Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #837: Ikoria with Dave Humpherys

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

I sit down with Dave Humpherys, set design lead for Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, and talk about the design of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been meeting with R&D of past and present to talk about sets we worked on together. So today, my guest is Dave Humphries to talk about Ikoria. Hey, Dave. Hey, everyone. Okay, so what is your earliest memory of Ikoria? Let's see.

Yeah, I mean, I think I remember, I mean, I was on Vision. I remember us trying to figure out Mutate. Certainly that was, like, one of the earlier things I remember. I mean, I know, like, I mean, I felt like we knew that this would sort of be, right, in our mind, it was kind of the, like, monsters on a kind of almost tropical island sort of vibe, or I forget, like, exactly what, like, monster island-ish sort of vibe. So, I don't know. I was pretty excited by that. I've always, right, I'm a biologist by training, now a game designer, but I don't know, like, a lot of that passion comes from just being really interested in stuff like mutations and animals and weird variants of creatures throughout

the world, our world and fantasy worlds. So just so the audience understands, so I led the vision design and Dave led the set design. And you like being on vision design. Not all set designers are on the vision design, but you enjoy being on the vision design. Yeah, I mean, I do try to be somewhat hands-off compared to if I were on a vision design for, say, another set that I wasn't going to be leading later. But, yeah, I mean, I like to be there to sort of steer things where I see that I'm going to be excited to take over. where I see that I'm going to be excited to take over. I mean, I try not to shoot down ideas too much and I try to hear out what's exciting other people. But yeah, I definitely like to be in a position

where if it looks like stuff's not working or if I see problems or I can point out problems that I foresee earlier so that your team can tackle those themselves rather than me having to tackle them later on in cases where you might not have an opportunity to revisit stuff that you're excited about for other reasons. So real quickly, just to fill the audience in,

originally, this was Cricket was its codename. Cricket was supposed to be Theros, and originally Eldraine was going to be two sets, and. Cricket was supposed to be Theros. And originally Eldraine was going to be two sets. And the third set was going to be Theros. But we decided to just make Eldraine one set. And then Theros got moved up. And then this idea came from something we had planned for like two years later. And Monstra Island was our shorthand for it.

Okay, so I know early on, mutate is something we started very early on. So what is your early memories of mutate? Well, I mean, I remember that the idea was that you had to mutate your creature over a creature that shared a keyword or a creature type, that that was like what we saw as the most thematic representation

of like it's, right's it's evolving to its kind of next level um but you you had to sort of be going along a path that that made sense um thematically um and again we we had at least even towards handoff we had like inheritable keywords so we were trying to define perhaps even like yeah which which keywords would be most prominent in the set and we were also gridding out all the colors so that each color had a most prominent creature type and that did get preserved throughout the process even if it didn't matter

mechanically in the way it started you know just in like white was focused on cats and red on dinosaurs and green on beasts and blue on elementals and I forgot what I didn't say. Black is in the nightmares, right? And in that case, yeah, the mutating creature gained any keyword or any keyword counters or counters or sorry any keywords in the form of these inheritable keyword counters potentially or, you know, and that was mostly what it was carrying over.

It was carrying over keywords, not the rest of the text like we changed it to during set design. So let me just explain something you were saying so the audience understands this. When we said inheritable keywords, what that meant was keyword counters were included very early in. And in fact, they were intertwined originally with mutate so the idea was if I mutated on top of a creature and it had any of the abilities that existed as a keyword counter

those keywords would get counters and go on the creature because in the original version of mutate you didn't like the later mutate in set design you got all the abilities of the creatures you were on, but that wasn't true originally. Yep. So, that's interesting.

