Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #825: Strixhaven with Ari Nieh

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

I sit down with Magic designer Ari Nieh to talk about the design of Strixhaven.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. So I've been having different various R&D folk of present and past to come talk about sets. And here's something I've never done before. Talk about the new set with somebody. So I have brought on Ari Nee. So Ari, hi. Hi Mark, how are you today? So we're going to talk Strixhaven today. So this was the very first set you worked on, correct?

Yes, that is correct. But not the first one to come out, right? No, I was on teams for sets that have come out before. Like I was on Kaldheim, I was on M21. But when I walked into the building and you you know got pulled into meetings to start designing stuff like uh strixhaven was the first meeting the first set that i was working on okay so uh and you were on we started on exploratory so you were on the exploratory design team you were on the vision design team you were on the set design team right you were

i was on set just for a little bit not not for very long. Okay, so let's... All of Vision and most of Exploratory. We're going to go way back to the very beginning. So what is your memory of the very beginning of Strixhaven? It's called fencing in design. Right, so we knew it was going to be opposite color, enemy color schools, like five schools, mage factions within a university. We knew it was going to be a instance and sorcery themed set because that was something people had been asking

for for a long time and it fit the creative really well to have a wizard university that's about instance and sorceries uh we knew we wanted these opposite the enemy color factions to be based on the conflict instead of on the overlap so that they were going to be pretty pretty different from the corresponding ravnica guilds because you know what what's the point in like doing a five factions of two colors each if they act exactly like the ravnica guilds then setting it on a new world you're you know you're not getting as much excitement and novelty out of that uh but we didn't know what the actual mechanics of the set were at all um so that that was one of the big things we did in exploratory was like try

a million different spell mechanics uh and also we tried to like nail down okay what are the five colleges what do they study in each college what is the like mechanical theme of each college so that was uh so what is that what is your memory during exploratory so i i've shared my i i i have previous podcasts where i shared my my version of how we made the colleges so i'm curious to get your take on what is your memory of how they came together um you know i was looking through sort of our old our old uh notes on from the meetings and like that, and they came together sort of at different speeds, right? Like, I think we decided, I'm trying to remember which ones were immediately the right thing and which ones were not. I know white, black, and blue, green took a little longer.

white black and blue green took a little longer um red blue being elemental magic we knew like basically right from the start it was like yeah definitely the red blue people do elemental magic but we had them on physical sciences instead of art for a while before they turned into art nerds um and i think that that was like uh oh thezzet are basically doing blue stuff, but in a red way. What if we flip that and we do red stuff, but in a blue way? Right. What if we have artists, but they do it in this really refined and and like studious and careful way? And that's what the Prismari can be. um black green i don't remember exactly i think we knew black green was going to be like biological sciences pretty early on but i don't think we came up with the life gain theme that early we knew it was going to be about this the central conflict was going to be life versus death right so it was

it was clearly going to be sort of somewhere in that space. And we knew it had to stay off of Golgari, so we were going to avoid too much graveyard stuff. Yeah, blue-green being math came a little later. Like, we tried a bunch of things for that. We were thinking about some kind of philosophy, maybe, because the conflict between blue and green is about real versus unreal. between blue and green is about real versus unreal um but eventually we came to this like platonism versus formalism conflict in mathematics right this debate over is math created or is math discovered which felt like a very blue green kind of debate how about lorhold what's your memories of lorhold uh i think originally we it I think originally it was going to be like the military faction in some sense. Not military like police like Boros, but like history of warfare, things like that.

I don't remember when we came up with Lorehold being graveyard. We definitely did want it to be, I think, really mechanically distinct from Boros, and I think we were pretty successful there. But when did we decide that it was history? That one might have been history fairly early on, actually. I think we were history pretty early on. Yeah, I'd have to look back at our notes.

