Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #813: TSP with Aaron Forsythe

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Aaron Forsythe and I share memories about working on the design of Time Spiral.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Well, a couple podcasts back, I had Richard Garfield on to talk about Arabian Nights, and I really had fun talking about that, so I decided to bring in a different designer to talk about a different set. So I have brought my boss, Aaron Forsyth. He and I, many years ago, both worked on Time Spiral. And Time Spiral Remastered is coming out, so we thought it might be fun to talk all things Time Spiral. So, hey, Aaron.

Hey. Okay, I'm glad this is not a podcast where you're going to spoil WandaVision for me. Every Friday, I'm terrified. It is very good. I would definitely watch it. But it's like my two loves, Marvel Comics and TV, have come together. So it's very exciting. Yeah, it's wild. Yep.

Okay. Time Spiral. Time Spiral. Speaking of time. Okay, so what is your earliest memories of Time Spiral? What is your memory of ending up on Time Spiral? Let me think. So I know Brian Tinsman was initially the lead.

I feel like we had moved around what sets were going to be where, and the Time Spiral was not initially where we had hoped it was going to be. Some other set had switched spots with it. What came out? Let's see. Ravnica Block was before it, and Lorwyn Block was after it.

Okay. Yeah. I don't, I guess I can't, I can't piece that together in a way that. I mean. I mean. Remembers exactly how it went down.

Here's the big picture on my end was, if I thought why you were on the team was I was grooming you to lead the set. Right. And so I was just trying to get you on a lot of design teams. Right. I had been on all three Ravnica sets and I led dissension. Yeah. And then, right, the plan was for me to lead a big set.

We usually only had one big set a year at that time. And I wanted to lead the following big set. So I was put on this big set team. This big set team. I think we were – you and I and Brian and whoever else was on the team. Devin was the fourth. Devin Lowe was our fourth. Like focused on time kind of as the key ingredients to what we wanted to be doing for the whole block, right?

Yeah. Pretty early. Yes. the whole block right yeah pretty early yes both real like time in the game like things mattered as far as like at the time that they happened within the game and then time is kind of a larger concept with regards to magic uh you know as a as a as a as a the game at the game and all the expansions and stuff we've released. And I think both of those elements actually came through in the three sets. Yes. Like the past, which we settled on the past, present, future for Time Spiral, Planner Chaos, and Future Sight.

And Time Spiral, the main focus is the past as the nostalgic element and the time-shifted cards and all the throwbacks to stuff that happened in Dominaria's past. But there's also some cards that refer to time explicitly, like Serra Avenger, or try to hint at things that happened earlier in the game. And we tried to carry that through all three sets. It was quite a very high concept for a magic set. It was quite a high concept, yes. I think I was being very bold, because I became head designer in the middle of Champions, but that already was well along its way.

And so Ravnica was my first, and then this was my second. So I was big on block planning planning so I was really trying to like let's be big and do blocks that have some larger theme to them and so. Right so if we strip out all the nostalgic stuff and just look at the new mechanics there's I think you know suspend very much plays into time

and split second I think was the other biggest new mechanic which also all plays with concept of time. And there was a third thing. For the first time, we keyworded Flash. Flash, right. Which also plays into time.

Right. So even if the set was not going to be nostalgia-focused, we had the framework for a mechanical suite that was about things happening at weird times or doing things at different times than what you were used to or things taking more time or less time to happen than normal and i think that would have been enough stuff to make a whole very compelling set out of and then we went ahead and added in like a dozen other mechanics and the time-shifted cheat with 121 other cards. And it just got crazy quickly. It did. So here's a question for you. Do you remember where the mechanics came from?

No. I think Split Second... Split Second was from another set that we stole from. I think it was a card in Cold Snap, right? It was a mechanic in Cold Snap. We? It was a mechanic in Cold Snap. We took it from Cold Snap. Cold Snap is its own story.

That's a different podcast. Incredibly short amount of time. But you, Devin, and I were all on that set as well. So Suspend started as a mechanic that Brian Tinsman made to convey legendary sorceries in the third Savior's Kamigawa.

