Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #851: Dominaria with Kelly Digges

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

I sit down with former R&D member Kelly Digges to talk about the making of Dominaria.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, I've been doing lots of interviews with magic people past and present. So today I have Kelly Diggs with us to talk about the making of Dominaria. Hey Kelly. Hey Mark, it's great to be here. So, let's start from the beginning. What's your earliest memory of making Dominaria? What's your memory of us making this? So, my earliest memory of making Dominaria was, boy, it must have been, I mean, six years ago now or something. It was before I was actually even on the creative team.

I was just kind of confabbing with them about some stuff in my role as a rules editor. But I got into a conversation with them about worlds that we could revisit and um dominaria was you know was on my personal list of things i'd want to see and i i had this image that i think i've mentioned in a podcast before of like it's a world of castles and dragons and all the you know fantasy stuff you expect from alpha but you dig six feet down and you hit rusted metal that like it's, it's, there was also this giant science fiction war on Dominaria. And so showing those two things interacting, that's my very first memory. That was before Dominaria was even on the schedule.

And then, and then, and then it was only much later when it was actually on the schedule that on the schedule, that my hand shot up in the air. I was like, can I have that one? Can I take it? So just for the audience, a little history. I believe there was a 13-year gap between the last time we had been on Dominaria, which was Time Spiral Block. Yeah, that's right. And so there was a huge gap. And early Magic, for the first, I don't know,

10 or so years of Magic, almost all of Magic was on Dominaria. There was a few exceptions, but the vast, vast majority, for some reason, we didn't seem to move around, even though we had a multiverse. And then we started to move around, and then we sort of left Dominaria in the dust and went to other places. And the challenge of Dominaria had always it's it was so many different things it wasn't one thing right right it was it was odyssey block with all the graveyard stuff it was onslaught block with all the tribal stuff it was it was yeah it was mirage block it was ice age block with all the snow it was everything and so yeah the the central challenge both creatively and mechanically going back was like so what is it? What is it?

Right. I mean, and we had changed how we treated planes. I mean, one of the things you were very involved in is we made a very big creative team and we, you know, we did all this world building and like modern magic planes are just very different than what early magic had been. And so it was like, how do we take this thing that the players love? It's a very beloved place. It was magic sort of birthplace in some level. But how do we take this thing that the players love? It's a very beloved place. It was Magic's sort of birthplace in some level. But how do we bring that to a modern age?

And that was the big challenge. Right. And I was on the exploratory design team, so we looked at some things like geography, that Dominaria has locations in a way that most of our planes don't, places that are on a map and we know their relations to each other. That didn't turn out to be that fruitful. But the word that I locked in on really early was history.

That what Dominaria has that none of our other worlds have the first time we go to them is this deep history, both in the game and in the world. And, you know, when I said history, people kept thinking of dusty libraries. And so a lot of the refinement of the creative pitch and even the mechanical pitch that came from history, which I know I was not the only one who locked in on, was how to make that history idea exciting and vibrant and present in the modern world. So just so the audience understands,

you were the creative liaison for this project and yeah so yeah i was i was the overall creative lead so it was kind of my my baby um and then i was also the creative liaison to design so i was on exploratory design vision design and set design um for the set i only made a few actual cards i made multani i remember um or a card that was very few actual cards i made multani i remember um or a card that was very very close to what what multani turned into um but but yeah uh and and then you know on the art side mark winters was the art director and he also had a tremendous impact on the creative of the set and i i cannot i cannot ever discuss the making of the set without

without discussing him um and he and i very much just put our heads together and kind of became one entity to the extent that we could. And, and had this vision that honestly, it felt like at times nobody else really understood that. Like we, we knew what we were trying to do. We knew what we wanted out of it. And, and many people, many people in the rest of the company didn't quite get it, but let us develop it until we could work with concept artists and show them

what we were doing. Yeah. One of the interesting things was, I think we walked out of exploratory with the idea of, okay, history's our thing. Like, that was what we left exploratory with. And a lot of what I was trying to do on the mechanical side was, what does it mean? If the set is history, what does that mean? And you and I worked very closely trying to, like, okay, how do we convey the flavor and the mechanics saying this is, Dominaria is the history world. That's what Dominaria is. Right. And, you know, I was interested in the possibility of an optimistic graveyard set because whenever we've done graveyard sets, they've always kind of keyed in on the death and