So, when we handed off, when I handed off the set to you, right, the way you would mutate things is you would, the things had to share either a um ability word or they had to share a creature type and then you made the change to sort of just a copied everything what what got you to make that change yeah i mean some of it was actually just the draft itself was pretty complicated like you you draft like a creature with first strike and then you draft a cat and then you'd see like you know i don't know you'd see a mutate creature that was a dinosaur and then you'd see a mutate creature that was a beast and meanwhile yeah it was it was just kind of overwhelming for players and draft like not in a fun way like um you know again like there's a

certain amount of complexity and, and whatnot, that's certainly fun and people enjoy solving, but yeah, this was just not the complexity that people were finding fun. Um, so I think that that was like, um, I guess the main reason that I saw change, I mean, there, there's also issues with backwards compatibility. Like we, right. I mean, if we want to most excite people with our new set, in many cases we want to show them cards that will fit into decks that they have built, their favorite standard deck,

their favorite commander deck, or whatever. Just odds are that someone might not have a deck that can easily incorporate these cards if they're asking for more specific things. So yeah, I wanted to try it where right that these could mutate over anything that was not human um and then you know i got agreement i think it was from doug at the time if i'm remembering the leads right or like yeah that we we kind of just agreed that like all the humanoids here would be humans so that like we we wouldn't have i don't

know goblins or elves mutating into these things and like at least within the world we could still pretty well maintain some sense of like you know monsters mutating into more out there and wild monsters and I forget so somewhere in that yeah so I you know we

switched that and as well we switched to like that just all the text would carry over. I mean, that was just more of a consideration for how splashy they were. Again, it felt like worth trying, and then I didn't really ever get too much pushback. I mean, again, there is complexity in that. But at the same time, it's exciting to be able to mix and match text between creatures. There's a lot of fun in terms of getting a Pinger and a Death Toucher together or all various other sorts of combinations you could get.

And I was just going to say, just on the backwards compatibility too, some of it was just having the play designers starting to give input. If you could only build a deck around Nightmares, having the play designers starting to give input in like that, right? If you could only build a deck around nightmares, that was going to be pretty limiting in terms of like how much exploration players could really do with those decks as opposed to the more open-ended versions of all these. Yeah. It's interesting to note that one of the things that we,

one of the decisions we make all the time in game design is the change in mutate both made it easier in some way and more complicated in other ways like it's it's you're always like it's not as if every decision makes everything simpler or more complex it's it's a there's a fluidity to it right you made it easier to play and easier to kind of draft and build a deck around but individually understanding what creatures did became more complex. Right, right. I mean, overall, the complexity probably went up, but again, the complexity, yeah, the complexity that was getting added was just, yeah, in a much more enjoyable form, I felt.

Yeah, and that's an important part, which is sort of when we do things that are complex, and one of the things about Ikoria is we definitely tested with pushing complexity a little more than normal. The set definitely was a little more loaded than the average set had been, but we were doing that on purpose and one of the things was we thought the complexity was kind of fun complexity rather than kind of busy complexity. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the counters cause, uh, you were very instrumental in the keyword counter. So let's talk about the, the origin of keyword counters. Yeah. So, um, right. So I, I led almond cut, um, the development of almond cut. And in that process I was, you know, looking at like, I was part of, you know, part of introducing like, Oh, well, you know, we can put into packs like these,

you know, these counters for plus one, plus one counters. And we also had, you know, brick counters and, or sorry, I guess it was minus one, minus one counters and brick counters. And in that process at some point during design, I was like, Oh, you know, like if we're going to put these in packs, like we could do sort of more, you know, more interesting counters, like we could do keyword counters. And I'd mentioned that to Aaron. And like, again, at that point, the set was already like, I don't know, Amonkhet already kind of had too many things going on. So, you know, I just put it more in the, you know, back of my mind,

you know, I want to, I want to pitch this for some later set. And I, if I remember correctly, then like we ran a sort of the brainstorming teams where you you were leading sort of like you know a sort of a study you know like you know what else can we do for some of our upcoming sets and like in that meeting i pitched to you who was running that team like hey we could do keyword counters again and i know you you latched on to that and then sort of ran with that at the beginning of vision design before i was even very heavily involved. Yeah. So we had done a hackathon basically where it was on future design space. And so we chopped up things. And one of the things that we looked at was other game components. And then one of the subsets of other game components was punch out

