Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #847: Unstable with Ben Hayes

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

I sit down with R&D member Ben Hayes to talk about the making of Unstable.

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 doing a lot of interviews recently where I talk to people, R&D people of past and present, about sets we worked on together. So today, I have Ben Hayes with me, and we're going to talk about working on Unstable. Hey, Ben. Hey, Mark. Happy to be here. Okay, so I'm going to set the scene, and then Happy to be here. off the development uh originally billy morano did the development but then he left wizards so i got passed to dave humphries and then he did it for a while but then he got another project and then it got handed to you although you i think you were on for all three right you were on the whole development just you only led the third part of it yeah i wasn't on from the very beginning of

development but i was on when each of those people were the lead. Yep. Okay. So let's, let's talk making of unstable. So what, what are the challenges? I mean, I've talked a lot about designing it. So let's talk about the developing end of it. What are the challenges of developing a set like unstable? Well, probably the biggest thing is just how many parts of the card you need to be thinking about while you're making changes and tuning and getting the set together that you don't have to think about on a normal magic set. On a standard Black Border magic set. When you're working on a standard Black Border Magic set, you're worrying about mana cost and thinking about whether something's an instant or a sorcery and power and toughness and how its abilities work. But in an unset and an unstable, you're thinking about the art because that has implications on the gameplay. You're thinking about the flavor text, whether or not the card has reminder text, how many capital letters there are in the title.

A whole bunch of things that just you need to be aware of as you're as you're seeing and building different parts of the set and putting different things together or changing cards especially you could uh you might make a change to a card that seems totally innocuous that either uh totally messes something up in how it mechanically relates to another card or maybe it kind of undermines what the joke of that card is so there's just a lot of things to keep in mind yeah i mean it's really interesting like um i'll use a couple cards example like goblin haberdasher cares about whether or not the creature has a hat. So all of a sudden, the art, like what normally, for example, in a normal magic set, while the art enhances the card, the art's awesome and a big part of magic, but it doesn't mechanically matter. What is in the art doesn't change how the card functions.

And all of a sudden, we would get art back from the artist and we're like, oh, the artist put a hat on this creature. Oh, now that means, like, it changes things. And I know, like, there was a pass we did late on where we had to count all the creatures that had hats to figure out what to cost Goblin Haberdasher at, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a great example of

one of those cards I was talking about and like Phoebe had a sneak can't be blocked by creatures with flavor text so like if we put flavor text on something like whether or not it has flavor text determines like how it interacts with this card

and capital offense cares about like like, capital letters. Like, templating matters, art matters, names matters, flavor text matters. There's no such thing, like, one of the, I mean, there's good and bad, but more good, I think, is that the unsets just say, hey, anything goes, anything can matter, but when you're making the set,

when anything can matter and you have to care about it, it just, it's just a very weird thing. Like, you're just caring about things that you never and you have to care about it it just it's just a very weird thing like you're just caring about things that you never ever have to care about from a design standpoint yeah you have to get more people involved uh you have to sort of be more methodical uh making sure that you're considering all the different parts of the card i think my favorite uh or well one of my favorites is uh it's called old guard the one the common white tapper that taps creatures without reminder text and then it has reminder text it says reminder text is still any italicized text in parentheses that explains rules you already know and that's a callback uh uh we did that joke i think in unhinged where we defined reminder text and then this is making a joke

the fact that we once did that so there's a lot of throwbacks to in in nonsense yeah yeah and that i mean every right every discipline gets involved in that, right? It's like editing is both imparting their own touch on the cards to make them come together in that way, but then also trying to think about things being presented clearly without cutting those jokes out. It's just like there's a lot of moving pieces and everyone really has to work together very carefully. And like I said, it's,

I think one of the real fun things about working on an unset is that you, you just are forced to deal with things you've never had to deal with before. And while there's challenges of that, they're like, you know, I've worked, I mean, this is my 25th year working on magic.

