Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #822: Strixhaven Design, Part 1

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

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

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so today, or today I will start telling, it's going to be more than one podcast, the story of Strixhaven, or Strixhaven Design. How did Strixhaven come to be?

So there's a lot of cool parts to this story, and I don't know how many podcasts it will take, but I will take as many as it takes to tell my story. Okay. So the original origin of the story probably goes back to original Innistrad. So we were trying to figure out how to make a werewolf's work. of werewolves work. And Tom Lapilli,

who was on the team, there was this double-sided mechanic that Duel Master, another trading card game, the one we make for Japan, had used. And so we knew we could print it.

And he suggested that. And it seemed a little out of the box at first, but we tried it and it was really fun. And it didn't take long. So the way, obviously, that the double-faced cards originally

worked were transforming double-faced cards. You play side A, and you can do something to turn it to side B, maybe even turn it back to side A. But you always play side A. But it didn't take very long once we came up with transforming double-faced cards to make modal double-faced cards. What if

you did them like split cards, where you could cast side A or cast side B? And then whatever you cast, that's the side that it was. And split cards can't do permanents. Split cards can just do spells, because you can't have the other side of that card on the battlefield. So I'd always realized that there was some... Like, I always wanted to do split cards where one of the sides

or both of the sides was a permanent, but split cards didn't let me do that. And so very quickly realized that modal double-faced cards were, oh, a really neat way that you could do double-faced cards. But transforming made the most sense in Innistrad. It was all about, you know, things turning to other things. It was the horror set. And I didn't want to mix and match two different kinds of double-faced cards just because it would cause confusion. So I said, okay, this is an awesome idea.

I'll put it in my back pocket. I'll wait till I find a good place to use it and then I'll use it there. And over the years, I mean, I always sort of thought about it and I would think about it. Is this the right place to use it? But I never really found

sort of the perfect opportunity to use it, which is ironic as the story goes on as we ended up using it a whole bunch of places. But anyway, it is one of those mechanics that I knew I wanted to do. Okay, so flash forward to we're having an off-site, and we are planning

the next batch of sets that we're doing. So this was I think we were doing a three year plan that started with throne of Eldrin. So throne of Eldrin in the next three years, we were, we were planning all that stuff out. Um,

and the, uh, Aaron Forsythe had asked me, um, so Mark, is there any mechanical thing you want to build a set around? And I said, yes,

yes, there is. I would like to build a set around? And I said, yes. Yes, there is. I would like to build a set around these modal double-faced cards that I thought were really cool. Anyway, I had a checklist of things that I cared about. Like, of things I knew that we'd wanted to do. And among other things on my checklist that we wanted to do, one was an enemy-colored set. things on my checklist that we wanted to do. One was an enemy colored set. So

Magic, we had done Apocalypse, which was the third set in the Invasion block. And that's like 18 years ago, I think. And then we later did Eventide, which was a hybrid enemy colored set, which was in the Shadowmoor block. That was 11

years ago. Actually, these dates are based on the... I just realized, when I wrote my document that I handed over, I used these dates. They might even be plus one year or plus two years since I wrote that document. But anyway, it was a while ago. Apocalypse was a long time ago,

and that's the last time we had done an enemy-colored set, a focused set. I mean, we'd done enemy color. Obviously, Ravnica has guilds that are enemy-colored, but as far as a set that's all based on enemy colors. Now, interestingly, originally, Dragons of Tarkir was supposed to be enemy-colored,

but what happened was, the idea was we were going to have a three-color set, drop a color, and have a two-color set. And we decided to do wedges because we hadn't done a wedge set yet. But the problem Eric Lauer pointed out to me was when you were drafting wedge, the correct plan is to draft

enemies because enemies let you have two different possible wedges. So if we had dropped down to an enemy set, just the draft would have been too similar. Because the first set, the wedge set, you would have drafted enemies and then the next set you would have drafted enemies. And we wanted them to be different. So we ended up changing

