Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #841: Shadowmoor with Sean Fletcher

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

I sit down with Sean Fletcher to talk about the design of Shadowmoor.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so I've been interviewing people from the past and present who I worked with on magic sets. So today I have, from working on Shadowmoor, Sean Fletcher. Hey, Sean. Hey, how are you? So, I want to start with a little trivia about Sean. I want to start with a little trivia about Sean. So, ever since magic sets were made at Wizards,

so like 10 bits forward, there's only ever been one person who was on a magic set who never before or after that worked at Wizards. And that is Sean, working on Shadowmoor. Technically, Greg Marks did work on a set

before he worked at Wizards, but he later worked at Wizards. So from a trivia standpoint, you were the only non-Wizards employee to work on a Wizards-made magic, to be on a magic team within the halls of Wizards. That is correct. So how did that happen, Sean?

How exactly did you end up on a team without working at Wizards? Oh, boy. Persistence and some renegade tactics. Years prior to, I say years prior, but boy, there probably weren't that many years before. Three or four years before I worked on Shadowmoor, I decided I wanted to do some work with Wizards of the Coast and Magic. And I was a graphic designer, so I started sending some portfolio pieces to Wizards

and had to kind of work sideways to figure out who to send the portfolio pieces to and eventually got some artwork under the nose of, I think, Brady Domermuth at the time. Yeah, the creative director, yeah. And interviewed for a position with, I think, Brady Domermuth at the time. Yeah, the creative director, yeah. And interviewed for a position with, I think, the Dungeons & Dragons team, and tanked the interview horribly.

It was one of the worst job interviews I've ever had. And then a few years after that, I sent you and a number of other folks at Wizards a book of puzzles that I put together, just trying to show off that, boy, I can kind of think in these abstract, circuitous ways that you guys think about games and puzzles. And I'd like to introduce myself to you to try to eventually leverage another job interview. And it sort of worked.

What happened was, yeah, so I get this in the mail. Now, from time to time, people will send me things. They're trying to get a job. You weren't the only person to ever do that. But you were the person who I was most, like, really impressed by your attempt to get hired. Just the whole, the way all the puzzles were made, it was just really, really cleverly done. And I think at the time, I was very intrigued by you. And so I asked to get permission to have you on a team, even though you didn't work at Wizards.

I was actually trying to get you hired, but that didn't quite end up happening. But I did bring you on to be on this team, and so you lived in the area, right, at the time? No, I lived in New Hampshire. Oh, you lived in New Hampshire. It was all the way across the country. Right, so this was long distance.

You visited at one point, right? I had visited once. The first time I sent you uh the the portfolio puzzles uh i had let you know that i was visiting friends in the seattle area and we made arrangements and got pizza for lunch and just hung out and talked for the afternoon um and then i went back to my apartment in new hampshire with my wife and a few weeks, if not brief months later, you called me one evening and I was surprised to hear you. And you very quickly went into. So I've got a project that I think you might be interested in participating in. And of course, I was. You know, you know, as a magic fan, you don't turn down someone at R&D that says hey I think

we've got something you might have fun with and I did the first couple of weeks of Shadowmore design from the apartment in New Hampshire but as soon as we saw an opportunity that that something cool could happen for us in Seattle we packed up the apartment and moved corner to corner, coast to coast, and restarted our lives in Seattle because we didn't have a whole lot going on in New Hampshire, so you might as well try something new. Okay, so let's talk about Shadowmore. So what is your earliest memories of Shadowmore? What do you remember? Where did it start? What do you remember? Where did it start? I remember on that phone call, you explained the four-set, two-block structure of the sets.

And I think you explained to me that the first set or the first block, the two sets in the Lorwyn block, were going to be creature-type based, tribal, and that the second half was going to be all color based. And then you sprung it on me that it would be hybrid primarily. And hybrid was something really, really new because Ravnica was fresh at the time. It had just been published. And the hybrid cards in Ravnica block were really exciting because it was something completely new, and to hear that I would be working on a set that was primarily hybrid was kind of mind-blowing, because it's like, here's the new hotness, and I'm being thrown right into the middle of it. Yeah, the real quick story behind hybrid is, when I made it in original Ravnica, it had taken a bigger footprint.