Kamigawa, okay. And the thing that ended up being the thing where they go on forever, that cycle. Epic. Epic. What happened is Brian made that, showed it to me, and I go, Brian, this is way more than a cycle. Epic. What happened is Brian made that, showed it to me, and I go, Brian, this is way more than a cycle. You could make a whole set out of this mechanic. And so I

said, you can't do it here. We're going to save it for later. But then I let Brian lead the set since it was his mechanic. I specifically remember we stole Teferi, Mage of Zelfir, the kind of first legendary Teferi creature that was really powerful. It's mono blue.

That whole card was a Bant Legend in Coldsnap that Devon called Lord Panthro or something. It was not really made to be an existing character, but the design of everything you have has flash and your opponent can't do anything except on their turn was ported over directly and just made it into Faerie. So yeah,

Cold Snap gave us a lot of ingredients for Time Spiral. Here's another early thing to keep you remember this. Do you remember Hybrid being in Time Spiral? Vaguely now that you mention it. But I don't remember what role it was attempting to play.

So early on, what happened was I had made Hybrid for Ravnica, and development kicked it out of Ravnica. But we were doing this crazy temporal thing. I'm like, okay, well, maybe we'll use hybrid here, representing, like, things are so crazy, the man is breaking apart. But then we found out that suspend and hybrid had no synergy.

And one of them had to go. And it turned out, I mean, Ravnica wanted, ended up wanting hybrid back anyway. And so we took hybrid out. Yeah, I do remember Brian Schneider, who was leading Ravnica development at the time,nica city of guilds the first one um coming around on hybrid and deciding it was actually important and something we wanted to put back in the set i do remember that happening for sure um yeah so I remember the early attempts at playing with the time-shifted sheet very vividly.

Playing in, I forget what conference room we were in, but you had a, I don't know, there's some story about you having a Solkenar, or you having to name a card and you named Solkenar, or something that... card and you named Sulcanar or something that... Yeah, I was playing Devon and we had... There was a mechanic that was in the set for a while where you could double tap things. You could tap them once then tap them again. And so it lets you activate them twice

if they were totally untapped. And we had some version of name a card and they have to discard it if you name it. And the reason it's not a double tap creature is you can name it once, look at their hand, and the second time, you knew you could get it. But I'd used it once, like I only had one tap, you know,

and so I'm just, or I'm sorry, I had two taps, but the first tap didn't matter because I'm not going to get it, so I'm just screwing around, and I say, Sulcanar the Swamp King, and I didn't know it was on the, you had put it onamp King. I didn't know you would put it on the bonus sheet. I didn't even know it was on the bonus sheet.

Like, I just named it as a joke because it didn't matter. And he goes, oh, you got me. And I'm like, what? I think that card was kicked around a lot as, like, an example of exactly the kind of card we wanted to put on the time-shifted sheet. And so it was probably, you know, in your head. Yeah. I guess this could be in there. And, yeah so it was probably you know in your head yeah i guess i guess this could be in there and yeah it was yeah anyways i ran around i mean it was just such a crazy hit that i was

very excited so um yeah so at some point we decided to i don't know if it was working with creative and whatnot and figure out this is going to be how we set up the mending and all these other things were like the past present future of dominaria and this was the first time we've been back to dominaria yeah wow since we started plane hopping with each block um so you know there's a lot of pent-up desire to use all those place names and old characters and whatnot and so when we decided to make the time spiral um focused on the past specifically dominaria's past like it was i was just like a kid in a candy store you know because i had this i had an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the previous sets and cards and all the weird stuff that we

ever done i did just immerse myself in it you know as a player for so long that being able to draw on all that and use it to make all of these crazy throwbacks and mashups um it was super indulgent uh and and super fun at the same time and i think you know in retrospect as someone who's now has to think more about the business and the whole audience that I regret a lot of it. But man, it was some of the most fun I ever had making cards even to this day however many years later. Yeah, it was super fun. By the way, just to correct a little bit, I know about the story. The idea for the mending was very, very early,

but Brady Domenech, who ran the creative team, all he wanted was some major event happens and he understood the idea that the Planeswalkers would give up their spark to solve it

and then we'd redo Planeswalkers, right? But he didn't care what it was. It just had to be some multi-level, like, some crazy large problem that they had to solve. And so when I had the idea for time, like, we had these time mechanics,

