Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #824: Kaldheim with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

I sit down with Magic designer Ethan Fleischer to talk about the design of Kaldheim.

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 I've been doing this thing where I've been sitting down with different designers and talking about sets that we made. So today I have Ethan Fleischer talking about Kaldheim. Thanks for having me, Mark. So I'm excited. Kaldheim was a fun set. So let's go back to the very beginning. So I'm excited. Kaldheim was a fun set.

So let's go back to the very beginning. So here's a little bit of trivia here that you and I know, but the audience doesn't know. Originally, I was going to leave Kaldheim because originally Kaldheim was going to be where Zendikar Rising came out. It was going to be the fall set. During this time,

you were the only person leading fall sets because you are Magic's head designer. Usually they have me lead the fall sets. That's traditionally how I've done it, but I don't always, but often I do. But anyway, then they moved it. They moved it to coming out the next set, and so

I couldn't do it, because I was doing the fall set, so I was doing Zendikar Rising. So I tagged you. So let's talk a little bit about you, because you were very eager to do this. Let's talk about you and your desire to do this set.

Yeah, I just love top-down sets and culturally inspired sets. I've worked on all of the Theros sets that we've made, and digging into a Viking and Norse mythology-themed set was very exciting to me. There's lots of fun stories, lots of cool monsters,

and lots of interesting history to dig into there. So where did you start? So, okay, you've been tasked with doing, you know, finally, because we've been talking about doing this set forever. In the North Set, like literally for 20 years, we've talked about doing this set. So finally, we're doing it. Well, I started by thinking about similar things that we've done in the past. We did Theros, which I mentioned, which is the Greek mythology theme set.

And we did Amonkhet, which was an Egyptian theme set that was focused much more on historical Egypt than it was on Egyptian mythology. Because Egyptian mythology isn't terribly well known. I felt like Viking stuff, Norse stuff, was kind of right in the middle there. Where like the mythology is pretty well known, but not quite as well known as Greek mythology. And the historical stuff is also actually quite recognizable and popular. The mythology is pretty well known, but not quite as well known as Greek mythology. And the historical stuff is also actually quite recognizable and popular. There have been lots of Viking themed TV shows and books and other kinds of media over the years that have nothing to do with mythology, but are nevertheless very popular and recognizable. So my thinking was, let's just do both. So my thinking was, let's just do both.

Let's get historical Vikings and Norse mythology and put it all together into one setting. So what was the first piece that sort of came together in making the set? The first piece, I think, was the idea that we should have different Viking clans that had different specialties. Like, how does each color of magic map onto the concept of a Viking? And so we kind of thought about, like, oh, Vikings are explorers. Vikings are raiders. Vikings have, you know, religious history. And there sort of different different angles that we could approach it from but pretty quickly uh we we hit on this very exciting concept that comes from their mythology and their cosmology which is the idea of the nine realms of the universe right they have nine worlds one of them is uh middenheim

which is earth where humans live uh but there are all these other realms where different kinds of elves live and the gods live and dwarves live and so as we continue to work on the set, we're like, oh, man, it would be really cool if we could find a way to incorporate this idea of multiple worlds into this setting. So let's talk a little bit about that. So I believe early on we were talking five worlds, right? I mean, we discussed various things. We were talking five worlds, right? We discussed various things. I think we landed on ten worlds pretty quickly because there were more races. I think we wanted a race for each world.

And when we started adding up all the races that we wanted to show that felt very distinctively Norse, there were more than five. There were fewer than ten, so we did have to stretch for a few of them. Like we had a world of shapeshifters in Kaldheim. And the reason of course that we went to ten instead of nine is because magic really loves multiples of five. So things that, you know, ten of things, five of things, fifteen of things, because we can kind of uh when we're building the set we can put what we call cycles in where we have a whole bunch of cards that are very similar to each other but differ on one axis and we can use those to kind of compare similar elements that uh belong to different factions or things like that, or in this case, live on different worlds.