spooky parts of it. But we had had shadows of vernistrad and then almond cat so there it was just too close on the heels of all that to do another graveyard set um and richard garfield who was on the set design or on the vision design team was never real keen on the idea of the graveyard as history he's like that's that's what happened two minutes ago like that's not history um you know which is what led him to develop what would become sagas. You know, but yeah, what does history mean? And I remember in a handoff document that I made at the start of vision design, you know, I had put in a little paragraph about, about legends,

about legendary creatures. And, um, cause that was something Mark Winters had pressed for. And, you know, he's, he's on the, uh, like most people on the art side, he's a little less, you know, connected to the mechanical parts of the game than it's the writer's job to be. So he, you know, he was like, legendary creatures seem really right. It's like, yeah, you know, but Kamigawa and there's difficulties about designing around legendary creatures and all that.

And, you know, so I put it in. I'm like, ah, a light legendary theme or more or even just more legends than usual you know the word legend it sounds you know like it connects to history but also it lets us talk about these extraordinary people from dominaria's past and present some of the ones from the past are immortal and therefore still alive um and so that was that was something i put in the handoff you know and then design looped its way back around to that much, much later on their own, I think, you know, with that handoff document having been long forgotten. But it did make sense. And I was very happy when that happened and even happier when the decision was made to make Planeswalkers legendary because that tied everything together.

Right. that tied everything together. Right. So one of the things that I know we did was we did this brainstorming session. I'm not sure if it was exploratory or vision, but where we said, okay, in the game, what represents history? What possibly could be history?

Oh, it could be the graveyard. Artifacts are obviously, you know, the very name of artifacts is objects of old, right? Legendary people, you know, famous things. We talked about stories. That's something we wrote down. Yep. So let's actually, legendary people, famous things. We talked about stories. That's something we wrote down. So let's actually, real quick, I want to jump into sagas a little bit, just because you brought it up.

So here's the origin of sagas, is we had written on the board we wanted stories. And we were like, okay, how exactly does one bring a story to life? And the earliest, so when we had made Planeswalkers, our early attempt at Planeswalkers had this, the way it worked was turn one, they did the first thing and turn two, they did the second thing and turn three, they did the third thing and turn four, they'd go and do the first thing again. And they would just rotate through those three things.

But the problem we ran into was it made them feel very dumb at times. Like, Garrick, the early Garrick was like, make a beast, and then double the number of beasts, and then all your beasts get, like, plus three, plus three. So in turn one, you made them... If someone killed that first beast you were very sad and garak looked not very smart right just like he spent two doors doing nothing because it didn't mean anything and it just it made one of the big

complaints we got is it made him feel stupid and so we ended up changing to give them a little more agency and what you know it felt like they were choosing to do things um but i remembered the gameplay was interesting that it just didn't fit Planeswalkers. So I pitched to the group, I said, can we make use of this? Because the one thing about a story is, if things go in order, okay, that's what a story is. So at least it didn't feel like they were dumb.

It's like, well, that's just the story, the story of this. And I gave to the group the idea of what can we do with this? And that's what richard went off and brought back his i think we posted this in some articles where richard like envisioned like this um a board that ran like you know a board that ran through the card and that the idea of icons on on spaces and stuff like you you'd advance your guy and then when you hit an icon an effect went off um yeah yeah and some of them had branch points and stuff which some of the things that richard came up with for saga some of the more

out there things i sort of see uh in the in the dungeons of adventures in the forgotten realms yes yes yes you know not that it was necessarily directly inspired but some of the same sorts of ideas of like you're moving through this space sometimes you're picking a path or whatever saga's ended up very much the simpler version. And, you know, in Richard's original design, you know, thing of it as a whole card, he had put it into the art. Because of our process, you know, that was something when I showed it to Mark Wenders,

he was like, I don't know, you know, what if we're most of the way through the art process and they decide that actually it needs one more node? Like that's going to be really, really, really challenging. So that was one feedback from our side was like, maybe not in the art can we figure out something else. How did sockets get to where they got? That's an interesting story. So do you mean in terms of art?

