Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #839: WAR with Doug Beyer

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

I sit down with Creative team member Doug Beyer to talk about the creation of War of the Spark.

I'm not pulling out my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so I've been doing a series of interviews recently where I've been talking with people who I've worked with on making sets. Now, most of those talks have been with other designers, and we talk a lot about the nuts and bolts of mechanics. But today, I have Doug Beyer with us. We're going to talk War of the Spark, and we're going to focus a little more on the creative side of things. And, I mean, I'll talk a little bit about how I designed to match the creative side, but the focus today will be a little bit different. And the reason we chose War of the Spark is... Well, hi, Doug. I guess I should bring you in here. Hello, hello, hello.

The reason we chose War of the Spark was this is Doug's baby. So, Doug, why don't you talk about sort of how War of the Spark came to be? Yeah, so we had a thought of doing a big climactic sort of crossover event, like a big impactful story climax as a magic set. This was an idea that had bubbled up really early on. We thought of it as an event set, a set that was focused more on the story events that was happening in the set

rather than on the world it was set in. And we wanted to build an arc. So we actually planned the ending many years in advance and pointed three years of sets toward that endings and sort of sprinkled details all along that arc to kind of point to this gigantic climax where all these planeswalkers battle Nicol Bolas. So I want to point out just that ending was like you had that ending pretty early, right? Yeah, that was pretty much, even during the pitch of it, when we weren't even sure what the magic sets along the way were going to be, we had some thoughts, but we weren't 100% sure.

But that ending on Ravnica with Nicol Bolas and a war with dozens or hundreds of planeswalkers, at the time, I didn't know what was possible, but that, that's the, that was the vision. And, uh, that was something that, uh, we hope to accomplish. Yeah. So, right. When, when you, I remember when you first pitched it, uh, my old take on it when you first pitched it was as a writer, like it sounded awesome, right? Like this giant war with all the planeswalkers fighting but as a designer i was like i get like three planeswalkers i'm not exactly sure how we're gonna pull this off yeah and that's same here to some degree like i we um we expected on the creative side that like the the simulation of a war with many many planeswalkers would be where the set ended up that like yeah it would

have three mythic planeswalkers, there'd be a Nicol Bolas and maybe a couple of other ones. Maybe we could, you know, ask nicely and get up to five or 10 planeswalkers just to kind of reinforce that big battle theme. We never expected to actually have designers and play designers really lean in and go for the most ambitious version of the set

and actually provide dozens of planeswalkers in the set so that was that was uh a huge what i found with this set over and over again was that we we asked for something very ambitious and everyone rose to the challenge everyone was like cool let's do the ambitious version we'll figure out a way we've never done something exactly like this before. It'll take some work. But yeah, let's try to do the ambitious version. And something I want to stress that I think is important for the audience to understand is, I mean, we make magic day in, day out, right? We make a lot of magic sets that it's kind of, I mean, it's challenging, but it's kind of fun to like shoot for the moon, you know, like. Okay, here's a crazy idea.

When I say, for example, I didn't know how it was going to work, I didn't say not to do it. I'm just like, okay, I have no idea how we're going to do this. But right, we started with, okay, that's what we're doing. We're doing a war with lots of planeswalkers. Figure out a way to make that relevant. And I remember we tried a bunch of different things. Like, we didn't start with, let's have 36

planeswalkers. That actually isn't where we started. I remember I had a mechanic called Skirmish, where like it was this little game that you would start, and then as you attacked, like think of like a tug of war, basically. And then as you would hit

your opponent, you would pull them toward your side and you'd go back and forth and then the idea was it would keep changing what those were and then it represented different parts of the fight and anyways we were just trying a very different thing and then the big my big moment was

that we said it was a planeswalker war and I said oh maybe we should do a little less war and a little more Planeswalker. That was the big sort of turning point. Right. I mean, and the skirmish mechanic was interesting. I remember playing several games with that.