Like I've, I've made a lot of magic sets. So a lot of the time when I'm doing something, I've done it like, you know, I've worked, I mean, this is my, what, 25th year working on magic. Like, I've made a lot of magic sets. So, a lot of the time when I'm doing something, I've done it before, you know. There's a lot of callbacks for me. There's a lot of, like, oh, this is like that. But what I love in the unsets, and just more, most magic sets do this some, but unsets do it more, is I just find myself in a situation that I've never had to ever think about that before. find myself in a situation that I've never had to ever think about that before and it's very entertaining to go, oh, okay

like, who's wearing a hat? I all of a sudden have to start thinking about that so that's cool Yeah, solving those new problems is fun I like that in the first few years that I was at Wizards I got to work on like Conspiracy

which has all kinds of considerations for multiplayer and draft matters that normal magic sets don't have. And I got to work on Stable with you and Duels of the Planeswalkers and just like, yeah, things where you have new questions that you're trying to answer, new challenges. It's really fun.

Okay, so let's... The set gets handed off to you. So what... This is late in the process. So like what I said, it's like a seven year, this is probably year five or something, right? That you got handed this. What did you have to do? Like what, let's talk a little bit about the,

I talk a lot about the early part of design. So this is a chance to talk a little bit of a later part of design. What's going on in the later part of making a set what what do you have to worry about yeah so as you mentioned you know i took this set over from two other previously developers um and so some things were already in place um i think all or most of the limited color pairs were in place so i didn't really have to solve that um a lot of the cards were uh either totally or mostly designed um and were just kind of a matter

of tweaking things here or there um and then uh the uh so contraptions and how they work were pretty far along. We had the, the basic, uh, three sprocket structure and sort of how they, how you cranked and moved along and triggered that. But there were certain elements of contraptions that we hadn't figured out yet. Um, things like how exactly do they work in draft? Do you have to play all the ones that you pick in a draft? Do we have minimum contraption deck size? Do we have a maximum contraption deck size?

So that was one of the things that I had to figure out when I took the set over. The other thing is exactly what all the contraptions did, I think, changed quite a bit. They're very hard to balance, just given that they're this repeated effect that you're going to get over and over, even if the card that generated them goes away. You can generate them for very little mana in some cases in the set you can generate lots of them at the same time with some cards in the set uh so they they were one of the areas that uh required some tuning um and and then yeah a lot of the high rarity cards exactly how those came together one of the things just so the audience understands, one of the things with contraptions we worked

really hard to do was we wanted synergy. Like, the whole point of a contraption is you build it, right? We wanted, like, we wanted you to go, oh, I want to put both these cards in the same sprocket so they happen together. And so we, it was very, very

modularly built. It was built so cards did interact with one another in a way. So that was also very challenging developmentally, right? They weren't just effects. They were synergistic effects that were designed to work with each other so that you had cool interactions that happened.

Yeah, exactly. And synergy, so here's an interesting thing we don't talk a lot about. Developing synergy is very challenging like you can determine whether a card is powerful or not right in a vacuum you can figure how powerful a card is but part of building um a magic set is understanding how the cards work with each other and when do cards get powerful through synergy not just sort of standalone and like we have to we have to make sure we understand the

power level as cards interact with each other and that that is a very complex thing because there are a lot of cards yeah and that was one of the big things um that was one of the big differences uh between unstable and previous uns Unstable really having a focus on being a great limited experience that incorporates all of our limited best practices and all those types of things. Gameplay is synergy, right? One of the things, real quickly, for the audience is both Unglued and Unhinged weren't designed to be played by themselves. They were

designed to be mixed in with existing magic. The idea was you would take two boosters of normal magic and mix in one pack of an unset, was the idea originally. And then what we finally came to was that's not how people played it. So for Unstable, I'm like, okay, I'm just building a limited environment. They're going to play it by itself. And so it was really the first set where we built a limited environment that was unto itself. Yeah, yeah, and figuring out how

you're going to do silver border mechanics, but have them be robust enough that they can actually support a limited environment was really interesting. Contraptions work really well for that. Host Augment works really well for that, although it does have challenges being developed for limited. Yeah, so let's talk about Host and Augment.

