Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #870: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Design

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

I talk about the design of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay guys, today it's time to talk about Midnight Hunt. So I'm going to talk through the design and explain all the things that went into making the set. Okay, so the first part of our story, we have to go all the way back to the very first Innistrad design. So one of the things I had said to the team was we had decided early on we wanted to do monsters. And that meant we wanted to have vampires and werewolves and zombies. Spirits would come later. And Magic had done a lot of vampires.
Starting point is 00:00:42 Magic had done a lot of zombies. But we really hadn't done a lot of werewolves. I think there were three black werewolves that existed. Three werewolves, all of which were black, before we had done Innistrad. And I'm like, okay, if anything is really going to sort of put our mark on magic, it's really going to be werewolves. That's the thing that magic, we hadn't really done well before. So I said to my team, okay, I want to make sure we hit werewolf out of the park.
Starting point is 00:01:06 How do we do that? And so I laid some parameters. The biggest parameter is that they had to have a human version and they had to have a werewolf version and that whatever one human became a werewolf, all humans became werewolves. You became
Starting point is 00:01:22 a werewolf all at the same time. So that was the parameters I gave, basically. I wanted to do top-down werewolves. You became a werewolf all at the same time. So that was the parameters I gave, basically. I wanted to do top-down werewolves and I wanted to do it in a way that I thought was splashy and fun. And so I sent my team off and they all came back with different ideas. So Tom Lepilli
Starting point is 00:01:37 came back. He had worked on a bunch of Duel Master sets. Duel Masters is a trading card game we make for Japan. And they had used double-faced technology. I think the way it worked in Duel Masters is you would have a card in your deck, and then you could go get a creature from the uber-dimensional zone, and the double-faced cards lived in the separate zone that you then brought them in.
Starting point is 00:02:02 And Tom said, well, what if we just did that? What if we had one-faced cards that went in your deck that got you double-faced cards that were outside your deck? That was his original pitch. And the idea was one side was a human and one side was a werewolf. And then, you know, they'd be human and werewolves. My pitch was something that I called Day-Night.
Starting point is 00:02:26 And the idea of Day-Night was, it was a separate game component. And, uh, when you would bring a creature that cared about Day-Night, you would bring in this outside game component. It was a double-sided card. On one side was Day, and on one side was Night. And there was a little track on it. And every time anybody cast a spell, you'd advance along the track. And basically every three spells would toggle
Starting point is 00:02:47 it, for all intents and purposes. So it would start as day, after three spells got cast, it'd become night, after three more spells got cast, it'd become day again. We play tested, I mean, I don't remember the other suggestions. There were a bunch of suggestions. Those were the top two. Those were ones
Starting point is 00:03:03 that both were very flavorful and very exciting and definitely a little more like we wanted to do something that was really exciting for werewolves. And we actually playtested both of those for a while. Ultimately, we decided that Double Face Cards was more exciting. There was some bookkeeping that went on with Day and Night, and just the idea of having two pieces of art, of having two sides of the card,
Starting point is 00:03:30 was just, it just was very exciting. And the more we played with it, the more we just saw the potential in it. And at the time, I really thought, like, well, we don't have a choice. Like, I didn't think we could do both. I'm like, well, we could do one or we could do the other. So we
Starting point is 00:03:45 put Day and Night aside, and we did Double Face Cards. Obviously, for those that don't know the story of Original Innistrad, and I've done podcasts on this, Double Face Cards were a bit of a struggle. Not everybody in R&D was very eager to do them. I obviously was very eager. I got behind them.
Starting point is 00:04:02 Once we played that to them, I realized how awesome they were, and I fought hard to get them to happen. Obviously they did happen because they came out. Anyway, flash forward many years later. So we do this thing in R&D we call the hackathon, where
Starting point is 00:04:18 we take a week off and we explore some facet of design. The very first hackathon was finding, we were making supplemental products. Mod Horizons and Jumpstart both came out of that hackathon. Anyway, we did a later hackathon at my request. We were looking at future design space. And one of the teams, the one I ended up running, was about using outside game components.
