Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #823: Strixhaven Design, Part 2

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

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

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so last time I was talking about the making of Strixhaven. And so I will continue talking about Strixhaven. Okay, so last time I talked about the making of the colleges. But I talked about sort of their flavor. I didn't talk about the making of the colleges, but I talked about sort of their flavor. I didn't talk about the mechanics. So let me start by talking about the mechanics. So one of the things that was really important was we didn't want them to be the Ravnica guilds.

So for example, red-white shouldn't be the aggro deck. Black-white shouldn't be a bleeder deck. We had to think about what they were. Black-white shouldn't be a bleeder deck. We had to think about what they were. The trickiest one, by the way, the trickiest one was red-blue, because the problem was the whole set was about Spells Matter, and red-blue was the Spells Matter guild.

So we'll get there. We'll get there. Okay, so let's first start with red-white. So we were interested in red-white not being the weenie rush color, right? So we said, well, what if we went in the opposite direction? What if we made it a slow-controlling color? And the idea that we were very enamored with was since we had made it the history college, well, what if the graveyard was important?

What if we can make the graveyard matter? The other thing that we were very interested in is thematically using spirits. Because I love the idea that you would get spirits from the dead to talk to, to learn about history and stuff. And so we really built them in a slower thing, more controlling aspects, maybe used to the graveyard. them in a slower thing, more controlling aspects, maybe used to the graveyard. So one of the things we realized when we looked at the graveyard was white is allowed to get

creatures out of the graveyard, and artifacts out of the graveyard, and enchantments out of the graveyard, and planeswalkers out of the graveyard. Red can get instants and sorcerers out of the graveyard. So between them, they actually had access to get a lot of different stuff out of the graveyard. And also another thing that we played into is realizing they actually had access to get a lot of different stuff out of the graveyard. And

also another thing that we played into is realizing that one of the fun things we could do was caring about things leaving the graveyard. It's something we had done on a few cards, but we realized that was a fun theme we could play around with. So anyway, we liked the idea that red-white is not the fast

so we ended up making that slower. I think in original vision design, red-white was the slowest of them. Set design sped them up a little bit. They ended up not being the slowest. They're a little more mid-range, because I think blue-red had to be a little slower. But anyway, so red-white, we started with the idea of, okay, red-white is not fast. But that said to us, okay, well, who's the, someone's got to be aggro. And we looked at all the opportunities.

We're like, well, I guess it needed to be white-black. And so we decided to make white-black aggro. Now, here's one of the problems we had with white-black was was we had sort of backed into it being the literature thing, and it made sense. We could justify it being literature. And we knew we wanted it to be the fast guild because it made sense mechanically if red-white wasn't the fast guild. But we're like, what does speed and aggression

have to do with literature? Like, how do those two things come together? And that's when one of the things that I had been looking for the whole time was trying to find a way to differentiate the schools in many different ways. So one of the concepts that we talked a little bit about was, what if each school had a different kind of magic? What if the kind of magic they used was a little bit different? And so when you sort of lay out the different kinds of ways you can do magic, one of them is verbal, right?

You can say words. One of the ways that you can do magical spells is you speak it. It's verbal. And then it dawned on me that, well, if white-black was the language, the word school, it made perfect sense that they would use vocal magic. And then it made me realize that, well, vocal magic, one of the nice things about vocal magic, it's fast. I say what I want to say and it's done. And a lot of the other ways to use magic are slower. And I said, okay, well, what if, what if, what if, because it was the word school, they use vocal magic.

And because vocal magic is the fastest of the magic, what if that was also the place they did combat? That it was sort of the school of magical combat, like the school where you train for combat. And then that started, it started just tying things together in a cool way. One of the things Doug Byer had done, Doug was the creative rep, together in a cool way. One of the things Doug Beyer had done, Doug was the creative rep, is he was trying to find tropes of school, school tropes of

different kinds of students. And he was really looking for a place to sort of put like, we call ROTC in the US, but like the military training. And he wanted kind of a place for kind of the mean kids. And anyway, it sort of all came together. And it was kind of neat because it was one of those things where we had mean kids. And anyway, it sort of all came together.

