Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #831: Mirrodin with Tyler Bielman

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

I sit down with former Magic designer Tyler Bielman to talk about the design of original Mirrodin.

I'm not pulling out my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, guys, I've been having so much fun talking with R&D folks, new and old, about sets we worked on together. Today is R&D old. It's Tyler Beelman is with me to talk about Original Mirrodin. Hey, Tyler. Hey, Mark. It's so great to see you. I'm so happy to be with you today. Okay, so let me, for the audience, I'm well versed in who you are, but the audience might not be. So Tyler started doing freelance work for Wizards, doing marketing and advertising. That's right, yeah. Joined on the brand team for a while. Yeah. And then you came over to R&D. You ran the creative team and did a lot of were and you were on the design team for Mirrodin, which is why we're talking about this today.

Although you you also did a lot of the creative, too. So you have a you have a larger role in Mirrodin. Yeah, I was at that point in time. I was sort of the creative director was the title and I ran the creative team and I hadn't done much game design actually at all. It was an incredible opportunity to start learning how to make games with uh this incredible team so uh so yeah it was it was amazing okay so part of the fun of the Mirrodin story uh and since the audience knows like uh Tyler and I have not talked about this ahead of time so I'm gonna jump in and uh we'll see let's see what Tyler remembers of this okay so we you and I had grandiose plans for Mirrodin long before we made Mirrodin. How much memory do you have of our original ideas on what Mirrodin was going to be?

I remember the first thing I remember is knowing it was going to be an artifact block. And then I remember coming out of my office and going to Brady's desk and saying, what if the whole world was made of metal? And that's what I remember as being a kickoff of the whole thing. And that's my first recollection of it. Now, I'm sure we must have talked subsequent to that or before that about something else,

but that's what I remember very vividly. Okay, so I'm going to tell you a story, something that we had planned. See if this comes back to you. Okay. You and I planned a three-year story arc in which the first year was mirrored as we knew it. It was a metal world

that was made, somebody made the metal world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second year was a prison world. A prison world. Right. Where people were fighting the warden made them fight for stuff and the third year was a fight between the two worlds that each had their own system

to get the best fighter so they could bring it to this big conflict that's right, I do remember that I think that was subsequent to the conversation I would have had with Brady but yeah, we definitely had I remember the prison world discussions at length, which I'm assuming, you know, we never did anything with. One day, we've not made a prison world yet,

but it's come up a bunch of times. Yeah, I remember in my head, it was like a lava world. Like it was going to be a lava world, was the prison world. But maybe that's, I'm misremembering, but that's what I remember. My memory of it was it was underground, but that lava world and underground prison world

don't negate one another. Yeah, that was going to be part of it. Yeah. Gosh, that's amazing. Yeah, I haven't thought about that since then. That's amazing. Okay, so another thing that you and I talked about is completely revamping artifacts. See, remember this.

So the idea we had was we were going to break artifacts up into, I think it was five categories to give more definition to artifacts. Did this ring a bell? Like potions and scrolls. Yeah, yeah, I remember that initial conversation and then that, of course, becoming, like, equipment becoming local artifacts. One of them was, like, one of them

were weapons, one was I don't know, armor or something, one was scrolls, one was potions and one was like miscellaneous i think yeah yeah and i mean that was i mean obviously right the the fantasy influence there coming in and it's funny to think of mirrodin as being closer to high fantasy than a lot of magic because it's this very interesting world made of metal but if you look at what we ended up doing with equipment and uh and the kind of the magic wand right the isochron scepter and and uh and what we did with uh the race class system like it's very classic fantasy stuff that's starting to seep its way in even though

that world is a very magic style uh mage punk uh magic world So the interesting thing is nowadays we have the creative team and the design team are very interwoven, but Mirrodin was one of the really first sets where that really happened. Like, we went to Brady and said, you know, it's a metal world, right?