But having gold cards and hybrid cards, it just got very confusing. So it got pulled from the set. And then late in development, Brian Schneider, who was leading the development, said, oh, we need something. We're missing something. He goes, would you mind if we put hybrid back in?

I go, fine, put Hybrid back in. We'd actually had been... I was planning to use it in Time Spiral, but I said, okay, fine, you can use it there. But he did it in... I think it was a vertical cycle, so it was a common, an uncommon, and a rare. So there weren't a lot of Hybrid cards made. And so when we were

plotting out the... I don't know what to call it, the block, Valoran Shattermore Mega Block. That came about because we had made Cold Snap two years earlier as kind of the fourth set, if you will, and it didn't really go over that well. And so I said to Billy, I go, look, if you want to do a fourth set,

let me know, I'll plan it. You know what I'm saying? I'll weave it in to the larger, you know, I'll make the four sets seem like a cohesive thing, not an afterthought. And so I then pitched the large, small, large, small that you're talking about. Like, okay, it's two mini blocks.

And so, you know, and the important part for me was I want the mini blocks to overlap with each other. And so I said, well, if each one is about a game component that the other one has, so if Lorwyn's about creature types, well, we can make sure that Shattermore has those creature types. And if Shattermore's about color, well, Lorwyn's going to have colors in it. So, you know, that was the idea. And so I think I started with the, how much hybrid could we have? That was the question.

So when you started, had that question been even answered yet? You asked us in, I think, the first meeting that I attended at the Wizards of the Coast headquarters, what percentage we felt that a set could support. And I think everyone around the table sort of came to the same, between 40 and 60%, let's just call it 50. Yeah, I think we ended up pretty close to 50. Yeah. It's funny in retrospect, looking back, I think 50 was too high. But, like, I think we would have been happier if it had been like 30, you know, 30, maybe a third, maybe a third of the set was hybrid.

you know 30 maybe a third maybe a third of the set was with hybrid um i remember part of the way in we realized that some of the color pairings were going to be harder to design hybrid for than others and i think that that's where we might have started kicking ourselves for aiming for that 50 mark yeah the the real trouble child is blue black and blue red are the two that have the biggest overlap issues now we didn't do enemy to the second set right even tight did enemy

but blue black like we were trying to do blue black right away and it's funny since then we've done a bunch to overlap them a little more

like there's things that now blue and black overlap with that they didn't at the time we made shadow more but it was there were some challenges there

in making that many hybrid cards. Okay, so let's talk mechanics. Yes. Okay, so we're going to start with Wither. So what is your earliest memories of Wither? Oh, well, I will admit I kind of cheated a little bit. Oh, I'm sorry, not Wither. I started with the wrong one.

I apologize. We need to start with Persist, not Wither. Persist? Yeah, Persist. So Persist actually happened after I was on the design team. I believe that one happened in development. No, that is not true. No?

No. So Persist actually happened originally in Lorwyn. Oh. So made by a designer named Nate Heiss, who designed Persist. I know Nate. So what happened was, so the idea was Lorwyn was going to be

sort of, it was a world that was going to change, right? The shtick of the Mega Block was we meet a world, and then something fundamentally changes about the world, and we see the world through a different lens. Like, the world, you know, changes into a different version. And so the

idea was, we liked the idea of light and dark, right? The first set is kind of the light fun, you know, set, and then the second set's a creepy dark set. And so, one of the ideas we had was, well, if this is the nice set, what if instead of killing creatures,

we merely hurt them? And so we put minus one, minus one counters into Lorwyn originally on the idea that, okay, well, instead of killing somebody, I'll give them two counters or something. And that's not as bad as killing them. And Persist was made during that time period where we had minus one, minus one counters. give them two counters or something, and that's not as bad as killing them. And Persist was made during that time