cards. And so the team I'd worked on was, okay, what are all the cool things we do with punch out cards? And you had pitched keyword counters, and so that's something we explored during that week, and they were really fun. There's a lot of nice, very simple, elegant things you could do with them. So when we got to the idea of doing Mutate, I was very excited of maybe mutating could involve using keyboard counters. And they were very linked early on,

and then as they sort of separated, both stayed in the set, but they didn't overlap as much. Yeah, I mean, at some point, they didn't really become crucial to the execution of mutate at all. They just, they became their own thing. I mean, you know, one of the things I do like about a choreo is how well it kind of does stay

on theme of like, right? I mean, this is, you know, it's kind of the build your own monster or, you know, it's kind of the build your own monster or, you know, make, make your, make your creature ever more exotic and powerful and unusual. Um, and like, yeah, I mean, I do feel most of the mechanics build pretty well towards that. Yeah. One of, one of the big things I know in vision,

which you carried over in set design was like, um, one of the goals of any vision thing is just having what I call bullseye. Like what, what are you aiming for? And this was the monster set. It was always the monster set. And the idea of building your own monsters was a big part of it. So let's talk about a different mechanic that let you sort of build things, Companion. So what is your memory of Companion?

Yeah, I mean, Companion also sort of originated in the hackathon. It was actually I mean, it was part of a team that I was leading where, yeah, we were taking in a bunch of, again, a bunch of ideas, you know, things that could eventually show up in sets. And it came about sort of as a synthesis

of, like, I think two separate ideas where, you know, it was both looking at, you know, people were interested in some sort of like component that started the game in play. And then there was also like, sort of like an entirely separate part of the brainstorm that people were excited to investigate was like some sort of deck building restrictions, like, and right, like, you know, we have these things, the various things, or, you know, some of our formats certainly have components of these, you know, especially these things the various things or you know some of our formats certainly have components of these you know especially when talking about commander and you know start in game start of the game component um you know so many of these formats to some extent

also have a deck building restriction um so yeah i mean i in in leading that team and you know certainly had others helping me to get to that point but yeah like it it dawned on me that we could we could bring both of these things together in a way where like well you can't really start with this like extra component at the beginning of the game because that's like really powerful but well you know what if that's offset by a deck building restriction that then you know it is a strong enough um concession in deck building that like we can give you something at the start and again that you know that didn't necessarily need to be a whole card or anything like that but that was that was mostly the genesis

of it and you know i i i think this is one of those things that i again i brought up to you during vision of like like we we want to show you know the humans bonding with creatures here and like um you know i think companion could have showed up in quite a few different sets but I did genuinely feel like oh well like right like you know what's what shows off better like you bonding with like a powerful creature than like somehow starting with this creature at the start of the game like you know it's it's it's you and this creature kind of against you know against the world or against your opponent or whatever and like it felt it felt like a pretty good match here in a way that I was excited about especially since I had been in on initial brainstorming. Right. I mean, of course, of course

we, we, you know, made some errors along the way and I think course corrected in some pretty cool ways, but yeah, that, that was, that was the genesis of how it started. So one of the big challenges, and this was a lot more set design and, and we did some of it in early vision, but was trying to find constraints for companions. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, I mean, it's tricky. Like, first of all, yeah, you need the constraints to be, again, hard enough that we can be giving you a reward. that we can be giving you a reward. We need the constraints to be like roughly equal in like how hard they are to do. Right, so that like we can sort of have these cards operating on a similar mechanical level, right? Like I mean we wanted them to work in limited and constructed. We wanted

them to be like cards you'd still consider putting in your deck. Like I mean like in some ways we put probably too many constraints on ourselves for all the things that we wanted them to do. But yeah, like, I mean, yeah. And again, at some point, like some people are like, we're really allergic to this idea. Like not necessarily in the ways that the public responded against them, but like a lot of people were like, what if my opponent's cheating?