That was your big pitch that I was very enamored with, was okay, everything's made of metal. What does that mean? What does it mean? Yeah. And I know Jeremy Cranford, who was the art director at the time, had this idea of weaving metal through

the biology of creatures. The idea that they eventually came up with, which wasn't quite where we started, was that the creatures had been pulled here from elsewhere, which I think was part of our original pitch, but that when they were pulled there, they weren't metal yet, but the act of being there, like

this environment slowly made them metal over time. Infected them, yeah. It would infect them with the kind of liquid metal kind of idea. I remember that as well. And then, yeah, and then the reveal at the thirds, like you said, there was the metal world, and then there was sort of the prison world. And we I think you and I both were big fans of Secret Wars from Marvel. Right.

Oh, yeah, for sure. You can see the influence there, you know, in this. So I think the idea was then the big reveal in the third act was, oh, my gosh, you know, this is one connected idea that these people, you know, whether they were taken to the prison world or taken to the metal world. Right. There were two there are these uber yeah it's all coming back now there were some uber entities who are essentially playing a big game with these two worlds right and the idea i think was that each one of them was trying to get the best combatants they could and there's just two different strategies for how to get the best combatants that you could which is just magic right at the end like it's just magic we just We just took this, we just pulled up to a cosmic scope of the two players. Oh my gosh, yeah, I remember all of that, yeah.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about equipment. So we had picked, one of the grandiose ideas that you and I had, and we spent a lot of time on this, was could we, one of the things that's always been a thing is enchantments and artifacts overlap a lot. Like, they're creatively very different, but mechanically they're really not that different. And we were trying

to figure out how to separate them a little more, and we were like... But one of the things we talked about was weapons. And that one of the things that Magic was kind of missing was, hey, I had these creatures, but I couldn't give them a weapon. Yeah, where's my flaming sword? Right. That's, like,

seems like that's a thing we should be doing. I know, but the way it worked is, you, the planeswalker, could have a flaming sword, but your creatures couldn't have a flaming sword. I mean, we had tried a little bit. Early Magic has some artifacts that you could tap and not untap, and it was trying to mimic the idea that

they had it. Yeah, creating a little narrative connection there. But you had to squint your eyes at it. Right. So what is your earliest memory of equipment? I remember coming out of a, we were in a design meeting with that incredible team. I don't remember who said it, but I remember that someone said, you know, we came up with the idea of, I remember local artifacts, right? That was the two word thing that came out of the conversation. So then I remember I got up, I was very excited. And so I went over to the organized play team and I

basically busted in on a meeting and I said, tell me why local artifacts wouldn't work, right? I said, why are there, is there anything I'm not seeing as to why it wouldn't work conceptually? And they all looked at each other and we had a brief conversation. That was fine. And I basically just did that in a few different places. There were those touchstone people. You'd go to customer service and talk to them a little bit, go to organized play and talk to them a little bit. And that's my initial recognition of it. I don't know from there, I don't remember the process of how it ended up mechanically, you know,

tack to attach and that kind of stuff, but or the cost to attach. So here's my memory. The very first thing we tried was we just did equipment as if it was an aura, but it was an artifact. Like literally, it said equip, but it acted exactly like an aura,

just it was an artifact and not an enchantment. Yeah. And the feedback we got was, we have auras. Like, if your whole goal is to make artifacts and equipment, I'm sorry, artifacts and enchantments different, why completely mimic what enchantments are doing? Right. That's right. And then somebody... The popping off thing, right? Right. Somebody said, well, what if...

The popping off thing, right? Right. Somebody said, well, what if... Like, if someone loses a sword, the argument was, if I give a goblin a sword and you kill the goblin, well, the sword is not gone. Someone else can pick up the sword. And we followed the flavors, kind of how we got there.

Well, the whole thing was flavor-driven, right? It was sort of a high-concept, top-down idea. Yeah, I do remember... I do remember... I remember vaguely playtesting that and the popping off being the next step in that process. It was the second thing we tried

and we really stuck with it. And the big question was, how do you get it on the creature? I think the big innovation we came up with was that you didn't put it on the creature right away. That you just played it and then there was a cost to get it from the play to the creature. Yeah, for the goblin to pick it up.

Right. Ironically, we do a lot of snap-on equipment these days where it snaps on automatically, but one of the things was to try to give it its own identity was it's not an aura. Look, you cast it like you cast any artifact. Oh, but it has a special quality that you can attach it to something.

