Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #845: Modern Horizons with Mark Globus

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

I sit down with former R&D member Mark Globus to talk about the making of the original Modern Horizons.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. So, in my time at home, I've been getting to do a lot of interviews, which is hard to do in my car. So, I've been asking people from Magic's past and present to come talk about making sets. So, today I have Mark Globus talking about the first Modern Horizons. Welcome, Mark. Thank you. Glad to be here. Okay, so, let's just jump into the fray and talk. So people know sort of what you did. You were the co-designer and co-lead

developer, lead designer and lead developer through the whole process. So you worked with Ethan on vision design. You worked with Adam Prozac on the set design. So you're there for the whole process. So anyways, we're going to tell the whole story and you're there for the whole process. So anyway, we're going to tell the whole story, and you were there for all of it. And even going back before that to the hackathon, which birthed the whole process. Right, so let's start with the hackathon. Let's talk about the hackathon.

Sure. So the hackathon actually, I think, was an idea that originally came from Mark Gottlieb. And the idea was, let's shut down Magic R&D for a week and let people jam on new products. And given that that was my main job, I was director of product design, this sounded awesome to me. That was my main job. I was director of product design. This sounded awesome to me.

And so we'd gather in a bunch of different ideas and set up some teams, and people would have a week to prove out their ideas and make some cool products. And a bunch of those have come to fruition. Things like BattleBond and JumpStart and, of course, Modern Horizons came out of this process. Okay, so what's your earliest memory of anybody pitching to you what would become Modern Horizons? It was simultaneous, both you and Ethan. Both had kind of a different take on this time spiral to space. And so I remember when I got those two pitches, I went to you and Ethan and said, hey, these sound really cool, but they also sound about the same. How about you guys work together?

And I forget exactly what the distinguishing parts were of the focus they weren't 100 the same but i kind of said you guys get to go work that out yeah so here here's here's the difference um is that i both agreed on the idea of a complex heavy nostalgia rich set like time spiral that as a supplemental product like Like, the problem with Time Spiral was the audience that loved it loved it, but a lot of the audience was like, what? You know, here's 50 mechanics

during the course of the block. Have fun. And they were just overwhelmed and they didn't get all the references. And there's people that just, it wasn't for them. But we're like, okay, there is an audience

and supplemental sets, like, maybe that's the audience. So Ethan pitched, I think, Time Spiral 2, meaning, let's just do another Time Spiral set. It's what he pitched. I pitched Future Sight 2, which is, there's a place for this complex, you know, a set that has a lot of complexity in it, really looking at the past, has a lot of nostalgia in it, sort of take the essence of Time Spiral

and redo it. The product that we did, I think, leaned a little bit more toward what Ethan was pitching than what I was pitching, although we were, I agree, in similar space. Okay, so, Ethan and I spent a week making the hack, we were in the hackathon,

Ally Steele was on her team, Nat Mose was on her team, so we had to make a playtest, you had a playtest, so we made a playtest for you, so come Friday, you sat down and did a playtest. So what do you remember of the playtest? That's right. So,

that was one of the things that everybody in the hackathon had to do. By the end of the week, there had to be a playtest, and they could do any kind of slice. And some people made drafts. I believe you guys made kind of like a fixed sealed deck. Yes, we gave you a sealed deck, but we handpicked what we gave you. Like it was a – right. Right, so that way you didn't have to you a sealed deck, but we handpicked what we gave you. Like it was, right. Right.

So that way you didn't have to make a whole set, which I thought was a really innovative way of trying to boil down the impossible task of making a complete set in a week. And I remember getting that stack of cards and just grinning from ear to ear as I'd go through the things. Just, you know, there was so much rich potential that was so visible from just that week. I was very excited. I don't remember a whole lot about the games other than laughing at times and seeing, you know, different things coming up. laughing at times, as seeing, you know, different things coming up. It was clear very early that this was something that I wanted to pursue and see if we could turn into a product.

Do you remember the code name we gave it? The code name that we had at some point became contemporary. Before that, Ethan and I named it for Hackathon week. We gave it a name. I don't remember that one. We called it Decadent. Yes, yes, okay, yeah, yeah. The code name when it became a real product was Contemporary.

