Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #869: Midnight Hunt Commander with Corey Bowen

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

I sit down with Designer Corey Bowen to talk about how the Commander decks for Innistrad: Midnight Hunt were created.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, I've been using my time at home to interview people, and today I have Corey Bowen with us to talk about Midnight Hunt Commander Decks. So we're going to dive in deep into making Commander. So, hey, Corey. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Okay, so I first want to give a little overview, and then we'll dive into Midnight Hunt specifically. So one of your jobs really is doing a lot of the Commander designs, correct? Yeah, I led a lot of Commander sets in my time here, and I've done a lot of card design specifically for Commander. So, I mean, you are on other teams and such,

but one of the, probably your primary job is you lead a lot of Commander sets. Yeah, I would say that's my primary job. And yeah, you are right. I'm on different standard sets and main sets all the time helping out, but my primary job and my responsibilities all stem from leading Commander sets.

Okay, so in particular today, we're going to talk about Midnight Haunt. But I'm particular today, we're going to talk about Midnight Hunt. But I'm hoping today, not only do we talk about Midnight Hunt, but kind of explain it in general, making commander decks, because that's something we haven't talked a lot about on this podcast. Okay, so you have Midnight Hunt. I mean, you have a set. We're going to talk about Midnight Hunt.

We'll use Midnight Hunt as the example here. But okay, we're going to make commander decks for a new set. What's the first thing you do? With Midnight Hunt, what example here. But, okay, we're going to make commander decks for a new set. What's the first thing you do? Like, with Midnight Hunt, what did you have to do? Yeah, so for Midnight Hunt, first thing we do is we try to think about what kind of deck themes would be cool. And for these commander decks that we're doing

that are kind of attached to main sets, we like to think about the world. What are, like, some cool top lines of the world what is popular with players and commander of that world um so from there we were thinking about innistrad we knew we were going to do um two innistrad sets it's midnight hunt and uh crimson bow uh and so we knew there would be four decks. So for Midnight Hunts, we were thinking about, I think the idea came out very early with Chris Mooney and deck that kind of had uh it's not a strictly human tribal deck but the green-white deck does have some human tribal elements it definitely reflects the human mechanics from the main set because that's another thing we do think about is what

is new in the main set what is the mechanics in the main set and how can we reflect that in a commander capacity so the the blue black zombies deck um it is making a lot of classic zombie plays but it's also using the decayed mechanic from the main set which is new decayed is mechanic that comes on to two zombie tokens and it means that the tokens can't block and when they attack, you sacrifice them at the end of combat. And so it was a new way that the main set was doing to just allow themselves to make hordes and hordes of zombies without it being as intimidating, I guess, and more for sacrifice spotter.

And so we wanted to make a commander that generated Decay tokens and used those to their advantage. So before we get into the decks, there's an elephant in the room. I want to talk about the elephant real quick, and then we'll get into the decks. So Midnight Hunt is the werewolf set. Wait, where's the werewolf deck? Let's talk a little bit about why there's no werewolf deck, and then we'll get into the decks that you did make. Yeah, absolutely. So why? Why is there no werewolf deck, and then we'll get into the decks that you did make. Yeah.

So why? Why is there no... How is it a Werewolf-themed set and there's no Werewolf deck? Yeah. I also asked this question. Many of us, you know, we went in, saying, hey, should we do Werewolves? So the big, big limiter for Werewolves

is that they are all double-sided cards. They're all DFCs, transforming DFCs. And we have never been able to put a DFC in a Commander pre-constructed product for a variety of reasons. Some of it is it's just a logistical production challenge for us. Some of it is, you know, these decks don't come with sleeves. We don't assume you have sleeves. And so it would take up token space by putting the checklist cards and the tokens but overall it's just been a big

block we've just never been able to do the dfcs let alone having a deck completely full of dfcs even if we were able to get over the production logistical challenges we probably wouldn't be able to fit the raw number of Checklist cards in the packaging itself. So for those reasons, it's just too many challenges. I could not do a Werewolf pre-constructed deck, but the Commander designers all came together and we worked together with the main set to make sure that we came up with a good Werewolf Commander in the main set, which we believe we have accomplished with Tovalar.