And it was kind of neat because it was one of those things where we had component pieces, and then once we sort of found the link, once we found a way to make words the thing that linked them all together, it really came together. And then white-black got to be our aggressive faction. Next up was, we'll talk blue-red.

So blue-red's problem was that Izzet, which we were trying to stay off of... Oh, by the way, the other nice thing about white-black being fast is white-black Orzhov, the other guilds we were trying to stay off of, is slow, very slow and bleeding. So that was very different from them.

So blue-red, the problem was Izzet is a spell faction color, we're in a spell faction set. So we said, okay, how do we make a spell so that was very different from them. Okay, so Blue-Red, the problem was, Izzet is a spell faction color, we're in a spell faction set, so we said, okay, how do we make a spell matter but different? And what we realized was a lot of the ways that Izzet worked is you want to cast a lot of spells. There are a lot of triggers that said, hey, when you play a spell, something happens.

So we decided, what if Blue-Red is more about making the big spell? What if blue-red is spell-focused but big? So it sort of does things to help it get to a larger place where it's just playing big spells, and then it's more controlling. Blue and red have aspects where you can, what if we made blue-red the control deck, so that it's sort of stalling

until it can build up its mana in the late game to make a big sort of splash. Like, once it gains control, it does big splashy things to win. And we like the idea that it's the art school that, like, it kind of puts on a show. Like, it's sort of slow and stalling until it does this big dramatic thing that felt very, it felt very, I don't know, it felt appropriate for the art school.

Okay, next we had black and green. So black-green Golgari, the black-green guild, is graveyard-based, right? It's a little slower, grindy graveyard-based. Well, we'd already said that red-white was going to be a little slower graveyard-based. That kind of deck was red-white, so it couldn't be black-green.

And since we were the biology thing, we liked a lot the idea of maybe life-mattering. Life-mattering is a theme we do from time to time. Normally we do it in white-black. That's the most common place to do life-mattering in sets. But we thought it would be cool to do it here, like the vampires in Ixalan had done in Life Matters. And when I say Life Matters,

both in that you can generate life and you can spend life. That life is a resource that you use in different ways. And so we thought that was really cool in Black Green that that kind of style was very different from the way

that, you know, Golgari and Ravnik had been. The final one was blue-green. That was our math school. So in vision design, we decided to try to make it go wide. One of the things we did is we thought of different strategies

that different guilds did, right? And so go wide, and Ravnica is a white-green thing. So we said, well, what if it was a green-blue thing? That could be interesting. So that's the path that we went down. Once we handed the set off, Yanni Skolnick led the set design for the set.

He and his team realized that actually it worked a little bit better if instead of being a go-wide strategy, it was a ramp strategy. So they converted it over and they made it a ramp strategy. So the idea that it's more mid-range, but you're working to build up and to get bigger things out faster.

And the reason that worked so well was when you try to do math things, growth becomes a big part of it. And so a lot of the math-oriented things wanted to, like, double things. Like, the idea of growth works very well into making it feel math-y. And so by making ramp part of it, you could do the more growth-oriented things. Okay, another big things we had done when trying to do the schools. Oh, before I get to that, though, I talked about white-black being the vocal school.

So we did give each school its own type of magic. Let me run through that real quick. So white-black is vocal. They talk. They're the word school. Blue-red is the art school. So they are gesture-based magic. It's their movements that generate the magic. And so the idea that the school of dance and the school of, you know, the idea is that when you're doing your magic, it's almost artistic looking when you're doing your magic in the art school, the art college.

And then for Black Green, we did component-based. So the idea there is just eye of a newt. You know, the idea that you're going and getting components and putting them together felt very, very wither-bloom and felt very biology-based and like, oh, I gotta go out in the world and gather components to build my thing. Red-white is scroll-based and like, oh, I got to go out in the world and gather components to build my thing.

