Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #816: Innistrad with Erik Lauer

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

I was the lead designer for original Innistrad, and Erik was the lead developer. I have Erik on my podcast to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, I've started doing this thing where I talk with R&D members about sets that we worked on together. And so today, I've brought in Eric Lauer to talk about Original Innistrad. Hey, Eric. Hello, Mark. How are you doing? Okay, so this is an interesting set where I led the design of the set and you led the development of the set. So I'm going to pick up the story. I mean, I've told the story of my part of making Innistrad.

So I'm going to pick up the story. There was a period, we used to have this period in between design and development that we called Divine, where development started giving feedback. So I'm going to pick up our story on, okay, I've made this set based on gothic horror, and you're brought in. So let's start at Divine. What do you remember from Divine? So my

very first game, I actually died before I got a fifth turn. And so Aaron asked me what I learned, and I said not much. I only had four turns, and then I died. But I did get to see double-faced cards in action, and we were actually playing sealed the first time.

So it's kind of rough when you're playing sealed and you just die that fast. And initially what was interesting about Divine was there were more black cards than any other color, but not by a lot. But we were playing sealed. So the way sealed worked at the time, you didn't get a lot of extra cards. So if you tried to build your deck using two colors that weren't black, it never worked out. So basically everyone played black if they were playing a two-color deck. So I decided, okay, it's going to gonna feel more black but it's not actually gonna

have more black cards if that's how sealed's gonna work you can't have a grand prix where it's everyone shows up and every single person's playing black basically let me just explain to the audience real quick you and i know this but um one of the ideas we were playing around with the world was so black that we opted the black but not a lot but by a little bit but enough obviously that it impacted limited yes oh well especially sealed sealed more than draft because you only get so many cards and in draft if someone else isn't someone's drafting black that means more cards for you if you're not drafting black but seal doesn't work that way um so this was my, we, development was really young at the time because Mike Turian and Matt Place had just left. So I was the only developer in all of R&D who had led a set to completion. Tom Lapilli was leading his first set and no other developer had led a set.

So we really were starting over with processes and how to get things done. And there was some concern that there wasn't enough new stuff, not from the developers, but from people that we would have play with the set. And there was some concern that the double-faced guards were just too big a change. And what bothered me was some people gave both complaints. Like, pick a lane. Is it too new or is it too different? Is it too new and different or is it too much the same old stuff like a core set? Unless you just think that this transformation flipping thing is just dumb,

how could it be both at the same time? And so we talked about what was in the set and i really thought so i added the idea that we've been putting around with a green needed more creature removal and making fight into a thing that green always got but other than that i just thought there was enough new stuff in this set uh so, for the audience to understand, when we handed over the set, Transform was in the set, and Flashback was in the set, and Morbid was in the set,

and the werewolf mechanic was in the set. So, most of the mechanics you think of as being in the set were there when we handed off. Right. So, we changed them a little bit. Flashback was all on-color, and we changed it to have some off-color. The werewolves transformed. there was a little bit of a timing glitch where if you cast the way it worked if you cast spells during the end step they never were counted so we tweaked things a little bit but that's basically

just finding out tiny glitches that uh you always. Oh, another thing you changed, by the way, as you brought that up. I think the way we had it originally was it just required two spells cast by any player to make it switch. And you changed it so one player had to cast both spells. Oh, that's right. Yes, I remember that. Yeah.

Then it was like, spell, cancel. Okay, it's daytime. And people wouldn't know it's daytime. Yeah. So usually I'm like, well, it must not be very intuitive, but if the rules say it works this way, you still don't think it does. I'm just gonna write, you should have to share this to yourself. Yeah. And the scob could eat a creature from either person's graveyard.

And I thought that that... So one of the things I try to avoid is what I call rock, paper, scissors, where this deck beats that deck beats another deck, even though some people think that's how games should work. I think it's more fun if we do different things, but every matchup is fair, and it's about us playing a game, not the rock defeating the scissor

it's about mark and eric playing a game of magic so uh that led to blue and black needing a lot more self mill so there's a one four that etbs and mills you and this was actually a really contentious card at the time people would come up to me and insist we take this card out of the set. How could you have a one four that mills you? What? So I actually like that people can discover which colors are for them and which colors are not for them and pick the stuff they really love and not just have everything be, what do we call it? Vanilla toast, I think.