Or what, you know, what if they didn't really follow the rules? And a lot of people were like what if my opponent's cheating or what you know what if they didn't really follow rules and a lot of people were really really concerned about this especially in paper play um in ways that i wasn't necessarily expecting um right like like in my mind it's just like i mean there's a certain amount of right like you if your opponent plays lightning bolt against you you assume they have four in their deck and not five or six or whatever right like it's there's a certain amount of built-in assumption that like i don't know some of our mechanics like get shot down for fear of cheating but for the most part i feel like we have to you know assume that for the most part people are going to operate in good faith and not shoot down mechanics too easily like i mean you know that that said we do need to work in ways

to make compromises to the the folks that are worried about it. Like I did get rid of a lot of the constraints on them that I felt were too hard to keep an eye on if you were worried about that sort of thing. Can you give me some examples of ones you threw out? I'm trying to think of the – yeah, like I'm going to struggle now to come up with them on the spot, but right. There were some where it was like where we could even make compromises. It's like, I guess one of the better examples is like you had to play like 16 creatures in your deck or something like that, where it's like, well, you know, that would be verifiable on a deck list or whatever. But then like, you know, how do you know if they really had like 16 creatures in their deck? And I'm just throwing that as an example where it could have been a different card type and a different number.

There was a tribal card, for example, where, like, a certain number, you had to pick a tribe, and a certain number had to be that tribe, right? Right, right. And that relates to, what is it, Kahira is sort of like an example of that in the end, where, like, you know, like that that design started sort of in the space we're talking about in the end it was like you know like we're just going to make the reward for that card so centric on playing creatures and then we're not going to even really care if you play creatures like we're gonna you know you can play it in a creatureless deck even though it says like all your stuff has to if you have a creature it has to be that type but um right in the end i tried to get to the point where they're like you know as soon as your opponent did something that didn't match it would be pretty obvious like i think like loot trees the the like the hardest one to kind of keep track of because

that's the singleton one um and you you might not immediately know if your opponent was trying to work around that but yeah i mean i i think in the real world that became less of a concern, ultimately the way things played out, or companions had bigger issues. But yeah, I mean, again, it's weird. I mean, I think Lutri in some ways was one of the first like kind of proof of concept cards that I had made in my mind. I mean, it actually ends up being one of the harder deck building restrictions in many ways. Okay, so let's move on to, there's one more named mechanic in the set, which is a returning mechanic, which is cycling. So what is your earliest memory of cycling? I mean, yeah, I mean, I think it was kind of just always there. mean again as i mentioned i'd led amon cut so i felt like i had lesson lessons learned there a little bit and wanted

to be more aggressive this time around but i mean cycling made a ton of sense to me just as like you know like i mean i kind of love reanimator decks in terms of like my historical preferences for like deck types and magic and uh you know like if if we're going to try to get you to play big creatures and putting cycling on them is a good way to make sure you don't get punished for including too many big creatures in your deck so that, you know, then you can try to play more than you otherwise would. And we could set up some sort of reanimator strategies, which we did like for the green, black color pair. So, I mean, yeah, I was,

I was very on board with cycling. Um, I mean the, the, the other thing with cycling. I mean, the other thing that cycling... I mean, one of the choices we made with cycling in the set is that we did start to lean on it eventually as a sort of a color-fixing mechanic in some sense by having a lot of colorless cycling. In some ways, that burned us in the end, or at least it burned us with like having too much one mana colorless cycling with Zenith's Flare and limited.

But yeah, I mean, I was totally on board with the mechanic in terms of matching some of the goals that we, you know, some of the, some of the weaknesses of trying to deliver on a big creature set. Like I,

right. I mean, I know even for some people at Coria, I didn't feel like enough of a big creature set, but it's really hard to throw a set that's just all a bunch of huge creatures. The gameplay there is fraught with peril, or has other issues potentially in the ways that we saw with, say, Rise of Eldrazi or something.