period where we had minus one, minus one counters because I said to my team, okay, let's come up with cool things. We have minus one, minus one counters. Let's do cool things with minus one, minus one counters. And Nate made Persist, saying, well, here's a cool thing. What if this creature, when they die, they come back, but they come back with the counter,

minus one, minus one counter, and that tells you that, oh, they've used their one comeback. And so they're a little weaker, but, you know, you get sort of one reuse of the creatures. But what happened was we found that minus one, minus one counters had the exact opposite effect. Like, it felt meaner. Like, somehow, you know, like, it's one thing to kill a creature, but, like, maiming a creature just felt meaner.

You're rubbing salt in the wound and letting them sit there feeling bad about themselves. So what happened was we pulled the minus one, minus one, and I said, okay, well, if it feels dark, we'll just use that in the dark set. So we ended up pushing that to the second set.

And Persist was in during Vision, during, I mean, Design wasn't Vision back then, but we did have Persist in during Design because we liked it in Lorwyn, so that's what happens once we put minus one, minus one counters we ended up sticking it in. Maybe it wasn't there right in the very beginning, but it was there

long before we handed it over. I don't actually remember working with any Persist design concepts. So it's possible you already had a slate of working models from before that just didn't come up much when we were talking about things like the Wither mechanic and the color matters. Okay, so let's get into Wither.

Now that I got Persist out of the way, let's talk Wither. So I was saying just a minute ago, I sort of cheated and I went back and read a whole bunch of articles just in the last couple of days about Shadowmoor design because it's been 15 years. It's a little hazy to me sometimes okay um and and i remember that i think we started it with a different name and it was slightly different in how it worked in that um it uh a creature with wither might have a different wither value than its actual power so something could be a 3-3 that had wither 1 and it would put 1-1-1 counter out there after the fact it was convoluted, it did all kinds of crazy rules things and one of the things that stuck out for me was that you could have a black creature with wither get blocked by a white creature

with pro-black and the white creature with Pro Black after combat would still get the minus one, minus one counters from Wither, because it was a triggered effect rather than a damage effect. Yeah, it was... I remember what you were saying. Originally

we had the number being different. Yes. And I think the problem was that it was very mentally hard to wrap your brain around it. Yes. Because if I had 3-3 wither one, really what I was was a 4-4

that one damage became minus one, minus one. Right. But when you saw a 3-3 attack, your brain didn't say it was a 4-4. Like, it just didn't do what you thought it did. And that definitely was... It was kind of mind-melty. And so we said, okay, let's...

Like, people understood if it was all. All made sense, but part just didn't make sense. So then we changed it. Another aspect of that was that it wound up dealing a different amount of let's call it you know functional damage to a creature than it would to a player because the wither didn't matter if you let the damage through and you took the damage yourself it didn't it wasn't going to put minus one minus one counters on a player so you would just take that three damage and ignore the minus one minus one counters on a player so you would just take that three damage and ignore the

minus one minus one that it would have put on oh right right right so a three three with wither one if it hits the opponent only the three damage to them because wither only applies to creatures and it created some interesting dynamics because uh some of the creatures we designed with that ability were the kinds of thing where it was like when it attacks maybe you just let it through because it's not going to hurt me as much as it would hurt the creatures that I block with. Yeah, the other thing that also happens a lot is I think sometimes when we start doing a mechanic, we tend to be, we put as many knobs on it as we can under the idea that it'll be easier to work with if there's lots of knobs. But what you find when you play sometimes is, oh, sometimes knobs are helpful, but sometimes they cause more confusion. And this was a case where,

right, a 3-3 with wither 1 was just a much, much more complex thing to understand than, you know, 3-3 with wither or 4-4 with wither. Okay. Let's talk about the untap symbol. Yes. What do you remember about the untap symbol.