Yeah, the thing that I remember is the conflict of chaos versus order, you know, is very organization-driven, people-driven, you know, and the idea of like, red and white caring about society as a whole felt interesting because red and white are the

two colors that have the most connection to people, but in very different ways. Yeah, I think we might have also been considering like a political science or kind of kind of area of being the area of study that like that captured the question of like the competing philosophies of like anarchism versus authoritarianism for for the red white conflict. But yeah, it was always going to be that conflict. Okay, so let's talk about Exploratory. I know you looked at the notes. So what are some things we didn't do, but we tried? Oh, we tried some wild stuff.

So I think we knew fairly early on that we were going to have something like Magecraft. that what we were going to have something like magecraft like it didn't it ended up being just magecraft which was very simple and like we you know it could have been something weirder but we knew we were going to have some mechanic which cared about casting a bunch of instants and sorceries and so then there was this question of how do we get the density of instants and sorceries in people's decks high enough that this is a viable thing because normally if you don't have enough creatures in your limited deck you just kind of lose games randomly from not being able to do enough things um not being able to be proactive and attack and things uh so we tried lots and lots of mechanics that let you cast more instance and sorceries um i think one

of the first ones that like maybe this was something that i was trying to push in my first week there was um cards that would create token sorceries that you would put in your hand and could cast from your hand like a real card um that that was one of the things we tried and i think that like it and they had different effects depending on what color of mana you spent on them um another thing we tried that was pretty cool was i this might have been one of ge George's mechanics was this a different kind of learning thing where like creatures had study counters on them. They would come in with a study counter and then you could tap them and remove a study counter to cast a spell. Right. So if you had some pyromancy student that came in with a study counter, then you could tap it and remove a counter and place a mana, and it would cast Searing Spear, and it would

put an actual copy of the spell Searing Spear on the stack and do three damage to something and also trigger your Magecraft or whatever. So that was pretty wild. Yeah, we later, when we turned over the set, we actually had something in the set called scrolls that were artifact tokens that had spells embedded in them.

And when you sacked them, you literally cast the spell that was inside them. And some came preloaded with existing magic spells and some you could like imprint spells on them to sort of save spells. I think that's an offshoot of some of the stuff you're talking about yeah this was this is kind of an offshoot of i mean it's kind of an offshoot of both of those ideas in a way yeah um one i remember like working with uh with donald smith on on a cycle that would like cast some really iconic instance or sorcery from the past like by like they would make a scroll right and they all made the scroll under different conditions um and the cycle of spells was armageddon was the white spell um time walk was the blue spell demonic tutor was the black spell

wheel of fortune uh was red and then we're like crap there isn't a green spell that is anywhere near to being on the level with those four so we i think we went with glimpse of nature but it was like oh that's that's unfortunate you know there there's really no green sorcery or instant that that like is a big you know impact like that they're all enablers like cultivating things so pack like that. They're all enablers, like cultivating things. Okay, so here's something else I remember us doing. We also,

so we messed around a bunch with how to make instant sorceries matter. I know we also messed around with some mechanics that we felt like school. Yep. I know we were, so we had one mechanic where the creature had two abilities, but it didn't have them yet. And you had to do something and then you would you would open up that ability and then now it had that activated ability.

literal level up and but instead of spending mana you just tapped the creature right and that represented studying it's like oh i'm gonna go to the library and i tap and my my text box doesn't change because i didn't lift weights in the library but now i have an activated ability where i could loot or ping or something and i learned how to cast some and it wasn't quite level up because you had two options and you could choose which one you wanted first. Oh, was it? Yeah, yeah. So, like, for example, let's say you have a red creature, and maybe it has an activation that tap to do damage to something, and it has another activation that's, like, fire breathing or something.

And then you could tap it and learn. Learn's a bad example because there's a mechanic called learn. But you could study or whatever. i think we actually called the study you could study and then you could either get the tapping ability that did damage or you could get the fire breathing ability and then you could later studying at the other one but you could do whatever order you wanted interesting i don't remember that though i vaguely remember something like that from a different team but there there's so many mechanics that we tried, like, it all blurs together.