Right, so it's interesting. Rise of Eldrazi really was kind of like front and center the whole time in design because Brian Tinsman, when he made Rise of Eldrazi, his whole attitude was, I want you playing with big creatures. I'm just going to slow down the early game so you do that. And what ended up happening was the people that understood what was going on had a really good time with it. But the players that just said, I don't know what's going on, I'm just

going to play normal magic, just had bad experiences because it didn't let you just kind of play normal magic. You kind of had to buy into it. And so one of my goals I know, and it passed along to you, was we wanted you to opt, if you wanted to play big

creatures you could, but it wasn't like you didn't have to play big creatures. And that was a big difference between Raizo, Drazi, and Ikoria to me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, like, yeah. I mean, in the end, like, the big creatures actually ended up a little bit on the weak side for Limited anyways. Right, I mean, yeah.

If anything, like, yeah, I mean, the human component was pretty strong. Like, I mean, I am really happy with the way some of the subtle stuff ended up too, like the allied color pairs where I chose to focus more on like other themes and pushed kind of the mechanics, the mechanic, not the mechanics, the keyword overlaps on the allied color pairs kind of as their own strategies with some other some other texture in there actually tended to like work out yeah i mean surprisingly well like there are a lot of things to do for a set that was kind of focused more towards enemy colors and wedges like i mean the allied colored strategies worked pretty well in some cases um right i mean again some of that got overshadowed, I feel, by how strong the Scythling deck was as well in Limited. But I feel like other than overshooting on Zenith Flare, there was just like a ton that was lovable about the Limited environment. Well, you bring up wedges.

Let's talk wedges. So we knew pretty early on that we were going to have a wedge component to the set. It wasn't a wedge set, meaning there wasn't lower rarity cards, really, Yeah. Yeah. So my memory of Wedge is... Oh, sorry. I just lost you, Dave. Go ahead.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, my internet probably went out real quick. Yeah, I mean, I think pretty early on I had at least been advocating for it as a Wedge set. Like, I think having the the spring set be a wedge set where we push strong three color stuff is just a good good timing for three color um environment where it's just going to be in the standard environment for a shorter period of time um you know i did make it pretty clear that like i felt like right like i wasn't

going to deliver on like a cons of tarkir where there's a factionalized mechanic for each wedge and and that sort of thing like great this this was a monster set this was not a wedge set this was more like this is our opportunity to give players wedge you know three color cards and excite them because people love those cards like but yeah i mean i wanted it to be like very clear that i would was not delivering on yeah like uh you know a cons of tark here style set you know you know certainly we can do sets like that in the future this this was more just delivering on cool three color cards because we know people like them and this is timing wise in the year this was i felt like a good place to do it and i i think it also helped tie in a little bit to like just the

structure of mutations and right like in our minds it was like all these you know wild hybrids of this creature and that creature and then at the top is like a cat nightmare you know elemental or you know whatever like whatever the combination of things was in the wedge if i don't know if i just gave an accurate example but it seemed to kind of fit in in other ways with what we were doing. One of the things that, like I said, was there was that each color had its own

creature type, monster creature type, and then as you started blending them with colors, they would start blending together. If black was nightmare and green was beast, it become a nightmare beast when you blend them together. And that goes through the two color,

all the way up into the three color. Yep. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, like, I mean, it also just let us do stuff. I mean, I know there were some concerns like that, you know, monsters aren't going to be for everyone. Monsters, you know, not everyone. Some people are going to find this too childish or too, you know, too whatever the reason is that they don't like, you know, creatures or monsters or, you know, they like spells or they like,

you know, something with, yeah, that seems set up to, you know, be more story driven for other reasons. So, like, I felt like Wedge was just another thing that we knew people like that they could latch on to that we could deliver on stuff like you know the ultimatums and the the tri lands and other things like that that would excite a different group of players who might not be as big a fan of our main theme yeah that's something we always

it's funny we always want to have a main theme but we always say okay but what are the players who don't like the main theme? What are they going to play? And so there's always a balance there between hitting the theme as much as we can, but also providing a few tangential things in the set. So let me ask about, you mentioned human tribals. That's another theme of the set. Because one of the things that I know