I went to him and said, okay, I want to do time mechanics. And he's like, okay, we'll make it a temporal thing. Like, you know, it didn't require it being time, but when I came to him with, I want to have time mechanics, he's like, okay, I guess it's a temporal accident, you know. So, and then they just, you know, they shifted that. It also helped at the time I was running the creative team for Iceworth.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. walker cards around then and we wanted to we wanted to get you know planeswalkers onto cards which is something we had never done before that they were supposed to be our you know our heroes our go-to characters that were going to be the kind of glue of our intellectual property but there was no way to ever show them because they were so powerful in the game that you know they could create worlds and wipe out civilizations and whatever that there's just no space for for those as magic cards um that we wanted to create the toned down version which ultimately showed up in lorwyn which you know was originally supposed to end up in future sight as a hint of the future so we needed this kind of story reset that was going to reset the entire multiverse and how Planeswalkers functioned in it.

So Time Spiral ended up being the block where that happened. It did. Yeah. So I did a separate podcast talking about the time-shifted sheet a little bit, but I would love to get your perspective on your memories of the time- sheet because you were very very involved in it yeah so we talked about um what were the gimmicks going to be what were going to be the

things that made this set stand out and if we did a past, present, future, that the past should involve actual old magic cards as one of the ways to represent this set showing magic's past. And because we had shifted to the 8th edition frame a couple years before, that gave a really clear visual as to what was an old magic card something anything that existed in the before that frame came out which was really convenient because i think we had we struggled showing what alternate present looked like with the planar chaos frames like that was not a clear because clear a message uh and the future frames were so wacky that i think that got that across pretty clearly but the past was this was very easy to do um and so it just became a puzzle of like which which cards should we pick how should we do this uh i i kind of begged to to be the one that got to do most of that work and i did and i actually was on both the design and the development team

for time spiral so i kind of got to shepherd it all the way through. And originally, they were not going to be standard legal. We could just pick whatever we wanted. And so we just kind of went nuts. Everyone said what their favorite old cards were. Threw them all on there. And there were some really powerful stuff like you know channel or whatever that ultimately ended up just not being fun at all because it was so powerful i remember swords

was on it for a while yeah swords to plowshares right some of that stuff was cool it was cool to put swords to plowshares and packs which you see we actually pulled off in strixhaven um haven um but then once you know the the real work came when i and randy bueller and brian and others decided you know that if we could pull this off to actually have the list be standard legal the the time shifted sheet exactly how far could we push it what powerful cards could be could be put in there um so it kind of got revamped a little bit had to pick things that were played into the set themes the mechanics that were already in there so the cards felt kind of natural in a little bit of environment but then still um have some weirdos for sure um it's. It's weird how much of it relies on color pie breaks, making you feel like old magic cards. I guess that's what makes them feel so distinct,

like a card like Ghost Ship, which is a blue regenerator, or Prodigal Sorcerer, which is a blue creature from Alpha that can tap to deal damage to anything. Those are just not cards we would make at all. So that made them feel very distinct from all the rest of to deal damage to anything. Those are just not cards we would make at all. So that made them feel very distinct from all the rest of the cards in the set. I don't know how you feel about that in retrospect. I think we would be less willing to pull that off now

the way we're managing the color pod. But that was a large part of the charm for me. I think Modern Horizons is kind of, how do we do Time Spiral now? That's what modern horizons kind of is right so um we have a lot of nostalgia without necessarily having to break the color pie or you know so yeah we don't there's been i mean having worked on modern horizons to write that the set got reviewed for color pie violations just like any other set we did. But yeah, the time-shifted sheet was kind of like cards that feel old because we wouldn't make them now for whatever reason.

