Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #809: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 1

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

This is part one of a two-part podcast where I interview Richard Garfield about the design of Arabian Nights, Magic's very first expansion.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been doing a lot of interviews. This was an interview you guys really enjoyed, so I brought him back. So Richard Garfield, thanks for joining us. Hi, Mark. It's great to be back. Okay, so last time you were on my show, we talked about Alpha and the creation of Alpha. But you've done other magic sets, so we're going to keep going. So I thought today we would talk Arabian Nights. Okay.

So here's the first question I have for you. Can you set the scene of how in the world did Arabian Nights even happen? How did it get made? What's the origin story to it even happening? Well, that's a really good question because it isn't straightforward and I have to really think about it to get my

head in myself back then. But when Arabian Nights was first conceived of, I thought that magic was going to be a collection of disjoint sets, so that Magic the Gathering would come out, and then when we finished printing it, we would go on to Magic Ice Age, and it wouldn't be

mixed with Magic the Gathering, it would have been tested separately, and so forth and so on. But the demand of it was such that Peter came to me and said we really, really want an expansion that you can shuffle into the base set and it took some convincing but I agreed to do it provided that players didn't feel obligated to purchase the expansion or obligated to play against it. Because I was afraid that it would feel like it was strong-arming people into this arms race,

which is sort of inherently a part of the game. But I think we as designers and publishers should sort of minimize because it makes it as accessible as possible for people. sort of minimize because it makes it as accessible as possible for people. So I think that sets the stage for where my head was at when we began talking about Arabian Knights and the first expansion. So quick question. I know that Magic sold out very quickly. They made enough that they thought was like six months and it sold out in a week.

And then they made beta and they thought that was going to be six months and it sold out in a week. And then they made beta and they thought that was going to be six months and it sold out in a week. You know, was it Rabie Knights? Like when they came to you, did you already have an idea or you had not even thought about it because you didn't think it was going to happen that fast? It was completely cold. I was in the mindset that the next thing we would publish would be Ice Age, which was essentially designed at that time. It changed a lot before it was put out, but in my mind back then, it was close to publishable. So yeah, it was cold. I had no idea.

Which is one of the reasons why with Arabian Nights, it's so disjoint from the flavor of magic. I wanted to experiment with a completely different flavor and had been reading some Arabian Nights at the time. And so it seemed like a natural place to try to get flavor from. So the question I have to ask is, why not put Ice Age out? Why do Arabian Nights? Why not just put Ice Age out? Well, at the time, Ice Age was doing a very different thing. Ice Age was similar to Magic the Gathering, but with twists. So even though I saw the game as being a series of disjoint sets being expanded in that way, I saw all the sets as being similar to one another.

So, for example there might have been a lot of common cards are the same uh and and so if peter decided to publish that instead it wasn't going to do the same thing it wasn't a bunch of new cards that people were going to be excited about shuffling into their deck it would have was it would be a bunch of old cards with new art and a few new cards. And that's not what he wanted. He wanted, you know, bang, a slug of all new cards to, you know, get players excited. Okay, so Peter came to you.

How much time did you have to make this thing that Peter wanted? It's a little hard for me to remember, but I'm guessing that he gave me a few months and it probably took me all that time. I was at the time teaching at Whitman College. And the first thing I did was I actually took my reading of Arabian Nights quite seriously. I read a couple more versions of it, took a lot of notes, because I wanted to really get the flavor reflected as accurately as possible within the genre of trading card game, which was kind of a new one to work with. Okay, so Arabian Nights was your choice.

