Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #875: Modern Horizons with Adam Prosak

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

I sit down with Designer Adam Prosak to talk about the design of Modern Horizons.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, I've been using my time at home to interview people from Magic's past and present. Today is Magic's present. So, I have Adam Prozac and we're going to talk about the original Modern Horizons. Hey, Adam. Hey, Mike. How's it going? Okay, so I have told my part of the story. So the audience has heard sort of how it came to be and Ethan and me pitching it and the hackathon and all that stuff. But I want to sort of pick up the story because you led the set design. I did.

So I want to talk about, okay, so the design, the vision design team, we made something and we handed it to you. So let's start the story there. Yeah, Modern Horizons was a wild, wild journey for me. Because one, it was my first time as a set lead with new cards in it. So previous to Modern Horizons, I had led stuff like Masters product, and I had been a primary contributor to our standard playtesting process, our FFL process. But this was kind of my first excursion into designing new cards as a set lead. And boy, it threw me into the deep end because Modern Horizons had so much new problems we had to tackle.

Yes, very much so. So there are two major problems that I just kind of identified as the outside and how are we going to do this? One of them, the first one was pretty easy, but still worth recognizing was like, oh, we wanted this to be at a time spiral level of complexity. So it's like kind of shifting kind of like our philosophies on how we design cards a little bit to a previous era that I wasn't a designer for. Like I, you know, I've been at Wizards about eight years and time spiral is from what 2007 so time spirals you know significantly before my time and so my sensibilities are very different from you know kind of time spiral era sensibilities and we wanted to recapture some of that so designing to the newer complexity finding a you know lots of ways to use like uh keywords and mechanics and all that stuff that was very uh very challenging for me um but that was relatively easy compared to the other

major tasks that we had to tackle which was how do we make cards for modern um and we had tons of tons of debates and it was very challenging. And I'm super happy with where we ended up and trying to find these like narrow applications for cards or new strategies for cards that like, oh, we wouldn't do this in a standard set. But here is the right place to do these types of designs. And yes, some of them tied into each other. Some of them were like, oh, this is a little bit more complex than we would want for Sandstead, but we think modern players will love this style of card. One of the things for the audience to understand is

we've been making standard sets forever. I mean, standard sets are what we understand. And this was the first time we... In the past, it had either been, it's for standard or it's for everything, right? It's for eternal formats or it's for standard formats. But it's never really been in the middle. And this was a very new idea at the time.

In fact, when we started the design, it wasn't for modern. By the time we were done, it was for modern. So it happened kind of mid-design. I actually remember the conversation where we kind of like the light bulb went off. It's like, oh, how do we make this product different? It's like, well well what if it's modern legal and like i could see like that you know i could see like bill rose kind of like light up uh and bill rose is our uh one of our vice presidents who kind of drives a lot of these like

uh product decision type of stuff but so yeah once once we got to the modern, it was like, yeah, okay, this is going to be wild. It's very challenging. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about some, there's some changes that happened to the set during set design. So I want to talk about a few of the bigger changes. I don't know if the audience is even aware of this or not, but we're going to talk about it.

So one of the biggest changes is, okay, I remember pieces of this, two of us maybe would remember it all originally there were like some dual lands in this like brand new dual lands that were like questionable whether modern was supposed to have

these dual lands but they there were these dual lands that were going to be in the set and then at some point I'm not sure who you know FFL somebody decided no we can't. We just can't make these dual lands. And then it's like, okay, something has to fill the void of these dual lands.

Do you remember this part of the story? Without going into too many details, we had a big, we have this kind of studio-wide meeting, like all the designers getting to me, we call it card crafting.

And basically enough people were like very skeptical of these. And like we had a card crafting. I wasn't sure how it was going to go. It was like, do people like these or not? And then the, the room was unanimous. No,

we don't like these, um, for, for modern. They shouldn't be in modern. Right. Um, or yeah just

let's not do these in the set and then is that like okay you know what kind of other things can we do to fill this void and that's kind of the genesis of when we started putting like oh what kind of stuff would we

could we do here but not in you know our standard set genesis of when we started putting, like, oh, what kind of stuff would we... could we do here but not in, you know, our standard set? We were like, okay, what about snow? That's when snow came into the set. Here's where the origin... This is my memory of the origin. Tell me if you're wrong. I think what happened was we said, we can't use these dual lands. What dual

lands could we use? And somebody said, how about snow dual lands? And they were like, well, we can't just have snow, like, we can't have no snow in the set and just have snow dual lands. That's what I remember, the pattern of it happening. It's like, let's have snow dual lands, but wait, wait, what does that mean?