we did in the set was we looked at the tropes of monsters and one of the big tropes, one of them is bonding, we talked about companions, but another big one is just fighting, right? Is that humans fight monsters. And so the human tribal really played into that. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I mean, especially once we set up the divide for mutated being human and you know or being non-humans like right the the big sort of conflict engine as we talk about it for this world is yeah monsters versus monsters monsters versus humans like you know those are the big right that's what this world is kind of all about um and i feel like most most are monster movie type things like that. That is also a big part of it. It's like the, you know, the monsters versus the humans, kind of the monsters, you know, toppling down the humans environment to some fashion. And, you know, the humans having various success in fighting against the monsters. So, yeah, I felt like we needed that component here.

I mean, I centered it in white, black, color pair. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have a whole lot to add here other than I felt like we wanted that component of a force fighting against the monsters to be a pretty prominent thing here in addition to the bonding angle you talked about. Okay, well, we're almost out of time time here so i just want to hit one last thing that was a big part of the set although it happened very late in the process which was the godzilla cards so what is your memory of how how the godzilla skins came to be yeah i mean that that was more coming from i mean like again the main person i interacted with on our team was Mike Turian.

And, you know, it became kind of more slowly and slowly more of a real thing. You know, for a while I wasn't sure it was going to happen and, you know, that, you know, we'd reach an agreement on it. So yeah, like at some point, like, right, like, I mean, there was the Biobox, like, Zalortha Godzilla card that I kind of made from scratch once that process started. Otherwise, like a lot of the cards were for all of the various creatures in their IP? Like, you know, which design sounds the most like this creature? And, you know, modified some stuff a little, but a lot of it was matching to cards that were already in the file. Right, because this happened pretty late in the process.

Like, the set was mostly done. It wasn't... You took cards that already existed and converted them for the skins. You didn't make brand-new cards. Right, yeah. I mean, the Godzilla card was the only card I... Right, the buy box, yeah.

Yeah, and even that may have partially preexisted. I mean, yeah, I mean, I... Right, like, because even that card probably could have spoke more to Godzilla. I mean, I did feel like that was just kind of a very unique line of text on that card where, you know, sort of everything's, you know, it's kind of the opposite of Adoran. Everything's, you know,

toughness is really its power. Yeah. So, we're almost ready to wrap up here, but any final thoughts on Ikoria that you want to share that we didn't hit upon yet? Yeah, I mean, I guess one of the things I think about most, of of course is just

companion i mean i i do feel like right the the solution to spend mana to put them into your hand actually was your suggestion um it was a suggestion that had never come up during play testing at all or before release um i mean i i think it was a very clever solution to the situation we found ourselves in. You know, in retrospect, I look at that a lot and it's like, wow, I really wish someone but i feel like if we if we had the number the mana cost to put it in it in hand as a knob for us like you know if it was two for this one and four for this one and you know like like if we could have used that as a knob as a way to you know like depending on how hard it was to meet the conditions that that would have solved a lot of things for us so i don't know it's it's again as a designer it's mostly just an interesting kind of case study for me of like

oh if we you know like we talk about how can we get more knobs on cards you know numbers we can turn that you know makes balancing things easier where right that like i i think uh yeah i mean i think we could have done a lot better job with them. I do hope that a lot of people have gotten joy out of them in the form that they ended up with. I think I personally had a blast with them in draft. Yeah, they were a lot of fun to draft

around. It's one of the things that we, when thinking of future stuff, we often think about that. How do you give people something to draft that really changes the way they draft, which is a pretty cool thing. They've been a big part of Magic. I do hope people... I hope there are still a lot of people that enjoy

the change that they brought to the game. I know a lot of people don't like them, but I am curious what people think of them in the final form. They ended up ignoring as much as they can where they started. Well, Dave, I am now at my desk. So we all know what that means.

I mean, 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, Dave. Thanks for joining us and talking all about Ikoria. Yeah, thanks, Mark. And thanks, everyone, for listening. Okay, guys, I will see all you next time. Thanks, Dave.

Bye-bye. Yep.