Yeah, visually. Visually. How did they end up visually where they ended up? mean in terms of art yeah visually visually how do they end up visually where they end up so um so the frame was made by james arnold um with uh you know with uh mark winters working closely with him you know getting this kind of uh chaptery feel to it um more about the frame in a second there's an interesting thing about the frame that i think even now a lot of people don't don't realize but um but the art i do not remember whose idea it was that they should be in-world art objects. I think it was mine, but I don't remember.

And I know that obviously if Mark Winters had said, no, that doesn't sound right, it would not have happened. But Mark and I really, really dove into that. Here's my memory of how I think it happened. So I'll give you my... dove into that. Here's my memory of how I think it happened, so I'll give you my... I had really liked the idea of, since it was a history set, of having

art that showed actual history on the cards. Right. You made the connection of, what if the sagas did that? Okay, okay, yeah. I just was enamored by the idea, but I didn't connect it to, what if that was the saga thing? You were the one that said connect it to what if that was the saga thing?

You were the one that said, oh, hey, what if the saga thing did that? Yeah, yeah. And the sagas, for Dominaria especially, I was really, really keen that creatively the sagas would all represent in-world documents or objects whose job is to convey history. And some of them, like the Antiquities War, their name actually comes from previously established in-world documents, other ones we made up, but again, then we quoted them. You know, The Eldest Reborn about Nicol Bolas is one that we made up, but then quoted.

So the implication that they're all in-world and these are illustrations or, or, um, performances or whatever, um, or even, you know, sort of, uh, visual representations of these, of these stories. We came up with as many different ones as we could, you know, there were 14 sagas and, you know, I think ultimately there were 14 different treatments of them. We really let the artists loose on them. I was so thrilled that in Kaldheim, well, I've been thrilled to see sagas continue. And I was so thrilled that in Kaldheim we finally got to the point where one of the sagas was literally actually a wood carving. I think it was Victor Adame. It was literally a wood carving that he carved and then took a picture of instead of a painting. But yeah, so and then the vertical orientation was really interesting.

That was a thing where it came up during the frame thing, and we were very skeptical of it at first, because that is a really unusual aspect ratio for a magic card. But it ended up interacting with this idea of visual art and letting us do things like statues, like that statue of Gerard that we don't usually get to do um so it just it resulted in art that we would never have made otherwise and there was a lot of skepticism until so we we um we commissioned um the history of benalia first because that was when we're like this is going to be a sweet sweet stained glass window we know what it's going to when we're like, this is going to be a sweet stained glass window. We know what it's going to look like.

We know what it's going to feel like. And we brought that to Mark Globus. I don't remember what his title was at the time. He was a product architect. He was a product architect. So he just wanted to make sure everything was coming together right. And we brought it to him. And he's like, oh, okay, got it.

Makes total sense. So that was kind of our proof of concept. And then we're like, okay, now we got to come up with 13 more um i want to jump in real quick of why the frame is that way because there is a mechanical or a structural reason why the why the frame had to be that way when richard had first made it there was like a track right and you said that the track just didn't work um but we knew that we wanted to repeat things like one of the that's right the thing that richard came up with that really helped us was,

oh, well, what if we have a little icon so that we can repeat effects so we don't have to write it twice? Right. So we needed to be able to write chapter one and chapter two next to the same effect when appropriate. Right. And so the verticalness allowed us, like the whole idea was chapters could repeat things so that we could get a whole bunch of text but shorten it.

So, well, if chapters one and two are the same thing, we don't have to write it twice. And I think James Arnold, when he made it, was like trying to get the sense of how can I visually allow us to do that? And the vertical slice let him do that. That's why it ended up being a vertical slice. That's right. That's right. And then the question was, can we make art like that? And the answer was very much yes. We can make some really cool and interesting art like that. So the frames, the other interesting thing about the frames

that I think flew under a lot of people's radars in Dominaria is, you know, there's different kind of watermark sort of things underneath the text of the different sagas, but it's not one style per color. It's one style per Dominarian culture. So the idea is that each of these things represents a cultural artifact from a different actual culture on Dominaria whose culture we know and the details of it we know. different actual culture on dominaria whose culture we know and the details of it we know um and so uh you know the antiquities war has a uh has a talarian um has a talarian background and um the fall of the thran has a thran background uh and then triumph of gerard has a a benelish background even though it's also white, just like Fall of the Thran, but it's from a different culture.