Okay, snow has to be in the set if we have snow dual lands. And they ended up not being snow dual lands. They didn't find like a design. And one of the reasons that they're not is like, oh, the other dual land cycle that we really liked was the Horizon Canopy cycle. We thought doing those would be super cool. Super happy with how they turned out.

But it kind of, yeah, it kind of did come from the like, what, you know, what do we replace these dual lands with? And somebody said snow dual lands, and I kind of took that from, like, oh, but I like these other dual lands, but I also like snow. Right. Well, here's what happens a lot that people might not realize, is you're sort of trying to solve things,

and so you do something, and that's when it makes you change to something else, but then the impetus for the change goes away. So like it's sometimes it's it seems like, oh, just out of nowhere came up with it. But really, it was a there's a sequence of events that happen. And lots of different things can trigger different different ideas. And it's really funny. Like I'm like, oh, I like snow in Modern Horizons.

We wouldn't you know, we wouldn't go back to it in a standard set. And, like, really shortly after the design of Modern Horizons ended, Kaldheim came up. It was like, the set lead for that, Dave Humphries, asked me, he's like, hey, did you like Snow and Modern Horizons? I'm like, yeah, it was pretty good. I'm happy with how it turned out. And it was like, and then that was the genesis for putting snow stuff in Kaldheim.

Right. Which is wild to me because when I did it, I had no idea that we would ever consider it for a standard set. But it turned out to do, you know, cool things in both sets. Yeah, we actually left it out in design on purpose because the previous time we used snow, it hadn't gone over. In fact, the two previous times we used snow, it hadn't gone over very well.

So we're like, yeah, it makes sense to have snow, but snow wasn't that popular. And then, right, Modern Horizons ended up doing, and then everyone liked how it was working in Modern Horizons, so we're like, okay, let's add it to Coldheim. Right. Yeah, just another thing of like, you know, an idea in one place

leads to another idea in another place. So what were the challenges of Snow? Because we hadn't done Snow in quite a while. Obviously, way before your time. Yeah, so the challenges of Snow are like, are there exciting cards to make with Snow? What is an exciting card to make with Snow? We had no frame of reference.

Probably the most exciting snow card prior to uh modern rises is scrying sheets yeah and it's just like this thing that gets you extra basic land every once in a while wasn't you know not that cool but what what is it exciting card that like um makes you like care about your basic lands because that's a lot of what um what your your snow base will look like yeah um and so we made made a few cards it was like oh if you have enough like we kind of treated them like if you have these basic lands if you have enough basic lands this gets bonus abilities um so that's like one of the reasons uh my favorite snow design is on thin ice uh it's a you know a white enchantment that can

kind of like change to the rocks in in theros but it can uh it's a white removal spell that uh kind of attaches itself let me just read to just read to the audience, because the audience may not know what Onthin Ice is. So Onthin Ice costs one white, it's a snow enchantment aura, enchant snow land you control, when Onthin Ice enters the battlefield, exile target creature and opponent controls, and so Onthin Ice leaves the battlefield. Yeah, so that's

my favorite snow design. There are a couple more powerful ones, like the Icefang Coatl. And we even banned a card that is snow-related, Arkham's Astrolabe, because it ended up being too efficient as just a fixer and a cantrip. So real quickly, Arkham's Astrolabe costs a snow mana. It's a snow artifact.

