Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #821: Kaladesh with Shawn Main

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

I sit down with former Magic designer Shawn Main to talk about the design of Kaladesh.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been getting together with different designers and talking about sets we've worked on together. So today, I've pulled someone from the past. So Sean Main is here to talk about the design of Kaladesh. Hey, Sean! Hey, nice to be here. So let me give a little background for the audience. So Sean came in second in the second grade designer search. From that, got an internship. From the internship, ended up getting a full-time job.

And how long did you work at Wizards? Six years, exactly. Six years, exactly. So he's off designing games at other places. We're coming up on the anniversary of that right now in just about three weeks. Oh, is it? Okay. So I miss Brooklyn with you, Sean. Yeah, I miss you and everyone else there. It was

good times, and it seems so weird to have been gone for a few years now. I know, I know. So anyway, we're going to go back in the... Okay, so let me set up Kaladesh. And then I'm interested. They've heard my take on Kaladesh,

so I'm more interested in your take on it, and then I'll jump in. So this product, so this was, I think, your first time leading a large set, a large, you'd led Magic Origins before this, right? Yes, I've led Originsins and then Conspiracy.

This was the first outside of Origins. Right. So this was the first sort of premiere non-core set. And so you and I actually did it together. So the way is I sort of led it for the first half. It was a year-long design. I led it for the first six months and you were on the team. And then we swapped off and you led it for the second six months and you were on the team, and then we swapped off and you led for the second six months and I was still on the team. But sort of the leadership

changed because it was your first time doing a premiere set. That was how we did it. What are your memories of the making of Kaladesh? My memory is well, I remember way back when we were doing the block

planning for the Bolas arc and we had penciled in, I think, just artifact world. And I'm not sure if we had too much other than that. But pretty early on, we kind of had the two themes that we were working with of like you wanted to revisit energy. of like you wanted to revisit energy and creative was interested in kind of positive inventor world kind of as a flavor. And then I think we are also just kind of fundamentally aware of some of the challenges

of artifacts given kind of Mirrodin and things and like having too many colorless cards in the course of a book. So by the way, I think the original pitch original pitch was i mean was not technically artifact world it was steampunk world right oh was it specific yeah so the idea was we had never done steampunk although the irony is uh as uh jeremy jarvis used to joke it was steampunk without the steam or the punk um but i think it started as a steampunk set now which implied artifacts i mean there was it definitely was started being an artifact heavy thing but i think it started

from steampunk being the the impetus i believe okay yeah i can remember some conversations with like kelly diggs where like you know before we'd really figured it out where it was possibly like more focused on kind of tapping into the energy supply and stealing it from the... I guess we kept the theme of really the renegades versus the government. So it was punk-esque. The other thing, because you did Magic Origins, so one of the things that happened very early on was the idea of this being Kaladesh.

Now, you actually had done the set that first introduced Kaladesh. So let's talk a smidgen about that. So Magic Origins, how did Kaladesh end up in Magic Origins? Yeah, so as part of the Planeswalkers' backstories, we needed to figure out what worlds they came from. And it's one of those where we see far enough into the future that you know this thing is coming. And it was a challenge for us because we knew so little about it, both creatively and mechanically at that point.

But we kind of took those really early kind of explorations of what it might be and started seeding in some things. And that's where kind of the Thoktor theme in Magic Origins came from. It's like, well, we don't know much about Kaladesh, but we're confident we're going to do some artifact creatures. We're going to lean into these little flying gizmos. So that's what people understand the timeline. So you had made Magic Origins. We had kind of decided while Magic Origins was being made

that Kaladesh would be the steampunk plane. We had very lightly penciled in steampunk plane and then Chandra's home world being that plane, it all sort of started coming together. And then extra work was done during Magic Origins. More work was done on Kaladesh than normally we would have put on it because we were throwing forward for ourselves. We decided during Magic Origins that the steampunk set was going to be kaladesh yeah i'm trying to remember

if there's like the timelines blur together in my head um because we we had a very long pre-design period where we were looking at the mechanics of kaladesh and i can't remember if that actually overlapped origins or or whether it was all kind of this speculative do you remember yeah it was all posts so okay kaladesh had this weird thing that we we don't normally have it was a brand new world but we had a style guide done like before we started design oh i forgot about that and that that i mean that net for this for the audience that never ever happens like normally, normally, it's not until Vision finishes that the style guide

even gets made. You know what I'm saying? Like, normally we do work and the style guide gets made after the work that we do, not before it. So,

like, we didn't know 100% that energy was going to be in the set. So, when we sat down in, when we were doing exploratory,

in fact, real quickly, so, the set was, real quickly, so the set was originally, the slot of the set was originally going to be what Amonkhet, it's going to be Amonkhet, and then halfway into Exploratory, we swapped it. Do you remember this? I had forgotten that, but you're right, because I remember those real early explorations of what Amonkhet was going to be, and then suddenly everything changed. Well, you had signed up for Amonkhet because you had actually spent time growing up in Egypt, right?