Right. One of the things for the audience to understand that is, it's very frustrating, I know, from outside the walls, when you're like, this seems like the obvious thing to do. Like, it's very easy for the outside person to not care about logistics, but it's very hard for us to not care about logistics. And when you make a product, one of the things that happens is, we have what's called

a product architect. And they will lay out parameters. Like, you have a budget, and you have certain things, like, there's certain things that you have access to. You have so many new pieces of art. Like, there's certain parameters that you have access to. And you, the person, like,

you have to meet the parameters. I know the audience just, like, wants, we should do whatever we want to do, but that's not true sometimes, and we did, we did want to make, like, everybody wanted to make a werewolf. It's not like no one wanted to make a werewolf deck. It's just on many different vectors, both on a printing thing, and you're right, on the checklist, it just, there were so many things that it wasn't something we were capable of doing. It wasn't because we were capable of doing. It wasn't because we didn't want to. It wasn't because we didn't think it would be a cool idea. It wasn't because we didn't know

people would ask, where's the werewolf deck? It just logistically didn't work. And that's why there's no werewolf deck. Okay, but there is a zombie deck and there is we'll call it a human deck. You're correct, it's not so human tribally. Right. It's not so human tribally, but...

Right, it's not so human tribally, but in the main set, humans and green-white in general are using this new mechanic called Coven. Cards with Coven have a trigger or a condition that turns on when you have three or more creatures with different powers. So if I have a 1-3, a 2-3, and a 3-3, that is three different powers, I've activated my coven. So the coven deck kind of takes advantage of this. We thought it would, you know, this is not something that commander decks have ever had to think about, players have ever to think about, and so we took this very limited centric mechanic and tried to

scale it up a little bit with commander with some of the new cards um so the deck has a bunch of plus one plus one counter synergies because that's a very fun way to manipulate your powers so you can get those three or more powers and we have a few new cards that instead of turning on at a threshold of three or more powers they're going to scale upwards for however many different powers you can achieve during the game which i think is kind of a great way to a great example of taking a limited mechanic and scaling it towards the slower games or the higher dreams that Commander has to offer. One of the things that I think is really important for the audience to get is we make a lot of Commander cards, right? Obviously, there's lots and lots of, you know,

Commanders are a super popular format. But one of the challenges is, yeah, we can make the same thing we made. We can make a card that plays into the same theme that we've done many times before. But really what we're wanting to do as much as we can is how can i make something that makes a commander deck no one's ever made before right like there's a lot of importance of trying to lean into the newness because we're trying to sort of expose you to like well commander is fun but here's what this offers commander that other sets might not offer commander right commander is all about expressing your identity and in a lot of sense your unique identity and it's interesting that you note that we are you know trying to do all of these new themes different takes on stuff because

we've done blue black zombies at least blue black zombies has been a theme that's been very popular in the past so why do blue black zombies again if it's an archetype that already exists with many popular commanders like brim brim or greece and gerald um so i think that the blue black zombie deck is kind of achieving two things on one end we have done blue black zombies before but it's kind of been a while and a lot of people have started to play magic since the last sinistra. Magic is a very fast-growing game, and there's a lot of new players. I think it's also really valuable to take something that is kind of very endemic to the DNA of Magic and the DNA of Innistrad and bring it back and say, hey, for all those who never got to experience those classic zombie decks of the past,

here's a pre-con that you can pick up and kind of fall in love with blue black zombies the same way all of these other veteran players did a bunch of years ago on the other side of that this deck is trying to play up a little bit more in the blue black sacrifice angle so zombies are very classically about recursion or about creating hordes of zombies and this deck does play in those angles but is also at the same time trying to offer a little bit different of a play style with playing up sacrificing so it is a return to something that is beloved but as you're saying it is also subtly trying to offer a differing game experience so we can have people be able to express what they want to with their full black zombie deck.