So, yeah, I know we liked the idea early on of... So, by the way, Ethan ran the team. I was on the design team. Ethan ran the team. I was on the team. We talked a lot about... Right, once we had the idea of the different worlds, we liked the idea of each world having sort of an iconic creature. And then

also, like, we were matching them up to the existing ones, sort of as we could. Right. I remember there was a while when we were like, we'll only show a few of the worlds, but we'll, you know, refer to some of the other ones. Because,

you know, we were all a little concerned, the world building team and the design team, we were all sort of concerned about giving the world building team too much to build out when they were making the, doing the concept push. But eventually, you know, we ran it up the chain and got permission to sort of uh put more resources into the concept push than we normally would have and so kaldheim's world guide is much larger than i think any other world guide except for dominaria's uh and so we we've done a huge amount of world building there so there's uh plenty left to see if we ever go back to Kaldheim. Okay, so what was the first mechanic?

So the worlds existed first. What was the first mechanic you remember being in the set? Oh, gosh. I knew sagas were going to be here before we even started. So day zero, I thought, oh, we have to have sagas. That was the mechanic that we designed for Dominaria. But the name of the mechanic saga is from old norse it's an old norse word and so it was like it would be criminally negligent not to put sagas in this

set uh and they play really well they're hard to design but uh so the the twist we did on sagas this time was to do multi-color sagas which uh are a little easier to design because you can kind of get some effects from each color and so it makes it easier to get a get a card that plays fun and tells a story well and it also played into our world right that one of the cool things about dividing your set into 10 worlds is oh the sagas you can do 10 sagas right right the way we the way we structured the set is that we focused each world into two colors um so it's kind of like a ravnica set where there are all these two color uh things that you know can represent denizens or stories or spells from different

worlds and i don't think the final product had an exactly one-for-one correspondence between worlds and sagas it didn't i think they they cheated a little bit but yeah yeah it's not not all the not all the cycles that we built in initially made it all the way through which is is not uncommon uh and part of that is just because sagas are super difficult to design and they require a lot of iteration. So not all constraints can always be met. Okay, so Saidas weren't in super early. Absolutely. I mean, I know that the tribal component came very early, right? Yeah, I thought that this was a great opportunity to give tribal fans some love just because there are so many creature types

that just feel very resonant with Norse mythology. You've got your elves, you've got your dwarves, you've got your trolls, gods, and so it seemed like a natural place to deploy

not only more of the tribal archetypes that we build into sets for limited but also just some tools that players could use for any tribal deck there's a lot of cards that allow you to choose a creature type and then give give that creature type a bonus and also uh of course we have some changelings in the set, which are all creature types. So one of the things I remember, it was very early in Vision, I believe. So we tend to do this exercise in top-down sets where we just write down, what would the audience expect of a blah set? Okay, what would they expect?

And so we made a giant list of what we thought people would expect, and there are just a lot of creature types in it. I remember one of our takeaways is, oh, well, maybe the set wants to have a tribal component because when you write it up on the wall, like, how do you not have, you know, dwarves and elves and all of this stuff? Absolutely.

Another thing that we knew going into this set was that we were going to have modal double-faced cards. You had set up a directive that, okay, the sets this year are all going to have modal double-faced cards. And this was a thing that originally we had planned for Strixhaven. It was like, okay, Strixhaven, we're going to build a world based on these modal double-faced cards. And that was Strixhaven.

And then we thought, well, let's not just, let's let the rest of the year use these cards and let the different sets use them in their own way. So we found some different ways for each set to use modal double-faced cards. The way we, you know, so for Zendikar Rising, it was cards that were a land on one side and something on the other side. And then for Kaldheim, we continued the one rare dual land cycle, but all of the other modal double-faced cards in Kaldheim were a god on one side and something associated with that god on the other. So you've got the God of Thunder on one side and his hammer on the other

side, right? Yeah, it's... Here's my memory of the other. So you've got the God of Thunder on one side and his hammer on the other side, right? Here's my memory of the story. We had a meeting where we were talking about how to do the gods, and we were talking about Thor, and we're like, okay, we have to have Thor, and you have to have Thor's hammer, our version of it, and it was like, what if they were on the same card?