So we have something in R&D we refer to as ASFAN, which stands for ASFAN. And it means, if I open a magic pack, what percentage am I going to see of something? And the reason that's so important is host augment is what we call an A-B mechanic, which means you need part A, which is the host, and part B, which is the augment. Now, you can play the host by itself, so the A works by itself. But B is meaningless. If you don't have a works by itself but b is meaningless if you don't have a host creature an augment is a blank card and so we had to make sure that you had there's enough hosts out in the environment that by the time you got an augment you already had a

host and so um if you want to talk a little bit about that about as fans and how do we make that work? Yeah, so there's the sort of level one of figuring it out, which is how many host cards do we have? What rarities are they at? How many augments do we have? What rarities are those at? And sort of mathing out how many hosts are going to appear relative to how many augments. how many hosts are going to appear relative to how many augments.

But then there's the more nuanced level of, okay, make sure that the host cards are things that you are going to want to play in most of your decks. You don't feel like you're incurring a big cost to play these cards. So they're not only getting picked, but they're also making it into your deck, which then makes it that much easier to include some augment cards. And then there's another level of cards that don't have host or augment, but in either subtle or explicit ways support the mechanic. So a raise dead effect, where you can bring back a creature from your

graveyard to your hand is in many cases going to count as an extra host creature if you want it to or more explicitly like are the two tutors for from your library a host and an augment creature so there's kind of like many layers to making them the work. And that tends to happen with synergistic mechanics, where you're like, here's level one, here's the more nuanced level two, here's the support cards that are in to make that mechanic work even better. And then, you know, you hope that in the end

you've done enough that it, you know, just naturally works for players. Yeah, so I want to talk about a certain aspect of Unsets that host augment plays into this quite a bit. It's what we call variance. So the idea of variance is how different does the game play from game to game? If I have the exact same deck,

I'm not changing the cards in my deck at all, how similar or dissimilar is the gameplay from one to the next? And normally in Magic, we're careful on our variants because there's tournaments, we want skill to matter. But when we do a more casual product like the Unsets are, we turn up variants. Because variants is very fun, but it lowers skill. But when you're just trying to have fun, it's okay. So like, contraptions and host augment were both picked because

they're high variance mechanics. That, hey, if I play a host with a different augment, that's a very different experience. Or if I cast contraptions and put, you know, I get two different things to put on the same sprocket, that might make it just a very different experience from another game with the

exact same deck. Yeah, exactly right. Like, if you think of it this way, normally the main way that you get variance in a game is which cards you draw and in what order you draw them in but if you take contraptions you could draw exactly the same hand of seven birds and let's say some of them assemble contraptions well you play those cards out exactly the same but you get different contraptions that you draw in or different contraptions in different combinations. And that's going to make the game play out potentially totally differently. So it's just adding another layer of even these cards, even if you drew the same cards, you're still going to have interesting different outcomes on, you know, different from what you would have last game with those cards.

different from what you would have last game with those cards. And one of the challenges of development is high variance is trickier to develop because you, the developer, don't know what's going to happen. When you can predict what's going to happen, you have more control of making sure it happens correct. But when there's this high variance and high combinatorics, meaning lots of things can combo different ways, it's just a lot harder to predict things.

Yeah, yeah. You kind of have to, you have to approach it differently with looking at like what the edge cases are in any of the different systems of like, okay, what's the thing on the far end of the spectrum host augment combination that's going to be the most powerful?

Or what are going to be the ones that work the least well together? Same with contraptions. Oh, okay. If I get contraption, exactly contraption A and exactly contraption B, that's probably the peak of power for a card that assembles two contraptions. And it's like, okay, okay well if the peak is here and everything is in between it's just like a lot more uh a lot more things to figure out which is the theme with this set so another thing that happened just to talk about like how variants played out a little bit um it turns out that it was very hard for us to make the set work in sealed and work in draft because the numbers we

needed to work in one were very different than numbers we were we needed to work in the other so for example um the set didn't have a pre-release but it had a release event we just said to people draft it this is not meant for sealed don't play sealed draft it we designed it for draft because we couldn't get the numbers right to do both, which is very indicative of a high-variance set. Yeah,

host-on-it were a big part of that, where it's like, if you're able to pick and choose host creatures throughout the course of a draft, you can build a deck with enough host creatures to to satisfy um the augment requirements um but if you're just randomly getting them and sealed you run into too many situations where like oh i got this i got this amazing rare