So that was something that James Arnold did for us. There's like eight different watermarks total or something, eight or nine. And I thought that was a really neat way of emphasizing that these are in-world artifacts, that these are how these people tell their stories. world artifacts that these are how these people tell their stories um the other really interesting thing that i'm not sure people realize or not is the cool part about it is we're telling the story through that culture's take on the story yes like one of the things that's really neat is it's we're not trying to tell the truth we're like well what does banalia think happened like what is the banalia version of the story um right and like and there were there were some interesting things about that where like um

uh the mending of dominaria uh is a wooden carving that shows um what like karn and lord wing grace and frailies as three planeswalkers who gave up something, gave up a great deal to help save Dominaria, and when it came out, people were like, well, hold on, what about Teferi? Teferi also, like, Teferi gave up his planeswalkers part to help save Dominaria. It's like, well, the mending of Dominaria is

a wood carving made in a place called Femeref. Femeref was the sister culture to Jalfir, which is Teferi's home culture, which he could not save. And something that they dug into into the stories about it is that Teferi is not well remembered in Femaref. In fact, in one of Martha Wells' stories, a Femarefy guy, Quende, tries to kill Teferi because of that. So yeah, Teferi's not on that statue statue not because teferi did not aid with the mending of dominaria but because the people of femoref would rather not remember that he helped with that um and that was a fun thing that was something we didn't play with we didn't play with a lot we

were originally going to play with it more actually at one point when we thought there would be more sagas in the set there was a cycle of common sagas um where each of them was how a prominent culture in that color remembers urza oh yeah i remember that so so white was going to be uh the benelish remembering him as like gerard's wise mentor uh blue was going to be the talarians remembering him as the greatest genius ever um black was going to be the Talarians, remembering him as the greatest genius ever. Black was going to be the Cabal, remembering him as the fool who died to the Phyrexians.

And I don't remember what red was going to be, but green was of course going to be the people of Yavimaya, remembering him as the great destroyer, the guy who ruined everything, just the worst dude. I really, really wanted to do that that and i'm sorry we didn't get to that that would have been great but like we definitely did play with the fact that this is how this is how people

remember their history it is not necessarily what exactly what really happened okay so now i want to get into another story um talking about something else mechanical is that but it yeah you and i went through a lot with it so i want want to talk about it a little bit. So, we knew... Yeah, we're getting into the story. So, we knew we wanted sagas. We thought those were awesome. We knew we wanted legendaries, because that was

a theme we did want. We also thought artifacts mattered, just because artifacts... It had some sense of history. Especially on Dominaria, where even the story of Urza was about him digging up things from the past at the time of that story, right? Right. So Dominaria has a lot of this, like, digging up things from the past. So artifacts, like, not just as objects, but objects from the past were pretty big.

So how are we going to make all these things, like, how are we going to make all these things come together? Right. We knew that they were all part of this same idea of historicity um and you know so the first place we went the first place you go is an ability word and so originally um all of those you know so you know we just we started writing artifacts legendaries and historics on things um and people didn't get it and then we were okay the ability word we're like historic dash whenever you cast an artifact legendary or saga spell uh do this and people are like i don't get it what what's the same about these three things they're just three different things

we're like well they're historic they're like i i guess but it just it just was not working and there was a point where we were I remember we were we were given the mandate like this is good but if people don't get it it's this there's no point to it make it work make people get it or it will be cut from the set and you will have to replace it and we we liked it enough and we were late enough in the process we're like we really don't want to cut it so you know it's it's funny i i think you i think you get flack i think you get flack sometimes mark for you know sort of telling the stories where you saved the day um and it's and you've explained before like those are the stories you know those are the stories you remember

and those are the easiest stories for you to tell but this is one where i saw it i saw it happen we were struggling with this we had no idea what to do. You know, I was the creative one and I'm a person with a background in templating, so I felt a lot of pressure to try to figure this out. And you just ran over to my desk one morning having, you know, figured it out in the shower or something and plunked something very close to what would be the historic reminder text on my desk. You know, and it's like, oh, that's it. You solved it. You did it. that's it you you solved it you did it that's it the the funny thing is the the the industry like so real quickly so people know a little background so bill rose is the vp of r&d um bill like just none of people were getting it and bill's like okay we're taking it out

is this what bill's like we're removing it and i'm like bill bill bill like it holds everything together it's the glue that like we have all these themes that don't make any sense together. It's the one thing that holds it all together. And so Bill, like, gave me time. But, yeah, he gave me a deadline. Like, you have a month or whatever. And so I was supposed to, I had to make cards that proved the concept. And then I was working with you because, you and Mark, because, like, I literally had to make cards and get art for them.