Drakir to ally. Likewise, on stable, I wanted to do an unfaction set. That's something I thought would be fun. And I was planning to do an enemy colored set. The problem was the one faction that I was kind of committed to was the steam floggers

because I wanted to do contraptions and I wanted to have Steamflogger boss in the set. And so I looked at red-white and red-blue and neither made perfect sense to me. I thought about red-blue for a while but just the

chaotic nature of the Steamfloggers just didn't feel a good fit for blue. So we ended up putting in red green, which made more sense. But anyway, that moved me to ally rather than enemy. So anyway, I'd been trying to make an enemy set. And so I knew I wanted to do that. Also, Jenna Helen and I, Jenna Helen's one of the creative people, she and I have been talking a lot

about different genre tropes in different places we could explore. And one of the ones that she and I talked about was magic school. So the magic school trope, there's many, many sources, but the idea of you go to a school that teaches you magic.

It is actually a pretty well... I mean, obviously, there's a few examples that are more known than others, but it goes way back, and there's lots of examples of the trope. But anyway, I talked... We talked a little bit about wanting to maybe find a place. I'm really, really into genre clifters,

meaning I love... What I have found is resonance is very powerful. It makes people want to play the set and gets them excited because they can connect to something that they understand. Like, resonance really, it taps into, like, people have emotional connections to things. And when you sort of use resonance, you're tapping into emotion they already have,

things they're already excited by. And it just makes for compelling, fun content. Anyway, I like genre stuff in general. And one of the things I've also been looking at is trying to find more general life experience stuff that we can tap into. And Magical School is cool because Magical School is not just magical school,

but school. Because Magical School is built on top of school and there's lots and lots of school tropes that we could use. So doing a Magical School would allow us to do Magical School is built on top of school and there's lots and lots of school tropes that we could use. So doing a Magical School would allow us to do Magical School tropes and also do just school tropes. Anyway, all this was kind of fluttering around

of different ideas I liked. And then I realized that if we took Magical School, we could make it an enemy color faction set and then we realized that if you did a Magical School, We could make it an enemy color faction set. And then we realized that if you did a magic school, one of the things that people have been asking for forever is a set based on instants and sorceries. We've done a set that was all creatures. We did a planeswalker set.

We've done an enchantment set, an artifact set. We've done just about every card type there is. We've done a land, you know, Zemekar cares about land. But we'd never done, I mean, we had done instant sorcery as a small theme, like as a sub-theme in sets, but never as the major theme. And so the idea of going to a magical school where people are

learning magic, you know, made a lot of sense that it's kind of cool to be our instant sorcery. And I had MDFCs. MDFCs are a great way to make that happen. Because one of the problems in a spell matter set is getting enough spells to matter, especially in limited. But if one side is an instant sorcery and the other side is a creature, that really helps solve that problem. So it kind of all came together, right? So it was like, okay,

we could do Magical School, we could do Enemy of Color Factions, we could do Instant Sorcery Matters, and we can do MDFCs. Anyway, so I was very excited. So when Aaron had asked me that, I said yes, and I go, I have a whole package in mind, and I pitched this idea

in the meeting, and everybody was excited. I said, I have a whole package in mind. And I pitched this idea in the meeting. And everybody was excited. They said, sounds good. Okay. So real quickly, another little history here. So when Unglued first came out way back in 2000, or sorry, 1998, the the original the very first onset um there was a card in it called bfm uh and so i was then making the second on this there was a set called unglued 2 that never ended up getting made but i i i it went as far as getting art so it went very far along before it got killed um or put on hiatus. And anyway,

in it, inspired by the popularity of BFM, I had done the reverse, meaning I put two cards on one card. So split cards, obviously. And anyway, when I first convinced Bill to put split cards on Invasion, Bill liked them, I liked them, I think Richard Garfield liked them, and other than that, nobody liked them.