We were very enamored by that idea. Yeah, because gods are, along with sagas, gods are another hard thing to design. We've done gods a few times, and they've always been very challenging to get the mechanics right. One of the challenges associated with them

is that gods are immortal in most mythologies. And so we always have to put some mechanic on them that makes them very hard to destroy, which can be challenging for the play design team to get everything balanced. Fortunately, Norse mythology has the Ragnarok prophecy in which all the gods get killed. It's part of the story.

It's canon. These gods are going to gonna die so we didn't have to worry about any mortality mechanic and then we just found there were so many gods that had some iconic item or creature or or other thing that that felt associated with them strongly they had this sort of special item or you know odin's raven or uh the rainbow bridge and so we kind of combine those two things together having these modal double face cards on the other side of legends was great for two reasons one uh in standard legendary creatures can be a little challenging right you don't want to have four of a legendary creature in your deck always because sometimes it gets stuck in your hand you have one on the battlefield

and here it is stuck well for these ones you can just cast the other side and we design the cards such that the front and the back would uh kind of combo with each other if they were on the battlefield at the same time and then for commander these gods gave players an exciting opportunity like guess what your commander can be thor's hammer this time you can cast it as thor's hammer and you can build your deck in such a way that having an equipment be your commander is the way you build your deck so it was a really it was really nice uh nice combination of things for different formats yeah i mean the um it's funny that one meeting where we talked about like the idea of thor and thor's hammer i think like half of the gods got me i mean not the final design of them but just like

the front is odin the back is his ravens. Like that meeting, I think half of our designs, the concept came from that one meeting. Yeah, we just had a, we just made a list of the Norse gods and then wrote the thing next to them. I think we also, there was a while when we were like thinking that the gods were going to, instead of their portfolio being quite so aligned to the Norse thing,

it was like going to be about a character trait or something. We ended up abandoning that line by the end. But yeah, we did. We just made a chart of all the characters and all of the things that would be on the other side. And yeah, almost all of them made it to the finish line, I would say.

Yeah, I remember when we came up at the meeting when we came up with the idea of Tybalt being on the back of Lokiki right right it was super fun because loki's always disguising himself as different things and loki and tibble have this sort of very similar personality where they just can't help themselves they just have to be a jerk they just have to stab somebody or they just have to do some awful thing it's just in in their nature. And so finding a way to make Tybalt into our Loki was super fun. I think originally he was going to disguise him, Tybalt was going to disguise himself as somebody who is very much his opposite,

like some really nice god who helps people or something. But in the end, it was a little more thematically cohesive to have him disguise himself as the Loki analog of Kaldheim. Okay, so next up, let's talk, I think the next mechanic, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think the next mechanic was Fertel that we made? Yeah, I believe that's right. So let's tell the story of Fertel, because you and I probably have different stories than the story of tell because you and i probably have different stories than the story for tell right so for tell there's a there for tell kind of uh combines a couple of

different concepts together for me uh and then i you know when you tell your story you'll have a totally different angle on it uh but uh for me i i was really interested in the fact that norse mythology is both backward looking creation mythology which which almost every mythology has and we use sagas to represent looking to the past that's a been a consistent through line with sagas uh but norse mythology also has this very prominent prophetic angle. What's going to happen at the end of time? And the Ragnarok myth. And so I wanted some sort of mechanic that felt like it was looking into the future.

This also kind of combined with an idea that we've been knocking around with the world building team, which was that these 10 realms were on a world tree and that every once in a while they would bump into each other and people could pass between them. And this would cause a little mini Ragnarok war to happen because inevitably all these people are a bunch of aggressive ax wielding maniacs. And so when they go from one realm to another, conflict inevitably erupts. And this is something we always need in Magic World. We need what we call a conflict engine,

which is an excuse for anybody to fight anybody else because that is what Magic's game mechanics are all about. It's about creatures fighting, right? And so I thought that maybe Fortel cards could represent things from one world passing into another. So that was one of the reasons that I wanted the cards to go into exile and then come onto the stack from exile. So sort of imply that they're coming in from outside. All right, now you tell your version about how Fortel came about. Okay, so 15 years ago, we made, I worked with Richard Garfield on Star Wars, the trading

card game. Hasbro had gotten the license for Star Wars. They came to us and said, we want a trading card game. And so Richard, I was on the team with Richard designing the structure of it, and then I led the very first set. I led the first core set, or whatever you want to call it.