augment card in green but all my host cards are in black and red. And it's like, oh, yep, that's not fun. But in draft, that's not going to happen. So let's talk a little bit about what do you think were the big challenges for you in developing this app? What do you remember spending your time on? Yeah. So,

um, some things that I spent my time on, um, host and augment, uh, definitely sort of smoothing out how those worked and limited, um, making sure that the numbers there were right and there was enough support

since we knew that A, B mechanics are tricky in that way to get those right. Figuring out and fine-tuning what all the contractions were going to do was a big part of it with them being unlimited repeatable effects um they inherently that type of thing's very powerful and limited uh because you're just generating infinite value over time so figuring out how to how to tune those um how to tune those contraption making cards to be satisfying um a lot of the higher rarity cards

uh well not a lot uh in terms of not maybe not the majority but many of the higher rarity cards um figuring out exactly how those worked or what they would do uh like baron von count i remember going back and forth for a while on exactly how that card would work. Better than one, the person outside the game becomes your teammate. There were a lot of, while the meat and potatoes structure of the set, the limited color pair, were in pretty good shape and pretty solid when i took it over there were some higher rarity concepts um sort of dungeons and dragons that were like we know we we love this concept and we have the shape of a card but we haven't really hammered it into exactly what we want the

final card to be uh so so a few of those as well well here's a good example of that, and I know this was a card you worked a lot on. So Urza Academy Headmaster. So basically it's our planeswalker in the set. It's Wooburg. So it's white, blue, black, red, green. And it just basically says he has a loyalty of four, and his three abilities are go to this website and click a button, and we'll tell you what it this website and click a button and

we'll tell you what it does so talk a little bit about making that that that's a very not normal magic card yeah that is not a normal magic card at all um so right in play testing it was very easy to just sort of hand wave that and say okay i plus one one, I'll just roll the die and look at my phone and pick up Planeswalker or whatever. Just figure out how to kind of get by with playtesting it. But then when it actually came time to print the card and somebody was actually making a website that had to do something when you click those buttons,

I had to figure out, okay, what should be on the list of pluses? What should be on the list of minuses? Do we want it to just be everything that's a plus or minus or, you know, an ultimate? Do we want to curate the list? How much do we want to make the list short enough that if somebody prints it out, they could manually do this? they could manually do this uh and then working with you know something that isn't a part of normal magic set development at all like working with the web team that's actually making the website them showing us sketches of hey we're thinking of laying it out like this and having these buttons here do you think that you know what do you think of that and just uh lots of considerations outside just the gameplay of the card, because the gameplay of the card extended to a website

with a random number generator. Abilities and, you know, all those decisions had to get made before the website was built. And that's an important part of where unsets are a little bit different from a normal magic set is there are just component pieces that other people are working on that matter mechanically in a way that's just not true normally. really closely with the editing team over the long period of time that the set was edited because anytime they would want to significantly change a text box i would sit down with them and and gauge whether it was um changing the card in a way that was undermining the the humor of the card or something like that and then in my role i was kind of working with editing

and then pinging mark and being like hey mark editing wants to make this change can you come over can we all look together um is this too much of a change or does it keep the the spirit and the joke of the card um so a lot of that where that's not normal with uh you know maybe maybe sometimes editing wants to change something in a way that makes the rules very very slightly different but nothing to the level and the scale of what it is on unstable yeah i use this this is actually an unhinged story but it makes this point really well where um i remember at one point there's a card called shoe tree in unhinged and which it's a tree folk, and then part of the mechanics of the card is you have to put your shoes on it.