Right, right, yeah, that was the actual code name. That was our Hackathon code name, not the actual code name. Contemporary was the real code name. Okay, so you picked, I mean, we did a hackathon. There was a slot for an upcoming supplemental set. You picked, this is the one you picked. So, okay, how did it go from the hackathon to starting

to become a real product? So, the thing that basically happens any time we go to create a real product is there are a lot of stakeholders across the company who need to come together to make a product and um so the next thing that happens when i've got some things that seem like they have a lot of promise to start talking to different people and the the biggest conversation

i remember having about the product was when i was discussing the product with Bill Rose, he asked if the product could be modern legal. And I said, I don't know. Let me go find out. Sounds fascinating. find out. Sounds fascinating. And I remember coming back to you and Ethan as well as other people in Magic R&D and started to explore that space. Once the answer came back as a yeah, that was when the product really took on some additional scope and size. We knew that if it were going to be modern legal, that the potential for the product was much larger than the potential for the slot that I was looking for and therefore would basically

get a lot more both resources, complexity and demands from the entire company. So at that point, we really started looking at, all right, if we're going to make this modern legal, what are the additional things that need to happen here? And that included things like getting additional playtesters available. available. Working with Magic Online to both mine data on Magic on the modern environment and figure out ways to use it. So there were a lot of things that needed to come together to make the product real given this additional parameter. So one of the things that's important, I mean, one of the reasons I like having a lot of different guests is that the audience can see there's a lot of different people that make magic.

So explain a little bit, what is a producer? What do they do? What is, we've called them architects, producers, they've had different names, but what is the job that you were doing? What essentially is that? Sure.

So I was, as director of product design, my job was to figure out all the high-level pieces of what needed to go into a particular product. So these might be things like, hey, we're going to have two 60-card decks, and it's going to be a fixed-deck product, and they're going to play against each other. Okay, well, you got something like dual decks. Oh, okay, well, now we want it to be more aimed at a new player, or we want to have something that can be a presence and have a lot of excitement at mass retailers. So really looking at a variety of different needs from the business standpoint, at the same time as constantly trying to encourage R&D and other parts of the company to come up with innovative

and exciting ideas. So, you know, as an example in that space, Jumpstart came about because one of the opportunities that I saw from working with some of the production teams was that we could do things with different kinds of collation. And so one of the things I asked of the hackathon teams were, hey, are there cool things that you can do if you had more control over what you could put in a particular booster pack? And that was how Jumpstart was born. control over what you could put in a particular booster pack. And that was how

Jumpstart was born. I mean, the one thing for the audience to understand is because I'm always talking from the perspective of the designers, you're designing the set, but it's a big company and there's a lot of moving pieces and there's a lot of other sections that have to make things happen and

it's really the producer slash architect that interacts with all the other parts of the company. You know, when I'm working on a set, I'm working, whoever my architect is, is like, well,

hey, there's lots of other things going on. And they're sort of lining all that up. You know, there's marketing and digital and organized play and infinite things. So like, let's get back a little bit to Modern Horizons. Okay, so we're making Modern Horizons

and you're like, okay, well, there might have digital implications. It might have organized play implications. How do we print it? There's a lot of things you have to figure out. And so what was the challenge of Modern Horizons? What made Modern Horizons, you know, what stood out to you of the challenges of it

the biggest challenges for modern horizons was just how large of a scope the product could have the fact that it was impacting modern meant that it was going to be interesting to going to be interesting to more players. And at the same time, that meant that there were more groups within Wizards who cared about it. So things like organized play is going to care a lot more about a set that's modern than a product that's coming out that say like um conspiracy or battle bond which may just have a little bit of in-store supplies in store uh support so things like this were we had conversations of would this go to Grand Prix? How would people receive a modern set that didn't go through standard? What would player expectations be? And how do you manage that type of uncertainty

of players? Given that things are going direct into modern, what are the challenges with hitting the right power level and excitement? How do you make it so that it's both exciting for modern and you're not making it so that standard is not exciting? And then on top of all of that, Commander was growing at this point in time. And so what are the uh the implications for cards that are going to be commander uh relevant and not so lots of people have lots of opinions on

all of this and part of my job was to to bring this all together and make sure that we were and make sure that we were all working towards a common goal for this product. Okay, so I want to get into the design a little bit, my area. Okay, so one of the things that happened pretty early on is you actually gave us some scope mechanically. So the rules that you lined up for us was the set could have any mechanic that was already in modern

but we drew a line that we stopped at Dragons of Tarkir. So we can use any mechanic up to Dragons of Tarkir. So explain to the audience, why did we stop? Why did we make a line at Dragons of Tarkir. So we can use any mechanic up to Dragons of Tarkir. So explain to the audience, why did we stop? Why did we make a line at Dragons of Tarkir? You bet. So we

needed to figure out different parameters for the set because we thought that there was potential for there to be a Modern Horizons 2, which hey, turns out there is one. And at that point in time,

we didn't really know where that was going to go, but we wanted to make sure that we saved space. So there were a couple of different places where we made definitions. One of them was what mechanics to use, and then that would provide some opportunity for perhaps then Modern Horizons 2 would go after other mechanics. Another rule that we ended up using was that all of the reprints would be new to modern. So figuring out some of these base rules

gave the set both structure as well as set some space in particular for follow-up sets. So you brought something up, so I'll bring it up now. There is one exception to your rule of reprints not being courtesy in modern. And that was the cycle of snow-covered lands. Right. So how did the snow-covered lands?