Or equip it, as we ended up calling it. I will say, by the way, so there's four new things in the set as far as named things, which was equipment, affinity, imprint, and a twine. We're going to talk about all of these. One of the things I'm very proud of is the design team

named all of them, and all of the names stuck. Oh, really? I do not remember that being the case. That's really funny. Well, you had Brian Tinsman and I both in there, right? And at that point, I don't know how much naming I...

Real quickly, just because you mentioned the team. The team was me and Brian Tinsman and Mike Elliott and Tyler and then bill rose was involved some yeah i mean just just a murderer's row of a team yeah for me coming into magic design like i mean you i mean it was amazing to work with that team right it was at the time mike and brian and bill and me were like leading 90 of the sets at the time so like it was all the set leads.

Yes. Oh, so one thing I didn't mention, by the way, you sort of mentioned this real quick, is we had got into the idea that we wanted to have blocks that were themes. Invasion kind of started this. Oh, yeah. Blocks have themes.

And I really, really wanted to do an artifact theme. So, like, I tagged this block as being artifacts super early, but that's all we knew about it. And then you were like, it's a world made of metal. And then, you know, we went down that path of how do we make an artifact world feel like an artifact world? Yeah, I mean, you and I had done some really great work on the color pie right on the color wheel

and like, what does it all mean? And so it was really interesting to then think about the artifact side of that and how does it all fit in? And if you do this world, what does it mean for green? And like all these cool sort of ideas that you and I were playing around with and I think that set really holds up as something that creatively

thematically and mechanically is just really nicely intertwined I mean, Mirrodin's fatal flaw was its development could have spent a little more time but I don't want to say I washed my hands of that but that was never really my department I was super proud of Mirrodin, I don't want to say I washed my hands of that, but that was never really my department. Yeah, I mean, design...

I'm super proud of Mirrodin. I think Mirrodin is... There are certain sets that definitely sort of put a flag in the ground and very much define things, and I think Mirrodin is definitely one of those sets. It really spoke to the players. I mean, it's a world we've gone back to multiple times, which usually is a sign... Yeah, every time

I see an announcement like that, I'm very proud of the Ravnica or Myriad Enrex. I was involved with both. Yeah. You know, that it has that persistence and that it has the legs because it was such a great high concept that you could then keep building on the foundations. So let's talk about the other mechanics here.

Affinity. What is your memory of Affinity for Artifacts? I honestly, I don't have much memory at all about it. I don't think it was, that was just, you know, mechanics like Affinity just weren't my area, right? The sort of like those sort of mana-oriented spike cards that, you know, just leveraged efficiency and you could create edge with.

It just wasn't really my cup of tea, right? I was much more in the imprint and the, oh God, the, sorry, the equipment side of things. The equipment side. So one of the things that we had, I had really, walking in, I really wanted this to be

what we call artifacts matter, meaning that we, like that part of Metal World was there's lots of artifacts. Why is it a Metal World? Because there's so many artifacts. That's part of where Metal World came from. Part of the thing that I felt was important was I wanted an artifact block where, man, there were a lot of artifacts. Another interesting thing, as we get into Infinity, is I actually put a lot of artifacts. Another interesting thing, as we get into Infinity, is I actually

put a lot more colored mana in the set. Do you remember this? I was a big believer that we needed to have a lot more color. So we had a lot more color activations and stuff. And then Bill stripped most of it out when it went to development. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. Yeah, you're right. I mean,

you had really good reasons for why to do that. Because we didn't want the set to be a colorless set, but we wanted, as you said, artifacts to matter, right? And that made a lot of sense at the time. of the development that happened was, I think, I in my head had this idea that we need to separate the things so everybody can't play everything. And then I think Bill was just like, it's an artifact set. Let's stop making it a colored set. It's an artifact set.

Let people play with the cards. And I think that, I mean, there's multiple things going on, but I think that, I think I sort of, in the deep of my heart, I knew there was something we needed to do and then I just didn't fight for it enough. In retrospect, I wish I had fought for that a little more.

Anyway, so Affinity came about because we wanted artifacts to matter, and it's like, okay, well, how can I care that you have a lot of artifacts? And cost reduction is just something that is a sexy thing. It's terribly dangerous. Well, I mean, yes, it's terribly dangerous.

