Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #855: Ice Age with Chris Page

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

I sit down with designer Chris page to talk about the design of Ice Age.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. So I've been doing a lot of interviews while I've been stuck at home, and some of them have been with people from the present and some from the past. So today I'm going way back. I have Chris Page with me today to talk about the design of Ice Age. So welcome, Chris. Hi. Okay, so I want to do a little setup for the audience, because not a lot of them know some of the... So way back when Magic first started, Richard had a lot of playtefters, which you were one of them,

before the game came out. Yeah. And then Richard, sensing that maybe one day, he didn't realize how quickly, but maybe one day there should be more Magic, he had some of the playte but maybe one day there should be more magic. He had some of the playtester, different groups went off and made their own set as some of the magic might need. So you were among what we now call the East Coast playtesters, which was you, Scaff Elias.

He added me to that group. I'm sorry, go ahead. He added me to that group. There was three people uh scaf jim and dave right so scaf elias jim lynn dave dave patty go ahead yeah yeah and uh richard added me to those people because i had already been feeding him lists of card ideas uh back in the beta part of the play test so my card ideas got used in the Gamma playtest. He wanted to grab me for one of the groups, and I was not pushy as far as being part of a group.

So let's go back to the very beginning of Ice Age. So people understand, your group, when Richard said, go off and make a set, Joel Mick and Bill Rose and Charlie Coutinho, that group went and made Mirage. Yeah. Barry Reich went and made a thing called Spectral Chaos that we borrowed for some of Invasion. But you guys went off and made a set codenamed Ice Age, I believe, right?

Correct. So let's talk about that. How did that, why'd you guys do that? And you could make anything. Why was it Ice Age? Correct. So let's talk about that. Why did you guys do that? You could make anything. Why was it Ice Age? It was Jim's idea to do a themed expansion to go in the past. I'd done one of my April Fool's posts about how to redo Gathering Green, and it started sane and ended rare with a card called a cookie monster where

like chaos orb you would messly destroy artifacts by pulling your mouth and chewing them and ended with me going in derail until we should start a sesame street expansion with uh letters from mana and such and such and jim said, maybe we should do a themed expansion, but let's try doing some sort of historical thing, going back in time. What about Ice Age? And that's what got the idea for doing

an Ice Age thing, to the best of my memory. Okay. So what is your earliest memory of making Ice Age? What did you guys do first? Basically, we sat in rooms of DRL, David Rittenhouse Laboratory, where three of the four of us were grad students, and took the existing list of what was currently magic

and made small changes in it these are some cards we'd like for a different environment change maybe uh 30 of the cards 25 of the cards and we'd see what would happen the idea back then was know, to slow, you'd have a fixed set for Magic, the original Magic, which was the Black Border, and then after those sold out, after a year or two, transition to a different Black Border set, Ice Age. Right, let me explain this for the audience.

The original idea for Magic wasn't expansions in the sense that we have now, where you keep building on top of Magic. The idea was Magic would come out, it would sell until it was gone, and then just a new Magic would start being sold. And so, you guys were trying to make a base set,

but just a tweaked version of the base set because it wasn't going to be additive, it was going to be replacement, sort of. Yeah. So, well, let's talk through some, like, of the mechanics and stuff that ended up in the set. Do you remember what happened first? What happened very early on was the cards that crossed colors, like Tinder Wall, where you had a green card, but it also was even better if you had red. Basically, it was a 0-3 wall, but you could spend a red mana and do some damage.

I think those were a scarce idea very early on. In fact, Richard borrowed one of those for his last five cards, Stedge Troll and Alpha. Cumin of Upkeep was also a very early one. It was Scaf's way of, I believe, wanting to fix Illusionary Forces, which in original playtesting was 4-4 for four mana with Upkeep of a blue mana, and it caused blue to dominate with combat on top of all the counterspelling.

And so Scath's Fix was to have it. Richard's Fix was to drop the toughness to 1, which is what happened in the final release of Magic. Scath's Fix was to give it a cumulative upkeep so you could only have it for a limited amount of time. And that was early? That was early. Those were the early mechanics.