You have shoe counters on it. And at one point, I was arguing with creative about the name, and they wanted to change the name. And I'm like, the card doesn't, the only reason the card holds together, the only reason that a tree folk with shoe counters on it makes any sense is it's called

Shoe Tree, which is, you know, an expression. And the second you stop calling it shoe tree, the audience is gonna go, what weird crazy card is this? You know, and that, the thing about unsets is the cards have a holisticness that is, I mean, not that normal magic cards don't have some of that,

but everything's gotta work together in a way that is organic, that really, right, you change one thing in one part of the card, and it can throw everything off. Because a lot of times things all sort of hinge on each other, and the combinedness of it is what makes the card the card. And so the unsets are a little bit different from an average set in that there's more, you know,

you wouldn't think changing flavor text would matter, but it can, or, or changing the, the, sometimes changing the template can matter in ways you couldn't expect. And that's, that's something very unique about working on, on, on sets. Yeah. Yeah. And fun. I mean, like it's, it's, I, it's harder and it takes more time and effort, but it's fun to work together on all that stuff and to feel like, right. Everyone has to be in sync to, to get this thing to, you know, sing and come out exactly the way we're planning. So, um, we talked about contraptions. We talked about host and augment. Did you find die rolling or outside assistance? Did that thing provide any unique challenges?

Outside assistance was pretty straightforward and simple, I would say uh to develop like the i mean the cards the cards had a lot of variance that you couldn't really get around and if you were playing those cards you were buying into that to some degree which i think made it um made them not need to be that precise uh and the outside assistance cards had the benefit that whenever somebody played one in a game, everyone was just super happy. It was like, oh, somebody played an outside assistance card. Yeah, it's like the person who played it was happy. The person who had it played against them was happy.

It's like, okay, yay, somebody's high-fiving me or somebody's answering a question uh so those were those were easy for that reason because they were just i mean every time in play testing they came up it was just a very fun happy thing for everyone uh die rolling uh some of those cards were a bit challenging i think i remember like um the red i want to say it was the red host common right there's a host cycle now there was a host cycle where etb enter the battlefield you roll to die um what was it it was it did damage right oh uh feisty stegosaur stegosaur stegosaurus so it's four r21 when this creature enters the battlefield

roll six out to die this creature deals the battlefield, roll a six-sided die. This creature deals damage equal to the result to target creature and opponent controls. Yeah, that one was one of the harder die rolls. When you have a common that's sort of a key piece of how limited is going to work since they

show up so often, and then you have that card where there's a huge amount of variance where you know if i'm trying to destroy a three three flying creature that i can't block there's a lot on the line of whether i actually destroy it or whether i roll a one or two and this card has has effectively essentially no effect um and so yeah i would say there were definitely some debates about whether cards like that were too much variance um but we we you know we leaned into it and uh i think that card is fun to play with and you you often have multiple things you can target and are sort of it's on you of how much risk you're buying into to try to kill larger creatures, and that's okay. So one last, we're almost out of time here,

but one last part of the set that I'm just curious to get your take on. So we did something weird where we did variants, where certain cards, there wasn't one version of them, there was multiple versions of them. And some of them were multiple rules, like I think there were six cards that the rules were different on them. What was it like working with variants? Because that's not something Magic normally does.

Yeah, that was... I mean, the card that immediately comes to mind is the Every Thingamajig. Figuring out all the different combinations of classic artifact abilities and how to put them together on the card was a really fun puzzle. Real quickly, I just want to tell people about the card. Everythingamajig costs five, and it would have three abilities, two of which had shown up previously on a non-uncard, and one that had previously shown up on an uncard.

And then we made a whole bunch of them, and right, we had to figure out what went with what. Right, and figuring out how to make them work together, that was just a super interesting, fun and interesting challenge. The one that's most memorable to me is um the one that has uh one mana flip a coin if you win the flip add two mana and then x uh everything in my jig becomes an xx until end of turn xx creature until end of turn so theoretically right you could just win a bunch of flips and make a 2020 or make 30 30 um so yeah putting those two abilities on the same card was fun. Figuring

out how to mix and match them was from like a huge pool of possible abilities was really interesting. Well, any final thoughts? I can see my desk here so I'm almost to work. Any final thoughts on making Unstable?

It was just really fun and it was a really great experience. Really great learning stable uh it was just really fun and it was a really great it was a really great experience um really great learning experience working so much with all the different teams and working with you and uh yeah i'm uh super proud of how it came out and uh i mean i love playing it myself so that's that's nice and yeah this was a fun chat well thanks for being here Ben but I see my desk so we all know what that means this is the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic so thank you Ben thanks for being with us and sharing all this information yeah you too thanks for having me and to everybody else I will see you all next time bye bye