I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I hope you enjoyed the story of Coldheim.

Anyway, guys, I will see you next week. Bye-bye.