There were five multicolored spells. They were the color hosers, the multicolored ones that really hurt the one color they were opposed to, Ghostly Flame being one of those So, I'm curious, in actual Magic history, Legends was the first set that had gold cards in it but did you guys have gold cards in your set?

Oh, yeah. We had gold cards on our set before camp. Gold cards, we didn't know they were gold border, but multicolored cards were something we kicked around during the playtest. During playtest period on the mailing list, that was a known thing. I think Richard avoided the avoid it. Richard avoided the original release just to keep it simple and because it developed

late in the playtest phase. Can you talk about the mailing list real quick? What was that? There was a mailing list. I joined in. There was a mailing list, Magic-L, that all the people with the coastline were on.

A number of the playtesters were on, both our group and Steve Conrad's Canadian group. It was my way of contacting people after Richard finished his thesis and got a job in Washington the summer of 1992. That made me actually get an email account. And it was our way of discussing what was going on, posting card lists, analyzing stuff, Richard making announcements, proposing changes, and also Peter Axton talking about development issues as far as dealing with printing and stuff like that. Okay, so... That was the main discussion mailing list

that connected these various groups. So I think if I remember correctly, when Richard first asked you guys to make something, there was no timeline. They had no idea when that would happen. He just was preparing for what he thought would eventually be needed. What? A year

or two after. Basically, a new thing would come out every year. I think it was a rough thing, but yeah. Okay, so Magic takes off. It's a little more successful than everybody guessed. And they realized they needed things a little sooner than that.

Yeah, I think, there's that one picture of all of us where, like, October of 93, realizing that this stuff is selling really quickly and we were planning expansion a month. At that point, Ice Age was set to come out October, but maybe we should be ready to have in september kind of thing uh but got pushed back some because we realized that was crazy

yeah the big thing was that we realized people wanted new cards and the idea of having only having 70 to 80 percent recycled cards especially in the rares was problematic so there was a fair number discussion there was discussion about what should we do about ice age and rich's suggestion was to let them let us just rework the set completely and add in lots of new cards and tweak other cards. Okay. So I just want to ask about some other things that were in the set and sort of how they got made. Sure. So let's talk about cantrips.

So we, just for the audience who doesn't know, we refer to a cantrip now as spells where you draw an extra card. When you play the spell, you get to draw a card. You guys did a slightly slower version of cantrips when you first introduced them. Yeah. Do you want to talk about how that came to be? Sure. That was one of the... Richard...

That was a thing that Richard proposed of one or two ideas probably sometime the year before Magic was released. And that was something I latched onto and pushed to include during Ice Age. We included the delay loop because we didn't have strong playtesting at that point. So we wanted to avoid degeneracy where you could just cycle through your entire deck in one turn. So that was just hesitancy for the loop.

Yeah, in early Magic, there wasn't a lot of development. I mean, there was a little bit, but not like we have now, where we have playtesting. Fallen Empires and Ice Age were actually the first. There was one serious playtest group, which I basically ran, and that was beginning of playtesting. So some

of the cards were playtested, like Necropotence was originally did not have the delay loop. You could just cycle through cards immediately. And thankfully, we managed to catch at least that much off of Necropotence during. But we had a book. I mean, we spent like 60. I can't see if this is a playtest book with 60 pages worth of notes on just testing various combinations. And we wouldn't. We'd throw in 18 of a card, 18 of a problem card, 18 of a land, and four of something else kind of thing.

So we were trying to see what happened when you had gross amounts of something so you brought up necropotence just because that's a pretty famous card from ice age do you remember the origin of necropotence no unfortunately um lich which is a similar one was came about because we were talking about greed from legends and we we were worried it might be degenerate. I think it was the first expansion card we ever playtested. And we wondered, well, what if you tweak this? And so that's dangerous. We should save it for later.