Starting point is 00:04:47 And so one of the things that came up was I remember Day Night. And so we actually tried playing some Day Night. We mocked up some cards. And it was a lot of fun. And I'm like, you know, I mean, I understand that it's this versus double-faced cards. Double-faced cards are more exciting and sexier. But I'm like, this is pretty fun. And so I said, okay, maybe we could find a place to
Starting point is 00:05:08 use this. I think it's kind of cool. Okay. So then flash forward a little longer until we get to Midnight Hut Vision Design. So Ethan Fleischer was the lead vision designer. And the team,
Starting point is 00:05:24 let's see, the team was Ethan, And the team, let's see. The team was Ethan, Doug Byer, George Phan, Ari Nee, James Rose, James Wyatt, and myself. Both Doug and James were from the creative team. And I don't think they overlapped. I think they were at different times. James is from elsewhere in the company, but he's a cool designer. We use him from time to time. Ari, you guys would know as the winner of the Great Designer Search 3.
Starting point is 00:05:50 And then George Phan, who is the creator of Plants vs. Zombies, spent a year at Wizards as sort of filling a bucket list. And it was great fun having George for a year. Anyway, he was on that team as well. So early on, like very, very early on, I said to Ethan, I go, well, I have a suggestion. Here's the day-night mechanic. We originally pitched it for original Innistrad.
Starting point is 00:06:09 Fine. And we did do it because we did double-faced cards. But look, we've been playtesting it. In the hackathon, we made some more cards. It's fun. And so Ethan and team played it. And they said, okay, we agree it's fun. Having this track is flavorful.
Starting point is 00:06:25 And the nice thing about having a track was that you could have multiple things that cared about it. It sort of said, hey, it's day, hey, it's night, and then you could have all sorts of different cards that cared about it. Ethan was a little skeptical about the condition to change. Now, I will note, when we made it originally, like, so it had a track, so every three spells it changed.
Starting point is 00:06:43 One of the things that Day did is Day said or it's like Night said if you're a human werewolf you become a werewolf and Day said if you're a werewolf you become a human werewolf
Starting point is 00:06:52 like you like turning to Day or Night just changed all werewolves like overriddenly changed all werewolves but anyway Ethan liked the general structure of Day and Night
Starting point is 00:07:04 but was dubious about the, there's a lot of tracking of like every time you play a spell, you have to track and everything. And so we played around with a bunch of different ways to, the flip conditions, you know, different ways to, to change day to night. Um, and in the end, the one that kind of worked best for us was what I would call the werewolf mechanic. Now, the interesting thing about the werewolf mechanic, by the way, so once we decided we wanted to do double-faced cards in original Innistrad,
Starting point is 00:07:32 there was the question of, well, how, when do humans become werewolves, when do werewolves become human? And kind of borrowing from the day-night, what we'd done with day-night, I liked the idea of when you cast spells, it mattered. And so we decided it was kind of cool if no spells or two spells, since those are both things that don't always happen, would be the things that triggered.
Starting point is 00:07:54 And then as we played them, it became clear both from a gameplay and from a flavor standpoint that nothing would make you into a werewolf, and two spells would make you back into a human was the idea. And the thought process there was there was the right amount of pressures
Starting point is 00:08:12 of when you wanted to turn into a werewolf and how many werewolves you had. And then later in the game it became harder to turn things back into day because you had less spells in your hand. So anyway, and then also the flavor we always liked was nighttime is when nothing happens, or mostly nothing happens. So no spells represents less activity.
Starting point is 00:08:29 And day is when things happen. So two spells represents more activity. So we liked the flavor. The gameplay played out pretty well. But anyway, once we realized, we said, you know what? We already had this mechanic that represents the day-night, essentially. What if we just apply that to the day-night structure? And so we did, and it played really well.
