Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #861: Antiquities with Skaff Elias

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

I sit down with former R&D member Skaff Elias to talk about the design of Antiquities.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so I've been using my time at home to do interviews. Today I'm going way back to antiquities. And I'm talking with Scaf Elias about the making of the second ever magic expansion. Hey Scaf. Hey, how's it going? Okay, so we're going way back. This is early, early magic. So what is your memory? How did antiquities first come to be? and Arabian Nights was I think probably it was certainly not out yet but it was probably still in design maybe and that was the one where of every set that has ever come out for magic all time that is the one most solely attributable to one person even much more so than Alpha

Richard just went home and and banged out Antiquities. And so it was looked over. Arabian Nights, he made Arabian Nights. Arabian Nights, right, sorry. And it was looked over, but I mean, it was barely looked over. And

there were not very many changes made to that. So for designing the next sets that was so difficult for him to do alone, you know, Peter really had asked us to form a team there among the playtesters at Penn and, you know, and come up with an expansion. So we looked around and asked people who wanted to participate, and we got the group together. And that was the origin of it. So mostly it's the people you worked with from most of the sets you worked on, which is you and Jim Lynn,n chris page jay petty except joel joel mick is also on this team which is not

normal for you guys that's correct yeah yeah he was uh he was added and i i can't exactly remember how that all came about i mean um he was there and he was a sharp guy, and we all knew him, and he was part of the general group. But anyway, yeah, he just got at it. Okay, so let me ask, so the first interesting thing about Antiquities, it's the first of a couple things,

so we're going to talk about how these came to be. So first off, it's the first set to have a mechanical theme. Like, Arabian Nights obviously had a flavor theme, but this is the first set that said, we're about something mechanically. And for those that have never played Antiquities, it's very loud.

It's about artifacts. So how did you get a mechanical theme? Well, we had wanted to do mechanical themes, you know, and in fact, even before that, you know, Ice Age was designed for for antiquities to a large extent. And we had always talked about wanting to do mechanical themes for sets. So that part was kind of in the air for quite a while. And people loved artifacts.

And so that was the idea. It was like, well, that's a slam dunk mechanical theme because everybody loves artifacts because they're soft and weak and don't like to fix their mana properly. And I mean, the other thing that's interesting is you guys went full throttle. Like every single card in the set has the word artifact on it, except for a couple of the lands, but they tap for colorless, so they clearly imply you're using the capped artifacts. Why do you, I mean, this is really strong. There's not a lot of sets we got this strong on a theme. Right.

So there's a couple reasons for that. One is obviously we wanted to make sure that the point got home. The sets back then were pretty small. There's not that many cards in the set um 85 unique cards in the set yeah and so so the thing is that it's um you know you we'd already had two uh expansions uh out the big one and then the smaller one with arabian knights plus in addition to that uh there were more on the horizon. I think the next set after Antiquities is Legends. Yeah. And Legends is a big set.

And so there's just going to be a lot of cards out there. We knew that we wanted it as a mechanical theme. We also knew that we probably weren't going to do another artifact set for a long time. So we're like, okay, let's get it out of the way and be done with this for at least a year or two or whatever. So that's part of the reason for it. It also meshed with the flavor that we wanted in addition, although that was certainly a secondary concern. Okay, so another thing the set did for the first time is it told a story or at least it it hinted it hinted at the story at bare minimum um how did that come about uh well that was the

thing i mean i had wanted to do that for a long time uh you know it was magic had sort of been random up to then and and we had taken uh obviously we couldn't afford any sort of licenses but richard uh wanted a theme and so we you know he pulled from arabian nights because he had just been reading it and uh and we had talked about doing a king arthur theme or stuff like that stuff that that was um you know public domain uh and and i i really wanted to develop our own story because i thought it would be able to mesh much better with mechanics. And we could make it do what we wanted it to do. And then also we could build up sort of secondary products around it. We could actually make the story interesting.