Because we, in design, in vision, we did not put snow-covered lands in. So how did that happen? How did snow-covered lands get in the set? Yeah, snow-covered lands were a late addition. They came in in set design. We had originally looked at some other lands to go into that set or design that those lands were not right. And so we had the hole. And we were trying to figure out what we were going to fill that hole with. And we were looking for something that could be exciting, something that would only be in, that would make sense for this product and would be

hard to place elsewhere. And we realized that not only with snow would we be able to provide some solutions to limited play, but people love full art lands and we really didn't have a good space to reprint snow lands as full art. And so it kind of ended up being this great solution to a bunch of little problems that we had. It gave us some limited play. It gave us an outlet for printing these full-art snowlands.

And gave some different texture to the set that really fit in with other things that we were doing. Okay, so I'm going to talk about some other themes that were in the set and see what your memories of these themes. Sure. So one of the big things about the first Modern Horizons was there's a pretty strong tribal component. You know, there was ninjas, there was goblins, there was slivers,

there was changelings. How did that come across? How did that come about? One of the things we wanted to do with Modern Horizons 1 was make sure that tribes that people loved but weren't being played in modern got some love. So goblins and ninjas are a great example of that space. People love goblins. People ask for more ninjas. There's definitely player excitement in this space.

But if you wanted to go and play goblins at your local modern event, you really didn't have the tools to be even somewhat competitive. And so we identified a few different tribes that could use that kind of help. We then looked at making sure that those tribes had proper support within the limited environment. And generally, tribal works better in limited when you've got some type of glue in between them, and changelings are an awesome fit for that. Yeah, another reason we liked changelings was we definitely wanted to do, especially at higher rarity, some one-of tribal stuff. And it allowed us to sort of put some in the set

and the changelings, a lot of those cards matter in limited in a way that'd be very hard for them to matter normally. That's right. I'd forgotten that. You're absolutely right. Cause I know one of the things that's funny that we did,

I know is we made a list. We had, I remember this, the giant whiteboard of what do people want? What is the audience asking for, especially in modern, but in general, what's the audience asking for

that maybe we can deliver? And stuff like slivers and ninjas. People are like, oh, make more ninjas, make more slivers, stuff like that. But one of the real common things we get is tribal lords.

Because obviously stuff like goblins we support from time to time. So there's plenty of goblin tribal stuff. But I want a bear lord. I want, you know, people come up with things that are much more of, and it's like, well, where else can we do something like that? And so we definitely lean toward that. And I know a lot of Modern Horizons 1 was built around, okay, we want some fan service here. This is the set

where we can deliver stuff that's really hard to deliver elsewhere. And Modern Horizons 2 really has been a place for us to sort of do high-level enfranchised fan service. We're like, man, they want this. This is a hard thing to put in a normal set. But maybe here we can make it.

It was super fun making that Bear Lord. I found the whole problem, one of the things that I I mean, I was obviously involved with the original Time Spiral, but one of the fun things about making Time Spiral and Modern Horizons and Modern Horizons 2 these kind of sets is

that as someone who's played Magic forever since 93 it's so fun to kind of sets is... As someone who's played Magic forever, since 93, it's so fun to kind of go very fanboy. Like, for example, in Modern Writings 2, we made the Chub Toad. We finally

turned Chub Toad. We gave him Bushido. We've been wanting to do that forever! And so it's just fun. Modern Writings sets are fun in that you can just sort of do stuff that you just... And there's a lot on the cutting room floor. So do you have any memories of anything that ended up on the cutting room floor that you particularly were sad to see on the cutting room floor? Wow.

You know, there were so many things I was excited to see. What was I sad that didn't make it? I'll pitch one and give you a little time to think here. Okay. So I made a 10-card cycle of guild cards in which they used two of the guild mechanics. Yeah. But the problem was, to make it work,

I needed access to all three. Like, according to our rules, I had access to the first and second visit, but not the third visit. And I really kind of

needed the third because not every, you know. And so I made this set and I borrowed some from the third. And so the reason it got cut was

I didn't follow the rules. But I love the idea of mix and match guild cards where it's the guild, but they're using idea of mix-and-match guild cards, where it's the guild, but they're using two of their mechanics from two different times we visited. And I was really sad to see that mechanic go.

I wasn't on Modern Horizons 2. I would have repitched it for Modern Horizons 2 if I had been on the team, but I wasn't, so... Maybe... I'll find some place to do them. I think they were cool. Yeah, I don't remember things that I was in particular sad to see go. I do remember things that I was tickled to make work. Okay.