I had pitched doing an Egypt set. Right. That's why you were in this slot, because you were supposed to be leading the Egypt set. And then it changed on us, but we were already sort of midway into it. And so you got Kaladesh instead of the Egypt set. That's right. I'd forgotten that entirely. Yeah. So I think in exploratory design, we talked about energy and we talked about vehicles. Both of those got brought up in exploratory.

Yeah, I believe we solved for both of them in exploratory design. Well, we solved for energy mostly, because there's like three ways to do energy. Do you remember all this? And we like walked through all the different ways? Oh, I remember, yes, making a lot of charts with like, you know, here's the pros and cons of each of these approaches. Have you talked about that on the podcast? No, we can talk. I mean, I haven't gone in depth on that, so we can talk a little about that. Do you remember the three different ways? Oh, yeah. So we had the three... I don't remember what we called them,

but there was a little bit more like Mirrodin where kind of you had charge counters, but you could spend them freely between your different artifacts. And then there was energy as we did it, where it just kind of accumulates in a single, single pile on you, the player.

And then the third one that at the time I know I really liked was gizmos where the artifacts were just to artifact tokens that didn't do anything intrinsically. And kind of the energy equivalent was like sacrifice artifacts, which is funny because that, you know, is so much of what food kind of became. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so what happened was, the real quick version of the story is, I had put energy in original Mirrodin, and then there was too much in it, and Bill Rose told me I had to take something out and it was the thing that was easiest to take out. It was the least intertwined with everything. And so I took it out

and I'd just been waiting for a place to use it. And then in, I think like the very first meeting of Exploratory, I was like, guys, this could be where we use energy. Do you remember anything of my pitch of that? I remember you being excited and we went off

and we kind of explored those three directions. I can't remember if there were others that we explored as part of it. And I mean, I think we, yeah, we, who was the team? Do you remember? It was me and Ethan, I know. Me, you and Ethan's all I remember.

Okay. But yeah, yeah. We did a lot of play tests with the three different versions and a lot of like um pros and cons on kind of the um yeah the charge counters and spending them across cards which i think has certain like you know it had certain pluses of like okay you can disrupt your opponent's energy and there's a lot of like but there was so much micromanagement and so much like challenge to looking across the board and like okay that card has four counters that card has two counters that that output uses three counters that output uses four counters and like being able to figure that out was was so complicated that we went with kind of the single reserve of energy. Yeah, which is, interestingly,

what happened was I knew how we had done it in Mirrodin. I didn't tell you guys. I just said, here are different ways we can do it, and what do you think is the right way? And then the team went through the exercise, and in the end, picked the same way I'd picked originally, but I didn't tell you, because I didn't want

to, like, sort of sway if another way was the better way um and then vehicles please remember here so vehicles had been an idea that had come up numerous numerous times and i think when we said steampunk world i think we're like well how do we not do vehicles so what is your memory of early exploration of vehicles uh so i know we we went through a lot of iterations there too with a lot that were focused on um kind of the inverse of equipment where like i'm attaching uh creatures to the vehicle and therefore they're getting kind of like for every creature attached to this like they're getting some kind of bonus. Um, I was glancing back at things this morning and saw, like, a hot air balloon. It was, like, you know, every, every

creature boarded on this has flying, things like that. Um, uh, but, yeah, we, then, then we went through, through a bunch, because we, we, um, kind of shifted more towards what they became, but there were huge questions of like is it uh natively an artifact creature uh is it an artifact that like once you get in the car um now the now the car has power um so yeah yeah i can't remember all the versions that we went through though i don't know if you you have memories of other ones well so here's the big one is we came out of Vision with the idea of you somehow crewed the vehicle. But we really hadn't settled on how that worked quite yet. And then the main way, the way we turned it off to development was crew N meant you had to tap that many creatures.