And the Brothers War, how did you get to the Brothers War? How did that happen? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. interesting and the brother's war how'd you get to the brother's war how'd that happen oh yeah so that that was we wanted to tie it to alpha uh as much as we could and so we looked at the artifacts that were in alpha and there's um ank of mishra and urza's glasses and so these are just random names that richard had come up with and so i think it was Richard. It's possible it was someone else, but I'm about 90% sure it was Richard. And then, so we're like, okay, well, let's, there's not, there's, there's no purposeful story in alpha, but there are some proper names. Let's tie it in as much as possible. So, uh, that, that's where we started. We like wrote down a list of, uh, you know, essentially all the proper, all the proper nouns in the first, in Alpha, and then, and especially those dealing with artifacts.

And then we just started this story from there. I mean, you know, you want a conflict, and so there's a war, and you've got Urzin, you've got Mishra. Now, why they were brothers, I think it's just some sort of standard, you know, I don't know. It's a common storytelling. Typical trope, you know, wasn't like any of us hated our families

or anything like that. So anyway, those are the origins. So one of the things you did that was very interesting was, it's not as if the story was told sort of modern day. It was kind of like you were glimpsing at a story that happened long in the past yeah so so the thing is when you know and i certainly have talked about this before the the thing that we were dealing with is is later days like now i mean gosh you guys have you know resources and you can make movies or TV shows or web comics or comics or novels or podcasts or whatever.

There's a lot of magazines. None of that existed back then. The only means we had to tell that story were the cards. Literally nothing else. There was just no other way for it to come out. And also the nature of trading card games is such that, again, these days you can sort of get the compilation of everything. But back then, you have to remember the vast majority of people would get four booster packs of Antiquities, right? I mean, that was their access to all of the information that they were going to get about the story. And so it's obviously difficult to tell a story under those circumstances. But even today, you know, most people probably don't own the whole magic set and a lot of people don't necessarily follow up. So your access to the story is these glimpses that you get.

And that's very similar, actually, to archaeology. So, you know, we sort of thought about all this strategically and said, hey, you know, it's kind of interesting, right? This is sort of the work that an archaeologist might do, right? They're getting bits and pieces of these various things. And the story isn't, like, so exact. It's not like you're watching a movie pieces of these various things. And the story isn't so exact. It's not like you're watching a movie or you have a narrative. You sort of piece it together.

So we thought that was kind of an interesting way for people to explore the story and it matched their amount of access. So with that archaeological theme, a bunch of stuff came out of that. And again, this is all from the original idea of how do you tell a story, you know, with four booster packs of cards, that's the origin of everything here. So we thought, okay, archeology. So that meant it was in the past. We took you as the player, as the viewpoint of someone who either uncovered these artifacts or, you know, was talking to someone who did in modern day. So everything was through these glimpses of artifacts, which is great because artifacts mechanically in magic are, you know, it's the same thing as artifacts today. So you

have these, you know, objects, not creatures generally, but objects buried from a long time ago. So from there, the story developed into, well, this is before the five colors of magic. First, really 100% took their modern day forms, whatever that means. And so a lot of the first magic was indeed uh these ancient artifacts why is the history not complete well the history is not complete because uh well there's basically armageddon a devastating war so the stuff is not only old but civilization has been destroyed and there you go does that all make sense yeah the other thing the audience i just want to make sure the audience understands is at the time antiquity came out early early on wizards was very secretive

about what was in the set so like right now when a set comes out you can see the spoiler and see all the cards you didn't see the cards unless you opened a booster pack or you saw your friends cards so like it was back then it's just important to understand that like you know when the staff says like that's all you had, that is all you had. There's not even other resources to see the cards. So that was a very different world. You could, I mean, by the time Antiquities came out, you could go on to the Usenet groups and you could get a list of all the cards. But you couldn't, like, see the cards.