And so one of the concepts in that Richard was really enraptured with trying to take a miniatures game and make a card game that acted a lot like a miniatures game. And so there was that acted a lot like a miniatures game. And so there was dice rolling and there's a lot of stuff. And one of the components of the game is you would have pieces that you would bring out,

but you only have so many sort of units to spend on them. So in order to have larger units, because Star Wars has giant ships and things, you would put them in sort of this build zone and then you could build them over time. you would put them in sort of this build zone, and then you could build them over time. So one day, not too long after I worked on that, I said, well, what if Magic did this? And so we made a mechanic we called LayAway.

And the idea of LayAway was... You're going to need to explain what LayAway is for the younger audience. Oh, so for those of you who might not know the concept of LayAway, if you can't afford to buy something at a store, something they... I guess it still exists, but it used to exist more back in the past. But you could pay money over time, and then once you had paid for all of it,

then you got it. But the idea was they would save it for you, and you could pay it off over time, and then once you're done paying for it, you would get it. But they wouldn't sell it. It was yours. And they pulled it behind the counter.

Right, they pulled it behind the counter so that it was yours. You had bought it, but you couldn't actually get it until you finished paying it off. And so the idea was that these were spells that you could pay for over time, and then when you finished them, you could cast the spell.

So the very first time you sort of pitched this, I can remember this meeting where you sort of pitched this idea, and I go, oh, you mean layaway. And you had never heard it. You'd never seen the mechanic before. I like layaway.

One of the things that happens all the time, by the way, is, and I'm kind of bad at this, is someone will pitch a new mechanic and I'm like, oh, yeah, we tried that because I've been working on the game forever. Almost anything, we try it at one point, some version of it, just because in 25 years, we've tried a lot of things. Like, almost anything, we try it at one point, you know, some version of it, just because, you know, in 25 years,

we've tried a lot of things. So, often when someone will come to something, I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's what we tried. We tried that, you know, and so this was one of those, you came up with the independent,

like, you had nothing, you didn't know of layaway, but I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, this is layaway. So, anyway. Yeah, and, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why mechanics don't make it, and a lot of them have nothing to do with the individual merits of the mechanic. It's just, yeah, and, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why mechanics don't make it.

And a lot of them have nothing to do with the individual merits of the mechanic. It's just like it doesn't fit. Yeah. This other one is doing something similar or or or what have you. But, you know, when there's a situation where there's a thematic reason to use a mechanic, you know, it can work out really well. it can work out really well. I do remember we had an early version of Fortel that wasn't quite right, and we got feedback from the play design team that we course-corrected once, and then after that, it was exactly as it...

Do you remember the course-correction? What was the original version? Oh, man. I can't remember now i do know that we started with two and it never changed yeah it was always two we knew two was right we were like if morph costs three this has to cost two yeah we definitely i mean more morph influenced us quite a bit i mean that we learned from a bunch of other mechanics and kind of crafting this mechanic.

Yeah. And yeah, I know we got some feedback. One of the things we always do is in Vision, we will go to Play Design and say, hey, what do you think of this mechanic? And they'll give us feedback so we can adjust it because we have to make a mechanic that they can balance and they can make.

So they usually give us very good notes about if there's problems there. Yeah, this one was a big... We got particularly good feedback from them because, like, Fortel is very much a spike mechanic. It's like a resource optimization and mind game mechanic. And so the play designers knew exactly where to move it slightly to make it the best spike mechanic that it could be.

Okay, so next up, Bost. So we didn't actually make Bost. I think Bost got officially made in set design, but we did have a bunch. We knew we wanted a combat mechanic, because how do you have Vikings and not have a combat mechanic? That seemed... We tried a bunch of stuff.