Whether they were weird creature types or weird rules text or off-color things that wouldn't make sense nowadays. So you end up with a lot of stuff like uncle istvan which is weird for a lot of reasons or evil eye orms by gore or even stuff like ustin troll you know red red doesn't get regenerators or didn't at that time um so yeah it was just like a list of all of everyone's favorite weird stuff i put some of my own pet cards like i love the card fiery justice from ice age that was my favorite card so that went on there my wife loved goblin snowman from ice ages for the arc it was so ridiculous so that got on there you know mike turian who i've known and played magic with for years before either of us worked at wizards his one of his favorite cards was spitting slug so it was just like an opportunity

to kind of you know without giving people true vanity, but just like give a nod to a bunch of individual cards that had meaning for us personally. And it just kind of showed off the true breadth and weirdness of what old magic was. So the coolest thing for me was that we kept it secret all the way through the pre-release. I don't know if you remember that, but like we we had kind of begged with marketing. Let's just try to keep this one under our hats. And we mostly did. I think some, some of some information about it got out early.

I, I talked about this in my podcast on the time. It did get out by the really invested people because we slipped in a few really small ways, but most, most audience didn't know. Got to experience that thing without even knowing it was there at the pre-release,

which is, or was a rare treat. You know, we rarely get to have surprises that big at our events, but that was awesome. So what else, memories of making Time Spiral? What are your memories? What jumps to mind when you think of Time Spiral?

Just all of the mashup cards. And then, you know, some of them are very cringey in retrospect,. There's, and then, you know, some of them are very cringy in retrospect, like storm cloud gin, which is a three, three flyer that has like R R colon plus two plus. Oh, I think it's plus two plus.

So it deals one damage to you. And that line of text was lifted from electric eel, which is a forgettable common from the dark. You know, which is a forgettable common from the dark um you know that's so bad that most people don't even know it exists and it certainly never gets played anywhere but there's just one of the things it's like that's a weird thing it's a blue creature that has a red activation and it deals a damage to me because it's supposed to be an electric eel so we put it on this gin which is also it has a cloud like the cloud the cloud dragon or uh cloud gin high flying mechanic yeah like electric eel didn't make a ton of sense on a gin like this there wasn't a lot of like cohesion to this approach it was just like what lines of text

are old and wacky and then we'll make creative figure out what the hell to call this thing they did a good job. They made a gym that has like lightning in the background to kind of give the electric eel nod. And the flavor text actually says as fickle as lightning, as slippery as an eel. But man, we did not make their jobs easy by picking this kind of nonsense and smashing it together. And like there's stuff like Cloud Chaser Kestrel, which is a threemana 2-2 flyer that destroys an enchantment when it comes into play, which was a nod to Cloud Chaser Eagle, which was a card from, I think Tempest was when that came out, that people who played Limited back then remembered pretty well. But it also had W colon any permanent becomes white until end of turn, which was a callback to Aurora Griffin from Plane Chase. But that text didn't do anything.

It was just extra nonsense for no reason just to make the card weird. And I think that's where the set lost a lot of people. Because we made you read and try to process all this stuff that was just there to kind of be funny or weird without a lot of upside as far as gameplay goes um and that's just not a thing we do today and we learned some lessons there i don't want to i shouldn't be trying to make cards that are fun to read on the internet and that's like the maximum value you'll ever extract from it it should be you know fun to play fun to own have uses uh elsewhere but times barrel has a few too many like you read it that's why we made it so it would be funny to read like the double cyclopean mummy that has the cyclopean tomb ability um like that card was not good it didn't play well

it was just ridiculous for ridiculous sake so like said, indulgent is a good word to describe this set. There's some stuff that turned out pretty well. I liked all the new salads that we made. Kind of a throwback to when I started playing, which was Fallen Empires. We did a bunch of new slivers. I think those went over well and some of those cards are still really popular even today um and then there was some really clever stuff like the the suspend cycle that you can't cast you know i think that was one of the ones you you pushed for pretty hard like what is the only way to play the card was to suspend it and you know those end up being

working out as really powerful when you get to modern or whatever you can cascade into them like living end and those cards are all all like represent old magic cards as well living end is living death and hyper genesis was eureka um ancestral visions was ancestral recall it was ancestral recall it's just fun it was just fun to go and find all those ways to do that white was White was balance and red was Wheel of Fortune. And then there was a Lotus. So do you remember that Suspend early on,