Red-white is scroll-based. They're all about history and reading and understanding the past. So it's kind of cool that their spells are all ancient, that the spells they're using are in fact old spells. They have the oldest spells and they're captured in time on scrolls. And then for green-blue,

we just tried to do sort of math magic, that they're captured in time on scrolls. And then for Green Blue, we just tried to do sort of math magic, that they're using formulas, and that their magic is sort of woven, math is woven into it. We thought it was really cool. The other big thing that I thought was neat about this is because we had each school having a really strong thematic thing,

it let the people who are doing the world building on the art side, like, it's fun to say, these are magic users, but they're math magic users. What does that mean? You know, these are history magic users. What does that mean? And it's really cool to let each group sort of find a cool thing that could really hit upon what the school was. Okay. The other thing we wanted to do was we wanted each school to have a mascot. So the reason for this is

one of the challenges, so let me come back to a theme that I dropped last time. So originally we were going to build the set around MDFCs because one of the challenges in the Spell Matter set is you need to find ways to get a lot of instants and sorceries into decks while still having some way to get

creatures. One of the ways to do that is through casting tokens. The creature tokens like you can make a sorcery or an instant that makes a creature token and then it's made a creature but it counts. Oh, real quickly,

when we talked about, well, sorry, what order I need to do this in? about, well, sorry. What order do I need to do this in? Well, okay, let me finish the tokens and then I'll get back to the mechanics. Okay. So we, tokens help you have spells that are creatures, sort of, essentially. And so we knew we wanted to have a mascot for each school.

So the white-black school, so Silverquill, we knew, mascot for each school. So the white-black school, so Silverquill, we knew looking at all the choices between the schools, we decided that white-black made the most sense for flying. And the reason is red and green really aren't flying colors.

And so you had blue-red, green-black, red-white, and green-blue. Every other color combination had green or red in it. So the only color combination without green or red was white-black. So white-black kind of had to have the flyer. So originally we made the flyer a gargoyle.

It was actually a white and black artifact creature token. We thought that was kind of cool because it fit into the theme of the college. It turned out that while it fit the school theme, it didn't do a great sense of reinforcing the college itself. And so they ended up making the Inklings, which are a brand new, you know, creatures made of ink, which was kind of cool. But anyway, we had made it a 2-1 flyer. That didn't change. Just the creative of what it was changed. For Blue-Red, we always knew we wanted elementals.

Blue-red's the elemental colors. Like I said, we originally were trying to have the school have more to do with elementals, but we said, okay, we can't do that, but we could have the elemental be... It'd be kind of fun that they're an art school, but maybe they work with elements, and the idea that they can craft elementals seems sort of cool. I think we had made ours 3-3 when I handed over the file. And then in set design, Yanni and his team ended up making it a little bit bigger, because it's

the big splashy, you know, the more controlling things. They made them 4-4. Black-green, we tried a bunch of things, couldn't find anything we liked, so we ended up making a token. They're the one that we sort of made, which are pests. We called them grubs in Vision Design. And the idea was

they're just 1-1 creatures that die and gain you life. Black and Green had this Life Matters thing, so it's kind of cool that its token sort of has something to do with life. We talked about maybe making them lifelink. The problem was Green doesn't have lifelink, only Black does. And we talked about it,

but in the end we decided it was kind of cool that when you sacrifice them, you got the life out of them, which played in the component magic element of the school. Okay. Then for red-white, I think the original version, we knew we wanted to be spirits,

because there's a little bit of spirit tribal in it. I think we made them 2-2 in our handoff, and I think Jan and his team changed them to tribal in it. I think we made them 2-2 in our handoff, and I think Jan and his team changed them to 3-2. I think they needed just a little more heft on them, so they added a power. But we like the idea of the history school has spirits. That made a lot of sense.

And then for the math school, we had always decided, in vision design, we called them fractals, so the name of them didn't change. What we had done originally, because we were going go wide, was Quandrix would make multiple tokens.

There's only school that made multiple tokens. So it would make a lot of 1-1s because we were trying to go wide. And so the idea was that you're making a bunch of 1-1 fractals and then it let us double fractals and do some sort of fun mathy stuff. In the end, when Jan and his team changed it from a go-wide strategy to a ramp strategy,

they ended up changing the fractals so instead of being 1-1s, they're 0-0s and they come with some number of plus-one-plus-one counters. So they're variable. And when you think about it, the math school having a variable token is pretty clever, so I approve.