Like, it was fun. It expressed war, but it's right. Like, most of the games, you know, they were about creatures still more than Plan more than planeswalkers and then the set just really became more of the planeswalker set like like you know it's it's in a straw but great you know about is about graveyards uh zendikar is about lands war became about planeswalkers and um the the whole focus of it shifted and then were able to, we had all this real estate now to get across the story of this massive battle, this massive conflict with Planeswalkers. So one of the things that's interesting is, and we'll use this set to talk about a larger thing that's true about magic design in general.

So when we first said, okay, we're going to make a lot of planeswalkers, we didn't know who the planeswalkers were necessarily. I mean, the story had been laid out in very loose form. So, like, there were certain characters we knew had to be there because, look, Liliana or Gideon or Nicol Bolas, like, okay, they were major, major players. Obviously, they had to be there. But as far as, you know, was Soren going to be there? Was Tybalt going to be there?

You know, there's a lot of questions about some of the work key to it. And so what happens, which is interesting, is in design, so in vision design, usually creative will give us a rough idea of what's going on, but the details aren't known yet. So a lot of times it's like we'll make characters that we know are going to be there, and there's slots. So we made a bunch of, like, I think we had some of our plans were like blue planeswalker white planes but like we didn't know who was supposed to be and we had we had to balance it out we had

to color balance it um and so we uh i think was james i tried to think who the creative rep was on the design team i think it was james because kept saying, can I get a rough list of who the Planeswalkers were? And it was constantly in flux and changing. And so let's talk a little bit about how the process of when creators decide who the characters are. How does that happen? Yeah. are or like how does that happen yeah so um as you've mentioned there's all very often a a back and forth exercise where we uh we know the the gist of what's going on we can we uh communicate with design and you guys build to the gist of of that theme and then feeding back like

how is this playing and we take some of of that information and build that into the war building or the story. In this case, there was a... I think I might even still have the whiteboard somewhere. Like, the whiteboard stayed in the same place for so long that the marker was having a hard time coming off. But it was, like, a list of all the planeswalkers, and then some of them were circled. Of, like, yes, we definitely want this person. And then sometimes there was scribble out like, nevermind, we want to hang on to Garrick for later

or whatever. But I gave many PowerPoint presentations that had the kind of the skeleton, the backbone of the story. And yes, like crucially major Gatewatch characters, Gideon and Lilly in particular were key and um nicobolas of course and then a lot of other planeswalkers they would like to some degree to get across the theme of tons of people are here just about everybody you've heard of is here was

really the main goal and the particulars kind of came down to uh you know do we do we have plans for one of these planswalker characters immediately after war of the spark is that is that or is there some other reason why like we didn't want koth to show up because we thought that he was too focused on his mission on nephorexia um so you know kind of one by one we went down through this list and then there were some people that was like i don't see why not like some of the planeswalkers were here like do does ob nixilis care about the fate of ravnica no not really but he's gonna be there if he hears that dozens of planeswalkers or hundreds of planeswalkers are showing up on one world at one time similarly like uh does soren markov care about ravnica does new herey i mean not particularly but once they hear that the other one is going to be there they want to like go you know go and battle each you

know battle each other because they have kind of this long-running feud going well also part of the whole bolus plan was bolus had bolus tricked lots and lots and lots of planeswalkers into this world. And for each planeswalker, it might have been different. Like, Bolas had this, this was a master-master plan. And, like, we joked about, okay, well, how does Bolas get this one there? How does he get that one there? Like, we had thought in our heads of, like, lots of little sort of vignette moments of, like, what would it have taken to get uh to convince this particular planeswalker to show up on ravnica at a certain point because like a necrobolus never has to deliver he has the um he has the immortal sun there which

traps planeswalkers on a world so as long as anybody planeswalks to ravnica they're stuck and and he you know he's ready to devour their sparks so So yeah, maybe Kaia, there's the promise of a mission or promise of control of the Orzhov. Maybe for Tybalt, there's just the promise of you'll get some evil mischief to do here if you come at this time. So yeah, for each character, was there something that could be the seed of interest knowing that he was just going to close the door and throw away the key once they showed up. So here I'm going to reveal why Garak wasn't there.