But yeah, it's all flavorful. Some of them are for you and some of them aren't if you don't like milling yourself don't play this color because that's how this deck is going to work but some other colors have to not act that way and have to act more normal and um so that was a large part of it. But the other outgrowth was because some members of R&D just wouldn't drop the hatchet when it came to trying to get double-faced cards out, just had fewer drafts because their feedback. You run drafts to get feedback on the draft environment when half the feedback is, I can't believe you're doing double-faced cards. It kind of makes it a not very useful experience so we moved on with a lot of flavor and tom lapilli was working on kaijudo at the time was it kaijudo no um what's the other one dark ascension no no no dual masters dual masters dual masters yeah which also was doing double-faced cards. Well, that's where the idea came from, by the way.

We were trying to make werewolves work. Tom Lapilli had been working on Duel Masters and said, hey, Duel Masters has this double-faced technology. Maybe we could use that. And we tried it, and we really liked it. Eric, I want to tell one story that fits in here. So you came to me early on on and you said to me, I'm getting a lot of,

of, um, comments on the double-faced cards. How much confidence do you have? And I said, a hundred percent, Eric, we 100% should be doing this.

It is the right call. And you said, okay, we'll make it happen. And I always remember that conversation. Oh, that's interesting. That is a blur to me because i kind of blurred

out all these conversations because several of them were not with you but with other people yeah really negative there were people who would play and would um they wouldn't use sleeves and they wouldn't use the equivalent of a checklist card they would just put in a double-faced card into their deck where you could see it. It's like, why are you doing that? And they're like, this is what I think I would do in the real world. No, you wouldn't.

So that type of discussion is what led to an interesting, I believe that we only drafted in all of development eight times the entire set. So a lot of it was just theory craft and some of it was um well what are these colors supposed to do and we couldn't figure out what blue green was supposed to do so i just kind of doodled out of depth with all these flashback cards tried drafting it once it was like oh it needs life gain and put in Nod to the Bone. It became the spider spotting

deck, but I only drafted it. It was only drafted one time in all of development. It was just like, oh, okay, it needs a few more cards. I put in a card that I didn't realize was

questionable to put in that could get a flashback card back from exile. Do you remember this card? Yeah, well, I mean, I do not like getting things back from exile. I believe if a card puts itself in exile, it can get back. Or if a card puts another card in exile,

it can get that card back. But other than that, I don't like getting things back from exile. Right, whereas I thought, well, I was just thinking to myself, okay, flashback's a mechanic. If you can get your flashback cards back, it's sort of like a tutor. And so I wasn't thinking that this would bother anyone. So I remember that, but that was part of my idea of how to put this deck together,

which I think added a lot of flavor to it. Another thing that was going on was we had five tribes. But after Lorwyn, there was some view. A lot of people at R&D did not think we should do another tribal set. But this was supposed to be lightly tribal. And I actually wanted it to be more tribal than design and hand it off. So I asked Mark about that, who basically said, well, if you think you could do it, do it, but be careful. This didn't work out well the last time.

Right. What happened was I sensed that R&D was very cautious about tribal. So I purposely made it lower because I thought the tribal part was important, but I'm like, well, I can scale it back. And then when you came to me, I'm like, look, if you can add more tribal, I have no problem with that. I just was worried about R&D's reaction to it.

Right. So I, my view is, it's fine to draft tribal. You need to make a set, though, where if I'm drafting zombies, someone who's not drafting a zombies deck will still want some of my cards. Not just that everyone goes down their own lane.