When Arkham's Astrolabe enters the battlefield, draw a card. One and tap, add one mana of any color. I have a really funny story about that. So pretty late in the set, Aaron Forsythe, another one of our VPs, and he was actually the lead of Modern Horizons 2, was looking through the file and had an idea. He was like, what if we make a card that costs no mana and he pitched um ice hide golem which is just a snow mana for two two vanilla creature artifact creature i'm like okay i have this card i don't like i'll i'll replace it that

your card sounds cool but then also what if i change arkham's astrolabe to cost a snow mana it used to have a bunch of texts about you having enough snow permanence and stuff like that. It was like, oh, what if it just costs a snow mana? That's a lot cleaner. And I kind of like that as a direction. And turned out, you know, in hindsight to be not the right call. But it's funny. Yeah, it's like one of those things where like, oh a different snowmanna card

incentivized me to change this snowmanna you know, Arkham's Astrolabe to a snowmanna design Yeah, one of the hardest things just for the audience, one of the hardest things to mana symbols when it's a new mana symbol, like when it represents a cost we're not used to

it's really hard to gauge costs. Like one of the reasons we got so good at costing is, okay, we've made a lot of cards that use red man or green man or whatever. Like it's a lot easier for us to understand. But as soon as it's like, here's a new thing we've never done before that it's, it's really,

really hard to wrap your mind around. Yeah. I remember, um, working on oath of the gate watch and colorless mana. Yeah. That was challenging.

And again, you know, Fraxian Mana is super, super challenging too. Yeah, the other thing, the interesting thing about Snow is one of the things that happens, and Snow is a good example, I guess, Chroma might be another example, where we do something and we just didn't do

it well. We're like, if you ever look at Ice Age, the snow cards are kind of sucky. It's not that they couldn't have been better. It's just sort of like, right, it was more negative than positive. Like, you got punished more for having them than using them. And part of sort of taking a mechanic and sort of like, I don't know, repurposing it or whatever, is like, what is the cool thing about this, and how do we use it in a way that really will make it exciting? You know, and it's weird when we stumble on something

and the audience doesn't like it, and go, well, maybe there's something really there. Although this was the opposite case, where the public was saying, we want more snow. I'm like, really? You didn't like it last time we did it? They're like, no, no, we want more snow. Yeah, like, really? You didn't like it last time we did it. But like, no, no, we want more snow. Yeah, it's we want you to do it correctly type of thing. And yet we've gotten, you know,

we have 20 years of experience on the design as a vice age or whatever. And so we've learned a thing or two, you know, as a group. So what else? Okay, other than snow, what else were you proud of of in modern horizon design um so i liked how a lot of the um i really really appreciate how the limited um came together a lot of this was taking the stuff from vision design. Here are cool ideas. And then kind of interweaving them so that they're both unique to themselves and synergized with other things. You know, my favorite example is the use of Changeling and even Changeling Tribal.

That was a big thing like black and white have some cards that like oh you know this is good if you have a changeling on the battlefield uh type thing um but using those to bridge kind of uh different archetypes that might not necessarily um work well together otherwise yeah Yeah. One of the things, so real quickly, the, the origin of Changeling in the set, cause it happened in design was we had a list. We said, oh, this is the set where we can make a lot more cards that people have been asking for forever. Like one of the problems, like we, we keep a long list of, Hey, the audience keeps asking for these things. We should make them one day. And a lot of them, they're hard to get into sets. A lot of

them are like, oh, well like the stars have to align for us to be able to do that and this was a set where like okay we weren't beholden to a world like we really had a lot more

and the complexity was higher we just had a lot more freedom and so we kept making these tribal cards but we're like well hi like we really should have a barrel or whatever

random things we should have and then we came to the conclusion of oh well if we make changeling a thing then that can let us make all these individual cards but then it can help pull together uh and then i think in set design like you guys uh the ninjas and the slivers i think that might have been there a little bit but you guys really pulled it up in set design so we um so a couple things with the tribal nature of the set one everything you said is to

and i'll even add like a lot of our constructed goals a lot of our modern goals it's like oh we can give a card to a tribal deck so we made a vampire a zombie that you know might consider playing and try and help elevate those modern strategies that probably aren't strong enough um like and then we also took some shots we're like with goblins we're like goblins needs a lot of stuff so we'll give them three or four things and we kind of worked all that stuff together so we took a lot of the ideas from vision design is like here here are the different tribes is like how much can form the backbone of a limited archetype how much is a one-off and how do we merge all of these together into like a

