Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #863: Shards of Alara with Devin Low

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

I sit down with former R&D member Devin Low to talk about the design of Shards of Alara.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So I'm using my time at home to talk to people past and present about making magic. So today I have Devin Lowe and we're going to talk about the making of Shards of Alara. Welcome, Devin. Hi Mark, how's it going? Going great. So I'm excited. I have not talked about Shards of alara in quite a while so this is this is exciting for me um this is like some sets i talk about a lot this one the sets that i haven't talked about as much so i'm excited for you and i to dig in deep into into the making of shards of alara yeah it's definitely a blast of the past it's been many many years since the set

came out but uh some of the things that it did can still be felt today so in some ways the the shadow of the shards are still with us right so. So the set came out in October of 2008. So real quickly, I'll do the setup of what the point of it was. And you led the development. So I'm going to do a little setup and then we'll talk about development. By the way, Bill Rose, who is currently the VP of R&D and at time was the VP of R&D, led the design for the set. VP of R&D, led the design for the set. Okay, so the idea of the set was

we had done a gold set with Invasion that was kind of like, play as many colors as you can, and then we did Ravnica, where we tried to go the opposite direction, which is play two colors, and so we wanted to do another gold set, so Bill's like, well, we've done two,

we've done play four or five, I got it! How about three about three yeah and people definitely have played three colored x over the years but it isn't something that's set to really emphasize there's like a little dash of three color play in uh apocalypse in the original invasion block with the first multicolored block after legends um because there was like an enemy color theme in apocalypse and they were like, if you have both enemy colors, you know, if you're blue and you love red and you love green, then that's a three-color pair.

So like a handful of three-color cycles in Apocalypse. So there never really had been an emphasis on three-color play until now. They've just been a spatter of three-color cards. Now, the interesting thing about three-color, I mean, it's very thematic, but something that the audience may or may not be aware of is it's really hard making three-color sets. So we're going to talk about that today because there's a lot of challenges to making them. So what are you, so you were the development lead.

So what's your first memory of seeing Shards of Alara? I remember that one of the big challenges was that what does it mean to have three colors mechanically and flavorfully is a tougher challenge than two colors not just because three is harder than two but because with two colors there's like a cogent overlap you can identify between what they do and

how they feel and so you can say that you know when green and red overlap it's they both have big monsters in common so you can sort of emphasize that you can say that when white and blue overlap they're both defensive, it's it's they both have big monsters in common you can sort of emphasize that you could say that um when white and blue overlap they're both defensive they both fly and they're within good walls and you can emphasize that and so uh famously all the two color brands of magic have mechanical elements that are similar that you can emphasize but when you take three cards uh three colors together you say what do red and green and

blue all have in common mechanically it's like, that is a Venn diagram that is very tight, right? It's very hard to name a keyword that red and green and blue all have in common of the evergreen keywords. And so... So be aware, be aware. This set was not... So we have wedge, which is colors to enemies, and we have arcs, or shards,

colors to allies. This set was about colors to allies. True. So I shouldn't have said red, green, blue. I should have said red, green, black. But even red, green, black, it's hard to name a kind of recurring magic effect that is common to red, green, black, or any other three-color arcs. And so the

approach that was taken again, instead, was to identify these worlds that were three-color worlds and give them a mechanic that they could emphasize, and have that mechanic be resident of red and green and black and then lean into what that mechanic meant. So let me bring this up real quickly because this happened during design.

So Brady Dommeroth was a creative director at the time and Bill just wanted three-color to matter and I think Brady was one that pitched what if we had a world where something happened and it broke into five components and each sub-world or shard only had three colors? Like, what would the world look like if only white, blue, and black were the colors and red and green didn't exist? What would that look like? And so every color sort of had a world where it was it and its allies.

And then we glommed onto that of like, oh, that's kind of cool. And what you're talking about, we gave each sort of shard its own identity, literally its own world. Yeah, and Brady might have come to this independently. Maybe he already had. But in pondering this and talking to Brady, I remember saying something like, hey, for the green, white, blue world, which is banned, instead of emphasizing what would a world look like that had tons of green and white and blue energy and mana sort of spilling out of it, what if we instead said, what does the world mean that has no death and has no violent aggression, right?