And, like, I had to, like, show Bill finished cards. That's right. I literally had to make cards and get art for them. And like, I had to like show Bill finished cards. That's right. We were mocking up, we were mocking up cards with historic abilities on them with the art we had from the concept push.

Right. That's right. Um, and we were trying all sorts of different things. And the, the, the, the solution I finally came up with,

which was funny is what's throwing people is they're seeing the list. And I go, what if we bury the list? What if we just, what if we just, we just, just call them their historic cards and people like what does that mean i go keep reading keep reading it'll tell you it's like oh well that's what historic cards are and yeah it was seeing the list even if we put the word near it people could not bundle the list together but once we bundled it together for them and after that it was it was immediate i mean i remember

it was everybody got it everyone we then showed it to new people who hadn't seen it before and we're like do you get it and we're like yeah absolutely those are historic like yeah those are all practically synonyms for history uh it makes sense yeah it was it does make sense it is funny sometimes one of the things i find interesting about the iteration of making sets is how you will try something and people just don't get it, and then you just do it slightly differently, and all the people are like, oh yeah, it makes total sense. Yeah, no, that was wild.

That was wild, and I'm very glad we figured it out, because I do think it's really important to the finished set and how it comes together. Well, I mean, a lot of times when I talk about design, when I say glue, what I mean is, sometimes in sets there's just something that makes all the component pieces make sense together.

And that when you pull out the glue, it seems like hodgepodge. It doesn't make any sense. Right. Right. We have said it's a history. It's all about history. I needed to convey history. If you didn't convey history, all of it fell apart.

And that's why I was... Yeah, sagas tell a story, but what do they have to do with legendary creatures? And like Historic answered that question. And another thing that we did to help Historic, and this was actually – this was something that Bill demanded, I remember, for Historic to kind of meet his needs. It was like we had just come off of Kaladesh where a lot of the artifacts, despite the meaning of the word artifact, were inventions. We had the Kaladesh inventions as a group of artifacts but they were they were wondrous devices that had just been created and so there was some concern over that it's like artifacts maybe don't feel historical anymore so one of the things that we

that we agreed to do on our side um and wanted to do anyway was like we're really going to focus on artifacts as you know old things you dig out of the ground which the first story that took place really on dominaria is the antiquities story which is about digging artifacts out of the ground um so dominaria was about artifacts as part of history from the very beginning um so that was a natural thing to focus on but that also helped historic helped historic hang together like yeah artifacts as a whole in magic can be a number of different things. But here, the word artifact is about artifacts. It's about relics of the past.

And we tried to hit that pretty hard. And the reason, by the way, it's interesting. The reason we were mocking up cards was we wanted people to see everything all together to see if they understood when all the pieces were together. Because a lot of Dominar, like, I mean,

all sets lean on art. It's not like art's not super important all the time, but I feel like Dominar more so than some, like, more so than the average set, like, a lot of what the, like, I remember seeing some early stuff that Mark had done about the world, and one of the cool things about it was you just saw

the past literally in the landscape, like it's a crashed Phyrexian war machine that's now become part of the village, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's something, you know, I mentioned my initial idea of, like, idyllic knights and castles, and then you dig down

and you hit metal. I said that to Mark Winters at some point, and he's like, okay, well, I can't paint, I can't paint what's six feet underground so how do we pull those layers apart so we ended up at the castles with crashed spaceships behind them aesthetic and you know, Thran relics

and all this stuff and I do think that for Dominarium more than most showing that history in the art and letting that breathe and letting a lot of the easter eggs be things that were in the literal background of the card that you could get them if you got them and ignore them if you didn't that if you were coming to it fresh it was just a beautiful place but if you if you knew you knew um i think that that was really important and uh

and yeah i agree that that there were some cards in Dominaria where what made them remarkable was their creative treatment and yeah, again, that's true in any set but Dominaria really, really relied on that to a great degree to hang together. Yeah, you bring up something really interesting which is always a challenge we have is this was a set that we knew the

enfranchised old-time players would, like, they would at least if they were going back to Dominaria, they would, just, we say we're going back to Dominaria, we had them. They'd be excited if we're going back to Dominaria.