And so that's why part of the reason there's a flashback deck is the zombies have the self-milling. The self-milling plays into the flashback. Everyone has all the cards have multiple people who want them for different reasons. Yeah. Everyone has, all the cards have multiple people who want them for different reasons. Yeah. And so that was, so it was interesting to see how different people,

we had two creative people on the team who worked on spirits and vampires. And of course, werewolves, their mechanic was built in and zombies had scab and humans tied into spirits. So we tied together the tribes a little bit more mechanically into what the cards look like, what they would be doing. So one of the biggest changes you made,

can we talk a little bit about the vampires? Yeah. So I think the vampiresires? Yeah. So, I think the Vampires were always supposed to be a kind of aggressive deck. Yes. They were supposed to be. That was my intent. That was the intent,

and what I noticed was, so, the thing was, some of the designers thought, oh, if you just put black and red cards together, it leans towards aggression. No, in Limited, black and red, typically your high draft books are all removal cards so if your draft goes really well the natural thing to do is to buy a lot of removal cards which gives you fewer creatures so then you just want your creatures to be threats that are hard to remove so you get down a little bit of damage and just remove something, hit your opponent over for a few times and the game ends.

And so but the idea was the vampires would be more aggressive. And so Doug Byer is very excellent at combining flavor and mechanics. the vampire tribe and figure out what would be something that would feel like vampire but would tell you uh yes i'm trying to focus more on reducing your life total than just uh a tritting you're bored and so that's where the idea that uh when another creature died or when a creature dies your opponent loses life. Came from Doug. I thought they were the... To me, werewolves are clearly the most important tribe. Actually, a lot of them were important for different reasons. This was, I believe, the first time we were doing human tribal.

Yes, it was the first time we were doing human tribal. So humans, my thought was we should focus on making sure humans is a constructed deck there are a lot of human cards that exist in the past and they have no nothing to put them together so we should make sure that that is uh you can use all your human cards and play this human what's going on mark now i just it's funny like once upon a time, human tribal was hard to do, and now human tribal is a lot easier to do. Yes. So I thought human tribal should mostly be constructed. Well, you would play it in limited, but our efforts should be more focused on constructed than for other tribes.

Werewolves, because they were content contentious i had this idea in draft of i don't want werewolves to be the deck you draft because your only focus is on winning the draft i want the person who really loves the the mechanic and the flavor of it to draft the werewolves the person who hates that stuff to not feel pressure to draft the werewolves so that was uh the way of... That was the way... Oh, no. Hold on. We lost Eric. We will get him back in a second. So the one thing

while we're waiting for Eric. Eric, are you back? Am I? Yeah, you're back now. Okay. Okay. So werewolves, what I was saying was some people love them, some people hate them. My way of dealing with that in Limited

is to make them not quite the strongest tribe. That way the people who love them will actually get to play them more often. And the people who hate them rarely feel pressure to draft werewolves but then we had so many discussions and eventually aaron just had i've had to take this because i said it's too much i'm leading this that i can't deal with this discussion anymore what do you do about the double-faced cards during draft are you supposed to cover them up are you supposed to show them to people? It's just laissez-faire rules

where whatever you want to do, you do. And I like do whatever you want to do, but it really is bothered the tournament group a lot that

it was ideologically they don't like it. To me, it was another sub game. Well, if you think it's good to reveal that you have a werewolf, go ahead and reveal it. And if you don't, try and hide it. But they said, no, no, no. Then it depends on where you're sitting at the table,

which is a fair point. And we can't have tournaments come down to where you sit in the table. So either everyone knows every card in every pack, or you're obligated to keep it hidden. And to me, well, fine. Then I would rather show them than have a judge deal with penalizing someone who didn't sufficiently well hide their card. Yeah.