That's so the audience understands. Like, the role of exploratory design is we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. The idea is we don't go deep on anything, we go wide, so we're just trying lots of different things. And then in Vision, we start committing to things and start making

decisions and start going down certain paths and go deeper. And the in Vision, we start committing to things and start making decisions and start going down certain paths and go deeper. And the mechanics we're talking about, some of them are exploratory, some of them actually happen in Vision. But we try a lot of different things, and that... Like, one of the things that... I'll ask you this question, Ari, see what you think.

What percentage of magic cards made during the whole course of design see print? What percentage do magic cards made during the whole course of design see print? What percentage do you think? Over the whole course of design? Over the whole course of design. Of all the cards we make during the whole course of design, what percentage actually see print? I'd say about 15%. Wow, that's higher than I would guess.

I would guess a little lower than that. Yeah. I mean, it depends how you count, because we also make cards that evolve over time. I'm not sure how you count some of those. Yeah, it's hard to say how you count. But if the question is, like, what percent of cards, like, that were in the Vision Design handoff

get printed verbatim, I would say, like, 1%. Yeah, yeah, so. All right. I think 1% to 2% is more where I put the, like, of all the cards we make, what does it actually end up getting made? Because we try a lot of different things.

And we do a lot of play tests. And so exploratory, one of the ways we do exploratory, it's easier in non-pandemic times. But normally what happens is people will come up with a mechanic. And then the designer who comes up with it, or maybe someone else came up with it. But we'll make decks. And then we'll play decks, and, you know, you'll take a... Usually we have simple decks that are like, you know,

core set cards, and then you make anywhere from like six to eight of the new mechanic and throw them in. Yep. A little more, depending on the mechanic sometimes. But, and then we play them and get a sense of how they play. And then there's three buckets in Exploratory. It's, this is good.

Vision will see it. We don't have to, we don't mess with it anymore. This's, this is good. Vision will see it. We don't mess with it anymore. This is bad. Vision knows not to mess with it. We don't have to worry about it anymore. Or, ah, maybe we should look at this a little more. And sometimes we'll play around with things to see if there's a tweak that makes it better. And sometimes we'll tweak the mechanics some.

Yep. Okay, so do you have any memories from, any stories from early, either exploratory or early vision? Yeah, so this is my favorite story, which is the very last day of exploratory design. We spent a lot of exploratory design working on spell mechanics and a lot working on defining the colleges and deciding, okay, what do they study there? What kind of style of magic do they do? What's their central conflict, et cetera? And we hadn't spent a whole lot of time on school tropes. So Mark was like, all right, for the last day,

try to think of things that deal with schools and we can make some decks with those and play test those. Now, one of the people on this team was george fan who was working at wizards at the time um the designer of plants versus zombies and in san aquarium and a lot of other really awesome uh sort of wacky games and george has kind of a wacky streak so the school deck that he brought was fish tribal, and it had a bunch of cards like tuna and mackerel, and they would cascade into other fish because they were schools of fish. That did not end up making it into the set, but maybe someday, if we do an underwater world or something, we'll have some schools and we'll bust out those George fan designs. We visit the underwater school of Orcabious. Yeah, like we've only visited the land schools.

Like, who knows what else is on the world? Right. The air school, the sea school. Orcabious is a big plane and we're only exploring, you know, Strixhaven. Yeah, it was fun. George came to work at Wizards for a year just as a sort of a bucket list thing he always wanted to do

in fact he was going to work for six months and he had so much fun he stayed for another six months but George was on the exploratory so exploratory was me, you, and Sidney