Do you remember? We tried a lot of different stuff one that i really remember was um was one that was called pyre we were we were interested in the concept of the viking funeral where you would put the body on a boat and light the boat on fire and push it out into the water uh so we had some kind of funeral themed mechanic that would kind of encourage you to uh risk your creatures or trade them in combat because you could get some value out of them from the graveyard and certainly raid was something that was always on the table for this set right raid is the the mechanic that would have would have felt great here and um but we didn't want to have too many repeat mechanics

so uh we tried a bunch of different things but yeah the the the set design team came up with boast and this was activated abilities that you can only activate while the creature's attacking i believe and only once yeah we we did have a bunch of combat oriented individual card designs and i don't know if any of those inspired bows.O.S.T., but when we handed over the set, it was very much like combat-mattered. It had a combat-matter sort of quality to it. Yeah, we definitely emphasized that in the handoff, and I feel like B.O.S.T. is definitely something that I would have been happy to put in the set if I'd thought of it myself. Okay, so next uh talk a little bit about snow so so we we did not we did not hand over the set with snow right what snow the snow mechanic has a crazy history it does in the original ice age set from 1995 there were uh

new basic lands snow covered-covered plains, snow-covered island, snow-covered swamp, snow-covered mountain, snow-covered forest. And there were some cards that cared about it in various ways. And then alliances had some more cards that cared about it. Right, so, real quickly, the problem in Ice Age was

they made more negative things than positive things. Right, they made more negative things than positive things. Right, they made more hosers for Snowlands than they did reasons to play with Snowlands. Right, so Limited wasn't really big at the time. I mean, there was a little bit of Limited. So, in construction, there were a few Snow decks that were very, very narrow, but there wasn't a lot of Snow played because you got punished more than you got rewarded for it. So, Snow, when it first came out, wasn't

very popular. And then when you made the famous third Ice Age set for Ice Age block years later, when was that, like 2000? It was right

before Ravnica. Original Ravnica. Yeah, it was right before original Ravnica. Right after Ravnica. Original Ravnica. It was right before original Ravnica. It was right after Ravnica. Oh, right after, yeah. Right after Ravnica, right before Time Spiral. In between Ravnica and Time Spiral. Y'all on the Cold Snap design team rationalized snow.

You came up with a whole new mana symbol that was shaped like a snowflake and said okay this is this is you can pay this with mana that comes from a snow source and that could be one of these snow covered basic lands or these new snow covered dual lands or even this mana elf or real that can tap for colorless snow right the reason snow even exists by just real, is we were trying to make the third set, but every mechanic from Ice Age and Alliances either was so cool we had just made an evergreen thing out of it

or not that good a mechanic. Like, there wasn't a lot to, like... So we were really stretching, like, how can we take something? And so we decided to make snow covered into something more and snow came about

because we were just, like, we had to do something from original Ice Age that wasn't something that had already become evergreen. To me, I was like, I got it. I was fully up. This was before I started working at Wizards, but as a Magic player, I was like, oh, this is cool.

They're making the third Ice Age block set and they've kind of turned Snow into this resource system that actually fits in with the rest of how magic works. I really appreciated it as

someone who's interested in magic design. But what happened was Cold Snap was not particularly well received. It didn't do that well. So Snow's first two appearances, for various reasons, both didn't go well. And so the reason we didn't various reasons, both didn't go well. Right. And so, the reason we didn't add Snow was like, it wasn't like, oh, people love Snow.

You forgot about the other time we did Snow. Oh, okay, go ahead. Which was in Modern Horizons. No, no, wait, wait. Modern Horizons didn't exist yet. Meaning, when we were in Vision, Modern Horizons hadn't happened yet. No, I designed Modern Horizons before I designed this set. No, I mean to the public. The public hadn't seen it yet.

I'm just saying that there's a major snow theme in Modern Horizons, and the reason was most of the mechanics that we went deep on in Modern Horizons and had multiple cards of were ones that we thought we would be unlikely to use in a standard set again. And so I was like, oh, Snow. That's a mechanic that made a lot of sense in Cold Snap, but to me, didn't seem like

it would make sense in very many other sets. And so I was like, alright, we can use this in Modern Horizons. And so we put full art Snow basics in Modern Horizons to give people something cool to collect. But if I remember correctly, the timing of this is somewhere in between us finishing and Dave taking over the set. Modern Horizons, I don't know if it came out or it, like, there was some talk about whether there was supposed to be snow in the set. David asked, like, should there be snow in the set or not?