You won the Arabian Nights. So how did you go, like in those two months or three months, how did you decide to make the set? What were the key decisions that first started forming what the set was? Well, unlike the previous set, I didn't have easy access to playtesters face-to-face. Since I was teaching now, my playtesters were in another area. So basically, I was designing a cold without testing and sending it to wizards to test themselves, and I didn't really know what their capabilities were. But in those couple

months, I did that research, and then I laid out a whole lot of cards, decided that your commons should be sort of generic characters that appeared in Arabian Nights. So you might get asps, for instance, and there's not a particular story which involves asps. They're sort of a generic character, jackals, things like that. Whereas the uncommon slash rares were going to be more characters and specific stories like Sinbad and the weird island fish, Taconius, and things like that. And then I began to brainstorm appropriate levels, appropriate new powers for these. And one of the things that made it really much easier than I probably would have expected going into it was our ability to make creative cards and fun cards was really getting a lot better as we understood the game more. Towards the end of the playtest for Magic the Gathering, the cards were becoming much, much more interesting and flavorful. And so this was just basically a continuation of that process. a continuation of that process. There was a lot of exciting things floating around,

a lot of exciting concepts that I wanted to test, even if I wasn't sure about having this expansion be just mixable with the old set. I was very worried about that because it wasn't going to have the same level of playtest because of the circumstances in which I was in and because of the time frame. Magic the Gathering had been playtested for years. This, even if I had my playtesters handy, would only be playtestable for a couple months.

So you made one decision I'm curious about. You did Arabian Nights, but you didn't just do the book like you sort of some of the stuff you think that was inspired by the book but you definitely made some stuff up that was sort of your flavor on stuff from the book um why was it just 100 exactly arabian nights so uh are you thinking there's only one oh there's only one card in particular I can think about that way. Is there anything in your mind in particular?

Well, do you think that every – okay, maybe I was – at least the naming was – I'm thinking of the naming of a lot of stuff. Certainly with the naming. So with the characters and the flavor, I pretty much followed straight Arabian Nights. I could be wrong. You could show me some cards and I would correct myself. With the exception of the City in a Bottle, which is a very special card. And that was, instead of being taken from Arabian Nights, it was taken from Neil Gaiman's Sandman issue 50 or something like that. Excellent issue and very appropriate for its purpose.

For the flavor, though, like asps, for instance, were from Arabian Nights in the sort of general sense. And same thing with the gins and afrites. But the names were taken from two places. Most of them were, if they weren't taken directly from stories which is most of the uncommons uh were uh the commons were taken uh from uh anglicized arabian uh words that that i was able to get uh so nafs nafs for some for instance might have been, I forget, jungle, right? And Gazban ogre, you know, was another word in Arabian. The exception to that, there was a handful of cards which were made for other people. So like my sister and my brother-in-law were getting married that summer.

And so there's If Biff Afreet. If Biff is my childhood nickname for Elizabeth. And Aaronam is her husband's name, Herman, sort of an anagram of that. Similarly, I was at another wedding that summer. I was the best man at I was at another wedding that summer. I was the best man at Jamie's Fristrom, or Jamie Radcliffe's wedding, and he was marrying Wendy, and so you've got

Edwin and the Meejay. Okay, that's what I was thinking. You had a lot of names like that that were sort of anywhere. So, yeah, some of the names were personal. Not so many, but most of them were Arabian. But, yeah, yeah, I did sneak in a few there.

Okay, so you had two months. You mapped out all the cool stuff you found in the source material. How did you go about making it? Like, this is the first time we ever had a small expansion, right? You had never done that. How did you figure out? I forget how we settled on that size uh i think i think maybe i just aimed for half the size i think we ended up at a third of the size though it wasn't really it was really a very small expansion in 98 cards i

think yeah yeah so we ended up like uh about a third of the size of the base. Oh, no, 90. Actually, 78 cards. And then there were some variants that, if you want to count those, there's 92 if you count the variants. But it's 78 cards, I believe. Yeah. I remember we had a rare mountain, too. Yes. How did that happen?