Sidney Adams was exploratory and then Vision was me, you, George Yanni Skolnick went on to do the set design

and I'm forgetting one person Bean oh and Andrew Bean Andrew Bean right Andrew Bean yeah um Yanni Skolnik went on to do the set design and I'm forgetting one person Dean oh and Andrew Dean Andrew Dean right Andrew Dean yeah

he was my strong second Andrew Dean was my strong second so it was the five of us uh in for the majority I think a few people rotated in and out

at the beginning and end maybe but that was the main for the majority of it um so this was your first set

you really had worked on. And the first set you had started. So as someone who played magic their whole life, what was it like sort of experiencing, seeing a magic set being formed from the very beginning? I mean, it was really exciting because it's, because exploratory design is very blue sky, blank slate, like anything goes, right? So I was allowed to try things that I knew perfectly well did not work in the rules of Magic

and probably had pretty severe implications for the game, like token sorceries in your hands, right? Like putting tokens in your hands, just not something Magic does. right? Like putting tokens in your hands, just not something magic does. Um, but like getting to play in that area and like try sort of really outside the box things. And that was really, that was super fun. Um, I think I was vaguely aware that like, you know, of all the things that happened in early design, most of them never get used. And, um, and that's just kind of okay. Right. That's like part of the part of how the sausage is made. So that wasn't particularly surprising to me. Um, but yeah, it was, it was also really interesting just like how much play testing goes on right that like

where people think of design as making up cards and then like developers play test them sometime down the road right that like play testing happens after design and that's not really the case right like that we're continuously play testing and iterating. Nothing goes in that hasn't been tried out within a few weeks of it being come up with. There's no, like, just make a bunch of cards and then later on

we'll see if they're any fun to play with. Another very unique thing of the early part of the process is a lot of the later part of the process is refined, right? Something exists and you're just trying to make it better lot of the later part of the process is refined, right? Is something exists

and you're just trying to make it better. But the early part isn't refined as much as what is it? What is the thing in the first place? And the interesting thing about Strixhaven is we came in knowing way, way more than we normally know. All the things you listed

in our first meeting, we knew all of that, which is there's a lot of sets where like you know when i choreo started like it's monsters that's where we started it's you know it's it's a monster plane we had very little to go on other than like a basic theme um this one had a lot of structure you know we knew it was enemy color we knew it was faction based we knew it was um spells matter we knew the trope space we were playing in um yeah and like now that i've been on more teams i feel like coming out of fencing

exploratory we actually had much more useful stuff to hand off than some exploratory teams have like or much more i would maybe useful is not the right word but like more concrete and refined like okay here's a list of, of like what the five colleges do, what they study, what their central conflict is, their magical style, their personality. Um, and we had some, you know, some pretty solid mechanical ideas, although a lot of those changed, um, throughout vision and set design. So here's another interesting thing. Your background is in academics. Yes. So, um, and Matt, for those that don't know, I mean, math being your big thing. So what was it like

working on a set that's the subject matter is, you know, an area of expertise for you? That was actually that was a lot of fun because I, you know, I got to try to design cards that specifically evoked some mathematical concepts. I don't know that any of them made it into the set. I think I had some plant that made a copy of itself and then put counters of varying amounts depending on which one was bigger. And basically, it created the Fibonacci sequence. But yeah, I think a lot of those didn't make it in but one thing i remember doing was pestering doug byer uh at some point and and being like hey here's a bunch of words that would be really cool to put in the

flavor text of of these quandrix cards or to put in their card names. And I also said, like, could you name a card Natural Transformation? Like, just for the math nerds out there, they would love it if there were a card named Natural Transformation. But I think a lot of these cuts were a little too deep, so they didn't get in there. I mean, there's a... Quandrix does have a decent number of...

I mean, I think there's not quite as deep, but yeah. Yes. I mean, there's a good reason that they don't let me, they don't let me name cards or write flavor text. Okay, so,

looking back at Strixhaven, you've now worked on a bunch of sets, obviously. What, what stands out in your mind is the most unique thing about Strixhaven? The most unique thing about Strixhaven? The most unique thing about Strixhaven?

I would say lesson learned. Like this, I think it's a use of the sideboard that's really, um, pretty unorthodox. I don't, I can't think of anything in that vein we've done before. I mean, companions were, were, companions were also made use of the sideboard as a reliable thing you could access, but in a very different way. So I think, yeah, I think lesson learned, it's super innovative. Were you on set design? The flavor of a school pretty well. Were you on set design when they pulled in lesson learned or was that after you left? I don't remember. I think it was either it was after I left, but also I think I was actually on set design

not immediately after Vision, but like a month or two later. Like I think I got randomly pulled in for one month when they needed a person and then I was off the next month just because of how scheduling worked out. Yeah, the interesting thing about Lesson Learned is in Kaladesh we had made the inventions, of how scheduling worked out? Yeah, the interesting thing about Lesson Learned is the...