Not that much power of creatures, but that many creatures. Oh, that's right, yep. And what happened was that was causing some problems because it made you have to play vehicles that are go-wide deck. And then in Ixalan, we were trying to make lands. We wanted to do double-faced lands, and so we wanted you to somehow, like, conquer the land or something. We ended up not going that direction,

but some idea of, like, you find the land or something. I mean, maybe conquer's the wrong word, but you find the land and to try to keep it off of vehicles, we did power there. That's right. And then I came back to Ian, who at the time Eric, Lauer,

and Ian together, just like you and I had co-done they had co-done the development and I came to Ian and I said we're trying this, you could try this on vehicles we were trying this here and it seemed to work well and Ian was a little skeptical at first

but they tried it and then it worked so that changed over The piece that I distinctly remember is at that time to go at first but they tried it and then it worked so um that changed okay yeah the piece that i distinctly remember is at that time um they were just an artifact not kind of um they didn't have the or no mechanically we were very interested in uh after that that they were an artifact creature that was dormant unless you had um uh tapped the the right number the right power of creatures and um jeremy at that time was like no it shouldn't be an artifact creature it should be an artifact and we're like oh okay that's uh that might be challenging now we have to hide the power

and toughness box inside the frame of the card um and i i think it was me although i i hate to steal credit here if it was someone else um said uh well let's let's just put it on the card anyway we've never done that before that's that's a little bit weird and unique um that might serve the fact that they're you know, that it's this special card type a little bit better, because we haven't done anything quite like that before with giving power and toughness, even though it's not natively an artifact creature.

Yeah, I mean, we ended up having to make a frame for it. Yeah, it... The version we had talked for a long time, right, where it was always an artifact creature, you just couldn't attack or block with it until you crewed it, and then, right, I don't remember if that might have been Jeremy. I don't remember exactly who made it.

Like, it was decided that it should not be a creature until you sort of turn it on. And then once someone's driving it, now it's like a creature. Yeah, I believe that came from creative because we had talked about that, but at the time we'd been kind of nervous because like, oh, now you get this extra value of like it's protected from sorcery speed removal and things like that.

And I mean, I think it ended up being the right call that just like you end up with something a little bit more unique now. OK, so let's talk about the other mechanics that we talked about. Energy, talk about vehicles. What is your memory of fabricate? So fabricate, I don't remember where in the process it came, but we were looking for sort of modular mechanics that, you know,

we, we thought could kind of represent the inventor flavor and let the player be a little bit clever but um they could like tie into other things and so um we we had fabricate as kind of this you know um either i've built you know used my my gear to build myself a little buddy or i've used it to um build myself like a ray gun or whatever it is and that that was kind of trying to get at that core inventor flavor.

I think for a while they were Thopters to kind of fit in with the magic origins. Yeah, they started as Thopters because they were trying to match magic origins. But flying was too good. You always picked the flying. So here's

what I believe happened. So we were in a meeting and we were trying to figure out what our... We knew we were missing a mechanic. We thought we were missing a mechanic. And so I wrote up on the board all the things... Well, the team. We brainstormed and wrote up on the board all the things we needed.

So we had a list of all the criteria that the mechanic needed to have. And then I was spitballing in the meeting and I said, how about this? And then people were like, yeah, that's pretty good. So it was just me spitballing in the meeting based on the list of criteria we'd written on the board.

But Do you remember the mechanics that we didn't end up using because we had a few that we pursued for a while well let's talk about those what mechanics didn't we use Sean so the two that stand

out in my memory that we've really spent a long time with one was reverse engineer that was really cool was like as a kicker on, make a temporary copy of an artifact you control, which was a super, super cool mechanic for getting at the feel. It was just, boy, there were so many levers that we couldn't deal with there. And, you know, copying inherently is a challenging mechanic to develop. It kind of became what we did come back to it for Saheeli's ability.

Right, that's exactly. Saheeli's ability was us making a nod toward, well, this used to be a whole mechanic, but I guess we'll just make it one ability on the planeswalker. And that kind of shows where there were developmental challenges given Saheeli's history. Yeah. It was, being on Saheeli was us making a throw to,

okay, this is a cool ability, maybe we can't do it as a whole mechanic, but, you know, it'd be cool on a Planeswalker, so. Yeah, it was a super fun mechanic in those early playtests. We just knew, you know. Oh yeah, it was a really fun mechanic it just caused endless headaches for play design so um and then the other one that we spent a lot

of time with um i remember what we called it we called it inventions i believe inventions okay yeah where you had um kind of a subtype of artifact that would go in your sideboard and you could invent them into your hand. So it was like, you know, using your sideboard as kind of your, your pool of things that you could invent. And that was another one that went really, really far into the process. And I remember it was like really at the handoff with kind of the development team where we were starting to see what those cards were going to need to look like to be at all balanced. And we had like five mana 2-2s and it was like, oh, this is not getting at the inventor flavor if you're making these really crummy looking cards. Well, let me explain a little bit for the audience how it worked.