Yeah, something funny, just tapping into my holidays real quick. I remember taking a class on pitching. Like, when you have to go sell an idea, you know, there's a lot of things they teach you, but how do you pitch something real well? And one of the truisms of pitching is old but new, right? Here's the thing that you know that's comfortable and acceptable, but here's the new twist that makes it different, right? And that I feel like a lot of this is like, well, hey, zombies, blue-black zombie, here's something that you've seen before. But, oh, here's our new twist.

Here's why this is not just the same thing you've seen before, but oh, here's our new twist. Here's why this is not just the same thing you've seen before. And it reminds me a lot of sort of that, of like, Magic has this nice thing of, you want some amount of familiarity. You want some amount of oh, that's something I can connect to. But you also want some amount of I've not seen this before, and how

do we put that in? So yeah. Old but new. Magic does this a lot um and midnight hunt commander does a lot something i like to do especially when we have these two decks you know like i said the blue black zombies deck it feels very classically old has a bit of a new twist but the green light coven deck you know there really isn't a strategy that cares about counters or sorry that cares about coven there's plenty of strategies that care about counters and there really isn't a green white option for humans either so that deck is more approaching new than it is approaching old and

that's kind of on purpose that between these two decks one of them kind of leans more classical the other one kind of leans more of like a newer, innovative space. Magic is a huge audience. There's a lot of veteran players, and there's a lot of newer players, and I like making that kind of dichotomy between decks or the differences between decks for their audiences so different people have something to latch on to among different decks. So in general

when you have two decks you try to make one more hitting an old theme and one more hitting a new theme yeah that's something i i try to do um is to make sure that they're hitting like that uh yeah i would say that's certainly true it's not going to be true all the time obviously but it's something i think about a lot when i'm doing two decks, and even when I'm doing four or five decks, you know, I want some portion of them to be clearly new and some portion of them to be clearly

classical in some way and sense. Right, I mean, I do think, for example, it's interesting you bring up that, like, different sets sort of prompt different numbers of decks. And, like, usually when you have five, usually there's a fact usually it's a faction thing right usually the set has built into it some sort of divisible by five thing that's built into what the set is yeah in the past few years it's been icoria which didn't have factions but it had strong three color identities

so it made sense to make five three colorcolor decks. And then Strixhaven, which was very heavily factionalized, definitely called for five decks. Now, do you wish you, as the commander sort of designer, do you like something where it's kind of inherent what you have to do? Like, Strixhaven, like, clearly you're just going to do the five schools, right? That's pretty obvious what you're going to do. Or do you like it where it's kind of open-ended like what what am i doing it doesn't like which you enjoy more that sort of tells you kind of what you want or like it's open-ended and do whatever you want to do yeah i i think both are fun um i

think i like it when it is factionalized i think I like it when I know what color pairs and I know kind of what the aesthetic is going to be. You know, with the Strixhaven colleges, I knew the colleges, all the colleges have all these amazing attributes and qualities and like these quirks and personalities. And within each college, there still was room to kind of think about it and move around you know i could we could be making the lore hold deck and we could make a spirits deck or a graveyard deck or what we went with was an artifact recursion deck um and i think i liked that a lot when there was a faction but it had a ton a ton of depth to it um icoria was was a little harder. It was factionalized, but not really factionalized.

It was a bunch of three-color stuff, but we really had to figure out what we wanted from that, and Ikoria kind of had a lot of themes that were a little bit harder to work around in Commander. With Innistrad, it's been pretty fun because it's felt like doing something based off of humans and zombies felt like a really solid starting point i guess i'll say i love a really strong starting points with a lot of depth um because within the depth we can kind of pick and choose what

directions we want to go sometimes when we're sitting there trying to make some stuff up out of nowhere it's a little bit more challenging um but that could just be fun too like i i think the abzan keywords deck in ikoria commander i i don't know that deck came out pretty quirky i really like it i'm pretty proud of doing that i definitely thought that that was a good way to emphasize some of the keyword cannery stuff in icoria by making a very unique deck and that just came out of just thin air mostly do you so here's another question for you do you enjoy like two color three color like i think for me i found it easier to think about wedge colored legends than shard colored legends i think my brain when i think about like jund or