So at the time, we were in very early stages of Eldraine. And so the story at the time involved Garak and Rowan and Will and Kazmina, who is kind of like a Merlin figure, and then Kazmina leaves the story to go to the War of Spark. Like, part of the story was she was leaving, like, we needed to get rid of her or something. It's like, oh, what if she left to go fight in the war? And then so we're like, whoa, okay,

so these stories have to be consecutive to each other for that to be true. So Garrett can't be there because he'd have to be here. And then that never panned out. The story didn't play out that way. But like we made decisions based on something we were trying to set up that didn't happen. And that happens a lot. And that happens a lot.

Like we always have concurrent sets and we're always trying to create the feeling of one continuous grand story. The reality is, these are all separate magic sets. They all have their own project deadlines. The fiction deadlines are often different than the set deadlines. So the particulars can be tricky sometimes. Yeah, the other thing, to use war of the spark as an example

one of the things that happens is um different things are done at different times so for example one of the complaints we got about war of the spark was where was dac because in in the in the novel like dac ends up playing a decent role in the story and he actually uh spoiler guys uh he dies in the story um and we he wasn't at all on the set you're like how in the story. And he actually, spoiler guys, he dies in the story. And he wasn't at all in the set. How in the world did that happen? And we're like, well, none of that had been written when we made the set. Like, it happened

after the set was done. And clearly, had we known, I mean, well, here's the DAC problem, by the way. This is a good example. So we color-balanced everything. And so we had i think two slots for blue red we had an uncommon slot for blue red and we had a rare slot for blue red and we had to have ralzera because he played a big role in the story and then it was like do we

want saheeli or do we want dak i think was the issue um and And I think we ended up wanting Saheeli more than, I mean, we didn't know the novel story, so we didn't know that Dak was going to be part of it. And we picked Saheeli over Dak just for, you know, just balancing things. Right, she was a more popular character in many situations. She also has a more unique power suite. Like, she's about artifacts and copying

which is an interesting uh interesting card to make to kind of like one of the things that end up being really cool about limited gameplay in war of the spark is that most of it is sort of it's like it's a pretty gold set there's a lot it's occurring on ravnica so there's a lot of um two color cards but then you also then just open this personality there's a lot of two-color cards. But then you also then just open this personality. There's a lot of legends in the set as well, just to kind of, you know, showcase legends from Ravnica that we hadn't seen for a long time.

And the feel of it was like, oh, I'm mostly, like, blue-red. But then I also opened Saheeli or whatever. And now I'm feeling like, wow, artifacts matter a lot more just because this one personality is in my deck. We thought that was just a cool result of having these

characters often at lower rarities, many of them at uncommon, that had some strong, we call them power suites. I don't know if you've talked about that on the podcast, but just like the list of that character's specialties, magical

specialties and personal spells that are so characteristic. And the designers and Dave Humphreys really tried to nail those power suites to each character in the card designs. So there's a whole bunch of weirdos. I mean, there's 36 characters who have their own particular style that you can open, and now they're just fighting for you and your deck. So you get this feeling, this crazy hodgepodge of

characters from all over the place. Yeah, real quickly, something you brought up that's kind of a little funny side note is some Planeswalkers are made with the cards in mind, and some are sort of made more story-related. And so, for example, someone like Chandra is easy to do, right? She does direct

damage. She fires not... It's not hard to do a pyromancer. Magic has plenty of damage in it. But then you get someone like Dovin, who like... He finds weakness in things. Like, what does that mechanically mean? You know what I'm saying? It's a lot trickier to pull off.

And one of the things is, I know that we lean toward one and two planeswalkers that are like, oh, like, Saheeli's very easy to do. She's an artifact theme. She copies things. Like, she's made to make fun magic cards out of. And other cards are definitely a little more challenging. Yeah.