There were a whole bunch of artifacts that they didn't need to go in your deck. Although I think they had mana cost. You could put them in your deck. But the idea was, when you invented, you could go get any one of these inventions. And the idea was, the flavor I think was

like, there's all sorts of doodads and tools and whatever, and you, the inventor, you can make whatever you need to in the moment to help you. And so the idea was that instead of being a tutor for a specific thing, it was this broad category of things. And, by the way,

so it did get handed off. It didn't get cut till the first month of development. Because development came to us and said, energy is very complex. Inventions is very complex. We can do one of them. Which would you prefer? And then we're like, okay, we have to do energy.

Energy was more core to what was going on than inventions. Yeah, yeah. Inventions was a cool idea that um i mean maybe someday we'd be able to find a version that worked but it was it was a challenging mechanic in that same way and yeah we had so many things that were kind of high complexity high like um uh like required a lot of like uh thought from the player and yeah yeah energy was the core thing that the set was about, so. Yeah, I mean, it's, I will say this, Inventions was mega cool.

It was, had we, I mean, what development basically said is these are both really interesting mechanics, and we can make one of them work, and then we were, like, energy, like, we had woven energy into the creative, like, energy was so Energy was so key to everything that there's just no way we could remove energy.

So that wasn't really a decision. It was the steam part of steampunk. Yes, it was. Yeah. Okay, so we talked about energy. We talked about vehicles. We talked about Fabricate. And then we talked about the two mechanics that didn't make it.

Any other sort of themes on the set you remember? The other things that, like... Well, I can remember a couple others that kind of got mostly cut along the way. We had the flavor of kind of the World's Fair, and we spent a lot of time trying to do some top-down designs there that didn't end up making it in, that were like prizes of, you take an action and you start accumulating, if you take the action enough, you get a prize for having won the competition.

And I think there's one or two enchantments in the set that are kind of the remnants of that cycle. But that ended up getting cut and there was a bounce stuff to my hand theme that worked really well with Fabricate and really well with Energy. And some of that is still there, but I think Aether Revolt explored that a little bit more in the final version. Yeah, I mean, some of the ideas that we had got pushed.

Aether Revolt picked up some of the themes that we had played around a little bit. Oh, here's something else that we tried to put in the set that didn't end up making the set. Polyphorate. Okay, yes. I mean, we explored that for a little while. Aether Revolt went even further. That I know they explored that for a little while uh either revolt went even further that i know they they carried through for a long time um but i think they ran into the same problem we did where it was well this looks cool because you've got all these plus one plus one counters and

energy but like this is a bad way to get energy so it's all about, you know, spread out some plus one plus one counters and use it that way. Yeah, I think actually Fabricate ended up taking the slot that Polyphorate held. Like, Polyphorate was in the set for a little while, we pulled it out, and then the vacuum of that made us make Fabricate.

Okay, yes. That sounds correct to me, yeah. Okay, so what is... The other interesting thing about Kaladesh was we were trying to do this inventor's fair. Like, so early on... Okay, so for Magic Origins, they had made Kaladesh, and they had made it very bright.

Like, one of the things that Jeremy Jarvis, who was the art director at the time, thought was very important was, a lot of times when you see steampunk, it's done very dark and very, like, pessimistically. And he really wanted to do it optimistically, not pessimistically. And Magic had done a lot of really downbeat worlds,

and we kind of felt like it was time for an upbeat world. And we knew Elman Kett was coming, so yeah. Yes. We needed contrast there. And so one of the things that happened early on was this idea of they had come up with this idea of this inventor's fair and I think from very

very early on, the idea of feel like an inventor was something that I was pushing from super early. And so I also know we spent a lot of time just trying to come up with individual, just crazy weird artifacts. What do you remember of that? Oh, yeah.

I mean, we spent a bunch of time, we made kind of like an updated version of the stations that fit together and a bunch of just like you know um top down or like you know just mechanically cool artifacts that i think um the the one that stands out the most that made it into the set was either flux um reservoir um that i believe was a a a Doug Byer card that just tickled us so much. That's the one that every time you cast a spell, you gain a life for every spell you've cast. Yeah.

And then you pay 50 life to deal 50 damage. And that pay 50 lifeline was just so entertaining to everyone that we fell in love with that card. Yeah, my... Go ahead. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, my contribution, I remember, the one of the wild... We made a whole bunch of wild cards.