Like, maybe someone could list what the cards were. You couldn't see them. You could get the text from them. But you couldn't see the cards. Maybe someone could list what the cards were. You couldn't see them. You could get the text from them. And so that was, you know, but even then, you have to remember,

that's a relatively small percentage of the players that had access to it that way. So it's not like it didn't exist. It was just like, you know, maybe a couple percent of the players had access to the list. And certainly, as you pointed out, no visuals, just text. Okay, so I was going to just talk through some of the cards in the set and sort of see what your memory is of how they came to be. So we're going to start with

the Urzatron. So Urza's Tower, Urza's Tower, Urza's Power Plant, Urza's Mine. How did that come to be, those cards? Right. So the thing with those, right, is that you wanted to have lands in Antiquities,

and by the nature of the whole set, we wanted them to generate colorless mana. So then you sort of start from there and you say like, okay, well, if you tap a land for one mana, that's pretty lame. That's not good enough. And if you tap it for two colorless mana, that's too good. So then there you go. That's like, so how do you, and this isn't just antiquities.

This is like the history of magic is, you know, one colored mana is, you can't go below generating one colored mana. Because otherwise you would just play with a basic land. And generating double is pretty difficult. You need to put a cost on it. So every land that's been designed properly since then is sort of somewhere in there, in that range. But where did you get the idea of there's three lands? You lands you gotta get all three out like where did that come from oh just a some means of essentially you know uh having you generate more than one colorless mana per land and and there's different

costs you can do right like um you know whatever city of brass you took a damage and at the time that had already been out and so uh and so uh or you can come into play tapped or there's you know there's different things that are the cost well the cost for this was you you had to have multiples we i mean it again it meshed with the story because we we did actually want, you know, the idea was the entire planet was essentially consumed in the war. That's, you know, this sort of like nightmarish kind of vision of these massive industrial camps gone crazy.

And so that was part of what. Okay, so here's a question that I've always wondered. So mine taps for two, power plant taps for two but tower taps for three why why have the tower tap for more than the mine and the power plant oh just to add a little bit of texture to it i think is is mainly is mainly what's going on i don't really think that we um i don't really think that we said oh yeah the proper cost instead of 222 is 223 or 234 or whatever i i mean i'm sure we thought that it wasn't too good and also that it was just a little more interesting if one of them was slightly more valuable so it had to be the tower because you know that's where it is I see. So another thing, just to bring up,

because the Urza Tron cards do do this. So on the lands, you had different art. I don't know if you had anything to do with this, but I'll ask. This is the first time that Magic cards had multiple art for the same card. Do you have any idea why that was done? I mean, it was done because

they were sort of – wait, it wasn't done for land in the basic set? I'm sorry. You're correct. You're correct. Alpha had the land in different art. You're right. That's just been a standard part of land for – that was printed in the commons. Oh, that's a good point.

So like Arabians, right, doesn't have any common land, right? Is that correct? I think that's correct. Oh, desert. Desert's a common land. Oh, desert might have alternate art. Yeah, I think it's just as simple as that. If the land's printed multiple times on a sheet.

So if it's printed multiple times on a sheet. So if it's printed multiple times on a sheet, it had multiple art. Yeah, Arabian Nights, well, Arabian Nights was also, Desert was weird because the way the sheets work, but okay, that's interesting. Sorry, there's nothing, the true first alternate art was Fallen Empires. Right, Fallen Empires is one, beyond the land, right.

Okay. Right. Okay, next, as we're talking about Empires is when, beyond the land. Right, okay. Right. Okay, next, as we're talking about land, let's talk about another land. Sorry for that story not being more interesting. No, no, no, hey, sometimes the answer's, oh, there's a very clean, simple answer. It's like, okay. I like clean, simple answers.