In Kaladesh, we had made the inventions, which is sort of the precursor to Lesson Learned, but it got artifacts rather than getting instants and sorceries. And what's really interesting to me is we were trying to make it work and it was complicated and we ended up cutting it because energy

was also complicated. But it turns out that getting instants and sorceries made it easier to develop than getting artifacts. Which is not something that's like it's not something I would have even thought of. Like it matters what the subset that you're getting is.

But it turned out that it just it flowed better for a lot of the dynamics of what makes that kind of mechanic work. Now to what extent do you think that was because we were doing fewer colored artifacts at the time of Kaladesh? Oh, that was part of it. Um,

the other part is while you can make artifacts that mimic sorceries to a certain extent, you know, like you can definitely, it's an artifact that comes and you sack it. So like it, it has a sorcery feel. Um,

we didn't want to do too many of those because they didn't feel super artifact-y. You can get away with some of them. And so just the nature of making them feel artifact-y made us want to have some number of more permanent things. And I think this mechanic just works better where it's more fine-pointed. You get something

and you're done. That's why instant sorcerers I think work a little better. But yeah, when Kaladesh was happening, right, colored artifacts weren't, I mean, obviously the Gearhulks existed, but I mean, it was a minor thing that we did. It wasn't a major thing. You know, now it's an evergreen,

we do it all the time thing. I think if we had had colored artifacts then, that would have helped a little bit, right? The fact that anybody could play anything really complicated some of the balancing of the mechanic. In fact, that reminds me of a story from Fencing Exploratory. Well before we were talking about Lesson and Learn, we did spend some time talking about, okay, what are some other magic school tropes? And we were like, potions, right? What about brewing potions?

tropes and we were like potions right what about brewing potions and so i think i i think i made a deck that like fetched potions from your sideboard right that were colored artifacts that you could use to gain life or make your opponent lose life or grow a creature or whatever you know do things that a potion would do and you were like hey these are kaladesh you know what was it inventions they're called inventions yeah you just reinvented kaladesh inventions um that did not work out so great for us before i mean if they weren't bad it was just i mean the real problem in kaladesh was it was very complicated and energy was very complicated and basically it was like you can't do both i'm like well energy is more important to what that is so um and i mean also that wouldn't really have made sense in fencing because like fetching artifacts from your sideboard in a set that's all about instance and sorceries which would just be

sort of a mechanical division from the the main point of the set but the fact that we eventually decided oh let's just do this with instance and and Sorceries and call it Learn, like, that made a lot of sense. Yeah, it is interesting how one of the cool things about you, we make a lot of mechanics, as you explained now, like an exploratory. We'll make all sorts of things. And what happens is most of it doesn't work. I mean, and not because the mechanics aren't good, but that's the other thing people don't seem to understand. It's not like the mechanics are a good mechanic or a bad mechanic. It's does it fit this set and the needs of this set and so a lot of times you make really

cool things and well they don't fit here but you sort of keep them in your mind and then later on when you're doing other sets other places you're like oh oh this this thing that we did back there maybe would work here yeah like there's a there's a mechanic in the in marathon right now. Right. Which which I believe I first pitched during the hockey exploratory. So, yeah, H.I.H. to M. You know, it's been it's been a while and the mechanics changed several times since then. But but yeah, now I think it's a good mechanic. Yeah. And I had Ethan on talking call time and like there's's a mechanic called layaway that I made based on

a Star Wars trading card game mechanic that, you know, kind of, I mean, was part of, Fortel was very similar to what it was and,

you know, so it is interesting. I mean, one of the things that, as we talk about Strixhaven, it's kind of funny how like, you're seeing all the sets around it, you know,

like we'll make things and some of the stuff goes here and some of the stuff we borrow from elsewhere. Okay, but we don't have too much, I'm almost to my desk. We don't have too much time. So, St'll make things, and some of the stuff goes here, and some of the stuff we borrow from elsewhere. Okay, but we don't have too much. I'm almost to my desk. We don't have too much time. So, Strixhaven, any other interesting vision, exploratory vision sort of memories of the set?