Yes. What do you remember about the untap symbol? I remember we talked about the potential power level for it, and I don't think I had a complete grasp on how strong the mechanic could be. It felt like a great way to sort of turn the world upside down, which was something that was going to be thematic through all of Lorwyn into Shadow War. But yeah, I don't think I had a full appreciation

of what could mechanically be done with that. So the Untyped Simba was the creation of Mark Gottlieb. I forgot what it got made for. Mark had made it... I don't think it was for this set. Maybe it was. Mark was on the set. Maybe he didn't make it for the set. One of the things I'd said to the team was

I really liked the idea of mirror imaging. Like, I liked the idea that the things you saw in the Lorwyn version had their mirror versions in the Shadowmore version. And I think Mark was like, oh, how do we make a shadow version of something? And he's like, ooh, what if we take the tap symbol and mirror it and make the untap symbol?

And so untap is a really good case study of something that seems very simple on its face and ends up being very complex in play. We just talked about Wither. So the problem we ran into, we had a couple problems with untap. One One was, if you look at the untapped symbol, it was literally the tap symbol, I think rotated 180 degrees, and then everything that was white was black, and everything that was black was white. It was a negative image of it. But even though it was upside down and a negative image of it, people just saw it as the tap

symbol. Like, that was one of our ongoing problems is that people just, if you look at them, if you took the tap symbol and the untapped symbol next to each other, clearly you can tell them apart. But in a vacuum where you're not really paying attention, it just kind of looks like the tap symbol. And so people would play it wrong. And then the second problem we ran into is um i i talk a lot about grokking things that the players like do you make a mechanic the

players can understand and and not just understand but like get the how it plays and for some reason the untapped symbol was just really un-grokkable. Like, just the mind state of knowing that this thing that's tapped could become untapped was really hard for people to wrap their brains around. Well, I think it ran so counterintuitive to 15 years of playing the game where untapping things was something you usually had to twiddle to get something untapped. You had to twiddle going way back to Alpha era there. I don't know if folks remember that card. It's so old. But you would have to play a spell or an effect to untap something,

and now to have so many creatures that could just do it themselves, in the middle of combat, you'd forget that, wait a minute, he doesn't have one blocker. He has potentially three blockers because those things will not only untap, but they'll do something else as they untap. And it created some pretty complex board states. Yeah, I mean, it was both complex in the fact that,

right, here's these things that can untap and do things. And on top of that, it had the... One of the things we try to avoid is, well, you want some stuff on the board in play doing things, right? You want some stuff on the battlefield that are interacting. Magic obviously has some give and take, but you don't want people feeling dumb, where, like, I attack and just forget

something and it wrecks me because I just forgot it. And people were not taking into account the untapped symbol. For some reason, it just was something that people really had a hard time remembering and it was really a mean concept, but man,

it didn't play well. Yeah, I also remember it being a little harder to use in practice than I think we wanted it to be, because it's not as easy as just tapping a creature so that it's tapped so that then later it can use the untap. You have to be able to find the opportunity to attack with that creature knowing that either I'm okay with that creature dying in combat so that I can untap it to get its effect before it dies,

or you have to fabricate some other system that allows you to start tapping that creature, which I think might get you into another mechanic on your list you want to talk about. Okay, go ahead. Segue in, please. The conspire mechanic. Okay, go ahead. Segway in, please. The conspire mechanic. Conspire was a mechanic that allowed you to tap creatures to get the extra copy of the spell,

which was, in my recollection, that was like the really feel-good, like you made something crazy happen combo, was to conspire using an untappable creature and then untap that creature to get the effect after the conspire using an untappable creature, and then untap that creature to get the effect after the conspire. Yeah, so this is my memory. Tell me if you remember.

I think we had put a bunch of things in that used tap as a resource, but I think the mechanic itself is the mechanic that got made in development. Yes. So Aaron Forsythe was the development lead. And so, we had had a whole bunch

of individual cards that kind of let you tap things as cost. And Aaron said, well, why don't we just consolidate this and make a mechanic out of it?