It was a major fight to get them out. If you listen to my podcast on Invasion with me and Bill Rose that I recorded a few weeks past, we talk about that. And anyway, it was a big fight, but we finally got them out there. Audience loved them. Meanwhile,

a similar thing happened in Innistrad. I talked about this earlier where we were trying to make werewolves work. We made the double-sided cards likewise. And if you listen to the podcast that Eric Lauer and I had talking about Innistrad, that was also a huge problem. There was a lot of resistance to making

double-faced cards. But they had come out and they were very popular. So when I was going to make MGFCs I'm like, okay, really it's just a combination of split cards and, you know, double-faced cards, like transforming double-faced cards. It's a combination of those two things. Yes, there was resistance to split cards, but we had made them and they were horribly successful.

Yes, there was initial resistance to double-faced cards, but we made them and they were horribly successful. Okay, I'm combining two really successful things. There's no way in the world that I could have any problems. Wah, wah, wah. Not true. So there was a bunch of resistance. So much so that, you know, upper management asked questions. Like, we hear there's some people unhappy with this. And so Aaron Forsythe decided, he asked me, why don't we, way ahead of time, let's put a mini team together, we'll

make some cards, because the easiest way to sort of convince the people we needed to convince is let them see actual cards. If we can show how cool the cards are, that's the easiest way, because if we can show them something, they'll go, ooh, the audience will love that, it's easier to go, okay, yeah, we should make that. So we put together a little mini team to make double-faced cards. Modal double-faced cards. And what happened was we made so many and they were so easy to make

and they were so cool that I got really excited. And so obviously, what do I do when there's pressure and people say not to make it? I try to make more of it. So I went to Aaron and I said, look, Aaron, these are really cool. I think instead of just putting all of them in one set, we could spread them out.

One of the things that I've really been working on is trying to find more cohesiveness to the year. We used to have blocks, obviously. It all took place in one set, I'm sorry, one setting. And, you know, the mechanics would overlap. And in the new world where we're bouncing around, we don't stay in places as long, and it's hard for the year to have a cohesiveness. So I said, what if we tried this? What if we took

this cool new mechanic that really is flexible and let each set could do its thing in its own way, but what if we put it in all three sets? So Zendikar Rising could have things on the front with a land on the back, so whatever it is, it could always be a land. And Call Time could have things on the front with a land on the back. So whatever it is, it could always be a land. And Kaltime could have gods in which the gods on the front and things related to the god, their hammer or their ravens or whatever could be on the back.

Anyway, that all ended up working out. Anyway, it all worked out. There's a longer story there, but I'm talking about Kaltime. I'm not talking about Sturgishaven. Okay, so what happened was I got the go-ahead to do that, but then I realized that I'd caused myself a little bit of a problem,

which is I had planned to build a set around double-faced cards, and I now had stripped double-faced cards out of it. So that was a problem I would have to solve. Okay, so it's finally time to sit down and start exploratory design on Strixhaven. So the idea... Okay, so we knew going in,

we knew going in it was an enemy-colored faction set. So one of the things that I was very eager to do was Ravnica, original Ravnica, had been our first faction set. I had made, in fact, it's the first set I had made while I was head designer. I became head designer like in the middle of Champions of Kamigawa block. And that was kind of, the train that left the station. So there wasn't a lot I could do. But the first set really that was kind of my baby that I could oversee as head designer was Ravnica, the original Ravnica block.

And I ended up, I mean, working closely with Brady Dommeroth and the creative team, we ended up coming up with the guild idea. And that was a big hit. Audiences loved it. And we really started, I mean, and there were some precursors to that, by the way. Like, if you go back,

we had done some faction in the past, but not quite as that tight as we had done there. But anyway, that just definitely led us to try to do other factioning. And so, you know, Shards of Alara happened, Concepts of Akir happened. But one of the things that I really wanted is,

we were in a weird space where, I mean, yeah, we could go back to Ravnica from time to time, but, like, factioning is so popular and players like it so much, and two colors really is by far the optimal way to do archetyping and stuff for draft, that I'm like, we just have to be able to do other two-color combinations. And so one of the goals of the set was saying,

I want to just sort of put a stake in the ground saying, hey, we can make really other cool, flavorful faction sets, two-color faction sets, that have their own feel to them that don't just feel like sort of Ravnica Part 2 or something. They feel like their own thing. And so there were a couple things.