If there is no black and red mana influence, then what if that is to take on the world, the absence of black and red more than the presence of green white and blue because that sort of gives you fewer elements to focus on instead of trying to incorporate three at once and so uh that approach is part of what drove bant to be a world of uh honorable duelists where instead of killing each other in combat they would just have an awesome duel with these brave champions and uh joust or something and then go home and have dinner and they wouldn't actually kill each other and so uh bant is a world of these single champions that uh are excellent sort of one-on-one honorable duelists but they uh are not all about wiping the other person out in

giant six-on-six creature battles and so that's part of why their keyword exalted uh says whenever a single creature attacks on your side it gets a bunch of buffs and benefits and uh stat increases because the emphasis is sort of uh and it goes to the the honorable set out your champion you know uh let's let's have a a jolly duel at a picnic and they go home and so uh how does that fighting style then contrast with the other worlds that aren't a violence and death and decay and that's sort of violence and death and decay? And that's sort of part of how the shards interact. Right. Another important thing is when you take away the enemy colors, like, for example, take Bant. Bant is kind of a white world. Like if white drove everything, what kind of world would it be?

Because its allies are there and its enemies are absent. And so we looked at each world by what's the center color, what's the color that, you know, it's two allies. And, like, Bant is very much a white-driven world, right, where honor matters. It has qualities where it's a very white-centric sort of thing. Oh, and I should mention, another thing that happened during the later part of design

is we made mini-teams where there were three-person teams for each world. Were you on any of the mini-teams? I don't remember. I think no. I think I'm supposed to be judging their output to some extent, and so I don't think that I was on the-person squads that went out and tried to look at each shard and make it feel more awesome in its presentation of a coherent theme. And I think that the shard keywords, I don't think existed at the design handoff, and the shard keywords came out of the mini-teams. Right. The mini-teams is where we got the... I think the mini-teams happen end of design, beginning development, sort of in that divine period, if you will. Yeah.

And I was... I led the Esper team and I was on the Bant and Naya teams. And then because I was head designer, I peeked my head in the other teams, but I wasn't technically on the other teams. Although I did come up with the keyword for the Black Center team.

Right. And Earth was my baby okay so how do you okay so magic nowadays like we have lots of worlds that you know what I'm saying we do a lot of worlds in a year but this was kind of different for us like at some level Shards of Alara isn't one world it's five

different worlds right and that put a lot of pressure on the worldbuilding team to come up with five different planes that had different art styles and different costumes and different sub-regions in those worlds because a lot of the magic worlds have a couple of green regions and a couple

of red regions and a couple of blue regions, and the worldbuilding guides do dictate cultures that live in those different regions, right? So there are sub-types of the planes that we visit. But in Shards of Alara, there were five different planes that were very different from each other, the Shards of the plane, and then they each had regions within them, right? Like there were cultures within Band and cultures within Esper that had their own things going on. And so it was a lot of work to do from the costuming and world building side.

But I think that they did a good job of keeping certain artists attached to each shard and not using them in any other shards. And so you feel a certain... I think most of the artists, I think the way they did it is every artist was put in a shard and only did that shard.

There's no cross-pollination. And so of the black cards in the set, some of them are from Grixis and some of them are from the other, you know, Esper, and the other, whatever the other black one is. Jund. Jund. And you can tell from looking at the cards,

even with the monocolor cards that are not gold cards, which cards are supposed to come from. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about each. So let's start with Band, because that's what you already talked about, Band. I remember, so the Band mini-team, if I'm not mistaken, was me. It was run by Brian Tinsman, and I think Ken Nagel was the third on it. And I remember Brian came up with Exalted. And I was actually very negative at first.

I thought it was too narrow a hoop to jump through. But then we played with it, and it just took me one play test to go, okay, you're right, this is a cool mechanic. Yeah, and Exalted seems like it's sort of like a dumb guy mechanic that's going to be easily thwarted, because attacking one creature a turn to get all your rewards turned on seems like it's going to falter when you hit one Regenerator, which was a thing that existed at

the time or uh one token maker or uh you know one one bit damage printer or something and uh indeed it is possible to sort of like stymie exalted with like uh something going wrong with the one guy but we were able to make cards that worked around that by saying, hey, we're just going to have fewer powerful regenerators in the set than usual. We're going to have fewer token makers that can make a guy return that can chump your exalted guy. We're going to have a lot of cards that can give your exalted guy evasion. We're going to have a lot of evasion guys that are good guys to make your exalted dude.