How did the rare mountain happen? I really do not remember. I know how the rare islands happened in the original. I don't know if we talked about that. But it's worth mentioning that until Magic actually got printed, I was hoping that we could randomize it in a similar way to how I randomized it in playtest, which was gigantic garbage bags. You shake them and you pull out 60 cards. And that's very, very different than the randomization

that we ended up using because we were using trading card machinery, which works in a particular way. So the distribution was much flatter. You always got the same number of rare cards. And at the time, I thought it was important that all the lands be equally printed. And so the rare islands were a consequence of the fact that if you sort of add up all the ones we managed to fit on the common sheet and the uncommon sheet that uh that uh it sort of made it so that it all ended up equal which of

course with the amount of cards the amount of land that was needed was ridiculous there's just for all there was more than you needed and so that didn't really matter um but anyway i forget how the magic the the the the mountain in particular came about. It might have been the same thing. Did we do other lands in the land? No, so here's my guess real quick, is the back was going to be, we can talk about this in a second, the back was going to be different, so you made lands on the sheets so that you could play

without having to have a different back, and then when you changed that, they had to take the basic lands off the sheets, and they missed one. That might be. Can we talk about the back? Yeah, yeah. How did the back... Tell me the story of the back.

Yeah, that was one of the biggest key moments in Magic development, was the Arabian knights card back until possibly possibly the very last minute uh we were going to use a purple card back a very handsome purple card back and so the reason for that was because i did again i did not want to make people feel obligated to play with or against Arabian Knights because I wasn't sure, I couldn't vouch for the quality the same way I could with the original set.

And so making it with a different card back, I felt, would make it feel like a separate game that was optional to opt into. like a separate game that was optional to opt into. There's the obvious problem is that if you're playing with two different card backs, then you're going to be able to see what you're playing with, what set the next card is coming from. You can look at somebody's hand and see that they've got three purple cards in it. They've got three Arabian Nights cards in their hand.

To me, that was less important than not feeling like the players were being bullied. But the response from the players on the Usenets in those days was very, very negative on that behalf. And most of the people I talked to within the company also were against it. I did have some allies who were in the same mind space that I was. Peter was against it, but he was not so much against it that he wasn't going to let me choose which way to go. But in any case, at the last minute, I relented and decided that we should make them the same card back and rely on the little tiny symbol on the card front to allow people to separate them, which was absolutely the right decision. I think my concerns were accurate, and they foreshadowed the new concerns, which are how do you make this game interesting in the long run where you continually dump new cards into the environment, which

was probably the biggest issue that we faced after just the issue of just managing to publish the cards in the next few years. Because the more cards you make for people to have, each card becomes subsequently less interesting. The environment becomes more complicated. The new players become more daunted. The entrenched players become more jaded and less interested in what you've got. So you end up wanting to have power creep and all these other things which I didn't want to see. And this all stems back to this decision not to do this decision not to do a different card back in some way or another. But we put off that problem till later. And later, of course, we did manage to solve it. It was a huge issue. And we did manage to solve it by getting people to make a principal play model which involved playing limited sets the previous year, the previous

two years, that sort of thing. But yeah, it was a really, really big moment in Magic. So I have a question. There's stories I've heard about Raby Nights and you're telling me something I'm trying to understand the order here. So I know that

when you decided to change the back that city in a bottle was made to so you could get rid of the arabian night set right yeah um did city in a bottle exist because you must have had art did it exist at that time to do something different no no no it it existed and it was already there uh i've probably told the story in a number of different ways but uh um did not make City in the Bottle in reaction to that. I think my fear of Arabian Nights and how it would affect the way players thought about the game and how it would be perceived as far as quality was concerned was such that I wanted to give people tools to get rid of

it, even if they weren't going to go with the card back. And so that it was already there in that way, but it was serving a similar purpose. I could be wrong. And, you know, I might have the timing wrong. And maybe, maybe, maybe I did relent earlier than I think. But the way I remember it is, all, you know, all that was in place. And then at the very last minute I flipped the switch. Uh, but yeah, uh, that, that is a good moment to mention Arabian nights, uh, sorry, uh, city in the bottle, um, city in the bottle, the effect of it, uh, is that when you play it, you remove all, uh, Arabian Knights from both your deck and your opponent's deck. And so the reasoning behind that was that players,