The idea that I had, and this all ties together with how the set came to be, was I liked the idea of having five factions that had a thematic connection to them. Like, one of the things when you look at Ravnica

is each Ravnica guild really is just, like, ooh, what do these colors have in common, right? What do these colors, you know, when you look at, like, Azorius, like, well, okay, when you overlap white and blue, what do you get? Oh, they love rules, you know, and when you look at, like, Azorius, like, well, okay, when you overlap white and blue, what do you get? Oh, they love rules, you know, and

the Ravnica was not, it was kind of guided by the colors and the color combinations, but, and not that we didn't make some overlying structure between them, okay, they're guilds in a city, I mean, we did do a little bit, but it's not, the factions weren't driven by a larger

element of them, right? The factions weren't driven by a larger element of them, right? The factions weren't driven by some larger piece. And so, the idea that I had was, and the reason I liked putting a faction set in something that had sort of top-down clusters that I could work with,

top-down theming, or top-down, it's not really a top down set, so top down is the wrong word, but the idea that I had genres to work with, I had flavor to work with as far as I could make like what I wanted to do was make factions in which the factions

belong to a larger whole that the factions weren't just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's ten guilds that belong to the guild pack, but each of the guilds are really their own animal, where what I was interested in is, what if you had factions that all clearly belonged together, that they were different facets of the same thing?

And the reason that I was really enamored with school was we were working with something real and resonant that people knew. So the idea that we had very, I mean, this was in early exploratory, is I said, okay. So one of the things also about the magical school tropes is a lot of times when you see magical schools, they really have a lot of fun with, oh, I'm taking a class in potions.

I'm taking a class in charms. I'm taking a class. You know, I'm taking a class in charms. I'm taking class, you know, that the classes you're taking are all magic, that you're taking classes in magic. And not that you wouldn't take classes in magic at a magic university, but one of the things that I was fascinated by that I hadn't seen as much of

was imagine if this was more of a real university that you studied real subjects and that magic was a means, a ways to study that subject. For example, I love the idea of what if history class was you summon the spirit of the dead person and then talk to them, ask them questions.

Like that's a really cool way to study history that's a magic way to study history. That's not, you don't normally get to study history by questioning the person who lived history, especially the long dead. And so very early on, I was like, okay, we have five factions. We're at a magical school.

Let's divvy up the factions based on school. Let's take school subjects and divvy them up. And the thing that I liked so much about it is that because we were messing in a real thing, it was a tangible... Like, one of the things that when you're trying to build something is the more existing real structure that you're using,

the more reality that you're building around, the more connective tissue you get to it. And so early on, I'm not sure it was day one, but very early on in exploratory, even before vision, we just wrote on the board, what are all the subject matters?

Like, what can you study? And our goal was to try to sort of narrow down to five general areas. So the first one that we sort of settled on was making black- we sort of settled on was making black green sort of science leaning toward biology oh another thing that I realized early on like I wanted to differentiate

the structure from Ravnica so number one was I was going to build all the colleges build all the factions colleges in, sorry, build all the factions' colleges in this case, around a unifying theme, which was going to be the school. That would allow me to have, instead of a mechanic per faction, I can have mechanics for all of them, and it was how they used, like, everybody used the same mechanics, just they used them differently.