And you do get to sort of feel smart and feel like you're doing something when you say, hey, I've got my 1-1-a-blockable guy. I've got this other guy that says whenever a single you say, hey, I've got my 1-1 unblockable guy. Because the other guy says, whenever a single creature attacks, give it plus 1, plus 1. Another guy says, whenever a single creature attacks, give it lifelink, plus 1, plus 1. Another guy says, whenever a single creature attacks, give it plus 1, plus 1. If it hits him, you draw a card.

And so you can sort of like have all these guys cheerleading for this brave unblockable dude who goes forward, and even though it's a 1-1 on paper, he ends up hitting his 4-4 and draws your card and gains you 4 life, and you feel like you're really doing it. And all the steps along the way, when you're gradually playing at your team and putting each of those components in place, you see

your guy getting more awesome, more awesome, more awesome, more awesome, and if they kill the unblockable guy, it's like, alright, well, one of these cheerleader guys can now be the guy who steps forward and gets the bonuses and can do some of the work. And so it did a good job of scaling up gradually, giving you big dreams, letting you taste those dreams along the way, and then delivering a big payoff of the work. And so it did a good job of kind of like scaling up gradually, giving you big dreams, letting you taste those dreams along the way,

and then delivering a big payoff at the end. And as long as we kept some of those things that foil the strategy out of the format, it was pretty effective. And it was,

I was happy to see it came back in a later course. That's sort of like a signal that people liked it and not to see it again. Yeah, that's a good sign. When mechanics come back, it means that it was a successful mechanic. Yeah, that's sort of like a signal that people liked it enough to see it again. Yeah, that's a good sign. When mechanics come back, it means that it was a successful mechanic.

Yeah, and it even sort of like hit and constructed a little bit with the triple color card that says when you attack alone, search your deck for an orb, put it on the guy for free, and you can like put the Eldrazi plus eight plus eight and Annihilator enchantment on the guy that attacked alone and really messed them up. So that was a

hot combo for a hot second. Okay, so next we'll talk... I was going to go around the color wheel. Sure, sure. So Esper. So this is the team I led. So this was the team of Marks. It was me, Mark Gottlieb, and Mark Globus. Yeah.

And so the whole shtick of Esper was because it was blue centered that they were kept trying to improve themselves blue is all about perfection and so and blue likes artifacts and so it's sort of like they were constantly

it's almost like this cyborg society where like we can be better by using technology to improve ourselves and then Gottlieb came up with the idea of, well, what if they were just all artifact creatures? Because in Future Sight, I had made a colored artifact creature, which was supposed to be a throw forward

to when we went back to Mirrodin for New Phyrexia. When New Phyrexia took over Mirrodin. That was originally planned for that. But then Gottlieb said, well, what if we do it here? And I'm like, well, okay, it makes sense in the world. And so we really leaned into Esper kind of being this artifact-themed set that cared about artifacts, and all its creatures were artifacts. So what kind of trouble did I give you doing that?

Yeah, I mean, actually, colored artifacts were new then. As you said, they had a preview in Future Sight, but it was the first time they really did a lot of colored artifacts. And it turns out that it makes them easier to develop than regular artifacts because you can lean into the color wheel more easily. You can more aggressively give them things that are typically restricted colors. And obviously, Magic has since then embraced colored artifacts a lot more and seen them as solving some of the problems

that artifact sets and artifacts often have. And so all the recent Magic sets have had colored artifacts and that has played pretty well. Now they seem pretty natural. And abusing an artifact with colored mana makes sense and plays totally fine. And so that is a case where a lot of development was about where do you want to sort of scale with

cards that say every artifact you have makes this better and to max this out you want 40 or 60 artifacts if you can get them and the sky's the limit versus cards that say you only need one artifact to make this really good because it pumps up one artifact guy you have or regrows one artifact in your graveyard but you don't need 60 artifacts

to make this good. It's enough to have six artifacts or something. Having a spectrum of cards that say you need a threshold of one to make this good versus it scales to a maximum of as many as you want is important to making it feel like you can get some value out of this when you're drafting or playing constructed from only a sprinkling of cards

with a mechanic versus really committing and going nuts. So by the way, just a little behind the scenes here, I believe this was the development where the term threshold one is something that R&D uses all the time came from. Well, I think honestly, I would roll back to Lorwyn because I worked on Lorwyn as well. And we used it a lot there talking about tribal matters. Oh, OK. Maybe it predated this then.