dance or something like that i i tend to like silo those shards into some very particular strategies like i particularly have a pretty hard time thinking about what else jund can do than specifically uh crush the blood braided um but with uh wedges i feel like there's because there hasn't been a ton explored for wedges in the past, there's just a lot of room to explore and make some stuff up and fight for new directions. I don't know what I prefer between two color and three color. I think I've always been partial to three color decks. But I think two color decks are also a lot of fun and i also enjoy making mono color legends quite a bit i think mono color legends are really interesting um you can

make them do like small subsets of different strategies that allow people who just fall in love with character or card to make very unique looking decks. So I guess my answer is I like all of them. I don't particularly enjoy making four color stuff because I'm confused by it. Designing four color cards is hard too.

Right. Yeah. Okay, so the Midnight Hunt deck. So, you pick your themes, and also, the other thing, there's a certain amount of color balance that has to happen, too, right?

Yeah, there's a certain amount of color balance. Kind of the theory behind this is that if you are a Magic player, you likely have a favorite color. So, when we release Commander decks, we would love you to go to the shelf of the stores you go to and see a new deck that contains your favorite color.

So among the two decks, four colors are represented, right? It's green, white, and blue-black. And that is purposeful. With two decks, we can't really get to having all the colors represented. We could have made one of the decks three color and one of the decks two color. We did this in Zendikar Rising. But I kind of prefer...

For Innistrad, it felt very obvious to do the two colors to align with the tribes, I guess. Right, and sometimes a set sort of, like... Nothing about Innistrad says three colors, so it's a little bit harder to do three color, where it's a lot easier to do two color because the themes are very two color focused. Right.

Okay, so let's, on the zombie deck, let's talk a little bit about Decade. I'm a big fan of the Decade mechanic. a little bit about Decade. I'm a big fan of the Decade mechanic. You have to listen to my other podcast. I'm talking all about Midnight Hunt in another podcast, and I talk about where Decade... Decade actually wasn't even from the design of Midnight Hunt. It was from Crimson Vow. But

let's talk a little bit about designing, like trying to design with that mechanic. So it's a brand new mechanic. It's doing things a little differently. How do you sort of embody that in a new deck? Yeah, so Decade has a few things going on with this um the first thing it does is it lets you create more zombie tokens for less mana and there is this inherent zombie fantasy that's like okay i think about all of the media that is cool with zombies and all of these tropes will like.

Like hordes and hordes of zombies is this very evident trope. And Decade can create more zombie bodies. So for super mana, we can make a ton of Decade tokens. And that lets you serve that fantasy more of these whores and hordes of zombie tokens it's like never-ending flow of zombie tokens and it's not as much of a gameplay problem because usually when they make a bunch of tokens it can stall out the board but decayed tokens they don't stall out the board they can't block so they're not going to be good chump blockers and when they attack they go away so you got to keep making them um so step one is decayed sweet

because hordes of zombies are cool uh step two is what do you do with decayed zombies you can't attack with them it's like obviously the very default notion of them is that you attack with them and that's fun um but you can also sacrifice them because they're not really worth a full token. Sacrificing them as if you were sacrificing a creature is just good value. So that's, again, where the deck kind of leans into more of a sacrifice theme. I think doing my research, I found there was not that many other blue-black sacrifice commanders. I think there was Grimgrin, but I think Grimgrin's also a little harder for newer players to grok. So

I enjoyed making meaning into sacrifice names. And so we can make a lot of zombie tokens. We can make them have decayed. Zombie hordes are cool. Sacrificing is cool. Then I started we started to think about what else

can we do with the Decade mechanic? Can we give things other than zombie tokens Decade? So let me look at my thing real quick. I believe we made this really cool card called