you couldn't, you had, Suspend meant it got suspended. You didn't have a choice. There was no way to do it. Right. The earliest version of Suspend, just, this is how you cast it. And then we decided that it made more sense that you could opt into it right just made it seem like a better mechanic like you could choose to do it because late game the problem was if you do them late game they

kind of just sucked um but late game when you had the mana you can just cast them right when you top deck your your errant ephemeron in in the mid game or late game when you're losing and it's like well if you in four turns i'll have this flyer that is... You start questioning why you put the card in your deck in the first place. Definitely didn't want that to be. I think that cycle was like, we thought it would be cool to do a little bit of that, but not too much. And it was cool. It was cool. There's definitely a lot of playing around with...

The reserve list was a real thing that we acknowledged back then and so this was an opportunity to kind of do homages to a lot of the cards we just weren't going to reprint otherwise like you said ancestor recall wheel of fortune there's a like a morph cycle that have like um a deranged hermit and ali from cairo and then there's a sliver cycle that had stuff like like a juzam jinn as a sliver so like these a Deranged Hermit, and an Ali from Cairo. And then there's a Sliver cycle that had stuff like a Juzam Jin as a Sliver. So these were all cards that, you know, we're not going to print the original versions of again,

but we could make these really cool. Yeah, the Magus cycle came from that too. Yeah, so the Magus cycle, I don't know if you've actually ever told the whole story of these. Okay, go ahead. We wanted some kind of splashy cycle. We knew the set was missing one last kind of high-profile cycle. And the stuff we tried, which now that we've gone on at least a decade,

I'm pretty sure we're not going to actually ever do it, where the stuff like you can add four, six mana artifacts from any point in Magic's history. Yes, the Gatekeepers! Right, the Gatekeepers. I don't know if you've actually ever... I just wrote an article where I finally revealed them to the audience. I don't know whether they'll hear this before the article. But it was like, we wanted cards that altered the deck.

If these cards were in your deck, it altered the deck-building rules specifically around standard to let you use other cards that were not otherwise standard legal and be able to put them into your standard deck. So you may add up to four wizards from any point in Magic's history to your deck, or up

to four six-mana artifacts, or up to four... I don't even remember what else. Two threes, that was one of them. Right, two threes. Any two, three creatures you want, you put them into your deck. I went through and I found things that weren't broken. Like I had to find like something that I could do. Right, right.

There couldn't be an obvious best answer that was too powerful for standard, but just things that let you. I think we had knights as one of them maybe as well. Maybe, yeah. Maybe knights. Yeah, there was a cycle of six. There was one of each color and an artifact was the cycle.

A combination of like outside of standard, this was kind of how people got to play anyway, so they didn't really pull much weight there. And the rules implications and the deck check implications

for judges and the Magic Online implications of them having to code all this stuff. I think there was a lot of, please don't do this, from a lot of different parts of the company. Yeah, I tried, but it was clearly it wasn't going to happen.

Yeah, so I came up with a major cycle of, like, what if there were creatures that represented old artifacts, but they were colored, and we tried to map them to the colors and give them bodies that matched what the casting costs of the artifacts would be um so it's like mages of the disc and then like which was never neural disc scroll it's curse scroll right candelabra which is another card we otherwise couldn't reprint

same with curse scroll um i just said the candelabra of tanos the green one the black one was mirror universe magus of the mirror and the which one am i missing the blue one is memory jar i'll never write so yeah again like playing along playing pulling around with reserve list cards trying to make cool throwbacks and homages to them. And they turned out well, and they actually spawned two more cycles. Well, two more cycles in the block. They spawned more cycles later. Right, and then even more.

Mages of the Moon is probably the most famous one of these. That was the enchantment one from Future Sight. Future Sight did enchantments. enchantment one from from future site future site did enchantments planar chaos did lands which i didn't really love because lands don't naturally have a a mana cost that you get to mirror yeah so they all just had kind of arbitrary bizarro mana costs but the the future site ones and the times borrow ones were both both quite cool yeah But it's quite cool. Yeah. What star?