if they really hated Arabian Knights and felt obliged to play with it or against it, that they could choose to play with that card and undo it. And that's why it was there. And it's sort of fitting that that's the only card which isn't actually from Arabian Nights mythos. It's from, as I mentioned, Neil Gaiman's Sandman. And the story it comes from is probably my favorite from that series uh but it was uh about um a uh sultan uh in the age of magic in the arabian nights who uh recognized that uh his kingdom was his sultanate i guess uh was at the height it could not get any better. It was just wonderfully

magical and charming and exciting and beautiful. And so he went to the Keeper of Dreams, which is Sandman, and asked him to preserve this forever in dreams. And Sandman said, you know, there is a cost to this, and he acknowledged the cost. And at the end of the story, which still sends chills up my back, he's walking away in the distance, and he's got this city in it, which is the Baghdad of magic. And it's panning out to sort of a modern Baghdad, which is war-torn, and kids running in the street barefoot with sort of smoldering stuff. And it's sort of like...

Anyway, so that fits, as you can see, just in my mind, perfectly for what it was intended to do, get rid of the Arabian Nights from my play experience. Okay, so you have your two months, you build the set. Is there any, other than we talked about the back is there any other like things you had to face for the first time because like one of the things that's important for the audience to understand is you were just doing things that had never been

done in a like you made the first trading card game so no one had ever made a expansion to a trading card game and what that meant uh yeah i think this was the first time i'm not i'm not sure this is accurate but it's close to accurate it was the first time that i actually tried to reflect specific stories and characters in cards uh i'm thinking back to the first uh set the magic the gathering and there were some there was some flavor there, and there was sort of some general mythos, but I don't think I actually tried to have

a particular story reflected, or a particular character. It was all much more my own creation. It was one of the reasons why I went with fantasy in the first place, is you could come up with some wacky thing like you take damage from cards in your hand and say, well, that's the cursed

what was that? The curse of the rat. The cursed doll. I forget what they all are. The other neat thing about Arabian Nights is it also you see yourself playing within new space. Like, for example,

lands in Alpha only tap for mana that's all that lambs did but we get arabian knights and all of a sudden there's lands some of them didn't even tap for mana but they did other things than than than mana production yeah yeah yeah that's true we uh i i did begin to stretch that boundary a lot in uh arabian knights and i think that was uh i mean i was clearly thinking of special lands back in the old day but as you say they were all uh mana uh it was like the the dual lands um and i don't know whether i had just put that off or really began to think about it for the first time until arabian nights uh but uh but yeah we had the... I forget then...

There was the desert, which does damage. And then there was the ivory tower. Was that a land? Ivory tower was not in Arabian Nights. That's in Library of Alexandria, maybe is what you're thinking of. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. Library of Alexandria. Yeah, there was like Island of Wok Wok.

There were a bunch of lands. Yeah, there was like Island of Wok Wok, there were a bunch of lands. But to illustrate the exercise of actually translating particular characters or stories into cards, there's a couple

good examples that are on the tip that I've just been thinking about recently one is the one that I always go back to Scheherazade I've cited that a number of times as being my favorite magic card and Scheherazade

was the character from Arabian Nights who's telling all the stories she is telling the stories. And one of the most fascinating things about her is that she's telling stories within stories. And the whole idea is she has to keep on telling stories in order to keep from being executed because she was with a charming sultan who liked to do that. because she was with a charming sultan who liked to do that.

And so she always wanted to leave a cliffhanger, and one way to do that was to delay stories and tell stories within stories. It's a fascinating thing, because you get all these sort of meta structures of her stories are very interesting. And so to reflect that, I decided to have it make you play games within games. So when you play Scheherazade, instead of telling a story within a story, you begin a sub-game of magic. And to me, that reflected as simply as I could imagine

the wonderful meta qualities of Scheherazade. I'm going to read. This is the actual text of Scheherazade just for the audience who might not know it. It costs two white mana. It's a sorcery. This is the Arabian Knight text. Players must leave game in progress as it is

and use the cards left in their libraries as decks with which to play a sub game of magic. When sub game is over, players shuffle these cards, return to their libraries, and resume game in progress, with any loser of sub game having his or her remaining life points rounding down. Effects that prevent damage may not be used to counter this loss of life. The sub game has no ante. Using less than 40 cards may be necessary. Yep, yep, yep, that sounds about right. may be necessary.