And that was that was also reflected in the fact that we wanted to have a signature spell for each of the planesworkers as well so there's an instant or sorcery and sometimes other card types. Some are creatures yeah some are creatures

that represent the like that was cast or summoned by one of the Planeswalkers in the set. So, like, Nihiri has a spell that shows Nihiri casting magic and using her particular kind of magic. So that was also work with the team to kind of, like, does this, you know, does this feel close enough for a J spell? Does this make sense for a Nissa spell? And that sort of thing.

So on top of all the story moments we were trying to get across in the Incident Sorceries and Enchantments, we were also trying to reflect that seeing the Planeswalkers even more than 36 Planeswalker cards in the set, is that we're going to reinforce that by

you also see them all over the spells. Right, one of the things that's always true is, whatever our theme is, and in this case it was kind of Planeswalkers, it's how do you spread that to other parts of the set? Yeah, yeah, we can make Planeswalkers, and obviously we made a lot of Planeswalkers, but even that's only 36 cards in the whole set. How

do you do it? And the signature spells were kind of a cool way to spread it to especially some lower rarity stuff, because the Planeswalkers even, we made some uncommon Planeswalkers, but even then made some uncommon Planeswalkers, but even then, is this still, you know, the Aspen's still not that high, although 36, it wasn't too bad.

Okay, so I want to talk about another big project of yours on this set, Doug, which is the story. So, normally, a normal Magic set will have, I don't know, five to seven, like, spotlight cards or whatever. How many did this set have? This set had something like 20, 21, 23. It's been a while now. I used to have it off the top of my head.

So that represented a huge uptick in the number of story moments, which meant we approached so much about this set differently than normal sets. There's always a summary, an outline of what the story is behind the set, but this one had an extremely detailed, like instead of a world guide for this set, we had something we called an event guide, and it was much more like a story bible. It was much more like Act 1. Here are the beats that happen. Here's what it looks like in Act 1. Here's who's involved. Here's, you know. It was much

more like a treatment for a movie. And then we had different visual cues to indicate where in the story, early, middle, or late, each card was taking place.

We had set pieces that were like locations. Can you talk about the timing, Doug? How do we visually show the timing? So we divided Act 1, 2, and 3 up by the lighting in the sky. So we knew that the climax of the story was Nicol Bolas casting the Elder Spell, beginning his ritual to sacrifice lots of people's sparks and gain ultimate power.

And so that was going to completely affect the way the sky looked. Swirling, greenish, eerie, stormy skies, like a mystical storm. And that would tell you very clearly, once you looked at the art of a card, that, wow, this tutu or the spell or whatever is taking place at that moment in Act 3. For Acts 2 and 1, we wanted another way to use the sky to kind of portray the act that it was in. So for Act 1, everything that was happening early early in the story, we used kind of like these pinkish purplish dawn early morning skies.

So if you look and see in A War on the Spark Card and there's this kind of sunrise coloration to the sky, that's Act One. And then for Act Two, it's just sort of like a normal sunny ravnica day so like like kind of so so you basically get more early morning midday and then elder spell those are our visual indicators to reinforce like you know we know that that uh the set is going to be experienced in you know people open cards out of booster packs that we have no way of controlling in what order people are exposed to the cards. So we wanted some way to kind of give you a way to kind of batch the cards that you open to get at least a broad sense of where in the story they fell. And then let's talk about the preview, because we did something cool for the previews for this set. Yeah, for the first time, this was the first time I've ever done this,

or to my knowledge this has ever been done, which was I took every card in the set, including every basic land, and made, uh, put them in chronological order. Um, we made a gigantic list of, um, sometimes they were, they were grouped. I mean, like, so there were 12 or so major buckets. And so this is the battle in the 10th district. This is the battle of the Sky Theater, which is happening around New Prav. This is the battle that is right before we do the assault on Bolas's Citadel. And so we worked with the communications team, the web teams, and were able to align the pre-use for the set to that chronological ordering. So the cards that you were seeing earliest during preview weeks were the earliest in the story, and the ones we waited until the very, very end were the ones that occur last in the story,

which is really, really cool. We did not know if that was going to work. Usually there's all kinds of constraints on what cards can be shown when and what venues want what kind of card and all kinds of things. But again, we asked for the ambitious version, like what if we previewed the set in roughly chronological order?