OK. That's where we started. But we did carry forward to here. And, like, I also remember with Esper, writing the word artifact on the type line is kind of like a nice invisible way to make something relevant. I love in Magic how you can write the word

elf on a type line, and it doesn't take any rules complexity, but it makes the card more relevant. People care about elves. Likewise, writing the word artifact on the type line doesn't make the card any more rules complex but it gives it a cool identity that some players get really excited about and so you can have cards that are like relatively simple but because they're artifacts people care about them more than normally would and it gives you a nice way to kind of cross over the themes uh to make a single card relevant to multiple archetypes

where there's like a four mana flying two three artifact creature that that regrows an artifact from the graveyard when you play it. And that card is great in the artifact deck for getting back your artifacts. There's a lot of artifacts in sacras themselves to give you ways to regrow them. But you might also want that in your exalted deck because a flying guy is great to layer your exalted bonuses on to be the guy who carries forward all the plus one plus ones in the air while you guys are kind of like cheering them off to the ground. And so that's very common in magic sets these days and in in my era back then also of uh trying to

say hey what are ways we can take a single card make it interesting to multiple archetypes and then have people kind of like uh you know value it in different ways in the draft uh maybe pivot from concentrating on exalted to concentrating artifacts or having a little bit of both and uh you know just sort of getting more mileage out of a sequel card. Okay, so the other thing I should point out before we move on from Esper was there definitely was some, like it's very funny, when we said let's do all artifacts, the mini team thought it was a great idea. There were people in R&D that were a little skeptical.

I mean, we obviously, by the time we got to development, everyone was on board, but it was not this idea of let's just make colored artifacts and everyone was on board. It didn't quite happen. It required a little bit of convincing people. Yeah, that makes sense to me. There was a lot of questions asked about

breaking rules that you've had in the past, but if it's worth it, you should break them. And certainly when the set theme demands it, it's a great time to break it. I've enjoyed playing the Forgotten Realms set, and for a long time, like, Rolling Bice and Magic was, like, sort of a taboo. But

the D&D set's a great time to roll D20s. It makes a lot of sense of theme, and so that's a great reason to break the rule. Okay, so let's get on to Grixis. I'm trying to remember who the Grixis team was. One of my problems is I'm on too many teams for too many years that it's very easy

to blur. The individual team members from 13 years ago is quite an ask. I'm not sure the audience even needs to know who the individual team members are. I just like giving reference to people when we do stuff like that. It's nice to call them out if we can. Okay, so

what happened there is my memory of what happened in the team was... Oh, here it is. I found the list. Grixis. You were the lead of Grixis. Ah! Jacuzzi!

So you were the lead of Grixis. I! Jacuzzi! So you were the lead of Grixis. And Eric Lauer and Brian Tinsman were on your team. Is it just coming back? It is kind of coming back, yes. So the keyword is Unearth, which is kind of like a flashback for creatures.

You could play the creature, it could fight, it could die, and then you could pay a different unearth mana cost to return that creature to the graveyard from the graveyard to play for one turn it gains haste and then it is exiled at the end of the turn or if it would otherwise leave play so you can sort of get a a almost like a token version of the card for one more attack on the turn you unearth it um and you can make the unearth cost way lower than the cards cost to play you can make the unearth cost way lower than the card's cost to play. You can make it higher than the card's cost to play. You can have a bunch of tricks where

when you unearth a creature, it has a enter the battlefield effect or a leaves the battlefield effect to sort of give you even more value than the card, you know, just coming back for one more attack. Then you can have sacrifice effects that let you, you know, kill the guys, you can unearth them, you can you sacrifice the tokens there's lots of tricks you can do

with unearth and one of the things i love about magic mechanics is when they're open-ended and they give players a lot of opportunity for creativity about how to use them and unearth certainly is that because there are just so many tricks you can do to get extra value at the creature you're unearthing or to throw guys in the graveyard so that they're there you can unearth them from the graveyard um and so it's really very versatile and it's a good evocation of the shards theme of grixis being a place where it's full of necromantic energy uh it's full of undead it's full of guys that are always coming back you know life energy is always sort of recycled again and again and animating guys again and again. And it's a place where there is no white mana and there is no green mana.