cohesive environment and like yeah so super happy with uh with how changeling ended up being really really important for accomplishing the you know the different tribal goals because like travel is one of the things like basically everybody latched on to as a um as a thing that we could do in the set like um for all sorts of different reasons both you know constructive callback reasons you know times around nostalgia all that stuff. So let's talk, I want to talk Slivers and Ninjas. Oh my. So the reason I know we were interested in Slivers in design

was one of the problems with Slivers is when you put them in a premiere set, is there's just only so many abilities to give to them, and most of them we've done before, right? It's really hard to make new Slivers because all the evergreen abilities we've done multiple times on slivers. But in Modern Horizons,

you could give them any ability. We had a lot of fun saying, okay, what could slivers have? Could they have Cascade? What crazy things can you give slivers? So I think when we turned it over, we had made a bunch of slivers just because we could make some fun slivers.

And then you guys sort of made it into an archetype right yeah so we they're focused in red and white mostly um but we did think it was important and cool if there were i'll call them off-color slivers so like uh there's a blue sliver and a black sliver and a green sliver and a five color sliver. So you could get a capture some of that. I guess Tempest air original. All the slivers are haphazardly distributed among the colors. Thought that was pretty cool. And also we,

I was so enamored with all your slivers have cascade. I just knew that had to be the five color sliver. But yeah, slivers are really funny. Slivers, I think, I might be wrong here, but I believe they were responsible for 100%

of the creative vetoes. Oh, were they? So some abilities are super flavored to one thing. I just can't... I think there was a Bushido sliver that got vetoed. It just makes no sense

creatively. We had a meeting in design where literally we were just like, okay, look at all the mechanics we've ever had in Magic. What can we put on the sliver? And we kept trying to one-up each other. Like, how about this? And I think Cascade was like our topper.

Like, how do you beat Cascade? That's why it's the five-color. So, yeah. So, yeah. So, I don't know how much people know this, but like, so Modern Horizons 1 actually couldn't use any mechanic from Magic's history. Right, right. There's a limit. We had a limit.

Yeah. It only used the ones from modern sets. Right. Right. So there's not a ton of mechanics. And not just that. We had a cutoff. We weren't allowed to go past Dragons of Tarkir, I think.

Yeah. There was a certain set because we wanted to save. Right, for future. Right. of Tarkir, I think. Yeah, there was a certain set because we wanted to save... Right, for future, yeah. Right, so I had a... The whole time during design, I had a notepad with every single eligible mechanic. Yeah. And I just kind of stared at that

every couple weeks or so. But anytime I was having a hard time with a certain card, I'm like, how many... I spent so much time trying to look at like the thing and try and like piece one mechanic with another mechanic because that was also a goal yeah is to find cards where you have like two disparate mechanics that would never show up right mix and match is what we go yeah right so like the um cascade plusrace card, Throws of Chaos, is a really good example.

It has no text other than the two mechanics. Okay, so let's talk ninjas. Yeah. So, my memory is we gave you a smattering of ninjas. It was not a theme remote. It was just, we had some fun. In fact, I think the Frog Ninja, which showed up in Modern Horizons 2, for some period of time in Modern Horizons 1. It was, it was.

So it's funny. Like, a lot of Modern Horizons 2 cards were originally in Modern Horizons 1. Like, Ethan was the vision design lead for both sets, Ethan Fleischer. And he was just like, I like this card. It didn't work out for one reason or another. Not because it's not a cool card. Yeah like this card. It didn't work out for one reason or another. Not because it's not a cool card. Yeah.

But because the environment didn't necessarily support it. And so a lot of time, yeah, a lot of Modern Horizons 2 cards are actually back. But to ninjas, so I actually really like ninjutsu. So we talked about, you know, snow. There's not enough cool snow cards. Well, with ninjas, the cards with ninjutsu are really cool. There's just not enough of them. I think there were like 10 of them in Magic before Modern Horizons 1. There's not a lot of ninjas.

Really, really small number. It showed up in one small set, which was a Kamigawa, and maybe a Commander product or two, like a one-off here. But there's so few of them and I think, like, I just thought it was cool enough, like, oh, this it's mechanically cohesive. Do you want to know why?