And so that if you were keeping up on what cards were previewed day by day, you were kind of following along in the story. So that was really cool. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about an event set separated from sort of a normal magic set is

normally when you make a magic set, it's so world-centric. And this set was... We did an interesting thing where we came to Ravnica And this set was, I mean, like, we did an interesting thing where we came to Ravnica before this set. Like, we had two whole sets of Ravnica. We got all your Ravnica

needs out of the way. So, like, okay, you got your Ravnica set. And then, like, okay, it's not about that. We did that. It's about sort of, like, we're really, really trying to service the story. And it was very interesting from a design standpoint for me, I know. Like, just, okay, how do

we service, how does a set service a story more so than an environment? And that came with a lot of challenges. Yeah, I mean, like, we we it was a very cool idea to visit Ravnica before having the idea to visit Ravnica before having the event set on Ravnica.

We knew that players would be wanting that very fun guild model gameplay of Ravnica. Like, oh good, we're going back to Ravnica, but we don't get guilds? Oh, that's too bad. So we wanted to make sure to get the setting established for those first two sets so that we can then have

this big story there. The other thing it allowed us to do was to have a little bit of setup. We were able to use the story for the first two Ravnica sets there to create the conditions that led to the War of the Spark. We saw Bolas' machinations, we saw him installing planeswalker allies of his to get in charge of the guilds

so that he could get his claws into Ravnica and prepare the stage for the War of the Spark. It also helped remind players of what the nouns and verbs of Ravnica are so that we could refer to them frequently in the battles

in War of the Spark. Yeah, one of the cool things I know we did in making the first two sets is you knew all the locations of where all the big battles were going to be. So we're like, okay, let's remind the audience, you know, this is new prom, this is this, this is that, you know, the audience was kind of like, we purposely

showed you those scenes ahead of time, so when we showed you again, we reminded you they were there. So that was, I remember doing that. So what... Go ahead. Just, if only to... I mean, in some ways, we were...

We wanted to create a baseline of Ravnica as well, to show what was going to be different in War of the Spark as well. Michael Ballas even changes the skyline of Ravnica as well to show what was going to be different in War of the Spark as well. Nicol Bolas even changes the skyline of Ravnica. He installs a gigantic statue of himself, and he creates this gigantic citadel, which we were going to show as part of the Ravnica skyline in War. So we wanted to make sure that we had enough scenes that showed that that wasn't true yet in the Ravnica sets leading before it. So just, again, setting the stage

for the events of the World's Fair. So, anyway, this was... I'm going to talk a little bit about how it's not often that you, in Magic, set something up years ahead of time and then finally get to that. I mean, so what was it like?

You literally pitched this three years ahead of time and then finally, three years later, we're making it. What was that like? I mean, you literally pitched this three years ahead of time, and then finally three years later we're making it. What was that like? Yeah, and it felt even longer because we were pitching the idea long before Kaladesh, which was kind of the official kickoff of the arc. So we had to know this, I mean, three, four, five years ahead of time. So finally seeing it come out was incredible. I was there with lead art director Taylor Iggerson at PAX East

when we shared the trailer for the first time. And we had all these people who were at PAX East who had filed in, and we had this gigantic stage set up. And the background of the stage was this huge panorama of the Ravikant skyline, but with sparks flying around. You know, what is going on? And we got to, so we're sitting there on the stage

facing the audience. So we get to all, the trailer itself is to our back. So we're not watching it. All we're watching is the faces of the people who were experiencing it for the first time. And just seeing, it was electric for me just to kind of see the emotions. I mean, that trailer was also a chef's kiss. It was, the trailer was great at getting

at the emotional heart of what was going on in the War of the Spark. And we watched people burst into tears. We watched people cheer, we watched, you know, just seeing the, that was the payoff for me, for me and Taylor, was just getting to see that all this work, we're gonna literally watch the faces of the first people exposed to what's going on in the War of the Spark. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, back at the office, we're already working on the next stuff.