I think I told all the most interesting stories of mechanics we tried out. Like, we had a lot of things which let you copy spells or like circumstantially flashback spells oh there was one version i liked this was a a learning kind of mechanic where like you cast a spell and then you exiled it like with learned by one of your creatures and then you could tap that creature to cast it once more from exile so sort of like flashback but they could like kill the creature if they wanted getting flashback. Oh, right, right.

You taught the creature the spell, and now the creature could do the spell. I remember that. Yeah, the other thing that we messed around with a bit is we tried to do mechanics that copied spells for a while. Because part of Magecraft was it triggers not just off the spell being cast, but a spell being copied as well.

And I know we tried to... Oh, do you remember familiars? Oh, yeah, familiars, yes. So those were pretty cool. So you would pay some mana and exile a spell from your hand to create a token and then you could cast the spell from exile and it was cheaper, I think,

depending on how many familiars you controlled. Right, well, there were a couple different takes on it. The one I'm remembering is we had an ability word called familiar that all it cared about is, did you have an artifact creature token? Not artifact, sorry. Did you have a or not not artifact sorry did you have a creature token oh did you have a creature just did you have a creature token and it gave a rider to the spell if you had a creature token because one of the

things about the um because we were trying to make spells matter you have to keep the density of instance and sorceries up but you still need creatures so uh creature tokens made a lot of sense because an instant resource youer could make a token, it's still a creature, but it counts for your instants and sorceries. And so for a while, we had a mechanic, or it's an ability word, but it rewarded you for having creature tokens,

and so it sort of said, hey, you're in school, you kind of want to familiar with you. Yeah. And we messed, yeah, and then we for a while had a mechanic where you could kick to make tokens, right? Yeah, there was kick to make tokens. There was kick to copy myself just to, like, get an extra magecraft trigger out of spells. Yeah.

Yeah, we talked about bringing replicate back as well. And we talked about a one-shot replicate where you only ever get one copy. Yeah. I think it was called Fork or something. And the funny thing, so talk about bringing spells from the back. We had a mechanic for a while where you kicked to get a creature token. That was taken from Ixalan. Ixalan had used that originally. We didn't

end up using an Ixalan, but... So it's like, Ixalan tried it, didn't use it. Strix hasn't tried it, didn't use it. One day we'll find the place. Yeah, I feel like people have this idea that we work on one set at a time and come up with mechanics for a set, but it's more like

we're always working on five sets at a time up and down the pipeline and so it's like a gigantic kitchen where people are picking up and putting down ingredients. What's that game, Overcooked? Have you ever seen this game i've not but uh okay it's a similar thing so um yeah the other interesting thing is um like one of the things that as the year progresses like there's a mechanic coming out later in the year that we just made for a completely other purpose

somewhere else and the the set was just looking for something, and they're like, oh, this looks cool. I think it may be a mechanic you made. Yes, it is a mechanic I made, and it switched from one set to a completely different one. Yes, but I guess we'll tell that story when that set comes out. Yeah, we'll tell that story later. But it's very funny how you made this mechanic that was really cool, and then a set that was further along needed a mechanic, and they're like that's cool

we'll take that one of the rules is the closer you are to release you have priority and so if you like because the idea is

the set that's farther back has more time to find a replacement and so if a set that's closer needs it they can steal stuff I mean there's some exceptions but they can steal stuff

and so anyway that's the story for another day but anyway alright it was fun. Thank you for coming and talking trick-saving with me. Yep. But I see my desk.

So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Ari, for being here. Thanks, Mark. Have a good day. And guys, I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.