I've nothing wrong with that. Yeah, it's as simple as you get. Okay, so another land. We'll talk about some other lands. Mishra's Factory, where did that come from? That's the land that becomes a creature. Yeah, you activate it to make it a 2-2 Assembly Worker. Yeah. You know, I don't know if there were precursor cards that fit that mechanic,

but the idea of being able to change from one classification to another to avoid the sweepers was essentially the idea there. Again, Mishra's Factory, it's not good enough if it only does a colorless, so you have to add an extra power to it, and the extra power

was avoiding the... Right, I just... The audience might not know these cards, Mishra's Factory, tap for one Kalas, you can tap it to give any Assembly worker plus one, plus one, and for one mana, you can turn it into a 2-2 Assembly worker.

Right. And so, you know, that turned out, you know, poor Urza, his stuff really never made it very far past Antiquities, his lands. But Mishra... The Urza tribe does see play in certain formats. Not that Mishra's factory isn't good, and we'll get to Mishra's workshop in a second. But yeah, Mishra outshone Urza a little bit in the lands.

Well, and also, again, I mean, I think the best of all of them is the strip mine, probably. Well, okay, how did strip mine come about? How did strip mine come about um how did strip mine come about again i mean you know you sit down and you you you divvy up the lands between urza and mishra and you know i will say that one thing is that the idea was ursa was the good guy and mishra was the bad guy you know more, more or less. Neither of them are... A little gray at times. Paragons of virtue. But so Urza's stuff isn't destructive, right?

It's just generating... It's just generating mana. And, you know, for Mitra's stuff, right? The strip mine is destructive, it's destroying land, it sort of fit the flavor of strip mine. And also...

Oh, I should tell the audience, strip mine, for those that don't know, is you tap for one colorless, or you can tap it to destroy a land. And you sack it to destroy a land. And then, you know sac it to destroy a land. Right. And then, you know, the same thing with the

factory where, you know, those lands die, obviously, a lot more than normal lands do. Okay, so one other, so probably the most powerful of the lands is a card called Mishra's Workshop. You tap to add three colors to your mana pool,

but you can only use it to cast artifacts. Right. Memory of this card? No, it's just pretty, I mean, it's just pretty standard. You know, back then when it came out, it was much less powerful than it is now. And, you know know part of that was sort of the original uh design idea behind artifacts which over the years has certainly been blurred is that an artifact should uh essentially be worse at doing whatever it's doing than any than the worst color right so if you have a creature

in blue you blues creatures back then were pretty bad of course again i know that that's also changed somewhat but uh so the idea was well why would you ever play a blue creature if you could just play an artifact instead that was just as good or better so so at the time, artifacts were, in general, they either did something that the colored cards didn't do, so they had their own unique thing. But if they did something that a colored card could or would do, then the artifact had to be worse at it than the worst color. be worse at it than the worst color so that was richard's uh you know constraint from the very beginning because otherwise uh you know like i said a lot of the cards inside colors become obsolete so at the time misha's workshop certainly wasn't uh you know what it later became but i will say even within this set there are some powerful artifacts in this act right there are and but but most of the time most of the time,

they're going to be doing something that I'm not saying we didn't screw up or whatever, but most of the time they're going to be doing something that color wouldn't do. Okay, so let's just talk a few of the powerful artifacts. A few of the things that are going to make what I just said

be a lie. I mean, they're memorable from the set because they're powerful, obviously. So, like, Candelabra of Thanos, do you remember how this... So, for the audience that might not know this... I have no idea what Candelabra of Thanos... I don't even remember that. Is that the one that just... So, it costs one...

Yeah, it costs one X and tap, untap X separate lands. So, that is definitely, you know, the idea for that was to use it with, like, the Urzitron. Yeah. Right, because the interesting thing about the Camelabra of Thanos is, I believe, before Antiquities, I believe, there were no lands that generated more than one mana. I do not believe that is correct. I believe that is correct. So the Camelabra of thanos is bad unless that's the case right unless you had a set that also had lands to produce more than one mana well i you

know there was the giant wild growth giant growth or something along those lines uh yeah there was yes in the original there was an enchantment that you could make a land produce two mana produce two mana so it wasn't like it was completely useless outside of antiquities but like you know obviously the the main because it's a terrible card. If all your mans are producing one mana, it's a pretty bad card. So this is really designed to... This is really designed