And we did with Greed. And Necropotence may have come out of that same kind of thought space. Okay, next. Snow. Snowlands. Where did Snowlands come from? That's my fault. That's your fault? How did that happen? That happened just because I was trying to think how could you give a basic land

and how could you do snowy land and I thought, well, what if you just give basic land and a tribute that other cards trigger off of? Other people liked it. We added it in and it turned out to be a bookkeeping mess. What you don't see in Ice Age is about 40 cards that have, or 20 cards that have minor tweaks, like a plus one plus one plus zero if there's snow covered planes in play or uh cost one extra mana if you don't have snow covered such and such in play and since we were worried that snow covered land we were so worried the snow covered land wouldn't

be better than regular land that we had all the pluses and minuses kind of balance each other out so it became a logistics pain towards the end i tried to rip the whole thing out but thanks to art we couldn't rip it out entirely so we still had it and i was very happy to see that you actually made it work in cold snap and if you wonder why there is essentially no snow cover stuff in Alliances, that's why. Yeah, the audience doesn't really, unaware of this, I've worked on Alliances on the development side. When you guys made Alliances, it wasn't really made as an Ice Age set, right? It was just made as its own set. We were just having fun.

Originally, the idea was that there would, back in like 93, there would be two expansions for Ice Age, but one of them got shunted off to the Homelands group. Anything else? We talked about Cume of Upkeep, Cantrip, Snowlands. Anything else that's memorable from Ice Age that you want to talk about? Things that were a component of the set? Yeah, we were... We had a number of things we were trying to match. Well, one memorable thing was that we had not yet had the idea that common cards should not have the smallest font size on them. So we had some cards like Balduvian Shaman, this whole idea.

You could change the color of the circles of protection, basically. You could change one word, one color name on a card, and give that illusion cumulative upkeep. Let me read, Chris, let me read the card to them, just so they can understand. So this is a common, guys. This is for the common in Ice Age. So it costs a blue mana Balduvian Shaman. I'm reading

it as it's written on the Ice Age cards. Summon Cleric. Tap. Permanently change the text of target white enchantment you control that does not have Cune of Upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another. For example, you may change counter black spells to

counter blue spells. Balduvian Shaman cannot change mana symbols. That enchantment now has Cune of Upkeep 1. Yeah, so that was... It also turned out to be... We tried to follow

the gathering card list, like swap out creature for creature, that kind of stuff, but it turned out to be more defensive than regular magic. So here's a question for you. This is true of Ice Age and a few other sets like Fallen Empires

that your team designed. Your team seems to not be a big fan of flying. Like they're just less flying than normal than in other sets. Yeah, I think that's because we all had strong personalities and we had the unfortunate mechanism that a card could only get in if all four people approved of it, which sometimes meant, well, we had two hours discussion about what to do with Giant Spider, for instance, whatever. I don't remember the name of the replacement. Discussion about what to do with giant spider, for instance, whatever. I don't remember the name of the replacement. I'll give you a second. Two or three that would get plus zero, plus two if it could block flying creatures.

And certain people had their colors they really liked or things they liked. And some people, I don't remember who, thought flying was really, really powerful. So we didn't include much of it at all. people, I don't remember who, thought flying was really, really powerful. So, uh, we didn't include much of it at all. Yeah, I think Scaf was not a big fan of flying, if I remember correctly. That's my memory, but I'm not certain of it, but yeah, that would track. Yeah, Woolly Spider

was the card you were thinking of. Yeah. One green, green, two, three, can block creatures with flying. If Woolly Spider's assigned to block creatures with flying, it gets plus zero, plus two, it'll end thinking of. Yeah. One green, green, two, three. Can block creatures with flying. If Woolly Spider is assigned to block creatures with flying, it gets plus zero, plus two at the end of turn. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about...

It's very interesting to me. I love hearing how other teams have done stuff. This idea that all four of you need to agree to add something. Talk a little bit about that. That's very intriguing to me. It's being in a room

and arguing back and forth and trying to find some sort of compromise card we'd have lists on the blackboard often of cars either back in the physics department or there was one time where i came out for a week to Wizards of the Coast to develop that in their, basically in their house, the house of three of them shared. And various Wizards of the Coast meeting rooms, wherever those were at that point. Yeah. So occasionally it would be,

three of us would come to agreement while the fourth person was asleep. That would sometimes happen. I remember Incinerate was a rough one because we wanted to recognize Lightning Bolt was too powerful. Some people thought Lightning Bolt was too powerful, so we duplicated. But if we made a card that cost two mana and did three damage that would be a strictly worse card and we were generally trying to avoid strictly worse strictly better unless it was a really extreme like wall of wood we didn't care that we made a card better than a zero three wall and the eventual compromise was to give it a tiny plus.