Starting point is 00:08:50 And so, anyway, so that was one of the earliest things we put in the set. Day-night was in the set super early. Later it became day-bound, night-bound. Now, I will say, just to answer some questions that I've been getting about this, it had always been my intent, and I think the intent of the Vision Design team, that we wanted old and new werewolves to work together. Obviously,
Starting point is 00:09:11 that's why we picked the werewolf mechanic as the flip. It did turn out as we got into set design, it drifted a little bit. I think set design realized that there were a few weird things about how werewolves had flipped that we could fix. For example, if nobody played a spell, it would flip to a werewolf.
Starting point is 00:09:30 But you could take off the turn, cast no spells, and then your opponent could play an instant at the very last moment, and then you wouldn't get your werewolves. And it was not really the intent, it was just kind of how the template worked out. So they decided to fix that. There's this cool gameplay where it was nightbound. Your nightbound things came on the nightbound side. But anyway, I really did push to try to get them lined up. I spent time talking to the rules manager about making the Old World rules have daybound and nightbound.
Starting point is 00:10:02 But in the end, what happened was it just was a pretty big piece of errata. The cards were changing significantly that I just lost that fight. And, you know, we have this thing about not trying to do functional errata. We can avoid it. And this was clearly functional errata. I thought it was functional errata
Starting point is 00:10:20 and a good purpose. I really did want the old and new werewolves to work together as cleanly as they could. They do work together in the sense that they do have the same flip trigger most of the time. But, anyway, that is why that Errata did not happen. Okay, so Day Knight was in the set pretty early on. Oh, okay, so early on we Oh, okay. So early on, we obviously
Starting point is 00:10:46 did the exercise of, okay, we're back on Innistrad. Five previous sets were set on Innistrad. What were the elements we wanted to bring back? Double-faced cards clearly were pretty loud. I mean, Avacyn Restored is the one set previously on Innistrad
Starting point is 00:11:04 that didn't have double-faced cards, and the biggest complaint from the audience was, where are the double-faced cards? Ironically, the reason we didn't do them was there was a lot of worry that people wouldn't like them, and so we sort of hedged our bets by not doing them Avacyn Restored. Ironically, people really did like them, and thus the biggest complaint was we didn't have them. But anyway, it was pretty clear we were going to do double-faced cards. I mean, it's kind of... First of all, we were going to do
Starting point is 00:11:29 Day-Night, and you can't do Day-Night without double-faced cards. I think we were always going to... Even before Day-Night existed, we were going to do double-faced cards. And so to do double-faced cards means transform. We would do transformed double-faced cards, unlike the modular ones that we used last year in Zendikar Rising and Call Time and Shrek's Haven.
Starting point is 00:11:49 Anyway, so we knew early on we were going to do Transforming and Double-Faced Cards. The other thing we had talked about early on was doing a flashback. I had actually, my master plan, you hear all the things I tried and failed at. My master plan was I actually wanted to do flashback both in Strixhaven and in Midnight Hunt. Because my thought process was one of the things that's been going on in the changeover from the block model to the non-block model is in the current system, we do a lot more different designs because we're going to a lot more different worlds. And there's less continuity in standard. And so one of the things that I've been trying to do is find ways to get more continuity. And so one of the ways to do that is I'm like, we could just repeat mechanics more. We could, you know, mechanics that's previously in standard, we could use again in standard.
Starting point is 00:12:45 And so my thought process was, oh, and at the time, this is important, the, in between them was a core set, which, well, it was going to be a core set. There's a period of time where the Dungeon Dragons set was a Dungeon Dragons themed core set. And so I was like, okay, well, there's a core set, but these are sort of back-to-back, I mean, if you count non-core sets.
Starting point is 00:13:11 But as Dungeon Dragons became more of a thing and less of a core set, we were like, well, is it weird to have Flashback and then not have it and then have it again? They weren't really consecutive to each other. And I'm like, but, you know, we just could have the same thing in two sets. And I really liked the idea that Flashback was just used very differently in the two sets.