Ghoul's Night Out that is a very multiplayer-oriented card. Do you want me to describe the card sure yeah we tell the card to the audience yeah called ghouls night out it's uh five mana three and two black mana uh it's a sorcery for each player you choose a creature card in that player's graveyard and then you put those cards onto the battlefield under your control they're black zombies in addition to the other colors and types and they gain decay so you are zombifying three creatures in commander from uh oh four creatures because it's each player's

graveyard so in a four-player game of commander you are getting four creatures onto the battlefield zombified for five mana usually that's a very pretty insane value however they have decayed so they're only here for a little bit this is kind of interesting because oh you know i'm gonna get my opponent's 10 10 so i can hit someone for 10 and then sacrifice it or i'm gonna get this powerful static ability or triggered ability or something that i can just like leave back for a while and it's like i'm resurrecting just that um so we really enjoyed messing around with decayed a little bit in that sense as well yeah one of the things that the designers always like to do whenever we have a new mechanic is understand the strengths and the weaknesses of

the mechanic like for example decayed is like well obviously it's weaknesses it's it's you know it's it's it's less real in some ways, and it doesn't last as long, and it's not as good in attacking and blocking, obviously. But what is its strengths? And the strengths is, I get a full creature for kind of the half the cost

of a creature. Now, I can't do a lot of things with it. I can't block with it. I can only attack once with it. But, for sacrifice purposes, for, right, it's kind of things with it. I can't block with it. I can only attack once with it. But for sacrifice purposes, for like, right, it's kind of neat that it's, all sacrifice carries is a creature. It's a full creature for sacrifice purposes, even though you didn't pay,

like you, it's sort of a discount creature. You paid less for it. But there's ways to use it as a full value of a creature. And that's how you can take advantage of it. Right, exactly. So I had a lot of fun working with the cave staff, making the sacrifice staff. I think the deck came out really well.

Okay, well, let's jump to the other deck and talk a little bit about Coven. So what is unique about Coven? Right, so we talked about this a little bit. You know, Coven cares about having all these different powers. Usually that feels like a very limited thing, but we thought it would be cool to try to approach it from Commander Angle. Some of the things we thought about, especially for Green-White, is kind of the reprints seemed really fun with Coven. You know, Bestial Menace is a sorcery that makes a 1-1, a 2-2, and a 3-3.

Pistani Semlinor also makes three tokens of different powers already. So there's all these cards that were token makers that were already kind of doing this for us. It was like, okay, it seems to me in the deck you can play your commander and you can play Beastial Menace. Bam, you've already got Coven going. Seems really fun.

Let's make some other cards that care about Coven or have Coven. Or let's make some cards like, I'm going to pick a card here on my list of things. I think there's a really fun green one. Celebrate the Harvest, which is a green sorcery, plus four mana, three generic, one green. You search your library for up to X basic land cards where X is the number of different powers among creatures you control. You get those on the battlefield and then you shuffle. Battlefield tapped.

So this was, you know, a card effect that is very crucial to Commander being land ramp scaling on your coven so let's say i have just regular coven i've got three different powers bam this for four mana gets you three lands which is well above rate but you know this is commander this is the format of dreams i guess and if you have like 10 different powers you've've achieved a great dream. You can pay 4 mana for 10 lands, which I thought was just really cool. So we have multiple cards in that deck that are scaling on the number of different powers you control. I think that's kind of where we take the mechanic and break through from limited and kind of scale it up in Commander. So Jess, I mentioned earlier about parameters.

So when you make a deck, like the Midnight Hunt decks, how many new cards do you have access to? Yeah, so for each deck, I believe there are 15 new cards in these ones. So for each deck, they have 15 new cards there is a base card that is gold there is a secondary commander that is also gold

each deck also has a third commander but those third commanders are monocolor within this subset of the two colors just for fun and then there's just a bunch of other monocolor cards hanging out with them. All right, 15.