Like one of the things that... The favorite card that I designed is a common. Okay. Mind Rake. Okay. what does mind rake do mind rake is two and a black for mind rot all right well every set needs a mind rot but it has overload it's cheaper okay so you know coming up with a way to make an overload card where the overload cost was cheaper while filling a need for the set. We need some type of mind rot effect for a limited. This came together very nicely. Finding those places where you could take a mechanic and use it in a different way.

That one was different both for its colors. Yeah. Black instead of, uh, being an, is it? Yeah. And having its overload costs be cheaper because, all right, well now I'm making myself discard cards. be cheaper because alright, well now I'm making myself discard cards. And it was fun to have that kind of

design come together. Yeah, it's funny. We talk a lot about Vorthos design, meaning top-down flavor design. Like, ooh, I'm making a character and look, I made the character. But I don't talk a lot about Mel design, which is like making something that's just crafted really well.

Your card is a perfect example of... It's a very clever card where all these pieces come together, and it's just very well designed. And Modern Horizons lets us do those as well. Not that we don't do good mail cards in every set, but the kind of stuff that we can do here.

Yes, you have tools that you don't have access to a lot of the time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I was trying to see if there was a burn spell to kind of do that way as well, but it didn't quite work out. And this ended up being perfect. And we really only needed one in that space, so that was fine.

Yeah, the one that I remember that I really liked is Segovian Angel, which had a funny story, which is in the hackathon, I made a cycle of mini creatures. And it was like mini angel, mini dragon, you know, and they were just, I took iconic creatures from magic that were famous and then just made miniature versions of them. And then Ethan later had the idea in Vision to make them Segovian, because for those who don't know real quick, there's a card called Segovian Leviathan that showed up in early magic. And it shows, like, in the picture, it's this giant creature. You see, like, little whales swimming by them that look like tiny fish. And then

you realize it's a 3-3. And we're like, what? Like, what is this art with a 3-3? And then we made this whole, like, well, there's the plane of Segovia, where everything's tiny. And just this running joke. I mean, literally, that's just making up something funny to answer a mistake we made.

And then Ethan came up with the idea of making the mini creature Segovia. And only the angel stayed, but it's a W-1-1 flying vigilance creature, because it's a little mini angel. That tickled me to no end. The coming together both of the creative

and mechanics to make something that's just very... And one of the challenges in Modern Horizons is it's not... It's easier to make rare cards that are complex and whatever, but trying to make really cards that feel right but that are common

is a lot trickier in a set like this. Because in a normal set, look, hey, the commons are just only so complex, but in this set, we still had to keep the commons not too complex, but in a set that was filled with complexity, so it are just only so complex. But in this set, we still had to keep the comments not too complex, but in a set that was filled with complexity. So it's more of a challenge. Yeah, that was definitely a fun one.

The other one that I remember kind of playing in that, how do you find the lower complexity but still feels like it fits the the environment was the um the green white hybrid disenchant oh right right right um yeah so that that was originally part of a cycle we actually made a cycle in which we found cards that existed in two different colors in magic's past uh and then printed them as hybrid cards so you could cast either version. And so the poster child of it was that card because Distant Shed and Naturalize obviously are two famous cards

that are the same but color shifted. And it turns out that sometimes we do this. We make a card and then try to make a whole cycle out of it. And the answer is, nah, just one card really is the cool part. Nothing else was as cool as that, so we just included that card. But I do... Yeah, it's cool. Definitely a fun one. I definitely felt like

it fit the vibe of the set, and it hit that nice, oh, we've got a simple execution that works out perfect for Comet. So anyway, I can almost see my desk here, so we're close to wrapping up. Any last thoughts on the making? As the person who sort of oversaw the project,

any last thoughts on the making of Modern Horizons? You know, it was definitely one of the both most ambitious and fun products that I worked on. and fun products that I worked on. And it's rare that I had the opportunity to get to be involved in so many different parts of the coming together of a product. And it was just a ton of fun. There was always a lot of excitement excitement a lot of passion for the product

and uh i i can only imagine that uh that that came through again on modern horizons too look oh yeah i mean they are insanely fun to me i mean having had my hand in a bunch of them they're very very fun to design in fact it you you get my hand in a bunch of them, they're very, very fun to design. In fact, you get to go a little crazy, and then you have to rein yourself back in. But it's just fun making things, and then you try to see how far you can push things. And most times you get reined in a little quicker,

and here you get to go a little bit farther, so that's a lot of fun. Yeah, every time we make a future site or make a Modern Horizons, people always joke like it's like an unset. And I always feel like, well, you know, it's just us pushing in space. You're not used to us pushing.

So that's always fun. But anyway, I see my desk here. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. But I want to thank you for being with us, Mark. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And it was so fun talking Modern Horizons. I love it. Okay, guys, for the rest of you, I will see you all next week. So thanks for listening and bye-bye.