But it's sexy. It's sexy and exciting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Gotcha. And also, because artifacts were generic mana, like, affinity for artifacts means it could be free, right? It had this, like, allure of, ooh, it could be free. Can I get there? Johnny loves it.

Can I get there? And so we stuck that in. So you mentioned imprint. What is your early memory of imprint? I just remember very uh adamantly wanting a magic wand right and just trying to figure out how to do that and then that became isochron scepter and and i remember just being so enamored of the idea of being able to put a spell into a wand and being able to cast it um having your wand of fireball or your wand

of lightning bolt or whatever. And I remember that's the dominant memory I have of it. It's a metaphor. Here's my memory. I mean, this is all intertwined, is I tried to make what ended up being called

Soul Shaper? I made a card that I called Clone Machine. Yeah, I do remember. When you call it that, I do remember. And you put a creature in it and make copies of this creature. Soul Foundry. It's called Soul Foundry.

And Brian had made a card It was equipment, or not equipment, but it was a thing that when you hit your opponent you put a spell in it. And both of those were ideas we didn't end up doing, but I liked them. And then when you talked about the magic wand, it was like the light bulb.

I saw the light of all these different things we tried to do and said, it really, I loved the idea of what if choosing a card was a mechanic? Like, what if we had... And you, like I said, I made something, you had made something, Brian had made something, and it's just like the stars aligned, and like, this could be a mechanic.

But it was many years in the making. I mean, you had made... You were trying to make the wand in the set, but the stuff that Brian and I made were in previous sets, but we had never actually printed. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And so, what happened was I think you had pitched an idea and then I'm like, and you didn't pitch it as a

mechanic, you pitched it as a singular one-card idea, but I recognized that we kept trying to do it and then I was like, oh, why make this one card? This could be a whole thing. Yeah, I mean, that's design, right? You are making those, as the lead designer right you're making these uh connections all the time right you've got this vast repository of ideas and i've watched you do it where you pluck out of the ether

uh these these ideas from the past and string them together to create a whole a holistic new thing uh it's an incredible uh process to be part of so yeah it yeah, it was great. And in print, I personally really like in print, although it's funny, we've learned that they're hard to make. That there's... Like, in print's the kind of mechanic that you can make a bunch, like a few really cool things, and then it starts getting

hard without making kind of, you know, like, pick a spell and choose its color or something. You could just pick the color, so that's not very interesting. Okay, let's move on. Entwine. This has a famous story, which I don't know if you know the answer to, but...

I probably don't. I remember a lot of conversations about Kicker is everything. Why is Kicker everything? That's what I remember. Lots of conversations about that. And then, I think that might have also bled into Dark Steel's design, too. Just trying to figure out how to bifurcate Kicker in interesting ways.

Okay, so I'll bring something else up and see if you remember, then I'll tell the story. Do you remember energy? Because an early form of energy was in this set. No, no, it doesn't ring a bell, Mark. It really doesn't. And the way we did it in this set is we had charge counters on artifacts. Yep.

And we made artifacts that could remove charge counters from any artifact you had. Right. So it's like, the idea was take serrated arrows, but imagine if you had another artifact that did something different

and they shared the counters. They shared the counters. Yep, I remember that now. And that was... That's not that far from energy. Energy, you, the player, keep them. But, I mean, it's a very similar thing, which is I have so many uses

that I can use it in different places. So Bill Rose stripped it out. He thought we had too much going on. So he took out the color stuff, or he lessened... There was some color stuff. He lessened the color stuff, and he took out energy.

And we were missing a spell mechanic. So what he said basically is, take this out, but we are missing something. Try to find a spell mechanic. And so I made a list of all the things we needed that would fit the role of what we were missing. And I went to sleep one night, and I literally dreamed it up. I literally woke from a dream and wrote it down. It's the best. It's the one mechanic that I basically know that

I dreamed up because I preloaded my brain and then I went to sleep and my brain's like, okay, here you go. When your brain comes through in the clutch, that's fantastic. Yeah, I find my early mornings when I'm just in that dream zone and I have some great ideas and I've had game designs come to me in that dream zone. And so I have some great ideas,

and I've had game designs come to me in that state. I love it. Okay, next up. Do you remember anything about Artifact Lands? No. I don't even remember them being in the design set. I mean, I have no recollection of it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure these were my baby.