Okay, so the next big thing was I was trying to make this not be Ravnica. We wanted to do something different. So as I explained last time, we liked the idea of having unified mechanics that all the schools got. Like, in Ravnica, every faction gets its own mechanic. And in fact, when you look at Shards of Lara,

when you look at Kans of Sharkira, other faction sets, that's really the low-hanging fruit way we tend to do things. But I mean, it's not the only way to do it. And since we had a set in which everything is cohesively tied together, every school carries spells and instance of sorceries, so there's

a connective mechanical tie between them that made it easier to do a connective tissue. So in Exploratory, we looked a lot at different mechanics. The weird thing about Incidents and Sorceries is that they're not permanents, they don't sit on the battlefield, they're either in your hand, you're casting them, or they're in the graveyard.

And so we realized that, once again, this was the obvious answer, but sometimes the obvious answer is the best answer, is you kind of wanted what we dubbed originally spellfall, right? Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery, it just cares about casting them. That's a

nice, clean, easy way. It makes you want to use them. And so we ended up making, I think we called it spellcraft. It's called magecraft in the final product. And so, by the way, woven in magecraft from the very, very beginning, we said whenever you cast or copy, by the way, woven in Maitreff from the very, very beginning, we said whenever you cast or copy,

and the reason we did that is one of the big challenging things about making a set that cares about spells is just getting enough spells in your deck. And so one of the ways to get additional spells is to copy them. So we're like, okay, well, if we copy them, let's just count those,

so whatever we're doing. And so we decided to do that. That mechanic never... I mean, it was in the set the whole time. And one of the things that was nice about it is because it's an input mechanic, meaning whenever the same thing happens, output change, you know, different output,

we could really pick outputs that worked differently for different factions. That each college... Like, white- Black, for example, is a little bit more of an aggro, or is the aggro one. So, their, all of their magecraft stuff is small incremental things that encourage you to play a lot

of cheap, a lot of small spells. So we could give that faction a lot of they're the ones that want to get as many spells as possible because they're doing small buffs. But then, you can give that faction a lot of... They're the ones that want to get as many spells as possible because they're doing small buffs. But then you can give that school cheaper spells, and they can be combat-oriented spells because combat spells are cheaper. And anyway, make them very focused.

Meanwhile, blue-red, which is definitely trying to build up, instead of giving it things that you want to cast a lot of spells at once, you can give it things in which, you know, it doesn't, it kind of, it's repetitive to do it twice. So you can give some stuff that you don't necessarily want to play a lot of small spells, but maybe just want to every turn play a spell. Green-black was very life-oriented, so a lot of the stuff,

we could do things which allowed you to sort of gain life, worked really well for that. Red-white, you know, was, was, cared about graveyards, you to sort of gain life worked really well for that. Red, white was cared about. Graveyards, there's a lot of different ways that you can carve and weave them so that what you were doing played into it. Obviously, green, blue was

ramping, so you could do things that helped it ramp. We could use the magecraft, meaning everybody wanted to use spells, but how you used it, why you used it, what you did with it just could work very differently. And the nice thing about Magecraft is it's a very flexible mechanic. Like I said, it's a singular input,

but the output is variable. So you have a lot of flexibility to sort of figure out how that works. Anyway, that... So Magecraft worked pretty well. And like I said, it was in from day one. It never left. There was a lot of tweaking of what effects

and who used what and stuff, but the mechanic itself was in and never left. So some other mechanics that I included. So the other big mechanic that was in the handoff that did not end up in the set was flashback. So flashback is a mechanic that actually I created

way, way long ago in Odyssey. Anyway, Flashback is nice in that one of the challenging things about doing a Spell Matters set is getting enough spells. And we knew we had a mechanic that just cared how many times you cast spells. So one of the questions was,

how do we cast more spells without going up in the number of cards in our deck? And so the answer is, well, what if you had spells that you can cast more than once? Well, cast more than once, that's flashback. So I can't right now. I promise in the future there's a story to be told about why flashback's not in the set.

It's not a story I can tell right now just because it involves future stuff. I will tell that story eventually, I promise you. But anyway, in set design, for reasons, it couldn't be in the set. So what that meant was they had to find something else to sort of take its place.