Starting point is 00:13:30 You know, Flashback in Shrickshaven is all about spells mattering and getting to cast multiple spells. And then it's more about graveyard manipulation and stuff. It just, both sets would like it. Both sets could use it. But it was slightly different. Anyway, anyway, I lost that out. One of the things, by the way, I will mention, one of the things that we did in Strixhaven,
Starting point is 00:13:53 when we had Flashback in it, is we did multicolored spells with Flashback. As that is not something... We hadn't previously made multicolored Flashback spells. So interestingly, when it got moved to Innistrad, or to Midnight Hunt, some of that got carried over.
Starting point is 00:14:11 So the idea of having multicolored spells actually came from them being in Strixhaven. But once they got moved, they're like, oh, we haven't done multicolored, that might be cool to do multicolored. That's kind of where that came from. Anyway, so putting flashback spells, no one fought that. It was one of those things where, like, we could do flashback.
Starting point is 00:14:30 Yeah, let's do flashback. So flashback and transforming double-faced cards were in very early. Day-night happened very early. Okay, so now, let's see. We have a couple other mechanics here that went through a little more rigmarole. So let's talk about Coven. So in the original mechanic we had, so the creative team had always had the story of the humans turning to sort of witchcraft
Starting point is 00:14:54 to try to find an answer for the monsters. Like one of the ongoing stories, you know, the ongoing sort of struggle, if you will, of Innistrad is the humans are being attacked on all sides by monsters and how they're going to do that. For a while, Avacyn helped them, but bad things happened to Avacyn. And while there still are some angels, they're not quite as protected by the angels as they once were. So the idea that they played around with, the creators played around with, is what if they turn to using magic and using witchcraft? And so that became a big part of the story. So we were really trying to find a way to represent that flavorfully.
Starting point is 00:15:31 So the earliest thing we tried, which I think was Ari's mechanic, was, I don't remember the name of it. I'll just call it witchcraft. I don't remember the name. But the idea was it was like a kicker spell, except in order to kick the spell, you had to tap three creatures. So the idea was, you know, do damage, but if you tap three creatures, it does more damage. Damage might be a bad example since it was centered in white-green because it was human.
Starting point is 00:15:54 Or, you know, giant growth for more or whatever. What it turned out was that just tapping three creatures was a little too much of a cost, and so it didn't quite play out right. And so they tried a bunch of different versions of it. That's what Vision... Vision handed that over. Vision handed that mechanic over. And then it got changed in set design.
Starting point is 00:16:17 So, the... So set design was trying to figure out, okay, we like the idea that you care about three creatures, but tapping them is too much of a cost. So they were exploring, like, okay, well, what if there's some threshold? Rather than having to tap them, you just had to have some threshold.
Starting point is 00:16:37 And so they experimented with different thresholds, trying to figure out, like, what kind of thing they needed to do to balance it. In the end, they came across having different powers. That's something that, like, okay, most decks... Like, one of the things is, you know, like, they talk about getting three humans or, like, other thresholds,
Starting point is 00:16:53 but the thing they liked about different powers was it was something decks could do, and if it's something you can manipulate with cards, you could add plus one, plus one counters and things, and it just seemed like it was something that you could care about, but in a way that the deck could go naturally and you can make cards that can make it a little bit better
Starting point is 00:17:09 and so Witchcraft sort of turned to Coven and I think they tried, I mean, I wasn't on the set design team, I know Vision handed over the Witchcraft variant, the kick or tap three creatures,
Starting point is 00:17:26 and they tried a bunch of different things. So they might have tried a bunch of different things before they landed on Cubbin, but that's how they ended up with Cubbin. Okay, next. Decayed. So this is an interesting story. So the Decayed creature tokens, Decayed the mechanic, if you will,
Starting point is 00:17:45 two things. One, it wasn't made in Midnight Hunt design. And two, it wasn't really made to be a keyworded thing. So what happened was, this was in Crimson Vow. So I led the vision design for Crimson Vow. And we were trying to figure out what to do with the vampires, not the vampires, with the zombies.