I think what happened was we made Affinity, or not made Affinity, we made Artifact Matters. There's just infinite ways that artifacts matter. And it dawned on me that, well, in this environment, people can be running Shatters left and right, because it's running artifact destruction.

And like, oh, well, that would be a negative, that would be a cool balance on a land because, hey, you could come to an artifact with things that cared about it, but it'd be way more susceptible to people getting rid of it. And in my head, I'm like, oh, that seems equally balanced. What could go wrong? That sounds good.

And I remember in early development, here's where I'll take the blame for this one. I think Randy, Randy Bueller, who led the team, said, these are a little bit dangerous. And I said, oh, but Randy, I know there's dangerous things you can do with them, but they're so much fun.

There's all these cool things you can do with them. And I said, please, please, if you can, try to keep them. Yeah, I seem to remember that when you say it with that phrasing, I seem to remember you saying exactly say it with that phrasing i seem to remember you saying exactly those words um so what else here's a question we're walking to the mechanics what else do you remember like when you what are your design memories of making meriden

yeah the big the big one for me is the sort of race class or species class system that that with the card types with the creature types that i believe that you know we on the creative team especially brandon bozzy had you know been wanting to make this move to allow us to kind of go again much like uh fantasy rpgs right or dnd you know it's an elf warrior or it's a goblin mystic or what have you. And so my recollection is that we did, we did a PowerPoint presentation to the bunch of R and D key folks and, you know, made the argument essentially that we thought that this would be a

productive thing for magic to do because it unlocked a lot more tribal stuff and there was a lot more things you could do with it. So I remember that being, you know, it was kind of a feather in our cap on the creative side to kind of be able to contribute in that way. Right. So here's my memory of that. So your team had put that together. So Brady, Brady Dommermuth, came and talked to me because he knew I had been trying to make multiple creature types forever. And so he knew I was like the most receptive one in R&D. So he came to me individually and pitched it to me.

And I said, well, you had me at like two creature types on a card, Brady. And so, and then I helped with the presentation with you guys to pitch it to R&D just because you all felt that if it didn't just come from the creative team, if you had some buy-in, that it would help sort of convince the other people in R&D. And so anyway, I was, I mean, it was

clearly the creative team was the one that came up with it. But I was an early early champion of... Yeah, you were a champion. I mean, that's, you know, in any organization, you have to have those champions that believe in what you're doing. And you were definitely champion. I mean, that's, you know, in any organization, you have to have those champions that, that believe in what you're doing. And you, and you were definitely that, I mean, your ability to balance the kind of the creative side of things with the mechanical side of things,

and then your, your innate design sense and your, and like, you know, you've got a lot of, you've got a lot of different skill sets. Right. So it was great to have you for that. Yeah. And then, you know, I just remember also being excited about, I might sound silly, but just the stuff we could reprint, right? Like, like the idea of a talk and then making mega the mega a talk and I see manipulator, which was a card that I had loved for a long time. So this was, it was just such a cool opportunity to kind of pull from the past too. I remember being really happy with that.

Okay. So this something came up in another podcast, but you brought up adding the, the race class. So there's an interesting, I'm curious to get your take on the, on this story. Cause we, I talked about it with somebody else in a recent podcast. So when we did race class, it, before that, we never called out humans on cards. That's right.

If you were a human soldier, we just said soldier. Right? But the race class system required, okay, now if you're a human, we have to say you're human. And so it required the introduction of the human creature type, which was controversial at the time. So what is your memory of this? Yeah, I mean, it brings up all the questions about are they human?

Is it humanity? Why is it so Earth-focused? Do we have to make up something that means man or human? And, yeah, I remember lots of discussions around that. And then ultimately my recollection is just landing on it's the thing that everybody knows. Everybody will understand it. We're thinking about this too hard. Nobody's going to hitch on this is my landing on. It's the thing that everybody knows. Everybody will understand it. We're thinking about this too hard. Nobody's going to hitch on this,

is my recollection. Yeah, I... Well, this is my memory of you, see if you remember this, is we were in a meeting and everybody... We got people to buy on to the race class, but the sticking point was humans.