And part of it really was the same goal. How do I get more spells in the deck without necessarily having to go up in the number of cards that are spells in my deck? How do I sort of make one card produce multiple spells?

So anyway, the answer to this goes back to Kaladesh. So in Kaladesh, and I did a podcast with Sean Main just a few weeks ago that you can listen to where we talk all about Kaladesh. In fact, we talked about this very mechanic I'm about to bring up. One of the things we made

was called Inventions. And the idea of Inventions was you had cards that were Inventions. They had a mana cost so you could put them in your deck, but they normally sat outside of your deck. And that when you cast a card that said go get an Invention, you went outside your deck in the tournament

with your sideboard, but anywhere else in non-tournament play, and then you can go get this, and so it could be whatever invention you wanted to get. What happened was, inventions were very complicated, and at the beginning of development, Eric Lauer and Ian Duke, who were running the set,

said to me and Sean, who were running the design, these are both, energy and inventions are both complicated mechanics we could make either of them work but we don't have the resources to make both of them work which one do you want? and it was a clear and easy decision

energy was very very woven into the very structure of not just the set but the flavor and the world anyway so we left energy, we took out inventions, but we knew someplace it was a cool mechanic. So when Yanni and team were trying to solve this,

they realized that inventions had this neat thing where if the cards that got you the invention, well, it didn't matter if they were spells, but if they were spells, you got two spells, and if they were a creature, it was a way to get a creature that got you a spell.

But anyway, it was nice in that it just, when you learned something, so the idea of learn and lesson is you learn something, which means you go get one of these lesson cards. There's 20 lesson cards. You go get them from outside your deck, and you bring it in. And the idea is, well, it's very flexible. And the idea of the lesson cards is none of them are powerful in a vacuum. In fact, they're a little bit on the weak side.

But you have the flexibility of choosing what you get. And that flexibility can be very powerful. And so... So anyway, it turned out that having the cards you go get be instants and sorceries rather than be artifacts was a little bit easier to develop, a little easier for play design, set design. So anyway, that ended up working out,

and it was... It did a great job. It was super flavorful. The lesson learned, so it's sort of like you're getting lessons, and it really played into the teaching aspect which we liked. And anyway, it was a perfect fit for the set.

Okay, so there's one other big component of the set that was not part of vision, but was part of set design. But I will mention something I did in set design, and then I don't know... I'm not sure whether this inspired it or not, but in my mind. In my mind, it inspired it. So when I handed off the set, there's a mechanic in the set called scrolls.

So what scrolls were, were artifact tokens that embedded in the token was a spell. Some of the cards let you choose what spell to put in it. You could pick a spell from some zone and put it in it. Others just came preloaded. The uncommons

were just like, I have divination, or whatever the spell was. I have a spell baked into me. And the idea of scrolls was, when you sacrifice them, they cast the spell sort of within them. And the flavor was really good. It's a scroll and it casts a spell. And when I say it casts a spell, it means it triggered

magecraft. Anything that cared about a spell being cast, it was cast for those purposes. But anyway, it was cast for those purposes. But anyway, it was flavorful and splashy for numerous reasons. It didn't quite work out. Someday, it's in my back pocket. It's one of those things

that I'll find at home for it one day. But anyway, one of the things that the scrolls did do is, like, some of the scrolls came preloaded, right? They had famous magic spells already on them. And I think one of the ideas that they were, Yanni and his team were thinking about was, look, we really want to play up this as the spell matter set. And we're sitting here at a university, and they came up with the idea of the, what's it called, mystical archive.

with the idea of the, what's it called, mystical archive. Well, what if the school, as a center of learning, had a place that had all the spells? You know, like, if you wanted to go learn about all the magic of the universe, of the multiverse, it collected all the spells here.

And yes, by the way, I think at least people who are students at the school, I think students at the school might know there's a multiverse because clearly the... Here's the spells you've never seen anywhere, but they're here. But the idea that they're definitely like Kazmina. There's some faculty that are planeswalkers. Oh, by the way, Liliana, real quick, this is a fun story.