Starting point is 00:18:04 And one of the things we wanted is, we really liked the idea, like if you look at pop culture zombies, which is what we're trying to figure out what to do with the vampires, not the vampires, with the zombies. And one of the things we wanted is, we really liked the idea, like, if you look at pop culture zombies, which is what we're trying to capture, there really is a sense of the danger of the zombie is not the individual zombie, right? Like, individual zombie, they're slow, they're dumb. It's the horde of zombies. And we had done a lot in previous sets of really trying to play up,
Starting point is 00:18:22 but one of the things we found was that a lot of the way the strategies played out was you tended to use your zombies to just gum up the board and sometimes once you got control, you attack with a zombie. So it did happen some of the time. But we were wondering if there were ways to get you to attack with zombies
Starting point is 00:18:36 rather than just as an end state win condition all the time. Like, there's ways to get to attack with zombies earlier than that. And so one of the big questions was how do we get hordes of zombies? How can we make zombie decks have hordes of zombies? And the one thing we realized was
Starting point is 00:18:53 that blocking was kind of problematic. Blocking really is what gummed up the board. So like, okay, well, what if we made zombies? So the first version we tried didn't block. What if we made zombie tokens that say can't block? And we tried that, and I mean, obviously you were aggressive with them because, well, they can't block. They're just like, what do we make zombie tokens that say can't block? And we tried that, and I mean, obviously you were aggressive with them because, well, they can't block. And there was something
Starting point is 00:19:10 cool there, but they still were a little bit too strong. Like, we couldn't make that many of them. Like, it obviously kept you from being defensive with them, but it really made people sort of a little bit more aggressive than was the intent. And it also,
Starting point is 00:19:27 part of what we were trying to do was make something that we could let you make more zombies, and it was a little bit still too good. So the next idea we came up with was, okay, what if we made them more one-shot rather than continuous? What if the idea was you make these zombies, but it's not that the zombie keeps hitting them, it's like it hits them once. Hits them once and falls apart or whatever.
Starting point is 00:19:45 And so we came up with the idea of, okay, can't block, and it's destroyed after it does combat damage, then it's destroyed, or sacrificed, destroyed. I forget how it's technically worded. Anyway, we tried that, and it was really interesting. It was one of the things I love when you're doing design is when you come up with something and it just makes you think
Starting point is 00:20:08 in ways you've never thought before. And what we found with Decade was, like, is it a creature? Is it a spell? Is it a temporary effect? Like, it's this weird, I mean, like, it's a creature in the sense that it triggers creature things
Starting point is 00:20:22 and you can sacrifice it as a creature. And I mean, it's a creature in some ways, but in other ways, it's a little more like a functional spell. Like it's a one-shot effect. Like it really is this weird hybrid of a different thing, which was really cool and fun. And the more we played with it,
Starting point is 00:20:36 the more we really enjoyed it. But anyway, so I should stress that when we made Midnight Hunt, we did not know Crimson Vow was coming. At the time we made Midnight Hunt and Vision Design, there was no Crimson Vow. It didn't exist yet. The next set was going to be Kamigawa in the winter, in its normal slot. And then, I won't get into the deep rigmarole here, but we decided that we wanted to change up the premiere schedule and have a set in November. And there's a lot of discussion about what should that set be? When we get to Crimson Vow, I'll get more into this story. But anyway,
Starting point is 00:21:16 in the end, we decided it makes sense to have it also in Innistrad. Once we did that, we then did Vision Design on Crimson Vow and I think when they were doing basically what happened was they were doing set design on Midnight Hunt while we were finishing up I think vision design and I think what happened was they needed something for I think they saw what we had done.
Starting point is 00:21:46 They looked at what we had done and realized that there were some synergies with how they were building the set with Decade. And so what ended up happening was they took Decade from Crimson Vow and then there was a different mechanic for the spirits that ended up going to Crimson Vow. So there kind of was a swap made where they took the zombie mechanic
Starting point is 00:22:09 from Crimson Vow but gave up, gave them the spirit mechanic. The reason that swap was made was each set, we knew the other mechanics in the set and it kind of, that swap just worked better with what else was in the set. And so,
Starting point is 00:22:24 but anyway, so Decade Counters made their way into Midnight Hunt. The interesting story behind the scenes, by the way, is... The Vision team was tickled by them. We really thought they were cool. But one thing we noticed is they tended to get a sort of negative first impression. Because it seems... It just seems like such a big drawback, right? It really seems like, why would I want creatures that can't block and I only get to use it once?