So there's no actual circle. There's no vitality. It's just endless necromancers getting the same guys back again and again. Okay, so two trivia questions for you. See how good your memory is. Okay. Okay, number one is,

do you remember when I first made Unearthed the silly name I gave it when I first made it? It's probably like a flashback reference. It is. It might be a corpse dance reference also. Close. It was Flash Dance of the Dead.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of was getting there. If you give me another second, I would have gotten it. Because I said Flashback, then I said Corp Dance. And between Flashdeck and Corp Dance and Mercurial's Water, I would have gotten the Flashdance. Yes. So, and here's another trivia question. You guys had a different mechanic before

we ended up replacing with Unearth. And that mechanic, we ended up doing a variant of it later on in another set. Yeah, I know what it was. It was whenever a creature dies, get a benefit. Yes, yes. Right. And so whenever creature dies, get a benefit.

You can also do lots of synergies and combos with, because lots of ways to make tokens happen, die, or if a guy died and he comes back. And because Grixis is a realm of death, then whenever creature dies, get a benefit. It seems like it matches that. Eventually, we move that into jund more and it was sort of like a fight between i i think i think i kept i came out of the mini team pitching whatever creature dies get a benefit yeah and then uh you probably pitched unearth and then eventually we said okay let's do unearth for grixis and we'll

make whatever guy dies get a benefit in jund um and this got us filling over the jund topic but jund is like a world of carnivores and dinosaurs and savagery and uh giant monsters that are constantly eating each other and it's like a predator prey uh world of things eating other things and so the jund team said hey we want to do devour which is when you play this creature uh sacrifice any number of other creatures every 20 sacrifice but x plus one encounters on the sky so you can play a dragon as devour three sacrifice any number of little uh goblins and the dragon gets three plus possible encounters for every goblin you sacrifice and it's like the a good example of giant thing devours little things gets a benefit and it is a carnivore and it eats the prey and uh you sort of want to make decks that have some prey

in them that are little guys that are easy to play or make tokens or when they die you get a benefit and then the giant dragon that eats them all and it gets a payoff and so um uh my concern with devour was uh you can build a deck that has a cool moment where you have like little little prey guys that are cheap and give you benefits to die, and a giant thing that eats them, but you don't want to put a ton of devourer guys in your deck, because when the first carnivore eats a little prey and gets a bunch of bonuses, and you've got a second

carnivore in your hand that wants to eat a bunch of prey and get a bunch of bonuses, what's he going to do, right? Your second carnivore doesn't have a lot to do if all you have on the board is one giant carnivore that already ate everything and no more things to eat. And so it's tough to make it like there's 11 guys that devour on it because

it's not that fun to draw your 11th devourer guy. Right. Some mechanics feed on the same resource. Delve has a similar issue where the second one is limited because the first one used the resource. Exactly. It's Delve, same thing. You want to put a bunch of cars in graveyard then delve to exiling cars graveyard

to get a benefit but then you already exiled them all so it's tough to do it again unless you jumped on the hoops to feed it again um and i often had this criticism back in the day of like i remember uh the lorwyn elemental mechanic was like um activated abilities uh all the elementals that had mana activated abilities they said spend five mana colon do something awesome then another elemental said spend four mana colon do something awesome another elemental said six mana do something awesome and my complaint was or my concern was hey you only have so much mana having three elementals on the board and they each have a different activated ability uses four or five or six mana isn't good because you can't spend your mana to feed all three of these guys it's like worse than a deck we just had one of them and then the other

two guys just spend their power points on being a guy that had no activated ability um eventually we did do that for thematic reasons we just sort of like uh tried to find enough ways to uh give you triggers on whether you spent mana activated abilities that you know paid you off for it um and other ways to give you enough mana to make it worthwhile. But in this case also, having a lot of devour cards in a deck would not be good. Whereas having a lot of when a guy dies triggers in a deck is good because you can put seven guys on the board that say

when a guy dies, get a benefit, have one guy die, and they all go off. So John did, by the way, the cards in John do have a bunch of death triggers. Correct. So we kept three to five of them as single cards unkeyworded, Jun do have a bunch of death triggers. Correct. We kept like three to five of them as single cards

unkeyworded and we did ultimately keep Devour after many debates on the grounds that it's just so thematically awesome and fun to have a giant dragon that eats a bunch of things and we tell people, hey, here's what Jun's about. A giant beast that eats a bunch of things and gets huge

and some of them also said, hey, get a reward based on how big my power is. So there's this big fungus guy, there's sort of like a force, a verdant force that says, when I come to play, devour three, eat a bunch of tokens, get a bunch of plus or minus counters,

and then every upkeep, free plus or minus one counter on me, like make another valid or something. So he gives you more food for the next card or try and sort of solve the problem I alluded to. Yeah, I think the thought it was just flavorful. I think we knew that we couldn't do tons of Devour, but that we thought it was super flavorful

is what we ended up with. Right. So we kept it because it's great at communicating that it's a realm of cardivores. We just didn't put in that many cards. I'm pretty sure it's on fewer cards instead than any other keywords from the shards. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. That's a way to sort of get people out of the trap of putting too many