Doesn't incinerate, also prevents regeneration. Yeah, so it's one RGL3, and then no creature can regenerate damaged by it. Well, here, I have a quick, tell a quick story, just to, I, well, you and I had never worked together because you never worked at Wizards. Your three fellow designers, Scaf and Jim and Dave, I did work with all three of them.

And Scaf and Jim, I mean, Dave left a little bit after I got there. So Dave and I overlapped by maybe a year. But the story I always tell

with Scaf and Jim, just because it's to show like when you talk about you have to argue things, is I remember it was late at night. Scaf and Jim were arguing.

I was tired of the argument. I went home, went to sleep, had a full night's sleep, got up, had breakfast. I come into the office. I mean, it's hours and hours and hours and hours later, and they are in the same spot having the same argument. They hadn't left since I had gone to bed the night before. That sounds about right. Yeah. Dave was Dave and I were somewhat less opinionated

than Jim and Scaf, which isn't hard, but we still had fairly significant opinions. So it was four eagles trying to find compromise. So yeah, it um some of the cards had a long uh discussion period what is what's the card you remember having the most arguments about probably woolly spider just because two four four two four four um 2-4 for 2-4 for 4 mana seemed just too weak and the other alternative

to the table I think was just a 2-2 and this was a creature that blocked flying. I think the final compromise was to get a larger defense but only one was blocking flying creatures. I think the plus zero, plus two when blocking a flying creature was the compromise. And then we could put it at three mana because it wasn't always two, four, and be able to block whatever the three three creatures that

came out were a lot of this discussion was also theoretical we almost never sat down and tried it out um this is because we didn't have the resources we didn't have the time we hadn't really done this before but so um we probably argued into a number of theoretical things that were wrong. Well, right. One of the things early on is the ability to playtest. I know in Alpha, Richard sort of had made cards. He wrote them on little tiny pieces of cardboard. Did you guys do much playtesting? I developed... The four of us did not do much with the playtest groups.

There were problems with actually just at this point just sending the cards, getting that organized, that one of the groups got the cards like one week before the deadline for playtesting, and we lost a few playtest groups like that. and we lost a few playtest groups like that. I developed a playtest group that started doing rigorous playtesting. Myself, Stephen Mulholland, Bill Brickman, and some of Tamara Duran, Mike Clark, Brad Kierkegaard, one of them is a friend I had in my lab, and some other gamers who ran a game store. And we just started testing the cards. The big thing was since we had a science background, we tested against known standards. We created a couple of standard decks, started creating statistics for how these competed against known, what we call touchstone decks, and analyzing them. And that did catch a number of cards. I our motto was this card sucks our job is done

so at this point we were looking for cards that were too powerful we weren't focusing cards which are too weak which was something that would be covered later in later years which something else was important but. But we were looking for degeneracy at this point. So what else, when you think back to making Ice Age, what are your, any other memories that really stand out as being like, this is a very strong memory of making Ice Age? Its release was interesting. Also, just creating cards, spending lots of time going through various files, and they were all written up in tech, which is a mathematics language, because that's what Richard used for original thing. We were printing out various sheets while we were designing various playtest sheets using some sort of cheap graphics program and playing them.

and playing them. You mentioned the release. That's a great story. So let's talk a little bit about the release of Ice Age. So what is your memory of the release of Ice Age? You were there, weren't you? I was there, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, sorry I laughed at you about the Xur and Orb thing. Yeah, that's... It was a reaction I was expecting most people to have because this idea the idea of Zeron Orb which is for zero mana and sacrifice a life, sacrifice a land you get two life and you're just seeing how far people would go

to sacrifice to gain life but it turned out to be an interesting stalling card. Yeah, the real quick story, just for the audience, is so we're in Toronto. We'll get to that in a second. We're in Toronto. We're at the event.