Starting point is 00:22:52 And, you know, it really made it feel like, why would I want that? But what the play designers found is as they started playing with it, it really made interesting things come up. It made really interesting play decisions. And I think that they finally saw what we saw originally and really came on board and really became to like it. And so, I will say, if you are, if you're, if on
Starting point is 00:23:12 the surface you've read Decade Counters and said, that doesn't sound like fun, please play them. It really is like, just the dynamic of what it means. Like, here's a really good example, which is I have, your opponent has a really good example, which is, I have, your opponent has a 2-2,
Starting point is 00:23:26 a 2-2, not a zombie, but a 2-2 creature in play. Now, normally, if I attack with a 2-2, I mean, maybe they let my 2-2 through, but a lot of times, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to block my 2-2 with your 2-2, and we're going to trade, and they're going to go away.
Starting point is 00:23:40 Now, I get a 2-2, I get a 2-2 Decayed Zombie, right? And so now, if I attack, now my opponent has an interesting decision. It's like, well, I could stop and trade with it, but it's going to die anyway. If I don't block it, it's going to die. So I'm not really trading my creature for that creature. That creature's already going away. What I'm trading for is my creature to stop the damage, which is 2 damage.
Starting point is 00:24:01 Okay, well, that's not nearly as good a trade, right? Trading creature for creature has more value than trading creature two damage. Okay, well, that's not nearly as good a trade, right? Trading creature for creature has more value than trading creature for damage. So what happens is, like, oh, people are less inclined to want to block them. Like, what seems like a drawback has weird advantages at times, where it's like, okay, I'm tacking it,
Starting point is 00:24:19 and you have to sort of question whether I'm willing to do, you know, like, I'm getting less equity for this. Do I want to still do the block? Anyway, it turned out pretty cool, and I'm glad, I'm glad it's in the set. Okay, next. Disturb.
Starting point is 00:24:34 So, I think what happened was, when they gave up, so we came up with a mechanic in Midnight Hunt for the spirits. It ended up getting traded to Crimson Vow, so I can't talk about it now because it's not public yet. But it's coming. And then I think set design had to replace it.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And I think the idea they came up with was... Basically the idea of, is there some way to sort of flash it back, right? Is there some way that one of the cool things is it's a creature, it dies, and then it comes back as a spirit. So the idea that the front face was a creature and the back face was a spirit was flavorfully
Starting point is 00:25:15 really compelling. And the question there is how exactly do you make that happen? I think they experimented with like it's a human and it dies and becomes a spirit, like sort of a built in transformation but what they found was that that's pretty powerful and both sides were kind of weak to make that true
Starting point is 00:25:32 and so they ended up deciding is to sort of go down the flashback path of saying okay well what if it's a normal creature but when it dies okay now you have the ability to cast it out of your graveyard and then the idea is if it ever leaves, it will get exiled. Sort of, it's a permanent, so it has to function a little bit differently than flashback.
Starting point is 00:25:49 But the same idea that you can only cast it once, that you don't get to keep recasting, you get to cast it once. And I do know that I've gotten a lot of feedback about people seem to think the costs are too high. It's funny, we get the same comments on Flashback.
Starting point is 00:26:06 The best way I can explain to people is this, is the card you're getting on the front of the card is not that far away from just being a card you can play. Usually it's a little less because you argue in the backside. But the idea is that I get a creature.