And then, Conspire also had this, you want to tap two things of the same color. So, it not only played with the untapped stuff, but it also played

with the color theme. Color matters, yeah. So let's talk about... I know we had cards like Elemental Mastery and Presence of Gond, and I'm still curious who this Gond character is. But they were enchantments that you could put on creatures that let them tap to do a thing.

I think Elemental Mastery made a whole bunch of little hasty tokens. Presence of Gond made one elf. There was a white-blue enchantment that at the beginning of your turn would tap a creature, which if you used it proactively against your opponent, it was a great way to lock their creatures down because as soon as it untapped, it tapped again. But then you could also put it on your own creature so that at the start of your turn, it would be tapped so that you could use its untappability.

Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of combos were woven in. Okay, so I want to segue to another theme that we just talked about, which was color matters. Yes. A lot of that in the set. Yeah, like one of the things that was,

when you're going hybrid, one of the things that you have to say is, okay, well, what's the strength of hybrid? How do you lean into hybrid? And the reason that the set was color matters was that hybrid does a really good job. Like my mono red deck could have black cards in it, even though I don't have swamps in it.

You know, any swamps. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Well, I was really intrigued by the idea of a draft format where you could draft mono-color cards. Like, you could have a mono-color draft, meaning I'm only playing basic lands of one color,

but yet I could have a lot of colors in my deck. Yeah, and by the end of that cycle, you could play a five-color deck on a single set of mana, a single type of mana. I remember playing a lot of two-color decks, like, intentionally two-color decks

that turned into four-color decks because of all the hybrid mana. And it was interesting to have to make some really fine-line decisions about is it worth putting in a couple of mana of this extra color to be able to do this activation on something that wasn't quite in your colors that you were intentionally playing. You almost had access to things sometimes, and you had to make the decision

whether you wanted to commit to having access to it. Yeah, it's an interesting set in that it really, you viably could play one color, and you could, right, you could play many, many colors. You really had a lot of options, especially when you had Shadowmorph even tied together. Yeah. So what do you remember of the Color Matters theme,

which was a pretty big theme? Oh, well, I think one of the things that stands out for me was I remember writing a little think piece in the middle of design where I realized that color density was something that the hybrid mana was really going to make matter, where all of a sudden it wasn't really all that scary to have a card that had four colored or three colored mana symbols in them, because it could be red or green or it could be white or blue um so all of a sudden we went from something that was like too white and one other uh from being okay commit to

white to something that was you know too white blue and and one other, being very flexible in how you could use it. Yeah, it's funny. The color density, it wasn't in Chathamore. It was in Eventide. But we did, Chroma ended up showing up later on the block, which was sort of the precursor to Devotion, if you will. Yeah, something that came back years and years later. So there's a story I want to tell,

just because this is one of my favorite stories of yours. So can we talk a little bit about the making of Kitchen Finks? Heather's Chipmunk? Heather's Chipmunk, yes.

So talk about how that card started. It was hard to start. Why is it Heather's Chipmunk? It is Heather's Chipmunk because when we were back in New Hampshire,

we had a chipmunk that lived in a hole in our yard. And at one point, Heather says to me, Heather's my wife, she says, will you make a card for me if you're going to make all these cards? And I said, I could probably sneak one into the set. She says, I want one based on that chipmunk in the yard. She liked watching the chipmunk pop out and run away and then run back and hide in the hole in the ground again. So I started with a 1-1 for one green-white hybrid mana. And it would give you one life when it entered play, and it would give you one life when it died or left the battlefield. I think it was just when it left the battlefield. And we put that in the design file. And I think the decision was made that it wasn't quite impactful enough. So it became a 2-2 and it

was still a chipmunk or a squirrel or something in the design file. And I think it went through all of design with the name Heather's Chipmunk. Because I remember it kept getting kind of funny side eyes when people that weren't familiar with the backstory would see this card called Heather's chipmunk. Who is this Heather and why does she have a chipmunk? And I remember at one point I sat down for a play test and Mark Gottlieb warned me that it was now a three-3-4-3 that gave you three life coming and going. And he proceeded to beat me mercilessly with it. It was almost embarrassing to be beaten by a squirrel that was initially designed to be something just light and happy. And now it was just this powerhouse of the set.