There was one previous event. And I had been playing with a card called Dark Heart of the Wood, which is similar to Zoran Orb. That was the inspiration. I thought Dark Heart of the Wood, which is similar to Zurn Orb. Yeah, that was the inspiration. Right, and so anyway, I thought that Dark Heart of the Wood was stronger than people

realized, so I saw Zurn Orb, I'm like, how can we print this? And I went to Chris and said, isn't this broken? And Chris goes, no, no, no, it's fine. I remember that, so that was... Sorry about that. That's okay, so talk about Toronto, and what was the pre-release like? So let's talk about that a little bit.

I don't really have many strong memories of it. It was weird because it was a giant room with all the people playing something that you'd help design. So I guess the word surreal comes to mind. Yeah, so it was the very first pre-release ever. It was a large room with lots of tables with all the people playing some sort of maybe Swiss tournament of these brand new Ice Age cards

and also just getting to see them play for the first time and discover what was out there because nobody knew. Yeah, so the tournament, just for the audience, was it was run with ante. So when you defeated your opponent, you played with ante. So you would win and lose cards as you played.

And then it was done... I think there was a cut on day one. So everybody played, and the people with a certain record would get cut to day two. And then... And by the way, the trivia was, I played in the event because I was reporting on it for the duelist. I made the cut to day two, and I had to step...

They're like, you can't play day two. So I had to step out. I had to drop out because I wasn't supposed to win the thing. I vaguely remember there was a discussion about that. But yeah, so I dropped out, and the next person got my spot. So that's how it happened. Yeah, and the other fun thing about Ice Age was, like,

do you remember they brought it in, like, armed guards brought it in and they, do you remember that? Nope. I'd take your word for it,

but, yeah. So, okay, so finally it comes out. So what was it like seeing the set you'd spent a long time on finally come out? It was cool.

Yeah, I didn't get to see many people play it. I was at Gen Con that year, so I did get to see people play it there, which was really neat. Yeah, it's funny looking back that in some ways, I mean, I guess Legends was the first large set, you know, large set other than the core set. But in a lot of ways, Ice Age to me was kind of the first sort of a little more modern. I mean, Legends had a lot of issues in that it didn't really understand how it was structured. It had a lot of neat ideas. But Ice Age really felt to me like the first kind of cohesive large set in a way that paved the future.

I remember development of Legends, yeah. Ice Age was kind of a transition point somewhat. It still is a problematic set, just in length, just installing kind of thing. set, just in length, just installing kind of thing. But I think for the time it came out, it was good. What it really could

have used was a lot more time for playtesting, just to find out this stuff. The other thing I should stress is at the time of Ice Age, I mean you guys were aware of Limited as a concept, but the sets weren't really developed for Limited, per se. Mirage was the first set that was really consciously made with Limited in mind.

Yeah. We were doing this one in a vacuum. Alliances, we started putting out cards to respond to particular decks that came out, but yeah, by Ice Age, we were not responding to the current environment. So what is... I'm almost at my desk here, so we have to wrap up, but what is your favorite card from Ice Age? Oh, Pygmy Allosaurus.

Just because I got a dinosaur in. Okay, so Pygmalosaurus, real quick, I'll just tell them what it does here. It is two and a green, two-two, some in dinosaur, and at swamp walk. So you're just happy you got a dinosaur into magic? Yep, I'm a dinosaur fan, and I was able to justify, because there was a Scientific American article about dinosaurs that they found in Antarctica, and one of them was Pygmalosaurus. Well, that's cool. That's Magic's first dinosaur.

And, like, it's funny. At some point, we moved away from dinosaurs. I think we made it a beast for a while, whatever. And then Ixalan came back, like, no, there's dinosaurs. It's got to go back to being a dinosaur. Well, that and old fogey and old fogey yes well anyway Chris

I want to thank you for joining us today it's been it's fun for me to go back on sets that predate me that doesn't happen a lot these days

but it's fun to hear stuff that I wasn't even there for so thank you for joining us for that yeah and guys I'm at my desk.

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. So once again, thanks, Chris. Thank you for having me. And I'll see all you next time. Bye-bye.