Starting point is 00:26:22 Then when the creature dies, the fact that I have a card in my graveyard that is active is a lot like drawing the card. It's a lot like when I die, draw a card. There's a lot of equity in that. And so we have to sort of weigh
Starting point is 00:26:37 how good the card is that you get to draw. And so much like with flashback how you have effects that are pretty close to normal, if you do that, the other side has to be kind of expensive to flashback. And it's just one of those things where it's just more valuable than you realize. It's just a slightly better thing than you realize, and so we have to cost for it accordingly. I think when you play it, you will find that, oh, well, I got my creature, it died, and then, hey, later in the game, when I would have nothing, because you get a creature and it dies, all of a sudden, I have
Starting point is 00:27:10 this resource that I can access. And the fact that it's a little more expensive than what would be in my hand ends up to be not that big a deal. So, um, anyway, I do like Disturbed. It's super flavorful. I really like how it plays. Okay, next up, Investigate. So I think when we made that list of what mechanics to bring back, we did talk about Investigate. And I think in design, vision design, we put two cards with Investigate. It was very, just a little tiny sampling. And the idea was, it's kind of cute.
Starting point is 00:27:41 People like Investigate, and it's flavorful. And maybe we'll just do a little tiny bit. Uh, set design basically took that, and they actually added three, I think there was five in the printed set. So they added a little bit, but not a, you know, not a lot, and it wasn't an archetype, you know, it wasn't, it didn't play
Starting point is 00:27:57 a large role in Limited, it was just kind of a nice, flavorful thing that got added. Um, and, which brings us to the point of, let's see, we have Daybound, Nightbound, we have Coven, we have Disturb, we have Decade, we have Flashback, we have Investigate, we have Transform. That's seven mechanics!
Starting point is 00:28:14 That's a lot of mechanics. It is a lot of mechanics. I will say this. One is I do think Daybound, Nightbound is a lot like the werewolf. The big difference is players tend to count things we name, where a lot of times Magic will have sort of mechanics, but we don't name them.
Starting point is 00:28:35 Daybound, sorry, Decade, all through Vision Design, the card just said it did that. It wasn't labeled. It wasn't a named thing. And I think they ended up doing that because there's some cool designs that added it to existing cards rather than just being on the creatures. And so that allowed them to sort of add the ability. So Decade got a keyword.
Starting point is 00:28:59 I think Disturbed didn't have a keyword early on. It was just sort of like, but they're like, oh, but it's flavorful. So there's some things that were in the set that we didn't, that like didn't necessarily get keyworded and they had words associated with them, but they decided it made sense to do that. So this is a set that like,
Starting point is 00:29:17 most of the things it does is labeled and that is not true for all sets. So part of it is, part of the reason it seems so high is there's some unlabeled things that here are labeled. Another thing is it is a little high. You know, there's a bunch of things going on. I think that
Starting point is 00:29:31 some of it, like Investigate and Flashback, are pretty established mechanics and aren't very complicated mechanics. Like, it's not that hard to understand. And even something like Decade, I mean, it's new, but I mean, if you read it, it tells you what it does. It's not very confusing. So, I mean, it's new, but if you read it, it tells you what it does. It's not very confusing.
Starting point is 00:29:47 So, I mean, none of these mechanics are, like, none of these are Mutate or Morph or Soulbond. There's mechanics we make that are like, okay, there's a lot going on. I have to understand it. These are not that. And so I think they were flavorful, and, you know, I think we're a little on the high end.
Starting point is 00:30:07 I wouldn't expect seven mechanics or seven named mechanics all the time. But anyway, that is all the mechanics. So we had a lot of fun making the set. I mean, I have a soft spot in my heart for Innistrad.
Starting point is 00:30:21 One of my babies from long ago. So it is fun to come back. It's amazing this is our third trip. You know, the behind the scenes story, I gotta get my desk room in here, but it took a while for me to get Innistrad made. There was a lot of skepticism about Innistrad
Starting point is 00:30:37 and it is funny to go from you know, sort of like begging people to make it to like, this is our third trip back. So there's something very satisfying about that. So I do enjoy that. Anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this jaunt through the design of Midnight Hunt. It was fun going back and thinking about it.
Starting point is 00:30:59 And hopefully it teases you for the Crimson Valve story to come. Because obviously there's a lot of interconnectivity between the two sets. But anyway, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.
Starting point is 00:31:15 I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.

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