Yeah, then there should be six cards of each other monocolor hanging out as well. And so, I mean, does that change from set to set, or is that roughly when you make a commander set, how many cards you get? It changes. It kind of depends on what's going on um different commander sets will sometimes the number of new cards will fluctuate depending on

our philosophy at the time and where we want to be landing with number of new cards um sometimes the makeup of how many secondary how many other legends are there in the deck will change. Like for example Crimson Vow will have a slightly different setup for a reason I'm not going to elaborate into. And also I depend on who's leading the product, what are their ideals. And a lot of the commander set leads, we do work together, we talk together every week in a stand-up and we are very collaborative but we do have different ideals sometimes um so maybe something that i do in my sets won't be the same exact structure someone else do does in their sets depending on the number of new cards how they feel about stuff their philosophy on stuff or you know the philosophy the whole group changes over time magic is a very uh design

philosophy is always changing people are we're always improving on ourselves so things are always going to be a little bit different and i think they're always iterate and improve in that way and i do know when you make five that also sometimes you can overlap cards like when in midnight hunt when one's blue blackblack and one's green-white, it's tricky to make a card that goes in both decks. But I know sometimes when you're building, like, five decks where there's more colors that overlap, you guys sometimes can overlap things. Yeah, we actually stopped doing that as much.

I believe, so Glenn Jones, who was kind of our commander-commander, he led C-19, and then he started talking to the group and saying, hey, you know, in these other pre-cons of the past, we used to have these kind of uncommons, so to speak, these new card uncommons that would be shared between decks. But he was questioning what those were doing. Were they adding appeal? was questioning what those were doing were they adding appeal um were they uh being too limited by being restricted to a theoretical uncommon status should we just not make those uncommons and instead you know just new rares in the decks because kind of the goals of of the new cards were to you know provide more commander cards that people would play in their decks

and an uncommon is limited in its complexity and theoretical appeal um which was kind of a strange point uh the uncommons were never like i think i think at the time there was a time where maybe the shared uncommons and pre-constructed decks were meant to kind of smooth over the games or have some cards that would be shared among the decks and smoother over the gameplay. But there have been so many cards printed in the past N years or whatever that I don't think we need that padding in the commander decks to make the decks feel like multiplayer decks.

I feel like there's enough reference to bring stuff over. So we don't actually do those uncommons that much. However, in Ikoria Commander and Strixhaven Commander, I still made a land that was common between all the decks just because that's something I like to experiment with every now and then. Sometimes we'll do something like that where we'll have a colorless card that is in every deck if we think it's a pretty cool land that we want to have high accessibility for the players

or if it's just something that we think is fun in all decks. In Ikoria Commander, there was a mana rock in every deck that was called Bonders Ornaments. It costs three mana, tapped for a man of any color but you can also pay four and tap it to have any or every player who had a bonders ornaments would draw a card so in playtesting this was called the commander friendship book bracelet because the idea is anyone else who had a commander friendship bracelet would benefit off of it and i thought that was a cool card to put in all five decks, and it wouldn't really work if it was only in one deck, for example.

So I'm almost to my desk here. I can see it in the distance. Any final thoughts? So for people that maybe have never bought a Commander product, like a Commander deck associated with a main set or something, what is your... Give a one-minute pitch here of why Midnight Hunt might be the thing to try, to try out.

Yeah, I think Midnight Hunt is a perfect pre-con for people who haven't experienced pre-constructed decks or that much Commander at all. The Blue Black Zombies deck is just such a tried and true archetype. It's very beloved. It's very like history worn people love blue black zombies it's very fun to play with these cards there's a lot of fun to be had

um if you love graveyard if you love creepy things you love hordes of tokens play this deck the coven deck also very fun you know it also plays with very you know beloved stuff people uh players love plus one plus one counters in green, white. Plus one, plus one counters are just a very fun mechanic to build up, to manipulate, to have synergy off of. There's a little bit of human travel. That's also very cool. And there's a cool, unique thing of counting powers.

I think these two decks are just really, really great entry points for prospective commander players. So I really would recommend them to people who are on the fence. Well, anyway, I want to thank you for joining us, Corey. Commander's

the one area where I don't have a lot of involvement. I mean, I have a little tiny bit, but so it is fun to bring somebody in who's just doing a very different kind of design. Not what I normally do, so I don't talk about it on the show a lot, obviously. So thanks for joining us yeah thank you for having me Mark

and for everybody else I'm at my desk so we all know what that means means it's the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me

to be making magic so I want to thank once again for Corey for being here and I'll see all you guys next time