Real quickly, just for the audience. Yeah, go for it. Why were there just, why there's so few ninjas? So, we originally had ninjas in Shims of Kamigawa but we were trying to figure out how to make Betrayers exciting and we're like, So, we originally had ninjas in Champions of Kamigawa, but we were trying to figure out how to make betrayers exciting, and we were like, we gotta hold something back so, like, we can go all out into the set, and then we're like,

how about ninjas? Why don't we, like, no ninjas in Champions, and then betrayers will be all ninjas? That was the idea, and then somehow it got, like, down to, like, ten ninjas, like, originally, like, you know, just ninjas everywhere, and then it got down to, like, ten ninjas, but that was why we held back. And then for some reason we didn't put them in saviors like betrayers was the ninja set so they couldn't go into say anyway some mistakes were made um but yeah i think i think ninjas are both like uh

popular really cool um really cohesive like one of the things i really liked about ninjas is there's not a ton of your ninjas gain whatever. No, a lot of their identity is through when I deal combat damage. Or when one enters the battlefield. Through the ninjas you get to reuse your enters the battlefield abilities. I thought it ended up being a pretty cool way to do a blue black uh color pay theme because a lot of times we'll do the like whenever you uh in lingo we call it like saboteur triggers whenever you deal combat damage to an opponent and we'll do that without ninjas yeah um and it's just so much cooler with know, I think ninjas is an awesome way to do it.

So I'm really happy with them. My goal is to make a, you know, just more ninjas to, you know, like, Ninja of the Deep Ours is really cool. Ink Eyes is really cool. Those are really cool ninjas from Kamigawa. If only we could make a set with more ninjas. If only that thing could happen.

Right. That's basically it. And I think we make a set with more ninjas. If only that thing could happen. Right. That's basically it. And I think we did. I was pretty happy with it. It ended up being one of the stronger limited strategies. So what other archetypes? What was your favorite archetype of the ones we haven't talked about yet? um so i really liked um the idea of um the draw to you theme in blue and red okay how'd that come um so it's interesting like don't want to just do like regular spells matter i was actually looking

it's another thing like snow where it's like oh like what can what can you do that we haven't done before and as soon as modern horizons does it like uh l drain uh picked it up and that that was even kind of in design concurrently um so i i liked that i also really liked um we talked about snow but i really like snow um historically blue and green is the toughest color combination to get right blue and green just don't have a lot of overlap as colors relative to other color combinations the right joke for the audience in r&d is like blue green is what's the set about that blue green is sometimes sometimes it's not you know like it's some nebulous term like tempo or ramp or, you know, something like that. It's ramp tempo. Yeah.

But yeah, blue and green, because it has access to the least removal, often struggles just as a color pair. Yeah. So you want to amplify it so that people do draft cards of every color combination together. Blue and green often needs the most work. But yeah, snow was a really cool way to do it. Bleeding it into all the five colors so there's enough fixing so that you'll take the other color snow lands as well. You can't just do snow-covered island and snow-covered forest and call it a day. You've got to do snow do snow covered swamp as well.

And green fetches land, which works out nice. Right. Yeah. And it being set. So that's one of the reasons we centered it in green. Um, it's like,

Oh, if it's green, it can, you can have access to the, you know, the five color things, um, and access to different,

um, different colors. And I thought that worked out really well. to different, um, different colors. And I thought that worked out really well. That was really cool. So any, I mean, I, I can see my desk here, so we, uh, we only have a little bit more time. Um, any other thoughts of like about Modern Horizons and other things you were proud of from Modern Horizons? Yeah. Uh, so one thing I did want to talk about is like how much, how challenging the deconstructed work was because we didn't have we didn't really have a team dedicated to play testing modern.

So we had to make one. So, you know, a lot of people, you know, came together a short amount of time and joined a testing team. And like we kind of knew like we're going to take some some risks like we ended up having to ban a handful of cards um but that was kind of to be expected to make like the set because like it was really really challenging to know what types of cards would make straight to modern cards like make modern more fun and uh overall i'm super happy with a ton of designs like i thought a you know a two-mana planeswalker was risky but it ended up it ended up being uh really good for modern maybe not for legacy but uh renin-6 i thought was a really cool design i really really liked all the work we put into Urza and Yawgmoth. Those are super iconic characters.