Though it's different on digital. So those were, that was a lot of it. And then a lot of the rest was actually developing a lot of flashback cards and um because so if you look at it there's where flashback is the card advantage of the set which was another discussion some of the designers did not see flashback as card drawing to me flashback is you cast the spell you draw a card the card you draw is the one that's in your graveyard actually the reason you draw cards is so you can play them later you can play this later just happens to be in your graveyard not your hand which was a little abstract for some of the non-developers on my team to say well what i drew a card but it's in my graveyard yes the reason you

draw a card is so you can play it and it's in your graveyard um so i'm not sure that i'm not is there anything else you want to talk about that was what i know remember yeah the thing about vampires that was interesting to me was it me was, we wanted vampires to be the aggressive tribe, but we just didn't do a good job of making that true. One of the things about development, set design, play design, is a lot of times it's realizing things, understanding what the vision is, but making it actually happen. We wanted vampires to be fast, but we hadn't made them fast. And you did a really good job of figuring out, okay, how do I make that true? Yeah, so sometimes I can watch a designer's—the designers are having fun, the developers are not having fun. And one thing I've noticed, sometimes you have to get the designers to play again and watch them and see why they're having fun.

Sometimes it's just not the strongest line. The developers will always focus on the strongest line, even if it's not a particularly fun game. So I think that in design it was working, but when developers were playing with the set, they were just killing everything in sight. It was all they ever did with Black Red. So it was make their removal a little weaker,

make the creatures a little more aggressive, add the flavorful creature dyes, they lose life to add, to say, look, get your opponent low and you finish them off with these things. But I think that's common. Oh, yeah. So we've talked about,

you talked a little bit about how you tweaked Transform and the Werewolf mechanic, and you talked about how you added in off-color stuff for Flashback. Do you want to talk about Morbid a little bit? What did you do with Morbid? Oh, one more thing about Transform. What I noticed was the number of Transform cards led to the rarities and the math not lining up,

and Mark really didn't like it when I cut some cards to make the numbers line up. I think Mark thought I was just cutting cards to cut them. When really I was just making the algebra work out. Do you remember this? I mean, I'm sure at the time it's like, that's a good card. Why are you cutting that card? It's a good card. But I don't know.

I think Mark, say which ones he thought were the best ones, which were the same ones. So, Morbid. So, in the end, I don't remember changing... I remember talking about which colors should do Morbid. I don't remember large changes to it. Wasn't it always if a creature died, you get a reward?

Yeah, yeah, I'm just wondering. I mean, going through the mechanics, I'm like, I'm trying to remember large changes to it. Wasn't it always if a creature died, you get a reward? Yeah, yeah. I'm just wondering. I mean, going through the mechanics, I'm trying to remember what else you changed. One of my memories of this whole set was I was very happy with the design, but I felt like you did a really good job of just taking the vision and making it better. Yeah, I thought Morbid worked a lot of the development.

Well, so some of it was just figuring out where where the sets the ideas were good the execution didn't always work yeah right i think let's say the biggest one in terms of limited was just saying i can only my scabs only eat creatures from my graveyard not yours therefore we need to put a bunch of self-milling on the creatures to make that work, which played into a loopy flashback deck, which then your loopy flashback deck has creatures in it, so cards that count your creatures.

So it wasn't going to be blue-green, but you'd put spider spawning in, which was top-down, and then it was, oh, we can stretch this out into a three-color deck. There weren't really three-color decks in the design handoff, but there was a blue-red-black flashback deck and a black-red-green spider-spawning deck that we made during development just to add a little bit. I like adding a little bit of three-color, although usually I do it with green in particular because green of course can fix the colors and make it all work but i don't think there was that much change there was a we had a refinement period would find the art came back because it's a very flavorful set so then we had a pass of just making little tweaks. And I think one of the mistakes in Limited,

which we called the Invisible Man, was the invisible stalker in the end. Yeah. So a couple of the mistakes in that, and there's a lifelink equipment when it's equipped to humans. Most of the mistakes actually are, we were trying really hard to tie into the flavor and going a little too far with the power in some of those cards. Although the main one was completely tangential to this.

There was a Pro Tour player card, which might be the most famous card from the whole set, which is snapcaster rage that was kind of tangential to the whole thing yeah originally that card was going to be a land that was also a counter spell and i said a land that's a counter spell if that's in the environment there's gonna be just decks with tons of counter spells because the opportunity cost is too low if it's like oh oh i don't have enough lands i'll just play this counter spell as a land this game um just lets you squeeze more counter spells into your deck so zach hill had not let any sense yet so i made a classic mistake i said you just make this one card and i'll trust you not realizing the psychology of this situation where if you

give someone just one card it's probably not going to be at the appropriate power level they're probably uh gonna push it too far and uh never checked and just like okay zach made a card let's throw it in yeah and so there was that and, and the card that killed me, the game which I lost on turn... before I got my fifth turn... Oh boy, the name is not coming to me. It was the one based on the fly.