Devourer cards in their deck because there just aren't too many Devourer cards. And the ones we kept were the like splashy fun ones and they're pretty high rarity. We don't have that many common Devourer guys.

And so that's the way we solved it. And the Death Trigger guys are still there sort of doing the workmanlike job of triggering things. And it worked with Devour, right? When you Devoured your guys and then it triggered

the Death Triggers. Right. And so you can make your Devour deck that has some Prey guys, some? When you devoured your guys, then it triggered the death triggers. Right. And so you can make your Devour deck that has some prey guys, some tokens, some death trigger guys, and then a few Devour guys

and have that, a few moments of Devour guy eating it and all the triggers go off. Right. And we had a lot of death triggers, right? We had a lot of death triggers so that things dying made things happen. Yeah.

And the death trigger guys are also good with sacrifice effects and the unearthed stuff. So that works well. So before we move on, John, real quickly. So John, Bill Rose was the lead of the mini team. And Mark Globus and Mike Turian, that was the red team. I can remember talking about Devour with Bill and all that stuff. Okay, so let's move on to the last team.

Naya, the Green Center team. So Ken Nagel was the lead because Ken loves green. And I and Mike Turian were the rest of the team. Yeah, Ken Nagel often also famously loves, like, giant creatures. He does. And that is indeed the theme of Naya is five power matters, rewarding you for creatures that have five power and giving you a lot of guys that have five power.

And so that is a good theme that Wizards has used, like, 10,000 times since then in like four power matters and five power matters and your team has six power matters incarnations. And they all play pretty well. And it's nice that much like Artifact, they rely on making a part of the card that is like kind of free in terms of rules complexity, have a mechanical synergy that is cool. And so having cards that say, hey, I care about elves, means you suddenly care about all the cards that happen to be elves.

Having cards say, I reward you for creatures with power five or greater makes you suddenly care more about random idiots that have power five or greater. And that's a nice way to make you say, ooh, I've got three of these. This five power amount of cards are really good. I've got three, I've got four, I've got five,

I've got seven creatures with power five or greater without needing to write words on cards saying uh whenever creature dies comma do this effect right and so i love opportunities to get uh players interested in cards that uh have a certain trait without having to have rules complexity to make them care about it um the five power matters theme is also a great opportunity to just like have a bunch of giant dudes at common that have five power, including in colors that don't really have them. Like white is very,

famously does not have five power creatures at common, right? Like I think there was like one at common that had five power greater. Yeah, white doesn't have that big creatures at common usually. Right, exactly. And so Naya was like a thematic-based time to break the rules once again and give White some commons of five power greater because it's Naya and it's a line of giant dinosaurs and monsters.

And of course it would have giant creatures in a way that's sort of like unusual. So we were talking about some criticism. So I'm going to throw some criticism at Naya. So we were talking about some criticism, so I'm going to throw some criticism at Naya. Yeah. So if you look at the Temur clan of Khans of Tarkir, you can see that we did the same theme again,

but we made two changes. Yeah. One is that we made it four and greater rather than five or greater, because five is just, it was a little hard, especially at Common, to get to the five. It's audaciously high. And the second thing we did is we named it.

We made an ability word, which, looking back, it was really our... I mean, I guess Esper also kind of didn't have a name, but it was kind of weird that three of them had clear names, and that nine kind of was a theme, but it wasn't named.

We should have named it. Yeah, I don't remember we had ability words in the game yet back then. It might have been that this is one of the sets that sort of like told us we should have ability words. We got tons of feedback saying, why didn't Naya get a mechanic? Grixis is unearthed.

No, we had ability words. Threshold was an ability word. That's Odyssey. I guess that's right. But Threshold, like, it was like Threshold, do something. It was like Threshold was an ability word. That's Odyssey. I guess that's right. But Threshold, like, it was like Threshold, do something. It was like Threshold, colon, this guy gets plus four, plus four. Yeah.