I wanted to make them, you know, very splashy and very appealing and very powerful. And I think the team did a great job on both of those cards. So, really, really happy overall with Modern Horizons 1. Obviously, like, not everything went perfectly and a lot of stuff was really hard and challenging but um yeah i just want to point out that one of the things about playtesting is um the more cards you have in the format the harder it becomes um because the com to torix like when you are playing standard and you have, I don't know how many cards are in standard, but you know,

under 2,000, you know, like there's only so many combinations, there's a limited number of combinations, but now when you say, okay, I have 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, 8,000, like, you know, just it becomes so hard to even be aware of all the possibilities, you know, and

one of the cool things about Modern is there's so many possibilities, but from a playtesting standpoint, that makes things really hard. Yeah, exactly. If you want to, so, I mean, one of the things we do in, you know, play designer, you know, constructive playtesting is allowing for possibilities, but not trying to capture every single one. If we can solve an environment on our own, that means it's too easy. That doesn't leave a lot for you all, the players, to figure things out.

So we try to make cards that are fun and exciting, but somehow don't break things. And part of the process is like, sometimes things get broken to make exciting cards. And one of the things our playtesting process missed was Hogak, which is very clearly just a power ally and had to ban very quickly. But a lot of the other cards are cards that we very intentionally thought like, oh, this would be a really interesting piece for Modern.

And I think we succeeded on that part. Yeah, in general, just so the audience was aware, when we made the set, like it was, we were trying something new. It was a supplemental set. We've never done it before. And even before we got it out the door we were really really excited by it um and then the when once the audience got a hold of it they loved it you know and that like one of the things that's really interesting is when we when time spiral was the premiere set

we had a lot of problems because it's not for everybody. But as a supplemental set, for those people that like it, it's for them. There's an audience that enjoys that and it's fun being able to make these sets. I love the code name in the hackathon for the set was Decadent.

Because just when you're designing, it's so decadent. I mean, we had limits, but there's so manyadent you can you know i mean we had limits but there's so many things you can do that you just normally can't do um and it is it's a fun thing to design for but yeah you're right i mean there's infinite challenges in some ways the more you can do the more challenges there are making sure you're not doing the wrong thing right yeah exactly i will say um over its life span like into the design process i never like i've never experienced like more hype built internally about a set uh during my time because it's kind of sort of like oh here's this like fun thing it's for you know small audience

um well it's for magic lovers and and you know the venn diagram of magic r&d and magic lovers is really high so right might even be a perfect circle um but yeah just like because we were all just so individually into like the target audience for this yeah it kind of got uh elevated and just built more hype and more you know cool things it was like oh like let's add these art cards to it that's a really cool new idea you know all that sort of thing like uh just general like positivity built over time was really cool to see yeah it definitely was a product a product that, I mean, this is true of many products, but just the love of the people making it

was so apparent. The people had such fun with it. It really was a, I mean, not that making magic isn't fun. It is very fun. But this was a little more fun than the average set just because you sort of got to just do things you don't normally get to do.

Yeah, it was both more fun and more stressful. Well, I mean, you're on that seat. I'm on the beginning end where we come up with crazy ideas. You're on the end where you have to make sure they all work. That's much harder on you. Big difference between final design and initial design is the stress level.

I mean, there's stress level initial design, but that's more about finding things and less about, you know... Whenever we find a cool thing, we're like, oh, okay, people... They'll make sure it's not broken or anything, but, you know... But, like, my stress comes from, I can't find anything, there's nothing cool, you know,

that's my stress level. I don't really tend to worry, is it broken? Like, other people figure that out. Yep, there's nobody after us to figure out if it's broken. The team after us is make sure the cards actually work. That's our design team's backstop. We have the editing and rules behind us.

So anyway, now it was a fun set to make. It's a fun set to talk about. So I want to thank you for joining us on the show. Of course. Thank you for having me. And guys, I can see talk about. So I want to thank you for joining us on the show. Of course. Thank you for having me. And guys, 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. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.