to, you know, help you power all the wacky lands. Okay, another very powerful card was called Ivory Tower. Costs one. During your upkeep, you gain one life for each card in your hand above four right do you remember the origin of this card yeah i mean the origin is uh well i mean the origin is that we wanted we wanted life gain you know and uh the ivory tower

again it's supposed to be at least reminiscent of Urza's tower. And the thing is that it's, you know, at the time in Magic, actually, you know, 99% of life gain in Magic is terrible. Yeah. And that's on purpose, right? Sorry for those of you who like life gain. That's on purpose just because of time considerations and stalemates and everything so um this was sort of pushing the boundaries as to what we thought you could do with life gain because um if you're just playing it straight

up and you don't have a really really clever strategy it's kind of a terrible card because you don't gain life unless you're not playing cards yeah so um so that that's the idea it was you know at the time it was like you either need to do it really really really cleverly or it's a soccer card was the card designed as an anti-black vice was that conscious uh i mean it was certainly meant to to be parallel uh you know and encounter it but it wasn't really i mean it wasn't like, oh man, we need to counter Black Vise. It was just supposed, you know, it's just

some sort of aesthetically parallel, basically, I think is the main... Okay, so the next card I want to talk to was a very influential card in that it did something Magic hadn't done, and since then it's just become part of the game,

which is millstone. So for the audience, artifact that costs two, two and tap, and you mill two. You mill target player for two. Where did this come from? I mean, obviously milling has become a thing.

Like Magic just does milling all the time now. But this was the first card that ever did it. Right. So originally, Magic in the very first, you know, version of the rules, well, probably the very first version of the rules running out of cards didn't kill you until it happened the first time. And Richard was like, OK, well, we need a rule. So it was it was in there not as a true alternate win condition because you weren't really supposed to get that far.

It was mostly like, well, if something's gone wrong in the game, there is a way to make sure it ends, you know, because, you know, we certainly hit those very early on in playtest. And so we have this alternate victory condition sitting there. So we're like, hey, let's go ahead and use it. Let's play with it. And so Millstone, I think, is one of the, you know, it's kind of interesting because it's, I think, I mean, it was pretty well designed.

Oh, yeah. It is amazing how you are at the right power level way back then and like, we just printed today. It's, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of unusual, right? You look at all these old cards way back then and like yeah we just printed today it's it's you know so yeah yeah it's it's it's kind of unusual right you look at all these old cards and it is sort of unusual to have a card like oh sure a black lotus or a mox or whatever and there's so many cards or oh shiva dragon was

supposed to be so powerful and then it turns out to not be and and so you you know uh sort of to get the power level right is you know i, I don't know. It was good. It was – and we did test it a lot. I mean, we really worked at it, the number of extra turns you would expect and what you were giving up and everything like that. Although I think certainly it was more, you know, more lucky than good. Okay. The last card I want to talk about was very controversial when the set came out

and there's actually a funny story about Richard like going to interview somebody about making a game and it's like I hope you don't make a broken card like the card we're about to talk about oh I know what you're going to say so it's Ornithopter so it costs zero for a zero

two flying creature so this was the first I think I mean there were mo to flying creature. So this was the first, I think, I mean, there were moxies and stuff. This is the first creature maybe that cost zero. Right, because see, a mox couldn't kill you. Well, or an orthopnecid wouldn't kill you either. Oh, but you can put an unstable mutation on it. Yes, you can. So, yeah, it's interesting.