And so there's this conversation of, okay, we don't have to call them human, and we're talk about other options and you were in the meeting and you at one point goes look guys we can name it something else but it's what the like why are we going to choose a word and then everybody else everybody playing the game is just going to call it human

like why are we doing that and you made this a passion plea and I always attribute that to yeah to the that sounds about right but I just remember, I called it the human plea. It's like, you're like... And you made this great argument,

which is, we can call it whatever we want, and then everybody in the game is just going to call it human. Why are we fighting that? That's kind of absurdly practical coming from me, actually. That's pretty funny. That's not usually my bailiwick. But yeah, that seems like a reasonable argument now, in hindsight. And we got it.

And it's funny, the concession we made at the time, I had a podcast with Tom LaPillard where we talked about human tribal for the first time. It showed up in Innistrad and Dark Ascension. We had promised at the time not, we wouldn't do any human tribal. That was our concession to R&D when we got them to agree to put human was, okay, we won't make human matter. It'll just be a thing. Oh, yeah. We'll never do human matter.

We'll never make it matter. Yeah. Eventually, you're going to do everything. Wow. Okay, so I'm not too far from my desk here. So, any other memories of Mirrodin? Uh, no, I mean, just honestly, it was the one thing. Okay. So let's go back to the first day. And I may not remember this, but maybe not. You had, you know, I, I had not done this before. I, I, I had dibbled, I had maybe dabbed my toe into game design at all at that point.

into game design at all at that point. And you put out the call for comments for the set. And you said, you know, I'm looking for comments, just for ideas, let's comment. And I did the thing that any, you know, I was an M, just a huge Magic fan. And so I had my, you know, word doc that I'd been putting cards into for years. And I just sent you the whole thing.

And so I remember we were at a Starbucks, I think, and you had a physical printout on paper when you used to use paper. And you said, okay, I've got, Tyler, I've got your cards here. It's really great. They're not commons, but there's some interesting ideas here. And I remember at the time, like, just sort of being like, okay, that's, I guess that's good. But I just didn't have any clue right about what what what was going to happen and as i learned through the design process about the slots and about the balance and about you know what what makes a common what a common needs to do in the set and just that learning curve was so great and uh and you know those initial steps with mirrodin set the

table for my whole career because that transition into game design is what I do today I do it in a different medium but it's but I I hearken back to those those initial lessons and the things I learned working with people like yourself you know literally at least once a week I'm like going back and like trying to communicate to people some of the insights that we had at Wizards R&D because it's a really special time and it's a really incredible process. Yeah, one of the things that to me is really interesting is that I find Wizards R&D

has been a good sort of breeding ground for designers that there's designers out there in the multiverse of game design that at some point pass through magic and so that's definitely very cool. Yeah, and for years I've told people who come to me,

how do I get into design? What do I do to learn it? I point them at your podcast. I point them at Wizards R&D resources that are out there because it really is. It's so funny because I don't think it was designed to be this way. I think it built itself up organically. But you have to learn how to make a system like magic.

this way. I think it built itself up organically, but you have to learn how to make a system like magic. And, and, but to do that, it's an incredible number of smart, brilliant people that went through that and honed that process. So, uh, yeah, I think it's a, it's an incredible starting point. And for me, it changed my life because I went from, you know, marketing and then into the creative role and then became a game designer and have been that ever since. Well, I will say one of the things that I've been enjoying about this whole series I'm doing is getting to talk with people

that you and I haven't talked in a while. So it's fun reminiscing. Absolutely. I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Mark. I had a blast. And now I leave with the desire to, ooh, can we do Prison World?

Yeah, exactly. What have we unleashed? Just remember that there's always a plan behind the plan. Well, the other thing that's great, the other thing that's really fun, hopefully for the audience when we go back, is there's things that we didn't do, but you later see us doing.

Like, for example, energy we tried, and then energy, you know, Kaladesh, years later ended up seeing fruition. And it's kind of funny how when you go back, you can see the seeds of things to come, even though they might not even have been used then. So that's always fun. It's an amazing journey.

But anyway, I am 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 so much for being on the show, Tyler. Mark, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Good to see you, buddy. Okay, guys. And I will see all of you next time. Bye-bye.