Do you remember when it got Persist? I think that happened after I was done. Okay, that happened in development. Yeah. Yeah, I think, right. It was Heather's Chipmunk throughout the, we handed it over as Heather's Chipmunk. We didn't change that name.

I mean, not that I thought that was going to be the real name, but that was the design name. And then I think what happened in development was they realized that it played, like, we realized that ETB effects played well with Persist. You know, because, like, you enter the battlefield, you get an effect, and then when it dies, Persist brings it back a second time. And so it just, it was, they comboed really well together. So my assumption is, they said, okay, well, okay, let's look at all our enter the battlefield effects, and maybe some of them will make persist. And so this card ended up

becoming a persist. It then was too powerful as a 3-3, so it got knocked down to a 3-2 and 2 life. But it's still very good. I hear it's playable. Oh, so here's the great story. I enjoyed it. So you shared the story about you playing in your local store

when the Shadowmore came out with the Card Kitchen things? Well, I remember explaining to people that it was actually Heather's Chipmunk. And I've had a few people ask me to sign the card since then. And whenever I do, they have me scratch out the name and write Heather's Chipmunk on the card to boot. There's a story I remember, you can tell the details of this, is you're playing... I remember them.

Well, here's my story, I see you remember the story. You're playing somebody at your local game store and you're playing Shadowmoor and Kitchen Things comes out. I think they had the Kitchen Finks. And you're like, oh, I designed that card and they didn't believe you. They thought you were lying to them and the store owner knew you had worked or something.

Somebody there was able to vouch for you or something or you went online for my article or whatever. And like, no, no, really, I'm not making this up. I actually made this card. It happened a few times. It happened a few times. It happened a few times. Having to find proof or evidence that, no, really, I did. Yeah, but you're not a pro tour player.

You're not a, no, I'm not. And yet somehow I still stumbled into this and by Mark Rosewater and everyone else's graces, just this average Magic player somehow got to make some cards, and now you've got them in front of you. So we're almost wrapping up here. I can see my desk,

but I just want to ask one final question for you, which is, as the only person, really the only outsider to be on a Magic set, what was that like? What was it like to be sort of... Surreal. It was very strange. You know, for years after that experience, I was sort of in the circle of friends of all of the Wizards folks. So I got to know Mike Turian really well. I got to know Nate Heiss and his wife, who's now at Wizards Bree. I got to know you.

I got to know Randy. Aaron Forsythe is a great friend. So it was very interesting to sort of play on the edges of that internal community. And it was fun to, for the year or so that the set had not come out yet, know, I guess that's possible. It could be something like that, knowing that they were either completely off base or they had a little bit of the story right, but not quite. Well, it was fun. I mean, one of the things that, one of my, I'm glad I was able to get you on the set.

It was a lot of fun working with you. And the Shannon Bowl was a lot of fun working with you. The Shadowmore was a lot of fun. It definitely... It's one of those sets I look back on and there's things I would change. The designer in me was like, oh, man, the untapped symbol didn't quite work the way I thought.

The hybrid, I would probably have a little less hybrid. The things I look back at. But I really, really enjoy Shadowmoor. It's one of my favorite sets to draft. I love drafting Shadowmoor just because somehow I love drafting monocolor decks, and it's like the set made so you can draft monocolor decks. I think I still have a few unopened starter decks.

Oh, God, remember starter decks back in the day? Ah, starter decks, yeah. I have a few unopened ones down in my garage somewhere. So if you're ever in Southern California, we'll do some sealed. Oh, that sounds good. So anyway, guys, I can see my desk. So 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 thank you, Sean. Thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for hosting. And for all the rest of you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.