Oh, yes. It was... What's the name of that one? It's the common blue card. Delver of Secrets. Delver of Secrets, yes. That was the card actually that killed me. The first game I ever played, my opponent cast a turn one Delver of Secrets

and flipped it on his second upkeep. So that by itself did nine damage. it on his second upkeep. So that by itself did nine damage. But interestingly, Delver of Secrets, when it was handed off from Design to Development, flipped on creatures, not instants and sorceries. So why would a blue card flip that way? And Mark said, well, I really like the fly, but I'm worried if it's instants and sorceries, it won't see play. And I said, don't worry. It didn't work. So, that's

where Legacy All-Star Delver of Secrets came from. Yeah, it's funny that I base it on the percentages of you being able to flip it. That's why I did Creature, just so it would flip more often. But you were right, that Flavor was much better being a spell. I just was worried that if I did a spell, it wouldn't happen. But it did.

Right, but as a constructed, so as a limited card, you might say, well, you only have 15 creatures and technically 14 creatures out of 39 if you have one Delver of Secrets in your deck that's on the table. Yeah. So in that sense, yes, you have all these lands and all these creatures, so you can't possibly have

many instants and sorceries, but it is a constructed card that you build around, which tells you to load your deck up with those. Ordeplayed in Legacy, where Brainstorm just is four right off the bat, and probably Force of Will also. That is true. So do you have any, what other,

I'm not super far away from my desk, so we have another maybe five minutes. What are your favorite stories of making Innistrad? My favorite stories? Yeah, do you have a memory of Innistrad? Do you remember some, I don't know, when you think back to Innistrad, what do you most remember? What I most remember isn't about Innistrad. It's about the situation in R&D where I was the only one who had let us set. So, by the way, let's tell the – you kind of did the setup to –

there was a lot of people unhappy with the double-faced cards. Do you remember – I remember the resolution. Do you remember the resolution of the story? Well – What happened? How did remember the resolution of the story? Well. What happened? How did they end up in this ad? Aaron just, what I remember mostly was Aaron just told people if they doubted that we should have double-faced cards to go to him instead of me.

Yeah, so what happened eventually. What? So here's the story as I remember it, is you were very flustered, just because everybody, I mean, a bunch of people were going to you, like, emphatically, this can't happen. You came to me, I said,

no, Eric, it's the right thing to do, we should do it. And you were getting very flustered, just because so many people were just yelling at you. And so I went to Aaron, and I said, Aaron, look, this should happen, it's the right thing I said, Aaron, look, this should happen. It's the right thing to do. It plays well.

And please, you have to help Eric because this is driving him batty because he just wants to make a set and people won't shut up about don't do this. And Aaron just put his foot down is what happened. Aaron just said, we're doing this. No more arguments. We're doing this. Do you remember that? I missed the story because the call dropped.

Oh, sorry. I was just explaining how Aaron basically put his foot down. The way it ended is Aaron just said, we're doing this, no more arguments, we're doing this. Yes. That was very helpful. You thought I wanted to cut it. I just wanted the arguments

to go away. I think at wanted to cut it I just wanted the arguments to go away I think at the time you were just very flustered I was just like it should be in the set I was afraid you were going to cut it I'm like look it really should be in the set and you seemed to want to keep it in the set it was just

you were getting flustered by the fact that everyone was yelling at you but I never made any moves or explored removing it from the set. Yeah. I did have to tell a team member, you can't bring this up anymore. You just have to just... It is funny.