Like, in terms of the work, we've completed War of the Spark long ago. But we're getting to see, finally, that experience hit the players, which was really, really rewarding. It was one of the top points in my career. So, I'm almost to my desk here, but there's one last thing that's a cool behind-the-scenes thing that I wanted to share to have you talk about. The audience just doesn't know. So you actually put together a trailer of your own. Like you were trying to get everybody in R&D kind of on board. So can you talk a little bit about the trailer you made?

Right. So I am not a graphic designer or an animator or, you know, I went to word school, not picture school. So my expertise is not in creating visuals. But with a lot of duct tape and PowerPoint and using images from our internal multiverse server, I put together a kind of what if trailer this you know the world of spark had not been green lit the whole idea of doing this set was not okayed yet we've been sort of talking about it but it wasn't it wasn't a slam dunk yet and i made this kind of fake trailer i i paid a dollar to buy a piece of music off of of itunes uh to you know get kind of like good movie trailer music. And then I just showed images of the Gatewatch, Ravnica, the tragedies that were going to befall Ravnica, this beloved world. And then this kind of like ending of this trailer

that just showed bam, bam, bam, all these Planeswalker characters you knew. Turns out that some of them were inaccurate by the end. But it was trying to get at the emotion of of what this set could be about and then after a few key people saw it then it was like yeah we're we're doing this set we're gonna go forward with it we still don't know how we're gonna make it all but uh yeah this little fake trailer was kind of instrumental in getting it through and in in your fake trailer, what did you call the set? I called it War of the Spark.

So I was very excited that that passed legal, you know, trademark search, all kinds of things. Like in my heart, it was always War of the Spark. And so I was very excited that that ended up being the name of the product. Yeah, one of the things that just for the audience audience to understand is, we come up with cool ideas but you have to sell everybody that it's a cool idea and it's very easy after the fact, after it's successful, to go, well of course

it's a great idea, right? It's very easy in 2020 hindsight, but it's a lot harder to sell something when you have nothing, you know, you have to and I remember Doug showing the video he put together and it was very powerful and you have nothing, you know, you have to, and I remember Doug showing the, the, the, the video he put together and it was very powerful. And, uh, I think it really was like the, the thing that made it happen. So. Yeah. I mean, the, the, uh, we work in a very collaborative

environment, so, uh, people don't always know that we don't always agree. We like, not everybody wants to do the same projects that everybody else does. Not everybody sees the same potential in it, even if you do really clearly in your mind. Mark knows this. But sometimes it takes a little bit of internal marketing. You have to show why this thing is powerful, why this is going to really capture people's hearts and minds. why this is going to really capture people's hearts and minds. Well, anyway, like I said, I always enjoy it. I felt like you gave a great idea, and then I'm trying to figure out how to make it happen.

So I'm happy, but the dust settled. I'm happy we actually delivered. That was one of my fears, that you had this really awesome idea, and we wouldn't step up to the idea. No, I was so pleased with with the teams in R&D, the art teams, the trailer teams, the web teams. Everybody stepped up with doing their version of the ambitious take on this set, which was just a huge honor to me.

I just got to be a participant, ultimately, in how many different groups of smart, smart people got to deliver on this concept and make it as cool as possible. Well, with that, guys, I see my desk. So that means we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks, Doug. Thanks for being with us today.

Thanks so much for having me. And everybody, I will see all you next time. Bye-bye.