And Threshold meant something, right? Like, you didn't just say... That's a good question. When did we do just a straight ability word? I mean, I guess Threshold later was labeled an ability word, but maybe it wasn't thought of that way when we made it. Yeah, like, at the time... The original printing of

Werebear... I'm looking it up now. I don't know. Okay, so Werebear says threshold- or m- Werebear gets plus two plus three, and then in parentheses it says you have thresholds as long as seven war cards in your graveyard. And so threshold did mean something and the reminder

text told you what it was but i think the magic cannot yet discover the technology of an ability word that meant nothing except to give you flavor information right and that is good technology it's it's super good to communicate hey here's what we're going for this is supposed to be in this i love that the forgotten realm set has uh you know tons of these flavor words labeling um what the abilities are supposed to do and saying this is Cure Wounds and this is Gentle Repose and stuff on other abilities, because it definitely helps you feel

the D&D theme there. Nowadays, with the Naya theme, we would certainly say Ferocious or whatever, and I guess obviously Construct here did that, as you said. It is smart to tell people, hey, this is what we're doing here, even if it's not a Mechanical Realms. My desk isn't too far away, even if it's not a mechanical relevance.

So my desk isn't too far away, so we've got to wrap up here. What are your final thoughts sort of on Shards of Alara? Like looking back, what do you think of sort of the set as a whole? It was the first time that we did three colors, and I think that pulled off the theme of three different worlds pretty well. I think that saying the absence of black and red is what makes the band world had meaning is a cool way to approach it um it was also like the big resurgence of nicobolis as a big villain because he uh was the villain of the shards of lara storyline and he was the one that sort of like united all the planes and sort of tried to seize the power of the Conflux, and there's an awesome Nicol Bolas

planeswalker in that block. It was the second block that ever had planeswalkers, and I think those went pretty well. Like, Elspeth, the first white 4-mana one was there, the first Tezzeret was there, the first Nicol Bolas was there, Lorwyn was the first planeswalker block, and this was the second planeswalker

block, and the planeswalkers, like, for such a new mechanic that's so hard to balance, went pretty well. And they were good in Limited and Constructed pretty much right off the bat. It was the first multicolor Planeswalkers. That's also true. But even just the second block of Planeswalkers still pretty early, and they were pretty good hits.

Looking back at the set, there are many things that Magic just has learned as an overall game since then right it's been 13 years um but there it used to be uh part of our dogma that you had to have like a bunch of bad cards uh i i know you've written many articles the topic of bad cards and there's many kinds of bad cards but back then part of the dogma was you have to have a bunch of just like junky stat cards in common and magic doesn't do that anymore that's definitely a positive element like there's definitely a bunch of blatantly awful statted creatures uh for the standards of the day where um uh this guy's like a what's this guy saying there's a guy who's like a a four mana black creature i i i guess it's a guy who's like a four mana black creature. I guess it's a four mana red creature that is 2-1.

So V-Issue No Skeleton. It's a four mana 2-1. For this price, you get the ability 2-ana, discard a card, regenerate V-Issue No Skeleton. And regeneration is like this guy, if he would die and said he doesn't die and he taps. But that is just a terror bad rate, even for the weaker creature curves of the time it's like this guy

is just abysmally terrible and at the time that was like you had to have at least one very bad static creature in common the rationale I think was like beginning players need to learn that some cards are better than others and they need to feel smart about cutting cards in their deck that are bad so we'll put these bad cards in and we want to have a certain number of

playables limited decks and so we'll give them some clunkers to be bad and not make the decks but in retrospect i think that was that that was a bad part of the dogma it's good the magic has ejected that and there are no magic creatures printed these days that are like routinely as terrible as these like terribly static uh guys that we put in the sets back then uh we only did occasionally it was only a few uh part of the reason we had them also is you could like feel smart if you use the bad card and still win a game against someone you could like kind of humiliate them but being able to be a skeleton or like tell some stories your friends about at the

time you see a skeleton or say oh in this case the issue of skeleton is actually good or make your bsu skeleton deck or be the guy that collects 300 fsus, get them all your friends that don't want VHU no skeleton. There are things that it did, right? But it wasn't worth it, in retrospect. I mean, the one thing, when I look back at Shards of Alara, it really put, like, the idea of making a

three-color set work, the idea of we can push kind of in a direction we hadn't pushed before. Like, one of the famous lessons of Shards of Alara is we just didn't put enough color fixing in. That's true. Like, we put more than we'd ever had, but it still wasn't enough.