But for new players, right, 13 years have gone by. The average Magic player had never played when Dominaria was a place you visited. And to those people,

it had to be cool. It couldn't just be, remember that? Because they don't remember that. And there was a duality to the set of, right, we needed just top-down

resonant, cool, high-fantasy stuff, and we needed all these callbacks, so for the people that knew what it was, it was, like, we wanted that sort of, in design I call it lenticular, but it's sort of lenticular from a creative standpoint. Like, it both was cool, but, you know, meant something

for those that knew. Yep, and there were a lot of things like that. There were a lot of things like that in the set. We took a great deal of care. You know, and part of it was we were approaching the whole creative in terms of renewal and rebirth. And so we wanted it to look fresh and beautiful. That, you know, Time Spiral was post-apocalyptic.

It was apocalyptic, really, not even post-apocalyptic. It was gross. And we were like, okay, it's been 60 years to spring back. Let's let it spring back. And, in fact, okay, it's 60 years to spring back. Let's let it spring back. And in fact, spring, springtime, Dominaria in springtime was one of our guidelines. There's little wildflowers, even in the Keldon Mountains, there's little alpine spring wildflowers.

And that was important. Another thing that was important to me was that we called the set Dominaria, not Return to Dominaria. Because we were calling it Return to Dominaria internally, but that was at a time when Ixalan was just called Ixalan, and Zendikar was just called Zendikar the first time we went there and all that. I was like, we've set a lot of sets on Dominaria,

but this is the first time that we're going to Dominaria as a whole and making that the focus. Not one part of it, not one theme of it, not one area, but Dominaria as a whole and making that the focus not one part of it not one theme of it not one area but dominaria let's just call it that and not make newer players feel like they missed something uh another thing that dave humphries did was uh push for the reprints in there that like even if you've never played with dominaria if you've had much if you've had much interaction with magic with older magic players, whatever, you've probably heard of Llanowar Elves.

And so getting Llanowar Elves in there was a... And a number of other... Llanowar Elves, Serra Angel, cards like that that have been reprinted a number of times that are classic in some sense, was another part of saying, like, we're home, we're back. And even if you don't know Dominaria, you know these. You know that these are important. So Dave Humphreys, by the way, was the set lead.

Yeah. So I'm almost at my desk here, so any final thoughts? When you think back at Dominaria, what do you think? I'm just so proud to have worked on it. I started playing Magic when I was 11

during Revised Edition, and I knew who, you know, during revised edition. And, like, I knew who Urza and Mishra were. You know, that was such an important thing for me was all those old stories. And to get to revisit that and bring it into our modern sensibilities, bring it up to our modern aesthetic sensibilities and into our modern aesthetic sensibilities um was just a tremendous joy and an honor and i'm so happy with the set uh when all is said and done i'm so proud of the work that i did and that you did and that everybody working on it did and i think that we we really fired on all cylinders there and i'm i'm just tremendously proud of of the set that

came together and and and really really happy with the response to it as well. I think people got what we were doing and liked it. And that was a really nice feeling. Yeah, one of my favorite sort of magic moments is we were in a meeting and they showed us a video. And it was the video of the audience at the panel where they announced that we were going to Dominaria. Yeah. And there's people, like, crying, hugging each other.

Like, they were just so excited they were going back to Dominaria. And it just really, like, rings true. Like, the game means a lot to people, and there's a lot of memories built in the game, and it was just, it was kind of fun to just see how like how excited people got like they really dominaria just really really meant something to so many players yeah and i i i hope and i believe that we we delivered on that we delivered on what that meant and and gave people what they wanted and i i'm i will always be i will always be proud of Dominaria. Me too.

I think we did good. It was a good say. We did good. Okay. Well, I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. It's time to, instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. So, Kelly, thank you for being with us. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. And for all you, I will see all you next time. Bye-bye.