That's how you showed the difference between them. So rather than having each thing using its own unique mechanic, which is how we did the Ravnica, they use them differently. That's how you showed the difference between them. So rather than having each thing using its own unique mechanic, which is how we did the Ravnica, we'd have overlapping. And because we're thematically tying it and having a mechanical, like this is a spells matter set, all the factions care about spells matter, that's something that let us have

a unifying group of mechanics. And the third thing was, and this is just the color pie in me, because we were doing enemies, one of the neat things about enemies is they inherently represent a conflict. Well, what if that conflict was baked into the faction? Like, one of the things, for example, you know, when I think back to college, I think back to standing around with friends that studied the same stuff I studied and arguing with them. standing around with friends that studied the same stuff I studied and arguing with them. Like, what is more a college than, you know, like,

shared love of a subject that you then fight about, you know what I'm saying? And that it seemed neat to me that you could build these colleges around conflict because there's always inherent things, like there's just inherent conflicts that happen in education. And so the idea that the schools inherently had a conflict built into them felt like a school. Everything was coming together, and that felt real natural. But the challenge was I had to figure out, I and my team, we had to figure out what made sense for each of the schools. Okay, so first up was black-green.

That was the one that became obvious. Black-green's conflict is life versus death, right? Green is the power of nature, and black harness is the power of death. And there's a cycle there. It's something really interesting. And what seems like, well, if you were Black-Green, the cycle of life is the thing you'd want to study, you know what I'm saying?

And so, like, being science-oriented, and one of the things that we wanted to do also was we were very interested in making sure that whatever we did, we steered in a different direction than we had in Ravnica, right? And so one of the things that I liked a lot in making the Black Green, not just science people, but really scientists all

wanted to understand, of wanting to see how things work. In Ravnica, we have that, but it's not the black-green. It's green-blue. Simic is the one that wants to understand the world. Simic is the one that's trying to improve upon nature, I think is our

line for Simic. I love the idea of people that were sort of fascinated and wanted to learn about the world, but just were sitting in a different place I love the idea of people that were sort of fascinated and wanted to learn about the world, but just were sitting in a different place. So the idea of making black-green the science biology sort of base thing made a lot of sense, and that

they were very much about getting their hands dirty and experiencing things and seeing the system live in itself. So that was the first college that sort of made sense to lock that in. Okay, I'll get to the mechanics in a second. Let me start with their flavor. Okay, the next one that I think we settled on

was, I think it was Red White. Okay, so Red White's conflict is chaos versus order. And what I realize is that it's about systems, that chaos and order are systems, and that it's interesting to think about, okay, well, who studies systems? Who studies the large... Now, we'd already said that the natural world

was going to be black-green, but there's something interesting in that red and white were the two colors that most care about people and connections. Now, white is very much about the good of the group, and I'm trying to help everybody. But red is very much about passionate connections. You know, red is the most loyal of the colors, the color that I will die for someone who I care about. That red is definitely the one who has a lot of very close, strong, familiar

bonds. And I said, okay, well, what if white and red were the ones that cared about people, not just structure of anything, because structure of the world, fine, that's black-green, structure of people, structure of society. And it's kind of interesting, it said, well, if you're going to study, so that's history, right? I mean, note when I say any one thing, there's a lot of expansion. When I say history, it's sociology, it's theology, it's psychology.

It's all the things that go into understanding why people click together and how people function as a larger group. And even it's how they function as individuals, because you have to understand that to understand how they interact with one another. And the idea of history, one of the things that's interesting is whenever we go to a world, we always try to find the color pairings for that world, obviously. And red-white tends to be, just by the nature of how its mechanics play out, very aggressive. And it's often about the military,

attacking creatures or something. The idea of tapping a little more into reds- whites, sort of wanting to understand the bigger part of people seemed really cool to me. And so I liked the idea of them being history. And the inherent conflict, like just like the fun thing, and this is true for

both black, green, and for red, white, is part of the conflict is what matters. Like when you look at biology, green and black are like, is it the life that brings new things or is it the death that shapes things? Like what is the more driving force there?