Yep, yep, yep. That sounds about right. And as a minor aside, it was some delight to me that there was a killer deck made with Scheherazade, which I don't think anybody's ever actually used. But as an exercise for the audience,

you can think about it involves uh at the time there was no limit to how many cards of a particular type you could play so you could play with all planes and shahrazad uh and you can throw in as many uh mox uh pearls as you want and uh and you can see how this would be a uh killer deck a that would take a long long time to resolve you just need to make sure you have at least uh uh one or two more cards than your opponent um and uh the uh the second um so the other the other story card, which is easy for me to recall, was a touch of honey because I ran across the playtest card the other day. A drop of honey. Can I read it first?

Absolutely. Okay, it's a drop of honey. Once again, this is the original Rabianite's text. It costs one green mana. It's an enchantment. During your upkeep, the creature in play with the lowest power is destroyed and cannot be regenerated. If there is a tie you choose which to destroy, drop of honey must be discarded if there are no creatures in play. know the original story that's uh uh just a sort of a a weird flavor uh for uh an effect which is reasonably straightforward um um but uh but the touch of honey the drop of honey uh is is a short

story that shahrazad told uh in some of the versions of arabian nights in which uh there's a drop of honey on the ground and some ants find it and then some other ants decide they want to fight for it. And then, I don't know, a bird decides they want to fight for the ants. And then this thing escalates until it leads to a war between kingdoms or sultanates of humankind. And so it all came from this touch of honey drop of honey so it's a pretty short story pretty uh straightforward and it's reflected in this card and that this touch of honey goes out and the weakest creatures

get destroyed progressively until there's not there's nobody left so my guess is so what you did is you went through arabian nights and then you just took notes on things you thought that might inspire cards and then just did a lot of top-down design is that how how most of that got made yeah the uh um yeah there were two i guess there were two halves to that there was the top-down which were from specific cards and stories like how do you do Sinbad and Aladdin and so forth. And then there was the ones where it was more of what I was used to, which are things like how do you do a jackal because there's no specific jackal and so you just want to give them a little flavor. I forget what he had. Maybe he had

Desert Walk. No, no, that was something else. Which one are we talking about? Her Jackal, I think. Oh, yeah. that was something else. Which one were we talking about? Her Jackal, I think. Oh yeah, Her Jackal. I can read you Her Jackal. Her Jackal costs one red mana. It's a 1-1. It's a Jackal. Tap to prevent a target creature from regenerating for the remainder of the turn.

Yeah, that was more along the lines of a more generic creature. Not anything in particular in mind when that was made. Were any of the cards like, here's a cool new space to play in mechanically, and I'll figure out a flavor to match it? Or was it mostly just top-down, like,

here's a cool Raven Knights thing, let me figure out how to design that? I'd say the almost entirely top-down. There was so much interesting room that was opening up in design that it was really easy to do the design in exciting areas with that restriction. where I might have been looking for an excuse to do lands like the Library of Alexandria, although that could have easily been top-down as well, where I had this Library of Alexandria and thought of that as being the effect I wanted as opposed to the other way around.

So, Richard, I'm almost at my desk here. So what I'd like to do is there's a lot left on the table here so we're going to wrap up this interview but we will do another one guys so we'll come back the next episode and we'll talk more about Arabian Nights because there's lots more to talk about

so anyway Richard I just want to thank you for being here it's a pleasure as I see my desk that means it's the end of my drive to work. And so instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Richard, thank you so much for being here. And like I said,

next episode we will have Richard back. So thanks for joining me, guys, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.