And I'm saying to him, I go, thematically it makes sense, but like, how popular is snow? And that it was Modern Horizons that really made Dave go, oh, okay, sure, I should add snow. The players loved the snow stuff in Modern Horizons. And I had totally, because snow hadn't done very well, the first sets that had snow in it didn't really do very well before. I was like, oh, snow is a disposable mechanic. Nobody likes it. It's just a joke mechanic.

And then it was like, wow, we really want more snow. I was like, oh, well. And so, yeah, Dave took that information to heart and added snow to the set. And it was something that, like, people had been asking about it, you know, people in Wizards, like, hey, is there going to be snow here?

And I was always like, no, we're not going to do it. But then once we got the data that players really liked snow now, Dave put it in and more power to him. Okay, one, we're almost out of time, but there's one final mechanic, just to talk real quickly, Changeling, we mentioned this earlier.

So early in the set, we actually had a mechanic, we had a tribal mechanic very early called Clan. Right. It was a mechanic that asked you to choose a creature type, if I recall correctly. Right, the way it worked is, whenever you played a Clan card, you chose a creature type, but if you played a second Clan card, you could change the creature type, but it recall correctly. Right. The way it worked is, whenever you played a clan card, you chose a creature type, but

if you played a second clan card, you could change the creature type, but it would be the same. All clan cards looked at the same thing, so... You could only ever have one clan chosen. It was like a variable that you could clear and replace with a different one, but you could never have two. You couldn't have elves and dwarves at the same time.

The reason we liked it was because this was a set that had so many different creature types in it. We're like, well, pick whatever one you care about in the moment. And it constructed, you know, you could build decks around it and just use it for whatever you wanted. Yeah, and it was a worthwhile experiment, but I do think

that ultimately the mechanic that the sort of variable clearing thing turned out not to be nearly as useful as we initially thought it might be. Yeah, it made complex decisions more so than we meant, especially in Limited.

Yeah, it just required too much forethought in Limited that playtesting kind of revealed it. Like, oh god, people are really sweating over, like, oh, I have three elves in my deck and two dwarves but one of the elves is in my hand what are the odds and like yeah so uh it turned out it turned out to just be a little too decision intensive for the tribal mechanic which like ultimately tribal stuff is something we try to um put into sets to make them more accessible to players who have a lower skill level. Right, and the problem was

there was a lot of tribal matter stuff because of all... We had all the things you wanted from the Norse, the dwarves, the elves, the giants, all that stuff. And so when Clan came out, there needed to be some glue to kind of make it work. And there's no better tribal glue than Changeling.

Like, any time you have a heavy tribal theme, Changeling is something that you seriously want to consider. And Changeling had also been in Modern Horizons and had also been popular. So, like, I think both

Changeling and Snow. That was definitely there to make Modern Horizons work, though. Oh, no, no, no. Yes. Complete faith in the changeling mechanic, but I knew that a sort of good way to position

new cards for Modern was to put some tribal rewards for various underserved tribes. Right. We didn't have changeling because we had clan, and then once clan left, they needed something, and then I think Dave was like, we know this works. Let's just throw in changelings. Yeah, and it was even supported by the world building by that point

we already had an entire realm full of shapeshifters so it was like okay we even have the concept art for these guys so it was pretty easy to implement so anyway we're almost out of time any final stories you want

to tell before we wrap up for today oh man any final thoughts on cold time called i i'm very happy with called time and i'm very happy with the reception i got it's uh it was the first uh set where i was the the solo vision lead on a new plane and i'm extremely happy with how it turned out. So I hope we get to go back there again sometime. Well, the set's doing very, very well. So odds are high. Yes. So anyway, I am now at my desk. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Ethan. Thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me. This was fun. And I hope you all enjoyed learning all about call time so bye bye Ethan and all you we will see you next time