And the cool thing with red and white is the idea of what drives society? Is it the rules and the structure that is made or is it the familiar bonds that matter? You know what I'm saying? And that red and White can really argue about sort of what is the essence of what history comes from. And once again, the reason the confluents are awesome is

there's no right answer. I mean, if you want to argue that life is the foundational source, you can. If you want to argue that death is the foundational source, you can. If you want to argue that it's about the chaotic nature of people, you can. Or the orderly nature of people, you can't. That's the cool part about this. It's not that one is right and one is wrong. It's actually an interesting conversation to have.

Okay. Next one that I think we figured out was... Blue-red. It's funny. Originally in blue-red, we explored a little bit the idea of them being hard science versus Black-Green's more softer science. With the idea that, you know,

Blue-Red, the elemental colors. But when we talked with Dog and the creative team, they made the good point that they started staring too much toward Izzet. And so we decided... I think Dog was the one that actually first pitched, what do you think of an art school? And the more we thought about that, it really made a lot of sense

because Red-Blue's conflict is the idea of intellect versus emotion, right? And one of the great debates of art, which is a really cool thing, is what is the purpose of art? Is art supposed to make you think or is art supposed to make you feel? And once again, there's no right answer. You know what I'm saying? It's just like I like the idea that one side of the art school is very prepared and cerebral and planning

everything out and the other end is very raw and emotional and spontaneous and it's all about what you make people feel when you do it and that seemed like a really neat sort of thing to make the art school so I thought that was pretty cool okay next up was Blue Green

we thought a lot about blue green once again because of Simic and also it made sense that black green was biology also Simic was very biology focused so we didn't want to do that for the blue greens college but something that came up was when you started looking at the main topics of study math was a really big one and I'm like well where does math go?

And I remember there was an article I'd read a while back that was talking about one of the big debates in mathematics is where does math come from? And the question is, is math a force? Is it just a natural force that man, that people discovered? Or did humans make it? Is math a result of humanity, a creation of humanity? Or, you know what I'm saying? Like, was there nothing and humans made it? Or was it always there and we just discovered it?

And when I realized that, the green-blue conflict is the nature-nurture conflict. Like, you know, are you born the way you are? Or do you make yourself the way you are? And that, knowing that that was one of the big, like, sort of internal conflicts of math was really cool to me. And I said, oh, that's kind of neat. And also, blue-green has a lot of structural things that worked well with, like, mathy concepts. As we started to sort of trying to make math things work, blue and green worked really well with that. So we decided that it made a lot of sense to be math. So that left white-black.

White-black was actually the trouble child for a while. So the one thing we realized early on was, well, the one big missing, gaping hole from an academic standpoint was language, was literature, was writing, was communications. Like, none of the other schools had any of that. And we're like, okay, we really kind of need that. I'm like, okay, well, like, white's conflict, white-black's conflict is the idea of the good of the group versus the good of the individual. And one of the interesting things is there's an interesting debate in

literature. I went to communication school here. And in communication and in literature, the idea of is what's the point of writing? Are you writing to change the world? Or are you writing to take advantage? Like, the idea is, what is the role and the ethics

of someone who's writing? And the idea is, you know, the white side could say, look, I'm writing to make the world a better place. I'm writing because ethically, I'm trying to do things that enhance the world and I'm spreading messages that I think will help people. Where the flip side is black saying, no, no, no. I'm writing because it lets me express who I am.

It lets me be what I want. And writing can be a means for me to get the things that I want. And it seemed like a cool conflict. Anyway, so we decided that we were going to make white-black the college of

words, of communication, of literature and stuff. Anyway, most of that happened in exploratory and early vision design. We had settled upon sort of our schools pretty early.

Like I said, the last one is we changed over Blue Red to Art School as part of the last change we made. But that was pretty early in vision. But anyway, so guys, that is how the schools came to be. I noticed I can see my desk from here,

so I'm going to have to wrap up here, but I have more podcasts to come, so hopefully you guys are enjoying hearing all about Strixhaven. It's fun to talk about it. But anyway, guys, since I see my desk, 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.

See you guys next time.