I think that slot was originally going to be Davriel. real quick. This is a fun story. I think that slot was originally going to be Davriel. And we had realized that we hadn't seen Liliana and that, like, we knew that part of her story was she was hiding out somewhere. And then we realized that her hiding out as a professor,

oh, it seems so cool. And so we included her. And the idea was we'd give her a different name but her planeswalker would tell you, I mean, the picture also tells you. But the planeswalker would say Planeswalker Liliana. We thought it was real fun. Anyway, so the Mystical Archive came up.

So back in Time Spiral, we had done a bonus sheet. In fact, the whole Time Spiral block did a bonus sheet. And that had gone over really well with the players. We had done a lot of different sort of things along the way. We'd done different kinds of bonus sheets and stuff. But it just seemed like a very natural, cool way to play up. Like, it's the instance of sorcery matter set. What if we had all the famous, or not all of them,

but many famous instance of sorceries from the past? And then Tom and his team just went to town on the booster fun. They look amazing. And the Japanese ones look amazing. Anyway, lots of fun. So that got added in. And I think that was added in mostly to really sort of reinforce the flavor. Okay, the other thing that was really important in this set was, and this is something, I think it'll be a few weeks from when you hear this.

I'm posting my handoff, my vision design handoff. And one of the things in it that I talked a bit about was one of the reasons that I had picked magical schools and is there was all these tropes both of magical schools, of schools and that one of the things that I knew the set had the chance to be very lovable because school is pretty universal like most people

have had some exposure to school you know and so there's just so much ripe one of the things that we tend to do is I love looking for trope space in different things and one of the fun things that I've been doing recently is finding real

life things and then mapping the trope space like okay well school is a thing that most people experience what are the tropes you see in pop culture that deal with schools what are the sort of like there's a lot of because schools are part of the human experience, they've been woven into stories, and there's lots of stories, and so

because of that, there's a lot of tropes that come out of it. So one of the things that was really important, so we actually made a list of every school trope we could think of. And when we handed over the file, we gave the set design team this exhaustive list of all these different tropes.

I mean, more so than could even fit in the set. We just had all these different ideas. And one of the fun things about the set, the thing I really loved about how the set turned out was there is a recognizability and a familiarity with all the school tropes. That is something very universal just because everyone's gone to school. That is, it's very lovable. I mean, the other thing about it is,

not that there's not some danger, because it's magic, so there's danger everywhere, but there's a lot of fun aspects to the set. A lot of, you know, there's a lot of chance to sort of appreciate. Like, one of the things that we really try to do is we said, what would you expect to see? Okay, you expect classes, you expect

athletic competition, you expect people hanging out on the quad, you know, what are all the different things that you can think of? And then, also we played, like I said, we also played in the Trump space of, when you hear stories, what kind of things do you see? The other cool thing that we did, and this is the creative team, but this is cool,

is each school got a student that ended up being our uncommon draft around, our goalpost. And that student represented, there's a story we could tell about that student in that school. And so that let us tell some of the sort of trope stories we wanted to tell and that each school had its own separate. And then those students show up in multiple art and flavor tags. So for each of those five students, there's a little story that runs through about sort of their time at the school. And it's fun.

And each one of them is telling a different kind of story. So it's kind of fun. We had a lot of them is telling a different kind of story. So it's kind of fun. We had a lot of different tropes for a lot of different kinds of stories. Um, and it, it was neat sort of like getting to like, you know, getting to hit all the, all the different tropes and stuff was, was lots of fun. I said the word tropes too many times. I know that. Um, anyway, um, I think that's basically where I'm almost done here.

I'm almost, almost to work. So that, uh, that is all the components that we put together to make this set I am super super happy with Strixhaven, it is one of my all time favorite sets that I've done like I'm saying

Innistrad, Ravnica Kaladesh. There's a lot of sets I really have a fondness for, a lot of the unsets. And this stands with them. This is a really, really fun set. And not only that, not only am I very proud of me and my team, I'm super proud of Yanni and his team, of the creative team, of all the teams. Like, everybody was on their A game.

Like, the set looks amazing, and the flavor text's great, and the names are awesome, and, like, all the component pieces, it just came together in a really fun and exciting way. So I'm excited for you all to play it. It really is a fun set. But anyway, I now am at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.