We made a whole bunch. Not all of them made it into the set. The wild card that I made, that I remember made it into the set, was Panharmonicon. Oh, yeah, which is a beautiful card, yeah. That's one of those, like, wonderful lines of text that, like,

does all kinds of crazy things and is just like, yeah, yeah, that's a home run of a card. Yeah, I just like doubling things, so. I've heard that about you. So what else? I mean, we have a little bit of time left. What other memories do you have of making Kaladesh?

So, So what else? I mean, we have a little bit of time left. What other memories do you have of making Kaladesh? So in terms of cards, the other one that kind of stands out in my mind was like kind of fighting for Chandra to be a four ability planeswalker. to be a four ability planeswalker um that we you know we we had so rarely done that at that point um but because she was kind of the face of the set um i thought that was that was important and i remember actually for a long time uh she had on her one of her abilities was destroy an artifact i was like she is from this world but she is like is outside it. Let's have her be the best way that she's in here and wrecking things. And that didn't survive, but I always was tickled by that line. So you bring up some of the audience that doesn't know. Let me expand the story a little bit. Originally, Chandra was going to be the face of Kaladesh.

But the problem was that Kaladesh was all about, like, invention, right? And they're like, well, the next set is about rebellion. Well, that seems more like it makes sense for Chandra to be the face of the rebellion set. And we didn't have, like, we're like, who's, so we ended up making Saheeli because we didn't have somebody to be the face

of invention. We wanted a planeswalker that represented invention. So when you were, you were talking about how we wanted to have the four Chandra, because at the time we made that, she was the face of the set, but that changed. Okay, yes, you're totally right. I was forgetting that part of it. But yeah, it was such an inventor world that we needed someone who could more, you know, represent the local face of invention.

And yeah, that's where Saheeli came from. Right. Saheeli literally was, we want an inventor on the box. It's inventor world. We need an inventor planeswalker to put on the box. And Saheeli, I thought was an awesome, I like Saheeli a lot. Oh, I agree. Yeah.

Yeah. Otherwise, I remember, you know, a lot of like remember a lot of early card names with terrible puns in them and then Do you remember any of the early puns? Do you remember any of them?

Oh, um, not no, I can't, I'm sorry Yeah, I put a lot of bad puns in the set, so not many of them stayed so yeah yeah I will say this

like Kaladesh is one of my favorite sets I've ever made a combination of A I like the real upbeat positivity of the world which not a lot of our worlds have that upbeat positivity. And it

was really a Johnny-Jenny sort of world. It really was like a set all about, like, let's be creative and see what you can do. And one of the things that I had said really early on was I wanted the variance to be a little higher than normal. Meaning, when you play Magic, if I play the same deck multiple

times, how different is the plays of the deck my goal walking in was I wanted the variance to be as high as a black bordered set like silver border we do crazy high variance because variance is fun but in black border we limit about how much variance we have because we want

to make sure that the good players are winning, we want skill to matter and if you get variance too high, skill matters a little bit less. But I know walking in, we wanted that. I really sort of enjoyed how we tapped into that, and in a way, that was really fun to me. Yeah, I think it's such a...

You mentioned the creative and the positivity of the world, and I think there's just so many cool things about the Aetherborn as this really unique take in like how how black operates as a color or the gremlins as kind of you know the the feeders of the world and just generally like yeah the the inventor flavor was just like such a delight to get to work with so any final thoughts i I can see my desk here, so we're almost to work,

but any final thoughts on the making of Kaladesh? No, it was, I remember, like, one thing that tickled us so much when we had vehicles was there was a ton of debate over, like,

whether creatures could get in them as soon as they hit the board whether the uh vehicle would kind of have haste or natively or not and and when we finally we you know came to the conclusions that we did about but how those would operate um we were really entertained by kind of the the vehicles with haste that you kind of had the flavor of like the car drives up and you hop right in and it takes off. And those are still some of my favorite vehicles from the set. Oh, another, it was funny.

We actually spent a lot of time talking about whether vehicles were allowed to get inside the vehicles. Oh, yes. The car driving the car was way more of a debate than, yes, you are right. I think we ended up saying that it just wasn't worth the words to stop it because it didn't happen much, and it was kind of novel when it did, so we left it be, but...

Yeah, there's those quirks at the edges of, like, you know, putting boots on your ooze or whatever, but you kind of embrace that you get into meme territory with those things, and that's okay. Mechanically, it's doing what you want. So anyway, I am now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

But Sean, I loved having you on. It was great talking Kaladesh. So nice to see you, and thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so anyway, guys, I'll see you and thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so anyway guys, I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.