Yeah, and part of it is that the rate on the color fixing wasn't good enough. Like, famously, Ravnica, the first Ravnica block, had tons of awesome color fixing because it had a cycle of common Karus in every color, meaning a land that said, come to play tapped. When you play this, you must return another land you control to your hand.

And it taps for two colors of mana from that guild. So it taps for black and green. So I don't know if you know these lands or not, but basically, it's like a land that is worth two lands. You play a lands in turn one, and turn two you play this tapped land that creates white and blue

two mana, and you return the planes to your hand and on your next turn you play the planes again. And so this card, this land I'm describing is like a very powerful land because it produces two mana. You gotta do some work to get it online land because it produces two mana. You've got to do some work to get it online, but it produces two mana, and it's two colors of mana for your guild.

So this is an extraordinarily powerful color fixer. If your opening hand is one land and one of these Karoo lands, you're in great shape. It's a very high power land, so much that they don't really make these anymore. And the artifact mana they had back then was a cycle of uh common signets that said two mana demir signet uh come

into play untapped i believe and pay one comma tap this artifact and make black blue and so it it it washed your mana and created mana in a very efficient way i'm not describing this very well but but damir seemed to ultimately taps to make a mana and watches your mana to make black and blue and this is like very very powerful and in contrast the lara mana fixers for these obelisks that uh cost three to play and say tap create white blue or black and that's the whole text and a three mana artifact mana fixer is like way way way worse than a two mana artifact mana fixer because by the time you have three lands you kind of like needed to have your colors online already and by the time you have three lands you don't really want to be like tapping

on your lands to play more cards and just make mana it's kind of like too late for all that you know what i mean and so the obelisks are just like so much worse than the overpowered signets and the panoramas were pretty good but so much worse than the Karus that even having the same number of slots on Mana Fixing as Ravnica, the overall power level of Mana Fixing was way, way worse. People didn't even want to play Obelisks, whereas they were dying to play Signets. So it was a little long-winded, but you know. It definitely taught us, I mean, one of the things now is, I mean, I think Shards of Alara really paved the way for three-color sets.

And obviously, you know, like Khan's Retarget learned a lot from looking at Shards of Alara really paved the way for three-color sets. And obviously, you know, like Khans of Tarkir learned a lot from looking at Shards of Alara. And I think whenever I look back at old sets, I always sort of say, like, what were the lessons we learned? You know, what new ground did it pave? And I think that Shards of Alara was pretty bold and did a lot of cool things. Like, it was, for example, us doing factions, you know, like pushing, like, we had done Ravnica, but this was us trying to do, you know, a different kind of factioning, and so, people always ask, will we ever go back to Alara, and I think there's a better chance we will than we never will. So, I hope one day to go back to it. I like

Alara, I like the shards. My biggest problem with the block is we took away what made the world awesome, which was the shards. And like in the story, the shards started coming together. So, um... Yeah, and like it is a fun moment in the story to think of like these different shards encountering each other and just have their minds blown. Where

if you're from Bant and used to a world of honorable combat where no one ever dies, and you get shoved into Grixis, where it's like a world of necromancy where everything is dead. Everyone's killing each other. There's all these ghoulish horrors that will like rip your head off. It's like, that would be quite a shock.

And, uh, to the. John, the guys that have never encountered like logic and knowledge and smart people. And then suddenly run into Esper and the S people are like, you know,

running circles around them with all their tricks and blue cards, that would be pretty mind-blowing too. So it's fun to think of those worlds colliding. I mean, it made sense in the story, it's just so. But anyway, by the way, we gotta wrap this up because I'm at my desk. But it was, it was, uh, Shares of Laura is fun to look back at. There's a lot of cool things.

There's cool things we tried. There's things maybe we could have done a little bit better, but that's true of anything when you look back in time. It paved the way for what came after it. But there were successes and failures. And you learned from both those. Yeah, it's all stepping stones to where we're going. So anyway, I want to thank you for being with us.

Devin, it was a lot of fun. I like reminiscing with you. Looking back. Likewise. So thank you for being with us. My pleasure. I love the podcast, and we have to be on again sometime.

Thanks for having me. So to everybody else, I can see 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 to Devin for joining us. And I'll see all of you guys next week. Bye-bye.