People always ask us if we you know had mathematical formulas and they would come up with these formulas for the value of a card and and this also this ornithopter exposed the lack of value among playtesters i don't know how much you guys experience that today people People know a lot more about the game than they did back then. But we would send these cards out to general playtests and the comments we would get back on Ornithopter were like, you can't do this, you've broken the game. And, you know, it's just because our formulas show that it's infinitely good, right? Because there would be some sort of division by zero error there. And it's like, well, yeah, maybe instead of concentrating on formulas, you should

concentrate on maybe thinking. But it's really, it was unbelievable. Like even at the time, when it was first proposed, like, you know, the people on the team were like, wait, we can't really do that. And I'm like, oh, let's think about it because I think you can. You know, there was this realization there that the main cost of a card, of course, is your draw. You know, it's costing you. A card. The opportunity cost.

And so, and that's why, you know, Ice Age, even though it was not in a decent form, Ice Age had the cantrips, which sort of played around with the cost of a card being a card. And Force of Will did it in the decent form. Ice Age had the cantrips, which sort of played around with the cost of the card being a card, and Force of Will did it in the opposite direction. But Ornithopter was this, like, really sort of brought it home initially where it's like, okay, here's the deal. The mana cost isn't the real cost of the card.

And it looks cool, right? I mean, it's just awesome. And then there was certainly the thought that at zero mana cost, you know, maybe at some point it can be used for some infinite loop somehow. And it was. There's a very famous deck called Fruity Pebbles

that used the Ornithopter. You used zero drop creatures, but Ornithopter was one of them. It was one of them. It was just infinite cycle, and the fact that it was zero means, you know. Because we weren't, not only weren't we scared of combos, as is obvious with Candelabra of Thanos and the Urzitron and stuff fact that it was zero means, you know. Because we weren't, not only weren't we scared of combos,

as is obvious with Candelabra of Thanos and the Urzatron and stuff like that, like, we wanted them to be a solid part of the game for people to build up to these crazy combos just as long as it was sufficiently difficult. Well, I do remember the playtest group said, what if you had a deck that was nothing but islands, ornithopters, and unstable mutations? Because we said, like,

the ornithopter's not infinitely good. And I mean, it wasn't just one playtest group. It was like multiple playtest groups. I mean, even when the set came out, I mean, I was on the outside. I have to stress, by the way, before I came to Wizards, my favorite set was Antiquities. I love Antiquities. And I remember when Ornithopter came out, there were people like, they

can't print that, and I would have arguments with people. I'm like, so how is it broken? It's like this hypothetically broken rather than actually practically broken. Yeah. So no, we just asked them to all submit decks, and of course, none of them ever were any good.

Okay, so we, I can see my desk here, so I'm almost to work. But any final thoughts on Antiquities? I do remember it being very fun to work on. It was a great group of people. And I thought working on the story was fun. And it was very interesting because that was one of the times

where there was a lot of back and forth between the story and the cards where like, Oh, well you've got four boo cards and you need a fifth one and you've run through all your mechanics and then, Oh, let's fill in a story gap or vice versa. So, uh, so it was, it was good. It was really very, it's extremely enjoyable to work on and i'm very happy how uh how most of it turned out i'm given given what we knew at the time obviously you know like oh yeah i mean

it's design set design is obviously a lot a lot people are a lot better at doing stuff than they were back then but um yeah the amount of knowledge we had was close to zero no i'm like i said i i i adore i adored Antiquities. I just think there's so much fun stuff in it. And yeah, I also, I always loved Artifacts and, you know, it really was,

in some ways, this is one of the sets that really inspired me. So it's fun for me to go back because a lot of the times when I'm doing these interviews, I was involved in making the set. I was a player for this set.

I remember playing it, but I had nothing to do with making it. You're approaching it as a little kid. Yeah, I have such fond memories. I was a player for this set. I remember playing it, but I had nothing to do with making it. You're approaching it as a little kid. Yeah, I have such fond memories. I don't know. I remember the first time I saw Triskelion. I just thought it was the most

amazing thing in the world. Yeah. I'm glad that you had fun with it. I think a lot of people did. Thank you, Scaf. Guys, thank you, Scaf. But guys, thank you for joining us. But I see my desk, so we all know what that means. So instead

of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So, once again, Scaf, thank you so much for being here. Awesome. Great to be here. And all of you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.