So, the guy that now, like, one of the guys in charge of magic, a guy named Ken Troop, who was really, really against him at the time, after the set that now, like, one of the guys in charge of magic, a guy named Ken Troop, who was really, really against him at the time, after the set came out, Ken came up to me and apologized. I don't know if he apologized to you, he apologized to me, and he said, I was, I was, I

really didn't think it was the right thing to do, I thought we were doing the wrong thing, and now the set's come out, and I see the reaction, I see the audience, and he goes, man, oh man, you were correct. I am so sorry. You did the right thing. So. It meant a lot to me. Because people oftentimes

will argue with things. It's not often that they come back later and go, I was wrong. I'm sorry. That doesn't happen all that often. Oh, interesting. So. I don't know, because normally when I disagree with you, I go after,

I change it to what I want, so I don't have any stories like that with you. Well, I mean, one of the things that's important, kind of the relationship between, between you and I is, I make something, or I or my team,

whatever, makes something, and we have a vision for it, and hey, we want to pass it along to you guys, and you and your team make the best that you can. And I respect that things have to change. And so most of the time, it's like, oh, okay, that makes it better. And every once in a while, if I think something's really important, I'll talk to you about it.

But, I mean, you listen to me when I say something's important, and I'm very respectful of if you want to change something, and I think it makes it better. I'm very respectful of you guys do need to change things. And so you and I have a pretty good rapport. I mean, you and I don't fight about much because when something matters, I bring it up, and I don't do that often. So you listen to me when I do it, and I don't know. I feel like we have a good rapport. I just don't remember really much of this thing happening where, like, you really wanted something, and I cut it. I just don't remember really much of this thing happening where it was like you really wanted something and I cut it.

I just don't remember that. No, no. I mean, usually if I say it's important, you keep it. So it doesn't. The biggest debate we had actually was in cons over morph, where it wasn't is this cool or not? It was, from my perspective, should we have six mechanics or five mechanics? Right, right. I mean, we're getting a little off topic for today.

The problem we had run into was I built the whole set around Morph, and then we added in the wedge thing that came later, and Morph was so kind of like in the center of everything, it was just hard to take out. And you were correct. It should have had five mechanics, not six, but the way it got built,

there was no way to take Morph out at the time we needed to take it out. Right, but that's the only thing that occurs to me where I really was like, I don't know. I'll do it, but it doesn't seem correct. That was the only one that comes to my mind. It wasn't like Morph was bad there even, and that's my only example. It was just like, hmm, seems like unnecessary complication. So I don't really...

I actually really liked the double-faced cards the whole time other than they were put together with scotch tape and it cut my hand one oh yeah that was my one complaint about it i should explain this to the audience literally what we did is we would print up the cards because we have stickers and then we would just tape the double the double-sided cards were just cards taped together so that it was actually double-sided. Right, so after I cut the bridge of my hand between my thumb and my index finger on one of my hands, it was really

painful, and then Peter had an idea of just taking one card and stickering both sides. Yes, that was the upgrade. Once we were by the cut your hand on the tapes thing, I liked them from then on. That was my one time of really not liking them.

So anyway. But that didn't apply to the real world, of course. So anyway, Eric, I'm almost to work here. So do you have any final thoughts on Innistrad, on original Innistrad? I just have really fond memories of both making it and playing with it. And obviously a lot of other people do too, because we made it again. Yeah, I mean, it's possible. People ask me, what's the best set I ever made?

And it's hard to pick. I've made so many sets. But like one of the leading contenders is Innistrad. I'm really happy. I thought Innistrad turned out amazingly well. Yeah, I agree. I don't have a favorite, but that's certainly high on my list. Yeah, I mean, I've made so many.

I have so many sets I've made. I have a bunch I like, but it is definitely one of my favorites. Like, as far as the end result was just really, really good. It is one of the home runs, in my mind, of sets that I did. I feel confident I've made the second most sets of anyone. That is quite possible.

I do think you've taken that. I like Elliot, and I don't know who else there would be. Yeah, I think you do have, you're in the number two. You ain't going to catch up to me anytime soon, but you clearly have the number two slot. Yes.

Okay. Okay, well, thanks, Eric. So, guys, I'm now at my desk, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So, Eric, thank you now at my desk, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for the ride.

And, guys, I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.