Can you think of a card that didn't make it that you thought was a... that entertained you, but it didn't end up making it to the set? I'll start so you can think for a little bit. Yeah, I have one. Oh, you have one? Okay, go ahead. Mine is Father of Runes. It was a one mana one one white

that had tap flicker one of your own creatures. It didn't give her protection, but it exiled it and returned to the battlefield. Ooh, I like that. It's absurd. I mean,

we have avalanche riders on the time the time shifted sheet so the fact that you just twice in one turn avalanche rider your opponent and then every turn thereafter without ever paying echo again just keep flickering it was was absolutely ridiculous and that's that's that was like the first deck anyone built with the card so i don't think we ever even got around to building a second deck uh it's one of those cards, like there's a lot of cards where if you couldn't execute it on it at these exact numbers, then there was just no point even trying to make it. Like Urza's Factory makes a 2-2 Assembly Worker for 7 tap,

and if we had to change that off of 7, which was the... Right, the Urzatron. The Urzatron mana number, or 2-2, because that's what an assembly worker that Mishra's factory represents would be. Then the whole joke kind of falls apart. Development did not love those cards because there's not much you can do to them.

It's either say yes or say no. And if you say no, we need to go figure something else out. What's yours? My card is a card that Brady veto vetoed uh was pirate ghost ship oh i remember ghost pirate ship ghost pirate ship right ghost pirate it was a cross between ghost ship and pirate ship right because it's funny both ghost ship and pirate ship are on the time shifted sheet but there's stuff that it's like you can do it there but don't make us do a real version of this

and like they did not want ship as a creature type they just we didn't have vehicles back then and ship just was a dumb creature type honestly it's not like it's a living creature people love walls so go ahead right please don't make us do ships okay we didn't do ghost pirate ship uh yeah i bet we could do a card like that in a Modern Horizons set, though, for sure. Yeah, it's funny that I think Modern Horizons really is a spiritual successor, so

if, I mean, A, Time Spiral Remastered is coming out, so if you want to experience Time Spiral and you weren't around when Time Spiral was around, you have the perfect opportunity. We're almost out of time, but do you want to real quickly, what inspired us to do Time Spiral Remastered? Do you remember? What inspired

us to do Time Spiral Remastered? Yeah. I don't remember. I do remember how much Time Spiral influenced the original Modern Horizons. That was the whole pitch, right, for the first Modern Horizons. Let's try to do another time spiral. But no, I don't remember

the... Gavin had the idea that it would be fun. One of the weird things about Magic is it's hard to go back and draft old environments. They're here, you draft them, and then they're gone. And you can refer to them, but he

really liked the idea of could we recapture and let people redraft something in tabletop and obviously digital they can yeah we can reissue things digitally very easily right so he came up with this idea of how could we do that and like he kind of got so far along that he finally realized he had kind of remade

Remastered like from a completely different vantage point he did all these things and like oh I've just made Remastered he goes how about we do a tabletop Remastered. From a completely different vantage point, he did all these things, and like, oh, I've just made remastered. He goes, how about we do a tabletop remastered? Right, because he did Tempest remastered on Magic Online. Right, right. Which is all three sets from that block, packaged up as one

draft environment. And so he had five choices, and he went around pitching the five choices of blocks, and Time Spiral was so number one that it won. And that's how that yeah if if you you know if you were invested like time star limited is so fun and it's just there's so many different things that can happen there's so many different cards way more than you're used to in a typical draft environment about which the sheer number of different cards

that you're exposed to just from all the different time shifted sheets. That, you know, it was my favorite limited environment for years and years and years. I haven't done it in so long that I can't really hold it up against our more recent stuff. But yeah, I look forward to that a ton. And the fact that there's a new time shifted sheet full of stuff that was not printed in the old border before. I just I'm such a sucker for those kind of things, to have all these old, the cards look so cool, and oh my gosh, look, this draft, I got this card, I never would have expected,

now I got to build my whole deck around it. It's super fun. Well, anyway, I want to thank you for being here, Aaron. Yeah. It was a lot of fun talking Time Spiral, bring back lots of memories. Memory lane, yeah. But I am now at my desk, so we all know that

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 once again, Aaron, thank you so much. Thank you. And everybody, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.